Estimate Hitting Time by Hitting Probability for Elitist Evolutionary Algorithms

Drift analysis is a powerful tool for analyzing the time complexity of evolutionary algorithms. However, it requires manual construction of drift functions to bound hitting time for each specific algorithm and problem. To address this limitation, general linear drift functions were introduced for elitist evolutionary algorithms. But calculating linear bound coefficients effectively remains a problem. This paper proposes a new method called drift analysis of hitting probability to compute these coefficients. Each coefficient is interpreted as a bound on the hitting probability of a fitness level, transforming the task of estimating hitting time into estimating hitting probability. A novel drift analysis method is then developed to estimate hitting probability, where paths are introduced to handle multimodal fitness landscapes. Explicit expressions are constructed to compute hitting probability, significantly simplifying the estimation process. One advantage of the proposed method is its ability to estimate both the lower and upper bounds of hitting time and to compare the performance of two algorithms in terms of hitting time. To demonstrate this application, two algorithms for the knapsack problem, each incorporating feasibility rules and greedy repair respectively, are compared. The analysis indicates that neither constraint handling technique consistently outperforms the other.

SyncTalk++: High-Fidelity and Efficient Synchronized Talking Heads Synthesis Using Gaussian Splatting

Achieving high synchronization in the synthesis of realistic, speech-driven talking head videos presents a significant challenge. A lifelike talking head requires synchronized coordination of subject identity, lip movements, facial expressions, and head poses. The absence of these synchronizations is a fundamental flaw, leading to unrealistic results. To address the critical issue of synchronization, identified as the ''devil'' in creating realistic talking heads, we introduce SyncTalk++, which features a Dynamic Portrait Renderer with Gaussian Splatting to ensure consistent subject identity preservation and a Face-Sync Controller that aligns lip movements with speech while innovatively using a 3D facial blendshape model to reconstruct accurate facial expressions. To ensure natural head movements, we propose a Head-Sync Stabilizer, which optimizes head poses for greater stability. Additionally, SyncTalk++ enhances robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) audio by incorporating an Expression Generator and a Torso Restorer, which generate speech-matched facial expressions and seamless torso regions. Our approach maintains consistency and continuity in visual details across frames and significantly improves rendering speed and quality, achieving up to 101 frames per second. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that SyncTalk++ outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synchronization and realism. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/synctalk++.

OmniSync: Towards Universal Lip Synchronization via Diffusion Transformers

Lip synchronization is the task of aligning a speaker's lip movements in video with corresponding speech audio, and it is essential for creating realistic, expressive video content. However, existing methods often rely on reference frames and masked-frame inpainting, which limit their robustness to identity consistency, pose variations, facial occlusions, and stylized content. In addition, since audio signals provide weaker conditioning than visual cues, lip shape leakage from the original video will affect lip sync quality. In this paper, we present OmniSync, a universal lip synchronization framework for diverse visual scenarios. Our approach introduces a mask-free training paradigm using Diffusion Transformer models for direct frame editing without explicit masks, enabling unlimited-duration inference while maintaining natural facial dynamics and preserving character identity. During inference, we propose a flow-matching-based progressive noise initialization to ensure pose and identity consistency, while allowing precise mouth-region editing. To address the weak conditioning signal of audio, we develop a Dynamic Spatiotemporal Classifier-Free Guidance (DS-CFG) mechanism that adaptively adjusts guidance strength over time and space. We also establish the AIGC-LipSync Benchmark, the first evaluation suite for lip synchronization in diverse AI-generated videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OmniSync significantly outperforms prior methods in both visual quality and lip sync accuracy, achieving superior results in both real-world and AI-generated videos.

DualTalk: Dual-Speaker Interaction for 3D Talking Head Conversations

In face-to-face conversations, individuals need to switch between speaking and listening roles seamlessly. Existing 3D talking head generation models focus solely on speaking or listening, neglecting the natural dynamics of interactive conversation, which leads to unnatural interactions and awkward transitions. To address this issue, we propose a new task -- multi-round dual-speaker interaction for 3D talking head generation -- which requires models to handle and generate both speaking and listening behaviors in continuous conversation. To solve this task, we introduce DualTalk, a novel unified framework that integrates the dynamic behaviors of speakers and listeners to simulate realistic and coherent dialogue interactions. This framework not only synthesizes lifelike talking heads when speaking but also generates continuous and vivid non-verbal feedback when listening, effectively capturing the interplay between the roles. We also create a new dataset featuring 50 hours of multi-round conversations with over 1,000 characters, where participants continuously switch between speaking and listening roles. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the naturalness and expressiveness of 3D talking heads in dual-speaker conversations. We recommend watching the supplementary video: https://ziqiaopeng.github.io/dualtalk.

