Authors: Pradyumna Reddy, Ismail Elezi, Jiankang Deng
Abstract: We introduce a novel 3D generative method, Generative 3D Reconstruction (G3DR) in ImageNet, capable of generating diverse and high-quality 3D objects from single images, addressing the limitations of existing methods. At the heart of our framework is a novel depth regularization technique that enables the generation of scenes with high-geometric fidelity. G3DR also leverages a pretrained language-vision model, such as CLIP, to enable reconstruction in novel views and improve the visual realism of generations. Additionally, G3DR designs a simple but effective sampling procedure to further improve the quality of generations. G3DR offers diverse and efficient 3D asset generation based on class or text conditioning. Despite its simplicity, G3DR is able to beat state-of-theart methods, improving over them by up to 22% in perceptual metrics and 90% in geometry scores, while needing only half of the training time. Code is available at https://github.com/preddy5/G3DR
Authors: Xindi Yang, Zeke Xie, Xiong Zhou, Boyu Liu, Buhua Liu, Yi Liu, Haoran Wang, Yunfeng Cai, Mingming Sun
Abstract: Neural field methods have seen great progress in various long-standing tasks in computer vision and computer graphics, including novel view synthesis and geometry reconstruction. As existing neural field methods try to predict some coordinate-based continuous target values, such as RGB for Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), all of these methods are regression models and are optimized by some regression loss. However, are regression models really better than classification models for neural field methods? In this work, we try to visit this very fundamental but overlooked question for neural fields from a machine learning perspective. We successfully propose a novel Neural Field Classifier (NFC) framework which formulates existing neural field methods as classification tasks rather than regression tasks. The proposed NFC can easily transform arbitrary Neural Field Regressor (NFR) into its classification variant via employing a novel Target Encoding module and optimizing a classification loss. By encoding a continuous regression target into a high-dimensional discrete encoding, we naturally formulate a multi-label classification task. Extensive experiments demonstrate the impressive effectiveness of NFC at the nearly free extra computational costs. Moreover, NFC also shows robustness to sparse inputs, corrupted images, and dynamic scenes.
Authors: Rishi Singhal, Srinath Srinivasan
Abstract: OOD detection has become more pertinent with advances in network design and increased task complexity. Identifying which parts of the data a given network is misclassifying has become as valuable as the network's overall performance. We can compress the model with quantization, but it suffers minor performance loss. The loss of performance further necessitates the need to derive the confidence estimate of the network's predictions. In line with this thinking, we introduce an Uncertainty Quantification(UQ) technique to quantify the uncertainty in the predictions from a pre-trained vision model. We subsequently leverage this information to extract valuable predictions while ignoring the non-confident predictions. We observe that our technique saves up to 80% of ignored samples from being misclassified. The code for the same is available here.
Authors: Shufan Pei, Junhong Lin, Wenxi Liu, Tiesong Zhao, Chia-Wen Lin
Abstract: In addition to low light, night images suffer degradation from light effects (e.g., glare, floodlight, etc). However, existing nighttime visibility enhancement methods generally focus on low-light regions, which neglects, or even amplifies the light effects. To address this issue, we propose an Adaptive Multi-scale Fusion network (AMFusion) with infrared and visible images, which designs fusion rules according to different illumination regions. First, we separately fuse spatial and semantic features from infrared and visible images, where the former are used for the adjustment of light distribution and the latter are used for the improvement of detection accuracy. Thereby, we obtain an image free of low light and light effects, which improves the performance of nighttime object detection. Second, we utilize detection features extracted by a pre-trained backbone that guide the fusion of semantic features. Hereby, we design a Detection-guided Semantic Fusion Module (DSFM) to bridge the domain gap between detection and semantic features. Third, we propose a new illumination loss to constrain fusion image with normal light intensity. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of AMFusion with better visual quality and detection accuracy. The source code will be released after the peer review process.
Authors: Yafei Zhang, Shen Zhou, Huafeng Li
Abstract: Recovering a clear image from a single hazy image is an open inverse problem. Although significant research progress has been made, most existing methods ignore the effect that downstream tasks play in promoting upstream dehazing. From the perspective of the haze generation mechanism, there is a potential relationship between the depth information of the scene and the hazy image. Based on this, we propose a dual-task collaborative mutual promotion framework to achieve the dehazing of a single image. This framework integrates depth estimation and dehazing by a dual-task interaction mechanism and achieves mutual enhancement of their performance. To realize the joint optimization of the two tasks, an alternative implementation mechanism with the difference perception is developed. On the one hand, the difference perception between the depth maps of the dehazing result and the ideal image is proposed to promote the dehazing network to pay attention to the non-ideal areas of the dehazing. On the other hand, by improving the depth estimation performance in the difficult-to-recover areas of the hazy image, the dehazing network can explicitly use the depth information of the hazy image to assist the clear image recovery. To promote the depth estimation, we propose to use the difference between the dehazed image and the ground truth to guide the depth estimation network to focus on the dehazed unideal areas. It allows dehazing and depth estimation to leverage their strengths in a mutually reinforcing manner. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve better performance than that of the state-of-the-art approaches.
Authors: Feifei Wang
Abstract: This technical report presents a diffusion model based framework for face swapping between two portrait images. The basic framework consists of three components, i.e., IP-Adapter, ControlNet, and Stable Diffusion's inpainting pipeline, for face feature encoding, multi-conditional generation, and face inpainting respectively. Besides, I introduce facial guidance optimization and CodeFormer based blending to further improve the generation quality. Specifically, we engage a recent light-weighted customization method (i.e., DreamBooth-LoRA), to guarantee the identity consistency by 1) using a rare identifier "sks" to represent the source identity, and 2) injecting the image features of source portrait into each cross-attention layer like the text features. Then I resort to the strong inpainting ability of Stable Diffusion, and utilize canny image and face detection annotation of the target portrait as the conditions, to guide ContorlNet's generation and align source portrait with the target portrait. To further correct face alignment, we add the facial guidance loss to optimize the text embedding during the sample generation.
Authors: Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Junjie Wang, Cheng Li, Boyu Wu, Fanjiang Xu, Qing Wang
Abstract: Due to the advantages of fusing information from various modalities, multimodal learning is gaining increasing attention. Being a fundamental task of multimodal learning, Visual Grounding (VG), aims to locate objects in images through natural language expressions. Ensuring the quality of VG models presents significant challenges due to the complex nature of the task. In the black box scenario, existing adversarial testing techniques often fail to fully exploit the potential of both modalities of information. They typically apply perturbations based solely on either the image or text information, disregarding the crucial correlation between the two modalities, which would lead to failures in test oracles or an inability to effectively challenge VG models. To this end, we propose PEELING, a text perturbation approach via image-aware property reduction for adversarial testing of the VG model. The core idea is to reduce the property-related information in the original expression meanwhile ensuring the reduced expression can still uniquely describe the original object in the image. To achieve this, PEELING first conducts the object and properties extraction and recombination to generate candidate property reduction expressions. It then selects the satisfied expressions that accurately describe the original object while ensuring no other objects in the image fulfill the expression, through querying the image with a visual understanding technique. We evaluate PEELING on the state-of-the-art VG model, i.e. OFA-VG, involving three commonly used datasets. Results show that the adversarial tests generated by PEELING achieves 21.4% in MultiModal Impact score (MMI), and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for images and texts by 8.2%--15.1%.
Authors: Wei Xu, Yi Wan
Abstract: The attention mechanism has gained significant recognition in the field of computer vision due to its ability to effectively enhance the performance of deep neural networks. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively utilize spatial information or, if they do, they come at the cost of reducing channel dimensions or increasing the complexity of neural networks. In order to address these limitations, this paper introduces an Efficient Local Attention (ELA) method that achieves substantial performance improvements with a simple structure. By analyzing the limitations of the Coordinate Attention method, we identify the lack of generalization ability in Batch Normalization, the adverse effects of dimension reduction on channel attention, and the complexity of attention generation process. To overcome these challenges, we propose the incorporation of 1D convolution and Group Normalization feature enhancement techniques. This approach enables accurate localization of regions of interest by efficiently encoding two 1D positional feature maps without the need for dimension reduction, while allowing for a lightweight implementation. We carefully design three hyperparameters in ELA, resulting in four different versions: ELA-T, ELA-B, ELA-S, and ELA-L, to cater to the specific requirements of different visual tasks such as image classification, object detection and sementic segmentation. ELA can be seamlessly integrated into deep CNN networks such as ResNet, MobileNet, and DeepLab. Extensive evaluations on the ImageNet, MSCOCO, and Pascal VOC datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed ELA module over current state-of-the-art methods in all three aforementioned visual tasks.
Authors: Kanchana Vaishnavi Gandikota, Paramanand Chandramouli
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the problem of zero-shot text-guided exploration of the solutions to open-domain image super-resolution. Our goal is to allow users to explore diverse, semantically accurate reconstructions that preserve data consistency with the low-resolution inputs for different large downsampling factors without explicitly training for these specific degradations. We propose two approaches for zero-shot text-guided super-resolution - i) modifying the generative process of text-to-image \textit{T2I} diffusion models to promote consistency with low-resolution inputs, and ii) incorporating language guidance into zero-shot diffusion-based restoration methods. We show that the proposed approaches result in diverse solutions that match the semantic meaning provided by the text prompt while preserving data consistency with the degraded inputs. We evaluate the proposed baselines for the task of extreme super-resolution and demonstrate advantages in terms of restoration quality, diversity, and explorability of solutions.
Authors: Yiming Zeng, Junhui Hou, Qijian Zhang, Siyu Ren, Wenping Wang
Abstract: Dynamic 3D point cloud sequences serve as one of the most common and practical representation modalities of dynamic real-world environments. However, their unstructured nature in both spatial and temporal domains poses significant challenges to effective and efficient processing. Existing deep point cloud sequence modeling approaches imitate the mature 2D video learning mechanisms by developing complex spatio-temporal point neighbor grouping and feature aggregation schemes, often resulting in methods lacking effectiveness, efficiency, and expressive power. In this paper, we propose a novel generic representation called \textit{Structured Point Cloud Videos} (SPCVs). Intuitively, by leveraging the fact that 3D geometric shapes are essentially 2D manifolds, SPCV re-organizes a point cloud sequence as a 2D video with spatial smoothness and temporal consistency, where the pixel values correspond to the 3D coordinates of points. The structured nature of our SPCV representation allows for the seamless adaptation of well-established 2D image/video techniques, enabling efficient and effective processing and analysis of 3D point cloud sequences. To achieve such re-organization, we design a self-supervised learning pipeline that is geometrically regularized and driven by self-reconstructive and deformation field learning objectives. Additionally, we construct SPCV-based frameworks for both low-level and high-level 3D point cloud sequence processing and analysis tasks, including action recognition, temporal interpolation, and compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate the versatility and superiority of the proposed SPCV, which has the potential to offer new possibilities for deep learning on unstructured 3D point cloud sequences. Code will be released at https://github.com/ZENGYIMING-EAMON/SPCV.
Authors: Minsung Kang, Fan Wang, Kai Kumano, Tomoyoshi Ito, Tomoyoshi Shimobaba
Abstract: This study presents a novel approach for generating holograms based on the neural radiance fields (NeRF) technique. Generating three-dimensional (3D) data is difficult in hologram computation. NeRF is a state-of-the-art technique for 3D light-field reconstruction from 2D images based on volume rendering. The NeRF can rapidly predict new-view images that do not include a training dataset. In this study, we constructed a rendering pipeline directly from a 3D light field generated from 2D images by NeRF for hologram generation using deep neural networks within a reasonable time. The pipeline comprises three main components: the NeRF, a depth predictor, and a hologram generator, all constructed using deep neural networks. The pipeline does not include any physical calculations. The predicted holograms of a 3D scene viewed from any direction were computed using the proposed pipeline. The simulation and experimental results are presented.
Authors: Chaoyan Huang, Zhongming Wu, Tieyong Zeng
Abstract: Prior-based methods for low-light image enhancement often face challenges in extracting available prior information from dim images. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective Retinex model with the proposed edge extraction prior. More specifically, we design an edge extraction network to capture the fine edge features from the low-light image directly. Building upon the Retinex theory, we decompose the low-light image into its illumination and reflectance components and introduce an edge-guided Retinex model for enhancing low-light images. To solve the proposed model, we propose a novel inertial Bregman alternating linearized minimization algorithm. This algorithm addresses the optimization problem associated with the edge-guided Retinex model, enabling effective enhancement of low-light images. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we establish the convergence properties of the algorithm. Besides, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges to a stationary point of the problem through nonconvex optimization theory. Furthermore, extensive experiments are conducted on multiple real-world low-light image datasets to demonstrate the efficiency and superiority of the proposed scheme.
Authors: Lian Xu, Mohammed Bennamoun, Farid Boussaid, Wanli Ouyang, Ferdous Sohel, Dan Xu
Abstract: Most existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods rely on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) to extract coarse class-specific localization maps using image-level labels. Prior works have commonly used an off-line heuristic thresholding process that combines the CAM maps with off-the-shelf saliency maps produced by a general pre-trained saliency model to produce more accurate pseudo-segmentation labels. We propose AuxSegNet+, a weakly supervised auxiliary learning framework to explore the rich information from these saliency maps and the significant inter-task correlation between saliency detection and semantic segmentation. In the proposed AuxSegNet+, saliency detection and multi-label image classification are used as auxiliary tasks to improve the primary task of semantic segmentation with only image-level ground-truth labels. We also propose a cross-task affinity learning mechanism to learn pixel-level affinities from the saliency and segmentation feature maps. In particular, we propose a cross-task dual-affinity learning module to learn both pairwise and unary affinities, which are used to enhance the task-specific features and predictions by aggregating both query-dependent and query-independent global context for both saliency detection and semantic segmentation. The learned cross-task pairwise affinity can also be used to refine and propagate CAM maps to provide better pseudo labels for both tasks. Iterative improvement of segmentation performance is enabled by cross-task affinity learning and pseudo-label updating. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with new state-of-the-art WSSS results on the challenging PASCAL VOC and MS COCO benchmarks.
