FADE: Adversarial Concept Erasure in Flow Models

TL;DR

FADE is a novel method for removing specific concepts from diffusion models, enhancing privacy and fairness while maintaining image quality, through adversarial fine-tuning and theoretical guarantees.

Contribution

We introduce FADE, a concept erasure technique for diffusion models that combines trajectory-aware fine-tuning with adversarial objectives, providing formal privacy guarantees and superior removal performance.

Findings

FADE outperforms baselines in concept removal efficacy.

FADE maintains higher image fidelity after concept erasure.

Ablation studies confirm the importance of each component.

Abstract

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable image generation capabilities, but also pose risks in privacy and fairness by memorizing sensitive concepts or perpetuating biases. We propose a novel \textbf{concept erasure} method for text-to-image diffusion models, designed to remove specified concepts (e.g., a private individual or a harmful stereotype) from the model's generative repertoire. Our method, termed \textbf{FADE} (Fair Adversarial Diffusion Erasure), combines a trajectory-aware fine-tuning strategy with an adversarial objective to ensure the concept is reliably removed while preserving overall model fidelity. Theoretically, we prove a formal guarantee that our approach minimizes the mutual information between the erased concept and the model's outputs, ensuring privacy and fairness. Empirically, we evaluate FADE on Stable Diffusion and FLUX, using benchmarks from prior work (e.g., object, celebrity, explicit content, and style erasure tasks from MACE). FADE achieves state-of-the-art concept removal performance, surpassing recent baselines like ESD, UCE, MACE, and ANT in terms of removal efficacy and image quality. Notably, FADE improves the harmonic mean of concept removal and fidelity by 5--10\% over the best prior method. We also conduct an ablation study to validate each component of FADE, confirming that our adversarial and trajectory-preserving objectives each contribute to its superior performance. Our work sets a new standard for safe and fair generative modeling by unlearning specified concepts without retraining from scratch.