Layout design is an important task in various design fields, including user interfaces, document, and graphic design. As this task requires tedious manual effort by designers, prior works have attempted to automate this process using generative models, but commonly fell short of providing intuitive user controls and achieving design objectives. In this paper, we build a conditional latent diffusion model, PLay, that generates parametrically conditioned layouts in vector graphic space from user-specified guidelines, which are commonly used by designers for representing their design intents in current practices. Our method outperforms prior works across three datasets on metrics including FID and FD-VG, and in user test. Moreover, it brings a novel and interactive experience to professional layout design processes.
AI-generated content has attracted lots of attention recently, but photo-realistic video synthesis is still challenging. Although many attempts using GANs and autoregressive models have been made in this area, the visual quality and length of generated videos are far from satisfactory. Diffusion models have shown remarkable results recently but require significant computational resources. To address this, we introduce lightweight video diffusion models by leveraging a low-dimensional 3D latent space, significantly outperforming previous pixel-space video diffusion models under a limited computational budget. In addition, we propose hierarchical diffusion in the latent space such that longer videos with more than one thousand frames can be produced. To further overcome the performance degradation issue for long video generation, we propose conditional latent perturbation and unconditional guidance that effectively mitigate the accumulated errors during the extension of video length. Extensive experiments on small domain datasets of different categories suggest that our framework generates more realistic and longer videos than previous strong baselines. We additionally provide an extension to large-scale text-to-video generation to demonstrate the superiority of our work. Our code and models will be made publicly available.
Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs) have emerged as a strong competitor to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, despite their widespread use in image synthesis and editing applications, their latent space is still not as well understood. Recently, a semantic latent space for DDMs, coined `$h$-space', was shown to facilitate semantic image editing in a way reminiscent of GANs. The $h$-space is comprised of the bottleneck activations in the DDM's denoiser across all timesteps of the diffusion process. In this paper, we explore the properties of h-space and propose several novel methods for finding meaningful semantic directions within it. We start by studying unsupervised methods for revealing interpretable semantic directions in pretrained DDMs. Specifically, we show that global latent directions emerge as the principal components in the latent space. Additionally, we provide a novel method for discovering image-specific semantic directions by spectral analysis of the Jacobian of the denoiser w.r.t. the latent code. Next, we extend the analysis by finding directions in a supervised fashion in unconditional DDMs. We demonstrate how such directions can be found by relying on either a labeled data set of real images or by annotating generated samples with a domain-specific attribute classifier. We further show how to semantically disentangle the found direction by simple linear projection. Our approaches are applicable without requiring any architectural modifications, text-based guidance, CLIP-based optimization, or model fine-tuning.
Users interact with text, image, code, or other editors on a daily basis. However, machine learning models are rarely trained in the settings that reflect the interactivity between users and their editor. This is understandable as training AI models with real users is not only slow and costly, but what these models learn may be specific to user interface design choices. Unfortunately, this means most of the research on text, code, and image generation has focused on non-interactive settings, whereby the model is expected to get everything right without accounting for any input from a user who may be willing to help. We introduce a new Interactive Text Generation task that allows training generation models interactively without the costs of involving real users, by using user simulators that provide edits that guide the model towards a given target text. We train our interactive models using Imitation Learning, and our experiments against competitive non-interactive generation models show that models trained interactively are superior to their non-interactive counterparts, even when all models are given the same budget of user inputs or edits.
We present PhoMoH, a neural network methodology to construct generative models of photo-realistic 3D geometry and appearance of human heads including hair, beards, an oral cavity, and clothing. In contrast to prior work, PhoMoH models the human head using neural fields, thus supporting complex topology. Instead of learning a head model from scratch, we propose to augment an existing expressive head model with new features. Concretely, we learn a highly detailed geometry network layered on top of a mid-resolution head model together with a detailed, local geometry-aware, and disentangled color field. Our proposed architecture allows us to learn photo-realistic human head models from relatively little data. The learned generative geometry and appearance networks can be sampled individually and enable the creation of diverse and realistic human heads. Extensive experiments validate our method qualitatively and across different metrics.