Authors: Chenchen Tao, Chong Wang, Yuexian Zou, Xiaohao Peng, Jiafei Wu, Jiangbo Qian
Abstract: Most models for weakly supervised video anomaly detection (WS-VAD) rely on multiple instance learning, aiming to distinguish normal and abnormal snippets without specifying the type of anomaly. The ambiguous nature of anomaly definitions across contexts introduces bias in detecting abnormal and normal snippets within the abnormal bag. Taking the first step to show the model why it is anomalous, a novel framework is proposed to guide the learning of suspected anomalies from event prompts. Given a textual prompt dictionary of potential anomaly events and the captions generated from anomaly videos, the semantic anomaly similarity between them could be calculated to identify the suspected anomalous events for each video snippet. It enables a new multi-prompt learning process to constrain the visual-semantic features across all videos, as well as provides a new way to label pseudo anomalies for self-training. To demonstrate effectiveness, comprehensive experiments and detailed ablation studies are conducted on four datasets, namely XD-Violence, UCF-Crime, TAD, and ShanghaiTech. Our proposed model outperforms most state-of-the-art methods in terms of AP or AUC (82.6\%, 87.7\%, 93.1\%, and 97.4\%). Furthermore, it shows promising performance in open-set and cross-dataset cases.
Authors: Hakan Yekta Yatbaz, Mehrdad Dianati, Konstantinos Koufos, Roger Woodman
Abstract: Reliable detection of various objects and road users in the surrounding environment is crucial for the safe operation of automated driving systems (ADS). Despite recent progresses in developing highly accurate object detectors based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), they still remain prone to detection errors, which can lead to fatal consequences in safety-critical applications such as ADS. An effective remedy to this problem is to equip the system with run-time monitoring, named as introspection in the context of autonomous systems. Motivated by this, we introduce a novel introspection solution, which operates at the frame level for DNN-based 2D object detection and leverages neural network activation patterns. The proposed approach pre-processes the neural activation patterns of the object detector's backbone using several different modes. To provide extensive comparative analysis and fair comparison, we also adapt and implement several state-of-the-art (SOTA) introspection mechanisms for error detection in 2D object detection, using one-stage and two-stage object detectors evaluated on KITTI and BDD datasets. We compare the performance of the proposed solution in terms of error detection, adaptability to dataset shift, and, computational and memory resource requirements. Our performance evaluation shows that the proposed introspection solution outperforms SOTA methods, achieving an absolute reduction in the missed error ratio of 9% to 17% in the BDD dataset.
Authors: Guangyang Zeng, Qingcheng Zeng, Xinghan Li, Biqiang Mu, Jiming Chen, Ling Shi, Junfeng Wu
Abstract: Given 2D point correspondences between an image pair, inferring the camera motion is a fundamental issue in the computer vision community. The existing works generally set out from the epipolar constraint and estimate the essential matrix, which is not optimal in the maximum likelihood (ML) sense. In this paper, we dive into the original measurement model with respect to the rotation matrix and normalized translation vector and formulate the ML problem. We then propose a two-step algorithm to solve it: In the first step, we estimate the variance of measurement noises and devise a consistent estimator based on bias elimination; In the second step, we execute a one-step Gauss-Newton iteration on manifold to refine the consistent estimate. We prove that the proposed estimate owns the same asymptotic statistical properties as the ML estimate: The first is consistency, i.e., the estimate converges to the ground truth as the point number increases; The second is asymptotic efficiency, i.e., the mean squared error of the estimate converges to the theoretical lower bound -- Cramer-Rao bound. In addition, we show that our algorithm has linear time complexity. These appealing characteristics endow our estimator with a great advantage in the case of dense point correspondences. Experiments on both synthetic data and real images demonstrate that when the point number reaches the order of hundreds, our estimator outperforms the state-of-the-art ones in terms of estimation accuracy and CPU time.
Authors: Pedro H. V. Valois, Jo\~ao Macedo, Leo S. F. Ribeiro, Jefersson A. dos Santos, Sandra Avila
Abstract: Crime in the 21st century is split into a virtual and real world. However, the former has become a global menace to people's well-being and security in the latter. The challenges it presents must be faced with unified global cooperation, and we must rely more than ever on automated yet trustworthy tools to combat the ever-growing nature of online offenses. Over 10 million child sexual abuse reports are submitted to the US National Center for Missing & Exploited Children every year, and over 80% originated from online sources. Therefore, investigation centers and clearinghouses cannot manually process and correctly investigate all imagery. In light of that, reliable automated tools that can securely and efficiently deal with this data are paramount. In this sense, the scene recognition task looks for contextual cues in the environment, being able to group and classify child sexual abuse data without requiring to be trained on sensitive material. The scarcity and limitations of working with child sexual abuse images lead to self-supervised learning, a machine-learning methodology that leverages unlabeled data to produce powerful representations that can be more easily transferred to target tasks. This work shows that self-supervised deep learning models pre-trained on scene-centric data can reach 71.6% balanced accuracy on our indoor scene classification task and, on average, 2.2 percentage points better performance than a fully supervised version. We cooperate with Brazilian Federal Police experts to evaluate our indoor classification model on actual child abuse material. The results demonstrate a notable discrepancy between the features observed in widely used scene datasets and those depicted on sensitive materials.
Authors: Shuo Yang, Zirui Shang, Yongqi Wang, Derong Deng, Hongwei Chen, Qiyuan Cheng, Xinxiao Wu
Abstract: This paper proposes a novel framework for multi-label image recognition without any training data, called data-free framework, which uses knowledge of pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) to learn prompts to adapt pretrained Vision-Language Model (VLM) like CLIP to multilabel classification. Through asking LLM by well-designed questions, we acquire comprehensive knowledge about characteristics and contexts of objects, which provides valuable text descriptions for learning prompts. Then we propose a hierarchical prompt learning method by taking the multi-label dependency into consideration, wherein a subset of category-specific prompt tokens are shared when the corresponding objects exhibit similar attributes or are more likely to co-occur. Benefiting from the remarkable alignment between visual and linguistic semantics of CLIP, the hierarchical prompts learned from text descriptions are applied to perform classification of images during inference. Our framework presents a new way to explore the synergies between multiple pre-trained models for novel category recognition. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (MS-COCO, VOC2007, and NUS-WIDE) demonstrate that our method achieves better results than the state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming the zero-shot multi-label recognition methods by 4.7% in mAP on MS-COCO.
Authors: Jiahao Cui, Jiale Duan, Binyan Luo, Hang Cao, Wang Guo, Haifeng Li
Abstract: Deep neural network-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) target recognition models are susceptible to adversarial examples. Current adversarial example generation methods for SAR imagery primarily operate in the 2D digital domain, known as image adversarial examples. Recent work, while considering SAR imaging scatter mechanisms, fails to account for the actual imaging process, rendering attacks in the three-dimensional physical domain infeasible, termed pseudo physics adversarial examples. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SAR-AE-SFP-Attack, a method to generate real physics adversarial examples by altering the scattering feature parameters of target objects. Specifically, we iteratively optimize the coherent energy accumulation of the target echo by perturbing the reflection coefficient and scattering coefficient in the scattering feature parameters of the three-dimensional target object, and obtain the adversarial example after echo signal processing and imaging processing in the RaySAR simulator. Experimental results show that compared to digital adversarial attack methods, SAR-AE-SFP Attack significantly improves attack efficiency on CNN-based models (over 30\%) and Transformer-based models (over 13\%), demonstrating significant transferability of attack effects across different models and perspectives.
Authors: Salaheldin Mohamed
Abstract: In recent years, significant progress has been made in the development of text- to-image generation models. However, these models still face limitations when it comes to achieving full controllability during the generation process. Often, spe- cific training or the use of limited models is required, and even then, they have certain restrictions. To address these challenges, A two-stage method that effec- tively combines controllability and high quality in the generation of images is proposed. This approach leverages the expertise of pre-trained models to achieve precise control over the generated images, while also harnessing the power of diffusion models to achieve state-of-the-art quality. By separating controllability from high quality, This method achieves outstanding results. It is compatible with both latent and image space diffusion models, ensuring versatility and flexibil- ity. Moreover, This approach consistently produces comparable outcomes to the current state-of-the-art methods in the field. Overall, This proposed method rep- resents a significant advancement in text-to-image generation, enabling improved controllability without compromising on the quality of the generated images.
Authors: Xinyi Yu, Ling Yan, Pengtao Jiang, Hao Chen, Bo Li, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Linlin Ou
Abstract: The realm of Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (WSIS) under box supervision has garnered substantial attention, showcasing remarkable advancements in recent years. However, the limitations of box supervision become apparent in its inability to furnish effective information for distinguishing foreground from background within the specified target box. This research addresses this challenge by introducing pseudo-depth maps into the training process of the instance segmentation network, thereby boosting its performance by capturing depth differences between instances. These pseudo-depth maps are generated using a readily available depth predictor and are not necessary during the inference stage. To enable the network to discern depth features when predicting masks, we integrate a depth prediction layer into the mask prediction head. This innovative approach empowers the network to simultaneously predict masks and depth, enhancing its ability to capture nuanced depth-related information during the instance segmentation process. We further utilize the mask generated in the training process as supervision to distinguish the foreground from the background. When selecting the best mask for each box through the Hungarian algorithm, we use depth consistency as one calculation cost item. The proposed method achieves significant improvements on Cityscapes and COCO dataset.
Authors: Junwen Xiong, Peng Zhang, Tao You, Chuanyue Li, Wei Huang, Yufei Zha
Abstract: Audio-visual saliency prediction can draw support from diverse modality complements, but further performance enhancement is still challenged by customized architectures as well as task-specific loss functions. In recent studies, denoising diffusion models have shown more promising in unifying task frameworks owing to their inherent ability of generalization. Following this motivation, a novel Diffusion architecture for generalized audio-visual Saliency prediction (DiffSal) is proposed in this work, which formulates the prediction problem as a conditional generative task of the saliency map by utilizing input audio and video as the conditions. Based on the spatio-temporal audio-visual features, an extra network Saliency-UNet is designed to perform multi-modal attention modulation for progressive refinement of the ground-truth saliency map from the noisy map. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed DiffSal can achieve excellent performance across six challenging audio-visual benchmarks, with an average relative improvement of 6.3\% over the previous state-of-the-art results by six metrics.
Authors: Jose Vargas Quiros, Chirag Raman, Stephanie Tan, Ekin Gedik, Laura Cabrera-Quiros, Hayley Hung
Abstract: Recognizing speaking in humans is a central task towards understanding social interactions. Ideally, speaking would be detected from individual voice recordings, as done previously for meeting scenarios. However, individual voice recordings are hard to obtain in the wild, especially in crowded mingling scenarios due to cost, logistics, and privacy concerns. As an alternative, machine learning models trained on video and wearable sensor data make it possible to recognize speech by detecting its related gestures in an unobtrusive, privacy-preserving way. These models themselves should ideally be trained using labels obtained from the speech signal. However, existing mingling datasets do not contain high quality audio recordings. Instead, speaking status annotations have often been inferred by human annotators from video, without validation of this approach against audio-based ground truth. In this paper we revisit no-audio speaking status estimation by presenting the first publicly available multimodal dataset with high-quality individual speech recordings of 33 subjects in a professional networking event. We present three baselines for no-audio speaking status segmentation: a) from video, b) from body acceleration (chest-worn accelerometer), c) from body pose tracks. In all cases we predict a 20Hz binary speaking status signal extracted from the audio, a time resolution not available in previous datasets. In addition to providing the signals and ground truth necessary to evaluate a wide range of speaking status detection methods, the availability of audio in REWIND makes it suitable for cross-modality studies not feasible with previous mingling datasets. Finally, our flexible data consent setup creates new challenges for multimodal systems under missing modalities.
Authors: Zijin Yin, Kongming Liang, Bing Li, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo
Abstract: When deploying segmentation models in practice, it is critical to evaluate their behaviors in varied and complex scenes. Different from the previous evaluation paradigms only in consideration of global attribute variations (e.g. adverse weather), we investigate both local and global attribute variations for robustness evaluation. To achieve this, we construct a mask-preserved attribute editing pipeline to edit visual attributes of real images with precise control of structural information. Therefore, the original segmentation labels can be reused for the edited images. Using our pipeline, we construct a benchmark covering both object and image attributes (e.g. color, material, pattern, style). We evaluate a broad variety of semantic segmentation models, spanning from conventional close-set models to recent open-vocabulary large models on their robustness to different types of variations. We find that both local and global attribute variations affect segmentation performances, and the sensitivity of models diverges across different variation types. We argue that local attributes have the same importance as global attributes, and should be considered in the robustness evaluation of segmentation models. Code: https://github.com/PRIS-CV/Pascal-EA.
Authors: Kaituo Feng, Changsheng Li, Dongchun Ren, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang
Abstract: End-to-end motion planning models equipped with deep neural networks have shown great potential for enabling full autonomous driving. However, the oversized neural networks render them impractical for deployment on resource-constrained systems, which unavoidably requires more computational time and resources during reference.To handle this, knowledge distillation offers a promising approach that compresses models by enabling a smaller student model to learn from a larger teacher model. Nevertheless, how to apply knowledge distillation to compress motion planners has not been explored so far. In this paper, we propose PlanKD, the first knowledge distillation framework tailored for compressing end-to-end motion planners. First, considering that driving scenes are inherently complex, often containing planning-irrelevant or even noisy information, transferring such information is not beneficial for the student planner. Thus, we design an information bottleneck based strategy to only distill planning-relevant information, rather than transfer all information indiscriminately. Second, different waypoints in an output planned trajectory may hold varying degrees of importance for motion planning, where a slight deviation in certain crucial waypoints might lead to a collision. Therefore, we devise a safety-aware waypoint-attentive distillation module that assigns adaptive weights to different waypoints based on the importance, to encourage the student to accurately mimic more crucial waypoints, thereby improving overall safety. Experiments demonstrate that our PlanKD can boost the performance of smaller planners by a large margin, and significantly reduce their reference time.
Authors: Fanzhe Yan, Gang Yang, Yu Li, Aiping Liu, Xun Chen
Abstract: Deep learning techniques have demonstrated great potential for accurately estimating brain age by analyzing Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data from healthy individuals. However, current methods for brain age estimation often directly utilize whole input images, overlooking two important considerations: 1) the heterogeneous nature of brain aging, where different brain regions may degenerate at different rates, and 2) the existence of age-independent redundancies in brain structure. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Dual Graph Attention based Disentanglement Multi-instance Learning (DGA-DMIL) framework for improving brain age estimation. Specifically, the 3D MRI data, treated as a bag of instances, is fed into a 2D convolutional neural network backbone, to capture the unique aging patterns in MRI. A dual graph attention aggregator is then proposed to learn the backbone features by exploiting the intra- and inter-instance relationships. Furthermore, a disentanglement branch is introduced to separate age-related features from age-independent structural representations to ameliorate the interference of redundant information on age prediction. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we evaluate it on two datasets, UK Biobank and ADNI, containing a total of 35,388 healthy individuals. Our proposed model demonstrates exceptional accuracy in estimating brain age, achieving a remarkable mean absolute error of 2.12 years in the UK Biobank. The results establish our approach as state-of-the-art compared to other competing brain age estimation models. In addition, the instance contribution scores identify the varied importance of brain areas for aging prediction, which provides deeper insights into the understanding of brain aging.
