This paper introduces Diffusion-BBO, a new online black-box optimization (BBO) framework that uses a conditional diffusion model as an inverse surrogate model. The framework employs an Uncertainty-aware Exploration (UaE) acquisition function to propose scores in the objective space for conditional sampling. The approach is shown theoretically to achieve a near-optimal solution and empirically outperforms existing online BBO baselines across 6 scientific discovery tasks.
The paper introduces ScoreAdv, a novel approach for generating natural adversarial examples (UAEs) using diffusion models. It incorporates an adversarial guidance mechanism and saliency maps to shift the sampling distribution and inject visual information. Experiments on ImageNet and CelebA datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art attack success rates, image quality, and robustness against defenses.
Dr. Zeke Xie from HKUST(GZ) presented research on noise initialization and sampling strategies for diffusion models. The talk covered golden noise for text-to-image models, zigzag diffusion sampling, smooth initializations for video diffusion, and leveraging image diffusion for video synthesis. Xie leads the xLeaF Lab, focusing on optimization, inference, and generative AI, with previous experience at Baidu Research. Why it matters: The work addresses core challenges in improving the quality and diversity of generated content from diffusion models, a key area of advancement for AI applications in the region.
This paper introduces SemDiff, a novel method for generating unrestricted adversarial examples (UAEs) by exploring the semantic latent space of diffusion models. SemDiff uses multi-attribute optimization to ensure attack success while preserving the naturalness and imperceptibility of generated UAEs. Experiments on high-resolution datasets demonstrate SemDiff's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in attack success rate and imperceptibility, while also evading defenses.
The paper introduces VENOM, a text-driven framework for generating high-quality unrestricted adversarial examples using diffusion models. VENOM unifies image content generation and adversarial synthesis into a single reverse diffusion process, enhancing both attack success rate and image quality. The framework incorporates an adaptive adversarial guidance strategy with momentum to ensure the generated adversarial examples align with the distribution of natural images.
The paper introduces UAE-3D, a multi-modal VAE for 3D molecule generation that compresses molecules into a unified latent space, maintaining near-zero reconstruction error. This approach simplifies latent diffusion modeling by eliminating the need to handle multi-modality and equivariance separately. Experiments on GEOM-Drugs and QM9 datasets show UAE-3D establishes new benchmarks in de novo and conditional 3D molecule generation, with significant improvements in efficiency and quality.