Paper Detail

Moore, Escher, Penrose: A Conformal Golden Braid

Sophia Feldman, Assaf Shocher

arxiv Score 6.6

Published 2026-10-01 · First seen 2026-10-02

General AI

Abstract

I don't think I have ever done anything as peculiar in my life. Among other things, it shows a young man looking with interest at a print on the wall of an exhibition that features himself. How can this be? Perhaps I am not far removed from Einstein's curved universe.'' So wrote M.C. Escher about his 1956 lithograph Print Gallery. Nearly half a century later, a mathematical analysis related its geometry to an untwisted source image through a conformal power map $z \mapsto z^α$, $α\in \mathbb{C}$. Building on this construction, we use a frozen text-to-image diffusion model to generate new self-referential scenes. Prompting alone does not enforce the recursion, while a post-hoc transformation can leave structures poorly connected. Applying the transformation during sampling is also insufficient: the denoiser may "repair" the intended distortion or drift out of the prescribed geometry. We construct a generalized inverse $T^\dagger$ of the non-invertible image transformation $T$, adapted to its recursive constraint. In the idealized formulation, the Penrose identity $TT^\dagger T = T$ makes $TT^\dagger$ an idempotent projection onto geometrically admissible images. Yet denoising only the transformed image remains an out-of-distribution task, even with projection. We therefore braid denoising steps with $T$ and $T^\dagger$: source-space steps develop the untwisted scene, while transformed-space steps refine its appearance and connections in the final geometry. We generate Print Gallery-like compositions and explore further transformations. Rather than distorting a finished image, we let the scene and its distortion develop together.

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BibTeX

@article{feldman2026moore,
  title = {Moore, Escher, Penrose: A Conformal Golden Braid},
  author = {Sophia Feldman and Assaf Shocher},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {I don't think I have ever done anything as peculiar in my life. Among other things, it shows a young man looking with interest at a print on the wall of an exhibition that features himself. How can this be? Perhaps I am not far removed from Einstein's curved universe.'' So wrote M.C. Escher about his 1956 lithograph Print Gallery. Nearly half a century later, a mathematical analysis related its geometry to an untwisted source image through a conformal power map \$z \textbackslash{}mapsto z\textasciicircum{}α\$, \$α\textbackslash{}in \textbackslash{}mathbb\{C\}\$},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02210},
  keywords = {cs.CV},
  eprint = {2610.02210},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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