Diffusion models were initially developed for text-to-image generation and are now being utilized to generate high quality synthetic images. Preceded by GANs, diffusion models have shown impressive results using various evaluation metrics. However, commonly used metrics such as FID and IS are not suitable for determining whether diffusion models are simply reproducing the training images. Here we train StyleGAN and diffusion models, using BRATS20 and BRATS21 datasets, to synthesize brain tumor images, and measure the correlation between the synthetic images and all training images. Our results show that diffusion models are much more likely to memorize the training images, especially for small datasets. Researchers should be careful when using diffusion models for medical imaging, if the final goal is to share the synthetic images.
Denoising diffusion models have recently shown impressive results in generative tasks. By learning powerful priors from huge collections of training images, such models are able to gradually modify complete noise to a clean natural image via a sequence of small denoising steps, seemingly making them well-suited for single image denoising. However, effectively applying denoising diffusion models to removal of realistic noise is more challenging than it may seem, since their formulation is based on additive white Gaussian noise, unlike noise in real-world images. In this work, we present SVNR, a novel formulation of denoising diffusion that assumes a more realistic, spatially-variant noise model. SVNR enables using the noisy input image as the starting point for the denoising diffusion process, in addition to conditioning the process on it. To this end, we adapt the diffusion process to allow each pixel to have its own time embedding, and propose training and inference schemes that support spatially-varying time maps. Our formulation also accounts for the correlation that exists between the condition image and the samples along the modified diffusion process. In our experiments we demonstrate the advantages of our approach over a strong diffusion model baseline, as well as over a state-of-the-art single image denoising method.
Current perceptual similarity metrics operate at the level of pixels and patches. These metrics compare images in terms of their low-level colors and textures, but fail to capture mid-level similarities and differences in image layout, object pose, and semantic content. In this paper, we develop a perceptual metric that assesses images holistically. Our first step is to collect a new dataset of human similarity judgments over image pairs that are alike in diverse ways. Critical to this dataset is that judgments are nearly automatic and shared by all observers. To achieve this we use recent text-to-image models to create synthetic pairs that are perturbed along various dimensions. We observe that popular perceptual metrics fall short of explaining our new data, and we introduce a new metric, DreamSim, tuned to better align with human perception. We analyze how our metric is affected by different visual attributes, and find that it focuses heavily on foreground objects and semantic content while also being sensitive to color and layout. Notably, despite being trained on synthetic data, our metric generalizes to real images, giving strong results on retrieval and reconstruction tasks. Furthermore, our metric outperforms both prior learned metrics and recent large vision models on these tasks.
Feature-Imitating-Networks (FINs) are neural networks with weights that are initialized to approximate closed-form statistical features. In this work, we perform the first-ever evaluation of FINs for biomedical image processing tasks. We begin by training a set of FINs to imitate six common radiomics features, and then compare the performance of networks with and without the FINs for three experimental tasks: COVID-19 detection from CT scans, brain tumor classification from MRI scans, and brain-tumor segmentation from MRI scans; we find that FINs provide best-in-class performance for all three tasks, while converging faster and more consistently when compared to networks with similar or greater representational power. The results of our experiments provide evidence that FINs may provide state-of-the-art performance for a variety of other biomedical image processing tasks.
Data-centric AI approach aims to enhance the model performance without modifying the model and has been shown to impact model performance positively. While recent attention has been given to data-centric AI based on synthetic data, due to its potential for performance improvement, data-centric AI has long been exclusively validated using real-world data and publicly available benchmark datasets. In respect of this, data-centric AI still highly depends on real-world data, and the verification of models using synthetic data has not yet been thoroughly carried out. Given the challenges above, we ask the question: Does data quality control (noise injection and balanced data), a data-centric AI methodology acclaimed to have a positive impact, exhibit the same positive impact in models trained solely with synthetic data? To address this question, we conducted comparative analyses between models trained on synthetic and real-world data based on grammatical error correction (GEC) task. Our experimental results reveal that the data quality control method has a positive impact on models trained with real-world data, as previously reported in existing studies, while a negative impact is observed in models trained solely on synthetic data.
