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Aug 14

ControlRadio: Prompt-Driven Controllable Diffusion for Cross-Modal Radio Map Generation

Radio maps describe how wireless signals propagate across space and are essential for wireless communication, sensing, and network planning. However, constructing accurate radio maps traditionally requires either dense measurements or computationally expensive physical simulations, which limits scalability and real-time deployment. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence offer a promising alternative, but existing approaches lack fine-grained control and physical consistency when applied to real-world wireless environments. Here we present ControlRadio, a controllable generative framework that produces radio maps from natural-language descriptions and environmental layouts, including building structures and transmitter locations. Joint semantic and spatial conditioning enables interpretable, propagation-plausible generation, while a controlled latent prior and layout-aware conditioning improve stability and structural consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlRadio achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and strong generalization across diverse urban scenarios, while reducing computation time by more than four orders of magnitude compared with conventional simulation-based methods. Such results suggest a new paradigm for scalable and controllable wireless environment modeling, with broad implications for next-generation communication systems and data-driven radio sensing.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 9

Anatomy-Guided Residual Motion Diffusion for Controllable 4D Cardiac MRI Synthesis

Developing robust artificial intelligence models for 4D (3D + time) medical imaging is constrained by limited annotated data, inter-device domain shifts, and privacy restrictions. To address this, we propose a 4D controllable generative framework for anatomically consistent data augmentation. A semi-supervised variational autoencoder learns a compact latent representation of anatomical volumes while jointly predicting aligned segmentation masks in a unified framework. Anatomical structure is then disentangled from temporal dynamics through a cascaded latent diffusion model (LDM). A static LDM generates subject-specific anatomy conditioned on clinical priors (diagnosis and volumes measures) and a subsequent motion LDM estimates residual latent motions, ensuring strict temporal coherence across the 4D sequence. The proposed approach was evaluated on cine cardiac MRI as a representative 4D imaging application. Experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate high controllability of static anatomy (Pearson r > 0.8) and strong temporal coherence (FVD = 288.08). In cross-vendor generalization experiments, augmenting training sets with synthetic 4D sequences significantly improves downstream segmentation performance. Using nnU-Net, the proposed augmentation strategy improves the average Dice score by 1.4% and reduces the Hausdorff Distance by 3.0mm compared to training on real data alone, for the left ventricle, Dice improves by 2.8% with a 5.4mm reduction in boundary error. Overall, this framework provides a scalable and controllable solution for 4D medical image synthesis, supporting the development of more robust models with limited annotations and cross-vendor variability. Code available on https://github.com/cyiheng/4DCardiacMRISynthesis.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 24

FrozenDrive: Zero-Shot Text-Guided Driving Scene Generation and Data Augmentation with Parameter-Free Frozen Diffusion Model

Synthetic data for autonomous driving is surging, powered by diffusion models that promise scalable scene generation. Yet key obstacles remain, as enforcing multi-view and temporal consistency often relies on backbone fine-tuning or added layers, which erodes pre-trained knowledge and weakens text alignment. Models also stay close to the training distribution, struggling under adverse weather and unseen configurations, and fidelity favors frequent over rare classes. We address these gaps with FrozenDrive, a controllable generative framework that preserves a pretrained diffusion models knowledge while achieving strong consistency. FrozenDrive conditions on rich driving-stack signals and text prompts, and introduces knowledge-preserving spatio-temporal attention to impose cross-view alignment and temporal coherence in a single pass within a parameter-free frozen diffusion backbone. An additional object-focused constraint improves per-object fidelity for rare categories. Without any weather- or scene-specific fine-tuning, our model synthesizes globally coherent multi-view driving scenes from text, particularly under adverse and rare conditions, and surpasses prior baselines. On nuScenes, FrozenDrive augmented data significantly improves AD models performance, especially at night and in rain, demonstrating stronger robustness when trained with our scenario-targeted data.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 17

DGPO: RL-Steered Graph Diffusion for Neural Architecture Generation

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning has proven effective for steering generative diffusion models toward desired properties in image and molecular domains. Graph diffusion models have similarly been applied to combinatorial structure generation, including neural architecture search (NAS). However, neural architectures are directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) where edge direction encodes functional semantics such as data flow-information that existing graph diffusion methods, designed for undirected structures, discard. We propose Directed Graph Policy Optimization (DGPO), which extends reinforcement learning fine-tuning of discrete graph diffusion models to DAGs via topological node ordering and positional encoding. Validated on NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, DGPO matches the benchmark optimum on all three NAS-Bench-201 tasks (91.61%, 73.49%, 46.77%). The central finding is that the model learns transferable structural priors: pretrained on only 7% of the search space, it generates near-oracle architectures after fine-tuning, within 0.32 percentage points of the full-data model and extrapolating 7.3 percentage points beyond its training ceiling. Bidirectional control experiments confirm genuine reward-driven steering, with inverse optimization reaching near random-chance accuracy (9.5%). These results demonstrate that reinforcement learning-steered discrete diffusion, once extended to handle directionality, provides a controllable generative framework for directed combinatorial structures.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 29

Once-for-All: Controllable Generative Image Compression with Dynamic Granularity Adaptation

Although recent generative image compression methods have demonstrated impressive potential in optimizing the rate-distortion-perception trade-off, they still face the critical challenge of flexible rate adaption to diverse compression necessities and scenarios. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a Controllable Generative Image Compression framework, termed Control-GIC, the first capable of fine-grained bitrate adaption across a broad spectrum while ensuring high-fidelity and generality compression. Control-GIC is grounded in a VQGAN framework that encodes an image as a sequence of variable-length codes (i.e. VQ-indices), which can be losslessly compressed and exhibits a direct positive correlation with the bitrates. Drawing inspiration from the classical coding principle, we correlate the information density of local image patches with their granular representations. Hence, we can flexibly determine a proper allocation of granularity for the patches to achieve dynamic adjustment for VQ-indices, resulting in desirable compression rates. We further develop a probabilistic conditional decoder capable of retrieving historic encoded multi-granularity representations according to transmitted codes, and then reconstruct hierarchical granular features in the formalization of conditional probability, enabling more informative aggregation to improve reconstruction realism. Our experiments show that Control-GIC allows highly flexible and controllable bitrate adaption where the results demonstrate its superior performance over recent state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/lianqi1008/Control-GIC.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 2, 2024

Multi-Decoder OneRec: Controllable Generative Retrieval for Multi-Objective Industrial Recommendation

Industrial recommender systems build candidate pools by assigning explicit quotas to objective-specific retrieval routes. This design offers quota control but increasingly fragments modeling, training, and serving as the route set grows. Semantic-ID-based generative retrieval provides a unified alternative, yet a single decoder entangles objective policies and limits candidate complementarity. We propose Multi-Decoder OneRec, a controllable framework that combines shared representations, isolated objective adaptation, and coordinated decoding. All objectives share a user-context module and the General Decoder, while each objective adds an isolated, parameter-efficient LoRA expert. During training, exposure-sample next-token prediction (NTP) updates the shared base, target-filtered NTP updates the event-based experts, and Kullback-Leibler (KL)-regularized policy optimization updates the Watch-time expert; gradient routing isolates these updates, and the General Decoder supplies a stop-gradient reference. At inference, explicit route quotas allocate the fixed budget and Multi-Decoder Constrained Beam Search reduces cross-route overlap. We publicly release Kwai26, a large-scale multi-objective benchmark with 1.31 billion raw item-level records, 31.85 million Item-ID entries, and 25.03 million items with valid Semantic IDs, together with predefined splits and an evaluation protocol. Under the same 512-item retrieval budget, Multi-Decoder OneRec improves over the single-decoder OneRec baseline by 1.69%-5.62% across four Recall@512 metrics. In a production A/B test, it yields relative gains of 0.37% in app usage time per device, 0.19% in Day-7 retained users, 0.19% in devices with at least one share, and 2.09% in new-content Cold-Start. These results show that generative retrieval can combine shared modeling with objective-specific control and complementary candidate generation.

