A Noise is Worth Diffusion Guidance

Diffusion models excel in generating high-quality images. However, current diffusion models struggle to produce reliable images without guidance methods, such as classifier-free guidance (CFG). Are guidance methods truly necessary? Observing that noise obtained via diffusion inversion can reconstruct high-quality images without guidance, we focus on the initial noise of the denoising pipeline. By mapping Gaussian noise to `guidance-free noise', we uncover that small low-magnitude low-frequency components significantly enhance the denoising process, removing the need for guidance and thus improving both inference throughput and memory. Expanding on this, we propose \ours, a novel method that replaces guidance methods with a single refinement of the initial noise. This refined noise enables high-quality image generation without guidance, within the same diffusion pipeline. Our noise-refining model leverages efficient noise-space learning, achieving rapid convergence and strong performance with just 50K text-image pairs. We validate its effectiveness across diverse metrics and analyze how refined noise can eliminate the need for guidance. See our project page: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/NoiseRefine/.

ControlFace: Harnessing Facial Parametric Control for Face Rigging

Manipulation of facial images to meet specific controls such as pose, expression, and lighting, also known as face rigging, is a complex task in computer vision. Existing methods are limited by their reliance on image datasets, which necessitates individual-specific fine-tuning and limits their ability to retain fine-grained identity and semantic details, reducing practical usability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce ControlFace, a novel face rigging method conditioned on 3DMM renderings that enables flexible, high-fidelity control. We employ a dual-branch U-Nets: one, referred to as FaceNet, captures identity and fine details, while the other focuses on generation. To enhance control precision, the control mixer module encodes the correlated features between the target-aligned control and reference-aligned control, and a novel guidance method, reference control guidance, steers the generation process for better control adherence. By training on a facial video dataset, we fully utilize FaceNet's rich representations while ensuring control adherence. Extensive experiments demonstrate ControlFace's superior performance in identity preservation and control precision, highlighting its practicality. Please see the project website: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/ControlFace/.

Less for More: Enhancing Preference Learning in Generative Language Models with Automated Self-Curation of Training Corpora

Ambiguity in language presents challenges in developing more enhanced language models, particularly in preference learning, where variability among annotators results in inconsistently annotated datasets used for model alignment. To address this issue, we introduce a self-curation method that preprocesses annotated datasets by leveraging proxy models trained directly on these datasets. Our method enhances preference learning by automatically detecting and removing ambiguous annotations within the dataset. The proposed approach is validated through extensive experiments, demonstrating a marked improvement in performance across various instruction-following tasks. Our work provides a straightforward and reliable method to overcome annotation inconsistencies, serving as an initial step towards the development of more advanced preference learning techniques.

Improving Instruction Following in Language Models through Proxy-Based Uncertainty Estimation

Assessing response quality to instructions in language models is vital but challenging due to the complexity of human language across different contexts. This complexity often results in ambiguous or inconsistent interpretations, making accurate assessment difficult. To address this issue, we propose a novel Uncertainty-aware Reward Model (URM) that introduces a robust uncertainty estimation for the quality of paired responses based on Bayesian approximation. Trained with preference datasets, our uncertainty-enabled proxy not only scores rewards for responses but also evaluates their inherent uncertainty. Empirical results demonstrate significant benefits of incorporating the proposed proxy into language model training. Our method boosts the instruction following capability of language models by refining data curation for training and improving policy optimization objectives, thereby surpassing existing methods by a large margin on benchmarks such as Vicuna and MT-bench. These findings highlight that our proposed approach substantially advances language model training and paves a new way of harnessing uncertainty within language models.

Self-Rectifying Diffusion Sampling with Perturbed-Attention Guidance

Recent studies have demonstrated that diffusion models are capable of generating high-quality samples, but their quality heavily depends on sampling guidance techniques, such as classifier guidance (CG) and classifier-free guidance (CFG). These techniques are often not applicable in unconditional generation or in various downstream tasks such as image restoration. In this paper, we propose a novel sampling guidance, called Perturbed-Attention Guidance (PAG), which improves diffusion sample quality across both unconditional and conditional settings, achieving this without requiring additional training or the integration of external modules. PAG is designed to progressively enhance the structure of samples throughout the denoising process. It involves generating intermediate samples with degraded structure by substituting selected self-attention maps in diffusion U-Net with an identity matrix, by considering the self-attention mechanisms' ability to capture structural information, and guiding the denoising process away from these degraded samples. In both ADM and Stable Diffusion, PAG surprisingly improves sample quality in conditional and even unconditional scenarios. Moreover, PAG significantly improves the baseline performance in various downstream tasks where existing guidances such as CG or CFG cannot be fully utilized, including ControlNet with empty prompts and image restoration such as inpainting and deblurring.

