ASGDiffusion: Parallel High-Resolution Generation with Asynchronous Structure Guidance

Training-free high-resolution (HR) image generation has garnered significant attention due to the high costs of training large diffusion models. Most existing methods begin by reconstructing the overall structure and then proceed to refine the local details. Despite their advancements, they still face issues with repetitive patterns in HR image generation. Besides, HR generation with diffusion models incurs significant computational costs. Thus, parallel generation is essential for interactive applications. To solve the above limitations, we introduce a novel method named ASGDiffusion for parallel HR generation with Asynchronous Structure Guidance (ASG) using pre-trained diffusion models. To solve the pattern repetition problem of HR image generation, ASGDiffusion leverages the low-resolution (LR) noise weighted by the attention mask as the structure guidance for the denoising step to ensure semantic consistency. The proposed structure guidance can significantly alleviate the pattern repetition problem. To enable parallel generation, we further propose a parallelism strategy, which calculates the patch noises and structure guidance asynchronously. By leveraging multi-GPU parallel acceleration, we significantly accelerate generation speed and reduce memory usage per GPU. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively and efficiently addresses common issues like pattern repetition and achieves state-of-the-art HR generation.

MixedGaussianAvatar: Realistically and Geometrically Accurate Head Avatar via Mixed 2D-3D Gaussian Splatting

Reconstructing high-fidelity 3D head avatars is crucial in various applications such as virtual reality. The pioneering methods reconstruct realistic head avatars with Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), which have been limited by training and rendering speed. Recent methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) significantly improve the efficiency of training and rendering. However, the surface inconsistency of 3DGS results in subpar geometric accuracy; later, 2DGS uses 2D surfels to enhance geometric accuracy at the expense of rendering fidelity. To leverage the benefits of both 2DGS and 3DGS, we propose a novel method named MixedGaussianAvatar for realistically and geometrically accurate head avatar reconstruction. Our main idea is to utilize 2D Gaussians to reconstruct the surface of the 3D head, ensuring geometric accuracy. We attach the 2D Gaussians to the triangular mesh of the FLAME model and connect additional 3D Gaussians to those 2D Gaussians where the rendering quality of 2DGS is inadequate, creating a mixed 2D-3D Gaussian representation. These 2D-3D Gaussians can then be animated using FLAME parameters. We further introduce a progressive training strategy that first trains the 2D Gaussians and then fine-tunes the mixed 2D-3D Gaussians. We demonstrate the superiority of MixedGaussianAvatar through comprehensive experiments. The code will be released at: https://github.com/ChenVoid/MGA/.

[CLS] Attention is All You Need for Training-Free Visual Token Pruning: Make VLM Inference Faster

Large vision-language models (VLMs) often rely on a substantial number of visual tokens when interacting with large language models (LLMs), which has proven to be inefficient. Recent efforts have aimed to accelerate VLM inference by pruning visual tokens. Most existing methods assess the importance of visual tokens based on the text-visual cross-attentions in LLMs. In this study, we find that the cross-attentions between text and visual tokens in LLMs are inaccurate. Pruning tokens based on these inaccurate attentions leads to significant performance degradation, especially at high reduction ratios. To this end, we introduce FasterVLM, a simple yet effective training-free visual token pruning method that evaluates the importance of visual tokens more accurately by utilizing attentions between the [CLS] token and image tokens from the visual encoder. Since FasterVLM eliminates redundant visual tokens immediately after the visual encoder, ensuring they do not interact with LLMs and resulting in faster VLM inference. It is worth noting that, benefiting from the accuracy of [CLS] cross-attentions, FasterVLM can prune 95\% of visual tokens while maintaining 90\% of the performance of LLaVA-1.5-7B. We apply FasterVLM to various VLMs, including LLaVA-1.5, LLaVA-NeXT, and Video-LLaVA, to demonstrate its effectiveness. Experimental results show that our FasterVLM maintains strong performance across various VLM architectures and reduction ratios, significantly outperforming existing text-visual attention-based methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Theia-4869/FasterVLM.

