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Adversarial Score Distillation: When score distillation meets GAN

December 01, 2023 Min Wei, Jingkai Zhou, Junyao Sun, Xuesong Zhang

cs.CV

Existing score distillation methods are sensitive to classifier-free guidance (CFG) scale: manifested as over-smoothness or instability at small CFG scales, while over-saturation at large ones. To explain and analyze these issues, we revisit the derivation of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and decipher existing score distillation with the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN) paradigm. With the WGAN paradigm, we find that existing score distillation either employs a fixed sub-optimal discriminator or conducts incomplete discriminator optimization, resulting in the scale-sensitive issue. We propose the Adversarial Score Distillation (ASD), which maintains an optimizable discriminator and updates it using the complete optimization objective. Experiments show that the proposed ASD performs favorably in 2D distillation and text-to-3D tasks against existing methods. Furthermore, to explore the generalization ability of our WGAN paradigm, we extend ASD to the image editing task, which achieves competitive results. The project page and code are at https://github.com/2y7c3/ASD.

TrackDiffusion: Multi-object Tracking Data Generation via Diffusion Models

December 01, 2023 Pengxiang Li, Zhili Liu, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Yunzhi Zhuge, Dit-Yan Yeung, Huchuan Lu, Xu Jia

cs.CV, cs.AI

Diffusion models have gained prominence in generating data for perception tasks such as image classification and object detection. However, the potential in generating high-quality tracking sequences, a crucial aspect in the field of video perception, has not been fully investigated. To address this gap, we propose TrackDiffusion, a novel architecture designed to generate continuous video sequences from the tracklets. TrackDiffusion represents a significant departure from the traditional layout-to-image (L2I) generation and copy-paste synthesis focusing on static image elements like bounding boxes by empowering image diffusion models to encompass dynamic and continuous tracking trajectories, thereby capturing complex motion nuances and ensuring instance consistency among video frames. For the first time, we demonstrate that the generated video sequences can be utilized for training multi-object tracking (MOT) systems, leading to significant improvement in tracker performance. Experimental results show that our model significantly enhances instance consistency in generated video sequences, leading to improved perceptual metrics. Our approach achieves an improvement of 8.7 in TrackAP and 11.8 in TrackAP$_{50}$ on the YTVIS dataset, underscoring its potential to redefine the standards of video data generation for MOT tasks and beyond.

DREAM: Diffusion Rectification and Estimation-Adaptive Models

November 30, 2023 Jinxin Zhou, Tianyu Ding, Tianyi Chen, Jiachen Jiang, Ilya Zharkov, Zhihui Zhu, Luming Liang

cs.CV, cs.AI

We present DREAM, a novel training framework representing Diffusion Rectification and Estimation-Adaptive Models, requiring minimal code changes (just three lines) yet significantly enhancing the alignment of training with sampling in diffusion models. DREAM features two components: diffusion rectification, which adjusts training to reflect the sampling process, and estimation adaptation, which balances perception against distortion. When applied to image super-resolution (SR), DREAM adeptly navigates the tradeoff between minimizing distortion and preserving high image quality. Experiments demonstrate DREAM’s superiority over standard diffusion-based SR methods, showing a $2$ to $3\times $ faster training convergence and a $10$ to $20\times$ reduction in necessary sampling steps to achieve comparable or superior results. We hope DREAM will inspire a rethinking of diffusion model training paradigms.

S2ST: Image-to-Image Translation in the Seed Space of Latent Diffusion

November 30, 2023 Or Greenberg, Eran Kishon, Dani Lischinski

cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG

Image-to-image translation (I2IT) refers to the process of transforming images from a source domain to a target domain while maintaining a fundamental connection in terms of image content. In the past few years, remarkable advancements in I2IT were achieved by Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which nevertheless struggle with translations requiring high precision. Recently, Diffusion Models have established themselves as the engine of choice for image generation. In this paper we introduce S2ST, a novel framework designed to accomplish global I2IT in complex photorealistic images, such as day-to-night or clear-to-rain translations of automotive scenes. S2ST operates within the seed space of a Latent Diffusion Model, thereby leveraging the powerful image priors learned by the latter. We show that S2ST surpasses state-of-the-art GAN-based I2IT methods, as well as diffusion-based approaches, for complex automotive scenes, improving fidelity while respecting the target domain’s appearance across a variety of domains. Notably, S2ST obviates the necessity for training domain-specific translation networks.

Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Generalizable Pixel-Level Semantic Prediction

November 30, 2023 Hsin-Ying Lee, Hung-Yu Tseng, Hsin-Ying Lee, Ming-Hsuan Yang

cs.CV

Contents generated by recent advanced Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models are sometimes too imaginative for existing off-the-shelf property semantic predictors to estimate due to the immitigable domain gap. We introduce DMP, a pipeline utilizing pre-trained T2I models as a prior for pixel-level semantic prediction tasks. To address the misalignment between deterministic prediction tasks and stochastic T2I models, we reformulate the diffusion process through a sequence of interpolations, establishing a deterministic mapping between input RGB images and output prediction distributions. To preserve generalizability, we use low-rank adaptation to fine-tune pre-trained models. Extensive experiments across five tasks, including 3D property estimation, semantic segmentation, and intrinsic image decomposition, showcase the efficacy of the proposed method. Despite limited-domain training data, the approach yields faithful estimations for arbitrary images, surpassing existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation

November 30, 2023 Tianwei Yin, Michaël Gharbi, Richard Zhang, Eli Shechtman, Frédo Durand, William T. Freeman, Taesung Park

cs.CV

Diffusion models generate high-quality images but require dozens of forward passes. We introduce Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD), a procedure to transform a diffusion model into a one-step image generator with minimal impact on image quality. We enforce the one-step image generator match the diffusion model at distribution level, by minimizing an approximate KL divergence whose gradient can be expressed as the difference between 2 score functions, one of the target distribution and the other of the synthetic distribution being produced by our one-step generator. The score functions are parameterized as two diffusion models trained separately on each distribution. Combined with a simple regression loss matching the large-scale structure of the multi-step diffusion outputs, our method outperforms all published few-step diffusion approaches, reaching 2.62 FID on ImageNet 64x64 and 11.49 FID on zero-shot COCO-30k, comparable to Stable Diffusion but orders of magnitude faster. Utilizing FP16 inference, our model can generate images at 20 FPS on modern hardware.

Continual Diffusion with STAMINA: STack-And-Mask INcremental Adapters

November 30, 2023 James Seale Smith, Yen-Chang Hsu, Zsolt Kira, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Recent work has demonstrated a remarkable ability to customize text-to-image diffusion models to multiple, fine-grained concepts in a sequential (i.e., continual) manner while only providing a few example images for each concept. This setting is known as continual diffusion. Here, we ask the question: Can we scale these methods to longer concept sequences without forgetting? Although prior work mitigates the forgetting of previously learned concepts, we show that its capacity to learn new tasks reaches saturation over longer sequences. We address this challenge by introducing a novel method, STack-And-Mask INcremental Adapters (STAMINA), which is composed of low-ranked attention-masked adapters and customized MLP tokens. STAMINA is designed to enhance the robust fine-tuning properties of LoRA for sequential concept learning via learnable hard-attention masks parameterized with low rank MLPs, enabling precise, scalable learning via sparse adaptation. Notably, all introduced trainable parameters can be folded back into the model after training, inducing no additional inference parameter costs. We show that STAMINA outperforms the prior SOTA for the setting of text-to-image continual customization on a 50-concept benchmark composed of landmarks and human faces, with no stored replay data. Additionally, we extended our method to the setting of continual learning for image classification, demonstrating that our gains also translate to state-of-the-art performance in this standard benchmark.

DiffusionAvatars: Deferred Diffusion for High-fidelity 3D Head Avatars

November 30, 2023 Tobias Kirschstein, Simon Giebenhain, Matthias Nießner

cs.CV

DiffusionAvatars synthesizes a high-fidelity 3D head avatar of a person, offering intuitive control over both pose and expression. We propose a diffusion-based neural renderer that leverages generic 2D priors to produce compelling images of faces. For coarse guidance of the expression and head pose, we render a neural parametric head model (NPHM) from the target viewpoint, which acts as a proxy geometry of the person. Additionally, to enhance the modeling of intricate facial expressions, we condition DiffusionAvatars directly on the expression codes obtained from NPHM via cross-attention. Finally, to synthesize consistent surface details across different viewpoints and expressions, we rig learnable spatial features to the head’s surface via TriPlane lookup in NPHM’s canonical space. We train DiffusionAvatars on RGB videos and corresponding tracked NPHM meshes of a person and test the obtained avatars in both self-reenactment and animation scenarios. Our experiments demonstrate that DiffusionAvatars generates temporally consistent and visually appealing videos for novel poses and expressions of a person, outperforming existing approaches.

Fast ODE-based Sampling for Diffusion Models in Around 5 Steps

November 30, 2023 Zhenyu Zhou, Defang Chen, Can Wang, Chun Chen

cs.CV, cs.AI

Sampling from diffusion models can be treated as solving the corresponding ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with the aim of obtaining an accurate solution with as few number of function evaluations (NFE) as possible. Recently, various fast samplers utilizing higher-order ODE solvers have emerged and achieved better performance than the initial first-order one. However, these numerical methods inherently result in certain approximation errors, which significantly degrades sample quality with extremely small NFE (e.g., around 5). In contrast, based on the geometric observation that each sampling trajectory almost lies in a two-dimensional subspace embedded in the ambient space, we propose Approximate MEan-Direction Solver (AMED-Solver) that eliminates truncation errors by directly learning the mean direction for fast diffusion sampling. Besides, our method can be easily used as a plugin to further improve existing ODE-based samplers. Extensive experiments on image synthesis with the resolution ranging from 32 to 256 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. With only 5 NFE, we achieve 7.14 FID on CIFAR-10, 13.75 FID on ImageNet 64$\times$64, and 12.79 FID on LSUN Bedroom. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhyzhouu/amed-solver.

On Exact Inversion of DPM-Solvers

November 30, 2023 Seongmin Hong, Kyeonghyun Lee, Suh Yoon Jeon, Hyewon Bae, Se Young Chun

cs.CV, cs.LG

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a key component in modern generative models. DPM-solvers have achieved reduced latency and enhanced quality significantly, but have posed challenges to find the exact inverse (i.e., finding the initial noise from the given image). Here we investigate the exact inversions for DPM-solvers and propose algorithms to perform them when samples are generated by the first-order as well as higher-order DPM-solvers. For each explicit denoising step in DPM-solvers, we formulated the inversions using implicit methods such as gradient descent or forward step method to ensure the robustness to large classifier-free guidance unlike the prior approach using fixed-point iteration. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed exact inversion methods significantly reduced the error of both image and noise reconstructions, greatly enhanced the ability to distinguish invisible watermarks and well prevented unintended background changes consistently during image editing. Project page: \url{https://smhongok.github.io/inv-dpm.html}.

Diffusion Models Without Attention

November 30, 2023 Jing Nathan Yan, Jiatao Gu, Alexander M. Rush

cs.CV, cs.LG

In recent advancements in high-fidelity image generation, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have emerged as a key player. However, their application at high resolutions presents significant computational challenges. Current methods, such as patchifying, expedite processes in UNet and Transformer architectures but at the expense of representational capacity. Addressing this, we introduce the Diffusion State Space Model (DiffuSSM), an architecture that supplants attention mechanisms with a more scalable state space model backbone. This approach effectively handles higher resolutions without resorting to global compression, thus preserving detailed image representation throughout the diffusion process. Our focus on FLOP-efficient architectures in diffusion training marks a significant step forward. Comprehensive evaluations on both ImageNet and LSUN datasets at two resolutions demonstrate that DiffuSSMs are on par or even outperform existing diffusion models with attention modules in FID and Inception Score metrics while significantly reducing total FLOP usage.

SMaRt: Improving GANs with Score Matching Regularity

November 30, 2023 Mengfei Xia, Yujun Shen, Ceyuan Yang, Ran Yi, Wenping Wang, Yong-jin Liu

cs.LG, cs.CV

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) usually struggle in learning from highly diverse data, whose underlying manifold is complex. In this work, we revisit the mathematical foundations of GANs, and theoretically reveal that the native adversarial loss for GAN training is insufficient to fix the problem of subsets with positive Lebesgue measure of the generated data manifold lying out of the real data manifold. Instead, we find that score matching serves as a valid solution to this issue thanks to its capability of persistently pushing the generated data points towards the real data manifold. We thereby propose to improve the optimization of GANs with score matching regularity (SMaRt). Regarding the empirical evidences, we first design a toy example to show that training GANs by the aid of a ground-truth score function can help reproduce the real data distribution more accurately, and then confirm that our approach can consistently boost the synthesis performance of various state-of-the-art GANs on real-world datasets with pre-trained diffusion models acting as the approximate score function. For instance, when training Aurora on the ImageNet 64x64 dataset, we manage to improve FID from 8.87 to 7.11, on par with the performance of one-step consistency model. The source code will be made public.

HiFi Tuner: High-Fidelity Subject-Driven Fine-Tuning for Diffusion Models

November 30, 2023 Zhonghao Wang, Wei Wei, Yang Zhao, Zhisheng Xiao, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Humphrey Shi, Tingbo Hou

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG

This paper explores advancements in high-fidelity personalized image generation through the utilization of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. While previous approaches have made significant strides in generating versatile scenes based on text descriptions and a few input images, challenges persist in maintaining the subject fidelity within the generated images. In this work, we introduce an innovative algorithm named HiFi Tuner to enhance the appearance preservation of objects during personalized image generation. Our proposed method employs a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, comprising a denoising process and a pivotal inversion process. Key enhancements include the utilization of mask guidance, a novel parameter regularization technique, and the incorporation of step-wise subject representations to elevate the sample fidelity. Additionally, we propose a reference-guided generation approach that leverages the pivotal inversion of a reference image to mitigate unwanted subject variations and artifacts. We further extend our method to a novel image editing task: substituting the subject in an image through textual manipulations. Experimental evaluations conducted on the DreamBooth dataset using the Stable Diffusion model showcase promising results. Fine-tuning solely on textual embeddings improves CLIP-T score by 3.6 points and improves DINO score by 9.6 points over Textual Inversion. When fine-tuning all parameters, HiFi Tuner improves CLIP-T score by 1.2 points and improves DINO score by 1.2 points over DreamBooth, establishing a new state of the art.

DiffGEPCI: 3D MRI Synthesis from mGRE Signals using 2.5D Diffusion Model

November 29, 2023 Yuyang Hu, Satya V. V. N. Kothapalli, Weijie Gan, Alexander L. Sukstanskii, Gregory F. Wu, Manu Goyal, Dmitriy A. Yablonskiy, Ulugbek S. Kamilov

eess.IV

We introduce a new framework called DiffGEPCI for cross-modality generation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) using a 2.5D conditional diffusion model. DiffGEPCI can synthesize high-quality Fluid Attenuated Inversion Recovery (FLAIR) and Magnetization Prepared-Rapid Gradient Echo (MPRAGE) images, without acquiring corresponding measurements, by leveraging multi-Gradient-Recalled Echo (mGRE) MRI signals as conditional inputs. DiffGEPCI operates in a two-step fashion: it initially estimates a 3D volume slice-by-slice using the axial plane and subsequently applies a refinement algorithm (referred to as 2.5D) to enhance the quality of the coronal and sagittal planes. Experimental validation on real mGRE data shows that DiffGEPCI achieves excellent performance, surpassing generative adversarial networks (GANs) and traditional diffusion models.

Do text-free diffusion models learn discriminative visual representations?

November 29, 2023 Soumik Mukhopadhyay, Matthew Gwilliam, Yosuke Yamaguchi, Vatsal Agarwal, Namitha Padmanabhan, Archana Swaminathan, Tianyi Zhou, Abhinav Shrivastava

cs.CV

While many unsupervised learning models focus on one family of tasks, either generative or discriminative, we explore the possibility of a unified representation learner: a model which addresses both families of tasks simultaneously. We identify diffusion models, a state-of-the-art method for generative tasks, as a prime candidate. Such models involve training a U-Net to iteratively predict and remove noise, and the resulting model can synthesize high-fidelity, diverse, novel images. We find that the intermediate feature maps of the U-Net are diverse, discriminative feature representations. We propose a novel attention mechanism for pooling feature maps and further leverage this mechanism as DifFormer, a transformer feature fusion of features from different diffusion U-Net blocks and noise steps. We also develop DifFeed, a novel feedback mechanism tailored to diffusion. We find that diffusion models are better than GANs, and, with our fusion and feedback mechanisms, can compete with state-of-the-art unsupervised image representation learning methods for discriminative tasks - image classification with full and semi-supervision, transfer for fine-grained classification, object detection and segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Our project website (https://mgwillia.github.io/diffssl/) and code (https://github.com/soumik-kanad/diffssl) are available publicly.

SODA: Bottleneck Diffusion Models for Representation Learning

November 29, 2023 Drew A. Hudson, Daniel Zoran, Mateusz Malinowski, Andrew K. Lampinen, Andrew Jaegle, James L. McClelland, Loic Matthey, Felix Hill, Alexander Lerchner

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

We introduce SODA, a self-supervised diffusion model, designed for representation learning. The model incorporates an image encoder, which distills a source view into a compact representation, that, in turn, guides the generation of related novel views. We show that by imposing a tight bottleneck between the encoder and a denoising decoder, and leveraging novel view synthesis as a self-supervised objective, we can turn diffusion models into strong representation learners, capable of capturing visual semantics in an unsupervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, SODA is the first diffusion model to succeed at ImageNet linear-probe classification, and, at the same time, it accomplishes reconstruction, editing and synthesis tasks across a wide range of datasets. Further investigation reveals the disentangled nature of its emergent latent space, that serves as an effective interface to control and manipulate the model’s produced images. All in all, we aim to shed light on the exciting and promising potential of diffusion models, not only for image generation, but also for learning rich and robust representations.

Leveraging Graph Diffusion Models for Network Refinement Tasks

November 29, 2023 Puja Trivedi, Ryan Rossi, David Arbour, Tong Yu, Franck Dernoncourt, Sungchul Kim, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Danai Koutra

cs.LG, cs.SI

Most real-world networks are noisy and incomplete samples from an unknown target distribution. Refining them by correcting corruptions or inferring unobserved regions typically improves downstream performance. Inspired by the impressive generative capabilities that have been used to correct corruptions in images, and the similarities between “in-painting” and filling in missing nodes and edges conditioned on the observed graph, we propose a novel graph generative framework, SGDM, which is based on subgraph diffusion. Our framework not only improves the scalability and fidelity of graph diffusion models, but also leverages the reverse process to perform novel, conditional generation tasks. In particular, through extensive empirical analysis and a set of novel metrics, we demonstrate that our proposed model effectively supports the following refinement tasks for partially observable networks: T1: denoising extraneous subgraphs, T2: expanding existing subgraphs and T3: performing “style” transfer by regenerating a particular subgraph to match the characteristics of a different node or subgraph.

Fair Text-to-Image Diffusion via Fair Mapping

November 29, 2023 Jia Li, Lijie Hu, Jingfeng Zhang, Tianhang Zheng, Hua Zhang, Di Wang

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG

In this paper, we address the limitations of existing text-to-image diffusion models in generating demographically fair results when given human-related descriptions. These models often struggle to disentangle the target language context from sociocultural biases, resulting in biased image generation. To overcome this challenge, we propose Fair Mapping, a general, model-agnostic, and lightweight approach that modifies a pre-trained text-to-image model by controlling the prompt to achieve fair image generation. One key advantage of our approach is its high efficiency. The training process only requires updating a small number of parameters in an additional linear mapping network. This not only reduces the computational cost but also accelerates the optimization process. We first demonstrate the issue of bias in generated results caused by language biases in text-guided diffusion models. By developing a mapping network that projects language embeddings into an unbiased space, we enable the generation of relatively balanced demographic results based on a keyword specified in the prompt. With comprehensive experiments on face image generation, we show that our method significantly improves image generation performance when prompted with descriptions related to human faces. By effectively addressing the issue of bias, we produce more fair and diverse image outputs. This work contributes to the field of text-to-image generation by enhancing the ability to generate images that accurately reflect the intended demographic characteristics specified in the text.

Using Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process to understand Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model and its Noise Schedules

November 29, 2023 Javier E. Santos, Yen Ting Lin

stat.ML, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.AI, cs.LG, math-ph, math.MP

The aim of this short note is to show that Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model DDPM, a non-homogeneous discrete-time Markov process, can be represented by a time-homogeneous continuous-time Markov process observed at non-uniformly sampled discrete times. Surprisingly, this continuous-time Markov process is the well-known and well-studied Ornstein-Ohlenbeck (OU) process, which was developed in 1930’s for studying Brownian particles in Harmonic potentials. We establish the formal equivalence between DDPM and the OU process using its analytical solution. We further demonstrate that the design problem of the noise scheduler for non-homogeneous DDPM is equivalent to designing observation times for the OU process. We present several heuristic designs for observation times based on principled quantities such as auto-variance and Fisher Information and connect them to ad hoc noise schedules for DDPM. Interestingly, we show that the Fisher-Information-motivated schedule corresponds exactly the cosine schedule, which was developed without any theoretical foundation but is the current state-of-the-art noise schedule.

November 29, 2023 Xiang Li, Qianli Shen, Kenji Kawaguchi

cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.MM

The booming use of text-to-image generative models has raised concerns about their high risk of producing copyright-infringing content. While probabilistic copyright protection methods provide a probabilistic guarantee against such infringement, in this paper, we introduce Virtually Assured Amplification Attack (VA3), a novel online attack framework that exposes the vulnerabilities of these protection mechanisms. The proposed framework significantly amplifies the probability of generating infringing content on the sustained interactions with generative models and a lower-bounded success probability of each engagement. Our theoretical and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and highlight the potential risk of implementing probabilistic copyright protection in practical applications of text-to-image generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/South7X/VA3.

HiDiffusion: Unlocking High-Resolution Creativity and Efficiency in Low-Resolution Trained Diffusion Models

November 29, 2023 Shen Zhang, Zhaowei Chen, Zhenyu Zhao, Zhenyuan Chen, Yao Tang, Yuhao Chen, Wengang Cao, Jiajun Liang

cs.CV

We introduce HiDiffusion, a tuning-free framework comprised of Resolution-Aware U-Net (RAU-Net) and Modified Shifted Window Multi-head Self-Attention (MSW-MSA) to enable pretrained large text-to-image diffusion models to efficiently generate high-resolution images (e.g. 1024$\times$1024) that surpass the training image resolution. Pretrained diffusion models encounter unreasonable object duplication in generating images beyond the training image resolution. We attribute it to the mismatch between the feature map size of high-resolution images and the receptive field of U-Net’s convolution. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet scalable method named RAU-Net. RAU-Net dynamically adjusts the feature map size to match the convolution’s receptive field in the deep block of U-Net. Another obstacle in high-resolution synthesis is the slow inference speed of U-Net. Our observations reveal that the global self-attention in the top block, which exhibits locality, however, consumes the majority of computational resources. To tackle this issue, we propose MSW-MSA. Unlike previous window attention mechanisms, our method uses a much larger window size and dynamically shifts windows to better accommodate diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our HiDiffusion can scale diffusion models to generate 1024$\times$1024, 2048$\times$2048, or even 4096$\times$4096 resolution images, while simultaneously reducing inference time by 40\%-60\%, achieving state-of-the-art performance on high-resolution image synthesis. The most significant revelation of our work is that a pretrained diffusion model on low-resolution images is scalable for high-resolution generation without further tuning. We hope this revelation can provide insights for future research on the scalability of diffusion models.

MMA-Diffusion: MultiModal Attack on Diffusion Models

November 29, 2023 Yijun Yang, Ruiyuan Gao, Xiaosen Wang, Nan Xu, Qiang Xu

cs.CR, cs.CV

In recent years, Text-to-Image (T2I) models have seen remarkable advancements, gaining widespread adoption. However, this progress has inadvertently opened avenues for potential misuse, particularly in generating inappropriate or Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Our work introduces MMA-Diffusion, a framework that presents a significant and realistic threat to the security of T2I models by effectively circumventing current defensive measures in both open-source models and commercial online services. Unlike previous approaches, MMA-Diffusion leverages both textual and visual modalities to bypass safeguards like prompt filters and post-hoc safety checkers, thus exposing and highlighting the vulnerabilities in existing defense mechanisms.

When StyleGAN Meets Stable Diffusion: a W+ Adapter for Personalized Image Generation

November 29, 2023 Xiaoming Li, Xinyu Hou, Chen Change Loy

cs.CV

Text-to-image diffusion models have remarkably excelled in producing diverse, high-quality, and photo-realistic images. This advancement has spurred a growing interest in incorporating specific identities into generated content. Most current methods employ an inversion approach to embed a target visual concept into the text embedding space using a single reference image. However, the newly synthesized faces either closely resemble the reference image in terms of facial attributes, such as expression, or exhibit a reduced capacity for identity preservation. Text descriptions intended to guide the facial attributes of the synthesized face may fall short, owing to the intricate entanglement of identity information with identity-irrelevant facial attributes derived from the reference image. To address these issues, we present the novel use of the extended StyleGAN embedding space $\mathcal{W}_+$, to achieve enhanced identity preservation and disentanglement for diffusion models. By aligning this semantically meaningful human face latent space with text-to-image diffusion models, we succeed in maintaining high fidelity in identity preservation, coupled with the capacity for semantic editing. Additionally, we propose new training objectives to balance the influences of both prompt and identity conditions, ensuring that the identity-irrelevant background remains unaffected during facial attribute modifications. Extensive experiments reveal that our method adeptly generates personalized text-to-image outputs that are not only compatible with prompt descriptions but also amenable to common StyleGAN editing directions in diverse settings. Our source code will be available at \url{https://github.com/csxmli2016/w-plus-adapter}.

DifFlow3D: Toward Robust Uncertainty-Aware Scene Flow Estimation with Diffusion Model

November 29, 2023 Jiuming Liu, Guangming Wang, Weicai Ye, Chaokang Jiang, Jinru Han, Zhe Liu, Guofeng Zhang, Dalong Du, Hesheng Wang

cs.CV

Scene flow estimation, which aims to predict per-point 3D displacements of dynamic scenes, is a fundamental task in the computer vision field. However, previous works commonly suffer from unreliable correlation caused by locally constrained searching ranges, and struggle with accumulated inaccuracy arising from the coarse-to-fine structure. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel uncertainty-aware scene flow estimation network (DifFlow3D) with the diffusion probabilistic model. Iterative diffusion-based refinement is designed to enhance the correlation robustness and resilience to challenging cases, e.g., dynamics, noisy inputs, repetitive patterns, etc. To restrain the generation diversity, three key flow-related features are leveraged as conditions in our diffusion model. Furthermore, we also develop an uncertainty estimation module within diffusion to evaluate the reliability of estimated scene flow. Our DifFlow3D achieves state-of-the-art performance, with 6.7\% and 19.1\% EPE3D reduction respectively on FlyingThings3D and KITTI 2015 datasets. Notably, our method achieves an unprecedented millimeter-level accuracy (0.0089m in EPE3D) on the KITTI dataset. Additionally, our diffusion-based refinement paradigm can be readily integrated as a plug-and-play module into existing scene flow networks, significantly increasing their estimation accuracy. Codes will be released later.

Unlocking Spatial Comprehension in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

November 28, 2023 Mohammad Mahdi Derakhshani, Menglin Xia, Harkirat Behl, Cees G. M. Snoek, Victor Rühle

cs.CV

We propose CompFuser, an image generation pipeline that enhances spatial comprehension and attribute assignment in text-to-image generative models. Our pipeline enables the interpretation of instructions defining spatial relationships between objects in a scene, such as `An image of a gray cat on the left of an orange dog’, and generate corresponding images. This is especially important in order to provide more control to the user. CompFuser overcomes the limitation of existing text-to-image diffusion models by decoding the generation of multiple objects into iterative steps: first generating a single object and then editing the image by placing additional objects in their designated positions. To create training data for spatial comprehension and attribute assignment we introduce a synthetic data generation process, that leverages a frozen large language model and a frozen layout-based diffusion model for object placement. We compare our approach to strong baselines and show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art image generation models in spatial comprehension and attribute assignment, despite being 3x to 5x smaller in parameters.

Shadows Don’t Lie and Lines Can’t Bend! Generative Models don’t know Projective Geometry…for now

November 28, 2023 Ayush Sarkar, Hanlin Mai, Amitabh Mahapatra, Svetlana Lazebnik, D. A. Forsyth, Anand Bhattad

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG

Generative models can produce impressively realistic images. This paper demonstrates that generated images have geometric features different from those of real images. We build a set of collections of generated images, prequalified to fool simple, signal-based classifiers into believing they are real. We then show that prequalified generated images can be identified reliably by classifiers that only look at geometric properties. We use three such classifiers. All three classifiers are denied access to image pixels, and look only at derived geometric features. The first classifier looks at the perspective field of the image, the second looks at lines detected in the image, and the third looks at relations between detected objects and shadows. Our procedure detects generated images more reliably than SOTA local signal based detectors, for images from a number of distinct generators. Saliency maps suggest that the classifiers can identify geometric problems reliably. We conclude that current generators cannot reliably reproduce geometric properties of real images.

DiffuseBot: Breeding Soft Robots With Physics-Augmented Generative Diffusion Models

November 28, 2023 Tsun-Hsuan Wang, Juntian Zheng, Pingchuan Ma, Yilun Du, Byungchul Kim, Andrew Spielberg, Joshua Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan, Daniela Rus

cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG

Nature evolves creatures with a high complexity of morphological and behavioral intelligence, meanwhile computational methods lag in approaching that diversity and efficacy. Co-optimization of artificial creatures’ morphology and control in silico shows promise for applications in physical soft robotics and virtual character creation; such approaches, however, require developing new learning algorithms that can reason about function atop pure structure. In this paper, we present DiffuseBot, a physics-augmented diffusion model that generates soft robot morphologies capable of excelling in a wide spectrum of tasks. DiffuseBot bridges the gap between virtually generated content and physical utility by (i) augmenting the diffusion process with a physical dynamical simulation which provides a certificate of performance, and (ii) introducing a co-design procedure that jointly optimizes physical design and control by leveraging information about physical sensitivities from differentiable simulation. We showcase a range of simulated and fabricated robots along with their capabilities. Check our website at https://diffusebot.github.io/

Adversarial Diffusion Distillation

November 28, 2023 Axel Sauer, Dominik Lorenz, Andreas Blattmann, Robin Rombach

cs.CV

We introduce Adversarial Diffusion Distillation (ADD), a novel training approach that efficiently samples large-scale foundational image diffusion models in just 1-4 steps while maintaining high image quality. We use score distillation to leverage large-scale off-the-shelf image diffusion models as a teacher signal in combination with an adversarial loss to ensure high image fidelity even in the low-step regime of one or two sampling steps. Our analyses show that our model clearly outperforms existing few-step methods (GANs, Latent Consistency Models) in a single step and reaches the performance of state-of-the-art diffusion models (SDXL) in only four steps. ADD is the first method to unlock single-step, real-time image synthesis with foundation models. Code and weights available under https://github.com/Stability-AI/generative-models and https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/ .

Space-Time Diffusion Features for Zero-Shot Text-Driven Motion Transfer

November 28, 2023 Danah Yatim, Rafail Fridman, Omer Bar Tal, Yoni Kasten, Tali Dekel

cs.CV

We present a new method for text-driven motion transfer - synthesizing a video that complies with an input text prompt describing the target objects and scene while maintaining an input video’s motion and scene layout. Prior methods are confined to transferring motion across two subjects within the same or closely related object categories and are applicable for limited domains (e.g., humans). In this work, we consider a significantly more challenging setting in which the target and source objects differ drastically in shape and fine-grained motion characteristics (e.g., translating a jumping dog into a dolphin). To this end, we leverage a pre-trained and fixed text-to-video diffusion model, which provides us with generative and motion priors. The pillar of our method is a new space-time feature loss derived directly from the model. This loss guides the generation process to preserve the overall motion of the input video while complying with the target object in terms of shape and fine-grained motion traits.

Ranni: Taming Text-to-Image Diffusion for Accurate Instruction Following

November 28, 2023 Yutong Feng, Biao Gong, Di Chen, Yujun Shen, Yu Liu, Jingren Zhou

cs.CV

Existing text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models usually struggle in interpreting complex prompts, especially those with quantity, object-attribute binding, and multi-subject descriptions. In this work, we introduce a semantic panel as the middleware in decoding texts to images, supporting the generator to better follow instructions. The panel is obtained through arranging the visual concepts parsed from the input text by the aid of large language models, and then injected into the denoising network as a detailed control signal to complement the text condition. To facilitate text-to-panel learning, we come up with a carefully designed semantic formatting protocol, accompanied by a fully-automatic data preparation pipeline. Thanks to such a design, our approach, which we call Ranni, manages to enhance a pre-trained T2I generator regarding its textual controllability. More importantly, the introduction of the generative middleware brings a more convenient form of interaction (i.e., directly adjusting the elements in the panel or using language instructions) and further allows users to finely customize their generation, based on which we develop a practical system and showcase its potential in continuous generation and chatting-based editing. Our project page is at https://ranni-t2i.github.io/Ranni.

Wavelet-based Fourier Information Interaction with Frequency Diffusion Adjustment for Underwater Image Restoration

November 28, 2023 Chen Zhao, Weiling Cai, Chenyu Dong, Chengwei Hu

cs.CV

Underwater images are subject to intricate and diverse degradation, inevitably affecting the effectiveness of underwater visual tasks. However, most approaches primarily operate in the raw pixel space of images, which limits the exploration of the frequency characteristics of underwater images, leading to an inadequate utilization of deep models’ representational capabilities in producing high-quality images. In this paper, we introduce a novel Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) framework, named WF-Diff, designed to fully leverage the characteristics of frequency domain information and diffusion models. WF-Diff consists of two detachable networks: Wavelet-based Fourier information interaction network (WFI2-net) and Frequency Residual Diffusion Adjustment Module (FRDAM). With our full exploration of the frequency domain information, WFI2-net aims to achieve preliminary enhancement of frequency information in the wavelet space. Our proposed FRDAM can further refine the high- and low-frequency information of the initial enhanced images, which can be viewed as a plug-and-play universal module to adjust the detail of the underwater images. With the above techniques, our algorithm can show SOTA performance on real-world underwater image datasets, and achieves competitive performance in visual quality.

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Image Inpainting of Cell Distributions in the Human Brain

November 28, 2023 Jan-Oliver Kropp, Christian Schiffer, Katrin Amunts, Timo Dickscheid

eess.IV, cs.CV

Recent advances in imaging and high-performance computing have made it possible to image the entire human brain at the cellular level. This is the basis to study the multi-scale architecture of the brain regarding its subdivision into brain areas and nuclei, cortical layers, columns, and cell clusters down to single cell morphology Methods for brain mapping and cell segmentation exploit such images to enable rapid and automated analysis of cytoarchitecture and cell distribution in complete series of histological sections. However, the presence of inevitable processing artifacts in the image data caused by missing sections, tears in the tissue, or staining variations remains the primary reason for gaps in the resulting image data. To this end we aim to provide a model that can fill in missing information in a reliable way, following the true cell distribution at different scales. Inspired by the recent success in image generation, we propose a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), trained on light-microscopic scans of cell-body stained sections. We extend this model with the RePaint method to impute missing or replace corrupted image data. We show that our trained DDPM is able to generate highly realistic image information for this purpose, generating plausible cell statistics and cytoarchitectonic patterns. We validate its outputs using two established downstream task models trained on the same data.

Robust Diffusion GAN using Semi-Unbalanced Optimal Transport

November 28, 2023 Quan Dao, Binh Ta, Tung Pham, Anh Tran

cs.CV

Diffusion models, a type of generative model, have demonstrated great potential for synthesizing highly detailed images. By integrating with GAN, advanced diffusion models like DDGAN \citep{xiao2022DDGAN} could approach real-time performance for expansive practical applications. While DDGAN has effectively addressed the challenges of generative modeling, namely producing high-quality samples, covering different data modes, and achieving faster sampling, it remains susceptible to performance drops caused by datasets that are corrupted with outlier samples. This work introduces a robust training technique based on semi-unbalanced optimal transport to mitigate the impact of outliers effectively. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our robust diffusion GAN (RDGAN) outperforms vanilla DDGAN in terms of the aforementioned generative modeling criteria, i.e., image quality, mode coverage of distribution, and inference speed, and exhibits improved robustness when dealing with both clean and corrupted datasets.

MobileDiffusion: Subsecond Text-to-Image Generation on Mobile Devices

November 28, 2023 Yang Zhao, Yanwu Xu, Zhisheng Xiao, Tingbo Hou

cs.CV

The deployment of large-scale text-to-image diffusion models on mobile devices is impeded by their substantial model size and slow inference speed. In this paper, we propose \textbf{MobileDiffusion}, a highly efficient text-to-image diffusion model obtained through extensive optimizations in both architecture and sampling techniques. We conduct a comprehensive examination of model architecture design to reduce redundancy, enhance computational efficiency, and minimize model’s parameter count, while preserving image generation quality. Additionally, we employ distillation and diffusion-GAN finetuning techniques on MobileDiffusion to achieve 8-step and 1-step inference respectively. Empirical studies, conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques. MobileDiffusion achieves a remarkable \textbf{sub-second} inference speed for generating a $512\times512$ image on mobile devices, establishing a new state of the art.

DiffusionTalker: Personalization and Acceleration for Speech-Driven 3D Face Diffuser

November 28, 2023 Peng Chen, Xiaobao Wei, Ming Lu, Yitong Zhu, Naiming Yao, Xingyu Xiao, Hui Chen

cs.CV, cs.SD, eess.AS

Speech-driven 3D facial animation has been an attractive task in both academia and industry. Traditional methods mostly focus on learning a deterministic mapping from speech to animation. Recent approaches start to consider the non-deterministic fact of speech-driven 3D face animation and employ the diffusion model for the task. However, personalizing facial animation and accelerating animation generation are still two major limitations of existing diffusion-based methods. To address the above limitations, we propose DiffusionTalker, a diffusion-based method that utilizes contrastive learning to personalize 3D facial animation and knowledge distillation to accelerate 3D animation generation. Specifically, to enable personalization, we introduce a learnable talking identity to aggregate knowledge in audio sequences. The proposed identity embeddings extract customized facial cues across different people in a contrastive learning manner. During inference, users can obtain personalized facial animation based on input audio, reflecting a specific talking style. With a trained diffusion model with hundreds of steps, we distill it into a lightweight model with 8 steps for acceleration. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released.

