RLCP: A Reinforcement Learning-based Copyright Protection Method for Text-to-Image Diffusion Model

Abstract

The increasing sophistication of text-to-image generative models has led to complex challenges in defining and enforcing copyright infringement criteria and protection. Existing methods, such as watermarking and dataset deduplication, fail to provide comprehensive solutions due to the lack of standardized metrics and the inherent complexity of addressing copyright infringement in diffusion models. To deal with these challenges, we propose a Reinforcement Learning-based Copyright Protection(RLCP) method for Text-to-Image Diffusion Model, which minimizes the generation of copyright-infringing content while maintaining the quality of the model-generated dataset. Our approach begins with the introduction of a novel copyright metric grounded in copyright law and court precedents on infringement. We then utilize the Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO) framework to guide the model through a multi-step decision-making process, optimizing it using a reward function that incorporates our proposed copyright metric. Additionally, we employ KL divergence as a regularization term to mitigate some failure modes and stabilize RL fine-tuning. Experiments conducted on 3 mixed datasets of copyright and non-copyright images demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces copyright infringement risk while maintaining image quality.