Unlearning Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

With the advancement of computer vision and natural language processing, text-to-video generation, enabled by text-to-video diffusion models, has become more prevalent. These models are trained using a large amount of data from the internet. However, the training data often contain copyrighted content, including cartoon character icons and artist styles, private portraits, and unsafe videos. Since filtering the data and retraining the model is challenging, methods for unlearning specific concepts from text-to-video diffusion models have been investigated. However, due to the high computational complexity and relative large optimization scale, there is little work on unlearning methods for text-to-video diffusion models. We propose a novel concept-unlearning method by transferring the unlearning capability of the text encoder of text-to-image diffusion models to text-to-video diffusion models. Specifically, the method optimizes the text encoder using few-shot unlearning, where several generated images are used. We then use the optimized text encoder in text-to-video diffusion models to generate videos. Our method costs low computation resources and has small optimization scale. We discuss the generated videos after unlearning a concept. The experiments demonstrates that our method can unlearn copyrighted cartoon characters, artist styles, objects and people's facial characteristics. Our method can unlearn a concept within about 100 seconds on an RTX 3070. Since there was no concept unlearning method for text-to-video diffusion models before, we make concept unlearning feasible and more accessible in the text-to-video domain.