Exploring Straighter Trajectories of Flow Matching with Diffusion Guidance

November 28, 2023 Siyu Xing, Jie Cao, Huaibo Huang, Xiao-Yu Zhang, Ran He

cs.CV, cs.LG

Flow matching as a paradigm of generative model achieves notable success across various domains. However, existing methods use either multi-round training or knowledge within minibatches, posing challenges in finding a favorable coupling strategy for straight trajectories. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, Straighter trajectories of Flow Matching (StraightFM). It straightens trajectories with the coupling strategy guided by diffusion model from entire distribution level. First, we propose a coupling strategy to straighten trajectories, creating couplings between image and noise samples under diffusion model guidance. Second, StraightFM also integrates real data to enhance training, employing a neural network to parameterize another coupling process from images to noise samples. StraightFM is jointly optimized with couplings from above two mutually complementary directions, resulting in straighter trajectories and enabling both one-step and few-step generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StraightFM yields high quality samples with fewer step. StraightFM generates visually appealing images with a lower FID among diffusion and traditional flow matching methods within 5 sampling steps when trained on pixel space. In the latent space (i.e., Latent Diffusion), StraightFM achieves a lower KID value compared to existing methods on the CelebA-HQ 256 dataset in fewer than 10 sampling steps.

Federated Learning with Diffusion Models for Privacy-Sensitive Vision Tasks

November 28, 2023 Ye Lin Tun, Chu Myaet Thwal, Ji Su Yoon, Sun Moo Kang, Chaoning Zhang, Choong Seon Hong

cs.LG, cs.CR

Diffusion models have shown great potential for vision-related tasks, particularly for image generation. However, their training is typically conducted in a centralized manner, relying on data collected from publicly available sources. This approach may not be feasible or practical in many domains, such as the medical field, which involves privacy concerns over data collection. Despite the challenges associated with privacy-sensitive data, such domains could still benefit from valuable vision services provided by diffusion models. Federated learning (FL) plays a crucial role in enabling decentralized model training without compromising data privacy. Instead of collecting data, an FL system gathers model parameters, effectively safeguarding the private data of different parties involved. This makes FL systems vital for managing decentralized learning tasks, especially in scenarios where privacy-sensitive data is distributed across a network of clients. Nonetheless, FL presents its own set of challenges due to its distributed nature and privacy-preserving properties. Therefore, in this study, we explore the FL strategy to train diffusion models, paving the way for the development of federated diffusion models. We conduct experiments on various FL scenarios, and our findings demonstrate that federated diffusion models have great potential to deliver vision services to privacy-sensitive domains.

TextDiffuser-2: Unleashing the Power of Language Models for Text Rendering

November 28, 2023 Jingye Chen, Yupan Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qifeng Chen, Furu Wei

cs.CV

The diffusion model has been proven a powerful generative model in recent years, yet remains a challenge in generating visual text. Several methods alleviated this issue by incorporating explicit text position and content as guidance on where and what text to render. However, these methods still suffer from several drawbacks, such as limited flexibility and automation, constrained capability of layout prediction, and restricted style diversity. In this paper, we present TextDiffuser-2, aiming to unleash the power of language models for text rendering. Firstly, we fine-tune a large language model for layout planning. The large language model is capable of automatically generating keywords for text rendering and also supports layout modification through chatting. Secondly, we utilize the language model within the diffusion model to encode the position and texts at the line level. Unlike previous methods that employed tight character-level guidance, this approach generates more diverse text images. We conduct extensive experiments and incorporate user studies involving human participants as well as GPT-4V, validating TextDiffuser-2’s capacity to achieve a more rational text layout and generation with enhanced diversity. The code and model will be available at \url{https://aka.ms/textdiffuser-2}.

PEA-Diffusion: Parameter-Efficient Adapter with Knowledge Distillation in non-English Text-to-Image Generation

November 28, 2023 Jian Ma, Chen Chen, Qingsong Xie, Haonan Lu

cs.CV, cs.CL

Text-to-image diffusion models are well-known for their ability to generate realistic images based on textual prompts. However, the existing works have predominantly focused on English, lacking support for non-English text-to-image models. The most commonly used translation methods cannot solve the generation problem related to language culture, while training from scratch on a specific language dataset is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we are inspired to propose a simple plug-and-play language transfer method based on knowledge distillation. All we need to do is train a lightweight MLP-like parameter-efficient adapter (PEA) with only 6M parameters under teacher knowledge distillation along with a small parallel data corpus. We are surprised to find that freezing the parameters of UNet can still achieve remarkable performance on the language-specific prompt evaluation set, demonstrating that PEA can stimulate the potential generation ability of the original UNet. Additionally, it closely approaches the performance of the English text-to-image model on a general prompt evaluation set. Furthermore, our adapter can be used as a plugin to achieve significant results in downstream tasks in cross-lingual text-to-image generation. Code will be available at: https://github.com/OPPO-Mente-Lab/PEA-Diffusion

Manifold Preserving Guided Diffusion

November 28, 2023 Yutong He, Naoki Murata, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Yuhta Takida, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Dongjun Kim, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuki Mitsufuji, J. Zico Kolter, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Stefano Ermon

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Despite the recent advancements, conditional image generation still faces challenges of cost, generalizability, and the need for task-specific training. In this paper, we propose Manifold Preserving Guided Diffusion (MPGD), a training-free conditional generation framework that leverages pretrained diffusion models and off-the-shelf neural networks with minimal additional inference cost for a broad range of tasks. Specifically, we leverage the manifold hypothesis to refine the guided diffusion steps and introduce a shortcut algorithm in the process. We then propose two methods for on-manifold training-free guidance using pre-trained autoencoders and demonstrate that our shortcut inherently preserves the manifolds when applied to latent diffusion models. Our experiments show that MPGD is efficient and effective for solving a variety of conditional generation applications in low-compute settings, and can consistently offer up to 3.8x speed-ups with the same number of diffusion steps while maintaining high sample quality compared to the baselines.

Test-time Adaptation of Discriminative Models via Diffusion Generative Feedback

November 27, 2023 Mihir Prabhudesai, Tsung-Wei Ke, Alexander C. Li, Deepak Pathak, Katerina Fragkiadaki

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO

The advancements in generative modeling, particularly the advent of diffusion models, have sparked a fundamental question: how can these models be effectively used for discriminative tasks? In this work, we find that generative models can be great test-time adapters for discriminative models. Our method, Diffusion-TTA, adapts pre-trained discriminative models such as image classifiers, segmenters and depth predictors, to each unlabelled example in the test set using generative feedback from a diffusion model. We achieve this by modulating the conditioning of the diffusion model using the output of the discriminative model. We then maximize the image likelihood objective by backpropagating the gradients to discriminative model’s parameters. We show Diffusion-TTA significantly enhances the accuracy of various large-scale pre-trained discriminative models, such as, ImageNet classifiers, CLIP models, image pixel labellers and image depth predictors. Diffusion-TTA outperforms existing test-time adaptation methods, including TTT-MAE and TENT, and particularly shines in online adaptation setups, where the discriminative model is continually adapted to each example in the test set. We provide access to code, results, and visualizations on our website: https://diffusion-tta.github.io/.

Self-correcting LLM-controlled Diffusion Models

November 27, 2023 Tsung-Han Wu, Long Lian, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Boyi Li, Trevor Darrell

cs.CV

Text-to-image generation has witnessed significant progress with the advent of diffusion models. Despite the ability to generate photorealistic images, current text-to-image diffusion models still often struggle to accurately interpret and follow complex input text prompts. In contrast to existing models that aim to generate images only with their best effort, we introduce Self-correcting LLM-controlled Diffusion (SLD). SLD is a framework that generates an image from the input prompt, assesses its alignment with the prompt, and performs self-corrections on the inaccuracies in the generated image. Steered by an LLM controller, SLD turns text-to-image generation into an iterative closed-loop process, ensuring correctness in the resulting image. SLD is not only training-free but can also be seamlessly integrated with diffusion models behind API access, such as DALL-E 3, to further boost the performance of state-of-the-art diffusion models. Experimental results show that our approach can rectify a majority of incorrect generations, particularly in generative numeracy, attribute binding, and spatial relationships. Furthermore, by simply adjusting the instructions to the LLM, SLD can perform image editing tasks, bridging the gap between text-to-image generation and image editing pipelines. We will make our code available for future research and applications.

DiffSLVA: Harnessing Diffusion Models for Sign Language Video Anonymization

November 27, 2023 Zhaoyang Xia, Carol Neidle, Dimitris N. Metaxas

cs.CV

Since American Sign Language (ASL) has no standard written form, Deaf signers frequently share videos in order to communicate in their native language. However, since both hands and face convey critical linguistic information in signed languages, sign language videos cannot preserve signer privacy. While signers have expressed interest, for a variety of applications, in sign language video anonymization that would effectively preserve linguistic content, attempts to develop such technology have had limited success, given the complexity of hand movements and facial expressions. Existing approaches rely predominantly on precise pose estimations of the signer in video footage and often require sign language video datasets for training. These requirements prevent them from processing videos ‘in the wild,’ in part because of the limited diversity present in current sign language video datasets. To address these limitations, our research introduces DiffSLVA, a novel methodology that utilizes pre-trained large-scale diffusion models for zero-shot text-guided sign language video anonymization. We incorporate ControlNet, which leverages low-level image features such as HED (Holistically-Nested Edge Detection) edges, to circumvent the need for pose estimation. Additionally, we develop a specialized module dedicated to capturing facial expressions, which are critical for conveying essential linguistic information in signed languages. We then combine the above methods to achieve anonymization that better preserves the essential linguistic content of the original signer. This innovative methodology makes possible, for the first time, sign language video anonymization that could be used for real-world applications, which would offer significant benefits to the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing communities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a series of signer anonymization experiments.

Closing the ODE-SDE gap in score-based diffusion models through the Fokker-Planck equation

November 27, 2023 Teo Deveney, Jan Stanczuk, Lisa Maria Kreusser, Chris Budd, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

cs.LG, cs.NA, math.NA, stat.ML

Score-based diffusion models have emerged as one of the most promising frameworks for deep generative modelling, due to their state-of-the art performance in many generation tasks while relying on mathematical foundations such as stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and ordinary differential equations (ODEs). Empirically, it has been reported that ODE based samples are inferior to SDE based samples. In this paper we rigorously describe the range of dynamics and approximations that arise when training score-based diffusion models, including the true SDE dynamics, the neural approximations, the various approximate particle dynamics that result, as well as their associated Fokker–Planck equations and the neural network approximations of these Fokker–Planck equations. We systematically analyse the difference between the ODE and SDE dynamics of score-based diffusion models, and link it to an associated Fokker–Planck equation. We derive a theoretical upper bound on the Wasserstein 2-distance between the ODE- and SDE-induced distributions in terms of a Fokker–Planck residual. We also show numerically that conventional score-based diffusion models can exhibit significant differences between ODE- and SDE-induced distributions which we demonstrate using explicit comparisons. Moreover, we show numerically that reducing the Fokker–Planck residual by adding it as an additional regularisation term leads to closing the gap between ODE- and SDE-induced distributions. Our experiments suggest that this regularisation can improve the distribution generated by the ODE, however that this can come at the cost of degraded SDE sample quality.

DiffAnt: Diffusion Models for Action Anticipation

November 27, 2023 Zeyun Zhong, Chengzhi Wu, Manuel Martin, Michael Voit, Juergen Gall, Jürgen Beyerer

cs.CV

Anticipating future actions is inherently uncertain. Given an observed video segment containing ongoing actions, multiple subsequent actions can plausibly follow. This uncertainty becomes even larger when predicting far into the future. However, the majority of existing action anticipation models adhere to a deterministic approach, neglecting to account for future uncertainties. In this work, we rethink action anticipation from a generative view, employing diffusion models to capture different possible future actions. In this framework, future actions are iteratively generated from standard Gaussian noise in the latent space, conditioned on the observed video, and subsequently transitioned into the action space. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, i.e., Breakfast, 50Salads, EpicKitchens, and EGTEA Gaze+, are performed and the proposed method achieves superior or comparable results to state-of-the-art methods, showing the effectiveness of a generative approach for action anticipation. Our code and trained models will be published on GitHub.

TFMQ-DM: Temporal Feature Maintenance Quantization for Diffusion Models

November 27, 2023 Yushi Huang, Ruihao Gong, Jing Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xianglong Liu

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

The Diffusion model, a prevalent framework for image generation, encounters significant challenges in terms of broad applicability due to its extended inference times and substantial memory requirements. Efficient Post-training Quantization (PTQ) is pivotal for addressing these issues in traditional models. Different from traditional models, diffusion models heavily depend on the time-step $t$ to achieve satisfactory multi-round denoising. Usually, $t$ from the finite set ${1, \ldots, T}$ is encoded to a temporal feature by a few modules totally irrespective of the sampling data. However, existing PTQ methods do not optimize these modules separately. They adopt inappropriate reconstruction targets and complex calibration methods, resulting in a severe disturbance of the temporal feature and denoising trajectory, as well as a low compression efficiency. To solve these, we propose a Temporal Feature Maintenance Quantization (TFMQ) framework building upon a Temporal Information Block which is just related to the time-step $t$ and unrelated to the sampling data. Powered by the pioneering block design, we devise temporal information aware reconstruction (TIAR) and finite set calibration (FSC) to align the full-precision temporal features in a limited time. Equipped with the framework, we can maintain the most temporal information and ensure the end-to-end generation quality. Extensive experiments on various datasets and diffusion models prove our state-of-the-art results. Remarkably, our quantization approach, for the first time, achieves model performance nearly on par with the full-precision model under 4-bit weight quantization. Additionally, our method incurs almost no extra computational cost and accelerates quantization time by $2.0 \times$ on LSUN-Bedrooms $256 \times 256$ compared to previous works.

Regularization by Texts for Latent Diffusion Inverse Solvers

November 27, 2023 Jeongsol Kim, Geon Yeong Park, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

The recent advent of diffusion models has led to significant progress in solving inverse problems, leveraging these models as effective generative priors. Nonetheless, challenges related to the ill-posed nature of such problems remain, often due to inherent ambiguities in measurements. Drawing inspiration from the human ability to resolve visual ambiguities through perceptual biases, here we introduce a novel latent diffusion inverse solver by incorporating regularization by texts (TReg). Specifically, TReg applies the textual description of the preconception of the solution during the reverse sampling phase, of which description isndynamically reinforced through null-text optimization for adaptive negation. Our comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that TReg successfully mitigates ambiguity in latent diffusion inverse solvers, enhancing their effectiveness and accuracy.

LFSRDiff: Light Field Image Super-Resolution via Diffusion Models

November 27, 2023 Wentao Chao, Fuqing Duan, Xuechun Wang, Yingqian Wang, Guanghui Wang

eess.IV, cs.CV

Light field (LF) image super-resolution (SR) is a challenging problem due to its inherent ill-posed nature, where a single low-resolution (LR) input LF image can correspond to multiple potential super-resolved outcomes. Despite this complexity, mainstream LF image SR methods typically adopt a deterministic approach, generating only a single output supervised by pixel-wise loss functions. This tendency often results in blurry and unrealistic results. Although diffusion models can capture the distribution of potential SR results by iteratively predicting Gaussian noise during the denoising process, they are primarily designed for general images and struggle to effectively handle the unique characteristics and information present in LF images. To address these limitations, we introduce LFSRDiff, the first diffusion-based LF image SR model, by incorporating the LF disentanglement mechanism. Our novel contribution includes the introduction of a disentangled U-Net for diffusion models, enabling more effective extraction and fusion of both spatial and angular information within LF images. Through comprehensive experimental evaluations and comparisons with the state-of-the-art LF image SR methods, the proposed approach consistently produces diverse and realistic SR results. It achieves the highest perceptual metric in terms of LPIPS. It also demonstrates the ability to effectively control the trade-off between perception and distortion. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/chaowentao/LFSRDiff}.

Functional Diffusion

November 26, 2023 Biao Zhang, Peter Wonka

cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG

We propose a new class of generative diffusion models, called functional diffusion. In contrast to previous work, functional diffusion works on samples that are represented by functions with a continuous domain. Functional diffusion can be seen as an extension of classical diffusion models to an infinite-dimensional domain. Functional diffusion is very versatile as images, videos, audio, 3D shapes, deformations, \etc, can be handled by the same framework with minimal changes. In addition, functional diffusion is especially suited for irregular data or data defined in non-standard domains. In our work, we derive the necessary foundations for functional diffusion and propose a first implementation based on the transformer architecture. We show generative results on complicated signed distance functions and deformation functions defined on 3D surfaces.

ToddlerDiffusion: Flash Interpretable Controllable Diffusion Model

November 24, 2023 Eslam Mohamed Bakr, Liangbing Zhao, Vincent Tao Hu, Matthieu Cord, Patrick Perez, Mohamed Elhoseiny

cs.CV

Diffusion-based generative models excel in perceptually impressive synthesis but face challenges in interpretability. This paper introduces ToddlerDiffusion, an interpretable 2D diffusion image-synthesis framework inspired by the human generation system. Unlike traditional diffusion models with opaque denoising steps, our approach decomposes the generation process into simpler, interpretable stages; generating contours, a palette, and a detailed colored image. This not only enhances overall performance but also enables robust editing and interaction capabilities. Each stage is meticulously formulated for efficiency and accuracy, surpassing Stable-Diffusion (LDM). Extensive experiments on datasets like LSUN-Churches and COCO validate our approach, consistently outperforming existing methods. ToddlerDiffusion achieves notable efficiency, matching LDM performance on LSUN-Churches while operating three times faster with a 3.76 times smaller architecture. Our source code is provided in the supplementary material and will be publicly accessible.

DemoFusion: Democratising High-Resolution Image Generation With No $$$

November 24, 2023 Ruoyi Du, Dongliang Chang, Timothy Hospedales, Yi-Zhe Song, Zhanyu Ma

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

High-resolution image generation with Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has immense potential but, due to the enormous capital investment required for training, it is increasingly centralised to a few large corporations, and hidden behind paywalls. This paper aims to democratise high-resolution GenAI by advancing the frontier of high-resolution generation while remaining accessible to a broad audience. We demonstrate that existing Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) possess untapped potential for higher-resolution image generation. Our novel DemoFusion framework seamlessly extends open-source GenAI models, employing Progressive Upscaling, Skip Residual, and Dilated Sampling mechanisms to achieve higher-resolution image generation. The progressive nature of DemoFusion requires more passes, but the intermediate results can serve as “previews”, facilitating rapid prompt iteration.

On diffusion-based generative models and their error bounds: The log-concave case with full convergence estimates

November 22, 2023 Stefano Bruno, Ying Zhang, Dong-Young Lim, Ömer Deniz Akyildiz, Sotirios Sabanis

cs.LG, math.OC, math.PR, stat.ML

We provide full theoretical guarantees for the convergence behaviour of diffusion-based generative models under the assumption of strongly logconcave data distributions while our approximating class of functions used for score estimation is made of Lipschitz continuous functions. We demonstrate via a motivating example, sampling from a Gaussian distribution with unknown mean, the powerfulness of our approach. In this case, explicit estimates are provided for the associated optimization problem, i.e. score approximation, while these are combined with the corresponding sampling estimates. As a result, we obtain the best known upper bound estimates in terms of key quantities of interest, such as the dimension and rates of convergence, for the Wasserstein-2 distance between the data distribution (Gaussian with unknown mean) and our sampling algorithm. Beyond the motivating example and in order to allow for the use of a diverse range of stochastic optimizers, we present our results using an $L^2$-accurate score estimation assumption, which crucially is formed under an expectation with respect to the stochastic optimizer and our novel auxiliary process that uses only known information. This approach yields the best known convergence rate for our sampling algorithm.

DiffusionMat: Alpha Matting as Sequential Refinement Learning

November 22, 2023 Yangyang Xu, Shengfeng He, Wenqi Shao, Kwan-Yee K. Wong, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo

cs.CV

In this paper, we introduce DiffusionMat, a novel image matting framework that employs a diffusion model for the transition from coarse to refined alpha mattes. Diverging from conventional methods that utilize trimaps merely as loose guidance for alpha matte prediction, our approach treats image matting as a sequential refinement learning process. This process begins with the addition of noise to trimaps and iteratively denoises them using a pre-trained diffusion model, which incrementally guides the prediction towards a clean alpha matte. The key innovation of our framework is a correction module that adjusts the output at each denoising step, ensuring that the final result is consistent with the input image’s structures. We also introduce the Alpha Reliability Propagation, a novel technique designed to maximize the utility of available guidance by selectively enhancing the trimap regions with confident alpha information, thus simplifying the correction task. To train the correction module, we devise specialized loss functions that target the accuracy of the alpha matte’s edges and the consistency of its opaque and transparent regions. We evaluate our model across several image matting benchmarks, and the results indicate that DiffusionMat consistently outperforms existing methods. Project page at~\url{https://cnnlstm.github.io/DiffusionMat

Accelerating Inference in Molecular Diffusion Models with Latent Representations of Protein Structure

November 22, 2023 Ian Dunn, David Ryan Koes

q-bio.BM, cs.LG

Diffusion generative models have emerged as a powerful framework for addressing problems in structural biology and structure-based drug design. These models operate directly on 3D molecular structures. Due to the unfavorable scaling of graph neural networks (GNNs) with graph size as well as the relatively slow inference speeds inherent to diffusion models, many existing molecular diffusion models rely on coarse-grained representations of protein structure to make training and inference feasible. However, such coarse-grained representations discard essential information for modeling molecular interactions and impair the quality of generated structures. In this work, we present a novel GNN-based architecture for learning latent representations of molecular structure. When trained end-to-end with a diffusion model for de novo ligand design, our model achieves comparable performance to one with an all-atom protein representation while exhibiting a 3-fold reduction in inference time.

Guided Flows for Generative Modeling and Decision Making

November 22, 2023 Qinqing Zheng, Matt Le, Neta Shaul, Yaron Lipman, Aditya Grover, Ricky T. Q. Chen

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.RO, stat.ML

Classifier-free guidance is a key component for improving the performance of conditional generative models for many downstream tasks. It drastically improves the quality of samples produced, but has so far only been used for diffusion models. Flow Matching (FM), an alternative simulation-free approach, trains Continuous Normalizing Flows (CNFs) based on regressing vector fields. It remains an open question whether classifier-free guidance can be performed for Flow Matching models, and to what extent does it improve performance. In this paper, we explore the usage of Guided Flows for a variety of downstream applications involving conditional image generation, speech synthesis, and reinforcement learning. In particular, we are the first to apply flow models to the offline reinforcement learning setting. We also show that Guided Flows significantly improves the sample quality in image generation and zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis, and can make use of drastically low amounts of computation without affecting the agent’s overall performance.

Recognition-Guided Diffusion Model for Scene Text Image Super-Resolution

November 22, 2023 Yuxuan Zhou, Liangcai Gao, Zhi Tang, Baole Wei

cs.CV

Scene Text Image Super-Resolution (STISR) aims to enhance the resolution and legibility of text within low-resolution (LR) images, consequently elevating recognition accuracy in Scene Text Recognition (STR). Previous methods predominantly employ discriminative Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) augmented with diverse forms of text guidance to address this issue. Nevertheless, they remain deficient when confronted with severely blurred images, due to their insufficient generation capability when little structural or semantic information can be extracted from original images. Therefore, we introduce RGDiffSR, a Recognition-Guided Diffusion model for scene text image Super-Resolution, which exhibits great generative diversity and fidelity even in challenging scenarios. Moreover, we propose a Recognition-Guided Denoising Network, to guide the diffusion model generating LR-consistent results through succinct semantic guidance. Experiments on the TextZoom dataset demonstrate the superiority of RGDiffSR over prior state-of-the-art methods in both text recognition accuracy and image fidelity.

Diffusion360: Seamless 360 Degree Panoramic Image Generation based on Diffusion Models

November 22, 2023 Mengyang Feng, Jinlin Liu, Miaomiao Cui, Xuansong Xie

cs.CV

This is a technical report on the 360-degree panoramic image generation task based on diffusion models. Unlike ordinary 2D images, 360-degree panoramic images capture the entire $360^\circ\times 180^\circ$ field of view. So the rightmost and the leftmost sides of the 360 panoramic image should be continued, which is the main challenge in this field. However, the current diffusion pipeline is not appropriate for generating such a seamless 360-degree panoramic image. To this end, we propose a circular blending strategy on both the denoising and VAE decoding stages to maintain the geometry continuity. Based on this, we present two models for \textbf{Text-to-360-panoramas} and \textbf{Single-Image-to-360-panoramas} tasks. The code has been released as an open-source project at \href{https://github.com/ArcherFMY/SD-T2I-360PanoImage}{https://github.com/ArcherFMY/SD-T2I-360PanoImage} and \href{https://www.modelscope.cn/models/damo/cv_diffusion_text-to-360panorama-image_generation/summary}{ModelScope}

On the Limitation of Diffusion Models for Synthesizing Training Datasets

November 22, 2023 Shin'ya Yamaguchi, Takuma Fukuda

cs.AI, cs.CV

Synthetic samples from diffusion models are promising for leveraging in training discriminative models as replications of real training datasets. However, we found that the synthetic datasets degrade classification performance over real datasets even when using state-of-the-art diffusion models. This means that modern diffusion models do not perfectly represent the data distribution for the purpose of replicating datasets for training discriminative tasks. This paper investigates the gap between synthetic and real samples by analyzing the synthetic samples reconstructed from real samples through the diffusion and reverse process. By varying the time steps starting the reverse process in the reconstruction, we can control the trade-off between the information in the original real data and the information added by diffusion models. Through assessing the reconstructed samples and trained models, we found that the synthetic data are concentrated in modes of the training data distribution as the reverse step increases, and thus, they are difficult to cover the outer edges of the distribution. Our findings imply that modern diffusion models are insufficient to replicate training data distribution perfectly, and there is room for the improvement of generative modeling in the replication of training datasets.

Diffusion Model Alignment Using Direct Preference Optimization

November 21, 2023 Bram Wallace, Meihua Dang, Rafael Rafailov, Linqi Zhou, Aaron Lou, Senthil Purushwalkam, Stefano Ermon, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty, Nikhil Naik

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG

Large language models (LLMs) are fine-tuned using human comparison data with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) methods to make them better aligned with users’ preferences. In contrast to LLMs, human preference learning has not been widely explored in text-to-image diffusion models; the best existing approach is to fine-tune a pretrained model using carefully curated high quality images and captions to improve visual appeal and text alignment. We propose Diffusion-DPO, a method to align diffusion models to human preferences by directly optimizing on human comparison data. Diffusion-DPO is adapted from the recently developed Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a simpler alternative to RLHF which directly optimizes a policy that best satisfies human preferences under a classification objective. We re-formulate DPO to account for a diffusion model notion of likelihood, utilizing the evidence lower bound to derive a differentiable objective. Using the Pick-a-Pic dataset of 851K crowdsourced pairwise preferences, we fine-tune the base model of the state-of-the-art Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL)-1.0 model with Diffusion-DPO. Our fine-tuned base model significantly outperforms both base SDXL-1.0 and the larger SDXL-1.0 model consisting of an additional refinement model in human evaluation, improving visual appeal and prompt alignment. We also develop a variant that uses AI feedback and has comparable performance to training on human preferences, opening the door for scaling of diffusion model alignment methods.

Stable Diffusion For Aerial Object Detection

November 21, 2023 Yanan Jian, Fuxun Yu, Simranjit Singh, Dimitrios Stamoulis

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Aerial object detection is a challenging task, in which one major obstacle lies in the limitations of large-scale data collection and the long-tail distribution of certain classes. Synthetic data offers a promising solution, especially with recent advances in diffusion-based methods like stable diffusion (SD). However, the direct application of diffusion methods to aerial domains poses unique challenges: stable diffusion’s optimization for rich ground-level semantics doesn’t align with the sparse nature of aerial objects, and the extraction of post-synthesis object coordinates remains problematic. To address these challenges, we introduce a synthetic data augmentation framework tailored for aerial images. It encompasses sparse-to-dense region of interest (ROI) extraction to bridge the semantic gap, fine-tuning the diffusion model with low-rank adaptation (LORA) to circumvent exhaustive retraining, and finally, a Copy-Paste method to compose synthesized objects with backgrounds, providing a nuanced approach to aerial object detection through synthetic data.

Concept Sliders: LoRA Adaptors for Precise Control in Diffusion Models

November 20, 2023 Rohit Gandikota, Joanna Materzynska, Tingrui Zhou, Antonio Torralba, David Bau

cs.CV

We present a method to create interpretable concept sliders that enable precise control over attributes in image generations from diffusion models. Our approach identifies a low-rank parameter direction corresponding to one concept while minimizing interference with other attributes. A slider is created using a small set of prompts or sample images; thus slider directions can be created for either textual or visual concepts. Concept Sliders are plug-and-play: they can be composed efficiently and continuously modulated, enabling precise control over image generation. In quantitative experiments comparing to previous editing techniques, our sliders exhibit stronger targeted edits with lower interference. We showcase sliders for weather, age, styles, and expressions, as well as slider compositions. We show how sliders can transfer latents from StyleGAN for intuitive editing of visual concepts for which textual description is difficult. We also find that our method can help address persistent quality issues in Stable Diffusion XL including repair of object deformations and fixing distorted hands. Our code, data, and trained sliders are available at https://sliders.baulab.info/

FrePolad: Frequency-Rectified Point Latent Diffusion for Point Cloud Generation

November 20, 2023 Chenliang Zhou, Fangcheng Zhong, Param Hanji, Zhilin Guo, Kyle Fogarty, Alejandro Sztrajman, Hongyun Gao, Cengiz Oztireli

cs.CV

We propose FrePolad: frequency-rectified point latent diffusion, a point cloud generation pipeline integrating a variational autoencoder (VAE) with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) for the latent distribution. FrePolad simultaneously achieves high quality, diversity, and flexibility in point cloud cardinality for generation tasks while maintaining high computational efficiency. The improvement in generation quality and diversity is achieved through (1) a novel frequency rectification module via spherical harmonics designed to retain high-frequency content while learning the point cloud distribution; and (2) a latent DDPM to learn the regularized yet complex latent distribution. In addition, FrePolad supports variable point cloud cardinality by formulating the sampling of points as conditional distributions over a latent shape distribution. Finally, the low-dimensional latent space encoded by the VAE contributes to FrePolad’s fast and scalable sampling. Our quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of FrePolad in terms of quality, diversity, and computational efficiency.

Pyramid Diffusion for Fine 3D Large Scene Generation

November 20, 2023 Yuheng Liu, Xinke Li, Xueting Li, Lu Qi, Chongshou Li, Ming-Hsuan Yang

cs.CV

Directly transferring the 2D techniques to 3D scene generation is challenging due to significant resolution reduction and the scarcity of comprehensive real-world 3D scene datasets. To address these issues, our work introduces the Pyramid Discrete Diffusion model (PDD) for 3D scene generation. This novel approach employs a multi-scale model capable of progressively generating high-quality 3D scenes from coarse to fine. In this way, the PDD can generate high-quality scenes within limited resource constraints and does not require additional data sources. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to adopt the simple but effective coarse-to-fine strategy for 3D large scene generation. Our experiments, covering both unconditional and conditional generation, have yielded impressive results, showcasing the model’s effectiveness and robustness in generating realistic and detailed 3D scenes. Our code will be available to the public.

Reti-Diff: Illumination Degradation Image Restoration with Retinex-based Latent Diffusion Model

November 20, 2023 Chunming He, Chengyu Fang, Yulun Zhang, Kai Li, Longxiang Tang, Chenyu You, Fengyang Xiao, Zhenhua Guo, Xiu Li

cs.CV

Illumination degradation image restoration (IDIR) techniques aim to improve the visibility of degraded images and mitigate the adverse effects of deteriorated illumination. Among these algorithms, diffusion model (DM)-based methods have shown promising performance but are often burdened by heavy computational demands and pixel misalignment issues when predicting the image-level distribution. To tackle these problems, we propose to leverage DM within a compact latent space to generate concise guidance priors and introduce a novel solution called Reti-Diff for the IDIR task. Reti-Diff comprises two key components: the Retinex-based latent DM (RLDM) and the Retinex-guided transformer (RGformer). To ensure detailed reconstruction and illumination correction, RLDM is empowered to acquire Retinex knowledge and extract reflectance and illumination priors. These priors are subsequently utilized by RGformer to guide the decomposition of image features into their respective reflectance and illumination components. Following this, RGformer further enhances and consolidates the decomposed features, resulting in the production of refined images with consistent content and robustness to handle complex degradation scenarios. Extensive experiments show that Reti-Diff outperforms existing methods on three IDIR tasks, as well as downstream applications. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ChunmingHe/Reti-Diff}.

Deep Equilibrium Diffusion Restoration with Parallel Sampling

November 20, 2023 Jiezhang Cao, Yue Shi, Kai Zhang, Yulun Zhang, Radu Timofte, Luc Van Gool

cs.CV

Diffusion-based image restoration (IR) methods aim to use diffusion models to recover high-quality (HQ) images from degraded images and achieve promising performance. Due to the inherent property of diffusion models, most of these methods need long serial sampling chains to restore HQ images step-by-step. As a result, it leads to expensive sampling time and high computation costs. Moreover, such long sampling chains hinder understanding the relationship between the restoration results and the inputs since it is hard to compute the gradients in the whole chains. In this work, we aim to rethink the diffusion-based IR models through a different perspective, i.e., a deep equilibrium (DEQ) fixed point system. Specifically, we derive an analytical solution by modeling the entire sampling chain in diffusion-based IR models as a joint multivariate fixed point system. With the help of the analytical solution, we are able to conduct single-image sampling in a parallel way and restore HQ images without training. Furthermore, we compute fast gradients in DEQ and found that initialization optimization can boost performance and control the generation direction. Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on typical IR tasks and real-world settings. The code and models will be made publicly available.

Advancing Urban Renewal: An Automated Approach to Generating Historical Arcade Facades with Stable Diffusion Models

November 20, 2023 Zheyuan Kuang, Jiaxin Zhang, Yiying Huang, Yunqin Li

cs.CV, cs.AI

Urban renewal and transformation processes necessitate the preservation of the historical urban fabric, particularly in districts known for their architectural and historical significance. These regions, with their diverse architectural styles, have traditionally required extensive preliminary research, often leading to subjective results. However, the advent of machine learning models has opened up new avenues for generating building facade images. Despite this, creating high-quality images for historical district renovations remains challenging, due to the complexity and diversity inherent in such districts. In response to these challenges, our study introduces a new methodology for automatically generating images of historical arcade facades, utilizing Stable Diffusion models conditioned on textual descriptions. By classifying and tagging a variety of arcade styles, we have constructed several realistic arcade facade image datasets. We trained multiple low-rank adaptation (LoRA) models to control the stylistic aspects of the generated images, supplemented by ControlNet models for improved precision and authenticity. Our approach has demonstrated high levels of precision, authenticity, and diversity in the generated images, showing promising potential for real-world urban renewal projects. This new methodology offers a more efficient and accurate alternative to conventional design processes in urban renewal, bypassing issues of unconvincing image details, lack of precision, and limited stylistic variety. Future research could focus on integrating this two-dimensional image generation with three-dimensional modeling techniques, providing a more comprehensive solution for renovating architectural facades in historical districts.

Fast Controllable Diffusion Models for Undersampled MRI Reconstruction

November 20, 2023 Wei Jiang, Zhuang Xiong, Feng Liu, Nan Ye, Hongfu Sun

eess.IV, cs.LG

Supervised deep learning methods have shown promise in undersampled Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction, but their requirement for paired data limits their generalizability to the diverse MRI acquisition parameters. Recently, unsupervised controllable generative diffusion models have been applied to undersampled MRI reconstruction, without paired data or model retraining for different MRI acquisitions. However, diffusion models are generally slow in sampling and state-of-the-art acceleration techniques can lead to sub-optimal results when directly applied to the controllable generation process. This study introduces a new algorithm called Predictor-Projector-Noisor (PPN), which enhances and accelerates controllable generation of diffusion models for undersampled MRI reconstruction. Our results demonstrate that PPN produces high-fidelity MR images that conform to undersampled k-space measurements with significantly shorter reconstruction time than other controllable sampling methods. In addition, the unsupervised PPN accelerated diffusion models are adaptable to different MRI acquisition parameters, making them more practical for clinical use than supervised learning techniques.

Gaussian Interpolation Flows

November 20, 2023 Yuan Gao, Jian Huang, Yuling Jiao

stat.ML, cs.LG

Gaussian denoising has emerged as a powerful principle for constructing simulation-free continuous normalizing flows for generative modeling. Despite their empirical successes, theoretical properties of these flows and the regularizing effect of Gaussian denoising have remained largely unexplored. In this work, we aim to address this gap by investigating the well-posedness of simulation-free continuous normalizing flows built on Gaussian denoising. Through a unified framework termed Gaussian interpolation flow, we establish the Lipschitz regularity of the flow velocity field, the existence and uniqueness of the flow, and the Lipschitz continuity of the flow map and the time-reversed flow map for several rich classes of target distributions. This analysis also sheds light on the auto-encoding and cycle-consistency properties of Gaussian interpolation flows. Additionally, we delve into the stability of these flows in source distributions and perturbations of the velocity field, using the quadratic Wasserstein distance as a metric. Our findings offer valuable insights into the learning techniques employed in Gaussian interpolation flows for generative modeling, providing a solid theoretical foundation for end-to-end error analyses of learning GIFs with empirical observations.

