Your Unlearning Gives You Away: Identifying Erased Concepts in Diffusion Models
cs.LG, cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-10-04
Updated: 2026-10-04
Code: https://github.com/fastai/imagenette
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Existing attacks on unlearned diffusion models assume that the erased concepts are known in advance and focus on recovering them.
Terminology
Abstract
Existing attacks on unlearned diffusion models assume that the erased concepts are known in advance and focus on recovering them. In practice, however, model providers may not disclose which concepts have been removed, and even with access to the original base model, an adversary may still lack a clear target to attack. In this paper, we aim to answer the following critical but overlooked questions: which concepts have been erased from the model, and how many have been erased in total? To this end, we present Tracer, a framework that rapidly and accurately identifies erased concepts and estimates their number. Tracer efficiently identifies erased concepts without generating and classifying images. By combining lightweight spectral analysis of weight footprints, it enables efficient search over large candidate vocabularies. To distinguish multiple erased concepts, we introduce a footprint coverage objective that guides sequential discovery. Tracer estimates the number of erased concepts by detecting a sharp decline in candidate confidence as the selected concepts account for the erasure footprint, without requiring labeled examples for calibration. The framework requires only lightweight linear algebra and limited forward probes, with no prior knowledge of the unlearning algorithm. Experiments across text-to-image and text-to-video backbones and diverse unlearning methods demonstrate that Tracer identifies erased concepts and estimates their number in seconds, achieving 150 to 137,000 times and 133 to 20,000 times speedups over MIA and brute-force search on image and video models, respectively, with substantially higher identification accuracy.
Sources
- Erasing Undesirable Concepts in Diffusion Models with Adversarial Preservation
- Fantastic Targets for Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models and Where To Find Them
- ConceptPrune: Concept Editing in Diffusion Models via Skilled Neuron Pruning
- Prompting4Debugging: Red-Teaming Text-to-Image Diffusion Models by Finding Problematic Prompts
- SAeUron: Interpretable Concept Unlearning in Diffusion Models with Sparse Autoencoders
- Forget-It-All: Multi-Concept Machine Unlearning via Concept-Aware Neuron Masking
- Forget Many, Forget Right: Scalable and Precise Concept Unlearning in Diffusion Models
- SalUn: Empowering Machine Unlearning via Gradient-based Weight Saliency in Both Image Classification and Generation
- A Probabilistic Fluctuation based Membership Inference Attack for Diffusion Models
- Recovering the Pre-Fine-Tuning Weights of Generative Models
- Z-Erase: Enabling Concept Erasure in Single-Stream Diffusion Transformers
- One Image is Worth a Thousand Words: A Usability Preservable Text-Image Collaborative Erasing Framework
- AEGIS: Adversarial Target-Guided Retention-Data-Free Robust Concept Erasure from Diffusion Models
- SPEED: Scalable, Precise, and Efficient Concept Erasure for Diffusion Models
- Unlearning Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
- Circumventing Concept Erasure Methods For Text-to-Image Generative Models
- SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
- Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models
- Membership Inference Attacks Against Text-to-image Generation Models
- TINA: Text-Free Inversion Attack for Unlearned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
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