Context-Conditioned Inpainting

This work introduces quantum-inspired tensor-network circuits as trainable transforms for image inpainting. Among the proposed architectures, the diagonal quantum Fourier transform (QFT) relaxation is invertible with $O(N^2 \log N)$ computational cost for $N\times N$ images, inherently preserving minimum coherence throughout training via its circuit structure and eliminating the need for explicit coherence penalties. Unconstrained gradient-based phase optimization (Riemannian-optimization free) enables efficient learning from randomly sampled training data, allowing the learned transform to generalize to test images observed through fixed sampling masks. Numerical tests show that the learned models outperform fixed transforms and per-image optimization while matching the performance of much larger unitary architectures, yet with far fewer parameters.

Vision-based crack inspection depends on segmentation networks whose reliability depends on the quantity, diversity and label quality of their training data. Pixel-level annotations are costly, and crack images of specific structures are scarce. Generative augmentation can supply additional data, but existing methods address isolated steps. They reuse annotated masks, offer limited control over crack geometry, and adopt the conditioning mask as the label without checking it. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline that produces labelled crack data without manual annotation and assesses the reliability of these data and of the detectors trained on them. Procedurally sampled Bézier skeletons with guaranteed geometric properties are converted into crack masks by a generative adversarial network (GAN). A dual-ControlNet Stable Diffusion model renders the masks as crack images, either on text-described surfaces or on user-provided backgrounds. An ensemble of segmentation networks trained on real images combines its agreement with the inherited label and its internal disagreement into a pixel-wise label confidence. This confidence weights the training loss instead of removing samples with a threshold. The trained detectors are evaluated with image-space probability of detection (POD) and calibration analyses. On CRACK500 and CrackTree200, the pipeline improves five segmentation networks over conventional, diffusion-based and flow-matching-based augmentation, and on CRACK500 confidence weighting yields a higher accuracy than threshold filtering at every tested threshold. On CRACK500, the crack width that U-Net detects with 90% probability at 95% confidence decreases from 8.0 to 4.3 pixels, and the expected calibration error decreases from 14.2% to 9.6%.

Brain-MRI inpainting replaces a masked region of a scan with synthesized, anatomically plausible healthy tissue, so that analysis tools built for healthy brains can be applied to images they would otherwise reject. On the BraTS local-synthesis benchmark, which ranks submissions on the structural similarity index (SSIM), the peak signal-to-noise ratio, and the mean squared error (MSE) jointly, the strongest recent models are accurate, but several report blurry synthesized regions and attribute this to the mean-seeking behavior of the $\ell_1$ and MSE terms in their training losses. We address this in post-processing, forming a deep ensemble of the two co-first-place 2025 models and training a lightweight residual refiner on the ensemble's own outputs under an $\ell_1$ loss augmented with a structural-similarity term whose weight $λ$ we vary. At a moderate $λ$ the refiner improves SSIM over the ensemble, from $0.8767$ to $0.8780$ on a held-out reproduction of the official scorer and from $0.8555$ to $0.8572$ on the official validation leaderboard, with essentially no change in MSE. The gain is small but consistent, improving $62.6\%$ of the held-out cases with a signed-rank $p=2.2\times10^{-7}$, whereas over-weighting the structural term reverses it. Two ablations bound the effect. Adding any third model to the two-model ensemble degrades it, and classical unsharp masking fails to improve SSIM at any strength (best $0.8765$ against $0.8767$), so the gain reflects learned rather than indiscriminate sharpening. The result is a cheap, reproducible post-processing stage that improves an already strong ensemble without any large-scale retraining.

Medical image inpainting has the potential to improve automated brain MRI analysis by reconstructing healthy tissue within pathological regions. We introduce RARF, a task-agnostic region-aware rectified flow framework for masked data generation. We instantiate the framework for 3D brain MRI inpainting as our submission to the BraTS Inpainting Challenge 2026. RARF restricts the stochastic interpolation process to the inpainting region, while the observed voxels remain fixed and provide patient-specific anatomical context. A three-dimensional neural network receives the partially voided image, with Gaussian noise filling the missing region, together with the inpainting mask and the corresponding timestep. The model is trained using masked flow-matching and reconstruction-consistency objectives, combined with mask-aware preprocessing and data augmentation. During inference, the learned velocity field transports the initial noise toward a plausible reconstruction of the missing tissue, which is then combined with the unchanged observed anatomy. Experiments under the BraTS evaluation protocol show that the proposed approach produces competitive reconstructions while maintaining anatomical consistency. Source code is available at: https://github.com/TomasGuija/rarf.

Mirrors are common in real-world images, yet producing geometrically consistent reflections with generative models remains challenging. Unlike most objects, mirror appearance depends on scene geometry and viewpoint, making it hard to synthesize using learned appearance priors alone. We address this in the mirror inpainting setting, where the scene is fixed and only the mirror region is generated. Our key insight is that much mirror content is geometrically constrained by the visible scene and need not be hallucinated. We estimate scene geometry and project visible content into the mirror to recover reflection regions determined by geometry. A generative model then completes the mirror region via a two-mask diffusion strategy balancing geometric constraints with the model's learned priors, reducing projection artifacts and improving reflection consistency. The method is training-free and applicable to complex real-world scenes. We evaluate on MirrorBench-V2 (synthetic) and real images. Using standard and geometry-aware metrics, we show that explicitly using scene geometry improves consistency.

Neural fields (NFs) map continuous coordinates to signals such as color or density, but fast high-quality reconstruction from sparse observations remains difficult. Classical Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) regression gives closed-form fits, yet it is fundamentally linear and cannot accumulate reusable task priors. We develop three algorithms that address these gaps. NTK-KIP learns a distilled support set of coordinates (and optional labels) so that a finite NTK can inpaint large missing regions from little observed data, yielding a compact non-linear representation instead of a raw kernel solve. MetaQuill meta-learns a shared initialization for an INR so that new scenes can be adapted by updating only a small task-specific weight offset, which provides true feature learning and a reusable prior. Finally, MetaQuill-KIP fuses both ideas: it seeds the task with a KIP-style non-linear warm start, then refines only that small offset around the meta-learned initialization. MetaQuill-KIP achieves high-PSNR reconstructions and semantically plausible inpainting under very sparse observations, while requiring only lightweight per-instance adaptation, whereas diffusion-style baselines typically depend on large pretrained generative priors and costly per-image tuning. This shows that NTK-driven neural fields can be made both non-linear and meta-learnable, narrowing the gap between analytic kernels and practical few-shot reconstruction.

We show that a frozen generic text-to-image diffusion model can perform conditional inpainting across three evaluated natural-image domains with one fixed controller configuration, without inpainting-specific weight training, dataset-specific weight adaptation, or learned inpainting-specific conditioning channels. Step-PI augments known-region projection with boundary-interior latent feedback, persistent PI state, and a predefined four-field release schedule that modulates controller signals along the reverse trajectory. Developed only on Main35-disjoint CelebA-HQ pilots, the controller transfers unchanged to AFHQ and Places2. Across two field-identical comparisons on the same 3,500 cases, adding persistent state and replacing uniform release with the predefined schedule each improve all 15 dataset-metric cells; 95% bootstrap intervals exclude zero for all five metrics in both comparisons. In descriptive native-route comparisons, Step-PI leads LanPaint and PILOT (the closest evaluated training-free baselines using vanilla SD1.5) on all five equal-dataset macro metrics. Inpainting-trained systems retain the absolute metric leads but rely on substantial inpainting-specific offline optimization. Our method provides a complementary approach for repurposing a frozen generic text-to-image model for cross-domain inpainting through test-time latent control.

