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Apr 24

Neural-Driven Image Editing

Traditional image editing typically relies on manual prompting, making it labor-intensive and inaccessible to individuals with limited motor control or language abilities. Leveraging recent advances in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and generative models, we propose LoongX, a hands-free image editing approach driven by multimodal neurophysiological signals. LoongX utilizes state-of-the-art diffusion models trained on a comprehensive dataset of 23,928 image editing pairs, each paired with synchronized electroencephalography (EEG), functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), photoplethysmography (PPG), and head motion signals that capture user intent. To effectively address the heterogeneity of these signals, LoongX integrates two key modules. The cross-scale state space (CS3) module encodes informative modality-specific features. The dynamic gated fusion (DGF) module further aggregates these features into a unified latent space, which is then aligned with edit semantics via fine-tuning on a diffusion transformer (DiT). Additionally, we pre-train the encoders using contrastive learning to align cognitive states with semantic intentions from embedded natural language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoongX achieves performance comparable to text-driven methods (CLIP-I: 0.6605 vs. 0.6558; DINO: 0.4812 vs. 0.4636) and outperforms them when neural signals are combined with speech (CLIP-T: 0.2588 vs. 0.2549). These results highlight the promise of neural-driven generative models in enabling accessible, intuitive image editing and open new directions for cognitive-driven creative technologies. Datasets and code will be released to support future work and foster progress in this emerging area.

  • 17 authors
·
Jul 7, 2025 1

Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Networks for Conditional Melody Generation with Long-term Structure

The rise of deep learning technologies has quickly advanced many fields, including that of generative music systems. There exist a number of systems that allow for the generation of good sounding short snippets, yet, these generated snippets often lack an overarching, longer-term structure. In this work, we propose CM-HRNN: a conditional melody generation model based on a hierarchical recurrent neural network. This model allows us to generate melodies with long-term structures based on given chord accompaniments. We also propose a novel, concise event-based representation to encode musical lead sheets while retaining the notes' relative position within the bar with respect to the musical meter. With this new data representation, the proposed architecture can simultaneously model the rhythmic, as well as the pitch structures in an effective way. Melodies generated by the proposed model were extensively evaluated in quantitative experiments as well as a user study to ensure the musical quality of the output as well as to evaluate if they contain repeating patterns. We also compared the system with the state-of-the-art AttentionRNN. This comparison shows that melodies generated by CM-HRNN contain more repeated patterns (i.e., higher compression ratio) and a lower tonal tension (i.e., more tonally concise). Results from our listening test indicate that CM-HRNN outperforms AttentionRNN in terms of long-term structure and overall rating.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 19, 2021

Generative Teaching Networks: Accelerating Neural Architecture Search by Learning to Generate Synthetic Training Data

This paper investigates the intriguing question of whether we can create learning algorithms that automatically generate training data, learning environments, and curricula in order to help AI agents rapidly learn. We show that such algorithms are possible via Generative Teaching Networks (GTNs), a general approach that is, in theory, applicable to supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, although our experiments only focus on the supervised case. GTNs are deep neural networks that generate data and/or training environments that a learner (e.g. a freshly initialized neural network) trains on for a few SGD steps before being tested on a target task. We then differentiate through the entire learning process via meta-gradients to update the GTN parameters to improve performance on the target task. GTNs have the beneficial property that they can theoretically generate any type of data or training environment, making their potential impact large. This paper introduces GTNs, discusses their potential, and showcases that they can substantially accelerate learning. We also demonstrate a practical and exciting application of GTNs: accelerating the evaluation of candidate architectures for neural architecture search (NAS), which is rate-limited by such evaluations, enabling massive speed-ups in NAS. GTN-NAS improves the NAS state of the art, finding higher performing architectures when controlling for the search proposal mechanism. GTN-NAS also is competitive with the overall state of the art approaches, which achieve top performance while using orders of magnitude less computation than typical NAS methods. Speculating forward, GTNs may represent a first step toward the ambitious goal of algorithms that generate their own training data and, in doing so, open a variety of interesting new research questions and directions.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 16, 2019

