new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Dec 25

Taming Flow-based I2V Models for Creative Video Editing

Although image editing techniques have advanced significantly, video editing, which aims to manipulate videos according to user intent, remains an emerging challenge. Most existing image-conditioned video editing methods either require inversion with model-specific design or need extensive optimization, limiting their capability of leveraging up-to-date image-to-video (I2V) models to transfer the editing capability of image editing models to the video domain. To this end, we propose IF-V2V, an Inversion-Free method that can adapt off-the-shelf flow-matching-based I2V models for video editing without significant computational overhead. To circumvent inversion, we devise Vector Field Rectification with Sample Deviation to incorporate information from the source video into the denoising process by introducing a deviation term into the denoising vector field. To further ensure consistency with the source video in a model-agnostic way, we introduce Structure-and-Motion-Preserving Initialization to generate motion-aware temporally correlated noise with structural information embedded. We also present a Deviation Caching mechanism to minimize the additional computational cost for denoising vector rectification without significantly impacting editing quality. Evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves superior editing quality and consistency over existing approaches, offering a lightweight plug-and-play solution to realize visual creativity.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 26

Rectified Diffusion: Straightness Is Not Your Need in Rectified Flow

Diffusion models have greatly improved visual generation but are hindered by slow generation speed due to the computationally intensive nature of solving generative ODEs. Rectified flow, a widely recognized solution, improves generation speed by straightening the ODE path. Its key components include: 1) using the diffusion form of flow-matching, 2) employing boldsymbol v-prediction, and 3) performing rectification (a.k.a. reflow). In this paper, we argue that the success of rectification primarily lies in using a pretrained diffusion model to obtain matched pairs of noise and samples, followed by retraining with these matched noise-sample pairs. Based on this, components 1) and 2) are unnecessary. Furthermore, we highlight that straightness is not an essential training target for rectification; rather, it is a specific case of flow-matching models. The more critical training target is to achieve a first-order approximate ODE path, which is inherently curved for models like DDPM and Sub-VP. Building on this insight, we propose Rectified Diffusion, which generalizes the design space and application scope of rectification to encompass the broader category of diffusion models, rather than being restricted to flow-matching models. We validate our method on Stable Diffusion v1-5 and Stable Diffusion XL. Our method not only greatly simplifies the training procedure of rectified flow-based previous works (e.g., InstaFlow) but also achieves superior performance with even lower training cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/G-U-N/Rectified-Diffusion.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 9, 2024 3

Steering Rectified Flow Models in the Vector Field for Controlled Image Generation

Diffusion models (DMs) excel in photorealism, image editing, and solving inverse problems, aided by classifier-free guidance and image inversion techniques. However, rectified flow models (RFMs) remain underexplored for these tasks. Existing DM-based methods often require additional training, lack generalization to pretrained latent models, underperform, and demand significant computational resources due to extensive backpropagation through ODE solvers and inversion processes. In this work, we first develop a theoretical and empirical understanding of the vector field dynamics of RFMs in efficiently guiding the denoising trajectory. Our findings reveal that we can navigate the vector field in a deterministic and gradient-free manner. Utilizing this property, we propose FlowChef, which leverages the vector field to steer the denoising trajectory for controlled image generation tasks, facilitated by gradient skipping. FlowChef is a unified framework for controlled image generation that, for the first time, simultaneously addresses classifier guidance, linear inverse problems, and image editing without the need for extra training, inversion, or intensive backpropagation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations and show that FlowChef significantly outperforms baselines in terms of performance, memory, and time requirements, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Project Page: https://flowchef.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024 8

Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow

We present rectified flow, a surprisingly simple approach to learning (neural) ordinary differential equation (ODE) models to transport between two empirically observed distributions \pi_0 and \pi_1, hence providing a unified solution to generative modeling and domain transfer, among various other tasks involving distribution transport. The idea of rectified flow is to learn the ODE to follow the straight paths connecting the points drawn from \pi_0 and \pi_1 as much as possible. This is achieved by solving a straightforward nonlinear least squares optimization problem, which can be easily scaled to large models without introducing extra parameters beyond standard supervised learning. The straight paths are special and preferred because they are the shortest paths between two points, and can be simulated exactly without time discretization and hence yield computationally efficient models. We show that the procedure of learning a rectified flow from data, called rectification, turns an arbitrary coupling of \pi_0 and \pi_1 to a new deterministic coupling with provably non-increasing convex transport costs. In addition, recursively applying rectification allows us to obtain a sequence of flows with increasingly straight paths, which can be simulated accurately with coarse time discretization in the inference phase. In empirical studies, we show that rectified flow performs superbly on image generation, image-to-image translation, and domain adaptation. In particular, on image generation and translation, our method yields nearly straight flows that give high quality results even with a single Euler discretization step.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 7, 2022

RecRecNet: Rectangling Rectified Wide-Angle Images by Thin-Plate Spline Model and DoF-based Curriculum Learning

The wide-angle lens shows appealing applications in VR technologies, but it introduces severe radial distortion into its captured image. To recover the realistic scene, previous works devote to rectifying the content of the wide-angle image. However, such a rectification solution inevitably distorts the image boundary, which potentially changes related geometric distributions and misleads the current vision perception models. In this work, we explore constructing a win-win representation on both content and boundary by contributing a new learning model, i.e., Rectangling Rectification Network (RecRecNet). In particular, we propose a thin-plate spline (TPS) module to formulate the non-linear and non-rigid transformation for rectangling images. By learning the control points on the rectified image, our model can flexibly warp the source structure to the target domain and achieves an end-to-end unsupervised deformation. To relieve the complexity of structure approximation, we then inspire our RecRecNet to learn the gradual deformation rules with a DoF (Degree of Freedom)-based curriculum learning. By increasing the DoF in each curriculum stage, namely, from similarity transformation (4-DoF) to homography transformation (8-DoF), the network is capable of investigating more detailed deformations, offering fast convergence on the final rectangling task. Experiments show the superiority of our solution over the compared methods on both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The code and dataset will be made available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 4, 2023

Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis

Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.

  • 17 authors
·
Mar 5, 2024 4

Taming Rectified Flow for Inversion and Editing

Rectified-flow-based diffusion transformers, such as FLUX and OpenSora, have demonstrated exceptional performance in the field of image and video generation. Despite their robust generative capabilities, these models often suffer from inaccurate inversion, which could further limit their effectiveness in downstream tasks such as image and video editing. To address this issue, we propose RF-Solver, a novel training-free sampler that enhances inversion precision by reducing errors in the process of solving rectified flow ODEs. Specifically, we derive the exact formulation of the rectified flow ODE and perform a high-order Taylor expansion to estimate its nonlinear components, significantly decreasing the approximation error at each timestep. Building upon RF-Solver, we further design RF-Edit, which comprises specialized sub-modules for image and video editing. By sharing self-attention layer features during the editing process, RF-Edit effectively preserves the structural information of the source image or video while achieving high-quality editing results. Our approach is compatible with any pre-trained rectified-flow-based models for image and video tasks, requiring no additional training or optimization. Extensive experiments on text-to-image generation, image & video inversion, and image & video editing demonstrate the robust performance and adaptability of our methods. Code is available at https://github.com/wangjiangshan0725/RF-Solver-Edit.

