GEM: Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows

Jonas Henry Grebe, Tobias Braun, Anna Rohrbach, Marcus Rohrbach
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 306:36652-36670, 2026.

Abstract

While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.

Cite this Paper


BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v306-grebe26a, title = {{GEM}: Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows}, author = {Grebe, Jonas Henry and Braun, Tobias and Rohrbach, Anna and Rohrbach, Marcus}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning}, pages = {36652--36670}, year = {2026}, editor = {Zhang, Tong and Dudik, Miroslav and Jaggi, Martin and Agarwal, Alekh and Li, Sharon and Schuurmans, Dale and Zhu, Jerry and Berkenkamp, Felix and Dong, Hanze and Bietti, Alberto}, volume = {306}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {06--11 Jul}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/v306/main/assets/grebe26a/grebe26a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/grebe26a.html}, abstract = {While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T GEM: Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows %A Jonas Henry Grebe %A Tobias Braun %A Anna Rohrbach %A Marcus Rohrbach %B Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2026 %E Tong Zhang %E Miroslav Dudik %E Martin Jaggi %E Alekh Agarwal %E Sharon Li %E Dale Schuurmans %E Jerry Zhu %E Felix Berkenkamp %E Hanze Dong %E Alberto Bietti %F pmlr-v306-grebe26a %I PMLR %P 36652--36670 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/grebe26a.html %V 306 %X While the rapid adoption of multimodal generative models offers immense potential, it has also increased the risks of harmful content synthesis, deepfakes, and copyright infringements. To address these challenges, concept erasure has emerged as a prospective safeguard. However, as the field gradually transitions from U-Net-based diffusion models to Rectified Flow Transformers, erasure research has struggled to keep pace. In this work, we introduce GEM, a simple but highly effective erasure framework for Rectified Flow models. As part of our contribution, we establish a principled bridge between trajectory-based unlearning grounded in Generative Flow Networks and classic teacher-guided erasure: we translate trajectory-based signals into a teacher-guided flow-matching setup that unifies the strengths of both paradigms. Concretely, a teacher provides complementary attraction and repulsion signals that we combine into a single geometric guidance objective, yielding targeted suppression of unwanted concepts while preserving benign generation.
APA
Grebe, J.H., Braun, T., Rohrbach, A. & Rohrbach, M.. (2026). GEM: Geometric Erasure by Contrastive Velocity Matching in Rectified Flows. Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 306:36652-36670 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v306/grebe26a.html.

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