Diffusion-Based Image Generation

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Overview

Diffusion models learn to turn noise into images through a sequence of denoising steps, often guided by text, labels, sketches, layouts, or reference images. Work spans pixel-space and latent-space models, U-Net and Transformer architectures, and related flow-matching methods, with efforts to improve training objectives, representations, and controllability. Researchers evaluate quality and prompt or spatial alignment on benchmarks such as ImageNet and COCO, and apply the models to editing, medical imaging, remote sensing, and synthetic data generation. A central challenge is balancing image quality, diversity, precise control, and reliability against the computation required for training and sampling; synthetic images also need validation for downstream usefulness and safety.

Latest papers

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328 papers46 papers in the last four weeks, up 171% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Apr 29, 2026

ACPO: Anchor-Constrained Perceptual Optimization for Diffusion Models with No-Reference Quality Guidance

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image generation, yet their training is predominantly driven by full-reference objectives that enforce pixel-wise similarity to ground-truth images.Such supervision, while effective for fidelity, may insufficient in terms of subjective visual perception quality and text-image semantic consistency. In this work, we investigate the problem of incorporating no-reference perceptual quality into diffusion training. A key challenge is that directly optimizing perceptual signals, such as those provided by no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) models, introduces a mismatch with the original diffusion objective, leading to training instability and distributional drift during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose an anchor-constrained optimization framework that enables stable perceptual adaptation. Specifically, we leverage a learned NR-IQA model as a perceptual guidance signal, while introducing an anchor-based regularization that enforces consistency with the base diffusion model in terms of noise prediction. This design effectively balances perceptual quality improvement and generative fidelity, allowing controlled adaptation toward perceptually favorable outputs without compromising the original generative behavior. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently enhances perceptual quality while preserving generation diversity and training stability, highlighting the effectiveness of anchor-constrained perceptual optimization for diffusion models.

Yang Yang, Feifan Meng, Han Fang +1

School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Anhui University · Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center · School of Cyber Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China

Diffusion Model GuidanceDiffusion Model Fine-TuningDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Models
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Apr 29, 2026

SpatialFusion: Endowing Unified Image Generation with Intrinsic 3D Geometric Awareness

Recent unified image generation models have achieved remarkable success by employing MLLMs for semantic understanding and diffusion backbones for image generation. However, these models remain fundamentally limited in spatially-aware tasks due to a lack of intrinsic spatial understanding and the absence of explicit geometric guidance during generation. In this paper, we propose SpatialFusion, a novel framework that internalizes 3D geometric awareness into unified image generation models. Specifically, we first employ a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) architecture to augment the MLLM with a parallel spatial transformer to enhance 3D geometric modeling capability. By sharing self-attention with the MLLM, the spatial transformer learns to derive metric-depth maps of target images from rich semantic contexts. These explicit geometric scaffolds are then injected into the diffusion backbone through a specialized depth adapter, providing precise spatial constraints for spatially-coherent image generation. Through a progressive two-stage training strategy, SpatialFusion significantly enhances performance on spatially-aware benchmarks, notably outperforming leading models such as GPT-4o. Additionally, it achieves generalized performance gains across both text-to-image generation and image editing scenarios, all while maintaining negligible inference overhead.

Haiyi Qiu, Kaihang Pan, Jiacheng Li +3

Zhejiang University Hangzhou, China · HiThink Research Hangzhou, China

Conditional Image GenerationImage GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image Editing
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Apr 24, 2026

Efficient Diffusion Distillation via Embedding Loss

Recent advances in distilling expensive diffusion models into efficient few-step generators show significant promise. However, these methods typically demand substantial computational resources and extended training periods, limiting accessibility for resource-constrained researchers, and existing supplementary loss functions have notable limitations. Regression loss requires pre-generating large datasets before training and limits the student model to the teacher's performance, while GAN-based losses suffer from training instability and require careful tuning. In this paper, we propose Embedding Loss (EL), a novel supplementary loss function that complements existing diffusion distillation methods to enhance generation quality and accelerate training with smaller batch sizes. Leveraging feature embeddings from a diverse set of randomly initialized networks, EL effectively aligns the feature distributions between the distilled few-step generator and the original data. By computing Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) in the embedded feature space, EL ensures robust distribution matching, thereby preserving sample fidelity and diversity during distillation. Within distribution matching distillation frameworks, EL demonstrates strong empirical performance for one-step generators. On the CIFAR-10 dataset, our approach achieves state-of-the-art FID values of 1.475 for unconditional generation and 1.380 for conditional generation. Beyond CIFAR-10, we further validate EL across multiple benchmarks and distillation methods, including ImageNet, AFHQ-v2, and FFHQ datasets, using DMD, DI, and CM distillation frameworks, demonstrating consistent improvements over existing one-step distillation methods. Our method also reduces training iterations by up to 80%, offering a more practical and scalable solution for deploying diffusion-based generative models in resource-constrained environments.

