Haodong Li

Peiyu Zhuang, Haodong Li, Rui Yang et al.

With the spread of tampered images, locating the tampered regions in digital images has drawn increasing attention. The existing image tampering localization methods, however, suffer from severe performance degradation when the tampered images are subjected to some post-processing, as the tampering traces would be distorted by the post-processing operations. The poor robustness against post-processing has become a bottleneck for the practical applications of image tampering localization techniques. In order to address this issue, this paper proposes a novel restoration-assisted framework for image tampering localization (ReLoc). The ReLoc framework mainly consists of an image restoration module and a tampering localization module. The key idea of ReLoc is to use the restoration module to recover a high-quality counterpart of the distorted tampered image, such that the distorted tampering traces can be re-enhanced, facilitating the tampering localization module to identify the tampered regions. To achieve this, the restoration module is optimized not only with the conventional constraints on image visual quality but also with a forensics-oriented objective function. Furthermore, the restoration module and the localization module are trained alternately, which can stabilize the training process and is beneficial for improving the performance. The proposed framework is evaluated by fighting against JPEG compression, the most commonly used post-processing. Extensive experimental results show that ReLoc can significantly improve the robustness against JPEG compression. The restoration module in a well-trained ReLoc model is transferable. Namely, it is still effective when being directly deployed with another tampering localization module.

Yixun Liang, Xin Yang, Jiantao Lin et al.

The recent advancements in text-to-3D generation mark a significant milestone in generative models, unlocking new possibilities for creating imaginative 3D assets across various real-world scenarios. While recent advancements in text-to-3D generation have shown promise, they often fall short in rendering detailed and high-quality 3D models. This problem is especially prevalent as many methods base themselves on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS). This paper identifies a notable deficiency in SDS, that it brings inconsistent and low-quality updating direction for the 3D model, causing the over-smoothing effect. To address this, we propose a novel approach called Interval Score Matching (ISM). ISM employs deterministic diffusing trajectories and utilizes interval-based score matching to counteract over-smoothing. Furthermore, we incorporate 3D Gaussian Splatting into our text-to-3D generation pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our model largely outperforms the state-of-the-art in quality and training efficiency.

Jing He, Haodong Li, Wei Yin et al.

Leveraging the visual priors of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models offers a promising solution to enhance zero-shot generalization in dense prediction tasks. However, existing methods often uncritically use the original diffusion formulation, which may not be optimal due to the fundamental differences between dense prediction and image generation. In this paper, we provide a systemic analysis of the diffusion formulation for the dense prediction, focusing on both quality and efficiency. And we find that the original parameterization type for image generation, which learns to predict noise, is harmful for dense prediction; the multi-step noising/denoising diffusion process is also unnecessary and challenging to optimize. Based on these insights, we introduce Lotus, a diffusion-based visual foundation model with a simple yet effective adaptation protocol for dense prediction. Specifically, Lotus is trained to directly predict annotations instead of noise, thereby avoiding harmful variance. We also reformulate the diffusion process into a single-step procedure, simplifying optimization and significantly boosting inference speed. Additionally, we introduce a novel tuning strategy called detail preserver, which achieves more accurate and fine-grained predictions. Without scaling up the training data or model capacity, Lotus achieves SoTA performance in zero-shot depth and normal estimation across various datasets. It also enhances efficiency, being significantly faster than most existing diffusion-based methods. Lotus' superior quality and efficiency also enable a wide range of practical applications, such as joint estimation, single/multi-view 3D reconstruction, etc. Project page: https://lotus3d.github.io/.

Dongzhi Jiang, Renrui Zhang, Haodong Li et al.

