DreamLayer: Simultaneous Multi-Layer Generation via Diffusion Mode

Text-driven image generation using diffusion models has recently gained significant attention. To enable more flexible image manipulation and editing, recent research has expanded from single image generation to transparent layer generation and multi-layer compositions. However, existing approaches often fail to provide a thorough exploration of multi-layer structures, leading to inconsistent inter-layer interactions, such as occlusion relationships, spatial layout, and shadowing. In this paper, we introduce DreamLayer, a novel framework that enables coherent text-driven generation of multiple image layers, by explicitly modeling the relationship between transparent foreground and background layers. DreamLayer incorporates three key components, i.e., Context-Aware Cross-Attention (CACA) for global-local information exchange, Layer-Shared Self-Attention (LSSA) for establishing robust inter-layer connections, and Information Retained Harmonization (IRH) for refining fusion details at the latent level. By leveraging a coherent full-image context, DreamLayer builds inter-layer connections through attention mechanisms and applies a harmonization step to achieve seamless layer fusion. To facilitate research in multi-layer generation, we construct a high-quality, diverse multi-layer dataset including 400k samples. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that DreamLayer generates more coherent and well-aligned layers, with broad applicability, including latent-space image editing and image-to-layer decomposition.

Unlocking Pretrained LLMs for Motion-Related Multimodal Generation: A Fine-Tuning Approach to Unify Diffusion and Next-Token Prediction

In this paper, we propose a unified framework that leverages a single pretrained LLM for Motion-related Multimodal Generation, referred to as MoMug. MoMug integrates diffusion-based continuous motion generation with the model's inherent autoregressive discrete text prediction capabilities by fine-tuning a pretrained LLM. This enables seamless switching between continuous motion output and discrete text token prediction within a single model architecture, effectively combining the strengths of both diffusion- and LLM-based approaches. Experimental results show that, compared to the most recent LLM-based baseline, MoMug improves FID by 38% and mean accuracy across seven metrics by 16.61% on the text-to-motion task. Additionally, it improves mean accuracy across eight metrics by 8.44% on the text-to-motion task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to integrate diffusion- and LLM-based generation within a single model for motion-related multimodal tasks while maintaining low training costs. This establishes a foundation for future advancements in motion-related generation, paving the way for high-quality yet cost-efficient motion synthesis.

Seeing is Understanding: Unlocking Causal Attention into Modality-Mutual Attention for Multimodal LLMs

Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in perceiving and reasoning over multimodal inquiries, ushering in a new research era for foundation models. However, vision-language misalignment in MLLMs has emerged as a critical challenge, where the textual responses generated by these models are not factually aligned with the given text-image inputs. Existing efforts to address vision-language misalignment have focused on developing specialized vision-language connectors or leveraging visual instruction tuning from diverse domains. In this paper, we tackle this issue from a fundamental yet unexplored perspective by revisiting the core architecture of MLLMs. Most MLLMs are typically built on decoder-only LLMs consisting of a causal attention mechanism, which limits the ability of earlier modalities (e.g., images) to incorporate information from later modalities (e.g., text). To address this problem, we propose AKI, a novel MLLM that unlocks causal attention into modality-mutual attention (MMA) to enable image tokens to attend to text tokens. This simple yet effective design allows AKI to achieve superior performance in 12 multimodal understanding benchmarks (+7.2% on average) without introducing additional parameters and increasing training time. Our MMA design is intended to be generic, allowing for application across various modalities, and scalable to accommodate diverse multimodal scenarios. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/sony/aki, and we will release our AKI-4B model to encourage further advancements in MLLMs across various directions.

Large Images are Gaussians: High-Quality Large Image Representation with Levels of 2D Gaussian Splatting

While Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have demonstrated significant success in image representation, they are often hindered by large training memory and slow decoding speed. Recently, Gaussian Splatting (GS) has emerged as a promising solution in 3D reconstruction due to its high-quality novel view synthesis and rapid rendering capabilities, positioning it as a valuable tool for a broad spectrum of applications. In particular, a GS-based representation, 2DGS, has shown potential for image fitting. In our work, we present \textbf{L}arge \textbf{I}mages are \textbf{G}aussians (\textbf{LIG}), which delves deeper into the application of 2DGS for image representations, addressing the challenge of fitting large images with 2DGS in the situation of numerous Gaussian points, through two distinct modifications: 1) we adopt a variant of representation and optimization strategy, facilitating the fitting of a large number of Gaussian points; 2) we propose a Level-of-Gaussian approach for reconstructing both coarse low-frequency initialization and fine high-frequency details. Consequently, we successfully represent large images as Gaussian points and achieve high-quality large image representation, demonstrating its efficacy across various types of large images. Code is available at {\href{https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/LIG}{https://github.com/HKU-MedAI/LIG}}.

AnyCharV: Bootstrap Controllable Character Video Generation with Fine-to-Coarse Guidance

Character video generation is a significant real-world application focused on producing high-quality videos featuring specific characters. Recent advancements have introduced various control signals to animate static characters, successfully enhancing control over the generation process. However, these methods often lack flexibility, limiting their applicability and making it challenging for users to synthesize a source character into a desired target scene. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework, AnyCharV, that flexibly generates character videos using arbitrary source characters and target scenes, guided by pose information. Our approach involves a two-stage training process. In the first stage, we develop a base model capable of integrating the source character with the target scene using pose guidance. The second stage further bootstraps controllable generation through a self-boosting mechanism, where we use the generated video in the first stage and replace the fine mask with the coarse one, enabling training outcomes with better preservation of character details. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed method. Our project page is https://anycharv.github.io.

