cs.CVApr 12, 2026

Erasing Thousands of Concepts: Towards Scalable and Practical Concept Erasure for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Authors: Hoigi Seo, Byung Hyun Lee, Jaehyun Cho, Sungjin Lim, Se Young Chun

Organizations: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea · IPAI, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea · INMC, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Abstract

Large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models deliver remarkable visual fidelity but pose safety risks due to their capacity to reproduce undesirable content, such as copyrighted ones. Concept erasure has emerged as a mitigation strategy, yet existing approaches struggle to balance scalability, precision, and robustness, which restricts their applicability to erasing only a few hundred concepts. To address these limitations, we present Erasing Thousands of Concepts (ETC), a scalable framework capable of erasing thousands of concepts while preserving generation quality. Our method first models low-rank concept distributions via a Student's t-distribution Mixture Model (tMM). It enables pin-point erasure of target concepts via affine optimal transport while preserving others by anchoring the boundaries of target concept distributions without pre-defined anchor concepts. We then train a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)-based module, termed MoEraser, which removes target embeddings while preserving the anchor embeddings. By injecting noise into the text embedding projector and fine-tuning MoEraser for recovery, our framework achieves robustness to white-box attack such as module removal. Extensive experiments on over 2,000 concepts across heterogeneous domains and diffusion models demerate state-of-the-art scalability and precision in large-scale concept erasure.

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