Generative AI for Medical Imaging: extending the MONAI Framework

Recent advances in generative AI have brought incredible breakthroughs in several areas, including medical imaging. These generative models have tremendous potential not only to help safely share medical data via synthetic datasets but also to perform an array of diverse applications, such as anomaly detection, image-to-image translation, denoising, and MRI reconstruction. However, due to the complexity of these models, their implementation and reproducibility can be difficult. This complexity can hinder progress, act as a use barrier, and dissuade the comparison of new methods with existing works. In this study, we present MONAI Generative Models, a freely available open-source platform that allows researchers and developers to easily train, evaluate, and deploy generative models and related applications. Our platform reproduces state-of-art studies in a standardised way involving different architectures (such as diffusion models, autoregressive transformers, and GANs), and provides pre-trained models for the community. We have implemented these models in a generalisable fashion, illustrating that their results can be extended to 2D or 3D scenarios, including medical images with different modalities (like CT, MRI, and X-Ray data) and from different anatomical areas. Finally, we adopt a modular and extensible approach, ensuring long-term maintainability and the extension of current applications for future features.

  • 24 authors
·
Jul 27, 2023

Generative AI for Autonomous Driving: Frontiers and Opportunities

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) constitutes a transformative technological wave that reconfigures industries through its unparalleled capabilities for content creation, reasoning, planning, and multimodal understanding. This revolutionary force offers the most promising path yet toward solving one of engineering's grandest challenges: achieving reliable, fully autonomous driving, particularly the pursuit of Level 5 autonomy. This survey delivers a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the emerging role of GenAI across the autonomous driving stack. We begin by distilling the principles and trade-offs of modern generative modeling, encompassing VAEs, GANs, Diffusion Models, and Large Language Models (LLMs). We then map their frontier applications in image, LiDAR, trajectory, occupancy, video generation as well as LLM-guided reasoning and decision making. We categorize practical applications, such as synthetic data workflows, end-to-end driving strategies, high-fidelity digital twin systems, smart transportation networks, and cross-domain transfer to embodied AI. We identify key obstacles and possibilities such as comprehensive generalization across rare cases, evaluation and safety checks, budget-limited implementation, regulatory compliance, ethical concerns, and environmental effects, while proposing research plans across theoretical assurances, trust metrics, transport integration, and socio-technical influence. By unifying these threads, the survey provides a forward-looking reference for researchers, engineers, and policymakers navigating the convergence of generative AI and advanced autonomous mobility. An actively maintained repository of cited works is available at https://github.com/taco-group/GenAI4AD.

  • 47 authors
·
May 13, 2025

DDMI: Domain-Agnostic Latent Diffusion Models for Synthesizing High-Quality Implicit Neural Representations

Recent studies have introduced a new class of generative models for synthesizing implicit neural representations (INRs) that capture arbitrary continuous signals in various domains. These models opened the door for domain-agnostic generative models, but they often fail to achieve high-quality generation. We observed that the existing methods generate the weights of neural networks to parameterize INRs and evaluate the network with fixed positional embeddings (PEs). Arguably, this architecture limits the expressive power of generative models and results in low-quality INR generation. To address this limitation, we propose Domain-agnostic Latent Diffusion Model for INRs (DDMI) that generates adaptive positional embeddings instead of neural networks' weights. Specifically, we develop a Discrete-to-continuous space Variational AutoEncoder (D2C-VAE), which seamlessly connects discrete data and the continuous signal functions in the shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel conditioning mechanism for evaluating INRs with the hierarchically decomposed PEs to further enhance expressive power. Extensive experiments across four modalities, e.g., 2D images, 3D shapes, Neural Radiance Fields, and videos, with seven benchmark datasets, demonstrate the versatility of DDMI and its superior performance compared to the existing INR generative models.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 23, 2024

Plug & Play Generative Networks: Conditional Iterative Generation of Images in Latent Space

