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Aug 25

FlowPainter: Inpainting Optical Flow via Confidence-Guided Completion

Existing optical flow methods broadly follow two paradigms: iterative optimization and diffusion-based estimation. Iterative methods, exemplified by RAFT, achieve high accuracy through recurrent refinement, but remain challenged by large displacements and complex motion. Diffusion-based methods introduce generative modeling and show promise in such ambiguous regions. However, existing diffusion models usually denoise the entire dense flow field from Gaussian noise, including simple regions where reliable motion can already be estimated by a lightweight network. This increases the denoising burden and may cause slow convergence and unstable training. To address this issue, we introduce FlowPainter, a diffusion-based optical flow framework that reformulates dense-flow generation as confidence-guided soft inpainting. FlowPainter employs a lightweight confidence-aware network to predict a rough flow and a pixel-wise confidence mask, distinguishing reliable simple regions from uncertain hard regions. The resulting simple-flow prior is used for confidence-based initialization and further injected into iterative denoising through confidence-gated residual guidance. With dynamically decaying guidance strength, FlowPainter stabilizes early denoising while preserving the flexibility of the diffusion model for late-stage detail refinement. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks, including Sintel, KITTI, and Spring, show that FlowPainter achieves strong accuracy under comparable training settings and converges more efficiently than existing diffusion-based optical flow methods, with notable gains on challenging benchmark splits. Our approach offers a practical way to integrate reliable discriminative priors with diffusion-based refinement for optical flow estimation. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mya012/FlowPainter.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 10

StreamFlow: Streamlined Multi-Frame Optical Flow Estimation for Video Sequences

Occlusions between consecutive frames have long posed a significant challenge in optical flow estimation. The inherent ambiguity introduced by occlusions directly violates the brightness constancy constraint and considerably hinders pixel-to-pixel matching. To address this issue, multi-frame optical flow methods leverage adjacent frames to mitigate the local ambiguity. Nevertheless, prior multi-frame methods predominantly adopt recursive flow estimation, resulting in a considerable computational overlap. In contrast, we propose a streamlined in-batch framework that eliminates the need for extensive redundant recursive computations while concurrently developing effective spatio-temporal modeling approaches under in-batch estimation constraints. Specifically, we present a Streamlined In-batch Multi-frame (SIM) pipeline tailored to video input, attaining a similar level of time efficiency to two-frame networks. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient Integrative Spatio-temporal Coherence (ISC) modeling method for effective spatio-temporal modeling during the encoding phase, which introduces no additional parameter overhead. Additionally, we devise a Global Temporal Regressor (GTR) that effectively explores temporal relations during decoding. Benefiting from the efficient SIM pipeline and effective modules, StreamFlow not only excels in terms of performance on the challenging KITTI and Sintel datasets, with particular improvement in occluded areas but also attains a remarkable 63.82% enhancement in speed compared with previous multi-frame methods. The code will be available soon at https://github.com/littlespray/StreamFlow.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

Event-based Temporally Dense Optical Flow Estimation with Sequential Neural Networks

Prior works on event-based optical flow estimation have investigated several gradient-based learning methods to train neural networks for predicting optical flow. However, they do not utilize the fast data rate of event data streams and rely on a spatio-temporal representation constructed from a collection of events over a fixed period of time (often between two grayscale frames). As a result, optical flow is only evaluated at a frequency much lower than the rate data is produced by an event-based camera, leading to a temporally sparse optical flow estimation. To predict temporally dense optical flow, we cast the problem as a sequential learning task and propose a training methodology to train sequential networks for continuous prediction on an event stream. We propose two types of networks: one focused on performance and another focused on compute efficiency. We first train long-short term memory networks (LSTMs) on the DSEC dataset and demonstrated 10x temporally dense optical flow estimation over existing flow estimation approaches. The additional benefit of having a memory to draw long temporal correlations back in time results in a 19.7% improvement in flow prediction accuracy of LSTMs over similar networks with no memory elements. We subsequently show that the inherent recurrence of spiking neural networks (SNNs) enables them to learn and estimate temporally dense optical flow with 31.8% lesser parameters than LSTM, but with a slightly increased error. This demonstrates potential for energy-efficient implementation of fast optical flow prediction using SNNs.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 3, 2022

Neural Scene Flow Prior

Before the deep learning revolution, many perception algorithms were based on runtime optimization in conjunction with a strong prior/regularization penalty. A prime example of this in computer vision is optical and scene flow. Supervised learning has largely displaced the need for explicit regularization. Instead, they rely on large amounts of labeled data to capture prior statistics, which are not always readily available for many problems. Although optimization is employed to learn the neural network, the weights of this network are frozen at runtime. As a result, these learning solutions are domain-specific and do not generalize well to other statistically different scenarios. This paper revisits the scene flow problem that relies predominantly on runtime optimization and strong regularization. A central innovation here is the inclusion of a neural scene flow prior, which uses the architecture of neural networks as a new type of implicit regularizer. Unlike learning-based scene flow methods, optimization occurs at runtime, and our approach needs no offline datasets -- making it ideal for deployment in new environments such as autonomous driving. We show that an architecture based exclusively on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) can be used as a scene flow prior. Our method attains competitive -- if not better -- results on scene flow benchmarks. Also, our neural prior's implicit and continuous scene flow representation allows us to estimate dense long-term correspondences across a sequence of point clouds. The dense motion information is represented by scene flow fields where points can be propagated through time by integrating motion vectors. We demonstrate such a capability by accumulating a sequence of lidar point clouds.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 1, 2021

CompactFlowNet: Efficient Real-time Optical Flow Estimation on Mobile Devices

We present CompactFlowNet, the first real-time mobile neural network for optical flow prediction, which involves determining the displacement of each pixel in an initial frame relative to the corresponding pixel in a subsequent frame. Optical flow serves as a fundamental building block for various video-related tasks, such as video restoration, motion estimation, video stabilization, object tracking, action recognition, and video generation. While current state-of-the-art methods prioritize accuracy, they often overlook constraints regarding speed and memory usage. Existing light models typically focus on reducing size but still exhibit high latency, compromise significantly on quality, or are optimized for high-performance GPUs, resulting in sub-optimal performance on mobile devices. This study aims to develop a mobile-optimized optical flow model by proposing a novel mobile device-compatible architecture, as well as enhancements to the training pipeline, which optimize the model for reduced weight, low memory utilization, and increased speed while maintaining minimal error. Our approach demonstrates superior or comparable performance to the state-of-the-art lightweight models on the challenging KITTI and Sintel benchmarks. Furthermore, it attains a significantly accelerated inference speed, thereby yielding real-time operational efficiency on the iPhone 8, while surpassing real-time performance levels on more advanced mobile devices.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 17, 2024

Taming generative video models for zero-shot optical flow extraction

Extracting optical flow from videos remains a core computer vision problem. Motivated by the success of large general-purpose models, we ask whether frozen self-supervised video models trained only for future frame prediction can be prompted, without fine-tuning, to output flow. Prior work reading out depth or illumination from video generators required fine-tuning, which is impractical for flow where labels are scarce and synthetic datasets suffer from a sim-to-real gap. Inspired by the Counterfactual World Model (CWM) paradigm, which can obtain point-wise correspondences by injecting a small tracer perturbation into a next-frame predictor and tracking its propagation, we extend this idea to generative video models. We explore several popular architectures and find that successful zero-shot flow extraction in this manner is aided by three model properties: (1) distributional prediction of future frames (avoiding blurry or noisy outputs); (2) factorized latents that treat each spatio-temporal patch independently; and (3) random-access decoding that can condition on any subset of future pixels. These properties are uniquely present in the recent Local Random Access Sequence (LRAS) architecture. Building on LRAS, we propose KL-tracing: a novel test-time procedure that injects a localized perturbation into the first frame, rolls out the model one step, and computes the Kullback-Leibler divergence between perturbed and unperturbed predictive distributions. Without any flow-specific fine-tuning, our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on real-world TAP-Vid DAVIS dataset (16.6% relative improvement for endpoint error) and synthetic TAP-Vid Kubric (4.7% relative improvement). Our results indicate that counterfactual prompting of controllable generative video models is a scalable and effective alternative to supervised or photometric-loss approaches for high-quality flow.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 11, 2025 1

