EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Hila Chefer
dblp:281/7362
· DBLP profile ↗
13ranked-venue papers
8as first author
13since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-1585-8782ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 10 · 6 first-author · 10 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 8 · 5 first-author · 8 since 2021Human-computer interaction and ubiquitous computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | VideoJAM: Joint Appearance-Motion Representations for Enhanced Motion Generation in Video ModelsabstractDespite tremendous recent progress, generative video models still struggle to capture real-world motion, dynamics, and physics. We show that this limitation arises from the conventional pixel reconstruction objective, which biases models toward appearance fidelity at the expense of motion coherence. To address this, we introduce VideoJAM, a novel framework that instills an effective motion prior to video generators, by encouraging the model to learn a joint appearance-motion representation. VideoJAM is composed of two complementary units. During training, we extend the objective to predict both the generated pixels and their corresponding motion from a single learned representation. During inference, we introduce Inner-Guidance, a mechanism that steers the generation toward coherent motion by leveraging the model’s own evolving motion prediction as a dynamic guidance signal. Notably, our framework can be applied to any video model with minimal adaptations, requiring no modifications to the training data or scaling of the model. VideoJAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in motion coherence, surpassing highly competitive proprietary models while also enhancing the perceived visual quality of the generations. These findings emphasize that appearance and motion can be complementary and, when effectively integrated, enhance both the visual quality and the coherence of video generation. Hila Chefer, Uriel Singer, Amit Zohar, Yuval Kirstain, Adam Polyak, Yaniv Taigman, Lior Wolf, Shelly Sheynin |
ICML | 1 |
| 2025 | Revisiting LRP: Positional Attribution as the Missing Ingredient for Transformer ExplainabilityabstractThe development of effective explainability tools for Transformers is a crucial pursuit in deep learning research. One of the most promising approaches in this domain is Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), which propagates relevance scores backward through the network to the input space by redistributing activation values based on predefined rules. However, existing LRP-based methods for Transformer explainability entirely overlook a critical component of the Transformer architecture: its positional encoding (PE), resulting in violations of conservation, and the loss of an important and unique type of relevance, which is also associated with structural and positional features. To address this limitation, we reformulate the input space for Transformer explainability as a set of position-token pairs, rather than relying solely on the standard vocabulary space. This allows us to propose specialized theoretically-grounded LRP rules designed to propagate attributions across various positional encoding methods, including Rotary, Learned, and Absolute PE. Extensive experiments with both fine-tuned classifiers and zero-shot foundation models, such as LLaMA 3, demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the SoTA in both vision and NLP explainability tasks. Our code is provided as a supplement. Yarden Bakish, Itamar Zimerman, Hila Chefer, Lior Wolf |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2025 | FlowMo: Variance-Based Flow Guidance for Coherent Motion in Video GenerationabstractText-to-video diffusion models are notoriously limited in their ability to model temporal aspects such as motion, physics, and dynamic interactions. Existing approaches address this limitation by retraining the model or introducing external conditioning signals to enforce temporal consistency. In this work, we explore whether a meaningful temporal representation can be extracted directly from the predictions of a pre-trained model without any additional training or auxiliary inputs. We introduce __FlowMo__, a novel training-free guidance method that enhances motion coherence using only the model's own predictions in each diffusion step.
FlowMo first derives an appearance-debiased temporal representation by measuring the distance between latents corresponding to consecutive frames. This highlights the implicit temporal structure predicted by the model.
It then estimates motion coherence by measuring the patch-wise variance across the temporal dimension, and guides the model to reduce this variance dynamically during sampling. Extensive experiments across multiple text-to-video models demonstrate that FlowMo significantly improves motion coherence without sacrificing visual quality or prompt alignment, offering an effective plug-and-play solution for enhancing the temporal fidelity of pre-trained video diffusion models. Ariel Shaulov, Itay Hazan 0001, Lior Wolf, Hila Chefer |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2024 | The Hidden Language of Diffusion ModelsabstractText-to-image diffusion models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate high-quality, diverse images from a textual prompt. However, the internal representations learned by these models remain an enigma. In this work, we present Conceptor, a novel method to interpret the internal representation of a textual concept by a diffusion model. This interpretation is obtained by decomposing the concept into a small set of human-interpretable textual elements. Applied over the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion model, Conceptor reveals non-trivial structures in the representations of concepts. For example, we find surprising visual connections between concepts, that transcend their textual semantics. We additionally discover concepts that rely on mixtures of exemplars, biases, renowned artistic styles, or a simultaneous fusion of multiple meanings of the concept.
