Diffusion modeLs have demonstrated exceptional efficacy in various generative applications. While existing models focus on minimizing a weighted sum of denoising score matching losses for data distribution modeling, their training primarily emphasizes instance-level optimization, over-looking valuable structural information within each mini-batch, indicative of pair-wise relationships among samples. To address this limitation, we introduce Structure-guided Adversarial training of Diffusion Models (SADM). In this pioneering approach, we compel the model to learn manifold structures between samples in each training batch. To ensure the model captures authentic manifold structures in the data distribution, we advocate adversarial training of the diffusion generator against a novel structure discriminator in a minimax game, distinguishing real manifold structures from the generated ones. SADM substantially outperforms existing methods in image generation and cross-domain fine-tuning tasks across 12 datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.58 and 2.11 on ImageNet for class-conditional image generation at resolutions of$256\times 256$and$512\times 512$, respectively.

Dichotomous Image Segmentation (DIS) tasks require highly precise annotations, and traditional dataset creation methods are labor intensive, costly, and require extensive domain expertise. Although using synthetic data for DIS is a promising solution to these challenges, current generative models and techniques struggle with the issues of scene deviations, noise-induced errors, and limited training sample variability. To address these issues, we introduce a novel approach, Mask Factory, which provides a scalable solution for generating diverse and precise datasets, markedly reducing preparation time and costs. We first introduce a general mask editing method that combines rigid and non-rigid editing techniques to generate high-quality synthetic masks. Specially, rigid editing leverages geometric priors from diffusion models to achieve precise viewpoint transformations under zero-shot conditions, while non-rigid editing employs adversarial training and self-attention mechanisms for complex, topologically consistent modifications. Then, we generate pairs of high-resolution image and accurate segmentation mask using a multi-conditional control generation method. Finally, our experiments on the widely-used DIS5K dataset benchmark demonstrate superior performance in quality and efficiency compared to existing methods. The code is available at https://qian-hao-tian.github.io/MaskFactory/.

In recent years, with the continuous development of the marine industry, underwater image enhancement has attracted plenty of attention. Unfortunately, the propagation of light in water will be absorbed by water bodies and scattered by suspended particles, resulting in color deviation and low contrast. To solve these two problems, we propose an Adaptive Transmission and Dynamic Color guided network (named ATDCnet) for underwater image enhancement. In particular, to exploit the knowledge of physics, we design an Adaptive Transmission-directed Module (ATM) to better guide the network. To deal with the color deviation problem, we design a Dynamic Color-guided Module (DCM) to post-process the enhanced image color. Further, we design an Encoder-Decoder-based (EDC) structure with attention and a multistage feature fusion mechanism to perform color restoration and contrast enhancement simultaneously. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the ATDCnet on multiple benchmark datasets.

Very recently, with the development of underwater robots, underwater image enhancement arising growing interests in the computer vision community. However, owing to light being scattered and absorbed while it traveling in water, underwater captured images often suffer from color cast and low visibility. Existing methods depend on specific prior knowledge and training data to enhance underwater images in the absence of structure information, which results in poor and unnatural performance. To this end, we propose a Structural-Inferred Bi-level Model (SIBM) that incorporates different modalities of knowledge (i.e., semantic domain, gradient-domain, and pixel domain) hierarchically enhancing underwater images. In particular, by introducing a semantic mask, we individually optimize the forehand branch that avoids unnecessary interference arising from the background region. We design a gradient-based high-frequency branch to exploit gradient-space guidance for preserving texture structures. Moreover, we construct a pixel-based branch by feeding semantic and gradient information to enhance underwater images. To exploit different modalities, we introduce a hyper-parameter optimization scheme to fuse the above domain information. Experimental results illustrate that the developed method not only outperforms the previous methods in quantitative scores but also generalizes well on real-world underwater datasets. Source code is available at \hrefhttps://github.com/IntegralCoCo/SIBM https://github.com/IntegralCoCo/SIBM.