Xinyu Wang, Muhammad Ibrahim, Atif Mansoor +1cs.CV
Generating realistic 3D city environments from remote sensing data is important for simulation, urban planning, and mixed reality, yet existing point cloud generation methods are limited to single objects or bounded indoor scenes and cannot handle the scale, seamless tiling, and partial observability challenges of city-scale generation. We present \ours{}, a multi-stage framework that generates dense, colored point clouds ($10^5$ points per $150\text{m}{\times}150\text{m}$ tile) at city scale, conditioned on satellite imagery, semantic segmentation maps, and digital surface models (DSM). A \emph{Grid-Aligned VAE} encodes each tile into a topology-preserving latent grid where tokens correspond to fixed spatial regions, enabling spatially coherent multi-modal conditioning and compact latent-space edge consistency that implicitly aligns thousands of boundary points for seamless cross-tile generation. A conditional rectified flow model synthesizes geometry latents from the fused multi-modal conditions, and an orientation-aware diffusion colorizer separately handles satellite-visible horizontal surfaces and occluded vertical façades. To support standardized evaluation, we build on public 3D data sources to introduce \emph{City3D-MultiGen}, a benchmark of $163$K densely annotated tiles from Melbourne and London with aligned point clouds, satellite images, semantic maps, and elevation data. Experiments show that \ours{} outperforms adapted point cloud generation baselines across all geometry metrics and produces visually coherent colored point clouds with seamless boundaries over arbitrarily large urban extents. Our benchmark details are available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/e32/City3D-MultiGen
Text-driven human motion synthesis has made substantial development with two core modules of motion representation and generative architecture. For representation, Vector Quantization (VQ)-based methods compress motion data into discrete tokens while latent-based models operate directly in continuous space. However, both of these representations exhibit significant limitations. VQ-based methods suffer from inherent information loss, which compromises the quality, diversity, and generalization of generated motions, while continuous representation on holistic whole-body motion hinders part-level flexibility. For architecture, diffusion and autoregressive diffusion models have demonstrated their superiority, yet the fine-grained controllability over individual body parts is also limited. Thus, we propose a unified spatiotemporally decoupled framework named DeMoDiff, which jointly redesigns representation and architecture. To enhance representation extraction capabilities and offer greater part-level controllability, we present a spatial-temporal VAE that encodes each body joint rather than compressing the whole-body motion into a single latent space. Then, we incorporate spatial-temporal masking and attention mechanisms into an autoregressive diffusion generator, achieving both generative capability and controllable editability. Extensive experiments on the HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and compelling motion generation results. Moreover, our framework demonstrates strong temporal and spatial editing capabilities, further validating its effectiveness. Our project page: https://rex0191.github.io/DeMoDiff/
Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) enables text-to-3D generation by optimizing rendered images with a pretrained diffusion prior, but latent SDS often produces structured color artifacts and high-frequency texture noise. We identify a failure mode of latent SDS caused by VAE-induced pixel drift: the optimized image can move along pixel-space directions that are weakly constrained by the VAE encoder, so its latent representation remains clean and semantically meaningful while the image itself accumulates visible artifacts. We support this diagnosis with controlled 2D SDS experiments, VAE-only optimization, and a simplified analysis showing that encoder-like latent objectives can amplify image-space noise when the inverse mapping to pixels is underconstrained. Motivated by this observation, we propose PixSDS, a lightweight VAE-consistent gradient repair method. PixSDS decodes a latent SDS lookahead step and uses the decoded image as a clean direction for pixel-space optimization, reducing motion in VAE-inconsistent directions without retraining the diffusion model, changing the renderer, or replacing the SDS objective. Experiments in 2D optimization and text-to-3D generation show that PixSDS substantially reduces structured artifacts while preserving semantic content. Code is publicly available at https://sevashasla.github.io/pixsds-webpage/.
Normalizing Flows (NFs) are powerful generative models capable of exact density estimation and sampling. However, their strict invertibility often forces the model to exhaust its capacity on low-level pixel details, hindering the capture of high-level semantic structures. While Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has excelled in representation learning, its integration into generative pipelines has remained largely modular and disjointed. In this paper, we propose MIMFlow, a unified end-to-end framework that jointly optimizes latent semantics, pixel reconstruction, and generative flow. By employing a VAE encoder to infer semantic latent from masked images, MIMFlow achieves a principled decoupling of the generative task: the Normalizing Flow focuses on modeling a simplified, low-frequency semantic manifold, while a specialized decoder handles high-frequency synthesis. This design effectively resolves the inherent capacity bottleneck of NFs, allowing the model to prioritize global structural coherence over redundant noise. Empirical results on ImageNet 256$\times$256 show that MIMFlow-L reaches 71.3\% linear probing accuracy and an FID of 2.50. Despite using only 128 tokens (50\% fewer than standard models), it yields a 32.8\% performance gain over similar-scale NF baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/MIMFlow.
Reconstructing dense 3D scenes from sparse LiDAR point clouds (LiDAR scene completion) is a fundamental challenge in autonomous driving, where diffusion models offer a promising solution. However, existing approaches rely on object-level autoencoders that collapse into unstable global representations at outdoor scale, and suffer from ground truth data corrupted by odometry drift that systematically degrades supervision quality. Furthermore, multi-step diffusion inference incurs prohibitive latency for real-time deployment. We present CloudDiffusion, addressing these issues with three independent components. First, a multi-token Gaussian VAE with cross-attention pooling provides stable scene-scale LiDAR compression as a standalone reconstruction module, avoiding the global-pooling and codebook-collapse failure modes of prior point-cloud autoencoders. Second, an anchor-based ICP ground truth refinement pipeline eliminates drift-induced noise from training supervision, reducing our single-step x0 diffusion teacher's squared Chamfer distance by approximately 16x on SemanticKITTI seq. 08 (0.396 to 0.024 m^2) with no model change (partly aided by the denser, more compact refined references). Third, the same teacher completes scenes in a single x0 step, operating directly in coordinate space, not in the VAE latent. It runs in near real time at 209ms/frame, 65-138x lower inference latency than iterative diffusion baselines. Our results indicate that data quality dominates model design in this regime, and suggest that multi-token latent spaces could serve as a stable first stage for future latent diffusion-based scene completion.
Video diffusion models have significantly advanced portrait video generation, yet their high computational demands limit their use in interactive applications. This work presents a framework for streamable talking portrait video generation conditioned on speech audio and reference images. Designed meticulously for streaming scenarios, it features a causal video VAE for deep latent compression and an autoregressive latent denoising model. Our causal VAE integrates a variable number of reference images as guidance, allowing the network to focus on dynamic information rather than static appearance, thereby enhancing compression efficacy and reconstruction quality. Additionally, we extend the residual auto-encoding paradigm to improve spatial-temporal causality handling in our VAE. The generator is based on a Rectified Flow Transformer architecture and produces video latents in a blockwise auto-regressive manner. Our method enables the real-time generation of high-quality talking portrait videos, achieving speeds significantly faster than baseline models. Furthermore, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that it is on par with or even outperforms these large models in realism, vividness, and video quality.