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Sep 9

DiffCloth: Diffusion Based Garment Synthesis and Manipulation via Structural Cross-modal Semantic Alignment

Cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation will significantly benefit the way fashion designers generate garments and modify their designs via flexible linguistic interfaces.Current approaches follow the general text-to-image paradigm and mine cross-modal relations via simple cross-attention modules, neglecting the structural correspondence between visual and textual representations in the fashion design domain. In this work, we instead introduce DiffCloth, a diffusion-based pipeline for cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation, which empowers diffusion models with flexible compositionality in the fashion domain by structurally aligning the cross-modal semantics. Specifically, we formulate the part-level cross-modal alignment as a bipartite matching problem between the linguistic Attribute-Phrases (AP) and the visual garment parts which are obtained via constituency parsing and semantic segmentation, respectively. To mitigate the issue of attribute confusion, we further propose a semantic-bundled cross-attention to preserve the spatial structure similarities between the attention maps of attribute adjectives and part nouns in each AP. Moreover, DiffCloth allows for manipulation of the generated results by simply replacing APs in the text prompts. The manipulation-irrelevant regions are recognized by blended masks obtained from the bundled attention maps of the APs and kept unchanged. Extensive experiments on the CM-Fashion benchmark demonstrate that DiffCloth both yields state-of-the-art garment synthesis results by leveraging the inherent structural information and supports flexible manipulation with region consistency.

Unleashing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Visual Perception

Diffusion models (DMs) have become the new trend of generative models and have demonstrated a powerful ability of conditional synthesis. Among those, text-to-image diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image-text pairs are highly controllable by customizable prompts. Unlike the unconditional generative models that focus on low-level attributes and details, text-to-image diffusion models contain more high-level knowledge thanks to the vision-language pre-training. In this paper, we propose VPD (Visual Perception with a pre-trained Diffusion model), a new framework that exploits the semantic information of a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model in visual perception tasks. Instead of using the pre-trained denoising autoencoder in a diffusion-based pipeline, we simply use it as a backbone and aim to study how to take full advantage of the learned knowledge. Specifically, we prompt the denoising decoder with proper textual inputs and refine the text features with an adapter, leading to a better alignment to the pre-trained stage and making the visual contents interact with the text prompts. We also propose to utilize the cross-attention maps between the visual features and the text features to provide explicit guidance. Compared with other pre-training methods, we show that vision-language pre-trained diffusion models can be faster adapted to downstream visual perception tasks using the proposed VPD. Extensive experiments on semantic segmentation, referring image segmentation and depth estimation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Notably, VPD attains 0.254 RMSE on NYUv2 depth estimation and 73.3% oIoU on RefCOCO-val referring image segmentation, establishing new records on these two benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/wl-zhao/VPD

GestureLSM: Latent Shortcut based Co-Speech Gesture Generation with Spatial-Temporal Modeling

Generating full-body human gestures based on speech signals remains challenges on quality and speed. Existing approaches model different body regions such as body, legs and hands separately, which fail to capture the spatial interactions between them and result in unnatural and disjointed movements. Additionally, their autoregressive/diffusion-based pipelines show slow generation speed due to dozens of inference steps. To address these two challenges, we propose GestureLSM, a flow-matching-based approach for Co-Speech Gesture Generation with spatial-temporal modeling. Our method i) explicitly model the interaction of tokenized body regions through spatial and temporal attention, for generating coherent full-body gestures. ii) introduce the flow matching to enable more efficient sampling by explicitly modeling the latent velocity space. To overcome the suboptimal performance of flow matching baseline, we propose latent shortcut learning and beta distribution time stamp sampling during training to enhance gesture synthesis quality and accelerate inference. Combining the spatial-temporal modeling and improved flow matching-based framework, GestureLSM achieves state-of-the-art performance on BEAT2 while significantly reducing inference time compared to existing methods, highlighting its potential for enhancing digital humans and embodied agents in real-world applications. Project Page: https://andypinxinliu.github.io/GestureLSM

Product-Level Try-on: Characteristics-preserving Try-on with Realistic Clothes Shading and Wrinkles

Image-based virtual try-on systems,which fit new garments onto human portraits,are gaining research attention.An ideal pipeline should preserve the static features of clothes(like textures and logos)while also generating dynamic elements(e.g.shadows,folds)that adapt to the model's pose and environment.Previous works fail specifically in generating dynamic features,as they preserve the warped in-shop clothes trivially with predicted an alpha mask by composition.To break the dilemma of over-preserving and textures losses,we propose a novel diffusion-based Product-level virtual try-on pipeline,\ie PLTON, which can preserve the fine details of logos and embroideries while producing realistic clothes shading and wrinkles.The main insights are in three folds:1)Adaptive Dynamic Rendering:We take a pre-trained diffusion model as a generative prior and tame it with image features,training a dynamic extractor from scratch to generate dynamic tokens that preserve high-fidelity semantic information. Due to the strong generative power of the diffusion prior,we can generate realistic clothes shadows and wrinkles.2)Static Characteristics Transformation: High-frequency Map(HF-Map)is our fundamental insight for static representation.PLTON first warps in-shop clothes to the target model pose by a traditional warping network,and uses a high-pass filter to extract an HF-Map for preserving static cloth features.The HF-Map is used to generate modulation maps through our static extractor,which are injected into a fixed U-net to synthesize the final result.To enhance retention,a Two-stage Blended Denoising method is proposed to guide the diffusion process for correct spatial layout and color.PLTON is finetuned only with our collected small-size try-on dataset.Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on 1024 768 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework in mimicking real clothes dynamics.

