Diffusion
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Just Image Transformers with Late-Stage Pixel Refinement
2026-11-09 19:08:13Denis Lukovnikov, Andreas M\"uller, Asja FischerAbstract
Recent work on latent-free diffusion transformers has demonstrated the feasibility of training image generators without a latent VAE. This avoids compression artifacts from the VAE and simplifies the training pipeline. In particular, JiT showed that even a standard transformer can be trained to generate images when the model is trained to predict the final image ($x$-prediction). Even though JiT unlocks training efficiency comparable to latent models, it still suffers from reduced image quality likely arising from modeling the image as a collection of large patches. In this work, we revisit JiT and show that adding simple convolutional pixel-pathway layers in a post-training phase significantly improves generation quality. Moreover, we show that the added pixel-pathway does not need to be active in the early denoising stages, and can be activated as late as in the last $20\%$ of the denoising process. Our experiments on ImageNet@256 show improvements compared to the original JiT results, achieving an FID of $1.78$ (from $2.34$ with corrected sampling), without using additional losses.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13120
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Stylization as Geodesic Navigation on Diffusion Manifolds
2026-11-09 15:36:42Yan Li, Zehao Li, Xinlong Sun, Fuchen Long, Xi Chen, Wenhan Luo, Yike GuoAbstract
Facial stylization asks for a delicate transformation: the image should look unmistakably artistic, yet the person should remain unmistakably the same. Existing training-free and instruction-driven methods often fail to expose such control, either drifting away from identity or producing only weak stylization. We introduce Stylus, a training-free framework that treats facial style transfer as navigation on the curved latent manifold of a pretrained diffusion model. Rather than interpolating in flat Euclidean space, \method refines the interpolated content--style point by lowering a ratio-weighted discrete geodesic energy under the pullback metric, made tractable by a rank-one power-iteration approximation of the Jacobian. This principle drives two complementary controls: content--style latent interpolation for smooth semantic fusion, and self-attention query optimization for spatially adaptive style injection. The resulting dual-control mechanism provides continuous, fine-grained control over stylization strength while preserving identity-critical facial structure, all without additional training. Experiments show that Stylus achieves the strongest identity and content preservation at competitive stylization strength.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.14097
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SpatialSR: Spatial Resolution-Centric Pipeline for Arbitrary-Scale Remote Sensing Super-Resolution
2026-11-09 12:47:34Yan Zhang, Runfeng Luo, Liangke Gao, Lin Yuan, Bin Xiao, Xinbo GaoAbstract
Although remote sensing image arbitrary-scale super-resolution (RSI-ASSR) methods support reconstruction at arbitrary or continuous scales, they predominantly condition on the relative scale factor and have not sufficiently investigated the absolute spatial resolution itself as a reconstruction prior, thereby disregarding the inherent spatial context of objects, which frequently leads to spatial-related distortions and compromised performance in downstream remote sensing applications. To address these challenges, we introduce SpatialSR, a SRe-centric arbitrary-scale RSISR method that leverages the spatial resolution (SRe) of remote sensing images (RSI) as an essential prior for super-resolution reconstruction. Distinct from existing SR methods, SpatialSR aims to restore high-resolution remote sensing images with a target SRe (typically set to 0.1m/pixel to align with the metadata of commonly used downstream task datasets). Specifically, we design a Spatial Resolution Estimation Module (SREM) to estimate the SRe of low-resolution (LR) images, thereby dynamically determining the required arbitrary scaling factor. Next, we employ a pretrained SRe-to-image diffusion model to extract SRe-specified texture-style codes, which are further incorporated into a carefully designed Resolution-aware Style Consistency Module (RSCM) to constrain the SRe-aware texture consistency of reconstructed images. Furthermore, to overcome the high computational expense inherent in diffusion-based SR methods, we wrap the iterative diffusion process as a Trajectory Consistency (TC) loss, which enables comparable reconstructed texture quality of the generative model in SpatialSR within a single step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed SpatialSR achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on commonly used RSISR and downstream (image classification and segmentation tasks) datasets.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13046
