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SubscribeCan We Generate Images with CoT? Let's Verify and Reinforce Image Generation Step by Step
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been extensively explored in large models to tackle complex understanding tasks. However, it still remains an open question whether such strategies can be applied to verifying and reinforcing image generation scenarios. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive investigation of the potential of CoT reasoning to enhance autoregressive image generation. We focus on three techniques: scaling test-time computation for verification, aligning model preferences with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and integrating these techniques for complementary effects. Our results demonstrate that these approaches can be effectively adapted and combined to significantly improve image generation performance. Furthermore, given the pivotal role of reward models in our findings, we propose the Potential Assessment Reward Model (PARM) and PARM++, specialized for autoregressive image generation. PARM adaptively assesses each generation step through a potential assessment approach, merging the strengths of existing reward models, and PARM++ further introduces a reflection mechanism to self-correct the generated unsatisfactory image. Using our investigated reasoning strategies, we enhance a baseline model, Show-o, to achieve superior results, with a significant +24% improvement on the GenEval benchmark, surpassing Stable Diffusion 3 by +15%. We hope our study provides unique insights and paves a new path for integrating CoT reasoning with autoregressive image generation. Code and models are released at https://github.com/ZiyuGuo99/Image-Generation-CoT
Improving Chain-of-Thought Efficiency for Autoregressive Image Generation
Autoregressive multimodal large language models have recently gained popularity for image generation, driven by advances in foundation models. To enhance alignment and detail, newer approaches employ chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, expanding user inputs into elaborated prompts prior to image synthesis. However, this strategy can introduce unnecessary redundancy -- a phenomenon we call visual overthinking -- which increases computational costs and can introduce details that contradict the original prompt. In this work, we explore how to generate more concise CoT sequences for more efficient image generation. We introduce ShortCoTI, a lightweight optimization framework that encourages more concise CoT while preserving output image quality. ShortCoTI rewards more concise prompts with an adaptive function that scales according to an estimated difficulty for each task. Incorporating this reward into a reinforcement learning paradigm reduces prompt reasoning length by 54% while maintaining or slightly improving quality metrics across multiple benchmarks (T2I-CompBench, GenEval). Qualitative analysis shows that our method eliminates verbose explanations and repetitive refinements, producing reasoning prompts that are both concise and semantically rich. As a result, ShortCoTI improves computational efficiency without compromising the fidelity or visual appeal of generated images.
X-Ray-CoT: Interpretable Chest X-ray Diagnosis with Vision-Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Chest X-ray imaging is crucial for diagnosing pulmonary and cardiac diseases, yet its interpretation demands extensive clinical experience and suffers from inter-observer variability. While deep learning models offer high diagnostic accuracy, their black-box nature hinders clinical adoption in high-stakes medical settings. To address this, we propose X-Ray-CoT (Chest X-Ray Chain-of-Thought), a novel framework leveraging Vision-Language Large Models (LVLMs) for intelligent chest X-ray diagnosis and interpretable report generation. X-Ray-CoT simulates human radiologists' "chain-of-thought" by first extracting multi-modal features and visual concepts, then employing an LLM-based component with a structured Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy to reason and produce detailed natural language diagnostic reports. Evaluated on the CORDA dataset, X-Ray-CoT achieves competitive quantitative performance, with a Balanced Accuracy of 80.52% and F1 score of 78.65% for disease diagnosis, slightly surpassing existing black-box models. Crucially, it uniquely generates high-quality, explainable reports, as validated by preliminary human evaluations. Our ablation studies confirm the integral role of each proposed component, highlighting the necessity of multi-modal fusion and CoT reasoning for robust and transparent medical AI. This work represents a significant step towards trustworthy and clinically actionable AI systems in medical imaging.
Uni-cot: Towards Unified Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Across Text and Vision
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely adopted to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by decomposing complex tasks into simpler, sequential subtasks. However, extending CoT to vision-language reasoning tasks remains challenging, as it often requires interpreting transitions of visual states to support reasoning. Existing methods often struggle with this due to limited capacity of modeling visual state transitions or incoherent visual trajectories caused by fragmented architectures. To overcome these limitations, we propose Uni-CoT, a Unified Chain-of-Thought framework that enables coherent and grounded multimodal reasoning within a single unified model. The key idea is to leverage a model capable of both image understanding and generation to reason over visual content and model evolving visual states. However, empowering a unified model to achieve that is non-trivial, given the high computational cost and the burden of training. To address this, Uni-CoT introduces a novel two-level reasoning paradigm: A Macro-Level CoT for high-level task planning and A Micro-Level CoT for subtask execution. This design significantly reduces the computational overhead. Furthermore, we introduce a structured training paradigm that combines interleaved image-text supervision for macro-level CoT with multi-task objectives for micro-level CoT. Together, these innovations allow Uni-CoT to perform scalable and coherent multi-modal reasoning. Furthermore, thanks to our design, all experiments can be efficiently completed using only 8 A100 GPUs with 80GB VRAM each. Experimental results on reasoning-driven image generation benchmark (WISE) and editing benchmarks (RISE and KRIS) indicates that Uni-CoT demonstrates SOTA performance and strong generalization, establishing Uni-CoT as a promising solution for multi-modal reasoning. Project Page and Code: https://sais-fuxi.github.io/projects/uni-cot/
T2I-R1: Reinforcing Image Generation with Collaborative Semantic-level and Token-level CoT
Recent advancements in large language models have demonstrated how chain-of-thought (CoT) and reinforcement learning (RL) can improve performance. However, applying such reasoning strategies to the visual generation domain remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present T2I-R1, a novel reasoning-enhanced text-to-image generation model, powered by RL with a bi-level CoT reasoning process. Specifically, we identify two levels of CoT that can be utilized to enhance different stages of generation: (1) the semantic-level CoT for high-level planning of the prompt and (2) the token-level CoT for low-level pixel processing during patch-by-patch generation. To better coordinate these two levels of CoT, we introduce BiCoT-GRPO with an ensemble of generation rewards, which seamlessly optimizes both generation CoTs within the same training step. By applying our reasoning strategies to the baseline model, Janus-Pro, we achieve superior performance with 13% improvement on T2I-CompBench and 19% improvement on the WISE benchmark, even surpassing the state-of-the-art model FLUX.1. Code is available at: https://github.com/CaraJ7/T2I-R1
R-CoT: Reverse Chain-of-Thought Problem Generation for Geometric Reasoning in Large Multimodal Models
Existing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) struggle with mathematical geometric reasoning due to a lack of high-quality image-text paired data. Current geometric data generation approaches, which apply preset templates to generate geometric data or use Large Language Models (LLMs) to rephrase questions and answers (Q&A), unavoidably limit data accuracy and diversity. To synthesize higher-quality data, we propose a two-stage Reverse Chain-of-Thought (R-CoT) geometry problem generation pipeline. First, we introduce GeoChain to produce high-fidelity geometric images and corresponding descriptions highlighting relations among geometric elements. We then design a Reverse A&Q method that reasons step-by-step based on the descriptions and generates questions in reverse from the reasoning results. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method brings significant and consistent improvements on multiple LMM baselines, achieving new performance records in the 2B, 7B, and 8B settings. Notably, R-CoT-8B significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art open-source mathematical models by 16.6% on MathVista and 9.2% on GeoQA, while also surpassing the closed-source model GPT-4o by an average of 13% across both datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/dle666/R-CoT.
Understanding-in-Generation: Reinforcing Generative Capability of Unified Model via Infusing Understanding into Generation
Recent works have made notable advancements in enhancing unified models for text-to-image generation through the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, these reasoning methods separate the processes of understanding and generation, which limits their ability to guide the reasoning of unified models in addressing the deficiencies of their generative capabilities. To this end, we propose a novel reasoning framework for unified models, Understanding-in-Generation (UiG), which harnesses the robust understanding capabilities of unified models to reinforce their performance in image generation. The core insight of our UiG is to integrate generative guidance by the strong understanding capabilities during the reasoning process, thereby mitigating the limitations of generative abilities. To achieve this, we introduce "Image Editing" as a bridge to infuse understanding into the generation process. Initially, we verify the generated image and incorporate the understanding of unified models into the editing instructions. Subsequently, we enhance the generated image step by step, gradually infusing the understanding into the generation process. Our UiG framework demonstrates a significant performance improvement in text-to-image generation over existing text-to-image reasoning methods, e.g., a 3.92% gain on the long prompt setting of the TIIF benchmark. The project code: https://github.com/QC-LY/UiG
Unaligned 2D to 3D Translation with Conditional Vector-Quantized Code Diffusion using Transformers
Generating 3D images of complex objects conditionally from a few 2D views is a difficult synthesis problem, compounded by issues such as domain gap and geometric misalignment. For instance, a unified framework such as Generative Adversarial Networks cannot achieve this unless they explicitly define both a domain-invariant and geometric-invariant joint latent distribution, whereas Neural Radiance Fields are generally unable to handle both issues as they optimize at the pixel level. By contrast, we propose a simple and novel 2D to 3D synthesis approach based on conditional diffusion with vector-quantized codes. Operating in an information-rich code space enables high-resolution 3D synthesis via full-coverage attention across the views. Specifically, we generate the 3D codes (e.g. for CT images) conditional on previously generated 3D codes and the entire codebook of two 2D views (e.g. 2D X-rays). Qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate state-of-the-art performance over specialized methods across varied evaluation criteria, including fidelity metrics such as density, coverage, and distortion metrics for two complex volumetric imagery datasets from in real-world scenarios.
SceneGen: Single-Image 3D Scene Generation in One Feedforward Pass
3D content generation has recently attracted significant research interest due to its applications in VR/AR and embodied AI. In this work, we address the challenging task of synthesizing multiple 3D assets within a single scene image. Concretely, our contributions are fourfold: (i) we present SceneGen, a novel framework that takes a scene image and corresponding object masks as input, simultaneously producing multiple 3D assets with geometry and texture. Notably, SceneGen operates with no need for optimization or asset retrieval; (ii) we introduce a novel feature aggregation module that integrates local and global scene information from visual and geometric encoders within the feature extraction module. Coupled with a position head, this enables the generation of 3D assets and their relative spatial positions in a single feedforward pass; (iii) we demonstrate SceneGen's direct extensibility to multi-image input scenarios. Despite being trained solely on single-image inputs, our architectural design enables improved generation performance with multi-image inputs; and (iv) extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations confirm the efficiency and robust generation abilities of our approach. We believe this paradigm offers a novel solution for high-quality 3D content generation, potentially advancing its practical applications in downstream tasks. The code and model will be publicly available at: https://mengmouxu.github.io/SceneGen.
Zebra-CoT: A Dataset for Interleaved Vision Language Reasoning
Humans often use visual aids, for example diagrams or sketches, when solving complex problems. Training multimodal models to do the same, known as Visual Chain of Thought (Visual CoT), is challenging due to: (1) poor off-the-shelf visual CoT performance, which hinders reinforcement learning, and (2) the lack of high-quality visual CoT training data. We introduce Zebra-CoT, a diverse large-scale dataset with 182,384 samples, containing logically coherent interleaved text-image reasoning traces. We focus on four categories of tasks where sketching or visual reasoning is especially natural, spanning scientific questions such as geometry, physics, and algorithms; 2D visual reasoning tasks like visual search and jigsaw puzzles; 3D reasoning tasks including 3D multi-hop inference, embodied and robot planning; visual logic problems and strategic games like chess. Fine-tuning the Anole-7B model on the Zebra-CoT training corpus results in an improvement of +12% in our test-set accuracy and yields up to +13% performance gain on standard VLM benchmark evaluations. Fine-tuning Bagel-7B yields a model that generates high-quality interleaved visual reasoning chains, underscoring Zebra-CoT's effectiveness for developing multimodal reasoning abilities. We open-source our dataset and models to support development and evaluation of visual CoT.
Visual-CoG: Stage-Aware Reinforcement Learning with Chain of Guidance for Text-to-Image Generation
Despite the promising progress of recent autoregressive models in text-to-image (T2I) generation, their ability to handle multi-attribute and ambiguous prompts remains limited. To address these limitations, existing works have applied chain-of-thought (CoT) to enable stage-aware visual synthesis and employed reinforcement learning (RL) to improve reasoning capabilities. However, most models provide reward signals only at the end of the generation stage. This monolithic final-only guidance makes it difficult to identify which stages contribute positively to the final outcome and may lead to suboptimal policies. To tackle this issue, we propose a Visual-Chain of Guidance (Visual-CoG) paradigm consisting of three stages: semantic reasoning, process refining, and outcome evaluation, with stage-aware rewards providing immediate guidance throughout the image generation pipeline. We further construct a visual cognition benchmark, VisCog-Bench, which comprises four subtasks to evaluate the effectiveness of semantic reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations on GenEval, T2I-CompBench, and the proposed VisCog-Bench show improvements of 15%, 5%, and 19%, respectively, demonstrating the superior performance of the proposed Visual-CoG. We will release all the resources soon.
CoT-lized Diffusion: Let's Reinforce T2I Generation Step-by-step
Current text-to-image (T2I) generation models struggle to align spatial composition with the input text, especially in complex scenes. Even layout-based approaches yield suboptimal spatial control, as their generation process is decoupled from layout planning, making it difficult to refine the layout during synthesis. We present CoT-Diff, a framework that brings step-by-step CoT-style reasoning into T2I generation by tightly integrating Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-driven 3D layout planning with the diffusion process. CoT-Diff enables layout-aware reasoning inline within a single diffusion round: at each denoising step, the MLLM evaluates intermediate predictions, dynamically updates the 3D scene layout, and continuously guides the generation process. The updated layout is converted into semantic conditions and depth maps, which are fused into the diffusion model via a condition-aware attention mechanism, enabling precise spatial control and semantic injection. Experiments on 3D Scene benchmarks show that CoT-Diff significantly improves spatial alignment and compositional fidelity, and outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 34.7% in complex scene spatial accuracy, thereby validating the effectiveness of this entangled generation paradigm.
Gen2Det: Generate to Detect
Recently diffusion models have shown improvement in synthetic image quality as well as better control in generation. We motivate and present Gen2Det, a simple modular pipeline to create synthetic training data for object detection for free by leveraging state-of-the-art grounded image generation methods. Unlike existing works which generate individual object instances, require identifying foreground followed by pasting on other images, we simplify to directly generating scene-centric images. In addition to the synthetic data, Gen2Det also proposes a suite of techniques to best utilize the generated data, including image-level filtering, instance-level filtering, and better training recipe to account for imperfections in the generation. Using Gen2Det, we show healthy improvements on object detection and segmentation tasks under various settings and agnostic to detection methods. In the long-tailed detection setting on LVIS, Gen2Det improves the performance on rare categories by a large margin while also significantly improving the performance on other categories, e.g. we see an improvement of 2.13 Box AP and 1.84 Mask AP over just training on real data on LVIS with Mask R-CNN. In the low-data regime setting on COCO, Gen2Det consistently improves both Box and Mask AP by 2.27 and 1.85 points. In the most general detection setting, Gen2Det still demonstrates robust performance gains, e.g. it improves the Box and Mask AP on COCO by 0.45 and 0.32 points.
ComfyGI: Automatic Improvement of Image Generation Workflows
Automatic image generation is no longer just of interest to researchers, but also to practitioners. However, current models are sensitive to the settings used and automatic optimization methods often require human involvement. To bridge this gap, we introduce ComfyGI, a novel approach to automatically improve workflows for image generation without the need for human intervention driven by techniques from genetic improvement. This enables image generation with significantly higher quality in terms of the alignment with the given description and the perceived aesthetics. On the performance side, we find that overall, the images generated with an optimized workflow are about 50% better compared to the initial workflow in terms of the median ImageReward score. These already good results are even surpassed in our human evaluation, as the participants preferred the images improved by ComfyGI in around 90% of the cases.
Vision-Language Generative Model for View-Specific Chest X-ray Generation
Synthetic medical data generation has opened up new possibilities in the healthcare domain, offering a powerful tool for simulating clinical scenarios, enhancing diagnostic and treatment quality, gaining granular medical knowledge, and accelerating the development of unbiased algorithms. In this context, we present a novel approach called ViewXGen, designed to overcome the limitations of existing methods that rely on general domain pipelines using only radiology reports to generate frontal-view chest X-rays. Our approach takes into consideration the diverse view positions found in the dataset, enabling the generation of chest X-rays with specific views, which marks a significant advancement in the field. To achieve this, we introduce a set of specially designed tokens for each view position, tailoring the generation process to the user's preferences. Furthermore, we leverage multi-view chest X-rays as input, incorporating valuable information from different views within the same study. This integration rectifies potential errors and contributes to faithfully capturing abnormal findings in chest X-ray generation. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted statistical analyses, evaluating its performance in a clinical efficacy metric on the MIMIC-CXR dataset. Also, human evaluation demonstrates the remarkable capabilities of ViewXGen, particularly in producing realistic view-specific X-rays that closely resemble the original images.
Beyond Textual CoT: Interleaved Text-Image Chains with Deep Confidence Reasoning for Image Editing
Image editing with natural language has gained significant popularity, yet existing methods struggle with intricate object intersections and fine-grained spatial relationships due to the lack of an explicit reasoning process. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been explored to enhance reasoning, purely textual CoT or CoT augmented with coordinate information is fundamentally limited in its ability to represent intricate visual layouts and lacks the necessary visual cues to guide the generation of fine-grained, pixel-level details. To address these challenges, we propose Multimodal Reasoning Edit (MURE), a novel framework that shifts the visual editing process from purely text-based reasoning to a series of interleaved textual and visual rationales. Our framework performs image editing using a natively multimodal, interleaved text-image CoT. This approach generates a step-by-step chain of reasoning where a textual description is followed by a corresponding visual cue, such as a positional mask that defined intended edited regions or a representation of new content. Furthermore, to mitigate the hallucination phenomenon of large language models, we introduce Multimodal Deep Confidence (MMDC) reasoning paradigm. This paradigm explores a tree of visual reasoning paths at each step. By pruning low-quality branches using a deep confidence score from a reward model, it ensures the model consistently follows a high-quality trajectory towards the final edited result. The proposed method decomposes complex editing tasks into interdependent sub-tasks, achieving greater precision at each stage and yielding high-fidelity edited results. We define the formulation for interleaved text-image chains and release the first CoT-Edit-14K dataset, comprising 14K high-quality editing examples. Extensive experiments show that our method yields significant improvements across three image editing benchmarks.
PhysGen: Rigid-Body Physics-Grounded Image-to-Video Generation
We present PhysGen, a novel image-to-video generation method that converts a single image and an input condition (e.g., force and torque applied to an object in the image) to produce a realistic, physically plausible, and temporally consistent video. Our key insight is to integrate model-based physical simulation with a data-driven video generation process, enabling plausible image-space dynamics. At the heart of our system are three core components: (i) an image understanding module that effectively captures the geometry, materials, and physical parameters of the image; (ii) an image-space dynamics simulation model that utilizes rigid-body physics and inferred parameters to simulate realistic behaviors; and (iii) an image-based rendering and refinement module that leverages generative video diffusion to produce realistic video footage featuring the simulated motion. The resulting videos are realistic in both physics and appearance and are even precisely controllable, showcasing superior results over existing data-driven image-to-video generation works through quantitative comparison and comprehensive user study. PhysGen's resulting videos can be used for various downstream applications, such as turning an image into a realistic animation or allowing users to interact with the image and create various dynamics. Project page: https://stevenlsw.github.io/physgen/
DreamRenderer: Taming Multi-Instance Attribute Control in Large-Scale Text-to-Image Models
Image-conditioned generation methods, such as depth- and canny-conditioned approaches, have demonstrated remarkable abilities for precise image synthesis. However, existing models still struggle to accurately control the content of multiple instances (or regions). Even state-of-the-art models like FLUX and 3DIS face challenges, such as attribute leakage between instances, which limits user control. To address these issues, we introduce DreamRenderer, a training-free approach built upon the FLUX model. DreamRenderer enables users to control the content of each instance via bounding boxes or masks, while ensuring overall visual harmony. We propose two key innovations: 1) Bridge Image Tokens for Hard Text Attribute Binding, which uses replicated image tokens as bridge tokens to ensure that T5 text embeddings, pre-trained solely on text data, bind the correct visual attributes for each instance during Joint Attention; 2) Hard Image Attribute Binding applied only to vital layers. Through our analysis of FLUX, we identify the critical layers responsible for instance attribute rendering and apply Hard Image Attribute Binding only in these layers, using soft binding in the others. This approach ensures precise control while preserving image quality. Evaluations on the COCO-POS and COCO-MIG benchmarks demonstrate that DreamRenderer improves the Image Success Ratio by 17.7% over FLUX and enhances the performance of layout-to-image models like GLIGEN and 3DIS by up to 26.8%. Project Page: https://limuloo.github.io/DreamRenderer/.
FlexGen: Flexible Multi-View Generation from Text and Image Inputs
In this work, we introduce FlexGen, a flexible framework designed to generate controllable and consistent multi-view images, conditioned on a single-view image, or a text prompt, or both. FlexGen tackles the challenges of controllable multi-view synthesis through additional conditioning on 3D-aware text annotations. We utilize the strong reasoning capabilities of GPT-4V to generate 3D-aware text annotations. By analyzing four orthogonal views of an object arranged as tiled multi-view images, GPT-4V can produce text annotations that include 3D-aware information with spatial relationship. By integrating the control signal with proposed adaptive dual-control module, our model can generate multi-view images that correspond to the specified text. FlexGen supports multiple controllable capabilities, allowing users to modify text prompts to generate reasonable and corresponding unseen parts. Additionally, users can influence attributes such as appearance and material properties, including metallic and roughness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach offers enhanced multiple controllability, marking a significant advancement over existing multi-view diffusion models. This work has substantial implications for fields requiring rapid and flexible 3D content creation, including game development, animation, and virtual reality. Project page: https://xxu068.github.io/flexgen.github.io/.
S-Chain: Structured Visual Chain-of-Thought For Medicine
Faithful reasoning in medical vision-language models (VLMs) requires not only accurate predictions but also transparent alignment between textual rationales and visual evidence. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has shown promise in medical visual question answering (VQA), no large-scale expert-level dataset has captured stepwise reasoning with precise visual grounding. We introduce S-Chain, the first large-scale dataset of 12,000 expert-annotated medical images with bounding boxes and structured visual CoT (SV-CoT), explicitly linking visual regions to reasoning steps. The dataset further supports 16 languages, totaling over 700k VQA pairs for broad multilingual applicability. Using S-Chain, we benchmark state-of-the-art medical VLMs (ExGra-Med, LLaVA-Med) and general-purpose VLMs (Qwen2.5-VL, InternVL2.5), showing that SV-CoT supervision significantly improves interpretability, grounding fidelity, and robustness. Beyond benchmarking, we study its synergy with retrieval-augmented generation, revealing how domain knowledge and visual grounding interact during autoregressive reasoning. Finally, we propose a new mechanism that strengthens the alignment between visual evidence and reasoning, improving both reliability and efficiency. S-Chain establishes a new benchmark for grounded medical reasoning and paves the way toward more trustworthy and explainable medical VLMs.
Gen4Gen: Generative Data Pipeline for Generative Multi-Concept Composition
Recent text-to-image diffusion models are able to learn and synthesize images containing novel, personalized concepts (e.g., their own pets or specific items) with just a few examples for training. This paper tackles two interconnected issues within this realm of personalizing text-to-image diffusion models. First, current personalization techniques fail to reliably extend to multiple concepts -- we hypothesize this to be due to the mismatch between complex scenes and simple text descriptions in the pre-training dataset (e.g., LAION). Second, given an image containing multiple personalized concepts, there lacks a holistic metric that evaluates performance on not just the degree of resemblance of personalized concepts, but also whether all concepts are present in the image and whether the image accurately reflects the overall text description. To address these issues, we introduce Gen4Gen, a semi-automated dataset creation pipeline utilizing generative models to combine personalized concepts into complex compositions along with text-descriptions. Using this, we create a dataset called MyCanvas, that can be used to benchmark the task of multi-concept personalization. In addition, we design a comprehensive metric comprising two scores (CP-CLIP and TI-CLIP) for better quantifying the performance of multi-concept, personalized text-to-image diffusion methods. We provide a simple baseline built on top of Custom Diffusion with empirical prompting strategies for future researchers to evaluate on MyCanvas. We show that by improving data quality and prompting strategies, we can significantly increase multi-concept personalized image generation quality, without requiring any modifications to model architecture or training algorithms.
CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning
Chain-of-Thought significantly enhances a model's reasoning capability, but it also comes with a considerable increase in inference costs due to long chains. With the observation that the reasoning path can be easily compressed under easy tasks but struggle on hard tasks, we explore the feasibility of elastically controlling the length of reasoning paths with only one model, thereby reducing the inference overhead of reasoning models dynamically based on task difficulty. We introduce a new tuning and inference strategy named CoT-Valve, designed to allow models to generate reasoning chains of varying lengths. To achieve this, we propose to identify a direction in the parameter space that, when manipulated, can effectively control the length of generated CoT. Moreover, we show that this property is valuable for compressing the reasoning chain. We construct datasets with chains from long to short for the same questions and explore two enhanced strategies for CoT-Valve: (1) a precise length-compressible CoT tuning method, and (2) a progressive chain length compression approach. Our experiments show that CoT-Valve successfully enables controllability and compressibility of the chain and shows better performance than the prompt-based control. We applied this method to QwQ-32B-Preview, reducing reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer.
