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Aug 7

ChatAnyone: Stylized Real-time Portrait Video Generation with Hierarchical Motion Diffusion Model

Real-time interactive video-chat portraits have been increasingly recognized as the future trend, particularly due to the remarkable progress made in text and voice chat technologies. However, existing methods primarily focus on real-time generation of head movements, but struggle to produce synchronized body motions that match these head actions. Additionally, achieving fine-grained control over the speaking style and nuances of facial expressions remains a challenge. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for stylized real-time portrait video generation, enabling expressive and flexible video chat that extends from talking head to upper-body interaction. Our approach consists of the following two stages. The first stage involves efficient hierarchical motion diffusion models, that take both explicit and implicit motion representations into account based on audio inputs, which can generate a diverse range of facial expressions with stylistic control and synchronization between head and body movements. The second stage aims to generate portrait video featuring upper-body movements, including hand gestures. We inject explicit hand control signals into the generator to produce more detailed hand movements, and further perform face refinement to enhance the overall realism and expressiveness of the portrait video. Additionally, our approach supports efficient and continuous generation of upper-body portrait video in maximum 512 * 768 resolution at up to 30fps on 4090 GPU, supporting interactive video-chat in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of our approach to produce portrait videos with rich expressiveness and natural upper-body movements.

UnlearnCanvas: A Stylized Image Dataset to Benchmark Machine Unlearning for Diffusion Models

The rapid advancement of diffusion models (DMs) has not only transformed various real-world industries but has also introduced negative societal concerns, including the generation of harmful content, copyright disputes, and the rise of stereotypes and biases. To mitigate these issues, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a potential solution, demonstrating its ability to remove undesired generative capabilities of DMs in various applications. However, by examining existing MU evaluation methods, we uncover several key challenges that can result in incomplete, inaccurate, or biased evaluations for MU in DMs. To address them, we enhance the evaluation metrics for MU, including the introduction of an often-overlooked retainability measurement for DMs post-unlearning. Additionally, we introduce UnlearnCanvas, a comprehensive high-resolution stylized image dataset that facilitates us to evaluate the unlearning of artistic painting styles in conjunction with associated image objects. We show that this dataset plays a pivotal role in establishing a standardized and automated evaluation framework for MU techniques on DMs, featuring 7 quantitative metrics to address various aspects of unlearning effectiveness. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark 5 state-of-the-art MU methods, revealing novel insights into their pros and cons, and the underlying unlearning mechanisms. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential of UnlearnCanvas to benchmark other generative modeling tasks, such as style transfer. The UnlearnCanvas dataset, benchmark, and the codes to reproduce all the results in this work can be found at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/UnlearnCanvas.

DGInStyle: Domain-Generalizable Semantic Segmentation with Image Diffusion Models and Stylized Semantic Control

Large, pretrained latent diffusion models (LDMs) have demonstrated an extraordinary ability to generate creative content, specialize to user data through few-shot fine-tuning, and condition their output on other modalities, such as semantic maps. However, are they usable as large-scale data generators, e.g., to improve tasks in the perception stack, like semantic segmentation? We investigate this question in the context of autonomous driving, and answer it with a resounding "yes". We propose an efficient data generation pipeline termed DGInStyle. First, we examine the problem of specializing a pretrained LDM to semantically-controlled generation within a narrow domain. Second, we design a Multi-resolution Latent Fusion technique to overcome the bias of LDMs towards dominant objects. Third, we propose a Style Swap technique to endow the rich generative prior with the learned semantic control. Using DGInStyle, we generate a diverse dataset of street scenes, train a domain-agnostic semantic segmentation model on it, and evaluate the model on multiple popular autonomous driving datasets. Our approach consistently increases the performance of several domain generalization methods, in some cases by +2.5 mIoU compared to the previous state-of-the-art method without our generative augmentation scheme. Source code and dataset are available at https://dginstyle.github.io .

Towards Multi-View Consistent Style Transfer with One-Step Diffusion via Vision Conditioning

The stylization of 3D scenes is an increasingly attractive topic in 3D vision. Although image style transfer has been extensively researched with promising results, directly applying 2D style transfer methods to 3D scenes often fails to preserve the structural and multi-view properties of 3D environments, resulting in unpleasant distortions in images from different viewpoints. To address these issues, we leverage the remarkable generative prior of diffusion-based models and propose a novel style transfer method, OSDiffST, based on a pre-trained one-step diffusion model (i.e., SD-Turbo) for rendering diverse styles in multi-view images of 3D scenes. To efficiently adapt the pre-trained model for multi-view style transfer on small datasets, we introduce a vision condition module to extract style information from the reference style image to serve as conditional input for the diffusion model and employ LoRA in diffusion model for adaptation. Additionally, we consider color distribution alignment and structural similarity between the stylized and content images using two specific loss functions. As a result, our method effectively preserves the structural information and multi-view consistency in stylized images without any 3D information. Experiments show that our method surpasses other promising style transfer methods in synthesizing various styles for multi-view images of 3D scenes. Stylized images from different viewpoints generated by our method achieve superior visual quality, with better structural integrity and less distortion. The source code is available at https://github.com/YushenZuo/OSDiffST.

Free-Lunch Color-Texture Disentanglement for Stylized Image Generation

Recent advances in Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have transformed image generation, enabling significant progress in stylized generation using only a few style reference images. However, current diffusion-based methods struggle with fine-grained style customization due to challenges in controlling multiple style attributes, such as color and texture. This paper introduces the first tuning-free approach to achieve free-lunch color-texture disentanglement in stylized T2I generation, addressing the need for independently controlled style elements for the Disentangled Stylized Image Generation (DisIG) problem. Our approach leverages the Image-Prompt Additivity property in the CLIP image embedding space to develop techniques for separating and extracting Color-Texture Embeddings (CTE) from individual color and texture reference images. To ensure that the color palette of the generated image aligns closely with the color reference, we apply a whitening and coloring transformation to enhance color consistency. Additionally, to prevent texture loss due to the signal-leak bias inherent in diffusion training, we introduce a noise term that preserves textural fidelity during the Regularized Whitening and Coloring Transformation (RegWCT). Through these methods, our Style Attributes Disentanglement approach (SADis) delivers a more precise and customizable solution for stylized image generation. Experiments on images from the WikiArt and StyleDrop datasets demonstrate that, both qualitatively and quantitatively, SADis surpasses state-of-the-art stylization methods in the DisIG task.Code will be released at https://deepffff.github.io/sadis.github.io/.

