new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Dec 29

Generative Neural Video Compression via Video Diffusion Prior

We present GNVC-VD, the first DiT-based generative neural video compression framework built upon an advanced video generation foundation model, where spatio-temporal latent compression and sequence-level generative refinement are unified within a single codec. Existing perceptual codecs primarily rely on pre-trained image generative priors to restore high-frequency details, but their frame-wise nature lacks temporal modeling and inevitably leads to perceptual flickering. To address this, GNVC-VD introduces a unified flow-matching latent refinement module that leverages a video diffusion transformer to jointly enhance intra- and inter-frame latents through sequence-level denoising, ensuring consistent spatio-temporal details. Instead of denoising from pure Gaussian noise as in video generation, GNVC-VD initializes refinement from decoded spatio-temporal latents and learns a correction term that adapts the diffusion prior to compression-induced degradation. A conditioning adaptor further injects compression-aware cues into intermediate DiT layers, enabling effective artifact removal while maintaining temporal coherence under extreme bitrate constraints. Extensive experiments show that GNVC-VD surpasses both traditional and learned codecs in perceptual quality and significantly reduces the flickering artifacts that persist in prior generative approaches, even below 0.01 bpp, highlighting the promise of integrating video-native generative priors into neural codecs for next-generation perceptual video compression.

DiffFit: Disentangled Garment Warping and Texture Refinement for Virtual Try-On

Virtual try-on (VTON) aims to synthesize realistic images of a person wearing a target garment, with broad applications in e-commerce and digital fashion. While recent advances in latent diffusion models have substantially improved visual quality, existing approaches still struggle with preserving fine-grained garment details, achieving precise garment-body alignment, maintaining inference efficiency, and generalizing to diverse poses and clothing styles. To address these challenges, we propose DiffFit, a novel two-stage latent diffusion framework for high-fidelity virtual try-on. DiffFit adopts a progressive generation strategy: the first stage performs geometry-aware garment warping, aligning the garment with the target body through fine-grained deformation and pose adaptation. The second stage refines texture fidelity via a cross-modal conditional diffusion model that integrates the warped garment, the original garment appearance, and the target person image for high-quality rendering. By decoupling geometric alignment and appearance refinement, DiffFit effectively reduces task complexity and enhances both generation stability and visual realism. It excels in preserving garment-specific attributes such as textures, wrinkles, and lighting, while ensuring accurate alignment with the human body. Extensive experiments on large-scale VTON benchmarks demonstrate that DiffFit achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and perceptual evaluations.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 29

Old Photo Restoration via Deep Latent Space Translation

We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with apartial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. Furthermore, we apply another face refinement network to recover fine details of faces in the old photos, thus ultimately generating photos with enhanced perceptual quality. With comprehensive experiments, the proposed pipeline demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods as well as existing commercial tools in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2020

WorldRFT: Latent World Model Planning with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Autonomous Driving

Latent World Models enhance scene representation through temporal self-supervised learning, presenting a perception annotation-free paradigm for end-to-end autonomous driving. However, the reconstruction-oriented representation learning tangles perception with planning tasks, leading to suboptimal optimization for planning. To address this challenge, we propose WorldRFT, a planning-oriented latent world model framework that aligns scene representation learning with planning via a hierarchical planning decomposition and local-aware interactive refinement mechanism, augmented by reinforcement learning fine-tuning (RFT) to enhance safety-critical policy performance. Specifically, WorldRFT integrates a vision-geometry foundation model to improve 3D spatial awareness, employs hierarchical planning task decomposition to guide representation optimization, and utilizes local-aware iterative refinement to derive a planning-oriented driving policy. Furthermore, we introduce Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which applies trajectory Gaussianization and collision-aware rewards to fine-tune the driving policy, yielding systematic improvements in safety. WorldRFT achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both open-loop nuScenes and closed-loop NavSim benchmarks. On nuScenes, it reduces collision rates by 83% (0.30% -> 0.05%). On NavSim, using camera-only sensors input, it attains competitive performance with the LiDAR-based SOTA method DiffusionDrive (87.8 vs. 88.1 PDMS).

