DiffDis: Empowering Generative Diffusion Model with Cross-Modal
  Discrimination Capability
Runhui Huang Jianhua Han Guansong Lu Xiaodan Liang Yihan Zeng Wei Zhang Hang Xu
Recently, large-scale diffusion models, e.g., Stable diffusion and DallE2,
have shown remarkable results on image synthesis. On the other hand,
large-scale cross-modal pre-trained models (e.g., CLIP, ALIGN, and FILIP) are
competent for various downstream tasks by learning to align vision and language
embeddings. In this paper, we explore the possibility of jointly modeling
generation and discrimination. Specifically, we propose DiffDis to unify the
cross-modal generative and discriminative pretraining into one single framework
under the diffusion process. DiffDis first formulates the image-text
discriminative problem as a generative diffusion process of the text embedding
from the text encoder conditioned on the image. Then, we propose a novel
dual-stream network architecture, which fuses the noisy text embedding with the
knowledge of latent images from different scales for image-text discriminative
learning. Moreover, the generative and discriminative tasks can efficiently
share the image-branch network structure in the multi-modality model.
Benefiting from diffusion-based unified training, DiffDis achieves both better
generation ability and cross-modal semantic alignment in one architecture.
Experimental results show that DiffDis outperforms single-task models on both
the image generation and the image-text discriminative tasks, e.g., 1.65%
improvement on average accuracy of zero-shot classification over 12 datasets
and 2.42 improvement on FID of zero-shot image synthesis.