TokenFlow: Unified Image Tokenizer for Multimodal Understanding and GenerationLiao Qu, Huichao Zhang, Yiheng Liu et al.
We present TokenFlow, a novel unified image tokenizer that bridges the long-standing gap between multimodal understanding and generation. Prior research attempt to employ a single reconstruction-targeted Vector Quantization (VQ) encoder for unifying these two tasks. We observe that understanding and generation require fundamentally different granularities of visual information. This leads to a critical trade-off, particularly compromising performance in multimodal understanding tasks. TokenFlow addresses this challenge through an innovative dual-codebook architecture that decouples semantic and pixel-level feature learning while maintaining their alignment via a shared mapping mechanism. This design enables direct access to both high-level semantic representations crucial for understanding tasks and fine-grained visual features essential for generation through shared indices. Our extensive experiments demonstrate TokenFlow's superiority across multiple dimensions. Leveraging TokenFlow, we demonstrate for the first time that discrete visual input can surpass LLaVA-1.5 13B in understanding performance, achieving a 7.2\% average improvement. For image reconstruction, we achieve a strong FID score of 0.63 at 384*384 resolution. Moreover, TokenFlow establishes state-of-the-art performance in autoregressive image generation with a GenEval score of 0.55 at 256*256 resolution, achieving comparable results to SDXL.
26.9CVDec 5, 2024
CreatiLayout: Siamese Multimodal Diffusion Transformer for Creative Layout-to-Image GenerationHui Zhang, Dexiang Hong, Yitong Wang et al.
Diffusion models have been recognized for their ability to generate images that are not only visually appealing but also of high artistic quality. As a result, Layout-to-Image (L2I) generation has been proposed to leverage region-specific positions and descriptions to enable more precise and controllable generation. However, previous methods primarily focus on UNet-based models (\eg SD1.5 and SDXL), and limited effort has explored Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs), which have demonstrated powerful image generation capabilities. Enabling MM-DiT for layout-to-image generation seems straightforward but is challenging due to the complexity of how layout is introduced, integrated, and balanced among multiple modalities. To this end, we explore various network variants to efficiently incorporate layout guidance into MM-DiT, and ultimately present SiamLayout. To inherit the advantages of MM-DiT, we use a separate set of network weights to process the layout, treating it as equally important as the image and text modalities. Meanwhile, to alleviate the competition among modalities, we decouple the image-layout interaction into a siamese branch alongside the image-text one and fuse them in the later stage. Moreover, we contribute a large-scale layout dataset, named LayoutSAM, which includes 2.7 million image-text pairs and 10.7 million entities. Each entity is annotated with a bounding box and a detailed description. We further construct the LayoutSAM-Eval benchmark as a comprehensive tool for evaluating the L2I generation quality. Finally, we introduce the Layout Designer, which taps into the potential of large language models in layout planning, transforming them into experts in layout generation and optimization. These components form CreatiLayout -- a systematic solution that integrates the layout model, dataset, and planner for creative layout-to-image generation.
20.4CVJul 6, 2025
DreamPoster: A Unified Framework for Image-Conditioned Generative Poster DesignXiwei Hu, Haokun Chen, Zhongqi Qi et al.
We present DreamPoster, a Text-to-Image generation framework that intelligently synthesizes high-quality posters from user-provided images and text prompts while maintaining content fidelity and supporting flexible resolution and layout outputs. Specifically, DreamPoster is built upon our T2I model, Seedream3.0 to uniformly process different poster generating types. For dataset construction, we propose a systematic data annotation pipeline that precisely annotates textual content and typographic hierarchy information within poster images, while employing comprehensive methodologies to construct paired datasets comprising source materials (e.g., raw graphics/text) and their corresponding final poster outputs. Additionally, we implement a progressive training strategy that enables the model to hierarchically acquire multi-task generation capabilities while maintaining high-quality generation. Evaluations on our testing benchmarks demonstrate DreamPoster's superiority over existing methods, achieving a high usability rate of 88.55\%, compared to GPT-4o (47.56\%) and SeedEdit3.0 (25.96\%). DreamPoster will be online in Jimeng and other Bytedance Apps.
DetailFlow: 1D Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Image Generation via Next-Detail PredictionYiheng Liu, Liao Qu, Huichao Zhang et al.
This paper presents DetailFlow, a coarse-to-fine 1D autoregressive (AR) image generation method that models images through a novel next-detail prediction strategy. By learning a resolution-aware token sequence supervised with progressively degraded images, DetailFlow enables the generation process to start from the global structure and incrementally refine details. This coarse-to-fine 1D token sequence aligns well with the autoregressive inference mechanism, providing a more natural and efficient way for the AR model to generate complex visual content. Our compact 1D AR model achieves high-quality image synthesis with significantly fewer tokens than previous approaches, i.e. VAR/VQGAN. We further propose a parallel inference mechanism with self-correction that accelerates generation speed by approximately 8x while reducing accumulation sampling error inherent in teacher-forcing supervision. On the ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, our method achieves 2.96 gFID with 128 tokens, outperforming VAR (3.3 FID) and FlexVAR (3.05 FID), which both require 680 tokens in their AR models. Moreover, due to the significantly reduced token count and parallel inference mechanism, our method runs nearly 2x faster inference speed compared to VAR and FlexVAR. Extensive experimental results demonstrate DetailFlow's superior generation quality and efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
14.4CVJun 17, 2025
DreamLight: Towards Harmonious and Consistent Image RelightingYong Liu, Wenpeng Xiao, Qianqian Wang et al.
We introduce a model named DreamLight for universal image relighting in this work, which can seamlessly composite subjects into a new background while maintaining aesthetic uniformity in terms of lighting and color tone. The background can be specified by natural images (image-based relighting) or generated from unlimited text prompts (text-based relighting). Existing studies primarily focus on image-based relighting, while with scant exploration into text-based scenarios. Some works employ intricate disentanglement pipeline designs relying on environment maps to provide relevant information, which grapples with the expensive data cost required for intrinsic decomposition and light source. Other methods take this task as an image translation problem and perform pixel-level transformation with autoencoder architecture. While these methods have achieved decent harmonization effects, they struggle to generate realistic and natural light interaction effects between the foreground and background. To alleviate these challenges, we reorganize the input data into a unified format and leverage the semantic prior provided by the pretrained diffusion model to facilitate the generation of natural results. Moreover, we propose a Position-Guided Light Adapter (PGLA) that condenses light information from different directions in the background into designed light query embeddings, and modulates the foreground with direction-biased masked attention. In addition, we present a post-processing module named Spectral Foreground Fixer (SFF) to adaptively reorganize different frequency components of subject and relighted background, which helps enhance the consistency of foreground appearance. Extensive comparisons and user study demonstrate that our DreamLight achieves remarkable relighting performance.