arXiv:2611.10106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Concept erasure, or concept unlearning, in text-to-image diffusion models is usually audited with prompt attacks. A prompt attack tests whether one conditioning string still retrieves the erased concept. It does not measure the probability that the fro
Beyond Prompt Attacks: Least-Action Auditing of Concept Erasure
arXiv:2611.10106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Concept erasure, or concept unlearning, in text-to-image diffusion models is usually audited with prompt attacks. A prompt attack tests whether one conditioning string still retrieves the erased concept. It does not measure the probability that the frozen generator still assigns to that concept. We introduce least-action auditing of this residual probability, and evaluate it on Stable Diffusion concept-erasure checkpoints. The least-action barrier is the minimum control cost of driving the frozen reverse process into a detector-defined concept event. This cost equals the path-space KL divergence of conditioning the model on the event, and therefore the event's negative log-probability. The estimate $\Delta S_{\mathrm{rob}}$ uses a CLIP$\wedge