FDDM: Unsupervised Medical Image Translation with a Frequency-Decoupled Diffusion Model

November 19, 2023 Yunxiang Li, Hua-Chieh Shao, Xiaoxue Qian, You Zhang

eess.IV, cs.CV

Diffusion models have demonstrated significant potential in producing high-quality images for medical image translation to aid disease diagnosis, localization, and treatment. Nevertheless, current diffusion models have limited success in achieving faithful image translations that can accurately preserve the anatomical structures of medical images, especially for unpaired datasets. The preservation of structural and anatomical details is essential to reliable medical diagnosis and treatment planning, as structural mismatches can lead to disease misidentification and treatment errors. In this study, we introduced a frequency-decoupled diffusion model (FDDM), a novel framework that decouples the frequency components of medical images in the Fourier domain during the translation process, to allow structure-preserved high-quality image conversion. FDDM applies an unsupervised frequency conversion module to translate the source medical images into frequency-specific outputs and then uses the frequency-specific information to guide a following diffusion model for final source-to-target image translation. We conducted extensive evaluations of FDDM using a public brain MR-to-CT translation dataset, showing its superior performance against other GAN-, VAE-, and diffusion-based models. Metrics including the Frechet inception distance (FID), the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and the structural similarity index measure (SSIM) were assessed. FDDM achieves an FID of 29.88, less than half of the second best. These results demonstrated FDDM’s prowess in generating highly-realistic target-domain images while maintaining the faithfulness of translated anatomical structures.

A Survey of Emerging Applications of Diffusion Probabilistic Models in MRI

November 19, 2023 Yuheng Fan, Hanxi Liao, Shiqi Huang, Yimin Luo, Huazhu Fu, Haikun Qi

cs.CV

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) which employ explicit likelihood characterization and a gradual sampling process to synthesize data, have gained increasing research interest. Despite their huge computational burdens due to the large number of steps involved during sampling, DPMs are widely appreciated in various medical imaging tasks for their high-quality and diversity of generation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an important medical imaging modality with excellent soft tissue contrast and superb spatial resolution, which possesses unique opportunities for diffusion models. Although there is a recent surge of studies exploring DPMs in MRI, a survey paper of DPMs specifically designed for MRI applications is still lacking. This review article aims to help researchers in the MRI community to grasp the advances of DPMs in different applications. We first introduce the theory of two dominant kinds of DPMs, categorized according to whether the diffusion time step is discrete or continuous, and then provide a comprehensive review of emerging DPMs in MRI, including reconstruction, image generation, image translation, segmentation, anomaly detection, and further research topics. Finally, we discuss the general limitations as well as limitations specific to the MRI tasks of DPMs and point out potential areas that are worth further exploration.

GaussianDiffusion: 3D Gaussian Splatting for Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models with Structured Noise

November 19, 2023 Xinhai Li, Huaibin Wang, Kuo-Kun Tseng

cs.CV

Text-to-3D, known for its efficient generation methods and expansive creative potential, has garnered significant attention in the AIGC domain. However, the amalgamation of Nerf and 2D diffusion models frequently yields oversaturated images, posing severe limitations on downstream industrial applications due to the constraints of pixelwise rendering method. Gaussian splatting has recently superseded the traditional pointwise sampling technique prevalent in NeRF-based methodologies, revolutionizing various aspects of 3D reconstruction. This paper introduces a novel text to 3D content generation framework based on Gaussian splatting, enabling fine control over image saturation through individual Gaussian sphere transparencies, thereby producing more realistic images. The challenge of achieving multi-view consistency in 3D generation significantly impedes modeling complexity and accuracy. Taking inspiration from SJC, we explore employing multi-view noise distributions to perturb images generated by 3D Gaussian splatting, aiming to rectify inconsistencies in multi-view geometry. We ingeniously devise an efficient method to generate noise that produces Gaussian noise from diverse viewpoints, all originating from a shared noise source. Furthermore, vanilla 3D Gaussian-based generation tends to trap models in local minima, causing artifacts like floaters, burrs, or proliferative elements. To mitigate these issues, we propose the variational Gaussian splatting technique to enhance the quality and stability of 3D appearance. To our knowledge, our approach represents the first comprehensive utilization of Gaussian splatting across the entire spectrum of 3D content generation processes.

Wasserstein Convergence Guarantees for a General Class of Score-Based Generative Models

November 18, 2023 Xuefeng Gao, Hoang M. Nguyen, Lingjiong Zhu

cs.LG, math.PR, stat.ML

Score-based generative models (SGMs) is a recent class of deep generative models with state-of-the-art performance in many applications. In this paper, we establish convergence guarantees for a general class of SGMs in 2-Wasserstein distance, assuming accurate score estimates and smooth log-concave data distribution. We specialize our result to several concrete SGMs with specific choices of forward processes modelled by stochastic differential equations, and obtain an upper bound on the iteration complexity for each model, which demonstrates the impacts of different choices of the forward processes. We also provide a lower bound when the data distribution is Gaussian. Numerically, we experiment SGMs with different forward processes, some of which are newly proposed in this paper, for unconditional image generation on CIFAR-10. We find that the experimental results are in good agreement with our theoretical predictions on the iteration complexity, and the models with our newly proposed forward processes can outperform existing models.

SDDPM: Speckle Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

November 17, 2023 Soumee Guha, Scott T. Acton

eess.IV

Coherent imaging systems, such as medical ultrasound and synthetic aperture radar (SAR), are subject to corruption from speckle due to sub-resolution scatterers. Since speckle is multiplicative in nature, the constituent image regions become corrupted to different extents. The task of denoising such images requires algorithms specifically designed for removing signal-dependent noise. This paper proposes a novel image denoising algorithm for removing signal-dependent multiplicative noise with diffusion models, called Speckle Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (SDDPM). We derive the mathematical formulations for the forward process, the reverse process, and the training objective. In the forward process, we apply multiplicative noise to a given image and prove that the forward process is Gaussian. We show that the reverse process is also Gaussian and the final training objective can be expressed as the Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence between the forward and reverse processes. As derived in the paper, the final denoising task is a single step process, thereby reducing the denoising time significantly. We have trained our model with natural land-use images and ultrasound images for different noise levels. Extensive experiments centered around two different applications show that SDDPM is robust and performs significantly better than the comparative models even when the images are severely corrupted.

K-space Cold Diffusion: Learning to Reconstruct Accelerated MRI without Noise

November 16, 2023 Guoyao Shen, Mengyu Li, Chad W. Farris, Stephan Anderson, Xin Zhang

eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG, physics.med-ph

Deep learning-based MRI reconstruction models have achieved superior performance these days. Most recently, diffusion models have shown remarkable performance in image generation, in-painting, super-resolution, image editing and more. As a generalized diffusion model, cold diffusion further broadens the scope and considers models built around arbitrary image transformations such as blurring, down-sampling, etc. In this paper, we propose a k-space cold diffusion model that performs image degradation and restoration in k-space without the need for Gaussian noise. We provide comparisons with multiple deep learning-based MRI reconstruction models and perform tests on a well-known large open-source MRI dataset. Our results show that this novel way of performing degradation can generate high-quality reconstruction images for accelerated MRI.

The Chosen One: Consistent Characters in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

November 16, 2023 Omri Avrahami, Amir Hertz, Yael Vinker, Moab Arar, Shlomi Fruchter, Ohad Fried, Daniel Cohen-Or, Dani Lischinski

cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG

Recent advances in text-to-image generation models have unlocked vast potential for visual creativity. However, these models struggle with generation of consistent characters, a crucial aspect for numerous real-world applications such as story visualization, game development asset design, advertising, and more. Current methods typically rely on multiple pre-existing images of the target character or involve labor-intensive manual processes. In this work, we propose a fully automated solution for consistent character generation, with the sole input being a text prompt. We introduce an iterative procedure that, at each stage, identifies a coherent set of images sharing a similar identity and extracts a more consistent identity from this set. Our quantitative analysis demonstrates that our method strikes a better balance between prompt alignment and identity consistency compared to the baseline methods, and these findings are reinforced by a user study. To conclude, we showcase several practical applications of our approach. Project page is available at https://omriavrahami.com/the-chosen-one

Score-based generative models learn manifold-like structures with constrained mixing

November 16, 2023 Li Kevin Wenliang, Ben Moran

stat.ML, cs.CV, cs.LG

How do score-based generative models (SBMs) learn the data distribution supported on a low-dimensional manifold? We investigate the score model of a trained SBM through its linear approximations and subspaces spanned by local feature vectors. During diffusion as the noise decreases, the local dimensionality increases and becomes more varied between different sample sequences. Importantly, we find that the learned vector field mixes samples by a non-conservative field within the manifold, although it denoises with normal projections as if there is an energy function in off-manifold directions. At each noise level, the subspace spanned by the local features overlap with an effective density function. These observations suggest that SBMs can flexibly mix samples with the learned score field while carefully maintaining a manifold-like structure of the data distribution.

DSR-Diff: Depth Map Super-Resolution with Diffusion Model

November 16, 2023 Yuan Shi, Bin Xia, Rui Zhu, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang

cs.CV, cs.AI

Color-guided depth map super-resolution (CDSR) improve the spatial resolution of a low-quality depth map with the corresponding high-quality color map, benefiting various applications such as 3D reconstruction, virtual reality, and augmented reality. While conventional CDSR methods typically rely on convolutional neural networks or transformers, diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated notable effectiveness in high-level vision tasks. In this work, we present a novel CDSR paradigm that utilizes a diffusion model within the latent space to generate guidance for depth map super-resolution. The proposed method comprises a guidance generation network (GGN), a depth map super-resolution network (DSRN), and a guidance recovery network (GRN). The GGN is specifically designed to generate the guidance while managing its compactness. Additionally, we integrate a simple but effective feature fusion module and a transformer-style feature extraction module into the DSRN, enabling it to leverage guided priors in the extraction, fusion, and reconstruction of multi-model images. Taking into account both accuracy and efficiency, our proposed method has shown superior performance in extensive experiments when compared to state-of-the-art methods. Our codes will be made available at https://github.com/shiyuan7/DSR-Diff.

Diffusion-Augmented Neural Processes

November 16, 2023 Lorenzo Bonito, James Requeima, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Richard E. Turner

cs.LG, I.2.6

Over the last few years, Neural Processes have become a useful modelling tool in many application areas, such as healthcare and climate sciences, in which data are scarce and prediction uncertainty estimates are indispensable. However, the current state of the art in the field (AR CNPs; Bruinsma et al., 2023) presents a few issues that prevent its widespread deployment. This work proposes an alternative, diffusion-based approach to NPs which, through conditioning on noised datasets, addresses many of these limitations, whilst also exceeding SOTA performance.

DIFFNAT: Improving Diffusion Image Quality Using Natural Image Statistics

November 16, 2023 Aniket Roy, Maiterya Suin, Anshul Shah, Ketul Shah, Jiang Liu, Rama Chellappa

cs.CV

Diffusion models have advanced generative AI significantly in terms of editing and creating naturalistic images. However, efficiently improving generated image quality is still of paramount interest. In this context, we propose a generic “naturalness” preserving loss function, viz., kurtosis concentration (KC) loss, which can be readily applied to any standard diffusion model pipeline to elevate the image quality. Our motivation stems from the projected kurtosis concentration property of natural images, which states that natural images have nearly constant kurtosis values across different band-pass versions of the image. To retain the “naturalness” of the generated images, we enforce reducing the gap between the highest and lowest kurtosis values across the band-pass versions (e.g., Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT)) of images. Note that our approach does not require any additional guidance like classifier or classifier-free guidance to improve the image quality. We validate the proposed approach for three diverse tasks, viz., (1) personalized few-shot finetuning using text guidance, (2) unconditional image generation, and (3) image super-resolution. Integrating the proposed KC loss has improved the perceptual quality across all these tasks in terms of both FID, MUSIQ score, and user evaluation.

Privacy Threats in Stable Diffusion Models

November 15, 2023 Thomas Cilloni, Charles Fleming, Charles Walter

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

This paper introduces a novel approach to membership inference attacks (MIA) targeting stable diffusion computer vision models, specifically focusing on the highly sophisticated Stable Diffusion V2 by StabilityAI. MIAs aim to extract sensitive information about a model’s training data, posing significant privacy concerns. Despite its advancements in image synthesis, our research reveals privacy vulnerabilities in the stable diffusion models’ outputs. Exploiting this information, we devise a black-box MIA that only needs to query the victim model repeatedly. Our methodology involves observing the output of a stable diffusion model at different generative epochs and training a classification model to distinguish when a series of intermediates originated from a training sample or not. We propose numerous ways to measure the membership features and discuss what works best. The attack’s efficacy is assessed using the ROC AUC method, demonstrating a 60\% success rate in inferring membership information. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on privacy and security in machine learning, highlighting the need for robust defenses against MIAs. Our findings prompt a reevaluation of the privacy implications of stable diffusion models, urging practitioners and developers to implement enhanced security measures to safeguard against such attacks.

DMV3D: Denoising Multi-View Diffusion using 3D Large Reconstruction Model

November 15, 2023 Yinghao Xu, Hao Tan, Fujun Luan, Sai Bi, Peng Wang, Jiahao Li, Zifan Shi, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Gordon Wetzstein, Zexiang Xu, Kai Zhang

cs.CV

We propose \textbf{DMV3D}, a novel 3D generation approach that uses a transformer-based 3D large reconstruction model to denoise multi-view diffusion. Our reconstruction model incorporates a triplane NeRF representation and can denoise noisy multi-view images via NeRF reconstruction and rendering, achieving single-stage 3D generation in $\sim$30s on single A100 GPU. We train \textbf{DMV3D} on large-scale multi-view image datasets of highly diverse objects using only image reconstruction losses, without accessing 3D assets. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results for the single-image reconstruction problem where probabilistic modeling of unseen object parts is required for generating diverse reconstructions with sharp textures. We also show high-quality text-to-3D generation results outperforming previous 3D diffusion models. Our project website is at: https://justimyhxu.github.io/projects/dmv3d/ .

A Spectral Diffusion Prior for Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution

November 15, 2023 Jianjun Liu, Zebin Wu, Liang Xiao

cs.CV, eess.IV

Fusion-based hyperspectral image (HSI) super-resolution aims to produce a high-spatial-resolution HSI by fusing a low-spatial-resolution HSI and a high-spatial-resolution multispectral image. Such a HSI super-resolution process can be modeled as an inverse problem, where the prior knowledge is essential for obtaining the desired solution. Motivated by the success of diffusion models, we propose a novel spectral diffusion prior for fusion-based HSI super-resolution. Specifically, we first investigate the spectrum generation problem and design a spectral diffusion model to model the spectral data distribution. Then, in the framework of maximum a posteriori, we keep the transition information between every two neighboring states during the reverse generative process, and thereby embed the knowledge of trained spectral diffusion model into the fusion problem in the form of a regularization term. At last, we treat each generation step of the final optimization problem as its subproblem, and employ the Adam to solve these subproblems in a reverse sequence. Experimental results conducted on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The code of the proposed approach will be available on https://github.com/liuofficial/SDP.

A Diffusion Model Based Quality Enhancement Method for HEVC Compressed Video

November 15, 2023 Zheng Liu, Honggang Qi

eess.IV, cs.CV

Video post-processing methods can improve the quality of compressed videos at the decoder side. Most of the existing methods need to train corresponding models for compressed videos with different quantization parameters to improve the quality of compressed videos. However, in most cases, the quantization parameters of the decoded video are unknown. This makes existing methods have their limitations in improving video quality. To tackle this problem, this work proposes a diffusion model based post-processing method for compressed videos. The proposed method first estimates the feature vectors of the compressed video and then uses the estimated feature vectors as the prior information for the quality enhancement model to adaptively enhance the quality of compressed video with different quantization parameters. Experimental results show that the quality enhancement results of our proposed method on mixed datasets are superior to existing methods.

Towards Graph-Aware Diffusion Modeling for Collaborative Filtering

November 15, 2023 Yunqin Zhu, Chao Wang, Hui Xiong

cs.IR, cs.LG

Recovering masked feedback with neural models is a popular paradigm in recommender systems. Seeing the success of diffusion models in solving ill-posed inverse problems, we introduce a conditional diffusion framework for collaborative filtering that iteratively reconstructs a user’s hidden preferences guided by its historical interactions. To better align with the intrinsic characteristics of implicit feedback data, we implement forward diffusion by applying synthetic smoothing filters to interaction signals on an item-item graph. The resulting reverse diffusion can be interpreted as a personalized process that gradually refines preference scores. Through graph Fourier transform, we equivalently characterize this model as an anisotropic Gaussian diffusion in the graph spectral domain, establishing both forward and reverse formulations. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on one dataset and yields competitive results on the others.

EDMSound: Spectrogram Based Diffusion Models for Efficient and High-Quality Audio Synthesis

November 15, 2023 Ge Zhu, Yutong Wen, Marc-André Carbonneau, Zhiyao Duan

cs.SD, eess.AS

Audio diffusion models can synthesize a wide variety of sounds. Existing models often operate on the latent domain with cascaded phase recovery modules to reconstruct waveform. This poses challenges when generating high-fidelity audio. In this paper, we propose EDMSound, a diffusion-based generative model in spectrogram domain under the framework of elucidated diffusion models (EDM). Combining with efficient deterministic sampler, we achieved similar Fr'echet audio distance (FAD) score as top-ranked baseline with only 10 steps and reached state-of-the-art performance with 50 steps on the DCASE2023 foley sound generation benchmark. We also revealed a potential concern regarding diffusion based audio generation models that they tend to generate samples with high perceptual similarity to the data from training data. Project page: https://agentcooper2002.github.io/EDMSound/

I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models

November 07, 2023 Shiwei Zhang, Jiayu Wang, Yingya Zhang, Kang Zhao, Hangjie Yuan, Zhiwu Qin, Xiang Wang, Deli Zhao, Jingren Zhou

cs.CV

Video synthesis has recently made remarkable strides benefiting from the rapid development of diffusion models. However, it still encounters challenges in terms of semantic accuracy, clarity and spatio-temporal continuity. They primarily arise from the scarcity of well-aligned text-video data and the complex inherent structure of videos, making it difficult for the model to simultaneously ensure semantic and qualitative excellence. In this report, we propose a cascaded I2VGen-XL approach that enhances model performance by decoupling these two factors and ensures the alignment of the input data by utilizing static images as a form of crucial guidance. I2VGen-XL consists of two stages: i) the base stage guarantees coherent semantics and preserves content from input images by using two hierarchical encoders, and ii) the refinement stage enhances the video’s details by incorporating an additional brief text and improves the resolution to 1280$\times$720. To improve the diversity, we collect around 35 million single-shot text-video pairs and 6 billion text-image pairs to optimize the model. By this means, I2VGen-XL can simultaneously enhance the semantic accuracy, continuity of details and clarity of generated videos. Through extensive experiments, we have investigated the underlying principles of I2VGen-XL and compared it with current top methods, which can demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse data. The source code and models will be publicly available at \url{https://i2vgen-xl.github.io}.

Generative learning for nonlinear dynamics

November 07, 2023 William Gilpin

cs.LG, nlin.CD, physics.comp-ph

Modern generative machine learning models demonstrate surprising ability to create realistic outputs far beyond their training data, such as photorealistic artwork, accurate protein structures, or conversational text. These successes suggest that generative models learn to effectively parametrize and sample arbitrarily complex distributions. Beginning half a century ago, foundational works in nonlinear dynamics used tools from information theory to infer properties of chaotic attractors from time series, motivating the development of algorithms for parametrizing chaos in real datasets. In this perspective, we aim to connect these classical works to emerging themes in large-scale generative statistical learning. We first consider classical attractor reconstruction, which mirrors constraints on latent representations learned by state space models of time series. We next revisit early efforts to use symbolic approximations to compare minimal discrete generators underlying complex processes, a problem relevant to modern efforts to distill and interpret black-box statistical models. Emerging interdisciplinary works bridge nonlinear dynamics and learning theory, such as operator-theoretic methods for complex fluid flows, or detection of broken detailed balance in biological datasets. We anticipate that future machine learning techniques may revisit other classical concepts from nonlinear dynamics, such as transinformation decay and complexity-entropy tradeoffs.

Generative Structural Design Integrating BIM and Diffusion Model

November 07, 2023 Zhili He, Yu-Hsing Wang, Jian Zhang

cs.LG, cs.CV

Intelligent structural design using AI can effectively reduce time overhead and increase efficiency. It has potential to become the new design paradigm in the future to assist and even replace engineers, and so it has become a research hotspot in the academic community. However, current methods have some limitations to be addressed, whether in terms of application scope, visual quality of generated results, or evaluation metrics of results. This study proposes a comprehensive solution. Firstly, we introduce building information modeling (BIM) into intelligent structural design and establishes a structural design pipeline integrating BIM and generative AI, which is a powerful supplement to the previous frameworks that only considered CAD drawings. In order to improve the perceptual quality and details of generations, this study makes 3 contributions. Firstly, in terms of generation framework, inspired by the process of human drawing, a novel 2-stage generation framework is proposed to replace the traditional end-to-end framework to reduce the generation difficulty for AI models. Secondly, in terms of generative AI tools adopted, diffusion models (DMs) are introduced to replace widely used generative adversarial network (GAN)-based models, and a novel physics-based conditional diffusion model (PCDM) is proposed to consider different design prerequisites. Thirdly, in terms of neural networks, an attention block (AB) consisting of a self-attention block (SAB) and a parallel cross-attention block (PCAB) is designed to facilitate cross-domain data fusion. The quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the powerful generation and representation capabilities of PCDM. Necessary ablation studies are conducted to examine the validity of the methods. This study also shows that DMs have the potential to replace GANs and become the new benchmark for generative problems in civil engineering.

Formulating Discrete Probability Flow Through Optimal Transport

November 07, 2023 Pengze Zhang, Hubery Yin, Chen Li, Xiaohua Xie

cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC

Continuous diffusion models are commonly acknowledged to display a deterministic probability flow, whereas discrete diffusion models do not. In this paper, we aim to establish the fundamental theory for the probability flow of discrete diffusion models. Specifically, we first prove that the continuous probability flow is the Monge optimal transport map under certain conditions, and also present an equivalent evidence for discrete cases. In view of these findings, we are then able to define the discrete probability flow in line with the principles of optimal transport. Finally, drawing upon our newly established definitions, we propose a novel sampling method that surpasses previous discrete diffusion models in its ability to generate more certain outcomes. Extensive experiments on the synthetic toy dataset and the CIFAR-10 dataset have validated the effectiveness of our proposed discrete probability flow. Code is released at: https://github.com/PangzeCheung/Discrete-Probability-Flow.

Reducing Spatial Fitting Error in Distillation of Denoising Diffusion Models

November 07, 2023 Shengzhe Zhou, Zejian Lee, Shengyuan Zhang, Lefan Hou, Changyuan Yang, Guang Yang, Lingyun Sun

cs.CV, cs.AI

Denoising Diffusion models have exhibited remarkable capabilities in image generation. However, generating high-quality samples requires a large number of iterations. Knowledge distillation for diffusion models is an effective method to address this limitation with a shortened sampling process but causes degraded generative quality. Based on our analysis with bias-variance decomposition and experimental observations, we attribute the degradation to the spatial fitting error occurring in the training of both the teacher and student model. Accordingly, we propose $\textbf{S}$patial $\textbf{F}$itting-$\textbf{E}$rror $\textbf{R}$eduction $\textbf{D}$istillation model ($\textbf{SFERD}$). SFERD utilizes attention guidance from the teacher model and a designed semantic gradient predictor to reduce the student’s fitting error. Empirically, our proposed model facilitates high-quality sample generation in a few function evaluations. We achieve an FID of 5.31 on CIFAR-10 and 9.39 on ImageNet 64$\times$64 with only one step, outperforming existing diffusion methods. Our study provides a new perspective on diffusion distillation by highlighting the intrinsic denoising ability of models.

Multi-Resolution Diffusion for Privacy-Sensitive Recommender Systems

November 06, 2023 Derek Lilienthal, Paul Mello, Magdalini Eirinaki, Stas Tiomkin

cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.LG

While recommender systems have become an integral component of the Web experience, their heavy reliance on user data raises privacy and security concerns. Substituting user data with synthetic data can address these concerns, but accurately replicating these real-world datasets has been a notoriously challenging problem. Recent advancements in generative AI have demonstrated the impressive capabilities of diffusion models in generating realistic data across various domains. In this work we introduce a Score-based Diffusion Recommendation Module (SDRM), which captures the intricate patterns of real-world datasets required for training highly accurate recommender systems. SDRM allows for the generation of synthetic data that can replace existing datasets to preserve user privacy, or augment existing datasets to address excessive data sparsity. Our method outperforms competing baselines such as generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, and recently proposed diffusion models in synthesizing various datasets to replace or augment the original data by an average improvement of 4.30% in Recall@$k$ and 4.65% in NDCG@$k$.

TS-Diffusion: Generating Highly Complex Time Series with Diffusion Models

November 06, 2023 Yangming Li

cs.LG

While current generative models have achieved promising performances in time-series synthesis, they either make strong assumptions on the data format (e.g., regularities) or rely on pre-processing approaches (e.g., interpolations) to simplify the raw data. In this work, we consider a class of time series with three common bad properties, including sampling irregularities, missingness, and large feature-temporal dimensions, and introduce a general model, TS-Diffusion, to process such complex time series. Our model consists of three parts under the framework of point process. The first part is an encoder of the neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) that converts time series into dense representations, with the jump technique to capture sampling irregularities and self-attention mechanism to handle missing values; The second component of TS-Diffusion is a diffusion model that learns from the representation of time series. These time-series representations can have a complex distribution because of their high dimensions; The third part is a decoder of another ODE that generates time series with irregularities and missing values given their representations. We have conducted extensive experiments on multiple time-series datasets, demonstrating that TS-Diffusion achieves excellent results on both conventional and complex time series and significantly outperforms previous baselines.

LDM3D-VR: Latent Diffusion Model for 3D VR

November 06, 2023 Gabriela Ben Melech Stan, Diana Wofk, Estelle Aflalo, Shao-Yen Tseng, Zhipeng Cai, Michael Paulitsch, Vasudev Lal

cs.CV, cs.AI

Latent diffusion models have proven to be state-of-the-art in the creation and manipulation of visual outputs. However, as far as we know, the generation of depth maps jointly with RGB is still limited. We introduce LDM3D-VR, a suite of diffusion models targeting virtual reality development that includes LDM3D-pano and LDM3D-SR. These models enable the generation of panoramic RGBD based on textual prompts and the upscaling of low-resolution inputs to high-resolution RGBD, respectively. Our models are fine-tuned from existing pretrained models on datasets containing panoramic/high-resolution RGB images, depth maps and captions. Both models are evaluated in comparison to existing related methods.

A Two-Stage Generative Model with CycleGAN and Joint Diffusion for MRI-based Brain Tumor Detection

November 06, 2023 Wenxin Wang, Zhuo-Xu Cui, Guanxun Cheng, Chentao Cao, Xi Xu, Ziwei Liu, Haifeng Wang, Yulong Qi, Dong Liang, Yanjie Zhu

eess.IV, cs.CV

Accurate detection and segmentation of brain tumors is critical for medical diagnosis. However, current supervised learning methods require extensively annotated images and the state-of-the-art generative models used in unsupervised methods often have limitations in covering the whole data distribution. In this paper, we propose a novel framework Two-Stage Generative Model (TSGM) that combines Cycle Generative Adversarial Network (CycleGAN) and Variance Exploding stochastic differential equation using joint probability (VE-JP) to improve brain tumor detection and segmentation. The CycleGAN is trained on unpaired data to generate abnormal images from healthy images as data prior. Then VE-JP is implemented to reconstruct healthy images using synthetic paired abnormal images as a guide, which alters only pathological regions but not regions of healthy. Notably, our method directly learned the joint probability distribution for conditional generation. The residual between input and reconstructed images suggests the abnormalities and a thresholding method is subsequently applied to obtain segmentation results. Furthermore, the multimodal results are weighted with different weights to improve the segmentation accuracy further. We validated our method on three datasets, and compared with other unsupervised methods for anomaly detection and segmentation. The DSC score of 0.8590 in BraTs2020 dataset, 0.6226 in ITCS dataset and 0.7403 in In-house dataset show that our method achieves better segmentation performance and has better generalization.

Diffusion-based Radiotherapy Dose Prediction Guided by Inter-slice Aware Structure Encoding

November 06, 2023 Zhenghao Feng, Lu Wen, Jianghong Xiao, Yuanyuan Xu, Xi Wu, Jiliu Zhou, Xingchen Peng, Yan Wang

cs.CV

Deep learning (DL) has successfully automated dose distribution prediction in radiotherapy planning, enhancing both efficiency and quality. However, existing methods suffer from the over-smoothing problem for their commonly used L1 or L2 loss with posterior average calculations. To alleviate this limitation, we propose a diffusion model-based method (DiffDose) for predicting the radiotherapy dose distribution of cancer patients. Specifically, the DiffDose model contains a forward process and a reverse process. In the forward process, DiffDose transforms dose distribution maps into pure Gaussian noise by gradually adding small noise and a noise predictor is simultaneously trained to estimate the noise added at each timestep. In the reverse process, it removes the noise from the pure Gaussian noise in multiple steps with the well-trained noise predictor and finally outputs the predicted dose distribution maps…

Scenario Diffusion: Controllable Driving Scenario Generation With Diffusion

November 05, 2023 Ethan Pronovost, Meghana Reddy Ganesina, Noureldin Hendy, Zeyu Wang, Andres Morales, Kai Wang, Nicholas Roy

cs.LG, cs.CV, cs.RO

Automated creation of synthetic traffic scenarios is a key part of validating the safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). In this paper, we propose Scenario Diffusion, a novel diffusion-based architecture for generating traffic scenarios that enables controllable scenario generation. We combine latent diffusion, object detection and trajectory regression to generate distributions of synthetic agent poses, orientations and trajectories simultaneously. To provide additional control over the generated scenario, this distribution is conditioned on a map and sets of tokens describing the desired scenario. We show that our approach has sufficient expressive capacity to model diverse traffic patterns and generalizes to different geographical regions.

Domain Transfer in Latent Space (DTLS) Wins on Image Super-Resolution – a Non-Denoising Model

November 04, 2023 Chun-Chuen Hui, Wan-Chi Siu, Ngai-Fong Law

eess.IV, cs.CV

Large scale image super-resolution is a challenging computer vision task, since vast information is missing in a highly degraded image, say for example forscale x16 super-resolution. Diffusion models are used successfully in recent years in extreme super-resolution applications, in which Gaussian noise is used as a means to form a latent photo-realistic space, and acts as a link between the space of latent vectors and the latent photo-realistic space. There are quite a few sophisticated mathematical derivations on mapping the statistics of Gaussian noises making Diffusion Models successful. In this paper we propose a simple approach which gets away from using Gaussian noise but adopts some basic structures of diffusion models for efficient image super-resolution. Essentially, we propose a DNN to perform domain transfer between neighbor domains, which can learn the differences in statistical properties to facilitate gradual interpolation with results of reasonable quality. Further quality improvement is achieved by conditioning the domain transfer with reference to the input LR image. Experimental results show that our method outperforms not only state-of-the-art large scale super resolution models, but also the current diffusion models for image super-resolution. The approach can readily be extended to other image-to-image tasks, such as image enlightening, inpainting, denoising, etc.

Stable Diffusion Reference Only: Image Prompt and Blueprint Jointly Guided Multi-Condition Diffusion Model for Secondary Painting

November 04, 2023 Hao Ai, Lu Sheng

cs.CV, cs.AI

Stable Diffusion and ControlNet have achieved excellent results in the field of image generation and synthesis. However, due to the granularity and method of its control, the efficiency improvement is limited for professional artistic creations such as comics and animation production whose main work is secondary painting. In the current workflow, fixing characters and image styles often need lengthy text prompts, and even requires further training through TextualInversion, DreamBooth or other methods, which is very complicated and expensive for painters. Therefore, we present a new method in this paper, Stable Diffusion Reference Only, a images-to-image self-supervised model that uses only two types of conditional images for precise control generation to accelerate secondary painting. The first type of conditional image serves as an image prompt, supplying the necessary conceptual and color information for generation. The second type is blueprint image, which controls the visual structure of the generated image. It is natively embedded into the original UNet, eliminating the need for ControlNet. We released all the code for the module and pipeline, and trained a controllable character line art coloring model at https://github.com/aihao2000/stable-diffusion-reference-only, that achieved state-of-the-art results in this field. This verifies the effectiveness of the structure and greatly improves the production efficiency of animations, comics, and fanworks.

Sparse Training of Discrete Diffusion Models for Graph Generation

November 03, 2023 Yiming Qin, Clement Vignac, Pascal Frossard

cs.LG, cs.AI

Generative models for graphs often encounter scalability challenges due to the inherent need to predict interactions for every node pair. Despite the sparsity often exhibited by real-world graphs, the unpredictable sparsity patterns of their adjacency matrices, stemming from their unordered nature, leads to quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we introduce SparseDiff, a denoising diffusion model for graph generation that is able to exploit sparsity during its training phase. At the core of SparseDiff is a message-passing neural network tailored to predict only a subset of edges during each forward pass. When combined with a sparsity-preserving noise model, this model can efficiently work with edge lists representations of graphs, paving the way for scalability to much larger structures. During the sampling phase, SparseDiff iteratively populates the adjacency matrix from its prior state, ensuring prediction of the full graph while controlling memory utilization. Experimental results show that SparseDiff simultaneously matches state-of-the-art in generation performance on both small and large graphs, highlighting the versatility of our method.

Score Models for Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

November 03, 2023 Harshit Sikchi, Rohan Chitnis, Ahmed Touati, Alborz Geramifard, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.RO

Offline Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning (GCRL) is tasked with learning to achieve multiple goals in an environment purely from offline datasets using sparse reward functions. Offline GCRL is pivotal for developing generalist agents capable of leveraging pre-existing datasets to learn diverse and reusable skills without hand-engineering reward functions. However, contemporary approaches to GCRL based on supervised learning and contrastive learning are often suboptimal in the offline setting. An alternative perspective on GCRL optimizes for occupancy matching, but necessitates learning a discriminator, which subsequently serves as a pseudo-reward for downstream RL. Inaccuracies in the learned discriminator can cascade, negatively influencing the resulting policy. We present a novel approach to GCRL under a new lens of mixture-distribution matching, leading to our discriminator-free method: SMORe. The key insight is combining the occupancy matching perspective of GCRL with a convex dual formulation to derive a learning objective that can better leverage suboptimal offline data. SMORe learns scores or unnormalized densities representing the importance of taking an action at a state for reaching a particular goal. SMORe is principled and our extensive experiments on the fully offline GCRL benchmark composed of robot manipulation and locomotion tasks, including high-dimensional observations, show that SMORe can outperform state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin.

Latent Diffusion Model for Conditional Reservoir Facies Generation

November 03, 2023 Daesoo Lee, Oscar Ovanger, Jo Eidsvik, Erlend Aune, Jacob Skauvold, Ragnar Hauge

physics.geo-ph, cs.LG, stat.ML

Creating accurate and geologically realistic reservoir facies based on limited measurements is crucial for field development and reservoir management, especially in the oil and gas sector. Traditional two-point geostatistics, while foundational, often struggle to capture complex geological patterns. Multi-point statistics offers more flexibility, but comes with its own challenges. With the rise of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and their success in various fields, there has been a shift towards using them for facies generation. However, recent advances in the computer vision domain have shown the superiority of diffusion models over GANs. Motivated by this, a novel Latent Diffusion Model is proposed, which is specifically designed for conditional generation of reservoir facies. The proposed model produces high-fidelity facies realizations that rigorously preserve conditioning data. It significantly outperforms a GAN-based alternative.

On the Generalization Properties of Diffusion Models

November 03, 2023 Puheng Li, Zhong Li, Huishuai Zhang, Jiang Bian

cs.LG, stat.ML

Diffusion models are a class of generative models that serve to establish a stochastic transport map between an empirically observed, yet unknown, target distribution and a known prior. Despite their remarkable success in real-world applications, a theoretical understanding of their generalization capabilities remains underdeveloped. This work embarks on a comprehensive theoretical exploration of the generalization attributes of diffusion models. We establish theoretical estimates of the generalization gap that evolves in tandem with the training dynamics of score-based diffusion models, suggesting a polynomially small generalization error ($O(n^{-2/5}+m^{-4/5})$) on both the sample size $n$ and the model capacity $m$, evading the curse of dimensionality (i.e., not exponentially large in the data dimension) when early-stopped. Furthermore, we extend our quantitative analysis to a data-dependent scenario, wherein target distributions are portrayed as a succession of densities with progressively increasing distances between modes. This precisely elucidates the adverse effect of “modes shift” in ground truths on the model generalization. Moreover, these estimates are not solely theoretical constructs but have also been confirmed through numerical simulations. Our findings contribute to the rigorous understanding of diffusion models’ generalization properties and provide insights that may guide practical applications.

PDF: Point Diffusion Implicit Function for Large-scale Scene Neural Representation

November 03, 2023 Yuhan Ding, Fukun Yin, Jiayuan Fan, Hui Li, Xin Chen, Wen Liu, Chongshan Lu, Gang YU, Tao Chen

cs.CV

Recent advances in implicit neural representations have achieved impressive results by sampling and fusing individual points along sampling rays in the sampling space. However, due to the explosively growing sampling space, finely representing and synthesizing detailed textures remains a challenge for unbounded large-scale outdoor scenes. To alleviate the dilemma of using individual points to perceive the entire colossal space, we explore learning the surface distribution of the scene to provide structural priors and reduce the samplable space and propose a Point Diffusion implicit Function, PDF, for large-scale scene neural representation. The core of our method is a large-scale point cloud super-resolution diffusion module that enhances the sparse point cloud reconstructed from several training images into a dense point cloud as an explicit prior. Then in the rendering stage, only sampling points with prior points within the sampling radius are retained. That is, the sampling space is reduced from the unbounded space to the scene surface. Meanwhile, to fill in the background of the scene that cannot be provided by point clouds, the region sampling based on Mip-NeRF 360 is employed to model the background representation. Expensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method for large-scale scene novel view synthesis, which outperforms relevant state-of-the-art baselines.

Investigating the Behavior of Diffusion Models for Accelerating Electronic Structure Calculations

November 02, 2023 Daniel Rothchild, Andrew S. Rosen, Eric Taw, Connie Robinson, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Aditi S. Krishnapriyan

physics.chem-ph, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.LG, physics.comp-ph

We present an investigation into diffusion models for molecular generation, with the aim of better understanding how their predictions compare to the results of physics-based calculations. The investigation into these models is driven by their potential to significantly accelerate electronic structure calculations using machine learning, without requiring expensive first-principles datasets for training interatomic potentials. We find that the inference process of a popular diffusion model for de novo molecular generation is divided into an exploration phase, where the model chooses the atomic species, and a relaxation phase, where it adjusts the atomic coordinates to find a low-energy geometry. As training proceeds, we show that the model initially learns about the first-order structure of the potential energy surface, and then later learns about higher-order structure. We also find that the relaxation phase of the diffusion model can be re-purposed to sample the Boltzmann distribution over conformations and to carry out structure relaxations. For structure relaxations, the model finds geometries with ~10x lower energy than those produced by a classical force field for small organic molecules. Initializing a density functional theory (DFT) relaxation at the diffusion-produced structures yields a >2x speedup to the DFT relaxation when compared to initializing at structures relaxed with a classical force field.

