Author name cluster

Ao Ma

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11 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

AutoPP: Towards Automated Product Poster Generation and Optimization

Jiahao Fan
Yuxin Qin
Wei Feng
Yanyin Chen
Yaoyu Li
Ao Ma
Yixiu Li
Li Zhuang

Product posters blend striking visuals with informative text to highlight the product and capture customer attention. However, crafting appealing posters and manually optimizing them based on online performance is laborious and resource-consuming. To address this, we introduce AutoPP, an automated pipeline for product poster generation and optimization that eliminates the need for human intervention. Specifically, the generator, relying solely on basic product information, first uses a unified design module to integrate the three key elements of a poster (background, text, and layout) into a cohesive output. Then, an element rendering module encodes these elements into condition tokens, efficiently and controllably generating the product poster. Based on the generated poster, the optimizer enhances its Click-Through Rate (CTR) by leveraging online feedback. It systematically replaces elements to gather fine-grained CTR comparisons and utilizes Isolated Direct Preference Optimization (IDPO) to attribute CTR gains to isolated elements. Our work is supported by AutoPP1M, the largest dataset specifically designed for product poster generation and optimization, which contains one million high-quality posters and feedback collected from over one million users. Experiments demonstrate that AutoPP achieves state-of-the-art results in both offline and online settings.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

ICM-Fusion: In-Context Meta-Optimized LoRA Fusion for Multi-Task Adaptation

Yihua Shao
Xiaofeng Lin
Xinwei Long
Siyu Chen
Minxi Yan
Yang Liu
Ziyang Yan
Ao Ma

Enabling multi-task adaptation in pre-trained Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) models is crucial for enhancing their generalization capabilities. Most existing pre-trained LoRA fusion methods decompose weight matrices, sharing similar parameters, while fusion divergent ones. However, this paradigm inevitably induces inter-weight conflicts and leads to catastrophic domain forgetting. While incremental learning enables adaptation to multiple tasks, it struggles to achieve generalization in few-shot scenarios. Consequently, when the weight data follows a long-tailed distribution, it can lead to forgetting in the fused weights. To address this issue, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA Fusion (ICM-Fusion), a novel framework that synergizes meta-learning with in-context adaptation. The key innovation lies in our task vector arithmetic, which dynamically balances conflicting optimization directions across domains through learned manifold projections. ICM-Fusion obtains the optimal task vector orientation for the fused model in the latent space by adjusting the orientation of the task vectors. Subsequently, the fused LoRA is reconstructed by a self-designed Fusion VAE (F-VAE) to realize multi-task LoRA generation. We have conducted extensive experiments on visual and linguistic tasks, and the experimental results demonstrate that ICM-Fusion can be adapted to a wide range of architectural models and applied to various tasks. Compared to the current pre-trained LoRA fusion method, ICM-Fusion fused LoRA can significantly reduce the multi-tasking loss and can even achieve task enhancement in few-shot scenarios.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

MoFu: Scale-Aware Modulation and Fourier Fusion for Multi-Subject Video Generation

Run Ling
Ke Cao
Jian Lu
Ao Ma
Haowei Liu
Runze He
Changwei Wang
Rongtao Xu

Multi-subject video generation aims to synthesize videos from textual prompts and multiple reference images, ensuring that each subject preserves natural scale and visual fidelity. However, current methods face two challenges: scale inconsistency, where variations in subject size lead to unnatural generation, and permutation sensitivity, where the order of reference inputs causes subject distortion. In this paper, we propose MoFu, a unified framework that tackles both challenges. For scale inconsistency, we introduce Scale-Aware Modulation (SMO), an LLM-guided module that extracts implicit scale cues from the prompt and modulates features to ensure consistent subject sizes. To address permutation sensitivity, we present a simple yet effective Fourier Fusion strategy that processes the frequency information of reference features via the Fast Fourier Transform to produce a unified representation. Besides, we design a Scale-Permutation Stability Loss to jointly encourage scale-consistent and permutation-invariant generation. To further evaluate these challenges, we establish a dedicated benchmark with controlled variations in subject scale and reference permutation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MoFu significantly outperforms existing methods in preserving natural scale, subject fidelity, and overall visual quality.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

RelaCtrl: Relevance-Guided Efficient Control for Diffusion Transformers

Ke Cao
Jing Wang
Ao Ma
Jiasong Feng
Xuanhua He
Run Ling
Haowei Liu
Jian Lu

The Diffusion Transformer plays a pivotal role in advancing text-to-image and text-to-video generation, owing primarily to its inherent scalability. However, existing controlled diffusion transformer methods incur significant parameter and computational overheads and suffer from inefficient resource allocation due to their failure to account for the varying relevance of control information across different transformer layers. To address this, we propose the Relevance-Guided Efficient Controllable Generation framework, RelaCtrl, enabling efficient and resource-optimized integration of control signals into the Diffusion Transformer. First, we evaluate the relevance of each layer in the Diffusion Transformer to the control information by assessing the ControlNet Relevance Score, which measures the impact of skipping each control layer on both the quality of generation and the control effectiveness during inference. Based on the strength of the relevance, we then tailor the positioning, parameter scale, and modeling capacity of the control layers to reduce unnecessary parameters and redundant computations. Additionally, to further improve efficiency, we replace the self-attention and FFN in the commonly used copy block with the carefully designed Two-Dimensional Shuffle Mixer (TDSM), enabling efficient implementation of both the token mixer and channel mixer. Both qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance with only 15% of the parameters and computational complexity compared to PixArt-delta.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

