# DiffUE: Enhancing Utility-Unlearnability Trade-off of Unlearnable Examples via Diffusion Autoencoders

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10580 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.10580/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [Understanding Black-box Predictions via Influence Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04730/) (2017)
- [Poison Frogs! Targeted Clean-Label Poisoning Attacks on Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.00792/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Autoencoders: Toward a Meaningful and Decodable Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15640/) (2021)
- [Feature Denoising for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03411/) (2018)
- [Generating Adversarial Examples with Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.02610/) (2018)
- [Unlearnable Examples: Making Personal Data Unexploitable](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04898/) (2021)
- [Constructing Unrestricted Adversarial Examples with Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07894/) (2018)
- [Better Safe Than Sorry: Preventing Delusive Adversaries with Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04716/) (2021)
- [Transferable Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.10114/) (2022)
- [Unlearnable Examples for Diffusion Models: Protect Data from Unauthorized Exploitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01902/) (2023)
- [Robust Unlearnable Examples: Protecting Data Against Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14533/) (2022)
- [Learning the Unlearnable: Adversarial Augmentations Suppress Unlearnable Example Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15127/) (2023)
- [Stable Unlearnable Example: Enhancing the Robustness of Unlearnable Examples via Stable Error-Minimizing Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13091/) (2023)
- [The Devil's Advocate: Shattering the Illusion of Unexploitable Data using Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08500/) (2023)
- [Provably Unlearnable Data Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03316/) (2024)
- [Unlearnable Examples Give a False Sense of Security: Piercing through Unexploitable Data with Learnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09241/) (2023)
- [Safeguarding Medical Image Segmentation Datasets against Unauthorized Training via Contour- and Texture-Aware Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14250/) (2024)
- [Detection and Defense of Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08898/) (2023)
- [Semantic Deep Hiding for Robust Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17349/) (2024)
- [Going Grayscale: The Road to Understanding and Improving Unlearnable Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13244/) (2021)
- [Temporal Unlearnable Examples: Preventing Personal Video Data from Unauthorized Exploitation by Object Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07483/) (2025)
- [Unlearnable Examples For Time Series](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02028/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

AI models are increasingly trained on personal images scraped from social media and public platforms, often without consent, leading to serious privacy violations, such as unauthorized facial recognition and targeted advertising. To counter this, researchers have developed unlearnable examples (UEs), images modified with imperceptible noise to prevent AI models from extracting meaningful information. However, existing UE methods primarily rely on pixel-space noise, which can be bypassed by relearning strategies such as adversarial training, image transformation, and compression. While some techniques improve robustness, they often come at the expense of significant degradation in image utility and perceptual quality. In this paper, we introduce DiffUE to overcome these limitations by injecting noise into the semantic space of images instead of the pixel space. Instead of corrupting pixel values, DiffUE modifies high-level semantic features of images, ensuring robust unlearnability while preserving visual quality and utility. By leveraging a diffusion-based autoencoder framework to manipulate semantic features, DiffUE generates purposeful, natural-looking modifications that effectively resist advanced relearning strategies. Extensive experiments on four datasets, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CelebA-HQ, and ImageNet, as well as a subjective user study, demonstrate that DiffUE significantly enhances the trade-off between image quality and unlearnability, offering a more robust and effective solution for safeguarding personal data in an increasingly exploitative AI landscape.