Samaneh Azadi

dblp:145/9932 · DBLP profile ↗
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13ranked-venue papers
7as first author
7since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 11 · 7 first-author · 5 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 10 · 4 first-author · 7 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Movie Weaver: Tuning-Free Multi-Concept Video Personalization with Anchored Prompts
abstract
Video personalization, which generates customized videos using reference images, has gained significant attention. However, prior methods typically focus on single-concept personalization, limiting broader applications that require multi-concept integration. Attempts to extend these models to multiple concepts often lead to identity blending, which results in composite characters with fused attributes from multiple sources. This challenge arises due to the lack of a mechanism to link each concept with its specific reference image. We address this with anchored prompts, which embed image anchors as unique tokens within text prompts, guiding accurate referencing during generation. Additionally, we introduce concept embeddings to encode the order of reference images. Our approach, Movie Weaver, seamlessly weaves multiple concepts—including face, body, and animal images—into one video, allowing flexible combinations in a single model. The evaluation shows that Movie Weaver outperforms existing methods for multi-concept video personalization in identity preservation and overall quality.
Zecheng He, Tingbo Hou, Ji Hou, Xiaoliang Dai, Felix Juefei-Xu, Samaneh Azadi, Animesh Sinha, Peizhao Zhang, Peter Vajda, Diana Marculescu
CVPR9
2025 MotiF: Making Text Count in Image Animation with Motion Focal Loss
abstract
Text-Image-to-Video (TI2V) generation aims to generate a video from an image following a text description, which is also referred to as text-guided image animation. Most existing methods struggle to generate videos that align well with the text prompts, particularly when motion is specified. To overcome this limitation, we introduce MotiF, a simple yet effective approach that directs the model's learning to the regions with more motion, thereby improving the text alignment and motion generation. We use optical flow to generate a motion heatmap and weight the loss according to the intensity of the motion. This modified objective leads to noticeable improvements and complements existing methods that utilize motion priors as model inputs. Additionally, due to the lack of a diverse benchmark for evaluating TI2V generation, we propose TI2V-Bench, a dataset consists of 320 image-text pairs for robust evaluation. We present a human evaluation protocol that asks the annotators to select an overall preference between two videos followed by their justifications. Through a comprehensive evaluation, MotiF outperforms nine open-sourced models, achieving an average preference of 72°%. The TI2V-Bench and additional results are released in the project website.
Samaneh Azadi, Rohit Girdhar, Saketh Rambhatla, Chen Sun 0002, Xi Yin 0001
CVPR2
2025 Generating Multi-Image Synthetic Data for Text-to-Image Customization
abstract
Customization of text-to-image models enables users to insert new concepts or objects and generate them in unseen settings. Existing methods either rely on comparatively expensive test-time optimization or train encoders on single-image datasets without multi-image supervision, which can limit image quality. We propose a simple approach to address these challenges. We first leverage existing text-to-image models and 3D datasets to create a high-quality Synthetic Customization Dataset (SynCD) consisting of multiple images of the same object in different lighting, backgrounds, and poses. Using this dataset, we train an encoder-based model that incorporates fine-grained visual details from reference images via a shared attention mechanism. Finally, we propose an inference technique that normalizes text and image guidance vectors to mitigate overexposure issues in sampled images. Through extensive experiments, we show that our encoder-based model, trained on SynCD, and with the proposed inference algorithm, improves upon existing encoder-based methods on standard customization benchmarks.
Nupur Kumari, Xi Yin 0001, Jun-Yan Zhu, Ishan Misra, Samaneh Azadi
ICCV5
2024 Factorizing Text-to-Video Generation by Explicit Image Conditioning
Rohit Girdhar, Mannat Singh, Quentin Duval, Samaneh Azadi, Sai Saketh Rambhatla, Akbar Shah, Xi Yin 0001, Devi Parikh, Ishan Misra
ECCV (62)5
2024 Shape-Guided Diffusion with Inside-Outside Attention
abstract
We introduce precise object silhouette as a new constraint in text-to-image diffusion models, which we dub Shape-Guided Diffusion. Our training-free method uses an Inside-Outside Attention mechanism during the inversion and generation process to apply a shape constraint to the cross- and self-attention maps. Our mechanism designates which spatial region is the object (inside) vs. background (outside) then associates edits to the correct region. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the shape-guided editing task, where the model must replace an object according to a text prompt and object mask. We curate a new ShapePrompts benchmark derived from MS-COCO and achieve SOTA results in shape faithfulness without a degradation in text alignment or image realism according to both automatic metrics and annotator ratings. Our data and code will be made available at https://shape-guided-diffusion.github.io.