Be-Your-Outpainter: Mastering Video Outpainting through Input-Specific Adaptation

Video outpainting is a challenging task, aiming at generating video content outside the viewport of the input video while maintaining inter-frame and intra-frame consistency. Existing methods fall short in either generation quality or flexibility. We introduce MOTIA Mastering Video Outpainting Through Input-Specific Adaptation, a diffusion-based pipeline that leverages both the intrinsic data-specific patterns of the source video and the image/video generative prior for effective outpainting. MOTIA comprises two main phases: input-specific adaptation and pattern-aware outpainting. The input-specific adaptation phase involves conducting efficient and effective pseudo outpainting learning on the single-shot source video. This process encourages the model to identify and learn patterns within the source video, as well as bridging the gap between standard generative processes and outpainting. The subsequent phase, pattern-aware outpainting, is dedicated to the generalization of these learned patterns to generate outpainting outcomes. Additional strategies including spatial-aware insertion and noise travel are proposed to better leverage the diffusion model's generative prior and the acquired video patterns from source videos. Extensive evaluations underscore MOTIA's superiority, outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods in widely recognized benchmarks. Notably, these advancements are achieved without necessitating extensive, task-specific tuning.

Toward effective protection against diffusion based mimicry through score distillation

While generative diffusion models excel in producing high-quality images, they can also be misused to mimic authorized images, posing a significant threat to AI systems. Efforts have been made to add calibrated perturbations to protect images from diffusion-based mimicry pipelines. However, most of the existing methods are too ineffective and even impractical to be used by individual users due to their high computation and memory requirements. In this work, we present novel findings on attacking latent diffusion models (LDM) and propose new plug-and-play strategies for more effective protection. In particular, we explore the bottleneck in attacking an LDM, discovering that the encoder module rather than the denoiser module is the vulnerable point. Based on this insight, we present our strategy using Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to double the speed of protection and reduce memory occupation by half without compromising its strength. Additionally, we provide a robust protection strategy by counterintuitively minimizing the semantic loss, which can assist in generating more natural perturbations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to substantiate our findings and comprehensively evaluate our newly proposed strategies. We hope our insights and protective measures can contribute to better defense against malicious diffusion-based mimicry, advancing the development of secure AI systems. The code is available in https://github.com/xavihart/Diff-Protect

X-NeMo: Expressive Neural Motion Reenactment via Disentangled Latent Attention

We propose X-NeMo, a novel zero-shot diffusion-based portrait animation pipeline that animates a static portrait using facial movements from a driving video of a different individual. Our work first identifies the root causes of the key issues in prior approaches, such as identity leakage and difficulty in capturing subtle and extreme expressions. To address these challenges, we introduce a fully end-to-end training framework that distills a 1D identity-agnostic latent motion descriptor from driving image, effectively controlling motion through cross-attention during image generation. Our implicit motion descriptor captures expressive facial motion in fine detail, learned end-to-end from a diverse video dataset without reliance on pretrained motion detectors. We further enhance expressiveness and disentangle motion latents from identity cues by supervising their learning with a dual GAN decoder, alongside spatial and color augmentations. By embedding the driving motion into a 1D latent vector and controlling motion via cross-attention rather than additive spatial guidance, our design eliminates the transmission of spatial-aligned structural clues from the driving condition to the diffusion backbone, substantially mitigating identity leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-NeMo surpasses state-of-the-art baselines, producing highly expressive animations with superior identity resemblance. Our code and models are available for research.

InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its reflow procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of 23.3 on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin (37.2 rightarrow 23.3 in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to 22.4. We call our one-step models InstaFlow. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of 13.1 in just 0.09 second, the best in leq 0.1 second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T (13.9 in 0.1 second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow.

EditVal: Benchmarking Diffusion Based Text-Guided Image Editing Methods

A plethora of text-guided image editing methods have recently been developed by leveraging the impressive capabilities of large-scale diffusion-based generative models such as Imagen and Stable Diffusion. A standardized evaluation protocol, however, does not exist to compare methods across different types of fine-grained edits. To address this gap, we introduce EditVal, a standardized benchmark for quantitatively evaluating text-guided image editing methods. EditVal consists of a curated dataset of images, a set of editable attributes for each image drawn from 13 possible edit types, and an automated evaluation pipeline that uses pre-trained vision-language models to assess the fidelity of generated images for each edit type. We use EditVal to benchmark 8 cutting-edge diffusion-based editing methods including SINE, Imagic and Instruct-Pix2Pix. We complement this with a large-scale human study where we show that EditVall's automated evaluation pipeline is strongly correlated with human-preferences for the edit types we considered. From both the human study and automated evaluation, we find that: (i) Instruct-Pix2Pix, Null-Text and SINE are the top-performing methods averaged across different edit types, however {\it only} Instruct-Pix2Pix and Null-Text are able to preserve original image properties; (ii) Most of the editing methods fail at edits involving spatial operations (e.g., changing the position of an object). (iii) There is no `winner' method which ranks the best individually across a range of different edit types. We hope that our benchmark can pave the way to developing more reliable text-guided image editing tools in the future. We will publicly release EditVal, and all associated code and human-study templates to support these research directions in https://deep-ml-research.github.io/editval/.