Jincheng Ying, Yitao Chen, Li Wenlin +2

School of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Guangdong University of Finance and Economics Guangzhou, China · School of Computer Science Shandong University Qingdao, China

Diffusion Model DistillationOne-Step Generative ModelingFew-Step Diffusion SamplingDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 22, 2026

LLaDA2.0-Uni: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Diffusion Large Language Model

We present LLaDA2.0-Uni, a unified discrete diffusion large language model (dLLM) that supports multimodal understanding and generation within a natively integrated framework. Its architecture combines a fully semantic discrete tokenizer, a MoE-based dLLM backbone, and a diffusion decoder. By discretizing continuous visual inputs via SigLIP-VQ, the model enables block-level masked diffusion for both text and vision inputs within the backbone, while the decoder reconstructs visual tokens into high-fidelity images. Inference efficiency is enhanced beyond parallel decoding through prefix-aware optimizations in the backbone and few-step distillation in the decoder. Supported by carefully curated large-scale data and a tailored multi-stage training pipeline, LLaDA2.0-Uni matches specialized VLMs in multimodal understanding while delivering strong performance in image generation and editing. Its native support for interleaved generation and reasoning establishes a promising and scalable paradigm for next-generation unified foundation models. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/inclusionAI/LLaDA2.0-Uni.

Inclusion AI, Tiwei Bie, Haoxing Chen +15

AGI Research Center, Inclusion AI

Unified Multimodal ModelsMultimodal GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationMultimodal Foundation ModelsDiffusion Language ModelsImage Editing+1
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Apr 22, 2026

Accelerating New Product Introduction for Visual Quality Inspection via Few-Shot Diffusion-Based Defect Synthesis

Industrial visual inspection systems often suffer from a severe scarcity of labeled defect data, particularly during the early stages of New Product Introduction (NPI). This limitation hinders the deployment of robust supervised detectors precisely when automated quality control is most needed. We present an end-to-end generative framework for high-fidelity, few-shot defect synthesis that enables both in-domain augmentation and cross-domain transfer. Our approach disentangles defect morphology from background appearance by combining masked textual inversion for defect representation learning, noise-blended conditioned generation for surface-aware synthesis, and gradient-aware post-processing for seamless visual integration. We evaluate the framework in two practically relevant settings: few-shot data augmentation, where synthetic samples enrich a small set of real defects, and zero-shot adaptation, where defects learned from a source domain are transferred to a novel target surface without any real target-domain defect examples. Using RF-DETR as the downstream detector, we show that the proposed pipeline substantially narrows the domain gap on a private industrial dataset. In the few-shot setting, synthetic augmentation improves mAP from 78.8% to 83.3%. In the zero-shot setting, synthetic domain adaptation improves mAP from 65.0% to 85.1%. These results demonstrate that high-fidelity defect synthesis can meaningfully accelerate NPI by enabling effective inspection models before sufficient real defect data has been collected.

Serkan Hamdi Güğül, Kemal Levi, Burak Acar

Relimetrics, Inc.

Synthetic-to-Real Domain AdaptationSynthetic Data AugmentationIndustrial InspectionDiffusion-Based Image GenerationSynthetic Anomaly Generation
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Apr 21, 2026

HarmoniDiff-RS: Training-Free Diffusion Harmonization for Satellite Image Composition

Satellite image composition plays a critical role in remote sensing applications such as data augmentation, disaste simulation, and urban planning. We propose HarmoniDiff-RS, a training-free diffusion-based framework for harmonizing composite satellite images under diverse domain conditions. Our method aligns the source and target domains through a Latent Mean Shift operation that transfers radiometric characteristics between them. To balance harmonization and content preservation, we introduce a Timestep-wise Latent Fusion strategy by leveraging early inverted latents for high harmonization and late latents for semantic consistency to generate a set of composite candidates. A lightweight harmony classifier is trained to further automatically select the most coherent result among them. We also construct RSIC-H, a benchmark dataset for satellite image harmonization derived from fMoW, providing 500 paired composition samples. Experiments demonstrate that our method effectively performs satellite image composition, showing strong potential for scalable remote-sensing synthesis and simulation tasks. Code is available at: https://github.com/XiaoqiZhuang/HarmoniDiff-RS.

Xiaoqi Zhuang, Jefersson A. Dos Santos, Jungong Han

The University of Sheffield · Tsinghua University

Compositional Image GenerationRemote SensingDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Models
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Apr 21, 2026

Denoising, Fast and Slow: Difficulty-Aware Adaptive Sampling for Image Generation

Diffusion- and flow-based models usually allocate compute uniformly across space, updating all patches with the same timestep and number of function evaluations. While convenient, this ignores the heterogeneity of natural images: some regions are easy to denoise, whereas others benefit from more refinement or additional context. Motivated by this, we explore patch-level noise scales for image synthesis. We find that naively varying timesteps across image tokens performs poorly, as it exposes the model to overly informative training states that do not occur at inference. We therefore introduce a timestep sampler that explicitly controls the maximum patch-level information available during training, and show that moving from global to patch-level timesteps already improves image generation over standard baselines. By further augmenting the model with a lightweight per-patch difficulty head, we enable adaptive samplers that allocate compute dynamically where it is most needed. Combined with noise levels varying over both space and diffusion time, this yields Patch Forcing (PF), a framework that advances easier regions earlier so they can provide context for harder ones. PF achieves superior results on class-conditional ImageNet, remains orthogonal to representation alignment and guidance methods, and scales to text-to-image synthesis. Our results suggest that patch-level denoising schedules provide a promising foundation for adaptive image generation.

