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Apr 2

Learning Efficient Coding of Natural Images with Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations

The efficient coding hypothesis proposes that the response properties of sensory systems are adapted to the statistics of their inputs such that they capture maximal information about the environment, subject to biological constraints. While elegant, information theoretic properties are notoriously difficult to measure in practical settings or to employ as objective functions in optimization. This difficulty has necessitated that computational models designed to test the hypothesis employ several different information metrics ranging from approximations and lower bounds to proxy measures like reconstruction error. Recent theoretical advances have characterized a novel and ecologically relevant efficiency metric, the manifold capacity, which is the number of object categories that may be represented in a linearly separable fashion. However, calculating manifold capacity is a computationally intensive iterative procedure that until now has precluded its use as an objective. Here we outline the simplifying assumptions that allow manifold capacity to be optimized directly, yielding Maximum Manifold Capacity Representations (MMCR). The resulting method is closely related to and inspired by advances in the field of self supervised learning (SSL), and we demonstrate that MMCRs are competitive with state of the art results on standard SSL benchmarks. Empirical analyses reveal differences between MMCRs and representations learned by other SSL frameworks, and suggest a mechanism by which manifold compression gives rise to class separability. Finally we evaluate a set of SSL methods on a suite of neural predictivity benchmarks, and find MMCRs are higly competitive as models of the ventral stream.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 6, 2023

What Makes a Face Look like a Hat: Decoupling Low-level and High-level Visual Properties with Image Triplets

In visual decision making, high-level features, such as object categories, have a strong influence on choice. However, the impact of low-level features on behavior is less understood partly due to the high correlation between high- and low-level features in the stimuli presented (e.g., objects of the same category are more likely to share low-level features). To disentangle these effects, we propose a method that de-correlates low- and high-level visual properties in a novel set of stimuli. Our method uses two Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as candidate models of the ventral visual stream: the CORnet-S that has high neural predictivity in high-level, IT-like responses and the VGG-16 that has high neural predictivity in low-level responses. Triplets (root, image1, image2) of stimuli are parametrized by the level of low- and high-level similarity of images extracted from the different layers. These stimuli are then used in a decision-making task where participants are tasked to choose the most similar-to-the-root image. We found that different networks show differing abilities to predict the effects of low-versus-high-level similarity: while CORnet-S outperforms VGG-16 in explaining human choices based on high-level similarity, VGG-16 outperforms CORnet-S in explaining human choices based on low-level similarity. Using Brain-Score, we observed that the behavioral prediction abilities of different layers of these networks qualitatively corresponded to their ability to explain neural activity at different levels of the visual hierarchy. In summary, our algorithm for stimulus set generation enables the study of how different representations in the visual stream affect high-level cognitive behaviors.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 3, 2024

Joint rotational invariance and adversarial training of a dual-stream Transformer yields state of the art Brain-Score for Area V4

Modern high-scoring models of vision in the brain score competition do not stem from Vision Transformers. However, in this paper, we provide evidence against the unexpected trend of Vision Transformers (ViT) being not perceptually aligned with human visual representations by showing how a dual-stream Transformer, a CrossViT~a la Chen et al. (2021), under a joint rotationally-invariant and adversarial optimization procedure yields 2nd place in the aggregate Brain-Score 2022 competition(Schrimpf et al., 2020b) averaged across all visual categories, and at the time of the competition held 1st place for the highest explainable variance of area V4. In addition, our current Transformer-based model also achieves greater explainable variance for areas V4, IT and Behaviour than a biologically-inspired CNN (ResNet50) that integrates a frontal V1-like computation module (Dapello et al.,2020). To assess the contribution of the optimization scheme with respect to the CrossViT architecture, we perform several additional experiments on differently optimized CrossViT's regarding adversarial robustness, common corruption benchmarks, mid-ventral stimuli interpretation and feature inversion. Against our initial expectations, our family of results provides tentative support for an "All roads lead to Rome" argument enforced via a joint optimization rule even for non biologically-motivated models of vision such as Vision Transformers. Code is available at https://github.com/williamberrios/BrainScore-Transformers

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 8, 2022

CurveStream: Boosting Streaming Video Understanding in MLLMs via Curvature-Aware Hierarchical Visual Memory Management

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved significant success in offline video understanding, yet their application to streaming videos is severely limited by the linear explosion of visual tokens, which often leads to Out-of-Memory (OOM) errors or catastrophic forgetting. Existing visual retention and memory management methods typically rely on uniform sampling, low-level physical metrics, or passive cache eviction. However, these strategies often lack intrinsic semantic awareness, potentially disrupting contextual coherence and blurring transient yet critical semantic transitions. To address these limitations, we propose CurveStream, a training-free, curvature-aware hierarchical visual memory management framework. Our approach is motivated by the key observation that high-curvature regions along continuous feature trajectories closely align with critical global semantic transitions. Based on this geometric insight, CurveStream evaluates real-time semantic intensity via a Curvature Score and integrates an online K-Sigma dynamic threshold to adaptively route frames into clear and fuzzy memory states under a strict token budget. Evaluations across diverse temporal scales confirm that this lightweight framework, CurveStream, consistently yields absolute performance gains of over 10% (e.g., 10.69% on StreamingBench and 13.58% on OVOBench) over respective baselines, establishing new state-of-the-art results for streaming video perception.The code will be released at https://github.com/streamingvideos/CurveStream.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 19 2

Brain-Streams: fMRI-to-Image Reconstruction with Multi-modal Guidance

Understanding how humans process visual information is one of the crucial steps for unraveling the underlying mechanism of brain activity. Recently, this curiosity has motivated the fMRI-to-image reconstruction task; given the fMRI data from visual stimuli, it aims to reconstruct the corresponding visual stimuli. Surprisingly, leveraging powerful generative models such as the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) has shown promising results in reconstructing complex visual stimuli such as high-resolution natural images from vision datasets. Despite the impressive structural fidelity of these reconstructions, they often lack details of small objects, ambiguous shapes, and semantic nuances. Consequently, the incorporation of additional semantic knowledge, beyond mere visuals, becomes imperative. In light of this, we exploit how modern LDMs effectively incorporate multi-modal guidance (text guidance, visual guidance, and image layout) for structurally and semantically plausible image generations. Specifically, inspired by the two-streams hypothesis suggesting that perceptual and semantic information are processed in different brain regions, our framework, Brain-Streams, maps fMRI signals from these brain regions to appropriate embeddings. That is, by extracting textual guidance from semantic information regions and visual guidance from perceptual information regions, Brain-Streams provides accurate multi-modal guidance to LDMs. We validate the reconstruction ability of Brain-Streams both quantitatively and qualitatively on a real fMRI dataset comprising natural image stimuli and fMRI data.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

Flow Equivariant World Models: Memory for Partially Observed Dynamic Environments

Embodied systems experience the world as 'a symphony of flows': a combination of many continuous streams of sensory input coupled to self-motion, interwoven with the dynamics of external objects. These streams obey smooth, time-parameterized symmetries, which combine through a precisely structured algebra; yet most neural network world models ignore this structure and instead repeatedly re-learn the same transformations from data. In this work, we introduce 'Flow Equivariant World Models', a framework in which both self-motion and external object motion are unified as one-parameter Lie group 'flows'. We leverage this unification to implement group equivariance with respect to these transformations, thereby providing a stable latent world representation over hundreds of timesteps. On both 2D and 3D partially observed video world modeling benchmarks, we demonstrate that Flow Equivariant World Models significantly outperform comparable state-of-the-art diffusion-based and memory-augmented world modeling architectures -- particularly when there are predictable world dynamics outside the agent's current field of view. We show that flow equivariance is particularly beneficial for long rollouts, generalizing far beyond the training horizon. By structuring world model representations with respect to internal and external motion, flow equivariance charts a scalable route to data efficient, symmetry-guided, embodied intelligence. Project link: https://flowequivariantworldmodels.github.io.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 3 2

NEVIS'22: A Stream of 100 Tasks Sampled from 30 Years of Computer Vision Research

A shared goal of several machine learning communities like continual learning, meta-learning and transfer learning, is to design algorithms and models that efficiently and robustly adapt to unseen tasks. An even more ambitious goal is to build models that never stop adapting, and that become increasingly more efficient through time by suitably transferring the accrued knowledge. Beyond the study of the actual learning algorithm and model architecture, there are several hurdles towards our quest to build such models, such as the choice of learning protocol, metric of success and data needed to validate research hypotheses. In this work, we introduce the Never-Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time, and it serves as an ideal test bed to assess how well models can adapt to new tasks, and do so better and more efficiently as time goes by. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and well understood supervised learning problems. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and an evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute.