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 22

LaDiR: Latent Diffusion Enhances LLMs for Text Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate their reasoning ability through chain-of-thought (CoT) generation. However, LLM's autoregressive decoding may limit the ability to revisit and refine earlier tokens in a holistic manner, which can also lead to inefficient exploration for diverse solutions. In this paper, we propose LaDiR (Latent Diffusion Reasoner), a novel reasoning framework that unifies the expressiveness of continuous latent representation with the iterative refinement capabilities of latent diffusion models for an existing LLM. We first construct a structured latent reasoning space using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that encodes text reasoning steps into blocks of thought tokens, preserving semantic information and interpretability while offering compact but expressive representations. Subsequently, we utilize a latent diffusion model that learns to denoise a block of latent thought tokens with a blockwise bidirectional attention mask, enabling longer horizon and iterative refinement with adaptive test-time compute. This design allows efficient parallel generation of diverse reasoning trajectories, allowing the model to plan and revise the reasoning process holistically. We conduct evaluations on a suite of mathematical reasoning and planning benchmarks. Empirical results show that LaDiR consistently improves accuracy, diversity, and interpretability over existing autoregressive, diffusion-based, and latent reasoning methods, revealing a new paradigm for text reasoning with latent diffusion.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6

Think-at-Hard: Selective Latent Iterations to Improve Reasoning Language Models

Improving reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially under parameter constraints, is crucial for real-world applications. Prior work proposes recurrent transformers, which allocate a fixed number of extra iterations per token to improve generation quality. After the first, standard forward pass, instead of verbalization, last-layer hidden states are fed back as inputs for additional iterations to refine token predictions. Yet we identify a latent overthinking phenomenon: easy token predictions that are already correct after the first pass are sometimes revised into errors in additional iterations. To address this, we propose Think-at-Hard (TaH), a dynamic latent thinking method that iterates deeper only at hard tokens. It employs a lightweight neural decider to trigger latent iterations only at tokens that are likely incorrect after the standard forward pass. During latent iterations, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules shift the LLM objective from general next-token prediction to focused hard-token refinement. We further introduce a duo-causal attention mechanism that extends attention from the token sequence dimension to an additional iteration depth dimension. This enables cross-iteration information flow while maintaining full sequential parallelism. Experiments show that TaH boosts LLM reasoning performance across five challenging benchmarks while maintaining the same parameter count. Compared with baselines that iterate twice for all output tokens, TaH delivers 8.1-11.3% accuracy gains while exempting 94% of tokens from the second iteration. Against strong single-iteration Qwen3 models finetuned with the same data, it also delivers 4.0-5.0% accuracy gains. When allowing less than 3% additional parameters from LoRA and the iteration decider, the gains increase to 8.5-12.6% and 5.3-5.4%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/TaH.

Binary Latent Diffusion

In this paper, we show that a binary latent space can be explored for compact yet expressive image representations. We model the bi-directional mappings between an image and the corresponding latent binary representation by training an auto-encoder with a Bernoulli encoding distribution. On the one hand, the binary latent space provides a compact discrete image representation of which the distribution can be modeled more efficiently than pixels or continuous latent representations. On the other hand, we now represent each image patch as a binary vector instead of an index of a learned cookbook as in discrete image representations with vector quantization. In this way, we obtain binary latent representations that allow for better image quality and high-resolution image representations without any multi-stage hierarchy in the latent space. In this binary latent space, images can now be generated effectively using a binary latent diffusion model tailored specifically for modeling the prior over the binary image representations. We present both conditional and unconditional image generation experiments with multiple datasets, and show that the proposed method performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods while dramatically improving the sampling efficiency to as few as 16 steps without using any test-time acceleration. The proposed framework can also be seamlessly scaled to 1024 times 1024 high-resolution image generation without resorting to latent hierarchy or multi-stage refinements.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 10, 2023

Instruct-CLIP: Improving Instruction-Guided Image Editing with Automated Data Refinement Using Contrastive Learning

Although natural language instructions offer an intuitive way to guide automated image editing, deep-learning models often struggle to achieve high-quality results, largely due to challenges in creating large, high-quality training datasets. Previous work has typically relied on text-toimage (T2I) generative models to produce pairs of original and edited images that simulate the input/output of an instruction-guided image-editing model. However, these image pairs often fail to align with the specified edit instructions due to the limitations of T2I models, which negatively impacts models trained on such datasets. To address this, we present Instruct-CLIP, a self-supervised method that learns the semantic changes between original and edited images to refine and better align the instructions in existing datasets. Furthermore, we adapt Instruct-CLIP to handle noisy latent images and diffusion timesteps so that it can be used to train latent diffusion models (LDMs) [19] and efficiently enforce alignment between the edit instruction and the image changes in latent space at any step of the diffusion pipeline. We use Instruct-CLIP to correct the InstructPix2Pix dataset and get over 120K refined samples we then use to fine-tune their model, guided by our novel Instruct-CLIP-based loss function. The resulting model can produce edits that are more aligned with the given instructions. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/Instruct-CLIP.git.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 24 2