Johannes Schusterbauer, Ming Gui, Yusong Li +3

Diffusion Model SamplingDiffusion SamplingDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Timestep SchedulingDiffusion Model Inference AccelerationDiffusion-Based Denoising
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Apr 20, 2026

MetaCloak-JPEG: JPEG-Robust Adversarial Perturbation for Preventing Unauthorized DreamBooth-Based Deepfake Generation

The rapid progress of subject-driven text-to-image synthesis, and in particular DreamBooth, has enabled a consent-free deepfake pipeline: an adversary needs only 4-8 publicly available face images to fine-tune a personalized diffusion model and produce photorealistic harmful content. Current adversarial face-protection systems -- PhotoGuard, Anti-DreamBooth, and MetaCloak -- perturb user images to disrupt surrogate fine-tuning, but all share a structural blindness: none backpropagates gradients through the JPEG compression pipeline that every major social-media platform applies before adversary access. Because JPEG quantization relies on round(), whose derivative is zero almost everywhere, adversarial energy concentrates in high-frequency DCT bands that JPEG discards, eliminating 60-80% of the protective signal. We introduce MetaCloak-JPEG, which closes this gap by inserting a Differentiable JPEG (DiffJPEG) layer built on the Straight-Through Estimator (STE): the forward pass applies standard JPEG compression, while the backward pass replaces round() with the identity. DiffJPEG is embedded in a JPEG-aware EOT distribution (~70% of augmentations include DiffJPEG) and a curriculum quality-factor schedule (QF: 95 to 50) inside a bilevel meta-learning loop. Under an l-inf perturbation budget of eps=8/255, MetaCloak-JPEG attains 32.7 dB PSNR, a 91.3% JPEG survival rate, and outperforms PhotoGuard on all 9 evaluated JPEG quality factors (9/9 wins, mean denoising-loss gain +0.125) within a 4.1 GB training-memory budget.

Tanjim Rahaman Fardin, S M Zunaid Alam, Mahadi Hasan Fahim +1

Computer Science and Engineering BRAC University Dhaka, Bangladesh

Adversarial RobustnessDiffusion-Based Image GenerationAdversarial Perturbations
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Apr 20, 2026

UniCSG: Unified High-Fidelity Content-Constrained Style-Driven Generation via Staged Semantic and Frequency Disentanglement

Style transfer must match a target style while preserving content semantics. DiT-based diffusion models often suffer from content-style entanglement, leading to reference-content leakage and unstable generation. We present UniCSG, a unified framework for content-constrained, style-driven generation in both text-guided and reference-guided settings. UniCSG employs staged training: (i) a latent-space semantic disentanglement stage that combines low-frequency preprocessing with conditioning corruption to encourage content-style separation, and (ii) a latent-space frequency-aware detail reconstruction stage that refines details via multi-scale frequency supervision. We further incorporate pixel-space reward learning to align latent objectives with perceptual quality after decoding. Experiments demonstrate improved content faithfulness, style alignment, and robustness in both settings.

Jingwei Yang, Ruoxi Wu, Wei Shen +4

China University of Mining and Technology, Beijing, China · OPPO Artificial Intelligence Center, Beijing, China

Constrained Generative ModelingDiffusion TransformerImage Style TransferRepresentation DisentanglementDiffusion-Based Image GenerationControllable Image Generation
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Apr 19, 2026

Coevolving Representations in Joint Image-Feature Diffusion

Joint image-feature generative modeling has recently emerged as an effective strategy for improving diffusion training by coupling low-level VAE latents with high-level semantic features extracted from pre-trained visual encoders. However, existing approaches rely on a fixed representation space, constructed independently of the generative objective and kept unchanged during training. We argue that the representation space guiding diffusion should itself adapt to the generative task. To this end, we propose Coevolving Representation Diffusion (CoReDi), a framework in which the semantic representation space evolves during training by learning a lightweight linear projection jointly with the diffusion model. While naively optimizing this projection leads to degenerate solutions, we show that stable coevolution can be achieved through a combination of stop-gradient targets, normalization, and targeted regularization that prevents feature collapse. This formulation enables the semantic space to progressively specialize to the needs of image synthesis, improving its complementarity with image latents. We apply CoReDi to both VAE latent diffusion and pixel-space diffusion, demonstrating that adaptive semantic representations improve generative modeling across both settings. Experiments show that CoReDi achieves faster convergence and higher sample quality compared to joint diffusion models operating in fixed representation spaces.

