Daily Papers

Latent variable generative models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks including image and video synthesis. These models are enabled by pretrained autoencoders that map high resolution data into a compressed lower dimensional latent space, where the generative models can subsequently be developed while requiring fewer computational resources. Despite their effectiveness, the direct application of latent variable models to higher dimensional domains such as videos continues to pose challenges for efficient training and inference. In this paper, we propose an autoencoder that projects volumetric data onto a four-plane factorized latent space that grows sublinearly with the input size, making it ideal for higher dimensional data like videos. The design of our factorized model supports straightforward adoption in a number of conditional generation tasks with latent diffusion models (LDMs), such as class-conditional generation, frame prediction, and video interpolation. Our results show that the proposed four-plane latent space retains a rich representation needed for high-fidelity reconstructions despite the heavy compression, while simultaneously enabling LDMs to operate with significant improvements in speed and memory.

Many deep generative models are defined as a push-forward of a Gaussian measure by a continuous generator, such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs). This work explores the latent space of such deep generative models. A key issue with these models is their tendency to output samples outside of the support of the target distribution when learning disconnected distributions. We investigate the relationship between the performance of these models and the geometry of their latent space. Building on recent developments in geometric measure theory, we prove a sufficient condition for optimality in the case where the dimension of the latent space is larger than the number of modes. Through experiments on GANs, we demonstrate the validity of our theoretical results and gain new insights into the latent space geometry of these models. Additionally, we propose a truncation method that enforces a simplicial cluster structure in the latent space and improves the performance of GANs.

Neural networks embed the geometric structure of a data manifold lying in a high-dimensional space into latent representations. Ideally, the distribution of the data points in the latent space should depend only on the task, the data, the loss, and other architecture-specific constraints. However, factors such as the random weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or other sources of randomness in the training phase may induce incoherent latent spaces that hinder any form of reuse. Nevertheless, we empirically observe that, under the same data and modeling choices, the angles between the encodings within distinct latent spaces do not change. In this work, we propose the latent similarity between each sample and a fixed set of anchors as an alternative data representation, demonstrating that it can enforce the desired invariances without any additional training. We show how neural architectures can leverage these relative representations to guarantee, in practice, invariance to latent isometries and rescalings, effectively enabling latent space communication: from zero-shot model stitching to latent space comparison between diverse settings. We extensively validate the generalization capability of our approach on different datasets, spanning various modalities (images, text, graphs), tasks (e.g., classification, reconstruction) and architectures (e.g., CNNs, GCNs, transformers).

Learning graph generative models over latent spaces has received less attention compared to models that operate on the original data space and has so far demonstrated lacklustre performance. We present GLAD a latent space graph generative model. Unlike most previous latent space graph generative models, GLAD operates on a discrete latent space that preserves to a significant extent the discrete nature of the graph structures making no unnatural assumptions such as latent space continuity. We learn the prior of our discrete latent space by adapting diffusion bridges to its structure. By operating over an appropriately constructed latent space we avoid relying on decompositions that are often used in models that operate in the original data space. We present experiments on a series of graph benchmark datasets which clearly show the superiority of the discrete latent space and obtain state of the art graph generative performance, making GLAD the first latent space graph generative model with competitive performance. Our source code is published at: https://github.com/v18nguye/GLAD.

In this paper, we show that a binary latent space can be explored for compact yet expressive image representations. We model the bi-directional mappings between an image and the corresponding latent binary representation by training an auto-encoder with a Bernoulli encoding distribution. On the one hand, the binary latent space provides a compact discrete image representation of which the distribution can be modeled more efficiently than pixels or continuous latent representations. On the other hand, we now represent each image patch as a binary vector instead of an index of a learned cookbook as in discrete image representations with vector quantization. In this way, we obtain binary latent representations that allow for better image quality and high-resolution image representations without any multi-stage hierarchy in the latent space. In this binary latent space, images can now be generated effectively using a binary latent diffusion model tailored specifically for modeling the prior over the binary image representations. We present both conditional and unconditional image generation experiments with multiple datasets, and show that the proposed method performs comparably to state-of-the-art methods while dramatically improving the sampling efficiency to as few as 16 steps without using any test-time acceleration. The proposed framework can also be seamlessly scaled to 1024 times 1024 high-resolution image generation without resorting to latent hierarchy or multi-stage refinements.

We present BlockFusion, a diffusion-based model that generates 3D scenes as unit blocks and seamlessly incorporates new blocks to extend the scene. BlockFusion is trained using datasets of 3D blocks that are randomly cropped from complete 3D scene meshes. Through per-block fitting, all training blocks are converted into the hybrid neural fields: with a tri-plane containing the geometry features, followed by a Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP) for decoding the signed distance values. A variational auto-encoder is employed to compress the tri-planes into the latent tri-plane space, on which the denoising diffusion process is performed. Diffusion applied to the latent representations allows for high-quality and diverse 3D scene generation. To expand a scene during generation, one needs only to append empty blocks to overlap with the current scene and extrapolate existing latent tri-planes to populate new blocks. The extrapolation is done by conditioning the generation process with the feature samples from the overlapping tri-planes during the denoising iterations. Latent tri-plane extrapolation produces semantically and geometrically meaningful transitions that harmoniously blend with the existing scene. A 2D layout conditioning mechanism is used to control the placement and arrangement of scene elements. Experimental results indicate that BlockFusion is capable of generating diverse, geometrically consistent and unbounded large 3D scenes with unprecedented high-quality shapes in both indoor and outdoor scenarios.

Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs) have emerged as a strong competitor to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, despite their widespread use in image synthesis and editing applications, their latent space is still not as well understood. Recently, a semantic latent space for DDMs, coined `h-space', was shown to facilitate semantic image editing in a way reminiscent of GANs. The h-space is comprised of the bottleneck activations in the DDM's denoiser across all timesteps of the diffusion process. In this paper, we explore the properties of h-space and propose several novel methods for finding meaningful semantic directions within it. We start by studying unsupervised methods for revealing interpretable semantic directions in pretrained DDMs. Specifically, we show that global latent directions emerge as the principal components in the latent space. Additionally, we provide a novel method for discovering image-specific semantic directions by spectral analysis of the Jacobian of the denoiser w.r.t. the latent code. Next, we extend the analysis by finding directions in a supervised fashion in unconditional DDMs. We demonstrate how such directions can be found by relying on either a labeled data set of real images or by annotating generated samples with a domain-specific attribute classifier. We further show how to semantically disentangle the found direction by simple linear projection. Our approaches are applicable without requiring any architectural modifications, text-based guidance, CLIP-based optimization, or model fine-tuning.

Graph neural networks aim to learn representations for graph-structured data and show impressive performance, particularly in node classification. Recently, many methods have studied the representations of GNNs from the perspective of optimization goals and spectral graph theory. However, the feature space that dominates representation learning has not been systematically studied in graph neural networks. In this paper, we propose to fill this gap by analyzing the feature space of both spatial and spectral models. We decompose graph neural networks into determined feature spaces and trainable weights, providing the convenience of studying the feature space explicitly using matrix space analysis. In particular, we theoretically find that the feature space tends to be linearly correlated due to repeated aggregations. Motivated by these findings, we propose 1) feature subspaces flattening and 2) structural principal components to expand the feature space. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed more comprehensive feature space, with comparable inference time to the baseline, and demonstrate its efficient convergence capability.

We tackle the problem disentangling the latent space of an autoencoder in order to separate labelled attribute information from other characteristic information. This then allows us to change selected attributes while preserving other information. Our method, matrix subspace projection, is much simpler than previous approaches to latent space factorisation, for example not requiring multiple discriminators or a careful weighting among their loss functions. Furthermore our new model can be applied to autoencoders as a plugin, and works across diverse domains such as images or text. We demonstrate the utility of our method for attribute manipulation in autoencoders trained across varied domains, using both human evaluation and automated methods. The quality of generation of our new model (e.g. reconstruction, conditional generation) is highly competitive to a number of strong baselines.

We investigate the problem of training generative models on a very sparse collection of 3D models. We use geometrically motivated energies to augment and thus boost a sparse collection of example (training) models. We analyze the Hessian of the as-rigid-as-possible (ARAP) energy to sample from and project to the underlying (local) shape space, and use the augmented dataset to train a variational autoencoder (VAE). We iterate the process of building latent spaces of VAE and augmenting the associated dataset, to progressively reveal a richer and more expressive generative space for creating geometrically and semantically valid samples. Our framework allows us to train generative 3D models even with a small set of good quality 3D models, which are typically hard to curate. We extensively evaluate our method against a set of strong baselines, provide ablation studies and demonstrate application towards establishing shape correspondences. We present multiple examples of interesting and meaningful shape variations even when starting from as few as 3-10 training shapes.

The inductive bias of a graph neural network (GNN) is largely encoded in its specified graph. Latent graph inference relies on latent geometric representations to dynamically rewire or infer a GNN's graph to maximize the GNN's predictive downstream performance, but it lacks solid theoretical foundations in terms of embedding-based representation guarantees. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a trainable deep learning architecture, coined neural snowflake, that can adaptively implement fractal-like metrics on R^d. We prove that any given finite weights graph can be isometrically embedded by a standard MLP encoder. Furthermore, when the latent graph can be represented in the feature space of a sufficiently regular kernel, we show that the combined neural snowflake and MLP encoder do not succumb to the curse of dimensionality by using only a low-degree polynomial number of parameters in the number of nodes. This implementation enables a low-dimensional isometric embedding of the latent graph. We conduct synthetic experiments to demonstrate the superior metric learning capabilities of neural snowflakes when compared to more familiar spaces like Euclidean space. Additionally, we carry out latent graph inference experiments on graph benchmarks. Consistently, the neural snowflake model achieves predictive performance that either matches or surpasses that of the state-of-the-art latent graph inference models. Importantly, this performance improvement is achieved without requiring random search for optimal latent geometry. Instead, the neural snowflake model achieves this enhancement in a differentiable manner.

Deep models have achieved impressive progress in solving partial differential equations (PDEs). A burgeoning paradigm is learning neural operators to approximate the input-output mappings of PDEs. While previous deep models have explored the multiscale architectures and various operator designs, they are limited to learning the operators as a whole in the coordinate space. In real physical science problems, PDEs are complex coupled equations with numerical solvers relying on discretization into high-dimensional coordinate space, which cannot be precisely approximated by a single operator nor efficiently learned due to the curse of dimensionality. We present Latent Spectral Models (LSM) toward an efficient and precise solver for high-dimensional PDEs. Going beyond the coordinate space, LSM enables an attention-based hierarchical projection network to reduce the high-dimensional data into a compact latent space in linear time. Inspired by classical spectral methods in numerical analysis, we design a neural spectral block to solve PDEs in the latent space that approximates complex input-output mappings via learning multiple basis operators, enjoying nice theoretical guarantees for convergence and approximation. Experimentally, LSM achieves consistent state-of-the-art and yields a relative gain of 11.5% averaged on seven benchmarks covering both solid and fluid physics. Code is available at https://github.com/thuml/Latent-Spectral-Models.

Latent-based image generative models, such as Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) and Mask Image Models (MIMs), have achieved notable success in image generation tasks. These models typically leverage reconstructive autoencoders like VQGAN or VAE to encode pixels into a more compact latent space and learn the data distribution in the latent space instead of directly from pixels. However, this practice raises a pertinent question: Is it truly the optimal choice? In response, we begin with an intriguing observation: despite sharing the same latent space, autoregressive models significantly lag behind LDMs and MIMs in image generation. This finding contrasts sharply with the field of NLP, where the autoregressive model GPT has established a commanding presence. To address this discrepancy, we introduce a unified perspective on the relationship between latent space and generative models, emphasizing the stability of latent space in image generative modeling. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective discrete image tokenizer to stabilize the latent space for image generative modeling. Experimental results show that image autoregressive modeling with our tokenizer (DiGIT) benefits both image understanding and image generation with the next token prediction principle, which is inherently straightforward for GPT models but challenging for other generative models. Remarkably, for the first time, a GPT-style autoregressive model for images outperforms LDMs, which also exhibits substantial improvement akin to GPT when scaling up model size. Our findings underscore the potential of an optimized latent space and the integration of discrete tokenization in advancing the capabilities of image generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/DiGIT.

Diffusion models have made significant contributions to computer vision, sparking a growing interest in the community recently regarding the application of them to graph generation. Existing discrete graph diffusion models exhibit heightened computational complexity and diminished training efficiency. A preferable and natural way is to directly diffuse the graph within the latent space. However, due to the non-Euclidean structure of graphs is not isotropic in the latent space, the existing latent diffusion models effectively make it difficult to capture and preserve the topological information of graphs. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel geometrically latent diffusion framework HypDiff. Specifically, we first establish a geometrically latent space with interpretability measures based on hyperbolic geometry, to define anisotropic latent diffusion processes for graphs. Then, we propose a geometrically latent diffusion process that is constrained by both radial and angular geometric properties, thereby ensuring the preservation of the original topological properties in the generative graphs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior effectiveness of HypDiff for graph generation with various topologies.

Despite the groundbreaking success of diffusion models in generating high-fidelity images, their latent space remains relatively under-explored, even though it holds significant promise for enabling versatile and interpretable image editing capabilities. The complicated denoising trajectory and high dimensionality of the latent space make it extremely challenging to interpret. Existing methods mainly explore the feature space of U-Net in Diffusion Models (DMs) instead of the latent space itself. In contrast, we directly investigate the latent space via Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and discover three useful properties that can be used to control generation results without the requirements of data collection and maintain identity fidelity generated images. Based on these properties, we propose a novel image editing framework that is capable of learning arbitrary attributes from one pair of latent codes destined by text prompts in Stable Diffusion Models. To validate our approach, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate its effectiveness and flexibility in image editing. We will release our codes soon to foster further research and applications in this area.

3D generation has witnessed significant advancements, yet efficiently producing high-quality 3D assets from a single image remains challenging. In this paper, we present a triplane autoencoder, which encodes 3D models into a compact triplane latent space to effectively compress both the 3D geometry and texture information. Within the autoencoder framework, we introduce a 3D-aware cross-attention mechanism, which utilizes low-resolution latent representations to query features from a high-resolution 3D feature volume, thereby enhancing the representation capacity of the latent space. Subsequently, we train a diffusion model on this refined latent space. In contrast to solely relying on image embedding for 3D generation, our proposed method advocates for the simultaneous utilization of both image embedding and shape embedding as conditions. Specifically, the shape embedding is estimated via a diffusion prior model conditioned on the image embedding. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms, achieving superior performance while requiring less training data and time. Our approach enables the generation of high-quality 3D assets in merely 7 seconds on a single A100 GPU.

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a promising method for deriving visual representations from unlabeled image data by predicting missing pixels from masked portions of images. It excels in region-aware learning and provides strong initializations for various tasks, but struggles to capture high-level semantics without further supervised fine-tuning, likely due to the low-level nature of its pixel reconstruction objective. A promising yet unrealized framework is learning representations through masked reconstruction in latent space, combining the locality of MIM with the high-level targets. However, this approach poses significant training challenges as the reconstruction targets are learned in conjunction with the model, potentially leading to trivial or suboptimal solutions.Our study is among the first to thoroughly analyze and address the challenges of such framework, which we refer to as Latent MIM. Through a series of carefully designed experiments and extensive analysis, we identify the source of these challenges, including representation collapsing for joint online/target optimization, learning objectives, the high region correlation in latent space and decoding conditioning. By sequentially addressing these issues, we demonstrate that Latent MIM can indeed learn high-level representations while retaining the benefits of MIM models.

It has been observed that representations learned by distinct neural networks conceal structural similarities when the models are trained under similar inductive biases. From a geometric perspective, identifying the classes of transformations and the related invariances that connect these representations is fundamental to unlocking applications, such as merging, stitching, and reusing different neural modules. However, estimating task-specific transformations a priori can be challenging and expensive due to several factors (e.g., weights initialization, training hyperparameters, or data modality). To this end, we introduce a versatile method to directly incorporate a set of invariances into the representations, constructing a product space of invariant components on top of the latent representations without requiring prior knowledge about the optimal invariance to infuse. We validate our solution on classification and reconstruction tasks, observing consistent latent similarity and downstream performance improvements in a zero-shot stitching setting. The experimental analysis comprises three modalities (vision, text, and graphs), twelve pretrained foundational models, nine benchmarks, and several architectures trained from scratch.

In disentangled representation learning, a model is asked to tease apart a dataset's underlying sources of variation and represent them independently of one another. Since the model is provided with no ground truth information about these sources, inductive biases take a paramount role in enabling disentanglement. In this work, we construct an inductive bias towards encoding to and decoding from an organized latent space. Concretely, we do this by (i) quantizing the latent space into discrete code vectors with a separate learnable scalar codebook per dimension and (ii) applying strong model regularization via an unusually high weight decay. Intuitively, the latent space design forces the encoder to combinatorially construct codes from a small number of distinct scalar values, which in turn enables the decoder to assign a consistent meaning to each value. Regularization then serves to drive the model towards this parsimonious strategy. We demonstrate the broad applicability of this approach by adding it to both basic data-reconstructing (vanilla autoencoder) and latent-reconstructing (InfoGAN) generative models. For reliable evaluation, we also propose InfoMEC, a new set of metrics for disentanglement that is cohesively grounded in information theory and fixes well-established shortcomings in previous metrics. Together with regularization, latent quantization dramatically improves the modularity and explicitness of learned representations on a representative suite of benchmark datasets. In particular, our quantized-latent autoencoder (QLAE) consistently outperforms strong methods from prior work in these key disentanglement properties without compromising data reconstruction.

While 3D content generation has advanced significantly, existing methods still face challenges with input formats, latent space design, and output representations. This paper introduces a novel 3D generation framework that addresses these challenges, offering scalable, high-quality 3D generation with an interactive Point Cloud-structured Latent space. Our framework employs a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with multi-view posed RGB-D(epth)-N(ormal) renderings as input, using a unique latent space design that preserves 3D shape information, and incorporates a cascaded latent diffusion model for improved shape-texture disentanglement. The proposed method, GaussianAnything, supports multi-modal conditional 3D generation, allowing for point cloud, caption, and single/multi-view image inputs. Notably, the newly proposed latent space naturally enables geometry-texture disentanglement, thus allowing 3D-aware editing. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on multiple datasets, outperforming existing methods in both text- and image-conditioned 3D generation.

Deep generative models (DGMs) have been widely developed for graph data. However, much less investigation has been carried out on understanding the latent space of such pretrained graph DGMs. These understandings possess the potential to provide constructive guidelines for crucial tasks, such as graph controllable generation. Thus in this work, we are interested in studying this problem and propose GraphCG, a method for the unsupervised discovery of steerable factors in the latent space of pretrained graph DGMs. We first examine the representation space of three pretrained graph DGMs with six disentanglement metrics, and we observe that the pretrained representation space is entangled. Motivated by this observation, GraphCG learns the steerable factors via maximizing the mutual information between semantic-rich directions, where the controlled graph moving along the same direction will share the same steerable factors. We quantitatively verify that GraphCG outperforms four competitive baselines on two graph DGMs pretrained on two molecule datasets. Additionally, we qualitatively illustrate seven steerable factors learned by GraphCG on five pretrained DGMs over five graph datasets, including two for molecules and three for point clouds.

Currently, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous in data science, which necessitates the development of techniques to decompose and interpret such multidimensional (aka tensor) datasets. Finding a low dimensional representation of the data, that is, its inherent structure, is one of the approaches that can serve to understand the dynamics of low dimensional latent features hidden in the data. Nonnegative RESCAL is one such technique, particularly well suited to analyze self-relational data, such as dynamic networks found in international trade flows. Nonnegative RESCAL computes a low dimensional tensor representation by finding the latent space containing multiple modalities. Estimating the dimensionality of this latent space is crucial for extracting meaningful latent features. Here, to determine the dimensionality of the latent space with nonnegative RESCAL, we propose a latent dimension determination method which is based on clustering of the solutions of multiple realizations of nonnegative RESCAL decompositions. We demonstrate the performance of our model selection method on synthetic data and then we apply our method to decompose a network of international trade flows data from International Monetary Fund and validate the resulting features against empirical facts from economic literature.

Modeling and re-rendering dynamic 3D scenes is a challenging task in 3D vision. Prior approaches build on NeRF and rely on implicit representations. This is slow since it requires many MLP evaluations, constraining real-world applications. We show that dynamic 3D scenes can be explicitly represented by six planes of learned features, leading to an elegant solution we call HexPlane. A HexPlane computes features for points in spacetime by fusing vectors extracted from each plane, which is highly efficient. Pairing a HexPlane with a tiny MLP to regress output colors and training via volume rendering gives impressive results for novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes, matching the image quality of prior work but reducing training time by more than 100times. Extensive ablations confirm our HexPlane design and show that it is robust to different feature fusion mechanisms, coordinate systems, and decoding mechanisms. HexPlane is a simple and effective solution for representing 4D volumes, and we hope they can broadly contribute to modeling spacetime for dynamic 3D scenes.

