Jianming Zhang

Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Jingwan Lu et al.

Recent image inpainting methods have made great progress but often struggle to generate plausible image structures when dealing with large holes in complex images. This is partially due to the lack of effective network structures that can capture both the long-range dependency and high-level semantics of an image. We propose cascaded modulation GAN (CM-GAN), a new network design consisting of an encoder with Fourier convolution blocks that extract multi-scale feature representations from the input image with holes and a dual-stream decoder with a novel cascaded global-spatial modulation block at each scale level. In each decoder block, global modulation is first applied to perform coarse and semantic-aware structure synthesis, followed by spatial modulation to further adjust the feature map in a spatially adaptive fashion. In addition, we design an object-aware training scheme to prevent the network from hallucinating new objects inside holes, fulfilling the needs of object removal tasks in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Please refer to the project page: \url{https://github.com/htzheng/CM-GAN-Inpainting}.

Wei Yin, Jianming Zhang, Oliver Wang et al.

Despite significant progress made in the past few years, challenges remain for depth estimation using a single monocular image. First, it is nontrivial to train a metric-depth prediction model that can generalize well to diverse scenes mainly due to limited training data. Thus, researchers have built large-scale relative depth datasets that are much easier to collect. However, existing relative depth estimation models often fail to recover accurate 3D scene shapes due to the unknown depth shift caused by training with the relative depth data. We tackle this problem here and attempt to estimate accurate scene shapes by training on large-scale relative depth data, and estimating the depth shift. To do so, we propose a two-stage framework that first predicts depth up to an unknown scale and shift from a single monocular image, and then exploits 3D point cloud data to predict the depth shift and the camera's focal length that allow us to recover 3D scene shapes. As the two modules are trained separately, we do not need strictly paired training data. In addition, we propose an image-level normalized regression loss and a normal-based geometry loss to improve training with relative depth annotation. We test our depth model on nine unseen datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot evaluation. Code is available at: https://git.io/Depth

Linyi Jin, Jianming Zhang, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy et al. · deepmind

Geometric camera calibration is often required for applications that understand the perspective of the image. We propose perspective fields as a representation that models the local perspective properties of an image. Perspective Fields contain per-pixel information about the camera view, parameterized as an up vector and a latitude value. This representation has a number of advantages as it makes minimal assumptions about the camera model and is invariant or equivariant to common image editing operations like cropping, warping, and rotation. It is also more interpretable and aligned with human perception. We train a neural network to predict Perspective Fields and the predicted Perspective Fields can be converted to calibration parameters easily. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach under various scenarios compared with camera calibration-based methods and show example applications in image compositing.

Yiran Wang, Zhiyu Pan, Xingyi Li et al.

Temporal consistency is the key challenge of video depth estimation. Previous works are based on additional optical flow or camera poses, which is time-consuming. By contrast, we derive consistency with less information. Since videos inherently exist with heavy temporal redundancy, a missing frame could be recovered from neighboring ones. Inspired by this, we propose the frame masking network (FMNet), a spatial-temporal transformer network predicting the depth of masked frames based on their neighboring frames. By reconstructing masked temporal features, the FMNet can learn intrinsic inter-frame correlations, which leads to consistency. Compared with prior arts, experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves comparable spatial accuracy and higher temporal consistency without any additional information. Our work provides a new perspective on consistent video depth estimation. Our official project page is https://github.com/RaymondWang987/FMNet.

Guangkai Xu, Wei Yin, Jianming Zhang et al.

Existing depth completion methods are often targeted at a specific sparse depth type and generalize poorly across task domains. We present a method to complete sparse/semi-dense, noisy, and potentially low-resolution depth maps obtained by various range sensors, including those in modern mobile phones, or by multi-view reconstruction algorithms. Our method leverages a data-driven prior in the form of a single image depth prediction network trained on large-scale datasets, the output of which is used as an input to our model. We propose an effective training scheme where we simulate various sparsity patterns in typical task domains. In addition, we design two new benchmarks to evaluate the generalizability and the robustness of depth completion methods. Our simple method shows superior cross-domain generalization ability against state-of-the-art depth completion methods, introducing a practical solution to high-quality depth capture on a mobile device. The code is available at: https://github.com/YvanYin/FillDepth.

Yu Zeng, Zhe Lin, Jianming Zhang et al.

We propose a new framework for conditional image synthesis from semantic layouts of any precision levels, ranging from pure text to a 2D semantic canvas with precise shapes. More specifically, the input layout consists of one or more semantic regions with free-form text descriptions and adjustable precision levels, which can be set based on the desired controllability. The framework naturally reduces to text-to-image (T2I) at the lowest level with no shape information, and it becomes segmentation-to-image (S2I) at the highest level. By supporting the levels in-between, our framework is flexible in assisting users of different drawing expertise and at different stages of their creative workflow. We introduce several novel techniques to address the challenges coming with this new setup, including a pipeline for collecting training data; a precision-encoded mask pyramid and a text feature map representation to jointly encode precision level, semantics, and composition information; and a multi-scale guided diffusion model to synthesize images. To evaluate the proposed method, we collect a test dataset containing user-drawn layouts with diverse scenes and styles. Experimental results show that the proposed method can generate high-quality images following the layout at given precision, and compares favorably against existing methods. Project page \url{https://zengxianyu.github.io/scenec/}

Yiran Wang, Min Shi, Jiaqi Li et al.

Video depth estimation aims to infer temporally consistent depth. One approach is to finetune a single-image model on each video with geometry constraints, which proves inefficient and lacks robustness. An alternative is learning to enforce consistency from data, which requires well-designed models and sufficient video depth data. To address both challenges, we introduce NVDS+ that stabilizes inconsistent depth estimated by various single-image models in a plug-and-play manner. We also elaborate a large-scale Video Depth in the Wild (VDW) dataset, which contains 14,203 videos with over two million frames, making it the largest natural-scene video depth dataset. Additionally, a bidirectional inference strategy is designed to improve consistency by adaptively fusing forward and backward predictions. We instantiate a model family ranging from small to large scales for different applications. The method is evaluated on VDW dataset and three public benchmarks. To further prove the versatility, we extend NVDS+ to video semantic segmentation and several downstream applications like bokeh rendering, novel view synthesis, and 3D reconstruction. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvements in consistency, accuracy, and efficiency. Our work serves as a solid baseline and data foundation for learning-based video depth estimation. Code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/RaymondWang987/NVDS

Yichen Sheng, Yifan Liu, Jianming Zhang et al.