Theodoros Kouzelis, Spyros Gidaris, Nikos Komodakis

Archimedes, Athena RC · National Technical University of Athens · University of Crete +1

Representation LearningLatent Diffusion ModelsDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 17, 2026

Elucidating the SNR-t Bias of Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Diffusion Probabilistic Models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of generative tasks. However, we have observed that these models often suffer from a Signal-to-Noise Ratio-timestep (SNR-t) bias. This bias refers to the misalignment between the SNR of the denoising sample and its corresponding timestep during the inference phase. Specifically, during training, the SNR of a sample is strictly coupled with its timestep. However, this correspondence is disrupted during inference, leading to error accumulation and impairing the generation quality. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to substantiate this phenomenon and propose a simple yet effective differential correction method to mitigate the SNR-t bias. Recognizing that diffusion models typically reconstruct low-frequency components before focusing on high-frequency details during the reverse denoising process, we decompose samples into various frequency components and apply differential correction to each component individually. Extensive experiments show that our approach significantly improves the generation quality of various diffusion models (IDDPM, ADM, DDIM, A-DPM, EA-DPM, EDM, PFGM++, and FLUX) on datasets of various resolutions with negligible computational overhead. The code is at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/DCW.

Meng Yu, Lei Sun, Jianhao Zeng +2

Lanzhou University · AMAP Alibaba Group

Diffusion Model SamplingDiffusion SamplingDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Models
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Apr 16, 2026

An Analysis of Regularization and Fokker-Planck Residuals in Diffusion Models for Image Generation

Recent work has shown that diffusion models trained with the denoising score matching (DSM) objective often violate the Fokker--Planck (FP) equation that governs the evolution of the true data density. Directly penalizing these deviations in the objective function reduces their magnitude but introduces a significant computational overhead. It is also observed that enforcing strict adherence to the FP equation does not necessarily lead to improvements in the quality of the generated samples, as often the best results are obtained with weaker FP regularization. In this paper, we investigate whether simpler penalty terms can provide similar benefits. We empirically analyze several lightweight regularizers, study their effect on FP residuals and generation quality, and show that the benefits of FP regularization are available at substantially lower computational cost. Our code is available at https://github.com/OnnoNiemann/fp_diffusion_analysis.

Onno Niemann, Gonzalo Martínez Muñoz, Alberto Suárez Gonzalez

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Diffusion-Based Image GenerationScore-Based Generative ModelingDiffusion ModelsFokker–Planck Equation
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Apr 15, 2026

PostureObjectstitch: Anomaly Image Generation Considering Assembly Relationships in Industrial Scenarios

Image generation technology can synthesize condition-specific images to supplement real-world industrial anomaly data and enhance anomaly detection model performance. Existing generation techniques rarely account for the pose and orientation of industrial components in assembly, making the generated images difficult to utilize for downstream application. To solve this, we propose a novel image synthesis approach, called PostureObjectStitch, that achieves accurate generation to meet the requirement of industrial assembly. A condition decoupling approach is introduced to separate input multi-view images into high-frequency, texture, and RGB features. The feature temporal modulation mechanism adapts these features across diffusion model time-steps, enabling progressive generation from coarse to fine details while maintaining consistency. To ensure semantic accuracy, we introduce a conditional loss that enhances critical industrial elements and a geometric prior that guides component positioning for correct assembly relationships. Comprehensive experimental results on the MureCom dataset, our newly contributed DreamAssembly dataset, and the downstream application validate the outstanding performance of our method.

Zebei Tong, Hongchang Chen, Yujie Lei +7

Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China · The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China · Li Auto, Beijing, China +1

Synthetic Anomaly GenerationConditional Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 14, 2026

AbdomenGen: Sequential Volume-Conditioned Diffusion Framework for Abdominal Anatomy Generation

Computational phantoms are widely used in medical imaging research, yet current systems to generate controlled, clinically meaningful anatomical variations remain limited. We present AbdomenGen, a sequential volume-conditioned diffusion framework for controllable abdominal anatomy generation. We introduce the Volume Control Scalar (VCS), a standardized residual that decouples organ size from body habitus, enabling interpretable volume modulation. Organ masks are synthesized sequentially, conditioning on the body mask and previously generated structures to preserve global anatomical coherence while supporting independent, multi-organ control. Across 11 abdominal organs, the proposed framework achieves strong geometric fidelity (e.g., liver dice 0.83±0.050.83 \pm 0.05), stable single-organ calibration over [−3,+3][-3,+3] VCS, and disentangled multi-organ modulation. To showcase clinical utility with a hepatomegaly cohort selected from MERLIN, Wasserstein-based VCS selection reduces distributional distance of training data by 73.6% . These results demonstrate calibrated, distribution-aware anatomical generation suitable for controllable abdominal phantom construction and simulation studies.

