SimAC: A Simple Anti-Customization Method for Protecting Face Privacy against Text-to-Image Synthesis of Diffusion Models
Authors: Feifei Wang, Zhentao Tan, Tianyi Wei, Yue Wu, Qidong Huang

Despite the success of diffusion-based customization methods on visual content creation increasing concerns have been raised about such techniques from both privacy and political perspectives. To tackle this issue several anti-customization methods have been proposed in very recent months predominantly grounded in adversarial attacks. Unfortunately most of these methods adopt straightforward designs such as end-to-end optimization with a focus on adversarially maximizing the original training loss thereby neglecting nuanced internal properties intrinsic to the diffusion model and even leading to ineffective optimization in some diffusion time steps. In this paper we strive to bridge this gap by undertaking a comprehensive exploration of these inherent properties to boost the performance of current anti-customization approaches. Two aspects of properties are investigated: 1) We examine the relationship between time step selection and the model's perception in the frequency domain of images and find that lower time steps can give much more contributions to adversarial noises. This inspires us to propose an adaptive greedy search for optimal time steps that seamlessly integrates with existing anti-customization methods. 2) We scrutinize the roles of features at different layers during denoising and devise a sophisticated feature-based optimization framework for anti-customization. Experiments on facial benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly increases identity disruption thereby protecting user privacy and copyright. Our code is available at: https://github.com/somuchtome/SimAC.