Wenze Hu

Tsu-Jui Fu, Wenze Hu, Xianzhi Du et al. · microsoft-research

Instruction-based image editing improves the controllability and flexibility of image manipulation via natural commands without elaborate descriptions or regional masks. However, human instructions are sometimes too brief for current methods to capture and follow. Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising capabilities in cross-modal understanding and visual-aware response generation via LMs. We investigate how MLLMs facilitate edit instructions and present MLLM-Guided Image Editing (MGIE). MGIE learns to derive expressive instructions and provides explicit guidance. The editing model jointly captures this visual imagination and performs manipulation through end-to-end training. We evaluate various aspects of Photoshop-style modification, global photo optimization, and local editing. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that expressive instructions are crucial to instruction-based image editing, and our MGIE can lead to a notable improvement in automatic metrics and human evaluation while maintaining competitive inference efficiency.

Feng Lin, Wenze Hu, Yaowei Wang et al.

Over the past few years, there has been growing interest in developing a broad, universal, and general-purpose computer vision system. Such systems have the potential to address a wide range of vision tasks simultaneously, without being limited to specific problems or data domains. This universality is crucial for practical, real-world computer vision applications. In this study, our focus is on a specific challenge: the large-scale, multi-domain universal object detection problem, which contributes to the broader goal of achieving a universal vision system. This problem presents several intricate challenges, including cross-dataset category label duplication, label conflicts, and the necessity to handle hierarchical taxonomies. To address these challenges, we introduce our approach to label handling, hierarchy-aware loss design, and resource-efficient model training utilizing a pre-trained large vision model. Our method has demonstrated remarkable performance, securing a prestigious second-place ranking in the object detection track of the Robust Vision Challenge 2022 (RVC 2022) on a million-scale cross-dataset object detection benchmark. We believe that our comprehensive study will serve as a valuable reference and offer an alternative approach for addressing similar challenges within the computer vision community. The source code for our work is openly available at https://github.com/linfeng93/Large-UniDet.

Phoenix X. Huang, Zhiwei Zhao, Chao Liu et al.

Automated machine learning systems for non-experts could be critical for industries to adopt artificial intelligence to their own applications. This paper detailed the engineering system implementation of an automated machine learning system called YMIR, which completely relies on graphical interface to interact with users. After importing training/validation data into the system, a user without AI knowledge can label the data, train models, perform data mining and evaluation by simply clicking buttons. The paper described: 1) Open implementation of model training and inference through docker containers. 2) Implementation of task and resource management. 3) Integration of Labeling software. 4) Implementation of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) with a rebuilt collaborative development paradigm. We also provide subsequent case study on training models with the system. We hope this paper can facilitate the prosperity of our automated machine learning community from industry application perspective. The code of the system has already been released to GitHub (https://github.com/industryessentials/ymir).

Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu, Xiaoyu Wang

Recently, vision transformers started to show impressive results which outperform large convolution based models significantly. However, in the area of small models for mobile or resource constrained devices, ConvNet still has its own advantages in both performance and model complexity. We propose ParC-Net, a pure ConvNet based backbone model that further strengthens these advantages by fusing the merits of vision transformers into ConvNets. Specifically, we propose position aware circular convolution (ParC), a light-weight convolution op which boasts a global receptive field while producing location sensitive features as in local convolutions. We combine the ParCs and squeeze-exictation ops to form a meta-former like model block, which further has the attention mechanism like transformers. The aforementioned block can be used in plug-and-play manner to replace relevant blocks in ConvNets or transformers. Experiment results show that the proposed ParC-Net achieves better performance than popular light-weight ConvNets and vision transformer based models in common vision tasks and datasets, while having fewer parameters and faster inference speed. For classification on ImageNet-1k, ParC-Net achieves 78.6% top-1 accuracy with about 5.0 million parameters, saving 11% parameters and 13% computational cost but gaining 0.2% higher accuracy and 23% faster inference speed (on ARM based Rockchip RK3288) compared with MobileViT, and uses only 0.5 times parameters but gaining 2.7% accuracy compared with DeIT. On MS-COCO object detection and PASCAL VOC segmentation tasks, ParC-Net also shows better performance. Source code is available at https://github.com/hkzhang91/ParC-Net

Yun Yi, Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu et al.

