Our Research

Building general-purpose multimodal simulators of the world.

We believe models that use video as their main input/output modality, when supplemented by other modalities like text and audio, will form the next paradigm of computing.
Research from Runway
June 2, 2025
Dual-Process Image Generation
by Grace Luo, Jonathan Granskog, Aleksander Hołyński, Trevor Darrell
Prior methods for controlling image generation are limited in their ability to be taught new tasks. In contrast, vision-language models, or VLMs, can learn tasks in-context and produce the correct outputs for a given input. We propose a dual-process distillation scheme that allows feed-forward image generators to learn new tasks from deliberative VLMs. Our scheme uses a VLM to rate the generated images and backpropagates this gradient to update the weights of the image generator. Our general framework enables a wide variety of new control tasks through the same text-and-image based interface. We showcase a handful of applications of this technique for different types of control signals, such as commonsense inferences and visual prompts. With our method, users can implement multimodal controls for properties such as color palette, line weight, horizon position, and relative depth within a...
March 31, 2025
StochasticSplats: Stochastic Rasterization for Sorting-Free 3D Gaussian Splatting
by Shakiba Kheradmand, Delio Vicini, George Kopanas, Dmitry Lagun, Kwang Moo Yi, Mark Matthews, Andrea Tagliasacchi
3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) is a popular radiance field method, with many application-specific extensions. Most variants rely on the same core algorithm: depth-sorting of Gaussian splats then rasterizing in primitive order. This ensures correct alpha compositing, but can cause rendering artifacts due to built-in approximations. Moreover, for a fixed representation, sorted rendering offers little control over render cost and visual fidelity. For example, and counter-intuitively, rendering a lower-resolution image is not necessarily faster. In this work, we address the above limitations by combining 3D Gaussian splatting with stochastic rasterization. Concretely, we leverage an unbiased Monte Carlo estimator of the volume rendering equation. This removes the need for sorting, and allows for accurate 3D blending of overlapping Gaussians. The number of Monte Carlo samples further imbues 3DG...
March 22, 2025
Progressive Prompt Detailing for Improved Alignment in Text-to-Image Generative Models
by Ketan Suhaas Saichandran, Xavier Thomas, Prakhar Kaushik, Deepti Ghadiyaram
Text-to-image generative models often struggle with long prompts detailing complex scenes, diverse objects with distinct visual characteristics and spatial relationships. In this work, we propose SCoPE (Scheduled interpolation of Coarse-to-fine Prompt Embeddings), a training-free method to improve text-to-image alignment by progressively refining the input prompt in a coarse-to-fine-grained manner. Given a detailed input prompt, we first decompose it into multiple sub-prompts which evolve from describing broad scene layout to highly intricate details. During inference, we interpolate between these sub-prompts and thus progressively introduce finer-grained details into the generated image. Our training-free plug-and-play approach significantly enhances prompt alignment, achieves an average improvement of up to +4% in Visual Question Answering (VQA) scores over the Stable Diffusion baselin...
We're advancing research in AI systems that can understand and simulate the world and its dynamics.
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RNA Sessions
An ongoing series of talks about frontier research in AI and art, hosted by Runway.
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