Authors: Ziniu Hu, Ahmet Iscen, Aashi Jain, Thomas Kipf, Yisong Yue, David A. Ross, Cordelia Schmid, Alireza Fathi
Abstract: This paper introduces SceneCraft, a Large Language Model (LLM) Agent converting text descriptions into Blender-executable Python scripts which render complex scenes with up to a hundred 3D assets. This process requires complex spatial planning and arrangement. We tackle these challenges through a combination of advanced abstraction, strategic planning, and library learning. SceneCraft first models a scene graph as a blueprint, detailing the spatial relationships among assets in the scene. SceneCraft then writes Python scripts based on this graph, translating relationships into numerical constraints for asset layout. Next, SceneCraft leverages the perceptual strengths of vision-language foundation models like GPT-V to analyze rendered images and iteratively refine the scene. On top of this process, SceneCraft features a library learning mechanism that compiles common script functions into a reusable library, facilitating continuous self-improvement without expensive LLM parameter tuning. Our evaluation demonstrates that SceneCraft surpasses existing LLM-based agents in rendering complex scenes, as shown by its adherence to constraints and favorable human assessments. We also showcase the broader application potential of SceneCraft by reconstructing detailed 3D scenes from the Sintel movie and guiding a video generative model with generated scenes as intermediary control signal.
Authors: Katia Genovese
Abstract: Camera calibration is a process of paramount importance in computer vision applications that require accurate quantitative measurements. The popular method developed by Zhang relies on the use of a large number of images of a planar grid of fiducial points captured in multiple poses. Although flexible and easy to implement, Zhang's method has some limitations. The simultaneous optimization of the entire parameter set, including the coefficients of a predefined distortion model, may result in poor distortion correction at the image boundaries or in miscalculation of the intrinsic parameters, even with a reasonably small reprojection error. Indeed, applications involving image stitching (e.g. multi-camera systems) require accurate mapping of distortion up to the outermost regions of the image. Moreover, intrinsic parameters affect the accuracy of camera pose estimation, which is fundamental for applications such as vision servoing in robot navigation and automated assembly. This paper proposes a method for estimating the complete set of calibration parameters from a single image of a planar speckle pattern covering the entire sensor. The correspondence between image points and physical points on the calibration target is obtained using Digital Image Correlation. The effective focal length and the extrinsic parameters are calculated separately after a prior evaluation of the principal point. At the end of the procedure, a dense and uniform model-free distortion map is obtained over the entire image. Synthetic data with different noise levels were used to test the feasibility of the proposed method and to compare its metrological performance with Zhang's method. Real-world tests demonstrate the potential of the developed method to reveal aspects of the image formation that are hidden by averaging over multiple images.
Authors: Venkatesh Jatla, Sravani Teeparthi, Ugesh Egala, Sylvia Celedon Pattichis, Marios S. Patticis
Abstract: Research on video activity detection has primarily focused on identifying well-defined human activities in short video segments. The majority of the research on video activity recognition is focused on the development of large parameter systems that require training on large video datasets. This paper develops a low-parameter, modular system with rapid inferencing capabilities that can be trained entirely on limited datasets without requiring transfer learning from large-parameter systems. The system can accurately detect and associate specific activities with the students who perform the activities in real-life classroom videos. Additionally, the paper develops an interactive web-based application to visualize human activity maps over long real-life classroom videos.
Authors: Taeheon Kim, Sebin Shin, Youngjoon Yu, Hak Gu Kim, Yong Man Ro
Abstract: RGBT multispectral pedestrian detection has emerged as a promising solution for safety-critical applications that require day/night operations. However, the modality bias problem remains unsolved as multispectral pedestrian detectors learn the statistical bias in datasets. Specifically, datasets in multispectral pedestrian detection mainly distribute between ROTO (day) and RXTO (night) data; the majority of the pedestrian labels statistically co-occur with their thermal features. As a result, multispectral pedestrian detectors show poor generalization ability on examples beyond this statistical correlation, such as ROTX data. To address this problem, we propose a novel Causal Mode Multiplexer (CMM) framework that effectively learns the causalities between multispectral inputs and predictions. Moreover, we construct a new dataset (ROTX-MP) to evaluate modality bias in multispectral pedestrian detection. ROTX-MP mainly includes ROTX examples not presented in previous datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed CMM framework generalizes well on existing datasets (KAIST, CVC-14, FLIR) and the new ROTX-MP. We will release our new dataset to the public for future research.
Authors: Assylzhan Izbassar, Pakizar Shamoi
Abstract: The nutritional quality of diets has significantly deteriorated over the past two to three decades, a decline often underestimated by the people. This deterioration, coupled with a hectic lifestyle, has contributed to escalating health concerns. Recognizing this issue, researchers at Harvard have advocated for a balanced nutritional plate model to promote health. Inspired by this research, our paper introduces an innovative Image-Based Dietary Assessment system aimed at evaluating the healthiness of meals through image analysis. Our system employs advanced image segmentation and classification techniques to analyze food items on a plate, assess their proportions, and calculate meal adherence to Harvard's healthy eating recommendations. This approach leverages machine learning and nutritional science to empower individuals with actionable insights for healthier eating choices. Our four-step framework involves segmenting the image, classifying the items, conducting a nutritional assessment based on the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate research, and offering tailored recommendations. The prototype system has shown promising results in promoting healthier eating habits by providing an accessible, evidence-based tool for dietary assessment.
Authors: Walter Zimmer, Gerhard Arya Wardana, Suren Sritharan, Xingcheng Zhou, Rui Song, Alois C. Knoll
Abstract: Cooperative perception offers several benefits for enhancing the capabilities of autonomous vehicles and improving road safety. Using roadside sensors in addition to onboard sensors increases reliability and extends the sensor range. External sensors offer higher situational awareness for automated vehicles and prevent occlusions. We propose CoopDet3D, a cooperative multi-modal fusion model, and TUMTraf-V2X, a perception dataset, for the cooperative 3D object detection and tracking task. Our dataset contains 2,000 labeled point clouds and 5,000 labeled images from five roadside and four onboard sensors. It includes 30k 3D boxes with track IDs and precise GPS and IMU data. We labeled eight categories and covered occlusion scenarios with challenging driving maneuvers, like traffic violations, near-miss events, overtaking, and U-turns. Through multiple experiments, we show that our CoopDet3D camera-LiDAR fusion model achieves an increase of +14.36 3D mAP compared to a vehicle camera-LiDAR fusion model. Finally, we make our dataset, model, labeling tool, and dev-kit publicly available on our website: https://tum-traffic-dataset.github.io/tumtraf-v2x.
Authors: Linsheng Chen, Guangrun Wang, Liuchun Yuan, Keze Wang, Ken Deng, Philip H. S. Torr
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have garnered remarkable success in novel view synthesis. Nonetheless, the task of generating high-quality images for novel views persists as a critical challenge. While the existing efforts have exhibited commendable progress, capturing intricate details, enhancing textures, and achieving superior Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) metrics warrant further focused attention and advancement. In this work, we propose NeRF-VPT, an innovative method for novel view synthesis to address these challenges. Our proposed NeRF-VPT employs a cascading view prompt tuning paradigm, wherein RGB information gained from preceding rendering outcomes serves as instructive visual prompts for subsequent rendering stages, with the aspiration that the prior knowledge embedded in the prompts can facilitate the gradual enhancement of rendered image quality. NeRF-VPT only requires sampling RGB data from previous stage renderings as priors at each training stage, without relying on extra guidance or complex techniques. Thus, our NeRF-VPT is plug-and-play and can be readily integrated into existing methods. By conducting comparative analyses of our NeRF-VPT against several NeRF-based approaches on demanding real-scene benchmarks, such as Realistic Synthetic 360, Real Forward-Facing, Replica dataset, and a user-captured dataset, we substantiate that our NeRF-VPT significantly elevates baseline performance and proficiently generates more high-quality novel view images than all the compared state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the cascading learning of NeRF-VPT introduces adaptability to scenarios with sparse inputs, resulting in a significant enhancement of accuracy for sparse-view novel view synthesis. The source code and dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/Freedomcls/NeRF-VPT}.
Authors: Guangrun Wang, Changlin Li, Liuchun Yuan, Jiefeng Peng, Xiaoyu Xian, Xiaodan Liang, Xiaojun Chang, Liang Lin
Abstract: Neural Architecture Search (NAS), aiming at automatically designing neural architectures by machines, has been considered a key step toward automatic machine learning. One notable NAS branch is the weight-sharing NAS, which significantly improves search efficiency and allows NAS algorithms to run on ordinary computers. Despite receiving high expectations, this category of methods suffers from low search effectiveness. By employing a generalization boundedness tool, we demonstrate that the devil behind this drawback is the untrustworthy architecture rating with the oversized search space of the possible architectures. Addressing this problem, we modularize a large search space into blocks with small search spaces and develop a family of models with the distilling neural architecture (DNA) techniques. These proposed models, namely a DNA family, are capable of resolving multiple dilemmas of the weight-sharing NAS, such as scalability, efficiency, and multi-modal compatibility. Our proposed DNA models can rate all architecture candidates, as opposed to previous works that can only access a sub- search space using heuristic algorithms. Moreover, under a certain computational complexity constraint, our method can seek architectures with different depths and widths. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our models achieve state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy of 78.9% and 83.6% on ImageNet for a mobile convolutional network and a small vision transformer, respectively. Additionally, we provide in-depth empirical analysis and insights into neural architecture ratings. Codes available: \url{https://github.com/changlin31/DNA}.
Authors: Siyuan Bian, Jiefeng Li, Jiasheng Tang, Cewu Lu
Abstract: Accurate human shape recovery from a monocular RGB image is a challenging task because humans come in different shapes and sizes and wear different clothes. In this paper, we propose ShapeBoost, a new human shape recovery framework that achieves pixel-level alignment even for rare body shapes and high accuracy for people wearing different types of clothes. Unlike previous approaches that rely on the use of PCA-based shape coefficients, we adopt a new human shape parameterization that decomposes the human shape into bone lengths and the mean width of each part slice. This part-based parameterization technique achieves a balance between flexibility and validity using a semi-analytical shape reconstruction algorithm. Based on this new parameterization, a clothing-preserving data augmentation module is proposed to generate realistic images with diverse body shapes and accurate annotations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in diverse body shape situations as well as in varied clothing situations.
Authors: Linhan Xia, Junbang Liu, Tong Wu
Abstract: This research presents a novel depth estimation algorithm based on a Transformer-encoder architecture, tailored for the NYU and KITTI Depth Dataset. This research adopts a transformer model, initially renowned for its success in natural language processing, to capture intricate spatial relationships in visual data for depth estimation tasks. A significant innovation of the research is the integration of a composite loss function that combines Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) with Mean Squared Error (MSE). This combined loss function is designed to ensure the structural integrity of the predicted depth maps relative to the original images (via SSIM) while minimizing pixel-wise estimation errors (via MSE). This research approach addresses the challenges of over-smoothing often seen in MSE-based losses and enhances the model's ability to predict depth maps that are not only accurate but also maintain structural coherence with the input images. Through rigorous training and evaluation using the NYU Depth Dataset, the model demonstrates superior performance, marking a significant advancement in single-image depth estimation, particularly in complex indoor and traffic environments.
Authors: Jie Feng, Hao Huang, Junpeng Zhang, Weisheng Dong, Dingwen Zhang, Licheng Jiao
Abstract: Mainstreamed weakly supervised road extractors rely on highly confident pseudo-labels propagated from scribbles, and their performance often degrades gradually as the image scenes tend various. We argue that such degradation is due to the poor model's invariance to scenes with different complexities, whereas existing solutions to this problem are commonly based on crafted priors that cannot be derived from scribbles. To eliminate the reliance on such priors, we propose a novel Structure-aware Mixup and Invariance Learning framework (SA-MixNet) for weakly supervised road extraction that improves the model invariance in a data-driven manner. Specifically, we design a structure-aware Mixup scheme to paste road regions from one image onto another for creating an image scene with increased complexity while preserving the road's structural integrity. Then an invariance regularization is imposed on the predictions of constructed and origin images to minimize their conflicts, which thus forces the model to behave consistently on various scenes. Moreover, a discriminator-based regularization is designed for enhancing the connectivity meanwhile preserving the structure of roads. Combining these designs, our framework demonstrates superior performance on the DeepGlobe, Wuhan, and Massachusetts datasets outperforming the state-of-the-art techniques by 1.47%, 2.12%, 4.09% respectively in IoU metrics, and showing its potential of plug-and-play. The code will be made publicly available.
Authors: Dipesh Gyawali, Jian Zhang, BB Karki
Abstract: Point cloud segmentation, which helps us understand the environment of specific structures and objects, can be performed in class-specific and class-agnostic ways. We propose a novel region-based transformer model called Region-Transformer for performing class-agnostic point cloud segmentation. The model utilizes a region-growth approach and self-attention mechanism to iteratively expand or contract a region by adding or removing points. It is trained on simulated point clouds with instance labels only, avoiding semantic labels. Attention-based networks have succeeded in many previous methods of performing point cloud segmentation. However, a region-growth approach with attention-based networks has yet to be used to explore its performance gain. To our knowledge, we are the first to use a self-attention mechanism in a region-growth approach. With the introduction of self-attention to region-growth that can utilize local contextual information of neighborhood points, our experiments demonstrate that the Region-Transformer model outperforms previous class-agnostic and class-specific methods on indoor datasets regarding clustering metrics. The model generalizes well to large-scale scenes. Key advantages include capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention, avoiding the need for semantic labels during training, and applicability to a variable number of objects. The Region-Transformer model represents a promising approach for flexible point cloud segmentation with applications in robotics, digital twinning, and autonomous vehicles.
Authors: Lingfeng Liu, Dong Ni, Hangjie Yuan
Abstract: Bandwidth constraints during signal acquisition frequently impede real-time detection applications. Hyperspectral data is a notable example, whose vast volume compromises real-time hyperspectral detection. To tackle this hurdle, we introduce a novel approach leveraging pre-acquisition modulation to reduce the acquisition volume. This modulation process is governed by a deep learning model, utilizing prior information. Central to our approach is LUM-ViT, a Vision Transformer variant. Uniquely, LUM-ViT incorporates a learnable under-sampling mask tailored for pre-acquisition modulation. To further optimize for optical calculations, we propose a kernel-level weight binarization technique and a three-stage fine-tuning strategy. Our evaluations reveal that, by sampling a mere 10% of the original image pixels, LUM-ViT maintains the accuracy loss within 1.8% on the ImageNet classification task. The method sustains near-original accuracy when implemented on real-world optical hardware, demonstrating its practicality. Code will be available at https://github.com/MaxLLF/LUM-ViT.
