Haoming Liu

Yuanhe Guo, Haoming Liu, Hongyi Wen

Recommender Systems are built to retrieve relevant items to satisfy users' information needs. The candidate corpus usually consists of a finite set of items that are ready to be served, such as videos, products, or articles. With recent advances in Generative AI such as GPT and Diffusion models, a new form of recommendation task is yet to be explored where items are to be created by generative models with personalized prompts. Taking image generation as an example, with a single prompt from the user and access to a generative model, it is possible to generate hundreds of new images in a few minutes. How shall we attain personalization in the presence of "infinite" items? In this preliminary study, we propose a two-stage framework, namely Prompt-Model Retrieval and Generated Item Ranking, to approach this new task formulation. We release GEMRec-18K, a prompt-model interaction dataset with 18K images generated by 200 publicly-available generative models paired with a diverse set of 90 textual prompts. Our findings demonstrate the promise of generative model recommendation as a novel personalization problem and the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. We highlight future directions for the RecSys community to advance towards generative recommender systems. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/MAPS-research/GEMRec.

Li Guo, Haoming Liu, Yuxuan Xia et al.

Few-shot segmentation aims to train a segmentation model that can fast adapt to a novel task for which only a few annotated images are provided. Most recent models have adopted a prototype-based paradigm for few-shot inference. These approaches may have limited generalization capacity beyond the standard 1- or 5-shot settings. In this paper, we closely examine and reevaluate the fine-tuning based learning scheme that fine-tunes the classification layer of a deep segmentation network pre-trained on diverse base classes. To improve the generalizability of the classification layer optimized with sparsely annotated samples, we introduce an instance-aware data augmentation (IDA) strategy that augments the support images based on the relative sizes of the target objects. The proposed IDA effectively increases the support set's diversity and promotes the distribution consistency between support and query images. On the other hand, the large visual difference between query and support images may hinder knowledge transfer and cripple the segmentation performance. To cope with this challenge, we introduce the local consensus guided cross attention (LCCA) to align the query feature with support features based on their dense correlation, further improving the model's generalizability to the query image. The significant performance improvements on the standard few-shot segmentation benchmarks PASCAL-$5^i$ and COCO-$20^i$ verify the efficacy of our proposed method.

Haoming Liu, Yuanhe Guo, Shengjie Wang et al.

Diffusion models, capable of high-quality image generation, receive unparalleled popularity for their ease of extension. Active users have created a massive collection of domain-specific diffusion models by fine-tuning base models on self-collected datasets. Recent work has focused on improving a single diffusion model by uncovering semantic and visual information encoded in various architecture components. However, those methods overlook the vastly available set of fine-tuned diffusion models and, therefore, miss the opportunity to utilize their combined capacity for novel generation. In this work, we propose Diffusion Cocktail (Ditail), a training-free method that transfers style and content information between multiple diffusion models. This allows us to perform diversified generations using a set of diffusion models, resulting in novel images unobtainable by a single model. Ditail also offers fine-grained control of the generation process, which enables flexible manipulations of styles and contents. With these properties, Ditail excels in numerous applications, including style transfer guided by diffusion models, novel-style image generation, and image manipulation via prompts or collage inputs.