Bo Zhang

Bo Zhang, Jiakang Yuan, Baopu Li et al. · deepmind

Few-shot fine-grained learning aims to classify a query image into one of a set of support categories with fine-grained differences. Although learning different objects' local differences via Deep Neural Networks has achieved success, how to exploit the query-support cross-image object semantic relations in Transformer-based architecture remains under-explored in the few-shot fine-grained scenario. In this work, we propose a Transformer-based double-helix model, namely HelixFormer, to achieve the cross-image object semantic relation mining in a bidirectional and symmetrical manner. The HelixFormer consists of two steps: 1) Relation Mining Process (RMP) across different branches, and 2) Representation Enhancement Process (REP) within each individual branch. By the designed RMP, each branch can extract fine-grained object-level Cross-image Semantic Relation Maps (CSRMs) using information from the other branch, ensuring better cross-image interaction in semantically related local object regions. Further, with the aid of CSRMs, the developed REP can strengthen the extracted features for those discovered semantically-related local regions in each branch, boosting the model's ability to distinguish subtle feature differences of fine-grained objects. Extensive experiments conducted on five public fine-grained benchmarks demonstrate that HelixFormer can effectively enhance the cross-image object semantic relation matching for recognizing fine-grained objects, achieving much better performance over most state-of-the-art methods under 1-shot and 5-shot scenarios. Our code is available at: https://github.com/JiakangYuan/HelixFormer

Tengfei Wang, Bo Zhang, Ting Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

This paper presents a 3D generative model that uses diffusion models to automatically generate 3D digital avatars represented as neural radiance fields. A significant challenge in generating such avatars is that the memory and processing costs in 3D are prohibitive for producing the rich details required for high-quality avatars. To tackle this problem we propose the roll-out diffusion network (Rodin), which represents a neural radiance field as multiple 2D feature maps and rolls out these maps into a single 2D feature plane within which we perform 3D-aware diffusion. The Rodin model brings the much-needed computational efficiency while preserving the integrity of diffusion in 3D by using 3D-aware convolution that attends to projected features in the 2D feature plane according to their original relationship in 3D. We also use latent conditioning to orchestrate the feature generation for global coherence, leading to high-fidelity avatars and enabling their semantic editing based on text prompts. Finally, we use hierarchical synthesis to further enhance details. The 3D avatars generated by our model compare favorably with those produced by existing generative techniques. We can generate highly detailed avatars with realistic hairstyles and facial hair like beards. We also demonstrate 3D avatar generation from image or text as well as text-guided editability.

Binxin Yang, Shuyang Gu, Bo Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

Language-guided image editing has achieved great success recently. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate exemplar-guided image editing for more precise control. We achieve this goal by leveraging self-supervised training to disentangle and re-organize the source image and the exemplar. However, the naive approach will cause obvious fusing artifacts. We carefully analyze it and propose an information bottleneck and strong augmentations to avoid the trivial solution of directly copying and pasting the exemplar image. Meanwhile, to ensure the controllability of the editing process, we design an arbitrary shape mask for the exemplar image and leverage the classifier-free guidance to increase the similarity to the exemplar image. The whole framework involves a single forward of the diffusion model without any iterative optimization. We demonstrate that our method achieves an impressive performance and enables controllable editing on in-the-wild images with high fidelity.

Junshu Tang, Tengfei Wang, Bo Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

In this work, we investigate the problem of creating high-fidelity 3D content from only a single image. This is inherently challenging: it essentially involves estimating the underlying 3D geometry while simultaneously hallucinating unseen textures. To address this challenge, we leverage prior knowledge from a well-trained 2D diffusion model to act as 3D-aware supervision for 3D creation. Our approach, Make-It-3D, employs a two-stage optimization pipeline: the first stage optimizes a neural radiance field by incorporating constraints from the reference image at the frontal view and diffusion prior at novel views; the second stage transforms the coarse model into textured point clouds and further elevates the realism with diffusion prior while leveraging the high-quality textures from the reference image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms prior works by a large margin, resulting in faithful reconstructions and impressive visual quality. Our method presents the first attempt to achieve high-quality 3D creation from a single image for general objects and enables various applications such as text-to-3D creation and texture editing.

Tengfei Wang, Ting Zhang, Bo Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

We propose to use pretraining to boost general image-to-image translation. Prior image-to-image translation methods usually need dedicated architectural design and train individual translation models from scratch, struggling for high-quality generation of complex scenes, especially when paired training data are not abundant. In this paper, we regard each image-to-image translation problem as a downstream task and introduce a simple and generic framework that adapts a pretrained diffusion model to accommodate various kinds of image-to-image translation. We also propose adversarial training to enhance the texture synthesis in the diffusion model training, in conjunction with normalized guidance sampling to improve the generation quality. We present extensive empirical comparison across various tasks on challenging benchmarks such as ADE20K, COCO-Stuff, and DIODE, showing the proposed pretraining-based image-to-image translation (PITI) is capable of synthesizing images of unprecedented realism and faithfulness.

Bowen Zhang, Chenyang Qi, Pan Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

In this work, we propose an ID-preserving talking head generation framework, which advances previous methods in two aspects. First, as opposed to interpolating from sparse flow, we claim that dense landmarks are crucial to achieving accurate geometry-aware flow fields. Second, inspired by face-swapping methods, we adaptively fuse the source identity during synthesis, so that the network better preserves the key characteristics of the image portrait. Although the proposed model surpasses prior generation fidelity on established benchmarks, to further make the talking head generation qualified for real usage, personalized fine-tuning is usually needed. However, this process is rather computationally demanding that is unaffordable to standard users. To solve this, we propose a fast adaptation model using a meta-learning approach. The learned model can be adapted to a high-quality personalized model as fast as 30 seconds. Last but not the least, a spatial-temporal enhancement module is proposed to improve the fine details while ensuring temporal coherency. Extensive experiments prove the significant superiority of our approach over the state of the arts in both one-shot and personalized settings.

