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.
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/.
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.
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.