Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster
in
Workshop: DIG-BUGS: Data in Generative Models (The Bad, the Ugly, and the Greats)

Layer-wise Influence Tracing: Data-Centric Mitigation of Memorization in Diffusion Models

Thomas Chen

Keywords: [ memorization ] [ generative models ] [ data-centric AI ] [ influence functions ] [ diffusion models ] [ Hessian sharpness ] [ machine unlearning ] [ privacy ]

[ ] [ Project Page ]
Sat 19 Jul 3 p.m. PDT — 3:45 p.m. PDT

Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models can inadvertently memorize andregenerate unique training images, posing serious privacy andcopyright risks. While recent work links such memorization to sharpspikes in the model’s log-density Hessian, existing diagnostics stop atflagging \emph{that} a model overfits, not \emph{which} samples are toblame or how to remove them. We introduce \emph{layer-wise influencetracing}, a scalable Hessian decomposition that assigns every trainingimage a curvature-based influence score. Deleting only the top$1\%$ high-risk images and performing a single, low-learning-ratefine-tune cuts verbatim reconstructions in Stable Diffusion XL by$72\%$ while keeping Fréchet Inception Distance within $1\%$ of thebaseline. The full procedure costs just 2.3 GPU-hours—over an order ofmagnitude cheaper than full-Hessian methods—and yields similar gains ona 1-billion-parameter distilled backbone. Our results turn a coarsememorization signal into an actionable, data-centric mitigationstrategy, paving the way toward privacy-respecting generative models at10 B+ scale.

Chat is not available.