Closing the Safety Gap: Surgical Concept Erasure in Visual Autoregressive Models

Abstract: The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has brought new opportunities for text-to-image generation, but also heightened safety concerns. Existing concept erasure techniques, primarily designed for diffusion models, fail to generalize to VARs due to their next-scale token prediction paradigm. In this paper, we first propose a novel VAR Erasure framework VARE that enables stable concept erasure in VAR models by leveraging auxiliary visual tokens to reduce fine-tuning intensity. Building upon this, we introduce S-VARE, a novel and effective concept erasure method designed for VAR, which incorporates a filtered cross entropy loss to precisely identify and minimally adjust unsafe visual tokens, along with a preservation loss to maintain semantic fidelity, addressing the issues such as language drift and reduced diversity introduce by na\"ive fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves surgical concept erasure while preserving generation quality, thereby closing the safety gap in autoregressive text-to-image generation by earlier methods.