MagicMix: Semantic Mixing with Diffusion Models

Have you ever imagined what a corgi-alike coffee machine or a tiger-alike rabbit would look like? In this work, we attempt to answer these questions by exploring a new task called semantic mixing, aiming at blending two different semantics to create a new concept (e.g., corgi + coffee machine -- > corgi-alike coffee machine). Unlike style transfer, where an image is stylized according to the reference style without changing the image content, semantic blending mixes two different concepts in a semantic manner to synthesize a novel concept while preserving the spatial layout and geometry. To this end, we present MagicMix, a simple yet effective solution based on pre-trained text-conditioned diffusion models. Motivated by the progressive generation property of diffusion models where layout/shape emerges at early denoising steps while semantically meaningful details appear at later steps during the denoising process, our method first obtains a coarse layout (either by corrupting an image or denoising from a pure Gaussian noise given a text prompt), followed by injection of conditional prompt for semantic mixing. Our method does not require any spatial mask or re-training, yet is able to synthesize novel objects with high fidelity. To improve the mixing quality, we further devise two simple strategies to provide better control and flexibility over the synthesized content. With our method, we present our results over diverse downstream applications, including semantic style transfer, novel object synthesis, breed mixing, and concept removal, demonstrating the flexibility of our method. More results can be found on the project page https://magicmix.github.io

Pixel-Aware Stable Diffusion for Realistic Image Super-resolution and Personalized Stylization

Realistic image super-resolution (Real-ISR) aims to reproduce perceptually realistic image details from a low-quality input. The commonly used adversarial training based Real-ISR methods often introduce unnatural visual artifacts and fail to generate realistic textures for natural scene images. The recently developed generative stable diffusion models provide a potential solution to Real-ISR with pre-learned strong image priors. However, the existing methods along this line either fail to keep faithful pixel-wise image structures or resort to extra skipped connections to reproduce details, which requires additional training in image space and limits their extension to other related tasks in latent space such as image stylization. In this work, we propose a pixel-aware stable diffusion (PASD) network to achieve robust Real-ISR as well as personalized stylization. In specific, a pixel-aware cross attention module is introduced to enable diffusion models perceiving image local structures in pixel-wise level, while a degradation removal module is used to extract degradation insensitive features to guide the diffusion process together with image high level information. By simply replacing the base diffusion model with a personalized one, our method can generate diverse stylized images without the need to collect pairwise training data. PASD can be easily integrated into existing diffusion models such as Stable Diffusion. Experiments on Real-ISR and personalized stylization demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The source code and models can be found at https://github.com/yangxy/PASD.

T-Stitch: Accelerating Sampling in Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Trajectory Stitching

Sampling from diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) is often expensive for high-quality image generation and typically requires many steps with a large model. In this paper, we introduce sampling Trajectory Stitching T-Stitch, a simple yet efficient technique to improve the sampling efficiency with little or no generation degradation. Instead of solely using a large DPM for the entire sampling trajectory, T-Stitch first leverages a smaller DPM in the initial steps as a cheap drop-in replacement of the larger DPM and switches to the larger DPM at a later stage. Our key insight is that different diffusion models learn similar encodings under the same training data distribution and smaller models are capable of generating good global structures in the early steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T-Stitch is training-free, generally applicable for different architectures, and complements most existing fast sampling techniques with flexible speed and quality trade-offs. On DiT-XL, for example, 40% of the early timesteps can be safely replaced with a 10x faster DiT-S without performance drop on class-conditional ImageNet generation. We further show that our method can also be used as a drop-in technique to not only accelerate the popular pretrained stable diffusion (SD) models but also improve the prompt alignment of stylized SD models from the public model zoo. Code is released at https://github.com/NVlabs/T-Stitch

Aladdin: Zero-Shot Hallucination of Stylized 3D Assets from Abstract Scene Descriptions

What constitutes the "vibe" of a particular scene? What should one find in "a busy, dirty city street", "an idyllic countryside", or "a crime scene in an abandoned living room"? The translation from abstract scene descriptions to stylized scene elements cannot be done with any generality by extant systems trained on rigid and limited indoor datasets. In this paper, we propose to leverage the knowledge captured by foundation models to accomplish this translation. We present a system that can serve as a tool to generate stylized assets for 3D scenes described by a short phrase, without the need to enumerate the objects to be found within the scene or give instructions on their appearance. Additionally, it is robust to open-world concepts in a way that traditional methods trained on limited data are not, affording more creative freedom to the 3D artist. Our system demonstrates this using a foundation model "team" composed of a large language model, a vision-language model and several image diffusion models, which communicate using an interpretable and user-editable intermediate representation, thus allowing for more versatile and controllable stylized asset generation for 3D artists. We introduce novel metrics for this task, and show through human evaluations that in 91% of the cases, our system outputs are judged more faithful to the semantics of the input scene description than the baseline, thus highlighting the potential of this approach to radically accelerate the 3D content creation process for 3D artists.

StyleTex: Style Image-Guided Texture Generation for 3D Models

Style-guided texture generation aims to generate a texture that is harmonious with both the style of the reference image and the geometry of the input mesh, given a reference style image and a 3D mesh with its text description. Although diffusion-based 3D texture generation methods, such as distillation sampling, have numerous promising applications in stylized games and films, it requires addressing two challenges: 1) decouple style and content completely from the reference image for 3D models, and 2) align the generated texture with the color tone, style of the reference image, and the given text prompt. To this end, we introduce StyleTex, an innovative diffusion-model-based framework for creating stylized textures for 3D models. Our key insight is to decouple style information from the reference image while disregarding content in diffusion-based distillation sampling. Specifically, given a reference image, we first decompose its style feature from the image CLIP embedding by subtracting the embedding's orthogonal projection in the direction of the content feature, which is represented by a text CLIP embedding. Our novel approach to disentangling the reference image's style and content information allows us to generate distinct style and content features. We then inject the style feature into the cross-attention mechanism to incorporate it into the generation process, while utilizing the content feature as a negative prompt to further dissociate content information. Finally, we incorporate these strategies into StyleTex to obtain stylized textures. The resulting textures generated by StyleTex retain the style of the reference image, while also aligning with the text prompts and intrinsic details of the given 3D mesh. Quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our method outperforms existing baseline methods by a significant margin.

Beyond Color and Lines: Zero-Shot Style-Specific Image Variations with Coordinated Semantics

Traditionally, style has been primarily considered in terms of artistic elements such as colors, brushstrokes, and lighting. However, identical semantic subjects, like people, boats, and houses, can vary significantly across different artistic traditions, indicating that style also encompasses the underlying semantics. Therefore, in this study, we propose a zero-shot scheme for image variation with coordinated semantics. Specifically, our scheme transforms the image-to-image problem into an image-to-text-to-image problem. The image-to-text operation employs vision-language models e.g., BLIP) to generate text describing the content of the input image, including the objects and their positions. Subsequently, the input style keyword is elaborated into a detailed description of this style and then merged with the content text using the reasoning capabilities of ChatGPT. Finally, the text-to-image operation utilizes a Diffusion model to generate images based on the text prompt. To enable the Diffusion model to accommodate more styles, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that injects text and style constraints into cross-attention. This ensures that the output image exhibits similar semantics in the desired style. To validate the performance of the proposed scheme, we constructed a benchmark comprising images of various styles and scenes and introduced two novel metrics. Despite its simplicity, our scheme yields highly plausible results in a zero-shot manner, particularly for generating stylized images with high-fidelity semantics.

