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Closed-Form Concept Erasure via Double Projections

About

While modern generative models such as diffusion-based architectures have enabled impressive creative capabilities, they also raise important safety and ethical risks. These concerns have led to growing interest in concept erasure, the process of removing unwanted concepts from model representations. Existing approaches often achieve strong erasure performance but rely on iterative optimization and may inadvertently distort unrelated concepts. In this work, we present a simple yet principled alternative: a linear transformation framework that achieves concept erasure analytically, without any training. Our method adapts a pretrained model through two sequential, closed-form steps: first, computing a proxy projection of the target concept, and second, applying a constrained transformation within the left null space of known concept directions. This design yields a deterministic and geometrically interpretable procedure for safe, efficient, and theory-grounded concept removal. Across a wide range of experiments, including object and style erasure on multiple Stable Diffusion variants and the flow-matching model (FLUX), our approach matches or surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art methods while preserving non-target concepts more faithfully. Requiring only a few seconds to apply, it offers a lightweight and drop-in tool for controlled model editing, advancing the goal of safer and more responsible generative models.

Chi Zhang, Jingpu Cheng, Zhixian Wang, Ping Liu• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Artistic Style ErasureSD Other Class artistic styles 1.4 (test)
Preservation Drop-1.4
36
Artistic Style ErasureSD Target Class artistic styles 1.4 (test)
Erased Accuracy26
36
Image Quality AssessmentFLUX-1 Preserved Concepts (non-target concepts)
LPIPS0.0362
22
Object ErasureImageNet-10 Target Concepts SD 1.4
Original Accuracy1
19
Concept PreservationImageNet 10 Preserved Concepts SD 1.4
Original Accuracy87.3
15
Concept ErasureStable Diffusion 1.5
Cassette Player Success Rate0.00e+0
6
Concept PreservationStable Diffusion 1.5
Cassette Player Score4.2
5
Object ErasureFLUX Object Erasure (evaluation set)
Erased Accuracy (Cassette Player)0.00e+0
3
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