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Jan 1

InstaDrag: Lightning Fast and Accurate Drag-based Image Editing Emerging from Videos

Accuracy and speed are critical in image editing tasks. Pan et al. introduced a drag-based image editing framework that achieves pixel-level control using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). A flurry of subsequent studies enhanced this framework's generality by leveraging large-scale diffusion models. However, these methods often suffer from inordinately long processing times (exceeding 1 minute per edit) and low success rates. Addressing these issues head on, we present InstaDrag, a rapid approach enabling high quality drag-based image editing in ~1 second. Unlike most previous methods, we redefine drag-based editing as a conditional generation task, eliminating the need for time-consuming latent optimization or gradient-based guidance during inference. In addition, the design of our pipeline allows us to train our model on large-scale paired video frames, which contain rich motion information such as object translations, changing poses and orientations, zooming in and out, etc. By learning from videos, our approach can significantly outperform previous methods in terms of accuracy and consistency. Despite being trained solely on videos, our model generalizes well to perform local shape deformations not presented in the training data (e.g., lengthening of hair, twisting rainbows, etc.). Extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations on benchmark datasets corroborate the superiority of our approach. The code and model will be released at https://github.com/magic-research/InstaDrag.

  • 5 authors
·
May 22, 2024

UltrAvatar: A Realistic Animatable 3D Avatar Diffusion Model with Authenticity Guided Textures

Recent advances in 3D avatar generation have gained significant attentions. These breakthroughs aim to produce more realistic animatable avatars, narrowing the gap between virtual and real-world experiences. Most of existing works employ Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, combined with a differentiable renderer and text condition, to guide a diffusion model in generating 3D avatars. However, SDS often generates oversmoothed results with few facial details, thereby lacking the diversity compared with ancestral sampling. On the other hand, other works generate 3D avatar from a single image, where the challenges of unwanted lighting effects, perspective views, and inferior image quality make them difficult to reliably reconstruct the 3D face meshes with the aligned complete textures. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D avatar generation approach termed UltrAvatar with enhanced fidelity of geometry, and superior quality of physically based rendering (PBR) textures without unwanted lighting. To this end, the proposed approach presents a diffuse color extraction model and an authenticity guided texture diffusion model. The former removes the unwanted lighting effects to reveal true diffuse colors so that the generated avatars can be rendered under various lighting conditions. The latter follows two gradient-based guidances for generating PBR textures to render diverse face-identity features and details better aligning with 3D mesh geometry. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the experiments.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 19, 2024 2

WaveStitch: Flexible and Fast Conditional Time Series Generation with Diffusion Models

Generating temporal data under conditions is crucial for forecasting, imputation, and generative tasks. Such data often has metadata and partially observed signals that jointly influence the generated values. However, existing methods face three key limitations: (1) they condition on either the metadata or observed values, but rarely both together; (2) they adopt either training-time approaches that fail to generalize to unseen scenarios, or inference-time approaches that ignore metadata; and (3) they suffer from trade-offs between generation speed and temporal coherence across time windows--choosing either slow but coherent autoregressive methods or fast but incoherent parallel ones. We propose WaveStitch, a novel diffusion-based method to overcome these hurdles through: (1) dual-sourced conditioning on both metadata and partially observed signals; (2) a hybrid training-inference architecture, incorporating metadata during training and observations at inference via gradient-based guidance; and (3) a novel pipeline-style paradigm that generates time windows in parallel while preserving coherence through an inference-time conditional loss and a stitching mechanism. Across diverse datasets, WaveStitch demonstrates adaptability to arbitrary patterns of observed signals, achieving 1.81x lower mean-squared-error compared to the state-of-the-art, and generates data up to 166.48x faster than autoregressive methods while maintaining coherence. Our code is available at: https://github.com/adis98/WaveStitch