Graphic designers often blend visual concepts to communicate multiple ideas within a single image, leveraging positive and negative space to create balance, emphasis, and aesthetic appeal. While computational methods have begun to support automatic concept blending, they largely overlook the role of spatial composition in the design. To address this gap, we present an automatic pipeline that explicitly applies positive and negative space throughout the blending process. Our approach first identifies plausible regions for concept integration by combining semantic reasoning from vision-language models with geometric constraints derived from real-world examples. Conditioned on these regions, the system generates blended compositions using a hybrid pixel-vector pipeline: diffusion-based inpainting produces a fast, coarse initialization, which is then refined through vector-based optimization at the point level to ensure structural coherence and balanced semantic expression. A multimodal agent orchestrates this process as a planner and evaluator, enabling iterative improvement and interpretable control. Through an evaluation using both baseline comparisons and a user study, we demonstrate greater expressiveness, creativity, and concept recognizability by effectively leveraging positive and negative space. We further demonstrate the generalizability of our approach across diverse applications, including controllable image and infographic generation.

Proactive tamper localization embeds an imperceptible signal into an image prior to distribution, enabling pixel-level manipulation detection. Existing methods assume a spliced (SP) setting, where synthesized regions are composited onto the original background, leaving embedded signals intact. However, real-world diffusion-based inpainting operates in a fully regenerated (FR) setting, where the entire image undergoes denoising, disrupting background signals and rendering existing frameworks ineffective. We propose APT, a semi-fragile latent-space perturbation that embeds a dense, vector-wise localization signal. By aligning each spatial feature vector toward a fixed anchor direction, APT localizes tampering via the alignment disparity between synthesized foreground and anchor-aligned background features after inpainting. The proposed hard negative mining loss and noisy perturbation branch further enforce uniform alignment. Experiments on COCO demonstrate that APT achieves an FR IoU of 0.92, outperforming the strongest baseline (WAM, 0.84), while existing methods collapse to near-random performance (AUC 0.5), establishing APT as a practical forensic framework generalizable across tampering types unknown at test time.

Sketch-guided image inpainting provides intuitive structural control, yet real sketches often mix reliable global intent with locally crowded, displaced, incomplete, or deliberately unconventional strokes. Existing approaches typically either retain the input sketch as a fixed condition throughout denoising or refine it into a clean structure before RGB synthesis. The former assumes uniformly reliable strokes and can propagate local errors throughout generation; the latter must resolve ambiguous structure before emerging appearance and semantic context become available. We propose SketchSense, a framework that interprets imperfect sketch guidance by synchronously denoising interacting RGB and structure streams. Bidirectional Attention Fusion couples appearance generation with structural recovery, producing a refined structure that exposes the model's evolving sketch interpretation. A phrase-level objective aligns the semantic grounding of the two streams. Sketch-Aware Spatial Regulation further adapts sketch use to local generation states by modulating attention and the fusion process, while an optional signed prior injects preserve-versus-correct intent into feature representations and attention behavior. Experiments on natural and structurally complex imagery show substantial gains over existing methods in both restoration quality and structural fidelity.

Latent diffusion models have recently advanced video frame interpolation by synthesizing intermediate frames between input images. However, handling large temporal gaps and complex motion remains challenging, often resulting in motion blur, structural distortions, and temporal inconsistencies. Event cameras provide high-temporal-resolution motion cues that are well suited for bridging these gaps and improving interpolation quality. To exploit this advantage without training an event-assisted model from scratch, we propose an adapter-based framework that incorporates event-derived cues into a pre-trained image-to-video diffusion model with minimal architectural changes. Specifically, our method leverages Image Warped Events (IWEs) and bidirectional sparse optical flow to provide spatially and temporally aligned guidance during generation. By injecting these event-guided structural and motion cues into the diffusion process, our approach reduces interpolation artifacts and improves both reconstruction fidelity and temporal coherence. Experimental results on real and synthetic benchmarks show that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. The project page is at https://joseph-lin-tech.github.io/BridgeEventDiT-VFI/.

Face inpainting with diffusion models has recently achieved impressive visual quality, yet preserving identity fidelity under significant occlusion and conflicting text guidance remains a major challenge. To address this issue, we present Reference Semantic Inpainting for Face (ReSem-Face), a cascaded diffusion framework that introduces an explicit identity-conditioned semantic prior for multi-reference face inpainting. Our approach distills representative identity features from multiple references to reconstruct missing semantic regions, which then guide the diffusion process through a multi-stream conditioning architecture. This design provides strong semantic constraints when pixels are absent and stabilizes identity reconstruction while remaining compatible with prompt-driven edits. Experiments on CelebAHQ-IDI-5 and VGGFace2 demonstrate that ReSem-Face yields more reliable identity-preserving completion under severe semantic masks and improves text-controlled editing quality compared with representative baselines.

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection (CDFSOD) aims to transfer knowledge from data-rich upstream generic domains to downstream expert domains using scarce training data, where the significant domain gap and data scarcity make it an unsolved challenge. To address this problem, we revisit a natural yet underexplored approach in CDFSOD: data augmentation, by directly synthesizing data through diffusion models to supplement limited training samples. However, due to large domain gaps, we find that current diffusion methods cannot produce good results, leading to performance even lower than using the original images. To address these limitations, we divide the domain gaps into visual gaps and semantic gaps for separate analysis. For the visual gap, we find that the diffusion model cannot distinguish noise from useful information on expert domains, which can be mitigated by adding weakened noise. For the semantic gap, we find that the background semantics shows much smaller gaps between domains than foreground semantics, and we can bridge this gap by background inpainting. Based on the above analysis, we propose a method (Selective Inpainting with Tailored Noise, SITN) to dynamically take different strategies for downstream data synthesis based on their different gaps from the general domain, including a Generation Module for adding tailored noise and a Selection Module to dynamically select the inpainting regions. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets of CDFSOD and 4 datasets of cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CDFSS) validate that we can synthesize helpful data, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Our codes is available at https://github.com/zzzzj311-droid/Free-Lunch-SITN

Overlapped friction ridge patterns are a recurring problem in latent fingerprints recovered from crime scenes and in live-scan scenarios where residual fingerprints on the sensor may corrupt subsequent acquisitions. Existing approaches for separating overlapped fingerprints either rely on rule-based orientation field completion that requires strong domain knowledge or train end-to-end deep neural networks that do not account for domain-specific considerations. This work introduces a diffusion-based pipeline for separating component fingerprints from an image containing overlapping friction ridge patterns. We formulate the separation problem as an inpainting task and progressively learn a diffusion model for this task in multiple stages. Starting from a pre-trained Stable Diffusion model, we progressively incorporate a fingerprint prior, add the ability to complete partial fingerprints, and finally propose \textbf{overlap-aware inpainting} that reconstructs each component print using a diffusion inpainting model based on multi-channel conditioning. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that component fingerprints reconstructed using the proposed diffusion-based inpainting method can match with their mated counterparts with very high probability.