Semantic Image Manipulation Using Scene Graphs
Image manipulation can be considered a special case of image generation where the image to be produced is a modification of an existing image. Image generation and manipulation have been, for the most part, tasks that operate on raw pixels. However, the remarkable progress in learning rich image and object representations has opened the way for tasks such as text-to-image or layout-to-image generation that are mainly driven by semantics. In our work, we address the novel problem of image manipulation from scene graphs, in which a user can edit images by merely applying changes in the nodes or edges of a semantic graph that is generated from the image. Our goal is to encode image information in a given constellation and from there on generate new constellations, such as replacing objects or even changing relationships between objects, while respecting the semantics and style from the original image. We introduce a spatio-semantic scene graph network that does not require direct supervision for constellation changes or image edits. This makes it possible to train the system from existing real-world datasets with no additional annotation effort.
Diffusion Model-based Data Augmentation Method for Fetal Head Ultrasound Segmentation
Medical image data is less accessible than in other domains due to privacy and regulatory constraints. In addition, labeling requires costly, time-intensive manual image annotation by clinical experts. To overcome these challenges, synthetic medical data generation offers a promising solution. Generative AI (GenAI), employing generative deep learning models, has proven effective at producing realistic synthetic images. This study proposes a novel mask-guided GenAI approach using diffusion models to generate synthetic fetal head ultrasound images paired with segmentation masks. These synthetic pairs augment real datasets for supervised fine-tuning of the Segment Anything Model (SAM). Our results show that the synthetic data captures real image features effectively, and this approach reaches state-of-the-art fetal head segmentation, especially when trained with a limited number of real image-mask pairs. In particular, the segmentation reaches Dice Scores of 94.66\% and 94.38\% using a handful of ultrasound images from the Spanish and African cohorts, respectively. Our code, models, and data are available on GitHub.
Towards Predicting Temporal Changes in a Patient's Chest X-ray Images based on Electronic Health Records
Chest X-ray imaging (CXR) is an important diagnostic tool used in hospitals to assess patient conditions and monitor changes over time. Generative models, specifically diffusion-based models, have shown promise in generating realistic synthetic X-rays. However, these models mainly focus on conditional generation using single-time-point data, i.e., typically CXRs taken at a specific time with their corresponding reports, limiting their clinical utility, particularly for capturing temporal changes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework, EHRXDiff, which predicts future CXR images by integrating previous CXRs with subsequent medical events, e.g., prescriptions, lab measures, etc. Our framework dynamically tracks and predicts disease progression based on a latent diffusion model, conditioned on the previous CXR image and a history of medical events. We comprehensively evaluate the performance of our framework across three key aspects, including clinical consistency, demographic consistency, and visual realism. We demonstrate that our framework generates high-quality, realistic future images that capture potential temporal changes, suggesting its potential for further development as a clinical simulation tool. This could offer valuable insights for patient monitoring and treatment planning in the medical field.
MCGM: Mask Conditional Text-to-Image Generative Model
Recent advancements in generative models have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence, enabling the creation of highly-realistic and detailed images. In this study, we propose a novel Mask Conditional Text-to-Image Generative Model (MCGM) that leverages the power of conditional diffusion models to generate pictures with specific poses. Our model builds upon the success of the Break-a-scene [1] model in generating new scenes using a single image with multiple subjects and incorporates a mask embedding injection that allows the conditioning of the generation process. By introducing this additional level of control, MCGM offers a flexible and intuitive approach for generating specific poses for one or more subjects learned from a single image, empowering users to influence the output based on their requirements. Through extensive experimentation and evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model in generating high-quality images that meet predefined mask conditions and improving the current Break-a-scene generative model.
Meta 3D AssetGen: Text-to-Mesh Generation with High-Quality Geometry, Texture, and PBR Materials
We present Meta 3D AssetGen (AssetGen), a significant advancement in text-to-3D generation which produces faithful, high-quality meshes with texture and material control. Compared to works that bake shading in the 3D object's appearance, AssetGen outputs physically-based rendering (PBR) materials, supporting realistic relighting. AssetGen generates first several views of the object with factored shaded and albedo appearance channels, and then reconstructs colours, metalness and roughness in 3D, using a deferred shading loss for efficient supervision. It also uses a sign-distance function to represent 3D shape more reliably and introduces a corresponding loss for direct shape supervision. This is implemented using fused kernels for high memory efficiency. After mesh extraction, a texture refinement transformer operating in UV space significantly improves sharpness and details. AssetGen achieves 17% improvement in Chamfer Distance and 40% in LPIPS over the best concurrent work for few-view reconstruction, and a human preference of 72% over the best industry competitors of comparable speed, including those that support PBR. Project page with generated assets: https://assetgen.github.io
Chain of Thought Empowers Transformers to Solve Inherently Serial Problems
Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However, the mechanism behind CoT remains unclear. This work provides a theoretical understanding of the power of CoT for decoder-only transformers through the lens of expressiveness. Conceptually, CoT empowers the model with the ability to perform inherently serial computation, which is otherwise lacking in transformers, especially when depth is low. Given input length n, previous works have shown that constant-depth transformers with finite precision poly(n) embedding size can only solve problems in TC^0 without CoT. We first show an even tighter expressiveness upper bound for constant-depth transformers with constant-bit precision, which can only solve problems in AC^0, a proper subset of TC^0. However, with T steps of CoT, constant-depth transformers using constant-bit precision and O(log n) embedding size can solve any problem solvable by boolean circuits of size T. Empirically, enabling CoT dramatically improves the accuracy for tasks that are hard for parallel computation, including the composition of permutation groups, iterated squaring, and circuit value problems, especially for low-depth transformers.
Next Visual Granularity Generation
We propose a novel approach to image generation by decomposing an image into a structured sequence, where each element in the sequence shares the same spatial resolution but differs in the number of unique tokens used, capturing different level of visual granularity. Image generation is carried out through our newly introduced Next Visual Granularity (NVG) generation framework, which generates a visual granularity sequence beginning from an empty image and progressively refines it, from global layout to fine details, in a structured manner. This iterative process encodes a hierarchical, layered representation that offers fine-grained control over the generation process across multiple granularity levels. We train a series of NVG models for class-conditional image generation on the ImageNet dataset and observe clear scaling behavior. Compared to the VAR series, NVG consistently outperforms it in terms of FID scores (3.30 -> 3.03, 2.57 ->2.44, 2.09 -> 2.06). We also conduct extensive analysis to showcase the capability and potential of the NVG framework. Our code and models will be released.
Linguistic Binding in Diffusion Models: Enhancing Attribute Correspondence through Attention Map Alignment
Text-conditioned image generation models often generate incorrect associations between entities and their visual attributes. This reflects an impaired mapping between linguistic binding of entities and modifiers in the prompt and visual binding of the corresponding elements in the generated image. As one notable example, a query like ``a pink sunflower and a yellow flamingo'' may incorrectly produce an image of a yellow sunflower and a pink flamingo. To remedy this issue, we propose SynGen, an approach which first syntactically analyses the prompt to identify entities and their modifiers, and then uses a novel loss function that encourages the cross-attention maps to agree with the linguistic binding reflected by the syntax. Specifically, we encourage large overlap between attention maps of entities and their modifiers, and small overlap with other entities and modifier words. The loss is optimized during inference, without retraining or fine-tuning the model. Human evaluation on three datasets, including one new and challenging set, demonstrate significant improvements of SynGen compared with current state of the art methods. This work highlights how making use of sentence structure during inference can efficiently and substantially improve the faithfulness of text-to-image generation.
ComplexBench-Edit: Benchmarking Complex Instruction-Driven Image Editing via Compositional Dependencies
Text-driven image editing has achieved remarkable success in following single instructions. However, real-world scenarios often involve complex, multi-step instructions, particularly ``chain'' instructions where operations are interdependent. Current models struggle with these intricate directives, and existing benchmarks inadequately evaluate such capabilities. Specifically, they often overlook multi-instruction and chain-instruction complexities, and common consistency metrics are flawed. To address this, we introduce ComplexBench-Edit, a novel benchmark designed to systematically assess model performance on complex, multi-instruction, and chain-dependent image editing tasks. ComplexBench-Edit also features a new vision consistency evaluation method that accurately assesses non-modified regions by excluding edited areas. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet powerful Chain-of-Thought (CoT)-based approach that significantly enhances the ability of existing models to follow complex instructions. Our extensive experiments demonstrate ComplexBench-Edit's efficacy in differentiating model capabilities and highlight the superior performance of our CoT-based method in handling complex edits. The data and code are released at https://github.com/llllly26/ComplexBench-Edit.
Self-conditioned Image Generation via Generating Representations
This paper presents Representation-Conditioned image Generation (RCG), a simple yet effective image generation framework which sets a new benchmark in class-unconditional image generation. RCG does not condition on any human annotations. Instead, it conditions on a self-supervised representation distribution which is mapped from the image distribution using a pre-trained encoder. During generation, RCG samples from such representation distribution using a representation diffusion model (RDM), and employs a pixel generator to craft image pixels conditioned on the sampled representation. Such a design provides substantial guidance during the generative process, resulting in high-quality image generation. Tested on ImageNet 256times256, RCG achieves a Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of 3.31 and an Inception Score (IS) of 253.4. These results not only significantly improve the state-of-the-art of class-unconditional image generation but also rival the current leading methods in class-conditional image generation, bridging the long-standing performance gap between these two tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/LTH14/rcg.
MedGen3D: A Deep Generative Framework for Paired 3D Image and Mask Generation
Acquiring and annotating sufficient labeled data is crucial in developing accurate and robust learning-based models, but obtaining such data can be challenging in many medical image segmentation tasks. One promising solution is to synthesize realistic data with ground-truth mask annotations. However, no prior studies have explored generating complete 3D volumetric images with masks. In this paper, we present MedGen3D, a deep generative framework that can generate paired 3D medical images and masks. First, we represent the 3D medical data as 2D sequences and propose the Multi-Condition Diffusion Probabilistic Model (MC-DPM) to generate multi-label mask sequences adhering to anatomical geometry. Then, we use an image sequence generator and semantic diffusion refiner conditioned on the generated mask sequences to produce realistic 3D medical images that align with the generated masks. Our proposed framework guarantees accurate alignment between synthetic images and segmentation maps. Experiments on 3D thoracic CT and brain MRI datasets show that our synthetic data is both diverse and faithful to the original data, and demonstrate the benefits for downstream segmentation tasks. We anticipate that MedGen3D's ability to synthesize paired 3D medical images and masks will prove valuable in training deep learning models for medical imaging tasks.
CheXGenBench: A Unified Benchmark For Fidelity, Privacy and Utility of Synthetic Chest Radiographs
We introduce CheXGenBench, a rigorous and multifaceted evaluation framework for synthetic chest radiograph generation that simultaneously assesses fidelity, privacy risks, and clinical utility across state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models. Despite rapid advancements in generative AI for real-world imagery, medical domain evaluations have been hindered by methodological inconsistencies, outdated architectural comparisons, and disconnected assessment criteria that rarely address the practical clinical value of synthetic samples. CheXGenBench overcomes these limitations through standardised data partitioning and a unified evaluation protocol comprising over 20 quantitative metrics that systematically analyse generation quality, potential privacy vulnerabilities, and downstream clinical applicability across 11 leading text-to-image architectures. Our results reveal critical inefficiencies in the existing evaluation protocols, particularly in assessing generative fidelity, leading to inconsistent and uninformative comparisons. Our framework establishes a standardised benchmark for the medical AI community, enabling objective and reproducible comparisons while facilitating seamless integration of both existing and future generative models. Additionally, we release a high-quality, synthetic dataset, SynthCheX-75K, comprising 75K radiographs generated by the top-performing model (Sana 0.6B) in our benchmark to support further research in this critical domain. Through CheXGenBench, we establish a new state-of-the-art and release our framework, models, and SynthCheX-75K dataset at https://raman1121.github.io/CheXGenBench/
Why Settle for One? Text-to-ImageSet Generation and Evaluation
Despite remarkable progress in Text-to-Image models, many real-world applications require generating coherent image sets with diverse consistency requirements. Existing consistent methods often focus on a specific domain with specific aspects of consistency, which significantly constrains their generalizability to broader applications. In this paper, we propose a more challenging problem, Text-to-ImageSet (T2IS) generation, which aims to generate sets of images that meet various consistency requirements based on user instructions. To systematically study this problem, we first introduce T2IS-Bench with 596 diverse instructions across 26 subcategories, providing comprehensive coverage for T2IS generation. Building on this, we propose T2IS-Eval, an evaluation framework that transforms user instructions into multifaceted assessment criteria and employs effective evaluators to adaptively assess consistency fulfillment between criteria and generated sets. Subsequently, we propose AutoT2IS, a training-free framework that maximally leverages pretrained Diffusion Transformers' in-context capabilities to harmonize visual elements to satisfy both image-level prompt alignment and set-level visual consistency. Extensive experiments on T2IS-Bench reveal that diverse consistency challenges all existing methods, while our AutoT2IS significantly outperforms current generalized and even specialized approaches. Our method also demonstrates the ability to enable numerous underexplored real-world applications, confirming its substantial practical value. Visit our project in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/T2IS-Home.
Unsupervised Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Preference Optimization
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning greatly improves the interpretability and problem-solving abilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, existing approaches are focused on text CoT, limiting their ability to leverage visual cues. Visual CoT remains underexplored, and the only work is based on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) that relies on extensive labeled bounding-box data and is hard to generalize to unseen cases. In this paper, we introduce Unsupervised Visual CoT (UV-CoT), a novel framework for image-level CoT reasoning via preference optimization. UV-CoT performs preference comparisons between model-generated bounding boxes (one is preferred and the other is dis-preferred), eliminating the need for bounding-box annotations. We get such preference data by introducing an automatic data generation pipeline. Given an image, our target MLLM (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B) generates seed bounding boxes using a template prompt and then answers the question using each bounded region as input. An evaluator MLLM (e.g., OmniLLM-12B) ranks the responses, and these rankings serve as supervision to train the target MLLM with UV-CoT by minimizing negative log-likelihood losses. By emulating human perception--identifying key regions and reasoning based on them--UV-CoT can improve visual comprehension, particularly in spatial reasoning tasks where textual descriptions alone fall short. Our experiments on six datasets demonstrate the superiority of UV-CoT, compared to the state-of-the-art textual and visual CoT methods. Our zero-shot testing on four unseen datasets shows the strong generalization of UV-CoT. The code is available in https://github.com/kesenzhao/UV-CoT.
SYN-LUNGS: Towards Simulating Lung Nodules with Anatomy-Informed Digital Twins for AI Training
AI models for lung cancer screening are limited by data scarcity, impacting generalizability and clinical applicability. Generative models address this issue but are constrained by training data variability. We introduce SYN-LUNGS, a framework for generating high-quality 3D CT images with detailed annotations. SYN-LUNGS integrates XCAT3 phantoms for digital twin generation, X-Lesions for nodule simulation (varying size, location, and appearance), and DukeSim for CT image formation with vendor and parameter variability. The dataset includes 3,072 nodule images from 1,044 simulated CT scans, with 512 lesions and 174 digital twins. Models trained on clinical + simulated data outperform clinical only models, achieving 10% improvement in detection, 2-9% in segmentation and classification, and enhanced synthesis. By incorporating anatomy-informed simulations, SYN-LUNGS provides a scalable approach for AI model development, particularly in rare disease representation and improving model reliability.
CCI4.0: A Bilingual Pretraining Dataset for Enhancing Reasoning in Large Language Models
We introduce CCI4.0, a large-scale bilingual pre-training dataset engineered for superior data quality and diverse human-like reasoning trajectory. CCI4.0 occupies roughly 35 TB of disk space and comprises two sub-datasets: CCI4.0-M2-Base and CCI4.0-M2-CoT. CCI4.0-M2-Base combines a 5.2 TB carefully curated Chinese web corpus, a 22.5 TB English subset from Nemotron-CC, and diverse sources from math, wiki, arxiv, and code. Although these data are mostly sourced from well-processed datasets, the quality standards of various domains are dynamic and require extensive expert experience and labor to process. So, we propose a novel pipeline justifying data quality mainly based on models through two-stage deduplication, multiclassifier quality scoring, and domain-aware fluency filtering. We extract 4.5 billion pieces of CoT(Chain-of-Thought) templates, named CCI4.0-M2-CoT. Differing from the distillation of CoT from larger models, our proposed staged CoT extraction exemplifies diverse reasoning patterns and significantly decreases the possibility of hallucination. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that LLMs pre-trained in CCI4.0 benefit from cleaner, more reliable training signals, yielding consistent improvements in downstream tasks, especially in math and code reflection tasks. Our results underscore the critical role of rigorous data curation and human thinking templates in advancing LLM performance, shedding some light on automatically processing pretraining corpora.
GoT: Unleashing Reasoning Capability of Multimodal Large Language Model for Visual Generation and Editing
Current image generation and editing methods primarily process textual prompts as direct inputs without reasoning about visual composition and explicit operations. We present Generation Chain-of-Thought (GoT), a novel paradigm that enables generation and editing through an explicit language reasoning process before outputting images. This approach transforms conventional text-to-image generation and editing into a reasoning-guided framework that analyzes semantic relationships and spatial arrangements. We define the formulation of GoT and construct large-scale GoT datasets containing over 9M samples with detailed reasoning chains capturing semantic-spatial relationships. To leverage the advantages of GoT, we implement a unified framework that integrates Qwen2.5-VL for reasoning chain generation with an end-to-end diffusion model enhanced by our novel Semantic-Spatial Guidance Module. Experiments show our GoT framework achieves excellent performance on both generation and editing tasks, with significant improvements over baselines. Additionally, our approach enables interactive visual generation, allowing users to explicitly modify reasoning steps for precise image adjustments. GoT pioneers a new direction for reasoning-driven visual generation and editing, producing images that better align with human intent. To facilitate future research, we make our datasets, code, and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/rongyaofang/GoT.
GenerateCT: Text-Guided 3D Chest CT Generation
Generative modeling has experienced substantial progress in recent years, particularly in text-to-image and text-to-video synthesis. However, the medical field has not yet fully exploited the potential of large-scale foundational models for synthetic data generation. In this paper, we introduce GenerateCT, the first method for text-conditional computed tomography (CT) generation, addressing the limitations in 3D medical imaging research and making our entire framework open-source. GenerateCT consists of a pre-trained large language model, a transformer-based text-conditional 3D chest CT generation architecture, and a text-conditional spatial super-resolution diffusion model. We also propose CT-ViT, which efficiently compresses CT volumes while preserving auto-regressiveness in-depth, enabling the generation of 3D CT volumes with variable numbers of axial slices. Our experiments demonstrate that GenerateCT can produce realistic, high-resolution, and high-fidelity 3D chest CT volumes consistent with medical language text prompts. We further investigate the potential of GenerateCT by training a model using generated CT volumes for multi-abnormality classification of chest CT volumes. Our contributions provide a valuable foundation for future research in text-conditional 3D medical image generation and have the potential to accelerate advancements in medical imaging research. Our code, pre-trained models, and generated data are available at https://github.com/ibrahimethemhamamci/GenerateCT.
FLUX-Reason-6M & PRISM-Bench: A Million-Scale Text-to-Image Reasoning Dataset and Comprehensive Benchmark
The advancement of open-source text-to-image (T2I) models has been hindered by the absence of large-scale, reasoning-focused datasets and comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, resulting in a performance gap compared to leading closed-source systems. To address this challenge, We introduce FLUX-Reason-6M and PRISM-Bench (Precise and Robust Image Synthesis Measurement Benchmark). FLUX-Reason-6M is a massive dataset consisting of 6 million high-quality FLUX-generated images and 20 million bilingual (English and Chinese) descriptions specifically designed to teach complex reasoning. The image are organized according to six key characteristics: Imagination, Entity, Text rendering, Style, Affection, and Composition, and design explicit Generation Chain-of-Thought (GCoT) to provide detailed breakdowns of image generation steps. The whole data curation takes 15,000 A100 GPU days, providing the community with a resource previously unattainable outside of large industrial labs. PRISM-Bench offers a novel evaluation standard with seven distinct tracks, including a formidable Long Text challenge using GCoT. Through carefully designed prompts, it utilizes advanced vision-language models for nuanced human-aligned assessment of prompt-image alignment and image aesthetics. Our extensive evaluation of 19 leading models on PRISM-Bench reveals critical performance gaps and highlights specific areas requiring improvement. Our dataset, benchmark, and evaluation code are released to catalyze the next wave of reasoning-oriented T2I generation. Project page: https://flux-reason-6m.github.io/ .
CogView3: Finer and Faster Text-to-Image Generation via Relay Diffusion
Recent advancements in text-to-image generative systems have been largely driven by diffusion models. However, single-stage text-to-image diffusion models still face challenges, in terms of computational efficiency and the refinement of image details. To tackle the issue, we propose CogView3, an innovative cascaded framework that enhances the performance of text-to-image diffusion. CogView3 is the first model implementing relay diffusion in the realm of text-to-image generation, executing the task by first creating low-resolution images and subsequently applying relay-based super-resolution. This methodology not only results in competitive text-to-image outputs but also greatly reduces both training and inference costs. Our experimental results demonstrate that CogView3 outperforms SDXL, the current state-of-the-art open-source text-to-image diffusion model, by 77.0\% in human evaluations, all while requiring only about 1/2 of the inference time. The distilled variant of CogView3 achieves comparable performance while only utilizing 1/10 of the inference time by SDXL.
MoVQ: Modulating Quantized Vectors for High-Fidelity Image Generation
Although two-stage Vector Quantized (VQ) generative models allow for synthesizing high-fidelity and high-resolution images, their quantization operator encodes similar patches within an image into the same index, resulting in a repeated artifact for similar adjacent regions using existing decoder architectures. To address this issue, we propose to incorporate the spatially conditional normalization to modulate the quantized vectors so as to insert spatially variant information to the embedded index maps, encouraging the decoder to generate more photorealistic images. Moreover, we use multichannel quantization to increase the recombination capability of the discrete codes without increasing the cost of model and codebook. Additionally, to generate discrete tokens at the second stage, we adopt a Masked Generative Image Transformer (MaskGIT) to learn an underlying prior distribution in the compressed latent space, which is much faster than the conventional autoregressive model. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed modulated VQGAN is able to greatly improve the reconstructed image quality as well as provide high-fidelity image generation.
Augmented Conditioning Is Enough For Effective Training Image Generation
Image generation abilities of text-to-image diffusion models have significantly advanced, yielding highly photo-realistic images from descriptive text and increasing the viability of leveraging synthetic images to train computer vision models. To serve as effective training data, generated images must be highly realistic while also sufficiently diverse within the support of the target data distribution. Yet, state-of-the-art conditional image generation models have been primarily optimized for creative applications, prioritizing image realism and prompt adherence over conditional diversity. In this paper, we investigate how to improve the diversity of generated images with the goal of increasing their effectiveness to train downstream image classification models, without fine-tuning the image generation model. We find that conditioning the generation process on an augmented real image and text prompt produces generations that serve as effective synthetic datasets for downstream training. Conditioning on real training images contextualizes the generation process to produce images that are in-domain with the real image distribution, while data augmentations introduce visual diversity that improves the performance of the downstream classifier. We validate augmentation-conditioning on a total of five established long-tail and few-shot image classification benchmarks and show that leveraging augmentations to condition the generation process results in consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art on the long-tailed benchmark and remarkable gains in extreme few-shot regimes of the remaining four benchmarks. These results constitute an important step towards effectively leveraging synthetic data for downstream training.
Revealing the Implicit Noise-based Imprint of Generative Models
With the rapid advancement of vision generation models, the potential security risks stemming from synthetic visual content have garnered increasing attention, posing significant challenges for AI-generated image detection. Existing methods suffer from inadequate generalization capabilities, resulting in unsatisfactory performance on emerging generative models. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel framework that leverages noise-based model-specific imprint for the detection task. Specifically, we propose a novel noise-based imprint simulator to capture intrinsic patterns imprinted in images generated by different models. By aggregating imprints from various generative models, imprints of future models can be extrapolated to expand training data, thereby enhancing generalization and robustness. Furthermore, we design a new pipeline that pioneers the use of noise patterns, derived from a noise-based imprint extractor, alongside other visual features for AI-generated image detection, resulting in a significant improvement in performance. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across three public benchmarks including GenImage, Synthbuster and Chameleon.