ZS-VCOS: Zero-Shot Video Camouflaged Object Segmentation By Optical Flow and Open Vocabulary Object Detection

Camouflaged object segmentation presents unique challenges compared to traditional segmentation tasks, primarily due to the high similarity in patterns and colors between camouflaged objects and their backgrounds. Effective solutions to this problem have significant implications in critical areas such as pest control, defect detection, and lesion segmentation in medical imaging. Prior research has predominantly emphasized supervised or unsupervised pre-training methods, leaving zero-shot approaches significantly underdeveloped. Existing zero-shot techniques commonly utilize the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in automatic mode or rely on vision-language models to generate cues for segmentation; however, their performances remain unsatisfactory, due to the similarity of the camouflaged object and the background. This work studies how to avoid training by integrating large pre-trained models like SAM-2 and Owl-v2 with temporal information into a modular pipeline. Evaluated on the MoCA-Mask dataset, our approach achieves outstanding performance improvements, significantly outperforming existing zero-shot methods by raising the F-measure (F_beta^w) from 0.296 to 0.628. Our approach also surpasses supervised methods, increasing the F-measure from 0.476 to 0.628. Additionally, evaluation on the MoCA-Filter dataset demonstrates an increase in the success rate from 0.628 to 0.697 when compared with FlowSAM, a supervised transfer method. A thorough ablation study further validates the individual contributions of each component. Besides our main contributions, we also highlight inconsistencies in previous work regarding metrics and settings. Code can be found in https://github.com/weathon/vcos.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

E-MoFlow: Learning Egomotion and Optical Flow from Event Data via Implicit Regularization

The estimation of optical flow and 6-DoF ego-motion, two fundamental tasks in 3D vision, has typically been addressed independently. For neuromorphic vision (e.g., event cameras), however, the lack of robust data association makes solving the two problems separately an ill-posed challenge, especially in the absence of supervision via ground truth. Existing works mitigate this ill-posedness by either enforcing the smoothness of the flow field via an explicit variational regularizer or leveraging explicit structure-and-motion priors in the parametrization to improve event alignment. The former notably introduces bias in results and computational overhead, while the latter, which parametrizes the optical flow in terms of the scene depth and the camera motion, often converges to suboptimal local minima. To address these issues, we propose an unsupervised framework that jointly optimizes egomotion and optical flow via implicit spatial-temporal and geometric regularization. First, by modeling camera's egomotion as a continuous spline and optical flow as an implicit neural representation, our method inherently embeds spatial-temporal coherence through inductive biases. Second, we incorporate structure-and-motion priors through differential geometric constraints, bypassing explicit depth estimation while maintaining rigorous geometric consistency. As a result, our framework (called E-MoFlow) unifies egomotion and optical flow estimation via implicit regularization under a fully unsupervised paradigm. Experiments demonstrate its versatility to general 6-DoF motion scenarios, achieving state-of-the-art performance among unsupervised methods and competitive even with supervised approaches.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 14, 2025

MF-LPR$^2$: Multi-Frame License Plate Image Restoration and Recognition using Optical Flow

License plate recognition (LPR) is important for traffic law enforcement, crime investigation, and surveillance. However, license plate areas in dash cam images often suffer from low resolution, motion blur, and glare, which make accurate recognition challenging. Existing generative models that rely on pretrained priors cannot reliably restore such poor-quality images, frequently introducing severe artifacts and distortions. To address this issue, we propose a novel multi-frame license plate restoration and recognition framework, MF-LPR^2, which addresses ambiguities in poor-quality images by aligning and aggregating neighboring frames instead of relying on pretrained knowledge. To achieve accurate frame alignment, we employ a state-of-the-art optical flow estimator in conjunction with carefully designed algorithms that detect and correct erroneous optical flow estimations by leveraging the spatio-temporal consistency inherent in license plate image sequences. Our approach enhances both image quality and recognition accuracy while preserving the evidential content of the input images. In addition, we constructed a novel Realistic LPR (RLPR) dataset to evaluate MF-LPR^2. The RLPR dataset contains 200 pairs of low-quality license plate image sequences and high-quality pseudo ground-truth images, reflecting the complexities of real-world scenarios. In experiments, MF-LPR^2 outperformed eight recent restoration models in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS by significant margins. In recognition, MF-LPR^2 achieved an accuracy of 86.44%, outperforming both the best single-frame LPR (14.04%) and the multi-frame LPR (82.55%) among the eleven baseline models. The results of ablation studies confirm that our filtering and refinement algorithms significantly contribute to these improvements.

FlowVid: Taming Imperfect Optical Flows for Consistent Video-to-Video Synthesis

Diffusion models have transformed the image-to-image (I2I) synthesis and are now permeating into videos. However, the advancement of video-to-video (V2V) synthesis has been hampered by the challenge of maintaining temporal consistency across video frames. This paper proposes a consistent V2V synthesis framework by jointly leveraging spatial conditions and temporal optical flow clues within the source video. Contrary to prior methods that strictly adhere to optical flow, our approach harnesses its benefits while handling the imperfection in flow estimation. We encode the optical flow via warping from the first frame and serve it as a supplementary reference in the diffusion model. This enables our model for video synthesis by editing the first frame with any prevalent I2I models and then propagating edits to successive frames. Our V2V model, FlowVid, demonstrates remarkable properties: (1) Flexibility: FlowVid works seamlessly with existing I2I models, facilitating various modifications, including stylization, object swaps, and local edits. (2) Efficiency: Generation of a 4-second video with 30 FPS and 512x512 resolution takes only 1.5 minutes, which is 3.1x, 7.2x, and 10.5x faster than CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. (3) High-quality: In user studies, our FlowVid is preferred 45.7% of the time, outperforming CoDeF (3.5%), Rerender (10.2%), and TokenFlow (40.4%).

  • 11 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023 1

NexusGS: Sparse View Synthesis with Epipolar Depth Priors in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have noticeably advanced photo-realistic novel view synthesis using images from densely spaced camera viewpoints. However, these methods struggle in few-shot scenarios due to limited supervision. In this paper, we present NexusGS, a 3DGS-based approach that enhances novel view synthesis from sparse-view images by directly embedding depth information into point clouds, without relying on complex manual regularizations. Exploiting the inherent epipolar geometry of 3DGS, our method introduces a novel point cloud densification strategy that initializes 3DGS with a dense point cloud, reducing randomness in point placement while preventing over-smoothing and overfitting. Specifically, NexusGS comprises three key steps: Epipolar Depth Nexus, Flow-Resilient Depth Blending, and Flow-Filtered Depth Pruning. These steps leverage optical flow and camera poses to compute accurate depth maps, while mitigating the inaccuracies often associated with optical flow. By incorporating epipolar depth priors, NexusGS ensures reliable dense point cloud coverage and supports stable 3DGS training under sparse-view conditions. Experiments demonstrate that NexusGS significantly enhances depth accuracy and rendering quality, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a considerable margin. Furthermore, we validate the superiority of our generated point clouds by substantially boosting the performance of competing methods. Project page: https://usmizuki.github.io/NexusGS/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

ArtHOI: Articulated Human-Object Interaction Synthesis by 4D Reconstruction from Video Priors

