Daily Papers

The Emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly impacted our engagement with violence, sparking ethical deliberations regarding the algorithmic creation of violent imagery. This paper scrutinizes the "Gore Diffusion LoRA Model," an innovative AI model proficient in generating hyper-realistic visuals portraying intense violence and bloodshed. Our exploration encompasses the model's technical intricacies, plausible applications, and the ethical quandaries inherent in its utilization. We contend that the creation and implementation of such models warrant a meticulous discourse concerning the convergence of AI, art, and violence. Furthermore, we advocate for a structured framework advocating responsible development and ethical deployment of these potent technologies.

Autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing actions on the web offer a promising avenue for automating computer tasks. However, the majority of existing benchmarks primarily focus on text-based agents, neglecting many natural tasks that require visual information to effectively solve. Given that most computer interfaces cater to human perception, visual information often augments textual data in ways that text-only models struggle to harness effectively. To bridge this gap, we introduce VisualWebArena, a benchmark designed to assess the performance of multimodal web agents on realistic visually grounded tasks. VisualWebArena comprises of a set of diverse and complex web-based tasks that evaluate various capabilities of autonomous multimodal agents. To perform on this benchmark, agents need to accurately process image-text inputs, interpret natural language instructions, and execute actions on websites to accomplish user-defined objectives. We conduct an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art LLM-based autonomous agents, including several multimodal models. Through extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we identify several limitations of text-only LLM agents, and reveal gaps in the capabilities of state-of-the-art multimodal language agents. VisualWebArena provides a framework for evaluating multimodal autonomous language agents, and offers insights towards building stronger autonomous agents for the web. Our code, baseline models, and data is publicly available at https://jykoh.com/vwa.

The problem of realistic VQA (RVQA), where a model has to reject unanswerable questions (UQs) and answer answerable ones (AQs), is studied. We first point out 2 drawbacks in current RVQA research, where (1) datasets contain too many unchallenging UQs and (2) a large number of annotated UQs are required for training. To resolve the first drawback, we propose a new testing dataset, RGQA, which combines AQs from an existing VQA dataset with around 29K human-annotated UQs. These UQs consist of both fine-grained and coarse-grained image-question pairs generated with 2 approaches: CLIP-based and Perturbation-based. To address the second drawback, we introduce an unsupervised training approach. This combines pseudo UQs obtained by randomly pairing images and questions, with an RoI Mixup procedure to generate more fine-grained pseudo UQs, and model ensembling to regularize model confidence. Experiments show that using pseudo UQs significantly outperforms RVQA baselines. RoI Mixup and model ensembling further increase the gain. Finally, human evaluation reveals a performance gap between humans and models, showing that more RVQA research is needed.

Deep generative models have various content creation applications such as graphic design, e-commerce, and virtual Try-on. However, current works mainly focus on synthesizing realistic visual outputs, often ignoring other sensory modalities, such as touch, which limits physical interaction with users. In this work, we leverage deep generative models to create a multi-sensory experience where users can touch and see the synthesized object when sliding their fingers on a haptic surface. The main challenges lie in the significant scale discrepancy between vision and touch sensing and the lack of explicit mapping from touch sensing data to a haptic rendering device. To bridge this gap, we collect high-resolution tactile data with a GelSight sensor and create a new visuotactile clothing dataset. We then develop a conditional generative model that synthesizes both visual and tactile outputs from a single sketch. We evaluate our method regarding image quality and tactile rendering accuracy. Finally, we introduce a pipeline to render high-quality visual and tactile outputs on an electroadhesion-based haptic device for an immersive experience, allowing for challenging materials and editable sketch inputs.

Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have significantly enhanced the quality of synthesized images. Despite this progress, evaluations predominantly focus on aesthetic appeal or alignment with text prompts. Consequently, there is limited understanding of whether these models can accurately represent a wide variety of realistic visual entities - a task requiring real-world knowledge. To address this gap, we propose a benchmark focused on evaluating Knowledge-InTensive image generaTion on real-world ENtities (i.e., KITTEN). Using KITTEN, we conduct a systematic study on the fidelity of entities in text-to-image generation models, focusing on their ability to generate a wide range of real-world visual entities, such as landmark buildings, aircraft, plants, and animals. We evaluate the latest text-to-image models and retrieval-augmented customization models using both automatic metrics and carefully-designed human evaluations, with an emphasis on the fidelity of entities in the generated images. Our findings reveal that even the most advanced text-to-image models often fail to generate entities with accurate visual details. Although retrieval-augmented models can enhance the fidelity of entity by incorporating reference images during testing, they often over-rely on these references and struggle to produce novel configurations of the entity as requested in creative text prompts.

Realistic video simulation has shown significant potential across diverse applications, from virtual reality to film production. This is particularly true for scenarios where capturing videos in real-world settings is either impractical or expensive. Existing approaches in video simulation often fail to accurately model the lighting environment, represent the object geometry, or achieve high levels of photorealism. In this paper, we propose Anything in Any Scene, a novel and generic framework for realistic video simulation that seamlessly inserts any object into an existing dynamic video with a strong emphasis on physical realism. Our proposed general framework encompasses three key processes: 1) integrating a realistic object into a given scene video with proper placement to ensure geometric realism; 2) estimating the sky and environmental lighting distribution and simulating realistic shadows to enhance the light realism; 3) employing a style transfer network that refines the final video output to maximize photorealism. We experimentally demonstrate that Anything in Any Scene framework produces simulated videos of great geometric realism, lighting realism, and photorealism. By significantly mitigating the challenges associated with video data generation, our framework offers an efficient and cost-effective solution for acquiring high-quality videos. Furthermore, its applications extend well beyond video data augmentation, showing promising potential in virtual reality, video editing, and various other video-centric applications. Please check our project website https://anythinginanyscene.github.io for access to our project code and more high-resolution video results.

Physically realistic materials are pivotal in augmenting the realism of 3D assets across various applications and lighting conditions. However, existing 3D assets and generative models often lack authentic material properties. Manual assignment of materials using graphic software is a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we exploit advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly GPT-4V, to present a novel approach, Make-it-Real: 1) We demonstrate that GPT-4V can effectively recognize and describe materials, allowing the construction of a detailed material library. 2) Utilizing a combination of visual cues and hierarchical text prompts, GPT-4V precisely identifies and aligns materials with the corresponding components of 3D objects. 3) The correctly matched materials are then meticulously applied as reference for the new SVBRDF material generation according to the original diffuse map, significantly enhancing their visual authenticity. Make-it-Real offers a streamlined integration into the 3D content creation workflow, showcasing its utility as an essential tool for developers of 3D assets.

We present a generalizable novel view synthesis method which enables modifying the visual appearance of an observed scene so rendered views match a target weather or lighting condition without any scene specific training or access to reference views at the target condition. Our method is based on a pretrained generalizable transformer architecture and is fine-tuned on synthetically generated scenes under different appearance conditions. This allows for rendering novel views in a consistent manner for 3D scenes that were not included in the training set, along with the ability to (i) modify their appearance to match the target condition and (ii) smoothly interpolate between different conditions. Experiments on real and synthetic scenes show that our method is able to generate 3D consistent renderings while making realistic appearance changes, including qualitative and quantitative comparisons. Please refer to our project page for video results: https://ava-nvs.github.io/

Deepfake images are fast becoming a serious concern due to their realism. Diffusion models have recently demonstrated highly realistic visual content generation, which makes them an excellent potential tool for Deepfake generation. To curb their exploitation for Deepfakes, it is imperative to first explore the extent to which diffusion models can be used to generate realistic content that is controllable with convenient prompts. This paper devises and explores a novel method in that regard. Our technique alters the popular stable diffusion model to generate a controllable high-quality Deepfake image with text and image prompts. In addition, the original stable model lacks severely in generating quality images that contain multiple persons. The modified diffusion model is able to address this problem, it add input anchor image's latent at the beginning of inferencing rather than Gaussian random latent as input. Hence, we focus on generating forged content for celebrity interactions, which may be used to spread rumors. We also apply Dreambooth to enhance the realism of our fake images. Dreambooth trains the pairing of center words and specific features to produce more refined and personalized output images. Our results show that with the devised scheme, it is possible to create fake visual content with alarming realism, such that the content can serve as believable evidence of meetings between powerful political figures.

Large vision language models (LVLMs) often suffer from object hallucination, producing objects not present in the given images. While current benchmarks for object hallucination primarily concentrate on the presence of a single object class rather than individual entities, this work systematically investigates multi-object hallucination, examining how models misperceive (e.g., invent nonexistent objects or become distracted) when tasked with focusing on multiple objects simultaneously. We introduce Recognition-based Object Probing Evaluation (ROPE), an automated evaluation protocol that considers the distribution of object classes within a single image during testing and uses visual referring prompts to eliminate ambiguity. With comprehensive empirical studies and analysis of potential factors leading to multi-object hallucination, we found that (1) LVLMs suffer more hallucinations when focusing on multiple objects compared to a single object. (2) The tested object class distribution affects hallucination behaviors, indicating that LVLMs may follow shortcuts and spurious correlations.(3) Hallucinatory behaviors are influenced by data-specific factors, salience and frequency, and model intrinsic behaviors. We hope to enable LVLMs to recognize and reason about multiple objects that often occur in realistic visual scenes, provide insights, and quantify our progress towards mitigating the issues.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have set new benchmarks in image and video generation, enabling realistic visual synthesis across single- and multi-frame contexts. However, these models still struggle with efficiently and explicitly generating 3D-consistent content. To address this, we propose World-consistent Video Diffusion (WVD), a novel framework that incorporates explicit 3D supervision using XYZ images, which encode global 3D coordinates for each image pixel. More specifically, we train a diffusion transformer to learn the joint distribution of RGB and XYZ frames. This approach supports multi-task adaptability via a flexible inpainting strategy. For example, WVD can estimate XYZ frames from ground-truth RGB or generate novel RGB frames using XYZ projections along a specified camera trajectory. In doing so, WVD unifies tasks like single-image-to-3D generation, multi-view stereo, and camera-controlled video generation. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, providing a scalable solution for 3D-consistent video and image generation with a single pretrained model.

We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.

The creation of complex 3D scenes tailored to user specifications has been a tedious and challenging task with traditional 3D modeling tools. Although some pioneering methods have achieved automatic text-to-3D generation, they are generally limited to small-scale scenes with restricted control over the shape and texture. We introduce SceneCraft, a novel method for generating detailed indoor scenes that adhere to textual descriptions and spatial layout preferences provided by users. Central to our method is a rendering-based technique, which converts 3D semantic layouts into multi-view 2D proxy maps. Furthermore, we design a semantic and depth conditioned diffusion model to generate multi-view images, which are used to learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) as the final scene representation. Without the constraints of panorama image generation, we surpass previous methods in supporting complicated indoor space generation beyond a single room, even as complicated as a whole multi-bedroom apartment with irregular shapes and layouts. Through experimental analysis, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in complex indoor scene generation with diverse textures, consistent geometry, and realistic visual quality. Code and more results are available at: https://orangesodahub.github.io/SceneCraft

General world models represent a crucial pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), serving as the cornerstone for various applications ranging from virtual environments to decision-making systems. Recently, the emergence of the Sora model has attained significant attention due to its remarkable simulation capabilities, which exhibits an incipient comprehension of physical laws. In this survey, we embark on a comprehensive exploration of the latest advancements in world models. Our analysis navigates through the forefront of generative methodologies in video generation, where world models stand as pivotal constructs facilitating the synthesis of highly realistic visual content. Additionally, we scrutinize the burgeoning field of autonomous-driving world models, meticulously delineating their indispensable role in reshaping transportation and urban mobility. Furthermore, we delve into the intricacies inherent in world models deployed within autonomous agents, shedding light on their profound significance in enabling intelligent interactions within dynamic environmental contexts. At last, we examine challenges and limitations of world models, and discuss their potential future directions. We hope this survey can serve as a foundational reference for the research community and inspire continued innovation. This survey will be regularly updated at: https://github.com/GigaAI-research/General-World-Models-Survey.

Text-to-image synthesis refers to computational methods which translate human written textual descriptions, in the form of keywords or sentences, into images with similar semantic meaning to the text. In earlier research, image synthesis relied mainly on word to image correlation analysis combined with supervised methods to find best alignment of the visual content matching to the text. Recent progress in deep learning (DL) has brought a new set of unsupervised deep learning methods, particularly deep generative models which are able to generate realistic visual images using suitably trained neural network models. In this paper, we review the most recent development in the text-to-image synthesis research domain. Our survey first introduces image synthesis and its challenges, and then reviews key concepts such as generative adversarial networks (GANs) and deep convolutional encoder-decoder neural networks (DCNN). After that, we propose a taxonomy to summarize GAN based text-to-image synthesis into four major categories: Semantic Enhancement GANs, Resolution Enhancement GANs, Diversity Enhancement GANS, and Motion Enhancement GANs. We elaborate the main objective of each group, and further review typical GAN architectures in each group. The taxonomy and the review outline the techniques and the evolution of different approaches, and eventually provide a clear roadmap to summarize the list of contemporaneous solutions that utilize GANs and DCNNs to generate enthralling results in categories such as human faces, birds, flowers, room interiors, object reconstruction from edge maps (games) etc. The survey will conclude with a comparison of the proposed solutions, challenges that remain unresolved, and future developments in the text-to-image synthesis domain.

We propose a new method for realistic real-time novel-view synthesis (NVS) of large scenes. Existing neural rendering methods generate realistic results, but primarily work for small scale scenes (<50 square meters) and have difficulty at large scale (>10000 square meters). Traditional graphics-based rasterization rendering is fast for large scenes but lacks realism and requires expensive manually created assets. Our approach combines the best of both worlds by taking a moderate-quality scaffold mesh as input and learning a neural texture field and shader to model view-dependant effects to enhance realism, while still using the standard graphics pipeline for real-time rendering. Our method outperforms existing neural rendering methods, providing at least 30x faster rendering with comparable or better realism for large self-driving and drone scenes. Our work is the first to enable real-time rendering of large real-world scenes.

We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.

We introduce a novel approach that takes a single semantic mask as input to synthesize multi-view consistent color images of natural scenes, trained with a collection of single images from the Internet. Prior works on 3D-aware image synthesis either require multi-view supervision or learning category-level prior for specific classes of objects, which can hardly work for natural scenes. Our key idea to solve this challenging problem is to use a semantic field as the intermediate representation, which is easier to reconstruct from an input semantic mask and then translate to a radiance field with the assistance of off-the-shelf semantic image synthesis models. Experiments show that our method outperforms baseline methods and produces photorealistic, multi-view consistent videos of a variety of natural scenes.

As Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) advances, a variety of methods have been developed to generate text, images, videos, and 3D objects from single or multimodal inputs, contributing efforts to emulate human-like cognitive content creation. However, generating realistic large-scale scenes from a single input presents a challenge due to the complexities involved in ensuring consistency across extrapolated views generated by models. Benefiting from recent video generation models and implicit neural representations, we propose Scene123, a 3D scene generation model, that not only ensures realism and diversity through the video generation framework but also uses implicit neural fields combined with Masked Autoencoders (MAE) to effectively ensures the consistency of unseen areas across views. Specifically, we initially warp the input image (or an image generated from text) to simulate adjacent views, filling the invisible areas with the MAE model. However, these filled images usually fail to maintain view consistency, thus we utilize the produced views to optimize a neural radiance field, enhancing geometric consistency. Moreover, to further enhance the details and texture fidelity of generated views, we employ a GAN-based Loss against images derived from the input image through the video generation model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate realistic and consistent scenes from a single prompt. Both qualitative and quantitative results indicate that our approach surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. We show encourage video examples at https://yiyingyang12.github.io/Scene123.github.io/.

Graphics design is important for various applications, including movie production and game design. To create a high-quality scene, designers usually need to spend hours in software like Blender, in which they might need to interleave and repeat operations, such as connecting material nodes, hundreds of times. Moreover, slightly different design goals may require completely different sequences, making automation difficult. In this paper, we propose a system that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs), like GPT-4V, to intelligently search the design action space to arrive at an answer that can satisfy a user's intent. Specifically, we design a vision-based edit generator and state evaluator to work together to find the correct sequence of actions to achieve the goal. Inspired by the role of visual imagination in the human design process, we supplement the visual reasoning capabilities of VLMs with "imagined" reference images from image-generation models, providing visual grounding of abstract language descriptions. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence suggesting our system can produce simple but tedious Blender editing sequences for tasks such as editing procedural materials from text and/or reference images, as well as adjusting lighting configurations for product renderings in complex scenes.

The human hand is the main medium through which we interact with our surroundings, making its digitization an important problem. While there are several works modeling the geometry of hands, little attention has been paid to capturing photo-realistic appearance. Moreover, for applications in extended reality and gaming, real-time rendering is critical. We present the first neural-implicit approach to photo-realistically render hands in real-time. This is a challenging problem as hands are textured and undergo strong articulations with pose-dependent effects. However, we show that this aim is achievable through our carefully designed method. This includes training on a low-resolution rendering of a neural radiance field, together with a 3D-consistent super-resolution module and mesh-guided sampling and space canonicalization. We demonstrate a novel application of perceptual loss on the image space, which is critical for learning details accurately. We also show a live demo where we photo-realistically render the human hand in real-time for the first time, while also modeling pose- and view-dependent appearance effects. We ablate all our design choices and show that they optimize for rendering speed and quality. Video results and our code can be accessed from https://vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/LiveHand/

Novel-view synthesis techniques achieve impressive results for static scenes but struggle when faced with the inconsistencies inherent to casual capture settings: varying illumination, scene motion, and other unintended effects that are difficult to model explicitly. We present an approach for leveraging generative video models to simulate the inconsistencies in the world that can occur during capture. We use this process, along with existing multi-view datasets, to create synthetic data for training a multi-view harmonization network that is able to reconcile inconsistent observations into a consistent 3D scene. We demonstrate that our world-simulation strategy significantly outperforms traditional augmentation methods in handling real-world scene variations, thereby enabling highly accurate static 3D reconstructions in the presence of a variety of challenging inconsistencies. Project page: https://alextrevithick.github.io/simvs

Recent advances in generative imagery have brought forth outpainting and inpainting models that can produce high-quality, plausible image content in unknown regions, but the content these models hallucinate is necessarily inauthentic, since the models lack sufficient context about the true scene. In this work, we propose RealFill, a novel generative approach for image completion that fills in missing regions of an image with the content that should have been there. RealFill is a generative inpainting model that is personalized using only a few reference images of a scene. These reference images do not have to be aligned with the target image, and can be taken with drastically varying viewpoints, lighting conditions, camera apertures, or image styles. Once personalized, RealFill is able to complete a target image with visually compelling contents that are faithful to the original scene. We evaluate RealFill on a new image completion benchmark that covers a set of diverse and challenging scenarios, and find that it outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. See more results on our project page: https://realfill.github.io

In spite of recent advancements in text-to-image generation, limitations persist in handling complex and imaginative prompts due to the restricted diversity and complexity of training data. This work explores how diffusion models can generate images from prompts requiring artistic creativity or specialized knowledge. We introduce the Realistic-Fantasy Benchmark (RFBench), a novel evaluation framework blending realistic and fantastical scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose the Realistic-Fantasy Network (RFNet), a training-free approach integrating diffusion models with LLMs. Extensive human evaluations and GPT-based compositional assessments demonstrate our approach's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. Our code and dataset is available at https://leo81005.github.io/Reality-and-Fantasy/.

We show, for the first time, that neural networks trained only on synthetic data achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the problem of 3D human pose and shape (HPS) estimation from real images. Previous synthetic datasets have been small, unrealistic, or lacked realistic clothing. Achieving sufficient realism is non-trivial and we show how to do this for full bodies in motion. Specifically, our BEDLAM dataset contains monocular RGB videos with ground-truth 3D bodies in SMPL-X format. It includes a diversity of body shapes, motions, skin tones, hair, and clothing. The clothing is realistically simulated on the moving bodies using commercial clothing physics simulation. We render varying numbers of people in realistic scenes with varied lighting and camera motions. We then train various HPS regressors using BEDLAM and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on real-image benchmarks despite training with synthetic data. We use BEDLAM to gain insights into what model design choices are important for accuracy. With good synthetic training data, we find that a basic method like HMR approaches the accuracy of the current SOTA method (CLIFF). BEDLAM is useful for a variety of tasks and all images, ground truth bodies, 3D clothing, support code, and more are available for research purposes. Additionally, we provide detailed information about our synthetic data generation pipeline, enabling others to generate their own datasets. See the project page: https://bedlam.is.tue.mpg.de/.

Recent techniques for real-time view synthesis have rapidly advanced in fidelity and speed, and modern methods are capable of rendering near-photorealistic scenes at interactive frame rates. At the same time, a tension has arisen between explicit scene representations amenable to rasterization and neural fields built on ray marching, with state-of-the-art instances of the latter surpassing the former in quality while being prohibitively expensive for real-time applications. In this work, we introduce SMERF, a view synthesis approach that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among real-time methods on large scenes with footprints up to 300 m^2 at a volumetric resolution of 3.5 mm^3. Our method is built upon two primary contributions: a hierarchical model partitioning scheme, which increases model capacity while constraining compute and memory consumption, and a distillation training strategy that simultaneously yields high fidelity and internal consistency. Our approach enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) navigation within a web browser and renders in real-time on commodity smartphones and laptops. Extensive experiments show that our method exceeds the current state-of-the-art in real-time novel view synthesis by 0.78 dB on standard benchmarks and 1.78 dB on large scenes, renders frames three orders of magnitude faster than state-of-the-art radiance field models, and achieves real-time performance across a wide variety of commodity devices, including smartphones. We encourage readers to explore these models interactively at our project website: https://smerf-3d.github.io.

Recent advances in diffusion models have revolutionized 2D and 3D content creation, yet generating photorealistic dynamic 4D scenes remains a significant challenge. Existing dynamic 4D generation methods typically rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, often fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. Consequently, the resulting scenes tend to be object-centric and lack photorealism. While text-to-video models can generate more realistic scenes with motion, they often struggle with spatial understanding and provide limited control over camera viewpoints during rendering. To address these limitations, we present PaintScene4D, a novel text-to-4D scene generation framework that departs from conventional multi-view generative models in favor of a streamlined architecture that harnesses video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method first generates a reference video using a video generation model, and then employs a strategic camera array selection for rendering. We apply a progressive warping and inpainting technique to ensure both spatial and temporal consistency across multiple viewpoints. Finally, we optimize multi-view images using a dynamic renderer, enabling flexible camera control based on user preferences. Adopting a training-free architecture, our PaintScene4D efficiently produces realistic 4D scenes that can be viewed from arbitrary trajectories. The code will be made publicly available. Our project page is at https://paintscene4d.github.io/

We introduce VividDream, a method for generating explorable 4D scenes with ambient dynamics from a single input image or text prompt. VividDream first expands an input image into a static 3D point cloud through iterative inpainting and geometry merging. An ensemble of animated videos is then generated using video diffusion models with quality refinement techniques and conditioned on renderings of the static 3D scene from the sampled camera trajectories. We then optimize a canonical 4D scene representation using an animated video ensemble, with per-video motion embeddings and visibility masks to mitigate inconsistencies. The resulting 4D scene enables free-view exploration of a 3D scene with plausible ambient scene dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that VividDream can provide human viewers with compelling 4D experiences generated based on diverse real images and text prompts.

Creating high-quality and interactive virtual environments, such as games and simulators, often involves complex and costly manual modeling processes. In this paper, we present Video2Game, a novel approach that automatically converts videos of real-world scenes into realistic and interactive game environments. At the heart of our system are three core components:(i) a neural radiance fields (NeRF) module that effectively captures the geometry and visual appearance of the scene; (ii) a mesh module that distills the knowledge from NeRF for faster rendering; and (iii) a physics module that models the interactions and physical dynamics among the objects. By following the carefully designed pipeline, one can construct an interactable and actionable digital replica of the real world. We benchmark our system on both indoor and large-scale outdoor scenes. We show that we can not only produce highly-realistic renderings in real-time, but also build interactive games on top.

Existing dynamic scene generation methods mostly rely on distilling knowledge from pre-trained 3D generative models, which are typically fine-tuned on synthetic object datasets. As a result, the generated scenes are often object-centric and lack photorealism. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel pipeline designed for photorealistic text-to-4D scene generation, discarding the dependency on multi-view generative models and instead fully utilizing video generative models trained on diverse real-world datasets. Our method begins by generating a reference video using the video generation model. We then learn the canonical 3D representation of the video using a freeze-time video, delicately generated from the reference video. To handle inconsistencies in the freeze-time video, we jointly learn a per-frame deformation to model these imperfections. We then learn the temporal deformation based on the canonical representation to capture dynamic interactions in the reference video. The pipeline facilitates the generation of dynamic scenes with enhanced photorealism and structural integrity, viewable from multiple perspectives, thereby setting a new standard in 4D scene generation.

