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Forget-It-All: Multi-Concept Machine Unlearning via Concept-Aware Neuron Masking

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026-05-19 v2 Machine Learning

Abstract

The widespread adoption of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models has raised concerns about their potential to generate copyrighted, inappropriate, or sensitive imagery. As a practical solution, machine unlearning aims to erase unwanted concepts without retraining from scratch. While most existing methods are effective for single-concept unlearning, they often struggle when removing multiple concepts, causing significant challenges in unlearning effectiveness, generation quality, and sensitivity to hyperparameters and datasets. We take a unique perspective on multi-concept unlearning by leveraging model sparsity and propose the Forget It All (FIA) framework. FIA first introduces Contrastive Concept Saliency to quantify each weight connection's contribution to a target concept. It then identifies Concept Sensitive Neurons by combining temporal and spatial information, ensuring that only neurons consistently responsive to the target concept are selected. Finally, FIA constructs masks from the identified neurons and fuses them into a unified multi-concept mask, where Concept Agnostic Neurons that broadly support general content generation are preserved while concept-specific neurons are pruned to remove the targets. FIA is training-free and requires minimal hyperparameter tuning for new tasks, enabling plug-and-play use. Extensive experiments across three distinct unlearning tasks demonstrate that FIA achieves more reliable multi-concept unlearning, improving forgetting effectiveness while maintaining generation fidelity and quality. Code is available at https://github.com/kaiyuan02415/Forget-It-All

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.06163,
  title  = {Forget-It-All: Multi-Concept Machine Unlearning via Concept-Aware Neuron Masking},
  author = {Kaiyuan Deng and Bo Hui and Gen Li and Jie Ji and Minghai Qin and Geng Yuan and Xiaolong Ma},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.06163},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted to ICML 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:58:17.972Z