Abstract:We present \textbf{Echo-Memory}, a controlled study of memory mechanisms in action-conditioned world models. These models generate multi-segment videos from a first frame, text prompt, and camera-action sequence, but their central failure is often memory rather than local image synthesis: after the camera leaves and returns, the scene or salient object may silently change. Existing memory designs are hard to compare because gains are entangled with backbone, training, retrieval, and evaluation differences. Echo-Memory fixes the action-to-video interface and varies only how history is stored and read by the generator. Under a shared video diffusion backbone, optimizer, camera-action representation, sampler, and evaluation pipeline, we compare raw context, compression-based memory, spatial summaries with different read-out paths, and state-space recurrence. This matched matrix separates four otherwise conflated axes: \emph{capacity}, \emph{compression}, \emph{read-out}, and \emph{recurrence}. We also evaluate memory through a three-branch protocol: replay quality, in-domain loop revisit, and open-domain return probes. The branches routinely disagree, showing that replay fidelity is not a sufficient proxy for remembering a world. Three findings follow. Raw context is a strong capacity baseline and improves open-domain return far more than it improves replay metrics. Compactness is not a free substitute for capacity: aggressive spatial and hybrid-compression memories lose the salient evidence needed for return. Finally, block-wise state-space recurrence is the strongest open-domain return mechanism in our matrix, showing that the structure of implicit memory matters as much as the decision to use it. These results provide a compact protocol for studying memory in action world models beyond isolated replay metrics.
Abstract:While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency.
Abstract:We present Echo Infinity, an autoregressive (AR) framework towards real-time infinite video generation that employs a learnable evolving memory to dynamically filter, abstract, and compress any-length history at constant cost. Existing methods mainly curate memory with predefined KV-cache schedules, fixed-ratio heuristic compression, or inference-time RoPE adaptation. These designs inevitably lose historical information and amplify compounding errors due to their limited cache window and ignorance of autoregressive generation noise. Inspired by human memory consolidation, Echo-Infinity replaces handcrafted memory curation with learnable Memory Query, which are updated by attention and a gating mechanism when past frames are evicted from the local window. The queries are optimized end-to-end with the video diffusion transformers (DiTs), forming an evolving memory that supports arbitrary compression ratios with constant computation independent of video length. They also act as a generalizable generation prior, improving quality even when only the optimized initial state is used. We further introduce Unified Relative RoPE Recipe, which anchors the sink frames to start from id 0 and lets the newest frame id grow at most to the DiTs' pretrained maximum temporal RoPE id throughout training and inference, freeing the model from the finite RoPE constraint and closing the train-test RoPE extrapolation gap. In long and short video generation, Echo-Infinity achieves state-of-the-art performance, and, to our knowledge, demonstrates promising 24-hour (>1.3 M frames) real-time rollouts for the first time, suggesting a practical path toward infinite video generation.




