Zhanjie Zhang

Zhizhong Wang, Zhanjie Zhang, Lei Zhao et al.

Recent studies have shown remarkable success in universal style transfer which transfers arbitrary visual styles to content images. However, existing approaches suffer from the aesthetic-unrealistic problem that introduces disharmonious patterns and evident artifacts, making the results easy to spot from real paintings. To address this limitation, we propose AesUST, a novel Aesthetic-enhanced Universal Style Transfer approach that can generate aesthetically more realistic and pleasing results for arbitrary styles. Specifically, our approach introduces an aesthetic discriminator to learn the universal human-delightful aesthetic features from a large corpus of artist-created paintings. Then, the aesthetic features are incorporated to enhance the style transfer process via a novel Aesthetic-aware Style-Attention (AesSA) module. Such an AesSA module enables our AesUST to efficiently and flexibly integrate the style patterns according to the global aesthetic channel distribution of the style image and the local semantic spatial distribution of the content image. Moreover, we also develop a new two-stage transfer training strategy with two aesthetic regularizations to train our model more effectively, further improving stylization performance. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that our approach synthesizes aesthetically more harmonious and realistic results than state of the art, greatly narrowing the disparity with real artist-created paintings. Our code is available at https://github.com/EndyWon/AesUST.

Jiakai Sun, Zhanjie Zhang, Jiafu Chen et al.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) has shown great success in novel view synthesis due to its state-of-the-art quality and flexibility. However, NeRF requires dense input views (tens to hundreds) and a long training time (hours to days) for a single scene to generate high-fidelity images. Although using the voxel grids to represent the radiance field can significantly accelerate the optimization process, we observe that for sparse inputs, the voxel grids are more prone to overfitting to the training views and will have holes and floaters, which leads to artifacts. In this paper, we propose VGOS, an approach for fast (3-5 minutes) radiance field reconstruction from sparse inputs (3-10 views) to address these issues. To improve the performance of voxel-based radiance field in sparse input scenarios, we propose two methods: (a) We introduce an incremental voxel training strategy, which prevents overfitting by suppressing the optimization of peripheral voxels in the early stage of reconstruction. (b) We use several regularization techniques to smooth the voxels, which avoids degenerate solutions. Experiments demonstrate that VGOS achieves state-of-the-art performance for sparse inputs with super-fast convergence. Code will be available at https://github.com/SJoJoK/VGOS.

Zhiwen Zuo, Lei Zhao, Ailin Li et al.

This paper presents a new adversarial training framework for image inpainting with segmentation confusion adversarial training (SCAT) and contrastive learning. SCAT plays an adversarial game between an inpainting generator and a segmentation network, which provides pixel-level local training signals and can adapt to images with free-form holes. By combining SCAT with standard global adversarial training, the new adversarial training framework exhibits the following three advantages simultaneously: (1) the global consistency of the repaired image, (2) the local fine texture details of the repaired image, and (3) the flexibility of handling images with free-form holes. Moreover, we propose the textural and semantic contrastive learning losses to stabilize and improve our inpainting model's training by exploiting the feature representation space of the discriminator, in which the inpainting images are pulled closer to the ground truth images but pushed farther from the corrupted images. The proposed contrastive losses better guide the repaired images to move from the corrupted image data points to the real image data points in the feature representation space, resulting in more realistic completed images. We conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating our model's effectiveness and superiority both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Jiasong Feng, Ao Ma, Jing Wang et al.

Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII) and Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR) at the beginning and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. Note that the T2V process of FancyVideo essentially involves a text-to-image step followed by T+I2V. This means it also supports the generation of videos from user images, i.e., the image-to-video (I2V) task. A significant number of experiments have shown that its performance is also outstanding.

Run Ling, Ke Cao, Jian Lu et al.

Multi-subject video generation aims to synthesize videos from textual prompts and multiple reference images, ensuring that each subject preserves natural scale and visual fidelity. However, current methods face two challenges: scale inconsistency, where variations in subject size lead to unnatural generation, and permutation sensitivity, where the order of reference inputs causes subject distortion. In this paper, we propose MoFu, a unified framework that tackles both challenges. For scale inconsistency, we introduce Scale-Aware Modulation (SMO), an LLM-guided module that extracts implicit scale cues from the prompt and modulates features to ensure consistent subject sizes. To address permutation sensitivity, we present a simple yet effective Fourier Fusion strategy that processes the frequency information of reference features via the Fast Fourier Transform to produce a unified representation. Besides, we design a Scale-Permutation Stability Loss to jointly encourage scale-consistent and permutation-invariant generation. To further evaluate these challenges, we establish a dedicated benchmark with controlled variations in subject scale and reference permutation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoFu significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving natural scale, subject fidelity, and overall visual quality.