  • 20 authors
·
Nov 15, 2022

STREAM: Spatio-TempoRal Evaluation and Analysis Metric for Video Generative Models

Image generative models have made significant progress in generating realistic and diverse images, supported by comprehensive guidance from various evaluation metrics. However, current video generative models struggle to generate even short video clips, with limited tools that provide insights for improvements. Current video evaluation metrics are simple adaptations of image metrics by switching the embeddings with video embedding networks, which may underestimate the unique characteristics of video. Our analysis reveals that the widely used Frechet Video Distance (FVD) has a stronger emphasis on the spatial aspect than the temporal naturalness of video and is inherently constrained by the input size of the embedding networks used, limiting it to 16 frames. Additionally, it demonstrates considerable instability and diverges from human evaluations. To address the limitations, we propose STREAM, a new video evaluation metric uniquely designed to independently evaluate spatial and temporal aspects. This feature allows comprehensive analysis and evaluation of video generative models from various perspectives, unconstrained by video length. We provide analytical and experimental evidence demonstrating that STREAM provides an effective evaluation tool for both visual and temporal quality of videos, offering insights into area of improvement for video generative models. To the best of our knowledge, STREAM is the first evaluation metric that can separately assess the temporal and spatial aspects of videos. Our code is available at https://github.com/pro2nit/STREAM.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 30, 2024

MotionStream: Real-Time Video Generation with Interactive Motion Controls

Current motion-conditioned video generation methods suffer from prohibitive latency (minutes per video) and non-causal processing that prevents real-time interaction. We present MotionStream, enabling sub-second latency with up to 29 FPS streaming generation on a single GPU. Our approach begins by augmenting a text-to-video model with motion control, which generates high-quality videos that adhere to the global text prompt and local motion guidance, but does not perform inference on the fly. As such, we distill this bidirectional teacher into a causal student through Self Forcing with Distribution Matching Distillation, enabling real-time streaming inference. Several key challenges arise when generating videos of long, potentially infinite time-horizons: (1) bridging the domain gap from training on finite length and extrapolating to infinite horizons, (2) sustaining high quality by preventing error accumulation, and (3) maintaining fast inference, without incurring growth in computational cost due to increasing context windows. A key to our approach is introducing carefully designed sliding-window causal attention, combined with attention sinks. By incorporating self-rollout with attention sinks and KV cache rolling during training, we properly simulate inference-time extrapolations with a fixed context window, enabling constant-speed generation of arbitrarily long videos. Our models achieve state-of-the-art results in motion following and video quality while being two orders of magnitude faster, uniquely enabling infinite-length streaming. With MotionStream, users can paint trajectories, control cameras, or transfer motion, and see results unfold in real-time, delivering a truly interactive experience.

adobe Adobe
·
Nov 3, 2025 7

Explainable Semantic Space by Grounding Language to Vision with Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning

In natural language processing, most models try to learn semantic representations merely from texts. The learned representations encode the distributional semantics but fail to connect to any knowledge about the physical world. In contrast, humans learn language by grounding concepts in perception and action and the brain encodes grounded semantics for cognition. Inspired by this notion and recent work in vision-language learning, we design a two-stream model for grounding language learning in vision. The model includes a VGG-based visual stream and a Bert-based language stream. The two streams merge into a joint representational space. Through cross-modal contrastive learning, the model first learns to align visual and language representations with the MS COCO dataset. The model further learns to retrieve visual objects with language queries through a cross-modal attention module and to infer the visual relations between the retrieved objects through a bilinear operator with the Visual Genome dataset. After training, the language stream of this model is a stand-alone language model capable of embedding concepts in a visually grounded semantic space. This semantic space manifests principal dimensions explainable with human intuition and neurobiological knowledge. Word embeddings in this semantic space are predictive of human-defined norms of semantic features and are segregated into perceptually distinctive clusters. Furthermore, the visually grounded language model also enables compositional language understanding based on visual knowledge and multimodal image search with queries based on images, texts, or their combinations.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 13, 2021

OmniStream: Mastering Perception, Reconstruction and Action in Continuous Streams

Modern visual agents require representations that are general, causal, and physically structured to operate in real-time streaming environments. However, current vision foundation models remain fragmented, specializing narrowly in image semantic perception, offline temporal modeling, or spatial geometry. This paper introduces OmniStream, a unified streaming visual backbone that effectively perceives, reconstructs, and acts from diverse visual inputs. By incorporating causal spatiotemporal attention and 3D rotary positional embeddings (3D-RoPE), our model supports efficient, frame-by-frame online processing of video streams via a persistent KV-cache. We pre-train OmniStream using a synergistic multi-task framework coupling static and temporal representation learning, streaming geometric reconstruction, and vision-language alignment on 29 datasets. Extensive evaluations show that, even with a strictly frozen backbone, OmniStream achieves consistently competitive performance with specialized experts across image and video probing, streaming geometric reconstruction, complex video and spatial reasoning, as well as robotic manipulation (unseen at training). Rather than pursuing benchmark-specific dominance, our work demonstrates the viability of training a single, versatile vision backbone that generalizes across semantic, spatial, and temporal reasoning, i.e., a more meaningful step toward general-purpose visual understanding for interactive and embodied agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12 2

Improving Video Generation with Human Feedback

Video generation has achieved significant advances through rectified flow techniques, but issues like unsmooth motion and misalignment between videos and prompts persist. In this work, we develop a systematic pipeline that harnesses human feedback to mitigate these problems and refine the video generation model. Specifically, we begin by constructing a large-scale human preference dataset focused on modern video generation models, incorporating pairwise annotations across multi-dimensions. We then introduce VideoReward, a multi-dimensional video reward model, and examine how annotations and various design choices impact its rewarding efficacy. From a unified reinforcement learning perspective aimed at maximizing reward with KL regularization, we introduce three alignment algorithms for flow-based models by extending those from diffusion models. These include two training-time strategies: direct preference optimization for flow (Flow-DPO) and reward weighted regression for flow (Flow-RWR), and an inference-time technique, Flow-NRG, which applies reward guidance directly to noisy videos. Experimental results indicate that VideoReward significantly outperforms existing reward models, and Flow-DPO demonstrates superior performance compared to both Flow-RWR and standard supervised fine-tuning methods. Additionally, Flow-NRG lets users assign custom weights to multiple objectives during inference, meeting personalized video quality needs. Project page: https://gongyeliu.github.io/videoalign.

