Diffusion-based or flow-based models have achieved significant progress in video synthesis but require multiple iterative sampling steps, which incurs substantial computational overhead. While many distillation methods that are solely based on trajectory-preserving or distribution-matching have been developed to accelerate video generation models, these approaches often suffer from performance breakdown or increased artifacts in few-step settings. To address these limitations, we propose SwiftVideo, a unified and stable distillation framework that combines the advantages of trajectory-preserving and distribution-matching strategies. Our approach introduces continuous-time consistency distillation to ensure precise preservation of ODE trajectories. Subsequently, We propose a dual-perspective alignment encompassing distribution alignment between synthetic and real data along with trajectory alignment across different inference steps. Our method maintains high-quality video generation while substantially reducing the number of inference steps. Quantitative evaluations on the OpenVid-1M benchmark demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in few-step video generation.

Recent advances in diffusion-based text-to-image models have simplified creating high-fidelity images, but preserving the identity (ID) of specific elements, like a personal dog, is still challenging. Object customization, using reference images and textual descriptions, is key to addressing this issue. Current object customization methods are either object-specific, requiring extensive fine-tuning, or object-agnostic, offering zero-shot customization but limited to specialized domains. The primary issue of promoting zero-shot object customization from specific domains to the general domain is to establish a large-scale general ID dataset for model pre-training, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline to construct a large dataset of general objects and build the Multi-Category ID-Consistent (MC-IDC) dataset, featuring 315k text-image samples across 10k categories. With the help of MC-IDC, we introduce Customizing Anything (CustAny), a zero-shot framework that maintains ID fidelity and supports flexible text editing for general objects. CustAny features three key components: a general ID extraction module, a dual-level ID injection module, and an ID-aware decoupling module, allowing it to customize any object from a single reference image and text prompt. Experiments demonstrate that CustAny outperforms existing methods in both general object customization and specialized domains like human customization and virtual try-on. Our contributions include a large-scale dataset, the CustAny framework and novel ID processing to advance this field. The official project page is in https://lingjiekong-fdu.github.io.

Although diffusion-based image virtual try-on has made considerable progress, emerging approaches still struggle to effectively address the issue of hand occlusion (i.e., clothing regions occluded by the hand part), leading to a notable degradation of the try-on performance. To tackle this issue widely existing in real-world scenarios, we propose VTON-HandFit, leveraging the power of hand priors to reconstruct the appearance and structure for hand occlusion cases. Firstly, we tailor a Hand-Pose Aggregation Net using the ControlNet-based structure explicitly and adaptively encoding the global hand and pose priors. Besides, to fully exploit the hand-related structure and appearance information, we propose Hand-feature Disentanglement Embedding module to disentangle the hand priors into the hand structure-parametric and visual-appearance features, and customize a masked cross attention for further decoupled feature embedding. Lastly, we customize a hand-canny constraint loss to better learn the structure edge knowledge from the hand template of model image. VTON-HandFit outperforms the baselines in qualitative and quantitative evaluations on the public dataset and our self-collected hand-occlusion Handfit-3K dataset particularly for the arbitrary hand pose occlusion cases in real-world scenarios. Our project page is at: https://vton-handfit.github.io.

Face Restoration (FR) is a crucial area within image and video processing, focusing on reconstructing high-quality portraits from degraded inputs. Despite advancements in image FR, video FR remains relatively under-explored, primarily due to challenges related to temporal consistency, motion artifacts, and the limited availability of high-quality video data. Moreover, traditional face restoration typically prioritizes enhancing resolution and may not give as much consideration to related tasks such as facial colorization and inpainting. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the Generalized Video Face Restoration (GVFR) task, which integrates video blind face restoration (BFR), inpainting, and colorization tasks that we empirically show to benefit each other. We present a unified framework, termed as stable video face restoration (SVFR), which leverages the generative and motion priors of Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) and incorporates task-specific information through a unified face restoration framework. A learnable task embedding is introduced to enhance task identification. Meanwhile, a novel Unified Latent Regularization (ULR) is employed to encourage the shared feature representation learning among different subtasks. To further enhance the restoration quality and temporal stability, we introduce the facial prior learning and the self-referred refinement as auxiliary strategies. The proposed framework effectively combines the complementary strengths of these tasks, enhancing temporal coherence and achieving superior restoration quality. This work advances the state-of-the-art in video FR and establishes a new paradigm for generalized video face restoration. Code and video demo are available at https://github.com/wangzhiyaoo/SVFR.git.

