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David Minnen

David Minnen

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    VideoPoet: A Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Video Generation
    Lijun Yu
    Xiuye Gu
    Rachel Hornung
    Hassan Akbari
    Ming-Chang Chiu
    Josh Dillon
    Agrim Gupta
    Meera Hahn
    Anja Hauth
    David Hendon
    Alonso Martinez
    Grant Schindler
    Huisheng Wang
    Jimmy Yan
    Xuan Yang
    Lu Jiang
    arxiv Preprint (2023) (to appear)
    Preview abstract We present VideoPoet, a language model capable of synthesizing high-quality video, with matching audio, from a large variety of conditioning signals. VideoPoet employs a decoder-only transformer architecture that processes multimodal inputs -- including images, videos, text, and audio. The training protocol follows that of Large Language Models (LLMs), consisting of two stages: pretraining and task-specific adaptation. During pretraining, VideoPoet incorporates a mixture of multimodal generative objectives within an autoregressive Transformer framework. The pretrained LLM serves as a foundation that can be adapted for a range of video generation tasks. We present empirical results demonstrating the model's state-of-the-art capabilities in zero-shot video generation, specifically highlighting VideoPoet's ability to generate high-fidelity motions. Project page: http://sites.research.google/videopoet/ View details
    Preview abstract The rate-distortion performance of neural image compression models has exceeded the state-of-the-art of non-learned codecs, but neural codecs are still far from widespread deployment and adoption. The largest obstacle is having efficient models that are feasible on a wide variety of consumer hardware. Comparative research and evaluation is difficult because of the lack of standard benchmarking platforms and by variations in hardware architectures and test environments.Through our rate-distortion-computation (RDC) study we demonstrate that neither floating-point operations (FLOPs) nor runtime are sufficient on their own to accurately rank neural compression methods. We also explore the RDC frontier, which leads to a family of model architectures with the best empirical trade-off between computational requirements and RD performance. Finally, we identify a novel neural compression architecture that yields state-of-the-art RD performance with rate savings of 23.1% over BPG (7.0% overVTM and 3.0% over ELIC) without requiring significantly more FLOPs than other learning-based codecs View details
    Preview abstract We show how transformers can be used to vastly simplify neural video compression. Previous methods have been relying on an increasing number of architectural biases and priors, including motion prediction and warping operations, resulting in complex models. Instead, we independently map input frames to representations and use a transformer to model their dependencies, letting it predict the distribution of future representations given the past. The resulting video compression transformer outperforms previous methods on standard video compression data sets. Experiments on synthetic data show that our model learns to handle complex motion patterns such as panning, blurring and fading purely from data. Our approach is easy to implement, and we release code to facilitate future research. View details
    Preview abstract We present the first neural video compression method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs). Our approach significantly outperforms previous neural and non-neural video compression methods in a user study, setting a new state-of-the-art in visual quality for neural methods. We show that the GAN loss is crucial to obtain this high visual quality. Two components make the GAN loss effective: we i) synthesize detail by conditioning the generator on a latent extracted from the warped previous reconstruction to then ii) propagate this detail with high-quality flow. We find that user studies are required to compare methods, i.e., none of our quantitative metrics were able to predict all studies. We present the network design choices in detail, and ablate them with user studies. View details
    Preview abstract Connectomic reconstruction of neural circuits relies on nanometer resolution microscopy which produces on the order of a petabyte of imagery for each cubic millimeter of brain tissue. The cost of storing such data is a significant barrier to broadening the use of connectomic approaches and scaling to even larger volumes. We present an image compression approach that uses machine learning-based denoising and standard image codecs to compress raw electron microscopy imagery of neuropil up to 17-fold with negligible loss of reconstruction accuracy. View details
    Nonlinear Transform Coding
    Philip A. Chou
    Sung Jin Hwang
    IEEE Trans. on Special Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 15 (2021) (to appear)
    Preview abstract We review a class of methods that can be collected under the name nonlinear transform coding (NTC), which over the past few years have become competitive with the best linear transform codecs for images, and have superseded them in terms of rate–distortion performance under established perceptual quality metrics such as MS-SSIM. We assess the empirical rate–distortion performance of NTC with the help of simple example sources, for which the optimal performance of a vector quantizer is easier to estimate than with natural data sources. To this end, we introduce a novel variant of entropy-constrained vector quantization. We provide an analysis of various forms of stochastic optimization techniques for NTC models; review architectures of transforms based on artificial neural networks, as well as learned entropy models; and provide a direct comparison of a number of methods to parameterize the rate–distortion trade-off of nonlinear transforms, introducing a simplified one. View details
