# Diffusion Illusions: Hiding Images in Plain Sight

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03817 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03817/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Improved Baselines with Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03744/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14988/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Fourier Features Let Networks Learn High Frequency Functions in Low Dimensional Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10739/) (2020)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10789/) (2022)
- [Vision Transformers Need Registers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16588/) (2023)
- [The Vendi Score: A Diversity Evaluation Metric for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02410/) (2022)
- [Holistic Evaluation of Text-To-Image Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04287/) (2023)
- [Navigating Text-To-Image Customization: From LyCORIS Fine-Tuning to Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14859/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Models for Reinforcement Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01223/) (2023)
- [Visual Anagrams: Generating Multi-View Optical Illusions with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17919/) (2023)
- [A Study on the Evaluation of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.10935/) (2022)
- [Peekaboo: Text to Image Diffusion Models are Zero-Shot Segmentors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13224/) (2022)
- [Evaluation Metrics for Conditional Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12361/) (2020)
- [Constructing Printable Surfaces with View-Dependent Appearance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07449/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Rethinking Score Distillation as a Bridge Between Image Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09417/) (2024)
- [SyncTweedies: A General Generative Framework Based on Synchronized Diffusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14370/) (2024)
- [Factorized Diffusion: Perceptual Illusions by Noise Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11615/) (2024)
- [Images that Sound: Composing Images and Sounds on a Single Canvas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12221/) (2024)
- [Illusory VQA: Benchmarking and Enhancing Multimodal Models on Visual Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08169/) (2024)
- [Mitigating Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Adaptive Attention Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.16872/) (2025)
- [The Art of Deception: Color Visual Illusions and Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10122/) (2024)
- [PTDiffusion: Free Lunch for Generating Optical Illusion Hidden Pictures with Phase-Transferred Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06186/) (2025)
- [LookingGlass: Generative Anamorphoses via Laplacian Pyramid Warping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08902/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Visual Anagram as Multi-task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02693/) (2024)
- [MatchDiffusion: Training-free Generation of Match-cuts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18677/) (2024)
- [Illusion3D: 3D Multiview Illusion with 2D Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09625/) (2024)
- [Stroke of Surprise: Progressive Semantic Illusions in Vector Sketching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12280/) (2026)
- [ChArtist: Generating Pictorial Charts with Unified Spatial and Subject Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14209/) (2026)
- [SMSP: A Plug-and-Play Strategy of Multi-Scale Perception for MLLMs to Perceive Visual Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.23118/) (2026)
- [LUSD: Localized Update Score Distillation for Text-Guided Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11054/) (2025)
- [A Framework for Generating Semantically Ambiguous Images to Probe Human and Machine Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.24730/) (2026)
- [Meschers: Geometry Processing of Impossible Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14960/) (2026)
- [Now You See the Hate: Adaptive View Retrieval for Hidden Hateful Illusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19061/) (2026)
- [Making Images from Images: Interleaving Denoising and Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15925/) (2024)
- [LatentCRF: Continuous CRF for Efficient Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18596/) (2024)
- [Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14756/) (2026)
- [JanusMesh: Fast and Zero-Shot 3D Visual Illusion Generation via Cross-Space Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20563/) (2026)
- [Mirror Illusion Art](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02015/) (2026)
- [Form and Void: Entangled Composition through an Autonomous AI Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02045/) (2026)
- [Moore, Escher, Penrose: A Conformal Golden Braid](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02210/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We explore the problem of computationally generating special `prime' images that produce optical illusions when physically arranged and viewed in a certain way. First, we propose a formal definition for this problem. Next, we introduce Diffusion Illusions, the first comprehensive pipeline designed to automatically generate a wide range of these illusions. Specifically, we both adapt the existing `score distillation loss' and propose a new `dream target loss' to optimize a group of differentially parametrized prime images, using a frozen text-to-image diffusion model. We study three types of illusions, each where the prime images are arranged in different ways and optimized using the aforementioned losses such that images derived from them align with user-chosen text prompts or images. We conduct comprehensive experiments on these illusions and verify the effectiveness of our proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, we showcase the successful physical fabrication of our illusions -- as they are all designed to work in the real world. Our code and examples are publicly available at our interactive project website: https://diffusionillusions.com