Daily Papers

We present DiffPortrait3D, a conditional diffusion model that is capable of synthesizing 3D-consistent photo-realistic novel views from as few as a single in-the-wild portrait. Specifically, given a single RGB input, we aim to synthesize plausible but consistent facial details rendered from novel camera views with retained both identity and facial expression. In lieu of time-consuming optimization and fine-tuning, our zero-shot method generalizes well to arbitrary face portraits with unposed camera views, extreme facial expressions, and diverse artistic depictions. At its core, we leverage the generative prior of 2D diffusion models pre-trained on large-scale image datasets as our rendering backbone, while the denoising is guided with disentangled attentive control of appearance and camera pose. To achieve this, we first inject the appearance context from the reference image into the self-attention layers of the frozen UNets. The rendering view is then manipulated with a novel conditional control module that interprets the camera pose by watching a condition image of a crossed subject from the same view. Furthermore, we insert a trainable cross-view attention module to enhance view consistency, which is further strengthened with a novel 3D-aware noise generation process during inference. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results both qualitatively and quantitatively on our challenging in-the-wild and multi-view benchmarks.

We introduce X-Dyna, a novel zero-shot, diffusion-based pipeline for animating a single human image using facial expressions and body movements derived from a driving video, that generates realistic, context-aware dynamics for both the subject and the surrounding environment. Building on prior approaches centered on human pose control, X-Dyna addresses key shortcomings causing the loss of dynamic details, enhancing the lifelike qualities of human video animations. At the core of our approach is the Dynamics-Adapter, a lightweight module that effectively integrates reference appearance context into the spatial attentions of the diffusion backbone while preserving the capacity of motion modules in synthesizing fluid and intricate dynamic details. Beyond body pose control, we connect a local control module with our model to capture identity-disentangled facial expressions, facilitating accurate expression transfer for enhanced realism in animated scenes. Together, these components form a unified framework capable of learning physical human motion and natural scene dynamics from a diverse blend of human and scene videos. Comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that X-Dyna outperforms state-of-the-art methods, creating highly lifelike and expressive animations. The code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/X-Dyna.

Text-to-video generation has shown promising results. However, by taking only natural languages as input, users often face difficulties in providing detailed information to precisely control the model's output. In this work, we propose fine-grained controllable video generation (FACTOR) to achieve detailed control. Specifically, FACTOR aims to control objects' appearances and context, including their location and category, in conjunction with the text prompt. To achieve detailed control, we propose a unified framework to jointly inject control signals into the existing text-to-video model. Our model consists of a joint encoder and adaptive cross-attention layers. By optimizing the encoder and the inserted layer, we adapt the model to generate videos that are aligned with both text prompts and fine-grained control. Compared to existing methods relying on dense control signals such as edge maps, we provide a more intuitive and user-friendly interface to allow object-level fine-grained control. Our method achieves controllability of object appearances without finetuning, which reduces the per-subject optimization efforts for the users. Extensive experiments on standard benchmark datasets and user-provided inputs validate that our model obtains a 70% improvement in controllability metrics over competitive baselines.

People detection methods are highly sensitive to the perpetual occlusions among the targets. As multi-camera set-ups become more frequently encountered, joint exploitation of the across views information would allow for improved detection performances. We provide a large-scale HD dataset named WILDTRACK which finally makes advanced deep learning methods applicable to this problem. The seven-static-camera set-up captures realistic and challenging scenarios of walking people. Notably, its camera calibration with jointly high-precision projection widens the range of algorithms which may make use of this dataset. In aim to help accelerate the research on automatic camera calibration, such annotations also accompany this dataset. Furthermore, the rich-in-appearance visual context of the pedestrian class makes this dataset attractive for monocular pedestrian detection as well, since: the HD cameras are placed relatively close to the people, and the size of the dataset further increases seven-fold. In summary, we overview existing multi-camera datasets and detection methods, enumerate details of our dataset, and we benchmark multi-camera state of the art detectors on this new dataset.

Although existing speech-driven talking face generation methods achieve significant progress, they are far from real-world application due to the avatar-specific training demand and unstable lip movements. To address the above issues, we propose the GSmoothFace, a novel two-stage generalized talking face generation model guided by a fine-grained 3d face model, which can synthesize smooth lip dynamics while preserving the speaker's identity. Our proposed GSmoothFace model mainly consists of the Audio to Expression Prediction (A2EP) module and the Target Adaptive Face Translation (TAFT) module. Specifically, we first develop the A2EP module to predict expression parameters synchronized with the driven speech. It uses a transformer to capture the long-term audio context and learns the parameters from the fine-grained 3D facial vertices, resulting in accurate and smooth lip-synchronization performance. Afterward, the well-designed TAFT module, empowered by Morphology Augmented Face Blending (MAFB), takes the predicted expression parameters and target video as inputs to modify the facial region of the target video without distorting the background content. The TAFT effectively exploits the identity appearance and background context in the target video, which makes it possible to generalize to different speakers without retraining. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments confirm the superiority of our method in terms of realism, lip synchronization, and visual quality. See the project page for code, data, and request pre-trained models: https://zhanghm1995.github.io/GSmoothFace.

Scene text recognition (STR) suffers from challenges of either less realistic synthetic training data or the difficulty of collecting sufficient high-quality real-world data, limiting the effectiveness of trained models. Meanwhile, despite producing holistically appealing text images, diffusion-based visual text generation methods struggle to synthesize accurate and realistic instance-level text at scale. To tackle this, we introduce TextSSR: a novel pipeline for Synthesizing Scene Text Recognition training data. TextSSR targets three key synthesizing characteristics: accuracy, realism, and scalability. It achieves accuracy through a proposed region-centric text generation with position-glyph enhancement, ensuring proper character placement. It maintains realism by guiding style and appearance generation using contextual hints from surrounding text or background. This character-aware diffusion architecture enjoys precise character-level control and semantic coherence preservation, without relying on natural language prompts. Therefore, TextSSR supports large-scale generation through combinatorial text permutations. Based on these, we present TextSSR-F, a dataset of 3.55 million quality-screened text instances. Extensive experiments show that STR models trained on TextSSR-F outperform those trained on existing synthetic datasets by clear margins on common benchmarks, and further improvements are observed when mixed with real-world training data. Code is available at https://github.com/YesianRohn/TextSSR.

Retrieving videos based on semantic motion is a fundamental, yet unsolved, problem. Existing video representation approaches overly rely on static appearance and scene context rather than motion dynamics, a bias inherited from their training data and objectives. Conversely, traditional motion-centric inputs like optical flow lack the semantic grounding needed to understand high-level motion. To demonstrate this inherent bias, we introduce the SimMotion benchmarks, combining controlled synthetic data with a new human-annotated real-world dataset. We show that existing models perform poorly on these benchmarks, often failing to disentangle motion from appearance. To address this gap, we propose SemanticMoments, a simple, training-free method that computes temporal statistics (specifically, higher-order moments) over features from pre-trained semantic models. Across our benchmarks, SemanticMoments consistently outperforms existing RGB, flow, and text-supervised methods. This demonstrates that temporal statistics in a semantic feature space provide a scalable and perceptually grounded foundation for motion-centric video understanding.

Text-based person retrieval aims to identify a target individual from an image gallery using a natural language description. Existing methods primarily focus on appearance-driven cross-modal retrieval, yet face significant challenges due to the visual complexity of scenes and the inherent ambiguity of textual descriptions. The contextual information, such as landmarks and relational cues, provides complementary cues that can offer valuable complementary insights for retrieval, but remains underexploited in current approaches. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a novel paradigm: scene-aware text-based person retrieval, which explicitly integrates both individual appearance and global scene context to improve retrieval accuracy. To support this, we first introduce ScenePerson-13W, a large-scale benchmark dataset comprising over 100,000 real-world scenes with rich annotations encompassing both pedestrian attributes and scene context. Based on this dataset, we further present SA-Person, a two-stage retrieval framework. In the first stage, SA-Person performs discriminative appearance grounding by aligning textual descriptions with pedestrian-specific regions. In the second stage, it introduces SceneRanker, a training-free, scene-aware re-ranking module that refines retrieval results by jointly reasoning over pedestrian appearance and the global scene context. Extensive experiments on ScenePerson-13W and existing benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SA-Person. Both the dataset and code will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

The paper analyzes the accuracy of publicly available object-recognition systems on a geographically diverse dataset. This dataset contains household items and was designed to have a more representative geographical coverage than commonly used image datasets in object recognition. We find that the systems perform relatively poorly on household items that commonly occur in countries with a low household income. Qualitative analyses suggest the drop in performance is primarily due to appearance differences within an object class (e.g., dish soap) and due to items appearing in a different context (e.g., toothbrushes appearing outside of bathrooms). The results of our study suggest that further work is needed to make object-recognition systems work equally well for people across different countries and income levels.

In this paper, we uncover a systematic bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models~(LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simply altering their order of appearance in the context. This manipulation allows us to skew the evaluation result, making one model appear considerably superior to the other, e.g., Vicuna-13B could beat ChatGPT on 66 over 80 tested queries with ChatGPT as an evaluator. To address this issue, we propose a calibration framework with three simple yet effective strategies: 1) Multiple Evidence Calibration, which requires the evaluator model to generate multiple evaluation evidence before assigning ratings; 2) Balanced Position Calibration, which aggregates results across various orders to determine the final score; 3) Human-in-the-Loop Calibration, which introduces a balanced position diversity entropy to measure the difficulty of each example and seeks human assistance when needed. We also manually annotate the "win/tie/lose" outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicuna Benchmark's question prompt, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach successfully mitigates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. We release our code and human annotation at https://github.com/i-Eval/FairEval to facilitate future research.

Traditional studies emphasize the significance of context information in improving matting performance. Consequently, deep learning-based matting methods delve into designing pooling or affinity-based context aggregation modules to achieve superior results. However, these modules cannot well handle the context scale shift caused by the difference in image size during training and inference, resulting in matting performance degradation. In this paper, we revisit the context aggregation mechanisms of matting networks and find that a basic encoder-decoder network without any context aggregation modules can actually learn more universal context aggregation, thereby achieving higher matting performance compared to existing methods. Building on this insight, we present AEMatter, a matting network that is straightforward yet very effective. AEMatter adopts a Hybrid-Transformer backbone with appearance-enhanced axis-wise learning (AEAL) blocks to build a basic network with strong context aggregation learning capability. Furthermore, AEMatter leverages a large image training strategy to assist the network in learning context aggregation from data. Extensive experiments on five popular matting datasets demonstrate that the proposed AEMatter outperforms state-of-the-art matting methods by a large margin.

We present GeoSynth, a model for synthesizing satellite images with global style and image-driven layout control. The global style control is via textual prompts or geographic location. These enable the specification of scene semantics or regional appearance respectively, and can be used together. We train our model on a large dataset of paired satellite imagery, with automatically generated captions, and OpenStreetMap data. We evaluate various combinations of control inputs, including different types of layout controls. Results demonstrate that our model can generate diverse, high-quality images and exhibits excellent zero-shot generalization. The code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/mvrl/GeoSynth.

Automatically generating photorealistic and self-consistent appearances for untextured 3D models is a critical challenge in digital content creation. The advancement of large-scale video generation models offers a natural approach: directly synthesizing 360-degree turntable videos (TTVs), which can serve not only as high-quality dynamic previews but also as an intermediate representation to drive texture synthesis and neural rendering. However, existing general-purpose video diffusion models struggle to maintain strict geometric consistency and appearance stability across the full range of views, making their outputs ill-suited for high-quality 3D reconstruction. To this end, we introduce TAPESTRY, a framework for generating high-fidelity TTVs conditioned on explicit 3D geometry. We reframe the 3D appearance generation task as a geometry-conditioned video diffusion problem: given a 3D mesh, we first render and encode multi-modal geometric features to constrain the video generation process with pixel-level precision, thereby enabling the creation of high-quality and consistent TTVs. Building upon this, we also design a method for downstream reconstruction tasks from the TTV input, featuring a multi-stage pipeline with 3D-Aware Inpainting. By rotating the model and performing a context-aware secondary generation, this pipeline effectively completes self-occluded regions to achieve full surface coverage. The videos generated by TAPESTRY are not only high-quality dynamic previews but also serve as a reliable, 3D-aware intermediate representation that can be seamlessly back-projected into UV textures or used to supervise neural rendering methods like 3DGS. This enables the automated creation of production-ready, complete 3D assets from untextured meshes. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in both video consistency and final reconstruction quality.

Text-to-video (T2V) generation has advanced rapidly, yet maintaining consistent character identities across scenes remains a major challenge. Existing personalization methods often focus on facial identity but fail to preserve broader contextual cues such as hairstyle, outfit, and body shape, which are critical for visual coherence. We propose ContextAnyone, a context-aware diffusion framework that achieves character-consistent video generation from text and a single reference image. Our method jointly reconstructs the reference image and generates new video frames, enabling the model to fully perceive and utilize reference information. Reference information is effectively integrated into a DiT-based diffusion backbone through a novel Emphasize-Attention module that selectively reinforces reference-aware features and prevents identity drift across frames. A dual-guidance loss combines diffusion and reference reconstruction objectives to enhance appearance fidelity, while the proposed Gap-RoPE positional embedding separates reference and video tokens to stabilize temporal modeling. Experiments demonstrate that ContextAnyone outperforms existing reference-to-video methods in identity consistency and visual quality, generating coherent and context-preserving character videos across diverse motions and scenes. Project page: https://github.com/ziyang1106/ContextAnyone{https://github.com/ziyang1106/ContextAnyone}.

The appearance of a human in clothing is driven not only by the pose but also by its temporal context, i.e., motion. However, such context has been largely neglected by existing monocular human modeling methods whose neural networks often struggle to learn a video of a person with large dynamics due to the motion ambiguity, i.e., there exist numerous geometric configurations of clothes that are dependent on the context of motion even for the same pose. In this paper, we introduce a method for high-quality modeling of clothed 3D human avatars using a video of a person with dynamic movements. The main challenge comes from the lack of 3D ground truth data of geometry and its temporal correspondences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel compositional human modeling framework that takes advantage of both explicit and implicit human modeling. For explicit modeling, a neural network learns to generate point-wise shape residuals and appearance features of a 3D body model by comparing its 2D rendering results and the original images. This explicit model allows for the reconstruction of discriminative 3D motion features from UV space by encoding their temporal correspondences. For implicit modeling, an implicit network combines the appearance and 3D motion features to decode high-fidelity clothed 3D human avatars with motion-dependent geometry and texture. The experiments show that our method can generate a large variation of secondary motion in a physically plausible way.

