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#1 Concept Reachability in Diffusion Models: Beyond Dataset Constraints [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Marta Aparicio Rodriguez, Xenia Miscouridou, Anastasia Borovykh

Despite significant advances in quality and complexity of the generations in text-to-image models, *prompting* does not always lead to the desired outputs. Controlling model behaviour by directly *steering* intermediate model activations has emerged as a viable alternative allowing to *reach* concepts in latent space that may otherwise remain inaccessible by prompt. In this work, we introduce a set of experiments to deepen our understanding of concept reachability. We design a training data setup with three key obstacles: scarcity of concepts, underspecification of concepts in the captions, and data biases with tied concepts. Our results show: (i) concept reachability in latent space exhibits a distinct phase transition, with only a small number of samples being sufficient to enable reachability, (ii) *where* in the latent space the intervention is performed critically impacts reachability, showing that certain concepts are reachable only at certain stages of transformation, and (iii) while prompting ability rapidly diminishes with a decrease in quality of the dataset, concepts often remain reliably reachable through steering. Model providers can leverage this to bypass costly retraining and dataset curation and instead innovate with user-facing control mechanisms.

Subject: ICML.2025 - Poster