Difan Liu

dblp:211/7920 · DBLP profile ↗
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23ranked-venue papers
3as first author
19since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5971-2748ORCID · corroborated

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

Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 21 · 3 first-author · 17 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 19 · 2 first-author · 16 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Mean-Shift Distillation for Diffusion Mode Seeking
abstract
We present mean-shift distillation, a novel diffusion distillation technique that provides a provably good proxy for the gradient of the diffusion output distribution. This is derived directly from mean-shift mode seeking on the distribution, and we show that its extrema are aligned with the modes. We further derive an efficient product distribution sampling procedure to evaluate the gradient. Our method is formulated as a drop-in replacement for score distillation sampling (SDS), requiring neither model retraining nor extensive modification of the sampling procedure. We show that it exhibits superior mode alignment as well as improved convergence in both synthetic and practical setups, yielding higher-fidelity results when applied to both text-to-image and text-to-3D applications with Stable Diffusion.
Vikas Thamizharasan, Nikitas Chatzis, Iliyan Georgiev, Matthew Fisher, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Difan Liu, Nanxuan Zhao, Michal Lukác
WACV6
2025 Move-in-2D: 2D-Conditioned Human Motion Generation
abstract
Generating realistic human videos remains a challenging task, with the most effective methods currently relying on a human motion sequence as a control signal. Existing approaches often use existing motion extracted from other videos, which restricts applications to specific motion types and global scene matching. We propose Move-in-2D, a novel approach to generate human motion sequences conditioned on a scene image, allowing for diverse motion that adapts to different scenes. Our approach utilizes a diffusion model that accepts both a scene image and text prompt as inputs, producing a motion sequence tailored to the scene. To train this model, we collect a large-scale video dataset featuring single-human activities, annotating each video with the corresponding human motion as the target output. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively predicts human motion that aligns with the scene image after projection. Furthermore, we show that the generated motion sequence improves human motion quality in video synthesis tasks.
Hsin-Ping Huang, Yang Zhou 0009, Jui-Hsien Wang, Difan Liu, Feng Liu 0015, Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001
CVPR4
2025 Visual Persona: Foundation Model for Full-Body Human Customization
abstract
We introduce Visual Persona, a foundation model for text-to-image full-body human customization that, given a single in-the-wild human image, generates diverse images of the individual guided by text descriptions. Unlike prior methods that focus solely on preserving facial identity, our approach captures detailed full-body appearance, aligning with text descriptions for body structure and scene variations. Training this model requires large-scale paired human data, consisting of multiple images per individual with consistent full-body identities, which is notoriously difficult to obtain. To address this, we propose a data curation pipeline leveraging vision-language models to evaluate full-body appearance consistency, resulting in Visual Persona-500K—a dataset of 580k paired human images across 100k unique identities. For precise appearance transfer, we introduce a transformer encoder-decoder architecture adapted to a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, which augments the input image into distinct body regions, encodes these regions as local appearance features, and projects them into dense identity embeddings independently to condition the diffusion model for synthesizing customized images. Visual Persona consistently surpasses existing approaches, generating high-quality, customized images from in-the-wild inputs. Extensive ablation studies validate design choices, and we demonstrate the versatility of Visual Persona across various downstream tasks.
Jisu Nam, Soowon Son, Jing Shi 0005, Difan Liu, Feng Liu 0015, Seungryong Kim, Yang Zhou 0009
CVPR5
2025 VideoGigaGAN: Towards Detail-rich Video Super-Resolution
abstract
Video super-resolution (VSR) models achieve temporal consistency but often produce blurrier results than their image-based counterparts due to limited generative capacity. This prompts the question: can we adapt a generative image upsampler for VSR while preserving temporal consistency? We introduce VideoGigaGAN, a new generative VSR model that combines high-frequency detail with temporal stability, building on the large-scale GigaGAN image upsampler. Simple adaptations of GigaGAN for VSR led to flickering issues, so we propose techniques to enhance temporal consistency. We validate the effectiveness of VideoGigaGAN by comparing it with state-of-the-art VSR models on public datasets and showcasing video results with 8× upsampling.
