Daily Papers

Lumina-T2X is a nascent family of Flow-based Large Diffusion Transformers that establishes a unified framework for transforming noise into various modalities, such as images and videos, conditioned on text instructions. Despite its promising capabilities, Lumina-T2X still encounters challenges including training instability, slow inference, and extrapolation artifacts. In this paper, we present Lumina-Next, an improved version of Lumina-T2X, showcasing stronger generation performance with increased training and inference efficiency. We begin with a comprehensive analysis of the Flag-DiT architecture and identify several suboptimal components, which we address by introducing the Next-DiT architecture with 3D RoPE and sandwich normalizations. To enable better resolution extrapolation, we thoroughly compare different context extrapolation methods applied to text-to-image generation with 3D RoPE, and propose Frequency- and Time-Aware Scaled RoPE tailored for diffusion transformers. Additionally, we introduced a sigmoid time discretization schedule to reduce sampling steps in solving the Flow ODE and the Context Drop method to merge redundant visual tokens for faster network evaluation, effectively boosting the overall sampling speed. Thanks to these improvements, Lumina-Next not only improves the quality and efficiency of basic text-to-image generation but also demonstrates superior resolution extrapolation capabilities and multilingual generation using decoder-based LLMs as the text encoder, all in a zero-shot manner. To further validate Lumina-Next as a versatile generative framework, we instantiate it on diverse tasks including visual recognition, multi-view, audio, music, and point cloud generation, showcasing strong performance across these domains. By releasing all codes and model weights, we aim to advance the development of next-generation generative AI capable of universal modeling.

Recent advancements have established Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) as a dominant framework in generative modeling. Building on this success, Lumina-Next achieves exceptional performance in the generation of photorealistic images with Next-DiT. However, its potential for video generation remains largely untapped, with significant challenges in modeling the spatiotemporal complexity inherent to video data. To address this, we introduce Lumina-Video, a framework that leverages the strengths of Next-DiT while introducing tailored solutions for video synthesis. Lumina-Video incorporates a Multi-scale Next-DiT architecture, which jointly learns multiple patchifications to enhance both efficiency and flexibility. By incorporating the motion score as an explicit condition, Lumina-Video also enables direct control of generated videos' dynamic degree. Combined with a progressive training scheme with increasingly higher resolution and FPS, and a multi-source training scheme with mixed natural and synthetic data, Lumina-Video achieves remarkable aesthetic quality and motion smoothness at high training and inference efficiency. We additionally propose Lumina-V2A, a video-to-audio model based on Next-DiT, to create synchronized sounds for generated videos. Codes are released at https://www.github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-Video.

We introduce Lumina-Image 2.0, an advanced text-to-image generation framework that achieves significant progress compared to previous work, Lumina-Next. Lumina-Image 2.0 is built upon two key principles: (1) Unification - it adopts a unified architecture (Unified Next-DiT) that treats text and image tokens as a joint sequence, enabling natural cross-modal interactions and allowing seamless task expansion. Besides, since high-quality captioners can provide semantically well-aligned text-image training pairs, we introduce a unified captioning system, Unified Captioner (UniCap), specifically designed for T2I generation tasks. UniCap excels at generating comprehensive and accurate captions, accelerating convergence and enhancing prompt adherence. (2) Efficiency - to improve the efficiency of our proposed model, we develop multi-stage progressive training strategies and introduce inference acceleration techniques without compromising image quality. Extensive evaluations on academic benchmarks and public text-to-image arenas show that Lumina-Image 2.0 delivers strong performances even with only 2.6B parameters, highlighting its scalability and design efficiency. We have released our training details, code, and models at https://github.com/Alpha-VLLM/Lumina-Image-2.0.

We present Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR), a new generation paradigm that redefines the autoregressive learning on images as coarse-to-fine "next-scale prediction" or "next-resolution prediction", diverging from the standard raster-scan "next-token prediction". This simple, intuitive methodology allows autoregressive (AR) transformers to learn visual distributions fast and generalize well: VAR, for the first time, makes AR models surpass diffusion transformers in image generation. On ImageNet 256x256 benchmark, VAR significantly improve AR baseline by improving Frechet inception distance (FID) from 18.65 to 1.80, inception score (IS) from 80.4 to 356.4, with around 20x faster inference speed. It is also empirically verified that VAR outperforms the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) in multiple dimensions including image quality, inference speed, data efficiency, and scalability. Scaling up VAR models exhibits clear power-law scaling laws similar to those observed in LLMs, with linear correlation coefficients near -0.998 as solid evidence. VAR further showcases zero-shot generalization ability in downstream tasks including image in-painting, out-painting, and editing. These results suggest VAR has initially emulated the two important properties of LLMs: Scaling Laws and zero-shot task generalization. We have released all models and codes to promote the exploration of AR/VAR models for visual generation and unified learning.

