Runyi Li

Yonghao Yu, Lang Huang, Runyi Li et al.

Causal video generators must predict from the past, but they need not learn only from it. In streaming autoregressive video diffusion, each emitted segment becomes a commitment that future segments must preserve. Standard training, however, only asks each causal state to explain the present. This creates what we call a representation-level planning gap: states that fit the current segment may discard identity, layout, and motion information needed for a consistent future. We introduce Video-Mirai, a training-only method that closes this gap without changing causal inference: the generator rolls out causally, a frozen foresight encoder reads the completed rollout non-causally, and a lightweight predictor distills the resulting stopped-gradient targets into causal states. Future frames supervise representations, never generator inputs. At inference, the encoder and predictor are discarded, leaving the original architecture, per-step FLOPs, and KV-cache behavior unchanged. Video-Mirai improves a strong Causal-Forcing baseline on 5-second VBench from 83.8 to 84.6 in terms of Total Score. On 30-second rollouts beyond the training horizon, subject consistency improves from 84.9 to 88.5 and background consistency from 90.2 to 91.9. Ablations identify future-conditioned targets as the key ingredient, and probes show that future frames become more decodable from current features. Causality should constrain inference, not representation supervision. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight. Project page: https://y0uroy.github.io/Video-Mirai.

Runyi Li

Low-dose Computed Tomography (LDCT) reconstruction is an important task in medical image analysis. Recent years have seen many deep learning based methods, proved to be effective in this area. However, these methods mostly follow a supervised architecture, which needs paired CT image of full dose and quarter dose, and the solution is highly dependent on specific measurements. In this work, we introduce Denoising Diffusion LDCT Model, dubbed as DDLM, generating noise-free CT image using conditioned sampling. DDLM uses pretrained model, and need no training nor tuning process, thus our proposal is in unsupervised manner. Experiments on LDCT images have shown comparable performance of DDLM using less inference time, surpassing other state-of-the-art methods, proving both accurate and efficient. Implementation code will be set to public soon.

Xuhan Sheng, Runyi Li, Bin Chen et al.

Omnidirectional image super-resolution (ODISR) aims to upscale low-resolution (LR) omnidirectional images (ODIs) to high-resolution (HR), addressing the growing demand for detailed visual content across a $180^{\circ}\times360^{\circ}$ viewport. Existing methods are limited by simple degradation assumptions (e.g., bicubic downsampling), which fail to capture the complex, unknown real-world degradation processes. Recent diffusion-based approaches suffer from slow inference due to their hundreds of sampling steps and frequent pixel-latent space conversions. To tackle these challenges, in this paper, we propose RealOSR, a novel diffusion-based approach for real-world ODISR (Real-ODISR) with single-step diffusion denoising. To sufficiently exploit the input information, RealOSR introduces a lightweight domain alignment module, which facilitates the efficient injection of LR ODI into the single-step latent denoising. Additionally, to better utilize the rich semantic and multi-scale feature modeling ability of denoising UNet, we develop a latent unfolding module that simulates the gradient descent process directly in latent space. Experimental results demonstrate that RealOSR outperforms previous methods in both ODI recovery quality and efficiency. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art diffusion-based ODISR method, OmniSSR, RealOSR achieves significant improvements in visual quality and over \textbf{200$\times$} inference acceleration. Our code and models will be released.

Yonghao Yu, Lang Huang, Zerun Wang et al.

Autoregressive (AR) visual generators model images as sequences of discrete tokens and are trained with next token likelihood. This strict causality supervision optimizes each step only by its immediate next token, which diminishes global coherence and slows convergence. We ask whether foresight, training signals that originate from later tokens, can help AR visual generation. We conduct a series of controlled diagnostics along the injection level, foresight layout, and foresight source axes, unveiling a key insight: aligning foresight to AR models' internal representation on the 2D image grids improves causality modeling. We formulate this insight with Mirai (meaning "future" in Japanese), a general framework that injects future information into AR training with no architecture change and no extra inference overhead: Mirai-E uses explicit foresight from multiple future positions of unidirectional representations, whereas Mirai-I leverages implicit foresight from matched bidirectional representations. Extensive experiments show that Mirai significantly accelerates convergence and improves generation quality. For instance, Mirai can speed up LlamaGen-B's convergence by up to 10$\times$ and reduce the generation FID from 5.34 to 4.34 on the ImageNet class-condition image generation benchmark. Our study highlights that visual autoregressive models need foresight.

