Papers for

creative ai developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Feature based tokenization improves image generation quality and efficiency

FeaTok: Feature-Loss Tokenization for Image Generation

Abstract: Discrete image generators learn the distribution of tokens produced by an image tokenizer. These token representations should be easy for generators to model, not merely enable faithful image reconstruction. Yet these tokenizers are commonly trained to reconstruct pixels, which prioritizes low-level fidelity and may disrupt representation structure useful for generation. Motivated by feature-predictive self-supervised learning, we introduce feature-loss tokenization (FeaTok), which trains discrete tokens by reconstructing pretrained features rather than pixels. Ablations across SigLIP, SigLIP2, DINOv2, and DINOv3 show better generative performance with FeaTok. In class-conditional generation, FeaTok advances the quality-compute Pareto frontier, reducing gFDr6 at 256x256 by up to 29 percent over the strongest discrete baselines and outperforming the strongest unguided continuous baseline (RAEv2) with 38 times less sampling compute. FeaTok also achieves higher human-preference reward-model scores than prior art without reward-based training and surpasses continuous and discrete text-conditional baselines on three benchmarks with only 500 fine-tuning updates after pre-training.

Thu 15 OctComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Generating images with computers often involves breaking them down into small pieces called tokens. The usual way to do this tries to recreate every pixel exactly, but that may not help computers understand how to generate new images. The authors propose a new way called FeaTok, which trains these tokens to rebuild important features of images instead of pixels. This change helps image generators create better pictures more efficiently, needing less computing power and fewer steps.
Open → 2610.22060v1

Framework links features of diffusion transformers to image generation control

D-Scope: Decomposing and Steering Diffusion Transformers with Sparse Autoencoders

Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) reveal visual structure in diffusion transformers (DiTs), but interpreting a feature does not establish whether it can be used to control generation. We introduce D-Scope (Diffusion Scope), a framework that connects feature interpretation to generation control through shared visual evidence. D-Scope aggregates SigLIP~2 embeddings of highly activating image patches into visual centroids. Matching target text descriptions against these visual centroids in the shared image-text embedding space then enables retrieval of individual features without per-feature text annotations. The underlying patches provide evidence for inspecting each selection, while spatially masked interventions test the corresponding decoder direction at varying strengths under fixed generation conditions. We characterize 150 SAEs across two model families and five layers, and introduce a benchmark of 100 target concepts with ten contexts each spanning under-specified and explicit-conflict conditions. Our empirical results show that high reconstruction fidelity can coexist with low dictionary utilization and limited visual-evidence coverage. Under per-case best-of-sweep strength selection, contrastive retrieval yields larger mean regional SigLIP~2 gains than direct retrieval across the tested steering configurations, without consistently improving outside-region preservation. D-Scope provides an inspectable framework for evaluating sparse DiT features through their visual evidence and the effects of their decoder directions on generation. The demo is available at https://jiahaozhang-public.github.io/d-scope/.

Wed 30 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern RecognitionArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Controlling how AI generates images often requires understanding hidden features inside the model, but knowing what features represent doesn’t guarantee they can be used to influence the image output. The authors introduce D-Scope, a system that connects the interpretation of these features to actually steering image generation by matching visual patterns to text descriptions. This approach helps test how activating or suppressing certain features changes the generated image and provides a way to inspect and control AI image creation more precisely. They tested D-Scope on many features and conditions to understand how well the features can be used to guide generation.
Open → 2609.39625v1

Hidden risks emerge when combining LoRA adapters in AI image generation

LoRango: It Takes Two LoRAs to Unlock Hidden Behaviors in Diffusion Models

Abstract: Users commonly combine multiple Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapters to personalize images with different subjects, styles, and visual attributes. Yet inspecting adapters individually does not establish the safety of their composition. We identify and characterize a pair-conditioned attack in text-to-image diffusion: individually useful and benign-appearing adapters redirect image generation when co-loaded with a specifically matched partner, whose identity serves as the trigger. We introduce LoRango to realize this attack through complementary Signature and Payload adapters. The Signature writes a pair-specific code into intermediate carrier representations, while the Payload uses code-selective responses and opposing signal/reference branches. These branches approximately cancel for standalone adapters and mismatched pairs; matched code-reader alignment breaks cancellation within native GEGLU blocks and releases the programmed action. Both adapters are exported as ordinary static LoRA files compatible with standard loaders, requiring no prompt trigger or base-pipeline modification. LoRango achieves matched-pair attack success rates of 97.9\% on SD v1.5 and 98.7\% on SDXL, compared with 2.8--4.6\% when implanted adapters are loaded individually. Further experiments evaluate pair selectivity, standalone fidelity, robustness to deployment variations, and applicability across denoiser architectures. These findings show that individual-adapter inspection is insufficient to assess the security of multi-LoRA personalization and motivate auditing adapter compositions.

Tue 22 SeptCryptography and SecurityComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
AI image generation models can be customized using small add-ons called LoRA adapters. This paper shows a security concern: two separate adapters that look safe on their own can secretly work together to change the images generated in unexpected ways. The authors created a method called LoRango that uses pairs of adapters to hide commands that only activate when loaded together, without needing any special changes to the AI model or user prompts. This means just checking one adapter at a time isn't enough to make sure combining them is safe.
Open → 2609.25884v1

Reasoning boosts AI story depth mostly by AI judges not humans

Does Reasoning Improve Psychological Depth in Large Language Models? It Depends on Who's Judging

Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge evaluators are increasingly used to score open-ended generation, yet a judge's correlation with human ratings on its development set may not guarantee valid measurement when outputs are closely matched and human preferences are subjective. We study this failure mode through psychological depth in short stories. Seven human readers and an LLM-judge ensemble selected on the original scalar Psychological Depth Scale dataset ($ρ= 0.646$) evaluated 60 blinded, prompt-matched story pairs from GPT-5 vs.\ GPT-4o and DeepSeek-R1 vs.\ DeepSeek-V3. Human preferences showed no universal reasoning advantage: GPT-5 was modestly preferred over GPT-4o (60.0--62.9\%), whereas DeepSeek-R1 trailed V3 (42.9\%), and inter-reader agreement was near chance (Krippendorff's $α= 0.070$), with within-reader consistency and recurring weighting patterns suggesting structured heterogeneity rather than random responding. The judge, by contrast, favored reasoning outputs in 89.0\% of dimension-level comparisons and 59 of 60 pairs on aggregate PDS, uniformly across all five evaluator configurations, and its scores were associated with surface features such as sentence length and lexical diversity. These results suggest that development-set performance is insufficient evidence for deployment validity on a shifted distribution, and that point-estimate judges can obscure the heterogeneity in subjective human evaluation.

Sat 12 SeptMachine LearningComputation and Language
The gist
This paper looks at whether large language models (like GPT-5 and others) produce stories with more psychological depth when they use reasoning. It turns out that human readers don’t strongly agree that one model is better than another in this way, with preferences varying a lot. On the other hand, AI-based judges consistently favor the stories with reasoning and tend to focus on things like sentence length. The authors show that AI judges trained on one set of data may not reliably reflect human judgments when the stories are different or more subjective.
Open → 2609.13773v1