Authors: Soumya Banerjee, Debarshi Kumar Sanyal, Samiran Chattopadhyay, Plaban Kumar Bhowmick, Partha Pratim Das
Digital libraries often face the challenge of processing a large volume of diverse document types. The manual collection and tagging of metadata can be a time-consuming and error-prone task. To address this, we aim to develop an automatic metadata extractor for digital libraries. In this work, we introduce the Heterogeneous Learning Resources (HLR) dataset designed for document image classification. The approach involves decomposing individual learning resources into constituent document images (sheets). These images are then processed through an OCR tool to extract textual representation. State-of-the-art classifiers are employed to classify both the document image and its textual content. Subsequently, the labels of the constituent document images are utilized to predict the label of the overall document.
Authors: Tzu-Heng Huang, Changho Shin, Sui Jiet Tay, Dyah Adila, Frederic Sala
We propose an approach for curating multimodal data that we used for our entry in the 2023 DataComp competition filtering track. Our technique combines object detection and weak supervision-based ensembling. In the first of two steps in our approach, we employ an out-of-the-box zero-shot object detection model to extract granular information and produce a variety of filter designs. In the second step, we employ weak supervision to ensemble filtering rules. This approach results in a 4% performance improvement when compared to the best-performing baseline, producing the top-ranking position in the small scale track at the time of writing. Furthermore, in the medium scale track, we achieve a noteworthy 4.2% improvement over the baseline by simply ensembling existing baselines with weak supervision.
Authors: Yinan Zhang, Eric Tzeng, Yilun Du, Dmitry Kislyuk
Text-to-image diffusion models are a class of deep generative models that have demonstrated an impressive capacity for high-quality image generation. However, these models are susceptible to implicit biases that arise from web-scale text-image training pairs and may inaccurately model aspects of images we care about. This can result in suboptimal samples, model bias, and images that do not align with human ethics and preferences. In this paper, we present an effective scalable algorithm to improve diffusion models using Reinforcement Learning (RL) across a diverse set of reward functions, such as human preference, compositionality, and fairness over millions of images. We illustrate how our approach substantially outperforms existing methods for aligning diffusion models with human preferences. We further illustrate how this substantially improves pretrained Stable Diffusion (SD) models, generating samples that are preferred by humans 80.3% of the time over those from the base SD model while simultaneously improving both the composition and diversity of generated samples.
Authors: Jiachen Li, Chuanbo Hua, Hengbo Ma, Jinkyoo Park, Victoria Dax, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
Social robot navigation can be helpful in various contexts of daily life but requires safe human-robot interactions and efficient trajectory planning. While modeling pairwise relations has been widely studied in multi-agent interacting systems, the ability to capture larger-scale group-wise activities is limited. In this paper, we propose a systematic relational reasoning approach with explicit inference of the underlying dynamically evolving relational structures, and we demonstrate its effectiveness for multi-agent trajectory prediction and social robot navigation. In addition to the edges between pairs of nodes (i.e., agents), we propose to infer hyperedges that adaptively connect multiple nodes to enable group-wise reasoning in an unsupervised manner. Our approach infers dynamically evolving relation graphs and hypergraphs to capture the evolution of relations, which the trajectory predictor employs to generate future states. Meanwhile, we propose to regularize the sharpness and sparsity of the learned relations and the smoothness of the relation evolution, which proves to enhance training stability and model performance. The proposed approach is validated on synthetic crowd simulations and real-world benchmark datasets. Experiments demonstrate that the approach infers reasonable relations and achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance. In addition, we present a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework for social robot navigation, which incorporates relational reasoning and trajectory prediction systematically. In a group-based crowd simulation, our method outperforms the strongest baseline by a significant margin in terms of safety, efficiency, and social compliance in dense, interactive scenarios.
Authors: Shoaib Meraj Sami, Md Mahedi Hasan, Nasser M. Nasrabadi, Raghuveer Rao
Annotating automatic target recognition (ATR) is a highly challenging task, primarily due to the unavailability of labeled data in the target domain. Hence, it is essential to construct an optimal target domain classifier by utilizing the labeled information of the source domain images. The transductive transfer learning (TTL) method that incorporates a CycleGAN-based unpaired domain translation network has been previously proposed in the literature for effective ATR annotation. Although this method demonstrates great potential for ATR, it severely suffers from lower annotation performance, higher Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score, and the presence of visual artifacts in the synthetic images. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid contrastive learning base unpaired domain translation (H-CUT) network that achieves a significantly lower FID score. It incorporates both attention and entropy to emphasize the domain-specific region, a noisy feature mixup module to generate high variational synthetic negative patches, and a modulated noise contrastive estimation (MoNCE) loss to reweight all negative patches using optimal transport for better performance. Our proposed contrastive learning and cycle-consistency-based TTL (C3TTL) framework consists of two H-CUT networks and two classifiers. It simultaneously optimizes cycle-consistency, MoNCE, and identity losses. In C3TTL, two H-CUT networks have been employed through a bijection mapping to feed the reconstructed source domain images into a pretrained classifier to guide the optimal target domain classifier. Extensive experimental analysis conducted on three ATR datasets demonstrates that the proposed C3TTL method is effective in annotating civilian and military vehicles, as well as ship targets.
Authors: Fatema-E Jannat, Sina Gholami, Minhaj Nur Alam, Hamed Tabkhi
Despite the revolutionary impact of AI and the development of locally trained algorithms, achieving widespread generalized learning from multi-modal data in medical AI remains a significant challenge. This gap hinders the practical deployment of scalable medical AI solutions. Addressing this challenge, our research contributes a self-supervised robust machine learning framework, OCT-SelfNet, for detecting eye diseases using optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. In this work, various data sets from various institutions are combined enabling a more comprehensive range of representation. Our method addresses the issue using a two-phase training approach that combines self-supervised pretraining and supervised fine-tuning with a mask autoencoder based on the SwinV2 backbone by providing a solution for real-world clinical deployment. Extensive experiments on three datasets with different encoder backbones, low data settings, unseen data settings, and the effect of augmentation show that our method outperforms the baseline model, Resnet-50 by consistently attaining AUC-ROC performance surpassing 77% across all tests, whereas the baseline model exceeds 54%. Moreover, in terms of the AUC-PR metric, our proposed method exceeded 42%, showcasing a substantial increase of at least 10% in performance compared to the baseline, which exceeded only 33%. This contributes to our understanding of our approach's potential and emphasizes its usefulness in clinical settings.
Authors: Yao Lu, Hiram Rayo Torres Rodriguez, Sebastian Vogel, Nick van de Waterlaat, Pavol Jancura
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has become the de-facto approach for designing accurate and efficient networks for edge devices. Since models are typically quantized for edge deployment, recent work has investigated quantization-aware NAS (QA-NAS) to search for highly accurate and efficient quantized models. However, existing QA-NAS approaches, particularly few-bit mixed-precision (FB-MP) methods, do not scale to larger tasks. Consequently, QA-NAS has mostly been limited to low-scale tasks and tiny networks. In this work, we present an approach to enable QA-NAS (INT8 and FB-MP) on large-scale tasks by leveraging the block-wise formulation introduced by block-wise NAS. We demonstrate strong results for the semantic segmentation task on the Cityscapes dataset, finding FB-MP models 33% smaller and INT8 models 17.6% faster than DeepLabV3 (INT8) without compromising task performance.
Authors: Ramchander Bhaskara, Georgios Georgakis, Jeremy Nash, Marissa Cameron, Joseph Bowkett, Adnan Ansar, Manoranjan Majji, Paul Backes
Sampling autonomy for icy moon lander missions requires understanding of topographic and photometric properties of the sampling terrain. Unavailability of high resolution visual datasets (either bird-eye view or point-of-view from a lander) is an obstacle for selection, verification or development of perception systems. We attempt to alleviate this problem by: 1) proposing Graphical Utility for Icy moon Surface Simulations (GUISS) framework, for versatile stereo dataset generation that spans the spectrum of bulk photometric properties, and 2) focusing on a stereo-based visual perception system and evaluating both traditional and deep learning-based algorithms for depth estimation from stereo matching. The surface reflectance properties of icy moon terrains (Enceladus and Europa) are inferred from multispectral datasets of previous missions. With procedural terrain generation and physically valid illumination sources, our framework can fit a wide range of hypotheses with respect to visual representations of icy moon terrains. This is followed by a study over the performance of stereo matching algorithms under different visual hypotheses. Finally, we emphasize the standing challenges to be addressed for simulating perception data assets for icy moons such as Enceladus and Europa. Our code can be found here: https://github.com/nasa-jpl/guiss.
Authors: Shih-Han Chou, Matthew Kowal, Yasmin Niknam, Diana Moyano, Shayaan Mehdi, Richard Pito, Cheng Zhang, Ian Knopke, Sedef Akinli Kocak, Leonid Sigal, Yalda Mohsenzadeh
While progress has been made in the domain of video-language understanding, current state-of-the-art algorithms are still limited in their ability to understand videos at high levels of abstraction, such as news-oriented videos. Alternatively, humans easily amalgamate information from video and language to infer information beyond what is visually observable in the pixels. An example of this is watching a news story, where the context of the event can play as big of a role in understanding the story as the event itself. Towards a solution for designing this ability in algorithms, we present a large-scale analysis on an in-house dataset collected by the Reuters News Agency, called Reuters Video-Language News (ReutersViLNews) dataset which focuses on high-level video-language understanding with an emphasis on long-form news. The ReutersViLNews Dataset consists of long-form news videos collected and labeled by news industry professionals over several years and contains prominent news reporting from around the world. Each video involves a single story and contains action shots of the actual event, interviews with people associated with the event, footage from nearby areas, and more. ReutersViLNews dataset contains videos from seven subject categories: disaster, finance, entertainment, health, politics, sports, and miscellaneous with annotations from high-level to low-level, title caption, visual video description, high-level story description, keywords, and location. We first present an analysis of the dataset statistics of ReutersViLNews compared to previous datasets. Then we benchmark state-of-the-art approaches for four different video-language tasks. The results suggest that news-oriented videos are a substantial challenge for current video-language understanding algorithms and we conclude by providing future directions in designing approaches to solve the ReutersViLNews dataset.
Authors: Ali Mottaghi, Mohammad Abdullah Jamal, Serena Yeung, Omid Mohareri
Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) presents a critical hurdle in computer vision, especially given the frequent scarcity of labeled data in real-world settings. This scarcity often causes foundation models, trained on extensive datasets, to underperform when applied to new domains. AdaEmbed, our newly proposed methodology for SSDA, offers a promising solution to these challenges. Leveraging the potential of unlabeled data, AdaEmbed facilitates the transfer of knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain by learning a shared embedding space. By generating accurate and uniform pseudo-labels based on the established embedding space, the model overcomes the limitations of conventional SSDA, thus enhancing performance significantly. Our method's effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on benchmark datasets such as DomainNet, Office-Home, and VisDA-C, where AdaEmbed consistently outperforms all the baselines, setting a new state of the art for SSDA. With its straightforward implementation and high data efficiency, AdaEmbed stands out as a robust and pragmatic solution for real-world scenarios, where labeled data is scarce. To foster further research and application in this area, we are sharing the codebase of our unified framework for semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Authors: Zhenxing Ming, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall
This paper introduces InverseMatrixVT3D, an efficient method for transforming multi-view image features into 3D feature volumes for 3D semantic occupancy prediction. Existing methods for constructing 3D volumes often rely on depth estimation, device-specific operators, or transformer queries, which hinders the widespread adoption of 3D occupancy models. In contrast, our approach leverages two projection matrices to store the static mapping relationships and matrix multiplications to efficiently generate global Bird's Eye View (BEV) features and local 3D feature volumes. Specifically, we achieve this by performing matrix multiplications between multi-view image feature maps and two sparse projection matrices. We introduce a sparse matrix handling technique for the projection matrices to optimise GPU memory usage. Moreover, a global-local attention fusion module is proposed to integrate the global BEV features with the local 3D feature volumes to obtain the final 3D volume. We also employ a multi-scale supervision mechanism to further enhance performance. Comprehensive experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the simplicity and effectiveness of our method. The code will be made available at:https://github.com/DanielMing123/InverseMatrixVT3D
Authors: Shubham Parashar, Zhiqiu Lin, Tian Liu, Xiangjue Dong, Yanan Li, Deva Ramanan, James Caverlee, Shu Kong
Vision-language models (VLMs) excel in zero-shot recognition but exhibit drastically imbalanced performance across visual concepts. For example, CLIP, despite an impressive mean zero-shot accuracy on ImageNet (72.7%), yields $<$10% on ten concepts (e.g., gyromitra and night snake), presumably, because these concepts are under-represented in VLMs' imbalanced pretraining data. Yet, assessing this imbalance is challenging as it is non-trivial to calculate the frequency of specific concepts within VLMs' large-scale pretraining data. Our work makes the first attempt to measure the concept frequency by analyzing pretraining texts. We use off-the-shelf language models to help count relevant texts that contain synonyms of the given concepts and resolve linguistic ambiguity. We confirm that popular VLM datasets like LAION indeed exhibit long-tailed concept distributions, which strongly correlate with per-class accuracies. Further, contemporary multimodal systems, e.g., visual chatbots and text-to-image generators, also struggle with the rare concepts identified by our method. To mitigate VLMs' imbalanced performance in zero-shot recognition, we propose REtrieval-Augmented Learning REAL. First, instead of prompting VLMs using the original class names, REAL uses their most frequent synonyms found in VLMs' pretraining texts. This already outperforms human-engineered and LLM-generated prompts over nine benchmark datasets, likely because VLMs have seen more images associated with the frequently used synonyms. Second, REAL uses all the concept synonyms to retrieve a small, class-balanced set of pretraining data to train a robust classifier. REAL surpasses the recent retrieval-augmented solution REACT, using 400x less storage and 10,000x less training time!
Authors: Naiyu Fang, Lemiao Qiu, Shuyou Zhang, Zili Wang, Kerui Hu, Jianrong Tan
When a shopper chooses garments online, garment transfer technology wears the garment from the model image onto the shopper's image, allowing the shopper to decide whether the garment is suitable for them. As garment transfer leverages wild and cheap person image as garment condition, it has attracted tremendous community attention and holds vast commercial potential. However, since the ground truth of garment transfer is almost unavailable in reality, previous studies have treated garment transfer as either pose transfer or garment-pose disentanglement, and trained garment transfer in self-supervised learning, yet do not cover garment transfer intentions completely. Therefore, the training supervising the garment transfer is a rock-hard issue. Notably, virtual try-on technology has exhibited superior performance using self-supervised learning. We supervise the garment transfer training via knowledge distillation from virtual try-on. Specifically, we first train the transfer parsing reasoning model at multi-phases to provide shape guidance for downstream tasks. The transfer parsing reasoning model learns the response and feature knowledge from the try-on parsing reasoning model and absorbs the hard knowledge from the ground truth. By leveraging the warping knowledge from virtual try-on, we estimate a progressive flow to precisely warp the garment by learning the shape and content correspondence. To enhance transfer realism, we propose a well-designed arm regrowth task to infer exposed skin pixel content. Experiments demonstrate that our method has state-of-the-art performance in transferring garments between person compared with other virtual try-on and garment transfer methods.
