Imane Si Salah, Emile Cribelier, Thomas Veit +2cs.CV
Image acquisition with a camera involves several degradations due to the optical system, sensor, or low-level processing steps. We address blind deblurring in professional photography: we aim to invert unknown isotropic blur without knowledge of the degradation kernel.For such inverse problems,where some high-frequency information is lost, it is challenging to use generative models to produce details that are both photo-realistic and faithful to the input. We propose SuperSharpen, a diffusion-based blind deblurring method offering explicit control over restoration strength through a blur measure. We compare two conditioning strategies: a ControlNet-style adapter on a frozen backbone, and full finetuning of the diffusion prior. Our experiments show that finetuning achieves better fidelity with fewer hallucinated details. We validate our approach on synthetic and real-world blur, demonstrating improved perceptual quality and controllable restoration strength.
Intensity-image reconstruction from event streams remains a challenging problem due to the binary, sparse, and asynchronous nature of event data. This work proposes eBIRD, an event-guided reconstruction framework that combines a DDPM with ControlNet-based conditioning. We analyze generic and specialized diffusion learning strategies for handwritten digit (N-MNIST) and face (RGBE-Gaze) reconstruction using 33ms event windows. On N-MNIST, the general model achieves the best reconstruction quality (MSE 0.0052, SSIM 0.8982, PSNR 23.34dB), whereas the specialized model performs best on RGBE-Gaze (MSE 0.0161, SSIM 0.7605, PSNR 19.08dB). These preliminary results suggest that controllable diffusion models are a promising approach for event-guided intensity-image reconstruction, while highlighting that the preferred learning strategy depends on the reconstruction domain.
Hairstyle transfer aims to synthesize a photorealistic portrait by transplanting the hairstyle from a reference image onto a source subject while preserving the source identity. Recent foundation models show strong generative capability, but they struggle with the zero-shot disentanglement required for precise local editing, often entangling the reference hairstyle with its original identity and pose. Existing diffusion-based pipelines typically decompose the task by first generating a "bald" image from the source and then injecting hairstyle features from the reference. However, we show that this paradigm suffers from a fundamental leakage problem. Identity Leakage in Hairstyle occurs when hairstyle features retain reference identity or pose information, while Flaw Leakage in Bald arises when residual artifacts in the bald image are propagated into the final synthesis. To address both issues, we propose the Dual-Purification Framework (DPF), which introduces two complementary training-time regularizers. Adversarial Hairstyle Purification (AHP) purifies hairstyle features by suppressing identity predictability under a mutual-information-inspired adversarial objective. Contrastive Geometric Purification (CGP) regularizes the ControlNet pathway with a contrastive objective, reducing the model's reliance on geometric artifacts in the bald condition. By jointly purifying the hairstyle representation and geometric pathway, DPF achieves high-fidelity, identity-preserving hairstyle transfer and state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks.
Synthetic data generation has emerged as a powerful tool for improving data scalability in computer vision. Recent diffusion-based pipelines have demonstrated strong photorealism. However, how to enforce precise 3D structure and pose consistency in generated images remains challenging. Existing methods leverage visual prompts such as edge maps to guide diffusion models, but often suffer from over-conditioning artifacts that degrade image realism and limit dataset quality. In this paper, we present a diffusion-based image generation framework that enforces 3D structural alignment while preserving photorealism through adaptive conditioning. Our framework, Adaptive Conditioning for 3D-Aware Synthetic Data Generation (AC3S), introduces a self-supervised visual prompt modulator that dynamically adjusts the strength of ControlNet conditioning, preventing over-conditioning and enabling the diffusion model to retain its generative expressiveness. To further enhance diversity and semantic consistency, we develop a multi-agent vision language model framework that composes detailed and 3D-aware prompts aligned with the underlying geometric structure. Together, these components enable the scalable generation of high-quality synthetic datasets with accurate 2D and 3D annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves image quality and downstream utility.
Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.
Generative AI has advanced the ability to render photorealistic or artistic images, yet it remains limited in a key aspect of human creativity: interpreting ambiguous shapes. This phenomenon, rooted in pareidolia, allows humans to perceive meaningful forms in random patterns such as clouds, stones, or leaves. To computationally replicate this imaginative process, we introduce Visual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Visual-RAG), a framework that generates animal art directly from natural silhouettes. Our method retrieves structurally similar animal shapes from a curated corpus of 28,586 high-quality silhouettes and uses them as reference exemplars to guide diffusion-based generation with ControlNet and IP-Adapter. Ablation studies confirm that shape Context with RANSAC provides the most accurate alignment, while removing shape standardization reduces the inlier ratio to just 13.4\%, underscoring the importance of structural fidelity in Visual-RAG. A user study with 12 participants evaluated the outputs in terms of aesthetics, silhouette fidelity, and overall impression. Results reveal that while Visual-RAG provides plausible interpretations, challenges remain in achieving high perceptual impact. This work lays the foundation for computational pareidolia, showing how machines can contribute to the early stages of imaginative discovery.
Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, Naresh Gurjar, Shashank Baghel +2cs.CV
The state-of-the-art generative models, such as CycleGAN, Pix2Pix, and diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable performance in the face generation task. However, they fail to effectively capture cross-modality semantic information in craniofacial reconstruction when translating from the skull (x-ray) to the face (optical) domain, due to a mismatch in the alignment of structural identity across modalities. To address this issue, we propose Cranio-Diff, a diffusion-based framework for cross-domain cranio-facial reconstruction from 2D X-ray skull images. The proposed approach integrates skull-conditioned structural guidance through ControlNet with biometric text conditioning to generate a face which is more semantically and structurally aligned with the given skull. The proposed Cranio-diff method is evaluated on skull-face dataset obtained from X-ray scans of 120 subjects in lateral and frontal views. To enable controlled evaluation, each face image is synthesised across three age groups (25, 45, 65) and three BMI variations of -10%, baseline and +10%, yielding 4320 paired samples. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only X-ray-face dataset with this magnitude. Extensive experiments showed that the proposed method outperforms recent existing approaches in both generated image quality and retrieval task. Finally, to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, we have evaluated the quality of the generated image using FID, IS, SSIM, LPIPS, PSNR and ArcFace score. Additionally, retrieval performance is evaluated using recall@k, mAP@k and MRR@k. Obtained experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be used as an alternate tool in providing aid in forensic investigations.
Modern video diffusion models excel at appearance synthesis but still struggle with physical consistency: objects drift, collisions lack realistic rebound, and material responses seldom match their underlying properties. We present PhyCo, a framework that introduces continuous, interpretable, and physically grounded control into video generation. Our approach integrates three key components: (i) a large-scale dataset of over 100K photorealistic simulation videos where friction, restitution, deformation, and force are systematically varied across diverse scenarios; (ii) physics-supervised fine-tuning of a pretrained diffusion model using a ControlNet conditioned on pixel-aligned physical property maps; and (iii) VLM-guided reward optimization, where a fine-tuned vision-language model evaluates generated videos with targeted physics queries and provides differentiable feedback. This combination enables a generative model to produce physically consistent and controllable outputs through variations in physical attributes-without any simulator or geometry reconstruction at inference. On the Physics-IQ benchmark, PhyCo significantly improves physical realism over strong baselines, and human studies confirm clearer and more faithful control over physical attributes. Our results demonstrate a scalable path toward physically consistent, controllable generative video models that generalize beyond synthetic training environments.