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 Waters, Austin


Greedy Growing Enables High-Resolution Pixel-Based Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We address the long-standing problem of how to learn effective pixel-based image diffusion models at scale, introducing a remarkably simple greedy growing method for stable training of large-scale, high-resolution models. without the needs for cascaded super-resolution components. The key insight stems from careful pre-training of core components, namely, those responsible for text-to-image alignment {\it vs.} high-resolution rendering. We first demonstrate the benefits of scaling a {\it Shallow UNet}, with no down(up)-sampling enc(dec)oder. Scaling its deep core layers is shown to improve alignment, object structure, and composition. Building on this core model, we propose a greedy algorithm that grows the architecture into high-resolution end-to-end models, while preserving the integrity of the pre-trained representation, stabilizing training, and reducing the need for large high-resolution datasets. This enables a single stage model capable of generating high-resolution images without the need of a super-resolution cascade. Our key results rely on public datasets and show that we are able to train non-cascaded models up to 8B parameters with no further regularization schemes. Vermeer, our full pipeline model trained with internal datasets to produce 1024x1024 images, without cascades, is preferred by 44.0% vs. 21.4% human evaluators over SDXL.


Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of Gemini models in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases and we discuss our approach toward deploying them responsibly to users.


PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We present the training recipe and results of scaling up PaLI-X, a multilingual vision and language model, both in terms of size of the components and the breadth of its training task mixture. Our model achieves new levels of performance on a wide-range of varied and complex tasks, including multiple image-based captioning and question-answering tasks, image-based document understanding and few-shot (in-context) learning, as well as object detection, video question answering, and video captioning. PaLI-X advances the state-of-the-art on most vision-and-language benchmarks considered (25+ of them). Finally, we observe emerging capabilities, such as complex counting and multilingual object detection, tasks that are not explicitly in the training mix.


A New Path: Scaling Vision-and-Language Navigation with Synthetic Instructions and Imitation Learning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent studies in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) train RL agents to execute natural-language navigation instructions in photorealistic environments, as a step towards robots that can follow human instructions. However, given the scarcity of human instruction data and limited diversity in the training environments, these agents still struggle with complex language grounding and spatial language understanding. Pretraining on large text and image-text datasets from the web has been extensively explored but the improvements are limited. We investigate large-scale augmentation with synthetic instructions. We take 500+ indoor environments captured in densely-sampled 360 degree panoramas, construct navigation trajectories through these panoramas, and generate a visually-grounded instruction for each trajectory using Marky, a high-quality multilingual navigation instruction generator. We also synthesize image observations from novel viewpoints using an image-to-image GAN. The resulting dataset of 4.2M instruction-trajectory pairs is two orders of magnitude larger than existing human-annotated datasets, and contains a wider variety of environments and viewpoints. To efficiently leverage data at this scale, we train a simple transformer agent with imitation learning. On the challenging RxR dataset, our approach outperforms all existing RL agents, improving the state-of-the-art NDTW from 71.1 to 79.1 in seen environments, and from 64.6 to 66.8 in unseen test environments. Our work points to a new path to improving instruction-following agents, emphasizing large-scale imitation learning and the development of synthetic instruction generation capabilities.


Simple and Effective Synthesis of Indoor 3D Scenes

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study the problem of synthesizing immersive 3D indoor scenes from one or more images. Our aim is to generate high-resolution images and videos from novel viewpoints, including viewpoints that extrapolate far beyond the input images while maintaining 3D consistency. Existing approaches are highly complex, with many separately trained stages and components. We propose a simple alternative: an image-to-image GAN that maps directly from reprojections of incomplete point clouds to full high-resolution RGB-D images. On the Matterport3D and RealEstate10K datasets, our approach significantly outperforms prior work when evaluated by humans, as well as on FID scores. Further, we show that our model is useful for generative data augmentation. A vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agent trained with trajectories spatially-perturbed by our model improves success rate by up to 1.5% over a state of the art baseline on the R2R benchmark. Our code will be made available to facilitate generative data augmentation and applications to downstream robotics and embodied AI tasks.


GRADE: Machine Learning Support for Graduate Admissions

AI Magazine

This article describes GRADE, a statistical machine learning system developed to support the work of the graduate admissions committee at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science (UTCS). In recent years, the number of applications to the UTCS PhD program has become too large to manage with a traditional review process. GRADE makes the review process more efficient by enabling reviewers to spend most of their time on applicants near the decision boundary and by focusing their attention on parts of each applicant's file that matter the most. An evaluation over two seasons of PhD admissions indicates that the system leads to dramatic time savings, reducing the total time spent on reviews by at least 74 percent.


GRADE: Machine Learning Support for Graduate Admissions

AI Magazine

This article describes GRADE, a statistical machine learning system developed to support the work of the graduate admissions committee at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science (UTCS). In recent years, the number of applications to the UTCS PhD program has become too large to manage with a traditional review process. GRADE uses historical admissions data to predict how likely the committee is to admit each new applicant. It reports each prediction as a score similar to those used by human reviewers, and accompanies each by an explanation of what applicant features most influenced its prediction. GRADE makes the review process more efficient by enabling reviewers to spend most of their time on applicants near the decision boundary and by focusing their attention on parts of each applicant’s file that matter the most. An evaluation over two seasons of PhD admissions indicates that the system leads to dramatic time savings, reducing the total time spent on reviews by at least 74 percent.


GRADE: Machine Learning Support for Graduate Admissions

AAAI Conferences

This paper describes GRADE, a statistical machine learning system developed to support the work of the graduate admissions committee at the University of Texas at Austin Department of Computer Science (UTCS). In recent years, the number of applications to the UTCS PhD program has become too large to manage with a traditional review process. GRADE uses historical admissions data to predict how likely the committee is to admit each new applicant. It reports each prediction as a score similar to those used by human reviewers, and accompanies each by an explanation of what applicant features most influenced its prediction. GRADE makes the review process more efficient by enabling reviewers to spend most of their time on applicants near the decision boundary and by focusing their attention on parts of each applicant’s file that matter the most. An evaluation over two seasons of PhD admissions indicates that the system leads to dramatic time savings, reducing the total time spent on reviews by at least 74%.