DICEPTION: A Generalist Diffusion Model for Visual Perceptual Tasks
Authors: name: Canyu Zhao, name: Mingyu Liu, name: Huanyi Zheng, name: Muzhi Zhu, name: Zhiyue Zhao, name: Hao Chen, name: Tong He, name: Chunhua Shen

Our primary goal here is to create a good, generalist perception model that
can tackle multiple tasks, within limits on computational resources and
training data. To achieve this, we resort to text-to-image diffusion models
pre-trained on billions of images. Our exhaustive evaluation metrics
demonstrate that DICEPTION effectively tackles multiple perception tasks,
achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art models. We achieve results
on par with SAM-vit-h using only 0.06% of their data (e.g., 600K vs. 1B
pixel-level annotated images). Inspired by Wang et al., DICEPTION formulates
the outputs of various perception tasks using color encoding; and we show that
the strategy of assigning random colors to different instances is highly
effective in both entity segmentation and semantic segmentation. Unifying
various perception tasks as conditional image generation enables us to fully
leverage pre-trained text-to-image models. Thus, DICEPTION can be efficiently
trained at a cost of orders of magnitude lower, compared to conventional models
that were trained from scratch. When adapting our model to other tasks, it only
requires fine-tuning on as few as 50 images and 1% of its parameters. DICEPTION
provides valuable insights and a more promising solution for visual generalist
models.