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Mar 14

MPI-Flow: Learning Realistic Optical Flow with Multiplane Images

The accuracy of learning-based optical flow estimation models heavily relies on the realism of the training datasets. Current approaches for generating such datasets either employ synthetic data or generate images with limited realism. However, the domain gap of these data with real-world scenes constrains the generalization of the trained model to real-world applications. To address this issue, we investigate generating realistic optical flow datasets from real-world images. Firstly, to generate highly realistic new images, we construct a layered depth representation, known as multiplane images (MPI), from single-view images. This allows us to generate novel view images that are highly realistic. To generate optical flow maps that correspond accurately to the new image, we calculate the optical flows of each plane using the camera matrix and plane depths. We then project these layered optical flows into the output optical flow map with volume rendering. Secondly, to ensure the realism of motion, we present an independent object motion module that can separate the camera and dynamic object motion in MPI. This module addresses the deficiency in MPI-based single-view methods, where optical flow is generated only by camera motion and does not account for any object movement. We additionally devise a depth-aware inpainting module to merge new images with dynamic objects and address unnatural motion occlusions. We show the superior performance of our method through extensive experiments on real-world datasets. Moreover, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both unsupervised and supervised training of learning-based models. The code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Sharpiless/MPI-Flow.

Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow

We present rectified flow, a surprisingly simple approach to learning (neural) ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to transport between two empirically observed distributions \pi_0 and \pi_1, hence providing a unified solution to generative modeling and domain transfer, among various other tasks involving distribution transport. The idea of rectified flow is to learn the ODE to follow the straight paths connecting the points drawn from \pi_0 and \pi_1 as much as possible. This is achieved by solving a straightforward nonlinear least squares optimization problem, which can be easily scaled to large models without introducing extra parameters beyond standard supervised learning. The straight paths are special and preferred because they are the shortest paths between two points, and can be simulated exactly without time discretization and hence yield computationally efficient models. We show that the procedure of learning a rectified flow from data, called rectification, turns an arbitrary coupling of \pi_0 and \pi_1 to a new deterministic coupling with provably non-increasing convex transport costs. In addition, recursively applying rectification allows us to obtain a sequence of flows with increasingly straight paths, which can be simulated accurately with coarse time discretization in the inference phase. In empirical studies, we show that rectified flow performs superbly on image generation, image-to-image translation, and domain adaptation. In particular, on image generation and translation, our method yields nearly straight flows that give high quality results even with a single Euler discretization step.

Flow Matching in Latent Space

Flow matching is a recent framework to train generative models that exhibits impressive empirical performance while being relatively easier to train compared with diffusion-based models. Despite its advantageous properties, prior methods still face the challenges of expensive computing and a large number of function evaluations of off-the-shelf solvers in the pixel space. Furthermore, although latent-based generative methods have shown great success in recent years, this particular model type remains underexplored in this area. In this work, we propose to apply flow matching in the latent spaces of pretrained autoencoders, which offers improved computational efficiency and scalability for high-resolution image synthesis. This enables flow-matching training on constrained computational resources while maintaining their quality and flexibility. Additionally, our work stands as a pioneering contribution in the integration of various conditions into flow matching for conditional generation tasks, including label-conditioned image generation, image inpainting, and semantic-to-image generation. Through extensive experiments, our approach demonstrates its effectiveness in both quantitative and qualitative results on various datasets, such as CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, LSUN Church & Bedroom, and ImageNet. We also provide a theoretical control of the Wasserstein-2 distance between the reconstructed latent flow distribution and true data distribution, showing it is upper-bounded by the latent flow matching objective. Our code will be available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/LFM.git.

GFlow: Recovering 4D World from Monocular Video

Reconstructing 4D scenes from video inputs is a crucial yet challenging task. Conventional methods usually rely on the assumptions of multi-view video inputs, known camera parameters, or static scenes, all of which are typically absent under in-the-wild scenarios. In this paper, we relax all these constraints and tackle a highly ambitious but practical task, which we termed as AnyV4D: we assume only one monocular video is available without any camera parameters as input, and we aim to recover the dynamic 4D world alongside the camera poses. To this end, we introduce GFlow, a new framework that utilizes only 2D priors (depth and optical flow) to lift a video (3D) to a 4D explicit representation, entailing a flow of Gaussian splatting through space and time. GFlow first clusters the scene into still and moving parts, then applies a sequential optimization process that optimizes camera poses and the dynamics of 3D Gaussian points based on 2D priors and scene clustering, ensuring fidelity among neighboring points and smooth movement across frames. Since dynamic scenes always introduce new content, we also propose a new pixel-wise densification strategy for Gaussian points to integrate new visual content. Moreover, GFlow transcends the boundaries of mere 4D reconstruction; it also enables tracking of any points across frames without the need for prior training and segments moving objects from the scene in an unsupervised way. Additionally, the camera poses of each frame can be derived from GFlow, allowing for rendering novel views of a video scene through changing camera pose. By employing the explicit representation, we may readily conduct scene-level or object-level editing as desired, underscoring its versatility and power. Visit our project website at: https://littlepure2333.github.io/GFlow

Mosaic-SDF for 3D Generative Models

Current diffusion or flow-based generative models for 3D shapes divide to two: distilling pre-trained 2D image diffusion models, and training directly on 3D shapes. When training a diffusion or flow models on 3D shapes a crucial design choice is the shape representation. An effective shape representation needs to adhere three design principles: it should allow an efficient conversion of large 3D datasets to the representation form; it should provide a good tradeoff of approximation power versus number of parameters; and it should have a simple tensorial form that is compatible with existing powerful neural architectures. While standard 3D shape representations such as volumetric grids and point clouds do not adhere to all these principles simultaneously, we advocate in this paper a new representation that does. We introduce Mosaic-SDF (M-SDF): a simple 3D shape representation that approximates the Signed Distance Function (SDF) of a given shape by using a set of local grids spread near the shape's boundary. The M-SDF representation is fast to compute for each shape individually making it readily parallelizable; it is parameter efficient as it only covers the space around the shape's boundary; and it has a simple matrix form, compatible with Transformer-based architectures. We demonstrate the efficacy of the M-SDF representation by using it to train a 3D generative flow model including class-conditioned generation with the 3D Warehouse dataset, and text-to-3D generation using a dataset of about 600k caption-shape pairs.