    Preview abstract Despite considerable progress on end-to-end optimized deep networks for image compression, video coding remains a challenging task. Recently proposed methods for learned video compression use optical flow and bilinear warping for motion compensation and show competitive rate-distortion performance relative to hand-engineered codecs like H.264 and HEVC. However, these learning-based methods rely on complex architectures and training schemes including the use of pre-trained optical flow networks, sequential training of sub-networks, adaptive rate control, and buffering intermediate reconstructions to disk during training. In this paper, we show that a generalized warping operator that better handles common failure cases, e.g. disocclusions and fast motion, can provide competitive compression results with a greatly simplified model and training procedure. Specifically, we propose scale-space flow, an intuitive generalization of optical flow that adds a scale parameter to allow the network to better model uncertainty. Our experiments show that a low-latency video compression model (no B-frames) using scale-space flow for motion compensation can outperform analogous state-of-the art learned video compression models while being trained using a much simpler procedure and without any pre-trained optical flow networks. View details
    Preview abstract We consider the problem of using variational latent-variable models for data compression. For such models to produce a compressed binary sequence, which is the universal data representation in a digital world, the latent representation needs to be subjected to entropy coding. Range coding as an entropy coding technique is optimal, but it can fail catastrophically if the computation of the prior differs even slightly between the sending and the receiving side. Unfortunately, this is a common scenario when floating point math is used and the sender and receiver operate on different hardware or software platforms, as numerical round-off is often platform dependent. We propose using integer networks as a universal solution to this problem, and demonstrate that they enable reliable cross-platform encoding and decoding of images using variational models. View details
    Preview abstract Recent models for learned image compression are based on autoencoders that learn approximately invertible mappings from pixels to a quantized latent representation. The transforms are combined with an entropy model, which is a prior on the latent representation that can be used with standard arithmetic coding algorithms to generate a compressed bitstream. Recently, hierarchical entropy models were introduced as a way to exploit more structure in the latents than previous fully factorized priors, improving compression performance while maintaining end-to-end optimization. Inspired by the success of autoregressive priors in probabilistic generative models, we examine autoregressive, hierarchical, and combined priors as alternatives, weighing their costs and benefits in the context of image compression. While it is well known that autoregressive models can incur a significant computational penalty, we find that in terms of compression performance, autoregressive and hierarchical priors are complementary and can be combined to exploit the probabilistic structure in the latents better than all previous learned models. The combined model yields state-of-the-art rate–distortion performance and generates smaller files than existing methods: 15.8% rate reductions over the baseline hierarchical model and 59.8%, 35%, and 8.4% savings over JPEG, JPEG2000, and BPG, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, our model is the first learning-based method to outperform the top standard image codec (BPG) on both the PSNR and MS-SSIM distortion metrics. View details
    Preview abstract The leading approach for image compression with artificial neural networks (ANNs) is to learn a nonlinear transform and a fixed entropy model that is directly optimized for rate-distortion performance. We show that this approach can be significantly improved by incorporating spatially local, image-dependent entropy models. The key insight is that existing ANN-based methods learn an entropy model that is shared between the encoder and decoder, but they do not transmit any side information that would allow the model to adapt to the structure of a specific image. We present a method for augmenting ANN-based image coders with image-dependent side information that leads to a 17.8% rate reduction over a state-of-the-art ANN-based baseline model on a standard evaluation set, and 70-98% reductions on images with low visual complexity that are poorly captured by a fixed, global entropy model. View details
    Preview abstract We propose a method for lossy image compression based on recurrent, convolutional neural networks that outperforms BPG (4:2:0), WebP, JPEG2000, and JPEG as measured by MS-SSIM. We introduce three improvements over previous research that lead to this state-of-the-art result using a single model. First, we show that training with a pixel-wise loss weighted by SSIM increases reconstruction quality according to several metrics. Second, we modify the recurrent architecture to improve spatial diffusion, which allows the network to more effectively capture and propagate image information through the network’s hidden state. Finally, in addition to lossless entropy coding, we use a spatially adaptive bit allocation algorithm to more efficiently use the limited number of bits to encode visually complex image regions. We evaluate our method on the Kodak and Tecnick image sets and compare against standard codecs as well recently published methods based on deep neural networks. View details
