In-Context LoRA for Diffusion Transformers

Recent research arXiv:2410.15027 has explored the use of diffusion transformers (DiTs) for task-agnostic image generation by simply concatenating attention tokens across images. However, despite substantial computational resources, the fidelity of the generated images remains suboptimal. In this study, we reevaluate and streamline this framework by hypothesizing that text-to-image DiTs inherently possess in-context generation capabilities, requiring only minimal tuning to activate them. Through diverse task experiments, we qualitatively demonstrate that existing text-to-image DiTs can effectively perform in-context generation without any tuning. Building on this insight, we propose a remarkably simple pipeline to leverage the in-context abilities of DiTs: (1) concatenate images instead of tokens, (2) perform joint captioning of multiple images, and (3) apply task-specific LoRA tuning using small datasets (e.g., $20\sim 100$ samples) instead of full-parameter tuning with large datasets. We name our models In-Context LoRA (IC-LoRA). This approach requires no modifications to the original DiT models, only changes to the training data. Remarkably, our pipeline generates high-fidelity image sets that better adhere to prompts. While task-specific in terms of tuning data, our framework remains task-agnostic in architecture and pipeline, offering a powerful tool for the community and providing valuable insights for further research on product-level task-agnostic generation systems. We release our code, data, and models at https://github.com/ali-vilab/In-Context-LoRA

Group Diffusion Transformers are Unsupervised Multitask Learners

While large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their task-agnostic capabilities, visual generation tasks such as image translation, style transfer, and character customization still rely heavily on supervised, task-specific datasets. In this work, we introduce Group Diffusion Transformers (GDTs), a novel framework that unifies diverse visual generation tasks by redefining them as a group generation problem. In this approach, a set of related images is generated simultaneously, optionally conditioned on a subset of the group. GDTs build upon diffusion transformers with minimal architectural modifications by concatenating self-attention tokens across images. This allows the model to implicitly capture cross-image relationships (e.g., identities, styles, layouts, surroundings, and color schemes) through caption-based correlations. Our design enables scalable, unsupervised, and task-agnostic pretraining using extensive collections of image groups sourced from multimodal internet articles, image galleries, and video frames. We evaluate GDTs on a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 200 instructions across 30 distinct visual generation tasks, including picture book creation, font design, style transfer, sketching, colorization, drawing sequence generation, and character customization. Our models achieve competitive zero-shot performance without any additional fine-tuning or gradient updates. Furthermore, ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of key components such as data scaling, group size, and model design. These results demonstrate the potential of GDTs as scalable, general-purpose visual generation systems.

CLASH: Complementary Learning with Neural Architecture Search for Gait Recognition

Gait recognition, which aims at identifying individuals by their walking patterns, has achieved great success based on silhouette. The binary silhouette sequence encodes the walking pattern within the sparse boundary representation. Therefore, most pixels in the silhouette are under-sensitive to the walking pattern since the sparse boundary lacks dense spatial-temporal information, which is suitable to be represented with dense texture. To enhance the sensitivity to the walking pattern while maintaining the robustness of recognition, we present a Complementary Learning with neural Architecture Search (CLASH) framework, consisting of walking pattern sensitive gait descriptor named dense spatial-temporal field (DSTF) and neural architecture search based complementary learning (NCL). Specifically, DSTF transforms the representation from the sparse binary boundary into the dense distance-based texture, which is sensitive to the walking pattern at the pixel level. Further, NCL presents a task-specific search space for complementary learning, which mutually complements the sensitivity of DSTF and the robustness of the silhouette to represent the walking pattern effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods under both in-the-lab and in-the-wild scenarios. On CASIA-B, we achieve rank-1 accuracy of 98.8%, 96.5%, and 89.3% under three conditions. On OU-MVLP, we achieve rank-1 accuracy of 91.9%. Under the latest in-the-wild datasets, we outperform the latest silhouette-based methods by 16.3% and 19.7% on Gait3D and GREW, respectively.

GVDIFF: Grounded Text-to-Video Generation with Diffusion Models

In text-to-video (T2V) generation, significant attention has been directed toward its development, yet unifying discrete and continuous grounding conditions in T2V generation remains under-explored. This paper proposes a Grounded text-to-Video generation framework, termed GVDIFF. First, we inject the grounding condition into the self-attention through an uncertainty-based representation to explicitly guide the focus of the network. Second, we introduce a spatial-temporal grounding layer that connects the grounding condition with target objects and enables the model with the grounded generation capacity in the spatial-temporal domain. Third, our dynamic gate network adaptively skips the redundant grounding process to selectively extract grounding information and semantics while improving efficiency. We extensively evaluate the grounded generation capacity of GVDIFF and demonstrate its versatility in applications, including long-range video generation, sequential prompts, and object-specific editing.

ScanFormer: Referring Expression Comprehension by Iteratively Scanning

Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) aims to localize the target objects specified by free-form natural language descriptions in images. While state-of-the-art methods achieve impressive performance, they perform a dense perception of images, which incorporates redundant visual regions unrelated to linguistic queries, leading to additional computational overhead. This inspires us to explore a question: can we eliminate linguistic-irrelevant redundant visual regions to improve the efficiency of the model? Existing relevant methods primarily focus on fundamental visual tasks, with limited exploration in vision-language fields. To address this, we propose a coarse-to-fine iterative perception framework, called ScanFormer. It can iteratively exploit the image scale pyramid to extract linguistic-relevant visual patches from top to bottom. In each iteration, irrelevant patches are discarded by our designed informativeness prediction. Furthermore, we propose a patch selection strategy for discarded patches to accelerate inference. Experiments on widely used datasets, namely RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and ReferItGame, verify the effectiveness of our method, which can strike a balance between accuracy and efficiency.

