Adapting the Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DPM) for direct image super-resolution is wasteful, given that a simple Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can recover the main low-frequency content. Therefore, we present ResDiff, a novel Diffusion Probabilistic Model based on Residual structure for Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). ResDiff utilizes a combination of a CNN, which restores primary low-frequency components, and a DPM, which predicts the residual between the ground-truth image and the CNN-predicted image. In contrast to the common diffusion-based methods that directly use LR images to guide the noise towards HR space, ResDiff utilizes the CNN's initial prediction to direct the noise towards the residual space between HR space and CNN-predicted space, which not only accelerates the generation process but also acquires superior sample quality. Additionally, a frequency-domain-based loss function for CNN is introduced to facilitate its restoration, and a frequency-domain guided diffusion is designed for DPM on behalf of predicting high-frequency details. The extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that ResDiff outperforms previous diffusion-based methods in terms of shorter model convergence time, superior generation quality, and more diverse samples.
We derive a minimalist but powerful deterministic denoising-diffusion model. While denoising diffusion has shown great success in many domains, its underlying theory remains largely inaccessible to non-expert users. Indeed, an understanding of graduate-level concepts such as Langevin dynamics or score matching appears to be required to grasp how it works. We propose an alternative approach that requires no more than undergrad calculus and probability. We consider two densities and observe what happens when random samples from these densities are blended (linearly interpolated). We show that iteratively blending and deblending samples produces random paths between the two densities that converge toward a deterministic mapping. This mapping can be evaluated with a neural network trained to deblend samples. We obtain a model that behaves like deterministic denoising diffusion: it iteratively maps samples from one density (e.g., Gaussian noise) to another (e.g., cat images). However, compared to the state-of-the-art alternative, our model is simpler to derive, simpler to implement, more numerically stable, achieves higher quality results in our experiments, and has interesting connections to computer graphics.
Diffusion models have the ability to generate high quality images by denoising pure Gaussian noise images. While previous research has primarily focused on improving the control of image generation through adjusting the denoising process, we propose a novel direction of manipulating the initial noise to control the generated image. Through experiments on stable diffusion, we show that blocks of pixels in the initial latent images have a preference for generating specific content, and that modifying these blocks can significantly influence the generated image. In particular, we show that modifying a part of the initial image affects the corresponding region of the generated image while leaving other regions unaffected, which is useful for repainting tasks. Furthermore, we find that the generation preferences of pixel blocks are primarily determined by their values, rather than their position. By moving pixel blocks with a tendency to generate user-desired content to user-specified regions, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in layout-to-image generation. Our results highlight the flexibility and power of initial image manipulation in controlling the generated image.
Current image generation models struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text. In this paper, we investigate a key contributing factor: popular text-to-image models lack character-level input features, making it much harder to predict a word's visual makeup as a series of glyphs. To quantify this effect, we conduct a series of experiments comparing character-aware vs. character-blind text encoders. In the text-only domain, we find that character-aware models provide large gains on a novel spelling task (WikiSpell). Applying our learnings to the visual domain, we train a suite of image generation models, and show that character-aware variants outperform their character-blind counterparts across a range of novel text rendering tasks (our DrawText benchmark). Our models set a much higher state-of-the-art on visual spelling, with 30+ point accuracy gains over competitors on rare words, despite training on far fewer examples.
The Differentiable Search Index (DSI) is a novel information retrieval (IR) framework that utilizes a differentiable function to generate a sorted list of document identifiers in response to a given query. However, due to the black-box nature of the end-to-end neural architecture, it remains to be understood to what extent DSI possesses the basic indexing and retrieval abilities. To mitigate this gap, in this study, we define and examine three important abilities that a functioning IR framework should possess, namely, exclusivity, completeness, and relevance ordering. Our analytical experimentation shows that while DSI demonstrates proficiency in memorizing the unidirectional mapping from pseudo queries to document identifiers, it falls short in distinguishing relevant documents from random ones, thereby negatively impacting its retrieval effectiveness. To address this issue, we propose a multi-task distillation approach to enhance the retrieval quality without altering the structure of the model and successfully endow it with improved indexing abilities. Through experiments conducted on various datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms previous DSI baselines.
Multi-scale design has been considered in recent image super-resolution (SR) works to explore the hierarchical feature information. Existing multi-scale networks aim to build elaborate blocks or progressive architecture for restoration. In general, larger scale features concentrate more on structural and high-level information, while smaller scale features contain plentiful details and textured information. In this point of view, information from larger scale features can be derived from smaller ones. Based on the observation, in this paper, we build a sequential hierarchical learning super-resolution network (SHSR) for effective image SR. Specially, we consider the inter-scale correlations of features, and devise a sequential multi-scale block (SMB) to progressively explore the hierarchical information. SMB is designed in a recursive way based on the linearity of convolution with restricted parameters. Besides the sequential hierarchical learning, we also investigate the correlations among the feature maps and devise a distribution transformation block (DTB). Different from attention-based methods, DTB regards the transformation in a normalization manner, and jointly considers the spatial and channel-wise correlations with scaling and bias factors. Experiment results show SHSR achieves superior quantitative performance and visual quality to state-of-the-art methods with near 34\% parameters and 50\% MACs off when scaling factor is $\times4$. To boost the performance without further training, the extension model SHSR$^+$ with self-ensemble achieves competitive performance than larger networks with near 92\% parameters and 42\% MACs off with scaling factor $\times4$.