Yubraj Bhandari, Lavsen Dahal, Paul Segars +1

Center for Virtual Imaging Trials, Dept. of Radiology, Duke University School of Medicine · Dept. of Physics, Trinity School of Arts and Sciences, Duke University · Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University

Medical Image SynthesisControllable Image GenerationConditional Generative ModelingDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 14, 2026

Fragile Reconstruction: Adversarial Vulnerability of Reconstruction-Based Detectors for Diffusion-Generated Images

Recently, detecting AI-generated images produced by diffusion-based models has attracted increasing attention due to their potential threat to safety. Among existing approaches, reconstruction-based methods have emerged as a prominent paradigm for this task. However, we find that such methods exhibit severe security vulnerabilities to adversarial perturbations; that is, by adding imperceptible adversarial perturbations to input images, the detection accuracy of classifiers collapses to near zero. To verify this threat, we present a systematic evaluation of the adversarial robustness of three representative detectors across four diverse generative backbone models. First, we construct adversarial attacks in white-box scenarios, which degrade the performance of all well-trained detectors. Moreover, we find that these attacks demonstrate transferability; specifically, attacks crafted against one detector can be transferred to others, indicating that adversarial attacks on detectors can also be constructed in a black-box setting. Finally, we assess common countermeasures and find that standard defense methods against adversarial attacks provide limited mitigation. We attribute these failures to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of attacked samples as perceived by the detectors. Overall, our results reveal fundamental security limitations of reconstruction-based detectors and highlight the need to rethink existing detection strategies.

Haoyang Jiang, Mingyang Yi, Shaolei Zhang +4

Renmin University of China, Beijing, China · Tencent Inc., Shenzhen, China

Adversarial Attacks on AI-Generated Image DetectorsAI-Generated Image DetectionAdversarial RobustnessAdversarial AttacksBlack-Box Adversarial AttacksDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 14, 2026

StructDiff: A Structure-Preserving and Spatially Controllable Diffusion Model for Single-Image Generation

This paper introduces StructDiff, a generative framework based on a single-scale diffusion model for single-image generation. Single-image generation aims to synthesize diverse samples with similar visual content to the source image by capturing its internal statistics, without relying on external data. However, existing methods often struggle to preserve the structural layout, especially for images with large rigid objects or strict spatial constraints. Moreover, most approaches lack spatial controllability, making it difficult to guide the structure or placement of generated content. To address these challenges, StructDiff introduces an adaptive receptive field module to maintain both global and local distributions. Building on this foundation, StructDiff incorporates 3D positional encoding (PE) as a spatial prior, allowing flexible control over positions, scale, and local details of generated objects. To our knowledge, this spatial control capability represents the first exploration of PE-based manipulation in single-image generation. Furthermore, we propose a novel evaluation criterion for single-image generation based on large language models (LLMs). This criterion specifically addresses the limitations of existing objective metrics and the high labor costs associated with user studies. StructDiff also demonstrates broad applicability across downstream tasks, such as text-guided image generation, image editing, outpainting, and paint-to-image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StructDiff outperforms existing methods in structural consistency, visual quality, and spatial controllability. The project page is available at https://butter-crab.github.io/StructDiff/.

Yinxi He, Kang Liao, Chunyu Lin +2

Institute of Information Science, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China, and also with Visual Intelligence +X International Cooperation Joint Laboratory of MOE, Beijing 100044, China. · College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationControllable Image Generation
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Apr 13, 2026

Dual-Control Frequency-Aware Diffusion Model for Depth-Dependent Optical Microrobot Microscopy Image Generation

Optical microrobots actuated by optical tweezers (OT) are important for cell manipulation and microscale assembly, but their autonomous operation depends on accurate 3D perception. Developing such perception systems is challenging because large-scale, high-quality microscopy datasets are scarce, owing to complex fabrication processes and labor-intensive annotation. Although generative AI offers a promising route for data augmentation, existing generative adversarial network (GAN)-based methods struggle to reproduce key optical characteristics, particularly depth-dependent diffraction and defocus effects. To address this limitation, we propose Du-FreqNet, a dual-control, frequency-aware diffusion model for physically consistent microscopy image synthesis. The framework features two independent ControlNet branches to encode microrobot 3D point clouds and depth-specific mesh layers, respectively. We introduce an adaptive frequency-domain loss that dynamically reweights high- and low-frequency components based on the distance to the focal plane. By leveraging differentiable FFT-based supervision, Du-FreqNet captures physically meaningful frequency distributions often missed by pixel-space methods. Trained on a limited dataset (e.g., 80 images per pose), our model achieves controllable, depth-dependent image synthesis, improving SSIM by 20.7% over baselines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Du-FreqNet generalizes effectively to unseen poses and significantly enhances downstream tasks, including 3D pose and depth estimation, thereby facilitating robust closed-loop control in microrobotic systems.

Lan Wei, Zongcai Tan, Kangyi Lu +2

Department of Bioengineering, Imperial-X AI Initiative, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom. · CAMS-Oxford Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.

Synthetic Data Generation for RoboticsDiffusion-Based Image GenerationControllable Image GenerationPhysics-Informed Generative Modeling
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Apr 12, 2026

ReContraster: Making Your Posters Stand Out with Regional Contrast

Effective poster design requires rapidly capturing attention and clearly conveying messages. Inspired by the ``contrast effects'' principle, we propose ReContraster, the first training-free model to leverage regional contrast to make posters stand out. By emulating the cognitive behaviors of a poster designer, ReContraster introduces the compositional multi-agent system to identify elements, organize layout, and evaluate generated poster candidates. To further ensure harmonious transitions across region boundaries, ReContraster integrates the hybrid denoising strategy during the diffusion process. We additionally contribute a new benchmark dataset for comprehensive evaluation. Seven quantitative metrics and four user studies confirm its superiority over relevant state-of-the-art methods, producing visually striking and aesthetically appealing posters.

