arXiv subjects

Scott Cohen

Publications and source records attributed to Scott Cohen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

AlbumFill: Album-Guided Reasoning and Retrieval for Personalized Image Completion

Personalized image completion aims to restore occluded regions in personal photos while preserving identity and appearance. Existing methods either rely on generic inpainting models that often fail to maintain identity consistency, or assume that suitable reference images are explicitly provided. In practice, suitable references are often not explicitly provided, requiring the system to search for identity-consistent images within personal photo collections. We present AlbumFill, a training-free framework that retrieves identity-consistent references from personal albums for personalized completion. Given an occluded image and a personal album, a vision-language model infers missing semantic cues to guide composed image retrieval, and the retrieved references are used by reference-based completion models. To facilitate this task, we introduce a dataset containing 54K human-centric samples with associated album images. Experiments across multiple baselines demonstrate the difficulty of personalized completion and highlight the importance of identity-consistent reference retrieval. Project Page: https://liagm.github.io/AlbumFill/

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arXiv2026

LightMover: Generative Light Movement with Color and Intensity Controls

We present LightMover, a framework for controllable light manipulation in single images that leverages video diffusion priors to produce physically plausible illumination changes without re-rendering the scene. We formulate light editing as a sequence-to-sequence prediction problem in visual token space: given an image and light-control tokens, the model adjusts light position, color, and intensity together with resulting reflections, shadows, and falloff from a single view. This unified treatment of spatial (movement) and appearance (color, intensity) controls improves both manipulation and illumination understanding. We further introduce an adaptive token-pruning mechanism that preserves spatially informative tokens while compactly encoding non-spatial attributes, reducing control sequence length by 41% while maintaining editing fidelity. To train our framework, we construct a scalable rendering pipeline that generates large numbers of image pairs across varied light positions, colors, and intensities while keeping the scene content consistent with the original image. LightMover enables precise, independent control over light position, color, and intensity, and achieves high PSNR and strong semantic consistency (DINO, CLIP) across different tasks.

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arXiv2025

CoT Referring: Improving Referring Expression Tasks with Grounded Reasoning

Referring Expression Comprehension and Segmentation are critical tasks for assessing the integration of language understanding and image comprehension, serving as benchmarks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a new strategy, CoT Referring, which enhances model reasoning across modalities through a structured, chain-of-thought training data structure. Our approach systematically parses textual structures to a sequential referring step, where in each step it identifies relationships and ensures consistent reference alignment, thereby improving accuracy in complex query scenarios. We restructure the training data to enforce a new output form, providing new annotations for existing datasets and compiling an evaluation benchmark from existing resources. This benchmark is designed explicitly for complex referring cases. We also integrate detection and segmentation capabilities into a unified MLLM framework, training it with a novel adaptive weighted loss to optimize performance. Experimental results on our curated benchmark and RefCOCO/+/g demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, with a notable increase of 2.5%+ over baseline models.

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arXiv2025

The Photographer Eye: Teaching Multimodal Large Language Models to Understand Image Aesthetics like Photographers

While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky. Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component--a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise--including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a languageguided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.

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arXiv2025

CompleteMe: Reference-based Human Image Completion

Recent methods for human image completion can reconstruct plausible body shapes but often fail to preserve unique details, such as specific clothing patterns or distinctive accessories, without explicit reference images. Even state-of-the-art reference-based inpainting approaches struggle to accurately capture and integrate fine-grained details from reference images. To address this limitation, we propose CompleteMe, a novel reference-based human image completion framework. CompleteMe employs a dual U-Net architecture combined with a Region-focused Attention (RFA) Block, which explicitly guides the model's attention toward relevant regions in reference images. This approach effectively captures fine details and ensures accurate semantic correspondence, significantly improving the fidelity and consistency of completed images. Additionally, we introduce a challenging benchmark specifically designed for evaluating reference-based human image completion tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior visual quality and semantic consistency compared to existing techniques. Project page: https://liagm.github.io/CompleteMe/

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arXiv2024

MetaShadow: Object-Centered Shadow Detection, Removal, and Synthesis

Shadows are often under-considered or even ignored in image editing applications, limiting the realism of the edited results. In this paper, we introduce MetaShadow, a three-in-one versatile framework that enables detection, removal, and controllable synthesis of shadows in natural images in an object-centered fashion. MetaShadow combines the strengths of two cooperative components: Shadow Analyzer, for object-centered shadow detection and removal, and Shadow Synthesizer, for reference-based controllable shadow synthesis. Notably, we optimize the learning of the intermediate features from Shadow Analyzer to guide Shadow Synthesizer to generate more realistic shadows that blend seamlessly with the scene. Extensive evaluations on multiple shadow benchmark datasets show significant improvements of MetaShadow over the existing state-of-the-art methods on object-centered shadow detection, removal, and synthesis. MetaShadow excels in image-editing tasks such as object removal, relocation, and insertion, pushing the boundaries of object-centered image editing.