  • 14 authors
·
Jul 28

Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching with Straight-Through Guidance for Controllable Biological Sequence Generation

Flow matching in the continuous simplex has emerged as a promising strategy for DNA sequence design, but struggles to scale to higher simplex dimensions required for peptide and protein generation. We introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow and Score Matching, a generative framework on the simplex based on a novel Gumbel-Softmax interpolant with a time-dependent temperature. Using this interpolant, we introduce Gumbel-Softmax Flow Matching by deriving a parameterized velocity field that transports from smooth categorical distributions to distributions concentrated at a single vertex of the simplex. We alternatively present Gumbel-Softmax Score Matching which learns to regress the gradient of the probability density. Our framework enables high-quality, diverse generation and scales efficiently to higher-dimensional simplices. To enable training-free guidance, we propose Straight-Through Guided Flows (STGFlow), a classifier-based guidance method that leverages straight-through estimators to steer the unconditional velocity field toward optimal vertices of the simplex. STGFlow enables efficient inference-time guidance using classifiers pre-trained on clean sequences, and can be used with any discrete flow method. Together, these components form a robust framework for controllable de novo sequence generation. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in conditional DNA promoter design, sequence-only protein generation, and target-binding peptide design for rare disease treatment.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 21, 2025 3

MultiRef: Controllable Image Generation with Multiple Visual References

Visual designers naturally draw inspiration from multiple visual references, combining diverse elements and aesthetic principles to create artwork. However, current image generative frameworks predominantly rely on single-source inputs -- either text prompts or individual reference images. In this paper, we focus on the task of controllable image generation using multiple visual references. We introduce MultiRef-bench, a rigorous evaluation framework comprising 990 synthetic and 1,000 real-world samples that require incorporating visual content from multiple reference images. The synthetic samples are synthetically generated through our data engine RefBlend, with 10 reference types and 33 reference combinations. Based on RefBlend, we further construct a dataset MultiRef containing 38k high-quality images to facilitate further research. Our experiments across three interleaved image-text models (i.e., OmniGen, ACE, and Show-o) and six agentic frameworks (e.g., ChatDiT and LLM + SD) reveal that even state-of-the-art systems struggle with multi-reference conditioning, with the best model OmniGen achieving only 66.6% in synthetic samples and 79.0% in real-world cases on average compared to the golden answer. These findings provide valuable directions for developing more flexible and human-like creative tools that can effectively integrate multiple sources of visual inspiration. The dataset is publicly available at: https://multiref.github.io/.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 9, 2025 2

CRS-Diff: Controllable Remote Sensing Image Generation with Diffusion Model

The emergence of generative models has revolutionized the field of remote sensing (RS) image generation. Despite generating high-quality images, existing methods are limited in relying mainly on text control conditions, and thus do not always generate images accurately and stably. In this paper, we propose CRS-Diff, a new RS generative framework specifically tailored for RS image generation, leveraging the inherent advantages of diffusion models while integrating more advanced control mechanisms. Specifically, CRS-Diff can simultaneously support text-condition, metadata-condition, and image-condition control inputs, thus enabling more precise control to refine the generation process. To effectively integrate multiple condition control information, we introduce a new conditional control mechanism to achieve multi-scale feature fusion, thus enhancing the guiding effect of control conditions. To our knowledge, CRS-Diff is the first multiple-condition controllable RS generative model. Experimental results in single-condition and multiple-condition cases have demonstrated the superior ability of our CRS-Diff to generate RS images both quantitatively and qualitatively compared with previous methods. Additionally, our CRS-Diff can serve as a data engine that generates high-quality training data for downstream tasks, e.g., road extraction. The code is available at https://github.com/Sonettoo/CRS-Diff.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

StructDiff: A Structure-Preserving and Spatially Controllable Diffusion Model for Single-Image Generation

This paper introduces StructDiff, a generative framework based on a single-scale diffusion model for single-image generation. Single-image generation aims to synthesize diverse samples with similar visual content to the source image by capturing its internal statistics, without relying on external data. However, existing methods often struggle to preserve the structural layout, especially for images with large rigid objects or strict spatial constraints. Moreover, most approaches lack spatial controllability, making it difficult to guide the structure or placement of generated content. To address these challenges, StructDiff introduces an adaptive receptive field module to maintain both global and local distributions. Building on this foundation, StructDiff incorporates 3D positional encoding (PE) as a spatial prior, allowing flexible control over positions, scale, and local details of generated objects. To our knowledge, this spatial control capability represents the first exploration of PE-based manipulation in single-image generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation criterion for single-image generation based on large language models (LLMs). This criterion specifically addresses the limitations of existing objective metrics and the high labor costs associated with user studies. StructDiff also demonstrates broad applicability across downstream tasks, such as text-guided image generation, image editing, outpainting, and paint-to-image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructDiff outperforms existing methods in structural consistency, visual quality, and spatial controllability. The project page is available at https://butter-crab.github.io/StructDiff/.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13

DiffuseVAE: Efficient, Controllable and High-Fidelity Generation from Low-Dimensional Latents

Diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate state-of-the-art results on several competitive image synthesis benchmarks but lack a low-dimensional, interpretable latent space, and are slow at generation. On the other hand, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) typically have access to a low-dimensional latent space but exhibit poor sample quality. We present DiffuseVAE, a novel generative framework that integrates VAE within a diffusion model framework, and leverage this to design novel conditional parameterizations for diffusion models. We show that the resulting model equips diffusion models with a low-dimensional VAE inferred latent code which can be used for downstream tasks like controllable synthesis. The proposed method also improves upon the speed vs quality tradeoff exhibited in standard unconditional DDPM/DDIM models (for instance, FID of 16.47 vs 34.36 using a standard DDIM on the CelebA-HQ-128 benchmark using T=10 reverse process steps) without having explicitly trained for such an objective. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits synthesis quality comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard image synthesis benchmarks like CIFAR-10 and CelebA-64 while outperforming most existing VAE-based methods. Lastly, we show that the proposed method exhibits inherent generalization to different types of noise in the conditioning signal. For reproducibility, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/kpandey008/DiffuseVAE.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 2, 2022

Tell What You Hear From What You See -- Video to Audio Generation Through Text

The content of visual and audio scenes is multi-faceted such that a video can be paired with various audio and vice-versa. Thereby, in video-to-audio generation task, it is imperative to introduce steering approaches for controlling the generated audio. While Video-to-Audio generation is a well-established generative task, existing methods lack such controllability. In this work, we propose VATT, a multi-modal generative framework that takes a video and an optional text prompt as input, and generates audio and optional textual description of the audio. Such a framework has two advantages: i) Video-to-Audio generation process can be refined and controlled via text which complements the context of visual information, and ii) The model can suggest what audio to generate for the video by generating audio captions. VATT consists of two key modules: VATT Converter, a LLM that is fine-tuned for instructions and includes a projection layer that maps video features to the LLM vector space; and VATT Audio, a transformer that generates audio tokens from visual frames and from optional text prompt using iterative parallel decoding. The audio tokens are converted to a waveform by pretrained neural codec. Experiments show that when VATT is compared to existing video-to-audio generation methods in objective metrics, it achieves competitive performance when the audio caption is not provided. When the audio caption is provided as a prompt, VATT achieves even more refined performance (lowest KLD score of 1.41). Furthermore, subjective studies show that VATT Audio has been chosen as preferred generated audio than audio generated by existing methods. VATT enables controllable video-to-audio generation through text as well as suggesting text prompts for videos through audio captions, unlocking novel applications such as text-guided video-to-audio generation and video-to-audio captioning.

PAct: Part-Decomposed Single-View Articulated Object Generation

Articulated objects are central to interactive 3D applications, including embodied AI, robotics, and VR/AR, where functional part decomposition and kinematic motion are essential. Yet producing high-fidelity articulated assets remains difficult to scale because it requires reliable part decomposition and kinematic rigging. Existing approaches largely fall into two paradigms: optimization-based reconstruction or distillation, which can be accurate but often takes tens of minutes to hours per instance, and inference-time methods that rely on template or part retrieval, producing plausible results that may not match the specific structure and appearance in the input observation. We introduce a part-centric generative framework for articulated object creation that synthesizes part geometry, composition, and articulation under explicit part-aware conditioning. Our representation models an object as a set of movable parts, each encoded by latent tokens augmented with part identity and articulation cues. Conditioned on a single image, the model generates articulated 3D assets that preserve instance-level correspondence while maintaining valid part structure and motion. The resulting approach avoids per-instance optimization, enables fast feed-forward inference, and supports controllable assembly and articulation, which are important for embodied interaction. Experiments on common articulated categories (e.g., drawers and doors) show improved input consistency, part accuracy, and articulation plausibility over optimization-based and retrieval-driven baselines, while substantially reducing inference time.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 16

LimeCross: Context-Conditioned Layered Image Editing with Structural Consistency

Layered image assets are widely used in real-world creative workflows, enabling non-destructive iteration and flexible re-composition. Recent advances in layered image generation and decomposition synthesize or recover layered representations, yet controllable editing of layered images remains challenging. Manual editing requires careful coordination across layers to maintain consistent illumination and contact, while AI-based pipelines collapse layers into a flattened image for editing, then decompose them again, introducing background-to-foreground leakage and unstable transparency. To address these limitations, we propose LimeCross, a training-free context-conditioned layered image editing framework that edits user-selected RGBA layers according to text while keeping the remaining layers unchanged. It leverages contextual cues from other layers using a bi-stream attention mechanism to preserve cross-layer consistency, while explicitly maintaining layer integrity to prevent the contamination of edited layers. To evaluate our approach, we introduce LayerEditBench, a benchmark of 1500 layered scenes with paired source/target prompts, along with evaluation protocols that assess both edit fidelity and alpha channel stability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LimeCross improves layer purity and composite realism over strong editing baselines, establishing context-conditioned layered editing as a principled framework for controllable generative creation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 10

Lumina-mGPT 2.0: Stand-Alone AutoRegressive Image Modeling

We present Lumina-mGPT 2.0, a stand-alone, decoder-only autoregressive model that revisits and revitalizes the autoregressive paradigm for high-quality image generation and beyond. Unlike existing approaches that rely on pretrained components or hybrid architectures, Lumina-mGPT 2.0 is trained entirely from scratch, enabling unrestricted architectural design and licensing freedom. It achieves generation quality on par with state-of-the-art diffusion models such as DALL-E 3 and SANA, while preserving the inherent flexibility and compositionality of autoregressive modeling. Our unified tokenization scheme allows the model to seamlessly handle a wide spectrum of tasks-including subject-driven generation, image editing, controllable synthesis, and dense prediction-within a single generative framework. To further boost usability, we incorporate efficient decoding strategies like inference-time scaling and speculative Jacobi sampling to improve quality and speed, respectively. Extensive evaluations on standard text-to-image benchmarks (e.g., GenEval, DPG) demonstrate that Lumina-mGPT 2.0 not only matches but in some cases surpasses diffusion-based models. Moreover, we confirm its multi-task capabilities on the Graph200K benchmark, with the native Lumina-mGPT 2.0 performing exceptionally well. These results position Lumina-mGPT 2.0 as a strong, flexible foundation model for unified multimodal generation. We have released our training details, code, and models at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-mGPT-2.0.