  • 18 authors
·
Jan 23, 2025 5

DTVNet+: A High-Resolution Scenic Dataset for Dynamic Time-lapse Video Generation

This paper presents a novel end-to-end dynamic time-lapse video generation framework, named DTVNet, to generate diversified time-lapse videos from a single landscape image conditioned on normalized motion vectors. The proposed DTVNet consists of two submodules: Optical Flow Encoder (OFE) and Dynamic Video Generator (DVG). The OFE maps a sequence of optical flow maps to a normalized motion vector that encodes the motion information of the generated video. The DVG contains motion and content streams to learn from the motion vector and the single landscape image. Besides, it contains an encoder to learn shared content features and a decoder to construct video frames with corresponding motion. Specifically, the motion stream introduces multiple adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN) layers to integrate multi-level motion information for controlling the object motion. In the testing stage, videos with the same content but various motion information can be generated by different normalized motion vectors based on only one input image. Also, we propose a high-resolution scenic time-lapse video dataset, named Quick-Sky-Time, to evaluate different approaches, which can be viewed as a new benchmark for high-quality scenic image and video generation tasks. We further conduct experiments on Sky Time-lapse, Beach, and Quick-Sky-Time datasets. The results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods for generating high-quality and various dynamic videos.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 11, 2020

Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams

Benefiting from the advancements in large language models and cross-modal alignment, existing multi-modal video understanding methods have achieved prominent performance in offline scenario. However, online video streams, as one of the most common media forms in the real world, have seldom received attention. Compared to offline videos, the 'dynamic' nature of online video streams poses challenges for the direct application of existing models and introduces new problems, such as the storage of extremely long-term information, interaction between continuous visual content and 'asynchronous' user questions. Therefore, in this paper we present Flash-VStream, a video-language model that simulates the memory mechanism of human. Our model is able to process extremely long video streams in real-time and respond to user queries simultaneously. Compared to existing models, Flash-VStream achieves significant reductions in inference latency and VRAM consumption, which is intimately related to performing understanding of online streaming video. In addition, given that existing video understanding benchmarks predominantly concentrate on offline scenario, we propose VStream-QA, a novel question answering benchmark specifically designed for online video streaming understanding. Comparisons with popular existing methods on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method for such challenging setting. To verify the generalizability of our approach, we further evaluate it on existing video understanding benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline scenarios as well. All code, models, and datasets are available at the https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 12, 2024 3

Anchor Forcing: Anchor Memory and Tri-Region RoPE for Interactive Streaming Video Diffusion

Interactive long video generation requires prompt switching to introduce new subjects or events, while maintaining perceptual fidelity and coherent motion over extended horizons. Recent distilled streaming video diffusion models reuse a rolling KV cache for long-range generation, enabling prompt-switch interaction through re-cache at each switch. However, existing streaming methods still exhibit progressive quality degradation and weakened motion dynamics. We identify two failure modes specific to interactive streaming generation: (i) at each prompt switch, current cache maintenance cannot simultaneously retain KV-based semantic context and recent latent cues, resulting in weak boundary conditioning and reduced perceptual quality; and (ii) during distillation, unbounded time indexing induces a positional distribution shift from the pretrained backbone's bounded RoPE regime, weakening pretrained motion priors and long-horizon motion retention. To address these issues, we propose Anchor Forcing, a cache-centric framework with two designs. First, an anchor-guided re-cache mechanism stores KV states in anchor caches and warm-starts re-cache from these anchors at each prompt switch, reducing post-switch evidence loss and stabilizing perceptual quality. Second, a tri-region RoPE with region-specific reference origins, together with RoPE re-alignment distillation, reconciles unbounded streaming indices with the pretrained RoPE regime to better retain motion priors. Experiments on long videos show that our method improves perceptual quality and motion metrics over prior streaming baselines in interactive settings. Project page: https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/Anchor-Forcing

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 12

Residual Stream Duality in Modern Transformer Architectures

Recent work has made clear that the residual pathway is not mere optimization plumbing; it is part of the model's representational machinery. We agree, but argue that the cleanest way to organize this design space is through a two-axis view of the Transformer. A decoder evolves information along two ordered dimensions: sequence position and layer depth. Self-attention already provides adaptive mixing along the sequence axis, whereas the residual stream usually performs fixed addition along the depth axis. If we fix a token position and treat layer index as the ordered variable, then a causal depth-wise residual attention read is exactly the same local operator as causal short sliding-window attention (ShortSWA), except written over depth rather than over sequence. This is the core residual stream duality behind Transformer^2. This perspective also clarifies the recent literature. ELC-BERT and DenseFormer already show that learned aggregation over depth can outperform uniform residual accumulation, while Vertical Attention, DeepCrossAttention (DCA), MUDDFormer, and Attention Residuals move further toward explicit attention-based routing over earlier layers. The key point, however, is that operator-level duality does not imply systems-level symmetry. For large-scale autoregressive models, sequence-axis ShortSWA is usually the more hardware-friendly placement because it reuses token-side sliding-window kernels, KV-cache layouts, and chunked execution. If the goal is instead to change the shortcut itself, Deep Delta Learning (DDL) is the cleaner intervention because it modifies the residual operator directly rather than adding a separate cross-layer retrieval path. Our recommendation is therefore simple: use DDL when the shortcut is the object of interest, and use sequence-axis ShortSWA when the goal is local adaptive mixing.

math-ai math-ai
·
Mar 16 2

StreamingVLM: Real-Time Understanding for Infinite Video Streams

Vision-language models (VLMs) could power real-time assistants and autonomous agents, but they face a critical challenge: understanding near-infinite video streams without escalating latency and memory usage. Processing entire videos with full attention leads to quadratic computational costs and poor performance on long videos. Meanwhile, simple sliding window methods are also flawed, as they either break coherence or suffer from high latency due to redundant recomputation. In this paper, we introduce StreamingVLM, a model designed for real-time, stable understanding of infinite visual input. Our approach is a unified framework that aligns training with streaming inference. During inference, we maintain a compact KV cache by reusing states of attention sinks, a short window of recent vision tokens, and a long window of recent text tokens. This streaming ability is instilled via a simple supervised fine-tuning (SFT) strategy that applies full attention on short, overlapped video chunks, which effectively mimics the inference-time attention pattern without training on prohibitively long contexts. For evaluation, we build Inf-Streams-Eval, a new benchmark with videos averaging over two hours that requires dense, per-second alignment between frames and text. On Inf-Streams-Eval, StreamingVLM achieves a 66.18% win rate against GPT-4O mini and maintains stable, real-time performance at up to 8 FPS on a single NVIDIA H100. Notably, our SFT strategy also enhances general VQA abilities without any VQA-specific fine-tuning, improving performance on LongVideoBench by +4.30 and OVOBench Realtime by +5.96. Code is available at https://github.com/mit-han-lab/streaming-vlm.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025 3

Category-Aware 3D Object Composition with Disentangled Texture and Shape Multi-view Diffusion

In this paper, we tackle a new task of 3D object synthesis, where a 3D model is composited with another object category to create a novel 3D model. However, most existing text/image/3D-to-3D methods struggle to effectively integrate multiple content sources, often resulting in inconsistent textures and inaccurate shapes. To overcome these challenges, we propose a straightforward yet powerful approach, category+3D-to-3D (C33D), for generating novel and structurally coherent 3D models. Our method begins by rendering multi-view images and normal maps from the input 3D model, then generating a novel 2D object using adaptive text-image harmony (ATIH) with the front-view image and a text description from another object category as inputs. To ensure texture consistency, we introduce texture multi-view diffusion, which refines the textures of the remaining multi-view RGB images based on the novel 2D object. For enhanced shape accuracy, we propose shape multi-view diffusion to improve the 2D shapes of both the multi-view RGB images and the normal maps, also conditioned on the novel 2D object. Finally, these outputs are used to reconstruct a complete and novel 3D model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, yielding impressive 3D creations, such as shark(3D)-crocodile(text) in the first row of Fig. 1. A project page is available at: https://xzr52.github.io/C33D/

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 2, 2025

Compositional Video Generation as Flow Equalization

Large-scale Text-to-Video (T2V) diffusion models have recently demonstrated unprecedented capability to transform natural language descriptions into stunning and photorealistic videos. Despite the promising results, a significant challenge remains: these models struggle to fully grasp complex compositional interactions between multiple concepts and actions. This issue arises when some words dominantly influence the final video, overshadowing other concepts.To tackle this problem, we introduce Vico, a generic framework for compositional video generation that explicitly ensures all concepts are represented properly. At its core, Vico analyzes how input tokens influence the generated video, and adjusts the model to prevent any single concept from dominating. Specifically, Vico extracts attention weights from all layers to build a spatial-temporal attention graph, and then estimates the influence as the max-flow from the source text token to the video target token. Although the direct computation of attention flow in diffusion models is typically infeasible, we devise an efficient approximation based on subgraph flows and employ a fast and vectorized implementation, which in turn makes the flow computation manageable and differentiable. By updating the noisy latent to balance these flows, Vico captures complex interactions and consequently produces videos that closely adhere to textual descriptions. We apply our method to multiple diffusion-based video models for compositional T2V and video editing. Empirical results demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the compositional richness and accuracy of the generated videos. Visit our website at~https://adamdad.github.io/vico/{https://adamdad.github.io/vico/}.