Shadows are essential for realistic image compositing. Physics-based shadow rendering methods require 3D geometries, which are not always available. Deep learning-based shadow synthesis methods learn a mapping from the light information to an object's shadow without explicitly modeling the shadow geometry. Still, they lack control and are prone to visual artifacts. We introduce pixel heigh, a novel geometry representation that encodes the correlations between objects, ground, and camera pose. The pixel height can be calculated from 3D geometries, manually annotated on 2D images, and can also be predicted from a single-view RGB image by a supervised approach. It can be used to calculate hard shadows in a 2D image based on the projective geometry, providing precise control of the shadows' direction and shape. Furthermore, we propose a data-driven soft shadow generator to apply softness to a hard shadow based on a softness input parameter. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that the proposed pixel height significantly improves the quality of the shadow generation while allowing for controllability.

Juewen Peng, Zhiguo Cao, Xianrui Luo et al.

We propose BokehMe, a hybrid bokeh rendering framework that marries a neural renderer with a classical physically motivated renderer. Given a single image and a potentially imperfect disparity map, BokehMe generates high-resolution photo-realistic bokeh effects with adjustable blur size, focal plane, and aperture shape. To this end, we analyze the errors from the classical scattering-based method and derive a formulation to calculate an error map. Based on this formulation, we implement the classical renderer by a scattering-based method and propose a two-stage neural renderer to fix the erroneous areas from the classical renderer. The neural renderer employs a dynamic multi-scale scheme to efficiently handle arbitrary blur sizes, and it is trained to handle imperfect disparity input. Experiments show that our method compares favorably against previous methods on both synthetic image data and real image data with predicted disparity. A user study is further conducted to validate the advantage of our method.

Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang, Julien Philip et al. · pku

Lighting effects such as shadows or reflections are key in making synthetic images realistic and visually appealing. To generate such effects, traditional computer graphics uses a physically-based renderer along with 3D geometry. To compensate for the lack of geometry in 2D Image compositing, recent deep learning-based approaches introduced a pixel height representation to generate soft shadows and reflections. However, the lack of geometry limits the quality of the generated soft shadows and constrain reflections to pure specular ones. We introduce PixHt-Lab, a system leveraging an explicit mapping from pixel height representation to 3D space. Using this mapping, PixHt-Lab reconstructs both the cutout and background geometry and renders realistic, diverse, lighting effects for image compositing. Given a surface with physically-based materials, we can render reflections with varying glossiness. To generate more realistic soft shadows, we further propose to use 3D-aware buffer channels to guide a neural renderer. Both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate that PixHt-Lab significantly improves soft shadow generation.

Yizhi Song, Zhifei Zhang, Zhe Lin et al.

Object compositing based on 2D images is a challenging problem since it typically involves multiple processing stages such as color harmonization, geometry correction and shadow generation to generate realistic results. Furthermore, annotating training data pairs for compositing requires substantial manual effort from professionals, and is hardly scalable. Thus, with the recent advances in generative models, in this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for object compositing by leveraging the power of conditional diffusion models. Our framework can hollistically address the object compositing task in a unified model, transforming the viewpoint, geometry, color and shadow of the generated object while requiring no manual labeling. To preserve the input object's characteristics, we introduce a content adaptor that helps to maintain categorical semantics and object appearance. A data augmentation method is further adopted to improve the fidelity of the generator. Our method outperforms relevant baselines in both realism and faithfulness of the synthesized result images in a user study on various real-world images.

Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, He Zhang, Jianming Zhang et al.

Current image harmonization methods consider the entire background as the guidance for harmonization. However, this may limit the capability for user to choose any specific object/person in the background to guide the harmonization. To enable flexible interaction between user and harmonization, we introduce interactive harmonization, a new setting where the harmonization is performed with respect to a selected \emph{region} in the reference image instead of the entire background. A new flexible framework that allows users to pick certain regions of the background image and use it to guide the harmonization is proposed. Inspired by professional portrait harmonization users, we also introduce a new luminance matching loss to optimally match the color/luminance conditions between the composite foreground and select reference region. This framework provides more control to the image harmonization pipeline achieving visually pleasing portrait edits. Furthermore, we also introduce a new dataset carefully curated for validating portrait harmonization. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach is efficient and robust compared to previous harmonization baselines, especially for portraits. Project Webpage at \href{https://jeya-maria-jose.github.io/IPH-web/}{https://jeya-maria-jose.github.io/IPH-web/}

Juewen Peng, Jianming Zhang, Xianrui Luo et al.

Partial occlusion effects are a phenomenon that blurry objects near a camera are semi-transparent, resulting in partial appearance of occluded background. However, it is challenging for existing bokeh rendering methods to simulate realistic partial occlusion effects due to the missing information of the occluded area in an all-in-focus image. Inspired by the learnable 3D scene representation, Multiplane Image (MPI), we attempt to address the partial occlusion by introducing a novel MPI-based high-resolution bokeh rendering framework, termed MPIB. To this end, we first present an analysis on how to apply the MPI representation to bokeh rendering. Based on this analysis, we propose an MPI representation module combined with a background inpainting module to implement high-resolution scene representation. This representation can then be reused to render various bokeh effects according to the controlling parameters. To train and test our model, we also design a ray-tracing-based bokeh generator for data generation. Extensive experiments on synthesized and real-world images validate the effectiveness and flexibility of this framework.

Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Jingwan Lu et al.