We propose L3DG, the first approach for generative 3D modeling of 3D Gaussians through a latent 3D Gaussian diffusion formulation. This enables effective generative 3D modeling, scaling to generation of entire room-scale scenes which can be very efficiently rendered. To enable effective synthesis of 3D Gaussians, we propose a latent diffusion formulation, operating in a compressed latent space of 3D Gaussians. This compressed latent space is learned by a vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), for which we employ a sparse convolutional architecture to efficiently operate on room-scale scenes. This way, the complexity of the costly generation process via diffusion is substantially reduced, allowing higher detail on object-level generation, as well as scalability to large scenes. By leveraging the 3D Gaussian representation, the generated scenes can be rendered from arbitrary viewpoints in real-time. We demonstrate that our approach significantly improves visual quality over prior work on unconditional object-level radiance field synthesis and showcase its applicability to room-scale scene generation.

Recent AI-based 3D content creation has largely evolved along two paths: feed-forward image-to-3D reconstruction approaches and 3D generative models trained with 2D or 3D supervision. In this work, we show that existing feed-forward reconstruction methods can serve as effective latent encoders for training 3D generative models, thereby bridging these two paradigms. By reusing powerful pre-trained reconstruction models, we avoid computationally expensive encoder network training and obtain rich 3D latent features for generative modeling for free. However, the latent spaces of reconstruction models are not well-suited for generative modeling due to their unstructured nature. To enable flow-based model training on these latent features, we develop post-processing pipelines, including protocols to standardize the features and spatial weighting to concentrate on important regions. We further incorporate a 2D image space perceptual rendering loss to handle the high-dimensional latent spaces. Finally, we propose a multi-stream transformer-based rectified flow architecture to achieve linear scaling and high-quality text-conditioned 3D generation. Our framework leverages the advancements of feed-forward reconstruction models to enhance the scalability of 3D generative modeling, achieving both high computational efficiency and state-of-the-art performance in text-to-3D generation.

Generative models serve as powerful tools for modeling the real world, with mainstream diffusion models, particularly those based on the latent diffusion model paradigm, achieving remarkable progress across various tasks, such as image and video synthesis. Latent diffusion models are typically trained using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), interacting with VAE latents rather than the real samples. While this generative paradigm speeds up training and inference, the quality of the generated outputs is limited by the latents' quality. Traditional VAE latents are often seen as spatial compression in pixel space and lack explicit semantic representations, which are essential for modeling the real world. In this paper, we introduce ReaLS (Representation-Aligned Latent Space), which integrates semantic priors to improve generation performance. Extensive experiments show that fundamental DiT and SiT trained on ReaLS can achieve a 15% improvement in FID metric. Furthermore, the enhanced semantic latent space enables more perceptual downstream tasks, such as segmentation and depth estimation.

Diffusion models have emerged as the state-of-the-art for image generation, among other tasks. Here, we present an efficient diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generation of neural fields. Our approach pre-processes training data, such as ShapeNet meshes, by converting them to continuous occupancy fields and factoring them into a set of axis-aligned triplane feature representations. Thus, our 3D training scenes are all represented by 2D feature planes, and we can directly train existing 2D diffusion models on these representations to generate 3D neural fields with high quality and diversity, outperforming alternative approaches to 3D-aware generation. Our approach requires essential modifications to existing triplane factorization pipelines to make the resulting features easy to learn for the diffusion model. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on 3D generation on several object classes from ShapeNet.

In this article, we focus on decomposing latent representations in generative adversarial networks or learned feature representations in deep autoencoders into semantically controllable factors in a semisupervised manner, without modifying the original trained models. Particularly, we propose factors' decomposer-entangler network (FDEN) that learns to decompose a latent representation into mutually independent factors. Given a latent representation, the proposed framework draws a set of interpretable factors, each aligned to independent factors of variations by minimizing their total correlation in an information-theoretic means. As a plug-in method, we have applied our proposed FDEN to the existing networks of adversarially learned inference and pioneer network and performed computer vision tasks of image-to-image translation in semantic ways, e.g., changing styles, while keeping the identity of a subject, and object classification in a few-shot learning scheme. We have also validated the effectiveness of the proposed method with various ablation studies in the qualitative, quantitative, and statistical examination.

We present a novel approach to the generation of static and articulated 3D assets that has a 3D autodecoder at its core. The 3D autodecoder framework embeds properties learned from the target dataset in the latent space, which can then be decoded into a volumetric representation for rendering view-consistent appearance and geometry. We then identify the appropriate intermediate volumetric latent space, and introduce robust normalization and de-normalization operations to learn a 3D diffusion from 2D images or monocular videos of rigid or articulated objects. Our approach is flexible enough to use either existing camera supervision or no camera information at all -- instead efficiently learning it during training. Our evaluations demonstrate that our generation results outperform state-of-the-art alternatives on various benchmark datasets and metrics, including multi-view image datasets of synthetic objects, real in-the-wild videos of moving people, and a large-scale, real video dataset of static objects.

Diffusion models have achieved unprecedented performance in generative modeling. The commonly-adopted formulation of the latent code of diffusion models is a sequence of gradually denoised samples, as opposed to the simpler (e.g., Gaussian) latent space of GANs, VAEs, and normalizing flows. This paper provides an alternative, Gaussian formulation of the latent space of various diffusion models, as well as an invertible DPM-Encoder that maps images into the latent space. While our formulation is purely based on the definition of diffusion models, we demonstrate several intriguing consequences. (1) Empirically, we observe that a common latent space emerges from two diffusion models trained independently on related domains. In light of this finding, we propose CycleDiffusion, which uses DPM-Encoder for unpaired image-to-image translation. Furthermore, applying CycleDiffusion to text-to-image diffusion models, we show that large-scale text-to-image diffusion models can be used as zero-shot image-to-image editors. (2) One can guide pre-trained diffusion models and GANs by controlling the latent codes in a unified, plug-and-play formulation based on energy-based models. Using the CLIP model and a face recognition model as guidance, we demonstrate that diffusion models have better coverage of low-density sub-populations and individuals than GANs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ChenWu98/cycle-diffusion.

Despite the extensive studies on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), how to reliably sample high-quality images from their latent spaces remains an under-explored topic. In this paper, we propose a novel GAN latent sampling method by exploring and exploiting the hubness priors of GAN latent distributions. Our key insight is that the high dimensionality of the GAN latent space will inevitably lead to the emergence of hub latents that usually have much larger sampling densities than other latents in the latent space. As a result, these hub latents are better trained and thus contribute more to the synthesis of high-quality images. Unlike the a posterior "cherry-picking", our method is highly efficient as it is an a priori method that identifies high-quality latents before the synthesis of images. Furthermore, we show that the well-known but purely empirical truncation trick is a naive approximation to the central clustering effect of hub latents, which not only uncovers the rationale of the truncation trick, but also indicates the superiority and fundamentality of our method. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Generative autoencoders offer a promising approach for controllable text generation by leveraging their latent sentence representations. However, current models struggle to maintain coherent latent spaces required to perform meaningful text manipulations via latent vector operations. Specifically, we demonstrate by example that neural encoders do not necessarily map similar sentences to nearby latent vectors. A theoretical explanation for this phenomenon establishes that high capacity autoencoders can learn an arbitrary mapping between sequences and associated latent representations. To remedy this issue, we augment adversarial autoencoders with a denoising objective where original sentences are reconstructed from perturbed versions (referred to as DAAE). We prove that this simple modification guides the latent space geometry of the resulting model by encouraging the encoder to map similar texts to similar latent representations. In empirical comparisons with various types of autoencoders, our model provides the best trade-off between generation quality and reconstruction capacity. Moreover, the improved geometry of the DAAE latent space enables zero-shot text style transfer via simple latent vector arithmetic.

This paper introduces a novel hierarchical autoencoder that maps 3D models into a highly compressed latent space. The hierarchical autoencoder is specifically designed to tackle the challenges arising from large-scale datasets and generative modeling using diffusion. Different from previous approaches that only work on a regular image or volume grid, our hierarchical autoencoder operates on unordered sets of vectors. Each level of the autoencoder controls different geometric levels of detail. We show that the model can be used to represent a wide range of 3D models while faithfully representing high-resolution geometry details. The training of the new architecture takes 0.70x time and 0.58x memory compared to the baseline. We also explore how the new representation can be used for generative modeling. Specifically, we propose a cascaded diffusion framework where each stage is conditioned on the previous stage. Our design extends existing cascaded designs for image and volume grids to vector sets.

There is a growing gap between the impressive results of deep image generative models and classical algorithms that offer theoretical guarantees. The former suffer from mode collapse or memorization issues, limiting their application to scientific data. The latter require restrictive assumptions such as log-concavity to escape the curse of dimensionality. We partially bridge this gap by introducing conditionally strongly log-concave (CSLC) models, which factorize the data distribution into a product of conditional probability distributions that are strongly log-concave. This factorization is obtained with orthogonal projectors adapted to the data distribution. It leads to efficient parameter estimation and sampling algorithms, with theoretical guarantees, although the data distribution is not globally log-concave. We show that several challenging multiscale processes are conditionally log-concave using wavelet packet orthogonal projectors. Numerical results are shown for physical fields such as the varphi^4 model and weak lensing convergence maps with higher resolution than in previous works.

We present a latent diffusion model over 3D scenes, that can be trained using only 2D image data. To achieve this, we first design an autoencoder that maps multi-view images to 3D Gaussian splats, and simultaneously builds a compressed latent representation of these splats. Then, we train a multi-view diffusion model over the latent space to learn an efficient generative model. This pipeline does not require object masks nor depths, and is suitable for complex scenes with arbitrary camera positions. We conduct careful experiments on two large-scale datasets of complex real-world scenes -- MVImgNet and RealEstate10K. We show that our approach enables generating 3D scenes in as little as 0.2 seconds, either from scratch, from a single input view, or from sparse input views. It produces diverse and high-quality results while running an order of magnitude faster than non-latent diffusion models and earlier NeRF-based generative models

The use of autoencoders for shape editing or generation through latent space manipulation suffers from unpredictable changes in the output shape. Our autoencoder-based method enables intuitive shape editing in latent space by disentangling latent sub-spaces into style variables and control points on the surface that can be manipulated independently. The key idea is adding a Lipschitz-type constraint to the loss function, i.e. bounding the change of the output shape proportionally to the change in latent space, leading to interpretable latent space representations. The control points on the surface that are part of the latent code of an object can then be freely moved, allowing for intuitive shape editing directly in latent space. We evaluate our method by comparing to state-of-the-art data-driven shape editing methods. We further demonstrate the expressiveness of our learned latent space by leveraging it for unsupervised part segmentation.

Text-guided diffusion models (TDMs) are widely applied but can fail unexpectedly. Common failures include: (i) natural-looking text prompts generating images with the wrong content, or (ii) different random samples of the latent variables that generate vastly different, and even unrelated, outputs despite being conditioned on the same text prompt. In this work, we aim to study and understand the failure modes of TDMs in more detail. To achieve this, we propose SAGE, the first adversarial search method on TDMs that systematically explores the discrete prompt space and the high-dimensional latent space, to automatically discover undesirable behaviors and failure cases in image generation. We use image classifiers as surrogate loss functions during searching, and employ human inspections to validate the identified failures. For the first time, our method enables efficient exploration of both the discrete and intricate human language space and the challenging latent space, overcoming the gradient vanishing problem. Then, we demonstrate the effectiveness of SAGE on five widely used generative models and reveal four typical failure modes: (1) We find a variety of natural text prompts that generate images failing to capture the semantics of input texts. We further discuss the underlying causes and potential solutions based on the results. (2) We find regions in the latent space that lead to distorted images independent of the text prompt, suggesting that parts of the latent space are not well-structured. (3) We also find latent samples that result in natural-looking images unrelated to the text prompt, implying a possible misalignment between the latent and prompt spaces. (4) By appending a single adversarial token embedding to any input prompts, we can generate a variety of specified target objects. Project page: https://sage-diffusion.github.io/

Large-scale pre-training tasks like image classification, captioning, or self-supervised techniques do not incentivize learning the semantic boundaries of objects. However, recent generative foundation models built using text-based latent diffusion techniques may learn semantic boundaries. This is because they have to synthesize intricate details about all objects in an image based on a text description. Therefore, we present a technique for segmenting real and AI-generated images using latent diffusion models (LDMs) trained on internet-scale datasets. First, we show that the latent space of LDMs (z-space) is a better input representation compared to other feature representations like RGB images or CLIP encodings for text-based image segmentation. By training the segmentation models on the latent z-space, which creates a compressed representation across several domains like different forms of art, cartoons, illustrations, and photographs, we are also able to bridge the domain gap between real and AI-generated images. We show that the internal features of LDMs contain rich semantic information and present a technique in the form of LD-ZNet to further boost the performance of text-based segmentation. Overall, we show up to 6% improvement over standard baselines for text-to-image segmentation on natural images. For AI-generated imagery, we show close to 20% improvement compared to state-of-the-art techniques. The project is available at https://koutilya-pnvr.github.io/LD-ZNet/.

We propose Deep Feature Factorization (DFF), a method capable of localizing similar semantic concepts within an image or a set of images. We use DFF to gain insight into a deep convolutional neural network's learned features, where we detect hierarchical cluster structures in feature space. This is visualized as heat maps, which highlight semantically matching regions across a set of images, revealing what the network `perceives' as similar. DFF can also be used to perform co-segmentation and co-localization, and we report state-of-the-art results on these tasks.

Recent progress has been made towards learning invariant or equivariant representations with self-supervised learning. While invariant methods are evaluated on large scale datasets, equivariant ones are evaluated in smaller, more controlled, settings. We aim at bridging the gap between the two in order to learn more diverse representations that are suitable for a wide range of tasks. We start by introducing a dataset called 3DIEBench, consisting of renderings from 3D models over 55 classes and more than 2.5 million images where we have full control on the transformations applied to the objects. We further introduce a predictor architecture based on hypernetworks to learn equivariant representations with no possible collapse to invariance. We introduce SIE (Split Invariant-Equivariant) which combines the hypernetwork-based predictor with representations split in two parts, one invariant, the other equivariant, to learn richer representations. We demonstrate significant performance gains over existing methods on equivariance related tasks from both a qualitative and quantitative point of view. We further analyze our introduced predictor and show how it steers the learned latent space. We hope that both our introduced dataset and approach will enable learning richer representations without supervision in more complex scenarios. Code and data are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SIE.

We present latentSplat, a method to predict semantic Gaussians in a 3D latent space that can be splatted and decoded by a light-weight generative 2D architecture. Existing methods for generalizable 3D reconstruction either do not scale to large scenes and resolutions, or are limited to interpolation of close input views. latentSplat combines the strengths of regression-based and generative approaches while being trained purely on readily available real video data. The core of our method are variational 3D Gaussians, a representation that efficiently encodes varying uncertainty within a latent space consisting of 3D feature Gaussians. From these Gaussians, specific instances can be sampled and rendered via efficient splatting and a fast, generative decoder. We show that latentSplat outperforms previous works in reconstruction quality and generalization, while being fast and scalable to high-resolution data.

We propose a new representation for encoding 3D shapes as neural fields. The representation is designed to be compatible with the transformer architecture and to benefit both shape reconstruction and shape generation. Existing works on neural fields are grid-based representations with latents defined on a regular grid. In contrast, we define latents on irregular grids, enabling our representation to be sparse and adaptive. In the context of shape reconstruction from point clouds, our shape representation built on irregular grids improves upon grid-based methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy. For shape generation, our representation promotes high-quality shape generation using auto-regressive probabilistic models. We show different applications that improve over the current state of the art. First, we show results for probabilistic shape reconstruction from a single higher resolution image. Second, we train a probabilistic model conditioned on very low resolution images. Third, we apply our model to category-conditioned generation. All probabilistic experiments confirm that we are able to generate detailed and high quality shapes to yield the new state of the art in generative 3D shape modeling.

Recently, text-to-3D generation has attracted significant attention, resulting in notable performance enhancements. Previous methods utilize end-to-end 3D generation models to initialize 3D Gaussians, multi-view diffusion models to enforce multi-view consistency, and text-to-image diffusion models to refine details with score distillation algorithms. However, these methods exhibit two limitations. Firstly, they encounter conflicts in generation directions since different models aim to produce diverse 3D assets. Secondly, the issue of over-saturation in score distillation has not been thoroughly investigated and solved. To address these limitations, we propose PlacidDreamer, a text-to-3D framework that harmonizes initialization, multi-view generation, and text-conditioned generation with a single multi-view diffusion model, while simultaneously employing a novel score distillation algorithm to achieve balanced saturation. To unify the generation direction, we introduce the Latent-Plane module, a training-friendly plug-in extension that enables multi-view diffusion models to provide fast geometry reconstruction for initialization and enhanced multi-view images to personalize the text-to-image diffusion model. To address the over-saturation problem, we propose to view score distillation as a multi-objective optimization problem and introduce the Balanced Score Distillation algorithm, which offers a Pareto Optimal solution that achieves both rich details and balanced saturation. Extensive experiments validate the outstanding capabilities of our PlacidDreamer. The code is available at https://github.com/HansenHuang0823/PlacidDreamer.

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) have made significant advancements in the field of image generation in recent years. One major advantage of LDMs is their ability to operate in a compressed latent space, allowing for more efficient training and deployment. However, despite these advantages, challenges with LDMs still remain. For example, it has been observed that LDMs often generate high-frequency details and complex compositions imperfectly. We hypothesize that one reason for these flaws is due to the fact that all pre- and post-training of LDMs are done in latent space, which is typically 8 times 8 lower spatial-resolution than the output images. To address this issue, we propose adding pixel-space supervision in the post-training process to better preserve high-frequency details. Experimentally, we show that adding a pixel-space objective significantly improves both supervised quality fine-tuning and preference-based post-training by a large margin on a state-of-the-art DiT transformer and U-Net diffusion models in both visual quality and visual flaw metrics, while maintaining the same text alignment quality.

We learn a latent space for easy capture, consistent interpolation, and efficient reproduction of visual material appearance. When users provide a photo of a stationary natural material captured under flashlight illumination, first it is converted into a latent material code. Then, in the second step, conditioned on the material code, our method produces an infinite and diverse spatial field of BRDF model parameters (diffuse albedo, normals, roughness, specular albedo) that subsequently allows rendering in complex scenes and illuminations, matching the appearance of the input photograph. Technically, we jointly embed all flash images into a latent space using a convolutional encoder, and -- conditioned on these latent codes -- convert random spatial fields into fields of BRDF parameters using a convolutional neural network (CNN). We condition these BRDF parameters to match the visual characteristics (statistics and spectra of visual features) of the input under matching light. A user study compares our approach favorably to previous work, even those with access to BRDF supervision.

AI-generated content has attracted lots of attention recently, but photo-realistic video synthesis is still challenging. Although many attempts using GANs and autoregressive models have been made in this area, the visual quality and length of generated videos are far from satisfactory. Diffusion models have shown remarkable results recently but require significant computational resources. To address this, we introduce lightweight video diffusion models by leveraging a low-dimensional 3D latent space, significantly outperforming previous pixel-space video diffusion models under a limited computational budget. In addition, we propose hierarchical diffusion in the latent space such that longer videos with more than one thousand frames can be produced. To further overcome the performance degradation issue for long video generation, we propose conditional latent perturbation and unconditional guidance that effectively mitigate the accumulated errors during the extension of video length. Extensive experiments on small domain datasets of different categories suggest that our framework generates more realistic and longer videos than previous strong baselines. We additionally provide an extension to large-scale text-to-video generation to demonstrate the superiority of our work. Our code and models will be made publicly available.

In this paper, we propose the first framework that enables solving graph learning tasks of all levels (node, edge and graph) and all types (generation, regression and classification) with one model. We first propose Latent Graph Diffusion (LGD), a generative model that can generate node, edge, and graph-level features of all categories simultaneously. We achieve this goal by embedding the graph structures and features into a latent space leveraging a powerful encoder which can also be decoded, then training a diffusion model in the latent space. LGD is also capable of conditional generation through a specifically designed cross-attention mechanism. Then we formulate prediction tasks including regression and classification as (conditional) generation, which enables our LGD to solve tasks of all levels and all types with provable guarantees. We verify the effectiveness of our framework with extensive experiments, where our models achieve state-of-the-art or highly competitive results across generation and regression tasks.

Multi-modal data-sets are ubiquitous in modern applications, and multi-modal Variational Autoencoders are a popular family of models that aim to learn a joint representation of the different modalities. However, existing approaches suffer from a coherence-quality tradeoff, where models with good generation quality lack generative coherence across modalities, and vice versa. We discuss the limitations underlying the unsatisfactory performance of existing methods, to motivate the need for a different approach. We propose a novel method that uses a set of independently trained, uni-modal, deterministic autoencoders. Individual latent variables are concatenated into a common latent space, which is fed to a masked diffusion model to enable generative modeling. We also introduce a new multi-time training method to learn the conditional score network for multi-modal diffusion. Our methodology substantially outperforms competitors in both generation quality and coherence, as shown through an extensive experimental campaign.

Latent 3D reconstruction has shown great promise in empowering 3D semantic understanding and 3D generation by distilling 2D features into the 3D space. However, existing approaches struggle with the domain gap between 2D feature space and 3D representations, resulting in degraded rendering performance. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework that integrates 3D awareness into the 2D latent space. The framework consists of three stages: (1) a correspondence-aware autoencoding method that enhances the 3D consistency of 2D latent representations, (2) a latent radiance field (LRF) that lifts these 3D-aware 2D representations into 3D space, and (3) a VAE-Radiance Field (VAE-RF) alignment strategy that improves image decoding from the rendered 2D representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art latent 3D reconstruction approaches in terms of synthesis performance and cross-dataset generalizability across diverse indoor and outdoor scenes. To our knowledge, this is the first work showing the radiance field representations constructed from 2D latent representations can yield photorealistic 3D reconstruction performance.