Synthesizing physically plausible articulated human-object interactions (HOI) without 3D/4D supervision remains a fundamental challenge. While recent zero-shot approaches leverage video diffusion models to synthesize human-object interactions, they are largely confined to rigid-object manipulation and lack explicit 4D geometric reasoning. To bridge this gap, we formulate articulated HOI synthesis as a 4D reconstruction problem from monocular video priors: given only a video generated by a diffusion model, we reconstruct a full 4D articulated scene without any 3D supervision. This reconstruction-based approach treats the generated 2D video as supervision for an inverse rendering problem, recovering geometrically consistent and physically plausible 4D scenes that naturally respect contact, articulation, and temporal coherence. We introduce ArtHOI, the first zero-shot framework for articulated human-object interaction synthesis via 4D reconstruction from video priors. Our key designs are: 1) Flow-based part segmentation: leveraging optical flow as a geometric cue to disentangle dynamic from static regions in monocular video; 2) Decoupled reconstruction pipeline: joint optimization of human motion and object articulation is unstable under monocular ambiguity, so we first recover object articulation, then synthesize human motion conditioned on the reconstructed object states. ArtHOI bridges video-based generation and geometry-aware reconstruction, producing interactions that are both semantically aligned and physically grounded. Across diverse articulated scenes (e.g., opening fridges, cabinets, microwaves), ArtHOI significantly outperforms prior methods in contact accuracy, penetration reduction, and articulation fidelity, extending zero-shot interaction synthesis beyond rigid manipulation through reconstruction-informed synthesis.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 4 3

HDR-NSFF: High Dynamic Range Neural Scene Flow Fields

Radiance of real-world scenes typically spans a much wider dynamic range than what standard cameras can capture. While conventional HDR methods merge alternating-exposure frames, these approaches are inherently constrained to 2D pixel-level alignment, often leading to ghosting artifacts and temporal inconsistency in dynamic scenes. To address these limitations, we present HDR-NSFF, a paradigm shift from 2D-based merging to 4D spatio-temporal modeling. Our framework reconstructs dynamic HDR radiance fields from alternating-exposure monocular videos by representing the scene as a continuous function of space and time, and is compatible with both neural radiance field and 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) based dynamic representations. This unified end-to-end pipeline explicitly models HDR radiance, 3D scene flow, geometry, and tone-mapping, ensuring physical plausibility and global coherence. We further enhance robustness by (i) extending semantic-based optical flow with DINO features to achieve exposure-invariant motion estimation, and (ii) incorporating a generative prior as a regularizer to compensate for limited observation in monocular captures and saturation-induced information loss. To evaluate HDR space-time view synthesis, we present the first real-world HDR-GoPro dataset specifically designed for dynamic HDR scenes. Experiments demonstrate that HDR-NSFF recovers fine radiance details and coherent dynamics even under challenging exposure variations, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance in novel space-time view synthesis. Project page: https://shin-dong-yeon.github.io/HDR-NSFF/

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 8

DCPI-Depth: Explicitly Infusing Dense Correspondence Prior to Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

There has been a recent surge of interest in learning to perceive depth from monocular videos in an unsupervised fashion. A key challenge in this field is achieving robust and accurate depth estimation in challenging scenarios, particularly in regions with weak textures or where dynamic objects are present. This study makes three major contributions by delving deeply into dense correspondence priors to provide existing frameworks with explicit geometric constraints. The first novelty is a contextual-geometric depth consistency loss, which employs depth maps triangulated from dense correspondences based on estimated ego-motion to guide the learning of depth perception from contextual information, since explicitly triangulated depth maps capture accurate relative distances among pixels. The second novelty arises from the observation that there exists an explicit, deducible relationship between optical flow divergence and depth gradient. A differential property correlation loss is, therefore, designed to refine depth estimation with a specific emphasis on local variations. The third novelty is a bidirectional stream co-adjustment strategy that enhances the interaction between rigid and optical flows, encouraging the former towards more accurate correspondence and making the latter more adaptable across various scenarios under the static scene hypotheses. DCPI-Depth, a framework that incorporates all these innovative components and couples two bidirectional and collaborative streams, achieves state-of-the-art performance and generalizability across multiple public datasets, outperforming all existing prior arts. Specifically, it demonstrates accurate depth estimation in texture-less and dynamic regions, and shows more reasonable smoothness. Our source code will be publicly available at mias.group/DCPI-Depth upon publication.

  • 4 authors
·
May 27, 2024

ANVIL: Accelerator-Native Video Interpolation via Codec Motion Vector Priors

Mobile displays refresh at 90-120 Hz, yet most video is encoded at 24-30 frames per second; real-time frame-rate doubling requires each synthesized frame within 33.3 ms on mobile neural processing units. We show that mainstream flow-based video frame interpolation faces three structural deployment barriers on mobile accelerators: spatial sampling operators exceed the frame budget or lack hardware support, iterative flow refinement collapses under 8-bit post-training quantization, and memory-bound operators dominate the inference graph. ANVIL addresses these barriers by reusing motion vectors already computed by the H.264 decoder to prealign input frames, removing learned optical flow, spatial sampling, and iterative accumulation from the accelerator graph. The remaining residual is refined by a convolution-dominated network whose inference graph is composed almost entirely of compute-bound operators. On a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 device, ANVIL achieves 12.8 ms 1080p network inference in 8-bit integer precision; an open-source Android player sustains 28.4 ms median end-to-end latency per interpolated frame pair over 54,623 consecutively logged samples during 30-minute continuous playback. Per-operator causal analysis identifies quantized accumulation on recurrent flow states as a key mechanism behind integer quantization failure in iterative methods. The current design targets H.264 playback scenarios with decoder-exposed motion vectors.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 27

Post-Training Quantization for Video Matting

Video matting is crucial for applications such as film production and virtual reality, yet deploying its computationally intensive models on resource-constrained devices presents challenges. Quantization is a key technique for model compression and acceleration. As an efficient approach, Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is still in its nascent stages for video matting, facing significant hurdles in maintaining accuracy and temporal coherence. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel and general PTQ framework specifically designed for video matting models, marking, to the best of our knowledge, the first systematic attempt in this domain. Our contributions include: (1) A two-stage PTQ strategy that combines block-reconstruction-based optimization for fast, stable initial quantization and local dependency capture, followed by a global calibration of quantization parameters to minimize accuracy loss. (2) A Statistically-Driven Global Affine Calibration (GAC) method that enables the network to compensate for cumulative statistical distortions arising from factors such as neglected BN layer effects, even reducing the error of existing PTQ methods on video matting tasks up to 20%. (3) An Optical Flow Assistance (OFA) component that leverages temporal and semantic priors from frames to guide the PTQ process, enhancing the model's ability to distinguish moving foregrounds in complex scenes and ultimately achieving near full-precision performance even under ultra-low-bit quantization. Comprehensive quantitative and visual results show that our PTQ4VM achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy performance across different bit-widths compared to the existing quantization methods. We highlight that the 4-bit PTQ4VM even achieves performance close to the full-precision counterpart while enjoying 8x FLOP savings.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 12, 2025

MUSTAN: Multi-scale Temporal Context as Attention for Robust Video Foreground Segmentation