MEGADance: Mixture-of-Experts Architecture for Genre-Aware 3D Dance Generation

Music-driven 3D dance generation has attracted increasing attention in recent years, with promising applications in choreography, virtual reality, and creative content creation. Previous research has generated promising realistic dance movement from audio signals. However, traditional methods underutilize genre conditioning, often treating it as auxiliary modifiers rather than core semantic drivers. This oversight compromises music-motion synchronization and disrupts dance genre continuity, particularly during complex rhythmic transitions, thereby leading to visually unsatisfactory effects. To address the challenge, we propose MEGADance, a novel architecture for music-driven 3D dance generation. By decoupling choreographic consistency into dance generality and genre specificity, MEGADance demonstrates significant dance quality and strong genre controllability. It consists of two stages: (1) High-Fidelity Dance Quantization Stage (HFDQ), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) and reconstructs them with kinematic-dynamic constraints, and (2) Genre-Aware Dance Generation Stage (GADG), which maps music into the latent representation by synergistic utilization of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) mechanism with Mamba-Transformer hybrid backbone. Extensive experiments on the FineDance and AIST++ dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of MEGADance both qualitatively and quantitatively. Code will be released upon acceptance.

MatchDance: Collaborative Mamba-Transformer Architecture Matching for High-Quality 3D Dance Synthesis

Music-to-dance generation represents a challenging yet pivotal task at the intersection of choreography, virtual reality, and creative content generation. Despite its significance, existing methods face substantial limitation in achieving choreographic consistency. To address the challenge, we propose MatchDance, a novel framework for music-to-dance generation that constructs a latent representation to enhance choreographic consistency. MatchDance employs a two-stage design: (1) a Kinematic-Dynamic-based Quantization Stage (KDQS), which encodes dance motions into a latent representation by Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) with kinematic-dynamic constraints and reconstructs them with high fidelity, and (2) a Hybrid Music-to-Dance Generation Stage(HMDGS), which uses a Mamba-Transformer hybrid architecture to map music into the latent representation, followed by the KDQS decoder to generate 3D dance motions. Additionally, a music-dance retrieval framework and comprehensive metrics are introduced for evaluation. Extensive experiments on the FineDance dataset demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Code will be released upon acceptance.

GPT-ImgEval: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Diagnosing GPT4o in Image Generation

The recent breakthroughs in OpenAI's GPT4o model have demonstrated surprisingly good capabilities in image generation and editing, resulting in significant excitement in the community. This technical report presents the first-look evaluation benchmark (named GPT-ImgEval), quantitatively and qualitatively diagnosing GPT-4o's performance across three critical dimensions: (1) generation quality, (2) editing proficiency, and (3) world knowledge-informed semantic synthesis. Across all three tasks, GPT-4o demonstrates strong performance, significantly surpassing existing methods in both image generation control and output quality, while also showcasing exceptional knowledge reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, based on the GPT-4o's generated data, we propose a classification-model-based approach to investigate the underlying architecture of GPT-4o, where our empirical results suggest the model consists of an auto-regressive (AR) combined with a diffusion-based head for image decoding, rather than the VAR-like architectures. We also provide a complete speculation on GPT-4o's overall architecture. In addition, we conduct a series of analyses to identify and visualize GPT-4o's specific limitations and the synthetic artifacts commonly observed in its image generation. We also present a comparative study of multi-round image editing between GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, and discuss the safety implications of GPT-4o's outputs, particularly their detectability by existing image forensic models. We hope that our work can offer valuable insight and provide a reliable benchmark to guide future research, foster reproducibility, and accelerate innovation in the field of image generation and beyond. The codes and datasets used for evaluating GPT-4o can be found at https://github.com/PicoTrex/GPT-ImgEval.

