PairFlow: Closed-Form Source-Target Coupling for Few-Step Generation in Discrete Flow Models

We introduce $\texttt{PairFlow}$, a lightweight preprocessing step for training Discrete Flow Models (DFMs) to achieve few-step sampling without requiring a pretrained teacher. DFMs have recently emerged as a new class of generative models for discrete data, offering strong performance. However, they suffer from slow sampling due to their iterative nature. Existing acceleration methods largely depend on finetuning, which introduces substantial additional training overhead. $\texttt{PairFlow}$ addresses this issue with a lightweight preprocessing step. Inspired by ReFlow and its extension to DFMs, we train DFMs from coupled samples of source and target distributions, without requiring any pretrained teacher. At the core of our approach is a closed-form inversion for DFMs, which allows efficient construction of paired source-target samples. Despite its extremely low cost, taking only up to 1.7% of the compute needed for full model training, $\texttt{PairFlow}$ matches or even surpasses the performance of two-stage training involving finetuning. Furthermore, models trained with our framework provide stronger base models for subsequent distillation, yielding further acceleration after finetuning. Experiments on molecular data as well as binary and RGB images demonstrate the broad applicability and effectiveness of our approach.

MatLat: Material Latent Space for PBR Texture Generation

We propose a generative framework for producing high-quality PBR textures on a given 3D mesh. As large-scale PBR texture datasets are scarce, our approach focuses on effectively leveraging the embedding space and diffusion priors of pretrained latent image generative models while learning a material latent space, MatLat, through targeted fine-tuning. Unlike prior methods that freeze the embedding network and thus lead to distribution shifts when encoding additional PBR channels and hinder subsequent diffusion training, we fine-tune the pretrained VAE so that new material channels can be incorporated with minimal latent distribution deviation. We further show that correspondence-aware attention alone is insufficient for cross-view consistency unless the latent-to-image mapping preserves locality. To enforce this locality, we introduce a regularization in the VAE fine-tuning that crops latent patches, decodes them, and aligns the corresponding image regions to maintain strong pixel-latent spatial correspondence. Ablation studies and comparison with previous baselines demonstrate that our framework improves PBR texture fidelity and that each component is critical for achieving state-of-the-art performance.

Toward Ambulatory Vision: Learning Visually-Grounded Active View Selection

Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering (VQA) but remain limited to snapshot vision, reasoning from static images. In contrast, embodied agents require ambulatory vision, actively moving to obtain more informative views. We introduce Visually Grounded Active View Selection (VG-AVS), a task that selects the most informative next viewpoint using only the visual information in the current image, without relying on scene memory or external knowledge. To support this task, we construct a synthetic dataset with automatically generated paired query-target views and question-answer prompts. We also propose a framework that fine-tunes pretrained VLMs through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by RL-based policy optimization. Our approach achieves strong question answering performance based on viewpoint selection and generalizes robustly to unseen synthetic and real scenes. Furthermore, incorporating our learned VG-AVS framework into existing scene-exploration-based EQA systems improves downstream question-answering accuracy.

BézierFlow: Bézier Stochastic Interpolant Schedulers for Few-Step Generation

We introduce BézierFlow, a lightweight training approach for few-step generation with pretrained diffusion and flow models. BézierFlow achieves a 2-3x performance improvement for sampling with $\leq$ 10 NFEs while requiring only 15 minutes of training. Recent lightweight training approaches have shown promise by learning optimal timesteps, but their scope remains restricted to ODE discretizations. To broaden this scope, we propose learning the optimal transformation of the sampling trajectory by parameterizing stochastic interpolant (SI) schedulers. The main challenge lies in designing a parameterization that satisfies critical desiderata, including boundary conditions, differentiability, and monotonicity of the SNR. To effectively meet these requirements, we represent scheduler functions as Bézier functions, where control points naturally enforce these properties. This reduces the problem to learning an ordered set of points in the time range, while the interpretation of the points changes from ODE timesteps to Bézier control points. Across a range of pretrained diffusion and flow models, BézierFlow consistently outperforms prior timestep-learning methods, demonstrating the effectiveness of expanding the search space from discrete timesteps to Bézier-based trajectory transformations.

Perspective-Aware Reasoning in Vision-Language Models via Mental Imagery Simulation

We present a framework for perspective-aware reasoning in vision-language models (VLMs) through mental imagery simulation. Perspective-taking, the ability to perceive an environment or situation from an alternative viewpoint, is a key benchmark for human-level visual understanding, essential for environmental interaction and collaboration with autonomous agents. Despite advancements in spatial reasoning within VLMs, recent research has shown that modern VLMs significantly lack perspective-aware reasoning capabilities and exhibit a strong bias toward egocentric interpretations. To bridge the gap between VLMs and human perception, we focus on the role of mental imagery, where humans perceive the world through abstracted representations that facilitate perspective shifts. Motivated by this, we propose a framework for perspective-aware reasoning, named Abstract Perspective Change (APC), that effectively leverages vision foundation models, such as object detection, segmentation, and orientation estimation, to construct scene abstractions and enable perspective transformations. Our experiments on synthetic and real-image benchmarks, compared with various VLMs, demonstrate significant improvements in perspective-aware reasoning with our framework, further outperforming fine-tuned spatial reasoning models and novel-view-synthesis-based approaches.

