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Björn Ommer

Publications and source records attributed to Björn Ommer.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Scaling Image Tokenizers with Grouped Spherical Quantization

Vision tokenizers have gained a lot of attraction due to their scalability and compactness; previous works depend on old-school GAN-based hyperparameters, biased comparisons, and a lack of comprehensive analysis of the scaling behaviours. To tackle those issues, we introduce Grouped Spherical Quantization (GSQ), featuring spherical codebook initialization and lookup regularization to constrain codebook latent to a spherical surface. Our empirical analysis of image tokenizer training strategies demonstrates that GSQ-GAN achieves superior reconstruction quality over state-of-the-art methods with fewer training iterations, providing a solid foundation for scaling studies. Building on this, we systematically examine the scaling behaviours of GSQ, specifically in latent dimensionality, codebook size, and compression ratios, and their impact on model performance. Our findings reveal distinct behaviours at high and low spatial compression levels, underscoring challenges in representing high-dimensional latent spaces. We show that GSQ can restructure high-dimensional latent into compact, low-dimensional spaces, thus enabling efficient scaling with improved quality. As a result, GSQ-GAN achieves a 16x down-sampling with a reconstruction FID (rFID) of 0.50.

cs.CV↗

Distillation of Diffusion Features for Semantic Correspondence

Semantic correspondence, the task of determining relationships between different parts of images, underpins various applications including 3D reconstruction, image-to-image translation, object tracking, and visual place recognition. Recent studies have begun to explore representations learned in large generative image models for semantic correspondence, demonstrating promising results. Building on this progress, current state-of-the-art methods rely on combining multiple large models, resulting in high computational demands and reduced efficiency. In this work, we address this challenge by proposing a more computationally efficient approach. We propose a novel knowledge distillation technique to overcome the problem of reduced efficiency. We show how to use two large vision foundation models and distill the capabilities of these complementary models into one smaller model that maintains high accuracy at reduced computational cost. Furthermore, we demonstrate that by incorporating 3D data, we are able to further improve performance, without the need for human-annotated correspondences. Overall, our empirical results demonstrate that our distilled model with 3D data augmentation achieves performance superior to current state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing computational load and enhancing practicality for real-world applications, such as semantic video correspondence. Our code and weights are publicly available on our project page.

cs.CV↗

Boosting Latent Diffusion with Flow Matching

Visual synthesis has recently seen significant leaps in performance, largely due to breakthroughs in generative models. Diffusion models have been a key enabler, as they excel in image diversity. However, this comes at the cost of slow training and synthesis, which is only partially alleviated by latent diffusion. To this end, flow matching is an appealing approach due to its complementary characteristics of faster training and inference but less diverse synthesis. We demonstrate that introducing flow matching between a frozen diffusion model and a convolutional decoder enables high-resolution image synthesis at reduced computational cost and model size. A small diffusion model can then effectively provide the necessary visual diversity, while flow matching efficiently enhances resolution and detail by mapping the small to a high-dimensional latent space. These latents are then projected to high-resolution images by the subsequent convolutional decoder of the latent diffusion approach. Combining the diversity of diffusion models, the efficiency of flow matching, and the effectiveness of convolutional decoders, state-of-the-art high-resolution image synthesis is achieved at $1024^2$ pixels with minimal computational cost. Further scaling up our method we can reach resolutions up to $2048^2$ pixels. Importantly, our approach is orthogonal to recent approximation and speed-up strategies for the underlying model, making it easily integrable into the various diffusion model frameworks.

cs.CV↗

ZigMa: A DiT-style Zigzag Mamba Diffusion Model

The diffusion model has long been plagued by scalability and quadratic complexity issues, especially within transformer-based structures. In this study, we aim to leverage the long sequence modeling capability of a State-Space Model called Mamba to extend its applicability to visual data generation. Firstly, we identify a critical oversight in most current Mamba-based vision methods, namely the lack of consideration for spatial continuity in the scan scheme of Mamba. Secondly, building upon this insight, we introduce a simple, plug-and-play, zero-parameter method named Zigzag Mamba, which outperforms Mamba-based baselines and demonstrates improved speed and memory utilization compared to transformer-based baselines. Lastly, we integrate Zigzag Mamba with the Stochastic Interpolant framework to investigate the scalability of the model on large-resolution visual datasets, such as FacesHQ $1024\times 1024$ and UCF101, MultiModal-CelebA-HQ, and MS COCO $256\times 256$ . Code will be released at https://taohu.me/zigma/

