CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35 (NeurIPS 2022) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper Supplemental

Authors

Ming Ding, Wendi Zheng, Wenyi Hong, Jie Tang

Abstract

Development of transformer-based text-to-image models is impeded by its slow generation and complexity, for high-resolution images. In this work, we put forward a solution based on hierarchical transformers and local parallel autoregressive generation. We pretrain a 6B-parameter transformer with a simple and flexible self-supervised task, a cross-modal general language model (CogLM), and fine-tune it for fast super-resolution. The new text-to-image system, CogView2, shows very competitive generation compared to concurrent state-of-the-art DALL-E-2, and naturally supports interactive text-guided editing on images.