DISGO: Automatic End-to-End Evaluation for Scene Text OCR

Mei-Yuh Hwang, Yangyang Shi, Ankit Ramchandani, Guan Pang, Praveen Krishnan, Lucas Kabela, Frank Seide, Samyak Datta, Jun Liu

This paper discusses the challenges of optical character recognition (OCR) on natural scenes, which is harder than OCR on documents due to the wild content and various image backgrounds. We propose to uniformly use word error rates (WER) as a new measurement for evaluating scene-text OCR, both end-to-end (e2e) performance and individual system component performances. Particularly for the e2e metric, we name it DISGO WER as it considers Deletion, Insertion, Substitution, and Grouping/Ordering errors. Finally we propose to utilize the concept of super blocks to automatically compute BLEU scores for e2e OCR machine translation. The small SCUT public test set is used to demonstrate WER performance by a modularized OCR system.

DeepCOVIDNet: An Interpretable Deep Learning Model for Predictive Surveillance of COVID-19 Using Heterogeneous Features and their Interactions

Ankit Ramchandani, Chao Fan, Ali Mostafavi

In this paper, we propose a deep learning model to forecast the range of increase in COVID-19 infected cases in future days and we present a novel method to compute equidimensional representations of multivariate time series and multivariate spatial time series data. Using this novel method, the proposed model can both take in a large number of heterogeneous features, such as census data, intra-county mobility, inter-county mobility, social distancing data, past growth of infection, among others, and learn complex interactions between these features. Using data collected from various sources, we estimate the range of increase in infected cases seven days into the future for all U.S. counties. In addition, we use the model to identify the most influential features for prediction of the growth of infection. We also analyze pairs of features and estimate the amount of observed second-order interaction between them. Experiments show that the proposed model obtains satisfactory predictive performance and fairly interpretable feature analysis results; hence, the proposed model could complement the standard epidemiological models for national-level surveillance of pandemics, such as COVID-19. The results and findings obtained from the deep learning model could potentially inform policymakers and researchers in devising effective mitigation and response strategies. To fast-track further development and experimentation, the code used to implement the proposed model has been made fully open source.

Lumos : Empowering Multimodal LLMs with Scene Text Recognition

Ashish Shenoy, Yichao Lu, Srihari Jayakumar, Debojeet Chatterjee, Mohsen Moslehpour, Pierce Chuang, Abhay Harpale, Vikas Bhardwaj, Di Xu, Shicong Zhao, Longfang Zhao, Ankit Ramchandani, Xin Luna Dong, Anuj Kumar

We introduce Lumos, the first end-to-end multimodal question-answering system with text understanding capabilities. At the core of Lumos is a Scene Text Recognition (STR) component that extracts text from first person point-of-view images, the output of which is used to augment input to a Multimodal Large Language Model (MM-LLM). While building Lumos, we encountered numerous challenges related to STR quality, overall latency, and model inference. In this paper, we delve into those challenges, and discuss the system architecture, design choices, and modeling techniques employed to overcome these obstacles. We also provide a comprehensive evaluation for each component, showcasing high quality and efficiency.

Text-to-Sticker: Style Tailoring Latent Diffusion Models for Human Expression

Animesh Sinha, Bo Sun, Anmol Kalia, Arantxa Casanova, Elliot Blanchard, David Yan, Winnie Zhang, Tony Nelli, Jiahui Chen, Hardik Shah, Licheng Yu, Mitesh Kumar Singh, Ankit Ramchandani, Maziar Sanjabi, Sonal Gupta, Amy Bearman, Dhruv Mahajan

We introduce Style Tailoring, a recipe to finetune Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) in a distinct domain with high visual quality, prompt alignment and scene diversity. We choose sticker image generation as the target domain, as the images significantly differ from photorealistic samples typically generated by large-scale LDMs. We start with a competent text-to-image model, like Emu, and show that relying on prompt engineering with a photorealistic model to generate stickers leads to poor prompt alignment and scene diversity. To overcome these drawbacks, we first finetune Emu on millions of sticker-like images collected using weak supervision to elicit diversity. Next, we curate human-in-the-loop (HITL) Alignment and Style datasets from model generations, and finetune to improve prompt alignment and style alignment respectively. Sequential finetuning on these datasets poses a tradeoff between better style alignment and prompt alignment gains. To address this tradeoff, we propose a novel fine-tuning method called Style Tailoring, which jointly fits the content and style distribution and achieves best tradeoff. Evaluation results show our method improves visual quality by 14%, prompt alignment by 16.2% and scene diversity by 15.3%, compared to prompt engineering the base Emu model for stickers generation.

