José Lezama

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    A Versatile Diffusion Transformer with Mixture of Noise Levels for Audiovisual Generation
    Bradley Kim
    Alonso Martinez
    Yu-Chuan Su
    Agrim Gupta
    Lu Jiang
    Jacob Walker
    Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) (2024) (to appear)
    Preview abstract Training diffusion models for audiovisual sequences allows for a range of generation tasks by learning conditional distributions of various input-output combinations of the two modalities. Nevertheless, this strategy often requires training a separate model for each task which is expensive. Here, we propose a novel training approach to effectively learn arbitrary conditional distributions in the audiovisual space. Our key contribution lies in how we parameterize the diffusion timestep in the forward diffusion process. Instead of the standard fixed diffusion timestep, we propose applying variable diffusion timesteps across the temporal dimension and across modalities of the inputs. This formulation offers flexibility to introduce variable noise levels for various portions of the input, hence the term mixture of noise levels. We propose a transformer-based audiovisual latent diffusion model and show that it can be trained in a task-agnostic fashion using our approach to enable a variety of audiovisual generation tasks at inference time. Experiments demonstrate the versatility of our method in tackling cross-modal and multimodal interpolation tasks in the audiovisual space. Notably, our proposed approach surpasses baselines in generating temporally and perceptually consistent samples conditioned on the input. View details
    Preview abstract We present W.A.L.T, a transformer-based approach for photorealistic video generation via diffusion modeling. Our approach has two key design decisions. First, we use a causal encoder to jointly compress images and videos within a unified latent space, enabling training and generation across modalities. Second, for memory and training efficiency, we use a window attention architecture tailored for joint spatial and spatiotemporal generative modeling. Taken together these design decisions enable us to achieve state-of-the-art performance on established video (UCF-101 and Kinetics-600) and image (ImageNet) generation benchmarks without using classifier free guidance. Finally, we also train a cascade of three models for the task of text-to-video generation consisting of a base latent video diffusion model, and two video super-resolution diffusion models to generate videos of 512*896 resolution at 8 frames per second. View details
    Language Model Beats Diffusion -- Tokenizer is Key to Visual Generation
    Nitesh Bharadwaj Gundavarapu
    Luca Versari
    Kihyuk Sohn
    Agrim Gupta
    Xiuye Gu
    Alex Hauptmann
    Boqing Gong
    Lu Jiang
    ICLR (2024)
    Preview abstract While Large Language Models (LLMs) are the dominant models for generative tasks in language, they do not perform as well as diffusion models on image and video generation. To effectively use LLMs for visual generation, one crucial component is the visual tokenizer that maps pixel-space inputs to discrete tokens appropriate for LLM learning. In this paper, we introduce MAGVIT-v2, a video tokenizer designed to generate concise and expressive tokens for both videos and images using a common token vocabulary. Equipped with this new tokenizer, we show that LLMs outperform diffusion models on standard image and video generation benchmarks including ImageNet and Kinetics. In addition, we demonstrate that our tokenizer surpasses the previously top-performing video tokenizer on two more tasks: (1) video compression comparable to the next-generation video codec (VCC) according to human evaluations, and (2) learning effective representations for action recognition tasks. View details
    VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation
    Dan Kondratyuk
    Xiuye Gu
    Jonathan Huang
    Grant Schindler
    Rachel Hornung
    Vighnesh Birodkar
    Jimmy Yan
    Ming-Chang Chiu
    Hassan Akbari
    Josh Dillon
    Agrim Gupta
    Meera Hahn
    Anja Hauth
    David Hendon
    Alonso Martinez
    Kihyuk Sohn
    Xuan Yang
    Huisheng Wang
    Lu Jiang
    ICML (2024)
    Preview abstract We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/ View details
    Preview abstract This paper introduces a Masked Generative Video Transformer, named MAGVIT, for multi-task video generation. We train a single MAGVIT model and apply it to multiple video generation tasks at inference time. To this end, two new designs are proposed: an improved 3D tokenizer model to quantize a video into spatial-temporal visual tokens, and a novel technique to embed conditions inside the mask to facilitate multi-task training. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the compelling quality, efficiency, and flexibility of the proposed model. First, MAGVIT radically improves the previous best fidelity on two video generation tasks. In terms of efficiency, MAGVIT offers leading video generation speed at inference time, which is estimated to be one or two orders-of-magnitudes faster than other models. As for flexibility, we verified that a single trained MAGVIT is able to generically perform 8+ tasks at several video benchmarks from drastically different visual domains. We will open source our framework and models. View details
