Zedong Zhang

Jun Li, Zedong Zhang, Jian Yang

Generating creative combinatorial objects from two seemingly unrelated object texts is a challenging task in text-to-image synthesis, often hindered by a focus on emulating existing data distributions. In this paper, we develop a straightforward yet highly effective method, called \textbf{balance swap-sampling}. First, we propose a swapping mechanism that generates a novel combinatorial object image set by randomly exchanging intrinsic elements of two text embeddings through a cutting-edge diffusion model. Second, we introduce a balance swapping region to efficiently sample a small subset from the newly generated image set by balancing CLIP distances between the new images and their original generations, increasing the likelihood of accepting the high-quality combinations. Last, we employ a segmentation method to compare CLIP distances among the segmented components, ultimately selecting the most promising object from the sampled subset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms recent SOTA T2I methods. Surprisingly, our results even rival those of human artists, such as frog-broccoli.

Eric Stumpe, Miroslav Despotovic, Zedong Zhang et al.

The assessment and valuation of real estate requires large datasets with real estate information. Unfortunately, real estate databases are usually sparse in practice, i.e., not for each property every important attribute is available. In this paper, we study the potential of predicting high-level real estate attributes from visual data, specifically from two visual modalities, namely indoor (interior) and outdoor (facade) photos. We design three models using different multimodal fusion strategies and evaluate them for three different use cases. Thereby, a particular challenge is to handle missing modalities. We evaluate different fusion strategies, present baselines for the different prediction tasks, and find that enriching the training data with additional incomplete samples can lead to an improvement in prediction accuracy. Furthermore, the fusion of information from indoor and outdoor photos results in a performance boost of up to 5% in Macro F1-score.

Yiwen Chen, Zedong Zhang, Haofeng Liu et al.

In recent years, a myriad of superlative works on intelligent robotics policies have been done, thanks to advances in machine learning. However, inefficiency and lack of transfer ability hindered algorithms from pragmatic applications, especially in human-robot collaboration, when few-shot fast learning and high flexibility become a wherewithal. To surmount this obstacle, we refer to a "Policy Pool", containing pre-trained skills that can be easily accessed and reused. An agent is employed to govern the "Policy Pool" by unfolding requisite skills in a flexible sequence, contingent on task specific predilection. This predilection can be automatically interpreted from one or few human expert demonstrations. Under this hierarchical setting, our algorithm is able to pick up a sparse-reward, multi-stage knack with only one demonstration in a Mini-Grid environment, showing the potential for instantly mastering complex robotics skills from human instructors. Additionally, the innate quality of our algorithm also allows for lifelong learning, making it a versatile agent.

Zeren Xiong, Zedong Zhang, Zikun Chen et al.

In this paper, we study an object synthesis task that combines an object text with an object image to create a new object image. However, most diffusion models struggle with this task, \textit{i.e.}, often generating an object that predominantly reflects either the text or the image due to an imbalance between their inputs. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective method called Adaptive Text-Image Harmony (ATIH) to generate novel and surprising objects. First, we introduce a scale factor and an injection step to balance text and image features in cross-attention and to preserve image information in self-attention during the text-image inversion diffusion process, respectively. Second, to better integrate object text and image, we design a balanced loss function with a noise parameter, ensuring both optimal editability and fidelity of the object image. Third, to adaptively adjust these parameters, we present a novel similarity score function that not only maximizes the similarities between the generated object image and the input text/image but also balances these similarities to harmonize text and image integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing remarkable object creations such as colobus-glass jar. Project page: https://xzr52.github.io/ATIH/.

Zeren Xiong, Yue Yu, Zedong Zhang et al.

Creating novel images by fusing visual cues from multiple sources is a fundamental yet underexplored problem in image-to-image generation, with broad applications in artistic creation, virtual reality and visual media. Existing methods often face two key challenges: coexistent generation, where multiple objects are simply juxtaposed without true integration, and bias generation, where one object dominates the output due to semantic imbalance. To address these issues, we propose Visual Mixing Diffusion (VMDiff), a simple yet effective diffusion-based framework that synthesizes a single, coherent object by integrating two input images at both noise and latent levels. Our approach comprises: (1) a hybrid sampling process that combines guided denoising, inversion, and spherical interpolation with adjustable parameters to achieve structure-aware fusion, mitigating coexistent generation; and (2) an efficient adaptive adjustment module, which introduces a novel similarity-based score to automatically and adaptively search for optimal parameters, countering semantic bias. Experiments on a curated benchmark of 780 concept pairs demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines in visual quality, semantic consistency, and human-rated creativity.

Miroslav Despotovic, Zedong Zhang, Eric Stumpe et al.

We describe a proof-of-concept for annotating real estate images using simple iterative rule-based semi-supervised learning. In this study, we have gained important insights into the content characteristics and uniqueness of individual image classes as well as essential requirements for a practical implementation.