In this work, we present DiffVoice, a novel text-to-speech model based on latent diffusion. We propose to first encode speech signals into a phoneme-rate latent representation with a variational autoencoder enhanced by adversarial training, and then jointly model the duration and the latent representation with a diffusion model. Subjective evaluations on LJSpeech and LibriTTS datasets demonstrate that our method beats the best publicly available systems in naturalness. By adopting recent generative inverse problem solving algorithms for diffusion models, DiffVoice achieves the state-of-the-art performance in text-based speech editing, and zero-shot adaptation.
Multi-modal data-sets are ubiquitous in modern applications, and multi-modal Variational Autoencoders are a popular family of models that aim to learn a joint representation of the different modalities. However, existing approaches suffer from a coherence-quality tradeoff, where models with good generation quality lack generative coherence across modalities, and vice versa. We discuss the limitations underlying the unsatisfactory performance of existing methods, to motivate the need for a different approach. We propose a novel method that uses a set of independently trained, uni-modal, deterministic autoencoders. Individual latent variables are concatenated into a common latent space, which is fed to a masked diffusion model to enable generative modeling. We also introduce a new multi-time training method to learn the conditional score network for multi-modal diffusion. Our methodology substantially outperforms competitors in both generation quality and coherence, as shown through an extensive experimental campaign.
With the demand for autonomous control and personalized speech generation, the style control and transfer in Text-to-Speech (TTS) is becoming more and more important. In this paper, we propose a new TTS system that can perform style transfer with interpretability and high fidelity. Firstly, we design a TTS system that combines variational autoencoder (VAE) and diffusion refiner to get refined mel-spectrograms. Specifically, a two-stage and a one-stage system are designed respectively, to improve the audio quality and the performance of style transfer. Secondly, a diffusion bridge of quantized VAE is designed to efficiently learn complex discrete style representations and improve the performance of style transfer. To have a better ability of style transfer, we introduce ControlVAE to improve the reconstruction quality and have good interpretability simultaneously. Experiments on LibriTTS dataset demonstrate that our method is more effective than baseline models.
Recently, text-to-image models have been thriving. Despite their powerful generative capacity, our research has uncovered a lack of robustness in this generation process. Specifically, the introduction of small perturbations to the text prompts can result in the blending of primary subjects with other categories or their complete disappearance in the generated images. In this paper, we propose Auto-attack on Text-to-image Models (ATM), a gradient-based approach, to effectively and efficiently generate such perturbations. By learning a Gumbel Softmax distribution, we can make the discrete process of word replacement or extension continuous, thus ensuring the differentiability of the perturbation generation. Once the distribution is learned, ATM can sample multiple attack samples simultaneously. These attack samples can prevent the generative model from generating the desired subjects without compromising image quality. ATM has achieved a 91.1% success rate in short-text attacks and an 81.2% success rate in long-text attacks. Further empirical analysis revealed four attack patterns based on: 1) the variability in generation speed, 2) the similarity of coarse-grained characteristics, 3) the polysemy of words, and 4) the positioning of words.
Recently it has been shown that using diffusion models for inverse problems can lead to remarkable results. However, these approaches require a closed-form expression of the degradation model and can not support complex degradations. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method (INDigo) that combines invertible neural networks (INN) and diffusion models for general inverse problems. Specifically, we train the forward process of INN to simulate an arbitrary degradation process and use the inverse as a reconstruction process. During the diffusion sampling process, we impose an additional data-consistency step that minimizes the distance between the intermediate result and the INN-optimized result at every iteration, where the INN-optimized image is composed of the coarse information given by the observed degraded image and the details generated by the diffusion process. With the help of INN, our algorithm effectively estimates the details lost in the degradation process and is no longer limited by the requirement of knowing the closed-form expression of the degradation model. Experiments demonstrate that our algorithm obtains competitive results compared with recently leading methods both quantitatively and visually. Moreover, our algorithm performs well on more complex degradation models and real-world low-quality images.