Authors: Yujie Lu, Long Wan, Nayu Ding, Yulong Wang, Shuhan Shen, Shen Cai, Lin Gao
Abstract: Neural implicit representation of geometric shapes has witnessed considerable advancements in recent years. However, common distance field based implicit representations, specifically signed distance field (SDF) for watertight shapes or unsigned distance field (UDF) for arbitrary shapes, routinely suffer from degradation of reconstruction accuracy when converting to explicit surface points and meshes. In this paper, we introduce a novel neural implicit representation based on unsigned orthogonal distance fields (UODFs). In UODFs, the minimal unsigned distance from any spatial point to the shape surface is defined solely in one orthogonal direction, contrasting with the multi-directional determination made by SDF and UDF. Consequently, every point in the 3D UODFs can directly access its closest surface points along three orthogonal directions. This distinctive feature leverages the accurate reconstruction of surface points without interpolation errors. We verify the effectiveness of UODFs through a range of reconstruction examples, extending from simple watertight or non-watertight shapes to complex shapes that include hollows, internal or assembling structures.
Authors: Yuhao Lin, Haiming Xu, Lingqiao Liu, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Abstract: Class-Agnostic Counting (CAC) seeks to accurately count objects in a given image with only a few reference examples. While previous methods achieving this relied on additional training, recent efforts have shown that it's possible to accomplish this without training by utilizing pre-existing foundation models, particularly the Segment Anything Model (SAM), for counting via instance-level segmentation. Although promising, current training-free methods still lag behind their training-based counterparts in terms of performance. In this research, we present a straightforward training-free solution that effectively bridges this performance gap, serving as a strong baseline. The primary contribution of our work lies in the discovery of four key technologies that can enhance performance. Specifically, we suggest employing a superpixel algorithm to generate more precise initial point prompts, utilizing an image encoder with richer semantic knowledge to replace the SAM encoder for representing candidate objects, and adopting a multiscale mechanism and a transductive prototype scheme to update the representation of reference examples. By combining these four technologies, our approach achieves significant improvements over existing training-free methods and delivers performance on par with training-based ones.
Authors: Zhende Song, Chenchen Wang, Jiamu Sheng, Chi Zhang, Gang Yu, Jiayuan Fan, Tao Chen
Abstract: The development of multimodal models has marked a significant step forward in how machines understand videos. These models have shown promise in analyzing short video clips. However, when it comes to longer formats like movies, they often fall short. The main hurdles are the lack of high-quality, diverse video data and the intensive work required to collect or annotate such data. In the face of these challenges, we propose MovieLLM, a novel framework designed to create synthetic, high-quality data for long videos. This framework leverages the power of GPT-4 and text-to-image models to generate detailed scripts and corresponding visuals. Our approach stands out for its flexibility and scalability, making it a superior alternative to traditional data collection methods. Our extensive experiments validate that the data produced by MovieLLM significantly improves the performance of multimodal models in understanding complex video narratives, overcoming the limitations of existing datasets regarding scarcity and bias.
Authors: Shangquan Sun, Wenqi Ren, Jingzhi Li, Rui Wang, Xiaochun Cao
Abstract: Knowledge distillation involves transferring soft labels from a teacher to a student using a shared temperature-based softmax function. However, the assumption of a shared temperature between teacher and student implies a mandatory exact match between their logits in terms of logit range and variance. This side-effect limits the performance of student, considering the capacity discrepancy between them and the finding that the innate logit relations of teacher are sufficient for student to learn. To address this issue, we propose setting the temperature as the weighted standard deviation of logit and performing a plug-and-play Z-score pre-process of logit standardization before applying softmax and Kullback-Leibler divergence. Our pre-process enables student to focus on essential logit relations from teacher rather than requiring a magnitude match, and can improve the performance of existing logit-based distillation methods. We also show a typical case where the conventional setting of sharing temperature between teacher and student cannot reliably yield the authentic distillation evaluation; nonetheless, this challenge is successfully alleviated by our Z-score. We extensively evaluate our method for various student and teacher models on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet, showing its significant superiority. The vanilla knowledge distillation powered by our pre-process can achieve favorable performance against state-of-the-art methods, and other distillation variants can obtain considerable gain with the assistance of our pre-process.
Authors: Yongchao Du, Min Wang, Wengang Zhou, Shuping Hui, Houqiang Li
Abstract: The task of composed image retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve images based on the query image and the text describing the users' intent. Existing methods have made great progress with the advanced large vision-language (VL) model in CIR task, however, they generally suffer from two main issues: lack of labeled triplets for model training and difficulty of deployment on resource-restricted environments when deploying the large vision-language model. To tackle the above problems, we propose Image2Sentence based Asymmetric zero-shot composed image retrieval (ISA), which takes advantage of the VL model and only relies on unlabeled images for composition learning. In the framework, we propose a new adaptive token learner that maps an image to a sentence in the word embedding space of VL model. The sentence adaptively captures discriminative visual information and is further integrated with the text modifier. An asymmetric structure is devised for flexible deployment, in which the lightweight model is adopted for the query side while the large VL model is deployed on the gallery side. The global contrastive distillation and the local alignment regularization are adopted for the alignment between the light model and the VL model for CIR task. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed ISA could better cope with the real retrieval scenarios and further improve retrieval accuracy and efficiency.
Authors: Yunzhuo Sun, Yifang Xu, Zien Xie, Yukun Shu, Sidan Du
Abstract: Moment retrieval (MR) and highlight detection (HD) aim to identify relevant moments and highlights in video from corresponding natural language query. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in various computer vision tasks. However, existing methods for MR\&HD have not yet been integrated with LLMs. In this letter, we propose a novel two-stage model that takes the output of LLMs as the input to the second-stage transformer encoder-decoder. First, MiniGPT-4 is employed to generate the detailed description of the video frame and rewrite the query statement, fed into the encoder as new features. Then, semantic similarity is computed between the generated description and the rewritten queries. Finally, continuous high-similarity video frames are converted into span anchors, serving as prior position information for the decoder. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves a state-of-the-art result, and by using only span anchors and similarity scores as outputs, positioning accuracy outperforms traditional methods, like Moment-DETR.
Authors: Xin Zhou, Dingkang Liang, Wei Xu, Xingkui Zhu, Yihan Xu, Zhikang Zou, Xiang Bai
Abstract: Point cloud analysis has achieved outstanding performance by transferring point cloud pre-trained models. However, existing methods for model adaptation usually update all model parameters, i.e., full fine-tuning paradigm, which is inefficient as it relies on high computational costs (e.g., training GPU memory) and massive storage space. In this paper, we aim to study parameter-efficient transfer learning for point cloud analysis with an ideal trade-off between task performance and parameter efficiency. To achieve this goal, we freeze the parameters of the default pre-trained models and then propose the Dynamic Adapter, which generates a dynamic scale for each token, considering the token significance to the downstream task. We further seamlessly integrate Dynamic Adapter with Prompt Tuning (DAPT) by constructing Internal Prompts, capturing the instance-specific features for interaction. Extensive experiments conducted on five challenging datasets demonstrate that the proposed DAPT achieves superior performance compared to the full fine-tuning counterparts while significantly reducing the trainable parameters and training GPU memory by 95% and 35%, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/LMD0311/DAPT.
Authors: Yifang Xu, Chenglei Peng, Ming Li, Yang Li, Sidan Du
Abstract: Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have achieved great success in monocular depth estimation (MDE). However, few existing works take the contributions for MDE of different levels feature maps into account, leading to inaccurate spatial layout, ambiguous boundaries and discontinuous object surface in the prediction. To better tackle these problems, we propose a Pyramid Feature Attention Network (PFANet) to improve the high-level context features and low-level spatial features. In the proposed PFANet, we design a Dual-scale Channel Attention Module (DCAM) to employ channel attention in different scales, which aggregate global context and local information from the high-level feature maps. To exploit the spatial relationship of visual features, we design a Spatial Pyramid Attention Module (SPAM) which can guide the network attention to multi-scale detailed information in the low-level feature maps. Finally, we introduce scale-invariant gradient loss to increase the penalty on errors in depth-wise discontinuous regions. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the KITTI dataset.
Authors: Jiakai Sun, Han Jiao, Guangyuan Li, Zhanjie Zhang, Lei Zhao, Wei Xing
Abstract: Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the na\"ive approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Yijun Yang, Ruiyuan Gao, Xiao Yang, Jianyuan Zhong, Qiang Xu
Abstract: Recent advancements in Text-to-Image (T2I) models have raised significant safety concerns about their potential misuse for generating inappropriate or Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) contents, despite existing countermeasures such as NSFW classifiers or model fine-tuning for inappropriate concept removal. Addressing this challenge, our study unveils GuardT2I, a novel moderation framework that adopts a generative approach to enhance T2I models' robustness against adversarial prompts. Instead of making a binary classification, GuardT2I utilizes a Large Language Model (LLM) to conditionally transform text guidance embeddings within the T2I models into natural language for effective adversarial prompt detection, without compromising the models' inherent performance. Our extensive experiments reveal that GuardT2I outperforms leading commercial solutions like OpenAI-Moderation and Microsoft Azure Moderator by a significant margin across diverse adversarial scenarios.
Authors: Xianju Li, Renxiang Guan, Zihao Li, Hao Liu, Jing Yang
Abstract: High-dimensional and complex spectral structures make clustering of hy-perspectral images (HSI) a challenging task. Subspace clustering has been shown to be an effective approach for addressing this problem. However, current subspace clustering algorithms are mainly designed for a single view and do not fully exploit spatial or texture feature information in HSI. This study proposed a multiview subspace clustering of HSI based on graph convolutional networks. (1) This paper uses the powerful classification ability of graph convolutional network and the learning ability of topologi-cal relationships between nodes to analyze and express the spatial relation-ship of HSI. (2) Pixel texture and pixel neighbor spatial-spectral infor-mation were sent to construct two graph convolutional subspaces. (3) An attention-based fusion module was used to adaptively construct a more discriminative feature map. The model was evaluated on three popular HSI datasets, including Indian Pines, Pavia University, and Houston. It achieved overall accuracies of 92.38%, 93.43%, and 83.82%, respectively and significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art clustering methods. In conclusion, the proposed model can effectively improve the clustering ac-curacy of HSI.
Authors: Roberto Di Via, Matteo Santacesaria, Francesca Odone, Vito Paolo Pastore
Abstract: In recent years, deep learning has emerged as a promising technique for medical image analysis. However, this application domain is likely to suffer from a limited availability of large public datasets and annotations. A common solution to these challenges in deep learning is the usage of a transfer learning framework, typically with a fine-tuning protocol, where a large-scale source dataset is used to pre-train a model, further fine-tuned on the target dataset. In this paper, we present a systematic study analyzing whether the usage of small-scale in-domain x-ray image datasets may provide any improvement for landmark detection over models pre-trained on large natural image datasets only. We focus on the multi-landmark localization task for three datasets, including chest, head, and hand x-ray images. Our results show that using in-domain source datasets brings marginal or no benefit with respect to an ImageNet out-of-domain pre-training. Our findings can provide an indication for the development of robust landmark detection systems in medical images when no large annotated dataset is available.
Authors: Mrityunjoy Gain, Avi Deb Raha, Rameswar Debnath
Abstract: Automatic colorization of gray images with objects of different colors and sizes is challenging due to inter- and intra-object color variation and the small area of the main objects due to extensive backgrounds. The learning process often favors dominant features, resulting in a biased model. In this paper, we formulate the colorization problem into a multinomial classification problem and then apply a weighted function to classes. We propose a set of formulas to transform color values into color classes and vice versa. Class optimization and balancing feature distribution are the keys for good performance. Observing class appearance on various extremely large-scale real-time images in practice, we propose 215 color classes for our colorization task. During training, we propose a class-weighted function based on true class appearance in each batch to ensure proper color saturation of individual objects. We establish a trade-off between major and minor classes to provide orthodox class prediction by eliminating major classes' dominance over minor classes. As we apply regularization to enhance the stability of the minor class, occasional minor noise may appear at the object's edges. We propose a novel object-selective color harmonization method empowered by the SAM to refine and enhance these edges. We propose a new color image evaluation metric, the Chromatic Number Ratio (CNR), to quantify the richness of color components. We compare our proposed model with state-of-the-art models using five different datasets: ADE, Celeba, COCO, Oxford 102 Flower, and ImageNet, in both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The experimental results show that our proposed model outstrips other models in visualization and CNR measurement criteria while maintaining satisfactory performance in regression (MSE, PSNR), similarity (SSIM, LPIPS, UIQI), and generative criteria (FID).
Authors: Chanyoung Kim, Woojung Han, Dayun Ju, Seong Jae Hwang
Abstract: Semantic segmentation has innately relied on extensive pixel-level labeled annotated data, leading to the emergence of unsupervised methodologies. Among them, leveraging self-supervised Vision Transformers for unsupervised semantic segmentation (USS) has been making steady progress with expressive deep features. Yet, for semantically segmenting images with complex objects, a predominant challenge remains: the lack of explicit object-level semantic encoding in patch-level features. This technical limitation often leads to inadequate segmentation of complex objects with diverse structures. To address this gap, we present a novel approach, EAGLE, which emphasizes object-centric representation learning for unsupervised semantic segmentation. Specifically, we introduce EiCue, a spectral technique providing semantic and structural cues through an eigenbasis derived from the semantic similarity matrix of deep image features and color affinity from an image. Further, by incorporating our object-centric contrastive loss with EiCue, we guide our model to learn object-level representations with intra- and inter-image object-feature consistency, thereby enhancing semantic accuracy. Extensive experiments on COCO-Stuff, Cityscapes, and Potsdam-3 datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art USS results of EAGLE with accurate and consistent semantic segmentation across complex scenes.
