Deep Reward Supervisions for Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Optimizing a text-to-image diffusion model with a given reward function is an important but underexplored research area. In this study, we propose Deep Reward Tuning (DRTune), an algorithm that directly supervises the final output image of a text-to-image diffusion model and back-propagates through the iterative sampling process to the input noise. We find that training earlier steps in the sampling process is crucial for low-level rewards, and deep supervision can be achieved efficiently and effectively by stopping the gradient of the denoising network input. DRTune is extensively evaluated on various reward models. It consistently outperforms other algorithms, particularly for low-level control signals, where all shallow supervision methods fail. Additionally, we fine-tune Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL 1.0) model via DRTune to optimize Human Preference Score v2.1, resulting in the Favorable Diffusion XL 1.0 (FDXL 1.0) model. FDXL 1.0 significantly enhances image quality compared to SDXL 1.0 and reaches comparable quality compared with Midjourney v5.2.

Human Preference Score v2: A Solid Benchmark for Evaluating Human Preferences of Text-to-Image Synthesis

Recent text-to-image generative models can generate high-fidelity images from text inputs, but the quality of these generated images cannot be accurately evaluated by existing evaluation metrics. To address this issue, we introduce Human Preference Dataset v2 (HPD v2), a large-scale dataset that captures human preferences on images from a wide range of sources. HPD v2 comprises 798,090 human preference choices on 430,060 pairs of images, making it the largest dataset of its kind. The text prompts and images are deliberately collected to eliminate potential bias, which is a common issue in previous datasets. By fine-tuning CLIP on HPD v2, we obtain Human Preference Score v2 (HPS v2), a scoring model that can more accurately predict text-generated images' human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that HPS v2 generalizes better than previous metrics across various image distributions and is responsive to algorithmic improvements of text-to-image generative models, making it a preferable evaluation metric for these models. We also investigate the design of the evaluation prompts for text-to-image generative models, to make the evaluation stable, fair and easy-to-use. Finally, we establish a benchmark for text-to-image generative models using HPS v2, which includes a set of recent text-to-image models from the academia, community and industry. The code and dataset is / will be available at https://github.com/tgxs002/HPSv2.

Perception Imitation: Towards Synthesis-free Simulator for Autonomous Vehicles

We propose a perception imitation method to simulate results of a certain perception model, and discuss a new heuristic route of autonomous driving simulator without data synthesis. The motivation is that original sensor data is not always necessary for tasks such as planning and control when semantic perception results are ready, so that simulating perception directly is more economic and efficient. In this work, a series of evaluation methods such as matching metric and performance of downstream task are exploited to examine the simulation quality. Experiments show that our method is effective to model the behavior of learning-based perception model, and can be further applied in the proposed simulation route smoothly.