Generating high-resolution, photo-realistic images has been a long-standing goal in machine learning. Recently, Nguyen et al. (2016) showed one interesting way to synthesize novel images by performing gradient ascent in the latent space of a generator network to maximize the activations of one or multiple neurons in a separate classifier network. In this paper we extend this method by introducing an additional prior on the latent code, improving both sample quality and sample diversity, leading to a state-of-the-art generative model that produces high quality images at higher resolutions (227x227) than previous generative models, and does so for all 1000 ImageNet categories. In addition, we provide a unified probabilistic interpretation of related activation maximization methods and call the general class of models "Plug and Play Generative Networks". PPGNs are composed of 1) a generator network G that is capable of drawing a wide range of image types and 2) a replaceable "condition" network C that tells the generator what to draw. We demonstrate the generation of images conditioned on a class (when C is an ImageNet or MIT Places classification network) and also conditioned on a caption (when C is an image captioning network). Our method also improves the state of the art of Multifaceted Feature Visualization, which generates the set of synthetic inputs that activate a neuron in order to better understand how deep neural networks operate. Finally, we show that our model performs reasonably well at the task of image inpainting. While image models are used in this paper, the approach is modality-agnostic and can be applied to many types of data.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 30, 2016

Semi-Parametric Neural Image Synthesis

Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Much of this success is due to the scalability of these architectures and hence caused by a dramatic increase in model complexity and in the computational resources invested in training these models. Our work questions the underlying paradigm of compressing large training data into ever growing parametric representations. We rather present an orthogonal, semi-parametric approach. We complement comparably small diffusion or autoregressive models with a separate image database and a retrieval strategy. During training we retrieve a set of nearest neighbors from this external database for each training instance and condition the generative model on these informative samples. While the retrieval approach is providing the (local) content, the model is focusing on learning the composition of scenes based on this content. As demonstrated by our experiments, simply swapping the database for one with different contents transfers a trained model post-hoc to a novel domain. The evaluation shows competitive performance on tasks which the generative model has not been trained on, such as class-conditional synthesis, zero-shot stylization or text-to-image synthesis without requiring paired text-image data. With negligible memory and computational overhead for the external database and retrieval we can significantly reduce the parameter count of the generative model and still outperform the state-of-the-art.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 25, 2022

Reinforcement Learning for Generative AI: A Survey

Deep Generative AI has been a long-standing essential topic in the machine learning community, which can impact a number of application areas like text generation and computer vision. The major paradigm to train a generative model is maximum likelihood estimation, which pushes the learner to capture and approximate the target data distribution by decreasing the divergence between the model distribution and the target distribution. This formulation successfully establishes the objective of generative tasks, while it is incapable of satisfying all the requirements that a user might expect from a generative model. Reinforcement learning, serving as a competitive option to inject new training signals by creating new objectives that exploit novel signals, has demonstrated its power and flexibility to incorporate human inductive bias from multiple angles, such as adversarial learning, hand-designed rules and learned reward model to build a performant model. Thereby, reinforcement learning has become a trending research field and has stretched the limits of generative AI in both model design and application. It is reasonable to summarize and conclude advances in recent years with a comprehensive review. Although there are surveys in different application areas recently, this survey aims to shed light on a high-level review that spans a range of application areas. We provide a rigorous taxonomy in this area and make sufficient coverage on various models and applications. Notably, we also surveyed the fast-developing large language model area. We conclude this survey by showing the potential directions that might tackle the limit of current models and expand the frontiers for generative AI.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 28, 2023

Antagonising explanation and revealing bias directly through sequencing and multimodal inference

Deep generative models produce data according to a learned representation, e.g. diffusion models, through a process of approximation computing possible samples. Approximation can be understood as reconstruction and the large datasets used to train models as sets of records in which we represent the physical world with some data structure (photographs, audio recordings, manuscripts). During the process of reconstruction, e.g., image frames develop each timestep towards a textual input description. While moving forward in time, frame sets are shaped according to learned bias and their production, we argue here, can be considered as going back in time; not by inspiration on the backward diffusion process but acknowledging culture is specifically marked in the records. Futures of generative modelling, namely in film and audiovisual arts, can benefit by dealing with diffusion systems as a process to compute the future by inevitably being tied to the past, if acknowledging the records as to capture fields of view at a specific time, and to correlate with our own finite memory ideals. Models generating new data distributions can target video production as signal processors and by developing sequences through timelines we ourselves also go back to decade-old algorithmic and multi-track methodologies revealing the actual predictive failure of contemporary approaches to synthesis in moving image, both as relevant to composition and not explanatory.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 25, 2023