CoCoVa: Chain of Continuous Vision-Language Thought for Latent Space Reasoning

In human cognition, there exist numerous thought processes that are tacit and beyond verbal expression, enabling us to understand and interact with the world in multiple ways. However, contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs) remain constrained to reasoning within the discrete and rigid space of linguistic tokens, thereby bottlenecking the rich, high-dimensional nature of visual perception. To bridge this gap, we propose CoCoVa (Chain of Continuous Vision-Language Thought), a novel framework for vision-language model that leverages continuous cross-modal reasoning for diverse vision-language tasks. The core of CoCoVa is an iterative reasoning cycle, where a novel Latent Q-Former (LQ-Former) acts as a dynamic reasoning engine, iteratively refining a chain of latent thought vectors through cross-modal fusion. To focus this process, a token selection mechanism dynamically identifies salient visual regions, mimicking attentional focus. To ensure these latent thoughts remain grounded, we train the model with a multi-task objective that combines contrastive learning and diffusion-based reconstruction, enforcing alignment between latent representations and both visual and textual modalities. Evaluations show CoCoVa improves accuracy and token efficiency over strong baselines. With a 1.5B backbone, it competes with or surpasses larger 7B-9B models on almost all benchmarks. When scaled to 7B LLM backbones, it remains competitive with state-of-the-art models. Qualitative analysis validates that learned latent space captures interpretable and structured reasoning patterns, highlighting the potential of CoCoVa to bridge the representational gap between discrete language processing and the continuous nature of visual understanding.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 4

PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose PoseTalk, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 4, 2024

NaviNeRF: NeRF-based 3D Representation Disentanglement by Latent Semantic Navigation

3D representation disentanglement aims to identify, decompose, and manipulate the underlying explanatory factors of 3D data, which helps AI fundamentally understand our 3D world. This task is currently under-explored and poses great challenges: (i) the 3D representations are complex and in general contains much more information than 2D image; (ii) many 3D representations are not well suited for gradient-based optimization, let alone disentanglement. To address these challenges, we use NeRF as a differentiable 3D representation, and introduce a self-supervised Navigation to identify interpretable semantic directions in the latent space. To our best knowledge, this novel method, dubbed NaviNeRF, is the first work to achieve fine-grained 3D disentanglement without any priors or supervisions. Specifically, NaviNeRF is built upon the generative NeRF pipeline, and equipped with an Outer Navigation Branch and an Inner Refinement Branch. They are complementary -- the outer navigation is to identify global-view semantic directions, and the inner refinement dedicates to fine-grained attributes. A synergistic loss is further devised to coordinate two branches. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviNeRF has a superior fine-grained 3D disentanglement ability than the previous 3D-aware models. Its performance is also comparable to editing-oriented models relying on semantic or geometry priors.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 22, 2023

HopFIR: Hop-wise GraphFormer with Intragroup Joint Refinement for 3D Human Pose Estimation

2D-to-3D human pose lifting is fundamental for 3D human pose estimation (HPE), for which graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have proven inherently suitable for modeling the human skeletal topology. However, the current GCN-based 3D HPE methods update the node features by aggregating their neighbors' information without considering the interaction of joints in different joint synergies. Although some studies have proposed importing limb information to learn the movement patterns, the latent synergies among joints, such as maintaining balance are seldom investigated. We propose the Hop-wise GraphFormer with Intragroup Joint Refinement (HopFIR) architecture to tackle the 3D HPE problem. HopFIR mainly consists of a novel hop-wise GraphFormer (HGF) module and an intragroup joint refinement (IJR) module. The HGF module groups the joints by k-hop neighbors and applies a hopwise transformer-like attention mechanism to these groups to discover latent joint synergies. The IJR module leverages the prior limb information for peripheral joint refinement. Extensive experimental results show that HopFIR outperforms the SOTA methods by a large margin, with a mean per-joint position error (MPJPE) on the Human3.6M dataset of 32.67 mm. We also demonstrate that the state-of-the-art GCN-based methods can benefit from the proposed hop-wise attention mechanism with a significant improvement in performance: SemGCN and MGCN are improved by 8.9% and 4.5%, respectively.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

NaTex: Seamless Texture Generation as Latent Color Diffusion

We present NaTex, a native texture generation framework that predicts texture color directly in 3D space. In contrast to previous approaches that rely on baking 2D multi-view images synthesized by geometry-conditioned Multi-View Diffusion models (MVDs), NaTex avoids several inherent limitations of the MVD pipeline. These include difficulties in handling occluded regions that require inpainting, achieving precise mesh-texture alignment along boundaries, and maintaining cross-view consistency and coherence in both content and color intensity. NaTex features a novel paradigm that addresses the aforementioned issues by viewing texture as a dense color point cloud. Driven by this idea, we propose latent color diffusion, which comprises a geometry-awared color point cloud VAE and a multi-control diffusion transformer (DiT), entirely trained from scratch using 3D data, for texture reconstruction and generation. To enable precise alignment, we introduce native geometry control that conditions the DiT on direct 3D spatial information via positional embeddings and geometry latents. We co-design the VAE-DiT architecture, where the geometry latents are extracted via a dedicated geometry branch tightly coupled with the color VAE, providing fine-grained surface guidance that maintains strong correspondence with the texture. With these designs, NaTex demonstrates strong performance, significantly outperforming previous methods in texture coherence and alignment. Moreover, NaTex also exhibits strong generalization capabilities, either training-free or with simple tuning, for various downstream applications, e.g., material generation, texture refinement, and part segmentation and texturing.