Authors: Rittika Adhikari, Christopher Settles
The recent pandemic has underscored the importance of accurately diagnosing COVID-19 in hospital settings. A major challenge in this regard is differentiating COVID-19 from other respiratory illnesses based on chest X-rays, compounded by the restrictions of HIPAA compliance which limit the comparison of patient X-rays. This paper introduces a HIPAA-compliant model to aid in the diagnosis of COVID-19, utilizing federated learning. Federated learning is a distributed machine learning approach that allows for algorithm training across multiple decentralized devices using local data samples, without the need for data sharing. Our model advances previous efforts in chest X-ray diagnostic models. We examined leading models from established competitions in this domain and developed our own models tailored to be effective with specific hospital data. Considering the model's operation in a federated learning context, we explored the potential impact of biased data updates on the model's performance. To enhance hospital understanding of the model's decision-making process and to verify that the model is not focusing on irrelevant features, we employed a visualization technique that highlights key features in chest X-rays indicative of a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
Authors: Geng Chen, Junqing Yang, Xiaozhou Pu, Ge-Peng Ji, Huan Xiong, Yongsheng Pan, Hengfei Cui, Yong Xia
Accurate segmentation of polyps from colonoscopy videos is of great significance to polyp treatment and early prevention of colorectal cancer. However, it is challenging due to the difficulties associated with modelling long-range spatio-temporal relationships within a colonoscopy video. In this paper, we address this challenging task with a novel Mixture-Attention Siamese Transformer (MAST), which explicitly models the long-range spatio-temporal relationships with a mixture-attention mechanism for accurate polyp segmentation. Specifically, we first construct a Siamese transformer architecture to jointly encode paired video frames for their feature representations. We then design a mixture-attention module to exploit the intra-frame and inter-frame correlations, enhancing the features with rich spatio-temporal relationships. Finally, the enhanced features are fed to two parallel decoders for predicting the segmentation maps. To the best of our knowledge, our MAST is the first transformer model dedicated to video polyp segmentation. Extensive experiments on the large-scale SUN-SEG benchmark demonstrate the superior performance of MAST in comparison with the cutting-edge competitors. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Junqing-Yang/MAST.
Authors: Shuai Liu, Di Wang, Quan Wang, Kai Huang
Previous single-stage detectors typically suffer the misalignment between localization accuracy and classification confidence. To solve the misalignment problem, we introduce a novel rectification method named neighbor IoU-voting (NIV) strategy. Typically, classification and regression are treated as separate branches, making it challenging to establish a connection between them. Consequently, the classification confidence cannot accurately reflect the regression quality. NIV strategy can serve as a bridge between classification and regression branches by calculating two types of statistical data from the regression output to correct the classification confidence. Furthermore, to alleviate the imbalance of detection accuracy for complete objects with dense points (easy objects) and incomplete objects with sparse points (difficult objects), we propose a new data augmentation scheme named object resampling. It undersamples easy objects and oversamples difficult objects by randomly transforming part of easy objects into difficult objects. Finally, combining the NIV strategy and object resampling augmentation, we design an efficient single-stage detector termed NIV-SSD. Extensive experiments on several datasets indicate the effectiveness of the NIV strategy and the competitive performance of the NIV-SSD detector. The code will be available at https://github.com/Say2L/NIV-SSD.
Authors: Shun Fang, Ming Cui, Xing Feng, Yanna Lv
Neural Radiation Field (NeRF) technology can learn a 3D implicit model of a scene from 2D images and synthesize realistic novel view images. This technology has received widespread attention from the industry and has good application prospects. In response to the problem that the rendering quality of NeRF images needs to be improved, many researchers have proposed various methods to improve the rendering quality in the past three years. The latest relevant papers are classified and reviewed, the technical principles behind quality improvement are analyzed, and the future evolution direction of quality improvement methods is discussed. This study can help researchers quickly understand the current state and evolutionary context of technology in this field, which is helpful in inspiring the development of more efficient algorithms and promoting the application of NeRF technology in related fields.
Authors: Yifan Zhang, Siyu Ren, Junhui Hou, Jinjian Wu, Guangming Shi
This paper introduces a novel self-supervised learning framework for enhancing 3D perception in autonomous driving scenes. Specifically, our approach, named NCLR, focuses on 2D-3D neural calibration, a novel pretext task that estimates the rigid transformation aligning camera and LiDAR coordinate systems. First, we propose the learnable transformation alignment to bridge the domain gap between image and point cloud data, converting features into a unified representation space for effective comparison and matching. Second, we identify the overlapping area between the image and point cloud with the fused features. Third, we establish dense 2D-3D correspondences to estimate the rigid transformation. The framework not only learns fine-grained matching from points to pixels but also achieves alignment of the image and point cloud at a holistic level, understanding their relative pose. We demonstrate NCLR's efficacy by applying the pre-trained backbone to downstream tasks, such as LiDAR-based 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and panoptic segmentation. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets illustrate the superiority of NCLR over existing self-supervised methods. The results confirm that joint learning from different modalities significantly enhances the network's understanding abilities and effectiveness of learned representation. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Eaphan/NCLR}.
Authors: Shun Fang, Ming Cui, Xing Feng, Yanan Zhang
NeRF's high-quality scene synthesis capability was quickly accepted by scholars in the years after it was proposed, and significant progress has been made in 3D scene representation and synthesis. However, the high computational cost limits intuitive and efficient editing of scenes, making NeRF's development in the scene editing field facing many challenges. This paper reviews the preliminary explorations of scholars on NeRF in the scene or object editing field in recent years, mainly changing the shape and texture of scenes or objects in new synthesized scenes; through the combination of residual models such as GaN and Transformer with NeRF, the generalization ability of NeRF scene editing has been further expanded, including realizing real-time new perspective editing feedback, multimodal editing of text synthesized 3D scenes, 4D synthesis performance, and in-depth exploration in light and shadow editing, initially achieving optimization of indirect touch editing and detail representation in complex scenes. Currently, most NeRF editing methods focus on the touch points and materials of indirect points, but when dealing with more complex or larger 3D scenes, it is difficult to balance accuracy, breadth, efficiency, and quality. Overcoming these challenges may become the direction of future NeRF 3D scene editing technology.
Authors: Ee Yeo Keat, Zhang Hao, Alexander Matyasko, Basura Fernando
Zero-shot open-ended inference on untrimmed videos poses a significant challenge, especially when no annotated data is utilized to navigate the inference direction. In this work, we aim to address this underexplored domain by introducing an adaptable framework that efficiently combines both the frozen vision-language (VL) model and off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) for conducting zero-shot open-ended inference tasks without requiring any additional training or fine-tuning. Our comprehensive experiments span various video action datasets for goal inference and action recognition tasks. The results demonstrate the framework's superior performance in goal inference compared to conventional vision-language models in open-ended and close-ended scenarios. Notably, the proposed framework exhibits the capability to generalize effectively to action recognition tasks, underscoring its versatility and potential contributions to advancing the video-based zero-shot understanding.
Authors: Xin Lin, Chong Shi, Yibing Zhan, Zuopeng Yang, Yaqi Wu, Dacheng Tao
Dynamic scene graph generation (SGG) focuses on detecting objects in a video and determining their pairwise relationships. Existing dynamic SGG methods usually suffer from several issues, including 1) Contextual noise, as some frames might contain occluded and blurred objects. 2) Label bias, primarily due to the high imbalance between a few positive relationship samples and numerous negative ones. Additionally, the distribution of relationships exhibits a long-tailed pattern. To address the above problems, in this paper, we introduce a network named TD$^2$-Net that aims at denoising and debiasing for dynamic SGG. Specifically, we first propose a denoising spatio-temporal transformer module that enhances object representation with robust contextual information. This is achieved by designing a differentiable Top-K object selector that utilizes the gumbel-softmax sampling strategy to select the relevant neighborhood for each object. Second, we introduce an asymmetrical reweighting loss to relieve the issue of label bias. This loss function integrates asymmetry focusing factors and the volume of samples to adjust the weights assigned to individual samples. Systematic experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed TD$^2$-Net over existing state-of-the-art approaches on Action Genome databases. In more detail, TD$^2$-Net outperforms the second-best competitors by 12.7 \% on mean-Recall@10 for predicate classification.
Authors: Kexin Li, Tao Jiang, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang, Yueting Zhuang, Jun Xiao
Interactive Video Object Segmentation (iVOS) is a challenging task that requires real-time human-computer interaction. To improve the user experience, it is important to consider the user's input habits, segmentation quality, running time and memory consumption.However, existing methods compromise user experience with single input mode and slow running speed. Specifically, these methods only allow the user to interact with one single frame, which limits the expression of the user's intent.To overcome these limitations and better align with people's usage habits, we propose a framework that can accept multiple frames simultaneously and explore synergistic interaction across frames (SIAF). Concretely, we designed the Across-Frame Interaction Module that enables users to annotate different objects freely on multiple frames. The AFI module will migrate scribble information among multiple interactive frames and generate multi-frame masks. Additionally, we employ the id-queried mechanism to process multiple objects in batches. Furthermore, for a more efficient propagation and lightweight model, we design a truncated re-propagation strategy to replace the previous multi-round fusion module, which employs an across-round memory that stores important interaction information. Our SwinB-SIAF achieves new state-of-the-art performance on DAVIS 2017 (89.6%, J&F@60). Moreover, our R50-SIAF is more than 3 faster than the state-of-the-art competitor under challenging multi-object scenarios.
Authors: Viet Dung Nguyen, Michael T. LaCour, Richard D. Komistek
Image segmentation in total knee arthroplasty is crucial for precise preoperative planning and accurate implant positioning, leading to improved surgical outcomes and patient satisfaction. The biggest challenges of image segmentation in total knee arthroplasty include accurately delineating complex anatomical structures, dealing with image artifacts and noise, and developing robust algorithms that can handle anatomical variations and pathologies commonly encountered in patients. The potential of using machine learning for image segmentation in total knee arthroplasty lies in its ability to improve segmentation accuracy, automate the process, and provide real-time assistance to surgeons, leading to enhanced surgical planning, implant placement, and patient outcomes. This paper proposes a methodology to use deep learning for robust and real-time total knee arthroplasty image segmentation. The deep learning model, trained on a large dataset, demonstrates outstanding performance in accurately segmenting both the implanted femur and tibia, achieving an impressive mean-Average-Precision (mAP) of 88.83 when compared to the ground truth while also achieving a real-time segmented speed of 20 frames per second (fps). We have introduced a novel methodology for segmenting implanted knee fluoroscopic or x-ray images that showcases remarkable levels of accuracy and speed, paving the way for various potential extended applications.
Authors: Haoran Wei, Lingyu Kong, Jinyue Chen, Liang Zhao, Zheng Ge, En Yu, Jianjian Sun, Chunrui Han, Xiangyu Zhang
Playing Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) in 2023 is trendy among the AI community. However, the relatively large number of parameters (more than 7B) of popular LVLMs makes it difficult to train and deploy on consumer GPUs, discouraging many researchers with limited resources. Imagine how cool it would be to experience all the features of current LVLMs on an old GTX1080ti (our only game card). Accordingly, we present Vary-toy in this report, a small-size Vary along with Qwen-1.8B as the base ``large'' language model. In Vary-toy, we introduce an improved vision vocabulary, allowing the model to not only possess all features of Vary but also gather more generality. Specifically, we replace negative samples of natural images with positive sample data driven by object detection in the procedure of generating vision vocabulary, more sufficiently utilizing the capacity of the vocabulary network and enabling it to efficiently encode visual information corresponding to natural objects. For experiments, Vary-toy can achieve 65.6% ANLS on DocVQA, 59.1% accuracy on ChartQA, 88.1% accuracy on RefCOCO, and 29% on MMVet. The code will be publicly available on the homepage.
Authors: Yuhang Zhang, Yue Yao, Xuannan Liu, Lixiong Qin, Wenjing Wang, Weihong Deng
Facial expression recognition (FER) models are typically trained on datasets with a fixed number of seven basic classes. However, recent research works point out that there are far more expressions than the basic ones. Thus, when these models are deployed in the real world, they may encounter unknown classes, such as compound expressions that cannot be classified into existing basic classes. To address this issue, we propose the open-set FER task for the first time. Though there are many existing open-set recognition methods, we argue that they do not work well for open-set FER because FER data are all human faces with very small inter-class distances, which makes the open-set samples very similar to close-set samples. In this paper, we are the first to transform the disadvantage of small inter-class distance into an advantage by proposing a new way for open-set FER. Specifically, we find that small inter-class distance allows for sparsely distributed pseudo labels of open-set samples, which can be viewed as symmetric noisy labels. Based on this novel observation, we convert the open-set FER to a noisy label detection problem. We further propose a novel method that incorporates attention map consistency and cycle training to detect the open-set samples. Extensive experiments on various FER datasets demonstrate that our method clearly outperforms state-of-the-art open-set recognition methods by large margins. Code is available at https://github.com/zyh-uaiaaaa.
Authors: Jianqiao Zheng, Xueqian Li, Simon Lucey
Training vision transformer networks on small datasets poses challenges. In contrast, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can achieve state-of-the-art performance by leveraging their architectural inductive bias. In this paper, we investigate whether this inductive bias can be reinterpreted as an initialization bias within a vision transformer network. Our approach is motivated by the finding that random impulse filters can achieve almost comparable performance to learned filters in CNNs. We introduce a novel initialization strategy for transformer networks that can achieve comparable performance to CNNs on small datasets while preserving its architectural flexibility.
Authors: Robert Turnbull, Evelyn Mannix
The capacity to isolate and recognize individual characters from facsimile images of papyrus manuscripts yields rich opportunities for digital analysis. For this reason the `ICDAR 2023 Competition on Detection and Recognition of Greek Letters on Papyri' was held as part of the 17th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. This paper discusses our submission to the competition. We used an ensemble of YOLOv8 models to detect and classify individual characters and employed two different approaches for refining the character predictions, including a transformer based DeiT approach and a ResNet-50 model trained on a large corpus of unlabelled data using SimCLR, a self-supervised learning method. Our submission won the recognition challenge with a mAP of 42.2%, and was runner-up in the detection challenge with a mean average precision (mAP) of 51.4%. At the more relaxed intersection over union threshold of 0.5, we achieved the highest mean average precision and mean average recall results for both detection and classification. We ran our prediction pipeline on more than 4,500 images from the Oxyrhynchus Papyri to illustrate the utility of our approach, and we release the results publicly in multiple formats.
Authors: Seungho Lee, Seoungyoon Kang, Hyunjung Shim
This study demonstrates a cost-effective approach to semantic segmentation using self-supervised vision transformers (SSVT). By freezing the SSVT backbone and training a lightweight segmentation head, our approach effectively utilizes imperfect labels, thereby improving robustness to label imperfections. Empirical experiments show significant performance improvements over existing methods for various annotation types, including scribble, point-level, and image-level labels. The research highlights the effectiveness of self-supervised vision transformers in dealing with imperfect labels, providing a practical and efficient solution for semantic segmentation while reducing annotation costs. Through extensive experiments, we confirm that our method outperforms baseline models for all types of imperfect labels. Especially under the zero-shot vision-language-model-based label, our model exhibits 11.5\%p performance gain compared to the baseline.
Authors: Yifan Liu, Chenxin Li, Chen Yang, Yixuan Yuan
Reconstructing deformable tissues from endoscopic stereo videos is essential in many downstream surgical applications. However, existing methods suffer from slow inference speed, which greatly limits their practical use. In this paper, we introduce EndoGaussian, a real-time surgical scene reconstruction framework that builds on 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our framework represents dynamic surgical scenes as canonical Gaussians and a time-dependent deformation field, which predicts Gaussian deformations at novel timestamps. Due to the efficient Gaussian representation and parallel rendering pipeline, our framework significantly accelerates the rendering speed compared to previous methods. In addition, we design the deformation field as the combination of a lightweight encoding voxel and an extremely tiny MLP, allowing for efficient Gaussian tracking with a minor rendering burden. Furthermore, we design a holistic Gaussian initialization method to fully leverage the surface distribution prior, achieved by searching informative points from across the input image sequence. Experiments on public endoscope datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve real-time rendering speed (195 FPS real-time, 100$\times$ gain) while maintaining the state-of-the-art reconstruction quality (35.925 PSNR) and the fastest training speed (within 2 min/scene), showing significant promise for intraoperative surgery applications. Code is available at: \url{https://yifliu3.github.io/EndoGaussian/}.
