EraseLoRA: MLLM-Driven Foreground Exclusion and Background Subtype Aggregation for Dataset-Free Object Removal

TL;DR

EraseLoRA introduces a dataset-free, background-aware framework for object removal that improves background reconstruction and avoids unwanted object reappearance by leveraging large-language models and test-time adaptation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel background-aware reasoning and test-time optimization approach that enhances dataset-free object removal without explicit attention manipulation.

Findings

Outperforms existing dataset-free methods in object removal benchmarks.

Achieves results competitive with dataset-driven approaches.

Effectively preserves background details and structure.

Abstract

Object removal differs from common inpainting, since it must prevent the masked target from reappearing and reconstruct the occluded background with structural and contextual fidelity, rather than merely filling a hole plausibly. Recent dataset-free approaches that redirect self-attention inside the mask fail in two ways: non-target foregrounds are often misinterpreted as background, which regenerates unwanted objects, and direct attention manipulation disrupts fine details and hinders coherent integration of background cues. We propose EraseLoRA, a novel dataset-free framework that replaces attention surgery with background-aware reasoning and test-time adaptation. First, Background-aware Foreground Exclusion (BFE), uses a multimodal large-language models to separate target foreground, non-target foregrounds, and clean background from a single image-mask pair without paired supervision, producing reliable background cues while excluding distractors. Second, Background-aware Reconstruction with Subtype Aggregation (BRSA), performs test-time optimization that treats inferred background subtypes as complementary pieces and enforces their consistent integration through reconstruction and alignment objectives, preserving local detail and global structure without explicit attention intervention. We validate EraseLoRA as a plug-in to pretrained diffusion models and across benchmarks for object removal, demonstrating consistent improvements over dataset-free baselines and competitive results against dataset-driven methods. The code will be made available upon publication.