Exploring the Role of Large Language Models in Prompt Encoding for Diffusion Models

Large language models (LLMs) based on decoder-only transformers have demonstrated superior text understanding capabilities compared to CLIP and T5-series models. However, the paradigm for utilizing current advanced LLMs in text-to-image diffusion models remains to be explored. We observed an unusual phenomenon: directly using a large language model as the prompt encoder significantly degrades the prompt-following ability in image generation. We identified two main obstacles behind this issue. One is the misalignment between the next token prediction training in LLM and the requirement for discriminative prompt features in diffusion models. The other is the intrinsic positional bias introduced by the decoder-only architecture. To deal with this issue, we propose a novel framework to fully harness the capabilities of LLMs. Through the carefully designed usage guidance, we effectively enhance the text representation capability for prompt encoding and eliminate its inherent positional bias. This allows us to integrate state-of-the-art LLMs into the text-to-image generation model flexibly. Furthermore, we also provide an effective manner to fuse multiple LLMs into our framework. Considering the excellent performance and scaling capabilities demonstrated by the transformer architecture, we further design an LLM-Infused Diffusion Transformer (LI-DiT) based on the framework. We conduct extensive experiments to validate LI-DiT across model size and data size. Benefiting from the inherent ability of the LLMs and our innovative designs, the prompt understanding performance of LI-DiT easily surpasses state-of-the-art open-source models as well as mainstream closed-source commercial models including Stable Diffusion 3, DALL-E 3, and Midjourney V6. The powerful LI-DiT-10B will be available after further optimization and security checks.

MoVA: Adapting Mixture of Vision Experts to Multimodal Context

As the key component in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), the ability of the visual encoder greatly affects MLLM's understanding on diverse image content. Although some large-scale pretrained vision encoders such as vision encoders in CLIP and DINOv2 have brought promising performance, we found that there is still no single vision encoder that can dominate various image content understanding, e.g., the CLIP vision encoder leads to outstanding results on general image understanding but poor performance on document or chart content. To alleviate the bias of CLIP vision encoder, we first delve into the inherent behavior of different pre-trained vision encoders and then propose the MoVA, a powerful and novel MLLM, adaptively routing and fusing task-specific vision experts with a coarse-to-fine mechanism. In the coarse-grained stage, we design a context-aware expert routing strategy to dynamically select the most suitable vision experts according to the user instruction, input image, and expertise of vision experts. This benefits from the powerful model function understanding ability of the large language model (LLM) equipped with expert-routing low-rank adaptation (LoRA). In the fine-grained stage, we elaborately conduct the mixture-of-vision-expert adapter (MoV-Adapter) to extract and fuse task-specific knowledge from various experts. This coarse-to-fine paradigm effectively leverages representations from experts based on multimodal context and model expertise, further enhancing the generalization ability. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Without any bells and whistles, MoVA can achieve significant performance gains over current state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of challenging multimodal benchmarks. Codes and models will be available at https://github.com/TempleX98/MoVA.

MedFLIP: Medical Vision-and-Language Self-supervised Fast Pre-Training with Masked Autoencoder

Within the domain of medical analysis, extensive research has explored the potential of mutual learning between Masked Autoencoders(MAEs) and multimodal data. However, the impact of MAEs on intermodality remains a key challenge. We introduce MedFLIP, a Fast Language-Image Pre-training method for Medical analysis. We explore MAEs for zero-shot learning with crossed domains, which enhances the model ability to learn from limited data, a common scenario in medical diagnostics. We verify that masking an image does not affect intermodal learning. Furthermore, we propose the SVD loss to enhance the representation learning for characteristics of medical images, aiming to improve classification accuracy by leveraging the structural intricacies of such data. Lastly, we validate using language will improve the zero-shot performance for the medical image analysis. MedFLIP scaling of the masking process marks an advancement in the field, offering a pathway to rapid and precise medical image analysis without the traditional computational bottlenecks. Through experiments and validation, MedFLIP demonstrates efficient performance improvements, setting an explored standard for future research and application in medical diagnostics.

Towards Large-scale Masked Face Recognition

During the COVID-19 coronavirus epidemic, almost everyone is wearing masks, which poses a huge challenge for deep learning-based face recognition algorithms. In this paper, we will present our \textbf{championship} solutions in ICCV MFR WebFace260M and InsightFace unconstrained tracks. We will focus on four challenges in large-scale masked face recognition, i.e., super-large scale training, data noise handling, masked and non-masked face recognition accuracy balancing, and how to design inference-friendly model architecture. We hope that the discussion on these four aspects can guide future research towards more robust masked face recognition systems.

Rethinking Robust Representation Learning Under Fine-grained Noisy Faces

Learning robust feature representation from large-scale noisy faces stands out as one of the key challenges in high-performance face recognition. Recent attempts have been made to cope with this challenge by alleviating the intra-class conflict and inter-class conflict. However, the unconstrained noise type in each conflict still makes it difficult for these algorithms to perform well. To better understand this, we reformulate the noise type of each class in a more fine-grained manner as N-identities|K^C-clusters. Different types of noisy faces can be generated by adjusting the values of \nkc. Based on this unified formulation, we found that the main barrier behind the noise-robust representation learning is the flexibility of the algorithm under different N, K, and C. For this potential problem, we propose a new method, named Evolving Sub-centers Learning~(ESL), to find optimal hyperplanes to accurately describe the latent space of massive noisy faces. More specifically, we initialize M sub-centers for each class and ESL encourages it to be automatically aligned to N-identities|K^C-clusters faces via producing, merging, and dropping operations. Images belonging to the same identity in noisy faces can effectively converge to the same sub-center and samples with different identities will be pushed away. We inspect its effectiveness with an elaborate ablation study on the synthetic noisy dataset with different N, K, and C. Without any bells and whistles, ESL can achieve significant performance gains over state-of-the-art methods on large-scale noisy faces

Target-Relevant Knowledge Preservation for Multi-Source Domain Adaptive Object Detection

Domain adaptive object detection (DAOD) is a promising way to alleviate performance drop of detectors in new scenes. Albeit great effort made in single source domain adaptation, a more generalized task with multiple source domains remains not being well explored, due to knowledge degradation during their combination. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach, namely target-relevant knowledge preservation (TRKP), to unsupervised multi-source DAOD. Specifically, TRKP adopts the teacher-student framework, where the multi-head teacher network is built to extract knowledge from labeled source domains and guide the student network to learn detectors in unlabeled target domain. The teacher network is further equipped with an adversarial multi-source disentanglement (AMSD) module to preserve source domain-specific knowledge and simultaneously perform cross-domain alignment. Besides, a holistic target-relevant mining (HTRM) scheme is developed to re-weight the source images according to the source-target relevance. By this means, the teacher network is enforced to capture target-relevant knowledge, thus benefiting decreasing domain shift when mentoring object detection in the target domain. Extensive experiments are conducted on various widely used benchmarks with new state-of-the-art scores reported, highlighting the effectiveness.