De-Diffusion Makes Text a Strong Cross-Modal Interface

November 01, 2023 Chen Wei, Chenxi Liu, Siyuan Qiao, Zhishuai Zhang, Alan Yuille, Jiahui Yu

cs.CV

We demonstrate text as a strong cross-modal interface. Rather than relying on deep embeddings to connect image and language as the interface representation, our approach represents an image as text, from which we enjoy the interpretability and flexibility inherent to natural language. We employ an autoencoder that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model for decoding. The encoder is trained to transform an input image into text, which is then fed into the fixed text-to-image diffusion decoder to reconstruct the original input – a process we term De-Diffusion. Experiments validate both the precision and comprehensiveness of De-Diffusion text representing images, such that it can be readily ingested by off-the-shelf text-to-image tools and LLMs for diverse multi-modal tasks. For example, a single De-Diffusion model can generalize to provide transferable prompts for different text-to-image tools, and also achieves a new state of the art on open-ended vision-language tasks by simply prompting large language models with few-shot examples.

Intriguing Properties of Data Attribution on Diffusion Models

November 01, 2023 Xiaosen Zheng, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Jing Jiang, Min Lin

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Data attribution seeks to trace model outputs back to training data. With the recent development of diffusion models, data attribution has become a desired module to properly assign valuations for high-quality or copyrighted training samples, ensuring that data contributors are fairly compensated or credited. Several theoretically motivated methods have been proposed to implement data attribution, in an effort to improve the trade-off between computational scalability and effectiveness. In this work, we conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on attributing diffusion models, specifically focusing on DDPMs trained on CIFAR-10 and CelebA, as well as a Stable Diffusion model LoRA-finetuned on ArtBench. Intriguingly, we report counter-intuitive observations that theoretically unjustified design choices for attribution empirically outperform previous baselines by a large margin, in terms of both linear datamodeling score and counterfactual evaluation. Our work presents a significantly more efficient approach for attributing diffusion models, while the unexpected findings suggest that at least in non-convex settings, constructions guided by theoretical assumptions may lead to inferior attribution performance. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/D-TRAK.

Diffusion models for probabilistic programming

November 01, 2023 Simon Dirmeier, Fernando Perez-Cruz

cs.LG, stat.ML

We propose Diffusion Model Variational Inference (DMVI), a novel method for automated approximate inference in probabilistic programming languages (PPLs). DMVI utilizes diffusion models as variational approximations to the true posterior distribution by deriving a novel bound to the marginal likelihood objective used in Bayesian modelling. DMVI is easy to implement, allows hassle-free inference in PPLs without the drawbacks of, e.g., variational inference using normalizing flows, and does not make any constraints on the underlying neural network model. We evaluate DMVI on a set of common Bayesian models and show that its posterior inferences are in general more accurate than those of contemporary methods used in PPLs while having a similar computational cost and requiring less manual tuning.

Adaptive Latent Diffusion Model for 3D Medical Image to Image Translation: Multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

November 01, 2023 Jonghun Kim, Hyunjin Park

eess.IV, cs.CV

Multi-modal images play a crucial role in comprehensive evaluations in medical image analysis providing complementary information for identifying clinically important biomarkers. However, in clinical practice, acquiring multiple modalities can be challenging due to reasons such as scan cost, limited scan time, and safety considerations. In this paper, we propose a model based on the latent diffusion model (LDM) that leverages switchable blocks for image-to-image translation in 3D medical images without patch cropping. The 3D LDM combined with conditioning using the target modality allows generating high-quality target modality in 3D overcoming the shortcoming of the missing out-of-slice information in 2D generation methods. The switchable block, noted as multiple switchable spatially adaptive normalization (MS-SPADE), dynamically transforms source latents to the desired style of the target latents to help with the diffusion process. The MS-SPADE block allows us to have one single model to tackle many translation tasks of one source modality to various targets removing the need for many translation models for different scenarios. Our model exhibited successful image synthesis across different source-target modality scenarios and surpassed other models in quantitative evaluations tested on multi-modal brain magnetic resonance imaging datasets of four different modalities and an independent IXI dataset. Our model demonstrated successful image synthesis across various modalities even allowing for one-to-many modality translations. Furthermore, it outperformed other one-to-one translation models in quantitative evaluations.

Score Normalization for a Faster Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler

October 31, 2023 Guoxuan Xia, Duolikun Danier, Ayan Das, Stathi Fotiadis, Farhang Nabiei, Ushnish Sengupta, Alberto Bernacchia

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Recently, Zhang et al. have proposed the Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler (DEIS) for fast generation of samples from Diffusion Models. It leverages the semi-linear nature of the probability flow ordinary differential equation (ODE) in order to greatly reduce integration error and improve generation quality at low numbers of function evaluations (NFEs). Key to this approach is the score function reparameterisation, which reduces the integration error incurred from using a fixed score function estimate over each integration step. The original authors use the default parameterisation used by models trained for noise prediction – multiply the score by the standard deviation of the conditional forward noising distribution. We find that although the mean absolute value of this score parameterisation is close to constant for a large portion of the reverse sampling process, it changes rapidly at the end of sampling. As a simple fix, we propose to instead reparameterise the score (at inference) by dividing it by the average absolute value of previous score estimates at that time step collected from offline high NFE generations. We find that our score normalisation (DEIS-SN) consistently improves FID compared to vanilla DEIS, showing an improvement at 10 NFEs from 6.44 to 5.57 on CIFAR-10 and from 5.9 to 4.95 on LSUN-Church 64x64. Our code is available at https://github.com/mtkresearch/Diffusion-DEIS-SN

Diversity and Diffusion: Observations on Synthetic Image Distributions with Stable Diffusion

October 31, 2023 David Marwood, Shumeet Baluja, Yair Alon

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Recent progress in text-to-image (TTI) systems, such as StableDiffusion, Imagen, and DALL-E 2, have made it possible to create realistic images with simple text prompts. It is tempting to use these systems to eliminate the manual task of obtaining natural images for training a new machine learning classifier. However, in all of the experiments performed to date, classifiers trained solely with synthetic images perform poorly at inference, despite the images used for training appearing realistic. Examining this apparent incongruity in detail gives insight into the limitations of the underlying image generation processes. Through the lens of diversity in image creation vs.accuracy of what is created, we dissect the differences in semantic mismatches in what is modeled in synthetic vs. natural images. This will elucidate the roles of the image-languag emodel, CLIP, and the image generation model, diffusion. We find four issues that limit the usefulness of TTI systems for this task: ambiguity, adherence to prompt, lack of diversity, and inability to represent the underlying concept. We further present surprising insights into the geometry of CLIP embeddings.

Diffusion Reconstruction of Ultrasound Images with Informative Uncertainty

October 31, 2023 Yuxin Zhang, Clément Huneau, Jérôme Idier, Diana Mateus

cs.CV, cs.LG

Despite its wide use in medicine, ultrasound imaging faces several challenges related to its poor signal-to-noise ratio and several sources of noise and artefacts. Enhancing ultrasound image quality involves balancing concurrent factors like contrast, resolution, and speckle preservation. In recent years, there has been progress both in model-based and learning-based approaches to improve ultrasound image reconstruction. Bringing the best from both worlds, we propose a hybrid approach leveraging advances in diffusion models. To this end, we adapt Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models (DDRM) to incorporate ultrasound physics through a linear direct model and an unsupervised fine-tuning of the prior diffusion model. We conduct comprehensive experiments on simulated, in-vitro, and in-vivo data, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach in achieving high-quality image reconstructions from a single plane wave input and in comparison to state-of-the-art methods. Finally, given the stochastic nature of the method, we analyse in depth the statistical properties of single and multiple-sample reconstructions, experimentally show the informativeness of their variance, and provide an empirical model relating this behaviour to speckle noise. The code and data are available at: (upon acceptance).

Synthesizing Diabetic Foot Ulcer Images with Diffusion Model

October 31, 2023 Reza Basiri, Karim Manji, Francois Harton, Alisha Poonja, Milos R. Popovic, Shehroz S. Khan

eess.IV, cs.CV

Diabetic Foot Ulcer (DFU) is a serious skin wound requiring specialized care. However, real DFU datasets are limited, hindering clinical training and research activities. In recent years, generative adversarial networks and diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating synthetic images with remarkable realism and diversity in many applications. This paper explores the potential of diffusion models for synthesizing DFU images and evaluates their authenticity through expert clinician assessments. Additionally, evaluation metrics such as Frechet Inception Distance (FID) and Kernel Inception Distance (KID) are examined to assess the quality of the synthetic DFU images. A dataset of 2,000 DFU images is used for training the diffusion model, and the synthetic images are generated by applying diffusion processes. The results indicate that the diffusion model successfully synthesizes visually indistinguishable DFU images. 70% of the time, clinicians marked synthetic DFU images as real DFUs. However, clinicians demonstrate higher unanimous confidence in rating real images than synthetic ones. The study also reveals that FID and KID metrics do not significantly align with clinicians’ assessments, suggesting alternative evaluation approaches are needed. The findings highlight the potential of diffusion models for generating synthetic DFU images and their impact on medical training programs and research in wound detection and classification.

Beyond U: Making Diffusion Models Faster & Lighter

October 31, 2023 Sergio Calvo-Ordonez, Jiahao Huang, Lipei Zhang, Guang Yang, Carola-Bibiane Schonlieb, Angelica I Aviles-Rivero

cs.LG, cs.CV

Diffusion models are a family of generative models that yield record-breaking performance in tasks such as image synthesis, video generation, and molecule design. Despite their capabilities, their efficiency, especially in the reverse denoising process, remains a challenge due to slow convergence rates and high computational costs. In this work, we introduce an approach that leverages continuous dynamical systems to design a novel denoising network for diffusion models that is more parameter-efficient, exhibits faster convergence, and demonstrates increased noise robustness. Experimenting with denoising probabilistic diffusion models, our framework operates with approximately a quarter of the parameters and 30% of the Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) compared to standard U-Nets in Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). Furthermore, our model is up to 70% faster in inference than the baseline models when measured in equal conditions while converging to better quality solutions.

Scaling Riemannian Diffusion Models

October 30, 2023 Aaron Lou, Minkai Xu, Stefano Ermon

cs.LG, math.DG, stat.ML

Riemannian diffusion models draw inspiration from standard Euclidean space diffusion models to learn distributions on general manifolds. Unfortunately, the additional geometric complexity renders the diffusion transition term inexpressible in closed form, so prior methods resort to imprecise approximations of the score matching training objective that degrade performance and preclude applications in high dimensions. In this work, we reexamine these approximations and propose several practical improvements. Our key observation is that most relevant manifolds are symmetric spaces, which are much more amenable to computation. By leveraging and combining various ans"{a}tze, we can quickly compute relevant quantities to high precision. On low dimensional datasets, our correction produces a noticeable improvement, allowing diffusion to compete with other methods. Additionally, we show that our method enables us to scale to high dimensional tasks on nontrivial manifolds. In particular, we model QCD densities on $SU(n)$ lattices and contrastively learned embeddings on high dimensional hyperspheres.

VideoCrafter1: Open Diffusion Models for High-Quality Video Generation

October 30, 2023 Haoxin Chen, Menghan Xia, Yingqing He, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Shaoshu Yang, Jinbo Xing, Yaofang Liu, Qifeng Chen, Xintao Wang, Chao Weng, Ying Shan

cs.CV

Video generation has increasingly gained interest in both academia and industry. Although commercial tools can generate plausible videos, there is a limited number of open-source models available for researchers and engineers. In this work, we introduce two diffusion models for high-quality video generation, namely text-to-video (T2V) and image-to-video (I2V) models. T2V models synthesize a video based on a given text input, while I2V models incorporate an additional image input. Our proposed T2V model can generate realistic and cinematic-quality videos with a resolution of $1024 \times 576$, outperforming other open-source T2V models in terms of quality. The I2V model is designed to produce videos that strictly adhere to the content of the provided reference image, preserving its content, structure, and style. This model is the first open-source I2V foundation model capable of transforming a given image into a video clip while maintaining content preservation constraints. We believe that these open-source video generation models will contribute significantly to the technological advancements within the community.

Text-to-3D with Classifier Score Distillation

October 30, 2023 Xin Yu, Yuan-Chen Guo, Yangguang Li, Ding Liang, Song-Hai Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR

Text-to-3D generation has made remarkable progress recently, particularly with methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) that leverages pre-trained 2D diffusion models. While the usage of classifier-free guidance is well acknowledged to be crucial for successful optimization, it is considered an auxiliary trick rather than the most essential component. In this paper, we re-evaluate the role of classifier-free guidance in score distillation and discover a surprising finding: the guidance alone is enough for effective text-to-3D generation tasks. We name this method Classifier Score Distillation (CSD), which can be interpreted as using an implicit classification model for generation. This new perspective reveals new insights for understanding existing techniques. We validate the effectiveness of CSD across a variety of text-to-3D tasks including shape generation, texture synthesis, and shape editing, achieving results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods. Our project page is https://xinyu-andy.github.io/Classifier-Score-Distillation

Noise-Free Score Distillation

October 26, 2023 Oren Katzir, Or Patashnik, Daniel Cohen-Or, Dani Lischinski

cs.CV

Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) has emerged as the de facto approach for text-to-content generation in non-image domains. In this paper, we reexamine the SDS process and introduce a straightforward interpretation that demystifies the necessity for large Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) scales, rooted in the distillation of an undesired noise term. Building upon our interpretation, we propose a novel Noise-Free Score Distillation (NFSD) process, which requires minimal modifications to the original SDS framework. Through this streamlined design, we achieve more effective distillation of pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models while using a nominal CFG scale. This strategic choice allows us to prevent the over-smoothing of results, ensuring that the generated data is both realistic and complies with the desired prompt. To demonstrate the efficacy of NFSD, we provide qualitative examples that compare NFSD and SDS, as well as several other methods.

SD4Match: Learning to Prompt Stable Diffusion Model for Semantic Matching

October 26, 2023 Xinghui Li, Jingyi Lu, Kai Han, Victor Prisacariu

cs.CV, cs.LG

In this paper, we address the challenge of matching semantically similar keypoints across image pairs. Existing research indicates that the intermediate output of the UNet within the Stable Diffusion (SD) can serve as robust image feature maps for such a matching task. We demonstrate that by employing a basic prompt tuning technique, the inherent potential of Stable Diffusion can be harnessed, resulting in a significant enhancement in accuracy over previous approaches. We further introduce a novel conditional prompting module that conditions the prompt on the local details of the input image pairs, leading to a further improvement in performance. We designate our approach as SD4Match, short for Stable Diffusion for Semantic Matching. Comprehensive evaluations of SD4Match on the PF-Pascal, PF-Willow, and SPair-71k datasets show that it sets new benchmarks in accuracy across all these datasets. Particularly, SD4Match outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by a margin of 12 percentage points on the challenging SPair-71k dataset.

Discrete Diffusion Language Modeling by Estimating the Ratios of the Data Distribution

October 25, 2023 Aaron Lou, Chenlin Meng, Stefano Ermon

stat.ML, cs.CL, cs.LG

Despite their groundbreaking performance for many generative modeling tasks, diffusion models have fallen short on discrete data domains such as natural language. Crucially, standard diffusion models rely on the well-established theory of score matching, but efforts to generalize this to discrete structures have not yielded the same empirical gains. In this work, we bridge this gap by proposing score entropy, a novel discrete score matching loss that is more stable than existing methods, forms an ELBO for maximum likelihood training, and can be efficiently optimized with a denoising variant. We scale our Score Entropy Discrete Diffusion models (SEDD) to the experimental setting of GPT-2, achieving highly competitive likelihoods while also introducing distinct algorithmic advantages. In particular, when comparing similarly sized SEDD and GPT-2 models, SEDD attains comparable perplexities (normally within $+10\%$ of and sometimes outperforming the baseline). Furthermore, SEDD models learn a more faithful sequence distribution (around $4\times$ better compared to GPT-2 models with ancestral sampling as measured by large models), can trade off compute for generation quality (needing only $16\times$ fewer network evaluations to match GPT-2), and enables arbitrary infilling beyond the standard left to right prompting.

Using Diffusion Models to Generate Synthetic Labelled Data for Medical Image Segmentation

October 25, 2023 Daniel Saragih, Pascal Tyrrell

eess.IV

In this paper, we proposed and evaluated a pipeline for generating synthetic labeled polyp images with the aim of augmenting automatic medical image segmentation models. In doing so, we explored the use of diffusion models to generate and style synthetic labeled data. The HyperKvasir dataset consisting of 1000 images of polyps in the human GI tract obtained from 2008 to 2016 during clinical endoscopies was used for training and testing. Furthermore, we did a qualitative expert review, and computed the Fr'echet Inception Distance (FID) and Multi-Scale Structural Similarity (MS-SSIM) between the output images and the source images to evaluate our samples. To evaluate its augmentation potential, a segmentation model was trained with the synthetic data to compare their performance with the real data and previous Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) methods. These models were evaluated using the Dice loss (DL) and Intersection over Union (IoU) score. Our pipeline generated images that more closely resembled real images according to the FID scores (GAN: $118.37 \pm 1.06 \text{ vs SD: } 65.99 \pm 0.37$). Improvements over GAN methods were seen on average when the segmenter was entirely trained (DL difference: $-0.0880 \pm 0.0170$, IoU difference: $0.0993 \pm 0.01493$) or augmented (DL difference: GAN $-0.1140 \pm 0.0900 \text{ vs SD }-0.1053 \pm 0.0981$, IoU difference: GAN $0.01533 \pm 0.03831 \text{ vs SD }0.0255 \pm 0.0454$) with synthetic data. Overall, we obtained more realistic synthetic images and improved segmentation model performance when fully or partially trained on synthetic data.

Multi-scale Diffusion Denoised Smoothing

October 25, 2023 Jongheon Jeong, Jinwoo Shin

cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML

Along with recent diffusion models, randomized smoothing has become one of a few tangible approaches that offers adversarial robustness to models at scale, e.g., those of large pre-trained models. Specifically, one can perform randomized smoothing on any classifier via a simple “denoise-and-classify” pipeline, so-called denoised smoothing, given that an accurate denoiser is available - such as diffusion model. In this paper, we present scalable methods to address the current trade-off between certified robustness and accuracy in denoised smoothing. Our key idea is to “selectively” apply smoothing among multiple noise scales, coined multi-scale smoothing, which can be efficiently implemented with a single diffusion model. This approach also suggests a new objective to compare the collective robustness of multi-scale smoothed classifiers, and questions which representation of diffusion model would maximize the objective. To address this, we propose to further fine-tune diffusion model (a) to perform consistent denoising whenever the original image is recoverable, but (b) to generate rather diverse outputs otherwise. Our experiments show that the proposed multi-scale smoothing scheme combined with diffusion fine-tuning enables strong certified robustness available with high noise level while maintaining its accuracy close to non-smoothed classifiers.

Fuse Your Latents: Video Editing with Multi-source Latent Diffusion Models

October 25, 2023 Tianyi Lu, Xing Zhang, Jiaxi Gu, Hang Xu, Renjing Pei, Songcen Xu, Zuxuan Wu

cs.CV, cs.AI

Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) are renowned for their powerful capabilities in image and video synthesis. Yet, video editing methods suffer from insufficient pre-training data or video-by-video re-training cost. In addressing this gap, we propose FLDM (Fused Latent Diffusion Model), a training-free framework to achieve text-guided video editing by applying off-the-shelf image editing methods in video LDMs. Specifically, FLDM fuses latents from an image LDM and an video LDM during the denoising process. In this way, temporal consistency can be kept with video LDM while high-fidelity from the image LDM can also be exploited. Meanwhile, FLDM possesses high flexibility since both image LDM and video LDM can be replaced so advanced image editing methods such as InstructPix2Pix and ControlNet can be exploited. To the best of our knowledge, FLDM is the first method to adapt off-the-shelf image editing methods into video LDMs for video editing. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that FLDM can improve the textual alignment and temporal consistency of edited videos.

DiffRef3D: A Diffusion-based Proposal Refinement Framework for 3D Object Detection

October 25, 2023 Se-Ho Kim, Inyong Koo, Inyoung Lee, Byeongjun Park, Changick Kim

cs.CV

Denoising diffusion models show remarkable performances in generative tasks, and their potential applications in perception tasks are gaining interest. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework named DiffRef3D which adopts the diffusion process on 3D object detection with point clouds for the first time. Specifically, we formulate the proposal refinement stage of two-stage 3D object detectors as a conditional diffusion process. During training, DiffRef3D gradually adds noise to the residuals between proposals and target objects, then applies the noisy residuals to proposals to generate hypotheses. The refinement module utilizes these hypotheses to denoise the noisy residuals and generate accurate box predictions. In the inference phase, DiffRef3D generates initial hypotheses by sampling noise from a Gaussian distribution as residuals and refines the hypotheses through iterative steps. DiffRef3D is a versatile proposal refinement framework that consistently improves the performance of existing 3D object detection models. We demonstrate the significance of DiffRef3D through extensive experiments on the KITTI benchmark. Code will be available.

Generative Pre-training for Speech with Flow Matching

October 25, 2023 Alexander H. Liu, Matt Le, Apoorv Vyas, Bowen Shi, Andros Tjandra, Wei-Ning Hsu

eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD

Generative models have gained more and more attention in recent years for their remarkable success in tasks that required estimating and sampling data distribution to generate high-fidelity synthetic data. In speech, text-to-speech synthesis and neural vocoder are good examples where generative models have shined. While generative models have been applied to different applications in speech, there exists no general-purpose generative model that models speech directly. In this work, we take a step toward this direction by showing a single pre-trained generative model can be adapted to different downstream tasks with strong performance. Specifically, we pre-trained a generative model, named SpeechFlow, on 60k hours of untranscribed speech with Flow Matching and masked conditions. Experiment results show the pre-trained generative model can be fine-tuned with task-specific data to match or surpass existing expert models on speech enhancement, separation, and synthesis. Our work suggested a foundational model for generation tasks in speech can be built with generative pre-training.

Score Matching-based Pseudolikelihood Estimation of Neural Marked Spatio-Temporal Point Process with Uncertainty Quantification

October 25, 2023 Zichong Li, Qunzhi Xu, Zhenghao Xu, Yajun Mei, Tuo Zhao, Hongyuan Zha

cs.LG

Spatio-temporal point processes (STPPs) are potent mathematical tools for modeling and predicting events with both temporal and spatial features. Despite their versatility, most existing methods for learning STPPs either assume a restricted form of the spatio-temporal distribution, or suffer from inaccurate approximations of the intractable integral in the likelihood training objective. These issues typically arise from the normalization term of the probability density function. Moreover, current techniques fail to provide uncertainty quantification for model predictions, such as confidence intervals for the predicted event’s arrival time and confidence regions for the event’s location, which is crucial given the considerable randomness of the data. To tackle these challenges, we introduce SMASH: a Score MAtching-based pSeudolikeliHood estimator for learning marked STPPs with uncertainty quantification. Specifically, our framework adopts a normalization-free objective by estimating the pseudolikelihood of marked STPPs through score-matching and offers uncertainty quantification for the predicted event time, location and mark by computing confidence regions over the generated samples. The superior performance of our proposed framework is demonstrated through extensive experiments in both event prediction and uncertainty quantification.

RAEDiff: Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models Based Reversible Adversarial Examples Self-Generation and Self-Recovery

October 25, 2023 Fan Xing, Xiaoyi Zhou, Xuefeng Fan, Zhuo Tian, Yan Zhao

cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG

Collected and annotated datasets, which are obtained through extensive efforts, are effective for training Deep Neural Network (DNN) models. However, these datasets are susceptible to be misused by unauthorized users, resulting in infringement of Intellectual Property (IP) rights owned by the dataset creators. Reversible Adversarial Exsamples (RAE) can help to solve the issues of IP protection for datasets. RAEs are adversarial perturbed images that can be restored to the original. As a cutting-edge approach, RAE scheme can serve the purposes of preventing unauthorized users from engaging in malicious model training, as well as ensuring the legitimate usage of authorized users. Nevertheless, in the existing work, RAEs still rely on the embedded auxiliary information for restoration, which may compromise their adversarial abilities. In this paper, a novel self-generation and self-recovery method, named as RAEDiff, is introduced for generating RAEs based on a Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM). It diffuses datasets into a Biased Gaussian Distribution (BGD) and utilizes the prior knowledge of the DDPM for generating and recovering RAEs. The experimental results demonstrate that RAEDiff effectively self-generates adversarial perturbations for DNN models, including Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) models, while also exhibiting significant self-recovery capabilities.

A Diffusion Weighted Graph Framework for New Intent Discovery

October 24, 2023 Wenkai Shi, Wenbin An, Feng Tian, Qinghua Zheng, QianYing Wang, Ping Chen

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

New Intent Discovery (NID) aims to recognize both new and known intents from unlabeled data with the aid of limited labeled data containing only known intents. Without considering structure relationships between samples, previous methods generate noisy supervisory signals which cannot strike a balance between quantity and quality, hindering the formation of new intent clusters and effective transfer of the pre-training knowledge. To mitigate this limitation, we propose a novel Diffusion Weighted Graph Framework (DWGF) to capture both semantic similarities and structure relationships inherent in data, enabling more sufficient and reliable supervisory signals. Specifically, for each sample, we diffuse neighborhood relationships along semantic paths guided by the nearest neighbors for multiple hops to characterize its local structure discriminately. Then, we sample its positive keys and weigh them based on semantic similarities and local structures for contrastive learning. During inference, we further propose Graph Smoothing Filter (GSF) to explicitly utilize the structure relationships to filter high-frequency noise embodied in semantically ambiguous samples on the cluster boundary. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models on all evaluation metrics across multiple benchmark datasets. Code and data are available at https://github.com/yibai-shi/DWGF.

A Comparative Study of Variational Autoencoders, Normalizing Flows, and Score-based Diffusion Models for Electrical Impedance Tomography

October 24, 2023 Huihui Wang, Guixian Xu, Qingping Zhou

eess.IV

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a widely employed imaging technique in industrial inspection, geophysical prospecting, and medical imaging. However, the inherent nonlinearity and ill-posedness of EIT image reconstruction present challenges for classical regularization techniques, such as the critical selection of regularization terms and the lack of prior knowledge. Deep generative models (DGMs) have been shown to play a crucial role in learning implicit regularizers and prior knowledge. This study aims to investigate the potential of three DGMs-variational autoencoder networks, normalizing flow, and score-based diffusion model-to learn implicit regularizers in learning-based EIT imaging. We first introduce background information on EIT imaging and its inverse problem formulation. Next, we propose three algorithms for performing EIT inverse problems based on corresponding DGMs. Finally, we present numerical and visual experiments, which reveal that (1) no single method consistently outperforms the others across all settings, and (2) when reconstructing an object with 2 anomalies using a well-trained model based on a training dataset containing 4 anomalies, the conditional normalizing flow model (CNF) exhibits the best generalization in low-level noise, while the conditional score-based diffusion model (CSD*) demonstrates the best generalization in high-level noise settings. We hope our preliminary efforts will encourage other researchers to assess their DGMs in EIT and other nonlinear inverse problems.

Discriminator Guidance for Autoregressive Diffusion Models

October 24, 2023 Filip Ekström Kelvinius, Fredrik Lindsten

cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML

We introduce discriminator guidance in the setting of Autoregressive Diffusion Models. The use of a discriminator to guide a diffusion process has previously been used for continuous diffusion models, and in this work we derive ways of using a discriminator together with a pretrained generative model in the discrete case. First, we show that using an optimal discriminator will correct the pretrained model and enable exact sampling from the underlying data distribution. Second, to account for the realistic scenario of using a sub-optimal discriminator, we derive a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm which iteratively takes the predictions from the discrimiator into account during the generation process. We test these approaches on the task of generating molecular graphs and show how the discriminator improves the generative performance over using only the pretrained model.

Improving Diffusion Models for ECG Imputation with an Augmented Template Prior

October 24, 2023 Alexander Jenkins, Zehua Chen, Fu Siong Ng, Danilo Mandic

cs.LG

Pulsative signals such as the electrocardiogram (ECG) are extensively collected as part of routine clinical care. However, noisy and poor-quality recordings are a major issue for signals collected using mobile health systems, decreasing the signal quality, leading to missing values, and affecting automated downstream tasks. Recent studies have explored the imputation of missing values in ECG with probabilistic time-series models. Nevertheless, in comparison with the deterministic models, their performance is still limited, as the variations across subjects and heart-beat relationships are not explicitly considered in the training objective. In this work, to improve the imputation and forecasting accuracy for ECG with probabilistic models, we present a template-guided denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), PulseDiff, which is conditioned on an informative prior for a range of health conditions. Specifically, 1) we first extract a subject-level pulsative template from the observed values to use as an informative prior of the missing values, which personalises the prior; 2) we then add beat-level stochastic shift terms to augment the prior, which considers variations in the position and amplitude of the prior at each beat; 3) we finally design a confidence score to consider the health condition of the subject, which ensures our prior is provided safely. Experiments with the PTBXL dataset reveal that PulseDiff improves the performance of two strong DDPM baseline models, CSDI and SSSD$^{S4}$, verifying that our method guides the generation of DDPMs while managing the uncertainty. When combined with SSSD$^{S4}$, PulseDiff outperforms the leading deterministic model for short-interval missing data and is comparable for long-interval data loss.

AutoDiff: combining Auto-encoder and Diffusion model for tabular data synthesizing

October 24, 2023 Namjoon Suh, Xiaofeng Lin, Din-Yin Hsieh, Merhdad Honarkhah, Guang Cheng

stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.LG

Diffusion model has become a main paradigm for synthetic data generation in many subfields of modern machine learning, including computer vision, language model, or speech synthesis. In this paper, we leverage the power of diffusion model for generating synthetic tabular data. The heterogeneous features in tabular data have been main obstacles in tabular data synthesis, and we tackle this problem by employing the auto-encoder architecture. When compared with the state-of-the-art tabular synthesizers, the resulting synthetic tables from our model show nice statistical fidelities to the real data, and perform well in downstream tasks for machine learning utilities. We conducted the experiments over $15$ publicly available datasets. Notably, our model adeptly captures the correlations among features, which has been a long-standing challenge in tabular data synthesis. Our code is available at https://github.com/UCLA-Trustworthy-AI-Lab/AutoDiffusion.

Matryoshka Diffusion Models

October 23, 2023 Jiatao Gu, Shuangfei Zhai, Yizhe Zhang, Josh Susskind, Navdeep Jaitly

cs.CV, cs.LG

Diffusion models are the de facto approach for generating high-quality images and videos, but learning high-dimensional models remains a formidable task due to computational and optimization challenges. Existing methods often resort to training cascaded models in pixel space or using a downsampled latent space of a separately trained auto-encoder. In this paper, we introduce Matryoshka Diffusion Models(MDM), an end-to-end framework for high-resolution image and video synthesis. We propose a diffusion process that denoises inputs at multiple resolutions jointly and uses a NestedUNet architecture where features and parameters for small-scale inputs are nested within those of large scales. In addition, MDM enables a progressive training schedule from lower to higher resolutions, which leads to significant improvements in optimization for high-resolution generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various benchmarks, including class-conditioned image generation, high-resolution text-to-image, and text-to-video applications. Remarkably, we can train a single pixel-space model at resolutions of up to 1024x1024 pixels, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization using the CC12M dataset, which contains only 12 million images.

Wonder3D: Single Image to 3D using Cross-Domain Diffusion

October 23, 2023 Xiaoxiao Long, Yuan-Chen Guo, Cheng Lin, Yuan Liu, Zhiyang Dou, Lingjie Liu, Yuexin Ma, Song-Hai Zhang, Marc Habermann, Christian Theobalt, Wenping Wang

cs.CV

In this work, we introduce Wonder3D, a novel method for efficiently generating high-fidelity textured meshes from single-view images.Recent methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) have shown the potential to recover 3D geometry from 2D diffusion priors, but they typically suffer from time-consuming per-shape optimization and inconsistent geometry. In contrast, certain works directly produce 3D information via fast network inferences, but their results are often of low quality and lack geometric details. To holistically improve the quality, consistency, and efficiency of image-to-3D tasks, we propose a cross-domain diffusion model that generates multi-view normal maps and the corresponding color images. To ensure consistency, we employ a multi-view cross-domain attention mechanism that facilitates information exchange across views and modalities. Lastly, we introduce a geometry-aware normal fusion algorithm that extracts high-quality surfaces from the multi-view 2D representations. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves high-quality reconstruction results, robust generalization, and reasonably good efficiency compared to prior works.

DICE: Diverse Diffusion Model with Scoring for Trajectory Prediction

October 23, 2023 Younwoo Choi, Ray Coden Mercurius, Soheil Mohamad Alizadeh Shabestary, Amir Rasouli

cs.CV, cs.RO

Road user trajectory prediction in dynamic environments is a challenging but crucial task for various applications, such as autonomous driving. One of the main challenges in this domain is the multimodal nature of future trajectories stemming from the unknown yet diverse intentions of the agents. Diffusion models have shown to be very effective in capturing such stochasticity in prediction tasks. However, these models involve many computationally expensive denoising steps and sampling operations that make them a less desirable option for real-time safety-critical applications. To this end, we present a novel framework that leverages diffusion models for predicting future trajectories in a computationally efficient manner. To minimize the computational bottlenecks in iterative sampling, we employ an efficient sampling mechanism that allows us to maximize the number of sampled trajectories for improved accuracy while maintaining inference time in real time. Moreover, we propose a scoring mechanism to select the most plausible trajectories by assigning relative ranks. We show the effectiveness of our approach by conducting empirical evaluations on common pedestrian (UCY/ETH) and autonomous driving (nuScenes) benchmark datasets on which our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on several subsets and metrics.

Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification for Speaker Verification

October 22, 2023 Yibo Bai, Xiao-Lei Zhang

eess.AS, cs.SD

Recently, automatic speaker verification (ASV) based on deep learning is easily contaminated by adversarial attacks, which is a new type of attack that injects imperceptible perturbations to audio signals so as to make ASV produce wrong decisions. This poses a significant threat to the security and reliability of ASV systems. To address this issue, we propose a Diffusion-Based Adversarial Purification (DAP) method that enhances the robustness of ASV systems against such adversarial attacks. Our method leverages a conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic model to effectively purify the adversarial examples and mitigate the impact of perturbations. DAP first introduces controlled noise into adversarial examples, and then performs a reverse denoising process to reconstruct clean audio. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed DAP in enhancing the security of ASV and meanwhile minimizing the distortion of the purified audio signals.

Diffusion-based Data Augmentation for Nuclei Image Segmentation

October 22, 2023 Xinyi Yu, Guanbin Li, Wei Lou, Siqi Liu, Xiang Wan, Yan Chen, Haofeng Li

eess.IV, cs.CV

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in the quantitative analysis of histopathology images. Although fully-supervised deep learning-based methods have made significant progress, a large number of labeled images are required to achieve great segmentation performance. Considering that manually labeling all nuclei instances for a dataset is inefficient, obtaining a large-scale human-annotated dataset is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, augmenting a dataset with only a few labeled images to improve the segmentation performance is of significant research and application value. In this paper, we introduce the first diffusion-based augmentation method for nuclei segmentation. The idea is to synthesize a large number of labeled images to facilitate training the segmentation model. To achieve this, we propose a two-step strategy. In the first step, we train an unconditional diffusion model to synthesize the Nuclei Structure that is defined as the representation of pixel-level semantic and distance transform. Each synthetic nuclei structure will serve as a constraint on histopathology image synthesis and is further post-processed to be an instance map. In the second step, we train a conditioned diffusion model to synthesize histopathology images based on nuclei structures. The synthetic histopathology images paired with synthetic instance maps will be added to the real dataset for training the segmentation model. The experimental results show that by augmenting 10% labeled real dataset with synthetic samples, one can achieve comparable segmentation results with the fully-supervised baseline.

Fast Diffusion GAN Model for Symbolic Music Generation Controlled by Emotions

October 21, 2023 Jincheng Zhang, György Fazekas, Charalampos Saitis

cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS

Diffusion models have shown promising results for a wide range of generative tasks with continuous data, such as image and audio synthesis. However, little progress has been made on using diffusion models to generate discrete symbolic music because this new class of generative models are not well suited for discrete data while its iterative sampling process is computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a diffusion model combined with a Generative Adversarial Network, aiming to (i) alleviate one of the remaining challenges in algorithmic music generation which is the control of generation towards a target emotion, and (ii) mitigate the slow sampling drawback of diffusion models applied to symbolic music generation. We first used a trained Variational Autoencoder to obtain embeddings of a symbolic music dataset with emotion labels and then used those to train a diffusion model. Our results demonstrate the successful control of our diffusion model to generate symbolic music with a desired emotion. Our model achieves several orders of magnitude improvement in computational cost, requiring merely four time steps to denoise while the steps required by current state-of-the-art diffusion models for symbolic music generation is in the order of thousands.

GraphMaker: Can Diffusion Models Generate Large Attributed Graphs?

October 20, 2023 Mufei Li, Eleonora Kreačić, Vamsi K. Potluru, Pan Li

cs.LG, cs.AI

Large-scale graphs with node attributes are fundamental in real-world scenarios, such as social and financial networks. The generation of synthetic graphs that emulate real-world ones is pivotal in graph machine learning, aiding network evolution understanding and data utility preservation when original data cannot be shared. Traditional models for graph generation suffer from limited model capacity. Recent developments in diffusion models have shown promise in merely graph structure generation or the generation of small molecular graphs with attributes. However, their applicability to large attributed graphs remains unaddressed due to challenges in capturing intricate patterns and scalability. This paper introduces GraphMaker, a novel diffusion model tailored for generating large attributed graphs. We study the diffusion models that either couple or decouple graph structure and node attribute generation to address their complex correlation. We also employ node-level conditioning and adopt a minibatch strategy for scalability. We further propose a new evaluation pipeline using models trained on generated synthetic graphs and tested on original graphs to evaluate the quality of synthetic data. Empirical evaluations on real-world datasets showcase GraphMaker’s superiority in generating realistic and diverse large-attributed graphs beneficial for downstream tasks.