Monocular 3D Object Detection with Bounding Box Denoising in 3D by Perceiver

The main challenge of monocular 3D object detection is the accurate localization of 3D center. Motivated by a new and strong observation that this challenge can be remedied by a 3D-space local-grid search scheme in an ideal case, we propose a stage-wise approach, which combines the information flow from 2D-to-3D (3D bounding box proposal generation with a single 2D image) and 3D-to-2D (proposal verification by denoising with 3D-to-2D contexts) in a top-down manner. Specifically, we first obtain initial proposals from off-the-shelf backbone monocular 3D detectors. Then, we generate a 3D anchor space by local-grid sampling from the initial proposals. Finally, we perform 3D bounding box denoising at the 3D-to-2D proposal verification stage. To effectively learn discriminative features for denoising highly overlapped proposals, this paper presents a method of using the Perceiver I/O model to fuse the 3D-to-2D geometric information and the 2D appearance information. With the encoded latent representation of a proposal, the verification head is implemented with a self-attention module. Our method, named as MonoXiver, is generic and can be easily adapted to any backbone monocular 3D detectors. Experimental results on the well-established KITTI dataset and the challenging large-scale Waymo dataset show that MonoXiver consistently achieves improvement with limited computation overhead.

FloAt: Flow Warping of Self-Attention for Clothing Animation Generation

We propose a diffusion model-based approach, FloAtControlNet to generate cinemagraphs composed of animations of human clothing. We focus on human clothing like dresses, skirts and pants. The input to our model is a text prompt depicting the type of clothing and the texture of clothing like leopard, striped, or plain, and a sequence of normal maps that capture the underlying animation that we desire in the output. The backbone of our method is a normal-map conditioned ControlNet which is operated in a training-free regime. The key observation is that the underlying animation is embedded in the flow of the normal maps. We utilize the flow thus obtained to manipulate the self-attention maps of appropriate layers. Specifically, the self-attention maps of a particular layer and frame are recomputed as a linear combination of itself and the self-attention maps of the same layer and the previous frame, warped by the flow on the normal maps of the two frames. We show that manipulating the self-attention maps greatly enhances the quality of the clothing animation, making it look more natural as well as suppressing the background artifacts. Through extensive experiments, we show that the method proposed beats all baselines both qualitatively in terms of visual results and user study. Specifically, our method is able to alleviate the background flickering that exists in other diffusion model-based baselines that we consider. In addition, we show that our method beats all baselines in terms of RMSE and PSNR computed using the input normal map sequences and the normal map sequences obtained from the output RGB frames. Further, we show that well-established evaluation metrics like LPIPS, SSIM, and CLIP scores that are generally for visual quality are not necessarily suitable for capturing the subtle motions in human clothing animations.

Conditional Image-to-Video Generation with Latent Flow Diffusion Models

Conditional image-to-video (cI2V) generation aims to synthesize a new plausible video starting from an image (e.g., a person's face) and a condition (e.g., an action class label like smile). The key challenge of the cI2V task lies in the simultaneous generation of realistic spatial appearance and temporal dynamics corresponding to the given image and condition. In this paper, we propose an approach for cI2V using novel latent flow diffusion models (LFDM) that synthesize an optical flow sequence in the latent space based on the given condition to warp the given image. Compared to previous direct-synthesis-based works, our proposed LFDM can better synthesize spatial details and temporal motion by fully utilizing the spatial content of the given image and warping it in the latent space according to the generated temporally-coherent flow. The training of LFDM consists of two separate stages: (1) an unsupervised learning stage to train a latent flow auto-encoder for spatial content generation, including a flow predictor to estimate latent flow between pairs of video frames, and (2) a conditional learning stage to train a 3D-UNet-based diffusion model (DM) for temporal latent flow generation. Unlike previous DMs operating in pixel space or latent feature space that couples spatial and temporal information, the DM in our LFDM only needs to learn a low-dimensional latent flow space for motion generation, thus being more computationally efficient. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, where LFDM consistently outperforms prior arts. Furthermore, we show that LFDM can be easily adapted to new domains by simply finetuning the image decoder. Our code is available at https://github.com/nihaomiao/CVPR23_LFDM.

RotationDrag: Point-based Image Editing with Rotated Diffusion Features

A precise and user-friendly manipulation of image content while preserving image fidelity has always been crucial to the field of image editing. Thanks to the power of generative models, recent point-based image editing methods allow users to interactively change the image content with high generalizability by clicking several control points. But the above mentioned editing process is usually based on the assumption that features stay constant in the motion supervision step from initial to target points. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive investigation in the feature space of diffusion models, and find that features change acutely under in-plane rotation. Based on this, we propose a novel approach named RotationDrag, which significantly improves point-based image editing performance when users intend to in-plane rotate the image content. Our method tracks handle points more precisely by utilizing the feature map of the rotated images, thus ensuring precise optimization and high image fidelity. Furthermore, we build a in-plane rotation focused benchmark called RotateBench, the first benchmark to evaluate the performance of point-based image editing method under in-plane rotation scenario on both real images and generated images. A thorough user study demonstrates the superior capability in accomplishing in-plane rotation that users intend to achieve, comparing the DragDiffusion baseline and other existing diffusion-based methods. See the project page https://github.com/Tony-Lowe/RotationDrag for code and experiment results.

Rectified Diffusion: Straightness Is Not Your Need in Rectified Flow

Diffusion models have greatly improved visual generation but are hindered by slow generation speed due to the computationally intensive nature of solving generative ODEs. Rectified flow, a widely recognized solution, improves generation speed by straightening the ODE path. Its key components include: 1) using the diffusion form of flow-matching, 2) employing boldsymbol v-prediction, and 3) performing rectification (a.k.a. reflow). In this paper, we argue that the success of rectification primarily lies in using a pretrained diffusion model to obtain matched pairs of noise and samples, followed by retraining with these matched noise-sample pairs. Based on this, components 1) and 2) are unnecessary. Furthermore, we highlight that straightness is not an essential training target for rectification; rather, it is a specific case of flow-matching models. The more critical training target is to achieve a first-order approximate ODE path, which is inherently curved for models like DDPM and Sub-VP. Building on this insight, we propose Rectified Diffusion, which generalizes the design space and application scope of rectification to encompass the broader category of diffusion models, rather than being restricted to flow-matching models. We validate our method on Stable Diffusion v1-5 and Stable Diffusion XL. Our method not only greatly simplifies the training procedure of rectified flow-based previous works (e.g., InstaFlow) but also achieves superior performance with even lower training cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/Rectified-Diffusion.

Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

Human 3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion Models

Creating realistic avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. Due to its ill-posed nature, recent works leverage powerful prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot provide multi-view shape priors with guaranteed 3D consistency. We propose Human 3Diffusion: Realistic Avatar Creation via Explicit 3D Consistent Diffusion. Our key insight is that 2D multi-view diffusion and 3D reconstruction models provide complementary information for each other, and by coupling them in a tight manner, we can fully leverage the potential of both models. We introduce a novel image-conditioned generative 3D Gaussian Splats reconstruction model that leverages the priors from 2D multi-view diffusion models, and provides an explicit 3D representation, which further guides the 2D reverse sampling process to have better 3D consistency. Experiments show that our proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and enables the creation of realistic avatars from a single RGB image, achieving high-fidelity in both geometry and appearance. Extensive ablations also validate the efficacy of our design, (1) multi-view 2D priors conditioning in generative 3D reconstruction and (2) consistency refinement of sampling trajectory via the explicit 3D representation. Our code and models will be released on https://yuxuan-xue.com/human-3diffusion.

Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.

AniClipart: Clipart Animation with Text-to-Video Priors

Clipart, a pre-made graphic art form, offers a convenient and efficient way of illustrating visual content. Traditional workflows to convert static clipart images into motion sequences are laborious and time-consuming, involving numerous intricate steps like rigging, key animation and in-betweening. Recent advancements in text-to-video generation hold great potential in resolving this problem. Nevertheless, direct application of text-to-video generation models often struggles to retain the visual identity of clipart images or generate cartoon-style motions, resulting in unsatisfactory animation outcomes. In this paper, we introduce AniClipart, a system that transforms static clipart images into high-quality motion sequences guided by text-to-video priors. To generate cartoon-style and smooth motion, we first define B\'{e}zier curves over keypoints of the clipart image as a form of motion regularization. We then align the motion trajectories of the keypoints with the provided text prompt by optimizing the Video Score Distillation Sampling (VSDS) loss, which encodes adequate knowledge of natural motion within a pretrained text-to-video diffusion model. With a differentiable As-Rigid-As-Possible shape deformation algorithm, our method can be end-to-end optimized while maintaining deformation rigidity. Experimental results show that the proposed AniClipart consistently outperforms existing image-to-video generation models, in terms of text-video alignment, visual identity preservation, and motion consistency. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of AniClipart by adapting it to generate a broader array of animation formats, such as layered animation, which allows topological changes.

FlowVid: Taming Imperfect Optical Flows for Consistent Video-to-Video Synthesis

Diffusion models have transformed the image-to-image (I2I) synthesis and are now permeating into videos. However, the advancement of video-to-video (V2V) synthesis has been hampered by the challenge of maintaining temporal consistency across video frames. This paper proposes a consistent V2V synthesis framework by jointly leveraging spatial conditions and temporal optical flow clues within the source video. Contrary to prior methods that strictly adhere to optical flow, our approach harnesses its benefits while handling the imperfection in flow estimation. We encode the optical flow via warping from the first frame and serve it as a supplementary reference in the diffusion model. This enables our model for video synthesis by editing the first frame with any prevalent I2I models and then propagating edits to successive frames. Our V2V model, FlowVid, demonstrates remarkable properties: (1) Flexibility: FlowVid works seamlessly with existing I2I models, facilitating various modifications, including stylization, object swaps, and local edits. (2) Efficiency: Generation of a 4-second video with 30 FPS and 512x512 resolution takes only 1.5 minutes, which is 3.1x, 7.2x, and 10.5x faster than CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. (3) High-quality: In user studies, our FlowVid is preferred 45.7% of the time, outperforming CoDeF (3.5%), Rerender (10.2%), and TokenFlow (40.4%).

Composite Diffusion | whole >= Σparts

For an artist or a graphic designer, the spatial layout of a scene is a critical design choice. However, existing text-to-image diffusion models provide limited support for incorporating spatial information. This paper introduces Composite Diffusion as a means for artists to generate high-quality images by composing from the sub-scenes. The artists can specify the arrangement of these sub-scenes through a flexible free-form segment layout. They can describe the content of each sub-scene primarily using natural text and additionally by utilizing reference images or control inputs such as line art, scribbles, human pose, canny edges, and more. We provide a comprehensive and modular method for Composite Diffusion that enables alternative ways of generating, composing, and harmonizing sub-scenes. Further, we wish to evaluate the composite image for effectiveness in both image quality and achieving the artist's intent. We argue that existing image quality metrics lack a holistic evaluation of image composites. To address this, we propose novel quality criteria especially relevant to composite generation. We believe that our approach provides an intuitive method of art creation. Through extensive user surveys, quantitative and qualitative analysis, we show how it achieves greater spatial, semantic, and creative control over image generation. In addition, our methods do not need to retrain or modify the architecture of the base diffusion models and can work in a plug-and-play manner with the fine-tuned models.

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion-based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state-of-the-art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion-based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike.

Flowing from Words to Pixels: A Framework for Cross-Modality Evolution

Diffusion models, and their generalization, flow matching, have had a remarkable impact on the field of media generation. Here, the conventional approach is to learn the complex mapping from a simple source distribution of Gaussian noise to the target media distribution. For cross-modal tasks such as text-to-image generation, this same mapping from noise to image is learnt whilst including a conditioning mechanism in the model. One key and thus far relatively unexplored feature of flow matching is that, unlike Diffusion models, they are not constrained for the source distribution to be noise. Hence, in this paper, we propose a paradigm shift, and ask the question of whether we can instead train flow matching models to learn a direct mapping from the distribution of one modality to the distribution of another, thus obviating the need for both the noise distribution and conditioning mechanism. We present a general and simple framework, CrossFlow, for cross-modal flow matching. We show the importance of applying Variational Encoders to the input data, and introduce a method to enable Classifier-free guidance. Surprisingly, for text-to-image, CrossFlow with a vanilla transformer without cross attention slightly outperforms standard flow matching, and we show that it scales better with training steps and model size, while also allowing for interesting latent arithmetic which results in semantically meaningful edits in the output space. To demonstrate the generalizability of our approach, we also show that CrossFlow is on par with or outperforms the state-of-the-art for various cross-modal / intra-modal mapping tasks, viz. image captioning, depth estimation, and image super-resolution. We hope this paper contributes to accelerating progress in cross-modal media generation.

FiTv2: Scalable and Improved Flexible Vision Transformer for Diffusion Model

Nature is infinitely resolution-free. In the context of this reality, existing diffusion models, such as Diffusion Transformers, often face challenges when processing image resolutions outside of their trained domain. To address this limitation, we conceptualize images as sequences of tokens with dynamic sizes, rather than traditional methods that perceive images as fixed-resolution grids. This perspective enables a flexible training strategy that seamlessly accommodates various aspect ratios during both training and inference, thus promoting resolution generalization and eliminating biases introduced by image cropping. On this basis, we present the Flexible Vision Transformer (FiT), a transformer architecture specifically designed for generating images with unrestricted resolutions and aspect ratios. We further upgrade the FiT to FiTv2 with several innovative designs, includingthe Query-Key vector normalization, the AdaLN-LoRA module, a rectified flow scheduler, and a Logit-Normal sampler. Enhanced by a meticulously adjusted network structure, FiTv2 exhibits 2times convergence speed of FiT. When incorporating advanced training-free extrapolation techniques, FiTv2 demonstrates remarkable adaptability in both resolution extrapolation and diverse resolution generation. Additionally, our exploration of the scalability of the FiTv2 model reveals that larger models exhibit better computational efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient post-training strategy to adapt a pre-trained model for the high-resolution generation. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the exceptional performance of FiTv2 across a broad range of resolutions. We have released all the codes and models at https://github.com/whlzy/FiT to promote the exploration of diffusion transformer models for arbitrary-resolution image generation.