Generating long, temporally coherent videos with precise control over subject identity and motion is a formidable challenge for current diffusion models, which often suffer from identity drift and are limited to short clips. We introduce PoseGen, a novel framework that generates arbitrarily long videos of a specific subject from a single reference image and a driving pose sequence. Our core innovation is an in-context LoRA finetuning strategy that injects subject appearance at the token level for identity preservation, while simultaneously conditioning on pose information at the channel level for fine-grained motion control. To overcome duration limits, PoseGen pioneers an interleaved segment generation method that seamlessly stitches video clips together, using a shared KV cache mechanism and a specialized transition process to ensure background consistency and temporal smoothness. Trained on a remarkably small 33-hour video dataset, extensive experiments show that PoseGen significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in identity fidelity, pose accuracy, and its unique ability to produce coherent, artifact-free videos of unlimited duration.

Natural image matting aims to estimate the alpha matte of the foreground from a given image. Various approaches have been explored to address this problem, such as interactive matting methods that use guidance such as click or trimap, and automatic matting methods tailored to specific objects. However, existing matting methods are designed for specific objects or guidance, neglecting the common requirement of aggregating global and local contexts in image matting. As a result, these methods often encounter challenges in accurately identifying the foreground and generating precise boundaries, which limits their effectiveness in unforeseen scenarios. In this paper, we propose a simple and universal matting framework, named Dual-Context Aggregation Matting (DCAM), which enables robust image matting with arbitrary guidance or without guidance. Specifically, DCAM first adopts a semantic backbone network to extract low-level features and context features from the input image and guidance. Then, we introduce a dual-context aggregation network that incorporates global object aggregators and local appearance aggregators to iteratively refine the extracted context features. By performing both global contour segmentation and local boundary refinement, DCAM exhibits robustness to diverse types of guidance and objects. Finally, we adopt a matting decoder network to fuse the low-level features and the refined context features for alpha matte estimation. Experimental results on five matting datasets demonstrate that the proposed DCAM outperforms state-of-the-art matting methods in both automatic matting and interactive matting tasks, which highlights the strong universality and high performance of DCAM. The source code is available at https://github.com/Windaway/DCAM.

We present an unsupervised visual feature learning algorithm driven by context-based pixel prediction. By analogy with auto-encoders, we propose Context Encoders -- a convolutional neural network trained to generate the contents of an arbitrary image region conditioned on its surroundings. In order to succeed at this task, context encoders need to both understand the content of the entire image, as well as produce a plausible hypothesis for the missing part(s). When training context encoders, we have experimented with both a standard pixel-wise reconstruction loss, as well as a reconstruction plus an adversarial loss. The latter produces much sharper results because it can better handle multiple modes in the output. We found that a context encoder learns a representation that captures not just appearance but also the semantics of visual structures. We quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of our learned features for CNN pre-training on classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. Furthermore, context encoders can be used for semantic inpainting tasks, either stand-alone or as initialization for non-parametric methods.

Existing video personalization methods preserve visual likeness but treat video and audio separately. Without access to the visual scene, audio models cannot synchronize sounds with on-screen actions; and because classical voice-cloning models condition only on a reference recording, a text prompt cannot redirect speaking style or acoustic environment. We propose ID-LoRA (Identity-Driven In-Context LoRA), which jointly generates a subject's appearance and voice in a single model, letting a text prompt, a reference image, and a short audio clip govern both modalities together. ID-LoRA adapts the LTX-2 joint audio-video diffusion backbone via parameter-efficient In-Context LoRA and, to our knowledge, is the first method to personalize visual appearance and voice in a single generative pass. Two challenges arise. Reference and generation tokens share the same positional-encoding space, making them hard to distinguish; we address this with negative temporal positions, placing reference tokens in a disjoint RoPE region while preserving their internal temporal structure. Speaker characteristics also tend to be diluted during denoising; we introduce identity guidance, a classifier-free guidance variant that amplifies speaker-specific features by contrasting predictions with and without the reference signal. In human preference studies, ID-LoRA is preferred over Kling 2.6 Pro by 73% of annotators for voice similarity and 65% for speaking style. On cross-environment settings, speaker similarity improves by 24% over Kling, with the gap widening as conditions diverge. A preliminary user study further suggests that joint generation provides a useful inductive bias for physically grounded sound synthesis. ID-LoRA achieves these results with only ~3K training pairs on a single GPU. Code, models, and data will be released.

Editing portrait videos is a challenging task that requires flexible yet precise control over a wide range of modifications, such as appearance changes, expression edits, or the addition of objects. The key difficulty lies in preserving the subject's original temporal behavior, demanding that every edited frame remains precisely synchronized with the corresponding source frame. We present Sync-LoRA, a method for editing portrait videos that achieves high-quality visual modifications while maintaining frame-accurate synchronization and identity consistency. Our approach uses an image-to-video diffusion model, where the edit is defined by modifying the first frame and then propagated to the entire sequence. To enable accurate synchronization, we train an in-context LoRA using paired videos that depict identical motion trajectories but differ in appearance. These pairs are automatically generated and curated through a synchronization-based filtering process that selects only the most temporally aligned examples for training. This training setup teaches the model to combine motion cues from the source video with the visual changes introduced in the edited first frame. Trained on a compact, highly curated set of synchronized human portraits, Sync-LoRA generalizes to unseen identities and diverse edits (e.g., modifying appearance, adding objects, or changing backgrounds), robustly handling variations in pose and expression. Our results demonstrate high visual fidelity and strong temporal coherence, achieving a robust balance between edit fidelity and precise motion preservation.

Generating controllable character animation from a reference image and motion guidance remains a challenging task due to the inherent difficulty of injecting appearance and motion cues into video diffusion models. Prior works often rely on complex architectures, explicit guider modules, or multi-stage processing pipelines, which increase structural overhead and hinder deployment. Inspired by the strong visual context modeling capacity of pre-trained video diffusion transformers, we propose FramePrompt, a minimalist yet powerful framework that treats reference images, skeleton-guided motion, and target video clips as a unified visual sequence. By reformulating animation as a conditional future prediction task, we bypass the need for guider networks and structural modifications. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms representative baselines across various evaluation metrics while also simplifying training. Our findings highlight the effectiveness of sequence-level visual conditioning and demonstrate the potential of pre-trained models for controllable animation without architectural changes.

Effectively representing medical images, especially retinal images, presents a considerable challenge due to variations in appearance, size, and contextual information of pathological signs called lesions. Precise discrimination of these lesions is crucial for diagnosing vision-threatening issues such as diabetic retinopathy. While visual attention-based neural networks have been introduced to learn spatial context and channel correlations from retinal images, they often fall short in capturing localized lesion context. Addressing this limitation, we propose a novel attention mechanism called Guided Context Gating, an unique approach that integrates Context Formulation, Channel Correlation, and Guided Gating to learn global context, spatial correlations, and localized lesion context. Our qualitative evaluation against existing attention mechanisms emphasize the superiority of Guided Context Gating in terms of explainability. Notably, experiments on the Zenodo-DR-7 dataset reveal a substantial 2.63% accuracy boost over advanced attention mechanisms & an impressive 6.53% improvement over the state-of-the-art Vision Transformer for assessing the severity grade of retinopathy, even with imbalanced and limited training samples for each class.

In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), a model trained on source data (e.g. synthetic) is adapted to target data (e.g. real-world) without access to target annotation. Most previous UDA methods struggle with classes that have a similar visual appearance on the target domain as no ground truth is available to learn the slight appearance differences. To address this problem, we propose a Masked Image Consistency (MIC) module to enhance UDA by learning spatial context relations of the target domain as additional clues for robust visual recognition. MIC enforces the consistency between predictions of masked target images, where random patches are withheld, and pseudo-labels that are generated based on the complete image by an exponential moving average teacher. To minimize the consistency loss, the network has to learn to infer the predictions of the masked regions from their context. Due to its simple and universal concept, MIC can be integrated into various UDA methods across different visual recognition tasks such as image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection. MIC significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance across the different recognition tasks for synthetic-to-real, day-to-nighttime, and clear-to-adverse-weather UDA. For instance, MIC achieves an unprecedented UDA performance of 75.9 mIoU and 92.8% on GTA-to-Cityscapes and VisDA-2017, respectively, which corresponds to an improvement of +2.1 and +3.0 percent points over the previous state of the art. The implementation is available at https://github.com/lhoyer/MIC.

Human affect recognition is a well-established research area with numerous applications, e.g., in psychological care, but existing methods assume that all emotions-of-interest are given a priori as annotated training examples. However, the rising granularity and refinements of the human emotional spectrum through novel psychological theories and the increased consideration of emotions in context brings considerable pressure to data collection and labeling work. In this paper, we conceptualize one-shot recognition of emotions in context -- a new problem aimed at recognizing human affect states in finer particle level from a single support sample. To address this challenging task, we follow the deep metric learning paradigm and introduce a multi-modal emotion embedding approach which minimizes the distance of the same-emotion embeddings by leveraging complementary information of human appearance and the semantic scene context obtained through a semantic segmentation network. All streams of our context-aware model are optimized jointly using weighted triplet loss and weighted cross entropy loss. We conduct thorough experiments on both, categorical and numerical emotion recognition tasks of the Emotic dataset adapted to our one-shot recognition problem, revealing that categorizing human affect from a single example is a hard task. Still, all variants of our model clearly outperform the random baseline, while leveraging the semantic scene context consistently improves the learnt representations, setting state-of-the-art results in one-shot emotion recognition. To foster research of more universal representations of human affect states, we will make our benchmark and models publicly available to the community under https://github.com/KPeng9510/Affect-DML.

Consistent video generation under editing operations requires persistence: when edits modify scene appearance or layout, subsequent generations should remain coherent across time and viewpoints. However, existing memory designs struggle to maintain long-term consistency after such modifications, as stored contexts may become outdated or invalid. To address this, we propose PermaVid, a novel framework built upon a multi-modal context memory that disentangles spatial context into semantic appearance and geometric structure, together with an edit-aware memory update and retrieval strategy that keeps memory evolution aligned with subsequent observations. Specifically, we develop two complementary memory banks: an RGB context memory that captures appearance-aware observations while implicitly encoding geometry, and a depth context memory that preserves geometry-only structure disentangled from semantics. Building on this design, we introduce a memory-guided video generation model that performs multi-modal feature fusion under reference conditions drawn from mixed-modality memory contexts. Experiments demonstrate that our method maintains strong long-term semantic and structural consistency after edits, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a popular option for photo-realistic object capture due to their ability to faithfully capture high-fidelity volumetric content even from handheld video input. Although much research has been devoted to efficient optimization leading to real-time training and rendering, options for interactive editing NeRFs remain limited. We present a very simple but effective neural network architecture that is fast and efficient while maintaining a low memory footprint. This architecture can be incrementally guided through user-friendly image-based edits. Our representation allows straightforward object selection via semantic feature distillation at the training stage. More importantly, we propose a local 3D-aware image context to facilitate view-consistent image editing that can then be distilled into fine-tuned NeRFs, via geometric and appearance adjustments. We evaluate our setup on a variety of examples to demonstrate appearance and geometric edits and report 10-30x speedup over concurrent work focusing on text-guided NeRF editing. Video results can be seen on our project webpage at https://proteusnerf.github.io.

Tracking tumor lesions across serial CT scans is essential for oncological response assessment. Existing automated methods face a fundamental trade-off: end-to-end trackers achieve high automation but offer no opportunity to correct silent tracking failures, while decoupled registration-segmentation pipelines permit user verification yet discard the lesion's prior appearance, limiting accuracy in ambiguous cases. In this work, we propose a Verified Tracking paradigm: a clinician verifies a registration-proposed prompt, which the model leverages alongside the baseline lesion appearance to resolve segmentation ambiguities. We present a unified framework combining early spatial prompt fusion with latent temporal difference weighting for longitudinally-informed segmentation. To address data scarcity, we leverage large-scale synthetic pretraining, proving essential for exploiting longitudinal context, improving performance by up to 4.5 Dice points over training from scratch. Our approach secured first place in the MICCAI autoPET IV challenge. We further curate and release PanTrack, a new longitudinal pancreatic cancer benchmark, to assess out-of-distribution generalization. Experiments show that our model outperforms prior work in both fully automatic and the proposed verified tracking setting offering a clinically safe middle ground between automation and control. Code, model and dataset will be released at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/LongiSeg

While Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) excel at synthesizing high-fidelity videos, enabling precise camera and scene control remains challenging. Existing methods predominantly rely on implicit diffusion priors to generate unobserved regions, inevitably leading to structural collapse during high-dynamic movements or complex occlusions. To address this challenge, we propose Real2SAM2Real, a framework that leverages 3D lifting models (e.g., SAM3D) to extract an explicitly editable 3D cache, serving as a robust geometric scaffold for the VDM. By capturing the entire 3D volume of foreground entities rather than just their visible shells, this cache injects holistic spatial priors into the VDM, providing dependable 3D-aware guidance for complex scene dynamics. To effectively leverage this 3D guidance while preserving pre-trained priors, we design a Soft Spatial-Aligned Injection mechanism alongside a minimally invasive fine-tuning strategy tailored for VDMs. Furthermore, we employ masked normal maps as a cross-modal bridge to construct a 3D-free data curation and perturbation pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Real2SAM2Real enables precise, decoupled control over both camera trajectories and multi-entity motions. By utilizing the complementary context from generative 3D caches, our framework overcomes typical breakdowns caused by over-reliance on diffusion priors, maintaining exceptional spatiotemporal consistency under large camera shifts and severe occlusions. Crucially, by decoupling geometry from appearance, our VDM-tailored 3D cache eradicates perspective ambiguities caused by structural holes and erroneous facades, as well as misleading cues from reflections and refractions. Project website is available at https://jiayi-wu-leo.github.io/real2sam2real

Understanding and reconstructing occluded objects is a challenging problem, especially in open-world scenarios where categories and contexts are diverse and unpredictable. Traditional methods, however, are typically restricted to closed sets of object categories, limiting their use in complex, open-world scenes. We introduce Open-World Amodal Appearance Completion, a training-free framework that expands amodal completion capabilities by accepting flexible text queries as input. Our approach generalizes to arbitrary objects specified by both direct terms and abstract queries. We term this capability reasoning amodal completion, where the system reconstructs the full appearance of the queried object based on the provided image and language query. Our framework unifies segmentation, occlusion analysis, and inpainting to handle complex occlusions and generates completed objects as RGBA elements, enabling seamless integration into applications such as 3D reconstruction and image editing. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generalizing to novel objects and occlusions, establishing a new benchmark for amodal completion in open-world settings. The code and datasets will be released after paper acceptance.

