Jacob Zhiyuan Fang

Jacob Zhiyuan Fang, Skyler Zheng, Vasu Sharma et al.

To build scalable models for challenging real-world tasks, it is important to learn from diverse, multi-modal data in various forms (e.g., videos, text, and images). Among the existing works, a plethora of them have focused on leveraging large but cumbersome cross-modal architectures. Regardless of their effectiveness, larger architectures unavoidably prevent the models from being extended to real-world applications, so building a lightweight VL architecture and an efficient learning schema is of great practical value. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Video-Language Model (dubbed as E-ViLM) and a masked video modeling (MVM) schema, assisted with a semantic vector-quantized tokenizer. In particular, our E-ViLM learns to reconstruct the semantic labels of masked video regions, produced by the pre-trained vector-quantized tokenizer, which discretizes the continuous visual signals into labels. We show that with our simple MVM task and regular VL pre-training modelings, our E-ViLM, despite its compactness, is able to learn expressive representations from Video-Language corpus and generalize well to extensive Video-Language tasks including video question answering, text-to-video retrieval, etc. In particular, our E-ViLM obtains obvious efficiency improvements by reaching competing performances with faster inference speed, i.e., our model reaches $39.3$% Top-$1$ accuracy on the MSRVTT benchmark, retaining $91.4$% of the accuracy of state-of-the-art larger VL architecture with only $15%$ parameters and $94.8%$ fewer GFLOPs. We also provide extensive ablative studies that validate the effectiveness of our proposed learning schema for E-ViLM.

Kaiwen Zhang, Liming Jiang, Angtian Wang et al.

Visual storytelling requires generating multi-shot videos with cinematic quality and long-range consistency. Inspired by human memory, we propose StoryMem, a paradigm that reformulates long-form video storytelling as iterative shot synthesis conditioned on explicit visual memory, transforming pre-trained single-shot video diffusion models into multi-shot storytellers. This is achieved by a novel Memory-to-Video (M2V) design, which maintains a compact and dynamically updated memory bank of keyframes from historical generated shots. The stored memory is then injected into single-shot video diffusion models via latent concatenation and negative RoPE shifts with only LoRA fine-tuning. A semantic keyframe selection strategy, together with aesthetic preference filtering, further ensures informative and stable memory throughout generation. Moreover, the proposed framework naturally accommodates smooth shot transitions and customized story generation applications. To facilitate evaluation, we introduce ST-Bench, a diverse benchmark for multi-shot video storytelling. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StoryMem achieves superior cross-shot consistency over previous methods while preserving high aesthetic quality and prompt adherence, marking a significant step toward coherent minute-long video storytelling.

Yufan Deng, Yuanyang Yin, Xun Guo et al. · bytedance

We tackle the task of any-reference video generation, which aims to synthesize videos conditioned on arbitrary types and combinations of reference subjects, together with textual prompts. This task faces persistent challenges, including identity inconsistency, entanglement among multiple reference subjects, and copy-paste artifacts. To address these issues, we introduce MAGREF, a unified and effective framework for any-reference video generation. Our approach incorporates masked guidance and a subject disentanglement mechanism, enabling flexible synthesis conditioned on diverse reference images and textual prompts. Specifically, masked guidance employs a region-aware masking mechanism combined with pixel-wise channel concatenation to preserve appearance features of multiple subjects along the channel dimension. This design preserves identity consistency and maintains the capabilities of the pre-trained backbone, without requiring any architectural changes. To mitigate subject confusion, we introduce a subject disentanglement mechanism which injects the semantic values of each subject derived from the text condition into its corresponding visual region. Additionally, we establish a four-stage data pipeline to construct diverse training pairs, effectively alleviating copy-paste artifacts. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive benchmark demonstrate that MAGREF consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for scalable, controllable, and high-fidelity any-reference video synthesis. Code and model can be found at: https://github.com/MAGREF-Video/MAGREF

Yufan Deng, Xun Guo, Yizhi Wang et al. · bytedance

Video generation has witnessed remarkable progress with the advent of deep generative models, particularly diffusion models. While existing methods excel in generating high-quality videos from text prompts or single images, personalized multi-subject video generation remains a largely unexplored challenge. This task involves synthesizing videos that incorporate multiple distinct subjects, each defined by separate reference images, while ensuring temporal and spatial consistency. Current approaches primarily rely on mapping subject images to keywords in text prompts, which introduces ambiguity and limits their ability to model subject relationships effectively. In this paper, we propose CINEMA, a novel framework for coherent multi-subject video generation by leveraging Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our approach eliminates the need for explicit correspondences between subject images and text entities, mitigating ambiguity and reducing annotation effort. By leveraging MLLM to interpret subject relationships, our method facilitates scalability, enabling the use of large and diverse datasets for training. Furthermore, our framework can be conditioned on varying numbers of subjects, offering greater flexibility in personalized content creation. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves subject consistency, and overall video coherence, paving the way for advanced applications in storytelling, interactive media, and personalized video generation.