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.

Compositional 3D-aware Video Generation with LLM Director

Significant progress has been made in text-to-video generation through the use of powerful generative models and large-scale internet data. However, substantial challenges remain in precisely controlling individual concepts within the generated video, such as the motion and appearance of specific characters and the movement of viewpoints. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm that generates each concept in 3D representation separately and then composes them with priors from Large Language Models (LLM) and 2D diffusion models. Specifically, given an input textual prompt, our scheme consists of three stages: 1) We leverage LLM as the director to first decompose the complex query into several sub-prompts that indicate individual concepts within the video~(e.g., scene, objects, motions), then we let LLM to invoke pre-trained expert models to obtain corresponding 3D representations of concepts. 2) To compose these representations, we prompt multi-modal LLM to produce coarse guidance on the scales and coordinates of trajectories for the objects. 3) To make the generated frames adhere to natural image distribution, we further leverage 2D diffusion priors and use Score Distillation Sampling to refine the composition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-fidelity videos from text with diverse motion and flexible control over each concept. Project page: https://aka.ms/c3v.

Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy

Creating realistic 3D objects and clothed avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. Due to its ill-posed nature, recent works leverage powerful prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot guarantee the generated multi-view images are 3D consistent. In this paper, we propose Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy. We leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model and a 3D diffusion model via our elegantly designed process that synchronizes two diffusion models at both training and sampling time. The synergy between the 2D and 3D diffusion models brings two major advantages: 1) 2D helps 3D in generalization: the pretrained 2D model has strong generalization ability to unseen images, providing strong shape priors for the 3D diffusion model; 2) 3D helps 2D in multi-view consistency: the 3D diffusion model enhances the 3D consistency of 2D multi-view sampling process, resulting in more accurate multi-view generation. We validate our idea through extensive experiments in image-based objects and clothed avatar generation tasks. Results show that our method generates realistic 3D objects and avatars with high-fidelity geometry and texture. Extensive ablations also validate our design choices and demonstrate the strong generalization ability to diverse clothing and compositional shapes. Our code and pretrained models will be publicly released on https://yuxuan-xue.com/gen-3diffusion.

Block and Detail: Scaffolding Sketch-to-Image Generation

We introduce a novel sketch-to-image tool that aligns with the iterative refinement process of artists. Our tool lets users sketch blocking strokes to coarsely represent the placement and form of objects and detail strokes to refine their shape and silhouettes. We develop a two-pass algorithm for generating high-fidelity images from such sketches at any point in the iterative process. In the first pass we use a ControlNet to generate an image that strictly follows all the strokes (blocking and detail) and in the second pass we add variation by renoising regions surrounding blocking strokes. We also present a dataset generation scheme that, when used to train a ControlNet architecture, allows regions that do not contain strokes to be interpreted as not-yet-specified regions rather than empty space. We show that this partial-sketch-aware ControlNet can generate coherent elements from partial sketches that only contain a small number of strokes. The high-fidelity images produced by our approach serve as scaffolds that can help the user adjust the shape and proportions of objects or add additional elements to the composition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of examples and evaluative comparisons. Quantitatively, evaluative user feedback indicates that novice viewers prefer the quality of images from our algorithm over a baseline Scribble ControlNet for 84% of the pairs and found our images had less distortion in 81% of the pairs.

Unifying Diffusion Models' Latent Space, with Applications to CycleDiffusion and Guidance

Diffusion models have achieved unprecedented performance in generative modeling. The commonly-adopted formulation of the latent code of diffusion models is a sequence of gradually denoised samples, as opposed to the simpler (e.g., Gaussian) latent space of GANs, VAEs, and normalizing flows. This paper provides an alternative, Gaussian formulation of the latent space of various diffusion models, as well as an invertible DPM-Encoder that maps images into the latent space. While our formulation is purely based on the definition of diffusion models, we demonstrate several intriguing consequences. (1) Empirically, we observe that a common latent space emerges from two diffusion models trained independently on related domains. In light of this finding, we propose CycleDiffusion, which uses DPM-Encoder for unpaired image-to-image translation. Furthermore, applying CycleDiffusion to text-to-image diffusion models, we show that large-scale text-to-image diffusion models can be used as zero-shot image-to-image editors. (2) One can guide pre-trained diffusion models and GANs by controlling the latent codes in a unified, plug-and-play formulation based on energy-based models. Using the CLIP model and a face recognition model as guidance, we demonstrate that diffusion models have better coverage of low-density sub-populations and individuals than GANs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/cycle-diffusion.

Long-Term Photometric Consistent Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

Sketch-Guided Scene Image Generation

Text-to-image models are showcasing the impressive ability to create high-quality and diverse generative images. Nevertheless, the transition from freehand sketches to complex scene images remains challenging using diffusion models. In this study, we propose a novel sketch-guided scene image generation framework, decomposing the task of scene image scene generation from sketch inputs into object-level cross-domain generation and scene-level image construction. We employ pre-trained diffusion models to convert each single object drawing into an image of the object, inferring additional details while maintaining the sparse sketch structure. In order to maintain the conceptual fidelity of the foreground during scene generation, we invert the visual features of object images into identity embeddings for scene generation. In scene-level image construction, we generate the latent representation of the scene image using the separated background prompts, and then blend the generated foreground objects according to the layout of the sketch input. To ensure the foreground objects' details remain unchanged while naturally composing the scene image, we infer the scene image on the blended latent representation using a global prompt that includes the trained identity tokens. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate the ability of the proposed approach to generate scene images from hand-drawn sketches surpasses the state-of-the-art approaches.