Jiakang Yuan, Bo Zhang, Xiangchao Yan et al. · deepmind

It is a long-term vision for Autonomous Driving (AD) community that the perception models can learn from a large-scale point cloud dataset, to obtain unified representations that can achieve promising results on different tasks or benchmarks. Previous works mainly focus on the self-supervised pre-training pipeline, meaning that they perform the pre-training and fine-tuning on the same benchmark, which is difficult to attain the performance scalability and cross-dataset application for the pre-training checkpoint. In this paper, for the first time, we are committed to building a large-scale pre-training point-cloud dataset with diverse data distribution, and meanwhile learning generalizable representations from such a diverse pre-training dataset. We formulate the point-cloud pre-training task as a semi-supervised problem, which leverages the few-shot labeled and massive unlabeled point-cloud data to generate the unified backbone representations that can be directly applied to many baseline models and benchmarks, decoupling the AD-related pre-training process and downstream fine-tuning task. During the period of backbone pre-training, by enhancing the scene- and instance-level distribution diversity and exploiting the backbone's ability to learn from unknown instances, we achieve significant performance gains on a series of downstream perception benchmarks including Waymo, nuScenes, and KITTI, under different baseline models like PV-RCNN++, SECOND, CenterPoint.

Junshu Tang, Bo Zhang, Binxin Yang et al. · microsoft-research

In contrast to the traditional avatar creation pipeline which is a costly process, contemporary generative approaches directly learn the data distribution from photographs. While plenty of works extend unconditional generative models and achieve some levels of controllability, it is still challenging to ensure multi-view consistency, especially in large poses. In this work, we propose a network that generates 3D-aware portraits while being controllable according to semantic parameters regarding pose, identity, expression and illumination. Our network uses neural scene representation to model 3D-aware portraits, whose generation is guided by a parametric face model that supports explicit control. While the latent disentanglement can be further enhanced by contrasting images with partially different attributes, there still exists noticeable inconsistency in non-face areas, e.g., hair and background, when animating expressions. Wesolve this by proposing a volume blending strategy in which we form a composite output by blending dynamic and static areas, with two parts segmented from the jointly learned semantic field. Our method outperforms prior arts in extensive experiments, producing realistic portraits with vivid expression in natural lighting when viewed from free viewpoints. It also demonstrates generalization ability to real images as well as out-of-domain data, showing great promise in real applications.

Hao Ouyang, Bo Zhang, Pan Zhang et al. · microsoft-research

We propose pose-guided multiplane image (MPI) synthesis which can render an animatable character in real scenes with photorealistic quality. We use a portable camera rig to capture the multi-view images along with the driving signal for the moving subject. Our method generalizes the image-to-image translation paradigm, which translates the human pose to a 3D scene representation -- MPIs that can be rendered in free viewpoints, using the multi-views captures as supervision. To fully cultivate the potential of MPI, we propose depth-adaptive MPI which can be learned using variable exposure images while being robust to inaccurate camera registration. Our method demonstrates advantageous novel-view synthesis quality over the state-of-the-art approaches for characters with challenging motions. Moreover, the proposed method is generalizable to novel combinations of training poses and can be explicitly controlled. Our method achieves such expressive and animatable character rendering all in real time, serving as a promising solution for practical applications.

Bin Wang, Fan Wu, Linke Ouyang et al.

Formula recognition presents significant challenges due to the complicated structure and varied notation of mathematical expressions. Despite continuous advancements in formula recognition models, the evaluation metrics employed by these models, such as BLEU and Edit Distance, still exhibit notable limitations. They overlook the fact that the same formula has diverse representations and is highly sensitive to the distribution of training data, thereby causing unfairness in formula recognition evaluation. To this end, we propose a Character Detection Matching (CDM) metric, ensuring the evaluation objectivity by designing an image-level rather than a LaTeX-level metric score. Specifically, CDM renders both the model-predicted LaTeX and the ground-truth LaTeX formulas into image-formatted formulas, then employs visual feature extraction and localization techniques for precise character-level matching, incorporating spatial position information. Such a spatially-aware and character-matching method offers a more accurate and equitable evaluation compared with previous BLEU and Edit Distance metrics that rely solely on text-based character matching. Experimentally, we evaluated various formula recognition models using CDM, BLEU, and ExpRate metrics. Their results demonstrate that the CDM aligns more closely with human evaluation standards and provides a fairer comparison across different models by eliminating discrepancies caused by diverse formula representations. Code is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/UniMERNet/tree/main/cdm.

Ben Fei, Zhaoyang Lyu, Liang Pan et al.

Existing image restoration methods mostly leverage the posterior distribution of natural images. However, they often assume known degradation and also require supervised training, which restricts their adaptation to complex real applications. In this work, we propose the Generative Diffusion Prior (GDP) to effectively model the posterior distributions in an unsupervised sampling manner. GDP utilizes a pre-train denoising diffusion generative model (DDPM) for solving linear inverse, non-linear, or blind problems. Specifically, GDP systematically explores a protocol of conditional guidance, which is verified more practical than the commonly used guidance way. Furthermore, GDP is strength at optimizing the parameters of degradation model during the denoising process, achieving blind image restoration. Besides, we devise hierarchical guidance and patch-based methods, enabling the GDP to generate images of arbitrary resolutions. Experimentally, we demonstrate GDP's versatility on several image datasets for linear problems, such as super-resolution, deblurring, inpainting, and colorization, as well as non-linear and blind issues, such as low-light enhancement and HDR image recovery. GDP outperforms the current leading unsupervised methods on the diverse benchmarks in reconstruction quality and perceptual quality. Moreover, GDP also generalizes well for natural images or synthesized images with arbitrary sizes from various tasks out of the distribution of the ImageNet training set.

