Stroke of Surprise: Progressive Semantic Illusions in Vector Sketching

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12280v1
• Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2026 18:59:54 GMT
• Title: Stroke of Surprise: Progressive Semantic Illusions in Vector Sketching
• Authors: Huai-Hsun Cheng, Siang-Ling Zhang, Yu-Lun Liu,
• Abstract summary: We introduce Progressive Semantic Illusions, a novel vector sketching task where a single sketch undergoes a dramatic semantic transformation through the sequential addition of strokes.<n>We present Stroke of Surprise, a generative framework that optimize vector strokes to satisfy distinct semantic interpretations.<n>Our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recognizability and illusion strength.
• Score: 5.052864647270501
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Visual illusions traditionally rely on spatial manipulations such as multi-view consistency. In this work, we introduce Progressive Semantic Illusions, a novel vector sketching task where a single sketch undergoes a dramatic semantic transformation through the sequential addition of strokes. We present Stroke of Surprise, a generative framework that optimizes vector strokes to satisfy distinct semantic interpretations at different drawing stages. The core challenge lies in the "dual-constraint": initial prefix strokes must form a coherent object (e.g., a duck) while simultaneously serving as the structural foundation for a second concept (e.g., a sheep) upon adding delta strokes. To address this, we propose a sequence-aware joint optimization framework driven by a dual-branch Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) mechanism. Unlike sequential approaches that freeze the initial state, our method dynamically adjusts prefix strokes to discover a "common structural subspace" valid for both targets. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Overlay Loss that enforces spatial complementarity, ensuring structural integration rather than occlusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in recognizability and illusion strength, successfully expanding visual anagrams from the spatial to the temporal dimension. Project page: https://stroke-of-surprise.github.io/

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