2025/09/16 by Shi, Qitan, Jiawei Zhang, Jin, Cheng +3
Computer Science · #Advanced Mathematical Modeling in Engineering #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Image and Signal Denoising Methods #Machine Learning (cs.LG)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.13007
openalex publication_date 2025/09/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/18 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Diffusion models excel at generating high-quality, diverse images but suffer from training data memorization, raising critical privacy and safety concerns. Data unlearning has emerged to mitigate this issue by removing the influence of specific data without retraining from scratch. We propose ReTrack, a fast and effective data unlearning method for diffusion models. ReTrack employs importance sampling to construct a more efficient fine-tuning loss, which we approximate by retaining only dominant terms. This yields an interpretable objective that redirects denoising trajectories toward the k-nearest neighbors, enabling efficient unlearning while preserving generative quality. Experiments on MNIST T-Shirt, CelebA-HQ, CIFAR-10, and Stable Diffusion show that ReTrack achieves state-of-the-art performance, striking the best trade-off between unlearning strength and generation quality preservation.