Authors: Chongke Bi, Xiaoxing Liu, Zhilei Liu
Talking face synthesis driven by audio is one of the current research hotspots in the fields of multidimensional signal processing and multimedia. Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has recently been brought to this research field in order to enhance the realism and 3D effect of the generated faces. However, most existing NeRF-based methods either burden NeRF with complex learning tasks while lacking methods for supervised multimodal feature fusion, or cannot precisely map audio to the facial region related to speech movements. These reasons ultimately result in existing methods generating inaccurate lip shapes. This paper moves a portion of NeRF learning tasks ahead and proposes a talking face synthesis method via NeRF with attention-based disentanglement (NeRF-AD). In particular, an Attention-based Disentanglement module is introduced to disentangle the face into Audio-face and Identity-face using speech-related facial action unit (AU) information. To precisely regulate how audio affects the talking face, we only fuse the Audio-face with audio feature. In addition, AU information is also utilized to supervise the fusion of these two modalities. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate that our NeRF-AD outperforms state-of-the-art methods in generating realistic talking face videos, including image quality and lip synchronization. To view video results, please refer to https://xiaoxingliu02.github.io/NeRF-AD.
Authors: Xiang Liu, Jiahong Chen, Bin Chen, Zimo Liu, Baoyi An, Shu-Tao Xia
Displaying high-quality images on edge devices, such as augmented reality devices, is essential for enhancing the user experience. However, these devices often face power consumption and computing resource limitations, making it challenging to apply many deep learning-based image compression algorithms in this field. Implicit Neural Representation (INR) for image compression is an emerging technology that offers two key benefits compared to cutting-edge autoencoder models: low computational complexity and parameter-free decoding. It also outperforms many traditional and early neural compression methods in terms of quality. In this study, we introduce a new Mixed Autoregressive Model (MARM) to significantly reduce the decoding time for the current INR codec, along with a new synthesis network to enhance reconstruction quality. MARM includes our proposed Autoregressive Upsampler (ARU) blocks, which are highly computationally efficient, and ARM from previous work to balance decoding time and reconstruction quality. We also propose enhancing ARU's performance using a checkerboard two-stage decoding strategy. Moreover, the ratio of different modules can be adjusted to maintain a balance between quality and speed. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves computational efficiency while preserving image quality. With different parameter settings, our method can outperform popular AE-based codecs in constrained environments in terms of both quality and decoding time, or achieve state-of-the-art reconstruction quality compared to other INR codecs.
Authors: Hongchi Xia, Yang Fu, Sifei Liu, Xiaolong Wang
We introduce a new RGB-D object dataset captured in the wild called WildRGB-D. Unlike most existing real-world object-centric datasets which only come with RGB capturing, the direct capture of the depth channel allows better 3D annotations and broader downstream applications. WildRGB-D comprises large-scale category-level RGB-D object videos, which are taken using an iPhone to go around the objects in 360 degrees. It contains around 8500 recorded objects and nearly 20000 RGB-D videos across 46 common object categories. These videos are taken with diverse cluttered backgrounds with three setups to cover as many real-world scenarios as possible: (i) a single object in one video; (ii) multiple objects in one video; and (iii) an object with a static hand in one video. The dataset is annotated with object masks, real-world scale camera poses, and reconstructed aggregated point clouds from RGBD videos. We benchmark four tasks with WildRGB-D including novel view synthesis, camera pose estimation, object 6d pose estimation, and object surface reconstruction. Our experiments show that the large-scale capture of RGB-D objects provides a large potential to advance 3D object learning. Our project page is https://wildrgbd.github.io/.
Authors: Hengjia Li, Yang Liu, Yuqi Lin, Zhanwei Zhang, Yibo Zhao, weihang Pan, Tu Zheng, Zheng Yang, Yuchun Jiang, Boxi Wu, Deng Cai
Generative domain adaptation has achieved remarkable progress, enabling us to adapt a pre-trained generator to a new target domain. However, existing methods simply adapt the generator to a single target domain and are limited to a single modality, either text-driven or image-driven. Moreover, they are prone to overfitting domain-specific attributes, which inevitably compromises cross-domain consistency. In this paper, we propose UniHDA, a unified and versatile framework for generative hybrid domain adaptation with multi-modal references from multiple domains. We use CLIP encoder to project multi-modal references into a unified embedding space and then linear interpolate the direction vectors from multiple target domains to achieve hybrid domain adaptation. To ensure the cross-domain consistency, we propose a novel cross-domain spatial structure (CSS) loss that maintains detailed spatial structure information between source and target generator. Experiments show that the adapted generator can synthesise realistic images with various attribute compositions. Additionally, our framework is versatile to multiple generators, \eg, StyleGAN2 and Diffusion Models.
Authors: Behnood Rasti, Alexandre Zouaoui, Julien Mairal, Jocelyn Chanussot
In this paper, we introduce a novel linear model tailored for semisupervised/library-based unmixing. Our model incorporates considerations for library mismatch while enabling the enforcement of the abundance sum-to-one constraint (ASC). Unlike conventional sparse unmixing methods, this model involves nonconvex optimization, presenting significant computational challenges. We demonstrate the efficacy of Alternating Methods of Multipliers (ADMM) in cyclically solving these intricate problems. We propose two semisupervised unmixing approaches, each relying on distinct priors applied to the new model in addition to the ASC: sparsity prior and convexity constraint. Our experimental results validate that enforcing the convexity constraint outperforms the sparsity prior for the endmember library. These results are corroborated across three simulated datasets (accounting for spectral variability and varying pixel purity levels) and the Cuprite dataset. Additionally, our comparison with conventional sparse unmixing methods showcases considerable advantages of our proposed model, which entails nonconvex optimization. Notably, our implementations of the proposed algorithms-fast semisupervised unmixing (FaSUn) and sparse unmixing using soft-shrinkage (SUnS)-prove considerably more efficient than traditional sparse unmixing methods. SUnS and FaSUn were implemented using PyTorch and provided in a dedicated Python package called Fast Semisupervised Unmixing (FUnmix), which is open-source and available at https://github.com/BehnoodRasti/FUnmix
Authors: Hao Yang, Hua Mao, Wai Lok Woo, Jie Chen, Xi Peng
Multiview clustering (MVC) segregates data samples into meaningful clusters by synthesizing information across multiple views. Moreover, deep learning-based methods have demonstrated their strong feature learning capabilities in MVC scenarios. However, effectively generalizing feature representations while maintaining consistency is still an intractable problem. In addition, most existing deep clustering methods based on contrastive learning overlook the consistency of the clustering representations during the clustering process. In this paper, we show how the above problems can be overcome and propose a consistent enhancement-based deep MVC method via contrastive learning (CCEC). Specifically, semantic connection blocks are incorporated into a feature representation to preserve the consistent information among multiple views. Furthermore, the representation process for clustering is enhanced through spectral clustering, and the consistency across multiple views is improved. Experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method in comparison with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code for this method can be accessed at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CCEC-E84E/.
Authors: Shengze Li, Jianjian Cao, Peng Ye, Yuhan Ding, Chongjun Tu, Tao Chen
Recently, foundational models such as CLIP and SAM have shown promising performance for the task of Zero-Shot Anomaly Segmentation (ZSAS). However, either CLIP-based or SAM-based ZSAS methods still suffer from non-negligible key drawbacks: 1) CLIP primarily focuses on global feature alignment across different inputs, leading to imprecise segmentation of local anomalous parts; 2) SAM tends to generate numerous redundant masks without proper prompt constraints, resulting in complex post-processing requirements. In this work, we innovatively propose a CLIP and SAM collaboration framework called ClipSAM for ZSAS. The insight behind ClipSAM is to employ CLIP's semantic understanding capability for anomaly localization and rough segmentation, which is further used as the prompt constraints for SAM to refine the anomaly segmentation results. In details, we introduce a crucial Unified Multi-scale Cross-modal Interaction (UMCI) module for interacting language with visual features at multiple scales of CLIP to reason anomaly positions. Then, we design a novel Multi-level Mask Refinement (MMR) module, which utilizes the positional information as multi-level prompts for SAM to acquire hierarchical levels of masks and merges them. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving the optimal segmentation performance on the MVTec-AD and VisA datasets.
Authors: Ru Peng, Heming Zou, Haobo Wang, Yawen Zeng, Zenan Huang, Junbo Zhao
The conventional evaluation protocols on machine learning models rely heavily on a labeled, i.i.d-assumed testing dataset, which is not often present in real world applications. The Automated Model Evaluation (AutoEval) shows an alternative to this traditional workflow, by forming a proximal prediction pipeline of the testing performance without the presence of ground-truth labels. Despite its recent successes, the AutoEval frameworks still suffer from an overconfidence issue, substantial storage and computational cost. In that regard, we propose a novel measure -- Meta-Distribution Energy (MDE) -- that allows the AutoEval framework to be both more efficient and effective. The core of the MDE is to establish a meta-distribution statistic, on the information (energy) associated with individual samples, then offer a smoother representation enabled by energy-based learning. We further provide our theoretical insights by connecting the MDE with the classification loss. We provide extensive experiments across modalities, datasets and different architectural backbones to validate MDE's validity, together with its superiority compared with prior approaches. We also prove MDE's versatility by showing its seamless integration with large-scale models, and easy adaption to learning scenarios with noisy- or imbalanced- labels.
Authors: Yue Hu, Xianghe Pang, Xiaoqi Qin, Yonina C. Eldar, Siheng Chen, Ping Zhang, Wenjun Zhang
Collaborative perception allows each agent to enhance its perceptual abilities by exchanging messages with others. It inherently results in a trade-off between perception ability and communication costs. Previous works transmit complete full-frame high-dimensional feature maps among agents, resulting in substantial communication costs. To promote communication efficiency, we propose only transmitting the information needed for the collaborator's downstream task. This pragmatic communication strategy focuses on three key aspects: i) pragmatic message selection, which selects task-critical parts from the complete data, resulting in spatially and temporally sparse feature vectors; ii) pragmatic message representation, which achieves pragmatic approximation of high-dimensional feature vectors with a task-adaptive dictionary, enabling communicating with integer indices; iii) pragmatic collaborator selection, which identifies beneficial collaborators, pruning unnecessary communication links. Following this strategy, we first formulate a mathematical optimization framework for the perception-communication trade-off and then propose PragComm, a multi-agent collaborative perception system with two key components: i) single-agent detection and tracking and ii) pragmatic collaboration. The proposed PragComm promotes pragmatic communication and adapts to a wide range of communication conditions. We evaluate PragComm for both collaborative 3D object detection and tracking tasks in both real-world, V2V4Real, and simulation datasets, OPV2V and V2X-SIM2.0. PragComm consistently outperforms previous methods with more than 32.7K times lower communication volume on OPV2V. Code is available at github.com/PhyllisH/PragComm.
Authors: Chang Liu, Laura Klein, Yixing Huang, Edith Baader, Michael Lell, Marc Kachelrieß, Andreas Maier
To facilitate a prospective estimation of CT effective dose and risk minimization process, a prospective spatial dose estimation and the known anatomical structures are expected. To this end, a CT reconstruction method is required to reconstruct CT volumes from as few projections as possible, i.e. by using the topograms, with anatomical structures as correct as possible. In this work, an optimized CT reconstruction model based on a generative adversarial network (GAN) is proposed. The GAN is trained to reconstruct 3D volumes from an anterior-posterior and a lateral CT projection. To enhance anatomical structures, a pre-trained organ segmentation network and the 3D perceptual loss are applied during the training phase, so that the model can then generate both organ-enhanced CT volume and the organ segmentation mask. The proposed method can reconstruct CT volumes with PSNR of 26.49, RMSE of 196.17, and SSIM of 0.64, compared to 26.21, 201.55 and 0.63 using the baseline method. In terms of the anatomical structure, the proposed method effectively enhances the organ shape and boundary and allows for a straight-forward identification of the relevant anatomical structures. We note that conventional reconstruction metrics fail to indicate the enhancement of anatomical structures. In addition to such metrics, the evaluation is expanded with assessing the organ segmentation performance. The average organ dice of the proposed method is 0.71 compared with 0.63 in baseline model, indicating the enhancement of anatomical structures.
Authors: Jibinraj Antony, Vinit Hegiste, Ali Nazeri, Hooman Tavakoli, Snehal Walunj, Christiane Plociennik, Martin Ruskowski
Object Detection (OD) has proven to be a significant computer vision method in extracting localized class information and has multiple applications in the industry. Although many of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) OD models perform well on medium and large sized objects, they seem to under perform on small objects. In most of the industrial use cases, it is difficult to collect and annotate data for small objects, as it is time-consuming and prone to human errors. Additionally, those datasets are likely to be unbalanced and often result in an inefficient model convergence. To tackle this challenge, this study presents a novel approach that injects additional data points to improve the performance of the OD models. Using synthetic data generation, the difficulties in data collection and annotations for small object data points can be minimized and to create a dataset with balanced distribution. This paper discusses the effects of a simple proportional class-balancing technique, to enable better anchor matching of the OD models. A comparison was carried out on the performances of the SOTA OD models: YOLOv5, YOLOv7 and SSD, for combinations of real and synthetic datasets within an industrial use case.
Authors: Dachong Li, Li Li, Zhuangzhuang Chen, Jianqiang Li
Recent studies reveal that the remarkable performance of Vision transformers (ViTs) benefits from large receptive fields. For this reason, the large convolutional kernel design becomes an ideal solution to make Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) great again. However, the typical large convolutional kernels turn out to be hardware-unfriendly operators, resulting in discount compatibility of various hardware platforms. Thus, it is unwise to simply enlarge the convolutional kernel size. In this paper, we reveal that small convolutional kernels and convolution operations can achieve the closing effects of large kernel sizes. Then, we propose a shift-wise operator that ensures the CNNs capture long-range dependencies with the help of the sparse mechanism, while remaining hardware-friendly. Experimental results show that our shift-wise operator significantly improves the accuracy of a regular CNN while markedly reducing computational requirements. On the ImageNet-1k, our shift-wise enhanced CNN model outperforms the state-of-the-art models. Code & models at https://github.com/lidc54/shift-wiseConv.
Authors: Fei Xie, Wankou Yang, Chunyu Wang, Lei Chu, Yue Cao, Chao Ma, Wenjun Zeng
Developing robust and discriminative appearance models has been a long-standing research challenge in visual object tracking. In the prevalent Siamese-based paradigm, the features extracted by the Siamese-like networks are often insufficient to model the tracked targets and distractor objects, thereby hindering them from being robust and discriminative simultaneously. While most Siamese trackers focus on designing robust correlation operations, we propose a novel single-branch tracking framework inspired by the transformer. Unlike the Siamese-like feature extraction, our tracker deeply embeds cross-image feature correlation in multiple layers of the feature network. By extensively matching the features of the two images through multiple layers, it can suppress non-target features, resulting in target-aware feature extraction. The output features can be directly used for predicting target locations without additional correlation steps. Thus, we reformulate the two-branch Siamese tracking as a conceptually simple, fully transformer-based Single-Branch Tracking pipeline, dubbed SBT. After conducting an in-depth analysis of the SBT baseline, we summarize many effective design principles and propose an improved tracker dubbed SuperSBT. SuperSBT adopts a hierarchical architecture with a local modeling layer to enhance shallow-level features. A unified relation modeling is proposed to remove complex handcrafted layer pattern designs. SuperSBT is further improved by masked image modeling pre-training, integrating temporal modeling, and equipping with dedicated prediction heads. Thus, SuperSBT outperforms the SBT baseline by 4.7%,3.0%, and 4.5% AUC scores in LaSOT, TrackingNet, and GOT-10K. Notably, SuperSBT greatly raises the speed of SBT from 37 FPS to 81 FPS. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior results on eight VOT benchmarks.