Xuehai He, Jian Zheng, Jacob Zhiyuan Fang et al.

Controllable text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate images conditioned on both text prompts and semantic inputs of other modalities like edge maps. Nevertheless, current controllable T2I methods commonly face challenges related to efficiency and faithfulness, especially when conditioning on multiple inputs from either the same or diverse modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel Flexible and Efficient method, FlexEControl, for controllable T2I generation. At the core of FlexEControl is a unique weight decomposition strategy, which allows for streamlined integration of various input types. This approach not only enhances the faithfulness of the generated image to the control, but also significantly reduces the computational overhead typically associated with multimodal conditioning. Our approach achieves a reduction of 41% in trainable parameters and 30% in memory usage compared with Uni-ControlNet. Moreover, it doubles data efficiency and can flexibly generate images under the guidance of multiple input conditions of various modalities.

Angtian Wang, Haibin Huang, Jacob Zhiyuan Fang et al. · bytedance

We propose a unified framework for motion control in video generation that seamlessly integrates camera movement, object-level translation, and fine-grained local motion using trajectory-based inputs. In contrast to prior methods that address these motion types through separate modules or task-specific designs, our approach offers a cohesive solution by projecting user-defined trajectories into the latent space of pre-trained image-to-video generation models via a lightweight motion injector. Users can specify keypoints and their motion paths to control localized deformations, entire object motion, virtual camera dynamics, or combinations of these. The injected trajectory signals guide the generative process to produce temporally consistent and semantically aligned motion sequences. Our framework demonstrates superior performance across multiple video motion control tasks, including stylized motion effects (e.g., motion brushes), dynamic viewpoint changes, and precise local motion manipulation. Experiments show that our method provides significantly better controllability and visual quality compared to prior approaches and commercial solutions, while remaining broadly compatible with various state-of-the-art video generation backbones. Project page: https://anytraj.github.io/.

Guofeng Zhang, Angtian Wang, Jacob Zhiyuan Fang et al. · bytedance

Text-to-video generation has advanced rapidly in visual fidelity, whereas standard methods still have limited ability to control the subject composition of generated scenes. Prior work shows that adding localized text control signals, such as bounding boxes or segmentation masks, can help. However, these methods struggle in complex scenarios and degrade in multi-object settings, offering limited precision and lacking a clear correspondence between individual trajectories and visual entities as the number of controllable objects increases. We introduce Text-Grounded Trajectories (TGT), a framework that conditions video generation on trajectories paired with localized text descriptions. We propose Location-Aware Cross-Attention (LACA) to integrate these signals and adopt a dual-CFG scheme to separately modulate local and global text guidance. In addition, we develop a data processing pipeline that produces trajectories with localized descriptions of tracked entities, and we annotate two million high quality video clips to train TGT. Together, these components enable TGT to use point trajectories as intuitive motion handles, pairing each trajectory with text to control both appearance and motion. Extensive experiments show that TGT achieves higher visual quality, more accurate text alignment, and improved motion controllability compared with prior approaches. Website: https://textgroundedtraj.github.io.

Zhongping Zhang, Jian Zheng, Jacob Zhiyuan Fang et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance in text-guided image generation. Current methods that leverage the knowledge of these models for image editing either fine-tune them using the input image (e.g., Imagic) or incorporate structure information as additional constraints (e.g., ControlNet). However, fine-tuning large-scale diffusion models on a single image can lead to severe overfitting issues and lengthy inference time. Information leakage from pretrained models also make it challenging to preserve image content not related to the text input. Additionally, methods that incorporate structural guidance (e.g., edge maps, semantic maps, keypoints) find retaining attributes like colors and textures difficult. Using the input image as a control could mitigate these issues, but since these models are trained via reconstruction, a model can simply hide information about the original image when encoding it to perfectly reconstruct the image without learning the editing task. To address these challenges, we propose a text-to-image editing model with an Image Information Removal module (IIR) that selectively erases color-related and texture-related information from the original image, allowing us to better preserve the text-irrelevant content and avoid issues arising from information hiding. Our experiments on CUB, Outdoor Scenes, and COCO reports our approach achieves the best editability-fidelity trade-off results. In addition, a user study on COCO shows that our edited images are preferred 35% more often than prior work.