VDE accelerates rectified flow models like Flux by 3.22x with LPIPS of 0.069 via velocity decomposition into parallel/orthogonal components plus periodic full-pass anchoring.
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Z-Image: An Efficient Image Generation Foundation Model with Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer
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abstract
The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently dominated by proprietary systems, such as Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0. Leading open-source alternatives, including Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-Image-3.0 and FLUX.2, are characterized by massive parameter counts (20B to 80B), making them impractical for inference, and fine-tuning on consumer-grade hardware. To address this gap, we propose Z-Image, an efficient 6B-parameter foundation generative model built upon a Scalable Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) architecture that challenges the "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm. By systematically optimizing the entire model lifecycle -- from a curated data infrastructure to a streamlined training curriculum -- we complete the full training workflow in just 314K H800 GPU hours (approx. $630K). Our few-step distillation scheme with reward post-training further yields Z-Image-Turbo, offering both sub-second inference latency on an enterprise-grade H800 GPU and compatibility with consumer-grade hardware (<16GB VRAM). Additionally, our omni-pre-training paradigm also enables efficient training of Z-Image-Edit, an editing model with impressive instruction-following capabilities. Both qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our model achieves performance comparable to or surpassing that of leading competitors across various dimensions. Most notably, Z-Image exhibits exceptional capabilities in photorealistic image generation and bilingual text rendering, delivering results that rival top-tier commercial models, thereby demonstrating that state-of-the-art results are achievable with significantly reduced computational overhead. We publicly release our code, weights, and online demo to foster the development of accessible, budget-friendly, yet state-of-the-art generative models.
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- abstract The landscape of high-performance image generation models is currently dominated by proprietary systems, such as Nano Banana Pro and Seedream 4.0. Leading open-source alternatives, including Qwen-Image, Hunyuan-Image-3.0 and FLUX.2, are characterized by massive parameter counts (20B to 80B), making them impractical for inference, and fine-tuning on consumer-grade hardware. To address this gap, we propose Z-Image, an efficient 6B-parameter foundation generative model built upon a Scalable Single-Stream Diffusion Transformer (S3-DiT) architecture that challenges the "scale-at-all-costs" paradigm
co-cited works
years
2026 73representative citing papers
Aurora introduces a VLM-based agent that converts raw user video edit requests into structured conditioning inputs for a unified diffusion transformer, improving performance on underspecified tasks via a new benchmark.
ChangeFlow reformulates remote sensing change detection as latent rectified-flow mask synthesis, reaching 80.4% average F1 across four benchmarks with 1.3-point gain and sampling-based ensembling.
ImageAttributionBench is a benchmark dataset demonstrating that state-of-the-art image attribution methods lack robustness to image degradation and fail to generalize to semantically disjoint domains.
AsymFlow uses rank-asymmetric velocity prediction to reach 1.57 FID on ImageNet 256x256 and enables finetuning of latent flow models into superior pixel-space text-to-image generators.
RevealLayer decomposes natural images into multiple RGBA layers using diffusion models with region-aware attention, occlusion-guided adaptation, and a composite loss, outperforming prior methods on a new benchmark dataset.
A method using attention head vectors detects and suppresses risky content generation in Diffusion Transformers at inference time.
Weblica scales RL training for visual web agents by building thousands of reproducible environments through HTTP caching for stable replays and LLM synthesis from real sites, yielding an 8B model that beats similar open baselines on navigation benchmarks.
Unfine-tuned MLLMs outperform fine-tuned models on remote sensing image captioning when captions are scored by their ability to reconstruct the source image, and a training-free self-correction method achieves SOTA performance.
A two-stage fine-tuning strategy on pre-trained generative models enables effective texture filtering that outperforms prior methods on challenging cases.
GDMD replaces raw-sample rewards with distillation-gradient rewards in RL-guided diffusion distillation, yielding 4-step models that surpass their multi-step teachers on GenEval and human preference metrics.
CT-1 transfers spatial reasoning from vision-language models to estimate camera trajectories, which are then used in a video diffusion model with wavelet regularization to produce controllable videos, claiming 25.7% better accuracy than prior methods.
A 300K quadruplet dataset and UniDG foundation model enable reference- or text-driven defect generation across categories, outperforming few-shot baselines on anomaly detection tasks.
FlowGuard detects unsafe content during diffusion image generation via linear latent decoding and curriculum learning, outperforming prior methods by over 30% F1 while reducing GPU memory by 97% and projection time to 0.2 seconds.
SurFITR is a new collection of 137k+ surveillance-style forged images that causes existing detectors to degrade while enabling substantial gains when used for training in both in-domain and cross-domain settings.
Chorus accelerates video DiT serving up to 45% via inter-request caching reuse in a three-stage denoising strategy with token-guided attention amplification.