DPM-Solver-v3: Improved Diffusion ODE Solver with Empirical Model Statistics

October 20, 2023 Kaiwen Zheng, Cheng Lu, Jianfei Chen, Jun Zhu

cs.CV, cs.LG

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have exhibited excellent performance for high-fidelity image generation while suffering from inefficient sampling. Recent works accelerate the sampling procedure by proposing fast ODE solvers that leverage the specific ODE form of DPMs. However, they highly rely on specific parameterization during inference (such as noise/data prediction), which might not be the optimal choice. In this work, we propose a novel formulation towards the optimal parameterization during sampling that minimizes the first-order discretization error of the ODE solution. Based on such formulation, we propose DPM-Solver-v3, a new fast ODE solver for DPMs by introducing several coefficients efficiently computed on the pretrained model, which we call empirical model statistics. We further incorporate multistep methods and a predictor-corrector framework, and propose some techniques for improving sample quality at small numbers of function evaluations (NFE) or large guidance scales. Experiments show that DPM-Solver-v3 achieves consistently better or comparable performance in both unconditional and conditional sampling with both pixel-space and latent-space DPMs, especially in 5$\sim$10 NFEs. We achieve FIDs of 12.21 (5 NFE), 2.51 (10 NFE) on unconditional CIFAR10, and MSE of 0.55 (5 NFE, 7.5 guidance scale) on Stable Diffusion, bringing a speed-up of 15%$\sim$30% compared to previous state-of-the-art training-free methods. Code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/DPM-Solver-v3.

CycleNet: Rethinking Cycle Consistency in Text-Guided Diffusion for Image Manipulation

October 19, 2023 Sihan Xu, Ziqiao Ma, Yidong Huang, Honglak Lee, Joyce Chai

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Diffusion models (DMs) have enabled breakthroughs in image synthesis tasks but lack an intuitive interface for consistent image-to-image (I2I) translation. Various methods have been explored to address this issue, including mask-based methods, attention-based methods, and image-conditioning. However, it remains a critical challenge to enable unpaired I2I translation with pre-trained DMs while maintaining satisfying consistency. This paper introduces Cyclenet, a novel but simple method that incorporates cycle consistency into DMs to regularize image manipulation. We validate Cyclenet on unpaired I2I tasks of different granularities. Besides the scene and object level translation, we additionally contribute a multi-domain I2I translation dataset to study the physical state changes of objects. Our empirical studies show that Cyclenet is superior in translation consistency and quality, and can generate high-quality images for out-of-domain distributions with a simple change of the textual prompt. Cyclenet is a practical framework, which is robust even with very limited training data (around 2k) and requires minimal computational resources (1 GPU) to train. Project homepage: https://cyclenetweb.github.io/

EMIT-Diff: Enhancing Medical Image Segmentation via Text-Guided Diffusion Model

October 19, 2023 Zheyuan Zhang, Lanhong Yao, Bin Wang, Debesh Jha, Elif Keles, Alpay Medetalibeyoglu, Ulas Bagci

cs.CV

Large-scale, big-variant, and high-quality data are crucial for developing robust and successful deep-learning models for medical applications since they potentially enable better generalization performance and avoid overfitting. However, the scarcity of high-quality labeled data always presents significant challenges. This paper proposes a novel approach to address this challenge by developing controllable diffusion models for medical image synthesis, called EMIT-Diff. We leverage recent diffusion probabilistic models to generate realistic and diverse synthetic medical image data that preserve the essential characteristics of the original medical images by incorporating edge information of objects to guide the synthesis process. In our approach, we ensure that the synthesized samples adhere to medically relevant constraints and preserve the underlying structure of imaging data. Due to the random sampling process by the diffusion model, we can generate an arbitrary number of synthetic images with diverse appearances. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct an extensive set of medical image segmentation experiments on multiple datasets, including Ultrasound breast (+13.87%), CT spleen (+0.38%), and MRI prostate (+7.78%), achieving significant improvements over the baseline segmentation methods. For the first time, to our best knowledge, the promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of our EMIT-Diff for medical image segmentation tasks and show the feasibility of introducing a first-ever text-guided diffusion model for general medical image segmentation tasks. With carefully designed ablation experiments, we investigate the influence of various data augmentation ratios, hyper-parameter settings, patch size for generating random merging mask settings, and combined influence with different network architectures.

Product of Gaussian Mixture Diffusion Models

October 19, 2023 Martin Zach, Erich Kobler, Antonin Chambolle, Thomas Pock

eess.IV

In this work we tackle the problem of estimating the density $ f_X $ of a random variable $ X $ by successive smoothing, such that the smoothed random variable $ Y $ fulfills the diffusion partial differential equation $ (\partial_t - \Delta_1)f_Y(\,\cdot\,, t) = 0 $ with initial condition $ f_Y(\,\cdot\,, 0) = f_X $. We propose a product-of-experts-type model utilizing Gaussian mixture experts and study configurations that admit an analytic expression for $ f_Y (\,\cdot\,, t) $. In particular, with a focus on image processing, we derive conditions for models acting on filter-, wavelet-, and shearlet responses. Our construction naturally allows the model to be trained simultaneously over the entire diffusion horizon using empirical Bayes. We show numerical results for image denoising where our models are competitive while being tractable, interpretable, and having only a small number of learnable parameters. As a byproduct, our models can be used for reliable noise estimation, allowing blind denoising of images corrupted by heteroscedastic noise.

Diverse Diffusion: Enhancing Image Diversity in Text-to-Image Generation

October 19, 2023 Mariia Zameshina, Olivier Teytaud, Laurent Najman

cs.CV

Latent diffusion models excel at producing high-quality images from text. Yet, concerns appear about the lack of diversity in the generated imagery. To tackle this, we introduce Diverse Diffusion, a method for boosting image diversity beyond gender and ethnicity, spanning into richer realms, including color diversity.Diverse Diffusion is a general unsupervised technique that can be applied to existing text-to-image models. Our approach focuses on finding vectors in the Stable Diffusion latent space that are distant from each other. We generate multiple vectors in the latent space until we find a set of vectors that meets the desired distance requirements and the required batch size.To evaluate the effectiveness of our diversity methods, we conduct experiments examining various characteristics, including color diversity, LPIPS metric, and ethnicity/gender representation in images featuring humans.The results of our experiments emphasize the significance of diversity in generating realistic and varied images, offering valuable insights for improving text-to-image models. Through the enhancement of image diversity, our approach contributes to the creation of more inclusive and representative AI-generated art.

Closed-Form Diffusion Models

October 19, 2023 Christopher Scarvelis, Haitz Sáez de Ocáriz Borde, Justin Solomon

cs.LG, stat.ML

Score-based generative models (SGMs) sample from a target distribution by iteratively transforming noise using the score function of the perturbed target. For any finite training set, this score function can be evaluated in closed form, but the resulting SGM memorizes its training data and does not generate novel samples. In practice, one approximates the score by training a neural network via score-matching. The error in this approximation promotes generalization, but neural SGMs are costly to train and sample, and the effective regularization this error provides is not well-understood theoretically. In this work, we instead explicitly smooth the closed-form score to obtain an SGM that generates novel samples without training. We analyze our model and propose an efficient nearest-neighbor-based estimator of its score function. Using this estimator, our method achieves sampling times competitive with neural SGMs while running on consumer-grade CPUs.

Bayesian Flow Networks in Continual Learning

October 18, 2023 Mateusz Pyla, Kamil Deja, Bartłomiej Twardowski, Tomasz Trzciński

cs.LG, cs.CV, stat.ML

Bayesian Flow Networks (BFNs) has been recently proposed as one of the most promising direction to universal generative modelling, having ability to learn any of the data type. Their power comes from the expressiveness of neural networks and Bayesian inference which make them suitable in the context of continual learning. We delve into the mechanics behind BFNs and conduct the experiments to empirically verify the generative capabilities on non-stationary data.

To Generate or Not? Safety-Driven Unlearned Diffusion Models Are Still Easy To Generate Unsafe Images … For Now

October 18, 2023 Yimeng Zhang, Jinghan Jia, Xin Chen, Aochuan Chen, Yihua Zhang, Jiancheng Liu, Ke Ding, Sijia Liu

cs.CV

The recent advances in diffusion models (DMs) have revolutionized the generation of complex and diverse images. However, these models also introduce potential safety hazards, such as the production of harmful content and infringement of data copyrights. Although there have been efforts to create safety-driven unlearning methods to counteract these challenges, doubts remain about their capabilities. To bridge this uncertainty, we propose an evaluation framework built upon adversarial attacks (also referred to as adversarial prompts), in order to discern the trustworthiness of these safety-driven unlearned DMs. Specifically, our research explores the (worst-case) robustness of unlearned DMs in eradicating unwanted concepts, styles, and objects, assessed by the generation of adversarial prompts. We develop a novel adversarial learning approach called UnlearnDiff that leverages the inherent classification capabilities of DMs to streamline the generation of adversarial prompts, making it as simple for DMs as it is for image classification attacks. This technique streamlines the creation of adversarial prompts, making the process as intuitive for generative modeling as it is for image classification assaults. Through comprehensive benchmarking, we assess the unlearning robustness of five prevalent unlearned DMs across multiple tasks. Our results underscore the effectiveness and efficiency of UnlearnDiff when compared to state-of-the-art adversarial prompting methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Diffusion-MU-Attack. WARNING: This paper contains model outputs that may be offensive in nature.

A Survey on Video Diffusion Models

October 16, 2023 Zhen Xing, Qijun Feng, Haoran Chen, Qi Dai, Han Hu, Hang Xu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

The recent wave of AI-generated content (AIGC) has witnessed substantial success in computer vision, with the diffusion model playing a crucial role in this achievement. Due to their impressive generative capabilities, diffusion models are gradually superseding methods based on GANs and auto-regressive Transformers, demonstrating exceptional performance not only in image generation and editing, but also in the realm of video-related research. However, existing surveys mainly focus on diffusion models in the context of image generation, with few up-to-date reviews on their application in the video domain. To address this gap, this paper presents a comprehensive review of video diffusion models in the AIGC era. Specifically, we begin with a concise introduction to the fundamentals and evolution of diffusion models. Subsequently, we present an overview of research on diffusion models in the video domain, categorizing the work into three key areas: video generation, video editing, and other video understanding tasks. We conduct a thorough review of the literature in these three key areas, including further categorization and practical contributions in the field. Finally, we discuss the challenges faced by research in this domain and outline potential future developmental trends. A comprehensive list of video diffusion models studied in this survey is available at https://github.com/ChenHsing/Awesome-Video-Diffusion-Models.

Self-supervised Fetal MRI 3D Reconstruction Based on Radiation Diffusion Generation Model

October 16, 2023 Junpeng Tan, Xin Zhang, Yao Lv, Xiangmin Xu, Gang Li

eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG

Although the use of multiple stacks can handle slice-to-volume motion correction and artifact removal problems, there are still several problems: 1) The slice-to-volume method usually uses slices as input, which cannot solve the problem of uniform intensity distribution and complementarity in regions of different fetal MRI stacks; 2) The integrity of 3D space is not considered, which adversely affects the discrimination and generation of globally consistent information in fetal MRI; 3) Fetal MRI with severe motion artifacts in the real-world cannot achieve high-quality super-resolution reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a novel fetal brain MRI high-quality volume reconstruction method, called the Radiation Diffusion Generation Model (RDGM). It is a self-supervised generation method, which incorporates the idea of Neural Radiation Field (NeRF) based on the coordinate generation and diffusion model based on super-resolution generation. To solve regional intensity heterogeneity in different directions, we use a pre-trained transformer model for slice registration, and then, a new regionally Consistent Implicit Neural Representation (CINR) network sub-module is proposed. CINR can generate the initial volume by combining a coordinate association map of two different coordinate mapping spaces. To enhance volume global consistency and discrimination, we introduce the Volume Diffusion Super-resolution Generation (VDSG) mechanism. The global intensity discriminant generation from volume-to-volume is carried out using the idea of diffusion generation, and CINR becomes the deviation intensity generation network of the volume-to-volume diffusion model. Finally, the experimental results on real-world fetal brain MRI stacks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.

Generative Entropic Neural Optimal Transport To Map Within and Across Spaces

October 13, 2023 Dominik Klein, Théo Uscidda, Fabian Theis, Marco Cuturi

stat.ML, cs.LG

Learning measure-to-measure mappings is a crucial task in machine learning, featured prominently in generative modeling. Recent years have witnessed a surge of techniques that draw inspiration from optimal transport (OT) theory. Combined with neural network models, these methods collectively known as \textit{Neural OT} use optimal transport as an inductive bias: such mappings should be optimal w.r.t. a given cost function, in the sense that they are able to move points in a thrifty way, within (by minimizing displacements) or across spaces (by being isometric). This principle, while intuitive, is often confronted with several practical challenges that require adapting the OT toolbox: cost functions other than the squared-Euclidean cost can be challenging to handle, the deterministic formulation of Monge maps leaves little flexibility, mapping across incomparable spaces raises multiple challenges, while the mass conservation constraint inherent to OT can provide too much credit to outliers. While each of these mismatches between practice and theory has been addressed independently in various works, we propose in this work an elegant framework to unify them, called \textit{generative entropic neural optimal transport} (GENOT). GENOT can accommodate any cost function; handles randomness using conditional generative models; can map points across incomparable spaces, and can be used as an \textit{unbalanced} solver. We evaluate our approach through experiments conducted on various synthetic datasets and demonstrate its practicality in single-cell biology. In this domain, GENOT proves to be valuable for tasks such as modeling cell development, predicting cellular responses to drugs, and translating between different data modalities of cells.

Unseen Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models

October 13, 2023 Ye Zhu, Yu Wu, Zhiwei Deng, Olga Russakovsky, Yan Yan

cs.LG, cs.CV

While the current trend in the generative field is scaling up towards larger models and more training data for generalized domain representations, we go the opposite direction in this work by synthesizing unseen domain images without additional training. We do so via latent sampling and geometric optimization using pre-trained and frozen Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) on single-domain datasets. Our key observation is that DDPMs pre-trained even just on single-domain images are already equipped with sufficient representation abilities to reconstruct arbitrary images from the inverted latent encoding following bi-directional deterministic diffusion and denoising trajectories. This motivates us to investigate the statistical and geometric behaviors of the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) samples from unseen image domains in the latent spaces along the denoising chain. Notably, we theoretically and empirically show that the inverted OOD samples also establish Gaussians that are distinguishable from the original In-Domain (ID) samples in the intermediate latent spaces, which allows us to sample from them directly. Geometrical domain-specific and model-dependent information of the unseen subspace (e.g., sample-wise distance and angles) is used to further optimize the sampled OOD latent encodings from the estimated Gaussian prior. We conduct extensive analysis and experiments using pre-trained diffusion models (DDPM, iDDPM) on different datasets (AFHQ, CelebA-HQ, LSUN-Church, and LSUN-Bedroom), proving the effectiveness of this novel perspective to explore and re-think the diffusion models’ data synthesis generalization ability.

Sampling from Mean-Field Gibbs Measures via Diffusion Processes

October 13, 2023 Ahmed El Alaoui, Andrea Montanari, Mark Sellke

math.PR

We consider Ising mixed $p$-spin glasses at high-temperature and without external field, and study the problem of sampling from the Gibbs distribution $\mu$ in polynomial time. We develop a new sampling algorithm with complexity of the same order as evaluating the gradient of the Hamiltonian and, in particular, at most linear in the input size. We prove that, at sufficiently high-temperature, it produces samples from a distribution $\mu^{alg}$ which is close in normalized Wasserstein distance to $\mu$. Namely, there exists a coupling of $\mu$ and $\mu^{alg}$ such that if $({\boldsymbol x},{\boldsymbol x}^{alg})\in{-1,+1}^n\times {-1,+1}^n$ is a pair drawn from this coupling, then $n^{-1}{\mathbb E}{|{\boldsymbol x}-{\boldsymbol x}^{alg}|_2^2}=o_n(1)$. For the case of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, our algorithm succeeds in the full replica-symmetric phase. We complement this result with a negative one for sampling algorithms satisfying a certain stability' property, which is verified by many standard techniques. No stable algorithm can approximately sample at temperatures below the onset of shattering, even under the normalized Wasserstein metric. Further, no algorithm can sample at temperatures below the onset of replica symmetry breaking. Our sampling method implements a discretized version of a diffusion process that has become recently popular in machine learning under the name of denoising diffusion.’ We derive the same process from the general construction of stochastic localization. Implementing the diffusion process requires to efficiently approximate the mean of the tilted measure. To this end, we use an approximate message passing algorithm that, as we prove, achieves sufficiently accurate mean estimation.

DDMT: Denoising Diffusion Mask Transformer Models for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection

October 13, 2023 Chaocheng Yang, Tingyin Wang, Xuanhui Yan

cs.LG, cs.AI

Anomaly detection in multivariate time series has emerged as a crucial challenge in time series research, with significant research implications in various fields such as fraud detection, fault diagnosis, and system state estimation. Reconstruction-based models have shown promising potential in recent years for detecting anomalies in time series data. However, due to the rapid increase in data scale and dimensionality, the issues of noise and Weak Identity Mapping (WIM) during time series reconstruction have become increasingly pronounced. To address this, we introduce a novel Adaptive Dynamic Neighbor Mask (ADNM) mechanism and integrate it with the Transformer and Denoising Diffusion Model, creating a new framework for multivariate time series anomaly detection, named Denoising Diffusion Mask Transformer (DDMT). The ADNM module is introduced to mitigate information leakage between input and output features during data reconstruction, thereby alleviating the problem of WIM during reconstruction. The Denoising Diffusion Transformer (DDT) employs the Transformer as an internal neural network structure for Denoising Diffusion Model. It learns the stepwise generation process of time series data to model the probability distribution of the data, capturing normal data patterns and progressively restoring time series data by removing noise, resulting in a clear recovery of anomalies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that combines Denoising Diffusion Model and the Transformer for multivariate time series anomaly detection. Experimental evaluations were conducted on five publicly available multivariate time series anomaly detection datasets. The results demonstrate that the model effectively identifies anomalies in time series data, achieving state-of-the-art performance in anomaly detection.

Debias the Training of Diffusion Models

October 12, 2023 Hu Yu, Li Shen, Jie Huang, Man Zhou, Hongsheng Li, Feng Zhao

cs.CV, cs.AI

Diffusion models have demonstrated compelling generation quality by optimizing the variational lower bound through a simple denoising score matching loss. In this paper, we provide theoretical evidence that the prevailing practice of using a constant loss weight strategy in diffusion models leads to biased estimation during the training phase. Simply optimizing the denoising network to predict Gaussian noise with constant weighting may hinder precise estimations of original images. To address the issue, we propose an elegant and effective weighting strategy grounded in the theoretically unbiased principle. Moreover, we conduct a comprehensive and systematic exploration to dissect the inherent bias problem deriving from constant weighting loss from the perspectives of its existence, impact and reasons. These analyses are expected to advance our understanding and demystify the inner workings of diffusion models. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that our proposed debiased estimation method significantly enhances sample quality without the reliance on complex techniques, and exhibits improved efficiency compared to the baseline method both in training and sampling processes.

Neural Diffusion Models

October 12, 2023 Grigory Bartosh, Dmitry Vetrov, Christian A. Naesseth

cs.LG, stat.ML

Diffusion models have shown remarkable performance on many generative tasks. Despite recent success, most diffusion models are restricted in that they only allow linear transformation of the data distribution. In contrast, broader family of transformations can potentially help train generative distributions more efficiently, simplifying the reverse process and closing the gap between the true negative log-likelihood and the variational approximation. In this paper, we present Neural Diffusion Models (NDMs), a generalization of conventional diffusion models that enables defining and learning time-dependent non-linear transformations of data. We show how to optimise NDMs using a variational bound in a simulation-free setting. Moreover, we derive a time-continuous formulation of NDMs, which allows fast and reliable inference using off-the-shelf numerical ODE and SDE solvers. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of NDMs with learnable transformations through experiments on standard image generation benchmarks, including CIFAR-10, downsampled versions of ImageNet and CelebA-HQ. NDMs outperform conventional diffusion models in terms of likelihood and produce high-quality samples.

Interpretable Diffusion via Information Decomposition

October 12, 2023 Xianghao Kong, Ollie Liu, Han Li, Dani Yogatama, Greg Ver Steeg

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT, math.IT

Denoising diffusion models enable conditional generation and density modeling of complex relationships like images and text. However, the nature of the learned relationships is opaque making it difficult to understand precisely what relationships between words and parts of an image are captured, or to predict the effect of an intervention. We illuminate the fine-grained relationships learned by diffusion models by noticing a precise relationship between diffusion and information decomposition. Exact expressions for mutual information and conditional mutual information can be written in terms of the denoising model. Furthermore, pointwise estimates can be easily estimated as well, allowing us to ask questions about the relationships between specific images and captions. Decomposing information even further to understand which variables in a high-dimensional space carry information is a long-standing problem. For diffusion models, we show that a natural non-negative decomposition of mutual information emerges, allowing us to quantify informative relationships between words and pixels in an image. We exploit these new relations to measure the compositional understanding of diffusion models, to do unsupervised localization of objects in images, and to measure effects when selectively editing images through prompt interventions.

Efficient Integrators for Diffusion Generative Models

October 11, 2023 Kushagra Pandey, Maja Rudolph, Stephan Mandt

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, stat.ML

Diffusion models suffer from slow sample generation at inference time. Therefore, developing a principled framework for fast deterministic/stochastic sampling for a broader class of diffusion models is a promising direction. We propose two complementary frameworks for accelerating sample generation in pre-trained models: Conjugate Integrators and Splitting Integrators. Conjugate integrators generalize DDIM, mapping the reverse diffusion dynamics to a more amenable space for sampling. In contrast, splitting-based integrators, commonly used in molecular dynamics, reduce the numerical simulation error by cleverly alternating between numerical updates involving the data and auxiliary variables. After extensively studying these methods empirically and theoretically, we present a hybrid method that leads to the best-reported performance for diffusion models in augmented spaces. Applied to Phase Space Langevin Diffusion [Pandey & Mandt, 2023] on CIFAR-10, our deterministic and stochastic samplers achieve FID scores of 2.11 and 2.36 in only 100 network function evaluations (NFE) as compared to 2.57 and 2.63 for the best-performing baselines, respectively. Our code and model checkpoints will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/mandt-lab/PSLD}.

Generative Modeling with Phase Stochastic Bridges

October 11, 2023 Tianrong Chen, Jiatao Gu, Laurent Dinh, Evangelos A. Theodorou, Josh Susskind, Shuangfei Zhai

cs.LG, cs.AI

Diffusion models (DMs) represent state-of-the-art generative models for continuous inputs. DMs work by constructing a Stochastic Differential Equation (SDE) in the input space (ie, position space), and using a neural network to reverse it. In this work, we introduce a novel generative modeling framework grounded in \textbf{phase space dynamics}, where a phase space is defined as {an augmented space encompassing both position and velocity.} Leveraging insights from Stochastic Optimal Control, we construct a path measure in the phase space that enables efficient sampling. {In contrast to DMs, our framework demonstrates the capability to generate realistic data points at an early stage of dynamics propagation.} This early prediction sets the stage for efficient data generation by leveraging additional velocity information along the trajectory. On standard image generation benchmarks, our model yields favorable performance over baselines in the regime of small Number of Function Evaluations (NFEs). Furthermore, our approach rivals the performance of diffusion models equipped with efficient sampling techniques, underscoring its potential as a new tool generative modeling.

Score Regularized Policy Optimization through Diffusion Behavior

October 11, 2023 Huayu Chen, Cheng Lu, Zhengyi Wang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

cs.LG

Recent developments in offline reinforcement learning have uncovered the immense potential of diffusion modeling, which excels at representing heterogeneous behavior policies. However, sampling from diffusion policies is considerably slow because it necessitates tens to hundreds of iterative inference steps for one action. To address this issue, we propose to extract an efficient deterministic inference policy from critic models and pretrained diffusion behavior models, leveraging the latter to directly regularize the policy gradient with the behavior distribution’s score function during optimization. Our method enjoys powerful generative capabilities of diffusion modeling while completely circumventing the computationally intensive and time-consuming diffusion sampling scheme, both during training and evaluation. Extensive results on D4RL tasks show that our method boosts action sampling speed by more than 25 times compared with various leading diffusion-based methods in locomotion tasks, while still maintaining state-of-the-art performance.

Generative Modeling on Manifolds Through Mixture of Riemannian Diffusion Processes

October 11, 2023 Jaehyeong Jo, Sung Ju Hwang

cs.LG, stat.ML

Learning the distribution of data on Riemannian manifolds is crucial for modeling data from non-Euclidean space, which is required by many applications from diverse scientific fields. Yet, existing generative models on manifolds suffer from expensive divergence computation or rely on approximations of heat kernel. These limitations restrict their applicability to simple geometries and hinder scalability to high dimensions. In this work, we introduce the Riemannian Diffusion Mixture, a principled framework for building a generative process on manifolds as a mixture of endpoint-conditioned diffusion processes instead of relying on the denoising approach of previous diffusion models, for which the generative process is characterized by its drift guiding toward the most probable endpoint with respect to the geometry of the manifold. We further propose a simple yet efficient training objective for learning the mixture process, that is readily applicable to general manifolds. Our method outperforms previous generative models on various manifolds while scaling to high dimensions and requires a dramatically reduced number of in-training simulation steps for general manifolds.

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

October 11, 2023 Ryan Po, Wang Yifan, Vladislav Golyanik, Kfir Aberman, Jonathan T. Barron, Amit H. Bermano, Eric Ryan Chan, Tali Dekel, Aleksander Holynski, Angjoo Kanazawa, C. Karen Liu, Lingjie Liu, Ben Mildenhall, Matthias Nießner, Björn Ommer, Christian Theobalt, Peter Wonka, Gordon Wetzstein

cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.GR, cs.LG

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion-based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state-of-the-art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion-based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike.

Diffusion Prior Regularized Iterative Reconstruction for Low-dose CT

October 10, 2023 Wenjun Xia, Yongyi Shi, Chuang Niu, Wenxiang Cong, Ge Wang

eess.IV, cs.LG, physics.med-ph

Computed tomography (CT) involves a patient’s exposure to ionizing radiation. To reduce the radiation dose, we can either lower the X-ray photon count or down-sample projection views. However, either of the ways often compromises image quality. To address this challenge, here we introduce an iterative reconstruction algorithm regularized by a diffusion prior. Drawing on the exceptional imaging prowess of the denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), we merge it with a reconstruction procedure that prioritizes data fidelity. This fusion capitalizes on the merits of both techniques, delivering exceptional reconstruction results in an unsupervised framework. To further enhance the efficiency of the reconstruction process, we incorporate the Nesterov momentum acceleration technique. This enhancement facilitates superior diffusion sampling in fewer steps. As demonstrated in our experiments, our method offers a potential pathway to high-definition CT image reconstruction with minimized radiation.

Stochastic Super-resolution of Cosmological Simulations with Denoising Diffusion Models

October 10, 2023 Andreas Schanz, Florian List, Oliver Hahn

astro-ph.CO, astro-ph.IM, cs.LG

In recent years, deep learning models have been successfully employed for augmenting low-resolution cosmological simulations with small-scale information, a task known as “super-resolution”. So far, these cosmological super-resolution models have relied on generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can achieve highly realistic results, but suffer from various shortcomings (e.g. low sample diversity). We introduce denoising diffusion models as a powerful generative model for super-resolving cosmic large-scale structure predictions (as a first proof-of-concept in two dimensions). To obtain accurate results down to small scales, we develop a new “filter-boosted” training approach that redistributes the importance of different scales in the pixel-wise training objective. We demonstrate that our model not only produces convincing super-resolution images and power spectra consistent at the percent level, but is also able to reproduce the diversity of small-scale features consistent with a given low-resolution simulation. This enables uncertainty quantification for the generated small-scale features, which is critical for the usefulness of such super-resolution models as a viable surrogate model for cosmic structure formation.

What Does Stable Diffusion Know about the 3D Scene?

October 10, 2023 Guanqi Zhan, Chuanxia Zheng, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman

cs.CV

Recent advances in generative models like Stable Diffusion enable the generation of highly photo-realistic images. Our objective in this paper is to probe the diffusion network to determine to what extent it ‘understands’ different properties of the 3D scene depicted in an image. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) We introduce a protocol to evaluate whether a network models a number of physical ‘properties’ of the 3D scene by probing for explicit features that represent these properties. The probes are applied on datasets of real images with annotations for the property. (ii) We apply this protocol to properties covering scene geometry, scene material, support relations, lighting, and view dependent measures. (iii) We find that Stable Diffusion is good at a number of properties including scene geometry, support relations, shadows and depth, but less performant for occlusion. (iv) We also apply the probes to other models trained at large-scale, including DINO and CLIP, and find their performance inferior to that of Stable Diffusion.

Latent Diffusion Counterfactual Explanations

October 10, 2023 Karim Farid, Simon Schrodi, Max Argus, Thomas Brox

cs.LG, cs.CV

Counterfactual explanations have emerged as a promising method for elucidating the behavior of opaque black-box models. Recently, several works leveraged pixel-space diffusion models for counterfactual generation. To handle noisy, adversarial gradients during counterfactual generation – causing unrealistic artifacts or mere adversarial perturbations – they required either auxiliary adversarially robust models or computationally intensive guidance schemes. However, such requirements limit their applicability, e.g., in scenarios with restricted access to the model’s training data. To address these limitations, we introduce Latent Diffusion Counterfactual Explanations (LDCE). LDCE harnesses the capabilities of recent class- or text-conditional foundation latent diffusion models to expedite counterfactual generation and focus on the important, semantic parts of the data. Furthermore, we propose a novel consensus guidance mechanism to filter out noisy, adversarial gradients that are misaligned with the diffusion model’s implicit classifier. We demonstrate the versatility of LDCE across a wide spectrum of models trained on diverse datasets with different learning paradigms. Finally, we showcase how LDCE can provide insights into model errors, enhancing our understanding of black-box model behavior.

Leveraging Diffusion-Based Image Variations for Robust Training on Poisoned Data

October 10, 2023 Lukas Struppek, Martin B. Hentschel, Clifton Poth, Dominik Hintersdorf, Kristian Kersting

cs.CR, cs.CV, cs.LG

Backdoor attacks pose a serious security threat for training neural networks as they surreptitiously introduce hidden functionalities into a model. Such backdoors remain silent during inference on clean inputs, evading detection due to inconspicuous behavior. However, once a specific trigger pattern appears in the input data, the backdoor activates, causing the model to execute its concealed function. Detecting such poisoned samples within vast datasets is virtually impossible through manual inspection. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that enables model training on potentially poisoned datasets by utilizing the power of recent diffusion models. Specifically, we create synthetic variations of all training samples, leveraging the inherent resilience of diffusion models to potential trigger patterns in the data. By combining this generative approach with knowledge distillation, we produce student models that maintain their general performance on the task while exhibiting robust resistance to backdoor triggers.

JointNet: Extending Text-to-Image Diffusion for Dense Distribution Modeling

October 10, 2023 Jingyang Zhang, Shiwei Li, Yuanxun Lu, Tian Fang, David McKinnon, Yanghai Tsin, Long Quan, Yao Yao

cs.CV

We introduce JointNet, a novel neural network architecture for modeling the joint distribution of images and an additional dense modality (e.g., depth maps). JointNet is extended from a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, where a copy of the original network is created for the new dense modality branch and is densely connected with the RGB branch. The RGB branch is locked during network fine-tuning, which enables efficient learning of the new modality distribution while maintaining the strong generalization ability of the large-scale pre-trained diffusion model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of JointNet by using RGBD diffusion as an example and through extensive experiments, showcasing its applicability in a variety of applications, including joint RGBD generation, dense depth prediction, depth-conditioned image generation, and coherent tile-based 3D panorama generation.

Latent Diffusion Model for DNA Sequence Generation

October 09, 2023 Zehui Li, Yuhao Ni, Tim August B. Huygelen, Akashaditya Das, Guoxuan Xia, Guy-Bart Stan, Yiren Zhao

cs.LG

The harnessing of machine learning, especially deep generative models, has opened up promising avenues in the field of synthetic DNA sequence generation. Whilst Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have gained traction for this application, they often face issues such as limited sample diversity and mode collapse. On the other hand, Diffusion Models are a promising new class of generative models that are not burdened with these problems, enabling them to reach the state-of-the-art in domains such as image generation. In light of this, we propose a novel latent diffusion model, DiscDiff, tailored for discrete DNA sequence generation. By simply embedding discrete DNA sequences into a continuous latent space using an autoencoder, we are able to leverage the powerful generative abilities of continuous diffusion models for the generation of discrete data. Additionally, we introduce Fr'echet Reconstruction Distance (FReD) as a new metric to measure the sample quality of DNA sequence generations. Our DiscDiff model demonstrates an ability to generate synthetic DNA sequences that align closely with real DNA in terms of Motif Distribution, Latent Embedding Distribution (FReD), and Chromatin Profiles. Additionally, we contribute a comprehensive cross-species dataset of 150K unique promoter-gene sequences from 15 species, enriching resources for future generative modelling in genomics. We will make our code public upon publication.

DiffuSeq-v2: Bridging Discrete and Continuous Text Spaces for Accelerated Seq2Seq Diffusion Models

October 09, 2023 Shansan Gong, Mukai Li, Jiangtao Feng, Zhiyong Wu, Lingpeng Kong

cs.LG, cs.CL

Diffusion models have gained prominence in generating high-quality sequences of text. Nevertheless, current approaches predominantly represent discrete text within a continuous diffusion space, which incurs substantial computational overhead during training and results in slower sampling speeds. In this paper, we introduce a soft absorbing state that facilitates the diffusion model in learning to reconstruct discrete mutations based on the underlying Gaussian space, thereby enhancing its capacity to recover conditional signals. During the sampling phase, we employ state-of-the-art ODE solvers within the continuous space to expedite the sampling process. Comprehensive experimental evaluations reveal that our proposed method effectively accelerates the training convergence by 4x and generates samples of similar quality 800x faster, rendering it significantly closer to practical application. \footnote{The code is released at \url{https://github.com/Shark-NLP/DiffuSeq}

DiffCPS: Diffusion Model based Constrained Policy Search for Offline Reinforcement Learning

October 09, 2023 Longxiang He, Linrui Zhang, Junbo Tan, Xueqian Wang

cs.LG

Constrained policy search (CPS) is a fundamental problem in offline reinforcement learning, which is generally solved by advantage weighted regression (AWR). However, previous methods may still encounter out-of-distribution actions due to the limited expressivity of Gaussian-based policies. On the other hand, directly applying the state-of-the-art models with distribution expression capabilities (i.e., diffusion models) in the AWR framework is insufficient since AWR requires exact policy probability densities, which is intractable in diffusion models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called $\textbf{Diffusion Model based Constrained Policy Search (DiffCPS)}$, which tackles the diffusion-based constrained policy search without resorting to AWR. The theoretical analysis reveals our key insights by leveraging the action distribution of the diffusion model to eliminate the policy distribution constraint in the CPS and then utilizing the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO) of diffusion-based policy to approximate the KL constraint. Consequently, DiffCPS admits the high expressivity of diffusion models while circumventing the cumbersome density calculation brought by AWR. Extensive experimental results based on the D4RL benchmark demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. We empirically show that DiffCPS achieves better or at least competitive performance compared to traditional AWR-based baselines as well as recent diffusion-based offline RL methods. The code is now available at $\href{https://github.com/felix-thu/DiffCPS}{https://github.com/felix-thu/DiffCPS}$.

Latent Diffusion Model for Medical Image Standardization and Enhancement

October 08, 2023 Md Selim, Jie Zhang, Faraneh Fathi, Michael A. Brooks, Ge Wang, Guoqiang Yu, Jin Chen

eess.IV, cs.CV

Computed tomography (CT) serves as an effective tool for lung cancer screening, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, providing a rich source of features to quantify temporal and spatial tumor changes. Nonetheless, the diversity of CT scanners and customized acquisition protocols can introduce significant inconsistencies in texture features, even when assessing the same patient. This variability poses a fundamental challenge for subsequent research that relies on consistent image features. Existing CT image standardization models predominantly utilize GAN-based supervised or semi-supervised learning, but their performance remains limited. We present DiffusionCT, an innovative score-based DDPM model that operates in the latent space to transform disparate non-standard distributions into a standardized form. The architecture comprises a U-Net-based encoder-decoder, augmented by a DDPM model integrated at the bottleneck position. First, the encoder-decoder is trained independently, without embedding DDPM, to capture the latent representation of the input data. Second, the latent DDPM model is trained while keeping the encoder-decoder parameters fixed. Finally, the decoder uses the transformed latent representation to generate a standardized CT image, providing a more consistent basis for downstream analysis. Empirical tests on patient CT images indicate notable improvements in image standardization using DiffusionCT. Additionally, the model significantly reduces image noise in SPAD images, further validating the effectiveness of DiffusionCT for advanced imaging tasks.

On Accelerating Diffusion-based Molecular Conformation Generation in SE(3)-invariant Space

October 07, 2023 Zihan Zhou, Ruiying Liu, Tianshu Yu

physics.comp-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG

Diffusion-based generative models in SE(3)-invariant space have demonstrated promising performance in molecular conformation generation, but typically require solving stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with thousands of update steps. Till now, it remains unclear how to effectively accelerate this procedure explicitly in SE(3)-invariant space, which greatly hinders its wide application in the real world. In this paper, we systematically study the diffusion mechanism in SE(3)-invariant space via the lens of approximate errors induced by existing methods. Thereby, we develop more precise approximate in SE(3) in the context of projected differential equations. Theoretical analysis is further provided as well as empirical proof relating hyper-parameters with such errors. Altogether, we propose a novel acceleration scheme for generating molecular conformations in SE(3)-invariant space. Experimentally, our scheme can generate high-quality conformations with 50x–100x speedup compared to existing methods.