Authors: Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Xiaotian Han, Yiqi Wang, Bohan Zhai, Yongfei Liu, Yunzhe Tao, Huaibo Huang, Ran He, Hongxia Yang
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have experienced significant advancements recently. Nevertheless, challenges persist in the accurate recognition and comprehension of intricate details within high-resolution images. Despite being indispensable for the development of robust MLLMs, this area remains underinvestigated. To tackle this challenge, our work introduces InfiMM-HD, a novel architecture specifically designed for processing images of different resolutions with low computational overhead. This innovation facilitates the enlargement of MLLMs to higher-resolution capabilities. InfiMM-HD incorporates a cross-attention module and visual windows to reduce computation costs. By integrating this architectural design with a four-stage training pipeline, our model attains improved visual perception efficiently and cost-effectively. Empirical study underscores the robustness and effectiveness of InfiMM-HD, opening new avenues for exploration in related areas. Codes and models can be found at https://huggingface.co/Infi-MM/infimm-hd
Authors: Meiling Li, Zhenxing Qian, Xinpeng Zhang
Abstract: Text-to-image generative models have recently garnered significant attention due to their ability to generate images based on prompt descriptions. While these models have shown promising performance, concerns have been raised regarding the potential misuse of the generated fake images. In response to this, we have presented a simple yet effective training-free method to attribute fake images generated by text-to-image models to their source models. Given a test image to be attributed, we first inverse the textual prompt of the image, and then put the reconstructed prompt into different candidate models to regenerate candidate fake images. By calculating and ranking the similarity of the test image and the candidate images, we can determine the source of the image. This attribution allows model owners to be held accountable for any misuse of their models. Note that our approach does not limit the number of candidate text-to-image generative models. Comprehensive experiments reveal that (1) Our method can effectively attribute fake images to their source models, achieving comparable attribution performance with the state-of-the-art method; (2) Our method has high scalability ability, which is well adapted to real-world attribution scenarios. (3) The proposed method yields satisfactory robustness to common attacks, such as Gaussian blurring, JPEG compression, and Resizing. We also analyze the factors that influence the attribution performance, and explore the boost brought by the proposed method as a plug-in to improve the performance of existing SOTA. We hope our work can shed some light on the solutions to addressing the source of AI-generated images, as well as to prevent the misuse of text-to-image generative models.
Authors: Chen Zhao, Chenyu Dong, Weiling Cai
Abstract: Underwater visuals undergo various complex degradations, inevitably influencing the efficiency of underwater vision tasks. Recently, diffusion models were employed to underwater image enhancement (UIE) tasks, and gained SOTA performance. However, these methods fail to consider the physical properties and underwater imaging mechanisms in the diffusion process, limiting information completion capacity of diffusion models. In this paper, we introduce a novel UIE framework, named PA-Diff, designed to exploiting the knowledge of physics to guide the diffusion process. PA-Diff consists of Physics Prior Generation (PPG) Branch and Physics-aware Diffusion Transformer (PDT) Branch. Our designed PPG branch is a plug-and-play network to produce the physics prior, which can be integrated into any deep framework. With utilizing the physics prior knowledge to guide the diffusion process, PDT branch can obtain underwater-aware ability and model the complex distribution in real-world underwater scenes. Extensive experiments prove that our method achieves best performance on UIE tasks.
Authors: Hongjian Liu, Qingsong Xie, Zhijie Deng, Chen Chen, Shixiang Tang, Fueyang Fu, Zheng-jun Zha, Haonan Lu
Abstract: The iterative sampling procedure employed by diffusion models (DMs) often leads to significant inference latency. To address this, we propose Stochastic Consistency Distillation (SCott) to enable accelerated text-to-image generation, where high-quality generations can be achieved with just 1-2 sampling steps, and further improvements can be obtained by adding additional steps. In contrast to vanilla consistency distillation (CD) which distills the ordinary differential equation solvers-based sampling process of a pretrained teacher model into a student, SCott explores the possibility and validates the efficacy of integrating stochastic differential equation (SDE) solvers into CD to fully unleash the potential of the teacher. SCott is augmented with elaborate strategies to control the noise strength and sampling process of the SDE solver. An adversarial loss is further incorporated to strengthen the sample quality with rare sampling steps. Empirically, on the MSCOCO-2017 5K dataset with a Stable Diffusion-V1.5 teacher, SCott achieves an FID (Frechet Inceptio Distance) of 22.1, surpassing that (23.4) of the 1-step InstaFlow (Liu et al., 2023) and matching that of 4-step UFOGen (Xue et al., 2023b). Moreover, SCott can yield more diverse samples than other consistency models for high-resolution image generation (Luo et al., 2023a), with up to 16% improvement in a qualified metric. The code and checkpoints are coming soon.
Authors: Qinglin Liu, Shengping Zhang, Quanling Meng, Bineng Zhong, Peiqiang Liu, Hongxun Yao
Abstract: Human instance matting aims to estimate an alpha matte for each human instance in an image, which is extremely challenging and has rarely been studied so far. Despite some efforts to use instance segmentation to generate a trimap for each instance and apply trimap-based matting methods, the resulting alpha mattes are often inaccurate due to inaccurate segmentation. In addition, this approach is computationally inefficient due to multiple executions of the matting method. To address these problems, this paper proposes a novel End-to-End Human Instance Matting (E2E-HIM) framework for simultaneous multiple instance matting in a more efficient manner. Specifically, a general perception network first extracts image features and decodes instance contexts into latent codes. Then, a united guidance network exploits spatial attention and semantics embedding to generate united semantics guidance, which encodes the locations and semantic correspondences of all instances. Finally, an instance matting network decodes the image features and united semantics guidance to predict all instance-level alpha mattes. In addition, we construct a large-scale human instance matting dataset (HIM-100K) comprising over 100,000 human images with instance alpha matte labels. Experiments on HIM-100K demonstrate the proposed E2E-HIM outperforms the existing methods on human instance matting with 50% lower errors and 5X faster speed (6 instances in a 640X640 image). Experiments on the PPM-100, RWP-636, and P3M datasets demonstrate that E2E-HIM also achieves competitive performance on traditional human matting.
Authors: Junwen Huang, Hao Yu, Kuan-Ting Yu, Nassir Navab, Slobodan Ilic, Benjamin Busam
Abstract: Recent learning methods for object pose estimation require resource-intensive training for each individual object instance or category, hampering their scalability in real applications when confronted with previously unseen objects. In this paper, we propose MatchU, a Fuse-Describe-Match strategy for 6D pose estimation from RGB-D images. MatchU is a generic approach that fuses 2D texture and 3D geometric cues for 6D pose prediction of unseen objects. We rely on learning geometric 3D descriptors that are rotation-invariant by design. By encoding pose-agnostic geometry, the learned descriptors naturally generalize to unseen objects and capture symmetries. To tackle ambiguous associations using 3D geometry only, we fuse additional RGB information into our descriptor. This is achieved through a novel attention-based mechanism that fuses cross-modal information, together with a matching loss that leverages the latent space learned from RGB data to guide the descriptor learning process. Extensive experiments reveal the generalizability of both the RGB-D fusion strategy as well as the descriptor efficacy. Benefiting from the novel designs, MatchU surpasses all existing methods by a significant margin in terms of both accuracy and speed, even without the requirement of expensive re-training or rendering.
Authors: Zishi Li, Xiaoxuan Ma, Qiuyan Shang, Wentao Zhu, Hai Ci, Yu Qiao, Yizhou Wang
Abstract: Temporal repetition counting aims to quantify the repeated action cycles within a video. The majority of existing methods rely on the similarity correlation matrix to characterize the repetitiveness of actions, but their scalability is hindered due to the quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that employs an action query representation to localize repeated action cycles with linear computational complexity. Based on this representation, we further develop two key components to tackle the essential challenges of temporal repetition counting. Firstly, to facilitate open-set action counting, we propose the dynamic update scheme on action queries. Unlike static action queries, this approach dynamically embeds video features into action queries, offering a more flexible and generalizable representation. Secondly, to distinguish between actions of interest and background noise actions, we incorporate inter-query contrastive learning to regularize the video representations corresponding to different action queries. As a result, our method significantly outperforms previous works, particularly in terms of long video sequences, unseen actions, and actions at various speeds. On the challenging RepCountA benchmark, we outperform the state-of-the-art method TransRAC by 26.5% in OBO accuracy, with a 22.7% mean error decrease and 94.1% computational burden reduction. Code is available at https://github.com/lizishi/DeTRC.
Authors: Shivam Pande
Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging provides precise classification for land use and cover due to its exceptional spectral resolution. However, the challenges of high dimensionality and limited spatial resolution hinder its effectiveness. This study addresses these challenges by employing deep learning techniques to efficiently process, extract features, and classify data in an integrated manner. To enhance spatial resolution, we integrate information from complementary modalities such as LiDAR and SAR data through multimodal learning. Moreover, adversarial learning and knowledge distillation are utilized to overcome issues stemming from domain disparities and missing modalities. We also tailor deep learning architectures to suit the unique characteristics of HSI data, utilizing 1D convolutional and recurrent neural networks to handle its continuous spectral dimension. Techniques like visual attention and feedback connections within the architecture bolster the robustness of feature extraction. Additionally, we tackle the issue of limited training samples through self-supervised learning methods, employing autoencoders for dimensionality reduction and exploring semi-supervised learning techniques that leverage unlabeled data. Our proposed approaches are evaluated across various HSI datasets, consistently outperforming existing state-of-the-art techniques.
Authors: Huijie Guo, Ying Ba, Jie Hu, Lingyu Si, Wenwen Qiang, Lei Shi
Abstract: Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) methods harness the concept of semantic invariance by utilizing data augmentation strategies to produce similar representations for different deformations of the same input. Essentially, the model captures the shared information among multiple augmented views of samples, while disregarding the non-shared information that may be beneficial for downstream tasks. To address this issue, we introduce a module called CompMod with Meta Comprehensive Regularization (MCR), embedded into existing self-supervised frameworks, to make the learned representations more comprehensive. Specifically, we update our proposed model through a bi-level optimization mechanism, enabling it to capture comprehensive features. Additionally, guided by the constrained extraction of features using maximum entropy coding, the self-supervised learning model learns more comprehensive features on top of learning consistent features. In addition, we provide theoretical support for our proposed method from information theory and causal counterfactual perspective. Experimental results show that our method achieves significant improvement in classification, object detection and instance segmentation tasks on multiple benchmark datasets.
Authors: Kun-Yu Lin, Henghui Ding, Jiaming Zhou, Yi-Xing Peng, Zhilin Zhao, Chen Change Loy, Wei-Shi Zheng
Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) has shown remarkable open-vocabulary abilities across various image understanding tasks. Building upon this impressive success, recent pioneer works have proposed to adapt the powerful CLIP to video data, leading to efficient and effective video learners for open-vocabulary action recognition. Inspired by the fact that humans perform actions in diverse environments, our work delves into an intriguing question: Can CLIP-based video learners effectively generalize to video domains they have not encountered during training? To answer this, we establish a CROSS-domain Open-Vocabulary Action recognition benchmark named XOV-Action, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of five state-of-the-art CLIP-based video learners under various types of domain gaps. Our evaluation demonstrates that previous methods exhibit limited action recognition performance in unseen video domains, revealing potential challenges of the cross-domain open-vocabulary action recognition task. To address this task, our work focuses on a critical challenge, namely scene bias, and we accordingly contribute a novel scene-aware video-text alignment method. Our key idea is to distinguish video representations apart from scene-encoded text representations, aiming to learn scene-agnostic video representations for recognizing actions across domains. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The benchmark and code will be available at https://github.com/KunyuLin/XOV-Action/.
Authors: Jaime Spencer, Chris Russell, Simon Hadfield, Richard Bowden
Abstract: Self-supervised learning is the key to unlocking generic computer vision systems. By eliminating the reliance on ground-truth annotations, it allows scaling to much larger data quantities. Unfortunately, self-supervised monocular depth estimation (SS-MDE) has been limited by the absence of diverse training data. Existing datasets have focused exclusively on urban driving in densely populated cities, resulting in models that fail to generalize beyond this domain. To address these limitations, this paper proposes two novel datasets: SlowTV and CribsTV. These are large-scale datasets curated from publicly available YouTube videos, containing a total of 2M training frames. They offer an incredibly diverse set of environments, ranging from snowy forests to coastal roads, luxury mansions and even underwater coral reefs. We leverage these datasets to tackle the challenging task of zero-shot generalization, outperforming every existing SS-MDE approach and even some state-of-the-art supervised methods. The generalization capabilities of our models are further enhanced by a range of components and contributions: 1) learning the camera intrinsics, 2) a stronger augmentation regime targeting aspect ratio changes, 3) support frame randomization, 4) flexible motion estimation, 5) a modern transformer-based architecture. We demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in extensive ablation experiments. To facilitate the development of future research, we make the datasets, code and pretrained models available to the public at https://github.com/jspenmar/slowtv_monodepth.
Authors: Yulei Niu, Wenliang Guo, Long Chen, Xudong Lin, Shih-Fu Chang
Abstract: We study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which aims to make a goal-oriented sequence of action steps given partial visual state observations. The motivation of this problem is to learn a structured and plannable state and action space. Recent works succeeded in sequence modeling of steps with only sequence-level annotations accessible during training, which overlooked the roles of states in the procedures. In this work, we point out that State CHangEs MAtter (SCHEMA) for procedure planning in instructional videos. We aim to establish a more structured state space by investigating the causal relations between steps and states in procedures. Specifically, we explicitly represent each step as state changes and track the state changes in procedures. For step representation, we leveraged the commonsense knowledge in large language models (LLMs) to describe the state changes of steps via our designed chain-of-thought prompting. For state change tracking, we align visual state observations with language state descriptions via cross-modal contrastive learning, and explicitly model the intermediate states of the procedure using LLM-generated state descriptions. Experiments on CrossTask, COIN, and NIV benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed SCHEMA model achieves state-of-the-art performance and obtains explainable visualizations.
Authors: Yuxiang Huang, John Zelek
Abstract: Motion segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision and is crucial in various applications such as robotics, autonomous driving and action recognition. Recently, spectral clustering based methods have shown impressive results on motion segmentation in dynamic environments. These methods perform spectral clustering on motion affinity matrices to cluster objects or point trajectories in the scene into different motion groups. However, existing methods often need the number of motions present in the scene to be known, which significantly reduces their practicality. In this paper, we propose a unified model selection technique to automatically infer the number of motion groups for spectral clustering based motion segmentation methods by combining different existing model selection techniques together. We evaluate our method on the KT3DMoSeg dataset and achieve competitve results comparing to the baseline where the number of clusters is given as ground truth information.
Authors: Tianyu Luan, Zhong Li, Lele Chen, Xuan Gong, Lichang Chen, Yi Xu, Junsong Yuan
Abstract: Existing 3D mesh shape evaluation metrics mainly focus on the overall shape but are usually less sensitive to local details. This makes them inconsistent with human evaluation, as human perception cares about both overall and detailed shape. In this paper, we propose an analytic metric named Spectrum Area Under the Curve Difference (SAUCD) that demonstrates better consistency with human evaluation. To compare the difference between two shapes, we first transform the 3D mesh to the spectrum domain using the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator and Fourier transform. Then, we calculate the Area Under the Curve (AUC) difference between the two spectrums, so that each frequency band that captures either the overall or detailed shape is equitably considered. Taking human sensitivity across frequency bands into account, we further extend our metric by learning suitable weights for each frequency band which better aligns with human perception. To measure the performance of SAUCD, we build a 3D mesh evaluation dataset called Shape Grading, along with manual annotations from more than 800 subjects. By measuring the correlation between our metric and human evaluation, we demonstrate that SAUCD is well aligned with human evaluation, and outperforms previous 3D mesh metrics.
