control signal
OmniVCus: Feedforward Subject-driven Video Customization with Multimodal Control Conditions
Existing feedforward subject-driven video customization methods mainly study single-subject scenarios due to the difficulty of constructing multi-subject training data pairs. Another challenging problem that how to use the signals such as depth, mask, camera, and text prompts to control and edit the subject in the customized video is still less explored. In this paper, we first propose a data construction pipeline, VideoCus-Factory, to produce training data pairs for multisubject customization from raw videos without labels and control signals such as depth-to-video and mask-to-video pairs. Based on our constructed data, we develop an Image-Video Transfer Mixed (IVTM) training with image editing data to enable instructive editing for the subject in the customized video. Then we propose a diffusion Transformer framework, OmniVCus, with two embedding mechanisms, Lottery Embedding (LE) and Temporally Aligned Embedding (TAE). LE enables inference with more subjects by using the training subjects to activate more frame embeddings. TAE encourages the generation process to extract guidance from temporally aligned control signals by assigning the same frame embeddings to the control and noise tokens. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Force Prompting: Video Generation Models Can Learn and Generalize Physics-based Control Signals
Recent advances in video generation models have sparked interest in world models capable of simulating realistic environments. While navigation has been wellexplored, physically meaningful interactions that mimic real-world forces remain largely understudied. In this work, we investigate using physical forces as a control signal for video generation and propose force prompts which enable users to interact with images through both localized point forces, such as poking a plant, and global wind force fields, such as wind blowing on fabric. We demonstrate that these force prompts can enable videos to respond realistically to physical control signals by leveraging the visual and motion prior in the original pretrained model, without using any 3D asset or physics simulator at inference. The primary challenge of force prompting is the difficulty in obtaining high quality paired force-video training data, both in the real world due to the difficulty of obtaining force signals, and in synthetic data due to limitations in the visual quality and domain diversity of physics simulators.
CPO: Condition Preference Optimization for Controllable Image Generation
To enhance controllability in text-to-image generation, ControlNet introduces image-based control signals, while ControlNet++ improves pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and the input control signal. To avoid the prohibitive cost of back-propagating through the sampling process, ControlNet++ optimizes only low-noise timesteps (e.g., t < 200) using a single-step approximation, which not only ignores the contribution of high-noise timesteps but also introduces additional approximation errors. A straightforward alternative for optimizing controllability across all timesteps is Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a fine-tuning method that increases model preference for more controllable images (Iw) over less controllable ones (Il). However, due to uncertainty in generative models, it is difficult to ensure that win-lose image pairs differ only in controllability while keeping other factors, such as image quality, fixed. To address this, we propose performing preference learning over control conditions rather than generated images.
Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation with Generative Prior
Existing interpolation methods use pre-trained video diffusion priors to generate intermediate frames between sparsely sampled keyframes. In the absence of 3D geometric guidance, these methods struggle to produce plausible results for complex, articulated human motions and offer limited control over the synthesized dynamics. In this paper, we introduce PoseFuse3DKeyframe Interpolator (PoseFuse3D-KI), a novel framework that integrates 3D human guidance signals into the diffusion process for Controllable Human-centric Keyframe Interpolation (CHKI). To provide rich spatial and structural cues for interpolation, our PoseFuse3D, a 3D-informed control model, features a novel SMPL-X encoder that transforms 3D geometry and shape into the 2D latent conditioning space, alongside a fusion network that integrates these 3D cues with 2D pose embeddings. For evaluation, we build CHKI-Video, a new dataset annotated with both 2D poses and 3DSMPL-X parameters. We show that PoseFuse3D-KI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on CHKI-Video, achieving a 9% improvement in PSNR and a 38% reduction in LPIPS. Comprehensive ablations demonstrate that our PoseFuse3D model improves interpolation fidelity.