AlignGen: Boosting Personalized Image Generation with Cross-Modality Prior Alignment
Personalized image generation aims to integrate user-provided concepts into text-to-image models, enabling the generation of customized content based on a given prompt. Recent zero-shot approaches, particularly those leveraging diffusion transformers, incorporate reference image information through multi-modal attention mechanism. This integration allows the generated output to be influenced by both the textual prior from the prompt and the visual prior from the reference image. However, we observe that when the prompt and reference image are misaligned, the generated results exhibit a stronger bias toward the textual prior, leading to a significant loss of reference content. To address this issue, we propose AlignGen, a Cross-Modality Prior Alignment mechanism that enhances personalized image generation by: 1) introducing a learnable token to bridge the gap between the textual and visual priors, 2) incorporating a robust training strategy to ensure proper prior alignment, and 3) employing a selective cross-modal attention mask within the multi-modal attention mechanism to further align the priors. Experimental results demonstrate that AlignGen outperforms existing zero-shot methods and even surpasses popular test-time optimization approaches.
DreamCreature: Crafting Photorealistic Virtual Creatures from Imagination
Recent text-to-image (T2I) generative models allow for high-quality synthesis following either text instructions or visual examples. Despite their capabilities, these models face limitations in creating new, detailed creatures within specific categories (e.g., virtual dog or bird species), which are valuable in digital asset creation and biodiversity analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel task, Virtual Creatures Generation: Given a set of unlabeled images of the target concepts (e.g., 200 bird species), we aim to train a T2I model capable of creating new, hybrid concepts within diverse backgrounds and contexts. We propose a new method called DreamCreature, which identifies and extracts the underlying sub-concepts (e.g., body parts of a specific species) in an unsupervised manner. The T2I thus adapts to generate novel concepts (e.g., new bird species) with faithful structures and photorealistic appearance by seamlessly and flexibly composing learned sub-concepts. To enhance sub-concept fidelity and disentanglement, we extend the textual inversion technique by incorporating an additional projector and tailored attention loss regularization. Extensive experiments on two fine-grained image benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of DreamCreature over prior methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluation. Ultimately, the learned sub-concepts facilitate diverse creative applications, including innovative consumer product designs and nuanced property modifications.
AnyStar: Domain randomized universal star-convex 3D instance segmentation
Star-convex shapes arise across bio-microscopy and radiology in the form of nuclei, nodules, metastases, and other units. Existing instance segmentation networks for such structures train on densely labeled instances for each dataset, which requires substantial and often impractical manual annotation effort. Further, significant reengineering or finetuning is needed when presented with new datasets and imaging modalities due to changes in contrast, shape, orientation, resolution, and density. We present AnyStar, a domain-randomized generative model that simulates synthetic training data of blob-like objects with randomized appearance, environments, and imaging physics to train general-purpose star-convex instance segmentation networks. As a result, networks trained using our generative model do not require annotated images from unseen datasets. A single network trained on our synthesized data accurately 3D segments C. elegans and P. dumerilii nuclei in fluorescence microscopy, mouse cortical nuclei in micro-CT, zebrafish brain nuclei in EM, and placental cotyledons in human fetal MRI, all without any retraining, finetuning, transfer learning, or domain adaptation. Code is available at https://github.com/neel-dey/AnyStar.
SFLD: Reducing the content bias for AI-generated Image Detection
Identifying AI-generated content is critical for the safe and ethical use of generative AI. Recent research has focused on developing detectors that generalize to unknown generators, with popular methods relying either on high-level features or low-level fingerprints. However, these methods have clear limitations: biased towards unseen content, or vulnerable to common image degradations, such as JPEG compression. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, SFLD, which incorporates PatchShuffle to integrate high-level semantic and low-level textural information. SFLD applies PatchShuffle at multiple levels, improving robustness and generalization across various generative models. Additionally, current benchmarks face challenges such as low image quality, insufficient content preservation, and limited class diversity. In response, we introduce TwinSynths, a new benchmark generation methodology that constructs visually near-identical pairs of real and synthetic images to ensure high quality and content preservation. Our extensive experiments and analysis show that SFLD outperforms existing methods on detecting a wide variety of fake images sourced from GANs, diffusion models, and TwinSynths, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance and generalization capabilities to novel generative models.
You Only Submit One Image to Find the Most Suitable Generative Model
Deep generative models have achieved promising results in image generation, and various generative model hubs, e.g., Hugging Face and Civitai, have been developed that enable model developers to upload models and users to download models. However, these model hubs lack advanced model management and identification mechanisms, resulting in users only searching for models through text matching, download sorting, etc., making it difficult to efficiently find the model that best meets user requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel setting called Generative Model Identification (GMI), which aims to enable the user to identify the most appropriate generative model(s) for the user's requirements from a large number of candidate models efficiently. To our best knowledge, it has not been studied yet. In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive solution consisting of three pivotal modules: a weighted Reduced Kernel Mean Embedding (RKME) framework for capturing the generated image distribution and the relationship between images and prompts, a pre-trained vision-language model aimed at addressing dimensionality challenges, and an image interrogator designed to tackle cross-modality issues. Extensive empirical results demonstrate the proposal is both efficient and effective. For example, users only need to submit a single example image to describe their requirements, and the model platform can achieve an average top-4 identification accuracy of more than 80%.
Generative Zoo
The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de
Polyp-Gen: Realistic and Diverse Polyp Image Generation for Endoscopic Dataset Expansion
Automated diagnostic systems (ADS) have shown significant potential in the early detection of polyps during endoscopic examinations, thereby reducing the incidence of colorectal cancer. However, due to high annotation costs and strict privacy concerns, acquiring high-quality endoscopic images poses a considerable challenge in the development of ADS. Despite recent advancements in generating synthetic images for dataset expansion, existing endoscopic image generation algorithms failed to accurately generate the details of polyp boundary regions and typically required medical priors to specify plausible locations and shapes of polyps, which limited the realism and diversity of the generated images. To address these limitations, we present Polyp-Gen, the first full-automatic diffusion-based endoscopic image generation framework. Specifically, we devise a spatial-aware diffusion training scheme with a lesion-guided loss to enhance the structural context of polyp boundary regions. Moreover, to capture medical priors for the localization of potential polyp areas, we introduce a hierarchical retrieval-based sampling strategy to match similar fine-grained spatial features. In this way, our Polyp-Gen can generate realistic and diverse endoscopic images for building reliable ADS. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art generation quality, and the synthetic images can improve the downstream polyp detection task. Additionally, our Polyp-Gen has shown remarkable zero-shot generalizability on other datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/CUHK-AIM-Group/Polyp-Gen.
DeepSketcher: Internalizing Visual Manipulation for Multimodal Reasoning
The "thinking with images" paradigm represents a pivotal shift in the reasoning of Vision Language Models (VLMs), moving from text-dominant chain-of-thought to image-interactive reasoning. By invoking visual tools or generating intermediate visual representations, VLMs can iteratively attend to fine-grained regions, enabling deeper image understanding and more faithful multimodal reasoning. As an emerging paradigm, however, it still leaves substantial room for exploration in data construction accuracy, structural design, and broader application scenarios, which offer rich opportunities for advancing multimodal reasoning. To further advance this line of work, we present DeepSketcher, a comprehensive suite comprising both an image-text interleaved dataset and a self-contained model. The dataset contains 31k chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories with diverse tool calls and resulting edited images, covering a wide range of data types and manipulation instructions with high annotation accuracy. Building on this resource, we design a model that performs interleaved image-text reasoning and natively generates "visual thoughts" by operating directly in the visual embedding space, rather than invoking external tools and repeatedly re-encoding generated images. This design enables tool-free and more flexible "thinking with images". Extensive experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate strong performance, validating both the utility of the dataset and the effectiveness of the model design.
Efficient-VQGAN: Towards High-Resolution Image Generation with Efficient Vision Transformers
Vector-quantized image modeling has shown great potential in synthesizing high-quality images. However, generating high-resolution images remains a challenging task due to the quadratic computational overhead of the self-attention process. In this study, we seek to explore a more efficient two-stage framework for high-resolution image generation with improvements in the following three aspects. (1) Based on the observation that the first quantization stage has solid local property, we employ a local attention-based quantization model instead of the global attention mechanism used in previous methods, leading to better efficiency and reconstruction quality. (2) We emphasize the importance of multi-grained feature interaction during image generation and introduce an efficient attention mechanism that combines global attention (long-range semantic consistency within the whole image) and local attention (fined-grained details). This approach results in faster generation speed, higher generation fidelity, and improved resolution. (3) We propose a new generation pipeline incorporating autoencoding training and autoregressive generation strategy, demonstrating a better paradigm for image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach in high-quality and high-resolution image reconstruction and generation.
Stylecodes: Encoding Stylistic Information For Image Generation
Diffusion models excel in image generation, but controlling them remains a challenge. We focus on the problem of style-conditioned image generation. Although example images work, they are cumbersome: srefs (style-reference codes) from MidJourney solve this issue by expressing a specific image style in a short numeric code. These have seen widespread adoption throughout social media due to both their ease of sharing and the fact they allow using an image for style control, without having to post the source images themselves. However, users are not able to generate srefs from their own images, nor is the underlying training procedure public. We propose StyleCodes: an open-source and open-research style encoder architecture and training procedure to express image style as a 20-symbol base64 code. Our experiments show that our encoding results in minimal loss in quality compared to traditional image-to-style techniques.
Exploration into Translation-Equivariant Image Quantization
This is an exploratory study that discovers the current image quantization (vector quantization) do not satisfy translation equivariance in the quantized space due to aliasing. Instead of focusing on anti-aliasing, we propose a simple yet effective way to achieve translation-equivariant image quantization by enforcing orthogonality among the codebook embeddings. To explore the advantages of translation-equivariant image quantization, we conduct three proof-of-concept experiments with a carefully controlled dataset: (1) text-to-image generation, where the quantized image indices are the target to predict, (2) image-to-text generation, where the quantized image indices are given as a condition, (3) using a smaller training set to analyze sample efficiency. From the strictly controlled experiments, we empirically verify that the translation-equivariant image quantizer improves not only sample efficiency but also the accuracy over VQGAN up to +11.9% in text-to-image generation and +3.9% in image-to-text generation.
I4VGen: Image as Stepping Stone for Text-to-Video Generation
Text-to-video generation has lagged behind text-to-image synthesis in quality and diversity due to the complexity of spatio-temporal modeling and limited video-text datasets. This paper presents I4VGen, a training-free and plug-and-play video diffusion inference framework, which enhances text-to-video generation by leveraging robust image techniques. Specifically, following text-to-image-to-video, I4VGen decomposes the text-to-video generation into two stages: anchor image synthesis and anchor image-guided video synthesis. Correspondingly, a well-designed generation-selection pipeline is employed to achieve visually-realistic and semantically-faithful anchor image, and an innovative Noise-Invariant Video Score Distillation Sampling is incorporated to animate the image to a dynamic video, followed by a video regeneration process to refine the video. This inference strategy effectively mitigates the prevalent issue of non-zero terminal signal-to-noise ratio. Extensive evaluations show that I4VGen not only produces videos with higher visual realism and textual fidelity but also integrates seamlessly into existing image-to-video diffusion models, thereby improving overall video quality.
Chimera: Compositional Image Generation using Part-based Concepting
Personalized image generative models are highly proficient at synthesizing images from text or a single image, yet they lack explicit control for composing objects from specific parts of multiple source images without user specified masks or annotations. To address this, we introduce Chimera, a personalized image generation model that generates novel objects by combining specified parts from different source images according to textual instructions. To train our model, we first construct a dataset from a taxonomy built on 464 unique (part, subject) pairs, which we term semantic atoms. From this, we generate 37k prompts and synthesize the corresponding images with a high-fidelity text-to-image model. We train a custom diffusion prior model with part-conditional guidance, which steers the image-conditioning features to enforce both semantic identity and spatial layout. We also introduce an objective metric PartEval to assess the fidelity and compositional accuracy of generation pipelines. Human evaluations and our proposed metric show that Chimera outperforms other baselines by 14% in part alignment and compositional accuracy and 21% in visual quality.
Meta 3D TextureGen: Fast and Consistent Texture Generation for 3D Objects
The recent availability and adaptability of text-to-image models has sparked a new era in many related domains that benefit from the learned text priors as well as high-quality and fast generation capabilities, one of which is texture generation for 3D objects. Although recent texture generation methods achieve impressive results by using text-to-image networks, the combination of global consistency, quality, and speed, which is crucial for advancing texture generation to real-world applications, remains elusive. To that end, we introduce Meta 3D TextureGen: a new feedforward method comprised of two sequential networks aimed at generating high-quality and globally consistent textures for arbitrary geometries of any complexity degree in less than 20 seconds. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results in quality and speed by conditioning a text-to-image model on 3D semantics in 2D space and fusing them into a complete and high-resolution UV texture map, as demonstrated by extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations. In addition, we introduce a texture enhancement network that is capable of up-scaling any texture by an arbitrary ratio, producing 4k pixel resolution textures.
Integrating Chain-of-Thought for Multimodal Alignment: A Study on 3D Vision-Language Learning
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has proven effective in natural language tasks but remains underexplored in multimodal alignment. This study investigates its integration into 3D vision-language learning by embedding structured reasoning into alignment training. We introduce the 3D-CoT Benchmark, a dataset with hierarchical CoT annotations covering shape recognition, functional inference, and causal reasoning. Through controlled experiments, we compare CoT-structured and standard textual annotations across large reasoning models (LRMs) and large language models (LLMs). Our evaluation employs a dual-layer framework assessing both intermediate reasoning and final inference quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CoT significantly improves 3D semantic grounding, with LRMs leveraging CoT more effectively than LLMs. Furthermore, we highlight that annotation structure influences performance-explicit reasoning markers aid LLMs, while unmarked CoT better aligns with LRM inference patterns. Our analyses suggest that CoT is crucial for enhancing multimodal reasoning, with implications beyond 3D tasks.
Multimodal Representation Alignment for Image Generation: Text-Image Interleaved Control Is Easier Than You Think
The field of advanced text-to-image generation is witnessing the emergence of unified frameworks that integrate powerful text encoders, such as CLIP and T5, with Diffusion Transformer backbones. Although there have been efforts to control output images with additional conditions, like canny and depth map, a comprehensive framework for arbitrary text-image interleaved control is still lacking. This gap is especially evident when attempting to merge concepts or visual elements from multiple images in the generation process. To mitigate the gap, we conducted preliminary experiments showing that large multimodal models (LMMs) offer an effective shared representation space, where image and text can be well-aligned to serve as a condition for external diffusion models. Based on this discovery, we propose Dream Engine, an efficient and unified framework designed for arbitrary text-image interleaved control in image generation models. Building on powerful text-to-image models like SD3.5, we replace the original text-only encoders by incorporating versatile multimodal information encoders such as QwenVL. Our approach utilizes a two-stage training paradigm, consisting of joint text-image alignment and multimodal interleaved instruction tuning. Our experiments demonstrate that this training method is effective, achieving a 0.69 overall score on the GenEval benchmark, and matching the performance of state-of-the-art text-to-image models like SD3.5 and FLUX.
DiagrammerGPT: Generating Open-Domain, Open-Platform Diagrams via LLM Planning
Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant growth over the past few years. Despite this, there has been little work on generating diagrams with T2I models. A diagram is a symbolic/schematic representation that explains information using structurally rich and spatially complex visualizations (e.g., a dense combination of related objects, text labels, directional arrows, connection lines, etc.). Existing state-of-the-art T2I models often fail at diagram generation because they lack fine-grained object layout control when many objects are densely connected via complex relations such as arrows/lines and also often fail to render comprehensible text labels. To address this gap, we present DiagrammerGPT, a novel two-stage text-to-diagram generation framework that leverages the layout guidance capabilities of LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to generate more accurate open-domain, open-platform diagrams. In the first stage, we use LLMs to generate and iteratively refine 'diagram plans' (in a planner-auditor feedback loop) which describe all the entities (objects and text labels), their relationships (arrows or lines), and their bounding box layouts. In the second stage, we use a diagram generator, DiagramGLIGEN, and a text label rendering module to generate diagrams following the diagram plans. To benchmark the text-to-diagram generation task, we introduce AI2D-Caption, a densely annotated diagram dataset built on top of the AI2D dataset. We show quantitatively and qualitatively that our DiagrammerGPT framework produces more accurate diagrams, outperforming existing T2I models. We also provide comprehensive analysis including open-domain diagram generation, vector graphic diagram generation in different platforms, human-in-the-loop diagram plan editing, and multimodal planner/auditor LLMs (e.g., GPT-4Vision). We hope our work can inspire further research on diagram generation via T2I models and LLMs.
Visual CoT: Unleashing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multi-Modal Language Models
This paper presents Visual CoT, a novel pipeline that leverages the reasoning capabilities of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) by incorporating visual Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. While MLLMs have shown promise in various visual tasks, they often lack interpretability and struggle with complex visual inputs. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-turn processing pipeline that dynamically focuses on visual inputs and provides interpretable thoughts. We collect and introduce the Visual CoT dataset comprising 373k question-answer pairs, annotated with intermediate bounding boxes highlighting key regions essential for answering the questions. Importantly, the introduced benchmark is capable of evaluating MLLMs in scenarios requiring specific local region identification. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and shed light on better inference strategies. The Visual CoT dataset, benchmark, and pre-trained models are available to foster further research in this direction.
Generative Photomontage
Text-to-image models are powerful tools for image creation. However, the generation process is akin to a dice roll and makes it difficult to achieve a single image that captures everything a user wants. In this paper, we propose a framework for creating the desired image by compositing it from various parts of generated images, in essence forming a Generative Photomontage. Given a stack of images generated by ControlNet using the same input condition and different seeds, we let users select desired parts from the generated results using a brush stroke interface. We introduce a novel technique that takes in the user's brush strokes, segments the generated images using a graph-based optimization in diffusion feature space, and then composites the segmented regions via a new feature-space blending method. Our method faithfully preserves the user-selected regions while compositing them harmoniously. We demonstrate that our flexible framework can be used for many applications, including generating new appearance combinations, fixing incorrect shapes and artifacts, and improving prompt alignment. We show compelling results for each application and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing image blending methods and various baselines.
Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in significantly longer output sequences, leading to increased computational costs and latency during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compress the CoT process through semantic alignment, enabling more efficient decoding while preserving the benefits of CoT reasoning. Our method introduces an auxiliary CoT model that learns to generate and compress the full thought process into a compact special token representation semantically aligned with the original CoT output. This compressed representation is then integrated into the input of the Hidden Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) model. The training process follows a two-stage procedure: First, the CoT model is optimized to generate the compressed token representations aligned with the ground-truth CoT outputs using a contrastive loss. Subsequently, with the CoT model parameters frozen, the HCoT model is fine-tuned to generate accurate subsequent predictions conditioned on the prefix instruction and the compressed CoT representations from the CoT model. Extensive experiments across three challenging domains - mathematical reasoning, agent invocation, and question answering - demonstrate that our semantic compression approach achieves competitive or improved performance compared to the full CoT baseline, while providing significant speedups of at least 1.5x in decoding time. Moreover, incorporating contrastive learning objectives further enhances the quality of the compressed representations, leading to better CoT prompting and improved task accuracy. Our work paves the way for more efficient exploitation of multi-step reasoning capabilities in LLMs across a wide range of applications.
ImageDream: Image-Prompt Multi-view Diffusion for 3D Generation
We introduce "ImageDream," an innovative image-prompt, multi-view diffusion model for 3D object generation. ImageDream stands out for its ability to produce 3D models of higher quality compared to existing state-of-the-art, image-conditioned methods. Our approach utilizes a canonical camera coordination for the objects in images, improving visual geometry accuracy. The model is designed with various levels of control at each block inside the diffusion model based on the input image, where global control shapes the overall object layout and local control fine-tunes the image details. The effectiveness of ImageDream is demonstrated through extensive evaluations using a standard prompt list. For more information, visit our project page at https://Image-Dream.github.io.
Image Content Generation with Causal Reasoning
The emergence of ChatGPT has once again sparked research in generative artificial intelligence (GAI). While people have been amazed by the generated results, they have also noticed the reasoning potential reflected in the generated textual content. However, this current ability for causal reasoning is primarily limited to the domain of language generation, such as in models like GPT-3. In visual modality, there is currently no equivalent research. Considering causal reasoning in visual content generation is significant. This is because visual information contains infinite granularity. Particularly, images can provide more intuitive and specific demonstrations for certain reasoning tasks, especially when compared to coarse-grained text. Hence, we propose a new image generation task called visual question answering with image (VQAI) and establish a dataset of the same name based on the classic Tom and Jerry animated series. Additionally, we develop a new paradigm for image generation to tackle the challenges of this task. Finally, we perform extensive experiments and analyses, including visualizations of the generated content and discussions on the potentials and limitations. The code and data are publicly available under the license of CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 for academic and non-commercial usage. The code and dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/IEIT-AGI/MIX-Shannon/blob/main/projects/VQAI/lgd_vqai.md.
seg2med: a segmentation-based medical image generation framework using denoising diffusion probabilistic models
In this study, we present seg2med, an advanced medical image synthesis framework that uses Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) to generate high-quality synthetic medical images conditioned on anatomical masks from TotalSegmentator. The framework synthesizes CT and MR images from segmentation masks derived from real patient data and XCAT digital phantoms, achieving a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.94 +/- 0.02 for CT and 0.89 +/- 0.04 for MR images compared to ground-truth images of real patients. It also achieves a Feature Similarity Index Measure (FSIM) of 0.78 +/- 0.04 for CT images from XCAT. The generative quality is further supported by a Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 3.62 for CT image generation. Additionally, seg2med can generate paired CT and MR images with consistent anatomical structures and convert images between CT and MR modalities, achieving SSIM values of 0.91 +/- 0.03 for MR-to-CT and 0.77 +/- 0.04 for CT-to-MR conversion. Despite the limitations of incomplete anatomical details in segmentation masks, the framework shows strong performance in cross-modality synthesis and multimodal imaging. seg2med also demonstrates high anatomical fidelity in CT synthesis, achieving a mean Dice coefficient greater than 0.90 for 11 abdominal organs and greater than 0.80 for 34 organs out of 59 in 58 test cases. The highest Dice of 0.96 +/- 0.01 was recorded for the right scapula. Leveraging the TotalSegmentator toolkit, seg2med enables segmentation mask generation across diverse datasets, supporting applications in clinical imaging, data augmentation, multimodal synthesis, and diagnostic algorithm development.
Guardians of Generation: Dynamic Inference-Time Copyright Shielding with Adaptive Guidance for AI Image Generation
Modern text-to-image generative models can inadvertently reproduce copyrighted content memorized in their training data, raising serious concerns about potential copyright infringement. We introduce Guardians of Generation, a model agnostic inference time framework for dynamic copyright shielding in AI image generation. Our approach requires no retraining or modification of the generative model weights, instead integrating seamlessly with existing diffusion pipelines. It augments the generation process with an adaptive guidance mechanism comprising three components: a detection module, a prompt rewriting module, and a guidance adjustment module. The detection module monitors user prompts and intermediate generation steps to identify features indicative of copyrighted content before they manifest in the final output. If such content is detected, the prompt rewriting mechanism dynamically transforms the user's prompt by sanitizing or replacing references that could trigger copyrighted material while preserving the prompt's intended semantics. The adaptive guidance module adaptively steers the diffusion process away from flagged content by modulating the model's sampling trajectory. Together, these components form a robust shield that enables a tunable balance between preserving creative fidelity and ensuring copyright compliance. We validate our method on a variety of generative models such as Stable Diffusion, SDXL, and Flux, demonstrating substantial reductions in copyrighted content generation with negligible impact on output fidelity or alignment with user intent. This work provides a practical, plug-and-play safeguard for generative image models, enabling more responsible deployment under real-world copyright constraints. Source code is available at: https://respailab.github.io/gog
T2I-Copilot: A Training-Free Multi-Agent Text-to-Image System for Enhanced Prompt Interpretation and Interactive Generation
Text-to-Image (T2I) generative models have revolutionized content creation but remain highly sensitive to prompt phrasing, often requiring users to repeatedly refine prompts multiple times without clear feedback. While techniques such as automatic prompt engineering, controlled text embeddings, denoising, and multi-turn generation mitigate these issues, they offer limited controllability, or often necessitate additional training, restricting the generalization abilities. Thus, we introduce T2I-Copilot, a training-free multi-agent system that leverages collaboration between (Multimodal) Large Language Models to automate prompt phrasing, model selection, and iterative refinement. This approach significantly simplifies prompt engineering while enhancing generation quality and text-image alignment compared to direct generation. Specifically, T2I-Copilot consists of three agents: (1) Input Interpreter, which parses the input prompt, resolves ambiguities, and generates a standardized report; (2) Generation Engine, which selects the appropriate model from different types of T2I models and organizes visual and textual prompts to initiate generation; and (3) Quality Evaluator, which assesses aesthetic quality and text-image alignment, providing scores and feedback for potential regeneration. T2I-Copilot can operate fully autonomously while also supporting human-in-the-loop intervention for fine-grained control. On GenAI-Bench, using open-source generation models, T2I-Copilot achieves a VQA score comparable to commercial models RecraftV3 and Imagen 3, surpasses FLUX1.1-pro by 6.17% at only 16.59% of its cost, and outperforms FLUX.1-dev and SD 3.5 Large by 9.11% and 6.36%. Code will be released at: https://github.com/SHI-Labs/T2I-Copilot.
