Image Super-resolution Via Latent Diffusion: A Sampling-space Mixture Of Experts And Frequency-augmented Decoder Approach

The recent use of diffusion prior, enhanced by pre-trained text-image models, has markedly elevated the performance of image super-resolution (SR). To alleviate the huge computational cost required by pixel-based diffusion SR, latent-based methods utilize a feature encoder to transform the image and then implement the SR image generation in a compact latent space. Nevertheless, there are two major issues that limit the performance of latent-based diffusion. First, the compression of latent space usually causes reconstruction distortion. Second, huge computational cost constrains the parameter scale of the diffusion model. To counteract these issues, we first propose a frequency compensation module that enhances the frequency components from latent space to pixel space. The reconstruction distortion (especially for high-frequency information) can be significantly decreased. Then, we propose to use Sample-Space Mixture of Experts (SS-MoE) to achieve more powerful latent-based SR, which steadily improves the capacity of the model without a significant increase in inference costs. These carefully crafted designs contribute to performance improvements in largely explored 4x blind super-resolution benchmarks and extend to large magnification factors, i.e., 8x image SR benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/amandaluof/moe_sr.

Effortless Cross-Platform Video Codec: A Codebook-Based Method

Under certain circumstances, advanced neural video codecs can surpass the most complex traditional codecs in their rate-distortion (RD) performance. One of the main reasons for the high performance of existing neural video codecs is the use of the entropy model, which can provide more accurate probability distribution estimations for compressing the latents. This also implies the rigorous requirement that entropy models running on different platforms should use consistent distribution estimations. However, in cross-platform scenarios, entropy models running on different platforms usually yield inconsistent probability distribution estimations due to floating point computation errors that are platform-dependent, which can cause the decoding side to fail in correctly decoding the compressed bitstream sent by the encoding side. In this paper, we propose a cross-platform video compression framework based on codebooks, which avoids autoregressive entropy modeling and achieves video compression by transmitting the index sequence of the codebooks. Moreover, instead of using optical flow for context alignment, we propose to use the conditional cross-attention module to obtain the context between frames. Due to the absence of autoregressive modeling and optical flow alignment, we can design an extremely minimalist framework that can greatly benefit computational efficiency. Importantly, our framework no longer contains any distribution estimation modules for entropy modeling, and thus computations across platforms are not necessarily consistent. Experimental results show that our method can outperform the traditional H.265 (medium) even without any entropy constraints, while achieving the cross-platform property intrinsically.

Advancing Pose-Guided Image Synthesis with Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models

Recent work has showcased the significant potential of diffusion models in pose-guided person image synthesis. However, owing to the inconsistency in pose between the source and target images, synthesizing an image with a distinct pose, relying exclusively on the source image and target pose information, remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents Progressive Conditional Diffusion Models (PCDMs) that incrementally bridge the gap between person images under the target and source poses through three stages. Specifically, in the first stage, we design a simple prior conditional diffusion model that predicts the global features of the target image by mining the global alignment relationship between pose coordinates and image appearance. Then, the second stage establishes a dense correspondence between the source and target images using the global features from the previous stage, and an inpainting conditional diffusion model is proposed to further align and enhance the contextual features, generating a coarse-grained person image. In the third stage, we propose a refining conditional diffusion model to utilize the coarsely generated image from the previous stage as a condition, achieving texture restoration and enhancing fine-detail consistency. The three-stage PCDMs work progressively to generate the final high-quality and high-fidelity synthesized image. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the consistency and photorealism of our proposed PCDMs under challenging scenarios.The code and model will be available at https://github.com/muzishen/PCDMs.

Hyperspectral Image Fusion via Logarithmic Low-rank Tensor Ring Decomposition

Integrating a low-spatial-resolution hyperspectral image (LR-HSI) with a high-spatial-resolution multispectral image (HR-MSI) is recognized as a valid method for acquiring HR-HSI. Among the current fusion approaches, the tensor ring (TR) decomposition-based method has received growing attention owing to its superior performance on preserving the spatial-spectral correlation. Furthermore, the low-rank property in some TR factors has been exploited via the matrix nuclear norm regularization along mode-2. On the other hand, the tensor nuclear norm (TNN)-based approaches have recently demonstrated to be more efficient on keeping high-dimensional low-rank structures in tensor recovery. Here, we study the low-rankness of TR factors from the TNN perspective and consider the mode-2 logarithmic TNN (LTNN) on each TR factor. A novel fusion model is proposed by incorporating this LTNN regularization and the weighted total variation which is to promote the continuity of HR-HSI in the spatial-spectral domain. Meanwhile, we have devised a highly efficient proximal alternating minimization algorithm to solve the proposed model. The experimental results indicate that our method improves the visual quality and exceeds the existing state-of-the-art fusion approaches with respect to various quantitative metrics.

