# CHIMERA: Adaptive Cache Injection and Semantic Anchor Prompting for Zero-shot Image Morphing with Morphing-oriented Metrics

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.07155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07155/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Image generation, text-to-image and editing, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Image generation, text-to-image and editing](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/image-generation-text-to-image-and-editing/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [AlignMorph: Tuning-Free Diffusion Image Morphing via Explicit Semantic Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.24330/) (2026)
- [SEAL: Semantic-aware Single-image Sticker Personalization with a Large-scale Sticker-tag Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26883/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent diffusion-based image morphing methods typically interpolate inverted latents and reuse limited conditioning signals, which often yields unstable intermediates for heterogeneous endpoint pairs. In particular, (i) feature reuse is usually partial or non-adaptive, leading to abrupt structural changes or over-smoothing, and (ii) text conditions are commonly obtained independently per endpoint and then interpolated, which can introduce incompatible semantics. We present CHIMERA, a novel zero-shot diffusion morphing framework that addresses both issues via inversion-guided denoising with complementary feature reuse and text conditioning. Adaptive Cache Injection (ACI) caches a broader set of multi-scale diffusion features beyond Key-Value-only reuse during DDIM inversion, and re-injects them with layer- and timestep-aware scheduling to stabilize denoising and enable gradual fusion. Semantic Anchor Prompting (SAP) uses a VLM to generate a shared anchor-prompt and anchor-conditioned endpoint prompts, and injects the anchor into cross-attention to improve intermediate semantic coherence. Finally, we propose Global-Local Consistency Score (GLCS), a morphing-oriented metric that jointly captures global domain harmonization and local transition smoothness. Extensive experiments and a user study show that CHIMERA produces smoother and more semantically consistent morphing results than prior methods, while remaining efficient and applicable across diverse diffusion backbones without retraining.