AI-Generated Images as Data Source: The Dawn of Synthetic Era

The advancement of visual intelligence is intrinsically tethered to the availability of large-scale data. In parallel, generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has unlocked the potential to create synthetic images that closely resemble real-world photographs. This prompts a compelling inquiry: how much visual intelligence could benefit from the advance of generative AI? This paper explores the innovative concept of harnessing these AI-generated images as new data sources, reshaping traditional modeling paradigms in visual intelligence. In contrast to real data, AI-generated data exhibit remarkable advantages, including unmatched abundance and scalability, the rapid generation of vast datasets, and the effortless simulation of edge cases. Built on the success of generative AI models, we examine the potential of their generated data in a range of applications, from training machine learning models to simulating scenarios for computational modeling, testing, and validation. We probe the technological foundations that support this groundbreaking use of generative AI, engaging in an in-depth discussion on the ethical, legal, and practical considerations that accompany this transformative paradigm shift. Through an exhaustive survey of current technologies and applications, this paper presents a comprehensive view of the synthetic era in visual intelligence. A project associated with this paper can be found at https://github.com/mwxely/AIGS .

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 3, 2023

Bridging Text and Video Generation: A Survey

Text-to-video (T2V) generation technology holds potential to transform multiple domains such as education, marketing, entertainment, and assistive technologies for individuals with visual or reading comprehension challenges, by creating coherent visual content from natural language prompts. From its inception, the field has advanced from adversarial models to diffusion-based models, yielding higher-fidelity, temporally consistent outputs. Yet challenges persist, such as alignment, long-range coherence, and computational efficiency. Addressing this evolving landscape, we present a comprehensive survey of text-to-video generative models, tracing their development from early GANs and VAEs to hybrid Diffusion-Transformer (DiT) architectures, detailing how these models work, what limitations they addressed in their predecessors, and why shifts toward new architectural paradigms were necessary to overcome challenges in quality, coherence, and control. We provide a systematic account of the datasets, which the surveyed text-to-video models were trained and evaluated on, and, to support reproducibility and assess the accessibility of training such models, we detail their training configurations, including their hardware specifications, GPU counts, batch sizes, learning rates, optimizers, epochs, and other key hyperparameters. Further, we outline the evaluation metrics commonly used for evaluating such models and present their performance across standard benchmarks, while also discussing the limitations of these metrics and the emerging shift toward more holistic, perception-aligned evaluation strategies. Finally, drawing from our analysis, we outline the current open challenges and propose a few promising future directions, laying out a perspective for future researchers to explore and build upon in advancing T2V research and applications.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 6, 2025 2

Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly advanced the field of computer vision by enabling machines to create and interpret visual data with unprecedented sophistication. This transformation builds upon a foundation of generative models to produce realistic images, videos, and 3D/4D content. Conventional generative models primarily focus on visual fidelity while often neglecting the physical plausibility of the generated content. This gap limits their effectiveness in applications that require adherence to real-world physical laws, such as robotics, autonomous systems, and scientific simulations. As generative models evolve to increasingly integrate physical realism and dynamic simulation, their potential to function as "world simulators" expands. Therefore, the field of physics-aware generation in computer vision is rapidly growing, calling for a comprehensive survey to provide a structured analysis of current efforts. To serve this purpose, the survey presents a systematic review, categorizing methods based on how they incorporate physical knowledge, either through explicit simulation or implicit learning. It also analyzes key paradigms, discusses evaluation protocols, and identifies future research directions. By offering a comprehensive overview, this survey aims to help future developments in physically grounded generation for computer vision. The reviewed papers are summarized at https://tinyurl.com/Physics-Aware-Generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 18, 2025

The History Began from AlexNet: A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Learning Approaches

