FlexEControl: Flexible and Efficient Multimodal Control for Text-to-Image Generation

Controllable text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models generate images conditioned on both text prompts and semantic inputs of other modalities like edge maps. Nevertheless, current controllable T2I methods commonly face challenges related to efficiency and faithfulness, especially when conditioning on multiple inputs from either the same or diverse modalities. In this paper, we propose a novel Flexible and Efficient method, FlexEControl, for controllable T2I generation. At the core of FlexEControl is a unique weight decomposition strategy, which allows for streamlined integration of various input types. This approach not only enhances the faithfulness of the generated image to the control, but also significantly reduces the computational overhead typically associated with multimodal conditioning. Our approach achieves a reduction of 41% in trainable parameters and 30% in memory usage compared with Uni-ControlNet. Moreover, it doubles data efficiency and can flexibly generate images under the guidance of multiple input conditions of various modalities.

E-ViLM: Efficient Video-Language Model via Masked Video Modeling with Semantic Vector-Quantized Tokenizer

To build scalable models for challenging real-world tasks, it is important to learn from diverse, multi-modal data in various forms (e.g., videos, text, and images). Among the existing works, a plethora of them have focused on leveraging large but cumbersome cross-modal architectures. Regardless of their effectiveness, larger architectures unavoidably prevent the models from being extended to real-world applications, so building a lightweight VL architecture and an efficient learning schema is of great practical value. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Video-Language Model (dubbed as E-ViLM) and a masked video modeling (MVM) schema, assisted with a semantic vector-quantized tokenizer. In particular, our E-ViLM learns to reconstruct the semantic labels of masked video regions, produced by the pre-trained vector-quantized tokenizer, which discretizes the continuous visual signals into labels. We show that with our simple MVM task and regular VL pre-training modelings, our E-ViLM, despite its compactness, is able to learn expressive representations from Video-Language corpus and generalize well to extensive Video-Language tasks including video question answering, text-to-video retrieval, etc. In particular, our E-ViLM obtains obvious efficiency improvements by reaching competing performances with faster inference speed, i.e., our model reaches $39.3$% Top-$1$ accuracy on the MSRVTT benchmark, retaining $91.4$% of the accuracy of state-of-the-art larger VL architecture with only $15%$ parameters and $94.8%$ fewer GFLOPs. We also provide extensive ablative studies that validate the effectiveness of our proposed learning schema for E-ViLM.

Text-to-image Editing by Image Information Removal

Diffusion models have demonstrated impressive performance in text-guided image generation. To leverage the knowledge of text-guided image generation models in image editing, current approaches either fine-tune the pretrained models using the input image (e.g., Imagic) or incorporate structure information as additional constraints into the pretrained models (e.g., ControlNet). However, fine-tuning large-scale diffusion models on a single image can lead to severe overfitting issues and lengthy inference time. The information leakage from pretrained models makes it challenging to preserve the text-irrelevant content of the input image while generating new features guided by language descriptions. On the other hand, methods that incorporate structural guidance (e.g., edge maps, semantic maps, keypoints) as additional constraints face limitations in preserving other attributes of the original image, such as colors or textures. A straightforward way to incorporate the original image is to directly use it as an additional control. However, since image editing methods are typically trained on the image reconstruction task, the incorporation can lead to the identical mapping issue, where the model learns to output an image identical to the input, resulting in limited editing capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a text-to-image editing model with Image Information Removal module (IIR) to selectively erase color-related and texture-related information from the original image, allowing us to better preserve the text-irrelevant content and avoid the identical mapping issue. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets: CUB, Outdoor Scenes, and COCO. Our approach achieves the best editability-fidelity trade-off, and our edited images are approximately 35% more preferred by annotators than the prior-arts on COCO.