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Trajectory-Regularized Distribution Distillation for One-Step Generation
2026-11-08 06:05:40An Zhao, Yixiang Zhou, Zejian Li, Yi Guo, Pei Chen, Lingyun SunAbstract
Distilling flow matching models for one-step generation generally follows two paradigms. Trajectory alignment supervises the student with the teacher's probability flow ODE, but its performance degrades under very small sampling budgets. Distribution matching directly optimizes the generated distribution, but estimating its reverse Kullback-Leibler gradient typically requires a separate network to track the evolving student score. We propose trajectory-regularized distribution distillation (TRD), which combines distribution-level and trajectory-level supervision through a momentum-mixture policy predicted in a single student forward pass. This policy serves simultaneously as a one-step generator, an estimator of the student's marginal velocity that removes the need for a second trainable network in distribution matching, and a closed-form time-dependent velocity field supervised along the teacher ODE trajectory. Experiments on SANA-1.6B and Stable Diffusion 3.5 show that TRD outperforms representative consistency and distribution matching baselines in generation quality and training efficiency for both one-step and few-step generation, with a trade-off in sample diversity.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.12978
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AR-Edit: Training-Free Autoregressive Video Editing without Inversion
2026-11-06 17:50:15Hovhannes Margaryan, Quentin Bammey, Christian Sandor, Vicky KalogeitonAbstract
Editing a video stream in real time, without access to future frames, is essential for interactive applications. Existing training-free video editing methods, however, assume full offline access to the entire sequence, while streaming approaches either rely on additional training or are limited to specific editing techniques. We show that this limitation can be removed by analyzing the self-attention dynamics of DMD-distilled autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models. We uncover a key asymmetry: queries and keys remain stable and aligned with their source counterparts across denoising timesteps, while values diverge and encode the evolving content. Inherited from the non-distilled bidirectional teacher, this asymmetry is strongest at high noise, where few-step streaming models operate. The resulting mechanism is simple: a single forward pass suffices to capture source identity in the value features, which can be reused throughout generation. Starting from pure Gaussian noise and injecting only these source values reconstructs the input with fidelity matching or surpassing inversion-based methods, effectively eliminating inversion. Based on this insight, we introduce AR-Edit, a training-free, inversion-free method that caches source values once and selectively injects them during denoising. Across multiple AR backbones, AR-Edit enables real-time streaming editing with superior source preservation and tonal fidelity at minimal overhead.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09795
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PoseRieFlow: Riemannian Flow Matching for Whole-Body Text-to-Pose Generation
2026-11-06 16:40:03Jan Spindler, Bardia Ardakanian, Patrick Stotko, Reinhard KleinAbstract
We present PoseRieFlow, a compact flow-matching framework for text-conditioned generation of whole-body 3D human poses. Prior text-to-pose methods either neglect articulated hands or model rotations in Euclidean space despite their non-Euclidean geometry. PoseRieFlow instead formulates generation directly on the product manifold of SMPL-H joint rotations, learning a text-conditioned vector field that transports samples from an isotropic $\mathrm{SO}(3)$ Gaussian prior to the data distribution along Riemannian geodesics. A part-tokenized Diffusion Transformer aggregates the 52 joints into eight body-part tokens, allocating a dedicated token and nonlinear projector to each hand, and restores per-joint resolution through part-specific decoders, shortening the sequence while improving kinematic fidelity over per-joint tokenization. With only 21.6M trainable parameters, PoseRieFlow supports expressive SMPL-H generation with detailed hand articulation at a fraction of the scale of recent LLM-based generators. On PoseScript, it attains the lowest whole-body kinematic error among all hand-producing methods, with consistent kinematic gains from the Riemannian formulation over its Euclidean counterpart at every practical inference budget, while distributional and retrieval metrics remain comparable between them.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09692