Video foreground segmentation (VFS) is an important computer vision task wherein one aims to segment the objects under motion from the background. Most of the current methods are image-based, i.e., rely only on spatial cues while ignoring motion cues. Therefore, they tend to overfit the training data and don't generalize well to out-of-domain (OOD) distribution. To solve the above problem, prior works exploited several cues such as optical flow, background subtraction mask, etc. However, having a video data with annotations like optical flow is a challenging task. In this paper, we utilize the temporal information and the spatial cues from the video data to improve OOD performance. However, the challenge lies in how we model the temporal information given the video data in an interpretable way creates a very noticeable difference. We therefore devise a strategy that integrates the temporal context of the video in the development of VFS. Our approach give rise to deep learning architectures, namely MUSTAN1 and MUSTAN2 and they are based on the idea of multi-scale temporal context as an attention, i.e., aids our models to learn better representations that are beneficial for VFS. Further, we introduce a new video dataset, namely Indoor Surveillance Dataset (ISD) for VFS. It has multiple annotations on a frame level such as foreground binary mask, depth map, and instance semantic annotations. Therefore, ISD can benefit other computer vision tasks. We validate the efficacy of our architectures and compare the performance with baselines. We demonstrate that proposed methods significantly outperform the benchmark methods on OOD. In addition, the performance of MUSTAN2 is significantly improved on certain video categories on OOD data due to ISD.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 1, 2024

VideoPainter: Any-length Video Inpainting and Editing with Plug-and-Play Context Control

Video inpainting, which aims to restore corrupted video content, has experienced substantial progress. Despite these advances, existing methods, whether propagating unmasked region pixels through optical flow and receptive field priors, or extending image-inpainting models temporally, face challenges in generating fully masked objects or balancing the competing objectives of background context preservation and foreground generation in one model, respectively. To address these limitations, we propose a novel dual-stream paradigm VideoPainter that incorporates an efficient context encoder (comprising only 6% of the backbone parameters) to process masked videos and inject backbone-aware background contextual cues to any pre-trained video DiT, producing semantically consistent content in a plug-and-play manner. This architectural separation significantly reduces the model's learning complexity while enabling nuanced integration of crucial background context. We also introduce a novel target region ID resampling technique that enables any-length video inpainting, greatly enhancing our practical applicability. Additionally, we establish a scalable dataset pipeline leveraging current vision understanding models, contributing VPData and VPBench to facilitate segmentation-based inpainting training and assessment, the largest video inpainting dataset and benchmark to date with over 390K diverse clips. Using inpainting as a pipeline basis, we also explore downstream applications including video editing and video editing pair data generation, demonstrating competitive performance and significant practical potential. Extensive experiments demonstrate VideoPainter's superior performance in both any-length video inpainting and editing, across eight key metrics, including video quality, mask region preservation, and textual coherence.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 7, 2025 3

Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos

Depth Anything has achieved remarkable success in monocular depth estimation with strong generalization ability. However, it suffers from temporal inconsistency in videos, hindering its practical applications. Various methods have been proposed to alleviate this issue by leveraging video generation models or introducing priors from optical flow and camera poses. Nonetheless, these methods are only applicable to short videos (< 10 seconds) and require a trade-off between quality and computational efficiency. We propose Video Depth Anything for high-quality, consistent depth estimation in super-long videos (over several minutes) without sacrificing efficiency. We base our model on Depth Anything V2 and replace its head with an efficient spatial-temporal head. We design a straightforward yet effective temporal consistency loss by constraining the temporal depth gradient, eliminating the need for additional geometric priors. The model is trained on a joint dataset of video depth and unlabeled images, similar to Depth Anything V2. Moreover, a novel key-frame-based strategy is developed for long video inference. Experiments show that our model can be applied to arbitrarily long videos without compromising quality, consistency, or generalization ability. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple video benchmarks demonstrate that our approach sets a new state-of-the-art in zero-shot video depth estimation. We offer models of different scales to support a range of scenarios, with our smallest model capable of real-time performance at 30 FPS.

  • 7 authors
·
Jan 21, 2025 2

TransVLM: A Vision-Language Framework and Benchmark for Detecting Any Shot Transitions

Traditional Shot Boundary Detection (SBD) inherently struggles with complex transitions by formulating the task around isolated cut points, frequently yielding corrupted video shots. We address this fundamental limitation by formalizing the Shot Transition Detection (STD) task. Rather than searching for ambiguous points, STD explicitly detects the continuous temporal segments of transitions. To tackle this, we propose TransVLM, a Vision-Language Model (VLM) framework for STD. Unlike regular VLMs that predominantly rely on spatial semantics and struggle with fine-grained inter-shot dynamics, our method explicitly injects optical flow as a critical motion prior at the input stage. Through a simple yet effective feature-fusion strategy, TransVLM directly processes concatenated color and motion representations, significantly enhancing its temporal awareness without incurring any additional visual token overhead on the language backbone. To overcome the severe class imbalance in public data, we design a scalable data engine to synthesize diverse transition videos for robust training, alongside a comprehensive benchmark for STD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TransVLM achieves superior overall performance, outperforming traditional heuristic methods, specialized spatiotemporal networks, and top-tier VLMs. This work has been deployed to production. For more related research, please visit HeyGen Research (https://www.heygen.com/research) and HeyGen Avatar-V (https://www.heygen.com/research/avatar-v-model). Project page: https://chence17.github.io/TransVLM/

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 29

Midway Network: Learning Representations for Recognition and Motion from Latent Dynamics

Object recognition and motion understanding are key components of perception that complement each other. While self-supervised learning methods have shown promise in their ability to learn from unlabeled data, they have primarily focused on obtaining rich representations for either recognition or motion rather than both in tandem. On the other hand, latent dynamics modeling has been used in decision making to learn latent representations of observations and their transformations over time for control and planning tasks. In this work, we present Midway Network, a new self-supervised learning architecture that is the first to learn strong visual representations for both object recognition and motion understanding solely from natural videos, by extending latent dynamics modeling to this domain. Midway Network leverages a midway top-down path to infer motion latents between video frames, as well as a dense forward prediction objective and hierarchical structure to tackle the complex, multi-object scenes of natural videos. We demonstrate that after pretraining on two large-scale natural video datasets, Midway Network achieves strong performance on both semantic segmentation and optical flow tasks relative to prior self-supervised learning methods. We also show that Midway Network's learned dynamics can capture high-level correspondence via a novel analysis method based on forward feature perturbation.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025

GFlow: Recovering 4D World from Monocular Video

Reconstructing 4D scenes from video inputs is a crucial yet challenging task. Conventional methods usually rely on the assumptions of multi-view video inputs, known camera parameters, or static scenes, all of which are typically absent under in-the-wild scenarios. In this paper, we relax all these constraints and tackle a highly ambitious but practical task, which we termed as AnyV4D: we assume only one monocular video is available without any camera parameters as input, and we aim to recover the dynamic 4D world alongside the camera poses. To this end, we introduce GFlow, a new framework that utilizes only 2D priors (depth and optical flow) to lift a video (3D) to a 4D explicit representation, entailing a flow of Gaussian splatting through space and time. GFlow first clusters the scene into still and moving parts, then applies a sequential optimization process that optimizes camera poses and the dynamics of 3D Gaussian points based on 2D priors and scene clustering, ensuring fidelity among neighboring points and smooth movement across frames. Since dynamic scenes always introduce new content, we also propose a new pixel-wise densification strategy for Gaussian points to integrate new visual content. Moreover, GFlow transcends the boundaries of mere 4D reconstruction; it also enables tracking of any points across frames without the need for prior training and segments moving objects from the scene in an unsupervised way. Additionally, the camera poses of each frame can be derived from GFlow, allowing for rendering novel views of a video scene through changing camera pose. By employing the explicit representation, we may readily conduct scene-level or object-level editing as desired, underscoring its versatility and power. Visit our project website at: https://littlepure2333.github.io/GFlow

  • 5 authors
·
May 28, 2024 3

LiftImage3D: Lifting Any Single Image to 3D Gaussians with Video Generation Priors

