Text-to-image diffusion models (T2I) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in creating realistic and aesthetic images. On the contrary, text-to-video diffusion models (T2V) still lag far behind in frame quality and text alignment, owing to insufficient quality and quantity of training videos. In this paper, we introduce VideoElevator, a training-free and plug-and-play method, which elevates the performance of T2V using superior capabilities of T2I. Different from conventional T2V sampling (i.e., temporal and spatial modeling), VideoElevator explicitly decomposes each sampling step into temporal motion refining and spatial quality elevating. Specifically, temporal motion refining uses encapsulated T2V to enhance temporal consistency, followed by inverting to the noise distribution required by T2I. Then, spatial quality elevating harnesses inflated T2I to directly predict less noisy latent, adding more photo-realistic details. We have conducted experiments in extensive prompts under the combination of various T2V and T2I. The results show that VideoElevator not only improves the performance of T2V baselines with foundational T2I, but also facilitates stylistic video synthesis with personalized T2I. Please watch all videos in supplementary materials for better view.

MetaDesigner introduces a transformative framework for artistic typography synthesis, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and grounded in a user-centric design paradigm. Its foundation is a multi-agent system comprising the Pipeline, Glyph, and Texture agents, which collectively orchestrate the creation of customizable WordArt, ranging from semantic enhancements to intricate textural elements. A central feedback mechanism leverages insights from both multimodal models and user evaluations, enabling iterative refinement of design parameters. Through this iterative process, MetaDesigner dynamically adjusts hyperparameters to align with user-defined stylistic and thematic preferences, consistently delivering WordArt that excels in visual quality and contextual resonance. Empirical evaluations underscore the system's versatility and effectiveness across diverse WordArt applications, yielding outputs that are both aesthetically compelling and context-sensitive.

Color enhancement is a crucial yet challenging task in digital photography. It demands methods that are (i) expressive enough for fine-grained adjustments, (ii) adaptable to diverse inputs, and (iii) able to preserve texture. Existing approaches typically fall short in at least one of these aspects, yielding unsatisfactory results. We propose GenColor, a novel diffusion-based framework for sophisticated, texture-preserving color enhancement. GenColor reframes the task as conditional image generation. Leveraging ControlNet and a tailored training scheme, it learns advanced color transformations that adapt to diverse lighting and content. We train GenColor on ARTISAN, our newly collected large-scale dataset of 1.2M high-quality photographs specifically curated for enhancement tasks. To overcome texture preservation limitations inherent in diffusion models, we introduce a color-transfer network with a novel degradation scheme that simulates texture–color relationships. This network achieves pixel-perfect texture preservation while enabling fine-grained color matching with the diffusion-generated reference images. Extensive experiments show that GenColor produces visually compelling results comparable to those of expert colorists and surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both subjective and objective evaluations. We have released the code and dataset.

Few-shot font generation is challenging, as it needs to capture the fine-grained stroke styles from a limited set of reference glyphs, and then transfer to other characters, which are expected to have similar styles. However, due to the diversity and complexity of Chinese font styles, the synthesized glyphs of existing methods usually exhibit visible artifacts, such as missing details and distorted strokes. In this paper, we propose a VQGAN-based framework (i.e., VQ-Font) to enhance glyph fidelity through token prior refinement and structure-aware enhancement. Specifically, we pre-train a VQGAN to encapsulate font token prior within a code-book. Subsequently, VQ-Font refines the synthesized glyphs with the codebook to eliminate the domain gap between synthesized and real-world strokes. Furthermore, our VQ-Font leverages the inherent design of Chinese characters, where structure components such as radicals and character components are combined in specific arrangements, to recalibrate fine-grained styles based on references. This process improves the matching and fusion of styles at the structure level. Both modules collaborate to enhance the fidelity of the generated fonts. Experiments on a collected font dataset show that our VQ-Font outperforms the competing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively, especially in generating challenging styles. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yaomingshuai/VQ-Font.

Face restoration is important in face image processing, and has been widely studied in recent years. However, previous works often fail to generate plausible high quality (HQ) results for real-world low quality (LQ) face images. In this paper, we propose a new progressive semantic-aware style transformation framework, named PSFR-GAN, for face restoration. Specifically, instead of using an encoder-decoder framework as previous methods, we formulate the restoration of LQ face images as a multi-scale progressive restoration procedure through semantic-aware style transformation. Given a pair of LQ face image and its corresponding parsing map, we first generate a multi-scale pyramid of the inputs, and then progressively modulate different scale features from coarse-to-fine in a semantic-aware style transfer way. Compared with previous networks, the proposed PSFR-GAN makes full use of the semantic (parsing maps) and pixel (LQ images) space information from different scales of input pairs. In addition, we further introduce a semantic aware style loss which calculates the feature style loss for each semantic region individually to improve the details of face textures. Finally, we pretrain a face parsing network which can generate decent parsing maps from real-world LQ face images. Experiment results show that our model trained with synthetic data can not only produce more realistic high-resolution results for synthetic LQ inputs but also generalize better to natural LQ face images compared with state-of-the-art methods.

The problem of robust alignment of batches of images can be formulated as a low-rank matrix optimization problem, relying on the similarity of well-aligned images. Going further, observing that the images to be aligned are sampled from a union of low-rank subspaces, we propose a new method based on subspace recovery techniques to provide more robust and accurate alignment. The proposed method seeks a set of domain transformations which are applied to the unaligned images so that the resulting images are made as similar as possible. The resulting optimization problem can be linearized as a series of convex optimization problems which can be solved by alternative sparsity pursuit techniques. Compared to existing methods like robust alignment by sparse and low-rank models, the proposed method can more effectively solve the batch image alignment problem, and extract more similar structures from the misaligned images.

Cloud manufacturing employs some progressive issues, for example, the ideas of cloud computing. It extends the "Software as a Service" concept to "Manufacture as a Service", sharing the "manufacturing resources and manufacturing capability". Access control prevents illegal operations effectively by monitoring the user's behavior. This paper proposes an access control model for the cloud manufacturing environment that called WRBAC. Considering the architectures and characteristics of cloud manufacturing, the model uses layered structure to achieve the system-level access control. Based on ABAC, RBAC and TBAC, the model introduces workflow to achieve the process automation. During the mapping between tasks and services, access permission is controlled by distributed policy conditions. In order to strengthen the cross-domain cooperation access protection, this paper refines the authorization mechanism by using attributes and mirror roles. WRBAC can effectively guarantee the security of cloud manufacturing cross-domain environment. The model has strong adaptability and pertinence.