EMD: Explicit Motion Modeling for High-Quality Street Gaussian Splatting

Photorealistic reconstruction of street scenes is essential for developing real-world simulators in autonomous driving. While recent methods based on 3D/4D Gaussian Splatting (GS) have demonstrated promising results, they still encounter challenges in complex street scenes due to the unpredictable motion of dynamic objects. Current methods typically decompose street scenes into static and dynamic objects, learning the Gaussians in either a supervised manner (e.g., w/ 3D bounding-box) or a self-supervised manner (e.g., w/o 3D bounding-box). However, these approaches do not effectively model the motions of dynamic objects (e.g., the motion speed of pedestrians is clearly different from that of vehicles), resulting in suboptimal scene decomposition. To address this, we propose Explicit Motion Decomposition (EMD), which models the motions of dynamic objects by introducing learnable motion embeddings to the Gaussians, enhancing the decomposition in street scenes. The proposed EMD is a plug-and-play approach applicable to various baseline methods. We also propose tailored training strategies to apply EMD to both supervised and self-supervised baselines. Through comprehensive experimentation, we illustrate the effectiveness of our approach with various established baselines. The code will be released at: https://qingpowuwu.github.io/emdgaussian.github.io/.

GazeGaussian: High-Fidelity Gaze Redirection with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Gaze estimation encounters generalization challenges when dealing with out-of-distribution data. To address this problem, recent methods use neural radiance fields (NeRF) to generate augmented data. However, existing methods based on NeRF are computationally expensive and lack facial details. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has become the prevailing representation of neural fields. While 3DGS has been extensively examined in head avatars, it faces challenges with accurate gaze control and generalization across different subjects. In this work, we propose GazeGaussian, a high-fidelity gaze redirection method that uses a two-stream 3DGS model to represent the face and eye regions separately. By leveraging the unstructured nature of 3DGS, we develop a novel eye representation for rigid eye rotation based on the target gaze direction. To enhance synthesis generalization across various subjects, we integrate an expression-conditional module to guide the neural renderer. Comprehensive experiments show that GazeGaussian outperforms existing methods in rendering speed, gaze redirection accuracy, and facial synthesis across multiple datasets. We also demonstrate that existing gaze estimation methods can leverage GazeGaussian to improve their generalization performance. The code will be available at: https://ucwxb.github.io/GazeGaussian/.

MC-LLaVA: Multi-Concept Personalized Vision-Language Model

Current vision-language models (VLMs) show exceptional abilities across diverse tasks including visual question answering. To enhance user experience in practical applications, recent studies investigate VLM personalization to understand user-provided concepts. However, existing studies mainly focus on single-concept personalization, neglecting the existence and interplay of multiple concepts, which limits the real-world applicability of personalized VLMs. In this paper, we propose the first multi-concept personalization method named MC-LLaVA along with a high-quality multi-concept personalization dataset. Specifically, MC-LLaVA uses a joint training strategy incorporating multiple concepts in a single training step, allowing VLMs to perform accurately in multi-concept personalization. To reduce the cost of joint training, MC-LLaVA leverages visual token information for concept token initialization, yielding improved concept representation and accelerating joint training. To advance multi-concept personalization research, we further contribute a high-quality dataset. We carefully collect images from various movies that contain multiple characters and manually generate the multi-concept question-answer samples. Our dataset features diverse movie types and question-answer types. We conduct comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate that MC-LLaVA can achieve impressive multi-concept personalized responses, paving the way for VLMs to become better user-specific assistants. The code and dataset will be publicly available at https://github.com/arctanxarc/MC-LLaVA.

PLGS: Robust Panoptic Lifting with 3D Gaussian Splatting

Previous methods utilize the Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) for panoptic lifting, while their training and rendering speed are unsatisfactory. In contrast, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a prominent technique due to its rapid training and rendering speed. However, unlike NeRF, the conventional 3DGS may not satisfy the basic smoothness assumption as it does not rely on any parameterized structures to render (e.g., MLPs). Consequently, the conventional 3DGS is, in nature, more susceptible to noisy 2D mask supervision. In this paper, we propose a new method called PLGS that enables 3DGS to generate consistent panoptic segmentation masks from noisy 2D segmentation masks while maintaining superior efficiency compared to NeRF-based methods. Specifically, we build a panoptic-aware structured 3D Gaussian model to introduce smoothness and design effective noise reduction strategies. For the semantic field, instead of initialization with structure from motion, we construct reliable semantic anchor points to initialize the 3D Gaussians. We then use these anchor points as smooth regularization during training. Additionally, we present a self-training approach using pseudo labels generated by merging the rendered masks with the noisy masks to enhance the robustness of PLGS. For the instance field, we project the 2D instance masks into 3D space and match them with oriented bounding boxes to generate cross-view consistent instance masks for supervision. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of both segmentation quality and speed.