MagicInfinite: Generating Infinite Talking Videos with Your Words and Voice

We present MagicInfinite, a novel diffusion Transformer (DiT) framework that overcomes traditional portrait animation limitations, delivering high-fidelity results across diverse character types-realistic humans, full-body figures, and stylized anime characters. It supports varied facial poses, including back-facing views, and animates single or multiple characters with input masks for precise speaker designation in multi-character scenes. Our approach tackles key challenges with three innovations: (1) 3D full-attention mechanisms with a sliding window denoising strategy, enabling infinite video generation with temporal coherence and visual quality across diverse character styles; (2) a two-stage curriculum learning scheme, integrating audio for lip sync, text for expressive dynamics, and reference images for identity preservation, enabling flexible multi-modal control over long sequences; and (3) region-specific masks with adaptive loss functions to balance global textual control and local audio guidance, supporting speaker-specific animations. Efficiency is enhanced via our innovative unified step and cfg distillation techniques, achieving a 20x inference speed boost over the basemodel: generating a 10 second 540x540p video in 10 seconds or 720x720p in 30 seconds on 8 H100 GPUs, without quality loss. Evaluations on our new benchmark demonstrate MagicInfinite's superiority in audio-lip synchronization, identity preservation, and motion naturalness across diverse scenarios. It is publicly available at https://www.hedra.com/, with examples at https://magicinfinite.github.io/.

HoloDreamer: Holistic 3D Panoramic World Generation from Text Descriptions

3D scene generation is in high demand across various domains, including virtual reality, gaming, and the film industry. Owing to the powerful generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models that provide reliable priors, the creation of 3D scenes using only text prompts has become viable, thereby significantly advancing researches in text-driven 3D scene generation. In order to obtain multiple-view supervision from 2D diffusion models, prevailing methods typically employ the diffusion model to generate an initial local image, followed by iteratively outpainting the local image using diffusion models to gradually generate scenes. Nevertheless, these outpainting-based approaches prone to produce global inconsistent scene generation results without high degree of completeness, restricting their broader applications. To tackle these problems, we introduce HoloDreamer, a framework that first generates high-definition panorama as a holistic initialization of the full 3D scene, then leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) to quickly reconstruct the 3D scene, thereby facilitating the creation of view-consistent and fully enclosed 3D scenes. Specifically, we propose Stylized Equirectangular Panorama Generation, a pipeline that combines multiple diffusion models to enable stylized and detailed equirectangular panorama generation from complex text prompts. Subsequently, Enhanced Two-Stage Panorama Reconstruction is introduced, conducting a two-stage optimization of 3D-GS to inpaint the missing region and enhance the integrity of the scene. Comprehensive experiments demonstrated that our method outperforms prior works in terms of overall visual consistency and harmony as well as reconstruction quality and rendering robustness when generating fully enclosed scenes.

MOSAIC: Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP

Style transfer driven by text prompts paved a new path for creatively stylizing the images without collecting an actual style image. Despite having promising results, with text-driven stylization, the user has no control over the stylization. If a user wants to create an artistic image, the user requires fine control over the stylization of various entities individually in the content image, which is not addressed by the current state-of-the-art approaches. On the other hand, diffusion style transfer methods also suffer from the same issue because the regional stylization control over the stylized output is ineffective. To address this problem, We propose a new method Multi-Object Segmented Arbitrary Stylization Using CLIP (MOSAIC), that can apply styles to different objects in the image based on the context extracted from the input prompt. Text-based segmentation and stylization modules which are based on vision transformer architecture, were used to segment and stylize the objects. Our method can extend to any arbitrary objects, styles and produce high-quality images compared to the current state of art methods. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to perform text-guided arbitrary object-wise stylization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through qualitative and quantitative analysis, showing that it can generate visually appealing stylized images with enhanced control over stylization and the ability to generalize to unseen object classes.

Diffusion in Diffusion: Cyclic One-Way Diffusion for Text-Vision-Conditioned Generation

Originating from the diffusion phenomenon in physics that describes particle movement, the diffusion generative models inherit the characteristics of stochastic random walk in the data space along the denoising trajectory. However, the intrinsic mutual interference among image regions contradicts the need for practical downstream application scenarios where the preservation of low-level pixel information from given conditioning is desired (e.g., customization tasks like personalized generation and inpainting based on a user-provided single image). In this work, we investigate the diffusion (physics) in diffusion (machine learning) properties and propose our Cyclic One-Way Diffusion (COW) method to control the direction of diffusion phenomenon given a pre-trained frozen diffusion model for versatile customization application scenarios, where the low-level pixel information from the conditioning needs to be preserved. Notably, unlike most current methods that incorporate additional conditions by fine-tuning the base text-to-image diffusion model or learning auxiliary networks, our method provides a novel perspective to understand the task needs and is applicable to a wider range of customization scenarios in a learning-free manner. Extensive experiment results show that our proposed COW can achieve more flexible customization based on strict visual conditions in different application settings. Project page: https://wangruoyu02.github.io/cow.github.io/.

Smooth Diffusion: Crafting Smooth Latent Spaces in Diffusion Models

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

FontStudio: Shape-Adaptive Diffusion Model for Coherent and Consistent Font Effect Generation

Recently, the application of modern diffusion-based text-to-image generation models for creating artistic fonts, traditionally the domain of professional designers, has garnered significant interest. Diverging from the majority of existing studies that concentrate on generating artistic typography, our research aims to tackle a novel and more demanding challenge: the generation of text effects for multilingual fonts. This task essentially requires generating coherent and consistent visual content within the confines of a font-shaped canvas, as opposed to a traditional rectangular canvas. To address this task, we introduce a novel shape-adaptive diffusion model capable of interpreting the given shape and strategically planning pixel distributions within the irregular canvas. To achieve this, we curate a high-quality shape-adaptive image-text dataset and incorporate the segmentation mask as a visual condition to steer the image generation process within the irregular-canvas. This approach enables the traditionally rectangle canvas-based diffusion model to produce the desired concepts in accordance with the provided geometric shapes. Second, to maintain consistency across multiple letters, we also present a training-free, shape-adaptive effect transfer method for transferring textures from a generated reference letter to others. The key insights are building a font effect noise prior and propagating the font effect information in a concatenated latent space. The efficacy of our FontStudio system is confirmed through user preference studies, which show a marked preference (78% win-rates on aesthetics) for our system even when compared to the latest unrivaled commercial product, Adobe Firefly.

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

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

Diffusion Models for Multi-Task Generative Modeling

Diffusion-based generative modeling has been achieving state-of-the-art results on various generation tasks. Most diffusion models, however, are limited to a single-generation modeling. Can we generalize diffusion models with the ability of multi-modal generative training for more generalizable modeling? In this paper, we propose a principled way to define a diffusion model by constructing a unified multi-modal diffusion model in a common diffusion space. We define the forward diffusion process to be driven by an information aggregation from multiple types of task-data, e.g., images for a generation task and labels for a classification task. In the reverse process, we enforce information sharing by parameterizing a shared backbone denoising network with additional modality-specific decoder heads. Such a structure can simultaneously learn to generate different types of multi-modal data with a multi-task loss, which is derived from a new multi-modal variational lower bound that generalizes the standard diffusion model. We propose several multimodal generation settings to verify our framework, including image transition, masked-image training, joint image-label and joint image-representation generative modeling. Extensive experimental results on ImageNet indicate the effectiveness of our framework for various multi-modal generative modeling, which we believe is an important research direction worthy of more future explorations.

