EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Di Liu 0003
dblp:15/1777-3
· DBLP profile ↗
20ranked-venue papers
5as first author
20since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 15 · 4 first-author · 15 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 10 · 4 first-author · 10 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Snapmoji: Instant Generation of Animatable Dual-Stylized AvatarsabstractDespite the increasing popularity of avatar systems such as Snapchat Bitmojis, existing production avatar platforms face several limitations, such as a limited number of predefined assets, tedious customization processes, and inefficient rendering requirements. Addressing these shortcomings, we introduce Snapmoji, an avatar generation system that instantly creates 3D avatars, and enables customization in a process we call dual-stylization. Snapmoji first maps a selfie of a user to a primary avatar (e.g., Bitmoji style) using a new technique we name Gaussian Domain Adaptation (GDA), then applies a secondary style (e.g., skeleton, yarn, toy) to the primary avatar, all while preserving the user’s identity. The generated 3D avatars can then be rendered an animated on mobile devices at 30–40 FPS. Eric Ming Chen, Di Liu 0003, Sizhuo Ma, Michael Vasilkovsky, Bing Zhou 0001, Wenzhou Wang, Jiahao Luo, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Vincent Sitzmann, Jian Wang 0100 |
WACV | 2 |
| 2026 | DICE: Discrete Inversion Enabling Controllable Editing for Masked Generative ModelsabstractRecent advances in discrete diffusion models have demonstrated strong performance in image generation and masked language modeling, yet they remain limited in their capacity for controlled content editing. We propose DICE (Discrete Inversion for Controllable Editing), a novel framework that pioneers precise inversion capabilities for discrete diffusion models, including both masked generative and multinomial diffusion variants. Our key innovation lies in capturing noise sequences and masking patterns during reverse diffusion process, enabling both accurate reconstruction and flexible editing without relying on predefined masks or attention-based manipulations. Through comprehensive experiments across image and text modalities using models such as Paella, VQ-Diffusion, RoBERTa and LLaDA, we demonstrate that DICE successfully maintains high fidelity to the original data while significantly expanding editing capabilities. These results establish new possibilities for fine-grained content manipulation in discrete spaces. Xiaoxiao He, Quan Dao, Ligong Han, Song Wen 0001, Minhao Bai, Di Liu 0003, Han Zhang 0010, Felix Juefei-Xu, Chaowei Tan, Bo Liu 0005, Martin Renqiang Min, Kang Li 0004, Faez Ahmed, Akash Srivastava, Hongdong Li, Junzhou Huang, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
WACV | 6 |
| 2026 | Large Sign Language Models: Toward 3D American Sign Language TranslationabstractWe present Large Sign Language Models (LSLM), a novel framework for translating 3D American Sign Language (ASL) by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as the backbone, which can benefit hearing-impaired individuals’ virtual communication. Unlike existing sign language recognition methods that rely on 2D video, our approach directly utilizes 3D sign language data to capture rich spatial, gestural, and depth information in 3D scenes. This enables more accurate and resilient translation, enhancing digital communication accessibility for the hearing-impaired community. Beyond the task of ASL translation, our work explores the integration of complex, embodied multimodal languages into the processing capabilities of LLMs, moving beyond purely text-based inputs to broaden their understanding of human communication. We investigate both direct translation from 3D gesture features to text and an instruction-guided setting where translations can be modulated by external prompts, offering greater flexibility. This work provides a foundational step toward inclusive, multimodal intelligent systems capable of understanding diverse forms of language. Xiaoxiao He, Di Liu 0003, Zhaoyang Xia, Chaowei Tan, Vivian Li, Bo Liu 0005, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Mubbasir Kapadia |
WACV | 3 |