Conditional Diffusion Model for Target Speaker Extraction

October 07, 2023 Theodor Nguyen, Guangzhi Sun, Xianrui Zheng, Chao Zhang, Philip C Woodland

eess.AS, cs.LG, cs.SD

We propose DiffSpEx, a generative target speaker extraction method based on score-based generative modelling through stochastic differential equations. DiffSpEx deploys a continuous-time stochastic diffusion process in the complex short-time Fourier transform domain, starting from the target speaker source and converging to a Gaussian distribution centred on the mixture of sources. For the reverse-time process, a parametrised score function is conditioned on a target speaker embedding to extract the target speaker from the mixture of sources. We utilise ECAPA-TDNN target speaker embeddings and condition the score function alternately on the SDE time embedding and the target speaker embedding. The potential of DiffSpEx is demonstrated with the WSJ0-2mix dataset, achieving an SI-SDR of 12.9 dB and a NISQA score of 3.56. Moreover, we show that fine-tuning a pre-trained DiffSpEx model to a specific speaker further improves performance, enabling personalisation in target speaker extraction.

DiffNAS: Bootstrapping Diffusion Models by Prompting for Better Architectures

October 07, 2023 Wenhao Li, Xiu Su, Shan You, Fei Wang, Chen Qian, Chang Xu

cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG

Diffusion models have recently exhibited remarkable performance on synthetic data. After a diffusion path is selected, a base model, such as UNet, operates as a denoising autoencoder, primarily predicting noises that need to be eliminated step by step. Consequently, it is crucial to employ a model that aligns with the expected budgets to facilitate superior synthetic performance. In this paper, we meticulously analyze the diffusion model and engineer a base model search approach, denoted “DiffNAS”. Specifically, we leverage GPT-4 as a supernet to expedite the search, supplemented with a search memory to enhance the results. Moreover, we employ RFID as a proxy to promptly rank the experimental outcomes produced by GPT-4. We also adopt a rapid-convergence training strategy to boost search efficiency. Rigorous experimentation corroborates that our algorithm can augment the search efficiency by 2 times under GPT-based scenarios, while also attaining a performance of 2.82 with 0.37 improvement in FID on CIFAR10 relative to the benchmark IDDPM algorithm.

DPM-TSE: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Target Sound Extraction

October 06, 2023 Jiarui Hai, Helin Wang, Dongchao Yang, Karan Thakkar, Najim Dehak, Mounya Elhilali

eess.AS, cs.SD

Common target sound extraction (TSE) approaches primarily relied on discriminative approaches in order to separate the target sound while minimizing interference from the unwanted sources, with varying success in separating the target from the background. This study introduces DPM-TSE, a first generative method based on diffusion probabilistic modeling (DPM) for target sound extraction, to achieve both cleaner target renderings as well as improved separability from unwanted sounds. The technique also tackles common background noise issues with DPM by introducing a correction method for noise schedules and sample steps. This approach is evaluated using both objective and subjective quality metrics on the FSD Kaggle 2018 dataset. The results show that DPM-TSE has a significant improvement in perceived quality in terms of target extraction and purity.

Generative Diffusion From An Action Principle

October 06, 2023 Akhil Premkumar

cs.LG, physics.class-ph

Generative diffusion models synthesize new samples by reversing a diffusive process that converts a given data set to generic noise. This is accomplished by training a neural network to match the gradient of the log of the probability distribution of a given data set, also called the score. By casting reverse diffusion as an optimal control problem, we show that score matching can be derived from an action principle, like the ones commonly used in physics. We use this insight to demonstrate the connection between different classes of diffusion models.

Diffusion Random Feature Model

October 06, 2023 Esha Saha, Giang Tran

stat.ML, cs.LG

Diffusion probabilistic models have been successfully used to generate data from noise. However, most diffusion models are computationally expensive and difficult to interpret with a lack of theoretical justification. Random feature models on the other hand have gained popularity due to their interpretability but their application to complex machine learning tasks remains limited. In this work, we present a diffusion model-inspired deep random feature model that is interpretable and gives comparable numerical results to a fully connected neural network having the same number of trainable parameters. Specifically, we extend existing results for random features and derive generalization bounds between the distribution of sampled data and the true distribution using properties of score matching. We validate our findings by generating samples on the fashion MNIST dataset and instrumental audio data.

Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference

October 06, 2023 Simian Luo, Yiqin Tan, Longbo Huang, Jian Li, Hang Zhao

cs.CV, cs.LG

Latent Diffusion models (LDMs) have achieved remarkable results in synthesizing high-resolution images. However, the iterative sampling process is computationally intensive and leads to slow generation. Inspired by Consistency Models (song et al.), we propose Latent Consistency Models (LCMs), enabling swift inference with minimal steps on any pre-trained LDMs, including Stable Diffusion (rombach et al). Viewing the guided reverse diffusion process as solving an augmented probability flow ODE (PF-ODE), LCMs are designed to directly predict the solution of such ODE in latent space, mitigating the need for numerous iterations and allowing rapid, high-fidelity sampling. Efficiently distilled from pre-trained classifier-free guided diffusion models, a high-quality 768 x 768 2~4-step LCM takes only 32 A100 GPU hours for training. Furthermore, we introduce Latent Consistency Fine-tuning (LCF), a novel method that is tailored for fine-tuning LCMs on customized image datasets. Evaluation on the LAION-5B-Aesthetics dataset demonstrates that LCMs achieve state-of-the-art text-to-image generation performance with few-step inference. Project Page: https://latent-consistency-models.github.io/

VI-Diff: Unpaired Visible-Infrared Translation Diffusion Model for Single Modality Labeled Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification

October 06, 2023 Han Huang, Yan Huang, Liang Wang

cs.CV

Visible-Infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) in real-world scenarios poses a significant challenge due to the high cost of cross-modality data annotation. Different sensing cameras, such as RGB/IR cameras for good/poor lighting conditions, make it costly and error-prone to identify the same person across modalities. To overcome this, we explore the use of single-modality labeled data for the VI-ReID task, which is more cost-effective and practical. By labeling pedestrians in only one modality (e.g., visible images) and retrieving in another modality (e.g., infrared images), we aim to create a training set containing both originally labeled and modality-translated data using unpaired image-to-image translation techniques. In this paper, we propose VI-Diff, a diffusion model that effectively addresses the task of Visible-Infrared person image translation. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that VI-Diff outperforms existing diffusion and GAN models, making it a promising solution for VI-ReID with single-modality labeled data. Our approach can be a promising solution to the VI-ReID task with single-modality labeled data and serves as a good starting point for future study. Code will be available.

Observation-Guided Diffusion Probabilistic Models

October 06, 2023 Junoh Kang, Jinyoung Choi, Sungik Choi, Bohyung Han

cs.LG, cs.AI

We propose a novel diffusion model called observation-guided diffusion probabilistic model (OGDM), which effectively addresses the trade-off between quality control and fast sampling. Our approach reestablishes the training objective by integrating the guidance of the observation process with the Markov chain in a principled way. This is achieved by introducing an additional loss term derived from the observation based on the conditional discriminator on noise level, which employs Bernoulli distribution indicating whether its input lies on the (noisy) real manifold or not. This strategy allows us to optimize the more accurate negative log-likelihood induced in the inference stage especially when the number of function evaluations is limited. The proposed training method is also advantageous even when incorporated only into the fine-tuning process, and it is compatible with various fast inference strategies since our method yields better denoising networks using the exactly same inference procedure without incurring extra computational cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training algorithm using diverse inference methods on strong diffusion model baselines.

Diffusion Models as Masked Audio-Video Learners

October 05, 2023 Elvis Nunez, Yanzi Jin, Mohammad Rastegari, Sachin Mehta, Maxwell Horton

cs.SD, cs.CV, cs.MM, eess.AS

Over the past several years, the synchronization between audio and visual signals has been leveraged to learn richer audio-visual representations. Aided by the large availability of unlabeled videos, many unsupervised training frameworks have demonstrated impressive results in various downstream audio and video tasks. Recently, Masked Audio-Video Learners (MAViL) has emerged as a state-of-the-art audio-video pre-training framework. MAViL couples contrastive learning with masked autoencoding to jointly reconstruct audio spectrograms and video frames by fusing information from both modalities. In this paper, we study the potential synergy between diffusion models and MAViL, seeking to derive mutual benefits from these two frameworks. The incorporation of diffusion into MAViL, combined with various training efficiency methodologies that include the utilization of a masking ratio curriculum and adaptive batch sizing, results in a notable 32% reduction in pre-training Floating-Point Operations (FLOPS) and an 18% decrease in pre-training wall clock time. Crucially, this enhanced efficiency does not compromise the model’s performance in downstream audio-classification tasks when compared to MAViL’s performance.

Aligning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Reward Backpropagation

October 05, 2023 Mihir Prabhudesai, Anirudh Goyal, Deepak Pathak, Katerina Fragkiadaki

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO

Text-to-image diffusion models have recently emerged at the forefront of image generation, powered by very large-scale unsupervised or weakly supervised text-to-image training datasets. Due to their unsupervised training, controlling their behavior in downstream tasks, such as maximizing human-perceived image quality, image-text alignment, or ethical image generation, is difficult. Recent works finetune diffusion models to downstream reward functions using vanilla reinforcement learning, notorious for the high variance of the gradient estimators. In this paper, we propose AlignProp, a method that aligns diffusion models to downstream reward functions using end-to-end backpropagation of the reward gradient through the denoising process. While naive implementation of such backpropagation would require prohibitive memory resources for storing the partial derivatives of modern text-to-image models, AlignProp finetunes low-rank adapter weight modules and uses gradient checkpointing, to render its memory usage viable. We test AlignProp in finetuning diffusion models to various objectives, such as image-text semantic alignment, aesthetics, compressibility and controllability of the number of objects present, as well as their combinations. We show AlignProp achieves higher rewards in fewer training steps than alternatives, while being conceptually simpler, making it a straightforward choice for optimizing diffusion models for differentiable reward functions of interest. Code and Visualization results are available at https://align-prop.github.io/.

Stochastic interpolants with data-dependent couplings

October 05, 2023 Michael S. Albergo, Mark Goldstein, Nicholas M. Boffi, Rajesh Ranganath, Eric Vanden-Eijnden

cs.LG, stat.ML

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure – such as flows and diffusions – construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to \textit{couple} the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.

Multimarginal generative modeling with stochastic interpolants

October 05, 2023 Michael S. Albergo, Nicholas M. Boffi, Michael Lindsey, Eric Vanden-Eijnden

cs.LG, math.PR

Given a set of $K$ probability densities, we consider the multimarginal generative modeling problem of learning a joint distribution that recovers these densities as marginals. The structure of this joint distribution should identify multi-way correspondences among the prescribed marginals. We formalize an approach to this task within a generalization of the stochastic interpolant framework, leading to efficient learning algorithms built upon dynamical transport of measure. Our generative models are defined by velocity and score fields that can be characterized as the minimizers of simple quadratic objectives, and they are defined on a simplex that generalizes the time variable in the usual dynamical transport framework. The resulting transport on the simplex is influenced by all marginals, and we show that multi-way correspondences can be extracted. The identification of such correspondences has applications to style transfer, algorithmic fairness, and data decorruption. In addition, the multimarginal perspective enables an efficient algorithm for reducing the dynamical transport cost in the ordinary two-marginal setting. We demonstrate these capacities with several numerical examples.

Wasserstein Distortion: Unifying Fidelity and Realism

October 05, 2023 Yang Qiu, Aaron B. Wagner, Johannes Ballé, Lucas Theis

cs.IT, cs.CV, eess.IV, math.IT

We introduce a distortion measure for images, Wasserstein distortion, that simultaneously generalizes pixel-level fidelity on the one hand and realism on the other. We show how Wasserstein distortion reduces mathematically to a pure fidelity constraint or a pure realism constraint under different parameter choices. Pairs of images that are close under Wasserstein distortion illustrate its utility. In particular, we generate random textures that have high fidelity to a reference texture in one location of the image and smoothly transition to an independent realization of the texture as one moves away from this point. Connections between Wasserstein distortion and models of the human visual system are noted.

Diffusing on Two Levels and Optimizing for Multiple Properties: A Novel Approach to Generating Molecules with Desirable Properties

October 05, 2023 Siyuan Guo, Jihong Guan, Shuigeng Zhou

q-bio.BM, cs.AI, cs.LG

In the past decade, Artificial Intelligence driven drug design and discovery has been a hot research topic, where an important branch is molecule generation by generative models, from GAN-based models and VAE-based models to the latest diffusion-based models. However, most existing models pursue only the basic properties like validity and uniqueness of the generated molecules, a few go further to explicitly optimize one single important molecular property (e.g. QED or PlogP), which makes most generated molecules little usefulness in practice. In this paper, we present a novel approach to generating molecules with desirable properties, which expands the diffusion model framework with multiple innovative designs. The novelty is two-fold. On the one hand, considering that the structures of molecules are complex and diverse, and molecular properties are usually determined by some substructures (e.g. pharmacophores), we propose to perform diffusion on two structural levels: molecules and molecular fragments respectively, with which a mixed Gaussian distribution is obtained for the reverse diffusion process. To get desirable molecular fragments, we develop a novel electronic effect based fragmentation method. On the other hand, we introduce two ways to explicitly optimize multiple molecular properties under the diffusion model framework. First, as potential drug molecules must be chemically valid, we optimize molecular validity by an energy-guidance function. Second, since potential drug molecules should be desirable in various properties, we employ a multi-objective mechanism to optimize multiple molecular properties simultaneously. Extensive experiments with two benchmark datasets QM9 and ZINC250k show that the molecules generated by our proposed method have better validity, uniqueness, novelty, Fr'echet ChemNet Distance (FCD), QED, and PlogP than those generated by current SOTA models.

Denoising Diffusion Step-aware Models

October 05, 2023 Shuai Yang, Yukang Chen, Luozhou Wang, Shu Liu, Yingcong Chen

cs.CV

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have garnered popularity for data generation across various domains. However, a significant bottleneck is the necessity for whole-network computation during every step of the generative process, leading to high computational overheads. This paper presents a novel framework, Denoising Diffusion Step-aware Models (DDSM), to address this challenge. Unlike conventional approaches, DDSM employs a spectrum of neural networks whose sizes are adapted according to the importance of each generative step, as determined through evolutionary search. This step-wise network variation effectively circumvents redundant computational efforts, particularly in less critical steps, thereby enhancing the efficiency of the diffusion model. Furthermore, the step-aware design can be seamlessly integrated with other efficiency-geared diffusion models such as DDIMs and latent diffusion, thus broadening the scope of computational savings. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that DDSM achieves computational savings of 49% for CIFAR-10, 61% for CelebA-HQ, 59% for LSUN-bedroom, 71% for AFHQ, and 76% for ImageNet, all without compromising the generation quality. Our code and models will be publicly available.

EfficientDM: Efficient Quantization-Aware Fine-Tuning of Low-Bit Diffusion Models

October 05, 2023 Yefei He, Jing Liu, Weijia Wu, Hong Zhou, Bohan Zhuang

cs.CV

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image synthesis and related generative tasks. Nevertheless, their practicality for low-latency real-world applications is constrained by substantial computational costs and latency issues. Quantization is a dominant way to compress and accelerate diffusion models, where post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) are two main approaches, each bearing its own properties. While PTQ exhibits efficiency in terms of both time and data usage, it may lead to diminished performance in low bit-width. On the other hand, QAT can alleviate performance degradation but comes with substantial demands on computational and data resources. To capitalize on the advantages while avoiding their respective drawbacks, we introduce a data-free and parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for low-bit diffusion models, dubbed EfficientDM, to achieve QAT-level performance with PTQ-like efficiency. Specifically, we propose a quantization-aware variant of the low-rank adapter (QALoRA) that can be merged with model weights and jointly quantized to low bit-width. The fine-tuning process distills the denoising capabilities of the full-precision model into its quantized counterpart, eliminating the requirement for training data. We also introduce scale-aware optimization and employ temporal learned step-size quantization to further enhance performance. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous PTQ-based diffusion models while maintaining similar time and data efficiency. Specifically, there is only a marginal 0.05 sFID increase when quantizing both weights and activations of LDM-4 to 4-bit on ImageNet 256x256. Compared to QAT-based methods, our EfficientDM also boasts a 16.2x faster quantization speed with comparable generation quality.

Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers: Improving learning signals through partial trajectory optimization

October 04, 2023 Dinghuai Zhang, Ricky Tian Qi Chen, Cheng-Hao Liu, Aaron Courville, Yoshua Bengio

cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.CO, stat.ME, stat.ML

We tackle the problem of sampling from intractable high-dimensional density functions, a fundamental task that often appears in machine learning and statistics. We extend recent sampling-based approaches that leverage controlled stochastic processes to model approximate samples from these target densities. The main drawback of these approaches is that the training objective requires full trajectories to compute, resulting in sluggish credit assignment issues due to use of entire trajectories and a learning signal present only at the terminal time. In this work, we present Diffusion Generative Flow Samplers (DGFS), a sampling-based framework where the learning process can be tractably broken down into short partial trajectory segments, via parameterizing an additional “flow function”. Our method takes inspiration from the theory developed for generative flow networks (GFlowNets), allowing us to make use of intermediate learning signals and benefit from off-policy exploration capabilities. Through a variety of challenging experiments, we demonstrate that DGFS results in more accurate estimates of the normalization constant than closely-related prior methods.

On Memorization in Diffusion Models

October 04, 2023 Xiangming Gu, Chao Du, Tianyu Pang, Chongxuan Li, Min Lin, Ye Wang

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Due to their capacity to generate novel and high-quality samples, diffusion models have attracted significant research interest in recent years. Notably, the typical training objective of diffusion models, i.e., denoising score matching, has a closed-form optimal solution that can only generate training data replicating samples. This indicates that a memorization behavior is theoretically expected, which contradicts the common generalization ability of state-of-the-art diffusion models, and thus calls for a deeper understanding. Looking into this, we first observe that memorization behaviors tend to occur on smaller-sized datasets, which motivates our definition of effective model memorization (EMM), a metric measuring the maximum size of training data at which a learned diffusion model approximates its theoretical optimum. Then, we quantify the impact of the influential factors on these memorization behaviors in terms of EMM, focusing primarily on data distribution, model configuration, and training procedure. Besides comprehensive empirical results identifying the influential factors, we surprisingly find that conditioning training data on uninformative random labels can significantly trigger the memorization in diffusion models. Our study holds practical significance for diffusion model users and offers clues to theoretical research in deep generative models. Code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/DiffMemorize.

Generalization in diffusion models arises from geometry-adaptive harmonic representation

October 04, 2023 Zahra Kadkhodaie, Florentin Guth, Eero P. Simoncelli, Stéphane Mallat

cs.CV, cs.LG

High-quality samples generated with score-based reverse diffusion algorithms provide evidence that deep neural networks (DNN) trained for denoising can learn high-dimensional densities, despite the curse of dimensionality. However, recent reports of memorization of the training set raise the question of whether these networks are learning the “true” continuous density of the data. Here, we show that two denoising DNNs trained on non-overlapping subsets of a dataset learn nearly the same score function, and thus the same density, with a surprisingly small number of training images. This strong generalization demonstrates an alignment of powerful inductive biases in the DNN architecture and/or training algorithm with properties of the data distribution. We analyze these, demonstrating that the denoiser performs a shrinkage operation in a basis adapted to the underlying image. Examination of these bases reveals oscillating harmonic structures along contours and in homogeneous image regions. We show that trained denoisers are inductively biased towards these geometry-adaptive harmonic representations by demonstrating that they arise even when the network is trained on image classes such as low-dimensional manifolds, for which the harmonic basis is suboptimal. Additionally, we show that the denoising performance of the networks is near-optimal when trained on regular image classes for which the optimal basis is known to be geometry-adaptive and harmonic.

MedDiffusion: Boosting Health Risk Prediction via Diffusion-based Data Augmentation

October 04, 2023 Yuan Zhong, Suhan Cui, Jiaqi Wang, Xiaochen Wang, Ziyi Yin, Yaqing Wang, Houping Xiao, Mengdi Huai, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma

cs.LG, cs.AI

Health risk prediction is one of the fundamental tasks under predictive modeling in the medical domain, which aims to forecast the potential health risks that patients may face in the future using their historical Electronic Health Records (EHR). Researchers have developed several risk prediction models to handle the unique challenges of EHR data, such as its sequential nature, high dimensionality, and inherent noise. These models have yielded impressive results. Nonetheless, a key issue undermining their effectiveness is data insufficiency. A variety of data generation and augmentation methods have been introduced to mitigate this issue by expanding the size of the training data set through the learning of underlying data distributions. However, the performance of these methods is often limited due to their task-unrelated design. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces a novel, end-to-end diffusion-based risk prediction model, named MedDiffusion. It enhances risk prediction performance by creating synthetic patient data during training to enlarge sample space. Furthermore, MedDiffusion discerns hidden relationships between patient visits using a step-wise attention mechanism, enabling the model to automatically retain the most vital information for generating high-quality data. Experimental evaluation on four real-world medical datasets demonstrates that MedDiffusion outperforms 14 cutting-edge baselines in terms of PR-AUC, F1, and Cohen’s Kappa. We also conduct ablation studies and benchmark our model against GAN-based alternatives to further validate the rationality and adaptability of our model design. Additionally, we analyze generated data to offer fresh insights into the model’s interpretability.

Learning to Reach Goals via Diffusion

October 04, 2023 Vineet Jain, Siamak Ravanbakhsh

cs.LG

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models capable of mapping random noise in high-dimensional spaces to a target manifold through iterative denoising. In this work, we present a novel perspective on goal-conditioned reinforcement learning by framing it within the context of diffusion modeling. Analogous to the diffusion process, where Gaussian noise is used to create random trajectories that walk away from the data manifold, we construct trajectories that move away from potential goal states. We then learn a goal-conditioned policy analogous to the score function. This approach, which we call Merlin, can reach predefined or novel goals from an arbitrary initial state without learning a separate value function. We consider three choices for the noise model to replace Gaussian noise in diffusion - reverse play from the buffer, reverse dynamics model, and a novel non-parametric approach. We theoretically justify our approach and validate it on offline goal-reaching tasks. Empirical results are competitive with state-of-the-art methods, which suggests this perspective on diffusion for RL is a simple, scalable, and effective direction for sequential decision-making.

SE(3)-Stochastic Flow Matching for Protein Backbone Generation

October 03, 2023 Avishek Joey Bose, Tara Akhound-Sadegh, Kilian Fatras, Guillaume Huguet, Jarrid Rector-Brooks, Cheng-Hao Liu, Andrei Cristian Nica, Maksym Korablyov, Michael Bronstein, Alexander Tong

cs.LG, cs.AI

The computational design of novel protein structures has the potential to impact numerous scientific disciplines greatly. Toward this goal, we introduce $\text{FoldFlow}$ a series of novel generative models of increasing modeling power based on the flow-matching paradigm over $3\text{D}$ rigid motions – i.e. the group $\text{SE(3)}$ – enabling accurate modeling of protein backbones. We first introduce $\text{FoldFlow-Base}$, a simulation-free approach to learning deterministic continuous-time dynamics and matching invariant target distributions on $\text{SE(3)}$. We next accelerate training by incorporating Riemannian optimal transport to create $\text{FoldFlow-OT}$, leading to the construction of both more simple and stable flows. Finally, we design $\text{FoldFlow-SFM}$ coupling both Riemannian OT and simulation-free training to learn stochastic continuous-time dynamics over $\text{SE(3)}$. Our family of $\text{FoldFlow}$ generative models offer several key advantages over previous approaches to the generative modeling of proteins: they are more stable and faster to train than diffusion-based approaches, and our models enjoy the ability to map any invariant source distribution to any invariant target distribution over $\text{SE(3)}$. Empirically, we validate our FoldFlow models on protein backbone generation of up to $300$ amino acids leading to high-quality designable, diverse, and novel samples.

Predicated Diffusion: Predicate Logic-Based Attention Guidance for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

October 03, 2023 Kota Sueyoshi, Takashi Matsubara

cs.CV

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable results in generating high-quality, diverse, and creative images. However, when it comes to text-based image generation, they often fail to capture the intended meaning presented in the text. For instance, a specified object may not be generated, an unnecessary object may be generated, and an adjective may alter objects it was not intended to modify. Moreover, we found that relationships indicating possession between objects are often overlooked. While users’ intentions in text are diverse, existing methods tend to specialize in only some aspects of these. In this paper, we propose Predicated Diffusion, a unified framework to express users’ intentions. We consider that the root of the above issues lies in the text encoder, which often focuses only on individual words and neglects the logical relationships between them. The proposed method does not solely rely on the text encoder, but instead, represents the intended meaning in the text as propositions using predicate logic and treats the pixels in the attention maps as the fuzzy predicates. This enables us to obtain a differentiable loss function that makes the image fulfill the proposition by minimizing it. When compared to several existing methods, we demonstrated that Predicated Diffusion can generate images that are more faithful to various text prompts, as verified by human evaluators and pretrained image-text models.

Conditional Diffusion Distillation

October 02, 2023 Kangfu Mei, Mauricio Delbracio, Hossein Talebi, Zhengzhong Tu, Vishal M. Patel, Peyman Milanfar

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Generative diffusion models provide strong priors for text-to-image generation and thereby serve as a foundation for conditional generation tasks such as image editing, restoration, and super-resolution. However, one major limitation of diffusion models is their slow sampling time. To address this challenge, we present a novel conditional distillation method designed to supplement the diffusion priors with the help of image conditions, allowing for conditional sampling with very few steps. We directly distill the unconditional pre-training in a single stage through joint-learning, largely simplifying the previous two-stage procedures that involve both distillation and conditional finetuning separately. Furthermore, our method enables a new parameter-efficient distillation mechanism that distills each task with only a small number of additional parameters combined with the shared frozen unconditional backbone. Experiments across multiple tasks including super-resolution, image editing, and depth-to-image generation demonstrate that our method outperforms existing distillation techniques for the same sampling time. Notably, our method is the first distillation strategy that can match the performance of the much slower fine-tuned conditional diffusion models.

Mirror Diffusion Models for Constrained and Watermarked Generation

October 02, 2023 Guan-Horng Liu, Tianrong Chen, Evangelos A. Theodorou, Molei Tao

stat.ML, cs.CV, cs.LG

Modern successes of diffusion models in learning complex, high-dimensional data distributions are attributed, in part, to their capability to construct diffusion processes with analytic transition kernels and score functions. The tractability results in a simulation-free framework with stable regression losses, from which reversed, generative processes can be learned at scale. However, when data is confined to a constrained set as opposed to a standard Euclidean space, these desirable characteristics appear to be lost based on prior attempts. In this work, we propose Mirror Diffusion Models (MDM), a new class of diffusion models that generate data on convex constrained sets without losing any tractability. This is achieved by learning diffusion processes in a dual space constructed from a mirror map, which, crucially, is a standard Euclidean space. We derive efficient computation of mirror maps for popular constrained sets, such as simplices and $\ell_2$-balls, showing significantly improved performance of MDM over existing methods. For safety and privacy purposes, we also explore constrained sets as a new mechanism to embed invisible but quantitative information (i.e., watermarks) in generated data, for which MDM serves as a compelling approach. Our work brings new algorithmic opportunities for learning tractable diffusion on complex domains.

Light Schrödinger Bridge

October 02, 2023 Alexander Korotin, Nikita Gushchin, Evgeny Burnaev

cs.LG

Despite the recent advances in the field of computational Schrodinger Bridges (SB), most existing SB solvers are still heavy-weighted and require complex optimization of several neural networks. It turns out that there is no principal solver which plays the role of simple-yet-effective baseline for SB just like, e.g., $k$-means method in clustering, logistic regression in classification or Sinkhorn algorithm in discrete optimal transport. We address this issue and propose a novel fast and simple SB solver. Our development is a smart combination of two ideas which recently appeared in the field: (a) parameterization of the Schrodinger potentials with sum-exp quadratic functions and (b) viewing the log-Schrodinger potentials as the energy functions. We show that combined together these ideas yield a lightweight, simulation-free and theoretically justified SB solver with a simple straightforward optimization objective. As a result, it allows solving SB in moderate dimensions in a matter of minutes on CPU without a painful hyperparameter selection. Our light solver resembles the Gaussian mixture model which is widely used for density estimation. Inspired by this similarity, we also prove an important theoretical result showing that our light solver is a universal approximator of SBs. The code for the LightSB solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/LightSB

Consistency Trajectory Models: Learning Probability Flow ODE Trajectory of Diffusion

October 01, 2023 Dongjun Kim, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Naoki Murata, Yuhta Takida, Toshimitsu Uesaka, Yutong He, Yuki Mitsufuji, Stefano Ermon

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, stat.ML

Consistency Models (CM) (Song et al., 2023) accelerate score-based diffusion model sampling at the cost of sample quality but lack a natural way to trade-off quality for speed. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Trajectory Model (CTM), a generalization encompassing CM and score-based models as special cases. CTM trains a single neural network that can – in a single forward pass – output scores (i.e., gradients of log-density) and enables unrestricted traversal between any initial and final time along the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) in a diffusion process. CTM enables the efficient combination of adversarial training and denoising score matching loss to enhance performance and achieves new state-of-the-art FIDs for single-step diffusion model sampling on CIFAR-10 (FID 1.73) and ImageNet at 64X64 resolution (FID 2.06). CTM also enables a new family of sampling schemes, both deterministic and stochastic, involving long jumps along the ODE solution trajectories. It consistently improves sample quality as computational budgets increase, avoiding the degradation seen in CM. Furthermore, CTM’s access to the score accommodates all diffusion model inference techniques, including exact likelihood computation.

DiffPoseTalk: Speech-Driven Stylistic 3D Facial Animation and Head Pose Generation via Diffusion Models

September 30, 2023 Zhiyao Sun, Tian Lv, Sheng Ye, Matthieu Gaetan Lin, Jenny Sheng, Yu-Hui Wen, Minjing Yu, Yong-jin Liu

cs.CV, cs.GR

The generation of stylistic 3D facial animations driven by speech poses a significant challenge as it requires learning a many-to-many mapping between speech, style, and the corresponding natural facial motion. However, existing methods either employ a deterministic model for speech-to-motion mapping or encode the style using a one-hot encoding scheme. Notably, the one-hot encoding approach fails to capture the complexity of the style and thus limits generalization ability. In this paper, we propose DiffPoseTalk, a generative framework based on the diffusion model combined with a style encoder that extracts style embeddings from short reference videos. During inference, we employ classifier-free guidance to guide the generation process based on the speech and style. We extend this to include the generation of head poses, thereby enhancing user perception. Additionally, we address the shortage of scanned 3D talking face data by training our model on reconstructed 3DMM parameters from a high-quality, in-the-wild audio-visual dataset. Our extensive experiments and user study demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Efficient Planning with Latent Diffusion

September 30, 2023 Wenhao Li

cs.LG, cs.AI

Temporal abstraction and efficient planning pose significant challenges in offline reinforcement learning, mainly when dealing with domains that involve temporally extended tasks and delayed sparse rewards. Existing methods typically plan in the raw action space and can be inefficient and inflexible. Latent action spaces offer a more flexible paradigm, capturing only possible actions within the behavior policy support and decoupling the temporal structure between planning and modeling. However, current latent-action-based methods are limited to discrete spaces and require expensive planning. This paper presents a unified framework for continuous latent action space representation learning and planning by leveraging latent, score-based diffusion models. We establish the theoretical equivalence between planning in the latent action space and energy-guided sampling with a pretrained diffusion model and incorporate a novel sequence-level exact sampling method. Our proposed method, $\texttt{LatentDiffuser}$, demonstrates competitive performance on low-dimensional locomotion control tasks and surpasses existing methods in higher-dimensional tasks.

Steered Diffusion: A Generalized Framework for Plug-and-Play Conditional Image Synthesis

September 30, 2023 Nithin Gopalakrishnan Nair, Anoop Cherian, Suhas Lohit, Ye Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Vishal M. Patel, Tim K. Marks

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Conditional generative models typically demand large annotated training sets to achieve high-quality synthesis. As a result, there has been significant interest in designing models that perform plug-and-play generation, i.e., to use a predefined or pretrained model, which is not explicitly trained on the generative task, to guide the generative process (e.g., using language). However, such guidance is typically useful only towards synthesizing high-level semantics rather than editing fine-grained details as in image-to-image translation tasks. To this end, and capitalizing on the powerful fine-grained generative control offered by the recent diffusion-based generative models, we introduce Steered Diffusion, a generalized framework for photorealistic zero-shot conditional image generation using a diffusion model trained for unconditional generation. The key idea is to steer the image generation of the diffusion model at inference time via designing a loss using a pre-trained inverse model that characterizes the conditional task. This loss modulates the sampling trajectory of the diffusion process. Our framework allows for easy incorporation of multiple conditions during inference. We present experiments using steered diffusion on several tasks including inpainting, colorization, text-guided semantic editing, and image super-resolution. Our results demonstrate clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over state-of-the-art diffusion-based plug-and-play models while adding negligible additional computational cost.

FashionFlow: Leveraging Diffusion Models for Dynamic Fashion Video Synthesis from Static Imagery

September 29, 2023 Tasin Islam, Alina Miron, XiaoHui Liu, Yongmin Li

cs.CV, cs.AI

Our study introduces a new image-to-video generator called FashionFlow. By utilising a diffusion model, we are able to create short videos from still images. Our approach involves developing and connecting relevant components with the diffusion model, which sets our work apart. The components include the use of pseudo-3D convolutional layers to generate videos efficiently. VAE and CLIP encoders capture vital characteristics from still images to influence the diffusion model. Our research demonstrates a successful synthesis of fashion videos featuring models posing from various angles, showcasing the fit and appearance of the garment. Our findings hold great promise for improving and enhancing the shopping experience for the online fashion industry.

Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards

September 29, 2023 Kevin Clark, Paul Vicol, Kevin Swersky, David J Fleet

cs.CV, cs.LG

We present Direct Reward Fine-Tuning (DRaFT), a simple and effective method for fine-tuning diffusion models to maximize differentiable reward functions, such as scores from human preference models. We first show that it is possible to backpropagate the reward function gradient through the full sampling procedure, and that doing so achieves strong performance on a variety of rewards, outperforming reinforcement learning-based approaches. We then propose more efficient variants of DRaFT: DRaFT-K, which truncates backpropagation to only the last K steps of sampling, and DRaFT-LV, which obtains lower-variance gradient estimates for the case when K=1. We show that our methods work well for a variety of reward functions and can be used to substantially improve the aesthetic quality of images generated by Stable Diffusion 1.4. Finally, we draw connections between our approach and prior work, providing a unifying perspective on the design space of gradient-based fine-tuning algorithms.

In search of dispersed memories: Generative diffusion models are associative memory networks

September 29, 2023 Luca Ambrogioni

stat.ML, cs.LG

Uncovering the mechanisms behind long-term memory is one of the most fascinating open problems in neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Artificial associative memory networks have been used to formalize important aspects of biological memory. Generative diffusion models are a type of generative machine learning techniques that have shown great performance in many tasks. Like associative memory systems, these networks define a dynamical system that converges to a set of target states. In this work we show that generative diffusion models can be interpreted as energy-based models and that, when trained on discrete patterns, their energy function is (asymptotically) identical to that of modern Hopfield networks. This equivalence allows us to interpret the supervised training of diffusion models as a synaptic learning process that encodes the associative dynamics of a modern Hopfield network in the weight structure of a deep neural network. Leveraging this connection, we formulate a generalized framework for understanding the formation of long-term memory, where creative generation and memory recall can be seen as parts of a unified continuum.

Diffusion Models as Stochastic Quantization in Lattice Field Theory

September 29, 2023 Lingxiao Wang, Gert Aarts, Kai Zhou

hep-lat, cs.LG

In this work, we establish a direct connection between generative diffusion models (DMs) and stochastic quantization (SQ). The DM is realized by approximating the reversal of a stochastic process dictated by the Langevin equation, generating samples from a prior distribution to effectively mimic the target distribution. Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the DM can serve as a global sampler for generating quantum lattice field configurations in two-dimensional $\phi^4$ theory. We demonstrate that DMs can notably reduce autocorrelation times in the Markov chain, especially in the critical region where standard Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) algorithms experience critical slowing down. The findings can potentially inspire further advancements in lattice field theory simulations, in particular in cases where it is expensive to generate large ensembles.

Consistency Models as a Rich and Efficient Policy Class for Reinforcement Learning

September 29, 2023 Zihan Ding, Chi Jin

cs.LG

Score-based generative models like the diffusion model have been testified to be effective in modeling multi-modal data from image generation to reinforcement learning (RL). However, the inference process of diffusion model can be slow, which hinders its usage in RL with iterative sampling. We propose to apply the consistency model as an efficient yet expressive policy representation, namely consistency policy, with an actor-critic style algorithm for three typical RL settings: offline, offline-to-online and online. For offline RL, we demonstrate the expressiveness of generative models as policies from multi-modal data. For offline-to-online RL, the consistency policy is shown to be more computational efficient than diffusion policy, with a comparable performance. For online RL, the consistency policy demonstrates significant speedup and even higher average performances than the diffusion policy.

Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models

September 29, 2023 Linqi Zhou, Aaron Lou, Samar Khanna, Stefano Ermon

cs.CV, cs.AI

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that map noise to data using stochastic processes. However, for many applications such as image editing, the model input comes from a distribution that is not random noise. As such, diffusion models must rely on cumbersome methods like guidance or projected sampling to incorporate this information in the generative process. In our work, we propose Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models (DDBMs), a natural alternative to this paradigm based on diffusion bridges, a family of processes that interpolate between two paired distributions given as endpoints. Our method learns the score of the diffusion bridge from data and maps from one endpoint distribution to the other by solving a (stochastic) differential equation based on the learned score. Our method naturally unifies several classes of generative models, such as score-based diffusion models and OT-Flow-Matching, allowing us to adapt existing design and architectural choices to our more general problem. Empirically, we apply DDBMs to challenging image datasets in both pixel and latent space. On standard image translation problems, DDBMs achieve significant improvement over baseline methods, and, when we reduce the problem to image generation by setting the source distribution to random noise, DDBMs achieve comparable FID scores to state-of-the-art methods despite being built for a more general task.