High-Efficiency Neural Video Compression via Hierarchical Predictive Learning

The enhanced Deep Hierarchical Video Compression-DHVC 2.0-has been introduced. This single-model neural video codec operates across a broad range of bitrates, delivering not only superior compression performance to representative methods but also impressive complexity efficiency, enabling real-time processing with a significantly smaller memory footprint on standard GPUs. These remarkable advancements stem from the use of hierarchical predictive coding. Each video frame is uniformly transformed into multiscale representations through hierarchical variational autoencoders. For a specific scale's feature representation of a frame, its corresponding latent residual variables are generated by referencing lower-scale spatial features from the same frame and then conditionally entropy-encoded using a probabilistic model whose parameters are predicted using same-scale temporal reference from previous frames and lower-scale spatial reference of the current frame. This feature-space processing operates from the lowest to the highest scale of each frame, completely eliminating the need for the complexity-intensive motion estimation and compensation techniques that have been standard in video codecs for decades. The hierarchical approach facilitates parallel processing, accelerating both encoding and decoding, and supports transmission-friendly progressive decoding, making it particularly advantageous for networked video applications in the presence of packet loss. Source codes will be made available.

All-in-One Image Coding for Joint Human-Machine Vision with Multi-Path Aggregation

Image coding for multi-task applications, catering to both human perception and machine vision, has been extensively investigated. Existing methods often rely on multiple task-specific encoder-decoder pairs, leading to high overhead of parameter and bitrate usage, or face challenges in multi-objective optimization under a unified representation, failing to achieve both performance and efficiency. To this end, we propose Multi-Path Aggregation (MPA) integrated into existing coding models for joint human-machine vision, unifying the feature representation with an all-in-one architecture. MPA employs a predictor to allocate latent features among task-specific paths based on feature importance varied across tasks, maximizing the utility of shared features while preserving task-specific features for subsequent refinement. Leveraging feature correlations, we develop a two-stage optimization strategy to alleviate multi-task performance degradation. Upon the reuse of shared features, as low as 1.89% parameters are further augmented and fine-tuned for a specific task, which completely avoids extensive optimization of the entire model. Experimental results show that MPA achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods in both task-specific and multi-objective optimization across human viewing and machine analysis tasks. Moreover, our all-in-one design supports seamless transitions between human- and machine-oriented reconstruction, enabling task-controllable interpretation without altering the unified model. Code is available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/MPA.

ThermalGaussian: Thermal 3D Gaussian Splatting

Thermography is especially valuable for the military and other users of surveillance cameras. Some recent methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) are proposed to reconstruct the thermal scenes in 3D from a set of thermal and RGB images. However, unlike NeRF, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) prevails due to its rapid training and real-time rendering. In this work, we propose ThermalGaussian, the first thermal 3DGS approach capable of rendering high-quality images in RGB and thermal modalities. We first calibrate the RGB camera and the thermal camera to ensure that both modalities are accurately aligned. Subsequently, we use the registered images to learn the multimodal 3D Gaussians. To prevent the overfitting of any single modality, we introduce several multimodal regularization constraints. We also develop smoothing constraints tailored to the physical characteristics of the thermal modality. Besides, we contribute a real-world dataset named RGBT-Scenes, captured by a hand-hold thermal-infrared camera, facilitating future research on thermal scene reconstruction. We conduct comprehensive experiments to show that ThermalGaussian achieves photorealistic rendering of thermal images and improves the rendering quality of RGB images. With the proposed multimodal regularization constraints, we also reduced the model's storage cost by 90\%. The code and dataset will be released.