Instella-T2I: Pushing the Limits of 1D Discrete Latent Space Image Generation

Image tokenization plays a critical role in reducing the computational demands of modeling high-resolution images, significantly improving the efficiency of image and multimodal understanding and generation. Recent advances in 1D latent spaces have reduced the number of tokens required by eliminating the need for a 2D grid structure. In this paper, we further advance compact discrete image representation by introducing 1D binary image latents. By representing each image as a sequence of binary vectors, rather than using traditional one-hot codebook tokens, our approach preserves high-resolution details while maintaining the compactness of 1D latents. To the best of our knowledge, our text-to-image models are the first to achieve competitive performance in both diffusion and auto-regressive generation using just 128 discrete tokens for images up to 1024x1024, demonstrating up to a 32-fold reduction in token numbers compared to standard VQ-VAEs. The proposed 1D binary latent space, coupled with simple model architectures, achieves marked improvements in speed training and inference speed. Our text-to-image models allow for a global batch size of 4096 on a single GPU node with 8 AMD MI300X GPUs, and the training can be completed within 200 GPU days. Our models achieve competitive performance compared to modern image generation models without any in-house private training data or post-training refinements, offering a scalable and efficient alternative to conventional tokenization methods.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 26

Semantics Lead the Way: Harmonizing Semantic and Texture Modeling with Asynchronous Latent Diffusion

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) inherently follow a coarse-to-fine generation process, where high-level semantic structure is generated slightly earlier than fine-grained texture. This indicates the preceding semantics potentially benefit texture generation by providing a semantic anchor. Recent advances have integrated semantic priors from pretrained visual encoders to further enhance LDMs, yet they still denoise semantic and VAE-encoded texture synchronously, neglecting such ordering. Observing these, we propose Semantic-First Diffusion (SFD), a latent diffusion paradigm that explicitly prioritizes semantic formation. SFD first constructs composite latents by combining a compact semantic latent, which is extracted from a pretrained visual encoder via a dedicated Semantic VAE, with the texture latent. The core of SFD is to denoise the semantic and texture latents asynchronously using separate noise schedules: semantics precede textures by a temporal offset, providing clearer high-level guidance for texture refinement and enabling natural coarse-to-fine generation. On ImageNet 256x256 with guidance, SFD achieves FID 1.06 (LightningDiT-XL) and FID 1.04 (1.0B LightningDiT-XXL), while achieving up to 100x faster convergence than the original DiT. SFD also improves existing methods like ReDi and VA-VAE, demonstrating the effectiveness of asynchronous, semantics-led modeling. Project page and code: https://yuemingpan.github.io/SFD.github.io/.

ED-NeRF: Efficient Text-Guided Editing of 3D Scene using Latent Space NeRF

Recently, there has been a significant advancement in text-to-image diffusion models, leading to groundbreaking performance in 2D image generation. These advancements have been extended to 3D models, enabling the generation of novel 3D objects from textual descriptions. This has evolved into NeRF editing methods, which allow the manipulation of existing 3D objects through textual conditioning. However, existing NeRF editing techniques have faced limitations in their performance due to slow training speeds and the use of loss functions that do not adequately consider editing. To address this, here we present a novel 3D NeRF editing approach dubbed ED-NeRF by successfully embedding real-world scenes into the latent space of the latent diffusion model (LDM) through a unique refinement layer. This approach enables us to obtain a NeRF backbone that is not only faster but also more amenable to editing compared to traditional image space NeRF editing. Furthermore, we propose an improved loss function tailored for editing by migrating the delta denoising score (DDS) distillation loss, originally used in 2D image editing to the three-dimensional domain. This novel loss function surpasses the well-known score distillation sampling (SDS) loss in terms of suitability for editing purposes. Our experimental results demonstrate that ED-NeRF achieves faster editing speed while producing improved output quality compared to state-of-the-art 3D editing models.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 4, 2023

DiffQRCoder: Diffusion-based Aesthetic QR Code Generation with Scanning Robustness Guided Iterative Refinement

