Evaluating identity preservation in generative models remains a critical yet unresolved challenge. Existing metrics rely on global embeddings or coarse VLM prompting, failing to capture fine-grained identity changes and providing limited diagnostic insight. We introduce Beyond the Pixels, a hierarchical evaluation framework that decomposes identity assessment into feature-level transformations. Our approach guides VLMs through structured reasoning by (1) hierarchically decomposing subjects into (type, style) -> attribute -> feature decision tree, and (2) prompting for concrete transformations rather than abstract similarity scores. This decomposition grounds VLM analysis in verifiable visual evidence, reducing hallucinations and improving consistency. We validate our framework across four state-of-the-art generative models, demonstrating strong alignment with human judgments in measuring identity consistency. Additionally, we introduce a new benchmark specifically designed to stress-test generative models. It comprises 1,078 image-prompt pairs spanning diverse subject types, including underrepresented categories such as anthropomorphic and animated characters, and captures an average of six to seven transformation axes per prompt.

Subject-driven image generation aims to synthesize novel depictions of a specific subject across diverse contexts while preserving its core identity features. Achieving both strong identity consistency and high prompt diversity presents a fundamental trade-off. We propose a LoRA fine-tuned diffusion model employing a latent concatenation strategy, which jointly processes reference and target images, combined with a masked Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) objective. This approach enables robust identity preservation without architectural modifications. To facilitate large-scale training, we introduce a two-stage Distilled Data Curation Framework: the first stage leverages data restoration and VLM-based filtering to create a compact, high-quality seed dataset from diverse sources; the second stage utilizes these cu-rated examples for parameter-efficient fine-tuning, thus scaling the generation capability across various subjects and contexts. Finally, for filtering and quality assessment, we present CHARIS, a fine-grained evaluation framework that performs attribute-level comparisons along five key axes: identity consistency, prompt adherence, region-wise color fidelity, visual quality, and transformation diversity.

While T ext-T o-Video (T2V) models have advanced rapidly, they continue to struggle with generating legible and coherent text within videos. In particular, existing models often fail to render correctly even short phrases or words and previous attempts to address this problem are computationally expensive and not suitable for video generation. In this work, we investigate a lightweight approach to improve T2V diffusion models using synthetic supervision. W e first generate text-rich images using a text-to-image (T2I) diffusion model, then animate them into short videos using a text-agnostic image-to-video (I2v) model. These synthetic video-prompt pairs are used to fine-tune W an2.1, a pre-trained T2V model, without any architectural changes. Our results show improvement in short-text legibility and temporal consistency with emerging structural priors for longer text. These findings suggest that curated synthetic data and weak supervision offer a practical path toward improving textual fidelity in T2V generation.

Face aging has become a crucial task in computer vision, with applications ranging from entertainment to healthcare. However, existing methods struggle with achieving a realistic and seamless transformation across the entire lifespan, especially when handling large age gaps or extreme head poses. The core challenge lies in balancing age accuracy and identity preservation--what we refer to as the Age-ID trade-off. Most prior methods either prioritize age transformation at the expense of identity consistency or vice versa. In this work, we address this issue by proposing a two-pass face aging framework, named Cradle2Cane, based on few-step text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models. The first pass focuses on solving age accuracy by introducing an adaptive noise injection (AdaNI) mechanism. This mechanism is guided by including prompt descriptions of age and gender for the given person as the textual condition. Also, by adjusting the noise level, we can control the strength of aging while allowing more flexibility in transforming the face. However, identity preservation is weakly ensured here to facilitate stronger age transformations. In the second pass, we enhance identity preservation while maintaining age-specific features by conditioning the model on two identity-aware embeddings (IDEmb): SVR-ArcFace and Rotate-CLIP. This pass allows for denoising the transformed image from the first pass, ensuring stronger identity preservation without compromising the aging accuracy. Both passes are jointly trained in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ test dataset, evaluated through Face++ and Qwen-VL protocols, show that our Cradle2Cane outperforms existing face aging methods in age accuracy and identity consistency. Code is available at https://github.com/byliutao/Cradle2Cane.

The exponential growth of the global makeup market has paralleled advancements in virtual makeup simulation technology. Despite the progress led by GANs, their application still encounters significant challenges, including training instability and limited customization capabilities. Addressing these challenges, we introduce DreamMakup - a novel training-free Diffusion model based Makeup Customization method, leveraging the inherent advantages of diffusion models for superior controllability and precise real-image editing. DreamMakeup employs early-stopped DDIM inversion to preserve the facial structure and identity while enabling extensive customization through various conditioning inputs such as reference images, specific RGB colors, and textual descriptions. Our model demonstrates notable improvements over existing GAN-based and recent diffusion-based frameworks - improved customization, color-matching capabilities, identity preservation and compatibility with textual descriptions or LLMs with affordable computational costs.

We populate this space by creating a dataset of over 60,000 models, each of which is a base model fine-tuned to insert a different person's

In this work, we analyze the limitations of two primary techniques in text-to-image personalization: Textual Inversion and DreamBooth.

We tackle the task of any-reference video generation, which aims to synthesize videos conditioned on arbitrary types and combinations of reference subjects, together with textual prompts. This task faces persistent challenges, including identity inconsistency, entanglement among multiple reference subjects, and copy-paste artifacts. To address these issues, we introduce MAGREF, a unified and effective framework for any-reference video generation. Our approach incorporates masked guidance and a subject disentanglement mechanism, enabling flexible synthesis conditioned on diverse reference images and textual prompts. Specifically, masked guidance employs a region-aware masking mechanism combined with pixel-wise channel concatenation to preserve appearance features of multiple subjects along the channel dimension. This design preserves identity consistency and maintains the capabilities of the pre-trained backbone, without requiring any architectural changes. To mitigate subject confusion, we introduce a subject disentanglement mechanism which injects the semantic values of each subject derived from the text condition into its corresponding visual region. Additionally, we establish a four-stage data pipeline to construct diverse training pairs, effectively alleviating copy-paste artifacts. Extensive experiments on a comprehensive benchmark demonstrate that MAGREF consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, paving the way for scalable, controllable, and high-fidelity any-reference video synthesis. Code and model can be found at: https://github.com/MAGREF-Video/MAGREF