This paper introduces ITA-MDT, the Image-Timestep-Adaptive Masked Diffusion Transformer Framework for Image-Based Virtual Try-On (IVTON), designed to overcome the limitations of previous approaches by leveraging the Masked Diffusion Transformer (MDT) for improved handling of both global garment context and fine-grained details. The IVTON task involves seamlessly superimposing a garment from one image onto a person in another, creating a realistic depiction of the person wearing the specified garment. Unlike conventional diffusion-based virtual try-on models that depend on large pre-trained U-Net architectures, ITA-MDT leverages a lightweight, scalable transformer-based denoising diffusion model with a mask latent modeling scheme, achieving competitive results while reducing computational overhead. A key component of ITA-MDT is the Image-Timestep Adaptive Feature Aggregator (ITAFA), a dynamic feature aggregator that combines all of the features from the image encoder into a unified feature of the same size, guided by diffusion timestep and garment image complexity. This enables adaptive weighting of features, allowing the model to emphasize either global information or fine-grained details based on the requirements of the denoising stage. Additionally, the Salient Region Extractor (SRE) module is presented to identify complex region of the garment to provide high-resolution local information to the denoising model as an additional condition alongside the global information of the full garment image. This targeted conditioning strategy enhances detail preservation of fine details in highly salient garment regions, optimizing computational resources by avoiding unnecessarily processing entire garment image. Comparative evaluations confirms that ITA-MDT improves efficiency while maintaining strong performance, reaching state-of-the-art results in several metrics. Our project page is available at https://jiwoohong93.github.io/ita-mdt/.

We introduce MDSGen, a novel framework for vision-guided open-domain sound generation optimized for model parameter size, memory consumption, and inference speed. This framework incorporates two key innovations: (1) a redundant video feature removal module that filters out unnecessary visual information, and (2) a temporal-aware masking strategy that leverages temporal context for enhanced audio generation accuracy. In contrast to existing resource-heavy Unet-based models, MDSGen employs denoising masked diffusion transformers, facilitating efficient generation without reliance on pre-trained diffusion models. Evaluated on the benchmark VGGSound dataset, our smallest model (5M parameters) achieves 97.9% alignment accuracy, using 172x fewer parameters, 371% less memory, and offering 36x faster inference than the current 860M-parameter state-of-the-art model (93.9% accuracy). The larger model (131M parameters) reaches nearly 99% accuracy while requiring 6.5x fewer parameters. These results highlight the scalability and effectiveness of our approach. The code is available at https://bit.ly/mdsgen.

We present MGAudio, a novel flow-based framework for open-domain video-to-audio generation, which introduces model-guided dual-role alignment as a central design principle. Unlike prior approaches that rely on classifier-based or classifier-free guidance, MGAudio enables the generative model to guide itself through a dedicated training objective designed for video-conditioned audio generation. The framework integrates three main components: (1) a scalable flow-based Transformer denoiser, (2) a dual-role alignment mechanism where the audio-visual encoder serves both as a conditioning module and as a feature aligner to improve generation quality, and (3) a model-guided objective that enhances cross-modal coherence and audio realism. MGAudio achieves state-of-the-art performance on VGGSound, reducing FAD to 0.40, substantially surpassing the best classifier-free guidance baselines, and consistently outperforms existing methods across FD, IS, and alignment metrics. It also generalizes well to the challenging UnAV-100 benchmark. These results highlight model-guided dual-role alignment as a powerful and scalable paradigm for conditional video-to-audio generation. Code is available at: https://github.com/pantheon5100/mgaudio

Actual image super-resolution is an extremely challenging task due to complex degradations existing in the image. To solve this problem, two dominant methodologies have emerged: degradation-estimation-based Addressing actual image super-resolution remains a formidable challenge due to the intricate degradations present in images. Two primary methodologies have emerged: degradation-estimation-based and blind-based methods. The former often struggle to accurately estimate degradation, limiting their effectiveness on real low-resolution images. Conversely, blind-based methods rely on a single perceptual perspective, constraining their adaptability to diverse perceptual characteristics. In response to these challenges, we present MPF-Net, a novel super-resolution approach aimed at enhancing real-world image super-resolution tasks by enabling the model to learn multiple perceptual features from input images. Our method features a Multi-Perception Feature Extraction module (MPFE) designed to extract diverse perceptual details, complemented by Cross-Perception Blocks (CPB) facilitating the fusion of this information for efficient super-resolution reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a contrastive regularization term (CR) to enhance the model’s learning by leveraging newly generated HR and LR images as positive and negative samples. Experimental results on challenging real-world SR datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

We present X-MDPT ($\underline{Cross}$-view $\underline{M}$asked $\underline{D}$iffusion $\underline{P}$rediction $\underline{T}$ransformers), a novel diffusion model designed for pose-guided human image generation. X-MDPT distinguishes itself by employing masked diffusion transformers that operate on latent patches, a departure from the commonly-used Unet structures in existing works. The model comprises three key modules: 1) a denoising diffusion Transformer, 2) an aggregation network that consolidates conditions into a single vector for the diffusion process, and 3) a mask cross-prediction module that enhances representation learning with semantic information from the reference image. X-MDPT demonstrates scalability, improving FID, SSIM, and LPIPS with larger models. Despite its simple design, our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on the DeepFashion dataset while exhibiting efficiency in terms of training parameters, training time, and inference speed. Our compact 33MB model achieves an FID of 7.42, surpassing a prior Unet latent diffusion approach (FID 8.07) using only $11\times$ fewer parameters. Our best model surpasses the pixel-based diffusion with $\frac{2}{3}$ of the parameters and achieves $5.43 \times$ faster inference. The code is available at https://github.com/trungpx/xmdpt.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPM) have been widely adopted in image-to-image translation to generate high-quality images. Prior attempts at applying the DPM to image super-resolution (SR) have shown that iteratively refining a pure Gaussian noise with a conditional image using a U-Net trained on denoising at various-level noises can help obtain a satisfied high-resolution image for the low-resolution one. To further improve the performance and simplify current DPM-based super-resolution methods, we propose a simple but non-trivial DPM-based super-resolution post-process framework, i.e., cDPMSR. After applying a pre-trained SR model on the to-be-test LR image to provide the conditional input, we adapt the standard DPM to conduct conditional image generation and perform super-resolution through a deterministic iterative denoising process. Our method surpasses prior attempts on both qualitative and quantitative results and can generate more photo-realistic counterparts for the low-resolution images with various benchmark datasets including Set5, Set14, Urban100, BSD100, and Manga109. Code will be published after accepted.