  • 2 authors
·
Jun 10, 2024 1

DAMO-StreamNet: Optimizing Streaming Perception in Autonomous Driving

Real-time perception, or streaming perception, is a crucial aspect of autonomous driving that has yet to be thoroughly explored in existing research. To address this gap, we present DAMO-StreamNet, an optimized framework that combines recent advances from the YOLO series with a comprehensive analysis of spatial and temporal perception mechanisms, delivering a cutting-edge solution. The key innovations of DAMO-StreamNet are (1) A robust neck structure incorporating deformable convolution, enhancing the receptive field and feature alignment capabilities (2) A dual-branch structure that integrates short-path semantic features and long-path temporal features, improving motion state prediction accuracy. (3) Logits-level distillation for efficient optimization, aligning the logits of teacher and student networks in semantic space. (4) A real-time forecasting mechanism that updates support frame features with the current frame, ensuring seamless streaming perception during inference. Our experiments demonstrate that DAMO-StreamNet surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving 37.8% (normal size (600, 960)) and 43.3% (large size (1200, 1920)) sAP without using extra data. This work not only sets a new benchmark for real-time perception but also provides valuable insights for future research. Additionally, DAMO-StreamNet can be applied to various autonomous systems, such as drones and robots, paving the way for real-time perception. The code is at https://github.com/zhiqic/DAMO-StreamNet.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 30, 2023

StreamingClaw Technical Report

Applications such as embodied intelligence rely on a real-time perception-decision-action closed loop, posing stringent challenges for streaming video understanding. However, current agents suffer from fragmented capabilities, such as supporting only offline video understanding, lacking long-term multimodal memory mechanisms, or struggling to achieve real-time reasoning and proactive interaction under streaming inputs. These shortcomings have become a key bottleneck for preventing them from sustaining perception, making real-time decisions, and executing actions in real-world environments. To alleviate these issues, we propose StreamingClaw, a unified agent framework for streaming video understanding and embodied intelligence. It is also an OpenClaw-compatible framework that supports real-time, multimodal streaming interaction. StreamingClaw integrates five core capabilities: (1) It supports real-time streaming reasoning. (2) It supports reasoning about future events and proactive interaction under the online evolution of interaction objectives. (3) It supports multimodal long-term storage, hierarchical evolution, and efficient retrieval of shared memory across multiple agents. (4) It supports a closed-loop of perception-decision-action. In addition to conventional tools and skills, it also provides streaming tools and action-centric skills tailored for real-world physical environments. (5) It is compatible with the OpenClaw framework, allowing it to fully leverage the resources and support of the open-source community. With these designs, StreamingClaw integrates online real-time reasoning, multimodal long-term memory, and proactive interaction within a unified framework. Moreover, by translating decisions into executable actions, it enables direct control of the physical world, supporting practical deployment of embodied interaction.

Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 31, 2024

StreamDiffusion: A Pipeline-level Solution for Real-time Interactive Generation

We introduce StreamDiffusion, a real-time diffusion pipeline designed for interactive image generation. Existing diffusion models are adept at creating images from text or image prompts, yet they often fall short in real-time interaction. This limitation becomes particularly evident in scenarios involving continuous input, such as Metaverse, live video streaming, and broadcasting, where high throughput is imperative. To address this, we present a novel approach that transforms the original sequential denoising into the batching denoising process. Stream Batch eliminates the conventional wait-and-interact approach and enables fluid and high throughput streams. To handle the frequency disparity between data input and model throughput, we design a novel input-output queue for parallelizing the streaming process. Moreover, the existing diffusion pipeline uses classifier-free guidance(CFG), which requires additional U-Net computation. To mitigate the redundant computations, we propose a novel residual classifier-free guidance (RCFG) algorithm that reduces the number of negative conditional denoising steps to only one or even zero. Besides, we introduce a stochastic similarity filter(SSF) to optimize power consumption. Our Stream Batch achieves around 1.5x speedup compared to the sequential denoising method at different denoising levels. The proposed RCFG leads to speeds up to 2.05x higher than the conventional CFG. Combining the proposed strategies and existing mature acceleration tools makes the image-to-image generation achieve up-to 91.07fps on one RTX4090, improving the throughputs of AutoPipline developed by Diffusers over 59.56x. Furthermore, our proposed StreamDiffusion also significantly reduces the energy consumption by 2.39x on one RTX3060 and 1.99x on one RTX4090, respectively.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 19, 2023 5

Speed by Simplicity: A Single-Stream Architecture for Fast Audio-Video Generative Foundation Model

We present daVinci-MagiHuman, an open-source audio-video generative foundation model for human-centric generation. daVinci-MagiHuman jointly generates synchronized video and audio using a single-stream Transformer that processes text, video, and audio within a unified token sequence via self-attention only. This single-stream design avoids the complexity of multi-stream or cross-attention architectures while remaining easy to optimize with standard training and inference infrastructure. The model is particularly strong in human-centric scenarios, producing expressive facial performance, natural speech-expression coordination, realistic body motion, and precise audio-video synchronization. It supports multilingual spoken generation across Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese), English, Japanese, Korean, German, and French. For efficient inference, we combine the single-stream backbone with model distillation, latent-space super-resolution, and a Turbo VAE decoder, enabling generation of a 5-second 256p video in 2 seconds on a single H100 GPU. In automatic evaluation, daVinci-MagiHuman achieves the highest visual quality and text alignment among leading open models, along with the lowest word error rate (14.60%) for speech intelligibility. In pairwise human evaluation, it achieves win rates of 80.0% against Ovi 1.1 and 60.9% against LTX 2.3 over 2000 comparisons. We open-source the complete model stack, including the base model, the distilled model, the super-resolution model, and the inference codebase.

  • 45 authors
·
Mar 23 6

Think While Watching: Online Streaming Segment-Level Memory for Multi-Turn Video Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance on offline video understanding, but most are limited to offline inference or have weak online reasoning, making multi-turn interaction over continuously arriving video streams difficult. Existing streaming methods typically use an interleaved perception-generation paradigm, which prevents concurrent perception and generation and leads to early memory decay as streams grow, hurting long-range dependency modeling. We propose Think While Watching, a memory-anchored streaming video reasoning framework that preserves continuous segment-level memory during multi-turn interaction. We build a three-stage, multi-round chain-of-thought dataset and adopt a stage-matched training strategy, while enforcing strict causality through a segment-level streaming causal mask and streaming positional encoding. During inference, we introduce an efficient pipeline that overlaps watching and thinking and adaptively selects the best attention backend. Under both single-round and multi-round streaming input protocols, our method achieves strong results. Built on Qwen3-VL, it improves single-round accuracy by 2.6% on StreamingBench and by 3.79% on OVO-Bench. In the multi-round setting, it maintains performance while reducing output tokens by 56%. Code is available at: https://github.com/wl666hhh/Think_While_Watching/

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 12 2

ChAda-ViT : Channel Adaptive Attention for Joint Representation Learning of Heterogeneous Microscopy Images