Yicheng Di, Wei Yuan, Tieke He et al.

Vision-language pretrained models offer strong transferable representations, yet adapting them in privacy-sensitive multi-party settings is challenging due to the high communication cost of federated optimization and the limited local data on clients. Federated prompt learning mitigates this issue by keeping the VLPM backbone frozen and collaboratively training lightweight prompt parameters. However, existing approaches typically enforce a unified prompt structure and length across clients, which is inadequate under practical client heterogeneity in both data distributions and system resources, and may further introduce conflicts between globally shared and locally optimal knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{SDFed}, a heterogeneous federated prompt learning framework that bridges Local-Global Discrepancy via Subspace Refinement and Divergence Control. SDFed maintains a fixed-length global prompt for efficient aggregation while allowing each client to learn a variable-length local prompt to better match its data characteristics and capacity. To mitigate local-global conflicts and facilitate effective knowledge transfer, SDFed introduces a subspace refinement method for local prompts and an information retention and divergence control strategy that preserves key local information while maintaining appropriate separability between global and local representations. Extensive experiments on several datasets demonstrate that SDFed consistently improves performance and robustness in heterogeneous federated settings.

Han Jiao, Jiakai Sun, Lei Zhao et al.

3D Gaussian Splatting has demonstrated remarkable real-time rendering capabilities and superior visual quality in novel view synthesis for static scenes. Building upon these advantages, researchers have progressively extended 3D Gaussians to dynamic scene reconstruction. Deformation field-based methods have emerged as a promising approach among various techniques. These methods maintain 3D Gaussian attributes in a canonical field and employ the deformation field to transform this field across temporal sequences. Nevertheless, these approaches frequently encounter challenges such as suboptimal rendering speeds, significant dependence on initial point clouds, and vulnerability to local optima in dim scenes. To overcome these limitations, we present FRoG, an efficient and robust framework for high-quality dynamic scene reconstruction. FRoG integrates per-Gaussian embedding with a coarse-to-fine temporal embedding strategy, accelerating rendering through the early fusion of temporal embeddings. Moreover, to enhance robustness against sparse initializations, we introduce a novel depth- and error-guided sampling strategy. This strategy populates the canonical field with new 3D Gaussians at low-deviation initial positions, significantly reducing the optimization burden on the deformation field and improving detail reconstruction in both static and dynamic regions. Furthermore, by modulating opacity variations, we mitigate the local optima problem in dim scenes, improving color fidelity. Comprehensive experimental results validate that our method achieves accelerated rendering speeds while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality.

Zhanjie Zhang, Quanwei Zhang, Guangyuan Li et al.

Artistic style transfer aims to transfer the learned style onto an arbitrary content image. However, most existing style transfer methods can only render consistent artistic stylized images, making it difficult for users to get enough stylized images to enjoy. To solve this issue, we propose a novel artistic style transfer framework called DyArtbank, which can generate diverse and highly realistic artistic stylized images. Specifically, we introduce a Dynamic Style Prompt ArtBank (DSPA), a set of learnable parameters. It can learn and store the style information from the collection of artworks, dynamically guiding pre-trained stable diffusion to generate diverse and highly realistic artistic stylized images. DSPA can also generate random artistic image samples with the learned style information, providing a new idea for data augmentation. Besides, a Key Content Feature Prompt (KCFP) module is proposed to provide sufficient content prompts for pre-trained stable diffusion to preserve the detailed structure of the input content image. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. Code is available: https://github.com/Jamie-Cheung/DyArtbank

Yun Wang, Longguang Wang, Chenghao Zhang et al.

Recently, learning-based stereo matching networks have advanced significantly. However, they often lack robustness and struggle to achieve impressive cross-domain performance due to domain shifts and imbalanced disparity distributions among diverse datasets. Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) can intuitively enhance the model's robustness, but integrating such a model into stereo matching cost-effectively to fully realize their robustness remains a key challenge. To address this, we propose SMoEStereo, a novel framework that adapts VFMs for stereo matching through a tailored, scene-specific fusion of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules. SMoEStereo introduces MoE-LoRA with adaptive ranks and MoE-Adapter with adaptive kernel sizes. The former dynamically selects optimal experts within MoE to adapt varying scenes across domains, while the latter injects inductive bias into frozen VFMs to improve geometric feature extraction. Importantly, to mitigate computational overhead, we further propose a lightweight decision network that selectively activates MoE modules based on input complexity, balancing efficiency with accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits state-of-the-art cross-domain and joint generalization across multiple benchmarks without dataset-specific adaptation. The code is available at \textcolor{red}{https://github.com/cocowy1/SMoE-Stereo}.