cs.CV↗

Stable-Pose: Leveraging Transformers for Pose-Guided Text-to-Image Generation

Controllable text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have shown impressive performance in generating high-quality visual content through the incorporation of various conditions. Current methods, however, exhibit limited performance when guided by skeleton human poses, especially in complex pose conditions such as side or rear perspectives of human figures. To address this issue, we present Stable-Pose, a novel adapter model that introduces a coarse-to-fine attention masking strategy into a vision Transformer (ViT) to gain accurate pose guidance for T2I models. Stable-Pose is designed to adeptly handle pose conditions within pre-trained Stable Diffusion, providing a refined and efficient way of aligning pose representation during image synthesis. We leverage the query-key self-attention mechanism of ViTs to explore the interconnections among different anatomical parts in human pose skeletons. Masked pose images are used to smoothly refine the attention maps based on target pose-related features in a hierarchical manner, transitioning from coarse to fine levels. Additionally, our loss function is formulated to allocate increased emphasis to the pose region, thereby augmenting the model's precision in capturing intricate pose details. We assessed the performance of Stable-Pose across five public datasets under a wide range of indoor and outdoor human pose scenarios. Stable-Pose achieved an AP score of 57.1 in the LAION-Human dataset, marking around 13% improvement over the established technique ControlNet. The project link and code is available at https://github.com/ai-med/StablePose.

cs.CV↗

CTRLorALTer: Conditional LoRAdapter for Efficient 0-Shot Control & Altering of T2I Models

Text-to-image generative models have become a prominent and powerful tool that excels at generating high-resolution realistic images. However, guiding the generative process of these models to consider detailed forms of conditioning reflecting style and/or structure information remains an open problem. In this paper, we present LoRAdapter, an approach that unifies both style and structure conditioning under the same formulation using a novel conditional LoRA block that enables zero-shot control. LoRAdapter is an efficient, powerful, and architecture-agnostic approach to condition text-to-image diffusion models, which enables fine-grained control conditioning during generation and outperforms recent state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.CV↗

Benchmarking Deep Learning-Based Low-Dose CT Image Denoising Algorithms

Long lasting efforts have been made to reduce radiation dose and thus the potential radiation risk to the patient for computed tomography acquisitions without severe deterioration of image quality. To this end, numerous reconstruction and noise reduction algorithms have been developed, many of which are based on iterative reconstruction techniques, incorporating prior knowledge in the projection or image domain. Recently, deep learning-based methods became increasingly popular and a multitude of papers claim ever improving performance both quantitatively and qualitatively. In this work, we find that the lack of a common benchmark setup and flaws in the experimental setup of many publications hinder verifiability of those claims. We propose a benchmark setup to overcome those flaws and improve reproducibility and verifiability of experimental results in the field. In a comprehensive and fair evaluation of several deep learning-based low dose CT denoising algorithms, we find that most methods perform statistically similar and improvements over the past six years have been marginal at best.

physics.med-ph↗

WaSt-3D: Wasserstein-2 Distance for Scene-to-Scene Stylization on 3D Gaussians

While style transfer techniques have been well-developed for 2D image stylization, the extension of these methods to 3D scenes remains relatively unexplored. Existing approaches demonstrate proficiency in transferring colors and textures but often struggle with replicating the geometry of the scenes. In our work, we leverage an explicit Gaussian Splatting (GS) representation and directly match the distributions of Gaussians between style and content scenes using the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). By employing the entropy-regularized Wasserstein-2 distance, we ensure that the transformation maintains spatial smoothness. Additionally, we decompose the scene stylization problem into smaller chunks to enhance efficiency. This paradigm shift reframes stylization from a pure generative process driven by latent space losses to an explicit matching of distributions between two Gaussian representations. Our method achieves high-resolution 3D stylization by faithfully transferring details from 3D style scenes onto the content scene. Furthermore, WaSt-3D consistently delivers results across diverse content and style scenes without necessitating any training, as it relies solely on optimization-based techniques. See our project page for additional results and source code: $\href{https://compvis.github.io/wast3d/}{https://compvis.github.io/wast3d/}$.

cs.CV↗

Unsupervised View-Invariant Human Posture Representation

Most recent view-invariant action recognition and performance assessment approaches rely on a large amount of annotated 3D skeleton data to extract view-invariant features. However, acquiring 3D skeleton data can be cumbersome, if not impractical, in in-the-wild scenarios. To overcome this problem, we present a novel unsupervised approach that learns to extract view-invariant 3D human pose representation from a 2D image without using 3D joint data. Our model is trained by exploiting the intrinsic view-invariant properties of human pose between simultaneous frames from different viewpoints and their equivariant properties between augmented frames from the same viewpoint. We evaluate the learned view-invariant pose representations for two downstream tasks. We perform comparative experiments that show improvements on the state-of-the-art unsupervised cross-view action classification accuracy on NTU RGB+D by a significant margin, on both RGB and depth images. We also show the efficiency of transferring the learned representations from NTU RGB+D to obtain the first ever unsupervised cross-view and cross-subject rank correlation results on the multi-view human movement quality dataset, QMAR, and marginally improve on the-state-of-the-art supervised results for this dataset. We also carry out ablation studies to examine the contributions of the different components of our proposed network.