Recent advancements in generative modeling now enable the creation of 4D content (moving 3D objects) controlled with text prompts. 4D generation has large potential in applications like virtual worlds, media, and gaming, but existing methods provide limited control over the appearance and geometry of generated content. In this work, we introduce a method for animating user-provided 3D objects by conditioning on textual prompts to guide 4D generation, enabling custom animations while maintaining the identity of the original object. We first convert a 3D mesh into a ``static" 4D Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) that preserves the visual attributes of the input object. Then, we animate the object using an Image-to-Video diffusion model driven by text. To improve motion realism, we introduce an incremental viewpoint selection protocol for sampling perspectives to promote lifelike movement and a masked Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss, which leverages attention maps to focus optimization on relevant regions. We evaluate our model in terms of temporal coherence, prompt adherence, and visual fidelity and find that our method outperforms baselines that are based on other approaches, achieving up to threefold improvements in identity preservation measured using LPIPS scores, and effectively balancing visual quality with dynamic content.

Creating plausible surfaces is an essential component in achieving a high degree of realism in rendering. To relieve artists, who create these surfaces in a time-consuming, manual process, automated retrieval of the spatially-varying Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (SVBRDF) from a single mobile phone image is desirable. By leveraging a deep neural network, this casual capturing method can be achieved. The trained network can estimate per pixel normal, base color, metallic and roughness parameters from the Disney BRDF. The input image is taken with a mobile phone lit by the camera flash. The network is trained to compensate for environment lighting and thus learned to reduce artifacts introduced by other light sources. These losses contain a multi-scale discriminator with an additional perceptual loss, a rendering loss using a differentiable renderer, and a parameter loss. Besides the local precision, this loss formulation generates material texture maps which are globally more consistent. The network is set up as a generator network trained in an adversarial fashion to ensure that only plausible maps are produced. The estimated parameters not only reproduce the material faithfully in rendering but capture the style of hand-authored materials due to the more global loss terms compared to previous works without requiring additional post-processing. Both the resolution and the quality is improved.

Rendering realistic images from 3D reconstruction is an essential task of many Computer Vision and Robotics pipelines, notably for mixed-reality applications as well as training autonomous agents in simulated environments. However, the quality of novel views heavily depends of the source reconstruction which is often imperfect due to noisy or missing geometry and appearance. Inspired by the recent success of reference-based super-resolution networks, we propose MaRINeR, a refinement method that leverages information of a nearby mapping image to improve the rendering of a target viewpoint. We first establish matches between the raw rendered image of the scene geometry from the target viewpoint and the nearby reference based on deep features, followed by hierarchical detail transfer. We show improved renderings in quantitative metrics and qualitative examples from both explicit and implicit scene representations. We further employ our method on the downstream tasks of pseudo-ground-truth validation, synthetic data enhancement and detail recovery for renderings of reduced 3D reconstructions.

We study the perception of color illusions by vision-language models. Color illusion, where a person's visual system perceives color differently from actual color, is well-studied in human vision. However, it remains underexplored whether vision-language models (VLMs), trained on large-scale human data, exhibit similar perceptual biases when confronted with such color illusions. We propose an automated framework for generating color illusion images, resulting in RCID (Realistic Color Illusion Dataset), a dataset of 19,000 realistic illusion images. Our experiments show that all studied VLMs exhibit perceptual biases similar human vision. Finally, we train a model to distinguish both human perception and actual pixel differences.

State-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods achieve impressive results for multi-view captures of static 3D scenes. However, the reconstructed scenes still lack "liveliness," a key component for creating engaging 3D experiences. Recently, novel video diffusion models generate realistic videos with complex motion and enable animations of 2D images, however they cannot naively be used to animate 3D scenes as they lack multi-view consistency. To breathe life into the static world, we propose Gaussians2Life, a method for animating parts of high-quality 3D scenes in a Gaussian Splatting representation. Our key idea is to leverage powerful video diffusion models as the generative component of our model and to combine these with a robust technique to lift 2D videos into meaningful 3D motion. We find that, in contrast to prior work, this enables realistic animations of complex, pre-existing 3D scenes and further enables the animation of a large variety of object classes, while related work is mostly focused on prior-based character animation, or single 3D objects. Our model enables the creation of consistent, immersive 3D experiences for arbitrary scenes.

We propose a method for converting a single RGB-D input image into a 3D photo - a multi-layer representation for novel view synthesis that contains hallucinated color and depth structures in regions occluded in the original view. We use a Layered Depth Image with explicit pixel connectivity as underlying representation, and present a learning-based inpainting model that synthesizes new local color-and-depth content into the occluded region in a spatial context-aware manner. The resulting 3D photos can be efficiently rendered with motion parallax using standard graphics engines. We validate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of challenging everyday scenes and show fewer artifacts compared with the state of the arts.

Novel view synthesis from a single input image is a challenging task, where the goal is to generate a new view of a scene from a desired camera pose that may be separated by a large motion. The highly uncertain nature of this synthesis task due to unobserved elements within the scene (i.e. occlusion) and outside the field-of-view makes the use of generative models appealing to capture the variety of possible outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel generative model capable of producing a sequence of photorealistic images consistent with a specified camera trajectory, and a single starting image. Our approach is centred on an autoregressive conditional diffusion-based model capable of interpolating visible scene elements, and extrapolating unobserved regions in a view, in a geometrically consistent manner. Conditioning is limited to an image capturing a single camera view and the (relative) pose of the new camera view. To measure the consistency over a sequence of generated views, we introduce a new metric, the thresholded symmetric epipolar distance (TSED), to measure the number of consistent frame pairs in a sequence. While previous methods have been shown to produce high quality images and consistent semantics across pairs of views, we show empirically with our metric that they are often inconsistent with the desired camera poses. In contrast, we demonstrate that our method produces both photorealistic and view-consistent imagery.

We consider the task of Image-to-Video (I2V) generation, which involves transforming static images into realistic video sequences based on a textual description. While recent advancements produce photorealistic outputs, they frequently struggle to create videos with accurate and consistent object motion, especially in multi-object scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a two-stage compositional framework that decomposes I2V generation into: (i) An explicit intermediate representation generation stage, followed by (ii) A video generation stage that is conditioned on this representation. Our key innovation is the introduction of a mask-based motion trajectory as an intermediate representation, that captures both semantic object information and motion, enabling an expressive but compact representation of motion and semantics. To incorporate the learned representation in the second stage, we utilize object-level attention objectives. Specifically, we consider a spatial, per-object, masked-cross attention objective, integrating object-specific prompts into corresponding latent space regions and a masked spatio-temporal self-attention objective, ensuring frame-to-frame consistency for each object. We evaluate our method on challenging benchmarks with multi-object and high-motion scenarios and empirically demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in temporal coherence, motion realism, and text-prompt faithfulness. Additionally, we introduce \benchmark, a new challenging benchmark for single-object and multi-object I2V generation, and demonstrate our method's superiority on this benchmark. Project page is available at https://guyyariv.github.io/TTM/.

We introduce Artistic Cinemagraph, a fully automated method for creating cinemagraphs from text descriptions - an especially challenging task when prompts feature imaginary elements and artistic styles, given the complexity of interpreting the semantics and motions of these images. Existing single-image animation methods fall short on artistic inputs, and recent text-based video methods frequently introduce temporal inconsistencies, struggling to keep certain regions static. To address these challenges, we propose an idea of synthesizing image twins from a single text prompt - a pair of an artistic image and its pixel-aligned corresponding natural-looking twin. While the artistic image depicts the style and appearance detailed in our text prompt, the realistic counterpart greatly simplifies layout and motion analysis. Leveraging existing natural image and video datasets, we can accurately segment the realistic image and predict plausible motion given the semantic information. The predicted motion can then be transferred to the artistic image to create the final cinemagraph. Our method outperforms existing approaches in creating cinemagraphs for natural landscapes as well as artistic and other-worldly scenes, as validated by automated metrics and user studies. Finally, we demonstrate two extensions: animating existing paintings and controlling motion directions using text.

Recent advancements in generative models have unlocked the capabilities to render photo-realistic data in a controllable fashion. Trained on the real data, these generative models are capable of producing realistic samples with minimal to no domain gap, as compared to the traditional graphics rendering. However, using the data generated using such models for training downstream tasks remains under-explored, mainly due to the lack of 3D consistent annotations. Moreover, controllable generative models are learned from massive data and their latent space is often too vast to obtain meaningful sample distributions for downstream task with limited generation. To overcome these challenges, we extract 3D consistent annotations from an existing controllable generative model, making the data useful for downstream tasks. Our experiments show competitive performance against state-of-the-art models using only generated synthetic data, demonstrating potential for solving downstream tasks. Project page: https://synth-forge.github.io

People often imagine relevant scenes to aid in the writing process. In this work, we aim to utilize visual information for composition in the same manner as humans. We propose a method, LIVE, that makes pre-trained language models (PLMs) Learn to Imagine for Visuallyaugmented natural language gEneration. First, we imagine the scene based on the text: we use a diffusion model to synthesize high-quality images conditioned on the input texts. Second, we use CLIP to determine whether the text can evoke the imagination in a posterior way. Finally, our imagination is dynamic, and we conduct synthesis for each sentence rather than generate only one image for an entire paragraph. Technically, we propose a novel plug-and-play fusion layer to obtain visually-augmented representations for each text. Our vision-text fusion layer is compatible with Transformerbased architecture. We have conducted extensive experiments on four generation tasks using BART and T5, and the automatic results and human evaluation demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. We will release the code, model, and data at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/LIVE.

Creating photorealistic materials for light transport algorithms requires carefully fine-tuning a set of material properties to achieve a desired artistic effect. This is typically a lengthy process that involves a trained artist with specialized knowledge. In this work, we present a technique that aims to empower novice and intermediate-level users to synthesize high-quality photorealistic materials by only requiring basic image processing knowledge. In the proposed workflow, the user starts with an input image and applies a few intuitive transforms (e.g., colorization, image inpainting) within a 2D image editor of their choice, and in the next step, our technique produces a photorealistic result that approximates this target image. Our method combines the advantages of a neural network-augmented optimizer and an encoder neural network to produce high-quality output results within 30 seconds. We also demonstrate that it is resilient against poorly-edited target images and propose a simple extension to predict image sequences with a strict time budget of 1-2 seconds per image.

Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Traditional analytic simulators sometimes struggle to capture sufficiently realistic simulation which can lead to problems including the well known "sim-to-real" gap in robotics. Learned simulators have emerged as an alternative for better capturing real-world physical dynamics, but require access to privileged ground truth physics information such as precise object geometry or particle tracks. Here we propose a method for learning simulators directly from observations. Visual Particle Dynamics (VPD) jointly learns a latent particle-based representation of 3D scenes, a neural simulator of the latent particle dynamics, and a renderer that can produce images of the scene from arbitrary views. VPD learns end to end from posed RGB-D videos and does not require access to privileged information. Unlike existing 2D video prediction models, we show that VPD's 3D structure enables scene editing and long-term predictions. These results pave the way for downstream applications ranging from video editing to robotic planning.

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.

Recent advancements in differentiable rendering and 3D reasoning have driven exciting results in novel view synthesis from a single image. Despite realistic results, methods are limited to relatively small view change. In order to synthesize immersive scenes, models must also be able to extrapolate. We present an approach that fuses 3D reasoning with autoregressive modeling to outpaint large view changes in a 3D-consistent manner, enabling scene synthesis. We demonstrate considerable improvement in single image large-angle view synthesis results compared to a variety of methods and possible variants across simulated and real datasets. In addition, we show increased 3D consistency compared to alternative accumulation methods. Project website: https://crockwell.github.io/pixelsynth/

The increasing demand for virtual reality applications has highlighted the significance of crafting immersive 3D assets. We present a text-to-3D 360^{circ} scene generation pipeline that facilitates the creation of comprehensive 360^{circ} scenes for in-the-wild environments in a matter of minutes. Our approach utilizes the generative power of a 2D diffusion model and prompt self-refinement to create a high-quality and globally coherent panoramic image. This image acts as a preliminary "flat" (2D) scene representation. Subsequently, it is lifted into 3D Gaussians, employing splatting techniques to enable real-time exploration. To produce consistent 3D geometry, our pipeline constructs a spatially coherent structure by aligning the 2D monocular depth into a globally optimized point cloud. This point cloud serves as the initial state for the centroids of 3D Gaussians. In order to address invisible issues inherent in single-view inputs, we impose semantic and geometric constraints on both synthesized and input camera views as regularizations. These guide the optimization of Gaussians, aiding in the reconstruction of unseen regions. In summary, our method offers a globally consistent 3D scene within a 360^{circ} perspective, providing an enhanced immersive experience over existing techniques. Project website at: http://dreamscene360.github.io/

Recent generative models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in generating realistic and visually pleasing images grounded on textual prompts. Nevertheless, a significant challenge remains in applying these models for the more intricate task of story visualization. Since it requires resolving pronouns (he, she, they) in the frame descriptions, i.e., anaphora resolution, and ensuring consistent characters and background synthesis across frames. Yet, the emerging Large Language Model (LLM) showcases robust reasoning abilities to navigate through ambiguous references and process extensive sequences. Therefore, we introduce StoryGPT-V, which leverages the merits of the latent diffusion (LDM) and LLM to produce images with consistent and high-quality characters grounded on given story descriptions. First, we train a character-aware LDM, which takes character-augmented semantic embedding as input and includes the supervision of the cross-attention map using character segmentation masks, aiming to enhance character generation accuracy and faithfulness. In the second stage, we enable an alignment between the output of LLM and the character-augmented embedding residing in the input space of the first-stage model. This harnesses the reasoning ability of LLM to address ambiguous references and the comprehension capability to memorize the context. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two visual story visualization benchmarks. Our model reports superior quantitative results and consistently generates accurate characters of remarkable quality with low memory consumption. Our code will be made publicly available.

Despite that convolutional neural networks (CNN) have recently demonstrated high-quality reconstruction for single-image super-resolution (SR), recovering natural and realistic texture remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we show that it is possible to recover textures faithful to semantic classes. In particular, we only need to modulate features of a few intermediate layers in a single network conditioned on semantic segmentation probability maps. This is made possible through a novel Spatial Feature Transform (SFT) layer that generates affine transformation parameters for spatial-wise feature modulation. SFT layers can be trained end-to-end together with the SR network using the same loss function. During testing, it accepts an input image of arbitrary size and generates a high-resolution image with just a single forward pass conditioned on the categorical priors. Our final results show that an SR network equipped with SFT can generate more realistic and visually pleasing textures in comparison to state-of-the-art SRGAN and EnhanceNet.

Realistic shadow generation is a critical component for high-quality image compositing and visual effects, yet existing methods suffer from certain limitations: Physics-based approaches require a 3D scene geometry, which is often unavailable, while learning-based techniques struggle with control and visual artifacts. We introduce a novel method for fast, controllable, and background-free shadow generation for 2D object images. We create a large synthetic dataset using a 3D rendering engine to train a diffusion model for controllable shadow generation, generating shadow maps for diverse light source parameters. Through extensive ablation studies, we find that rectified flow objective achieves high-quality results with just a single sampling step enabling real-time applications. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the model generalizes well to real-world images. To facilitate further research in evaluating quality and controllability in shadow generation, we release a new public benchmark containing a diverse set of object images and shadow maps in various settings. The project page is available at https://gojasper.github.io/controllable-shadow-generation-project/

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world. This raises a key question: do VLMs have the similar kind of illusions as humans do, or do they faithfully learn to represent reality? To investigate this question, we build a dataset containing five types of visual illusions and formulate four tasks to examine visual illusions in state-of-the-art VLMs. Our findings have shown that although the overall alignment is low, larger models are closer to human perception and more susceptible to visual illusions. Our dataset and initial findings will promote a better understanding of visual illusions in humans and machines and provide a stepping stone for future computational models that can better align humans and machines in perceiving and communicating about the shared visual world. The code and data are available at https://github.com/vl-illusion/dataset.

The accuracy of learning-based optical flow estimation models heavily relies on the realism of the training datasets. Current approaches for generating such datasets either employ synthetic data or generate images with limited realism. However, the domain gap of these data with real-world scenes constrains the generalization of the trained model to real-world applications. To address this issue, we investigate generating realistic optical flow datasets from real-world images. Firstly, to generate highly realistic new images, we construct a layered depth representation, known as multiplane images (MPI), from single-view images. This allows us to generate novel view images that are highly realistic. To generate optical flow maps that correspond accurately to the new image, we calculate the optical flows of each plane using the camera matrix and plane depths. We then project these layered optical flows into the output optical flow map with volume rendering. Secondly, to ensure the realism of motion, we present an independent object motion module that can separate the camera and dynamic object motion in MPI. This module addresses the deficiency in MPI-based single-view methods, where optical flow is generated only by camera motion and does not account for any object movement. We additionally devise a depth-aware inpainting module to merge new images with dynamic objects and address unnatural motion occlusions. We show the superior performance of our method through extensive experiments on real-world datasets. Moreover, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in both unsupervised and supervised training of learning-based models. The code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/Sharpiless/MPI-Flow.

Recent techniques for text-to-4D generation synthesize dynamic 3D scenes using supervision from pre-trained text-to-video models. However, existing representations for motion, such as deformation models or time-dependent neural representations, are limited in the amount of motion they can generate-they cannot synthesize motion extending far beyond the bounding box used for volume rendering. The lack of a more flexible motion model contributes to the gap in realism between 4D generation methods and recent, near-photorealistic video generation models. Here, we propose TC4D: trajectory-conditioned text-to-4D generation, which factors motion into global and local components. We represent the global motion of a scene's bounding box using rigid transformation along a trajectory parameterized by a spline. We learn local deformations that conform to the global trajectory using supervision from a text-to-video model. Our approach enables the synthesis of scenes animated along arbitrary trajectories, compositional scene generation, and significant improvements to the realism and amount of generated motion, which we evaluate qualitatively and through a user study. Video results can be viewed on our website: https://sherwinbahmani.github.io/tc4d.

Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render as many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shifts between training and testing to isolate variables of interest for sound experimentation. Despite such promise, the use of synthetic image data is still limited -- and often played down -- mainly due to their lack of realism. Most works therefore rely on datasets of real images, which have often been scraped from public images on the internet, and may have issues with regards to privacy, bias, and copyright, while offering little control over how objects precisely appear. In this work, we present a path to democratize the use of photorealistic synthetic data: we develop a new generation of interactive environments for representation learning research, that offer both controllability and realism. We use the Unreal Engine, a powerful game engine well known in the entertainment industry, to produce PUG (Photorealistic Unreal Graphics) environments and datasets for representation learning. In this paper, we demonstrate the potential of PUG to enable more rigorous evaluations of vision models.

Physical simulations produce excellent predictions of weather effects. Neural radiance fields produce SOTA scene models. We describe a novel NeRF-editing procedure that can fuse physical simulations with NeRF models of scenes, producing realistic movies of physical phenomena in those scenes. Our application -- Climate NeRF -- allows people to visualize what climate change outcomes will do to them. ClimateNeRF allows us to render realistic weather effects, including smog, snow, and flood. Results can be controlled with physically meaningful variables like water level. Qualitative and quantitative studies show that our simulated results are significantly more realistic than those from SOTA 2D image editing and SOTA 3D NeRF stylization.

We present an end-to-end system for the high-fidelity capture, model reconstruction, and real-time rendering of walkable spaces in virtual reality using neural radiance fields. To this end, we designed and built a custom multi-camera rig to densely capture walkable spaces in high fidelity and with multi-view high dynamic range images in unprecedented quality and density. We extend instant neural graphics primitives with a novel perceptual color space for learning accurate HDR appearance, and an efficient mip-mapping mechanism for level-of-detail rendering with anti-aliasing, while carefully optimizing the trade-off between quality and speed. Our multi-GPU renderer enables high-fidelity volume rendering of our neural radiance field model at the full VR resolution of dual 2Ktimes2K at 36 Hz on our custom demo machine. We demonstrate the quality of our results on our challenging high-fidelity datasets, and compare our method and datasets to existing baselines. We release our dataset on our project website.

In this paper, we address the problem of conditional scene decoration for 360-degree images. Our method takes a 360-degree background photograph of an indoor scene and generates decorated images of the same scene in the panorama view. To do this, we develop a 360-aware object layout generator that learns latent object vectors in the 360-degree view to enable a variety of furniture arrangements for an input 360-degree background image. We use this object layout to condition a generative adversarial network to synthesize images of an input scene. To further reinforce the generation capability of our model, we develop a simple yet effective scene emptier that removes the generated furniture and produces an emptied scene for our model to learn a cyclic constraint. We train the model on the Structure3D dataset and show that our model can generate diverse decorations with controllable object layout. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Structure3D dataset and generalizes well to the Zillow indoor scene dataset. Our user study confirms the immersive experiences provided by the realistic image quality and furniture layout in our generation results. Our implementation will be made available.

Recent text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion V3 and Flux, have achieved notable progress. However, these models are strongly restricted to their limited knowledge, a.k.a., their own fixed parameters, that are trained with closed datasets. This leads to significant hallucinations or distortions when facing fine-grained and unseen novel real-world objects, e.g., the appearance of the Tesla Cybertruck. To this end, we present the first real-object-based retrieval-augmented generation framework (RealRAG), which augments fine-grained and unseen novel object generation by learning and retrieving real-world images to overcome the knowledge gaps of generative models. Specifically, to integrate missing memory for unseen novel object generation, we train a reflective retriever by self-reflective contrastive learning, which injects the generator's knowledge into the sef-reflective negatives, ensuring that the retrieved augmented images compensate for the model's missing knowledge. Furthermore, the real-object-based framework integrates fine-grained visual knowledge for the generative models, tackling the distortion problem and improving the realism for fine-grained object generation. Our Real-RAG is superior in its modular application to all types of state-of-the-art text-to-image generative models and also delivers remarkable performance boosts with all of them, such as a gain of 16.18% FID score with the auto-regressive model on the Stanford Car benchmark.

Nowadays, autonomous cars can drive smoothly in ordinary cases, and it is widely recognized that realistic sensor simulation will play a critical role in solving remaining corner cases by simulating them. To this end, we propose an autonomous driving simulator based upon neural radiance fields (NeRFs). Compared with existing works, ours has three notable features: (1) Instance-aware. Our simulator models the foreground instances and background environments separately with independent networks so that the static (e.g., size and appearance) and dynamic (e.g., trajectory) properties of instances can be controlled separately. (2) Modular. Our simulator allows flexible switching between different modern NeRF-related backbones, sampling strategies, input modalities, etc. We expect this modular design to boost academic progress and industrial deployment of NeRF-based autonomous driving simulation. (3) Realistic. Our simulator set new state-of-the-art photo-realism results given the best module selection. Our simulator will be open-sourced while most of our counterparts are not. Project page: https://open-air-sun.github.io/mars/.

We propose a generative model that, given a coarsely edited image, synthesizes a photorealistic output that follows the prescribed layout. Our method transfers fine details from the original image and preserves the identity of its parts. Yet, it adapts it to the lighting and context defined by the new layout. Our key insight is that videos are a powerful source of supervision for this task: objects and camera motions provide many observations of how the world changes with viewpoint, lighting, and physical interactions. We construct an image dataset in which each sample is a pair of source and target frames extracted from the same video at randomly chosen time intervals. We warp the source frame toward the target using two motion models that mimic the expected test-time user edits. We supervise our model to translate the warped image into the ground truth, starting from a pretrained diffusion model. Our model design explicitly enables fine detail transfer from the source frame to the generated image, while closely following the user-specified layout. We show that by using simple segmentations and coarse 2D manipulations, we can synthesize a photorealistic edit faithful to the user's input while addressing second-order effects like harmonizing the lighting and physical interactions between edited objects.

The last decade has seen tremendous progress in our ability to generate realistic-looking data, be it images, text, audio, or video. Here, we discuss the closely related problem of quantifying realism, that is, designing functions that can reliably tell realistic data from unrealistic data. This problem turns out to be significantly harder to solve and remains poorly understood, despite its prevalence in machine learning and recent breakthroughs in generative AI. Drawing on insights from algorithmic information theory, we discuss why this problem is challenging, why a good generative model alone is insufficient to solve it, and what a good solution would look like. In particular, we introduce the notion of a universal critic, which unlike adversarial critics does not require adversarial training. While universal critics are not immediately practical, they can serve both as a North Star for guiding practical implementations and as a tool for analyzing existing attempts to capture realism.

We present a framework for generating full-bodied photorealistic avatars that gesture according to the conversational dynamics of a dyadic interaction. Given speech audio, we output multiple possibilities of gestural motion for an individual, including face, body, and hands. The key behind our method is in combining the benefits of sample diversity from vector quantization with the high-frequency details obtained through diffusion to generate more dynamic, expressive motion. We visualize the generated motion using highly photorealistic avatars that can express crucial nuances in gestures (e.g. sneers and smirks). To facilitate this line of research, we introduce a first-of-its-kind multi-view conversational dataset that allows for photorealistic reconstruction. Experiments show our model generates appropriate and diverse gestures, outperforming both diffusion- and VQ-only methods. Furthermore, our perceptual evaluation highlights the importance of photorealism (vs. meshes) in accurately assessing subtle motion details in conversational gestures. Code and dataset available online.

