Ce Liu

Bin Xiao, Haiping Wu, Weijian Xu et al.

We introduce Florence-2, a novel vision foundation model with a unified, prompt-based representation for a variety of computer vision and vision-language tasks. While existing large vision models excel in transfer learning, they struggle to perform a diversity of tasks with simple instructions, a capability that implies handling the complexity of various spatial hierarchy and semantic granularity. Florence-2 was designed to take text-prompt as task instructions and generate desirable results in text forms, whether it be captioning, object detection, grounding or segmentation. This multi-task learning setup demands large-scale, high-quality annotated data. To this end, we co-developed FLD-5B that consists of 5.4 billion comprehensive visual annotations on 126 million images, using an iterative strategy of automated image annotation and model refinement. We adopted a sequence-to-sequence structure to train Florence-2 to perform versatile and comprehensive vision tasks. Extensive evaluations on numerous tasks demonstrated Florence-2 to be a strong vision foundation model contender with unprecedented zero-shot and fine-tuning capabilities.

Kwonjoon Lee, Huiwen Chang, Lu Jiang et al.

Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown competitive performance on image recognition while requiring less vision-specific inductive biases. In this paper, we investigate if such performance can be extended to image generation. To this end, we integrate the ViT architecture into generative adversarial networks (GANs). For ViT discriminators, we observe that existing regularization methods for GANs interact poorly with self-attention, causing serious instability during training. To resolve this issue, we introduce several novel regularization techniques for training GANs with ViTs. For ViT generators, we examine architectural choices for latent and pixel mapping layers to facilitate convergence. Empirically, our approach, named ViTGAN, achieves comparable performance to the leading CNN-based GAN models on three datasets: CIFAR-10, CelebA, and LSUN bedroom.