FasterCache: Training-Free Video Diffusion Model Acceleration with High Quality

In this paper, we present \textbf{\textit{FasterCache}}, a novel training-free strategy designed to accelerate the inference of video diffusion models with high-quality generation. By analyzing existing cache-based methods, we observe that \textit{directly reusing adjacent-step features degrades video quality due to the loss of subtle variations}. We further perform a pioneering investigation of the acceleration potential of classifier-free guidance (CFG) and reveal significant redundancy between conditional and unconditional features within the same timestep. Capitalizing on these observations, we introduce FasterCache to substantially accelerate diffusion-based video generation. Our key contributions include a dynamic feature reuse strategy that preserves both feature distinction and temporal continuity, and CFG-Cache which optimizes the reuse of conditional and unconditional outputs to further enhance inference speed without compromising video quality. We empirically evaluate FasterCache on recent video diffusion models. Experimental results show that FasterCache can significantly accelerate video generation (\eg 1.67$\times$ speedup on Vchitect-2.0) while keeping video quality comparable to the baseline, and consistently outperform existing methods in both inference speed and video quality.

BiGR: Harnessing Binary Latent Codes for Image Generation and Improved Visual Representation Capabilities

We introduce BiGR, a novel conditional image generation model using compact binary latent codes for generative training, focusing on enhancing both generation and representation capabilities. BiGR is the first conditional generative model that unifies generation and discrimination within the same framework. BiGR features a binary tokenizer, a masked modeling mechanism, and a binary transcoder for binary code prediction. Additionally, we introduce a novel entropy-ordered sampling method to enable efficient image generation. Extensive experiments validate BiGR's superior performance in generation quality, as measured by FID-50k, and representation capabilities, as evidenced by linear-probe accuracy. Moreover, BiGR showcases zero-shot generalization across various vision tasks, enabling applications such as image inpainting, outpainting, editing, interpolation, and enrichment, without the need for structural modifications. Our findings suggest that BiGR unifies generative and discriminative tasks effectively, paving the way for further advancements in the field.

AvatarGO: Zero-shot 4D Human-Object Interaction Generation and Animation

Recent advancements in diffusion models have led to significant improvements in the generation and animation of 4D full-body human-object interactions (HOI). Nevertheless, existing methods primarily focus on SMPL-based motion generation, which is limited by the scarcity of realistic large-scale interaction data. This constraint affects their ability to create everyday HOI scenes. This paper addresses this challenge using a zero-shot approach with a pre-trained diffusion model. Despite this potential, achieving our goals is difficult due to the diffusion model's lack of understanding of ''where'' and ''how'' objects interact with the human body. To tackle these issues, we introduce AvatarGO, a novel framework designed to generate animatable 4D HOI scenes directly from textual inputs. Specifically, 1) for the ''where'' challenge, we propose LLM-guided contact retargeting, which employs Lang-SAM to identify the contact body part from text prompts, ensuring precise representation of human-object spatial relations. 2) For the ''how'' challenge, we introduce correspondence-aware motion optimization that constructs motion fields for both human and object models using the linear blend skinning function from SMPL-X. Our framework not only generates coherent compositional motions, but also exhibits greater robustness in handling penetration issues. Extensive experiments with existing methods validate AvatarGO's superior generation and animation capabilities on a variety of human-object pairs and diverse poses. As the first attempt to synthesize 4D avatars with object interactions, we hope AvatarGO could open new doors for human-centric 4D content creation.

ArtiFade: Learning to Generate High-quality Subject from Blemished Images

Subject-driven text-to-image generation has witnessed remarkable advancements in its ability to learn and capture characteristics of a subject using only a limited number of images. However, existing methods commonly rely on high-quality images for training and may struggle to generate reasonable images when the input images are blemished by artifacts. This is primarily attributed to the inadequate capability of current techniques in distinguishing subject-related features from disruptive artifacts. In this paper, we introduce ArtiFade to tackle this issue and successfully generate high-quality artifact-free images from blemished datasets. Specifically, ArtiFade exploits fine-tuning of a pre-trained text-to-image model, aiming to remove artifacts. The elimination of artifacts is achieved by utilizing a specialized dataset that encompasses both unblemished images and their corresponding blemished counterparts during fine-tuning. ArtiFade also ensures the preservation of the original generative capabilities inherent within the diffusion model, thereby enhancing the overall performance of subject-driven methods in generating high-quality and artifact-free images. We further devise evaluation benchmarks tailored for this task. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate the generalizability of ArtiFade in effective artifact removal under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios.

ConceptExpress: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Single-image Unsupervised Concept Extraction

While personalized text-to-image generation has enabled the learning of a single concept from multiple images, a more practical yet challenging scenario involves learning multiple concepts within a single image. However, existing works tackling this scenario heavily rely on extensive human annotations. In this paper, we introduce a novel task named Unsupervised Concept Extraction (UCE) that considers an unsupervised setting without any human knowledge of the concepts. Given an image that contains multiple concepts, the task aims to extract and recreate individual concepts solely relying on the existing knowledge from pretrained diffusion models. To achieve this, we present ConceptExpress that tackles UCE by unleashing the inherent capabilities of pretrained diffusion models in two aspects. Specifically, a concept localization approach automatically locates and disentangles salient concepts by leveraging spatial correspondence from diffusion self-attention; and based on the lookup association between a concept and a conceptual token, a concept-wise optimization process learns discriminative tokens that represent each individual concept. Finally, we establish an evaluation protocol tailored for the UCE task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ConceptExpress is a promising solution to the UCE task. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/haoosz/ConceptExpress