With the success of Diffusion Models for image generation, the technologies also have revolutionized the aesthetic Quick Response (QR) code generation. Despite significant improvements in visual attractiveness for the beautified codes, their scannabilities are usually sacrificed and thus hinder their practical uses in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel training-free Diffusion-based QR Code generator (DiffQRCoder) to effectively craft both scannable and visually pleasing QR codes. The proposed approach introduces Scanning-Robust Perceptual Guidance (SRPG), a new diffusion guidance for Diffusion Models to guarantee the generated aesthetic codes to obey the ground-truth QR codes while maintaining their attractiveness during the denoising process. Additionally, we present another post-processing technique, Scanning Robust Manifold Projected Gradient Descent (SR-MPGD), to further enhance their scanning robustness through iterative latent space optimization. With extensive experiments, the results demonstrate that our approach not only outperforms other compared methods in Scanning Success Rate (SSR) with better or comparable CLIP aesthetic score (CLIP-aes.) but also significantly improves the SSR of the ControlNet-only approach from 60% to 99%. The subjective evaluation indicates that our approach achieves promising visual attractiveness to users as well. Finally, even with different scanning angles and the most rigorous error tolerance settings, our approach robustly achieves over 95% SSR, demonstrating its capability for real-world applications. Our project page is available at https://jwliao1209.github.io/DiffQRCoder.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 10, 2024 1

Unify, Align and Refine: Multi-Level Semantic Alignment for Radiology Report Generation

Automatic radiology report generation has attracted enormous research interest due to its practical value in reducing the workload of radiologists. However, simultaneously establishing global correspondences between the image (e.g., Chest X-ray) and its related report and local alignments between image patches and keywords remains challenging. To this end, we propose an Unify, Align and then Refine (UAR) approach to learn multi-level cross-modal alignments and introduce three novel modules: Latent Space Unifier (LSU), Cross-modal Representation Aligner (CRA) and Text-to-Image Refiner (TIR). Specifically, LSU unifies multimodal data into discrete tokens, making it flexible to learn common knowledge among modalities with a shared network. The modality-agnostic CRA learns discriminative features via a set of orthonormal basis and a dual-gate mechanism first and then globally aligns visual and textual representations under a triplet contrastive loss. TIR boosts token-level local alignment via calibrating text-to-image attention with a learnable mask. Additionally, we design a two-stage training procedure to make UAR gradually grasp cross-modal alignments at different levels, which imitates radiologists' workflow: writing sentence by sentence first and then checking word by word. Extensive experiments and analyses on IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our UAR against varied state-of-the-art methods.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 28, 2023

HyperReenact: One-Shot Reenactment via Jointly Learning to Refine and Retarget Faces

In this paper, we present our method for neural face reenactment, called HyperReenact, that aims to generate realistic talking head images of a source identity, driven by a target facial pose. Existing state-of-the-art face reenactment methods train controllable generative models that learn to synthesize realistic facial images, yet producing reenacted faces that are prone to significant visual artifacts, especially under the challenging condition of extreme head pose changes, or requiring expensive few-shot fine-tuning to better preserve the source identity characteristics. We propose to address these limitations by leveraging the photorealistic generation ability and the disentangled properties of a pretrained StyleGAN2 generator, by first inverting the real images into its latent space and then using a hypernetwork to perform: (i) refinement of the source identity characteristics and (ii) facial pose re-targeting, eliminating this way the dependence on external editing methods that typically produce artifacts. Our method operates under the one-shot setting (i.e., using a single source frame) and allows for cross-subject reenactment, without requiring any subject-specific fine-tuning. We compare our method both quantitatively and qualitatively against several state-of-the-art techniques on the standard benchmarks of VoxCeleb1 and VoxCeleb2, demonstrating the superiority of our approach in producing artifact-free images, exhibiting remarkable robustness even under extreme head pose changes. We make the code and the pretrained models publicly available at: https://github.com/StelaBou/HyperReenact .

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

CLIP-Guided StyleGAN Inversion for Text-Driven Real Image Editing

Researchers have recently begun exploring the use of StyleGAN-based models for real image editing. One particularly interesting application is using natural language descriptions to guide the editing process. Existing approaches for editing images using language either resort to instance-level latent code optimization or map predefined text prompts to some editing directions in the latent space. However, these approaches have inherent limitations. The former is not very efficient, while the latter often struggles to effectively handle multi-attribute changes. To address these weaknesses, we present CLIPInverter, a new text-driven image editing approach that is able to efficiently and reliably perform multi-attribute changes. The core of our method is the use of novel, lightweight text-conditioned adapter layers integrated into pretrained GAN-inversion networks. We demonstrate that by conditioning the initial inversion step on the CLIP embedding of the target description, we are able to obtain more successful edit directions. Additionally, we use a CLIP-guided refinement step to make corrections in the resulting residual latent codes, which further improves the alignment with the text prompt. Our method outperforms competing approaches in terms of manipulation accuracy and photo-realism on various domains including human faces, cats, and birds, as shown by our qualitative and quantitative results.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 17, 2023