Auto-regressive models have achieved impressive results in 2D image generation by modeling joint distributions in grid space. In this paper, we extend auto-regressive models to 3D domains, and seek a stronger ability of 3D shape generation by improving auto-regressive models at capacity and scalability simultaneously. Firstly, we leverage an ensemble of publicly available 3D datasets to facilitate the training of large-scale models. It consists of a comprehensive collection of approximately 900,000 objects, with multiple properties of meshes, points, voxels, rendered images, and text captions. This diverse labeled dataset, termed Objaverse-Mix, empowers our model to learn from a wide range of object variations. However, directly applying 3D auto-regression encounters critical challenges of high computational demands on volumetric grids and ambiguous auto-regressive order along grid dimensions, resulting in inferior quality of 3D shapes. To this end, we then present a novel framework Argus3D in terms of capacity. Concretely, our approach introduces discrete representation learning based on a latent vector instead of volumetric grids, which not only reduces computational costs but also preserves essential geometric details by learning the joint distributions in a more tractable order. The capacity of conditional generation can thus be realized by simply concatenating various conditioning inputs to the latent vector, such as point clouds, categories, images, and texts. In addition, thanks to the simplicity of our model architecture, we naturally scale up our approach to a larger model with an impressive 3.6 billion parameters, further enhancing the quality of versatile 3D generation. Extensive experiments on four generation tasks demonstrate that Argus3D can synthesize diverse and faithful shapes across multiple categories, achieving remarkable performance.

Extracting planes from a 3D scene is useful for downstream tasks in robotics and augmented reality. In this paper we tackle the problem of estimating the planar surfaces in a scene from posed images. Our first finding is that a surprisingly competitive baseline results from combining popular clustering algorithms with recent improvements in 3D geometry estimation. However, such purely geometric methods are understandably oblivious to plane semantics, which are crucial to discerning distinct planes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method that predicts multi-view consistent plane embeddings that complement geometry when clustering points into planes. We show through extensive evaluation on the ScanNetV2 dataset that our new method outperforms existing approaches and our strong geometric baseline for the task of plane estimation.

We propose Strivec, a novel neural representation that models a 3D scene as a radiance field with sparsely distributed and compactly factorized local tensor feature grids. Our approach leverages tensor decomposition, following the recent work TensoRF, to model the tensor grids. In contrast to TensoRF which uses a global tensor and focuses on their vector-matrix decomposition, we propose to utilize a cloud of local tensors and apply the classic CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition to factorize each tensor into triple vectors that express local feature distributions along spatial axes and compactly encode a local neural field. We also apply multi-scale tensor grids to discover the geometry and appearance commonalities and exploit spatial coherence with the tri-vector factorization at multiple local scales. The final radiance field properties are regressed by aggregating neural features from multiple local tensors across all scales. Our tri-vector tensors are sparsely distributed around the actual scene surface, discovered by a fast coarse reconstruction, leveraging the sparsity of a 3D scene. We demonstrate that our model can achieve better rendering quality while using significantly fewer parameters than previous methods, including TensoRF and Instant-NGP.

We propose a novel approach for few-shot talking-head synthesis. While recent works in neural talking heads have produced promising results, they can still produce images that do not preserve the identity of the subject in source images. We posit this is a result of the entangled representation of each subject in a single latent code that models 3D shape information, identity cues, colors, lighting and even background details. In contrast, we propose to factorize the representation of a subject into its spatial and style components. Our method generates a target frame in two steps. First, it predicts a dense spatial layout for the target image. Second, an image generator utilizes the predicted layout for spatial denormalization and synthesizes the target frame. We experimentally show that this disentangled representation leads to a significant improvement over previous methods, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Unsupervised learning of probabilistic models is a central yet challenging problem in machine learning. Specifically, designing models with tractable learning, sampling, inference and evaluation is crucial in solving this task. We extend the space of such models using real-valued non-volume preserving (real NVP) transformations, a set of powerful invertible and learnable transformations, resulting in an unsupervised learning algorithm with exact log-likelihood computation, exact sampling, exact inference of latent variables, and an interpretable latent space. We demonstrate its ability to model natural images on four datasets through sampling, log-likelihood evaluation and latent variable manipulations.

We introduce a new generative model that combines latent diffusion with persistent homology to create 3D shapes with high diversity, with a special emphasis on their topological characteristics. Our method involves representing 3D shapes as implicit fields, then employing persistent homology to extract topological features, including Betti numbers and persistence diagrams. The shape generation process consists of two steps. Initially, we employ a transformer-based autoencoding module to embed the implicit representation of each 3D shape into a set of latent vectors. Subsequently, we navigate through the learned latent space via a diffusion model. By strategically incorporating topological features into the diffusion process, our generative module is able to produce a richer variety of 3D shapes with different topological structures. Furthermore, our framework is flexible, supporting generation tasks constrained by a variety of inputs, including sparse and partial point clouds, as well as sketches. By modifying the persistence diagrams, we can alter the topology of the shapes generated from these input modalities.

The autoencoder is an unsupervised learning paradigm that aims to create a compact latent representation of data by minimizing the reconstruction loss. However, it tends to overlook the fact that most data (images) are embedded in a lower-dimensional space, which is crucial for effective data representation. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called Low-Rank Autoencoder (LoRAE). In LoRAE, we incorporated a low-rank regularizer to adaptively reconstruct a low-dimensional latent space while preserving the basic objective of an autoencoder. This helps embed the data in a lower-dimensional space while preserving important information. It is a simple autoencoder extension that learns low-rank latent space. Theoretically, we establish a tighter error bound for our model. Empirically, our model's superiority shines through various tasks such as image generation and downstream classification. Both theoretical and practical outcomes highlight the importance of acquiring low-dimensional embeddings.

The capability to learn latent representations plays a key role in the effectiveness of recent machine learning methods. An active frontier in representation learning is understanding representations for combinatorial structures which may not admit well-behaved local neighborhoods or distance functions. For example, for polygons, slightly perturbing vertex locations might lead to significant changes in their combinatorial structure and may even lead to invalid polygons. In this paper, we investigate representations to capture the underlying combinatorial structures of polygons. Specifically, we study the open problem of Visibility Reconstruction: Given a visibility graph G, construct a polygon P whose visibility graph is G. We introduce VisDiff, a novel diffusion-based approach to reconstruct a polygon from its given visibility graph G. Our method first estimates the signed distance function (SDF) of P from G. Afterwards, it extracts ordered vertex locations that have the pairwise visibility relationship given by the edges of G. Our main insight is that going through the SDF significantly improves learning for reconstruction. In order to train VisDiff, we make two main contributions: (1) We design novel loss components for computing the visibility in a differentiable manner and (2) create a carefully curated dataset. We use this dataset to benchmark our method and achieve 21% improvement in F1-Score over standard methods. We also demonstrate effective generalization to out-of-distribution polygon types and show that learning a generative model allows us to sample the set of polygons with a given visibility graph. Finally, we extend our method to the related combinatorial problem of reconstruction from a triangulation. We achieve 95% classification accuracy of triangulation edges and a 4% improvement in Chamfer distance compared to current architectures.

Trit-plane coding enables deep progressive image compression, but it cannot use autoregressive context models. In this paper, we propose the context-based trit-plane coding (CTC) algorithm to achieve progressive compression more compactly. First, we develop the context-based rate reduction module to estimate trit probabilities of latent elements accurately and thus encode the trit-planes compactly. Second, we develop the context-based distortion reduction module to refine partial latent tensors from the trit-planes and improve the reconstructed image quality. Third, we propose a retraining scheme for the decoder to attain better rate-distortion tradeoffs. Extensive experiments show that CTC outperforms the baseline trit-plane codec significantly in BD-rate on the Kodak lossless dataset, while increasing the time complexity only marginally. Our codes are available at https://github.com/seungminjeon-github/CTC.

Zero-shot learning has gained popularity due to its potential to scale recognition models without requiring additional training data. This is usually achieved by associating categories with their semantic information like attributes. However, we believe that the potential offered by this paradigm is not yet fully exploited. In this work, we propose to utilize the structure of the space spanned by the attributes using a set of relations. We devise objective functions to preserve these relations in the embedding space, thereby inducing semanticity to the embedding space. Through extensive experimental evaluation on five benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that inducing semanticity to the embedding space is beneficial for zero-shot learning. The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art on the standard zero-shot setting as well as the more realistic generalized zero-shot setting. We also demonstrate how the proposed approach can be useful for making approximate semantic inferences about an image belonging to a category for which attribute information is not available.

We present SliderSpace, a framework for automatically decomposing the visual capabilities of diffusion models into controllable and human-understandable directions. Unlike existing control methods that require a user to specify attributes for each edit direction individually, SliderSpace discovers multiple interpretable and diverse directions simultaneously from a single text prompt. Each direction is trained as a low-rank adaptor, enabling compositional control and the discovery of surprising possibilities in the model's latent space. Through extensive experiments on state-of-the-art diffusion models, we demonstrate SliderSpace's effectiveness across three applications: concept decomposition, artistic style exploration, and diversity enhancement. Our quantitative evaluation shows that SliderSpace-discovered directions decompose the visual structure of model's knowledge effectively, offering insights into the latent capabilities encoded within diffusion models. User studies further validate that our method produces more diverse and useful variations compared to baselines. Our code, data and trained weights are available at https://sliderspace.baulab.info

Large language models are extensively applied across a wide range of tasks, such as customer support, content creation, educational tutoring, and providing financial guidance. However, a well-known drawback is their predisposition to generate hallucinations. This damages the trustworthiness of the information these models provide, impacting decision-making and user confidence. We propose a method to detect hallucinations by looking at the structure of the latent space and finding associations within hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations. We create a graph structure that connects generations that lie closely in the embedding space. Moreover, we employ a Graph Attention Network which utilizes message passing to aggregate information from neighboring nodes and assigns varying degrees of importance to each neighbor based on their relevance. Our findings show that 1) there exists a structure in the latent space that differentiates between hallucinated and non-hallucinated generations, 2) Graph Attention Networks can learn this structure and generalize it to unseen generations, and 3) the robustness of our method is enhanced when incorporating contrastive learning. When evaluated against evidence-based benchmarks, our model performs similarly without access to search-based methods.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely applied in modeling diverse image distributions. However, despite its impressive applications, the structure of the latent space in GANs largely remains as a black-box, leaving its controllable generation an open problem, especially when spurious correlations between different semantic attributes exist in the image distributions. To address this problem, previous methods typically learn linear directions or individual channels that control semantic attributes in the image space. However, they often suffer from imperfect disentanglement, or are unable to obtain multi-directional controls. In this work, in light of the above challenges, we propose a novel approach that discovers nonlinear controls, which enables multi-directional manipulation as well as effective disentanglement, based on gradient information in the learned GAN latent space. More specifically, we first learn interpolation directions by following the gradients from classification networks trained separately on the attributes, and then navigate the latent space by exclusively controlling channels activated for the target attribute in the learned directions. Empirically, with small training data, our approach is able to gain fine-grained controls over a diverse set of bi-directional and multi-directional attributes, and we showcase its ability to achieve disentanglement significantly better than state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The field of neural rendering has witnessed significant progress with advancements in generative models and differentiable rendering techniques. Though 2D diffusion has achieved success, a unified 3D diffusion pipeline remains unsettled. This paper introduces a novel framework called LN3Diff to address this gap and enable fast, high-quality, and generic conditional 3D generation. Our approach harnesses a 3D-aware architecture and variational autoencoder (VAE) to encode the input image into a structured, compact, and 3D latent space. The latent is decoded by a transformer-based decoder into a high-capacity 3D neural field. Through training a diffusion model on this 3D-aware latent space, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on ShapeNet for 3D generation and demonstrates superior performance in monocular 3D reconstruction and conditional 3D generation across various datasets. Moreover, it surpasses existing 3D diffusion methods in terms of inference speed, requiring no per-instance optimization. Our proposed LN3Diff presents a significant advancement in 3D generative modeling and holds promise for various applications in 3D vision and graphics tasks.

This work presents an easy-to-use regularizer for GAN training, which helps explicitly link some axes of the latent space to an image region or a semantic category (e.g., sky) in the synthesis. Establishing such a connection facilitates a more convenient local control of GAN generation, where users can alter image content only within a spatial area simply by partially resampling the latent codes. Experimental results confirm four appealing properties of our regularizer, which we call LinkGAN. (1) Any image region can be linked to the latent space, even if the region is pre-selected before training and fixed for all instances. (2) Two or multiple regions can be independently linked to different latent axes, surprisingly allowing tokenized control of synthesized images. (3) Our regularizer can improve the spatial controllability of both 2D and 3D GAN models, barely sacrificing the synthesis performance. (4) The models trained with our regularizer are compatible with GAN inversion techniques and maintain editability on real images

We introduce an unsupervised feature learning approach that embeds 3D shape information into a single-view image representation. The main idea is a self-supervised training objective that, given only a single 2D image, requires all unseen views of the object to be predictable from learned features. We implement this idea as an encoder-decoder convolutional neural network. The network maps an input image of an unknown category and unknown viewpoint to a latent space, from which a deconvolutional decoder can best "lift" the image to its complete viewgrid showing the object from all viewing angles. Our class-agnostic training procedure encourages the representation to capture fundamental shape primitives and semantic regularities in a data-driven manner---without manual semantic labels. Our results on two widely-used shape datasets show 1) our approach successfully learns to perform "mental rotation" even for objects unseen during training, and 2) the learned latent space is a powerful representation for object recognition, outperforming several existing unsupervised feature learning methods.

We propose SketchINR, to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the xy point coordinates in a sketch at each time and stroke. Despite its simplicity, SketchINR outperforms existing representations at multiple tasks: (i) Encoding an entire sketch dataset into a fixed size latent vector, SketchINR gives 60times and 10times data compression over raster and vector sketches, respectively. (ii) SketchINR's auto-decoder provides a much higher-fidelity representation than other learned vector sketch representations, and is uniquely able to scale to complex vector sketches such as FS-COCO. (iii) SketchINR supports parallelisation that can decode/render sim100times faster than other learned vector representations such as SketchRNN. (iv) SketchINR, for the first time, emulates the human ability to reproduce a sketch with varying abstraction in terms of number and complexity of strokes. As a first look at implicit sketches, SketchINR's compact high-fidelity representation will support future work in modelling long and complex sketches.

Current auto-regressive mesh generation methods suffer from issues such as incompleteness, insufficient detail, and poor generalization. In this paper, we propose an Auto-regressive Auto-encoder (ArAE) model capable of generating high-quality 3D meshes with up to 4,000 faces at a spatial resolution of 512^3. We introduce a novel mesh tokenization algorithm that efficiently compresses triangular meshes into 1D token sequences, significantly enhancing training efficiency. Furthermore, our model compresses variable-length triangular meshes into a fixed-length latent space, enabling training latent diffusion models for better generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior quality, diversity, and generalization capabilities of our model in both point cloud and image-conditioned mesh generation tasks.

Driven by the appealing properties of neural fields for storing and communicating 3D data, the problem of directly processing them to address tasks such as classification and part segmentation has emerged and has been investigated in recent works. Early approaches employ neural fields parameterized by shared networks trained on the whole dataset, achieving good task performance but sacrificing reconstruction quality. To improve the latter, later methods focus on individual neural fields parameterized as large Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), which are, however, challenging to process due to the high dimensionality of the weight space, intrinsic weight space symmetries, and sensitivity to random initialization. Hence, results turn out significantly inferior to those achieved by processing explicit representations, e.g., point clouds or meshes. In the meantime, hybrid representations, in particular based on tri-planes, have emerged as a more effective and efficient alternative to realize neural fields, but their direct processing has not been investigated yet. In this paper, we show that the tri-plane discrete data structure encodes rich information, which can be effectively processed by standard deep-learning machinery. We define an extensive benchmark covering a diverse set of fields such as occupancy, signed/unsigned distance, and, for the first time, radiance fields. While processing a field with the same reconstruction quality, we achieve task performance far superior to frameworks that process large MLPs and, for the first time, almost on par with architectures handling explicit representations.

Directly learning to model 4D content, including shape, color and motion, is challenging. Existing methods depend on skeleton-based motion control and offer limited continuity in detail. To address this, we propose a novel framework that generates coherent 4D sequences with animation of 3D shapes under given conditions with dynamic evolution of shape and color over time through integrative latent mapping. We first employ an integrative latent unified representation to encode shape and color information of each detailed 3D geometry frame. The proposed skeleton-free latent 4D sequence joint representation allows us to leverage diffusion models in a low-dimensional space to control the generation of 4D sequences. Finally, temporally coherent 4D sequences are generated conforming well to the input images and text prompts. Extensive experiments on the ShapeNet, 3DBiCar and DeformingThings4D datasets for several tasks demonstrate that our method effectively learns to generate quality 3D shapes with color and 4D mesh animations, improving over the current state-of-the-art. Source code will be released.

We present a novel alignment-before-generation approach to tackle the challenging task of generating general 3D shapes based on 2D images or texts. Directly learning a conditional generative model from images or texts to 3D shapes is prone to producing inconsistent results with the conditions because 3D shapes have an additional dimension whose distribution significantly differs from that of 2D images and texts. To bridge the domain gap among the three modalities and facilitate multi-modal-conditioned 3D shape generation, we explore representing 3D shapes in a shape-image-text-aligned space. Our framework comprises two models: a Shape-Image-Text-Aligned Variational Auto-Encoder (SITA-VAE) and a conditional Aligned Shape Latent Diffusion Model (ASLDM). The former model encodes the 3D shapes into the shape latent space aligned to the image and text and reconstructs the fine-grained 3D neural fields corresponding to given shape embeddings via the transformer-based decoder. The latter model learns a probabilistic mapping function from the image or text space to the latent shape space. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach can generate higher-quality and more diverse 3D shapes that better semantically conform to the visual or textural conditional inputs, validating the effectiveness of the shape-image-text-aligned space for cross-modality 3D shape generation.

Polygonal meshes are ubiquitous, but have only played a relatively minor role in the deep learning revolution. State-of-the-art neural generative models for 3D shapes learn implicit functions and generate meshes via expensive iso-surfacing. We overcome these challenges by employing a classical spatial data structure from computer graphics, Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), to facilitate 3D learning. The core operation of BSP involves recursive subdivision of 3D space to obtain convex sets. By exploiting this property, we devise BSP-Net, a network that learns to represent a 3D shape via convex decomposition without supervision. The network is trained to reconstruct a shape using a set of convexes obtained from a BSP-tree built over a set of planes, where the planes and convexes are both defined by learned network weights. BSP-Net directly outputs polygonal meshes from the inferred convexes. The generated meshes are watertight, compact (i.e., low-poly), and well suited to represent sharp geometry. We show that the reconstruction quality by BSP-Net is competitive with those from state-of-the-art methods while using much fewer primitives. We also explore variations to BSP-Net including using a more generic decoder for reconstruction, more general primitives than planes, as well as training a generative model with variational auto-encoders. Code is available at https://github.com/czq142857/BSP-NET-original.

In this work, we present SceneDreamer, an unconditional generative model for unbounded 3D scenes, which synthesizes large-scale 3D landscapes from random noise. Our framework is learned from in-the-wild 2D image collections only, without any 3D annotations. At the core of SceneDreamer is a principled learning paradigm comprising 1) an efficient yet expressive 3D scene representation, 2) a generative scene parameterization, and 3) an effective renderer that can leverage the knowledge from 2D images. Our approach begins with an efficient bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation generated from simplex noise, which includes a height field for surface elevation and a semantic field for detailed scene semantics. This BEV scene representation enables 1) representing a 3D scene with quadratic complexity, 2) disentangled geometry and semantics, and 3) efficient training. Moreover, we propose a novel generative neural hash grid to parameterize the latent space based on 3D positions and scene semantics, aiming to encode generalizable features across various scenes. Lastly, a neural volumetric renderer, learned from 2D image collections through adversarial training, is employed to produce photorealistic images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SceneDreamer and superiority over state-of-the-art methods in generating vivid yet diverse unbounded 3D worlds.

Latent factor models are the driving forces of the state-of-the-art recommender systems, with an important insight of vectorizing raw input features into dense embeddings. The dimensions of different feature embeddings are often set to a same value empirically, which limits the predictive performance of latent factor models. Existing works have proposed heuristic or reinforcement learning-based methods to search for mixed feature embedding dimensions. For efficiency concern, these methods typically choose embedding dimensions from a restricted set of candidate dimensions. However, this restriction will hurt the flexibility of dimension selection, leading to suboptimal performance of search results. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Neural Input Search (DNIS), a method that searches for mixed feature embedding dimensions in a more flexible space through continuous relaxation and differentiable optimization. The key idea is to introduce a soft selection layer that controls the significance of each embedding dimension, and optimize this layer according to model's validation performance. DNIS is model-agnostic and thus can be seamlessly incorporated with existing latent factor models for recommendation. We conduct experiments with various architectures of latent factor models on three public real-world datasets for rating prediction, Click-Through-Rate (CTR) prediction, and top-k item recommendation. The results demonstrate that our method achieves the best predictive performance compared with existing neural input search approaches with fewer embedding parameters and less time cost.