Unsupervised pre-training methods utilizing large and diverse datasets have achieved tremendous success across a range of domains. Recent work has investigated such unsupervised pre-training methods for model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) but is limited to domain-specific or simulated data. In this paper, we study the problem of pre-training world models with abundant in-the-wild videos for efficient learning of downstream visual control tasks. However, in-the-wild videos are complicated with various contextual factors, such as intricate backgrounds and textured appearance, which precludes a world model from extracting shared world knowledge to generalize better. To tackle this issue, we introduce Contextualized World Models (ContextWM) that explicitly model both the context and dynamics to overcome the complexity and diversity of in-the-wild videos and facilitate knowledge transfer between distinct scenes. Specifically, a contextualized extension of the latent dynamics model is elaborately realized by incorporating a context encoder to retain contextual information and empower the image decoder, which allows the latent dynamics model to concentrate on essential temporal variations. Our experiments show that in-the-wild video pre-training equipped with ContextWM can significantly improve the sample-efficiency of MBRL in various domains, including robotic manipulation, locomotion, and autonomous driving.

We introduce a new setting, Edit Transfer, where a model learns a transformation from just a single source-target example and applies it to a new query image. While text-based methods excel at semantic manipulations through textual prompts, they often struggle with precise geometric details (e.g., poses and viewpoint changes). Reference-based editing, on the other hand, typically focuses on style or appearance and fails at non-rigid transformations. By explicitly learning the editing transformation from a source-target pair, Edit Transfer mitigates the limitations of both text-only and appearance-centric references. Drawing inspiration from in-context learning in large language models, we propose a visual relation in-context learning paradigm, building upon a DiT-based text-to-image model. We arrange the edited example and the query image into a unified four-panel composite, then apply lightweight LoRA fine-tuning to capture complex spatial transformations from minimal examples. Despite using only 42 training samples, Edit Transfer substantially outperforms state-of-the-art TIE and RIE methods on diverse non-rigid scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of few-shot visual relation learning.

In this article, we analyze how changing the underlying 3D shape of the base identity in face images can distort their overall appearance, especially from the perspective of deep face recognition. As done in popular training data augmentation schemes, we graphically render real and synthetic face images with randomly chosen or best-fitting 3D face models to generate novel views of the base identity. We compare deep features generated from these images to assess the perturbation these renderings introduce into the original identity. We perform this analysis at various degrees of facial yaw with the base identities varying in gender and ethnicity. Additionally, we investigate if adding some form of context and background pixels in these rendered images, when used as training data, further improves the downstream performance of a face recognition model. Our experiments demonstrate the significance of facial shape in accurate face matching and underpin the importance of contextual data for network training.

Historical documents encompass a wealth of cultural treasures but suffer from severe damages including character missing, paper damage, and ink erosion over time. However, existing document processing methods primarily focus on binarization, enhancement, etc., neglecting the repair of these damages. To this end, we present a new task, termed Historical Document Repair (HDR), which aims to predict the original appearance of damaged historical documents. To fill the gap in this field, we propose a large-scale dataset HDR28K and a diffusion-based network DiffHDR for historical document repair. Specifically, HDR28K contains 28,552 damaged-repaired image pairs with character-level annotations and multi-style degradations. Moreover, DiffHDR augments the vanilla diffusion framework with semantic and spatial information and a meticulously designed character perceptual loss for contextual and visual coherence. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DiffHDR trained using HDR28K significantly surpasses existing approaches and exhibits remarkable performance in handling real damaged documents. Notably, DiffHDR can also be extended to document editing and text block generation, showcasing its high flexibility and generalization capacity. We believe this study could pioneer a new direction of document processing and contribute to the inheritance of invaluable cultures and civilizations. The dataset and code is available at https://github.com/yeungchenwa/HDR.

Character image animation aims to synthesize high-fidelity videos by transferring motion from a driving sequence to a static reference image. Despite recent advancements, existing methods suffer from two fundamental challenges: (1) suboptimal motion injection strategies that lead to a trade-off between identity preservation and motion consistency, manifesting as a "see-saw", and (2) an over-reliance on explicit pose priors (e.g., skeletons), which inadequately capture intricate dynamics and hinder generalization to arbitrary, non-humanoid characters. To address these challenges, we present DreamActor-M2, a universal animation framework that reimagines motion conditioning as an in-context learning problem. Our approach follows a two-stage paradigm. First, we bridge the input modality gap by fusing reference appearance and motion cues into a unified latent space, enabling the model to jointly reason about spatial identity and temporal dynamics by leveraging the generative prior of foundational models. Second, we introduce a self-bootstrapped data synthesis pipeline that curates pseudo cross-identity training pairs, facilitating a seamless transition from pose-dependent control to direct, end-to-end RGB-driven animation. This strategy significantly enhances generalization across diverse characters and motion scenarios. To facilitate comprehensive evaluation, we further introduce AW Bench, a versatile benchmark encompassing a wide spectrum of characters types and motion scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DreamActor-M2 achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior visual fidelity and robust cross-domain generalization. Project Page: https://grisoon.github.io/DreamActor-M2/

In image editing, it is essential to incorporate a context image to convey the user's precise requirements, such as subject appearance or image style. Existing training-based visual context-aware editing methods incur data collection effort and training cost. On the other hand, the training-free alternatives are typically established on diffusion inversion, which struggles with consistency and flexibility. In this work, we propose VicoEdit, a training-free and inversion-free method to inject the visual context into the pretrained text-prompted editing model. More specifically, VicoEdit directly transforms the source image into the target one based on the visual context, thereby eliminating the need for inversion that can lead to deviated trajectories. Moreover, we design a posterior sampling approach guided by concept alignment to enhance the editing consistency. Empirical results demonstrate that our training-free method achieves even better editing performance than the state-of-the-art training-based models.

Wearable cameras are becoming more and more popular in several applications, increasing the interest of the research community in developing approaches for recognizing actions from the first-person point of view. An open challenge in egocentric action recognition is that videos lack detailed information about the main actor's pose and thus tend to record only parts of the movement when focusing on manipulation tasks. Thus, the amount of information about the action itself is limited, making crucial the understanding of the manipulated objects and their context. Many previous works addressed this issue with two-stream architectures, where one stream is dedicated to modeling the appearance of objects involved in the action, and another to extracting motion features from optical flow. In this paper, we argue that learning features jointly from these two information channels is beneficial to capture the spatio-temporal correlations between the two better. To this end, we propose a single stream architecture able to do so, thanks to the addition of a self-supervised block that uses a pretext motion prediction task to intertwine motion and appearance knowledge. Experiments on several publicly available databases show the power of our approach.

Transformer models exhibit in-context learning: the ability to accurately predict the response to a novel query based on illustrative examples in the input sequence. In-context learning contrasts with traditional in-weights learning of query-output relationships. What aspects of the training data distribution and architecture favor in-context vs in-weights learning? Recent work has shown that specific distributional properties inherent in language, such as burstiness, large dictionaries and skewed rank-frequency distributions, control the trade-off or simultaneous appearance of these two forms of learning. We first show that these results are recapitulated in a minimal attention-only network trained on a simplified dataset. In-context learning (ICL) is driven by the abrupt emergence of an induction head, which subsequently competes with in-weights learning. By identifying progress measures that precede in-context learning and targeted experiments, we construct a two-parameter model of an induction head which emulates the full data distributional dependencies displayed by the attention-based network. A phenomenological model of induction head formation traces its abrupt emergence to the sequential learning of three nested logits enabled by an intrinsic curriculum. We propose that the sharp transitions in attention-based networks arise due to a specific chain of multi-layer operations necessary to achieve ICL, which is implemented by nested nonlinearities sequentially learned during training.

The pervasive influence of social biases in language data has sparked the need for benchmark datasets that capture and evaluate these biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing efforts predominantly focus on English language and the Western context, leaving a void for a reliable dataset that encapsulates India's unique socio-cultural nuances. To bridge this gap, we introduce IndiBias, a comprehensive benchmarking dataset designed specifically for evaluating social biases in the Indian context. We filter and translate the existing CrowS-Pairs dataset to create a benchmark dataset suited to the Indian context in Hindi language. Additionally, we leverage LLMs including ChatGPT and InstructGPT to augment our dataset with diverse societal biases and stereotypes prevalent in India. The included bias dimensions encompass gender, religion, caste, age, region, physical appearance, and occupation. We also build a resource to address intersectional biases along three intersectional dimensions. Our dataset contains 800 sentence pairs and 300 tuples for bias measurement across different demographics. The dataset is available in English and Hindi, providing a size comparable to existing benchmark datasets. Furthermore, using IndiBias we compare ten different language models on multiple bias measurement metrics. We observed that the language models exhibit more bias across a majority of the intersectional groups.

Generating a coherent multi-shot video requires structured cross-shot memory. Subject appearance, scene context, and speaker identity must persist across cuts. Existing approaches either train end-to-end over fixed-length sequences and cannot scale, generate shot-by-shot with memory banks that grow linearly, or orchestrate pretrained generators under an LLM planner without a multi-shot-aware backbone. We present UnityShots, a memory-driven multi-shot audio-video generation system built on LTX-2.3, trained on annotated cinematic and music-video shots. The video stream maintains two fixed-size slots, a long-term memory (LTM) slot anchored to the opening shot and a short-term memory (STM) slot holding the immediately preceding tail, both updated at every cut by a boundary-conditioned gate that fuses visual cut probability and beat-tracker signals. The audio stream injects a reference speaker token at every shot to preserve vocal timbre without a sliding audio bank. A discrete cut-type prior, learned through AdaLN, becomes an inference-time control knob over transition strength. We release a benchmark of 200 multi-cultural multi-shot sequences spanning six ethnic regions and ten or more languages, with per-shot reference identities, reference audio, and per-boundary transition labels. Evaluated across I2V, T2V, and R2V conditioning modes, UnityShots leads open-source baselines on every cross-shot coherence metric and matches the strongest closed-source system on the multi-shot axes.

Controllable and physically grounded egocentric video generation is essential for embodied agents to reason about how their own and others' actions manifest and change the world. Compared to generic video synthesis, egocentric generation is especially challenging: the camera is tightly coupled to the actor, leading to rapid viewpoint changes and frequent self-occlusions; the underlying actions are subtle, articulated, and often only partially visible; and both the people and the scene state must evolve consistently with the specified controls. We present E^3C, a controllable video diffusion framework for egocentric generation that builds structured and compact conditions disentangling persistent scene structure from human-driven dynamics. From context frames, E^3C constructs a semi-dense point cloud-based 3D memory and augments each point with appearance descriptors from video-VAE features. Rendering this memory into target viewpoints produces conditioning aligned with the target frames. Human dynamics are modeled separately. The observed people in the scene are controlled by skeleton renderings (exo human control), while the camera wearer is specified by their 3D body joints and 6DoF wrist motion (ego human control). To preserve ego human control when the wearer's body parts are invisible, we introduce an ego motion encoder that produces persistent cross-attention tokens. Experiments on Nymeria show that E^3C improves visual fidelity, camera-motion accuracy, object consistency, and ego & exo human control over strong baselines, while also enabling intuitive scene editing.

The image-to-image translation abilities of generative learning models have recently made significant progress in the estimation of complex (steered) mappings between image distributions. While appearance based tasks like image in-painting or style transfer have been studied at length, we propose to investigate the potential of generative models in the context of physical simulations. Providing a dataset of 300k image-pairs and baseline evaluations for three different physical simulation tasks, we propose a benchmark to investigate the following research questions: i) are generative models able to learn complex physical relations from input-output image pairs? ii) what speedups can be achieved by replacing differential equation based simulations? While baseline evaluations of different current models show the potential for high speedups (ii), these results also show strong limitations toward the physical correctness (i). This underlines the need for new methods to enforce physical correctness. Data, baseline models and evaluation code http://www.physics-gen.org.

Over the last decades, the world has been witnessing growing threats to the security in urban spaces, which has augmented the relevance given to visual surveillance solutions able to detect, track and identify persons of interest in crowds. In particular, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are a potential tool for this kind of analysis, as they provide a cheap way for data collection, cover large and difficult-to-reach areas, while reducing human staff demands. In this context, all the available datasets are exclusively suitable for the pedestrian re-identification problem, in which the multi-camera views per ID are taken on a single day, and allows the use of clothing appearance features for identification purposes. Accordingly, the main contributions of this paper are two-fold: 1) we announce the UAV-based P-DESTRE dataset, which is the first of its kind to provide consistent ID annotations across multiple days, making it suitable for the extremely challenging problem of person search, i.e., where no clothing information can be reliably used. Apart this feature, the P-DESTRE annotations enable the research on UAV-based pedestrian detection, tracking, re-identification and soft biometric solutions; and 2) we compare the results attained by state-of-the-art pedestrian detection, tracking, reidentification and search techniques in well-known surveillance datasets, to the effectiveness obtained by the same techniques in the P-DESTRE data. Such comparison enables to identify the most problematic data degradation factors of UAV-based data for each task, and can be used as baselines for subsequent advances in this kind of technology. The dataset and the full details of the empirical evaluation carried out are freely available at http://p-destre.di.ubi.pt/.

