Yijia Wang

Weiming Chen, Qifan Liu, Siyi Liu et al.

Recent research has shown that text-to-image diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality images guided by text prompts. But can they be used to generate or approximate real-world images from the seed noise? This is known as the diffusion inversion problem, which serves as a fundamental building block for bridging diffusion models and real-world scenarios. However, existing diffusion inversion methods often suffer from low reconstruction quality or weak robustness. Two major challenges need to be carefully addressed: (1) the misalignment between the inversion and generation trajectories during the diffusion process, and (2) the mismatch between the diffusion inversion process and the VQ autoencoder (VQAE) reconstruction. To address these challenges, we introduce a latent bias vector at each inversion step, which is learned to reduce the misalignment between inversion and generation trajectories. We refer to this strategy as Latent Bias Optimization (LBO). Furthermore, we perform an approximate joint optimization of the diffusion inversion and VQAE reconstruction processes by learning to adjust the image latent representation, which serves as the connecting interface between them. We refer to this technique as Image Latent Boosting (ILB). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the image reconstruction quality of the diffusion model, as well as the performance of downstream tasks, including image editing and rare concept generation.

Yuto Mandai, Katie Seaborn, Tomoyasu Nakano et al.

"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with two varieties of computer voices: text-to-speech (TTS) and game character voices. We found kawaii "sweet spots" through manipulation of fundamental and formant frequencies, but only for certain voices and to a certain extent. Findings also suggest a ceiling effect for the kawaii vocalics of certain voices. We offer empirical validation of the preliminary kawaii vocalics model and an elementary method for manipulating kawaii perceptions of computer voice.

Weiming Chen, Yijia Wang, Zhihan Zhu et al.

We consider the problem of ultra-low bit rate visual communication for remote vision analysis, human interactions and control in challenging scenarios with very low communication bandwidth, such as deep space exploration, battlefield intelligence, and robot navigation in complex environments. In this paper, we ask the following important question: can we accurately reconstruct the visual scene using only a very small portion of the bit rate in existing coding methods while not sacrificing the accuracy of vision analysis and performance of human interactions? Existing text-to-image generation models offer a new approach for ultra-low bitrate image description. However, they can only achieve a semantic-level approximation of the visual scene, which is far insufficient for the purpose of visual communication and remote vision analysis and human interactions. To address this important issue, we propose to seamlessly integrate image generation with deep image compression, using joint text and coding latent to guide the rectified flow models for precise generation of the visual scene. The semantic text description and coding latent are both encoded and transmitted to the decoder at a very small bit rate. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can achieve the same image reconstruction quality and vision analysis accuracy as existing methods while using much less bandwidth. The code will be released upon paper acceptance.