Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts in Diffusion Unlearning

Miso Kim, Georu Lee, Yunji Kim, Hoki Kim, Jinseong Park, Woojin Lee

International Conference on Learning Representations 2026 (ICLR 2026) Conference

Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. Unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved $\textbf{CARE}$ ($\textbf{C}$o-occurring $\textbf{A}$ssociated $\textbf{RE}$tained concepts). Then, we introduce the $\textbf{CARE score}$, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose $\textbf{ReCARE}$ ($\textbf{R}$obust $\textbf{e}$rasure for $\textbf{CARE}$), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts ($\textit{Nudity}$, $\textit{Van Gogh}$ style, and $\textit{Tench}$ object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.