Dan Zhang

Vadim Sushko, Dan Zhang, Juergen Gall et al.

Joint synthesis of images and segmentation masks with generative adversarial networks (GANs) is promising to reduce the effort needed for collecting image data with pixel-wise annotations. However, to learn high-fidelity image-mask synthesis, existing GAN approaches first need a pre-training phase requiring large amounts of image data, which limits their utilization in restricted image domains. In this work, we take a step to reduce this limitation, introducing the task of one-shot image-mask synthesis. We aim to generate diverse images and their segmentation masks given only a single labelled example, and assuming, contrary to previous models, no access to any pre-training data. To this end, inspired by the recent architectural developments of single-image GANs, we introduce our OSMIS model which enables the synthesis of segmentation masks that are precisely aligned to the generated images in the one-shot regime. Besides achieving the high fidelity of generated masks, OSMIS outperforms state-of-the-art single-image GAN models in image synthesis quality and diversity. In addition, despite not using any additional data, OSMIS demonstrates an impressive ability to serve as a source of useful data augmentation for one-shot segmentation applications, providing performance gains that are complementary to standard data augmentation techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/ boschresearch/one-shot-synthesis

Ugur Ali Kaplan, Margret Keuper, Anna Khoreva et al.

Foundation models (FMs) have revolutionized computer vision, enabling effective learning across different domains. However, their performance under domain shift is yet underexplored. This paper investigates the zero-shot domain adaptation potential of FMs by comparing different backbone architectures and introducing novel domain-aware components that leverage domain related textual embeddings. We propose domain adaptive normalization, termed as Domino, which explicitly leverages domain embeddings during fine-tuning, thus making the model domain aware. Ultimately, Domino enables more robust computer vision models that can adapt effectively to various unseen domains.

Vadim Sushko, Dan Zhang, Juergen Gall et al.

Given a large dataset for training, generative adversarial networks (GANs) can achieve remarkable performance for the image synthesis task. However, training GANs in extremely low data regimes remains a challenge, as overfitting often occurs, leading to memorization or training divergence. In this work, we introduce SIV-GAN, an unconditional generative model that can generate new scene compositions from a single training image or a single video clip. We propose a two-branch discriminator architecture, with content and layout branches designed to judge internal content and scene layout realism separately from each other. This discriminator design enables synthesis of visually plausible, novel compositions of a scene, with varying content and layout, while preserving the context of the original sample. Compared to previous single image GANs, our model generates more diverse, higher quality images, while not being restricted to a single image setting. We further introduce a new challenging task of learning from a few frames of a single video. In this training setup the training images are highly similar to each other, which makes it difficult for prior GAN models to achieve a synthesis of both high quality and diversity.

Vadim Sushko, Edgar Schönfeld, Dan Zhang et al.

Despite their recent successes, GAN models for semantic image synthesis still suffer from poor image quality when trained with only adversarial supervision. Historically, additionally employing the VGG-based perceptual loss has helped to overcome this issue, significantly improving the synthesis quality, but at the same time limiting the progress of GAN models for semantic image synthesis. In this work, we propose a novel, simplified GAN model, which needs only adversarial supervision to achieve high quality results. We re-design the discriminator as a semantic segmentation network, directly using the given semantic label maps as the ground truth for training. By providing stronger supervision to the discriminator as well as to the generator through spatially- and semantically-aware discriminator feedback, we are able to synthesize images of higher fidelity with better alignment to their input label maps, making the use of the perceptual loss superfluous. Moreover, we enable high-quality multi-modal image synthesis through global and local sampling of a 3D noise tensor injected into the generator, which allows complete or partial image change. We show that images synthesized by our model are more diverse and follow the color and texture distributions of real images more closely. We achieve an average improvement of $6$ FID and $5$ mIoU points over the state of the art across different datasets using only adversarial supervision.

Dan Zhang, Anna Khoreva

Training of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) is notoriously fragile, requiring to maintain a careful balance between the generator and the discriminator in order to perform well. To mitigate this issue we introduce a new regularization technique - progressive augmentation of GANs (PA-GAN). The key idea is to gradually increase the task difficulty of the discriminator by progressively augmenting its input or feature space, thus enabling continuous learning of the generator. We show that the proposed progressive augmentation preserves the original GAN objective, does not compromise the discriminator's optimality and encourages a healthy competition between the generator and discriminator, leading to the better-performing generator. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of PA-GAN across different architectures and on multiple benchmarks for the image synthesis task, on average achieving ~3 point improvement of the FID score.