  • 9 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024

SplitFlow: Flow Decomposition for Inversion-Free Text-to-Image Editing

Rectified flow models have become a de facto standard in image generation due to their stable sampling trajectories and high-fidelity outputs. Despite their strong generative capabilities, they face critical limitations in image editing tasks: inaccurate inversion processes for mapping real images back into the latent space, and gradient entanglement issues during editing often result in outputs that do not faithfully reflect the target prompt. Recent efforts have attempted to directly map source and target distributions via ODE-based approaches without inversion; however,these methods still yield suboptimal editing quality. In this work, we propose a flow decomposition-and-aggregation framework built upon an inversion-free formulation to address these limitations. Specifically, we semantically decompose the target prompt into multiple sub-prompts, compute an independent flow for each, and aggregate them to form a unified editing trajectory. While we empirically observe that decomposing the original flow enhances diversity in the target space, generating semantically aligned outputs still requires consistent guidance toward the full target prompt. To this end, we design a projection and soft-aggregation mechanism for flow, inspired by gradient conflict resolution in multi-task learning. This approach adaptively weights the sub-target velocity fields, suppressing semantic redundancy while emphasizing distinct directions, thereby preserving both diversity and consistency in the final edited output. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing zero-shot editing approaches in terms of semantic fidelity and attribute disentanglement. The code is available at https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/SplitFlow.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 29

Improving the Training of Rectified Flows

Diffusion models have shown great promise for image and video generation, but sampling from state-of-the-art models requires expensive numerical integration of a generative ODE. One approach for tackling this problem is rectified flows, which iteratively learn smooth ODE paths that are less susceptible to truncation error. However, rectified flows still require a relatively large number of function evaluations (NFEs). In this work, we propose improved techniques for training rectified flows, allowing them to compete with knowledge distillation methods even in the low NFE setting. Our main insight is that under realistic settings, a single iteration of the Reflow algorithm for training rectified flows is sufficient to learn nearly straight trajectories; hence, the current practice of using multiple Reflow iterations is unnecessary. We thus propose techniques to improve one-round training of rectified flows, including a U-shaped timestep distribution and LPIPS-Huber premetric. With these techniques, we improve the FID of the previous 2-rectified flow by up to 72% in the 1 NFE setting on CIFAR-10. On ImageNet 64times64, our improved rectified flow outperforms the state-of-the-art distillation methods such as consistency distillation and progressive distillation in both one-step and two-step settings and rivals the performance of improved consistency training (iCT) in FID. Code is available at https://github.com/sangyun884/rfpp.

  • 3 authors
·
May 30, 2024

On gauge freedom, conservativity and intrinsic dimensionality estimation in diffusion models

Diffusion models are generative models that have recently demonstrated impressive performances in terms of sampling quality and density estimation in high dimensions. They rely on a forward continuous diffusion process and a backward continuous denoising process, which can be described by a time-dependent vector field and is used as a generative model. In the original formulation of the diffusion model, this vector field is assumed to be the score function (i.e. it is the gradient of the log-probability at a given time in the diffusion process). Curiously, on the practical side, most studies on diffusion models implement this vector field as a neural network function and do not constrain it be the gradient of some energy function (that is, most studies do not constrain the vector field to be conservative). Even though some studies investigated empirically whether such a constraint will lead to a performance gain, they lead to contradicting results and failed to provide analytical results. Here, we provide three analytical results regarding the extent of the modeling freedom of this vector field. {Firstly, we propose a novel decomposition of vector fields into a conservative component and an orthogonal component which satisfies a given (gauge) freedom. Secondly, from this orthogonal decomposition, we show that exact density estimation and exact sampling is achieved when the conservative component is exactly equals to the true score and therefore conservativity is neither necessary nor sufficient to obtain exact density estimation and exact sampling. Finally, we show that when it comes to inferring local information of the data manifold, constraining the vector field to be conservative is desirable.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 6, 2024

TReFT: Taming Rectified Flow Models For One-Step Image Translation

Rectified Flow (RF) models have advanced high-quality image and video synthesis via optimal transport theory. However, when applied to image-to-image translation, they still depend on costly multi-step denoising, hindering real-time applications. Although the recent adversarial training paradigm, CycleGAN-Turbo, works in pretrained diffusion models for one-step image translation, we find that directly applying it to RF models leads to severe convergence issues. In this paper, we analyze these challenges and propose TReFT, a novel method to Tame Rectified Flow models for one-step image Translation. Unlike previous works, TReFT directly uses the velocity predicted by pretrained DiT or UNet as output-a simple yet effective design that tackles the convergence issues under adversarial training with one-step inference. This design is mainly motivated by a novel observation that, near the end of the denoising process, the velocity predicted by pretrained RF models converges to the vector from origin to the final clean image, a property we further justify through theoretical analysis. When applying TReFT to large pretrained RF models such as SD3.5 and FLUX, we introduce memory-efficient latent cycle-consistency and identity losses during training, as well as lightweight architectural simplifications for faster inference. Pretrained RF models finetuned with TReFT achieve performance comparable to sota methods across multiple image translation datasets while enabling real-time inference.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 25

InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its reflow procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of 23.3 on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin (37.2 rightarrow 23.3 in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to 22.4. We call our one-step models InstaFlow. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of 13.1 in just 0.09 second, the best in leq 0.1 second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T (13.9 in 0.1 second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 12, 2023 1

DocScanner: Robust Document Image Rectification with Progressive Learning

Compared with flatbed scanners, portable smartphones provide more convenience for physical document digitization. However, such digitized documents are often distorted due to uncontrolled physical deformations, camera positions, and illumination variations. To this end, we present DocScanner, a novel framework for document image rectification. Different from existing solutions, DocScanner addresses this issue by introducing a progressive learning mechanism. Specifically, DocScanner maintains a single estimate of the rectified image, which is progressively corrected with a recurrent architecture. The iterative refinements make DocScanner converge to a robust and superior rectification performance, while the lightweight recurrent architecture ensures the running efficiency. To further improve the rectification quality, based on the geometric priori between the distorted and the rectified images, a geometric regularization is introduced during training to further improve the performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on the Doc3D dataset and the DocUNet Benchmark dataset, and the quantitative and qualitative evaluation results verify the effectiveness of DocScanner, which outperforms previous methods on OCR accuracy, image similarity, and our proposed distortion metric by a considerable margin. Furthermore, our DocScanner shows superior efficiency in runtime latency and model size.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 28, 2021

TripoSG: High-Fidelity 3D Shape Synthesis using Large-Scale Rectified Flow Models

Recent advancements in diffusion techniques have propelled image and video generation to unprece- dented levels of quality, significantly accelerating the deployment and application of generative AI. However, 3D shape generation technology has so far lagged behind, constrained by limitations in 3D data scale, complexity of 3D data process- ing, and insufficient exploration of advanced tech- niques in the 3D domain. Current approaches to 3D shape generation face substantial challenges in terms of output quality, generalization capa- bility, and alignment with input conditions. We present TripoSG, a new streamlined shape diffu- sion paradigm capable of generating high-fidelity 3D meshes with precise correspondence to input images. Specifically, we propose: 1) A large-scale rectified flow transformer for 3D shape generation, achieving state-of-the-art fidelity through training on extensive, high-quality data. 2) A hybrid supervised training strategy combining SDF, normal, and eikonal losses for 3D VAE, achieving high- quality 3D reconstruction performance. 3) A data processing pipeline to generate 2 million high- quality 3D samples, highlighting the crucial rules for data quality and quantity in training 3D gen- erative models. Through comprehensive experi- ments, we have validated the effectiveness of each component in our new framework. The seamless integration of these parts has enabled TripoSG to achieve state-of-the-art performance in 3D shape generation. The resulting 3D shapes exhibit en- hanced detail due to high-resolution capabilities and demonstrate exceptional fidelity to input im- ages. Moreover, TripoSG demonstrates improved versatility in generating 3D models from diverse image styles and contents, showcasing strong gen- eralization capabilities. To foster progress and innovation in the field of 3D generation, we will make our model publicly available.