Single-image 3D reconstruction remains a fundamental challenge in computer vision due to inherent geometric ambiguities and limited viewpoint information. Recent advances in Latent Video Diffusion Models (LVDMs) offer promising 3D priors learned from large-scale video data. However, leveraging these priors effectively faces three key challenges: (1) degradation in quality across large camera motions, (2) difficulties in achieving precise camera control, and (3) geometric distortions inherent to the diffusion process that damage 3D consistency. We address these challenges by proposing LiftImage3D, a framework that effectively releases LVDMs' generative priors while ensuring 3D consistency. Specifically, we design an articulated trajectory strategy to generate video frames, which decomposes video sequences with large camera motions into ones with controllable small motions. Then we use robust neural matching models, i.e. MASt3R, to calibrate the camera poses of generated frames and produce corresponding point clouds. Finally, we propose a distortion-aware 3D Gaussian splatting representation, which can learn independent distortions between frames and output undistorted canonical Gaussians. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LiftImage3D achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging datasets, i.e. LLFF, DL3DV, and Tanks and Temples, and generalizes well to diverse in-the-wild images, from cartoon illustrations to complex real-world scenes.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 12, 2024

ReynoldsFlow: Exquisite Flow Estimation via Reynolds Transport Theorem

Optical flow is a fundamental technique for motion estimation, widely applied in video stabilization, interpolation, and object tracking. Traditional optical flow estimation methods rely on restrictive assumptions like brightness constancy and slow motion constraints. Recent deep learning-based flow estimations require extensive training on large domain-specific datasets, making them computationally demanding. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) advances have enabled deep learning models to take advantage of optical flow as an important feature for object tracking and motion analysis. Since optical flow is commonly encoded in HSV for visualization, its conversion to RGB for neural network processing is nonlinear and may introduce perceptual distortions. These transformations amplify the sensitivity to estimation errors, potentially affecting the predictive accuracy of the networks. To address these challenges that are influential to the performance of downstream network models, we propose Reynolds flow, a novel training-free flow estimation inspired by the Reynolds transport theorem, offering a principled approach to modeling complex motion dynamics. In addition to conventional HSV-based visualization of Reynolds flow, we also introduce an RGB-encoded representation of Reynolds flow designed to improve flow visualization and feature enhancement for neural networks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Reynolds flow in video-based tasks. Experimental results on three benchmarks, tiny object detection on UAVDB, infrared object detection on Anti-UAV, and pose estimation on GolfDB, demonstrate that networks trained with RGB-encoded Reynolds flow achieve SOTA performance, exhibiting improved robustness and efficiency across all tasks.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

UniFlow: Zero-Shot LiDAR Scene Flow for Autonomous Vehicles

LiDAR scene flow is the task of estimating per-point 3D motion between consecutive point clouds. Recent methods achieve centimeter-level accuracy on popular autonomous vehicle (AV) datasets, but are typically only trained and evaluated on a single sensor. In this paper, we aim to learn general motion priors that transfer to diverse and unseen LiDAR sensors. However, prior work in LiDAR semantic segmentation and 3D object detection demonstrate that naively training on multiple datasets yields worse performance than single dataset models. Interestingly, we find that this conventional wisdom does not hold for motion estimation, and that state-of-the-art scene flow methods greatly benefit from cross-dataset training without architectural modification. We posit that low-level tasks such as motion estimation may be less sensitive to sensor configuration; indeed, our analysis shows that models trained on fast-moving objects (e.g., from highway datasets) perform well on fast-moving objects, even across different datasets. Informed by our analysis, we propose UniFlow, a feedforward model that unifies and trains on multiple large-scale LiDAR scene flow datasets with diverse sensor placements and point cloud densities. Our frustratingly simple solution establishes a new state-of-the-art on Waymo and nuScenes, improving over prior work by 5.1% and 35.2% respectively. Moreover, UniFlow achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on unseen datasets like TruckScenes and AEVAScenes, outperforming prior dataset-specific models by 30.1% and 22.5% respectively.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 22, 2025

LM-Gaussian: Boost Sparse-view 3D Gaussian Splatting with Large Model Priors

We aim to address sparse-view reconstruction of a 3D scene by leveraging priors from large-scale vision models. While recent advancements such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated remarkable successes in 3D reconstruction, these methods typically necessitate hundreds of input images that densely capture the underlying scene, making them time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. However, sparse-view reconstruction is inherently ill-posed and under-constrained, often resulting in inferior and incomplete outcomes. This is due to issues such as failed initialization, overfitting on input images, and a lack of details. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce LM-Gaussian, a method capable of generating high-quality reconstructions from a limited number of images. Specifically, we propose a robust initialization module that leverages stereo priors to aid in the recovery of camera poses and the reliable point clouds. Additionally, a diffusion-based refinement is iteratively applied to incorporate image diffusion priors into the Gaussian optimization process to preserve intricate scene details. Finally, we utilize video diffusion priors to further enhance the rendered images for realistic visual effects. Overall, our approach significantly reduces the data acquisition requirements compared to previous 3DGS methods. We validate the effectiveness of our framework through experiments on various public datasets, demonstrating its potential for high-quality 360-degree scene reconstruction. Visual results are on our website.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 5, 2024

TRIP: Temporal Residual Learning with Image Noise Prior for Image-to-Video Diffusion Models

Recent advances in text-to-video generation have demonstrated the utility of powerful diffusion models. Nevertheless, the problem is not trivial when shaping diffusion models to animate static image (i.e., image-to-video generation). The difficulty originates from the aspect that the diffusion process of subsequent animated frames should not only preserve the faithful alignment with the given image but also pursue temporal coherence among adjacent frames. To alleviate this, we present TRIP, a new recipe of image-to-video diffusion paradigm that pivots on image noise prior derived from static image to jointly trigger inter-frame relational reasoning and ease the coherent temporal modeling via temporal residual learning. Technically, the image noise prior is first attained through one-step backward diffusion process based on both static image and noised video latent codes. Next, TRIP executes a residual-like dual-path scheme for noise prediction: 1) a shortcut path that directly takes image noise prior as the reference noise of each frame to amplify the alignment between the first frame and subsequent frames; 2) a residual path that employs 3D-UNet over noised video and static image latent codes to enable inter-frame relational reasoning, thereby easing the learning of the residual noise for each frame. Furthermore, both reference and residual noise of each frame are dynamically merged via attention mechanism for final video generation. Extensive experiments on WebVid-10M, DTDB and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our TRIP for image-to-video generation. Please see our project page at https://trip-i2v.github.io/TRIP/.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 25, 2024 1

RoamScene3D: Immersive Text-to-3D Scene Generation via Adaptive Object-aware Roaming

Generating immersive 3D scenes from texts is a core task in computer vision, crucial for applications in virtual reality and game development. Despite the promise of leveraging 2D diffusion priors, existing methods suffer from spatial blindness and rely on predefined trajectories that fail to exploit the inner relationships among salient objects. Consequently, these approaches are unable to comprehend the semantic layout, preventing them from exploring the scene adaptively to infer occluded content. Moreover, current inpainting models operate in 2D image space, struggling to plausibly fill holes caused by camera motion. To address these limitations, we propose RoamScene3D, a novel framework that bridges the gap between semantic guidance and spatial generation. Our method reasons about the semantic relations among objects and produces consistent and photorealistic scenes. Specifically, we employ a vision-language model (VLM) to construct a scene graph that encodes object relations, guiding the camera to perceive salient object boundaries and plan an adaptive roaming trajectory. Furthermore, to mitigate the limitations of static 2D priors, we introduce a Motion-Injected Inpainting model that is fine-tuned on a synthetic panoramic dataset integrating authentic camera trajectories, making it adaptive to camera motion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that with semantic reasoning and geometric constraints, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in producing consistent and photorealistic scenes. Our code is available at https://github.com/JS-CHU/RoamScene3D.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 27

