Human vs. AI: A Novel Benchmark and a Comparative Study on the Detection of Generated Images and the Impact of Prompts

With the advent of publicly available AI-based text-to-image systems, the process of creating photorealistic but fully synthetic images has been largely democratized. This can pose a threat to the public through a simplified spread of disinformation. Machine detectors and human media expertise can help to differentiate between AI-generated (fake) and real images and counteract this danger. Although AI generation models are highly prompt-dependent, the impact of the prompt on the fake detection performance has rarely been investigated yet. This work therefore examines the influence of the prompt's level of detail on the detectability of fake images, both with an AI detector and in a user study. For this purpose, we create a novel dataset, COCOXGEN, which consists of real photos from the COCO dataset as well as images generated with SDXL and Fooocus using prompts of two standardized lengths. Our user study with 200 participants shows that images generated with longer, more detailed prompts are detected significantly more easily than those generated with short prompts. Similarly, an AI-based detection model achieves better performance on images generated with longer prompts. However, humans and AI models seem to pay attention to different details, as we show in a heat map analysis.

SenCLIP: Enhancing zero-shot land-use mapping for Sentinel-2 with ground-level prompting

Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, demonstrate impressive zero-shot classification capabilities with free-form prompts and even show some generalization in specialized domains. However, their performance on satellite imagery is limited due to the underrepresentation of such data in their training sets, which predominantly consist of ground-level images. Existing prompting techniques for satellite imagery are often restricted to generic phrases like a satellite image of ..., limiting their effectiveness for zero-shot land-use and land-cover (LULC) mapping. To address these challenges, we introduce SenCLIP, which transfers CLIPs representation to Sentinel-2 imagery by leveraging a large dataset of Sentinel-2 images paired with geotagged ground-level photos from across Europe. We evaluate SenCLIP alongside other SOTA remote sensing VLMs on zero-shot LULC mapping tasks using the EuroSAT and BigEarthNet datasets with both aerial and ground-level prompting styles. Our approach, which aligns ground-level representations with satellite imagery, demonstrates significant improvements in classification accuracy across both prompt styles, opening new possibilities for applying free-form textual descriptions in zero-shot LULC mapping.

TryOffAnyone: Tiled Cloth Generation from a Dressed Person

The fashion industry is increasingly leveraging computer vision and deep learning technologies to enhance online shopping experiences and operational efficiencies. In this paper, we address the challenge of generating high-fidelity tiled garment images essential for personalized recommendations, outfit composition, and virtual try-on systems from photos of garments worn by models. Inspired by the success of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in image-to-image translation, we propose a novel approach utilizing a fine-tuned StableDiffusion model. Our method features a streamlined single-stage network design, which integrates garmentspecific masks to isolate and process target clothing items effectively. By simplifying the network architecture through selective training of transformer blocks and removing unnecessary crossattention layers, we significantly reduce computational complexity while achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets like VITON-HD. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in producing high-quality tiled garment images for both full-body and half-body inputs. Code and model are available at: https://github.com/ixarchakos/try-off-anyone

GASP: Gaussian Avatars with Synthetic Priors

Gaussian Splatting has changed the game for real-time photo-realistic rendering. One of the most popular applications of Gaussian Splatting is to create animatable avatars, known as Gaussian Avatars. Recent works have pushed the boundaries of quality and rendering efficiency but suffer from two main limitations. Either they require expensive multi-camera rigs to produce avatars with free-view rendering, or they can be trained with a single camera but only rendered at high quality from this fixed viewpoint. An ideal model would be trained using a short monocular video or image from available hardware, such as a webcam, and rendered from any view. To this end, we propose GASP: Gaussian Avatars with Synthetic Priors. To overcome the limitations of existing datasets, we exploit the pixel-perfect nature of synthetic data to train a Gaussian Avatar prior. By fitting this prior model to a single photo or video and fine-tuning it, we get a high-quality Gaussian Avatar, which supports 360$^\circ$ rendering. Our prior is only required for fitting, not inference, enabling real-time application. Through our method, we obtain high-quality, animatable Avatars from limited data which can be animated and rendered at 70fps on commercial hardware. See our project page (https://microsoft.github.io/GASP/) for results.