Autoregressive (AR) modeling, known for its next-token prediction paradigm, underpins state-of-the-art language and visual generative models. Traditionally, a ``token'' is treated as the smallest prediction unit, often a discrete symbol in language or a quantized patch in vision. However, the optimal token definition for 2D image structures remains an open question. Moreover, AR models suffer from exposure bias, where teacher forcing during training leads to error accumulation at inference. In this paper, we propose xAR, a generalized AR framework that extends the notion of a token to an entity X, which can represent an individual patch token, a cell (a ktimes k grouping of neighboring patches), a subsample (a non-local grouping of distant patches), a scale (coarse-to-fine resolution), or even a whole image. Additionally, we reformulate discrete token classification as continuous entity regression, leveraging flow-matching methods at each AR step. This approach conditions training on noisy entities instead of ground truth tokens, leading to Noisy Context Learning, which effectively alleviates exposure bias. As a result, xAR offers two key advantages: (1) it enables flexible prediction units that capture different contextual granularity and spatial structures, and (2) it mitigates exposure bias by avoiding reliance on teacher forcing. On ImageNet-256 generation benchmark, our base model, xAR-B (172M), outperforms DiT-XL/SiT-XL (675M) while achieving 20times faster inference. Meanwhile, xAR-H sets a new state-of-the-art with an FID of 1.24, running 2.2times faster than the previous best-performing model without relying on vision foundation modules (\eg, DINOv2) or advanced guidance interval sampling.

Effective multi-shot generation demands purposeful, film-like transitions and strict cinematic continuity. Current methods, however, often prioritize basic visual consistency, neglecting crucial editing patterns (e.g., shot/reverse shot, cutaways) that drive narrative flow for compelling storytelling. This yields outputs that may be visually coherent but lack narrative sophistication and true cinematic integrity. To bridge this, we introduce Next Shot Generation (NSG): synthesizing a subsequent, high-quality shot that critically conforms to professional editing patterns while upholding rigorous cinematic continuity. Our framework, Cut2Next, leverages a Diffusion Transformer (DiT). It employs in-context tuning guided by a novel Hierarchical Multi-Prompting strategy. This strategy uses Relational Prompts to define overall context and inter-shot editing styles. Individual Prompts then specify per-shot content and cinematographic attributes. Together, these guide Cut2Next to generate cinematically appropriate next shots. Architectural innovations, Context-Aware Condition Injection (CACI) and Hierarchical Attention Mask (HAM), further integrate these diverse signals without introducing new parameters. We construct RawCuts (large-scale) and CuratedCuts (refined) datasets, both with hierarchical prompts, and introduce CutBench for evaluation. Experiments show Cut2Next excels in visual consistency and text fidelity. Crucially, user studies reveal a strong preference for Cut2Next, particularly for its adherence to intended editing patterns and overall cinematic continuity, validating its ability to generate high-quality, narratively expressive, and cinematically coherent subsequent shots.

Several recent studies have attempted to autoregressively generate continuous speech representations without discrete speech tokens by combining diffusion and autoregressive models, yet they often face challenges with excessive computational loads or suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling (DiTAR), a patch-based autoregressive framework combining a language model with a diffusion transformer. This approach significantly enhances the efficacy of autoregressive models for continuous tokens and reduces computational demands. DiTAR utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy for patch generation, where the language model processes aggregated patch embeddings and the diffusion transformer subsequently generates the next patch based on the output of the language model. For inference, we propose defining temperature as the time point of introducing noise during the reverse diffusion ODE to balance diversity and determinism. We also show in the extensive scaling analysis that DiTAR has superb scalability. In zero-shot speech generation, DiTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in robustness, speaker similarity, and naturalness.

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance across a range of natural language processing tasks, but their deployment comes at a high computational and financial cost. On the other hand, smaller language models (SLMs), which can be deployed on lower-cost edge devices, struggle to match the performance of their larger counterparts. This paper presents a novel hybrid inference approach that leverages the strengths of both model types while minimizing reliance on costly cloud-based LLMs. Unlike existing methods that route entire queries to either an SLM or a cloud LLM, our approach introduces a reward-based mechanism to dynamically determine the involvement of the cloud LLM during token generation. Specifically, each token predicted by the SLM is evaluated against a reward score, and only when this score falls below a certain threshold is the cloud LLM consulted for assistance in the next token prediction. This method not only reduces the traffic to the cloud LLM, thereby lowering costs, but also allows for flexible control over response quality depending on the reward score threshold. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces cloud LLM usage with minimal impact on overall response quality, offering a cost-effective solution for deploying high-performance language models

Recent advances in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate that visual signals can effectively complement sparse action supervisions. However, letting VLA directly predict high-dimensional visual states can distribute model capacity and incur prohibitive training cost, while compressing visual states into more compact supervisory signals inevitably incurs information bottlenecks. Moreover, existing methods often suffer from poor comprehension and reasoning capabilities due to the neglect of language supervision. This paper introduces Mantis, a novel framework featuring a Disentangled Visual Foresight (DVF) to tackle these issues. Specifically, Mantis decouples visual foresight prediction from the backbone with the combination of meta queries and a diffusion Transformer (DiT) head. With the current visual state provided to the DiT via a residual connection, a simple next-state prediction objective enables the meta queries to automatically capture the latent actions that delineate the visual trajectory, and hence boost the learning of explicit actions. The disentanglement reduces the burden of the VLA backbone, enabling it to maintain comprehension and reasoning capabilities through language supervision. Empirically, pretrained on human manipulation videos, robot demonstrations, and image-text pairs, Mantis achieves a 96.7% success rate on LIBERO benchmark after fine-tuning, surpassing powerful baselines while exhibiting high convergence speed. Real-world evaluations show that Mantis outperforms π_{0.5}, a leading open-source VLA model, particularly in instruction-following capability, generalization to unseen instructions, and reasoning ability. Code and weights are released to support the open-source community.