Bringing Characters to New Stories: Training-Free Theme-Specific Image Generation via Dynamic Visual Prompting

The stories and characters that captivate us as we grow up shape unique fantasy worlds, with images serving as the primary medium for visually experiencing these realms. Personalizing generative models through fine-tuning with theme-specific data has become a prevalent approach in text-to-image generation. However, unlike object customization, which focuses on learning specific objects, theme-specific generation encompasses diverse elements such as characters, scenes, and objects. Such diversity also introduces a key challenge: how to adaptively generate multi-character, multi-concept, and continuous theme-specific images (TSI). Moreover, fine-tuning approaches often come with significant computational overhead, time costs, and risks of overfitting. This paper explores a fundamental question: Can image generation models directly leverage images as contextual input, similarly to how large language models use text as context? To address this, we present T-Prompter, a novel training-free TSI method for generation. T-Prompter introduces visual prompting, a mechanism that integrates reference images into generative models, allowing users to seamlessly specify the target theme without requiring additional training. To further enhance this process, we propose a Dynamic Visual Prompting (DVP) mechanism, which iteratively optimizes visual prompts to improve the accuracy and quality of generated images. Our approach enables diverse applications, including consistent story generation, character design, realistic character generation, and style-guided image generation. Comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art personalization methods demonstrate that T-Prompter achieves significantly better results and excels in maintaining character identity preserving, style consistency and text alignment, offering a robust and flexible solution for theme-specific image generation.

Interactive Visual Assessment for Text-to-Image Generation Models

Visual generation models have achieved remarkable progress in computer graphics applications but still face significant challenges in real-world deployment. Current assessment approaches for visual generation tasks typically follow an isolated three-phase framework: test input collection, model output generation, and user assessment. These fashions suffer from fixed coverage, evolving difficulty, and data leakage risks, limiting their effectiveness in comprehensively evaluating increasingly complex generation models. To address these limitations, we propose DyEval, an LLM-powered dynamic interactive visual assessment framework that facilitates collaborative evaluation between humans and generative models for text-to-image systems. DyEval features an intuitive visual interface that enables users to interactively explore and analyze model behaviors, while adaptively generating hierarchical, fine-grained, and diverse textual inputs to continuously probe the capability boundaries of the models based on their feedback. Additionally, to provide interpretable analysis for users to further improve tested models, we develop a contextual reflection module that mines failure triggers of test inputs and reflects model potential failure patterns supporting in-depth analysis using the logical reasoning ability of LLM. Qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that DyEval can effectively help users identify max up to 2.56 times generation failures than conventional methods, and uncover complex and rare failure patterns, such as issues with pronoun generation and specific cultural context generation. Our framework provides valuable insights for improving generative models and has broad implications for advancing the reliability and capabilities of visual generation systems across various domains.

HeadRouter: A Training-free Image Editing Framework for MM-DiTs by Adaptively Routing Attention Heads

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have exhibited robust capabilities in image generation tasks. However, accurate text-guided image editing for multimodal DiTs (MM-DiTs) still poses a significant challenge. Unlike UNet-based structures that could utilize self/cross-attention maps for semantic editing, MM-DiTs inherently lack support for explicit and consistent incorporated text guidance, resulting in semantic misalignment between the edited results and texts. In this study, we disclose the sensitivity of different attention heads to different image semantics within MM-DiTs and introduce HeadRouter, a training-free image editing framework that edits the source image by adaptively routing the text guidance to different attention heads in MM-DiTs. Furthermore, we present a dual-token refinement module to refine text/image token representations for precise semantic guidance and accurate region expression. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate HeadRouter's performance in terms of editing fidelity and image quality.

Computer-aided Colorization State-of-the-science: A Survey

This paper reviews published research in the field of computer-aided colorization technology. We argue that the colorization task originates from computer graphics, prospers by introducing computer vision, and tends to the fusion of vision and graphics, so we put forward our taxonomy and organize the whole paper chronologically. We extend the existing reconstruction-based colorization evaluation techniques, considering that aesthetic assessment of colored images should be introduced to ensure that colorization satisfies human visual-related requirements and emotions more closely. We perform the colorization aesthetic assessment on seven representative unconditional colorization models and discuss the difference between our assessment and the existing reconstruction-based metrics. Finally, this paper identifies unresolved issues and proposes fruitful areas for future research and development. Access to the project associated with this survey can be obtained at https://github.com/DanielCho-HK/Colorization.

Break-for-Make: Modular Low-Rank Adaptations for Composable Content-Style Customization

Personalized generation paradigms empower designers to customize visual intellectual properties with the help of textual descriptions by tuning or adapting pre-trained text-to-image models on a few images. Recent works explore approaches for concurrently customizing both content and detailed visual style appearance. However, these existing approaches often generate images where the content and style are entangled. In this study, we reconsider the customization of content and style concepts from the perspective of parameter space construction. Unlike existing methods that utilize a shared parameter space for content and style, we propose a learning framework that separates the parameter space to facilitate individual learning of content and style, thereby enabling disentangled content and style. To achieve this goal, we introduce "partly learnable projection" (PLP) matrices to separate the original adapters into divided sub-parameter spaces. We propose "break-for-make" customization learning pipeline based on PLP, which is simple yet effective. We break the original adapters into "up projection" and "down projection", train content and style PLPs individually with the guidance of corresponding textual prompts in the separate adapters, and maintain generalization by employing a multi-correspondence projection learning strategy. Based on the adapters broken apart for separate training content and style, we then make the entity parameter space by reconstructing the content and style PLPs matrices, followed by fine-tuning the combined adapter to generate the target object with the desired appearance. Experiments on various styles, including textures, materials, and artistic style, show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art single/multiple concept learning pipelines in terms of content-style-prompt alignment.