GuideSR: Rethinking Guidance for One-Step High-Fidelity Diffusion-Based Super-Resolution

In this paper, we propose GuideSR, a novel single-step diffusion-based image super-resolution (SR) model specifically designed to enhance image fidelity. Existing diffusion-based SR approaches typically adapt pre-trained generative models to image restoration tasks by adding extra conditioning on a VAE-downsampled representation of the degraded input, which often compromises structural fidelity. GuideSR addresses this limitation by introducing a dual-branch architecture comprising: (1) a Guidance Branch that preserves high-fidelity structures from the original-resolution degraded input, and (2) a Diffusion Branch, which a pre-trained latent diffusion model to enhance perceptual quality. Unlike conventional conditioning mechanisms, our Guidance Branch features a tailored structure for image restoration tasks, combining Full Resolution Blocks (FRBs) with channel attention and an Image Guidance Network (IGN) with guided attention. By embedding detailed structural information directly into the restoration pipeline, GuideSR produces sharper and more visually consistent results. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that GuideSR achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining the low computational cost of single-step approaches, with up to 1.39dB PSNR gain on challenging real-world datasets. Our approach consistently outperforms existing methods across various reference-based metrics including PSNR, SSIM, LPIPS, DISTS and FID, further representing a practical advancement for real-world image restoration.

DiffCalib: Reformulating Monocular Camera Calibration as Diffusion-Based Dense Incident Map Generation

Monocular camera calibration is a key precondition for numerous 3D vision applications. Despite considerable advancements, existing methods often hinge on specific assumptions and struggle to generalize across varied real-world scenarios, and the performance is limited by insufficient training data. Recently, diffusion models trained on expansive datasets have been confirmed to maintain the capability to generate diverse, high-quality images. This success suggests a strong potential of the models to effectively understand varied visual information. In this work, we leverage the comprehensive visual knowledge embedded in pre-trained diffusion models to enable more robust and accurate monocular camera intrinsic estimation. Specifically, we reformulate the problem of estimating the four degrees of freedom (4-DoF) of camera intrinsic parameters as a dense incident map generation task. The map details the angle of incidence for each pixel in the RGB image, and its format aligns well with the paradigm of diffusion models. The camera intrinsic then can be derived from the incident map with a simple non-learning RANSAC algorithm during inference. Moreover, to further enhance the performance, we jointly estimate a depth map to provide extra geometric information for the incident map estimation. Extensive experiments on multiple testing datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, gaining up to a 40% reduction in prediction errors. Besides, the experiments also show that the precise camera intrinsic and depth maps estimated by our pipeline can greatly benefit practical applications such as 3D reconstruction from a single in-the-wild image.

Stable-Hair: Real-World Hair Transfer via Diffusion Model

Current hair transfer methods struggle to handle diverse and intricate hairstyles, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based hair transfer framework, named Stable-Hair, which robustly transfers a wide range of real-world hairstyles to user-provided faces for virtual hair try-on. To achieve this goal, our Stable-Hair framework is designed as a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, we train a Bald Converter alongside stable diffusion to remove hair from the user-provided face images, resulting in bald images. In the second stage, we specifically designed a Hair Extractor and a Latent IdentityNet to transfer the target hairstyle with highly detailed and high-fidelity to the bald image. The Hair Extractor is trained to encode reference images with the desired hairstyles, while the Latent IdentityNet ensures consistency in identity and background. To minimize color deviations between source images and transfer results, we introduce a novel Latent ControlNet architecture, which functions as both the Bald Converter and Latent IdentityNet. After training on our curated triplet dataset, our method accurately transfers highly detailed and high-fidelity hairstyles to the source images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing hair transfer methods. Project page: red{https://xiaojiu-z.github.io/Stable-Hair.github.io/}

Real-World Image Variation by Aligning Diffusion Inversion Chain

Recent diffusion model advancements have enabled high-fidelity images to be generated using text prompts. However, a domain gap exists between generated images and real-world images, which poses a challenge in generating high-quality variations of real-world images. Our investigation uncovers that this domain gap originates from a latents' distribution gap in different diffusion processes. To address this issue, we propose a novel inference pipeline called Real-world Image Variation by ALignment (RIVAL) that utilizes diffusion models to generate image variations from a single image exemplar. Our pipeline enhances the generation quality of image variations by aligning the image generation process to the source image's inversion chain. Specifically, we demonstrate that step-wise latent distribution alignment is essential for generating high-quality variations. To attain this, we design a cross-image self-attention injection for feature interaction and a step-wise distribution normalization to align the latent features. Incorporating these alignment processes into a diffusion model allows RIVAL to generate high-quality image variations without further parameter optimization. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms existing methods with respect to semantic-condition similarity and perceptual quality. Furthermore, this generalized inference pipeline can be easily applied to other diffusion-based generation tasks, such as image-conditioned text-to-image generation and example-based image inpainting.

ACE: All-round Creator and Editor Following Instructions via Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative technology and have been found to be applicable in various scenarios. Most existing foundational diffusion models are primarily designed for text-guided visual generation and do not support multi-modal conditions, which are essential for many visual editing tasks. This limitation prevents these foundational diffusion models from serving as a unified model in the field of visual generation, like GPT-4 in the natural language processing field. In this work, we propose ACE, an All-round Creator and Editor, which achieves comparable performance compared to those expert models in a wide range of visual generation tasks. To achieve this goal, we first introduce a unified condition format termed Long-context Condition Unit (LCU), and propose a novel Transformer-based diffusion model that uses LCU as input, aiming for joint training across various generation and editing tasks. Furthermore, we propose an efficient data collection approach to address the issue of the absence of available training data. It involves acquiring pairwise images with synthesis-based or clustering-based pipelines and supplying these pairs with accurate textual instructions by leveraging a fine-tuned multi-modal large language model. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of our model, we establish a benchmark of manually annotated pairs data across a variety of visual generation tasks. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in visual generation fields. Thanks to the all-in-one capabilities of our model, we can easily build a multi-modal chat system that responds to any interactive request for image creation using a single model to serve as the backend, avoiding the cumbersome pipeline typically employed in visual agents. Code and models will be available on the project page: https://ali-vilab.github.io/ace-page/.