InstantDrag: Improving Interactivity in Drag-based Image Editing

Drag-based image editing has recently gained popularity for its interactivity and precision. However, despite the ability of text-to-image models to generate samples within a second, drag editing still lags behind due to the challenge of accurately reflecting user interaction while maintaining image content. Some existing approaches rely on computationally intensive per-image optimization or intricate guidance-based methods, requiring additional inputs such as masks for movable regions and text prompts, thereby compromising the interactivity of the editing process. We introduce InstantDrag, an optimization-free pipeline that enhances interactivity and speed, requiring only an image and a drag instruction as input. InstantDrag consists of two carefully designed networks: a drag-conditioned optical flow generator (FlowGen) and an optical flow-conditioned diffusion model (FlowDiffusion). InstantDrag learns motion dynamics for drag-based image editing in real-world video datasets by decomposing the task into motion generation and motion-conditioned image generation. We demonstrate InstantDrag's capability to perform fast, photo-realistic edits without masks or text prompts through experiments on facial video datasets and general scenes. These results highlight the efficiency of our approach in handling drag-based image editing, making it a promising solution for interactive, real-time applications.

DynVideo-E: Harnessing Dynamic NeRF for Large-Scale Motion- and View-Change Human-Centric Video Editing

Despite remarkable research advances in diffusion-based video editing, existing methods are limited to short-length videos due to the contradiction between long-range consistency and frame-wise editing. Recent approaches attempt to tackle this challenge by introducing video-2D representations to degrade video editing to image editing. However, they encounter significant difficulties in handling large-scale motion- and view-change videos especially for human-centric videos. This motivates us to introduce the dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) as the human-centric video representation to ease the video editing problem to a 3D space editing task. As such, editing can be performed in the 3D spaces and propagated to the entire video via the deformation field. To provide finer and direct controllable editing, we propose the image-based 3D space editing pipeline with a set of effective designs. These include multi-view multi-pose Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) from both 2D personalized diffusion priors and 3D diffusion priors, reconstruction losses on the reference image, text-guided local parts super-resolution, and style transfer for 3D background space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, dubbed as DynVideo-E, significantly outperforms SOTA approaches on two challenging datasets by a large margin of 50% ~ 95% in terms of human preference. Compelling video comparisons are provided in the project page https://showlab.github.io/DynVideo-E/. Our code and data will be released to the community.

Controllable Longer Image Animation with Diffusion Models

Generating realistic animated videos from static images is an important area of research in computer vision. Methods based on physical simulation and motion prediction have achieved notable advances, but they are often limited to specific object textures and motion trajectories, failing to exhibit highly complex environments and physical dynamics. In this paper, we introduce an open-domain controllable image animation method using motion priors with video diffusion models. Our method achieves precise control over the direction and speed of motion in the movable region by extracting the motion field information from videos and learning moving trajectories and strengths. Current pretrained video generation models are typically limited to producing very short videos, typically less than 30 frames. In contrast, we propose an efficient long-duration video generation method based on noise reschedule specifically tailored for image animation tasks, facilitating the creation of videos over 100 frames in length while maintaining consistency in content scenery and motion coordination. Specifically, we decompose the denoise process into two distinct phases: the shaping of scene contours and the refining of motion details. Then we reschedule the noise to control the generated frame sequences maintaining long-distance noise correlation. We conducted extensive experiments with 10 baselines, encompassing both commercial tools and academic methodologies, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our project page: https://wangqiang9.github.io/Controllable.github.io/

Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency

We present LayerDiffusion, an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock.

Bellman Optimal Step-size Straightening of Flow-Matching Models

Flow matching is a powerful framework for generating high-quality samples in various applications, especially image synthesis. However, the intensive computational demands of these models, especially during the fine-tuning process and sampling processes, pose significant challenges for low-resource scenarios. This paper introduces Bellman Optimal Step-size Straightening (BOSS) technique for distilling flow-matching generative models: it aims specifically for a few-step efficient image sampling while adhering to a computational budget constraint. First, this technique involves a dynamic programming algorithm that optimizes the step sizes of the pretrained network. Then, it refines the velocity network to match the optimal step sizes, aiming to straighten the generation paths. Extensive experimental evaluations across image generation tasks demonstrate the efficacy of BOSS in terms of both resource utilization and image quality. Our results reveal that BOSS achieves substantial gains in efficiency while maintaining competitive sample quality, effectively bridging the gap between low-resource constraints and the demanding requirements of flow-matching generative models. Our paper also fortifies the responsible development of artificial intelligence, offering a more sustainable generative model that reduces computational costs and environmental footprints. Our code can be found at https://github.com/nguyenngocbaocmt02/BOSS.

ARFlow: Autogressive Flow with Hybrid Linear Attention

Flow models are effective at progressively generating realistic images, but they generally struggle to capture long-range dependencies during the generation process as they compress all the information from previous time steps into a single corrupted image. To address this limitation, we propose integrating autoregressive modeling -- known for its excellence in modeling complex, high-dimensional joint probability distributions -- into flow models. During training, at each step, we construct causally-ordered sequences by sampling multiple images from the same semantic category and applying different levels of noise, where images with higher noise levels serve as causal predecessors to those with lower noise levels. This design enables the model to learn broader category-level variations while maintaining proper causal relationships in the flow process. During generation, the model autoregressively conditions the previously generated images from earlier denoising steps, forming a contextual and coherent generation trajectory. Additionally, we design a customized hybrid linear attention mechanism tailored to our modeling approach to enhance computational efficiency. Our approach, termed ARFlow, under 400k training steps, achieves 14.08 FID scores on ImageNet at 128 * 128 without classifier-free guidance, reaching 4.34 FID with classifier-free guidance 1.5, significantly outperforming the previous flow-based model SiT's 9.17 FID. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our modeling strategy and chunk-wise attention design.

ColorFlow: Retrieval-Augmented Image Sequence Colorization

Automatic black-and-white image sequence colorization while preserving character and object identity (ID) is a complex task with significant market demand, such as in cartoon or comic series colorization. Despite advancements in visual colorization using large-scale generative models like diffusion models, challenges with controllability and identity consistency persist, making current solutions unsuitable for industrial application.To address this, we propose ColorFlow, a three-stage diffusion-based framework tailored for image sequence colorization in industrial applications. Unlike existing methods that require per-ID finetuning or explicit ID embedding extraction, we propose a novel robust and generalizable Retrieval Augmented Colorization pipeline for colorizing images with relevant color references. Our pipeline also features a dual-branch design: one branch for color identity extraction and the other for colorization, leveraging the strengths of diffusion models. We utilize the self-attention mechanism in diffusion models for strong in-context learning and color identity matching. To evaluate our model, we introduce ColorFlow-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for reference-based colorization. Results show that ColorFlow outperforms existing models across multiple metrics, setting a new standard in sequential image colorization and potentially benefiting the art industry. We release our codes and models on our project page: https://zhuang2002.github.io/ColorFlow/.