Longitudinal multiparametric MRI is central to follow-up imaging in oncology, yet real-world clinical data are characterised by missing sequences, heterogeneous acquisition protocols, and varying spatial resolutions across time points. We propose a patient-specific conditional implicit neural representation (INR) that models multimodal longitudinal MRI as a continuous function of world coordinates, time, and modality conditioning. The model is trained with stochastic modality dropout to handle incomplete data, and its continuous coordinate-space formulation enables both spatial and temporal interpolation without resampling to a fixed voxel grid. A self-consistency-based confidence estimator is derived from cross-modal reconstruction performance at inference time. We evaluate the framework on longitudinal MRI from paediatric brain tumour patients, demonstrating statistically significant improvements over linear interpolation for T1CE and FLAIR (p < 0.05), with mean MS-SSIM of 0.95 $\pm$ 0.02 for T1CE. Predicted confidence correlates strongly with true reconstruction quality (Pearson r up to 0.996), suggesting reliable deployment potential in heterogeneous clinical settings.

The ASNR-MICCAI BraTS Local Synthesis (Inpainting) task asks for the anatomically plausible completion of healthy brain tissue within a masked region of a T1-weighted MRI, providing a tumor-free anatomical reference for downstream analysis. As the task is scored by distortion metrics (SSIM, PSNR, MSE), we build a deterministic regression model and focus on giving it inductive biases tailored to inpainting. Our network follows the U-DiT principle of performing self-attention on a downsampled token grid: a volumetric encoder-decoder imports long-range context through a downsampled global self-attention block with three-dimensional rotary position embeddings, while convolutions and skip connections preserve high-frequency detail. Two ideas drive our results. First, we constrain the attention so that occluded ("void") tokens attend only to known-healthy tokens of the same volume, with a learned bias toward each query's contralateral homologue, forcing the completion to be inferred from observed anatomy rather than from other unknown regions. Second, we add a contralateral-symmetry input that supplies the mirrored healthy hemisphere as a patient-specific prior; since the brain is approximately bilaterally symmetric and lesions are typically unilateral, this prior improves the distortion metrics at matched structural similarity. On the official BraTS-2026 validation leaderboard our submission reaches a mean healthy-region SSIM of $0.864$, PSNR of $24.7$,dB and MSE of $4.6{\times}10^{-3}$ over $219$ cases. We further analyse the residual smoothness inherent to distortion-optimal regression and discuss its implications for anatomical realism.

Trajectory data collected in real-world settings is frequently incomplete due to sensor failure, communication loss, or occlusion. We address the task of \emph{trajectory inpainting}: reconstructing contiguous missing segments from observed context. We propose a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) with symmetric dilation that relaxes the standard causality constraint, allowing each time step to draw on both past and future observations, a property that is essential for inpainting, but absent from forecasting-oriented architectures. The model is trained with a composite loss that combines weighted mean squared error, boundary--continuity penalties, and a smoothness regularizer. Trained on a synthetic dataset of $1,000$ (train), $200$ (validation), and $300$ (test) two-dimensional trajectories with randomly placed 20% masked segments, the model achieves good R$^{2}$, MSE and MAE metrics.

In this paper, we present NEO, a unified framework providing language-guided NeRF editing for robotic manipulation. Our paper introduces (i) a language-guided object removal that combines neural field resampling with multiview-consistent progressive inpainting, (ii) a direct NeRF weight editing method utilizing knowledge distillation, composing original and edited NeRFs via a teacher-student model, enabling coherent modeling of future scene states before a robot executes an action, and (iii) the first benchmark (NEO-Dataset) for quantitatively evaluating NeRF scene editing methods suitable for robot manipulation. We show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in scene editing tasks, including object removal and pick-and-place robotic experiments, yielding visually coherent and geometrically consistent edits that reduce artifacts commonly introduced by prior methods.

Image inpainting aims to recover missing regions while preserving structural consistency. We propose a non-parametric method without network training based on data-guided stochastic dynamics. Starting from a masked image, the missing pixels are evolved through a reverse-time stochastic differential equation with a kernel-weighted correction estimated directly from a reference dataset. This empirical correction guides the reconstruction toward high-density regions of the data distribution without training a neural network or fitting a parametric density model. Experiments on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and MVTec show that the proposed method outperforms Mean Fill, Telea, and Navier-Stokes inpainting in PSNR, SSIM, and visual quality. On CelebA, it remains competitive and produces plausible completions for structure-sensitive occlusions. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of empirical reference statistics as a non-parametric prior for image inpainting.

In real-world machine learning applications, incomplete observations create a fundamental challenge. Researchers have come up with several ideas to address this crucial problem. However, current models still face challenges in balancing scalability and structural consistency. This study proposes a feature imputation method, called FILLER, that deliberately searches the two-dimensional latent space produced by a generative model and fills the missing values with appropriate entries. The generative model is trained on fully observed data to generate samples from the latent space, and FILLER uses this trained model to impute the values missing in the corrupted test samples. In this study, G-NeuroDAVIS serves the purpose of the generative model. This work also presents a mathematical proof on the convergence of the iterative search. Finally, FILLER has been evaluated on several image datasets under random and structured missingness patterns with varying levels of imputation complexities. In order to justify the efficacy of FILLER, it has been compared against existing state-of-the-art solution strategies in terms of RMSE, PSNR, and SSIM. In addition, Wilcoxon signed-rank test has been carried out to validate statistical significance. Moreover, downstream analyses (classification and clustering) have also established the quality of imputation in terms of standard metrics.

Image inpainting aims to reconstruct missing or corrupted regions of an image while preserving as much as possible, visual and semantic consistency. In medical imaging, this task is particularly important because artifacts, missing information, and pathological alterations can compromise diagnostic reliability and downstream clinical applications. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as state-of-the-art generative approaches for medical image inpainting due to their ability to generate anatomically consistent reconstructions. This survey presents a systematic review of diffusion-based methods for medical image inpainting, covering the main architectures, applications, datasets, and evaluation strategies reported across 60 studies. In addition, we propose a taxonomy for diffusion-based approaches. The analysis reveals a rapid growth of research interest in diffusion-based medical image inpainting, with denoising diffusion probabilistic models and latent diffusion models emerging as the dominant architectures. The reviewed studies mainly focus on artifact removal, data augmentation, pseudo-healthy tissue reconstruction, and anomaly detection, particularly in magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography imaging. Overall, diffusion models demonstrate strong performance in producing anatomically plausible reconstructions and aiding downstream clinical tasks. However, the review also highlights important challenges, including the lack of standardized benchmarks, limited dataset diversity, and restricted validation procedures across diverse clinical applications and imaging scenarios.

Recent advances in 3D scene editing have leveraged iterative diffusion models to update input views. However, this process is computationally expensive and struggles to produce sharp details. Meanwhile, ``hallucination drift'' frequently introduces multi-view inconsistencies, leading to structural artifacts when rendering novel viewpoints. To address this problem, we present 3D-GIMP (3D Gaussian Inpainting Meets Patch Matching), a novel hybrid paradigm designed for high-fidelity object removal in 3D Gaussian Splatting. Instead of diffusing every view, 3D-GIMP performs a single generative inpainting on a key reference view, which serves as an appearance prior. We then introduce a 3D-aware PatchMatch algorithm to propagate these reference textures across all remaining views via correspondence matching, effectively bypassing the stochastic nature of frame-by-frame diffusion. By prioritizing reconstructive consistency over iterative generation, 3D-GIMP maintains high-frequency details across arbitrary resolutions while ensuring a mathematically consistent 3D reconstruction. Our experiments demonstrate that 3D-GIMP not only achieves competitive inpainting quality as previous methods using diffusion in multiple views, but also outperforms these methods in rendering speed and view consistency.