Stable-Hair v2: Real-World Hair Transfer via Multiple-View Diffusion Model

While diffusion-based methods have shown impressive capabilities in capturing diverse and complex hairstyles, their ability to generate consistent and high-quality multi-view outputs -- crucial for real-world applications such as digital humans and virtual avatars -- remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose Stable-Hair v2, a novel diffusion-based multi-view hair transfer framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage multi-view diffusion models for robust, high-fidelity, and view-consistent hair transfer across multiple perspectives. We introduce a comprehensive multi-view training data generation pipeline comprising a diffusion-based Bald Converter, a data-augment inpainting model, and a face-finetuned multi-view diffusion model to generate high-quality triplet data, including bald images, reference hairstyles, and view-aligned source-bald pairs. Our multi-view hair transfer model integrates polar-azimuth embeddings for pose conditioning and temporal attention layers to ensure smooth transitions between views. To optimize this model, we design a novel multi-stage training strategy consisting of pose-controllable latent IdentityNet training, hair extractor training, and temporal attention training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method accurately transfers detailed and realistic hairstyles to source subjects while achieving seamless and consistent results across views, significantly outperforming existing methods and establishing a new benchmark in multi-view hair transfer. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/sunkymepro/StableHairV2.

Diffusion Graph Neural Networks for Robustness in Olfaction Sensors and Datasets

Robotic odour source localization (OSL) is a critical capability for autonomous systems operating in complex environments. However, current OSL methods often suffer from ambiguities, particularly when robots misattribute odours to incorrect objects due to limitations in olfactory datasets and sensor resolutions. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel machine learning method using diffusion-based molecular generation to enhance odour localization accuracy that can be used by itself or with automated olfactory dataset construction pipelines with vision-language models (VLMs) This generative process of our diffusion model expands the chemical space beyond the limitations of both current olfactory datasets and the training data of VLMs, enabling the identification of potential odourant molecules not previously documented. The generated molecules can then be more accurately validated using advanced olfactory sensors which emulate human olfactory recognition through electronic sensor arrays. By integrating visual analysis, language processing, and molecular generation, our framework enhances the ability of olfaction-vision models on robots to accurately associate odours with their correct sources, thereby improving navigation and decision-making through better sensor selection for a target compound. Our methodology represents a foundational advancement in the field of artificial olfaction, offering a scalable solution to the challenges posed by limited olfactory data and sensor ambiguities.

GVGEN: Text-to-3D Generation with Volumetric Representation

In recent years, 3D Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful technique for 3D reconstruction and generation, known for its fast and high-quality rendering capabilities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel diffusion-based framework, GVGEN, designed to efficiently generate 3D Gaussian representations from text input. We propose two innovative techniques:(1) Structured Volumetric Representation. We first arrange disorganized 3D Gaussian points as a structured form GaussianVolume. This transformation allows the capture of intricate texture details within a volume composed of a fixed number of Gaussians. To better optimize the representation of these details, we propose a unique pruning and densifying method named the Candidate Pool Strategy, enhancing detail fidelity through selective optimization. (2) Coarse-to-fine Generation Pipeline. To simplify the generation of GaussianVolume and empower the model to generate instances with detailed 3D geometry, we propose a coarse-to-fine pipeline. It initially constructs a basic geometric structure, followed by the prediction of complete Gaussian attributes. Our framework, GVGEN, demonstrates superior performance in qualitative and quantitative assessments compared to existing 3D generation methods. Simultaneously, it maintains a fast generation speed (sim7 seconds), effectively striking a balance between quality and efficiency.

Hyper3D: Efficient 3D Representation via Hybrid Triplane and Octree Feature for Enhanced 3D Shape Variational Auto-Encoders

Recent 3D content generation pipelines often leverage Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to encode shapes into compact latent representations, facilitating diffusion-based generation. Efficiently compressing 3D shapes while preserving intricate geometric details remains a key challenge. Existing 3D shape VAEs often employ uniform point sampling and 1D/2D latent representations, such as vector sets or triplanes, leading to significant geometric detail loss due to inadequate surface coverage and the absence of explicit 3D representations in the latent space. Although recent work explores 3D latent representations, their large scale hinders high-resolution encoding and efficient training. Given these challenges, we introduce Hyper3D, which enhances VAE reconstruction through efficient 3D representation that integrates hybrid triplane and octree features. First, we adopt an octree-based feature representation to embed mesh information into the network, mitigating the limitations of uniform point sampling in capturing geometric distributions along the mesh surface. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid latent space representation that integrates a high-resolution triplane with a low-resolution 3D grid. This design not only compensates for the lack of explicit 3D representations but also leverages a triplane to preserve high-resolution details. Experimental results demonstrate that Hyper3D outperforms traditional representations by reconstructing 3D shapes with higher fidelity and finer details, making it well-suited for 3D generation pipelines.

