English

Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models

Machine Learning 2022-12-13 v3 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Computers and Society

Abstract

Cutting-edge diffusion models produce images with high quality and customizability, enabling them to be used for commercial art and graphic design purposes. But do diffusion models create unique works of art, or are they replicating content directly from their training sets? In this work, we study image retrieval frameworks that enable us to compare generated images with training samples and detect when content has been replicated. Applying our frameworks to diffusion models trained on multiple datasets including Oxford flowers, Celeb-A, ImageNet, and LAION, we discuss how factors such as training set size impact rates of content replication. We also identify cases where diffusion models, including the popular Stable Diffusion model, blatantly copy from their training data.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.03860,
  title  = {Diffusion Art or Digital Forgery? Investigating Data Replication in Diffusion Models},
  author = {Gowthami Somepalli and Vasu Singla and Micah Goldblum and Jonas Geiping and Tom Goldstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.03860},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Updated draft with the following changes (1) Clarified the LAION Aesthetics versions everywhere (2) Correction on which LAION Aesthetics version SD - 1.4 is finetuned on and updated figure 12 based on this (3) A section on possible causes of replication

R2 v1 2026-06-28T07:25:07.104Z