Domain-Aware Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models

Foundation models (FMs) have revolutionized computer vision, enabling effective learning across different domains. However, their performance under domain shift is yet underexplored. This paper investigates the zero-shot domain adaptation potential of FMs by comparing different backbone architectures and introducing novel domain-aware components that leverage domain related textual embeddings. We propose domain adaptive normalization, termed as Domino, which explicitly leverages domain embeddings during fine-tuning, thus making the model domain aware. Ultimately, Domino enables more robust computer vision models that can adapt effectively to various unseen domains.

Label-free Neural Semantic Image Synthesis

Recent work has shown great progress in integrating spatial conditioning to control large, pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models. Despite these advances, existing methods describe the spatial image content using hand-crafted conditioning inputs, which are either semantically ambiguous (e.g., edges) or require expensive manual annotations (e.g., semantic segmentation). To address these limitations, we propose a new label-free way of conditioning diffusion models to enable fine-grained spatial control. We introduce the concept of neural semantic image synthesis, which uses neural layouts extracted from pre-trained foundation models as conditioning. Neural layouts are advantageous as they provide rich descriptions of the desired image, containing both semantics and detailed geometry of the scene. We experimentally show that images synthesized via neural semantic image synthesis achieve similar or superior pixel-level alignment of semantic classes compared to those created using expensive semantic label maps. At the same time, they capture better semantics, instance separation, and object orientation than other label-free conditioning options, such as edges or depth. Moreover, we show that images generated by neural layout conditioning can effectively augment real data for training various perception tasks.

VSTAR: Generative Temporal Nursing for Longer Dynamic Video Synthesis

Despite tremendous progress in the field of text-to-video (T2V) synthesis, open-sourced T2V diffusion models struggle to generate longer videos with dynamically varying and evolving content. They tend to synthesize quasi-static videos, ignoring the necessary visual change-over-time implied in the text prompt. At the same time, scaling these models to enable longer, more dynamic video synthesis often remains computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we introduce the concept of Generative Temporal Nursing (GTN), where we aim to alter the generative process on the fly during inference to improve control over the temporal dynamics and enable generation of longer videos. We propose a method for GTN, dubbed VSTAR, which consists of two key ingredients: 1) Video Synopsis Prompting (VSP) - automatic generation of a video synopsis based on the original single prompt leveraging LLMs, which gives accurate textual guidance to different visual states of longer videos, and 2) Temporal Attention Regularization (TAR) - a regularization technique to refine the temporal attention units of the pre-trained T2V diffusion models, which enables control over the video dynamics. We experimentally showcase the superiority of the proposed approach in generating longer, visually appealing videos over existing open-sourced T2V models. We additionally analyze the temporal attention maps realized with and without VSTAR, demonstrating the importance of applying our method to mitigate neglect of the desired visual change over time.

Adversarial Supervision Makes Layout-to-Image Diffusion Models Thrive

Despite the recent advances in large-scale diffusion models, little progress has been made on the layout-to-image (L2I) synthesis task. Current L2I models either suffer from poor editability via text or weak alignment between the generated image and the input layout. This limits their usability in practice. To mitigate this, we propose to integrate adversarial supervision into the conventional training pipeline of L2I diffusion models (ALDM). Specifically, we employ a segmentation-based discriminator which provides explicit feedback to the diffusion generator on the pixel-level alignment between the denoised image and the input layout. To encourage consistent adherence to the input layout over the sampling steps, we further introduce the multistep unrolling strategy. Instead of looking at a single timestep, we unroll a few steps recursively to imitate the inference process, and ask the discriminator to assess the alignment of denoised images with the layout over a certain time window. Our experiments show that ALDM enables layout faithfulness of the generated images, while allowing broad editability via text prompts. Moreover, we showcase its usefulness for practical applications: by synthesizing target distribution samples via text control, we improve domain generalization of semantic segmentation models by a large margin (~12 mIoU points).

QPoser: Quantized Explicit Pose Prior Modeling for Controllable Pose Generation

Explicit pose prior models compress human poses into latent representations for using in pose-related downstream tasks. A desirable explicit pose prior model should satisfy three desirable abilities: 1) correctness, i.e. ensuring to generate physically possible poses; 2) expressiveness, i.e. ensuring to preserve details in generation; 3) controllability, meaning that generation from reference poses and explicit instructions should be convenient. Existing explicit pose prior models fail to achieve all of three properties, in special controllability. To break this situation, we propose QPoser, a highly controllable explicit pose prior model which guarantees correctness and expressiveness. In QPoser, a multi-head vector quantized autoencoder (MS-VQVAE) is proposed for obtaining expressive and distributed pose representations. Furthermore, a global-local feature integration mechanism (GLIF-AE) is utilized to disentangle the latent representation and integrate full-body information into local-joint features. Experimental results show that QPoser significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in representing expressive and correct poses, meanwhile is easily to be used for detailed conditional generation from reference poses and prompting instructions.

Anomaly-Aware Semantic Segmentation via Style-Aligned OoD Augmentation

Within the context of autonomous driving, encountering unknown objects becomes inevitable during deployment in the open world. Therefore, it is crucial to equip standard semantic segmentation models with anomaly awareness. Many previous approaches have utilized synthetic out-of-distribution (OoD) data augmentation to tackle this problem. In this work, we advance the OoD synthesis process by reducing the domain gap between the OoD data and driving scenes, effectively mitigating the style difference that might otherwise act as an obvious shortcut during training. Additionally, we propose a simple fine-tuning loss that effectively induces a pre-trained semantic segmentation model to generate a ``none of the given classes" prediction, leveraging per-pixel OoD scores for anomaly segmentation. With minimal fine-tuning effort, our pipeline enables the use of pre-trained models for anomaly segmentation while maintaining the performance on the original task.