SpaceBlender: Creating Context-Rich Collaborative Spaces Through Generative 3D Scene Blending

There is increased interest in using generative AI to create 3D spaces for Virtual Reality (VR) applications. However, today's models produce artificial environments, falling short of supporting collaborative tasks that benefit from incorporating the user's physical context. To generate environments that support VR telepresence, we introduce SpaceBlender, a novel pipeline that utilizes generative AI techniques to blend users' physical surroundings into unified virtual spaces. This pipeline transforms user-provided 2D images into context-rich 3D environments through an iterative process consisting of depth estimation, mesh alignment, and diffusion-based space completion guided by geometric priors and adaptive text prompts. In a preliminary within-subjects study, where 20 participants performed a collaborative VR affinity diagramming task in pairs, we compared SpaceBlender with a generic virtual environment and a state-of-the-art scene generation framework, evaluating its ability to create virtual spaces suitable for collaboration. Participants appreciated the enhanced familiarity and context provided by SpaceBlender but also noted complexities in the generative environments that could detract from task focus. Drawing on participant feedback, we propose directions for improving the pipeline and discuss the value and design of blended spaces for different scenarios.

X-Actor: Emotional and Expressive Long-Range Portrait Acting from Audio

We present X-Actor, a novel audio-driven portrait animation framework that generates lifelike, emotionally expressive talking head videos from a single reference image and an input audio clip. Unlike prior methods that emphasize lip synchronization and short-range visual fidelity in constrained speaking scenarios, X-Actor enables actor-quality, long-form portrait performance capturing nuanced, dynamically evolving emotions that flow coherently with the rhythm and content of speech. Central to our approach is a two-stage decoupled generation pipeline: an audio-conditioned autoregressive diffusion model that predicts expressive yet identity-agnostic facial motion latent tokens within a long temporal context window, followed by a diffusion-based video synthesis module that translates these motions into high-fidelity video animations. By operating in a compact facial motion latent space decoupled from visual and identity cues, our autoregressive diffusion model effectively captures long-range correlations between audio and facial dynamics through a diffusion-forcing training paradigm, enabling infinite-length emotionally-rich motion prediction without error accumulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that X-Actor produces compelling, cinematic-style performances that go beyond standard talking head animations and achieves state-of-the-art results in long-range, audio-driven emotional portrait acting.

AniMer+: Unified Pose and Shape Estimation Across Mammalia and Aves via Family-Aware Transformer

In the era of foundation models, achieving a unified understanding of different dynamic objects through a single network has the potential to empower stronger spatial intelligence. Moreover, accurate estimation of animal pose and shape across diverse species is essential for quantitative analysis in biological research. However, this topic remains underexplored due to the limited network capacity of previous methods and the scarcity of comprehensive multi-species datasets. To address these limitations, we introduce AniMer+, an extended version of our scalable AniMer framework. In this paper, we focus on a unified approach for reconstructing mammals (mammalia) and birds (aves). A key innovation of AniMer+ is its high-capacity, family-aware Vision Transformer (ViT) incorporating a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) design. Its architecture partitions network layers into taxa-specific components (for mammalia and aves) and taxa-shared components, enabling efficient learning of both distinct and common anatomical features within a single model. To overcome the critical shortage of 3D training data, especially for birds, we introduce a diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. This pipeline produces two large-scale synthetic datasets: CtrlAni3D for quadrupeds and CtrlAVES3D for birds. To note, CtrlAVES3D is the first large-scale, 3D-annotated dataset for birds, which is crucial for resolving single-view depth ambiguities. Trained on an aggregated collection of 41.3k mammalian and 12.4k avian images (combining real and synthetic data), our method demonstrates superior performance over existing approaches across a wide range of benchmarks, including the challenging out-of-domain Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both our novel network architecture and the generated synthetic datasets in enhancing real-world application performance.

AniMer: Animal Pose and Shape Estimation Using Family Aware Transformer

Quantitative analysis of animal behavior and biomechanics requires accurate animal pose and shape estimation across species, and is important for animal welfare and biological research. However, the small network capacity of previous methods and limited multi-species dataset leave this problem underexplored. To this end, this paper presents AniMer to estimate animal pose and shape using family aware Transformer, enhancing the reconstruction accuracy of diverse quadrupedal families. A key insight of AniMer is its integration of a high-capacity Transformer-based backbone and an animal family supervised contrastive learning scheme, unifying the discriminative understanding of various quadrupedal shapes within a single framework. For effective training, we aggregate most available open-sourced quadrupedal datasets, either with 3D or 2D labels. To improve the diversity of 3D labeled data, we introduce CtrlAni3D, a novel large-scale synthetic dataset created through a new diffusion-based conditional image generation pipeline. CtrlAni3D consists of about 10k images with pixel-aligned SMAL labels. In total, we obtain 41.3k annotated images for training and validation. Consequently, the combination of a family aware Transformer network and an expansive dataset enables AniMer to outperform existing methods not only on 3D datasets like Animal3D and CtrlAni3D, but also on out-of-distribution Animal Kingdom dataset. Ablation studies further demonstrate the effectiveness of our network design and CtrlAni3D in enhancing the performance of AniMer for in-the-wild applications. The project page of AniMer is https://luoxue-star.github.io/AniMer_project_page/.

