Although text-to-image diffusion models exhibit remarkable generative power, concept erasure techniques are essential for preventing harmful content. Existing adversarial probes evaluate these methods by testing whether erased concepts can still be recovered. However, existing erasure and probe methods remain largely text-centric, focusing on whether the text-to-image mapping is severed while overlooking whether the corresponding visual knowledge remains. To investigate this question from a visual perspective, we leverage diffusion inversion to probe whether a generative trajectory can reconstruct visual instances of an erased concept. Under a null-text condition, standard inversion avoids the textual pathway but amplifies approximation errors, hindering faithful trajectory recovery. To address this challenge, we introduce TINA+, a diffusion-consistent Text-free INversion Attack equipped with optimization-based inversion. We also find that unconstrained diffusion inversion may discover spurious trajectories, even allowing a randomly initialized diffusion model to reconstruct the target concept. Such trajectories may falsely indicate residual visual knowledge. TINA+ therefore introduces Diffusion-Consistent Trajectory Regularization to suppress this failure mode. By penalizing trajectories that fall far below the expected marginal energy evolution of diffusion, TINA+ suppresses spurious inversion paths while preserving its ability to recover erased concepts. Experiments across twelve erasure methods, four concept-erasure tasks, and different model architectures demonstrate that TINA+ reliably probes residual visual knowledge through diffusion-consistent visual trajectories. These results provide stronger evidence that current methods often obscure concepts by severing text-image links rather than eliminating the underlying visual knowledge.
Qianlong Xiang, Miao Zhang, Kun Wang et al.· 0 citations
Once visual content enters an AI pipeline, its owner often retains little technical control over how it is used. Legal and regulatory remedies can address misuse, but many technical interventions must be applied earlier, when content is released or accessed. This survey examines the protective paradigm that has grown around this intervention point, which we call \emph{adversarial attacks for good}. Perturbations and structured signals long studied as attacks on learned models are instead applied by data owners, creators, platforms, or auditors to disrupt unauthorized automation or support later accountability. Five research communities have arrived at this inversion largely independently, each addressing a different stage of a visual asset's lifecycle: privacy filters against unwanted recognition at sharing time, unlearnable examples against unauthorized training, generative safeguards against malicious editing or imitation, adversarial CAPTCHAs for access control against automated agents, and provenance mechanisms for post-circulation attribution. Although developed in separate venues with incompatible success criteria, many of these methods exploit persistent gaps between human perception, semantic interpretation, and machine inference, suggesting that the paradigm remains relevant as visual pipelines evolve toward multimodal models and autonomous agents. To make their claims comparable, we evaluate all five families along shared axes of transferability, adaptability, and deployment readiness. Across the lifecycle, we find that most protections are still validated mainly against static or weakly adaptive adversaries, while evidence beyond controlled benchmarks remains scarce. We close by consolidating cross-stage countermeasures and open problems for robust, composable, and deployable owner-side protection.
Jiaming Zhang, Boyang Chen, Zherui Li et al.· 0 citations
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