Xuanyu Zhang, Runyi Li, Jiwen Yu et al.

In the era where AI-generated content (AIGC) models can produce stunning and lifelike images, the lingering shadow of unauthorized reproductions and malicious tampering poses imminent threats to copyright integrity and information security. Current image watermarking methods, while widely accepted for safeguarding visual content, can only protect copyright and ensure traceability. They fall short in localizing increasingly realistic image tampering, potentially leading to trust crises, privacy violations, and legal disputes. To solve this challenge, we propose an innovative proactive forensics framework EditGuard, to unify copyright protection and tamper-agnostic localization, especially for AIGC-based editing methods. It can offer a meticulous embedding of imperceptible watermarks and precise decoding of tampered areas and copyright information. Leveraging our observed fragility and locality of image-into-image steganography, the realization of EditGuard can be converted into a united image-bit steganography issue, thus completely decoupling the training process from the tampering types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our EditGuard balances the tamper localization accuracy, copyright recovery precision, and generalizability to various AIGC-based tampering methods, especially for image forgery that is difficult for the naked eye to detect. The project page is available at https://xuanyuzhang21.github.io/project/editguard/.

Xuanyu Zhang, Youmin Xu, Runyi Li et al.

AI-generated video has revolutionized short video production, filmmaking, and personalized media, making video local editing an essential tool. However, this progress also blurs the line between reality and fiction, posing challenges in multimedia forensics. To solve this urgent issue, V2A-Mark is proposed to address the limitations of current video tampering forensics, such as poor generalizability, singular function, and single modality focus. Combining the fragility of video-into-video steganography with deep robust watermarking, our method can embed invisible visual-audio localization watermarks and copyright watermarks into the original video frames and audio, enabling precise manipulation localization and copyright protection. We also design a temporal alignment and fusion module and degradation prompt learning to enhance the localization accuracy and decoding robustness. Meanwhile, we introduce a sample-level audio localization method and a cross-modal copyright extraction mechanism to couple the information of audio and video frames. The effectiveness of V2A-Mark has been verified on a visual-audio tampering dataset, emphasizing its superiority in localization precision and copyright accuracy, crucial for the sustainable development of video editing in the AIGC video era.

Xuanyu Zhang, Zecheng Tang, Zhipei Xu et al.

With the rapid growth of generative AI and its widespread application in image editing, new risks have emerged regarding the authenticity and integrity of digital content. Existing versatile watermarking approaches suffer from trade-offs between tamper localization precision and visual quality. Constrained by the limited flexibility of previous framework, their localized watermark must remain fixed across all images. Under AIGC-editing, their copyright extraction accuracy is also unsatisfactory. To address these challenges, we propose OmniGuard, a novel augmented versatile watermarking approach that integrates proactive embedding with passive, blind extraction for robust copyright protection and tamper localization. OmniGuard employs a hybrid forensic framework that enables flexible localization watermark selection and introduces a degradation-aware tamper extraction network for precise localization under challenging conditions. Additionally, a lightweight AIGC-editing simulation layer is designed to enhance robustness across global and local editing. Extensive experiments show that OmniGuard achieves superior fidelity, robustness, and flexibility. Compared to the recent state-of-the-art approach EditGuard, our method outperforms it by 4.25dB in PSNR of the container image, 20.7% in F1-Score under noisy conditions, and 14.8% in average bit accuracy.

Runyi Li, Xuhan Sheng, Weiqi Li et al.

