Weijia Mao

Jia-Wei Liu, Yan-Pei Cao, Weijia Mao et al.

Modeling dynamic scenes is important for many applications such as virtual reality and telepresence. Despite achieving unprecedented fidelity for novel view synthesis in dynamic scenes, existing methods based on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) suffer from slow convergence (i.e., model training time measured in days). In this paper, we present DeVRF, a novel representation to accelerate learning dynamic radiance fields. The core of DeVRF is to model both the 3D canonical space and 4D deformation field of a dynamic, non-rigid scene with explicit and discrete voxel-based representations. However, it is quite challenging to train such a representation which has a large number of model parameters, often resulting in overfitting issues. To overcome this challenge, we devise a novel static-to-dynamic learning paradigm together with a new data capture setup that is convenient to deploy in practice. This paradigm unlocks efficient learning of deformable radiance fields via utilizing the 3D volumetric canonical space learnt from multi-view static images to ease the learning of 4D voxel deformation field with only few-view dynamic sequences. To further improve the efficiency of our DeVRF and its synthesized novel view's quality, we conduct thorough explorations and identify a set of strategies. We evaluate DeVRF on both synthetic and real-world dynamic scenes with different types of deformation. Experiments demonstrate that DeVRF achieves two orders of magnitude speedup (100x faster) with on-par high-fidelity results compared to the previous state-of-the-art approaches. The code and dataset will be released in https://github.com/showlab/DeVRF.

Jinheng Xie, Weijia Mao, Zechen Bai et al.

We present a unified transformer, i.e., Show-o, that unifies multimodal understanding and generation. Unlike fully autoregressive models, Show-o unifies autoregressive and (discrete) diffusion modeling to adaptively handle inputs and outputs of various and mixed modalities. The unified model flexibly supports a wide range of vision-language tasks including visual question-answering, text-to-image generation, text-guided inpainting/extrapolation, and mixed-modality generation. Across various benchmarks, it demonstrates comparable or superior performance to existing individual models with an equivalent or larger number of parameters tailored for understanding or generation. This significantly highlights its potential as a next-generation foundation model. Code and models are released at https://github.com/showlab/Show-o.

Satoshi Tsutsui, Weijia Mao, Sijing Lin et al.

Rendering scenes with a high-quality human face from arbitrary viewpoints is a practical and useful technique for many real-world applications. Recently, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), a rendering technique that uses neural networks to approximate classical ray tracing, have been considered as one of the promising approaches for synthesizing novel views from a sparse set of images. We find that NeRF can render new views while maintaining geometric consistency, but it does not properly maintain skin details, such as moles and pores. These details are important particularly for faces because when we look at an image of a face, we are much more sensitive to details than when we look at other objects. On the other hand, 3D Morpable Models (3DMMs) based on traditional meshes and textures can perform well in terms of skin detail despite that it has less precise geometry and cannot cover the head and the entire scene with background. Based on these observations, we propose a method to use both NeRF and 3DMM to synthesize a high-fidelity novel view of a scene with a face. Our method learns a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to mix a NeRF-synthesized image and a 3DMM-rendered image and produces a photorealistic scene with a face preserving the skin details. Experiments with various real-world scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. The code will be available on https://github.com/showlab/headshot .

Jia-Wei Liu, Yan-Pei Cao, Jay Zhangjie Wu et al.

Despite recent progress in diffusion-based video editing, existing methods are limited to short-length videos due to the contradiction between long-range consistency and frame-wise editing. Prior attempts to address this challenge by introducing video-2D representations encounter significant difficulties with large-scale motion- and view-change videos, especially in human-centric scenarios. To overcome this, we propose to introduce the dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) as the innovative video representation, where the editing can be performed in the 3D spaces and propagated to the entire video via the deformation field. To provide consistent and controllable editing, we propose the image-based video-NeRF editing pipeline with a set of innovative designs, including multi-view multi-pose Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) from both the 2D personalized diffusion prior and 3D diffusion prior, reconstruction losses, text-guided local parts super-resolution, and style transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, dubbed as DynVideo-E, significantly outperforms SOTA approaches on two challenging datasets by a large margin of 50% ~ 95% for human preference. Code will be released at https://showlab.github.io/DynVideo-E/.