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) for semantic segmentation aims to improve model generalization across domains. While existing UDA methods leverage labels (source domain) and pseudo-labels (target domain) to learn domain-invariant features, they often treat each object as a singular entity, failing to capture the hierarchical understanding of instance semantics, and thus overfitting on certain samples. To address this, we propose a unified Inter- and Intra-instance Self-supervised learning framework for Domain Adaptive semantic segmentation, called I2SDA, which leverages diffusion models to unlock the awareness of instance semantics by capturing both inter-instance correlations and intra-instance structures. Building on the impressive compositional generalization abilities of diffusion models, this framework enables more effective domain-invariant feature learning. For inter-instance correlation, we leverage the similarity metric of diffusion feature across samples to provide additional supervision for the segmentation model, explicitly encouraging learning of the contextual dependencies between instances for more reliable and precise category predictions. For intra-instance structure, we generate diverse yet structurally consistent class-specific instances on target domain samples via diffusion models, guided by source domain labels, enabling the model to develop fine-grained understanding of intrinsic instance structures. Extensive experiments on SYNTHIA → Cityscape and GTA5 → Cityscape benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of our method.

Human image animation aims to generate a video from a static image by following a specified pose sequence. Existing methods typically adopt a multi-stage pipeline that separately learns appearance and motion, leading to appearance degradation and temporal inconsistencies. To address these issues, we propose VividPose, an innovative end-to-end pipeline based on Stable Video Diffusion (SVD) that ensures superior temporal stability. To enhance the retention of human identity, we propose an identity-aware appearance controller that integrates additional facial information without compromising other appearance details such as clothing texture and background. To accommodate diverse human body shapes and hand movements, we introduce a geometry-aware pose controller that utilizes both rendering maps and skeleton maps. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on the UBCFashion and TikTok benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, VividPose exhibits superior generalization capabilities on our proposed in-the-wild dataset. Our project page is available at https://kelu007.github.io/vivid-pose.

Despite remarkable progress in image-based virtual try-on systems, generating realistic and robust fitting images for cross-category virtual try-on remains a challenging task. The primary difficulty arises from the absence of human-like reasoning, which involves addressing size mismatches between garments and models while recognizing and leveraging the distinct functionalities of various regions within the model images. To address this issue, we draw inspiration from human cognitive processes and disentangle the complex reasoning required for cross-category try-on into a structured framework. This framework systematically decomposes the model image into three distinct regions: try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones. Each zone plays a specific role in accommodating the garment and facilitating realistic synthesis. To endow the model with robust reasoning capabilities for cross-category scenarios, we propose an iterative data constructor. This constructor encompasses diverse scenarios, including intra-category try-on, any-to-dress transformations (replacing any garment category with a dress), and dress-to-any transformations (replacing a dress with another garment category). Utilizing the generated dataset, we introduce a tri-zone priors generator that intelligently predicts the try-on, reconstruction, and imagination zones by analyzing how the input garment is expected to align with the model image. Guided by these tri-zone priors, our proposed method, CrossVTON, achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing existing baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations. Notably, it demonstrates superior capability in handling cross-category virtual try-on, meeting the complex demands of real-world applications.

Recent advances in Talking Head Generation (THG) have achieved impressive lip synchronization and visual quality through diffusion models; yet existing methods struggle to generate emotionally expressive portraits while preserving speaker identity. We identify three critical limitations in current emotional talking head generation: insufficient utilization of audio's inherent emotional cues, identity leakage in emotion representations, and isolated learning of emotion correlations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework dubbed as DICE-Talk, following the idea of disentangling identity with emotion, and then cooperating emotions with similar characteristics. First, we develop a disentangled emotion embedder that jointly models audio-visual emotional cues through cross-modal attention, representing emotions as identity-agnostic Gaussian distributions. Second, we introduce a correlation-enhanced emotion conditioning module with learnable emotion banks that explicitly capture inter-emotion relationships through vector quantization and attention-based feature aggregation. Third, we design an emotion discrimination objective that enforces affective consistency during the diffusion process through latent-space classification. Extensive experiments on MEAD and HDTF datasets demonstrate our method's superiority, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches in emotion accuracy while maintaining competitive lip-sync performance. Qualitative results and user studies further confirm our method's ability to generate identity-preserving portraits with rich, correlated emotional expressions that naturally adapt to unseen identities.

Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) has emerged as a prominent approach for adapting visual foundation models to novel tasks, by effectively exploiting contextual information embedded in in-context examples, which can be formulated as a global ranking problem of potential candidates. Current VICL methods, such as Partial2Global and VPR, are grounded in the similarity-priority assumption that images more visually similar to a query image serve as better in-context examples. This foundational assumption, while intuitive, lacks sufficient justification for its efficacy in selecting optimal in-context examples. Furthermore, Partial2Global constructs its global ranking from a series of randomly sampled pairwise preference predictions. Such a reliance on random sampling can lead to incomplete coverage and redundant samplings of comparisons, thus further adversely impacting the final global ranking. To address these issues, this paper introduces an enhanced variant of Partial2Global designed for reliable and holistic selection of in-context examples in VICL. Our proposed method, dubbed RH-Partial2Global, leverages a jackknife conformal prediction-guided strategy to construct reliable alternative sets and a covering design-based sampling approach to ensure comprehensive and uniform coverage of pairwise preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RH-Partial2Global achieves excellent performance and outperforms Partial2Global across diverse visual tasks.

Facial Appearance Editing (FAE) focuses on modifying physical attributes like pose, expression, and lighting in facial images while preserving identity and background, which is crucial in photography. Despite significant progress, current research faces three main challenges: low generation fidelity, poor attribute preservation, and inefficient inference. To address these issues, this paper introduces MagicFace, a slot-driven, high-fidelity, one-shot FAE framework. Particularly, MagicFace employs Space-sensitive Physical Customization (SPC) for accurate query attribute transfer, utilizing rendering textures from the 3D Morphable Model (3DMM) to ensure fidelity and generalization. To preserve source attributes, we propose the Region-responsive Semantic Composition (RSC) module, guided by slot attention to learn and preserve decoupled source features. This approach can successfully maintain identity and reduces artifacts related to non-facial attributes such as hair, clothes, and background. Additionally, we introduce a consistency regularization technique to enhance editing controllability by leveraging prior knowledge from attention matrices in the diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MagicFace achieves state-of-the-art performance in FAE task, outperforming existing methods.

Positive and Unlabeled (PU) learning, a binary classification model trained with only positive and unlabeled data, generally suffers from overfitted risk estimation due to inconsistent data distributions. To address this, we introduce a pseudo-supervised PU learning framework (PSPU), in which we train the PU model first, use it to gather confident samples for the pseudo supervision, and then apply these supervision to correct the PU model’s weights by leveraging non-PU objectives. We also incorporate an additional consistency loss to mitigate noisy sample effects. Our PSPU outperforms recent PU learning methods significantly on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 in both balanced and imbalanced settings, and enjoys competitive performance on MVTecAD for industrial anomaly detection.

Visual In-Context Learning (VICL) is a prevailing way to transfer visual foundation models to new tasks by leveraging contextual information contained in in-context examples to enhance learning and prediction of query sample. The fundamental problem in VICL is how to select the best prompt to activate its power as much as possible, which is equivalent to the ranking problem to test the in-context behavior of each candidate in the alternative set and select the best one. To utilize more appropriate ranking metric and leverage more comprehensive information among the alternative set, we propose a novel in-context example selection framework to approximately identify the global optimal prompt, i.e. choosing the best performing in-context examples from all alternatives for each query sample. Our method, dubbed Partial2Global, adopts a transformer-based list-wise ranker to provide a more comprehensive comparison within several alternatives, and a consistency-aware ranking aggregator to generate globally consistent ranking. The effectiveness of Partial2Global is validated through experiments on foreground segmentation, single object detection and image colorization, demonstrating that Partial2Global selects consistently better in-context examples compared with other methods, and thus establish the new state-of-the-arts.

