The 1st PortraitCraft Challenge: A CVPR 2026 Workshop Competition on Portrait Composition Understanding and Generation

This paper presents an overview of the inaugural PortraitCraft Challenge, held as one of the official competitions at CVPR 2026. The challenge focuses on portrait composition understanding and generation, aiming to advance AI research in portrait aesthetics analysis and controllable image synthesis. Unlike existing datasets and tasks that primarily focus on global aesthetic scoring, PortraitCraft introduces a unified evaluation framework comprising two complementary tracks. Track 1 requires models to perform structured portrait composition understanding, and Track 2 requires models to generate portrait images from structured composition descriptions under explicit compositional constraints. To support the challenge, we constructed and publicly released a large-scale portrait composition dataset consisting of approximately 50,000 curated real portrait images, providing multi-level supervision. This report describes the challenge setup, evaluation protocols, dataset composition, and final results, along with an analysis of the technical characteristics of the submitted solutions. The PortraitCraft Challenge provides a standardized and reproducible platform for research on portrait composition understanding and generation, and is expected to foster further progress in the fields of portrait aesthetics and controllable image generation.

ContentV: Efficient Training of Video Generation Models with Limited Compute

Recent advances in video generation demand increasingly efficient training recipes to mitigate escalating computational costs. In this report, we present ContentV, an 8B-parameter text-to-video model that achieves state-of-the-art performance (85.14 on VBench) after training on 256 x 64GB Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for merely four weeks. ContentV generates diverse, high-quality videos across multiple resolutions and durations from text prompts, enabled by three key innovations: (1) A minimalist architecture that maximizes reuse of pre-trained image generation models for video generation; (2) A systematic multi-stage training strategy leveraging flow matching for enhanced efficiency; and (3) A cost-effective reinforcement learning with human feedback framework that improves generation quality without requiring additional human annotations. All the code and models are available at: https://contentv.github.io.

Towards Self-Improvement of Diffusion Models via Group Preference Optimization

Aligning text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown notable improvements in generation quality. However, applying DPO to T2I faces two challenges: the sensitivity of DPO to preference pairs and the labor-intensive process of collecting and annotating high-quality data. In this work, we demonstrate that preference pairs with marginal differences can degrade DPO performance. Since DPO relies exclusively on relative ranking while disregarding the absolute difference of pairs, it may misclassify losing samples as wins, or vice versa. We empirically show that extending the DPO from pairwise to groupwise and incorporating reward standardization for reweighting leads to performance gains without explicit data selection. Furthermore, we propose Group Preference Optimization (GPO), an effective self-improvement method that enhances performance by leveraging the model's own capabilities without requiring external data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GPO is effective across various diffusion models and tasks. Specifically, combining with widely used computer vision models, such as YOLO and OCR, the GPO improves the accurate counting and text rendering capabilities of the Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium by 20 percentage points. Notably, as a plug-and-play method, no extra overhead is introduced during inference.

CascadeV: An Implementation of Wurstchen Architecture for Video Generation

Recently, with the tremendous success of diffusion models in the field of text-to-image (T2I) generation, increasing attention has been directed toward their potential in text-to-video (T2V) applications. However, the computational demands of diffusion models pose significant challenges, particularly in generating high-resolution videos with high frame rates. In this paper, we propose CascadeV, a cascaded latent diffusion model (LDM), that is capable of producing state-of-the-art 2K resolution videos. Experiments demonstrate that our cascaded model achieves a higher compression ratio, substantially reducing the computational challenges associated with high-quality video generation. We also implement a spatiotemporal alternating grid 3D attention mechanism, which effectively integrates spatial and temporal information, ensuring superior consistency across the generated video frames. Furthermore, our model can be cascaded with existing T2V models, theoretically enabling a 4$\times$ increase in resolution or frames per second without any fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/bytedance/CascadeV.