Authors: Chenying Liu, Conrad M Albrecht, Yi Wang, Qingyu Li, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract: While the volume of remote sensing data is increasing daily, deep learning in Earth Observation faces lack of accurate annotations for supervised optimization. Crowdsourcing projects such as OpenStreetMap distribute the annotation load to their community. However, such annotation inevitably generates noise due to insufficient control of the label quality, lack of annotators, frequent changes of the Earth's surface as a result of natural disasters and urban development, among many other factors. We present Adaptively trIggered Online Object-wise correction (AIO2) to address annotation noise induced by incomplete label sets. AIO2 features an Adaptive Correction Trigger (ACT) module that avoids label correction when the model training under- or overfits, and an Online Object-wise Correction (O2C) methodology that employs spatial information for automated label modification. AIO2 utilizes a mean teacher model to enhance training robustness with noisy labels to both stabilize the training accuracy curve for fitting in ACT and provide pseudo labels for correction in O2C. Moreover, O2C is implemented online without the need to store updated labels every training epoch. We validate our approach on two building footprint segmentation datasets with different spatial resolutions. Experimental results with varying degrees of building label noise demonstrate the robustness of AIO2. Source code will be available at https://github.com/zhu-xlab/AIO2.git.
Authors: Zhenxing Ming, Julie Stephany Berrio, Mao Shan, Stewart Worrall
Abstract: This paper introduces OccFusion, a straightforward and efficient sensor fusion framework for predicting 3D occupancy. A comprehensive understanding of 3D scenes is crucial in autonomous driving, and recent models for 3D semantic occupancy prediction have successfully addressed the challenge of describing real-world objects with varied shapes and classes. However, existing methods for 3D occupancy prediction heavily rely on surround-view camera images, making them susceptible to changes in lighting and weather conditions. By integrating features from additional sensors, such as lidar and surround view radars, our framework enhances the accuracy and robustness of occupancy prediction, resulting in top-tier performance on the nuScenes benchmark. Furthermore, extensive experiments conducted on the nuScenes dataset, including challenging night and rainy scenarios, confirm the superior performance of our sensor fusion strategy across various perception ranges. The code for this framework will be made available at https://github.com/DanielMing123/OCCFusion.
Authors: Xinyue Li, Aous Naman, David Taubman
Abstract: This work proposes to augment the lifting steps of the conventional wavelet transform with additional neural network assisted lifting steps. These additional steps reduce residual redundancy (notably aliasing information) amongst the wavelet subbands, and also improve the visual quality of reconstructed images at reduced resolutions. The proposed approach involves two steps, a high-to-low step followed by a low-to-high step. The high-to-low step suppresses aliasing in the low-pass band by using the detail bands at the same resolution, while the low-to-high step aims to further remove redundancy from detail bands, so as to achieve higher energy compaction. The proposed two lifting steps are trained in an end-to-end fashion; we employ a backward annealing approach to overcome the non-differentiability of the quantization and cost functions during back-propagation. Importantly, the networks employed in this paper are compact and with limited non-linearities, allowing a fully scalable system; one pair of trained network parameters are applied for all levels of decomposition and for all bit-rates of interest. By employing the proposed approach within the JPEG 2000 image coding standard, our method can achieve up to 17.4% average BD bit-rate saving over a wide range of bit-rates, while retaining quality and resolution scalability features of JPEG 2000.
Authors: Jisong Kim, Geonho Bang, Kwangjin Choi, Minjae Seong, Jaechang Yoo, Eunjong Pyo, Jun Won Choi
Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel point generation model, referred to as Pillar-based Point Generation Network (PillarGen), which facilitates the transformation of point clouds from one domain into another. PillarGen can produce synthetic point clouds with enhanced density and quality based on the provided input point clouds. The PillarGen model performs the following three steps: 1) pillar encoding, 2) Occupied Pillar Prediction (OPP), and 3) Pillar to Point Generation (PPG). The input point clouds are encoded using a pillar grid structure to generate pillar features. Then, OPP determines the active pillars used for point generation and predicts the center of points and the number of points to be generated for each active pillar. PPG generates the synthetic points for each active pillar based on the information provided by OPP. We evaluate the performance of PillarGen using our proprietary radar dataset, focusing on enhancing the density and quality of short-range radar data using the long-range radar data as supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that PillarGen outperforms traditional point upsampling methods in quantitative and qualitative measures. We also confirm that when PillarGen is incorporated into bird's eye view object detection, a significant improvement in detection accuracy is achieved.
Authors: Jieren Deng, Haojian Zhang, Kun Ding, Jianhua Hu, Xingxuan Zhang, Yunkuan Wang
Abstract: This paper presents Incremental Vision-Language Object Detection (IVLOD), a novel learning task designed to incrementally adapt pre-trained Vision-Language Object Detection Models (VLODMs) to various specialized domains, while simultaneously preserving their zero-shot generalization capabilities for the generalized domain. To address this new challenge, we present the Zero-interference Reparameterizable Adaptation (ZiRa), a novel method that introduces Zero-interference Loss and reparameterization techniques to tackle IVLOD without incurring additional inference costs or a significant increase in memory usage. Comprehensive experiments on COCO and ODinW-13 datasets demonstrate that ZiRa effectively safeguards the zero-shot generalization ability of VLODMs while continuously adapting to new tasks. Specifically, after training on ODinW-13 datasets, ZiRa exhibits superior performance compared to CL-DETR and iDETR, boosting zero-shot generalizability by substantial 13.91 and 8.71 AP, respectively.
Authors: Qingyao Tian, Huai Liao, Xinyan Huang, Jian Chen, Zihui Zhang, Bingyu Yang, Sebastien Ourselin, Hongbin Liu
Abstract: Real-time 6 DOF localization of bronchoscopes is crucial for enhancing intervention quality. However, current vision-based technologies struggle to balance between generalization to unseen data and computational speed. In this study, we propose a Depth-based Dual-Loop framework for real-time Visually Navigated Bronchoscopy (DD-VNB) that can generalize across patient cases without the need of re-training. The DD-VNB framework integrates two key modules: depth estimation and dual-loop localization. To address the domain gap among patients, we propose a knowledge-embedded depth estimation network that maps endoscope frames to depth, ensuring generalization by eliminating patient-specific textures. The network embeds view synthesis knowledge into a cycle adversarial architecture for scale-constrained monocular depth estimation. For real-time performance, our localization module embeds a fast ego-motion estimation network into the loop of depth registration. The ego-motion inference network estimates the pose change of the bronchoscope in high frequency while depth registration against the pre-operative 3D model provides absolute pose periodically. Specifically, the relative pose changes are fed into the registration process as the initial guess to boost its accuracy and speed. Experiments on phantom and in-vivo data from patients demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework: 1) monocular depth estimation outperforms SOTA, 2) localization achieves an accuracy of Absolute Tracking Error (ATE) of 4.7 $\pm$ 3.17 mm in phantom and 6.49 $\pm$ 3.88 mm in patient data, 3) with a frame-rate approaching video capture speed, 4) without the necessity of case-wise network retraining. The framework's superior speed and accuracy demonstrate its promising clinical potential for real-time bronchoscopic navigation.
Authors: Supreeth Narasimhaswamy, Uttaran Bhattacharya, Xiang Chen, Ishita Dasgupta, Saayan Mitra, Minh Hoai
Abstract: Text-to-image generative models can generate high-quality humans, but realism is lost when generating hands. Common artifacts include irregular hand poses, shapes, incorrect numbers of fingers, and physically implausible finger orientations. To generate images with realistic hands, we propose a novel diffusion-based architecture called HanDiffuser that achieves realism by injecting hand embeddings in the generative process. HanDiffuser consists of two components: a Text-to-Hand-Params diffusion model to generate SMPL-Body and MANO-Hand parameters from input text prompts, and a Text-Guided Hand-Params-to-Image diffusion model to synthesize images by conditioning on the prompts and hand parameters generated by the previous component. We incorporate multiple aspects of hand representation, including 3D shapes and joint-level finger positions, orientations and articulations, for robust learning and reliable performance during inference. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments and perform user studies to demonstrate the efficacy of our method in generating images with high-quality hands.
Authors: Yangbo Jiang, Zhiwei Jiang, Le Han, Zenan Huang, Nenggan Zheng
Abstract: Channel attention mechanisms endeavor to recalibrate channel weights to enhance representation abilities of networks. However, mainstream methods often rely solely on global average pooling as the feature squeezer, which significantly limits the overall potential of models. In this paper, we investigate the statistical moments of feature maps within a neural network. Our findings highlight the critical role of high-order moments in enhancing model capacity. Consequently, we introduce a flexible and comprehensive mechanism termed Extensive Moment Aggregation (EMA) to capture the global spatial context. Building upon this mechanism, we propose the Moment Channel Attention (MCA) framework, which efficiently incorporates multiple levels of moment-based information while minimizing additional computation costs through our Cross Moment Convolution (CMC) module. The CMC module via channel-wise convolution layer to capture multiple order moment information as well as cross channel features. The MCA block is designed to be lightweight and easily integrated into a variety of neural network architectures. Experimental results on classical image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming existing channel attention methods.
Authors: Howard H. Qian, Yangxiao Lu, Kejia Ren, Gaotian Wang, Ninad Khargonkar, Yu Xiang, Kaiyu Hang
Abstract: In order to successfully perform manipulation tasks in new environments, such as grasping, robots must be proficient in segmenting unseen objects from the background and/or other objects. Previous works perform unseen object instance segmentation (UOIS) by training deep neural networks on large-scale data to learn RGB/RGB-D feature embeddings, where cluttered environments often result in inaccurate segmentations. We build upon these methods and introduce a novel approach to correct inaccurate segmentation, such as under-segmentation, of static image-based UOIS masks by using robot interaction and a designed body frame-invariant feature. We demonstrate that the relative linear and rotational velocities of frames randomly attached to rigid bodies due to robot interactions can be used to identify objects and accumulate corrected object-level segmentation masks. By introducing motion to regions of segmentation uncertainty, we are able to drastically improve segmentation accuracy in an uncertainty-driven manner with minimal, non-disruptive interactions (ca. 2-3 per scene). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed interactive perception pipeline in accurately segmenting cluttered scenes by achieving an average object segmentation accuracy rate of 80.7%, an increase of 28.2% when compared with other state-of-the-art UOIS methods.
Authors: Feng Shuang, Wenbo He, Shaodong Li
Abstract: Recently, 3D hand reconstruction has gained more attention in human-computer cooperation, especially for hand-object interaction scenario. However, it still remains huge challenge due to severe hand-occlusion caused by interaction, which contain the balance of accuracy and physical plausibility, highly nonlinear mapping of model parameters and occlusion feature enhancement. To overcome these issues, we propose a 3D hand reconstruction network combining the benefits of model-based and model-free approaches to balance accuracy and physical plausibility for hand-object interaction scenario. Firstly, we present a novel MANO pose parameters regression module from 2D joints directly, which avoids the process of highly nonlinear mapping from abstract image feature and no longer depends on accurate 3D joints. Moreover, we further propose a vertex-joint mutual graph-attention model guided by MANO to jointly refine hand meshes and joints, which model the dependencies of vertex-vertex and joint-joint and capture the correlation of vertex-joint for aggregating intra-graph and inter-graph node features respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a competitive performance on recently benchmark datasets HO3DV2 and Dex-YCB, and outperforms all only model-base approaches and model-free approaches.
Authors: Wenkai Gong
Abstract: As mobile computing technology rapidly evolves, deploying efficient object detection algorithms on mobile devices emerges as a pivotal research area in computer vision. This study zeroes in on optimizing the YOLOv7 algorithm to boost its operational efficiency and speed on mobile platforms while ensuring high accuracy. Leveraging a synergy of advanced techniques such as Group Convolution, ShuffleNetV2, and Vision Transformer, this research has effectively minimized the model's parameter count and memory usage, streamlined the network architecture, and fortified the real-time object detection proficiency on resource-constrained devices. The experimental outcomes reveal that the refined YOLO model demonstrates exceptional performance, markedly enhancing processing velocity while sustaining superior detection accuracy.
Authors: Jingyu Gong, Min Wang, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Zhizhong Zhang, Yuan Xie, Lizhuang Ma
Abstract: Motion synthesis in real-world 3D scenes has recently attracted much attention. However, the static environment assumption made by most current methods usually cannot be satisfied especially for real-time motion synthesis in scanned point cloud scenes, if multiple dynamic objects exist, e.g., moving persons or vehicles. To handle this problem, we propose the first Dynamic Environment MOtion Synthesis framework (DEMOS) to predict future motion instantly according to the current scene, and use it to dynamically update the latent motion for final motion synthesis. Concretely, we propose a Spherical-BEV perception method to extract local scene features that are specifically designed for instant scene-aware motion prediction. Then, we design a time-variant motion blending to fuse the new predicted motions into the latent motion, and the final motion is derived from the updated latent motions, benefitting both from motion-prior and iterative methods. We unify the data format of two prevailing datasets, PROX and GTA-IM, and take them for motion synthesis evaluation in 3D scenes. We also assess the effectiveness of the proposed method in dynamic environments from GTA-IM and Semantic3D to check the responsiveness. The results show our method outperforms previous works significantly and has great performance in handling dynamic environments.
Authors: Zhengqi Xu, Ke Yuan, Huiqiong Wang, Yong Wang, Mingli Song, Jie Song
Abstract: Recently, model merging techniques have surfaced as a solution to combine multiple single-talent models into a single multi-talent model. However, previous endeavors in this field have either necessitated additional training or fine-tuning processes, or require that the models possess the same pre-trained initialization. In this work, we identify a common drawback in prior works w.r.t. the inconsistency of unit similarity in the weight space and the activation space. To address this inconsistency, we propose an innovative model merging framework, coined as merging under dual-space constraints (MuDSC). Specifically, instead of solely maximizing the objective of a single space, we advocate for the exploration of permutation matrices situated in a region with a unified high similarity in the dual space, achieved through the linear combination of activation and weight similarity matrices. In order to enhance usability, we have also incorporated adaptations for group structure, including Multi-Head Attention and Group Normalization. Comprehensive experimental comparisons demonstrate that MuDSC can significantly boost the performance of merged models with various task combinations and architectures. Furthermore, the visualization of the merged model within the multi-task loss landscape reveals that MuDSC enables the merged model to reside in the overlapping segment, featuring a unified lower loss for each task. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/zju-vipa/training_free_model_merging.