FlexiClip: Locality-Preserving Free-Form Character Animation

Animating clipart images with seamless motion while maintaining visual fidelity and temporal coherence presents significant challenges. Existing methods, such as AniClipart, effectively model spatial deformations but often fail to ensure smooth temporal transitions, resulting in artifacts like abrupt motions and geometric distortions. Similarly, text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models struggle to handle clipart due to the mismatch in statistical properties between natural video and clipart styles. This paper introduces FlexiClip, a novel approach designed to overcome these limitations by addressing the intertwined challenges of temporal consistency and geometric integrity. FlexiClip extends traditional B\'ezier curve-based trajectory modeling with key innovations: temporal Jacobians to correct motion dynamics incrementally, continuous-time modeling via probability flow ODEs (pfODEs) to mitigate temporal noise, and a flow matching loss inspired by GFlowNet principles to optimize smooth motion transitions. These enhancements ensure coherent animations across complex scenarios involving rapid movements and non-rigid deformations. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FlexiClip in generating animations that are not only smooth and natural but also structurally consistent across diverse clipart types, including humans and animals. By integrating spatial and temporal modeling with pre-trained video diffusion models, FlexiClip sets a new standard for high-quality clipart animation, offering robust performance across a wide range of visual content. Project Page: https://creative-gen.github.io/flexiclip.github.io/

StableDreamer: Taming Noisy Score Distillation Sampling for Text-to-3D

In the realm of text-to-3D generation, utilizing 2D diffusion models through score distillation sampling (SDS) frequently leads to issues such as blurred appearances and multi-faced geometry, primarily due to the intrinsically noisy nature of the SDS loss. Our analysis identifies the core of these challenges as the interaction among noise levels in the 2D diffusion process, the architecture of the diffusion network, and the 3D model representation. To overcome these limitations, we present StableDreamer, a methodology incorporating three advances. First, inspired by InstructNeRF2NeRF, we formalize the equivalence of the SDS generative prior and a simple supervised L2 reconstruction loss. This finding provides a novel tool to debug SDS, which we use to show the impact of time-annealing noise levels on reducing multi-faced geometries. Second, our analysis shows that while image-space diffusion contributes to geometric precision, latent-space diffusion is crucial for vivid color rendition. Based on this observation, StableDreamer introduces a two-stage training strategy that effectively combines these aspects, resulting in high-fidelity 3D models. Third, we adopt an anisotropic 3D Gaussians representation, replacing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs), to enhance the overall quality, reduce memory usage during training, and accelerate rendering speeds, and better capture semi-transparent objects. StableDreamer reduces multi-face geometries, generates fine details, and converges stably.

SweetDreamer: Aligning Geometric Priors in 2D Diffusion for Consistent Text-to-3D

It is inherently ambiguous to lift 2D results from pre-trained diffusion models to a 3D world for text-to-3D generation. 2D diffusion models solely learn view-agnostic priors and thus lack 3D knowledge during the lifting, leading to the multi-view inconsistency problem. We find that this problem primarily stems from geometric inconsistency, and avoiding misplaced geometric structures substantially mitigates the problem in the final outputs. Therefore, we improve the consistency by aligning the 2D geometric priors in diffusion models with well-defined 3D shapes during the lifting, addressing the vast majority of the problem. This is achieved by fine-tuning the 2D diffusion model to be viewpoint-aware and to produce view-specific coordinate maps of canonically oriented 3D objects. In our process, only coarse 3D information is used for aligning. This "coarse" alignment not only resolves the multi-view inconsistency in geometries but also retains the ability in 2D diffusion models to generate detailed and diversified high-quality objects unseen in the 3D datasets. Furthermore, our aligned geometric priors (AGP) are generic and can be seamlessly integrated into various state-of-the-art pipelines, obtaining high generalizability in terms of unseen shapes and visual appearance while greatly alleviating the multi-view inconsistency problem. Our method represents a new state-of-the-art performance with an 85+% consistency rate by human evaluation, while many previous methods are around 30%. Our project page is https://sweetdreamer3d.github.io/

Pix2Shape: Towards Unsupervised Learning of 3D Scenes from Images using a View-based Representation

We infer and generate three-dimensional (3D) scene information from a single input image and without supervision. This problem is under-explored, with most prior work relying on supervision from, e.g., 3D ground-truth, multiple images of a scene, image silhouettes or key-points. We propose Pix2Shape, an approach to solve this problem with four components: (i) an encoder that infers the latent 3D representation from an image, (ii) a decoder that generates an explicit 2.5D surfel-based reconstruction of a scene from the latent code (iii) a differentiable renderer that synthesizes a 2D image from the surfel representation, and (iv) a critic network trained to discriminate between images generated by the decoder-renderer and those from a training distribution. Pix2Shape can generate complex 3D scenes that scale with the view-dependent on-screen resolution, unlike representations that capture world-space resolution, i.e., voxels or meshes. We show that Pix2Shape learns a consistent scene representation in its encoded latent space and that the decoder can then be applied to this latent representation in order to synthesize the scene from a novel viewpoint. We evaluate Pix2Shape with experiments on the ShapeNet dataset as well as on a novel benchmark we developed, called 3D-IQTT, to evaluate models based on their ability to enable 3d spatial reasoning. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrate Pix2Shape's ability to solve scene reconstruction, generation, and understanding tasks.

DiffEditor: Boosting Accuracy and Flexibility on Diffusion-based Image Editing

Large-scale Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have revolutionized image generation over the last few years. Although owning diverse and high-quality generation capabilities, translating these abilities to fine-grained image editing remains challenging. In this paper, we propose DiffEditor to rectify two weaknesses in existing diffusion-based image editing: (1) in complex scenarios, editing results often lack editing accuracy and exhibit unexpected artifacts; (2) lack of flexibility to harmonize editing operations, e.g., imagine new content. In our solution, we introduce image prompts in fine-grained image editing, cooperating with the text prompt to better describe the editing content. To increase the flexibility while maintaining content consistency, we locally combine stochastic differential equation (SDE) into the ordinary differential equation (ODE) sampling. In addition, we incorporate regional score-based gradient guidance and a time travel strategy into the diffusion sampling, further improving the editing quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can efficiently achieve state-of-the-art performance on various fine-grained image editing tasks, including editing within a single image (e.g., object moving, resizing, and content dragging) and across images (e.g., appearance replacing and object pasting). Our source code is released at https://github.com/MC-E/DragonDiffusion.