Yuxin Qin, Ke Cao, Haowei Liu et al.

E-commerce product poster generation aims to automatically synthesize a single image that effectively conveys product information by presenting a subject, text, and a designed style. Recent diffusion models with fine-grained and efficient controllability have advanced product poster synthesis, yet they typically rely on multi-stage pipelines, and simultaneous control over subject, text, and style remains underexplored. Such naive multi-stage pipelines also show three issues: poor subject fidelity, inaccurate text, and inconsistent style. To address these issues, we propose InnoAds-Composer, a single-stage framework that enables efficient tri-conditional control tokens over subject, glyph, and style. To alleviate the quadratic overhead introduced by naive tri-conditional token concatenation, we perform importance analysis over layers and timesteps and route each condition only to the most responsive positions, thereby shortening the active token sequence. Besides, to improve the accuracy of Chinese text rendering, we design a Text Feature Enhancement Module (TFEM) that integrates features from both glyph images and glyph crops. To support training and evaluation, we also construct a high-quality e-commerce product poster dataset and benchmark, which is the first dataset that jointly contains subject, text, and style conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InnoAds-Composer significantly outperforms existing product poster methods without obviously increasing inference latency.

Yun Wang, Zhengjie Yang, Jiahao Zheng et al.

Recent self-supervised stereo matching methods have made significant progress. They typically rely on the photometric consistency assumption, which presumes corresponding points across views share the same appearance. However, this assumption could be compromised by real-world disturbances, resulting in invalid supervisory signals and a significant accuracy gap compared to supervised methods. To address this issue, we propose SMFormer, a framework integrating more reliable self-supervision guided by the Vision Foundation Model (VFM) and data augmentation. We first incorporate the VFM with the Feature Pyramid Network (FPN), providing a discriminative and robust feature representation against disturbance in various scenarios. We then devise an effective data augmentation mechanism that ensures robustness to various transformations. The data augmentation mechanism explicitly enforces consistency between learned features and those influenced by illumination variations. Additionally, it regularizes the output consistency between disparity predictions of strong augmented samples and those generated from standard samples. Experiments on multiple mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that our SMFormer achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among self-supervised methods and even competes on par with supervised ones. Remarkably, in the challenging Booster benchmark, SMFormer even outperforms some SOTA supervised methods, such as CFNet.

Yicheng Di, Zhanjie Zhang, Yun Wang et al.

Motivation-based recommendation systems uncover user behavior drivers. Motivation modeling, crucial for decision-making and content preference, explains recommendation generation. Existing methods often treat motivation as latent variables from interaction data, neglecting heterogeneous information like review text. In multimodal motivation fusion, two challenges arise: 1) achieving stable cross-modal alignment amid noise, and 2) identifying features reflecting the same underlying motivation across modalities. To address these, we propose LLM-driven Motivation-aware Multimodal Recommendation (LMMRec), a model-agnostic framework leveraging large language models for deep semantic priors and motivation understanding. LMMRec uses chain-of-thought prompting to extract fine-grained user and item motivations from text. A dual-encoder architecture models textual and interaction-based motivations for cross-modal alignment, while Motivation Coordination Strategy and Interaction-Text Correspondence Method mitigate noise and semantic drift through contrastive learning and momentum updates. Experiments on three datasets show LMMRec achieves up to a 4.98\% performance improvement.

Jiakai Sun, Han Jiao, Guangyuan Li et al.

Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the naïve approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Shenghan Zhang, Run Ling, Ke Cao et al.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for privacy-preserving multi-camera video understanding. However, applying FL to cross-view scenarios faces three major challenges: (i) heterogeneous viewpoints and backgrounds lead to highly non-IID client distributions and overfitting to view-specific patterns, (ii) local distribution biases cause misaligned representations that hinder consistent cross-view semantics, and (iii) large video architectures incur prohibitive communication overhead. To address these issues, we propose FedCVU, a federated framework with three components: VS-Norm, which preserves normalization parameters to handle view-specific statistics; CV-Align, a lightweight contrastive regularization module to improve cross-view representation alignment; and SLA, a selective layer aggregation strategy that reduces communication without sacrificing accuracy. Extensive experiments on action understanding and person re-identification tasks under a cross-view protocol demonstrate that FedCVU consistently boosts unseen-view accuracy while maintaining strong seen-view performance, outperforming state-of-the-art FL baselines and showing robustness to domain heterogeneity and communication constraints.

