ControlNet++: Improving Conditional Controls with Efficient Consistency
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Authors: name: Ming Li, name: Taojiannan Yang, name: Huafeng Kuang, name: Jie Wu, name: Zhaoning Wang, name: Xuefeng Xiao, name: Chen Chen

To enhance the controllability of text-to-image diffusion models, existing
efforts like ControlNet incorporated image-based conditional controls. In this
paper, we reveal that existing methods still face significant challenges in
generating images that align with the image conditional controls. To this end,
we propose ControlNet++, a novel approach that improves controllable generation
by explicitly optimizing pixel-level cycle consistency between generated images
and conditional controls. Specifically, for an input conditional control, we
use a pre-trained discriminative reward model to extract the corresponding
condition of the generated images, and then optimize the consistency loss
between the input conditional control and extracted condition. A
straightforward implementation would be generating images from random noises
and then calculating the consistency loss, but such an approach requires
storing gradients for multiple sampling timesteps, leading to considerable time
and memory costs. To address this, we introduce an efficient reward strategy
that deliberately disturbs the input images by adding noise, and then uses the
single-step denoised images for reward fine-tuning. This avoids the extensive
costs associated with image sampling, allowing for more efficient reward
fine-tuning. Extensive experiments show that ControlNet++ significantly
improves controllability under various conditional controls. For example, it
achieves improvements over ControlNet by 7.9% mIoU, 13.4% SSIM, and 7.6% RMSE,
respectively, for segmentation mask, line-art edge, and depth conditions.