OmniVCus: Feedforward Subject-driven Video Customization with Multimodal Control Conditions
Existing feedforward subject-driven video customization methods mainly study single-subject scenarios due to the difficulty of constructing multi-subject training data pairs. Another challenging problem that how to use the signals such as depth, mask, camera, and text prompts to control and edit the subject in the customized video is still less explored. In this paper, we first propose a data construction pipeline, VideoCus-Factory, to produce training data pairs for multi-subject customization from raw videos without labels and control signals such as depth-to-video and mask-to-video pairs. Based on our constructed data, we develop an Image-Video Transfer Mixed (IVTM) training with image editing data to enable instructive editing for the subject in the customized video. Then we propose a diffusion Transformer framework, OmniVCus, with two embedding mechanisms, Lottery Embedding (LE) and Temporally Aligned Embedding (TAE). LE enables inference with more subjects by using the training subjects to activate more frame embeddings. TAE encourages the generation process to extract guidance from temporally aligned control signals by assigning the same frame embeddings to the control and noise tokens. Experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.
Force Prompting: Video Generation Models Can Learn And Generalize Physics-based Control Signals
Recent advances in video generation models have sparked interest in world models capable of simulating realistic environments. While navigation has been well-explored, physically meaningful interactions that mimic real-world forces remain largely understudied. In this work, we investigate using physical forces as a control signal for video generation and propose force prompts which enable users to interact with images through both localized point forces, such as poking a plant, and global wind force fields, such as wind blowing on fabric. We demonstrate that these force prompts can enable videos to respond realistically to physical control signals by leveraging the physical prior in the original pretrained model, without using any 3D asset or physics simulator at inference. The primary challenge of force prompting is the difficulty in obtaining high quality paired force-video training data, both in the real world due to the difficulty of obtaining force signals, and in synthetic data due to limitations in the visual quality and domain diversity of physics simulators.
CPO: Condition Preference Optimization for Controllable Image Generation
To enhance controllability in text-to-image generation, ControlNet introduces image-based control signals, while ControlNet++ improves pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images and the input control signal. To avoid the prohibitive cost of back-propagating through the sampling process, ControlNet++ optimizes only low-noise timesteps (e.g., $t < 200$) using a single-step approximation, which not only ignores the contribution of high-noise timesteps but also introduces additional approximation errors. A straightforward alternative for optimizing controllability across all timesteps is Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a fine-tuning method that increases model preference for more controllable images ($I^{w}$) over less controllable ones ($I^{l}$). However, due to uncertainty in generative models, it is difficult to ensure that win--lose image pairs differ only in controllability while keeping other factors, such as image quality, fixed. To address this, we propose performing preference learning over control conditions rather than generated images.
Probabilistic inverse optimal control for non-linear partially observable systems disentangles perceptual uncertainty and behavioral costs
Inverse optimal control can be used to characterize behavior in sequential decisionmaking tasks. Most existing work, however, is limited to fully observable or linear systems, or requires the action signals to be known. Here, we introduce a probabilistic approach to inverse optimal control for partially observable stochastic non-linear systems with unobserved action signals, which unifies previous approaches to inverse optimal control with maximum causal entropy formulations. Using an explicit model of the noise characteristics of the sensory and motor systems of the agent in conjunction with local linearization techniques, we derive an approximate likelihood function for the model parameters, which can be computed within a single forward pass.
Symplectic Inductive Bias for Data-Driven Target Reachability in Hamiltonian Systems
Ouyang, Zhuo, Liu, Jixian, Mallada, Enrique
Inductive bias refers to restrictions on the hypothesis class that enable a learning method to generalize effectively from limited data. A canonical example in control is linearity, which underpins low sample-complexity guarantees for stabilization and optimal control. For general nonlinear dynamics, by contrast, guarantees often rely on smoothness assumptions (e.g., Lipschitz continuity) which, when combined with covering arguments, can lead to data requirements that grow exponentially with the ambient dimension. In this paper we argue that data-efficient nonlinear control demands exploiting inductive bias embedded in nature itself, namely, structure imposed by physical laws. Focusing on Hamiltonian systems, we leverage symplectic geometry and intrinsic recurrence on energy level sets to solve target reachability problems. Our approach combines the recurrence property with a recently proposed class of policies, called chain policies, which composes locally certified trajectory segments extracted from demonstrations to achieve target reachability. We provide sufficient conditions for reachability under this construction and show that the resulting data requirements depend on explicit geometric and recurrence properties of the Hamiltonian rather than the state dimension.