Structure-guided image completion aims to inpaint a local region of an image according to an input guidance map from users. While such a task enables many practical applications for interactive editing, existing methods often struggle to hallucinate realistic object instances in complex natural scenes. Such a limitation is partially due to the lack of semantic-level constraints inside the hole region as well as the lack of a mechanism to enforce realistic object generation. In this work, we propose a learning paradigm that consists of semantic discriminators and object-level discriminators for improving the generation of complex semantics and objects. Specifically, the semantic discriminators leverage pretrained visual features to improve the realism of the generated visual concepts. Moreover, the object-level discriminators take aligned instances as inputs to enforce the realism of individual objects. Our proposed scheme significantly improves the generation quality and achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including segmentation-guided completion, edge-guided manipulation and panoptically-guided manipulation on Places2 datasets. Furthermore, our trained model is flexible and can support multiple editing use cases, such as object insertion, replacement, removal and standard inpainting. In particular, our trained model combined with a novel automatic image completion pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard inpainting task.

Gemma Canet Tarrés, Zhe Lin, Zhifei Zhang et al.

Compositing an object into an image involves multiple non-trivial sub-tasks such as object placement and scaling, color/lighting harmonization, viewpoint/geometry adjustment, and shadow/reflection generation. Recent generative image compositing methods leverage diffusion models to handle multiple sub-tasks at once. However, existing models face limitations due to their reliance on masking the original object during training, which constrains their generation to the input mask. Furthermore, obtaining an accurate input mask specifying the location and scale of the object in a new image can be highly challenging. To overcome such limitations, we define a novel problem of unconstrained generative object compositing, i.e., the generation is not bounded by the mask, and train a diffusion-based model on a synthesized paired dataset. Our first-of-its-kind model is able to generate object effects such as shadows and reflections that go beyond the mask, enhancing image realism. Additionally, if an empty mask is provided, our model automatically places the object in diverse natural locations and scales, accelerating the compositing workflow. Our model outperforms existing object placement and compositing models in various quality metrics and user studies.

Soo Ye Kim, Jianming Zhang, Simon Niklaus et al.

Depth maps are used in a wide range of applications from 3D rendering to 2D image effects such as Bokeh. However, those predicted by single image depth estimation (SIDE) models often fail to capture isolated holes in objects and/or have inaccurate boundary regions. Meanwhile, high-quality masks are much easier to obtain, using commercial auto-masking tools or off-the-shelf methods of segmentation and matting or even by manual editing. Hence, in this paper, we formulate a novel problem of mask-guided depth refinement that utilizes a generic mask to refine the depth prediction of SIDE models. Our framework performs layered refinement and inpainting/outpainting, decomposing the depth map into two separate layers signified by the mask and the inverse mask. As datasets with both depth and mask annotations are scarce, we propose a self-supervised learning scheme that uses arbitrary masks and RGB-D datasets. We empirically show that our method is robust to different types of masks and initial depth predictions, accurately refining depth values in inner and outer mask boundary regions. We further analyze our model with an ablation study and demonstrate results on real applications. More information can be found at https://sooyekim.github.io/MaskDepth/ .

Xin Yuan, Zhe Lin, Jason Kuen et al.

We develop an approach for text-to-image generation that embraces additional retrieval images, driven by a combination of implicit visual guidance loss and generative objectives. Unlike most existing text-to-image generation methods which merely take the text as input, our method dynamically feeds cross-modal search results into a unified training stage, hence improving the quality, controllability and diversity of generation results. We propose a novel hypernetwork modulated visual-text encoding scheme to predict the weight update of the encoding layer, enabling effective transfer from visual information (e.g. layout, content) into the corresponding latent domain. Experimental results show that our model guided with additional retrieval visual data outperforms existing GAN-based models. On COCO dataset, we achieve better FID of $9.13$ with up to $3.5 \times$ fewer generator parameters, compared with the state-of-the-art method.

Xingyi Li, Zhiguo Cao, Huiqiang Sun et al.

We present 3D Cinemagraphy, a new technique that marries 2D image animation with 3D photography. Given a single still image as input, our goal is to generate a video that contains both visual content animation and camera motion. We empirically find that naively combining existing 2D image animation and 3D photography methods leads to obvious artifacts or inconsistent animation. Our key insight is that representing and animating the scene in 3D space offers a natural solution to this task. To this end, we first convert the input image into feature-based layered depth images using predicted depth values, followed by unprojecting them to a feature point cloud. To animate the scene, we perform motion estimation and lift the 2D motion into the 3D scene flow. Finally, to resolve the problem of hole emergence as points move forward, we propose to bidirectionally displace the point cloud as per the scene flow and synthesize novel views by separately projecting them into target image planes and blending the results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. A user study is also conducted to validate the compelling rendering results of our method.

Jiaqi Li, Yiran Wang, Zihao Huang et al.

Depth estimation aims to predict dense depth maps. In autonomous driving scenes, sparsity of annotations makes the task challenging. Supervised models produce concave objects due to insufficient structural information. They overfit to valid pixels and fail to restore spatial structures. Self-supervised methods are proposed for the problem. Their robustness is limited by pose estimation, leading to erroneous results in natural scenes. In this paper, we propose a supervised framework termed Diffusion-Augmented Depth Prediction (DADP). We leverage the structural characteristics of diffusion model to enforce depth structures of depth models in a plug-and-play manner. An object-guided integrality loss is also proposed to further enhance regional structure integrality by fetching objective information. We evaluate DADP on three driving benchmarks and achieve significant improvements in depth structures and robustness. Our work provides a new perspective on depth estimation with sparse annotations in autonomous driving scenes.

Xiao Pan, Hao Luo, Weihua Chen et al.

We study the backward compatible problem for person re-identification (Re-ID), which aims to constrain the features of an updated new model to be comparable with the existing features from the old model in galleries. Most of the existing works adopt distillation-based methods, which focus on pushing new features to imitate the distribution of the old ones. However, the distillation-based methods are intrinsically sub-optimal since it forces the new feature space to imitate the inferior old feature space. To address this issue, we propose the Ranking-based Backward Compatible Learning (RBCL), which directly optimizes the ranking metric between new features and old features. Different from previous methods, RBCL only pushes the new features to find best-ranking positions in the old feature space instead of strictly alignment, and is in line with the ultimate goal of backward retrieval. However, the sharp sigmoid function used to make the ranking metric differentiable also incurs the gradient vanish issue, therefore stems the ranking refinement during the later period of training. To address this issue, we propose the Dynamic Gradient Reactivation (DGR), which can reactivate the suppressed gradients by adding dynamic computed constant during forward step. To further help targeting the best-ranking positions, we include the Neighbor Context Agents (NCAs) to approximate the entire old feature space during training. Unlike previous works which only test on the in-domain settings, we make the first attempt to introduce the cross-domain settings (including both supervised and unsupervised), which are more meaningful and difficult. The experimental results on all five settings show that the proposed RBCL outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods by large margins under all settings.