Haoyang Peng, Baopu Li, Bo Zhang et al. · allen-ai, deepmind

Point cloud based 3D deep model has wide applications in many applications such as autonomous driving, house robot, and so on. Inspired by the recent prompt learning in natural language processing, this work proposes a novel Multi-view Vision-Prompt Fusion Network (MvNet) for few-shot 3D point cloud classification. MvNet investigates the possibility of leveraging the off-the-shelf 2D pre-trained models to achieve the few-shot classification, which can alleviate the over-dependence issue of the existing baseline models towards the large-scale annotated 3D point cloud data. Specifically, MvNet first encodes a 3D point cloud into multi-view image features for a number of different views. Then, a novel multi-view prompt fusion module is developed to effectively fuse information from different views to bridge the gap between 3D point cloud data and 2D pre-trained models. A set of 2D image prompts can then be derived to better describe the suitable prior knowledge for a large-scale pre-trained image model for few-shot 3D point cloud classification. Extensive experiments on ModelNet, ScanObjectNN, and ShapeNet datasets demonstrate that MvNet achieves new state-of-the-art performance for 3D few-shot point cloud image classification. The source code of this work will be available soon.

Bo Zhang, Jiakang Yuan, Botian Shi et al.

Current 3D object detection models follow a single dataset-specific training and testing paradigm, which often faces a serious detection accuracy drop when they are directly deployed in another dataset. In this paper, we study the task of training a unified 3D detector from multiple datasets. We observe that this appears to be a challenging task, which is mainly due to that these datasets present substantial data-level differences and taxonomy-level variations caused by different LiDAR types and data acquisition standards. Inspired by such observation, we present a Uni3D which leverages a simple data-level correction operation and a designed semantic-level coupling-and-recoupling module to alleviate the unavoidable data-level and taxonomy-level differences, respectively. Our method is simple and easily combined with many 3D object detection baselines such as PV-RCNN and Voxel-RCNN, enabling them to effectively learn from multiple off-the-shelf 3D datasets to obtain more discriminative and generalizable representations. Experiments are conducted on many dataset consolidation settings including Waymo-nuScenes, nuScenes-KITTI, Waymo-KITTI, and Waymo-nuScenes-KITTI consolidations. Their results demonstrate that Uni3D exceeds a series of individual detectors trained on a single dataset, with a 1.04x parameter increase over a selected baseline detector. We expect this work will inspire the research of 3D generalization since it will push the limits of perceptual performance.

Fan Bao, Chongxuan Li, Jiacheng Sun et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a class of powerful deep generative models (DGMs). Despite their success, the iterative generation process over the full timesteps is much less efficient than other DGMs such as GANs. Thus, the generation performance on a subset of timesteps is crucial, which is greatly influenced by the covariance design in DPMs. In this work, we consider diagonal and full covariances to improve the expressive power of DPMs. We derive the optimal result for such covariances, and then correct it when the mean of DPMs is imperfect. Both the optimal and the corrected ones can be decomposed into terms of conditional expectations over functions of noise. Building upon it, we propose to estimate the optimal covariance and its correction given imperfect mean by learning these conditional expectations. Our method can be applied to DPMs with both discrete and continuous timesteps. We consider the diagonal covariance in our implementation for computational efficiency. For an efficient practical implementation, we adopt a parameter sharing scheme and a two-stage training process. Empirically, our method outperforms a wide variety of covariance design on likelihood results, and improves the sample quality especially on a small number of timesteps.

Siyu Wang, Jianfei Chen, Chongxuan Li et al.

By applying entropy codecs with learned data distributions, neural compressors have significantly outperformed traditional codecs in terms of compression ratio. However, the high inference latency of neural networks hinders the deployment of neural compressors in practical applications. In this work, we propose Integer-only Discrete Flows (IODF), an efficient neural compressor with integer-only arithmetic. Our work is built upon integer discrete flows, which consists of invertible transformations between discrete random variables. We propose efficient invertible transformations with integer-only arithmetic based on 8-bit quantization. Our invertible transformation is equipped with learnable binary gates to remove redundant filters during inference. We deploy IODF with TensorRT on GPUs, achieving 10x inference speedup compared to the fastest existing neural compressors, while retaining the high compression rates on ImageNet32 and ImageNet64.

Xiangchao Yan, Runjian Chen, Bo Zhang et al.

Annotating 3D LiDAR point clouds for perception tasks is fundamental for many applications e.g., autonomous driving, yet it still remains notoriously labor-intensive. Pretraining-finetuning approach can alleviate the labeling burden by fine-tuning a pre-trained backbone across various downstream datasets as well as tasks. In this paper, we propose SPOT, namely Scalable Pre-training via Occupancy prediction for learning Transferable 3D representations under such a label-efficient fine-tuning paradigm. SPOT achieves effectiveness on various public datasets with different downstream tasks, showcasing its general representation power, cross-domain robustness and data scalability which are three key factors for real-world application. Specifically, we both theoretically and empirically show, for the first time, that general representations learning can be achieved through the task of occupancy prediction. Then, to address the domain gap caused by different LiDAR sensors and annotation methods, we develop a beam re-sampling technique for point cloud augmentation combined with class-balancing strategy. Furthermore, scalable pre-training is observed, that is, the downstream performance across all the experiments gets better with more pre-training data. Additionally, such pre-training strategy also remains compatible with unlabeled data. The hope is that our findings will facilitate the understanding of LiDAR points and pave the way for future advancements in LiDAR pre-training.

Xin Li, Yeqi Bai, Pinlong Cai et al.

This paper explores the emerging knowledge-driven autonomous driving technologies. Our investigation highlights the limitations of current autonomous driving systems, in particular their sensitivity to data bias, difficulty in handling long-tail scenarios, and lack of interpretability. Conversely, knowledge-driven methods with the abilities of cognition, generalization and life-long learning emerge as a promising way to overcome these challenges. This paper delves into the essence of knowledge-driven autonomous driving and examines its core components: dataset \& benchmark, environment, and driver agent. By leveraging large language models, world models, neural rendering, and other advanced artificial intelligence techniques, these components collectively contribute to a more holistic, adaptive, and intelligent autonomous driving system. The paper systematically organizes and reviews previous research efforts in this area, and provides insights and guidance for future research and practical applications of autonomous driving. We will continually share the latest updates on cutting-edge developments in knowledge-driven autonomous driving along with the relevant valuable open-source resources at: \url{https://github.com/PJLab-ADG/awesome-knowledge-driven-AD}.