Taesung Park, Richard Zhang 0001, Yang Zhou 0009, Eli Shechtman, Feng Liu 0015, Jia-Bin Huang 0001, Difan Liu
CVPR8
2025 Rethinking Layered Graphic Design Generation with a Top-Down Approach
abstract
Graphic design is crucial for conveying ideas and messages. Designers usually organize their work into objects, backgrounds, and vectorized text layers to simplify editing. However, this workflow demands considerable expertise. With the rise of GenAI methods, an endless supply of high-quality graphic designs in pixel format has become more accessible, though these designs often lack editability. Despite this, non-layered designs still inspire human designers, influencing their choices in layouts and text styles, ultimately guiding the creation of layered designs. Motivated by this observation, we propose Accordion, a graphic design generation framework taking the first attempt to convert AI-generated designs into editable layered designs, meanwhile refining nonsensical AI-generated text with meaningful alternatives guided by user prompts. It is built around a vision language model (VLM) playing distinct roles in three curated stages. For each stage, we design prompts to guide the VLM in executing different tasks. Distinct from existing bottom-up methods (e.g., COLE and Open-COLE) that gradually generate elements to create layered designs, our approach works in a top-down manner by using the visually harmonious reference image as global guidance to decompose each layer. Additionally, it leverages multiple vision experts such as SAM and element removal models to facilitate the creation of graphic layers. We train our method using the in-house graphic design dataset Design39K, augmented with AI-generated design images coupled with refined ground truth created by a customized inpainting model. Experimental results and user studies by designers show that Accordion generates favorable results on the DesignIntention benchmark, including tasks such as text-to-template, adding text to background, and text de-rendering, and also excels in creating design variations.
Jingye Chen, Nanxuan Zhao, Difan Liu, Jimei Yang, Qifeng Chen 0001
ICCV5
2025 DOLLAR: Few-Step Video Generation Via Distillation and Latent Reward Optimization
abstract
Diffusion probabilistic models have shown significant progress in video generation; however, their computational efficiency is limited by the large number of sampling steps required. Reducing sampling steps often compromises video quality or generation diversity. In this work, we introduce a distillation method that combines variational score distillation and consistency distillation to achieve few-step video generation, maintaining both high quality and diversity. We also propose a latent reward model fine-tuning approach to further enhance video generation performance according to any specified reward metric. This approach reduces memory usage and does not require the reward to be differentiable. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in few-step generation for 10-second videos (128 frames at 12 FPS). The distilled student model achieves a score of 82.57 on VBench, surpassing the teacher model as well as baseline models Gen-3, T2V-Turbo, and Kling. One-step distillation accelerates the teacher model's diffusion sampling by up to 278.6 times, enabling near real-time generation. Human evaluations further validate the superior performance of our 4-step student models compared to teacher model using 50-step DDIM sampling.
Chi Jin 0001, Difan Liu, Haitian Zheng, Krishna Kumar Singh, Zhe Lin 0001, Yuchen Liu 0002
ICCV3
2025 VEGGIE: Instructional Editing and Reasoning Video Concepts with Grounded Generation
Shoubin Yu, Difan Liu, Ziqiao Ma 0001, Yicong Hong, Yang Zhou 0009, Hao Tan 0002, Joyce Y. Chai, Mohit Bansal
ICCV2
2025 How to Train Your Dragon: Automatic Diffusion-Based Rigging for Characters with Diverse Topologies
abstract
Abstract Recent diffusion‐based methods have achieved impressive results on animating images of human subjects. However, most of that success has built on human‐specific body pose representations and extensive training with labeled real videos. In this work, we extend the ability of such models to animate images of characters with more diverse skeletal topologies. Given a small number (3–5) of example frames showing the character in different poses with corresponding skeletal information, our model quickly infers a rig for that character that can generate images corresponding to new skeleton poses. We propose a procedural data generation pipeline that efficiently samples training data with diverse topologies on the fly. We use it, along with a novel skeleton representation, to train our model on articulated shapes spanning a large space of textures and topologies. Then during fine‐tuning, our model rapidly adapts to unseen target characters and generalizes well to rendering new poses, both for realistic and more stylized cartoon appearances. To better evaluate performance on this novel and challenging task, we create the first 2D video dataset that contains both humanoid and non‐humanoid subjects with per‐frame keypoint annotations. With extensive experiments, we demonstrate the superior quality of our results.