Through a large battery of experiments, we demonstrate Conceptor's ability to provide meaningful, robust, and faithful decompositions for a wide variety of abstract, concrete, and complex textual concepts, while allowing to naturally connect each decomposition element to its corresponding visual impact on the generated images. Hila Chefer, Oran Lang, Mor Geva, Volodymyr Polosukhin, Assaf Shocher, Michal Irani, Inbar Mosseri, Lior Wolf |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2024 | Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation
Omer Bar-Tal, Hila Chefer, Omer Tov, Charles Herrmann, Roni Paiss, Shiran Zada, Ariel Ephrat, Junhwa Hur, Amit Raj, Yuanzhen Li, Michael Rubinstein, Tomer Michaeli, Oliver Wang, Deqing Sun, Tali Dekel, Inbar Mosseri |
SIGGRAPH Asia | 2 |
| 2024 | Still-Moving: Customized Video Generation without Customized Video DataabstractCustomizing text-to-image (T2I) models has seen tremendous progress recently, particularly in areas such as personalization, stylization, and conditional generation. However, expanding this progress to video generation is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of customized video data. In this work, we introduce Still-Moving, a novel generic framework for customizing a text-to-video (T2V) model, without requiring any customized video data. The framework applies to the prominent T2V design where the video model is built over a T2I model (e.g., via inflation). We assume access to a customized version of the T2I model, trained only on still image data (e.g., using DreamBooth). Naively plugging in the weights of the customized T2I model into the T2V model often leads to significant artifacts or insufficient adherence to the customization data. To overcome this issue, we train lightweight Spatial Adapters that adjust the features produced by the injected T2I layers. Importantly, our adapters are trained on "frozen videos" (i.e., repeated images), constructed from image samples generated by the customized T2I model. This training is facilitated by a novel Motion Adapter module, which allows us to train on such static videos while preserving the motion prior of the video model. At test time, we remove the Motion Adapter modules and leave in only the trained Spatial Adapters. This restores the motion prior of the T2V model while adhering to the spatial prior of the customized T2I model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on diverse tasks including personalized, stylized, and conditional generation. In all evaluated scenarios, our method seamlessly integrates the spatial prior of the customized T2I model with a motion prior supplied by the T2V model. Hila Chefer, Shiran Zada, Roni Paiss, Ariel Ephrat, Omer Tov, Michael Rubinstein, Lior Wolf, Tali Dekel, Tomer Michaeli, Inbar Mosseri |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2023 | Discriminative Class Tokens for Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractRecent advances in text-to-image diffusion models have enabled the generation of diverse and high-quality images. While impressive, the images often fall short of depicting subtle details and are susceptible to errors due to ambiguity in the input text. One way of alleviating these issues is to train diffusion models on class-labeled datasets. This approach has two disadvantages: (i) supervised datasets are generally small compared to large-scale scraped text-image datasets on which text-to-image models are trained, affecting the quality and diversity of the generated images, or (ii) the input is a hard-coded label, as opposed to free-form text, limiting the control over the generated images.In this work, we propose a non-invasive fine-tuning technique that capitalizes on the expressive potential of freeform text while achieving high accuracy through discriminative signals from a pretrained classifier. This is done by iteratively modifying the embedding of an added input token of a text-to-image diffusion model, by steering generated images toward a given target class according to a classifier. Our method is fast compared to prior fine-tuning methods and does not require a collection of in-class images or retraining of a noise-tolerant classifier. We evaluate our method extensively, showing that the generated images are: (i) more accurate and of higher quality than standard diffusion models, (ii) can be used to augment training data in a low-resource setting, and (iii) reveal information about the data used to train the guiding classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/idansc/discriminative_class_tokens. Idan Schwartz, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Hila Chefer, Serge J. Belongie, Lior Wolf, Sagie Benaim |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2023 | Attend-and-Excite: Attention-Based Semantic Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion ModelsabstractRecent text-to-image generative models have demonstrated an unparalleled ability to generate diverse and creative imagery guided by a target text prompt. While revolutionary, current state-of-the-art diffusion models may still fail in generating images that fully convey the semantics in the