Xiangxiang Chu, Jianlin Su, Bo Zhang et al.

Large language models are built on top of a transformer-based architecture to process textual inputs. For example, the LLaMA stands out among many open-source implementations. Can the same transformer be used to process 2D images? In this paper, we answer this question by unveiling a LLaMA-like vision transformer in plain and pyramid forms, termed VisionLLaMA, which is tailored for this purpose. VisionLLaMA is a unified and generic modelling framework for solving most vision tasks. We extensively evaluate its effectiveness using typical pre-training paradigms in a good portion of downstream tasks of image perception and especially image generation. In many cases, VisionLLaMA have exhibited substantial gains over the previous state-of-the-art vision transformers. We believe that VisionLLaMA can serve as a strong new baseline model for vision generation and understanding. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/VisionLLaMA.

Chen Shi, Shaoshuai Shi, Xiaoyang Lyu et al.

Feed-forward 3D reconstruction for autonomous driving has advanced rapidly, yet existing methods struggle with the joint challenges of sparse, non-overlapping camera views and complex scene dynamics. We present UniSplat, a general feed-forward framework that learns robust dynamic scene reconstruction through unified latent spatio-temporal fusion. UniSplat constructs a 3D latent scaffold, a structured representation that captures geometric and semantic scene context by leveraging pretrained foundation models. To effectively integrate information across spatial views and temporal frames, we introduce an efficient fusion mechanism that operates directly within the 3D scaffold, enabling consistent spatio-temporal alignment. To ensure complete and detailed reconstructions, we design a dual-branch decoder that generates dynamic-aware Gaussians from the fused scaffold by combining point-anchored refinement with voxel-based generation, and maintain a persistent memory of static Gaussians to enable streaming scene completion beyond current camera coverage. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that UniSplat achieves state-of-the-art performance in novel view synthesis, while providing robust and high-quality renderings even for viewpoints outside the original camera coverage.

Ziyu Wan, Bo Zhang, Dongdong Chen et al.

We present a learning-based framework, recurrent transformer network (RTN), to restore heavily degraded old films. Instead of performing frame-wise restoration, our method is based on the hidden knowledge learned from adjacent frames that contain abundant information about the occlusion, which is beneficial to restore challenging artifacts of each frame while ensuring temporal coherency. Moreover, contrasting the representation of the current frame and the hidden knowledge makes it possible to infer the scratch position in an unsupervised manner, and such defect localization generalizes well to real-world degradations. To better resolve mixed degradation and compensate for the flow estimation error during frame alignment, we propose to leverage more expressive transformer blocks for spatial restoration. Experiments on both synthetic dataset and real-world old films demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed RTN over existing solutions. In addition, the same framework can effectively propagate the color from keyframes to the whole video, ultimately yielding compelling restored films. The implementation and model will be released at https://github.com/raywzy/Bringing-Old-Films-Back-to-Life.

Bowen Zhang, Shuyang Gu, Bo Zhang et al.

Despite the tantalizing success in a broad of vision tasks, transformers have not yet demonstrated on-par ability as ConvNets in high-resolution image generative modeling. In this paper, we seek to explore using pure transformers to build a generative adversarial network for high-resolution image synthesis. To this end, we believe that local attention is crucial to strike the balance between computational efficiency and modeling capacity. Hence, the proposed generator adopts Swin transformer in a style-based architecture. To achieve a larger receptive field, we propose double attention which simultaneously leverages the context of the local and the shifted windows, leading to improved generation quality. Moreover, we show that offering the knowledge of the absolute position that has been lost in window-based transformers greatly benefits the generation quality. The proposed StyleSwin is scalable to high resolutions, with both the coarse geometry and fine structures benefit from the strong expressivity of transformers. However, blocking artifacts occur during high-resolution synthesis because performing the local attention in a block-wise manner may break the spatial coherency. To solve this, we empirically investigate various solutions, among which we find that employing a wavelet discriminator to examine the spectral discrepancy effectively suppresses the artifacts. Extensive experiments show the superiority over prior transformer-based GANs, especially on high resolutions, e.g., 1024x1024. The StyleSwin, without complex training strategies, excels over StyleGAN on CelebA-HQ 1024, and achieves on-par performance on FFHQ-1024, proving the promise of using transformers for high-resolution image generation. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/microsoft/StyleSwin.

Xiangxiang Chu, Zhi Tian, Yuqing Wang et al.

Very recently, a variety of vision transformer architectures for dense prediction tasks have been proposed and they show that the design of spatial attention is critical to their success in these tasks. In this work, we revisit the design of the spatial attention and demonstrate that a carefully-devised yet simple spatial attention mechanism performs favourably against the state-of-the-art schemes. As a result, we propose two vision transformer architectures, namely, Twins-PCPVT and Twins-SVT. Our proposed architectures are highly-efficient and easy to implement, only involving matrix multiplications that are highly optimized in modern deep learning frameworks. More importantly, the proposed architectures achieve excellent performance on a wide range of visual tasks, including image level classification as well as dense detection and segmentation. The simplicity and strong performance suggest that our proposed architectures may serve as stronger backbones for many vision tasks. Our code is released at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/Twins .

Xiangxiang Chu, Zhi Tian, Bo Zhang et al.