  • 11 authors
·
Feb 10 4

Taming Feed-forward Reconstruction Models as Latent Encoders for 3D Generative Models

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 31, 2024

Implicit Neural Spatial Representations for Time-dependent PDEs

Implicit Neural Spatial Representation (INSR) has emerged as an effective representation of spatially-dependent vector fields. This work explores solving time-dependent PDEs with INSR. Classical PDE solvers introduce both temporal and spatial discretizations. Common spatial discretizations include meshes and meshless point clouds, where each degree-of-freedom corresponds to a location in space. While these explicit spatial correspondences are intuitive to model and understand, these representations are not necessarily optimal for accuracy, memory usage, or adaptivity. Keeping the classical temporal discretization unchanged (e.g., explicit/implicit Euler), we explore INSR as an alternative spatial discretization, where spatial information is implicitly stored in the neural network weights. The network weights then evolve over time via time integration. Our approach does not require any training data generated by existing solvers because our approach is the solver itself. We validate our approach on various PDEs with examples involving large elastic deformations, turbulent fluids, and multi-scale phenomena. While slower to compute than traditional representations, our approach exhibits higher accuracy and lower memory consumption. Whereas classical solvers can dynamically adapt their spatial representation only by resorting to complex remeshing algorithms, our INSR approach is intrinsically adaptive. By tapping into the rich literature of classic time integrators, e.g., operator-splitting schemes, our method enables challenging simulations in contact mechanics and turbulent flows where previous neural-physics approaches struggle. Videos and codes are available on the project page: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/INSR-PDE/

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 30, 2022

Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM): Instance Deformation for Image Manipulation and Synthesis

In medical imaging, the diffusion models have shown great potential in synthetic image generation tasks. However, these models often struggle with the interpretable connections between the generated and existing images and could create illusions. To address these challenges, our research proposes a novel diffusion-based generative model based on deformation diffusion and recovery. This model, named Deformation-Recovery Diffusion Model (DRDM), diverges from traditional score/intensity and latent feature-based approaches, emphasizing morphological changes through deformation fields rather than direct image synthesis. This is achieved by introducing a topological-preserving deformation field generation method, which randomly samples and integrates a set of multi-scale Deformation Vector Fields (DVF). DRDM is trained to learn to recover unreasonable deformation components, thereby restoring each randomly deformed image to a realistic distribution. These innovations facilitate the generation of diverse and anatomically plausible deformations, enhancing data augmentation and synthesis for further analysis in downstream tasks, such as few-shot learning and image registration. Experimental results in cardiac MRI and pulmonary CT show DRDM is capable of creating diverse, large (over 10\% image size deformation scale), and high-quality (negative rate of the Jacobian matrix's determinant is lower than 1\%) deformation fields. The further experimental results in downstream tasks, 2D image segmentation and 3D image registration, indicate significant improvements resulting from DRDM, showcasing the potential of our model to advance image manipulation and synthesis in medical imaging and beyond. Project page: https://jianqingzheng.github.io/def_diff_rec/

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024

RecTok: Reconstruction Distillation along Rectified Flow

Visual tokenizers play a crucial role in diffusion models. The dimensionality of latent space governs both reconstruction fidelity and the semantic expressiveness of the latent feature. However, a fundamental trade-off is inherent between dimensionality and generation quality, constraining existing methods to low-dimensional latent spaces. Although recent works have leveraged vision foundation models to enrich the semantics of visual tokenizers and accelerate convergence, high-dimensional tokenizers still underperform their low-dimensional counterparts. In this work, we propose RecTok, which overcomes the limitations of high-dimensional visual tokenizers through two key innovations: flow semantic distillation and reconstruction--alignment distillation. Our key insight is to make the forward flow in flow matching semantically rich, which serves as the training space of diffusion transformers, rather than focusing on the latent space as in previous works. Specifically, our method distills the semantic information in VFMs into the forward flow trajectories in flow matching. And we further enhance the semantics by introducing a masked feature reconstruction loss. Our RecTok achieves superior image reconstruction, generation quality, and discriminative performance. It achieves state-of-the-art results on the gFID-50K under both with and without classifier-free guidance settings, while maintaining a semantically rich latent space structure. Furthermore, as the latent dimensionality increases, we observe consistent improvements. Code and model are available at https://shi-qingyu.github.io/rectok.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 15 2

Are We Really Learning the Score Function? Reinterpreting Diffusion Models Through Wasserstein Gradient Flow Matching

Diffusion models are commonly interpreted as learning the score function, i.e., the gradient of the log-density of noisy data. However, this assumption implies that the target of learning is a conservative vector field, which is not enforced by the neural network architectures used in practice. We present numerical evidence that trained diffusion networks violate both integral and differential constraints required of true score functions, demonstrating that the learned vector fields are not conservative. Despite this, the models perform remarkably well as generative mechanisms. To explain this apparent paradox, we advocate a new theoretical perspective: diffusion training is better understood as flow matching to the velocity field of a Wasserstein Gradient Flow (WGF), rather than as score learning for a reverse-time stochastic differential equation. Under this view, the "probability flow" arises naturally from the WGF framework, eliminating the need to invoke reverse-time SDE theory and clarifying why generative sampling remains successful even when the neural vector field is not a true score. We further show that non-conservative errors from neural approximation do not necessarily harm density transport. Our results advocate for adopting the WGF perspective as a principled, elegant, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding diffusion generative models.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 29

3D^2-Actor: Learning Pose-Conditioned 3D-Aware Denoiser for Realistic Gaussian Avatar Modeling

Advancements in neural implicit representations and differentiable rendering have markedly improved the ability to learn animatable 3D avatars from sparse multi-view RGB videos. However, current methods that map observation space to canonical space often face challenges in capturing pose-dependent details and generalizing to novel poses. While diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities in 2D image generation, their potential for creating animatable 3D avatars from 2D inputs remains underexplored. In this work, we introduce 3D^2-Actor, a novel approach featuring a pose-conditioned 3D-aware human modeling pipeline that integrates iterative 2D denoising and 3D rectifying steps. The 2D denoiser, guided by pose cues, generates detailed multi-view images that provide the rich feature set necessary for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction and pose rendering. Complementing this, our Gaussian-based 3D rectifier renders images with enhanced 3D consistency through a two-stage projection strategy and a novel local coordinate representation. Additionally, we propose an innovative sampling strategy to ensure smooth temporal continuity across frames in video synthesis. Our method effectively addresses the limitations of traditional numerical solutions in handling ill-posed mappings, producing realistic and animatable 3D human avatars. Experimental results demonstrate that 3D^2-Actor excels in high-fidelity avatar modeling and robustly generalizes to novel poses. Code is available at: https://github.com/silence-tang/GaussianActor.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 16, 2024

SlimFlow: Training Smaller One-Step Diffusion Models with Rectified Flow

Diffusion models excel in high-quality generation but suffer from slow inference due to iterative sampling. While recent methods have successfully transformed diffusion models into one-step generators, they neglect model size reduction, limiting their applicability in compute-constrained scenarios. This paper aims to develop small, efficient one-step diffusion models based on the powerful rectified flow framework, by exploring joint compression of inference steps and model size. The rectified flow framework trains one-step generative models using two operations, reflow and distillation. Compared with the original framework, squeezing the model size brings two new challenges: (1) the initialization mismatch between large teachers and small students during reflow; (2) the underperformance of naive distillation on small student models. To overcome these issues, we propose Annealing Reflow and Flow-Guided Distillation, which together comprise our SlimFlow framework. With our novel framework, we train a one-step diffusion model with an FID of 5.02 and 15.7M parameters, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art one-step diffusion model (FID=6.47, 19.4M parameters) on CIFAR10. On ImageNet 64times64 and FFHQ 64times64, our method yields small one-step diffusion models that are comparable to larger models, showcasing the effectiveness of our method in creating compact, efficient one-step diffusion models.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024