Guangyuan Li, Chen Rao, Juncheng Mo et al.

Recently, diffusion models (DM) have been applied in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) super-resolution (SR) reconstruction, exhibiting impressive performance, especially with regard to detailed reconstruction. However, the current DM-based SR reconstruction methods still face the following issues: (1) They require a large number of iterations to reconstruct the final image, which is inefficient and consumes a significant amount of computational resources. (2) The results reconstructed by these methods are often misaligned with the real high-resolution images, leading to remarkable distortion in the reconstructed MR images. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an efficient diffusion model for multi-contrast MRI SR, named as DiffMSR. Specifically, we apply DM in a highly compact low-dimensional latent space to generate prior knowledge with high-frequency detail information. The highly compact latent space ensures that DM requires only a few simple iterations to produce accurate prior knowledge. In addition, we design the Prior-Guide Large Window Transformer (PLWformer) as the decoder for DM, which can extend the receptive field while fully utilizing the prior knowledge generated by DM to ensure that the reconstructed MR image remains undistorted. Extensive experiments on public and clinical datasets demonstrate that our DiffMSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Zhanjie Zhang, Quanwei Zhang, Guangyuan Li et al.

Artistic style transfer aims to repaint the content image with the learned artistic style. Existing artistic style transfer methods can be divided into two categories: small model-based approaches and pre-trained large-scale model-based approaches. Small model-based approaches can preserve the content strucuture, but fail to produce highly realistic stylized images and introduce artifacts and disharmonious patterns; Pre-trained large-scale model-based approaches can generate highly realistic stylized images but struggle with preserving the content structure. To address the above issues, we propose ArtBank, a novel artistic style transfer framework, to generate highly realistic stylized images while preserving the content structure of the content images. Specifically, to sufficiently dig out the knowledge embedded in pre-trained large-scale models, an Implicit Style Prompt Bank (ISPB), a set of trainable parameter matrices, is designed to learn and store knowledge from the collection of artworks and behave as a visual prompt to guide pre-trained large-scale models to generate highly realistic stylized images while preserving content structure. Besides, to accelerate training the above ISPB, we propose a novel Spatial-Statistical-based self-Attention Module (SSAM). The qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art artistic style transfer methods.

Zhanjie Zhang, Quanwei Zhang, Huaizhong Lin et al.

Artistic style transfer aims to transfer the learned artistic style onto an arbitrary content image, generating artistic stylized images. Existing generative adversarial network-based methods fail to generate highly realistic stylized images and always introduce obvious artifacts and disharmonious patterns. Recently, large-scale pre-trained diffusion models opened up a new way for generating highly realistic artistic stylized images. However, diffusion model-based methods generally fail to preserve the content structure of input content images well, introducing some undesired content structure and style patterns. To address the above problems, we propose a novel pre-trained diffusion-based artistic style transfer method, called LSAST, which can generate highly realistic artistic stylized images while preserving the content structure of input content images well, without bringing obvious artifacts and disharmonious style patterns. Specifically, we introduce a Step-aware and Layer-aware Prompt Space, a set of learnable prompts, which can learn the style information from the collection of artworks and dynamically adjusts the input images' content structure and style pattern. To train our prompt space, we propose a novel inversion method, called Step-ware and Layer-aware Prompt Inversion, which allows the prompt space to learn the style information of the artworks collection. In addition, we inject a pre-trained conditional branch of ControlNet into our LSAST, which further improved our framework's ability to maintain content structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can generate more highly realistic artistic stylized images than the state-of-the-art artistic style transfer methods.

Jing Wang, Ao Ma, Ke Cao et al.