Yiren Song, Cheng Liu, Weijia Mao et al.

Learning directly from human demonstration videos is a key milestone toward scalable and generalizable robot learning. Yet existing methods rely on intermediate representations such as keypoints or trajectories, introducing information loss and cumulative errors that harm temporal and visual consistency. We present Mitty, a Diffusion Transformer that enables video In-Context Learning for end-to-end Human2Robot video generation. Built on a pretrained video diffusion model, Mitty leverages strong visual-temporal priors to translate human demonstrations into robot-execution videos without action labels or intermediate abstractions. Demonstration videos are compressed into condition tokens and fused with robot denoising tokens through bidirectional attention during diffusion. To mitigate paired-data scarcity, we also develop an automatic synthesis pipeline that produces high-quality human-robot pairs from large egocentric datasets. Experiments on Human2Robot and EPIC-Kitchens show that Mitty delivers state-of-the-art results, strong generalization to unseen environments, and new insights for scalable robot learning from human observations.

Weijia Mao, Zhenheng Yang, Mike Zheng Shou

Unified multimodal large language models such as Show-o and Janus have achieved strong performance across both generation and understanding tasks. However, these models typically rely on large-scale datasets and require substantial computation during the pretraining stage. In addition, several post-training methods have been proposed, but they often depend on external data or are limited to task-specific customization. In this work, we introduce UniRL, a self-improving post-training approach. Our approach enables the model to generate images from prompts and use them as training data in each iteration, without relying on any external image data. Moreover, it enables the two tasks to enhance each other: the generated images are used for understanding, and the understanding results are used to supervise generation. We explore supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to optimize the models. UniRL offers three key advantages: (1) it requires no external image data, as all training samples are generated by the model itself during training; (2) it not only improves individual task performance, but also reduces the imbalance between generation and understanding; and (3) it requires only several additional training steps during the post-training stage. We evaluate UniRL on top of Show-o and Janus, achieving a GenEval score of 0.77 for Show-o and 0.65 for Janus. Code and models will be released in https://github.com/showlab/UniRL.

Rui Zhao, Weijia Mao, Mike Zheng Shou

Adapting generative models to specific domains presents an effective solution for satisfying specialized requirements. However, adapting to some complex domains remains challenging, especially when these domains require substantial paired data to capture the targeted distributions. Since unpaired data from a single modality, such as vision or language, is more readily available, we utilize the bidirectional mappings between vision and language learned by the unified generative model to enable training on unpaired data for domain adaptation. Specifically, we propose DoraCycle, which integrates two multimodal cycles: text-to-image-to-text and image-to-text-to-image. The model is optimized through cross-entropy loss computed at the cycle endpoints, where both endpoints share the same modality. This facilitates self-evolution of the model without reliance on annotated text-image pairs. Experimental results demonstrate that for tasks independent of paired knowledge, such as stylization, DoraCycle can effectively adapt the unified model using only unpaired data. For tasks involving new paired knowledge, such as specific identities, a combination of a small set of paired image-text examples and larger-scale unpaired data is sufficient for effective domain-oriented adaptation. The code will be released at https://github.com/showlab/DoraCycle.

Yuchao Gu, Guian Fang, Yuxin Jiang et al.