In image and video technologies, data augmentation is widely used to improve the generalization of deep visual models, and mixup-based strategies that interpolate between samples have become the dominant approach. However, computing informative mixing regions adds substantial overhead, and blending content across different images frequently disrupts the semantic integrity of the resulting sample. We propose \our{}, a data augmentation method that constructs challenging yet label-consistent training samples entirely within a single visual sample. \our{} first extracts multi-scale salient patches from the sample using a lightweight saliency detector, refines each patch with an instruction-guided generative model, and blends the edited patch back into the non-salient regions of the same sample; because the generative edits are computed once and cached offline, this step adds negligible training cost. To further diversify the learned representation, \our{} injects self-similar fractal structure into the same salient regions at an adaptive ratio, so each training sample carries both fractal and non-fractal structure. We derive a second-order approximation of the resulting vicinal risk, showing that the method simultaneously enforces invariance to the generative edit and suppresses curvature along the perturbed salient directions, and we verify both predictions empirically. We evaluate on small to large backbones for instance Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Vision-Language Foundational Models (VLMs) across seven benchmarks covering coarse- and fine-grained classification, robustness to corruption and occlusion, calibration, and transfer and self-supervised learning, InstructMixup outperforms nine competing augmentation methods, surpassing the strongest baseline across all benchmarks.

Image-based indoor scene relighting remains challenging due to the complex interplay between cluttered geometry and local illumination, requiring precise modeling of light position, color, and intensity. Existing data-driven methods implicitly learn this relationship via paired multi-illumination datasets. Nevertheless, this data is costly and fails to scale, which is essential for accurate light-source-level control. Conversely, inverse-rendering methods reduce the data dependency by incorporating physical priors; however, they lack the robustness of intrinsic estimation in challenging conditions. In this paper, we present FreeLit, a paired-free framework for controllable indoor relighting that explicitly manipulates light-source location, color, and intensity. Instead of relying on paired supervision, we construct a physics-guided illumination prior from intrinsic scene properties, generating a structured lightmap along with a pseudo-relit image to guide diffusion-based synthesis. To address instability in intrinsic estimation, especially in low-light scenes, we introduce a relighting-guided intrinsic stabilization strategy that enforces illumination-invariant reflectance through structure-aware distillation and consistency constraints. Furthermore, we propose controllability-oriented evaluation metrics to quantify alignment with user-specified illumination color and intensity. Experimental results demonstrate that FreeLit achieves stable, physically consistent, and controllable relighting, with improved robustness in low-light indoor scenes, without requiring paired supervision.

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.

Color transfer aims to align the color distribution of a source image with that of a reference image while preserving structural and semantic consistency. However, existing methods often suffer from inaccurate global mapping, semantic misalignment, and visual artifacts. To address these issues, we propose ColorFM, an optimization-to-learning framework. ColorFM connects online optimization to offline inference by reformulating color transfer as the transport of pixel distributions along velocity fields via Flow Matching. Specifically, we introduce ColorFM-O, an instance-specific optimization scheme that fits the velocity field through hierarchical color coupling guided by semantic priors. By numerically integrating the induced flow trajectories, ColorFM-O produces precise and semantically consistent color transfer results, while generating high-quality paired data as pseudo-supervision. Building upon this, we design ColorFM-L, an efficient feed-forward model trained on the generated pairs. Through implicit state modeling, ColorFM-L extracts deep semantic features to predict flow parameters for bidirectional linearized transport, ensuring accurate color transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ColorFM-L outperforms state-of-the-art methods in visual quality, structural fidelity, and semantic consistency, successfully combining the accuracy of optimization with the speed of feed-forward inference.

Image outpainting extends an image beyond its original borders, requiring seamless style integration and globally coherent scene completion. Building on the success of diffusion models, recent methods have achieved substantial improvements in visual quality. In practice, however, high-resolution outpainting is commonly performed via progressive expansion around a fixed source image, particularly in artwork scenarios. Despite this progress, existing approaches still suffer from three key limitations: (i) the absence of a reliable global planning mechanism, which leads to structural instability and error accumulation at high resolutions; (ii) limited spatial controllability beyond text prompts, making it difficult to place objects at user-specified locations; and (iii) high inference latency caused by inherently sequential patch generation. To address these issues, we propose a global blueprint-guided two-stage diffusion framework for layout-controllable high-resolution outpainting with efficient parallel synthesis. In Stage 1, we generate a low-resolution global blueprint using a layout adapter that injects bounding-box conditions into a Stable Diffusion inpainting backbone, producing a globally consistent structural plan while extracting global guidance features. In Stage 2, we synthesize high-resolution local patches in parallel by injecting the blueprint-derived global guidance and initializing each patch from the blueprint using the low-frequency preservation property of forward diffusion. This design eliminates sequential dependency while maintaining global coherence. Extensive experiments on large-scale artwork datasets demonstrate improved visual fidelity, stronger semantic consistency, and substantially reduced inference time compared to prior baselines, while uniquely supporting explicit layout control for artwork outpainting.

Monocular-to-stereo conversion synthesizes stereoscopic content from 2D videos for immersive 3D experiences. In modern Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) approaches, stereo inpainting of disocclusions is the critical bottleneck. Training-based methods achieve superior quality but rely on scarce stereo pairs or synthetic data with domain gaps. We address this through the first self-supervised framework learning from monocular videos via cycle consistency. Our key contribution is the Geometric Reciprocity Theorem (GRT): under the nearest-neighbor DIBR formulation, the disocclusion mask when synthesizing a target view equals the mask of pixels lost when warping back from target to source, enabling analytical computation of test-time disocclusion masks directly from monocular images. This yields train-test consistency for the stated warping formulation, supporting self-supervised learning from unlimited monocular videos and substantial improvements over training-free and supervised state-of-the-art methods. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/grt/

Deep learning models for medical diagnosis frequently exhibit substantial performance disparities across sensitive subgroups (e.g., race, sex), even when average accuracy is high. While generative data augmentation offers a route to mitigate this, existing strategies are suboptimal; they typically address only one or two dependency channels between sensitive attributes and image features. We formalize the medical image formation process via a structural causal model, revealing that sensitive attributes actually influence image content through four distinct pathways-a structural complexity neglected by prior works. Based on this insight, we introduce CIPHER (Causal Intervention Pathways for Healthcare Equity and Robustness), a framework designed to systematically intervene on all four causal paths. To achieve this, CIPHER utilizes a diffusion backbone equipped with classifier-free guidance and null-text inversion. This technical design enables the faithful reconstruction of patient-specific anatomy while allowing for the precise, editable synthesis of counterfactuals required to break sensitive dependency chains. We tested CIPHER using chest X-ray and dermoscopy benchmarks across both standard and shifted data distributions. By employing a multi-pathway intervention strategy, our model reduced worst-group disparities by an average of 35.8% compared to disease-conditioned synthesis baselines, while also improving total diagnostic accuracy