Divide & Bind Your Attention for Improved Generative Semantic Nursing

Emerging large-scale text-to-image generative models, e.g., Stable Diffusion (SD), have exhibited overwhelming results with high fidelity. Despite the magnificent progress, current state-of-the-art models still struggle to generate images fully adhering to the input prompt. Prior work, Attend & Excite, has introduced the concept of Generative Semantic Nursing (GSN), aiming to optimize cross-attention during inference time to better incorporate the semantics. It demonstrates promising results in generating simple prompts, e.g., ``a cat and a dog''. However, its efficacy declines when dealing with more complex prompts, and it does not explicitly address the problem of improper attribute binding. To address the challenges posed by complex prompts or scenarios involving multiple entities and to achieve improved attribute binding, we propose Divide & Bind. We introduce two novel loss objectives for GSN: a novel attendance loss and a binding loss. Our approach stands out in its ability to faithfully synthesize desired objects with improved attribute alignment from complex prompts and exhibits superior performance across multiple evaluation benchmarks. More videos and updates can be found on the project page \url{https://sites.google.com/view/divide-and-bind}.

Intra- & Extra-Source Exemplar-Based Style Synthesis for Improved Domain Generalization

The generalization with respect to domain shifts, as they frequently appear in applications such as autonomous driving, is one of the remaining big challenges for deep learning models. Therefore, we propose an exemplar-based style synthesis pipeline to improve domain generalization in semantic segmentation. Our method is based on a novel masked noise encoder for StyleGAN2 inversion. The model learns to faithfully reconstruct the image, preserving its semantic layout through noise prediction. Using the proposed masked noise encoder to randomize style and content combinations in the training set, i.e., intra-source style augmentation (ISSA) effectively increases the diversity of training data and reduces spurious correlation. As a result, we achieve up to $12.4\%$ mIoU improvements on driving-scene semantic segmentation under different types of data shifts, i.e., changing geographic locations, adverse weather conditions, and day to night. ISSA is model-agnostic and straightforwardly applicable with CNNs and Transformers. It is also complementary to other domain generalization techniques, e.g., it improves the recent state-of-the-art solution RobustNet by $3\%$ mIoU in Cityscapes to Dark Z\"urich. In addition, we demonstrate the strong plug-n-play ability of the proposed style synthesis pipeline, which is readily usable for extra-source exemplars e.g., web-crawled images, without any retraining or fine-tuning. Moreover, we study a new use case to indicate neural network's generalization capability by building a stylized proxy validation set. This application has significant practical sense for selecting models to be deployed in the open-world environment. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/boschresearch/ISSA}.

Reliable machine learning potentials based on artificial neural network for graphene

Graphene is one of the most researched two dimensional (2D) material due to its unique combination of mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. Special 2D structure of graphene enables it to exhibit a wide range of peculiar material properties like high Young's modulus, high specific strength etc. which are critical for myriad of applications including light weight structural materials, multi-functional coating and flexible electronics. It is quite challenging and costly to experimentally investigate graphene/graphene based nanocomposites, computational simulations such as molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are widely adopted for understanding the microscopic origins of their unique properties. However, disparate results were reported from computational studies, especially MD simulations using various empirical inter-atomic potentials. In this work, an artificial neural network based interatomic potential has been developed for graphene to represent the potential energy surface based on first principle calculations. The developed machine learning potential (MLP) facilitates high fidelity MD simulations to approach the accuracy of ab initio methods but with a fraction of computational cost, which allows larger simulation size/length, and thereby enables accelerated discovery/design of graphene-based novel materials. Lattice parameter, coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE), Young's modulus and yield strength are estimated using machine learning accelerated MD simulations (MLMD), which are compared to experimental/first principle calculations from previous literatures. It is demonstrated that MLMD can capture the dominating mechanism governing CTE of graphene, including effects from lattice parameter and out of plane rippling.

Intra-Source Style Augmentation for Improved Domain Generalization

The generalization with respect to domain shifts, as they frequently appear in applications such as autonomous driving, is one of the remaining big challenges for deep learning models. Therefore, we propose an intra-source style augmentation (ISSA) method to improve domain generalization in semantic segmentation. Our method is based on a novel masked noise encoder for StyleGAN2 inversion. The model learns to faithfully reconstruct the image preserving its semantic layout through noise prediction. Random masking of the estimated noise enables the style mixing capability of our model, i.e. it allows to alter the global appearance without affecting the semantic layout of an image. Using the proposed masked noise encoder to randomize style and content combinations in the training set, ISSA effectively increases the diversity of training data and reduces spurious correlation. As a result, we achieve up to $12.4\%$ mIoU improvements on driving-scene semantic segmentation under different types of data shifts, i.e., changing geographic locations, adverse weather conditions, and day to night. ISSA is model-agnostic and straightforwardly applicable with CNNs and Transformers. It is also complementary to other domain generalization techniques, e.g., it improves the recent state-of-the-art solution RobustNet by $3\%$ mIoU in Cityscapes to Dark Z\"urich.