Physics-informed Reduced Order Modeling of Time-dependent PDEs via Differentiable Solvers

Reduced-order modeling (ROM) of time-dependent and parameterized differential equations aims to accelerate the simulation of complex high-dimensional systems by learning a compact latent manifold representation that captures the characteristics of the solution fields and their time-dependent dynamics. Although high-fidelity numerical solvers generate the training datasets, they have thus far been excluded from the training process, causing the learned latent dynamics to drift away from the discretized governing physics. This mismatch often limits generalization and forecasting capabilities. In this work, we propose Physics-informed ROM (Φ-ROM) by incorporating differentiable PDE solvers into the training procedure. Specifically, the latent space dynamics and its dependence on PDE parameters are shaped directly by the governing physics encoded in the solver, ensuring a strong correspondence between the full and reduced systems. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven ROMs and other physics-informed strategies by accurately generalizing to new dynamics arising from unseen parameters, enabling long-term forecasting beyond the training horizon, maintaining continuity in both time and space, and reducing the data cost. Furthermore, Φ-ROM learns to recover and forecast the solution fields even when trained or evaluated with sparse and irregular observations of the fields, providing a flexible framework for field reconstruction and data assimilation. We demonstrate the framework's robustness across various PDE solvers and highlight its broad applicability by providing an open-source JAX implementation that is readily extensible to other PDE systems and differentiable solvers, available at https://phi-rom.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
May 20

GuideFlow3D: Optimization-Guided Rectified Flow For Appearance Transfer

Transferring appearance to 3D assets using different representations of the appearance object - such as images or text - has garnered interest due to its wide range of applications in industries like gaming, augmented reality, and digital content creation. However, state-of-the-art methods still fail when the geometry between the input and appearance objects is significantly different. A straightforward approach is to directly apply a 3D generative model, but we show that this ultimately fails to produce appealing results. Instead, we propose a principled approach inspired by universal guidance. Given a pretrained rectified flow model conditioned on image or text, our training-free method interacts with the sampling process by periodically adding guidance. This guidance can be modeled as a differentiable loss function, and we experiment with two different types of guidance including part-aware losses for appearance and self-similarity. Our experiments show that our approach successfully transfers texture and geometric details to the input 3D asset, outperforming baselines both qualitatively and quantitatively. We also show that traditional metrics are not suitable for evaluating the task due to their inability of focusing on local details and comparing dissimilar inputs, in absence of ground truth data. We thus evaluate appearance transfer quality with a GPT-based system objectively ranking outputs, ensuring robust and human-like assessment, as further confirmed by our user study. Beyond showcased scenarios, our method is general and could be extended to different types of diffusion models and guidance functions.

Transport-Guided Rectified Flow Inversion: Improved Image Editing Using Optimal Transport Theory

Effective image inversion in rectified flow models - mapping real images to editable latent representations - is crucial for practical image editing applications; however, achieving optimal balance between reconstruction fidelity and editing flexibility remains a fundamental challenge. In this work, we introduce the Optimal Transport Inversion Pipeline (OTIP), a zero-shot framework that leverages optimal transport theory to guide the inversion process in rectified flow models. Our underlying hypothesis is that incorporating transport-based guidance during the reverse diffusion process can effectively balance reconstruction accuracy and editing controllability through principled trajectory optimization. The method computes optimal transport paths between image and noise distributions while maintaining computational efficiency. Our approach achieves high-fidelity reconstruction with LPIPS scores of 0.001 and SSIM of 0.992 on face editing benchmarks, demonstrating superior preservation of fine-grained details compared to existing methods. We evaluate the framework across multiple editing tasks, observing 7.8% to 12.9% improvements in reconstruction loss over RF-Inversion on the LSUN-Bedroom and LSUN-Church datasets, respectively. For semantic face editing, our method achieves an 11.2% improvement in identity preservation and a 1.6% enhancement in perceptual quality, while maintaining computational efficiency comparable to baseline approaches. Qualitatively, our method produces visually compelling edits with superior semantic consistency and fine-grained detail preservation across diverse editing scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/marianlupascu/OT-Inversion

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 4

A Deep Conjugate Direction Method for Iteratively Solving Linear Systems

We present a novel deep learning approach to approximate the solution of large, sparse, symmetric, positive-definite linear systems of equations. These systems arise from many problems in applied science, e.g., in numerical methods for partial differential equations. Algorithms for approximating the solution to these systems are often the bottleneck in problems that require their solution, particularly for modern applications that require many millions of unknowns. Indeed, numerical linear algebra techniques have been investigated for many decades to alleviate this computational burden. Recently, data-driven techniques have also shown promise for these problems. Motivated by the conjugate gradients algorithm that iteratively selects search directions for minimizing the matrix norm of the approximation error, we design an approach that utilizes a deep neural network to accelerate convergence via data-driven improvement of the search directions. Our method leverages a carefully chosen convolutional network to approximate the action of the inverse of the linear operator up to an arbitrary constant. We train the network using unsupervised learning with a loss function equal to the L^2 difference between an input and the system matrix times the network evaluation, where the unspecified constant in the approximate inverse is accounted for. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on spatially discretized Poisson equations with millions of degrees of freedom arising in computational fluid dynamics applications. Unlike state-of-the-art learning approaches, our algorithm is capable of reducing the linear system residual to a given tolerance in a small number of iterations, independent of the problem size. Moreover, our method generalizes effectively to various systems beyond those encountered during training.

  • 6 authors
·
May 22, 2022

Relation Rectification in Diffusion Model

Despite their exceptional generative abilities, large text-to-image diffusion models, much like skilled but careless artists, often struggle with accurately depicting visual relationships between objects. This issue, as we uncover through careful analysis, arises from a misaligned text encoder that struggles to interpret specific relationships and differentiate the logical order of associated objects. To resolve this, we introduce a novel task termed Relation Rectification, aiming to refine the model to accurately represent a given relationship it initially fails to generate. To address this, we propose an innovative solution utilizing a Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (HGCN). It models the directional relationships between relation terms and corresponding objects within the input prompts. Specifically, we optimize the HGCN on a pair of prompts with identical relational words but reversed object orders, supplemented by a few reference images. The lightweight HGCN adjusts the text embeddings generated by the text encoder, ensuring the accurate reflection of the textual relation in the embedding space. Crucially, our method retains the parameters of the text encoder and diffusion model, preserving the model's robust performance on unrelated descriptions. We validated our approach on a newly curated dataset of diverse relational data, demonstrating both quantitative and qualitative enhancements in generating images with precise visual relations. Project page: https://wuyinwei-hah.github.io/rrnet.github.io/.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 29, 2024

ReQFlow: Rectified Quaternion Flow for Efficient and High-Quality Protein Backbone Generation

