Paper ID: 2404.19227

Espresso: Robust Concept Filtering in Text-to-Image Models

Anudeep Das, Vasisht Duddu, Rui Zhang, N. Asokan

Diffusion based text-to-image models are trained on large datasets scraped from the Internet, potentially containing unacceptable concepts (e.g., copyright infringing or unsafe). We need concept removal techniques (CRTs) which are effective in preventing the generation of images with unacceptable concepts, utility-preserving on acceptable concepts, and robust against evasion with adversarial prompts. None of the prior CRTs satisfy all these requirements simultaneously. We introduce Espresso, the first robust concept filter based on Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP). We configure CLIP to identify unacceptable concepts in generated images using the distance of their embeddings to the text embeddings of both unacceptable and acceptable concepts. This lets us fine-tune for robustness by separating the text embeddings of unacceptable and acceptable concepts while preserving their pairing with image embeddings for utility. We present a pipeline to evaluate various CRTs, attacks against them, and show that Espresso, is more effective and robust than prior CRTs, while retaining utility.

Submitted: Apr 30, 2024