{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/selective-amnesia-a-continual-learning-1","title":"Selective Amnesia: A Continual Learning Approach to Forgetting in Deep Generative Models","arxiv_id":"2305.10120","date":"2023-05-17","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2023 11","authors":["Alvin Heng","Harold Soh"],"abstract":"The recent proliferation of large-scale text-to-image models has led to growing concerns that such models may be misused to generate harmful, misleading, and inappropriate content. Motivated by this issue, we derive a technique inspired by continual learning to selectively forget concepts in pretrained deep generative models. Our method, dubbed Selective Amnesia, enables controllable forgetting where a user can specify how a concept should be forgotten. Selective Amnesia can be applied to conditional variational likelihood models, which encompass a variety of popular deep generative frameworks, including variational autoencoders and large-scale text-to-image diffusion models. Experiments across different models demonstrate that our approach induces forgetting on a variety of concepts, from entire classes in standard datasets to celebrity and nudity prompts in text-to-image models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/clear-nus/selective-amnesia.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10120v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.10120v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"selective-amnesia-a-continual-learning-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/clear-nus/selective-amnesia","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continual-learning","task_name":"Continual Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"diffusion","method_name":"Diffusion"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2305.10120","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2305.10120","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}