Parrot: Pareto-optimal Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning Framework for Text-to-Image Generation

Recent works demonstrate that using reinforcement learning (RL) with quality rewards can enhance the quality of generated images in text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, a simple aggregation of multiple rewards may cause over-optimization in certain metrics and degradation in others, and it is challenging to manually find the optimal weights. An effective strategy to jointly optimize multiple rewards in RL for T2I generation is highly desirable. This paper introduces Parrot, a novel multi-reward RL framework for T2I generation. Through the use of the batch-wise Pareto optimal selection, Parrot automatically identifies the optimal trade-off among different rewards during the RL optimization of the T2I generation. Additionally, Parrot employs a joint optimization approach for the T2I model and the prompt expansion network, facilitating the generation of quality-aware text prompts, thus further enhancing the final image quality. To counteract the potential catastrophic forgetting of the original user prompt due to prompt expansion, we introduce original prompt centered guidance at inference time, ensuring that the generated image remains faithful to the user input. Extensive experiments and a user study demonstrate that Parrot outperforms several baseline methods across various quality criteria, including aesthetics, human preference, image sentiment, and text-image alignment.

Soundini: Sound-Guided Diffusion for Natural Video Editing

We propose a method for adding sound-guided visual effects to specific regions of videos with a zero-shot setting. Animating the appearance of the visual effect is challenging because each frame of the edited video should have visual changes while maintaining temporal consistency. Moreover, existing video editing solutions focus on temporal consistency across frames, ignoring the visual style variations over time, e.g., thunderstorm, wave, fire crackling. To overcome this limitation, we utilize temporal sound features for the dynamic style. Specifically, we guide denoising diffusion probabilistic models with an audio latent representation in the audio-visual latent space. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to explore sound-guided natural video editing from various sound sources with sound-specialized properties, such as intensity, timbre, and volume. Additionally, we design optical flow-based guidance to generate temporally consistent video frames, capturing the pixel-wise relationship between adjacent frames. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing video editing techniques, producing more realistic visual effects that reflect the properties of sound. Please visit our page: https://kuai-lab.github.io/soundini-gallery/.

Deep 3D-to-2D Watermarking: Embedding Messages in 3D Meshes and Extracting Them from 2D Renderings

Digital watermarking is widely used for copyright protection. Traditional 3D watermarking approaches or commercial software are typically designed to embed messages into 3D meshes, and later retrieve the messages directly from distorted/undistorted watermarked 3D meshes. Retrieving messages from 2D renderings of such meshes, however, is still challenging and underexplored. We introduce a novel end-to-end learning framework to solve this problem through: 1) an encoder to covertly embed messages in both mesh geometry and textures; 2) a differentiable renderer to render watermarked 3D objects from different camera angles and under varied lighting conditions; 3) a decoder to recover the messages from 2D rendered images. From extensive experiments, we show that our models learn to embed information visually imperceptible to humans, and to reconstruct the embedded information from 2D renderings robust to 3D distortions. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can be generalized to work with different renderers, such as ray tracers and real-time renderers.

GIFnets: Differentiable GIF Encoding Framework

Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a widely used image file format. Due to the limited number of palette colors, GIF encoding often introduces color banding artifacts. Traditionally, dithering is applied to reduce color banding, but introducing dotted-pattern artifacts. To reduce artifacts and provide a better and more efficient GIF encoding, we introduce a differentiable GIF encoding pipeline, which includes three novel neural networks: PaletteNet, DitherNet, and BandingNet. Each of these three networks provides an important functionality within the GIF encoding pipeline. PaletteNet predicts a near-optimal color palette given an input image. DitherNet manipulates the input image to reduce color banding artifacts and provides an alternative to traditional dithering. Finally, BandingNet is designed to detect color banding, and provides a new perceptual loss specifically for GIF images. As far as we know, this is the first fully differentiable GIF encoding pipeline based on deep neural networks and compatible with existing GIF decoders. User study shows that our algorithm is better than Floyd-Steinberg based GIF encoding.