Despite the advancements of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) in RGB vision, their ability to generalize to unseen visual modalities remains a largely unexplored challenge. We argue that different visual modalities are merely distinct samplings of the same physical world. Therefore, effective generalization requires models to possess both modality-agnostic perception of scene semantics and the adaptability to modality-specific characteristics. To achieve this, we propose a training framework, VVM-Tuning, to equip LMMs with these capabilities through modality synthesis and modality contexts. Specifically, we synthesize diverse appearance-varied images from RGB scenes, training the model to disentangle invariant semantics from varying visual appearances, and align these appearances with language for visual concepts decoupled from modalities. We then introduce modality contexts in the prompt and use instruction tuning to assist the model in mapping these appearance variations back to modality-related attributes, enabling zero-shot adaptation to unseen modalities during inference. To facilitate research in this direction, we introduce VVM-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 6 real and synthetic modalities to evaluate semantic perception and modality understanding. Experiments demonstrate that, via our training on synthetic modalities, 5 tested models exhibit consistent improvements on both real-world and novel synthetic modalities without in-modality training. Source code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/Hunter-Will/VVM-Tuning.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI, but are constrained by limited context windows, hindering their utility in tasks like extended conversations and document analysis. To enable using context beyond limited context windows, we propose virtual context management, a technique drawing inspiration from hierarchical memory systems in traditional operating systems that provide the appearance of large memory resources through data movement between fast and slow memory. Using this technique, we introduce MemGPT (Memory-GPT), a system that intelligently manages different memory tiers in order to effectively provide extended context within the LLM's limited context window, and utilizes interrupts to manage control flow between itself and the user. We evaluate our OS-inspired design in two domains where the limited context windows of modern LLMs severely handicaps their performance: document analysis, where MemGPT is able to analyze large documents that far exceed the underlying LLM's context window, and multi-session chat, where MemGPT can create conversational agents that remember, reflect, and evolve dynamically through long-term interactions with their users. We release MemGPT code and data for our experiments at https://memgpt.ai.

To address key limitations in human-object interaction (HOI) video generation -- specifically the reliance on curated motion data, limited generalization to novel objects/scenarios, and restricted accessibility -- we introduce HunyuanVideo-HOMA, a weakly conditioned multimodal-driven framework. HunyuanVideo-HOMA enhances controllability and reduces dependency on precise inputs through sparse, decoupled motion guidance. It encodes appearance and motion signals into the dual input space of a multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT), fusing them within a shared context space to synthesize temporally consistent and physically plausible interactions. To optimize training, we integrate a parameter-space HOI adapter initialized from pretrained MMDiT weights, preserving prior knowledge while enabling efficient adaptation, and a facial cross-attention adapter for anatomically accurate audio-driven lip synchronization. Extensive experiments confirm state-of-the-art performance in interaction naturalness and generalization under weak supervision. Finally, HunyuanVideo-HOMA demonstrates versatility in text-conditioned generation and interactive object manipulation, supported by a user-friendly demo interface. The project page is at https://anonymous.4open.science/w/homa-page-0FBE/.

Diffusion Transformer(DiT) based video generation models have recently achieved impressive visual quality and temporal coherence, but they still frequently violate basic physical laws and commonsense dynamics, revealing a lack of explicit world knowledge. In this work, we explore how to equip them with a plug-and-play memory that injects useful world knowledge. Motivated by in-context memory in Transformer-based LLMs, we conduct empirical studies to show that DiT can be steered via interventions on its hidden states, and simple low-pass and high-pass filters in the embedding space naturally disentangle low-level appearance and high-level physical/semantic cues, enabling targeted guidance. Building on these observations, we propose a learnable memory encoder DiT-Mem, composed of stacked 3D CNNs, low-/high-pass filters, and self-attention layers. The encoder maps reference videos into a compact set of memory tokens, which are concatenated as the memory within the DiT self-attention layers. During training, we keep the diffusion backbone frozen, and only optimize the memory encoder. It yields a rather efficient training process on few training parameters (150M) and 10K data samples, and enables plug-and-play usage at inference time. Extensive experiments on state-of-the-art models demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in improving physical rule following and video fidelity. Our code and data are publicly released here: https://thrcle421.github.io/DiT-Mem-Web/.

This paper introduces a novel one-stage end-to-end detector specifically designed to detect small lesions in medical images. Precise localization of small lesions presents challenges due to their appearance and the diverse contextual backgrounds in which they are found. To address this, our approach introduces a new type of pixel-based anchor that dynamically moves towards the targeted lesion for detection. We refer to this new architecture as GravityNet, and the novel anchors as gravity points since they appear to be "attracted" by the lesions. We conducted experiments on two well-established medical problems involving small lesions to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach: microcalcifications detection in digital mammograms and microaneurysms detection in digital fundus images. Our method demonstrates promising results in effectively detecting small lesions in these medical imaging tasks.

Foot contact plays a critical role in human interaction with the world, and thus exploring foot contact can advance our understanding of human movement and physical interaction. Despite its importance, existing methods often approximate foot contact using a zero-velocity constraint and focus on joint-level contact, failing to capture the detailed interaction between the foot and the world. Dense estimation of foot contact is crucial for accurately modeling this interaction, yet predicting dense foot contact from a single RGB image remains largely underexplored. There are two main challenges for learning dense foot contact estimation. First, shoes exhibit highly diverse appearances, making it difficult for models to generalize across different styles. Second, ground often has a monotonous appearance, making it difficult to extract informative features. To tackle these issues, we present a FEet COntact estimation (FECO) framework that learns dense foot contact with shoe style-invariant and ground-aware learning. To overcome the challenge of shoe appearance diversity, our approach incorporates shoe style adversarial training that enforces shoe style-invariant features for contact estimation. To effectively utilize ground information, we introduce a ground feature extractor that captures ground properties based on spatial context. As a result, our proposed method achieves robust foot contact estimation regardless of shoe appearance and effectively leverages ground information. Code will be released.

We introduce INQUIRE, a text-to-image retrieval benchmark designed to challenge multimodal vision-language models on expert-level queries. INQUIRE includes iNaturalist 2024 (iNat24), a new dataset of five million natural world images, along with 250 expert-level retrieval queries. These queries are paired with all relevant images comprehensively labeled within iNat24, comprising 33,000 total matches. Queries span categories such as species identification, context, behavior, and appearance, emphasizing tasks that require nuanced image understanding and domain expertise. Our benchmark evaluates two core retrieval tasks: (1) INQUIRE-Fullrank, a full dataset ranking task, and (2) INQUIRE-Rerank, a reranking task for refining top-100 retrievals. Detailed evaluation of a range of recent multimodal models demonstrates that INQUIRE poses a significant challenge, with the best models failing to achieve an mAP@50 above 50%. In addition, we show that reranking with more powerful multimodal models can enhance retrieval performance, yet there remains a significant margin for improvement. By focusing on scientifically-motivated ecological challenges, INQUIRE aims to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and the needs of real-world scientific inquiry, encouraging the development of retrieval systems that can assist with accelerating ecological and biodiversity research. Our dataset and code are available at https://inquire-benchmark.github.io

Object insertion aims to seamlessly composite a reference object into a specified region of a background image. Recent diffusion-based methods achieve high visual quality but formulate insertion as a simple 2D inpainting task, providing no explicit control over the object's 3D pose and limiting their practical applicability. We propose DIRECT (Decomposed Injection for Reference Composition and Target-integration), a novel framework that integrates interactive pose manipulation with high-fidelity 2D image synthesis to enable pose-controllable object insertion. Our method decomposes the insertion conditions into three complementary components: appearance guidance capturing visual details from the reference object, geometry guidance derived from the user-adjusted 3D proxy, and context guidance from the target background. By injecting them through separate pathways, DIRECT avoids feature entanglement and simultaneously preserves reference appearance, follows the user-specified pose, and adapts the object to the target scene. We also introduce an automated data construction pipeline to improve the diversity and quality of training data. Experiments show that DIRECT outperforms previous methods in both geometric controllability and visual quality.

Previous works on image inpainting mainly focus on inpainting background or partially missing objects, while the problem of inpainting an entire missing object remains unexplored. This work studies a new image inpainting task, i.e. shape-guided object inpainting. Given an incomplete input image, the goal is to fill in the hole by generating an object based on the context and implicit guidance given by the hole shape. Since previous methods for image inpainting are mainly designed for background inpainting, they are not suitable for this task. Therefore, we propose a new data preparation method and a novel Contextual Object Generator (CogNet) for the object inpainting task. On the data side, we incorporate object priors into training data by using object instances as holes. The CogNet has a two-stream architecture that combines the standard bottom-up image completion process with a top-down object generation process. A predictive class embedding module bridges the two streams by predicting the class of the missing object from the bottom-up features, from which a semantic object map is derived as the input of the top-down stream. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate realistic objects that fit the context in terms of both visual appearance and semantic meanings. Code can be found at the project page https://zengxianyu.github.io/objpaint

Character animation aims to generate lifelike videos by transferring motion dynamics from a driving video to a reference image. Recent strides in generative models have paved the way for high-fidelity character animation. In this work, we present Kling-MotionControl, a unified DiT-based framework engineered specifically for robust, precise, and expressive holistic character animation. Leveraging a divide-and-conquer strategy within a cohesive system, the model orchestrates heterogeneous motion representations tailored to the distinct characteristics of body, face, and hands, effectively reconciling large-scale structural stability with fine-grained articulatory expressiveness. To ensure robust cross-identity generalization, we incorporate adaptive identity-agnostic learning, facilitating natural motion retargeting for diverse characters ranging from realistic humans to stylized cartoons. Simultaneously, we guarantee faithful appearance preservation through meticulous identity injection and fusion designs, further supported by a subject library mechanism that leverages comprehensive reference contexts. To ensure practical utility, we implement an advanced acceleration framework utilizing multi-stage distillation, boosting inference speed by over 10x. Kling-MotionControl distinguishes itself through intelligent semantic motion understanding and precise text responsiveness, allowing for flexible control beyond visual inputs. Human preference evaluations demonstrate that Kling-MotionControl delivers superior performance compared to leading commercial and open-source solutions, achieving exceptional fidelity in holistic motion control, open domain generalization, and visual quality and coherence. These results establish Kling-MotionControl as a robust solution for high-quality, controllable, and lifelike character animation.

We present a task and benchmark dataset for person-centric visual grounding, the problem of linking between people named in a caption and people pictured in an image. In contrast to prior work in visual grounding, which is predominantly object-based, our new task masks out the names of people in captions in order to encourage methods trained on such image-caption pairs to focus on contextual cues (such as rich interactions between multiple people), rather than learning associations between names and appearances. To facilitate this task, we introduce a new dataset, Who's Waldo, mined automatically from image-caption data on Wikimedia Commons. We propose a Transformer-based method that outperforms several strong baselines on this task, and are releasing our data to the research community to spur work on contextual models that consider both vision and language.

Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.

This paper proposes dynamic human group detection in videos. For detecting complex groups, not only the local appearance features of in-group members but also the global context of the scene are important. Such local and global appearance features in each frame are extracted using a Vision-Language Model (VLM) augmented for group detection in our method. For further improvement, the group structure should be consistent over time. While previous methods are stabilized on the assumption that groups are not changed in a video, our method detects dynamically changing groups by global optimization using a graph with all frames' groupness probabilities estimated by our groupness-augmented CLIP features. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art group detection methods on public datasets. Code: https://github.com/irajisamurai/VLM-GroupDetection.git

Existing logo detection benchmarks consider artificial deployment scenarios by assuming that large training data with fine-grained bounding box annotations for each class are available for model training. Such assumptions are often invalid in realistic logo detection scenarios where new logo classes come progressively and require to be detected with little or none budget for exhaustively labelling fine-grained training data for every new class. Existing benchmarks are thus unable to evaluate the true performance of a logo detection method in realistic and open deployments. In this work, we introduce a more realistic and challenging logo detection setting, called Open Logo Detection. Specifically, this new setting assumes fine-grained labelling only on a small proportion of logo classes whilst the remaining classes have no labelled training data to simulate the open deployment. We further create an open logo detection benchmark, called OpenLogo,to promote the investigation of this new challenge. OpenLogo contains 27,083 images from 352 logo classes, built by aggregating/refining 7 existing datasets and establishing an open logo detection evaluation protocol. To address this challenge, we propose a Context Adversarial Learning (CAL) approach to synthesising training data with coherent logo instance appearance against diverse background context for enabling more effective optimisation of contemporary deep learning detection models. Experiments show the performance advantage of CAL over existing state-of-the-art alternative methods on the more realistic and challenging OpenLogo benchmark.

Recently, action recognition has been dominated by transformer-based methods, thanks to their spatiotemporal contextual aggregation capacities. However, despite the significant progress achieved on scene-related datasets, they do not perform well on motion-sensitive datasets due to the lack of elaborate motion modeling designs. Meanwhile, we observe that the widely-used cost volume in traditional action recognition is highly similar to the affinity matrix defined in self-attention, but equipped with powerful motion modeling capacities. In light of this, we propose to integrate those effective motion modeling properties into the existing transformer in a unified and neat way, with the proposal of the Explicit Motion Information Mining module (EMIM). In EMIM, we propose to construct the desirable affinity matrix in a cost volume style, where the set of key candidate tokens is sampled from the query-based neighboring area in the next frame in a sliding-window manner. Then, the constructed affinity matrix is used to aggregate contextual information for appearance modeling and is converted into motion features for motion modeling as well. We validate the motion modeling capacities of our method on four widely-used datasets, and our method performs better than existing state-of-the-art approaches, especially on motion-sensitive datasets, i.e., Something-Something V1 & V2.