Peixuan Zhang, Zijian Jia, Ziqi Cai +3

School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University +1

Image GenerationCompositional Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 11, 2026

Intra-finger Variability of Diffusion-based Latent Fingerprint Generation

The primary goal of this work is to systematically evaluate the intra-finger variability of synthetic fingerprints (particularly latent prints) generated using a state-of-the-art diffusion model. Specifically, we focus on enhancing the latent style diversity of the generative model by constructing a comprehensive latent style bank curated from seven diverse datasets, which enables the precise synthesis of latent prints with over 40 distinct styles encapsulating different surfaces and processing techniques. We also implement a semi-automated framework to understand the integrity of fingerprint ridges and minutiae in the generated impressions. Our analysis indicates that though the generation process largely preserves the identity, a small number of local inconsistencies (addition and removal of minutiae) are introduced, especially when there are poor quality regions in the reference image. Furthermore, mismatch between the reference image and the chosen style embedding that guides the generation process introduces global inconsistencies in the form of hallucinated ridge patterns. These insights highlight the limitations of existing synthetic fingerprint generators and the need to further improve these models to simultaneously enhance both diversity and identity consistency.

Noor Hussein, Anil K. Jain, Karthik Nandakumar

Michigan State University, USA · MBZUAI, UAE

Fingerprint IdentificationSynthetic Data GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationBiometric IdentificationDiffusion Model Guidance
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Apr 11, 2026

FREE-Switch: Frequency-based Dynamic LoRA Switch for Style Transfer

With the growing availability of open-sourced adapters trained on the same diffusion backbone for diverse scenes and objects, combining these pretrained weights enables low-cost customized generation. However, most existing model merging methods are designed for classification or text generation, and when applied to image generation, they suffer from content drift due to error accumulation across multiple diffusion steps. For image-oriented methods, training-based approaches are computationally expensive and unsuitable for edge deployment, while training-free ones use uniform fusion strategies that ignore inter-adapter differences, leading to detail degradation. We find that since different adapters are specialized for generating different types of content, the contribution of each diffusion step carries different significance for each adapter. Accordingly, we propose a frequency-domain importance-driven dynamic LoRA switch method. Furthermore, we observe that maintaining semantic consistency across adapters effectively mitigates detail loss; thus, we design an automatic Generation Alignment mechanism to align generation intents at the semantic level. Experiments demonstrate that our FREE-Switch (Frequency-based Efficient and Dynamic LoRA Switch) framework efficiently combines adapters for different objects and styles, substantially reducing the training cost of high-quality customized generation.

Shenghe Zheng, Minyu Zhang, Tianhao Liu +1

Harbin Institute of Technology

Diffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion ModelsImage Style TransferLow-Rank Adaptation
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Apr 11, 2026

FlowPalm: Optical Flow Driven Non-Rigid Deformation for Geometrically Diverse Palmprint Generation

Recently, synthetic palmprints have been increasingly used as substitutes for real data to train recognition models. To be effective, such synthetic data must reflect the diversity of real palmprints, including both style variation and geometric variation. However, existing palmprint generation methods mainly focus on style translation, while geometric variation is either ignored or approximated by simple handcrafted augmentations. In this work, we propose FlowPalm, an optical-flow-driven palmprint generation framework capable of simulating the complex non-rigid deformations observed in real palms. Specifically, FlowPalm estimates optical flows between real palmprint pairs to capture the statistical patterns of geometric deformations. Building on these priors, we design a progressive sampling process that gradually introduces the geometric deformations during diffusion while maintaining identity consistency. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that FlowPalm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art palmprint generation approaches in downstream recognition tasks. Project page: https://yuchenzou.github.io/FlowPalm/

Yuchen Zou, Huikai Shao, Lihuang Fang +2

Xi’an Jiaotong University · Sichuan Digital Economy Industry Development Research Institute · Southern University of Science and Technology

Synthetic Data GenerationBiometric IdentificationDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 10, 2026

SCoRe: Clean Image Generation from Diffusion Models Trained on Noisy Images

Diffusion models trained on noisy datasets often reproduce high-frequency training artifacts, significantly degrading generation quality. To address this, we propose SCoRe (Spectral Cutoff Regeneration), a training-free, generation-time spectral regeneration method for clean image generation from diffusion models trained on noisy images. Leveraging the spectral bias of diffusion models, which infer high-frequency details from low-frequency cues, SCoRe suppresses corrupted high-frequency components of a generated image via a frequency cutoff and regenerates them via SDEdit. Crucially, we derive a theoretical mapping between the cutoff frequency and the SDEdit initialization timestep based on Radially Averaged Power Spectral Density (RAPSD), which prevents excessive noise injection during regeneration. Experiments on synthetic (CIFAR-10) and real-world (SIDD) noisy datasets demonstrate that SCoRe substantially outperforms post-processing and noise-robust baselines, restoring samples closer to clean image distributions without any retraining or fine-tuning.