Scene4U: Hierarchical Layered 3D Scene Reconstruction from Single Panoramic Image for Your Immerse Exploration

The reconstruction of immersive and realistic 3D scenes holds significant practical importance in various fields of computer vision and computer graphics. Typically, immersive and realistic scenes should be free from obstructions by dynamic objects, maintain global texture consistency, and allow for unrestricted exploration. The current mainstream methods for image-driven scene construction involves iteratively refining the initial image using a moving virtual camera to generate the scene. However, previous methods struggle with visual discontinuities due to global texture inconsistencies under varying camera poses, and they frequently exhibit scene voids caused by foreground-background occlusions. To this end, we propose a novel layered 3D scene reconstruction framework from panoramic image, named Scene4U. Specifically, Scene4U integrates an open-vocabulary segmentation model with a large language model to decompose a real panorama into multiple layers. Then, we employs a layered repair module based on diffusion model to restore occluded regions using visual cues and depth information, generating a hierarchical representation of the scene. The multi-layer panorama is then initialized as a 3D Gaussian Splatting representation, followed by layered optimization, which ultimately produces an immersive 3D scene with semantic and structural consistency that supports free exploration. Scene4U outperforms state-of-the-art method, improving by 24.24% in LPIPS and 24.40% in BRISQUE, while also achieving the fastest training speed. Additionally, to demonstrate the robustness of Scene4U and allow users to experience immersive scenes from various landmarks, we build WorldVista3D dataset for 3D scene reconstruction, which contains panoramic images of globally renowned sites. The implementation code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/LongHZ140516/Scene4U .

ExGes: Expressive Human Motion Retrieval and Modulation for Audio-Driven Gesture Synthesis

Audio-driven human gesture synthesis is a crucial task with broad applications in virtual avatars, human-computer interaction, and creative content generation. Despite notable progress, existing methods often produce gestures that are coarse, lack expressiveness, and fail to fully align with audio semantics. To address these challenges, we propose ExGes, a novel retrieval-enhanced diffusion framework with three key designs: (1) a Motion Base Construction, which builds a gesture library using training dataset; (2) a Motion Retrieval Module, employing constrative learning and momentum distillation for fine-grained reference poses retreiving; and (3) a Precision Control Module, integrating partial masking and stochastic masking to enable flexible and fine-grained control. Experimental evaluations on BEAT2 demonstrate that ExGes reduces Fr\'echet Gesture Distance by 6.2\% and improves motion diversity by 5.3\% over EMAGE, with user studies revealing a 71.3\% preference for its naturalness and semantic relevance. Code will be released upon acceptance.

LEADRE: Multi-Faceted Knowledge Enhanced LLM Empowered Display Advertisement Recommender System

Display advertising provides significant value to advertisers, publishers, and users. Traditional display advertising systems utilize a multi-stage architecture consisting of retrieval, coarse ranking, and final ranking. However, conventional retrieval methods rely on ID-based learning to rank mechanisms and fail to adequately utilize the content information of ads, which hampers their ability to provide diverse recommendation lists. To address this limitation, we propose leveraging the extensive world knowledge of LLMs. However, three key challenges arise when attempting to maximize the effectiveness of LLMs: "How to capture user interests", "How to bridge the knowledge gap between LLMs and advertising system", and "How to efficiently deploy LLMs". To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel LLM-based framework called LLM Empowered Display ADvertisement REcommender system (LEADRE). LEADRE consists of three core modules: (1) The Intent-Aware Prompt Engineering introduces multi-faceted knowledge and designs intent-aware <Prompt, Response> pairs that fine-tune LLMs to generate ads tailored to users' personal interests. (2) The Advertising-Specific Knowledge Alignment incorporates auxiliary fine-tuning tasks and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align LLMs with ad semantic and business value. (3) The Efficient System Deployment deploys LEADRE in an online environment by integrating both latency-tolerant and latency-sensitive service. Extensive offline experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of LEADRE and validate the contributions of individual modules. Online A/B test shows that LEADRE leads to a 1.57% and 1.17% GMV lift for serviced users on WeChat Channels and Moments separately. LEADRE has been deployed on both platforms, serving tens of billions of requests each day.