  • 21 authors
·
Jul 23, 2025

SCEdit: Efficient and Controllable Image Diffusion Generation via Skip Connection Editing

Image diffusion models have been utilized in various tasks, such as text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis. Recent research has introduced tuning methods that make subtle adjustments to the original models, yielding promising results in specific adaptations of foundational generative diffusion models. Rather than modifying the main backbone of the diffusion model, we delve into the role of skip connection in U-Net and reveal that hierarchical features aggregating long-distance information across encoder and decoder make a significant impact on the content and quality of image generation. Based on the observation, we propose an efficient generative tuning framework, dubbed SCEdit, which integrates and edits Skip Connection using a lightweight tuning module named SC-Tuner. Furthermore, the proposed framework allows for straightforward extension to controllable image synthesis by injecting different conditions with Controllable SC-Tuner, simplifying and unifying the network design for multi-condition inputs. Our SCEdit substantially reduces training parameters, memory usage, and computational expense due to its lightweight tuners, with backward propagation only passing to the decoder blocks. Extensive experiments conducted on text-to-image generation and controllable image synthesis tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of efficiency and performance. Project page: https://scedit.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 18, 2023 3

Semantically Controllable Augmentations for Generalizable Robot Learning

Generalization to unseen real-world scenarios for robot manipulation requires exposure to diverse datasets during training. However, collecting large real-world datasets is intractable due to high operational costs. For robot learning to generalize despite these challenges, it is essential to leverage sources of data or priors beyond the robot's direct experience. In this work, we posit that image-text generative models, which are pre-trained on large corpora of web-scraped data, can serve as such a data source. These generative models encompass a broad range of real-world scenarios beyond a robot's direct experience and can synthesize novel synthetic experiences that expose robotic agents to additional world priors aiding real-world generalization at no extra cost. In particular, our approach leverages pre-trained generative models as an effective tool for data augmentation. We propose a generative augmentation framework for semantically controllable augmentations and rapidly multiplying robot datasets while inducing rich variations that enable real-world generalization. Based on diverse augmentations of robot data, we show how scalable robot manipulation policies can be trained and deployed both in simulation and in unseen real-world environments such as kitchens and table-tops. By demonstrating the effectiveness of image-text generative models in diverse real-world robotic applications, our generative augmentation framework provides a scalable and efficient path for boosting generalization in robot learning at no extra human cost.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024

HiGR: Industrial-Scale Hierarchical Generative Slate Recommendation Framework in Tencent

Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. While recent generative recommendation methods have shown strong potential in modeling item sequences with semantic IDs, directly applying them to industrial-scale slate recommendation faces a fundamental disconnect: entangled SID spaces confound high-level list planning, fine-grained autoregressive decoding over long sequences limits semantic planning efficiency, and token-level objectives misalign with holistic slate quality. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an industrial-scale hierarchical generative framework for slate recommendation that bridges this disconnect through a co-designed pipeline. First, HiGR learns structured SIDs via a Prefix-Contrastive Residual Quantized VAE (PCRQ-VAE). By enforcing high-level prefixes to capture shared semantics, PCRQ-VAE creates a controllable discrete space that acts as a prerequisite for efficient planning. Leveraging this structured space, our Hierarchical Slate Decoder (HSD) shifts autoregressive modeling from entangled token-level decoding to coarse-grained preference embeddings. This design significantly reduces inference latency while allowing explicit global slate structure planning. Finally, this stable planning space enables an ORPO-based listwise alignment mechanism to optimize triple-objective implicit feedback-ranking fidelity, genuine user interest, and diversity. Extensive offline experiments show that HiGR outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a 5times inference speedup. Online A/B tests on Tencent platforms further improve watch time by 1.22% and video plays by 1.73%. HiGR has been deployed on multiple Tencent platform surfaces, serving hundreds of millions of users and proving its industrial-scale applicability.

  • 13 authors
·
Jun 10

Generative AI for Urban Design: A Stepwise Approach Integrating Human Expertise with Multimodal Diffusion Models

Urban design is a multifaceted process that demands careful consideration of site-specific constraints and collaboration among diverse professionals and stakeholders. The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) offers transformative potential by improving the efficiency of design generation and facilitating the communication of design ideas. However, most existing approaches are not well integrated with human design workflows. They often follow end-to-end pipelines with limited control, overlooking the iterative nature of real-world design. This study proposes a stepwise generative urban design framework that integrates multimodal diffusion models with human expertise to enable more adaptive and controllable design processes. Instead of generating design outcomes in a single end-to-end process, the framework divides the process into three key stages aligned with established urban design workflows: (1) road network and land use planning, (2) building layout planning, and (3) detailed planning and rendering. At each stage, multimodal diffusion models generate preliminary designs based on textual prompts and image-based constraints, which can then be reviewed and refined by human designers. We design an evaluation framework to assess the fidelity, compliance, and diversity of the generated designs. Experiments using data from Chicago and New York City demonstrate that our framework outperforms baseline models and end-to-end approaches across all three dimensions. This study underscores the benefits of multimodal diffusion models and stepwise generation in preserving human control and facilitating iterative refinements, laying the groundwork for human-AI interaction in urban design solutions.

  • 8 authors
·
May 29, 2025

Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Controllable Image-to-Image Translation

We propose a unified Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for controllable image-to-image translation, i.e., transferring an image from a source to a target domain guided by controllable structures. In addition to conditioning on a reference image, we show how the model can generate images conditioned on controllable structures, e.g., class labels, object keypoints, human skeletons, and scene semantic maps. The proposed model consists of a single generator and a discriminator taking a conditional image and the target controllable structure as input. In this way, the conditional image can provide appearance information and the controllable structure can provide the structure information for generating the target result. Moreover, our model learns the image-to-image mapping through three novel losses, i.e., color loss, controllable structure guided cycle-consistency loss, and controllable structure guided self-content preserving loss. Also, we present the Fr\'echet ResNet Distance (FRD) to evaluate the quality of the generated images. Experiments on two challenging image translation tasks, i.e., hand gesture-to-gesture translation and cross-view image translation, show that our model generates convincing results, and significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on both tasks. Meanwhile, the proposed framework is a unified solution, thus it can be applied to solving other controllable structure guided image translation tasks such as landmark guided facial expression translation and keypoint guided person image generation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make one GAN framework work on all such controllable structure guided image translation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Ha0Tang/GestureGAN.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 12, 2019

ChildDiffusion: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI and Controllable Augmentations for Child Facial Data using Stable Diffusion and Large Language Models

In this research work we have proposed high-level ChildDiffusion framework capable of generating photorealistic child facial samples and further embedding several intelligent augmentations on child facial data using short text prompts, detailed textual guidance from LLMs, and further image to image transformation using text guidance control conditioning thus providing an opportunity to curate fully synthetic large scale child datasets. The framework is validated by rendering high-quality child faces representing ethnicity data, micro expressions, face pose variations, eye blinking effects, facial accessories, different hair colours and styles, aging, multiple and different child gender subjects in a single frame. Addressing privacy concerns regarding child data acquisition requires a comprehensive approach that involves legal, ethical, and technological considerations. Keeping this in view this framework can be adapted to synthesise child facial data which can be effectively used for numerous downstream machine learning tasks. The proposed method circumvents common issues encountered in generative AI tools, such as temporal inconsistency and limited control over the rendered outputs. As an exemplary use case we have open-sourced child ethnicity data consisting of 2.5k child facial samples of five different classes which includes African, Asian, White, South Asian/ Indian, and Hispanic races by deploying the model in production inference phase. The rendered data undergoes rigorous qualitative as well as quantitative tests to cross validate its efficacy and further fine-tuning Yolo architecture for detecting and classifying child ethnicity as an exemplary downstream machine learning task.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024

PhyCo: Learning Controllable Physical Priors for Generative Motion

Modern video diffusion models excel at appearance synthesis but still struggle with physical consistency: objects drift, collisions lack realistic rebound, and material responses seldom match their underlying properties. We present PhyCo, a framework that introduces continuous, interpretable, and physically grounded control into video generation. Our approach integrates three key components: (i) a large-scale dataset of over 100K photorealistic simulation videos where friction, restitution, deformation, and force are systematically varied across diverse scenarios; (ii) physics-supervised fine-tuning of a pretrained diffusion model using a ControlNet conditioned on pixel-aligned physical property maps; and (iii) VLM-guided reward optimization, where a fine-tuned vision-language model evaluates generated videos with targeted physics queries and provides differentiable feedback. This combination enables a generative model to produce physically consistent and controllable outputs through variations in physical attributes-without any simulator or geometry reconstruction at inference. On the Physics-IQ benchmark, PhyCo significantly improves physical realism over strong baselines, and human studies confirm clearer and more faithful control over physical attributes. Our results demonstrate a scalable path toward physically consistent, controllable generative video models that generalize beyond synthetic training environments.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 29 1

