Achieving machine autonomy and human control often represent divergent objectives in the design of interactive AI systems. Visual generative foundation models such as Stable Diffusion show promise in navigating these goals, especially when prompted with arbitrary languages. However, they often fall short in generating images with spatial, structural, or geometric controls. The integration of such controls, which can accommodate various visual conditions in a single unified model, remains an unaddressed challenge. In response, we introduce UniControl, a new generative foundation model that consolidates a wide array of controllable condition-to-image (C2I) tasks within a singular framework, while still allowing for arbitrary language prompts. UniControl enables pixel-level-precise image generation, where visual conditions primarily influence the generated structures and language prompts guide the style and context. To equip UniControl with the capacity to handle diverse visual conditions, we augment pretrained text-to-image diffusion models and introduce a task-aware HyperNet to modulate the diffusion models, enabling the adaptation to different C2I tasks simultaneously. Trained on nine unique C2I tasks, UniControl demonstrates impressive zero-shot generation abilities with unseen visual conditions. Experimental results show that UniControl often surpasses the performance of single-task-controlled methods of comparable model sizes. This control versatility positions UniControl as a significant advancement in the realm of controllable visual generation.
Along with the nearing completion of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), comes an increasing demand for accurate and reliable automated solutions to extract valuable information from the vast amount of data it will allow acquiring. Automated source finding is a particularly important task in this context, as it enables the detection and classification of astronomical objects. Deep-learning-based object detection and semantic segmentation models have proven to be suitable for this purpose. However, training such deep networks requires a high volume of labeled data, which is not trivial to obtain in the context of radio astronomy. Since data needs to be manually labeled by experts, this process is not scalable to large dataset sizes, limiting the possibilities of leveraging deep networks to address several tasks. In this work, we propose RADiff, a generative approach based on conditional diffusion models trained over an annotated radio dataset to generate synthetic images, containing radio sources of different morphologies, to augment existing datasets and reduce the problems caused by class imbalances. We also show that it is possible to generate fully-synthetic image-annotation pairs to automatically augment any annotated dataset. We evaluate the effectiveness of this approach by training a semantic segmentation model on a real dataset augmented in two ways: 1) using synthetic images obtained from real masks, and 2) generating images from synthetic semantic masks. We show an improvement in performance when applying augmentation, gaining up to 18% in performance when using real masks and 4% when augmenting with synthetic masks. Finally, we employ this model to generate large-scale radio maps with the objective of simulating Data Challenges.
Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly in Large Language Models (LLMs), associated with deep learning-based computer vision techniques, have shown substantial potential for automating a variety of tasks. One notable model is Visual ChatGPT, which combines ChatGPT's LLM capabilities with visual computation to enable effective image analysis. The model's ability to process images based on textual inputs can revolutionize diverse fields. However, its application in the remote sensing domain remains unexplored. This is the first paper to examine the potential of Visual ChatGPT, a cutting-edge LLM founded on the GPT architecture, to tackle the aspects of image processing related to the remote sensing domain. Among its current capabilities, Visual ChatGPT can generate textual descriptions of images, perform canny edge and straight line detection, and conduct image segmentation. These offer valuable insights into image content and facilitate the interpretation and extraction of information. By exploring the applicability of these techniques within publicly available datasets of satellite images, we demonstrate the current model's limitations in dealing with remote sensing images, highlighting its challenges and future prospects. Although still in early development, we believe that the combination of LLMs and visual models holds a significant potential to transform remote sensing image processing, creating accessible and practical application opportunities in the field.
Acquiring and annotating sufficient labeled data is crucial in developing accurate and robust learning-based models, but obtaining such data can be challenging in many medical image segmentation tasks. One promising solution is to synthesize realistic data with ground-truth mask annotations. However, no prior studies have explored generating complete 3D volumetric images with masks. In this paper, we present MedGen3D, a deep generative framework that can generate paired 3D medical images and masks. First, we represent the 3D medical data as 2D sequences and propose the Multi-Condition Diffusion Probabilistic Model (MC-DPM) to generate multi-label mask sequences adhering to anatomical geometry. Then, we use an image sequence generator and semantic diffusion refiner conditioned on the generated mask sequences to produce realistic 3D medical images that align with the generated masks. Our proposed framework guarantees accurate alignment between synthetic images and segmentation maps. Experiments on 3D thoracic CT and brain MRI datasets show that our synthetic data is both diverse and faithful to the original data, and demonstrate the benefits for downstream segmentation tasks. We anticipate that MedGen3D's ability to synthesize paired 3D medical images and masks will prove valuable in training deep learning models for medical imaging tasks.
