ICLR 2026poster0 citations

Forget Many, Forget Right: Scalable and Precise Concept Unlearning in Diffusion Models

Kaiyuan Deng, Gen Li, Yang Xiao, Bo Hui, Xiaolong Ma

Abstract

While multi-concept unlearning has shown progress, extending to large-scale scenarios remains difficult, as existing methods face three persistent challenges: **(i)** they often introduce conflicting weight updates, making some targets difficult to unlearn or causing degradation of generative capability; **(ii)** they lack precise mechanisms to keep unlearning strictly confined to target concepts, resulting in collateral damage on similar content; **(iii)** many approaches rely on additional data or auxiliary modules, causing scalability and efficiency bottlenecks as the number of concepts grows. To simultaneously address these challenges, we propose **Scalable-Precise Concept Unlearning (ScaPre)**, a unified and lightweight framework tailored for scalable and precise large-scale unlearning. ScaPre introduces a *conflict-aware stable design*, which integrates the spectral trace regularizer and geometry alignment to stabilize the optimization space, suppress conflicting updates, and preserve the pretrained global structure. Furthermore, the *Informax Decoupler* identifies concept-relevant parameters and adaptively reweights updates, ensuring that unlearning is confined to the target subspace without collateral damage. ScaPre yields an efficient closed-form solution, requiring no additional data or auxiliary sub-models, while maintaining both scalability and precision. Comprehensive experiments across large-scale objects, styles, and explicit content benchmarks demonstrate that ScaPre effectively removes target concepts while maintaining generation quality. It can forget up to **×5** more concepts than the best baseline within the limits of acceptable generative quality, and outperforms existing multi-concept approaches in precision and efficiency, achieving a new state of the art for large-scale unlearning.

machine unlearninglarge-scale unlearningdiffusion model
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
deng2026forget,
title={Forget Many, Forget Right: Scalable and Precise Concept Unlearning in Diffusion Models},
author={Kaiyuan Deng and Gen Li and Yang Xiao and Bo Hui and Xiaolong Ma},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=zt7IPzsXrT}
}