Protein backbone generation plays a central role in de novo protein design and is significant for many biological and medical applications. Although diffusion and flow-based generative models provide potential solutions to this challenging task, they often generate proteins with undesired designability and suffer computational inefficiency. In this study, we propose a novel rectified quaternion flow (ReQFlow) matching method for fast and high-quality protein backbone generation. In particular, our method generates a local translation and a 3D rotation from random noise for each residue in a protein chain, which represents each 3D rotation as a unit quaternion and constructs its flow by spherical linear interpolation (SLERP) in an exponential format. We train the model by quaternion flow (QFlow) matching with guaranteed numerical stability and rectify the QFlow model to accelerate its inference and improve the designability of generated protein backbones, leading to the proposed ReQFlow model. Experiments show that ReQFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance in protein backbone generation while requiring much fewer sampling steps and significantly less inference time (e.g., being 37x faster than RFDiffusion and 62x faster than Genie2 when generating a backbone of length 300), demonstrating its effectiveness and efficiency. The code is available at https://github.com/AngxiaoYue/ReQFlow.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 20 3

SplatFlow: Multi-View Rectified Flow Model for 3D Gaussian Splatting Synthesis

Text-based generation and editing of 3D scenes hold significant potential for streamlining content creation through intuitive user interactions. While recent advances leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for high-fidelity and real-time rendering, existing methods are often specialized and task-focused, lacking a unified framework for both generation and editing. In this paper, we introduce SplatFlow, a comprehensive framework that addresses this gap by enabling direct 3DGS generation and editing. SplatFlow comprises two main components: a multi-view rectified flow (RF) model and a Gaussian Splatting Decoder (GSDecoder). The multi-view RF model operates in latent space, generating multi-view images, depths, and camera poses simultaneously, conditioned on text prompts, thus addressing challenges like diverse scene scales and complex camera trajectories in real-world settings. Then, the GSDecoder efficiently translates these latent outputs into 3DGS representations through a feed-forward 3DGS method. Leveraging training-free inversion and inpainting techniques, SplatFlow enables seamless 3DGS editing and supports a broad range of 3D tasks-including object editing, novel view synthesis, and camera pose estimation-within a unified framework without requiring additional complex pipelines. We validate SplatFlow's capabilities on the MVImgNet and DL3DV-7K datasets, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in various 3D generation, editing, and inpainting-based tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 25, 2024 2

Space and Time Continuous Physics Simulation From Partial Observations

Modern techniques for physical simulations rely on numerical schemes and mesh-refinement methods to address trade-offs between precision and complexity, but these handcrafted solutions are tedious and require high computational power. Data-driven methods based on large-scale machine learning promise high adaptivity by integrating long-range dependencies more directly and efficiently. In this work, we focus on fluid dynamics and address the shortcomings of a large part of the literature, which are based on fixed support for computations and predictions in the form of regular or irregular grids. We propose a novel setup to perform predictions in a continuous spatial and temporal domain while being trained on sparse observations. We formulate the task as a double observation problem and propose a solution with two interlinked dynamical systems defined on, respectively, the sparse positions and the continuous domain, which allows to forecast and interpolate a solution from the initial condition. Our practical implementation involves recurrent GNNs and a spatio-temporal attention observer capable of interpolating the solution at arbitrary locations. Our model not only generalizes to new initial conditions (as standard auto-regressive models do) but also performs evaluation at arbitrary space and time locations. We evaluate on three standard datasets in fluid dynamics and compare to strong baselines, which are outperformed both in classical settings and in the extended new task requiring continuous predictions.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 17, 2024

Flexible Isosurface Extraction for Gradient-Based Mesh Optimization

This work considers gradient-based mesh optimization, where we iteratively optimize for a 3D surface mesh by representing it as the isosurface of a scalar field, an increasingly common paradigm in applications including photogrammetry, generative modeling, and inverse physics. Existing implementations adapt classic isosurface extraction algorithms like Marching Cubes or Dual Contouring; these techniques were designed to extract meshes from fixed, known fields, and in the optimization setting they lack the degrees of freedom to represent high-quality feature-preserving meshes, or suffer from numerical instabilities. We introduce FlexiCubes, an isosurface representation specifically designed for optimizing an unknown mesh with respect to geometric, visual, or even physical objectives. Our main insight is to introduce additional carefully-chosen parameters into the representation, which allow local flexible adjustments to the extracted mesh geometry and connectivity. These parameters are updated along with the underlying scalar field via automatic differentiation when optimizing for a downstream task. We base our extraction scheme on Dual Marching Cubes for improved topological properties, and present extensions to optionally generate tetrahedral and hierarchically-adaptive meshes. Extensive experiments validate FlexiCubes on both synthetic benchmarks and real-world applications, showing that it offers significant improvements in mesh quality and geometric fidelity.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 10, 2023

Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restoration

Photo-realistic image restoration algorithms are typically evaluated by distortion measures (e.g., PSNR, SSIM) and by perceptual quality measures (e.g., FID, NIQE), where the desire is to attain the lowest possible distortion without compromising on perceptual quality. To achieve this goal, current methods typically attempt to sample from the posterior distribution, or to optimize a weighted sum of a distortion loss (e.g., MSE) and a perceptual quality loss (e.g., GAN). Unlike previous works, this paper is concerned specifically with the optimal estimator that minimizes the MSE under a constraint of perfect perceptual index, namely where the distribution of the reconstructed images is equal to that of the ground-truth ones. A recent theoretical result shows that such an estimator can be constructed by optimally transporting the posterior mean prediction (MMSE estimate) to the distribution of the ground-truth images. Inspired by this result, we introduce Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow (PMRF), a simple yet highly effective algorithm that approximates this optimal estimator. In particular, PMRF first predicts the posterior mean, and then transports the result to a high-quality image using a rectified flow model that approximates the desired optimal transport map. We investigate the theoretical utility of PMRF and demonstrate that it consistently outperforms previous methods on a variety of image restoration tasks.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 1, 2024 3

AB-UPT: Scaling Neural CFD Surrogates for High-Fidelity Automotive Aerodynamics Simulations via Anchored-Branched Universal Physics Transformers

Recent advances in neural surrogate modeling offer the potential for transformative innovations in applications such as automotive aerodynamics. Yet, industrial-scale problems often involve volumetric meshes with cell counts reaching the 100 millions, presenting major scalability challenges. Complex geometries further complicate modeling through intricate surface-volume interactions, while quantities such as vorticity are highly nonlinear and must satisfy strict divergence-free constraints. To address these requirements, we introduce AB-UPT as a novel modeling scheme for building neural surrogates for CFD simulations. AB-UPT is designed to: (i) decouple geometry encoding and prediction tasks via multi-branch operators; (ii) enable scalability to high-resolution outputs via neural simulation in a low-dimensional latent space, coupled with anchored neural field decoders to predict high-fidelity outputs; (iii) enforce physics consistency by a novel divergence-free formulation. We show that AB-UPT yields state-of-the-art predictive accuracy of surface and volume fields on automotive CFD simulations ranging from 33 thousand up to 150 million mesh cells. Furthermore, our anchored neural field architecture enables the enforcement of hard physical constraints on the physics predictions without degradation in performance, exemplified by modeling divergence-free vorticity fields. Notably, the proposed models can be trained on a single GPU in less than a day and predict industry-standard surface and volume fields within seconds. Additionally, we show that the flexible design of our method enables neural simulation from a CAD geometry alone, omitting the need for costly CFD meshing procedures.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 13