Prompts have been shown to be an effective method to adapt a frozen Pretrained Language Model (PLM) to perform well on downstream tasks. Prompts can be represented by a human-engineered word sequence or by a learned continuous embedding. In this work, we investigate conditional and compositional differentiable prompting. We propose a new model, Prompt Production System (PRopS), which learns to transform task instructions or input metadata, into continuous prompts that elicit task-specific outputs from the PLM. Our model uses a modular network structure based on our neural formulation of Production Systems, which allows the model to learn discrete rules -- neural functions that learn to specialize in transforming particular prompt input patterns, making it suitable for compositional transfer learning and few-shot learning. We present extensive empirical and theoretical analysis and show that PRopS consistently surpasses other PLM adaptation techniques, and often improves upon fully fine-tuned models, on compositional generalization tasks, controllable summarization and multilingual translation, while needing fewer trainable parameters.
Investigating how people perceive virtual reality videos in the wild (\ie, those captured by everyday users) is a crucial and challenging task in VR-related applications due to complex \textit{authentic} distortions localized in space and time. Existing panoramic video databases only consider synthetic distortions, assume fixed viewing conditions, and are limited in size. To overcome these shortcomings, we construct the VR Video Quality in the Wild (VRVQW) database, which is one of the first of its kind, and contains $502$ user-generated videos with diverse content and distortion characteristics. Based on VRVQW, we conduct a formal psychophysical experiment to record the scanpaths and perceived quality scores from $139$ participants under two different viewing conditions. We provide a thorough statistical analysis of the recorded data, observing significant impact of viewing conditions on both human scanpaths and perceived quality. Moreover, we develop an objective quality assessment model for VR videos based on pseudocylindrical representation and convolution. Results on the proposed VRVQW show that our method is superior to existing video quality assessment models, only underperforming viewport-based models that otherwise rely on human scanpaths for projection. Last, we explore the additional use of the VRVQW dataset to benchmark saliency detection techniques, highlighting the need for further research. We have made the database and code available at \url{//github.com/limuhit/VR-Video-Quality-in-the-Wild}.
This paper investigates the performance of diffusion models for video anomaly detection (VAD) within the most challenging but also the most operational scenario in which the data annotations are not used. As being sparse, diverse, contextual, and often ambiguous, detecting abnormal events precisely is a very ambitious task. To this end, we rely only on the information-rich spatio-temporal data, and the reconstruction power of the diffusion models such that a high reconstruction error is utilized to decide the abnormality. Experiments performed on two large-scale video anomaly detection datasets demonstrate the consistent improvement of the proposed method over the state-of-the-art generative models while in some cases our method achieves better scores than the more complex models. This is the first study using a diffusion model and examining its parameters' influence to present guidance for VAD in surveillance scenarios.
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.
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.
Neural network models usually suffer from the challenge of incorporating commonsense knowledge into the open-domain dialogue systems. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware dialogue generation model (called TransDG), which transfers question representation and knowledge matching abilities from knowledge base question answering (KBQA) task to facilitate the utterance understanding and factual knowledge selection for dialogue generation. In addition, we propose a response guiding attention and a multi-step decoding strategy to steer our model to focus on relevant features for response generation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model has robust superiority over compared methods in generating informative and fluent dialogues. Our code is available at //github.com/siat-nlp/TransDG.
Visual Question Answering (VQA) models have struggled with counting objects in natural images so far. We identify a fundamental problem due to soft attention in these models as a cause. To circumvent this problem, we propose a neural network component that allows robust counting from object proposals. Experiments on a toy task show the effectiveness of this component and we obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on the number category of the VQA v2 dataset without negatively affecting other categories, even outperforming ensemble models with our single model. On a difficult balanced pair metric, the component gives a substantial improvement in counting over a strong baseline by 6.6%.