Unsupervised learning of depth from indoor monocular videos is challenging as the artificial environment contains many textureless regions. Fortunately, the indoor scenes are full of specific structures, such as planes and lines, which should help guide unsupervised depth learning. This paper proposes PLNet that leverages the plane and line priors to enhance the depth estimation. We first represent the scene geometry using local planar coefficients and impose the smoothness constraint on the representation. Moreover, we enforce the planar and linear consistency by randomly selecting some sets of points that are probably coplanar or collinear to construct simple and effective consistency losses. To verify the proposed method's effectiveness, we further propose to evaluate the flatness and straightness of the predicted point cloud on the reliable planar and linear regions. The regularity of these regions indicates quality indoor reconstruction. Experiments on NYU Depth V2 and ScanNet show that PLNet outperforms existing methods. The code is available at https://github.com/HalleyJiang/PLNet.

A standard Variational Autoencoder, with a Euclidean latent space, is structurally incapable of capturing topological properties of certain datasets. To remove topological obstructions, we introduce Diffusion Variational Autoencoders with arbitrary manifolds as a latent space. A Diffusion Variational Autoencoder uses transition kernels of Brownian motion on the manifold. In particular, it uses properties of the Brownian motion to implement the reparametrization trick and fast approximations to the KL divergence. We show that the Diffusion Variational Autoencoder is capable of capturing topological properties of synthetic datasets. Additionally, we train MNIST on spheres, tori, projective spaces, SO(3), and a torus embedded in R3. Although a natural dataset like MNIST does not have latent variables with a clear-cut topological structure, training it on a manifold can still highlight topological and geometrical properties.

We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two steps suffer from considerable computational costs, preventing the state-of-the-art methods such as the t-SNE from scaling to large-scale and high-dimensional data (e.g., millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions). We propose the LargeVis, a technique that first constructs an accurately approximated K-nearest neighbor graph from the data and then layouts the graph in the low-dimensional space. Comparing to t-SNE, LargeVis significantly reduces the computational cost of the graph construction step and employs a principled probabilistic model for the visualization step, the objective of which can be effectively optimized through asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a linear time complexity. The whole procedure thus easily scales to millions of high-dimensional data points. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate that the LargeVis outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. The hyper-parameters of LargeVis are also much more stable over different data sets.

Generalized Zero-Shot Learning (GZSL) is a challenging topic that has promising prospects in many realistic scenarios. Using a gating mechanism that discriminates the unseen samples from the seen samples can decompose the GZSL problem to a conventional Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) problem and a supervised classification problem. However, training the gate is usually challenging due to the lack of data in the unseen domain. To resolve this problem, in this paper, we propose a boundary based Out-of-Distribution (OOD) classifier which classifies the unseen and seen domains by only using seen samples for training. First, we learn a shared latent space on a unit hyper-sphere where the latent distributions of visual features and semantic attributes are aligned class-wisely. Then we find the boundary and the center of the manifold for each class. By leveraging the class centers and boundaries, the unseen samples can be separated from the seen samples. After that, we use two experts to classify the seen and unseen samples separately. We extensively validate our approach on five popular benchmark datasets including AWA1, AWA2, CUB, FLO and SUN. The experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our approach over state-of-the-art methods.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently achieved remarkable success in text-guided image generation. In image editing, DiTs project text and image inputs to a joint latent space, from which they decode and synthesize new images. However, it remains largely unexplored how multimodal information collectively forms this joint space and how they guide the semantics of the synthesized images. In this paper, we investigate the latent space of DiT models and uncover two key properties: First, DiT's latent space is inherently semantically disentangled, where different semantic attributes can be controlled by specific editing directions. Second, consistent semantic editing requires utilizing the entire joint latent space, as neither encoded image nor text alone contains enough semantic information. We show that these editing directions can be obtained directly from text prompts, enabling precise semantic control without additional training or mask annotations. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective Encode-Identify-Manipulate (EIM) framework for zero-shot fine-grained image editing. Specifically, we first encode both the given source image and the text prompt that describes the image, to obtain the joint latent embedding. Then, using our proposed Hessian Score Distillation Sampling (HSDS) method, we identify editing directions that control specific target attributes while preserving other image features. These directions are guided by text prompts and used to manipulate the latent embeddings. Moreover, we propose a new metric to quantify the disentanglement degree of the latent space of diffusion models. Extensive experiment results on our new curated benchmark dataset and analysis demonstrate DiT's disentanglement properties and effectiveness of the EIM framework.

While recent progress in video-text retrieval has been advanced by the exploration of better representation learning, in this paper, we present a novel multi-grained sparse learning framework, S3MA, to learn an aligned sparse space shared between the video and the text for video-text retrieval. The shared sparse space is initialized with a finite number of sparse concepts, each of which refers to a number of words. With the text data at hand, we learn and update the shared sparse space in a supervised manner using the proposed similarity and alignment losses. Moreover, to enable multi-grained alignment, we incorporate frame representations for better modeling the video modality and calculating fine-grained and coarse-grained similarities. Benefiting from the learned shared sparse space and multi-grained similarities, extensive experiments on several video-text retrieval benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of S3MA over existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yimuwangcs/Better_Cross_Modal_Retrieval.

Latent diffusion models for image generation have crossed a quality threshold which enabled them to achieve mass adoption. Recently, a series of works have made advancements towards replicating this success in the 3D domain, introducing techniques such as point cloud VAE, triplane representation, neural implicit surfaces and differentiable rendering based training. We take another step along this direction, combining these developments in a two-step pipeline consisting of 1) a triplane VAE which can learn latent representations of textured meshes and 2) a conditional diffusion model which generates the triplane features. For the first time this architecture allows conditional and unconditional generation of high quality textured or untextured 3D meshes across multiple diverse categories in a few seconds on a single GPU. It outperforms previous work substantially on image-conditioned and unconditional generation on mesh quality as well as texture generation. Furthermore, we demonstrate the scalability of our model to large datasets for increased quality and diversity. We will release our code and trained models.

Single-image piece-wise planar 3D reconstruction aims to simultaneously segment plane instances and recover 3D plane parameters from an image. Most recent approaches leverage convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and achieve promising results. However, these methods are limited to detecting a fixed number of planes with certain learned order. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel two-stage method based on associative embedding, inspired by its recent success in instance segmentation. In the first stage, we train a CNN to map each pixel to an embedding space where pixels from the same plane instance have similar embeddings. Then, the plane instances are obtained by grouping the embedding vectors in planar regions via an efficient mean shift clustering algorithm. In the second stage, we estimate the parameter for each plane instance by considering both pixel-level and instance-level consistencies. With the proposed method, we are able to detect an arbitrary number of planes. Extensive experiments on public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method. Furthermore, our method runs at 30 fps at the testing time, thus could facilitate many real-time applications such as visual SLAM and human-robot interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/svip-lab/PlanarReconstruction.

This paper addresses a challenging question: How can we efficiently create high-quality, wide-scope 3D scenes from a single arbitrary image? Existing methods face several constraints, such as requiring multi-view data, time-consuming per-scene optimization, low visual quality in backgrounds, and distorted reconstructions in unseen areas. We propose a novel pipeline to overcome these limitations. Specifically, we introduce a large-scale reconstruction model that uses latents from a video diffusion model to predict 3D Gaussian Splattings for the scenes in a feed-forward manner. The video diffusion model is designed to create videos precisely following specified camera trajectories, allowing it to generate compressed video latents that contain multi-view information while maintaining 3D consistency. We train the 3D reconstruction model to operate on the video latent space with a progressive training strategy, enabling the efficient generation of high-quality, wide-scope, and generic 3D scenes. Extensive evaluations across various datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing methods for single-view 3D scene generation, particularly with out-of-domain images. For the first time, we demonstrate that a 3D reconstruction model can be effectively built upon the latent space of a diffusion model to realize efficient 3D scene generation.

Jointly identifying a mixture of discrete and continuous factors of variability without supervision is a key problem in unraveling complex phenomena. Variational inference has emerged as a promising method to learn interpretable mixture representations. However, posterior approximation in high-dimensional latent spaces, particularly for discrete factors remains challenging. Here, we propose an unsupervised variational framework using multiple interacting networks called cpl-mixVAE that scales well to high-dimensional discrete settings. In this framework, the mixture representation of each network is regularized by imposing a consensus constraint on the discrete factor. We justify the use of this framework by providing both theoretical and experimental results. Finally, we use the proposed method to jointly uncover discrete and continuous factors of variability describing gene expression in a single-cell transcriptomic dataset profiling more than a hundred cortical neuron types.

A recent trend among generalizable novel view synthesis methods is to learn a rendering operator acting over single camera rays. This approach is promising because it removes the need for explicit volumetric rendering, but it effectively treats target images as collections of independent pixels. Here, we propose to learn a global rendering operator acting over all camera rays jointly. We show that the right representation to enable such rendering is a 5-dimensional plane sweep volume consisting of the projection of the input images on a set of planes facing the target camera. Based on this understanding, we introduce our Convolutional Global Latent Renderer (ConvGLR), an efficient convolutional architecture that performs the rendering operation globally in a low-resolution latent space. Experiments on various datasets under sparse and generalizable setups show that our approach consistently outperforms existing methods by significant margins.

This paper addresses unsupervised representation learning on tabular data containing multiple views generated by distinct sources of measurement. Traditional methods, which tackle this problem using the multi-view framework, are constrained by predefined assumptions that assume feature sets share the same information and representations should learn globally shared factors. However, this assumption is not always valid for real-world tabular datasets with complex dependencies between feature sets, resulting in localized information that is harder to learn. To overcome this limitation, we propose a data-driven approach that learns feature set dependencies by representing feature sets as graph nodes and their relationships as learnable edges. Furthermore, we introduce LEGATO, a novel hierarchical graph autoencoder that learns a smaller, latent graph to aggregate information from multiple views dynamically. This approach results in latent graph components that specialize in capturing localized information from different regions of the input, leading to superior downstream performance.

In this paper, we introduce DimensionX, a framework designed to generate photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from just a single image with video diffusion. Our approach begins with the insight that both the spatial structure of a 3D scene and the temporal evolution of a 4D scene can be effectively represented through sequences of video frames. While recent video diffusion models have shown remarkable success in producing vivid visuals, they face limitations in directly recovering 3D/4D scenes due to limited spatial and temporal controllability during generation. To overcome this, we propose ST-Director, which decouples spatial and temporal factors in video diffusion by learning dimension-aware LoRAs from dimension-variant data. This controllable video diffusion approach enables precise manipulation of spatial structure and temporal dynamics, allowing us to reconstruct both 3D and 4D representations from sequential frames with the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions. Additionally, to bridge the gap between generated videos and real-world scenes, we introduce a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising strategy for 4D generation. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that DimensionX achieves superior results in controllable video generation, as well as in 3D and 4D scene generation, compared with previous methods.

We introduce nested diffusion models, an efficient and powerful hierarchical generative framework that substantially enhances the generation quality of diffusion models, particularly for images of complex scenes. Our approach employs a series of diffusion models to progressively generate latent variables at different semantic levels. Each model in this series is conditioned on the output of the preceding higher-level models, culminating in image generation. Hierarchical latent variables guide the generation process along predefined semantic pathways, allowing our approach to capture intricate structural details while significantly improving image quality. To construct these latent variables, we leverage a pre-trained visual encoder, which learns strong semantic visual representations, and modulate its capacity via dimensionality reduction and noise injection. Across multiple datasets, our system demonstrates significant enhancements in image quality for both unconditional and class/text conditional generation. Moreover, our unconditional generation system substantially outperforms the baseline conditional system. These advancements incur minimal computational overhead as the more abstract levels of our hierarchy work with lower-dimensional representations.

Modern learning-based approaches to 3D-aware image synthesis achieve high photorealism and 3D-consistent viewpoint changes for the generated images. Existing approaches represent instances in a shared canonical space. However, for in-the-wild datasets a shared canonical system can be difficult to define or might not even exist. In this work, we instead model instances in view space, alleviating the need for posed images and learned camera distributions. We find that in this setting, existing GAN-based methods are prone to generating flat geometry and struggle with distribution coverage. We hence propose WildFusion, a new approach to 3D-aware image synthesis based on latent diffusion models (LDMs). We first train an autoencoder that infers a compressed latent representation, which additionally captures the images' underlying 3D structure and enables not only reconstruction but also novel view synthesis. To learn a faithful 3D representation, we leverage cues from monocular depth prediction. Then, we train a diffusion model in the 3D-aware latent space, thereby enabling synthesis of high-quality 3D-consistent image samples, outperforming recent state-of-the-art GAN-based methods. Importantly, our 3D-aware LDM is trained without any direct supervision from multiview images or 3D geometry and does not require posed images or learned pose or camera distributions. It directly learns a 3D representation without relying on canonical camera coordinates. This opens up promising research avenues for scalable 3D-aware image synthesis and 3D content creation from in-the-wild image data. See https://katjaschwarz.github.io/wildfusion for videos of our 3D results.

We propose a novel method, LoLep, which regresses Locally-Learned planes from a single RGB image to represent scenes accurately, thus generating better novel views. Without the depth information, regressing appropriate plane locations is a challenging problem. To solve this issue, we pre-partition the disparity space into bins and design a disparity sampler to regress local offsets for multiple planes in each bin. However, only using such a sampler makes the network not convergent; we further propose two optimizing strategies that combine with different disparity distributions of datasets and propose an occlusion-aware reprojection loss as a simple yet effective geometric supervision technique. We also introduce a self-attention mechanism to improve occlusion inference and present a Block-Sampling Self-Attention (BS-SA) module to address the problem of applying self-attention to large feature maps. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and generate state-of-the-art results on different datasets. Compared to MINE, our approach has an LPIPS reduction of 4.8%-9.0% and an RV reduction of 73.9%-83.5%. We also evaluate the performance on real-world images and demonstrate the benefits.

This paper presents a new exploration into a category of diffusion models built upon state space architecture. We endeavor to train diffusion models for image data, wherein the traditional U-Net backbone is supplanted by a state space backbone, functioning on raw patches or latent space. Given its notable efficacy in accommodating long-range dependencies, Diffusion State Space Models (DiS) are distinguished by treating all inputs including time, condition, and noisy image patches as tokens. Our assessment of DiS encompasses both unconditional and class-conditional image generation scenarios, revealing that DiS exhibits comparable, if not superior, performance to CNN-based or Transformer-based U-Net architectures of commensurate size. Furthermore, we analyze the scalability of DiS, gauged by the forward pass complexity quantified in Gflops. DiS models with higher Gflops, achieved through augmentation of depth/width or augmentation of input tokens, consistently demonstrate lower FID. In addition to demonstrating commendable scalability characteristics, DiS-H/2 models in latent space achieve performance levels akin to prior diffusion models on class-conditional ImageNet benchmarks at the resolution of 256times256 and 512times512, while significantly reducing the computational burden. The code and models are available at: https://github.com/feizc/DiS.

A key aspect of text-to-image personalization methods is the manner in which the target concept is represented within the generative process. This choice greatly affects the visual fidelity, downstream editability, and disk space needed to store the learned concept. In this paper, we explore a new text-conditioning space that is dependent on both the denoising process timestep (time) and the denoising U-Net layers (space) and showcase its compelling properties. A single concept in the space-time representation is composed of hundreds of vectors, one for each combination of time and space, making this space challenging to optimize directly. Instead, we propose to implicitly represent a concept in this space by optimizing a small neural mapper that receives the current time and space parameters and outputs the matching token embedding. In doing so, the entire personalized concept is represented by the parameters of the learned mapper, resulting in a compact, yet expressive, representation. Similarly to other personalization methods, the output of our neural mapper resides in the input space of the text encoder. We observe that one can significantly improve the convergence and visual fidelity of the concept by introducing a textual bypass, where our neural mapper additionally outputs a residual that is added to the output of the text encoder. Finally, we show how one can impose an importance-based ordering over our implicit representation, providing users control over the reconstruction and editability of the learned concept using a single trained model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over a range of concepts and prompts, showing our method's ability to generate high-quality and controllable compositions without fine-tuning any parameters of the generative model itself.

Hyperbolic embeddings offer excellent quality with few dimensions when embedding hierarchical data structures like synonym or type hierarchies. Given a tree, we give a combinatorial construction that embeds the tree in hyperbolic space with arbitrarily low distortion without using optimization. On WordNet, our combinatorial embedding obtains a mean-average-precision of 0.989 with only two dimensions, while Nickel et al.'s recent construction obtains 0.87 using 200 dimensions. We provide upper and lower bounds that allow us to characterize the precision-dimensionality tradeoff inherent in any hyperbolic embedding. To embed general metric spaces, we propose a hyperbolic generalization of multidimensional scaling (h-MDS). We show how to perform exact recovery of hyperbolic points from distances, provide a perturbation analysis, and give a recovery result that allows us to reduce dimensionality. The h-MDS approach offers consistently low distortion even with few dimensions across several datasets. Finally, we extract lessons from the algorithms and theory above to design a PyTorch-based implementation that can handle incomplete information and is scalable.

Many approaches in generalized zero-shot learning rely on cross-modal mapping between the image feature space and the class embedding space. As labeled images are expensive, one direction is to augment the dataset by generating either images or image features. However, the former misses fine-grained details and the latter requires learning a mapping associated with class embeddings. In this work, we take feature generation one step further and propose a model where a shared latent space of image features and class embeddings is learned by modality-specific aligned variational autoencoders. This leaves us with the required discriminative information about the image and classes in the latent features, on which we train a softmax classifier. The key to our approach is that we align the distributions learned from images and from side-information to construct latent features that contain the essential multi-modal information associated with unseen classes. We evaluate our learned latent features on several benchmark datasets, i.e. CUB, SUN, AWA1 and AWA2, and establish a new state of the art on generalized zero-shot as well as on few-shot learning. Moreover, our results on ImageNet with various zero-shot splits show that our latent features generalize well in large-scale settings.

Sparse autoencoders have recently produced dictionaries of high-dimensional vectors corresponding to the universe of concepts represented by large language models. We find that this concept universe has interesting structure at three levels: 1) The "atomic" small-scale structure contains "crystals" whose faces are parallelograms or trapezoids, generalizing well-known examples such as (man-woman-king-queen). We find that the quality of such parallelograms and associated function vectors improves greatly when projecting out global distractor directions such as word length, which is efficiently done with linear discriminant analysis. 2) The "brain" intermediate-scale structure has significant spatial modularity; for example, math and code features form a "lobe" akin to functional lobes seen in neural fMRI images. We quantify the spatial locality of these lobes with multiple metrics and find that clusters of co-occurring features, at coarse enough scale, also cluster together spatially far more than one would expect if feature geometry were random. 3) The "galaxy" scale large-scale structure of the feature point cloud is not isotropic, but instead has a power law of eigenvalues with steepest slope in middle layers. We also quantify how the clustering entropy depends on the layer.

We propose a novel approach for preserving topological structures of the input space in latent representations of autoencoders. Using persistent homology, a technique from topological data analysis, we calculate topological signatures of both the input and latent space to derive a topological loss term. Under weak theoretical assumptions, we construct this loss in a differentiable manner, such that the encoding learns to retain multi-scale connectivity information. We show that our approach is theoretically well-founded and that it exhibits favourable latent representations on a synthetic manifold as well as on real-world image data sets, while preserving low reconstruction errors.

Latent variable models (LVMs) with discrete compositional latents are an important but challenging setting due to a combinatorially large number of possible configurations of the latents. A key tradeoff in modeling the posteriors over latents is between expressivity and tractable optimization. For algorithms based on expectation-maximization (EM), the E-step is often intractable without restrictive approximations to the posterior. We propose the use of GFlowNets, algorithms for sampling from an unnormalized density by learning a stochastic policy for sequential construction of samples, for this intractable E-step. By training GFlowNets to sample from the posterior over latents, we take advantage of their strengths as amortized variational inference algorithms for complex distributions over discrete structures. Our approach, GFlowNet-EM, enables the training of expressive LVMs with discrete compositional latents, as shown by experiments on non-context-free grammar induction and on images using discrete variational autoencoders (VAEs) without conditional independence enforced in the encoder.

Driven by advances in recording technology, large-scale high-dimensional datasets have emerged across many scientific disciplines. Especially in biology, clustering is often used to gain insights into the structure of such datasets, for instance to understand the organization of different cell types. However, clustering is known to scale poorly to high dimensions, even though the exact impact of dimensionality is unclear as current benchmark datasets are mostly two-dimensional. Here we propose MNIST-Nd, a set of synthetic datasets that share a key property of real-world datasets, namely that individual samples are noisy and clusters do not perfectly separate. MNIST-Nd is obtained by training mixture variational autoencoders with 2 to 64 latent dimensions on MNIST, resulting in six datasets with comparable structure but varying dimensionality. It thus offers the chance to disentangle the impact of dimensionality on clustering. Preliminary common clustering algorithm benchmarks on MNIST-Nd suggest that Leiden is the most robust for growing dimensions.

