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Charles Herrmann

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6 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Simple Approach to Unifying Diffusion-based Conditional Generation

Xirui Li
Charles Herrmann
Kelvin C. K. Chan
Yinxiao Li
Deqing Sun
Chao Ma 0004
Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001

Recent progress in image generation has sparked research into controlling these models through condition signals, with various methods addressing specific challenges in conditional generation. Instead of proposing another specialized technique, we introduce a simple, unified framework to handle diverse conditional generation tasks involving a specific image-condition correlation. By learning a joint distribution over a correlated image pair (e.g. image and depth) with a diffusion model, our approach enables versatile capabilities via different inference-time sampling schemes, including controllable image generation (e.g. depth to image), estimation (e.g. image to depth), signal guidance, joint generation (image \& depth), and coarse control. Previous attempts at unification often introduce complexity through multi-stage training, architectural modification, or increased parameter counts. In contrast, our simplified formulation requires a single, computationally efficient training stage, maintains the standard model input, and adds minimal learned parameters (15% of the base model). Moreover, our model supports additional capabilities like non-spatially aligned and coarse conditioning. Extensive results show that our single model can produce comparable results with specialized methods and better results than prior unified methods. We also demonstrate that multiple models can be effectively combined for multi-signal conditional generation.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Force Prompting: Video Generation Models Can Learn And Generalize Physics-based Control Signals

Nate Gillman
Charles Herrmann
Michael Freeman
Daksh Aggarwal
Evan Luo
Deqing Sun
Chen Sun

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. Our key finding is that video generation models can generalize remarkably well when adapted to follow physical force conditioning from videos synthesized by Blender, even with limited demonstrations of few objects (e. g. , flying flags, rolling balls, etc. ). Our method can generate videos which simulate forces across diverse geometries, settings, and materials. We also try to understand the source of this generalization and perform ablations on the training data that reveal two key elements: visual diversity and the use of specific text keywords during training. Our approach is trained on only around 15k training examples for a single day on four A100 GPUs, and outperforms existing methods on force adherence and physics realism, bringing world models closer to real-world physics interactions. All datasets, code, and model weights will be open-sourced. Video examples can be found at https: //sites. google. com/view/force-prompting-neurips2025

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

High-Resolution Frame Interpolation with Patch-based Cascaded Diffusion

Junhwa Hur
Charles Herrmann
Saurabh Saxena
Janne Kontkanen
Wei-Sheng Lai
Yichang Shih
Michael Rubinstein
David J. Fleet

Despite the recent progress, existing frame interpolation methods still struggle with processing extremely high resolution input and handling challenging cases such as repetitive textures, thin objects, and large motion. To address these issues, we introduce a patch-based cascaded pixel diffusion model for high resolution frame interpolation, HiFI, that excels in these scenarios while achieving competitive performance on standard benchmarks. Cascades, which generate a series of images from low to high resolution, can help significantly with large or complex motion that require both global context for a coarse solution and detailed context for high resolution output. However, contrary to prior work on cascaded diffusion models which perform diffusion on increasingly large resolutions, we use a single model that always performs diffusion at the same resolution and upsamples by processing patches of the inputs and the prior solution. At inference time, this drastically reduces memory usage and allows a single model, solving both frame interpolation (base model’s task) and spatial up-sampling, saving training cost as well. HiFI excels at high-resolution images and complex repeated textures that require global context, achieving comparable or state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks (Vimeo, Xiph, X-Test, and SEPE-8K). We further introduce a new dataset, LaMoR, that focuses on particularly challenging cases, and HiFI significantly outperforms other baselines.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

MonST3R: A Simple Approach for Estimating Geometry in the Presence of Motion

Junyi Zhang 0004
Charles Herrmann
Junhwa Hur
Varun Jampani
Trevor Darrell
Forrester Cole
Deqing Sun
Ming-Hsuan Yang 0001

Estimating geometry from dynamic scenes, where objects move and deform over time, remains a core challenge in computer vision. Current approaches often rely on multi-stage pipelines or global optimizations that decompose the problem into subtasks, like depth and flow, leading to complex systems prone to errors. In this paper, we present Motion DUSt3R (MonST3R), a novel geometry-first approach that directly estimates per-timestep geometry from dynamic scenes. Our key insight is that by simply estimating a pointmap for each timestep, we can effectively adapt DUSt3R’s representation, previously only used for static scenes, to dynamic scenes. However, this approach presents a significant challenge: the scarcity of suitable training data, namely dynamic, posed videos with depth labels. Despite this, we show that by posing the problem as a fine-tuning task, identifying several suitable datasets, and strategically training the model on this limited data, we can surprisingly enable the model to handle dynamics, even without an explicit motion representation. Based on this, we introduce new optimizations for several downstream video-specific tasks and demonstrate strong performance on video depth and camera pose estimation, outperforming prior work in terms of robustness and efficiency. Moreover, MonST3R shows promising results for primarily feed-forward 4D reconstruction. Interactive 4D results, source code, and trained models are available at: https://monst3r-project.github.io/.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Tale of Two Features: Stable Diffusion Complements DINO for Zero-Shot Semantic Correspondence

Junyi Zhang
Charles Herrmann
Junhwa Hur
Luisa Polania Cabrera
Varun Jampani
Deqing Sun
Ming-Hsuan Yang

Text-to-image diffusion models have made significant advances in generating and editing high-quality images. As a result, numerous approaches have explored the ability of diffusion model features to understand and process single images for downstream tasks, e. g. , classification, semantic segmentation, and stylization. However, significantly less is known about what these features reveal across multiple, different images and objects. In this work, we exploit Stable Diffusion (SD) features for semantic and dense correspondence and discover that with simple post-processing, SD features can perform quantitatively similar to SOTA representations. Interestingly, the qualitative analysis reveals that SD features have very different properties compared to existing representation learning features, such as the recently released DINOv2: while DINOv2 provides sparse but accurate matches, SD features provide high-quality spatial information but sometimes inaccurate semantic matches. We demonstrate that a simple fusion of these two features works surprisingly well, and a zero-shot evaluation using nearest neighbors on these fused features provides a significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets, e. g. , SPair-71k, PF-Pascal, and TSS. We also show that these correspondences can enable interesting applications such as instance swapping in two images. Project page: https: //sd-complements-dino. github. io/.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

The Surprising Effectiveness of Diffusion Models for Optical Flow and Monocular Depth Estimation

Saurabh Saxena
Charles Herrmann
Junhwa Hur
Abhishek Kar
Mohammad Norouzi
Deqing Sun
David J. Fleet

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models have transformed image generation with their impressive fidelity and diversity. We show that they also excel in estimating optical flow and monocular depth, surprisingly without task-specific architectures and loss functions that are predominant for these tasks. Compared to the point estimates of conventional regression-based methods, diffusion models also enable Monte Carlo inference, e. g. , capturing uncertainty and ambiguity in flow and depth. With self-supervised pre-training, the combined use of synthetic and real data for supervised training, and technical innovations (infilling and step-unrolled denoising diffusion training) to handle noisy-incomplete training data, one can train state-of-the-art diffusion models for depth and optical flow estimation, with additional zero-shot coarse-to-fine refinement for high resolution estimates. Extensive experiments focus on quantitative performance against benchmarks, ablations, and the model's ability to capture uncertainty and multimodality, and impute missing values. Our model obtains a state-of-the-art relative depth error of 0. 074 on the indoor NYU benchmark and an Fl-all score of 3. 26\% on the KITTI optical flow benchmark, about 25\% better than the best published method.

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