Sebastian Regalado, Varshanth R. Rao, Ruowei Jiang +2cs.CV cs.AI
Although advancements in face landmark detection (FLD) methods continue to push performance boundaries, they overlook two major functional limitations: (1) different network parameters need to be trained independently for each ``$N$-point'' benchmark dataset, and (2) a model trained on an ``$N$-point'' dataset reliably outputs only the $N$ landmarks. In our work, we first conceptualize Face Part-Anchored Landmark Positions (FPALPs), wherein each landmark is treated as a progression value between zero (start) and one (end) along a face part's contour. Every landmark can be expressed in the FPALP format, irrespective of its source dataset, hence unlocking the ability to unify all ``$N$-point'' datasets into a single dataset. Secondly, we represent each landmark with an FPALP-based query, refine it progressively with a cross-modality decoder, and predict its coordinates based on the final representation. Our approach, called Unified Dynamic FLD, embodies these two design choices and streamlines the landmark detection pipeline by enabling (1) a single model to learn on any number of ``$N$-point'' datasets, and (2) yield any number of specific landmark predictions by loading the designated landmark queries at runtime. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our method delivers these benefits while remaining competitive with, and in several cases outperforming existing state-of-the-art methods.
Modern computer vision pipelines remain fragmented, with tasks such as text-to-image generation, editing, restoration, and classical perception handled by separate models. We study Unified Visual Generation (UVG), where a single model produces diverse image-valued outputs through a unified multimodal interface. While diffusion-based systems dominate UVG due to strong quality and controllability, their iterative sampling incurs substantial inference latency, limiting practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose UniGen-AR, a framework that pairs a general-purpose multi-modal language model (MLLM) with an efficient next-scale visual auto-regressive (VAR) decoder. This design retains the flexibility of MLLM-based conditioning while leveraging the sampling efficiency and latent unification properties of VAR models. In our framework, the MLLM encodes free-form instructions and control signals into a unified sequence, which guides the VAR decoder to generate image-valued outputs for over 15 tasks spanning four families. Empirically, UniGen-AR achieves up to $19 \times$ lower inference latency than diffusion-based baselines while maintaining or improving output quality. Our ablations further reveal that VQ-VAE tokenizer design, particularly codebook size and hierarchy, is a critical factor for VAR scalability in UVG. These results establish visual auto-regressive modeling as a compelling and efficient backbone for unified visual generation. Our project page is at https://zpbao.github.io/projects/unigenar.
Recent advances in diffusion models have shown impressive performance in controllable image generation and dense prediction tasks. However, existing approaches typically treat diffusion-based controllable generation and dense prediction as separate tasks, overlooking the potential benefits of jointly modeling the heterogeneous distributions. In this work, we introduce UniGP, a framework built upon MMDiT, which unifies controllable generation and dense prediction through simple joint training, without the need for complex task-specific designs or losses, while preserving the backbone's versatile priors. By learning controllable generation and prediction under different conditions, our model effectively captures the joint distribution of image-geometry pairs. UniGP is capable of versatile controllable generation, dense prediction, and joint generation. Specifically, the proposed UniGP consists of DUGP and a unified dataset training strategy. The former, following the principle of Occam's razor, uses only a copied image branch of MMDiT to model dense distributions beyond RGB, while the latter integrates heterogeneous datasets into a unified training framework to jointly model generation and perception tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified model surpasses prior unified approaches and performs on par with specialized methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that multi-task joint training provides complementary benefits: generative priors enrich perceptual details, while perceptual learning improves structural alignment in generation.