URLs: https://github.com/zju-vipa/training_free_model_merging.
Authors: Yutian Liu, Wenjun Ke, Jianguo Wei
Abstract: Handwritten mathematical expression recognition (HMER) is challenging in OCR tasks due to the complex layouts of mathematical expressions, suffering from issues including over-parsing and under-parsing. To solve these, previous methods utilize historical attention weights to improve the attention mechanism. However, this approach has limitations in addressing under-parsing since it cannot correct the erroneous attention on image regions that should be parsed at subsequent decoding steps. When this happens, the attention module incorporates future context into the current decoding step, thus confusing the alignment process. To address this issue, we propose an attention guidance mechanism to explicitly suppress attention weights in irrelevant regions and enhance ones in appropriate regions, thereby inhibiting access to information outside the intended context. Depending on the type of attention guidance, we devise two complementary approaches to refine attention weights: self-guidance that coordinates attention of multiple heads and neighbor-guidance that integrates attention from adjacent time steps. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving expression recognition rates of 60.75% / 61.81% / 63.30% on the CROHME 2014 / 2016 / 2019 datasets.
Authors: Yuhao Xu, Tao Gu, Weifeng Chen, Chengcai Chen
Abstract: Image-based virtual try-on (VTON), which aims to generate an outfitted image of a target human wearing an in-shop garment, is a challenging image-synthesis task calling for not only high fidelity of the outfitted human but also full preservation of garment details. To tackle this issue, we propose Outfitting over Try-on Diffusion (OOTDiffusion), leveraging the power of pretrained latent diffusion models and designing a novel network architecture for realistic and controllable virtual try-on. Without an explicit warping process, we propose an outfitting UNet to learn the garment detail features, and merge them with the target human body via our proposed outfitting fusion in the denoising process of diffusion models. In order to further enhance the controllability of our outfitting UNet, we introduce outfitting dropout to the training process, which enables us to adjust the strength of garment features through classifier-free guidance. Our comprehensive experiments on the VITON-HD and Dress Code datasets demonstrate that OOTDiffusion efficiently generates high-quality outfitted images for arbitrary human and garment images, which outperforms other VTON methods in both fidelity and controllability, indicating an impressive breakthrough in virtual try-on. Our source code is available at https://github.com/levihsu/OOTDiffusion.
Authors: Tung Le, Khai Nguyen, Shanlin Sun, Nhat Ho, Xiaohui Xie
Abstract: In the realm of computer vision and graphics, accurately establishing correspondences between geometric 3D shapes is pivotal for applications like object tracking, registration, texture transfer, and statistical shape analysis. Moving beyond traditional hand-crafted and data-driven feature learning methods, we incorporate spectral methods with deep learning, focusing on functional maps (FMs) and optimal transport (OT). Traditional OT-based approaches, often reliant on entropy regularization OT in learning-based framework, face computational challenges due to their quadratic cost. Our key contribution is to employ the sliced Wasserstein distance (SWD) for OT, which is a valid fast optimal transport metric in an unsupervised shape matching framework. This unsupervised framework integrates functional map regularizers with a novel OT-based loss derived from SWD, enhancing feature alignment between shapes treated as discrete probability measures. We also introduce an adaptive refinement process utilizing entropy regularized OT, further refining feature alignments for accurate point-to-point correspondences. Our method demonstrates superior performance in non-rigid shape matching, including near-isometric and non-isometric scenarios, and excels in downstream tasks like segmentation transfer. The empirical results on diverse datasets highlight our framework's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, setting new standards in non-rigid shape matching with efficient OT metrics and an adaptive refinement module.
Authors: Zhongjie Ba, Qingyu Liu, Zhenguang Liu, Shuang Wu, Feng Lin, Li Lu, Kui Ren
Abstract: Deepfake technology has given rise to a spectrum of novel and compelling applications. Unfortunately, the widespread proliferation of high-fidelity fake videos has led to pervasive confusion and deception, shattering our faith that seeing is believing. One aspect that has been overlooked so far is that current deepfake detection approaches may easily fall into the trap of overfitting, focusing only on forgery clues within one or a few local regions. Moreover, existing works heavily rely on neural networks to extract forgery features, lacking theoretical constraints guaranteeing that sufficient forgery clues are extracted and superfluous features are eliminated. These deficiencies culminate in unsatisfactory accuracy and limited generalizability in real-life scenarios. In this paper, we try to tackle these challenges through three designs: (1) We present a novel framework to capture broader forgery clues by extracting multiple non-overlapping local representations and fusing them into a global semantic-rich feature. (2) Based on the information bottleneck theory, we derive Local Information Loss to guarantee the orthogonality of local representations while preserving comprehensive task-relevant information. (3) Further, to fuse the local representations and remove task-irrelevant information, we arrive at a Global Information Loss through the theoretical analysis of mutual information. Empirically, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmark datasets.Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/QingyuLiu/Exposing-the-Deception}, hoping to inspire researchers.
Authors: Bedrettin Cetinkaya, Sinan Kalkan, Emre Akbas
Abstract: Detecting edges in images suffers from the problems of (P1) heavy imbalance between positive and negative classes as well as (P2) label uncertainty owing to disagreement between different annotators. Existing solutions address P1 using class-balanced cross-entropy loss and dice loss and P2 by only predicting edges agreed upon by most annotators. In this paper, we propose RankED, a unified ranking-based approach that addresses both the imbalance problem (P1) and the uncertainty problem (P2). RankED tackles these two problems with two components: One component which ranks positive pixels over negative pixels, and the second which promotes high confidence edge pixels to have more label certainty. We show that RankED outperforms previous studies and sets a new state-of-the-art on NYUD-v2, BSDS500 and Multi-cue datasets. Code is available at https://ranked-cvpr24.github.io.
Authors: Jianhan Qi, Yuheng Jia, Hui Liu, Junhui Hou
Abstract: Hyperspectral images (HSI) clustering is an important but challenging task. The state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods usually rely on superpixels, however, they do not fully utilize the spatial and spectral information in HSI 3-D structure, and their optimization targets are not clustering-oriented. In this work, we first use 3-D and 2-D hybrid convolutional neural networks to extract the high-order spatial and spectral features of HSI through pre-training, and then design a superpixel graph contrastive clustering (SPGCC) model to learn discriminative superpixel representations. Reasonable augmented views are crucial for contrastive clustering, and conventional contrastive learning may hurt the cluster structure since different samples are pushed away in the embedding space even if they belong to the same class. In SPGCC, we design two semantic-invariant data augmentations for HSI superpixels: pixel sampling augmentation and model weight augmentation. Then sample-level alignment and clustering-center-level contrast are performed for better intra-class similarity and inter-class dissimilarity of superpixel embeddings. We perform clustering and network optimization alternatively. Experimental results on several HSI datasets verify the advantages of the proposed method, e.g., on India Pines, our model improves the clustering accuracy from 58.79% to 67.59% compared to the SOTA method.
Authors: Litong Gong, Yiran Zhu, Weijie Li, Xiaoyang Kang, Biao Wang, Tiezheng Ge, Bo Zheng
Abstract: Recently, video generation has achieved significant rapid development based on superior text-to-image generation techniques. In this work, we propose a high fidelity framework for image-to-video generation, named AtomoVideo. Based on multi-granularity image injection, we achieve higher fidelity of the generated video to the given image. In addition, thanks to high quality datasets and training strategies, we achieve greater motion intensity while maintaining superior temporal consistency and stability. Our architecture extends flexibly to the video frame prediction task, enabling long sequence prediction through iterative generation. Furthermore, due to the design of adapter training, our approach can be well combined with existing personalised models and controllable modules. By quantitatively and qualitatively evaluation, AtomoVideo achieves superior results compared to popular methods, more examples can be found on our project website: https://atomo- video.github.io/.
URLs: https://atomo-
Authors: Tong Zheng, Shusaku Sone, Yoshitaka Ushiku, Yuki Oba, Jiaxin Ma
Abstract: This paper presents a Tri-branch Neural Fusion (TNF) approach designed for classifying multimodal medical images and tabular data. It also introduces two solutions to address the challenge of label inconsistency in multimodal classification. Traditional methods in multi-modality medical data classification often rely on single-label approaches, typically merging features from two distinct input modalities. This becomes problematic when features are mutually exclusive or labels differ across modalities, leading to reduced accuracy. To overcome this, our TNF approach implements a tri-branch framework that manages three separate outputs: one for image modality, another for tabular modality, and a third hybrid output that fuses both image and tabular data. The final decision is made through an ensemble method that integrates likelihoods from all three branches. We validate the effectiveness of TNF through extensive experiments, which illustrate its superiority over traditional fusion and ensemble methods in various convolutional neural networks and transformer-based architectures across multiple datasets.
Authors: Baozhu Zhao, Qiwei Xiong, Xiaohan Zhang, Jingfeng Guo, Qi Liu, Xiaofen Xing, Xiangmin Xu
Abstract: Three-dimensional point cloud anomaly detection that aims to detect anomaly data points from a training set serves as the foundation for a variety of applications, including industrial inspection and autonomous driving. However, existing point cloud anomaly detection methods often incorporate multiple feature memory banks to fully preserve local and global representations, which comes at the high cost of computational complexity and mismatches between features. To address that, we propose an unsupervised point cloud anomaly detection framework based on joint local-global features, termed PointCore. To be specific, PointCore only requires a single memory bank to store local (coordinate) and global (PointMAE) representations and different priorities are assigned to these local-global features, thereby reducing the computational cost and mismatching disturbance in inference. Furthermore, to robust against the outliers, a normalization ranking method is introduced to not only adjust values of different scales to a notionally common scale, but also transform densely-distributed data into a uniform distribution. Extensive experiments on Real3D-AD dataset demonstrate that PointCore achieves competitive inference time and the best performance in both detection and localization as compared to the state-of-the-art Reg3D-AD approach and several competitors.
Authors: Lukas H\"ollein, Alja\v{z} Bo\v{z}i\v{c}, Norman M\"uller, David Novotny, Hung-Yu Tseng, Christian Richardt, Michael Zollh\"ofer, Matthias Nie{\ss}ner
Abstract: 3D asset generation is getting massive amounts of attention, inspired by the recent success of text-guided 2D content creation. Existing text-to-3D methods use pretrained text-to-image diffusion models in an optimization problem or fine-tune them on synthetic data, which often results in non-photorealistic 3D objects without backgrounds. In this paper, we present a method that leverages pretrained text-to-image models as a prior, and learn to generate multi-view images in a single denoising process from real-world data. Concretely, we propose to integrate 3D volume-rendering and cross-frame-attention layers into each block of the existing U-Net network of the text-to-image model. Moreover, we design an autoregressive generation that renders more 3D-consistent images at any viewpoint. We train our model on real-world datasets of objects and showcase its capabilities to generate instances with a variety of high-quality shapes and textures in authentic surroundings. Compared to the existing methods, the results generated by our method are consistent, and have favorable visual quality (-30% FID, -37% KID).
Authors: Zhishan Zhou, Shihao. zhou, Zhi Lv, Minqiang Zou, Yao Tang, Jiajun Liang
Abstract: 3D hand pose estimation has found broad application in areas such as gesture recognition and human-machine interaction tasks. As performance improves, the complexity of the systems also increases, which can limit the comparative analysis and practical implementation of these methods. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective baseline that not only surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods but also demonstrates computational efficiency. To establish this baseline, we abstract existing work into two components: a token generator and a mesh regressor, and then examine their core structures. A core structure, in this context, is one that fulfills intrinsic functions, brings about significant improvements, and achieves excellent performance without unnecessary complexities. Our proposed approach is decoupled from any modifications to the backbone, making it adaptable to any modern models. Our method outperforms existing solutions, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results across multiple datasets. On the FreiHAND dataset, our approach produced a PA-MPJPE of 5.7mm and a PA-MPVPE of 6.0mm. Similarly, on the Dexycb dataset, we observed a PA-MPJPE of 5.5mm and a PA-MPVPE of 5.0mm. As for performance speed, our method reached up to 33 frames per second (fps) when using HRNet and up to 70 fps when employing FastViT-MA36
Authors: Haonan Wang, Qixiang Zhang, Yi Li, Xiaomeng Li
Abstract: Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSSS) has been proposed to alleviate the burden of time-consuming pixel-level manual labeling, which leverages limited labeled data along with larger amounts of unlabeled data. Current state-of-the-art methods train the labeled data with ground truths and unlabeled data with pseudo labels. However, the two training flows are separate, which allows labeled data to dominate the training process, resulting in low-quality pseudo labels and, consequently, sub-optimal results. To alleviate this issue, we present AllSpark, which reborns the labeled features from unlabeled ones with the channel-wise cross-attention mechanism. We further introduce a Semantic Memory along with a Channel Semantic Grouping strategy to ensure that unlabeled features adequately represent labeled features. The AllSpark shed new light on the architecture level designs of SSSS rather than framework level, which avoids increasingly complicated training pipeline designs. It can also be regarded as a flexible bottleneck module that can be seamlessly integrated into a general transformer-based segmentation model. The proposed AllSpark outperforms existing methods across all evaluation protocols on Pascal, Cityscapes and COCO benchmarks without bells-and-whistles. Code and model weights are available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/AllSpark.
Authors: Yuxiao Wang, Zhenao Wei, Xinyu Jiang, Yu Lei, Weiying Xue, Jinxiu Liu, Qi Liu
Abstract: Recent human-object interaction (HOI) detection approaches rely on high cost of manpower and require comprehensive annotated image datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel self-adaption language-driven HOI detection method, termed as FreeA, without labeling by leveraging the adaptability of CLIP to generate latent HOI labels. To be specific, FreeA matches image features of human-object pairs with HOI text templates, and a priori knowledge-based mask method is developed to suppress improbable interactions. In addition, FreeA utilizes the proposed interaction correlation matching method to enhance the likelihood of actions related to a specified action, further refine the generated HOI labels. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that FreeA achieves state-of-the-art performance among weakly supervised HOI models. Our approach is +8.58 mean Average Precision (mAP) on HICO-DET and +1.23 mAP on V-COCO more accurate in localizing and classifying the interactive actions than the newest weakly model, and +1.68 mAP and +7.28 mAP than the latest weakly+ model, respectively. Code will be available at https://drliuqi.github.io/.