Dina Bashkirova, Arijit Ray, Rupayan Mallick et al.

Professional artists, photographers, and other visual content creators use object relighting to establish their photo's desired effect. Unfortunately, manual tools that allow relighting have a steep learning curve and are difficult to master. Although generative editing methods now enable some forms of image editing, relighting is still beyond today's capabilities; existing methods struggle to keep other aspects of the image -- colors, shapes, and textures -- consistent after the edit. We propose Lasagna, a method that enables intuitive text-guided relighting control. Lasagna learns a lighting prior by using score distillation sampling to distill the prior of a diffusion model, which has been finetuned on synthetic relighting data. To train Lasagna, we curate a new synthetic dataset ReLiT, which contains 3D object assets re-lit from multiple light source locations. Despite training on synthetic images, quantitative results show that Lasagna relights real-world images while preserving other aspects of the input image, outperforming state-of-the-art text-guided image editing methods. Lasagna enables realistic and controlled results on natural images and digital art pieces and is preferred by humans over other methods in over 91% of cases. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our learning objective by extending it to allow colorization, another form of image editing.

Jiaqi Li, Yiran Wang, Jinghong Zheng et al.

Depth refinement aims to infer high-resolution depth with fine-grained edges and details, refining low-resolution results of depth estimation models. The prevailing methods adopt tile-based manners by merging numerous patches, which lacks efficiency and produces inconsistency. Besides, prior arts suffer from fuzzy depth boundaries and limited generalizability. Analyzing the fundamental reasons for these limitations, we model depth refinement as a noisy Poisson fusion problem with local inconsistency and edge deformation noises. We propose the Self-distilled Depth Refinement (SDDR) framework to enforce robustness against the noises, which mainly consists of depth edge representation and edge-based guidance. With noisy depth predictions as input, SDDR generates low-noise depth edge representations as pseudo-labels by coarse-to-fine self-distillation. Edge-based guidance with edge-guided gradient loss and edge-based fusion loss serves as the optimization objective equivalent to Poisson fusion. When depth maps are better refined, the labels also become more noise-free. Our model can acquire strong robustness to the noises, achieving significant improvements in accuracy, edge quality, efficiency, and generalizability on five different benchmarks. Moreover, directly training another model with edge labels produced by SDDR brings improvements, suggesting that our method could help with training robust refinement models in future works.

Yunze Man, Yichen Sheng, Jianming Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in 3D object reconstruction from single images have primarily focused on improving the accuracy of object shapes. Yet, these techniques often fail to accurately capture the inter-relation between the object, ground, and camera. As a result, the reconstructed objects often appear floating or tilted when placed on flat surfaces. This limitation significantly affects 3D-aware image editing applications like shadow rendering and object pose manipulation. To address this issue, we introduce ORG (Object Reconstruction with Ground), a novel task aimed at reconstructing 3D object geometry in conjunction with the ground surface. Our method uses two compact pixel-level representations to depict the relationship between camera, object, and ground. Experiments show that the proposed ORG model can effectively reconstruct object-ground geometry on unseen data, significantly enhancing the quality of shadow generation and pose manipulation compared to conventional single-image 3D reconstruction techniques.

Liao Shen, Tianqi Liu, Huiqiang Sun et al.

We study the problem of generating intermediate images from image pairs with large motion while maintaining semantic consistency. Due to the large motion, the intermediate semantic information may be absent in input images. Existing methods either limit to small motion or focus on topologically similar objects, leading to artifacts and inconsistency in the interpolation results. To overcome this challenge, we delve into pre-trained image diffusion models for their capabilities in semantic cognition and representations, ensuring consistent expression of the absent intermediate semantic representations with the input. To this end, we propose DreamMover, a novel image interpolation framework with three main components: 1) A natural flow estimator based on the diffusion model that can implicitly reason about the semantic correspondence between two images. 2) To avoid the loss of detailed information during fusion, our key insight is to fuse information in two parts, high-level space and low-level space. 3) To enhance the consistency between the generated images and input, we propose the self-attention concatenation and replacement approach. Lastly, we present a challenging benchmark dataset InterpBench to evaluate the semantic consistency of generated results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project is available at https://dreamm0ver.github.io .

Hongwu Peng, Ohiremen Dibua, Yuanjun Xiong et al.

We propose Complete-muE, a framework which targets hyperparameter transfer across dense FFN and any Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) setups in transformer blocks. Existing tools such as $μ$P (requires fixed architectue) or SDE (requires fixed per-step token count) cannot directly solve the hyperparameter transfer problem in MoE setups because Dense to MoE transfer or MoE total experts scaling changes both architecture and tokens per expert. Complete-muE solves this challenge with a two-bridge system: Bridge~I maps between dense FFN and Dense MoE by active-width $μ$P with a normalized router scale. Bridge~II maps between Dense MoE and sparse MoE by activated-expert scaling, where the first-order SDE LR/WD correction cancels while a bounded residual $σ_0$ shift remains. The resulting transfer rule, which we term as Complete muE, covers changes in activated experts, total capacity, granularity, and shared/group-balanced hybrids for MoE models as well as network width/depth, batch size, and duration changes for general Transformer models. Extensive language model and diffusion model pretraining experiments confirm that complete-muE yields relatively stable hyperparameter optima across model architectures and parameter counts -- with only minor drift consistent with the non-strict SDE behavior of Bridge~II. In practice this drift is small enough that hyperparameters tuned on a single dense reference transfer near-optimally to all MoE configurations -- \emph{tune dense once, transfer to all} is the practical recipe at the core of Complete-muE. This enables MoE models to achieve accelerated convergence speedup over dense models when scaling model capacity without costly hyperparameter search.

Yuanhao Cai, He Zhang, Kai Zhang et al.

