Text-to-image generation has traditionally focused on finding better modeling assumptions for training on a fixed dataset. These assumptions might involve complex architectures, auxiliary losses, or side information such as object part labels or segmentation masks supplied during training. We describe a simple approach for this task based on a transformer that autoregressively models the text and image tokens as a single stream of data. With sufficient data and scale, our approach is competitive with previous domain-specific models when evaluated in a zero-shot fashion.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
This paper proposes a new generative adversarial network for pose transfer, i.e., transferring the pose of a given person to a target pose. The generator of the network comprises a sequence of Pose-Attentional Transfer Blocks that each transfers certain regions it attends to, generating the person image progressively. Compared with those in previous works, our generated person images possess better appearance consistency and shape consistency with the input images, thus significantly more realistic-looking. The efficacy and efficiency of the proposed network are validated both qualitatively and quantitatively on Market-1501 and DeepFashion. Furthermore, the proposed architecture can generate training images for person re-identification, alleviating data insufficiency. Codes and models are available at: //github.com/tengteng95/Pose-Transfer.git.
Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graphical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long-distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming encoder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.
Most conditional generation tasks expect diverse outputs given a single conditional context. However, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) often focus on the prior conditional information and ignore the input noise vectors, which contribute to the output variations. Recent attempts to resolve the mode collapse issue for cGANs are usually task-specific and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization term to address the mode collapse issue for cGANs. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the ratio of the distance between generated images with respect to the corresponding latent codes, thus encouraging the generators to explore more minor modes during training. This mode seeking regularization term is readily applicable to various conditional generation tasks without imposing training overhead or modifying the original network structures. We validate the proposed algorithm on three conditional image synthesis tasks including categorical generation, image-to-image translation, and text-to-image synthesis with different baseline models. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed regularization method for improving diversity without loss of quality.
Generating realistic images from scene graphs asks neural networks to be able to reason about object relationships and compositionality. As a relatively new task, how to properly ensure the generated images comply with scene graphs or how to measure task performance remains an open question. In this paper, we propose to harness scene graph context to improve image generation from scene graphs. We introduce a scene graph context network that pools features generated by a graph convolutional neural network that are then provided to both the image generation network and the adversarial loss. With the context network, our model is trained to not only generate realistic looking images, but also to better preserve non-spatial object relationships. We also define two novel evaluation metrics, the relation score and the mean opinion relation score, for this task that directly evaluate scene graph compliance. We use both quantitative and qualitative studies to demonstrate that our pro-posed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on this challenging task.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) boast impressive capacity to generate realistic images. However, like much of the field of deep learning, they require an inordinate amount of data to produce results, thereby limiting their usefulness in generating novelty. In the same vein, recent advances in meta-learning have opened the door to many few-shot learning applications. In the present work, we propose Few-shot Image Generation using Reptile (FIGR), a GAN meta-trained with Reptile. Our model successfully generates novel images on both MNIST and Omniglot with as little as 4 images from an unseen class. We further contribute FIGR-8, a new dataset for few-shot image generation, which contains 1,548,944 icons categorized in over 18,409 classes. Trained on FIGR-8, initial results show that our model can generalize to more advanced concepts (such as "bird" and "knife") from as few as 8 samples from a previously unseen class of images and as little as 10 training steps through those 8 images. This work demonstrates the potential of training a GAN for few-shot image generation and aims to set a new benchmark for future work in the domain.
Despite recent progress in generative image modeling, successfully generating high-resolution, diverse samples from complex datasets such as ImageNet remains an elusive goal. To this end, we train Generative Adversarial Networks at the largest scale yet attempted, and study the instabilities specific to such scale. We find that applying orthogonal regularization to the generator renders it amenable to a simple "truncation trick", allowing fine control over the trade-off between sample fidelity and variety by truncating the latent space. Our modifications lead to models which set the new state of the art in class-conditional image synthesis. When trained on ImageNet at 128x128 resolution, our models (BigGANs) achieve an Inception Score (IS) of 166.3 and Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of 9.6, improving over the previous best IS of 52.52 and FID of 18.65.
Neural question generation (NQG) is the task of generating a question from a given passage with deep neural networks. Previous NQG models suffer from a problem that a significant proportion of the generated questions include words in the question target, resulting in the generation of unintended questions. In this paper, we propose answer-separated seq2seq, which better utilizes the information from both the passage and the target answer. By replacing the target answer in the original passage with a special token, our model learns to identify which interrogative word should be used. We also propose a new module termed keyword-net, which helps the model better capture the key information in the target answer and generate an appropriate question. Experimental results demonstrate that our answer separation method significantly reduces the number of improper questions which include answers. Consequently, our model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art NQG models.
Image captioning approaches currently generate descriptions which lack specific information, such as named entities that are involved in the images. In this paper we propose a new task which aims to generate informative image captions, given images and hashtags as input. We propose a simple, but effective approach in which we, first, train a CNN-LSTM model to generate a template caption based on the input image. Then we use a knowledge graph based collective inference algorithm to fill in the template with specific named entities retrieved via the hashtags. Experiments on a new benchmark dataset collected from Flickr show that our model generates news-style image descriptions with much richer information. The METEOR score of our model almost triples the score of the baseline image captioning model on our benchmark dataset, from 4.8 to 13.60.
Generating novel, yet realistic, images of persons is a challenging task due to the complex interplay between the different image factors, such as the foreground, background and pose information. In this work, we aim at generating such images based on a novel, two-stage reconstruction pipeline that learns a disentangled representation of the aforementioned image factors and generates novel person images at the same time. First, a multi-branched reconstruction network is proposed to disentangle and encode the three factors into embedding features, which are then combined to re-compose the input image itself. Second, three corresponding mapping functions are learned in an adversarial manner in order to map Gaussian noise to the learned embedding feature space, for each factor respectively. Using the proposed framework, we can manipulate the foreground, background and pose of the input image, and also sample new embedding features to generate such targeted manipulations, that provide more control over the generation process. Experiments on Market-1501 and Deepfashion datasets show that our model does not only generate realistic person images with new foregrounds, backgrounds and poses, but also manipulates the generated factors and interpolates the in-between states. Another set of experiments on Market-1501 shows that our model can also be beneficial for the person re-identification task.