The task of Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to transfer the knowledge learned from base categories with sufficient labelled data to novel categories with scarce known information. It is currently an important research question and has great practical values in the real-world applications. Despite extensive previous efforts are made on few-shot learning tasks, we emphasize that most existing methods did not take into account the distributional shift caused by sample selection bias in the FSL scenario. Such a selection bias can induce spurious correlation between the semantic causal features, that are causally and semantically related to the class label, and the other non-causal features. Critically, the former ones should be invariant across changes in distributions, highly related to the classes of interest, and thus well generalizable to novel classes, while the latter ones are not stable to changes in the distribution. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy dubbed as PatchMix that can break this spurious dependency by replacing the patch-level information and supervision of the query images with random gallery images from different classes from the query ones. We theoretically show that such an augmentation mechanism, different from existing ones, is able to identify the causal features. To further make these features to be discriminative enough for classification, we propose Correlation-guided Reconstruction (CGR) and Hardness-Aware module for instance discrimination and easier discrimination between similar classes. Moreover, such a framework can be adapted to the unsupervised FSL scenario. The utility of our method is demonstrated on the state-of-the-art results consistently achieved on several benchmarks including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, CUB, Cars, Places and Plantae, in all settings of single-domain, cross-domain and unsupervised FSL. By studying the intra-variance property of learned features and visualizing the learned features, we further quantitatively and qualitatively show that such a promising result is due to the effectiveness in learning causal features.

Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning aims to learn a model with rare positive samples and abundant unlabeled samples. Compared with classical binary classification, the task of PU learning is much more challenging due to the existence of many incompletely-annotated data instances. Since only part of the most confident positive samples are available and evidence is not enough to categorize the rest samples, many of these unlabeled data may also be the positive samples. Research on this topic is particularly useful and essential to many real-world tasks which demand very expensive labelling cost. For example, the recognition tasks in disease diagnosis, recommendation system and satellite image recognition may only have few positive samples that can be annotated by the experts. While this problem is receiving increasing attention, most of the efforts have been dedicated to the design of trustworthy risk estimators such as uPU and nnPU and direct knowledge distillation, e.g., Self-PU. These methods mainly omit the intrinsic hardness of some unlabeled data, which can result in sub-optimal performance as a consequence of fitting the easy noisy data and not sufficiently utilizing the hard data. In this paper, we focus on improving the commonly-used nnPU with a novel training pipeline. We highlight the intrinsic difference of hardness of samples in the dataset and the proper learning strategies for easy and hard data. By considering this fact, we propose first splitting the unlabeled dataset with an early-stop strategy. The samples that have inconsistent predictions between the temporary and base model are considered as hard samples. Then the model utilizes a noise-tolerant Jensen-Shannon divergence loss for easy data; and a dual-source consistency regularization for hard data which includes a cross-consistency between student and base model for low-level features and self-consistency for high-level features and predictions, respectively. Our method achieves much better results compared with existing methods on CIFAR10 and two medical datasets of liver cancer survival time prediction, and low blood pressure diagnosis of pregnant, individually. The experimental results validates the efficacy of our proposed method.

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize target classes by adapting the prior knowledge learned from source classes. Such knowledge usually resides in a deep embedding model for a general matching purpose of the support and query image pairs. The objective of this paper is to repurpose the contrastive learning for such matching to learn a few-shot embedding model. We make the following contributions: (i) We investigate the contrastive learning with Noise Contrastive Estimation (NCE) in a supervised manner for training a few-shot embedding model; (ii) We propose a novel contrastive training scheme dubbed infoPatch, exploiting the patch-wise relationship to substantially improve the popular infoNCE; (iii) We show that the embedding learned by the proposed infoPatch is more effective; (iv) Our model is thoroughly evaluated on few-shot recognition task; and demonstrates state-of-the-art results on miniImageNet and appealing performance on tieredImageNet, Fewshot-CIFAR100 (FC-100).

Few-shot learning (FSL), which aims to recognise new classes by adapting the learned knowledge with extremely limited few-shot (support) examples, remains an important open problem in computer vision. Most of the existing methods for feature alignment in few-shot learning only consider image-level or spatial-level alignment while omitting the channel disparity. Our insight is that these methods would lead to poor adaptation with redundant matching, and leveraging channel-wise adjustment is the key to well adapting the learned knowledge to new classes. Therefore, in this paper, we propose to learn a dynamic alignment, which can effectively highlight both query regions and channels according to different local support information. Specifically, this is achieved by first dynamically sampling the neighbourhood of the feature position conditioned on the input few shot, based on which we further predict a both position-dependent and channel-dependent Dynamic Meta-filter. The filter is used to align the query feature with position-specific and channel-specific knowledge. Moreover, we adopt Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) to enable a more accurate control of the alignment. In such a sense our model is able to better capture fine-grained semantic context of the few-shot example and thus facilitates dynamical knowledge adaptation for few-shot learning. The resulting framework establishes the new state-of-the-arts on major few-shot visual recognition benchmarks, including miniImageNet and tieredImageNet.