Authors: Wanjuan Su, Chen Zhang, Qingshan Xu, Wenbing Tao
Surface reconstruction has traditionally relied on the Multi-View Stereo (MVS)-based pipeline, which often suffers from noisy and incomplete geometry. This is due to that although MVS has been proven to be an effective way to recover the geometry of the scenes, especially for locally detailed areas with rich textures, it struggles to deal with areas with low texture and large variations of illumination where the photometric consistency is unreliable. Recently, Neural Implicit Surface Reconstruction (NISR) combines surface rendering and volume rendering techniques and bypasses the MVS as an intermediate step, which has emerged as a promising alternative to overcome the limitations of traditional pipelines. While NISR has shown impressive results on simple scenes, it remains challenging to recover delicate geometry from uncontrolled real-world scenes which is caused by its underconstrained optimization. To this end, the framework PSDF is proposed which resorts to external geometric priors from a pretrained MVS network and internal geometric priors inherent in the NISR model to facilitate high-quality neural implicit surface learning. Specifically, the visibility-aware feature consistency loss and depth prior-assisted sampling based on external geometric priors are introduced. These proposals provide powerfully geometric consistency constraints and aid in locating surface intersection points, thereby significantly improving the accuracy and delicate reconstruction of NISR. Meanwhile, the internal prior-guided importance rendering is presented to enhance the fidelity of the reconstructed surface mesh by mitigating the biased rendering issue in NISR. Extensive experiments on the Tanks and Temples dataset show that PSDF achieves state-of-the-art performance on complex uncontrolled scenes.
Authors: Tim Brödermann, David Bruggemann, Christos Sakaridis, Kevin Ta, Odysseas Liagouris, Jason Corkill, Luc Van Gool
Achieving level-5 driving automation in autonomous vehicles necessitates a robust semantic visual perception system capable of parsing data from different sensors across diverse conditions. However, existing semantic perception datasets often lack important non-camera modalities typically used in autonomous vehicles, or they do not exploit such modalities to aid and improve semantic annotations in challenging conditions. To address this, we introduce MUSES, the MUlti-SEnsor Semantic perception dataset for driving in adverse conditions under increased uncertainty. MUSES includes synchronized multimodal recordings with 2D panoptic annotations for 2500 images captured under diverse weather and illumination. The dataset integrates a frame camera, a lidar, a radar, an event camera, and an IMU/GNSS sensor. Our new two-stage panoptic annotation protocol captures both class-level and instance-level uncertainty in the ground truth and enables the novel task of uncertainty-aware panoptic segmentation we introduce, along with standard semantic and panoptic segmentation. MUSES proves both effective for training and challenging for evaluating models under diverse visual conditions, and it opens new avenues for research in multimodal and uncertainty-aware dense semantic perception. Our dataset and benchmark will be made publicly available.
Authors: Sonal Kumar, Arijit Sur, Rashmi Dutta Baruah
Successive proposals of several self-supervised training schemes continue to emerge, taking one step closer to developing a universal foundation model. In this process, the unsupervised downstream tasks are recognized as one of the evaluation methods to validate the quality of visual features learned with a self-supervised training scheme. However, unsupervised dense semantic segmentation has not been explored as a downstream task, which can utilize and evaluate the quality of semantic information introduced in patch-level feature representations during self-supervised training of a vision transformer. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel data-driven approach for unsupervised semantic segmentation (DatUS^2) as a downstream task. DatUS^2 generates semantically consistent and dense pseudo annotate segmentation masks for the unlabeled image dataset without using any visual-prior or synchronized data. We compare these pseudo-annotated segmentation masks with ground truth masks for evaluating recent self-supervised training schemes to learn shared semantic properties at the patch level and discriminative semantic properties at the segment level. Finally, we evaluate existing state-of-the-art self-supervised training schemes with our proposed downstream task, i.e., DatUS^2. Also, the best version of DatUS^2 outperforms the existing state-of-the-art method for the unsupervised dense semantic segmentation task with 15.02% MiOU and 21.47% Pixel accuracy on the SUIM dataset. It also achieves a competitive level of accuracy for a large-scale and complex dataset, i.e., the COCO dataset.
Authors: Rongjie Li, Songyang Zhang, Xuming He
Scene Graph Generation (SGG) remains a challenging visual understanding task due to its compositional property. Most previous works adopt a bottom-up, two-stage or point-based, one-stage approach, which often suffers from high time complexity or suboptimal designs. In this work, we propose a novel SGG method to address the aforementioned issues, formulating the task as a bipartite graph construction problem. To address the issues above, we create a transformer-based end-to-end framework to generate the entity and entity-aware predicate proposal set, and infer directed edges to form relation triplets. Moreover, we design a graph assembling module to infer the connectivity of the bipartite scene graph based on our entity-aware structure, enabling us to generate the scene graph in an end-to-end manner. Based on bipartite graph assembling paradigm, we further propose a new technical design to address the efficacy of entity-aware modeling and optimization stability of graph assembling. Equipped with the enhanced entity-aware design, our method achieves optimal performance and time-complexity. Extensive experimental results show that our design is able to achieve the state-of-the-art or comparable performance on three challenging benchmarks, surpassing most of the existing approaches and enjoying higher efficiency in inference. Code is available: https://github.com/Scarecrow0/SGTR
Authors: Alfonso López, Carlos Javier Ogayar, Francisco Ramón Feito, Joaquim João Sousa
The classification of different grapevine varieties is a relevant phenotyping task in Precision Viticulture since it enables estimating the growth of vineyard rows dedicated to different varieties, among other applications concerning the wine industry. This task can be performed with destructive methods that require time-consuming tasks, including data collection and analysis in the laboratory. However, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) provide a more efficient and less prohibitive approach to collecting hyperspectral data, despite acquiring noisier data. Therefore, the first task is the processing of these data to correct and downsample large amounts of data. In addition, the hyperspectral signatures of grape varieties are very similar. In this work, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is proposed for classifying seventeen varieties of red and white grape variants. Rather than classifying single samples, these are processed together with their neighbourhood. Hence, the extraction of spatial and spectral features is addressed with 1) a spatial attention layer and 2) Inception blocks. The pipeline goes from processing to dataset elaboration, finishing with the training phase. The fitted model is evaluated in terms of response time, accuracy and data separability, and compared with other state-of-the-art CNNs for classifying hyperspectral data. Our network was proven to be much more lightweight with a reduced number of input bands, a lower number of trainable weights and therefore, reduced training time. Despite this, the evaluated metrics showed much better results for our network (~99% overall accuracy), in comparison with previous works barely achieving 81% OA.
Authors: Shaoheng Fang, Rui Ye, Wenhao Wang, Zuhong Liu, Yuxiao Wang, Yafei Wang, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang
Roadside unit (RSU) can significantly improve the safety and robustness of autonomous vehicles through Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. Currently, the usage of a single RSU mainly focuses on real-time inference and V2X collaboration, while neglecting the potential value of the high-quality data collected by RSU sensors. Integrating the vast amounts of data from numerous RSUs can provide a rich source of data for model training. However, the absence of ground truth annotations and the difficulty of transmitting enormous volumes of data are two inevitable barriers to fully exploiting this hidden value. In this paper, we introduce FedRSU, an innovative federated learning framework for self-supervised scene flow estimation. In FedRSU, we present a recurrent self-supervision training paradigm, where for each RSU, the scene flow prediction of points at every timestamp can be supervised by its subsequent future multi-modality observation. Another key component of FedRSU is federated learning, where multiple devices collaboratively train an ML model while keeping the training data local and private. With the power of the recurrent self-supervised learning paradigm, FL is able to leverage innumerable underutilized data from RSU. To verify the FedRSU framework, we construct a large-scale multi-modality dataset RSU-SF. The dataset consists of 17 RSU clients, covering various scenarios, modalities, and sensor settings. Based on RSU-SF, we show that FedRSU can greatly improve model performance in ITS and provide a comprehensive benchmark under diverse FL scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we provide the first real-world LiDAR-camera multi-modal dataset and benchmark for the FL community.
Authors: Guoxin Si, Shiliang Fu, Wei Yao
With the intensification of global warming, the monitoring of methane emission and detection of gas plumes from landfills have increasingly received attention. We decompose methane emission monitoring into three sub-tasks: methane concentration inversion, plume segmentation, and emission rate estimation. Conventional algorithms have limitations: methane concentration inversion usually uses the matched filter, which is sensitive to global spectrum distribution and contains a large amount of noises. There is limited research on plume segmentation, with many studies resorting to manual segmentation that is likely to be subjective. The estimation of methane emission rate often utilizes IME algorithm, which relies on obtaining meteorological measurement data. Using the WENT landfill site in Hong Kong and PRISMA hyperspectral satellite imagery, we propose a new deep learning-based framework for quantitative monitoring of methane emissions from remote sensing images based on physical simulation. We generate simulated methane plumes using large eddy simulation (LES) and different concentration maps of fugitive emission using the radiative transfer equation (RTE), while combining augmentation techniques to create a simulated PRISMA dataset. We train a U-Net network for methane concentration inversion, a Mask R-CNN network for methane plume segmentation, and a ResNet-50 network for methane emission rate estimation. All three deep networks achieve higher validation accuracy compared to conventional algorithms. We further respectively combine the first two sub-tasks and the last two sub-tasks to design the multi-task learning models - MTL-01 and MTL-02, both of which achieve higher accuracy than single-task models. Our research serves as a demonstration of applying multi-task deep learning to quantitative methane monitoring and can be extended to a broad range of methane monitoring tasks.
Authors: Lincan Li, Wei Shao, Wei Dong, Yijun Tian, Kaixiang Yang, Wenjie Zhang
The aspiration of the next generation's autonomous driving (AD) technology relies on the dedicated integration and interaction among intelligent perception, prediction, planning, and low-level control. There has been a huge bottleneck regarding the upper bound of autonomous driving algorithm performance, a consensus from academia and industry believes that the key to surmount the bottleneck lies in data-centric autonomous driving technology. Recent advancement in AD simulation, closed-loop model training, and AD big data engine have gained some valuable experience. However, there is a lack of systematic knowledge and deep understanding regarding how to build efficient data-centric AD technology for AD algorithm self-evolution and better AD big data accumulation. To fill in the identified research gaps, this article will closely focus on reviewing the state-of-the-art data-driven autonomous driving technologies, with an emphasis on the comprehensive taxonomy of autonomous driving datasets characterized by milestone generations, key features, data acquisition settings, etc. Furthermore, we provide a systematic review of the existing benchmark closed-loop AD big data pipelines from the industrial frontier, including the procedure of closed-loop frameworks, key technologies, and empirical studies. Finally, the future directions, potential applications, limitations and concerns are discussed to arouse efforts from both academia and industry for promoting the further development of autonomous driving.
Authors: Zhongyuan Zhao, Zhenyu Bao, Qing Li, Guoping Qiu, Kanglin Liu
Despite much progress, creating real-time high-fidelity head avatar is still difficult and existing methods have to trade-off between speed and quality. 3DMM based methods often fail to model non-facial structures such as eyeglasses and hairstyles, while neural implicit models suffer from deformation inflexibility and rendering inefficiency.
Although 3D Gaussian has been demonstrated to possess promising capability for geometry representation and radiance field reconstruction, applying 3D Gaussian in head avatar creation remains a major challenge since it is difficult for 3D Gaussian to model the head shape variations caused by changing poses and expressions. In this paper, we introduce PSAvatar, a novel framework for animatable head avatar creation that utilizes discrete geometric primitive to create a parametric morphable shape model and employs 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and high fidelity rendering. The parametric morphable shape model is a Point-based Morphable Shape Model (PMSM) which uses points instead of meshes for 3D representation to achieve enhanced representation flexibility. The PMSM first converts the FLAME mesh to points by sampling on the surfaces as well as off the meshes to enable the reconstruction of not only surface-like structures but also complex geometries such as eyeglasses and hairstyles. By aligning these points with the head shape in an analysis-by-synthesis manner, the PMSM makes it possible to utilize 3D Gaussian for fine detail representation and appearance modeling, thus enabling the creation of high-fidelity avatars. We show that PSAvatar can reconstruct high-fidelity head avatars of a variety of subjects and the avatars can be animated in real-time ($\ge$ 25 fps at a resolution of 512 x 512 )
Authors: Cheng Han, Qifan Wang, Yiming Cui, Wenguan Wang, Lifu Huang, Siyuan Qi, Dongfang Liu
As the scale of vision models continues to grow, the emergence of Visual Prompt Tuning (VPT) as a parameter-efficient transfer learning technique has gained attention due to its superior performance compared to traditional full-finetuning. However, the conditions favoring VPT (the ``when") and the underlying rationale (the ``why") remain unclear. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive analysis across 19 distinct datasets and tasks. To understand the ``when" aspect, we identify the scenarios where VPT proves favorable by two dimensions: task objectives and data distributions. We find that VPT is preferrable when there is 1) a substantial disparity between the original and the downstream task objectives (e.g., transitioning from classification to counting), or 2) a similarity in data distributions between the two tasks (e.g., both involve natural images). In exploring the ``why" dimension, our results indicate VPT's success cannot be attributed solely to overfitting and optimization considerations. The unique way VPT preserves original features and adds parameters appears to be a pivotal factor. Our study provides insights into VPT's mechanisms, and offers guidance for its optimal utilization.
Authors: Mukai Li, Lei Li, Yuwei Yin, Masood Ahmed, Zhenguang Liu, Qi Liu
VLMs (Vision-Language Models) extend the capabilities of LLMs (Large Language Models) to accept multimodal inputs. Since it has been verified that LLMs can be induced to generate harmful or inaccurate content through specific test cases (termed as Red Teaming), how VLMs perform in similar scenarios, especially with their combination of textual and visual inputs, remains a question. To explore this problem, we present a novel red teaming dataset RTVLM, which encompasses 10 subtasks (e.g., image misleading, multi-modal jail-breaking, face fairness, etc) under 4 primary aspects (faithfulness, privacy, safety, fairness). Our RTVLM is the first red-teaming dataset to benchmark current VLMs in terms of these 4 different aspects. Detailed analysis shows that 10 prominent open-sourced VLMs struggle with the red teaming in different degrees and have up to 31% performance gap with GPT-4V. Additionally, we simply apply red teaming alignment to LLaVA-v1.5 with Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) using RTVLM, and this bolsters the models' performance with 10% in RTVLM test set, 13% in MM-Hal, and without noticeable decline in MM-Bench, overpassing other LLaVA-based models with regular alignment data. This reveals that current open-sourced VLMs still lack red teaming alignment. Our code and datasets will be open-source.
Authors: Akshay Daydar, Alik Pramanick, Arijit Sur, Subramani Kanagaraj
Knee Osteoarthritis (KOA) is the third most prevalent Musculoskeletal Disorder (MSD) after neck and back pain. To monitor such a severe MSD, a segmentation map of the femur, tibia and tibiofemoral cartilage is usually accessed using the automated segmentation algorithm from the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of the knee. But, in recent works, such segmentation is conceivable only from the multistage framework thus creating data handling issues and needing continuous manual inference rendering it unable to make a quick and precise clinical diagnosis. In order to solve these issues, in this paper the Multi-Resolution Attentive-Unet (MtRA-Unet) is proposed to segment the femur, tibia and tibiofemoral cartilage automatically. The proposed work has included a novel Multi-Resolution Feature Fusion (MRFF) and Shape Reconstruction (SR) loss that focuses on multi-contextual information and structural anatomical details of the femur, tibia and tibiofemoral cartilage. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed work is a single-stage and end-to-end framework producing a Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) of 98.5% for the femur, 98.4% for the tibia, 89.1% for Femoral Cartilage (FC) and 86.1% for Tibial Cartilage (TC) for critical MRI slices that can be helpful to clinicians for KOA grading. The time to segment MRI volume (160 slices) per subject is 22 sec. which is one of the fastest among state-of-the-art. Moreover, comprehensive experimentation on the segmentation of FC and TC which is of utmost importance for morphology-based studies to check KOA progression reveals that the proposed method has produced an excellent result with binary segmentation
Authors: Fabian Bongratz, Anne-Marie Rickmann, Christian Wachinger
The reconstruction of cortical surfaces is a prerequisite for quantitative analyses of the cerebral cortex in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Existing segmentation-based methods separate the surface registration from the surface extraction, which is computationally inefficient and prone to distortions. We introduce Vox2Cortex-Flow (V2C-Flow), a deep mesh-deformation technique that learns a deformation field from a brain template to the cortical surfaces of an MRI scan. To this end, we present a geometric neural network that models the deformation-describing ordinary differential equation in a continuous manner. The network architecture comprises convolutional and graph-convolutional layers, which allows it to work with images and meshes at the same time. V2C-Flow is not only very fast, requiring less than two seconds to infer all four cortical surfaces, but also establishes vertex-wise correspondences to the template during reconstruction. In addition, V2C-Flow is the first approach for cortex reconstruction that models white matter and pial surfaces jointly, therefore avoiding intersections between them. Our comprehensive experiments on internal and external test data demonstrate that V2C-Flow results in cortical surfaces that are state-of-the-art in terms of accuracy. Moreover, we show that the established correspondences are more consistent than in FreeSurfer and that they can directly be utilized for cortex parcellation and group analyses of cortical thickness.