Semantic segmentation models struggle with data sparsity and rare or visually diverse regions, e.g., dense regions or small objects in aerial or autonomous mobility data. While synthetic augmentation is an appealing solution, directly generating new labeled data risks misalignment of labels and generated pixels. Existing solutions to this problem often rely on external models, or employ coarse heuristics such as indiscriminately augmenting all foreground objects or entire backgrounds, which wastes capacity on uninformative pixels. To address this, we propose an uncertainty-guided synthetic context augmentation strategy that strictly preserves label validity and efficiently maximizes pixel informativeness per synthetic sample - no external guardrails required. Using a baseline segmenter's predictive entropy, we identify uncertain semantic regions and inpaint only the complementary visual context. When fine-tuning the segmenter on this synthetic data, we compute the loss only over the original pixels, excluding inpainted regions. This focuses learning on the unmodified, uncertain regions while presenting them in novel contexts. We demonstrate substantial mIoU gains on Cityscapes, UAVID, and BDD100K with the largest gains on rare and difficult classes such as buses, trains, or (from the aerial perspective) cars. Our results demonstrate that uncertainty-guided context augmentation is a highly effective lever to improve segmentation performance on complex datasets, with code provided at https://github.com/XITASO/Preserve-the-Hard-Regenerate-the-Rest.

Makeup transfer applies a reference cosmetic style to a source face while preserving its identity and geometry. However, this task is severely hindered by the lack of real paired training data. Current methods rely on either weak priors or synthetic pseudo-targets from large-scale editing models. These paradigms provide suboptimal guidance, often leading to degraded fine-grained details, synthetic artifacts, and identity drift. To this end, we propose Anchoring on Reality Makeup Transfer (ART), a two-stage framework with a reality-anchored refinement cycle. In Stage I, the model is initialized with pseudo-targets to establish basic semantic alignment and global makeup placement. Crucially, Stage II shifts supervision from pseudo-targets to the real reference, reconstructing it from its bare-skin counterpart through a differentiable cycle that penalizes any omitted detail and overrides synthetic artifacts. Furthermore, we introduce MakeupFaces2K (MF2K), the first 2K-resolution in-the-wild makeup portrait dataset comprising 8,573 images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior makeup fidelity, strong background stability, and robust identity preservation, especially for complex makeup styles.

Motions of objects and scenes carry essential intelligence in video understanding, offering rich cues for interpreting dynamic settings and interactions. Due to the cost and scarcity of high-quality annotation or ground truth of pixel-wise optical flow, however, motion estimation models are typically trained in synthetic domains while deployed in real-world domains. Addressing synthetic-to-real domain generalization challenges has been crucial for developing practical solutions in diverse open-world use cases. This paper introduces SciFlow, a simple yet effective, network-agnostic, training-based approach that leverages self-supervised learning to generalize motion estimation across synthetic and open-world domains. Specifically, SciFlow imposes semantic interference from open-world images onto synthetic images during training, blending indomain features with cross-domain interference, which enables the network to adapt to the real-world domains. Additionally, SciFlow utilizes geometric consistency to ensure validity of the self-supervision. Our experiment results show that SciFlow not only significantly enhances model robustness amidst domain variations, but also remarkably enables synthetic-to-real domain generalization without requiring any ground truth in the open world.

3D scene inpainting is essential for reconstructing areas corrupted by occlusions or limited viewpoints. While recent methods leverage Gaussian Splatting (GS) for efficient 3D editing, they often depend on precise multi-view segmentation masks and are inherently constrained to object removal tasks. We propose CoIn, a novel framework that bridges 2D inpainting models and 3DGS through a multi-stage consistency pipeline. Our approach first generates initial inpainted images using a diffusion model, enabling the use of arbitrary-shaped masks and diverse tasks like object insertion. We then introduce Reference Adaptive GS with Feature Attention to reconstruct a coarse 3D scene by adaptively weighing towards a reference view (2D -> 3D). This 3D representation provides geometric guidance to the diffusion process via GS-based Reference Feature Warping, ensuring multi-view consistency (3D -> 2D). Finally, a Texture-Enhancing Discriminator refines the 3D scene to achieve high photometric realism (2D -> 3D). Experiments show that CoIn, effectively leveraging bidirectional information flow, achieves state-of-the-art performance and effectively handles both object removal and object insertion with flexible mask input.

Although deep Face Swapping (FS) models may benefit the entertainment industry, they pose severe threats to privacy and security. Existing protections, including deepfake detection and adversarial perturbation, are either passive responses or ineffective to unseen subject-agnostic FS models. In this paper, we propose a transferable attack against subject-agnostic FS models named Additive Identity attack based on a Relighting function (AIR). AIR leverages reillumination and additive perturbations to mislead the identity extraction modules in subject-agnostic FS models. By using these two types of perturbations simultaneously, the attack space is extended such that stronger but more visually natural adversarial examples can be identified. To further enhance the visual quality while preserving the effectiveness of the attack, an adaptive translation-invariant operation and an illumination control scheme are designed for AIR. Unlike other methods, AIR does not require a surrogate FS model to achieve high transferability. In addition, a mathematical proof is given for the extension of the attack space. Extensive experiments using 1000 image pairs across various state-of-the-art subject-agnostic FS models, including GAN and diffusion-based FS models, show that AIR surpasses all existing attacks in terms of both attack success rate and image quality.

We propose NullFlow, a principled framework for one-step generative image reconstruction. Our key idea is to confine the generative flow to a measurement-consistent subspace. Because the flow never leaves this subspace, NullFlow needs no separate data-fidelity corrections, unlike existing solvers. NullFlow samples in a single network evaluation by learning the flow's average velocity, avoiding the step-by-step integration of traditional flow matching methods. We prove that the average velocity of this constrained flow yields a training objective whose global minimizer is a one-step posterior sampler. We show on image inpainting that NullFlow matches state-of-the-art diffusion solvers while cutting inference from hundreds of network evaluations to one.

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$λ$ Mix Interaction ($LλMI$) block. Comprising Local-$λ$ and Interactive-$λ$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

We present a novel framework for realistic and controllable 3D face re-aging which produces highly detailed, identity-preserving results. Existing 3D editing methods, while effective for coarse semantic changes, are not well suited for re-aging, as even small inconsistencies across re-aged 2D views can lead to over-smoothing of subtle but perceptually important age-related details. To address this challenge, we first introduce a 2D diffusion-based re-aging model, DiffReaging, trained on synthetically generated image pairs. We further propose a center-out editing propagation strategy that leverages this re-aging model to reconstruct multi-view-consistent re-aged images. Specifically, starting from a re-aged frontal pivot view, we reconstruct the remaining views through warping and our proposed Masked-DiffReaging process. By injecting existing content at every step of the diffusion process, Masked-DiffReaging ensures that the reconstructed regions remain coherent with existing pixels. The resulting consistent set of re-aged views supervises the optimization of the re-aged 3D representation. Our method outperforms existing 3D editing techniques both visually and quantitatively, enabling smooth, fine-grained control over age transformations in 3D face models.

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.

