Papers › ConceptPrune: Concept Editing in Diffusion Models via Skilled Neuron Pruning

ConceptPrune: Concept Editing in Diffusion Models via Skilled Neuron Pruning

29 May 2024arXiv:2405.19237archive 2025-07-28

Ruchika Chavhan, Da Li, Timothy Hospedales

While large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image-generation capabilities, there are significant concerns about their potential misuse for generating unsafe content, violating copyright, and perpetuating societal biases. Recently, the text-to-image generation community has begun addressing these concerns by editing or unlearning undesired concepts from pre-trained models. However, these methods often involve data-intensive and inefficient fine-tuning or utilize various forms of token remapping, rendering them susceptible to adversarial jailbreaks. In this paper, we present a simple and effective training-free approach, ConceptPrune, wherein we first identify critical regions within pre-trained models responsible for generating undesirable concepts, thereby facilitating straightforward concept unlearning via weight pruning. Experiments across a range of concepts including artistic styles, nudity, object erasure, and gender debiasing demonstrate that target concepts can be efficiently erased by pruning a tiny fraction, approximately 0.12% of total weights, enabling multi-concept erasure and robustness against various white-box and black-box adversarial attacks.

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ruchikachavhan/concept-prune officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report
linweiii/backdoordm mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Image GenerationText to Image GenerationText-to-Image Generation

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DiffusionPruning

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