SeFi-Image: A Text-to-Image Foundation Model with Semantic-First Diffusion

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.22568

Code: https://github.com/jmliu206/SeFi-Image

Model: https://huggingface.co/SeFi-Image

Project Page: https://jmliu206.github.io/sefi-web/

Abstract

>Training image generation foundation models consumes substantial resources. Previous methods have attempted to leverage semantic guidance to accelerate the training process, yet their experiments were only conducted on simple datasets such as ImageNet, at low resolutions, and with small-scale models. In this paper, we propose SeFi-Image, a text-to-image foundation model built upon semantic-first diffusion, a novel latent diffusion modeling paradigm. We instantiate SeFi-Image at three model scales, 1B, 2B, and 5B parameters, enabling systematic study of scaling behavior and flexible deployment under varying compute budgets. Notably, our largest 5B model was trained with merely 125K A800 GPU hours, corresponding to roughly 10-20% of the training compute used by Z-Image. However, it achieves results comparable to or even superior to Qwen-Image and Z-Image. Despite this modest training compute, SeFi-Image achieves strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, including GenEval, DPG, LongTextBench, OneIG, and CVTG-2K. Moreover, we provide DMD2-distilled few-step turbo variants for each model scale to accommodate diverse hardware constraints and latency requirements. We publicly release our code, weights and hope this work offers the community useful insights into semantic-guided diffusion modeling for T2I generation, while also providing practical and readily deployable model options.

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reddit.com
u/ninjasaid13 — 2 months ago

InterleaveThinker: Reinforcing Agentic Interleaved Generation

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.13679

Code: https://github.com/zhengdian1/InterleaveThinker

Abstract

>Recent image generators have demonstrated impressive photorealism and instruction-following capabilities in single-image generation and editing. However, constrained by their architectures, they cannot achieve interleaved generation (text-image sequence), which has crucial applications in visual narratives, guidance, and embodied manipulation. Even the latest open-source Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) exhibit limited performance in this regard. In this paper, we introduce InterleaveThinker, the first multi-agent pipeline designed to endow any existing image generator with interleaved generation capabilities. Specifically, we employ a planner agent to organize the image-text input sequence, instructing the image generator on the required execution at each step. Subsequently, we introduce a critic agent to evaluate the generator's outputs, identify samples that deviate from the planned instructions, and refine the instructions for regeneration. To implement this pipeline, we construct the Interleave-Planner-SFT-80k and Interleave-Critic-SFT-112k to perform a format cold-start. Then we develop Interleave-Critic-RL-13k to reinforce the step-wise instruction correction capability within a generation trajectory using GRPO. Since a single interleaved generation trajectory may involve over 25 generator calls, optimizing the entire trajectory is computationally impractical. Therefore, we propose accuracy reward and step-wise reward, allowing single-step RL to effectively guide the entire generation trajectory. The results show that InterleaveThinker improves performance across various image generators. On interleaved generation benchmarks, it achieves performance comparable to Nano Banana and GPT-5. Surprisingly, it also significantly enhances the base model on reasoning-based benchmarks; for example, on 4-step FLUX.2-klein, we observe substantial gains on WISE and RISE.

u/ninjasaid13 — 2 months ago

i1: A Simple and Fully Open-Source Recipe for Strong Text-to-Image Models

Code: https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1

Abstract

>Diffusion models have consistently driven progress in text-to-image generation. However, it is challenging to attribute recent progress to specific modeling and data choices: state-of-the-art open-weight models provide limited ablations, and do not disclose their training data and full training details. The research community needs fully open (weights, data, and code) models as a foundation for further research; yet existing fully open models still fall significantly short of leading models in performance. In this project, we conduct a systematic investigation of the modeling and data design choices in text-to-image diffusion training and inference with 300+ controlled experiments totaling 700K+ TPU v6e hours. Our experiments highlight several empirical findings (e.g., equal weighting is a strong default for mixing curated datasets) and simple design decisions (e.g., larger text encoder adapters improve performance with minimal added parameters) for training strong models. Guided by these insights, we train i1, a 3B-parameter text-to-image diffusion model using only publicly available datasets. i1 is competitive with leading models on five representative benchmarks (GenEval, DPG, PRISM, CVTG-2K, and LongText), and outperforms the best existing fully open model by 29.5 absolute percentage points on average. We provide the i1 checkpoints, training and inference code, and the data processing pipeline. Together, our findings and the i1 recipe establish a practical foundation for future open research in text-to-image diffusion models. Our code is available at https://github.com/zlab-princeton/i1.