Layout Agnostic Scene Text Image Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Qilong Zhangli, Jindong Jiang, Di Liu, Licheng Yu, Xiaoliang Dai, Ankit Ramchandani, Guan Pang, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Praveen Krishnan

While diffusion models have significantly advanced the quality of image generation their capability to accurately and coherently render text within these images remains a substantial challenge. Conventional diffusion-based methods for scene text generation are typically limited by their reliance on an intermediate layout output. This dependency often results in a constrained diversity of text styles and fonts an inherent limitation stemming from the deterministic nature of the layout generation phase. To address these challenges this paper introduces SceneTextGen a novel diffusion-based model specifically designed to circumvent the need for a predefined layout stage. By doing so SceneTextGen facilitates a more natural and varied representation of text. The novelty of SceneTextGen lies in its integration of three key components: a character-level encoder for capturing detailed typographic properties coupled with a character-level instance segmentation model and a word-level spotting model to address the issues of unwanted text generation and minor character inaccuracies. We validate the performance of our method by demonstrating improved character recognition rates on generated images across different public visual text datasets in comparison to both standard diffusion based methods and text specific methods.

Animated Stickers: Bringing Stickers to Life with Video Diffusion

David Yan, Winnie Zhang, Luxin Zhang, Anmol Kalia, Dingkang Wang, Ankit Ramchandani, Miao Liu, Albert Pumarola, Edgar Schoenfeld, Elliot Blanchard, Krishna Narni, Yaqiao Luo, Lawrence Chen, Guan Pang, Ali Thabet, Peter Vajda, Amy Bearman, Licheng Yu

We introduce animated stickers, a video diffusion model which generates an animation conditioned on a text prompt and static sticker image. Our model is built on top of the state-of-the-art Emu text-to-image model, with the addition of temporal layers to model motion. Due to the domain gap, i.e. differences in visual and motion style, a model which performed well on generating natural videos can no longer generate vivid videos when applied to stickers. To bridge this gap, we employ a two-stage finetuning pipeline: first with weakly in-domain data, followed by human-in-the-loop (HITL) strategy which we term ensemble-of-teachers. It distills the best qualities of multiple teachers into a smaller student model. We show that this strategy allows us to specifically target improvements to motion quality while maintaining the style from the static image. With inference optimizations, our model is able to generate an eight-frame video with high-quality, interesting, and relevant motion in under one second.

Imagine yourself: Tuning-Free Personalized Image Generation

Zecheng He, Bo Sun, Felix Juefei-Xu, Haoyu Ma, Ankit Ramchandani, Vincent Cheung, Siddharth Shah, Anmol Kalia, Harihar Subramanyam, Alireza Zareian, Li Chen, Ankit Jain, Ning Zhang, Peizhao Zhang, Roshan Sumbaly, Peter Vajda, Animesh Sinha

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy across various image-to-image tasks. In this research, we introduce Imagine yourself, a state-of-the-art model designed for personalized image generation. Unlike conventional tuning-based personalization techniques, Imagine yourself operates as a tuning-free model, enabling all users to leverage a shared framework without individualized adjustments. Moreover, previous work met challenges balancing identity preservation, following complex prompts and preserving good visual quality, resulting in models having strong copy-paste effect of the reference images. Thus, they can hardly generate images following prompts that require significant changes to the reference image, \eg, changing facial expression, head and body poses, and the diversity of the generated images is low. To address these limitations, our proposed method introduces 1) a new synthetic paired data generation mechanism to encourage image diversity, 2) a fully parallel attention architecture with three text encoders and a fully trainable vision encoder to improve the text faithfulness, and 3) a novel coarse-to-fine multi-stage finetuning methodology that gradually pushes the boundary of visual quality. Our study demonstrates that Imagine yourself surpasses the state-of-the-art personalization model, exhibiting superior capabilities in identity preservation, visual quality, and text alignment. This model establishes a robust foundation for various personalization applications. Human evaluation results validate the model's SOTA superiority across all aspects (identity preservation, text faithfulness, and visual appeal) compared to the previous personalization models.