FlowSep: Language-Queried Sound Separation with Rectified Flow Matching

Language-queried audio source separation (LASS) focuses on separating sounds using textual descriptions of the desired sources. Current methods mainly use discriminative approaches, such as time-frequency masking, to separate target sounds and minimize interference from other sources. However, these models face challenges when separating overlapping soundtracks, which may lead to artifacts such as spectral holes or incomplete separation. Rectified flow matching (RFM), a generative model that establishes linear relations between the distribution of data and noise, offers superior theoretical properties and simplicity, but has not yet been explored in sound separation. In this work, we introduce FlowSep, a new generative model based on RFM for LASS tasks. FlowSep learns linear flow trajectories from noise to target source features within the variational autoencoder (VAE) latent space. During inference, the RFM-generated latent features are reconstructed into a mel-spectrogram via the pre-trained VAE decoder, followed by a pre-trained vocoder to synthesize the waveform. Trained on 1,680 hours of audio data, FlowSep outperforms the state-of-the-art models across multiple benchmarks, as evaluated with subjective and objective metrics. Additionally, our results show that FlowSep surpasses a diffusion-based LASS model in both separation quality and inference efficiency, highlighting its strong potential for audio source separation tasks. Code, pre-trained models and demos can be found at: https://audio-agi.github.io/FlowSep_demo/.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 11, 2024

Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKV

Transformers have revolutionized medical image restoration, but the quadratic complexity still poses limitations for their application to high-resolution medical images. The recent advent of the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) model in the natural language processing field has attracted much attention due to its ability to process long sequences efficiently. To leverage its advanced design, we propose Restore-RWKV, the first RWKV-based model for medical image restoration. Since the original RWKV model is designed for 1D sequences, we make two necessary modifications for modeling spatial relations in 2D medical images. First, we present a recurrent WKV (Re-WKV) attention mechanism that captures global dependencies with linear computational complexity. Re-WKV incorporates bidirectional attention as basic for a global receptive field and recurrent attention to effectively model 2D dependencies from various scan directions. Second, we develop an omnidirectional token shift (Omni-Shift) layer that enhances local dependencies by shifting tokens from all directions and across a wide context range. These adaptations make the proposed Restore-RWKV an efficient and effective model for medical image restoration. Even a lightweight variant of Restore-RWKV, with only 1.16 million parameters, achieves comparable or even superior results compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting Restore-RWKV achieves SOTA performance across a range of medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, MRI image super-resolution, and all-in-one medical image restoration. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yaziwel/Restore-RWKV.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 14, 2024

Geometry aware inference of steady state PDEs using Equivariant Neural Fields representations

Recent advances in Neural Fields have enabled powerful, discretization-invariant methods for learning neural operators that approximate solutions of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) on general geometries. Building on these developments, we introduce enf2enf, an encoder--decoder methodology for predicting steady-state Partial Differential Equations with non-parameterized geometric variability, based on recently proposed Equivariant Neural Field architectures. In enf2enf, input geometries are encoded into latent point cloud embeddings that inherently preserve geometric grounding and capture local phenomena. The resulting representations are then combined with global parameters and directly decoded into continuous output fields, thus efficiently modeling the coupling between geometry and physics. By leveraging the inductive biases of locality and translation invariance, our approach is able to capture fine-scale physical features as well as complex shape variations, thereby enhancing generalization and physical compliance. Extensive experiments on a high-fidelity aerodynamic dataset, a hyper-elastic material benchmark, and multi-element airfoil geometries, demonstrate that the proposed model achieves superior or competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art graph based, operator learning, and neural field methods. Notably, our method supports real time inference and zero-shot super-resolution, enabling efficient training on low-resolution meshes while maintaining high accuracy on full-scale discretizations.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 24

Physics-Informed Image Restoration via Progressive PDE Integration

Motion blur, caused by relative movement between camera and scene during exposure, significantly degrades image quality and impairs downstream computer vision tasks such as object detection, tracking, and recognition in dynamic environments. While deep learning-based motion deblurring methods have achieved remarkable progress, existing approaches face fundamental challenges in capturing the long-range spatial dependencies inherent in motion blur patterns. Traditional convolutional methods rely on limited receptive fields and require extremely deep networks to model global spatial relationships. These limitations motivate the need for alternative approaches that incorporate physical priors to guide feature evolution during restoration. In this paper, we propose a progressive training framework that integrates physics-informed PDE dynamics into state-of-the-art restoration architectures. By leveraging advection-diffusion equations to model feature evolution, our approach naturally captures the directional flow characteristics of motion blur while enabling principled global spatial modeling. Our PDE-enhanced deblurring models achieve superior restoration quality with minimal overhead, adding only approximately 1\% to inference GMACs while providing consistent improvements in perceptual quality across multiple state-of-the-art architectures. Comprehensive experiments on standard motion deblurring benchmarks demonstrate that our physics-informed approach improves PSNR and SSIM significantly across four diverse architectures, including FFTformer, NAFNet, Restormer, and Stripformer. These results validate that incorporating mathematical physics principles through PDE-based global layers can enhance deep learning-based image restoration, establishing a promising direction for physics-informed neural network design in computer vision applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 9

Towards scalable surrogate models based on Neural Fields for large scale aerodynamic simulations

This paper introduces a novel surrogate modeling framework for aerodynamic applications based on Neural Fields. The proposed approach, MARIO (Modulated Aerodynamic Resolution Invariant Operator), addresses non parametric geometric variability through an efficient shape encoding mechanism and exploits the discretization-invariant nature of Neural Fields. It enables training on significantly downsampled meshes, while maintaining consistent accuracy during full-resolution inference. These properties allow for efficient modeling of diverse flow conditions, while reducing computational cost and memory requirements compared to traditional CFD solvers and existing surrogate methods. The framework is validated on two complementary datasets that reflect industrial constraints. First, the AirfRANS dataset consists in a two-dimensional airfoil benchmark with non-parametric shape variations. Performance evaluation of MARIO on this case demonstrates an order of magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy over existing methods across velocity, pressure, and turbulent viscosity fields, while accurately capturing boundary layer phenomena and aerodynamic coefficients. Second, the NASA Common Research Model features three-dimensional pressure distributions on a full aircraft surface mesh, with parametric control surface deflections. This configuration confirms MARIO's accuracy and scalability. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods demonstrates that Neural Field surrogates can provide rapid and accurate aerodynamic predictions under the computational and data limitations characteristic of industrial applications.

  • 6 authors
·
May 14

Text-to-Vector Generation with Neural Path Representation

Vector graphics are widely used in digital art and highly favored by designers due to their scalability and layer-wise properties. However, the process of creating and editing vector graphics requires creativity and design expertise, making it a time-consuming task. Recent advancements in text-to-vector (T2V) generation have aimed to make this process more accessible. However, existing T2V methods directly optimize control points of vector graphics paths, often resulting in intersecting or jagged paths due to the lack of geometry constraints. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel neural path representation by designing a dual-branch Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that learns the path latent space from both sequence and image modalities. By optimizing the combination of neural paths, we can incorporate geometric constraints while preserving expressivity in generated SVGs. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage path optimization method to improve the visual and topological quality of generated SVGs. In the first stage, a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model guides the initial generation of complex vector graphics through the Variational Score Distillation (VSD) process. In the second stage, we refine the graphics using a layer-wise image vectorization strategy to achieve clearer elements and structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments and showcase various applications. The project page is https://intchous.github.io/T2V-NPR.

