Poster design is a critical medium for visual communication. Prior work has explored automatic poster design using deep learning techniques, but these approaches lack text accuracy, user customization, and aesthetic appeal, limiting their applicability in artistic domains such as movies and exhibitions, where both clear content delivery and visual impact are essential. To address these limitations, we present POSTA: a modular framework powered by diffusion models and multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for customized artistic poster generation. The framework consists of three modules. Background Diffusion creates a themed background based on user input. Design MLLM then generates layout and typography elements that align with and complement the background style. Finally, to enhance the poster's aesthetic appeal, ArtText Diffusion applies additional stylization to key text elements. The final result is a visually cohesive and appealing poster, with a fully modular process that allows for complete customization. To train our models, we develop the PosterArt dataset, comprising high-quality artistic posters annotated with layout, typography, and pixel-level stylized text segmentation. Our comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates POSTA's exceptional controllability and design diversity, outperforming existing models in both text accuracy and aesthetic quality.

Fine-grained control of text-to-image diffusion transformer models (DiT) remains a critical challenge for practical deployment. While recent advances such as OminiControl and others have enabled a controllable generation of diverse control signals, these methods face significant computational inefficiency when handling long conditional inputs. We present OminiControl2, an efficient framework that achieves efficient image-conditional image generation. OminiControl2 introduces two key innovations: (1) a dynamic compression strategy that streamlines conditional inputs by preserving only the most semantically relevant tokens during generation, and (2) a conditional feature reuse mechanism that computes condition token features only once and reuses them across denoising steps. These architectural improvements preserve the original framework's parameter efficiency and multi-modal versatility while dramatically reducing computational costs. Our experiments demonstrate that OminiControl2 reduces conditional processing overhead by over 90% compared to its predecessor, achieving an overall 5.9$\times$ speedup in multi-conditional generation scenarios. This efficiency enables the practical implementation of complex, multi-modal control for high-quality image synthesis with DiT models.

Dataset distillation (DD) has emerged as a promising approach to compress datasets and speed up model training. However, the underlying connections among various DD methods remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce UniDD, a spectral filtering framework that unifies diverse DD objectives. UniDD interprets each DD objective as a specific filter function that affects the eigenvalues of the feature-feature correlation (FFC) matrix and modulates the frequency components of the feature-label correlation (FLC) matrix. In this way, UniDD reveals that the essence of DD fundamentally lies in matching frequency-specific features. Moreover, according to the filter behaviors, we classify existing methods into low-frequency matching and high-frequency matching, encoding global texture and local details, respectively. However, existing methods rely on fixed filter functions throughout distillation, which cannot capture the low- and high-frequency information simultaneously. To address this limitation, we further propose Curriculum Frequency Matching (CFM), which gradually adjusts the filter parameter to cover both low- and high-frequency information of the FFC and FLC matrices. Extensive experiments on small-scale datasets, such as CIFAR-10/100, and large-scale datasets, including ImageNet-1K, demonstrate the superior performance of CFM over existing baselines and validate the practicality of UniDD.

Dataset distillation and dataset pruning are two prominent techniques for compressing datasets to improve computational and storage efficiency. Despite their overlapping objectives, these approaches are rarely compared directly. Even within each field, the evaluation protocols are inconsistent across various methods, which complicates fair comparisons and hinders reproducibility. Considering these limitations, we introduce in this paper a benchmark that equitably evaluates methodologies across both distillation and pruning literatures. Notably, our benchmark reveals that in the mainstream dataset distillation setting for large-scale datasets, which heavily rely on soft labels from pre-trained models, even randomly selected subsets can achieve surprisingly competitive performance. This finding suggests that an overemphasis on soft labels may be diverting attention from the intrinsic value of the image data, while also imposing additional burdens in terms of generation, storage, and application. To address these issues, we propose a new framework for dataset compression, termed Prune, Combine, and Augment (PCA), which focuses on leveraging image data exclusively, relies solely on hard labels for evaluation, and achieves state-of-the-art performance in this setup. By shifting the emphasis back to the images, our benchmark and PCA framework pave the way for more balanced and accessible techniques in dataset compression research. Our code is available at: https://github.com/ArmandXiao/Rethinking-Dataset-Compression

In this paper, we introduce OminiControl, a highly versatile and parameter-efficient framework that integrates image conditions into pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models. At its core, OminiControl leverages a parameter reuse mechanism, enabling the DiT to encode image conditions using itself as a powerful backbone and process them with its flexible multi-modal attention processors. Unlike existing methods, which rely heavily on additional encoder modules with complex architectures, OminiControl (1) effectively and efficiently incorporates injected image conditions with only ~0.1% additional parameters, and (2) addresses a wide range of image conditioning tasks in a unified manner, including subject-driven generation and spatially-aligned conditions such as edges, depth, and more. Remarkably, these capabilities are achieved by training on images generated by the DiT itself, which is particularly beneficial for subject-driven generation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that OminiControl outperforms existing UNet-based and DiT-adapted models in both subject-driven and spatially-aligned conditional generation. Additionally, we release our training dataset, Subjects200K, a diverse collection of over 200,000 identity-consistent images, along with an efficient data synthesis pipeline to advance research in subject-consistent generation.

