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Diffusion with Forward Models: Solving Stochastic Inverse Problems Without Direct Supervision
Ayush Tewari · Tianwei Yin · George Cazenavette · Semon Rezchikov · Josh Tenenbaum · Fredo Durand · Bill Freeman · Vincent Sitzmann

Thu Dec 14 08:45 AM -- 10:45 AM (PST) @ Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 #202
in Poster Session 5 »

Denoising diffusion models are a powerful type of generative models used to capture complex distributions of real-world signals. However, their applicability is limited to scenarios where training samples are readily available, which is not always the case in real-world applications. For example, in inverse graphics, the goal is to generate samples from a distribution of 3D scenes that align with a given image, but ground-truth 3D scenes are unavailable and only 2D images are accessible. To address this limitation, we propose a novel class of denoising diffusion probabilistic models that learn to sample from distributions of signals that are never directly observed. Instead, these signals are measured indirectly through a known differentiable forward model, which produces partial observations of the unknown signal. Our approach involves integrating the forward model directly into the denoising process. A key contribution of our work is the integration of a differentiable forward model into the denoising process. This integration effectively connects the generative modeling of observations with the generative modeling of the underlying signals, allowing for end-to-end training of a conditional generative model over signals. During inference, our approach enables sampling from the distribution of underlying signals that are consistent with a given partial observation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three challenging computer vision tasks. For instance, in the context of inverse graphics, our model enables direct sampling from the distribution of 3D scenes that align with a single 2D input image.

Author Information

Ayush Tewari (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Tianwei Yin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
George Cazenavette (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Semon Rezchikov (Harvard University)
Josh Tenenbaum (MIT)

Josh Tenenbaum is an Associate Professor of Computational Cognitive Science at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received his PhD from MIT in 1999, and was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University from 1999 to 2002. He studies learning and inference in humans and machines, with the twin goals of understanding human intelligence in computational terms and bringing computers closer to human capacities. He focuses on problems of inductive generalization from limited data -- learning concepts and word meanings, inferring causal relations or goals -- and learning abstract knowledge that supports these inductive leaps in the form of probabilistic generative models or 'intuitive theories'. He has also developed several novel machine learning methods inspired by human learning and perception, most notably Isomap, an approach to unsupervised learning of nonlinear manifolds in high-dimensional data. He has been Associate Editor for the journal Cognitive Science, has been active on program committees for the CogSci and NIPS conferences, and has co-organized a number of workshops, tutorials and summer schools in human and machine learning. Several of his papers have received outstanding paper awards or best student paper awards at the IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), NIPS, and Cognitive Science conferences. He is the recipient of the New Investigator Award from the Society for Mathematical Psychology (2005), the Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2007), and the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (in the area of cognition and human learning) from the American Psychological Association (2008).

Fredo Durand (MIT)
Bill Freeman (MIT/Google)
Vincent Sitzmann (MIT)

Vincent is an incoming Assistant Professor at MIT EECS, where he will lead the Scene Representation Group (scenerepresentations.org). Currently, he is a Postdoc at MIT's CSAIL with Josh Tenenbaum, Bill Freeman, and Fredo Durand. He finished his Ph.D. at Stanford University. His research interest lies in neural scene representations - the way neural networks learn to represent information on our world. His goal is to allow independent agents to reason about our world given visual observations, such as inferring a complete model of a scene with information on geometry, material, lighting etc. from only few observations, a task that is simple for humans, but currently impossible for AI.

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