Authors: Omer Bar-Tal, Hila Chefer, Omer Tov, Charles Herrmann, Roni Paiss, Shiran Zada, Ariel Ephrat, Junhwa Hur, Yuanzhen Li, Tomer Michaeli, Oliver Wang, Deqing Sun, Tali Dekel, Inbar Mosseri
We introduce Lumiere -- a text-to-video diffusion model designed for synthesizing videos that portray realistic, diverse and coherent motion -- a pivotal challenge in video synthesis. To this end, we introduce a Space-Time U-Net architecture that generates the entire temporal duration of the video at once, through a single pass in the model. This is in contrast to existing video models which synthesize distant keyframes followed by temporal super-resolution -- an approach that inherently makes global temporal consistency difficult to achieve. By deploying both spatial and (importantly) temporal down- and up-sampling and leveraging a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model, our model learns to directly generate a full-frame-rate, low-resolution video by processing it in multiple space-time scales. We demonstrate state-of-the-art text-to-video generation results, and show that our design easily facilitates a wide range of content creation tasks and video editing applications, including image-to-video, video inpainting, and stylized generation.
Authors: Zimeng Wang, Zhiyang Dou, Rui Xu, Cheng Lin, Yuan Liu, Xiaoxiao Long, Shiqing Xin, Lingjie Liu, Taku Komura, Xiaoming Yuan, Wenping Wang
We introduce Coverage Axis++, a novel and efficient approach to 3D shape skeletonization. The current state-of-the-art approaches for this task often rely on the watertightness of the input or suffer from substantial computational costs, thereby limiting their practicality. To address this challenge, Coverage Axis++ proposes a heuristic algorithm to select skeletal points, offering a high-accuracy approximation of the Medial Axis Transform (MAT) while significantly mitigating computational intensity for various shape representations. We introduce a simple yet effective strategy that considers both shape coverage and uniformity to derive skeletal points. The selection procedure enforces consistency with the shape structure while favoring the dominant medial balls, which thus introduces a compact underlying shape representation in terms of MAT. As a result, Coverage Axis++ allows for skeletonization for various shape representations (e.g., water-tight meshes, triangle soups, point clouds), specification of the number of skeletal points, few hyperparameters, and highly efficient computation with improved reconstruction accuracy. Extensive experiments across a wide range of 3D shapes validate the efficiency and effectiveness of Coverage Axis++. The code will be publicly available once the paper is published.
Authors: Michael Ahn, Debidatta Dwibedi, Chelsea Finn, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Nikhil Joshi, Ryan Julian, Sean Kirmani, Isabel Leal, Edward Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Isabel Leal, Sharath Maddineni, Kanishka Rao, Dorsa Sadigh, Pannag Sanketi, Pierre Sermanet, Quan Vuong, Stefan Welker, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Steve Xu, Zhuo Xu
Foundation models that incorporate language, vision, and more recently actions have revolutionized the ability to harness internet scale data to reason about useful tasks. However, one of the key challenges of training embodied foundation models is the lack of data grounded in the physical world. In this paper, we propose AutoRT, a system that leverages existing foundation models to scale up the deployment of operational robots in completely unseen scenarios with minimal human supervision. AutoRT leverages vision-language models (VLMs) for scene understanding and grounding, and further uses large language models (LLMs) for proposing diverse and novel instructions to be performed by a fleet of robots. Guiding data collection by tapping into the knowledge of foundation models enables AutoRT to effectively reason about autonomy tradeoffs and safety while significantly scaling up data collection for robot learning. We demonstrate AutoRT proposing instructions to over 20 robots across multiple buildings and collecting 77k real robot episodes via both teleoperation and autonomous robot policies. We experimentally show that such "in-the-wild" data collected by AutoRT is significantly more diverse, and that AutoRT's use of LLMs allows for instruction following data collection robots that can align to human preferences.
Authors: Xin Wang, Ruisheng Su, Weiyi Xie, Wenjin Wang, Yi Xu, Ritse Mann, Jungong Han, Tao Tan
In medical-data driven learning, 3D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have started to show superior performance to 2D CNNs in numerous deep learning tasks, proving the added value of 3D spatial information in feature representation. However, the difficulty in collecting more training samples to converge, more computational resources and longer execution time make this approach less applied. Also, applying transfer learning on 3D CNN is challenging due to a lack of publicly available pre-trained 3D models. To tackle these issues, we proposed a novel 2D strategical representation of volumetric data, namely 2.75D. In this work, the spatial information of 3D images is captured in a single 2D view by a spiral-spinning technique. As a result, 2D CNN networks can also be used to learn volumetric information. Besides, we can fully leverage pre-trained 2D CNNs for downstream vision problems. We also explore a multi-view 2.75D strategy, 2.75D 3 channels (2.75Dx3), to boost the advantage of 2.75D. We evaluated the proposed methods on three public datasets with different modalities or organs (Lung CT, Breast MRI, and Prostate MRI), against their 2D, 2.5D, and 3D counterparts in classification tasks. Results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform other counterparts when all methods were trained from scratch on the lung dataset. Such performance gain is more pronounced with transfer learning or in the case of limited training data. Our methods also achieved comparable performance on other datasets. In addition, our methods achieved a substantial reduction in time consumption of training and inference compared with the 2.5D or 3D method.
Authors: Sheng Sun, Armando Marino, Wenze Shui, Zhongwen Hu
In this work we explore the performance of DCNNs on semantic segmentation using spaceborne polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (PolSAR) datasets. The semantic segmentation task using PolSAR data can be categorized as weakly supervised learning when the characteristics of SAR data and data annotating procedures are factored in. Datasets are initially analyzed for selecting feasible pre-training images. Then the differences between spaceborne and airborne datasets are examined in terms of spatial resolution and viewing geometry. In this study we used two dual-polarimetric images acquired by TerraSAR-X DLR. A novel method to produce training dataset with more supervised information is developed. Specifically, a series of typical classified images as well as intensity images serve as training datasets. A field survey is conducted for an area of about 20 square kilometers to obtain a ground truth dataset used for accuracy evaluation. Several transfer learning strategies are made for aforementioned training datasets which will be combined in a practicable order. Three DCNN models, including SegNet, U-Net, and LinkNet, are implemented next.
Authors: Jingkang Yang, Kaiyang Zhou, Yixuan Li, Ziwei Liu
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensuring the reliability and safety of machine learning systems. For instance, in autonomous driving, we would like the driving system to issue an alert and hand over the control to humans when it detects unusual scenes or objects that it has never seen during training time and cannot make a safe decision. The term, OOD detection, first emerged in 2017 and since then has received increasing attention from the research community, leading to a plethora of methods developed, ranging from classification-based to density-based to distance-based ones. Meanwhile, several other problems, including anomaly detection (AD), novelty detection (ND), open set recognition (OSR), and outlier detection (OD), are closely related to OOD detection in terms of motivation and methodology. Despite common goals, these topics develop in isolation, and their subtle differences in definition and problem setting often confuse readers and practitioners. In this survey, we first present a unified framework called generalized OOD detection, which encompasses the five aforementioned problems, i.e., AD, ND, OSR, OOD detection, and OD. Under our framework, these five problems can be seen as special cases or sub-tasks, and are easier to distinguish. We then review each of these five areas by summarizing their recent technical developments, with a special focus on OOD detection methodologies. We conclude this survey with open challenges and potential research directions.
Authors: Mingkun Li, Shupeng Cheng, Peng Xu, Xiatian Zhu, Chun-Guang Li, Jun Guo
We investigate unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) with clothes change, a new challenging problem with more practical usability and scalability to real-world deployment. Most existing re-id methods artificially assume the clothes of every single person to be stationary across space and time. This condition is mostly valid for short-term re-id scenarios since an average person would often change the clothes even within a single day. To alleviate this assumption, several recent works have introduced the clothes change facet to re-id, with a focus on supervised learning person identity discriminative representation with invariance to clothes changes. Taking a step further towards this long-term re-id direction, we further eliminate the requirement of person identity labels, as they are significantly more expensive and more tedious to annotate in comparison to short-term person re-id datasets. Compared to conventional unsupervised short-term re-id, this new problem is drastically more challenging as different people may have similar clothes whilst the same person can wear multiple suites of clothes over different locations and times with very distinct appearance. To overcome such obstacles, we introduce a novel Curriculum Person Clustering (CPC) method that can adaptively regulate the unsupervised clustering criterion according to the clustering confidence. Experiments on three long-term person re-id datasets show that our CPC outperforms SOTA unsupervised re-id methods and even closely matches the supervised re-id models.
Authors: Sara Abdali
As social media platforms are evolving from text-based forums into multi-modal environments, the nature of misinformation in social media is also transforming accordingly. Taking advantage of the fact that visual modalities such as images and videos are more favorable and attractive to the users and textual contents are sometimes skimmed carelessly, misinformation spreaders have recently targeted contextual connections between the modalities e.g., text and image. Hence many researchers have developed automatic techniques for detecting possible cross-modal discordance in web-based content. We analyze, categorize and identify existing approaches in addition to challenges and shortcomings they face in order to unearth new research opportunities in the field of multi-modal misinformation detection.
Authors: Jay J. Yoo, Khashayar Namdar, Farzad Khalvati
Training machine learning models to segment tumors and other anomalies in medical images is an important step for developing diagnostic tools but generally requires manually annotated ground truth segmentations, which necessitates significant time and resources. This work proposes the use of a superpixel generation model and a superpixel clustering model to enable weakly supervised brain tumor segmentations. The proposed method utilizes binary image-level classification labels, which are readily accessible, to significantly improve the initial region of interest segmentations generated by standard weakly supervised methods without requiring ground truth annotations. We used 2D slices of magnetic resonance brain scans from the Multimodal Brain Tumor Segmentation Challenge 2020 dataset and labels indicating the presence of tumors to train the pipeline. On the test cohort, our method achieved a mean Dice coefficient of 0.691 and a mean 95% Hausdorff distance of 18.1, outperforming existing superpixel-based weakly supervised segmentation methods.
Authors: Jie Zhu, Jiyang Qi, Mingyu Ding, Xiaokang Chen, Ping Luo, Xinggang Wang, Wenyu Liu, Leye Wang, Jingdong Wang
In this paper, we are interested in understanding self-supervised pretraining through studying the capability that self-supervised representation pretraining methods learn part-aware representations. The study is mainly motivated by that random views, used in contrastive learning, and random masked (visible) patches, used in masked image modeling, are often about object parts.
We explain that contrastive learning is a part-to-whole task: the projection layer hallucinates the whole object representation from the object part representation learned from the encoder, and that masked image modeling is a part-to-part task: the masked patches of the object are hallucinated from the visible patches. The explanation suggests that the self-supervised pretrained encoder is required to understand the object part. We empirically compare the off-the-shelf encoders pretrained with several representative methods on object-level recognition and part-level recognition. The results show that the fully-supervised model outperforms self-supervised models for object-level recognition, and most self-supervised contrastive learning and masked image modeling methods outperform the fully-supervised method for part-level recognition. It is observed that the combination of contrastive learning and masked image modeling further improves the performance.
Authors: Arnaud Bougaham, Valentin Delchevalerie, Mohammed El Adoui, Benoît Frénay
In this study, a new Anomaly Detection (AD) approach for industrial and medical images is proposed. This method leverages the theoretical strengths of unsupervised learning and the data availability of both normal and abnormal classes. Indeed, the AD is often formulated as an unsupervised task, implying only normal images during training. These normal images are devoted to be reconstructed, through an autoencoder architecture for instance. However, the information contained in abnormal data, when available, is also valuable for this reconstruction. The model would be able to identify its weaknesses by better learning how to transform an abnormal (respectively normal) image into a normal (respectively abnormal) one, helping the entire model to learn better than a single normal to normal reconstruction. To address this challenge, the proposed method uses Cycle-Generative Adversarial Networks (Cycle-GAN) for (ab)normal-to-normal translation. After an input image has been reconstructed by the normal generator, an anomaly score quantifies the differences between the input and its reconstruction. Based on a threshold set to satisfy a business quality constraint, the input image is then flagged as normal or not. The proposed method is evaluated on industrial and medical datasets. The results demonstrate accurate performance with a zero false negative constraint compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ValDelch/CycleGANS-AnomalyDetection.
Authors: Junjie Ni, Yijin Li, Zhaoyang Huang, Hongsheng Li, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui, Guofeng Zhang
Local feature matching aims at establishing sparse correspondences between a pair of images. Recently, detector-free methods present generally better performance but are not satisfactory in image pairs with large scale differences. In this paper, we propose Patch Area Transportation with Subdivision (PATS) to tackle this issue. Instead of building an expensive image pyramid, we start by splitting the original image pair into equal-sized patches and gradually resizing and subdividing them into smaller patches with the same scale. However, estimating scale differences between these patches is non-trivial since the scale differences are determined by both relative camera poses and scene structures, and thus spatially varying over image pairs. Moreover, it is hard to obtain the ground truth for real scenes. To this end, we propose patch area transportation, which enables learning scale differences in a self-supervised manner. In contrast to bipartite graph matching, which only handles one-to-one matching, our patch area transportation can deal with many-to-many relationships. PATS improves both matching accuracy and coverage, and shows superior performance in downstream tasks, such as relative pose estimation, visual localization, and optical flow estimation. The source code is available at \url{https://zju3dv.github.io/pats/}.
Authors: Ali Borji
The ability of image and video generation models to create photorealistic images has reached unprecedented heights, making it difficult to distinguish between real and fake images in many cases. However, despite this progress, a gap remains between the quality of generated images and those found in the real world. To address this, we have reviewed a vast body of literature from both academic publications and social media to identify qualitative shortcomings in image generation models, which we have classified into five categories. By understanding these failures, we can identify areas where these models need improvement, as well as develop strategies for detecting deep fakes. The prevalence of deep fakes in today's society is a serious concern, and our findings can help mitigate their negative impact.
Authors: Tobias Rueckert (1), Daniel Rueckert (2 and 3), Christoph Palm (1 and 4) ((1) Regensburg Medical Image Computing (ReMIC), Ostbayerische Technische Hochschule Regensburg (OTH Regensburg), Germany, (2) Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Medicine, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technical University of Munich, Germany, (3) Department of Computing, Imperial College London, UK, (4) Regensburg Center of Health Sciences and Technology (RCHST), OTH Regensburg, Germany)
In the field of computer- and robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, enormous progress has been made in recent years based on the recognition of surgical instruments in endoscopic images and videos. In particular, the determination of the position and type of instruments is of great interest. Current work involves both spatial and temporal information, with the idea that predicting the movement of surgical tools over time may improve the quality of the final segmentations. The provision of publicly available datasets has recently encouraged the development of new methods, mainly based on deep learning. In this review, we identify and characterize datasets used for method development and evaluation and quantify their frequency of use in the literature. We further present an overview of the current state of research regarding the segmentation and tracking of minimally invasive surgical instruments in endoscopic images and videos. The paper focuses on methods that work purely visually, without markers of any kind attached to the instruments, considering both single-frame semantic and instance segmentation approaches, as well as those that incorporate temporal information. The publications analyzed were identified through the platforms Google Scholar, Web of Science, and PubMed. The search terms used were "instrument segmentation", "instrument tracking", "surgical tool segmentation", and "surgical tool tracking", resulting in a total of 741 articles published between 01/2015 and 07/2023, of which 123 were included using systematic selection criteria. A discussion of the reviewed literature is provided, highlighting existing shortcomings and emphasizing the available potential for future developments.