The Llama 3 Herd of Models

Aaron Grattafiori, Abhimanyu Dubey, Abhinav Jauhri, Abhinav Pandey, Abhishek Kadian, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Aiesha Letman, Akhil Mathur, Alan Schelten, Alex Vaughan, Amy Yang, Angela Fan, Anirudh Goyal, Anthony Hartshorn, Aobo Yang, Archi Mitra, Archie Sravankumar, Artem Korenev, Arthur Hinsvark, Arun Rao, Aston Zhang, Aurelien Rodriguez, Austen Gregerson, Ava Spataru, Baptiste Roziere, Bethany Biron, Binh Tang, Bobbie Chern, Charlotte Caucheteux, Chaya Nayak, Chloe Bi, Chris Marra, Chris McConnell, Christian Keller, Christophe Touret, Chunyang Wu, Corinne Wong, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Cyrus Nikolaidis, Damien Allonsius, Daniel Song, Danielle Pintz, Danny Livshits, Danny Wyatt, David Esiobu, Dhruv Choudhary, Dhruv Mahajan, Diego Garcia-Olano, Diego Perino, Dieuwke Hupkes, Egor Lakomkin, Ehab AlBadawy, Elina Lobanova, Emily Dinan, Eric Michael Smith, Filip Radenovic, Francisco Guzmán, Frank Zhang, Gabriel Synnaeve, Gabrielle Lee, Georgia Lewis Anderson, Govind Thattai, Graeme Nail, Gregoire Mialon, Guan Pang, Guillem Cucurell, Hailey Nguyen, Hannah Korevaar, Hu Xu, Hugo Touvron, Iliyan Zarov, Imanol Arrieta Ibarra, Isabel Kloumann, Ishan Misra, Ivan Evtimov, Jack Zhang, Jade Copet, Jaewon Lee, Jan Geffert, Jana Vranes, Jason Park, Jay Mahadeokar, Jeet Shah, Jelmer van der Linde, Jennifer Billock, Jenny Hong, Jenya Lee, Jeremy Fu, Jianfeng Chi, Jianyu Huang, Jiawen Liu, Jie Wang, Jiecao Yu, Joanna Bitton, Joe Spisak, Jongsoo Park, Joseph Rocca, Joshua Johnstun, Joshua Saxe, Junteng Jia, Kalyan Vasuden Alwala, Karthik Prasad, Kartikeya Upasani, Kate Plawiak, Ke Li, Kenneth Heafield, Kevin Stone, Khalid El-Arini, Krithika Iyer, Kshitiz Malik, Kuenley Chiu, Kunal Bhalla, Kushal Lakhotia, Lauren Rantala-Yeary, Laurens van der Maaten, Lawrence Chen, Liang Tan, Liz Jenkins, Louis Martin, Lovish Madaan, Lubo Malo, Lukas Blecher, Lukas Landzaat, Luke de Oliveira, Madeline Muzzi, Mahesh Pasupuleti, Mannat Singh, Manohar Paluri, Marcin Kardas, Maria Tsimpoukelli, Mathew Oldham, Mathieu Rita, Maya Pavlova, Melanie Kambadur, Mike Lewis, Min Si, Mitesh Kumar Singh, Mona Hassan, Naman Goyal, Narjes Torabi, Nikolay Bashlykov, Nikolay Bogoychev, Niladri Chatterji, Ning Zhang, Olivier Duchenne, Onur Çelebi, Patrick Alrassy, Pengchuan Zhang, Pengwei Li, Petar Vasic, Peter Weng, Prajjwal Bhargava, Pratik Dubal, Praveen Krishnan, Punit Singh Koura, Puxin Xu, Qing He, Qingxiao Dong, Ragavan Srinivasan, Raj Ganapathy, Ramon Calderer, Ricardo Silveira Cabral, Robert Stojnic, Roberta Raileanu, Rohan Maheswari, Rohit Girdhar, Rohit Patel, Romain Sauvestre, Ronnie Polidoro, Roshan Sumbaly, Ross Taylor, Ruan Silva, Rui Hou, Rui Wang, Saghar Hosseini, Sahana Chennabasappa, Sanjay Singh, Sean Bell, Seohyun