PaintScene4D: Consistent 4D Scene Generation from Text Prompts

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized 2D and 3D content creation, yet generating photorealistic dynamic 4D scenes remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 4D generation methods typically rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, often fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. Consequently, the resulting scenes tend to be object-centric and lack photorealism. While text-to-video models can generate more realistic scenes with motion, they often struggle with spatial understanding and provide limited control over camera viewpoints during rendering. To address these limitations, we present PaintScene4D, a novel text-to-4D scene generation framework that departs from conventional multi-view generative models in favor of a streamlined architecture that harnesses video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method first generates a reference video using a video generation model, and then employs a strategic camera array selection for rendering. We apply a progressive warping and inpainting technique to ensure both spatial and temporal consistency across multiple viewpoints. Finally, we optimize multi-view images using a dynamic renderer, enabling flexible camera control based on user preferences. Adopting a training-free architecture, our PaintScene4D efficiently produces realistic 4D scenes that can be viewed from arbitrary trajectories. The code will be made publicly available. Our project page is at https://paintscene4d.github.io/

Structural Multiplane Image: Bridging Neural View Synthesis and 3D Reconstruction

The Multiplane Image (MPI), containing a set of fronto-parallel RGBA layers, is an effective and efficient representation for view synthesis from sparse inputs. Yet, its fixed structure limits the performance, especially for surfaces imaged at oblique angles. We introduce the Structural MPI (S-MPI), where the plane structure approximates 3D scenes concisely. Conveying RGBA contexts with geometrically-faithful structures, the S-MPI directly bridges view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. It can not only overcome the critical limitations of MPI, i.e., discretization artifacts from sloped surfaces and abuse of redundant layers, and can also acquire planar 3D reconstruction. Despite the intuition and demand of applying S-MPI, great challenges are introduced, e.g., high-fidelity approximation for both RGBA layers and plane poses, multi-view consistency, non-planar regions modeling, and efficient rendering with intersected planes. Accordingly, we propose a transformer-based network based on a segmentation model. It predicts compact and expressive S-MPI layers with their corresponding masks, poses, and RGBA contexts. Non-planar regions are inclusively handled as a special case in our unified framework. Multi-view consistency is ensured by sharing global proxy embeddings, which encode plane-level features covering the complete 3D scenes with aligned coordinates. Intensive experiments show that our method outperforms both previous state-of-the-art MPI-based view synthesis methods and planar reconstruction methods.

MVD^2: Efficient Multiview 3D Reconstruction for Multiview Diffusion

As a promising 3D generation technique, multiview diffusion (MVD) has received a lot of attention due to its advantages in terms of generalizability, quality, and efficiency. By finetuning pretrained large image diffusion models with 3D data, the MVD methods first generate multiple views of a 3D object based on an image or text prompt and then reconstruct 3D shapes with multiview 3D reconstruction. However, the sparse views and inconsistent details in the generated images make 3D reconstruction challenging. We present MVD^2, an efficient 3D reconstruction method for multiview diffusion (MVD) images. MVD^2 aggregates image features into a 3D feature volume by projection and convolution and then decodes volumetric features into a 3D mesh. We train MVD^2 with 3D shape collections and MVD images prompted by rendered views of 3D shapes. To address the discrepancy between the generated multiview images and ground-truth views of the 3D shapes, we design a simple-yet-efficient view-dependent training scheme. MVD^2 improves the 3D generation quality of MVD and is fast and robust to various MVD methods. After training, it can efficiently decode 3D meshes from multiview images within one second. We train MVD^2 with Zero-123++ and ObjectVerse-LVIS 3D dataset and demonstrate its superior performance in generating 3D models from multiview images generated by different MVD methods, using both synthetic and real images as prompts.

X-Dreamer: Creating High-quality 3D Content by Bridging the Domain Gap Between Text-to-2D and Text-to-3D Generation

In recent times, automatic text-to-3D content creation has made significant progress, driven by the development of pretrained 2D diffusion models. Existing text-to-3D methods typically optimize the 3D representation to ensure that the rendered image aligns well with the given text, as evaluated by the pretrained 2D diffusion model. Nevertheless, a substantial domain gap exists between 2D images and 3D assets, primarily attributed to variations in camera-related attributes and the exclusive presence of foreground objects. Consequently, employing 2D diffusion models directly for optimizing 3D representations may lead to suboptimal outcomes. To address this issue, we present X-Dreamer, a novel approach for high-quality text-to-3D content creation that effectively bridges the gap between text-to-2D and text-to-3D synthesis. The key components of X-Dreamer are two innovative designs: Camera-Guided Low-Rank Adaptation (CG-LoRA) and Attention-Mask Alignment (AMA) Loss. CG-LoRA dynamically incorporates camera information into the pretrained diffusion models by employing camera-dependent generation for trainable parameters. This integration enhances the alignment between the generated 3D assets and the camera's perspective. AMA loss guides the attention map of the pretrained diffusion model using the binary mask of the 3D object, prioritizing the creation of the foreground object. This module ensures that the model focuses on generating accurate and detailed foreground objects. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method compared to existing text-to-3D approaches. Our project webpage: https://xmuxiaoma666.github.io/Projects/X-Dreamer .

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.

Optimal Linear Subspace Search: Learning to Construct Fast and High-Quality Schedulers for Diffusion Models

In recent years, diffusion models have become the most popular and powerful methods in the field of image synthesis, even rivaling human artists in artistic creativity. However, the key issue currently limiting the application of diffusion models is its extremely slow generation process. Although several methods were proposed to speed up the generation process, there still exists a trade-off between efficiency and quality. In this paper, we first provide a detailed theoretical and empirical analysis of the generation process of the diffusion models based on schedulers. We transform the designing problem of schedulers into the determination of several parameters, and further transform the accelerated generation process into an expansion process of the linear subspace. Based on these analyses, we consequently propose a novel method called Optimal Linear Subspace Search (OLSS), which accelerates the generation process by searching for the optimal approximation process of the complete generation process in the linear subspaces spanned by latent variables. OLSS is able to generate high-quality images with a very small number of steps. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive comparative experiments on open-source diffusion models. Experimental results show that with a given number of steps, OLSS can significantly improve the quality of generated images. Using an NVIDIA A100 GPU, we make it possible to generate a high-quality image by Stable Diffusion within only one second without other optimization techniques.

Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models

Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks, including image interpolation, inversion, and editing. In this work, we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue, we propose Smooth Diffusion, a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically, we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition, we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.

EG4D: Explicit Generation of 4D Object without Score Distillation

In recent years, the increasing demand for dynamic 3D assets in design and gaming applications has given rise to powerful generative pipelines capable of synthesizing high-quality 4D objects. Previous methods generally rely on score distillation sampling (SDS) algorithm to infer the unseen views and motion of 4D objects, thus leading to unsatisfactory results with defects like over-saturation and Janus problem. Therefore, inspired by recent progress of video diffusion models, we propose to optimize a 4D representation by explicitly generating multi-view videos from one input image. However, it is far from trivial to handle practical challenges faced by such a pipeline, including dramatic temporal inconsistency, inter-frame geometry and texture diversity, and semantic defects brought by video generation results. To address these issues, we propose DG4D, a novel multi-stage framework that generates high-quality and consistent 4D assets without score distillation. Specifically, collaborative techniques and solutions are developed, including an attention injection strategy to synthesize temporal-consistent multi-view videos, a robust and efficient dynamic reconstruction method based on Gaussian Splatting, and a refinement stage with diffusion prior for semantic restoration. The qualitative results and user preference study demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines in generation quality by a considerable margin. Code will be released at https://github.com/jasongzy/EG4D.