Recent unified multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning for enhanced text-to-image generation. However, existing approaches remain limited, either treating the model merely as a standalone generator or relying on abstract textual planning. To this end, we propose Draft-as-CoT (DraCo), a novel interleaved reasoning paradigm that fully leverages both textual and visual contents in CoT for better planning and verification. Our method first generates a low-resolution draft image as preview, providing more concrete and structural visual planning and guidance. Then, we employ the model's inherent understanding capability to verify potential semantic misalignments between the draft and input prompt, and performs refinement through selective corrections with super-resolution. In this way, our approach addresses two fundamental challenges: the coarse-grained nature of textual planning and the difficulty in generating rare attribute combinations. To support training, we curate DraCo-240K, aiming to enhance three atomic capabilities spanning general correction, instance manipulation, and layout reorganization. Supported by DraCo-CFG, a specialized classifier-free guidance (CFG) strategy for interleaved reasoning, DraCo achieves a tremendous increase on GenEval (+8%), Imagine-Bench (+0.91), and GenEval++ (+3%), significantly outperforming direct generation and other generation methods empowered by CoT.

Xinan He, Kaiqing Lin, Yue Zhou et al.

With the rapid advancement of video generation models such as Veo and Wan, the visual quality of synthetic content has reached a level where macro-level semantic errors and temporal inconsistencies are no longer prominent. However, this does not imply that the distinction between real and cutting-edge high-fidelity fake is untraceable. We argue that AI-generated videos are essentially products of a manifold-fitting process rather than a physical recording. Consequently, the pixel composition logic of consecutive adjacent frames residual in AI videos exhibits a structured and homogenous characteristic. We term this phenomenon `Manifold Projection Fluctuations' (MPF). Driven by this insight, we propose a hierarchical dual-path framework that operates as a sequential filtering process. The first, the Static Manifold Deviation Branch, leverages the refined perceptual boundaries of Large-Scale Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) to capture residual spatial anomalies or physical violations that deviate from the natural real-world manifold (off-manifold). For the remaining high-fidelity videos that successfully reside on-manifold and evade spatial detection, we introduce the Micro-Temporal Fluctuation Branch as a secondary, fine-grained filter. By analyzing the structured MPF that persists even in visually perfect sequences, our framework ensures that forgeries are exposed regardless of whether they manifest as global real-world manifold deviations or subtle computational fingerprints.

Jing He, Haodong Li, Mingzhi Sheng et al.

Recovering pixel-wise geometric properties from a single image is fundamentally ill-posed due to appearance ambiguity and non-injective mappings between 2D observations and 3D structures. While discriminative regression models achieve strong performance through large-scale supervision, their success is bounded by the scale, quality and diversity of available data and limited physical reasoning. Recent diffusion models exhibit powerful world priors that encode geometry and semantics learned from massive image-text data, yet directly reusing their stochastic generative formulation is suboptimal for deterministic geometric inference: the former is optimized for diverse and high-fidelity image generation, whereas the latter requires stable and accurate predictions. In this work, we propose Lotus-2, a two-stage deterministic framework for stable, accurate and fine-grained geometric dense prediction, aiming to provide an optimal adaption protocol to fully exploit the pre-trained generative priors. Specifically, in the first stage, the core predictor employs a single-step deterministic formulation with a clean-data objective and a lightweight local continuity module (LCM) to generate globally coherent structures without grid artifacts. In the second stage, the detail sharpener performs a constrained multi-step rectified-flow refinement within the manifold defined by the core predictor, enhancing fine-grained geometry through noise-free deterministic flow matching. Using only 59K training samples, less than 1% of existing large-scale datasets, Lotus-2 establishes new state-of-the-art results in monocular depth estimation and highly competitive surface normal prediction. These results demonstrate that diffusion models can serve as deterministic world priors, enabling high-quality geometric reasoning beyond traditional discriminative and generative paradigms.

Jiyuan Wang, Chunyu Lin, Cheng Guan et al.

In this paper, we propose Jasmine, the first Stable Diffusion (SD)-based self-supervised framework for monocular depth estimation, which effectively harnesses SD's visual priors to enhance the sharpness and generalization of unsupervised prediction. Previous SD-based methods are all supervised since adapting diffusion models for dense prediction requires high-precision supervision. In contrast, self-supervised reprojection suffers from inherent challenges (e.g., occlusions, texture-less regions, illumination variance), and the predictions exhibit blurs and artifacts that severely compromise SD's latent priors. To resolve this, we construct a novel surrogate task of hybrid image reconstruction. Without any additional supervision, it preserves the detail priors of SD models by reconstructing the images themselves while preventing depth estimation from degradation. Furthermore, to address the inherent misalignment between SD's scale and shift invariant estimation and self-supervised scale-invariant depth estimation, we build the Scale-Shift GRU. It not only bridges this distribution gap but also isolates the fine-grained texture of SD output against the interference of reprojection loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Jasmine achieves SoTA performance on the KITTI benchmark and exhibits superior zero-shot generalization across multiple datasets.