Step1X-3D: Towards High-Fidelity and Controllable Generation of Textured 3D Assets

While generative artificial intelligence has advanced significantly across text, image, audio, and video domains, 3D generation remains comparatively underdeveloped due to fundamental challenges such as data scarcity, algorithmic limitations, and ecosystem fragmentation. To this end, we present Step1X-3D, an open framework addressing these challenges through: (1) a rigorous data curation pipeline processing >5M assets to create a 2M high-quality dataset with standardized geometric and textural properties; (2) a two-stage 3D-native architecture combining a hybrid VAE-DiT geometry generator with an diffusion-based texture synthesis module; and (3) the full open-source release of models, training code, and adaptation modules. For geometry generation, the hybrid VAE-DiT component produces TSDF representations by employing perceiver-based latent encoding with sharp edge sampling for detail preservation. The diffusion-based texture synthesis module then ensures cross-view consistency through geometric conditioning and latent-space synchronization. Benchmark results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance that exceeds existing open-source methods, while also achieving competitive quality with proprietary solutions. Notably, the framework uniquely bridges the 2D and 3D generation paradigms by supporting direct transfer of 2D control techniques~(e.g., LoRA) to 3D synthesis. By simultaneously advancing data quality, algorithmic fidelity, and reproducibility, Step1X-3D aims to establish new standards for open research in controllable 3D asset generation.

ControlCity: A Multimodal Diffusion Model Based Approach for Accurate Geospatial Data Generation and Urban Morphology Analysis

Volunteer Geographic Information (VGI), with its rich variety, large volume, rapid updates, and diverse sources, has become a critical source of geospatial data. However, VGI data from platforms like OSM exhibit significant quality heterogeneity across different data types, particularly with urban building data. To address this, we propose a multi-source geographic data transformation solution, utilizing accessible and complete VGI data to assist in generating urban building footprint data. We also employ a multimodal data generation framework to improve accuracy. First, we introduce a pipeline for constructing an 'image-text-metadata-building footprint' dataset, primarily based on road network data and supplemented by other multimodal data. We then present ControlCity, a geographic data transformation method based on a multimodal diffusion model. This method first uses a pre-trained text-to-image model to align text, metadata, and building footprint data. An improved ControlNet further integrates road network and land-use imagery, producing refined building footprint data. Experiments across 22 global cities demonstrate that ControlCity successfully simulates real urban building patterns, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our method achieves an average FID score of 50.94, reducing error by 71.01% compared to leading methods, and a MIoU score of 0.36, an improvement of 38.46%. Additionally, our model excels in tasks like urban morphology transfer, zero-shot city generation, and spatial data completeness assessment. In the zero-shot city task, our method accurately predicts and generates similar urban structures, demonstrating strong generalization. This study confirms the effectiveness of our approach in generating urban building footprint data and capturing complex city characteristics.

HiWave: Training-Free High-Resolution Image Generation via Wavelet-Based Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion models have emerged as the leading approach for image synthesis, demonstrating exceptional photorealism and diversity. However, training diffusion models at high resolutions remains computationally prohibitive, and existing zero-shot generation techniques for synthesizing images beyond training resolutions often produce artifacts, including object duplication and spatial incoherence. In this paper, we introduce HiWave, a training-free, zero-shot approach that substantially enhances visual fidelity and structural coherence in ultra-high-resolution image synthesis using pretrained diffusion models. Our method employs a two-stage pipeline: generating a base image from the pretrained model followed by a patch-wise DDIM inversion step and a novel wavelet-based detail enhancer module. Specifically, we first utilize inversion methods to derive initial noise vectors that preserve global coherence from the base image. Subsequently, during sampling, our wavelet-domain detail enhancer retains low-frequency components from the base image to ensure structural consistency, while selectively guiding high-frequency components to enrich fine details and textures. Extensive evaluations using Stable Diffusion XL demonstrate that HiWave effectively mitigates common visual artifacts seen in prior methods, achieving superior perceptual quality. A user study confirmed HiWave's performance, where it was preferred over the state-of-the-art alternative in more than 80% of comparisons, highlighting its effectiveness for high-quality, ultra-high-resolution image synthesis without requiring retraining or architectural modifications.

GenCompositor: Generative Video Compositing with Diffusion Transformer

Video compositing combines live-action footage to create video production, serving as a crucial technique in video creation and film production. Traditional pipelines require intensive labor efforts and expert collaboration, resulting in lengthy production cycles and high manpower costs. To address this issue, we automate this process with generative models, called generative video compositing. This new task strives to adaptively inject identity and motion information of foreground video to the target video in an interactive manner, allowing users to customize the size, motion trajectory, and other attributes of the dynamic elements added in final video. Specifically, we designed a novel Diffusion Transformer (DiT) pipeline based on its intrinsic properties. To maintain consistency of the target video before and after editing, we revised a light-weight DiT-based background preservation branch with masked token injection. As to inherit dynamic elements from other sources, a DiT fusion block is proposed using full self-attention, along with a simple yet effective foreground augmentation for training. Besides, for fusing background and foreground videos with different layouts based on user control, we developed a novel position embedding, named Extended Rotary Position Embedding (ERoPE). Finally, we curated a dataset comprising 61K sets of videos for our new task, called VideoComp. This data includes complete dynamic elements and high-quality target videos. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively realizes generative video compositing, outperforming existing possible solutions in fidelity and consistency.

VividPose: Advancing Stable Video Diffusion for Realistic Human Image Animation

Human image animation involves generating a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Current approaches typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, which often leads to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. This approach ensures that the generated videos maintain high fidelity to the identity of human subject, preserving key facial features across various poses. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both dense rendering maps from SMPL-X and sparse skeleton maps. This enables accurate alignment of pose and shape in the generated videos, providing a robust framework capable of handling a wide range of body shapes and dynamic hand movements. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Codes and models will be available.

