Towards Memorization-Free Diffusion Models

Chen Chen, Daochang Liu, Chang Xu; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024, pp. 8425-8434

Pretrained diffusion models and their outputs are widely accessible due to their exceptional capacity for synthesizing high-quality images and their open-source nature. The users however may face litigation risks owing to the models' tendency to memorize and regurgitate training data during inference. To address this we introduce Anti-Memorization Guidance (AMG) a novel framework employing three targeted guidance strategies for the main causes of memorization: image and caption duplication and highly specific user prompts. Consequently AMG ensures memorization-free outputs while maintaining high image quality and text alignment leveraging the synergy of its guidance methods each indispensable in its own right. AMG also features an innovative automatic detection system for potential memorization during each step of inference process allows selective application of guidance strategies minimally interfering with the original sampling process to preserve output utility. We applied AMG to pretrained Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) and Stable Diffusion across various generation tasks. The results demonstrate that AMG is the first approach to successfully eradicates all instances of memorization with no or marginal impacts on image quality and text-alignment as evidenced by FID and CLIP scores.