Distilling ODE Solvers of Diffusion Models into Smaller Steps

September 28, 2023 Sanghwan Kim, Hao Tang, Fisher Yu

cs.CV

Distillation techniques have substantially improved the sampling speed of diffusion models, allowing of the generation within only one step or a few steps. However, these distillation methods require extensive training for each dataset, sampler, and network, which limits their practical applicability. To address this limitation, we propose a straightforward distillation approach, Distilled-ODE solvers (D-ODE solvers), that optimizes the ODE solver rather than training the denoising network. D-ODE solvers are formulated by simply applying a single parameter adjustment to existing ODE solvers. Subsequently, D-ODE solvers with smaller steps are optimized by ODE solvers with larger steps through distillation over a batch of samples. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that D-ODE solvers outperform existing ODE solvers, including DDIM, PNDM, DPM-Solver, DEIS, and EDM, especially when generating samples with fewer steps. Our method incur negligible computational overhead compared to previous distillation techniques, enabling simple and rapid integration with previous samplers. Qualitative analysis further shows that D-ODE solvers enhance image quality while preserving the sampling trajectory of ODE solvers.

DiffGAN-F2S: Symmetric and Efficient Denoising Diffusion GANs for Structural Connectivity Prediction from Brain fMRI

September 28, 2023 Qiankun Zuo, Ruiheng Li, Yi Di, Hao Tian, Changhong Jing, Xuhang Chen, Shuqiang Wang

cs.CV, eess.IV

Mapping from functional connectivity (FC) to structural connectivity (SC) can facilitate multimodal brain network fusion and discover potential biomarkers for clinical implications. However, it is challenging to directly bridge the reliable non-linear mapping relations between SC and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this paper, a novel diffusision generative adversarial network-based fMRI-to-SC (DiffGAN-F2S) model is proposed to predict SC from brain fMRI in an end-to-end manner. To be specific, the proposed DiffGAN-F2S leverages denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) and adversarial learning to efficiently generate high-fidelity SC through a few steps from fMRI. By designing the dual-channel multi-head spatial attention (DMSA) and graph convolutional modules, the symmetric graph generator first captures global relations among direct and indirect connected brain regions, then models the local brain region interactions. It can uncover the complex mapping relations between fMRI and structural connectivity. Furthermore, the spatially connected consistency loss is devised to constrain the generator to preserve global-local topological information for accurate intrinsic SC prediction. Testing on the public Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, the proposed model can effectively generate empirical SC-preserved connectivity from four-dimensional imaging data and shows superior performance in SC prediction compared with other related models. Furthermore, the proposed model can identify the vast majority of important brain regions and connections derived from the empirical method, providing an alternative way to fuse multimodal brain networks and analyze clinical disease.

Exploiting the Signal-Leak Bias in Diffusion Models

September 27, 2023 Martin Nicolas Everaert, Athanasios Fitsios, Marco Bocchio, Sami Arpa, Sabine Süsstrunk, Radhakrishna Achanta

cs.CV, cs.LG

There is a bias in the inference pipeline of most diffusion models. This bias arises from a signal leak whose distribution deviates from the noise distribution, creating a discrepancy between training and inference processes. We demonstrate that this signal-leak bias is particularly significant when models are tuned to a specific style, causing sub-optimal style matching. Recent research tries to avoid the signal leakage during training. We instead show how we can exploit this signal-leak bias in existing diffusion models to allow more control over the generated images. This enables us to generate images with more varied brightness, and images that better match a desired style or color. By modeling the distribution of the signal leak in the spatial frequency and pixel domains, and including a signal leak in the initial latent, we generate images that better match expected results without any additional training.

High Perceptual Quality Wireless Image Delivery with Denoising Diffusion Models

September 27, 2023 Selim F. Yilmaz, Xueyan Niu, Bo Bai, Wei Han, Lei Deng, Deniz Gunduz

eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.IT, cs.LG, cs.MM, math.IT

We consider the image transmission problem over a noisy wireless channel via deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) along with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) at the receiver. Specifically, we are interested in the perception-distortion trade-off in the practical finite block length regime, in which separate source and channel coding can be highly suboptimal. We introduce a novel scheme that utilizes the range-null space decomposition of the target image. We transmit the range-space of the image after encoding and employ DDPM to progressively refine its null space contents. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements in distortion and perceptual quality of reconstructed images compared to standard DeepJSCC and the state-of-the-art generative learning-based method. We will publicly share our source code to facilitate further research and reproducibility.

Factorized Diffusion Architectures for Unsupervised Image Generation and Segmentation

September 27, 2023 Xin Yuan, Michael Maire

cs.CV, cs.LG

We develop a neural network architecture which, trained in an unsupervised manner as a denoising diffusion model, simultaneously learns to both generate and segment images. Learning is driven entirely by the denoising diffusion objective, without any annotation or prior knowledge about regions during training. A computational bottleneck, built into the neural architecture, encourages the denoising network to partition an input into regions, denoise them in parallel, and combine the results. Our trained model generates both synthetic images and, by simple examination of its internal predicted partitions, a semantic segmentation of those images. Without any finetuning, we directly apply our unsupervised model to the downstream task of segmenting real images via noising and subsequently denoising them. Experiments demonstrate that our model achieves accurate unsupervised image segmentation and high-quality synthetic image generation across multiple datasets.

Learning Using Generated Privileged Information by Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

September 26, 2023 Rafael-Edy Menadil, Mariana-Iuliana Georgescu, Radu Tudor Ionescu

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Learning Using Privileged Information is a particular type of knowledge distillation where the teacher model benefits from an additional data representation during training, called privileged information, improving the student model, which does not see the extra representation. However, privileged information is rarely available in practice. To this end, we propose a text classification framework that harnesses text-to-image diffusion models to generate artificial privileged information. The generated images and the original text samples are further used to train multimodal teacher models based on state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures. Finally, the knowledge from multimodal teachers is distilled into a text-based (unimodal) student. Hence, by employing a generative model to produce synthetic data as privileged information, we guide the training of the student model. Our framework, called Learning Using Generated Privileged Information (LUGPI), yields noticeable performance gains on four text classification data sets, demonstrating its potential in text classification without any additional cost during inference.

Diffusion-based Holistic Texture Rectification and Synthesis

September 26, 2023 Guoqing Hao, Satoshi Iizuka, Kensho Hara, Edgar Simo-Serra, Hirokatsu Kataoka, Kazuhiro Fukui

cs.GR, cs.CV

We present a novel framework for rectifying occlusions and distortions in degraded texture samples from natural images. Traditional texture synthesis approaches focus on generating textures from pristine samples, which necessitate meticulous preparation by humans and are often unattainable in most natural images. These challenges stem from the frequent occlusions and distortions of texture samples in natural images due to obstructions and variations in object surface geometry. To address these issues, we propose a framework that synthesizes holistic textures from degraded samples in natural images, extending the applicability of exemplar-based texture synthesis techniques. Our framework utilizes a conditional Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) with a novel occlusion-aware latent transformer. This latent transformer not only effectively encodes texture features from partially-observed samples necessary for the generation process of the LDM, but also explicitly captures long-range dependencies in samples with large occlusions. To train our model, we introduce a method for generating synthetic data by applying geometric transformations and free-form mask generation to clean textures. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and quantitatively. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the different components of our proposed framework. Results are corroborated by a perceptual user study which highlights the efficiency of our proposed approach.

Text-image guided Diffusion Model for generating Deepfake celebrity interactions

September 26, 2023 Yunzhuo Chen, Nur Al Hasan Haldar, Naveed Akhtar, Ajmal Mian

cs.CV

Deepfake images are fast becoming a serious concern due to their realism. Diffusion models have recently demonstrated highly realistic visual content generation, which makes them an excellent potential tool for Deepfake generation. To curb their exploitation for Deepfakes, it is imperative to first explore the extent to which diffusion models can be used to generate realistic content that is controllable with convenient prompts. This paper devises and explores a novel method in that regard. Our technique alters the popular stable diffusion model to generate a controllable high-quality Deepfake image with text and image prompts. In addition, the original stable model lacks severely in generating quality images that contain multiple persons. The modified diffusion model is able to address this problem, it add input anchor image’s latent at the beginning of inferencing rather than Gaussian random latent as input. Hence, we focus on generating forged content for celebrity interactions, which may be used to spread rumors. We also apply Dreambooth to enhance the realism of our fake images. Dreambooth trains the pairing of center words and specific features to produce more refined and personalized output images. Our results show that with the devised scheme, it is possible to create fake visual content with alarming realism, such that the content can serve as believable evidence of meetings between powerful political figures.

Bootstrap Diffusion Model Curve Estimation for High Resolution Low-Light Image Enhancement

September 26, 2023 Jiancheng Huang, Yifan Liu, Shifeng Chen

cs.CV

Learning-based methods have attracted a lot of research attention and led to significant improvements in low-light image enhancement. However, most of them still suffer from two main problems: expensive computational cost in high resolution images and unsatisfactory performance in simultaneous enhancement and denoising. To address these problems, we propose BDCE, a bootstrap diffusion model that exploits the learning of the distribution of the curve parameters instead of the normal-light image itself. Specifically, we adopt the curve estimation method to handle the high-resolution images, where the curve parameters are estimated by our bootstrap diffusion model. In addition, a denoise module is applied in each iteration of curve adjustment to denoise the intermediate enhanced result of each iteration. We evaluate BDCE on commonly used benchmark datasets, and extensive experiments show that it achieves state-of-the-art qualitative and quantitative performance.

Multiple Noises in Diffusion Model for Semi-Supervised Multi-Domain Translation

September 25, 2023 Tsiry Mayet, Simon Bernard, Clement Chatelain, Romain Herault

cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG

Domain-to-domain translation involves generating a target domain sample given a condition in the source domain. Most existing methods focus on fixed input and output domains, i.e. they only work for specific configurations (i.e. for two domains, either $D_1\rightarrow{}D_2$ or $D_2\rightarrow{}D_1$). This paper proposes Multi-Domain Diffusion (MDD), a conditional diffusion framework for multi-domain translation in a semi-supervised context. Unlike previous methods, MDD does not require defining input and output domains, allowing translation between any partition of domains within a set (such as $(D_1, D_2)\rightarrow{}D_3$, $D_2\rightarrow{}(D_1, D_3)$, $D_3\rightarrow{}D_1$, etc. for 3 domains), without the need to train separate models for each domain configuration. The key idea behind MDD is to leverage the noise formulation of diffusion models by incorporating one noise level per domain, which allows missing domains to be modeled with noise in a natural way. This transforms the training task from a simple reconstruction task to a domain translation task, where the model relies on less noisy domains to reconstruct more noisy domains. We present results on a multi-domain (with more than two domains) synthetic image translation dataset with challenging semantic domain inversion.

NetDiffus: Network Traffic Generation by Diffusion Models through Time-Series Imaging

September 23, 2023 Nirhoshan Sivaroopan, Dumindu Bandara, Chamara Madarasingha, Guilluame Jourjon, Anura Jayasumana, Kanchana Thilakarathna

cs.NI, cs.LG

Network data analytics are now at the core of almost every networking solution. Nonetheless, limited access to networking data has been an enduring challenge due to many reasons including complexity of modern networks, commercial sensitivity, privacy and regulatory constraints. In this work, we explore how to leverage recent advancements in Diffusion Models (DM) to generate synthetic network traffic data. We develop an end-to-end framework - NetDiffus that first converts one-dimensional time-series network traffic into two-dimensional images, and then synthesizes representative images for the original data. We demonstrate that NetDiffus outperforms the state-of-the-art traffic generation methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) by providing 66.4% increase in fidelity of the generated data and 18.1% increase in downstream machine learning tasks. We evaluate NetDiffus on seven diverse traffic traces and show that utilizing synthetic data significantly improves traffic fingerprinting, anomaly detection and traffic classification.

Domain-Guided Conditional Diffusion Model for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

September 23, 2023 Yulong Zhang, Shuhao Chen, Weisen Jiang, Yu Zhang, Jiangang Lu, James T. Kwok

cs.LG, cs.CV

Limited transferability hinders the performance of deep learning models when applied to new application scenarios. Recently, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) has achieved significant progress in addressing this issue via learning domain-invariant features. However, the performance of existing UDA methods is constrained by the large domain shift and limited target domain data. To alleviate these issues, we propose DomAin-guided Conditional Diffusion Model (DACDM) to generate high-fidelity and diversity samples for the target domain. In the proposed DACDM, by introducing class information, the labels of generated samples can be controlled, and a domain classifier is further introduced in DACDM to guide the generated samples for the target domain. The generated samples help existing UDA methods transfer from the source domain to the target domain more easily, thus improving the transfer performance. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that DACDM brings a large improvement to the performance of existing UDA methods.

MosaicFusion: Diffusion Models as Data Augmenters for Large Vocabulary Instance Segmentation

September 22, 2023 Jiahao Xie, Wei Li, Xiangtai Li, Ziwei Liu, Yew Soon Ong, Chen Change Loy

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

We present MosaicFusion, a simple yet effective diffusion-based data augmentation approach for large vocabulary instance segmentation. Our method is training-free and does not rely on any label supervision. Two key designs enable us to employ an off-the-shelf text-to-image diffusion model as a useful dataset generator for object instances and mask annotations. First, we divide an image canvas into several regions and perform a single round of diffusion process to generate multiple instances simultaneously, conditioning on different text prompts. Second, we obtain corresponding instance masks by aggregating cross-attention maps associated with object prompts across layers and diffusion time steps, followed by simple thresholding and edge-aware refinement processing. Without bells and whistles, our MosaicFusion can produce a significant amount of synthetic labeled data for both rare and novel categories. Experimental results on the challenging LVIS long-tailed and open-vocabulary benchmarks demonstrate that MosaicFusion can significantly improve the performance of existing instance segmentation models, especially for rare and novel categories. Code will be released at https://github.com/Jiahao000/MosaicFusion.

Deep learning probability flows and entropy production rates in active matter

September 22, 2023 Nicholas M. Boffi, Eric Vanden-Eijnden

cond-mat.stat-mech, cond-mat.soft, cs.LG, cs.NA, math.NA

Active matter systems, from self-propelled colloids to motile bacteria, are characterized by the conversion of free energy into useful work at the microscopic scale. These systems generically involve physics beyond the reach of equilibrium statistical mechanics, and a persistent challenge has been to understand the nature of their nonequilibrium states. The entropy production rate and the magnitude of the steady-state probability current provide quantitative ways to do so by measuring the breakdown of time-reversal symmetry and the strength of nonequilibrium transport of measure. Yet, their efficient computation has remained elusive, as they depend on the system’s unknown and high-dimensional probability density. Here, building upon recent advances in generative modeling, we develop a deep learning framework that estimates the score of this density. We show that the score, together with the microscopic equations of motion, gives direct access to the entropy production rate, the probability current, and their decomposition into local contributions from individual particles, spatial regions, and degrees of freedom. To represent the score, we introduce a novel, spatially-local transformer-based network architecture that learns high-order interactions between particles while respecting their underlying permutation symmetry. We demonstrate the broad utility and scalability of the method by applying it to several high-dimensional systems of interacting active particles undergoing motility-induced phase separation (MIPS). We show that a single instance of our network trained on a system of 4096 particles at one packing fraction can generalize to other regions of the phase diagram, including systems with as many as 32768 particles. We use this observation to quantify the spatial structure of the departure from equilibrium in MIPS as a function of the number of particles and the packing fraction.

A Diffusion-Model of Joint Interactive Navigation

September 21, 2023 Matthew Niedoba, Jonathan Wilder Lavington, Yunpeng Liu, Vasileios Lioutas, Justice Sefas, Xiaoxuan Liang, Dylan Green, Setareh Dabiri, Berend Zwartsenberg, Adam Scibior, Frank Wood

cs.LG, cs.RO

Simulation of autonomous vehicle systems requires that simulated traffic participants exhibit diverse and realistic behaviors. The use of prerecorded real-world traffic scenarios in simulation ensures realism but the rarity of safety critical events makes large scale collection of driving scenarios expensive. In this paper, we present DJINN - a diffusion based method of generating traffic scenarios. Our approach jointly diffuses the trajectories of all agents, conditioned on a flexible set of state observations from the past, present, or future. On popular trajectory forecasting datasets, we report state of the art performance on joint trajectory metrics. In addition, we demonstrate how DJINN flexibly enables direct test-time sampling from a variety of valuable conditional distributions including goal-based sampling, behavior-class sampling, and scenario editing.

Latent Diffusion Models for Structural Component Design

September 20, 2023 Ethan Herron, Jaydeep Rade, Anushrut Jignasu, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Aditya Balu, Soumik Sarkar, Adarsh Krishnamurthy

cs.LG

Recent advances in generative modeling, namely Diffusion models, have revolutionized generative modeling, enabling high-quality image generation tailored to user needs. This paper proposes a framework for the generative design of structural components. Specifically, we employ a Latent Diffusion model to generate potential designs of a component that can satisfy a set of problem-specific loading conditions. One of the distinct advantages our approach offers over other generative approaches, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), is that it permits the editing of existing designs. We train our model using a dataset of geometries obtained from structural topology optimization utilizing the SIMP algorithm. Consequently, our framework generates inherently near-optimal designs. Our work presents quantitative results that support the structural performance of the generated designs and the variability in potential candidate designs. Furthermore, we provide evidence of the scalability of our framework by operating over voxel domains with resolutions varying from $32^3$ to $128^3$. Our framework can be used as a starting point for generating novel near-optimal designs similar to topology-optimized designs.

Light Field Diffusion for Single-View Novel View Synthesis

September 20, 2023 Yifeng Xiong, Haoyu Ma, Shanlin Sun, Kun Han, Xiaohui Xie

cs.CV

Single-view novel view synthesis, the task of generating images from new viewpoints based on a single reference image, is an important but challenging task in computer vision. Recently, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) has become popular in this area due to its strong ability to generate high-fidelity images. However, current diffusion-based methods directly rely on camera pose matrices as viewing conditions, globally and implicitly introducing 3D constraints. These methods may suffer from inconsistency among generated images from different perspectives, especially in regions with intricate textures and structures. In this work, we present Light Field Diffusion (LFD), a conditional diffusion-based model for single-view novel view synthesis. Unlike previous methods that employ camera pose matrices, LFD transforms the camera view information into light field encoding and combines it with the reference image. This design introduces local pixel-wise constraints within the diffusion models, thereby encouraging better multi-view consistency. Experiments on several datasets show that our LFD can efficiently generate high-fidelity images and maintain better 3D consistency even in intricate regions. Our method can generate images with higher quality than NeRF-based models, and we obtain sample quality similar to other diffusion-based models but with only one-third of the model size.

Assessing the capacity of a denoising diffusion probabilistic model to reproduce spatial context

September 19, 2023 Rucha Deshpande, Muzaffer Özbey, Hua Li, Mark A. Anastasio, Frank J. Brooks

eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG, stat.ML

Diffusion models have emerged as a popular family of deep generative models (DGMs). In the literature, it has been claimed that one class of diffusion models – denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) – demonstrate superior image synthesis performance as compared to generative adversarial networks (GANs). To date, these claims have been evaluated using either ensemble-based methods designed for natural images, or conventional measures of image quality such as structural similarity. However, there remains an important need to understand the extent to which DDPMs can reliably learn medical imaging domain-relevant information, which is referred to as spatial context' in this work. To address this, a systematic assessment of the ability of DDPMs to learn spatial context relevant to medical imaging applications is reported for the first time. A key aspect of the studies is the use of stochastic context models (SCMs) to produce training data. In this way, the ability of the DDPMs to reliably reproduce spatial context can be quantitatively assessed by use of post-hoc image analyses. Error-rates in DDPM-generated ensembles are reported, and compared to those corresponding to a modern GAN. The studies reveal new and important insights regarding the capacity of DDPMs to learn spatial context. Notably, the results demonstrate that DDPMs hold significant capacity for generating contextually correct images that are interpolated’ between training samples, which may benefit data-augmentation tasks in ways that GANs cannot.

PGDiff: Guiding Diffusion Models for Versatile Face Restoration via Partial Guidance

September 19, 2023 Peiqing Yang, Shangchen Zhou, Qingyi Tao, Chen Change Loy

cs.CV

Exploiting pre-trained diffusion models for restoration has recently become a favored alternative to the traditional task-specific training approach. Previous works have achieved noteworthy success by limiting the solution space using explicit degradation models. However, these methods often fall short when faced with complex degradations as they generally cannot be precisely modeled. In this paper, we propose PGDiff by introducing partial guidance, a fresh perspective that is more adaptable to real-world degradations compared to existing works. Rather than specifically defining the degradation process, our approach models the desired properties, such as image structure and color statistics of high-quality images, and applies this guidance during the reverse diffusion process. These properties are readily available and make no assumptions about the degradation process. When combined with a diffusion prior, this partial guidance can deliver appealing results across a range of restoration tasks. Additionally, PGDiff can be extended to handle composite tasks by consolidating multiple high-quality image properties, achieved by integrating the guidance from respective tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only outperforms existing diffusion-prior-based approaches but also competes favorably with task-specific models.

Accelerating Diffusion-Based Text-to-Audio Generation with Consistency Distillation

September 19, 2023 Yatong Bai, Trung Dang, Dung Tran, Kazuhito Koishida, Somayeh Sojoudi

cs.SD, cs.LG, cs.MM, eess.AS

Diffusion models power a vast majority of text-to-audio (TTA) generation methods. Unfortunately, these models suffer from slow inference speed due to iterative queries to the underlying denoising network, thus unsuitable for scenarios with inference time or computational constraints. This work modifies the recently proposed consistency distillation framework to train TTA models that require only a single neural network query. In addition to incorporating classifier-free guidance into the distillation process, we leverage the availability of generated audio during distillation training to fine-tune the consistency TTA model with novel loss functions in the audio space, such as the CLAP score. Our objective and subjective evaluation results on the AudioCaps dataset show that consistency models retain diffusion models’ high generation quality and diversity while reducing the number of queries by a factor of 400.

Forgedit: Text Guided Image Editing via Learning and Forgetting

September 19, 2023 Shiwen Zhang, Shuai Xiao, Weilin Huang

cs.CV

Text guided image editing on real images given only the image and the target text prompt as inputs, is a very general and challenging problem, which requires the editing model to reason by itself which part of the image should be edited, to preserve the characteristics of original image, and also to perform complicated non-rigid editing. Previous fine-tuning based solutions are time-consuming and vulnerable to overfitting, limiting their editing capabilities. To tackle these issues, we design a novel text guided image editing method, Forgedit. First, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework which learns to reconstruct the given image in less than one minute by vision language joint learning. Then we introduce vector subtraction and vector projection to explore the proper text embedding for editing. We also find a general property of UNet structures in Diffusion Models and inspired by such a finding, we design forgetting strategies to diminish the fatal overfitting issues and significantly boost the editing abilities of Diffusion Models. Our method, Forgedit, implemented with Stable Diffusion, achieves new state-of-the-art results on the challenging text guided image editing benchmark TEdBench, surpassing the previous SOTA method Imagic with Imagen, in terms of both CLIP score and LPIPS score. Codes are available at https://github.com/witcherofresearch/Forgedit.

Learning End-to-End Channel Coding with Diffusion Models

September 19, 2023 Muah Kim, Rick Fritschek, Rafael F. Schaefer

cs.IT, cs.LG, math.IT

The training of neural encoders via deep learning necessitates a differentiable channel model due to the backpropagation algorithm. This requirement can be sidestepped by approximating either the channel distribution or its gradient through pilot signals in real-world scenarios. The initial approach draws upon the latest advancements in image generation, utilizing generative adversarial networks (GANs) or their enhanced variants to generate channel distributions. In this paper, we address this channel approximation challenge with diffusion models, which have demonstrated high sample quality in image generation. We offer an end-to-end channel coding framework underpinned by diffusion models and propose an efficient training algorithm. Our simulations with various channel models establish that our diffusion models learn the channel distribution accurately, thereby achieving near-optimal end-to-end symbol error rates (SERs). We also note a significant advantage of diffusion models: A robust generalization capability in high signal-to-noise ratio regions, in contrast to GAN variants that suffer from error floor. Furthermore, we examine the trade-off between sample quality and sampling speed, when an accelerated sampling algorithm is deployed, and investigate the effect of the noise scheduling on this trade-off. With an apt choice of noise scheduling, sampling time can be significantly reduced with a minor increase in SER.

Diffusion-based speech enhancement with a weighted generative-supervised learning loss

September 19, 2023 Jean-Eudes Ayilo, Mostafa Sadeghi, Romain Serizel

cs.CV, cs.SD, eess.AS, eess.SP, stat.ML

Diffusion-based generative models have recently gained attention in speech enhancement (SE), providing an alternative to conventional supervised methods. These models transform clean speech training samples into Gaussian noise centered at noisy speech, and subsequently learn a parameterized model to reverse this process, conditionally on noisy speech. Unlike supervised methods, generative-based SE approaches usually rely solely on an unsupervised loss, which may result in less efficient incorporation of conditioned noisy speech. To address this issue, we propose augmenting the original diffusion training objective with a mean squared error (MSE) loss, measuring the discrepancy between estimated enhanced speech and ground-truth clean speech at each reverse process iteration. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methodology.

AutoDiffusion: Training-Free Optimization of Time Steps and Architectures for Automated Diffusion Model Acceleration

September 19, 2023 Lijiang Li, Huixia Li, Xiawu Zheng, Jie Wu, Xuefeng Xiao, Rui Wang, Min Zheng, Xin Pan, Fei Chao, Rongrong Ji

cs.CV

Diffusion models are emerging expressive generative models, in which a large number of time steps (inference steps) are required for a single image generation. To accelerate such tedious process, reducing steps uniformly is considered as an undisputed principle of diffusion models. We consider that such a uniform assumption is not the optimal solution in practice; i.e., we can find different optimal time steps for different models. Therefore, we propose to search the optimal time steps sequence and compressed model architecture in a unified framework to achieve effective image generation for diffusion models without any further training. Specifically, we first design a unified search space that consists of all possible time steps and various architectures. Then, a two stage evolutionary algorithm is introduced to find the optimal solution in the designed search space. To further accelerate the search process, we employ FID score between generated and real samples to estimate the performance of the sampled examples. As a result, the proposed method is (i).training-free, obtaining the optimal time steps and model architecture without any training process; (ii). orthogonal to most advanced diffusion samplers and can be integrated to gain better sample quality. (iii). generalized, where the searched time steps and architectures can be directly applied on different diffusion models with the same guidance scale. Experimental results show that our method achieves excellent performance by using only a few time steps, e.g. 17.86 FID score on ImageNet 64 $\times$ 64 with only four steps, compared to 138.66 with DDIM. The code is available at https://github.com/lilijiangg/AutoDiffusion.

Diffusion Methods for Generating Transition Paths

September 19, 2023 Luke Triplett, Jianfeng Lu

physics.comp-ph, cs.LG, stat.ML

In this work, we seek to simulate rare transitions between metastable states using score-based generative models. An efficient method for generating high-quality transition paths is valuable for the study of molecular systems since data is often difficult to obtain. We develop two novel methods for path generation in this paper: a chain-based approach and a midpoint-based approach. The first biases the original dynamics to facilitate transitions, while the second mirrors splitting techniques and breaks down the original transition into smaller transitions. Numerical results of generated transition paths for the M"uller potential and for Alanine dipeptide demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches in both the data-rich and data-scarce regimes.

Generating and Imputing Tabular Data via Diffusion and Flow-based Gradient-Boosted Trees

September 18, 2023 Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Kilian Fatras, Tal Kachman

cs.LG

Tabular data is hard to acquire and is subject to missing values. This paper proposes a novel approach to generate and impute mixed-type (continuous and categorical) tabular data using score-based diffusion and conditional flow matching. Contrary to previous work that relies on neural networks to learn the score function or the vector field, we instead rely on XGBoost, a popular Gradient-Boosted Tree (GBT) method. We empirically show on 27 different datasets that our approach i) generates highly realistic synthetic data when the training dataset is either clean or tainted by missing data and ii) generates diverse plausible data imputations. Furthermore, our method outperforms deep-learning generation methods on data generation and is competitive on data imputation. Finally, it can be trained in parallel using CPUs without the need for a GPU. To make it easily accessible, we release our code through a Python library and an R package.

What is a Fair Diffusion Model? Designing Generative Text-To-Image Models to Incorporate Various Worldviews

September 18, 2023 Zoe De Simone, Angie Boggust, Arvind Satyanarayan, Ashia Wilson

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.CY

Generative text-to-image (GTI) models produce high-quality images from short textual descriptions and are widely used in academic and creative domains. However, GTI models frequently amplify biases from their training data, often producing prejudiced or stereotypical images. Yet, current bias mitigation strategies are limited and primarily focus on enforcing gender parity across occupations. To enhance GTI bias mitigation, we introduce DiffusionWorldViewer, a tool to analyze and manipulate GTI models’ attitudes, values, stories, and expectations of the world that impact its generated images. Through an interactive interface deployed as a web-based GUI and Jupyter Notebook plugin, DiffusionWorldViewer categorizes existing demographics of GTI-generated images and provides interactive methods to align image demographics with user worldviews. In a study with 13 GTI users, we find that DiffusionWorldViewer allows users to represent their varied viewpoints about what GTI outputs are fair and, in doing so, challenges current notions of fairness that assume a universal worldview.

Speeding Up Speech Synthesis In Diffusion Models By Reducing Data Distribution Recovery Steps Via Content Transfer

September 18, 2023 Peter Ochieng

cs.SD, cs.CL, eess.AS

Diffusion based vocoders have been criticised for being slow due to the many steps required during sampling. Moreover, the model’s loss function that is popularly implemented is designed such that the target is the original input $x_0$ or error $\epsilon_0$. For early time steps of the reverse process, this results in large prediction errors, which can lead to speech distortions and increase the learning time. We propose a setup where the targets are the different outputs of forward process time steps with a goal to reduce the magnitude of prediction errors and reduce the training time. We use the different layers of a neural network (NN) to perform denoising by training them to learn to generate representations similar to the noised outputs in the forward process of the diffusion. The NN layers learn to progressively denoise the input in the reverse process until finally the final layer estimates the clean speech. To avoid 1:1 mapping between layers of the neural network and the forward process steps, we define a skip parameter $\tau>1$ such that an NN layer is trained to cumulatively remove the noise injected in the $\tau$ steps in the forward process. This significantly reduces the number of data distribution recovery steps and, consequently, the time to generate speech. We show through extensive evaluation that the proposed technique generates high-fidelity speech in competitive time that outperforms current state-of-the-art tools. The proposed technique is also able to generalize well to unseen speech.

Gradpaint: Gradient-Guided Inpainting with Diffusion Models

September 18, 2023 Asya Grechka, Guillaume Couairon, Matthieu Cord

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have recently achieved remarkable results in conditional and unconditional image generation. The pre-trained models can be adapted without further training to different downstream tasks, by guiding their iterative denoising process at inference time to satisfy additional constraints. For the specific task of image inpainting, the current guiding mechanism relies on copying-and-pasting the known regions from the input image at each denoising step. However, diffusion models are strongly conditioned by the initial random noise, and therefore struggle to harmonize predictions inside the inpainting mask with the real parts of the input image, often producing results with unnatural artifacts. Our method, dubbed GradPaint, steers the generation towards a globally coherent image. At each step in the denoising process, we leverage the model’s “denoised image estimation” by calculating a custom loss measuring its coherence with the masked input image. Our guiding mechanism uses the gradient obtained from backpropagating this loss through the diffusion model itself. GradPaint generalizes well to diffusion models trained on various datasets, improving upon current state-of-the-art supervised and unsupervised methods.

Progressive Text-to-Image Diffusion with Soft Latent Direction

September 18, 2023 YuTeng Ye, Jiale Cai, Hang Zhou, Guanwen Li, Youjia Zhang, Zikai Song, Chenxing Gao, Junqing Yu, Wei Yang

cs.CV

In spite of the rapidly evolving landscape of text-to-image generation, the synthesis and manipulation of multiple entities while adhering to specific relational constraints pose enduring challenges. This paper introduces an innovative progressive synthesis and editing operation that systematically incorporates entities into the target image, ensuring their adherence to spatial and relational constraints at each sequential step. Our key insight stems from the observation that while a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model adeptly handles one or two entities, it often falters when dealing with a greater number. To address this limitation, we propose harnessing the capabilities of a Large Language Model (LLM) to decompose intricate and protracted text descriptions into coherent directives adhering to stringent formats. To facilitate the execution of directives involving distinct semantic operations-namely insertion, editing, and erasing-we formulate the Stimulus, Response, and Fusion (SRF) framework. Within this framework, latent regions are gently stimulated in alignment with each operation, followed by the fusion of the responsive latent components to achieve cohesive entity manipulation. Our proposed framework yields notable advancements in object synthesis, particularly when confronted with intricate and lengthy textual inputs. Consequently, it establishes a new benchmark for text-to-image generation tasks, further elevating the field’s performance standards.

Regularised Diffusion-Shock Inpainting

September 15, 2023 Kristina Schaefer, Joachim Weickert

eess.IV

We introduce regularised diffusion–shock (RDS) inpainting as a modification of diffusion–shock inpainting from our SSVM 2023 conference paper. RDS inpainting combines two carefully chosen components: homogeneous diffusion and coherence-enhancing shock filtering. It benefits from the complementary synergy of its building blocks: The shock term propagates edge data with perfect sharpness and directional accuracy over large distances due to its high degree of anisotropy. Homogeneous diffusion fills large areas efficiently. The second order equation underlying RDS inpainting inherits a maximum–minimum principle from its components, which is also fulfilled in the discrete case, in contrast to competing anisotropic methods. The regularisation addresses the largest drawback of the original model: It allows a drastic reduction in model parameters without any loss in quality. Furthermore, we extend RDS inpainting to vector-valued data. Our experiments show a performance that is comparable to or better than many inpainting models, including anisotropic processes of second or fourth order.

DCTTS: Discrete Diffusion Model with Contrastive Learning for Text-to-speech Generation

September 13, 2023 Zhichao Wu, Qiulin Li, Sixing Liu, Qun Yang

cs.SD, eess.AS

In the Text-to-speech(TTS) task, the latent diffusion model has excellent fidelity and generalization, but its expensive resource consumption and slow inference speed have always been a challenging. This paper proposes Discrete Diffusion Model with Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Speech Generation(DCTTS). The following contributions are made by DCTTS: 1) The TTS diffusion model based on discrete space significantly lowers the computational consumption of the diffusion model and improves sampling speed; 2) The contrastive learning method based on discrete space is used to enhance the alignment connection between speech and text and improve sampling quality; and 3) It uses an efficient text encoder to simplify the model’s parameters and increase computational efficiency. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach proposed in this paper has outstanding speech synthesis quality and sampling speed while significantly reducing the resource consumption of diffusion model. The synthesized samples are available at https://github.com/lawtherWu/DCTTS.

Adapt and Diffuse: Sample-adaptive Reconstruction via Latent Diffusion Models

September 12, 2023 Zalan Fabian, Berk Tinaz, Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

eess.IV, cs.LG, I.2.6; I.4.5

Inverse problems arise in a multitude of applications, where the goal is to recover a clean signal from noisy and possibly (non)linear observations. The difficulty of a reconstruction problem depends on multiple factors, such as the structure of the ground truth signal, the severity of the degradation, the implicit bias of the reconstruction model and the complex interactions between the above factors. This results in natural sample-by-sample variation in the difficulty of a reconstruction task, which is often overlooked by contemporary techniques. Recently, diffusion-based inverse problem solvers have established new state-of-the-art in various reconstruction tasks. However, they have the drawback of being computationally prohibitive. Our key observation in this paper is that most existing solvers lack the ability to adapt their compute power to the difficulty of the reconstruction task, resulting in long inference times, subpar performance and wasteful resource allocation. We propose a novel method that we call severity encoding, to estimate the degradation severity of noisy, degraded signals in the latent space of an autoencoder. We show that the estimated severity has strong correlation with the true corruption level and can give useful hints at the difficulty of reconstruction problems on a sample-by-sample basis. Furthermore, we propose a reconstruction method based on latent diffusion models that leverages the predicted degradation severities to fine-tune the reverse diffusion sampling trajectory and thus achieve sample-adaptive inference times. We utilize latent diffusion posterior sampling to maintain data consistency with observations. We perform experiments on both linear and nonlinear inverse problems and demonstrate that our technique achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art diffusion-based techniques, with significant improvements in computational efficiency.

On the Contraction Coefficient of the Schrödinger Bridge for Stochastic Linear Systems

September 12, 2023 Alexis M. H. Teter, Yongxin Chen, Abhishek Halder

math.OC, cs.LG, cs.SY, eess.SY, stat.ML

Schr"{o}dinger bridge is a stochastic optimal control problem to steer a given initial state density to another, subject to controlled diffusion and deadline constraints. A popular method to numerically solve the Schr"{o}dinger bridge problems, in both classical and in the linear system settings, is via contractive fixed point recursions. These recursions can be seen as dynamic versions of the well-known Sinkhorn iterations, and under mild assumptions, they solve the so-called Schr"{o}dinger systems with guaranteed linear convergence. In this work, we study a priori estimates for the contraction coefficients associated with the convergence of respective Schr"{o}dinger systems. We provide new geometric and control-theoretic interpretations for the same. Building on these newfound interpretations, we point out the possibility of improved computation for the worst-case contraction coefficients of linear SBPs by preconditioning the endpoint support sets.

Reasoning with Latent Diffusion in Offline Reinforcement Learning

September 12, 2023 Siddarth Venkatraman, Shivesh Khaitan, Ravi Tej Akella, John Dolan, Jeff Schneider, Glen Berseth

cs.LG

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching portions of suboptimal trajectories from the static dataset while avoiding extrapolation errors arising due to a lack of support in the dataset. Existing approaches use conservative methods that are tricky to tune and struggle with multi-modal data (as we show) or rely on noisy Monte Carlo return-to-go samples for reward conditioning. In this work, we propose a novel approach that leverages the expressiveness of latent diffusion to model in-support trajectory sequences as compressed latent skills. This facilitates learning a Q-function while avoiding extrapolation error via batch-constraining. The latent space is also expressive and gracefully copes with multi-modal data. We show that the learned temporally-abstract latent space encodes richer task-specific information for offline RL tasks as compared to raw state-actions. This improves credit assignment and facilitates faster reward propagation during Q-learning. Our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on the D4RL benchmarks, particularly excelling in long-horizon, sparse-reward tasks.

