Abstract
Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.
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May 18, 2026cs.CV
Diffusion models have been widely studied for removing unsafe content learned during pre-training. Existing methods require expensive supervised data, either unsafe-text paired with safe-image groundtruth or negative/positive image pairs, making them impractical to scale. Furthermore, offline reinforcement learning and supervised fine-tuning approaches that generate synthetic data offline suffer from catastrophic forgetting, degrading generation quality. We propose a novel online reinforcement learning framework that addresses both data scarcity and model degradation through post-training with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on both negative and positive text prompts. To eliminate the need for fine-tuning specialized safe/unsafe reward models, we introduce a \textit{steering reward mechanism} that exploits an inherent property of CLIP embeddings: steering text representations toward positive safety directions and away from negative ones in the embedding space. Our online-policy approach enables the model to learn from diverse prompts, including explicit unsafe content, without catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method reduces inappropriate content to 18.07% (vs. 48.9% for SD v1.4) and nudity detections to 15 (vs. 646 baseline) while improving compositional generation quality from 42.08% to 47.83% on GenEval. Remarkably, these safety gains generalize to out-of-domain unsafe prompts across seven harm categories, achieving state-of-the-art performance without supervised paired data or reward tuning. Github: https://github.com/MAXNORM8650/SafeDiffusion-R1.
Komal Kumar, Ankan Deria, Abhishek Basu +3
May 13, 2026cs.CL
Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) provide a promising alternative to autoregressive language models by generating text through iterative denoising and bidirectional refinement. However, this iterative generation paradigm also introduces unique safety vulnerabilities when harmful tokens generated at intermediate denoising steps propagate through subsequent refinement processes and eventually induce unsafe outputs. While there are a few attempts to remedy this issue, they either fail to generate safe outputs or generate safe yet low-quality outputs. This motivates us to propose an inference-time defense framework based on the step-wise intervention during the denoising process, which then improves the safety without compromising the output quality. The key component of our framework is a contrastive safety direction (SGD), a latent direction that captures the semantic boundary between harmful and safe generations. We leverage SGD to assess the alignment of generated tokens with harmful semantics at each denoising step. When harmful alignment is detected, our method remasks the corresponding tokens and resumes the denoising process with adaptive steering, where the steering strength is modulated according to the estimated degree of harmfulness. As a plug-and-play module, our method circumvents the need for additional fine-tuning and can be directly incorporated into off-the-shelf diffusion models. The experimental results show that our approaches reduce jailbreak success rates to 0.64% while preserving generation quality close to the original model performance. This confirms the effectiveness of step-wise intervention for safe diffusion language model generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/leeyejin1231/DLM_Steering_Remasking.
Yejin Lee, Yo-Sub Han
Jul 16, 2026cs.CV
State-of-the-art flow based text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generative abilities but remain vulnerable to producing unsafe content. Prior safety efforts range from concept erasure and prompt filtering to classifier-based gating. However, simple techniques like parameter efficient adaptations of the models easily bypass such guardrails. We introduce a unique principled approach that achieves safety by regulating the model's attention dynamics through inference-time introspection, exhibiting intrinsic robustness. Our method analyzes and rebalances attention activations throughout image synthesis, steering generations away from unsafe concepts while preserving semantic alignment. This introspective control ensures safety of deployed models. Across standard and adversarial safety benchmarks, our approach achieves remarkable safety scores while maintaining or even improving alignment and perceptual quality. Our results reveal that attention-space regulation offers a considerably more promising path to safer diffusion transformer based image generation than the existing concept erasing mechanism.Our code can be accessed at https://basim-azam.github.io/iam/
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