This survey reviews text-to-image diffusion models in the context that diffusion models have emerged to be popular for a wide range of generative tasks. As a self-contained work, this survey starts with a brief introduction of how a basic diffusion model works for image synthesis, followed by how condition or guidance improves learning. Based on that, we present a review of state-of-the-art methods on text-conditioned image synthesis, i.e., text-to-image. We further summarize applications beyond text-to-image generation: text-guided creative generation and text-guided image editing. Beyond the progress made so far, we discuss existing challenges and promising future directions.
This paper presents a simple yet effective approach that improves continual test-time adaptation (TTA) in a memory-efficient manner. TTA may primarily be conducted on edge devices with limited memory, so reducing memory is crucial but has been overlooked in previous TTA studies. In addition, long-term adaptation often leads to catastrophic forgetting and error accumulation, which hinders applying TTA in real-world deployments. Our approach consists of two components to address these issues. First, we present lightweight meta networks that can adapt the frozen original networks to the target domain. This novel architecture minimizes memory consumption by decreasing the size of intermediate activations required for backpropagation. Second, our novel self-distilled regularization controls the output of the meta networks not to deviate significantly from the output of the frozen original networks, thereby preserving well-trained knowledge from the source domain. Without additional memory, this regularization prevents error accumulation and catastrophic forgetting, resulting in stable performance even in long-term test-time adaptation. We demonstrate that our simple yet effective strategy outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks for image classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Notably, our proposed method with ResNet-50 and WideResNet-40 takes 86% and 80% less memory than the recent state-of-the-art method, CoTTA.
Diffusion probabilistic models (DPM) have been widely adopted in image-to-image translation to generate high-quality images. Prior attempts at applying the DPM to image super-resolution (SR) have shown that iteratively refining a pure Gaussian noise with a conditional image using a U-Net trained on denoising at various-level noises can help obtain a satisfied high-resolution image for the low-resolution one. To further improve the performance and simplify current DPM-based super-resolution methods, we propose a simple but non-trivial DPM-based super-resolution post-process framework,i.e., cDPMSR. After applying a pre-trained SR model on the to-be-test LR image to provide the conditional input, we adapt the standard DPM to conduct conditional image generation and perform super-resolution through a deterministic iterative denoising process. Our method surpasses prior attempts on both qualitative and quantitative results and can generate more photo-realistic counterparts for the low-resolution images with various benchmark datasets including Set5, Set14, Urban100, BSD100, and Manga109. Code will be published after accepted.
We present a novel data-efficient semi-supervised framework to improve the generalization of image captioning models. Constructing a large-scale labeled image captioning dataset is an expensive task in terms of labor, time, and cost. In contrast to manually annotating all the training samples, separately collecting uni-modal datasets is immensely easier, e.g., a large-scale image dataset and a sentence dataset. We leverage such massive unpaired image and caption data upon standard paired data by learning to associate them. To this end, our proposed semi-supervised learning method assigns pseudo-labels to unpaired samples in an adversarial learning fashion, where the joint distribution of image and caption is learned. Our method trains a captioner to learn from a paired data and to progressively associate unpaired data. This approach shows noticeable performance improvement even in challenging scenarios including out-of-task data (i.e., relational captioning, where the target task is different from the unpaired data) and web-crawled data. We also show that our proposed method is theoretically well-motivated and has a favorable global optimal property. Our extensive and comprehensive empirical results both on (1) image-based and (2) dense region-based captioning datasets followed by comprehensive analysis on the scarcely-paired COCO dataset demonstrate the consistent effectiveness of our semisupervised learning method with unpaired data compared to competing methods.
Driven by improved architectures and better representation learning frameworks, the field of visual recognition has enjoyed rapid modernization and performance boost in the early 2020s. For example, modern ConvNets, represented by ConvNeXt, have demonstrated strong performance in various scenarios. While these models were originally designed for supervised learning with ImageNet labels, they can also potentially benefit from self-supervised learning techniques such as masked autoencoders (MAE). However, we found that simply combining these two approaches leads to subpar performance. In this paper, we propose a fully convolutional masked autoencoder framework and a new Global Response Normalization (GRN) layer that can be added to the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance inter-channel feature competition. This co-design of self-supervised learning techniques and architectural improvement results in a new model family called ConvNeXt V2, which significantly improves the performance of pure ConvNets on various recognition benchmarks, including ImageNet classification, COCO detection, and ADE20K segmentation. We also provide pre-trained ConvNeXt V2 models of various sizes, ranging from an efficient 3.7M-parameter Atto model with 76.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, to a 650M Huge model that achieves a state-of-the-art 88.9% accuracy using only public training data.
