# Bypassing Copyright Protection in Diffusion-based Customization via Two-Stage Latent Feature Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.09909 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.09909/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 34 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Robustness, privacy and adversarial aspects](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/robustness-privacy-and-adversarial-aspects/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (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)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.01618/) (2022)
- [Align your Latents: High-Resolution Video Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08818/) (2023)
- [LSUN: Construction of a Large-scale Image Dataset using Deep Learning with Humans in the Loop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.03365/) (2015)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Models in Vision: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04747/) (2022)
- [Structure and Content-Guided Video Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03011/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models for Adversarial Purification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07460/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02646/) (2022)
- [More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05744/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Example Does Good: Preventing Painting Imitation from Diffusion Models via Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04578/) (2023)
- [Raising the Cost of Malicious AI-Powered Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06588/) (2023)
- [Anti-DreamBooth: Protecting users from personalized text-to-image synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15433/) (2023)
- [AUC Maximization in the Era of Big Data and AI: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15046/) (2022)
- [MultiTrust: A Comprehensive Benchmark Towards Trustworthy Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07057/) (2024)
- [GIFD: A Generative Gradient Inversion Method with Feature Domain Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04699/) (2023)
- [One Perturbation is Enough: On Generating Universal Adversarial Perturbations against Vision-Language Pre-training Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05491/) (2024)
- [Can Protective Perturbation Safeguard Personal Data from Being Exploited by Stable Diffusion?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00084/) (2023)
- [SimAC: A Simple Anti-Customization Method for Protecting Face Privacy against Text-to-Image Synthesis of Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07865/) (2023)
- [IMPRESS: Evaluating the Resilience of Imperceptible Perturbations Against Unauthorized Data Usage in Diffusion-Based Generative AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.19248/) (2023)
- [We-Math 2.0: A Versatile MathBook System for Incentivizing Visual Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10433/) (2025)
- [Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04013/) (2024)
- [CLIP-Guided Generative Networks for Transferable Targeted Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10179/) (2024)
- [A Closer Look at GAN Priors: Exploiting Intermediate Features for Enhanced Model Inversion Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13863/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [CHILLGuard: Towards Fine-Grained Chinese LLM Safety Guardrail with Scalable Data Construction and Model-aware Preference Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15396/) (2026)
- [Weak Ties, Strong Signals: Efficient Training Data Detection in Diffusion LLMs via Independent Token Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.22145/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

With the growing concerns over copyright infringement in diffusion-based customization, adversarial attacks have emerged as a prominent defense strategy to prevent malicious content forgery in personalized image generation. However, current defenses typically introduce persistent perturbations in the latent space of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs), which remain susceptible to adaptive bypasses by adversaries. In this paper, we introduce Two-Stage Latent Feature Optimization (TS-LFO), an efficient and effective copyright-stealing attack against protected diffusion-based customization. We begin by observing that existing defenses primarily disrupt the mapping between input images and their latent representations, thereby degrading the model's ability to produce personalized outputs. To counteract this, TS-LFO restores the broken mapping through a two-stage optimization process. In the Latent Denoising Stage, we enhance semantic consistency between latent codes and input images by jointly minimizing a Latent-Image Alignment Loss and a Latent Diffusion Loss with timestep-dependent weights, effectively suppressing the high-frequency noise introduced by defenses. In the Latent Reconstruction Stage, we recover low-frequency semantic information using pixel-level constraints to refine the latent features. Extensive experiments show that TS-LFO consistently bypasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) copyright defenses and outperforms SOTA copyright attacks such as DiffPure, GrIDPure and IMPRESS across diverse settings.