Image composition involves seamlessly integrating given objects into a specific visual context. Current training-free methods rely on composing attention weights from several samplers to guide the generator. However, since these weights are derived from disparate contexts, their combination leads to coherence confusion and loss of appearance information. These issues worsen with their excessive focus on background generation, even when unnecessary in this task. This not only impedes their swift implementation but also compromises foreground generation quality. Moreover, these methods introduce unwanted artifacts in the transition area. In this paper, we formulate image composition as a subject-based local editing task, solely focusing on foreground generation. At each step, the edited foreground is combined with the noisy background to maintain scene consistency. To address the remaining issues, we propose PrimeComposer, a faster training-free diffuser that composites the images by well-designed attention steering across different noise levels. This steering is predominantly achieved by our Correlation Diffuser, utilizing its self-attention layers at each step. Within these layers, the synthesized subject interacts with both the referenced object and background, capturing intricate details and coherent relationships. This prior information is encoded into the attention weights, which are then integrated into the self-attention layers of the generator to guide the synthesis process. Besides, we introduce a Region-constrained Cross-Attention to confine the impact of specific subject-related tokens to desired regions, addressing the unwanted artifacts shown in the prior method thereby further improving the coherence in the transition area. Our method exhibits the fastest inference efficiency and extensive experiments demonstrate our superiority both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Historical documents represent an invaluable cultural heritage, yet have undergone significant degradation over time through tears, water erosion, and oxidation. Existing Historical Document Restoration (HDR) methods primarily focus on single modality or limited-size restoration, failing to meet practical needs. To fill this gap, we present a full-page HDR dataset (FPHDR) and a novel automated HDR solution (AutoHDR). Specifically, FPHDR comprises 1,633 real and 6,543 synthetic images with character-level and line-level locations, as well as character annotations in different damage grades. AutoHDR mimics historians' restoration workflows through a three-stage approach: OCR-assisted damage localization, vision-language context text prediction, and patch autoregressive appearance restoration. The modular architecture of AutoHDR enables seamless human-machine collaboration, allowing for flexible intervention and optimization at each restoration stage. Experiments demonstrate AutoHDR's remarkable performance in HDR. When processing severely damaged documents, our method improves OCR accuracy from 46.83\% to 84.05\%, with further enhancement to 94.25\% through human-machine collaboration. We believe this work represents a significant advancement in automated historical document restoration and contributes substantially to cultural heritage preservation. The model and dataset are available at https://github.com/SCUT-DLVCLab/AutoHDR.

Recovering real-world scenes as interactive simulation environments can enable generalizable robot learning and reproducible policy evaluation. However, constructing scenes that are both physically stable and visually faithful remains slow and expensive. In this work, we present RoboSnap, a real-to-sim framework that turns a single RGB image into a simulation-ready scene. The key idea is a layered design that separates the physics-critical interaction area from the surrounding visual context: collision-aware foreground assets are refined for stable robot interaction, while a 3D Gaussian splatting visual layer preserves faithful background appearance under novel views. Experiments on DROID scenes and real-robot tasks show that RoboSnap achieves reliable trajectory replay in the recovered scenes, supports task-specific synthetic data generation for policy training, and yields meaningful sim-real correlation for policy evaluation. To further support real-to-sim research, we introduce DROID-Sim, a real-to-sim companion dataset constructed from 564 real-world scenes in DROID. Extensive experiments suggest that the value of real-to-sim methods lies not only in high-fidelity visual reconstruction, but in turning real environments into reusable infrastructure for robot learning and evaluation.

Remote sensing change detection (RSCD) aims to localise changes between two images of the same geographic region. In practice, change masks often follow region-level annotation conventions rather than purely local appearance differences, making them context-dependent and occasionally ambiguous. Most state-of-the-art methods utilise per-pixel discriminative classification, which produces a single prediction per input and fails to explicitly model the changed region as a coherent whole. A natural alternative is generative formulation, which can model a distribution of plausible masks, enabling sampling to capture ambiguity and encourage global consistency. However, existing generative RSCD approaches typically lag behind strong discriminative baselines due to the high computational cost of pixel-space generation and the complexity of their conditioning mechanisms. To address the limitations of prior discriminative and generative methods, we propose ChangeFlow, a generative framework that reformulates change detection as the synthesis of a change mask in latent space via rectified flow. ChangeFlow is guided by a structured yet lightweight conditioning signal, and its stochastic design naturally supports sampling-based prediction ensembling. Namely, aggregating multiple predicted change masks improves robustness, while sample agreement provides a practical confidence estimation that highlights ambiguous regions. Across four benchmarks, ChangeFlow achieves an average F1 of 80.4\%, improving by 1.3 points on average over the previous best method, while maintaining inference speed comparable to recent strong baselines. Project page: https://blaz-r.github.io/changeflow_cd

Category-level 3D/6D pose estimation is a crucial step towards comprehensive 3D scene understanding, which would enable a broad range of applications in robotics and embodied AI. Recent works explored neural mesh models that approach a range of 2D and 3D tasks from an analysis-by-synthesis perspective. Despite the largely enhanced robustness to partial occlusion and domain shifts, these methods depended heavily on 3D annotations for part-contrastive learning, which confines them to a narrow set of categories and hinders efficient scaling. In this work, we present DINeMo, a novel neural mesh model that is trained with no 3D annotations by leveraging pseudo-correspondence obtained from large visual foundation models. We adopt a bidirectional pseudo-correspondence generation method, which produce pseudo correspondence utilize both local appearance features and global context information. Experimental results on car datasets demonstrate that our DINeMo outperforms previous zero- and few-shot 3D pose estimation by a wide margin, narrowing the gap with fully-supervised methods by 67.3%. Our DINeMo also scales effectively and efficiently when incorporating more unlabeled images during training, which demonstrate the advantages over supervised learning methods that rely on 3D annotations. Our project page is available at https://analysis-by-synthesis.github.io/DINeMo/.

Large text-to-image models achieved a remarkable leap in the evolution of AI, enabling high-quality and diverse synthesis of images from a given text prompt. However, these models lack the ability to mimic the appearance of subjects in a given reference set and synthesize novel renditions of them in different contexts. In this work, we present a new approach for "personalization" of text-to-image diffusion models (specializing them to users' needs). Given as input just a few images of a subject, we fine-tune a pretrained text-to-image model (Imagen, although our method is not limited to a specific model) such that it learns to bind a unique identifier with that specific subject. Once the subject is embedded in the output domain of the model, the unique identifier can then be used to synthesize fully-novel photorealistic images of the subject contextualized in different scenes. By leveraging the semantic prior embedded in the model with a new autogenous class-specific prior preservation loss, our technique enables synthesizing the subject in diverse scenes, poses, views, and lighting conditions that do not appear in the reference images. We apply our technique to several previously-unassailable tasks, including subject recontextualization, text-guided view synthesis, appearance modification, and artistic rendering (all while preserving the subject's key features). Project page: https://dreambooth.github.io/

We present MetaFind, a scene-aware tri-modal compositional retrieval framework designed to enhance scene generation in the metaverse by retrieving 3D assets from large-scale repositories. MetaFind addresses two core challenges: (i) inconsistent asset retrieval that overlooks spatial, semantic, and stylistic constraints, and (ii) the absence of a standardized retrieval paradigm specifically tailored for 3D asset retrieval, as existing approaches mainly rely on general-purpose 3D shape representation models. Our key innovation is a flexible retrieval mechanism that supports arbitrary combinations of text, image, and 3D modalities as queries, enhancing spatial reasoning and style consistency by jointly modeling object-level features (including appearance) and scene-level layout structures. Methodologically, MetaFind introduces a plug-and-play equivariant layout encoder ESSGNN that captures spatial relationships and object appearance features, ensuring retrieved 3D assets are contextually and stylistically coherent with the existing scene, regardless of coordinate frame transformations. The framework supports iterative scene construction by continuously adapting retrieval results to current scene updates. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the improved spatial and stylistic consistency of MetaFind in various retrieval tasks compared to baseline methods.

We address the problem of generating a 3D-consistent, navigable environment that is spatially grounded: a simulation of a real location. Existing video generative models can produce a plausible sequence that is consistent with a text (T2V) or image (I2V) prompt. However, the capability to reconstruct the real world under arbitrary weather conditions and dynamic object configurations is essential for downstream applications including autonomous driving and robotics simulation. To this end, we present CityRAG, a video generative model that leverages large corpora of geo-registered data as context to ground generation to the physical scene, while maintaining learned priors for complex motion and appearance changes. CityRAG relies on temporally unaligned training data, which teaches the model to semantically disentangle the underlying scene from its transient attributes. Our experiments demonstrate that CityRAG can generate coherent minutes-long, physically grounded video sequences, maintain weather and lighting conditions over thousands of frames, achieve loop closure, and navigate complex trajectories to reconstruct real-world geography.

Recent conditional video generation models have shown promising potentials to transform 3D engine renderings, such as depth maps and untextured geometry, into photorealistic videos for gaming and immersive content creation. These applications require long-horizon auto-regressive generation that continuously synthesizes new frames while preserving a persistent 3D world. Auto-regressive generators synthesize video chunk by chunk with a bounded KV cache, so when the camera revisits a location after its context has been evicted, the model often regenerates inconsistent appearance, even though the conditioning renderings (e.g., depth) remain perfectly aligned with the underlying geometry.We address this revisit inconsistency without any post-training by exploiting correspondences the 3D engine already provides: temporal correspondence retrieves pose-matched historical latent chunks into the KV cache as loop-closure memory, while spatial correspondence from camera pose and depth reprojection biases token-level attention toward geometrically corresponding regions of the retrieved chunks. We demonstrate our method on loop-closure trajectories mined from TartanAir and TartanGround dataset to mirror complicate real-world application scenarios, where it outperforms existing training-free baselines on revisit consistency without losing overall video quality. Project Page: https://wenchao-m.github.io/ClosetheLoop.github.io/

Segmentation is a fundamental vision task underlying numerous downstream applications. Recent promptable segmentation models, such as Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), extend segmentation from category-agnostic mask prediction to concept-guided localization conditioned on high-level textual prompts. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate mask accuracy or object presence, leaving unclear whether these models faithfully ground the queried concept or instead rely on visually salient but semantically misleading cues. We introduce CAFE: Counterfactual Attribute Factuality Evaluation, a novel benchmark for evaluating concept-faithful segmentation in promptable segmentation models. Our CAFE is built on attribute-level counterfactual manipulation: the target region and ground-truth mask are preserved, while attributes such as surface appearance, context, or material composition are modified to introduce misleading semantic cues. The benchmark contains 2,146 paired test samples, each consisting of a target image, a ground-truth mask, a positive prompt, and a misleading negative prompt. These samples cover three counterfactual categories: Superficial Mimicry (SM), Context Conflict (CC), and Ontological Conflict (OC). We evaluate various model types and sizes on our CAFE. Experiments reveal a systematic gap between localization quality and concept discrimination: models often generate accurate masks even for misleading prompts, suggesting that strong mask prediction does not necessarily imply faithful semantic grounding. Our CAFE provides a controlled benchmark for diagnosing whether promptable segmentation models perform concept-faithful grounding rather than shortcut-driven mask retrieval.

Large multimodal language models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed as web agents, yet many multimodal browsing benchmarks can be solved by shallow, fixed workflows that lean on high-recall image search and nearby text-masking the genuinely multimodal challenges of fine-grained visual reasoning, provenance verification, and long-horizon tool use. We introduce MMSearch-Plus, a benchmark of 311 tasks that highly demand multimodal understanding while preserving the difficulty profile of strong text-only browsing suites. Each item is constructed to contain multiple weak, localized visual signals that must be extracted, propagated through iterative text-image search, and cross-validated under retrieval noise before answering. Our curation procedure, Spatial-Temporal Extrapolation, seeds questions whose answers require extrapolating from spatial cues (micro-text, part-level appearance, layouts, signage) and temporal traces (broadcast overlays, seasonal context) to out-of-image facts such as events, dates, and venues. We provide a model-agnostic agent framework with browsing tools and evaluate a range of closed and open MLLMs. The strongest agent (o3) attains 15.1% without search and 36.0% accuracy with rollout under our framework, while a strong open-source model (Qwen-2.5-VL-72B-Instruct) achieves 0.0% without search and 6.9% after 20 rounds of search. Beyond answer accuracy, we assess bounding-box production and cropped-image search, and conduct an error analysis that surfaces failures in source verification, part-based reasoning, and long-horizon planning.

Hand-object interaction (HOI) recognition requires capturing both hand manipulations and object transformations. However, existing video-language models often fall into shortcuts by relying on spurious correlations among hands, objects, or environmental context, rather than reasoning from the appearance and dynamics of hands and objects themselves. To address this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm that combines (i) hand-object masked training, which enables robust reasoning from partial hand or object observations, and (ii) an HOI-dynamics-aware decoder that explicitly learns hand- and object-centric embeddings through auxiliary predictions of their locations and semantics, enhancing sensitivity to both cues. To systematically evaluate such cue-specific reasoning, we introduce Cue-Isolated HOI (CI-HOI), a new evaluation that assesses models' ability to predict actions from hand- and object-related cues independently. To enable CI-HOI, we curate the DEHOI testbed, which separates hand- and object-related observations for disentangled HOI evaluation through inpainting. Using DEHOI, we demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our training strategy exploits hand- and object-centric information more effectively than existing models. Our approach improves over existing models on DEHOI, standard action recognition, object state recognition, and even robot manipulation action recognition, leading to more robust HOI understanding.

Foundation models have transformed vision and language by learning general-purpose representations from large-scale unlabeled data, yet 3D medical imaging lacks analogous approaches. Existing self-supervised methods rely on low-level reconstruction or contrastive objectives that fail to capture the anatomical semantics critical for medical image analysis, limiting transfer to downstream tasks. We present MASS (MAsk-guided Self-Supervised learning), which treats in-context segmentation as the pretext task for learning general-purpose medical imaging representations. MASS's key insight is that automatically generated class-agnostic masks provide sufficient structural supervision for learning semantically rich representations. By training on thousands of diverse mask proposals spanning anatomical structures and pathological findings, MASS learns what semantically defines medical structures: the holistic combination of appearance, shape, spatial context, and anatomical relationships. We demonstrate effectiveness across data regimes: from small-scale pretraining on individual datasets (20-200 scans) to large-scale multi-modal pretraining on 5K CT, MRI, and PET volumes, all without annotations. MASS demonstrates: (i) few-shot segmentation on novel structures, (ii) matching full supervision with only 20-40\% labeled data while outperforming self-supervised baselines by over 20 in Dice score in low-data regimes, and (iii) frozen-encoder classification on unseen pathologies that matches full supervised training with thousands of samples. Mask-guided self-supervised pretraining captures broadly generalizable knowledge, opening a path toward 3D medical imaging foundation models without expert annotations. Code is available: https://github.com/Stanford-AIMI/MASS.