Few-step video generation has been significantly advanced by consistency distillation. However, the performance of consistency-distilled models often degrades as more sampling steps are allocated at test time, limiting their effectiveness for any-step video diffusion. This limitation arises because consistency distillation replaces the original probability-flow ODE trajectory with a consistency-sampling trajectory, weakening the desirable test-time scaling behavior of ODE sampling. To address this limitation, we introduce AnyFlow, the first any-step video diffusion distillation framework based on flow maps. Instead of distilling a model for only a few fixed sampling steps, AnyFlow optimizes the full ODE sampling trajectory. To this end, we shift the distillation target from endpoint consistency mapping $(z_{t}\rightarrow z_{0})$ to flow-map transition learning $(z_{t}\rightarrow z_{r})$ over arbitrary time intervals. We further propose Flow Map Backward Simulation, which decomposes a full Euler rollout into shortcut flow-map transitions, enabling efficient on-policy distillation that reduces test-time errors (i.e., discretization error in few-step sampling and exposure bias in causal generation). Extensive experiments across both bidirectional and causal architectures, at scales ranging from 1.3B to 14B parameters, demonstrate that AnyFlow achieves performance matches or surpasses consistency-based counterparts in the few-step regime, while scaling with sampling step budgets.

Weijia Mao, Zhenheng Yang, Mike Zheng Shou

Unified multimodal transformers, which handle both generation and understanding tasks within a shared parameter space, have received increasing attention in recent research. Although various unified transformers have been proposed, training these models is costly due to redundant tokens and heavy attention computation. In the past, studies on large language models have demonstrated that token pruning methods, such as Mixture of Depths (MoD), can significantly improve computational efficiency. MoD employs a router to select the most important ones for processing within a transformer layer. However, directly applying MoD-based token pruning to unified transformers will result in suboptimal performance because different tasks exhibit varying levels of token redundancy. In our work, we analyze the unified transformers by (1) examining attention weight patterns, (2) evaluating the layer importance and token redundancy, and (3) analyzing task interactions. Our findings reveal that token redundancy is primarily influenced by different tasks and layers. Building on these findings, we introduce UniMoD, a task-aware token pruning method that employs a separate router for each task to determine which tokens should be pruned. We apply our method to Show-o and Emu3, reducing training FLOPs by approximately 15% in Show-o and 40% in Emu3, while maintaining or improving performance on several benchmarks. Code will be released at https://github.com/showlab/UniMoD.

Yuang Ai, Jiaming Han, Shaobin Zhuang et al.

We present BitDance, a scalable autoregressive (AR) image generator that predicts binary visual tokens instead of codebook indices. With high-entropy binary latents, BitDance lets each token represent up to $2^{256}$ states, yielding a compact yet highly expressive discrete representation. Sampling from such a huge token space is difficult with standard classification. To resolve this, BitDance uses a binary diffusion head: instead of predicting an index with softmax, it employs continuous-space diffusion to generate the binary tokens. Furthermore, we propose next-patch diffusion, a new decoding method that predicts multiple tokens in parallel with high accuracy, greatly speeding up inference. On ImageNet 256x256, BitDance achieves an FID of 1.24, the best among AR models. With next-patch diffusion, BitDance beats state-of-the-art parallel AR models that use 1.4B parameters, while using 5.4x fewer parameters (260M) and achieving 8.7x speedup. For text-to-image generation, BitDance trains on large-scale multimodal tokens and generates high-resolution, photorealistic images efficiently, showing strong performance and favorable scaling. When generating 1024x1024 images, BitDance achieves a speedup of over 30x compared to prior AR models. We release code and models to facilitate further research on AR foundation models. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/shallowdream204/BitDance.

Yuchao Gu, Weijia Mao, Mike Zheng Shou

Long-context video modeling is essential for enabling generative models to function as world simulators, as they must maintain temporal coherence over extended time spans. However, most existing models are trained on short clips, limiting their ability to capture long-range dependencies, even with test-time extrapolation. While training directly on long videos is a natural solution, the rapid growth of vision tokens makes it computationally prohibitive. To support exploring efficient long-context video modeling, we first establish a strong autoregressive baseline called Frame AutoRegressive (FAR). FAR models temporal dependencies between continuous frames, converges faster than video diffusion transformers, and outperforms token-level autoregressive models. Based on this baseline, we observe context redundancy in video autoregression. Nearby frames are critical for maintaining temporal consistency, whereas distant frames primarily serve as context memory. To eliminate this redundancy, we propose the long short-term context modeling using asymmetric patchify kernels, which apply large kernels to distant frames to reduce redundant tokens, and standard kernels to local frames to preserve fine-grained detail. This significantly reduces the training cost of long videos. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on both short and long video generation, providing an effective baseline for long-context autoregressive video modeling.

