Fwd2Bot: LVLM Visual Token Compression with Double Forward Bottleneck

In this work, we aim to compress the vision tokens of a Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) into a representation that is simultaneously suitable for (a) generative and (b) discriminative tasks, (c) is nearly lossless, and (d) is storage-efficient. We propose a novel compression approach, called Fwd2Bot, that uses the LVLM itself to compress the visual information in a task-agnostic manner. At the core of Fwd2bot there exists a "double-forward pass" training strategy, whereby, during the first forward pass, the LLM (of the LVLM) creates a bottleneck by condensing the visual information into a small number of summary tokens. Then, using the same LLM, the second forward pass processes the language instruction(s) alongside the summary tokens, used as a direct replacement for the image ones. The training signal is provided by two losses: an autoregressive one applied after the second pass that provides a direct optimization objective for compression, and a contrastive loss, applied after the first pass, that further boosts the representation strength, especially for discriminative tasks. The training is further enhanced by stage-specific adapters. We accompany the proposed method by an in-depth ablation study. Overall, Fwd2Bot results in highly-informative compressed representations suitable for both generative and discriminative tasks. For generative tasks, we offer a 2x higher compression rate without compromising the generative capabilities, setting a new state-of-the-art result. For discriminative tasks, we set a new state-of-the-art on image retrieval and compositionality.

Edge-SD-SR: Low Latency and Parameter Efficient On-device Super-Resolution with Stable Diffusion via Bidirectional Conditioning

There has been immense progress recently in the visual quality of Stable Diffusion-based Super Resolution (SD-SR). However, deploying large diffusion models on computationally restricted devices such as mobile phones remains impractical due to the large model size and high latency. This is compounded for SR as it often operates at high res (e.g. 4Kx3K). In this work, we introduce Edge-SD-SR, the first parameter efficient and low latency diffusion model for image super-resolution. Edge-SD-SR consists of ~169M parameters, including UNet, encoder and decoder, and has a complexity of only ~142 GFLOPs. To maintain a high visual quality on such low compute budget, we introduce a number of training strategies: (i) A novel conditioning mechanism on the low resolution input, coined bidirectional conditioning, which tailors the SD model for the SR task. (ii) Joint training of the UNet and encoder, while decoupling the encodings of the HR and LR images and using a dedicated schedule. (iii) Finetuning the decoder using the UNet's output to directly tailor the decoder to the latents obtained at inference time. Edge-SD-SR runs efficiently on device, e.g. it can upscale a 128x128 patch to 512x512 in 38 msec while running on a Samsung S24 DSP, and of a 512x512 to 2048x2048 (requiring 25 model evaluations) in just ~1.1 sec. Furthermore, we show that Edge-SD-SR matches or even outperforms state-of-the-art SR approaches on the most established SR benchmarks.

Discriminative Fine-tuning of LVLMs

Contrastively-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have become the de facto approach for discriminative vision-language representation learning. However, these models have limited language understanding, often exhibiting a "bag of words" behavior. At the same time, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), which combine vision encoders with LLMs, have been shown capable of detailed vision-language reasoning, yet their autoregressive nature renders them less suitable for discriminative tasks. In this work, we propose to combine "the best of both worlds": a new training approach for discriminative fine-tuning of LVLMs that results in strong discriminative and compositional capabilities. Essentially, our approach converts a generative LVLM into a discriminative one, unlocking its capability for powerful image-text discrimination combined with enhanced language understanding. Our contributions include: (1) A carefully designed training/optimization framework that utilizes image-text pairs of variable length and granularity for training the model with both contrastive and next-token prediction losses. This is accompanied by ablation studies that justify the necessity of our framework's components. (2) A parameter-efficient adaptation method using a combination of soft prompting and LoRA adapters. (3) Significant improvements over state-of-the-art CLIP-like models of similar size, including standard image-text retrieval benchmarks and notable gains in compositionality.