To showcase products, merchants often incur substantial costs creating high-quality display images. Foreground Conditioned Outpainting (FCO) meets this demand, allowing users to create desired backgrounds for foreground instances at a low cost by adjusting the text prompt. However, existing text-driven FCO methods exhibit critical flaws in their outputs, most notably the presence of artifacts, which refer to regions in the synthesized background that share the same semantics as the foreground instance. Such artifacts diminish the object's prominence and degrade image quality. We attribute the issue to the misalignment between the given instance and text-derived concept embeddings. To address this, we propose the Customized Concept Embedding Diffusion (CCE-Diffusion) framework. Its core is a CCE-Module to customize concept embeddings, bridging the gap between generic noun semantics and a specific visual instance. An Instance-Aware Loss guides the module's optimization, while a Semantic-Preserving Prompt Template prevents customized embeddings from distorting other words in the prompt. Both qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that CCE-Diffusion significantly reduces artifacts in the outputs. As a plug-and-play component, the CCE-Module can integrate with various FCO methods, enhancing their performance.

We study preference alignment for image inpainting. Rather than proposing yet another method, we revisit the problem from first principles and reassess its core challenges. We adopt the widely used direct preference optimization framework and construct preference training data with publicly available reward models. Our empirical study spans nine reward models, two benchmarks, and two baseline inpainting models that differ in architecture and generative mechanism. Our main findings are: (1) Most reward models provide valid signals for preference data construction, although some are unreliable as evaluators. (2) Across models and benchmarks, preference data exhibits consistent trends under both candidate and sample scaling. (3) Reward models display pronounced biases--particularly in brightness, composition, and color scheme--that make them prone to inducing reward hacking. (4) A simple ensemble of reward models mitigates such biases and yields robust, generalizable performance. {\color{rebuttal_blue}(5) Preference alignment is transferable to the object removal task, where the goal shifts from open-ended creative generation to coherent background completion. (6) Further analysis reveals that a calibrated ensemble method further mitigates hacking and improves robustness.} Without modifying model architectures or introducing additional datasets, our models substantially outperform prior state-of-the-art models on standard metrics, large vision-language model evaluations, and human assessments. Our code is available at: https://github.com/shenytzzz/Follow-Your-Preference.

Diffusion-based inverse problem solvers can produce realistic reconstructions, but realism alone does not ensure that the recovered details are supported by the measurement. We study this failure as measurement-conditioned hallucination: visually meaningful content that is either implausible or inconsistent with the measured instance. Our analysis separates Bayes-rule-based diffusion inverse solvers into a prior update and a measurement-conditioning step, showing that hallucinated content can enter through the prior-side proposal before the measurement correction is applied. Motivated by this view, we propose Robust Prior Update (RPU), a solver-level module that probes the local stability of the diffusion prior update, re-anchors the resulting displacement at the current iterate, and leaves the measurement update unchanged. We instantiate RPU in DPS and evaluate it on FFHQ and ImageNet inverse problems using automatic metrics and human faithfulness studies. On FFHQ, RPU improves PSNR and LPIPS over DPS across box inpainting, Gaussian deblurring, and motion deblurring. In human judgments, RPU receives 91.9% of blind non-tie majority preferences and 91.1% of ground-truth-assisted non-tie preferences on FFHQ box inpainting, while the ImageNet Gaussian reader study is tie-heavy but favors RPU among non-tie cases. These results support a targeted claim: robustifying the prior update can improve instance faithfulness in diffusion inverse solvers, especially when the prior shapes weakly constrained content.

We present PAI-Studio, a new reference-conditioned video synthesis task that addresses a long-standing challenge in cinematic background replacement: generating dynamic backgrounds aligned with foreground motion while preserving foreground identity, matching reference scene appearance, and achieving globally consistent illumination with realistic foreground relighting. Existing open-source systems and commercial APIs cannot simultaneously ensure motion-consistent background generation, high-fidelity foreground relighting and foreground identity preservation, often resulting in static backgrounds, inconsistent boundaries, and noticeable compositing artifacts. To bridge this gap, we build upon a Diffusion Transformer video backbone and reformulate the problem as an in-context conditional generation task. Through bidirectional attention, our model jointly captures foreground dynamics and background reference information within a unified architecture. We further construct a 30K-scale dataset sourced from high-quality films and online videos to support this task. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing open-source and commercial API solutions.

The tasks of object removal and inpainting 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes face challenges such as 3D consistency across camera views. In comparing 2D inpainters and their suitability for the 3D domain, we find that reconstruction-based inpainters outperform generative diffusion models in 3D consistency. Integrating these 2D inpainters into different single-step methods for creating and finetuning 3DGS scenes, our results indicate that initializing the scene from scratch produces higher quality results than finetuning the existing scene. Using a state-of-the-art generative 2D inpainter, we create a straightforward baseline to underline the importance of object removal before inpainting in the 3D setting. Since 360° datasets rarely include real-world ground truths, and challenging occlusion scenarios are equally sparse, we introduce a novel multi-object scene with recorded ground truth data and many views with object occlusions.

Testing object detectors in safety-critical domains requires semantically meaningful probes beyond pixel-level corruptions. We present SemProbe, a tool for semantic robustness probing: users upload deployment images, create masks manually or automatically, select operational design domain-derived factors (or custom prompts), and run diffusion-based controlled inpainting. The system supports batch jobs, parallel seed/workflow variations, and configurable generation parameters. After each output, model inference runs automatically and displays annotated before/after comparisons with performance deltas. All probes are logged as structured artifacts, enabling traceable robustness evidence aligned with safety evaluation workflows. We demonstrate \textsc{SemProbe} on hand detection for dimension saws, targeting factors from insurance-oriented test criteria.

We present an image-conditioned point cloud completion approach that treats images as the primary geometric source rather than a secondary guide. To this end, we introduce an Image-to-Point (I2P) module that can reconstruct complete point clouds directly from a single RGB image, with no need for 3D inputs. Additionally, we introduce a transformer-based Point-to-Point (P2P) refinement module that uses self- and cross-attention between point tokens and image features to iteratively refine the coarse I2P output. The I2P module enables the image encoder to learn rich geometric representations, while the P2P module progressively recovers fine-grained details. Unlike existing multimodal methods that rely on auxiliary losses or fusion modules, our explicit I2P task provides a strong, geometry-aware prior based on images alone. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet-ViPC demonstrate state-of-the-art completion performance with a 12.3% relative Chamfer Distance improvement over prior methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/AzharSindhi/I2PRef.git

Mask-free video object insertion has emerged as a challenging task, requiring harmonious integration of reference objects into source videos. However, existing methods struggle when references exhibit severe stylistic domain gaps with the source scene. To overcome this, we propose \textit{\textbf{Smart-Insertion-V}}, an end-to-end \textbf{Dual-Stream} framework that concurrently conducts video insertion and image style transfer. Within this framework, the image stream synchronously guides the video generation process, while a \textbf{Closed-loop Feedback} mechanism is further incorporated to ensure robust insertion. Inevitably, integrating these diverse conditioning signals results in feature entanglement and style leakage. To tackle this issue, we design \textbf{Dual-World-View RoPE} to distinguish different signals via spatial-temporal offsets without incurring heavy training overhead. Furthermore, to facilitate spatial grounding and stylistic adaptation, we introduce a \textbf{Decoupled Guidance Module} that leverages a Vision-Language Model for semantic reasoning while preserving original temporal guidance with native text encoder. To bridge data gap for harmonious reference insertion task, we propose a data curation pipeline and will release an \textbf{open-source dataset}. Experiments demonstrate that our method can insert objects into plausible positions while achieving the most harmonious results.