The tracking-by-detection paradigm today has become the dominant method for multi-object tracking and works by detecting objects in each frame and then performing data association across frames. However, its sequential frame-wise matching property fundamentally suffers from the intermediate interruptions in a video, such as object occlusions, fast camera movements, and abrupt light changes. Moreover, it typically overlooks temporal information beyond the two frames for matching. In this paper, we investigate an alternative by treating object association as clip-wise matching. Our new perspective views a single long video sequence as multiple short clips, and then the tracking is performed both within and between the clips. The benefits of this new approach are two folds. First, our method is robust to tracking error accumulation or propagation, as the video chunking allows bypassing the interrupted frames, and the short clip tracking avoids the conventional error-prone long-term track memory management. Second, the multiple frame information is aggregated during the clip-wise matching, resulting in a more accurate long-range track association than the current frame-wise matching. Given the state-of-the-art tracking-by-detection tracker, QDTrack, we showcase how the tracking performance improves with our new tracking formulation. We evaluate our proposals on two tracking benchmarks, TAO and MOT17 that have complementary characteristics and challenges each other.
Scaling object taxonomies is one of the important steps toward a robust real-world deployment of recognition systems. We have faced remarkable progress in images since the introduction of the LVIS benchmark. To continue this success in videos, a new video benchmark, TAO, was recently presented. Given the recent encouraging results from both detection and tracking communities, we are interested in marrying those two advances and building a strong large vocabulary video tracker. However, supervisions in LVIS and TAO are inherently sparse or even missing, posing two new challenges for training the large vocabulary trackers. First, no tracking supervisions are in LVIS, which leads to inconsistent learning of detection (with LVIS and TAO) and tracking (only with TAO). Second, the detection supervisions in TAO are partial, which results in catastrophic forgetting of absent LVIS categories during video fine-tuning. To resolve these challenges, we present a simple but effective learning framework that takes full advantage of all available training data to learn detection and tracking while not losing any LVIS categories to recognize. With this new learning scheme, we show that consistent improvements of various large vocabulary trackers are capable, setting strong baseline results on the challenging TAO benchmarks.
Test-time adaptation (TTA) has attracted significant attention due to its practical properties which enable the adaptation of a pre-trained model to a new domain with only target dataset during the inference stage. Prior works on TTA assume that the target dataset comes from the same distribution and thus constitutes a single homogeneous domain. In practice, however, the target domain can contain multiple homogeneous domains which are sufficiently distinctive from each other and those multiple domains might occur cyclically. Our preliminary investigation shows that domain-specific TTA outperforms vanilla TTA treating compound domain (CD) as a single one. However, domain labels are not available for CD, which makes domain-specific TTA not practicable. To this end, we propose an online clustering algorithm for finding pseudo-domain labels to obtain similar benefits as domain-specific configuration and accumulating knowledge of cyclic domains effectively. Moreover, we observe that there is a significant discrepancy in terms of prediction quality among samples, especially in the CD context. This further motivates us to boost its performance with gradient denoising by considering the image-wise similarity with the source distribution. Overall, the key contribution of our work lies in proposing a highly significant new task compound domain test-time adaptation (CD-TTA) on semantic segmentation as well as providing a strong baseline to facilitate future works to benchmark.
Universal Domain Adaptation aims to transfer the knowledge between the datasets by handling two shifts: domain-shift and category-shift. The main challenge is correctly distinguishing the unknown target samples while adapting the distribution of known class knowledge from source to target. Most existing methods approach this problem by first training the target adapted known classifier and then relying on the single threshold to distinguish unknown target samples. However, this simple threshold-based approach prevents the model from considering the underlying complexities existing between the known and unknown samples in the high-dimensional feature space. In this paper, we propose a new approach in which we use two sets of feature points, namely dual Classifiers for Prototypes and Reciprocals (CPR). Our key idea is to associate each prototype with corresponding known class features while pushing the reciprocals apart from these prototypes to locate them in the potential unknown feature space. The target samples are then classified as unknown if they fall near any reciprocals at test time. To successfully train our framework, we collect the partial, confident target samples that are classified as known or unknown through on our proposed multi-criteria selection. We then additionally apply the entropy loss regularization to them. For further adaptation, we also apply standard consistency regularization that matches the predictions of two different views of the input to make more compact target feature space. We evaluate our proposal, CPR, on three standard benchmarks and achieve comparable or new state-of-the-art results. We also provide extensive ablation experiments to verify our main design choices in our framework.
We propose MATE, the first Test-Time-Training (TTT) method designed for 3D data. It makes deep networks trained in point cloud classification robust to distribution shifts occurring in test data, which could not be anticipated during training. Like existing TTT methods, which focused on classifying 2D images in the presence of distribution shifts at test-time, MATE also leverages test data for adaptation. Its test-time objective is that of a Masked Autoencoder: Each test point cloud has a large portion of its points removed before it is fed to the network, tasked with reconstructing the full point cloud. Once the network is updated, it is used to classify the point cloud. We test MATE on several 3D object classification datasets and show that it significantly improves robustness of deep networks to several types of corruptions commonly occurring in 3D point clouds. Further, we show that MATE is very efficient in terms of the fraction of points it needs for the adaptation. It can effectively adapt given as few as 5% of tokens of each test sample, which reduces its memory footprint and makes it lightweight. We also highlight that MATE achieves competitive performance by adapting sparingly on the test data, which further reduces its computational overhead, making it ideal for real-time applications.