EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Lvmin Zhang
dblp:202/2313
· DBLP profile ↗
16ranked-venue papers
13as first author
12since 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 · 12 · 11 first-author · 8 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 9 · 8 first-author · 7 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | UniVidX: A Unified Multimodal Framework for Versatile Video Generation via Diffusion PriorsabstractRecent progress has shown that video diffusion models (VDMs) can be repurposed to solve various multimodal graphics tasks. However, existing approaches predominantly train separate models for each specific problem setting. This practice locks models into fixed input-output mappings, and typically ignores the joint correlations across modalities. In this paper, we present UniVidX , a unified multimodal framework designed to leverage VDM priors to enable versatile video generation. Our goal is to (i) master diverse pixel-aligned tasks by formulating them as conditional generation problems within multimodal space, (ii) adapt to modality-specific distributions without compromising the backbone's native priors, and (iii) ensure cross-modal consistency during synthesis. Concretely, we propose three key designs: 1) Stochastic Condition Masking (SCM): by randomly partitioning modalities into clean conditions and noisy targets during training, we enable the model to learn omni-directional conditional generation rather than fixed mappings. 2) Decoupled Gated LoRA (DGL): we attach per-modality LoRAs and activate them when a modality serves as a generation target, thereby preserving the VDM's strong priors. 3) Cross-Modal Self-Attention (CMSA): we explicitly share keys/values across modalities while maintaining modality-specific queries, facilitating information exchange and inter-modal alignment. We validate our framework by instantiating it in two domains: 1) UniVid-Intrinsic for RGB videos and their intrinsic maps (albedo, irradiance, normal), and 2) UniVid-Alpha for blended RGB videos and their constituent RGBA layers. Experimental results demonstrate that both models achieve performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods across distinct tasks. Notably, they exhibit robust generalization capabilities in in-the-wild scenarios, even when trained on limited datasets of fewer than 1k videos. Houyuan Chen, Hong Li 0016, Xianghao Kong, Tianrui Zhu, Shaocong Xu, Weiqing Xiao, Yuwei Guo 0002, Chongjie Ye, Lvmin Zhang, Hao Zhao 0002, Anyi Rao |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 9 |
| 2025 | Scaling In-the-Wild Training for Diffusion-based Illumination Harmonization and Editing by Imposing Consistent Light TransportabstractDiffusion-based image generators are becoming unique methods for illumination harmonization and editing. The current bottleneck in scaling up the training of diffusion-based illumination editing models is mainly in the difficulty of preserving the underlying image details and maintaining intrinsic properties, such as albedos, unchanged. Without appropriate constraints, directly training the latest large image models with complex, varied, or in-the-wild data is likely to produce a structure-guided random image generator, rather than achieving the intended goal of precise illumination manipulation. We propose Imposing Consistent Light (IC-Light) transport during training, rooted in the physical principle that the linear blending of an object's appearances under different illumination conditions is consistent with its appearance under mixed illumination. This consistency allows for stable and scalable illumination learning, uniform handling of various data sources, and facilitates a physically grounded model behavior that modifies only the illumination of images while keeping other intrinsic properties unchanged. Based on this method, we can scale up the training of diffusion-based illumination editing models to large data quantities (> 10 million), across all available data types (real light stages, rendered samples, in-the-wild synthetic augmentations, etc), and using strong backbones (SDXL, Flux, etc). We also demonstrate that this approach reduces uncertainties and mitigates artifacts such as mismatched materials or altered albedos. Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, Maneesh Agrawala |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2025 | Radial Attention: 𝒪(n log n) Sparse Attention with Energy Decay for Long Video Generation
Xingyang Li, Tianle Cai, Haocheng Xi, Shuo Yang 0011, Yujun Lin 0001, Lvmin Zhang, Jinbo Hu, Kelly Peng, Maneesh Agrawala, Ion Stoica, Kurt Keutzer, Song Han 0003 |
NeurIPS | 7 |
| 2025 | Frame Context Packing and Drift Prevention in Next-Frame-Prediction Video Diffusion ModelsabstractWe present a neural network structure, FramePack, to train next-frame (or next-frame-section) prediction models for video generation. FramePack compresses input frame contexts with frame-wise importance so that more frames can be encoded within a fixed context length, with more important frames having longer contexts. The frame importance can be measured using time proximity, feature similarity, or hybrid metrics. The packing method allows for inference with thousands of frames and training with relatively large batch sizes. We also present drift prevention methods to address observation bias (error accumulation), including early-established endpoints, adjusted sampling orders, and discrete history representation. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the anti-drifting methods in both single-directional video streaming and bi-directional video generation. Finally, we show that existing video diffusion models can be finetuned with FramePack, and analyze the differences between different packing schedules. Lvmin Zhang, Shengqu Cai, Gordon Wetzstein, Maneesh Agrawala |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2025 | CineVision: An Interactive Pre-visualization Storyboard System for Director-Cinematographer Collaboration
