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.

Compositional Customized Image Generation aims to customize multiple target concepts within generation content, which has gained attention for its wild application. Existing approaches mainly concentrate on the target entity's appearance preservation, while neglecting the fine-grained interaction control among target entities. To enable the model of such interaction control capability, we focus on human object interaction scenario and propose the task of Customized Human Object Interaction Image Generation(CHOI), which simultaneously requires identity preservation for target human object and the interaction semantic control between them. Two primary challenges exist for CHOI:(1)simultaneous identity preservation and interaction control demands require the model to decompose the human object into self-contained identity features and pose-oriented interaction features, while the current HOI image datasets fail to provide ideal samples for such feature-decomposed learning.(2)inappropriate spatial configuration between human and object may lead to the lack of desired interaction semantics. To tackle it, we first process a large-scale dataset, where each sample encompasses the same pair of human object involving different interactive poses. Then we design a two-stage model Interact-Custom, which firstly explicitly models the spatial configuration by generating a foreground mask depicting the interaction behavior, then under the guidance of this mask, we generate the target human object interacting while preserving their identities features. Furthermore, if the background image and the union location of where the target human object should appear are provided by users, Interact-Custom also provides the optional functionality to specify them, offering high content controllability. Extensive experiments on our tailored metrics for CHOI task demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.