Simulated virtual environments have been widely used to learn robotic agents that perform daily household tasks. These environments encourage research progress by far, but often provide limited object interactability, visual appearance different from real-world environments, or relatively smaller environment sizes. This prevents the learned models in the virtual scenes from being readily deployable. To bridge the gap between these learning environments and deploying (i.e., real) environments, we propose the ReALFRED benchmark that employs real-world scenes, objects, and room layouts to learn agents to complete household tasks by understanding free-form language instructions and interacting with objects in large, multi-room and 3D-captured scenes. Specifically, we extend the ALFRED benchmark with updates for larger environmental spaces with smaller visual domain gaps. With ReALFRED, we analyze previously crafted methods for the ALFRED benchmark and observe that they consistently yield lower performance in all metrics, encouraging the community to develop methods in more realistic environments. Our code and data are publicly available.

Novel view synthesis from an in-the-wild video is difficult due to challenges like scene dynamics and lack of parallax. While existing methods have shown promising results with implicit neural radiance fields, they are slow to train and render. This paper revisits explicit video representations to synthesize high-quality novel views from a monocular video efficiently. We treat static and dynamic video content separately. Specifically, we build a global static scene model using an extended plane-based scene representation to synthesize temporally coherent novel video. Our plane-based scene representation is augmented with spherical harmonics and displacement maps to capture view-dependent effects and model non-planar complex surface geometry. We opt to represent the dynamic content as per-frame point clouds for efficiency. While such representations are inconsistency-prone, minor temporal inconsistencies are perceptually masked due to motion. We develop a method to quickly estimate such a hybrid video representation and render novel views in real time. Our experiments show that our method can render high-quality novel views from an in-the-wild video with comparable quality to state-of-the-art methods while being 100x faster in training and enabling real-time rendering.

Visual communication, dating back to prehistoric cave paintings, is the use of visual elements to convey ideas and information. In today's visually saturated world, effective design demands an understanding of graphic design principles, visual storytelling, human psychology, and the ability to distill complex information into clear visuals. This dissertation explores how recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to automate the creation of effective visual communication designs. Although generative models have made great progress in generating images from text, they still struggle to simplify complex ideas into clear, abstract visuals and are constrained by pixel-based outputs, which lack flexibility for many design tasks. To address these challenges, we constrain the models' operational space and introduce task-specific regularizations. We explore various aspects of visual communication, namely, sketches and visual abstraction, typography, animation, and visual inspiration.

The ability to generate highly realistic 2D images from mere text prompts has recently made huge progress in terms of speed and quality, thanks to the advent of image diffusion models. Naturally, the question arises if this can be also achieved in the generation of 3D content from such text prompts. To this end, a new line of methods recently emerged trying to harness diffusion models, trained on 2D images, for supervision of 3D model generation using view dependent prompts. While achieving impressive results, these methods, however, have two major drawbacks. First, rather than commonly used 3D meshes, they instead generate neural radiance fields (NeRFs), making them impractical for most real applications. Second, these approaches tend to produce over-saturated models, giving the output a cartoonish looking effect. Therefore, in this work we propose a novel method for generation of highly realistic-looking 3D meshes. To this end, we extend NeRF to employ an SDF backbone, leading to improved 3D mesh extraction. In addition, we propose a novel way to finetune the mesh texture, removing the effect of high saturation and improving the details of the output 3D mesh.

Modern visual effects (VFX) software has made it possible for skilled artists to create imagery of virtually anything. However, the creation process remains laborious, complex, and largely inaccessible to everyday users. In this work, we present AutoVFX, a framework that automatically creates realistic and dynamic VFX videos from a single video and natural language instructions. By carefully integrating neural scene modeling, LLM-based code generation, and physical simulation, AutoVFX is able to provide physically-grounded, photorealistic editing effects that can be controlled directly using natural language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to validate AutoVFX's efficacy across a diverse spectrum of videos and instructions. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that AutoVFX outperforms all competing methods by a large margin in generative quality, instruction alignment, editing versatility, and physical plausibility.

Directly generating scenes from satellite imagery offers exciting possibilities for integration into applications like games and map services. However, challenges arise from significant view changes and scene scale. Previous efforts mainly focused on image or video generation, lacking exploration into the adaptability of scene generation for arbitrary views. Existing 3D generation works either operate at the object level or are difficult to utilize the geometry obtained from satellite imagery. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel architecture for direct 3D scene generation by introducing diffusion models into 3D sparse representations and combining them with neural rendering techniques. Specifically, our approach generates texture colors at the point level for a given geometry using a 3D diffusion model first, which is then transformed into a scene representation in a feed-forward manner. The representation can be utilized to render arbitrary views which would excel in both single-frame quality and inter-frame consistency. Experiments in two city-scale datasets show that our model demonstrates proficiency in generating photo-realistic street-view image sequences and cross-view urban scenes from satellite imagery.

After pre-training on extensive image-text pairs, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) demonstrates promising performance on a wide variety of benchmarks. However, a substantial volume of non-paired data, such as multimodal interleaved documents, remains underutilized for vision-language representation learning. To fully leverage these unpaired documents, we initially establish a Real-World Data Extraction pipeline to extract high-quality images and texts. Then we design a hierarchical retrieval method to efficiently associate each image with multiple semantically relevant realistic texts. To further enhance fine-grained visual information, we propose an image semantic augmented generation module for synthetic text production. Furthermore, we employ a semantic balance sampling strategy to improve dataset diversity, enabling better learning of long-tail concepts. Based on these innovations, we construct RealSyn, a dataset combining realistic and synthetic texts, available in three scales: 15M, 30M, and 100M. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealSyn effectively advances vision-language representation learning and exhibits strong scalability. Models pre-trained on RealSyn achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream tasks. To facilitate future research, the RealSyn dataset and pre-trained model weights are released at https://github.com/deepglint/RealSyn.

Current 3D content generation builds on generative models that output RGB images. Modern graphics pipelines, however, require physically-based rendering (PBR) material properties. We propose to model the PBR image distribution directly to avoid photometric inaccuracies in RGB generation and the inherent ambiguity in extracting PBR from RGB. Existing paradigms for cross-modal finetuning are not suited for PBR generation due to a lack of data and the high dimensionality of the output modalities: we overcome both challenges by retaining a frozen RGB model and tightly linking a newly trained PBR model using a novel cross-network communication paradigm. As the base RGB model is fully frozen, the proposed method does not risk catastrophic forgetting during finetuning and remains compatible with techniques such as IPAdapter pretrained for the base RGB model. We validate our design choices, robustness to data sparsity, and compare against existing paradigms with an extensive experimental section.

We present a simple yet powerful neural network that implicitly represents and renders 3D objects and scenes only from 2D observations. The network models 3D geometries as a general radiance field, which takes a set of 2D images with camera poses and intrinsics as input, constructs an internal representation for each point of the 3D space, and then renders the corresponding appearance and geometry of that point viewed from an arbitrary position. The key to our approach is to learn local features for each pixel in 2D images and to then project these features to 3D points, thus yielding general and rich point representations. We additionally integrate an attention mechanism to aggregate pixel features from multiple 2D views, such that visual occlusions are implicitly taken into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate high-quality and realistic novel views for novel objects, unseen categories and challenging real-world scenes.

We introduce WonderJourney, a modularized framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes, we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image) and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey, a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes, and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling, diverse visual results across various scene types and styles, forming imaginary "wonderjourneys". Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney/

The model-based estimation of 3D animal pose and shape from images enables computational modeling of animal behavior. Training models for this purpose requires large amounts of labeled image data with precise pose and shape annotations. However, capturing such data requires the use of multi-view or marker-based motion-capture systems, which are impractical to adapt to wild animals in situ and impossible to scale across a comprehensive set of animal species. Some have attempted to address the challenge of procuring training data by pseudo-labeling individual real-world images through manual 2D annotation, followed by 3D-parameter optimization to those labels. While this approach may produce silhouette-aligned samples, the obtained pose and shape parameters are often implausible due to the ill-posed nature of the monocular fitting problem. Sidestepping real-world ambiguity, others have designed complex synthetic-data-generation pipelines leveraging video-game engines and collections of artist-designed 3D assets. Such engines yield perfect ground-truth annotations but are often lacking in visual realism and require considerable manual effort to adapt to new species or environments. Motivated by these shortcomings, we propose an alternative approach to synthetic-data generation: rendering with a conditional image-generation model. We introduce a pipeline that samples a diverse set of poses and shapes for a variety of mammalian quadrupeds and generates realistic images with corresponding ground-truth pose and shape parameters. To demonstrate the scalability of our approach, we introduce GenZoo, a synthetic dataset containing one million images of distinct subjects. We train a 3D pose and shape regressor on GenZoo, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on a real-world animal pose and shape estimation benchmark, despite being trained solely on synthetic data. https://genzoo.is.tue.mpg.de

Reconstructing photorealistic and dynamic portrait avatars from images is essential to many applications including advertising, visual effects, and virtual reality. Depending on the application, avatar reconstruction involves different capture setups and constraints - for example, visual effects studios use camera arrays to capture hundreds of reference images, while content creators may seek to animate a single portrait image downloaded from the internet. As such, there is a large and heterogeneous ecosystem of methods for avatar reconstruction. Techniques based on multi-view stereo or neural rendering achieve the highest quality results, but require hundreds of reference images. Recent generative models produce convincing avatars from a single reference image, but visual fidelity yet lags behind multi-view techniques. Here, we present CAP4D: an approach that uses a morphable multi-view diffusion model to reconstruct photoreal 4D (dynamic 3D) portrait avatars from any number of reference images (i.e., one to 100) and animate and render them in real time. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance for single-, few-, and multi-image 4D portrait avatar reconstruction, and takes steps to bridge the gap in visual fidelity between single-image and multi-view reconstruction techniques.

Given a set of calibrated images of a scene, we present an approach that produces a simple, compact, and actionable 3D world representation by means of 3D primitives. While many approaches focus on recovering high-fidelity 3D scenes, we focus on parsing a scene into mid-level 3D representations made of a small set of textured primitives. Such representations are interpretable, easy to manipulate and suited for physics-based simulations. Moreover, unlike existing primitive decomposition methods that rely on 3D input data, our approach operates directly on images through differentiable rendering. Specifically, we model primitives as textured superquadric meshes and optimize their parameters from scratch with an image rendering loss. We highlight the importance of modeling transparency for each primitive, which is critical for optimization and also enables handling varying numbers of primitives. We show that the resulting textured primitives faithfully reconstruct the input images and accurately model the visible 3D points, while providing amodal shape completions of unseen object regions. We compare our approach to the state of the art on diverse scenes from DTU, and demonstrate its robustness on real-life captures from BlendedMVS and Nerfstudio. We also showcase how our results can be used to effortlessly edit a scene or perform physical simulations. Code and video results are available at https://www.tmonnier.com/DBW .

Speech-driven facial animation is the process that automatically synthesizes talking characters based on speech signals. The majority of work in this domain creates a mapping from audio features to visual features. This approach often requires post-processing using computer graphics techniques to produce realistic albeit subject dependent results. We present an end-to-end system that generates videos of a talking head, using only a still image of a person and an audio clip containing speech, without relying on handcrafted intermediate features. Our method generates videos which have (a) lip movements that are in sync with the audio and (b) natural facial expressions such as blinks and eyebrow movements. Our temporal GAN uses 3 discriminators focused on achieving detailed frames, audio-visual synchronization, and realistic expressions. We quantify the contribution of each component in our model using an ablation study and we provide insights into the latent representation of the model. The generated videos are evaluated based on sharpness, reconstruction quality, lip-reading accuracy, synchronization as well as their ability to generate natural blinks.

Real-world data collection for robotics is costly and resource-intensive, requiring skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulations offer a scalable alternative but often fail to achieve sim-to-real generalization due to geometric and visual gaps. To address these challenges, we propose a 3D-photorealistic real-to-sim system, namely, RE^3SIM, addressing geometric and visual sim-to-real gaps. RE^3SIM employs advanced 3D reconstruction and neural rendering techniques to faithfully recreate real-world scenarios, enabling real-time rendering of simulated cross-view cameras within a physics-based simulator. By utilizing privileged information to collect expert demonstrations efficiently in simulation, and train robot policies with imitation learning, we validate the effectiveness of the real-to-sim-to-real pipeline across various manipulation task scenarios. Notably, with only simulated data, we can achieve zero-shot sim-to-real transfer with an average success rate exceeding 58%. To push the limit of real-to-sim, we further generate a large-scale simulation dataset, demonstrating how a robust policy can be built from simulation data that generalizes across various objects. Codes and demos are available at: http://xshenhan.github.io/Re3Sim/.

Creating photorealistic avatars for individuals traditionally involves extensive capture sessions with complex and expensive studio devices like the LightStage system. While recent strides in neural representations have enabled the generation of photorealistic and animatable 3D avatars from quick phone scans, they have the capture-time lighting baked-in, lack facial details and have missing regions in areas such as the back of the ears. Thus, they lag in quality compared to studio-captured avatars. In this paper, we propose a method that bridges this gap by generating studio-like illuminated texture maps from short, monocular phone captures. We do this by parameterizing the phone texture maps using the W^+ space of a StyleGAN2, enabling near-perfect reconstruction. Then, we finetune a StyleGAN2 by sampling in the W^+ parameterized space using a very small set of studio-captured textures as an adversarial training signal. To further enhance the realism and accuracy of facial details, we super-resolve the output of the StyleGAN2 using carefully designed diffusion model that is guided by image gradients of the phone-captured texture map. Once trained, our method excels at producing studio-like facial texture maps from casual monocular smartphone videos. Demonstrating its capabilities, we showcase the generation of photorealistic, uniformly lit, complete avatars from monocular phone captures. http://shahrukhathar.github.io/2024/07/22/Bridging.html{The project page can be found here.}

The correct insertion of virtual objects in images of real-world scenes requires a deep understanding of the scene's lighting, geometry and materials, as well as the image formation process. While recent large-scale diffusion models have shown strong generative and inpainting capabilities, we find that current models do not sufficiently "understand" the scene shown in a single picture to generate consistent lighting effects (shadows, bright reflections, etc.) while preserving the identity and details of the composited object. We propose using a personalized large diffusion model as guidance to a physically based inverse rendering process. Our method recovers scene lighting and tone-mapping parameters, allowing the photorealistic composition of arbitrary virtual objects in single frames or videos of indoor or outdoor scenes. Our physically based pipeline further enables automatic materials and tone-mapping refinement.

Modeling and producing lifelike clothed human images has attracted researchers' attention from different areas for decades, with the complexity from highly articulated and structured content. Rendering algorithms decompose and simulate the imaging process of a camera, while are limited by the accuracy of modeled variables and the efficiency of computation. Generative models can produce impressively vivid human images, however still lacking in controllability and editability. This paper studies photorealism enhancement of rendered images, leveraging generative power from diffusion models on the controlled basis of rendering. We introduce a novel framework to translate rendered images into their realistic counterparts, which consists of two stages: Domain Knowledge Injection (DKI) and Realistic Image Generation (RIG). In DKI, we adopt positive (real) domain finetuning and negative (rendered) domain embedding to inject knowledge into a pretrained Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model. In RIG, we generate the realistic image corresponding to the input rendered image, with a Texture-preserving Attention Control (TAC) to preserve fine-grained clothing textures, exploiting the decoupled features encoded in the UNet structure. Additionally, we introduce SynFashion dataset, featuring high-quality digital clothing images with diverse textures. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our method in rendered-to-real image translation.

Realistic virtual humans play a crucial role in numerous industries, such as metaverse, intelligent healthcare, and self-driving simulation. But creating them on a large scale with high levels of realism remains a challenge. The utilization of deep implicit function sparks a new era of image-based 3D clothed human reconstruction, enabling pixel-aligned shape recovery with fine details. Subsequently, the vast majority of works locate the surface by regressing the deterministic implicit value for each point. However, should all points be treated equally regardless of their proximity to the surface? In this paper, we propose replacing the implicit value with an adaptive uncertainty distribution, to differentiate between points based on their distance to the surface. This simple ``value to distribution'' transition yields significant improvements on nearly all the baselines. Furthermore, qualitative results demonstrate that the models trained using our uncertainty distribution loss, can capture more intricate wrinkles, and realistic limbs. Code and models are available for research purposes at https://github.com/psyai-net/D-IF_release.

Accurately simulating real world object dynamics is essential for various applications such as robotics, engineering, graphics, and design. To better capture complex real dynamics such as contact and friction, learned simulators based on graph networks have recently shown great promise. However, applying these learned simulators to real scenes comes with two major challenges: first, scaling learned simulators to handle the complexity of real world scenes which can involve hundreds of objects each with complicated 3D shapes, and second, handling inputs from perception rather than 3D state information. Here we introduce a method which substantially reduces the memory required to run graph-based learned simulators. Based on this memory-efficient simulation model, we then present a perceptual interface in the form of editable NeRFs which can convert real-world scenes into a structured representation that can be processed by graph network simulator. We show that our method uses substantially less memory than previous graph-based simulators while retaining their accuracy, and that the simulators learned in synthetic environments can be applied to real world scenes captured from multiple camera angles. This paves the way for expanding the application of learned simulators to settings where only perceptual information is available at inference time.

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.

Rendering photo-realistic novel-view images of complex scenes has been a long-standing challenge in computer graphics. In recent years, great research progress has been made on enhancing rendering quality and accelerating rendering speed in the realm of view synthesis. However, when rendering complex dynamic scenes with sparse views, the rendering quality remains limited due to occlusion problems. Besides, for rendering high-resolution images on dynamic scenes, the rendering speed is still far from real-time. In this work, we propose a generalizable view synthesis method that can render high-resolution novel-view images of complex static and dynamic scenes in real-time from sparse views. To address the occlusion problems arising from the sparsity of input views and the complexity of captured scenes, we introduce an explicit 3D visibility reasoning approach that can efficiently estimate the visibility of sampled 3D points to the input views. The proposed visibility reasoning approach is fully differentiable and can gracefully fit inside the volume rendering pipeline, allowing us to train our networks with only multi-view images as supervision while refining geometry and texture simultaneously. Besides, each module in our pipeline is carefully designed to bypass the time-consuming MLP querying process and enhance the rendering quality of high-resolution images, enabling us to render high-resolution novel-view images in real-time.Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous view synthesis methods in both rendering quality and speed, particularly when dealing with complex dynamic scenes with sparse views.

One-shot 3D talking portrait generation aims to reconstruct a 3D avatar from an unseen image, and then animate it with a reference video or audio to generate a talking portrait video. The existing methods fail to simultaneously achieve the goals of accurate 3D avatar reconstruction and stable talking face animation. Besides, while the existing works mainly focus on synthesizing the head part, it is also vital to generate natural torso and background segments to obtain a realistic talking portrait video. To address these limitations, we present Real3D-Potrait, a framework that (1) improves the one-shot 3D reconstruction power with a large image-to-plane model that distills 3D prior knowledge from a 3D face generative model; (2) facilitates accurate motion-conditioned animation with an efficient motion adapter; (3) synthesizes realistic video with natural torso movement and switchable background using a head-torso-background super-resolution model; and (4) supports one-shot audio-driven talking face generation with a generalizable audio-to-motion model. Extensive experiments show that Real3D-Portrait generalizes well to unseen identities and generates more realistic talking portrait videos compared to previous methods. Video samples and source code are available at https://real3dportrait.github.io .

3D shape modeling is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires years of expertise. To facilitate 3D shape modeling, we propose a 3D shape generation network that takes a 3D VR sketch as a condition. We assume that sketches are created by novices without art training and aim to reconstruct geometrically realistic 3D shapes of a given category. To handle potential sketch ambiguity, our method creates multiple 3D shapes that align with the original sketch's structure. We carefully design our method, training the model step-by-step and leveraging multi-modal 3D shape representation to support training with limited training data. To guarantee the realism of generated 3D shapes we leverage the normalizing flow that models the distribution of the latent space of 3D shapes. To encourage the fidelity of the generated 3D shapes to an input sketch, we propose a dedicated loss that we deploy at different stages of the training process. The code is available at https://github.com/Rowl1ng/3Dsketch2shape.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have emerged as promising tools for advancing autonomous driving (AD) research, offering scalable closed-loop simulation and data augmentation capabilities. However, to trust the results achieved in simulation, one needs to ensure that AD systems perceive real and rendered data in the same way. Although the performance of rendering methods is increasing, many scenarios will remain inherently challenging to reconstruct faithfully. To this end, we propose a novel perspective for addressing the real-to-simulated data gap. Rather than solely focusing on improving rendering fidelity, we explore simple yet effective methods to enhance perception model robustness to NeRF artifacts without compromising performance on real data. Moreover, we conduct the first large-scale investigation into the real-to-simulated data gap in an AD setting using a state-of-the-art neural rendering technique. Specifically, we evaluate object detectors and an online mapping model on real and simulated data, and study the effects of different fine-tuning strategies.Our results show notable improvements in model robustness to simulated data, even improving real-world performance in some cases. Last, we delve into the correlation between the real-to-simulated gap and image reconstruction metrics, identifying FID and LPIPS as strong indicators. See https://research.zenseact.com/publications/closing-real2sim-gap for our project page.

Recently, with the rapid advancements of generative models, the field of visual text generation has witnessed significant progress. However, it is still challenging to render high-quality text images in real-world scenarios, as three critical criteria should be satisfied: (1) Fidelity: the generated text images should be photo-realistic and the contents are expected to be the same as specified in the given conditions; (2) Reasonability: the regions and contents of the generated text should cohere with the scene; (3) Utility: the generated text images can facilitate related tasks (e.g., text detection and recognition). Upon investigation, we find that existing methods, either rendering-based or diffusion-based, can hardly meet all these aspects simultaneously, limiting their application range. Therefore, we propose in this paper a visual text generator (termed SceneVTG), which can produce high-quality text images in the wild. Following a two-stage paradigm, SceneVTG leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to recommend reasonable text regions and contents across multiple scales and levels, which are used by a conditional diffusion model as conditions to generate text images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SceneVTG significantly outperforms traditional rendering-based methods and recent diffusion-based methods in terms of fidelity and reasonability. Besides, the generated images provide superior utility for tasks involving text detection and text recognition. Code and datasets are available at AdvancedLiterateMachinery.

In this work, we aim to reconstruct a time-varying 3D model, capable of rendering photo-realistic renderings with independent control of viewpoint, illumination, and time, from Internet photos of large-scale landmarks. The core challenges are twofold. First, different types of temporal changes, such as illumination and changes to the underlying scene itself (such as replacing one graffiti artwork with another) are entangled together in the imagery. Second, scene-level temporal changes are often discrete and sporadic over time, rather than continuous. To tackle these problems, we propose a new scene representation equipped with a novel temporal step function encoding method that can model discrete scene-level content changes as piece-wise constant functions over time. Specifically, we represent the scene as a space-time radiance field with a per-image illumination embedding, where temporally-varying scene changes are encoded using a set of learned step functions. To facilitate our task of chronology reconstruction from Internet imagery, we also collect a new dataset of four scenes that exhibit various changes over time. We demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art view synthesis results on this dataset, while achieving independent control of viewpoint, time, and illumination.

We present a method that uses a text-to-image model to generate consistent content across multiple image scales, enabling extreme semantic zooms into a scene, e.g., ranging from a wide-angle landscape view of a forest to a macro shot of an insect sitting on one of the tree branches. We achieve this through a joint multi-scale diffusion sampling approach that encourages consistency across different scales while preserving the integrity of each individual sampling process. Since each generated scale is guided by a different text prompt, our method enables deeper levels of zoom than traditional super-resolution methods that may struggle to create new contextual structure at vastly different scales. We compare our method qualitatively with alternative techniques in image super-resolution and outpainting, and show that our method is most effective at generating consistent multi-scale content.

We present a method for zero-shot, text-driven appearance manipulation in natural images and videos. Given an input image or video and a target text prompt, our goal is to edit the appearance of existing objects (e.g., object's texture) or augment the scene with visual effects (e.g., smoke, fire) in a semantically meaningful manner. We train a generator using an internal dataset of training examples, extracted from a single input (image or video and target text prompt), while leveraging an external pre-trained CLIP model to establish our losses. Rather than directly generating the edited output, our key idea is to generate an edit layer (color+opacity) that is composited over the original input. This allows us to constrain the generation process and maintain high fidelity to the original input via novel text-driven losses that are applied directly to the edit layer. Our method neither relies on a pre-trained generator nor requires user-provided edit masks. We demonstrate localized, semantic edits on high-resolution natural images and videos across a variety of objects and scenes.

