DiffSafeMerge: Mitigating Backdoor Inheritance in Diffusion Model Merging
Unconditional diffusion checkpoint merging assumes benign sources, yet a compromised public checkpoint can transfer a dormant backdoor while clean generation appears normal. Mitigation is difficult without knowing the compromised source, trigger, or target, and broad sanitization may degrade image quality. We introduce DiffSafeMerge (DSM), which uses a small unlabeled clean set and fixed, attack-agnostic stress probes to score source blocks, shrink suspicious contributions toward a trusted reference, and select attenuation under a clean denoising-loss budget. We evaluate four attacks, two datasets, and 21 target conditions. Intended merging already has zero worst-target ASR in 10 of 14 so...
| Authors | Jiayang Zhang, Ji Guo, Jiachen Li et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CR |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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