Abstract:Traditional cartoon and anime production involves keyframing, inbetweening, and colorization stages, which require intensive manual effort. Despite recent advances in AI, existing methods often handle these stages separately, leading to error accumulation and artifacts. For instance, inbetweening approaches struggle with large motions, while colorization methods require dense per-frame sketches. To address this, we introduce ToonComposer, a generative model that unifies inbetweening and colorization into a single post-keyframing stage. ToonComposer employs a sparse sketch injection mechanism to provide precise control using keyframe sketches. Additionally, it uses a cartoon adaptation method with the spatial low-rank adapter to tailor a modern video foundation model to the cartoon domain while keeping its temporal prior intact. Requiring as few as a single sketch and a colored reference frame, ToonComposer excels with sparse inputs, while also supporting multiple sketches at any temporal location for more precise motion control. This dual capability reduces manual workload and improves flexibility, empowering artists in real-world scenarios. To evaluate our model, we further created PKBench, a benchmark featuring human-drawn sketches that simulate real-world use cases. Our evaluation demonstrates that ToonComposer outperforms existing methods in visual quality, motion consistency, and production efficiency, offering a superior and more flexible solution for AI-assisted cartoon production.
Abstract:Image customization, a crucial technique for industrial media production, aims to generate content that is consistent with reference images. However, current approaches conventionally separate image customization into position-aware and position-free customization paradigms and lack a universal framework for diverse customization, limiting their applications across various scenarios. To overcome these limitations, we propose IC-Custom, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates position-aware and position-free image customization through in-context learning. IC-Custom concatenates reference images with target images to a polyptych, leveraging DiT's multi-modal attention mechanism for fine-grained token-level interactions. We introduce the In-context Multi-Modal Attention (ICMA) mechanism with learnable task-oriented register tokens and boundary-aware positional embeddings to enable the model to correctly handle different task types and distinguish various inputs in polyptych configurations. To bridge the data gap, we carefully curated a high-quality dataset of 12k identity-consistent samples with 8k from real-world sources and 4k from high-quality synthetic data, avoiding the overly glossy and over-saturated synthetic appearance. IC-Custom supports various industrial applications, including try-on, accessory placement, furniture arrangement, and creative IP customization. Extensive evaluations on our proposed ProductBench and the publicly available DreamBench demonstrate that IC-Custom significantly outperforms community workflows, closed-source models, and state-of-the-art open-source approaches. IC-Custom achieves approximately 73% higher human preference across identity consistency, harmonicity, and text alignment metrics, while training only 0.4% of the original model parameters. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/IC_Custom
Abstract:Text-based Person Retrieval (TPR) as a multi-modal task, which aims to retrieve the target person from a pool of candidate images given a text description, has recently garnered considerable attention due to the progress of contrastive visual-language pre-trained model. Prior works leverage pre-trained CLIP to extract person visual and textual features and fully fine-tune the entire network, which have shown notable performance improvements compared to uni-modal pre-training models. However, full-tuning a large model is prone to overfitting and hinders the generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a novel Unified Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) method for Text-based Person Retrieval (UP-Person) to thoroughly transfer the multi-modal knowledge from CLIP. Specifically, UP-Person simultaneously integrates three lightweight PETL components including Prefix, LoRA and Adapter, where Prefix and LoRA are devised together to mine local information with task-specific information prompts, and Adapter is designed to adjust global feature representations. Additionally, two vanilla submodules are optimized to adapt to the unified architecture of TPR. For one thing, S-Prefix is proposed to boost attention of prefix and enhance the gradient propagation of prefix tokens, which improves the flexibility and performance of the vanilla prefix. For another thing, L-Adapter is designed in parallel with layer normalization to adjust the overall distribution, which can resolve conflicts caused by overlap and interaction among multiple submodules. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our UP-Person achieves state-of-the-art results across various person retrieval datasets, including CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES and RSTPReid while merely fine-tuning 4.7\% parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/Liu-Yating/UP-Person.
Abstract:Element-level visual manipulation is essential in digital content creation, but current diffusion-based methods lack the precision and flexibility of traditional tools. In this work, we introduce BlobCtrl, a framework that unifies element-level generation and editing using a probabilistic blob-based representation. By employing blobs as visual primitives, our approach effectively decouples and represents spatial location, semantic content, and identity information, enabling precise element-level manipulation. Our key contributions include: 1) a dual-branch diffusion architecture with hierarchical feature fusion for seamless foreground-background integration; 2) a self-supervised training paradigm with tailored data augmentation and score functions; and 3) controllable dropout strategies to balance fidelity and diversity. To support further research, we introduce BlobData for large-scale training and BlobBench for systematic evaluation. Experiments show that BlobCtrl excels in various element-level manipulation tasks while maintaining computational efficiency, offering a practical solution for precise and flexible visual content creation. Project page: https://liyaowei-stu.github.io/project/BlobCtrl/
Abstract:Text-based person retrieval (TPR) has gained significant attention as a fine-grained and challenging task that closely aligns with practical applications. Tailoring CLIP to person domain is now a emerging research topic due to the abundant knowledge of vision-language pretraining, but challenges still remain during fine-tuning: (i) Previous full-model fine-tuning in TPR is computationally expensive and prone to overfitting.(ii) Existing parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) for TPR lacks of fine-grained feature extraction. To address these issues, we propose Domain-Aware Mixture-of-Adapters (DM-Adapter), which unifies Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) and PETL to enhance fine-grained feature representations while maintaining efficiency. Specifically, Sparse Mixture-of-Adapters is designed in parallel to MLP layers in both vision and language branches, where different experts specialize in distinct aspects of person knowledge to handle features more finely. To promote the router to exploit domain information effectively and alleviate the routing imbalance, Domain-Aware Router is then developed by building a novel gating function and injecting learnable domain-aware prompts. Extensive experiments show that our DM-Adapter achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous methods by a significant margin.




Abstract:Image editing has advanced significantly with the development of diffusion models using both inversion-based and instruction-based methods. However, current inversion-based approaches struggle with big modifications (e.g., adding or removing objects) due to the structured nature of inversion noise, which hinders substantial changes. Meanwhile, instruction-based methods often constrain users to black-box operations, limiting direct interaction for specifying editing regions and intensity. To address these limitations, we propose BrushEdit, a novel inpainting-based instruction-guided image editing paradigm, which leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and image inpainting models to enable autonomous, user-friendly, and interactive free-form instruction editing. Specifically, we devise a system enabling free-form instruction editing by integrating MLLMs and a dual-branch image inpainting model in an agent-cooperative framework to perform editing category classification, main object identification, mask acquisition, and editing area inpainting. Extensive experiments show that our framework effectively combines MLLMs and inpainting models, achieving superior performance across seven metrics including mask region preservation and editing effect coherence.




Abstract:Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: \href{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.