| 2025 | LUCAS: Layered Universal Codec AvatarsabstractPhotorealistic 3D head avatar reconstruction faces critical challenges in modeling dynamic face-hair interactions and achieving cross-identity generalization, particularly during expressions and head movements. We present LUCAS, a novel Universal Prior Model (UPM) for codec avatar modeling that disentangles face and hair through a layered representation. Unlike previous UPMs that treat hair as an integral part of the head, our approach separates the modeling of the hairless head and hair into distinct branches. LUCAS is the first to introduce a mesh-based UPM, facilitating real-time rendering on devices. Our layered representation also improves the anchor geometry for precise and visually appealing Gaussian renderings. Experimental results indicate that LUCAS outperforms existing single-mesh and Gaussian-based avatar models in both quantitative and qualitative assessments, including evaluations on held-out subjects in zero-shot driving scenarios. LUCAS demonstrates superior dynamic performance in managing head pose changes, expression transfer, and hairstyle variations, thereby advancing the state-of-the-art in 3D head avatar reconstruction. Project page: https://lsn33096.github.io/LUCAS/. Di Liu 0003, Teng Deng, Giljoo Nam, Stanislav Pidhorskyi, Jason M. Saragih, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Chen Cao 0001 |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2025 | Show and Segment: Universal Medical Image Segmentation via In-Context LearningabstractMedical image segmentation remains challenging due to the vast diversity of anatomical structures, imaging modalities, and segmentation tasks. While deep learning has made significant advances, current approaches struggle to generalize as they require task-specific training or fine-tuning on unseen classes. We present Iris, a novel In-context Reference Image guided Segmentation framework that enables flexible adaptation to novel tasks through the use of reference examples without fine-tuning. At its core, Iris features a lightweight context task encoding module that distills task-specific information from reference context image-label pairs. This rich context embedding information is used to guide the segmentation of target objects. By decoupling task encoding from inference, Iris supports diverse strategies from one-shot inference and context example ensemble to object-level context example retrieval and in-context tuning. Through comprehensive evaluation across twelve datasets, we demonstrate that Iris performs strongly compared to task-specific models on in-distribution tasks. On seven held-out datasets, Iris shows superior generalization to out-of-distribution data and unseen classes. Further, Iris’s task encoding module can automatically discover anatomical relationships across datasets and modalities, offering insights into medical objects without explicit anatomical supervision. Yunhe Gao, Di Liu 0003, Zhuowei Li 0002, Yunsheng Li, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
CVPR | 2 |
| 2025 | T2Bs: Text-to-Character Blendshapes via Video GenerationabstractWe present T2Bs, a framework for generating high-quality, animatable character head morphable models from text by combining static text-to-3D generation with video diffusion. Text-to-3D models produce detailed static geometry but lack motion synthesis, while video diffusion models generate motion with temporal and multi-view geometric inconsistencies. T2Bs bridges this gap by leveraging deformable 3D Gaussian splatting to align static 3D assets with video outputs. By constraining motion with static geometry and employing a view-dependent deformation MLP, T2Bs (i) outperforms existing 4D generation methods in accuracy and expressiveness while reducing video artifacts and view inconsistencies, and (ii) reconstructs smooth, coherent, fully registered 3D geometries designed to scale for building morphable models with diverse, realistic facial motions. This enables synthesizing expressive, animatable character heads that surpass current 4D generation techniques. Jiahao Luo, Chaoyang Wang 0001, Michael Vasilkovsky, Vladislav Shakhrai, Di Liu 0003, Peiye Zhuang, Sergey Tulyakov, Peter Wonka, Hsin-Ying Lee 0001, Jian Wang 0100 |
ICCV | 5 |