Video-based visual relation detection tasks, such as video scene graph generation, play important roles in fine-grained video understanding. However, current video visual relation detection datasets have two main limitations that hinder the progress of research in this area. First, they do not explore complex human-human interactions in multi-person scenarios. Second, the relation types of existing datasets have relatively low-level semantics and can be often recognized by appearance or simple prior information, without the need for detailed spatio-temporal context reasoning. Nevertheless, comprehending high-level interactions between humans is crucial for understanding complex multi-person videos, such as sports and surveillance videos. To address this issue, we propose a new video visual relation detection task: video human-human interaction detection, and build a dataset named SportsHHI for it. SportsHHI contains 34 high-level interaction classes from basketball and volleyball sports. 118,075 human bounding boxes and 50,649 interaction instances are annotated on 11,398 keyframes. To benchmark this, we propose a two-stage baseline method and conduct extensive experiments to reveal the key factors for a successful human-human interaction detector. We hope that SportsHHI can stimulate research on human interaction understanding in videos and promote the development of spatio-temporal context modeling techniques in video visual relation detection.

Accurate segmentation of power lines in various aerial images is very important for UAV flight safety. The complex background and very thin structures of power lines, however, make it an inherently difficult task in computer vision. This paper presents PLGAN, a simple yet effective method based on generative adversarial networks, to segment power lines from aerial images with different backgrounds. Instead of directly using the adversarial networks to generate the segmentation, we take their certain decoding features and embed them into another semantic segmentation network by considering more context, geometry, and appearance information of power lines. We further exploit the appropriate form of the generated images for high-quality feature embedding and define a new loss function in the Hough-transform parameter space to enhance the segmentation of very thin power lines. Extensive experiments and comprehensive analysis demonstrate that our proposed PLGAN outperforms the prior state-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation and line detection.

As a common image editing operation, image composition (object insertion) aims to combine the foreground from one image and another background image, resulting in a composite image. However, there are many issues that could make the composite images unrealistic. These issues can be summarized as the inconsistency between foreground and background, which includes appearance inconsistency (e.g., incompatible illumination), geometry inconsistency (e.g., unreasonable size), and semantic inconsistency (e.g., mismatched semantic context). Image composition task could be decomposed into multiple sub-tasks, in which each sub-task targets at one or more issues. Specifically, object placement aims to find reasonable scale, location, and shape for the foreground. Image blending aims to address the unnatural boundary between foreground and background. Image harmonization aims to adjust the illumination statistics of foreground. Shadow (resp., reflection) generation aims to generate plausible shadow (resp., reflection) for the foreground. These sub-tasks can be executed sequentially or parallelly to acquire realistic composite images. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous survey on image composition (object insertion). In this paper, we conduct comprehensive survey over the sub-tasks and combinatorial task of image composition (object insertion). For each one, we summarize the existing methods, available datasets, and common evaluation metrics. We have also contributed the first image composition toolbox libcom, which assembles 10+ image composition related functions (e.g., image blending, image harmonization, object placement, shadow generation, generative composition). The ultimate goal of this toolbox is solving all the problems related to image composition with simple `import libcom'.

Recent text-to-image generation models have acquired the ability of multi-reference generation and editing; the ability to inherit the appearance of subjects from multiple reference images and re-render them under new contexts. However, the existing benchmark datasets often focus on the generation with single or a few reference images, which prevents us from measuring the progress on how model performance advances or pointing out their weaknesses, under different multi-reference conditions. In addition, their task definitions are still vague, typically limited to axes such as "what to edit" or "how many references are given", and therefore fail to capture the intrinsic difficulty of multi-reference settings. To address this gap, we introduce MultiBanana, which is carefully designed to assesses the edge of model capabilities by widely covering multi-reference-specific problems at scale: (1) varying the number of references, (2) domain mismatch among references (e.g., photo vs. anime), (3) scale mismatch between reference and target scenes, (4) references containing rare concepts (e.g., a red banana), and (5) multilingual textual references for rendering. Our analysis among a variety of text-to-image models reveals their superior performances, typical failure modes, and areas for improvement. MultiBanana will be released as an open benchmark to push the boundaries and establish a standardized basis for fair comparison in multi-reference image generation. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/matsuolab/multibanana .

Adapting vision-language models to remote sensing imagery presents a fundamental challenge: both the visual and linguistic distributions of satellite data lie far outside natural image pretraining corpora. Despite this, prompting remains the dominant deployment paradigm, driven by the assumption that domain-specific language can guide frozen model representations toward specialized tasks. We test this assumption directly on a domain where the mismatch is prominent: cloud segmentation for satellite imagery. Using CLIPSeg on the CloudSEN12+ cloud segmentation benchmark, we evaluate 60 prompt variants spanning simple labels, domain terminology, appearance descriptors, and contextual cues, finding that every variant underperforms the zero-shot baseline (0.255 mIoU), with engineered prompts scoring as low as 0.07 mIoU. No amount of linguistic refinement bridges the gap between CLIP's natural image representations and satellite spectral imagery. In contrast, supervised fine-tuning with just 0.1% labeled data (~8 images) surpasses zero-shot performance overall, and 5-10% data recovers ~85% of maximum achievable mIoU. Full fine-tuning consistently outperforms low-rank adaptation by 0.03-0.09 mIoU, with the largest gaps for spectrally ambiguous classes, and at 0.5 to 1% labeled data, fine-tuning temporarily degrades performance on these classes before recovering, a supervision dip that aggregate mIoU can mask. For practitioners adapting vision-language models to specialized imagery, our results deliver a clear message: labeled data is not the expensive alternative to prompting; it is the worthwhile path.

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of small, blurred, or occluded appearance from novel/base categories, whose detection heavily relies on contextual information. To address this, we propose a novel approach, namely Simple Image-level Classification for Context-Aware Detection Scoring (SIC-CADS), to leverage the superior global knowledge yielded from CLIP for complementing the current OVOD models from a global perspective. The core of SIC-CADS is a multi-modal multi-label recognition (MLR) module that learns the object co-occurrence-based contextual information from CLIP to recognize all possible object categories in the scene. These image-level MLR scores can then be utilized to refine the instance-level detection scores of the current OVOD models in detecting those hard objects. This is verified by extensive empirical results on two popular benchmarks, OV-LVIS and OV-COCO, which show that SIC-CADS achieves significant and consistent improvement when combined with different types of OVOD models. Further, SIC-CADS also improves the cross-dataset generalization ability on Objects365 and OpenImages. The code is available at https://github.com/mala-lab/SIC-CADS.

In Video Object Detection (VID), a common practice is to leverage the rich temporal contexts from the video to enhance the object representations in each frame. Existing methods treat the temporal contexts obtained from different objects indiscriminately and ignore their different identities. While intuitively, aggregating local views of the same object in different frames may facilitate a better understanding of the object. Thus, in this paper, we aim to enable the model to focus on the identity-consistent temporal contexts of each object to obtain more comprehensive object representations and handle the rapid object appearance variations such as occlusion, motion blur, etc. However, realizing this goal on top of existing VID models faces low-efficiency problems due to their redundant region proposals and nonparallel frame-wise prediction manner. To aid this, we propose ClipVID, a VID model equipped with Identity-Consistent Aggregation (ICA) layers specifically designed for mining fine-grained and identity-consistent temporal contexts. It effectively reduces the redundancies through the set prediction strategy, making the ICA layers very efficient and further allowing us to design an architecture that makes parallel clip-wise predictions for the whole video clip. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method: a state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance (84.7% mAP) on the ImageNet VID dataset while running at a speed about 7x faster (39.3 fps) than previous SOTAs.

Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the input contexts can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we introduce a new method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of retrieved passages that could answer the original question. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, e.g. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks and provide gains of 5-20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning.

Video prediction is increasingly viewed as a path toward generalizable world models, yet it remains unclear whether these systems learn underlying causal structure or merely exploit superficial visual correlations for future prediction. We introduce CRONOS, an intervention-based benchmark designed to evaluate counterfactual physical consistency: whether a model's predictions of physical events respond appropriately to controlled changes in the visual input, such as variations of scene context, viewpoint, object appearance, and object category. Built in a photorealistic Unreal Engine environment, CRONOS enables controlled, high-fidelity generation of videos across diverse scenes and dynamics. In contrast to previous benchmarks, CRONOS systematically intervenes on four key factors - viewpoint, scene, object category, and object appearance - while keeping the underlying physical event type, such as a collision, occlusion, or fall, fixed. Our evaluation of recent open-source video generators reveals substantial failures in counterfactual physical consistency: prediction quality for the same physical event type is affected by appearance, environment, and, particularly by viewpoint changes. CRONOS provides a controlled and reproducible testbed for diagnosing how the quality of generated videos changes for different interventions, establishing a concrete target for developing models that perform consistently across changes of multiple conditions. The dataset and code are available at our project page.

Recent text-to-video generation approaches rely on computationally heavy training and require large-scale video datasets. In this paper, we introduce a new task of zero-shot text-to-video generation and propose a low-cost approach (without any training or optimization) by leveraging the power of existing text-to-image synthesis methods (e.g., Stable Diffusion), making them suitable for the video domain. Our key modifications include (i) enriching the latent codes of the generated frames with motion dynamics to keep the global scene and the background time consistent; and (ii) reprogramming frame-level self-attention using a new cross-frame attention of each frame on the first frame, to preserve the context, appearance, and identity of the foreground object. Experiments show that this leads to low overhead, yet high-quality and remarkably consistent video generation. Moreover, our approach is not limited to text-to-video synthesis but is also applicable to other tasks such as conditional and content-specialized video generation, and Video Instruct-Pix2Pix, i.e., instruction-guided video editing. As experiments show, our method performs comparably or sometimes better than recent approaches, despite not being trained on additional video data. Our code will be open sourced at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/Text2Video-Zero .

We present Infinite-Story, a training-free framework for consistent text-to-image (T2I) generation tailored for multi-prompt storytelling scenarios. Built upon a scale-wise autoregressive model, our method addresses two key challenges in consistent T2I generation: identity inconsistency and style inconsistency. To overcome these issues, we introduce three complementary techniques: Identity Prompt Replacement, which mitigates context bias in text encoders to align identity attributes across prompts; and a unified attention guidance mechanism comprising Adaptive Style Injection and Synchronized Guidance Adaptation, which jointly enforce global style and identity appearance consistency while preserving prompt fidelity. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches that require fine-tuning or suffer from slow inference, Infinite-Story operates entirely at test time, delivering high identity and style consistency across diverse prompts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art generation performance, while offering over 6X faster inference (1.72 seconds per image) than the existing fastest consistent T2I models, highlighting its effectiveness and practicality for real-world visual storytelling.

Talking face generation (TFG) aims to animate a target identity's face to create realistic talking videos. Personalized TFG is a variant that emphasizes the perceptual identity similarity of the synthesized result (from the perspective of appearance and talking style). While previous works typically solve this problem by learning an individual neural radiance field (NeRF) for each identity to implicitly store its static and dynamic information, we find it inefficient and non-generalized due to the per-identity-per-training framework and the limited training data. To this end, we propose MimicTalk, the first attempt that exploits the rich knowledge from a NeRF-based person-agnostic generic model for improving the efficiency and robustness of personalized TFG. To be specific, (1) we first come up with a person-agnostic 3D TFG model as the base model and propose to adapt it into a specific identity; (2) we propose a static-dynamic-hybrid adaptation pipeline to help the model learn the personalized static appearance and facial dynamic features; (3) To generate the facial motion of the personalized talking style, we propose an in-context stylized audio-to-motion model that mimics the implicit talking style provided in the reference video without information loss by an explicit style representation. The adaptation process to an unseen identity can be performed in 15 minutes, which is 47 times faster than previous person-dependent methods. Experiments show that our MimicTalk surpasses previous baselines regarding video quality, efficiency, and expressiveness. Source code and video samples are available at https://mimictalk.github.io .

This paper introduces a novel dataset to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of age, genders, apparent skin tones and ambient lighting conditions. Our dataset is composed of 3,011 subjects and contains over 45,000 videos, with an average of 15 videos per person. The videos were recorded in multiple U.S. states with a diverse set of adults in various age, gender and apparent skin tone groups. A key feature is that each subject agreed to participate for their likenesses to be used. Additionally, our age and gender annotations are provided by the subjects themselves. A group of trained annotators labeled the subjects' apparent skin tone using the Fitzpatrick skin type scale. Moreover, annotations for videos recorded in low ambient lighting are also provided. As an application to measure robustness of predictions across certain attributes, we provide a comprehensive study on the top five winners of the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC). Experimental evaluation shows that the winning models are less performant on some specific groups of people, such as subjects with darker skin tones and thus may not generalize to all people. In addition, we also evaluate the state-of-the-art apparent age and gender classification methods. Our experiments provides a thorough analysis on these models in terms of fair treatment of people from various backgrounds.

With the growing success of text or image guided 3D generators, users demand more control over the generation process, appearance stylization being one of them. Given a reference image, this requires adapting the appearance of a generated 3D asset to reflect the visual style of the reference while maintaining visual consistency from multiple viewpoints. To tackle this problem, we draw inspiration from the success of 2D stylization methods that leverage the attention mechanisms in large image generation models to capture and transfer visual style. In particular, we probe if large reconstruction models, commonly used in the context of 3D generation, has a similar capability. We discover that the certain attention blocks in these models capture the appearance specific features. By injecting features from a visual style image to such blocks, we develop a simple yet effective 3D appearance stylization method. Our method does not require training or test time optimization. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach achieves superior results in terms of 3D appearance stylization, significantly improving efficiency while maintaining high-quality visual outcomes.