cs.CV↗

Quantum Denoising Diffusion Models

In recent years, machine learning models like DALL-E, Craiyon, and Stable Diffusion have gained significant attention for their ability to generate high-resolution images from concise descriptions. Concurrently, quantum computing is showing promising advances, especially with quantum machine learning which capitalizes on quantum mechanics to meet the increasing computational requirements of traditional machine learning algorithms. This paper explores the integration of quantum machine learning and variational quantum circuits to augment the efficacy of diffusion-based image generation models. Specifically, we address two challenges of classical diffusion models: their low sampling speed and the extensive parameter requirements. We introduce two quantum diffusion models and benchmark their capabilities against their classical counterparts using MNIST digits, Fashion MNIST, and CIFAR-10. Our models surpass the classical models with similar parameter counts in terms of performance metrics FID, SSIM, and PSNR. Moreover, we introduce a consistency model unitary single sampling architecture that combines the diffusion procedure into a single step, enabling a fast one-step image generation.

quant-ph↗

State of the Art on Diffusion Models for Visual Computing

The field of visual computing is rapidly advancing due to the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (AI), which unlocks unprecedented capabilities for the generation, editing, and reconstruction of images, videos, and 3D scenes. In these domains, diffusion models are the generative AI architecture of choice. Within the last year alone, the literature on diffusion-based tools and applications has seen exponential growth and relevant papers are published across the computer graphics, computer vision, and AI communities with new works appearing daily on arXiv. This rapid growth of the field makes it difficult to keep up with all recent developments. The goal of this state-of-the-art report (STAR) is to introduce the basic mathematical concepts of diffusion models, implementation details and design choices of the popular Stable Diffusion model, as well as overview important aspects of these generative AI tools, including personalization, conditioning, inversion, among others. Moreover, we give a comprehensive overview of the rapidly growing literature on diffusion-based generation and editing, categorized by the type of generated medium, including 2D images, videos, 3D objects, locomotion, and 4D scenes. Finally, we discuss available datasets, metrics, open challenges, and social implications. This STAR provides an intuitive starting point to explore this exciting topic for researchers, artists, and practitioners alike.

cs.AI↗

SceneGenie: Scene Graph Guided Diffusion Models for Image Synthesis

Text-conditioned image generation has made significant progress in recent years with generative adversarial networks and more recently, diffusion models. While diffusion models conditioned on text prompts have produced impressive and high-quality images, accurately representing complex text prompts such as the number of instances of a specific object remains challenging. To address this limitation, we propose a novel guidance approach for the sampling process in the diffusion model that leverages bounding box and segmentation map information at inference time without additional training data. Through a novel loss in the sampling process, our approach guides the model with semantic features from CLIP embeddings and enforces geometric constraints, leading to high-resolution images that accurately represent the scene. To obtain bounding box and segmentation map information, we structure the text prompt as a scene graph and enrich the nodes with CLIP embeddings. Our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public benchmarks for image generation from scene graphs, surpassing both scene graph to image and text-based diffusion models in various metrics. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating bounding box and segmentation map guidance in the diffusion model sampling process for more accurate text-to-image generation.

cs.CV↗

Semi-Parametric Neural Image Synthesis

Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Much of this success is due to the scalability of these architectures and hence caused by a dramatic increase in model complexity and in the computational resources invested in training these models. Our work questions the underlying paradigm of compressing large training data into ever growing parametric representations. We rather present an orthogonal, semi-parametric approach. We complement comparably small diffusion or autoregressive models with a separate image database and a retrieval strategy. During training we retrieve a set of nearest neighbors from this external database for each training instance and condition the generative model on these informative samples. While the retrieval approach is providing the (local) content, the model is focusing on learning the composition of scenes based on this content. As demonstrated by our experiments, simply swapping the database for one with different contents transfers a trained model post-hoc to a novel domain. The evaluation shows competitive performance on tasks which the generative model has not been trained on, such as class-conditional synthesis, zero-shot stylization or text-to-image synthesis without requiring paired text-image data. With negligible memory and computational overhead for the external database and retrieval we can significantly reduce the parameter count of the generative model and still outperform the state-of-the-art.

cs.CV↗

Text-Guided Synthesis of Artistic Images with Retrieval-Augmented Diffusion Models