Deep Joint Unrolling for Deblurring and Low-Light Image Enhancement (JUDE).pdf

Low-light and blurring issues are prevalent when capturing photos at night, often due to the use of long exposure to address dim environments. Addressing these joint problems can be challenging and error-prone if an end-to-end model is trained without incorporating an appropriate physical model. In this paper, we introduce JUDE, a Deep Joint Unrolling for Deblurring and Low-Light Image Enhancement, inspired by the image physical model. Based on Retinex theory and the blurring model, the low-light blurry input is iteratively deblurred and decomposed, producing sharp low-light reflectance and illuminance through an unrolling mechanism. Additionally, we incorporate various modules to estimate the initial blur kernel, enhance brightness, and eliminate noise in the final image. Comprehensive experiments on LOL-Blur and Real-LOL-Blur demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Deep Lidar-guided Image Deblurring

The rise of portable Lidar instruments, including their adoption in smartphones, opens the door to novel computational imaging techniques. Being an active sensing instrument, Lidar can provide complementary data to passive optical sensors, particularly in situations like low-light imaging where motion blur can affect photos. In this paper, we study if the depth information provided by mobile Lidar sensors is useful for the task of image deblurring and how to integrate it with a general approach that transforms any state-of-the-art neural deblurring model into a depth-aware one. To achieve this, we developed a universal adapter structure that efficiently preprocesses the depth information to modulate image features with depth features. Additionally, we applied a continual learning strategy to pretrained encoder-decoder models, enabling them to incorporate depth information as an additional input with minimal extra data requirements. We demonstrate that utilizing true depth information can significantly boost the effectiveness of deblurring algorithms, as validated on a dataset with real-world depth data captured by a smartphone Lidar.

SAT: Spatial Aptitude Training for Multimodal Language Models

Spatial perception is a fundamental component of intelligence. While many studies highlight that large multimodal language models (MLMs) struggle to reason about space, they only test for static spatial reasoning, such as categorizing the relative positions of objects. Meanwhile, real-world deployment requires dynamic capabilities like perspective-taking and egocentric action recognition. As a roadmap to improving spatial intelligence, we introduce SAT, Spatial Aptitude Training, which goes beyond static relative object position questions to the more dynamic tasks. SAT contains 218K question-answer pairs for 22K synthetic scenes across a training and testing set. Generated using a photo-realistic physics engine, our dataset can be arbitrarily scaled and easily extended to new actions, scenes, and 3D assets. We find that even MLMs that perform relatively well on static questions struggle to accurately answer dynamic spatial questions. Further, we show that SAT instruction-tuning data improves not only dynamic spatial reasoning on SAT, but also zero-shot performance on existing real-image spatial benchmarks: $23\%$ on CVBench, $8\%$ on the harder BLINK benchmark, and $18\%$ on VSR. When instruction-tuned on SAT, our 13B model matches larger proprietary MLMs like GPT4-V and Gemini-3-1.0 in spatial reasoning. Our data/code is available at http://arijitray1993.github.io/SAT/ .

