Text-driven Visual Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Prior

There has been tremendous progress in large-scale text-to-image synthesis driven by diffusion models enabling versatile downstream applications such as 3D object synthesis from texts, image editing, and customized generation. We present a generic approach using latent diffusion models as powerful image priors for various visual synthesis tasks. Existing methods that utilize such priors fail to use these models' full capabilities. To improve this, our core ideas are 1) a feature matching loss between features from different layers of the decoder to provide detailed guidance and 2) a KL divergence loss to regularize the predicted latent features and stabilize the training. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on three different applications, text-to-3D, StyleGAN adaptation, and layered image editing. Extensive results show our method compares favorably against baselines.

ELDA: Using Edges to Have an Edge on Semantic Segmentation Based UDA

Many unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) methods have been proposed to bridge the domain gap by utilizing domain invariant information. Most approaches have chosen depth as such information and achieved remarkable success. Despite their effectiveness, using depth as domain invariant information in UDA tasks may lead to multiple issues, such as excessively high extraction costs and difficulties in achieving a reliable prediction quality. As a result, we introduce Edge Learning based Domain Adaptation (ELDA), a framework which incorporates edge information into its training process to serve as a type of domain invariant information. In our experiments, we quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that the incorporation of edge information is indeed beneficial and effective and enables ELDA to outperform the contemporary state-of-the-art methods on two commonly adopted benchmarks for semantic segmentation based UDA tasks. In addition, we show that ELDA is able to better separate the feature distributions of different classes. We further provide an ablation analysis to justify our design decisions.

Pixel-Wise Prediction based Visual Odometry via Uncertainty Estimation

This paper introduces pixel-wise prediction based visual odometry (PWVO), which is a dense prediction task that evaluates the values of translation and rotation for every pixel in its input observations. PWVO employs uncertainty estimation to identify the noisy regions in the input observations, and adopts a selection mechanism to integrate pixel-wise predictions based on the estimated uncertainty maps to derive the final translation and rotation. In order to train PWVO in a comprehensive fashion, we further develop a data generation workflow for generating synthetic training data. The experimental results show that PWVO is able to deliver favorable results. In addition, our analyses validate the effectiveness of the designs adopted in PWVO, and demonstrate that the uncertainty maps estimated by PWVO is capable of capturing the noises in its input observations.

Investigation of Factorized Optical Flows as Mid-Level Representations

In this paper, we introduce a new concept of incorporating factorized flow maps as mid-level representations, for bridging the perception and the control modules in modular learning based robotic frameworks. To investigate the advantages of factorized flow maps and examine their interplay with the other types of mid-level representations, we further develop a configurable framework, along with four different environments that contain both static and dynamic objects, for analyzing the impacts of factorized optical flow maps on the performance of deep reinforcement learning agents. Based on this framework, we report our experimental results on various scenarios, and offer a set of analyses to justify our hypothesis. Finally, we validate flow factorization in real world scenarios.