GenOpticalFlow: A Generative Approach to Unsupervised Optical Flow Learning

Optical flow estimation is a fundamental problem in computer vision, yet the reliance on expensive ground-truth annotations limits the scalability of supervised approaches. Although unsupervised and semi-supervised methods alleviate this issue, they often suffer from unreliable supervision signals based on brightness constancy and smoothness assumptions, leading to inaccurate motion estimation in complex real-world scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we introduce \modelname, a novel framework that synthesizes large-scale, perfectly aligned frame--flow data pairs for supervised optical flow training without human annotations. Specifically, our method leverages a pre-trained depth estimation network to generate pseudo optical flows, which serve as conditioning inputs for a next-frame generation model trained to produce high-fidelity, pixel-aligned subsequent frames. This process enables the creation of abundant, high-quality synthetic data with precise motion correspondence. Furthermore, we propose an inconsistent pixel filtering strategy that identifies and removes unreliable pixels in generated frames, effectively enhancing fine-tuning performance on real-world datasets. Extensive experiments on KITTI2012, KITTI2015, and Sintel demonstrate that \modelname achieves competitive or superior results compared to existing unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches, highlighting its potential as a scalable and annotation-free solution for optical flow learning. We will release our code upon acceptance.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 22

OptFlow: Fast Optimization-based Scene Flow Estimation without Supervision

Scene flow estimation is a crucial component in the development of autonomous driving and 3D robotics, providing valuable information for environment perception and navigation. Despite the advantages of learning-based scene flow estimation techniques, their domain specificity and limited generalizability across varied scenarios pose challenges. In contrast, non-learning optimization-based methods, incorporating robust priors or regularization, offer competitive scene flow estimation performance, require no training, and show extensive applicability across datasets, but suffer from lengthy inference times. In this paper, we present OptFlow, a fast optimization-based scene flow estimation method. Without relying on learning or any labeled datasets, OptFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance for scene flow estimation on popular autonomous driving benchmarks. It integrates a local correlation weight matrix for correspondence matching, an adaptive correspondence threshold limit for nearest-neighbor search, and graph prior rigidity constraints, resulting in expedited convergence and improved point correspondence identification. Moreover, we demonstrate how integrating a point cloud registration function within our objective function bolsters accuracy and differentiates between static and dynamic points without relying on external odometry data. Consequently, OptFlow outperforms the baseline graph-prior method by approximately 20% and the Neural Scene Flow Prior method by 5%-7% in accuracy, all while offering the fastest inference time among all non-learning scene flow estimation methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Jan 3, 2024

DragFlow: Unleashing DiT Priors with Region Based Supervision for Drag Editing

Drag-based image editing has long suffered from distortions in the target region, largely because the priors of earlier base models, Stable Diffusion, are insufficient to project optimized latents back onto the natural image manifold. With the shift from UNet-based DDPMs to more scalable DiT with flow matching (e.g., SD3.5, FLUX), generative priors have become significantly stronger, enabling advances across diverse editing tasks. However, drag-based editing has yet to benefit from these stronger priors. This work proposes the first framework to effectively harness FLUX's rich prior for drag-based editing, dubbed DragFlow, achieving substantial gains over baselines. We first show that directly applying point-based drag editing to DiTs performs poorly: unlike the highly compressed features of UNets, DiT features are insufficiently structured to provide reliable guidance for point-wise motion supervision. To overcome this limitation, DragFlow introduces a region-based editing paradigm, where affine transformations enable richer and more consistent feature supervision. Additionally, we integrate pretrained open-domain personalization adapters (e.g., IP-Adapter) to enhance subject consistency, while preserving background fidelity through gradient mask-based hard constraints. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are further employed to resolve task ambiguities. For evaluation, we curate a novel Region-based Dragging benchmark (ReD Bench) featuring region-level dragging instructions. Extensive experiments on DragBench-DR and ReD Bench show that DragFlow surpasses both point-based and region-based baselines, setting a new state-of-the-art in drag-based image editing. Code and datasets will be publicly available upon publication.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 2, 2025 2

Fast Multi-view Consistent 3D Editing with Video Priors

Text-driven 3D editing enables user-friendly 3D object or scene editing with text instructions. Due to the lack of multi-view consistency priors, existing methods typically resort to employing 2D generation or editing models to process each view individually, followed by iterative 2D-3D-2D updating. However, these methods are not only time-consuming but also prone to over-smoothed results because the different editing signals gathered from different views are averaged during the iterative process. In this paper, we propose generative Video Prior based 3D Editing (ViP3DE) to employ the temporal consistency priors from pre-trained video generation models for multi-view consistent 3D editing in a single forward pass. Our key insight is to condition the video generation model on a single edited view to generate other consistent edited views for 3D updating directly, thereby bypassing the iterative editing paradigm. Since 3D updating requires edited views to be paired with specific camera poses, we propose motion-preserved noise blending for the video model to generate edited views at predefined camera poses. In addition, we introduce geometry-aware denoising to further enhance multi-view consistency by integrating 3D geometric priors into video models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed ViP3DE can achieve high-quality 3D editing results even within a single forward pass, significantly outperforming existing methods in both editing quality and speed.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 28, 2025

Controllable Longer Image Animation with Diffusion Models

Generating realistic animated videos from static images is an important area of research in computer vision. Methods based on physical simulation and motion prediction have achieved notable advances, but they are often limited to specific object textures and motion trajectories, failing to exhibit highly complex environments and physical dynamics. In this paper, we introduce an open-domain controllable image animation method using motion priors with video diffusion models. Our method achieves precise control over the direction and speed of motion in the movable region by extracting the motion field information from videos and learning moving trajectories and strengths. Current pretrained video generation models are typically limited to producing very short videos, typically less than 30 frames. In contrast, we propose an efficient long-duration video generation method based on noise reschedule specifically tailored for image animation tasks, facilitating the creation of videos over 100 frames in length while maintaining consistency in content scenery and motion coordination. Specifically, we decompose the denoise process into two distinct phases: the shaping of scene contours and the refining of motion details. Then we reschedule the noise to control the generated frame sequences maintaining long-distance noise correlation. We conducted extensive experiments with 10 baselines, encompassing both commercial tools and academic methodologies, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our project page: https://wangqiang9.github.io/Controllable.github.io/

  • 5 authors
·
May 27, 2024

Unsupervised Hierarchical Domain Adaptation for Adverse Weather Optical Flow

Optical flow estimation has made great progress, but usually suffers from degradation under adverse weather. Although semi/full-supervised methods have made good attempts, the domain shift between the synthetic and real adverse weather images would deteriorate their performance. To alleviate this issue, our start point is to unsupervisedly transfer the knowledge from source clean domain to target degraded domain. Our key insight is that adverse weather does not change the intrinsic optical flow of the scene, but causes a significant difference for the warp error between clean and degraded images. In this work, we propose the first unsupervised framework for adverse weather optical flow via hierarchical motion-boundary adaptation. Specifically, we first employ image translation to construct the transformation relationship between clean and degraded domains. In motion adaptation, we utilize the flow consistency knowledge to align the cross-domain optical flows into a motion-invariance common space, where the optical flow from clean weather is used as the guidance-knowledge to obtain a preliminary optical flow for adverse weather. Furthermore, we leverage the warp error inconsistency which measures the motion misalignment of the boundary between the clean and degraded domains, and propose a joint intra- and inter-scene boundary contrastive adaptation to refine the motion boundary. The hierarchical motion and boundary adaptation jointly promotes optical flow in a unified framework. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments have been performed to verify the superiority of the proposed method.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 23, 2023

Consistent Video Editing as Flow-Driven Image-to-Video Generation

With the prosper of video diffusion models, down-stream applications like video editing have been significantly promoted without consuming much computational cost. One particular challenge in this task lies at the motion transfer process from the source video to the edited one, where it requires the consideration of the shape deformation in between, meanwhile maintaining the temporal consistency in the generated video sequence. However, existing methods fail to model complicated motion patterns for video editing, and are fundamentally limited to object replacement, where tasks with non-rigid object motions like multi-object and portrait editing are largely neglected. In this paper, we observe that optical flows offer a promising alternative in complex motion modeling, and present FlowV2V to re-investigate video editing as a task of flow-driven Image-to-Video (I2V) generation. Specifically, FlowV2V decomposes the entire pipeline into first-frame editing and conditional I2V generation, and simulates pseudo flow sequence that aligns with the deformed shape, thus ensuring the consistency during editing. Experimental results on DAVIS-EDIT with improvements of 13.67% and 50.66% on DOVER and warping error illustrate the superior temporal consistency and sample quality of FlowV2V compared to existing state-of-the-art ones. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to analyze the internal functionalities of the first-frame paradigm and flow alignment in the proposed method.

