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Manoj Kumar

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    Preview abstract The scaling of Transformers has driven breakthrough capabilities for language models. At present, the largest large language models (LLMs) contain upwards of 100B parameters. Vision Transformers (ViT) have introduced the same architecture to image and video modeling, but these have not yet been successfully scaled to nearly the same degree; the largest dense ViT contains 4B parameters. We present a recipe for highly efficient training of a 22B-parameter ViT and perform a wide variety of experiments on the resulting model. When evaluated on downstream tasks (often with a lightweight linear model on frozen features) ViT22B demonstrates increasing performance with scale. We further observe other interesting benefits of scale, including an improved tradeoff between bias and performance, an improved alignment to human visual perception in terms of shape/texture bias, and improved robustness. ViT22B demonstrates the potential for "LLM-like'' scaling in vision, and provides key steps towards getting there. View details
    Dual PatchNorm
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract We discover that just placing two LayerNorms: before and after the patch embedding layer leads to improvements over well-tuned ViT models. In particular, this outperforms exhaustive search for alternative LayerNorm placement strategies in the transformer block itself. View details
    Preview abstract Human-like perceptual similarity is an emergent property in the intermediate feature space of ImageNet-pretrained classifiers. Perceptual distances between images, as measured in the space of pre-trained image embeddings, have outperformed prior low-level metrics significantly on assessing image similarity. This has led to the wide adoption of perceptual distances as both an evaluation metric and an auxiliary training objective for image synthesis tasks. While image classification has improved by leaps and bounds, the de facto standard for computing perceptual distances uses older, less accurate models such as VGG and AlexNet. Motivated by this, we evaluate the perceptual scores of modern networks: ResNets, EfficientNets and VisionTransformers. Surprisingly, we observe an inverse correlation between ImageNet accuracy and perceptual scores: better classifiers achieve worse perceptual scores. We dive deeper into this, studying the ImageNet accuracy/perceptual score relationship under different hyperparameter configurations. Improving accuracy improves perceptual scores up to a certain point, but beyond this point we uncover a Pareto frontier between accuracies and perceptual scores. We explore this relationship further using distortion invariance, spatial frequency sensitivity and alternative perceptual functions. Based on our study, we find a ImageNet trained ResNet-6 network whose emergent perceptual score matches the best prior score obtained with networks trained explicitly on a perceptual similarity task. View details
    Preview abstract We present the Colorization Transformer, a novel approach for diverse high fidelity image colorization based on self-attention. Given a grayscale image, the colorization proceeds in three steps. We first use an autoregressive transformer to produce a low resolution coarse coloring of the grayscale image. Our architecture adopts conditional self-attention blocks to effectively capture grayscale input. Two subsequent fully parallel networks upsample the coarse colored low resolution image into a finely colored high resolution image. Sampling from the Colorization Transformer produces diverse colorings whose fidelity outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on colorising ImageNet based on FID results and based on a human evaluation in a Mechanical Turk test. Remarkably, in more than 60\% of cases human evaluators prefer the highest rated among three generated colorings over the ground truth. View details
    VideoFlow: A Conditional Flow-Based Model for Stochastic Video Generation
    Mohammad Babaeizadeh
    Chelsea Finn
    Sergey Levine
    Laurent Dinh
    ICLR (2020) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Generative models that can model and predict sequences of future events can, in principle, learn to capture complex real-world phenomena, such as physical interactions. However, a central challenge in video prediction is that the future is highly uncertain: a sequence of past observations of events can imply many possible futures. Although a number of recent works have studied probabilistic models that can represent uncertain futures, such models are either extremely expensive computationally as in the case of pixel-level autoregressive models, or do not directly optimize the likelihood of the data. To our knowledge, our work is the first to propose multi-frame video prediction with normalizing flows, which allows for direct optimization of the data likelihood, and produces high-quality stochastic predictions. We describe an approach for modeling the latent space dynamics, and demonstrate that flow-based generative models offer a viable and competitive approach to generative modeling of video. View details
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