In text-to-image generation tasks, the advancements of diffusion models have facilitated the fidelity of generated results. However, these models encounter challenges when processing text prompts containing multiple entities and attributes. The uneven distribution of attention results in the issues of entity leakage and attribute misalignment. Training from scratch to address this issue requires numerous labeled data and is resource-consuming. Motivated by this, we propose an attribution-focusing mechanism, a training-free phase-wise mechanism by modulation of attention for diffusion model. One of our core ideas is to guide the model to concentrate on the corresponding syntactic components of the prompt at distinct timesteps. To achieve this, we incorporate a temperature control mechanism within the early phases of the self-attention modules to mitigate entity leakage issues. An object-focused masking scheme and a phase-wise dynamic weight control mechanism are integrated into the cross-attention modules, enabling the model to discern the affiliation of semantic information between entities more effectively. The experimental results in various alignment scenarios demonstrate that our model attain better image-text alignment with minimal additional computational cost.
Deep learning models for traffic forecasting often assume the residual is independent and isotropic across time and space. This assumption simplifies loss functions such as mean absolute error, but real-world residual processes often exhibit significant autocorrelation and structured spatiotemporal correlation. This paper introduces a dynamic regression (DR) framework to enhance existing spatiotemporal traffic forecasting models by incorporating structured learning for the residual process. We assume the residual of the base model (i.e., a well-developed traffic forecasting model) follows a matrix-variate seasonal autoregressive (AR) model, which is seamlessly integrated into the training process through the redesign of the loss function. Importantly, the parameters of the DR framework are jointly optimized alongside the base model. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep traffic forecasting models using both speed and flow datasets, demonstrating improved performance and providing interpretable AR coefficients and spatiotemporal covariance matrices.
Diffusion Models (DMs) have achieved great success in image generation and other fields. By fine sampling through the trajectory defined by the SDE/ODE solver based on a well-trained score model, DMs can generate remarkable high-quality results. However, this precise sampling often requires multiple steps and is computationally demanding. To address this problem, instance-based distillation methods have been proposed to distill a one-step generator from a DM by having a simpler student model mimic a more complex teacher model. Yet, our research reveals an inherent limitations in these methods: the teacher model, with more steps and more parameters, occupies different local minima compared to the student model, leading to suboptimal performance when the student model attempts to replicate the teacher. To avoid this problem, we introduce a novel distributional distillation method, which uses an exclusive distributional loss. This method exceeds state-of-the-art (SOTA) results while requiring significantly fewer training images. Additionally, we show that DMs' layers are activated differently at different time steps, leading to an inherent capability to generate images in a single step. Freezing most of the convolutional layers in a DM during distributional distillation leads to further performance improvements. Our method achieves the SOTA results on CIFAR-10 (FID 1.54), AFHQv2 64x64 (FID 1.23), FFHQ 64x64 (FID 0.85) and ImageNet 64x64 (FID 1.16) with great efficiency. Most of those results are obtained with only 5 million training images within 6 hours on 8 A100 GPUs. This breakthrough not only enhances the understanding of efficient image generation models but also offers a scalable framework for advancing the state of the art in various applications.
The generation of high-quality human images through text-to-image (T2I) methods is a significant yet challenging task. Distinct from general image generation, human image synthesis must satisfy stringent criteria related to human pose, anatomy, and alignment with textual prompts, making it particularly difficult to achieve realistic results. Recent advancements in T2I generation based on diffusion models have shown promise, yet challenges remain in meeting human-specific preferences. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach tailored specifically for human image generation utilizing Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Specifically, we introduce an efficient method for constructing a specialized DPO dataset for training human image generation models without the need for costly human feedback. We also propose a modified loss function that enhances the DPO training process by minimizing artifacts and improving image fidelity. Our method demonstrates its versatility and effectiveness in generating human images, including personalized text-to-image generation. Through comprehensive evaluations, we show that our approach significantly advances the state of human image generation, achieving superior results in terms of natural anatomies, poses, and text-image alignment.
Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved tremendous success in the field of controllable image generation, while also coming along with issues of privacy leakage and data copyrights. Membership inference arises in these contexts as a potential auditing method for detecting unauthorized data usage. While some efforts have been made on diffusion models, they are not applicable to text-to-image diffusion models due to the high computation overhead and enhanced generalization capabilities. In this paper, we first identify a conditional overfitting phenomenon in text-to-image diffusion models, indicating that these models tend to overfit the conditional distribution of images given the text rather than the marginal distribution of images. Based on this observation, we derive an analytical indicator, namely Conditional Likelihood Discrepancy (CLiD), to perform membership inference, which reduces the stochasticity in estimating the memorization of individual samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms previous methods across various data distributions and scales. Additionally, our method shows superior resistance to overfitting mitigation strategies such as early stopping and data augmentation.
Deferring systems extend supervised Machine Learning (ML) models with the possibility to defer predictions to human experts. However, evaluating the impact of a deferring strategy on system accuracy is still an overlooked area. This paper fills this gap by evaluating deferring systems through a causal lens. We link the potential outcomes framework for causal inference with deferring systems. This allows us to identify the causal impact of the deferring strategy on predictive accuracy. We distinguish two scenarios. In the first one, we can access both the human and the ML model predictions for the deferred instances. In such a case, we can identify the individual causal effects for deferred instances and aggregates of them. In the second scenario, only human predictions are available for the deferred instances. In this case, we can resort to regression discontinuity design to estimate a local causal effect. We empirically evaluate our approach on synthetic and real datasets for seven deferring systems from the literature.
This work introduces composed image retrieval to remote sensing. It allows to query a large image archive by image examples alternated by a textual description, enriching the descriptive power over unimodal queries, either visual or textual. Various attributes can be modified by the textual part, such as shape, color, or context. A novel method fusing image-to-image and text-to-image similarity is introduced. We demonstrate that a vision-language model possesses sufficient descriptive power and no further learning step or training data are necessary. We present a new evaluation benchmark focused on color, context, density, existence, quantity, and shape modifications. Our work not only sets the state-of-the-art for this task, but also serves as a foundational step in addressing a gap in the field of remote sensing image retrieval. Code at: //github.com/billpsomas/rscir
As image recognition models become more prevalent, scalable coding methods for machines and humans gain more importance. Applications of image recognition models include traffic monitoring and farm management. In these use cases, the scalable coding method proves effective because the tasks require occasional image checking by humans. Existing image compression methods for humans and machines meet these requirements to some extent. However, these compression methods are effective solely for specific image recognition models. We propose a learning-based scalable image coding method for humans and machines that is compatible with numerous image recognition models. We combine an image compression model for machines with a compression model, providing additional information to facilitate image decoding for humans. The features in these compression models are fused using a feature fusion network to achieve efficient image compression. Our method's additional information compression model is adjusted to reduce the number of parameters by enabling combinations of features of different sizes in the feature fusion network. Our approach confirms that the feature fusion network efficiently combines image compression models while reducing the number of parameters. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scalable coding method by evaluating the image compression performance in terms of decoded image quality and bitrate.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degree-scalers (which generalize the sum aggregator). Finally, we compare the capacity of different models to capture and exploit the graph structure via a novel benchmark containing multiple tasks taken from classical graph theory, alongside existing benchmarks from real-world domains, all of which demonstrate the strength of our model. With this work, we hope to steer some of the GNN research towards new aggregation methods which we believe are essential in the search for powerful and robust models.
Answering questions that require reading texts in an image is challenging for current models. One key difficulty of this task is that rare, polysemous, and ambiguous words frequently appear in images, e.g., names of places, products, and sports teams. To overcome this difficulty, only resorting to pre-trained word embedding models is far from enough. A desired model should utilize the rich information in multiple modalities of the image to help understand the meaning of scene texts, e.g., the prominent text on a bottle is most likely to be the brand. Following this idea, we propose a novel VQA approach, Multi-Modal Graph Neural Network (MM-GNN). It first represents an image as a graph consisting of three sub-graphs, depicting visual, semantic, and numeric modalities respectively. Then, we introduce three aggregators which guide the message passing from one graph to another to utilize the contexts in various modalities, so as to refine the features of nodes. The updated nodes have better features for the downstream question answering module. Experimental evaluations show that our MM-GNN represents the scene texts better and obviously facilitates the performances on two VQA tasks that require reading scene texts.
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.