SemanticMIM: Marring Masked Image Modeling with Semantics Compression for General Visual Representation

This paper represents a neat yet effective framework, named SemanticMIM, to integrate the advantages of masked image modeling (MIM) and contrastive learning (CL) for general visual representation. We conduct a thorough comparative analysis between CL and MIM, revealing that their complementary advantages fundamentally stem from two distinct phases, i.e., compression and reconstruction. Specifically, SemanticMIM leverages a proxy architecture that customizes interaction between image and mask tokens, bridging these two phases to achieve general visual representation with the property of abundant semantic and positional awareness. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative evaluations, we demonstrate that SemanticMIM effectively amalgamates the benefits of CL and MIM, leading to significant enhancement of performance and feature linear separability. SemanticMIM also offers notable interpretability through attention response visualization. Codes are available at https://github.com/yyk-wew/SemanticMIM.

GaitMPL: Gait Recognition with Memory-Augmented Progressive Learning

Gait recognition aims at identifying the pedestrians at a long distance by their biometric gait patterns. It is inherently challenging due to the various covariates and the properties of silhouettes (textureless and colorless), which result in two kinds of pair-wise hard samples: the same pedestrian could have distinct silhouettes (intra-class diversity) and different pedestrians could have similar silhouettes (inter-class similarity). In this work, we propose to solve the hard sample issue with a Memory-augmented Progressive Learning network (GaitMPL), including Dynamic Reweighting Progressive Learning module (DRPL) and Global Structure-Aligned Memory bank (GSAM). Specifically, DRPL reduces the learning difficulty of hard samples by easy-to-hard progressive learning. GSAM further augments DRPL with a structure-aligned memory mechanism, which maintains and models the feature distribution of each ID. Experiments on two commonly used datasets, CASIA-B and OU-MVLP, demonstrate the effectiveness of GaitMPL. On CASIA-B, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance, i.e., 88.0% on the most challenging condition (Clothing) and 93.3% on the average condition, which outperforms the other methods by at least 3.8% and 1.4%, respectively.

GaitGCI: Generative Counterfactual Intervention for Gait Recognition

Gait is one of the most promising biometrics that aims to identify pedestrians from their walking patterns. However, prevailing methods are susceptible to confounders, resulting in the networks hardly focusing on the regions that reflect effective walking patterns. To address this fundamental problem in gait recognition, we propose a Generative Counterfactual Intervention framework, dubbed GaitGCI, consisting of Counterfactual Intervention Learning (CIL) and Diversity-Constrained Dynamic Convolution (DCDC). CIL eliminates the impacts of confounders by maximizing the likelihood difference between factual/counterfactual attention while DCDC adaptively generates sample-wise factual/counterfactual attention to efficiently perceive the sample-wise properties. With matrix decomposition and diversity constraint, DCDC guarantees the model to be efficient and effective. Extensive experiments indicate that proposed GaitGCI: 1) could effectively focus on the discriminative and interpretable regions that reflect gait pattern; 2) is model-agnostic and could be plugged into existing models to improve performance with nearly no extra cost; 3) efficiently achieves state-of-the-art performance on arbitrary scenarios (in-the-lab and in-the-wild).

Referring Expression Comprehension Using Language Adaptive Inference

Different from universal object detection, referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to locate specific objects referred to by natural language expressions. The expression provides high-level concepts of relevant visual and contextual patterns, which vary significantly with different expressions and account for only a few of those encoded in the REC model. This leads us to a question: do we really need the entire network with a fixed structure for various referring expressions? Ideally, given an expression, only expression-relevant components of the REC model are required. These components should be small in number as each expression only contains very few visual and contextual clues. This paper explores the adaptation between expressions and REC models for dynamic inference. Concretely, we propose a neat yet efficient framework named Language Adaptive Dynamic Subnets (LADS), which can extract language-adaptive subnets from the REC model conditioned on the referring expressions. By using the compact subnet, the inference can be more economical and efficient. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, and Referit show that the proposed method achieves faster inference speed and higher accuracy against state-of-the-art approaches.

MetaGait: Learning to Learn an Omni Sample Adaptive Representation for Gait Recognition

Gait recognition, which aims at identifying individuals by their walking patterns, has recently drawn increasing research attention. However, gait recognition still suffers from the conflicts between the limited binary visual clues of the silhouette and numerous covariates with diverse scales, which brings challenges to the model's adaptiveness. In this paper, we address this conflict by developing a novel MetaGait that learns to learn an omni sample adaptive representation. Towards this goal, MetaGait injects meta-knowledge, which could guide the model to perceive sample-specific properties, into the calibration network of the attention mechanism to improve the adaptiveness from the omni-scale, omni-dimension, and omni-process perspectives. Specifically, we leverage the meta-knowledge across the entire process, where Meta Triple Attention and Meta Temporal Pooling are presented respectively to adaptively capture omni-scale dependency from spatial/channel/temporal dimensions simultaneously and to adaptively aggregate temporal information through integrating the merits of three complementary temporal aggregation methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed MetaGait. On CASIA-B, we achieve rank-1 accuracy of 98.7%, 96.0%, and 89.3% under three conditions, respectively. On OU-MVLP, we achieve rank-1 accuracy of 92.4%.