Make-Your-Anchor: A Diffusion-based 2D Avatar Generation Framework

Despite the remarkable process of talking-head-based avatar-creating solutions, directly generating anchor-style videos with full-body motions remains challenging. In this study, we propose Make-Your-Anchor, a novel system necessitating only a one-minute video clip of an individual for training, subsequently enabling the automatic generation of anchor-style videos with precise torso and hand movements. Specifically, we finetune a proposed structure-guided diffusion model on input video to render 3D mesh conditions into human appearances. We adopt a two-stage training strategy for the diffusion model, effectively binding movements with specific appearances. To produce arbitrary long temporal video, we extend the 2D U-Net in the frame-wise diffusion model to a 3D style without additional training cost, and a simple yet effective batch-overlapped temporal denoising module is proposed to bypass the constraints on video length during inference. Finally, a novel identity-specific face enhancement module is introduced to improve the visual quality of facial regions in the output videos. Comparative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the system in terms of visual quality, temporal coherence, and identity preservation, outperforming SOTA diffusion/non-diffusion methods. Project page: \url{https://github.com/ICTMCG/Make-Your-Anchor}.

Dance-to-Music Generation with Encoder-based Textual Inversion of Diffusion Models

The harmonious integration of music with dance movements is pivotal in vividly conveying the artistic essence of dance. This alignment also significantly elevates the immersive quality of gaming experiences and animation productions. While there has been remarkable advancement in creating high-fidelity music from textual descriptions, current methodologies mainly concentrate on modulating overarching characteristics such as genre and emotional tone. They often overlook the nuanced management of temporal rhythm, which is indispensable in crafting music for dance, since it intricately aligns the musical beats with the dancers' movements. Recognizing this gap, we propose an encoder-based textual inversion technique for augmenting text-to-music models with visual control, facilitating personalized music generation. Specifically, we develop dual-path rhythm-genre inversion to effectively integrate the rhythm and genre of a dance motion sequence into the textual space of a text-to-music model. Contrary to the classical textual inversion method, which directly updates text embeddings to reconstruct a single target object, our approach utilizes separate rhythm and genre encoders to obtain text embeddings for two pseudo-words, adapting to the varying rhythms and genres. To achieve a more accurate evaluation, we propose improved evaluation metrics for rhythm alignment. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Furthermore, our method seamlessly adapts to in-the-wild data and effectively integrates with the inherent text-guided generation capability of the pre-trained model. Samples are available at \url{https://youtu.be/D7XDwtH1YwE}.

Regenerating Arbitrary Video Sequences with Distillation Path-Finding

If the video has long been mentioned as a widespread visualization form, the animation sequence in the video is mentioned as storytelling for people. Producing an animation requires intensive human labor from skilled professional artists to obtain plausible animation in both content and motion direction, incredibly for animations with complex content, multiple moving objects, and dense movement. This paper presents an interactive framework to generate new sequences according to the users' preference on the starting frame. The critical contrast of our approach versus prior work and existing commercial applications is that novel sequences with arbitrary starting frame are produced by our system with a consistent degree in both content and motion direction. To achieve this effectively, we first learn the feature correlation on the frameset of the given video through a proposed network called RSFNet. Then, we develop a novel path-finding algorithm, SDPF, which formulates the knowledge of motion directions of the source video to estimate the smooth and plausible sequences. The extensive experiments show that our framework can produce new animations on the cartoon and natural scenes and advance prior works and commercial applications to enable users to obtain more predictable results.

Retargeting video with an end-to-end framework

Video holds significance in computer graphics applications. Because of the heterogeneous of digital devices, retargeting videos becomes an essential function to enhance user viewing experience in such applications. In the research of video retargeting, preserving the relevant visual content in videos, avoiding flicking, and processing time are the vital challenges. Extending image retargeting techniques to the video domain is challenging due to the high running time. Prior work of video retargeting mainly utilizes time-consuming preprocessing to analyze frames. Plus, being tolerant of different video content, avoiding important objects from shrinking, and the ability to play with arbitrary ratios are the limitations that need to be resolved in these systems requiring investigation. In this paper, we present an end-to-end RETVI method to retarget videos to arbitrary aspect ratios. We eliminate the computational bottleneck in the conventional approaches by designing RETVI with two modules, content feature analyzer (CFA) and adaptive deforming estimator (ADE). The extensive experiments and evaluations show that our system outperforms previous work in quality and running time. Visit our project website for more results at http://graphics.csie.ncku.edu.tw/RETVI.

ProSpect: Expanded Conditioning for the Personalization of Attribute-aware Image Generation

Personalizing generative models offers a way to guide image generation with user-provided references. Current personalization methods can invert an object or concept into the textual conditioning space and compose new natural sentences for text-to-image diffusion models. However, representing and editing specific visual attributes like material, style, layout, etc. remains a challenge, leading to a lack of disentanglement and editability. To address this, we propose a novel approach that leverages the step-by-step generation process of diffusion models, which generate images from low- to high-frequency information, providing a new perspective on representing, generating, and editing images. We develop Prompt Spectrum Space P*, an expanded textual conditioning space, and a new image representation method called ProSpect. ProSpect represents an image as a collection of inverted textual token embeddings encoded from per-stage prompts, where each prompt corresponds to a specific generation stage (i.e., a group of consecutive steps) of the diffusion model. Experimental results demonstrate that P* and ProSpect offer stronger disentanglement and controllability compared to existing methods. We apply ProSpect in various personalized attribute-aware image generation applications, such as image/text-guided material/style/layout transfer/editing, achieving previously unattainable results with a single image input without fine-tuning the diffusion models.