Adapting pre-trained foundation models for various downstream tasks has been prevalent in artificial intelligence. Due to the vast number of tasks and high costs, adjusting all parameters becomes unfeasible. To mitigate this, several fine-tuning techniques have been developed to update the pre-trained model weights in a more resource-efficient manner, such as through low-rank adjustments. Yet, almost all of these methods focus on linear weights, neglecting the intricacies of parameter spaces in higher dimensions like 4D. Alternatively, some methods can be adapted for high-dimensional parameter space by compressing changes in the original space into two dimensions and then employing low-rank matrix decomposition. However, these approaches destructs the structural integrity of the involved high-dimensional spaces. To tackle the diversity of dimensional spaces across different foundation models and provide a more precise representation of the changes within these spaces, this paper introduces a generalized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework, FLoRA, designed for various dimensional parameter space. Specifically, utilizing Tucker decomposition, FLoRA asserts that changes in each dimensional parameter space are based on a low-rank core space which maintains the consistent topological structure with the original space. It then models the changes through this core space alongside corresponding weights to reconstruct alterations in the original space. FLoRA effectively preserves the structural integrity of the change of original N-dimensional parameter space, meanwhile decomposes it via low-rank tensor decomposition. Extensive experiments on computer vision, natural language processing and multi-modal tasks validate FLoRA's effectiveness. Codes are available at https://github.com/SJTU-DeepVisionLab/FLoRA.

We present network embedding algorithms that capture information about a node from the local distribution over node attributes around it, as observed over random walks following an approach similar to Skip-gram. Observations from neighborhoods of different sizes are either pooled (AE) or encoded distinctly in a multi-scale approach (MUSAE). Capturing attribute-neighborhood relationships over multiple scales is useful for a diverse range of applications, including latent feature identification across disconnected networks with similar attributes. We prove theoretically that matrices of node-feature pointwise mutual information are implicitly factorized by the embeddings. Experiments show that our algorithms are robust, computationally efficient and outperform comparable models on social networks and web graphs.

This paper introduces Least Volume-a simple yet effective regularization inspired by geometric intuition-that can reduce the necessary number of latent dimensions needed by an autoencoder without requiring any prior knowledge of the intrinsic dimensionality of the dataset. We show that the Lipschitz continuity of the decoder is the key to making it work, provide a proof that PCA is just a linear special case of it, and reveal that it has a similar PCA-like importance ordering effect when applied to nonlinear models. We demonstrate the intuition behind the regularization on some pedagogical toy problems, and its effectiveness on several benchmark problems, including MNIST, CIFAR-10 and CelebA.

Current work on human-machine alignment aims at understanding machine-learned latent spaces and their correspondence to human representations. G{\"a}rdenfors' conceptual spaces is a prominent framework for understanding human representations. Convexity of object regions in conceptual spaces is argued to promote generalizability, few-shot learning, and interpersonal alignment. Based on these insights, we investigate the notion of convexity of concept regions in machine-learned latent spaces. We develop a set of tools for measuring convexity in sampled data and evaluate emergent convexity in layered representations of state-of-the-art deep networks. We show that convexity is robust to basic re-parametrization and, hence, meaningful as a quality of machine-learned latent spaces. We find that approximate convexity is pervasive in neural representations in multiple application domains, including models of images, audio, human activity, text, and medical images. Generally, we observe that fine-tuning increases the convexity of label regions. We find evidence that pretraining convexity of class label regions predicts subsequent fine-tuning performance.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), especially the recent style-based generators (StyleGANs), have versatile semantics in the structured latent space. Latent semantics discovery methods emerge to move around the latent code such that only one factor varies during the traversal. Recently, an unsupervised method proposed a promising direction to directly use the eigenvectors of the projection matrix that maps latent codes to features as the interpretable directions. However, one overlooked fact is that the projection matrix is non-orthogonal and the number of eigenvectors is too large. The non-orthogonality would entangle semantic attributes in the top few eigenvectors, and the large dimensionality might result in meaningless variations among the directions even if the matrix is orthogonal. To avoid these issues, we propose Householder Projector, a flexible and general low-rank orthogonal matrix representation based on Householder transformations, to parameterize the projection matrix. The orthogonality guarantees that the eigenvectors correspond to disentangled interpretable semantics, while the low-rank property encourages that each identified direction has meaningful variations. We integrate our projector into pre-trained StyleGAN2/StyleGAN3 and evaluate the models on several benchmarks. Within only 1% of the original training steps for fine-tuning, our projector helps StyleGANs to discover more disentangled and precise semantic attributes without sacrificing image fidelity.

We introduce Motion2VecSets, a 4D diffusion model for dynamic surface reconstruction from point cloud sequences. While existing state-of-the-art methods have demonstrated success in reconstructing non-rigid objects using neural field representations, conventional feed-forward networks encounter challenges with ambiguous observations from noisy, partial, or sparse point clouds. To address these challenges, we introduce a diffusion model that explicitly learns the shape and motion distribution of non-rigid objects through an iterative denoising process of compressed latent representations. The diffusion-based priors enable more plausible and probabilistic reconstructions when handling ambiguous inputs. We parameterize 4D dynamics with latent sets instead of using global latent codes. This novel 4D representation allows us to learn local shape and deformation patterns, leading to more accurate non-linear motion capture and significantly improving generalizability to unseen motions and identities. For more temporally-coherent object tracking, we synchronously denoise deformation latent sets and exchange information across multiple frames. To avoid computational overhead, we designed an interleaved space and time attention block to alternately aggregate deformation latents along spatial and temporal domains. Extensive comparisons against state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority of our Motion2VecSets in 4D reconstruction from various imperfect observations. More detailed information can be found at https://vveicao.github.io/projects/Motion2VecSets/.

Since the pioneering work on the lottery ticket hypothesis for graph neural networks (GNNs) was proposed in Chen et al. (2021), the study on finding graph lottery tickets (GLT) has become one of the pivotal focus in the GNN community, inspiring researchers to discover sparser GLT while achieving comparable performance to original dense networks. In parallel, the graph structure has gained substantial attention as a crucial factor in GNN training dynamics, also elucidated by several recent studies. Despite this, contemporary studies on GLT, in general, have not fully exploited inherent pathways in the graph structure and identified tickets in an iterative manner, which is time-consuming and inefficient. To address these limitations, we introduce TEDDY, a one-shot edge sparsification framework that leverages structural information by incorporating edge-degree information. Following edge sparsification, we encourage the parameter sparsity during training via simple projected gradient descent on the ell_0 ball. Given the target sparsity levels for both the graph structure and the model parameters, our TEDDY facilitates efficient and rapid realization of GLT within a single training. Remarkably, our experimental results demonstrate that TEDDY significantly surpasses conventional iterative approaches in generalization, even when conducting one-shot sparsification that solely utilizes graph structures, without taking feature information into account.

Recently, diffusion models have made remarkable progress in text-to-image (T2I) generation, synthesizing images with high fidelity and diverse contents. Despite this advancement, latent space smoothness within diffusion models remains largely unexplored. Smooth latent spaces ensure that a perturbation on an input latent corresponds to a steady change in the output image. This property proves beneficial in downstream tasks, including image interpolation, inversion, and editing. In this work, we expose the non-smoothness of diffusion latent spaces by observing noticeable visual fluctuations resulting from minor latent variations. To tackle this issue, we propose Smooth Diffusion, a new category of diffusion models that can be simultaneously high-performing and smooth. Specifically, we introduce Step-wise Variation Regularization to enforce the proportion between the variations of an arbitrary input latent and that of the output image is a constant at any diffusion training step. In addition, we devise an interpolation standard deviation (ISTD) metric to effectively assess the latent space smoothness of a diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that Smooth Diffusion stands out as a more desirable solution not only in T2I generation but also across various downstream tasks. Smooth Diffusion is implemented as a plug-and-play Smooth-LoRA to work with various community models. Code is available at https://github.com/SHI-Labs/Smooth-Diffusion.

We propose a method for generating paraphrases of English questions that retain the original intent but use a different surface form. Our model combines a careful choice of training objective with a principled information bottleneck, to induce a latent encoding space that disentangles meaning and form. We train an encoder-decoder model to reconstruct a question from a paraphrase with the same meaning and an exemplar with the same surface form, leading to separated encoding spaces. We use a Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoder to represent the surface form as a set of discrete latent variables, allowing us to use a classifier to select a different surface form at test time. Crucially, our method does not require access to an external source of target exemplars. Extensive experiments and a human evaluation show that we are able to generate paraphrases with a better tradeoff between semantic preservation and syntactic novelty compared to previous methods.

Integrating a notion of symmetry into point cloud neural networks is a provably effective way to improve their generalization capability. Of particular interest are E(3) equivariant point cloud networks where Euclidean transformations applied to the inputs are preserved in the outputs. Recent efforts aim to extend networks that are E(3) equivariant, to accommodate inputs made of multiple parts, each of which exhibits local E(3) symmetry. In practical settings, however, the partitioning into individually transforming regions is unknown a priori. Errors in the partition prediction would unavoidably map to errors in respecting the true input symmetry. Past works have proposed different ways to predict the partition, which may exhibit uncontrolled errors in their ability to maintain equivariance to the actual partition. To this end, we introduce APEN: a general framework for constructing approximate piecewise-E(3) equivariant point networks. Our primary insight is that functions that are equivariant with respect to a finer partition will also maintain equivariance in relation to the true partition. Leveraging this observation, we propose a design where the equivariance approximation error at each layers can be bounded solely in terms of (i) uncertainty quantification of the partition prediction, and (ii) bounds on the probability of failing to suggest a proper subpartition of the ground truth one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of APEN using two data types exemplifying part-based symmetry: (i) real-world scans of room scenes containing multiple furniture-type objects; and, (ii) human motions, characterized by articulated parts exhibiting rigid movement. Our empirical results demonstrate the advantage of integrating piecewise E(3) symmetry into network design, showing a distinct improvement in generalization compared to prior works for both classification and segmentation tasks.

Recent works learn 3D representation explicitly under text-3D guidance. However, limited text-3D data restricts the vocabulary scale and text control of generations. Generators may easily fall into a stereotype concept for certain text prompts, thus losing open-vocabulary generation ability. To tackle this issue, we introduce a conditional 3D generative model, namely TextField3D. Specifically, rather than using the text prompts as input directly, we suggest to inject dynamic noise into the latent space of given text prompts, i.e., Noisy Text Fields (NTFs). In this way, limited 3D data can be mapped to the appropriate range of textual latent space that is expanded by NTFs. To this end, an NTFGen module is proposed to model general text latent code in noisy fields. Meanwhile, an NTFBind module is proposed to align view-invariant image latent code to noisy fields, further supporting image-conditional 3D generation. To guide the conditional generation in both geometry and texture, multi-modal discrimination is constructed with a text-3D discriminator and a text-2.5D discriminator. Compared to previous methods, TextField3D includes three merits: 1) large vocabulary, 2) text consistency, and 3) low latency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves a potential open-vocabulary 3D generation capability.

This paper proposes a new type of generative model that is able to quickly learn a latent representation without an encoder. This is achieved using empirical Bayes to calculate the expectation of the posterior, which is implemented by initialising a latent vector with zeros, then using the gradient of the log-likelihood of the data with respect to this zero vector as new latent points. The approach has similar characteristics to autoencoders, but with a simpler architecture, and is demonstrated in a variational autoencoder equivalent that permits sampling. This also allows implicit representation networks to learn a space of implicit functions without requiring a hypernetwork, retaining their representation advantages across datasets. The experiments show that the proposed method converges faster, with significantly lower reconstruction error than autoencoders, while requiring half the parameters.

Representation learning has become an invaluable approach for learning from symbolic data such as text and graphs. However, while complex symbolic datasets often exhibit a latent hierarchical structure, state-of-the-art methods typically learn embeddings in Euclidean vector spaces, which do not account for this property. For this purpose, we introduce a new approach for learning hierarchical representations of symbolic data by embedding them into hyperbolic space -- or more precisely into an n-dimensional Poincar\'e ball. Due to the underlying hyperbolic geometry, this allows us to learn parsimonious representations of symbolic data by simultaneously capturing hierarchy and similarity. We introduce an efficient algorithm to learn the embeddings based on Riemannian optimization and show experimentally that Poincar\'e embeddings outperform Euclidean embeddings significantly on data with latent hierarchies, both in terms of representation capacity and in terms of generalization ability.

Dimensionality reduction methods are unsupervised approaches which learn low-dimensional spaces where some properties of the initial space, typically the notion of "neighborhood", are preserved. Such methods usually require propagation on large k-NN graphs or complicated optimization solvers. On the other hand, self-supervised learning approaches, typically used to learn representations from scratch, rely on simple and more scalable frameworks for learning. In this paper, we propose TLDR, a dimensionality reduction method for generic input spaces that is porting the recent self-supervised learning framework of Zbontar et al. (2021) to the specific task of dimensionality reduction, over arbitrary representations. We propose to use nearest neighbors to build pairs from a training set and a redundancy reduction loss to learn an encoder that produces representations invariant across such pairs. TLDR is a method that is simple, easy to train, and of broad applicability; it consists of an offline nearest neighbor computation step that can be highly approximated, and a straightforward learning process. Aiming for scalability, we focus on improving linear dimensionality reduction, and show consistent gains on image and document retrieval tasks, e.g. gaining +4% mAP over PCA on ROxford for GeM- AP, improving the performance of DINO on ImageNet or retaining it with a 10x compression.

Recent works have shown that, when trained at scale, uni-modal 2D vision and text encoders converge to learned features that share remarkable structural properties, despite arising from different representations. However, the role of 3D encoders with respect to other modalities remains unexplored. Furthermore, existing 3D foundation models that leverage large datasets are typically trained with explicit alignment objectives with respect to frozen encoders from other representations. In this work, we investigate the possibility of a posteriori alignment of representations obtained from uni-modal 3D encoders compared to text-based feature spaces. We show that naive post-training feature alignment of uni-modal text and 3D encoders results in limited performance. We then focus on extracting subspaces of the corresponding feature spaces and discover that by projecting learned representations onto well-chosen lower-dimensional subspaces the quality of alignment becomes significantly higher, leading to improved accuracy on matching and retrieval tasks. Our analysis further sheds light on the nature of these shared subspaces, which roughly separate between semantic and geometric data representations. Overall, ours is the first work that helps to establish a baseline for post-training alignment of 3D uni-modal and text feature spaces, and helps to highlight both the shared and unique properties of 3D data compared to other representations.

Large-scale 3D generative models require substantial computational resources yet often fall short in capturing fine details and complex geometries at high resolutions. We attribute this limitation to the inefficiency of current representations, which lack the compactness required to model the generative models effectively. To address this, we introduce a novel approach called Wavelet Latent Diffusion, or WaLa, that encodes 3D shapes into wavelet-based, compact latent encodings. Specifically, we compress a 256^3 signed distance field into a 12^3 times 4 latent grid, achieving an impressive 2427x compression ratio with minimal loss of detail. This high level of compression allows our method to efficiently train large-scale generative networks without increasing the inference time. Our models, both conditional and unconditional, contain approximately one billion parameters and successfully generate high-quality 3D shapes at 256^3 resolution. Moreover, WaLa offers rapid inference, producing shapes within two to four seconds depending on the condition, despite the model's scale. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance across multiple datasets, with significant improvements in generation quality, diversity, and computational efficiency. We open-source our code and, to the best of our knowledge, release the largest pretrained 3D generative models across different modalities.

Recent works have demonstrated reasonable success of representation learning in hypercomplex space. Specifically, "fully-connected layers with Quaternions" (4D hypercomplex numbers), which replace real-valued matrix multiplications in fully-connected layers with Hamilton products of Quaternions, both enjoy parameter savings with only 1/4 learnable parameters and achieve comparable performance in various applications. However, one key caveat is that hypercomplex space only exists at very few predefined dimensions (4D, 8D, and 16D). This restricts the flexibility of models that leverage hypercomplex multiplications. To this end, we propose parameterizing hypercomplex multiplications, allowing models to learn multiplication rules from data regardless of whether such rules are predefined. As a result, our method not only subsumes the Hamilton product, but also learns to operate on any arbitrary nD hypercomplex space, providing more architectural flexibility using arbitrarily 1/n learnable parameters compared with the fully-connected layer counterpart. Experiments of applications to the LSTM and Transformer models on natural language inference, machine translation, text style transfer, and subject verb agreement demonstrate architectural flexibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Latent diffusion models with Transformer architectures excel at generating high-fidelity images. However, recent studies reveal an optimization dilemma in this two-stage design: while increasing the per-token feature dimension in visual tokenizers improves reconstruction quality, it requires substantially larger diffusion models and more training iterations to achieve comparable generation performance. Consequently, existing systems often settle for sub-optimal solutions, either producing visual artifacts due to information loss within tokenizers or failing to converge fully due to expensive computation costs. We argue that this dilemma stems from the inherent difficulty in learning unconstrained high-dimensional latent spaces. To address this, we propose aligning the latent space with pre-trained vision foundation models when training the visual tokenizers. Our proposed VA-VAE (Vision foundation model Aligned Variational AutoEncoder) significantly expands the reconstruction-generation frontier of latent diffusion models, enabling faster convergence of Diffusion Transformers (DiT) in high-dimensional latent spaces. To exploit the full potential of VA-VAE, we build an enhanced DiT baseline with improved training strategies and architecture designs, termed LightningDiT. The integrated system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ImageNet 256x256 generation with an FID score of 1.35 while demonstrating remarkable training efficiency by reaching an FID score of 2.11 in just 64 epochs--representing an over 21 times convergence speedup compared to the original DiT. Models and codes are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/LightningDiT.

We present a method for estimating neural scenes representations of objects given only a single image. The core of our method is the estimation of a geometric scaffold for the object and its use as a guide for the reconstruction of the underlying radiance field. Our formulation is based on a generative process that first maps a latent code to a voxelized shape, and then renders it to an image, with the object appearance being controlled by a second latent code. During inference, we optimize both the latent codes and the networks to fit a test image of a new object. The explicit disentanglement of shape and appearance allows our model to be fine-tuned given a single image. We can then render new views in a geometrically consistent manner and they represent faithfully the input object. Additionally, our method is able to generalize to images outside of the training domain (more realistic renderings and even real photographs). Finally, the inferred geometric scaffold is itself an accurate estimate of the object's 3D shape. We demonstrate in several experiments the effectiveness of our approach in both synthetic and real images.

A creative idea is often born from transforming, combining, and modifying ideas from existing visual examples capturing various concepts. However, one cannot simply copy the concept as a whole, and inspiration is achieved by examining certain aspects of the concept. Hence, it is often necessary to separate a concept into different aspects to provide new perspectives. In this paper, we propose a method to decompose a visual concept, represented as a set of images, into different visual aspects encoded in a hierarchical tree structure. We utilize large vision-language models and their rich latent space for concept decomposition and generation. Each node in the tree represents a sub-concept using a learned vector embedding injected into the latent space of a pretrained text-to-image model. We use a set of regularizations to guide the optimization of the embedding vectors encoded in the nodes to follow the hierarchical structure of the tree. Our method allows to explore and discover new concepts derived from the original one. The tree provides the possibility of endless visual sampling at each node, allowing the user to explore the hidden sub-concepts of the object of interest. The learned aspects in each node can be combined within and across trees to create new visual ideas, and can be used in natural language sentences to apply such aspects to new designs.

Seamlessly blending features from multiple images is extremely challenging because of complex relationships in lighting, geometry, and partial occlusion which cause coupling between different parts of the image. Even though recent work on GANs enables synthesis of realistic hair or faces, it remains difficult to combine them into a single, coherent, and plausible image rather than a disjointed set of image patches. We present a novel solution to image blending, particularly for the problem of hairstyle transfer, based on GAN-inversion. We propose a novel latent space for image blending which is better at preserving detail and encoding spatial information, and propose a new GAN-embedding algorithm which is able to slightly modify images to conform to a common segmentation mask. Our novel representation enables the transfer of the visual properties from multiple reference images including specific details such as moles and wrinkles, and because we do image blending in a latent-space we are able to synthesize images that are coherent. Our approach avoids blending artifacts present in other approaches and finds a globally consistent image. Our results demonstrate a significant improvement over the current state of the art in a user study, with users preferring our blending solution over 95 percent of the time.