Haodong Li, Bin Li, Shunquan Tan et al.

With the powerful deep network architectures, such as generative adversarial networks, one can easily generate photorealistic images. Although the generated images are not dedicated for fooling human or deceiving biometric authentication systems, research communities and public media have shown great concerns on the security issues caused by these images. This paper addresses the problem of identifying deep network generated (DNG) images. Taking the differences between camera imaging and DNG image generation into considerations, we analyze the disparities between DNG images and real images in different color components. We observe that the DNG images are more distinguishable from real ones in the chrominance components, especially in the residual domain. Based on these observations, we propose a feature set to capture color image statistics for identifying DNG images. Additionally, we evaluate several detection situations, including the training-testing data are matched or mismatched in image sources or generative models and detection with only real images. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately identify DNG images and outperforms existing methods when the training and testing data are mismatched. Moreover, when the GAN model is unknown, our methods also achieves good performance with one-class classification by using only real images for training.

Bolin Chen, Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo

In recent years, image forensics has attracted more and more attention, and many forensic methods have been proposed for identifying image processing operations. Up to now, most existing methods are based on hand crafted features, and just one specific operation is considered in their methods. In many forensic scenarios, however, multiple classification for various image processing operations is more practical. Besides, it is difficult to obtain effective features by hand for some image processing operations. In this paper, therefore, we propose a new convolutional neural network (CNN) based method to adaptively learn discriminative features for identifying typical image processing operations. We carefully design the high pass filter bank to get the image residuals of the input image, the channel expansion layer to mix up the resulting residuals, the pooling layers, and the activation functions employed in our method. The extensive results show that the proposed method can outperform the currently best method based on hand crafted features and three related methods based on CNN for image steganalysis and/or forensics, achieving the state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, we provide more supplementary results to show the rationality and robustness of the proposed model.

Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo, Quanquan Rao et al.

The fingerprint-copy attack aims to confuse camera identification based on sensor pattern noise. However, the triangle test shows that the forged images undergone fingerprint-copy attack would share a non-PRNU (Photo-response nonuniformity) component with every stolen image, and thus can detect fingerprint-copy attack. In this paper, we propose an improved fingerprint-copy attack scheme. Our main idea is to superimpose the estimated fingerprint into the target image dispersedly, via employing a block-wise method and using the stolen images randomly and partly. We also develop a practical method to determine the strength of the superimposed fingerprint based on objective image quality. In such a way, the impact of non-PRNU component on the triangle test is reduced, and our improved fingerprint-copy attack is difficultly detected. The experiments evaluated on 2,900 images from 4 cameras show that our scheme can effectively fool camera identification, and significantly degrade the performance of the triangle test simultaneously.

Haodong Li, Weiqi Luo, Xiaoqing Qiu et al.

Image forensics have attracted wide attention during the past decade. Though many forensic methods have been proposed to identify image forgeries, most of them are targeted ones, since their proposed features are highly dependent on the image operation under investigation. The performance of the well-designed features for detecting the targeted operation usually degrades significantly for other operations. On the other hand, a wise attacker can perform anti-forensics to fool the existing forensic methods, making countering anti-forensics become an urgent need. In this paper, we try to find a universal feature to detect various image processing and anti-forensic operations. Based on our extensive experiments and analysis, we find that any image processing/anti-forensic operations would inevitably modify many image pixels. This would change some inherent statistics within original images, which is similar to the case of steganography. Therefore, we model image processing/anti-forensic operations as steganography problems, and propose a detection strategy by applying steganalytic features. With some advanced steganalytic features, we are able to detect various image operations and further identify their types. In our experiments, we have tested several steganalytic features on 11 different kinds of typical image processing operations and 4 kinds of anti-forensic operations. The experimental results have shown that the proposed strategy significantly outperforms the existing forensic methods in both effectiveness and universality.