Zeqi Gu, Difan Liu, Timothy R. Langlois, Matthew Fisher, Abe Davis
Comput. Graph. Forum2
2024 SNED: Superposition Network Architecture Search for Efficient Video Diffusion Model
abstract
While AI-generated content has garnered significant attention, achieving photo-realistic video synthesis remains a formidable challenge. Despite the promising advances in diffusion models for video generation quality, the complex model architecture and substantial computational demands for both training and inference create a significant gap between these models and real-world applications. This paper presents SNED, a superposition network architecture search method for efficient video diffusion model. Our method employs a supernet training paradigm that targets various model cost and resolution options using a weight-sharing method. Moreover, we propose the supernet training sampling warm-up for fast training optimization. To showcase the flexibility of our method, we conduct experiments involving both pixel-space and latent-space video diffusion models. The results demonstrate that our framework consistently produces comparable results across different model options with high efficiency. According to the experiment for the pixel-space video diffusion model, we can achieve consistent video generation results simultaneously across 64×64 to 256×256 resolutions with a large range of model sizes from 640M to 1.6B number of parameters for pixel-space video diffusion models.
Zhengang Li 0001, Yuchen Liu 0002, Difan Liu, Tobias Hinz, Feng Liu 0015, Yanzhi Wang 0001
CVPR4
2024 Visual Layout Composer: Image-Vector Dual Diffusion Model for Design Layout Generation
abstract
This paper proposes an image-vector dual diffusion model for generative layout design. Distinct from prior efforts that mostly ignores visual information of elements and the whole canvas, our approach integrates the power of a pre-trained large image diffusion model to guide layout composition in a vector diffusion model by providing enhanced salient region understanding and high-level inter-element relationship reasoning. Our proposed model simultaneously operates in two domains: it generates the overall design appearance in the image domain while optimizing the size and position of each design element in the vector domain. The proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art results on several datasets and enables new layout design applications. Project webpage: https://aminshabani.github.io/visual_layout_composer.
Mohammad Amin Shabani, Difan Liu, Nanxuan Zhao, Jimei Yang, Yasutaka Furukawa
CVPR3
2024 VecFusion: Vector Font Generation with Diffusion
abstract
We present VecFusion, a new neural architecture that can generate vector fonts with varying topological structures and precise control point positions. Our approach is a cascaded diffusion model which consists of a raster diffusion model followed by a vector diffusion model. The raster model generates low-resolution, rasterized fonts with auxiliary control point information, capturing the global style and shape of the font, while the vector model synthesizes vector fonts conditioned on the low-resolution raster fonts from the first stage. To synthesize long and complex curves, our vector diffusion model uses a transformer architecture and a novel vector representation that enables the modeling of diverse vector geometry and the precise prediction of control points. Our experiments show that, in contrast to previous generative models for vector graphics, our new cascaded vector diffusion model generates higher quality vector fonts, with complex structures and diverse styles.
Vikas Thamizharasan, Difan Liu, Shantanu Agarwal, Matthew Fisher, Michaël Gharbi, Oliver Wang, Alec Jacobson, Evangelos Kalogerakis
CVPR2
2024 NIVeL: Neural Implicit Vector Layers for Text-to-Vector Generation
abstract
The success of denoising diffusion models in representing rich data distributions over 2D raster images has prompted research on extending them to other data representations, such as vector graphics. Unfortunately due to their variable structure and scarcity of vector training data, directly applying diffusion models on this domain remains a challenging problem. Using workarounds like optimization via Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) is also fraught with difficulty, as vector representations are non-trivial to directly optimize and tend to result in implausible geometries such as redundant or self-intersecting shapes. NIVeL addresses these challenges by reinterpreting the problem on an alternative, intermediate domain which preserves the desirable properties of vector graphicsmainly sparsity of representation and resolution-independence. This alternative domain is based on neural implicit fields expressed in a set of decomposable, editable layers. Based on our experiments, NIVeL produces text-to- vector graphics results of significantly better quality than the state-of-the-art.