FAM Diffusion: Frequency and Attention Modulation for High-Resolution Image Generation with Stable Diffusion

Diffusion models are proficient at generating high-quality images. They are however effective only when operating at the resolution used during training. Inference at a scaled resolution leads to repetitive patterns and structural distortions. Retraining at higher resolutions quickly becomes prohibitive. Thus, methods enabling pre-existing diffusion models to operate at flexible test-time resolutions are highly desirable. Previous works suffer from frequent artifacts and often introduce large latency overheads. We propose two simple modules that combine to solve these issues. We introduce a Frequency Modulation (FM) module that leverages the Fourier domain to improve the global structure consistency, and an Attention Modulation (AM) module which improves the consistency of local texture patterns, a problem largely ignored in prior works. Our method, coined Fam diffusion, can seamlessly integrate into any latent diffusion model and requires no additional training. Extensive qualitative results highlight the effectiveness of our method in addressing structural and local artifacts, while quantitative results show state-of-the-art performance. Also, our method avoids redundant inference tricks for improved consistency such as patch-based or progressive generation, leading to negligible latency overheads.

CemiFace: Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic Face Generation for Face Recognition

Privacy issue is a main concern in developing face recognition techniques. Although synthetic face images can partially mitigate potential legal risks while maintaining effective face recognition (FR) performance, FR models trained by face images synthesized by existing generative approaches frequently suffer from performance degradation problems due to the insufficient discriminative quality of these synthesized samples. In this paper, we systematically investigate what contributes to solid face recognition model training, and reveal that face images with certain degree of similarities to their identity centers show great effectiveness in the performance of trained FR models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel diffusion-based approach (namely Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic Face Generation (CemiFace)) which produces facial samples with various levels of similarity to the subject center, thus allowing to generate face datasets containing effective discriminative samples for training face recognition. Experimental results show that with a modest degree of similarity, training on the generated dataset can produce competitive performance compared to previous generation methods.

MM2Latent: Text-to-facial image generation and editing in GANs with multimodal assistance

Generating human portraits is a hot topic in the image generation area, e.g. mask-to-face generation and text-to-face generation. However, these unimodal generation methods lack controllability in image generation. Controllability can be enhanced by exploring the advantages and complementarities of various modalities. For instance, we can utilize the advantages of text in controlling diverse attributes and masks in controlling spatial locations. Current state-of-the-art methods in multimodal generation face limitations due to their reliance on extensive hyperparameters, manual operations during the inference stage, substantial computational demands during training and inference, or inability to edit real images. In this paper, we propose a practical framework - MM2Latent - for multimodal image generation and editing. We use StyleGAN2 as our image generator, FaRL for text encoding, and train an autoencoders for spatial modalities like mask, sketch and 3DMM. We propose a strategy that involves training a mapping network to map the multimodal input into the w latent space of StyleGAN. The proposed framework 1) eliminates hyperparameters and manual operations in the inference stage, 2) ensures fast inference speeds, and 3) enables the editing of real images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance in multimodal image generation, surpassing recent GAN- and diffusion-based methods. Also, it proves effective in multimodal image editing and is faster than GAN- and diffusion-based methods. We make the code publicly available at: https://github.com/Open-Debin/MM2Latent

MobileQuant: Mobile-friendly Quantization for On-device Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized language processing, delivering outstanding results across multiple applications. However, deploying LLMs on edge devices poses several challenges with respect to memory, energy, and compute costs, limiting their widespread use in devices such as mobile phones. A promising solution is to reduce the number of bits used to represent weights and activations. While existing works have found partial success at quantizing LLMs to lower bitwidths, e.g. 4-bit weights, quantizing activations beyond 16 bits often leads to large computational overheads due to poor on-device quantization support, or a considerable accuracy drop. Yet, 8-bit activations are very attractive for on-device deployment as they would enable LLMs to fully exploit mobile-friendly hardware, e.g. Neural Processing Units (NPUs). In this work, we make a first attempt to facilitate the on-device deployment of LLMs using integer-only quantization. We first investigate the limitations of existing quantization methods for on-device deployment, with a special focus on activation quantization. We then address these limitations by introducing a simple post-training quantization method, named MobileQuant, that extends previous weight equivalent transformation works by jointly optimizing the weight transformation and activation range parameters in an end-to-end manner. MobileQuant demonstrates superior capabilities over existing methods by 1) achieving near-lossless quantization on a wide range of LLM benchmarks, 2) reducing latency and energy consumption by 20\%-50\% compared to current on-device quantization strategies, 3) requiring limited compute budget, 4) being compatible with mobile-friendly compute units, e.g. NPU.