Existing feedforward image-to-3D methods mainly rely on 2D multi-view diffusion models that cannot guarantee 3D consistency. These methods easily collapse when changing the prompt view direction and mainly handle object-centric cases. In this paper, we propose a novel single-stage 3D diffusion model, DiffusionGS, for object generation and scene reconstruction from a single view. DiffusionGS directly outputs 3D Gaussian point clouds at each timestep to enforce view consistency and allow the model to generate robustly given prompt views of any directions, beyond object-centric inputs. Plus, to improve the capability and generality of DiffusionGS, we scale up 3D training data by developing a scene-object mixed training strategy. Experiments show that DiffusionGS yields improvements of 2.20 dB/23.25 and 1.34 dB/19.16 in PSNR/FID for objects and scenes than the state-of-the-art methods, without depth estimator. Plus, our method enjoys over 5$\times$ faster speed ($\sim$6s on an A100 GPU). Our Project page at https://caiyuanhao1998.github.io/project/DiffusionGS/ shows the video and interactive results. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/caiyuanhao1998/Open-DiffusionGS

Nannan Li, Qing Liu, Krishna Kumar Singh et al.

Human image editing includes tasks like changing a person's pose, their clothing, or editing the image according to a text prompt. However, prior work often tackles these tasks separately, overlooking the benefit of mutual reinforcement from learning them jointly. In this paper, we propose UniHuman, a unified model that addresses multiple facets of human image editing in real-world settings. To enhance the model's generation quality and generalization capacity, we leverage guidance from human visual encoders and introduce a lightweight pose-warping module that can exploit different pose representations, accommodating unseen textures and patterns. Furthermore, to bridge the disparity between existing human editing benchmarks with real-world data, we curated 400K high-quality human image-text pairs for training and collected 2K human images for out-of-domain testing, both encompassing diverse clothing styles, backgrounds, and age groups. Experiments on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets demonstrate that UniHuman outperforms task-specific models by a significant margin. In user studies, UniHuman is preferred by the users in an average of 77% of cases. Our project is available at https://github.com/NannanLi999/UniHuman.

Kaihong Wang, Lingzhi Zhang, Jianming Zhang

Despite recent advancements, text-to-image generation models often produce images containing artifacts, especially in human figures. These artifacts appear as poorly generated human bodies, including distorted, missing, or extra body parts, leading to visual inconsistencies with typical human anatomy and greatly impairing overall fidelity. In this study, we address this challenge by curating Human Artifact Dataset (HAD), a diverse dataset specifically designed to localize human artifacts. HAD comprises over 37,000 images generated by several popular text-to-image models, annotated for human artifact localization. Using this dataset, we train the Human Artifact Detection Models (HADM), which can identify different artifacts across multiple generative domains and demonstrate strong generalization, even on images from unseen generators. Additionally, to further improve generators' perception of human structural coherence, we use the predictions from our HADM as feedback for diffusion model finetuning. Our experiments confirm a reduction in human artifacts in the resulting model. Furthermore, we showcase a novel application of our HADM in an iterative inpainting framework to correct human artifacts in arbitrary images directly, demonstrating its utility in improving image quality. Our dataset and detection models are available at: https://github.com/wangkaihong/HADM.

Kai Zhang, Peng Wang, Sai Bi et al.

We present KnapFormer, an efficient and versatile framework to combine workload balancing and sequence parallelism in distributed training of Diffusion Transformers (DiT). KnapFormer builds on the insight that strong synergy exists between sequence parallelism and the need to address the significant token imbalance across ranks. This imbalance arises from variable-length text inputs and varying visual token counts in mixed-resolution and image-video joint training. KnapFormer redistributes tokens by first gathering sequence length metadata across all ranks in a balancing group and solving a global knapsack problem. The solver aims to minimize the variances of total workload per-GPU, while accounting for the effect of sequence parallelism. By integrating DeepSpeed-Ulysees-based sequence parallelism in the load-balancing decision process and utilizing a simple semi-empirical workload model, KnapFormers achieves minimal communication overhead and less than 1% workload discrepancy in real-world training workloads with sequence length varying from a few hundred to tens of thousands. It eliminates straggler effects and achieves 2x to 3x speedup when training state-of-the-art diffusion models like FLUX on mixed-resolution and image-video joint data corpora. We open-source the KnapFormer implementation at https://github.com/Kai-46/KnapFormer/

Yifan Jiang, He Zhang, Jianming Zhang et al.

Image harmonization aims to improve the quality of image compositing by matching the "appearance" (\eg, color tone, brightness and contrast) between foreground and background images. However, collecting large-scale annotated datasets for this task requires complex professional retouching. Instead, we propose a novel Self-Supervised Harmonization framework (SSH) that can be trained using just "free" natural images without being edited. We reformulate the image harmonization problem from a representation fusion perspective, which separately processes the foreground and background examples, to address the background occlusion issue. This framework design allows for a dual data augmentation method, where diverse [foreground, background, pseudo GT] triplets can be generated by cropping an image with perturbations using 3D color lookup tables (LUTs). In addition, we build a real-world harmonization dataset as carefully created by expert users, for evaluation and benchmarking purposes. Our results show that the proposed self-supervised method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of reference metrics, visual quality, and subject user study. Code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/SSHarmonization}.

Zhenyu Wu, Zhaowen Wang, Ye Yuan et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) nowadays are capable of producing images of incredible realism. One concern raised is whether the state-of-the-art GAN's learned distribution still suffers from mode collapse, and what to do if so. Existing diversity tests of samples from GANs are usually conducted qualitatively on a small scale, and/or depends on the access to original training data as well as the trained model parameters. This paper explores to diagnose GAN intra-mode collapse and calibrate that, in a novel black-box setting: no access to training data, nor the trained model parameters, is assumed. The new setting is practically demanded, yet rarely explored and significantly more challenging. As a first stab, we devise a set of statistical tools based on sampling, that can visualize, quantify, and rectify intra-mode collapse. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed diagnosis and calibration techniques, via extensive simulations and experiments, on unconditional GAN image generation (e.g., face and vehicle). Our study reveals that the intra-mode collapse is still a prevailing problem in state-of-the-art GANs and the mode collapse is diagnosable and calibratable in black-box settings. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/BlackBoxGANCollapse.

Wei Yin, Jianming Zhang, Oliver Wang et al.

