# CoreUnlearn: Rethinking Concept Unlearning through Disentangled Component-Level Erasure in Text-guided Diffusion Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01658 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01658/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 59 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)
- LLM safety and security / [Vision-language and text-to-image safety](https://mlsanity.com/safety/vision-language-and-text-to-image-safety/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 59)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.00796/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [On Distillation of Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03142/) (2022)
- [Erasing Concepts from Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07345/) (2023)
- [Safe Latent Diffusion: Mitigating Inappropriate Degeneration in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05105/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03860/) (2022)
- [Unified Concept Editing in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14761/) (2023)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [DeepCache: Accelerating Diffusion Models for Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00858/) (2023)
- [Ablating Concepts in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13516/) (2023)
- [MACE: Mass Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06135/) (2024)
- [Forget-Me-Not: Learning to Forget in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17591/) (2023)
- [Q-Diffusion: Quantizing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04304/) (2023)
- [Ring-A-Bell! How Reliable are Concept Removal Methods for Diffusion Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10012/) (2023)
- [To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images ... For Now](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11868/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10647/) (2023)
- [MMA-Diffusion: MultiModal Attack on Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17516/) (2023)
- [fastai: A Layered API for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.04688/) (2020)
- [Prompting4Debugging: Red-Teaming Text-to-Image Diffusion Models by Finding Problematic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06135/) (2023)
- [One-Dimensional Adapter to Rule Them All: Concepts, Diffusion Models and Erasing Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16145/) (2023)
- [Defensive Unlearning with Adversarial Training for Robust Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15234/) (2024)
- [Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12383/) (2024)
- [Intriguing properties of synthetic images: from generative adversarial networks to diffusion models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06408/) (2023)
- [Receler: Reliable Concept Erasing of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Lightweight Erasers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17717/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text guided diffusion models have revolutionized image synthesis but also raise ethical concerns, such as privacy violation and harmful content generation. To mitigate these issues, prevailing methods typically leverage an alignment mechanism, with predefined erasure references, to fine-tune pretrained model weights. However, these techniques are intrinsically limited by the representational capacity of textual space and display high sensitivity to the choice of predefined erasure references, e.g., suboptimal references may significantly affect the model utility preservation during erasure. To overcome these limitations, we introduce CoreUnlearn, aiming to disentangle and remove the erasure-critical component of the undesirable concept. Specifically, CoreUnlearn comprises a Component Extraction Module (CEM) and a Swap Disentangling Strategy (SDS). Guided by SDS, CEM is pre-trained to decompose concept embeddings into distinct component types. Leveraging this decomposition, CoreUnlearn then removes the erasure-critical component while retaining non-critical ones by fine-tuning model weights. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoreUnlearn achieves effective concept erasure with minimal impact on overall model performance.