Particle-based deep generative models, such as gradient flows and score-based diffusion models, have recently gained traction thanks to their striking performance. Their principle of displacing particle distributions by differential equations is conventionally seen as opposed to the previously widespread generative adversarial networks (GANs), which involve training a pushforward generator network. In this paper, we challenge this interpretation and propose a novel framework that unifies particle and adversarial generative models by framing generator training as a generalization of particle models. This suggests that a generator is an optional addition to any such generative model. Consequently, integrating a generator into a score-based diffusion model and training a GAN without a generator naturally emerge from our framework. We empirically test the viability of these original models as proofs of concepts of potential applications of our framework.
Building on the success of PC-JeDi we introduce PC-Droid, a substantially improved diffusion model for the generation of jet particle clouds. By leveraging a new diffusion formulation, studying more recent integration solvers, and training on all jet types simultaneously, we are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance for all types of jets across all evaluation metrics. We study the trade-off between generation speed and quality by comparing two attention based architectures, as well as the potential of consistency distillation to reduce the number of diffusion steps. Both the faster architecture and consistency models demonstrate performance surpassing many competing models, with generation time up to two orders of magnitude faster than PC-JeDi.
The conventional understanding of adversarial training in generative adversarial networks (GANs) is that the discriminator is trained to estimate a divergence, and the generator learns to minimize this divergence. We argue that despite the fact that many variants of GANs were developed following this paradigm, the current theoretical understanding of GANs and their practical algorithms are inconsistent. In this paper, we leverage Wasserstein gradient flows which characterize the evolution of particles in the sample space, to gain theoretical insights and algorithmic inspiration of GANs. We introduce a unified generative modeling framework - MonoFlow: the particle evolution is rescaled via a monotonically increasing mapping of the log density ratio. Under our framework, adversarial training can be viewed as a procedure first obtaining MonoFlow's vector field via training the discriminator and the generator learns to draw the particle flow defined by the corresponding vector field. We also reveal the fundamental difference between variational divergence minimization and adversarial training. This analysis helps us to identify what types of generator loss functions can lead to the successful training of GANs and suggest that GANs may have more loss designs beyond the literature (e.g., non-saturated loss), as long as they realize MonoFlow. Consistent empirical studies are included to validate the effectiveness of our framework.
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.
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.
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.
Generative models are now capable of producing highly realistic images that look nearly indistinguishable from the data on which they are trained. This raises the question: if we have good enough generative models, do we still need datasets? We investigate this question in the setting of learning general-purpose visual representations from a black-box generative model rather than directly from data. Given an off-the-shelf image generator without any access to its training data, we train representations from the samples output by this generator. We compare several representation learning methods that can be applied to this setting, using the latent space of the generator to generate multiple "views" of the same semantic content. We show that for contrastive methods, this multiview data can naturally be used to identify positive pairs (nearby in latent space) and negative pairs (far apart in latent space). We find that the resulting representations rival those learned directly from real data, but that good performance requires care in the sampling strategy applied and the training method. Generative models can be viewed as a compressed and organized copy of a dataset, and we envision a future where more and more "model zoos" proliferate while datasets become increasingly unwieldy, missing, or private. This paper suggests several techniques for dealing with visual representation learning in such a future. Code is released on our project page: //ali-design.github.io/GenRep/
Sequential recommendation as an emerging topic has attracted increasing attention due to its important practical significance. Models based on deep learning and attention mechanism have achieved good performance in sequential recommendation. Recently, the generative models based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) have shown the unique advantage in collaborative filtering. In particular, the sequential VAE model as a recurrent version of VAE can effectively capture temporal dependencies among items in user sequence and perform sequential recommendation. However, VAE-based models suffer from a common limitation that the representational ability of the obtained approximate posterior distribution is limited, resulting in lower quality of generated samples. This is especially true for generating sequences. To solve the above problem, in this work, we propose a novel method called Adversarial and Contrastive Variational Autoencoder (ACVAE) for sequential recommendation. Specifically, we first introduce the adversarial training for sequence generation under the Adversarial Variational Bayes (AVB) framework, which enables our model to generate high-quality latent variables. Then, we employ the contrastive loss. The latent variables will be able to learn more personalized and salient characteristics by minimizing the contrastive loss. Besides, when encoding the sequence, we apply a recurrent and convolutional structure to capture global and local relationships in the sequence. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed ACVAE model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.
High spectral dimensionality and the shortage of annotations make hyperspectral image (HSI) classification a challenging problem. Recent studies suggest that convolutional neural networks can learn discriminative spatial features, which play a paramount role in HSI interpretation. However, most of these methods ignore the distinctive spectral-spatial characteristic of hyperspectral data. In addition, a large amount of unlabeled data remains an unexploited gold mine for efficient data use. Therefore, we proposed an integration of generative adversarial networks (GANs) and probabilistic graphical models for HSI classification. Specifically, we used a spectral-spatial generator and a discriminator to identify land cover categories of hyperspectral cubes. Moreover, to take advantage of a large amount of unlabeled data, we adopted a conditional random field to refine the preliminary classification results generated by GANs. Experimental results obtained using two commonly studied datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieved encouraging classification accuracy using a small number of data for training.