| 2025 | Implicit In-context LearningabstractIn-context Learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to swiftly adapt to unseen tasks at inference-time by prefixing a few demonstration examples before queries. Despite its versatility, ICL incurs substantial computational and memory overheads compared to zero-shot learning and is sensitive to the selection and order of demonstration examples. In this work, we introduce \textbf{Implicit In-context Learning} (I2CL), an innovative paradigm that reduces the inference cost of ICL to that of zero-shot learning with minimal information loss. I2CL operates by first generating a condensed vector representation, namely a context vector, extracted from the demonstration examples. It then conducts an inference-time intervention through injecting a linear combination of the context vector and query activations back into the model’s residual streams. Empirical evaluation on nine real-world tasks across three model architectures demonstrates that I2CL achieves few-shot level performance at zero-shot inference cost, and it exhibits robustness against variations in demonstration examples. Furthermore, I2CL facilitates a novel representation of ``task-ids'', enhancing task similarity detection and fostering effective transfer learning. We also perform a comprehensive analysis and ablation study on I2CL, offering deeper insights into its internal mechanisms. Code is available at https://github.com/LzVv123456/I2CL. Zhuowei Li 0002, Zihao Xu 0001, Ligong Han, Yunhe Gao, Song Wen 0001, Di Liu 0003, Hao Wang 0014, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
ICLR | 6 |
| 2025 | Improved Training Technique for Latent Consistency ModelsabstractConsistency models are a new family of generative models capable of producing high-quality samples in either a single step or multiple steps. Recently, consistency models have demonstrated impressive performance, achieving results on par with diffusion models in the pixel space. However, the success of scaling consistency training to large-scale datasets, particularly for text-to-image and video generation tasks, is determined by performance in the latent space. In this work, we analyze the statistical differences between pixel and latent spaces, discovering that latent data often contains highly impulsive outliers, which significantly degrade the performance of iCT in the latent space. To address this, we replace Pseudo-Huber losses with Cauchy losses, effectively mitigating the impact of outliers. Additionally, we introduce a diffusion loss at early timesteps and employ optimal transport (OT) coupling to further enhance performance. Lastly, we introduce the adaptive scaling-$c$ scheduler to manage the robust training process and adopt Non-scaling LayerNorm in the architecture to better capture the statistics of the features and reduce outlier impact. With these strategies, we successfully train latent consistency models capable of high-quality sampling with one or two steps, significantly narrowing the performance gap between latent consistency and diffusion models. The implementation is released here: \url{https://github.com/quandao10/sLCT/} Quan Dao, Khanh Doan, Di Liu 0003, Trung Le 0001, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | The Hidden Life of Tokens: Reducing Hallucination of Large Vision-Language Models Via Visual Information SteeringabstractLarge Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can reason effectively over both textual and visual inputs, but they tend to hallucinate syntactically coherent yet visually ungrounded contents. In this paper, we investigate the internal dynamics of hallucination by examining the tokens logits rankings throughout the generation process, revealing three key patterns in how LVLMs process information: (1) gradual visual information loss – visually grounded tokens gradually become less favored throughout generation, and (2) early excitation – semantically meaningful tokens achieve peak activation in the layers earlier than the final layer. (3) hidden genuine information – visually grounded tokens though not being eventually decided still retain relatively high rankings at inference. Based on these insights, we propose VISTA (Visual Information Steering with Token-logit Augmentation), a training-free inference-time intervention framework that reduces hallucination while promoting genuine information. VISTA works by combining two complementary approaches: reinforcing visual information in activation space and leveraging early layer activations to promote semantically meaningful decoding. Compared to existing methods, VISTA requires no external supervision and is applicable to various decoding strategies. Extensive experiments show that VISTA on average reduces hallucination by about 40% on evaluated open-ended generation task, and it consistently outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks across four architectures under three decoding strategies. Code is available at https://github.com/LzVv123456/VISTA. Zhuowei Li 0002, Haizhou Shi, Yunhe Gao, Di Liu 0003, Zhenting Wang, Yuxiao Chen 0002, Ting Liu 0005, Long Zhao 0003, Hao Wang 0014, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