Zheng Wei 0003, Lvmin Zhang, Yefeng Zheng 0001, Pan Hui 0001, Maneesh Agrawala, Huamin Qu, Anyi Rao |
UIST | 3 |
| 2025 | Generating Past and Future in Digital Painting ProcessesabstractWe present a framework to generate past and future processes for drawing process videos. Given a canvas image uploaded by a user, the framework can generate both preceding and succeeding states of the drawing process, and the generated states can be reused as inputs for further state generation. We observe that the user queries typically have one-to-one or many-to-many states, and in many cases, involve non-contiguous states. This necessitates a backend that solves a set-to-set problem with arbitrary combinations of past or future states. To this end, we repurpose video diffusion models to learn the set-to-set mapping with pretrained video priors. We implement the system with strong diffusion transformer backbones ( e.g. , CogVideoX and LTXVideo) and high-quality data processing ( e.g. , sampling short shots from long videos of real drawing records). Experiments show that the generated states are diverse in drawing contexts and resemble human drawing processes. This capability may aid artists in visualizing potential outcomes, generating creative inspirations, or refining existing workflows. Lvmin Zhang, Chuan Yan, Yuwei Guo 0002, Jinbo Xing, Maneesh Agrawala |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2024 | Transparent Image Layer Diffusion using Latent TransparencyabstractWe present an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock. Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2023 | Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractWe present ControlNet, a neural network architecture to add spatial conditioning controls to large, pretrained text-to-image diffusion models. ControlNet locks the production-ready large diffusion models, and reuses their deep and robust encoding layers pretrained with billions of images as a strong backbone to learn a diverse set of conditional controls. The neural architecture is connected with "zero convolutions" (zero-initialized convolution layers) that progressively grow the parameters from zero and ensure that no harmful noise could affect the finetuning. We test various conditioning controls, e.g., edges, depth, segmentation, human pose, etc., with Stable Diffusion, using single or multiple conditions, with or without prompts. We show that the training of ControlNets is robust with small (1m) datasets. Extensive results show that ControlNet may facilitate wider applications to control image diffusion models. Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, Maneesh Agrawala |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2022 | Sprite-from-Sprite: Cartoon Animation Decomposition with Self-supervised Sprite EstimationabstractWe present an approach to decompose cartoon animation videos into a set of "sprites" --- the basic units of digital cartoons that depict the contents and transforms of each animated object. The sprites in real-world cartoons are unique: artists may draw arbitrary sprite animations for expressiveness, where the animated content is often complicated, irregular, and challenging; alternatively, artists may also reduce their workload by tweening and adjusting sprites, or even reuse static sprites, in which case the transformations are relatively regular and simple. Based on these observations, we propose a sprite decomposition framework using Pixel Multilayer Perceptrons (Pixel MLPs) where the estimation of each sprite is conditioned on and guided by all other sprites. In this way, once those relatively regular and simple sprites are resolved, the decomposition of the remaining "challenging" sprites can simplified and eased with the guidance of other sprites. We call this method "sprite-from-sprite" cartoon decomposition. We study ablative architectures of our framework, and the user study demonstrates that our results are the most preferred ones in 19/20 cases. Lvmin Zhang, Tien-Tsin Wong |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2021 | User-Guided Line Art Flat Filling With Split Filling MechanismabstractFlat filling is a critical step in digital artistic content creation with the objective of filling line arts with flat colors. We present a deep learning framework for user-guided line art flat filling that can compute the "influence areas" of the user color scribbles, i.e., the areas where the user scribbles should propagate and influence. This framework explicitly controls such scribble influence areas for artists to manipulate the colors of image details and avoid color leakage/contamination between scribbles, and simultaneously, leverages data-driven color generation to facilitate content creation. This framework is based on a Split Filling Mechanism (SFM), which first splits the user scribbles into individual groups and then independently processes the colors and influence areas of each group with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Learned from more than a million illustrations, the framework can estimate the scribble influence areas in a content-aware manner, and can smartly generate visually pleasing colors to assist the daily works of artists. We show that our proposed framework is easy to use, allowing even amateurs to obtain professional-quality results on a wide variety of line arts. Lvmin Zhang, Chengze Li, Edgar Simo-Serra, Yi Ji 0001, Tien-Tsin Wong, Chunping Liu |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2021 | Generating Manga From Illustrations via Mimicking Manga Creation WorkflowabstractWe present a framework to generate manga from digital illustrations. In professional mange studios, the manga create workflow consists of three key steps: (1) Artists use line drawings to delineate the structural outlines in manga storyboards. (2) Artists apply several types of regular screentones to render the shading, occlusion, and object materials. (3) Artists selectively paste