Weijia Mao, Yan-Pei Cao, Jia-Wei Liu et al.

We introduce ShowRoom3D, a three-stage approach for generating high-quality 3D room-scale scenes from texts. Previous methods using 2D diffusion priors to optimize neural radiance fields for generating room-scale scenes have shown unsatisfactory quality. This is primarily attributed to the limitations of 2D priors lacking 3D awareness and constraints in the training methodology. In this paper, we utilize a 3D diffusion prior, MVDiffusion, to optimize the 3D room-scale scene. Our contributions are in two aspects. Firstly, we propose a progressive view selection process to optimize NeRF. This involves dividing the training process into three stages, gradually expanding the camera sampling scope. Secondly, we propose the pose transformation method in the second stage. It will ensure MVDiffusion provide the accurate view guidance. As a result, ShowRoom3D enables the generation of rooms with improved structural integrity, enhanced clarity from any view, reduced content repetition, and higher consistency across different perspectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method, significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin in terms of user study.

Shaobin Zhuang, Yuang Ai, Jiaming Han et al.

Unified Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) require a visual representation that simultaneously supports high-fidelity reconstruction, complex semantic extraction, and generative suitability. However, existing visual tokenizers typically struggle to satisfy these conflicting objectives within a single framework. In this paper, we introduce UniWeTok, a unified discrete tokenizer designed to bridge this gap using a massive binary codebook ($\mathit{2^{128}}$). For training framework, we introduce Pre-Post Distillation and a Generative-Aware Prior to enhance the semantic extraction and generative prior of the discrete tokens. In terms of model architecture, we propose a convolution-attention hybrid architecture with the SigLu activation function. SigLu activation not only bounds the encoder output and stabilizes the semantic distillation process but also effectively addresses the optimization conflict between token entropy loss and commitment loss. We further propose a three-stage training framework designed to enhance UniWeTok's adaptability cross various image resolutions and perception-sensitive scenarios, such as those involving human faces and textual content. On ImageNet, UniWeTok achieves state-of-the-art image generation performance (FID: UniWeTok 1.38 vs. REPA 1.42) while requiring a remarkably low training compute (Training Tokens: UniWeTok 33B vs. REPA 262B). On general-domain, UniWeTok demonstrates highly competitive capabilities across a broad range of tasks, including multimodal understanding, image generation (DPG Score: UniWeTok 86.63 vs. FLUX.1 [Dev] 83.84), and editing (GEdit Overall Score: UniWeTok 5.09 vs. OmniGen 5.06). We release code and models to facilitate community exploration of unified tokenizer and MLLM.

Weijia Mao, Hao Chen, Zhenheng Yang et al.

A reliable reward function is essential for reinforcement learning (RL) in image generation. Most current RL approaches depend on pre-trained preference models that output scalar rewards to approximate human preferences. However, these rewards often fail to capture human perception and are vulnerable to reward hacking, where higher scores do not correspond to better images. To address this, we introduce Adv-GRPO, an RL framework with an adversarial reward that iteratively updates both the reward model and the generator. The reward model is supervised using reference images as positive samples and can largely avoid being hacked. Unlike KL regularization that constrains parameter updates, our learned reward directly guides the generator through its visual outputs, leading to higher-quality images. Moreover, while optimizing existing reward functions can alleviate reward hacking, their inherent biases remain. For instance, PickScore may degrade image quality, whereas OCR-based rewards often reduce aesthetic fidelity. To address this, we take the image itself as a reward, using reference images and vision foundation models (e.g., DINO) to provide rich visual rewards. These dense visual signals, instead of a single scalar, lead to consistent gains across image quality, aesthetics, and task-specific metrics. Finally, we show that combining reference samples with foundation-model rewards enables distribution transfer and flexible style customization. In human evaluation, our method outperforms Flow-GRPO and SD3, achieving 70.0% and 72.4% win rates in image quality and aesthetics, respectively. Code and models have been released.