With the wide and deep adoption of deep learning models in real applications, there is an increasing need to model and learn the representations of the neural networks themselves. These models can be used to estimate attributes of different neural network architectures such as the accuracy and latency, without running the actual training or inference tasks. In this paper, we propose a neural architecture representation model that can be used to estimate these attributes holistically. Specifically, we first propose a simple and effective tokenizer to encode both the operation and topology information of a neural network into a single sequence. Then, we design a multi-stage fusion transformer to build a compact vector representation from the converted sequence. For efficient model training, we further propose an information flow consistency augmentation and correspondingly design an architecture consistency loss, which brings more benefits with less augmentation samples compared with previous random augmentation strategies. Experiment results on NAS-Bench-101, NAS-Bench-201, DARTS search space and NNLQP show that our proposed framework can be used to predict the aforementioned latency and accuracy attributes of both cell architectures and whole deep neural networks, and achieves promising performance. Code is available at https://github.com/yuny220/NAR-Former.

Zhanpeng Feng, Shiliang Zhang, Rinyoichi Takezoe et al.

Active learning is an important technology for automated machine learning systems. In contrast to Neural Architecture Search (NAS) which aims at automating neural network architecture design, active learning aims at automating training data selection. It is especially critical for training a long-tailed task, in which positive samples are sparsely distributed. Active learning alleviates the expensive data annotation issue through incrementally training models powered with efficient data selection. Instead of annotating all unlabeled samples, it iteratively selects and annotates the most valuable samples. Active learning has been popular in image classification, but has not been fully explored in object detection. Most of current approaches on object detection are evaluated with different settings, making it difficult to fairly compare their performance. To facilitate the research in this field, this paper contributes an active learning benchmark framework named as ALBench for evaluating active learning in object detection. Developed on an automatic deep model training system, this ALBench framework is easy-to-use, compatible with different active learning algorithms, and ensures the same training and testing protocols. We hope this automated benchmark system help researchers to easily reproduce literature's performance and have objective comparisons with prior arts. The code will be release through Github.

Ruihan Xu, Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu et al.

Transformers have shown great potential in various computer vision tasks. By borrowing design concepts from transformers, many studies revolutionized CNNs and showed remarkable results. This paper falls in this line of studies. Specifically, we propose a new convolutional neural network, ParCNetV2, that extends position-aware circular convolution (ParCNet) with oversized convolutions and bifurcate gate units to enhance attention. The oversized convolution employs a kernel with twice the input size to model long-range dependencies through a global receptive field. Simultaneously, it achieves implicit positional encoding by removing the shift-invariant property from convolution kernels, i.e., the effective kernels at different spatial locations are different when the kernel size is twice as large as the input size. The bifurcate gate unit implements an attention mechanism similar to self-attention in transformers. It is applied through element-wise multiplication of the two branches, one serves as feature transformation while the other serves as attention weights. Additionally, we introduce a uniform local-global convolution block to unify the design of the early and late stage convolution blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method over other convolutional neural networks and hybrid models that combine CNNs and transformers. Code will be released.

Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu, Xiaoyu Wang

Currently, one main research line in designing a more efficient vision transformer is reducing the computational cost of self attention modules by adopting sparse attention or using local attention windows. In contrast, we propose a different approach that aims to improve the performance of transformer-based architectures by densifying the attention pattern. Specifically, we proposed forward cross attention for hybrid vision transformer (FcaFormer), where tokens from previous blocks in the same stage are secondary used. To achieve this, the FcaFormer leverages two innovative components: learnable scale factors (LSFs) and a token merge and enhancement module (TME). The LSFs enable efficient processing of cross tokens, while the TME generates representative cross tokens. By integrating these components, the proposed FcaFormer enhances the interactions of tokens across blocks with potentially different semantics, and encourages more information flows to the lower levels. Based on the forward cross attention (Fca), we have designed a series of FcaFormer models that achieve the best trade-off between model size, computational cost, memory cost, and accuracy. For example, without the need for knowledge distillation to strengthen training, our FcaFormer achieves 83.1% top-1 accuracy on Imagenet with only 16.3 million parameters and about 3.6 billion MACs. This saves almost half of the parameters and a few computational costs while achieving 0.7% higher accuracy compared to distilled EfficientFormer.

Tao Yang, Haokui Zhang, Wenze Hu et al.