Despite significant progress in monocular depth estimation in the wild, recent state-of-the-art methods cannot be used to recover accurate 3D scene shape due to an unknown depth shift induced by shift-invariant reconstruction losses used in mixed-data depth prediction training, and possible unknown camera focal length. We investigate this problem in detail, and propose a two-stage framework that first predicts depth up to an unknown scale and shift from a single monocular image, and then use 3D point cloud encoders to predict the missing depth shift and focal length that allow us to recover a realistic 3D scene shape. In addition, we propose an image-level normalized regression loss and a normal-based geometry loss to enhance depth prediction models trained on mixed datasets. We test our depth model on nine unseen datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot dataset generalization. Code is available at: https://git.io/Depth

Qihang Yu, Jianming Zhang, He Zhang et al.

We propose Mask Guided (MG) Matting, a robust matting framework that takes a general coarse mask as guidance. MG Matting leverages a network (PRN) design which encourages the matting model to provide self-guidance to progressively refine the uncertain regions through the decoding process. A series of guidance mask perturbation operations are also introduced in the training to further enhance its robustness to external guidance. We show that PRN can generalize to unseen types of guidance masks such as trimap and low-quality alpha matte, making it suitable for various application pipelines. In addition, we revisit the foreground color prediction problem for matting and propose a surprisingly simple improvement to address the dataset issue. Evaluation on real and synthetic benchmarks shows that MG Matting achieves state-of-the-art performance using various types of guidance inputs. Code and models are available at https://github.com/yucornetto/MGMatting.

Shikun Liu, Zhe Lin, Yilin Wang et al.

We present a novel resizing module for neural networks: shape adaptor, a drop-in enhancement built on top of traditional resizing layers, such as pooling, bilinear sampling, and strided convolution. Whilst traditional resizing layers have fixed and deterministic reshaping factors, our module allows for a learnable reshaping factor. Our implementation enables shape adaptors to be trained end-to-end without any additional supervision, through which network architectures can be optimised for each individual task, in a fully automated way. We performed experiments across seven image classification datasets, and results show that by simply using a set of our shape adaptors instead of the original resizing layers, performance increases consistently over human-designed networks, across all datasets. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of shape adaptors on two other applications: network compression and transfer learning. The source code is available at: https://github.com/lorenmt/shape-adaptor.

Jason Kuen, Federico Perazzi, Zhe Lin et al.

Large scale object detection datasets are constantly increasing their size in terms of the number of classes and annotations count. Yet, the number of object-level categories annotated in detection datasets is an order of magnitude smaller than image-level classification labels. State-of-the art object detection models are trained in a supervised fashion and this limits the number of object classes they can detect. In this paper, we propose a novel weight transfer network (WTN) to effectively and efficiently transfer knowledge from classification network's weights to detection network's weights to allow detection of novel classes without box supervision. We first introduce input and feature normalization schemes to curb the under-fitting during training of a vanilla WTN. We then propose autoencoder-WTN (AE-WTN) which uses reconstruction loss to preserve classification network's information over all classes in the target latent space to ensure generalization to novel classes. Compared to vanilla WTN, AE-WTN obtains absolute performance gains of 6% on two Open Images evaluation sets with 500 seen and 57 novel classes respectively, and 25% on a Visual Genome evaluation set with 200 novel classes. The code is available at https://github.com/xternalz/AE-WTN.

Siwang Zhou, Yan He, Yonghe Liu et al.

Incorporating deep neural networks in image compressive sensing (CS) receives intensive attentions in multimedia technology and applications recently. As deep network approaches learn the inverse mapping directly from the CS measurements, the reconstruction speed is significantly faster than the conventional CS algorithms. However, for existing network based approaches, a CS sampling procedure has to map a separate network model. This may potentially degrade the performance of image CS with block-wise sampling because of blocking artifacts, especially when multiple sampling rates are assigned to different blocks within an image. In this paper, we develop a multichannel deep network for block-based image CS by exploiting inter-block correlation with performance significantly exceeding the current state-of-the-art methods. The significant performance improvement is attributed to block-wise approximation but full image removal of blocking artifacts. Specifically, with our multichannel structure, the image blocks with a variety of sampling rates can be reconstructed in a single model. The initially reconstructed blocks are then capable of being reassembled into a full image to improve the recovered images by unrolling a hand-designed block based CS recovery algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art CS methods by a large margin in terms of objective metrics and subjective visual image quality. Our source codes are available at https://github.com/siwangzhou/DeepBCS.

Yi Zeng, Pingping Zhang, Jianming Zhang et al.

Deep neural network based methods have made a significant breakthrough in salient object detection. However, they are typically limited to input images with low resolutions ($400\times400$ pixels or less). Little effort has been made to train deep neural networks to directly handle salient object detection in very high-resolution images. This paper pushes forward high-resolution saliency detection, and contributes a new dataset, named High-Resolution Salient Object Detection (HRSOD). To our best knowledge, HRSOD is the first high-resolution saliency detection dataset to date. As another contribution, we also propose a novel approach, which incorporates both global semantic information and local high-resolution details, to address this challenging task. More specifically, our approach consists of a Global Semantic Network (GSN), a Local Refinement Network (LRN) and a Global-Local Fusion Network (GLFN). GSN extracts the global semantic information based on down-sampled entire image. Guided by the results of GSN, LRN focuses on some local regions and progressively produces high-resolution predictions. GLFN is further proposed to enforce spatial consistency and boost performance. Experiments illustrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on high-resolution saliency datasets by a large margin, and achieves comparable or even better performance than them on widely-used saliency benchmarks. The HRSOD dataset is available at https://github.com/yi94code/HRSOD.

Vasili Ramanishka, Abir Das, Jianming Zhang et al.

Neural image/video captioning models can generate accurate descriptions, but their internal process of mapping regions to words is a black box and therefore difficult to explain. Top-down neural saliency methods can find important regions given a high-level semantic task such as object classification, but cannot use a natural language sentence as the top-down input for the task. In this paper, we propose Caption-Guided Visual Saliency to expose the region-to-word mapping in modern encoder-decoder networks and demonstrate that it is learned implicitly from caption training data, without any pixel-level annotations. Our approach can produce spatial or spatiotemporal heatmaps for both predicted captions, and for arbitrary query sentences. It recovers saliency without the overhead of introducing explicit attention layers, and can be used to analyze a variety of existing model architectures and improve their design. Evaluation on large-scale video and image datasets demonstrates that our approach achieves comparable captioning performance with existing methods while providing more accurate saliency heatmaps. Our code is available at visionlearninggroup.github.io/caption-guided-saliency/.