Authors: Nikolaos Gkanatsios, Ayush Jain, Zhou Xian, Yunchu Zhang, Christopher Atkeson, Katerina Fragkiadaki
Language is compositional; an instruction can express multiple relation constraints to hold among objects in a scene that a robot is tasked to rearrange. Our focus in this work is an instructable scene-rearranging framework that generalizes to longer instructions and to spatial concept compositions never seen at training time. We propose to represent language-instructed spatial concepts with energy functions over relative object arrangements. A language parser maps instructions to corresponding energy functions and an open-vocabulary visual-language model grounds their arguments to relevant objects in the scene. We generate goal scene configurations by gradient descent on the sum of energy functions, one per language predicate in the instruction. Local vision-based policies then re-locate objects to the inferred goal locations. We test our model on established instruction-guided manipulation benchmarks, as well as benchmarks of compositional instructions we introduce. We show our model can execute highly compositional instructions zero-shot in simulation and in the real world. It outperforms language-to-action reactive policies and Large Language Model planners by a large margin, especially for long instructions that involve compositions of multiple spatial concepts. Simulation and real-world robot execution videos, as well as our code and datasets are publicly available on our website: https://ebmplanner.github.io.
Authors: Daniel Rose, Vaishnavi Himakunthala, Andy Ouyang, Ryan He, Alex Mei, Yujie Lu, Michael Saxon, Chinmay Sonar, Diba Mirza, William Yang Wang
Recent advances in large language models elicit reasoning in a chain-of-thought that allows models to decompose problems in a human-like fashion. Though this paradigm improves multi-step reasoning ability in language models, it is limited by being unimodal and applied mainly to question-answering tasks. We claim that incorporating visual augmentation into reasoning is essential, especially for complex, imaginative tasks. Consequently, we introduce VCoT, a novel method that leverages chain-of-thought prompting with vision-language grounding to recursively bridge the logical gaps within sequential data. Our method uses visual guidance to generate synthetic multimodal infillings that add consistent and novel information to reduce the logical gaps for downstream tasks that can benefit from temporal reasoning, as well as provide interpretability into models' multi-step reasoning. We apply VCoT to the Visual Storytelling and WikiHow summarization datasets and demonstrate through human evaluation that VCoT offers novel and consistent synthetic data augmentation beating chain-of-thought baselines, which can be used to enhance downstream performance.
Authors: George Stoica, Daniel Bolya, Jakob Bjorner, Pratik Ramesh, Taylor Hearn, Judy Hoffman
Typical deep visual recognition models are capable of performing the one task they were trained on. In this paper, we tackle the extremely difficult problem of combining distinct models with different initializations, each solving a separate task, into one multi-task model without any additional training. Prior work in model merging permutes one model to the space of the other then averages them together. While this works for models trained on the same task, we find that this fails to account for the differences in models trained on disjoint tasks. Thus, we introduce "ZipIt!", a general method for merging two arbitrary models of the same architecture that incorporates two simple strategies. First, in order to account for features that aren't shared between models, we expand the model merging problem to allow for merging features within each model by defining a general "zip" operation. Second, we add support for partially zipping the models up until a specified layer, naturally creating a multi-head model. We find that these two changes combined account for 20-60% improvement over prior work, making it more feasible to merge models trained on disjoint tasks without retraining.
Authors: Viraj Shah, Svetlana Lazebnik, Julien Philip
In this work, we propose to solve ill-posed inverse imaging problems using a bank of Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) as a prior and apply our method to the case of Intrinsic Image Decomposition for faces and materials. Our method builds on the demonstrated success of GANs to capture complex image distributions. At the core of our approach is the idea that the latent space of a GAN is a well-suited optimization domain to solve inverse problems. Given an input image, we propose to jointly inverse the latent codes of a set of GANs and combine their outputs to reproduce the input. Contrary to most GAN inversion methods which are limited to inverting only a single GAN, we demonstrate that it is possible to maintain distribution priors while inverting several GANs jointly. We show that our approach is modular, allowing various forward imaging models, and that it can successfully decompose both synthetic and real images.
Authors: Youze Wang, Wenbo Hu, Richang Hong
Multimodal learning involves developing models that can integrate information from various sources like images and texts. In this field, multimodal text generation is a crucial aspect that involves processing data from multiple modalities and outputting text. The image-guided story ending generation (IgSEG) is a particularly significant task, targeting on an understanding of complex relationships between text and image data with a complete story text ending. Unfortunately, deep neural networks, which are the backbone of recent IgSEG models, are vulnerable to adversarial samples. Current adversarial attack methods mainly focus on single-modality data and do not analyze adversarial attacks for multimodal text generation tasks that use cross-modal information. To this end, we propose an iterative adversarial attack method (Iterative-attack) that fuses image and text modality attacks, allowing for an attack search for adversarial text and image in an more effective iterative way. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing single-modal and non-iterative multimodal attack methods, indicating the potential for improving the adversarial robustness of multimodal text generation models, such as multimodal machine translation, multimodal question answering, etc.
Authors: Xu Yang, Yongliang Wu, Mingzhuo Yang, Haokun Chen, Xin Geng
After discovering that Language Models (LMs) can be good in-context few-shot learners, numerous strategies have been proposed to optimize in-context sequence configurations. Recently, researchers in Vision-Language (VL) domains also develop their few-shot learners, while they only use the simplest way, ie., randomly sampling, to configure in-context image-text pairs. In order to explore the effects of varying configurations on VL in-context learning, we devised four strategies for image selection and four for caption assignment to configure in-context image-text pairs for image captioning. Here Image Captioning is used as the case study since it can be seen as the visually-conditioned LM. Our comprehensive experiments yield two counter-intuitive but valuable insights, highlighting the distinct characteristics of VL in-context learning due to multi-modal synergy, as compared to the NLP case. Furthermore, in our exploration of optimal combination strategies, we observed an average performance enhancement of 20.9 of CIDEr scores compared to the baseline. The code is given in https://github.com/yongliang-wu/ExploreCfg.
Authors: Sanyam Jain
Marine animals and deep underwater objects are difficult to recognize and monitor for safety of aquatic life. There is an increasing challenge when the water is saline with granular particles and impurities. In such natural adversarial environment, traditional approaches like CNN start to fail and are expensive to compute. This project involves implementing and evaluating various object detection models, including EfficientDet, YOLOv5, YOLOv8, and Detectron2, on an existing annotated underwater dataset, called the Brackish-Dataset. The dataset comprises annotated image sequences of fish, crabs, starfish, and other aquatic animals captured in Limfjorden water with limited visibility. The aim of this research project is to study the efficiency of newer models on the same dataset and contrast them with the previous results based on accuracy and inference time. Firstly, I compare the results of YOLOv3 (31.10% mean Average Precision (mAP)), YOLOv4 (83.72% mAP), YOLOv5 (97.6%), YOLOv8 (98.20%), EfficientDet (98.56% mAP) and Detectron2 (95.20% mAP) on the same dataset. Secondly, I provide a modified BiSkFPN mechanism (BiFPN neck with skip connections) to perform complex feature fusion in adversarial noise which makes modified EfficientDet robust to perturbations. Third, analyzed the effect on accuracy of EfficientDet (98.63% mAP) and YOLOv5 by adversarial learning (98.04% mAP). Last, I provide class activation map based explanations (CAM) for the two models to promote Explainability in black box models. Overall, the results indicate that modified EfficientDet achieved higher accuracy with five-fold cross validation than the other models with 88.54% IoU of feature maps.
Authors: Yujiang Pu, Xiaoyu Wu, Lulu Yang, Shengjin Wang
Video anomaly detection under weak supervision presents significant challenges, particularly due to the lack of frame-level annotations during training. While prior research has utilized graph convolution networks and self-attention mechanisms alongside multiple instance learning (MIL)-based classification loss to model temporal relations and learn discriminative features, these methods often employ multi-branch architectures to capture local and global dependencies separately, resulting in increased parameters and computational costs. Moreover, the coarse-grained interclass separability provided by the binary constraint of MIL-based loss neglects the fine-grained discriminability within anomalous classes. In response, this paper introduces a weakly supervised anomaly detection framework that focuses on efficient context modeling and enhanced semantic discriminability. We present a Temporal Context Aggregation (TCA) module that captures comprehensive contextual information by reusing the similarity matrix and implementing adaptive fusion. Additionally, we propose a Prompt-Enhanced Learning (PEL) module that integrates semantic priors using knowledge-based prompts to boost the discriminative capacity of context features while ensuring separability between anomaly sub-classes. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method's components, demonstrating competitive performance with reduced parameters and computational effort on three challenging benchmarks: UCF-Crime, XD-Violence, and ShanghaiTech datasets. Notably, our approach significantly improves the detection accuracy of certain anomaly sub-classes, underscoring its practical value and efficacy. Our code is available at: https://github.com/yujiangpu20/PEL4VAD.
Authors: Weiliang Chan, Qianqian Ren
Urban region embedding is an important and yet highly challenging issue due to the complexity and constantly changing nature of urban data. To address the challenges, we propose a Region-Wise Multi-View Representation Learning (ROMER) to capture multi-view dependencies and learn expressive representations of urban regions without the constraints of rigid neighbourhood region conditions. Our model focus on learn urban region representation from multi-source urban data. First, we capture the multi-view correlations from mobility flow patterns, POI semantics and check-in dynamics. Then, we adopt global graph attention networks to learn similarity of any two vertices in graphs. To comprehensively consider and share features of multiple views, a two-stage fusion module is further proposed to learn weights with external attention to fuse multi-view embeddings. Extensive experiments for two downstream tasks on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 17\% improvement.
Authors: Yubiao Yue, Xinyu Zeng, Xiaoqiang Shi, Meiping Zhang, Haihua Liang, Fan Zhang, Yanmei Chen, Zefeng Xie, Wenrui Wu, Zhenzhang Li
Traditional ear disease diagnosis heavily depends on experienced specialists and specialized equipment, frequently resulting in misdiagnoses, treatment delays, and financial burdens for some patients. Utilizing deep learning models for efficient ear disease diagnosis has proven effective and affordable. However, existing research overlooked model inference speed and parameter size required for deployment. To tackle these challenges, we constructed a large-scale dataset comprising eight ear disease categories and normal ear canal samples from two hospitals. Inspired by ShuffleNetV2, we developed Best-EarNet, an ultrafast and ultralight network enabling real-time ear disease diagnosis. Best-EarNet incorporates the novel Local-Global Spatial Feature Fusion Module which can capture global and local spatial information simultaneously and guide the network to focus on crucial regions within feature maps at various levels, mitigating low accuracy issues. Moreover, our network uses multiple auxiliary classification heads for efficient parameter optimization. With 0.77M parameters, Best-EarNet achieves an average frames per second of 80 on CPU. Employing transfer learning and five-fold cross-validation with 22,581 images from Hospital-1, the model achieves an impressive 95.23% accuracy. External testing on 1,652 images from Hospital-2 validates its performance, yielding 92.14% accuracy. Compared to state-of-the-art networks, Best-EarNet establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) in practical applications. Most importantly, we developed an intelligent diagnosis system called Ear Keeper, which can be deployed on common electronic devices. By manipulating a compact electronic otoscope, users can perform comprehensive scanning and diagnosis of the ear canal using real-time video. This study provides a novel paradigm for ear endoscopy and other medical endoscopic image recognition applications.
Authors: Imraj RD Singh, Alexander Denker, Riccardo Barbano, Željko Kereta, Bangti Jin, Kris Thielemans, Peter Maass, Simon Arridge
Score-based generative models have demonstrated highly promising results for medical image reconstruction tasks in magnetic resonance imaging or computed tomography. However, their application to Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is still largely unexplored. PET image reconstruction involves a variety of challenges, including Poisson noise with high variance and a wide dynamic range. To address these challenges, we propose several PET-specific adaptations of score-based generative models. The proposed framework is developed for both 2D and 3D PET. In addition, we provide an extension to guided reconstruction using magnetic resonance images. We validate the approach through extensive 2D and 3D $\textit{in-silico}$ experiments with a model trained on patient-realistic data without lesions, and evaluate on data without lesions as well as out-of-distribution data with lesions. This demonstrates the proposed method's robustness and significant potential for improved PET reconstruction.
Authors: Xuyang Liu, Siteng Huang, Yachen Kang, Honggang Chen, Donglin Wang
Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities for generative tasks by leveraging strong vision-language alignment from pre-training. However, most vision-language discriminative tasks require extensive fine-tuning on carefully-labeled datasets to acquire such alignment, with great cost in time and computing resources. In this work, we explore directly applying a pre-trained generative diffusion model to the challenging discriminative task of visual grounding without any fine-tuning and additional training dataset. Specifically, we propose VGDiffZero, a simple yet effective zero-shot visual grounding framework based on text-to-image diffusion models. We also design a comprehensive region-scoring method considering both global and local contexts of each isolated proposal. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that VGDiffZero achieves strong performance on zero-shot visual grounding. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/VGDiffZero.
Authors: Yuan-Ming Li, Ling-An Zeng, Jing-Ke Meng, Wei-Shi Zheng
Action Quality Assessment (AQA) is a task that tries to answer how well an action is carried out. While remarkable progress has been achieved, existing works on AQA assume that all the training data are visible for training in one time, but do not enable continual learning on assessing new technical actions. In this work, we address such a Continual Learning problem in AQA (Continual-AQA), which urges a unified model to learn AQA tasks sequentially without forgetting. Our idea for modeling Continual-AQA is to sequentially learn a task-consistent score-discriminative feature distribution, in which the latent features express a strong correlation with the score labels regardless of the task or action types. From this perspective, we aim to mitigate the forgetting in Continual-AQA from two aspects. Firstly, to fuse the features of new and previous data into a score-discriminative distribution, a novel Feature-Score Correlation-Aware Rehearsal is proposed to store and reuse data from previous tasks with limited memory size. Secondly, an Action General-Specific Graph is developed to learn and decouple the action-general and action-specific knowledge so that the task-consistent score-discriminative features can be better extracted across various tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the contributions of proposed components. The comparisons with the existing continual learning methods additionally verify the effectiveness and versatility of our approach.
Authors: Samuel Pegg, Kai Li, Xiaolin Hu
Audio-visual speech separation methods aim to integrate different modalities to generate high-quality separated speech, thereby enhancing the performance of downstream tasks such as speech recognition. Most existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models operate in the time domain. However, their overly simplistic approach to modeling acoustic features often necessitates larger and more computationally intensive models in order to achieve SOTA performance. In this paper, we present a novel time-frequency domain audio-visual speech separation method: Recurrent Time-Frequency Separation Network (RTFS-Net), which applies its algorithms on the complex time-frequency bins yielded by the Short-Time Fourier Transform. We model and capture the time and frequency dimensions of the audio independently using a multi-layered RNN along each dimension. Furthermore, we introduce a unique attention-based fusion technique for the efficient integration of audio and visual information, and a new mask separation approach that takes advantage of the intrinsic spectral nature of the acoustic features for a clearer separation. RTFS-Net outperforms the previous SOTA method using only 10% of the parameters and 18% of the MACs. This is the first time-frequency domain audio-visual speech separation method to outperform all contemporary time-domain counterparts.