Recent developments in differentiable and neural rendering have made impressive breakthroughs in a variety of 2D and 3D tasks, e.g. novel view synthesis, 3D reconstruction. Typically, differentiable rendering relies on a dense viewpoint coverage of the scene, such that the geometry can be disambiguated from appearance observations alone. Several challenges arise when only a few input views are available, often referred to as sparse or few-shot neural rendering. As this is an underconstrained problem, most existing approaches introduce the use of regularisation, together with a diversity of learnt and hand-crafted priors. A recurring problem in sparse rendering literature is the lack of an homogeneous, up-to-date, dataset and evaluation protocol. While high-resolution datasets are standard in dense reconstruction literature, sparse rendering methods often evaluate with low-resolution images. Additionally, data splits are inconsistent across different manuscripts, and testing ground-truth images are often publicly available, which may lead to over-fitting. In this work, we propose the Sparse Rendering (SpaRe) dataset and benchmark. We introduce a new dataset that follows the setup of the DTU MVS dataset. The dataset is composed of 97 new scenes based on synthetic, high-quality assets. Each scene has up to 64 camera views and 7 lighting configurations, rendered at 1600x1200 resolution. We release a training split of 82 scenes to foster generalizable approaches, and provide an online evaluation platform for the validation and test sets, whose ground-truth images remain hidden. We propose two different sparse configurations (3 and 9 input images respectively). This provides a powerful and convenient tool for reproducible evaluation, and enable researchers easy access to a public leaderboard with the state-of-the-art performance scores. Available at: https://sparebenchmark.github.io/

Recent studies have introduced a new class of generative models for synthesizing implicit neural representations (INRs) that capture arbitrary continuous signals in various domains. These models opened the door for domain-agnostic generative models, but they often fail to achieve high-quality generation. We observed that the existing methods generate the weights of neural networks to parameterize INRs and evaluate the network with fixed positional embeddings (PEs). Arguably, this architecture limits the expressive power of generative models and results in low-quality INR generation. To address this limitation, we propose Domain-agnostic Latent Diffusion Model for INRs (DDMI) that generates adaptive positional embeddings instead of neural networks' weights. Specifically, we develop a Discrete-to-continuous space Variational AutoEncoder (D2C-VAE), which seamlessly connects discrete data and the continuous signal functions in the shared latent space. Additionally, we introduce a novel conditioning mechanism for evaluating INRs with the hierarchically decomposed PEs to further enhance expressive power. Extensive experiments across four modalities, e.g., 2D images, 3D shapes, Neural Radiance Fields, and videos, with seven benchmark datasets, demonstrate the versatility of DDMI and its superior performance compared to the existing INR generative models.

We present a diffusion-based model for 3D-aware generative novel view synthesis from as few as a single input image. Our model samples from the distribution of possible renderings consistent with the input and, even in the presence of ambiguity, is capable of rendering diverse and plausible novel views. To achieve this, our method makes use of existing 2D diffusion backbones but, crucially, incorporates geometry priors in the form of a 3D feature volume. This latent feature field captures the distribution over possible scene representations and improves our method's ability to generate view-consistent novel renderings. In addition to generating novel views, our method has the ability to autoregressively synthesize 3D-consistent sequences. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results on synthetic renderings and room-scale scenes; we also show compelling results for challenging, real-world objects.

Text-guided image generation has progressed rapidly in recent years, inspiring major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. Recently, it has been shown that using score distillation, one can successfully text-guide a NeRF model to generate a 3D object. We adapt the score distillation to the publicly available, and computationally efficient, Latent Diffusion Models, which apply the entire diffusion process in a compact latent space of a pretrained autoencoder. As NeRFs operate in image space, a naive solution for guiding them with latent score distillation would require encoding to the latent space at each guidance step. Instead, we propose to bring the NeRF to the latent space, resulting in a Latent-NeRF. Analyzing our Latent-NeRF, we show that while Text-to-3D models can generate impressive results, they are inherently unconstrained and may lack the ability to guide or enforce a specific 3D structure. To assist and direct the 3D generation, we propose to guide our Latent-NeRF using a Sketch-Shape: an abstract geometry that defines the coarse structure of the desired object. Then, we present means to integrate such a constraint directly into a Latent-NeRF. This unique combination of text and shape guidance allows for increased control over the generation process. We also show that latent score distillation can be successfully applied directly on 3D meshes. This allows for generating high-quality textures on a given geometry. Our experiments validate the power of our different forms of guidance and the efficiency of using latent rendering. Implementation is available at https://github.com/eladrich/latent-nerf

We introduce MeshGPT, a new approach for generating triangle meshes that reflects the compactness typical of artist-created meshes, in contrast to dense triangle meshes extracted by iso-surfacing methods from neural fields. Inspired by recent advances in powerful large language models, we adopt a sequence-based approach to autoregressively generate triangle meshes as sequences of triangles. We first learn a vocabulary of latent quantized embeddings, using graph convolutions, which inform these embeddings of the local mesh geometry and topology. These embeddings are sequenced and decoded into triangles by a decoder, ensuring that they can effectively reconstruct the mesh. A transformer is then trained on this learned vocabulary to predict the index of the next embedding given previous embeddings. Once trained, our model can be autoregressively sampled to generate new triangle meshes, directly generating compact meshes with sharp edges, more closely imitating the efficient triangulation patterns of human-crafted meshes. MeshGPT demonstrates a notable improvement over state of the art mesh generation methods, with a 9% increase in shape coverage and a 30-point enhancement in FID scores across various categories.

Despite increasing progress in development of methods for generating visual counterfactual explanations, especially with the recent rise of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models, previous works consider them as an entirely local technique. In this work, we take the first step at globalizing them. Specifically, we discover that the latent space of Diffusion Autoencoders encodes the inference process of a given classifier in the form of global directions. We propose a novel proxy-based approach that discovers two types of these directions with the use of only single image in an entirely black-box manner. Precisely, g-directions allow for flipping the decision of a given classifier on an entire dataset of images, while h-directions further increase the diversity of explanations. We refer to them in general as Global Counterfactual Directions (GCDs). Moreover, we show that GCDs can be naturally combined with Latent Integrated Gradients resulting in a new black-box attribution method, while simultaneously enhancing the understanding of counterfactual explanations. We validate our approach on existing benchmarks and show that it generalizes to real-world use-cases.

Representing visual signals by coordinate-based deep fully-connected networks has been shown advantageous in fitting complex details and solving inverse problems than discrete grid-based representation. However, acquiring such a continuous Implicit Neural Representation (INR) requires tedious per-scene training on tons of signal measurements, which limits its practicality. In this paper, we present a generic INR framework that achieves both data and training efficiency by learning a Neural Implicit Dictionary (NID) from a data collection and representing INR as a functional combination of basis sampled from the dictionary. Our NID assembles a group of coordinate-based subnetworks which are tuned to span the desired function space. After training, one can instantly and robustly acquire an unseen scene representation by solving the coding coefficients. To parallelly optimize a large group of networks, we borrow the idea from Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) to design and train our network with a sparse gating mechanism. Our experiments show that, NID can improve reconstruction of 2D images or 3D scenes by 2 orders of magnitude faster with up to 98% less input data. We further demonstrate various applications of NID in image inpainting and occlusion removal, which are considered to be challenging with vanilla INR. Our codes are available in https://github.com/VITA-Group/Neural-Implicit-Dict.

Despite the widespread application of latent factor analysis, existing methods suffer from the following weaknesses: requiring the number of factors to be known, lack of theoretical guarantees for learning the model structure, and nonidentifiability of the parameters due to rotation invariance properties of the likelihood. We address these concerns by proposing a fast correlation thresholding (CT) algorithm that simultaneously learns the number of latent factors and a rotationally identifiable model structure. Our novel approach translates this structure learning problem into the search for so-called independent maximal cliques in a thresholded correlation graph that can be easily constructed from the observed data. Our clique analysis technique scales well up to thousands of variables, while competing methods are not applicable in a reasonable amount of running time. We establish a finite-sample error bound and high-dimensional consistency for the structure learning of our method. Through a series of simulation studies and a real data example, we show that the CT algorithm is an accurate method for learning the structure of factor analysis models and is robust to violations of its assumptions.

Despite the latest remarkable advances in generative modeling, efficient generation of high-quality 3D assets from textual prompts remains a difficult task. A key challenge lies in data scarcity: the most extensive 3D datasets encompass merely millions of assets, while their 2D counterparts contain billions of text-image pairs. To address this, we propose a novel approach which harnesses the power of large, pretrained 2D diffusion models. More specifically, our approach, HexaGen3D, fine-tunes a pretrained text-to-image model to jointly predict 6 orthographic projections and the corresponding latent triplane. We then decode these latents to generate a textured mesh. HexaGen3D does not require per-sample optimization, and can infer high-quality and diverse objects from textual prompts in 7 seconds, offering significantly better quality-to-latency trade-offs when comparing to existing approaches. Furthermore, HexaGen3D demonstrates strong generalization to new objects or compositions.

Can one inject new concepts into an already trained generative model, while respecting its existing structure and knowledge? We propose a new task - domain expansion - to address this. Given a pretrained generator and novel (but related) domains, we expand the generator to jointly model all domains, old and new, harmoniously. First, we note the generator contains a meaningful, pretrained latent space. Is it possible to minimally perturb this hard-earned representation, while maximally representing the new domains? Interestingly, we find that the latent space offers unused, "dormant" directions, which do not affect the output. This provides an opportunity: By "repurposing" these directions, we can represent new domains without perturbing the original representation. In fact, we find that pretrained generators have the capacity to add several - even hundreds - of new domains! Using our expansion method, one "expanded" model can supersede numerous domain-specific models, without expanding the model size. Additionally, a single expanded generator natively supports smooth transitions between domains, as well as composition of domains. Code and project page available at https://yotamnitzan.github.io/domain-expansion/.

Despite the remarkable progress in deep generative models, synthesizing high-resolution and temporally coherent videos still remains a challenge due to their high-dimensionality and complex temporal dynamics along with large spatial variations. Recent works on diffusion models have shown their potential to solve this challenge, yet they suffer from severe computation- and memory-inefficiency that limit the scalability. To handle this issue, we propose a novel generative model for videos, coined projected latent video diffusion models (PVDM), a probabilistic diffusion model which learns a video distribution in a low-dimensional latent space and thus can be efficiently trained with high-resolution videos under limited resources. Specifically, PVDM is composed of two components: (a) an autoencoder that projects a given video as 2D-shaped latent vectors that factorize the complex cubic structure of video pixels and (b) a diffusion model architecture specialized for our new factorized latent space and the training/sampling procedure to synthesize videos of arbitrary length with a single model. Experiments on popular video generation datasets demonstrate the superiority of PVDM compared with previous video synthesis methods; e.g., PVDM obtains the FVD score of 639.7 on the UCF-101 long video (128 frames) generation benchmark, which improves 1773.4 of the prior state-of-the-art.

Hallucinations in LLMs pose a significant concern to their safe deployment in real-world applications. Recent approaches have leveraged the latent space of LLMs for hallucination detection, but their embeddings, optimized for linguistic coherence rather than factual accuracy, often fail to clearly separate truthful and hallucinated content. To this end, we propose the Truthfulness Separator Vector (TSV), a lightweight and flexible steering vector that reshapes the LLM's representation space during inference to enhance the separation between truthful and hallucinated outputs, without altering model parameters. Our two-stage framework first trains TSV on a small set of labeled exemplars to form compact and well-separated clusters. It then augments the exemplar set with unlabeled LLM generations, employing an optimal transport-based algorithm for pseudo-labeling combined with a confidence-based filtering process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSV achieves state-of-the-art performance with minimal labeled data, exhibiting strong generalization across datasets and providing a practical solution for real-world LLM applications.

The premise of identifiable and causal representation learning is to improve the current representation learning paradigm in terms of generalizability or robustness. Despite recent progress in questions of identifiability, more theoretical results demonstrating concrete advantages of these methods for downstream tasks are needed. In this paper, we consider the task of intervention extrapolation: predicting how interventions affect an outcome, even when those interventions are not observed at training time, and show that identifiable representations can provide an effective solution to this task even if the interventions affect the outcome non-linearly. Our setup includes an outcome Y, observed features X, which are generated as a non-linear transformation of latent features Z, and exogenous action variables A, which influence Z. The objective of intervention extrapolation is to predict how interventions on A that lie outside the training support of A affect Y. Here, extrapolation becomes possible if the effect of A on Z is linear and the residual when regressing Z on A has full support. As Z is latent, we combine the task of intervention extrapolation with identifiable representation learning, which we call Rep4Ex: we aim to map the observed features X into a subspace that allows for non-linear extrapolation in A. We show that the hidden representation is identifiable up to an affine transformation in Z-space, which is sufficient for intervention extrapolation. The identifiability is characterized by a novel constraint describing the linearity assumption of A on Z. Based on this insight, we propose a method that enforces the linear invariance constraint and can be combined with any type of autoencoder. We validate our theoretical findings through synthetic experiments and show that our approach succeeds in predicting the effects of unseen interventions.

In this paper, we present Surf-D, a novel method for generating high-quality 3D shapes as Surfaces with arbitrary topologies using Diffusion models. Specifically, we adopt Unsigned Distance Field (UDF) as the surface representation, as it excels in handling arbitrary topologies, enabling the generation of complex shapes. While the prior methods explored shape generation with different representations, they suffer from limited topologies and geometry details. Moreover, it's non-trivial to directly extend prior diffusion models to UDF because they lack spatial continuity due to the discrete volume structure. However, UDF requires accurate gradients for mesh extraction and learning. To tackle the issues, we first leverage a point-based auto-encoder to learn a compact latent space, which supports gradient querying for any input point through differentiation to effectively capture intricate geometry at a high resolution. Since the learning difficulty for various shapes can differ, a curriculum learning strategy is employed to efficiently embed various surfaces, enhancing the whole embedding process. With pretrained shape latent space, we employ a latent diffusion model to acquire the distribution of various shapes. Our approach demonstrates superior performance in shape generation across multiple modalities and conducts extensive experiments in unconditional generation, category conditional generation, 3D reconstruction from images, and text-to-shape tasks.

We introduce an Extended Textual Conditioning space in text-to-image models, referred to as P+. This space consists of multiple textual conditions, derived from per-layer prompts, each corresponding to a layer of the denoising U-net of the diffusion model. We show that the extended space provides greater disentangling and control over image synthesis. We further introduce Extended Textual Inversion (XTI), where the images are inverted into P+, and represented by per-layer tokens. We show that XTI is more expressive and precise, and converges faster than the original Textual Inversion (TI) space. The extended inversion method does not involve any noticeable trade-off between reconstruction and editability and induces more regular inversions. We conduct a series of extensive experiments to analyze and understand the properties of the new space, and to showcase the effectiveness of our method for personalizing text-to-image models. Furthermore, we utilize the unique properties of this space to achieve previously unattainable results in object-style mixing using text-to-image models. Project page: https://prompt-plus.github.io

We infer and generate three-dimensional (3D) scene information from a single input image and without supervision. This problem is under-explored, with most prior work relying on supervision from, e.g., 3D ground-truth, multiple images of a scene, image silhouettes or key-points. We propose Pix2Shape, an approach to solve this problem with four components: (i) an encoder that infers the latent 3D representation from an image, (ii) a decoder that generates an explicit 2.5D surfel-based reconstruction of a scene from the latent code (iii) a differentiable renderer that synthesizes a 2D image from the surfel representation, and (iv) a critic network trained to discriminate between images generated by the decoder-renderer and those from a training distribution. Pix2Shape can generate complex 3D scenes that scale with the view-dependent on-screen resolution, unlike representations that capture world-space resolution, i.e., voxels or meshes. We show that Pix2Shape learns a consistent scene representation in its encoded latent space and that the decoder can then be applied to this latent representation in order to synthesize the scene from a novel viewpoint. We evaluate Pix2Shape with experiments on the ShapeNet dataset as well as on a novel benchmark we developed, called 3D-IQTT, to evaluate models based on their ability to enable 3d spatial reasoning. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation demonstrate Pix2Shape's ability to solve scene reconstruction, generation, and understanding tasks.

Deep sparse networks are widely investigated as a neural network architecture for prediction tasks with high-dimensional sparse features, with which feature interaction selection is a critical component. While previous methods primarily focus on how to search feature interaction in a coarse-grained space, less attention has been given to a finer granularity. In this work, we introduce a hybrid-grained feature interaction selection approach that targets both feature field and feature value for deep sparse networks. To explore such expansive space, we propose a decomposed space which is calculated on the fly. We then develop a selection algorithm called OptFeature, which efficiently selects the feature interaction from both the feature field and the feature value simultaneously. Results from experiments on three large real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that OptFeature performs well in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Additional studies support the feasibility of our method.

We present a two-stage text-to-3D generation system, namely 3DTopia, which generates high-quality general 3D assets within 5 minutes using hybrid diffusion priors. The first stage samples from a 3D diffusion prior directly learned from 3D data. Specifically, it is powered by a text-conditioned tri-plane latent diffusion model, which quickly generates coarse 3D samples for fast prototyping. The second stage utilizes 2D diffusion priors to further refine the texture of coarse 3D models from the first stage. The refinement consists of both latent and pixel space optimization for high-quality texture generation. To facilitate the training of the proposed system, we clean and caption the largest open-source 3D dataset, Objaverse, by combining the power of vision language models and large language models. Experiment results are reported qualitatively and quantitatively to show the performance of the proposed system. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/3DTopia/3DTopia

We present PERSE, a method for building an animatable personalized generative avatar from a reference portrait. Our avatar model enables facial attribute editing in a continuous and disentangled latent space to control each facial attribute, while preserving the individual's identity. To achieve this, our method begins by synthesizing large-scale synthetic 2D video datasets, where each video contains consistent changes in the facial expression and viewpoint, combined with a variation in a specific facial attribute from the original input. We propose a novel pipeline to produce high-quality, photorealistic 2D videos with facial attribute editing. Leveraging this synthetic attribute dataset, we present a personalized avatar creation method based on the 3D Gaussian Splatting, learning a continuous and disentangled latent space for intuitive facial attribute manipulation. To enforce smooth transitions in this latent space, we introduce a latent space regularization technique by using interpolated 2D faces as supervision. Compared to previous approaches, we demonstrate that PERSE generates high-quality avatars with interpolated attributes while preserving identity of reference person.

Spatio-temporal compression of videos, utilizing networks such as Variational Autoencoders (VAE), plays a crucial role in OpenAI's SORA and numerous other video generative models. For instance, many LLM-like video models learn the distribution of discrete tokens derived from 3D VAEs within the VQVAE framework, while most diffusion-based video models capture the distribution of continuous latent extracted by 2D VAEs without quantization. The temporal compression is simply realized by uniform frame sampling which results in unsmooth motion between consecutive frames. Currently, there lacks of a commonly used continuous video (3D) VAE for latent diffusion-based video models in the research community. Moreover, since current diffusion-based approaches are often implemented using pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models, directly training a video VAE without considering the compatibility with existing T2I models will result in a latent space gap between them, which will take huge computational resources for training to bridge the gap even with the T2I models as initialization. To address this issue, we propose a method for training a video VAE of latent video models, namely CV-VAE, whose latent space is compatible with that of a given image VAE, e.g., image VAE of Stable Diffusion (SD). The compatibility is achieved by the proposed novel latent space regularization, which involves formulating a regularization loss using the image VAE. Benefiting from the latent space compatibility, video models can be trained seamlessly from pre-trained T2I or video models in a truly spatio-temporally compressed latent space, rather than simply sampling video frames at equal intervals. With our CV-VAE, existing video models can generate four times more frames with minimal finetuning. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed video VAE.

We consider the problem of simultaneously clustering and learning a linear representation of data lying close to a union of low-dimensional manifolds, a fundamental task in machine learning and computer vision. When the manifolds are assumed to be linear subspaces, this reduces to the classical problem of subspace clustering, which has been studied extensively over the past two decades. Unfortunately, many real-world datasets such as natural images can not be well approximated by linear subspaces. On the other hand, numerous works have attempted to learn an appropriate transformation of the data, such that data is mapped from a union of general non-linear manifolds to a union of linear subspaces (with points from the same manifold being mapped to the same subspace). However, many existing works have limitations such as assuming knowledge of the membership of samples to clusters, requiring high sampling density, or being shown theoretically to learn trivial representations. In this paper, we propose to optimize the Maximal Coding Rate Reduction metric with respect to both the data representation and a novel doubly stochastic cluster membership, inspired by state-of-the-art subspace clustering results. We give a parameterization of such a representation and membership, allowing efficient mini-batching and one-shot initialization. Experiments on CIFAR-10, -20, -100, and TinyImageNet-200 datasets show that the proposed method is much more accurate and scalable than state-of-the-art deep clustering methods, and further learns a latent linear representation of the data.

Despite recent successes in hair acquisition that fits a high-dimensional hair model to a specific input subject, generative hair models, which establish general embedding spaces for encoding, editing, and sampling diverse hairstyles, are way less explored. In this paper, we present GroomGen, the first generative model designed for hair geometry composed of highly-detailed dense strands. Our approach is motivated by two key ideas. First, we construct hair latent spaces covering both individual strands and hairstyles. The latent spaces are compact, expressive, and well-constrained for high-quality and diverse sampling. Second, we adopt a hierarchical hair representation that parameterizes a complete hair model to three levels: single strands, sparse guide hairs, and complete dense hairs. This representation is critical to the compactness of latent spaces, the robustness of training, and the efficiency of inference. Based on this hierarchical latent representation, our proposed pipeline consists of a strand-VAE and a hairstyle-VAE that encode an individual strand and a set of guide hairs to their respective latent spaces, and a hybrid densification step that populates sparse guide hairs to a dense hair model. GroomGen not only enables novel hairstyle sampling and plausible hairstyle interpolation, but also supports interactive editing of complex hairstyles, or can serve as strong data-driven prior for hairstyle reconstruction from images. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach with qualitative examples of diverse sampled hairstyles and quantitative evaluation of generation quality regarding every single component and the entire pipeline.

