Push-Pull Attentional Anchoring for Diffusion Concept Erasure

Overview & Synopsis

Rapid advances in diffusion models have raised concerns about privacy, harmful content, and copyright violations. Concept erasure methods aim to address these risks by removing undesirable concepts from pretrained models without full retraining. However, existing approaches often degrade non-target generation quality through heuristic strength scaling (e.g., classifier-free guidance or negative prompt scaling), leading to uncontrolled and excessive semantic drift. To address this, we propose Push-Pull Attentional Anchoring (PPAA), a mechanism in the cross-attention space that displaces target representations while anchoring the scale of erasure via bounded cosine-similarity constraints. By using a relative similarity ratio instead of an absolute difference, our adaptive threshold represents a meaningful percentage of semantic retention, facilitating a single value to be applied uniformly across layers. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple concept categories, including celebrities, artistic styles, nudity, and intellectual property. Our method achieves favorable trade-offs against prior approaches on Stable Diffusion v1.4 and demonstrates its applicability to modern architectures such as FLUX.