Crafting Your Evolving Dreams: Concept-Incremental Versatile Customization
Authors: Jiahua Dong, Wenqi Liang, Hongliu Li, Yang Cong, Duzhen Zhang, Hanbin Zhao, Henghui Ding, Yulun Zhang, +2 more
Abstract
Custom diffusion models (CDMs) have garnered significant interest owing to their remarkable capacity for generating personalized concepts. However, the majority of CDMs unrealistically presume that the user's collection of personalized concepts is static and incapable of incremental growth over time. Furthermore, they exhibit significant catastrophic forgetting and concept neglect of previously learned concepts when incrementally learning a sequence of new ones. To resolve the above challenges, we develop a novel Continually Customizable Diffusion Model (CCDM), enabling users to perform concept-incremental versatile customization. Specifically, we design an attribute-decoupled LoRA (AD-LoRA) module and a relevance-guided AD-LoRA aggregation strategy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. They can preserve concept-specific attributes of each task and leverage beneficial inter-task correlations to enhance the continual learning of new customization tasks. Additionally, to address the challenge of concept neglect, we propose a controllable regional context synthesis strategy that performs multi-concept composition in alignment with user-provided conditions. This strategy enhances the overall consistency in multi-concept synthesis by guaranteeing semantic independence between user-defined regions and their smooth boundary transitions. Experiments show our CCDM exhibits significant improvements over baseline methods.
Visual autoregressive (VAR) models have recently emerged as an efficient paradigm for text-to-image generation. Despite their strong generative capability, existing VAR-based personalization methods remain limited to static settings, failing to accommodate evolving user demands. In particular, sequential concept learning leads to severe catastrophic forgetting, while multi-concept synthesis often suffers from feature entanglement and attribute inconsistency. In this work, we present the first systematic study of continual personalized generation in VAR models. We identify two key challenges: (i) preserving previously learned concepts during sequential customization, and (ii) composing multiple personalized concepts in a controllable manner. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework with two core components. For continual single-concept learning, we introduce Gradient-based Concept Neuron Selection (GCNS), which identifies concept-relevant neurons and constrains only conflicting parameters across tasks, effectively mitigating forgetting without additional model expansion. For multi-concept synthesis, we propose a context-aware composition strategy that performs multi-branch feature modeling and localized cross-attention fusion guided by spatial conditions, enabling precise and disentangled concept composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance in long-sequence continual personalization while achieving superior results in multi-concept image synthesis compared to existing baselines. These findings highlight the potential of VAR models for scalable and controllable personalized generation.
Parameter-efficient fine-tuning enables fast personalization of text-to-image diffusion models, but composing multiple custom concepts remains challenging due to representation interference. Existing modular methods either rely on expensive post-hoc fusion or freeze adaptation subspaces, which limit expressiveness and concept fidelity. To address this trade-off, we propose Sequential regularized LoRA (SeqLoRA), a constrained continual learning framework that jointly optimizes both LoRA factors via bilevel optimization. Theoretically, we establish strong convergence guarantees for our algorithm and model the residual layer activations as a matrix sub-Gaussian process to derive high-probability bounds on catastrophic forgetting. We further prove that learning the LoRA basis from data minimizes residual interference energy more effectively than frozen-basis methods. Experiments on multi-concept image generation demonstrate that SeqLoRA improves identity preservation and scalability across up to 101 concepts, while avoiding costly fusion and reducing attribute interference in composed generations.
Concept erasure has emerged as a promising approach to mitigate undesired or unsafe content in diffusion models, yet existing methods still face significant limitations. While training-based methods are effective, their high computational cost limits scalability. Editing-based methods are more efficient and deployment-friendly, yet they struggle to simultaneously achieve precise concept erasure and preserve overall generative capacity. We identify this core limitation of the editing-based methods as reliance on additive parameter updates. Our empirical analysis reveals that concept semantics primarily depend on neuron direction rather than neuron magnitude, while overall generative capacity relies on the angular geometry of neurons. As additive updates inherently entangle direction, magnitude, and angular geometry, they inevitably introduce unintended interference between concept erasure and overall generation performance. To address this, we propose Orthogonal Concept Erasure (OCE), which reformulates editing-based erasure as multiplicative parameter updates from a geometric perspective. Specifically, OCE applies layer-wise orthogonal transformations derived from a closed-form solution to the parameters, enabling precise concept erasure while preserving the neuron magnitude and angular geometry. Furthermore, to address conflicting constraints in multi-concept erasure, OCE introduces a subspace-level objective with structured subspace manipulation, yielding a more effective and scalable erasure. Extensive experiments on single- and multi-concept erasure demonstrate that OCE outperforms existing methods in concept erasure and non-target preservation, erasing up to 100 concepts in 4.3 s. Code: https://github.com/HansSunY/OCE.