DreamID-Omni: Unified Framework for Controllable Human-Centric Audio-Video Generation

Recent advancements in foundation models have revolutionized joint audio-video generation. However, existing approaches typically treat human-centric tasks including reference-based audio-video generation (R2AV), video editing (RV2AV) and audio-driven video animation (RA2V) as isolated objectives. Furthermore, achieving precise, disentangled control over multiple character identities and voice timbres within a single framework remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose DreamID-Omni, a unified framework for controllable human-centric audio-video generation. Specifically, we design a Symmetric Conditional Diffusion Transformer that integrates heterogeneous conditioning signals via a symmetric conditional injection scheme. To resolve the pervasive identity-timbre binding failures and speaker confusion in multi-person scenarios, we introduce a Dual-Level Disentanglement strategy: Synchronized RoPE at the signal level to ensure rigid attention-space binding, and Structured Captions at the semantic level to establish explicit attribute-subject mappings. Furthermore, we devise a Multi-Task Progressive Training scheme that leverages weakly-constrained generative priors to regularize strongly-constrained tasks, preventing overfitting and harmonizing disparate objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamID-Omni achieves comprehensive state-of-the-art performance across video, audio, and audio-visual consistency, even outperforming leading proprietary commercial models. We will release our code to bridge the gap between academic research and commercial-grade applications.

ByteDance ByteDance
·
Feb 12 5

FireRedTTS: A Foundation Text-To-Speech Framework for Industry-Level Generative Speech Applications

This work proposes FireRedTTS, a foundation text-to-speech framework, to meet the growing demands for personalized and diverse generative speech applications. The framework comprises three parts: data processing, foundation system, and downstream applications. First, we comprehensively present our data processing pipeline, which transforms massive raw audio into a large-scale high-quality TTS dataset with rich annotations and a wide coverage of content, speaking style, and timbre. Then, we propose a language-model-based foundation TTS system. The speech signal is compressed into discrete semantic tokens via a semantic-aware speech tokenizer, and can be generated by a language model from the prompt text and audio. Then, a two-stage waveform generator is proposed to decode them to the high-fidelity waveform. We present two applications of this system: voice cloning for dubbing and human-like speech generation for chatbots. The experimental results demonstrate the solid in-context learning capability of FireRedTTS, which can stably synthesize high-quality speech consistent with the prompt text and audio. For dubbing, FireRedTTS can clone target voices in a zero-shot way for the UGC scenario and adapt to studio-level expressive voice characters in the PUGC scenario via few-shot fine-tuning with 1-hour recording. Moreover, FireRedTTS achieves controllable human-like speech generation in a casual style with paralinguistic behaviors and emotions via instruction tuning, to better serve spoken chatbots.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 5, 2024 1

Dimension-Reduction Attack! Video Generative Models are Experts on Controllable Image Synthesis

Video generative models can be regarded as world simulators due to their ability to capture dynamic, continuous changes inherent in real-world environments. These models integrate high-dimensional information across visual, temporal, spatial, and causal dimensions, enabling predictions of subjects in various status. A natural and valuable research direction is to explore whether a fully trained video generative model in high-dimensional space can effectively support lower-dimensional tasks such as controllable image generation. In this work, we propose a paradigm for video-to-image knowledge compression and task adaptation, termed Dimension-Reduction Attack (DRA-Ctrl), which utilizes the strengths of video models, including long-range context modeling and flatten full-attention, to perform various generation tasks. Specially, to address the challenging gap between continuous video frames and discrete image generation, we introduce a mixup-based transition strategy that ensures smooth adaptation. Moreover, we redesign the attention structure with a tailored masking mechanism to better align text prompts with image-level control. Experiments across diverse image generation tasks, such as subject-driven and spatially conditioned generation, show that repurposed video models outperform those trained directly on images. These results highlight the untapped potential of large-scale video generators for broader visual applications. DRA-Ctrl provides new insights into reusing resource-intensive video models and lays foundation for future unified generative models across visual modalities. The project page is https://dra-ctrl-2025.github.io/DRA-Ctrl/.

  • 7 authors
·
May 29, 2025

HomeWorld: A Unified Floorplan-to-Furnished Framework for Generating Controllable, Densely Interactive Whole-Home Scenes

Indoor scene generation is crucial for robot simulation and modern interior design. However, complex layouts together with scarce 3D scene data make learning-based generation challenging. Existing methods often rely on hand-crafted rules or focus on isolated sub-tasks (e.g., floorplan synthesis or single-room furnishing), producing whole-home scenes that lack global coherence, realism, and simulation readiness. To mitigate these limitations, we propose a unified hierarchical framework that decomposes indoor scene synthesis into controllable stages. First, we curate a large-scale dataset of 300K real residential floorplans to train a large language model for whole-home floorplan generation. With detailed descriptions and a K-D tree-based representation, our method enables fine-grained, controllable whole-home floorplan generation. Building upon the generated whole-home floorplan, we leverage image generation models to draft furniture layouts from multi-level roaming viewpoints, and then generate the layouts of small manipulable objects on different supporting surfaces (e.g., cabinets, desks, and dining tables) for embodied AI simulation. During furniture and object layout generation, a VLM-based refiner iteratively corrects furniture and object placement, and a 3D generative model enables flexible replacement of individual assets. We further attach basic physical attributes and simple surface texture and lighting setups to complete the pipeline for embodied AI use. Experiments and user studies demonstrate that our pipeline produces indoor spaces with greater layout diversity and stronger 3D design appeal, outperforming prior methods on both quantitative and qualitative metrics. Finally, alongside our generation pipeline, we will release the floorplan dataset and 5K fully furnished scenes to the community. Project Page: https://kairos-homeworld.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3

Auditing and Generating Synthetic Data with Controllable Trust Trade-offs

Data collected from the real world tends to be biased, unbalanced, and at risk of exposing sensitive and private information. This reality has given rise to the idea of creating synthetic datasets to alleviate risk, bias, harm, and privacy concerns inherent in the real data. This concept relies on Generative AI models to produce unbiased, privacy-preserving synthetic data while being true to the real data. In this new paradigm, how can we tell if this approach delivers on its promises? We present an auditing framework that offers a holistic assessment of synthetic datasets and AI models trained on them, centered around bias and discrimination prevention, fidelity to the real data, utility, robustness, and privacy preservation. We showcase our framework by auditing multiple generative models on diverse use cases, including education, healthcare, banking, human resources, and across different modalities, from tabular, to time-series, to natural language. Our use cases demonstrate the importance of a holistic assessment in order to ensure compliance with socio-technical safeguards that regulators and policymakers are increasingly enforcing. For this purpose, we introduce the trust index that ranks multiple synthetic datasets based on their prescribed safeguards and their desired trade-offs. Moreover, we devise a trust-index-driven model selection and cross-validation procedure via auditing in the training loop that we showcase on a class of transformer models that we dub TrustFormers, across different modalities. This trust-driven model selection allows for controllable trust trade-offs in the resulting synthetic data. We instrument our auditing framework with workflows that connect different stakeholders from model development to audit and certification via a synthetic data auditing report.

  • 14 authors
·
Apr 21, 2023

Light-X: Generative 4D Video Rendering with Camera and Illumination Control

Recent advances in illumination control extend image-based methods to video, yet still facing a trade-off between lighting fidelity and temporal consistency. Moving beyond relighting, a key step toward generative modeling of real-world scenes is the joint control of camera trajectory and illumination, since visual dynamics are inherently shaped by both geometry and lighting. To this end, we present Light-X, a video generation framework that enables controllable rendering from monocular videos with both viewpoint and illumination control. 1) We propose a disentangled design that decouples geometry and lighting signals: geometry and motion are captured via dynamic point clouds projected along user-defined camera trajectories, while illumination cues are provided by a relit frame consistently projected into the same geometry. These explicit, fine-grained cues enable effective disentanglement and guide high-quality illumination. 2) To address the lack of paired multi-view and multi-illumination videos, we introduce Light-Syn, a degradation-based pipeline with inverse-mapping that synthesizes training pairs from in-the-wild monocular footage. This strategy yields a dataset covering static, dynamic, and AI-generated scenes, ensuring robust training. Extensive experiments show that Light-X outperforms baseline methods in joint camera-illumination control and surpasses prior video relighting methods under both text- and background-conditioned settings.

