CVNov 24, 2025

Now You See It, Now You Don't - Instant Concept Erasure for Safe Text-to-Image and Video Generation

arXiv:2511.18684v12 citations
Originality Highly original
AI Analysis

This addresses the need for safe and efficient concept removal in generative AI models, with incremental improvements in robustness and cross-domain applicability.

The paper tackles the problem of robust concept removal in text-to-image and text-to-video models to enable safe deployment, introducing Instant Concept Erasure (ICE) as a training-free, modality-agnostic method that achieves precise unlearning with zero overhead, showing strong erasure across various concepts while minimizing degradation of generative abilities.

Robust concept removal for text-to-image (T2I) and text-to-video (T2V) models is essential for their safe deployment. Existing methods, however, suffer from costly retraining, inference overhead, or vulnerability to adversarial attacks. Crucially, they rarely model the latent semantic overlap between the target erase concept and surrounding content -- causing collateral damage post-erasure -- and even fewer methods work reliably across both T2I and T2V domains. We introduce Instant Concept Erasure (ICE), a training-free, modality-agnostic, one-shot weight modification approach that achieves precise, persistent unlearning with zero overhead. ICE defines erase and preserve subspaces using anisotropic energy-weighted scaling, then explicitly regularises against their intersection using a unique, closed-form overlap projector. We pose a convex and Lipschitz-bounded Spectral Unlearning Objective, balancing erasure fidelity and intersection preservation, that admits a stable and unique analytical solution. This solution defines a dissociation operator that is translated to the model's text-conditioning layers, making the edit permanent and runtime-free. Across targeted removals of artistic styles, objects, identities, and explicit content, ICE efficiently achieves strong erasure with improved robustness to red-teaming, all while causing only minimal degradation of original generative abilities in both T2I and T2V models.

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