ThermalGen: Style-Disentangled Flow-Based Generative Models for RGB-to-Thermal Image Translation
Paired RGB-thermal data is crucial for visual-thermal sensor fusion and cross-modality tasks, including important applications such as multi-modal image alignment and retrieval. However, the scarcity of synchronized and calibrated RGB-thermal image pairs presents a major obstacle to progress in these areas. To overcome this challenge, RGB-to-Thermal (RGB-T) image translation has emerged as a promising solution, enabling the synthesis of thermal images from abundant RGB datasets for training purposes. In this study, we propose ThermalGen, an adaptive flow-based generative model for RGB-T image translation, incorporating an RGB image conditioning architecture and a style-disentangled mechanism. To support large-scale training, we curated eight public satellite-aerial, aerial, and ground RGB-T paired datasets, and introduced three new large-scale satellite-aerial RGB-T datasets--DJI-day, Bosonplus-day, and Bosonplus-night--captured across diverse times, sensor types, and geographic regions. Extensive evaluations across multiple RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate that ThermalGen achieves comparable or superior translation performance compared to existing GAN-based and diffusion-based methods. To our knowledge, ThermalGen is the first RGB-T image translation model capable of synthesizing thermal images that reflect significant variations in viewpoints, sensor characteristics, and environmental conditions. Project page: http://xjh19971.github.io/ThermalGen
ProCreate, Dont Reproduce! Propulsive Energy Diffusion for Creative Generation
In this paper, we propose ProCreate, a simple and easy-to-implement method to improve sample diversity and creativity of diffusion-based image generative models and to prevent training data reproduction. ProCreate operates on a set of reference images and actively propels the generated image embedding away from the reference embeddings during the generation process. We propose FSCG-8 (Few-Shot Creative Generation 8), a few-shot creative generation dataset on eight different categories -- encompassing different concepts, styles, and settings -- in which ProCreate achieves the highest sample diversity and fidelity. Furthermore, we show that ProCreate is effective at preventing replicating training data in a large-scale evaluation using training text prompts. Code and FSCG-8 are available at https://github.com/Agentic-Learning-AI-Lab/procreate-diffusion-public. The project page is available at https://procreate-diffusion.github.io.
BitsFusion: 1.99 bits Weight Quantization of Diffusion Model
Diffusion-based image generation models have achieved great success in recent years by showing the capability of synthesizing high-quality content. However, these models contain a huge number of parameters, resulting in a significantly large model size. Saving and transferring them is a major bottleneck for various applications, especially those running on resource-constrained devices. In this work, we develop a novel weight quantization method that quantizes the UNet from Stable Diffusion v1.5 to 1.99 bits, achieving a model with 7.9X smaller size while exhibiting even better generation quality than the original one. Our approach includes several novel techniques, such as assigning optimal bits to each layer, initializing the quantized model for better performance, and improving the training strategy to dramatically reduce quantization error. Furthermore, we extensively evaluate our quantized model across various benchmark datasets and through human evaluation to demonstrate its superior generation quality.
Supervised Homography Learning with Realistic Dataset Generation
In this paper, we propose an iterative framework, which consists of two phases: a generation phase and a training phase, to generate realistic training data and yield a supervised homography network. In the generation phase, given an unlabeled image pair, we utilize the pre-estimated dominant plane masks and homography of the pair, along with another sampled homography that serves as ground truth to generate a new labeled training pair with realistic motion. In the training phase, the generated data is used to train the supervised homography network, in which the training data is refined via a content consistency module and a quality assessment module. Once an iteration is finished, the trained network is used in the next data generation phase to update the pre-estimated homography. Through such an iterative strategy, the quality of the dataset and the performance of the network can be gradually and simultaneously improved. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and existing supervised methods can be also improved based on the generated dataset. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/JianghaiSCU/RealSH.
MaskBit: Embedding-free Image Generation via Bit Tokens
Masked transformer models for class-conditional image generation have become a compelling alternative to diffusion models. Typically comprising two stages - an initial VQGAN model for transitioning between latent space and image space, and a subsequent Transformer model for image generation within latent space - these frameworks offer promising avenues for image synthesis. In this study, we present two primary contributions: Firstly, an empirical and systematic examination of VQGANs, leading to a modernized VQGAN. Secondly, a novel embedding-free generation network operating directly on bit tokens - a binary quantized representation of tokens with rich semantics. The first contribution furnishes a transparent, reproducible, and high-performing VQGAN model, enhancing accessibility and matching the performance of current state-of-the-art methods while revealing previously undisclosed details. The second contribution demonstrates that embedding-free image generation using bit tokens achieves a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.52 on the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, with a compact generator model of mere 305M parameters.
A Watermark for Auto-Regressive Image Generation Models
The rapid evolution of image generation models has revolutionized visual content creation, enabling the synthesis of highly realistic and contextually accurate images for diverse applications. However, the potential for misuse, such as deepfake generation, image based phishing attacks, and fabrication of misleading visual evidence, underscores the need for robust authenticity verification mechanisms. While traditional statistical watermarking techniques have proven effective for autoregressive language models, their direct adaptation to image generation models encounters significant challenges due to a phenomenon we term retokenization mismatch, a disparity between original and retokenized sequences during the image generation process. To overcome this limitation, we propose C-reweight, a novel, distortion-free watermarking method explicitly designed for image generation models. By leveraging a clustering-based strategy that treats tokens within the same cluster equivalently, C-reweight mitigates retokenization mismatch while preserving image fidelity. Extensive evaluations on leading image generation platforms reveal that C-reweight not only maintains the visual quality of generated images but also improves detectability over existing distortion-free watermarking techniques, setting a new standard for secure and trustworthy image synthesis.
MME-CoT: Benchmarking Chain-of-Thought in Large Multimodal Models for Reasoning Quality, Robustness, and Efficiency
Answering questions with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its impact on Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) still lacks a systematic assessment and in-depth investigation. In this paper, we introduce MME-CoT, a specialized benchmark evaluating the CoT reasoning performance of LMMs, spanning six domains: math, science, OCR, logic, space-time, and general scenes. As the first comprehensive study in this area, we propose a thorough evaluation suite incorporating three novel metrics that assess the reasoning quality, robustness, and efficiency at a fine-grained level. Leveraging curated high-quality data and a unique evaluation strategy, we conduct an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art LMMs, uncovering several key insights: 1) Models with reflection mechanism demonstrate a superior CoT quality, with Kimi k1.5 outperforming GPT-4o and demonstrating the highest quality results; 2) CoT prompting often degrades LMM performance on perception-heavy tasks, suggesting a potentially harmful overthinking behavior; and 3) Although the CoT quality is high, LMMs with reflection exhibit significant inefficiency in both normal response and self-correction phases. We hope MME-CoT serves as a foundation for advancing multimodal reasoning in LMMs. Project Page: https://mmecot.github.io/
Taming Generative Synthetic Data for X-ray Prohibited Item Detection
Training prohibited item detection models requires a large amount of X-ray security images, but collecting and annotating these images is time-consuming and laborious. To address data insufficiency, X-ray security image synthesis methods composite images to scale up datasets. However, previous methods primarily follow a two-stage pipeline, where they implement labor-intensive foreground extraction in the first stage and then composite images in the second stage. Such a pipeline introduces inevitable extra labor cost and is not efficient. In this paper, we propose a one-stage X-ray security image synthesis pipeline (Xsyn) based on text-to-image generation, which incorporates two effective strategies to improve the usability of synthetic images. The Cross-Attention Refinement (CAR) strategy leverages the cross-attention map from the diffusion model to refine the bounding box annotation. The Background Occlusion Modeling (BOM) strategy explicitly models background occlusion in the latent space to enhance imaging complexity. To the best of our knowledge, compared with previous methods, Xsyn is the first to achieve high-quality X-ray security image synthesis without extra labor cost. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms all previous methods with 1.2% mAP improvement, and the synthetic images generated by our method are beneficial to improve prohibited item detection performance across various X-ray security datasets and detectors. Code is available at https://github.com/pILLOW-1/Xsyn/.
Paired Diffusion: Generation of related, synthetic PET-CT-Segmentation scans using Linked Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models
The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in biomedical imaging and radiotherapy is hindered by the limited availability of large imaging data repositories. With recent research and improvements in denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPM), high quality synthetic medical scans are now possible. Despite this, there is currently no way of generating multiple related images, such as a corresponding ground truth which can be used to train models, so synthetic scans are often manually annotated before use. This research introduces a novel architecture that is able to generate multiple, related PET-CT-tumour mask pairs using paired networks and conditional encoders. Our approach includes innovative, time step-controlled mechanisms and a `noise-seeding' strategy to improve DDPM sampling consistency. While our model requires a modified perceptual loss function to ensure accurate feature alignment we show generation of clearly aligned synthetic images and improvement in segmentation accuracy with generated images.
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.
CSGO: Content-Style Composition in Text-to-Image Generation
The diffusion model has shown exceptional capabilities in controlled image generation, which has further fueled interest in image style transfer. Existing works mainly focus on training free-based methods (e.g., image inversion) due to the scarcity of specific data. In this study, we present a data construction pipeline for content-style-stylized image triplets that generates and automatically cleanses stylized data triplets. Based on this pipeline, we construct a dataset IMAGStyle, the first large-scale style transfer dataset containing 210k image triplets, available for the community to explore and research. Equipped with IMAGStyle, we propose CSGO, a style transfer model based on end-to-end training, which explicitly decouples content and style features employing independent feature injection. The unified CSGO implements image-driven style transfer, text-driven stylized synthesis, and text editing-driven stylized synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing style control capabilities in image generation. Additional visualization and access to the source code can be located on the project page: https://csgo-gen.github.io/.
Compositional Feature Augmentation for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) aims to detect all the visual relation triplets <sub, pred, obj> in a given image. With the emergence of various advanced techniques for better utilizing both the intrinsic and extrinsic information in each relation triplet, SGG has achieved great progress over the recent years. However, due to the ubiquitous long-tailed predicate distributions, today's SGG models are still easily biased to the head predicates. Currently, the most prevalent debiasing solutions for SGG are re-balancing methods, e.g., changing the distributions of original training samples. In this paper, we argue that all existing re-balancing strategies fail to increase the diversity of the relation triplet features of each predicate, which is critical for robust SGG. To this end, we propose a novel Compositional Feature Augmentation (CFA) strategy, which is the first unbiased SGG work to mitigate the bias issue from the perspective of increasing the diversity of triplet features. Specifically, we first decompose each relation triplet feature into two components: intrinsic feature and extrinsic feature, which correspond to the intrinsic characteristics and extrinsic contexts of a relation triplet, respectively. Then, we design two different feature augmentation modules to enrich the feature diversity of original relation triplets by replacing or mixing up either their intrinsic or extrinsic features from other samples. Due to its model-agnostic nature, CFA can be seamlessly incorporated into various SGG frameworks. Extensive ablations have shown that CFA achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on the trade-off between different metrics.
On the generation of periodic discrete structures with identical two-point correlation
Strategies for the generation of periodic discrete structures with identical two-point correlation are developed. Starting from a pair of root structures, which are not related by translation, phase inversion or axis reflections, child structures of arbitrary resolution (i.e., pixel or voxel numbers) and number of phases (i.e., material phases/species) can be generated by means of trivial embedding based phase extension, application of kernels and/or phase coalescence, such that the generated structures inherit the two-point-correlation equivalence. Proofs of the inheritance property are provided by means of the Discrete Fourier Transform theory. A Python 3 implementation of the results is offered by the authors through the Github repository https://github.com/DataAnalyticsEngineering/EQ2PC in order to make the provided results reproducible and useful for all interested readers. Examples for the generation of structures are demonstrated, together with applications in the homogenization theory of periodic media.
Unlocking Pre-trained Image Backbones for Semantic Image Synthesis
Semantic image synthesis, i.e., generating images from user-provided semantic label maps, is an important conditional image generation task as it allows to control both the content as well as the spatial layout of generated images. Although diffusion models have pushed the state of the art in generative image modeling, the iterative nature of their inference process makes them computationally demanding. Other approaches such as GANs are more efficient as they only need a single feed-forward pass for generation, but the image quality tends to suffer on large and diverse datasets. In this work, we propose a new class of GAN discriminators for semantic image synthesis that generates highly realistic images by exploiting feature backbone networks pre-trained for tasks such as image classification. We also introduce a new generator architecture with better context modeling and using cross-attention to inject noise into latent variables, leading to more diverse generated images. Our model, which we dub DP-SIMS, achieves state-of-the-art results in terms of image quality and consistency with the input label maps on ADE-20K, COCO-Stuff, and Cityscapes, surpassing recent diffusion models while requiring two orders of magnitude less compute for inference.
MedSyn: Text-guided Anatomy-aware Synthesis of High-Fidelity 3D CT Images
This paper introduces an innovative methodology for producing high-quality 3D lung CT images guided by textual information. While diffusion-based generative models are increasingly used in medical imaging, current state-of-the-art approaches are limited to low-resolution outputs and underutilize radiology reports' abundant information. The radiology reports can enhance the generation process by providing additional guidance and offering fine-grained control over the synthesis of images. Nevertheless, expanding text-guided generation to high-resolution 3D images poses significant memory and anatomical detail-preserving challenges. Addressing the memory issue, we introduce a hierarchical scheme that uses a modified UNet architecture. We start by synthesizing low-resolution images conditioned on the text, serving as a foundation for subsequent generators for complete volumetric data. To ensure the anatomical plausibility of the generated samples, we provide further guidance by generating vascular, airway, and lobular segmentation masks in conjunction with the CT images. The model demonstrates the capability to use textual input and segmentation tasks to generate synthesized images. The results of comparative assessments indicate that our approach exhibits superior performance compared to the most advanced models based on GAN and diffusion techniques, especially in accurately retaining crucial anatomical features such as fissure lines, airways, and vascular structures. This innovation introduces novel possibilities. This study focuses on two main objectives: (1) the development of a method for creating images based on textual prompts and anatomical components, and (2) the capability to generate new images conditioning on anatomical elements. The advancements in image generation can be applied to enhance numerous downstream tasks.
AnyArtisticGlyph: Multilingual Controllable Artistic Glyph Generation
Artistic Glyph Image Generation (AGIG) differs from current creativity-focused generation models by offering finely controllable deterministic generation. It transfers the style of a reference image to a source while preserving its content. Although advanced and promising, current methods may reveal flaws when scrutinizing synthesized image details, often producing blurred or incorrect textures, posing a significant challenge. Hence, we introduce AnyArtisticGlyph, a diffusion-based, multilingual controllable artistic glyph generation model. It includes a font fusion and embedding module, which generates latent features for detailed structure creation, and a vision-text fusion and embedding module that uses the CLIP model to encode references and blends them with transformation caption embeddings for seamless global image generation. Moreover, we incorporate a coarse-grained feature-level loss to enhance generation accuracy. Experiments show that it produces natural, detailed artistic glyph images with state-of-the-art performance. Our project will be open-sourced on https://github.com/jiean001/AnyArtisticGlyph to advance text generation technology.
SADM: Sequence-Aware Diffusion Model for Longitudinal Medical Image Generation
Human organs constantly undergo anatomical changes due to a complex mix of short-term (e.g., heartbeat) and long-term (e.g., aging) factors. Evidently, prior knowledge of these factors will be beneficial when modeling their future state, i.e., via image generation. However, most of the medical image generation tasks only rely on the input from a single image, thus ignoring the sequential dependency even when longitudinal data is available. Sequence-aware deep generative models, where model input is a sequence of ordered and timestamped images, are still underexplored in the medical imaging domain that is featured by several unique challenges: 1) Sequences with various lengths; 2) Missing data or frame, and 3) High dimensionality. To this end, we propose a sequence-aware diffusion model (SADM) for the generation of longitudinal medical images. Recently, diffusion models have shown promising results in high-fidelity image generation. Our method extends this new technique by introducing a sequence-aware transformer as the conditional module in a diffusion model. The novel design enables learning longitudinal dependency even with missing data during training and allows autoregressive generation of a sequence of images during inference. Our extensive experiments on 3D longitudinal medical images demonstrate the effectiveness of SADM compared with baselines and alternative methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ubc-tea/SADM-Longitudinal-Medical-Image-Generation.
IFAdapter: Instance Feature Control for Grounded Text-to-Image Generation
While Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models excel at generating visually appealing images of individual instances, they struggle to accurately position and control the features generation of multiple instances. The Layout-to-Image (L2I) task was introduced to address the positioning challenges by incorporating bounding boxes as spatial control signals, but it still falls short in generating precise instance features. In response, we propose the Instance Feature Generation (IFG) task, which aims to ensure both positional accuracy and feature fidelity in generated instances. To address the IFG task, we introduce the Instance Feature Adapter (IFAdapter). The IFAdapter enhances feature depiction by incorporating additional appearance tokens and utilizing an Instance Semantic Map to align instance-level features with spatial locations. The IFAdapter guides the diffusion process as a plug-and-play module, making it adaptable to various community models. For evaluation, we contribute an IFG benchmark and develop a verification pipeline to objectively compare models' abilities to generate instances with accurate positioning and features. Experimental results demonstrate that IFAdapter outperforms other models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
SnapGen: Taming High-Resolution Text-to-Image Models for Mobile Devices with Efficient Architectures and Training
Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models face several limitations, including large model sizes, slow runtime, and low-quality generation on mobile devices. This paper aims to address all of these challenges by developing an extremely small and fast T2I model that generates high-resolution and high-quality images on mobile platforms. We propose several techniques to achieve this goal. First, we systematically examine the design choices of the network architecture to reduce model parameters and latency, while ensuring high-quality generation. Second, to further improve generation quality, we employ cross-architecture knowledge distillation from a much larger model, using a multi-level approach to guide the training of our model from scratch. Third, we enable a few-step generation by integrating adversarial guidance with knowledge distillation. For the first time, our model SnapGen, demonstrates the generation of 1024x1024 px images on a mobile device around 1.4 seconds. On ImageNet-1K, our model, with only 372M parameters, achieves an FID of 2.06 for 256x256 px generation. On T2I benchmarks (i.e., GenEval and DPG-Bench), our model with merely 379M parameters, surpasses large-scale models with billions of parameters at a significantly smaller size (e.g., 7x smaller than SDXL, 14x smaller than IF-XL).
Image Synthesis with Graph Conditioning: CLIP-Guided Diffusion Models for Scene Graphs
Advancements in generative models have sparked significant interest in generating images while adhering to specific structural guidelines. Scene graph to image generation is one such task of generating images which are consistent with the given scene graph. However, the complexity of visual scenes poses a challenge in accurately aligning objects based on specified relations within the scene graph. Existing methods approach this task by first predicting a scene layout and generating images from these layouts using adversarial training. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to generate images from scene graphs which eliminates the need of predicting intermediate layouts. We leverage pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models and CLIP guidance to translate graph knowledge into images. Towards this, we first pre-train our graph encoder to align graph features with CLIP features of corresponding images using a GAN based training. Further, we fuse the graph features with CLIP embedding of object labels present in the given scene graph to create a graph consistent CLIP guided conditioning signal. In the conditioning input, object embeddings provide coarse structure of the image and graph features provide structural alignment based on relationships among objects. Finally, we fine tune a pre-trained diffusion model with the graph consistent conditioning signal with reconstruction and CLIP alignment loss. Elaborate experiments reveal that our method outperforms existing methods on standard benchmarks of COCO-stuff and Visual Genome dataset.
IRGen: Generative Modeling for Image Retrieval
While generative modeling has become prevalent across numerous research fields, its integration into the realm of image retrieval remains largely unexplored and underjustified. In this paper, we present a novel methodology, reframing image retrieval as a variant of generative modeling and employing a sequence-to-sequence model. This approach is harmoniously aligned with the current trend towards unification in research, presenting a cohesive framework that allows for end-to-end differentiable searching. This, in turn, facilitates superior performance via direct optimization techniques. The development of our model, dubbed IRGen, addresses the critical technical challenge of converting an image into a concise sequence of semantic units, which is pivotal for enabling efficient and effective search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used image retrieval benchmarks as well as two million-scale datasets, yielding significant improvement compared to prior competitive retrieval methods. In addition, the notable surge in precision scores facilitated by generative modeling presents the potential to bypass the reranking phase, which is traditionally indispensable in practical retrieval workflows.
On the De-duplication of LAION-2B
Generative models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, have societal implications that extend beyond the field of computer science. These models require large image databases like LAION-2B, which contain two billion images. At this scale, manual inspection is difficult and automated analysis is challenging. In addition, recent studies show that duplicated images pose copyright problems for models trained on LAION2B, which hinders its usability. This paper proposes an algorithmic chain that runs with modest compute, that compresses CLIP features to enable efficient duplicate detection, even for vast image volumes. Our approach demonstrates that roughly 700 million images, or about 30\%, of LAION-2B's images are likely duplicated. Our method also provides the histograms of duplication on this dataset, which we use to reveal more examples of verbatim copies by Stable Diffusion and further justify the approach. The current version of the de-duplicated set will be distributed online.
ContextGen: Contextual Layout Anchoring for Identity-Consistent Multi-Instance Generation
Multi-instance image generation (MIG) remains a significant challenge for modern diffusion models due to key limitations in achieving precise control over object layout and preserving the identity of multiple distinct subjects. To address these limitations, we introduce ContextGen, a novel Diffusion Transformer framework for multi-instance generation that is guided by both layout and reference images. Our approach integrates two key technical contributions: a Contextual Layout Anchoring (CLA) mechanism that incorporates the composite layout image into the generation context to robustly anchor the objects in their desired positions, and Identity Consistency Attention (ICA), an innovative attention mechanism that leverages contextual reference images to ensure the identity consistency of multiple instances. Recognizing the lack of large-scale, hierarchically-structured datasets for this task, we introduce IMIG-100K, the first dataset with detailed layout and identity annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ContextGen sets a new state-of-the-art, outperforming existing methods in control precision, identity fidelity, and overall visual quality.
CharacterGen: Efficient 3D Character Generation from Single Images with Multi-View Pose Canonicalization
In the field of digital content creation, generating high-quality 3D characters from single images is challenging, especially given the complexities of various body poses and the issues of self-occlusion and pose ambiguity. In this paper, we present CharacterGen, a framework developed to efficiently generate 3D characters. CharacterGen introduces a streamlined generation pipeline along with an image-conditioned multi-view diffusion model. This model effectively calibrates input poses to a canonical form while retaining key attributes of the input image, thereby addressing the challenges posed by diverse poses. A transformer-based, generalizable sparse-view reconstruction model is the other core component of our approach, facilitating the creation of detailed 3D models from multi-view images. We also adopt a texture-back-projection strategy to produce high-quality texture maps. Additionally, we have curated a dataset of anime characters, rendered in multiple poses and views, to train and evaluate our model. Our approach has been thoroughly evaluated through quantitative and qualitative experiments, showing its proficiency in generating 3D characters with high-quality shapes and textures, ready for downstream applications such as rigging and animation.
Plug & Play Generative Networks: Conditional Iterative Generation of Images in Latent Space
Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2016) showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227x227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models "Plug and Play Generative Networks". PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable "condition" network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization, which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data.
MedShift: Implicit Conditional Transport for X-Ray Domain Adaptation
Synthetic medical data offers a scalable solution for training robust models, but significant domain gaps limit its generalizability to real-world clinical settings. This paper addresses the challenge of cross-domain translation between synthetic and real X-ray images of the head, focusing on bridging discrepancies in attenuation behavior, noise characteristics, and soft tissue representation. We propose MedShift, a unified class-conditional generative model based on Flow Matching and Schrodinger Bridges, which enables high-fidelity, unpaired image translation across multiple domains. Unlike prior approaches that require domain-specific training or rely on paired data, MedShift learns a shared domain-agnostic latent space and supports seamless translation between any pair of domains seen during training. We introduce X-DigiSkull, a new dataset comprising aligned synthetic and real skull X-rays under varying radiation doses, to benchmark domain translation models. Experimental results demonstrate that, despite its smaller model size compared to diffusion-based approaches, MedShift offers strong performance and remains flexible at inference time, as it can be tuned to prioritize either perceptual fidelity or structural consistency, making it a scalable and generalizable solution for domain adaptation in medical imaging. The code and dataset are available at https://caetas.github.io/medshift.html
PAID: A Framework of Product-Centric Advertising Image Design
Creating visually appealing advertising images is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Is it possible to automatically generate such images using only basic product information--specifically, a product foreground image, taglines, and a target size? Existing methods mainly focus on parts of the problem and fail to provide a comprehensive solution. To address this gap, we propose a novel multistage framework called Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID). It consists of four sequential stages to highlight product foregrounds and taglines while achieving overall image aesthetics: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are designed and trained for the first three stages: First, we use a visual language model (VLM) to generate background prompts that match the products. Next, a VLM-based layout generation model arranges the placement of product foregrounds, graphic elements (taglines and decorative underlays), and various nongraphic elements (objects from the background prompt). Following this, we train an SDXL-based image generation model that can simultaneously accept prompts, layouts, and foreground controls. To support the PAID framework, we create corresponding datasets with over 50,000 labeled images. Extensive experimental results and online A/B tests demonstrate that PAID can produce more visually appealing advertising images.