Omnidirectional images (ODIs) are commonly used in real-world visual tasks, and high-resolution ODIs help improve the performance of related visual tasks. Most existing super-resolution methods for ODIs use end-to-end learning strategies, resulting in inferior realness of generated images and a lack of effective out-of-domain generalization capabilities in training methods. Image generation methods represented by diffusion model provide strong priors for visual tasks and have been proven to be effectively applied to image restoration tasks. Leveraging the image priors of the Stable Diffusion (SD) model, we achieve omnidirectional image super-resolution with both fidelity and realness, dubbed as OmniSSR. Firstly, we transform the equirectangular projection (ERP) images into tangent projection (TP) images, whose distribution approximates the planar image domain. Then, we use SD to iteratively sample initial high-resolution results. At each denoising iteration, we further correct and update the initial results using the proposed Octadecaplex Tangent Information Interaction (OTII) and Gradient Decomposition (GD) technique to ensure better consistency. Finally, the TP images are transformed back to obtain the final high-resolution results. Our method is zero-shot, requiring no training or fine-tuning. Experiments of our method on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Runyi Li, Xuanyu Zhang, Chuhan Tong et al.

With the advancement of AIGC technologies, the modalities generated by models have expanded from images and videos to 3D objects, leading to an increasing number of works focused on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) generative models. Existing research on copyright protection for generative models has primarily concentrated on watermarking in image and text modalities, with little exploration into the copyright protection of 3D object generative models. In this paper, we propose the first bit watermarking framework for 3DGS generative models, named GaussianSeal, to enable the decoding of bits as copyright identifiers from the rendered outputs of generated 3DGS. By incorporating adaptive bit modulation modules into the generative model and embedding them into the network blocks in an adaptive way, we achieve high-precision bit decoding with minimal training overhead while maintaining the fidelity of the model's outputs. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms post-processing watermarking approaches for 3DGS objects, achieving superior performance of watermark decoding accuracy and preserving the quality of the generated results.

Runyi Li, Bin Chen, Jian Zhang et al.

Blind face restoration from low-quality (LQ) images is a challenging task that requires not only high-fidelity image reconstruction but also the preservation of facial identity. While diffusion models like Stable Diffusion have shown promise in generating high-quality (HQ) images, their VAE modules are typically trained only on HQ data, resulting in semantic misalignment when encoding LQ inputs. This mismatch significantly weakens the effectiveness of LQ conditions during the denoising process. Existing approaches often tackle this issue by retraining the VAE encoder, which is computationally expensive and memory-intensive. To address this limitation efficiently, we propose LAFR (Latent Alignment for Face Restoration), a novel codebook-based latent space adapter that aligns the latent distribution of LQ images with that of HQ counterparts, enabling semantically consistent diffusion sampling without altering the original VAE. To further enhance identity preservation, we introduce a multi-level restoration loss that combines constraints from identity embeddings and facial structural priors. Additionally, by leveraging the inherent structural regularity of facial images, we show that lightweight finetuning of diffusion prior on just 0.9% of FFHQ dataset is sufficient to achieve results comparable to state-of-the-art methods, reduce training time by 70%. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world face restoration benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of LAFR, achieving high-quality, identity-preserving face reconstruction from severely degraded inputs.

Runyi Li, Bin Chen, Jian Zhang et al.

Real-world image super-resolution is a critical image processing task, where two key evaluation criteria are the fidelity to the original image and the visual realness of the generated results. Although existing methods based on diffusion models excel in visual realness by leveraging strong priors, they often struggle to achieve an effective balance between fidelity and realness. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that a linear combination of multiple models outperforms individual models, motivating us to harness the strengths of different models for a more effective trade-off. Based on this insight, we propose a distillation-based approach that leverages the geometric decomposition of both fidelity and realness, alongside the performance advantages of multiple teacher models, to strike a more balanced trade-off. Furthermore, we explore the controllability of this trade-off, enabling a flexible and adjustable super-resolution process, which we call CTSR (Controllable Trade-off Super-Resolution). Experiments conducted on several real-world image super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior performance across both fidelity and realness metrics.