Title: Image Can Bring Your Memory Back: A Novel Multi-Modal Guided Attack against Image Generation Model Unlearning
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: Adversarial attacks, Machine unlearning, Image generation model unlearning, AI safety, Stable Diffusion model, AIGC

Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion-based image generation models (IGMs), such as Stable Diffusion (SD), have substantially improved the quality and diversity of AI-generated content. However, these models also pose ethical, legal, and societal risks, including the generation of harmful, misleading, or copyright-infringing material. Machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a promising mitigation by selectively removing undesirable concepts from pretrained models, yet the robustness of existing methods, particularly under multi-modal adversarial inputs, remains insufficiently explored. To address this gap, we propose RECALL, a multi-modal adversarial framework for systematically evaluating and compromising the robustness of unlearned IGMs. Unlike prior approaches that primarily optimize adversarial text prompts, RECALL exploits the native multi-modal conditioning of diffusion models by efficiently optimizing adversarial image prompts guided by a single semantically relevant reference image. Extensive experiments across ten state-of-the-art unlearning methods and diverse representative tasks show that RECALL consistently surpasses existing baselines in adversarial effectiveness, computational efficiency, and semantic fidelity to the original prompt. These results reveal critical vulnerabilities in current unlearning pipelines and underscore the need for more robust, verifiable unlearning mechanisms. More than just an attack, RECALL also serves as an auditing tool for model owners and unlearning practitioners, enabling systematic robustness evaluation. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RECALL.

TL;DR: RECALL optimizes adversarial image prompts under text conditioning to recover erased concepts, serving both as an attack and as a robustness auditing tool for unlearned diffusion models.