Deep Learning (DL) models tend to perform poorly when the data comes from a distribution different from the training one. In critical applications such as medical imaging, out-of-distribution (OOD) detection helps to identify such data samples, increasing the model's reliability. Recent works have developed DL-based OOD detection that achieves promising results on 2D medical images. However, scaling most of these approaches on 3D images is computationally intractable. Furthermore, the current 3D solutions struggle to achieve acceptable results in detecting even synthetic OOD samples. Such limited performance might indicate that DL often inefficiently embeds large volumetric images. We argue that using the intensity histogram of the original CT or MRI scan as embedding is descriptive enough to run OOD detection. Therefore, we propose a histogram-based method that requires no DL and achieves almost perfect results in this domain. Our proposal is supported two-fold. We evaluate the performance on the publicly available datasets, where our method scores 1.0 AUROC in most setups. And we score second in the Medical Out-of-Distribution challenge without fine-tuning and exploiting task-specific knowledge. Carefully discussing the limitations, we conclude that our method solves the sample-level OOD detection on 3D medical images in the current setting.
Recently, ChatGPT, along with DALL-E-2 and Codex,has been gaining significant attention from society. As a result, many individuals have become interested in related resources and are seeking to uncover the background and secrets behind its impressive performance. In fact, ChatGPT and other Generative AI (GAI) techniques belong to the category of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC), which involves the creation of digital content, such as images, music, and natural language, through AI models. The goal of AIGC is to make the content creation process more efficient and accessible, allowing for the production of high-quality content at a faster pace. AIGC is achieved by extracting and understanding intent information from instructions provided by human, and generating the content according to its knowledge and the intent information. In recent years, large-scale models have become increasingly important in AIGC as they provide better intent extraction and thus, improved generation results. With the growth of data and the size of the models, the distribution that the model can learn becomes more comprehensive and closer to reality, leading to more realistic and high-quality content generation. This survey provides a comprehensive review on the history of generative models, and basic components, recent advances in AIGC from unimodal interaction and multimodal interaction. From the perspective of unimodality, we introduce the generation tasks and relative models of text and image. From the perspective of multimodality, we introduce the cross-application between the modalities mentioned above. Finally, we discuss the existing open problems and future challenges in AIGC.
Denoising diffusion models represent a recent emerging topic in computer vision, demonstrating remarkable results in the area of generative modeling. A diffusion model is a deep generative model that is based on two stages, a forward diffusion stage and a reverse diffusion stage. In the forward diffusion stage, the input data is gradually perturbed over several steps by adding Gaussian noise. In the reverse stage, a model is tasked at recovering the original input data by learning to gradually reverse the diffusion process, step by step. Diffusion models are widely appreciated for the quality and diversity of the generated samples, despite their known computational burdens, i.e. low speeds due to the high number of steps involved during sampling. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of articles on denoising diffusion models applied in vision, comprising both theoretical and practical contributions in the field. First, we identify and present three generic diffusion modeling frameworks, which are based on denoising diffusion probabilistic models, noise conditioned score networks, and stochastic differential equations. We further discuss the relations between diffusion models and other deep generative models, including variational auto-encoders, generative adversarial networks, energy-based models, autoregressive models and normalizing flows. Then, we introduce a multi-perspective categorization of diffusion models applied in computer vision. Finally, we illustrate the current limitations of diffusion models and envision some interesting directions for future research.
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.
The U-Net was presented in 2015. With its straight-forward and successful architecture it quickly evolved to a commonly used benchmark in medical image segmentation. The adaptation of the U-Net to novel problems, however, comprises several degrees of freedom regarding the exact architecture, preprocessing, training and inference. These choices are not independent of each other and substantially impact the overall performance. The present paper introduces the nnU-Net ('no-new-Net'), which refers to a robust and self-adapting framework on the basis of 2D and 3D vanilla U-Nets. We argue the strong case for taking away superfluous bells and whistles of many proposed network designs and instead focus on the remaining aspects that make out the performance and generalizability of a method. We evaluate the nnU-Net in the context of the Medical Segmentation Decathlon challenge, which measures segmentation performance in ten disciplines comprising distinct entities, image modalities, image geometries and dataset sizes, with no manual adjustments between datasets allowed. At the time of manuscript submission, nnU-Net achieves the highest mean dice scores across all classes and seven phase 1 tasks (except class 1 in BrainTumour) in the online leaderboard of the challenge.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.