given text prompt. We analyze the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and assess the existence of catastrophic neglect , where the model fails to generate one or more of the subjects from the input prompt. Moreover, we find that in some cases the model also fails to correctly bind attributes ( e.g. , colors) to their corresponding subjects. To help mitigate these failure cases, we introduce the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN) , where we seek to intervene in the generative process on the fly during inference time to improve the faithfulness of the generated images. Using an attention-based formulation of GSN, dubbed Attend-and-Excite , we guide the model to refine the cross-attention units to attend to all subject tokens in the text prompt and strengthen --- or excite --- their activations, encouraging the model to generate all subjects described in the text prompt. We compare our approach to alternative approaches and demonstrate that it conveys the desired concepts more faithfully across a range of text prompts. Code is available at our project page: https://attendandexcite.github.io/Attend-and-Excite/. Hila Chefer, Yuval Alaluf, Yael Vinker, Lior Wolf, Daniel Cohen-Or |
ACM Trans. Graph. | 1 |
| 2022 | Image-Based CLIP-Guided Essence Transfer
Hila Chefer, Sagie Benaim, Roni Paiss, Lior Wolf |
ECCV (13) | 1 |
| 2022 | No Token Left Behind: Explainability-Aided Image Classification and Generation
Roni Paiss, Hila Chefer, Lior Wolf |
ECCV (12) | 2 |
| 2022 | Optimizing Relevance Maps of Vision Transformers Improves RobustnessabstractIt has been observed that visual classification models often rely mostly on spurious cues such as the image background, which hurts their robustness to distribution changes. To alleviate this shortcoming, we propose to monitor the model's relevancy signal and direct the model to base its prediction on the foreground object.This is done as a finetuning step, involving relatively few samples consisting of pairs of images and their associated foreground masks. Specifically, we encourage the model's relevancy map (i) to assign lower relevance to background regions, (ii) to consider as much information as possible from the foreground, and (iii) we encourage the decisions to have high confidence. When applied to Vision Transformer (ViT) models, a marked improvement in robustness to domain-shifts is observed. Moreover, the foreground masks can be obtained automatically, from a self-supervised variant of the ViT model itself; therefore no additional supervision is required. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hila-chefer/RobustViT. Hila Chefer, Idan Schwartz, Lior Wolf |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2021 | Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention VisualizationabstractSelf-attention techniques, and specifically Transformers, are dominating the field of text processing and are becoming increasingly popular in computer vision classification tasks. In order to visualize the parts of the image that led to a certain classification, existing methods either rely on the obtained attention maps or employ heuristic propagation along the attention graph. In this work, we propose a novel way to compute relevancy for Transformer networks. The method assigns local relevance based on the Deep Taylor Decomposition principle and then propagates these relevancy scores through the layers. This propagation involves attention layers and skip connections, which challenge existing methods. Our solution is based on a specific formulation that is shown to maintain the total relevancy across layers. We benchmark our method on very recent visual Transformer networks, as well as on a text classification problem, and demonstrate a clear advantage over the existing explainability methods. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hila-chefer/Transformer-Explainability. Hila Chefer, Shir Gur, Lior Wolf |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2021 | Generic Attention-model Explainability for Interpreting Bi-Modal and Encoder-Decoder TransformersabstractTransformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention mechanisms. These attention modules also play a role in other computer vision tasks including object detection and image segmentation. Unlike Transformers that only use self-attention, Transformers with co-attention require to consider multiple attention maps in parallel in order to highlight the information that is relevant to the prediction in the model’s input. In this work, we propose the first method to explain prediction by any Transformer-based architecture, including bi-modal Transformers and Transformers with co-attentions. We provide generic solutions and apply these to the three most commonly used of these architectures: (i) pure self-attention, (ii) self-attention combined with co-attention, and (iii) encoder-decoder attention. We show that our method is superior to all existing methods which are adapted from single modality explainability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/hila-chefer/Transformer-MM-Explainability. Hila Chefer, Shir Gur, Lior Wolf |
ICCV | 1 |