Fantastic Targets for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models and Where To Find Them

Concept erasure has emerged as a promising technique for mitigating the risk of harmful content generation in diffusion models by selectively unlearning undesirable concepts. The common principle of previous works to remove a specific concept is to map it to a fixed generic concept, such as a neutral concept or just an empty text prompt. In this paper, we demonstrate that this fixed-target strategy is suboptimal, as it fails to account for the impact of erasing one concept on the others. To address this limitation, we model the concept space as a graph and empirically analyze the effects of erasing one concept on the remaining concepts. Our analysis uncovers intriguing geometric properties of the concept space, where the influence of erasing a concept is confined to a local region. Building on this insight, we propose the Adaptive Guided Erasure (AGE) method, which dynamically selects optimal target concepts tailored to each undesirable concept, minimizing unintended side effects. Experimental results show that AGE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art erasure methods on preserving unrelated concepts while maintaining effective erasure performance. Our code is published at https://github.com/tuananhbui89/Adaptive-Guided-Erasure.