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arXiv2024

Refine-by-Align: Reference-Guided Artifacts Refinement through Semantic Alignment

Personalized image generation has emerged from the recent advancements in generative models. However, these generated personalized images often suffer from localized artifacts such as incorrect logos, reducing fidelity and fine-grained identity details of the generated results. Furthermore, there is little prior work tackling this problem. To help improve these identity details in the personalized image generation, we introduce a new task: reference-guided artifacts refinement. We present Refine-by-Align, a first-of-its-kind model that employs a diffusion-based framework to address this challenge. Our model consists of two stages: Alignment Stage and Refinement Stage, which share weights of a unified neural network model. Given a generated image, a masked artifact region, and a reference image, the alignment stage identifies and extracts the corresponding regional features in the reference, which are then used by the refinement stage to fix the artifacts. Our model-agnostic pipeline requires no test-time tuning or optimization. It automatically enhances image fidelity and reference identity in the generated image, generalizing well to existing models on various tasks including but not limited to customization, generative compositing, view synthesis, and virtual try-on. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that our pipeline greatly pushes the boundary of fine details in the image synthesis models.

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arXiv2024

FairDeDup: Detecting and Mitigating Vision-Language Fairness Disparities in Semantic Dataset Deduplication

Recent dataset deduplication techniques have demonstrated that content-aware dataset pruning can dramatically reduce the cost of training Vision-Language Pretrained (VLP) models without significant performance losses compared to training on the original dataset. These results have been based on pruning commonly used image-caption datasets collected from the web -- datasets that are known to harbor harmful social biases that may then be codified in trained models. In this work, we evaluate how deduplication affects the prevalence of these biases in the resulting trained models and introduce an easy-to-implement modification to the recent SemDeDup algorithm that can reduce the negative effects that we observe. When examining CLIP-style models trained on deduplicated variants of LAION-400M, we find our proposed FairDeDup algorithm consistently leads to improved fairness metrics over SemDeDup on the FairFace and FACET datasets while maintaining zero-shot performance on CLIP benchmarks.

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arXiv2024

FINEMATCH: Aspect-based Fine-grained Image and Text Mismatch Detection and Correction

Recent progress in large-scale pre-training has led to the development of advanced vision-language models (VLMs) with remarkable proficiency in comprehending and generating multimodal content. Despite the impressive ability to perform complex reasoning for VLMs, current models often struggle to effectively and precisely capture the compositional information on both the image and text sides. To address this, we propose FineMatch, a new aspect-based fine-grained text and image matching benchmark, focusing on text and image mismatch detection and correction. This benchmark introduces a novel task for boosting and evaluating the VLMs' compositionality for aspect-based fine-grained text and image matching. In this task, models are required to identify mismatched aspect phrases within a caption, determine the aspect's class, and propose corrections for an image-text pair that may contain between 0 and 3 mismatches. To evaluate the models' performance on this new task, we propose a new evaluation metric named ITM-IoU for which our experiments show a high correlation to human evaluation. In addition, we also provide a comprehensive experimental analysis of existing mainstream VLMs, including fully supervised learning and in-context learning settings. We have found that models trained on FineMatch demonstrate enhanced proficiency in detecting fine-grained text and image mismatches. Moreover, models (e.g., GPT-4V, Gemini Pro Vision) with strong abilities to perform multimodal in-context learning are not as skilled at fine-grained compositional image and text matching analysis. With FineMatch, we are able to build a system for text-to-image generation hallucination detection and correction.