We propose a conditional positional encoding (CPE) scheme for vision Transformers. Unlike previous fixed or learnable positional encodings, which are pre-defined and independent of input tokens, CPE is dynamically generated and conditioned on the local neighborhood of the input tokens. As a result, CPE can easily generalize to the input sequences that are longer than what the model has ever seen during training. Besides, CPE can keep the desired translation-invariance in the image classification task, resulting in improved performance. We implement CPE with a simple Position Encoding Generator (PEG) to get seamlessly incorporated into the current Transformer framework. Built on PEG, we present Conditional Position encoding Vision Transformer (CPVT). We demonstrate that CPVT has visually similar attention maps compared to those with learned positional encodings and delivers outperforming results. Our code is available at https://github.com/Meituan-AutoML/CPVT .

Xiangxiang Chu, Bo Zhang, Qingyuan Li et al.

To discover powerful yet compact models is an important goal of neural architecture search. Previous two-stage one-shot approaches are limited by search space with a fixed depth. It seems handy to include an additional skip connection in the search space to make depths variable. However, it creates a large range of perturbation during supernet training and it has difficulty giving a confident ranking for subnetworks. In this paper, we discover that skip connections bring about significant feature inconsistency compared with other operations, which potentially degrades the supernet performance. Based on this observation, we tackle the problem by imposing an equivariant learnable stabilizer to homogenize such disparities. Experiments show that our proposed stabilizer helps to improve the supernet's convergence as well as ranking performance. With an evolutionary search backend that incorporates the stabilized supernet as an evaluator, we derive a family of state-of-the-art architectures, the SCARLET series of several depths, especially SCARLET-A obtains 76.9% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaomi-automl/ScarletNAS.

Chen Shi, Shaoshuai Shi, Kehua Sheng et al.

Data-driven learning has advanced autonomous driving, yet task-specific models struggle with out-of-distribution scenarios due to their narrow optimization objectives and reliance on costly annotated data. We present DriveX, a self-supervised world model that learns generalizable scene dynamics and holistic representations (geometric, semantic, and motion) from large-scale driving videos. DriveX introduces Omni Scene Modeling (OSM), a module that unifies multimodal supervision-3D point cloud forecasting, 2D semantic representation, and image generation-to capture comprehensive scene evolution. To simplify learning complex dynamics, we propose a decoupled latent world modeling strategy that separates world representation learning from future state decoding, augmented by dynamic-aware ray sampling to enhance motion modeling. For downstream adaptation, we design Future Spatial Attention (FSA), a unified paradigm that dynamically aggregates spatiotemporal features from DriveX's predictions to enhance task-specific inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate DriveX's effectiveness: it achieves significant improvements in 3D future point cloud prediction over prior work, while attaining state-of-the-art results on diverse tasks including occupancy prediction, flow estimation, and end-to-end driving. These results validate DriveX's capability as a general-purpose world model, paving the way for robust and unified autonomous driving frameworks.

Runjian Chen, Wenqi Shao, Bo Zhang et al.

Deep-learning-based autonomous driving (AD) perception introduces a promising picture for safe and environment-friendly transportation. However, the over-reliance on real labeled data in LiDAR perception limits the scale of on-road attempts. 3D real world data is notoriously time-and-energy-consuming to annotate and lacks corner cases like rare traffic participants. On the contrary, in simulators like CARLA, generating labeled LiDAR point clouds with corner cases is a piece of cake. However, introducing synthetic point clouds to improve real perception is non-trivial. This stems from two challenges: 1) sample efficiency of simulation datasets 2) simulation-to-real gaps. To overcome both challenges, we propose a plug-and-play method called JiSAM , shorthand for Jittering augmentation, domain-aware backbone and memory-based Sectorized AlignMent. In extensive experiments conducted on the famous AD dataset NuScenes, we demonstrate that, with SOTA 3D object detector, JiSAM is able to utilize the simulation data and only labels on 2.5% available real data to achieve comparable performance to models trained on all real data. Additionally, JiSAM achieves more than 15 mAPs on the objects not labeled in the real training set. We will release models and codes.

Fan Bao, Chongxuan Li, Jun Zhu et al.

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) represent a class of powerful generative models. Despite their success, the inference of DPMs is expensive since it generally needs to iterate over thousands of timesteps. A key problem in the inference is to estimate the variance in each timestep of the reverse process. In this work, we present a surprising result that both the optimal reverse variance and the corresponding optimal KL divergence of a DPM have analytic forms w.r.t. its score function. Building upon it, we propose Analytic-DPM, a training-free inference framework that estimates the analytic forms of the variance and KL divergence using the Monte Carlo method and a pretrained score-based model. Further, to correct the potential bias caused by the score-based model, we derive both lower and upper bounds of the optimal variance and clip the estimate for a better result. Empirically, our analytic-DPM improves the log-likelihood of various DPMs, produces high-quality samples, and meanwhile enjoys a 20x to 80x speed up.

Shuyang Gu, Dong Chen, Jianmin Bao et al.

We present the vector quantized diffusion (VQ-Diffusion) model for text-to-image generation. This method is based on a vector quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) whose latent space is modeled by a conditional variant of the recently developed Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM). We find that this latent-space method is well-suited for text-to-image generation tasks because it not only eliminates the unidirectional bias with existing methods but also allows us to incorporate a mask-and-replace diffusion strategy to avoid the accumulation of errors, which is a serious problem with existing methods. Our experiments show that the VQ-Diffusion produces significantly better text-to-image generation results when compared with conventional autoregressive (AR) models with similar numbers of parameters. Compared with previous GAN-based text-to-image methods, our VQ-Diffusion can handle more complex scenes and improve the synthesized image quality by a large margin. Finally, we show that the image generation computation in our method can be made highly efficient by reparameterization. With traditional AR methods, the text-to-image generation time increases linearly with the output image resolution and hence is quite time consuming even for normal size images. The VQ-Diffusion allows us to achieve a better trade-off between quality and speed. Our experiments indicate that the VQ-Diffusion model with the reparameterization is fifteen times faster than traditional AR methods while achieving a better image quality.

Xiaoyu Li, Bo Zhang, Jing Liao et al.