Direct Numerical Layout Generation for 3D Indoor Scene Synthesis via Spatial Reasoning
Realistic 3D indoor scene synthesis is vital for embodied AI and digital content creation. It can be naturally divided into two subtasks: object generation and layout generation. While recent generative models have significantly advanced object-level quality and controllability, layout generation remains challenging due to limited datasets. Existing methods either overfit to these datasets or rely on predefined constraints to optimize numerical layout that sacrifice flexibility. As a result, they fail to generate scenes that are both open-vocabulary and aligned with fine-grained user instructions. We introduce DirectLayout, a framework that directly generates numerical 3D layouts from text descriptions using generalizable spatial reasoning of large language models (LLMs). DirectLayout decomposes the generation into three stages: producing a Bird's-Eye View (BEV) layout, lifting it into 3D space, and refining object placements. To enable explicit spatial reasoning and help the model grasp basic principles of object placement, we employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Activation based on the 3D-Front dataset. Additionally, we design CoT-Grounded Generative Layout Reward to enhance generalization and spatial planning. During inference, DirectLayout addresses asset-layout mismatches via Iterative Asset-Layout Alignment through in-context learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DirectLayout achieves impressive semantic consistency, generalization and physical plausibility.
Generalized Large-Scale Data Condensation via Various Backbone and Statistical Matching
The lightweight "local-match-global" matching introduced by SRe2L successfully creates a distilled dataset with comprehensive information on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k. However, this one-sided approach is limited to a particular backbone, layer, and statistics, which limits the improvement of the generalization of a distilled dataset. We suggest that sufficient and various "local-match-global" matching are more precise and effective than a single one and has the ability to create a distilled dataset with richer information and better generalization. We call this perspective "generalized matching" and propose Generalized Various Backbone and Statistical Matching (G-VBSM) in this work, which aims to create a synthetic dataset with densities, ensuring consistency with the complete dataset across various backbones, layers, and statistics. As experimentally demonstrated, G-VBSM is the first algorithm to obtain strong performance across both small-scale and large-scale datasets. Specifically, G-VBSM achieves a performance of 38.7% on CIFAR-100 with 128-width ConvNet, 47.6% on Tiny-ImageNet with ResNet18, and 31.4% on the full 224x224 ImageNet-1k with ResNet18, under images per class (IPC) 10, 50, and 10, respectively. These results surpass all SOTA methods by margins of 3.9%, 6.5%, and 10.1%, respectively.
DAG-Math: Graph-Guided Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on mathematical problems when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet it remains unclear whether this success stems from search, rote procedures, or rule-consistent reasoning. To address this, we propose modeling CoT as a certain rule-based stochastic process over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where nodes represent intermediate derivation states and edges encode rule applications. Within this framework, we introduce logical closeness, a metric that quantifies how well a model's CoT trajectory (i.e., the LLM's final output) adheres to the DAG structure, providing evaluation beyond classical PASS@k metrics. Building on this, we introduce the DAG-MATH CoT format and construct a benchmark that guides LLMs to generate CoT trajectories in this format, thereby enabling the evaluation of their reasoning ability under our framework. Across standard mathematical reasoning datasets, our analysis uncovers statistically significant differences in reasoning fidelity among representative LLM families-even when PASS@k is comparable-highlighting gaps between final-answer accuracy and rule-consistent derivation. Our framework provides a balance between free-form CoT and formal proofs systems, offering actionable diagnostics for LLMs reasoning evaluation. Our benchmark and code are available at: https://github.com/YuanheZ/DAG-MATH-Formatted-CoT.
RealGeneral: Unifying Visual Generation via Temporal In-Context Learning with Video Models
Unifying diverse image generation tasks within a single framework remains a fundamental challenge in visual generation. While large language models (LLMs) achieve unification through task-agnostic data and generation, existing visual generation models fail to meet these principles. Current approaches either rely on per-task datasets and large-scale training or adapt pre-trained image models with task-specific modifications, limiting their generalizability. In this work, we explore video models as a foundation for unified image generation, leveraging their inherent ability to model temporal correlations. We introduce RealGeneral, a novel framework that reformulates image generation as a conditional frame prediction task, analogous to in-context learning in LLMs. To bridge the gap between video models and condition-image pairs, we propose (1) a Unified Conditional Embedding module for multi-modal alignment and (2) a Unified Stream DiT Block with decoupled adaptive LayerNorm and attention mask to mitigate cross-modal interference. RealGeneral demonstrates effectiveness in multiple important visual generation tasks, e.g., it achieves a 14.5% improvement in subject similarity for customized generation and a 10% enhancement in image quality for canny-to-image task. Project page: https://lyne1.github.io/RealGeneral/
I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models
Video synthesis has recently made remarkable strides benefiting from the rapid development of diffusion models. However, it still encounters challenges in terms of semantic accuracy, clarity and spatio-temporal continuity. They primarily arise from the scarcity of well-aligned text-video data and the complex inherent structure of videos, making it difficult for the model to simultaneously ensure semantic and qualitative excellence. In this report, we propose a cascaded I2VGen-XL approach that enhances model performance by decoupling these two factors and ensures the alignment of the input data by utilizing static images as a form of crucial guidance. I2VGen-XL consists of two stages: i) the base stage guarantees coherent semantics and preserves content from input images by using two hierarchical encoders, and ii) the refinement stage enhances the video's details by incorporating an additional brief text and improves the resolution to 1280times720. To improve the diversity, we collect around 35 million single-shot text-video pairs and 6 billion text-image pairs to optimize the model. By this means, I2VGen-XL can simultaneously enhance the semantic accuracy, continuity of details and clarity of generated videos. Through extensive experiments, we have investigated the underlying principles of I2VGen-XL and compared it with current top methods, which can demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse data. The source code and models will be publicly available at https://i2vgen-xl.github.io.
UFOGen: You Forward Once Large Scale Text-to-Image Generation via Diffusion GANs
Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in transforming textual prompts into coherent images, yet the computational cost of their inference remains a persistent challenge. To address this issue, we present UFOGen, a novel generative model designed for ultra-fast, one-step text-to-image synthesis. In contrast to conventional approaches that focus on improving samplers or employing distillation techniques for diffusion models, UFOGen adopts a hybrid methodology, integrating diffusion models with a GAN objective. Leveraging a newly introduced diffusion-GAN objective and initialization with pre-trained diffusion models, UFOGen excels in efficiently generating high-quality images conditioned on textual descriptions in a single step. Beyond traditional text-to-image generation, UFOGen showcases versatility in applications. Notably, UFOGen stands among the pioneering models enabling one-step text-to-image generation and diverse downstream tasks, presenting a significant advancement in the landscape of efficient generative models. \blfootnote{*Work done as a student researcher of Google, dagger indicates equal contribution.
Generative Medical Segmentation
Rapid advancements in medical image segmentation performance have been significantly driven by the development of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). These models follow the discriminative pixel-wise classification learning paradigm and often have limited ability to generalize across diverse medical imaging datasets. In this manuscript, we introduce Generative Medical Segmentation (GMS), a novel approach leveraging a generative model to perform image segmentation. Concretely, GMS employs a robust pre-trained vision foundation model to extract latent representations for images and corresponding ground truth masks, followed by a model that learns a mapping function from the image to the mask in the latent space. Once trained, the model generates an estimated segmentation mask using the pre-trained vision foundation model to decode the predicted latent representation back into the image space. The design of GMS leads to fewer trainable parameters in the model which reduces the risk of overfitting and enhances its generalization capability. Our experimental analysis across five public datasets in different medical imaging domains demonstrates GMS outperforms existing discriminative and generative segmentation models. Furthermore, GMS is able to generalize well across datasets from different centers within the same imaging modality. Our experiments suggest GMS offers a scalable and effective solution for medical image segmentation. GMS implementation and trained model weights are available at https://github.com/King-HAW/GMS.
OmniGen: Unified Image Generation
In this work, we introduce OmniGen, a new diffusion model for unified image generation. Unlike popular diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion), OmniGen no longer requires additional modules such as ControlNet or IP-Adapter to process diverse control conditions. OmniGenis characterized by the following features: 1) Unification: OmniGen not only demonstrates text-to-image generation capabilities but also inherently supports other downstream tasks, such as image editing, subject-driven generation, and visual-conditional generation. Additionally, OmniGen can handle classical computer vision tasks by transforming them into image generation tasks, such as edge detection and human pose recognition. 2) Simplicity: The architecture of OmniGen is highly simplified, eliminating the need for additional text encoders. Moreover, it is more user-friendly compared to existing diffusion models, enabling complex tasks to be accomplished through instructions without the need for extra preprocessing steps (e.g., human pose estimation), thereby significantly simplifying the workflow of image generation. 3) Knowledge Transfer: Through learning in a unified format, OmniGen effectively transfers knowledge across different tasks, manages unseen tasks and domains, and exhibits novel capabilities. We also explore the model's reasoning capabilities and potential applications of chain-of-thought mechanism. This work represents the first attempt at a general-purpose image generation model, and there remain several unresolved issues. We will open-source the related resources at https://github.com/VectorSpaceLab/OmniGen to foster advancements in this field.
ChatGen: Automatic Text-to-Image Generation From FreeStyle Chatting
Despite the significant advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generative models, users often face a trial-and-error challenge in practical scenarios. This challenge arises from the complexity and uncertainty of tedious steps such as crafting suitable prompts, selecting appropriate models, and configuring specific arguments, making users resort to labor-intensive attempts for desired images. This paper proposes Automatic T2I generation, which aims to automate these tedious steps, allowing users to simply describe their needs in a freestyle chatting way. To systematically study this problem, we first introduce ChatGenBench, a novel benchmark designed for Automatic T2I. It features high-quality paired data with diverse freestyle inputs, enabling comprehensive evaluation of automatic T2I models across all steps. Additionally, recognizing Automatic T2I as a complex multi-step reasoning task, we propose ChatGen-Evo, a multi-stage evolution strategy that progressively equips models with essential automation skills. Through extensive evaluation across step-wise accuracy and image quality, ChatGen-Evo significantly enhances performance over various baselines. Our evaluation also uncovers valuable insights for advancing automatic T2I. All our data, code, and models will be available in https://chengyou-jia.github.io/ChatGen-Home
A Simple Approach to Unifying Diffusion-based Conditional Generation
Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image & depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce significant complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simple formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.
LaV-CoT: Language-Aware Visual CoT with Multi-Aspect Reward Optimization for Real-World Multilingual VQA
As large vision language models (VLMs) advance, their capabilities in multilingual visual question answering (mVQA) have significantly improved. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proven to enhance interpretability and complex reasoning. However, most existing approaches rely primarily on textual CoT and provide limited support for multilingual multimodal reasoning, constraining their deployment in real-world applications. To address this gap, we introduce LaV-CoT, the first Language-aware Visual CoT framework with Multi-Aspect Reward Optimization. LaV-CoT incorporates an interpretable multi-stage reasoning pipeline consisting of Text Summary with Bounding Box (BBox), Language Identification, Spatial Object-level Captioning, and Step-by-step Logical Reasoning. Following this reasoning pipeline, we design an automated data curation method that generates multilingual CoT annotations through iterative generation, correction, and refinement, enabling scalable and high-quality training data. To improve reasoning and generalization, LaV-CoT adopts a two-stage training paradigm combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Language-aware Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by verifiable multi-aspect rewards including language consistency, structural accuracy, and semantic alignment. Extensive evaluations on public datasets including MMMB, Multilingual MMBench, and MTVQA show that LaV-CoT achieves up to ~9.5% accuracy improvements over open-source baselines of similar size and even surpasses models with 2times larger scales by ~2.6%. Moreover, LaV-CoT outperforms advanced proprietary models such as GPT-4o-0513 and Gemini-2.5-flash. We further conducted an online A/B test to validate our method on real-world data, highlighting its effectiveness for industrial deployment. Our code is available at this link: https://github.com/HJNVR/LaV-CoT
CoT-Self-Instruct: Building high-quality synthetic prompts for reasoning and non-reasoning tasks
We propose CoT-Self-Instruct, a synthetic data generation method that instructs LLMs to first reason and plan via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) based on the given seed tasks, and then to generate a new synthetic prompt of similar quality and complexity for use in LLM training, followed by filtering for high-quality data with automatic metrics. In verifiable reasoning, our synthetic data significantly outperforms existing training datasets, such as s1k and OpenMathReasoning, across MATH500, AMC23, AIME24 and GPQA-Diamond. For non-verifiable instruction-following tasks, our method surpasses the performance of human or standard self-instruct prompts on both AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard.
EGC: Image Generation and Classification via a Diffusion Energy-Based Model
Learning image classification and image generation using the same set of network parameters is a challenging problem. Recent advanced approaches perform well in one task often exhibit poor performance in the other. This work introduces an energy-based classifier and generator, namely EGC, which can achieve superior performance in both tasks using a single neural network. Unlike a conventional classifier that outputs a label given an image (i.e., a conditional distribution p(y|x)), the forward pass in EGC is a classifier that outputs a joint distribution p(x,y), enabling an image generator in its backward pass by marginalizing out the label y. This is done by estimating the energy and classification probability given a noisy image in the forward pass, while denoising it using the score function estimated in the backward pass. EGC achieves competitive generation results compared with state-of-the-art approaches on ImageNet-1k, CelebA-HQ and LSUN Church, while achieving superior classification accuracy and robustness against adversarial attacks on CIFAR-10. This work represents the first successful attempt to simultaneously excel in both tasks using a single set of network parameters. We believe that EGC bridges the gap between discriminative and generative learning.
Learned representation-guided diffusion models for large-image generation
To synthesize high-fidelity samples, diffusion models typically require auxiliary data to guide the generation process. However, it is impractical to procure the painstaking patch-level annotation effort required in specialized domains like histopathology and satellite imagery; it is often performed by domain experts and involves hundreds of millions of patches. Modern-day self-supervised learning (SSL) representations encode rich semantic and visual information. In this paper, we posit that such representations are expressive enough to act as proxies to fine-grained human labels. We introduce a novel approach that trains diffusion models conditioned on embeddings from SSL. Our diffusion models successfully project these features back to high-quality histopathology and remote sensing images. In addition, we construct larger images by assembling spatially consistent patches inferred from SSL embeddings, preserving long-range dependencies. Augmenting real data by generating variations of real images improves downstream classifier accuracy for patch-level and larger, image-scale classification tasks. Our models are effective even on datasets not encountered during training, demonstrating their robustness and generalizability. Generating images from learned embeddings is agnostic to the source of the embeddings. The SSL embeddings used to generate a large image can either be extracted from a reference image, or sampled from an auxiliary model conditioned on any related modality (e.g. class labels, text, genomic data). As proof of concept, we introduce the text-to-large image synthesis paradigm where we successfully synthesize large pathology and satellite images out of text descriptions.
InfGen: A Resolution-Agnostic Paradigm for Scalable Image Synthesis
Arbitrary resolution image generation provides a consistent visual experience across devices, having extensive applications for producers and consumers. Current diffusion models increase computational demand quadratically with resolution, causing 4K image generation delays over 100 seconds. To solve this, we explore the second generation upon the latent diffusion models, where the fixed latent generated by diffusion models is regarded as the content representation and we propose to decode arbitrary resolution images with a compact generated latent using a one-step generator. Thus, we present the InfGen, replacing the VAE decoder with the new generator, for generating images at any resolution from a fixed-size latent without retraining the diffusion models, which simplifies the process, reducing computational complexity and can be applied to any model using the same latent space. Experiments show InfGen is capable of improving many models into the arbitrary high-resolution era while cutting 4K image generation time to under 10 seconds.
AGG: Amortized Generative 3D Gaussians for Single Image to 3D
Given the growing need for automatic 3D content creation pipelines, various 3D representations have been studied to generate 3D objects from a single image. Due to its superior rendering efficiency, 3D Gaussian splatting-based models have recently excelled in both 3D reconstruction and generation. 3D Gaussian splatting approaches for image to 3D generation are often optimization-based, requiring many computationally expensive score-distillation steps. To overcome these challenges, we introduce an Amortized Generative 3D Gaussian framework (AGG) that instantly produces 3D Gaussians from a single image, eliminating the need for per-instance optimization. Utilizing an intermediate hybrid representation, AGG decomposes the generation of 3D Gaussian locations and other appearance attributes for joint optimization. Moreover, we propose a cascaded pipeline that first generates a coarse representation of the 3D data and later upsamples it with a 3D Gaussian super-resolution module. Our method is evaluated against existing optimization-based 3D Gaussian frameworks and sampling-based pipelines utilizing other 3D representations, where AGG showcases competitive generation abilities both qualitatively and quantitatively while being several orders of magnitude faster. Project page: https://ir1d.github.io/AGG/
PartImageNet: A Large, High-Quality Dataset of Parts
It is natural to represent objects in terms of their parts. This has the potential to improve the performance of algorithms for object recognition and segmentation but can also help for downstream tasks like activity recognition. Research on part-based models, however, is hindered by the lack of datasets with per-pixel part annotations. This is partly due to the difficulty and high cost of annotating object parts so it has rarely been done except for humans (where there exists a big literature on part-based models). To help address this problem, we propose PartImageNet, a large, high-quality dataset with part segmentation annotations. It consists of 158 classes from ImageNet with approximately 24,000 images. PartImageNet is unique because it offers part-level annotations on a general set of classes including non-rigid, articulated objects, while having an order of magnitude larger size compared to existing part datasets (excluding datasets of humans). It can be utilized for many vision tasks including Object Segmentation, Semantic Part Segmentation, Few-shot Learning and Part Discovery. We conduct comprehensive experiments which study these tasks and set up a set of baselines. The dataset and scripts are released at https://github.com/TACJu/PartImageNet.
ADDP: Learning General Representations for Image Recognition and Generation with Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process
Image recognition and generation have long been developed independently of each other. With the recent trend towards general-purpose representation learning, the development of general representations for both recognition and generation tasks is also promoted. However, preliminary attempts mainly focus on generation performance, but are still inferior on recognition tasks. These methods are modeled in the vector-quantized (VQ) space, whereas leading recognition methods use pixels as inputs. Our key insights are twofold: (1) pixels as inputs are crucial for recognition tasks; (2) VQ tokens as reconstruction targets are beneficial for generation tasks. These observations motivate us to propose an Alternating Denoising Diffusion Process (ADDP) that integrates these two spaces within a single representation learning framework. In each denoising step, our method first decodes pixels from previous VQ tokens, then generates new VQ tokens from the decoded pixels. The diffusion process gradually masks out a portion of VQ tokens to construct the training samples. The learned representations can be used to generate diverse high-fidelity images and also demonstrate excellent transfer performance on recognition tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves competitive performance on unconditional generation, ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20k segmentation. Importantly, our method represents the first successful development of general representations applicable to both generation and dense recognition tasks. Code shall be released.
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.
Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Providing these steps for prompting demonstrations is called chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. CoT prompting has two major paradigms. One leverages a simple prompt like "Let's think step by step" to facilitate step-by-step thinking before answering a question. The other uses a few manual demonstrations one by one, each composed of a question and a reasoning chain that leads to an answer. The superior performance of the second paradigm hinges on the hand-crafting of task-specific demonstrations one by one. We show that such manual efforts may be eliminated by leveraging LLMs with the "Let's think step by step" prompt to generate reasoning chains for demonstrations one by one, i.e., let's think not just step by step, but also one by one. However, these generated chains often come with mistakes. To mitigate the effect of such mistakes, we find that diversity matters for automatically constructing demonstrations. We propose an automatic CoT prompting method: Auto-CoT. It samples questions with diversity and generates reasoning chains to construct demonstrations. On ten public benchmark reasoning tasks with GPT-3, Auto-CoT consistently matches or exceeds the performance of the CoT paradigm that requires manual designs of demonstrations. Code is available at https://github.com/amazon-research/auto-cot
CodePlot-CoT: Mathematical Visual Reasoning by Thinking with Code-Driven Images
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they still face a critical bottleneck with problems requiring visual assistance, such as drawing auxiliary lines or plotting functions to solve the problems. Most LLMs and VLMs are constrained to text-only reasoning chains, while multimodal unified models that can generate interleaved text and images lack the necessary precision and controllability for such tasks. To address this, we propose CodePlot-CoT, a code-driven Chain-of-Thought paradigm for "thinking with images" in mathematics. Our approach leverages the VLM to generate text reasoning as well as executable plotting code, which is then rendered into images as "visual thought", to solve mathematical problems. To achieve this, we first construct Math-VR, the first large-scale, bilingual dataset and benchmark for Mathematics problems with Visual Reasoning, comprising 178K samples. Second, to create high-quality training data, we develop a state-of-the-art image-to-code converter specialized for parsing complex mathematical figures into codes. Finally, using these training data, we train the CodePlot-CoT model for solving mathematical problems. Experimental results show that our model achieves up to 21% increase over base model on our new benchmark, fully validating the efficacy of our proposed code-driven reasoning paradigm. Our work opens a new direction for multimodal mathematical reasoning and provides the community with the first large-scale dataset, comprehensive benchmark, and strong approach for such problems. To facilitate future research, we make our datasets, code, and pretrained models publicly available at https://github.com/HKU-MMLab/Math-VR-CodePlot-CoT.
CoT Information: Improved Sample Complexity under Chain-of-Thought Supervision
Learning complex functions that involve multi-step reasoning poses a significant challenge for standard supervised learning from input-output examples. Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision, which provides intermediate reasoning steps together with the final output, has emerged as a powerful empirical technique, underpinning much of the recent progress in the reasoning capabilities of large language models. This paper develops a statistical theory of learning under CoT supervision. A key characteristic of the CoT setting, in contrast to standard supervision, is the mismatch between the training objective (CoT risk) and the test objective (end-to-end risk). A central part of our analysis, distinguished from prior work, is explicitly linking those two types of risk to achieve sharper sample complexity bounds. This is achieved via the *CoT information measure* I_{D, h_star}^{CoT}(epsilon; calH), which quantifies the additional discriminative power gained from observing the reasoning process. The main theoretical results demonstrate how CoT supervision can yield significantly faster learning rates compared to standard E2E supervision. Specifically, it is shown that the sample complexity required to achieve a target E2E error epsilon scales as d/I_{D, h_star}^{CoT}(epsilon; calH), where d is a measure of hypothesis class complexity, which can be much faster than standard d/epsilon rates. Information-theoretic lower bounds in terms of the CoT information are also obtained. Together, these results suggest that CoT information is a fundamental measure of statistical complexity for learning under chain-of-thought supervision.
General Image-to-Image Translation with One-Shot Image Guidance
Large-scale text-to-image models pre-trained on massive text-image pairs show excellent performance in image synthesis recently. However, image can provide more intuitive visual concepts than plain text. People may ask: how can we integrate the desired visual concept into an existing image, such as our portrait? Current methods are inadequate in meeting this demand as they lack the ability to preserve content or translate visual concepts effectively. Inspired by this, we propose a novel framework named visual concept translator (VCT) with the ability to preserve content in the source image and translate the visual concepts guided by a single reference image. The proposed VCT contains a content-concept inversion (CCI) process to extract contents and concepts, and a content-concept fusion (CCF) process to gather the extracted information to obtain the target image. Given only one reference image, the proposed VCT can complete a wide range of general image-to-image translation tasks with excellent results. Extensive experiments are conducted to prove the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/CrystalNeuro/visual-concept-translator.
Specifying Object Attributes and Relations in Interactive Scene Generation
We introduce a method for the generation of images from an input scene graph. The method separates between a layout embedding and an appearance embedding. The dual embedding leads to generated images that better match the scene graph, have higher visual quality, and support more complex scene graphs. In addition, the embedding scheme supports multiple and diverse output images per scene graph, which can be further controlled by the user. We demonstrate two modes of per-object control: (i) importing elements from other images, and (ii) navigation in the object space, by selecting an appearance archetype. Our code is publicly available at https://www.github.com/ashual/scene_generation
Stop Reasoning! When Multimodal LLMs with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Meets Adversarial Images
Recently, Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) have shown a great ability to understand images. However, like traditional vision models, they are still vulnerable to adversarial images. Meanwhile, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely explored on MLLMs, which not only improves model's performance, but also enhances model's explainability by giving intermediate reasoning steps. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of study regarding MLLMs' adversarial robustness with CoT and an understanding of what the rationale looks like when MLLMs infer wrong answers with adversarial images. Our research evaluates the adversarial robustness of MLLMs when employing CoT reasoning, finding that CoT marginally improves adversarial robustness against existing attack methods. Moreover, we introduce a novel stop-reasoning attack technique that effectively bypasses the CoT-induced robustness enhancements. Finally, we demonstrate the alterations in CoT reasoning when MLLMs confront adversarial images, shedding light on their reasoning process under adversarial attacks.
Goku: Flow Based Video Generative Foundation Models
This paper introduces Goku, a state-of-the-art family of joint image-and-video generation models leveraging rectified flow Transformers to achieve industry-leading performance. We detail the foundational elements enabling high-quality visual generation, including the data curation pipeline, model architecture design, flow formulation, and advanced infrastructure for efficient and robust large-scale training. The Goku models demonstrate superior performance in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations, setting new benchmarks across major tasks. Specifically, Goku achieves 0.76 on GenEval and 83.65 on DPG-Bench for text-to-image generation, and 84.85 on VBench for text-to-video tasks. We believe that this work provides valuable insights and practical advancements for the research community in developing joint image-and-video generation models.