Diffusion Models Generate Images Like Painters: an Analytical Theory of Outline First, Details Later

How do diffusion generative models convert pure noise into meaningful images? In a variety of pretrained diffusion models (including conditional latent space models like Stable Diffusion), we observe that the reverse diffusion process that underlies image generation has the following properties: (i) individual trajectories tend to be low-dimensional and resemble 2D `rotations'; (ii) high-variance scene features like layout tend to emerge earlier, while low-variance details tend to emerge later; and (iii) early perturbations tend to have a greater impact on image content than later perturbations. To understand these phenomena, we derive and study a closed-form solution to the probability flow ODE for a Gaussian distribution, which shows that the reverse diffusion state rotates towards a gradually-specified target on the image manifold. It also shows that generation involves first committing to an outline, and then to finer and finer details. We find that this solution accurately describes the initial phase of image generation for pretrained models, and can in principle be used to make image generation more efficient by skipping reverse diffusion steps. Finally, we use our solution to characterize the image manifold in Stable Diffusion. Our viewpoint reveals an unexpected similarity between generation by GANs and diffusion and provides a conceptual link between diffusion and image retrieval.

Diffusion Sampling with Momentum for Mitigating Divergence Artifacts

Despite the remarkable success of diffusion models in image generation, slow sampling remains a persistent issue. To accelerate the sampling process, prior studies have reformulated diffusion sampling as an ODE/SDE and introduced higher-order numerical methods. However, these methods often produce divergence artifacts, especially with a low number of sampling steps, which limits the achievable acceleration. In this paper, we investigate the potential causes of these artifacts and suggest that the small stability regions of these methods could be the principal cause. To address this issue, we propose two novel techniques. The first technique involves the incorporation of Heavy Ball (HB) momentum, a well-known technique for improving optimization, into existing diffusion numerical methods to expand their stability regions. We also prove that the resulting methods have first-order convergence. The second technique, called Generalized Heavy Ball (GHVB), constructs a new high-order method that offers a variable trade-off between accuracy and artifact suppression. Experimental results show that our techniques are highly effective in reducing artifacts and improving image quality, surpassing state-of-the-art diffusion solvers on both pixel-based and latent-based diffusion models for low-step sampling. Our research provides novel insights into the design of numerical methods for future diffusion work.

Understanding Hallucinations in Diffusion Models through Mode Interpolation

Colloquially speaking, image generation models based upon diffusion processes are frequently said to exhibit "hallucinations," samples that could never occur in the training data. But where do such hallucinations come from? In this paper, we study a particular failure mode in diffusion models, which we term mode interpolation. Specifically, we find that diffusion models smoothly "interpolate" between nearby data modes in the training set, to generate samples that are completely outside the support of the original training distribution; this phenomenon leads diffusion models to generate artifacts that never existed in real data (i.e., hallucinations). We systematically study the reasons for, and the manifestation of this phenomenon. Through experiments on 1D and 2D Gaussians, we show how a discontinuous loss landscape in the diffusion model's decoder leads to a region where any smooth approximation will cause such hallucinations. Through experiments on artificial datasets with various shapes, we show how hallucination leads to the generation of combinations of shapes that never existed. Finally, we show that diffusion models in fact know when they go out of support and hallucinate. This is captured by the high variance in the trajectory of the generated sample towards the final few backward sampling process. Using a simple metric to capture this variance, we can remove over 95% of hallucinations at generation time while retaining 96% of in-support samples. We conclude our exploration by showing the implications of such hallucination (and its removal) on the collapse (and stabilization) of recursive training on synthetic data with experiments on MNIST and 2D Gaussians dataset. We release our code at https://github.com/locuslab/diffusion-model-hallucination.

Diffusion with Forward Models: Solving Stochastic Inverse Problems Without Direct Supervision

Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in inverse graphics, the goal is to generate samples from a distribution of 3D scenes that align with a given image, but ground-truth 3D scenes are unavailable and only 2D images are accessible. To address this limitation, we propose a novel class of denoising diffusion probabilistic models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed. Instead, these signals are measured indirectly through a known differentiable forward model, which produces partial observations of the unknown signal. Our approach involves integrating the forward model directly into the denoising process. This integration effectively connects the generative modeling of observations with the generative modeling of the underlying signals, allowing for end-to-end training of a conditional generative model over signals. During inference, our approach enables sampling from the distribution of underlying signals that are consistent with a given partial observation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three challenging computer vision tasks. For instance, in the context of inverse graphics, our model enables direct sampling from the distribution of 3D scenes that align with a single 2D input image.

Geometric Trajectory Diffusion Models

Generative models have shown great promise in generating 3D geometric systems, which is a fundamental problem in many natural science domains such as molecule and protein design. However, existing approaches only operate on static structures, neglecting the fact that physical systems are always dynamic in nature. In this work, we propose geometric trajectory diffusion models (GeoTDM), the first diffusion model for modeling the temporal distribution of 3D geometric trajectories. Modeling such distribution is challenging as it requires capturing both the complex spatial interactions with physical symmetries and temporal correspondence encapsulated in the dynamics. We theoretically justify that diffusion models with equivariant temporal kernels can lead to density with desired symmetry, and develop a novel transition kernel leveraging SE(3)-equivariant spatial convolution and temporal attention. Furthermore, to induce an expressive trajectory distribution for conditional generation, we introduce a generalized learnable geometric prior into the forward diffusion process to enhance temporal conditioning. We conduct extensive experiments on both unconditional and conditional generation in various scenarios, including physical simulation, molecular dynamics, and pedestrian motion. Empirical results on a wide suite of metrics demonstrate that GeoTDM can generate realistic geometric trajectories with significantly higher quality.

Composite Diffusion | whole >= Σparts

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

Kinetic Typography Diffusion Model

This paper introduces a method for realistic kinetic typography that generates user-preferred animatable 'text content'. We draw on recent advances in guided video diffusion models to achieve visually-pleasing text appearances. To do this, we first construct a kinetic typography dataset, comprising about 600K videos. Our dataset is made from a variety of combinations in 584 templates designed by professional motion graphics designers and involves changing each letter's position, glyph, and size (i.e., flying, glitches, chromatic aberration, reflecting effects, etc.). Next, we propose a video diffusion model for kinetic typography. For this, there are three requirements: aesthetic appearances, motion effects, and readable letters. This paper identifies the requirements. For this, we present static and dynamic captions used as spatial and temporal guidance of a video diffusion model, respectively. The static caption describes the overall appearance of the video, such as colors, texture and glyph which represent a shape of each letter. The dynamic caption accounts for the movements of letters and backgrounds. We add one more guidance with zero convolution to determine which text content should be visible in the video. We apply the zero convolution to the text content, and impose it on the diffusion model. Lastly, our glyph loss, only minimizing a difference between the predicted word and its ground-truth, is proposed to make the prediction letters readable. Experiments show that our model generates kinetic typography videos with legible and artistic letter motions based on text prompts.

