Latent Guard: a Safety Framework for Text-to-image Generation

Runtao Liu*, Ashkan Khakzar, Jindong Gu, Qifeng Chen*, Philip Torr, Fabio Pizzati* ;

"With the ability to generate high-quality images, text-to-image (T2I) models can be exploited for creating inappropriate content. To prevent misuse, existing safety measures are either based on text blacklists, easily circumvented, or harmful content classification, using large datasets for training and offering low flexibility. Here, we propose , a framework designed to improve safety measures in text-to-image generation. Inspired by blacklist-based approaches, learns a latent space on top of the T2I model’s text encoder, where we check the presence of harmful concepts in the input text embeddings. Our framework is composed of a data generation pipeline specific to the task using large language models, ad-hoc architectural components, and a contrastive learning strategy to benefit from the generated data. Our method is evaluated on three datasets and against four baselines. redWarning: This paper contains potentially offensive text and images."