Creating diverse and high-quality 3D assets with an automatic generative model is highly desirable. Despite extensive efforts on 3D generation, most existing works focus on the generation of a single category or a few categories. In this paper, we introduce a diffusion-based feed-forward framework for synthesizing massive categories of real-world 3D objects with a single generative model. Notably, there are three major challenges for this large-vocabulary 3D generation: a) the need for expressive yet efficient 3D representation; b) large diversity in geometry and texture across categories; c) complexity in the appearances of real-world objects. To this end, we propose a novel triplane-based 3D-aware Diffusion model with TransFormer, DiffTF, for handling challenges via three aspects. 1) Considering efficiency and robustness, we adopt a revised triplane representation and improve the fitting speed and accuracy. 2) To handle the drastic variations in geometry and texture, we regard the features of all 3D objects as a combination of generalized 3D knowledge and specialized 3D features. To extract generalized 3D knowledge from diverse categories, we propose a novel 3D-aware transformer with shared cross-plane attention. It learns the cross-plane relations across different planes and aggregates the generalized 3D knowledge with specialized 3D features. 3) In addition, we devise the 3D-aware encoder/decoder to enhance the generalized 3D knowledge in the encoded triplanes for handling categories with complex appearances. Extensive experiments on ShapeNet and OmniObject3D (over 200 diverse real-world categories) convincingly demonstrate that a single DiffTF model achieves state-of-the-art large-vocabulary 3D object generation performance with large diversity, rich semantics, and high quality.

We propose CARFF: Conditional Auto-encoded Radiance Field for 3D Scene Forecasting, a method for predicting future 3D scenes given past observations, such as 2D ego-centric images. Our method maps an image to a distribution over plausible 3D latent scene configurations using a probabilistic encoder, and predicts the evolution of the hypothesized scenes through time. Our latent scene representation conditions a global Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) to represent a 3D scene model, which enables explainable predictions and straightforward downstream applications. This approach extends beyond previous neural rendering work by considering complex scenarios of uncertainty in environmental states and dynamics. We employ a two-stage training of Pose-Conditional-VAE and NeRF to learn 3D representations. Additionally, we auto-regressively predict latent scene representations as a partially observable Markov decision process, utilizing a mixture density network. We demonstrate the utility of our method in realistic scenarios using the CARLA driving simulator, where CARFF can be used to enable efficient trajectory and contingency planning in complex multi-agent autonomous driving scenarios involving visual occlusions.

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.

Shape generation is the practice of producing 3D shapes as various representations for 3D content creation. Previous studies on 3D shape generation have focused on shape quality and structure, without or less considering the importance of semantic information. Consequently, such generative models often fail to preserve the semantic consistency of shape structure or enable manipulation of the semantic attributes of shapes during generation. In this paper, we proposed a novel semantic generative model named 3D Semantic Subspace Traverser that utilizes semantic attributes for category-specific 3D shape generation and editing. Our method utilizes implicit functions as the 3D shape representation and combines a novel latent-space GAN with a linear subspace model to discover semantic dimensions in the local latent space of 3D shapes. Each dimension of the subspace corresponds to a particular semantic attribute, and we can edit the attributes of generated shapes by traversing the coefficients of those dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can produce plausible shapes with complex structures and enable the editing of semantic attributes. The code and trained models are available at https://github.com/TrepangCat/3D_Semantic_Subspace_Traverser

While current multi-frame restoration methods combine information from multiple input images using 2D alignment techniques, recent advances in novel view synthesis are paving the way for a new paradigm relying on volumetric scene representations. In this work, we introduce the first 3D-based multi-frame denoising method that significantly outperforms its 2D-based counterparts with lower computational requirements. Our method extends the multiplane image (MPI) framework for novel view synthesis by introducing a learnable encoder-renderer pair manipulating multiplane representations in feature space. The encoder fuses information across views and operates in a depth-wise manner while the renderer fuses information across depths and operates in a view-wise manner. The two modules are trained end-to-end and learn to separate depths in an unsupervised way, giving rise to Multiplane Feature (MPF) representations. Experiments on the Spaces and Real Forward-Facing datasets as well as on raw burst data validate our approach for view synthesis, multi-frame denoising, and view synthesis under noisy conditions.

Causal representation learning has showed a variety of settings in which we can disentangle latent variables with identifiability guarantees (up to some reasonable equivalence class). Common to all of these approaches is the assumption that (1) the latent variables are represented as d-dimensional vectors, and (2) that the observations are the output of some injective generative function of these latent variables. While these assumptions appear benign, we show that when the observations are of multiple objects, the generative function is no longer injective and disentanglement fails in practice. We can address this failure by combining recent developments in object-centric learning and causal representation learning. By modifying the Slot Attention architecture arXiv:2006.15055, we develop an object-centric architecture that leverages weak supervision from sparse perturbations to disentangle each object's properties. This approach is more data-efficient in the sense that it requires significantly fewer perturbations than a comparable approach that encodes to a Euclidean space and we show that this approach successfully disentangles the properties of a set of objects in a series of simple image-based disentanglement experiments.

Recent advancements in diffusion models for 2D and 3D content creation have sparked a surge of interest in generating 4D content. However, the scarcity of 3D scene datasets constrains current methodologies to primarily object-centric generation. To overcome this limitation, we present Comp4D, a novel framework for Compositional 4D Generation. Unlike conventional methods that generate a singular 4D representation of the entire scene, Comp4D innovatively constructs each 4D object within the scene separately. Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs), the framework begins by decomposing an input text prompt into distinct entities and maps out their trajectories. It then constructs the compositional 4D scene by accurately positioning these objects along their designated paths. To refine the scene, our method employs a compositional score distillation technique guided by the pre-defined trajectories, utilizing pre-trained diffusion models across text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-to-3D domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate our outstanding 4D content creation capability compared to prior arts, showcasing superior visual quality, motion fidelity, and enhanced object interactions.

While neural fields have made significant strides in view synthesis and scene reconstruction, editing them poses a formidable challenge due to their implicit encoding of geometry and texture information from multi-view inputs. In this paper, we introduce LatentEditor, an innovative framework designed to empower users with the ability to perform precise and locally controlled editing of neural fields using text prompts. Leveraging denoising diffusion models, we successfully embed real-world scenes into the latent space, resulting in a faster and more adaptable NeRF backbone for editing compared to traditional methods. To enhance editing precision, we introduce a delta score to calculate the 2D mask in the latent space that serves as a guide for local modifications while preserving irrelevant regions. Our novel pixel-level scoring approach harnesses the power of InstructPix2Pix (IP2P) to discern the disparity between IP2P conditional and unconditional noise predictions in the latent space. The edited latents conditioned on the 2D masks are then iteratively updated in the training set to achieve 3D local editing. Our approach achieves faster editing speeds and superior output quality compared to existing 3D editing models, bridging the gap between textual instructions and high-quality 3D scene editing in latent space. We show the superiority of our approach on four benchmark 3D datasets, LLFF, IN2N, NeRFStudio and NeRF-Art.

This paper introduces a new interpretation of the Variational Autoencoder framework by taking a fully geometric point of view. We argue that vanilla VAE models unveil naturally a Riemannian structure in their latent space and that taking into consideration those geometrical aspects can lead to better interpolations and an improved generation procedure. This new proposed sampling method consists in sampling from the uniform distribution deriving intrinsically from the learned Riemannian latent space and we show that using this scheme can make a vanilla VAE competitive and even better than more advanced versions on several benchmark datasets. Since generative models are known to be sensitive to the number of training samples we also stress the method's robustness in the low data regime.

Recently, State Space Models (SSMs), with Mamba as a prime example, have shown great promise for long-range dependency modeling with linear complexity. Then, Vision Mamba and the subsequent architectures are presented successively, and they perform well on visual tasks. The crucial step of applying Mamba to visual tasks is to construct 2D visual features in sequential manners. To effectively organize and construct visual features within the 2D image space through 1D selective scan, we propose a novel Multi-Head Scan (MHS) module. The embeddings extracted from the preceding layer are projected into multiple lower-dimensional subspaces. Subsequently, within each subspace, the selective scan is performed along distinct scan routes. The resulting sub-embeddings, obtained from the multi-head scan process, are then integrated and ultimately projected back into the high-dimensional space. Moreover, we incorporate a Scan Route Attention (SRA) mechanism to enhance the module's capability to discern complex structures. To validate the efficacy of our module, we exclusively substitute the 2D-Selective-Scan (SS2D) block in VM-UNet with our proposed module, and we train our models from scratch without using any pre-trained weights. The results indicate a significant improvement in performance while reducing the parameters of the original VM-UNet. The code for this study is publicly available at https://github.com/PixDeep/MHS-VM.

3D GAN inversion aims to achieve high reconstruction fidelity and reasonable 3D geometry simultaneously from a single image input. However, existing 3D GAN inversion methods rely on time-consuming optimization for each individual case. In this work, we introduce a novel encoder-based inversion framework based on EG3D, one of the most widely-used 3D GAN models. We leverage the inherent properties of EG3D's latent space to design a discriminator and a background depth regularization. This enables us to train a geometry-aware encoder capable of converting the input image into corresponding latent code. Additionally, we explore the feature space of EG3D and develop an adaptive refinement stage that improves the representation ability of features in EG3D to enhance the recovery of fine-grained textural details. Finally, we propose an occlusion-aware fusion operation to prevent distortion in unobserved regions. Our method achieves impressive results comparable to optimization-based methods while operating up to 500 times faster. Our framework is well-suited for applications such as semantic editing.

3D plane recovery from a single image can usually be divided into several subtasks of plane detection, segmentation, parameter estimation and possibly depth estimation. Previous works tend to solve this task by either extending the RCNN-based segmentation network or the dense pixel embedding-based clustering framework. However, none of them tried to integrate above related subtasks into a unified framework but treat them separately and sequentially, which we suspect is potentially a main source of performance limitation for existing approaches. Motivated by this finding and the success of query-based learning in enriching reasoning among semantic entities, in this paper, we propose PlaneRecTR, a Transformer-based architecture, which for the first time unifies all subtasks related to single-view plane recovery with a single compact model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed unified learning achieves mutual benefits across subtasks, obtaining a new state-of-the-art performance on public ScanNet and NYUv2-Plane datasets. Codes are available at https://github.com/SJingjia/PlaneRecTR.

The variational autoencoder (VAE; Kingma, Welling (2014)) is a recently proposed generative model pairing a top-down generative network with a bottom-up recognition network which approximates posterior inference. It typically makes strong assumptions about posterior inference, for instance that the posterior distribution is approximately factorial, and that its parameters can be approximated with nonlinear regression from the observations. As we show empirically, the VAE objective can lead to overly simplified representations which fail to use the network's entire modeling capacity. We present the importance weighted autoencoder (IWAE), a generative model with the same architecture as the VAE, but which uses a strictly tighter log-likelihood lower bound derived from importance weighting. In the IWAE, the recognition network uses multiple samples to approximate the posterior, giving it increased flexibility to model complex posteriors which do not fit the VAE modeling assumptions. We show empirically that IWAEs learn richer latent space representations than VAEs, leading to improved test log-likelihood on density estimation benchmarks.

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a powerful unsupervised method for extracting sparse representations from language models, yet scalable training remains a significant challenge. We introduce a suite of 256 SAEs, trained on each layer and sublayer of the Llama-3.1-8B-Base model, with 32K and 128K features. Modifications to a state-of-the-art SAE variant, Top-K SAEs, are evaluated across multiple dimensions. In particular, we assess the generalizability of SAEs trained on base models to longer contexts and fine-tuned models. Additionally, we analyze the geometry of learned SAE latents, confirming that feature splitting enables the discovery of new features. The Llama Scope SAE checkpoints are publicly available at~https://huggingface.co/fnlp/Llama-Scope, alongside our scalable training, interpretation, and visualization tools at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/Language-Model-SAEs. These contributions aim to advance the open-source Sparse Autoencoder ecosystem and support mechanistic interpretability research by reducing the need for redundant SAE training.

Monocular depth estimation aims to infer a dense depth map from a single image, which is a fundamental and prevalent task in computer vision. Many previous works have shown impressive depth estimation results through carefully designed network structures, but they usually ignore the planar information and therefore perform poorly in low-texture areas of indoor scenes. In this paper, we propose Plane2Depth, which adaptively utilizes plane information to improve depth prediction within a hierarchical framework. Specifically, in the proposed plane guided depth generator (PGDG), we design a set of plane queries as prototypes to softly model planes in the scene and predict per-pixel plane coefficients. Then the predicted plane coefficients can be converted into metric depth values with the pinhole camera model. In the proposed adaptive plane query aggregation (APGA) module, we introduce a novel feature interaction approach to improve the aggregation of multi-scale plane features in a top-down manner. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve outstanding performance, especially in low-texture or repetitive areas. Furthermore, under the same backbone network, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the NYU-Depth-v2 dataset, achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods KITTI dataset and can be generalized to unseen scenes effectively.

This paper presents the Large Vision Diffusion Transformer (LaVin-DiT), a scalable and unified foundation model designed to tackle over 20 computer vision tasks in a generative framework. Unlike existing large vision models directly adapted from natural language processing architectures, which rely on less efficient autoregressive techniques and disrupt spatial relationships essential for vision data, LaVin-DiT introduces key innovations to optimize generative performance for vision tasks. First, to address the high dimensionality of visual data, we incorporate a spatial-temporal variational autoencoder that encodes data into a continuous latent space. Second, for generative modeling, we develop a joint diffusion transformer that progressively produces vision outputs. Third, for unified multi-task training, in-context learning is implemented. Input-target pairs serve as task context, which guides the diffusion transformer to align outputs with specific tasks within the latent space. During inference, a task-specific context set and test data as queries allow LaVin-DiT to generalize across tasks without fine-tuning. Trained on extensive vision datasets, the model is scaled from 0.1B to 3.4B parameters, demonstrating substantial scalability and state-of-the-art performance across diverse vision tasks. This work introduces a novel pathway for large vision foundation models, underscoring the promising potential of diffusion transformers. The code and models will be open-sourced.

In an effort to create a more efficient AI system, we introduce a new multi-modality learning framework that leverages a modality-agnostic concept space possessing abstract knowledge and a set of modality-specific projection models tailored to process distinct modality inputs and map them onto the concept space. Decoupled from specific modalities and their associated projection models, the concept space focuses on learning abstract knowledge that is universally applicable across modalities. Subsequently, the knowledge embedded into the concept space streamlines the learning processes of modality-specific projection models. We evaluate our framework on two popular tasks: Image-Text Matching and Visual Question Answering. Our framework achieves performance on par with benchmark models while demonstrating more efficient learning curves.

We present Fillerbuster, a method that completes unknown regions of a 3D scene by utilizing a novel large-scale multi-view latent diffusion transformer. Casual captures are often sparse and miss surrounding content behind objects or above the scene. Existing methods are not suitable for handling this challenge as they focus on making the known pixels look good with sparse-view priors, or on creating the missing sides of objects from just one or two photos. In reality, we often have hundreds of input frames and want to complete areas that are missing and unobserved from the input frames. Additionally, the images often do not have known camera parameters. Our solution is to train a generative model that can consume a large context of input frames while generating unknown target views and recovering image poses when desired. We show results where we complete partial captures on two existing datasets. We also present an uncalibrated scene completion task where our unified model predicts both poses and creates new content. Our model is the first to predict many images and poses together for scene completion.

Recently, how to achieve precise image editing has attracted increasing attention, especially given the remarkable success of text-to-image generation models. To unify various spatial-aware image editing abilities into one framework, we adopt the concept of layers from the design domain to manipulate objects flexibly with various operations. The key insight is to transform the spatial-aware image editing task into a combination of two sub-tasks: multi-layered latent decomposition and multi-layered latent fusion. First, we segment the latent representations of the source images into multiple layers, which include several object layers and one incomplete background layer that necessitates reliable inpainting. To avoid extra tuning, we further explore the inner inpainting ability within the self-attention mechanism. We introduce a key-masking self-attention scheme that can propagate the surrounding context information into the masked region while mitigating its impact on the regions outside the mask. Second, we propose an instruction-guided latent fusion that pastes the multi-layered latent representations onto a canvas latent. We also introduce an artifact suppression scheme in the latent space to enhance the inpainting quality. Due to the inherent modular advantages of such multi-layered representations, we can achieve accurate image editing, and we demonstrate that our approach consistently surpasses the latest spatial editing methods, including Self-Guidance and DiffEditor. Last, we show that our approach is a unified framework that supports various accurate image editing tasks on more than six different editing tasks.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.

Diffusion probabilistic models have been shown to generate state-of-the-art results on several competitive image synthesis benchmarks but lack a low-dimensional, interpretable latent space, and are slow at generation. On the other hand, standard Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) typically have access to a low-dimensional latent space but exhibit poor sample quality. We present DiffuseVAE, a novel generative framework that integrates VAE within a diffusion model framework, and leverage this to design novel conditional parameterizations for diffusion models. We show that the resulting model equips diffusion models with a low-dimensional VAE inferred latent code which can be used for downstream tasks like controllable synthesis. The proposed method also improves upon the speed vs quality tradeoff exhibited in standard unconditional DDPM/DDIM models (for instance, FID of 16.47 vs 34.36 using a standard DDIM on the CelebA-HQ-128 benchmark using T=10 reverse process steps) without having explicitly trained for such an objective. Furthermore, the proposed model exhibits synthesis quality comparable to state-of-the-art models on standard image synthesis benchmarks like CIFAR-10 and CelebA-64 while outperforming most existing VAE-based methods. Lastly, we show that the proposed method exhibits inherent generalization to different types of noise in the conditioning signal. For reproducibility, our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/kpandey008/DiffuseVAE.

Building cross-modal applications is challenging due to limited paired multi-modal data. Recent works have shown that leveraging a pre-trained multi-modal contrastive representation space enables cross-modal tasks to be learned from uni-modal data. This is based on the assumption that contrastive optimization makes embeddings from different modalities interchangeable. However, this assumption is under-explored due to the poorly understood geometry of the multi-modal contrastive space, where a modality gap exists. In our study, we provide a theoretical explanation of this space's geometry and introduce a three-step method, C^3 (Connect, Collapse, Corrupt), to bridge the modality gap, enhancing the interchangeability of embeddings. Our C^3 method significantly improves cross-modal learning from uni-modal data, achieving state-of-the-art results on zero-shot image / audio / video captioning and text-to-image generation.

Reliable application of machine learning is of primary importance to the practical deployment of deep learning methods. A fundamental challenge is that models are often unreliable due to overconfidence. In this paper, we estimate a model's reliability by measuring the agreement between its latent space, and the latent space of a foundation model. However, it is challenging to measure the agreement between two different latent spaces due to their incoherence, \eg, arbitrary rotations and different dimensionality. To overcome this incoherence issue, we design a neighborhood agreement measure between latent spaces and find that this agreement is surprisingly well-correlated with the reliability of a model's predictions. Further, we show that fusing neighborhood agreement into a model's predictive confidence in a post-hoc way significantly improves its reliability. Theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on failure detection across various datasets verify the effectiveness of our method on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings.

We introduce 3DShape2VecSet, a novel shape representation for neural fields designed for generative diffusion models. Our shape representation can encode 3D shapes given as surface models or point clouds, and represents them as neural fields. The concept of neural fields has previously been combined with a global latent vector, a regular grid of latent vectors, or an irregular grid of latent vectors. Our new representation encodes neural fields on top of a set of vectors. We draw from multiple concepts, such as the radial basis function representation and the cross attention and self-attention function, to design a learnable representation that is especially suitable for processing with transformers. Our results show improved performance in 3D shape encoding and 3D shape generative modeling tasks. We demonstrate a wide variety of generative applications: unconditioned generation, category-conditioned generation, text-conditioned generation, point-cloud completion, and image-conditioned generation.

Aided by text-to-image and text-to-video diffusion models, existing 4D content creation pipelines utilize score distillation sampling to optimize the entire dynamic 3D scene. However, as these pipelines generate 4D content from text or image inputs, they incur significant time and effort in prompt engineering through trial and error. This work introduces 4DGen, a novel, holistic framework for grounded 4D content creation that decomposes the 4D generation task into multiple stages. We identify static 3D assets and monocular video sequences as key components in constructing the 4D content. Our pipeline facilitates conditional 4D generation, enabling users to specify geometry (3D assets) and motion (monocular videos), thus offering superior control over content creation. Furthermore, we construct our 4D representation using dynamic 3D Gaussians, which permits efficient, high-resolution supervision through rendering during training, thereby facilitating high-quality 4D generation. Additionally, we employ spatial-temporal pseudo labels on anchor frames, along with seamless consistency priors implemented through 3D-aware score distillation sampling and smoothness regularizations. Compared to existing baselines, our approach yields competitive results in faithfully reconstructing input signals and realistically inferring renderings from novel viewpoints and timesteps. Most importantly, our method supports grounded generation, offering users enhanced control, a feature difficult to achieve with previous methods. Project page: https://vita-group.github.io/4DGen/

The ability of the Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) framework to learn generative models mapping from simple latent distributions to arbitrarily complex data distributions has been demonstrated empirically, with compelling results showing that the latent space of such generators captures semantic variation in the data distribution. Intuitively, models trained to predict these semantic latent representations given data may serve as useful feature representations for auxiliary problems where semantics are relevant. However, in their existing form, GANs have no means of learning the inverse mapping -- projecting data back into the latent space. We propose Bidirectional Generative Adversarial Networks (BiGANs) as a means of learning this inverse mapping, and demonstrate that the resulting learned feature representation is useful for auxiliary supervised discrimination tasks, competitive with contemporary approaches to unsupervised and self-supervised feature learning.