Baking Gaussian Splatting into Diffusion Denoiser for Fast and Scalable Single-stage Image-to-3D Generation
Existing feed-forward image-to-3D methods mainly rely on 2D multi-view diffusion models that cannot guarantee 3D consistency. These methods easily collapse when changing the prompt view direction and mainly handle object-centric prompt images. In this paper, we propose a novel single-stage 3D diffusion model, DiffusionGS, for object and scene generation from a single view. DiffusionGS directly outputs 3D Gaussian point clouds at each timestep to enforce view consistency and allow the model to generate robustly given prompt views of any directions, beyond object-centric inputs. Plus, to improve the capability and generalization ability of DiffusionGS, we scale up 3D training data by developing a scene-object mixed training strategy. Experiments show that our method enjoys better generation quality (2.20 dB higher in PSNR and 23.25 lower in FID) and over 5x faster speed (~6s on an A100 GPU) than SOTA methods. The user study and text-to-3D applications also reveals the practical values of our method. Our Project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/DiffusionGS/ shows the video and interactive generation results.
Scaling the Codebook Size of VQGAN to 100,000 with a Utilization Rate of 99%
In the realm of image quantization exemplified by VQGAN, the process encodes images into discrete tokens drawn from a codebook with a predefined size. Recent advancements, particularly with LLAMA 3, reveal that enlarging the codebook significantly enhances model performance. However, VQGAN and its derivatives, such as VQGAN-FC (Factorized Codes) and VQGAN-EMA, continue to grapple with challenges related to expanding the codebook size and enhancing codebook utilization. For instance, VQGAN-FC is restricted to learning a codebook with a maximum size of 16,384, maintaining a typically low utilization rate of less than 12% on ImageNet. In this work, we propose a novel image quantization model named VQGAN-LC (Large Codebook), which extends the codebook size to 100,000, achieving an utilization rate exceeding 99%. Unlike previous methods that optimize each codebook entry, our approach begins with a codebook initialized with 100,000 features extracted by a pre-trained vision encoder. Optimization then focuses on training a projector that aligns the entire codebook with the feature distributions of the encoder in VQGAN-LC. We demonstrate the superior performance of our model over its counterparts across a variety of tasks, including image reconstruction, image classification, auto-regressive image generation using GPT, and image creation with diffusion- and flow-based generative models. Code and models are available at https://github.com/zh460045050/VQGAN-LC.
PixArt-Σ: Weak-to-Strong Training of Diffusion Transformer for 4K Text-to-Image Generation
In this paper, we introduce PixArt-\Sigma, a Diffusion Transformer model~(DiT) capable of directly generating images at 4K resolution. PixArt-\Sigma represents a significant advancement over its predecessor, PixArt-\alpha, offering images of markedly higher fidelity and improved alignment with text prompts. A key feature of PixArt-\Sigma is its training efficiency. Leveraging the foundational pre-training of PixArt-\alpha, it evolves from the `weaker' baseline to a `stronger' model via incorporating higher quality data, a process we term "weak-to-strong training". The advancements in PixArt-\Sigma are twofold: (1) High-Quality Training Data: PixArt-\Sigma incorporates superior-quality image data, paired with more precise and detailed image captions. (2) Efficient Token Compression: we propose a novel attention module within the DiT framework that compresses both keys and values, significantly improving efficiency and facilitating ultra-high-resolution image generation. Thanks to these improvements, PixArt-\Sigma achieves superior image quality and user prompt adherence capabilities with significantly smaller model size (0.6B parameters) than existing text-to-image diffusion models, such as SDXL (2.6B parameters) and SD Cascade (5.1B parameters). Moreover, PixArt-\Sigma's capability to generate 4K images supports the creation of high-resolution posters and wallpapers, efficiently bolstering the production of high-quality visual content in industries such as film and gaming.
Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought from Labeled Data
Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) advances the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) and achieves superior performance in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. However, most CoT studies rely on carefully designed human-annotated rational chains to prompt the language model, which poses challenges for real-world applications where labeled training data is available without human-annotated rational chains. This creates barriers to applications of CoT prompting to these general tasks. This paper proposes a new strategy, Automate-CoT (Automatic Prompt Augmentation and Selection with Chain-of-Thought), that can bypass human engineering of CoTs by automatically augmenting rational chains from a small labeled dataset, and then pruning low-quality chains to construct a candidate pool of machine-generated rationale chains based on the labels. Finally, it selects the optimal combination of several rationale chains from the pool for CoT prompting by employing a variance-reduced policy gradient strategy to estimate the significance of each example in a black-box language model. Automate-CoT enables a quick adaptation of the CoT technique to different tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, where state-of-the-art results are achieved on arithmetic reasoning (+2.7\%), commonsense reasoning (+3.4\%), symbolic reasoning (+3.2\%), and non-reasoning tasks (+2.5\%). Our code will be available at https://github.com/shizhediao/automate-cot.
Intelligent Grimm -- Open-ended Visual Storytelling via Latent Diffusion Models
Generative models have recently exhibited exceptional capabilities in various scenarios, for example, image generation based on text description. In this work, we focus on the task of generating a series of coherent image sequence based on a given storyline, denoted as open-ended visual storytelling. We make the following three contributions: (i) to fulfill the task of visual storytelling, we introduce two modules into a pre-trained stable diffusion model, and construct an auto-regressive image generator, termed as StoryGen, that enables to generate the current frame by conditioning on both a text prompt and a preceding frame; (ii) to train our proposed model, we collect paired image and text samples by sourcing from various online sources, such as videos, E-books, and establish a data processing pipeline for constructing a diverse dataset, named StorySalon, with a far larger vocabulary than existing animation-specific datasets; (iii) we adopt a three-stage curriculum training strategy, that enables style transfer, visual context conditioning, and human feedback alignment, respectively. Quantitative experiments and human evaluation have validated the superiority of our proposed model, in terms of image quality, style consistency, content consistency, and visual-language alignment. We will make the code, model, and dataset publicly available to the research community.
Tokenize Image as a Set
This paper proposes a fundamentally new paradigm for image generation through set-based tokenization and distribution modeling. Unlike conventional methods that serialize images into fixed-position latent codes with a uniform compression ratio, we introduce an unordered token set representation to dynamically allocate coding capacity based on regional semantic complexity. This TokenSet enhances global context aggregation and improves robustness against local perturbations. To address the critical challenge of modeling discrete sets, we devise a dual transformation mechanism that bijectively converts sets into fixed-length integer sequences with summation constraints. Further, we propose Fixed-Sum Discrete Diffusion--the first framework to simultaneously handle discrete values, fixed sequence length, and summation invariance--enabling effective set distribution modeling. Experiments demonstrate our method's superiority in semantic-aware representation and generation quality. Our innovations, spanning novel representation and modeling strategies, advance visual generation beyond traditional sequential token paradigms. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Gengzigang/TokenSet.
StegoGAN: Leveraging Steganography for Non-Bijective Image-to-Image Translation
Most image-to-image translation models postulate that a unique correspondence exists between the semantic classes of the source and target domains. However, this assumption does not always hold in real-world scenarios due to divergent distributions, different class sets, and asymmetrical information representation. As conventional GANs attempt to generate images that match the distribution of the target domain, they may hallucinate spurious instances of classes absent from the source domain, thereby diminishing the usefulness and reliability of translated images. CycleGAN-based methods are also known to hide the mismatched information in the generated images to bypass cycle consistency objectives, a process known as steganography. In response to the challenge of non-bijective image translation, we introduce StegoGAN, a novel model that leverages steganography to prevent spurious features in generated images. Our approach enhances the semantic consistency of the translated images without requiring additional postprocessing or supervision. Our experimental evaluations demonstrate that StegoGAN outperforms existing GAN-based models across various non-bijective image-to-image translation tasks, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our code and pretrained models are accessible at https://github.com/sian-wusidi/StegoGAN.
Improving Generalization of Image Captioning with Unsupervised Prompt Learning
Pretrained visual-language models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot abilities in image captioning, when accompanied by hand-crafted prompts. Meanwhile, hand-crafted prompts utilize human prior knowledge to guide the model. However, due to the diversity between different domains, such hand-crafted prompt that provide invariant prior knowledge may result in mode collapse for some domains. Some researches attempted to incorporate expert knowledge and instruction datasets, but the results were costly and led to hallucinations. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised prompt learning method to improve Generalization of Image Captioning (GeneIC), which learns a domain-specific prompt vector for the target domain without requiring annotated data. GeneIC aligns visual and language modalities with a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) model, thus optimizing the domain-specific prompt vector from two aspects: attribute and semantic consistency. Specifically, GeneIC first generates attribute-transferred images with differing attributes, while retaining semantic similarity with original images. Then, GeneIC uses CLIP to measure the similarity between the images and the generated sentences. By exploring the variable and invariant features in the original images and attribute-transferred images, attribute consistency constrains the attribute change direction of both images and sentences to learn domain-specific knowledge. The semantic consistency directly measures the similarity between the generated sentences and images to ensure the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the generated sentences. Consequently, GeneIC only optimizes the prompt vectors, which effectively retains the knowledge in the large model and introduces domain-specific knowledge.
Learning to Generate Semantic Layouts for Higher Text-Image Correspondence in Text-to-Image Synthesis
Existing text-to-image generation approaches have set high standards for photorealism and text-image correspondence, largely benefiting from web-scale text-image datasets, which can include up to 5~billion pairs. However, text-to-image generation models trained on domain-specific datasets, such as urban scenes, medical images, and faces, still suffer from low text-image correspondence due to the lack of text-image pairs. Additionally, collecting billions of text-image pairs for a specific domain can be time-consuming and costly. Thus, ensuring high text-image correspondence without relying on web-scale text-image datasets remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present a novel approach for enhancing text-image correspondence by leveraging available semantic layouts. Specifically, we propose a Gaussian-categorical diffusion process that simultaneously generates both images and corresponding layout pairs. Our experiments reveal that we can guide text-to-image generation models to be aware of the semantics of different image regions, by training the model to generate semantic labels for each pixel. We demonstrate that our approach achieves higher text-image correspondence compared to existing text-to-image generation approaches in the Multi-Modal CelebA-HQ and the Cityscapes dataset, where text-image pairs are scarce. Codes are available in this https://pmh9960.github.io/research/GCDP
GarmageNet: A Multimodal Generative Framework for Sewing Pattern Design and Generic Garment Modeling
Realistic digital garment modeling remains a labor-intensive task due to the intricate process of translating 2D sewing patterns into high-fidelity, simulation-ready 3D garments. We introduce GarmageNet, a unified generative framework that automates the creation of 2D sewing patterns, the construction of sewing relationships, and the synthesis of 3D garment initializations compatible with physics-based simulation. Central to our approach is Garmage, a novel garment representation that encodes each panel as a structured geometry image, effectively bridging the semantic and geometric gap between 2D structural patterns and 3D garment shapes. GarmageNet employs a latent diffusion transformer to synthesize panel-wise geometry images and integrates GarmageJigsaw, a neural module for predicting point-to-point sewing connections along panel contours. To support training and evaluation, we build GarmageSet, a large-scale dataset comprising over 10,000 professionally designed garments with detailed structural and style annotations. Our method demonstrates versatility and efficacy across multiple application scenarios, including scalable garment generation from multi-modal design concepts (text prompts, sketches, photographs), automatic modeling from raw flat sewing patterns, pattern recovery from unstructured point clouds, and progressive garment editing using conventional instructions-laying the foundation for fully automated, production-ready pipelines in digital fashion. Project page: https://style3d.github.io/garmagenet.
NFIG: Autoregressive Image Generation with Next-Frequency Prediction
Autoregressive models have achieved promising results in natural language processing. However, for image generation tasks, they encounter substantial challenges in effectively capturing long-range dependencies, managing computational costs, and most crucially, defining meaningful autoregressive sequences that reflect natural image hierarchies. To address these issues, we present Next-Frequency Image Generation (NFIG), a novel framework that decomposes the image generation process into multiple frequency-guided stages. Our approach first generates low-frequency components to establish global structure with fewer tokens, then progressively adds higher-frequency details, following the natural spectral hierarchy of images. This principled autoregressive sequence not only improves the quality of generated images by better capturing true causal relationships between image components, but also significantly reduces computational overhead during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NFIG achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer steps, offering a more efficient solution for image generation, with 1.25times speedup compared to VAR-d20 while achieving better performance (FID: 2.81) on the ImageNet-256 benchmark. We hope that our insight of incorporating frequency-domain knowledge to guide autoregressive sequence design will shed light on future research. We will make our code publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.
FairCoT: Enhancing Fairness in Diffusion Models via Chain of Thought Reasoning of Multimodal Language Models
In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in diffusion models through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models (LLMs). FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement and attire-based attribute prediction to systematically mitigate biases, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero-shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across multiple models, including DALL-E and various Stable Diffusion variants, demonstrate that FairCoT significantly improves fairness and diversity metrics without compromising image quality or relevance. Our approach advances ethical AI practices in generative modeling, promoting socially responsible content generation and setting new standards for fairness in AI-generated imagery.
Present and Future Generalization of Synthetic Image Detectors
The continued release of new and better image generation models increases the demand for synthetic image detectors. In such a dynamic field, detectors need to be able to generalize widely and be robust to uncontrolled alterations. The present work is motivated by this setting, when looking at the role of time, image transformations and data sources, for detector generalization. In these experiments, none of the evaluated detectors is found universal, but results indicate an ensemble could be. Experiments on data collected in the wild show this task to be more challenging than the one defined by large-scale datasets, pointing to a gap between experimentation and actual practice. Finally, we observe a race equilibrium effect, where better generators lead to better detectors, and vice versa. We hypothesize this pushes the field towards a perpetually close race between generators and detectors.
URSA: Understanding and Verifying Chain-of-thought Reasoning in Multimodal Mathematics
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely applied in the mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, the introduction of derivative process supervision on CoT trajectories has sparked discussions on enhancing scaling capabilities during test time, thereby boosting the potential of these models. However, in multimodal mathematical reasoning, the scarcity of high-quality CoT training data has hindered existing models from achieving high-precision CoT reasoning and has limited the realization of reasoning potential during test time. In this work, we propose a three-module synthesis strategy that integrates CoT distillation, trajectory-format rewriting, and format unification. It results in a high-quality CoT reasoning instruction fine-tuning dataset in multimodal mathematics, MMathCoT-1M. We comprehensively validate the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance of the trained URSA-7B model on multiple multimodal mathematical benchmarks. For test-time scaling, we introduce a data synthesis strategy that automatically generates process annotation datasets, known as DualMath-1.1M, focusing on both interpretation and logic. By further training URSA-7B on DualMath-1.1M, we transition from CoT reasoning capabilities to robust supervision abilities. The trained URSA-RM-7B acts as a verifier, effectively enhancing the performance of URSA-7B at test time. URSA-RM-7B also demonstrates excellent out-of-distribution (OOD) verifying capabilities, showcasing its generalization. Model weights, training data and code will be open-sourced.
Wave-GMS: Lightweight Multi-Scale Generative Model for Medical Image Segmentation
For equitable deployment of AI tools in hospitals and healthcare facilities, we need Deep Segmentation Networks that offer high performance and can be trained on cost-effective GPUs with limited memory and large batch sizes. In this work, we propose Wave-GMS, a lightweight and efficient multi-scale generative model for medical image segmentation. Wave-GMS has a substantially smaller number of trainable parameters, does not require loading memory-intensive pretrained vision foundation models, and supports training with large batch sizes on GPUs with limited memory. We conducted extensive experiments on four publicly available datasets (BUS, BUSI, Kvasir-Instrument, and HAM10000), demonstrating that Wave-GMS achieves state-of-the-art segmentation performance with superior cross-domain generalizability, while requiring only ~2.6M trainable parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/ATPLab-LUMS/Wave-GMS.
PartGen: Part-level 3D Generation and Reconstruction with Multi-View Diffusion Models
Text- or image-to-3D generators and 3D scanners can now produce 3D assets with high-quality shapes and textures. These assets typically consist of a single, fused representation, like an implicit neural field, a Gaussian mixture, or a mesh, without any useful structure. However, most applications and creative workflows require assets to be made of several meaningful parts that can be manipulated independently. To address this gap, we introduce PartGen, a novel approach that generates 3D objects composed of meaningful parts starting from text, an image, or an unstructured 3D object. First, given multiple views of a 3D object, generated or rendered, a multi-view diffusion model extracts a set of plausible and view-consistent part segmentations, dividing the object into parts. Then, a second multi-view diffusion model takes each part separately, fills in the occlusions, and uses those completed views for 3D reconstruction by feeding them to a 3D reconstruction network. This completion process considers the context of the entire object to ensure that the parts integrate cohesively. The generative completion model can make up for the information missing due to occlusions; in extreme cases, it can hallucinate entirely invisible parts based on the input 3D asset. We evaluate our method on generated and real 3D assets and show that it outperforms segmentation and part-extraction baselines by a large margin. We also showcase downstream applications such as 3D part editing.
C3oT: Generating Shorter Chain-of-Thought without Compromising Effectiveness
Generating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) before deriving the answer can effectively improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and significantly improve the accuracy of the generated answer. However, in most cases, the length of the generated CoT is much longer than the desired final answer, which results in additional decoding costs. Furthermore, existing research has discovered that shortening the reasoning steps in CoT, even while preserving the key information, diminishes LLMs' abilities. These phenomena make it difficult to use LLMs and CoT in many real-world applications that only require the final answer and are sensitive to latency, such as search and recommendation. To reduce the costs of model decoding and shorten the length of the generated CoT, this paper presents Conditioned Compressed Chain-of-Thought (C3oT), a CoT compression framework that involves a compressor to compress an original longer CoT into a shorter CoT while maintaining key information and interpretability, a conditioned training method to train LLMs with both longer CoT and shorter CoT simultaneously to learn the corresponding relationships between them, and a conditioned inference method to gain the reasoning ability learned from longer CoT by generating shorter CoT. We conduct experiments over four datasets from arithmetic and commonsense scenarios, showing that the proposed method is capable of compressing the length of generated CoT by up to more than 50% without compromising its effectiveness.
ImageRAG: Dynamic Image Retrieval for Reference-Guided Image Generation
Diffusion models enable high-quality and diverse visual content synthesis. However, they struggle to generate rare or unseen concepts. To address this challenge, we explore the usage of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with image generation models. We propose ImageRAG, a method that dynamically retrieves relevant images based on a given text prompt, and uses them as context to guide the generation process. Prior approaches that used retrieved images to improve generation, trained models specifically for retrieval-based generation. In contrast, ImageRAG leverages the capabilities of existing image conditioning models, and does not require RAG-specific training. Our approach is highly adaptable and can be applied across different model types, showing significant improvement in generating rare and fine-grained concepts using different base models. Our project page is available at: https://rotem-shalev.github.io/ImageRAG
RadEdit: stress-testing biomedical vision models via diffusion image editing
Biomedical imaging datasets are often small and biased, meaning that real-world performance of predictive models can be substantially lower than expected from internal testing. This work proposes using generative image editing to simulate dataset shifts and diagnose failure modes of biomedical vision models; this can be used in advance of deployment to assess readiness, potentially reducing cost and patient harm. Existing editing methods can produce undesirable changes, with spurious correlations learned due to the co-occurrence of disease and treatment interventions, limiting practical applicability. To address this, we train a text-to-image diffusion model on multiple chest X-ray datasets and introduce a new editing method RadEdit that uses multiple masks, if present, to constrain changes and ensure consistency in the edited images. We consider three types of dataset shifts: acquisition shift, manifestation shift, and population shift, and demonstrate that our approach can diagnose failures and quantify model robustness without additional data collection, complementing more qualitative tools for explainable AI.
Generative Photography: Scene-Consistent Camera Control for Realistic Text-to-Image Synthesis
Image generation today can produce somewhat realistic images from text prompts. However, if one asks the generator to synthesize a particular camera setting such as creating different fields of view using a 24mm lens versus a 70mm lens, the generator will not be able to interpret and generate scene-consistent images. This limitation not only hinders the adoption of generative tools in photography applications but also exemplifies a broader issue of bridging the gap between the data-driven models and the physical world. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Generative Photography, a framework designed to control camera intrinsic settings during content generation. The core innovation of this work are the concepts of Dimensionality Lifting and Contrastive Camera Learning, which achieve continuous and consistent transitions for different camera settings. Experimental results show that our method produces significantly more scene-consistent photorealistic images than state-of-the-art models such as Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.
QC-StyleGAN -- Quality Controllable Image Generation and Manipulation
The introduction of high-quality image generation models, particularly the StyleGAN family, provides a powerful tool to synthesize and manipulate images. However, existing models are built upon high-quality (HQ) data as desired outputs, making them unfit for in-the-wild low-quality (LQ) images, which are common inputs for manipulation. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing a novel GAN structure that allows for generating images with controllable quality. The network can synthesize various image degradation and restore the sharp image via a quality control code. Our proposed QC-StyleGAN can directly edit LQ images without altering their quality by applying GAN inversion and manipulation techniques. It also provides for free an image restoration solution that can handle various degradations, including noise, blur, compression artifacts, and their mixtures. Finally, we demonstrate numerous other applications such as image degradation synthesis, transfer, and interpolation. The code is available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/QC-StyleGAN.
Leveraging Representations from Intermediate Encoder-blocks for Synthetic Image Detection
The recently developed and publicly available synthetic image generation methods and services make it possible to create extremely realistic imagery on demand, raising great risks for the integrity and safety of online information. State-of-the-art Synthetic Image Detection (SID) research has led to strong evidence on the advantages of feature extraction from foundation models. However, such extracted features mostly encapsulate high-level visual semantics instead of fine-grained details, which are more important for the SID task. On the contrary, shallow layers encode low-level visual information. In this work, we leverage the image representations extracted by intermediate Transformer blocks of CLIP's image-encoder via a lightweight network that maps them to a learnable forgery-aware vector space capable of generalizing exceptionally well. We also employ a trainable module to incorporate the importance of each Transformer block to the final prediction. Our method is compared against the state-of-the-art by evaluating it on 20 test datasets and exhibits an average +10.6% absolute performance improvement. Notably, the best performing models require just a single epoch for training (~8 minutes). Code available at https://github.com/mever-team/rine.
Towards Interpretable Counterfactual Generation via Multimodal Autoregression
Counterfactual medical image generation enables clinicians to explore clinical hypotheses, such as predicting disease progression, facilitating their decision-making. While existing methods can generate visually plausible images from disease progression prompts, they produce silent predictions that lack interpretation to verify how the generation reflects the hypothesized progression -- a critical gap for medical applications that require traceable reasoning. In this paper, we propose Interpretable Counterfactual Generation (ICG), a novel task requiring the joint generation of counterfactual images that reflect the clinical hypothesis and interpretation texts that outline the visual changes induced by the hypothesis. To enable ICG, we present ICG-CXR, the first dataset pairing longitudinal medical images with hypothetical progression prompts and textual interpretations. We further introduce ProgEmu, an autoregressive model that unifies the generation of counterfactual images and textual interpretations. We demonstrate the superiority of ProgEmu in generating progression-aligned counterfactuals and interpretations, showing significant potential in enhancing clinical decision support and medical education. Project page: https://progemu.github.io.
Text-to-3D using Gaussian Splatting
In this paper, we present Gaussian Splatting based text-to-3D generation (GSGEN), a novel approach for generating high-quality 3D objects. Previous methods suffer from inaccurate geometry and limited fidelity due to the absence of 3D prior and proper representation. We leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting, a recent state-of-the-art representation, to address existing shortcomings by exploiting the explicit nature that enables the incorporation of 3D prior. Specifically, our method adopts a progressive optimization strategy, which includes a geometry optimization stage and an appearance refinement stage. In geometry optimization, a coarse representation is established under a 3D geometry prior along with the ordinary 2D SDS loss, ensuring a sensible and 3D-consistent rough shape. Subsequently, the obtained Gaussians undergo an iterative refinement to enrich details. In this stage, we increase the number of Gaussians by compactness-based densification to enhance continuity and improve fidelity. With these designs, our approach can generate 3D content with delicate details and more accurate geometry. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for capturing high-frequency components. Video results are provided at https://gsgen3d.github.io. Our code is available at https://github.com/gsgen3d/gsgen
ProSpect: Prompt Spectrum for Attribute-Aware Personalization of Diffusion Models
Personalizing generative models offers a way to guide image generation with user-provided references. Current personalization methods can invert an object or concept into the textual conditioning space and compose new natural sentences for text-to-image diffusion models. However, representing and editing specific visual attributes such as material, style, and layout remains a challenge, leading to a lack of disentanglement and editability. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach that leverages the step-by-step generation process of diffusion models, which generate images from low to high frequency information, providing a new perspective on representing, generating, and editing images. We develop the Prompt Spectrum Space P*, an expanded textual conditioning space, and a new image representation method called \sysname. ProSpect represents an image as a collection of inverted textual token embeddings encoded from per-stage prompts, where each prompt corresponds to a specific generation stage (i.e., a group of consecutive steps) of the diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that P* and ProSpect offer better disentanglement and controllability compared to existing methods. We apply ProSpect in various personalized attribute-aware image generation applications, such as image-guided or text-driven manipulations of materials, style, and layout, achieving previously unattainable results from a single image input without fine-tuning the diffusion models. Our source code is available athttps://github.com/zyxElsa/ProSpect.