Sonia Kim, Sergey Edunov, Shaoliang Nie, Sharan Narang, Sharath Raparthy, Sheng Shen, Shengye Wan, Shruti Bhosale, Shun Zhang, Simon Vandenhende, Soumya Batra, Spencer Whitman, Sten Sootla, Stephane Collot, Suchin Gururangan, Sydney Borodinsky, Tamar Herman, Tara Fowler, Tarek Sheasha, Thomas Georgiou, Thomas Scialom, Tobias Speckbacher, Todor Mihaylov, Tong Xiao, Ujjwal Karn, Vedanuj Goswami, Vibhor Gupta, Vignesh Ramanathan, Viktor Kerkez, Vincent Gonguet, Virginie Do, Vish Vogeti, Vítor Albiero, Vladan Petrovic, Weiwei Chu, Wenhan Xiong, Wenyin Fu, Whitney Meers, Xavier Martinet, Xiaodong Wang, Xiaofang Wang, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan, Xide Xia, Xinfeng Xie, Xuchao Jia, Xuewei Wang, Yaelle Goldschlag, Yashesh Gaur, Yasmine Babaei, Yi Wen, Yiwen Song, Yuchen Zhang, Yue Li, Yuning Mao, Zacharie Delpierre Coudert, Zheng Yan, Zhengxing Chen, Zoe Papakipos, Aaditya Singh, Aayushi Srivastava, Abha Jain, Adam Kelsey, Adam Shajnfeld, Adithya Gangidi, Adolfo Victoria, Ahuva Goldstand, Ajay Menon, Ajay Sharma, Alex Boesenberg, Alexei Baevski, Allie Feinstein, Amanda Kallet, Amit Sangani, Amos Teo, Anam Yunus, Andrei Lupu, Andres Alvarado, Andrew Caples, Andrew Gu, Andrew Ho, Andrew Poulton, Andrew Ryan, Ankit Ramchandani, Annie Dong, Annie Franco, Anuj Goyal, Aparajita Saraf, Arkabandhu Chowdhury, Ashley Gabriel, Ashwin Bharambe, Assaf Eisenman, Azadeh Yazdan, Beau James, Ben Maurer, Benjamin Leonhardi, Bernie Huang, Beth Loyd, Beto De Paola, Bhargavi Paranjape, Bing Liu, Bo Wu, Boyu Ni, Braden Hancock, Bram Wasti, Brandon Spence, Brani Stojkovic, Brian Gamido, Britt Montalvo, Carl Parker, Carly Burton, Catalina Mejia, Ce Liu, Changhan Wang, Changkyu Kim, Chao Zhou, Chester Hu, Ching-Hsiang Chu, Chris Cai, Chris Tindal, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Cynthia Gao, Damon Civin, Dana Beaty, Daniel Kreymer, Daniel Li, David Adkins, David Xu, Davide Testuggine, Delia David, Devi Parikh, Diana Liskovich, Didem Foss, Dingkang Wang, Duc Le, Dustin Holland, Edward Dowling, Eissa Jamil, Elaine Montgomery, Eleonora Presani, Emily Hahn, Emily Wood, Eric-Tuan Le, Erik Brinkman, Esteban Arcaute, Evan Dunbar, Evan Smothers, Fei Sun, Felix Kreuk, Feng Tian, Filippos Kokkinos, Firat Ozgenel, Francesco Caggioni, Frank Kanayet, Frank Seide, Gabriela Medina Florez, Gabriella Schwarz, Gada Badeer, Georgia Swee, Gil Halpern, Grant Herman, Grigory Sizov, Guangyi, Zhang, Guna Lakshminarayanan, Hakan Inan, Hamid Shojanazeri, Han Zou, Hannah Wang, Hanwen Zha, Haroun Habeeb, Harrison Rudolph, Helen Suk, Henry Aspegren, Hunter Goldman, Hongyuan Zhan, Ibrahim Damlaj, Igor Molybog, Igor Tufanov, Ilias Leontiadis, Irina-Elena Veliche, Itai Gat, Jake Weissman, James Geboski, James Kohli, Janice Lam, Japhet Asher, Jean-Baptiste Gaya, Jeff