Zhe Lin

Cusuh Ham, Gemma Canet Tarres, Tu Bui et al.

We present CoGS, a novel method for the style-conditioned, sketch-driven synthesis of images. CoGS enables exploration of diverse appearance possibilities for a given sketched object, enabling decoupled control over the structure and the appearance of the output. Coarse-grained control over object structure and appearance are enabled via an input sketch and an exemplar "style" conditioning image to a transformer-based sketch and style encoder to generate a discrete codebook representation. We map the codebook representation into a metric space, enabling fine-grained control over selection and interpolation between multiple synthesis options before generating the image via a vector quantized GAN (VQGAN) decoder. Our framework thereby unifies search and synthesis tasks, in that a sketch and style pair may be used to run an initial synthesis which may be refined via combination with similar results in a search corpus to produce an image more closely matching the user's intent. We show that our model, trained on the 125 object classes of our newly created Pseudosketches dataset, is capable of producing a diverse gamut of semantic content and appearance styles.

Zihan Ding, Chi Jin, Difan Liu et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models have shown significant progress in video generation; however, their computational efficiency is limited by the large number of sampling steps required. Reducing sampling steps often compromises video quality or generation diversity. In this work, we introduce a distillation method that combines variational score distillation and consistency distillation to achieve few-step video generation, maintaining both high quality and diversity. We also propose a latent reward model fine-tuning approach to further enhance video generation performance according to any specified reward metric. This approach reduces memory usage and does not require the reward to be differentiable. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in few-step generation for 10-second videos (128 frames at 12 FPS). The distilled student model achieves a score of 82.57 on VBench, surpassing the teacher model as well as baseline models Gen-3, T2V-Turbo, and Kling. One-step distillation accelerates the teacher model's diffusion sampling by up to 278.6 times, enabling near real-time generation. Human evaluations further validate the superior performance of our 4-step student models compared to teacher model using 50-step DDIM sampling.

Sangwon Jang, Taekyung Ki, Jaehyeong Jo et al.

Advancements in diffusion models have significantly improved video quality, directing attention to fine-grained controllability. However, many existing methods depend on fine-tuning large-scale video models for specific tasks, which becomes increasingly impractical as model sizes continue to grow. In this work, we present Frame Guidance, a training-free guidance for controllable video generation based on frame-level signals, such as keyframes, style reference images, sketches, or depth maps. For practical training-free guidance, we propose a simple latent processing method that dramatically reduces memory usage, and apply a novel latent optimization strategy designed for globally coherent video generation. Frame Guidance enables effective control across diverse tasks, including keyframe guidance, stylization, and looping, without any training, compatible with any video models. Experimental results show that Frame Guidance can produce high-quality controlled videos for a wide range of tasks and input signals.

Long Nguyen, Jia Zhen, Zhe Lin et al.

Understanding and accurately predicting within-field spatial variability of crop yield play a key role in site-specific management of crop inputs such as irrigation water and fertilizer for optimized crop production. However, such a task is challenged by the complex interaction between crop growth and environmental and managerial factors, such as climate, soil conditions, tillage, and irrigation. In this paper, we present a novel Spatial-temporal Multi-Task Learning algorithms for within-field crop yield prediction in west Texas from 2001 to 2003. This algorithm integrates multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn different features simultaneously, and to aggregate spatial-temporal features by introducing a weighted regularizer to the loss functions. Our comprehensive experimental results consistently outperform the results of other conventional methods, and suggest a promising approach, which improves the landscape of crop prediction research fields.