Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generation via Reward-Guided Optimization

Recent advances in image-to-video (I2V) generation have achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing high-quality, temporally coherent videos from static images. Among all the applications of I2V, human-centric video generation includes a large portion. However, existing I2V models encounter difficulties in maintaining identity consistency between the input human image and the generated video, especially when the person in the video exhibits significant expression changes and movements. This issue becomes critical when the human face occupies merely a small fraction of the image. Since humans are highly sensitive to identity variations, this poses a critical yet under-explored challenge in I2V generation. In this paper, we propose Identity-Preserving Reward-guided Optimization (IPRO), a novel video diffusion framework based on reinforcement learning to enhance identity preservation. Instead of introducing auxiliary modules or altering model architectures, our approach introduces a direct and effective tuning algorithm that optimizes diffusion models using a face identity scorer. To improve performance and accelerate convergence, our method backpropagates the reward signal through the last steps of the sampling chain, enabling richer gradient feedback. We also propose a novel facial scoring mechanism that treats faces in ground-truth videos as facial feature pools, providing multi-angle facial information to enhance generalization. A KL-divergence regularization is further incorporated to stabilize training and prevent overfitting to the reward signal. Extensive experiments on Wan 2.2 I2V model and our in-house I2V model demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project and code are available at \href{https://ipro-alimama.github.io/}{https://ipro-alimama.github.io/}.

TBStar-Edit: From Image Editing Pattern Shifting to Consistency Enhancement

Recent advances in image generation and editing technologies have enabled state-of-the-art models to achieve impressive results in general domains. However, when applied to e-commerce scenarios, these general models often encounter consistency limitations. To address this challenge, we introduce TBStar-Edit, an new image editing model tailored for the e-commerce domain. Through rigorous data engineering, model architecture design and training strategy, TBStar-Edit achieves precise and high-fidelity image editing while maintaining the integrity of product appearance and layout. Specifically, for data engineering, we establish a comprehensive data construction pipeline, encompassing data collection, construction, filtering, and augmentation, to acquire high-quality, instruction-following, and strongly consistent editing data to support model training. For model architecture design, we design a hierarchical model framework consisting of a base model, pattern shifting modules, and consistency enhancement modules. For model training, we adopt a two-stage training strategy to enhance the consistency preservation: first stage for editing pattern shifting, and second stage for consistency enhancement. Each stage involves training different modules with separate datasets. Finally, we conduct extensive evaluations of TBStar-Edit on a self-proposed e-commerce benchmark, and the results demonstrate that TBStar-Edit outperforms existing general-domain editing models in both objective metrics (VIE Score) and subjective user preference.

CTR-Driven Ad Text Generation via Online Feedback Preference Optimization

Advertising text plays a critical role in determining click-through rates (CTR) in online advertising. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer significant efficiency advantages over manual ad text creation. However, LLM-generated ad texts do not guarantee higher CTR performance compared to human-crafted texts, revealing a gap between generation quality and online performance of ad texts. In this work, we propose a novel ad text generation method which optimizes for CTR through preference optimization from online feedback. Our approach adopts an innovative two-stage framework: (1) diverse ad text sampling via one-shot in-context learning, using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide exemplars with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning; (2) CTR-driven preference optimization from online feedback, which weighs preference pairs according to their CTR gains and confidence levels. Through our method, the resulting model enables end-to-end generation of high-CTR ad texts. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method in both offline and online metrics. Notably, we have applied our method on a large-scale online shopping platform and achieved significant CTR improvements, showcasing its strong applicability and effectiveness in advertising systems.

Differentiable Solver Search for Fast Diffusion Sampling

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable generation quality but at the cost of numerous function evaluations. Recently, advanced ODE-based solvers have been developed to mitigate the substantial computational demands of reverse-diffusion solving under limited sampling steps. However, these solvers, heavily inspired by Adams-like multistep methods, rely solely on t-related Lagrange interpolation. We show that t-related Lagrange interpolation is suboptimal for diffusion model and reveal a compact search space comprised of time steps and solver coefficients. Building on our analysis, we propose a novel differentiable solver search algorithm to identify more optimal solver. Equipped with the searched solver, rectified-flow models, e.g., SiT-XL/2 and FlowDCN-XL/2, achieve FID scores of 2.40 and 2.35, respectively, on ImageNet256 with only 10 steps. Meanwhile, DDPM model, DiT-XL/2, reaches a FID score of 2.33 with only 10 steps. Notably, our searched solver outperforms traditional solvers by a significant margin. Moreover, our searched solver demonstrates generality across various model architectures, resolutions, and model sizes.

DMM: Building a Versatile Image Generation Model via Distillation-Based Model Merging

The success of text-to-image (T2I) generation models has spurred a proliferation of numerous model checkpoints fine-tuned from the same base model on various specialized datasets. This overwhelming specialized model production introduces new challenges for high parameter redundancy and huge storage cost, thereby necessitating the development of effective methods to consolidate and unify the capabilities of diverse powerful models into a single one. A common practice in model merging adopts static linear interpolation in the parameter space to achieve the goal of style mixing. However, it neglects the features of T2I generation task that numerous distinct models cover sundry styles which may lead to incompatibility and confusion in the merged model. To address this issue, we introduce a style-promptable image generation pipeline which can accurately generate arbitrary-style images under the control of style vectors. Based on this design, we propose the score distillation based model merging paradigm (DMM), compressing multiple models into a single versatile T2I model. Moreover, we rethink and reformulate the model merging task in the context of T2I generation, by presenting new merging goals and evaluation protocols. Our experiments demonstrate that DMM can compactly reorganize the knowledge from multiple teacher models and achieve controllable arbitrary-style generation.