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arXiv2024

IMPRINT: Generative Object Compositing by Learning Identity-Preserving Representation

Generative object compositing emerges as a promising new avenue for compositional image editing. However, the requirement of object identity preservation poses a significant challenge, limiting practical usage of most existing methods. In response, this paper introduces IMPRINT, a novel diffusion-based generative model trained with a two-stage learning framework that decouples learning of identity preservation from that of compositing. The first stage is targeted for context-agnostic, identity-preserving pretraining of the object encoder, enabling the encoder to learn an embedding that is both view-invariant and conducive to enhanced detail preservation. The subsequent stage leverages this representation to learn seamless harmonization of the object composited to the background. In addition, IMPRINT incorporates a shape-guidance mechanism offering user-directed control over the compositing process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IMPRINT significantly outperforms existing methods and various baselines on identity preservation and composition quality.

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arXiv2023

Latent Feature-Guided Diffusion Models for Shadow Removal

Recovering textures under shadows has remained a challenging problem due to the difficulty of inferring shadow-free scenes from shadow images. In this paper, we propose the use of diffusion models as they offer a promising approach to gradually refine the details of shadow regions during the diffusion process. Our method improves this process by conditioning on a learned latent feature space that inherits the characteristics of shadow-free images, thus avoiding the limitation of conventional methods that condition on degraded images only. Additionally, we propose to alleviate potential local optima during training by fusing noise features with the diffusion network. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which outperforms the previous best method by 13% in terms of RMSE on the AISTD dataset. Further, we explore instance-level shadow removal, where our model outperforms the previous best method by 82% in terms of RMSE on the DESOBA dataset.

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arXiv2023

SCoRD: Subject-Conditional Relation Detection with Text-Augmented Data

We propose Subject-Conditional Relation Detection SCoRD, where conditioned on an input subject, the goal is to predict all its relations to other objects in a scene along with their locations. Based on the Open Images dataset, we propose a challenging OIv6-SCoRD benchmark such that the training and testing splits have a distribution shift in terms of the occurrence statistics of $\langle$subject, relation, object$\rangle$ triplets. To solve this problem, we propose an auto-regressive model that given a subject, it predicts its relations, objects, and object locations by casting this output as a sequence of tokens. First, we show that previous scene-graph prediction methods fail to produce as exhaustive an enumeration of relation-object pairs when conditioned on a subject on this benchmark. Particularly, we obtain a recall@3 of 83.8% for our relation-object predictions compared to the 49.75% obtained by a recent scene graph detector. Then, we show improved generalization on both relation-object and object-box predictions by leveraging during training relation-object pairs obtained automatically from textual captions and for which no object-box annotations are available. Particularly, for $\langle$subject, relation, object$\rangle$ triplets for which no object locations are available during training, we are able to obtain a recall@3 of 33.80% for relation-object pairs and 26.75% for their box locations.

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arXiv2023

GamutMLP: A Lightweight MLP for Color Loss Recovery

Cameras and image-editing software often process images in the wide-gamut ProPhoto color space, encompassing 90% of all visible colors. However, when images are encoded for sharing, this color-rich representation is transformed and clipped to fit within the small-gamut standard RGB (sRGB) color space, representing only 30% of visible colors. Recovering the lost color information is challenging due to the clipping procedure. Inspired by neural implicit representations for 2D images, we propose a method that optimizes a lightweight multi-layer-perceptron (MLP) model during the gamut reduction step to predict the clipped values. GamutMLP takes approximately 2 seconds to optimize and requires only 23 KB of storage. The small memory footprint allows our GamutMLP model to be saved as metadata in the sRGB image -- the model can be extracted when needed to restore wide-gamut color values. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for color recovery and compare it with alternative strategies, including pre-trained DNN-based gamut expansion networks and other implicit neural representation methods. As part of this effort, we introduce a new color gamut dataset of 2200 wide-gamut/small-gamut images for training and testing. Our code and dataset can be found on the project website: https://gamut-mlp.github.io.

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arXiv2023

TopNet: Transformer-based Object Placement Network for Image Compositing

We investigate the problem of automatically placing an object into a background image for image compositing. Given a background image and a segmented object, the goal is to train a model to predict plausible placements (location and scale) of the object for compositing. The quality of the composite image highly depends on the predicted location/scale. Existing works either generate candidate bounding boxes or apply sliding-window search using global representations from background and object images, which fail to model local information in background images. However, local clues in background images are important to determine the compatibility of placing the objects with certain locations/scales. In this paper, we propose to learn the correlation between object features and all local background features with a transformer module so that detailed information can be provided on all possible location/scale configurations. A sparse contrastive loss is further proposed to train our model with sparse supervision. Our new formulation generates a 3D heatmap indicating the plausibility of all location/scale combinations in one network forward pass, which is over 10 times faster than the previous sliding-window method. It also supports interactive search when users provide a pre-defined location or scale. The proposed method can be trained with explicit annotation or in a self-supervised manner using an off-the-shelf inpainting model, and it outperforms state-of-the-art methods significantly. The user study shows that the trained model generalizes well to real-world images with diverse challenging scenes and object categories.