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

RealGen: Retrieval Augmented Generation for Controllable Traffic Scenarios

Simulation plays a crucial role in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) due to the potential risks associated with real-world testing. Although significant progress has been made in the visual aspects of simulators, generating complex behavior among agents remains a formidable challenge. It is not only imperative to ensure realism in the scenarios generated but also essential to incorporate preferences and conditions to facilitate controllable generation for AV training and evaluation. Traditional methods, mainly relying on memorizing the distribution of training datasets, often fall short in generating unseen scenarios. Inspired by the success of retrieval augmented generation in large language models, we present RealGen, a novel retrieval-based in-context learning framework for traffic scenario generation. RealGen synthesizes new scenarios by combining behaviors from multiple retrieved examples in a gradient-free way, which may originate from templates or tagged scenarios. This in-context learning framework endows versatile generative capabilities, including the ability to edit scenarios, compose various behaviors, and produce critical scenarios. Evaluations show that RealGen offers considerable flexibility and controllability, marking a new direction in the field of controllable traffic scenario generation. Check our project website for more information: https://realgen.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023

DrivingGen: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Generative Video World Models in Autonomous Driving

Video generation models, as one form of world models, have emerged as one of the most exciting frontiers in AI, promising agents the ability to imagine the future by modeling the temporal evolution of complex scenes. In autonomous driving, this vision gives rise to driving world models: generative simulators that imagine ego and agent futures, enabling scalable simulation, safe testing of corner cases, and rich synthetic data generation. Yet, despite fast-growing research activity, the field lacks a rigorous benchmark to measure progress and guide priorities. Existing evaluations remain limited: generic video metrics overlook safety-critical imaging factors; trajectory plausibility is rarely quantified; temporal and agent-level consistency is neglected; and controllability with respect to ego conditioning is ignored. Moreover, current datasets fail to cover the diversity of conditions required for real-world deployment. To address these gaps, we present DrivingGen, the first comprehensive benchmark for generative driving world models. DrivingGen combines a diverse evaluation dataset curated from both driving datasets and internet-scale video sources, spanning varied weather, time of day, geographic regions, and complex maneuvers, with a suite of new metrics that jointly assess visual realism, trajectory plausibility, temporal coherence, and controllability. Benchmarking 14 state-of-the-art models reveals clear trade-offs: general models look better but break physics, while driving-specific ones capture motion realistically but lag in visual quality. DrivingGen offers a unified evaluation framework to foster reliable, controllable, and deployable driving world models, enabling scalable simulation, planning, and data-driven decision-making.

Wh0: Generative World Models as Scalable Sources of Egocentric Human Hand Manipulation Data

Scaling dexterous manipulation requires generalization across objects, scenes, and tasks, yet existing data sources face a trade-off between scale and scene/embodiment alignment: teleoperation data is well aligned with robot deployment but expensive to collect; simulation is scalable but limited by the sim-to-real gap; and real egocentric videos scale effectively but remain misaligned with robot deployment. We propose Wh0, a framework that uses generative video world models as scalable and controllable sources of egocentric human-hand manipulation data to unlock the manipulation capabilities of pretrained dexterous VLA models. Conditioned on language, objects, and scenes, Wh0 uses a generative world model to produce WM-H, a 50k-episode dataset of egocentric human-object interaction videos. Wh0 then converts the generated videos into robot-trainable supervision through hand motion reconstruction and visual editing. Co-trained with a limited amount of real robot data, WM-H adapts pretrained VLA models to dexterous manipulation deployment. Across 18 real-world dexterous manipulation tasks, compared with a model post-trained only on robot data, Wh0 improves zero-shot success on unseen tasks from 8.3% to 38.9%. Ablation studies further show that scalable generation and scene/embodiment alignment are key drivers of performance gains. Videos and open-source code can be found on our project website: https://chenyt31.github.io/wh0.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
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Jun 22

GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos

Generative game engines have the potential to revolutionize game development by autonomously creating new content and reducing manual workload. However, existing video-based game generation methods fail to address the critical challenge of scene generalization, limiting their applicability to existing games with fixed styles and scenes. In this paper, we present GameFactory, a framework focused on exploring scene generalization in game video generation. To enable the creation of entirely new and diverse games, we leverage pre-trained video diffusion models trained on open-domain video data. To bridge the domain gap between open-domain priors and small-scale game dataset, we propose a multi-phase training strategy that decouples game style learning from action control, preserving open-domain generalization while achieving action controllability. Using Minecraft as our data source, we release GF-Minecraft, a high-quality and diversity action-annotated video dataset for research. Furthermore, we extend our framework to enable autoregressive action-controllable game video generation, allowing the production of unlimited-length interactive game videos. Experimental results demonstrate that GameFactory effectively generates open-domain, diverse, and action-controllable game videos, representing a significant step forward in AI-driven game generation. Our dataset and project page are publicly available at https://vvictoryuki.github.io/gamefactory/.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 14, 2025 4

Narrative Weaver: Towards Controllable Long-Range Visual Consistency with Multi-Modal Conditioning

We present "Narrative Weaver", a novel framework that addresses a fundamental challenge in generative AI: achieving multi-modal controllable, long-range, and consistent visual content generation. While existing models excel at generating high-fidelity short-form visual content, they struggle to maintain narrative coherence and visual consistency across extended sequences - a critical limitation for real-world applications such as filmmaking and e-commerce advertising. Narrative Weaver introduces the first holistic solution that seamlessly integrates three essential capabilities: fine-grained control, automatic narrative planning, and long-range coherence. Our architecture combines a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for high-level narrative planning with a novel fine-grained control module featuring a dynamic Memory Bank that prevents visual drift. To enable practical deployment, we develop a progressive, multi-stage training strategy that efficiently leverages existing pre-trained models, achieving state-of-the-art performance even with limited training data. Recognizing the absence of suitable evaluation benchmarks, we construct and release the E-commerce Advertising Video Storyboard Dataset (EAVSD) - the first comprehensive dataset for this task, containing over 330K high-quality images with rich narrative annotations. Through extensive experiments across three distinct scenarios (controllable multi-scene generation, autonomous storytelling, and e-commerce advertising), we demonstrate our method's superiority while opening new possibilities for AI-driven content creation.

  • 6 authors
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Mar 12

Wan-Move: Motion-controllable Video Generation via Latent Trajectory Guidance

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Dec 9, 2025 5

Champ: Controllable and Consistent Human Image Animation with 3D Parametric Guidance

In this study, we introduce a methodology for human image animation by leveraging a 3D human parametric model within a latent diffusion framework to enhance shape alignment and motion guidance in curernt human generative techniques. The methodology utilizes the SMPL(Skinned Multi-Person Linear) model as the 3D human parametric model to establish a unified representation of body shape and pose. This facilitates the accurate capture of intricate human geometry and motion characteristics from source videos. Specifically, we incorporate rendered depth images, normal maps, and semantic maps obtained from SMPL sequences, alongside skeleton-based motion guidance, to enrich the conditions to the latent diffusion model with comprehensive 3D shape and detailed pose attributes. A multi-layer motion fusion module, integrating self-attention mechanisms, is employed to fuse the shape and motion latent representations in the spatial domain. By representing the 3D human parametric model as the motion guidance, we can perform parametric shape alignment of the human body between the reference image and the source video motion. Experimental evaluations conducted on benchmark datasets demonstrate the methodology's superior ability to generate high-quality human animations that accurately capture both pose and shape variations. Furthermore, our approach also exhibits superior generalization capabilities on the proposed wild dataset. Project page: https://fudan-generative-vision.github.io/champ.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024 2

GenView: Enhancing View Quality with Pretrained Generative Model for Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning has achieved remarkable success in acquiring high-quality representations from unlabeled data. The widely adopted contrastive learning framework aims to learn invariant representations by minimizing the distance between positive views originating from the same image. However, existing techniques to construct positive views highly rely on manual transformations, resulting in limited diversity and potentially false positive pairs. To tackle these challenges, we present GenView, a controllable framework that augments the diversity of positive views leveraging the power of pretrained generative models while preserving semantics. We develop an adaptive view generation method that dynamically adjusts the noise level in sampling to ensure the preservation of essential semantic meaning while introducing variability. Additionally, we introduce a quality-driven contrastive loss, which assesses the quality of positive pairs by considering both foreground similarity and background diversity. This loss prioritizes the high-quality positive pairs we construct while reducing the influence of low-quality pairs, thereby mitigating potential semantic inconsistencies introduced by generative models and aggressive data augmentation. Thanks to the improved positive view quality and the quality-driven contrastive loss, GenView significantly improves self-supervised learning across various tasks. For instance, GenView improves MoCov2 performance by 2.5%/2.2% on ImageNet linear/semi-supervised classification. Moreover, GenView even performs much better than naively augmenting the ImageNet dataset with Laion400M or ImageNet21K. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaojieli0903/genview.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 18, 2024

A Vision-language Framework for Comparative Reasoning in Radiology

Medical imaging artificial intelligence has achieved strong performance in isolated image interpretation, but remains poorly aligned with radiological practice, where diagnosis and follow-up rely on comparison across prior studies and analogous reference cases. Here we formulate radiological comparison as an entity-aware cross-image reasoning problem and introduce a framework that supports both reference-case retrieval and temporal comparative interpretation. We construct MedReCo-DB, a large-scale comparative imaging resource derived from routine image-report pairs, comprising more than 690,000 images from over 160,000 patients across eight institutions, four countries and seven imaging modalities. Reports are decomposed into anatomical structures, abnormal findings and pathological conditions to provide supervision for entity-conditioned retrieval and comparative visual question answering. Using this resource, we develop MedReCo, an entity-aware visual encoder for controllable retrieval of clinically analogous cases, and MedReCo-VLM, a vision--language extension for generative interpretation of interval change. Across internal, external and cross-center evaluations, MedReCo achieved the highest Recall@1 in all 12 internal retrieval settings and improved external retrieval by a mean of 6.0 percentage points. In clinically confusable differential groups, it consistently outperformed the strongest baselines. MedReCo-VLM achieved the best performance across all comparative generation evaluations and improved longitudinal follow-up accuracy by 14.5-46.5 percentage points on chest radiographs and 13.0-27.9 percentage points on CT. These findings suggest that entity-aware comparative reasoning can be learned from routine clinical data at scale and may provide a more clinically aligned foundation for medical imaging AI.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 7

UniControl: A Unified Diffusion Model for Controllable Visual Generation In the Wild

Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural, or geometric controls. The integration of such controls, which can accommodate various visual conditions in a single unified model, remains an unaddressed challenge. In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts. UniControl enables pixel-level-precise image generation, where visual conditions primarily influence the generated structures and language prompts guide the style and context. To equip UniControl with the capacity to handle diverse visual conditions, we augment pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and introduce a task-aware HyperNet to modulate the diffusion models, enabling the adaptation to different C2I tasks simultaneously. Trained on nine unique C2I tasks, UniControl demonstrates impressive zero-shot generation abilities with unseen visual conditions. Experimental results show that UniControl often surpasses the performance of single-task-controlled methods of comparable model sizes. This control versatility positions UniControl as a significant advancement in the realm of controllable visual generation.

