VisualCloze: A Universal Image Generation Framework via Visual
  In-Context Learning
Authors: name: Zhong-Yu Li; name: Ruoyi Du; name: Juncheng Yan; name: Le Zhuo; name: Zhen Li; name: Peng Gao; name: Zhanyu Ma; name: Ming-Ming Cheng
Published: 2025-04-10 17:59:42

Abstract: Recent progress in diffusion models significantly advances various image
generation tasks. However, the current mainstream approach remains focused on
building task-specific models, which have limited efficiency when supporting a
wide range of different needs. While universal models attempt to address this
limitation, they face critical challenges, including generalizable task
instruction, appropriate task distributions, and unified architectural design.
To tackle these challenges, we propose VisualCloze, a universal image
generation framework, which supports a wide range of in-domain tasks,
generalization to unseen ones, unseen unification of multiple tasks, and
reverse generation. Unlike existing methods that rely on language-based task
instruction, leading to task ambiguity and weak generalization, we integrate
visual in-context learning, allowing models to identify tasks from visual
demonstrations. Meanwhile, the inherent sparsity of visual task distributions
hampers the learning of transferable knowledge across tasks. To this end, we
introduce Graph200K, a graph-structured dataset that establishes various
interrelated tasks, enhancing task density and transferable knowledge.
Furthermore, we uncover that our unified image generation formulation shared a
consistent objective with image infilling, enabling us to leverage the strong
generative priors of pre-trained infilling models without modifying the
architectures.