ICML | 4 |
| 2024 | Instantaneous Perception of Moving Objects in 3DabstractThe perception of 3D motion of surrounding traffic participants is crucial for driving safety. While existing works primarily focus on general large motions, we contend that the instantaneous detection and quantification of subtle motions is equally important as they indicate the nuances in driving behavior that may be safety critical, such as behaviors near a stop sign of parking positions. We delve into this under-explored task, examining its unique challenges and developing our solution, accompanied by a carefully designed benchmark. Specifically, due to the lack of correspondences between consecutive frames of sparse Lidar point clouds, static objects might appear to be moving - the socalled swimming effect. This intertwines with the true object motion, thereby posing ambiguity in accurate estimation, especially for subtle motions. To address this, we propose to leverage local occupancy completion of object point clouds to densify the shape cue, and mitigate the impact of swimming artifacts. The occupancy completion is learned in an end-to-end fashion together with the detection of moving objects and the estimation of their motion, instantaneously as soon as objects start to move. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance compared to standard 3D motion estimation approaches, particularly highlighting our method's specialized treatment of subtle motions. Di Liu 0003, Bingbing Zhuang, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Manmohan Krishna Chandraker |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2024 | Layout-Agnostic Scene Text Image Synthesis with Diffusion ModelsabstractWhile diffusion models have significantly advanced the quality of image generation, their capability to accurately and coherently render text within these images remains a substantial challenge. Conventional diffusion-based methods for scene text generation are typically limited by their reliance on an intermediate layout output. This dependency often results in a constrained diversity of text styles and fonts, an inherent limitation stemming from the deterministic nature of the layout generation phase. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Scene TextGen, a novel diffusion-based model specifically designed to circumvent the need for a predefined layout stage. By doing so, Scene-TextGen facilitates a more natural and varied representation of text. The novelty of SceneTextGen lies in its integration of three key components: a character-level encoder for capturing detailed typographic properties, coupled with a character-level instance segmentation model and a word-level spotting model to address the issues of unwanted text generation and minor character inaccuracies. We validate the performance of our method by demonstrating improved character recognition rates on generated images across different public visual text datasets in comparison to both standard diffusion based methods and text specific methods. Qilong Zhangli, Jindong Jiang, Di Liu 0003, Licheng Yu, Xiaoliang Dai, Ankit Ramchandani, Guan Pang, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Praveen Krishnan |
CVPR | 3 |
| 2024 | Second-Order Graph ODEs for Multi-Agent Trajectory ForecastingabstractTrajectory forecasting of multiple agents is a fundamental task that has applications in various fields, such as autonomous driving, physical system modeling and smart cities. It is challenging because agent interactions and underlying continuous dynamics jointly affect its behavior. Existing approaches often rely on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) or Transformers to extract agent interaction features. However, they tend to neglect how the distance and velocity information between agents impact their interactions dynamically. Moreover, previous methods use RNNs or first-order Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) to model temporal dynamics, which may lack interpretability with respect to how each agent is driven by interactions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes the Agent Graph ODE, a novel approach that models agent interactions and continuous second-order dynamics explicitly. Our method utilizes a variational autoencoder architecture, incorporating spatial-temporal Transformers with distance information and dynamic interaction graph construction in the encoder module. In the decoder module, we employ GNNs with distance information to model agent interactions, and use coupled second-order ODEs to capture the underlying continuous dynamics by modeling the relationship between acceleration and agent interactions. Experimental results show that our proposed Agent Graph ODE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in prediction accuracy. Moreover, our method performs well in sudden situations not seen in the training dataset. Song Wen 0001, Hao Wang 0014, Di Liu 0003, Qilong Zhangli, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