  • 6 authors
·
Jun 9, 2025

RFMSR: Residual Flow Matching for Image Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution (ISR) has witnessed remarkable progress with diffusion models and flow matching. The dominant text-to-image (T2I) based approaches leverage large-scale foundation models as generative priors, achieving impressive perceptual quality but at the cost of massive model sizes and prohibitive training expenses. Recent flow-matching-based vision-only approaches have made significant strides; however, they adopt standard flow formulations that transport from a pure Gaussian prior to the data distribution, discarding the rich structural information already present in the low-quality (LQ) input. Furthermore, existing single-step acceleration techniques often forfeit the model's multi-step inference capability. In this paper, we propose Residual Flow Matching for Image Super-Resolution (RFMSR), a vision-only framework that centers the source distribution at the LQ latent, reducing transport distance and preserving structural priors throughout the flow trajectory. We further introduce a two-phase training strategy: Phase I pretrains the velocity field via conditional flow matching, while Phase II applies end-to-end supervision to the single-step prediction while retaining the velocity loss across all timesteps, achieving high-quality single-step generation without sacrificing multi-step refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RFMSR achieves comparable or even superior perceptual quality compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/Faze-Hsw/RFMSR.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 13

SynFlow: Scaling Up LiDAR Scene Flow Estimation with Synthetic Data

Reliable 3D dynamic perception requires models that can anticipate motion beyond predefined categories, yet progress is hindered by the scarcity of dense, high-quality motion annotations. While self-supervision on unlabeled real data offers a path forward, empirical evidence suggests that scaling unlabeled data fails to close the performance gap due to noisy proxy signals. In this paper, we propose a shift in paradigm: learning robust real-world motion priors entirely from scalable simulation. We introduce SynFlow, a data generation pipeline that generates large-scale synthetic dataset specifically designed for LiDAR scene flow. Unlike prior works that prioritize sensor-specific realism, SynFlow employs a motion-oriented strategy to synthesize diverse kinematic patterns across 4,000 sequences (sim940k frames), termed SynFlow-4k. This represents a 34x scale-up in annotated volume over existing real-world benchmarks. Our experiments demonstrate that SynFlow-4k provides a highly domain-invariant motion prior. In a zero-shot regime, models trained exclusively on our synthetic data generalize across multiple real-world benchmarks, rivaling in-domain supervised baselines on nuScenes and outperforming state-of-the-art methods on TruckScenes by 31.8%. Furthermore, SynFlow-4k serves as a label-efficient foundation: fine-tuning with only 5% of real-world labels surpasses models trained from scratch on the full available budget. We open-source the pipeline and dataset to facilitate research in generalizable 3D motion estimation. More detail can be found at https://kin-zhang.github.io/SynFlow.

KTH KTH
·
Apr 9

P-Flow: Prompting Visual Effects Generation

Recent advancements in video generation models have significantly improved their ability to follow text prompts. However, the customization of dynamic visual effects, defined as temporally evolving and appearance-driven visual phenomena like object crushing or explosion, remains underexplored. Prior works on motion customization or control mainly focus on low-level motions of the subject or camera, which can be guided using explicit control signals such as motion trajectories. In contrast, dynamic visual effects involve higher-level semantics that are more naturally suited for control via text prompts. However, it is hard and time-consuming for humans to craft a single prompt that accurately specifies these effects, as they require complex temporal reasoning and iterative refinement over time. To address this challenge, we propose P-Flow, a novel training-free framework for customizing dynamic visual effects in video generation without modifying the underlying model. By leveraging the semantic and temporal reasoning capabilities of vision-language models, P-Flow performs test-time prompt optimization, refining prompts based on the discrepancy between the visual effects of the reference video and the generated output. Through iterative refinement, the prompts evolve to better induce the desired dynamic effect in novel scenes. Experiments demonstrate that P-Flow achieves high-fidelity and diverse visual effect customization and outperforms other models on both text-to-video and image-to-video generation tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/showlab/P-Flow.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 22

Human Motion Diffusion as a Generative Prior

Recent work has demonstrated the significant potential of denoising diffusion models for generating human motion, including text-to-motion capabilities. However, these methods are restricted by the paucity of annotated motion data, a focus on single-person motions, and a lack of detailed control. In this paper, we introduce three forms of composition based on diffusion priors: sequential, parallel, and model composition. Using sequential composition, we tackle the challenge of long sequence generation. We introduce DoubleTake, an inference-time method with which we generate long animations consisting of sequences of prompted intervals and their transitions, using a prior trained only for short clips. Using parallel composition, we show promising steps toward two-person generation. Beginning with two fixed priors as well as a few two-person training examples, we learn a slim communication block, ComMDM, to coordinate interaction between the two resulting motions. Lastly, using model composition, we first train individual priors to complete motions that realize a prescribed motion for a given joint. We then introduce DiffusionBlending, an interpolation mechanism to effectively blend several such models to enable flexible and efficient fine-grained joint and trajectory-level control and editing. We evaluate the composition methods using an off-the-shelf motion diffusion model, and further compare the results to dedicated models trained for these specific tasks.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 2, 2023

Self-Supervised Learning via Conditional Motion Propagation

Intelligent agent naturally learns from motion. Various self-supervised algorithms have leveraged motion cues to learn effective visual representations. The hurdle here is that motion is both ambiguous and complex, rendering previous works either suffer from degraded learning efficacy, or resort to strong assumptions on object motions. In this work, we design a new learning-from-motion paradigm to bridge these gaps. Instead of explicitly modeling the motion probabilities, we design the pretext task as a conditional motion propagation problem. Given an input image and several sparse flow guidance vectors on it, our framework seeks to recover the full-image motion. Compared to other alternatives, our framework has several appealing properties: (1) Using sparse flow guidance during training resolves the inherent motion ambiguity, and thus easing feature learning. (2) Solving the pretext task of conditional motion propagation encourages the emergence of kinematically-sound representations that poss greater expressive power. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework learns structural and coherent features; and achieves state-of-the-art self-supervision performance on several downstream tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and human parsing. Furthermore, our framework is successfully extended to several useful applications such as semi-automatic pixel-level annotation. Project page: "http://mmlab.ie.cuhk.edu.hk/projects/CMP/".