Attentive Multi-Layer Perceptron for Non-autoregressive Generation

Autoregressive~(AR) generation almost dominates sequence generation for its efficacy. Recently, non-autoregressive~(NAR) generation gains increasing popularity for its efficiency and growing efficacy. However, its efficiency is still bottlenecked by quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, which is prohibitive for scaling to long sequence generation and few works have been done to mitigate this problem. In this paper, we propose a novel MLP variant, \textbf{A}ttentive \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{L}ayer \textbf{P}erceptron~(AMLP), to produce a generation model with linear time and space complexity. Different from classic MLP with static and learnable projection matrices, AMLP leverages adaptive projections computed from inputs in an attentive mode. The sample-aware adaptive projections enable communications among tokens in a sequence, and model the measurement between the query and key space. Furthermore, we marry AMLP with popular NAR models, deriving a highly efficient NAR-AMLP architecture with linear time and space complexity. Empirical results show that such marriage architecture surpasses competitive efficient NAR models, by a significant margin on text-to-speech synthesis and machine translation. We also test AMLP's self- and cross-attention ability separately with extensive ablation experiments, and find them comparable or even superior to the other efficient models. The efficiency analysis further shows that AMLP extremely reduces the memory cost against vanilla non-autoregressive models for long sequences.

Mode Connectivity and Data Heterogeneity of Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to train a model while keeping their data private collaboratively. Previous studies have shown that data heterogeneity between clients leads to drifts across client updates. However, there are few studies on the relationship between client and global modes, making it unclear where these updates end up drifting. We perform empirical and theoretical studies on this relationship by utilizing mode connectivity, which measures performance change (i.e., connectivity) along parametric paths between different modes. Empirically, reducing data heterogeneity makes the connectivity on different paths more similar, forming more low-error overlaps between client and global modes. We also find that a barrier to connectivity occurs when linearly connecting two global modes, while it disappears with considering non-linear mode connectivity. Theoretically, we establish a quantitative bound on the global-mode connectivity using mean-field theory or dropout stability. The bound demonstrates that the connectivity improves when reducing data heterogeneity and widening trained models. Numerical results further corroborate our analytical findings.

Semantic Communications using Foundation Models: Design Approaches and Open Issues

Foundation models (FMs), including large language models, have become increasingly popular due to their wide-ranging applicability and ability to understand human-like semantics. While previous research has explored the use of FMs in semantic communications to improve semantic extraction and reconstruction, the impact of these models on different system levels, considering computation and memory complexity, requires further analysis. This study focuses on integrating FMs at the effectiveness, semantic, and physical levels, using universal knowledge to profoundly transform system design. Additionally, it examines the use of compact models to balance performance and complexity, comparing three separate approaches that employ FMs. Ultimately, the study highlights unresolved issues in the field that need addressing.

Towards Real-Time Neural Video Codec for Cross-Platform Application Using Calibration Information

The state-of-the-art neural video codecs have outperformed the most sophisticated traditional codecs in terms of RD performance in certain cases. However, utilizing them for practical applications is still challenging for two major reasons. 1) Cross-platform computational errors resulting from floating point operations can lead to inaccurate decoding of the bitstream. 2) The high computational complexity of the encoding and decoding process poses a challenge in achieving real-time performance. In this paper, we propose a real-time cross-platform neural video codec, which is capable of efficiently decoding of 720P video bitstream from other encoding platforms on a consumer-grade GPU. First, to solve the problem of inconsistency of codec caused by the uncertainty of floating point calculations across platforms, we design a calibration transmitting system to guarantee the consistent quantization of entropy parameters between the encoding and decoding stages. The parameters that may have transboundary quantization between encoding and decoding are identified in the encoding stage, and their coordinates will be delivered by auxiliary transmitted bitstream. By doing so, these inconsistent parameters can be processed properly in the decoding stage. Furthermore, to reduce the bitrate of the auxiliary bitstream, we rectify the distribution of entropy parameters using a piecewise Gaussian constraint. Second, to match the computational limitations on the decoding side for real-time video codec, we design a lightweight model. A series of efficiency techniques enable our model to achieve 25 FPS decoding speed on NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPU. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can achieve real-time decoding of 720P videos while encoding on another platform. Furthermore, the real-time model brings up to a maximum of 24.2\% BD-rate improvement from the perspective of PSNR with the anchor H.265.