Authors: Jonas Belouadi, Anne Lauscher, Steffen Eger
Generating bitmap graphics from text has gained considerable attention, yet for scientific figures, vector graphics are often preferred. Given that vector graphics are typically encoded using low-level graphics primitives, generating them directly is difficult. To address this, we propose the use of TikZ, a well-known abstract graphics language that can be compiled to vector graphics, as an intermediate representation of scientific figures. TikZ offers human-oriented, high-level commands, thereby facilitating conditional language modeling with any large language model. To this end, we introduce DaTikZ, the first large-scale TikZ dataset consisting of 120k TikZ drawings aligned with captions. We fine-tune LLaMA on DaTikZ, as well as our new model CLiMA, which augments LLaMA with multimodal CLIP embeddings. In both human and automatic evaluation, CLiMA and LLaMA outperform commercial GPT-4 and Claude 2 in terms of similarity to human-created figures, with CLiMA additionally improving text-image alignment. Our detailed analysis shows that all models generalize well and are not susceptible to memorization. GPT-4 and Claude 2, however, tend to generate more simplistic figures compared to both humans and our models. We make our framework, AutomaTikZ, along with model weights and datasets, publicly available.
Authors: Ziqiao Shang, Li Yu
Recently how to introduce large amounts of unlabeled facial images in the wild into supervised Facial Action Unit (AU) detection frameworks has become a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new AU detection framework where multi-task learning is introduced to jointly learn AU domain separation and reconstruction and facial landmark detection by sharing the parameters of homostructural facial extraction modules. In addition, we propose a new feature alignment scheme based on contrastive learning by simple projectors and an improved contrastive loss, which adds four additional intermediate supervisors to promote the feature reconstruction process. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate our superiority against the state-of-the-art methods for AU detection in the wild.
Authors: Hongwei Ren, Yue Zhou, Yulong Huang, Haotian Fu, Xiaopeng Lin, Jie Song, Bojun Cheng
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that respond to local changes in light intensity and feature low latency, high energy efficiency, and high dynamic range. Meanwhile, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained significant attention due to their remarkable efficiency and fault tolerance. By synergistically harnessing the energy efficiency inherent in event cameras and the spike-based processing capabilities of SNNs, their integration could enable ultra-low-power application scenarios, such as action recognition tasks. However, existing approaches often entail converting asynchronous events into conventional frames, leading to additional data mapping efforts and a loss of sparsity, contradicting the design concept of SNNs and event cameras. To address this challenge, we propose SpikePoint, a novel end-to-end point-based SNN architecture. SpikePoint excels at processing sparse event cloud data, effectively extracting both global and local features through a singular-stage structure. Leveraging the surrogate training method, SpikePoint achieves high accuracy with few parameters and maintains low power consumption, specifically employing the identity mapping feature extractor on diverse datasets. SpikePoint achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on four event-based action recognition datasets using only 16 timesteps, surpassing other SNN methods. Moreover, it also achieves SOTA performance across all methods on three datasets, utilizing approximately 0.3\% of the parameters and 0.5\% of power consumption employed by artificial neural networks (ANNs). These results emphasize the significance of Point Cloud and pave the way for many ultra-low-power event-based data processing applications.
Authors: Qing Ma, Jiancheng Pan, Cong Bai
Image-text retrieval has developed rapidly in recent years. However, it is still a challenge in remote sensing due to visual-semantic imbalance, which leads to incorrect matching of non-semantic visual and textual features. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Direction-Oriented Visual-semantic Embedding Model (DOVE) to mine the relationship between vision and language. Our highlight is to conduct visual and textual representations in latent space, directing them as close as possible to a redundancy-free regional visual representation. Concretely, a Regional-Oriented Attention Module (ROAM) adaptively adjusts the distance between the final visual and textual embeddings in the latent semantic space, oriented by regional visual features. Meanwhile, a lightweight Digging Text Genome Assistant (DTGA) is designed to expand the range of tractable textual representation and enhance global word-level semantic connections using less attention operations. Ultimately, we exploit a global visual-semantic constraint to reduce single visual dependency and serve as an external constraint for the final visual and textual representations. The effectiveness and superiority of our method are verified by extensive experiments including parameter evaluation, quantitative comparison, ablation studies and visual analysis, on two benchmark datasets, RSICD and RSITMD.
Authors: Elham Amin Mansour, Hehui Zheng, Robert K. Katzschmann
The world around us is full of soft objects we perceive and deform with dexterous hand movements. For a robotic hand to control soft objects, it has to acquire online state feedback of the deforming object. While RGB-D cameras can collect occluded point clouds at a rate of 30Hz, this does not represent a continuously trackable object surface. Hence, in this work, we developed a method that takes as input a template mesh which is the mesh of an object in its non-deformed state and a deformed point cloud of the same object, and then shapes the template mesh such that it matches the deformed point cloud. The reconstruction of meshes from point clouds has long been studied in the field of Computer graphics under 3D reconstruction and 4D reconstruction, however, both lack the speed and generalizability needed for robotics applications. Our model is designed using a point cloud auto-encoder and a Real-NVP architecture. Our trained model can perform mesh reconstruction and tracking at a rate of 58Hz on a template mesh of 3000 vertices and a deformed point cloud of 5000 points and is generalizable to the deformations of six different object categories which are assumed to be made of soft material in our experiments (scissors, hammer, foam brick, cleanser bottle, orange, and dice). The object meshes are taken from the YCB benchmark dataset. An instance of a downstream application can be the control algorithm for a robotic hand that requires online feedback from the state of the manipulated object which would allow online grasp adaptation in a closed-loop manner. Furthermore, the tracking capacity of our method can help in the system identification of deforming objects in a marker-free approach. In future work, we will extend our trained model to generalize beyond six object categories and additionally to real-world deforming point clouds.
Authors: Zhongyi Shui, Yunlong Zhang, Kai Yao, Chenglu Zhu, Sunyi Zheng, Jingxiong Li, Honglin Li, Yuxuan Sun, Ruizhe Guo, Lin Yang
Nucleus instance segmentation in histology images is crucial for a broad spectrum of clinical applications. Current dominant algorithms rely on regression of nuclear proxy maps. Distinguishing nucleus instances from the estimated maps requires carefully curated post-processing, which is error-prone and parameter-sensitive. Recently, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has earned huge attention in medical image segmentation, owing to its impressive generalization ability and promptable property. Nevertheless, its potential on nucleus instance segmentation remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we present a novel prompt-driven framework that consists of a nucleus prompter and SAM for automatic nucleus instance segmentation. Specifically, the prompter learns to generate a unique point prompt for each nucleus while the SAM is fine-tuned to output the corresponding mask for the prompted nucleus. Furthermore, we propose the inclusion of adjacent nuclei as negative prompts to enhance the model's capability to identify overlapping nuclei. Without complicated post-processing, our proposed method sets a new state-of-the-art performance on three challenging benchmarks. Code is available at \url{github.com/windygoo/PromptNucSeg}
Authors: Adrian Azzarelli, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, David R Bull
Dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (Dynamic NeRF) enhance NeRF technology to model moving scenes. However, they are resource intensive and challenging to compress. To address this issue, this paper presents WavePlanes, a fast and more compact explicit model. We propose a multi-scale space and space-time feature plane representation using N-level 2-D wavelet coefficients. The inverse discrete wavelet transform reconstructs N feature signals at varying detail, which are linearly decoded to approximate the color and density of volumes in a 4-D grid. Exploiting the sparsity of wavelet coefficients, we compress a Hash Map containing only non-zero coefficients and their locations on each plane. This results in a compressed model size of ~12 MB. Compared with state-of-the-art plane-based models, WavePlanes is up to 15x smaller, less computationally demanding and achieves comparable results in as little as one hour of training - without requiring custom CUDA code or high performance computing resources. Additionally, we propose new feature fusion schemes that work as well as previously proposed schemes while providing greater interpretability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/azzarelli/waveplanes/
Authors: Gabriel della Maggiora, Luis Alberto Croquevielle, Nikita Deshpande, Harry Horsley, Thomas Heinis, Artur Yakimovich
Inverse problems aim to determine parameters from observations, a crucial task in engineering and science. Lately, generative models, especially diffusion models, have gained popularity in this area for their ability to produce realistic solutions and their good mathematical properties. Despite their success, an important drawback of diffusion models is their sensitivity to the choice of variance schedule, which controls the dynamics of the diffusion process. Fine-tuning this schedule for specific applications is crucial but time-costly and does not guarantee an optimal result. We propose a novel approach for learning the schedule as part of the training process. Our method supports probabilistic conditioning on data, provides high-quality solutions, and is flexible, proving able to adapt to different applications with minimum overhead. This approach is tested in two unrelated inverse problems: super-resolution microscopy and quantitative phase imaging, yielding comparable or superior results to previous methods and fine-tuned diffusion models. We conclude that fine-tuning the schedule by experimentation should be avoided because it can be learned during training in a stable way that yields better results.
Authors: Hongyang Li, Yang Li, Huijie Wang, Jia Zeng, Pinlong Cai, Huilin Xu, Dahua Lin, Junchi Yan, Feng Xu, Lu Xiong, Jingdong Wang, Futang Zhu, Kai Yan, Chunjing Xu, Tiancai Wang, Beipeng Mu, Shaoqing Ren, Zhihui Peng, Yu Qiao
With the continuous maturation and application of autonomous driving technology, a systematic examination of open-source autonomous driving datasets becomes instrumental in fostering the robust evolution of the industry ecosystem. Current autonomous driving datasets can broadly be categorized into two generations. The first-generation autonomous driving datasets are characterized by relatively simpler sensor modalities, smaller data scale, and is limited to perception-level tasks. KITTI, introduced in 2012, serves as a prominent representative of this initial wave. In contrast, the second-generation datasets exhibit heightened complexity in sensor modalities, greater data scale and diversity, and an expansion of tasks from perception to encompass prediction and control. Leading examples of the second generation include nuScenes and Waymo, introduced around 2019. This comprehensive review, conducted in collaboration with esteemed colleagues from both academia and industry, systematically assesses over seventy open-source autonomous driving datasets from domestic and international sources. It offers insights into various aspects, such as the principles underlying the creation of high-quality datasets, the pivotal role of data engine systems, and the utilization of generative foundation models to facilitate scalable data generation. Furthermore, this review undertakes an exhaustive analysis and discourse regarding the characteristics and data scales that future third-generation autonomous driving datasets should possess. It also delves into the scientific and technical challenges that warrant resolution. These endeavors are pivotal in advancing autonomous innovation and fostering technological enhancement in critical domains. For further details, please refer to https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/DriveAGI.
Authors: Dongliang Luo, Yuliang Liu, Rui Yang, Xianjin Liu, Jishen Zeng, Yu Zhou, Xiang Bai
With the surge in realistic text tampering, detecting fraudulent text in images has gained prominence for maintaining information security. However, the high costs associated with professional text manipulation and annotation limit the availability of real-world datasets, with most relying on synthetic tampering, which inadequately replicates real-world tampering attributes. To address this issue, we present the Real Text Manipulation (RTM) dataset, encompassing 14,250 text images, which include 5,986 manually and 5,258 automatically tampered images, created using a variety of techniques, alongside 3,006 unaltered text images for evaluating solution stability. Our evaluations indicate that existing methods falter in text forgery detection on the RTM dataset. We propose a robust baseline solution featuring a Consistency-aware Aggregation Hub and a Gated Cross Neighborhood-attention Fusion module for efficient multi-modal information fusion, supplemented by a Tampered-Authentic Contrastive Learning module during training, enriching feature representation distinction. This framework, extendable to other dual-stream architectures, demonstrated notable localization performance improvements of 7.33% and 6.38% on manual and overall manipulations, respectively. Our contributions aim to propel advancements in real-world text tampering detection. Code and dataset will be made available at https://github.com/DrLuo/RTM
Authors: Xianghui Xie, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll
Reconstructing human-object interaction in 3D from a single RGB image is a challenging task and existing data driven methods do not generalize beyond the objects present in the carefully curated 3D interaction datasets. Capturing large-scale real data to learn strong interaction and 3D shape priors is very expensive due to the combinatorial nature of human-object interactions. In this paper, we propose ProciGen (Procedural interaction Generation), a method to procedurally generate datasets with both, plausible interaction and diverse object variation. We generate 1M+ human-object interaction pairs in 3D and leverage this large-scale data to train our HDM (Hierarchical Diffusion Model), a novel method to reconstruct interacting human and unseen objects, without any templates. Our HDM is an image-conditioned diffusion model that learns both realistic interaction and highly accurate human and object shapes. Experiments show that our HDM trained with ProciGen significantly outperforms prior methods that requires template meshes and that our dataset allows training methods with strong generalization ability to unseen object instances. Our code and data will be publicly released at: https://virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/procigen-hdm.
Authors: Renjie Wu, Hu Wang, Feras Dayoub, Hsiang-Ting Chen
Augmented Reality (AR) devices, emerging as prominent mobile interaction platforms, face challenges in user safety, particularly concerning oncoming vehicles. While some solutions leverage onboard camera arrays, these cameras often have limited field-of-view (FoV) with front or downward perspectives. Addressing this, we propose a new out-of-view semantic segmentation task and Segment Beyond View (SBV), a novel audio-visual semantic segmentation method. SBV supplements the visual modality, which miss the information beyond FoV, with the auditory information using a teacher-student distillation model (Omni2Ego). The model consists of a vision teacher utilising panoramic information, an auditory teacher with 8-channel audio, and an audio-visual student that takes views with limited FoV and binaural audio as input and produce semantic segmentation for objects outside FoV. SBV outperforms existing models in comparative evaluations and shows a consistent performance across varying FoV ranges and in monaural audio settings.
Authors: Cheng-Yen Hsieh, Tarasha Khurana, Achal Dave, Deva Ramanan
Amodal perception, the ability to comprehend complete object structures from partial visibility, is a fundamental skill, even for infants. Its significance extends to applications like autonomous driving, where a clear understanding of heavily occluded objects is essential. However, modern detection and tracking algorithms often overlook this critical capability, perhaps due to the prevalence of modal annotations in most datasets. To address the scarcity of amodal data, we introduce the TAO-Amodal benchmark, featuring 880 diverse categories in thousands of video sequences. Our dataset includes amodal and modal bounding boxes for visible and occluded objects, including objects that are partially out-of-frame. To enhance amodal tracking with object permanence, we leverage a lightweight plug-in module, the amodal expander, to transform standard, modal trackers into amodal ones through fine-tuning on a few hundred video sequences with data augmentation. We achieve a 3.3\% and 1.6\% improvement on the detection and tracking of occluded objects on TAO-Amodal. When evaluated on people, our method produces dramatic improvements of 2x compared to state-of-the-art modal baselines.
Authors: Sebastian-Vasile Echim, Iulian-Marius Tăiatu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel, Florin Pop
This work focuses on plant leaf disease classification and explores three crucial aspects: adversarial training, model explainability, and model compression. The models' robustness against adversarial attacks is enhanced through adversarial training, ensuring accurate classification even in the presence of threats. Leveraging explainability techniques, we gain insights into the model's decision-making process, improving trust and transparency. Additionally, we explore model compression techniques to optimize computational efficiency while maintaining classification performance. Through our experiments, we determine that on a benchmark dataset, the robustness can be the price of the classification accuracy with performance reductions of 3%-20% for regular tests and gains of 50%-70% for adversarial attack tests. We also demonstrate that a student model can be 15-25 times more computationally efficient for a slight performance reduction, distilling the knowledge of more complex models.
Authors: Yixuan Wang, Shuangyin Li
Diffusion models have emerged as powerful generative tools, rivaling GANs in sample quality and mirroring the likelihood scores of autoregressive models. A subset of these models, exemplified by DDIMs, exhibit an inherent asymmetry: they are trained over $T$ steps but only sample from a subset of $T$ during generation. This selective sampling approach, though optimized for speed, inadvertently misses out on vital information from the unsampled steps, leading to potential compromises in sample quality. To address this issue, we present the S$^{2}$-DMs, which is a new training method by using an innovative $L_{skip}$, meticulously designed to reintegrate the information omitted during the selective sampling phase. The benefits of this approach are manifold: it notably enhances sample quality, is exceptionally simple to implement, requires minimal code modifications, and is flexible enough to be compatible with various sampling algorithms. On the CIFAR10 dataset, models trained using our algorithm showed an improvement of 3.27% to 14.06% over models trained with traditional methods across various sampling algorithms (DDIMs, PNDMs, DEIS) and different numbers of sampling steps (10, 20, ..., 1000). On the CELEBA dataset, the improvement ranged from 8.97% to 27.08%. Access to the code and additional resources is provided in the github.
