Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have brought about rapid progress towards generating photorealistic images. Yet the equitable allocation of their modeling capacity among subgroups has received less attention, which could lead to potential biases against underrepresented minorities if left uncontrolled. In this work, we first formalize the problem of minority inclusion as one of data coverage, and then propose to improve data coverage by harmonizing adversarial training with reconstructive generation. The experiments show that our method outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of data coverage on both seen and unseen data. We develop an extension that allows explicit control over the minority subgroups that the model should ensure to include, and validate its effectiveness at little compromise from the overall performance on the entire dataset. Code, models, and supplemental videos are available at GitHub.
We propose to learn energy-based model (EBM) in the latent space of a generator model, so that the EBM serves as a prior model that stands on the top-down network of the generator model. Both the latent space EBM and the top-down network can be learned jointly by maximum likelihood, which involves short-run MCMC sampling from both the prior and posterior distributions of the latent vector. Due to the low dimensionality of the latent space and the expressiveness of the top-down network, a simple EBM in latent space can capture regularities in the data effectively, and MCMC sampling in latent space is efficient and mixes well. We show that the learned model exhibits strong performances in terms of image and text generation and anomaly detection. The one-page code can be found in supplementary materials.
In this paper, we introduce a new reinforcement learning (RL) based neural architecture search (NAS) methodology for effective and efficient generative adversarial network (GAN) architecture search. The key idea is to formulate the GAN architecture search problem as a Markov decision process (MDP) for smoother architecture sampling, which enables a more effective RL-based search algorithm by targeting the potential global optimal architecture. To improve efficiency, we exploit an off-policy GAN architecture search algorithm that makes efficient use of the samples generated by previous policies. Evaluation on two standard benchmark datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10 and STL-10) demonstrates that the proposed method is able to discover highly competitive architectures for generally better image generation results with a considerably reduced computational burden: 7 GPU hours. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yuantian013/E2GAN.
Iterative generative models, such as noise conditional score networks and denoising diffusion probabilistic models, produce high quality samples by gradually denoising an initial noise vector. However, their denoising process has many steps, making them 2-3 orders of magnitude slower than other generative models such as GANs and VAEs. In this paper, we establish a novel connection between knowledge distillation and image generation with a technique that distills a multi-step denoising process into a single step, resulting in a sampling speed similar to other single-step generative models. Our Denoising Student generates high quality samples comparable to GANs on the CIFAR-10 and CelebA datasets, without adversarial training. We demonstrate that our method scales to higher resolutions through experiments on 256 x 256 LSUN. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/tcl9876/Denoising_Student
Background subtraction is a significant task in computer vision and an essential step for many real world applications. One of the challenges for background subtraction methods is dynamic background, which constitute stochastic movements in some parts of the background. In this paper, we have proposed a new background subtraction method, called DBSGen, which uses two generative neural networks, one for dynamic motion removal and another for background generation. At the end, the foreground moving objects are obtained by a pixel-wise distance threshold based on a dynamic entropy map. The proposed method has a unified framework that can be optimized in an end-to-end and unsupervised fashion. The performance of the method is evaluated over dynamic background sequences and it outperforms most of state-of-the-art methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/FatemeBahri/DBSGen.
We introduce VampNet, a masked acoustic token modeling approach to music synthesis, compression, inpainting, and variation. We use a variable masking schedule during training which allows us to sample coherent music from the model by applying a variety of masking approaches (called prompts) during inference. VampNet is non-autoregressive, leveraging a bidirectional transformer architecture that attends to all tokens in a forward pass. With just 36 sampling passes, VampNet can generate coherent high-fidelity musical waveforms. We show that by prompting VampNet in various ways, we can apply it to tasks like music compression, inpainting, outpainting, continuation, and looping with variation (vamping). Appropriately prompted, VampNet is capable of maintaining style, genre, instrumentation, and other high-level aspects of the music. This flexible prompting capability makes VampNet a powerful music co-creation tool. Code and audio samples are available online.
