The blooming of virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies has driven an increasing demand for the creation of high-quality, immersive, and dynamic environments. However, existing generative techniques either focus solely on dynamic objects or perform outpainting from a single perspective image, failing to meet the requirements of VR/AR applications that need free-viewpoint, 360$^{\circ}$ virtual views where users can move in all directions. In this work, we tackle the challenging task of elevating a single panorama to an immersive 4D experience. For the first time, we demonstrate the capability to generate omnidirectional dynamic scenes with 360$^{\circ}$ views at 4K (4096 $\times$ 2048) resolution, thereby providing an immersive user experience. Our method introduces a pipeline that facilitates natural scene animations and optimizes a set of 3D Gaussians using efficient splatting techniques for real-time exploration. To overcome the lack of scene-scale annotated 4D data and models, especially in panoramic formats, we propose a novel Panoramic Denoiser that adapts generic 2D diffusion priors to animate consistently in 360$^{\circ}$ images, transforming them into panoramic videos with dynamic scenes at targeted regions. Subsequently, we propose Dynamic Panoramic Lifting to elevate the panoramic video into a 4D immersive environment while preserving spatial and temporal consistency. By transferring prior knowledge from 2D models in the perspective domain to the panoramic domain and the 4D lifting with spatial appearance and geometry regularization, we achieve high-quality Panorama-to-4D generation at a resolution of 4K for the first time. Project page: https://4k4dgen.github.io/.

In this work, we present a novel direction to build an image tokenizer directly on top of a frozen vision foundation model, which is a largely underexplored area. Specifically, we employ a frozen vision foundation model as the encoder of our tokenizer. To enhance its effectiveness, we introduce two key components: (1) a region-adaptive quantization framework that reduces redundancy in the pre-trained features on regular 2D grids, and (2) a semantic reconstruction objective that aligns the tokenizer’s outputs with the foundation model’s representations to preserve semantic fidelity. Based on these designs, our proposed image tokenizer, \textbf{\ours}, achieves substantial improvements in image reconstruction and generation quality, while also enhancing token efficiency. It further boosts autoregressive (AR) generation---achieving a gFID of \textbf{1.36} on ImageNet benchmarks, while accelerating model convergence by \textbf{three times}, and enabling high-fidelity class-conditional synthesis without the need for classifier-free guidance (CFG). The code is available at \href{https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/VFMTok}{https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/VFMTok}.

Comprehending natural language instructions is a charming property for both 2D and 3D layout synthesis systems. Existing methods implicitly model object joint distributions and express object relations, hindering generation's controllability. We introduce InstructLayout, a novel generative framework that integrates a semantic graph prior and a layout decoder to improve controllability and fidelity for 2D and 3D layout synthesis. The proposed semantic graph prior learns layout appearances and object distributions simultaneously, demonstrating versatility across various downstream tasks in a zero-shot manner. To facilitate the benchmarking for text-driven 2D and 3D scene synthesis, we respectively curate two high-quality datasets of layout-instruction pairs from public Internet resources with large language and multimodal models. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in both 2D and 3D layout synthesis tasks. Thorough ablation studies confirm the efficacy of crucial design components.

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has signif-icantly promoted the development of NAS techniques because of its high search efficiency and effectiveness but suf-fers from performance collapse. In this paper, we make efforts to alleviate the performance collapse problem for DARTS from two aspects. First, we investigate the expres-sive power of the supernet in DARTS and then derive a new setup of DARTS paradigm with only training Batch-Norm. Second, we theoretically find that random features dilute the auxiliary connection role of skip-connection in supernet optimization and enable search algorithm focus on fairer operation selection, thereby solving the performance collapse problem. We instantiate DARTS and PC-DARTS with random features to build an improved version for each named RF-DARTS and RF-PCDARTS respectively. Experimental results show that RF-DARTS obtains 94.36% test accuracy on CIFAR-10 (which is the nearest optimal result in NAS-Bench-201), and achieves the newest state-of-the-art top-1 test error of 24.0% on ImageNet when transferring from CIFAR-10. Moreover, RF-DARTS performs robustly across three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN) and four search spaces (S1-S4). Besides, RF-PCDARTS achieves even better results on ImageNet, that is, 23.9% top-1 and 7.1% top-5 test error, surpassing representative methods like single-path, training-free, and partial-channel paradigms directly searched on ImageNet.

In this paper, we investigate a new variant of neural architecture search (NAS) paradigm – searching with random labels (RLNAS). The task sounds counter-intuitive for most existing NAS algorithms since random label provides few information on the performance of each candidate architecture. Instead, we propose a novel NAS framework based on ease-of-convergence hypothesis, which requires only random labels during searching. The algorithm involves two steps: first, we train a SuperNet using random labels; second, from the SuperNet we extract the subnetwork whose weights change most significantly during the training. Extensive experiments are evaluated on multiple datasets (e.g. NAS-Bench-201 and ImageNet) and multiple search spaces (e.g. DARTS-like and MobileNet-like). Very surprisingly, RLNAS achieves comparable or even better results compared with state-of-the-art NAS methods such as PC-DARTS, Single Path One-Shot, even though the counterparts utilize full ground truth labels for searching. We hope our finding could inspire new understandings on the essential of NAS.

Deep neural networks have achieved out-standing performance in many real-world applications with the expense of huge computational resources. The DenseNet, one of the recently proposed neural network architecture, has achieved the state-of-the-art performance in many visual tasks. However, it has great redundancy due to the dense connections of the internal structure, which leads to high computational costs in inference with such dense networks. To address this issue, we design a reinforcement learning framework to search for efficient DenseNet architectures with layer-wise pruning (LWP) for different tasks, while retaining the original advantages of DenseNet, such as feature reuse, short paths, etc. In this framework, an agent evaluates the importance of each connection between any two block layers, and prunes the redundant connections. In addition, a novel reward-shaping trick is introduced to make DenseNet reach a better trade-off between accuracy and float point operations (FLOPs). Our experiments show that DenseNet with LWP is more compact and efficient than existing alternatives.