Dong Huk Park, Grace Luo, Clayton Toste, Samaneh Azadi, Xihui Liu, Maka Karalashvili, Anna Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell
WACV4
2023 Make-An-Animation: Large-Scale Text-conditional 3D Human Motion Generation
abstract
Text-guided human motion generation has drawn significant interest because of its impactful applications spanning animation and robotics. Recently, application of diffusion models for motion generation has enabled improvements in the quality of generated motions. However, existing approaches are limited by their reliance on relatively small-scale motion capture data, leading to poor performance on more diverse, in-the-wild prompts. In this paper, we introduce Make-An-Animation, a text-conditioned human motion generation model which learns more diverse poses and prompts from large-scale image-text datasets, enabling significant improvement in performance over prior works. Make-An-Animation is trained in two stages. First, we train on a curated large-scale dataset of (text, static pseudo-pose) pairs extracted from image-text datasets. Second, we fine-tune on motion capture data, adding additional layers to model the temporal dimension. Unlike prior diffusion models for motion generation, Make-An-Animation uses a U-Net architecture similar to recent text-to-video generation models. Human evaluation of motion realism and alignment with input text shows that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on text-to-motion generation. Generated samples can be viewed at https://azadis.github.io/make-an-animation.
Samaneh Azadi, Akbar Shah, Thomas Hayes, Devi Parikh, Sonal Gupta
ICCV1
2023 More Control for Free! Image Synthesis with Semantic Diffusion Guidance
abstract
Controllable image synthesis models allow creation of diverse images based on text instructions or guidance from a reference image. Recently, denoising diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate more realistic imagery than prior methods, and have been successfully demonstrated in unconditional and class-conditional settings. We investigate fine-grained, continuous control of this model class, and introduce a novel unified framework for semantic diffusion guidance, which allows either language or image guidance, or both. Guidance is injected into a pretrained unconditional diffusion model using the gradient of image-text or image matching scores, without re-training the diffusion model. We explore CLIP-based language guidance as well as both content and style-based image guidance in a unified framework. Our text-guided synthesis approach can be applied to datasets without associated text annotations. We conduct experiments on FFHQ and LSUN datasets, and show results on fine-grained text-guided image synthesis, synthesis of images related to a style or content reference image, and examples with both textual and image guidance.1
Xihui Liu, Dong Huk Park, Samaneh Azadi, Gong Zhang 0011, Arman Chopikyan, Humphrey Shi, Anna Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell
WACV3
2020 Compositional GAN: Learning Image-Conditional Binary Composition
Samaneh Azadi, Deepak Pathak, Sayna Ebrahimi, Trevor Darrell
Int. J. Comput. Vis.1
2019 Discriminator Rejection Sampling
Samaneh Azadi, Catherine Olsson, Trevor Darrell, Ian J. Goodfellow, Augustus Odena
ICLR (Poster)1
2018 Multi-Content GAN for Few-Shot Font Style Transfer
abstract
In this work, we focus on the challenge of taking partial observations of highly-stylized text and generalizing the observations to generate unobserved glyphs in the ornamented typeface. To generate a set of multi-content images following a consistent style from very few examples, we propose an end-to-end stacked conditional GAN model considering content along channels and style along network layers. Our proposed network transfers the style of given glyphs to the contents of unseen ones, capturing highly stylized fonts found in the real-world such as those on movie posters or infographics. We seek to transfer both the typographic stylization (ex. serifs and ears) as well as the textual stylization (ex. color gradients and effects.) We base our experiments on our collected data set including 10,000 fonts with different styles and demonstrate effective generalization from a very small number of observed glyphs.
Samaneh Azadi, Matthew Fisher, Vladimir G. Kim, Eli Shechtman, Trevor Darrell
CVPR1
2017 Learning Detection with Diverse Proposals
abstract
To predict a set of diverse and informative proposals with enriched representations, this paper introduces a differentiable Determinantal Point Process (DPP) layer that is able to augment the object detection architectures. Most modern object detection architectures, such as Faster R-CNN, learn to localize objects by minimizing deviations from the ground truth, but ignore correlation between multiple proposals and object categories. Non-Maximum Suppression (NMS) as a widely used proposal pruning scheme ignores label-and instance-level relations between object candidates resulting in multi-labeled detections. In the multi-class case, NMS selects boxes with the largest prediction scores ignoring the semantic relation between categories of potential election. In contrast, our trainable DPP layer, allowing for Learning Detection with Diverse Proposals (LDDP), considers both label-level contextual information and spatial layout relationships between proposals without increasing the number of parameters of the network, and thus improves location and category specifications of final detected bounding boxes substantially during both training and inference schemes. Furthermore, we show that LDDP keeps it superiority over Faster R-CNN even if the number of proposals generated by LDPP is only ~30% as many as those for Faster R-CNN.
Samaneh Azadi, Jiashi Feng, Trevor Darrell
CVPR1
2014 Optimization-Based Artifact Correction for Electron Microscopy Image Stacks
Samaneh Azadi, Jeremy Maitin-Shepard, Pieter Abbeel
ECCV (2)1
2014 Towards an optimal stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers
abstract
We study regularized stochastic convex optimization subject to linear equality constraints. This class of problems was recently also studied by Ouyang et al. (2013) and Suzuki (2013); both introduced similar stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (SADMM) algorithms. However, the analysis of both papers led to suboptimal convergence rates. This paper presents two new SADMM methods: (i) the first attains the minimax optimal rate of O(1/k) for nonsmooth strongly-convex stochastic problems; while (ii) the second progresses towards an optimal rate by exhibiting an O(1/k^2) rate for the smooth part. We present several experiments with our new methods; the results indicate improved performance over competing ADMM methods.
Samaneh Azadi, Suvrit Sra
ICML1