How Robust is Model Editing after Fine-Tuning? An Empirical Study on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Abstract

Model editing offers a low-cost technique to inject or correct a particular behavior in a pre-trained model without extensive retraining, supporting applications such as factual correction and bias mitigation. Despite this common practice, it remains unknown whether edits persist after fine-tuning or whether they are inadvertently reversed. This question has fundamental practical implications. For example, if fine-tuning removes prior edits, it could serve as a defence mechanism against hidden malicious edits. Vice versa, the unintended removal of edits related to bias mitigation could pose serious safety concerns. We systematically investigate the interaction between model editing and fine-tuning in the context of T2I diffusion models, which are known to exhibit biases and generate inappropriate content. Our study spans two T2I model families (Stable Diffusion and FLUX), two sota editing techniques, and three fine-tuning methods (DreamBooth, LoRA, and DoRA). Through an extensive empirical analysis across diverse editing tasks and evaluation metrics, our findings reveal a trend: edits generally fail to persist through fine-tuning, even when fine-tuning is tangential or unrelated to the edits. Notably, we observe that DoRA exhibits the strongest edit reversal effect. At the same time, among editing methods, UCE demonstrates greater robustness, retaining significantly higher efficacy post-fine-tuning compared to ReFACT. These findings highlight a crucial limitation in current editing methodologies, emphasizing the need for more robust techniques to ensure reliable long-term control and alignment of deployed AI systems. These findings have dual implications for AI safety: they suggest that fine-tuning could serve as a remediation mechanism for malicious edits while simultaneously highlighting the need for re-editing after fine-tuning to maintain beneficial safety and alignment properties.