Kubrick: Multimodal Agent Collaborations for Synthetic Video Generation

Text-to-video generation has been dominated by end-to-end diffusion-based or autoregressive models. On one hand, those novel models provide plausible versatility, but they are criticized for physical correctness, shading and illumination, camera motion, and temporal consistency. On the other hand, film industry relies on manually-edited Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI) using 3D modeling software. Human-directed 3D synthetic videos and animations address the aforementioned shortcomings, but it is extremely tedious and requires tight collaboration between movie makers and 3D rendering experts. In this paper, we introduce an automatic synthetic video generation pipeline based on Vision Large Language Model (VLM) agent collaborations. Given a natural language description of a video, multiple VLM agents auto-direct various processes of the generation pipeline. They cooperate to create Blender scripts which render a video that best aligns with the given description. Based on film making inspiration and augmented with Blender-based movie making knowledge, the Director agent decomposes the input text-based video description into sub-processes. For each sub-process, the Programmer agent produces Python-based Blender scripts based on customized function composing and API calling. Then, the Reviewer agent, augmented with knowledge of video reviewing, character motion coordinates, and intermediate screenshots uses its compositional reasoning ability to provide feedback to the Programmer agent. The Programmer agent iteratively improves the scripts to yield the best overall video outcome. Our generated videos show better quality than commercial video generation models in 5 metrics on video quality and instruction-following performance. Moreover, our framework outperforms other approaches in a comprehensive user study on quality, consistency, and rationality.

COHO: Context-Sensitive City-Scale Hierarchical Urban Layout Generation

The generation of large-scale urban layouts has garnered substantial interest across various disciplines. Prior methods have utilized procedural generation requiring manual rule coding or deep learning needing abundant data. However, prior approaches have not considered the context-sensitive nature of urban layout generation. Our approach addresses this gap by leveraging a canonical graph representation for the entire city, which facilitates scalability and captures the multi-layer semantics inherent in urban layouts. We introduce a novel graph-based masked autoencoder (GMAE) for city-scale urban layout generation. The method encodes attributed buildings, city blocks, communities and cities into a unified graph structure, enabling self-supervised masked training for graph autoencoder. Additionally, we employ scheduled iterative sampling for 2.5D layout generation, prioritizing the generation of important city blocks and buildings. Our approach achieves good realism, semantic consistency, and correctness across the heterogeneous urban styles in 330 US cities. Codes and datasets are released at https://github.com/Arking1995/COHO.

GlobalMapper: Arbitrary-Shaped Urban Layout Generation

Modeling and designing urban building layouts is of significant interest in computer vision, computer graphics, and urban applications. A building layout consists of a set of buildings in city blocks defined by a network of roads. We observe that building layouts are discrete structures, consisting of multiple rows of buildings of various shapes, and are amenable to skeletonization for mapping arbitrary city block shapes to a canonical form. Hence, we propose a fully automatic approach to building layout generation using graph attention networks. Our method generates realistic urban layouts given arbitrary road networks, and enables conditional generation based on learned priors. Our results, including user study, demonstrate superior performance as compared to prior layout generation networks, support arbitrary city block and varying building shapes as demonstrated by generating layouts for 28 large cities.

Diffusion-based Document Layout Generation

We develop a diffusion-based approach for various document layout sequence generation. Layout sequences specify the contents of a document design in an explicit format. Our novel diffusion-based approach works in the sequence domain rather than the image domain in order to permit more complex and realistic layouts. We also introduce a new metric, Document Earth Mover's Distance (Doc-EMD). By considering similarity between heterogeneous categories document designs, we handle the shortcomings of prior document metrics that only evaluate the same category of layouts. Our empirical analysis shows that our diffusion-based approach is comparable to or outperforming other previous methods for layout generation across various document datasets. Moreover, our metric is capable of differentiating documents better than previous metrics for specific cases.

Design and Deployment of Photo2Building: A Cloud-based Procedural Modeling Tool as a Service

We present a Photo2Building tool to create a plausible 3D model of a building from only a single photograph. Our tool is based on a prior desktop version which, as described in this paper, is converted into a client-server model, with job queuing, web-page support, and support of concurrent usage. The reported cloud-based web-accessible tool can reconstruct a building in 40 seconds on average and costing only 0.60 USD with current pricing. This provides for an extremely scalable and possibly widespread tool for creating building models for use in urban design and planning applications. With the growing impact of rapid urbanization on weather and climate and resource availability, access to such a service is expected to help a wide variety of users such as city planners, urban meteorologists worldwide in the quest to improved prediction of urban weather and designing climate-resilient cities of the future.