Recent innovations on text-to-3D generation have featured Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), which enables the zero-shot learning of implicit 3D models (NeRF) by directly distilling prior knowledge from 2D diffusion models. However, current SDS-based models still struggle with intricate text prompts and commonly result in distorted 3D models with unrealistic textures or cross-view inconsistency issues. In this work, we introduce a novel Visual Prompt-guided text-to-3D diffusion model (VP3D) that explicitly unleashes the visual appearance knowledge in 2D visual prompt to boost text-to-3D generation. Instead of solely supervising SDS with text prompt, VP3D first capitalizes on 2D diffusion model to generate a high-quality image from input text, which subsequently acts as visual prompt to strengthen SDS optimization with explicit visual appearance. Meanwhile, we couple the SDS optimization with additional differentiable reward function that encourages rendering images of 3D models to better visually align with 2D visual prompt and semantically match with text prompt. Through extensive experiments, we show that the 2D Visual Prompt in our VP3D significantly eases the learning of visual appearance of 3D models and thus leads to higher visual fidelity with more detailed textures. It is also appealing in view that when replacing the self-generating visual prompt with a given reference image, VP3D is able to trigger a new task of stylized text-to-3D generation. Our project page is available at https://vp3d-cvpr24.github.io.

Three-dimensional (3D) understanding of objects and scenes play a key role in humans' ability to interact with the world and has been an active area of research in computer vision, graphics, and robotics. Large scale synthetic and object-centric 3D datasets have shown to be effective in training models that have 3D understanding of objects. However, applying a similar approach to real-world objects and scenes is difficult due to a lack of large-scale data. Videos are a potential source for real-world 3D data, but finding diverse yet corresponding views of the same content has shown to be difficult at scale. Furthermore, standard videos come with fixed viewpoints, determined at the time of capture. This restricts the ability to access scenes from a variety of more diverse and potentially useful perspectives. We argue that large scale 360 videos can address these limitations to provide: scalable corresponding frames from diverse views. In this paper, we introduce 360-1M, a 360 video dataset, and a process for efficiently finding corresponding frames from diverse viewpoints at scale. We train our diffusion-based model, Odin, on 360-1M. Empowered by the largest real-world, multi-view dataset to date, Odin is able to freely generate novel views of real-world scenes. Unlike previous methods, Odin can move the camera through the environment, enabling the model to infer the geometry and layout of the scene. Additionally, we show improved performance on standard novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction benchmarks.

We propose 4Real-Video, a novel framework for generating 4D videos, organized as a grid of video frames with both time and viewpoint axes. In this grid, each row contains frames sharing the same timestep, while each column contains frames from the same viewpoint. We propose a novel two-stream architecture. One stream performs viewpoint updates on columns, and the other stream performs temporal updates on rows. After each diffusion transformer layer, a synchronization layer exchanges information between the two token streams. We propose two implementations of the synchronization layer, using either hard or soft synchronization. This feedforward architecture improves upon previous work in three ways: higher inference speed, enhanced visual quality (measured by FVD, CLIP, and VideoScore), and improved temporal and viewpoint consistency (measured by VideoScore and Dust3R-Confidence).

We present a method that achieves state-of-the-art results for synthesizing novel views of complex scenes by optimizing an underlying continuous volumetric scene function using a sparse set of input views. Our algorithm represents a scene using a fully-connected (non-convolutional) deep network, whose input is a single continuous 5D coordinate (spatial location (x,y,z) and viewing direction (theta, phi)) and whose output is the volume density and view-dependent emitted radiance at that spatial location. We synthesize views by querying 5D coordinates along camera rays and use classic volume rendering techniques to project the output colors and densities into an image. Because volume rendering is naturally differentiable, the only input required to optimize our representation is a set of images with known camera poses. We describe how to effectively optimize neural radiance fields to render photorealistic novel views of scenes with complicated geometry and appearance, and demonstrate results that outperform prior work on neural rendering and view synthesis. View synthesis results are best viewed as videos, so we urge readers to view our supplementary video for convincing comparisons.

We present a complete system for real-time rendering of scenes with complex appearance previously reserved for offline use. This is achieved with a combination of algorithmic and system level innovations. Our appearance model utilizes learned hierarchical textures that are interpreted using neural decoders, which produce reflectance values and importance-sampled directions. To best utilize the modeling capacity of the decoders, we equip the decoders with two graphics priors. The first prior -- transformation of directions into learned shading frames -- facilitates accurate reconstruction of mesoscale effects. The second prior -- a microfacet sampling distribution -- allows the neural decoder to perform importance sampling efficiently. The resulting appearance model supports anisotropic sampling and level-of-detail rendering, and allows baking deeply layered material graphs into a compact unified neural representation. By exposing hardware accelerated tensor operations to ray tracing shaders, we show that it is possible to inline and execute the neural decoders efficiently inside a real-time path tracer. We analyze scalability with increasing number of neural materials and propose to improve performance using code optimized for coherent and divergent execution. Our neural material shaders can be over an order of magnitude faster than non-neural layered materials. This opens up the door for using film-quality visuals in real-time applications such as games and live previews.

Realistic simulation of dynamic scenes requires accurately capturing diverse material properties and modeling complex object interactions grounded in physical principles. However, existing methods are constrained to basic material types with limited predictable parameters, making them insufficient to represent the complexity of real-world materials. We introduce a novel approach that leverages multi-modal foundation models and video diffusion to achieve enhanced 4D dynamic scene simulation. Our method utilizes multi-modal models to identify material types and initialize material parameters through image queries, while simultaneously inferring 3D Gaussian splats for detailed scene representation. We further refine these material parameters using video diffusion with a differentiable Material Point Method (MPM) and optical flow guidance rather than render loss or Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) loss. This integrated framework enables accurate prediction and realistic simulation of dynamic interactions in real-world scenarios, advancing both accuracy and flexibility in physics-based simulations.

We present DINAR, an approach for creating realistic rigged fullbody avatars from single RGB images. Similarly to previous works, our method uses neural textures combined with the SMPL-X body model to achieve photo-realistic quality of avatars while keeping them easy to animate and fast to infer. To restore the texture, we use a latent diffusion model and show how such model can be trained in the neural texture space. The use of the diffusion model allows us to realistically reconstruct large unseen regions such as the back of a person given the frontal view. The models in our pipeline are trained using 2D images and videos only. In the experiments, our approach achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality and good generalization to new poses and viewpoints. In particular, the approach improves state-of-the-art on the SnapshotPeople public benchmark.

While perspective is a well-studied topic in art, it is generally taken for granted in images. However, for the recent wave of high-quality image synthesis methods such as latent diffusion models, perspective accuracy is not an explicit requirement. Since these methods are capable of outputting a wide gamut of possible images, it is difficult for these synthesized images to adhere to the principles of linear perspective. We introduce a novel geometric constraint in the training process of generative models to enforce perspective accuracy. We show that outputs of models trained with this constraint both appear more realistic and improve performance of downstream models trained on generated images. Subjective human trials show that images generated with latent diffusion models trained with our constraint are preferred over images from the Stable Diffusion V2 model 70% of the time. SOTA monocular depth estimation models such as DPT and PixelFormer, fine-tuned on our images, outperform the original models trained on real images by up to 7.03% in RMSE and 19.3% in SqRel on the KITTI test set for zero-shot transfer.

This work tackles the challenging task of achieving real-time novel view synthesis for reflective surfaces across various scenes. Existing real-time rendering methods, especially those based on meshes, often have subpar performance in modeling surfaces with rich view-dependent appearances. Our key idea lies in leveraging meshes for rendering acceleration while incorporating a novel approach to parameterize view-dependent information. We decompose the color into diffuse and specular, and model the specular color in the reflected direction based on a neural environment map. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable reconstruction quality for highly reflective surfaces compared to state-of-the-art offline methods, while also efficiently enabling real-time rendering on edge devices such as smartphones.

We show how to build a model that allows realistic, free-viewpoint renderings of a scene under novel lighting conditions from video. Our method -- UrbanIR: Urban Scene Inverse Rendering -- computes an inverse graphics representation from the video. UrbanIR jointly infers shape, albedo, visibility, and sun and sky illumination from a single video of unbounded outdoor scenes with unknown lighting. UrbanIR uses videos from cameras mounted on cars (in contrast to many views of the same points in typical NeRF-style estimation). As a result, standard methods produce poor geometry estimates (for example, roofs), and there are numerous ''floaters''. Errors in inverse graphics inference can result in strong rendering artifacts. UrbanIR uses novel losses to control these and other sources of error. UrbanIR uses a novel loss to make very good estimates of shadow volumes in the original scene. The resulting representations facilitate controllable editing, delivering photorealistic free-viewpoint renderings of relit scenes and inserted objects. Qualitative evaluation demonstrates strong improvements over the state-of-the-art.

Deep generative vision models are now able to synthesize realistic-looking satellite imagery. But, the possibility of hallucinations prevents their adoption for risk-sensitive applications, such as generating materials for communicating climate change. To demonstrate this issue, we train a generative adversarial network (pix2pixHD) to create synthetic satellite imagery of future flooding and reforestation events. We find that a pure deep learning-based model can generate photorealistic flood visualizations but hallucinates floods at locations that were not susceptible to flooding. To address this issue, we propose to condition and evaluate generative vision models on segmentation maps of physics-based flood models. We show that our physics-conditioned model outperforms the pure deep learning-based model and a handcrafted baseline. We evaluate the generalization capability of our method to different remote sensing data and different climate-related events (reforestation). We publish our code and dataset which includes the data for a third case study of melting Arctic sea ice and >30,000 labeled HD image triplets -- or the equivalent of 5.5 million images at 128x128 pixels -- for segmentation guided image-to-image translation in Earth observation. Code and data is available at https://github.com/blutjens/eie-earth-public.

Although large-scale text-to-image generative models have shown promising performance in synthesizing high-quality images, directly applying these models to image editing remains a significant challenge. This challenge is further amplified in video editing due to the additional dimension of time. Especially for editing real videos as it necessitates maintaining a stable semantic layout across the frames while executing localized edits precisely without disrupting the existing backgrounds. In this paper, we propose RealCraft, an attention-control-based method for zero-shot editing in real videos. By employing the object-centric manipulation of cross-attention between prompts and frames and spatial-temporal attention within the frames, we achieve precise shape-wise editing along with enhanced consistency. Our model can be used directly with Stable Diffusion and operates without the need for additional localized information. We showcase our zero-shot attention-control-based method across a range of videos, demonstrating localized, high-fidelity, shape-precise and time-consistent editing in videos of various lengths, up to 64 frames.

We address the dual problems of novel view synthesis and environment reconstruction from hand-held RGBD sensors. Our contributions include 1) modeling highly specular objects, 2) modeling inter-reflections and Fresnel effects, and 3) enabling surface light field reconstruction with the same input needed to reconstruct shape alone. In cases where scene surface has a strong mirror-like material component, we generate highly detailed environment images, revealing room composition, objects, people, buildings, and trees visible through windows. Our approach yields state of the art view synthesis techniques, operates on low dynamic range imagery, and is robust to geometric and calibration errors.

We introduce DreamDrone, an innovative method for generating unbounded flythrough scenes from textual prompts. Central to our method is a novel feature-correspondence-guidance diffusion process, which utilizes the strong correspondence of intermediate features in the diffusion model. Leveraging this guidance strategy, we further propose an advanced technique for editing the intermediate latent code, enabling the generation of subsequent novel views with geometric consistency. Extensive experiments reveal that DreamDrone significantly surpasses existing methods, delivering highly authentic scene generation with exceptional visual quality. This approach marks a significant step in zero-shot perpetual view generation from textual prompts, enabling the creation of diverse scenes, including natural landscapes like oases and caves, as well as complex urban settings such as Lego-style street views. Our code is publicly available.

Recent advances in internet-scale video data pretraining have led to the development of text-to-video generative models that can create high-quality videos across a broad range of visual concepts, synthesize realistic motions and render complex objects. Hence, these generative models have the potential to become general-purpose simulators of the physical world. However, it is unclear how far we are from this goal with the existing text-to-video generative models. To this end, we present VideoPhy, a benchmark designed to assess whether the generated videos follow physical commonsense for real-world activities (e.g. marbles will roll down when placed on a slanted surface). Specifically, we curate diverse prompts that involve interactions between various material types in the physical world (e.g., solid-solid, solid-fluid, fluid-fluid). We then generate videos conditioned on these captions from diverse state-of-the-art text-to-video generative models, including open models (e.g., CogVideoX) and closed models (e.g., Lumiere, Dream Machine). Our human evaluation reveals that the existing models severely lack the ability to generate videos adhering to the given text prompts, while also lack physical commonsense. Specifically, the best performing model, CogVideoX-5B, generates videos that adhere to the caption and physical laws for 39.6% of the instances. VideoPhy thus highlights that the video generative models are far from accurately simulating the physical world. Finally, we propose an auto-evaluator, VideoCon-Physics, to assess the performance reliably for the newly released models.

AI video generation is undergoing a revolution, with quality and realism advancing rapidly. These advances have led to a passionate scientific debate: Do video models learn ``world models'' that discover laws of physics -- or, alternatively, are they merely sophisticated pixel predictors that achieve visual realism without understanding the physical principles of reality? We address this question by developing Physics-IQ, a comprehensive benchmark dataset that can only be solved by acquiring a deep understanding of various physical principles, like fluid dynamics, optics, solid mechanics, magnetism and thermodynamics. We find that across a range of current models (Sora, Runway, Pika, Lumiere, Stable Video Diffusion, and VideoPoet), physical understanding is severely limited, and unrelated to visual realism. At the same time, some test cases can already be successfully solved. This indicates that acquiring certain physical principles from observation alone may be possible, but significant challenges remain. While we expect rapid advances ahead, our work demonstrates that visual realism does not imply physical understanding. Our project page is at https://physics-iq.github.io; code at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-IQ-benchmark.

Recent interest in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) for practical applications is moderated by the significant challenge of hallucination or the inconsistency between the factual information and the generated text. In this paper, we first perform an in-depth analysis of hallucinations and discover several novel insights about how and when LVLMs hallucinate. From our analysis, we show that: (1) The community's efforts have been primarily targeted towards reducing hallucinations related to visual recognition (VR) prompts (e.g., prompts that only require describing the image), thereby ignoring hallucinations for cognitive prompts (e.g., prompts that require additional skills like reasoning on contents of the image). (2) LVLMs lack visual perception, i.e., they can see but not necessarily understand or perceive the input image. We analyze responses to cognitive prompts and show that LVLMs hallucinate due to a perception gap: although LVLMs accurately recognize visual elements in the input image and possess sufficient cognitive skills, they struggle to respond accurately and hallucinate. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose Visual Description Grounded Decoding (VDGD), a simple, robust, and training-free method for alleviating hallucinations. Specifically, we first describe the image and add it as a prefix to the instruction. Next, during auto-regressive decoding, we sample from the plausible candidates according to their KL-Divergence (KLD) to the description, where lower KLD is given higher preference. Experimental results on several benchmarks and LVLMs show that VDGD improves significantly over other baselines in reducing hallucinations. We also propose VaLLu, a benchmark for the comprehensive evaluation of the cognitive capabilities of LVLMs.

We present a diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generative novel view synthesis from as few as a single input image. Our model samples from the distribution of possible renderings consistent with the input and, even in the presence of ambiguity, is capable of rendering diverse and plausible novel views. To achieve this, our method makes use of existing 2D diffusion backbones but, crucially, incorporates geometry priors in the form of a 3D feature volume. This latent feature field captures the distribution over possible scene representations and improves our method's ability to generate view-consistent novel renderings. In addition to generating novel views, our method has the ability to autoregressively synthesize 3D-consistent sequences. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on synthetic renderings and room-scale scenes; we also show compelling results for challenging, real-world objects.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation, building on the success of high-performance text-to-image generative models, have made it possible to create imaginative and richly textured 3D objects from textual descriptions. However, a key challenge remains in effectively decoupling light-independent and lighting-dependent components to enhance the quality of generated 3D models and their relighting performance. In this paper, we present MVLight, a novel light-conditioned multi-view diffusion model that explicitly integrates lighting conditions directly into the generation process. This enables the model to synthesize high-quality images that faithfully reflect the specified lighting environment across multiple camera views. By leveraging this capability to Score Distillation Sampling (SDS), we can effectively synthesize 3D models with improved geometric precision and relighting capabilities. We validate the effectiveness of MVLight through extensive experiments and a user study.

We introduce a new approach for generating realistic 3D models with UV maps through a representation termed "Object Images." This approach encapsulates surface geometry, appearance, and patch structures within a 64x64 pixel image, effectively converting complex 3D shapes into a more manageable 2D format. By doing so, we address the challenges of both geometric and semantic irregularity inherent in polygonal meshes. This method allows us to use image generation models, such as Diffusion Transformers, directly for 3D shape generation. Evaluated on the ABO dataset, our generated shapes with patch structures achieve point cloud FID comparable to recent 3D generative models, while naturally supporting PBR material generation.

Accurate Story visualization requires several necessary elements, such as identity consistency across frames, the alignment between plain text and visual content, and a reasonable layout of objects in images. Most previous works endeavor to meet these requirements by fitting a text-to-image (T2I) model on a set of videos in the same style and with the same characters, e.g., the FlintstonesSV dataset. However, the learned T2I models typically struggle to adapt to new characters, scenes, and styles, and often lack the flexibility to revise the layout of the synthesized images. This paper proposes a system for generic interactive story visualization, capable of handling multiple novel characters and supporting the editing of layout and local structure. It is developed by leveraging the prior knowledge of large language and T2I models, trained on massive corpora. The system comprises four interconnected components: story-to-prompt generation (S2P), text-to-layout generation (T2L), controllable text-to-image generation (C-T2I), and image-to-video animation (I2V). First, the S2P module converts concise story information into detailed prompts required for subsequent stages. Next, T2L generates diverse and reasonable layouts based on the prompts, offering users the ability to adjust and refine the layout to their preference. The core component, C-T2I, enables the creation of images guided by layouts, sketches, and actor-specific identifiers to maintain consistency and detail across visualizations. Finally, I2V enriches the visualization process by animating the generated images. Extensive experiments and a user study are conducted to validate the effectiveness and flexibility of interactive editing of the proposed system.

Creating a vivid video from the event or scenario in our imagination is a truly fascinating experience. Recent advancements in text-to-video synthesis have unveiled the potential to achieve this with prompts only. While text is convenient in conveying the overall scene context, it may be insufficient to control precisely. In this paper, we explore customized video generation by utilizing text as context description and motion structure (e.g. frame-wise depth) as concrete guidance. Our method, dubbed Make-Your-Video, involves joint-conditional video generation using a Latent Diffusion Model that is pre-trained for still image synthesis and then promoted for video generation with the introduction of temporal modules. This two-stage learning scheme not only reduces the computing resources required, but also improves the performance by transferring the rich concepts available in image datasets solely into video generation. Moreover, we use a simple yet effective causal attention mask strategy to enable longer video synthesis, which mitigates the potential quality degradation effectively. Experimental results show the superiority of our method over existing baselines, particularly in terms of temporal coherence and fidelity to users' guidance. In addition, our model enables several intriguing applications that demonstrate potential for practical usage.

We present MAV3D (Make-A-Video3D), a method for generating three-dimensional dynamic scenes from text descriptions. Our approach uses a 4D dynamic Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), which is optimized for scene appearance, density, and motion consistency by querying a Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion-based model. The dynamic video output generated from the provided text can be viewed from any camera location and angle, and can be composited into any 3D environment. MAV3D does not require any 3D or 4D data and the T2V model is trained only on Text-Image pairs and unlabeled videos. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experiments and show an improvement over previously established internal baselines. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to generate 3D dynamic scenes given a text description.

The task of human reposing involves generating a realistic image of a person standing in an arbitrary conceivable pose. There are multiple difficulties in generating perceptually accurate images, and existing methods suffer from limitations in preserving texture, maintaining pattern coherence, respecting cloth boundaries, handling occlusions, manipulating skin generation, etc. These difficulties are further exacerbated by the fact that the possible space of pose orientation for humans is large and variable, the nature of clothing items is highly non-rigid, and the diversity in body shape differs largely among the population. To alleviate these difficulties and synthesize perceptually accurate images, we propose VGFlow. Our model uses a visibility-guided flow module to disentangle the flow into visible and invisible parts of the target for simultaneous texture preservation and style manipulation. Furthermore, to tackle distinct body shapes and avoid network artifacts, we also incorporate a self-supervised patch-wise "realness" loss to improve the output. VGFlow achieves state-of-the-art results as observed qualitatively and quantitatively on different image quality metrics (SSIM, LPIPS, FID).

Powered by large-scale text-to-image generation models, text-to-3D avatar generation has made promising progress. However, most methods fail to produce photorealistic results, limited by imprecise geometry and low-quality appearance. Towards more practical avatar generation, we present SEEAvatar, a method for generating photorealistic 3D avatars from text with SElf-Evolving constraints for decoupled geometry and appearance. For geometry, we propose to constrain the optimized avatar in a decent global shape with a template avatar. The template avatar is initialized with human prior and can be updated by the optimized avatar periodically as an evolving template, which enables more flexible shape generation. Besides, the geometry is also constrained by the static human prior in local parts like face and hands to maintain the delicate structures. For appearance generation, we use diffusion model enhanced by prompt engineering to guide a physically based rendering pipeline to generate realistic textures. The lightness constraint is applied on the albedo texture to suppress incorrect lighting effect. Experiments show that our method outperforms previous methods on both global and local geometry and appearance quality by a large margin. Since our method can produce high-quality meshes and textures, such assets can be directly applied in classic graphics pipeline for realistic rendering under any lighting condition. Project page at: https://seeavatar3d.github.io.

In this paper, we present an innovative solution for the challenges of the virtual try-on task: our novel Hierarchical Cross-Attention Network (HCANet). HCANet is crafted with two primary stages: geometric matching and try-on, each playing a crucial role in delivering realistic virtual try-on outcomes. A key feature of HCANet is the incorporation of a novel Hierarchical Cross-Attention (HCA) block into both stages, enabling the effective capture of long-range correlations between individual and clothing modalities. The HCA block enhances the depth and robustness of the network. By adopting a hierarchical approach, it facilitates a nuanced representation of the interaction between the person and clothing, capturing intricate details essential for an authentic virtual try-on experience. Our experiments establish the prowess of HCANet. The results showcase its performance across both quantitative metrics and subjective evaluations of visual realism. HCANet stands out as a state-of-the-art solution, demonstrating its capability to generate virtual try-on results that excel in accuracy and realism. This marks a significant step in advancing virtual try-on technologies.

Reconstructing real-world 3D objects has numerous applications in computer vision, such as virtual reality, video games, and animations. Ideally, 3D reconstruction methods should generate high-fidelity results with 3D consistency in real-time. Traditional methods match pixels between images using photo-consistency constraints or learned features, while differentiable rendering methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) use differentiable volume rendering or surface-based representation to generate high-fidelity scenes. However, these methods require excessive runtime for rendering, making them impractical for daily applications. To address these challenges, we present EvaSurf, an Efficient View-Aware implicit textured Surface reconstruction method on mobile devices. In our method, we first employ an efficient surface-based model with a multi-view supervision module to ensure accurate mesh reconstruction. To enable high-fidelity rendering, we learn an implicit texture embedded with a set of Gaussian lobes to capture view-dependent information. Furthermore, with the explicit geometry and the implicit texture, we can employ a lightweight neural shader to reduce the expense of computation and further support real-time rendering on common mobile devices. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can reconstruct high-quality appearance and accurate mesh on both synthetic and real-world datasets. Moreover, our method can be trained in just 1-2 hours using a single GPU and run on mobile devices at over 40 FPS (Frames Per Second), with a final package required for rendering taking up only 40-50 MB.

The recently developed and publicly available synthetic image generation methods and services make it possible to create extremely realistic imagery on demand, raising great risks for the integrity and safety of online information. State-of-the-art Synthetic Image Detection (SID) research has led to strong evidence on the advantages of feature extraction from foundation models. However, such extracted features mostly encapsulate high-level visual semantics instead of fine-grained details, which are more important for the SID task. On the contrary, shallow layers encode low-level visual information. In this work, we leverage the image representations extracted by intermediate Transformer blocks of CLIP's image-encoder via a lightweight network that maps them to a learnable forgery-aware vector space capable of generalizing exceptionally well. We also employ a trainable module to incorporate the importance of each Transformer block to the final prediction. Our method is compared against the state-of-the-art by evaluating it on 20 test datasets and exhibits an average +10.6% absolute performance improvement. Notably, the best performing models require just a single epoch for training (~8 minutes). Code available at https://github.com/mever-team/rine.

Creating visually appealing advertising images is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Is it possible to automatically generate such images using only basic product information--specifically, a product foreground image, taglines, and a target size? Existing methods mainly focus on parts of the problem and fail to provide a comprehensive solution. To address this gap, we propose a novel multistage framework called Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID). It consists of four sequential stages to highlight product foregrounds and taglines while achieving overall image aesthetics: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are designed and trained for the first three stages: First, we use a visual language model (VLM) to generate background prompts that match the products. Next, a VLM-based layout generation model arranges the placement of product foregrounds, graphic elements (taglines and decorative underlays), and various nongraphic elements (objects from the background prompt). Following this, we train an SDXL-based image generation model that can simultaneously accept prompts, layouts, and foreground controls. To support the PAID framework, we create corresponding datasets with over 50,000 labeled images. Extensive experimental results and online A/B tests demonstrate that PAID can produce more visually appealing advertising images.