Contaminants such as dust, dirt and moisture adhering to the camera lens can greatly affect the quality and clarity of the resulting image or video. In this paper, we propose a video restoration method to automatically remove these contaminants and produce a clean video. Our approach first seeks to detect attention maps that indicate the regions that need to be restored. In order to leverage the corresponding clean pixels from adjacent frames, we propose a flow completion module to hallucinate the flow of the background scene to the attention regions degraded by the contaminants. Guided by the attention maps and completed flows, we propose a recurrent technique to restore the input frame by fetching clean pixels from adjacent frames. Finally, a multi-frame processing stage is used to further process the entire video sequence in order to enforce temporal consistency. The entire network is trained on a synthetic dataset that approximates the physical lighting properties of contaminant artifacts. This new dataset and our novel framework lead to our method that is able to address different contaminants and outperforms competitive restoration approaches both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Fan Bao, Chongxuan Li, Kun Xu et al.

Score matching (SM) provides a compelling approach to learn energy-based models (EBMs) by avoiding the calculation of partition function. However, it remains largely open to learn energy-based latent variable models (EBLVMs), except some special cases. This paper presents a bi-level score matching (BiSM) method to learn EBLVMs with general structures by reformulating SM as a bi-level optimization problem. The higher level introduces a variational posterior of the latent variables and optimizes a modified SM objective, and the lower level optimizes the variational posterior to fit the true posterior. To solve BiSM efficiently, we develop a stochastic optimization algorithm with gradient unrolling. Theoretically, we analyze the consistency of BiSM and the convergence of the stochastic algorithm. Empirically, we show the promise of BiSM in Gaussian restricted Boltzmann machines and highly nonstructural EBLVMs parameterized by deep convolutional neural networks. BiSM is comparable to the widely adopted contrastive divergence and SM methods when they are applicable; and can learn complex EBLVMs with intractable posteriors to generate natural images.

Ziyu Wan, Bo Zhang, Dongdong Chen et al.

We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with apartial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. Furthermore, we apply another face refinement network to recover fine details of faces in the old photos, thus ultimately generating photos with enhanced perceptual quality. With comprehensive experiments, the proposed pipeline demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methods as well as existing commercial tools in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.

Xiaoyu Li, Bo Zhang, Jing Liao et al.

We propose a novel framework to produce cartoon videos by fetching the color information from two input keyframes while following the animated motion guided by a user sketch. The key idea of the proposed approach is to estimate the dense cross-domain correspondence between the sketch and cartoon video frames, and employ a blending module with occlusion estimation to synthesize the middle frame guided by the sketch. After that, the input frames and the synthetic frame equipped with established correspondence are fed into an arbitrary-time frame interpolation pipeline to generate and refine additional inbetween frames. Finally, a module to preserve temporal consistency is employed. Compared to common frame interpolation methods, our approach can address frames with relatively large motion and also has the flexibility to enable users to control the generated video sequences by editing the sketch guidance. By explicitly considering the correspondence between frames and the sketch, we can achieve higher quality results than other image synthesis methods. Our results show that our system generalizes well to different movie frames, achieving better results than existing solutions.

Ziyu Wan, Bo Zhang, Dongdong Chen et al.

We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces. And the translation between these two latent spaces is learned with synthetic paired data. This translation generalizes well to real photos because the domain gap is closed in the compact latent space. Besides, to address multiple degradations mixed in one old photo, we design a global branch with a partial nonlocal block targeting to the structured defects, such as scratches and dust spots, and a local branch targeting to the unstructured defects, such as noises and blurriness. Two branches are fused in the latent space, leading to improved capability to restore old photos from multiple defects. The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality for old photos restoration.

Ziyu Wang, Shuyu Cheng, Yueru Li et al.

Score matching provides an effective approach to learning flexible unnormalized models, but its scalability is limited by the need to evaluate a second-order derivative. In this paper, we present a scalable approximation to a general family of learning objectives including score matching, by observing a new connection between these objectives and Wasserstein gradient flows. We present applications with promise in learning neural density estimators on manifolds, and training implicit variational and Wasserstein auto-encoders with a manifold-valued prior.

Xiangxiang Chu, Shun Lu, Xudong Li et al.

Blending multiple convolutional kernels is proved advantageous in neural architecture design. However, current two-stage neural architecture search methods are mainly limited to single-path search spaces. How to efficiently search models of multi-path structures remains a difficult problem. In this paper, we are motivated to train a one-shot multi-path supernet to accurately evaluate the candidate architectures. Specifically, we discover that in the studied search spaces, feature vectors summed from multiple paths are nearly multiples of those from a single path. Such disparity perturbs the supernet training and its ranking ability. Therefore, we propose a novel mechanism called Shadow Batch Normalization (SBN) to regularize the disparate feature statistics. Extensive experiments prove that SBNs are capable of stabilizing the optimization and improving ranking performance. We call our unified multi-path one-shot approach as MixPath, which generates a series of models that achieve state-of-the-art results on ImageNet.

Deli Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Bo Zhang

Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has been widely applied as a fundamental generative model in machine learning. For complex samples like imagery objects or scenes, however, VAE suffers from the dimensional dilemma between reconstruction precision that needs high-dimensional latent codes and probabilistic inference that favors a low-dimensional latent space. By virtue of high-dimensional geometry, we propose a very simple algorithm, called Spherical Auto-Encoder (SAE), completely different from existing VAEs to address the issue. SAE is in essence the vanilla autoencoder with spherical normalization on the latent space. We analyze the unique characteristics of random variables on spheres in high dimensions and argue that random variables on spheres are agnostic to various prior distributions and data modes when the dimension is sufficiently high. Therefore, SAE can harness a high-dimensional latent space to improve the inference precision of latent codes while maintain the property of stochastic sampling from priors. The experiments on sampling and inference validate our theoretical analysis and the superiority of SAE.

Chongxuan Li, Kun Xu, Jiashuo Liu et al.