REWIND: Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion with Exemplar-Based Identity Conditioning

We present REWIND (Real-Time Egocentric Whole-Body Motion Diffusion), a one-step diffusion model for real-time, high-fidelity human motion estimation from egocentric image inputs. While an existing method for egocentric whole-body (i.e., body and hands) motion estimation is non-real-time and acausal due to diffusion-based iterative motion refinement to capture correlations between body and hand poses, REWIND operates in a fully causal and real-time manner. To enable real-time inference, we introduce (1) cascaded body-hand denoising diffusion, which effectively models the correlation between egocentric body and hand motions in a fast, feed-forward manner, and (2) diffusion distillation, which enables high-quality motion estimation with a single denoising step. Our denoising diffusion model is based on a modified Transformer architecture, designed to causally model output motions while enhancing generalizability to unseen motion lengths. Additionally, REWIND optionally supports identity-conditioned motion estimation when identity prior is available. To this end, we propose a novel identity conditioning method based on a small set of pose exemplars of the target identity, which further enhances motion estimation quality. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that REWIND significantly outperforms the existing baselines both with and without exemplar-based identity conditioning.

ORIGEN: Zero-Shot 3D Orientation Grounding in Text-to-Image Generation

We introduce ORIGEN, the first zero-shot method for 3D orientation grounding in text-to-image generation across multiple objects and diverse categories. While previous work on spatial grounding in image generation has mainly focused on 2D positioning, it lacks control over 3D orientation. To address this, we propose a reward-guided sampling approach using a pretrained discriminative model for 3D orientation estimation and a one-step text-to-image generative flow model. While gradient-ascent-based optimization is a natural choice for reward-based guidance, it struggles to maintain image realism. Instead, we adopt a sampling-based approach using Langevin dynamics, which extends gradient ascent by simply injecting random noise--requiring just a single additional line of code. Additionally, we introduce adaptive time rescaling based on the reward function to accelerate convergence. Our experiments show that ORIGEN outperforms both training-based and test-time guidance methods across quantitative metrics and user studies.

Inference-Time Scaling for Flow Models via Stochastic Generation and Rollover Budget Forcing

We propose an inference-time scaling approach for pretrained flow models. Recently, inference-time scaling has gained significant attention in LLMs and diffusion models, improving sample quality or better aligning outputs with user preferences by leveraging additional computation. For diffusion models, particle sampling has allowed more efficient scaling due to the stochasticity at intermediate denoising steps. On the contrary, while flow models have gained popularity as an alternative to diffusion models--offering faster generation and high-quality outputs in state-of-the-art image and video generative models--efficient inference-time scaling methods used for diffusion models cannot be directly applied due to their deterministic generative process. To enable efficient inference-time scaling for flow models, we propose three key ideas: 1) SDE-based generation, enabling particle sampling in flow models, 2) Interpolant conversion, broadening the search space and enhancing sample diversity, and 3) Rollover Budget Forcing (RBF), an adaptive allocation of computational resources across timesteps to maximize budget utilization. Our experiments show that SDE-based generation, particularly variance-preserving (VP) interpolant-based generation, improves the performance of particle sampling methods for inference-time scaling in flow models. Additionally, we demonstrate that RBF with VP-SDE achieves the best performance, outperforming all previous inference-time scaling approaches.

Unconditional Priors Matter! Improving Conditional Generation of Fine-Tuned Diffusion Models

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a fundamental technique in training conditional diffusion models. The common practice for CFG-based training is to use a single network to learn both conditional and unconditional noise prediction, with a small dropout rate for conditioning. However, we observe that the joint learning of unconditional noise with limited bandwidth in training results in poor priors for the unconditional case. More importantly, these poor unconditional noise predictions become a serious reason for degrading the quality of conditional generation. Inspired by the fact that most CFG-based conditional models are trained by fine-tuning a base model with better unconditional generation, we first show that simply replacing the unconditional noise in CFG with that predicted by the base model can significantly improve conditional generation. Furthermore, we show that a diffusion model other than the one the fine-tuned model was trained on can be used for unconditional noise replacement. We experimentally verify our claim with a range of CFG-based conditional models for both image and video generation, including Zero-1-to-3, Versatile Diffusion, DiT, DynamiCrafter, and InstructPix2Pix.

VideoHandles: Editing 3D Object Compositions in Videos Using Video Generative Priors

Generative methods for image and video editing use generative models as priors to perform edits despite incomplete information, such as changing the composition of 3D objects shown in a single image. Recent methods have shown promising composition editing results in the image setting, but in the video setting, editing methods have focused on editing object's appearance and motion, or camera motion, and as a result, methods to edit object composition in videos are still missing. We propose \name as a method for editing 3D object compositions in videos of static scenes with camera motion. Our approach allows editing the 3D position of a 3D object across all frames of a video in a temporally consistent manner. This is achieved by lifting intermediate features of a generative model to a 3D reconstruction that is shared between all frames, editing the reconstruction, and projecting the features on the edited reconstruction back to each frame. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first generative approach to edit object compositions in videos. Our approach is simple and training-free, while outperforming state-of-the-art image editing baselines.