At some point we'll have so many models based on so many other models it will longer longer be possible to tell which techniques are really involved.
"A photo of a iPhone from the stone age."
"Adolf Hitler pissing against the wind and enjoying it."
"Painting: Captain Jean-Luc Picard crossing of the Delaware River in a Porsche 911".
I'm curious if they do a backward pass here, would probably have value. They seem to describe sticking the text tokens first meaning that once you start generating image tokens all the text tokens are visible. That would have the model learning to generate an image with respect to a prompt but you could also literally just reverse the order of the sequence to have the model also learn to generate prompts with respect to the image. It's not clear if this is happening.
> Similar to the rejection sampling used in VQVAE-2, we use CLIP to rerank the top 32 of 512 samples for each caption in all of the interactive visuals. This procedure can also be seen as a kind of language-guided search16, and can have a dramatic impact on sample quality.
> CLIP pre-trains an image encoder and a text encoder to predict which images were paired with which texts in our dataset. We then use this behavior to turn CLIP into a zero-shot classifier. We convert all of a dataset’s classes into captions such as “a photo of a dog” and predict the class of the caption CLIP estimates best pairs with a given image.
A network optimizing for both use cases (e.g. the training set is half 256 + 1024, half 1024 + 256) would likely be worse than a model optimizing for one of the use cases, but then again models like T5 argue against it.
Broke: Use a text encoder to feed text data to an image generator, like a GAN.
Woke: Use a text and image encoder as the same input to decode text and images as the same output
And yet, due to the magic of Transformers, it works.
From the technical description, this seems feasible to clone given a sufficiently robust dataset of images, although the scope of the demo output implies a much more robust dataset than the ones Microsoft has offered publicly.