We propose a unified game-theoretical framework to perform classification and conditional image generation given limited supervision. It is formulated as a three-player minimax game consisting of a generator, a classifier and a discriminator, and therefore is referred to as Triple Generative Adversarial Network (Triple-GAN). The generator and the classifier characterize the conditional distributions between images and labels to perform conditional generation and classification, respectively. The discriminator solely focuses on identifying fake image-label pairs. Under a nonparametric assumption, we prove the unique equilibrium of the game is that the distributions characterized by the generator and the classifier converge to the data distribution. As a byproduct of the three-player mechanism, Triple-GAN is flexible to incorporate different semi-supervised classifiers and GAN architectures. We evaluate Triple-GAN in two challenging settings, namely, semi-supervised learning and the extreme low data regime. In both settings, Triple-GAN can achieve excellent classification results and generate meaningful samples in a specific class simultaneously. In particular, using a commonly adopted 13-layer CNN classifier, Triple-GAN outperforms extensive semi-supervised learning methods substantially on more than 10 benchmarks no matter data augmentation is applied or not.

Charles K. Chui, Shao-Bo Lin, Bo Zhang et al.

The great success of deep learning poses urgent challenges for understanding its working mechanism and rationality. The depth, structure, and massive size of the data are recognized to be three key ingredients for deep learning. Most of the recent theoretical studies for deep learning focus on the necessity and advantages of depth and structures of neural networks. In this paper, we aim at rigorous verification of the importance of massive data in embodying the out-performance of deep learning. To approximate and learn spatially sparse and smooth functions, we establish a novel sampling theorem in learning theory to show the necessity of massive data. We then prove that implementing the classical empirical risk minimization on some deep nets facilitates in realization of the optimal learning rates derived in the sampling theorem. This perhaps explains why deep learning performs so well in the era of big data.

Kun Xu, Chongxuan Li, Jun Zhu et al.

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are effective in generating realistic images but the training is often unstable. There are existing efforts that model the training dynamics of GANs in the parameter space but the analysis cannot directly motivate practically effective stabilizing methods. To this end, we present a conceptually novel perspective from control theory to directly model the dynamics of GANs in the function space and provide simple yet effective methods to stabilize GANs' training. We first analyze the training dynamic of a prototypical Dirac GAN and adopt the widely-used closed-loop control (CLC) to improve its stability. We then extend CLC to stabilize the training dynamic of normal GANs, where CLC is implemented as a squared $L2$ regularizer on the output of the discriminator. Empirical results show that our method can effectively stabilize the training and obtain state-of-the-art performance on data generation tasks.

Xiaoyu Li, Bo Zhang, Pedro V. Sander et al.

We propose the first general framework to automatically correct different types of geometric distortion in a single input image. Our proposed method employs convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained by using a large synthetic distortion dataset to predict the displacement field between distorted images and corrected images. A model fitting method uses the CNN output to estimate the distortion parameters, achieving a more accurate prediction. The final corrected image is generated based on the predicted flow using an efficient, high-quality resampling method. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms traditional correction methods, and allows for interesting applications such as distortion transfer, distortion exaggeration, and co-occurring distortion correction.

Deli Zhao, Jiapeng Zhu, Zhenfang Guo et al.

Training generative models like Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is challenging for noisy data. A novel curriculum learning algorithm pertaining to clustering is proposed to address this issue in this paper. The curriculum construction is based on the centrality of underlying clusters in data points. The data points of high centrality takes priority of being fed into generative models during training. To make our algorithm scalable to large-scale data, the active set is devised, in the sense that every round of training proceeds only on an active subset containing a small fraction of already trained data and the incremental data of lower centrality. Moreover, the geometric analysis is presented to interpret the necessity of cluster curriculum for generative models. The experiments on cat and human-face data validate that our algorithm is able to learn the optimal generative models (e.g. ProGAN) with respect to specified quality metrics for noisy data. An interesting finding is that the optimal cluster curriculum is closely related to the critical point of the geometric percolation process formulated in the paper.

Jiapeng Zhu, Deli Zhao, Bo Zhang et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) play an increasingly important role in machine learning. However, there is one fundamental issue hindering their practical applications: the absence of capability for encoding real-world samples. The conventional way of addressing this issue is to learn an encoder for GAN via Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE). In this paper, we show that the entanglement of the latent space for the VAE/GAN framework poses the main challenge for encoder learning. To address the entanglement issue and enable inference in GAN we propose a novel algorithm named Latently Invertible Autoencoder (LIA). The framework of LIA is that an invertible network and its inverse mapping are symmetrically embedded in the latent space of VAE. The decoder of LIA is first trained as a standard GAN with the invertible network and then the partial encoder is learned from a disentangled autoencoder by detaching the invertible network from LIA, thus avoiding the entanglement problem caused by the random latent space. Experiments conducted on the FFHQ face dataset and three LSUN datasets validate the effectiveness of LIA/GAN.

Xiangxiang Chu, Bo Zhang, Ruijun Xu et al.

Fabricating neural models for a wide range of mobile devices demands for a specific design of networks due to highly constrained resources. Both evolution algorithms (EA) and reinforced learning methods (RL) have been dedicated to solve neural architecture search problems. However, these combinations usually concentrate on a single objective such as the error rate of image classification. They also fail to harness the very benefits from both sides. In this paper, we present a new multi-objective oriented algorithm called MoreMNAS (Multi-Objective Reinforced Evolution in Mobile Neural Architecture Search) by leveraging good virtues from both EA and RL. In particular, we incorporate a variant of multi-objective genetic algorithm NSGA-II, in which the search space is composed of various cells so that crossovers and mutations can be performed at the cell level. Moreover, reinforced control is mixed with a natural mutating process to regulate arbitrary mutation, maintaining a delicate balance between exploration and exploitation. Therefore, not only does our method prevent the searched models from degrading during the evolution process, but it also makes better use of learned knowledge. Our experiments conducted in Super-resolution domain (SR) deliver rivalling models compared to some state-of-the-art methods with fewer FLOPS.