Contrastive learning (CL) is widely known to require many negative samples, 65536 in MoCo for instance, for which the performance of a dictionary-free framework is often inferior because the negative sample size (NSS) is limited by its mini-batch size (MBS). To decouple the NSS from the MBS, a dynamic dictionary has been adopted in a large volume of CL frameworks, among which arguably the most popular one is MoCo family. In essence, MoCo adopts a momentum-based queue dictionary, for which we perform a fine-grained analysis of its size and consistency. We point out that InfoNCE loss used in MoCo implicitly attract anchors to their corresponding positive sample with various strength of penalties and identify such inter-anchor hardness-awareness property as a major reason for the necessity of a large dictionary. Our findings motivate us to simplify MoCo v2 via the removal of its dictionary as well as momentum. Based on an InfoNCE with the proposed dual temperature, our simplified frameworks, Sim-MoCo and SimCo, outperform MoCo v2 by a visible margin. Moreover, our work bridges the gap between CL and non-CL frameworks, contributing to a more unified under-standing of these two mainstream frameworks in SSL. Code is available at: https://bit.ly/3LkQbaT.

Model agnostic meta-learning (MAML) is a popular state-of-the-art meta-learning algorithm that provides good weight initialization of a model given a variety of learning tasks. The model initialized by provided weight can be fine-tuned to an unseen task despite only using a small amount of samples and within a few adaptation steps. MAML is simple and versatile but requires costly learning rate tuning and careful design of the task distribution which affects its scalability and generalization. This paper proposes a more robust MAML based on an adaptive learning scheme and a prioritization task buffer (PTB) referred to as Robust MAML (RMAML) for improving scalability of training process and alleviating the problem of distribution mismatch. RMAML uses gradient-based hyper-parameter optimization to automatically find the optimal learning rate and uses the PTB to gradually adjust training task distribution toward testing task distribution over the course of training. Experimental results on meta reinforcement learning environments demonstrate a substantial performance gain as well as being less sensitive to hyper-parameter choice and robust to distribution mismatch.

This paper considers a network referred to as Modality Shifting Attention Network (MSAN) for Multimodal Video Question Answering (MVQA) task. MSAN decomposes the task into two sub-tasks: (1) localization of temporal moment relevant to the question, and (2) accurate prediction of the answer based on the localized moment. The modality required for temporal localization may be different from that for answer prediction, and this ability to shift modality is essential for performing the task. To this end, MSAN is based on (1) the moment proposal network (MPN) that attempts to locate the most appropriate temporal moment from each of the modalities, and also on (2) the heterogeneous reasoning network (HRN) that predicts the answer using an attention mechanism on both modalities. MSAN is able to place importance weight on the two modalities for each sub-task using a component referred to as Modality Importance Modulation (MIM). Experimental results show that MSAN outperforms previous state-of-the-art by achieving 71.13\% test accuracy on TVQA benchmark dataset. Extensive ablation studies and qualitative analysis are conducted to validate various components of the network.

Data augmentation can impact the generalization performance of an image classification model in a significant way. However, it is currently conducted on the basis of trial and error, and its impact on the generalization performance cannot be predicted during training. This paper considers an influence function that predicts how generalization performance, in terms of validation loss, is affected by a particular augmented training sample. The influence function provides an approximation of the change in validation loss without actually comparing the performances that include and exclude the sample in the training process. Based on this function, a differentiable augmentation network is learned to augment an input training sample to reduce validation loss. The augmented sample is fed into the classification network, and its influence is approximated as a function of the parameters of the last fully-connected layer of the classification network. By backpropagating the influence to the augmentation network, the augmentation network parameters are learned. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet show that the proposed method provides better generalization performance than conventional data augmentation methods do.

This paper considers an architecture referred to as Cascade Region Proposal Network (Cascade RPN) for improving the region-proposal quality and detection performance by systematically addressing the limitation of the conventional RPN that heuristically defines the anchors and aligns the features to the anchors. First, instead of using multiple anchors with predefined scales and aspect ratios, Cascade RPN relies on a single anchor per location and performs multi-stage refinement. Each stage is progressively more stringent in defining positive samples by starting out with an anchor-free metric followed by anchor-based metrics in the ensuing stages. Second, to attain alignment between the features and the anchors throughout the stages, adaptive convolution is proposed that takes the anchors in addition to the image features as its input and learns the sampled features guided by the anchors. A simple implementation of a two-stage Cascade RPN achieves 13.4 point AR higher than that of the conventional RPN, surpassing any existing region proposal methods. When adopting to Fast R-CNN and Faster R-CNN, Cascade RPN can improve the detection mAP by 3.1 and 3.5 points, respectively. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/thangvubk/Cascade-RPN.