This paper introduces a new model to generate rhythmically relevant non-verbal facial behaviors for virtual agents while they speak. The model demonstrates perceived performance comparable to behaviors directly extracted from the data and replayed on a virtual agent, in terms of synchronization with speech and believability. Interestingly, we found that training the model with two different sets of data, instead of one, did not necessarily improve its performance. The expressiveness of the people in the dataset and the shooting conditions are key elements. We also show that employing an adversarial model, in which fabricated fake examples are introduced during the training phase, increases the perception of synchronization with speech. A collection of videos demonstrating the results and code can be accessed at: https://github.com/aldelb/non_verbal_facial_animation.
Deep generative replay has emerged as a promising approach for continual learning in decision-making tasks. This approach addresses the problem of catastrophic forgetting by leveraging the generation of trajectories from previously encountered tasks to augment the current dataset. However, existing deep generative replay methods for continual learning rely on autoregressive models, which suffer from compounding errors in the generated trajectories. In this paper, we propose a simple, scalable, and non-autoregressive method for continual learning in decision-making tasks using a generative model that generates task samples conditioned on the trajectory timestep. We evaluate our method on Continual World benchmarks and find that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the average success rate metric among continual learning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/WilliamYue37/t-DGR.
To predict future trajectories, the normalizing flow with a standard Gaussian prior suffers from weak diversity. The ineffectiveness comes from the conflict between the fact of asymmetric and multi-modal distribution of likely outcomes and symmetric and single-modal original distribution and supervision losses. Instead, we propose constructing a mixed Gaussian prior for a normalizing flow model for trajectory prediction. The prior is constructed by analyzing the trajectory patterns in the training samples without requiring extra annotations while showing better expressiveness and being multi-modal and asymmetric. Besides diversity, it also provides better controllability for probabilistic trajectory generation. We name our method Mixed Gaussian Flow (MGF). It achieves state-of-the-art performance in the evaluation of both trajectory alignment and diversity on the popular UCY/ETH and SDD datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/mulplue/MGF.
Visual storytelling involves generating a sequence of coherent frames from a textual storyline while maintaining consistency in characters and scenes. Existing autoregressive methods, which rely on previous frame-sentence pairs, struggle with high memory usage, slow generation speeds, and limited context integration. To address these issues, we propose ContextualStory, a novel framework designed to generate coherent story frames and extend frames for visual storytelling. ContextualStory utilizes Spatially-Enhanced Temporal Attention to capture spatial and temporal dependencies, handling significant character movements effectively. Additionally, we introduce a Storyline Contextualizer to enrich context in storyline embedding, and a StoryFlow Adapter to measure scene changes between frames for guiding the model. Extensive experiments on PororoSV and FlintstonesSV datasets demonstrate that ContextualStory significantly outperforms existing SOTA methods in both story visualization and continuation. Code is available at https://github.com/sixiaozheng/ContextualStory.
Most of the existing medication recommendation models are predicted with only structured data such as medical codes, with the remaining other large amount of unstructured or semi-structured data underutilization. To increase the utilization effectively, we proposed a method of enhancing medication recommendation with Large Language Model (LLM) text representation. LLM harnesses powerful language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling the extraction of information from complex and lengthy unstructured data such as clinical notes which contain complex terminology. This method can be applied to several existing base models we selected and improve medication recommendation performance with the combination representation of text and medical codes experiments on two different datasets. LLM text representation alone can even demonstrate a comparable ability to the medical code representation alone. Overall, this is a general method that can be applied to other models for improved recommendations.
The prototyping of computer games, particularly card games, requires extensive human effort in creative ideation and gameplay evaluation. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer opportunities to automate and streamline these processes. However, it remains challenging for LLMs to design novel game mechanics beyond existing databases, generate consistent gameplay environments, and develop scalable gameplay AI for large-scale evaluations. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing a comprehensive automated card game prototyping framework. The approach highlights a graph-based indexing method for generating novel game designs, an LLM-driven system for consistent game code generation validated by gameplay records, and a gameplay AI constructing method that uses an ensemble of LLM-generated action-value functions optimized through self-play. These contributions aim to accelerate card game prototyping, reduce human labor, and lower barriers to entry for game developers.
In this research, we propose a novel denoising diffusion model based on shortest-path modeling that optimizes residual propagation to enhance both denoising efficiency and quality.Drawing on Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models (DDIM) and insights from graph theory, our model, termed the Shortest Path Diffusion Model (ShortDF), treats the denoising process as a shortest-path problem aimed at minimizing reconstruction error. By optimizing the initial residuals, we improve the efficiency of the reverse diffusion process and the quality of the generated samples.Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmarks demonstrate that ShortDF significantly reduces diffusion time (or steps) while enhancing the visual fidelity of generated samples compared to prior arts.This work, we suppose, paves the way for interactive diffusion-based applications and establishes a foundation for rapid data generation. Code is available at https://github.com/UnicomAI/ShortDF.