PosterMaker: Towards High-Quality Product Poster Generation with Accurate Text Rendering

Product posters, which integrate subject, scene, and text, are crucial promotional tools for attracting customers. Creating such posters using modern image generation methods is valuable, while the main challenge lies in accurately rendering text, especially for complex writing systems like Chinese, which contains over 10,000 individual characters. In this work, we identify the key to precise text rendering as constructing a character-discriminative visual feature as a control signal. Based on this insight, we propose a robust character-wise representation as control and we develop TextRenderNet, which achieves a high text rendering accuracy of over 90%. Another challenge in poster generation is maintaining the fidelity of user-specific products. We address this by introducing SceneGenNet, an inpainting-based model, and propose subject fidelity feedback learning to further enhance fidelity. Based on TextRenderNet and SceneGenNet, we present PosterMaker, an end-to-end generation framework. To optimize PosterMaker efficiently, we implement a two-stage training strategy that decouples text rendering and background generation learning. Experimental results show that PosterMaker outperforms existing baselines by a remarkable margin, which demonstrates its effectiveness.

PAID: A Framework of Product-Centric Advertising Image Design

In E-commerce platforms, a full advertising image is composed of a background image and marketing taglines. Automatic ad image design reduces human costs and plays a crucial role. For the convenience of users, a novel automatic framework named Product-Centric Advertising Image Design (PAID) is proposed in this work. PAID takes the product foreground image, required taglines, and target size as input and creates an ad image automatically. PAID consists of four sequential stages: prompt generation, layout generation, background image generation, and graphics rendering. Different expert models are trained to conduct these sub-tasks. A visual language model (VLM) based prompt generation model is leveraged to produce a product-matching background prompt. The layout generation model jointly predicts text and image layout according to the background prompt, product, and taglines to achieve the best harmony. An SDXL-based layout-controlled inpainting model is trained to generate an aesthetic background image. Previous ad image design methods take a background image as input and then predict the layout of taglines, which limits the spatial layout due to fixed image content. Innovatively, our PAID adjusts the stages to produce an unrestricted layout. To complete the PAID framework, we created two high-quality datasets, PITA and PIL. Extensive experimental results show that PAID creates more visually pleasing advertising images than previous methods.

FlowDCN: Exploring DCN-like Architectures for Fast Image Generation with Arbitrary Resolution

Arbitrary-resolution image generation still remains a challenging task in AIGC, as it requires handling varying resolutions and aspect ratios while maintaining high visual quality. Existing transformer-based diffusion methods suffer from quadratic computation cost and limited resolution extrapolation capabilities, making them less effective for this task. In this paper, we propose FlowDCN, a purely convolution-based generative model with linear time and memory complexity, that can efficiently generate high-quality images at arbitrary resolutions. Equipped with a new design of learnable group-wise deformable convolution block, our FlowDCN yields higher flexibility and capability to handle different resolutions with a single model. FlowDCN achieves the state-of-the-art 4.30 sFID on $256\times256$ ImageNet Benchmark and comparable resolution extrapolation results, surpassing transformer-based counterparts in terms of convergence speed (only $\frac{1}{5}$ images), visual quality, parameters ($8\%$ reduction) and FLOPs ($20\%$ reduction). We believe FlowDCN offers a promising solution to scalable and flexible image synthesis.

Enhancing Taobao Display Advertising with Multimodal Representations: Challenges, Approaches and Insights

Despite the recognized potential of multimodal data to improve model accuracy, many large-scale industrial recommendation systems, including Taobao display advertising system, predominantly depend on sparse ID features in their models. In this work, we explore approaches to leverage multimodal data to enhance the recommendation accuracy. We start from identifying the key challenges in adopting multimodal data in a manner that is both effective and cost-efficient for industrial systems. To address these challenges, we introduce a two-phase framework, including: 1) the pre-training of multimodal representations to capture semantic similarity, and 2) the integration of these representations with existing ID-based models. Furthermore, we detail the architecture of our production system, which is designed to facilitate the deployment of multimodal representations. Since the integration of multimodal representations in mid-2023, we have observed significant performance improvements in Taobao display advertising system. We believe that the insights we have gathered will serve as a valuable resource for practitioners seeking to leverage multimodal data in their systems.

R2C2-Coder: Enhancing and Benchmarking Real-world Repository-level Code Completion Abilities of Code Large Language Models

Code completion models have made significant progress in recent years. Recently, repository-level code completion has drawn more attention in modern software development, and several baseline methods and benchmarks have been proposed. However, existing repository-level code completion methods often fall short of fully using the extensive context of a project repository, such as the intricacies of relevant files and class hierarchies. Besides, the existing benchmarks usually focus on limited code completion scenarios, which cannot reflect the repository-level code completion abilities well of existing methods. To address these limitations, we propose the R2C2-Coder to enhance and benchmark the real-world repository-level code completion abilities of code Large Language Models, where the R2C2-Coder includes a code prompt construction method R2C2-Enhance and a well-designed benchmark R2C2-Bench. Specifically, first, in R2C2-Enhance, we first construct the candidate retrieval pool and then assemble the completion prompt by retrieving from the retrieval pool for each completion cursor position. Second, based on R2C2 -Enhance, we can construct a more challenging and diverse R2C2-Bench with training, validation and test splits, where a context perturbation strategy is proposed to simulate the real-world repository-level code completion well. Extensive results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our R2C2-Coder.