Gen-Searcher is the first trained search-augmented image generation agent using SFT followed by GRPO reinforcement learning with dual text-image rewards, delivering 15-16 point gains on knowledge-intensive benchmarks.
DiNa-LRM introduces a diffusion-native latent reward model using a noise-calibrated Thurstone likelihood on noisy states, matching VLM performance at lower compute in image alignment and preference optimization.
A cascaded LoRA diffusion pipeline in UV space with cross-intrinsic attention and differentiable BRDF shading produces 4K PBR avatar assets from single images after training on under 100 scans.
Qwen-Image-Agent is a unified agent framework that progressively builds sufficient generation context for T2I models via Context-Aware Planning and Context Grounding, achieving SOTA on IA-Bench, Mindbench, and WISE-Verified.
NTRK is a reward-guided diffusion sampler that uses a whitening operator to bias the noise term toward high-reward outcomes, outperforming baselines with up to 20x fewer sampling steps on aesthetic tasks.
Representation Forcing enables end-to-end pixel-space unified multimodal models by making visual representation prediction a native autoregressive generation target that guides subsequent pixel diffusion in the same backbone.
GenClaw introduces a three-stage code-driven workflow for agentic image generation that inserts programmatic sketches between linguistic reasoning and pixel synthesis.
RT-Lynx shifts DiT sparsity from weights to activations, reports up to 1.55x linear-layer speedup while preserving generation quality across multiple diffusion models.
citing papers explorer
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VDE: Training-Free Accelerating Rectified Flow Model via Velocity Decomposition and Estimation
VDE accelerates rectified flow models like Flux by 3.22x with LPIPS of 0.069 via velocity decomposition into parallel/orthogonal components plus periodic full-pass anchoring.
-
Aurora: Unified Video Editing with a Tool-Using Agent
Aurora introduces a VLM-based agent that converts raw user video edit requests into structured conditioning inputs for a unified diffusion transformer, improving performance on underspecified tasks via a new benchmark.
-
ChangeFlow -- Latent Rectified Flow for Change Detection in Remote Sensing
ChangeFlow reformulates remote sensing change detection as latent rectified-flow mask synthesis, reaching 80.4% average F1 across four benchmarks with 1.3-point gain and sampling-based ensembling.
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ImageAttributionBench: How Far Are We from Generalizable Attribution?
ImageAttributionBench is a benchmark dataset demonstrating that state-of-the-art image attribution methods lack robustness to image degradation and fail to generalize to semantically disjoint domains.
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Asymmetric Flow Models
AsymFlow uses rank-asymmetric velocity prediction to reach 1.57 FID on ImageNet 256x256 and enables finetuning of latent flow models into superior pixel-space text-to-image generators.
-
RevealLayer: Disentangling Hidden and Visible Layers via Occlusion-Aware Image Decomposition
RevealLayer decomposes natural images into multiple RGBA layers using diffusion models with region-aware attention, occlusion-guided adaptation, and a composite loss, outperforming prior methods on a new benchmark dataset.
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What Concepts Lie Within? Detecting and Suppressing Risky Content in Diffusion Transformers
A method using attention head vectors detects and suppresses risky content generation in Diffusion Transformers at inference time.
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Weblica: Scalable and Reproducible Training Environments for Visual Web Agents
Weblica scales RL training for visual web agents by building thousands of reproducible environments through HTTP caching for stable replays and LLM synthesis from real sites, yielding an 8B model that beats similar open baselines on navigation benchmarks.
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Evaluating Remote Sensing Image Captions Beyond Metric Biases
Unfine-tuned MLLMs outperform fine-tuned models on remote sensing image captioning when captions are scored by their ability to reconstruct the source image, and a training-free self-correction method achieves SOTA performance.
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Generative Texture Filtering
A two-stage fine-tuning strategy on pre-trained generative models enables effective texture filtering that outperforms prior methods on challenging cases.
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Guiding Distribution Matching Distillation with Gradient-Based Reinforcement Learning
GDMD replaces raw-sample rewards with distillation-gradient rewards in RL-guided diffusion distillation, yielding 4-step models that surpass their multi-step teachers on GenEval and human preference metrics.
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CT-1: Vision-Language-Camera Models Transfer Spatial Reasoning Knowledge to Camera-Controllable Video Generation
CT-1 transfers spatial reasoning from vision-language models to estimate camera trajectories, which are then used in a video diffusion model with wavelet regularization to produce controllable videos, claiming 25.7% better accuracy than prior methods.
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Large-Scale Universal Defect Generation: Foundation Models and Datasets
A 300K quadruplet dataset and UniDG foundation model enable reference- or text-driven defect generation across categories, outperforming few-shot baselines on anomaly detection tasks.
