SPEED: Scalable, Precise, and Efficient Concept Erasure for Diffusion Models
About
Erasing concepts from large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has become increasingly crucial due to the growing concerns over copyright infringement, offensive content, and privacy violations. In scalable applications, fine-tuning-based methods are time-consuming to precisely erase multiple target concepts, while real-time editing-based methods often degrade the generation quality of non-target concepts due to conflicting optimization objectives. To address this dilemma, we introduce SPEED, an efficient concept erasure approach that directly edits model parameters. SPEED searches for a null space, a model editing space where parameter updates do not affect non-target concepts, to achieve scalable and precise erasure. To facilitate accurate null space optimization, we incorporate three complementary strategies: Influence-based Prior Filtering (IPF) to selectively retain the most affected non-target concepts, Directed Prior Augmentation (DPA) to enrich the filtered retain set with semantically consistent variations, and Invariant Equality Constraints (IEC) to preserve key invariants during the T2I generation process. Extensive evaluations across multiple concept erasure tasks demonstrate that SPEED consistently outperforms existing methods in non-target preservation while achieving efficient and high-fidelity concept erasure, successfully erasing 100 concepts within only 5 seconds. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/Ouxiang-Li/SPEED.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Art Style Erasure | Artist style and content prompts 5 groups SD v1.4 based (test) | CS Style31.402 | 40 | |
| Art Style Erasure | Artist style and content prompt groups v1.4 (test) | Lgene76.7 | 16 | |
| Concept Reawakening | ImageNette Tench | CLIP Score31.12 | 7 | |
| Concept Reawakening | ImageNette 4-concept erasure: English Springer, French Horn, Golf Ball, Parachute SD v1.4 base (test) | Accuracy51.25 | 7 | |
| Concept Reawakening | ImageNette English Springer | CLIP Score24.38 | 7 | |
| Concept Reawakening | ImageNette Parachute | CLIP Score24.75 | 7 | |
| Semantic Alignment | Celebrity Identities | Taylor Swift Alignment Score23.97 | 7 | |
| Semantic Alignment | Intellectual Property Characters | Snoopy Alignment Score22.85 | 7 | |
| Concept Reawakening | Unsafe Content | Blood23.9 | 7 | |
| Concept Reawakening | ImageNette 2-concept erasure: English Springer, Golf Ball SD v1.4 base (test) | Accuracy69.34 | 6 |