ICML 2025poster4 citations

EraseAnything: Enabling Concept Erasure in Rectified Flow Transformers

Daiheng Gao, Shilin Lu, Wenbo Zhou, Jiaming Chu, Jie Zhang, Mengxi Jia, Bang Zhang, Zhaoxin Fan

Abstract

Removing unwanted concepts from large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models while maintaining their overall generative quality remains an open challenge. This difficulty is especially pronounced in emerging paradigms, such as Stable Diffusion (SD) v3 and Flux, which incorporate flow matching and transformer-based architectures. These advancements limit the transferability of existing concept-erasure techniques that were originally designed for the previous T2I paradigm (e.g., SD v1.4). In this work, we introduce EraseAnything, the first method specifically developed to address concept erasure within the latest flow-based T2I framework. We formulate concept erasure as a bi-level optimization problem, employing LoRA-based parameter tuning and an attention map regularizer to selectively suppress undesirable activations. Furthermore, we propose a self-contrastive learning strategy to ensure that removing unwanted concepts does not inadvertently harm performance on unrelated ones. Experimental results demonstrate that EraseAnything successfully fills the research gap left by earlier methods in this new T2I paradigm, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of concept erasure tasks.

Concept ErasingText2ImageSafetyUnlearning
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
gao2025eraseanything,
title={EraseAnything: Enabling Concept Erasure in Rectified Flow Transformers},
author={Daiheng Gao and Shilin Lu and Wenbo Zhou and Jiaming Chu and Jie Zhang and Mengxi Jia and Bang Zhang and Zhaoxin Fan and Weiming Zhang},
booktitle={Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2025},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=vvBAZJh2nQ}
}