DiLightNet: Fine-grained Lighting Control for Diffusion-based Image Generation

This paper presents a novel method for exerting fine-grained lighting control during text-driven diffusion-based image generation. While existing diffusion models already have the ability to generate images under any lighting condition, without additional guidance these models tend to correlate image content and lighting. Moreover, text prompts lack the necessary expressional power to describe detailed lighting setups. To provide the content creator with fine-grained control over the lighting during image generation, we augment the text-prompt with detailed lighting information in the form of radiance hints, i.e., visualizations of the scene geometry with a homogeneous canonical material under the target lighting. However, the scene geometry needed to produce the radiance hints is unknown. Our key observation is that we only need to guide the diffusion process, hence exact radiance hints are not necessary; we only need to point the diffusion model in the right direction. Based on this observation, we introduce a three stage method for controlling the lighting during image generation. In the first stage, we leverage a standard pretrained diffusion model to generate a provisional image under uncontrolled lighting. Next, in the second stage, we resynthesize and refine the foreground object in the generated image by passing the target lighting to a refined diffusion model, named DiLightNet, using radiance hints computed on a coarse shape of the foreground object inferred from the provisional image. To retain the texture details, we multiply the radiance hints with a neural encoding of the provisional synthesized image before passing it to DiLightNet. Finally, in the third stage, we resynthesize the background to be consistent with the lighting on the foreground object. We demonstrate and validate our lighting controlled diffusion model on a variety of text prompts and lighting conditions.

DiffuseHigh: Training-free Progressive High-Resolution Image Synthesis through Structure Guidance

Recent surge in large-scale generative models has spurred the development of vast fields in computer vision. In particular, text-to-image diffusion models have garnered widespread adoption across diverse domain due to their potential for high-fidelity image generation. Nonetheless, existing large-scale diffusion models are confined to generate images of up to 1K resolution, which is far from meeting the demands of contemporary commercial applications. Directly sampling higher-resolution images often yields results marred by artifacts such as object repetition and distorted shapes. Addressing the aforementioned issues typically necessitates training or fine-tuning models on higher resolution datasets. However, this undertaking poses a formidable challenge due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale high-resolution contents and substantial computational resources. While several preceding works have proposed alternatives, they often fail to produce convincing results. In this work, we probe the generative ability of diffusion models at higher resolution beyond its original capability and propose a novel progressive approach that fully utilizes generated low-resolution image to guide the generation of higher resolution image. Our method obviates the need for additional training or fine-tuning which significantly lowers the burden of computational costs. Extensive experiments and results validate the efficiency and efficacy of our method. Project page: https://yhyun225.github.io/DiffuseHigh/

Image Referenced Sketch Colorization Based on Animation Creation Workflow

Sketch colorization plays an important role in animation and digital illustration production tasks. However, existing methods still meet problems in that text-guided methods fail to provide accurate color and style reference, hint-guided methods still involve manual operation, and image-referenced methods are prone to cause artifacts. To address these limitations, we propose a diffusion-based framework inspired by real-world animation production workflows. Our approach leverages the sketch as the spatial guidance and an RGB image as the color reference, and separately extracts foreground and background from the reference image with spatial masks. Particularly, we introduce a split cross-attention mechanism with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) modules. They are trained separately with foreground and background regions to control the corresponding embeddings for keys and values in cross-attention. This design allows the diffusion model to integrate information from foreground and background independently, preventing interference and eliminating the spatial artifacts. During inference, we design switchable inference modes for diverse use scenarios by changing modules activated in the framework. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, along with user studies, demonstrate our advantages over existing methods in generating high-qualigy artifact-free results with geometric mismatched references. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component. Codes are available at https://github.com/ tellurion-kanata/colorizeDiffusion.

Rectified Diffusion: Straightness Is Not Your Need in Rectified Flow

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

Financial Models in Generative Art: Black-Scholes-Inspired Concept Blending in Text-to-Image Diffusion

We introduce a novel approach for concept blending in pretrained text-to-image diffusion models, aiming to generate images at the intersection of multiple text prompts. At each time step during diffusion denoising, our algorithm forecasts predictions w.r.t. the generated image and makes informed text conditioning decisions. Central to our method is the unique analogy between diffusion models, which are rooted in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and the Black-Scholes model for financial option pricing. By drawing parallels between key variables in both domains, we derive a robust algorithm for concept blending that capitalizes on the Markovian dynamics of the Black-Scholes framework. Our text-based concept blending algorithm is data-efficient, meaning it does not need additional training. Furthermore, it operates without human intervention or hyperparameter tuning. We highlight the benefits of our approach by comparing it qualitatively and quantitatively to other text based concept blending techniques, including linear interpolation, alternating prompts, step-wise prompt switching, and CLIP-guided prompt selection across various scenarios such as single object per text prompt, multiple objects per text prompt and objects against backgrounds. Our work shows that financially inspired techniques can enhance text-to-image concept blending in generative AI, paving the way for broader innovation. Code is available at https://github.com/divyakraman/BlackScholesDiffusion2024.

Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

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

Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent Transparency

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

Any-Size-Diffusion: Toward Efficient Text-Driven Synthesis for Any-Size HD Images

Stable diffusion, a generative model used in text-to-image synthesis, frequently encounters resolution-induced composition problems when generating images of varying sizes. This issue primarily stems from the model being trained on pairs of single-scale images and their corresponding text descriptions. Moreover, direct training on images of unlimited sizes is unfeasible, as it would require an immense number of text-image pairs and entail substantial computational expenses. To overcome these challenges, we propose a two-stage pipeline named Any-Size-Diffusion (ASD), designed to efficiently generate well-composed images of any size, while minimizing the need for high-memory GPU resources. Specifically, the initial stage, dubbed Any Ratio Adaptability Diffusion (ARAD), leverages a selected set of images with a restricted range of ratios to optimize the text-conditional diffusion model, thereby improving its ability to adjust composition to accommodate diverse image sizes. To support the creation of images at any desired size, we further introduce a technique called Fast Seamless Tiled Diffusion (FSTD) at the subsequent stage. This method allows for the rapid enlargement of the ASD output to any high-resolution size, avoiding seaming artifacts or memory overloads. Experimental results on the LAION-COCO and MM-CelebA-HQ benchmarks demonstrate that ASD can produce well-structured images of arbitrary sizes, cutting down the inference time by 2x compared to the traditional tiled algorithm.

Product-Level Try-on: Characteristics-preserving Try-on with Realistic Clothes Shading and Wrinkles

Image-based virtual try-on systems,which fit new garments onto human portraits,are gaining research attention.An ideal pipeline should preserve the static features of clothes(like textures and logos)while also generating dynamic elements(e.g.shadows,folds)that adapt to the model's pose and environment.Previous works fail specifically in generating dynamic features,as they preserve the warped in-shop clothes trivially with predicted an alpha mask by composition.To break the dilemma of over-preserving and textures losses,we propose a novel diffusion-based Product-level virtual try-on pipeline,\ie PLTON, which can preserve the fine details of logos and embroideries while producing realistic clothes shading and wrinkles.The main insights are in three folds:1)Adaptive Dynamic Rendering:We take a pre-trained diffusion model as a generative prior and tame it with image features,training a dynamic extractor from scratch to generate dynamic tokens that preserve high-fidelity semantic information. Due to the strong generative power of the diffusion prior,we can generate realistic clothes shadows and wrinkles.2)Static Characteristics Transformation: High-frequency Map(HF-Map)is our fundamental insight for static representation.PLTON first warps in-shop clothes to the target model pose by a traditional warping network,and uses a high-pass filter to extract an HF-Map for preserving static cloth features.The HF-Map is used to generate modulation maps through our static extractor,which are injected into a fixed U-net to synthesize the final result.To enhance retention,a Two-stage Blended Denoising method is proposed to guide the diffusion process for correct spatial layout and color.PLTON is finetuned only with our collected small-size try-on dataset.Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on 1024 768 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework in mimicking real clothes dynamics.

