Proceedings Article•
Neural Discrete Representation Learning
02 Nov 2017-Vol. 30, pp 6306-6315
TL;DR: The Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) as discussed by the authors is a generative model that learns a discrete latent representation by using vector quantization.
Abstract: Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE), differs from VAEs in two key ways: the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent representation, we incorporate ideas from vector quantisation (VQ). Using the VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of ``posterior collapse'' -— where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful autoregressive decoder -— typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes, providing further evidence of the utility of the learnt representations.
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23 May 2022
TL;DR: This work presents Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding, and finds that human raters prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment.
Abstract: We present Imagen, a text-to-image diffusion model with an unprecedented degree of photorealism and a deep level of language understanding. Imagen builds on the power of large transformer language models in understanding text and hinges on the strength of diffusion models in high-fidelity image generation. Our key discovery is that generic large language models (e.g. T5), pretrained on text-only corpora, are surprisingly effective at encoding text for image synthesis: increasing the size of the language model in Imagen boosts both sample fidelity and image-text alignment much more than increasing the size of the image diffusion model. Imagen achieves a new state-of-the-art FID score of 7.27 on the COCO dataset, without ever training on COCO, and human raters find Imagen samples to be on par with the COCO data itself in image-text alignment. To assess text-to-image models in greater depth, we introduce DrawBench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark for text-to-image models. With DrawBench, we compare Imagen with recent methods including VQ-GAN+CLIP, Latent Diffusion Models, and DALL-E 2, and find that human raters prefer Imagen over other models in side-by-side comparisons, both in terms of sample quality and image-text alignment. See https://imagen.research.google/ for an overview of the results.
1,270 citations
Proceedings Article•
12 Jul 2020TL;DR: This work trains a sequence Transformer to auto-regressively predict pixels, without incorporating knowledge of the 2D input structure, and finds that a GPT-2 scale model learns strong image representations as measured by linear probing, fine-tuning, and low-data classification.
Abstract: Inspired by progress in unsupervised representation learning for natural language, we examine whether similar models can learn useful representations for images. We train a sequence Transformer to auto-regressively predict pixels, without incorporating knowledge of the 2D input structure. Despite training on low-resolution ImageNet without labels, we find that a GPT-2 scale model learns strong image representations as measured by linear probing, fine-tuning, and low-data classification. On CIFAR-10, we achieve 96.3% accuracy with a linear probe, outperforming a supervised Wide ResNet, and 99.0% accuracy with full finetuning, matching the top supervised pre-trained models. An even larger model trained on a mixture of ImageNet and web images is competitive with self-supervised benchmarks on ImageNet, achieving 72.0% top-1 accuracy on a linear probe of our features.
849 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is demonstrated how combining the effectiveness of the inductive bias of CNNs with the expressivity of transformers enables them to model and thereby synthesize high-resolution images.
Abstract: Designed to learn long-range interactions on sequential data, transformers continue to show state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of tasks. In contrast to CNNs, they contain no inductive bias that prioritizes local interactions. This makes them expressive, but also computationally infeasible for long sequences, such as high-resolution images. We demonstrate how combining the effectiveness of the inductive bias of CNNs with the expressivity of transformers enables them to model and thereby synthesize high-resolution images. We show how to (i) use CNNs to learn a context-rich vocabulary of image constituents, and in turn (ii) utilize transformers to efficiently model their composition within high-resolution images. Our approach is readily applied to conditional synthesis tasks, where both non-spatial information, such as object classes, and spatial information, such as segmentations, can control the generated image. In particular, we present the first results on semantically-guided synthesis of megapixel images with transformers and obtain the state of the art among autoregressive models on class-conditional ImageNet. Code and pretrained models can be found at this https URL .
744 citations
Posted Content•
TL;DR: It is demonstrated that a multi-scale hierarchical organization of VQ-VAE, augmented with powerful priors over the latent codes, is able to generate samples with quality that rivals that of state of the art Generative Adversarial Networks on multifaceted datasets such as ImageNet, while not suffering from GAN's known shortcomings such as mode collapse and lack of diversity.
Abstract: We explore the use of Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE) models for large scale image generation. To this end, we scale and enhance the autoregressive priors used in VQ-VAE to generate synthetic samples of much higher coherence and fidelity than possible before. We use simple feed-forward encoder and decoder networks, making our model an attractive candidate for applications where the encoding and/or decoding speed is critical. Additionally, VQ-VAE requires sampling an autoregressive model only in the compressed latent space, which is an order of magnitude faster than sampling in the pixel space, especially for large images. We demonstrate that a multi-scale hierarchical organization of VQ-VAE, augmented with powerful priors over the latent codes, is able to generate samples with quality that rivals that of state of the art Generative Adversarial Networks on multifaceted datasets such as ImageNet, while not suffering from GAN's known shortcomings such as mode collapse and lack of diversity.
593 citations
TL;DR: This survey takes a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning, and comprehensively review the existing empirical methods into three main categories according to their objectives.
Abstract: Deep supervised learning has achieved great success in the last decade. However, its deficiencies of dependence on manual labels and vulnerability to attacks have driven people to explore a better solution. As an alternative, self-supervised learning attracts many researchers for its soaring performance on representation learning in the last several years. Self-supervised representation learning leverages input data itself as supervision and benefits almost all types of downstream tasks. In this survey, we take a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. We comprehensively review the existing empirical methods and summarize them into three main categories according to their objectives: generative, contrastive, and generative-contrastive (adversarial). We further investigate related theoretical analysis work to provide deeper thoughts on how self-supervised learning works. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for self-supervised learning. An outline slide for the survey is provided.
576 citations