Transformed Low-rank Adaptation via Tensor Decomposition and Its Applications to Text-to-image Models

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) of text-to-image models has become an increasingly popular technique with many applications. Among the various PEFT methods, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and its variants have gained significant attention due to their effectiveness, enabling users to fine-tune models with limited computational resources. However, the approximation gap between the low-rank assumption and desired fine-tuning weights prevents the simultaneous acquisition of ultra-parameter-efficiency and better performance. To reduce this gap and further improve the power of LoRA, we propose a new PEFT method that combines two classes of adaptations, namely, transform and residual adaptations. In specific, we first apply a full-rank and dense transform to the pre-trained weight. This learnable transform is expected to align the pre-trained weight as closely as possible to the desired weight, thereby reducing the rank of the residual weight. Then, the residual part can be effectively approximated by more compact and parameter-efficient structures, with a smaller approximation error. To achieve ultra-parameter-efficiency in practice, we design highly flexible and effective tensor decompositions for both the transform and residual adaptations. Additionally, popular PEFT methods such as DoRA can be summarized under this transform plus residual adaptation scheme. Experiments are conducted on fine-tuning Stable Diffusion models in subject-driven and controllable generation. The results manifest that our method can achieve better performances and parameter efficiency compared to LoRA and several baselines.

CCStereo: Audio-Visual Contextual and Contrastive Learning for Binaural Audio Generation

Binaural audio generation (BAG) aims to convert monaural audio to stereo audio using visual prompts, requiring a deep understanding of spatial and semantic information. However, current models risk overfitting to room environments and lose fine-grained spatial details. In this paper, we propose a new audio-visual binaural generation model incorporating an audio-visual conditional normalisation layer that dynamically aligns the mean and variance of the target difference audio features using visual context, along with a new contrastive learning method to enhance spatial sensitivity by mining negative samples from shuffled visual features. We also introduce a cost-efficient way to utilise test-time augmentation in video data to enhance performance. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art generation accuracy on the FAIR-Play and MUSIC-Stereo benchmarks.

Taming Multimodal Joint Training for High-Quality Video-to-Audio Synthesis

We propose to synthesize high-quality and synchronized audio, given video and optional text conditions, using a novel multimodal joint training framework MMAudio. In contrast to single-modality training conditioned on (limited) video data only, MMAudio is jointly trained with larger-scale, readily available text-audio data to learn to generate semantically aligned high-quality audio samples. Additionally, we improve audio-visual synchrony with a conditional synchronization module that aligns video conditions with audio latents at the frame level. Trained with a flow matching objective, MMAudio achieves new video-to-audio state-of-the-art among public models in terms of audio quality, semantic alignment, and audio-visual synchronization, while having a low inference time (1.23s to generate an 8s clip) and just 157M parameters. MMAudio also achieves surprisingly competitive performance in text-to-audio generation, showing that joint training does not hinder single-modality performance. Code and demo are available at: https://hkchengrex.github.io/MMAudio

SAVGBench: Benchmarking Spatially Aligned Audio-Video Generation

This work addresses the lack of multimodal generative models capable of producing high-quality videos with spatially aligned audio. While recent advancements in generative models have been successful in video generation, they often overlook the spatial alignment between audio and visuals, which is essential for immersive experiences. To tackle this problem, we establish a new research direction in benchmarking Spatially Aligned Audio-Video Generation (SAVG). We propose three key components for the benchmark: dataset, baseline, and metrics. We introduce a spatially aligned audio-visual dataset, derived from an audio-visual dataset consisting of multichannel audio, video, and spatiotemporal annotations of sound events. We propose a baseline audio-visual diffusion model focused on stereo audio-visual joint learning to accommodate spatial sound. Finally, we present metrics to evaluate video and spatial audio quality, including a new spatial audio-visual alignment metric. Our experimental result demonstrates that gaps exist between the baseline model and ground truth in terms of video and audio quality, and spatial alignment between both modalities.

TraSCE: Trajectory Steering for Concept Erasure

Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have brought them to the public spotlight, becoming widely accessible and embraced by everyday users. However, these models have been shown to generate harmful content such as not-safe-for-work (NSFW) images. While approaches have been proposed to erase such abstract concepts from the models, jail-breaking techniques have succeeded in bypassing such safety measures. In this paper, we propose TraSCE, an approach to guide the diffusion trajectory away from generating harmful content. Our approach is based on negative prompting, but as we show in this paper, conventional negative prompting is not a complete solution and can easily be bypassed in some corner cases. To address this issue, we first propose a modification of conventional negative prompting. Furthermore, we introduce a localized loss-based guidance that enhances the modified negative prompting technique by steering the diffusion trajectory. We demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks in removing harmful content including ones proposed by red teams; and erasing artistic styles and objects. Our proposed approach does not require any training, weight modifications, or training data (both image or prompt), making it easier for model owners to erase new concepts.