How to learn discriminative video representation from unlabeled videos is challenging but crucial for video analysis. The latest attempts seek to learn a representation model by predicting the appearance contents in the masked regions. However, simply masking and recovering appearance contents may not be sufficient to model temporal clues as the appearance contents can be easily reconstructed from a single frame. To overcome this limitation, we present Masked Motion Encoding (MME), a new pre-training paradigm that reconstructs both appearance and motion information to explore temporal clues. In MME, we focus on addressing two critical challenges to improve the representation performance: 1) how to well represent the possible long-term motion across multiple frames; and 2) how to obtain fine-grained temporal clues from sparsely sampled videos. Motivated by the fact that human is able to recognize an action by tracking objects' position changes and shape changes, we propose to reconstruct a motion trajectory that represents these two kinds of change in the masked regions. Besides, given the sparse video input, we enforce the model to reconstruct dense motion trajectories in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Pre-trained with our MME paradigm, the model is able to anticipate long-term and fine-grained motion details. Code is available at https://github.com/XinyuSun/MME.

Successfully handling context is essential for any dialog understanding task. This context maybe be conversational (relying on previous user queries or system responses), visual (relying on what the user sees, for example, on their screen), or background (based on signals such as a ringing alarm or playing music). In this work, we present an overview of MARRS, or Multimodal Reference Resolution System, an on-device framework within a Natural Language Understanding system, responsible for handling conversational, visual and background context. In particular, we present different machine learning models to enable handing contextual queries; specifically, one to enable reference resolution, and one to handle context via query rewriting. We also describe how these models complement each other to form a unified, coherent, lightweight system that can understand context while preserving user privacy.

Facial appearance editing is crucial for digital avatars, AR/VR, and personalized content creation, driving realistic user experiences. However, preserving identity with generative models is challenging, especially in scenarios with limited data availability. Traditional methods often require multiple images and still struggle with unnatural face shifts, inconsistent hair alignment, or excessive smoothing effects. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel diffusion-based framework, InstaFace, to generate realistic images while preserving identity using only a single image. Central to InstaFace, we introduce an efficient guidance network that harnesses 3D perspectives by integrating multiple 3DMM-based conditionals without introducing additional trainable parameters. Moreover, to ensure maximum identity retention as well as preservation of background, hair, and other contextual features like accessories, we introduce a novel module that utilizes feature embeddings from a facial recognition model and a pre-trained vision-language model. Quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method outperforms several state-of-the-art approaches in terms of identity preservation, photorealism, and effective control of pose, expression, and lighting.

We extend Textual Inversion to learn pseudo-words that represent a concept at different resolutions. This allows us to generate images that use the concept with different levels of detail and also to manipulate different resolutions using language. Once learned, the user can generate images at different levels of agreement to the original concept; "A photo of S^*(0)" produces the exact object while the prompt "A photo of S^*(0.8)" only matches the rough outlines and colors. Our framework allows us to generate images that use different resolutions of an image (e.g. details, textures, styles) as separate pseudo-words that can be composed in various ways. We open-soure our code in the following URL: https://github.com/giannisdaras/multires_textual_inversion

It this paper we revisit the fast stylization method introduced in Ulyanov et. al. (2016). We show how a small change in the stylization architecture results in a significant qualitative improvement in the generated images. The change is limited to swapping batch normalization with instance normalization, and to apply the latter both at training and testing times. The resulting method can be used to train high-performance architectures for real-time image generation. The code will is made available on github at https://github.com/DmitryUlyanov/texture_nets. Full paper can be found at arXiv:1701.02096.

Putting together an ideal outfit is a process that involves creativity and style intuition. This makes it a particularly difficult task to automate. Existing styling products generally involve human specialists and a highly curated set of fashion items. In this paper, we will describe how we bootstrapped the Complete The Look (CTL) system at Pinterest. This is a technology that aims to learn the subjective task of "style compatibility" in order to recommend complementary items that complete an outfit. In particular, we want to show recommendations from other categories that are compatible with an item of interest. For example, what are some heels that go well with this cocktail dress? We will introduce our outfit dataset of over 1 million outfits and 4 million objects, a subset of which we will make available to the research community, and describe the pipeline used to obtain and refresh this dataset. Furthermore, we will describe how we evaluate this subjective task and compare model performance across multiple training methods. Lastly, we will share our lessons going from experimentation to working prototype, and how to mitigate failure modes in the production environment. Our work represents one of the first examples of an industrial-scale solution for compatibility-based fashion recommendation.

Describes an audio dataset of spoken words designed to help train and evaluate keyword spotting systems. Discusses why this task is an interesting challenge, and why it requires a specialized dataset that is different from conventional datasets used for automatic speech recognition of full sentences. Suggests a methodology for reproducible and comparable accuracy metrics for this task. Describes how the data was collected and verified, what it contains, previous versions and properties. Concludes by reporting baseline results of models trained on this dataset.

In our everyday lives and social interactions we often try to perceive the emotional states of people. There has been a lot of research in providing machines with a similar capacity of recognizing emotions. From a computer vision perspective, most of the previous efforts have been focusing in analyzing the facial expressions and, in some cases, also the body pose. Some of these methods work remarkably well in specific settings. However, their performance is limited in natural, unconstrained environments. Psychological studies show that the scene context, in addition to facial expression and body pose, provides important information to our perception of people's emotions. However, the processing of the context for automatic emotion recognition has not been explored in depth, partly due to the lack of proper data. In this paper we present EMOTIC, a dataset of images of people in a diverse set of natural situations, annotated with their apparent emotion. The EMOTIC dataset combines two different types of emotion representation: (1) a set of 26 discrete categories, and (2) the continuous dimensions Valence, Arousal, and Dominance. We also present a detailed statistical and algorithmic analysis of the dataset along with annotators' agreement analysis. Using the EMOTIC dataset we train different CNN models for emotion recognition, combining the information of the bounding box containing the person with the contextual information extracted from the scene. Our results show how scene context provides important information to automatically recognize emotional states and motivate further research in this direction. Dataset and code is open-sourced and available at: https://github.com/rkosti/emotic and link for the peer-reviewed published article: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8713881

This work presents Insert Anything, a unified framework for reference-based image insertion that seamlessly integrates objects from reference images into target scenes under flexible, user-specified control guidance. Instead of training separate models for individual tasks, our approach is trained once on our new AnyInsertion dataset--comprising 120K prompt-image pairs covering diverse tasks such as person, object, and garment insertion--and effortlessly generalizes to a wide range of insertion scenarios. Such a challenging setting requires capturing both identity features and fine-grained details, while allowing versatile local adaptations in style, color, and texture. To this end, we propose to leverage the multimodal attention of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to support both mask- and text-guided editing. Furthermore, we introduce an in-context editing mechanism that treats the reference image as contextual information, employing two prompting strategies to harmonize the inserted elements with the target scene while faithfully preserving their distinctive features. Extensive experiments on AnyInsertion, DreamBooth, and VTON-HD benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing alternatives, underscoring its great potential in real-world applications such as creative content generation, virtual try-on, and scene composition.

Our goal is to create a realistic 3D facial avatar with hair and accessories using only a text description. While this challenge has attracted significant recent interest, existing methods either lack realism, produce unrealistic shapes, or do not support editing, such as modifications to the hairstyle. We argue that existing methods are limited because they employ a monolithic modeling approach, using a single representation for the head, face, hair, and accessories. Our observation is that the hair and face, for example, have very different structural qualities that benefit from different representations. Building on this insight, we generate avatars with a compositional model, in which the head, face, and upper body are represented with traditional 3D meshes, and the hair, clothing, and accessories with neural radiance fields (NeRF). The model-based mesh representation provides a strong geometric prior for the face region, improving realism while enabling editing of the person's appearance. By using NeRFs to represent the remaining components, our method is able to model and synthesize parts with complex geometry and appearance, such as curly hair and fluffy scarves. Our novel system synthesizes these high-quality compositional avatars from text descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our method, Text-guided generation and Editing of Compositional Avatars (TECA), produces avatars that are more realistic than those of recent methods while being editable because of their compositional nature. For example, our TECA enables the seamless transfer of compositional features like hairstyles, scarves, and other accessories between avatars. This capability supports applications such as virtual try-on.

The ability to integrate context, including perceptual and temporal cues, plays a pivotal role in grounding the meaning of a linguistic utterance. In order to measure to what extent current vision-and-language models master this ability, we devise a new multimodal challenge, Image Retrieval from Contextual Descriptions (ImageCoDe). In particular, models are tasked with retrieving the correct image from a set of 10 minimally contrastive candidates based on a contextual description. As such, each description contains only the details that help distinguish between images. Because of this, descriptions tend to be complex in terms of syntax and discourse and require drawing pragmatic inferences. Images are sourced from both static pictures and video frames. We benchmark several state-of-the-art models, including both cross-encoders such as ViLBERT and bi-encoders such as CLIP, on ImageCoDe. Our results reveal that these models dramatically lag behind human performance: the best variant achieves an accuracy of 20.9 on video frames and 59.4 on static pictures, compared with 90.8 in humans. Furthermore, we experiment with new model variants that are better equipped to incorporate visual and temporal context into their representations, which achieve modest gains. Our hope is that ImageCoDE will foster progress in grounded language understanding by encouraging models to focus on fine-grained visual differences.

How can one visually characterize people in a decade? In this work, we assemble the Faces Through Time dataset, which contains over a thousand portrait images from each decade, spanning the 1880s to the present day. Using our new dataset, we present a framework for resynthesizing portrait images across time, imagining how a portrait taken during a particular decade might have looked like, had it been taken in other decades. Our framework optimizes a family of per-decade generators that reveal subtle changes that differentiate decade--such as different hairstyles or makeup--while maintaining the identity of the input portrait. Experiments show that our method is more effective in resynthesizing portraits across time compared to state-of-the-art image-to-image translation methods, as well as attribute-based and language-guided portrait editing models. Our code and data will be available at https://facesthroughtime.github.io

Contemporary makeup transfer methods primarily focus on replicating makeup from one face to another, considerably limiting their use in creating diverse and creative character makeup essential for visual storytelling. Such methods typically fail to address the need for uniqueness and contextual relevance, specifically aligning with character and story settings as they depend heavily on existing facial makeup in reference images. This approach also presents a significant challenge when attempting to source a perfectly matched facial makeup style, further complicating the creation of makeup designs inspired by various story elements, such as theme, background, and props that do not necessarily feature faces. To address these limitations, we introduce Gorgeous, a novel diffusion-based makeup application method that goes beyond simple transfer by innovatively crafting unique and thematic facial makeup. Unlike traditional methods, Gorgeous does not require the presence of a face in the reference images. Instead, it draws artistic inspiration from a minimal set of three to five images, which can be of any type, and transforms these elements into practical makeup applications directly on the face. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Gorgeous can effectively generate distinctive character facial makeup inspired by the chosen thematic reference images. This approach opens up new possibilities for integrating broader story elements into character makeup, thereby enhancing the narrative depth and visual impact in storytelling.

Recent research has made significant progress in localizing and editing image regions based on text. However, most approaches treat these regions in isolation, relying solely on local cues without accounting for how each part contributes to the overall visual and semantic composition. This often results in inconsistent edits, unnatural transitions, or loss of coherence across the image. In this work, we propose Region in Context, a novel framework for text-conditioned image editing that performs multilevel semantic alignment between vision and language, inspired by the human ability to reason about edits in relation to the whole scene. Our method encourages each region to understand its role within the global image context, enabling precise and harmonized changes. At its core, the framework introduces a dual-level guidance mechanism: regions are represented with full-image context and aligned with detailed region-level descriptions, while the entire image is simultaneously matched to a comprehensive scene-level description generated by a large vision-language model. These descriptions serve as explicit verbal references of the intended content, guiding both local modifications and global structure. Experiments show that it produces more coherent and instruction-aligned results. Code is available at: https://github.com/thuyvuphuong/Region-in-Context.git

Most text-to-image customization techniques fine-tune models on a small set of personal concept images captured in minimal contexts. This often results in the model becoming overfitted to these training images and unable to generalize to new contexts in future text prompts. Existing customization methods are built on the success of effectively representing personal concepts as textual embeddings. Thus, in this work, we resort to diversifying the context of these personal concepts solely within the textual space by simply creating a contextually rich set of text prompts, together with a widely used self-supervised learning objective. Surprisingly, this straightforward and cost-effective method significantly improves semantic alignment in the textual space, and this effect further extends to the image space, resulting in higher prompt fidelity for generated images. Additionally, our approach does not require any architectural modifications, making it highly compatible with existing text-to-image customization methods. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our approach by combining it with four different baseline methods, achieving notable CLIP score improvements.

Human image datasets used to develop and evaluate technology should represent the diversity of human phenotypes, including skin tone. Datasets that include skin tone information frequently rely on manual skin tone ratings based on the Fitzpatrick Skin Type (FST) or the Monk Skin Tone (MST) scales in lieu of the actual measured skin tone of the image dataset subjects. However, perceived skin tone is subject to known biases and skin tone appearance in digital images can vary substantially depending on the capture camera and environment, confounding manual ratings. Surprisingly, the relationship between skin-tone ratings and measured skin tone has not been explored. To close this research gap, we measured the relationship between skin tone ratings from existing scales (FST, MST) and skin tone values measured by a calibrated colorimeter. We also propose and assess a novel Colorimetric Skin Tone (CST) scale developed based on prior colorimetric measurements. Using experiments requiring humans to rate their own skin tone and the skin tone of subjects in images, we show that the new CST scale is more sensitive, consistent, and colorimetrically accurate. While skin tone ratings appeared to correct for some color variation across images, they introduced biases related to race and other factors. These biases must be considered before using manual skin-tone ratings in technology evaluations or for engineering decisions.

We introduce an attention-based method that uses learned binary attention masks to ensure that only attended image regions influence the prediction. Context can strongly affect object perception, sometimes leading to biased representations, particularly when objects appear in out-of-distribution backgrounds. At the same time, many image-level object-centric tasks require identifying relevant regions, often requiring context. To address this conundrum, we propose a two-stage framework: stage 1 processes the full image to discover object parts and identify task-relevant regions, while stage 2 leverages input attention masking to restrict its receptive field to these regions, enabling a focused analysis while filtering out potentially spurious information. Both stages are trained jointly, allowing stage 2 to refine stage 1. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves robustness against spurious correlations and out-of-distribution backgrounds.

