Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16481v1
• Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2026 10:39:41 GMT
• Title: Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
• Abstract summary: Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones.<n> Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness.<n>We present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality.
• Score: 30.409877438368724
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models deliver remarkable visual fidelity but pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones. Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness, which restricts their applicability to erasing only a few hundred concepts. To address these limitations, we present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality. Our method first models low-rank concept distributions via a Student's t-distribution Mixture Model (tMM). It enables pin-point erasure of target concepts via affine optimal transport while preserving others by anchoring the boundaries of target concept distributions without pre-defined anchor concepts. We then train a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based module, termed MoEraser, which removes target embeddings while preserving the anchor embeddings. By injecting noise into the text embedding projector and fine-tuning MoEraser for recovery, our framework achieves robustness to white-box attack such as module removal. Extensive experiments on over 2,000 concepts across heterogeneous domains and diffusion models demerate state-of-the-art scalability and precision in large-scale concept erasure.

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