Blind Inverse Problem Solving Made Easy by Text-to-Image Latent Diffusion

Blind inverse problems, where both the target data and forward operator are unknown, are crucial to many computer vision applications. Existing methods often depend on restrictive assumptions such as additional training, operator linearity, or narrow image distributions, thus limiting their generalizability. In this work, we present LADiBI, a training-free framework that uses large-scale text-to-image diffusion models to solve blind inverse problems with minimal assumptions. By leveraging natural language prompts, LADiBI jointly models priors for both the target image and operator, allowing for flexible adaptation across a variety of tasks. Additionally, we propose a novel posterior sampling approach that combines effective operator initialization with iterative refinement, enabling LADiBI to operate without predefined operator forms. Our experiments show that LADiBI is capable of solving a broad range of image restoration tasks, including both linear and nonlinear problems, on diverse target image distributions.

Classifier-Free Guidance inside the Attraction Basin May Cause Memorization

Diffusion models are prone to exactly reproduce images from the training data. This exact reproduction of the training data is concerning as it can lead to copyright infringement and/or leakage of privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we present a novel way to understand the memorization phenomenon, and propose a simple yet effective approach to mitigate it. We argue that memorization occurs because of an attraction basin in the denoising process which steers the diffusion trajectory towards a memorized image. However, this can be mitigated by guiding the diffusion trajectory away from the attraction basin by not applying classifier-free guidance until an ideal transition point occurs from which classifier-free guidance is applied. This leads to the generation of non-memorized images that are high in image quality and well-aligned with the conditioning mechanism. To further improve on this, we present a new guidance technique, \emph{opposite guidance}, that escapes the attraction basin sooner in the denoising process. We demonstrate the existence of attraction basins in various scenarios in which memorization occurs, and we show that our proposed approach successfully mitigates memorization.

Music Foundation Model as Generic Booster for Music Downstream Tasks

We demonstrate the efficacy of using intermediate representations from a single foundation model to enhance various music downstream tasks. We introduce SoniDo, a music foundation model (MFM) designed to extract hierarchical features from target music samples. By leveraging hierarchical intermediate features, SoniDo constrains the information granularity, leading to improved performance across various downstream tasks including both understanding and generative tasks. We specifically evaluated this approach on representative tasks such as music tagging, music transcription, music source separation, and music mixing. Our results reveal that the features extracted from foundation models provide valuable enhancements in training downstream task models. This highlights the capability of using features extracted from music foundation models as a booster for downstream tasks. Our approach not only benefits existing task-specific models but also supports music downstream tasks constrained by data scarcity. This paves the way for more effective and accessible music processing solutions.

OpenMU: Your Swiss Army Knife for Music Understanding

We present OpenMU-Bench, a large-scale benchmark suite for addressing the data scarcity issue in training multimodal language models to understand music. To construct OpenMU-Bench, we leveraged existing datasets and bootstrapped new annotations. OpenMU-Bench also broadens the scope of music understanding by including lyrics understanding and music tool usage. Using OpenMU-Bench, we trained our music understanding model, OpenMU, with extensive ablations, demonstrating that OpenMU outperforms baseline models such as MU-Llama. Both OpenMU and OpenMU-Bench are open-sourced to facilitate future research in music understanding and to enhance creative music production efficiency.

Mitigating Embedding Collapse in Diffusion Models for Categorical Data

Latent diffusion models have enabled continuous-state diffusion models to handle a variety of datasets, including categorical data. However, most methods rely on fixed pretrained embeddings, limiting the benefits of joint training with the diffusion model. While jointly learning the embedding (via reconstruction loss) and the latent diffusion model (via score matching loss) could enhance performance, our analysis shows that end-to-end training risks embedding collapse, degrading generation quality. To address this issue, we introduce CATDM, a continuous diffusion framework within the embedding space that stabilizes training. We propose a novel objective combining the joint embedding-diffusion variational lower bound with a Consistency-Matching (CM) regularizer, alongside a shifted cosine noise schedule and random dropping strategy. The CM regularizer ensures the recovery of the true data distribution. Experiments on benchmarks show that CATDM mitigates embedding collapse, yielding superior results on FFHQ, LSUN Churches, and LSUN Bedrooms. In particular, CATDM achieves an FID of 6.81 on ImageNet $256\times256$ with 50 steps. It outperforms non-autoregressive models in machine translation and is on a par with previous methods in text generation.