Recently, unsupervised representation learning (URL) has improved the sample efficiency of Reinforcement Learning (RL) by pretraining a model from a large unlabeled dataset. The underlying principle of these methods is to learn temporally predictive representations by predicting future states in the latent space. However, an important challenge of this approach is the representational collapse, where the subspace of the latent representations collapses into a low-dimensional manifold. To address this issue, we propose a novel URL framework that causally predicts future states while increasing the dimension of the latent manifold by decorrelating the features in the latent space. Through extensive empirical studies, we demonstrate that our framework effectively learns predictive representations without collapse, which significantly improves the sample efficiency of state-of-the-art URL methods on the Atari 100k benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/dojeon-ai/SimTPR.

3D meshes are widely used in computer vision and graphics for their efficiency in animation and minimal memory use, playing a crucial role in movies, games, AR, and VR. However, creating temporally consistent and realistic textures for mesh sequences remains labor-intensive for professional artists. On the other hand, while video diffusion models excel at text-driven video generation, they often lack 3D geometry awareness and struggle with achieving multi-view consistent texturing for 3D meshes. In this work, we present Tex4D, a zero-shot approach that integrates inherent 3D geometry knowledge from mesh sequences with the expressiveness of video diffusion models to produce multi-view and temporally consistent 4D textures. Given an untextured mesh sequence and a text prompt as inputs, our method enhances multi-view consistency by synchronizing the diffusion process across different views through latent aggregation in the UV space. To ensure temporal consistency, we leverage prior knowledge from a conditional video generation model for texture synthesis. However, straightforwardly combining the video diffusion model and the UV texture aggregation leads to blurry results. We analyze the underlying causes and propose a simple yet effective modification to the DDIM sampling process to address this issue. Additionally, we introduce a reference latent texture to strengthen the correlation between frames during the denoising process. To the best of our knowledge, Tex4D is the first method specifically designed for 4D scene texturing. Extensive experiments demonstrate its superiority in producing multi-view and multi-frame consistent videos based on untextured mesh sequences.

Despite the significant recent progress in deep generative models, the underlying structure of their latent spaces is still poorly understood, thereby making the task of performing semantically meaningful latent traversals an open research challenge. Most prior work has aimed to solve this challenge by modeling latent structures linearly, and finding corresponding linear directions which result in `disentangled' generations. In this work, we instead propose to model latent structures with a learned dynamic potential landscape, thereby performing latent traversals as the flow of samples down the landscape's gradient. Inspired by physics, optimal transport, and neuroscience, these potential landscapes are learned as physically realistic partial differential equations, thereby allowing them to flexibly vary over both space and time. To achieve disentanglement, multiple potentials are learned simultaneously, and are constrained by a classifier to be distinct and semantically self-consistent. Experimentally, we demonstrate that our method achieves both more qualitatively and quantitatively disentangled trajectories than state-of-the-art baselines. Further, we demonstrate that our method can be integrated as a regularization term during training, thereby acting as an inductive bias towards the learning of structured representations, ultimately improving model likelihood on similarly structured data.

Point clouds provide a flexible geometric representation suitable for countless applications in computer graphics; they also comprise the raw output of most 3D data acquisition devices. While hand-designed features on point clouds have long been proposed in graphics and vision, however, the recent overwhelming success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for image analysis suggests the value of adapting insight from CNN to the point cloud world. Point clouds inherently lack topological information so designing a model to recover topology can enrich the representation power of point clouds. To this end, we propose a new neural network module dubbed EdgeConv suitable for CNN-based high-level tasks on point clouds including classification and segmentation. EdgeConv acts on graphs dynamically computed in each layer of the network. It is differentiable and can be plugged into existing architectures. Compared to existing modules operating in extrinsic space or treating each point independently, EdgeConv has several appealing properties: It incorporates local neighborhood information; it can be stacked applied to learn global shape properties; and in multi-layer systems affinity in feature space captures semantic characteristics over potentially long distances in the original embedding. We show the performance of our model on standard benchmarks including ModelNet40, ShapeNetPart, and S3DIS.

Despite the success of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in image synthesis, applying trained GAN models to real image processing remains challenging. Previous methods typically invert a target image back to the latent space either by back-propagation or by learning an additional encoder. However, the reconstructions from both of the methods are far from ideal. In this work, we propose a novel approach, called mGANprior, to incorporate the well-trained GANs as effective prior to a variety of image processing tasks. In particular, we employ multiple latent codes to generate multiple feature maps at some intermediate layer of the generator, then compose them with adaptive channel importance to recover the input image. Such an over-parameterization of the latent space significantly improves the image reconstruction quality, outperforming existing competitors. The resulting high-fidelity image reconstruction enables the trained GAN models as prior to many real-world applications, such as image colorization, super-resolution, image inpainting, and semantic manipulation. We further analyze the properties of the layer-wise representation learned by GAN models and shed light on what knowledge each layer is capable of representing.

We explore and analyze the latent style space of StyleGAN2, a state-of-the-art architecture for image generation, using models pretrained on several different datasets. We first show that StyleSpace, the space of channel-wise style parameters, is significantly more disentangled than the other intermediate latent spaces explored by previous works. Next, we describe a method for discovering a large collection of style channels, each of which is shown to control a distinct visual attribute in a highly localized and disentangled manner. Third, we propose a simple method for identifying style channels that control a specific attribute, using a pretrained classifier or a small number of example images. Manipulation of visual attributes via these StyleSpace controls is shown to be better disentangled than via those proposed in previous works. To show this, we make use of a newly proposed Attribute Dependency metric. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of StyleSpace controls to the manipulation of real images. Our findings pave the way to semantically meaningful and well-disentangled image manipulations via simple and intuitive interfaces.

Latent space exploration is a technique that discovers interpretable latent directions and manipulates latent codes to edit various attributes in images generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). However, in previous work, spatial control is limited to simple transformations (e.g., translation and rotation), and it is laborious to identify appropriate latent directions and adjust their parameters. In this paper, we tackle the problem of editing the StyleGAN image layout by annotating the image directly. To do so, we propose an interactive framework for manipulating latent codes in accordance with the user inputs. In our framework, the user annotates a StyleGAN image with locations they want to move or not and specifies a movement direction by mouse dragging. From these user inputs and initial latent codes, our latent transformer based on a transformer encoder-decoder architecture estimates the output latent codes, which are fed to the StyleGAN generator to obtain a result image. To train our latent transformer, we utilize synthetic data and pseudo-user inputs generated by off-the-shelf StyleGAN and optical flow models, without manual supervision. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over existing methods.

Building animatable 3D models is challenging due to the need for 3D scans, laborious registration, and manual rigging, which are difficult to scale to arbitrary categories. Recently, differentiable rendering provides a pathway to obtain high-quality 3D models from monocular videos, but these are limited to rigid categories or single instances. We present RAC that builds category 3D models from monocular videos while disentangling variations over instances and motion over time. Three key ideas are introduced to solve this problem: (1) specializing a skeleton to instances via optimization, (2) a method for latent space regularization that encourages shared structure across a category while maintaining instance details, and (3) using 3D background models to disentangle objects from the background. We show that 3D models of humans, cats, and dogs can be learned from 50-100 internet videos.

Inspired by the remarkable success of Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) for image synthesis, we study LDM for text-to-video generation, which is a formidable challenge due to the computational and memory constraints during both model training and inference. A single LDM is usually only capable of generating a very limited number of video frames. Some existing works focus on separate prediction models for generating more video frames, which suffer from additional training cost and frame-level jittering, however. In this paper, we propose a framework called "Reuse and Diffuse" dubbed VidRD to produce more frames following the frames already generated by an LDM. Conditioned on an initial video clip with a small number of frames, additional frames are iteratively generated by reusing the original latent features and following the previous diffusion process. Besides, for the autoencoder used for translation between pixel space and latent space, we inject temporal layers into its decoder and fine-tune these layers for higher temporal consistency. We also propose a set of strategies for composing video-text data that involve diverse content from multiple existing datasets including video datasets for action recognition and image-text datasets. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves good results in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our project page is available https://anonymous0x233.github.io/ReuseAndDiffuse/{here}.

3D shape generation aims to produce innovative 3D content adhering to specific conditions and constraints. Existing methods often decompose 3D shapes into a sequence of localized components, treating each element in isolation without considering spatial consistency. As a result, these approaches exhibit limited versatility in 3D data representation and shape generation, hindering their ability to generate highly diverse 3D shapes that comply with the specified constraints. In this paper, we introduce a novel spatial-aware 3D shape generation framework that leverages 2D plane representations for enhanced 3D shape modeling. To ensure spatial coherence and reduce memory usage, we incorporate a hybrid shape representation technique that directly learns a continuous signed distance field representation of the 3D shape using orthogonal 2D planes. Additionally, we meticulously enforce spatial correspondences across distinct planes using a transformer-based autoencoder structure, promoting the preservation of spatial relationships in the generated 3D shapes. This yields an algorithm that consistently outperforms state-of-the-art 3D shape generation methods on various tasks, including unconditional shape generation, multi-modal shape completion, single-view reconstruction, and text-to-shape synthesis.

Neural embedding models have become a fundamental component of modern information retrieval (IR) pipelines. These models produce a single embedding x in R^d per data-point, allowing for fast retrieval via highly optimized maximum inner product search (MIPS) algorithms. Recently, beginning with the landmark ColBERT paper, multi-vector models, which produce a set of embedding per data point, have achieved markedly superior performance for IR tasks. Unfortunately, using these models for IR is computationally expensive due to the increased complexity of multi-vector retrieval and scoring. In this paper, we introduce MUVERA (MUlti-VEctor Retrieval Algorithm), a retrieval mechanism which reduces multi-vector similarity search to single-vector similarity search. This enables the usage of off-the-shelf MIPS solvers for multi-vector retrieval. MUVERA asymmetrically generates Fixed Dimensional Encodings (FDEs) of queries and documents, which are vectors whose inner product approximates multi-vector similarity. We prove that FDEs give high-quality epsilon-approximations, thus providing the first single-vector proxy for multi-vector similarity with theoretical guarantees. Empirically, we find that FDEs achieve the same recall as prior state-of-the-art heuristics while retrieving 2-5times fewer candidates. Compared to prior state of the art implementations, MUVERA achieves consistently good end-to-end recall and latency across a diverse set of the BEIR retrieval datasets, achieving an average of 10% improved recall with 90% lower latency.

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) have gained significant popularity among researchers as a powerful tool for understanding unknown distributions based on limited samples. This popularity stems partly from their impressive performance and partly from their ability to provide meaningful feature representations in the latent space. Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAEs), a variant of VAEs, aim to not only improve model efficiency but also interpretability. However, there has been limited focus on analyzing their statistical guarantees. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the data distributions to which WAEs are applied - such as natural images - are often presumed to possess an underlying low-dimensional structure within a high-dimensional feature space, which current theory does not adequately account for, rendering known bounds inefficient. To bridge the gap between the theory and practice of WAEs, in this paper, we show that WAEs can learn the data distributions when the network architectures are properly chosen. We show that the convergence rates of the expected excess risk in the number of samples for WAEs are independent of the high feature dimension, instead relying only on the intrinsic dimension of the data distribution.

Modern methods for vision-centric autonomous driving perception widely adopt the bird's-eye-view (BEV) representation to describe a 3D scene. Despite its better efficiency than voxel representation, it has difficulty describing the fine-grained 3D structure of a scene with a single plane. To address this, we propose a tri-perspective view (TPV) representation which accompanies BEV with two additional perpendicular planes. We model each point in the 3D space by summing its projected features on the three planes. To lift image features to the 3D TPV space, we further propose a transformer-based TPV encoder (TPVFormer) to obtain the TPV features effectively. We employ the attention mechanism to aggregate the image features corresponding to each query in each TPV plane. Experiments show that our model trained with sparse supervision effectively predicts the semantic occupancy for all voxels. We demonstrate for the first time that using only camera inputs can achieve comparable performance with LiDAR-based methods on the LiDAR segmentation task on nuScenes. Code: https://github.com/wzzheng/TPVFormer.

We present PointInfinity, an efficient family of point cloud diffusion models. Our core idea is to use a transformer-based architecture with a fixed-size, resolution-invariant latent representation. This enables efficient training with low-resolution point clouds, while allowing high-resolution point clouds to be generated during inference. More importantly, we show that scaling the test-time resolution beyond the training resolution improves the fidelity of generated point clouds and surfaces. We analyze this phenomenon and draw a link to classifier-free guidance commonly used in diffusion models, demonstrating that both allow trading off fidelity and variability during inference. Experiments on CO3D show that PointInfinity can efficiently generate high-resolution point clouds (up to 131k points, 31 times more than Point-E) with state-of-the-art quality.

Point cloud analysis (such as 3D segmentation and detection) is a challenging task, because of not only the irregular geometries of many millions of unordered points, but also the great variations caused by depth, viewpoint, occlusion, etc. Current studies put much focus on the adaption of neural networks to the complex geometries of point clouds, but are blind to a fundamental question: how to learn an appropriate point embedding space that is aware of both discriminative semantics and challenging variations? As a response, we propose a clustering based supervised learning scheme for point cloud analysis. Unlike current de-facto, scene-wise training paradigm, our algorithm conducts within-class clustering on the point embedding space for automatically discovering subclass patterns which are latent yet representative across scenes. The mined patterns are, in turn, used to repaint the embedding space, so as to respect the underlying distribution of the entire training dataset and improve the robustness to the variations. Our algorithm is principled and readily pluggable to modern point cloud segmentation networks during training, without extra overhead during testing. With various 3D network architectures (i.e., voxel-based, point-based, Transformer-based, automatically searched), our algorithm shows notable improvements on famous point cloud segmentation datasets (i.e.,2.0-2.6% on single-scan and 2.0-2.2% multi-scan of SemanticKITTI, 1.8-1.9% on S3DIS, in terms of mIoU). Our algorithm also demonstrates utility in 3D detection, showing 2.0-3.4% mAP gains on KITTI.

The availability of large-scale multimodal datasets and advancements in diffusion models have significantly accelerated progress in 4D content generation. Most prior approaches rely on multiple image or video diffusion models, utilizing score distillation sampling for optimization or generating pseudo novel views for direct supervision. However, these methods are hindered by slow optimization speeds and multi-view inconsistency issues. Spatial and temporal consistency in 4D geometry has been extensively explored respectively in 3D-aware diffusion models and traditional monocular video diffusion models. Building on this foundation, we propose a strategy to migrate the temporal consistency in video diffusion models to the spatial-temporal consistency required for 4D generation. Specifically, we present a novel framework, Diffusion4D, for efficient and scalable 4D content generation. Leveraging a meticulously curated dynamic 3D dataset, we develop a 4D-aware video diffusion model capable of synthesizing orbital views of dynamic 3D assets. To control the dynamic strength of these assets, we introduce a 3D-to-4D motion magnitude metric as guidance. Additionally, we propose a novel motion magnitude reconstruction loss and 3D-aware classifier-free guidance to refine the learning and generation of motion dynamics. After obtaining orbital views of the 4D asset, we perform explicit 4D construction with Gaussian splatting in a coarse-to-fine manner. The synthesized multi-view consistent 4D image set enables us to swiftly generate high-fidelity and diverse 4D assets within just several minutes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art techniques in terms of generation efficiency and 4D geometry consistency across various prompt modalities.

Continuous latent variables (LVs) are a key ingredient of many generative models, as they allow modelling expressive mixtures with an uncountable number of components. In contrast, probabilistic circuits (PCs) are hierarchical discrete mixtures represented as computational graphs composed of input, sum and product units. Unlike continuous LV models, PCs provide tractable inference but are limited to discrete LVs with categorical (i.e. unordered) states. We bridge these model classes by introducing probabilistic integral circuits (PICs), a new language of computational graphs that extends PCs with integral units representing continuous LVs. In the first place, PICs are symbolic computational graphs and are fully tractable in simple cases where analytical integration is possible. In practice, we parameterise PICs with light-weight neural nets delivering an intractable hierarchical continuous mixture that can be approximated arbitrarily well with large PCs using numerical quadrature. On several distribution estimation benchmarks, we show that such PIC-approximating PCs systematically outperform PCs commonly learned via expectation-maximization or SGD.

The primal sketch is a fundamental representation in Marr's vision theory, which allows for parsimonious image-level processing from 2D to 2.5D perception. This paper takes a further step by computing 3D primal sketch of wireframes from a set of images with known camera poses, in which we take the 2D wireframes in multi-view images as the basis to compute 3D wireframes in a volumetric rendering formulation. In our method, we first propose a NEural Attraction (NEAT) Fields that parameterizes the 3D line segments with coordinate Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs), enabling us to learn the 3D line segments from 2D observation without incurring any explicit feature correspondences across views. We then present a novel Global Junction Perceiving (GJP) module to perceive meaningful 3D junctions from the NEAT Fields of 3D line segments by optimizing a randomly initialized high-dimensional latent array and a lightweight decoding MLP. Benefitting from our explicit modeling of 3D junctions, we finally compute the primal sketch of 3D wireframes by attracting the queried 3D line segments to the 3D junctions, significantly simplifying the computation paradigm of 3D wireframe parsing. In experiments, we evaluate our approach on the DTU and BlendedMVS datasets with promising performance obtained. As far as we know, our method is the first approach to achieve high-fidelity 3D wireframe parsing without requiring explicit matching.

In this paper, we study how to synthesize a dynamic reference from an external dictionary to perform conditional coding of the input image in the latent domain and how to learn the conditional latent synthesis and coding modules in an end-to-end manner. Our approach begins by constructing a universal image feature dictionary using a multi-stage approach involving modified spatial pyramid pooling, dimension reduction, and multi-scale feature clustering. For each input image, we learn to synthesize a conditioning latent by selecting and synthesizing relevant features from the dictionary, which significantly enhances the model's capability in capturing and exploring image source correlation. This conditional latent synthesis involves a correlation-based feature matching and alignment strategy, comprising a Conditional Latent Matching (CLM) module and a Conditional Latent Synthesis (CLS) module. The synthesized latent is then used to guide the encoding process, allowing for more efficient compression by exploiting the correlation between the input image and the reference dictionary. According to our theoretical analysis, the proposed conditional latent coding (CLC) method is robust to perturbations in the external dictionary samples and the selected conditioning latent, with an error bound that scales logarithmically with the dictionary size, ensuring stability even with large and diverse dictionaries. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our new method improves the coding performance by a large margin (up to 1.2 dB) with a very small overhead of approximately 0.5\% bits per pixel. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ydchen0806/CLC.

We present AROMA (Attentive Reduced Order Model with Attention), a framework designed to enhance the modeling of partial differential equations (PDEs) using local neural fields. Our flexible encoder-decoder architecture can obtain smooth latent representations of spatial physical fields from a variety of data types, including irregular-grid inputs and point clouds. This versatility eliminates the need for patching and allows efficient processing of diverse geometries. The sequential nature of our latent representation can be interpreted spatially and permits the use of a conditional transformer for modeling the temporal dynamics of PDEs. By employing a diffusion-based formulation, we achieve greater stability and enable longer rollouts compared to conventional MSE training. AROMA's superior performance in simulating 1D and 2D equations underscores the efficacy of our approach in capturing complex dynamical behaviors.

Generative models have been very popular in the recent years for their image generation capabilities. GAN-based models are highly regarded for their disentangled latent space, which is a key feature contributing to their success in controlled image editing. On the other hand, diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generating high-quality images. However, the latent space of diffusion models is not as thoroughly explored or understood. Existing methods that aim to explore the latent space of diffusion models usually relies on text prompts to pinpoint specific semantics. However, this approach may be restrictive in areas such as art, fashion, or specialized fields like medicine, where suitable text prompts might not be available or easy to conceive thus limiting the scope of existing work. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method to discover latent semantics in text-to-image diffusion models without relying on text prompts. Our method takes a small set of unlabeled images from specific domains, such as faces or cats, and a pre-trained diffusion model, and discovers diverse semantics in unsupervised fashion using a contrastive learning objective. Moreover, the learned directions can be applied simultaneously, either within the same domain (such as various types of facial edits) or across different domains (such as applying cat and face edits within the same image) without interfering with each other. Our extensive experiments show that our method achieves highly disentangled edits, outperforming existing approaches in both diffusion-based and GAN-based latent space editing methods.

Modeling latent variables with priors and hyperpriors is an essential problem in variational image compression. Formally, trade-off between rate and distortion is handled well if priors and hyperpriors precisely describe latent variables. Current practices only adopt univariate priors and process each variable individually. However, we find inter-correlations and intra-correlations exist when observing latent variables in a vectorized perspective. These findings reveal visual redundancies to improve rate-distortion performance and parallel processing ability to speed up compression. This encourages us to propose a novel vectorized prior. Specifically, a multivariate Gaussian mixture is proposed with means and covariances to be estimated. Then, a novel probabilistic vector quantization is utilized to effectively approximate means, and remaining covariances are further induced to a unified mixture and solved by cascaded estimation without context models involved. Furthermore, codebooks involved in quantization are extended to multi-codebooks for complexity reduction, which formulates an efficient compression procedure. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets against state-of-the-art indicate our model has better rate-distortion performance and an impressive 3.18times compression speed up, giving us the ability to perform real-time, high-quality variational image compression in practice. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/xiaosu-zhu/McQuic.