ICLR 2026poster0 citations

VMDiff: Visual Mixing Diffusion for Limitless Cross-Object Synthesis

Zeren Xiong, Yue Yu, Ze-dong Zhang, Shuo Chen, Jian Yang, Jun Li

Abstract

Creating novel images by fusing visual cues from multiple sources is a fundamental yet underexplored problem in image-to-image generation, with broad applications in artistic creation, virtual reality and visual media. Existing methods often face two key challenges: coexistent generation, where multiple objects are simply juxtaposed without true integration, and bias generation, where one object dominates the output due to semantic imbalance. To address these issues, we propose **Visual Mixing Diffusion (VMDiff)**, a simple yet effective diffusion-based framework that synthesizes a single, coherent object by integrating two input images at both noise and latent levels. Our approach comprises: (1) a **hybrid sampling process** that combines guided denoising, inversion, and spherical interpolation with adjustable parameters to achieve structure-aware fusion, mitigating coexistent generation; and (2) an **efficient adaptive adjustment module**, which introduces a novel similarity-based score to automatically and adaptively search for optimal parameters, countering semantic bias. Experiments on a curated benchmark of 780 concept pairs demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines in visual quality, semantic consistency, and human-rated creativity.

Image generationImage concept fusion
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
xiong2026vmdiff,
title={{VMD}iff: Visual Mixing Diffusion for Limitless Cross-Object Synthesis},
author={Zeren Xiong and Yue Yu and Ze-dong Zhang and Shuo Chen and Jian Yang and Jun Li},
booktitle={The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=rrXxoH2jgF}
}
VMDiff: Visual Mixing Diffusion for Limitless Cross-Object Synthesis · ICLR 2026