From Dense Prediction to Visual Editing: Structured Supervision for Unified Image and Video Creation
Organizations: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · Celia Research HK · City University of Hong Kong
Abstract
Unified image and video creation requires a model to follow diverse instructions while preserving identity, geometry, and temporal structure from visual context. However, semantic-only conditioning and creation-only training do not explicitly supervise the local structure needed for precise, temporally consistent editing. We therefore formulate depth and surface-normal prediction as image-form denoising targets, using these dense tasks as structured visual supervision within the same creation interface. Our framework decouples semantic interpretation from spatially aligned visual injection while sharing one multimodal diffusion transformer (MMDiT) backbone across all tasks. Mutual Context Attention (MCA), a paired-video data-construction procedure, and a progressive training curriculum then connect the learned structural cues to temporally localized editing and reference-conditioned creation. A single checkpoint obtains the highest overall score in the reported comparison of unified systems (4.15); adding dense supervision improves OpenVE Overall from 3.98 to 4.06 and Local Add from 3.92 to 4.18. These results support a deliberately bounded conclusion: perception-oriented dense supervision transfers useful structural knowledge to downstream creation, especially editing locality and preservation; we do not claim superiority as a standalone dense predictor.
Figures & tables
| Task family | Primary input | Optional context | Target behavior |
|---|---|---|---|
| Text-to-image/video generation | Text prompt | None | Synthesize an image or video from scratch |
| In-context generation | Text prompt | Subject, frame, sketch, layout, pose, depth, normal | Generate content consistent with visual context |
| Instruction-based editing | Source image/video + instruction | Mask or structured control | Apply requested edits while preserving untouched regions |
| In-context editing | Source image/video | Reference image/video, edited keyframes | Transfer style, identity, structure, or edits across time |
| Dense prediction | Source image/video + instruction | Target representation type | Predict depth or normal maps as image-form outputs |
| Method | Unified Overall | Generation | Editing | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | Quality | Semantic | Overall | Quality | Semantic | IFS | ||
| UniVideo [ 34 ] | 4.03 | 4.08 | 4.12 | 4.04 | 3.98 | 4.01 | 3.95 | 3.90 |
| VINO [ 5 ] | 4.12 | 4.16 | 4.19 | 4.13 | 4.08 | 4.11 | 4.06 | 4.03 |
| Ours | 4.15 | 4.15 | 4.17 | 4.13 | 4.16 | 4.18 | 4.15 | 4.14 |
| Stage | Objectives | Capability introduced |
|---|---|---|
| I | Generation; VLM reconstruction; consistency preservation (7:2:1) | Condition alignment and prior retention |
| II | Instruction editing; depth/normals; MCA pairs; generation replay | Local editing and explicit structural supervision |
| III | Subject/reference generation; reference editing; keyframe propagation; multi-reference composition | Reference binding and compositional creation |
| Variant | Overall | Local Add | Local Remove | Local Change | Background Change | Global Style |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| w/o Dense Prediction | 3.98 | 3.92 | 3.84 | 3.89 | 3.76 | 3.89 |
