Scaling Autoregressive Models for Content-Rich Text-to-Image Generation

We present the Pathways Autoregressive Text-to-Image (Parti) model, which generates high-fidelity photorealistic images and supports content-rich synthesis involving complex compositions and world knowledge. Parti treats text-to-image generation as a sequence-to-sequence modeling problem, akin to machine translation, with sequences of image tokens as the target outputs rather than text tokens in another language. This strategy can naturally tap into the rich body of prior work on large language models, which have seen continued advances in capabilities and performance through scaling data and model sizes. Our approach is simple: First, Parti uses a Transformer-based image tokenizer, ViT-VQGAN, to encode images as sequences of discrete tokens. Second, we achieve consistent quality improvements by scaling the encoder-decoder Transformer model up to 20B parameters, with a new state-of-the-art zero-shot FID score of 7.23 and finetuned FID score of 3.22 on MS-COCO. Our detailed analysis on Localized Narratives as well as PartiPrompts (P2), a new holistic benchmark of over 1600 English prompts, demonstrate the effectiveness of Parti across a wide variety of categories and difficulty aspects. We also explore and highlight limitations of our models in order to define and exemplify key areas of focus for further improvements. See https://parti.research.google/ for high-resolution images.

Simple and Effective Synthesis of Indoor 3D Scenes

We study the problem of synthesizing immersive 3D indoor scenes from one or more images. Our aim is to generate high-resolution images and videos from novel viewpoints, including viewpoints that extrapolate far beyond the input images while maintaining 3D consistency. Existing approaches are highly complex, with many separately trained stages and components. We propose a simple alternative: an image-to-image GAN that maps directly from reprojections of incomplete point clouds to full high-resolution RGB-D images. On the Matterport3D and RealEstate10K datasets, our approach significantly outperforms prior work when evaluated by humans, as well as on FID scores. Further, we show that our model is useful for generative data augmentation. A vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agent trained with trajectories spatially-perturbed by our model improves success rate by up to 1.5% over a state of the art baseline on the R2R benchmark. Our code will be made available to facilitate generative data augmentation and applications to downstream robotics and embodied AI tasks.

Vector-quantized Image Modeling with Improved VQGAN

Pretraining language models with next-token prediction on massive text corpora has delivered phenomenal zero-shot, few-shot, transfer learning and multi-tasking capabilities on both generative and discriminative language tasks. Motivated by this success, we explore a Vector-quantized Image Modeling (VIM) approach that involves pretraining a Transformer to predict rasterized image tokens autoregressively. The discrete image tokens are encoded from a learned Vision-Transformer-based VQGAN (ViT-VQGAN). We first propose multiple improvements over vanilla VQGAN from architecture to codebook learning, yielding better efficiency and reconstruction fidelity. The improved ViT-VQGAN further improves vector-quantized image modeling tasks, including unconditional, class-conditioned image generation and unsupervised representation learning. When trained on ImageNet at 256x256 resolution, we achieve Inception Score (IS) of 175.1 and Fr'echet Inception Distance (FID) of 4.17, a dramatic improvement over the vanilla VQGAN, which obtains 70.6 and 17.04 for IS and FID, respectively. Based on ViT-VQGAN and unsupervised pretraining, we further evaluate the pretrained Transformer by averaging intermediate features, similar to Image GPT (iGPT). This ImageNet-pretrained VIM-L significantly beats iGPT-L on linear-probe accuracy from 60.3% to 72.2% for a similar model size. ViM-L also outperforms iGPT-XL which is trained with extra web image data and larger model size.

Pathdreamer: A World Model for Indoor Navigation

People navigating in unfamiliar buildings take advantage of myriad visual, spatial and semantic cues to efficiently achieve their navigation goals. Towards equipping computational agents with similar capabilities, we introduce Pathdreamer, a visual world model for agents navigating in novel indoor environments. Given one or more previous visual observations, Pathdreamer generates plausible high-resolution 360 visual observations (RGB, semantic segmentation and depth) for viewpoints that have not been visited, in buildings not seen during training. In regions of high uncertainty (e.g. predicting around corners, imagining the contents of an unseen room), Pathdreamer can predict diverse scenes, allowing an agent to sample multiple realistic outcomes for a given trajectory. We demonstrate that Pathdreamer encodes useful and accessible visual, spatial and semantic knowledge about human environments by using it in the downstream task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN). Specifically, we show that planning ahead with Pathdreamer brings about half the benefit of looking ahead at actual observations from unobserved parts of the environment. We hope that Pathdreamer will help unlock model-based approaches to challenging embodied navigation tasks such as navigating to specified objects and VLN.