Unlike color photography images, which are consistently encoded into RGB channels, biological images encompass various modalities, where the type of microscopy and the meaning of each channel varies with each experiment. Importantly, the number of channels can range from one to a dozen and their correlation is often comparatively much lower than RGB, as each of them brings specific information content. This aspect is largely overlooked by methods designed out of the bioimage field, and current solutions mostly focus on intra-channel spatial attention, often ignoring the relationship between channels, yet crucial in most biological applications. Importantly, the variable channel type and count prevent the projection of several experiments to a unified representation for large scale pre-training. In this study, we propose ChAda-ViT, a novel Channel Adaptive Vision Transformer architecture employing an Inter-Channel Attention mechanism on images with an arbitrary number, order and type of channels. We also introduce IDRCell100k, a bioimage dataset with a rich set of 79 experiments covering 7 microscope modalities, with a multitude of channel types, and channel counts varying from 1 to 10 per experiment. Our proposed architecture, trained in a self-supervised manner, outperforms existing approaches in several biologically relevant downstream tasks. Additionally, it can be used to bridge the gap for the first time between assays with different microscopes, channel numbers or types by embedding various image and experimental modalities into a unified biological image representation. The latter should facilitate interdisciplinary studies and pave the way for better adoption of deep learning in biological image-based analyses. Code and Data to be released soon.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 26, 2023

Infinity-RoPE: Action-Controllable Infinite Video Generation Emerges From Autoregressive Self-Rollout

Current autoregressive video diffusion models are constrained by three core bottlenecks: (i) the finite temporal horizon imposed by the base model's 3D Rotary Positional Embedding (3D-RoPE), (ii) slow prompt responsiveness in maintaining fine-grained action control during long-form rollouts, and (iii) the inability to realize discontinuous cinematic transitions within a single generation stream. We introduce infty-RoPE, a unified inference-time framework that addresses all three limitations through three interconnected components: Block-Relativistic RoPE, KV Flush, and RoPE Cut. Block-Relativistic RoPE reformulates temporal encoding as a moving local reference frame, where each newly generated latent block is rotated relative to the base model's maximum frame horizon while earlier blocks are rotated backward to preserve relative temporal geometry. This relativistic formulation eliminates fixed temporal positions, enabling continuous video generation far beyond the base positional limits. To obtain fine-grained action control without re-encoding, KV Flush renews the KV cache by retaining only two latent frames, the global sink and the last generated latent frame, thereby ensuring immediate prompt responsiveness. Finally, RoPE Cut introduces controlled discontinuities in temporal RoPE coordinates, enabling multi-cut scene transitions within a single continuous rollout. Together, these components establish infty-RoPE as a training-free foundation for infinite-horizon, controllable, and cinematic video diffusion. Comprehensive experiments show that infty-RoPE consistently surpasses previous autoregressive models in overall VBench scores.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25, 2025 2

StreamDiffusionV2: A Streaming System for Dynamic and Interactive Video Generation

Generative models are reshaping the live-streaming industry by redefining how content is created, styled, and delivered. Previous image-based streaming diffusion models have powered efficient and creative live streaming products but have hit limits on temporal consistency due to the foundation of image-based designs. Recent advances in video diffusion have markedly improved temporal consistency and sampling efficiency for offline generation. However, offline generation systems primarily optimize throughput by batching large workloads. In contrast, live online streaming operates under strict service-level objectives (SLOs): time-to-first-frame must be minimal, and every frame must meet a per-frame deadline with low jitter. Besides, scalable multi-GPU serving for real-time streams remains largely unresolved so far. To address this, we present StreamDiffusionV2, a training-free pipeline for interactive live streaming with video diffusion models. StreamDiffusionV2 integrates an SLO-aware batching scheduler and a block scheduler, together with a sink-token--guided rolling KV cache, a motion-aware noise controller, and other system-level optimizations. Moreover, we introduce a scalable pipeline orchestration that parallelizes the diffusion process across denoising steps and network layers, achieving near-linear FPS scaling without violating latency guarantees. The system scales seamlessly across heterogeneous GPU environments and supports flexible denoising steps (e.g., 1--4), enabling both ultra-low-latency and higher-quality modes. Without TensorRT or quantization, StreamDiffusionV2 renders the first frame within 0.5s and attains 58.28 FPS with a 14B-parameter model and 64.52 FPS with a 1.3B-parameter model on four H100 GPUs, making state-of-the-art generative live streaming practical and accessible--from individual creators to enterprise-scale platforms.

  • 14 authors
·
Nov 10, 2025

StreamingT2V: Consistent, Dynamic, and Extendable Long Video Generation from Text

Text-to-video diffusion models enable the generation of high-quality videos that follow text instructions, making it easy to create diverse and individual content. However, existing approaches mostly focus on high-quality short video generation (typically 16 or 24 frames), ending up with hard-cuts when naively extended to the case of long video synthesis. To overcome these limitations, we introduce StreamingT2V, an autoregressive approach for long video generation of 80, 240, 600, 1200 or more frames with smooth transitions. The key components are:(i) a short-term memory block called conditional attention module (CAM), which conditions the current generation on the features extracted from the previous chunk via an attentional mechanism, leading to consistent chunk transitions, (ii) a long-term memory block called appearance preservation module, which extracts high-level scene and object features from the first video chunk to prevent the model from forgetting the initial scene, and (iii) a randomized blending approach that enables to apply a video enhancer autoregressively for infinitely long videos without inconsistencies between chunks. Experiments show that StreamingT2V generates high motion amount. In contrast, all competing image-to-video methods are prone to video stagnation when applied naively in an autoregressive manner. Thus, we propose with StreamingT2V a high-quality seamless text-to-long video generator that outperforms competitors with consistency and motion. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Picsart-AI-Research/StreamingT2V

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 21, 2024 2

FiVE: A Fine-grained Video Editing Benchmark for Evaluating Emerging Diffusion and Rectified Flow Models

Numerous text-to-video (T2V) editing methods have emerged recently, but the lack of a standardized benchmark for fair evaluation has led to inconsistent claims and an inability to assess model sensitivity to hyperparameters. Fine-grained video editing is crucial for enabling precise, object-level modifications while maintaining context and temporal consistency. To address this, we introduce FiVE, a Fine-grained Video Editing Benchmark for evaluating emerging diffusion and rectified flow models. Our benchmark includes 74 real-world videos and 26 generated videos, featuring 6 fine-grained editing types, 420 object-level editing prompt pairs, and their corresponding masks. Additionally, we adapt the latest rectified flow (RF) T2V generation models, Pyramid-Flow and Wan2.1, by introducing FlowEdit, resulting in training-free and inversion-free video editing models Pyramid-Edit and Wan-Edit. We evaluate five diffusion-based and two RF-based editing methods on our FiVE benchmark using 15 metrics, covering background preservation, text-video similarity, temporal consistency, video quality, and runtime. To further enhance object-level evaluation, we introduce FiVE-Acc, a novel metric leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to assess the success of fine-grained video editing. Experimental results demonstrate that RF-based editing significantly outperforms diffusion-based methods, with Wan-Edit achieving the best overall performance and exhibiting the least sensitivity to hyperparameters. More video demo available on the anonymous website: https://sites.google.com/view/five-benchmark

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 17, 2025

STARFlow-V: End-to-End Video Generative Modeling with Normalizing Flow

Normalizing flows (NFs) are end-to-end likelihood-based generative models for continuous data, and have recently regained attention with encouraging progress on image generation. Yet in the video generation domain, where spatiotemporal complexity and computational cost are substantially higher, state-of-the-art systems almost exclusively rely on diffusion-based models. In this work, we revisit this design space by presenting STARFlow-V, a normalizing flow-based video generator with substantial benefits such as end-to-end learning, robust causal prediction, and native likelihood estimation. Building upon the recently proposed STARFlow, STARFlow-V operates in the spatiotemporal latent space with a global-local architecture which restricts causal dependencies to a global latent space while preserving rich local within-frame interactions. This eases error accumulation over time, a common pitfall of standard autoregressive diffusion model generation. Additionally, we propose flow-score matching, which equips the model with a light-weight causal denoiser to improve the video generation consistency in an autoregressive fashion. To improve the sampling efficiency, STARFlow-V employs a video-aware Jacobi iteration scheme that recasts inner updates as parallelizable iterations without breaking causality. Thanks to the invertible structure, the same model can natively support text-to-video, image-to-video as well as video-to-video generation tasks. Empirically, STARFlow-V achieves strong visual fidelity and temporal consistency with practical sampling throughput relative to diffusion-based baselines. These results present the first evidence, to our knowledge, that NFs are capable of high-quality autoregressive video generation, establishing them as a promising research direction for building world models. Code and generated samples are available at https://github.com/apple/ml-starflow.

