[Submitted on 1 Oct 2026]
Title:Keep It CALM: Analyzing the Limits of Global Unsafety in Text-to-Image Generation
View a PDF of the paper titled Keep It CALM: Analyzing the Limits of Global Unsafety in Text-to-Image Generation, by NaHyeon Park and 2 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Training-free safeguards for text-to-image generation often rely on a reusable safety signal, such as an unsafe direction or global toxic subspace, applied broadly across prompts. We provide a controlled geometric analysis of this global-unsafety assumption and reveal a consistent coverage-selectivity trade-off: compact unsafe subspaces fail to cover heterogeneous unsafe semantics, whereas broader aggregation increasingly distorts safety-adjacent benign prompts. Motivated by this finding, we propose CALM (Counterfactual Adaptive Local Modulation), a training-free safeguard that replaces uniform global removal with prompt-local counterfactual correction. Using matched unsafe-benign anchors, CALM routes each prompt to active unsafe categories, minimally edits only violating token representations toward the safe side, and suppresses positively aligned unsafe residual components. Across broad evaluation, CALM significantly improves unsafe content suppression while preserving benign utility, demonstrating that local counterfactual correction provides a more selective alternative to global unsafe signal removal.
Comments: NeurIPS 2026
Subjects:
Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2610.02300 [cs.AI]
(or arXiv:2610.02300v1 [cs.AI] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.02300
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: NaHyeon Park [view email] [v1] Thu, 1 Oct 2026 17:55:02 UTC (8,010 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
View a PDF of the paper titled Keep It CALM: Analyzing the Limits of Global Unsafety in Text-to-Image Generation, by NaHyeon Park and 2 other authors
View PDF
HTML (experimental)
TeX Source
view license
Current browse context:
cs.AI
new | recent | 2026-10
Change to browse by:
cs
References & Citations
NASA ADS
Google Scholar
Semantic Scholar
Loading...
Data provided by:
Bibliographic Tools
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Demos
Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers
Recommenders and Search Tools
Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
Author
Venue
Institution
Topic
About arXivLabs
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)