Deep learning has demonstrated tremendous success in variety of application domains in the past few years. This new field of machine learning has been growing rapidly and applied in most of the application domains with some new modalities of applications, which helps to open new opportunity. There are different methods have been proposed on different category of learning approaches, which includes supervised, semi-supervised and un-supervised learning. The experimental results show state-of-the-art performance of deep learning over traditional machine learning approaches in the field of Image Processing, Computer Vision, Speech Recognition, Machine Translation, Art, Medical imaging, Medical information processing, Robotics and control, Bio-informatics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Cyber security, and many more. This report presents a brief survey on development of DL approaches, including Deep Neural Network (DNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) including Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), Auto-Encoder (AE), Deep Belief Network (DBN), Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In addition, we have included recent development of proposed advanced variant DL techniques based on the mentioned DL approaches. Furthermore, DL approaches have explored and evaluated in different application domains are also included in this survey. We have also comprised recently developed frameworks, SDKs, and benchmark datasets that are used for implementing and evaluating deep learning approaches. There are some surveys have published on Deep Learning in Neural Networks [1, 38] and a survey on RL [234]. However, those papers have not discussed the individual advanced techniques for training large scale deep learning models and the recently developed method of generative models [1].

  • 9 authors
·
Mar 3, 2018

Enhancing Diffusion Models for High-Quality Image Generation

This report presents the comprehensive implementation, evaluation, and optimization of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) and Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIMs), which are state-of-the-art generative models. During inference, these models take random noise as input and iteratively generate high-quality images as output. The study focuses on enhancing their generative capabilities by incorporating advanced techniques such as Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), Latent Diffusion Models with Variational Autoencoders (VAE), and alternative noise scheduling strategies. The motivation behind this work is the growing demand for efficient and scalable generative AI models that can produce realistic images across diverse datasets, addressing challenges in applications such as art creation, image synthesis, and data augmentation. Evaluations were conducted on datasets including CIFAR-10 and ImageNet-100, with a focus on improving inference speed, computational efficiency, and image quality metrics like Frechet Inception Distance (FID). Results demonstrate that DDIM + CFG achieves faster inference and superior image quality. Challenges with VAE and noise scheduling are also highlighted, suggesting opportunities for future optimization. This work lays the groundwork for developing scalable, efficient, and high-quality generative AI systems to benefit industries ranging from entertainment to robotics.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024

Prompting Forgetting: Unlearning in GANs via Textual Guidance

State-of-the-art generative models exhibit powerful image-generation capabilities, introducing various ethical and legal challenges to service providers hosting these models. Consequently, Content Removal Techniques (CRTs) have emerged as a growing area of research to control outputs without full-scale retraining. Recent work has explored the use of Machine Unlearning in generative models to address content removal. However, the focus of such research has been on diffusion models, and unlearning in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) has remained largely unexplored. We address this gap by proposing Text-to-Unlearn, a novel framework that selectively unlearns concepts from pre-trained GANs using only text prompts, enabling feature unlearning, identity unlearning, and fine-grained tasks like expression and multi-attribute removal in models trained on human faces. Leveraging natural language descriptions, our approach guides the unlearning process without requiring additional datasets or supervised fine-tuning, offering a scalable and efficient solution. To evaluate its effectiveness, we introduce an automatic unlearning assessment method adapted from state-of-the-art image-text alignment metrics, providing a comprehensive analysis of the unlearning methodology. To our knowledge, Text-to-Unlearn is the first cross-modal unlearning framework for GANs, representing a flexible and efficient advancement in managing generative model behavior.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025 1

Examining User-Friendly and Open-Sourced Large GPT Models: A Survey on Language, Multimodal, and Scientific GPT Models

Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) models have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) with remarkable performance in various tasks and also extend their power to multimodal domains. Despite their success, large GPT models like GPT-4 face inherent limitations such as considerable size, high computational requirements, complex deployment processes, and closed development loops. These constraints restrict their widespread adoption and raise concerns regarding their responsible development and usage. The need for user-friendly, relatively small, and open-sourced alternative GPT models arises from the desire to overcome these limitations while retaining high performance. In this survey paper, we provide an examination of alternative open-sourced models of large GPTs, focusing on user-friendly and relatively small models that facilitate easier deployment and accessibility. Through this extensive survey, we aim to equip researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts with a thorough understanding of user-friendly and relatively small open-sourced models of large GPTs, their current state, challenges, and future research directions, inspiring the development of more efficient, accessible, and versatile GPT models that cater to the broader scientific community and advance the field of general artificial intelligence. The source contents are continuously updating in https://github.com/GPT-Alternatives/gpt_alternatives.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 27, 2023