Vikas Thamizharasan, Difan Liu, Matthew Fisher, Nanxuan Zhao, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Michal Lukác
CVPR2
2024 Attention-Driven Training-Free Efficiency Enhancement of Diffusion Models
abstract
Diffusion models (DMs) have exhibited superior performance in generating high-quality and diverse images. How-ever, this exceptional performance comes at the cost of expensive generation process, particularly due to the heavily used attention module in leading models. Existing works mainly adopt a retraining process to enhance DM efficiency. This is computationally expensive and not very scalable. To this end, we introduce the Attention-driven Training-free Efficient Diffusion Model (AT-EDM) framework that leverages attention maps to perform run-time pruning of redundant tokens, without the need for any retraining. Specifically, for single-denoising-step pruning, we develop a novel ranking algorithm, Generalized Weighted Page Rank (G-WPR), to identify redundant tokens, and a similarity-based recovery method to restore tokens for the convolution operation. In addition, we propose a Denoising-Steps-Aware Pruning (DSAP) approach to adjust the pruning budget across different denoising timesteps for better generation quality. Extensive evaluations show that AT-EDM performs favorably against prior art in terms of efficiency (e.g., 38.8% FLOPs saving and up to 1.53× speed-up over Stable Diffusion XL) while maintaining nearly the same FID and CLIP scores as the full model. Project webpage: https://atedm.github.io.
Hongjie Wang 0002, Difan Liu, Yijun Li 0001, Zhe Lin 0001, Niraj K. Jha, Yuchen Liu 0002
CVPR2
2024 HARIVO: Harnessing Text-to-Image Models for Video Generation
Mingi Kwon, Seoung Wug Oh, Yang Zhou 0009, Difan Liu, Joon-Young Lee, Haoran Cai, Baqiao Liu, Feng Liu 0015, Youngjung Uh
ECCV (53)4
2024 Customize-A-Video: One-Shot Motion Customization of Text-to-Video Diffusion Models
Yixuan Ren, Yang Zhou 0009, Jimei Yang, Jing Shi 0005, Difan Liu, Feng Liu 0015, Mingi Kwon, Abhinav Shrivastava
ECCV (89)5
2024 LRM: Large Reconstruction Model for Single Image to 3D
abstract
We propose the first Large Reconstruction Model (LRM) that predicts the 3D model of an object from a single input image within just 5 seconds. In contrast to many previous methods that are trained on small-scale datasets such as ShapeNet in a category-specific fashion, LRM adopts a highly scalable transformer-based architecture with 500 million learnable parameters to directly predict a neural radiance field (NeRF) from the input image. We train our model in an end-to-end manner on massive multi-view data containing around 1 million objects, including both synthetic renderings from Objaverse and real captures from MVImgNet. This combination of a high-capacity model and large-scale training data empowers our model to be highly generalizable and produce high-quality 3D reconstructions from various testing inputs, including real-world in-the-wild captures and images created by generative models. Video demos and interactable 3D meshes can be found on our LRM project webpage: https://yiconghong.me/LRM.
Yicong Hong, Kai Zhang 0045, Jiuxiang Gu, Sai Bi, Yang Zhou 0009, Difan Liu, Feng Liu 0015, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Trung Bui, Hao Tan 0002
ICLR6
2022 Neural Shape Parsers for Constructive Solid Geometry
abstract
Constructive solid geometry (CSG) is a geometric modeling technique that defines complex shapes by recursively applying boolean operations on primitives such as spheres and cylinders. We present CSGNet, a deep network architecture that takes as input a 2D or 3D shape and outputs a CSG program that models it. Parsing shapes into CSG programs is desirable as it yields a compact and interpretable generative model. However, the task is challenging since the space of primitives and their combinations can be prohibitively large. CSGNet uses a convolutional encoder and recurrent decoder based on deep networks to map shapes to modeling instructions in a feed-forward manner and is significantly faster than bottom-up approaches. We investigate two architectures for this task-a vanilla encoder (CNN) - decoder (RNN) and another architecture that augments the encoder with an explicit memory module based on the program execution stack. The stack augmentation improves the reconstruction quality of the generated shape and learning efficiency. Our approach is also more effective as a shape primitive detector compared to a state-of-the-art object detector. Finally, we demonstrate CSGNet can be trained on novel datasets without program annotations through policy gradient techniques.