We introduce MVSplat360, a feed-forward approach for 360{\deg} novel view synthesis (NVS) of diverse real-world scenes, using only sparse observations. This setting is inherently ill-posed due to minimal overlap among input views and insufficient visual information provided, making it challenging for conventional methods to achieve high-quality results. Our MVSplat360 addresses this by effectively combining geometry-aware 3D reconstruction with temporally consistent video generation. Specifically, it refactors a feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) model to render features directly into the latent space of a pre-trained Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) model, where these features then act as pose and visual cues to guide the denoising process and produce photorealistic 3D-consistent views. Our model is end-to-end trainable and supports rendering arbitrary views with as few as 5 sparse input views. To evaluate MVSplat360's performance, we introduce a new benchmark using the challenging DL3DV-10K dataset, where MVSplat360 achieves superior visual quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on wide-sweeping or even 360{\deg} NVS tasks. Experiments on the existing benchmark RealEstate10K also confirm the effectiveness of our model. The video results are available on our project page: https://donydchen.github.io/mvsplat360.

A word-as-image is a semantic typography technique where a word illustration presents a visualization of the meaning of the word, while also preserving its readability. We present a method to create word-as-image illustrations automatically. This task is highly challenging as it requires semantic understanding of the word and a creative idea of where and how to depict these semantics in a visually pleasing and legible manner. We rely on the remarkable ability of recent large pretrained language-vision models to distill textual concepts visually. We target simple, concise, black-and-white designs that convey the semantics clearly. We deliberately do not change the color or texture of the letters and do not use embellishments. Our method optimizes the outline of each letter to convey the desired concept, guided by a pretrained Stable Diffusion model. We incorporate additional loss terms to ensure the legibility of the text and the preservation of the style of the font. We show high quality and engaging results on numerous examples and compare to alternative techniques.

Realistic object interactions are crucial for creating immersive virtual experiences, yet synthesizing realistic 3D object dynamics in response to novel interactions remains a significant challenge. Unlike unconditional or text-conditioned dynamics generation, action-conditioned dynamics requires perceiving the physical material properties of objects and grounding the 3D motion prediction on these properties, such as object stiffness. However, estimating physical material properties is an open problem due to the lack of material ground-truth data, as measuring these properties for real objects is highly difficult. We present PhysDreamer, a physics-based approach that endows static 3D objects with interactive dynamics by leveraging the object dynamics priors learned by video generation models. By distilling these priors, PhysDreamer enables the synthesis of realistic object responses to novel interactions, such as external forces or agent manipulations. We demonstrate our approach on diverse examples of elastic objects and evaluate the realism of the synthesized interactions through a user study. PhysDreamer takes a step towards more engaging and realistic virtual experiences by enabling static 3D objects to dynamically respond to interactive stimuli in a physically plausible manner. See our project page at https://physdreamer.github.io/.

We present an approach to generate a 360-degree view of a person with a consistent, high-resolution appearance from a single input image. NeRF and its variants typically require videos or images from different viewpoints. Most existing approaches taking monocular input either rely on ground-truth 3D scans for supervision or lack 3D consistency. While recent 3D generative models show promise of 3D consistent human digitization, these approaches do not generalize well to diverse clothing appearances, and the results lack photorealism. Unlike existing work, we utilize high-capacity 2D diffusion models pretrained for general image synthesis tasks as an appearance prior of clothed humans. To achieve better 3D consistency while retaining the input identity, we progressively synthesize multiple views of the human in the input image by inpainting missing regions with shape-guided diffusion conditioned on silhouette and surface normal. We then fuse these synthesized multi-view images via inverse rendering to obtain a fully textured high-resolution 3D mesh of the given person. Experiments show that our approach outperforms prior methods and achieves photorealistic 360-degree synthesis of a wide range of clothed humans with complex textures from a single image.

Editing a local region or a specific object in a 3D scene represented by a NeRF is challenging, mainly due to the implicit nature of the scene representation. Consistently blending a new realistic object into the scene adds an additional level of difficulty. We present Blended-NeRF, a robust and flexible framework for editing a specific region of interest in an existing NeRF scene, based on text prompts or image patches, along with a 3D ROI box. Our method leverages a pretrained language-image model to steer the synthesis towards a user-provided text prompt or image patch, along with a 3D MLP model initialized on an existing NeRF scene to generate the object and blend it into a specified region in the original scene. We allow local editing by localizing a 3D ROI box in the input scene, and seamlessly blend the content synthesized inside the ROI with the existing scene using a novel volumetric blending technique. To obtain natural looking and view-consistent results, we leverage existing and new geometric priors and 3D augmentations for improving the visual fidelity of the final result. We test our framework both qualitatively and quantitatively on a variety of real 3D scenes and text prompts, demonstrating realistic multi-view consistent results with much flexibility and diversity compared to the baselines. Finally, we show the applicability of our framework for several 3D editing applications, including adding new objects to a scene, removing/replacing/altering existing objects, and texture conversion.

Human video generation task has gained significant attention with the advancement of deep generative models. Generating realistic videos with human movements is challenging in nature, due to the intricacies of human body topology and sensitivity to visual artifacts. The extensively studied 2D media generation methods take advantage of massive human media datasets, but struggle with 3D-aware control; whereas 3D avatar-based approaches, while offering more freedom in control, lack photorealism and cannot be harmonized seamlessly with background scene. We propose AMG, a method that combines the 2D photorealism and 3D controllability by conditioning video diffusion models on controlled rendering of 3D avatars. We additionally introduce a novel data processing pipeline that reconstructs and renders human avatar movements from dynamic camera videos. AMG is the first method that enables multi-person diffusion video generation with precise control over camera positions, human motions, and background style. We also demonstrate through extensive evaluation that it outperforms existing human video generation methods conditioned on pose sequences or driving videos in terms of realism and adaptability.

3D immersive scene generation is a challenging yet critical task in computer vision and graphics. A desired virtual 3D scene should 1) exhibit omnidirectional view consistency, and 2) allow for free exploration in complex scene hierarchies. Existing methods either rely on successive scene expansion via inpainting or employ panorama representation to represent large FOV scene environments. However, the generated scene suffers from semantic drift during expansion and is unable to handle occlusion among scene hierarchies. To tackle these challenges, we introduce LayerPano3D, a novel framework for full-view, explorable panoramic 3D scene generation from a single text prompt. Our key insight is to decompose a reference 2D panorama into multiple layers at different depth levels, where each layer reveals the unseen space from the reference views via diffusion prior. LayerPano3D comprises multiple dedicated designs: 1) we introduce a novel text-guided anchor view synthesis pipeline for high-quality, consistent panorama generation. 2) We pioneer the Layered 3D Panorama as underlying representation to manage complex scene hierarchies and lift it into 3D Gaussians to splat detailed 360-degree omnidirectional scenes with unconstrained viewing paths. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework generates state-of-the-art 3D panoramic scene in both full view consistency and immersive exploratory experience. We believe that LayerPano3D holds promise for advancing 3D panoramic scene creation with numerous applications.

Photo-realistic and controllable 3D avatars are crucial for various applications such as virtual and mixed reality (VR/MR), telepresence, gaming, and film production. Traditional methods for avatar creation often involve time-consuming scanning and reconstruction processes for each avatar, which limits their scalability. Furthermore, these methods do not offer the flexibility to sample new identities or modify existing ones. On the other hand, by learning a strong prior from data, generative models provide a promising alternative to traditional reconstruction methods, easing the time constraints for both data capture and processing. Additionally, generative methods enable downstream applications beyond reconstruction, such as editing and stylization. Nonetheless, the research on generative 3D avatars is still in its infancy, and therefore current methods still have limitations such as creating static avatars, lacking photo-realism, having incomplete facial details, or having limited drivability. To address this, we propose a text-conditioned generative model that can generate photo-realistic facial avatars of diverse identities, with more complete details like hair, eyes and mouth interior, and which can be driven through a powerful non-parametric latent expression space. Specifically, we integrate the generative and editing capabilities of latent diffusion models with a strong prior model for avatar expression driving. Our model can generate and control high-fidelity avatars, even those out-of-distribution. We also highlight its potential for downstream applications, including avatar editing and single-shot avatar reconstruction.

Recently, 3D generative models have made impressive progress, enabling the generation of almost arbitrary 3D assets from text or image inputs. However, these approaches generate objects in isolation without any consideration for the scene where they will eventually be placed. In this paper, we propose a framework that allows for the stylization of an existing 3D asset to fit into a given 2D scene, and additionally produce a photorealistic composition as if the asset was placed within the environment. This not only opens up a new level of control for object stylization, for example, the same assets can be stylized to reflect changes in the environment, such as summer to winter or fantasy versus futuristic settings-but also makes the object-scene composition more controllable. We achieve this by combining modeling and optimizing the object's texture and environmental lighting through differentiable ray tracing with image priors from pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. We demonstrate that our method is applicable to a wide variety of indoor and outdoor scenes and arbitrary objects.

Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the na\"ive approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Despite the longstanding adage "an image is worth a thousand words," creating accurate and hyper-detailed image descriptions for training Vision-Language models remains challenging. Current datasets typically have web-scraped descriptions that are short, low-granularity, and often contain details unrelated to the visual content. As a result, models trained on such data generate descriptions replete with missing information, visual inconsistencies, and hallucinations. To address these issues, we introduce ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop annotation framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions and a new dataset resulting from this process. We validate the framework through evaluations focused on the quality of the dataset and its utility for fine-tuning with considerations for readability, comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and human-likeness. Our dataset significantly improves across these dimensions compared to recently released datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V outputs (+48%). Furthermore, models fine-tuned with IIW data excel by +31% against prior work along the same human evaluation dimensions. Given our fine-tuned models, we also evaluate text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning. Our model's descriptions can generate images closest to the original, as judged by both automated and human metrics. We also find our model produces more compositionally rich descriptions, outperforming the best baseline by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets.

We present The Matrix, the first foundational realistic world simulator capable of generating continuous 720p high-fidelity real-scene video streams with real-time, responsive control in both first- and third-person perspectives, enabling immersive exploration of richly dynamic environments. Trained on limited supervised data from AAA games like Forza Horizon 5 and Cyberpunk 2077, complemented by large-scale unsupervised footage from real-world settings like Tokyo streets, The Matrix allows users to traverse diverse terrains -- deserts, grasslands, water bodies, and urban landscapes -- in continuous, uncut hour-long sequences. Operating at 16 FPS, the system supports real-time interactivity and demonstrates zero-shot generalization, translating virtual game environments to real-world contexts where collecting continuous movement data is often infeasible. For example, The Matrix can simulate a BMW X3 driving through an office setting--an environment present in neither gaming data nor real-world sources. This approach showcases the potential of AAA game data to advance robust world models, bridging the gap between simulations and real-world applications in scenarios with limited data.

Common editing operations performed by professional photographers include the cleanup operations: de-emphasizing distracting elements and enhancing subjects. These edits are challenging, requiring a delicate balance between manipulating the viewer's attention while maintaining photo realism. While recent approaches can boast successful examples of attention attenuation or amplification, most of them also suffer from frequent unrealistic edits. We propose a realism loss for saliency-guided image enhancement to maintain high realism across varying image types, while attenuating distractors and amplifying objects of interest. Evaluations with professional photographers confirm that we achieve the dual objective of realism and effectiveness, and outperform the recent approaches on their own datasets, while requiring a smaller memory footprint and runtime. We thus offer a viable solution for automating image enhancement and photo cleanup operations.

Creating digital avatars from textual prompts has long been a desirable yet challenging task. Despite the promising outcomes obtained through 2D diffusion priors in recent works, current methods face challenges in achieving high-quality and animated avatars effectively. In this paper, we present HeadStudio, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian splatting to generate realistic and animated avatars from text prompts. Our method drives 3D Gaussians semantically to create a flexible and achievable appearance through the intermediate FLAME representation. Specifically, we incorporate the FLAME into both 3D representation and score distillation: 1) FLAME-based 3D Gaussian splatting, driving 3D Gaussian points by rigging each point to a FLAME mesh. 2) FLAME-based score distillation sampling, utilizing FLAME-based fine-grained control signal to guide score distillation from the text prompt. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of HeadStudio in generating animatable avatars from textual prompts, exhibiting visually appealing appearances. The avatars are capable of rendering high-quality real-time (geq 40 fps) novel views at a resolution of 1024. They can be smoothly controlled by real-world speech and video. We hope that HeadStudio can advance digital avatar creation and that the present method can widely be applied across various domains.

In the realm of vision models, the primary mode of representation is using pixels to rasterize the visual world. Yet this is not always the best or unique way to represent visual content, especially for designers and artists who depict the world using geometry primitives such as polygons. Vector graphics (VG), on the other hand, offer a textual representation of visual content, which can be more concise and powerful for content like cartoons or sketches. Recent studies have shown promising results on processing vector graphics with capable Large Language Models (LLMs). However, such works focus solely on qualitative results, understanding, or a specific type of vector graphics. We propose VGBench, a comprehensive benchmark for LLMs on handling vector graphics through diverse aspects, including (a) both visual understanding and generation, (b) evaluation of various vector graphics formats, (c) diverse question types, (d) wide range of prompting techniques, (e) under multiple LLMs. Evaluating on our collected 4279 understanding and 5845 generation samples, we find that LLMs show strong capability on both aspects while exhibiting less desirable performance on low-level formats (SVG). Both data and evaluation pipeline will be open-sourced at https://vgbench.github.io.

Human visual imagination usually begins with analogies or rough sketches. For example, given an image with a girl playing guitar before a building, one may analogously imagine how it seems like if Iron Man playing guitar before Pyramid in Egypt. Nonetheless, visual condition may not be precisely aligned with the imaginary result indicated by text prompt, and existing layout-controllable text-to-image (T2I) generation models is prone to producing degraded generated results with obvious artifacts. To address this issue, we present a novel T2I generation method dubbed SmartControl, which is designed to modify the rough visual conditions for adapting to text prompt. The key idea of our SmartControl is to relax the visual condition on the areas that are conflicted with text prompts. In specific, a Control Scale Predictor (CSP) is designed to identify the conflict regions and predict the local control scales, while a dataset with text prompts and rough visual conditions is constructed for training CSP. It is worth noting that, even with a limited number (e.g., 1,000~2,000) of training samples, our SmartControl can generalize well to unseen objects. Extensive experiments on four typical visual condition types clearly show the efficacy of our SmartControl against state-of-the-arts. Source code, pre-trained models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/liuxiaoyu1104/SmartControl.

Predicting realistic ground views from satellite imagery in urban scenes is a challenging task due to the significant view gaps between satellite and ground-view images. We propose a novel pipeline to tackle this challenge, by generating geospecifc views that maximally respect the weak geometry and texture from multi-view satellite images. Different from existing approaches that hallucinate images from cues such as partial semantics or geometry from overhead satellite images, our method directly predicts ground-view images at geolocation by using a comprehensive set of information from the satellite image, resulting in ground-level images with a resolution boost at a factor of ten or more. We leverage a novel building refinement method to reduce geometric distortions in satellite data at ground level, which ensures the creation of accurate conditions for view synthesis using diffusion networks. Moreover, we proposed a novel geospecific prior, which prompts distribution learning of diffusion models to respect image samples that are closer to the geolocation of the predicted images. We demonstrate our pipeline is the first to generate close-to-real and geospecific ground views merely based on satellite images.

Generative models can produce impressively realistic images. This paper demonstrates that generated images have geometric features different from those of real images. We build a set of collections of generated images, prequalified to fool simple, signal-based classifiers into believing they are real. We then show that prequalified generated images can be identified reliably by classifiers that only look at geometric properties. We use three such classifiers. All three classifiers are denied access to image pixels, and look only at derived geometric features. The first classifier looks at the perspective field of the image, the second looks at lines detected in the image, and the third looks at relations between detected objects and shadows. Our procedure detects generated images more reliably than SOTA local signal based detectors, for images from a number of distinct generators. Saliency maps suggest that the classifiers can identify geometric problems reliably. We conclude that current generators cannot reliably reproduce geometric properties of real images.

We present a novel appearance model that simultaneously realizes explicit high-quality 3D surface mesh recovery and photorealistic novel view synthesis from sparse view samples. Our key idea is to model the underlying scene geometry Mesh as an Atlas of Charts which we render with 2D Gaussian surfels (MAtCha Gaussians). MAtCha distills high-frequency scene surface details from an off-the-shelf monocular depth estimator and refines it through Gaussian surfel rendering. The Gaussian surfels are attached to the charts on the fly, satisfying photorealism of neural volumetric rendering and crisp geometry of a mesh model, i.e., two seemingly contradicting goals in a single model. At the core of MAtCha lies a novel neural deformation model and a structure loss that preserve the fine surface details distilled from learned monocular depths while addressing their fundamental scale ambiguities. Results of extensive experimental validation demonstrate MAtCha's state-of-the-art quality of surface reconstruction and photorealism on-par with top contenders but with dramatic reduction in the number of input views and computational time. We believe MAtCha will serve as a foundational tool for any visual application in vision, graphics, and robotics that require explicit geometry in addition to photorealism. Our project page is the following: https://anttwo.github.io/matcha/

Recent text-to-image generation models have shown promising results in generating high-fidelity photo-realistic images. Though the results are astonishing to human eyes, how applicable these generated images are for recognition tasks remains under-explored. In this work, we extensively study whether and how synthetic images generated from state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models can be used for image recognition tasks, and focus on two perspectives: synthetic data for improving classification models in data-scarce settings (i.e. zero-shot and few-shot), and synthetic data for large-scale model pre-training for transfer learning. We showcase the powerfulness and shortcomings of synthetic data from existing generative models, and propose strategies for better applying synthetic data for recognition tasks. Code: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SyntheticData.

We present LRM-Zero, a Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) trained entirely on synthesized 3D data, achieving high-quality sparse-view 3D reconstruction. The core of LRM-Zero is our procedural 3D dataset, Zeroverse, which is automatically synthesized from simple primitive shapes with random texturing and augmentations (e.g., height fields, boolean differences, and wireframes). Unlike previous 3D datasets (e.g., Objaverse) which are often captured or crafted by humans to approximate real 3D data, Zeroverse completely ignores realistic global semantics but is rich in complex geometric and texture details that are locally similar to or even more intricate than real objects. We demonstrate that our LRM-Zero, trained with our fully synthesized Zeroverse, can achieve high visual quality in the reconstruction of real-world objects, competitive with models trained on Objaverse. We also analyze several critical design choices of Zeroverse that contribute to LRM-Zero's capability and training stability. Our work demonstrates that 3D reconstruction, one of the core tasks in 3D vision, can potentially be addressed without the semantics of real-world objects. The Zeroverse's procedural synthesis code and interactive visualization are available at: https://desaixie.github.io/lrm-zero/.

Image generation today can produce somewhat realistic images from text prompts. However, if one asks the generator to synthesize a particular camera setting such as creating different fields of view using a 24mm lens versus a 70mm lens, the generator will not be able to interpret and generate scene-consistent images. This limitation not only hinders the adoption of generative tools in photography applications but also exemplifies a broader issue of bridging the gap between the data-driven models and the physical world. In this paper, we introduce the concept of Generative Photography, a framework designed to control camera intrinsic settings during content generation. The core innovation of this work are the concepts of Dimensionality Lifting and Contrastive Camera Learning, which achieve continuous and consistent transitions for different camera settings. Experimental results show that our method produces significantly more scene-consistent photorealistic images than state-of-the-art models such as Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.

DiT diffusion models have achieved great success in text-to-video generation, leveraging their scalability in model capacity and data scale. High content and motion fidelity aligned with text prompts, however, often require large model parameters and a substantial number of function evaluations (NFEs). Realistic and visually appealing details are typically reflected in high resolution outputs, further amplifying computational demands especially for single stage DiT models. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two stage framework, FlashVideo, which strategically allocates model capacity and NFEs across stages to balance generation fidelity and quality. In the first stage, prompt fidelity is prioritized through a low resolution generation process utilizing large parameters and sufficient NFEs to enhance computational efficiency. The second stage establishes flow matching between low and high resolutions, effectively generating fine details with minimal NFEs. Quantitative and visual results demonstrate that FlashVideo achieves state-of-the-art high resolution video generation with superior computational efficiency. Additionally, the two-stage design enables users to preview the initial output before committing to full resolution generation, thereby significantly reducing computational costs and wait times as well as enhancing commercial viability .

In recent years, extensive research has focused on 3D natural scene generation, but the domain of 3D city generation has not received as much exploration. This is due to the greater challenges posed by 3D city generation, mainly because humans are more sensitive to structural distortions in urban environments. Additionally, generating 3D cities is more complex than 3D natural scenes since buildings, as objects of the same class, exhibit a wider range of appearances compared to the relatively consistent appearance of objects like trees in natural scenes. To address these challenges, we propose CityDreamer, a compositional generative model designed specifically for unbounded 3D cities, which separates the generation of building instances from other background objects, such as roads, green lands, and water areas, into distinct modules. Furthermore, we construct two datasets, OSM and GoogleEarth, containing a vast amount of real-world city imagery to enhance the realism of the generated 3D cities both in their layouts and appearances. Through extensive experiments, CityDreamer has proven its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generating a wide range of lifelike 3D cities.

We present a video generation model that accurately reproduces object motion, changes in camera viewpoint, and new content that arises over time. Existing video generation methods often fail to produce new content as a function of time while maintaining consistencies expected in real environments, such as plausible dynamics and object persistence. A common failure case is for content to never change due to over-reliance on inductive biases to provide temporal consistency, such as a single latent code that dictates content for the entire video. On the other extreme, without long-term consistency, generated videos may morph unrealistically between different scenes. To address these limitations, we prioritize the time axis by redesigning the temporal latent representation and learning long-term consistency from data by training on longer videos. To this end, we leverage a two-phase training strategy, where we separately train using longer videos at a low resolution and shorter videos at a high resolution. To evaluate the capabilities of our model, we introduce two new benchmark datasets with explicit focus on long-term temporal dynamics.

Current work on image-based story generation suffers from the fact that the existing image sequence collections do not have coherent plots behind them. We improve visual story generation by producing a new image-grounded dataset, Visual Writing Prompts (VWP). VWP contains almost 2K selected sequences of movie shots, each including 5-10 images. The image sequences are aligned with a total of 12K stories which were collected via crowdsourcing given the image sequences and a set of grounded characters from the corresponding image sequence. Our new image sequence collection and filtering process has allowed us to obtain stories that are more coherent and have more narrativity compared to previous work. We also propose a character-based story generation model driven by coherence as a strong baseline. Evaluations show that our generated stories are more coherent, visually grounded, and have more narrativity than stories generated with the current state-of-the-art model.

We address the problem of synthesizing multi-view optical illusions: images that change appearance upon a transformation, such as a flip or rotation. We propose a simple, zero-shot method for obtaining these illusions from off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion models. During the reverse diffusion process, we estimate the noise from different views of a noisy image, and then combine these noise estimates together and denoise the image. A theoretical analysis suggests that this method works precisely for views that can be written as orthogonal transformations, of which permutations are a subset. This leads to the idea of a visual anagram--an image that changes appearance under some rearrangement of pixels. This includes rotations and flips, but also more exotic pixel permutations such as a jigsaw rearrangement. Our approach also naturally extends to illusions with more than two views. We provide both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrating the effectiveness and flexibility of our method. Please see our project webpage for additional visualizations and results: https://dangeng.github.io/visual_anagrams/

This paper aims to tackle the challenge of dynamic view synthesis from multi-view videos. The key observation is that while previous grid-based methods offer consistent rendering, they fall short in capturing appearance details of a complex dynamic scene, a domain where multi-view image-based rendering methods demonstrate the opposite properties. To combine the best of two worlds, we introduce Im4D, a hybrid scene representation that consists of a grid-based geometry representation and a multi-view image-based appearance representation. Specifically, the dynamic geometry is encoded as a 4D density function composed of spatiotemporal feature planes and a small MLP network, which globally models the scene structure and facilitates the rendering consistency. We represent the scene appearance by the original multi-view videos and a network that learns to predict the color of a 3D point from image features, instead of memorizing detailed appearance totally with networks, thereby naturally making the learning of networks easier. Our method is evaluated on five dynamic view synthesis datasets including DyNeRF, ZJU-MoCap, NHR, DNA-Rendering and ENeRF-Outdoor datasets. The results show that Im4D exhibits state-of-the-art performance in rendering quality and can be trained efficiently, while realizing real-time rendering with a speed of 79.8 FPS for 512x512 images, on a single RTX 3090 GPU.

Multi-view image generation attracts particular attention these days due to its promising 3D-related applications, e.g., image viewpoint editing. Most existing methods follow a paradigm where a 3D representation is first synthesized, and then rendered into 2D images to ensure photo-consistency across viewpoints. However, such explicit bias for photo-consistency sacrifices photo-realism, causing geometry artifacts and loss of fine-scale details when these methods are applied to edit real images. To address this issue, we propose ray conditioning, a geometry-free alternative that relaxes the photo-consistency constraint. Our method generates multi-view images by conditioning a 2D GAN on a light field prior. With explicit viewpoint control, state-of-the-art photo-realism and identity consistency, our method is particularly suited for the viewpoint editing task.

Human perception of the world is shaped by a multitude of viewpoints and modalities. While many existing datasets focus on scene understanding from a certain perspective (e.g. egocentric or third-person views), our dataset offers a panoptic perspective (i.e. multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities). Specifically, we encapsulate third-person panoramic and front views, as well as egocentric monocular/binocular views with rich modalities including video, multi-channel audio, directional binaural delay, location data and textual scene descriptions within each scene captured, presenting comprehensive observation of the world. Figure 1 offers a glimpse of all 28 scene categories of our 360+x dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first database that covers multiple viewpoints with multiple data modalities to mimic how daily information is accessed in the real world. Through our benchmark analysis, we presented 5 different scene understanding tasks on the proposed 360+x dataset to evaluate the impact and benefit of each data modality and perspective in panoptic scene understanding. We hope this unique dataset could broaden the scope of comprehensive scene understanding and encourage the community to approach these problems from more diverse perspectives.

We present a method for estimating neural scenes representations of objects given only a single image. The core of our method is the estimation of a geometric scaffold for the object and its use as a guide for the reconstruction of the underlying radiance field. Our formulation is based on a generative process that first maps a latent code to a voxelized shape, and then renders it to an image, with the object appearance being controlled by a second latent code. During inference, we optimize both the latent codes and the networks to fit a test image of a new object. The explicit disentanglement of shape and appearance allows our model to be fine-tuned given a single image. We can then render new views in a geometrically consistent manner and they represent faithfully the input object. Additionally, our method is able to generalize to images outside of the training domain (more realistic renderings and even real photographs). Finally, the inferred geometric scaffold is itself an accurate estimate of the object's 3D shape. We demonstrate in several experiments the effectiveness of our approach in both synthetic and real images.

Automatic 3D content creation has achieved rapid progress recently due to the availability of pre-trained, large language models and image diffusion models, forming the emerging topic of text-to-3D content creation. Existing text-to-3D methods commonly use implicit scene representations, which couple the geometry and appearance via volume rendering and are suboptimal in terms of recovering finer geometries and achieving photorealistic rendering; consequently, they are less effective for generating high-quality 3D assets. In this work, we propose a new method of Fantasia3D for high-quality text-to-3D content creation. Key to Fantasia3D is the disentangled modeling and learning of geometry and appearance. For geometry learning, we rely on a hybrid scene representation, and propose to encode surface normal extracted from the representation as the input of the image diffusion model. For appearance modeling, we introduce the spatially varying bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) into the text-to-3D task, and learn the surface material for photorealistic rendering of the generated surface. Our disentangled framework is more compatible with popular graphics engines, supporting relighting, editing, and physical simulation of the generated 3D assets. We conduct thorough experiments that show the advantages of our method over existing ones under different text-to-3D task settings. Project page and source codes: https://fantasia3d.github.io/.

Generating photorealistic images with controllable camera pose and scene contents is essential for many applications including AR/VR and simulation. Despite the fact that rapid progress has been made in 3D-aware generative models, most existing methods focus on object-centric images and are not applicable to generating urban scenes for free camera viewpoint control and scene editing. To address this challenging task, we propose UrbanGIRAFFE, which uses a coarse 3D panoptic prior, including the layout distribution of uncountable stuff and countable objects, to guide a 3D-aware generative model. Our model is compositional and controllable as it breaks down the scene into stuff, objects, and sky. Using stuff prior in the form of semantic voxel grids, we build a conditioned stuff generator that effectively incorporates the coarse semantic and geometry information. The object layout prior further allows us to learn an object generator from cluttered scenes. With proper loss functions, our approach facilitates photorealistic 3D-aware image synthesis with diverse controllability, including large camera movement, stuff editing, and object manipulation. We validate the effectiveness of our model on both synthetic and real-world datasets, including the challenging KITTI-360 dataset.

Generative models trained on internet data have revolutionized how text, image, and video content can be created. Perhaps the next milestone for generative models is to simulate realistic experience in response to actions taken by humans, robots, and other interactive agents. Applications of a real-world simulator range from controllable content creation in games and movies, to training embodied agents purely in simulation that can be directly deployed in the real world. We explore the possibility of learning a universal simulator (UniSim) of real-world interaction through generative modeling. We first make the important observation that natural datasets available for learning a real-world simulator are often rich along different axes (e.g., abundant objects in image data, densely sampled actions in robotics data, and diverse movements in navigation data). With careful orchestration of diverse datasets, each providing a different aspect of the overall experience, UniSim can emulate how humans and agents interact with the world by simulating the visual outcome of both high-level instructions such as "open the drawer" and low-level controls such as "move by x, y" from otherwise static scenes and objects. There are numerous use cases for such a real-world simulator. As an example, we use UniSim to train both high-level vision-language planners and low-level reinforcement learning policies, each of which exhibit zero-shot real-world transfer after training purely in a learned real-world simulator. We also show that other types of intelligence such as video captioning models can benefit from training with simulated experience in UniSim, opening up even wider applications. Video demos can be found at https://universal-simulator.github.io.

Despite significant advances in large-scale text-to-image models, achieving hyper-realistic human image generation remains a desirable yet unsolved task. Existing models like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2 tend to generate human images with incoherent parts or unnatural poses. To tackle these challenges, our key insight is that human image is inherently structural over multiple granularities, from the coarse-level body skeleton to fine-grained spatial geometry. Therefore, capturing such correlations between the explicit appearance and latent structure in one model is essential to generate coherent and natural human images. To this end, we propose a unified framework, HyperHuman, that generates in-the-wild human images of high realism and diverse layouts. Specifically, 1) we first build a large-scale human-centric dataset, named HumanVerse, which consists of 340M images with comprehensive annotations like human pose, depth, and surface normal. 2) Next, we propose a Latent Structural Diffusion Model that simultaneously denoises the depth and surface normal along with the synthesized RGB image. Our model enforces the joint learning of image appearance, spatial relationship, and geometry in a unified network, where each branch in the model complements to each other with both structural awareness and textural richness. 3) Finally, to further boost the visual quality, we propose a Structure-Guided Refiner to compose the predicted conditions for more detailed generation of higher resolution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework yields the state-of-the-art performance, generating hyper-realistic human images under diverse scenarios. Project Page: https://snap-research.github.io/HyperHuman/

We address the problem of active mapping with a continually-learned neural scene representation, namely Active Neural Mapping. The key lies in actively finding the target space to be explored with efficient agent movement, thus minimizing the map uncertainty on-the-fly within a previously unseen environment. In this paper, we examine the weight space of the continually-learned neural field, and show empirically that the neural variability, the prediction robustness against random weight perturbation, can be directly utilized to measure the instant uncertainty of the neural map. Together with the continuous geometric information inherited in the neural map, the agent can be guided to find a traversable path to gradually gain knowledge of the environment. We present for the first time an active mapping system with a coordinate-based implicit neural representation for online scene reconstruction. Experiments in the visually-realistic Gibson and Matterport3D environment demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method.

Reconstructing 3D human appearance from a single image is crucial for achieving holographic communication and immersive social experiences. However, this remains a challenge for existing methods, which typically rely on multi-camera setups or are limited to offline operations. In this paper, we propose R^2Human, the first approach for real-time inference and rendering of photorealistic 3D human appearance from a single image. The core of our approach is to combine the strengths of implicit texture fields and explicit neural rendering with our novel representation, namely Z-map. Based on this, we present an end-to-end network that performs high-fidelity color reconstruction of visible areas and provides reliable color inference for occluded regions. To further enhance the 3D perception ability of our network, we leverage the Fourier occupancy field to reconstruct a detailed 3D geometry, which serves as a prior for the texture field generation and provides a sampling surface in the rendering stage. Experiments show that our end-to-end method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic data and challenging real-world images and even outperforms many offline methods. The project page is available for research purposes at http://cic.tju.edu.cn/faculty/likun/projects/R2Human.

We target a 3D generative model for general natural scenes that are typically unique and intricate. Lacking the necessary volumes of training data, along with the difficulties of having ad hoc designs in presence of varying scene characteristics, renders existing setups intractable. Inspired by classical patch-based image models, we advocate for synthesizing 3D scenes at the patch level, given a single example. At the core of this work lies important algorithmic designs w.r.t the scene representation and generative patch nearest-neighbor module, that address unique challenges arising from lifting classical 2D patch-based framework to 3D generation. These design choices, on a collective level, contribute to a robust, effective, and efficient model that can generate high-quality general natural scenes with both realistic geometric structure and visual appearance, in large quantities and varieties, as demonstrated upon a variety of exemplar scenes.

Generating faithful visualizations of human faces requires capturing both coarse and fine-level details of the face geometry and appearance. Existing methods are either data-driven, requiring an extensive corpus of data not publicly accessible to the research community, or fail to capture fine details because they rely on geometric face models that cannot represent fine-grained details in texture with a mesh discretization and linear deformation designed to model only a coarse face geometry. We introduce a method that bridges this gap by drawing inspiration from traditional computer graphics techniques. Unseen expressions are modeled by blending appearance from a sparse set of extreme poses. This blending is performed by measuring local volumetric changes in those expressions and locally reproducing their appearance whenever a similar expression is performed at test time. We show that our method generalizes to unseen expressions, adding fine-grained effects on top of smooth volumetric deformations of a face, and demonstrate how it generalizes beyond faces.

3D scene generation conditioned on text prompts has significantly progressed due to the development of 2D diffusion generation models. However, the textual description of 3D scenes is inherently inaccurate and lacks fine-grained control during training, leading to implausible scene generation. As an intuitive and feasible solution, the 3D layout allows for precise specification of object locations within the scene. To this end, we present a text-to-scene generation method (namely, Layout2Scene) using additional semantic layout as the prompt to inject precise control of 3D object positions. Specifically, we first introduce a scene hybrid representation to decouple objects and backgrounds, which is initialized via a pre-trained text-to-3D model. Then, we propose a two-stage scheme to optimize the geometry and appearance of the initialized scene separately. To fully leverage 2D diffusion priors in geometry and appearance generation, we introduce a semantic-guided geometry diffusion model and a semantic-geometry guided diffusion model which are finetuned on a scene dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more plausible and realistic scenes as compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Furthermore, the generated scene allows for flexible yet precise editing, thereby facilitating multiple downstream applications.

3D Visual Grounding (3DVG) aims to locate objects in 3D scenes based on textual descriptions, which is essential for applications like augmented reality and robotics. Traditional 3DVG approaches rely on annotated 3D datasets and predefined object categories, limiting scalability and adaptability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SeeGround, a zero-shot 3DVG framework leveraging 2D Vision-Language Models (VLMs) trained on large-scale 2D data. We propose to represent 3D scenes as a hybrid of query-aligned rendered images and spatially enriched text descriptions, bridging the gap between 3D data and 2D-VLMs input formats. We propose two modules: the Perspective Adaptation Module, which dynamically selects viewpoints for query-relevant image rendering, and the Fusion Alignment Module, which integrates 2D images with 3D spatial descriptions to enhance object localization. Extensive experiments on ScanRefer and Nr3D demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing zero-shot methods by large margins. Notably, we exceed weakly supervised methods and rival some fully supervised ones, outperforming previous SOTA by 7.7% on ScanRefer and 7.1% on Nr3D, showcasing its effectiveness.

Recent advancements in large generative models, particularly diffusion-based methods, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of image editing. However, achieving precise control over image composition tasks remains a challenge. Layered representations, which allow for independent editing of image components, are essential for user-driven content creation, yet existing approaches often struggle to decompose image into plausible layers with accurately retained transparent visual effects such as shadows and reflections. We propose LayerDecomp, a generative framework for image layer decomposition which outputs photorealistic clean backgrounds and high-quality transparent foregrounds with faithfully preserved visual effects. To enable effective training, we first introduce a dataset preparation pipeline that automatically scales up simulated multi-layer data with synthesized visual effects. To further enhance real-world applicability, we supplement this simulated dataset with camera-captured images containing natural visual effects. Additionally, we propose a consistency loss which enforces the model to learn accurate representations for the transparent foreground layer when ground-truth annotations are not available. Our method achieves superior quality in layer decomposition, outperforming existing approaches in object removal and spatial editing tasks across several benchmarks and multiple user studies, unlocking various creative possibilities for layer-wise image editing. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LayerDecomp.

In the text-to-image generation field, recent remarkable progress in Stable Diffusion makes it possible to generate rich kinds of novel photorealistic images. However, current models still face misalignment issues (e.g., problematic spatial relation understanding and numeration failure) in complex natural scenes, which impedes the high-faithfulness text-to-image generation. Although recent efforts have been made to improve controllability by giving fine-grained guidance (e.g., sketch and scribbles), this issue has not been fundamentally tackled since users have to provide such guidance information manually. In this work, we strive to synthesize high-fidelity images that are semantically aligned with a given textual prompt without any guidance. Toward this end, we propose a coarse-to-fine paradigm to achieve layout planning and image generation. Concretely, we first generate the coarse-grained layout conditioned on a given textual prompt via in-context learning based on Large Language Models. Afterward, we propose a fine-grained object-interaction diffusion method to synthesize high-faithfulness images conditioned on the prompt and the automatically generated layout. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models in terms of layout and image generation. Our code and settings are available at https://layoutllm-t2i.github.io.

As synthetic media becomes progressively more realistic and barriers to using it continue to lower, the technology has been increasingly utilized for malicious purposes, from financial fraud to nonconsensual pornography. Today, the principal defense against being misled by synthetic media relies on the ability of the human observer to visually and auditorily discern between real and fake. However, it remains unclear just how vulnerable people actually are to deceptive synthetic media in the course of their day to day lives. We conducted a perceptual study with 1276 participants to assess how accurate people were at distinguishing synthetic images, audio only, video only, and audiovisual stimuli from authentic. To reflect the circumstances under which people would likely encounter synthetic media in the wild, testing conditions and stimuli emulated a typical online platform, while all synthetic media used in the survey was sourced from publicly accessible generative AI technology. We find that overall, participants struggled to meaningfully discern between synthetic and authentic content. We also find that detection performance worsens when the stimuli contains synthetic content as compared to authentic content, images featuring human faces as compared to non face objects, a single modality as compared to multimodal stimuli, mixed authenticity as compared to being fully synthetic for audiovisual stimuli, and features foreign languages as compared to languages the observer is fluent in. Finally, we also find that prior knowledge of synthetic media does not meaningfully impact their detection performance. Collectively, these results indicate that people are highly susceptible to being tricked by synthetic media in their daily lives and that human perceptual detection capabilities can no longer be relied upon as an effective counterdefense.

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.

3D cars are commonly used in self-driving systems, virtual/augmented reality, and games. However, existing 3D car datasets are either synthetic or low-quality, presenting a significant gap toward the high-quality real-world 3D car datasets and limiting their applications in practical scenarios. In this paper, we propose the first large-scale 3D real car dataset, termed 3DRealCar, offering three distinctive features. (1) High-Volume: 2,500 cars are meticulously scanned by 3D scanners, obtaining car images and point clouds with real-world dimensions; (2) High-Quality: Each car is captured in an average of 200 dense, high-resolution 360-degree RGB-D views, enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction; (3) High-Diversity: The dataset contains various cars from over 100 brands, collected under three distinct lighting conditions, including reflective, standard, and dark. Additionally, we offer detailed car parsing maps for each instance to promote research in car parsing tasks. Moreover, we remove background point clouds and standardize the car orientation to a unified axis for the reconstruction only on cars without background and controllable rendering. We benchmark 3D reconstruction results with state-of-the-art methods across each lighting condition in 3DRealCar. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the standard lighting condition part of 3DRealCar can be used to produce a large number of high-quality 3D cars, improving various 2D and 3D tasks related to cars. Notably, our dataset brings insight into the fact that recent 3D reconstruction methods face challenges in reconstructing high-quality 3D cars under reflective and dark lighting conditions. red{https://xiaobiaodu.github.io/3drealcar/{Our dataset is available here.}}

Emerging Metaverse applications demand accessible, accurate, and easy-to-use tools for 3D digital human creations in order to depict different cultures and societies as if in the physical world. Recent large-scale vision-language advances pave the way to for novices to conveniently customize 3D content. However, the generated CG-friendly assets still cannot represent the desired facial traits for human characteristics. In this paper, we present DreamFace, a progressive scheme to generate personalized 3D faces under text guidance. It enables layman users to naturally customize 3D facial assets that are compatible with CG pipelines, with desired shapes, textures, and fine-grained animation capabilities. From a text input to describe the facial traits, we first introduce a coarse-to-fine scheme to generate the neutral facial geometry with a unified topology. We employ a selection strategy in the CLIP embedding space, and subsequently optimize both the details displacements and normals using Score Distillation Sampling from generic Latent Diffusion Model. Then, for neutral appearance generation, we introduce a dual-path mechanism, which combines the generic LDM with a novel texture LDM to ensure both the diversity and textural specification in the UV space. We also employ a two-stage optimization to perform SDS in both the latent and image spaces to significantly provides compact priors for fine-grained synthesis. Our generated neutral assets naturally support blendshapes-based facial animations. We further improve the animation ability with personalized deformation characteristics by learning the universal expression prior using the cross-identity hypernetwork. Notably, DreamFace can generate of realistic 3D facial assets with physically-based rendering quality and rich animation ability from video footage, even for fashion icons or exotic characters in cartoons and fiction movies.

Significant advancements in video diffusion models have brought substantial progress to the field of text-to-video (T2V) synthesis. However, existing T2V synthesis model struggle to accurately generate complex motion dynamics, leading to a reduction in video realism. One possible solution is to collect massive data and train the model on it, but this would be extremely expensive. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we reformulate the typical T2V generation process as a search-based generation pipeline. Instead of scaling up the model training, we employ existing videos as the motion prior database. Specifically, we divide T2V generation process into two steps: (i) For a given prompt input, we search existing text-video datasets to find videos with text labels that closely match the prompt motions. We propose a tailored search algorithm that emphasizes object motion features. (ii) Retrieved videos are processed and distilled into motion priors to fine-tune a pre-trained base T2V model, followed by generating desired videos using input prompt. By utilizing the priors gleaned from the searched videos, we enhance the realism of the generated videos' motion. All operations can be finished on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU. We validate our method against state-of-the-art T2V models across diverse prompt inputs. The code will be public.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often generate plausible but incorrect responses to visual queries. However, reliably quantifying the effect of such hallucinations in free-form responses to open-ended queries is challenging as it requires visually verifying each claim within the response. We propose Programmatic VLM Evaluation (PROVE), a new benchmarking paradigm for evaluating VLM responses to open-ended queries. To construct PROVE, we provide a large language model (LLM) with a high-fidelity scene-graph representation constructed from a hyper-detailed image caption, and prompt it to generate diverse question-answer (QA) pairs, as well as programs that can be executed over the scene graph object to verify each QA pair. We thus construct a benchmark of 10.5k challenging but visually grounded QA pairs. Next, to evaluate free-form model responses to queries in PROVE, we propose a programmatic evaluation strategy that measures both the helpfulness and truthfulness of a response within a unified scene graph-based framework. We benchmark the helpfulness-truthfulness trade-offs of a range of VLMs on PROVE, finding that very few are in-fact able to achieve a good balance between the two. Project page: https://prove-explorer.netlify.app/.

Recent advances in view synthesis and real-time rendering have achieved photorealistic quality at impressive rendering speeds. While Radiance Field-based methods achieve state-of-the-art quality in challenging scenarios such as in-the-wild captures and large-scale scenes, they often suffer from excessively high compute requirements linked to volumetric rendering. Gaussian Splatting-based methods, on the other hand, rely on rasterization and naturally achieve real-time rendering but suffer from brittle optimization heuristics that underperform on more challenging scenes. In this work, we present RadSplat, a lightweight method for robust real-time rendering of complex scenes. Our main contributions are threefold. First, we use radiance fields as a prior and supervision signal for optimizing point-based scene representations, leading to improved quality and more robust optimization. Next, we develop a novel pruning technique reducing the overall point count while maintaining high quality, leading to smaller and more compact scene representations with faster inference speeds. Finally, we propose a novel test-time filtering approach that further accelerates rendering and allows to scale to larger, house-sized scenes. We find that our method enables state-of-the-art synthesis of complex captures at 900+ FPS.

In this paper, we propose a method to extract physically-based rendering (PBR) materials from a single real-world image. We do so in two steps: first, we map regions of the image to material concepts using a diffusion model, which allows the sampling of texture images resembling each material in the scene. Second, we benefit from a separate network to decompose the generated textures into Spatially Varying BRDFs (SVBRDFs), providing us with materials ready to be used in rendering applications. Our approach builds on existing synthetic material libraries with SVBRDF ground truth, but also exploits a diffusion-generated RGB texture dataset to allow generalization to new samples using unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Our contributions are thoroughly evaluated on synthetic and real-world datasets. We further demonstrate the applicability of our method for editing 3D scenes with materials estimated from real photographs. The code and models will be made open-source. Project page: https://astra-vision.github.io/MaterialPalette/

Radiance Field methods have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis of scenes captured with multiple photos or videos. However, achieving high visual quality still requires neural networks that are costly to train and render, while recent faster methods inevitably trade off speed for quality. For unbounded and complete scenes (rather than isolated objects) and 1080p resolution rendering, no current method can achieve real-time display rates. We introduce three key elements that allow us to achieve state-of-the-art visual quality while maintaining competitive training times and importantly allow high-quality real-time (>= 30 fps) novel-view synthesis at 1080p resolution. First, starting from sparse points produced during camera calibration, we represent the scene with 3D Gaussians that preserve desirable properties of continuous volumetric radiance fields for scene optimization while avoiding unnecessary computation in empty space; Second, we perform interleaved optimization/density control of the 3D Gaussians, notably optimizing anisotropic covariance to achieve an accurate representation of the scene; Third, we develop a fast visibility-aware rendering algorithm that supports anisotropic splatting and both accelerates training and allows realtime rendering. We demonstrate state-of-the-art visual quality and real-time rendering on several established datasets.

Animating a still image offers an engaging visual experience. Traditional image animation techniques mainly focus on animating natural scenes with stochastic dynamics (e.g. clouds and fluid) or domain-specific motions (e.g. human hair or body motions), and thus limits their applicability to more general visual content. To overcome this limitation, we explore the synthesis of dynamic content for open-domain images, converting them into animated videos. The key idea is to utilize the motion prior of text-to-video diffusion models by incorporating the image into the generative process as guidance. Given an image, we first project it into a text-aligned rich context representation space using a query transformer, which facilitates the video model to digest the image content in a compatible fashion. However, some visual details still struggle to be preserved in the resultant videos. To supplement with more precise image information, we further feed the full image to the diffusion model by concatenating it with the initial noises. Experimental results show that our proposed method can produce visually convincing and more logical & natural motions, as well as higher conformity to the input image. Comparative evaluation demonstrates the notable superiority of our approach over existing competitors.

Synthesizing high-fidelity videos from real-world multi-view input is challenging because of the complexities of real-world environments and highly dynamic motions. Previous works based on neural radiance fields have demonstrated high-quality reconstructions of dynamic scenes. However, training such models on real-world scenes is time-consuming, usually taking days or weeks. In this paper, we present a novel method named MixVoxels to better represent the dynamic scenes with fast training speed and competitive rendering qualities. The proposed MixVoxels represents the 4D dynamic scenes as a mixture of static and dynamic voxels and processes them with different networks. In this way, the computation of the required modalities for static voxels can be processed by a lightweight model, which essentially reduces the amount of computation, especially for many daily dynamic scenes dominated by the static background. To separate the two kinds of voxels, we propose a novel variation field to estimate the temporal variance of each voxel. For the dynamic voxels, we design an inner-product time query method to efficiently query multiple time steps, which is essential to recover the high-dynamic motions. As a result, with 15 minutes of training for dynamic scenes with inputs of 300-frame videos, MixVoxels achieves better PSNR than previous methods. Codes and trained models are available at https://github.com/fengres/mixvoxels

Motion magnification helps us visualize subtle, imperceptible motion. However, prior methods only work for 2D videos captured with a fixed camera. We present a 3D motion magnification method that can magnify subtle motions from scenes captured by a moving camera, while supporting novel view rendering. We represent the scene with time-varying radiance fields and leverage the Eulerian principle for motion magnification to extract and amplify the variation of the embedding of a fixed point over time. We study and validate our proposed principle for 3D motion magnification using both implicit and tri-plane-based radiance fields as our underlying 3D scene representation. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic and real-world scenes captured under various camera setups.

