Maya.
One real photograph, rebuilt into a complete reference canon. Every asset is scored against that source before it ships — the score sits on each tile, and where a score cannot be trusted the tile says so.
Every gate up to this point was a floor: more similarity to the source is better. That reverses the moment the brief is a deliberate change to the person. A tile scoring 0.85 against the source does not mean success here — it means the weight never applied and the after canon came back under a different filename.
So the before canon gates on a window, 0.42–0.68, and the two failures point in opposite directions: below the floor the change overshot and it is a different woman; above the ceiling the change never happened. A one-sided gate is structurally blind to the second failure, and the second failure is the one that looks like success.
It caught two immediately. chin_down returned 0.842 / 0.807 / 0.861 and soft_smile 0.807 / 0.800 / 0.824 — six consecutive takes a floor-only gate would have ranked as the best in the set. Both failed for the same anatomical reason: a closed-lip smile lifts and tightens the cheek, and chin-down compresses the under-chin into the neck. Those are exactly the two regions where added weight shows, so each pose hides its own evidence. They are declared as gaps rather than forced.
Weight is soft tissue and cannot move bone. Cheek fullness, jaw softness, under-chin, neck and lid weight are free to change. Interocular distance, the nose bridge line and length, brow arch, hairline, ear position, lip outline, freckles and her natural asymmetry are load-bearing identity and survive untouched. That split is what keeps her recognisable through a large change.
Each pair is the same circumstance in both states — the same errand, the same mirror, the same car, the same night out. That pairing is the point: a transformation reads when the situation is held constant and the only variable is her.
Both panels are matched to a common height and given identical treatment. No arrows, no burned-in labels, no divider graphics — the captions sit outside the image area so the photographs stay photographs.
Both states trace to the same origin. The after canon and the before canon are each built star-topology from profile.jpg, so neither is derived from the other and neither inherits the other's drift.
profile.jpg
The single confirmed photograph of Maya, and the sole origin of every reference below. Nothing else feeds identity.
The previous Maya Biometric/ sheets were rejected outright — they measured 0.21–0.36 against this image, the same band that condemned the legacy set as a different person. They were studio glamour renders, not photographs.
Star topology. Every reference here is exactly one edit away from this file, never edited from another render, so generation loss cannot compound across the set.
The collage is assembled locally from the exact nine master files. It is never re-rendered as a grid — asking a model for a 3×3 would reinterpret all nine into slightly different people.
2K, never 4K. At 4K the output is upscaled somewhere in the backend and skin turns mushy and faintly cartoonish. The forehead lines in the snarl and surprise masters, the nasolabial folds, the uneven complexion — that texture is what 4K averages away.
Both profiles were generated independently, not mirrored from one another, so they are genuine opposite views of the same inferred head.
Why the profiles are not gated. ArcFace similarity correlates with face width in frame at 0.80 — it substantially measures how large and how frontal a face is, not whether it is her. A true 90° profile presents almost no frontal information, so gating it would reject correct geometry and pull the whole set back toward flat frontal frames. Frontal gates at 0.70, three-quarter at 0.60, profiles are reported and verified by eye. The eye decides.
Known gap: a5_profile_right sits closer to 80° than a true 90°. Declared rather than quietly accepted.