Adaptive Budget Optimization for Multichannel Advertising Using Combinatorial Bandits

Effective budget allocation is crucial for optimizing the performance of digital advertising campaigns. However, the development of practical budget allocation algorithms remain limited, primarily due to the lack of public datasets and comprehensive simulation environments capable of verifying the intricacies of real-world advertising. While multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithms have been extensively studied, their efficacy diminishes in non-stationary environments where quick adaptation to changing market dynamics is essential. In this paper, we advance the field of budget allocation in digital advertising by introducing three key contributions. First, we develop a simulation environment designed to mimic multichannel advertising campaigns over extended time horizons, incorporating logged real-world data. Second, we propose an enhanced combinatorial bandit budget allocation strategy that leverages a saturating mean function and a targeted exploration mechanism with change-point detection. This approach dynamically adapts to changing market conditions, improving allocation efficiency by filtering target regions based on domain knowledge. Finally, we present both theoretical analysis and empirical results, demonstrating that our method consistently outperforms baseline strategies, achieving higher rewards and lower regret across multiple real-world campaigns.

Exploring the latent space of diffusion models directly through singular value decomposition

Despite the groundbreaking success of diffusion models in generating high-fidelity images, their latent space remains relatively under-explored, even though it holds significant promise for enabling versatile and interpretable image editing capabilities. The complicated denoising trajectory and high dimensionality of the latent space make it extremely challenging to interpret. Existing methods mainly explore the feature space of U-Net in Diffusion Models (DMs) instead of the latent space itself. In contrast, we directly investigate the latent space via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and discover three useful properties that can be used to control generation results without the requirements of data collection and maintain identity fidelity generated images. Based on these properties, we propose a novel image editing framework that is capable of learning arbitrary attributes from one pair of latent codes destined by text prompts in Stable Diffusion Models. To validate our approach, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness and flexibility in image editing. We will release our codes soon to foster further research and applications in this area.

EasySplat: View-Adaptive Learning makes 3D Gaussian Splatting Easy

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) techniques have achieved satisfactory 3D scene representation. Despite their impressive performance, they confront challenges due to the limitation of structure-from-motion (SfM) methods on acquiring accurate scene initialization, or the inefficiency of densification strategy. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework EasySplat to achieve high-quality 3DGS modeling. Instead of using SfM for scene initialization, we employ a novel method to release the power of large-scale pointmap approaches. Specifically, we propose an efficient grouping strategy based on view similarity, and use robust pointmap priors to obtain high-quality point clouds and camera poses for 3D scene initialization. After obtaining a reliable scene structure, we propose a novel densification approach that adaptively splits Gaussian primitives based on the average shape of neighboring Gaussian ellipsoids, utilizing KNN scheme. In this way, the proposed method tackles the limitation on initialization and optimization, leading to an efficient and accurate 3DGS modeling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EasySplat outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) in handling novel view synthesis.

Auto-bidding in real-time auctions via Oracle Imitation Learning (OIL)

Online advertising has become one of the most successful business models of the internet era. Impression opportunities are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where advertisers bid to secure advertisement slots. Deciding the best bid for an impression opportunity is challenging, due to the stochastic nature of user behavior and the variability of advertisement traffic over time. In this work, we propose a framework for training auto-bidding agents in multi-slot second-price auctions to maximize acquisitions (e.g., clicks, conversions) while adhering to budget and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) constraints. We exploit the insight that, after an advertisement campaign concludes, determining the optimal bids for each impression opportunity can be framed as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) with a nonlinear objective. We propose an "oracle" algorithm that identifies a near-optimal combination of impression opportunities and advertisement slots, considering both past and future advertisement traffic data. This oracle solution serves as a training target for a student network which bids having access only to real-time information, a method we term Oracle Imitation Learning (OIL). Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate that OIL achieves superior performance compared to both online and offline reinforcement learning algorithms, offering improved sample efficiency. Notably, OIL shifts the complexity of training auto-bidding agents from crafting sophisticated learning algorithms to solving a nonlinear constrained optimization problem efficiently.

Point Cloud-Assisted Neural Image Compression

High-efficient image compression is a critical requirement. In several scenarios where multiple modalities of data are captured by different sensors, the auxiliary information from other modalities are not fully leveraged by existing image-only codecs, leading to suboptimal compression efficiency. In this paper, we increase image compression performance with the assistance of point cloud, which is widely adopted in the area of autonomous driving. We first unify the data representation for both modalities to facilitate data processing. Then, we propose the point cloud-assisted neural image codec (PCA-NIC) to enhance the preservation of image texture and structure by utilizing the high-dimensional point cloud information. We further introduce a multi-modal feature fusion transform module (MMFFT) to capture more representative image features, remove redundant information between channels and modalities that are not relevant to the image content. Our work is the first to improve image compression performance using point cloud and achieves state-of-the-art performance.