Unifying Self-Supervised Clustering and Energy-Based Models

Self-supervised learning excels at learning representations from large amounts of data. At the same time, generative models offer the complementary property of learning information about the underlying data generation process. In this study, we aim at establishing a principled connection between these two paradigms and highlight the benefits of their complementarity. In particular, we perform an analysis of self-supervised learning objectives, elucidating the underlying probabilistic graphical models and presenting a standardized methodology for their derivation from first principles. The analysis suggests a natural means of integrating self-supervised learning with likelihood-based generative models. We instantiate this concept within the realm of cluster-based self-supervised learning and energy models, introducing a lower bound proven to reliably penalize the most important failure modes and unlocking full unification. Our theoretical findings are substantiated through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, demonstrating that our objective function allows to jointly train a backbone network in a discriminative and generative fashion, consequently outperforming existing self-supervised learning strategies in terms of clustering, generation and out-of-distribution detection performance by a wide margin. We also demonstrate that the solution can be integrated into a neuro-symbolic framework to tackle a simple yet non-trivial instantiation of the symbol grounding problem. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/emsansone/GEDI.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

The Nature of Mathematical Modeling and Probabilistic Optimization Engineering in Generative AI

In this paper, we give an in-depth analysis on the mathematical problem formulations and the probabilistic optimization explorations for some of the key components in Transformer model [33] in the field of generative AI. We explore and discuss some potential further enhancement for current state of the art methods for some key underlying technologies of generative AI models from algorithmic and probabilistic optimization perspective. In particular, we present an optimal solution for sub-word encoding (SWE) based on similar initial settings as that of byte-pair encoding (BPE) algorithm in [9] with similar objectives as that of WordPiece approach in [28, 31] to maximize the likelihood of the training data. We also present cross entropy optimization method to optimize hyperparameters for word2vec model [17]. In addition, we propose a factored combination of rotary positional encoding (RoPE) [32] and attention with linear biases (ALiBi) [23] with a harmonic series. We also present a probabilistic FlashAttention [6, 7] (PrFlashAttention) method with a probability distribution over block distances in the matrix to decide which block is likely to participate in a given round of attention computation while maintaining the lower triangle shape of the tensor for autoregressive language models by re-shaping the tensors. Finally, we present staircase adaptive quantization (SAQ) of key-value (KV) cache for multi-query attention (MQA) based on the framework presented in [16] to have gradual quantization degradation while achieving reasonable model quality and cost savings.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

3D Scene Generation: A Survey

3D scene generation seeks to synthesize spatially structured, semantically meaningful, and photorealistic environments for applications such as immersive media, robotics, autonomous driving, and embodied AI. Early methods based on procedural rules offered scalability but limited diversity. Recent advances in deep generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) and 3D representations (e.g., NeRF, 3D Gaussians) have enabled the learning of real-world scene distributions, improving fidelity, diversity, and view consistency. Recent advances like diffusion models bridge 3D scene synthesis and photorealism by reframing generation as image or video synthesis problems. This survey provides a systematic overview of state-of-the-art approaches, organizing them into four paradigms: procedural generation, neural 3D-based generation, image-based generation, and video-based generation. We analyze their technical foundations, trade-offs, and representative results, and review commonly used datasets, evaluation protocols, and downstream applications. We conclude by discussing key challenges in generation capacity, 3D representation, data and annotations, and evaluation, and outline promising directions including higher fidelity, physics-aware and interactive generation, and unified perception-generation models. This review organizes recent advances in 3D scene generation and highlights promising directions at the intersection of generative AI, 3D vision, and embodied intelligence. To track ongoing developments, we maintain an up-to-date project page: https://github.com/hzxie/Awesome-3D-Scene-Generation.

