BEM: Learning Bregman Divergences for Concept Erasure in Flow Matching Models

Mohamed-Hicham Leghettas, Markus Püschel

Concept erasure removes harmful, private, or copyrighted concepts from text-to-image models while preserving their other abilities. Leading models such as FLUX and Stable Diffusion 3 are trained with flow matching, and erasure methods for them fine-tune the model toward a guided teacher's velocities under a Euclidean loss. Yet the squared distance is only one member of a larger family: Bregman divergences are exactly the losses under which flow matching recovers the correct velocity field, and each member shapes differently what is erased and what is preserved. We introduce BEM (Bregman erasure matching), which is, to our knowledge, the first to learn this divergence through bi-level optimization, so that the fine-tuned model forgets the concept on unseen prompts while its unrelated generations stay unchanged. In the experiments we target the suppression of nudity, violence, real identities, and copyrighted characters. Under the evaluation protocol of GEM, BEM removes more of the concept than GEM on most settings, cutting the unsafe rate on bloody gore from 53.9% to 14.4% and the FID on nudity from 8.64 to 6.64, while retention holds on some concepts and degrades on others.