Zhiwei Hao

Chengcheng Wang, Zhiwei Hao, Yehui Tang et al.

Diffusion-based super-resolution (SR) models have recently garnered significant attention due to their potent restoration capabilities. But conventional diffusion models perform noise sampling from a single distribution, constraining their ability to handle real-world scenes and complex textures across semantic regions. With the success of segment anything model (SAM), generating sufficiently fine-grained region masks can enhance the detail recovery of diffusion-based SR model. However, directly integrating SAM into SR models will result in much higher computational cost. In this paper, we propose the SAM-DiffSR model, which can utilize the fine-grained structure information from SAM in the process of sampling noise to improve the image quality without additional computational cost during inference. In the process of training, we encode structural position information into the segmentation mask from SAM. Then the encoded mask is integrated into the forward diffusion process by modulating it to the sampled noise. This adjustment allows us to independently adapt the noise mean within each corresponding segmentation area. The diffusion model is trained to estimate this modulated noise. Crucially, our proposed framework does NOT change the reverse diffusion process and does NOT require SAM at inference. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing superior performance in suppressing artifacts, and surpassing existing diffusion-based methods by 0.74 dB at the maximum in terms of PSNR on DIV2K dataset. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/lose4578/SAM-DiffSR.

Jianyuan Guo, Zhiwei Hao, Chengcheng Wang et al.

Training general-purpose vision models on purely sequential visual data, eschewing linguistic inputs, has heralded a new frontier in visual understanding. These models are intended to not only comprehend but also seamlessly transit to out-of-domain tasks. However, current endeavors are hamstrung by an over-reliance on colossal models, exemplified by models with upwards of 3B parameters, and the necessity for an extensive corpus of visual data, often comprising a staggering 400B tokens. In this paper, we delve into the development of an efficient, autoregression-based vision model, innovatively architected to operate on a limited dataset. We meticulously demonstrate how this model achieves proficiency in a spectrum of visual tasks spanning both high-level and low-level semantic understanding during the testing phase. Our empirical evaluations underscore the model's agility in adapting to various tasks, heralding a significant reduction in the parameter footprint, and a marked decrease in training data requirements, thereby paving the way for more sustainable and accessible advancements in the field of generalist vision models. The code is available at https://github.com/ggjy/DeLVM.

Zhiwei Hao, Jianyuan Guo, Kai Han et al.

The tremendous success of large models trained on extensive datasets demonstrates that scale is a key ingredient in achieving superior results. Therefore, the reflection on the rationality of designing knowledge distillation (KD) approaches for limited-capacity architectures solely based on small-scale datasets is now deemed imperative. In this paper, we identify the \emph{small data pitfall} that presents in previous KD methods, which results in the underestimation of the power of vanilla KD framework on large-scale datasets such as ImageNet-1K. Specifically, we show that employing stronger data augmentation techniques and using larger datasets can directly decrease the gap between vanilla KD and other meticulously designed KD variants. This highlights the necessity of designing and evaluating KD approaches in the context of practical scenarios, casting off the limitations of small-scale datasets. Our investigation of the vanilla KD and its variants in more complex schemes, including stronger training strategies and different model capacities, demonstrates that vanilla KD is elegantly simple but astonishingly effective in large-scale scenarios. Without bells and whistles, we obtain state-of-the-art ResNet-50, ViT-S, and ConvNeXtV2-T models for ImageNet, which achieve 83.1\%, 84.3\%, and 85.0\% top-1 accuracy, respectively. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/Hao840/vanillaKD.