Tales of the 2025 Los Angeles Fire: Hotwash for Public Health Concerns in Reddit via LLM-Enhanced Topic Modeling

Wildfires have become increasingly frequent, irregular, and severe in recent years. Understanding how affected populations perceive and respond during wildfire crises is critical for timely and empathetic disaster response. Social media platforms offer a crowd-sourced channel to capture evolving public discourse, providing hyperlocal information and insight into public sentiment. This study analyzes Reddit discourse during the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, spanning from the onset of the disaster to full containment. We collect 385 posts and 114,879 comments related to the Palisades and Eaton fires. We adopt topic modeling methods to identify the latent topics, enhanced by large language models (LLMs) and human-in-the-loop (HITL) refinement. Furthermore, we develop a hierarchical framework to categorize latent topics, consisting of two main categories, Situational Awareness (SA) and Crisis Narratives (CN). The volume of SA category closely aligns with real-world fire progressions, peaking within the first 2-5 days as the fires reach the maximum extent. The most frequent co-occurring category set of public health and safety, loss and damage, and emergency resources expands on a wide range of health-related latent topics, including environmental health, occupational health, and one health. Grief signals and mental health risks consistently accounted for 60 percentage and 40 percentage of CN instances, respectively, with the highest total volume occurring at night. This study contributes the first annotated social media dataset on the 2025 LA fires, and introduces a scalable multi-layer framework that leverages topic modeling for crisis discourse analysis. By identifying persistent public health concerns, our results can inform more empathetic and adaptive strategies for disaster response, public health communication, and future research in comparable climate-related disaster events.

  • 10 authors
·
May 14

Scaling Language-Centric Omnimodal Representation Learning

Recent multimodal embedding approaches leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) fine-tuned with contrastive learning (CL) have shown promising results, yet the underlying reasons behind their superiority remain underexplored. This work argues that a crucial advantage of MLLM-based approaches stems from implicit cross-modal alignment achieved during generative pretraining, where the language decoder learns to exploit multimodal signals within a shared representation space for generating unimodal outputs. Through analysis of anisotropy and kernel similarity structure, we empirically confirm that latent alignment emerges within MLLM representations, allowing CL to serve as a lightweight refinement stage. Leveraging this insight, we propose a Language-Centric Omnimodal Embedding framework, termed LCO-Emb. Extensive experiments across diverse backbones and benchmarks demonstrate its effectiveness, achieving state-of-the-art performance across modalities. Furthermore, we identify a Generation-Representation Scaling Law (GRSL), showing that the representational capabilities gained through contrastive refinement scales positively with the MLLM's generative capabilities. This suggests that improving generative abilities evolves as an effective paradigm for enhancing representation quality. We provide a theoretical explanation of GRSL, which formally links the MLLM's generative quality to the upper bound on its representation performance, and validate it on a challenging, low-resource visual-document retrieval task, showing that continual generative pretraining before CL can further enhance the potential of a model's embedding capabilities. Codes, models, and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/LCO-Embedding.

Alibaba-DAMO-Academy DAMO Academy
·
Oct 13 4

Teller: Real-Time Streaming Audio-Driven Portrait Animation with Autoregressive Motion Generation

In this work, we introduce the first autoregressive framework for real-time, audio-driven portrait animation, a.k.a, talking head. Beyond the challenge of lengthy animation times, a critical challenge in realistic talking head generation lies in preserving the natural movement of diverse body parts. To this end, we propose Teller, the first streaming audio-driven protrait animation framework with autoregressive motion generation. Specifically, Teller first decomposes facial and body detail animation into two components: Facial Motion Latent Generation (FMLG) based on an autoregressive transfromer, and movement authenticity refinement using a Efficient Temporal Module (ETM).Concretely, FMLG employs a Residual VQ model to map the facial motion latent from the implicit keypoint-based model into discrete motion tokens, which are then temporally sliced with audio embeddings. This enables the AR tranformer to learn real-time, stream-based mappings from audio to motion. Furthermore, Teller incorporate ETM to capture finer motion details. This module ensures the physical consistency of body parts and accessories, such as neck muscles and earrings, improving the realism of these movements. Teller is designed to be efficient, surpassing the inference speed of diffusion-based models (Hallo 20.93s vs. Teller 0.92s for one second video generation), and achieves a real-time streaming performance of up to 25 FPS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms recent audio-driven portrait animation models, especially in small movements, as validated by human evaluations with a significant margin in quality and realism.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 24