Temporal action localization is an important yet challenging task in video understanding. Typically, such a task aims at inferring both the action category and localization of the start and end frame for each action instance in a long, untrimmed video. While most current models achieve good results by using pre-defined anchors and numerous actionness, such methods could be bothered with both large number of outputs and heavy tuning of locations and sizes corresponding to different anchors. Instead, anchor-free methods is lighter, getting rid of redundant hyper-parameters, but gains few attention. In this paper, we propose the first purely anchor-free temporal localization method, which is both efficient and effective. Our model includes (i) an end-to-end trainable basic predictor, (ii) a saliency-based refinement module to gather more valuable boundary features for each proposal with a novel boundary pooling, and (iii) several consistency constraints to make sure our model can find the accurate boundary given arbitrary proposals. Extensive experiments show that our method beats all anchor-based and actionness-guided methods with a remarkable margin on THUMOS14, achieving state-of-the-art results, and comparable ones on ActivityNet v1.3. Code is available at https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/ActionDetection-AFSD.

Recently, AutoRegressive (AR) models for the whole image generation empowered by transformers have achieved comparable or even better performance compared to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Unfortunately, directly applying such AR models to edit/change local image regions, may suffer from the problems of missing global information, slow inference speed, and information leakage of local guidance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel model -- image Local Autoregressive Transformer (iLAT), to better facilitate the locally guided image synthesis. Our iLAT learns the novel local discrete representations, by the newly proposed local autoregressive (LA) transformer of the attention mask and convolution mechanism. Thus iLAT can efficiently synthesize the local image regions by key guidance information. Our iLAT is evaluated on various locally guided image syntheses, such as pose-guided person image synthesis and face editing. Both quantitative and qualitative results show the efficacy of our model.

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize new objects with extremely limited training data for each category. Previous efforts are made by either leveraging meta-learning paradigm or novel principles in data augmentation to alleviate this extremely data-scarce problem. In contrast, this paper presents a simple statistical approach, dubbed Instance Credibility Inference (ICI) to exploit the distribution support of unlabeled instances for few-shot learning. Specifically, we first train a linear classifier with the labeled few-shot examples and use it to infer the pseudo-labels for the unlabeled data. To measure the credibility of each pseudo-labeled instance, we then propose to solve another linear regression hypothesis by increasing the sparsity of the incidental parameters and rank the pseudo-labeled instances with their sparsity degree. We select the most trustworthy pseudo-labeled instances alongside the labeled examples to re-train the linear classifier. This process is iterated until all the unlabeled samples are included in the expanded training set, i.e. the pseudo-label is converged for unlabeled data pool. Extensive experiments under two few-shot settings show that our simple approach can establish new state-of-the-arts on four widely used few-shot learning benchmark datasets including miniImageNet, tieredImageNet, CIFAR-FS, and CUB. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Yikai-Wang/ICI-FSL

This paper aims at learning to score the figure skating sports videos. To address this task, we propose a deep architecture that includes two complementary components, i.e., Self-Attentive LSTM and Multi-scale Convolutional Skip LSTM. These two components can efficiently learn the local and global sequential information in each video. Furthermore, we present a large-scale figure skating sports video dataset - FisV dataset. This dataset includes 500 figure skating videos with the average length of 2 minutes and 50 seconds. Each video is annotated by two scores of nine different referees, i.e., Total Element Score(TES) and Total Program Component Score (PCS). Our proposed model is validated on FisV and MIT-skate datasets. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our models in learning to score the figure skating videos. The codes and datasets would be downloaded from https://github.com/loadder/MS_LSTM.git.

Generating realistic images with the guidance of reference images and human poses is challenging. Despite the success of previous works on synthesizing person images in the iconic views, no efforts are made towards the task of poseguided image synthesis in the non-iconic views. Particularly, we find that previous models cannot handle such a complex task, where the person images are captured in the non-iconic views by commercially-available digital cameras. To this end, we propose a new framework - Multi-branch Refinement Network (MR-Net), which utilizes several visual cues, including target person poses, foreground person body and scene images parsed. Furthermore, a novel Region of Interest (RoI) perceptual loss is proposed to optimize the MR-Net. Extensive experiments on two non-iconic datasets, Penn Action and BBC-Pose, as well as an iconic dataset - Market-1501, show the efficacy of the proposed model that can tackle the problem of pose-guided person image generation from the non-iconic views. The data, models, and codes are downloadable from https://github.com/loadder/MR-Net.