apple Apple
·
Nov 25, 2025 2

InfiniteVGGT: Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer for Endless Streams

The grand vision of enabling persistent, large-scale 3D visual geometry understanding is shackled by the irreconcilable demands of scalability and long-term stability. While offline models like VGGT achieve inspiring geometry capability, their batch-based nature renders them irrelevant for live systems. Streaming architectures, though the intended solution for live operation, have proven inadequate. Existing methods either fail to support truly infinite-horizon inputs or suffer from catastrophic drift over long sequences. We shatter this long-standing dilemma with InfiniteVGGT, a causal visual geometry transformer that operationalizes the concept of a rolling memory through a bounded yet adaptive and perpetually expressive KV cache. Capitalizing on this, we devise a training-free, attention-agnostic pruning strategy that intelligently discards obsolete information, effectively ``rolling'' the memory forward with each new frame. Fully compatible with FlashAttention, InfiniteVGGT finally alleviates the compromise, enabling infinite-horizon streaming while outperforming existing streaming methods in long-term stability. The ultimate test for such a system is its performance over a truly infinite horizon, a capability that has been impossible to rigorously validate due to the lack of extremely long-term, continuous benchmarks. To address this critical gap, we introduce the Long3D benchmark, which, for the first time, enables a rigorous evaluation of continuous 3D geometry estimation on sequences about 10,000 frames. This provides the definitive evaluation platform for future research in long-term 3D geometry understanding. Code is available at: https://github.com/AutoLab-SAI-SJTU/InfiniteVGGT

AutoLab-SJTU AutoLab
·
Jan 5 3

MMFace-DiT: A Dual-Stream Diffusion Transformer for High-Fidelity Multimodal Face Generation

Recent multimodal face generation models address the spatial control limitations of text-to-image diffusion models by augmenting text-based conditioning with spatial priors such as segmentation masks, sketches, or edge maps. This multimodal fusion enables controllable synthesis aligned with both high-level semantic intent and low-level structural layout. However, most existing approaches typically extend pre-trained text-to-image pipelines by appending auxiliary control modules or stitching together separate uni-modal networks. These ad hoc designs inherit architectural constraints, duplicate parameters, and often fail under conflicting modalities or mismatched latent spaces, limiting their ability to perform synergistic fusion across semantic and spatial domains. We introduce MMFace-DiT, a unified dual-stream diffusion transformer engineered for synergistic multimodal face synthesis. Its core novelty lies in a dual-stream transformer block that processes spatial (mask/sketch) and semantic (text) tokens in parallel, deeply fusing them through a shared Rotary Position-Embedded (RoPE) Attention mechanism. This design prevents modal dominance and ensures strong adherence to both text and structural priors to achieve unprecedented spatial-semantic consistency for controllable face generation. Furthermore, a novel Modality Embedder enables a single cohesive model to dynamically adapt to varying spatial conditions without retraining. MMFace-DiT achieves a 40% improvement in visual fidelity and prompt alignment over six state-of-the-art multimodal face generation models, establishing a flexible new paradigm for end-to-end controllable generative modeling. The code and dataset are available on our project page: https://vcbsl.github.io/MMFace-DiT/

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 30 2

VideoLLM-online: Online Video Large Language Model for Streaming Video

Recent Large Language Models have been enhanced with vision capabilities, enabling them to comprehend images, videos, and interleaved vision-language content. However, the learning methods of these large multimodal models typically treat videos as predetermined clips, making them less effective and efficient at handling streaming video inputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning-In-Video-Stream (LIVE) framework, which enables temporally aligned, long-context, and real-time conversation within a continuous video stream. Our LIVE framework comprises comprehensive approaches to achieve video streaming dialogue, encompassing: (1) a training objective designed to perform language modeling for continuous streaming inputs, (2) a data generation scheme that converts offline temporal annotations into a streaming dialogue format, and (3) an optimized inference pipeline to speed up the model responses in real-world video streams. With our LIVE framework, we built VideoLLM-online model upon Llama-2/Llama-3 and demonstrate its significant advantages in processing streaming videos. For instance, on average, our model can support streaming dialogue in a 5-minute video clip at over 10 FPS on an A100 GPU. Moreover, it also showcases state-of-the-art performance on public offline video benchmarks, such as recognition, captioning, and forecasting. The code, model, data, and demo have been made available at https://showlab.github.io/videollm-online.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 17, 2024 1

BehaviorVLM: Unified Finetuning-Free Behavioral Understanding with Vision-Language Reasoning

Understanding freely moving animal behavior is central to neuroscience, where pose estimation and behavioral understanding form the foundation for linking neural activity to natural actions. Yet both tasks still depend heavily on human annotation or unstable unsupervised pipelines, limiting scalability and reproducibility. We present BehaviorVLM, a unified vision-language framework for pose estimation and behavioral understanding that requires no task-specific finetuning and minimal human labeling by guiding pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) through detailed, explicit, and verifiable reasoning steps. For pose estimation, we leverage quantum-dot-grounded behavioral data and propose a multi-stage pipeline that integrates temporal, spatial, and cross-view reasoning. This design greatly reduces human annotation effort, exposes low-confidence labels through geometric checks such as reprojection error, and produces labels that can later be filtered, corrected, or used to fine-tune downstream pose models. For behavioral understanding, we propose a pipeline that integrates deep embedded clustering for over-segmented behavior discovery, VLM-based per-clip video captioning, and LLM-based reasoning to merge and semantically label behavioral segments. The behavioral pipeline can operate directly from visual information and does not require keypoints to segment behavior. Together, these components enable scalable, interpretable, and label-light analysis of multi-animal behavior.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 12

On the Existence and Behaviour of Secondary Attention Sinks

Attention sinks are tokens, often the beginning-of-sequence (BOS) token, that receive disproportionately high attention despite limited semantic relevance. In this work, we identify a class of attention sinks, which we term secondary sinks, that differ fundamentally from the sinks studied in prior works, which we term primary sinks. While prior works have identified that tokens other than BOS can sometimes become sinks, they were found to exhibit properties analogous to the BOS token. Specifically, they emerge at the same layer, persist throughout the network and draw a large amount of attention mass. Whereas, we find the existence of secondary sinks that arise primarily in middle layers and can persist for a variable number of layers, and draw a smaller, but still significant, amount of attention mass. Through extensive experiments across 11 model families, we analyze where these secondary sinks appear, their properties, how they are formed, and their impact on the attention mechanism. Specifically, we show that: (1) these sinks are formed by specific middle-layer MLP modules; these MLPs map token representations to vectors that align with the direction of the primary sink of that layer. (2) The ell_2-norm of these vectors determines the sink score of the secondary sink, and also the number of layers it lasts for, thereby leading to different impacts on the attention mechanisms accordingly. (3) The primary sink weakens in middle layers, coinciding with the emergence of secondary sinks. We observe that in larger-scale models, the location and lifetime of the sinks, together referred to as sink levels, appear in a more deterministic and frequent manner. Specifically, we identify three sink levels in QwQ-32B and six levels in Qwen3-14B.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 22, 2025