  • 3 authors
·
May 16, 2024

Training Transformers for Mesh-Based Simulations

Simulating physics using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is predominantly driven by message-passing architectures, which face challenges in scaling and efficiency, particularly in handling large, complex meshes. These architectures have inspired numerous enhancements, including multigrid approaches and K-hop aggregation (using neighbours of distance K), yet they often introduce significant complexity and suffer from limited in-depth investigations. In response to these challenges, we propose a novel Graph Transformer architecture that leverages the adjacency matrix as an attention mask. The proposed approach incorporates innovative augmentations, including Dilated Sliding Windows and Global Attention, to extend receptive fields without sacrificing computational efficiency. Through extensive experimentation, we evaluate model size, adjacency matrix augmentations, positional encoding and K-hop configurations using challenging 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) datasets. We also train over 60 models to find a scaling law between training FLOPs and parameters. The introduced models demonstrate remarkable scalability, performing on meshes with up to 300k nodes and 3 million edges. Notably, the smallest model achieves parity with MeshGraphNet while being 7times faster and 6times smaller. The largest model surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 38.8\% on average and outperforms MeshGraphNet by 52\% on the all-rollout RMSE, while having a similar training speed. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DonsetPG/graph-physics.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 25

DeepMesh: Differentiable Iso-Surface Extraction

Geometric Deep Learning has recently made striking progress with the advent of continuous deep implicit fields. They allow for detailed modeling of watertight surfaces of arbitrary topology while not relying on a 3D Euclidean grid, resulting in a learnable parameterization that is unlimited in resolution. Unfortunately, these methods are often unsuitable for applications that require an explicit mesh-based surface representation because converting an implicit field to such a representation relies on the Marching Cubes algorithm, which cannot be differentiated with respect to the underlying implicit field. In this work, we remove this limitation and introduce a differentiable way to produce explicit surface mesh representations from Deep Implicit Fields. Our key insight is that by reasoning on how implicit field perturbations impact local surface geometry, one can ultimately differentiate the 3D location of surface samples with respect to the underlying deep implicit field. We exploit this to define DeepMesh - an end-to-end differentiable mesh representation that can vary its topology. We validate our theoretical insight through several applications: Single view 3D Reconstruction via Differentiable Rendering, Physically-Driven Shape Optimization, Full Scene 3D Reconstruction from Scans and End-to-End Training. In all cases our end-to-end differentiable parameterization gives us an edge over state-of-the-art algorithms.

  • 7 authors
·
Jun 20, 2021

Infinity-RoPE: Action-Controllable Infinite Video Generation Emerges From Autoregressive Self-Rollout

Current autoregressive video diffusion models are constrained by three core bottlenecks: (i) the finite temporal horizon imposed by the base model's 3D Rotary Positional Embedding (3D-RoPE), (ii) slow prompt responsiveness in maintaining fine-grained action control during long-form rollouts, and (iii) the inability to realize discontinuous cinematic transitions within a single generation stream. We introduce infty-RoPE, a unified inference-time framework that addresses all three limitations through three interconnected components: Block-Relativistic RoPE, KV Flush, and RoPE Cut. Block-Relativistic RoPE reformulates temporal encoding as a moving local reference frame, where each newly generated latent block is rotated relative to the base model's maximum frame horizon while earlier blocks are rotated backward to preserve relative temporal geometry. This relativistic formulation eliminates fixed temporal positions, enabling continuous video generation far beyond the base positional limits. To obtain fine-grained action control without re-encoding, KV Flush renews the KV cache by retaining only two latent frames, the global sink and the last generated latent frame, thereby ensuring immediate prompt responsiveness. Finally, RoPE Cut introduces controlled discontinuities in temporal RoPE coordinates, enabling multi-cut scene transitions within a single continuous rollout. Together, these components establish infty-RoPE as a training-free foundation for infinite-horizon, controllable, and cinematic video diffusion. Comprehensive experiments show that infty-RoPE consistently surpasses previous autoregressive models in overall VBench scores.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 25 2

Flux4D: Flow-based Unsupervised 4D Reconstruction

Reconstructing large-scale dynamic scenes from visual observations is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with critical implications for robotics and autonomous systems. While recent differentiable rendering methods such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have achieved impressive photorealistic reconstruction, they suffer from scalability limitations and require annotations to decouple actor motion. Existing self-supervised methods attempt to eliminate explicit annotations by leveraging motion cues and geometric priors, yet they remain constrained by per-scene optimization and sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce Flux4D, a simple and scalable framework for 4D reconstruction of large-scale dynamic scenes. Flux4D directly predicts 3D Gaussians and their motion dynamics to reconstruct sensor observations in a fully unsupervised manner. By adopting only photometric losses and enforcing an "as static as possible" regularization, Flux4D learns to decompose dynamic elements directly from raw data without requiring pre-trained supervised models or foundational priors simply by training across many scenes. Our approach enables efficient reconstruction of dynamic scenes within seconds, scales effectively to large datasets, and generalizes well to unseen environments, including rare and unknown objects. Experiments on outdoor driving datasets show Flux4D significantly outperforms existing methods in scalability, generalization, and reconstruction quality.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 2

OReX: Object Reconstruction from Planar Cross-sections Using Neural Fields

Reconstructing 3D shapes from planar cross-sections is a challenge inspired by downstream applications like medical imaging and geographic informatics. The input is an in/out indicator function fully defined on a sparse collection of planes in space, and the output is an interpolation of the indicator function to the entire volume. Previous works addressing this sparse and ill-posed problem either produce low quality results, or rely on additional priors such as target topology, appearance information, or input normal directions. In this paper, we present OReX, a method for 3D shape reconstruction from slices alone, featuring a Neural Field as the interpolation prior. A modest neural network is trained on the input planes to return an inside/outside estimate for a given 3D coordinate, yielding a powerful prior that induces smoothness and self-similarities. The main challenge for this approach is high-frequency details, as the neural prior is overly smoothing. To alleviate this, we offer an iterative estimation architecture and a hierarchical input sampling scheme that encourage coarse-to-fine training, allowing the training process to focus on high frequencies at later stages. In addition, we identify and analyze a ripple-like effect stemming from the mesh extraction step. We mitigate it by regularizing the spatial gradients of the indicator function around input in/out boundaries during network training, tackling the problem at the root. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experimentation, we demonstrate our method is robust, accurate, and scales well with the size of the input. We report state-of-the-art results compared to previous approaches and recent potential solutions, and demonstrate the benefit of our individual contributions through analysis and ablation studies.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 23, 2022

Bilateral Guided Radiance Field Processing

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves unprecedented performance in synthesizing novel view synthesis, utilizing multi-view consistency. When capturing multiple inputs, image signal processing (ISP) in modern cameras will independently enhance them, including exposure adjustment, color correction, local tone mapping, etc. While these processings greatly improve image quality, they often break the multi-view consistency assumption, leading to "floaters" in the reconstructed radiance fields. To address this concern without compromising visual aesthetics, we aim to first disentangle the enhancement by ISP at the NeRF training stage and re-apply user-desired enhancements to the reconstructed radiance fields at the finishing stage. Furthermore, to make the re-applied enhancements consistent between novel views, we need to perform imaging signal processing in 3D space (i.e. "3D ISP"). For this goal, we adopt the bilateral grid, a locally-affine model, as a generalized representation of ISP processing. Specifically, we optimize per-view 3D bilateral grids with radiance fields to approximate the effects of camera pipelines for each input view. To achieve user-adjustable 3D finishing, we propose to learn a low-rank 4D bilateral grid from a given single view edit, lifting photo enhancements to the whole 3D scene. We demonstrate our approach can boost the visual quality of novel view synthesis by effectively removing floaters and performing enhancements from user retouching. The source code and our data are available at: https://bilarfpro.github.io.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1, 2024