SEEAvatar: Photorealistic Text-to-3D Avatar Generation with Constrained Geometry and Appearance

Powered by large-scale text-to-image generation models, text-to-3D avatar generation has made promising progress. However, most methods fail to produce photorealistic results, limited by imprecise geometry and low-quality appearance. Towards more practical avatar generation, we present SEEAvatar, a method for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from text with SElf-Evolving constraints for decoupled geometry and appearance. For geometry, we propose to constrain the optimized avatar in a decent global shape with a template avatar. The template avatar is initialized with human prior and can be updated by the optimized avatar periodically as an evolving template, which enables more flexible shape generation. Besides, the geometry is also constrained by the static human prior in local parts like face and hands to maintain the delicate structures. For appearance generation, we use diffusion model enhanced by prompt engineering to guide a physically based rendering pipeline to generate realistic textures. The lightness constraint is applied on the albedo texture to suppress incorrect lighting effect. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on both global and local geometry and appearance quality by a large margin. Since our method can produce high-quality meshes and textures, such assets can be directly applied in classic graphics pipeline for realistic rendering under any lighting condition. Project page at: https://seeavatar3d.github.io.

Brain Captioning: Decoding human brain activity into images and text

Every day, the human brain processes an immense volume of visual information, relying on intricate neural mechanisms to perceive and interpret these stimuli. Recent breakthroughs in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have enabled scientists to extract visual information from human brain activity patterns. In this study, we present an innovative method for decoding brain activity into meaningful images and captions, with a specific focus on brain captioning due to its enhanced flexibility as compared to brain decoding into images. Our approach takes advantage of cutting-edge image captioning models and incorporates a unique image reconstruction pipeline that utilizes latent diffusion models and depth estimation. We utilized the Natural Scenes Dataset, a comprehensive fMRI dataset from eight subjects who viewed images from the COCO dataset. We employed the Generative Image-to-text Transformer (GIT) as our backbone for captioning and propose a new image reconstruction pipeline based on latent diffusion models. The method involves training regularized linear regression models between brain activity and extracted features. Additionally, we incorporated depth maps from the ControlNet model to further guide the reconstruction process. We evaluate our methods using quantitative metrics for both generated captions and images. Our brain captioning approach outperforms existing methods, while our image reconstruction pipeline generates plausible images with improved spatial relationships. In conclusion, we demonstrate significant progress in brain decoding, showcasing the enormous potential of integrating vision and language to better understand human cognition. Our approach provides a flexible platform for future research, with potential applications in various fields, including neural art, style transfer, and portable devices.

CycleHOI: Improving Human-Object Interaction Detection with Cycle Consistency of Detection and Generation

Recognition and generation are two fundamental tasks in computer vision, which are often investigated separately in the exiting literature. However, these two tasks are highly correlated in essence as they both require understanding the underline semantics of visual concepts. In this paper, we propose a new learning framework, coined as CycleHOI, to boost the performance of human-object interaction (HOI) detection by bridging the DETR-based detection pipeline and the pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. Our key design is to introduce a novel cycle consistency loss for the training of HOI detector, which is able to explicitly leverage the knowledge captured in the powerful diffusion model to guide the HOI detector training. Specifically, we build an extra generation task on top of the decoded instance representations from HOI detector to enforce a detection-generation cycle consistency. Moreover, we perform feature distillation from diffusion model to detector encoder to enhance its representation power. In addition, we further utilize the generation power of diffusion model to augment the training set in both aspects of label correction and sample generation. We perform extensive experiments to verify the effectiveness and generalization power of our CycleHOI with three HOI detection frameworks on two public datasets: HICO-DET and V-COCO. The experimental results demonstrate our CycleHOI can significantly improve the performance of the state-of-the-art HOI detectors.

A Large-scale AI-generated Image Inpainting Benchmark

Recent advances in generative models enable highly realistic image manipulations, creating an urgent need for robust forgery detection methods. Current datasets for training and evaluating these methods are limited in scale and diversity. To address this, we propose a methodology for creating high-quality inpainting datasets and apply it to create DiQuID, comprising over 95,000 inpainted images generated from 78,000 original images sourced from MS-COCO, RAISE, and OpenImages. Our methodology consists of three components: (1) Semantically Aligned Object Replacement (SAOR) that identifies suitable objects through instance segmentation and generates contextually appropriate prompts, (2) Multiple Model Image Inpainting (MMII) that employs various state-of-the-art inpainting pipelines primarily based on diffusion models to create diverse manipulations, and (3) Uncertainty-Guided Deceptiveness Assessment (UGDA) that evaluates image realism through comparative analysis with originals. The resulting dataset surpasses existing ones in diversity, aesthetic quality, and technical quality. We provide comprehensive benchmarking results using state-of-the-art forgery detection methods, demonstrating the dataset's effectiveness in evaluating and improving detection algorithms. Through a human study with 42 participants on 1,000 images, we show that while humans struggle with images classified as deceiving by our methodology, models trained on our dataset maintain high performance on these challenging cases. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/mever-team/DiQuID.

DreamClear: High-Capacity Real-World Image Restoration with Privacy-Safe Dataset Curation

Image restoration (IR) in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges due to the lack of high-capacity models and comprehensive datasets. To tackle these issues, we present a dual strategy: GenIR, an innovative data curation pipeline, and DreamClear, a cutting-edge Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based image restoration model. GenIR, our pioneering contribution, is a dual-prompt learning pipeline that overcomes the limitations of existing datasets, which typically comprise only a few thousand images and thus offer limited generalizability for larger models. GenIR streamlines the process into three stages: image-text pair construction, dual-prompt based fine-tuning, and data generation & filtering. This approach circumvents the laborious data crawling process, ensuring copyright compliance and providing a cost-effective, privacy-safe solution for IR dataset construction. The result is a large-scale dataset of one million high-quality images. Our second contribution, DreamClear, is a DiT-based image restoration model. It utilizes the generative priors of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models and the robust perceptual capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve photorealistic restoration. To boost the model's adaptability to diverse real-world degradations, we introduce the Mixture of Adaptive Modulator (MoAM). It employs token-wise degradation priors to dynamically integrate various restoration experts, thereby expanding the range of degradations the model can address. Our exhaustive experiments confirm DreamClear's superior performance, underlining the efficacy of our dual strategy for real-world image restoration. Code and pre-trained models will be available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/DreamClear.