RAD: Towards Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Multi-modal Clinical Diagnosis

Clinical diagnosis is a highly specialized discipline requiring both domain expertise and strict adherence to rigorous guidelines. While current AI-driven medical research predominantly focuses on knowledge graphs or natural text pretraining paradigms to incorporate medical knowledge, these approaches primarily rely on implicitly encoded knowledge within model parameters, neglecting task-specific knowledge required by diverse downstream tasks. To address this limitation, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Diagnosis (RAD), a novel framework that explicitly injects external knowledge into multimodal models directly on downstream tasks. Specifically, RAD operates through three key mechanisms: retrieval and refinement of disease-centered knowledge from multiple medical sources, a guideline-enhanced contrastive loss that constrains the latent distance between multi-modal features and guideline knowledge, and the dual transformer decoder that employs guidelines as queries to steer cross-modal fusion, aligning the models with clinical diagnostic workflows from guideline acquisition to feature extraction and decision-making. Moreover, recognizing the lack of quantitative evaluation of interpretability for multimodal diagnostic models, we introduce a set of criteria to assess the interpretability from both image and text perspectives. Extensive evaluations across four datasets with different anatomies demonstrate RAD's generalizability, achieving state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, RAD enables the model to concentrate more precisely on abnormal regions and critical indicators, ensuring evidence-based, trustworthy diagnosis. Our code is available at https://github.com/tdlhl/RAD.

GeneMAN: Generalizable Single-Image 3D Human Reconstruction from Multi-Source Human Data

Given a single in-the-wild human photo, it remains a challenging task to reconstruct a high-fidelity 3D human model. Existing methods face difficulties including a) the varying body proportions captured by in-the-wild human images; b) diverse personal belongings within the shot; and c) ambiguities in human postures and inconsistency in human textures. In addition, the scarcity of high-quality human data intensifies the challenge. To address these problems, we propose a Generalizable image-to-3D huMAN reconstruction framework, dubbed GeneMAN, building upon a comprehensive multi-source collection of high-quality human data, including 3D scans, multi-view videos, single photos, and our generated synthetic human data. GeneMAN encompasses three key modules. 1) Without relying on parametric human models (e.g., SMPL), GeneMAN first trains a human-specific text-to-image diffusion model and a view-conditioned diffusion model, serving as GeneMAN 2D human prior and 3D human prior for reconstruction, respectively. 2) With the help of the pretrained human prior models, the Geometry Initialization-&-Sculpting pipeline is leveraged to recover high-quality 3D human geometry given a single image. 3) To achieve high-fidelity 3D human textures, GeneMAN employs the Multi-Space Texture Refinement pipeline, consecutively refining textures in the latent and the pixel spaces. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GeneMAN could generate high-quality 3D human models from a single image input, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods. Notably, GeneMAN could reveal much better generalizability in dealing with in-the-wild images, often yielding high-quality 3D human models in natural poses with common items, regardless of the body proportions in the input images.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

DPDEdit: Detail-Preserved Diffusion Models for Multimodal Fashion Image Editing

Fashion image editing is a crucial tool for designers to convey their creative ideas by visualizing design concepts interactively. Current fashion image editing techniques, though advanced with multimodal prompts and powerful diffusion models, often struggle to accurately identify editing regions and preserve the desired garment texture detail. To address these challenges, we introduce a new multimodal fashion image editing architecture based on latent diffusion models, called Detail-Preserved Diffusion Models (DPDEdit). DPDEdit guides the fashion image generation of diffusion models by integrating text prompts, region masks, human pose images, and garment texture images. To precisely locate the editing region, we first introduce Grounded-SAM to predict the editing region based on the user's textual description, and then combine it with other conditions to perform local editing. To transfer the detail of the given garment texture into the target fashion image, we propose a texture injection and refinement mechanism. Specifically, this mechanism employs a decoupled cross-attention layer to integrate textual descriptions and texture images, and incorporates an auxiliary U-Net to preserve the high-frequency details of generated garment texture. Additionally, we extend the VITON-HD dataset using a multimodal large language model to generate paired samples with texture images and textual descriptions. Extensive experiments show that our DPDEdit outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of image fidelity and coherence with the given multimodal inputs.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024

WorldForge: Unlocking Emergent 3D/4D Generation in Video Diffusion Model via Training-Free Guidance