Advanced image editing software enables easy creation of highly convincing image manipulations, which has been made even more accessible in recent years due to advances in generative AI. Manipulated images, while often harmless, could spread misinformation, create false narratives, and influence people's opinions on important issues. Despite this growing threat, there is limited research on detecting advanced manipulations across different visual domains. Thus, we introduce Analysis Under Domain-shifts, qualIty, Type, and Size (AUDITS), a comprehensive benchmark designed for studying axes of analysis in image manipulation detection. AUDITS comprises over 530K images from two distinct sources (user and news photos). We curate our dataset to support analysis across multiple axes using recent diffusion-based inpaintings, spanning a diverse range of manipulation types and sizes. We conduct experiments under different types of domain shift to evaluate robustness of existing image manipulation detection methods. Our goal is to drive further research in this area by offering new insights that would help develop more reliable and generalizable image manipulation detection methods.

We present PIXLRelight, a feed-forward approach for physically controllable single-image relighting. Existing methods either provide limited lighting control (e.g. through text or environment maps), accumulate errors when chaining inverse and forward rendering, or require costly per-image optimization. Our key idea is to bridge physically based rendering (PBR) and learned image synthesis through a shared intrinsic conditioning that can be obtained from either real photographs or PBR renders. At training time, paired multi-illumination photographs are decomposed into albedo, diffuse shading, and non-diffuse residuals, which condition the model. At inference time, the same conditioning is computed from a path-traced render of a coarse 3D reconstruction of the input under user-specified PBR lights. A transformer-based neural renderer then applies the target illumination to the source photograph, preserving fine image detail through a per-pixel affine modulation. PIXLRelight enables arbitrary PBR-style lighting control, achieves state-of-the-art relighting quality, and runs in under a tenth of a second per image. Code and models are available at https://mlfarinha.github.io/pixl-relight/.

Video outpainting generates plausible visual content beyond the original spatial extent of a video, playing a key role in adapting videos to diverse display formats. To support such use cases, it must enable large spatial extrapolation over long sequences. However, most existing methods address only one of these challenges or lack explicit mechanisms for ensuring global spatio-temporal consistency, leading to notable limitations. In this paper, we propose HL-OutPaint, a high-resolution video outpainting framework for long sequences. Our approach follows a coarse-to-fine strategy with a two-stage pipeline. We first construct Global Coarse Guidance (GCG), a low-resolution representation that captures global structure and dominant motion across the video. Unlike naive downsampling, GCG is built via a novel global-local frame swapping mechanism that couples sparse global keyframes with local temporal windows and exchanges information during sampling. This enables GCG to encode both long-term structural consistency and short-term temporal dynamics in a unified representation. Guided by this representation, HL-OutPaint then performs high-resolution outpainting to generate spatially detailed and temporally consistent content. By separating global structure modeling from fine-grained synthesis, our framework achieves stable, coherent generation for large spatial expansion and long video sequences. Extensive experiments show that HL-OutPaint outperforms existing methods in challenging scenarios involving wide spatial extrapolation and long video sequences.

We present StyleText, a large-scale dataset and benchmark for localized scene-text inpainting with style preservation. StyleText contains 28,518 image-mask-prompt triplets grouped into 9,932 scene families, enabling controlled evaluation of text legibility and visual consistency under shared scene context. We construct the dataset with an automated pipeline that combines LLM prompt templating, Flux-based source generation with key-value (KV) cache injection, OCR-based semantic filtering, polygon mask extraction, and mask-conditioned FluxFill augmentation. We define a reproducible evaluation protocol using normalized OCR metrics (word accuracy and character error rate) and CLIP image-image similarity with explicit preprocessing. A FluxFill+LoRA baseline trained on StyleText improves OCR accuracy substantially over initialization while maintaining scene style consistency, establishing a strong reference point for future comparisons.

Face inpainting techniques recover missing or occluded facial regions in a visually realistic manner, but preserving the identity in the final output remains a fundamental challenge. Identity consistency is crucial for downstream applications such as face recognition, digital forensics, and human-computer interaction, where even subtle identity distortions can significantly degrade performance or trust. Although diffusion-based generative models have recently achieved remarkable progress in image inpainting, they often struggle to faithfully retain individual-specific facial characteristics. On the other hand, existing identity-aware methods typically rely on costly fine-tuning, auxiliary supervision, or exhibit limited robustness to diverse occlusions, poses, and facial variations. To address these limitations, we propose ID-ControlNet, an identity-preserving face inpainting framework built upon latent diffusion models. Based on ControlNet architecture, our approach conditions the diffusion process on facial identity embeddings extracted from a pretrained face recognition network. This design enables reconstruction of occluded facial regions while maintaining global facial coherence and identity fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce an identity consistency and triplet loss training strategy that explicitly enforces alignment between the generated face and the target identity representation. Extensive experiments on CelebA-HQ, FFHQ, and on a new E-Mask dataset demonstrate that ID-ControlNet significantly improves identity preservation over standard diffusion-based inpainting methods, achieving performance comparable to SOTA identity-aware approaches.

Trajectory-controlled human motion generation aims to synthesize realistic human motions conditioned on both textual descriptions and spatial trajectories. However, existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: first, the conflict between text and trajectory conditions disrupts the denoising process, resulting in compromised motion quality or inaccurate trajectory following; second, the use of redundant motion representations introduces inconsistencies between motion components, leading to instability during trajectory control. To address these challenges, we propose CMC, a decoupled framework that effectively coordinates text and trajectory conditions through a divide-and-conquer strategy. CMC follows a divide-and-conquer paradigm, comprising two cascaded stages: Trajectory Control and Motion Completion. In the first stage, a diffusion model generates a simplified representation of the controlled joints under trajectory guidance, based on the given trajectories, ensuring accurate and stable trajectory following. In the second stage, a text-conditioned diffusion inpainting model generates full-body motions using the simplified representation from the first stage as partial observations. To mitigate overfitting caused by limited inpainting training data, we further introduce the Selective Inpainting Mechanism (SIM), which alternates between text-to-motion generation and motion inpainting tasks during training. Experiments on HumanML3D and KIT datasets demonstrate that CMC achieves state-of-the-art performance in control accuracy and motion quality, demonstrating its effectiveness in coordinating multimodal conditions and representations.

We study image inpainting with generative diffusion models. Existing methods typically either train dedicated task-specific models, or adapt a pretrained diffusion model separately for each masked image at deployment. We introduce a middle-ground model, termed Amortized Inpainting with Diffusion (AID), which keeps a pretrained diffusion backbone fixed, trains a small reusable guidance module offline, and then reuses it across masked images without per-instance optimization. We formulate it as a deterministic guidance problem with a supervised terminal objective. To make this problem learnable in high dimensions, we derive an auxiliary Gaussian formulation and prove that solving this randomized problem recovers the optimal deterministic guidance field. This bridge yields a principled continuous-time actor--critic algorithm for learning the guidance module in a fully data-driven manner. Empirically, on AFHQv2 and FFHQ under the pixel EDM pipeline and on ImageNet under the latent EDM2 pipeline, AID consistently improves the quality--speed trade-off over strong fixed-backbone and amortized inpainting baselines across multiple mask types, while adding less than one percent trainable overhead.