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 8, 2025

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

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

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 4, 2024 1

DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Infrared imaging is essential for autonomous driving and robotic operations as a supportive modality due to its reliable performance in challenging environments. Despite its popularity, the limitations of infrared cameras, such as low spatial resolution and complex degradations, consistently challenge imaging quality and subsequent visual tasks. Hence, infrared image super-resolution (IISR) has been developed to address this challenge. While recent developments in diffusion models have greatly advanced this field, current methods to solve it either ignore the unique modal characteristics of infrared imaging or overlook the machine perception requirements. To bridge these gaps, we propose DifIISR, an infrared image super-resolution diffusion model optimized for visual quality and perceptual performance. Our approach achieves task-based guidance for diffusion by injecting gradients derived from visual and perceptual priors into the noise during the reverse process. Specifically, we introduce an infrared thermal spectrum distribution regulation to preserve visual fidelity, ensuring that the reconstructed infrared images closely align with high-resolution images by matching their frequency components. Subsequently, we incorporate various visual foundational models as the perceptual guidance for downstream visual tasks, infusing generalizable perceptual features beneficial for detection and segmentation. As a result, our approach gains superior visual results while attaining State-Of-The-Art downstream task performance. Code is available at https://github.com/zirui0625/DifIISR

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 3, 2025

Empower Structure-Based Molecule Optimization with Gradient Guided Bayesian Flow Networks

Structure-Based molecule optimization (SBMO) aims to optimize molecules with both continuous coordinates and discrete types against protein targets. A promising direction is to exert gradient guidance on generative models given its remarkable success in images, but it is challenging to guide discrete data and risks inconsistencies between modalities. To this end, we leverage a continuous and differentiable space derived through Bayesian inference, presenting Molecule Joint Optimization (MolJO), the gradient-based SBMO framework that facilitates joint guidance signals across different modalities while preserving SE(3)-equivariance. We introduce a novel backward correction strategy that optimizes within a sliding window of the past histories, allowing for a seamless trade-off between explore-and-exploit during optimization. MolJO achieves state-of-the-art performance on CrossDocked2020 benchmark (Success Rate 51.3%, Vina Dock -9.05 and SA 0.78), more than 4x improvement in Success Rate compared to the gradient-based counterpart, and 2x "Me-Better" Ratio as much as 3D baselines. Furthermore, we extend MolJO to a wide range of optimization settings, including multi-objective optimization and challenging tasks in drug design such as R-group optimization and scaffold hopping, further underscoring its versatility. Code is available at https://github.com/AlgoMole/MolCRAFT.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 20, 2024

Dynamic Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance via Online Feedback

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is a cornerstone of text-to-image diffusion models, yet its effectiveness is limited by the use of static guidance scales. This "one-size-fits-all" approach fails to adapt to the diverse requirements of different prompts; moreover, prior solutions like gradient-based correction or fixed heuristic schedules introduce additional complexities and fail to generalize. In this work, we challeng this static paradigm by introducing a framework for dynamic CFG scheduling. Our method leverages online feedback from a suite of general-purpose and specialized small-scale latent-space evaluations, such as CLIP for alignment, a discriminator for fidelity and a human preference reward model, to assess generation quality at each step of the reverse diffusion process. Based on this feedback, we perform a greedy search to select the optimal CFG scale for each timestep, creating a unique guidance schedule tailored to every prompt and sample. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both small-scale models and the state-of-the-art Imagen 3, showing significant improvements in text alignment, visual quality, text rendering and numerical reasoning. Notably, when compared against the default Imagen 3 baseline, our method achieves up to 53.8% human preference win-rate for overall preference, a figure that increases up to to 55.5% on prompts targeting specific capabilities like text rendering. Our work establishes that the optimal guidance schedule is inherently dynamic and prompt-dependent, and provides an efficient and generalizable framework to achieve it.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 19, 2025

EmoDubber: Towards High Quality and Emotion Controllable Movie Dubbing

Given a piece of text, a video clip, and a reference audio, the movie dubbing task aims to generate speech that aligns with the video while cloning the desired voice. The existing methods have two primary deficiencies: (1) They struggle to simultaneously hold audio-visual sync and achieve clear pronunciation; (2) They lack the capacity to express user-defined emotions. To address these problems, we propose EmoDubber, an emotion-controllable dubbing architecture that allows users to specify emotion type and emotional intensity while satisfying high-quality lip sync and pronunciation. Specifically, we first design Lip-related Prosody Aligning (LPA), which focuses on learning the inherent consistency between lip motion and prosody variation by duration level contrastive learning to incorporate reasonable alignment. Then, we design Pronunciation Enhancing (PE) strategy to fuse the video-level phoneme sequences by efficient conformer to improve speech intelligibility. Next, the speaker identity adapting module aims to decode acoustics prior and inject the speaker style embedding. After that, the proposed Flow-based User Emotion Controlling (FUEC) is used to synthesize waveform by flow matching prediction network conditioned on acoustics prior. In this process, the FUEC determines the gradient direction and guidance scale based on the user's emotion instructions by the positive and negative guidance mechanism, which focuses on amplifying the desired emotion while suppressing others. Extensive experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate favorable performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