Recent rapid advancements in text-to-video (T2V) generation, such as SoRA and Kling, have shown great potential for building world simulators. However, current T2V models struggle to grasp abstract physical principles and generate videos that adhere to physical laws. This challenge arises primarily from a lack of clear guidance on physical information due to a significant gap between abstract physical principles and generation models. To this end, we introduce the World Simulator Assistant (WISA), an effective framework for decomposing and incorporating physical principles into T2V models. Specifically, WISA decomposes physical principles into textual physical descriptions, qualitative physical categories, and quantitative physical properties. To effectively embed these physical attributes into the generation process, WISA incorporates several key designs, including Mixture-of-Physical-Experts Attention (MoPA) and a Physical Classifier, enhancing the model's physics awareness. Furthermore, most existing datasets feature videos where physical phenomena are either weakly represented or entangled with multiple co-occurring processes, limiting their suitability as dedicated resources for learning explicit physical principles. We propose a novel video dataset, WISA-32K, collected based on qualitative physical categories. It consists of 32,000 videos, representing 17 physical laws across three domains of physics: dynamics, thermodynamics, and optics. Experimental results demonstrate that WISA can effectively enhance the compatibility of T2V models with real-world physical laws, achieving a considerable improvement on the VideoPhy benchmark. The visual exhibitions of WISA and WISA-32K are available in the https://360cvgroup.github.io/WISA/.

Zhanjie Zhang, Jiakai Sun, Guangyuan Li et al.

Arbitrary style transfer holds widespread attention in research and boasts numerous practical applications. The existing methods, which either employ cross-attention to incorporate deep style attributes into content attributes or use adaptive normalization to adjust content features, fail to generate high-quality stylized images. In this paper, we introduce an innovative technique to improve the quality of stylized images. Firstly, we propose Style Consistency Instance Normalization (SCIN), a method to refine the alignment between content and style features. In addition, we have developed an Instance-based Contrastive Learning (ICL) approach designed to understand the relationships among various styles, thereby enhancing the quality of the resulting stylized images. Recognizing that VGG networks are more adept at extracting classification features and need to be better suited for capturing style features, we have also introduced the Perception Encoder (PE) to capture style features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method generates high-quality stylized images and effectively prevents artifacts compared with the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Ke Cao, Jing Wang, Ao Ma et al.

The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing text-to-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the "ControlNet Relevance Score"-i.e., the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta.

Zhanjie Zhang, Quanwei Zhang, Junsheng Luan et al.

Given an arbitrary content and style image, arbitrary style transfer aims to render a new stylized image which preserves the content image's structure and possesses the style image's style. Existing arbitrary style transfer methods are based on either small models or pre-trained large-scale models. The small model-based methods fail to generate high-quality stylized images, bringing artifacts and disharmonious patterns. The pre-trained large-scale model-based methods can generate high-quality stylized images but struggle to preserve the content structure and cost long inference time. To this end, we propose a new framework, called SPAST, to generate high-quality stylized images with less inference time. Specifically, we design a novel Local-global Window Size Stylization Module (LGWSSM)tofuse style features into content features. Besides, we introduce a novel style prior loss, which can dig out the style priors from a pre-trained large-scale model into the SPAST and motivate the SPAST to generate high-quality stylized images with short inference time.We conduct abundant experiments to verify that our proposed method can generate high-quality stylized images and less inference time compared with the SOTA arbitrary style transfer methods.

Zhanjie Zhang, Ao Ma, Ke Cao et al.

Ultra-high quality artistic style transfer refers to repainting an ultra-high quality content image using the style information learned from the style image. Existing artistic style transfer methods can be categorized into style reconstruction-based and content-style disentanglement-based style transfer approaches. Although these methods can generate some artistic stylized images, they still exhibit obvious artifacts and disharmonious patterns, which hinder their ability to produce ultra-high quality artistic stylized images. To address these issues, we propose a novel artistic image style transfer method, U-StyDiT, which is built on transformer-based diffusion (DiT) and learns content-style disentanglement, generating ultra-high quality artistic stylized images. Specifically, we first design a Multi-view Style Modulator (MSM) to learn style information from a style image from local and global perspectives, conditioning U-StyDiT to generate stylized images with the learned style information. Then, we introduce a StyDiT Block to learn content and style conditions simultaneously from a style image. Additionally, we propose an ultra-high quality artistic image dataset, Aes4M, comprising 10 categories, each containing 400,000 style images. This dataset effectively solves the problem that the existing style transfer methods cannot produce high-quality artistic stylized images due to the size of the dataset and the quality of the images in the dataset. Finally, the extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments validate that our U-StyDiT can create higher quality stylized images compared to state-of-the-art artistic style transfer methods. To our knowledge, our proposed method is the first to address the generation of ultra-high quality stylized images using transformer-based diffusion.

Zhou Hong, Rongsheng Hu, Yicheng Di et al.