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A Novel Conditional Adversarial Diffusion Model for High-Fidelity OCT-to-OCT Image Translation and Precise Anti-VEGF Therapy Response Prediction in Diabetic Macular Edema
2026-11-06 16:06:25Reza Rasti, Armin Biglari, Sobhan Mohammadi Hafshejani, Alireza Dehghani, Michael J. Allingham, Sina FarsiuAbstract
Diabetic macular edema (DME) is a leading cause of severe vision loss among working-age adults. Although intravitreal anti-vascular endothelial growth factor (anti-VEGF) injections currently serve as the first-line therapy for DME, a notable subset of patients fails to respond despite the substantial cost and clinical burden, suggesting they may benefit more from alternative interventions. Automated, noninvasive pre-treatment response assessment could therefore spare non-responders from the current trial-and-error treatment paradigm. In this study, we propose a novel conditional adversarial diffusion framework that synthesizes post-treatment optical coherence tomography (OCT) images from baseline scans, enabling the derivation of each patient's initial response to anti-VEGF therapy. The model was developed with subject-level 5-fold cross-validation on a US cohort (n = 127) and externally validated on an independent Iranian cohort (n = 44). Benchmarked against fourteen baseline and state-of-the-art translation models, the proposed model achieved the best treatment-response prediction performance among the methods evaluated for that task on both cohorts, with balanced accuracies of 85.7% and 93.0% on the US cohort and 85.2% and 95.3% on the external Iranian cohort at the 10% and 20% central subfield thickness reduction thresholds, respectively. Ultimately, this framework offers a decision-support tool to help ophthalmologists anticipate initial anti-VEGF outcomes in DME prior to treatment initiation, toward personalized therapy selection. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03958
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SPSC: Zero-Shot Cross-Subject EEG-to-Image Reconstruction via Semantic Preservation and Subspace Calibration
2026-11-06 12:18:59Yutang Lu, Shuai Jiang, Fei Su, Zhicheng ZhaoAbstract
Pretrained vision-language models and diffusion generators have driven rapid progress in brain-to-image generation, while EEG-based reconstruction is still constrained by low signal-to-noise ratio and cross-subject semantic shifts. Zero-shot cross-subject reconstruction poses even greater challenges: EEG semantic embeddings learned from source subjects deviate from the manifold of image embeddings of the unseen target subject, particularly when neither target labels nor target image embeddings are available. To address this issue, we introduce the Semantic Preservation and Subspace Calibration (SPSC) framework, which first uses Object Mask Contrastive Regularization (OMCR) with object identity for backend training, and then constructs Subspace Candidate Gate (SCG) to achieve label-free semantic correction for target subjects during inference. Specifically, OMCR regularizes the conditioning space with object-level positive samples to preserve object-level feature neighborhoods within the reconstruction prior and low-level branch, while SCG exploits training image prototypes and batch statistics of unlabeled target EEG to select candidates for each task within subspaces of image prototypes. Under the leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) setting across ten subjects on the THINGS-EEG dataset, SPSC improves the cross-subject reconstruction from 0.552 to 0.713 on CLIP and from 0.612 to 0.745 on Alex.5. These significant gains indicate that the semantically calibrated conditions can better support generation for the target subjects under label-free inference.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09380
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Horizon-Coupled Obstacle Guidance for Relative-Action Diffusion Policies
2026-11-06 11:38:26Guangyuan Wang, Haishan Xia, Zitao Zhang, Kejia Chen, Yuanchen Sun, Zhenguo Sun, Donghao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Alois KnollAbstract
