Austin Waters

TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

Greedy Growing Enables High-Resolution Pixel-Based Diffusion Models

• Cristina Nader Vasconcelos
• Abdullah Rashwan
• Austin Waters
• Trevor Walker
• Keyang Xu
• Jimmy Yan
• Rui Qian
• Yeqing Li

We address the long-standing problem of how to learn effective pixel-based image diffusion models at scale, introducing a remarkably simple greedy 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 vs. high resolution rendering. We first demonstrate the benefits of scaling a 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 1024×1024 images, without cascades, is preferred by 44.0% vs. 21.4% human evaluators over SDXL.

AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Simple and Effective Synthesis of Indoor 3D Scenes

• Jing Yu Koh
• Harsh Agrawal
• Dhruv Batra
• Richard Tucker
• Austin Waters
• Honglak Lee
• Yinfei Yang
• Jason Baldridge

We study the problem of synthesizing immersive 3D indoor scenes from one or a few 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 mature R2R benchmark. Our code will be made available to facilitate generative data augmentation and applications to downstream robotics and embodied AI tasks.

ICML Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Spherical Topic Models

• Joseph Reisinger
• Austin Waters
• Bryan Silverthorn
• Raymond Mooney