Yizhi Song, Zhifei Zhang, Zhe Lin et al.

Generative object compositing emerges as a promising new avenue for compositional image editing. However, the requirement of object identity preservation poses a significant challenge, limiting practical usage of most existing methods. In response, this paper introduces IMPRINT, a novel diffusion-based generative model trained with a two-stage learning framework that decouples learning of identity preservation from that of compositing. The first stage is targeted for context-agnostic, identity-preserving pretraining of the object encoder, enabling the encoder to learn an embedding that is both view-invariant and conducive to enhanced detail preservation. The subsequent stage leverages this representation to learn seamless harmonization of the object composited to the background. In addition, IMPRINT incorporates a shape-guidance mechanism offering user-directed control over the compositing process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMPRINT significantly outperforms existing methods and various baselines on identity preservation and composition quality.

Xi Chen, Zhifei Zhang, He Zhang et al.

We introduce UniReal, a unified framework designed to address various image generation and editing tasks. Existing solutions often vary by tasks, yet share fundamental principles: preserving consistency between inputs and outputs while capturing visual variations. Inspired by recent video generation models that effectively balance consistency and variation across frames, we propose a unifying approach that treats image-level tasks as discontinuous video generation. Specifically, we treat varying numbers of input and output images as frames, enabling seamless support for tasks such as image generation, editing, customization, composition, etc. Although designed for image-level tasks, we leverage videos as a scalable source for universal supervision. UniReal learns world dynamics from large-scale videos, demonstrating advanced capability in handling shadows, reflections, pose variation, and object interaction, while also exhibiting emergent capability for novel applications.

Mengwei Ren, Wei Xiong, Jae Shin Yoon et al.

Portrait harmonization aims to composite a subject into a new background, adjusting its lighting and color to ensure harmony with the background scene. Existing harmonization techniques often only focus on adjusting the global color and brightness of the foreground and ignore crucial illumination cues from the background such as apparent lighting direction, leading to unrealistic compositions. We introduce Relightful Harmonization, a lighting-aware diffusion model designed to seamlessly harmonize sophisticated lighting effect for the foreground portrait using any background image. Our approach unfolds in three stages. First, we introduce a lighting representation module that allows our diffusion model to encode lighting information from target image background. Second, we introduce an alignment network that aligns lighting features learned from image background with lighting features learned from panorama environment maps, which is a complete representation for scene illumination. Last, to further boost the photorealism of the proposed method, we introduce a novel data simulation pipeline that generates synthetic training pairs from a diverse range of natural images, which are used to refine the model. Our method outperforms existing benchmarks in visual fidelity and lighting coherence, showing superior generalization in real-world testing scenarios, highlighting its versatility and practicality.

Jaskirat Singh, Jianming Zhang, Qing Liu et al.

The field of generative image inpainting and object insertion has made significant progress with the recent advent of latent diffusion models. Utilizing a precise object mask can greatly enhance these applications. However, due to the challenges users encounter in creating high-fidelity masks, there is a tendency for these methods to rely on more coarse masks (e.g., bounding box) for these applications. This results in limited control and compromised background content preservation. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SmartMask, which allows any novice user to create detailed masks for precise object insertion. Combined with a ControlNet-Inpaint model, our experiments demonstrate that SmartMask achieves superior object insertion quality, preserving the background content more effectively than previous methods. Notably, unlike prior works the proposed approach can also be used even without user-mask guidance, which allows it to perform mask-free object insertion at diverse positions and scales. Furthermore, we find that when used iteratively with a novel instruction-tuning based planning model, SmartMask can be used to design detailed layouts from scratch. As compared with user-scribble based layout design, we observe that SmartMask allows for better quality outputs with layout-to-image generation methods. Project page is available at https://smartmask-gen.github.io

Yao-Chih Lee, Zhoutong Zhang, Kevin Blackburn-Matzen et al.

Novel view synthesis from an in-the-wild video is difficult due to challenges like scene dynamics and lack of parallax. While existing methods have shown promising results with implicit neural radiance fields, they are slow to train and render. This paper revisits explicit video representations to synthesize high-quality novel views from a monocular video efficiently. We treat static and dynamic video content separately. Specifically, we build a global static scene model using an extended plane-based scene representation to synthesize temporally coherent novel video. Our plane-based scene representation is augmented with spherical harmonics and displacement maps to capture view-dependent effects and model non-planar complex surface geometry. We opt to represent the dynamic content as per-frame point clouds for efficiency. While such representations are inconsistency-prone, minor temporal inconsistencies are perceptually masked due to motion. We develop a method to quickly estimate such a hybrid video representation and render novel views in real time. Our experiments show that our method can render high-quality novel views from an in-the-wild video with comparable quality to state-of-the-art methods while being 100x faster in training and enabling real-time rendering.

Hang Hua, Qing Liu, Lingzhi Zhang et al.

The advent of large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has significantly advanced multimodal tasks, enabling more sophisticated and accurate reasoning across various applications, including image and video captioning, visual question answering, and cross-modal retrieval. Despite their superior capabilities, VLMs struggle with fine-grained image regional composition information perception. Specifically, they have difficulty accurately aligning the segmentation masks with the corresponding semantics and precisely describing the compositional aspects of the referred regions. However, compositionality - the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of known visual and textual components - is critical for facilitating coherent reasoning and understanding across modalities by VLMs. To address this issue, we propose FINECAPTION, a novel VLM that can recognize arbitrary masks as referential inputs and process high-resolution images for compositional image captioning at different granularity levels. To support this endeavor, we introduce COMPOSITIONCAP, a new dataset for multi-grained region compositional image captioning, which introduces the task of compositional attribute-aware regional image captioning. Empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to other state-of-the-art VLMs. Additionally, we analyze the capabilities of current VLMs in recognizing various visual prompts for compositional region image captioning, highlighting areas for improvement in VLM design and training.

