Efficient Diffusion Models: A Comprehensive Survey from Principles to Practices

As one of the most popular and sought-after generative models in the recent years, diffusion models have sparked the interests of many researchers and steadily shown excellent advantage in various generative tasks such as image synthesis, video generation, molecule design, 3D scene rendering and multimodal generation, relying on their dense theoretical principles and reliable application practices. The remarkable success of these recent efforts on diffusion models comes largely from progressive design principles and efficient architecture, training, inference, and deployment methodologies. However, there has not been a comprehensive and in-depth review to summarize these principles and practices to help the rapid understanding and application of diffusion models. In this survey, we provide a new efficiency-oriented perspective on these existing efforts, which mainly focuses on the profound principles and efficient practices in architecture designs, model training, fast inference and reliable deployment, to guide further theoretical research, algorithm migration and model application for new scenarios in a reader-friendly way. \url{https://github.com/ponyzym/Efficient-DMs-Survey}

EventLens: Leveraging Event-Aware Pretraining and Cross-modal Linking Enhances Visual Commonsense Reasoning

Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) is a cognitive task, challenging models to answer visual questions requiring human commonsense, and to provide rationales explaining why the answers are correct. With emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), it is natural and imperative to explore their applicability to VCR. However, VCR task demands more external knowledge to tackle its challenging questions, necessitating special designs to activate LLMs' commonsense reasoning abilities. Also, most existing Multimodal LLMs adopted an abstraction of entire input image, which makes it difficult to comprehend VCR's unique co-reference tags between image regions and text, posing challenges for fine-grained alignment. To address these issues, we propose EventLens that leverages Event-Aware Pretraining and Cross-modal Linking and EnhanceS VCR. First, by emulating the cognitive process of human reasoning, an Event-Aware Pretraining auxiliary task is introduced to better activate LLM's global comprehension of intricate scenarios. Second, during fine-tuning, we further utilize reference tags to bridge RoI features with texts, while preserving both modality semantics. Finally, we use instruct-style prompts to narrow the gap between pretraining and fine-tuning, and task-specific adapters to better integrate LLM's inherent knowledge with new commonsense. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed auxiliary task and fine-grained linking strategy.