Axel Sauer

Axel Sauer, Tero Karras, Samuli Laine et al. · nvidia

Text-to-image synthesis has recently seen significant progress thanks to large pretrained language models, large-scale training data, and the introduction of scalable model families such as diffusion and autoregressive models. However, the best-performing models require iterative evaluation to generate a single sample. In contrast, generative adversarial networks (GANs) only need a single forward pass. They are thus much faster, but they currently remain far behind the state-of-the-art in large-scale text-to-image synthesis. This paper aims to identify the necessary steps to regain competitiveness. Our proposed model, StyleGAN-T, addresses the specific requirements of large-scale text-to-image synthesis, such as large capacity, stable training on diverse datasets, strong text alignment, and controllable variation vs. text alignment tradeoff. StyleGAN-T significantly improves over previous GANs and outperforms distilled diffusion models - the previous state-of-the-art in fast text-to-image synthesis - in terms of sample quality and speed.

Katja Schwarz, Axel Sauer, Michael Niemeyer et al.

State-of-the-art 3D-aware generative models rely on coordinate-based MLPs to parameterize 3D radiance fields. While demonstrating impressive results, querying an MLP for every sample along each ray leads to slow rendering. Therefore, existing approaches often render low-resolution feature maps and process them with an upsampling network to obtain the final image. Albeit efficient, neural rendering often entangles viewpoint and content such that changing the camera pose results in unwanted changes of geometry or appearance. Motivated by recent results in voxel-based novel view synthesis, we investigate the utility of sparse voxel grid representations for fast and 3D-consistent generative modeling in this paper. Our results demonstrate that monolithic MLPs can indeed be replaced by 3D convolutions when combining sparse voxel grids with progressive growing, free space pruning and appropriate regularization. To obtain a compact representation of the scene and allow for scaling to higher voxel resolutions, our model disentangles the foreground object (modeled in 3D) from the background (modeled in 2D). In contrast to existing approaches, our method requires only a single forward pass to generate a full 3D scene. It hence allows for efficient rendering from arbitrary viewpoints while yielding 3D consistent results with high visual fidelity.

Axel Sauer, Katja Schwarz, Andreas Geiger

Computer graphics has experienced a recent surge of data-centric approaches for photorealistic and controllable content creation. StyleGAN in particular sets new standards for generative modeling regarding image quality and controllability. However, StyleGAN's performance severely degrades on large unstructured datasets such as ImageNet. StyleGAN was designed for controllability; hence, prior works suspect its restrictive design to be unsuitable for diverse datasets. In contrast, we find the main limiting factor to be the current training strategy. Following the recently introduced Projected GAN paradigm, we leverage powerful neural network priors and a progressive growing strategy to successfully train the latest StyleGAN3 generator on ImageNet. Our final model, StyleGAN-XL, sets a new state-of-the-art on large-scale image synthesis and is the first to generate images at a resolution of $1024^2$ at such a dataset scale. We demonstrate that this model can invert and edit images beyond the narrow domain of portraits or specific object classes.