HKUST
Abstract:Visual presentations are vital for effective communication. Early attempts to automate their creation using deep learning often faced issues such as poorly organized layouts, inaccurate text summarization, and a lack of image understanding, leading to mismatched visuals and text. These limitations restrict their application in formal contexts like business and scientific research. To address these challenges, we propose PreGenie, an agentic and modular framework powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for generating high-quality visual presentations. PreGenie is built on the Slidev presentation framework, where slides are rendered from Markdown code. It operates in two stages: (1) Analysis and Initial Generation, which summarizes multimodal input and generates initial code, and (2) Review and Re-generation, which iteratively reviews intermediate code and rendered slides to produce final, high-quality presentations. Each stage leverages multiple MLLMs that collaborate and share information. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that PreGenie excels in multimodal understanding, outperforming existing models in both aesthetics and content consistency, while aligning more closely with human design preferences.
Abstract:With the rapid advancement of generative models, general-purpose generation has gained increasing attention as a promising approach to unify diverse tasks across modalities within a single system. Despite this progress, existing open-source frameworks often remain fragile and struggle to support complex real-world applications due to the lack of structured workflow planning and execution-level feedback. To address these limitations, we present ComfyMind, a collaborative AI system designed to enable robust and scalable general-purpose generation, built on the ComfyUI platform. ComfyMind introduces two core innovations: Semantic Workflow Interface (SWI) that abstracts low-level node graphs into callable functional modules described in natural language, enabling high-level composition and reducing structural errors; Search Tree Planning mechanism with localized feedback execution, which models generation as a hierarchical decision process and allows adaptive correction at each stage. Together, these components improve the stability and flexibility of complex generative workflows. We evaluate ComfyMind on three public benchmarks: ComfyBench, GenEval, and Reason-Edit, which span generation, editing, and reasoning tasks. Results show that ComfyMind consistently outperforms existing open-source baselines and achieves performance comparable to GPT-Image-1. ComfyMind paves a promising path for the development of open-source general-purpose generative AI systems. Project page: https://github.com/LitaoGuo/ComfyMind
Abstract:Video-to-audio synthesis, which generates synchronized audio for visual content, critically enhances viewer immersion and narrative coherence in film and interactive media. However, video-to-audio dubbing for long-form content remains an unsolved challenge due to dynamic semantic shifts, temporal misalignment, and the absence of dedicated datasets. While existing methods excel in short videos, they falter in long scenarios (e.g., movies) due to fragmented synthesis and inadequate cross-scene consistency. We propose LVAS-Agent, a novel multi-agent framework that emulates professional dubbing workflows through collaborative role specialization. Our approach decomposes long-video synthesis into four steps including scene segmentation, script generation, sound design and audio synthesis. Central innovations include a discussion-correction mechanism for scene/script refinement and a generation-retrieval loop for temporal-semantic alignment. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce LVAS-Bench, the first benchmark with 207 professionally curated long videos spanning diverse scenarios. Experiments demonstrate superior audio-visual alignment over baseline methods. Project page: https://lvas-agent.github.io
Abstract:Diffusion models have achieved great success in generating 2D images. However, the quality and generalizability of 3D content generation remain limited. State-of-the-art methods often require large-scale 3D assets for training, which are challenging to collect. In this work, we introduce Kiss3DGen (Keep It Simple and Straightforward in 3D Generation), an efficient framework for generating, editing, and enhancing 3D objects by repurposing a well-trained 2D image diffusion model for 3D generation. Specifically, we fine-tune a diffusion model to generate ''3D Bundle Image'', a tiled representation composed of multi-view images and their corresponding normal maps. The normal maps are then used to reconstruct a 3D mesh, and the multi-view images provide texture mapping, resulting in a complete 3D model. This simple method effectively transforms the 3D generation problem into a 2D image generation task, maximizing the utilization of knowledge in pretrained diffusion models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our Kiss3DGen model is compatible with various diffusion model techniques, enabling advanced features such as 3D editing, mesh and texture enhancement, etc. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing its ability to produce high-quality 3D models efficiently.
Abstract:Due to the effective multi-scale feature fusion capabilities of the Path Aggregation FPN (PAFPN), it has become a widely adopted component in YOLO-based detectors. However, PAFPN struggles to integrate high-level semantic cues with low-level spatial details, limiting its performance in real-world applications, especially with significant scale variations. In this paper, we propose MHAF-YOLO, a novel detection framework featuring a versatile neck design called the Multi-Branch Auxiliary FPN (MAFPN), which consists of two key modules: the Superficial Assisted Fusion (SAF) and Advanced Assisted Fusion (AAF). The SAF bridges the backbone and the neck by fusing shallow features, effectively transferring crucial low-level spatial information with high fidelity. Meanwhile, the AAF integrates multi-scale feature information at deeper neck layers, delivering richer gradient information to the output layer and further enhancing the model learning capacity. To complement MAFPN, we introduce the Global Heterogeneous Flexible Kernel Selection (GHFKS) mechanism and the Reparameterized Heterogeneous Multi-Scale (RepHMS) module to enhance feature fusion. RepHMS is globally integrated into the network, utilizing GHFKS to select larger convolutional kernels for various feature layers, expanding the vertical receptive field and capturing contextual information across spatial hierarchies. Locally, it optimizes convolution by processing both large and small kernels within the same layer, broadening the lateral receptive field and preserving crucial details for detecting smaller targets. The source code of this work is available at: https://github.com/yang0201/MHAF-YOLO.