StyDeco: Unsupervised Style Transfer with Distilling Priors and Semantic Decoupling

Diffusion models have emerged as the dominant paradigm for style transfer, but their text-driven mechanism is hindered by a core limitation: it treats textual descriptions as uniform, monolithic guidance. This limitation overlooks the semantic gap between the non-spatial nature of textual descriptions and the spatially-aware attributes of visual style, often leading to the loss of semantic structure and fine-grained details during stylization. In this paper, we propose StyDeco, an unsupervised framework that resolves this limitation by learning text representations specifically tailored for the style transfer task. Our framework first employs Prior-Guided Data Distillation (PGD), a strategy designed to distill stylistic knowledge without human supervision. It leverages a powerful frozen generative model to automatically synthesize pseudo-paired data. Subsequently, we introduce Contrastive Semantic Decoupling (CSD), a task-specific objective that adapts a text encoder using domain-specific weights. CSD performs a two-class clustering in the semantic space, encouraging source and target representations to form distinct clusters. Extensive experiments on three classic benchmarks demonstrate that our framework outperforms several existing approaches in both stylistic fidelity and structural preservation, highlighting its effectiveness in style transfer with semantic preservation. In addition, our framework supports a unique de-stylization process, further demonstrating its extensibility. Our code is vailable at https://github.com/QuanjianSong/StyDeco.

An Overview of Diffusion Models: Applications, Guided Generation, Statistical Rates and Optimization

Diffusion models, a powerful and universal generative AI technology, have achieved tremendous success in computer vision, audio, reinforcement learning, and computational biology. In these applications, diffusion models provide flexible high-dimensional data modeling, and act as a sampler for generating new samples under active guidance towards task-desired properties. Despite the significant empirical success, theory of diffusion models is very limited, potentially slowing down principled methodological innovations for further harnessing and improving diffusion models. In this paper, we review emerging applications of diffusion models, understanding their sample generation under various controls. Next, we overview the existing theories of diffusion models, covering their statistical properties and sampling capabilities. We adopt a progressive routine, beginning with unconditional diffusion models and connecting to conditional counterparts. Further, we review a new avenue in high-dimensional structured optimization through conditional diffusion models, where searching for solutions is reformulated as a conditional sampling problem and solved by diffusion models. Lastly, we discuss future directions about diffusion models. The purpose of this paper is to provide a well-rounded theoretical exposure for stimulating forward-looking theories and methods of diffusion models.

StreamDiffusion: A Pipeline-level Solution for Real-time Interactive Generation

We introduce StreamDiffusion, a real-time diffusion pipeline designed for interactive image generation. Existing diffusion models are adept at creating images from text or image prompts, yet they often fall short in real-time interaction. This limitation becomes particularly evident in scenarios involving continuous input, such as Metaverse, live video streaming, and broadcasting, where high throughput is imperative. To address this, we present a novel approach that transforms the original sequential denoising into the batching denoising process. Stream Batch eliminates the conventional wait-and-interact approach and enables fluid and high throughput streams. To handle the frequency disparity between data input and model throughput, we design a novel input-output queue for parallelizing the streaming process. Moreover, the existing diffusion pipeline uses classifier-free guidance(CFG), which requires additional U-Net computation. To mitigate the redundant computations, we propose a novel residual classifier-free guidance (RCFG) algorithm that reduces the number of negative conditional denoising steps to only one or even zero. Besides, we introduce a stochastic similarity filter(SSF) to optimize power consumption. Our Stream Batch achieves around 1.5x speedup compared to the sequential denoising method at different denoising levels. The proposed RCFG leads to speeds up to 2.05x higher than the conventional CFG. Combining the proposed strategies and existing mature acceleration tools makes the image-to-image generation achieve up-to 91.07fps on one RTX4090, improving the throughputs of AutoPipline developed by Diffusers over 59.56x. Furthermore, our proposed StreamDiffusion also significantly reduces the energy consumption by 2.39x on one RTX3060 and 1.99x on one RTX4090, respectively.

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

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

Derivative-Free Guidance in Continuous and Discrete Diffusion Models with Soft Value-Based Decoding

Diffusion models excel at capturing the natural design spaces of images, molecules, DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. However, rather than merely generating designs that are natural, we often aim to optimize downstream reward functions while preserving the naturalness of these design spaces. Existing methods for achieving this goal often require ``differentiable'' proxy models (e.g., classifier guidance or DPS) or involve computationally expensive fine-tuning of diffusion models (e.g., classifier-free guidance, RL-based fine-tuning). In our work, we propose a new method to address these challenges. Our algorithm is an iterative sampling method that integrates soft value functions, which looks ahead to how intermediate noisy states lead to high rewards in the future, into the standard inference procedure of pre-trained diffusion models. Notably, our approach avoids fine-tuning generative models and eliminates the need to construct differentiable models. This enables us to (1) directly utilize non-differentiable features/reward feedback, commonly used in many scientific domains, and (2) apply our method to recent discrete diffusion models in a principled way. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm across several domains, including image generation, molecule generation, and DNA/RNA sequence generation. The code is available at https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD{https://github.com/masa-ue/SVDD}.

NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation

Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.

The Cow of Rembrandt - Analyzing Artistic Prompt Interpretation in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating artistic content by learning from billions of images, including popular artworks. However, the fundamental question of how these models internally represent concepts, such as content and style in paintings, remains unexplored. Traditional computer vision assumes content and style are orthogonal, but diffusion models receive no explicit guidance about this distinction during training. In this work, we investigate how transformer-based text-to-image diffusion models encode content and style concepts when generating artworks. We leverage cross-attention heatmaps to attribute pixels in generated images to specific prompt tokens, enabling us to isolate image regions influenced by content-describing versus style-describing tokens. Our findings reveal that diffusion models demonstrate varying degrees of content-style separation depending on the specific artistic prompt and style requested. In many cases, content tokens primarily influence object-related regions while style tokens affect background and texture areas, suggesting an emergent understanding of the content-style distinction. These insights contribute to our understanding of how large-scale generative models internally represent complex artistic concepts without explicit supervision. We share the code and dataset, together with an exploratory tool for visualizing attention maps at https://github.com/umilISLab/artistic-prompt-interpretation.