GenCAD: Image-Conditioned Computer-Aided Design Generation with Transformer-Based Contrastive Representation and Diffusion Priors

The creation of manufacturable and editable 3D shapes through Computer-Aided Design (CAD) remains a highly manual and time-consuming task, hampered by the complex topology of boundary representations of 3D solids and unintuitive design tools. While most work in the 3D shape generation literature focuses on representations like meshes, voxels, or point clouds, practical engineering applications demand the modifiability and manufacturability of CAD models and the ability for multi-modal conditional CAD model generation. This paper introduces GenCAD, a generative model that employs autoregressive transformers with a contrastive learning framework and latent diffusion models to transform image inputs into parametric CAD command sequences, resulting in editable 3D shape representations. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that GenCAD significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of the unconditional and conditional generations of CAD models. Additionally, the contrastive learning framework of GenCAD facilitates the retrieval of CAD models using image queries from large CAD databases, which is a critical challenge within the CAD community. Our results provide a significant step forward in highlighting the potential of generative models to expedite the entire design-to-production pipeline and seamlessly integrate different design modalities.

Single-Step Latent Diffusion for Underwater Image Restoration

Underwater image restoration algorithms seek to restore the color, contrast, and appearance of a scene that is imaged underwater. They are a critical tool in applications ranging from marine ecology and aquaculture to underwater construction and archaeology. While existing pixel-domain diffusion-based image restoration approaches are effective at restoring simple scenes with limited depth variation, they are computationally intensive and often generate unrealistic artifacts when applied to scenes with complex geometry and significant depth variation. In this work we overcome these limitations by combining a novel network architecture (SLURPP) with an accurate synthetic data generation pipeline. SLURPP combines pretrained latent diffusion models -- which encode strong priors on the geometry and depth of scenes -- with an explicit scene decomposition -- which allows one to model and account for the effects of light attenuation and backscattering. To train SLURPP we design a physics-based underwater image synthesis pipeline that applies varied and realistic underwater degradation effects to existing terrestrial image datasets. This approach enables the generation of diverse training data with dense medium/degradation annotations. We evaluate our method extensively on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SLURPP is over 200X faster than existing diffusion-based methods while offering ~ 3 dB improvement in PSNR on synthetic benchmarks. It also offers compelling qualitative improvements on real-world data. Project website https://tianfwang.github.io/slurpp/.

Style Customization of Text-to-Vector Generation with Image Diffusion Priors

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) are highly favored by designers due to their resolution independence and well-organized layer structure. Although existing text-to-vector (T2V) generation methods can create SVGs from text prompts, they often overlook an important need in practical applications: style customization, which is vital for producing a collection of vector graphics with consistent visual appearance and coherent aesthetics. Extending existing T2V methods for style customization poses certain challenges. Optimization-based T2V models can utilize the priors of text-to-image (T2I) models for customization, but struggle with maintaining structural regularity. On the other hand, feed-forward T2V models can ensure structural regularity, yet they encounter difficulties in disentangling content and style due to limited SVG training data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage style customization pipeline for SVG generation, making use of the advantages of both feed-forward T2V models and T2I image priors. In the first stage, we train a T2V diffusion model with a path-level representation to ensure the structural regularity of SVGs while preserving diverse expressive capabilities. In the second stage, we customize the T2V diffusion model to different styles by distilling customized T2I models. By integrating these techniques, our pipeline can generate high-quality and diverse SVGs in custom styles based on text prompts in an efficient feed-forward manner. The effectiveness of our method has been validated through extensive experiments. The project page is https://customsvg.github.io.

LAMP: Learn A Motion Pattern for Few-Shot-Based Video Generation

With the impressive progress in diffusion-based text-to-image generation, extending such powerful generative ability to text-to-video raises enormous attention. Existing methods either require large-scale text-video pairs and a large number of training resources or learn motions that are precisely aligned with template videos. It is non-trivial to balance a trade-off between the degree of generation freedom and the resource costs for video generation. In our study, we present a few-shot-based tuning framework, LAMP, which enables text-to-image diffusion model Learn A specific Motion Pattern with 8~16 videos on a single GPU. Specifically, we design a first-frame-conditioned pipeline that uses an off-the-shelf text-to-image model for content generation so that our tuned video diffusion model mainly focuses on motion learning. The well-developed text-to-image techniques can provide visually pleasing and diverse content as generation conditions, which highly improves video quality and generation freedom. To capture the features of temporal dimension, we expand the pretrained 2D convolution layers of the T2I model to our novel temporal-spatial motion learning layers and modify the attention blocks to the temporal level. Additionally, we develop an effective inference trick, shared-noise sampling, which can improve the stability of videos with computational costs. Our method can also be flexibly applied to other tasks, e.g. real-world image animation and video editing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LAMP can effectively learn the motion pattern on limited data and generate high-quality videos. The code and models are available at https://rq-wu.github.io/projects/LAMP.