    Visual Prompt Tuning for Generative Transfer Learning
    Kihyuk Sohn
    Huiwen Chang
    Luisa Polania
    Han Zhang
    Lu Jiang
    CVPR 2023 (2023)
    Preview abstract Transferring knowledge from an image synthesis model trained on a large dataset is a promising direction for learning generative image models from various domains efficiently. While previous works have studied GAN models, we present a recipe for learning vision transformers by generative knowledge transfer. We base our framework on state-of-the-art generative vision transformers that represent an image as a sequence of visual tokens to the autoregressive or non-autoregressive transformers. To adapt to a new domain, we employ prompt tuning, which prepends learnable tokens called prompt to the image token sequence, and introduce a new prompt design for our task. We study on a variety of visual domains, including visual task adaptation benchmark, with varying amount of training images, and show effectiveness of knowledge transfer and a significantly better image generation quality over existing works. View details
    Preview abstract Recent conditional image generation methods produce images of remarkable diversity, fidelity and realism. However, the majority of these methods allow conditioning only on labels or text prompts, which limits their level of control over the generation result. In this paper, we introduce MaskSketch, a masked image generation method that allows spatial conditioning of the generation result, using a guiding sketch as an extra conditioning signal during sampling. MaskSketch utilizes a pre-trained masked image generator, requires no model training or paired supervision, and works with input sketches of different levels of abstraction. We propose a novel parallel sampling scheme that leverages the structural information encoded in the intermediate self-attention maps of a masked generative transformer, such as scene layout and object shape. Our results show that MaskSketch achieves high image realism and fidelity to the guiding structure. Evaluated on standard benchmark datasets, MaskSketch outperforms state-of-the-art methods for sketch-to-image translation, as well as generic image-to-image translation approaches. View details
    Preview abstract This paper studies non-autoregressive transformers for the image synthesis task from the lens of discrete diffusion models. We find that generative methods based on non-autoregressive transformers suffer from decoding compounding error due to the parallel sampling of visual tokens. To alleviate it, we introduce discrete predictor-corrector diffusion models (DPC). Predictor-corrector samplers are a recently introduced class of samplers for diffusion models which improve upon ancestral samplers by correcting the sampling distribution of intermediate diffusion states using MCMC methods. In DPC, the Langevin corrector, which does not have a direct counterpart in discrete space, is replaced with a discrete MCMC transition defined by a learned corrector kernel. The corrector kernel is trained to make the correction steps achieve asymptotic convergence, in distribution, to the real marginal of the intermediate diffusion states. Our experiments show that equipped with DPC, discrete diffusion models can achieve comparable quality to continuous diffusion models, while having orders of magnitude faster sampling times. DPC improves upon existing discrete latent space models for class-conditional image generation on ImageNet, and outperforms recent diffusion models and GANs, according to visual evaluation user studies. View details
    Preview abstract Non-autoregressive generative transformers recently demonstrated impressive image generation performance, and orders of magnitude faster sampling than their autoregressive counterparts. However, optimal parallel sampling from the true joint distribution of visual tokens remains an open challenge. In this paper we introduce Token-Critic, an auxiliary model to guide the sampling of a non-autoregressive generative transformer. Given a masked-and-reconstructed real image, the Token-Critic model is trained to distinguish which visual tokens belong to the original image and which were sampled by the generative transformer. During non-autoregressive iterative sampling, Token-Critic is used to select which tokens to accept and which to reject and resample. Coupled with Token-Critic, a state-of-the-art generative transformer significantly improves its performance, and outperforms recent diffusion models and GANs in terms of the trade-off between generated image quality and diversity, in the challenging class-conditional ImageNet generation. View details