Kun Xu, Haoyu Liang, Jun Zhu et al.

Deep generative models have shown promising results in generating realistic images, but it is still non-trivial to generate images with complicated structures. The main reason is that most of the current generative models fail to explore the structures in the images including spatial layout and semantic relations between objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel deep structured generative model which boosts generative adversarial networks (GANs) with the aid of structure information. In particular, the layout or structure of the scene is encoded by a stochastic and-or graph (sAOG), in which the terminal nodes represent single objects and edges represent relations between objects. With the sAOG appropriately harnessed, our model can successfully capture the intrinsic structure in the scenes and generate images of complicated scenes accordingly. Furthermore, a detection network is introduced to infer scene structures from a image. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on both modeling the intrinsic structures, and generating realistic images.

Chao Du, Kun Xu, Chongxuan Li et al.

Implicit generative models are difficult to train as no explicit density functions are defined. Generative adversarial nets (GANs) present a minimax framework to train such models, which however can suffer from mode collapse due to the nature of the JS-divergence. This paper presents a learning by teaching (LBT) approach to learning implicit models, which intrinsically avoids the mode collapse problem by optimizing a KL-divergence rather than the JS-divergence in GANs. In LBT, an auxiliary density estimator is introduced to fit the implicit model's distribution while the implicit model teaches the density estimator to match the data distribution. LBT is formulated as a bilevel optimization problem, whose optimal generator matches the true data distribution. LBT can be naturally integrated with GANs to derive a hybrid LBT-GAN that enjoys complimentary benefits. Finally, we present a stochastic gradient ascent algorithm with unrolling to solve the challenging learning problems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Chongxuan Li, Max Welling, Jun Zhu et al.

We propose Graphical Generative Adversarial Networks (Graphical-GAN) to model structured data. Graphical-GAN conjoins the power of Bayesian networks on compactly representing the dependency structures among random variables and that of generative adversarial networks on learning expressive dependency functions. We introduce a structured recognition model to infer the posterior distribution of latent variables given observations. We generalize the Expectation Propagation (EP) algorithm to learn the generative model and recognition model jointly. Finally, we present two important instances of Graphical-GAN, i.e. Gaussian Mixture GAN (GMGAN) and State Space GAN (SSGAN), which can successfully learn the discrete and temporal structures on visual datasets, respectively.

Bingke Zhu, Yingying Chen, Jinqiao Wang et al.

Image matting plays an important role in image and video editing. However, the formulation of image matting is inherently ill-posed. Traditional methods usually employ interaction to deal with the image matting problem with trimaps and strokes, and cannot run on the mobile phone in real-time. In this paper, we propose a real-time automatic deep matting approach for mobile devices. By leveraging the densely connected blocks and the dilated convolution, a light full convolutional network is designed to predict a coarse binary mask for portrait images. And a feathering block, which is edge-preserving and matting adaptive, is further developed to learn the guided filter and transform the binary mask into alpha matte. Finally, an automatic portrait animation system based on fast deep matting is built on mobile devices, which does not need any interaction and can realize real-time matting with 15 fps. The experiments show that the proposed approach achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art matting solvers.

Chongxuan Li, Kun Xu, Jun Zhu et al.

Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs) have shown promise in image generation and semi-supervised learning (SSL). However, existing GANs in SSL have two problems: (1) the generator and the discriminator (i.e. the classifier) may not be optimal at the same time; and (2) the generator cannot control the semantics of the generated samples. The problems essentially arise from the two-player formulation, where a single discriminator shares incompatible roles of identifying fake samples and predicting labels and it only estimates the data without considering the labels. To address the problems, we present triple generative adversarial net (Triple-GAN), which consists of three players---a generator, a discriminator and a classifier. The generator and the classifier characterize the conditional distributions between images and labels, and the discriminator solely focuses on identifying fake image-label pairs. We design compatible utilities to ensure that the distributions characterized by the classifier and the generator both converge to the data distribution. Our results on various datasets demonstrate that Triple-GAN as a unified model can simultaneously (1) achieve the state-of-the-art classification results among deep generative models, and (2) disentangle the classes and styles of the input and transfer smoothly in the data space via interpolation in the latent space class-conditionally.

Chongxuan Li, Jun Zhu, Bo Zhang

Deep generative models (DGMs) are effective on learning multilayered representations of complex data and performing inference of input data by exploring the generative ability. However, it is relatively insufficient to empower the discriminative ability of DGMs on making accurate predictions. This paper presents max-margin deep generative models (mmDGMs) and a class-conditional variant (mmDCGMs), which explore the strongly discriminative principle of max-margin learning to improve the predictive performance of DGMs in both supervised and semi-supervised learning, while retaining the generative capability. In semi-supervised learning, we use the predictions of a max-margin classifier as the missing labels instead of performing full posterior inference for efficiency; we also introduce additional max-margin and label-balance regularization terms of unlabeled data for effectiveness. We develop an efficient doubly stochastic subgradient algorithm for the piecewise linear objectives in different settings. Empirical results on various datasets demonstrate that: (1) max-margin learning can significantly improve the prediction performance of DGMs and meanwhile retain the generative ability; (2) in supervised learning, mmDGMs are competitive to the best fully discriminative networks when employing convolutional neural networks as the generative and recognition models; and (3) in semi-supervised learning, mmDCGMs can perform efficient inference and achieve state-of-the-art classification results on several benchmarks.

Shaohua Wan, Zhijun Chen, Tao Zhang et al.

Recently significant performance improvement in face detection was made possible by deeply trained convolutional networks. In this report, a novel approach for training state-of-the-art face detector is described. The key is to exploit the idea of hard negative mining and iteratively update the Faster R-CNN based face detector with the hard negatives harvested from a large set of background examples. We demonstrate that our face detector outperforms state-of-the-art detectors on the FDDB dataset, which is the de facto standard for evaluating face detection algorithms.