Color encoding in Latent Space of Stable Diffusion Models

Abstract: Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have achieved remarkable visual fidelity, yet a detailed understanding of how specific perceptual attributes - such as color and shape - are internally represented remains limited. This work explores how color is encoded in a generative model through a systematic analysis of the latent representations in Stable Diffusion. Through controlled synthetic datasets, principal component analysis (PCA) and similarity metrics, we reveal that color information is encoded along circular, opponent axes predominantly captured in latent channels c_3 and c_4, whereas intensity and shape are primarily represented in channels c_1 and c_2. Our findings indicate that the latent space of Stable Diffusion exhibits an interpretable structure aligned with a efficient coding representation. These insights provide a foundation for future work in model understanding, editing applications, and the design of more disentangled generative frameworks.