InstaFlow: One Step is Enough for High-Quality Diffusion-Based Text-to-Image Generation

September 12, 2023 Xingchao Liu, Xiwen Zhang, Jianzhu Ma, Jian Peng, Qiang Liu

cs.LG, cs.CV

Diffusion models have revolutionized text-to-image generation with its exceptional quality and creativity. However, its multi-step sampling process is known to be slow, often requiring tens of inference steps to obtain satisfactory results. Previous attempts to improve its sampling speed and reduce computational costs through distillation have been unsuccessful in achieving a functional one-step model. In this paper, we explore a recent method called Rectified Flow, which, thus far, has only been applied to small datasets. The core of Rectified Flow lies in its \emph{reflow} procedure, which straightens the trajectories of probability flows, refines the coupling between noises and images, and facilitates the distillation process with student models. We propose a novel text-conditioned pipeline to turn Stable Diffusion (SD) into an ultra-fast one-step model, in which we find reflow plays a critical role in improving the assignment between noise and images. Leveraging our new pipeline, we create, to the best of our knowledge, the first one-step diffusion-based text-to-image generator with SD-level image quality, achieving an FID (Frechet Inception Distance) of $23.3$ on MS COCO 2017-5k, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art technique, progressive distillation, by a significant margin ($37.2$ $\rightarrow$ $23.3$ in FID). By utilizing an expanded network with 1.7B parameters, we further improve the FID to $22.4$. We call our one-step models \emph{InstaFlow}. On MS COCO 2014-30k, InstaFlow yields an FID of $13.1$ in just $0.09$ second, the best in $\leq 0.1$ second regime, outperforming the recent StyleGAN-T ($13.9$ in $0.1$ second). Notably, the training of InstaFlow only costs 199 A100 GPU days. Project page:~\url{https://github.com/gnobitab/InstaFlow}.

Elucidating the solution space of extended reverse-time SDE for diffusion models

September 12, 2023 Qinpeng Cui, Xinyi Zhang, Zongqing Lu, Qingmin Liao

cs.LG, cs.CV

Diffusion models (DMs) demonstrate potent image generation capabilities in various generative modeling tasks. Nevertheless, their primary limitation lies in slow sampling speed, requiring hundreds or thousands of sequential function evaluations through large neural networks to generate high-quality images. Sampling from DMs can be seen alternatively as solving corresponding stochastic differential equations (SDEs) or ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In this work, we formulate the sampling process as an extended reverse-time SDE (ER SDE), unifying prior explorations into ODEs and SDEs. Leveraging the semi-linear structure of ER SDE solutions, we offer exact solutions and arbitrarily high-order approximate solutions for VP SDE and VE SDE, respectively. Based on the solution space of the ER SDE, we yield mathematical insights elucidating the superior performance of ODE solvers over SDE solvers in terms of fast sampling. Additionally, we unveil that VP SDE solvers stand on par with their VE SDE counterparts. Finally, we devise fast and training-free samplers, ER-SDE-Solvers, achieving state-of-the-art performance across all stochastic samplers. Experimental results demonstrate achieving 3.45 FID in 20 function evaluations and 2.24 FID in 50 function evaluations on the ImageNet $64\times64$ dataset.

Diffusion-based Adversarial Purification for Robust Deep MRI Reconstruction

September 11, 2023 Ismail Alkhouri, Shijun Liang, Rongrong Wang, Qing Qu, Saiprasad Ravishankar

eess.IV

Deep learning (DL) techniques have been extensively employed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction, delivering notable performance enhancements over traditional non-DL methods. Nonetheless, recent studies have identified vulnerabilities in these models during testing, namely, their susceptibility to (\textit{i}) worst-case measurement perturbations and to (\textit{ii}) variations in training/testing settings like acceleration factors and k-space sampling locations. This paper addresses the robustness challenges by leveraging diffusion models. In particular, we present a robustification strategy that improves the resilience of DL-based MRI reconstruction methods by utilizing pretrained diffusion models as noise purifiers. In contrast to conventional robustification methods for DL-based MRI reconstruction, such as adversarial training (AT), our proposed approach eliminates the need to tackle a minimax optimization problem. It only necessitates fine-tuning on purified examples. Our experimental results highlight the efficacy of our approach in mitigating the aforementioned instabilities when compared to leading robustification approaches for deep MRI reconstruction, including AT and randomized smoothing.

Diffusion-Guided Reconstruction of Everyday Hand-Object Interaction Clips

September 11, 2023 Yufei Ye, Poorvi Hebbar, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani

cs.CV

We tackle the task of reconstructing hand-object interactions from short video clips. Given an input video, our approach casts 3D inference as a per-video optimization and recovers a neural 3D representation of the object shape, as well as the time-varying motion and hand articulation. While the input video naturally provides some multi-view cues to guide 3D inference, these are insufficient on their own due to occlusions and limited viewpoint variations. To obtain accurate 3D, we augment the multi-view signals with generic data-driven priors to guide reconstruction. Specifically, we learn a diffusion network to model the conditional distribution of (geometric) renderings of objects conditioned on hand configuration and category label, and leverage it as a prior to guide the novel-view renderings of the reconstructed scene. We empirically evaluate our approach on egocentric videos across 6 object categories, and observe significant improvements over prior single-view and multi-view methods. Finally, we demonstrate our system’s ability to reconstruct arbitrary clips from YouTube, showing both 1st and 3rd person interactions.

Diffusion-Based Co-Speech Gesture Generation Using Joint Text and Audio Representation

September 11, 2023 Anna Deichler, Shivam Mehta, Simon Alexanderson, Jonas Beskow

eess.AS, cs.HC, cs.LG, cs.SD, 68T42, I.2.6; I.2.7

This paper describes a system developed for the GENEA (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) Challenge 2023. Our solution builds on an existing diffusion-based motion synthesis model. We propose a contrastive speech and motion pretraining (CSMP) module, which learns a joint embedding for speech and gesture with the aim to learn a semantic coupling between these modalities. The output of the CSMP module is used as a conditioning signal in the diffusion-based gesture synthesis model in order to achieve semantically-aware co-speech gesture generation. Our entry achieved highest human-likeness and highest speech appropriateness rating among the submitted entries. This indicates that our system is a promising approach to achieve human-like co-speech gestures in agents that carry semantic meaning.

Treatment-aware Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Longitudinal MRI Generation and Diffuse Glioma Growth Prediction

September 11, 2023 Qinghui Liu, Elies Fuster-Garcia, Ivar Thokle Hovden, Donatas Sederevicius, Karoline Skogen, Bradley J MacIntosh, Edvard Grødem, Till Schellhorn, Petter Brandal, Atle Bjørnerud, Kyrre Eeg Emblem

eess.IV, cs.CV

Diffuse gliomas are malignant brain tumors that grow widespread through the brain. The complex interactions between neoplastic cells and normal tissue, as well as the treatment-induced changes often encountered, make glioma tumor growth modeling challenging. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end network capable of generating future tumor masks and realistic MRIs of how the tumor will look at any future time points for different treatment plans. Our approach is based on cutting-edge diffusion probabilistic models and deep-segmentation neural networks. We included sequential multi-parametric magnetic resonance images (MRI) and treatment information as conditioning inputs to guide the generative diffusion process. This allows for tumor growth estimates at any given time point. We trained the model using real-world postoperative longitudinal MRI data with glioma tumor growth trajectories represented as tumor segmentation maps over time. The model has demonstrated promising performance across a range of tasks, including the generation of high-quality synthetic MRIs with tumor masks, time-series tumor segmentations, and uncertainty estimates. Combined with the treatment-aware generated MRIs, the tumor growth predictions with uncertainty estimates can provide useful information for clinical decision-making.

Diff-Privacy: Diffusion-based Face Privacy Protection

September 11, 2023 Xiao He, Mingrui Zhu, Dongxin Chen, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao

cs.CV

Privacy protection has become a top priority as the proliferation of AI techniques has led to widespread collection and misuse of personal data. Anonymization and visual identity information hiding are two important facial privacy protection tasks that aim to remove identification characteristics from facial images at the human perception level. However, they have a significant difference in that the former aims to prevent the machine from recognizing correctly, while the latter needs to ensure the accuracy of machine recognition. Therefore, it is difficult to train a model to complete these two tasks simultaneously. In this paper, we unify the task of anonymization and visual identity information hiding and propose a novel face privacy protection method based on diffusion models, dubbed Diff-Privacy. Specifically, we train our proposed multi-scale image inversion module (MSI) to obtain a set of SDM format conditional embeddings of the original image. Based on the conditional embeddings, we design corresponding embedding scheduling strategies and construct different energy functions during the denoising process to achieve anonymization and visual identity information hiding. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in protecting facial privacy.

Learning Energy-Based Models by Cooperative Diffusion Recovery Likelihood

September 10, 2023 Yaxuan Zhu, Jianwen Xie, Yingnian Wu, Ruiqi Gao

stat.ML, cs.LG

Training energy-based models (EBMs) with maximum likelihood estimation on high-dimensional data can be both challenging and time-consuming. As a result, there a noticeable gap in sample quality between EBMs and other generative frameworks like GANs and diffusion models. To close this gap, inspired by the recent efforts of learning EBMs by maximimizing diffusion recovery likelihood (DRL), we propose cooperative diffusion recovery likelihood (CDRL), an effective approach to tractably learn and sample from a series of EBMs defined on increasingly noisy versons of a dataset, paired with an initializer model for each EBM. At each noise level, the initializer model learns to amortize the sampling process of the EBM, and the two models are jointly estimated within a cooperative training framework. Samples from the initializer serve as starting points that are refined by a few sampling steps from the EBM. With the refined samples, the EBM is optimized by maximizing recovery likelihood, while the initializer is optimized by learning from the difference between the refined samples and the initial samples. We develop a new noise schedule and a variance reduction technique to further improve the sample quality. Combining these advances, we significantly boost the FID scores compared to existing EBM methods on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet 32x32, with a 2x speedup over DRL. In addition, we extend our method to compositional generation and image inpainting tasks, and showcase the compatibility of CDRL with classifier-free guidance for conditional generation, achieving similar trade-offs between sample quality and sample diversity as in diffusion models.

SA-Solver: Stochastic Adams Solver for Fast Sampling of Diffusion Models

September 10, 2023 Shuchen Xue, Mingyang Yi, Weijian Luo, Shifeng Zhang, Jiacheng Sun, Zhenguo Li, Zhi-Ming Ma

cs.LG, stat.ML

Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) have achieved considerable success in generation tasks. As sampling from DPMs is equivalent to solving diffusion SDE or ODE which is time-consuming, numerous fast sampling methods built upon improved differential equation solvers are proposed. The majority of such techniques consider solving the diffusion ODE due to its superior efficiency. However, stochastic sampling could offer additional advantages in generating diverse and high-quality data. In this work, we engage in a comprehensive analysis of stochastic sampling from two aspects: variance-controlled diffusion SDE and linear multi-step SDE solver. Based on our analysis, we propose SA-Solver, which is an improved efficient stochastic Adams method for solving diffusion SDE to generate data with high quality. Our experiments show that SA-Solver achieves: 1) improved or comparable performance compared with the existing state-of-the-art sampling methods for few-step sampling; 2) SOTA FID scores on substantial benchmark datasets under a suitable number of function evaluations (NFEs).

Prefix-diffusion: A Lightweight Diffusion Model for Diverse Image Captioning

September 10, 2023 Guisheng Liu, Yi Li, Zhengcong Fei, Haiyan Fu, Xiangyang Luo, Yanqing Guo

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL

While impressive performance has been achieved in image captioning, the limited diversity of the generated captions and the large parameter scale remain major barriers to the real-word application of these systems. In this work, we propose a lightweight image captioning network in combination with continuous diffusion, called Prefix-diffusion. To achieve diversity, we design an efficient method that injects prefix image embeddings into the denoising process of the diffusion model. In order to reduce trainable parameters, we employ a pre-trained model to extract image features and further design an extra mapping network. Prefix-diffusion is able to generate diverse captions with relatively less parameters, while maintaining the fluency and relevance of the captions benefiting from the generative capabilities of the diffusion model. Our work paves the way for scaling up diffusion models for image captioning, and achieves promising performance compared with recent approaches.

MaskDiffusion: Boosting Text-to-Image Consistency with Conditional Mask

September 08, 2023 Yupeng Zhou, Daquan Zhou, Zuo-Liang Zhu, Yaxing Wang, Qibin Hou, Jiashi Feng

cs.CV

Recent advancements in diffusion models have showcased their impressive capacity to generate visually striking images. Nevertheless, ensuring a close match between the generated image and the given prompt remains a persistent challenge. In this work, we identify that a crucial factor leading to the text-image mismatch issue is the inadequate cross-modality relation learning between the prompt and the output image. To better align the prompt and image content, we advance the cross-attention with an adaptive mask, which is conditioned on the attention maps and the prompt embeddings, to dynamically adjust the contribution of each text token to the image features. This mechanism explicitly diminishes the ambiguity in semantic information embedding from the text encoder, leading to a boost of text-to-image consistency in the synthesized images. Our method, termed MaskDiffusion, is training-free and hot-pluggable for popular pre-trained diffusion models. When applied to the latent diffusion models, our MaskDiffusion can significantly improve the text-to-image consistency with negligible computation overhead compared to the original diffusion models.

InstructDiffusion: A Generalist Modeling Interface for Vision Tasks

September 07, 2023 Zigang Geng, Binxin Yang, Tiankai Hang, Chen Li, Shuyang Gu, Ting Zhang, Jianmin Bao, Zheng Zhang, Han Hu, Dong Chen, Baining Guo

cs.CV

We present InstructDiffusion, a unifying and generic framework for aligning computer vision tasks with human instructions. Unlike existing approaches that integrate prior knowledge and pre-define the output space (e.g., categories and coordinates) for each vision task, we cast diverse vision tasks into a human-intuitive image-manipulating process whose output space is a flexible and interactive pixel space. Concretely, the model is built upon the diffusion process and is trained to predict pixels according to user instructions, such as encircling the man’s left shoulder in red or applying a blue mask to the left car. InstructDiffusion could handle a variety of vision tasks, including understanding tasks (such as segmentation and keypoint detection) and generative tasks (such as editing and enhancement). It even exhibits the ability to handle unseen tasks and outperforms prior methods on novel datasets. This represents a significant step towards a generalist modeling interface for vision tasks, advancing artificial general intelligence in the field of computer vision.

DiffusionEngine: Diffusion Model is Scalable Data Engine for Object Detection

September 07, 2023 Manlin Zhang, Jie Wu, Yuxi Ren, Ming Li, Jie Qin, Xuefeng Xiao, Wei Liu, Rui Wang, Min Zheng, Andy J. Ma

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG

Data is the cornerstone of deep learning. This paper reveals that the recently developed Diffusion Model is a scalable data engine for object detection. Existing methods for scaling up detection-oriented data often require manual collection or generative models to obtain target images, followed by data augmentation and labeling to produce training pairs, which are costly, complex, or lacking diversity. To address these issues, we presentDiffusionEngine (DE), a data scaling-up engine that provides high-quality detection-oriented training pairs in a single stage. DE consists of a pre-trained diffusion model and an effective Detection-Adapter, contributing to generating scalable, diverse and generalizable detection data in a plug-and-play manner. Detection-Adapter is learned to align the implicit semantic and location knowledge in off-the-shelf diffusion models with detection-aware signals to make better bounding-box predictions. Additionally, we contribute two datasets, i.e., COCO-DE and VOC-DE, to scale up existing detection benchmarks for facilitating follow-up research. Extensive experiments demonstrate that data scaling-up via DE can achieve significant improvements in diverse scenarios, such as various detection algorithms, self-supervised pre-training, data-sparse, label-scarce, cross-domain, and semi-supervised learning. For example, when using DE with a DINO-based adapter to scale up data, mAP is improved by 3.1% on COCO, 7.6% on VOC, and 11.5% on Clipart.

Text-to-feature diffusion for audio-visual few-shot learning

September 07, 2023 Otniel-Bogdan Mercea, Thomas Hummel, A. Sophia Koepke, Zeynep Akata

cs.CV

Training deep learning models for video classification from audio-visual data commonly requires immense amounts of labeled training data collected via a costly process. A challenging and underexplored, yet much cheaper, setup is few-shot learning from video data. In particular, the inherently multi-modal nature of video data with sound and visual information has not been leveraged extensively for the few-shot video classification task. Therefore, we introduce a unified audio-visual few-shot video classification benchmark on three datasets, i.e. the VGGSound-FSL, UCF-FSL, ActivityNet-FSL datasets, where we adapt and compare ten methods. In addition, we propose AV-DIFF, a text-to-feature diffusion framework, which first fuses the temporal and audio-visual features via cross-modal attention and then generates multi-modal features for the novel classes. We show that AV-DIFF obtains state-of-the-art performance on our proposed benchmark for audio-visual (generalised) few-shot learning. Our benchmark paves the way for effective audio-visual classification when only limited labeled data is available. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/AVDIFF-GFSL.

DiffDefense: Defending against Adversarial Attacks via Diffusion Models

September 07, 2023 Hondamunige Prasanna Silva, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto Del Bimbo

cs.LG, cs.CR, cs.CV

This paper presents a novel reconstruction method that leverages Diffusion Models to protect machine learning classifiers against adversarial attacks, all without requiring any modifications to the classifiers themselves. The susceptibility of machine learning models to minor input perturbations renders them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While diffusion-based methods are typically disregarded for adversarial defense due to their slow reverse process, this paper demonstrates that our proposed method offers robustness against adversarial threats while preserving clean accuracy, speed, and plug-and-play compatibility. Code at: https://github.com/HondamunigePrasannaSilva/DiffDefence.

Reuse and Diffuse: Iterative Denoising for Text-to-Video Generation

September 07, 2023 Jiaxi Gu, Shicong Wang, Haoyu Zhao, Tianyi Lu, Xing Zhang, Zuxuan Wu, Songcen Xu, Wei Zhang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Hang Xu

cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM

Inspired by the remarkable success of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) for image synthesis, we study LDM for text-to-video generation, which is a formidable challenge due to the computational and memory constraints during both model training and inference. A single LDM is usually only capable of generating a very limited number of video frames. Some existing works focus on separate prediction models for generating more video frames, which suffer from additional training cost and frame-level jittering, however. In this paper, we propose a framework called “Reuse and Diffuse” dubbed $\textit{VidRD}$ to produce more frames following the frames already generated by an LDM. Conditioned on an initial video clip with a small number of frames, additional frames are iteratively generated by reusing the original latent features and following the previous diffusion process. Besides, for the autoencoder used for translation between pixel space and latent space, we inject temporal layers into its decoder and fine-tune these layers for higher temporal consistency. We also propose a set of strategies for composing video-text data that involve diverse content from multiple existing datasets including video datasets for action recognition and image-text datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves good results in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available $\href{https://anonymous0x233.github.io/ReuseAndDiffuse/}{here}$.

Diffusion Model is Secretly a Training-free Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmenter

September 06, 2023 Jinglong Wang, Xiawei Li, Jing Zhang, Qingyuan Xu, Qin Zhou, Qian Yu, Lu Sheng, Dong Xu

cs.CV

Recent research has explored the utilization of pre-trained text-image discriminative models, such as CLIP, to tackle the challenges associated with open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. However, it is worth noting that the alignment process based on contrastive learning employed by these models may unintentionally result in the loss of crucial localization information and object completeness, which are essential for achieving accurate semantic segmentation. More recently, there has been an emerging interest in extending the application of diffusion models beyond text-to-image generation tasks, particularly in the domain of semantic segmentation. These approaches utilize diffusion models either for generating annotated data or for extracting features to facilitate semantic segmentation. This typically involves training segmentation models by generating a considerable amount of synthetic data or incorporating additional mask annotations. To this end, we uncover the potential of generative text-to-image conditional diffusion models as highly efficient open-vocabulary semantic segmenters, and introduce a novel training-free approach named DiffSegmenter. Specifically, by feeding an input image and candidate classes into an off-the-shelf pre-trained conditional latent diffusion model, the cross-attention maps produced by the denoising U-Net are directly used as segmentation scores, which are further refined and completed by the followed self-attention maps. Additionally, we carefully design effective textual prompts and a category filtering mechanism to further enhance the segmentation results. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that the proposed DiffSegmenter achieves impressive results for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation.

Diffusion-EDFs: Bi-equivariant Denoising Generative Modeling on SE(3) for Visual Robotic Manipulation

September 06, 2023 Hyunwoo Ryu, Jiwoo Kim, Hyunseok An, Junwoo Chang, Joohwan Seo, Taehan Kim, Yubin Kim, Chaewon Hwang, Jongeun Choi, Roberto Horowitz

cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG

Diffusion generative modeling has become a promising approach for learning robotic manipulation tasks from stochastic human demonstrations. In this paper, we present Diffusion-EDFs, a novel SE(3)-equivariant diffusion-based approach for visual robotic manipulation tasks. We show that our proposed method achieves remarkable data efficiency, requiring only 5 to 10 human demonstrations for effective end-to-end training in less than an hour. Furthermore, our benchmark experiments demonstrate that our approach has superior generalizability and robustness compared to state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we validate our methods with real hardware experiments. Project Website: https://sites.google.com/view/diffusion-edfs/home

Diffusion on the Probability Simplex

September 05, 2023 Griffin Floto, Thorsteinn Jonsson, Mihai Nica, Scott Sanner, Eric Zhengyu Zhu

cs.LG, stat.ML

Diffusion models learn to reverse the progressive noising of a data distribution to create a generative model. However, the desired continuous nature of the noising process can be at odds with discrete data. To deal with this tension between continuous and discrete objects, we propose a method of performing diffusion on the probability simplex. Using the probability simplex naturally creates an interpretation where points correspond to categorical probability distributions. Our method uses the softmax function applied to an Ornstein-Unlenbeck Process, a well-known stochastic differential equation. We find that our methodology also naturally extends to include diffusion on the unit cube which has applications for bounded image generation.

Diffusion-based 3D Object Detection with Random Boxes

September 05, 2023 Xin Zhou, Jinghua Hou, Tingting Yao, Dingkang Liang, Zhe Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Jianwei Cheng, Xiang Bai

cs.CV

3D object detection is an essential task for achieving autonomous driving. Existing anchor-based detection methods rely on empirical heuristics setting of anchors, which makes the algorithms lack elegance. In recent years, we have witnessed the rise of several generative models, among which diffusion models show great potential for learning the transformation of two distributions. Our proposed Diff3Det migrates the diffusion model to proposal generation for 3D object detection by considering the detection boxes as generative targets. During training, the object boxes diffuse from the ground truth boxes to the Gaussian distribution, and the decoder learns to reverse this noise process. In the inference stage, the model progressively refines a set of random boxes to the prediction results. We provide detailed experiments on the KITTI benchmark and achieve promising performance compared to classical anchor-based 3D detection methods.

Diffusion Generative Inverse Design

September 05, 2023 Marin Vlastelica, Tatiana López-Guevara, Kelsey Allen, Peter Battaglia, Arnaud Doucet, Kimberley Stachenfeld

cs.LG, cs.AI

Inverse design refers to the problem of optimizing the input of an objective function in order to enact a target outcome. For many real-world engineering problems, the objective function takes the form of a simulator that predicts how the system state will evolve over time, and the design challenge is to optimize the initial conditions that lead to a target outcome. Recent developments in learned simulation have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) can be used for accurate, efficient, differentiable estimation of simulator dynamics, and support high-quality design optimization with gradient- or sampling-based optimization procedures. However, optimizing designs from scratch requires many expensive model queries, and these procedures exhibit basic failures on either non-convex or high-dimensional problems. In this work, we show how denoising diffusion models (DDMs) can be used to solve inverse design problems efficiently and propose a particle sampling algorithm for further improving their efficiency. We perform experiments on a number of fluid dynamics design challenges, and find that our approach substantially reduces the number of calls to the simulator compared to standard techniques.

sasdim: self-adaptive noise scaling diffusion model for spatial time series imputation

September 05, 2023 Shunyang Zhang, Senzhang Wang, Xianzhen Tan, Ruochen Liu, Jian Zhang, Jianxin Wang

cs.LG, cs.AI

Spatial time series imputation is critically important to many real applications such as intelligent transportation and air quality monitoring. Although recent transformer and diffusion model based approaches have achieved significant performance gains compared with conventional statistic based methods, spatial time series imputation still remains as a challenging issue due to the complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the noise uncertainty of the spatial time series data. Especially, recent diffusion process based models may introduce random noise to the imputations, and thus cause negative impact on the model performance. To this end, we propose a self-adaptive noise scaling diffusion model named SaSDim to more effectively perform spatial time series imputation. Specially, we propose a new loss function that can scale the noise to the similar intensity, and propose the across spatial-temporal global convolution module to more effectively capture the dynamic spatial-temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments conducted on three real world datasets verify the effectiveness of SaSDim by comparison with current state-of-the-art baselines.

Gradient Domain Diffusion Models for Image Synthesis

September 05, 2023 Yuanhao Gong

cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.MM, cs.PF, eess.IV

Diffusion models are getting popular in generative image and video synthesis. However, due to the diffusion process, they require a large number of steps to converge. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose to perform the diffusion process in the gradient domain, where the convergence becomes faster. There are two reasons. First, thanks to the Poisson equation, the gradient domain is mathematically equivalent to the original image domain. Therefore, each diffusion step in the image domain has a unique corresponding gradient domain representation. Second, the gradient domain is much sparser than the image domain. As a result, gradient domain diffusion models converge faster. Several numerical experiments confirm that the gradient domain diffusion models are more efficient than the original diffusion models. The proposed method can be applied in a wide range of applications such as image processing, computer vision and machine learning tasks.

Softmax Bias Correction for Quantized Generative Models

September 04, 2023 Nilesh Prasad Pandey, Marios Fournarakis, Chirag Patel, Markus Nagel

cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is the go-to compression technique for large generative models, such as stable diffusion or large language models. PTQ methods commonly keep the softmax activation in higher precision as it has been shown to be very sensitive to quantization noise. However, this can lead to a significant runtime and power overhead during inference on resource-constraint edge devices. In this work, we investigate the source of the softmax sensitivity to quantization and show that the quantization operation leads to a large bias in the softmax output, causing accuracy degradation. To overcome this issue, we propose an offline bias correction technique that improves the quantizability of softmax without additional compute during deployment, as it can be readily absorbed into the quantization parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on stable diffusion v1.5 and 125M-size OPT language model, achieving significant accuracy improvement for 8-bit quantized softmax.

Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis

September 04, 2023 Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Ming Ding, Wenyi Hong, Jianqiao Wangni, Zhuoyi Yang, Jie Tang

cs.CV, cs.LG

Diffusion models achieved great success in image synthesis, but still face challenges in high-resolution generation. Through the lens of discrete cosine transformation, we find the main reason is that \emph{the same noise level on a higher resolution results in a higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the frequency domain}. In this work, we present Relay Diffusion Model (RDM), which transfers a low-resolution image or noise into an equivalent high-resolution one for diffusion model via blurring diffusion and block noise. Therefore, the diffusion process can continue seamlessly in any new resolution or model without restarting from pure noise or low-resolution conditioning. RDM achieves state-of-the-art FID on CelebA-HQ and sFID on ImageNet 256$\times$256, surpassing previous works such as ADM, LDM and DiT by a large margin. All the codes and checkpoints are open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/RelayDiffusion}.

GenSelfDiff-HIS: Generative Self-Supervision Using Diffusion for Histopathological Image Segmentation

September 04, 2023 Vishnuvardhan Purma, Suhas Srinath, Seshan Srirangarajan, Aanchal Kakkar, Prathosh A. P

cs.CV

Histopathological image segmentation is a laborious and time-intensive task, often requiring analysis from experienced pathologists for accurate examinations. To reduce this burden, supervised machine-learning approaches have been adopted using large-scale annotated datasets for histopathological image analysis. However, in several scenarios, the availability of large-scale annotated data is a bottleneck while training such models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is an alternative paradigm that provides some respite by constructing models utilizing only the unannotated data which is often abundant. The basic idea of SSL is to train a network to perform one or many pseudo or pretext tasks on unannotated data and use it subsequently as the basis for a variety of downstream tasks. It is seen that the success of SSL depends critically on the considered pretext task. While there have been many efforts in designing pretext tasks for classification problems, there haven’t been many attempts on SSL for histopathological segmentation. Motivated by this, we propose an SSL approach for segmenting histopathological images via generative diffusion models in this paper. Our method is based on the observation that diffusion models effectively solve an image-to-image translation task akin to a segmentation task. Hence, we propose generative diffusion as the pretext task for histopathological image segmentation. We also propose a multi-loss function-based fine-tuning for the downstream task. We validate our method using several metrics on two publically available datasets along with a newly proposed head and neck (HN) cancer dataset containing hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) stained images along with annotations. Codes will be made public at https://github.com/PurmaVishnuVardhanReddy/GenSelfDiff-HIS.git.

FinDiff: Diffusion Models for Financial Tabular Data Generation

September 04, 2023 Timur Sattarov, Marco Schreyer, Damian Borth

cs.LG, q-fin.ST

The sharing of microdata, such as fund holdings and derivative instruments, by regulatory institutions presents a unique challenge due to strict data confidentiality and privacy regulations. These challenges often hinder the ability of both academics and practitioners to conduct collaborative research effectively. The emergence of generative models, particularly diffusion models, capable of synthesizing data mimicking the underlying distributions of real-world data presents a compelling solution. This work introduces ‘FinDiff’, a diffusion model designed to generate real-world financial tabular data for a variety of regulatory downstream tasks, for example economic scenario modeling, stress tests, and fraud detection. The model uses embedding encodings to model mixed modality financial data, comprising both categorical and numeric attributes. The performance of FinDiff in generating synthetic tabular financial data is evaluated against state-of-the-art baseline models using three real-world financial datasets (including two publicly available datasets and one proprietary dataset). Empirical results demonstrate that FinDiff excels in generating synthetic tabular financial data with high fidelity, privacy, and utility.

Accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling with diffusion models

September 04, 2023 N. T. Hunt-Smith, W. Melnitchouk, F. Ringer, N. Sato, A. W Thomas, M. J. White

hep-ph, stat.ML

Global fits of physics models require efficient methods for exploring high-dimensional and/or multimodal posterior functions. We introduce a novel method for accelerating Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling by pairing a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm with a diffusion model that can draw global samples with the aim of approximating the posterior. We briefly review diffusion models in the context of image synthesis before providing a streamlined diffusion model tailored towards low-dimensional data arrays. We then present our adapted Metropolis-Hastings algorithm which combines local proposals with global proposals taken from a diffusion model that is regularly trained on the samples produced during the MCMC run. Our approach leads to a significant reduction in the number of likelihood evaluations required to obtain an accurate representation of the Bayesian posterior across several analytic functions, as well as for a physical example based on a global analysis of parton distribution functions. Our method is extensible to other MCMC techniques, and we briefly compare our method to similar approaches based on normalizing flows. A code implementation can be found at https://github.com/NickHunt-Smith/MCMC-diffusion.

Diffusion Models with Deterministic Normalizing Flow Priors

September 03, 2023 Mohsen Zand, Ali Etemad, Michael Greenspan

cs.CV

For faster sampling and higher sample quality, we propose DiNof ($\textbf{Di}$ffusion with $\textbf{No}$rmalizing $\textbf{f}$low priors), a technique that makes use of normalizing flows and diffusion models. We use normalizing flows to parameterize the noisy data at any arbitrary step of the diffusion process and utilize it as the prior in the reverse diffusion process. More specifically, the forward noising process turns a data distribution into partially noisy data, which are subsequently transformed into a Gaussian distribution by a nonlinear process. The backward denoising procedure begins with a prior created by sampling from the Gaussian distribution and applying the invertible normalizing flow transformations deterministically. To generate the data distribution, the prior then undergoes the remaining diffusion stochastic denoising procedure. Through the reduction of the number of total diffusion steps, we are able to speed up both the forward and backward processes. More importantly, we improve the expressive power of diffusion models by employing both deterministic and stochastic mappings. Experiments on standard image generation datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches. On the unconditional CIFAR10 dataset, for example, we achieve an FID of 2.01 and an Inception score of 9.96. Our method also demonstrates competitive performance on CelebA-HQ-256 dataset as it obtains an FID score of 7.11. Code is available at https://github.com/MohsenZand/DiNof.

NADiffuSE: Noise-aware Diffusion-based Model for Speech Enhancement

September 03, 2023 Wen Wang, Dongchao Yang, Qichen Ye, Bowen Cao, Yuexian Zou

cs.SD, eess.AS

The goal of speech enhancement (SE) is to eliminate the background interference from the noisy speech signal. Generative models such as diffusion models (DM) have been applied to the task of SE because of better generalization in unseen noisy scenes. Technical routes for the DM-based SE methods can be summarized into three types: task-adapted diffusion process formulation, generator-plus-conditioner (GPC) structures and the multi-stage frameworks. We focus on the first two approaches, which are constructed under the GPC architecture and use the task-adapted diffusion process to better deal with the real noise. However, the performance of these SE models is limited by the following issues: (a) Non-Gaussian noise estimation in the task-adapted diffusion process. (b) Conditional domain bias caused by the weak conditioner design in the GPC structure. (c) Large amount of residual noise caused by unreasonable interpolation operations during inference. To solve the above problems, we propose a noise-aware diffusion-based SE model (NADiffuSE) to boost the SE performance, where the noise representation is extracted from the noisy speech signal and introduced as a global conditional information for estimating the non-Gaussian components. Furthermore, the anchor-based inference algorithm is employed to achieve a compromise between the speech distortion and noise residual. In order to mitigate the performance degradation caused by the conditional domain bias in the GPC framework, we investigate three model variants, all of which can be viewed as multi-stage SE based on the preprocessing networks for Mel spectrograms. Experimental results show that NADiffuSE outperforms other DM-based SE models under the GPC infrastructure. Audio samples are available at: https://square-of-w.github.io/NADiffuSE-demo/.

VGDiffZero: Text-to-image Diffusion Models Can Be Zero-shot Visual Grounders

September 03, 2023 Xuyang Liu, Siteng Huang, Yachen Kang, Honggang Chen, Donglin Wang

cs.CV

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities across various generative tasks, enabled by strong vision-language alignment obtained through pre-training. However, most vision-language discriminative tasks require extensive fine-tuning on carefully-labeled datasets to acquire such alignment, with great cost in time and computing resources. In this work, we explore directly applying a pre-trained generative diffusion model to the challenging discriminative task of visual grounding without any fine-tuning and additional training dataset. Specifically, we propose VGDiffZero, a simple yet effective zero-shot visual grounding framework based on text-to-image diffusion models. We also design a comprehensive region-scoring method considering both global and local contexts of each isolated proposal. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that VGDiffZero achieves strong performance on zero-shot visual grounding.

DiCLET-TTS: Diffusion Model based Cross-lingual Emotion Transfer for Text-to-Speech – A Study between English and Mandarin

September 02, 2023 Tao Li, Chenxu Hu, Jian Cong, Xinfa Zhu, Jingbei Li, Qiao Tian, Yuping Wang, Lei Xie

cs.SD, eess.AS

While the performance of cross-lingual TTS based on monolingual corpora has been significantly improved recently, generating cross-lingual speech still suffers from the foreign accent problem, leading to limited naturalness. Besides, current cross-lingual methods ignore modeling emotion, which is indispensable paralinguistic information in speech delivery. In this paper, we propose DiCLET-TTS, a Diffusion model based Cross-Lingual Emotion Transfer method that can transfer emotion from a source speaker to the intra- and cross-lingual target speakers. Specifically, to relieve the foreign accent problem while improving the emotion expressiveness, the terminal distribution of the forward diffusion process is parameterized into a speaker-irrelevant but emotion-related linguistic prior by a prior text encoder with the emotion embedding as a condition. To address the weaker emotional expressiveness problem caused by speaker disentanglement in emotion embedding, a novel orthogonal projection based emotion disentangling module (OP-EDM) is proposed to learn the speaker-irrelevant but emotion-discriminative embedding. Moreover, a condition-enhanced DPM decoder is introduced to strengthen the modeling ability of the speaker and the emotion in the reverse diffusion process to further improve emotion expressiveness in speech delivery. Cross-lingual emotion transfer experiments show the superiority of DiCLET-TTS over various competitive models and the good design of OP-EDM in learning speaker-irrelevant but emotion-discriminative embedding.

Correlated and Multi-frequency Diffusion Modeling for Highly Under-sampled MRI Reconstruction

September 02, 2023 Yu Guan, Chuanming Yu, Shiyu Lu, Zhuoxu Cui, Dong Liang, Qiegen Liu

eess.IV, cs.CV

Most existing MRI reconstruction methods perform tar-geted reconstruction of the entire MR image without tak-ing specific tissue regions into consideration. This may fail to emphasize the reconstruction accuracy on im-portant tissues for diagnosis. In this study, leveraging a combination of the properties of k-space data and the diffusion process, our novel scheme focuses on mining the multi-frequency prior with different strategies to pre-serve fine texture details in the reconstructed image. In addition, a diffusion process can converge more quickly if its target distribution closely resembles the noise distri-bution in the process. This can be accomplished through various high-frequency prior extractors. The finding further solidifies the effectiveness of the score-based gen-erative model. On top of all the advantages, our method improves the accuracy of MRI reconstruction and accel-erates sampling process. Experimental results verify that the proposed method successfully obtains more accurate reconstruction and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion Modeling with Domain-conditioned Prior Guidance for Accelerated MRI and qMRI Reconstruction

September 02, 2023 Wanyu Bian, Albert Jang, Fang Liu

cs.LG

This study introduces a novel approach for image reconstruction based on a diffusion model conditioned on the native data domain. Our method is applied to multi-coil MRI and quantitative MRI reconstruction, leveraging the domain-conditioned diffusion model within the frequency and parameter domains. The prior MRI physics are used as embeddings in the diffusion model, enforcing data consistency to guide the training and sampling process, characterizing MRI k-space encoding in MRI reconstruction, and leveraging MR signal modeling for qMRI reconstruction. Furthermore, a gradient descent optimization is incorporated into the diffusion steps, enhancing feature learning and improving denoising. The proposed method demonstrates a significant promise, particularly for reconstructing images at high acceleration factors. Notably, it maintains great reconstruction accuracy and efficiency for static and quantitative MRI reconstruction across diverse anatomical structures. Beyond its immediate applications, this method provides potential generalization capability, making it adaptable to inverse problems across various domains.

Fast Diffusion EM: a diffusion model for blind inverse problems with application to deconvolution