-
FlowGuard: Towards Lightweight In-Generation Safety Detection for Diffusion Models via Linear Latent Decoding
FlowGuard detects unsafe content during diffusion image generation via linear latent decoding and curriculum learning, outperforming prior methods by over 30% F1 while reducing GPU memory by 97% and projection time to 0.2 seconds.
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SurFITR: A Dataset for Surveillance Image Forgery Detection and Localisation
SurFITR is a new collection of 137k+ surveillance-style forged images that causes existing detectors to degrade while enabling substantial gains when used for training in both in-domain and cross-domain settings.
-
Beyond Few-Step Inference: Accelerating Video Diffusion Transformer Model Serving with Inter-Request Caching Reuse
Chorus accelerates video DiT serving up to 45% via inter-request caching reuse in a three-stage denoising strategy with token-guided attention amplification.
-
Gen-Searcher: Reinforcing Agentic Search for Image Generation
Gen-Searcher is the first trained search-augmented image generation agent using SFT followed by GRPO reinforcement learning with dual text-image rewards, delivering 15-16 point gains on knowledge-intensive benchmarks.
-
Beyond VLM-Based Rewards: Diffusion-Native Latent Reward Modeling
DiNa-LRM introduces a diffusion-native latent reward model using a noise-calibrated Thurstone likelihood on noisy states, matching VLM performance at lower compute in image alignment and preference optimization.
-
Monocular Avatar Reconstruction via Cascaded Diffusion Priors and UV-Space Differentiable Shading
A cascaded LoRA diffusion pipeline in UV space with cross-intrinsic attention and differentiable BRDF shading produces 4K PBR avatar assets from single images after training on under 100 scans.
-
Qwen-Image-Agent: Bridging the Context Gap in Real-World Image Generation
Qwen-Image-Agent is a unified agent framework that progressively builds sufficient generation context for T2I models via Context-Aware Planning and Context Grounding, achieving SOTA on IA-Bench, Mindbench, and WISE-Verified.
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NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment
NTRK is a reward-guided diffusion sampler that uses a whitening operator to bias the noise term toward high-reward outcomes, outperforming baselines with up to 20x fewer sampling steps on aesthetic tasks.
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Representation Forcing for Bottleneck-Free Unified Multimodal Models
Representation Forcing enables end-to-end pixel-space unified multimodal models by making visual representation prediction a native autoregressive generation target that guides subsequent pixel diffusion in the same backbone.
-
GenClaw: Code-Driven Agentic Image Generation
GenClaw introduces a three-stage code-driven workflow for agentic image generation that inserts programmatic sketches between linguistic reasoning and pixel synthesis.
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RT-Lynx: Putting the GEMM Sparsity In a Right Way for Diffusion Models
RT-Lynx shifts DiT sparsity from weights to activations, reports up to 1.55x linear-layer speedup while preserving generation quality across multiple diffusion models.
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Reinforcing Few-step Generators via Reward-Tilted Distribution Matching
RTDMD unifies KL minimization to a reward-tilted teacher into distribution matching plus reward terms, using AC-DMD in stage one and hybrid GRPO-style gradients plus SubGRPO in stage two to reach new SOTA on preference, aesthetic, and compositional metrics with 4-step generation on SD3, SD3.5, and F
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PiD: Fast and High-Resolution Latent Decoding with Pixel Diffusion
PiD is a pixel diffusion decoder that performs latent-to-pixel conversion and 4-8x upsampling in one generative step, enabling early stopping of latent diffusion and achieving sub-second 2048x2048 decoding with claimed better fidelity than cascaded baselines.
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TextSculptor: Training and Benchmarking Scene Text Editing
TextSculptor supplies an automated data synthesis pipeline yielding 3.2M samples plus a four-task benchmark that raises open-source scene text editing performance.
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Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers
DAR replaces residual addition in DiTs with learnable, timestep-adaptive aggregation of sublayer outputs, yielding 2.11 FID improvement on SiT-XL/2 and 8.75x faster convergence on ImageNet 256x256.
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TextAlign: Preference Alignment for Text Rendering with Hierarchical Rewards
TextAlign uses a hierarchical VLM reward for preference alignment to boost text accuracy in generative models like FLUX.1-dev.
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Sketch Then Paint: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion Multi-Modal Large Language Models
Proposes HT-GRPO with sketch-then-paint staged updates, prompt-conditioned importance ratios, and hierarchical credit assignment for dMLLMs, reporting gains on GenEval and DPG plus quality metrics.
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Unlocking Complex Visual Generation via Closed-Loop Verified Reasoning
CLVR framework adds closed-loop visual verification, proxy prompt reinforcement learning, and delta-space weight merge to improve complex text-to-image generation over single-step or unverified multi-step baselines.