OneActor: Consistent Character Generation via Cluster-Conditioned Guidance

Text-to-image diffusion models benefit artists with high-quality image generation. Yet its stochastic nature prevent artists from creating consistent images of the same character. Existing methods try to tackle this challenge and generate consistent content in various ways. However, they either depend on external data or require expensive tuning of the diffusion model. For this issue, we argue that a lightweight but intricate guidance is enough to function. Aiming at this, we lead the way to formalize the objective of consistent generation, derive a clustering-based score function and propose a novel paradigm, OneActor. We design a cluster-conditioned model which incorporates posterior samples to guide the denoising trajectories towards the target cluster. To overcome the overfitting challenge shared by one-shot tuning pipelines, we devise auxiliary components to simultaneously augment the tuning and regulate the inference. This technique is later verified to significantly enhance the content diversity of generated images. Comprehensive experiments show that our method outperforms a variety of baselines with satisfactory character consistency, superior prompt conformity as well as high image quality. And our method is at least 4 times faster than tuning-based baselines. Furthermore, to our best knowledge, we first prove that the semantic space has the same interpolation property as the latent space dose. This property can serve as another promising tool for fine generation control.

FlexPainter: Flexible and Multi-View Consistent Texture Generation

Texture map production is an important part of 3D modeling and determines the rendering quality. Recently, diffusion-based methods have opened a new way for texture generation. However, restricted control flexibility and limited prompt modalities may prevent creators from producing desired results. Furthermore, inconsistencies between generated multi-view images often lead to poor texture generation quality. To address these issues, we introduce FlexPainter, a novel texture generation pipeline that enables flexible multi-modal conditional guidance and achieves highly consistent texture generation. A shared conditional embedding space is constructed to perform flexible aggregation between different input modalities. Utilizing such embedding space, we present an image-based CFG method to decompose structural and style information, achieving reference image-based stylization. Leveraging the 3D knowledge within the image diffusion prior, we first generate multi-view images simultaneously using a grid representation to enhance global understanding. Meanwhile, we propose a view synchronization and adaptive weighting module during diffusion sampling to further ensure local consistency. Finally, a 3D-aware texture completion model combined with a texture enhancement model is used to generate seamless, high-resolution texture maps. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both flexibility and generation quality.

ACE: All-round Creator and Editor Following Instructions via Diffusion Transformer

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful generative technology and have been found to be applicable in various scenarios. Most existing foundational diffusion models are primarily designed for text-guided visual generation and do not support multi-modal conditions, which are essential for many visual editing tasks. This limitation prevents these foundational diffusion models from serving as a unified model in the field of visual generation, like GPT-4 in the natural language processing field. In this work, we propose ACE, an All-round Creator and Editor, which achieves comparable performance compared to those expert models in a wide range of visual generation tasks. To achieve this goal, we first introduce a unified condition format termed Long-context Condition Unit (LCU), and propose a novel Transformer-based diffusion model that uses LCU as input, aiming for joint training across various generation and editing tasks. Furthermore, we propose an efficient data collection approach to address the issue of the absence of available training data. It involves acquiring pairwise images with synthesis-based or clustering-based pipelines and supplying these pairs with accurate textual instructions by leveraging a fine-tuned multi-modal large language model. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of our model, we establish a benchmark of manually annotated pairs data across a variety of visual generation tasks. The extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model in visual generation fields. Thanks to the all-in-one capabilities of our model, we can easily build a multi-modal chat system that responds to any interactive request for image creation using a single model to serve as the backend, avoiding the cumbersome pipeline typically employed in visual agents. Code and models will be available on the project page: https://ali-vilab.github.io/ace-page/.

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

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

Style Injection in Diffusion: A Training-free Approach for Adapting Large-scale Diffusion Models for Style Transfer

Despite the impressive generative capabilities of diffusion models, existing diffusion model-based style transfer methods require inference-stage optimization (e.g. fine-tuning or textual inversion of style) which is time-consuming, or fails to leverage the generative ability of large-scale diffusion models. To address these issues, we introduce a novel artistic style transfer method based on a pre-trained large-scale diffusion model without any optimization. Specifically, we manipulate the features of self-attention layers as the way the cross-attention mechanism works; in the generation process, substituting the key and value of content with those of style image. This approach provides several desirable characteristics for style transfer including 1) preservation of content by transferring similar styles into similar image patches and 2) transfer of style based on similarity of local texture (e.g. edge) between content and style images. Furthermore, we introduce query preservation and attention temperature scaling to mitigate the issue of disruption of original content, and initial latent Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) to deal with the disharmonious color (failure to transfer the colors of style). Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both conventional and diffusion-based style transfer baselines.

Diffusion Models for Medical Image Analysis: A Comprehensive Survey

Denoising diffusion models, a class of generative models, have garnered immense interest lately in various deep-learning problems. A diffusion probabilistic model defines a forward diffusion stage where the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise and then learns to reverse the diffusion process to retrieve the desired noise-free data from noisy data samples. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for their strong mode coverage and quality of the generated samples despite their known computational burdens. Capitalizing on the advances in computer vision, the field of medical imaging has also observed a growing interest in diffusion models. To help the researcher navigate this profusion, this survey intends to provide a comprehensive overview of diffusion models in the discipline of medical image analysis. Specifically, we introduce the solid theoretical foundation and fundamental concepts behind diffusion models and the three generic diffusion modelling frameworks: diffusion probabilistic models, noise-conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. Then, we provide a systematic taxonomy of diffusion models in the medical domain and propose a multi-perspective categorization based on their application, imaging modality, organ of interest, and algorithms. To this end, we cover extensive applications of diffusion models in the medical domain. Furthermore, we emphasize the practical use case of some selected approaches, and then we discuss the limitations of the diffusion models in the medical domain and propose several directions to fulfill the demands of this field. Finally, we gather the overviewed studies with their available open-source implementations at https://github.com/amirhossein-kz/Awesome-Diffusion-Models-in-Medical-Imaging.

InstaRevive: One-Step Image Enhancement via Dynamic Score Matching

Image enhancement finds wide-ranging applications in real-world scenarios due to complex environments and the inherent limitations of imaging devices. Recent diffusion-based methods yield promising outcomes but necessitate prolonged and computationally intensive iterative sampling. In response, we propose InstaRevive, a straightforward yet powerful image enhancement framework that employs score-based diffusion distillation to harness potent generative capability and minimize the sampling steps. To fully exploit the potential of the pre-trained diffusion model, we devise a practical and effective diffusion distillation pipeline using dynamic control to address inaccuracies in updating direction during score matching. Our control strategy enables a dynamic diffusing scope, facilitating precise learning of denoising trajectories within the diffusion model and ensuring accurate distribution matching gradients during training. Additionally, to enrich guidance for the generative power, we incorporate textual prompts via image captioning as auxiliary conditions, fostering further exploration of the diffusion model. Extensive experiments substantiate the efficacy of our framework across a diverse array of challenging tasks and datasets, unveiling the compelling efficacy and efficiency of InstaRevive in delivering high-quality and visually appealing results. Code is available at https://github.com/EternalEvan/InstaRevive.