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

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

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 10, 2024 1

Eliminating Oversaturation and Artifacts of High Guidance Scales in Diffusion Models

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) is crucial for improving both generation quality and alignment between the input condition and final output in diffusion models. While a high guidance scale is generally required to enhance these aspects, it also causes oversaturation and unrealistic artifacts. In this paper, we revisit the CFG update rule and introduce modifications to address this issue. We first decompose the update term in CFG into parallel and orthogonal components with respect to the conditional model prediction and observe that the parallel component primarily causes oversaturation, while the orthogonal component enhances image quality. Accordingly, we propose down-weighting the parallel component to achieve high-quality generations without oversaturation. Additionally, we draw a connection between CFG and gradient ascent and introduce a new rescaling and momentum method for the CFG update rule based on this insight. Our approach, termed adaptive projected guidance (APG), retains the quality-boosting advantages of CFG while enabling the use of higher guidance scales without oversaturation. APG is easy to implement and introduces practically no additional computational overhead to the sampling process. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that APG is compatible with various conditional diffusion models and samplers, leading to improved FID, recall, and saturation scores while maintaining precision comparable to CFG, making our method a superior plug-and-play alternative to standard classifier-free guidance.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024 8

D2D: Detector-to-Differentiable Critic for Improved Numeracy in Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have achieved strong performance in semantic alignment, yet they still struggle with generating the correct number of objects specified in prompts. Existing approaches typically incorporate auxiliary counting networks as external critics to enhance numeracy. However, since these critics must provide gradient guidance during generation, they are restricted to regression-based models that are inherently differentiable, thus excluding detector-based models with superior counting ability, whose count-via-enumeration nature is non-differentiable. To overcome this limitation, we propose Detector-to-Differentiable (D2D), a novel framework that transforms non-differentiable detection models into differentiable critics, thereby leveraging their superior counting ability to guide numeracy generation. Specifically, we design custom activation functions to convert detector logits into soft binary indicators, which are then used to optimize the noise prior at inference time with pre-trained T2I models. Our extensive experiments on SDXL-Turbo, SD-Turbo, and Pixart-DMD across four benchmarks of varying complexity (low-density, high-density, and multi-object scenarios) demonstrate consistent and substantial improvements in object counting accuracy (e.g., boosting up to 13.7% on D2D-Small, a 400-prompt, low-density benchmark), with minimal degradation in overall image quality and computational overhead.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 22, 2025 2

Discrete Diffusion for Reflective Vision-Language-Action Models in Autonomous Driving

End-to-End (E2E) solutions have emerged as a mainstream approach for autonomous driving systems, with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models representing a new paradigm that leverages pre-trained multimodal knowledge from Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to interpret and interact with complex real-world environments. However, these methods remain constrained by the limitations of imitation learning, which struggles to inherently encode physical rules during training. Existing approaches often rely on complex rule-based post-refinement, employ reinforcement learning that remains largely limited to simulation, or utilize diffusion guidance that requires computationally expensive gradient calculations. To address these challenges, we introduce ReflectDrive, a novel learning-based framework that integrates a reflection mechanism for safe trajectory generation via discrete diffusion. We first discretize the two-dimensional driving space to construct an action codebook, enabling the use of pre-trained Diffusion Language Models for planning tasks through fine-tuning. Central to our approach is a safety-aware reflection mechanism that performs iterative self-correction without gradient computation. Our method begins with goal-conditioned trajectory generation to model multi-modal driving behaviors. Based on this, we apply local search methods to identify unsafe tokens and determine feasible solutions, which then serve as safe anchors for inpainting-based regeneration. Evaluated on the NAVSIM benchmark, ReflectDrive demonstrates significant advantages in safety-critical trajectory generation, offering a scalable and reliable solution for autonomous driving systems.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 24, 2025 2