  • 5 authors
·
May 8, 2025 2

Natural scene reconstruction from fMRI signals using generative latent diffusion

In neural decoding research, one of the most intriguing topics is the reconstruction of perceived natural images based on fMRI signals. Previous studies have succeeded in re-creating different aspects of the visuals, such as low-level properties (shape, texture, layout) or high-level features (category of objects, descriptive semantics of scenes) but have typically failed to reconstruct these properties together for complex scene images. Generative AI has recently made a leap forward with latent diffusion models capable of generating high-complexity images. Here, we investigate how to take advantage of this innovative technology for brain decoding. We present a two-stage scene reconstruction framework called ``Brain-Diffuser''. In the first stage, starting from fMRI signals, we reconstruct images that capture low-level properties and overall layout using a VDVAE (Very Deep Variational Autoencoder) model. In the second stage, we use the image-to-image framework of a latent diffusion model (Versatile Diffusion) conditioned on predicted multimodal (text and visual) features, to generate final reconstructed images. On the publicly available Natural Scenes Dataset benchmark, our method outperforms previous models both qualitatively and quantitatively. When applied to synthetic fMRI patterns generated from individual ROI (region-of-interest) masks, our trained model creates compelling ``ROI-optimal'' scenes consistent with neuroscientific knowledge. Thus, the proposed methodology can have an impact on both applied (e.g. brain-computer interface) and fundamental neuroscience.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 9, 2023

Spiking Diffusion Models

Recent years have witnessed Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) gaining attention for their ultra-low energy consumption and high biological plausibility compared with traditional Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Despite their distinguished properties, the application of SNNs in the computationally intensive field of image generation is still under exploration. In this paper, we propose the Spiking Diffusion Models (SDMs), an innovative family of SNN-based generative models that excel in producing high-quality samples with significantly reduced energy consumption. In particular, we propose a Temporal-wise Spiking Mechanism (TSM) that allows SNNs to capture more temporal features from a bio-plasticity perspective. In addition, we propose a threshold-guided strategy that can further improve the performances by up to 16.7% without any additional training. We also make the first attempt to use the ANN-SNN approach for SNN-based generation tasks. Extensive experimental results reveal that our approach not only exhibits comparable performance to its ANN counterpart with few spiking time steps, but also outperforms previous SNN-based generative models by a large margin. Moreover, we also demonstrate the high-quality generation ability of SDM on large-scale datasets, e.g., LSUN bedroom. This development marks a pivotal advancement in the capabilities of SNN-based generation, paving the way for future research avenues to realize low-energy and low-latency generative applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/AndyCao1125/SDM.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 29, 2024

StudioGAN: A Taxonomy and Benchmark of GANs for Image Synthesis

Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is one of the state-of-the-art generative models for realistic image synthesis. While training and evaluating GAN becomes increasingly important, the current GAN research ecosystem does not provide reliable benchmarks for which the evaluation is conducted consistently and fairly. Furthermore, because there are few validated GAN implementations, researchers devote considerable time to reproducing baselines. We study the taxonomy of GAN approaches and present a new open-source library named StudioGAN. StudioGAN supports 7 GAN architectures, 9 conditioning methods, 4 adversarial losses, 13 regularization modules, 3 differentiable augmentations, 7 evaluation metrics, and 5 evaluation backbones. With our training and evaluation protocol, we present a large-scale benchmark using various datasets (CIFAR10, ImageNet, AFHQv2, FFHQ, and Baby/Papa/Granpa-ImageNet) and 3 different evaluation backbones (InceptionV3, SwAV, and Swin Transformer). Unlike other benchmarks used in the GAN community, we train representative GANs, including BigGAN, StyleGAN2, and StyleGAN3, in a unified training pipeline and quantify generation performance with 7 evaluation metrics. The benchmark evaluates other cutting-edge generative models(e.g., StyleGAN-XL, ADM, MaskGIT, and RQ-Transformer). StudioGAN provides GAN implementations, training, and evaluation scripts with the pre-trained weights. StudioGAN is available at https://github.com/POSTECH-CVLab/PyTorch-StudioGAN.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 19, 2022

ArtifactGen: Benchmarking WGAN-GP vs Diffusion for Label-Aware EEG Artifact Synthesis