Gopal Sharma, Rishabh Goyal, Difan Liu, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Subhransu Maji
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.3
2022 ASSET: autoregressive semantic scene editing with transformers at high resolutions
abstract
We present ASSET, a neural architecture for automatically modifying an input high-resolution image according to a user's edits on its semantic segmentation map. Our architecture is based on a transformer with a novel attention mechanism. Our key idea is to sparsify the transformer's attention matrix at high resolutions, guided by dense attention extracted at lower image resolutions. While previous attention mechanisms are computationally too expensive for handling high-resolution images or are overly constrained within specific image regions hampering long-range interactions, our novel attention mechanism is both computationally efficient and effective. Our sparsified attention mechanism is able to capture long-range interactions and context, leading to synthesizing interesting phenomena in scenes, such as reflections of landscapes onto water or fora consistent with the rest of the landscape, that were not possible to generate reliably with previous convnets and transformer approaches. We present qualitative and quantitative results, along with user studies, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Our code and dataset are available at our project page: https://github.com/DifanLiu/ASSET
Difan Liu, Sandesh Shetty, Tobias Hinz, Matthew Fisher, Richard Zhang 0001, Taesung Park, Evangelos Kalogerakis
ACM Trans. Graph.1
2021 Neural Strokes: Stylized Line Drawing of 3D Shapes
abstract
This paper introduces a model for producing stylized line drawings from 3D shapes. The model takes a 3D shape and a viewpoint as input, and outputs a drawing with textured strokes, with variations in stroke thickness, deformation, and color learned from an artist’s style. The model is fully differentiable. We train its parameters from a single training drawing of another 3D shape. We show that, in contrast to previous image-based methods, the use of a geometric representation of 3D shape and 2D strokes allows the model to transfer important aspects of shape and texture style while preserving contours. Our method outputs the resulting drawing in a vector representation, enabling richer downstream analysis or editing in interactive applications. Our code and dataset are available at our project page: www.github.com/DifanLiu/NeuralStrokes
Difan Liu, Matthew Fisher, Aaron Hertzmann, Evangelos Kalogerakis
ICCV1
2020 Neural Contours: Learning to Draw Lines From 3D Shapes
abstract
This paper introduces a method for learning to generate line drawings from 3D models. Our architecture incorporates a differentiable module operating on geometric features of the 3D model, and an image-based module operating on view-based shape representations. At test time, geometric and view-based reasoning are combined with the help of a neural module to create a line drawing. The model is trained on a large number of crowdsourced comparisons of line drawings. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves significant improvements in line drawing over the state-of-the-art when evaluated on standard benchmarks, resulting in drawings that are comparable to those produced by experienced human artists.
Difan Liu, Mohamed Nabail, Aaron Hertzmann, Evangelos Kalogerakis
CVPR1
2020 ParSeNet: A Parametric Surface Fitting Network for 3D Point Clouds
Gopal Sharma, Difan Liu, Subhransu Maji, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Siddhartha Chaudhuri, Radomír Mech
ECCV (7)2
2018 CSGNet: Neural Shape Parser for Constructive Solid Geometry
abstract
We present a neural architecture that takes as input a 2D or 3D shape and outputs a program that generates the shape. The instructions in our program are based on constructive solid geometry principles, i.e., a set of boolean operations on shape primitives defined recursively. Bottom-up techniques for this shape parsing task rely on primitive detection and are inherently slow since the search space over possible primitive combinations is large. In contrast, our model uses a recurrent neural network that parses the input shape in a top-down manner, which is significantly faster and yields a compact and easy-to-interpret sequence of modeling instructions. Our model is also more effective as a shape detector compared to existing state-of-the-art detection techniques. We finally demonstrate that our network can be trained on novel datasets without ground-truth program annotations through policy gradient techniques.
Gopal Sharma, Rishabh Goyal, Difan Liu, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Subhransu Maji
CVPR3
2018 Deep part induction from articulated object pairs
abstract
Object functionality is often expressed through part articulation - as when the two rigid parts of a scissor pivot against each other to perform the cutting function. Such articulations are often similar across objects within the same functional category. In this paper we explore how the observation of different articulation states provides evidence for part structure and motion of 3D objects. Our method takes as input a pair of unsegmented shapes representing two different articulation states of two functionally related objects, and induces their common parts along with their underlying rigid motion. This is a challenging setting, as we assume no prior shape structure, no prior shape category information, no consistent shape orientation, the articulation states may belong to objects of different geometry, plus we allow inputs to be noisy and partial scans, or point clouds lifted from RGB images. Our method learns a neural network architecture with three modules that respectively propose correspondences, estimate 3D deformation flows, and perform segmentation. To achieve optimal performance, our architecture alternates between correspondence, deformation flow, and segmentation prediction iteratively in an ICP-like fashion. Our results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in the task of discovering articulated parts of objects. In addition, our part induction is object-class agnostic and successfully generalizes to new and unseen objects.
Li Yi 0001, Difan Liu, Evangelos Kalogerakis, Hao Su 0001, Leonidas J. Guibas
ACM Trans. Graph.3