  • 13 authors
·
May 18, 2023 1

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Text Embedding Interpolation for Continuous Image Steering

We present a training-free framework for continuous and controllable image editing at test time for text-conditioned generative models. In contrast to prior approaches that rely on additional training or manual user intervention, we find that a simple steering in the text-embedding space is sufficient to produce smooth edit control. Given a target concept (e.g., enhancing photorealism or changing facial expression), we use a large language model to automatically construct a small set of debiased contrastive prompt pairs, from which we compute a steering vector in the generator's text-encoder space. We then add this vector directly to the input prompt representation to control generation along the desired semantic axis. To obtain a continuous control, we propose an elastic range search procedure that automatically identifies an effective interval of steering magnitudes, avoiding both under-steering (no-edit) and over-steering (changing other attributes). Adding the scaled versions of the same vector within this interval yields smooth and continuous edits. Since our method modifies only textual representations, it naturally generalizes across text-conditioned modalities, including image and video generation. To quantify the steering continuity, we introduce a new evaluation metric that measures the uniformity of semantic change across edit strengths. We compare the continuous editing behavior across methods and find that, despite its simplicity and lightweight design, our approach is comparable to training-based alternatives, outperforming other training-free methods.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 17

DreamShot: Personalized Storyboard Synthesis with Video Diffusion Prior

Storyboard synthesis plays a crucial role in visual storytelling, aiming to generate coherent shot sequences that visually narrate cinematic events with consistent characters, scenes, and transitions. However, existing approaches are mostly adapted from text-to-image diffusion models, which struggle to maintain long-range temporal coherence, consistent character identities, and narrative flow across multiple shots. In this paper, we introduce DreamShot, a video generative model based storyboard framework that fully exploits powerful video diffusion priors for controllable multi-shot synthesis. DreamShot supports both Text-to-Shot and Reference-to-Shot generation, as well as story continuation conditioned on previous frames, enabling flexible and context-aware storyboard generation. By leveraging the spatial-temporal consistency inherent in video generative models, DreamShot produces visually and semantically coherent sequences with improved narrative fidelity and character continuity. Furthermore, DreamShot incorporates a multi-reference role conditioning module that accepts multiple character reference images and enforces identity alignment via a Role-Attention Consistency Loss, explicitly constraining attention between reference and generated roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamShot achieves superior scene coherence, role consistency, and generation efficiency compared to state-of-the-art text-to-image storyboard models, establishing a new direction toward controllable video model-driven visual storytelling.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 18

StepAudio 2.5 Technical Report

Unified audio-language modeling has emerged as a prominent trend in modern speech systems, promising to bring the reasoning capabilities of large language models to auditory tasks. However, existing unified foundations often struggle to match the depth of specialized systems across automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), and realtime spoken interaction. Bridging this gap remains an open challenge. This report presents StepAudio 2.5, a unified audio-language foundation model that matches or exceeds specialized systems across all three capabilities. Rather than treating these tasks as architecturally distinct, we operate on the premise that once text and audio share a multimodal representational space, task specialization becomes a matter of operational regimes: data construction, optimization targets, and decoding constraints. Guided by this insight, we advance the post-training paradigm from standard supervised learning to task-tailored Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), using it as the primary mechanism to define complex optimization targets. We leverage this RLHF-centric alignment, alongside specialized decoding, to shape a shared backbone into three distinct operational modes. Concretely, the ASR branch advances transcription efficiency via verifiable multi-token decoding; the TTS branch achieves controllable, expressive synthesis through preference-based RLHF and context-rich supervision; and the Realtime branch realizes low-latency, persona-consistent dialogue via generative reward modeling within an RLHF framework. On standard benchmarks, StepAudio 2.5 achieves state-of-the-art results across ASR, TTS, and Realtime, demonstrating that a singular audio-language foundation can successfully internalize the distinct deployment objectives of speech understanding, generation, and live interaction.

  • 101 authors
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May 21 2

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.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 14, 2022

Gated Condition Injection without Multimodal Attention: Towards Controllable Linear-Attention Transformers

Recent advances in diffusion-based controllable visual generation have led to remarkable improvements in image quality. However, these powerful models are typically deployed on cloud servers due to their large computational demands, raising serious concerns about user data privacy. To enable secure and efficient on-device generation, we explore in this paper controllable diffusion models built upon linear attention architectures, which offer superior scalability and efficiency, even on edge devices. Yet, our experiments reveal that existing controllable generation frameworks, such as ControlNet and OminiControl, either lack the flexibility to support multiple heterogeneous condition types or suffer from slow convergence on such linear-attention models. To address these limitations, we propose a novel controllable diffusion framework tailored for linear attention backbones like SANA. The core of our method lies in a unified gated conditioning module working in a dual-path pipeline, which effectively integrates multi-type conditional inputs, such as spatially aligned and non-aligned cues. Extensive experiments on multiple tasks and benchmarks demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art controllable generation performance based on linear-attention models, surpassing existing methods in terms of fidelity and controllability.

Trajectory Forcing: Structure-First Generation with Controllable Semantic Trajectories

Diffusion and flow-based generative models produce strong images, yet their controllability remains largely endpoint-centric: users specify conditions and receive final outputs, while the intermediate generative dynamics remain hidden. Recent methods have begun to exploit generation order and process decomposition to improve sample quality, but still treat intermediate states as internal computation rather than objects for interaction. We propose Trajectory Forcing (TF), a trajectory-centric framework that makes the generation path explicit, semantic, and editable. TF organizes synthesis as a sequence of semantically structured stages, progressing from global layout to object-, part-, and detail-level representations. Each stage produces a decodable latent state that can be inspected, evaluated, and locally edited before the next stage begins. To instantiate this path, we derive coarse-to-fine teacher hierarchies by clustering pretrained visual representations such as DINOv2, and train a hierarchy-conditioned one-step flow-matching model at each level. We further introduce trajectory-aware metrics that measure structural consistency and local controllability beyond endpoint quality metrics such as FID. Experiments show that TF achieves competitive sample quality while exposing coherent intermediate states and supporting localized edits across semantic levels. By shifting the focus from final images to the generative path itself, TF opens a route toward controllable, trajectory-aware image synthesis.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 20

RelaCtrl: Relevance-Guided Efficient Control for Diffusion Transformers

The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing text-to-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the "ControlNet Relevance Score"-i.e., the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta. More examples are available at https://relactrl.github.io/RelaCtrl/.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 20, 2025 2

AttriCtrl: Fine-Grained Control of Aesthetic Attribute Intensity in Diffusion Models

Recent breakthroughs in text-to-image diffusion models have significantly enhanced both the visual fidelity and semantic controllability of generated images. However, fine-grained control over aesthetic attributes remains challenging, especially when users require continuous and intensity-specific adjustments. Existing approaches often rely on vague textual prompts, which are inherently ambiguous in expressing both the aesthetic semantics and the desired intensity, or depend on costly human preference data for alignment, limiting their scalability and practicality. To address these limitations, we propose AttriCtrl, a plug-and-play framework for precise and continuous control of aesthetic attributes. Specifically, we quantify abstract aesthetics by leveraging semantic similarity from pre-trained vision-language models, and employ a lightweight value encoder that maps scalar intensities in [0,1] to learnable embeddings within diffusion-based generation. This design enables intuitive and customizable aesthetic manipulation, with minimal training overhead and seamless integration into existing generation pipelines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AttriCtrl achieves accurate control over individual attributes as well as flexible multi-attribute composition. Moreover, it is fully compatible with popular open-source controllable generation frameworks, showcasing strong integration capability and practical utility across diverse generation scenarios.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 4, 2025

ImprovNet -- Generating Controllable Musical Improvisations with Iterative Corruption Refinement

Despite deep learning's remarkable advances in style transfer across various domains, generating controllable performance-level musical style transfer for complete symbolically represented musical works remains a challenging area of research. Much of this is owed to limited datasets, especially for genres such as jazz, and the lack of unified models that can handle multiple music generation tasks. This paper presents ImprovNet, a transformer-based architecture that generates expressive and controllable musical improvisations through a self-supervised corruption-refinement training strategy. The improvisational style transfer is aimed at making meaningful modifications to one or more musical elements - melody, harmony or rhythm of the original composition with respect to the target genre. ImprovNet unifies multiple capabilities within a single model: it can perform cross-genre and intra-genre improvisations, harmonize melodies with genre-specific styles, and execute short prompt continuation and infilling tasks. The model's iterative generation framework allows users to control the degree of style transfer and structural similarity to the original composition. Objective and subjective evaluations demonstrate ImprovNet's effectiveness in generating musically coherent improvisations while maintaining structural relationships with the original pieces. The model outperforms Anticipatory Music Transformer in short continuation and infilling tasks and successfully achieves recognizable genre conversion, with 79\% of participants correctly identifying jazz-style improvisations of classical pieces. Our code and demo page can be found at https://github.com/keshavbhandari/improvnet.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 6, 2025

MagicMotion: Controllable Video Generation with Dense-to-Sparse Trajectory Guidance

Recent advances in video generation have led to remarkable improvements in visual quality and temporal coherence. Upon this, trajectory-controllable video generation has emerged to enable precise object motion control through explicitly defined spatial paths. However, existing methods struggle with complex object movements and multi-object motion control, resulting in imprecise trajectory adherence, poor object consistency, and compromised visual quality. Furthermore, these methods only support trajectory control in a single format, limiting their applicability in diverse scenarios. Additionally, there is no publicly available dataset or benchmark specifically tailored for trajectory-controllable video generation, hindering robust training and systematic evaluation. To address these challenges, we introduce MagicMotion, a novel image-to-video generation framework that enables trajectory control through three levels of conditions from dense to sparse: masks, bounding boxes, and sparse boxes. Given an input image and trajectories, MagicMotion seamlessly animates objects along defined trajectories while maintaining object consistency and visual quality. Furthermore, we present MagicData, a large-scale trajectory-controlled video dataset, along with an automated pipeline for annotation and filtering. We also introduce MagicBench, a comprehensive benchmark that assesses both video quality and trajectory control accuracy across different numbers of objects. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicMotion outperforms previous methods across various metrics. Our project page are publicly available at https://quanhaol.github.io/magicmotion-site.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 20, 2025 2

CrossWordBench: Evaluating the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs with Controllable Puzzle Generation

Existing reasoning evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) predominantly either assess text-based reasoning or vision-language understanding capabilities, with limited dynamic interplay between textual and visual constraints. To address this limitation, we introduce CrossWordBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of both LLMs and LVLMs through the medium of crossword puzzles-a task requiring multimodal adherence to semantic constraints from text-based clues and intersectional constraints from visual grid structures. CrossWordBench leverages a controllable puzzle generation framework that produces puzzles in multiple formats (text and image) and offers different evaluation strategies ranging from direct puzzle solving to interactive modes. Our extensive evaluation of over 20 models reveals that reasoning LLMs outperform non-reasoning models substantially by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints. We further demonstrate that LVLMs struggle with the task, showing a strong correlation between their puzzle-solving performance and grid-parsing accuracy. Our findings offer insights into the limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 30, 2025 2

VFX Creator: Animated Visual Effect Generation with Controllable Diffusion Transformer

Crafting magic and illusions is one of the most thrilling aspects of filmmaking, with visual effects (VFX) serving as the powerhouse behind unforgettable cinematic experiences. While recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have driven progress in generic image and video synthesis, the domain of controllable VFX generation remains relatively underexplored. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for animated VFX generation as image animation, where dynamic effects are generated from user-friendly textual descriptions and static reference images. Our work makes two primary contributions: (i) Open-VFX, the first high-quality VFX video dataset spanning 15 diverse effect categories, annotated with textual descriptions, instance segmentation masks for spatial conditioning, and start-end timestamps for temporal control. (ii) VFX Creator, a simple yet effective controllable VFX generation framework based on a Video Diffusion Transformer. The model incorporates a spatial and temporal controllable LoRA adapter, requiring minimal training videos. Specifically, a plug-and-play mask control module enables instance-level spatial manipulation, while tokenized start-end motion timestamps embedded in the diffusion process, alongside the text encoder, allow precise temporal control over effect timing and pace. Extensive experiments on the Open-VFX test set demonstrate the superiority of the proposed system in generating realistic and dynamic effects, achieving state-of-the-art performance and generalization ability in both spatial and temporal controllability. Furthermore, we introduce a specialized metric to evaluate the precision of temporal control. By bridging traditional VFX techniques with generative approaches, VFX Creator unlocks new possibilities for efficient and high-quality video effect generation, making advanced VFX accessible to a broader audience.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025 2

Vivid-VR: Distilling Concepts from Text-to-Video Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Video Restoration

We present Vivid-VR, a DiT-based generative video restoration method built upon an advanced T2V foundation model, where ControlNet is leveraged to control the generation process, ensuring content consistency. However, conventional fine-tuning of such controllable pipelines frequently suffers from distribution drift due to limitations in imperfect multimodal alignment, resulting in compromised texture realism and temporal coherence. To tackle this challenge, we propose a concept distillation training strategy that utilizes the pretrained T2V model to synthesize training samples with embedded textual concepts, thereby distilling its conceptual understanding to preserve texture and temporal quality. To enhance generation controllability, we redesign the control architecture with two key components: 1) a control feature projector that filters degradation artifacts from input video latents to minimize their propagation through the generation pipeline, and 2) a new ControlNet connector employing a dual-branch design. This connector synergistically combines MLP-based feature mapping with cross-attention mechanism for dynamic control feature retrieval, enabling both content preservation and adaptive control signal modulation. Extensive experiments show that Vivid-VR performs favorably against existing approaches on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, as well as AIGC videos, achieving impressive texture realism, visual vividness, and temporal consistency. The codes and checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/Vivid-VR.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 20, 2025

FilterPrompt: Guiding Image Transfer in Diffusion Models

In controllable generation tasks, flexibly manipulating the generated images to attain a desired appearance or structure based on a single input image cue remains a critical and longstanding challenge. Achieving this requires the effective decoupling of key attributes within the input image data, aiming to get representations accurately. Previous research has predominantly concentrated on disentangling image attributes within feature space. However, the complex distribution present in real-world data often makes the application of such decoupling algorithms to other datasets challenging. Moreover, the granularity of control over feature encoding frequently fails to meet specific task requirements. Upon scrutinizing the characteristics of various generative models, we have observed that the input sensitivity and dynamic evolution properties of the diffusion model can be effectively fused with the explicit decomposition operation in pixel space. This integration enables the image processing operations performed in pixel space for a specific feature distribution of the input image, and can achieve the desired control effect in the generated results. Therefore, we propose FilterPrompt, an approach to enhance the model control effect. It can be universally applied to any diffusion model, allowing users to adjust the representation of specific image features in accordance with task requirements, thereby facilitating more precise and controllable generation outcomes. In particular, our designed experiments demonstrate that the FilterPrompt optimizes feature correlation, mitigates content conflicts during the generation process, and enhances the model's control capability.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 20, 2024

Generating Compositional Scenes via Text-to-image RGBA Instance Generation

Text-to-image diffusion generative models can generate high quality images at the cost of tedious prompt engineering. Controllability can be improved by introducing layout conditioning, however existing methods lack layout editing ability and fine-grained control over object attributes. The concept of multi-layer generation holds great potential to address these limitations, however generating image instances concurrently to scene composition limits control over fine-grained object attributes, relative positioning in 3D space and scene manipulation abilities. In this work, we propose a novel multi-stage generation paradigm that is designed for fine-grained control, flexibility and interactivity. To ensure control over instance attributes, we devise a novel training paradigm to adapt a diffusion model to generate isolated scene components as RGBA images with transparency information. To build complex images, we employ these pre-generated instances and introduce a multi-layer composite generation process that smoothly assembles components in realistic scenes. Our experiments show that our RGBA diffusion model is capable of generating diverse and high quality instances with precise control over object attributes. Through multi-layer composition, we demonstrate that our approach allows to build and manipulate images from highly complex prompts with fine-grained control over object appearance and location, granting a higher degree of control than competing methods.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 16, 2024 2

Exploring Gradient-based Multi-directional Controls in GANs

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied in modeling diverse image distributions. However, despite its impressive applications, the structure of the latent space in GANs largely remains as a black-box, leaving its controllable generation an open problem, especially when spurious correlations between different semantic attributes exist in the image distributions. To address this problem, previous methods typically learn linear directions or individual channels that control semantic attributes in the image space. However, they often suffer from imperfect disentanglement, or are unable to obtain multi-directional controls. In this work, in light of the above challenges, we propose a novel approach that discovers nonlinear controls, which enables multi-directional manipulation as well as effective disentanglement, based on gradient information in the learned GAN latent space. More specifically, we first learn interpolation directions by following the gradients from classification networks trained separately on the attributes, and then navigate the latent space by exclusively controlling channels activated for the target attribute in the learned directions. Empirically, with small training data, our approach is able to gain fine-grained controls over a diverse set of bi-directional and multi-directional attributes, and we showcase its ability to achieve disentanglement significantly better than state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 1, 2022