Complex chemical space and limited knowledge scope with biases holds immense challenge for human scientists, yet in automated materials discovery. Existing intelligent methods relies more on numerical computation, leading to inefficient exploration and results with hard-interpretability. To bridge this gap, we introduce a principles-guided material discovery system powered by language inferential multi-agent system (MAS), namely PriM. Our framework integrates automated hypothesis generation with experimental validation in a roundtable system of MAS, enabling systematic exploration while maintaining scientific rigor. Based on our framework, the case study of nano helix demonstrates higher materials exploration rate and property value while providing transparent reasoning pathways. This approach develops an automated-and-transparent paradigm for material discovery, with broad implications for rational design of functional materials. Code is publicly available at our \href{https://github.com/amair-lab/PriM}{GitHub}.
A scene graph is a key image representation in visual reasoning. The generalisability of Scene Graph Generation (SGG) methods is crucial for reliable reasoning and real-world applicability. However, imbalanced training datasets limit this, underrepresenting meaningful visual relationships. Current SGG methods using external knowledge sources face limitations due to these imbalances or restricted relationship coverage, impacting their reasoning and generalisation capabilities. We propose a novel neurosymbolic approach that integrates data-driven object detection with heterogeneous knowledge graph-based object refinement and zero-shot relationship retrieval, highlighting the loosely coupled synergy between neural and symbolic components. This combination addresses the limitations of imbalanced training datasets in scene graph generation and enables effective prediction of unseen visual relationships. Objects are detected using a region-based deep neural network and refined based on their positional and structural similarity, followed by retrieval of pairwise visual relationships using a heterogeneous knowledge graph. The redundant and irrelevant visual relationships are discarded based on the similarity of relationship labels and node embeddings. Finally, the visual relationships are interlinked to generate the scene graph. The employed heterogeneous knowledge graph combines diverse knowledge sources, offering rich common sense knowledge about objects and their interactions in the world. Our method, evaluated using the benchmark Visual Genome dataset and zero-shot recall (zR@K) metric, shows a 59.96% improvement over existing state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in generalised SGG. The object refinement step effectively improved the object detection performance by 57.1%. Additional evaluation using the GQA dataset confirms the cross-dataset generalisability of our method. We also compared various knowledge sources and embedding models to determine an optimal combination for zero-shot SGG. The source code is available at https://github.com/jaleedkhan/zsrr-sgg.
Ideally, dialogue systems should generate responses that are faithful to the knowledge contained in relevant documents. However, many models generate hallucinated responses instead that contradict it or contain unverifiable information. To mitigate such undesirable behaviour, it has been proposed to fine-tune a `negative expert' on negative examples and subtract its parameters from those of a pre-trained model. However, intuitively, this does not take into account that some parameters are more responsible than others in causing hallucinations. Thus, we propose to weigh their individual importance via (an approximation of) the Fisher Information matrix, which measures the uncertainty of their estimate. We call this method Elastic Weight Removal (EWR). We evaluate our method -- using different variants of Flan-T5 as a backbone language model -- on multiple datasets for information-seeking dialogue generation and compare our method with state-of-the-art techniques for faithfulness, such as CTRL, Quark, DExperts, and Noisy Channel reranking. Extensive automatic and human evaluation shows that EWR systematically increases faithfulness at minor costs in terms of other metrics. However, we notice that only discouraging hallucinations may increase extractiveness, i.e. shallow copy-pasting of document spans, which can be undesirable. Hence, as a second main contribution, we show that our method can be extended to simultaneously discourage hallucinations and extractive responses. We publicly release the code for reproducing EWR and all baselines.