irregular screen textures onto the canvas to achieve various background layouts or special effects. Motivated by this workflow, we propose a data-driven framework to convert a digital illustration into three corresponding components: manga line drawing, regular screen-tone, and irregular screen texture. These components can be directly composed into manga images and can be further retouched for more plentiful manga creations. To this end, we create a large-scale dataset with these three components annotated by artists in a human-in-the-loop manner. We conduct both perceptual user study and qualitative evaluation of the generated manga, and observe that our generated image layers for these three components are practically usable in the daily works of manga artists. We provide 60 qualitative results and 15 additional comparisons in the supplementary material. We will make our presented manga dataset publicly available to assist related applications. Lvmin Zhang, Qingnan Fan, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2021 | SmartShadow: Artistic Shadow Drawing Tool for Line DrawingsabstractSmartShadow is a deep learning application for digital painting artists to draw shadows on line drawings, with three proposed tools. (1) Shadow brush: artists can draw scribbles to coarsely indicate the areas inside or outside their wanted shadows, and the application will generate the shadows in real-time. (2) Shadow boundary brush: this brush can precisely control the boundary of any specific shadow. (3) Global shadow generator: this tool can estimate the global shadow direction from input brush scribbles, and then consistently propagate local shadows to the entire image. These three tools can not only speed up the shadow drawing process (by 3.1× as experiments validate), but also allow for the flexibility to achieve various shadow effects and facilitate richer artistic creations. To this end, we train Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a collected large-scale dataset of both real and synthesized data, and especially, we collect 1670 shadow samples drawn by real artists. Both qualitative analysis and user study show that our approach can generate high-quality shadows that are practically usable in the daily works of digital painting artists. We present 30 additional results and 15 visual comparisons in the supplementary materiel. Lvmin Zhang, Jinyue Jiang, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu |
ICCV | 1 |
| 2020 | DanbooRegion: An Illustration Region Dataset
Lvmin Zhang, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu |
ECCV (13) | 1 |
| 2020 | Erasing Appearance Preservation in Optimization-Based Smoothing
Lvmin Zhang, Chengze Li, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu, Tien-Tsin Wong |
ECCV (6) | 1 |
| 2020 | Generating Digital Painting Lighting Effects via RGB-space GeometryabstractWe present an algorithm to generate digital painting lighting effects from a single image. Our algorithm is based on a key observation: Artists use many overlapping strokes to paint lighting effects, i.e., pixels with dense stroke history tend to gather more illumination strokes. Based on this observation, we design an algorithm to both estimate the density of strokes in a digital painting using color geometry and then generate novel lighting effects by mimicking artists’ coarse-to-fine workflow. Coarse lighting effects are first generated using a wave transform and then retouched according to the stroke density of the original illustrations into usable lighting effects. Our algorithm is content-aware, with generated lighting effects naturally adapting to image structures, and can be used as an interactive tool to simplify current labor-intensive workflows for generating lighting effects for digital and matte paintings. In addition, our algorithm can also produce usable lighting effects for photographs or three-dimensional rendered images. We evaluate our approach with both an in-depth qualitative and a quantitative analysis that includes a perceptual user study. Results show that our proposed approach is not only able to produce favorable lighting effects with respect to existing approaches, but also that it is able to significantly reduce the needed interaction time. Lvmin Zhang, Edgar Simo-Serra, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2018 | Two-stage sketch colorizationabstractSketch or line art colorization is a research field with significant market demand. Different from photo colorization which strongly relies on texture information, sketch colorization is more challenging as sketches may not have texture. Even worse, color, texture, and gradient have to be generated from the abstract sketch lines. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic learning-based framework to colorize sketches with proper color, texture as well as gradient. Our framework consists of two stages. In the first drafting stage, our model guesses color regions and splashes a rich variety of colors over the sketch to obtain a color draft. In the second refinement stage, it detects the unnatural colors and artifacts, and try to fix and refine the result. Comparing to existing approaches, this two-stage design effectively divides the complex colorization task into two simpler and goal-clearer subtasks. This eases the learning and raises the quality of colorization. Our model resolves the artifacts such as water-color blurring, color distortion, and dull textures. We build an interactive software based on our model for evaluation. Users can iteratively edit and refine the colorization. We evaluate our learning model and the interactive system through an extensive user study. Statistics shows that our method outperforms the state-of-art techniques and industrial applications in several aspects including, the visual quality, the ability of user control, user experience, and other metrics. Lvmin Zhang, Chengze Li, Tien-Tsin Wong, Yi Ji 0001, Chunping Liu |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |