Miaomiao Zhao

Yongkun Du, Miaomiao Zhao, Songlin Fan et al.

Mask Diffusion Models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to auto-regressive models (ARMs) for vision-language tasks, owing to their flexible balance of efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce MDMs into the Scene Text Recognition (STR) task. We show that vanilla MDM lags behind ARMs in terms of accuracy, although it improves recognition efficiency. To bridge this gap, we propose MDiff4STR, a Mask Diffusion model enhanced with two key improvement strategies tailored for STR. Specifically, we identify two key challenges in applying MDMs to STR: noising gap between training and inference, and overconfident predictions during inference. Both significantly hinder the performance of MDMs. To mitigate the first issue, we develop six noising strategies that better align training with inference behavior. For the second, we propose a token-replacement noise mechanism that provides a non-mask noise type, encouraging the model to reconsider and revise overly confident but incorrect predictions. We conduct extensive evaluations of MDiff4STR on both standard and challenging STR benchmarks, covering diverse scenarios including irregular, artistic, occluded, and Chinese text, as well as whether the use of pretraining. Across these settings, MDiff4STR consistently outperforms popular STR models, surpassing state-of-the-art ARMs in accuracy, while maintaining fast inference with only three denoising steps. Code: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR.

Haozhi Zhu, Miaomiao Zhao, Dingyao Liu et al.

3D scene generation is a core technology for gaming, film/VFX, and VR/AR. Growing demand for rapid iteration, high-fidelity detail, and accessible content creation has further increased interest in this area. Existing methods broadly follow two paradigms - indirect 2D-to-3D reconstruction and direct 3D generation - but both are limited by weak structural modeling and heavy reliance on large-scale ground-truth supervision, often producing structural artifacts, geometric inconsistencies, and degraded high-frequency details in complex scenes. We propose GeoDiff3D, an efficient self-supervised framework that uses coarse geometry as a structural anchor and a geometry-constrained 2D diffusion model to provide texture-rich reference images. Importantly, GeoDiff3D does not require strict multi-view consistency of the diffusion-generated references and remains robust to the resulting noisy, inconsistent guidance. We further introduce voxel-aligned 3D feature aggregation and dual self-supervision to maintain scene coherence and fine details while substantially reducing dependence on labeled data. GeoDiff3D also trains with low computational cost and enables fast, high-quality 3D scene generation. Extensive experiments on challenging scenes show improved generalization and generation quality over existing baselines, offering a practical solution for accessible and efficient 3D scene construction.