Amber-Image: Efficient Compression of Large-Scale Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have significantly advanced Text-to-Image (T2I) generation but suffer from prohibitive computational costs and deployment barriers. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient compression framework that transforms the 60-layer dual-stream MMDiT-based Qwen-Image into lightweight models without training from scratch. Leveraging this framework, we introduce Amber-Image, a series of streamlined T2I models. We first derive Amber-Image-10B using a timestep-sensitive depth pruning strategy, where retained layers are reinitialized via local weight averaging and optimized through layer-wise distillation and full-parameter fine-tuning. Building on this, we develop Amber-Image-6B by introducing a hybrid-stream architecture that converts deep-layer dual streams into a single stream initialized from the image branch, further refined via progressive distillation and lightweight fine-tuning. Our approach reduces parameters by 70% and eliminates the need for large-scale data engineering. Notably, the entire compression and training pipeline-from the 10B to the 6B variant-requires fewer than 2,000 GPU hours, demonstrating exceptional cost-efficiency compared to training from scratch. Extensive evaluations on benchmarks like DPG-Bench and LongText-Bench show that Amber-Image achieves high-fidelity synthesis and superior text rendering, matching much larger models.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 18

Machine Learning Modeling for Multi-order Human Visual Motion Processing

Our research aims to develop machines that learn to perceive visual motion as do humans. While recent advances in computer vision (CV) have enabled DNN-based models to accurately estimate optical flow in naturalistic images, a significant disparity remains between CV models and the biological visual system in both architecture and behavior. This disparity includes humans' ability to perceive the motion of higher-order image features (second-order motion), which many CV models fail to capture because of their reliance on the intensity conservation law. Our model architecture mimics the cortical V1-MT motion processing pathway, utilizing a trainable motion energy sensor bank and a recurrent graph network. Supervised learning employing diverse naturalistic videos allows the model to replicate psychophysical and physiological findings about first-order (luminance-based) motion perception. For second-order motion, inspired by neuroscientific findings, the model includes an additional sensing pathway with nonlinear preprocessing before motion energy sensing, implemented using a simple multilayer 3D CNN block. When exploring how the brain acquired the ability to perceive second-order motion in natural environments, in which pure second-order signals are rare, we hypothesized that second-order mechanisms were critical when estimating robust object motion amidst optical fluctuations, such as highlights on glossy surfaces. We trained our dual-pathway model on novel motion datasets with varying material properties of moving objects. We found that training to estimate object motion from non-Lambertian materials naturally endowed the model with the capacity to perceive second-order motion, as can humans. The resulting model effectively aligns with biological systems while generalizing to both first- and second-order motion phenomena in natural scenes.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

Neural Circuit Architectural Priors for Embodied Control

Artificial neural networks for motor control usually adopt generic architectures like fully connected MLPs. While general, these tabula rasa architectures rely on large amounts of experience to learn, are not easily transferable to new bodies, and have internal dynamics that are difficult to interpret. In nature, animals are born with highly structured connectivity in their nervous systems shaped by evolution; this innate circuitry acts synergistically with learning mechanisms to provide inductive biases that enable most animals to function well soon after birth and learn efficiently. Convolutional networks inspired by visual circuitry have encoded useful biases for vision. However, it is unknown the extent to which ANN architectures inspired by neural circuitry can yield useful biases for other AI domains. In this work, we ask what advantages biologically inspired ANN architecture can provide in the domain of motor control. Specifically, we translate C. elegans locomotion circuits into an ANN model controlling a simulated Swimmer agent. On a locomotion task, our architecture achieves good initial performance and asymptotic performance comparable with MLPs, while dramatically improving data efficiency and requiring orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture is interpretable and transfers to new body designs. An ablation analysis shows that constrained excitation/inhibition is crucial for learning, while weight initialization contributes to good initial performance. Our work demonstrates several advantages of biologically inspired ANN architecture and encourages future work in more complex embodied control.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 13, 2022

StreamDiT: Real-Time Streaming Text-to-Video Generation

Recently, great progress has been achieved in text-to-video (T2V) generation by scaling transformer-based diffusion models to billions of parameters, which can generate high-quality videos. However, existing models typically produce only short clips offline, restricting their use cases in interactive and real-time applications. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing StreamDiT, a streaming video generation model. StreamDiT training is based on flow matching by adding a moving buffer. We design mixed training with different partitioning schemes of buffered frames to boost both content consistency and visual quality. StreamDiT modeling is based on adaLN DiT with varying time embedding and window attention. To practice the proposed method, we train a StreamDiT model with 4B parameters. In addition, we propose a multistep distillation method tailored for StreamDiT. Sampling distillation is performed in each segment of a chosen partitioning scheme. After distillation, the total number of function evaluations (NFEs) is reduced to the number of chunks in a buffer. Finally, our distilled model reaches real-time performance at 16 FPS on one GPU, which can generate video streams at 512p resolution. We evaluate our method through both quantitative metrics and human evaluation. Our model enables real-time applications, e.g. streaming generation, interactive generation, and video-to-video. We provide video results and more examples in our project website: <a href="https://cumulo-autumn.github.io/StreamDiT/">this https URL.</a>

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025 5

VDT: General-purpose Video Diffusion Transformers via Mask Modeling

This work introduces Video Diffusion Transformer (VDT), which pioneers the use of transformers in diffusion-based video generation. It features transformer blocks with modularized temporal and spatial attention modules to leverage the rich spatial-temporal representation inherited in transformers. We also propose a unified spatial-temporal mask modeling mechanism, seamlessly integrated with the model, to cater to diverse video generation scenarios. VDT offers several appealing benefits. 1) It excels at capturing temporal dependencies to produce temporally consistent video frames and even simulate the physics and dynamics of 3D objects over time. 2) It facilitates flexible conditioning information, \eg, simple concatenation in the token space, effectively unifying different token lengths and modalities. 3) Pairing with our proposed spatial-temporal mask modeling mechanism, it becomes a general-purpose video diffuser for harnessing a range of tasks, including unconditional generation, video prediction, interpolation, animation, and completion, etc. Extensive experiments on these tasks spanning various scenarios, including autonomous driving, natural weather, human action, and physics-based simulation, demonstrate the effectiveness of VDT. Additionally, we present comprehensive studies on how \model handles conditioning information with the mask modeling mechanism, which we believe will benefit future research and advance the field. Project page: https:VDT-2023.github.io

  • 7 authors
·
May 22, 2023

Many-for-Many: Unify the Training of Multiple Video and Image Generation and Manipulation Tasks

Diffusion models have shown impressive performance in many visual generation and manipulation tasks. Many existing methods focus on training a model for a specific task, especially, text-to-video (T2V) generation, while many other works focus on finetuning the pretrained T2V model for image-to-video (I2V), video-to-video (V2V), image and video manipulation tasks, etc. However, training a strong T2V foundation model requires a large amount of high-quality annotations, which is very costly. In addition, many existing models can perform only one or several tasks. In this work, we introduce a unified framework, namely many-for-many, which leverages the available training data from many different visual generation and manipulation tasks to train a single model for those different tasks. Specifically, we design a lightweight adapter to unify the different conditions in different tasks, then employ a joint image-video learning strategy to progressively train the model from scratch. Our joint learning leads to a unified visual generation and manipulation model with improved video generation performance. In addition, we introduce depth maps as a condition to help our model better perceive the 3D space in visual generation. Two versions of our model are trained with different model sizes (8B and 2B), each of which can perform more than 10 different tasks. In particular, our 8B model demonstrates highly competitive performance in video generation tasks compared to open-source and even commercial engines. Our models and source codes are available at https://github.com/leeruibin/MfM.git.

