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Virtual presentation / poster accept

ChiroDiff: Modelling chirographic data with Diffusion Models

Ayan Das · Yongxin Yang · Timothy Hospedales · Tao Xiang · Yi-Zhe Song

Keywords: [ Generative models ] [ generative model ] [ chirographic data ] [ diffusion model ] [ Continuous-time ]


Abstract: Generative modelling over continuous-time geometric constructs, a.k.a $chirographic\ data$ such as handwriting, sketches, drawings etc., have been accomplished through autoregressive distributions. Such strictly-ordered discrete factorization however falls short of capturing key properties of chirographic data -- it fails to build holistic understanding of the temporal concept due to one-way visibility (causality). Consequently, temporal data has been modelled as discrete token sequences of fixed sampling rate instead of capturing the true underlying concept. In this paper, we introduce a powerful model-class namely Denoising\ Diffusion\ Probabilistic\ Models or DDPMs for chirographic data that specifically addresses these flaws. Our model named "ChiroDiff", being non-autoregressive, learns to capture holistic concepts and therefore remains resilient to higher temporal sampling rate up to a good extent. Moreover, we show that many important downstream utilities (e.g. conditional sampling, creative mixing) can be flexibly implemented using ChiroDiff. We further show some unique use-cases like stochastic vectorization, de-noising/healing, abstraction are also possible with this model-class. We perform quantitative and qualitative evaluation of our framework on relevant datasets and found it to be better or on par with competing approaches.

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