Affordances-Oriented Planning using Foundation Models for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation

LLM-based agents have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance in the vision-language navigation (VLN) task. However, these zero-shot methods focus only on solving high-level task planning by selecting nodes in predefined navigation graphs for movements, overlooking low-level control in realistic navigation scenarios. To bridge this gap, we propose AO-Planner, a novel affordances-oriented planning framework for continuous VLN task. Our AO-Planner integrates various foundation models to achieve affordances-oriented motion planning and action decision-making, both performed in a zero-shot manner. Specifically, we employ a visual affordances prompting (VAP) approach, where visible ground is segmented utilizing SAM to provide navigational affordances, based on which the LLM selects potential next waypoints and generates low-level path planning towards selected waypoints. We further introduce a high-level agent, PathAgent, to identify the most probable pixel-based path and convert it into 3D coordinates to fulfill low-level motion. Experimental results on the challenging R2R-CE benchmark demonstrate that AO-Planner achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance (5.5% improvement in SPL). Our method establishes an effective connection between LLM and 3D world to circumvent the difficulty of directly predicting world coordinates, presenting novel prospects for employing foundation models in low-level motion control.

A Survey on 3D Human Avatar Modeling -- From Reconstruction to Generation

3D modeling has long been an important area in computer vision and computer graphics. Recently, thanks to the breakthroughs in neural representations and generative models, we witnessed a rapid development of 3D modeling. 3D human modeling, lying at the core of many real-world applications, such as gaming and animation, has attracted significant attention. Over the past few years, a large body of work on creating 3D human avatars has been introduced, forming a new and abundant knowledge base for 3D human modeling. The scale of the literature makes it difficult for individuals to keep track of all the works. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of these emerging techniques for 3D human avatar modeling, from both reconstruction and generation perspectives. Firstly, we review representative methods for 3D human reconstruction, including methods based on pixel-aligned implicit function, neural radiance field, and 3D Gaussian Splatting, etc. We then summarize representative methods for 3D human generation, especially those using large language models like CLIP, diffusion models, and various 3D representations, which demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Finally, we discuss our reflection on existing methods and open challenges for 3D human avatar modeling, shedding light on future research.

Bridging Different Language Models and Generative Vision Models for Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation has made significant advancements with the introduction of text-to-image diffusion models. These models typically consist of a language model that interprets user prompts and a vision model that generates corresponding images. As language and vision models continue to progress in their respective domains, there is a great potential in exploring the replacement of components in text-to-image diffusion models with more advanced counterparts. A broader research objective would therefore be to investigate the integration of any two unrelated language and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. In this paper, we explore this objective and propose LaVi-Bridge, a pipeline that enables the integration of diverse pre-trained language models and generative vision models for text-to-image generation. By leveraging LoRA and adapters, LaVi-Bridge offers a flexible and plug-and-play approach without requiring modifications to the original weights of the language and vision models. Our pipeline is compatible with various language models and generative vision models, accommodating different structures. Within this framework, we demonstrate that incorporating superior modules, such as more advanced language models or generative vision models, results in notable improvements in capabilities like text alignment or image quality. Extensive evaluations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of LaVi-Bridge. Code is available at https://github.com/ShihaoZhaoZSH/LaVi-Bridge.

PLACE: Adaptive Layout-Semantic Fusion for Semantic Image Synthesis

Recent advancements in large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models have led to remarkable progress in semantic image synthesis. Nevertheless, synthesizing high-quality images with consistent semantics and layout remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose the adaPtive LAyout-semantiC fusion modulE (PLACE) that harnesses pre-trained models to alleviate the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first employ the layout control map to faithfully represent layouts in the feature space. Subsequently, we combine the layout and semantic features in a timestep-adaptive manner to synthesize images with realistic details. During fine-tuning, we propose the Semantic Alignment (SA) loss to further enhance layout alignment. Additionally, we introduce the Layout-Free Prior Preservation (LFP) loss, which leverages unlabeled data to maintain the priors of pre-trained models, thereby improving the visual quality and semantic consistency of synthesized images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs favorably in terms of visual quality, semantic consistency, and layout alignment. The source code and model are available at https://github.com/cszy98/PLACE/tree/main.

MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting for Unified Vision-and-Language Navigation

Embodied agents equipped with GPT as their brain have exhibited extraordinary thinking and decision-making abilities across various tasks. However, existing zero-shot agents for vision-and-language navigation (VLN) only prompt the GPT to handle excessive environmental information and select potential locations within localized environments, without constructing an effective ''global-view'' (e.g., a commonly-used map) for the agent to understand the overall environment. In this work, we present a novel map-guided GPT-based path-planning agent, dubbed MapGPT, for the zero-shot VLN task. Specifically, we convert a topological map constructed online into prompts to encourage map-guided global exploration, and require the agent to explicitly output and update multi-step path planning to avoid getting stuck in local exploration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MapGPT is effective, achieving impressive performance on both the R2R and REVERIE datasets (38.8% and 28.4% success rate, respectively) and showcasing the newly emerged global thinking and path planning capabilities of the GPT model. Unlike previous VLN agents, which require separate parameters fine-tuning or specific prompt design to accommodate various instruction styles across different datasets, our MapGPT is more unified as it can adapt to different instruction styles seamlessly, which is the first of its kind in this field.