| w/ Dense Prediction | 4.06 | 4.18 | 4.02 | 4.11 | 3.95 | 4.06 |
| Method | OpenVE-Bench | InsEdit-Bench | Latency | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Overall | Local Add | Local Remove | Local Change | Subtitle Edit | Creative Edit | Overall | IC | TVQ | URP | ||
| VACE-14B [ 13 ] | 3.01 | 1.76 | 3.99 | 2.47 | 4.41 | 2.17 | 3.08 | 2.39 | 2.64 | 4.21 | 9.08 |
| OmniVideo [ 28 ] | 3.66 | 2.80 | 4.52 | 3.75 | 4.95 | 1.13 | 4.13 | 4.04 | 4.04 | 4.32 | 20.58 |
| InsViE [ 36 ] | 3.25 | 2.25 | 3.56 | 2.82 | 4.77 | 3.36 | 2.76 | 2.19 | 2.29 | 3.80 | 1.06 |
| Lucy-Edit [ 29 ] | 3.77 | 3.92 | 3.95 | 3.93 | 4.23 | 4.19 | 3.64 | 3.24 | 3.38 | 4.30 | 0.60 |
| ICVE [ 19 ] | 3.76 | 3.77 | 4.50 | 3.87 | 4.68 | 3.54 | 3.54 | 2.91 | 2.94 | 4.79 | 20.60 |
| Method | Overall | Local Add | Local Remove | Local Change | Background Change | Global Style | Subtitle Edit | Creative Edit | Camera Edit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| VACE-14B [ 13 ] | 3.01 | 1.76 | 3.99 | 2.47 | 2.81 | 3.46 | 4.41 | 2.17 | 3.09 |
| OmniVideo [ 28 ] | 3.66 | 2.80 | 4.52 | 3.75 | 4.11 | 3.41 | 4.95 | 1.13 | 3.62 |
| InsViE [ 36 ] | 3.25 | 2.25 | 3.56 | 2.82 | 2.68 | 3.63 | 4.77 | 3.36 | 3.61 |
| Lucy-Edit [ 29 ] | 3.77 | 3.92 | 3.95 | 3.93 | 3.25 | 3.64 | 4.23 | 4.19 | 3.54 |
| ICVE [ 19 ] | 3.76 | 3.77 | 4.50 | 3.87 | 3.51 | 3.87 | 4.68 | 3.54 | 2.84 |
| Ditto [ 1 ] | 3.44 | 2.48 | 3.53 | 2.89 | 3.52 | 4.48 | 3.69 | 4.14 | 3.33 |
| Method | G_SC | G_PQ | G_O |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini2.5 | 7.48 | 8.30 | 7.17 |
| GPT4o | 8.06 | 7.80 | 7.48 |
| Seedream4 | 8.33 | 8.00 | 7.72 |
| UniWorld-V1 [ 20 ] | 5.04 | 7.56 | 4.98 |
| OmniGen2 [ 35 ] | 6.79 | 6.68 | 6.18 |
| Flux-Kontext-Dev [ 2 ] | 7.23 | 7.28 | 6.53 |
| Construction | Alignment | Prompt | Temporal | Artifact (%) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Independent generation | 0.67 | 0.79 | 0.72 | 18.6 |
| First-frame propagation | 0.78 | 0.71 | 0.76 | 15.4 |
| MCA-generated | 0.84 | 0.82 | 0.81 | 9.8 |
| Category | Raw | Kept | Keep rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Object add/remove | 38.4K | 30.6K | 79.7% |
| Attribute/action | 31.2K | 24.5K | 78.5% |
| Background/weather | 26.8K | 21.4K | 79.9% |
| Style/relighting | 18.6K | 15.1K | 81.2% |
| Temporal edits | 33.7K | 26.9K | 79.8% |
| Video editing data | InsEdit-Bench Overall |
|---|---|
| 4K non-MCA | 3.96 |
| 2K non-MCA + 2K MCA | 4.08 |
| Variant | Overall | IC | TVQ | URP |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edit-only Baseline | 4.41 | 4.24 | 4.30 | 4.70 |
| + Gen Data w/ SigLIP-1 | 4.46 | 4.32 | 4.33 | 4.72 |
| + Gen Data w/ SigLIP-3 | 4.30 | 4.09 | 4.17 | 4.63 |
| + Gen Data w/ SigLIP-3 Avg | 4.32 | 4.11 | 4.21 | 4.65 |
| + Gen Data w/o VLM Vision | 4.10 | 3.83 | 3.80 | 4.52 |
| Group | Variant | Overall | IC | TVQ | URP |
| Baseline | Edit-only Baseline | 4.41 | 4.24 | 4.30 | 4.70 |
| Initialization | w/o Stage 1 Init | 4.15 | 3.94 | 3.95 | 4.57 |
| w/o Stage 1 Consistency Init | 4.26 | 3.99 | 4.04 | 4.74 | |
| w/o Stage 1 VLM-Recon Init | 4.29 | 4.09 | 4.15 | 4.63 | |
| Data Ratio | Image:Video = 1:1 | 4.34 | 4.15 | 4.16 | 4.71 |
| Image:Video = 1:4 | 4.27 | 4.07 | 4.12 | 4.62 |
Video Editing
Video editing uses AI to alter, compose, relight, or reorganize moving footage while controlling how changes persist across frames.
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