ARDY: Autoregressive Diffusion with Hybrid Representation for Interactive Human Motion Generation

Generating realistic 3D human motions in real-time within interactive applications is key for animation, simulation, and humanoid robotics. While recent offline motion generation approaches offer precise control via text and kinematic constraints, they lack the inference speed required for interactive settings. Conversely, existing online methods enable real-time synthesis but often sacrifice controllability or struggle with complex text semantics and long-horizon goals due to limited context windows. In this work, we introduce ARDY, a streaming generation framework that bridges this gap by enabling high-fidelity motion generation controllable via online text prompts and flexible kinematic constraints. ARDY employs a hybrid representation that combines explicit root features with a latent body embedding, balancing precise trajectory control with efficient generative learning. We propose a two-stage autoregressive transformer denoiser that features variable history context and supports conditioning on flexible, long-horizon kinematic constraints. By training on a large-scale motion capture dataset and being directly conditioned on text labels and kinematic constraints sampled from ground truth poses, ARDY natively learns controllable generation that supports online prompting and flexible long-horizon goals. Extensive evaluations on the HumanML3D benchmark and the large-scale, high-fidelity Bones Rigplay dataset demonstrate ARDY's high motion quality and constraint adherence, validating the efficacy of our key architectural decisions. Finally, we demonstrate the method's practical versatility through an interactive demo featuring dynamic text control, diverse keyframe pose constraints, path following, and interactive locomotion control via mouse and keyboard. Supplementary video results, code, and model releases can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/ardy/.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
Jul 8 1

LucidDreaming: Controllable Object-Centric 3D Generation

With the recent development of generative models, Text-to-3D generations have also seen significant growth. Nonetheless, achieving precise control over 3D generation continues to be an arduous task, as using text to control often leads to missing objects and imprecise locations. Contemporary strategies for enhancing controllability in 3D generation often entail the introduction of additional parameters, such as customized diffusion models. This often induces hardness in adapting to different diffusion models or creating distinct objects. In this paper, we present LucidDreaming as an effective pipeline capable of fine-grained control over 3D generation. It requires only minimal input of 3D bounding boxes, which can be deduced from a simple text prompt using a Large Language Model. Specifically, we propose clipped ray sampling to separately render and optimize objects with user specifications. We also introduce object-centric density blob bias, fostering the separation of generated objects. With individual rendering and optimizing of objects, our method excels not only in controlled content generation from scratch but also within the pre-trained NeRF scenes. In such scenarios, existing generative approaches often disrupt the integrity of the original scene, and current editing methods struggle to synthesize new content in empty spaces. We show that our method exhibits remarkable adaptability across a spectrum of mainstream Score Distillation Sampling-based 3D generation frameworks, and achieves superior alignment of 3D content when compared to baseline approaches. We also provide a dataset of prompts with 3D bounding boxes, benchmarking 3D spatial controllability.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 30, 2023

ControlNet++: Improving Conditional Controls with Efficient Consistency Feedback

To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, existing efforts like ControlNet incorporated image-based conditional controls. In this paper, we reveal that existing methods still face significant challenges in generating images that align with the image conditional controls. To this end, we propose ControlNet++, a novel approach that improves controllable generation by explicitly optimizing pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and conditional controls. Specifically, for an input conditional control, we use a pre-trained discriminative reward model to extract the corresponding condition of the generated images, and then optimize the consistency loss between the input conditional control and extracted condition. A straightforward implementation would be generating images from random noises and then calculating the consistency loss, but such an approach requires storing gradients for multiple sampling timesteps, leading to considerable time and memory costs. To address this, we introduce an efficient reward strategy that deliberately disturbs the input images by adding noise, and then uses the single-step denoised images for reward fine-tuning. This avoids the extensive costs associated with image sampling, allowing for more efficient reward fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that ControlNet++ significantly improves controllability under various conditional controls. For example, it achieves improvements over ControlNet by 7.9% mIoU, 13.4% SSIM, and 7.6% RMSE, respectively, for segmentation mask, line-art edge, and depth conditions.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 11, 2024 2

SkyReels-A2: Compose Anything in Video Diffusion Transformers

This paper presents SkyReels-A2, a controllable video generation framework capable of assembling arbitrary visual elements (e.g., characters, objects, backgrounds) into synthesized videos based on textual prompts while maintaining strict consistency with reference images for each element. We term this task elements-to-video (E2V), whose primary challenges lie in preserving the fidelity of each reference element, ensuring coherent composition of the scene, and achieving natural outputs. To address these, we first design a comprehensive data pipeline to construct prompt-reference-video triplets for model training. Next, we propose a novel image-text joint embedding model to inject multi-element representations into the generative process, balancing element-specific consistency with global coherence and text alignment. We also optimize the inference pipeline for both speed and output stability. Moreover, we introduce a carefully curated benchmark for systematic evaluation, i.e, A2 Bench. Experiments demonstrate that our framework can generate diverse, high-quality videos with precise element control. SkyReels-A2 is the first open-source commercial grade model for the generation of E2V, performing favorably against advanced closed-source commercial models. We anticipate SkyReels-A2 will advance creative applications such as drama and virtual e-commerce, pushing the boundaries of controllable video generation.

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 3, 2025 3

Magic-Me: Identity-Specific Video Customized Diffusion

Creating content for a specific identity (ID) has shown significant interest in the field of generative models. In the field of text-to-image generation (T2I), subject-driven content generation has achieved great progress with the ID in the images controllable. However, extending it to video generation is not well explored. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective subject identity controllable video generation framework, termed Video Custom Diffusion (VCD). With a specified subject ID defined by a few images, VCD reinforces the identity information extraction and injects frame-wise correlation at the initialization stage for stable video outputs with identity preserved to a large extent. To achieve this, we propose three novel components that are essential for high-quality ID preservation: 1) an ID module trained with the cropped identity by prompt-to-segmentation to disentangle the ID information and the background noise for more accurate ID token learning; 2) a text-to-video (T2V) VCD module with 3D Gaussian Noise Prior for better inter-frame consistency and 3) video-to-video (V2V) Face VCD and Tiled VCD modules to deblur the face and upscale the video for higher resolution. Despite its simplicity, we conducted extensive experiments to verify that VCD is able to generate stable and high-quality videos with better ID over the selected strong baselines. Besides, due to the transferability of the ID module, VCD is also working well with finetuned text-to-image models available publically, further improving its usability. The codes are available at https://github.com/Zhen-Dong/Magic-Me.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 14, 2024 2

CPO: Condition Preference Optimization for Controllable Image Generation

To enhance controllability in text-to-image generation, ControlNet introduces image-based control signals, while ControlNet++ improves pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and the input control signal. To avoid the prohibitive cost of back-propagating through the sampling process, ControlNet++ optimizes only low-noise timesteps (e.g., t < 200) using a single-step approximation, which not only ignores the contribution of high-noise timesteps but also introduces additional approximation errors. A straightforward alternative for optimizing controllability across all timesteps is Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a fine-tuning method that increases model preference for more controllable images (I^{w}) over less controllable ones (I^{l}). However, due to uncertainty in generative models, it is difficult to ensure that win--lose image pairs differ only in controllability while keeping other factors, such as image quality, fixed. To address this, we propose performing preference learning over control conditions rather than generated images. Specifically, we construct winning and losing control signals, c^{w} and c^{l}, and train the model to prefer c^{w}. This method, which we term Condition Preference Optimization (CPO), eliminates confounding factors and yields a low-variance training objective. Our approach theoretically exhibits lower contrastive loss variance than DPO and empirically achieves superior results. Moreover, CPO requires less computation and storage for dataset curation. Extensive experiments show that CPO significantly improves controllability over the state-of-the-art ControlNet++ across multiple control types: over 10% error rate reduction in segmentation, 70--80% in human pose, and consistent 2--5% reductions in edge and depth maps.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 6, 2025

Steered Diffusion: A Generalized Framework for Plug-and-Play Conditional Image Synthesis

Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

XMusic: Towards a Generalized and Controllable Symbolic Music Generation Framework

In recent years, remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have been achieved in the fields of image synthesis and text generation, generating content comparable to that produced by humans. However, the quality of AI-generated music has not yet reached this standard, primarily due to the challenge of effectively controlling musical emotions and ensuring high-quality outputs. This paper presents a generalized symbolic music generation framework, XMusic, which supports flexible prompts (i.e., images, videos, texts, tags, and humming) to generate emotionally controllable and high-quality symbolic music. XMusic consists of two core components, XProjector and XComposer. XProjector parses the prompts of various modalities into symbolic music elements (i.e., emotions, genres, rhythms and notes) within the projection space to generate matching music. XComposer contains a Generator and a Selector. The Generator generates emotionally controllable and melodious music based on our innovative symbolic music representation, whereas the Selector identifies high-quality symbolic music by constructing a multi-task learning scheme involving quality assessment, emotion recognition, and genre recognition tasks. In addition, we build XMIDI, a large-scale symbolic music dataset that contains 108,023 MIDI files annotated with precise emotion and genre labels. Objective and subjective evaluations show that XMusic significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with impressive music quality. Our XMusic has been awarded as one of the nine Highlights of Collectibles at WAIC 2023. The project homepage of XMusic is https://xmusic-project.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 15, 2025 2