Transformer models have made tremendous progress in various fields in recent years. In the field of computer vision, vision transformers (ViTs) also become strong alternatives to convolutional neural networks (ConvNets), yet they have not been able to replace ConvNets since both have their own merits. For instance, ViTs are good at extracting global features with attention mechanisms while ConvNets are more efficient in modeling local relationships due to their strong inductive bias. A natural idea that arises is to combine the strengths of both ConvNets and ViTs to design new structures. In this paper, we propose a new basic neural network operator named position-aware circular convolution (ParC) and its accelerated version Fast-ParC. The ParC operator can capture global features by using a global kernel and circular convolution while keeping location sensitiveness by employing position embeddings. Our Fast-ParC further reduces the O(n2) time complexity of ParC to O(n log n) using Fast Fourier Transform. This acceleration makes it possible to use global convolution in the early stages of models with large feature maps, yet still maintains the overall computational cost comparable with using 3x3 or 7x7 kernels. The proposed operation can be used in a plug-and-play manner to 1) convert ViTs to pure-ConvNet architecture to enjoy wider hardware support and achieve higher inference speed; 2) replacing traditional convolutions in the deep stage of ConvNets to improve accuracy by enlarging the effective receptive field. Experiment results show that our ParC op can effectively enlarge the receptive field of traditional ConvNets, and adopting the proposed op benefits both ViTs and ConvNet models on all three popular vision tasks, image classification, object

Yanghao Li, Rui Qian, Bowen Pan et al.

Unified multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) that can both understand and generate visual content hold immense potential. However, existing open-source models often suffer from a performance trade-off between these capabilities. We present Manzano, a simple and scalable unified framework that substantially reduces this tension by coupling a hybrid image tokenizer with a well-curated training recipe. A single shared vision encoder feeds two lightweight adapters that produce continuous embeddings for image-to-text understanding and discrete tokens for text-to-image generation within a common semantic space. A unified autoregressive LLM predicts high-level semantics in the form of text and image tokens, with an auxiliary diffusion decoder subsequently translating the image tokens into pixels. The architecture, together with a unified training recipe over understanding and generation data, enables scalable joint learning of both capabilities. Manzano achieves state-of-the-art results among unified models, and is competitive with specialist models, particularly on text-rich evaluation. Our studies show minimal task conflicts and consistent gains from scaling model size, validating our design choice of a hybrid tokenizer.

Phoenix X. Huang, Wenze Hu, William Brendel et al.

This paper introduces an open source platform to support the rapid development of computer vision applications at scale. The platform puts the efficient data development at the center of the machine learning development process, integrates active learning methods, data and model version control, and uses concepts such as projects to enable fast iterations of multiple task specific datasets in parallel. This platform abstracts the development process into core states and operations, and integrates third party tools via open APIs as implementations of the operations. This open design reduces the development cost and adoption cost for ML teams with existing tools. At the same time, the platform supports recording project development histories, through which successful projects can be shared to further boost model production efficiency on similar tasks. The platform is open source and is already used internally to meet the increasing demand for different real world computer vision applications.

Zongyu Lin, Wei Liu, Chen Chen et al.

The field of video generation has made remarkable advancements, yet there remains a pressing need for a clear, systematic recipe that can guide the development of robust and scalable models. In this work, we present a comprehensive study that systematically explores the interplay of model architectures, training recipes, and data curation strategies, culminating in a simple and scalable text-image-conditioned video generation method, named STIV. Our framework integrates image condition into a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) through frame replacement, while incorporating text conditioning via a joint image-text conditional classifier-free guidance. This design enables STIV to perform both text-to-video (T2V) and text-image-to-video (TI2V) tasks simultaneously. Additionally, STIV can be easily extended to various applications, such as video prediction, frame interpolation, multi-view generation, and long video generation, etc. With comprehensive ablation studies on T2I, T2V, and TI2V, STIV demonstrate strong performance, despite its simple design. An 8.7B model with 512 resolution achieves 83.1 on VBench T2V, surpassing both leading open and closed-source models like CogVideoX-5B, Pika, Kling, and Gen-3. The same-sized model also achieves a state-of-the-art result of 90.1 on VBench I2V task at 512 resolution. By providing a transparent and extensible recipe for building cutting-edge video generation models, we aim to empower future research and accelerate progress toward more versatile and reliable video generation solutions.

Tsu-Jui Fu, Yusu Qian, Chen Chen et al.

Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models have shown impressive results in generating visually compelling images following user prompts. Building on this, various methods further fine-tune the pre-trained T2I model for specific tasks. However, this requires separate model architectures, training designs, and multiple parameter sets to handle different tasks. In this paper, we introduce UniVG, a generalist diffusion model capable of supporting a diverse range of image generation tasks with a single set of weights. UniVG treats multi-modal inputs as unified conditions to enable various downstream applications, ranging from T2I generation, inpainting, instruction-based editing, identity-preserving generation, and layout-guided generation, to depth estimation and referring segmentation. Through comprehensive empirical studies on data mixing and multi-task training, we provide detailed insights into the training processes and decisions that inform our final designs. For example, we show that T2I generation and other tasks, such as instruction-based editing, can coexist without performance trade-offs, while auxiliary tasks like depth estimation and referring segmentation enhance image editing. Notably, our model can even outperform some task-specific models on their respective benchmarks, marking a significant step towards a unified image generation model.

