In this paper, we present an improved leakage-based transmit precoding scheme that is composed of vector perturbation (VP), pre-filter (PF), and signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio (SLNR) precoder for multi-user multi-input multi-output (MU-MIMO) systems. In particular, we propose a new PF capable of greatly improving the system performance by mitigating residual leakage effects caused by VP. Through the bit-error-rate (BER) evaluations, we verify the superiority of the proposed transmit precoding scheme to various conventional block diagonalization (BD)- and SLNR-based precoding schemes exploiting PF and VP.