Yuta Matsuzaki, Seiichi Uchida, Shumpei Takezaki

Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan

Diffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion ModelsDiffusion Model Sampling
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Apr 9, 2026

What Matters in Virtual Try-Off? Dual-UNet Diffusion Model For Garment Reconstruction

Virtual Try-On (VTON) has seen rapid advancements, providing a strong foundation for generative fashion tasks. However, the inverse problem, Virtual Try-Off (VTOFF)-aimed at reconstructing the canonical garment from a draped-on image-remains a less understood domain, distinct from the heavily researched field of VTON. In this work, we seek to establish a robust architectural foundation for VTOFF by studying and adapting various diffusion-based strategies from VTON and general Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs). We focus our investigation on the Dual-UNet Diffusion Model architecture and analyze three axes of design: (i) Generation Backbone: comparing Stable Diffusion variants; (ii) Conditioning: ablating different mask designs, masked/unmasked inputs for image conditioning, and the utility of high-level semantic features; and (iii) Losses and Training Strategies: evaluating the impact of the auxiliary attention-based loss, perceptual objectives and multi-stage curriculum schedules. Extensive experiments reveal trade-offs across various configuration options. Evaluated on VITON-HD and DressCode datasets, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with a drop of 9.5% on the primary metric DISTS and competitive performance on LPIPS, FID, KID, and SSIM, providing both stronger baselines and insights to guide future Virtual Try-Off research.

Loc-Phat Truong, Meysam Madadi, Sergio Escalera

Computer Vision Center, Spain · Universitat de Barcelona, Spain

Diffusion ModelsDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 9, 2026

GroundingAnomaly: Spatially-Grounded Diffusion for Few-Shot Anomaly Synthesis

The performance of visual anomaly inspection in industrial quality control is often constrained by the scarcity of real anomalous samples. Consequently, anomaly synthesis techniques have been developed to enlarge training sets and enhance downstream inspection. However, existing methods either suffer from poor integration caused by inpainting or fail to provide accurate masks. To address these limitations, we propose GroundingAnomaly, a novel few-shot anomaly image generation framework. Our framework introduces a Spatial Conditioning Module that leverages per-pixel semantic maps to enable precise spatial control over the synthesized anomalies. Furthermore, a Gated Self-Attention Module is designed to inject conditioning tokens into a frozen U-Net via gated attention layers. This carefully preserves pretrained priors while ensuring stable few-shot adaptation. Extensive evaluations on the MVTec AD and VisA datasets demonstrate that GroundingAnomaly generates high-quality anomalies and achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple downstream tasks, including anomaly detection, segmentation, and instance-level detection.

Yishen Liu, Hongcang Chen, Pengcheng Zhao +8

Beijing Institute of Technology · Beijing Jiaotong University · Li Auto +1

Synthetic Anomaly GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationIndustrial Anomaly DetectionConditional Image Generation
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Apr 8, 2026

Generative Phomosaic with Structure-Aligned and Personalized Diffusion

We present the first generative approach to photomosaic creation. Traditional photomosaic methods rely on a large number of tile images and color-based matching, which limits both diversity and structural consistency. Our generative photomosaic framework synthesizes tile images using diffusion-based generation conditioned on reference images. A low-frequency conditioned diffusion mechanism aligns global structure while preserving prompt-driven details. This generative formulation enables photomosaic composition that is both semantically expressive and structurally coherent, effectively overcoming the fundamental limitations of matching-based approaches. By leveraging few-shot personalized diffusion, our model is able to produce user-specific or stylistically consistent tiles without requiring an extensive collection of images.

Jaeyoung Chung, Hyunjin Son, Kyoung Mu Lee

Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

Diffusion-Based Image GenerationConditional Image Generation
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Apr 8, 2026

Data Warmup: Complexity-Aware Curricula for Efficient Diffusion Training

A key inefficiency in diffusion training occurs when a randomly initialized network, lacking visual priors, encounters gradients from the full complexity spectrum--most of which it lacks the capacity to resolve. We propose Data Warmup, a curriculum strategy that schedules training images from simple to complex without modifying the model or loss. Each image is scored offline by a semantic-aware complexity metric combining foreground dominance (how much of the image salient objects occupy) and foreground typicality (how closely the salient content matches learned visual prototypes). A temperature-controlled sampler then prioritizes low-complexity images early and anneals toward uniform sampling. On ImageNet 256x256 with SiT backbones (S/2 to XL/2), Data Warmup improves IS by up to 6.11 and FID by up to 3.41, reaching baseline quality tens of thousands of iterations earlier. Reversing the curriculum (exposing hard images first) degrades performance below the uniform baseline, confirming that the simple-to-complex ordering itself drives the gains. The method combines with orthogonal accelerators such as REPA and requires only ~10 minutes of one-time preprocessing with zero per-iteration overhead.