Real-world robot deployment requires adapting learned policies to unseen obstacles without collecting new demonstrations or retraining. Existing policy-level guidance often applies obstacle corrections independently at individual horizon steps, which may address local obstacle violations but fail to coordinate the action sequence into a complete, task-directed detour. How obstacle responses should be propagated across the action horizon to coordinate complete, task-directed avoidance motion remains underexplored. We introduce an inferencetime obstacle-guidance framework for pretrained relative-action diffusion policies. It rolls out cumulative relative actions into a workspace trajectory, evaluates obstacle interactions along the trajectory with an SDF-based obstacle model, and propagates each obstacle response to all contributing action increments during denoising. Real-robot experiments across seven obstacleconstrained scenarios spanning four manipulation tasks show that our method achieves 105/140 (75.0%) collision-free task successes, compared with 8/140 (5.7%) for absolute-action pointwise guidance. Ablations show that the relative-action horizoncoupled formulation provides the larger observed improvement across both obstacle models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09340
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T2I Models Rarely Invert Negation but Often Fail to Suppress Negated Concepts: Benchmarking Negation Suppression in Text-to-Image Generation
2026-11-06 10:56:01Akansha Gautam, Aparna Bharati, Mayank Vatsa, Richa SinghAbstract
Text-to-image diffusion models often fail to suppress explicitly negated concepts, such as a lamp for "a desk without a lamp." We introduce T2I-NSI, a benchmark and metric for measuring negation sensitivity in text-to-image generation. It pairs each negated prompt with a canonical positive counterpart and factorizes negation by linguistic form (lexical/semantic, morphological, syntactic) and target type (objects, attributes, relations, compositions, and nested cases). The benchmark contains 759,869 paired prompt atoms over a 5,082-object catalog, with 916,272 images (911,982 open-weights, 4,290 closed-source), scored by a Basic CLIP estimator and a Robust ensemble of CLIP, VQA and open-vocabulary detection. Negation sensitivity is low: open-weights generators score NSI <= 0.038, while GPT-Image-1.5 and Gemini-2.5-Flash-Image reach about 0.09. The dominant failure is under-suppression rather than misdirection. Inverse interpretation is essentially absent (0.00% across over 450K atom-model evaluations), whereas models render the concept under both prompts on 8-19% of atoms and only partly suppress it on a further 9-25%; most remaining atoms are too weakly rendered to label. A blinded human study (420 atoms, nine annotators) corroborates the near-absence of inversion and the high persistence rate, and a matched-prompt comparison shows the open-versus-closed gap (~3.5x) is not a prompt-generator artifact. Code and data: this https URL
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09304
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MDF++: Visuo-Tactile World Action Model with End-to-end Representation Learning
2026-11-06 10:47:23Zixuan Huang, Jinhao Yu, Zachary Charlick, Dmitry BerensonAbstract
Recently, world-action models (WAMs) have emerged as a powerful framework for robot manipulation. By jointly modeling action generation and future observation prediction, WAMs can act and anticipate the outcomes of the actions. However, existing WAMs typically rely on frozen pretrained encoders trained with reconstruction, which may not produce representations well suited for robot control. In this paper, we tackle the problem of learning physicallygrounded, control-relevant representations for WAMs. We propose MDF++, a visuo-tactile world-action model that learns latent representations of multisensory observations end-to-end with a diffusion backbone. While naive joint training can lead to feature collapse, MDF++ introduces a multi-task learning strategy that leverages cross-modal correlations to learn task-relevant representations. We evaluate MDF++ on a suite of contact-rich manipulation tasks, including realworld bolt screwing and nut mating, and show that it outperforms WAMs built on frozen pretrained representations by up to 50%. Additional videos are available on our website: this http URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09293
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DUET: Dual-Sparse Inference for Block Diffusion Language Models
2026-11-06 09:59:42Siyuan Yan, Shen Gu, Xiaoxing Ma, Chun Cao, Jingwei XuAbstract
Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel token generation through iterative denoising, yet their inference remains costly due to repeated attention over a growing historical prefix and repeated processing of the entire current generation block. Historical attention becomes increasingly expensive as generation progresses, while all current-block positions are propagated through the Transformer at every denoising step even though only a small fraction are typically resolved at that step. In this paper, we introduce Duet, a training-free dual-sparse inference framework that addresses these challenges through prefix Key-Value (KV) sparsity and early query sparsity, respectively. Specifically, Duet exploits the concentration and cross-step stability of historical attention within each generation block to construct a compact historical KV subset that is reused across denoising steps. For query sparsity, Duet predicts update positions from shallow representations and propagates only the corresponding queries through the suffix Transformer layers, avoiding deep computation at positions unlikely to be updated in the current step. Experiments show that Duet maintains competitive accuracy while achieving 1.34$\times$/2.83$\times$ end-to-end/per-step speedups on LLaDA2.1-mini and 2.41$\times$/4.72$\times$ on SDAR-8B-Chat-b32 at a 32K context length.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09239