VideoFrom3D: 3D Scene Video Generation via Complementary Image and Video Diffusion Models
In this paper, we propose VideoFrom3D, a novel framework for synthesizing high-quality 3D scene videos from coarse geometry, a camera trajectory, and a reference image. Our approach streamlines the 3D graphic design workflow, enabling flexible design exploration and rapid production of deliverables. A straightforward approach to synthesizing a video from coarse geometry might condition a video diffusion model on geometric structure. However, existing video diffusion models struggle to generate high-fidelity results for complex scenes due to the difficulty of jointly modeling visual quality, motion, and temporal consistency. To address this, we propose a generative framework that leverages the complementary strengths of image and video diffusion models. Specifically, our framework consists of a Sparse Anchor-view Generation (SAG) and a Geometry-guided Generative Inbetweening (GGI) module. The SAG module generates high-quality, cross-view consistent anchor views using an image diffusion model, aided by Sparse Appearance-guided Sampling. Building on these anchor views, GGI module faithfully interpolates intermediate frames using a video diffusion model, enhanced by flow-based camera control and structural guidance. Notably, both modules operate without any paired dataset of 3D scene models and natural images, which is extremely difficult to obtain. Comprehensive experiments show that our method produces high-quality, style-consistent scene videos under diverse and challenging scenarios, outperforming simple and extended baselines.
MCMC: Bridging Rendering, Optimization and Generative AI
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has made unprecedented advances in vision language models over the past two years. During the generative process, new samples (images) are generated from an unknown high-dimensional distribution. Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are particularly effective in drawing samples from such complex, high-dimensional distributions. This makes MCMC methods an integral component for models like EBMs, ensuring accurate sample generation. Gradient-based optimization is at the core of modern generative models. The update step during the optimization forms a Markov chain where the new update depends only on the current state. This allows exploration of the parameter space in a memoryless manner, thus combining the benefits of gradient-based optimization and MCMC sampling. MCMC methods have shown an equally important role in physically based rendering where complex light paths are otherwise quite challenging to sample from simple importance sampling techniques. A lot of research is dedicated towards bringing physical realism to samples (images) generated from diffusion-based generative models in a data-driven manner, however, a unified framework connecting these techniques is still missing. In this course, we take the first steps toward understanding each of these components and exploring how MCMC could potentially serve as a bridge, linking these closely related areas of research. Our course aims to provide necessary theoretical and practical tools to guide students, researchers and practitioners towards the common goal of generative physically based rendering. All Jupyter notebooks with demonstrations associated to this tutorial can be found on the project webpage: https://sinbag.github.io/mcmc/
Seedream 4.0: Toward Next-generation Multimodal Image Generation
We introduce Seedream 4.0, an efficient and high-performance multimodal image generation system that unifies text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, image editing, and multi-image composition within a single framework. We develop a highly efficient diffusion transformer with a powerful VAE which also can reduce the number of image tokens considerably. This allows for efficient training of our model, and enables it to fast generate native high-resolution images (e.g., 1K-4K). Seedream 4.0 is pretrained on billions of text-image pairs spanning diverse taxonomies and knowledge-centric concepts. Comprehensive data collection across hundreds of vertical scenarios, coupled with optimized strategies, ensures stable and large-scale training, with strong generalization. By incorporating a carefully fine-tuned VLM model, we perform multi-modal post-training for training both T2I and image editing tasks jointly. For inference acceleration, we integrate adversarial distillation, distribution matching, and quantization, as well as speculative decoding. It achieves an inference time of up to 1.8 seconds for generating a 2K image (without a LLM/VLM as PE model). Comprehensive evaluations reveal that Seedream 4.0 can achieve state-of-the-art results on both T2I and multimodal image editing. In particular, it demonstrates exceptional multimodal capabilities in complex tasks, including precise image editing and in-context reasoning, and also allows for multi-image reference, and can generate multiple output images. This extends traditional T2I systems into an more interactive and multidimensional creative tool, pushing the boundary of generative AI for both creativity and professional applications. Seedream 4.0 is now accessible on https://www.volcengine.com/experience/ark?launch=seedream.
Panoptic Scene Graph Generation
Existing research addresses scene graph generation (SGG) -- a critical technology for scene understanding in images -- from a detection perspective, i.e., objects are detected using bounding boxes followed by prediction of their pairwise relationships. We argue that such a paradigm causes several problems that impede the progress of the field. For instance, bounding box-based labels in current datasets usually contain redundant classes like hairs, and leave out background information that is crucial to the understanding of context. In this work, we introduce panoptic scene graph generation (PSG), a new problem task that requires the model to generate a more comprehensive scene graph representation based on panoptic segmentations rather than rigid bounding boxes. A high-quality PSG dataset, which contains 49k well-annotated overlapping images from COCO and Visual Genome, is created for the community to keep track of its progress. For benchmarking, we build four two-stage baselines, which are modified from classic methods in SGG, and two one-stage baselines called PSGTR and PSGFormer, which are based on the efficient Transformer-based detector, i.e., DETR. While PSGTR uses a set of queries to directly learn triplets, PSGFormer separately models the objects and relations in the form of queries from two Transformer decoders, followed by a prompting-like relation-object matching mechanism. In the end, we share insights on open challenges and future directions.
Strictly-ID-Preserved and Controllable Accessory Advertising Image Generation
Customized generative text-to-image models have the ability to produce images that closely resemble a given subject. However, in the context of generating advertising images for e-commerce scenarios, it is crucial that the generated subject's identity aligns perfectly with the product being advertised. In order to address the need for strictly-ID preserved advertising image generation, we have developed a Control-Net based customized image generation pipeline and have taken earring model advertising as an example. Our approach facilitates a seamless interaction between the earrings and the model's face, while ensuring that the identity of the earrings remains intact. Furthermore, to achieve a diverse and controllable display, we have proposed a multi-branch cross-attention architecture, which allows for control over the scale, pose, and appearance of the model, going beyond the limitations of text prompts. Our method manages to achieve fine-grained control of the generated model's face, resulting in controllable and captivating advertising effects.
EDITOR: Effective and Interpretable Prompt Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Text-to-image generation models~(e.g., Stable Diffusion) have achieved significant advancements, enabling the creation of high-quality and realistic images based on textual descriptions. Prompt inversion, the task of identifying the textual prompt used to generate a specific artifact, holds significant potential for applications including data attribution, model provenance, and watermarking validation. Recent studies introduced a delayed projection scheme to optimize for prompts representative of the vocabulary space, though challenges in semantic fluency and efficiency remain. Advanced image captioning models or visual large language models can generate highly interpretable prompts, but they often lack in image similarity. In this paper, we propose a prompt inversion technique called \sys for text-to-image diffusion models, which includes initializing embeddings using a pre-trained image captioning model, refining them through reverse-engineering in the latent space, and converting them to texts using an embedding-to-text model. Our experiments on the widely-used datasets, such as MS COCO, LAION, and Flickr, show that our method outperforms existing methods in terms of image similarity, textual alignment, prompt interpretability and generalizability. We further illustrate the application of our generated prompts in tasks such as cross-concept image synthesis, concept manipulation, evolutionary multi-concept generation and unsupervised segmentation.
The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown enhanced capabilities of solving novel tasks by reasoning step-by-step known as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning; how can we instill the same capability of reasoning step-by-step on unseen tasks into LMs that possess less than <100B parameters? To address this question, we first introduce the CoT Collection, a new instruction-tuning dataset that augments 1.88 million CoT rationales across 1,060 tasks. We show that continually fine-tuning Flan-T5 (3B & 11B) with the CoT Collection enables the 3B & 11B LMs to perform CoT better on unseen tasks, leading to an improvement in the average zero-shot accuracy on 27 datasets of the BIG-Bench-Hard benchmark by +4.34% and +2.44%, respectively. Furthermore, we show that instruction tuning with CoT allows LMs to possess stronger few-shot learning capabilities, resulting in an improvement of +2.97% and +2.37% on 4 domain-specific tasks over Flan-T5 (3B & 11B), respectively. We make our CoT Collection data and our trained models publicly available at https://github.com/kaist-lklab/CoT-Collection.
FlexPainter: Flexible and Multi-View Consistent Texture Generation
Texture map production is an important part of 3D modeling and determines the rendering quality. Recently, diffusion-based methods have opened a new way for texture generation. However, restricted control flexibility and limited prompt modalities may prevent creators from producing desired results. Furthermore, inconsistencies between generated multi-view images often lead to poor texture generation quality. To address these issues, we introduce FlexPainter, a novel texture generation pipeline that enables flexible multi-modal conditional guidance and achieves highly consistent texture generation. A shared conditional embedding space is constructed to perform flexible aggregation between different input modalities. Utilizing such embedding space, we present an image-based CFG method to decompose structural and style information, achieving reference image-based stylization. Leveraging the 3D knowledge within the image diffusion prior, we first generate multi-view images simultaneously using a grid representation to enhance global understanding. Meanwhile, we propose a view synchronization and adaptive weighting module during diffusion sampling to further ensure local consistency. Finally, a 3D-aware texture completion model combined with a texture enhancement model is used to generate seamless, high-resolution texture maps. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both flexibility and generation quality.
Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation
We present the Pathways Autoregressive Text-to-Image (Parti) model, which generates high-fidelity photorealistic images and supports content-rich synthesis involving complex compositions and world knowledge. Parti treats text-to-image generation as a sequence-to-sequence modeling problem, akin to machine translation, with sequences of image tokens as the target outputs rather than text tokens in another language. This strategy can naturally tap into the rich body of prior work on large language models, which have seen continued advances in capabilities and performance through scaling data and model sizes. Our approach is simple: First, Parti uses a Transformer-based image tokenizer, ViT-VQGAN, to encode images as sequences of discrete tokens. Second, we achieve consistent quality improvements by scaling the encoder-decoder Transformer model up to 20B parameters, with a new state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 7.23 and finetuned FID score of 3.22 on MS-COCO. Our detailed analysis on Localized Narratives as well as PartiPrompts (P2), a new holistic benchmark of over 1600 English prompts, demonstrate the effectiveness of Parti across a wide variety of categories and difficulty aspects. We also explore and highlight limitations of our models in order to define and exemplify key areas of focus for further improvements. See https://parti.research.google/ for high-resolution images.
Generating Images with 3D Annotations Using Diffusion Models
Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative method, capable of producing stunning photo-realistic images from natural language descriptions. However, these models lack explicit control over the 3D structure in the generated images. Consequently, this hinders our ability to obtain detailed 3D annotations for the generated images or to craft instances with specific poses and distances. In this paper, we propose 3D Diffusion Style Transfer (3D-DST), which incorporates 3D geometry control into diffusion models. Our method exploits ControlNet, which extends diffusion models by using visual prompts in addition to text prompts. We generate images of the 3D objects taken from 3D shape repositories (e.g., ShapeNet and Objaverse), render them from a variety of poses and viewing directions, compute the edge maps of the rendered images, and use these edge maps as visual prompts to generate realistic images. With explicit 3D geometry control, we can easily change the 3D structures of the objects in the generated images and obtain ground-truth 3D annotations automatically. This allows us to improve a wide range of vision tasks, e.g., classification and 3D pose estimation, in both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) settings. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on ImageNet-100/200, ImageNet-R, PASCAL3D+, ObjectNet3D, and OOD-CV. The results show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, e.g., 3.8 percentage points on ImageNet-100 using DeiT-B.
Improving Synthetic Image Detection Towards Generalization: An Image Transformation Perspective
With recent generative models facilitating photo-realistic image synthesis, the proliferation of synthetic images has also engendered certain negative impacts on social platforms, thereby raising an urgent imperative to develop effective detectors. Current synthetic image detection (SID) pipelines are primarily dedicated to crafting universal artifact features, accompanied by an oversight about SID training paradigm. In this paper, we re-examine the SID problem and identify two prevalent biases in current training paradigms, i.e., weakened artifact features and overfitted artifact features. Meanwhile, we discover that the imaging mechanism of synthetic images contributes to heightened local correlations among pixels, suggesting that detectors should be equipped with local awareness. In this light, we propose SAFE, a lightweight and effective detector with three simple image transformations. Firstly, for weakened artifact features, we substitute the down-sampling operator with the crop operator in image pre-processing to help circumvent artifact distortion. Secondly, for overfitted artifact features, we include ColorJitter and RandomRotation as additional data augmentations, to help alleviate irrelevant biases from color discrepancies and semantic differences in limited training samples. Thirdly, for local awareness, we propose a patch-based random masking strategy tailored for SID, forcing the detector to focus on local regions at training. Comparative experiments are conducted on an open-world dataset, comprising synthetic images generated by 26 distinct generative models. Our pipeline achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, with remarkable improvements of 4.5% in accuracy and 2.9% in average precision against existing methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ouxiang-Li/SAFE.
CSIM: A Copula-based similarity index sensitive to local changes for Image quality assessment
Image similarity metrics play an important role in computer vision applications, as they are used in image processing, computer vision and machine learning. Furthermore, those metrics enable tasks such as image retrieval, object recognition and quality assessment, essential in fields like healthcare, astronomy and surveillance. Existing metrics, such as PSNR, MSE, SSIM, ISSM and FSIM, often face limitations in terms of either speed, complexity or sensitivity to small changes in images. To address these challenges, a novel image similarity metric, namely CSIM, that combines real-time while being sensitive to subtle image variations is investigated in this paper. The novel metric uses Gaussian Copula from probability theory to transform an image into vectors of pixel distribution associated to local image patches. These vectors contain, in addition to intensities and pixel positions, information on the dependencies between pixel values, capturing the structural relationships within the image. By leveraging the properties of Copulas, CSIM effectively models the joint distribution of pixel intensities, enabling a more nuanced comparison of image patches making it more sensitive to local changes compared to other metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that CSIM outperforms existing similarity metrics in various image distortion scenarios, including noise, compression artifacts and blur. The metric's ability to detect subtle differences makes it suitable for applications requiring high precision, such as medical imaging, where the detection of minor anomalies can be of a high importance. The results obtained in this work can be reproduced from this Github repository: https://github.com/safouaneelg/copulasimilarity.
X-MoGen: Unified Motion Generation across Humans and Animals
Text-driven motion generation has attracted increasing attention due to its broad applications in virtual reality, animation, and robotics. While existing methods typically model human and animal motion separately, a joint cross-species approach offers key advantages, such as a unified representation and improved generalization. However, morphological differences across species remain a key challenge, often compromising motion plausibility. To address this, we propose X-MoGen, the first unified framework for cross-species text-driven motion generation covering both humans and animals. X-MoGen adopts a two-stage architecture. First, a conditional graph variational autoencoder learns canonical T-pose priors, while an autoencoder encodes motion into a shared latent space regularized by morphological loss. In the second stage, we perform masked motion modeling to generate motion embeddings conditioned on textual descriptions. During training, a morphological consistency module is employed to promote skeletal plausibility across species. To support unified modeling, we construct UniMo4D, a large-scale dataset of 115 species and 119k motion sequences, which integrates human and animal motions under a shared skeletal topology for joint training. Extensive experiments on UniMo4D demonstrate that X-MoGen outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both seen and unseen species.
Graph Density-Aware Losses for Novel Compositions in Scene Graph Generation
Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to predict graph-structured descriptions of input images, in the form of objects and relationships between them. This task is becoming increasingly useful for progress at the interface of vision and language. Here, it is important - yet challenging - to perform well on novel (zero-shot) or rare (few-shot) compositions of objects and relationships. In this paper, we identify two key issues that limit such generalization. Firstly, we show that the standard loss used in this task is unintentionally a function of scene graph density. This leads to the neglect of individual edges in large sparse graphs during training, even though these contain diverse few-shot examples that are important for generalization. Secondly, the frequency of relationships can create a strong bias in this task, such that a blind model predicting the most frequent relationship achieves good performance. Consequently, some state-of-the-art models exploit this bias to improve results. We show that such models can suffer the most in their ability to generalize to rare compositions, evaluating two different models on the Visual Genome dataset and its more recent, improved version, GQA. To address these issues, we introduce a density-normalized edge loss, which provides more than a two-fold improvement in certain generalization metrics. Compared to other works in this direction, our enhancements require only a few lines of code and no added computational cost. We also highlight the difficulty of accurately evaluating models using existing metrics, especially on zero/few shots, and introduce a novel weighted metric.
TripoSG: High-Fidelity 3D Shape Synthesis using Large-Scale Rectified Flow Models
Recent advancements in diffusion techniques have propelled image and video generation to unprece- dented levels of quality, significantly accelerating the deployment and application of generative AI. However, 3D shape generation technology has so far lagged behind, constrained by limitations in 3D data scale, complexity of 3D data process- ing, and insufficient exploration of advanced tech- niques in the 3D domain. Current approaches to 3D shape generation face substantial challenges in terms of output quality, generalization capa- bility, and alignment with input conditions. We present TripoSG, a new streamlined shape diffu- sion paradigm capable of generating high-fidelity 3D meshes with precise correspondence to input images. Specifically, we propose: 1) A large-scale rectified flow transformer for 3D shape generation, achieving state-of-the-art fidelity through training on extensive, high-quality data. 2) A hybrid supervised training strategy combining SDF, normal, and eikonal losses for 3D VAE, achieving high- quality 3D reconstruction performance. 3) A data processing pipeline to generate 2 million high- quality 3D samples, highlighting the crucial rules for data quality and quantity in training 3D gen- erative models. Through comprehensive experi- ments, we have validated the effectiveness of each component in our new framework. The seamless integration of these parts has enabled TripoSG to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 3D shape generation. The resulting 3D shapes exhibit en- hanced detail due to high-resolution capabilities and demonstrate exceptional fidelity to input im- ages. Moreover, TripoSG demonstrates improved versatility in generating 3D models from diverse image styles and contents, showcasing strong gen- eralization capabilities. To foster progress and innovation in the field of 3D generation, we will make our model publicly available.
DiffMorph: Text-less Image Morphing with Diffusion Models
Text-conditioned image generation models are a prevalent use of AI image synthesis, yet intuitively controlling output guided by an artist remains challenging. Current methods require multiple images and textual prompts for each object to specify them as concepts to generate a single customized image. On the other hand, our work, \verb|DiffMorph|, introduces a novel approach that synthesizes images that mix concepts without the use of textual prompts. Our work integrates a sketch-to-image module to incorporate user sketches as input. \verb|DiffMorph| takes an initial image with conditioning artist-drawn sketches to generate a morphed image. We employ a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model and fine-tune it to reconstruct each image faithfully. We seamlessly merge images and concepts from sketches into a cohesive composition. The image generation capability of our work is demonstrated through our results and a comparison of these with prompt-based image generation.
CoMoGAN: continuous model-guided image-to-image translation
CoMoGAN is a continuous GAN relying on the unsupervised reorganization of the target data on a functional manifold. To that matter, we introduce a new Functional Instance Normalization layer and residual mechanism, which together disentangle image content from position on target manifold. We rely on naive physics-inspired models to guide the training while allowing private model/translations features. CoMoGAN can be used with any GAN backbone and allows new types of image translation, such as cyclic image translation like timelapse generation, or detached linear translation. On all datasets, it outperforms the literature. Our code is available at http://github.com/cv-rits/CoMoGAN .
Autoregressive Model Beats Diffusion: Llama for Scalable Image Generation
We introduce LlamaGen, a new family of image generation models that apply original ``next-token prediction'' paradigm of large language models to visual generation domain. It is an affirmative answer to whether vanilla autoregressive models, e.g., Llama, without inductive biases on visual signals can achieve state-of-the-art image generation performance if scaling properly. We reexamine design spaces of image tokenizers, scalability properties of image generation models, and their training data quality. The outcome of this exploration consists of: (1) An image tokenizer with downsample ratio of 16, reconstruction quality of 0.94 rFID and codebook usage of 97% on ImageNet benchmark. (2) A series of class-conditional image generation models ranging from 111M to 3.1B parameters, achieving 2.18 FID on ImageNet 256x256 benchmarks, outperforming the popular diffusion models such as LDM, DiT. (3) A text-conditional image generation model with 775M parameters, from two-stage training on LAION-COCO and high aesthetics quality images, demonstrating competitive performance of visual quality and text alignment. (4) We verify the effectiveness of LLM serving frameworks in optimizing the inference speed of image generation models and achieve 326% - 414% speedup. We release all models and codes to facilitate open-source community of visual generation and multimodal foundation models.
Pandora3D: A Comprehensive Framework for High-Quality 3D Shape and Texture Generation
This report presents a comprehensive framework for generating high-quality 3D shapes and textures from diverse input prompts, including single images, multi-view images, and text descriptions. The framework consists of 3D shape generation and texture generation. (1). The 3D shape generation pipeline employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to encode implicit 3D geometries into a latent space and a diffusion network to generate latents conditioned on input prompts, with modifications to enhance model capacity. An alternative Artist-Created Mesh (AM) generation approach is also explored, yielding promising results for simpler geometries. (2). Texture generation involves a multi-stage process starting with frontal images generation followed by multi-view images generation, RGB-to-PBR texture conversion, and high-resolution multi-view texture refinement. A consistency scheduler is plugged into every stage, to enforce pixel-wise consistency among multi-view textures during inference, ensuring seamless integration. The pipeline demonstrates effective handling of diverse input formats, leveraging advanced neural architectures and novel methodologies to produce high-quality 3D content. This report details the system architecture, experimental results, and potential future directions to improve and expand the framework. The source code and pretrained weights are released at: https://github.com/Tencent/Tencent-XR-3DGen.
PixCell: A generative foundation model for digital histopathology images
The digitization of histology slides has revolutionized pathology, providing massive datasets for cancer diagnosis and research. Contrastive self-supervised and vision-language models have been shown to effectively mine large pathology datasets to learn discriminative representations. On the other hand, generative models, capable of synthesizing realistic and diverse images, present a compelling solution to address unique problems in pathology that involve synthesizing images; overcoming annotated data scarcity, enabling privacy-preserving data sharing, and performing inherently generative tasks, such as virtual staining. We introduce PixCell, the first diffusion-based generative foundation model for histopathology. We train PixCell on PanCan-30M, a vast, diverse dataset derived from 69,184 H\&E-stained whole slide images covering various cancer types. We employ a progressive training strategy and a self-supervision-based conditioning that allows us to scale up training without any annotated data. PixCell generates diverse and high-quality images across multiple cancer types, which we find can be used in place of real data to train a self-supervised discriminative model. Synthetic images shared between institutions are subject to fewer regulatory barriers than would be the case with real clinical images. Furthermore, we showcase the ability to precisely control image generation using a small set of annotated images, which can be used for both data augmentation and educational purposes. Testing on a cell segmentation task, a mask-guided PixCell enables targeted data augmentation, improving downstream performance. Finally, we demonstrate PixCell's ability to use H\&E structural staining to infer results from molecular marker studies; we use this capability to infer IHC staining from H\&E images. Our trained models are publicly released to accelerate research in computational pathology.
Is Artificial Intelligence Generated Image Detection a Solved Problem?
The rapid advancement of generative models, such as GANs and Diffusion models, has enabled the creation of highly realistic synthetic images, raising serious concerns about misinformation, deepfakes, and copyright infringement. Although numerous Artificial Intelligence Generated Image (AIGI) detectors have been proposed, often reporting high accuracy, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios remains questionable. To bridge this gap, we introduce AIGIBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the robustness and generalization capabilities of state-of-the-art AIGI detectors. AIGIBench simulates real-world challenges through four core tasks: multi-source generalization, robustness to image degradation, sensitivity to data augmentation, and impact of test-time pre-processing. It includes 23 diverse fake image subsets that span both advanced and widely adopted image generation techniques, along with real-world samples collected from social media and AI art platforms. Extensive experiments on 11 advanced detectors demonstrate that, despite their high reported accuracy in controlled settings, these detectors suffer significant performance drops on real-world data, limited benefits from common augmentations, and nuanced effects of pre-processing, highlighting the need for more robust detection strategies. By providing a unified and realistic evaluation framework, AIGIBench offers valuable insights to guide future research toward dependable and generalizable AIGI detection.