  • 10 authors
·
Jun 2, 2025

Consistent Video Editing as Flow-Driven Image-to-Video Generation

With the prosper of video diffusion models, down-stream applications like video editing have been significantly promoted without consuming much computational cost. One particular challenge in this task lies at the motion transfer process from the source video to the edited one, where it requires the consideration of the shape deformation in between, meanwhile maintaining the temporal consistency in the generated video sequence. However, existing methods fail to model complicated motion patterns for video editing, and are fundamentally limited to object replacement, where tasks with non-rigid object motions like multi-object and portrait editing are largely neglected. In this paper, we observe that optical flows offer a promising alternative in complex motion modeling, and present FlowV2V to re-investigate video editing as a task of flow-driven Image-to-Video (I2V) generation. Specifically, FlowV2V decomposes the entire pipeline into first-frame editing and conditional I2V generation, and simulates pseudo flow sequence that aligns with the deformed shape, thus ensuring the consistency during editing. Experimental results on DAVIS-EDIT with improvements of 13.67% and 50.66% on DOVER and warping error illustrate the superior temporal consistency and sample quality of FlowV2V compared to existing state-of-the-art ones. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the internal functionalities of the first-frame paradigm and flow alignment in the proposed method.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025

Improving Joint Audio-Video Generation with Cross-Modal Context Learning

The dual-stream transformer architecture-based joint audio-video generation method has become the dominant paradigm in current research. By incorporating pre-trained video diffusion models and audio diffusion models, along with a cross-modal interaction attention module, high-quality, temporally synchronized audio-video content can be generated with minimal training data. In this paper, we first revisit the dual-stream transformer paradigm and further analyze its limitations, including model manifold variations caused by the gating mechanism controlling cross-modal interactions, biases in multi-modal background regions introduced by cross-modal attention, and the inconsistencies in multi-modal classifier-free guidance (CFG) during training and inference, as well as conflicts between multiple conditions. To alleviate these issues, we propose Cross-Modal Context Learning (CCL), equipped with several carefully designed modules. Temporally Aligned RoPE and Partitioning (TARP) effectively enhances the temporal alignment between audio latent and video latent representations. The Learnable Context Tokens (LCT) and Dynamic Context Routing (DCR) in the Cross-Modal Context Attention (CCA) module provide stable unconditional anchors for cross-modal information, while dynamically routing based on different training tasks, further enhancing the model's convergence speed and generation quality. During inference, Unconditional Context Guidance (UCG) leverages the unconditional support provided by LCT to facilitate different forms of CFG, improving train-inference consistency and further alleviating conflicts. Through comprehensive evaluations, CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with recent academic methods while requiring substantially fewer resources.

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 19

3DreamBooth: High-Fidelity 3D Subject-Driven Video Generation Model

Creating dynamic, view-consistent videos of customized subjects is highly sought after for a wide range of emerging applications, including immersive VR/AR, virtual production, and next-generation e-commerce. However, despite rapid progress in subject-driven video generation, existing methods predominantly treat subjects as 2D entities, focusing on transferring identity through single-view visual features or textual prompts. Because real-world subjects are inherently 3D, applying these 2D-centric approaches to 3D object customization reveals a fundamental limitation: they lack the comprehensive spatial priors necessary to reconstruct the 3D geometry. Consequently, when synthesizing novel views, they must rely on generating plausible but arbitrary details for unseen regions, rather than preserving the true 3D identity. Achieving genuine 3D-aware customization remains challenging due to the scarcity of multi-view video datasets. While one might attempt to fine-tune models on limited video sequences, this often leads to temporal overfitting. To resolve these issues, we introduce a novel framework for 3D-aware video customization, comprising 3DreamBooth and 3Dapter. 3DreamBooth decouples spatial geometry from temporal motion through a 1-frame optimization paradigm. By restricting updates to spatial representations, it effectively bakes a robust 3D prior into the model without the need for exhaustive video-based training. To enhance fine-grained textures and accelerate convergence, we incorporate 3Dapter, a visual conditioning module. Following single-view pre-training, 3Dapter undergoes multi-view joint optimization with the main generation branch via an asymmetrical conditioning strategy. This design allows the module to act as a dynamic selective router, querying view-specific geometric hints from a minimal reference set. Project page: https://ko-lani.github.io/3DreamBooth/

Discrete Key-Value Bottleneck

Deep neural networks perform well on classification tasks where data streams are i.i.d. and labeled data is abundant. Challenges emerge with non-stationary training data streams such as continual learning. One powerful approach that has addressed this challenge involves pre-training of large encoders on volumes of readily available data, followed by task-specific tuning. Given a new task, however, updating the weights of these encoders is challenging as a large number of weights needs to be fine-tuned, and as a result, they forget information about the previous tasks. In the present work, we propose a model architecture to address this issue, building upon a discrete bottleneck containing pairs of separate and learnable key-value codes. Our paradigm will be to encode; process the representation via a discrete bottleneck; and decode. Here, the input is fed to the pre-trained encoder, the output of the encoder is used to select the nearest keys, and the corresponding values are fed to the decoder to solve the current task. The model can only fetch and re-use a sparse number of these key-value pairs during inference, enabling localized and context-dependent model updates. We theoretically investigate the ability of the discrete key-value bottleneck to minimize the effect of learning under distribution shifts and show that it reduces the complexity of the hypothesis class. We empirically verify the proposed method under challenging class-incremental learning scenarios and show that the proposed model - without any task boundaries - reduces catastrophic forgetting across a wide variety of pre-trained models, outperforming relevant baselines on this task.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 22, 2022

Langevin Flows for Modeling Neural Latent Dynamics

Neural populations exhibit latent dynamical structures that drive time-evolving spiking activities, motivating the search for models that capture both intrinsic network dynamics and external unobserved influences. In this work, we introduce LangevinFlow, a sequential Variational Auto-Encoder where the time evolution of latent variables is governed by the underdamped Langevin equation. Our approach incorporates physical priors -- such as inertia, damping, a learned potential function, and stochastic forces -- to represent both autonomous and non-autonomous processes in neural systems. Crucially, the potential function is parameterized as a network of locally coupled oscillators, biasing the model toward oscillatory and flow-like behaviors observed in biological neural populations. Our model features a recurrent encoder, a one-layer Transformer decoder, and Langevin dynamics in the latent space. Empirically, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic neural populations generated by a Lorenz attractor, closely matching ground-truth firing rates. On the Neural Latents Benchmark (NLB), the model achieves superior held-out neuron likelihoods (bits per spike) and forward prediction accuracy across four challenging datasets. It also matches or surpasses alternative methods in decoding behavioral metrics such as hand velocity. Overall, this work introduces a flexible, physics-inspired, high-performing framework for modeling complex neural population dynamics and their unobserved influences.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 15, 2025

Online Unsupervised Video Object Segmentation via Contrastive Motion Clustering

Online unsupervised video object segmentation (UVOS) uses the previous frames as its input to automatically separate the primary object(s) from a streaming video without using any further manual annotation. A major challenge is that the model has no access to the future and must rely solely on the history, i.e., the segmentation mask is predicted from the current frame as soon as it is captured. In this work, a novel contrastive motion clustering algorithm with an optical flow as its input is proposed for the online UVOS by exploiting the common fate principle that visual elements tend to be perceived as a group if they possess the same motion pattern. We build a simple and effective auto-encoder to iteratively summarize non-learnable prototypical bases for the motion pattern, while the bases in turn help learn the representation of the embedding network. Further, a contrastive learning strategy based on a boundary prior is developed to improve foreground and background feature discrimination in the representation learning stage. The proposed algorithm can be optimized on arbitrarily-scale data i.e., frame, clip, dataset) and performed in an online fashion. Experiments on DAVIS_{16}, FBMS, and SegTrackV2 datasets show that the accuracy of our method surpasses the previous state-of-the-art (SoTA) online UVOS method by a margin of 0.8%, 2.9%, and 1.1%, respectively. Furthermore, by using an online deep subspace clustering to tackle the motion grouping, our method is able to achieve higher accuracy at 3times faster inference time compared to SoTA online UVOS method, and making a good trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. Our code is available at https://github.com/xilin1991/ClusterNet.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 21, 2023