Marcus, Jeff Tang, Jennifer Chan, Jenny Zhen, Jeremy Reizenstein, Jeremy Teboul, Jessica Zhong, Jian Jin, Jingyi Yang, Joe Cummings, Jon Carvill, Jon Shepard, Jonathan McPhie, Jonathan Torres, Josh Ginsburg, Junjie Wang, Kai Wu, Kam Hou U, Karan Saxena, Kartikay Khandelwal, Katayoun Zand, Kathy Matosich, Kaushik Veeraraghavan, Kelly Michelena, Keqian Li, Kiran Jagadeesh, Kun Huang, Kunal Chawla, Kyle Huang, Lailin Chen, Lakshya Garg, Lavender A, Leandro Silva, Lee Bell, Lei Zhang, Liangpeng Guo, Licheng Yu, Liron Moshkovich, Luca Wehrstedt, Madian Khabsa, Manav Avalani, Manish Bhatt, Martynas Mankus, Matan Hasson, Matthew Lennie, Matthias Reso, Maxim Groshev, Maxim Naumov, Maya Lathi, Meghan Keneally, Miao Liu, Michael L. Seltzer, Michal Valko, Michelle Restrepo, Mihir Patel, Mik Vyatskov, Mikayel Samvelyan, Mike Clark, Mike Macey, Mike Wang, Miquel Jubert Hermoso, Mo Metanat, Mohammad Rastegari, Munish Bansal, Nandhini Santhanam, Natascha Parks, Natasha White, Navyata Bawa, Nayan Singhal, Nick Egebo, Nicolas Usunier, Nikhil Mehta, Nikolay Pavlovich Laptev, Ning Dong, Norman Cheng, Oleg Chernoguz, Olivia Hart, Omkar Salpekar, Ozlem Kalinli, Parkin Kent, Parth Parekh, Paul Saab, Pavan Balaji, Pedro Rittner, Philip Bontrager, Pierre Roux, Piotr Dollar, Polina Zvyagina, Prashant Ratanchandani, Pritish Yuvraj, Qian Liang, Rachad Alao, Rachel Rodriguez, Rafi Ayub, Raghotham Murthy, Raghu Nayani, Rahul Mitra, Rangaprabhu Parthasarathy, Raymond Li, Rebekkah Hogan, Robin Battey, Rocky Wang, Russ Howes, Ruty Rinott, Sachin Mehta, Sachin Siby, Sai Jayesh Bondu, Samyak Datta, Sara Chugh, Sara Hunt, Sargun Dhillon, Sasha Sidorov, Satadru Pan, Saurabh Mahajan, Saurabh Verma, Seiji Yamamoto, Sharadh Ramaswamy, Shaun Lindsay, Shaun Lindsay, Sheng Feng, Shenghao Lin, Shengxin Cindy Zha, Shishir Patil, Shiva Shankar, Shuqiang Zhang, Shuqiang Zhang, Sinong Wang, Sneha Agarwal, Soji Sajuyigbe, Soumith Chintala, Stephanie Max, Stephen Chen, Steve Kehoe, Steve Satterfield, Sudarshan Govindaprasad, Sumit Gupta, Summer Deng, Sungmin Cho, Sunny Virk, Suraj Subramanian, Sy Choudhury, Sydney Goldman, Tal Remez, Tamar Glaser, Tamara Best, Thilo Koehler, Thomas Robinson, Tianhe Li, Tianjun Zhang, Tim Matthews, Timothy Chou, Tzook Shaked, Varun Vontimitta, Victoria Ajayi, Victoria Montanez, Vijai Mohan, Vinay Satish Kumar, Vishal Mangla, Vlad Ionescu, Vlad Poenaru, Vlad Tiberiu Mihailescu, Vladimir Ivanov, Wei Li, Wenchen Wang, Wenwen Jiang, Wes Bouaziz, Will Constable, Xiaocheng Tang, Xiaojian Wu, Xiaolan Wang, Xilun Wu, Xinbo Gao, Yaniv Kleinman, Yanjun Chen, Ye Hu, Ye Jia, Ye Qi, Yenda Li, Yilin Zhang, Ying Zhang, Yossi Adi, Youngjin Nam, Yu, Wang, Yu Zhao, Yuchen Hao, Yundi Qian, Yunlu Li, Yuzi He, Zach Rait, Zachary DeVito, Zef Rosnbrick, Zhaoduo Wen, Zhenyu Yang, Zhiwei Zhao, Zhiyu Ma