MetaDreamer: Efficient Text-to-3D Creation With Disentangling Geometry and Texture
Generative models for 3D object synthesis have seen significant advancements with the incorporation of prior knowledge distilled from 2D diffusion models. Nevertheless, challenges persist in the form of multi-view geometric inconsistencies and slow generation speeds within the existing 3D synthesis frameworks. This can be attributed to two factors: firstly, the deficiency of abundant geometric a priori knowledge in optimization, and secondly, the entanglement issue between geometry and texture in conventional 3D generation methods.In response, we introduce MetaDreammer, a two-stage optimization approach that leverages rich 2D and 3D prior knowledge. In the first stage, our emphasis is on optimizing the geometric representation to ensure multi-view consistency and accuracy of 3D objects. In the second stage, we concentrate on fine-tuning the geometry and optimizing the texture, thereby achieving a more refined 3D object. Through leveraging 2D and 3D prior knowledge in two stages, respectively, we effectively mitigate the interdependence between geometry and texture. MetaDreamer establishes clear optimization objectives for each stage, resulting in significant time savings in the 3D generation process. Ultimately, MetaDreamer can generate high-quality 3D objects based on textual prompts within 20 minutes, and to the best of our knowledge, it is the most efficient text-to-3D generation method. Furthermore, we introduce image control into the process, enhancing the controllability of 3D generation. Extensive empirical evidence confirms that our method is not only highly efficient but also achieves a quality level that is at the forefront of current state-of-the-art 3D generation techniques.
Scene123: One Prompt to 3D Scene Generation via Video-Assisted and Consistency-Enhanced MAE
As Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) advances, a variety of methods have been developed to generate text, images, videos, and 3D objects from single or multimodal inputs, contributing efforts to emulate human-like cognitive content creation. However, generating realistic large-scale scenes from a single input presents a challenge due to the complexities involved in ensuring consistency across extrapolated views generated by models. Benefiting from recent video generation models and implicit neural representations, we propose Scene123, a 3D scene generation model, that not only ensures realism and diversity through the video generation framework but also uses implicit neural fields combined with Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to effectively ensures the consistency of unseen areas across views. Specifically, we initially warp the input image (or an image generated from text) to simulate adjacent views, filling the invisible areas with the MAE model. However, these filled images usually fail to maintain view consistency, thus we utilize the produced views to optimize a neural radiance field, enhancing geometric consistency. Moreover, to further enhance the details and texture fidelity of generated views, we employ a GAN-based Loss against images derived from the input image through the video generation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate realistic and consistent scenes from a single prompt. Both qualitative and quantitative results indicate that our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. We show encourage video examples at https://yiyingyang12.github.io/Scene123.github.io/.
Generative Visual Prompt: Unifying Distributional Control of Pre-Trained Generative Models
Generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) learn the underlying data distribution in an unsupervised manner. However, many applications of interest require sampling from a particular region of the output space or sampling evenly over a range of characteristics. For efficient sampling in these scenarios, we propose Generative Visual Prompt (PromptGen), a framework for distributional control over pre-trained generative models by incorporating knowledge of other off-the-shelf models. PromptGen defines control as energy-based models (EBMs) and samples images in a feed-forward manner by approximating the EBM with invertible neural networks, avoiding optimization at inference. Our experiments demonstrate how PromptGen can efficiently sample from several unconditional generative models (e.g., StyleGAN2, StyleNeRF, diffusion autoencoder, NVAE) in a controlled or/and de-biased manner using various off-the-shelf models: (1) with the CLIP model as control, PromptGen can sample images guided by text, (2) with image classifiers as control, PromptGen can de-bias generative models across a set of attributes or attribute combinations, and (3) with inverse graphics models as control, PromptGen can sample images of the same identity in different poses. (4) Finally, PromptGen reveals that the CLIP model shows a "reporting bias" when used as control, and PromptGen can further de-bias this controlled distribution in an iterative manner. The code is available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/Generative-Visual-Prompt.
Subject-Consistent and Pose-Diverse Text-to-Image Generation
Subject-consistent generation (SCG)-aiming to maintain a consistent subject identity across diverse scenes-remains a challenge for text-to-image (T2I) models. Existing training-free SCG methods often achieve consistency at the cost of layout and pose diversity, hindering expressive visual storytelling. To address the limitation, we propose subject-Consistent and pose-Diverse T2I framework, dubbed as CoDi, that enables consistent subject generation with diverse pose and layout. Motivated by the progressive nature of diffusion, where coarse structures emerge early and fine details are refined later, CoDi adopts a two-stage strategy: Identity Transport (IT) and Identity Refinement (IR). IT operates in the early denoising steps, using optimal transport to transfer identity features to each target image in a pose-aware manner. This promotes subject consistency while preserving pose diversity. IR is applied in the later denoising steps, selecting the most salient identity features to further refine subject details. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results on subject consistency, pose diversity, and prompt fidelity demonstrate that CoDi achieves both better visual perception and stronger performance across all metrics. The code is provided in https://github.com/NJU-PCALab/CoDi.
UNIC-Adapter: Unified Image-instruction Adapter with Multi-modal Transformer for Image Generation
Recently, text-to-image generation models have achieved remarkable advancements, particularly with diffusion models facilitating high-quality image synthesis from textual descriptions. However, these models often struggle with achieving precise control over pixel-level layouts, object appearances, and global styles when using text prompts alone. To mitigate this issue, previous works introduce conditional images as auxiliary inputs for image generation, enhancing control but typically necessitating specialized models tailored to different types of reference inputs. In this paper, we explore a new approach to unify controllable generation within a single framework. Specifically, we propose the unified image-instruction adapter (UNIC-Adapter) built on the Multi-Modal-Diffusion Transformer architecture, to enable flexible and controllable generation across diverse conditions without the need for multiple specialized models. Our UNIC-Adapter effectively extracts multi-modal instruction information by incorporating both conditional images and task instructions, injecting this information into the image generation process through a cross-attention mechanism enhanced by Rotary Position Embedding. Experimental results across a variety of tasks, including pixel-level spatial control, subject-driven image generation, and style-image-based image synthesis, demonstrate the effectiveness of our UNIC-Adapter in unified controllable image generation.
MedCLM: Learning to Localize and Reason via a CoT-Curriculum in Medical Vision-Language Models
Bridging clinical diagnostic reasoning with AI remains a central challenge in medical imaging. We introduce MedCLM, an automated pipeline that converts detection datasets into large-scale medical visual question answering (VQA) data with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning by linking lesion boxes to organ segmentation and structured rationales. These contextual signals enable medical vision-language models to generate question-answer pairs with step-by-step reasoning. To utilize this data effectively, we propose an Integrated CoT-Curriculum Strategy composed of an Easy stage with explicit lesion boxes for visual grounding, a Medium stage that encourages implicit localization, and a Hard stage for weakly supervised reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that MedCLM attains state-of-the-art performance on several medical VQA benchmarks, providing a scalable framework for developing clinically aligned medical vision-language models.
The Devil is in the Prompts: De-Identification Traces Enhance Memorization Risks in Synthetic Chest X-Ray Generation
Generative models, particularly text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models, play a crucial role in medical image analysis. However, these models are prone to training data memorization, posing significant risks to patient privacy. Synthetic chest X-ray generation is one of the most common applications in medical image analysis with the MIMIC-CXR dataset serving as the primary data repository for this task. This study adopts a data-driven approach and presents the first systematic attempt to identify prompts and text tokens in MIMIC-CXR that contribute the most to training data memorization. Our analysis reveals an unexpected finding: prompts containing traces of de-identification procedures are among the most memorized, with de-identification markers contributing the most. Furthermore, we also find existing inference-time memorization mitigation strategies are ineffective and fail to sufficiently reduce the model's reliance on memorized text tokens highlighting a broader issue in T2I synthesis with MIMIC-CXR. On this front, we propose actionable strategies to enhance privacy and improve the reliability of generative models in medical imaging. Finally, our results provide a foundation for future work on developing and benchmarking memorization mitigation techniques for synthetic chest X-ray generation using the MIMIC-CXR dataset.
Advancing Pose-Guided Image Synthesis with Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models
Recent work has showcased the significant potential of diffusion models in pose-guided person image synthesis. However, owing to the inconsistency in pose between the source and target images, synthesizing an image with a distinct pose, relying exclusively on the source image and target pose information, remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models (PCDMs) that incrementally bridge the gap between person images under the target and source poses through three stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we design a simple prior conditional diffusion model that predicts the global features of the target image by mining the global alignment relationship between pose coordinates and image appearance. Then, the second stage establishes a dense correspondence between the source and target images using the global features from the previous stage, and an inpainting conditional diffusion model is proposed to further align and enhance the contextual features, generating a coarse-grained person image. In the third stage, we propose a refining conditional diffusion model to utilize the coarsely generated image from the previous stage as a condition, achieving texture restoration and enhancing fine-detail consistency. The three-stage PCDMs work progressively to generate the final high-quality and high-fidelity synthesized image. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the consistency and photorealism of our proposed PCDMs under challenging scenarios.The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/PCDMs.
StyleGAN knows Normal, Depth, Albedo, and More
Intrinsic images, in the original sense, are image-like maps of scene properties like depth, normal, albedo or shading. This paper demonstrates that StyleGAN can easily be induced to produce intrinsic images. The procedure is straightforward. We show that, if StyleGAN produces G({w}) from latents {w}, then for each type of intrinsic image, there is a fixed offset {d}_c so that G({w}+{d}_c) is that type of intrinsic image for G({w}). Here {d}_c is {\em independent of {w}}. The StyleGAN we used was pretrained by others, so this property is not some accident of our training regime. We show that there are image transformations StyleGAN will {\em not} produce in this fashion, so StyleGAN is not a generic image regression engine. It is conceptually exciting that an image generator should ``know'' and represent intrinsic images. There may also be practical advantages to using a generative model to produce intrinsic images. The intrinsic images obtained from StyleGAN compare well both qualitatively and quantitatively with those obtained by using SOTA image regression techniques; but StyleGAN's intrinsic images are robust to relighting effects, unlike SOTA methods.
Leveraging Unpaired Data for Vision-Language Generative Models via Cycle Consistency
Current vision-language generative models rely on expansive corpora of paired image-text data to attain optimal performance and generalization capabilities. However, automatically collecting such data (e.g. via large-scale web scraping) leads to low quality and poor image-text correlation, while human annotation is more accurate but requires significant manual effort and expense. We introduce ITIT (InTegrating Image Text): an innovative training paradigm grounded in the concept of cycle consistency which allows vision-language training on unpaired image and text data. ITIT is comprised of a joint image-text encoder with disjoint image and text decoders that enable bidirectional image-to-text and text-to-image generation in a single framework. During training, ITIT leverages a small set of paired image-text data to ensure its output matches the input reasonably well in both directions. Simultaneously, the model is also trained on much larger datasets containing only images or texts. This is achieved by enforcing cycle consistency between the original unpaired samples and the cycle-generated counterparts. For instance, it generates a caption for a given input image and then uses the caption to create an output image, and enforces similarity between the input and output images. Our experiments show that ITIT with unpaired datasets exhibits similar scaling behavior as using high-quality paired data. We demonstrate image generation and captioning performance on par with state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-to-text models with orders of magnitude fewer (only 3M) paired image-text data.
Image Understanding Makes for A Good Tokenizer for Image Generation
Abstract Modern image generation (IG) models have been shown to capture rich semantics valuable for image understanding (IU) tasks. However, the potential of IU models to improve IG performance remains uncharted. We address this issue using a token-based IG framework, which relies on effective tokenizers to project images into token sequences. Currently, pixel reconstruction (e.g., VQGAN) dominates the training objective for image tokenizers. In contrast, our approach adopts the feature reconstruction objective, where tokenizers are trained by distilling knowledge from pretrained IU encoders. Comprehensive comparisons indicate that tokenizers with strong IU capabilities achieve superior IG performance across a variety of metrics, datasets, tasks, and proposal networks. Notably, VQ-KD CLIP achieves 4.10 FID on ImageNet-1k (IN-1k). Visualization suggests that the superiority of VQ-KD can be partly attributed to the rich semantics within the VQ-KD codebook. We further introduce a straightforward pipeline to directly transform IU encoders into tokenizers, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness for IG tasks. These discoveries may energize further exploration into image tokenizer research and inspire the community to reassess the relationship between IU and IG. The code is released at https://github.com/magic-research/vector_quantization.
A Style is Worth One Code: Unlocking Code-to-Style Image Generation with Discrete Style Space
Innovative visual stylization is a cornerstone of artistic creation, yet generating novel and consistent visual styles remains a significant challenge. Existing generative approaches typically rely on lengthy textual prompts, reference images, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning to guide style-aware image generation, but often struggle with style consistency, limited creativity, and complex style representations. In this paper, we affirm that a style is worth one numerical code by introducing the novel task, code-to-style image generation, which produces images with novel, consistent visual styles conditioned solely on a numerical style code. To date, this field has only been primarily explored by the industry (e.g., Midjourney), with no open-source research from the academic community. To fill this gap, we propose CoTyle, the first open-source method for this task. Specifically, we first train a discrete style codebook from a collection of images to extract style embeddings. These embeddings serve as conditions for a text-to-image diffusion model (T2I-DM) to generate stylistic images. Subsequently, we train an autoregressive style generator on the discrete style embeddings to model their distribution, allowing the synthesis of novel style embeddings. During inference, a numerical style code is mapped to a unique style embedding by the style generator, and this embedding guides the T2I-DM to generate images in the corresponding style. Unlike existing methods, our method offers unparalleled simplicity and diversity, unlocking a vast space of reproducible styles from minimal input. Extensive experiments validate that CoTyle effectively turns a numerical code into a style controller, demonstrating a style is worth one code.
ImagenHub: Standardizing the evaluation of conditional image generation models
Recently, a myriad of conditional image generation and editing models have been developed to serve different downstream tasks, including text-to-image generation, text-guided image editing, subject-driven image generation, control-guided image generation, etc. However, we observe huge inconsistencies in experimental conditions: datasets, inference, and evaluation metrics - render fair comparisons difficult. This paper proposes ImagenHub, which is a one-stop library to standardize the inference and evaluation of all the conditional image generation models. Firstly, we define seven prominent tasks and curate high-quality evaluation datasets for them. Secondly, we built a unified inference pipeline to ensure fair comparison. Thirdly, we design two human evaluation scores, i.e. Semantic Consistency and Perceptual Quality, along with comprehensive guidelines to evaluate generated images. We train expert raters to evaluate the model outputs based on the proposed metrics. Our human evaluation achieves a high inter-worker agreement of Krippendorff's alpha on 76% models with a value higher than 0.4. We comprehensively evaluated a total of around 30 models and observed three key takeaways: (1) the existing models' performance is generally unsatisfying except for Text-guided Image Generation and Subject-driven Image Generation, with 74% models achieving an overall score lower than 0.5. (2) we examined the claims from published papers and found 83% of them hold with a few exceptions. (3) None of the existing automatic metrics has a Spearman's correlation higher than 0.2 except subject-driven image generation. Moving forward, we will continue our efforts to evaluate newly published models and update our leaderboard to keep track of the progress in conditional image generation.
Halton Scheduler For Masked Generative Image Transformer
Masked Generative Image Transformers (MaskGIT) have emerged as a scalable and efficient image generation framework, able to deliver high-quality visuals with low inference costs. However, MaskGIT's token unmasking scheduler, an essential component of the framework, has not received the attention it deserves. We analyze the sampling objective in MaskGIT, based on the mutual information between tokens, and elucidate its shortcomings. We then propose a new sampling strategy based on our Halton scheduler instead of the original Confidence scheduler. More precisely, our method selects the token's position according to a quasi-random, low-discrepancy Halton sequence. Intuitively, that method spreads the tokens spatially, progressively covering the image uniformly at each step. Our analysis shows that it allows reducing non-recoverable sampling errors, leading to simpler hyper-parameters tuning and better quality images. Our scheduler does not require retraining or noise injection and may serve as a simple drop-in replacement for the original sampling strategy. Evaluation of both class-to-image synthesis on ImageNet and text-to-image generation on the COCO dataset demonstrates that the Halton scheduler outperforms the Confidence scheduler quantitatively by reducing the FID and qualitatively by generating more diverse and more detailed images. Our code is at https://github.com/valeoai/Halton-MaskGIT.
Detecting Harmful Memes with Decoupled Understanding and Guided CoT Reasoning
Detecting harmful memes is essential for maintaining the integrity of online environments. However, current approaches often struggle with resource efficiency, flexibility, or explainability, limiting their practical deployment in content moderation systems. To address these challenges, we introduce U-CoT+, a novel framework for harmful meme detection. Instead of relying solely on prompting or fine-tuning multimodal models, we first develop a high-fidelity meme-to-text pipeline that converts visual memes into detail-preserving textual descriptions. This design decouples meme interpretation from meme classification, thus avoiding immediate reasoning over complex raw visual content and enabling resource-efficient harmful meme detection with general large language models (LLMs). Building on these textual descriptions, we further incorporate targeted, interpretable human-crafted guidelines to guide models' reasoning under zero-shot CoT prompting. As such, this framework allows for easy adaptation to different harmfulness detection criteria across platforms, regions, and over time, offering high flexibility and explainability. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our framework, highlighting its potential for explainable and low-resource harmful meme detection using small-scale LLMs. Codes and data are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HMC-AF2B/README.md.
FreeCustom: Tuning-Free Customized Image Generation for Multi-Concept Composition
Benefiting from large-scale pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) generative models, impressive progress has been achieved in customized image generation, which aims to generate user-specified concepts. Existing approaches have extensively focused on single-concept customization and still encounter challenges when it comes to complex scenarios that involve combining multiple concepts. These approaches often require retraining/fine-tuning using a few images, leading to time-consuming training processes and impeding their swift implementation. Furthermore, the reliance on multiple images to represent a singular concept increases the difficulty of customization. To this end, we propose FreeCustom, a novel tuning-free method to generate customized images of multi-concept composition based on reference concepts, using only one image per concept as input. Specifically, we introduce a new multi-reference self-attention (MRSA) mechanism and a weighted mask strategy that enables the generated image to access and focus more on the reference concepts. In addition, MRSA leverages our key finding that input concepts are better preserved when providing images with context interactions. Experiments show that our method's produced images are consistent with the given concepts and better aligned with the input text. Our method outperforms or performs on par with other training-based methods in terms of multi-concept composition and single-concept customization, but is simpler. Codes can be found at https://github.com/aim-uofa/FreeCustom.
MIMIC-CXR-JPG, a large publicly available database of labeled chest radiographs
Chest radiography is an extremely powerful imaging modality, allowing for a detailed inspection of a patient's thorax, but requiring specialized training for proper interpretation. With the advent of high performance general purpose computer vision algorithms, the accurate automated analysis of chest radiographs is becoming increasingly of interest to researchers. However, a key challenge in the development of these techniques is the lack of sufficient data. Here we describe MIMIC-CXR-JPG v2.0.0, a large dataset of 377,110 chest x-rays associated with 227,827 imaging studies sourced from the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center between 2011 - 2016. Images are provided with 14 labels derived from two natural language processing tools applied to the corresponding free-text radiology reports. MIMIC-CXR-JPG is derived entirely from the MIMIC-CXR database, and aims to provide a convenient processed version of MIMIC-CXR, as well as to provide a standard reference for data splits and image labels. All images have been de-identified to protect patient privacy. The dataset is made freely available to facilitate and encourage a wide range of research in medical computer vision.
MRGen: Diffusion-based Controllable Data Engine for MRI Segmentation towards Unannotated Modalities
Medical image segmentation has recently demonstrated impressive progress with deep neural networks, yet the heterogeneous modalities and scarcity of mask annotations limit the development of segmentation models on unannotated modalities. This paper investigates a new paradigm for leveraging generative models in medical applications: controllably synthesizing data for unannotated modalities, without requiring registered data pairs. Specifically, we make the following contributions in this paper: (i) we collect and curate a large-scale radiology image-text dataset, MedGen-1M, comprising modality labels, attributes, region, and organ information, along with a subset of organ mask annotations, to support research in controllable medical image generation; (ii) we propose a diffusion-based data engine, termed MRGen, which enables generation conditioned on text prompts and masks, synthesizing MR images for diverse modalities lacking mask annotations, to train segmentation models on unannotated modalities; (iii) we conduct extensive experiments across various modalities, illustrating that our data engine can effectively synthesize training samples and extend MRI segmentation towards unannotated modalities.
AeroGen: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Diffusion-Driven Data Generation
Remote sensing image object detection (RSIOD) aims to identify and locate specific objects within satellite or aerial imagery. However, there is a scarcity of labeled data in current RSIOD datasets, which significantly limits the performance of current detection algorithms. Although existing techniques, e.g., data augmentation and semi-supervised learning, can mitigate this scarcity issue to some extent, they are heavily dependent on high-quality labeled data and perform worse in rare object classes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a layout-controllable diffusion generative model (i.e. AeroGen) tailored for RSIOD. To our knowledge, AeroGen is the first model to simultaneously support horizontal and rotated bounding box condition generation, thus enabling the generation of high-quality synthetic images that meet specific layout and object category requirements. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end data augmentation framework that integrates a diversity-conditioned generator and a filtering mechanism to enhance both the diversity and quality of generated data. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic data produced by our method are of high quality and diversity. Furthermore, the synthetic RSIOD data can significantly improve the detection performance of existing RSIOD models, i.e., the mAP metrics on DIOR, DIOR-R, and HRSC datasets are improved by 3.7%, 4.3%, and 2.43%, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/AeroGen.
Garment3DGen: 3D Garment Stylization and Texture Generation
We introduce Garment3DGen a new method to synthesize 3D garment assets from a base mesh given a single input image as guidance. Our proposed approach allows users to generate 3D textured clothes based on both real and synthetic images, such as those generated by text prompts. The generated assets can be directly draped and simulated on human bodies. First, we leverage the recent progress of image to 3D diffusion methods to generate 3D garment geometries. However, since these geometries cannot be utilized directly for downstream tasks, we propose to use them as pseudo ground-truth and set up a mesh deformation optimization procedure that deforms a base template mesh to match the generated 3D target. Second, we introduce carefully designed losses that allow the input base mesh to freely deform towards the desired target, yet preserve mesh quality and topology such that they can be simulated. Finally, a texture estimation module generates high-fidelity texture maps that are globally and locally consistent and faithfully capture the input guidance, allowing us to render the generated 3D assets. With Garment3DGen users can generate the textured 3D garment of their choice without the need of artist intervention. One can provide a textual prompt describing the garment they desire to generate a simulation-ready 3D asset. We present a plethora of quantitative and qualitative comparisons on various assets both real and generated and provide use-cases of how one can generate simulation-ready 3D garments.
ShareGPT-4o-Image: Aligning Multimodal Models with GPT-4o-Level Image Generation
Recent advances in multimodal generative models have unlocked photorealistic, instruction-aligned image generation, yet leading systems like GPT-4o-Image remain proprietary and inaccessible. To democratize these capabilities, we present ShareGPT-4o-Image, the first dataset comprising 45K text-to-image and 46K text-and-image-to-image data, all synthesized using GPT-4o's image generation capabilities for distilling its advanced image generation abilities. Leveraging this dataset, we develop Janus-4o, a multimodal large language model capable of both text-to-image and text-and-image-to-image generation. Janus-4o not only significantly improves text-to-image generation over its predecessor, Janus-Pro, but also newly supports text-and-image-to-image generation. Notably, it achieves impressive performance in text-and-image-to-image generation from scratch, using only 91K synthetic samples and 6 hours of training on an 8 A800-GPU machine. We hope the release of ShareGPT-4o-Image and Janus-4o will foster open research in photorealistic, instruction-aligned image generation.
Fake it till you make it: Learning transferable representations from synthetic ImageNet clones
Recent image generation models such as Stable Diffusion have exhibited an impressive ability to generate fairly realistic images starting from a simple text prompt. Could such models render real images obsolete for training image prediction models? In this paper, we answer part of this provocative question by investigating the need for real images when training models for ImageNet classification. Provided only with the class names that have been used to build the dataset, we explore the ability of Stable Diffusion to generate synthetic clones of ImageNet and measure how useful these are for training classification models from scratch. We show that with minimal and class-agnostic prompt engineering, ImageNet clones are able to close a large part of the gap between models produced by synthetic images and models trained with real images, for the several standard classification benchmarks that we consider in this study. More importantly, we show that models trained on synthetic images exhibit strong generalization properties and perform on par with models trained on real data for transfer. Project page: https://europe.naverlabs.com/imagenet-sd/
AlignedGen: Aligning Style Across Generated Images
Despite their generative power, diffusion models struggle to maintain style consistency across images conditioned on the same style prompt, hindering their practical deployment in creative workflows. While several training-free methods attempt to solve this, they are constrained to the U-Net architecture, which not only leads to low-quality results and artifacts like object repetition but also renders them incompatible with superior Diffusion Transformer (DiT). To address these issues, we introduce AlignedGen, a novel training-free framework that enhances style consistency across images generated by DiT models. Our work first reveals a critical insight: naive attention sharing fails in DiT due to conflicting positional signals from improper position embeddings. We introduce Shifted Position Embedding (ShiftPE), an effective solution that resolves this conflict by allocating a non-overlapping set of positional indices to each image. Building on this foundation, we develop Advanced Attention Sharing (AAS), a suite of three techniques meticulously designed to fully unleash the potential of attention sharing within the DiT. Furthermore, to broaden the applicability of our method, we present an efficient query, key, and value feature extraction algorithm, enabling our method to seamlessly incorporate external images as style references. Extensive experimental results validate that our method effectively enhances style consistency across generated images while maintaining precise text-to-image alignment.