Chen Chen, Rui Qian, Wenze Hu et al.

In this work, we empirically study Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for text-to-image generation, focusing on architectural choices, text-conditioning strategies, and training protocols. We evaluate a range of DiT-based architectures--including PixArt-style and MMDiT variants--and compare them with a standard DiT variant which directly processes concatenated text and noise inputs. Surprisingly, our findings reveal that the performance of standard DiT is comparable with those specialized models, while demonstrating superior parameter-efficiency, especially when scaled up. Leveraging the layer-wise parameter sharing strategy, we achieve a further reduction of 66% in model size compared to an MMDiT architecture, with minimal performance impact. Building on an in-depth analysis of critical components such as text encoders and Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs), we introduce DiT-Air and DiT-Air-Lite. With supervised and reward fine-tuning, DiT-Air achieves state-of-the-art performance on GenEval and T2I CompBench, while DiT-Air-Lite remains highly competitive, surpassing most existing models despite its compact size.

Yusu Qian, Eli Bocek-Rivele, Liangchen Song et al.

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated remarkable text-guided image editing capabilities, with systems like GPT-4o and Nano-Banana setting new benchmarks. However, the research community's progress remains constrained by the absence of large-scale, high-quality, and openly accessible datasets built from real images. We introduce Pico-Banana-400K, a comprehensive 400K-image dataset for instruction-based image editing. Our dataset is constructed by leveraging Nano-Banana to generate diverse edit pairs from real photographs in the OpenImages collection. What distinguishes Pico-Banana-400K from previous synthetic datasets is our systematic approach to quality and diversity. We employ a fine-grained image editing taxonomy to ensure comprehensive coverage of edit types while maintaining precise content preservation and instruction faithfulness through MLLM-based quality scoring and careful curation. Beyond single turn editing, Pico-Banana-400K enables research into complex editing scenarios. The dataset includes three specialized subsets: (1) a 72K-example multi-turn collection for studying sequential editing, reasoning, and planning across consecutive modifications; (2) a 56K-example preference subset for alignment research and reward model training; and (3) paired long-short editing instructions for developing instruction rewriting and summarization capabilities. By providing this large-scale, high-quality, and task-rich resource, Pico-Banana-400K establishes a robust foundation for training and benchmarking the next generation of text-guided image editing models.

Mingyuan Zhou, Yi Gu, Huangjie Zheng et al. · apple-ml

Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but are limited by slow iterative sampling. Distillation methods alleviate this by enabling one- or few-step generation. Flow matching, originally introduced as a distinct framework, has since been shown to be theoretically equivalent to diffusion under Gaussian assumptions, raising the question of whether distillation techniques such as score distillation transfer directly. We provide a simple derivation -- based on Bayes' rule and conditional expectations -- that unifies Gaussian diffusion and flow matching without relying on ODE/SDE formulations. Building on this view, we extend Score identity Distillation (SiD) to pretrained text-to-image flow-matching models, including SANA, SD3-Medium, SD3.5-Medium/Large, and FLUX.1-dev, all with DiT backbones. Experiments show that, with only modest flow-matching- and DiT-specific adjustments, SiD works out of the box across these models, in both data-free and data-aided settings, without requiring teacher finetuning or architectural changes. This provides the first systematic evidence that score distillation applies broadly to text-to-image flow matching models, resolving prior concerns about stability and soundness and unifying acceleration techniques across diffusion- and flow-based generators. We will make the PyTorch implementation publicly available.

Haokui Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Wenze Hu et al.

We propose a generic feature compression method for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (ANNS) problems, which speeds up existing ANNS methods in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, based on transformer, we propose a new network structure to compress the feature into a low dimensional space, and an inhomogeneous neighborhood relationship preserving (INRP) loss that aims to maintain high search accuracy. Specifically, we use multiple compression projections to cast the feature into many low dimensional spaces, and then use transformer to globally optimize these projections such that the features are well compressed following the guidance from our loss function. The loss function is designed to assign high weights on point pairs that are close in original feature space, and keep their distances in projected space. Keeping these distances helps maintain the eventual top-k retrieval accuracy, and down weighting others creates room for feature compression. In experiments, we run our compression method on public datasets, and use the compressed features in graph based, product quantization and scalar quantization based ANNS solutions. Experimental results show that our compression method can significantly improve the efficiency of these methods while preserves or even improves search accuracy, suggesting its broad potential impact on real world applications.