Jinrui Yang, Qing Liu, Yijun Li et al.

Recent advancements in large generative models, particularly diffusion-based methods, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of image editing. However, achieving precise control over image composition tasks remains a challenge. Layered representations, which allow for independent editing of image components, are essential for user-driven content creation, yet existing approaches often struggle to decompose image into plausible layers with accurately retained transparent visual effects such as shadows and reflections. We propose $\textbf{LayerDecomp}$, a generative framework for image layer decomposition which outputs photorealistic clean backgrounds and high-quality transparent foregrounds with faithfully preserved visual effects. To enable effective training, we first introduce a dataset preparation pipeline that automatically scales up simulated multi-layer data with synthesized visual effects. To further enhance real-world applicability, we supplement this simulated dataset with camera-captured images containing natural visual effects. Additionally, we propose a consistency loss which enforces the model to learn accurate representations for the transparent foreground layer when ground-truth annotations are not available. Our method achieves superior quality in layer decomposition, outperforming existing approaches in object removal and spatial editing tasks across several benchmarks and multiple user studies, unlocking various creative possibilities for layer-wise image editing. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LayerDecomp.

Jing Gu, Nanxuan Zhao, Wei Xiong et al.

Effective editing of personal content holds a pivotal role in enabling individuals to express their creativity, weaving captivating narratives within their visual stories, and elevate the overall quality and impact of their visual content. Therefore, in this work, we introduce SwapAnything, a novel framework that can swap any objects in an image with personalized concepts given by the reference, while keeping the context unchanged. Compared with existing methods for personalized subject swapping, SwapAnything has three unique advantages: (1) precise control of arbitrary objects and parts rather than the main subject, (2) more faithful preservation of context pixels, (3) better adaptation of the personalized concept to the image. First, we propose targeted variable swapping to apply region control over latent feature maps and swap masked variables for faithful context preservation and initial semantic concept swapping. Then, we introduce appearance adaptation, to seamlessly adapt the semantic concept into the original image in terms of target location, shape, style, and content during the image generation process. Extensive results on both human and automatic evaluation demonstrate significant improvements of our approach over baseline methods on personalized swapping. Furthermore, SwapAnything shows its precise and faithful swapping abilities across single object, multiple objects, partial object, and cross-domain swapping tasks. SwapAnything also achieves great performance on text-based swapping and tasks beyond swapping such as object insertion.

Jian Tian, Shuailong Li, Yang Cao et al.

The evolution of Large Language Model (LLM) serving towards complex, distributed architectures--specifically the P/D-separated, large-scale DP+EP paradigm--introduces distinct scheduling challenges. Unlike traditional deployments where schedulers can treat instances as black boxes, DP+EP architectures exhibit high internal synchronization costs. We identify that immediate request dispatching in such systems leads to severe in-engine queuing and parallelization bubbles, degrading Time-to-First-Token (TTFT). To address this, we propose Staggered Batch Scheduling (SBS), a mechanism that deliberately buffers requests to form optimal execution batches. This temporal decoupling eliminates internal queuing bubbles without compromising throughput. Furthermore, leveraging the scheduling window created by buffering, we introduce a Load-Aware Global Allocation strategy that balances computational load across DP units for both Prefill and Decode phases. Deployed on a production H800 cluster serving Deepseek-V3, our system reduces TTFT by 30%-40% and improves throughput by 15%-20% compared to state-of-the-art immediate scheduling baselines.

Yusuf Dalva, Yijun Li, Qing Liu et al.

Large-scale diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality images from textual descriptions, gaining popularity across various applications. However, the generation of layered content, such as transparent images with foreground and background layers, remains an under-explored area. Layered content generation is crucial for creative workflows in fields like graphic design, animation, and digital art, where layer-based approaches are fundamental for flexible editing and composition. In this paper, we propose a novel image generation pipeline based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) that generates images with two layers: a foreground layer (RGBA) with transparency information and a background layer (RGB). Unlike existing methods that generate these layers sequentially, our approach introduces a harmonized generation mechanism that enables dynamic interactions between the layers for more coherent outputs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, showing significant improvements in visual coherence, image quality, and layer consistency compared to baseline methods.

Yizhi Song, Liu He, Zhifei Zhang et al.

Personalized image generation has emerged from the recent advancements in generative models. However, these generated personalized images often suffer from localized artifacts such as incorrect logos, reducing fidelity and fine-grained identity details of the generated results. Furthermore, there is little prior work tackling this problem. To help improve these identity details in the personalized image generation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided artifacts refinement. We present Refine-by-Align, a first-of-its-kind model that employs a diffusion-based framework to address this challenge. Our model consists of two stages: Alignment Stage and Refinement Stage, which share weights of a unified neural network model. Given a generated image, a masked artifact region, and a reference image, the alignment stage identifies and extracts the corresponding regional features in the reference, which are then used by the refinement stage to fix the artifacts. Our model-agnostic pipeline requires no test-time tuning or optimization. It automatically enhances image fidelity and reference identity in the generated image, generalizing well to existing models on various tasks including but not limited to customization, generative compositing, view synthesis, and virtual try-on. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that our pipeline greatly pushes the boundary of fine details in the image synthesis models.

Tianyu Wang, Jianming Zhang, Haitian Zheng et al.

Shadows are often under-considered or even ignored in image editing applications, limiting the realism of the edited results. In this paper, we introduce MetaShadow, a three-in-one versatile framework that enables detection, removal, and controllable synthesis of shadows in natural images in an object-centered fashion. MetaShadow combines the strengths of two cooperative components: Shadow Analyzer, for object-centered shadow detection and removal, and Shadow Synthesizer, for reference-based controllable shadow synthesis. Notably, we optimize the learning of the intermediate features from Shadow Analyzer to guide Shadow Synthesizer to generate more realistic shadows that blend seamlessly with the scene. Extensive evaluations on multiple shadow benchmark datasets show significant improvements of MetaShadow over the existing state-of-the-art methods on object-centered shadow detection, removal, and synthesis. MetaShadow excels in image-editing tasks such as object removal, relocation, and insertion, pushing the boundaries of object-centered image editing.