Modern predictive models are often deployed to environments in which computational budgets are dynamic. Anytime algorithms are well-suited to such environments as, at any point during computation, they can output a prediction whose quality is a function of computation time. Early-exit neural networks have garnered attention in the context of anytime computation due to their capability to provide intermediate predictions at various stages throughout the network. However, we demonstrate that current early-exit networks are not directly applicable to anytime settings, as the quality of predictions for individual data points is not guaranteed to improve with longer computation. To address this shortcoming, we propose an elegant post-hoc modification, based on the Product-of-Experts, that encourages an early-exit network to become gradually confident. This gives our deep models the property of conditional monotonicity in the prediction quality -- an essential stepping stone towards truly anytime predictive modeling using early-exit architectures. Our empirical results on standard image-classification tasks demonstrate that such behaviors can be achieved while preserving competitive accuracy on average.
Recently, text-to-image models have been thriving. Despite their powerful generative capacity, our research has uncovered a lack of robustness in this generation process. Specifically, the introduction of small perturbations to the text prompts can result in the blending of primary subjects with other categories or their complete disappearance in the generated images. In this paper, we propose Auto-attack on Text-to-image Models (ATM), a gradient-based approach, to effectively and efficiently generate such perturbations. By learning a Gumbel Softmax distribution, we can make the discrete process of word replacement or extension continuous, thus ensuring the differentiability of the perturbation generation. Once the distribution is learned, ATM can sample multiple attack samples simultaneously. These attack samples can prevent the generative model from generating the desired subjects without compromising image quality. ATM has achieved a 91.1% success rate in short-text attacks and an 81.2% success rate in long-text attacks. Further empirical analysis revealed four attack patterns based on: 1) the variability in generation speed, 2) the similarity of coarse-grained characteristics, 3) the polysemy of words, and 4) the positioning of words.
Latent variable models (LVMs) with discrete compositional latents are an important but challenging setting due to a combinatorially large number of possible configurations of the latents. A key tradeoff in modeling the posteriors over latents is between expressivity and tractable optimization. For algorithms based on expectation-maximization (EM), the E-step is often intractable without restrictive approximations to the posterior. We propose the use of GFlowNets, algorithms for sampling from an unnormalized density by learning a stochastic policy for sequential construction of samples, for this intractable E-step. By training GFlowNets to sample from the posterior over latents, we take advantage of their strengths as amortized variational inference algorithms for complex distributions over discrete structures. Our approach, GFlowNet-EM, enables the training of expressive LVMs with discrete compositional latents, as shown by experiments on non-context-free grammar induction and on images using discrete variational autoencoders (VAEs) without conditional independence enforced in the encoder.
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.
Diffusion models are a class of deep generative models that have shown impressive results on various tasks with dense theoretical founding. Although diffusion models have achieved impressive quality and diversity of sample synthesis than other state-of-the-art models, they still suffer from costly sampling procedure and sub-optimal likelihood estimation. Recent studies have shown great enthusiasm on improving the performance of diffusion model. In this article, we present a first comprehensive review of existing variants of the diffusion models. Specifically, we provide a first taxonomy of diffusion models and categorize them variants to three types, namely sampling-acceleration enhancement, likelihood-maximization enhancement and data-generalization enhancement. We also introduce in detail other five generative models (i.e., variational autoencoders, generative adversarial networks, normalizing flow, autoregressive models, and energy-based models), and clarify the connections between diffusion models and these generative models. Then we make a thorough investigation into the applications of diffusion models, including computer vision, natural language processing, waveform signal processing, multi-modal modeling, molecular graph generation, time series modeling, and adversarial purification. Furthermore, we propose new perspectives pertaining to the development of this generative model.
Diffusion models have shown incredible capabilities as generative models; indeed, they power the current state-of-the-art models on text-conditioned image generation such as Imagen and DALL-E 2. In this work we review, demystify, and unify the understanding of diffusion models across both variational and score-based perspectives. We first derive Variational Diffusion Models (VDM) as a special case of a Markovian Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder, where three key assumptions enable tractable computation and scalable optimization of the ELBO. We then prove that optimizing a VDM boils down to learning a neural network to predict one of three potential objectives: the original source input from any arbitrary noisification of it, the original source noise from any arbitrarily noisified input, or the score function of a noisified input at any arbitrary noise level. We then dive deeper into what it means to learn the score function, and connect the variational perspective of a diffusion model explicitly with the Score-based Generative Modeling perspective through Tweedie's Formula. Lastly, we cover how to learn a conditional distribution using diffusion models via guidance.