Splatter-360: Generalizable 360$^{\circ}$ Gaussian Splatting for Wide-baseline Panoramic Images

Wide-baseline panoramic images are frequently used in applications like VR and simulations to minimize capturing labor costs and storage needs. However, synthesizing novel views from these panoramic images in real time remains a significant challenge, especially due to panoramic imagery's high resolution and inherent distortions. Although existing 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) methods can produce photo-realistic views under narrow baselines, they often overfit the training views when dealing with wide-baseline panoramic images due to the difficulty in learning precise geometry from sparse 360$^{\circ}$ views. This paper presents \textit{Splatter-360}, a novel end-to-end generalizable 3DGS framework designed to handle wide-baseline panoramic images. Unlike previous approaches, \textit{Splatter-360} performs multi-view matching directly in the spherical domain by constructing a spherical cost volume through a spherical sweep algorithm, enhancing the network's depth perception and geometry estimation. Additionally, we introduce a 3D-aware bi-projection encoder to mitigate the distortions inherent in panoramic images and integrate cross-view attention to improve feature interactions across multiple viewpoints. This enables robust 3D-aware feature representations and real-time rendering capabilities. Experimental results on the HM3D~\cite{hm3d} and Replica~\cite{replica} demonstrate that \textit{Splatter-360} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art NeRF and 3DGS methods (e.g., PanoGRF, MVSplat, DepthSplat, and HiSplat) in both synthesis quality and generalization performance for wide-baseline panoramic images. Code and trained models are available at \url{https://3d-aigc.github.io/Splatter-360/}.

ACQ: A Unified Framework for Automated Programmatic Creativity in Online Advertising

In online advertising, the demand-side platform (a.k.a. DSP) enables advertisers to create different ad creatives for real-time bidding. Intuitively, advertisers tend to create more ad creatives for a single photo to increase the probability of participating in bidding, further enhancing their ad cost. From the perspective of DSP, the following are two overlooked issues. On the one hand, the number of ad creatives cannot grow indefinitely. On the other hand, the marginal effects of ad cost diminish as the number of ad creatives increases. To this end, this paper proposes a two-stage framework named Automated Creatives Quota (ACQ) to achieve the automatic creation and deactivation of ad creatives. ACQ dynamically allocates the creative quota across multiple advertisers to maximize the revenue of the ad platform. ACQ comprises two components: a prediction module to estimate the cost of a photo under different numbers of ad creatives, and an allocation module to decide the quota for photos considering their estimated costs in the prediction module. Specifically, in the prediction module, we develop a multi-task learning model based on an unbalanced binary tree to effectively mitigate the target variable imbalance problem. In the allocation module, we formulate the quota allocation problem as a multiple-choice knapsack problem (MCKP) and develop an efficient solver to solve such large-scale problems involving tens of millions of ads. We performed extensive offline and online experiments to validate the superiority of our proposed framework, which increased cost by 9.34%.

GraPE: A Generate-Plan-Edit Framework for Compositional T2I Synthesis

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant progress with diffusion models, enabling generation of photo-realistic images from text prompts. Despite this progress, existing methods still face challenges in following complex text prompts, especially those requiring compositional and multi-step reasoning. Given such complex instructions, SOTA models often make mistakes in faithfully modeling object attributes, and relationships among them. In this work, we present an alternate paradigm for T2I synthesis, decomposing the task of complex multi-step generation into three steps, (a) Generate: we first generate an image using existing diffusion models (b) Plan: we make use of Multi-Modal LLMs (MLLMs) to identify the mistakes in the generated image expressed in terms of individual objects and their properties, and produce a sequence of corrective steps required in the form of an edit-plan. (c) Edit: we make use of an existing text-guided image editing models to sequentially execute our edit-plan over the generated image to get the desired image which is faithful to the original instruction. Our approach derives its strength from the fact that it is modular in nature, is training free, and can be applied over any combination of image generation and editing models. As an added contribution, we also develop a model capable of compositional editing, which further helps improve the overall accuracy of our proposed approach. Our method flexibly trades inference time compute with performance on compositional text prompts. We perform extensive experimental evaluation across 3 benchmarks and 10 T2I models including DALLE-3 and the latest -- SD-3.5-Large. Our approach not only improves the performance of the SOTA models, by upto 3 points, it also reduces the performance gap between weaker and stronger models. $\href{https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/}{https://dair-iitd.github.io/GraPE/}$