Recently, Zhang et al. have proposed the Diffusion Exponential Integrator Sampler (DEIS) for fast generation of samples from Diffusion Models. It leverages the semi-linear nature of the probability flow ordinary differential equation (ODE) in order to greatly reduce integration error and improve generation quality at low numbers of function evaluations (NFEs). Key to this approach is the score function reparameterisation, which reduces the integration error incurred from using a fixed score function estimate over each integration step. The original authors use the default parameterisation used by models trained for noise prediction -- multiply the score by the standard deviation of the conditional forward noising distribution. We find that although the mean absolute value of this score parameterisation is close to constant for a large portion of the reverse sampling process, it changes rapidly at the end of sampling. As a simple fix, we propose to instead reparameterise the score (at inference) by dividing it by the average absolute value of previous score estimates at that time step collected from offline high NFE generations. We find that our score normalisation (DEIS-SN) consistently improves FID compared to vanilla DEIS, showing an improvement at 10 NFEs from 6.44 to 5.57 on CIFAR-10 and from 5.9 to 4.95 on LSUN-Church 64x64. Our code is available at https://github.com/mtkresearch/Diffusion-DEIS-SN
Ancient artifacts are an important medium for cultural preservation and restoration. However, many physical copies of artifacts are either damaged or lost, leaving a blank space in archaeological and historical studies that calls for artifact image generation techniques. Despite the significant advancements in open-domain text-to-image synthesis, existing approaches fail to capture the important domain knowledge presented in the textual description, resulting in errors in recreated images such as incorrect shapes and patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge-aware artifact image synthesis approach that brings lost historical objects accurately into their visual forms. We use a pretrained diffusion model as backbone and introduce three key techniques to enhance the text-to-image generation framework: 1) we construct prompts with explicit archaeological knowledge elicited from large language models (LLMs); 2) we incorporate additional textual guidance to correlated historical expertise in a contrastive manner; 3) we introduce further visual-semantic constraints on edge and perceptual features that enable our model to learn more intricate visual details of the artifacts. Compared to existing approaches, our proposed model produces higher-quality artifact images that align better with the implicit details and historical knowledge contained within written documents, thus achieving significant improvements across automatic metrics and in human evaluation. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/danielwusg/artifact_diffusion.
Generative large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks, yet they remain susceptible to backdoor attacks: carefully crafted triggers in the input can manipulate the model to produce adversary-specified outputs. While prior research has predominantly focused on backdoor risks in vision and classification settings, the vulnerability of LLMs in open-ended text generation remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BackdoorLLM (Our BackdoorLLM benchmark was awarded First Prize in the SafetyBench competition, https://www.mlsafety.org/safebench/winners, organized by the Center for AI Safety, https://safe.ai/.), the first comprehensive benchmark for systematically evaluating backdoor threats in text-generation LLMs. BackdoorLLM provides: (i) a unified repository of benchmarks with a standardized training and evaluation pipeline; (ii) a diverse suite of attack modalities, including data poisoning, weight poisoning, hidden-state manipulation, and chain-of-thought hijacking; (iii) over 200 experiments spanning 8 distinct attack strategies, 7 real-world scenarios, and 6 model architectures; (iv) key insights into the factors that govern backdoor effectiveness and failure modes in LLMs; and (v) a defense toolkit encompassing 7 representative mitigation techniques. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bboylyg/BackdoorLLM. We will continuously incorporate emerging attack and defense methodologies to support the research in advancing the safety and reliability of LLMs.
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows have significantly improved tasks such as information extraction, question answering, and complex planning scenarios. In order to achieve success in long context tasks, a large amount of work has been done to enhance the long context capabilities of the model through synthetic data. Existing methods typically utilize the Self-Instruct framework to generate instruction tuning data for better long context capability improvement. However, our preliminary experiments indicate that less than 35% of generated samples are multi-hop, and more than 40% exhibit poor quality, limiting comprehensive understanding and further research. To improve the quality of synthetic data, we propose the Multi-agent Interactive Multi-hop Generation (MIMG) framework, incorporating a Quality Verification Agent, a Single-hop Question Generation Agent, a Multiple Question Sampling Strategy, and a Multi-hop Question Merger Agent. This framework improves the data quality, with the proportion of high-quality, multi-hop, and diverse data exceeding 85%. Furthermore, we systematically investigate strategies for document selection, question merging, and validation techniques through extensive experiments across various models. Our findings show that our synthetic high-quality long-context instruction data significantly enhances model performance, even surpassing models trained on larger amounts of human-annotated data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/WowCZ/LongMIT.