TR-DQ: Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization

Yihua Shao
Deyang Lin
Minxi Yan
Siyu Chen
Fanhu Zeng
Minwen Liao
Ao Ma
Ziyang Yan

Diffusion models have been widely adopted in image and video generation. However, their complex network architecture leads to high inference overhead for its generation process. Existing diffusion quantization methods primarily focus on the quantization of the model structure while ignoring the impact of time-steps variation during sampling. At the same time, most current approaches fail to account for significant activations that cannot be eliminated, resulting in substantial performance degradation after quantization. To address these issues, we propose Time-Rotation Diffusion Quantization (TR-DQ), a novel quantization method incorporating time-step and rotation-based optimization. TR-DQ first divides the sampling process based on time-steps and applies a rotation matrix to smooth activations and weights dynamically. For different time-steps, a dedicated hyperparameter is introduced for adaptive timing modeling, which enables dynamic quantization across different time steps. Additionally, we also explore the compression potential of Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG-wise) to establish a foundation for subsequent work. TR-DQ achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on image generation and video generation tasks and a 1.38-1.89× speedup and 1.97-2.58× memory reduction in inference compared to existing quantization methods.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Bridge Diffusion Model: Bridge Chinese Text-to-Image Diffusion Model with English Communities

Shanyuan Liu
Bo Cheng
Yuhang Ma
Liebucha Wu
Ao Ma
Xiaoyu Wu
Dawei Leng
Yuhui Yin

Text-to-Image generation (TTI) technologies are advancing rapidly, especially in the English language communities. However, apart from the user input language barrier problem, English-native TTI models inherently carry biases from their English world centric training data, which creates a dilemma for development of other language-native TTI models. One common choice is to fine-tune the English-native TTI model with translated samples. It falls short of fully addressing the model bias problem. Alternatively, training non-English language native models from scratch can effectively resolve the English world bias, but model trained this way would diverge from the English TTI communities, thus not able to utilize the strides continuously gaining in the English TTI communities any more. To build Chinese TTI model meanwhile keep compatibility with the English TTI communities, we propose a novel model structure referred as "Bridge Diffusion Model" (BDM). The proposed BDM employs a backbone-branch network structure to learn the Chinese semantics while keep the latent space compatible with the English-native TTI backbone, in an end-to-end manner. The unique advantages of the proposed BDM are that it's not only adept at generating images that precisely depict Chinese semantics, but also compatible with various English-native TTI plugins, such as different checkpoints, LoRA, ControlNet, Dreambooth, and Textual Inversion, etc. Moreover, BDM can concurrently generate content seamlessly combining both Chinese-native and English-native semantics within a single image, fostering cultural interaction.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FancyVideo: Towards Dynamic and Consistent Video Generation via Cross-frame Textual Guidance

Jiasong Feng
Ao Ma
Jing Wang
Ke Cao
Zhanjie Zhang

Synthesizing motion-rich and temporally consistent videos remains a challenge in artificial intelligence, especially when dealing with extended durations. Existing text-to-video (T2V) models commonly employ spatial cross-attention for text control, equivalently guiding different frame generations without frame-specific textual guidance. Thus, the model's capacity to comprehend the temporal logic conveyed in prompts and generate videos with coherent motion is restricted. To tackle this limitation, we introduce FancyVideo, an innovative video generator that improves the existing text-control mechanism with the well-designed Cross-frame Textual Guidance Module (CTGM). Specifically, CTGM incorporates the Temporal Information Injector (TII) and Temporal Affinity Refiner (TAR) at the beginning and end of cross-attention, respectively, to achieve frame-specific textual guidance. Firstly, TII injects frame-specific information from latent features into text conditions, thereby obtaining cross-frame textual conditions. Then, TAR refines the correlation matrix between cross-frame textual conditions and latent features along the time dimension. Extensive experiments comprising both quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FancyVideo. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art T2V generation results on the EvalCrafter benchmark and facilitates the synthesis of dynamic and consistent videos. Note that the T2V process of FancyVideo essentially involves a text-to-image step followed by T+I2V. This means it also supports the generation of videos from user images, i. e. , the image-to-video (I2V) task. A significant number of experiments have shown that its performance is also outstanding.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

WISA: World simulator assistant for physics-aware text-to-video generation

Jing Wang
Ao Ma
Ke Cao
Jun Zheng
Jiasong Feng
Zhanjie Zhang
Wanyuan Pang
Xiaodan Liang