Abstract:Estimating physical properties for visual data is a crucial task in computer vision, graphics, and robotics, underpinning applications such as augmented reality, physical simulation, and robotic grasping. However, this area remains under-explored due to the inherent ambiguities in physical property estimation. To address these challenges, we introduce GaussianProperty, a training-free framework that assigns physical properties of materials to 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we integrate the segmentation capability of SAM with the recognition capability of GPT-4V(ision) to formulate a global-local physical property reasoning module for 2D images. Then we project the physical properties from multi-view 2D images to 3D Gaussians using a voting strategy. We demonstrate that 3D Gaussians with physical property annotations enable applications in physics-based dynamic simulation and robotic grasping. For physics-based dynamic simulation, we leverage the Material Point Method (MPM) for realistic dynamic simulation. For robot grasping, we develop a grasping force prediction strategy that estimates a safe force range required for object grasping based on the estimated physical properties. Extensive experiments on material segmentation, physics-based dynamic simulation, and robotic grasping validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, highlighting its crucial role in understanding physical properties from visual data. Online demo, code, more cases and annotated datasets are available on \href{https://Gaussian-Property.github.io}{this https URL}.
Abstract:We propose PRM, a novel photometric stereo based large reconstruction model to reconstruct high-quality meshes with fine-grained local details. Unlike previous large reconstruction models that prepare images under fixed and simple lighting as both input and supervision, PRM renders photometric stereo images by varying materials and lighting for the purposes, which not only improves the precise local details by providing rich photometric cues but also increases the model robustness to variations in the appearance of input images. To offer enhanced flexibility of images rendering, we incorporate a real-time physically-based rendering (PBR) method and mesh rasterization for online images rendering. Moreover, in employing an explicit mesh as our 3D representation, PRM ensures the application of differentiable PBR, which supports the utilization of multiple photometric supervisions and better models the specular color for high-quality geometry optimization. Our PRM leverages photometric stereo images to achieve high-quality reconstructions with fine-grained local details, even amidst sophisticated image appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PRM significantly outperforms other models.
Abstract:Recent large reconstruction models have made notable progress in generating high-quality 3D objects from single images. However, these methods often struggle with controllability, as they lack information from multiple views, leading to incomplete or inconsistent 3D reconstructions. To address this limitation, we introduce LucidFusion, a flexible end-to-end feed-forward framework that leverages the Relative Coordinate Map (RCM). Unlike traditional methods linking images to 3D world thorough pose, LucidFusion utilizes RCM to align geometric features coherently across different views, making it highly adaptable for 3D generation from arbitrary, unposed images. Furthermore, LucidFusion seamlessly integrates with the original single-image-to-3D pipeline, producing detailed 3D Gaussians at a resolution of $512 \times 512$, making it well-suited for a wide range of applications.
Abstract:In this work, we introduce FlexGen, a flexible framework designed to generate controllable and consistent multi-view images, conditioned on a single-view image, or a text prompt, or both. FlexGen tackles the challenges of controllable multi-view synthesis through additional conditioning on 3D-aware text annotations. We utilize the strong reasoning capabilities of GPT-4V to generate 3D-aware text annotations. By analyzing four orthogonal views of an object arranged as tiled multi-view images, GPT-4V can produce text annotations that include 3D-aware information with spatial relationship. By integrating the control signal with proposed adaptive dual-control module, our model can generate multi-view images that correspond to the specified text. FlexGen supports multiple controllable capabilities, allowing users to modify text prompts to generate reasonable and corresponding unseen parts. Additionally, users can influence attributes such as appearance and material properties, including metallic and roughness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach offers enhanced multiple controllability, marking a significant advancement over existing multi-view diffusion models. This work has substantial implications for fields requiring rapid and flexible 3D content creation, including game development, animation, and virtual reality. Project page: https://xxu068.github.io/flexgen.github.io/.
Abstract:Due to the effective performance of multi-scale feature fusion, Path Aggregation FPN (PAFPN) is widely employed in YOLO detectors. However, it cannot efficiently and adaptively integrate high-level semantic information with low-level spatial information simultaneously. We propose a new model named MAF-YOLO in this paper, which is a novel object detection framework with a versatile neck named Multi-Branch Auxiliary FPN (MAFPN). Within MAFPN, the Superficial Assisted Fusion (SAF) module is designed to combine the output of the backbone with the neck, preserving an optimal level of shallow information to facilitate subsequent learning. Meanwhile, the Advanced Assisted Fusion (AAF) module deeply embedded within the neck conveys a more diverse range of gradient information to the output layer. Furthermore, our proposed Re-parameterized Heterogeneous Efficient Layer Aggregation Network (RepHELAN) module ensures that both the overall model architecture and convolutional design embrace the utilization of heterogeneous large convolution kernels. Therefore, this guarantees the preservation of information related to small targets while simultaneously achieving the multi-scale receptive field. Finally, taking the nano version of MAF-YOLO for example, it can achieve 42.4% AP on COCO with only 3.76M learnable parameters and 10.51G FLOPs, and approximately outperforms YOLOv8n by about 5.1%. The source code of this work is available at: https://github.com/yang-0201/MAF-YOLO.