Authors: Fanda Fan, Chunjie Luo, Wanling Gao, Jianfeng Zhan
The burgeoning field of Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) is witnessing rapid advancements, particularly in video generation. This paper introduces AIGCBench, a pioneering comprehensive and scalable benchmark designed to evaluate a variety of video generation tasks, with a primary focus on Image-to-Video (I2V) generation. AIGCBench tackles the limitations of existing benchmarks, which suffer from a lack of diverse datasets, by including a varied and open-domain image-text dataset that evaluates different state-of-the-art algorithms under equivalent conditions. We employ a novel text combiner and GPT-4 to create rich text prompts, which are then used to generate images via advanced Text-to-Image models. To establish a unified evaluation framework for video generation tasks, our benchmark includes 11 metrics spanning four dimensions to assess algorithm performance. These dimensions are control-video alignment, motion effects, temporal consistency, and video quality. These metrics are both reference video-dependent and video-free, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation strategy. The evaluation standard proposed correlates well with human judgment, providing insights into the strengths and weaknesses of current I2V algorithms. The findings from our extensive experiments aim to stimulate further research and development in the I2V field. AIGCBench represents a significant step toward creating standardized benchmarks for the broader AIGC landscape, proposing an adaptable and equitable framework for future assessments of video generation tasks. We have open-sourced the dataset and evaluation code on the project website: https://www.benchcouncil.org/AIGCBench.
Authors: Jiaqing Zhang, Jie Lei, Weiying Xie, Geng Yang, Daixun Li, Yunsong Li
In multimodal land cover classification (MLCC), a common challenge is the redundancy in data distribution, where irrelevant information from multiple modalities can hinder the effective integration of their unique features. To tackle this, we introduce the Multimodal Informative Vit (MIVit), a system with an innovative information aggregate-distributing mechanism. This approach redefines redundancy levels and integrates performance-aware elements into the fused representation, facilitating the learning of semantics in both forward and backward directions. MIVit stands out by significantly reducing redundancy in the empirical distribution of each modality's separate and fused features. It employs oriented attention fusion (OAF) for extracting shallow local features across modalities in horizontal and vertical dimensions, and a Transformer feature extractor for extracting deep global features through long-range attention. We also propose an information aggregation constraint (IAC) based on mutual information, designed to remove redundant information and preserve complementary information within embedded features. Additionally, the information distribution flow (IDF) in MIVit enhances performance-awareness by distributing global classification information across different modalities' feature maps. This architecture also addresses missing modality challenges with lightweight independent modality classifiers, reducing the computational load typically associated with Transformers. Our results show that MIVit's bidirectional aggregate-distributing mechanism between modalities is highly effective, achieving an average overall accuracy of 95.56% across three multimodal datasets. This performance surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in MLCC. The code for MIVit is accessible at https://github.com/icey-zhang/MIViT.
Authors: Jonas Dippel, Barbara Feulner, Tobias Winterhoff, Simon Schallenberg, Gabriel Dernbach, Andreas Kunft, Stephan Tietz, Philipp Jurmeister, David Horst, Lukas Ruff, Klaus-Robert Müller, Frederick Klauschen, Maximilian Alber
Histopathology plays a central role in clinical medicine and biomedical research. While artificial intelligence shows promising results on many pathological tasks, generalization and dealing with rare diseases, where training data is scarce, remains a challenge. Distilling knowledge from unlabeled data into a foundation model before learning from, potentially limited, labeled data provides a viable path to address these challenges. In this work, we extend the state of the art of foundation models for digital pathology whole slide images by semi-automated data curation and incorporating pathologist domain knowledge. Specifically, we combine computational and pathologist domain knowledge (1) to curate a diverse dataset of 103k slides corresponding to 750 million image patches covering data from different fixation, staining, and scanning protocols as well as data from different indications and labs across the EU and US, (2) for grouping semantically similar slides and tissue patches, and (3) to augment the input images during training. We evaluate the resulting model on a set of public and internal benchmarks and show that although our foundation model is trained with an order of magnitude less slides, it performs on par or better than competing models. We expect that scaling our approach to more data and larger models will further increase its performance and capacity to deal with increasingly complex real world tasks in diagnostics and biomedical research.
Authors: Guiming Cao, Kaize Shi, Hong Fu, Huaiwen Zhang, Guandong Xu
Pre-trained Vision-Language (V-L) models set the benchmark for generalization to downstream tasks among the noteworthy contenders. Many characteristics of the V-L model have been explored in existing research including the challenge of the sensitivity to text input and the tuning process across multi-modal prompts. With the advanced utilization of the V-L model like CLIP, recent approaches deploy learnable prompts instead of hand-craft prompts to boost the generalization performance and address the aforementioned challenges. Inspired by layer-wise training, which is wildly used in image fusion, we note that using a sequential training process to adapt different modalities branches of CLIP efficiently facilitates the improvement of generalization. In the context of addressing the multi-modal prompting challenge, we propose Token-wise Adaptive for Multi-modal Prompt Learning (APLe) for tuning both modalities prompts, vision and language, as tokens in a sequential manner. APLe addresses the challenges in V-L models to promote prompt learning across both modalities, which indicates a competitive generalization performance in line with the state-of-the-art. Preeminently, APLe shows robustness and favourable performance in prompt-length experiments with an absolute advantage in adopting the V-L models.
Authors: Siyu Zou, Jiji Tang, Yiyi Zhou, Jing He, Chaoyi Zhao, Rongsheng Zhang, Zhipeng Hu, Xiaoshuai Sun
Diffusion-based Image Editing (DIE) is an emerging research hot-spot, which often applies a semantic mask to control the target area for diffusion-based editing. However, most existing solutions obtain these masks via manual operations or off-line processing, greatly reducing their efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient image editing method for Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models, termed Instant Diffusion Editing(InstDiffEdit). In particular, InstDiffEdit aims to employ the cross-modal attention ability of existing diffusion models to achieve instant mask guidance during the diffusion steps. To reduce the noise of attention maps and realize the full automatics, we equip InstDiffEdit with a training-free refinement scheme to adaptively aggregate the attention distributions for the automatic yet accurate mask generation. Meanwhile, to supplement the existing evaluations of DIE, we propose a new benchmark called Editing-Mask to examine the mask accuracy and local editing ability of existing methods. To validate InstDiffEdit, we also conduct extensive experiments on ImageNet and Imagen, and compare it with a bunch of the SOTA methods. The experimental results show that InstDiffEdit not only outperforms the SOTA methods in both image quality and editing results, but also has a much faster inference speed, i.e., +5 to +6 times.
Authors: Win Kent Ong, Kam Woh Ng, Chee Seng Chan, Yi Zhe Song, Tao Xiang
Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) models have gained significant attention in the computer vision community in the recent past with state-of-the-art visual quality and produced impressive demonstrations. Since then, technopreneurs have sought to leverage NeRF models into a profitable business. Therefore, NeRF models make it worth the risk of plagiarizers illegally copying, re-distributing, or misusing those models. This paper proposes a comprehensive intellectual property (IP) protection framework for the NeRF model in both black-box and white-box settings, namely IPR-NeRF. In the black-box setting, a diffusion-based solution is introduced to embed and extract the watermark via a two-stage optimization process. In the white-box setting, a designated digital signature is embedded into the weights of the NeRF model by adopting the sign loss objective. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that not only does our approach maintain the fidelity (\ie, the rendering quality) of IPR-NeRF models, but it is also robust against both ambiguity and removal attacks compared to prior arts.
Authors: Kuan-Ting Kuo, Dana Moukheiber, Sebastian Cajas Ordonez, David Restrepo, Atika Rahman Paddo, Tsung-Yu Chen, Lama Moukheiber, Mira Moukheiber, Sulaiman Moukheiber, Saptarshi Purkayastha, Po-Chih Kuo, Leo Anthony Celi
Dengue fever presents a substantial challenge in developing countries where sanitation infrastructure is inadequate. The absence of comprehensive healthcare systems exacerbates the severity of dengue infections, potentially leading to life-threatening circumstances. Rapid response to dengue outbreaks is also challenging due to limited information exchange and integration. While timely dengue outbreak forecasts have the potential to prevent such outbreaks, the majority of dengue prediction studies have predominantly relied on data that impose significant burdens on individual countries for collection. In this study, our aim is to improve health equity in resource-constrained countries by exploring the effectiveness of high-resolution satellite imagery as a nontraditional and readily accessible data source. By leveraging the wealth of publicly available and easily obtainable satellite imagery, we present a scalable satellite extraction framework based on Sentinel Hub, a cloud-based computing platform. Furthermore, we introduce DengueNet, an innovative architecture that combines Vision Transformer, Radiomics, and Long Short-term Memory to extract and integrate spatiotemporal features from satellite images. This enables dengue predictions on an epi-week basis. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conducted experiments on five municipalities in Colombia. We utilized a dataset comprising 780 high-resolution Sentinel-2 satellite images for training and evaluation. The performance of DengueNet was assessed using the mean absolute error (MAE) metric. Across the five municipalities, DengueNet achieved an average MAE of 43.92. Our findings strongly support the efficacy of satellite imagery as a valuable resource for dengue prediction, particularly in informing public health policies within countries where manually collected data is scarce and dengue virus prevalence is severe.
Authors: Nhat M. Hoang, Kehong Gong, Chuan Guo, Michael Bi Mi
Controllable generation of 3D human motions becomes an important topic as the world embraces digital transformation. Existing works, though making promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, heavily rely on meticulously captured and annotated (e.g., text) high-quality motion corpus, a resource-intensive endeavor in the real world. This motivates our proposed MotionMix, a simple yet effective weakly-supervised diffusion model that leverages both noisy and unannotated motion sequences. Specifically, we separate the denoising objectives of a diffusion model into two stages: obtaining conditional rough motion approximations in the initial $T-T^*$ steps by learning the noisy annotated motions, followed by the unconditional refinement of these preliminary motions during the last $T^*$ steps using unannotated motions. Notably, though learning from two sources of imperfect data, our model does not compromise motion generation quality compared to fully supervised approaches that access gold data. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our MotionMix, as a versatile framework, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performances on text-to-motion, action-to-motion, and music-to-dance tasks.
Authors: Sicheng Shen, Dongcheng Zhao, Guobin Shen, Yi Zeng
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), as the third generation of neural networks, have gained prominence for their biological plausibility and computational efficiency, especially in processing diverse datasets. The integration of attention mechanisms, inspired by advancements in neural network architectures, has led to the development of Spiking Transformers. These have shown promise in enhancing SNNs' capabilities, particularly in the realms of both static and neuromorphic datasets. Despite their progress, a discernible gap exists in these systems, specifically in the Spiking Self Attention (SSA) mechanism's effectiveness in leveraging the temporal processing potential of SNNs. To address this, we introduce the Temporal Interaction Module (TIM), a novel, convolution-based enhancement designed to augment the temporal data processing abilities within SNN architectures. TIM's integration into existing SNN frameworks is seamless and efficient, requiring minimal additional parameters while significantly boosting their temporal information handling capabilities. Through rigorous experimentation, TIM has demonstrated its effectiveness in exploiting temporal information, leading to state-of-the-art performance across various neuromorphic datasets.
Authors: Jae Young Lee, Woonghyun Ka, Jaehyun Choi, Junmo Kim
We propose a novel stereo-confidence that can be measured externally to various stereo-matching networks, offering an alternative input modality choice of the cost volume for learning-based approaches, especially in safety-critical systems. Grounded in the foundational concepts of disparity definition and the disparity plane sweep, the proposed stereo-confidence method is built upon the idea that any shift in a stereo-image pair should be updated in a corresponding amount shift in the disparity map. Based on this idea, the proposed stereo-confidence method can be summarized in three folds. 1) Using the disparity plane sweep, multiple disparity maps can be obtained and treated as a 3-D volume (predicted disparity volume), like the cost volume is constructed. 2) One of these disparity maps serves as an anchor, allowing us to define a desirable (or ideal) disparity profile at every spatial point. 3) By comparing the desirable and predicted disparity profiles, we can quantify the level of matching ambiguity between left and right images for confidence measurement. Extensive experimental results using various stereo-matching networks and datasets demonstrate that the proposed stereo-confidence method not only shows competitive performance on its own but also consistent performance improvements when it is used as an input modality for learning-based stereo-confidence methods.
Authors: Woonghyun Ka, Jae Young Lee, Jaehyun Choi, Junmo Kim
In stereo-matching knowledge distillation methods of the self-supervised monocular depth estimation, the stereo-matching network's knowledge is distilled into a monocular depth network through pseudo-depth maps. In these methods, the learning-based stereo-confidence network is generally utilized to identify errors in the pseudo-depth maps to prevent transferring the errors. However, the learning-based stereo-confidence networks should be trained with ground truth (GT), which is not feasible in a self-supervised setting. In this paper, we propose a method to identify and filter errors in the pseudo-depth map using multiple disparity maps by checking their consistency without the need for GT and a training process. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods and works well on various configurations by filtering out erroneous areas where the stereo-matching is vulnerable, especially such as textureless regions, occlusion boundaries, and reflective surfaces.
Authors: Sergio Morell-Ortega, Marina Ruiz-Perez, Marien Gadea, Roberto Vivo-Hernando, Gregorio Rubio, Fernando Aparici, Maria de la Iglesia-Vaya, Gwenaelle Catheline, Pierrick Coupé, José V. Manjón
This paper introduces a novel multimodal and high-resolution human brain cerebellum lobule segmentation method. Unlike current tools that operate at standard resolution ($1 \text{ mm}^{3}$) or using mono-modal data, the proposed method improves cerebellum lobule segmentation through the use of a multimodal and ultra-high resolution ($0.125 \text{ mm}^{3}$) training dataset. To develop the method, first, a database of semi-automatically labelled cerebellum lobules was created to train the proposed method with ultra-high resolution T1 and T2 MR images. Then, an ensemble of deep networks has been designed and developed, allowing the proposed method to excel in the complex cerebellum lobule segmentation task, improving precision while being memory efficient. Notably, our approach deviates from the traditional U-Net model by exploring alternative architectures. We have also integrated deep learning with classical machine learning methods incorporating a priori knowledge from multi-atlas segmentation, which improved precision and robustness. Finally, a new online pipeline, named DeepCERES, has been developed to make available the proposed method to the scientific community requiring as input only a single T1 MR image at standard resolution.
Authors: Zuxiang Situ, Qi Wang, Shuai Teng, Wanen Feng, Gongfa Chen, Qianqian Zhou, Guangtao Fu
Deep learning models have become increasingly popular for flood prediction due to their superior accuracy and efficiency compared to traditional methods. However, current machine learning methods often rely on separate spatial or temporal feature analysis and have limitations on the types, number, and dimensions of input data. This study presented a CNN-RNN hybrid feature fusion modelling approach for urban flood prediction, which integrated the strengths of CNNs in processing spatial features and RNNs in analyzing different dimensions of time sequences. This approach allowed for both static and dynamic flood predictions. Bayesian optimization was applied to identify the seven most influential flood-driven factors and determine the best combination strategy. By combining four CNNs (FCN, UNet, SegNet, DeepLabv3+) and three RNNs (LSTM, BiLSTM, GRU), the optimal hybrid model was identified as LSTM-DeepLabv3+. This model achieved the highest prediction accuracy (MAE, RMSE, NSE, and KGE were 0.007, 0.025, 0.973 and 0.755, respectively) under various rainfall input conditions. Additionally, the processing speed was significantly improved, with an inference time of 1.158s (approximately 1/125 of the traditional computation time) compared to the physically-based models.