Novel architectures have recently improved generative image synthesis leading to excellent visual quality in various tasks. Of particular note is the field of ``AI-Art'', which has seen unprecedented growth with the emergence of powerful multimodal models such as CLIP. By combining speech and image synthesis models, so-called ``prompt-engineering'' has become established, in which carefully selected and composed sentences are used to achieve a certain visual style in the synthesized image. In this note, we present an alternative approach based on retrieval-augmented diffusion models (RDMs). In RDMs, a set of nearest neighbors is retrieved from an external database during training for each training instance, and the diffusion model is conditioned on these informative samples. During inference (sampling), we replace the retrieval database with a more specialized database that contains, for example, only images of a particular visual style. This provides a novel way to prompt a general trained model after training and thereby specify a particular visual style. As shown by our experiments, this approach is superior to specifying the visual style within the text prompt. We open-source code and model weights at https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion .

cs.CV↗

ArtFID: Quantitative Evaluation of Neural Style Transfer

The field of neural style transfer has experienced a surge of research exploring different avenues ranging from optimization-based approaches and feed-forward models to meta-learning methods. The developed techniques have not just progressed the field of style transfer, but also led to breakthroughs in other areas of computer vision, such as all of visual synthesis. However, whereas quantitative evaluation and benchmarking have become pillars of computer vision research, the reproducible, quantitative assessment of style transfer models is still lacking. Even in comparison to other fields of visual synthesis, where widely used metrics exist, the quantitative evaluation of style transfer is still lagging behind. To support the automatic comparison of different style transfer approaches and to study their respective strengths and weaknesses, the field would greatly benefit from a quantitative measurement of stylization performance. Therefore, we propose a method to complement the currently mostly qualitative evaluation schemes. We provide extensive evaluations and a large-scale user study to show that the proposed metric strongly coincides with human judgment.

cs.CV↗

High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models

By decomposing the image formation process into a sequential application of denoising autoencoders, diffusion models (DMs) achieve state-of-the-art synthesis results on image data and beyond. Additionally, their formulation allows for a guiding mechanism to control the image generation process without retraining. However, since these models typically operate directly in pixel space, optimization of powerful DMs often consumes hundreds of GPU days and inference is expensive due to sequential evaluations. To enable DM training on limited computational resources while retaining their quality and flexibility, we apply them in the latent space of powerful pretrained autoencoders. In contrast to previous work, training diffusion models on such a representation allows for the first time to reach a near-optimal point between complexity reduction and detail preservation, greatly boosting visual fidelity. By introducing cross-attention layers into the model architecture, we turn diffusion models into powerful and flexible generators for general conditioning inputs such as text or bounding boxes and high-resolution synthesis becomes possible in a convolutional manner. Our latent diffusion models (LDMs) achieve a new state of the art for image inpainting and highly competitive performance on various tasks, including unconditional image generation, semantic scene synthesis, and super-resolution, while significantly reducing computational requirements compared to pixel-based DMs. Code is available at https://github.com/CompVis/latent-diffusion .

cs.CV↗

Characterizing Generalization under Out-Of-Distribution Shifts in Deep Metric Learning

Deep Metric Learning (DML) aims to find representations suitable for zero-shot transfer to a priori unknown test distributions. However, common evaluation protocols only test a single, fixed data split in which train and test classes are assigned randomly. More realistic evaluations should consider a broad spectrum of distribution shifts with potentially varying degree and difficulty. In this work, we systematically construct train-test splits of increasing difficulty and present the ooDML benchmark to characterize generalization under out-of-distribution shifts in DML. ooDML is designed to probe the generalization performance on much more challenging, diverse train-to-test distribution shifts. Based on our new benchmark, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis of state-of-the-art DML methods. We find that while generalization tends to consistently degrade with difficulty, some methods are better at retaining performance as the distribution shift increases. Finally, we propose few-shot DML as an efficient way to consistently improve generalization in response to unknown test shifts presented in ooDML. Code available here: https://github.com/CompVis/Characterizing_Generalization_in_DML.

cs.LG↗

iPOKE: Poking a Still Image for Controlled Stochastic Video Synthesis

How would a static scene react to a local poke? What are the effects on other parts of an object if you could locally push it? There will be distinctive movement, despite evident variations caused by the stochastic nature of our world. These outcomes are governed by the characteristic kinematics of objects that dictate their overall motion caused by a local interaction. Conversely, the movement of an object provides crucial information about its underlying distinctive kinematics and the interdependencies between its parts. This two-way relation motivates learning a bijective mapping between object kinematics and plausible future image sequences. Therefore, we propose iPOKE -- invertible Prediction of Object Kinematics -- that, conditioned on an initial frame and a local poke, allows to sample object kinematics and establishes a one-to-one correspondence to the corresponding plausible videos, thereby providing a controlled stochastic video synthesis. In contrast to previous works, we do not generate arbitrary realistic videos, but provide efficient control of movements, while still capturing the stochastic nature of our environment and the diversity of plausible outcomes it entails. Moreover, our approach can transfer kinematics onto novel object instances and is not confined to particular object classes. Our project page is available at https://bit.ly/3dJN4Lf.

cs.CV↗