3D head avatars built with neural implicit volumetric representations have achieved unprecedented levels of photorealism. However, the computational cost of these methods remains a significant barrier to their widespread adoption, particularly in real-time applications such as virtual reality and teleconferencing. While attempts have been made to develop fast neural rendering approaches for static scenes, these methods cannot be simply employed to support realistic facial expressions, such as in the case of a dynamic facial performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel fast 3D neural implicit head avatar model that achieves real-time rendering while maintaining fine-grained controllability and high rendering quality. Our key idea lies in the introduction of local hash table blendshapes, which are learned and attached to the vertices of an underlying face parametric model. These per-vertex hash-tables are linearly merged with weights predicted via a CNN, resulting in expression dependent embeddings. Our novel representation enables efficient density and color predictions using a lightweight MLP, which is further accelerated by a hierarchical nearest neighbor search method. Extensive experiments show that our approach runs in real-time while achieving comparable rendering quality to state-of-the-arts and decent results on challenging expressions.

We present a new method for synthesizing high-resolution photo-realistic images from semantic label maps using conditional generative adversarial networks (conditional GANs). Conditional GANs have enabled a variety of applications, but the results are often limited to low-resolution and still far from realistic. In this work, we generate 2048x1024 visually appealing results with a novel adversarial loss, as well as new multi-scale generator and discriminator architectures. Furthermore, we extend our framework to interactive visual manipulation with two additional features. First, we incorporate object instance segmentation information, which enables object manipulations such as removing/adding objects and changing the object category. Second, we propose a method to generate diverse results given the same input, allowing users to edit the object appearance interactively. Human opinion studies demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing methods, advancing both the quality and the resolution of deep image synthesis and editing.

We introduce a novel framework for 3D human avatar generation and personalization, leveraging text prompts to enhance user engagement and customization. Central to our approach are key innovations aimed at overcoming the challenges in photo-realistic avatar synthesis. Firstly, we utilize a conditional Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) model, trained on a large-scale unannotated multi-view dataset, to create a versatile initial solution space that accelerates and diversifies avatar generation. Secondly, we develop a geometric prior, leveraging the capabilities of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models, to ensure superior view invariance and enable direct optimization of avatar geometry. These foundational ideas are complemented by our optimization pipeline built on Variational Score Distillation (VSD), which mitigates texture loss and over-saturation issues. As supported by our extensive experiments, these strategies collectively enable the creation of custom avatars with unparalleled visual quality and better adherence to input text prompts. You can find more results and videos in our website: https://syntec-research.github.io/MagicMirror

We present an imaging and neural rendering technique that seeks to synthesize videos of light propagating through a scene from novel, moving camera viewpoints. Our approach relies on a new ultrafast imaging setup to capture a first-of-its kind, multi-viewpoint video dataset with picosecond-level temporal resolution. Combined with this dataset, we introduce an efficient neural volume rendering framework based on the transient field. This field is defined as a mapping from a 3D point and 2D direction to a high-dimensional, discrete-time signal that represents time-varying radiance at ultrafast timescales. Rendering with transient fields naturally accounts for effects due to the finite speed of light, including viewpoint-dependent appearance changes caused by light propagation delays to the camera. We render a range of complex effects, including scattering, specular reflection, refraction, and diffraction. Additionally, we demonstrate removing viewpoint-dependent propagation delays using a time warping procedure, rendering of relativistic effects, and video synthesis of direct and global components of light transport.

This work addresses the problem of real-time rendering of photorealistic human body avatars learned from multi-view videos. While the classical approaches to model and render virtual humans generally use a textured mesh, recent research has developed neural body representations that achieve impressive visual quality. However, these models are difficult to render in real-time and their quality degrades when the character is animated with body poses different than the training observations. We propose an animatable human model based on 3D Gaussian Splatting, that has recently emerged as a very efficient alternative to neural radiance fields. The body is represented by a set of gaussian primitives in a canonical space which is deformed with a coarse to fine approach that combines forward skinning and local non-rigid refinement. We describe how to learn our Human Gaussian Splatting (HuGS) model in an end-to-end fashion from multi-view observations, and evaluate it against the state-of-the-art approaches for novel pose synthesis of clothed body. Our method achieves 1.5 dB PSNR improvement over the state-of-the-art on THuman4 dataset while being able to render in real-time (80 fps for 512x512 resolution).

Recent improvements in synthetic data generation make it possible to produce images that are highly photorealistic and indistinguishable from real ones. Furthermore, synthetic generation pipelines have the potential to generate an unlimited number of images. The combination of high photorealism and scale turn the synthetic data into a promising candidate for potentially improving various machine learning (ML) pipelines. Thus far, a large body of research in this field has focused on using synthetic images for training, by augmenting and enlarging training data. In contrast to using synthetic data for training, in this work we explore whether synthetic data can be beneficial for model selection. Considering the task of image classification, we demonstrate that when data is scarce, synthetic data can be used to replace the held out validation set, thus allowing to train on a larger dataset.

Existing diffusion-based text-to-3D generation methods primarily focus on producing visually realistic shapes and appearances, often neglecting the physical constraints necessary for downstream tasks. Generated models frequently fail to maintain balance when placed in physics-based simulations or 3D printed. This balance is crucial for satisfying user design intentions in interactive gaming, embodied AI, and robotics, where stable models are needed for reliable interaction. Additionally, stable models ensure that 3D-printed objects, such as figurines for home decoration, can stand on their own without requiring additional supports. To fill this gap, we introduce Atlas3D, an automatic and easy-to-implement method that enhances existing Score Distillation Sampling (SDS)-based text-to-3D tools. Atlas3D ensures the generation of self-supporting 3D models that adhere to physical laws of stability under gravity, contact, and friction. Our approach combines a novel differentiable simulation-based loss function with physically inspired regularization, serving as either a refinement or a post-processing module for existing frameworks. We verify Atlas3D's efficacy through extensive generation tasks and validate the resulting 3D models in both simulated and real-world environments.

In text-to-image (T2I) generation, a prevalent training technique involves utilizing Vision Language Models (VLMs) for image re-captioning. Even though VLMs are known to exhibit hallucination, generating descriptive content that deviates from the visual reality, the ramifications of such caption hallucinations on T2I generation performance remain under-explored. Through our empirical investigation, we first establish a comprehensive dataset comprising VLM-generated captions, and then systematically analyze how caption hallucination influences generation outcomes. Our findings reveal that (1) the disparities in caption quality persistently impact model outputs during fine-tuning. (2) VLMs confidence scores serve as reliable indicators for detecting and characterizing noise-related patterns in the data distribution. (3) even subtle variations in caption fidelity have significant effects on the quality of learned representations. These findings collectively emphasize the profound impact of caption quality on model performance and highlight the need for more sophisticated robust training algorithm in T2I. In response to these observations, we propose a approach leveraging VLM confidence score to mitigate caption noise, thereby enhancing the robustness of T2I models against hallucination in caption.

Automatic 3D content creation has gained increasing attention recently, due to its potential in various applications such as video games, film industry, and AR/VR. Recent advancements in diffusion models and multimodal models have notably improved the quality and efficiency of 3D object generation given a single RGB image. However, 3D objects generated even by state-of-the-art methods are still unsatisfactory compared to human-created assets. Considering only textures instead of materials makes these methods encounter challenges in photo-realistic rendering, relighting, and flexible appearance editing. And they also suffer from severe misalignment between geometry and high-frequency texture details. In this work, we propose a novel approach to boost the quality of generated 3D objects from the perspective of Physics-Based Rendering (PBR) materials. By analyzing the components of PBR materials, we choose to consider albedo, roughness, metalness, and bump maps. For albedo and bump maps, we leverage Stable Diffusion fine-tuned on synthetic data to extract these values, with novel usages of these fine-tuned models to obtain 3D consistent albedo UV and bump UV for generated objects. In terms of roughness and metalness maps, we adopt a semi-automatic process to provide room for interactive adjustment, which we believe is more practical. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model is generally beneficial for various state-of-the-art generation methods, significantly boosting the quality and realism of their generated 3D objects, with natural relighting effects and substantially improved geometry.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in artificial intelligence generated content(AIGC), with diverse input modalities, e.g., text, image, video, audio and 3D. The 3D is the most close visual modality to real-world 3D environment and carries enormous knowledge. The 3D content generation shows both academic and practical values while also presenting formidable technical challenges. This review aims to consolidate developments within the burgeoning domain of 3D content generation. Specifically, a new taxonomy is proposed that categorizes existing approaches into three types: 3D native generative methods, 2D prior-based 3D generative methods, and hybrid 3D generative methods. The survey covers approximately 60 papers spanning the major techniques. Besides, we discuss limitations of current 3D content generation techniques, and point out open challenges as well as promising directions for future work. Accompanied with this survey, we have established a project website where the resources on 3D content generation research are provided. The project page is available at https://github.com/hitcslj/Awesome-AIGC-3D.

Static LiDAR scanners produce accurate, dense, colored point clouds, but often contain obtrusive artifacts which makes them ill-suited for direct display. We propose an efficient method to render photorealistic images of such scans without any expensive preprocessing or training of a scene-specific model. A naive projection of the point cloud to the output view using 1x1 pixels is fast and retains the available detail, but also results in unintelligible renderings as background points leak in between the foreground pixels. The key insight is that these projections can be transformed into a realistic result using a deep convolutional model in the form of a U-Net, and a depth-based heuristic that prefilters the data. The U-Net also handles LiDAR-specific problems such as missing parts due to occlusion, color inconsistencies and varying point densities. We also describe a method to generate synthetic training data to deal with imperfectly-aligned ground truth images. Our method achieves real-time rendering rates using an off-the-shelf GPU and outperforms the state-of-the-art in both speed and quality.

Large language models are known to suffer from the hallucination problem in that they are prone to output statements that are false or inconsistent, indicating a lack of knowledge. A proposed solution to this is to provide the model with additional data modalities that complements the knowledge obtained through text. We investigate the use of visual data to complement the knowledge of large language models by proposing a method for evaluating visual knowledge transfer to text for uni- or multimodal language models. The method is based on two steps, 1) a novel task querying for knowledge of memory colors, i.e. typical colors of well-known objects, and 2) filtering of model training data to clearly separate knowledge contributions. Additionally, we introduce a model architecture that involves a visual imagination step and evaluate it with our proposed method. We find that our method can successfully be used to measure visual knowledge transfer capabilities in models and that our novel model architecture shows promising results for leveraging multimodal knowledge in a unimodal setting.

We present DreamPose, a diffusion-based method for generating animated fashion videos from still images. Given an image and a sequence of human body poses, our method synthesizes a video containing both human and fabric motion. To achieve this, we transform a pretrained text-to-image model (Stable Diffusion) into a pose-and-image guided video synthesis model, using a novel finetuning strategy, a set of architectural changes to support the added conditioning signals, and techniques to encourage temporal consistency. We fine-tune on a collection of fashion videos from the UBC Fashion dataset. We evaluate our method on a variety of clothing styles and poses, and demonstrate that our method produces state-of-the-art results on fashion video animation. Video results are available on our project page.

Posters play a crucial role in marketing and advertising, contributing significantly to industrial design by enhancing visual communication and brand visibility. With recent advances in controllable text-to-image diffusion models, more concise research is now focusing on rendering text within synthetic images. Despite improvements in text rendering accuracy, the field of end-to-end poster generation remains underexplored. This complex task involves striking a balance between text rendering accuracy and automated layout to produce high-resolution images with variable aspect ratios. To tackle this challenge, we propose an end-to-end text rendering framework employing a triple cross-attention mechanism rooted in align learning, designed to create precise poster text within detailed contextual backgrounds. Additionally, we introduce a high-resolution dataset that exceeds 1024 pixels in image resolution. Our approach leverages the SDXL architecture. Extensive experiments validate the ability of our method to generate poster images featuring intricate and contextually rich backgrounds. Codes will be available at https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/GlyphDraw2.

We introduce the Scene Language, a visual scene representation that concisely and precisely describes the structure, semantics, and identity of visual scenes. It represents a scene with three key components: a program that specifies the hierarchical and relational structure of entities in the scene, words in natural language that summarize the semantic class of each entity, and embeddings that capture the visual identity of each entity. This representation can be inferred from pre-trained language models via a training-free inference technique, given text or image inputs. The resulting scene can be rendered into images using traditional, neural, or hybrid graphics renderers. Together, this forms a robust, automated system for high-quality 3D and 4D scene generation. Compared with existing representations like scene graphs, our proposed Scene Language generates complex scenes with higher fidelity, while explicitly modeling the scene structures to enable precise control and editing.

Machine learning requires data, but acquiring and labeling real-world data is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming. More importantly, it is nearly impossible to alter real data post-acquisition (e.g., change the illumination of a room), making it very difficult to measure how specific properties of the data affect performance. In this paper, we present AI Playground (AIP), an open-source, Unreal Engine-based tool for generating and labeling virtual image data. With AIP, it is trivial to capture the same image under different conditions (e.g., fidelity, lighting, etc.) and with different ground truths (e.g., depth or surface normal values). AIP is easily extendable and can be used with or without code. To validate our proposed tool, we generated eight datasets of otherwise identical but varying lighting and fidelity conditions. We then trained deep neural networks to predict (1) depth values, (2) surface normals, or (3) object labels and assessed each network's intra- and cross-dataset performance. Among other insights, we verified that sensitivity to different settings is problem-dependent. We confirmed the findings of other studies that segmentation models are very sensitive to fidelity, but we also found that they are just as sensitive to lighting. In contrast, depth and normal estimation models seem to be less sensitive to fidelity or lighting and more sensitive to the structure of the image. Finally, we tested our trained depth-estimation networks on two real-world datasets and obtained results comparable to training on real data alone, confirming that our virtual environments are realistic enough for real-world tasks.

Generative models, such as diffusion models (DMs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), and generative adversarial networks (GANs), produce images with a level of authenticity that makes them nearly indistinguishable from real photos and artwork. While this capability is beneficial for many industries, the difficulty of identifying synthetic images leaves online media platforms vulnerable to impersonation and misinformation attempts. To support the development of defensive methods, we introduce ImagiNet, a high-resolution and balanced dataset for synthetic image detection, designed to mitigate potential biases in existing resources. It contains 200K examples, spanning four content categories: photos, paintings, faces, and uncategorized. Synthetic images are produced with open-source and proprietary generators, whereas real counterparts of the same content type are collected from public datasets. The structure of ImagiNet allows for a two-track evaluation system: i) classification as real or synthetic and ii) identification of the generative model. To establish a baseline, we train a ResNet-50 model using a self-supervised contrastive objective (SelfCon) for each track. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance and high inference speed across established benchmarks, achieving an AUC of up to 0.99 and balanced accuracy ranging from 86% to 95%, even under social network conditions that involve compression and resizing. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/delyan-boychev/imaginet.

For a given scene, humans can easily reason for the locations and pose to place objects. Designing a computational model to reason about these affordances poses a significant challenge, mirroring the intuitive reasoning abilities of humans. This work tackles the problem of realistic human insertion in a given background scene termed as Semantic Human Placement. This task is extremely challenging given the diverse backgrounds, scale, and pose of the generated person and, finally, the identity preservation of the person. We divide the problem into the following two stages i) learning semantic masks using text guidance for localizing regions in the image to place humans and ii) subject-conditioned inpainting to place a given subject adhering to the scene affordance within the semantic masks. For learning semantic masks, we leverage rich object-scene priors learned from the text-to-image generative models and optimize a novel parameterization of the semantic mask, eliminating the need for large-scale training. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first ones to provide an effective solution for realistic human placements in diverse real-world scenes. The proposed method can generate highly realistic scene compositions while preserving the background and subject identity. Further, we present results for several downstream tasks - scene hallucination from a single or multiple generated persons and text-based attribute editing. With extensive comparisons against strong baselines, we show the superiority of our method in realistic human placement.

Building world models that accurately and comprehensively represent the real world is the utmost aspiration for conditional image generative models as it would enable their use as world simulators. For these models to be successful world models, they should not only excel at image quality and prompt-image consistency but also ensure high representation diversity. However, current research in generative models mostly focuses on creative applications that are predominantly concerned with human preferences of image quality and aesthetics. We note that generative models have inference time mechanisms - or knobs - that allow the control of generation consistency, quality, and diversity. In this paper, we use state-of-the-art text-to-image and image-and-text-to-image models and their knobs to draw consistency-diversity-realism Pareto fronts that provide a holistic view on consistency-diversity-realism multi-objective. Our experiments suggest that realism and consistency can both be improved simultaneously; however there exists a clear tradeoff between realism/consistency and diversity. By looking at Pareto optimal points, we note that earlier models are better at representation diversity and worse in consistency/realism, and more recent models excel in consistency/realism while decreasing significantly the representation diversity. By computing Pareto fronts on a geodiverse dataset, we find that the first version of latent diffusion models tends to perform better than more recent models in all axes of evaluation, and there exist pronounced consistency-diversity-realism disparities between geographical regions. Overall, our analysis clearly shows that there is no best model and the choice of model should be determined by the downstream application. With this analysis, we invite the research community to consider Pareto fronts as an analytical tool to measure progress towards world models.

This work aims to learn a high-quality text-to-video (T2V) generative model by leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) model as a basis. It is a highly desirable yet challenging task to simultaneously a) accomplish the synthesis of visually realistic and temporally coherent videos while b) preserving the strong creative generation nature of the pre-trained T2I model. To this end, we propose LaVie, an integrated video generation framework that operates on cascaded video latent diffusion models, comprising a base T2V model, a temporal interpolation model, and a video super-resolution model. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) We reveal that the incorporation of simple temporal self-attentions, coupled with rotary positional encoding, adequately captures the temporal correlations inherent in video data. 2) Additionally, we validate that the process of joint image-video fine-tuning plays a pivotal role in producing high-quality and creative outcomes. To enhance the performance of LaVie, we contribute a comprehensive and diverse video dataset named Vimeo25M, consisting of 25 million text-video pairs that prioritize quality, diversity, and aesthetic appeal. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LaVie achieves state-of-the-art performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, we showcase the versatility of pre-trained LaVie models in various long video generation and personalized video synthesis applications.

Personalized 3D avatars require an animatable representation of digital humans. Doing so instantly from monocular videos offers scalability to broad class of users and wide-scale applications. In this paper, we present a fast, simple, yet effective method for creating animatable 3D digital humans from monocular videos. Our method utilizes the efficiency of Gaussian splatting to model both 3D geometry and appearance. However, we observed that naively optimizing Gaussian splats results in inaccurate geometry, thereby leading to poor animations. This work achieves and illustrates the need of accurate 3D mesh-type modelling of the human body for animatable digitization through Gaussian splats. This is achieved by developing a novel pipeline that benefits from three key aspects: (a) implicit modelling of surface's displacements and the color's spherical harmonics; (b) binding of 3D Gaussians to the respective triangular faces of the body template; (c) a novel technique to render normals followed by their auxiliary supervision. Our exhaustive experiments on three different benchmark datasets demonstrates the state-of-the-art results of our method, in limited time settings. In fact, our method is faster by an order of magnitude (in terms of training time) than its closest competitor. At the same time, we achieve superior rendering and 3D reconstruction performance under the change of poses.

The default strategy for training single-view Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) follows the fully supervised route using large-scale datasets of synthetic 3D assets or multi-view captures. Although these resources simplify the training procedure, they are hard to scale up beyond the existing datasets and they are not necessarily representative of the real distribution of object shapes. To address these limitations, in this paper, we introduce Real3D, the first LRM system that can be trained using single-view real-world images. Real3D introduces a novel self-training framework that can benefit from both the existing synthetic data and diverse single-view real images. We propose two unsupervised losses that allow us to supervise LRMs at the pixel- and semantic-level, even for training examples without ground-truth 3D or novel views. To further improve performance and scale up the image data, we develop an automatic data curation approach to collect high-quality examples from in-the-wild images. Our experiments show that Real3D consistently outperforms prior work in four diverse evaluation settings that include real and synthetic data, as well as both in-domain and out-of-domain shapes. Code and model can be found here: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/Real3D/

Controllable character animation is an emerging task that generates character videos controlled by pose sequences from given character images. Although character consistency has made significant progress via reference UNet, another crucial factor, pose control, has not been well studied by existing methods yet, resulting in several issues: 1) The generation may fail when the input pose sequence is corrupted. 2) The hands generated using the DWPose sequence are blurry and unrealistic. 3) The generated video will be shaky if the pose sequence is not smooth enough. In this paper, we present RealisDance to handle all the above issues. RealisDance adaptively leverages three types of poses, avoiding failed generation caused by corrupted pose sequences. Among these pose types, HaMeR provides accurate 3D and depth information of hands, enabling RealisDance to generate realistic hands even for complex gestures. Besides using temporal attention in the main UNet, RealisDance also inserts temporal attention into the pose guidance network, smoothing the video from the pose condition aspect. Moreover, we introduce pose shuffle augmentation during training to further improve generation robustness and video smoothness. Qualitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of RealisDance over other existing methods, especially in hand quality.

Volumetric (4D) performance capture is fundamental for AR/VR content generation. Whereas previous work in 4D performance capture has shown impressive results in studio settings, the technology is still far from being accessible to a typical consumer who, at best, might own a single RGBD sensor. Thus, in this work, we propose a method to synthesize free viewpoint renderings using a single RGBD camera. The key insight is to leverage previously seen "calibration" images of a given user to extrapolate what should be rendered in a novel viewpoint from the data available in the sensor. Given these past observations from multiple viewpoints, and the current RGBD image from a fixed view, we propose an end-to-end framework that fuses both these data sources to generate novel renderings of the performer. We demonstrate that the method can produce high fidelity images, and handle extreme changes in subject pose and camera viewpoints. We also show that the system generalizes to performers not seen in the training data. We run exhaustive experiments demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed semi-parametric model (i.e. calibration images available to the neural network) compared to other state of the art machine learned solutions. Further, we compare the method with more traditional pipelines that employ multi-view capture. We show that our framework is able to achieve compelling results, with substantially less infrastructure than previously required.

Text-to-video generation has lagged behind text-to-image synthesis in quality and diversity due to the complexity of spatio-temporal modeling and limited video-text datasets. This paper presents I4VGen, a training-free and plug-and-play video diffusion inference framework, which enhances text-to-video generation by leveraging robust image techniques. Specifically, following text-to-image-to-video, I4VGen decomposes the text-to-video generation into two stages: anchor image synthesis and anchor image-guided video synthesis. Correspondingly, a well-designed generation-selection pipeline is employed to achieve visually-realistic and semantically-faithful anchor image, and an innovative Noise-Invariant Video Score Distillation Sampling is incorporated to animate the image to a dynamic video, followed by a video regeneration process to refine the video. This inference strategy effectively mitigates the prevalent issue of non-zero terminal signal-to-noise ratio. Extensive evaluations show that I4VGen not only produces videos with higher visual realism and textual fidelity but also integrates seamlessly into existing image-to-video diffusion models, thereby improving overall video quality.

Virtual try-on (VTON) technology has gained attention due to its potential to transform online retail by enabling realistic clothing visualization of images and videos. However, most existing methods struggle to achieve high-quality results across image and video try-on tasks, especially in long video scenarios. In this work, we introduce CatV2TON, a simple and effective vision-based virtual try-on (V2TON) method that supports both image and video try-on tasks with a single diffusion transformer model. By temporally concatenating garment and person inputs and training on a mix of image and video datasets, CatV2TON achieves robust try-on performance across static and dynamic settings. For efficient long-video generation, we propose an overlapping clip-based inference strategy that uses sequential frame guidance and Adaptive Clip Normalization (AdaCN) to maintain temporal consistency with reduced resource demands. We also present ViViD-S, a refined video try-on dataset, achieved by filtering back-facing frames and applying 3D mask smoothing for enhanced temporal consistency. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that CatV2TON outperforms existing methods in both image and video try-on tasks, offering a versatile and reliable solution for realistic virtual try-ons across diverse scenarios.

We propose a dense RGBD SLAM system based on 3D Gaussian Splatting that provides metrically accurate pose tracking and visually realistic reconstruction. To this end, we first propose a Gaussian densification strategy based on the rendering loss to map unobserved areas and refine reobserved areas. Second, we introduce extra regularization parameters to alleviate the forgetting problem in the continuous mapping problem, where parameters tend to overfit the latest frame and result in decreasing rendering quality for previous frames. Both mapping and tracking are performed with Gaussian parameters by minimizing re-rendering loss in a differentiable way. Compared to recent neural and concurrently developed gaussian splatting RGBD SLAM baselines, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on the synthetic dataset Replica and competitive results on the real-world dataset TUM.

Due to its powerful capability of representation learning and high-efficiency computation, deep hashing has made significant progress in large-scale image retrieval. However, deep hashing networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples, which is a practical secure problem but seldom studied in hashing-based retrieval field. In this paper, we propose a novel prototype-supervised adversarial network (ProS-GAN), which formulates a flexible generative architecture for efficient and effective targeted hashing attack. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generation-based method to attack deep hashing networks. Generally, our proposed framework consists of three parts, i.e., a PrototypeNet, a generator, and a discriminator. Specifically, the designed PrototypeNet embeds the target label into the semantic representation and learns the prototype code as the category-level representative of the target label. Moreover, the semantic representation and the original image are jointly fed into the generator for a flexible targeted attack. Particularly, the prototype code is adopted to supervise the generator to construct the targeted adversarial example by minimizing the Hamming distance between the hash code of the adversarial example and the prototype code. Furthermore, the generator is against the discriminator to simultaneously encourage the adversarial examples visually realistic and the semantic representation informative. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed framework can efficiently produce adversarial examples with better targeted attack performance and transferability over state-of-the-art targeted attack methods of deep hashing. The related codes could be available at https://github.com/xunguangwang/ProS-GAN .

