Unlearning or Concealment? A Critical Analysis and Evaluation Metrics for Unlearning in Diffusion Models

Recent research has seen significant interest in methods for concept removal and targeted forgetting in text-to-image diffusion models. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive white-box analysis showing the vulnerabilities in existing diffusion model unlearning methods. We show that existing unlearning methods lead to decoupling of the targeted concepts (meant to be forgotten) for the corresponding prompts. This is concealment and not actual forgetting, which was the original goal. This paper presents a rigorous theoretical and empirical examination of five commonly used techniques for unlearning in diffusion models, while showing their potential weaknesses. We introduce two new evaluation metrics: Concept Retrieval Score (\textbf{CRS}) and Concept Confidence Score (\textbf{CCS}). These metrics are based on a successful adversarial attack setup that can recover \textit{forgotten} concepts from unlearned diffusion models. \textbf{CRS} measures the similarity between the latent representations of the unlearned and fully trained models after unlearning. It reports the extent of retrieval of the \textit{forgotten} concepts with increasing amount of guidance. CCS quantifies the confidence of the model in assigning the target concept to the manipulated data. It reports the probability of the \textit{unlearned} model's generations to be aligned with the original domain knowledge with increasing amount of guidance. The \textbf{CCS} and \textbf{CRS} enable a more robust evaluation of concept erasure methods. Evaluating existing five state-of-the-art methods with our metrics, reveal significant shortcomings in their ability to truly \textit{unlearn}. Source Code: \color{blue}{https://respailab.github.io/unlearning-or-concealment}