Retrieval-Augmented Score Distillation for Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation has achieved significant success by incorporating powerful 2D diffusion models, but insufficient 3D prior knowledge also leads to the inconsistency of 3D geometry. Recently, since large-scale multi-view datasets have been released, fine-tuning the diffusion model on the multi-view datasets becomes a mainstream to solve the 3D inconsistency problem. However, it has confronted with fundamental difficulties regarding the limited quality and diversity of 3D data, compared with 2D data. To sidestep these trade-offs, we explore a retrieval-augmented approach tailored for score distillation, dubbed RetDream. We postulate that both expressiveness of 2D diffusion models and geometric consistency of 3D assets can be fully leveraged by employing the semantically relevant assets directly within the optimization process. To this end, we introduce novel framework for retrieval-based quality enhancement in text-to-3D generation. We leverage the retrieved asset to incorporate its geometric prior in the variational objective and adapt the diffusion model's 2D prior toward view consistency, achieving drastic improvements in both geometry and fidelity of generated scenes. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that RetDream exhibits superior quality with increased geometric consistency. Project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/RetDream/.

Domain Generalization Using Large Pretrained Models with Mixture-of-Adapters

Learning a robust vision model despite large distribution shift is essential for model deployment in real-world settings. Especially, domain generalization (DG) algorithm aims to maintain the performance of a trained model on different distributions which were not seen during training. One of the most effective methods has been leveraging the already learned rich knowledge of large pretrained models. However, naively fine-tuning large models to DG tasks is often practically infeasible due to memory limitations, extensive time requirements for training, and the risk of learned knowledge deterioration. Recently, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been proposed to reduce the high computational cost during training and efficiently adapt large models to downstream tasks. In this work, for the first time, we find that the use of adapters in PEFT methods not only reduce high computational cost during training but also serve as an effective regularizer for DG tasks. Surprisingly, a naive adapter implementation for large models achieve superior performance on common datasets. However, in situations of large distribution shifts, additional factors such as optimal amount of regularization due to the strength of distribution shifts should be considered for a sophisticated adapter implementation. To address this, we propose a mixture-of-expert based adapter fine-tuning method, dubbed as mixture-of-adapters (MoA). Specifically, we employ multiple adapters that have varying capacities, and by using learnable routers, we allocate each token to a proper adapter. By using both PEFT and MoA methods, we effectively alleviate the performance deterioration caused by distribution shifts and achieve state-of-the-art performance on diverse DG benchmarks.

User-friendly Image Editing with Minimal Text Input: Leveraging Captioning and Injection Techniques

Recent text-driven image editing in diffusion models has shown remarkable success. However, the existing methods assume that the user's description sufficiently grounds the contexts in the source image, such as objects, background, style, and their relations. This assumption is unsuitable for real-world applications because users have to manually engineer text prompts to find optimal descriptions for different images. From the users' standpoint, prompt engineering is a labor-intensive process, and users prefer to provide a target word for editing instead of a full sentence. To address this problem, we first demonstrate the importance of a detailed text description of the source image, by dividing prompts into three categories based on the level of semantic details. Then, we propose simple yet effective methods by combining prompt generation frameworks, thereby making the prompt engineering process more user-friendly. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the importance of prompts in text-driven image editing and our method is comparable to ground-truth prompts.

Let 2D Diffusion Model Know 3D-Consistency for Robust Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation has shown rapid progress in recent days with the advent of score distillation, a methodology of using pretrained text-to-2D diffusion models to optimize neural radiance field (NeRF) in the zero-shot setting. However, the lack of 3D awareness in the 2D diffusion models destabilizes score distillation-based methods from reconstructing a plausible 3D scene. To address this issue, we propose 3DFuse, a novel framework that incorporates 3D awareness into pretrained 2D diffusion models, enhancing the robustness and 3D consistency of score distillation-based methods. We realize this by first constructing a coarse 3D structure of a given text prompt and then utilizing projected, view-specific depth map as a condition for the diffusion model. Additionally, we introduce a training strategy that enables the 2D diffusion model learns to handle the errors and sparsity within the coarse 3D structure for robust generation, as well as a method for ensuring semantic consistency throughout all viewpoints of the scene. Our framework surpasses the limitations of prior arts, and has significant implications for 3D consistent generation of 2D diffusion models.

DAG: Depth-Aware Guidance with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

In recent years, generative models have undergone significant advancement due to the success of diffusion models. The success of these models is often attributed to their use of guidance techniques, such as classifier and classifier-free methods, which provides effective mechanisms to trade-off between fidelity and diversity. However, these methods are not capable of guiding a generated image to be aware of its geometric configuration, e.g., depth, which hinders the application of diffusion models to areas that require a certain level of depth awareness. To address this limitation, we propose a novel guidance approach for diffusion models that uses estimated depth information derived from the rich intermediate representations of diffusion models. To do this, we first present a label-efficient depth estimation framework using the internal representations of diffusion models. At the sampling phase, we utilize two guidance techniques to self-condition the generated image using the estimated depth map, the first of which uses pseudo-labeling, and the subsequent one uses a depth-domain diffusion prior. Experiments and extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in guiding the diffusion models toward geometrically plausible image generation. Project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/DAG/.