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Mesh-Agnostic Refinement Models for Latent Space Encoding of 3D Human Body Shapes
2026-11-06 08:03:33Chaima Zouaoui, Jonathan Cerqueira, Sylvain Arguillere, Martin Bauer, Nicolas Charon, Mohamed Daoudi, Emmanuel HartmanAbstract
Parametric human body models such as the Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model provide compact representations of human shape and pose, but their reconstructions remain affected by both errors in estimated latent parameters and limitations in the decoder's expressive capacity. We propose a framework for refining these reconstructions by exploiting the geometric discrepancy between an initial decoded surface and a target mesh, without requiring vertex correspondences between them. The framework comprises three complementary approaches. Latent-VaRefine uses varifold distance gradients to correct the estimated latent code while preserving the original parametric representation. Vertex-VaRefine processes multiscale varifold-gradient features with a DiffusionNet backbone to predict vertex displacements in a canonical pose, yielding an approximately pose-equivariant refinement pipeline. ElaOpt directly optimizes surface deformations under elastic regularization and normal direction constraints. On AMASS, Vertex-VaRefine reduces the mean vertex-to-vertex error of OmniFit reconstructions from 1.181 to 0.342 cm, a 71.0 percent reduction, while combining Latent-VaRefine with ElaOpt reduces the asymmetric Chamfer distance of ArtEq reconstructions from 1.681 to 0.717 cm, a 57.3 percent reduction. Evaluations with SMPL-H and SMPL-X demonstrate the framework's adaptability to different body models, while additional experiments on remeshed targets and raw scans assess its robustness to changes in discretization and geometry beyond the parametric model. These results highlight the complementary strengths of latent space correction, learned vertex refinement, and elastic optimization, offering different trade-offs between preserving the model parameterization and improving geometric fidelity.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03285
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Trajectory Forcing: Exploiting Diffusion Trajectories for Autoregressive Long Video Generation
2026-11-06 07:26:19Bohan Wang, Shuo Chen, Yunzhi Li, Zhaozheng Chen, Junzhe Zhang, Hanwang ZhangAbstract
Autoregressive (AR) modeling is arguably the only way to extend a fixed-length video diffusion model to longer or even streaming videos. However, existing AR diffusion methods use only the previously predicted chunk as context for the next, discarding the intermediate predictions that constitute the chunk's generation history. In contrast, conventional AR models such as LLMs condition on the entire history of preceding tokens. To this end, we propose Trajectory Forcing (TraF), an AR diffusion method that exploits the denoising trajectories of previous video chunks as context. TraF operates under two training regimes: (1) with ground-truth videos, where pseudo-trajectories are constructed from Gaussian interpolations and re-predicted by the model, and (2) with a teacher model, where real trajectories are obtained from the student's own denoising rollout. The first regime naturally provides a strong initialization for the second. On the 5-second VBench benchmark, TraF achieves a Total score of 85.15, outperforming Self Forcing (+0.84) and Causal Forcing (+1.11), with Quality and Semantic improving simultaneously. On 30-second generation---6$\times$ the training horizon---TraF achieves the highest overall quality among all compared methods.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09096
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Emo-LiveSync: Real-Time Universal Lip Synchronization with Explicit Emotion Control
2026-11-06 07:01:35Sangjoon Yu, Seungeun Lee, JoonHeyok Shin, Ji-Su KangAbstract