Image style transfer aims to integrate the visual patterns of a specific artistic style into a content image while preserving its content structure. Existing methods mainly rely on the generative adversarial network (GAN) or stable diffusion (SD). GAN-based approaches using CNNs or Transformers struggle to jointly capture local and global dependencies, leading to artifacts and disharmonious patterns. SD-based methods reduce such issues but often fail to preserve content structures and suffer from slow inference. To address these issues, we revisit GAN and propose a mamba-based generator, termed as StyMam, to produce high-quality stylized images without introducing artifacts and disharmonious patterns. Specifically, we introduce a mamba-based generator with a residual dual-path strip scanning mechanism and a channel-reweighted spatial attention module. The former efficiently captures local texture features, while the latter models global dependencies. Finally, extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms in both quality and speed.

Yun Wang, Long Zhang, Jingren Liu et al.

Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) excel at general video understanding but struggle with long-form videos due to context window limits. Consequently, recent approaches focus on keyframe retrieval, condensing lengthy videos into a small set of informative frames. Despite their practicality, these methods simplify the problem to static text image matching, overlooking spatio temporal relationships crucial for capturing scene transitions and contextual continuity, and may yield redundant keyframes with limited information, diluting salient cues essential for accurate video question answering. To address these limitations, we introduce Video-EM, a training free framework inspired by the principles of human episodic memory, designed to facilitate robust and contextually grounded reasoning. Rather than treating keyframes as isolated visual entities, Video-EM explicitly models them as temporally ordered episodic events, capturing both spatial relationships and temporal dynamics necessary for accurately reconstructing the underlying narrative. Furthermore, the framework leverages chain of thought (CoT) thinking with LLMs to iteratively identify a minimal yet highly informative subset of episodic memories, enabling efficient and accurate question answering by Video-LLMs. Extensive evaluations on the Video-MME, EgoSchema, HourVideo, and LVBench benchmarks confirm the superiority of Video-EM, which achieves highly competitive results with performance gains of 4-9 percent over respective baselines while utilizing fewer frames.

Ao Ma, Jiasong Feng, Ke Cao et al.

Storytelling tasks involving generating consistent subjects have gained significant attention recently. However, existing methods, whether training-free or training-based, continue to face challenges in maintaining subject consistency due to the lack of fine-grained guidance and inter-frame interaction. Additionally, the scarcity of high-quality data in this field makes it difficult to precisely control storytelling tasks, including the subject's position, appearance, clothing, expression, and posture, thereby hindering further advancements. In this paper, we demonstrate that layout conditions, such as the subject's position and detailed attributes, effectively facilitate fine-grained interactions between frames. This not only strengthens the consistency of the generated frame sequence but also allows for precise control over the subject's position, appearance, and other key details. Building on this, we introduce an advanced storytelling task: Layout-Togglable Storytelling, which enables precise subject control by incorporating layout conditions. To address the lack of high-quality datasets with layout annotations for this task, we develop Lay2Story-1M, which contains over 1 million 720p and higher-resolution images, processed from approximately 11,300 hours of cartoon videos. Building on Lay2Story-1M, we create Lay2Story-Bench, a benchmark with 3,000 prompts designed to evaluate the performance of different methods on this task. Furthermore, we propose Lay2Story, a robust framework based on the Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) architecture for Layout-Togglable Storytelling tasks. Through both qualitative and quantitative experiments, we find that our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques, achieving the best results in terms of consistency, semantic correlation, and aesthetic quality.

Run Ling, Wenji Wang, Yuting Liu et al.

Personalized image generation is crucial for improving the user experience, as it renders reference images into preferred ones according to user visual preferences. Although effective, existing methods face two main issues. First, existing methods treat all items in the user historical sequence equally when extracting user preferences, overlooking the varying semantic similarities between historical items and the reference item. Disproportionately high weights for low-similarity items distort users' visual preferences for the reference item. Second, existing methods heavily rely on consistency between generated and reference images to optimize the generation, which leads to underfitting user preferences and hinders personalization. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval Augment Personalized Image GenerAtion guided by Recommendation (RAGAR). Our approach uses a retrieval mechanism to assign different weights to historical items according to their similarities to the reference item, thereby extracting more refined users' visual preferences for the reference item. Then we introduce a novel rank task based on the multi-modal ranking model to optimize the personalization of the generated images instead of forcing depend on consistency. Extensive experiments and human evaluations on three real-world datasets demonstrate that RAGAR achieves significant improvements in both personalization and semantic metrics compared to five baselines.