Morphological Addressing of Identity Basins in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

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Authors: Andrew Fraser
Cited by: 0

Abstract

We demonstrate that morphological pressure creates navigable gradients at multiple levels of the text-to-image generative pipeline. In Study~1, identity basins in Stable Diffusion 1.5 can be navigated using morphological descriptors -- constituent features like platinum blonde,'' beauty mark,'' and 1950s glamour'' -- without the target's name or photographs. A self-distillation loop (generating synthetic images from descriptor prompts, then training a LoRA on those outputs) achieves consistent convergence toward a specific identity as measured by ArcFace similarity. The trained LoRA creates a local coordinate system shaping not only the target identity but also its inverse: maximal away-conditioning produces eldritch'' structural breakdown in base SD1.5, while the LoRA-equipped model produces ``uncanny valley'' outputs -- coherent but precisely wrong. In Study~2, we extend this to prompt-level morphology. Drawing on phonestheme theory, we generate 200 novel nonsense words from English sound-symbolic clusters (e.g., \emph{cr-}, \emph{sn-}, \emph{-oid}, \emph{-ax}) and find that phonestheme-bearing candidates produce significantly more visually coherent outputs than random controls (mean Purity@1 = 0.371 vs.\ 0.209, p

Fields of Study & Subjects

Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning Digital Media Forensic Detection

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
20 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint