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arXiv · 2601.16803

SoS: Analysis of Surface over Semantics in Multilingual Text-To-Image Generation

Carolin Holtermann·Florian Schneider·Anne Lauscher
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Abstract

Text-to-image (T2I) models are increasingly employed by users worldwide. However, prior research has pointed to the high sensitivity of T2I towards particular input languages - when faced with languages other than English (i.e., different surface forms of the same prompt), T2I models often produce culturally stereotypical depictions, prioritizing the surface over the prompt's semantics. Yet a comprehensive analysis of this behavior, which we dub Surface-over-Semantics (SoS), is missing. We present the first analysis of T2I models' SoS tendencies. To this end, we create a set of prompts covering 171 cultural identities, translated into 14 languages, and use it to prompt seven T2I models. To quantify SoS tendencies across models, languages, and cultures, we introduce a novel measure and analyze how the tendencies we identify manifest visually. We show that all but one model exhibit strong surface-level tendency in at least two languages, with this effect intensifying across the layers of T2I text encoders. Moreover, these surface tendencies frequently correlate with stereotypical visual depictions.

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Carolin Holtermann, Florian Schneider, Anne Lauscher. 2026-01-23. SoS: Analysis of Surface over Semantics in Multilingual Text-To-Image Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.16803

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