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation, exemplified by models such as Sora and Kling, have demonstrated strong potential for constructing world simulators. However, existing T2V models still struggle to understand abstract physical principles and to generate videos that faithfully obey physical laws. This limitation stems primarily from the lack of explicit physical guidance, caused by a significant gap between high-level physical concepts and the generative capabilities of current models. To address this challenge, we propose the W orld S imulator A ssistant ( WISA ), a novel framework designed to systematically decompose and integrate physical principles into T2V models. Specifically, WISA decomposes physical knowledge into three hierarchical levels: textual physical descriptions, qualitative physical categories, and quantitative physical properties. It then incorporates several carefully designed modules—such as Mixture-of-Physical-Experts Attention (MoPA) and a Physical Classifier—to effectively encode these attributes and enhance the model’s adherence to physical laws during generation. In addition, most existing video datasets feature only weak or implicit representations of physical phenomena, limiting their utility for learning explicit physical principles. To bridge this gap, we present WISA-80K, a new dataset comprising 80, 000 human-curated videos that depict 17 fundamental physical laws across three core domains of physics: dynamics, thermodynamics, and optics. Experimental results show that WISA substantially improves the alignment of T2V models (such as CogVideoX and Wan2. 1) with real-world physical laws, achieving notable gains on the VideoPhy benchmark. Our data, code, and models are available in the Project Page.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

HiCo: Hierarchical Controllable Diffusion Model for Layout-to-image Generation

Bo Cheng
Yuhang Ma
Liebucha Wu
Shanyuan Liu
Ao Ma
Xiaoyu Wu
Dawei Leng
Yuhui Yin

The task of layout-to-image generation involves synthesizing images based on the captions of objects and their spatial positions. Existing methods still struggle in complex layout generation, where common bad cases include object missing, inconsistent lighting, conflicting view angles, etc. To effectively address these issues, we propose a \textbf{Hi}erarchical \textbf{Co}ntrollable (HiCo) diffusion model for layout-to-image generation, featuring object seperable conditioning branch structure. Our key insight is to achieve spatial disentanglement through hierarchical modeling of layouts. We use a multi branch structure to represent hierarchy and aggregate them in fusion module. To evaluate the performance of multi-objective controllable layout generation in natural scenes, we introduce the HiCo-7K benchmark, derived from the GRIT-20M dataset and manually cleaned. https: //github. com/360CVGroup/HiCo_T2I.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Offline Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Evolving Gradient Agreement

Jiaxing Chen
Weilin Yuan
Shaofei Chen
Furong Liu
Ao Ma
Zhenzhen Hu
Peng Li

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) is a machine learning paradigm aimed at learning reinforcement learning policies that can quickly adapt to unseen tasks with few-shot data. Nevertheless, applying Meta-RL to real-world applications faces challenges due to the cost of data acquisition. To address this problem, offline Meta-RL has emerged as a promising solution, focusing on learning policies from pre-collected data that can effectively and rapidly adapt to unseen tasks. In this paper, we propose a new offline Meta-RL method called Meta-Actor-Critic with Evolving Gradient Agreement (MACEGA). MACEGA utilizes an evolutionary approach to estimate meta-gradients conductive to generalization across unseen tasks. During meta-training, gradient evolution is utilized to meta-update the value network and policies. Moreover, we use gradient agreement as an optimization objective for meta-learning, thereby enhancing the generalization ability of the meta-policy. We experimentally demonstrate the robustness of MACEGA in handling offline data quality. Furthermore, extensive experiments on various benchmarks provide empirical evidence that MACEGA outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in generalizing to unseen tasks, thus demonstrating its potential for real-world applications.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Res-Tuning: A Flexible and Efficient Tuning Paradigm via Unbinding Tuner from Backbone

Zeyinzi Jiang
Chaojie Mao
Ziyuan Huang
Ao Ma
Yiliang Lv
Yujun Shen
Deli Zhao
Jingren Zhou

Parameter-efficient tuning has become a trend in transferring large-scale foundation models to downstream applications. Existing methods typically embed some light-weight tuners into the backbone, where both the design and the learning of the tuners are highly dependent on the base model. This work offers a new tuning paradigm, dubbed Res-Tuning, which intentionally unbinds tuners from the backbone. With both theoretical and empirical evidence, we show that popular tuning approaches have their equivalent counterparts under our unbinding formulation, and hence can be integrated into our framework effortlessly. Thanks to the structural disentanglement, we manage to free the design of tuners from the network architecture, facilitating flexible combination of various tuning strategies. We further propose a memory-efficient variant of Res-Tuning, where the bypass i. e. , formed by a sequence of tuners) is effectively detached from the main branch, such that the gradients are back-propagated only to the tuners but not to the backbone. Such a detachment also allows one-time backbone forward for multi-task inference. Extensive experiments on both discriminative and generative tasks demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing alternatives from the perspectives of efficacy and efficiency. Project page: https: //res-tuning. github. io/.

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