LayerDiff: Exploring Text-guided Multi-layered Composable Image Synthesis via Layer-Collaborative Diffusion Model

Despite the success of generating high-quality images given any text prompts by diffusion-based generative models, prior works directly generate the entire images, but cannot provide object-wise manipulation capability. To support wider real applications like professional graphic design and digital artistry, images are frequently created and manipulated in multiple layers to offer greater flexibility and control. Therefore in this paper, we propose a layer-collaborative diffusion model, named LayerDiff, specifically designed for text-guided, multi-layered, composable image synthesis. The composable image consists of a background layer, a set of foreground layers, and associated mask layers for each foreground element. To enable this, LayerDiff introduces a layer-based generation paradigm incorporating multiple layer-collaborative attention modules to capture inter-layer patterns. Specifically, an inter-layer attention module is designed to encourage information exchange and learning between layers, while a text-guided intra-layer attention module incorporates layer-specific prompts to direct the specific-content generation for each layer. A layer-specific prompt-enhanced module better captures detailed textual cues from the global prompt. Additionally, a self-mask guidance sampling strategy further unleashes the model's ability to generate multi-layered images. We also present a pipeline that integrates existing perceptual and generative models to produce a large dataset of high-quality, text-prompted, multi-layered images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our LayerDiff model can generate high-quality multi-layered images with performance comparable to conventional whole-image generation methods. Moreover, LayerDiff enables a broader range of controllable generative applications, including layer-specific image editing and style transfer.

GrowCLIP: Data-aware Automatic Model Growing for Large-scale Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training

Cross-modal pre-training has shown impressive performance on a wide range of downstream tasks, benefiting from massive image-text pairs collected from the Internet. In practice, online data are growing constantly, highlighting the importance of the ability of pre-trained model to learn from data that is continuously growing. Existing works on cross-modal pre-training mainly focus on training a network with fixed architecture. However, it is impractical to limit the model capacity when considering the continuously growing nature of pre-training data in real-world applications. On the other hand, it is important to utilize the knowledge in the current model to obtain efficient training and better performance. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose GrowCLIP, a data-driven automatic model growing algorithm for contrastive language-image pre-training with continuous image-text pairs as input. Specially, we adopt a dynamic growth space and seek out the optimal architecture at each growth step to adapt to online learning scenarios. And the shared encoder is proposed in our growth space to enhance the degree of cross-modal fusion. Besides, we explore the effect of growth in different dimensions, which could provide future references for the design of cross-modal model architecture. Finally, we employ parameter inheriting with momentum (PIM) to maintain the previous knowledge and address the issue of the local minimum dilemma. Compared with the existing methods, GrowCLIP improves 2.3% average top-1 accuracy on zero-shot image classification of 9 downstream tasks. As for zero-shot image retrieval, GrowCLIP can improve 1.2% for top-1 image-to-text recall on Flickr30K dataset.

DiffDis: Empowering Generative Diffusion Model with Cross-Modal Discrimination Capability

Recently, large-scale diffusion models, e.g., Stable diffusion and DallE2, have shown remarkable results on image synthesis. On the other hand, large-scale cross-modal pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP, ALIGN, and FILIP) are competent for various downstream tasks by learning to align vision and language embeddings. In this paper, we explore the possibility of jointly modeling generation and discrimination. Specifically, we propose DiffDis to unify the cross-modal generative and discriminative pretraining into one single framework under the diffusion process. DiffDis first formulates the image-text discriminative problem as a generative diffusion process of the text embedding from the text encoder conditioned on the image. Then, we propose a novel dual-stream network architecture, which fuses the noisy text embedding with the knowledge of latent images from different scales for image-text discriminative learning. Moreover, the generative and discriminative tasks can efficiently share the image-branch network structure in the multi-modality model. Benefiting from diffusion-based unified training, DiffDis achieves both better generation ability and cross-modal semantic alignment in one architecture. Experimental results show that DiffDis outperforms single-task models on both the image generation and the image-text discriminative tasks, e.g., 1.65% improvement on average accuracy of zero-shot classification over 12 datasets and 2.42 improvement on FID of zero-shot image synthesis.

