MotionCFG: Boosting Motion Dynamics via Stochastic Concept Perturbation

Despite recent advances in Text-to-Video (T2V) synthesis, generating high-fidelity and dynamic motion remains a significant challenge. Existing methods primarily rely on Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG), often with explicit negative prompts (e.g. "static", "blurry"), to suppress undesired artifacts. However, such explicit negations frequently introduce unintended semantic bias and distort object integrity; a phenomenon we define as Content-Motion Drift. To address this, we propose MotionCFG, a framework that enhances motion dynamics by contrasting a target concept with its noise-perturbed counterparts. Specifically, by injecting Gaussian noise into the concept embeddings, MotionCFG creates localized negative anchors that encapsulate a broad complementary space of sub-optimal motion variations. Unlike explicit negations, this approach facilitates implicit hard negative mining without shifting the global semantic identity, allowing for a focused refinement of temporal details. Combined with a piecewise guidance schedule that confines intervention to the early denoising steps, MotionCFG consistently improves motion dynamics across state-of-the-art T2V frameworks with negligible computational overhead and minimal compromise in visual quality. Additionally, we demonstrate that this noise-induced contrastive mechanism is effective not only for sharpening motion trajectories but also for steering complex, non-linear concepts such as precise object numerosity, which are typically difficult to modulate via standard text-based guidance.

Physics-guided and fabrication-aware inverse design of photonic devices using diffusion models

Designing free-form photonic devices is fundamentally challenging due to the vast number of possible geometries and the complex requirements of fabrication constraints. Traditional inverse-design approaches--whether driven by human intuition, global optimization, or adjoint-based gradient methods--often involve intricate binarization and filtering steps, while recent deep learning strategies demand prohibitively large numbers of simulations (10^5 to 10^6). To overcome these limitations, we present AdjointDiffusion, a physics-guided framework that integrates adjoint sensitivity gradients into the sampling process of diffusion models. AdjointDiffusion begins by training a diffusion network on a synthetic, fabrication-aware dataset of binary masks. During inference, we compute the adjoint gradient of a candidate structure and inject this physics-based guidance at each denoising step, steering the generative process toward high figure-of-merit (FoM) solutions without additional post-processing. We demonstrate our method on two canonical photonic design problems--a bent waveguide and a CMOS image sensor color router--and show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art nonlinear optimizers (such as MMA and SLSQP) in both efficiency and manufacturability, while using orders of magnitude fewer simulations (approximately 2 x 10^2) than pure deep learning approaches (approximately 10^5 to 10^6). By eliminating complex binarization schedules and minimizing simulation overhead, AdjointDiffusion offers a streamlined, simulation-efficient, and fabrication-aware pipeline for next-generation photonic device design. Our open-source implementation is available at https://github.com/dongjin-seo2020/AdjointDiffusion.

Boost-and-Skip: A Simple Guidance-Free Diffusion for Minority Generation

Minority samples are underrepresented instances located in low-density regions of a data manifold, and are valuable in many generative AI applications, such as data augmentation, creative content generation, etc. Unfortunately, existing diffusion-based minority generators often rely on computationally expensive guidance dedicated for minority generation. To address this, here we present a simple yet powerful guidance-free approach called Boost-and-Skip for generating minority samples using diffusion models. The key advantage of our framework requires only two minimal changes to standard generative processes: (i) variance-boosted initialization and (ii) timestep skipping. We highlight that these seemingly-trivial modifications are supported by solid theoretical and empirical evidence, thereby effectively promoting emergence of underrepresented minority features. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Boost-and-Skip greatly enhances the capability of generating minority samples, even rivaling guidance-based state-of-the-art approaches while requiring significantly fewer computations.

MinorityPrompt: Text to Minority Image Generation via Prompt Optimization

We investigate the generation of minority samples using pretrained text-to-image (T2I) latent diffusion models. Minority instances, in the context of T2I generation, can be defined as ones living on low-density regions of text-conditional data distributions. They are valuable for various applications of modern T2I generators, such as data augmentation and creative AI. Unfortunately, existing pretrained T2I diffusion models primarily focus on high-density regions, largely due to the influence of guided samplers (like CFG) that are essential for producing high-quality generations. To address this, we present a novel framework to counter the high-density-focus of T2I diffusion models. Specifically, we first develop an online prompt optimization framework that can encourage the emergence of desired properties during inference while preserving semantic contents of user-provided prompts. We subsequently tailor this generic prompt optimizer into a specialized solver that promotes the generation of minority features by incorporating a carefully-crafted likelihood objective. Our comprehensive experiments, conducted across various types of T2I models, demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the capability to produce high-quality minority instances compared to existing samplers.

Self-Guided Generation of Minority Samples Using Diffusion Models

We present a novel approach for generating minority samples that live on low-density regions of a data manifold. Our framework is built upon diffusion models, leveraging the principle of guided sampling that incorporates an arbitrary energy-based guidance during inference time. The key defining feature of our sampler lies in its \emph{self-contained} nature, \ie, implementable solely with a pretrained model. This distinguishes our sampler from existing techniques that require expensive additional components (like external classifiers) for minority generation. Specifically, we first estimate the likelihood of features within an intermediate latent sample by evaluating a reconstruction loss w.r.t. its posterior mean. The generation then proceeds with the minimization of the estimated likelihood, thereby encouraging the emergence of minority features in the latent samples of subsequent timesteps. To further improve the performance of our sampler, we provide several time-scheduling techniques that properly manage the influence of guidance over inference steps. Experiments on benchmark real datasets demonstrate that our approach can greatly improve the capability of creating realistic low-likelihood minority instances over the existing techniques without the reliance on costly additional elements. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/soobin-um/sg-minority}.

Don't Play Favorites: Minority Guidance for Diffusion Models

We explore the problem of generating minority samples using diffusion models. The minority samples are instances that lie on low-density regions of a data manifold. Generating sufficient numbers of such minority instances is important, since they often contain some unique attributes of the data. However, the conventional generation process of the diffusion models mostly yields majority samples (that lie on high-density regions of the manifold) due to their high likelihoods, making themselves highly ineffective and time-consuming for the task. In this work, we present a novel framework that can make the generation process of the diffusion models focus on the minority samples. We first provide a new insight on the majority-focused nature of the diffusion models: they denoise in favor of the majority samples. The observation motivates us to introduce a metric that describes the uniqueness of a given sample. To address the inherent preference of the diffusion models w.r.t. the majority samples, we further develop minority guidance, a sampling technique that can guide the generation process toward regions with desired likelihood levels. Experiments on benchmark real datasets demonstrate that our minority guidance can greatly improve the capability of generating the low-likelihood minority samples over existing generative frameworks including the standard diffusion sampler.