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 27, 2019

WorldForge: Unlocking Emergent 3D/4D Generation in Video Diffusion Model via Training-Free Guidance

Recent video diffusion models demonstrate strong potential in spatial intelligence tasks due to their rich latent world priors. However, this potential is hindered by their limited controllability and geometric inconsistency, creating a gap between their strong priors and their practical use in 3D/4D tasks. As a result, current approaches often rely on retraining or fine-tuning, which risks degrading pretrained knowledge and incurs high computational costs. To address this, we propose WorldForge, a training-free, inference-time framework composed of three tightly coupled modules. Intra-Step Recursive Refinement introduces a recursive refinement mechanism during inference, which repeatedly optimizes network predictions within each denoising step to enable precise trajectory injection. Flow-Gated Latent Fusion leverages optical flow similarity to decouple motion from appearance in the latent space and selectively inject trajectory guidance into motion-related channels. Dual-Path Self-Corrective Guidance compares guided and unguided denoising paths to adaptively correct trajectory drift caused by noisy or misaligned structural signals. Together, these components inject fine-grained, trajectory-aligned guidance without training, achieving both accurate motion control and photorealistic content generation. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks validate our method's superiority in realism, trajectory consistency, and visual fidelity. This work introduces a novel plug-and-play paradigm for controllable video synthesis, offering a new perspective on leveraging generative priors for spatial intelligence.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 18, 2025 7

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, 2025

VideoScene: Distilling Video Diffusion Model to Generate 3D Scenes in One Step

Recovering 3D scenes from sparse views is a challenging task due to its inherent ill-posed problem. Conventional methods have developed specialized solutions (e.g., geometry regularization or feed-forward deterministic model) to mitigate the issue. However, they still suffer from performance degradation by minimal overlap across input views with insufficient visual information. Fortunately, recent video generative models show promise in addressing this challenge as they are capable of generating video clips with plausible 3D structures. Powered by large pretrained video diffusion models, some pioneering research start to explore the potential of video generative prior and create 3D scenes from sparse views. Despite impressive improvements, they are limited by slow inference time and the lack of 3D constraint, leading to inefficiencies and reconstruction artifacts that do not align with real-world geometry structure. In this paper, we propose VideoScene to distill the video diffusion model to generate 3D scenes in one step, aiming to build an efficient and effective tool to bridge the gap from video to 3D. Specifically, we design a 3D-aware leap flow distillation strategy to leap over time-consuming redundant information and train a dynamic denoising policy network to adaptively determine the optimal leap timestep during inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our VideoScene achieves faster and superior 3D scene generation results than previous video diffusion models, highlighting its potential as an efficient tool for future video to 3D applications. Project Page: https://hanyang-21.github.io/VideoScene

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 2, 2025 2

From Diffusion to Flow: Efficient Motion Generation in MotionGPT3

Recent text-driven motion generation methods span both discrete token-based approaches and continuous-latent formulations. MotionGPT3 exemplifies the latter paradigm, combining a learned continuous motion latent space with a diffusion-based prior for text-conditioned synthesis. While rectified flow objectives have recently demonstrated favorable convergence and inference-time properties relative to diffusion in image and audio generation, it remains unclear whether these advantages transfer cleanly to the motion generation setting. In this work, we conduct a controlled empirical study comparing diffusion and rectified flow objectives within the MotionGPT3 framework. By holding the model architecture, training protocol, and evaluation setup fixed, we isolate the effect of the generative objective on training dynamics, final performance, and inference efficiency. Experiments on the HumanML3D dataset show that rectified flow converges in fewer training epochs, reaches strong test performance earlier, and matches or exceeds diffusion-based motion quality under identical conditions. Moreover, flow-based priors exhibit stable behavior across a wide range of inference step counts and achieve competitive quality with fewer sampling steps, yielding improved efficiency-quality trade-offs. Overall, our results suggest that several known benefits of rectified flow objectives do extend to continuous-latent text-to-motion generation, highlighting the importance of the training objective choice in motion priors.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 21

Safe Few-Step Generation via Velocity Editing

Flow matching has recently emerged as a strong paradigm for state-of-the-art text-to-image (T2I) generation, enabling high-quality generation with a small number of sampling steps. As these models are increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring safe and non-sensitive content generation has become a critical requirement. However, adapting safety and concept removal methods to this new generation framework remains an open challenge. Specifically, prior methods largely rely on iterative trajectory steering across a number of denoising steps or on CLIP-centric prompt embedding manipulation. These design assumptions pose fundamental bottlenecks for safety in flow matching-based T2I generation, where limited sampling steps constrain iterative correction and modern context-aware text encoders diminish the effectiveness of embedding-level interventions. In this paper, we propose VESFlow, a training-free safety method tailored to flow matching with extremely few sampling steps. Leveraging the fact that flow matching models learn the marginal velocity, we directly edit the velocity field via a safe-conditional posterior. VESFlow steers the trajectory toward safe outputs while leaving the conditioning prompt unchanged. Building on the observation that VESFlow leaves outputs unchanged under benign prompts, we further introduce a risk score-based filtering that bypasses velocity editing to reduce computational cost while preserving benign prompt generation. Based on this filtering, we propose VESFlow+, a stronger variant of VESFlow that not only edits the velocity toward the safe direction, but also pushes it away from the unsafe direction. Experimental results show that VESFlow+ removes the target concept, reducing the attack success rate by NudeNet to 6.3% on Ring-A-Bell and 6.8% on MMA-Diffusion on the 4-step MeanFlow model, while preserving fidelity on benign prompts.

SEE4D: Pose-Free 4D Generation via Auto-Regressive Video Inpainting

Immersive applications call for synthesizing spatiotemporal 4D content from casual videos without costly 3D supervision. Existing video-to-4D methods typically rely on manually annotated camera poses, which are labor-intensive and brittle for in-the-wild footage. Recent warp-then-inpaint approaches mitigate the need for pose labels by warping input frames along a novel camera trajectory and using an inpainting model to fill missing regions, thereby depicting the 4D scene from diverse viewpoints. However, this trajectory-to-trajectory formulation often entangles camera motion with scene dynamics and complicates both modeling and inference. We introduce SEE4D, a pose-free, trajectory-to-camera framework that replaces explicit trajectory prediction with rendering to a bank of fixed virtual cameras, thereby separating camera control from scene modeling. A view-conditional video inpainting model is trained to learn a robust geometry prior by denoising realistically synthesized warped images and to inpaint occluded or missing regions across virtual viewpoints, eliminating the need for explicit 3D annotations. Building on this inpainting core, we design a spatiotemporal autoregressive inference pipeline that traverses virtual-camera splines and extends videos with overlapping windows, enabling coherent generation at bounded per-step complexity. We validate See4D on cross-view video generation and sparse reconstruction benchmarks. Across quantitative metrics and qualitative assessments, our method achieves superior generalization and improved performance relative to pose- or trajectory-conditioned baselines, advancing practical 4D world modeling from casual videos.

  • 11 authors
·
Oct 30, 2025

Still-Moving: Customized Video Generation without Customized Video Data

Customizing text-to-image (T2I) models has seen tremendous progress recently, particularly in areas such as personalization, stylization, and conditional generation. However, expanding this progress to video generation is still in its infancy, primarily due to the lack of customized video data. In this work, we introduce Still-Moving, a novel generic framework for customizing a text-to-video (T2V) model, without requiring any customized video data. The framework applies to the prominent T2V design where the video model is built over a text-to-image (T2I) model (e.g., via inflation). We assume access to a customized version of the T2I model, trained only on still image data (e.g., using DreamBooth or StyleDrop). Naively plugging in the weights of the customized T2I model into the T2V model often leads to significant artifacts or insufficient adherence to the customization data. To overcome this issue, we train lightweight Spatial Adapters that adjust the features produced by the injected T2I layers. Importantly, our adapters are trained on "frozen videos" (i.e., repeated images), constructed from image samples generated by the customized T2I model. This training is facilitated by a novel Motion Adapter module, which allows us to train on such static videos while preserving the motion prior of the video model. At test time, we remove the Motion Adapter modules and leave in only the trained Spatial Adapters. This restores the motion prior of the T2V model while adhering to the spatial prior of the customized T2I model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on diverse tasks including personalized, stylized, and conditional generation. In all evaluated scenarios, our method seamlessly integrates the spatial prior of the customized T2I model with a motion prior supplied by the T2V model.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 11, 2024 2