UniDiff: Advancing Vision-Language Models with Generative and Discriminative Learning

Recent advances in vision-language pre-training have enabled machines to perform better in multimodal object discrimination (e.g., image-text semantic alignment) and image synthesis (e.g., text-to-image generation). On the other hand, fine-tuning pre-trained models with discriminative or generative capabilities such as CLIP and Stable Diffusion on domain-specific datasets has shown to be effective in various tasks by adapting to specific domains. However, few studies have explored the possibility of learning both discriminative and generative capabilities and leveraging their synergistic effects to create a powerful and personalized multimodal model during fine-tuning. This paper presents UniDiff, a unified multi-modal model that integrates image-text contrastive learning (ITC), text-conditioned image synthesis learning (IS), and reciprocal semantic consistency modeling (RSC). UniDiff effectively learns aligned semantics and mitigates the issue of semantic collapse during fine-tuning on small datasets by leveraging RSC on visual features from CLIP and diffusion models, without altering the pre-trained model's basic architecture. UniDiff demonstrates versatility in both multi-modal understanding and generative tasks. Experimental results on three datasets (Fashion-man, Fashion-woman, and E-commercial Product) showcase substantial enhancements in vision-language retrieval and text-to-image generation, illustrating the advantages of combining discriminative and generative fine-tuning. The proposed UniDiff model establishes a robust pipeline for personalized modeling and serves as a benchmark for future comparisons in the field.

Boosting Visual-Language Models by Exploiting Hard Samples

Large vision and language models, such as Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), are rapidly becoming the industry norm for matching images and texts. In order to improve its zero-shot recognition performance, current research either adds additional web-crawled image-text pairs or designs new training losses. However, the additional costs associated with training from scratch and data collection substantially hinder their deployment. In this paper, we present HELIP, a low-cost strategy for boosting the performance of well-trained CLIP models by finetuning them with hard samples over original training data. Mixing hard examples into each batch, the well-trained CLIP model is then fine-tuned using the conventional contrastive alignment objective and a margin loss to distinguish between normal and hard negative data. HELIP is deployed in a plug-and-play fashion to existing models. On a comprehensive zero-shot and retrieval benchmark, without training the model from scratch or utilizing additional data, HELIP consistently boosts existing models to achieve leading performance. In particular, HELIP boosts ImageNet zero-shot accuracy of SLIP by 3.05 and 4.47 when pretrained on CC3M and CC12M respectively. In addition, a systematic evaluation of zero-shot and linear probing experiments across fine-grained classification datasets demonstrates a consistent performance improvement and validates the efficacy of HELIP . When pretraining on CC3M, HELIP boosts zero-shot performance of CLIP and SLIP by 8.4\% and 18.6\% on average respectively, and linear probe performance by 9.5\% and 3.0\% on average respectively.

NLIP: Noise-robust Language-Image Pre-training

Large-scale cross-modal pre-training paradigms have recently shown ubiquitous success on a wide range of downstream tasks, e.g., zero-shot classification, retrieval and image captioning. However, their successes highly rely on the scale and quality of web-crawled data that naturally contain incomplete and noisy information (e.g., wrong or irrelevant content). Existing works either design manual rules to clean data or generate pseudo-targets as auxiliary signals for reducing noise impact, which do not explicitly tackle both the incorrect and incomplete challenges simultaneously. In this paper, to automatically mitigate the impact of noise by solely mining over existing data, we propose a principled Noise-robust Language-Image Pre-training framework (NLIP) to stabilize pre-training via two schemes: noise-harmonization and noise-completion. First, in noise-harmonization scheme, NLIP estimates the noise probability of each pair according to the memorization effect of cross-modal transformers, then adopts noise-adaptive regularization to harmonize the cross-modal alignments with varying degrees. Second, in noise-completion scheme, to enrich the missing object information of text, NLIP injects a concept-conditioned cross-modal decoder to obtain semantic-consistent synthetic captions to complete noisy ones, which uses the retrieved visual concepts (i.e., objects' names) for the corresponding image to guide captioning generation. By collaboratively optimizing noise-harmonization and noise-completion schemes, our NLIP can alleviate the common noise effects during image-text pre-training in a more efficient way. Extensive experiments show the significant performance improvements of our NLIP using only 26M data over existing pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP, FILIP and BLIP) on 12 zero-shot classification datasets, MSCOCO image captioning and zero-shot image-text retrieval tasks.