Recent video diffusion models demonstrate strong potential in spatial intelligence tasks due to their rich latent world priors. However, this potential is hindered by their limited controllability and geometric inconsistency, creating a gap between their strong priors and their practical use in 3D/4D tasks. As a result, current approaches often rely on retraining or fine-tuning, which risks degrading pretrained knowledge and incurs high computational costs. To address this, we propose WorldForge, a training-free, inference-time framework composed of three tightly coupled modules. Intra-Step Recursive Refinement introduces a recursive refinement mechanism during inference, which repeatedly optimizes network predictions within each denoising step to enable precise trajectory injection. Flow-Gated Latent Fusion leverages optical flow similarity to decouple motion from appearance in the latent space and selectively inject trajectory guidance into motion-related channels. Dual-Path Self-Corrective Guidance compares guided and unguided denoising paths to adaptively correct trajectory drift caused by noisy or misaligned structural signals. Together, these components inject fine-grained, trajectory-aligned guidance without training, achieving both accurate motion control and photorealistic content generation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate our method's superiority in realism, trajectory consistency, and visual fidelity. This work introduces a novel plug-and-play paradigm for controllable video synthesis, offering a new perspective on leveraging generative priors for spatial intelligence.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 18 3

OnePiece: Bringing Context Engineering and Reasoning to Industrial Cascade Ranking System

Despite the growing interest in replicating the scaled success of large language models (LLMs) in industrial search and recommender systems, most existing industrial efforts remain limited to transplanting Transformer architectures, which bring only incremental improvements over strong Deep Learning Recommendation Models (DLRMs). From a first principle perspective, the breakthroughs of LLMs stem not only from their architectures but also from two complementary mechanisms: context engineering, which enriches raw input queries with contextual cues to better elicit model capabilities, and multi-step reasoning, which iteratively refines model outputs through intermediate reasoning paths. However, these two mechanisms and their potential to unlock substantial improvements remain largely underexplored in industrial ranking systems. In this paper, we propose OnePiece, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates LLM-style context engineering and reasoning into both retrieval and ranking models of industrial cascaded pipelines. OnePiece is built on a pure Transformer backbone and further introduces three key innovations: (1) structured context engineering, which augments interaction history with preference and scenario signals and unifies them into a structured tokenized input sequence for both retrieval and ranking; (2) block-wise latent reasoning, which equips the model with multi-step refinement of representations and scales reasoning bandwidth via block size; (3) progressive multi-task training, which leverages user feedback chains to effectively supervise reasoning steps during training. OnePiece has been deployed in the main personalized search scenario of Shopee and achieves consistent online gains across different key business metrics, including over +2% GMV/UU and a +2.90% increase in advertising revenue.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 22 3

Motion Transfer-Enhanced StyleGAN for Generating Diverse Macaque Facial Expressions

Generating animal faces using generative AI techniques is challenging because the available training images are limited both in quantity and variation, particularly for facial expressions across individuals. In this study, we focus on macaque monkeys, widely studied in systems neuroscience and evolutionary research, and propose a method to generate their facial expressions using a style-based generative image model (i.e., StyleGAN2). To address data limitations, we implemented: 1) data augmentation by synthesizing new facial expression images using a motion transfer to animate still images with computer graphics, 2) sample selection based on the latent representation of macaque faces from an initially trained StyleGAN2 model to ensure the variation and uniform sampling in training dataset, and 3) loss function refinement to ensure the accurate reproduction of subtle movements, such as eye movements. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method enables the generation of diverse facial expressions for multiple macaque individuals, outperforming models trained solely on original still images. Additionally, we show that our model is effective for style-based image editing, where specific style parameters correspond to distinct facial movements. These findings underscore the model's potential for disentangling motion components as style parameters, providing a valuable tool for research on macaque facial expressions.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 20

InstructAny2Pix: Flexible Visual Editing via Multimodal Instruction Following

The ability to provide fine-grained control for generating and editing visual imagery has profound implications for computer vision and its applications. Previous works have explored extending controllability in two directions: instruction tuning with text-based prompts and multi-modal conditioning. However, these works make one or more unnatural assumptions on the number and/or type of modality inputs used to express controllability. We propose InstructAny2Pix, a flexible multi-modal instruction-following system that enables users to edit an input image using instructions involving audio, images, and text. InstructAny2Pix consists of three building blocks that facilitate this capability: a multi-modal encoder that encodes different modalities such as images and audio into a unified latent space, a diffusion model that learns to decode representations in this latent space into images, and a multi-modal LLM that can understand instructions involving multiple images and audio pieces and generate a conditional embedding of the desired output, which can be used by the diffusion decoder. Additionally, to facilitate training efficiency and improve generation quality, we include an additional refinement prior module that enhances the visual quality of LLM outputs. These designs are critical to the performance of our system. We demonstrate that our system can perform a series of novel instruction-guided editing tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/jacklishufan/InstructAny2Pix.git

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 11, 2023