Denoising Likelihood Score Matching for Conditional Score-based Data GenerationChen-Hao Chao, Wei-Fang Sun, Bo-Wun Cheng et al. · utoronto
Many existing conditional score-based data generation methods utilize Bayes' theorem to decompose the gradients of a log posterior density into a mixture of scores. These methods facilitate the training procedure of conditional score models, as a mixture of scores can be separately estimated using a score model and a classifier. However, our analysis indicates that the training objectives for the classifier in these methods may lead to a serious score mismatch issue, which corresponds to the situation that the estimated scores deviate from the true ones. Such an issue causes the samples to be misled by the deviated scores during the diffusion process, resulting in a degraded sampling quality. To resolve it, we formulate a novel training objective, called Denoising Likelihood Score Matching (DLSM) loss, for the classifier to match the gradients of the true log likelihood density. Our experimental evidence shows that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods on both Cifar-10 and Cifar-100 benchmarks noticeably in terms of several key evaluation metrics. We thus conclude that, by adopting DLSM, the conditional scores can be accurately modeled, and the effect of the score mismatch issue is alleviated.
Local Implicit Normalizing Flow for Arbitrary-Scale Image Super-ResolutionJie-En Yao, Li-Yuan Tsao, Yi-Chen Lo et al.
Flow-based methods have demonstrated promising results in addressing the ill-posed nature of super-resolution (SR) by learning the distribution of high-resolution (HR) images with the normalizing flow. However, these methods can only perform a predefined fixed-scale SR, limiting their potential in real-world applications. Meanwhile, arbitrary-scale SR has gained more attention and achieved great progress. Nonetheless, previous arbitrary-scale SR methods ignore the ill-posed problem and train the model with per-pixel L1 loss, leading to blurry SR outputs. In this work, we propose "Local Implicit Normalizing Flow" (LINF) as a unified solution to the above problems. LINF models the distribution of texture details under different scaling factors with normalizing flow. Thus, LINF can generate photo-realistic HR images with rich texture details in arbitrary scale factors. We evaluate LINF with extensive experiments and show that LINF achieves the state-of-the-art perceptual quality compared with prior arbitrary-scale SR methods.
ELDA: Using Edges to Have an Edge on Semantic Segmentation Based UDATing-Hsuan Liao, Huang-Ru Liao, Shan-Ya Yang et al. · utoronto
Many unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been proposed to bridge the domain gap by utilizing domain invariant information. Most approaches have chosen depth as such information and achieved remarkable success. Despite their effectiveness, using depth as domain invariant information in UDA tasks may lead to multiple issues, such as excessively high extraction costs and difficulties in achieving a reliable prediction quality. As a result, we introduce Edge Learning based Domain Adaptation (ELDA), a framework which incorporates edge information into its training process to serve as a type of domain invariant information. In our experiments, we quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that the incorporation of edge information is indeed beneficial and effective and enables ELDA to outperform the contemporary state-of-the-art methods on two commonly adopted benchmarks for semantic segmentation based UDA tasks. In addition, we show that ELDA is able to better separate the feature distributions of different classes. We further provide an ablation analysis to justify our design decisions.
Boosting Flow-based Generative Super-Resolution Models via Learned PriorLi-Yuan Tsao, Yi-Chen Lo, Chia-Che Chang et al.
Flow-based super-resolution (SR) models have demonstrated astonishing capabilities in generating high-quality images. However, these methods encounter several challenges during image generation, such as grid artifacts, exploding inverses, and suboptimal results due to a fixed sampling temperature. To overcome these issues, this work introduces a conditional learned prior to the inference phase of a flow-based SR model. This prior is a latent code predicted by our proposed latent module conditioned on the low-resolution image, which is then transformed by the flow model into an SR image. Our framework is designed to seamlessly integrate with any contemporary flow-based SR model without modifying its architecture or pre-trained weights. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed framework through extensive experiments and ablation analyses. The proposed framework successfully addresses all the inherent issues in flow-based SR models and enhances their performance in various SR scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/liyuantsao/BFSR