Guojin Zhong

Guojin Zhong, Jin Yuan, Pan Wang et al.

The recently rising markup-to-image generation poses greater challenges as compared to natural image generation, due to its low tolerance for errors as well as the complex sequence and context correlations between markup and rendered image. This paper proposes a novel model named "Contrast-augmented Diffusion Model with Fine-grained Sequence Alignment" (FSA-CDM), which introduces contrastive positive/negative samples into the diffusion model to boost performance for markup-to-image generation. Technically, we design a fine-grained cross-modal alignment module to well explore the sequence similarity between the two modalities for learning robust feature representations. To improve the generalization ability, we propose a contrast-augmented diffusion model to explicitly explore positive and negative samples by maximizing a novel contrastive variational objective, which is mathematically inferred to provide a tighter bound for the model's optimization. Moreover, the context-aware cross attention module is developed to capture the contextual information within markup language during the denoising process, yielding better noise prediction results. Extensive experiments are conducted on four benchmark datasets from different domains, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed components in FSA-CDM, significantly exceeding state-of-the-art performance by about 2%-12% DTW improvements. The code will be released at https://github.com/zgj77/FSACDM.

Xu Zhang, Jin Yuan, Hanwang Zhang et al.

Controllable image semantic understanding tasks, such as captioning or segmentation, necessitate users to input a prompt (e.g., text or bounding boxes) to predict a unique outcome, presenting challenges such as high-cost prompt input or limited information output. This paper introduces a new task ``Image Collaborative Segmentation and Captioning'' (SegCaptioning), which aims to translate a straightforward prompt, like a bounding box around an object, into diverse semantic interpretations represented by (caption, masks) pairs, allowing flexible result selection by users. This task poses significant challenges, including accurately capturing a user's intention from a minimal prompt while simultaneously predicting multiple semantically aligned caption words and masks. Technically, we propose a novel Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Model that leverages structured scene graph features for correlated mask-caption prediction. Initially, we introduce a Prompt-Centric Scene Graph Adaptor to map a user's prompt to a scene graph, effectively capturing his intention. Subsequently, we employ a diffusion process incorporating a Scene Graph Guided Bimodal Transformer to predict correlated caption-mask pairs by uncovering intricate correlations between them. To ensure accurate alignment, we design a Multi-Entities Contrastive Learning loss to explicitly align visual and textual entities by considering inter-modal similarity, resulting in well-aligned caption-mask pairs. Extensive experiments conducted on two datasets demonstrate that SGDiff achieves superior performance in SegCaptioning, yielding promising results for both captioning and segmentation tasks with minimal prompt input.