Haste Makes Waste? Towards Safe Few-Step Text-to-Image Models

Lior Ziv, Mahmood Sharif

While few-step distilled text-to-image models have gained traction due to their fast generation times, the speed-up implications on their unsafe generation rates remain unknown. We uncover an inherent tension between speed and safety: few-step models are often more unsafe than their teachers, and reducing the number of inference steps consistently raises unsafe generation rates. We further find that acceleration makes unsafe concepts harder to erase in few-step models, with existing concept-erasure methods markedly less effective than in teachers. We offer a mechanistic diagnosis for why erasure methods fail on few-step models, finding that the fragility of few-step models' generation process and the way generation guidance is usually distilled into those models may hinder established concept-erasure methods. To address the speed-safety trade-off, we propose DICE (Distillation-Integrated Concept Erasure), a post-distillation erasure method tailored for few-step models. DICE aligns both its latent construction and its generation-preservation loss with the distillation method that produced the model, keeping erasure faithful to few-step models. DICE demonstrates strong results in…