HiddenObjects: Scalable Diffusion-Distilled Spatial Priors for Object Placement

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Schouten, Marco, Siglidis, Ioannis, Belongie, Serge, Papadopoulos, Dim P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Schouten, Marco
Siglidis, Ioannis
Belongie, Serge
Papadopoulos, Dim P.
author_facet Schouten, Marco
Siglidis, Ioannis
Belongie, Serge
Papadopoulos, Dim P.
contents We propose a method to learn explicit, class-conditioned spatial priors for object placement in natural scenes by distilling the implicit placement knowledge encoded in text-conditioned diffusion models. Prior work relies either on manually annotated data, which is inherently limited in scale, or on inpainting-based object-removal pipelines, whose artifacts promote shortcut learning. To address these limitations, we introduce a fully automated and scalable framework that evaluates dense object placements on high-quality real backgrounds using a diffusion-based inpainting pipeline. With this pipeline, we construct HiddenObjects, a large-scale dataset comprising 27M placement annotations, evaluated across 27k distinct scenes, with ranked bounding box insertions for different images and object categories. Experimental results show that our spatial priors outperform sparse human annotations on a downstream image editing task (3.90 vs. 2.68 VLM-Judge), and significantly surpass existing placement baselines and zero-shot Vision-Language Models for object placement. Furthermore, we distill these priors into a lightweight model for fast practical inference (230,000x faster).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_10675
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle HiddenObjects: Scalable Diffusion-Distilled Spatial Priors for Object Placement
Schouten, Marco
Siglidis, Ioannis
Belongie, Serge
Papadopoulos, Dim P.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We propose a method to learn explicit, class-conditioned spatial priors for object placement in natural scenes by distilling the implicit placement knowledge encoded in text-conditioned diffusion models. Prior work relies either on manually annotated data, which is inherently limited in scale, or on inpainting-based object-removal pipelines, whose artifacts promote shortcut learning. To address these limitations, we introduce a fully automated and scalable framework that evaluates dense object placements on high-quality real backgrounds using a diffusion-based inpainting pipeline. With this pipeline, we construct HiddenObjects, a large-scale dataset comprising 27M placement annotations, evaluated across 27k distinct scenes, with ranked bounding box insertions for different images and object categories. Experimental results show that our spatial priors outperform sparse human annotations on a downstream image editing task (3.90 vs. 2.68 VLM-Judge), and significantly surpass existing placement baselines and zero-shot Vision-Language Models for object placement. Furthermore, we distill these priors into a lightweight model for fast practical inference (230,000x faster).
title HiddenObjects: Scalable Diffusion-Distilled Spatial Priors for Object Placement
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.10675