WACV | 3 |
| 2024 | Steering Prototypes with Prompt-tuning for Rehearsal-free Continual LearningabstractIn the context of continual learning, prototypes—as representative class embeddings—offer advantages in memory conservation and the mitigation of catastrophic forgetting. However, challenges related to semantic drift and prototype interference persist. In this study, we introduce the Contrastive Prototypical Prompt (CPP) approach. Through task-specific prompt-tuning, underpinned by a contrastive learning objective, we effectively address both aforementioned challenges. Our evaluations on four challenging class-incremental benchmarks reveal that CPP achieves a significant 4% to 6% improvement over state-of-the-art methods. Importantly, CPP operates without a rehearsal buffer and narrows the performance divergence between continual and offline joint-learning, suggesting an innovative scheme for Transformer-based continual learning systems1. Zhuowei Li 0002, Long Zhao 0003, Han Zhang 0010, Di Liu 0003, Ting Liu 0005, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
WACV | 5 |
| 2024 | ProxEdit: Improving Tuning-Free Real Image Editing with Proximal GuidanceabstractDDIM inversion has revealed the remarkable potential of real image editing within diffusion-based methods. However, the accuracy of DDIM reconstruction degrades as larger classifier-free guidance (CFG) scales being used for enhanced editing. Null-text inversion (NTI) optimizes null embeddings to align the reconstruction and inversion trajectories with larger CFG scales, enabling real image editing with cross-attention control. Negative-prompt inversion (NPI) further offers a training-free closed-form solution of NTI. However, it may introduce artifacts and is still constrained by DDIM reconstruction quality. To overcome these limitations, we propose proximal guidance and incorporate it to NPI with cross-attention control. We enhance NPI with a regularization term and inversion guidance, which reduces artifacts while capitalizing on its training-free nature. Additionally, we extend the concepts to incorporate mutual self-attention control, enabling geometry and layout alterations in the editing process. Our method provides an efficient and straightforward approach, effectively addressing real image editing tasks with minimal computational overhead. Ligong Han, Song Wen 0001, Kunpeng Song, Mengwei Ren, Ruijiang Gao, Anastasis Stathopoulos, Xiaoxiao He, Yuxiao Chen 0002, Di Liu 0003, Qilong Zhangli, Jindong Jiang, Zhaoyang Xia, Akash Srivastava, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
WACV | 11 |
| 2023 | DeFormer: Integrating Transformers with Deformable Models for 3D Shape Abstraction from a Single ImageabstractAccurate 3D shape abstraction from a single 2D image is a long-standing problem in computer vision and graphics. By leveraging a set of primitives to represent the target shape, recent methods have achieved promising results. However, these methods either use a relatively large number of primitives or lack geometric flexibility due to the limited expressibility of the primitives. In this paper, we propose a novel bi-channel Transformer architecture, integrated with parameterized deformable models, termed DeFormer, to simultaneously estimate the global and local deformations of primitives. In this way, DeFormer can abstract complex object shapes while using a small number of primitives which offer a broader geometry coverage and finer details. Then, we introduce a force-driven dynamic fitting and a cycle-consistent re-projection loss to optimize the primitive parameters. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet across various settings show that DeFormer achieves better reconstruction accuracy over the state-of-the-art, and visualizes with consistent semantic correspondences for improved interpretability. Di Liu 0003, Xiang Yu 0002, Meng Ye 0003, Qilong Zhangli, Zhuowei Li 0002, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2023 | LEPARD: Learning Explicit Part Discovery for 3D Articulated Shape ReconstructionabstractReconstructing the 3D articulated shape of an animal from a single in-the-wild image is a challenging task. We propose LEPARD, a learning-based framework that discovers semantically meaningful 3D parts and reconstructs 3D shapes in a part-based manner. This is advantageous as 3D parts are robust to pose variations due to articulations and their shape is typically simpler than the overall shape of the object. In our framework, the parts are explicitly represented as parameterized primitive surfaces with global and local deformations in 3D that deform to match the image evidence. We propose a kinematics-inspired optimization to guide each transformation of the primitive deformation given 2D evidence. Similar to recent approaches, LEPARD is only trained using off-the-shelf deep features from DINO and does not require any form of 2D or 3D annotations. Experiments on 3D animal shape reconstruction, demonstrate significant improvement over existing alternatives in terms of both the overall reconstruction performance as well as the ability to discover semantically meaningful and consistent parts. Di Liu 0003, Anastasis Stathopoulos, Qilong Zhangli, Yunhe Gao, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2023 | Deep Learning Segmentation of the Right Ventricle in Cardiac MRI: The M&Ms ChallengeabstractIn recent years, several deep learning models have been proposed to accurately quantify and diagnose cardiac pathologies. These automated tools heavily rely on the accurate segmentation of cardiac structures in MRI images. However, segmentation of the right ventricle is challenging due to its highly complex shape and ill-defined borders. Hence, there is a need for new methods to handle such structure's geometrical and textural complexities, notably in the presence of pathologies such as Dilated Right Ventricle, Tricuspid Regurgitation, Arrhythmogenesis, Tetralogy of Fallot, and Inter-atrial Communication. The last MICCAI challenge on right ventricle segmentation was held in 2012 and included only 48 cases from a single clinical center. As part of the 12th Workshop on Statistical Atlases and Computational Models of the Heart (STACOM 2021), the M&Ms-2 challenge was organized to promote the interest of the research community around right ventricle segmentation in multi-disease, multi-view, and multi-center cardiac MRI. Three hundred sixty CMR cases, including short-axis and long-axis 4-chamber views, were collected from three Spanish hospitals using nine different scanners from three different vendors, and included a diverse set of right and left ventricle pathologies. The solutions provided by the participants show that nnU-Net achieved the best results overall. However, multi-view approaches were able to capture additional information, highlighting the need to integrate multiple cardiac diseases, views, scanners, and acquisition protocols to produce reliable automatic cardiac segmentation algorithms. Carlos Martín-Isla, Víctor M. Campello, Cristian Izquierdo, Kaisar Kushibar, Carla Sendra-Balcells, Polyxeni Gkontra, Alireza Sojoudi, Mitchell J. Fulton, Tewodros Weldebirhan Arega, Kumaradevan Punithakumar, Lei Li 0020, Xiaowu Sun, Yasmina Alkhalil, Di Liu 0003, Sana Jabbar, Sandro F. Queiros, Francesco Galati, Moona Mazher, Zheyao Gao, Marcel Beetz, Lennart Tautz, Christoforos Galazis, Marta Varela, Markus Hüllebrand, Vicente Grau, Xiahai Zhuang, Domenec Puig, Maria A. Zuluaga, Hassan Mohy-ud-Din, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Marcel Breeuwer, Rob J. van der Geest, Michelle Noga, Stéphanie Bricq, Mark Rentschler, Andrea Guala 0002, Steffen E. Petersen, Sergio Escalera, Jose Rodriguez-Palomares, Karim Lekadir |
IEEE J. Biomed. Health Informatics | 14 |
| 2022 | DeepRecon: Joint 2D Cardiac Segmentation and 3D Volume Reconstruction via a Structure-Specific Generative Method
Zhennan Yan, Mu Zhou, Di Liu 0003, Khalid Sawalha, Meng Ye 0003, Qilong Zhangli, Mikael Kanski, Subhi Al'Aref, Leon Axel, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
MICCAI (4) | 4 |
| 2022 | TransFusion: Multi-view Divergent Fusion for Medical Image Segmentation with Transformers
Di Liu 0003, Yunhe Gao, Qilong Zhangli, Ligong Han, Xiaoxiao He, Zhaoyang Xia, Song Wen 0001, Zhennan Yan, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
MICCAI (5) | 1 |
| 2022 | Region Proposal Rectification Towards Robust Instance Segmentation of Biological Images
Qilong Zhangli, Jingru Yi, Di Liu 0003, Xiaoxiao He, Zhaoyang Xia, Ligong Han, Yunhe Gao, Song Wen 0001, Haiming Tang, He Wang 0016, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas |
MICCAI (4) | 3 |