Comment by throwaway314155

1 day ago

It wasn't because it was "out of distribution" (although that's a reasonable assumption and it is at least _somewhat_ out of distribution, given the scarcity of your examples).

Like the avocado armchair before it, the real reason was simply that it "looked cool". It scratched some particular itch for people.

For me, indeed it's correlated with "imagination". An avocado armchair output had a particular blending of concepts that matched (in my mind) the way humans blend concepts. With the "astronaut riding a horse on the moon", you are hitting a little of that; but also you're effectively addressing criticism about text-to-image models with a prompt that serves as an evaluation for a couple of things:

1.) t2i is bad at people (astronaut)

2.) t2i struggles with animal legs (horse)

3.) t2i struggles with costumes, commonly putting the spacesuit on both the astronaut _and_ the horse - and mangling that in the process (and usually ruining any sense of good artistic aesthetics).

4.) t2i commonly gets confused with the moon specifically, frequently creating a moon _landscape_ but also doing something silly like putting "another" moon in the "night sky" as well.

There are probably other things. And of course this is subjective. But as someone who followed these things as they happened, which was I believe the release of DALL-E 2 and the first Stable Diffusion models, this is why I thought it was a good evaluation (at the time).

edit: I truly despise HN comment's formatting rules.

3 comments

throwaway314155

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godelski  1 day ago 

  > although that's a reasonable assumption and it is at least _somewhat_ out of distribution, given the scarcity of your examples

This isn't what "out of distribution" means. There can be ZERO images and it wouldn't mean something is OOD. OOD means not within the underlying distribution. That's why I made the whole point about interpolation.

Is it scarce? Hard to tell. But I wouldn't make that assumption based on my examples. Search is poisoned now.

I think there's a lot of things that are assumed scarce which are not. There's entire datasets that are spoiled because people haven't bothered to check.

  > edit: I truly despise HN comment's formatting rules.

  Add 2 spaces
  on a new
  line and 

  you can do whatever you want because it is a quote block
  That's also why I quote people this way

  • throwaway314155  1 day ago

    > This isn't what "out of distribution" means. There can be ZERO images and it wouldn't mean something is OOD. OOD means not within the underlying distribution. That's why I made the whole point about interpolation.

    Sure. I'll concede to that, although it's a bit pedantic.

    > Is it scarce? Hard to tell. But I wouldn't make that assumption based on my examples. Search is poisoned now.

    I was more referring to why it originally was used, not why it would still be used. In any case, I maintain that it was _not_ used for being OOD, which I mentioned in my first comment.

    > Add 2 spaces > on a new > line and > ...

    Yeah, I still hate it. Sorry. Give me markdown support and I'll be happy.

    edit: I'll leave my mistake here as an example of why it's non-intuitive.

    • godelski  1 day ago 

        > although it's a bit pedantic.

      If we're discussing research -- and I think this is fair since we're discussing a link to an arxiv paper -- then being pedantic matters. Things have definitions and we are supposed to know what they mean.

        > Give me markdown support and I'll be happy.

      You and me both