u/ninjasaid13 — 2 months ago

Asymmetric Flow Models

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12964

Abstract

>Flow-based generation in high-dimensional spaces is difficult because velocity prediction requires modeling high-dimensional noise, even when data has strong low-rank structure. We present Asymmetric Flow Modeling (AsymFlow), a rank-asymmetric velocity parameterization that restricts noise prediction to a low-rank subspace while keeping data prediction full-dimensional. From this asymmetric prediction, AsymFlow analytically recovers the full-dimensional velocity without changing the network architecture or training/sampling procedures. On ImageNet 256256, AsymFlow achieves a leading 1.57 FID, outperforming prior DiT/JiT-like pixel diffusion models by a large margin. AsymFlow also provides the first-ever route for finetuning pretrained latent flow models into pixel-space models: aligning the low-rank pixel subspace to the latent space gives a seamless initialization that preserves the latent model's high-level semantics and structure, so finetuning mainly improves low-level mismatches rather than relearning pixel generation. We show that the pixel AsymFlow model finetuned from FLUX.2 klein 9B establishes a new state of the art for pixel-space text-to-image generation, beating its latent base on HPSv3, DPG-Bench, and GenEval while qualitatively showing substantially improved visual realism.

u/ninjasaid13 — 3 months ago

Alice v1: Distillation-Enhanced Video Generation Surpassing Closed-Source Models

Code: https://github.com/mirage-video/Alice

Model: https://huggingface.co/gomirageai/Alice-T2V-14B-MoE

Abstract

>Wepresent Alice v1, a 14-billion parameter open-source video generation model that achieves state-of-the-art quality through consistency distillation with score regularization (rCM). Contrary to conventional distillation-which trades quality for speed-we demonstrate that rCM-based distillation can exceed teacher model quality. We attribute this to three mechanisms: (1) the score regularization term acts as a mode-seeking objective that concentrates probability mass on high-quality outputs rather than covering the full teacher distribution, (2) our targeted synthetic data pipeline with hard example mining provides training signal specifically for failure modes (physics, hands, faces) that the teacher handles inconsistently, and (3) consistency enforcement acts as implicit regularization, eliminating "lucky path" dependence on specific noise samples. Alice v1 generates 5-second 720p videos at 24fps in 4 denoising steps (~8 seconds on H100), a 7x speedup over the 50-step teacher while improving VBench score from 84.0 (Wan2.2) to 91.2. This surpasses both the teacher and closed-source systems including Veo3 (~90) and Sora2 (~88) on automated benchmarks, with competitive results in human preference studies. We release all model weights, training code, synthetic data pipelines, and evaluation scripts to advance open research in video generation.

arxiv.org
u/ninjasaid13 — 3 months ago

Abstract

>Animatable 3D assets, defined as geometry equipped with an articulated skeleton and skinning weights, are fundamental to interactive graphics, embodied agents, and animation production. While recent 3D generative models can synthesize visually plausible shapes from images, the results are typically static. Obtaining usable rigs via post-hoc auto-rigging is brittle and often produces skeletons that are topologically inconsistent with the generated geometry. We present AniGen, a unified framework that directly generates animate-ready 3D assets conditioned on a single image. Our key insight is to represent shape, skeleton, and skinning as mutually consistent S^(3) Fields (Shape, Skeleton, Skin) defined over a shared spatial domain. To enable the robust learning of these fields, we introduce two technical innovations: (i) a confidence-decaying skeleton field that explicitly handles the geometric ambiguity of bone prediction at Voronoi boundaries, and (ii) a dual skin feature field that decouples skinning weights from specific joint counts, allowing a fixed-architecture network to predict rigs of arbitrary complexity. Built upon a two-stage flow-matching pipeline, AniGen first synthesizes a sparse structural scaffold and then generates dense geometry and articulation in a structured latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AniGen substantially outperforms state-of-the-art sequential baselines in rig validity and animation quality, generalizing effectively to in-the-wild images across diverse categories including animals, humanoids, and machinery.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08746

Project Page: https://yihua7.github.io/AniGen_web/

Code: https://github.com/VAST-AI-Research/AniGen

Demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/VAST-AI/AniGen

u/ninjasaid13 — 4 months ago