Lip synchronization, the task of generating realistic lip movements synchronized with audio signals, is fundamental to applications such as film dubbing, virtual avatars, and digital content creation. Recent GAN-based methods offer computational efficiency but often lack visual fidelity, while diffusion-based approaches achieve high-quality results at the cost of substantial computational overhead. Moreover, most existing methods are limited to photo-realistic human faces, restricting their applicability to stylized characters and non-human entities. In this paper, we propose an efficient universal lip-sync video generation framework that achieves high-quality results without compromising computational efficiency. We build on LivePortrait, a warp-based portrait animation model, and introduce a training strategy that aligns audio signals to an implicit motion space by distilling knowledge from a pre-trained video-to-motion model. This enables real-time inference while maintaining high visual fidelity, and naturally generalizes to diverse stylistic characters beyond photo-realistic humans. Furthermore, we introduce an expressive control gate that enables explicit manipulation of emotional expressions for content enrichment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both visual quality and lip-sync accuracy while ensuring real-time inference.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09074
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UniRGBA: Unifying RGB and Alpha in Pretrained Video Diffusion Models
2026-11-06 06:57:20Lei Xu, Zhuo Li, Yongyi Jin, Aoyu WangAbstract
Recent advances in video diffusion models have achieved remarkable photorealistic RGB synthesis, yet generating videos with a native alpha channel remains an open challenge. Existing approaches often rely on matting-style data and non-native RGBA designs, causing them to specialize in real-object scenes and to degrade severely on visual-effect content whose semi-transparency is spatially non-local and non-elliptical. We present UniRGBA, a unified framework whose key insight is that RGBA generation does not require a dedicated alpha encoder or complex latent-space restructuring---a minimal, targeted extension of the existing RGB pathway is sufficient. UniRGBA-VAE extends a causal video VAE to 4-channel RGBA via zero-initialized channel expansion, symmetric selective layer unfreezing (5% trainable), and a six-term progressive reconstruction loss anchored by a KL reference loss that prevents latent drift, followed by a two-stage schedule that introduces a lightweight GAN objective. We then apply standard DoRA to the pretrained DiT, reusing the unified 4-channel latent without any alpha-specific architectural changes. On a visual-effect RGBA benchmark, UniRGBA substantially outperforms Wan-Alpha on RGBA reconstruction while preserving RGB fidelity. For generation, UniRGBA outperforms Wan-Alpha on RGBA text-to-video tasks and matches or surpasses the original pretrained Wan2.1 backbone on RGB-only metrics, demonstrating that native alpha support can be integrated without compromising the underlying RGB prior or the model's architectural versatility.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09069
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TriTD: Tri-Partite Trajectory-Distribution Distillation for Real-Time Autoregressive Video Generation
2026-11-06 05:31:42Jia Li, Xurui Peng, Haowei Zhu, Tianyu Zhao, Jiexi Wang, Youwei Zheng, Yuxi Ren, Xinglong Wu, Xing Wang, Hayden Kwok-Hay SoAbstract
Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion has emerged as a leading paradigm for efficient video generation, yet its practical deployment remains bottlenecked by the trade-off between generation quality and inference efficiency. We attribute this bottleneck to three error sources in AR rollouts: the base model error, the train-inference distribution mismatch, and the upstream error propagation. Building on this decomposition, we derive closed-form upper bounds on the per-step and cumulative errors, providing a principled basis for jointly optimizing generation quality and inference efficiency. Guided by this analysis, we propose TriTD, a Tri-Partite Trajectory-Distribution co-optimized distillation framework with three complementary modules. First, for ODE initialization, we adopt a Next-Node Trajectory Distillation (NTD) objective, which shortens the supervision horizon and admits a lower regression-error floor. Second, we introduce Chunk-Graded Noising (CGN), a monotonically non-decreasing per-chunk noising schedule that helps narrow the expected train-inference noise mismatch and removes redundant KV-cache updates, yielding substantial speedups at no quality cost. Third, we propose Orthogonal-Parallel DMD (OP-DMD), a distribution-matching loss that retains the original DMD supervision while introducing an additional regression constraint in the orthogonal subspace to suppress off-axis drift, improving both training stability and final generation quality. Extensive experiments show that TriTD consistently surpasses existing baselines in visual quality while reaching a real-time throughput of 26.8 FPS on a single H100 GPU, delivering a balanced quality-efficiency solution for interactive streaming video generation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26165