With the recent surge of generative models, diffusion-based approaches have become mainstream for view synthesis tasks, either in an explicit depth-warp-inpaint or in an implicit end-to-end manner. Despite their success, both paradigms often suffer from noticeable quality degradation, e.g., blurred details and distorted structures, caused by pixel-to-latent compression and diffusion hallucination. In this paper, we investigate diffusion degradation from three key dimensions (i.e., spatial, temporal, and backbone-related) and propose UniFixer, a universal reference-guided framework that fixes diverse degradation artifacts via a coarse-to-fine strategy. Specifically, a reference pre-alignment module is first designed to perform coarse alignment between the reference view and the degraded novel view. A global structure anchoring mechanism then rectifies geometric distortions to ensure structural fidelity, followed by a local detail injection module that recovers fine-grained texture details for high-quality view synthesis. Our UniFixer serves as a plug-and-play refiner that achieves zero-shot fixing across different types of diffusion degradation, and extensive experiments verify our state-of-the-art performance on novel view synthesis and stereo conversion.

Text-guided inpainting has made image forgery increasingly realistic, challenging both SID and IFL. However, existing methods often struggle to point out suspicious signals across domains. To address this problem, we propose EDGER, a patch-based, dual-branch framework that localizes manipulated regions in arbitrary resolution images without sacrificing native resolution. The first branch, Edge-Guided Segmentation, introduces a Frequency-based Edge Detector to emphasize high-frequency inconsistencies at manipulation boundaries, and fine-tunes a SegFormer to fuse RGB and edge features for pixel-level masks. Since edge evidence is most informative only when patches contain both authentic and manipulated pixels, we complement Edge-Guided Segmentation with a Synthetic Heatmapping branch, a classification-based localizer that fine-tunes a CLIP-ViT image encoder with LoRA to flag fully synthetic patches. Together, Synthetic Heatmapping provides coarse, patch-level synthetic priors, while Edge-Guided Segmentation sharpens boundaries within partially manipulated patches, yielding comprehensive localization. Evaluated in the MediaEval 2025, SynthIM challenge, Manipulated Region Localization Task's setting, our approach scales to multi-megapixel imagery and exhibits strong cross-domain generalization. Extensive ablations highlight the complementary roles of frequency-based edge cues and patch-level synthetic priors in driving accurate, resolution-agnostic localization.

Generative tabular augmentation is appealing in data-scarce domains, yet the prevailing focus on distributional fidelity does not reliably translate into better downstream models. We formalize a fidelity-utility gap: common generative objectives prioritize distributional plausibility, whereas augmentation succeeds only when injected samples reduce the current learner's held-out evaluation loss. This gap motivates learning not just how to generate, but what to generate and when to inject as training evolves. We propose TAP (Tabular Augmentation Policy), which couples diffusion inpainting with a lightweight, learner-conditioned policy to steer generation toward high-utility regions and controls safe injection via explicit gating and conservative windowed commitment. Under severe data scarcity, TAP consistently outperforms strong generative baselines on seven real-world datasets, improving classification accuracy by up to 15.6 percentage points and reducing regression RMSE by up to 32%.

Neural surrogate models for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) are typically trained as forward operators that map explicit problem specifications, such as geometry and boundary conditions, to solution fields. This ties the model to the conditioning variables seen during training and limits reuse under boundary-condition shifts or local geometry changes. We propose to reformulate steady CFD inference as an inpainting problem: instead of training on explicit boundary conditions, we learn a self-supervised prior over velocity fields and impose boundary constraints only during inference by fixing known regions such as inlet, outlet or unchanged regions from previous simulations. To scale this idea to large 3D meshes, we introduce a local neighbourhood tokeniser that represents high-resolution velocity fields as compact spatial latent tokens and train latent flow-matching and masked-autoencoder models on these tokens. On intracranial aneurysm hemodynamics, our method reconstructs full velocity fields from sparse boundary context, outperforms supervised neural surrogates under boundary-condition and dataset shift and enables local geometry editing by reusing unchanged simulation context. These results suggest that viewing CFD inference as context-conditioned inpainting can turn neural surrogates from task-specific predictors into reusable flow priors.

Product poster generation poses distinct challenges beyond general poster design, requiring both faithful preservation of product appearance and precise control over dense, multi-line text layouts. Prior methods typically adopt inpainting frameworks augmented with auxiliary modules such as ControlNet and OCR encoders. However, these approaches introduce architectural complexity and computational overhead while still suffering from text errors and subject extension artifacts. We present SimplePoster, a simple yet effective inpainting-based framework that achieves faithful subject preservation and accurate, position-controllable text rendering without external controllers. Our approach builds on two observations: (1) full-parameter fine-tuning of the base model effectively suppresses subject extension, outperforming ControlNet-based alternatives; and (2) a zero-cost character-level position encoding enables geometry-aware text generation without dedicated layout modules. Experiments show that SimplePoster achieves a $98.7\%$ subject preservation rate, compared to $55.2\%$ for SeedEdit 3.0 and $85.3\%$ for PosterMaker, while also improving text rendering accuracy. Code, models, benchmark and a part of training data will be available at https://github.com/Alibaba-YuFeng/SIMPLEPOSTER

Autoregressive (AR) models can generate high-quality low-poly meshes from point clouds, but they still operate in an all-or-nothing manner: when a local region is unsatisfactory, the entire mesh must be regenerated, wasting computation and destroying satisfactory mesh structure elsewhere. We introduce MeshFIM, a Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) framework that regenerates a target region of a low-poly mesh conditioned on the surrounding context. MeshFIM addresses three mesh-specific challenges: enforcing exact attachment along the exposed boundary, preserving topological order in the context, and suppressing overflow beyond the intended region. It does so with five complementary design choices: boundary vertex markers, context positional embeddings, expanded context width, context augmentation, and a low-poly geometry encoder whose gated subtraction mechanism focuses generation on the missing region by leveraging the difference between the reference surface and the existing mesh. Detailed ablation studies are presented to show the effectiveness of every introduced component. Based on MeshFIM, we demonstrate two applications: interactive brush-based editing and automatic defect repair on low-poly mesh (see Figure 1). Last but not least, experiments show that MeshFIM outperforms a range of baselines in mesh refinement, mesh repair and whole mesh generation plus stitch-back scheme.

Makeup transfer aims to apply the makeup style of a reference portrait to a source portrait while preserving identity and background. Early methods formulate this task as unsupervised image-to-image translation, relying on surrogate objectives and often yielding limited performance. Recent diffusion- and flow-based approaches instead exploit synthetic data for supervised training, leading to significant improvements. However, these methods still face two critical challenges: synthetic supervision frequently fails to faithfully preserve identity, and the domain gap between synthetic and real data limits generalization, resulting in degraded performance in complex real-world scenarios. To address these issues, this paper first proposes ConsistentBeauty, a novel data curation pipeline that ensures makeup fidelity and strict identity consistency within the synthesized data. Second, we propose RealBeauty, a synthetic-to-real post-training framework. Beyond supervised learning on curated synthetic data, we further adapt the model to real-world scenarios through reinforcement learning and design novel verifiable rewards tailored to the makeup transfer task. It allows the model to further benefit from real makeup patterns beyond synthetic supervision. In addition, we establish a new diverse benchmark for makeup transfer, covering a wide range of skin tones, ages, genders, poses, and makeup styles, thereby enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of model performance under diverse real-world conditions. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and demonstrates clear advantages in identity preservation and performance on complex real-world cases.