Follow-Your-Click: Open-domain Regional Image Animation via Short Prompts

Despite recent advances in image-to-video generation, better controllability and local animation are less explored. Most existing image-to-video methods are not locally aware and tend to move the entire scene. However, human artists may need to control the movement of different objects or regions. Additionally, current I2V methods require users not only to describe the target motion but also to provide redundant detailed descriptions of frame contents. These two issues hinder the practical utilization of current I2V tools. In this paper, we propose a practical framework, named Follow-Your-Click, to achieve image animation with a simple user click (for specifying what to move) and a short motion prompt (for specifying how to move). Technically, we propose the first-frame masking strategy, which significantly improves the video generation quality, and a motion-augmented module equipped with a short motion prompt dataset to improve the short prompt following abilities of our model. To further control the motion speed, we propose flow-based motion magnitude control to control the speed of target movement more precisely. Our framework has simpler yet precise user control and better generation performance than previous methods. Extensive experiments compared with 7 baselines, including both commercial tools and research methods on 8 metrics, suggest the superiority of our approach. Project Page: https://follow-your-click.github.io/

Grounding Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Controlled High-Quality Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) generative diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding performance in synthesizing diverse, high-quality visuals from text captions. Several layout-to-image models have been developed to control the generation process by utilizing a wide range of layouts, such as segmentation maps, edges, and human keypoints. In this work, we propose ObjectDiffusion, a model that conditions T2I diffusion models on semantic and spatial grounding information, enabling the precise rendering and placement of desired objects in specific locations defined by bounding boxes. To achieve this, we make substantial modifications to the network architecture introduced in ControlNet to integrate it with the grounding method proposed in GLIGEN. We fine-tune ObjectDiffusion on the COCO2017 training dataset and evaluate it on the COCO2017 validation dataset. Our model improves the precision and quality of controllable image generation, achieving an AP_{50} of 46.6, an AR of 44.5, and an FID of 19.8, outperforming the current SOTA model trained on open-source datasets across all three metrics. ObjectDiffusion demonstrates a distinctive capability in synthesizing diverse, high-quality, high-fidelity images that seamlessly conform to the semantic and spatial control layout. Evaluated in qualitative and quantitative tests, ObjectDiffusion exhibits remarkable grounding capabilities in closed-set and open-set vocabulary settings across a wide variety of contexts. The qualitative assessment verifies the ability of ObjectDiffusion to generate multiple detailed objects in varying sizes, forms, and locations.

Motion-I2V: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Generation with Explicit Motion Modeling

We introduce Motion-I2V, a novel framework for consistent and controllable image-to-video generation (I2V). In contrast to previous methods that directly learn the complicated image-to-video mapping, Motion-I2V factorizes I2V into two stages with explicit motion modeling. For the first stage, we propose a diffusion-based motion field predictor, which focuses on deducing the trajectories of the reference image's pixels. For the second stage, we propose motion-augmented temporal attention to enhance the limited 1-D temporal attention in video latent diffusion models. This module can effectively propagate reference image's feature to synthesized frames with the guidance of predicted trajectories from the first stage. Compared with existing methods, Motion-I2V can generate more consistent videos even at the presence of large motion and viewpoint variation. By training a sparse trajectory ControlNet for the first stage, Motion-I2V can support users to precisely control motion trajectories and motion regions with sparse trajectory and region annotations. This offers more controllability of the I2V process than solely relying on textual instructions. Additionally, Motion-I2V's second stage naturally supports zero-shot video-to-video translation. Both qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate the advantages of Motion-I2V over prior approaches in consistent and controllable image-to-video generation.

Denoising Diffusion via Image-Based Rendering

Generating 3D scenes is a challenging open problem, which requires synthesizing plausible content that is fully consistent in 3D space. While recent methods such as neural radiance fields excel at view synthesis and 3D reconstruction, they cannot synthesize plausible details in unobserved regions since they lack a generative capability. Conversely, existing generative methods are typically not capable of reconstructing detailed, large-scale scenes in the wild, as they use limited-capacity 3D scene representations, require aligned camera poses, or rely on additional regularizers. In this work, we introduce the first diffusion model able to perform fast, detailed reconstruction and generation of real-world 3D scenes. To achieve this, we make three contributions. First, we introduce a new neural scene representation, IB-planes, that can efficiently and accurately represent large 3D scenes, dynamically allocating more capacity as needed to capture details visible in each image. Second, we propose a denoising-diffusion framework to learn a prior over this novel 3D scene representation, using only 2D images without the need for any additional supervision signal such as masks or depths. This supports 3D reconstruction and generation in a unified architecture. Third, we develop a principled approach to avoid trivial 3D solutions when integrating the image-based rendering with the diffusion model, by dropping out representations of some images. We evaluate the model on several challenging datasets of real and synthetic images, and demonstrate superior results on generation, novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction.

TRIP: Temporal Residual Learning with Image Noise Prior for Image-to-Video Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have demonstrated the utility of powerful diffusion models. Nevertheless, the problem is not trivial when shaping diffusion models to animate static image (i.e., image-to-video generation). The difficulty originates from the aspect that the diffusion process of subsequent animated frames should not only preserve the faithful alignment with the given image but also pursue temporal coherence among adjacent frames. To alleviate this, we present TRIP, a new recipe of image-to-video diffusion paradigm that pivots on image noise prior derived from static image to jointly trigger inter-frame relational reasoning and ease the coherent temporal modeling via temporal residual learning. Technically, the image noise prior is first attained through one-step backward diffusion process based on both static image and noised video latent codes. Next, TRIP executes a residual-like dual-path scheme for noise prediction: 1) a shortcut path that directly takes image noise prior as the reference noise of each frame to amplify the alignment between the first frame and subsequent frames; 2) a residual path that employs 3D-UNet over noised video and static image latent codes to enable inter-frame relational reasoning, thereby easing the learning of the residual noise for each frame. Furthermore, both reference and residual noise of each frame are dynamically merged via attention mechanism for final video generation. Extensive experiments on WebVid-10M, DTDB and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our TRIP for image-to-video generation. Please see our project page at https://trip-i2v.github.io/TRIP/.