CreativeSynth: Creative Blending and Synthesis of Visual Arts based on Multimodal Diffusion

Large-scale text-to-image generative models have made impressive strides, showcasing their ability to synthesize a vast array of high-quality images. However, adapting these models for artistic image editing presents two significant challenges. Firstly, users struggle to craft textual prompts that meticulously detail visual elements of the input image. Secondly, prevalent models, when effecting modifications in specific zones, frequently disrupt the overall artistic style, complicating the attainment of cohesive and aesthetically unified artworks. To surmount these obstacles, we build the innovative unified framework CreativeSynth, which is based on a diffusion model with the ability to coordinate multimodal inputs and multitask in the field of artistic image generation. By integrating multimodal features with customized attention mechanisms, CreativeSynth facilitates the importation of real-world semantic content into the domain of art through inversion and real-time style transfer. This allows for the precise manipulation of image style and content while maintaining the integrity of the original model parameters. Rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluations underscore that CreativeSynth excels in enhancing artistic images' fidelity and preserves their innate aesthetic essence. By bridging the gap between generative models and artistic finesse, CreativeSynth becomes a custom digital palette.

Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusions

A class of generative models that unifies flow-based and diffusion-based methods is introduced. These models extend the framework proposed in Albergo & Vanden-Eijnden (2023), enabling the use of a broad class of continuous-time stochastic processes called `stochastic interpolants' to bridge any two arbitrary probability density functions exactly in finite time. These interpolants are built by combining data from the two prescribed densities with an additional latent variable that shapes the bridge in a flexible way. The time-dependent probability density function of the stochastic interpolant is shown to satisfy a first-order transport equation as well as a family of forward and backward Fokker-Planck equations with tunable diffusion coefficient. Upon consideration of the time evolution of an individual sample, this viewpoint immediately leads to both deterministic and stochastic generative models based on probability flow equations or stochastic differential equations with an adjustable level of noise. The drift coefficients entering these models are time-dependent velocity fields characterized as the unique minimizers of simple quadratic objective functions, one of which is a new objective for the score of the interpolant density. We show that minimization of these quadratic objectives leads to control of the likelihood for generative models built upon stochastic dynamics, while likelihood control for deterministic dynamics is more stringent. We also discuss connections with other methods such as score-based diffusion models, stochastic localization processes, probabilistic denoising techniques, and rectifying flows. In addition, we demonstrate that stochastic interpolants recover the Schr\"odinger bridge between the two target densities when explicitly optimizing over the interpolant. Finally, algorithmic aspects are discussed and the approach is illustrated on numerical examples.

DiffuMural: Restoring Dunhuang Murals with Multi-scale Diffusion

Large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have produced excellent results in the field of conditional image generation. However, restoration of ancient murals, as an important downstream task in this field, poses significant challenges to diffusion model-based restoration methods due to its large defective area and scarce training samples. Conditional restoration tasks are more concerned with whether the restored part meets the aesthetic standards of mural restoration in terms of overall style and seam detail, and such metrics for evaluating heuristic image complements are lacking in current research. We therefore propose DiffuMural, a combined Multi-scale convergence and Collaborative Diffusion mechanism with ControlNet and cyclic consistency loss to optimise the matching between the generated images and the conditional control. DiffuMural demonstrates outstanding capabilities in mural restoration, leveraging training data from 23 large-scale Dunhuang murals that exhibit consistent visual aesthetics. The model excels in restoring intricate details, achieving a coherent overall appearance, and addressing the unique challenges posed by incomplete murals lacking factual grounding. Our evaluation framework incorporates four key metrics to quantitatively assess incomplete murals: factual accuracy, textural detail, contextual semantics, and holistic visual coherence. Furthermore, we integrate humanistic value assessments to ensure the restored murals retain their cultural and artistic significance. Extensive experiments validate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches in both qualitative and quantitative metrics.

Closing the ODE-SDE gap in score-based diffusion models through the Fokker-Planck equation

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as one of the most promising frameworks for deep generative modelling, due to their state-of-the art performance in many generation tasks while relying on mathematical foundations such as stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Empirically, it has been reported that ODE based samples are inferior to SDE based samples. In this paper we rigorously describe the range of dynamics and approximations that arise when training score-based diffusion models, including the true SDE dynamics, the neural approximations, the various approximate particle dynamics that result, as well as their associated Fokker--Planck equations and the neural network approximations of these Fokker--Planck equations. We systematically analyse the difference between the ODE and SDE dynamics of score-based diffusion models, and link it to an associated Fokker--Planck equation. We derive a theoretical upper bound on the Wasserstein 2-distance between the ODE- and SDE-induced distributions in terms of a Fokker--Planck residual. We also show numerically that conventional score-based diffusion models can exhibit significant differences between ODE- and SDE-induced distributions which we demonstrate using explicit comparisons. Moreover, we show numerically that reducing the Fokker--Planck residual by adding it as an additional regularisation term leads to closing the gap between ODE- and SDE-induced distributions. Our experiments suggest that this regularisation can improve the distribution generated by the ODE, however that this can come at the cost of degraded SDE sample quality.

EMDM: Efficient Motion Diffusion Model for Fast and High-Quality Motion Generation

We introduce Efficient Motion Diffusion Model (EMDM) for fast and high-quality human motion generation. Current state-of-the-art generative diffusion models have produced impressive results but struggle to achieve fast generation without sacrificing quality. On the one hand, previous works, like motion latent diffusion, conduct diffusion within a latent space for efficiency, but learning such a latent space can be a non-trivial effort. On the other hand, accelerating generation by naively increasing the sampling step size, e.g., DDIM, often leads to quality degradation as it fails to approximate the complex denoising distribution. To address these issues, we propose EMDM, which captures the complex distribution during multiple sampling steps in the diffusion model, allowing for much fewer sampling steps and significant acceleration in generation. This is achieved by a conditional denoising diffusion GAN to capture multimodal data distributions among arbitrary (and potentially larger) step sizes conditioned on control signals, enabling fewer-step motion sampling with high fidelity and diversity. To minimize undesired motion artifacts, geometric losses are imposed during network learning. As a result, EMDM achieves real-time motion generation and significantly improves the efficiency of motion diffusion models compared to existing methods while achieving high-quality motion generation. Our code will be publicly available upon publication.

Locally Attentional SDF Diffusion for Controllable 3D Shape Generation

Although the recent rapid evolution of 3D generative neural networks greatly improves 3D shape generation, it is still not convenient for ordinary users to create 3D shapes and control the local geometry of generated shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based 3D generation framework -- locally attentional SDF diffusion, to model plausible 3D shapes, via 2D sketch image input. Our method is built on a two-stage diffusion model. The first stage, named occupancy-diffusion, aims to generate a low-resolution occupancy field to approximate the shape shell. The second stage, named SDF-diffusion, synthesizes a high-resolution signed distance field within the occupied voxels determined by the first stage to extract fine geometry. Our model is empowered by a novel view-aware local attention mechanism for image-conditioned shape generation, which takes advantage of 2D image patch features to guide 3D voxel feature learning, greatly improving local controllability and model generalizability. Through extensive experiments in sketch-conditioned and category-conditioned 3D shape generation tasks, we validate and demonstrate the ability of our method to provide plausible and diverse 3D shapes, as well as its superior controllability and generalizability over existing work. Our code and trained models are available at https://zhengxinyang.github.io/projects/LAS-Diffusion.html