In the 1950s Horace Barlow and Fred Attneave suggested a connection between sensory systems and how they are adapted to the environment: early vision evolved to maximise the information it conveys about incoming signals. Following Shannon's definition, this information was described using the probability of the images taken from natural scenes. Previously, direct accurate predictions of image probabilities were not possible due to computational limitations. Despite the exploration of this idea being indirect, mainly based on oversimplified models of the image density or on system design methods, these methods had success in reproducing a wide range of physiological and psychophysical phenomena. In this paper, we directly evaluate the probability of natural images and analyse how it may determine perceptual sensitivity. We employ image quality metrics that correlate well with human opinion as a surrogate of human vision, and an advanced generative model to directly estimate the probability. Specifically, we analyse how the sensitivity of full-reference image quality metrics can be predicted from quantities derived directly from the probability distribution of natural images. First, we compute the mutual information between a wide range of probability surrogates and the sensitivity of the metrics and find that the most influential factor is the probability of the noisy image. Then we explore how these probability surrogates can be combined using a simple model to predict the metric sensitivity, giving an upper bound for the correlation of 0.85 between the model predictions and the actual perceptual sensitivity. Finally, we explore how to combine the probability surrogates using simple expressions, and obtain two functional forms (using one or two surrogates) that can be used to predict the sensitivity of the human visual system given a particular pair of images.
We address the challenge of recovering an underlying scene geometry and colors from a sparse set of RGBD view observations. In this work, we present a new solution termed RGBD$^2$ that sequentially generates novel RGBD views along a camera trajectory, and the scene geometry is simply the fusion result of these views. More specifically, we maintain an intermediate surface mesh used for rendering new RGBD views, which subsequently becomes complete by an inpainting network; each rendered RGBD view is later back-projected as a partial surface and is supplemented into the intermediate mesh. The use of intermediate mesh and camera projection helps solve the tough problem of multi-view inconsistency. We practically implement the RGBD inpainting network as a versatile RGBD diffusion model, which is previously used for 2D generative modeling; we make a modification to its reverse diffusion process to enable our use. We evaluate our approach on the task of 3D scene synthesis from sparse RGBD inputs; extensive experiments on the ScanNet dataset demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing ones. Project page: //jblei.site/proj/rgbd-diffusion.
Topology Optimization seeks to find the best design that satisfies a set of constraints while maximizing system performance. Traditional iterative optimization methods like SIMP can be computationally expensive and get stuck in local minima, limiting their applicability to complex or large-scale problems. Learning-based approaches have been developed to accelerate the topology optimization process, but these methods can generate designs with floating material and low performance when challenged with out-of-distribution constraint configurations. Recently, deep generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models, conditioned on constraints and physics fields have shown promise, but they require extensive pre-processing and surrogate models for improving performance. To address these issues, we propose a Generative Optimization method that integrates classic optimization like SIMP as a refining mechanism for the topology generated by a deep generative model. We also remove the need for conditioning on physical fields using a computationally inexpensive approximation inspired by classic ODE solutions and reduce the number of steps needed to generate a feasible and performant topology. Our method allows us to efficiently generate good topologies and explicitly guide them to regions with high manufacturability and high performance, without the need for external auxiliary models or additional labeled data. We believe that our method can lead to significant advancements in the design and optimization of structures in engineering applications, and can be applied to a broader spectrum of performance-aware engineering design problems.
Probabilistic diffusion models have achieved state-of-the-art results for image synthesis, inpainting, and text-to-image tasks. However, they are still in the early stages of generating complex 3D shapes. This work proposes Diffusion-SDF, a generative model for shape completion, single-view reconstruction, and reconstruction of real-scanned point clouds. We use neural signed distance functions (SDFs) as our 3D representation to parameterize the geometry of various signals (e.g., point clouds, 2D images) through neural networks. Neural SDFs are implicit functions and diffusing them amounts to learning the reversal of their neural network weights, which we solve using a custom modulation module. Extensive experiments show that our method is capable of both realistic unconditional generation and conditional generation from partial inputs. This work expands the domain of diffusion models from learning 2D, explicit representations, to 3D, implicit representations.
Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in visual synthesis, but have also raised concerns about potential abuse for malicious purposes. In this paper, we seek to build a detector for telling apart real images from diffusion-generated images. We find that existing detectors struggle to detect images generated by diffusion models, even if we include generated images from a specific diffusion model in their training data. To address this issue, we propose a novel image representation called DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE), which measures the error between an input image and its reconstruction counterpart by a pre-trained diffusion model. We observe that diffusion-generated images can be approximately reconstructed by a diffusion model while real images cannot. It provides a hint that DIRE can serve as a bridge to distinguish generated and real images. DIRE provides an effective way to detect images generated by most diffusion models, and it is general for detecting generated images from unseen diffusion models and robust to various perturbations. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive diffusion-generated benchmark including images generated by eight diffusion models to evaluate the performance of diffusion-generated image detectors. Extensive experiments on our collected benchmark demonstrate that DIRE exhibits superiority over previous generated-image detectors. The code and dataset are available at //github.com/ZhendongWang6/DIRE.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.