Artifacts in electroencephalography (EEG) -- muscle, eye movement, electrode, chewing, and shiver -- confound automated analysis yet are costly to label at scale. We study whether modern generative models can synthesize realistic, label-aware artifact segments suitable for augmentation and stress-testing. Using the TUH EEG Artifact (TUAR) corpus, we curate subject-wise splits and fixed-length multi-channel windows (e.g., 250 samples) with preprocessing tailored to each model (per-window min--max for adversarial training; per-recording/channel z-score for diffusion). We compare a conditional WGAN-GP with a projection discriminator to a 1D denoising diffusion model with classifier-free guidance, and evaluate along three axes: (i) fidelity via Welch band-power deltas (Deltadelta, Deltatheta, Deltaalpha, Deltabeta), channel-covariance Frobenius distance, autocorrelation L_2, and distributional metrics (MMD/PRD); (ii) specificity via class-conditional recovery with lightweight kNN/classifiers; and (iii) utility via augmentation effects on artifact recognition. In our setting, WGAN-GP achieves closer spectral alignment and lower MMD to real data, while both models exhibit weak class-conditional recovery, limiting immediate augmentation gains and revealing opportunities for stronger conditioning and coverage. We release a reproducible pipeline -- data manifests, training configurations, and evaluation scripts -- to establish a baseline for EEG artifact synthesis and to surface actionable failure modes for future work.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

LinEAS: End-to-end Learning of Activation Steering with a Distributional Loss

The growing use of generative models in daily life calls for efficient mechanisms to control their generation, to e.g., produce safe content or provide users with tools to explore style changes. Ideally, such mechanisms should require low volume of unpaired data (i.e., without explicit preference), and should be cheap, both at train and inference time, while preserving output quality. Recent research has shown that such mechanisms can be obtained by intervening exclusively on model activations, with the goal of correcting distributional differences between activations seen when using prompts from a source vs. a target set (e.g., toxic and non-toxic sentences). While cheap, these fast methods are inherently crude: their maps are tuned locally, not accounting for their impact on downstream layers, resulting in interventions that cause unintended shifts when used out-of-sample. We propose in this work linear end-to-end activation steering (LinEAS), an approach trained with a global loss that accounts simultaneously for all layer-wise distributional shifts. In addition to being more robust, the loss used to train LinEAS can be regularized with sparsifying norms, which can automatically carry out neuron selection. LinEAS only requires a handful of unpaired samples to be effective, and beats similar baselines on toxicity mitigation in language models, becoming competitive with oracle-dependent methods that have access to strong supervision. LinEAS is modality-agnostic and we empirically find that it outperforms existing activation steering methods at mitigating and including new concepts at the output of single-step text-to-image generation models.

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Mar 11, 2025 1

Repulsor: Accelerating Generative Modeling with a Contrastive Memory Bank

The dominance of denoising generative models (e.g., diffusion, flow-matching) in visual synthesis is tempered by their substantial training costs and inefficiencies in representation learning. While injecting discriminative representations via auxiliary alignment has proven effective, this approach still faces key limitations: the reliance on external, pre-trained encoders introduces overhead and domain shift. A dispersed-based strategy that encourages strong separation among in-batch latent representations alleviates this specific dependency. To assess the effect of the number of negative samples in generative modeling, we propose {\mname}, a plug-and-play training framework that requires no external encoders. Our method integrates a memory bank mechanism that maintains a large, dynamically updated queue of negative samples across training iterations. This decouples the number of negatives from the mini-batch size, providing abundant and high-quality negatives for a contrastive objective without a multiplicative increase in computational cost. A low-dimensional projection head is used to further minimize memory and bandwidth overhead. {\mname} offers three principal advantages: (1) it is self-contained, eliminating dependency on pretrained vision foundation models and their associated forward-pass overhead; (2) it introduces no additional parameters or computational cost during inference; and (3) it enables substantially faster convergence, achieving superior generative quality more efficiently. On ImageNet-256, {\mname} achieves a state-of-the-art FID of 2.40 within 400k steps, significantly outperforming comparable methods.

  • 10 authors
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Dec 9, 2025