This is the preface for the book by E. N. Dzhafarov, J. V. Kujala, and V. H. Cervantes, titled Contextuality in Random Variables: A Systematic Introduction. It is to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

Fashion illustration is used by designers to communicate their vision and to bring the design idea from conceptualization to realization, showing how clothes interact with the human body. In this context, computer vision can thus be used to improve the fashion design process. Differently from previous works that mainly focused on the virtual try-on of garments, we propose the task of multimodal-conditioned fashion image editing, guiding the generation of human-centric fashion images by following multimodal prompts, such as text, human body poses, and garment sketches. We tackle this problem by proposing a new architecture based on latent diffusion models, an approach that has not been used before in the fashion domain. Given the lack of existing datasets suitable for the task, we also extend two existing fashion datasets, namely Dress Code and VITON-HD, with multimodal annotations collected in a semi-automatic manner. Experimental results on these new datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal, both in terms of realism and coherence with the given multimodal inputs. Source code and collected multimodal annotations are publicly available at: https://github.com/aimagelab/multimodal-garment-designer.

We present FashionComposer for compositional fashion image generation. Unlike previous methods, FashionComposer is highly flexible. It takes multi-modal input (i.e., text prompt, parametric human model, garment image, and face image) and supports personalizing the appearance, pose, and figure of the human and assigning multiple garments in one pass. To achieve this, we first develop a universal framework capable of handling diverse input modalities. We construct scaled training data to enhance the model's robust compositional capabilities. To accommodate multiple reference images (garments and faces) seamlessly, we organize these references in a single image as an "asset library" and employ a reference UNet to extract appearance features. To inject the appearance features into the correct pixels in the generated result, we propose subject-binding attention. It binds the appearance features from different "assets" with the corresponding text features. In this way, the model could understand each asset according to their semantics, supporting arbitrary numbers and types of reference images. As a comprehensive solution, FashionComposer also supports many other applications like human album generation, diverse virtual try-on tasks, etc.

End-to-end human animation with rich multi-modal conditions, e.g., text, image and audio has achieved remarkable advancements in recent years. However, most existing methods could only animate a single subject and inject conditions in a global manner, ignoring scenarios that multiple concepts could appears in the same video with rich human-human interactions and human-object interactions. Such global assumption prevents precise and per-identity control of multiple concepts including humans and objects, therefore hinders applications. In this work, we discard the single-entity assumption and introduce a novel framework that enforces strong, region-specific binding of conditions from modalities to each identity's spatiotemporal footprint. Given reference images of multiple concepts, our method could automatically infer layout information by leveraging a mask predictor to match appearance cues between the denoised video and each reference appearance. Furthermore, we inject local audio condition into its corresponding region to ensure layout-aligned modality matching in a iterative manner. This design enables the high-quality generation of controllable multi-concept human-centric videos. Empirical results and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our explicit layout control for multi-modal conditions compared to implicit counterparts and other existing methods.

Generating and editing a person's face demands high precision, as even minor modifications can significantly alter a subject's perceived identity. Current personalization and editing methods built on general-purpose text-to-image models, however, often lack the precision required for fine-grained facial edits. We present a method for fine-grained identity tuning in text-to-image personalization models. Unlike standard image editing, which operates on a given image, identity tuning modifies the latent representation of a specific identity, enabling the generation of diverse images that consistently depict the same edited identity. To enable fine-grained latent identity tuning, we explore the latent space of a pre-trained, frozen encoder for text-to-image personalization. Our approach requires no additional training. Instead, it leverages the existing architecture of a frozen encoder to uncover latent semantic directions. This space consists of a set of latent tokens that play distinct roles in capturing different aspects of an identity and often correspond to specific spatial or semantic facial regions. We show that meaningful directions can be identified within this space and within subspaces defined by selected tokens, enabling localized, fine-grained, and semantically coherent edits. We validate our approach through qualitative and quantitative experiments that demonstrate diverse localized facial edits while preserving cross-image identity consistency. Project page at: https://garibida.github.io/IdentityTuning/

Artificial intelligence has significantly advanced skin cancer diagnosis by enabling rapid and accurate detection of malignant lesions. In this domain, most publicly available image datasets consist of single, isolated skin lesions positioned at the center of the image. While these lesion-centric datasets have been fundamental for developing diagnostic algorithms, they lack the context of the surrounding skin, which is critical for improving lesion detection. The iToBoS dataset was created to address this challenge. It includes 16,954 images of skin regions from 100 participants, captured using 3D total body photography. Each image roughly corresponds to a 7 times 9 cm section of skin with all suspicious lesions annotated using bounding boxes. Additionally, the dataset provides metadata such as anatomical location, age group, and sun damage score for each image. This dataset aims to facilitate training and benchmarking of algorithms, with the goal of enabling early detection of skin cancer and deployment of this technology in non-clinical environments.

Person search aims to jointly localize and identify a query person from natural, uncropped images, which has been actively studied over the past few years. In this paper, we delve into the rich context information globally and locally surrounding the target person, which we refer to as scene and group context, respectively. Unlike previous works that treat the two types of context individually, we exploit them in a unified global-local context network (GLCNet) with the intuitive aim of feature enhancement. Specifically, re-ID embeddings and context features are simultaneously learned in a multi-stage fashion, ultimately leading to enhanced, discriminative features for person search. We conduct the experiments on two person search benchmarks (i.e., CUHK-SYSU and PRW) as well as extend our approach to a more challenging setting (i.e., character search on MovieNet). Extensive experimental results demonstrate the consistent improvement of the proposed GLCNet over the state-of-the-art methods on all three datasets. Our source codes, pre-trained models, and the new dataset are publicly available at: https://github.com/ZhengPeng7/GLCNet.

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have grown increasingly powerful in recent years, but can also exhibit harmful biases. Prior studies investigating such biases have primarily focused on demographic traits related to the visual characteristics of a person depicted in an image, such as their race or gender. This has left biases related to cultural differences (e.g., religion, socioeconomic status), which cannot be readily discerned from an individual's appearance alone, relatively understudied. A key challenge in measuring cultural biases is that determining which group an individual belongs to often depends upon cultural context cues in images, and datasets annotated with cultural context cues are lacking. To address this gap, we introduce Cultural Counterfactuals: a high-quality synthetic dataset containing nearly 60k counterfactual images for measuring cultural biases related to religion, nationality, and socioeconomic status. To ensure that cultural contexts are accurately depicted, we generate our dataset using an image-editing model to place people of different demographics into real cultural context images. This enables the construction of counterfactual image sets which depict the same person in multiple different contexts, allowing for precise measurement of the impact that cultural context differences have on LVLM outputs. We demonstrate the utility of Cultural Counterfactuals for quantifying cultural biases in popular LVLMs.

Referenceless metrics (e.g., CLIPScore) use pretrained vision--language models to assess image descriptions directly without costly ground-truth reference texts. Such methods can facilitate rapid progress, but only if they truly align with human preference judgments. In this paper, we introduce ContextRef, a benchmark for assessing referenceless metrics for such alignment. ContextRef has two components: human ratings along a variety of established quality dimensions, and ten diverse robustness checks designed to uncover fundamental weaknesses. A crucial aspect of ContextRef is that images and descriptions are presented in context, reflecting prior work showing that context is important for description quality. Using ContextRef, we assess a variety of pretrained models, scoring functions, and techniques for incorporating context. None of the methods is successful with ContextRef, but we show that careful fine-tuning yields substantial improvements. ContextRef remains a challenging benchmark though, in large part due to the challenge of context dependence.

Language model users often issue queries that lack specification, where the context under which a query was issued -- such as the user's identity, the query's intent, and the criteria for a response to be useful -- is not explicit. For instance, a good response to a subjective query like "What book should I read next?" would depend on the user's preferences, and a good response to an open-ended query like "How do antibiotics work against bacteria?" would depend on the user's expertise. This makes evaluation of responses to such queries an ill-posed task, as evaluators may make arbitrary judgments about the response quality. To remedy this, we present contextualized evaluations, a protocol that synthetically constructs context surrounding an underspecified query and provides it during evaluation. We find that the presence of context can 1) alter conclusions drawn from evaluation, even flipping win rates between model pairs, 2) nudge evaluators to make fewer judgments based on surface-level criteria, like style, and 3) provide new insights about model behavior across diverse contexts. Specifically, our procedure uncovers an implicit bias towards WEIRD contexts in models' "default" responses and we find that models are not equally sensitive to following different contexts, even when they are provided in prompts.

Facial images have extensive practical applications. Although the current large-scale text-image diffusion models exhibit strong generation capabilities, it is challenging to generate the desired facial images using only text prompt. Image prompts are a logical choice. However, current methods of this type generally focus on general domain. In this paper, we aim to optimize image makeup techniques to generate the desired facial images. Specifically, (1) we built a dataset of 4 million high-quality face image-text pairs (FaceCaptionHQ-4M) based on LAION-Face to train our Face-MakeUp model; (2) to maintain consistency with the reference facial image, we extract/learn multi-scale content features and pose features for the facial image, integrating these into the diffusion model to enhance the preservation of facial identity features for diffusion models. Validation on two face-related test datasets demonstrates that our Face-MakeUp can achieve the best comprehensive performance.All codes are available at:https://github.com/ddw2AIGROUP2CQUPT/Face-MakeUp

Identifying sitters in historical paintings is a key task for art historians, offering insight into their lives and how they chose to be seen. However, the process is often subjective and limited by the lack of data and stylistic variations. Automated facial recognition is capable of handling challenging conditions and can assist, but while traditional facial recognition models perform well on photographs, they struggle with paintings due to domain shift and high intra-class variation. Artistic factors such as style, skill, intent, and influence from other works further complicate recognition. In this work, we investigate the potential of foundation models to improve facial recognition in artworks. By fine-tuning foundation models and integrating their embeddings with those from conventional facial recognition networks, we demonstrate notable improvements over current state-of-the-art methods. Our results show that foundation models can bridge the gap where traditional methods are ineffective. Paper page at https://www.idiap.ch/paper/artface/

In this paper, we design a benchmark task and provide the associated datasets for recognizing face images and link them to corresponding entity keys in a knowledge base. More specifically, we propose a benchmark task to recognize one million celebrities from their face images, by using all the possibly collected face images of this individual on the web as training data. The rich information provided by the knowledge base helps to conduct disambiguation and improve the recognition accuracy, and contributes to various real-world applications, such as image captioning and news video analysis. Associated with this task, we design and provide concrete measurement set, evaluation protocol, as well as training data. We also present in details our experiment setup and report promising baseline results. Our benchmark task could lead to one of the largest classification problems in computer vision. To the best of our knowledge, our training dataset, which contains 10M images in version 1, is the largest publicly available one in the world.

The image relighting task of transferring illumination conditions between two images offers an interesting and difficult challenge with potential applications in photography, cinematography and computer graphics. In this report we present methods that we tried to achieve that goal. Our models are trained on a rendered dataset of artificial locations with varied scene content, light source location and color temperature. With this dataset, we used a network with illumination estimation component aiming to infer and replace light conditions in the latent space representation of the concerned scenes.

People preserve memories of events such as birthdays, weddings, or vacations by capturing photos, often depicting groups of people. Invariably, some individuals in the image are more important than others given the context of the event. This paper analyzes the concept of the importance of individuals in group photographs. We address two specific questions -- Given an image, who are the most important individuals in it? Given multiple images of a person, which image depicts the person in the most important role? We introduce a measure of importance of people in images and investigate the correlation between importance and visual saliency. We find that not only can we automatically predict the importance of people from purely visual cues, incorporating this predicted importance results in significant improvement in applications such as im2text (generating sentences that describe images of groups of people).

Computer vision models have known performance disparities across attributes such as gender and skin tone. This means during tasks such as classification and detection, model performance differs for certain classes based on the demographics of the people in the image. These disparities have been shown to exist, but until now there has not been a unified approach to measure these differences for common use-cases of computer vision models. We present a new benchmark named FACET (FAirness in Computer Vision EvaluaTion), a large, publicly available evaluation set of 32k images for some of the most common vision tasks - image classification, object detection and segmentation. For every image in FACET, we hired expert reviewers to manually annotate person-related attributes such as perceived skin tone and hair type, manually draw bounding boxes and label fine-grained person-related classes such as disk jockey or guitarist. In addition, we use FACET to benchmark state-of-the-art vision models and present a deeper understanding of potential performance disparities and challenges across sensitive demographic attributes. With the exhaustive annotations collected, we probe models using single demographics attributes as well as multiple attributes using an intersectional approach (e.g. hair color and perceived skin tone). Our results show that classification, detection, segmentation, and visual grounding models exhibit performance disparities across demographic attributes and intersections of attributes. These harms suggest that not all people represented in datasets receive fair and equitable treatment in these vision tasks. We hope current and future results using our benchmark will contribute to fairer, more robust vision models. FACET is available publicly at https://facet.metademolab.com/

Customized generative text-to-image models have the ability to produce images that closely resemble a given subject. However, in the context of generating advertising images for e-commerce scenarios, it is crucial that the generated subject's identity aligns perfectly with the product being advertised. In order to address the need for strictly-ID preserved advertising image generation, we have developed a Control-Net based customized image generation pipeline and have taken earring model advertising as an example. Our approach facilitates a seamless interaction between the earrings and the model's face, while ensuring that the identity of the earrings remains intact. Furthermore, to achieve a diverse and controllable display, we have proposed a multi-branch cross-attention architecture, which allows for control over the scale, pose, and appearance of the model, going beyond the limitations of text prompts. Our method manages to achieve fine-grained control of the generated model's face, resulting in controllable and captivating advertising effects.

We learn a visual representation that captures information about the camera that recorded a given photo. To do this, we train a multimodal embedding between image patches and the EXIF metadata that cameras automatically insert into image files. Our model represents this metadata by simply converting it to text and then processing it with a transformer. The features that we learn significantly outperform other self-supervised and supervised features on downstream image forensics and calibration tasks. In particular, we successfully localize spliced image regions "zero shot" by clustering the visual embeddings for all of the patches within an image.