One-shot Federated learning (FL) is a powerful technology facilitating collaborative training of machine learning models in a single round of communication. While its superiority lies in communication efficiency and privacy preservation compared to iterative FL, one-shot FL often compromises model performance. Prior research has primarily focused on employing data-free knowledge distillation to optimize data generators and ensemble models for better aggregating local knowledge into the server model. Prior research has primarily focused on employing datafree knowledge distillation to optimize data generators and ensemble models for better aggregating local knowledge into the server model. However, these methods typically struggle with data heterogeneity, where inconsistent local data distributions can cause teachers to provide misleading knowledge. Additionally, they may encounter scalability issues with complex datasets due to inherent twostep information loss: first, during local training (from data to model), and second, when transferring knowledge to the server model (from model to inversed data). In this paper, we propose FedSD2C, a novel and practical one-shot FL framework designed to address these challenges. FedSD2C introduces a distiller to synthesize informative distillates directly from local data to reduce information loss and proposes sharing synthetic distillates instead of inconsistent local models to tackle data heterogeneity. Our empirical results demonstrate that FedSD2C consistently outperforms other one-shot FL methods with more complex and real datasets, achieving up to 2.6 the performance of the best baseline.

Single domain generalization (single DG) aims at learning a robust model generalizable to unseen domains from only one training domain, making it a highly ambitious and challenging task. State-of-the-art approaches have mostly relied on data augmentations, such as adversarial perturbation and style enhancement, to synthesize new data and thus increase robustness. Nevertheless, they have largely overlooked the underlying coherence between the augmented domains, which in turn leads to inferior results in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective scheme, termed as \emph{StyDeSty}, to explicitly account for the alignment of the source and pseudo domains in the process of data augmentation, enabling them to interact with each other in a self-consistent manner and further giving rise to a latent domain with strong generalization power. The heart of StyDeSty lies in the interaction between a \emph{stylization} module for generating novel stylized samples using the source domain, and a \emph{destylization} module for transferring stylized and source samples to a latent domain to learn content-invariant features. The stylization and destylization modules work adversarially and reinforce each other. During inference, the destylization module transforms the input sample with an arbitrary style shift to the latent domain, in which the downstream tasks are carried out. Specifically, the location of the destylization layer within the backbone network is determined by a dedicated neural architecture search (NAS) strategy. We evaluate StyDeSty on multiple benchmarks and demonstrate that it yields encouraging results, outperforming the state of the art by up to {13.44%} on classification accuracy. Codes are available here: https://github.com/Huage001/StyDeSty.

The proliferation of large-scale AI models trained on extensive datasets has revolutionized machine learning. With these models taking on increasingly central roles in various applications, the need to understand their behavior and enhance interpretability has become paramount. To investigate the impact of changes in training data on a pre-trained model, a common approach is leave-one-out retraining. This entails systematically altering the training dataset by removing specific samples to observe resulting changes within the model. However, retraining the model for each altered dataset presents a significant computational challenge, given the need to perform this operation for every dataset variation. In this paper, we introduce an efficient framework for assessing data impact, comprising offline training and online evaluation stages. During the offline training phase, we approximate the influence of training data on the target model through a distilled synset, formulated as a reversed gradient matching problem. For online evaluation, we expedite the leave-one-out process using the synset, which is then utilized to compute the attribution matrix based on the evaluation objective. Experimental evaluations, including training data attribution and assessments of data quality, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves comparable model behavior evaluation while significantly speeding up the process compared to the direct retraining method.

Brain decoding, a pivotal field in neuroscience, aims to reconstruct stimuli from acquired brain signals, primarily utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Currently, brain decoding is confined to a per-subject-per-model paradigm, limiting its applicability to the same individual for whom the decoding model is trained. This constraint stems from three key challenges: 1) the inherent variability in input dimensions across subjects due to differences in brain size; 2) the unique intrinsic neural patterns, influencing how different individuals perceive and process sensory information; 3) limited data availability for new subjects in real-world scenarios hampers the performance of decoding models. In this paper, we present a novel approach, MindBridge, that achieves cross-subject brain decoding by employing only one model. Our proposed framework establishes a generic paradigm capable of addressing these challenges by introducing biological-inspired aggregation function and novel cyclic fMRI reconstruction mechanism for subject-invariant representation learning. Notably, by cycle reconstruction of fMRI, MindBridge can enable novel fMRI synthesis, which also can serve as pseudo data augmentation. Within the framework, we also devise a novel reset-tuning method for adapting a pretrained model to a new subject. Experimental results demonstrate MindBridge's ability to reconstruct images for multiple subjects, which is competitive with dedicated subject-specific models. Furthermore, with limited data for a new subject, we achieve a high level of decoding accuracy, surpassing that of subject-specific models. This advancement in cross-subject brain decoding suggests promising directions for wider applications in neuroscience and indicates potential for more efficient utilization of limited fMRI data in real-world scenarios. Project page: https://littlepure2333.github.io/MindBridge

Recent success of deep learning is largely attributed to the sheer amount of data used for training deep neural networks.Despite the unprecedented success, the massive data, unfortunately, significantly increases the burden on storage and transmission and further gives rise to a cumbersome model training process. Besides, relying on the raw data for training \emph{per se} yields concerns about privacy and copyright. To alleviate these shortcomings, dataset distillation~(DD), also known as dataset condensation (DC), was introduced and has recently attracted much research attention in the community. Given an original dataset, DD aims to derive a much smaller dataset containing synthetic samples, based on which the trained models yield performance comparable with those trained on the original dataset. In this paper, we give a comprehensive review and summary of recent advances in DD and its application. We first introduce the task formally and propose an overall algorithmic framework followed by all existing DD methods. Next, we provide a systematic taxonomy of current methodologies in this area, and discuss their theoretical interconnections. We also present current challenges in DD through extensive experiments and envision possible directions for future works.