    Preview abstract We describe an end-to-end trainable model for image compression based on variational autoencoders. The model incorporates a hyperprior to effectively capture spatial dependencies in the latent representation. This hyperprior relates to side information, a concept universal to virtually all modern image codecs, but largely unexplored in image compression using artificial neural networks (ANNs). Unlike existing autoencoder compression methods, our model trains a complex prior jointly with the underlying autoencoder. We demonstrate that this model leads to state-of-the-art image compression when measuring visual quality using the popular MS-SSIM index, and yields rate–distortion performance surpassing published ANN-based methods when evaluated using a more traditional metric based on squared error (PSNR). Furthermore, we provide a qualitative comparison of models trained for different distortion metrics. View details
    Preview abstract We present a full reference, perceptual image metric based on VGG-16, an artificial neural network trained on object classification. We fit the metric to a new database based on 140k unique images annotated with ground truth by human raters who received minimal instruction. The resulting metric shows competitive performance on TID 2013, a database widely used to assess image quality assessments methods. More interestingly, it shows strong responses to objects potentially carrying semantic relevance such as faces and text, which we demonstrate using a visualization technique and ablation experiments. In effect, the metric appears to model a higher influence of semantic context on judgements, which we observe particularly in untrained raters. As the vast majority of users of image processing systems are unfamiliar with Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks, these findings may have significant impact on real-world applications of perceptual metrics. View details
    Spatially adaptive image compression using a tiled deep network
    Michele Covell
    Sung Jin Hwang
    Damien Vincent
    Proceedings of the International Conference on Image Processing (2017), pp. 2796-2800
    Preview abstract Deep neural networks represent a powerful class of function approximators that can learn to compress and reconstruct images. Existing image compression algorithms based on neural networks learn quantized representations with a constant spatial bit rate across each image. While entropy coding introduces some spatial variation, traditional codecs have benefited significantly by explicitly adapting the bit rate based on local image complexity and visual saliency. This paper introduces an algorithm that combines deep neural networks with quality-sensitive bit rate adaptation using a tiled network. We demonstrate the importance of spatial context prediction and show improved quantitative (PSNR) and qualitative (subjective rater assessment) results compared to a non-adaptive baseline and a recently published image compression model based on fully-convolutional neural networks. View details
    Variable Rate Image Compression with Recurrent Neural Networks
    Sung Jin Hwang
    Damien Vincent
    Michele Covell
    International Conference on Learning Representations (2016)
    Preview abstract A large fraction of Internet traffic is now driven by requests from mobile devices with relatively small screens and often stringent bandwidth requirements. Due to these factors, it has become the norm for modern graphics-heavy websites to transmit low-resolution, low-bytecount image previews (thumbnails) as part of the initial page load process to improve apparent page responsiveness. Increasing thumbnail compression beyond the capabilities of existing codecs is therefore a current research focus, as any byte savings will significantly enhance the experience of mobile device users. Toward this end, we propose a general framework for variable-rate image compression and a novel architecture based on convolutional and deconvolutional LSTM recurrent networks. Our models address the main issues that have prevented autoencoder neural networks from competing with existing image compression algorithms: (1) our networks only need to be trained once (not per-image), regardless of input image dimensions and the desired compression rate; (2) our networks are progressive, meaning that the more bits are sent, the more accurate the image reconstruction; and (3) the proposed architecture is at least as efficient as a standard purpose-trained autoencoder for a given number of bits. On a large-scale benchmark of 32×32 thumbnails, our LSTM-based approaches provide better visual quality than (headerless) JPEG, JPEG2000 and WebP, with a storage size that is reduced by 10% or more. View details
    Preview abstract This paper presents a set of full-resolution lossy image compression methods based on neural networks. Each of the architectures we describe can provide variable compression rates during deployment without requiring retraining of the network: each network need only be trained once. All of our architectures consist of a recurrent neural network (RNN)-based encoder and decoder, a binarizer, and a neural network for entropy coding. We compare RNN types (LSTM, associative LSTM) and introduce a new hybrid of GRU and ResNet. We also study "one-shot" versus additive reconstruction architectures and introduce a new scaled-additive framework. We compare to previous work, showing improvements of 4.3%-8.8% AUC (area under the rate-distortion curve), depending on the perceptual metric used. As far as we know, this is the first neural network architecture that is able to outperform JPEG at image compression across most bitrates on the rate-distortion curve on the Kodak dataset images, with and without the aid of entropy coding. View details
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