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Structured Visual Landscape: Generating Preferred Representations in Biological and Artificial Neural Networks
2026-11-06 05:00:38Yusong Zhao, Edgar Y. Walker, Hao Wang, Mi LuAbstract
Understanding how neurons respond to visual stimulus is an important question in both deep learning and neuroscience. It has significant implications for enhancing the interpretability of black-box artificial neural networks and for understanding the visual representation in the human brain. We propose a structured visual representations landscape and design an activation-based prior that allows us to effectively regularize the landscape with activations from brain regions or neural network units. Our model Vis-Lens integrates a variational autoencoder and a diffusion model into an image generation framework. It enables the generation of natural, realistic preferred images by directly modifying the activation-regularized latent codes without per-image iterative optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on both artificial neural networks and human visual cortex using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Our framework improves activation modulation and image realism compared with a recent state-of-the-art method for generating preferred visual representations of these neural targets. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.03597
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FANO: Anchored Forward-Noise Optimization for Diffusion Inverse Problems
2026-11-06 03:11:09Shilong Han, Hongxia WangAbstract
Pre-trained diffusion models have become a widely adopted zero-shot prior for image inverse problems, among which annealed decoupling methods achieve leading reconstruction performance on nonlinear tasks. We find, however, that annealed methods that directly optimize the denoiser input $x_t$ exhibit radial drift in later layers: within-layer optimization drives the noise-component norm of $x_t$ away from its typical value, pushing the denoiser out of its high-performance regime and degrading reconstruction quality. To address this, we propose FANO (Anchored Forward-Noise Optimization). At each annealing layer, FANO fixes the previous denoiser estimate as an anchor and optimizes only the forward noise $e$, whose distribution is known, instead of $x_t$, thereby preserving the forward-diffusion structure of the denoiser input. The standard Gaussian prior on $e$ concentrates its norm near the typical value, and deviations degrade denoiser performance. We accordingly decompose $e$ in polar coordinates into a direction and a radial magnitude, and apply a soft potential to regulate the radius, keeping $x_t$ in the high-density region of the forward distribution. On multiple linear and nonlinear inverse problems, FANO matches the strongest current baselines on linear tasks and achieves consistent improvements on nonlinear tasks.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08923
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MotionCore: A Latent Neural Simulator for Video Generation with Rigid-Body Dynamics
2026-11-06 02:45:37Zheng Wang, Zhengwei Gong, Yuanzhi Liang, Chi ZhangAbstract
Video generation models can produce highly realistic videos while generating physically inconsistent object motion. This limitation suggests that visual modeling alone may not provide a transferable representation of physical dynamics. We introduce MotionCore, a framework for learning physical dynamics via a learnable partial differential equation solver and focuses on rigid-body motion. We introduce a latent neural simulator learning to predict the evolution of object-level physical states from observed motion. Its predictions are then converted into spatially aligned latent controls for a controllable video diffusion model. The generator serves as a visual interface: it provides appearance and scene detail, while the learned dynamics model specifies the physical trajectory. To preserve this trajectory through the interface, MotionCore combines a diffusion-matching objective with a low-capacity decodability constraint on object identity and position. We evaluate MotionCore on public physical-consistency benchmarks and on paired data with known trajectories. Results indicate that MotionCore improves physical consistency and trajectory obedience in the evaluated rigid-body settings, while maintaining comparable visual quality. A controlled ablation protocol compares learned dynamics with an analytic prior and studies the choice of latent evolution processor.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08904
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