Jiwon Kang

Tony Feng, Trieu Trinh, Garrett Bingham et al.

We present a case study in semi-autonomous mathematics discovery, using Gemini to systematically evaluate 700 conjectures labeled 'Open' in Bloom's Erdős Problems database. We employ a hybrid methodology: AI-driven natural language verification to narrow the search space, followed by human expert evaluation to gauge correctness and novelty. We address 13 problems that were marked 'Open' in the database: 5 through seemingly novel autonomous solutions, and 8 through identification of previous solutions in the existing literature. Our findings suggest that the 'Open' status of the problems was through obscurity rather than difficulty. We also identify and discuss issues arising in applying AI to math conjectures at scale, highlighting the difficulty of literature identification and the risk of ''subconscious plagiarism'' by AI. We reflect on the takeaways from AI-assisted efforts on the Erdős Problems.

Jiwon Kang, Yeji Choi, JoungBin Lee et al.

Face swapping aims to transfer the identity of a source face onto a target face while preserving target-specific attributes such as pose, expression, lighting, skin tone, and makeup. However, since real ground truth for face swapping is unavailable, achieving both accurate identity transfer and high-quality attribute preservation remains challenging. In addition, recent diffusion-based approaches attempt to improve visual fidelity through conditional inpainting on masked target images, but the masked condition removes crucial appearance cues of target, resulting in plausible yet misaligned attributes. To address these limitations, we propose APPLE (Attribute-Preserving Pseudo-Labeling), a diffusion-based teacher-student framework that enhances attribute fidelity through attribute-aware pseudo-label supervision. We reformulate face swapping as a conditional deblurring task to more faithfully preserve target-specific attributes such as lighting, skin tone, and makeup. In addition, we introduce an attribute-aware inversion scheme to further improve detailed attribute preservation. Through an elaborate attribute-preserving design for teacher learning, APPLE produces high-quality pseudo triplets that explicitly provide the student with direct face-swapping supervision. Overall, APPLE achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of attribute preservation and identity transfer, producing more photorealistic and target-faithful results.

Donghoon Ahn, Jiwon Kang, Sanghyun Lee et al.

Diffusion models excel in generating high-quality images. However, current diffusion models struggle to produce reliable images without guidance methods, such as classifier-free guidance (CFG). Are guidance methods truly necessary? Observing that noise obtained via diffusion inversion can reconstruct high-quality images without guidance, we focus on the initial noise of the denoising pipeline. By mapping Gaussian noise to `guidance-free noise', we uncover that small low-magnitude low-frequency components significantly enhance the denoising process, removing the need for guidance and thus improving both inference throughput and memory. Expanding on this, we propose \ours, a novel method that replaces guidance methods with a single refinement of the initial noise. This refined noise enables high-quality image generation without guidance, within the same diffusion pipeline. Our noise-refining model leverages efficient noise-space learning, achieving rapid convergence and strong performance with just 50K text-image pairs. We validate its effectiveness across diverse metrics and analyze how refined noise can eliminate the need for guidance. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/NoiseRefine/.

SeonHwa Kim, Jiwon Kim, Soobin Park et al.

Score distillation sampling (SDS) demonstrates a powerful capability for text-conditioned 2D image and 3D object generation by distilling the knowledge from learned score functions. However, SDS often suffers from blurriness caused by noisy gradients. When SDS meets the image editing, such degradations can be reduced by adjusting bias shifts using reference pairs, but the de-biasing techniques are still corrupted by erroneous gradients. To this end, we introduce Identity-preserving Distillation Sampling (IDS), which compensates for the gradient leading to undesired changes in the results. Based on the analysis that these errors come from the text-conditioned scores, a new regularization technique, called fixed-point iterative regularization (FPR), is proposed to modify the score itself, driving the preservation of the identity even including poses and structures. Thanks to a self-correction by FPR, the proposed method provides clear and unambiguous representations corresponding to the given prompts in image-to-image editing and editable neural radiance field (NeRF). The structural consistency between the source and the edited data is obviously maintained compared to other state-of-the-art methods.

Donghoon Ahn, Jiwon Kang, Sanghyun Lee et al.

Recent guidance methods in diffusion models steer reverse sampling by perturbing the model to construct an implicit weak model and guide generation away from it. Among these approaches, attention perturbation has demonstrated strong empirical performance in unconditional scenarios where classifier-free guidance is not applicable. However, existing attention perturbation methods lack principled approaches for determining where perturbations should be applied, particularly in Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures where quality-relevant computations are distributed across layers. In this paper, we investigate the granularity of attention perturbations, ranging from the layer level down to individual attention heads, and discover that specific heads govern distinct visual concepts such as structure, style, and texture quality. Building on this insight, we propose "HeadHunter", a systematic framework for iteratively selecting attention heads that align with user-centric objectives, enabling fine-grained control over generation quality and visual attributes. In addition, we introduce SoftPAG, which linearly interpolates each selected head's attention map toward an identity matrix, providing a continuous knob to tune perturbation strength and suppress artifacts. Our approach not only mitigates the oversmoothing issues of existing layer-level perturbation but also enables targeted manipulation of specific visual styles through compositional head selection. We validate our method on modern large-scale DiT-based text-to-image models including Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX.1, demonstrating superior performance in both general quality enhancement and style-specific guidance. Our work provides the first head-level analysis of attention perturbation in diffusion models, uncovering interpretable specialization within attention layers and enabling practical design of effective perturbation strategies.

Jaewoo Jung, Jisang Han, Honggyu An et al.

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has recently demonstrated impressive capabilities in real-time novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction. However, 3DGS heavily depends on the accurate initialization derived from Structure-from-Motion (SfM) methods. When the quality of the initial point cloud deteriorates, such as in the presence of noise or when using randomly initialized point cloud, 3DGS often undergoes large performance drops. To address this limitation, we propose a novel optimization strategy dubbed RAIN-GS (Relaing Accurate Initialization Constraint for 3D Gaussian Splatting). Our approach is based on an in-depth analysis of the original 3DGS optimization scheme and the analysis of the SfM initialization in the frequency domain. Leveraging simple modifications based on our analyses, RAIN-GS successfully trains 3D Gaussians from sub-optimal point cloud (e.g., randomly initialized point cloud), effectively relaxing the need for accurate initialization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our strategy through quantitative and qualitative comparisons on multiple datasets, where RAIN-GS trained with random point cloud achieves performance on-par with or even better than 3DGS trained with accurate SfM point cloud. Our project page and code can be found at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/RAIN-GS.