CLIPCleaner: Cleaning Noisy Labels with CLIP

Learning with Noisy labels (LNL) poses a significant challenge for the Machine Learning community. Some of the most widely used approaches that select as clean samples for which the model itself (the in-training model) has high confidence, e.g., `small loss', can suffer from the so called `self-confirmation' bias. This bias arises because the in-training model, is at least partially trained on the noisy labels. Furthermore, in the classification case, an additional challenge arises because some of the label noise is between classes that are visually very similar (`hard noise'). This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a method (\textit{CLIPCleaner}) that leverages CLIP, a powerful Vision-Language (VL) model for constructing a zero-shot classifier for efficient, offline, clean sample selection. This has the advantage that the sample selection is decoupled from the in-training model and that the sample selection is aware of the semantic and visual similarities between the classes due to the way that CLIP is trained. We provide theoretical justifications and empirical evidence to demonstrate the advantages of CLIP for LNL compared to conventional pre-trained models. Compared to current methods that combine iterative sample selection with various techniques, \textit{CLIPCleaner} offers a simple, single-step approach that achieves competitive or superior performance on benchmark datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time a VL model has been used for sample selection to address the problem of Learning with Noisy Labels (LNL), highlighting their potential in the domain.

CLIP-DPO: Vision-Language Models as a Source of Preference for Fixing Hallucinations in LVLMs

Despite recent successes, LVLMs or Large Vision Language Models are prone to hallucinating details like objects and their properties or relations, limiting their real-world deployment. To address this and improve their robustness, we present CLIP-DPO, a preference optimization method that leverages contrastively pre-trained Vision-Language (VL) embedding models, such as CLIP, for DPO-based optimization of LVLMs. Unlike prior works tackling LVLM hallucinations, our method does not rely on paid-for APIs, and does not require additional training data or the deployment of other external LVLMs. Instead, starting from the initial pool of supervised fine-tuning data, we generate a diverse set of predictions, which are ranked based on their CLIP image-text similarities, and then filtered using a robust rule-based approach to obtain a set of positive and negative pairs for DPO-based training. We applied CLIP-DPO fine-tuning to the MobileVLM-v2 family of models and to LlaVA-1.5, in all cases observing significant improvements in terms of hallucination reduction over baseline models. We also observe better performance for zero-shot classification, suggesting improved grounding capabilities, and verify that the original performance on standard LVLM benchmarks is overall preserved.

Efficient Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning with Explicit Cluster Balancing

Self-supervised learning has recently emerged as the preeminent pretraining paradigm across and between modalities, with remarkable results. In the image domain specifically, group (or cluster) discrimination has been one of the most successful methods. However, such frameworks need to guard against heavily imbalanced cluster assignments to prevent collapse to trivial solutions. Existing works typically solve this by reweighing cluster assignments to promote balance, or with offline operations (e.g. regular re-clustering) that prevent collapse. However, the former typically requires large batch sizes, which leads to increased resource requirements, and the latter introduces scalability issues with regard to large datasets. In this work, we propose ExCB, a framework that tackles this problem with a novel cluster balancing method. ExCB estimates the relative size of the clusters across batches and balances them by adjusting cluster assignments, proportionately to their relative size and in an online manner. Thereby, it overcomes previous methods' dependence on large batch sizes and is fully online, and therefore scalable to any dataset. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate our approach and demonstrate that ExCB: a) achieves state-of-the-art results with significantly reduced resource requirements compared to previous works, b) is fully online, and therefore scalable to large datasets, and c) is stable and effective even with very small batch sizes.