Recent breakthroughs in text-to-4D generation rely on pre-trained text-to-image and text-to-video models to generate dynamic 3D scenes. However, current text-to-4D methods face a three-way tradeoff between the quality of scene appearance, 3D structure, and motion. For example, text-to-image models and their 3D-aware variants are trained on internet-scale image datasets and can be used to produce scenes with realistic appearance and 3D structure -- but no motion. Text-to-video models are trained on relatively smaller video datasets and can produce scenes with motion, but poorer appearance and 3D structure. While these models have complementary strengths, they also have opposing weaknesses, making it difficult to combine them in a way that alleviates this three-way tradeoff. Here, we introduce hybrid score distillation sampling, an alternating optimization procedure that blends supervision signals from multiple pre-trained diffusion models and incorporates benefits of each for high-fidelity text-to-4D generation. Using hybrid SDS, we demonstrate synthesis of 4D scenes with compelling appearance, 3D structure, and motion.

People with visual impairments often struggle to create content that relies heavily on visual elements, particularly when conveying spatial and structural information. Existing accessible drawing tools, which construct images line by line, are suitable for simple tasks like math but not for more expressive artwork. On the other hand, emerging generative AI-based text-to-image tools can produce expressive illustrations from descriptions in natural language, but they lack precise control over image composition and properties. To address this gap, our work integrates generative AI with a constructive approach that provides users with enhanced control and editing capabilities. Our system, AltCanvas, features a tile-based interface enabling users to construct visual scenes incrementally, with each tile representing an object within the scene. Users can add, edit, move, and arrange objects while receiving speech and audio feedback. Once completed, the scene can be rendered as a color illustration or as a vector for tactile graphic generation. Involving 14 blind or low-vision users in design and evaluation, we found that participants effectively used the AltCanvas workflow to create illustrations.

The problem of modeling an animatable 3D human head avatar under light-weight setups is of significant importance but has not been well solved. Existing 3D representations either perform well in the realism of portrait images synthesis or the accuracy of expression control, but not both. To address the problem, we introduce a novel hybrid explicit-implicit 3D representation, Facial Model Conditioned Neural Radiance Field, which integrates the expressiveness of NeRF and the prior information from the parametric template. At the core of our representation, a synthetic-renderings-based condition method is proposed to fuse the prior information from the parametric model into the implicit field without constraining its topological flexibility. Besides, based on the hybrid representation, we properly overcome the inconsistent shape issue presented in existing methods and improve the animation stability. Moreover, by adopting an overall GAN-based architecture using an image-to-image translation network, we achieve high-resolution, realistic and view-consistent synthesis of dynamic head appearance. Experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance for 3D head avatar animation compared with previous methods.

While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, existing methods still adopt techniques from the photorealistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth preparation with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photorealistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.

Large-scale Text-to-Image (TTI) models have become a common approach for generating training data in various generative fields. However, visual hallucinations, which contain perceptually critical defects, remain a concern, especially in non-photorealistic styles like cartoon characters. We propose a novel visual hallucination detection system for cartoon character images generated by TTI models. Our approach leverages pose-aware in-context visual learning (PA-ICVL) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs), utilizing both RGB images and pose information. By incorporating pose guidance from a fine-tuned pose estimator, we enable VLMs to make more accurate decisions. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in identifying visual hallucinations compared to baseline methods relying solely on RGB images. This research advances TTI models by mitigating visual hallucinations, expanding their potential in non-photorealistic domains.

We present LoD-NeuS, an efficient neural representation for high-frequency geometry detail recovery and anti-aliased novel view rendering. Drawing inspiration from voxel-based representations with the level of detail (LoD), we introduce a multi-scale tri-plane-based scene representation that is capable of capturing the LoD of the signed distance function (SDF) and the space radiance. Our representation aggregates space features from a multi-convolved featurization within a conical frustum along a ray and optimizes the LoD feature volume through differentiable rendering. Additionally, we propose an error-guided sampling strategy to guide the growth of the SDF during the optimization. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior surface reconstruction and photorealistic view synthesis compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Generating multi-view images based on text or single-image prompts is a critical capability for the creation of 3D content. Two fundamental questions on this topic are what data we use for training and how to ensure multi-view consistency. This paper introduces a novel framework that makes fundamental contributions to both questions. Unlike leveraging images from 2D diffusion models for training, we propose a dense consistent multi-view generation model that is fine-tuned from off-the-shelf video generative models. Images from video generative models are more suitable for multi-view generation because the underlying network architecture that generates them employs a temporal module to enforce frame consistency. Moreover, the video data sets used to train these models are abundant and diverse, leading to a reduced train-finetuning domain gap. To enhance multi-view consistency, we introduce a 3D-Aware Denoising Sampling, which first employs a feed-forward reconstruction module to get an explicit global 3D model, and then adopts a sampling strategy that effectively involves images rendered from the global 3D model into the denoising sampling loop to improve the multi-view consistency of the final images. As a by-product, this module also provides a fast way to create 3D assets represented by 3D Gaussians within a few seconds. Our approach can generate 24 dense views and converges much faster in training than state-of-the-art approaches (4 GPU hours versus many thousand GPU hours) with comparable visual quality and consistency. By further fine-tuning, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative metrics and visual effects. Our project page is aigc3d.github.io/VideoMV.

A major challenge in monocular 3D object detection is the limited diversity and quantity of objects in real datasets. While augmenting real scenes with virtual objects holds promise to improve both the diversity and quantity of the objects, it remains elusive due to the lack of an effective 3D object insertion method in complex real captured scenes. In this work, we study augmenting complex real indoor scenes with virtual objects for monocular 3D object detection. The main challenge is to automatically identify plausible physical properties for virtual assets (e.g., locations, appearances, sizes, etc.) in cluttered real scenes. To address this challenge, we propose a physically plausible indoor 3D object insertion approach to automatically copy virtual objects and paste them into real scenes. The resulting objects in scenes have 3D bounding boxes with plausible physical locations and appearances. In particular, our method first identifies physically feasible locations and poses for the inserted objects to prevent collisions with the existing room layout. Subsequently, it estimates spatially-varying illumination for the insertion location, enabling the immersive blending of the virtual objects into the original scene with plausible appearances and cast shadows. We show that our augmentation method significantly improves existing monocular 3D object models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. For the first time, we demonstrate that a physically plausible 3D object insertion, serving as a generative data augmentation technique, can lead to significant improvements for discriminative downstream tasks such as monocular 3D object detection. Project website: https://gyhandy.github.io/3D-Copy-Paste/

High-quality human reconstruction and photo-realistic rendering of a dynamic scene is a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics. Despite considerable efforts invested in developing various capture systems and reconstruction algorithms, recent advancements still struggle with loose or oversized clothing and overly complex poses. In part, this is due to the challenges of acquiring high-quality human datasets. To facilitate the development of these fields, in this paper, we present PKU-DyMVHumans, a versatile human-centric dataset for high-fidelity reconstruction and rendering of dynamic human scenarios from dense multi-view videos. It comprises 8.2 million frames captured by more than 56 synchronized cameras across diverse scenarios. These sequences comprise 32 human subjects across 45 different scenarios, each with a high-detailed appearance and realistic human motion. Inspired by recent advancements in neural radiance field (NeRF)-based scene representations, we carefully set up an off-the-shelf framework that is easy to provide those state-of-the-art NeRF-based implementations and benchmark on PKU-DyMVHumans dataset. It is paving the way for various applications like fine-grained foreground/background decomposition, high-quality human reconstruction and photo-realistic novel view synthesis of a dynamic scene. Extensive studies are performed on the benchmark, demonstrating new observations and challenges that emerge from using such high-fidelity dynamic data.

Full-blown AI-generated video generation continues its journey through the uncanny valley to produce content that is perceptually indistinguishable from reality. Intermixed with many exciting and creative applications are malicious applications that harm individuals, organizations, and democracies. We describe an effective and robust technique for distinguishing real from AI-generated human motion. This technique leverages a multi-modal semantic embedding, making it robust to the types of laundering that typically confound more low- to mid-level approaches. This method is evaluated against a custom-built dataset of video clips with human actions generated by seven text-to-video AI models and matching real footage.

Recent progress in text-guided image inpainting, based on the unprecedented success of text-to-image diffusion models, has led to exceptionally realistic and visually plausible results. However, there is still significant potential for improvement in current text-to-image inpainting models, particularly in better aligning the inpainted area with user prompts and performing high-resolution inpainting. Therefore, in this paper we introduce HD-Painter, a completely training-free approach that accurately follows to prompts and coherently scales to high-resolution image inpainting. To this end, we design the Prompt-Aware Introverted Attention (PAIntA) layer enhancing self-attention scores by prompt information and resulting in better text alignment generations. To further improve the prompt coherence we introduce the Reweighting Attention Score Guidance (RASG) mechanism seamlessly integrating a post-hoc sampling strategy into general form of DDIM to prevent out-of-distribution latent shifts. Moreover, HD-Painter allows extension to larger scales by introducing a specialized super-resolution technique customized for inpainting, enabling the completion of missing regions in images of up to 2K resolution. Our experiments demonstrate that HD-Painter surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively, achieving an impressive generation accuracy improvement of 61.4% vs 51.9%. We will make the codes publicly available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/HD-Painter

We present En3D, an enhanced generative scheme for sculpting high-quality 3D human avatars. Unlike previous works that rely on scarce 3D datasets or limited 2D collections with imbalanced viewing angles and imprecise pose priors, our approach aims to develop a zero-shot 3D generative scheme capable of producing visually realistic, geometrically accurate and content-wise diverse 3D humans without relying on pre-existing 3D or 2D assets. To address this challenge, we introduce a meticulously crafted workflow that implements accurate physical modeling to learn the enhanced 3D generative model from synthetic 2D data. During inference, we integrate optimization modules to bridge the gap between realistic appearances and coarse 3D shapes. Specifically, En3D comprises three modules: a 3D generator that accurately models generalizable 3D humans with realistic appearance from synthesized balanced, diverse, and structured human images; a geometry sculptor that enhances shape quality using multi-view normal constraints for intricate human anatomy; and a texturing module that disentangles explicit texture maps with fidelity and editability, leveraging semantical UV partitioning and a differentiable rasterizer. Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms prior works in terms of image quality, geometry accuracy and content diversity. We also showcase the applicability of our generated avatars for animation and editing, as well as the scalability of our approach for content-style free adaptation.

The detection and localization of deepfake content, particularly when small fake segments are seamlessly mixed with real videos, remains a significant challenge in the field of digital media security. Based on the recently released AV-Deepfake1M dataset, which contains more than 1 million manipulated videos across more than 2,000 subjects, we introduce the 1M-Deepfakes Detection Challenge. This challenge is designed to engage the research community in developing advanced methods for detecting and localizing deepfake manipulations within the large-scale high-realistic audio-visual dataset. The participants can access the AV-Deepfake1M dataset and are required to submit their inference results for evaluation across the metrics for detection or localization tasks. The methodologies developed through the challenge will contribute to the development of next-generation deepfake detection and localization systems. Evaluation scripts, baseline models, and accompanying code will be available on https://github.com/ControlNet/AV-Deepfake1M.

We propose PD-GAN, a probabilistic diverse GAN for image inpainting. Given an input image with arbitrary hole regions, PD-GAN produces multiple inpainting results with diverse and visually realistic content. Our PD-GAN is built upon a vanilla GAN which generates images based on random noise. During image generation, we modulate deep features of input random noise from coarse-to-fine by injecting an initially restored image and the hole regions in multiple scales. We argue that during hole filling, the pixels near the hole boundary should be more deterministic (i.e., with higher probability trusting the context and initially restored image to create natural inpainting boundary), while those pixels lie in the center of the hole should enjoy more degrees of freedom (i.e., more likely to depend on the random noise for enhancing diversity). To this end, we propose spatially probabilistic diversity normalization (SPDNorm) inside the modulation to model the probability of generating a pixel conditioned on the context information. SPDNorm dynamically balances the realism and diversity inside the hole region, making the generated content more diverse towards the hole center and resemble neighboring image content more towards the hole boundary. Meanwhile, we propose a perceptual diversity loss to further empower PD-GAN for diverse content generation. Experiments on benchmark datasets including CelebA-HQ, Places2 and Paris Street View indicate that PD-GAN is effective for diverse and visually realistic image restoration.

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.

Analog magnetic tapes have been the main video data storage device for several decades. Videos stored on analog videotapes exhibit unique degradation patterns caused by tape aging and reader device malfunctioning that are different from those observed in film and digital video restoration tasks. In this work, we present a reference-based approach for the resToration of digitized Analog videotaPEs (TAPE). We leverage CLIP for zero-shot artifact detection to identify the cleanest frames of each video through textual prompts describing different artifacts. Then, we select the clean frames most similar to the input ones and employ them as references. We design a transformer-based Swin-UNet network that exploits both neighboring and reference frames via our Multi-Reference Spatial Feature Fusion (MRSFF) blocks. MRSFF blocks rely on cross-attention and attention pooling to take advantage of the most useful parts of each reference frame. To address the absence of ground truth in real-world videos, we create a synthetic dataset of videos exhibiting artifacts that closely resemble those commonly found in analog videotapes. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show the effectiveness of our approach compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The code, the model, and the synthetic dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/TAPE.

The rapid expansion of mobile internet has resulted in a substantial increase in user-generated content (UGC) images, thereby making the thorough assessment of UGC images both urgent and essential. Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in image quality assessment (IQA) and image aesthetic assessment (IAA). Despite this progress, effectively scoring the quality and aesthetics of UGC images still faces two main challenges: 1) A single score is inadequate to capture the hierarchical human perception. 2) How to use MLLMs to output numerical scores, such as mean opinion scores (MOS), remains an open question. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel dataset, named Realistic image Quality and Aesthetic (RealQA), including 14,715 UGC images, each of which is annoted with 10 fine-grained attributes. These attributes span three levels: low level (e.g., image clarity), middle level (e.g., subject integrity) and high level (e.g., composition). Besides, we conduct a series of in-depth and comprehensive investigations into how to effectively predict numerical scores using MLLMs. Surprisingly, by predicting just two extra significant digits, the next token paradigm can achieve SOTA performance. Furthermore, with the help of chain of thought (CoT) combined with the learnt fine-grained attributes, the proposed method can outperform SOTA methods on five public datasets for IQA and IAA with superior interpretability and show strong zero-shot generalization for video quality assessment (VQA). The code and dataset will be released.

We introduce PointOdyssey, a large-scale synthetic dataset, and data generation framework, for the training and evaluation of long-term fine-grained tracking algorithms. Our goal is to advance the state-of-the-art by placing emphasis on long videos with naturalistic motion. Toward the goal of naturalism, we animate deformable characters using real-world motion capture data, we build 3D scenes to match the motion capture environments, and we render camera viewpoints using trajectories mined via structure-from-motion on real videos. We create combinatorial diversity by randomizing character appearance, motion profiles, materials, lighting, 3D assets, and atmospheric effects. Our dataset currently includes 104 videos, averaging 2,000 frames long, with orders of magnitude more correspondence annotations than prior work. We show that existing methods can be trained from scratch in our dataset and outperform the published variants. Finally, we introduce modifications to the PIPs point tracking method, greatly widening its temporal receptive field, which improves its performance on PointOdyssey as well as on two real-world benchmarks. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://pointodyssey.com

We introduce animated stickers, a video diffusion model which generates an animation conditioned on a text prompt and static sticker image. Our model is built on top of the state-of-the-art Emu text-to-image model, with the addition of temporal layers to model motion. Due to the domain gap, i.e. differences in visual and motion style, a model which performed well on generating natural videos can no longer generate vivid videos when applied to stickers. To bridge this gap, we employ a two-stage finetuning pipeline: first with weakly in-domain data, followed by human-in-the-loop (HITL) strategy which we term ensemble-of-teachers. It distills the best qualities of multiple teachers into a smaller student model. We show that this strategy allows us to specifically target improvements to motion quality while maintaining the style from the static image. With inference optimizations, our model is able to generate an eight-frame video with high-quality, interesting, and relevant motion in under one second.

Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2016) showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227x227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models "Plug and Play Generative Networks". PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable "condition" network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization, which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data.

Creating relightable and animatable avatars from multi-view or monocular videos is a challenging task for digital human creation and virtual reality applications. Previous methods rely on neural radiance fields or ray tracing, resulting in slow training and rendering processes. By utilizing Gaussian Splatting, we propose a simple and efficient method to decouple body materials and lighting from sparse-view or monocular avatar videos, so that the avatar can be rendered simultaneously under novel viewpoints, poses, and lightings at interactive frame rates (6.9 fps). Specifically, we first obtain the canonical body mesh using a signed distance function and assign attributes to each mesh vertex. The Gaussians in the canonical space then interpolate from nearby body mesh vertices to obtain the attributes. We subsequently deform the Gaussians to the posed space using forward skinning, and combine the learnable environment light with the Gaussian attributes for shading computation. To achieve fast shadow modeling, we rasterize the posed body mesh from dense viewpoints to obtain the visibility. Our approach is not only simple but also fast enough to allow interactive rendering of avatar animation under environmental light changes. Experiments demonstrate that, compared to previous works, our method can render higher quality results at a faster speed on both synthetic and real datasets.

In this work, we propose a method to address the challenge of rendering a 3D human from a single image in a free-view manner. Some existing approaches could achieve this by using generalizable pixel-aligned implicit fields to reconstruct a textured mesh of a human or by employing a 2D diffusion model as guidance with the Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) method, to lift the 2D image into 3D space. However, a generalizable implicit field often results in an over-smooth texture field, while the SDS method tends to lead to a texture-inconsistent novel view with the input image. In this paper, we introduce a texture-consistent back view synthesis module that could transfer the reference image content to the back view through depth and text-guided attention injection. Moreover, to alleviate the color distortion that occurs in the side region, we propose a visibility-aware patch consistency regularization for texture mapping and refinement combined with the synthesized back view texture. With the above techniques, we could achieve high-fidelity and texture-consistent human rendering from a single image. Experiments conducted on both real and synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and show that our approach outperforms previous baseline methods.

Recent advancements in text-to-3D generation technology have significantly advanced the conversion of textual descriptions into imaginative well-geometrical and finely textured 3D objects. Despite these developments, a prevalent limitation arises from the use of RGB data in diffusion or reconstruction models, which often results in models with inherent lighting and shadows effects that detract from their realism, thereby limiting their usability in applications that demand accurate relighting capabilities. To bridge this gap, we present UniDream, a text-to-3D generation framework by incorporating unified diffusion priors. Our approach consists of three main components: (1) a dual-phase training process to get albedo-normal aligned multi-view diffusion and reconstruction models, (2) a progressive generation procedure for geometry and albedo-textures based on Score Distillation Sample (SDS) using the trained reconstruction and diffusion models, and (3) an innovative application of SDS for finalizing PBR generation while keeping a fixed albedo based on Stable Diffusion model. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that UniDream surpasses existing methods in generating 3D objects with clearer albedo textures, smoother surfaces, enhanced realism, and superior relighting capabilities.

Vision language models (VLMs) perceive the world through a combination of a visual encoder and a large language model (LLM). The visual encoder, pre-trained on large-scale vision-text datasets, provides zero-shot generalization to visual data, and the LLM endows its high reasoning ability to VLMs. It leads VLMs to achieve high performance on wide benchmarks without fine-tuning, exhibiting zero or few-shot capability. However, recent studies show that VLMs are vulnerable to hallucination. This undesirable behavior degrades reliability and credibility, thereby making users unable to fully trust the output from VLMs. To enhance trustworthiness and better tackle the hallucination of VLMs, we curate a new evaluation dataset, called the BEfore-AFter hallucination dataset (BEAF), and introduce new metrics: True Understanding (TU), IGnorance (IG), StuBbornness (SB), and InDecision (ID). Unlike prior works that focus only on constructing questions and answers, the key idea of our benchmark is to manipulate visual scene information by image editing models and to design the metrics based on scene changes. This allows us to clearly assess whether VLMs correctly understand a given scene by observing the ability to perceive changes. We also visualize image-wise object relationship by virtue of our two-axis view: vision and text. Upon evaluating VLMs with our dataset, we observed that our metrics reveal different aspects of VLM hallucination that have not been reported before. Project page: https://beafbench.github.io/

We present WonderWorld, a novel framework for interactive 3D scene generation that enables users to interactively specify scene contents and layout and see the created scenes in low latency. The major challenge lies in achieving fast generation of 3D scenes. Existing scene generation approaches fall short of speed as they often require (1) progressively generating many views and depth maps, and (2) time-consuming optimization of the scene geometry representations. We introduce the Fast Layered Gaussian Surfels (FLAGS) as our scene representation and an algorithm to generate it from a single view. Our approach does not need multiple views, and it leverages a geometry-based initialization that significantly reduces optimization time. Another challenge is generating coherent geometry that allows all scenes to be connected. We introduce the guided depth diffusion that allows partial conditioning of depth estimation. WonderWorld generates connected and diverse 3D scenes in less than 10 seconds on a single A6000 GPU, enabling real-time user interaction and exploration. We demonstrate the potential of WonderWorld for user-driven content creation and exploration in virtual environments. We will release full code and software for reproducibility. Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderWorld/.

Generating images with both photorealism and multiview 3D consistency is crucial for 3D-aware GANs, yet existing methods struggle to achieve them simultaneously. Improving the photorealism via CNN-based 2D super-resolution can break the strict 3D consistency, while keeping the 3D consistency by learning high-resolution 3D representations for direct rendering often compromises image quality. In this paper, we propose a novel learning strategy, namely 3D-to-2D imitation, which enables a 3D-aware GAN to generate high-quality images while maintaining their strict 3D consistency, by letting the images synthesized by the generator's 3D rendering branch to mimic those generated by its 2D super-resolution branch. We also introduce 3D-aware convolutions into the generator for better 3D representation learning, which further improves the image generation quality. With the above strategies, our method reaches FID scores of 5.4 and 4.3 on FFHQ and AFHQ-v2 Cats, respectively, at 512x512 resolution, largely outperforming existing 3D-aware GANs using direct 3D rendering and coming very close to the previous state-of-the-art method that leverages 2D super-resolution. Project website: https://seanchenxy.github.io/Mimic3DWeb.

People say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Then how can we get the rich information out of the image? We argue that by using visual clues to bridge large pretrained vision foundation models and language models, we can do so without any extra cross-modal training. Thanks to the strong zero-shot capability of foundation models, we start by constructing a rich semantic representation of the image (e.g., image tags, object attributes / locations, captions) as a structured textual prompt, called visual clues, using a vision foundation model. Based on visual clues, we use large language model to produce a series of comprehensive descriptions for the visual content, which is then verified by the vision model again to select the candidate that aligns best with the image. We evaluate the quality of generated descriptions by quantitative and qualitative measurement. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a structured semantic representation.

Visual storytelling aims to generate compelling narratives from image sequences. Existing models often focus on enhancing the representation of the image sequence, e.g., with external knowledge sources or advanced graph structures. Despite recent progress, the stories are often repetitive, illogical, and lacking in detail. To mitigate these issues, we present a novel framework which integrates visual representations with pretrained language models and planning. Our model translates the image sequence into a visual prefix, a sequence of continuous embeddings which language models can interpret. It also leverages a sequence of question-answer pairs as a blueprint plan for selecting salient visual concepts and determining how they should be assembled into a narrative. Automatic and human evaluation on the VIST benchmark (Huang et al., 2016) demonstrates that blueprint-based models generate stories that are more coherent, interesting, and natural compared to competitive baselines and state-of-the-art systems.

Generating animatable human avatars from a single image is essential for various digital human modeling applications. Existing 3D reconstruction methods often struggle to capture fine details in animatable models, while generative approaches for controllable animation, though avoiding explicit 3D modeling, suffer from viewpoint inconsistencies in extreme poses and computational inefficiencies. In this paper, we address these challenges by leveraging the power of generative models to produce detailed multi-view canonical pose images, which help resolve ambiguities in animatable human reconstruction. We then propose a robust method for 3D reconstruction of inconsistent images, enabling real-time rendering during inference. Specifically, we adapt a transformer-based video generation model to generate multi-view canonical pose images and normal maps, pretraining on a large-scale video dataset to improve generalization. To handle view inconsistencies, we recast the reconstruction problem as a 4D task and introduce an efficient 3D modeling approach using 4D Gaussian Splatting. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves photorealistic, real-time animation of 3D human avatars from in-the-wild images, showcasing its effectiveness and generalization capability.