P$^3$OVD: Fine-grained Visual-Text Prompt-Driven Self-Training for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Inspired by the success of visual-language methods (VLMs) in zero-shot classification, recent works attempt to extend this line of work into object detection by leveraging the localization ability of pre-trained VLMs and generating pseudo labels for unseen classes in a self-training manner. However, since the current VLMs are usually pre-trained with aligning sentence embedding with global image embedding, the direct use of them lacks fine-grained alignment for object instances, which is the core of detection. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Pretrain-adaPt-Pseudo labeling paradigm for Open-Vocabulary Detection (P$^3$OVD) that introduces a fine-grained visual-text prompt adapting stage to enhance the current self-training paradigm with a more powerful fine-grained alignment. During the adapting stage, we enable VLM to obtain fine-grained alignment by using learnable text prompts to resolve an auxiliary dense pixel-wise prediction task. Furthermore, we propose a visual prompt module to provide the prior task information (i.e., the categories need to be predicted) for the vision branch to better adapt the pretrained VLM to the downstream tasks. Experiments show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance for open-vocabulary object detection, e.g., 31.5% mAP on unseen classes of COCO.

Wukong: 100 Million Large-scale Chinese Cross-modal Pre-training Dataset and A Foundation Framework

Vision-Language Pre-training (VLP) models have shown remarkable performance on various downstream tasks. Their success heavily relies on the scale of pre-trained cross-modal datasets. However, the lack of large-scale datasets and benchmarks in Chinese hinders the development of Chinese VLP models and broader multilingual applications. In this work, we release a large-scale Chinese cross-modal dataset named Wukong, containing 100 million Chinese image-text pairs from the web. Wukong aims to benchmark different multi-modal pre-training methods to facilitate the VLP research and community development. Furthermore, we release a group of models pre-trained with various image encoders (ViT-B/ViT-L/SwinT) and also apply advanced pre-training techniques into VLP such as locked-image text tuning, token-wise similarity in contrastive learning, and reduced-token interaction. Extensive experiments and a deep benchmarking of different downstream tasks are also provided. Experiments show that Wukong can serve as a promising Chinese pre-training dataset and benchmark for different cross-modal learning methods. For the zero-shot image classification task on 10 datasets, our model achieves an average accuracy of 73.03%. For the image-text retrieval task,our model achieves a mean recall of 71.6% on AIC-ICC which is 12.9% higher than the result of WenLan 2.0. More information can refer to https://wukong-dataset.github.io/wukong-dataset/.

FILIP: Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-Training

Unsupervised large-scale vision-language pre-training has shown promising advances on various downstream tasks. Existing methods often model the cross-modal interaction either via the similarity of the global feature of each modality which misses sufficient information, or finer-grained interactions using cross/self-attention upon visual and textual tokens. However, cross/self-attention suffers from inferior efficiency in both training and inference. In this paper, we introduce a large-scale Fine-grained Interactive Language-Image Pre-training (FILIP) to achieve finer-level alignment through a cross-modal late interaction mechanism, which uses a token-wise maximum similarity between visual and textual tokens to guide the contrastive objective. FILIP successfully leverages the finer-grained expressiveness between image patches and textual words by modifying only contrastive loss, while simultaneously gaining the ability to pre-compute image and text representations offline at inference, keeping both large-scale training and inference efficient. Furthermore, we construct a new large-scale image-text pair dataset called FILIP300M for pre-training. Experiments show that FILIP achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple downstream vision-language tasks including zero-shot image classification and image-text retrieval. The visualization on word-patch alignment further shows that FILIP can learn meaningful fine-grained features with promising localization ability.