Robust Concept Erasure Using Task Vectors
Minh Pham Kelly O. Marshall Chinmay Hegde Niv Cohen
With the rapid growth of text-to-image models, a variety of techniques have
been suggested to prevent undesirable image generations. Yet, these methods
often only protect against specific user prompts and have been shown to allow
unsafe generations with other inputs. Here we focus on unconditionally erasing
a concept from a text-to-image model rather than conditioning the erasure on
the user's prompt. We first show that compared to input-dependent erasure
methods, concept erasure that uses Task Vectors (TV) is more robust to
unexpected user inputs, not seen during training. However, TV-based erasure can
also affect the core performance of the edited model, particularly when the
required edit strength is unknown. To this end, we propose a method called
Diverse Inversion, which we use to estimate the required strength of the TV
edit. Diverse Inversion finds within the model input space a large set of word
embeddings, each of which induces the generation of the target concept. We find
that encouraging diversity in the set makes our estimation more robust to
unexpected prompts. Finally, we show that Diverse Inversion enables us to apply
a TV edit only to a subset of the model weights, enhancing the erasure
capabilities while better maintaining the core functionality of the model.