Three-dimensional (3-D) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is widely used in many security and industrial applications requiring high-resolution imaging of concealed or occluded objects. The ability to resolve intricate 3-D targets is essential to the performance of such applications and depends directly on system bandwidth. However, because high-bandwidth systems face several prohibitive hurdles, an alternative solution is to operate multiple radars at distinct frequency bands and fuse the multiband signals. Current multiband signal fusion methods assume a simple target model and a small number of point reflectors, which is invalid for realistic security screening and industrial imaging scenarios wherein the target model effectively consists of a large number of reflectors. To the best of our knowledge, this study presents the first use of deep learning for multiband signal fusion. The proposed network, called kR-Net, employs a hybrid, dual-domain complex-valued convolutional neural network (CV-CNN) to fuse multiband signals and impute the missing samples in the frequency gaps between subbands. By exploiting the relationships in both the wavenumber domain and wavenumber spectral domain, the proposed framework overcomes the drawbacks of existing multiband imaging techniques for realistic scenarios at a fraction of the computation time of existing multiband fusion algorithms. Our method achieves high-resolution imaging of intricate targets previously impossible using conventional techniques and enables finer resolution capacity for concealed weapon detection and occluded object classification using multiband signaling without requiring more advanced hardware. Furthermore, a fully integrated multiband imaging system is developed using commercially available millimeter-wave (mmWave) radars for efficient multiband imaging.
Deep learning shows great potential in generation tasks thanks to deep latent representation. Generative models are classes of models that can generate observations randomly with respect to certain implied parameters. Recently, the diffusion Model becomes a raising class of generative models by virtue of its power-generating ability. Nowadays, great achievements have been reached. More applications except for computer vision, speech generation, bioinformatics, and natural language processing are to be explored in this field. However, the diffusion model has its natural drawback of a slow generation process, leading to many enhanced works. This survey makes a summary of the field of the diffusion model. We firstly state the main problem with two landmark works - DDPM and DSM. Then, we present a diverse range of advanced techniques to speed up the diffusion models - training schedule, training-free sampling, mixed-modeling, and score & diffusion unification. Regarding existing models, we also provide a benchmark of FID score, IS, and NLL according to specific NFE. Moreover, applications with diffusion models are introduced including computer vision, sequence modeling, audio, and AI for science. Finally, there is a summarization of this field together with limitations & further directions.
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown dramatic improvements in single image super-resolution (SISR) by using large-scale external samples. Despite their remarkable performance based on the external dataset, they cannot exploit internal information within a specific image. Another problem is that they are applicable only to the specific condition of data that they are supervised. For instance, the low-resolution (LR) image should be a "bicubic" downsampled noise-free image from a high-resolution (HR) one. To address both issues, zero-shot super-resolution (ZSSR) has been proposed for flexible internal learning. However, they require thousands of gradient updates, i.e., long inference time. In this paper, we present Meta-Transfer Learning for Zero-Shot Super-Resolution (MZSR), which leverages ZSSR. Precisely, it is based on finding a generic initial parameter that is suitable for internal learning. Thus, we can exploit both external and internal information, where one single gradient update can yield quite considerable results. (See Figure 1). With our method, the network can quickly adapt to a given image condition. In this respect, our method can be applied to a large spectrum of image conditions within a fast adaptation process.
Modern neural network training relies heavily on data augmentation for improved generalization. After the initial success of label-preserving augmentations, there has been a recent surge of interest in label-perturbing approaches, which combine features and labels across training samples to smooth the learned decision surface. In this paper, we propose a new augmentation method that leverages the first and second moments extracted and re-injected by feature normalization. We replace the moments of the learned features of one training image by those of another, and also interpolate the target labels. As our approach is fast, operates entirely in feature space, and mixes different signals than prior methods, one can effectively combine it with existing augmentation methods. We demonstrate its efficacy across benchmark data sets in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing, where it consistently improves the generalization performance of highly competitive baseline networks.
Image-to-image translation aims to learn the mapping between two visual domains. There are two main challenges for many applications: 1) the lack of aligned training pairs and 2) multiple possible outputs from a single input image. In this work, we present an approach based on disentangled representation for producing diverse outputs without paired training images. To achieve diversity, we propose to embed images onto two spaces: a domain-invariant content space capturing shared information across domains and a domain-specific attribute space. Our model takes the encoded content features extracted from a given input and the attribute vectors sampled from the attribute space to produce diverse outputs at test time. To handle unpaired training data, we introduce a novel cross-cycle consistency loss based on disentangled representations. Qualitative results show that our model can generate diverse and realistic images on a wide range of tasks without paired training data. For quantitative comparisons, we measure realism with user study and diversity with a perceptual distance metric. We apply the proposed model to domain adaptation and show competitive performance when compared to the state-of-the-art on the MNIST-M and the LineMod datasets.