Neural Fields in Robotics: A Survey

Neural Fields have emerged as a transformative approach for 3D scene representation in computer vision and robotics, enabling accurate inference of geometry, 3D semantics, and dynamics from posed 2D data. Leveraging differentiable rendering, Neural Fields encompass both continuous implicit and explicit neural representations enabling high-fidelity 3D reconstruction, integration of multi-modal sensor data, and generation of novel viewpoints. This survey explores their applications in robotics, emphasizing their potential to enhance perception, planning, and control. Their compactness, memory efficiency, and differentiability, along with seamless integration with foundation and generative models, make them ideal for real-time applications, improving robot adaptability and decision-making. This paper provides a thorough review of Neural Fields in robotics, categorizing applications across various domains and evaluating their strengths and limitations, based on over 200 papers. First, we present four key Neural Fields frameworks: Occupancy Networks, Signed Distance Fields, Neural Radiance Fields, and Gaussian Splatting. Second, we detail Neural Fields' applications in five major robotics domains: pose estimation, manipulation, navigation, physics, and autonomous driving, highlighting key works and discussing takeaways and open challenges. Finally, we outline the current limitations of Neural Fields in robotics and propose promising directions for future research. Project page: https://robonerf.github.io

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 26, 2024 2

Gaussian RBFNet: Gaussian Radial Basis Functions for Fast and Accurate Representation and Reconstruction of Neural Fields

Neural fields such as DeepSDF and Neural Radiance Fields have recently revolutionized novel-view synthesis and 3D reconstruction from RGB images and videos. However, achieving high-quality representation, reconstruction, and rendering requires deep neural networks, which are slow to train and evaluate. Although several acceleration techniques have been proposed, they often trade off speed for memory. Gaussian splatting-based methods, on the other hand, accelerate the rendering time but remain costly in terms of training speed and memory needed to store the parameters of a large number of Gaussians. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural representation that is fast, both at training and inference times, and lightweight. Our key observation is that the neurons used in traditional MLPs perform simple computations (a dot product followed by ReLU activation) and thus one needs to use either wide and deep MLPs or high-resolution and high-dimensional feature grids to parameterize complex nonlinear functions. We show in this paper that by replacing traditional neurons with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernels, one can achieve highly accurate representation of 2D (RGB images), 3D (geometry), and 5D (radiance fields) signals with just a single layer of such neurons. The representation is highly parallelizable, operates on low-resolution feature grids, and is compact and memory-efficient. We demonstrate that the proposed novel representation can be trained for 3D geometry representation in less than 15 seconds and for novel view synthesis in less than 15 mins. At runtime, it can synthesize novel views at more than 60 fps without sacrificing quality.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 9

SparseFlex: High-Resolution and Arbitrary-Topology 3D Shape Modeling

Creating high-fidelity 3D meshes with arbitrary topology, including open surfaces and complex interiors, remains a significant challenge. Existing implicit field methods often require costly and detail-degrading watertight conversion, while other approaches struggle with high resolutions. This paper introduces SparseFlex, a novel sparse-structured isosurface representation that enables differentiable mesh reconstruction at resolutions up to 1024^3 directly from rendering losses. SparseFlex combines the accuracy of Flexicubes with a sparse voxel structure, focusing computation on surface-adjacent regions and efficiently handling open surfaces. Crucially, we introduce a frustum-aware sectional voxel training strategy that activates only relevant voxels during rendering, dramatically reducing memory consumption and enabling high-resolution training. This also allows, for the first time, the reconstruction of mesh interiors using only rendering supervision. Building upon this, we demonstrate a complete shape modeling pipeline by training a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a rectified flow transformer for high-quality 3D shape generation. Our experiments show state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy, with a ~82% reduction in Chamfer Distance and a ~88% increase in F-score compared to previous methods, and demonstrate the generation of high-resolution, detailed 3D shapes with arbitrary topology. By enabling high-resolution, differentiable mesh reconstruction and generation with rendering losses, SparseFlex significantly advances the state-of-the-art in 3D shape representation and modeling.

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 27 2

Lotus-2: Advancing Geometric Dense Prediction with Powerful Image Generative Model

Recovering pixel-wise geometric properties from a single image is fundamentally ill-posed due to appearance ambiguity and non-injective mappings between 2D observations and 3D structures. While discriminative regression models achieve strong performance through large-scale supervision, their success is bounded by the scale, quality and diversity of available data and limited physical reasoning. Recent diffusion models exhibit powerful world priors that encode geometry and semantics learned from massive image-text data, yet directly reusing their stochastic generative formulation is suboptimal for deterministic geometric inference: the former is optimized for diverse and high-fidelity image generation, whereas the latter requires stable and accurate predictions. In this work, we propose Lotus-2, a two-stage deterministic framework for stable, accurate and fine-grained geometric dense prediction, aiming to provide an optimal adaption protocol to fully exploit the pre-trained generative priors. Specifically, in the first stage, the core predictor employs a single-step deterministic formulation with a clean-data objective and a lightweight local continuity module (LCM) to generate globally coherent structures without grid artifacts. In the second stage, the detail sharpener performs a constrained multi-step rectified-flow refinement within the manifold defined by the core predictor, enhancing fine-grained geometry through noise-free deterministic flow matching. Using only 59K training samples, less than 1% of existing large-scale datasets, Lotus-2 establishes new state-of-the-art results in monocular depth estimation and highly competitive surface normal prediction. These results demonstrate that diffusion models can serve as deterministic world priors, enabling high-quality geometric reasoning beyond traditional discriminative and generative paradigms.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 30 2

Diffusion-based Visual Anagram as Multi-task Learning

Visual anagrams are images that change appearance upon transformation, like flipping or rotation. With the advent of diffusion models, generating such optical illusions can be achieved by averaging noise across multiple views during the reverse denoising process. However, we observe two critical failure modes in this approach: (i) concept segregation, where concepts in different views are independently generated, which can not be considered a true anagram, and (ii) concept domination, where certain concepts overpower others. In this work, we cast the visual anagram generation problem in a multi-task learning setting, where different viewpoint prompts are analogous to different tasks,and derive denoising trajectories that align well across tasks simultaneously. At the core of our designed framework are two newly introduced techniques, where (i) an anti-segregation optimization strategy that promotes overlap in cross-attention maps between different concepts, and (ii) a noise vector balancing method that adaptively adjusts the influence of different tasks. Additionally, we observe that directly averaging noise predictions yields suboptimal performance because statistical properties may not be preserved, prompting us to derive a noise variance rectification method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate our method's superior ability to generate visual anagrams spanning diverse concepts.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 3, 2024

Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-image models encounter safety issues, including concerns related to copyright and Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Despite several methods have been proposed for erasing inappropriate concepts from diffusion models, they often exhibit incomplete erasure, consume a lot of computing resources, and inadvertently damage generation ability. In this work, we introduce Reliable and Efficient Concept Erasure (RECE), a novel approach that modifies the model in 3 seconds without necessitating additional fine-tuning. Specifically, RECE efficiently leverages a closed-form solution to derive new target embeddings, which are capable of regenerating erased concepts within the unlearned model. To mitigate inappropriate content potentially represented by derived embeddings, RECE further aligns them with harmless concepts in cross-attention layers. The derivation and erasure of new representation embeddings are conducted iteratively to achieve a thorough erasure of inappropriate concepts. Besides, to preserve the model's generation ability, RECE introduces an additional regularization term during the derivation process, resulting in minimizing the impact on unrelated concepts during the erasure process. All the processes above are in closed-form, guaranteeing extremely efficient erasure in only 3 seconds. Benchmarking against previous approaches, our method achieves more efficient and thorough erasure with minor damage to original generation ability and demonstrates enhanced robustness against red-teaming tools. Code is available at https://github.com/CharlesGong12/RECE.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 17, 2024