SPARE: Self-distillation for PARameter-Efficient Removal

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Abstract

Machine Unlearning aims to remove the influence of specific data or concepts from trained models while preserving overall performance, a capability increasingly required by data protection regulations and responsible AI practices. Despite recent progress, unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models remains challenging due to high computational costs and the difficulty of balancing effective forgetting with retention of unrelated concepts. We introduce Self-distillation for PARameter Efficient Removal (SPARE), a two-stage unlearning method for image generation that combines parameter localization with self-distillation. SPARE first identifies parameters most responsible for generation of the unwanted concepts using gradient-based saliency and constrains updates through sparse low rank adapters, ensuring lightweight, localized modifications. In a second stage, SPARE applies a self-distillation objective that overwrites the unwanted concept with a user-defined surrogate while preserving behavior for other concepts. In addition we proposed a timestep sampling scheme for diffusion models to target only the crucial timesteps for a given concept leading to efficient unlearning. SPARE surpasses the current state-of-the-art on the UnlearnCanvas benchmark, and ablation studies on several datasets indicate fine-grained control over the forgetting-retention trade-off. Our results demonstrate that SPARE achieves strong concept erasure and high retainability across various domains, making it a suitable solution for selective unlearning in diffusion-based image generation models.