Revisiting Hierarchical Approach for Persistent Long-Term Video Prediction

Learning to predict the long-term future of video frames is notoriously challenging due to inherent ambiguities in the distant future and dramatic amplifications of prediction error through time. Despite the recent advances in the literature, existing approaches are limited to moderately short-term prediction (less than a few seconds), while extrapolating it to a longer future quickly leads to destruction in structure and content. In this work, we revisit hierarchical models in video prediction. Our method predicts future frames by first estimating a sequence of semantic structures and subsequently translating the structures to pixels by video-to-video translation. Despite the simplicity, we show that modeling structures and their dynamics in the discrete semantic structure space with a stochastic recurrent estimator leads to surprisingly successful long-term prediction. We evaluate our method on three challenging datasets involving car driving and human dancing, and demonstrate that it can generate complicated scene structures and motions over a very long time horizon (i.e., thousands frames), setting a new standard of video prediction with orders of magnitude longer prediction time than existing approaches. Full videos and codes are available at https://1konny.github.io/HVP/.

Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning for Text-to-Image Generation

The output of text-to-image synthesis systems should be coherent, clear, photo-realistic scenes with high semantic fidelity to their conditioned text descriptions. Our Cross-Modal Contrastive Generative Adversarial Network (XMC-GAN) addresses this challenge by maximizing the mutual information between image and text. It does this via multiple contrastive losses which capture inter-modality and intra-modality correspondences. XMC-GAN uses an attentional self-modulation generator, which enforces strong text-image correspondence, and a contrastive discriminator, which acts as a critic as well as a feature encoder for contrastive learning. The quality of XMC-GAN's output is a major step up from previous models, as we show on three challenging datasets. On MS-COCO, not only does XMC-GAN improve state-of-the-art FID from 24.70 to 9.33, but--more importantly--people prefer XMC-GAN by 77.3 for image quality and 74.1 for image-text alignment, compared to three other recent models. XMC-GAN also generalizes to the challenging Localized Narratives dataset (which has longer, more detailed descriptions), improving state-of-the-art FID from 48.70 to 14.12. Lastly, we train and evaluate XMC-GAN on the challenging Open Images data, establishing a strong benchmark FID score of 26.91.

Text-to-Image Generation Grounded by Fine-Grained User Attention

Localized Narratives is a dataset with detailed natural language descriptions of images paired with mouse traces that provide a sparse, fine-grained visual grounding for phrases. We propose TReCS, a sequential model that exploits this grounding to generate images. TReCS uses descriptions to retrieve segmentation masks and predict object labels aligned with mouse traces. These alignments are used to select and position masks to generate a fully covered segmentation canvas; the final image is produced by a segmentation-to-image generator using this canvas. This multi-step, retrieval-based approach outperforms existing direct text-to-image generation models on both automatic metrics and human evaluations: overall, its generated images are more photo-realistic and better match descriptions.

SideInfNet: A Deep Neural Network for Semi-Automatic Semantic Segmentation with Side Information

Fully-automatic execution is the ultimate goal for many Computer Vision applications. However, this objective is not always realistic in tasks associated with high failure costs, such as medical applications. For these tasks, a compromise between fully-automatic execution and user interactions is often preferred due to desirable accuracy and performance. Semi-automatic methods require minimal effort from experts by allowing them to provide cues that guide computer algorithms. Inspired by the practicality and applicability of the semi-automatic approach, this paper proposes a novel deep neural network architecture, namely SideInfNet that effectively integrates features learnt from images with side information extracted from user annotations to produce high quality semantic segmentation results. To evaluate our method, we applied the proposed network to three semantic segmentation tasks and conducted extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Experimental results and comparison with prior work have verified the superiority of our model, suggesting the generality and effectiveness of the model in semi-automatic semantic segmentation.

Object Boundary Detection and Classification with Image-level Labels

Semantic boundary and edge detection aims at simultaneously detecting object edge pixels in images and assigning class labels to them. Systematic training of predictors for this task requires the labeling of edges in images which is a particularly tedious task. We propose a novel strategy for solving this task, when pixel-level annotations are not available, performing it in an almost zero-shot manner by relying on conventional whole image neural net classifiers that were trained using large bounding boxes. Our method performs the following two steps at test time. Firstly it predicts the class labels by applying the trained whole image network to the test images. Secondly, it computes pixel-wise scores from the obtained predictions by applying backprop gradients as well as recent visualization algorithms such as deconvolution and layer-wise relevance propagation. We show that high pixel-wise scores are indicative for the location of semantic boundaries, which suggests that the semantic boundary problem can be approached without using edge labels during the training phase.