Jinhong Lin, Pan Wang, Zitong Zhan +2

University of Wisconsin–Madison · University of Pittsburgh · University at Buffalo, SUNY

Diffusion-Based Image GenerationCurriculum LearningDiffusion Model Acceleration
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Apr 8, 2026

ICG: Improving Cover Image Generation via MLLM-based Prompting and Personalized Preference Alignment

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content. Yet, personalized cover image generation remains underexplored, despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. We propose ICG, a novel framework that integrates MLLM-based prompting with personalized preference alignment to generate high-quality, contextually relevant covers. ICG extracts semantic features from item titles and reference images via meta tokens, refines them with user embeddings, and injects the resulting personalized context into the diffusion model. To address the lack of labeled supervision, we adopt a multi-reward learning strategy that combines public aesthetic and relevance rewards with a personalized preference model trained from user behavior. Unlike prior pipelines relying on handcrafted prompts and disjointed modules, ICG employs an adapter to bridge MLLMs and diffusion models for end-to-end training. Experiments demonstrate that ICG significantly improves image quality, semantic fidelity, and personalization, leading to stronger user appeal and offline recommendation accuracy in downstream tasks. As a plug-and-play adapter bridging MLLMs and diffusion models, ICG is compatible with common checkpoints and requires no ground-truth labels during optimization.

Zhipeng Bian, Jieming Zhu, Qijiong Liu +6

Huazhong University of Science and Technology · Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab · Hong Kong Polytechnic University +1

Image GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationT2I Diffusion ModelsPreference Alignment
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Apr 7, 2026

Cross-Resolution Diffusion Models via Network Pruning

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image synthesis performance, yet many UNet-based models are trained at certain fixed resolutions. Their quality tends to degrade when generating images at out-of-training resolutions. We trace this issue to resolution-dependent parameter behaviors, where weights that function well at the default resolution can become adverse when spatial scales shift, weakening semantic alignment and causing structural instability in the UNet architecture. Based on this analysis, this paper introduces CR-Diff, a novel method that improves the cross-resolution visual consistency by pruning some parameters of the diffusion model. Specifically, CR-Diff has two stages. It first performs block-wise pruning to selectively eliminate adverse weights. Then, a pruned output amplification is conducted to further purify the pruned predictions. Empirically, extensive experiments suggest that CR-Diff can improve perceptual fidelity and semantic coherence across various diffusion backbones and unseen resolutions, while largely preserving the performance at default resolutions. Additionally, CR-Diff supports prompt-specific refinement, enabling quality enhancement on demand.

Jiaxuan Ren, Junhan Zhu, Huan Wang

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China · Westlake University

Diffusion Model PruningImage GenerationDiffusion-Based Image GenerationDiffusion Models
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Apr 6, 2026

CAGE: Bridging the Accuracy-Aesthetics Gap in Educational Diagrams via Code-Anchored Generative Enhancement

Educational diagrams -- labeled illustrations of biological processes, chemical structures, physical systems, and mathematical concepts -- are essential cognitive tools in K-12 instruction. Yet no existing method can generate them both accurately and engagingly. Open-source diffusion models produce visually rich images but catastrophically garble text labels. Code-based generation via LLMs guarantees label correctness but yields visually flat outputs. Closed-source APIs partially bridge this gap but remain unreliable and prohibitively expensive at educational scale. We quantify this accuracy-aesthetics dilemma across all three paradigms on 400 K-12 diagram prompts, measuring both label fidelity and visual quality through complementary automated and human evaluation protocols. To resolve it, we propose CAGE (Code-Anchored Generative Enhancement): an LLM synthesizes executable code producing a structurally correct diagram, then a diffusion model conditioned on the programmatic output via ControlNet refines it into a visually polished graphic while preserving label fidelity. We also introduce EduDiagram-2K, a collection of 2,000 paired programmatic-stylized diagrams enabling this pipeline, and present proof-of-concept results and a research agenda for the multimedia community.

Dikshant Kukreja, Kshitij Sah, Karan Goyal +2

IIIT Delhi, India

T2I GenerationDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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Apr 3, 2026

Visual Prototype Conditioned Focal Region Generation for UAV-Based Object Detection

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based object detection is a critical but challenging task, when applied in dynamically changing scenarios with limited annotated training data. Layout-to-image generation approaches have proved effective in promoting detection accuracy by synthesizing labeled images based on diffusion models. However, they suffer from frequently producing artifacts, especially near layout boundaries of tiny objects, thus substantially limiting their performance. To address these issues, we propose UAVGen, a novel layout-to-image generation framework tailored for UAV-based object detection. Specifically, UAVGen designs a Visual Prototype Conditioned Diffusion Model (VPC-DM) that constructs representative instances for each class and integrates them into latent embeddings for high-fidelity object generation. Moreover, a Focal Region Enhanced Data Pipeline (FRE-DP) is introduced to emphasize object-concentrated foreground regions in synthesis, combined with a label refinement to correct missing, extra and misaligned generations. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, and consistently promotes accuracy when integrated with distinct detectors. The source code is available at https://github.com/Sirius-Li/UAVGen.

Wenhao Li, Zimeng Wu, Yu Wu +2

State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China · Hangzhou Innovation Institute, Beihang University, Hangzhou, China

Image GenerationData AugmentationAerial Object DetectionDiffusion-Based Image Generation
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