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MiVE: Multiscale Vision-language features for reference-guided video Editing
MiVE repurposes VLMs as multiscale feature extractors integrated into a unified self-attention Diffusion Transformer for reference-guided video editing, claiming top human preference scores over prior methods.
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Skill-Aligned Annotation for Reliable Evaluation in Text-to-Image Generation
Skill-aligned annotation improves inter-annotator agreement and evaluation stability in text-to-image generation compared to uniform annotation baselines.
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Early Semantic Grounding in Image Editing Models for Zero-Shot Referring Image Segmentation
Pretrained instruction-based image editing models exhibit early foreground-background separability that enables a training-free framework for zero-shot referring image segmentation using a single denoising step.
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UniCustom: Unified Visual Conditioning for Multi-Reference Image Generation
A unified visual conditioning approach fuses semantic and appearance features before VLM processing, with two-stage training and slot-wise regularization, to improve consistency in multi-reference image generation.
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L2P: Unlocking Latent Potential for Pixel Generation
L2P repurposes pre-trained LDMs for direct pixel generation via large-patch tokenization and shallow-layer training on synthetic data, matching source performance with 8-GPU training and enabling native 4K output.
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HiDream-O1-Image: A Natively Unified Image Generative Foundation Model with Pixel-level Unified Transformer
A pixel-space Diffusion Transformer with Unified Transformer architecture unifies image generation, editing, and personalization in an end-to-end model that maps all inputs to a shared token space and scales from 8B to over 200B parameters.
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Generative 3D Gaussians with Learned Density Control
DeG models 3D Gaussians via learned octree density and uses VecSeq Sobol re-indexing to turn set generation into sequence modeling, claiming SOTA quality in single-image-to-3D.
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SCOPE: Structured Decomposition and Conditional Skill Orchestration for Complex Image Generation
SCOPE maintains semantic commitments via structured specifications and conditional skill orchestration, achieving 0.60 EGIP on the new Gen-Arena benchmark while outperforming baselines on WISE-V and MindBench.
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DynT2I-Eval: A Dynamic Evaluation Framework for Text-to-Image Models
DynT2I-Eval creates fresh prompts via dimension decomposition and dynamic sampling to evaluate text-to-image models on text alignment, quality, and aesthetics while maintaining a stable leaderboard.
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D-OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Continuously Tuning Step-Distilled Diffusion Models
D-OPSD formulates supervised fine-tuning of step-distilled diffusion models as on-policy self-distillation by having the model act as both teacher (with multimodal context) and student (with text-only context) on its own roll-outs.
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LIVEditor-14B: Lightning Unified Video Editing via In-Context Sparse Attention
LIVEditor-14B applies a new sparse attention method (ISA) that prunes context and uses query-sharpness routing to cut attention latency ~60% with no loss in editing quality on standard benchmarks.
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Tuna-2: Pixel Embeddings Beat Vision Encoders for Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Tuna-2 shows that direct pixel embeddings can replace vision encoders in unified multimodal models, achieving competitive generation and stronger understanding at scale.
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LLaDA2.0-Uni: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Diffusion Large Language Model
LLaDA2.0-Uni unifies multimodal understanding and generation inside one discrete diffusion large language model with a semantic tokenizer, MoE backbone, and diffusion decoder.
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CoInteract: Physically-Consistent Human-Object Interaction Video Synthesis via Spatially-Structured Co-Generation
CoInteract adds a human-aware mixture-of-experts and spatially-structured co-generation to a diffusion transformer to synthesize videos with stable structures and physically plausible human-object contacts.
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Any3DAvatar: Fast and High-Quality Full-Head 3D Avatar Reconstruction from Single Portrait Image
Any3DAvatar reconstructs full-head 3D Gaussian avatars from one image via one-step denoising on a Plücker-aware scaffold plus auxiliary view supervision, beating prior single-image methods on fidelity while running substantially faster.
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Generative Refinement Networks for Visual Synthesis
GRN uses hierarchical binary quantization and entropy-guided refinement to set new ImageNet records of 0.56 rFID for reconstruction and 1.81 gFID for class-conditional generation while releasing code and models.
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Continuous Adversarial Flow Models
Continuous adversarial flow models replace MSE in flow matching with adversarial training via a discriminator, improving guidance-free FID on ImageNet from 8.26 to 3.63 for SiT and similar gains for JiT and text-to-image benchmarks.
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APE: Agentic Prompt Enhancer for Image Generation and Editing
APE post-trains small language models as single-agent or multi-agent prompt enhancers that improve visual alignment on image generation and editing benchmarks without altering the downstream visual model.
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GenEvolve: Self-Evolving Image Generation Agents via Tool-Orchestrated Visual Experience Distillation
GenEvolve introduces a self-evolving agent framework for image generation using tool-orchestrated trajectories and Visual Experience Distillation to achieve claimed SOTA results on benchmarks.