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arXiv2022

Structure-Guided Image Completion with Image-level and Object-level Semantic Discriminators

Structure-guided image completion aims to inpaint a local region of an image according to an input guidance map from users. While such a task enables many practical applications for interactive editing, existing methods often struggle to hallucinate realistic object instances in complex natural scenes. Such a limitation is partially due to the lack of semantic-level constraints inside the hole region as well as the lack of a mechanism to enforce realistic object generation. In this work, we propose a learning paradigm that consists of semantic discriminators and object-level discriminators for improving the generation of complex semantics and objects. Specifically, the semantic discriminators leverage pretrained visual features to improve the realism of the generated visual concepts. Moreover, the object-level discriminators take aligned instances as inputs to enforce the realism of individual objects. Our proposed scheme significantly improves the generation quality and achieves state-of-the-art results on various tasks, including segmentation-guided completion, edge-guided manipulation and panoptically-guided manipulation on Places2 datasets. Furthermore, our trained model is flexible and can support multiple editing use cases, such as object insertion, replacement, removal and standard inpainting. In particular, our trained model combined with a novel automatic image completion pipeline achieves state-of-the-art results on the standard inpainting task.

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arXiv2022

ObjectStitch: Generative Object Compositing

Object compositing based on 2D images is a challenging problem since it typically involves multiple processing stages such as color harmonization, geometry correction and shadow generation to generate realistic results. Furthermore, annotating training data pairs for compositing requires substantial manual effort from professionals, and is hardly scalable. Thus, with the recent advances in generative models, in this work, we propose a self-supervised framework for object compositing by leveraging the power of conditional diffusion models. Our framework can hollistically address the object compositing task in a unified model, transforming the viewpoint, geometry, color and shadow of the generated object while requiring no manual labeling. To preserve the input object's characteristics, we introduce a content adaptor that helps to maintain categorical semantics and object appearance. A data augmentation method is further adopted to improve the fidelity of the generator. Our method outperforms relevant baselines in both realism and faithfulness of the synthesized result images in a user study on various real-world images.

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arXiv2022

GALA: Toward Geometry-and-Lighting-Aware Object Search for Compositing

Compositing-aware object search aims to find the most compatible objects for compositing given a background image and a query bounding box. Previous works focus on learning compatibility between the foreground object and background, but fail to learn other important factors from large-scale data, i.e. geometry and lighting. To move a step further, this paper proposes GALA (Geometry-and-Lighting-Aware), a generic foreground object search method with discriminative modeling on geometry and lighting compatibility for open-world image compositing. Remarkably, it achieves state-of-the-art results on the CAIS dataset and generalizes well on large-scale open-world datasets, i.e. Pixabay and Open Images. In addition, our method can effectively handle non-box scenarios, where users only provide background images without any input bounding box. A web demo (see supplementary materials) is built to showcase applications of the proposed method for compositing-aware search and automatic location/scale prediction for the foreground object.

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arXiv2022

CM-GAN: Image Inpainting with Cascaded Modulation GAN and Object-Aware Training

Recent image inpainting methods have made great progress but often struggle to generate plausible image structures when dealing with large holes in complex images. This is partially due to the lack of effective network structures that can capture both the long-range dependency and high-level semantics of an image. We propose cascaded modulation GAN (CM-GAN), a new network design consisting of an encoder with Fourier convolution blocks that extract multi-scale feature representations from the input image with holes and a dual-stream decoder with a novel cascaded global-spatial modulation block at each scale level. In each decoder block, global modulation is first applied to perform coarse and semantic-aware structure synthesis, followed by spatial modulation to further adjust the feature map in a spatially adaptive fashion. In addition, we design an object-aware training scheme to prevent the network from hallucinating new objects inside holes, fulfilling the needs of object removal tasks in real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments are conducted to show that our method significantly outperforms existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Please refer to the project page: \url{https://github.com/htzheng/CM-GAN-Inpainting}.

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