Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
About
Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models deliver remarkable visual fidelity but pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones. Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness, which restricts their applicability to erasing only a few hundred concepts. To address these limitations, we present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality. Our method first models low-rank concept distributions via a Student's t-distribution Mixture Model (tMM). It enables pin-point erasure of target concepts via affine optimal transport while preserving others by anchoring the boundaries of target concept distributions without pre-defined anchor concepts. We then train a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based module, termed MoEraser, which removes target embeddings while preserving the anchor embeddings. By injecting noise into the text embedding projector and fine-tuning MoEraser for recovery, our framework achieves robustness to white-box attack such as module removal. Extensive experiments on over 2,000 concepts across heterogeneous domains and diffusion models demerate state-of-the-art scalability and precision in large-scale concept erasure.
Related benchmarks
| Task | Dataset | Result | Rank | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text-to-Image Generation | COCO 30k | FID13.61 | 63 | |
| Explicit Content Removal | I2P | Buttocks Count0.00e+0 | 47 | |
| Content Preservation | MS-COCO (30K) | FID14.06 | 19 | |
| Concept Preservation | 100 Artistic Styles | CLIP Score29.14 | 10 | |
| Concept Erasure and Preservation | 50 Target Celebrities and 100 Remaining Celebrities | Accuracy (Target)0.24 | 10 | |
| Concept Erasure Robustness | Ring-A-Bell (RAB) | Attack Success Rate1.42 | 7 | |
| Concept Erasure Robustness | UnlearnDiff (UD) | Attack Success Rate52.82 | 7 | |
| Concept Erasure | Characters SDv1.4 (Target (430) Remain (279)) | CRSt0.13 | 6 | |
| Concept Erasure | Celebrities SDv1.4 (Target Remain) | CRSt9.9 | 6 | |
| Concept Erasure | Artistic Style SD v1.4 (Target (693) Remain (430)) | CR Score (Target)13 | 6 |