Authors: Lin Li, Haoyan Guan, Jianing Qiu, Michael Spratling
Abstract: Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP, despite having remarkable generalization ability, are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. This work studies the adversarial robustness of VLMs from the novel perspective of the text prompt instead of the extensively studied model weights (frozen in this work). We first show that the effectiveness of both adversarial attack and defense are sensitive to the used text prompt. Inspired by this, we propose a method to improve resilience to adversarial attacks by learning a robust text prompt for VLMs. The proposed method, named Adversarial Prompt Tuning (APT), is effective while being both computationally and data efficient. Extensive experiments are conducted across 15 datasets and 4 data sparsity schemes (from 1-shot to full training data settings) to show APT's superiority over hand-engineered prompts and other state-of-the-art adaption methods. APT demonstrated excellent abilities in terms of the in-distribution performance and the generalization under input distribution shift and across datasets. Surprisingly, by simply adding one learned word to the prompts, APT can significantly boost the accuracy and robustness (epsilon=4/255) over the hand-engineered prompts by +13% and +8.5% on average respectively. The improvement further increases, in our most effective setting, to +26.4% for accuracy and +16.7% for robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/TreeLLi/APT.
Authors: Zhengyao Lv, Yuxiang Wei, Wangmeng Zuo, Kwan-Yee K. Wong
Abstract: Recent advancements in large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models have led to remarkable progress in semantic image synthesis. Nevertheless, synthesizing high-quality images with consistent semantics and layout remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose the adaPtive LAyout-semantiC fusion modulE (PLACE) that harnesses pre-trained models to alleviate the aforementioned issues. Specifically, we first employ the layout control map to faithfully represent layouts in the feature space. Subsequently, we combine the layout and semantic features in a timestep-adaptive manner to synthesize images with realistic details. During fine-tuning, we propose the Semantic Alignment (SA) loss to further enhance layout alignment. Additionally, we introduce the Layout-Free Prior Preservation (LFP) loss, which leverages unlabeled data to maintain the priors of pre-trained models, thereby improving the visual quality and semantic consistency of synthesized images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach performs favorably in terms of visual quality, semantic consistency, and layout alignment. The source code and model are available at https://github.com/cszy98/PLACE/tree/main.
Authors: Simon Thomine, Hichem Snoussi
Abstract: Detecting surface anomalies of industrial materials poses a significant challenge within a myriad of industrial manufacturing processes. In recent times, various methodologies have emerged, capitalizing on the advantages of employing a network pre-trained on natural images for the extraction of representative features. Subsequently, these features are subjected to processing through a diverse range of techniques including memory banks, normalizing flow, and knowledge distillation, which have exhibited exceptional accuracy. This paper revisits approaches based on pre-trained features by introducing a novel method centered on target-specific embedding. To capture the most representative features of the texture under consideration, we employ a variant of a contrastive training procedure that incorporates both artificially generated defective samples and anomaly-free samples during training. Exploiting the intrinsic properties of surfaces, we derived a meaningful representation from the defect-free samples during training, facilitating a straightforward yet effective calculation of anomaly scores. The experiments conducted on the MVTEC AD and TILDA datasets demonstrate the competitiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Hyunwoo Ha, Oh Hyun-Bin, Kim Jun-Seong, Kwon Byung-Ki, Kim Sung-Bin, Linh-Tam Tran, Ji-Yun Kim, Sung-Ho Bae, Tae-Hyun Oh
Abstract: Video motion magnification is a technique to capture and amplify subtle motion in a video that is invisible to the naked eye. The deep learning-based prior work successfully demonstrates the modelling of the motion magnification problem with outstanding quality compared to conventional signal processing-based ones. However, it still lags behind real-time performance, which prevents it from being extended to various online applications. In this paper, we investigate an efficient deep learning-based motion magnification model that runs in real time for full-HD resolution videos. Due to the specified network design of the prior art, i.e. inhomogeneous architecture, the direct application of existing neural architecture search methods is complicated. Instead of automatic search, we carefully investigate the architecture module by module for its role and importance in the motion magnification task. Two key findings are 1) Reducing the spatial resolution of the latent motion representation in the decoder provides a good trade-off between computational efficiency and task quality, and 2) surprisingly, only a single linear layer and a single branch in the encoder are sufficient for the motion magnification task. Based on these findings, we introduce a real-time deep learning-based motion magnification model with4.2X fewer FLOPs and is 2.7X faster than the prior art while maintaining comparable quality.
Authors: Chao Xu, Yang Liu, Jiazheng Xing, Weida Wang, Mingze Sun, Jun Dan, Tianxin Huang, Siyuan Li, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Ying Tai, Baigui Sun
Abstract: In this paper, we abstract the process of people hearing speech, extracting meaningful cues, and creating various dynamically audio-consistent talking faces, termed Listening and Imagining, into the task of high-fidelity diverse talking faces generation from a single audio. Specifically, it involves two critical challenges: one is to effectively decouple identity, content, and emotion from entangled audio, and the other is to maintain intra-video diversity and inter-video consistency. To tackle the issues, we first dig out the intricate relationships among facial factors and simplify the decoupling process, tailoring a Progressive Audio Disentanglement for accurate facial geometry and semantics learning, where each stage incorporates a customized training module responsible for a specific factor. Secondly, to achieve visually diverse and audio-synchronized animation solely from input audio within a single model, we introduce the Controllable Coherent Frame generation, which involves the flexible integration of three trainable adapters with frozen Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) to focus on maintaining facial geometry and semantics, as well as texture and temporal coherence between frames. In this way, we inherit high-quality diverse generation from LDMs while significantly improving their controllability at a low training cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our method in handling this paradigm. The codes will be released at https://github.com/modelscope/facechain.
Authors: Lingyan Ran, Yali Li, Guoqiang Liang, Yanning Zhang
Abstract: Semantic segmentation is an important and popular research area in computer vision that focuses on classifying pixels in an image based on their semantics. However, supervised deep learning requires large amounts of data to train models and the process of labeling images pixel by pixel is time-consuming and laborious. This review aims to provide a first comprehensive and organized overview of the state-of-the-art research results on pseudo-label methods in the field of semi-supervised semantic segmentation, which we categorize from different perspectives and present specific methods for specific application areas. In addition, we explore the application of pseudo-label technology in medical and remote-sensing image segmentation. Finally, we also propose some feasible future research directions to address the existing challenges.
Authors: Ritwik Gupta, Shufan Li, Tyler Zhu, Jitendra Malik, Trevor Darrell, Karttikeya Mangalam
Abstract: Modern computer vision pipelines handle large images in one of two sub-optimal ways: down-sampling or cropping. These two methods incur significant losses in the amount of information and context present in an image. There are many downstream applications in which global context matters as much as high frequency details, such as in real-world satellite imagery; in such cases researchers have to make the uncomfortable choice of which information to discard. We introduce xT, a simple framework for vision transformers which effectively aggregates global context with local details and can model large images end-to-end on contemporary GPUs. We select a set of benchmark datasets across classic vision tasks which accurately reflect a vision model's ability to understand truly large images and incorporate fine details over large scales and assess our method's improvement on them. By introducing a nested tokenization scheme for large images in conjunction with long-sequence length models normally used for natural language processing, we are able to increase accuracy by up to 8.6% on challenging classification tasks and $F_1$ score by 11.6 on context-dependent segmentation in large images.
Authors: Lei Li, Tianfang Zhang, Zhongyu Jiang, Cheng-Yen Yang, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Stefan Oehmcke, Dimitri Pierre Johannes Gominski, Fabian Gieseke, Christian Igel
Abstract: Accurate and consistent methods for counting trees based on remote sensing data are needed to support sustainable forest management, assess climate change mitigation strategies, and build trust in tree carbon credits. Two-dimensional remote sensing imagery primarily shows overstory canopy, and it does not facilitate easy differentiation of individual trees in areas with a dense canopy and does not allow for easy separation of trees when the canopy is dense. We leverage the fusion of three-dimensional LiDAR measurements and 2D imagery to facilitate the accurate counting of trees. We compare a deep learning approach to counting trees in forests using 3D airborne LiDAR data and 2D imagery. The approach is compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, like operating on 3D point cloud and 2D imagery. We empirically evaluate the different methods on the NeonTreeCount data set, which we use to define a tree-counting benchmark. The experiments show that FuseCountNet yields more accurate tree counts.
Authors: Puru Vaish, Shunxin Wang, Nicola Strisciuglio
Abstract: Computer vision models normally witness degraded performance when deployed in real-world scenarios, due to unexpected changes in inputs that were not accounted for during training. Data augmentation is commonly used to address this issue, as it aims to increase data variety and reduce the distribution gap between training and test data. However, common visual augmentations might not guarantee extensive robustness of computer vision models. In this paper, we propose Auxiliary Fourier-basis Augmentation (AFA), a complementary technique targeting augmentation in the frequency domain and filling the augmentation gap left by visual augmentations. We demonstrate the utility of augmentation via Fourier-basis additive noise in a straightforward and efficient adversarial setting. Our results show that AFA benefits the robustness of models against common corruptions, OOD generalization, and consistency of performance of models against increasing perturbations, with negligible deficit to the standard performance of models. It can be seamlessly integrated with other augmentation techniques to further boost performance.
Authors: Huali Xu, Li Liu, Shuaifeng Zhi, Shaojing Fu, Zhuo Su, Ming-Ming Cheng, Yongxiang Liu
Abstract: Existing Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning (CDFSL) methods require access to source domain data to train a model in the pre-training phase. However, due to increasing concerns about data privacy and the desire to reduce data transmission and training costs, it is necessary to develop a CDFSL solution without accessing source data. For this reason, this paper explores a Source-Free CDFSL (SF-CDFSL) problem, in which CDFSL is addressed through the use of existing pretrained models instead of training a model with source data, avoiding accessing source data. This paper proposes an Enhanced Information Maximization with Distance-Aware Contrastive Learning (IM-DCL) method to address these challenges. Firstly, we introduce the transductive mechanism for learning the query set. Secondly, information maximization (IM) is explored to map target samples into both individual certainty and global diversity predictions, helping the source model better fit the target data distribution. However, IM fails to learn the decision boundary of the target task. This motivates us to introduce a novel approach called Distance-Aware Contrastive Learning (DCL), in which we consider the entire feature set as both positive and negative sets, akin to Schrodinger's concept of a dual state. Instead of a rigid separation between positive and negative sets, we employ a weighted distance calculation among features to establish a soft classification of the positive and negative sets for the entire feature set. Furthermore, we address issues related to IM by incorporating contrastive constraints between object features and their corresponding positive and negative sets. Evaluations of the 4 datasets in the BSCD-FSL benchmark indicate that the proposed IM-DCL, without accessing the source domain, demonstrates superiority over existing methods, especially in the distant domain task.
Authors: Xin Zhang, Tao Xiao, Gepeng Ji, Xuan Wu, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao
Abstract: Camouflage poses challenges in distinguishing a static target, whereas any movement of the target can break this disguise. Existing video camouflaged object detection (VCOD) approaches take noisy motion estimation as input or model motion implicitly, restricting detection performance in complex dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel Explicit Motion handling and Interactive Prompting framework for VCOD, dubbed EMIP, which handles motion cues explicitly using a frozen pre-trained optical flow fundamental model. EMIP is characterized by a two-stream architecture for simultaneously conducting camouflaged segmentation and optical flow estimation. Interactions across the dual streams are realized in an interactive prompting way that is inspired by emerging visual prompt learning. Two learnable modules, i.e. the camouflaged feeder and motion collector, are designed to incorporate segmentation-to-motion and motion-to-segmentation prompts, respectively, and enhance outputs of the both streams. The prompt fed to the motion stream is learned by supervising optical flow in a self-supervised manner. Furthermore, we show that long-term historical information can also be incorporated as a prompt into EMIP and achieve more robust results with temporal consistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our EMIP achieves new state-of-the-art records on popular VCOD benchmarks. The code will be publicly available.
Authors: Shitao Chen, Haolin Zhang, Nanning Zheng
Abstract: 3D object detection based on LiDAR point cloud and prior anchor boxes is a critical technology for autonomous driving environment perception and understanding. Nevertheless, an overlooked practical issue in existing methods is the ambiguity in training sample allocation based on box Intersection over Union (IoU_box). This problem impedes further enhancements in the performance of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors. To tackle this challenge, this paper introduces a new training sample selection method that utilizes point cloud distribution for anchor sample quality measurement, named Point Assisted Sample Selection (PASS). This method has undergone rigorous evaluation on two widely utilized datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the application of PASS elevates the average precision of anchor-based LiDAR 3D object detectors to a novel state-of-the-art, thereby proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The codes will be made available at https://github.com/XJTU-Haolin/Point_Assisted_Sample_Selection.
URLs: https://github.com/XJTU-Haolin/Point_Assisted_Sample_Selection.
Authors: Noah Maul, Annette Birkhold, Fabian Wagner, Mareike Thies, Maximilian Rohleder, Philipp Berg, Markus Kowarschik, Andreas Maier
Abstract: Three-dimensional Digital Subtraction Angiography (3D-DSA) is a well-established X-ray-based technique for visualizing vascular anatomy. Recently, four-dimensional DSA (4D-DSA) reconstruction algorithms have been developed to enable the visualization of volumetric contrast flow dynamics through time-series of volumes. . This reconstruction problem is ill-posed mainly due to vessel overlap in the projection direction and geometric vessel foreshortening, which leads to information loss in the recorded projection images. However, knowledge about the underlying fluid dynamics can be leveraged to constrain the solution space. In our work, we implicitly include this information in a neural network-based model that is trained on a dataset of image-based blood flow simulations. The model predicts the spatially averaged contrast agent concentration for each centerline point of the vasculature over time, lowering the overall computational demand. The trained network enables the reconstruction of relative contrast agent concentrations with a mean absolute error of 0.02 $\pm$ 0.02 and a mean absolute percentage error of 5.31 % $\pm$ 9.25 %. Moreover, the network is robust to varying degrees of vessel overlap and vessel foreshortening. Our approach demonstrates the potential of the integration of machine learning and blood flow simulations in time-resolved angiographic flow reconstruction.
Authors: Yuxuan Liu
Abstract: This dissertation is a multifaceted contribution to the advancement of vision-based 3D perception technologies. In the first segment, the thesis introduces structural enhancements to both monocular and stereo 3D object detection algorithms. By integrating ground-referenced geometric priors into monocular detection models, this research achieves unparalleled accuracy in benchmark evaluations for monocular 3D detection. Concurrently, the work refines stereo 3D detection paradigms by incorporating insights and inferential structures gleaned from monocular networks, thereby augmenting the operational efficiency of stereo detection systems. The second segment is devoted to data-driven strategies and their real-world applications in 3D vision detection. A novel training regimen is introduced that amalgamates datasets annotated with either 2D or 3D labels. This approach not only augments the detection models through the utilization of a substantially expanded dataset but also facilitates economical model deployment in real-world scenarios where only 2D annotations are readily available. Lastly, the dissertation presents an innovative pipeline tailored for unsupervised depth estimation in autonomous driving contexts. Extensive empirical analyses affirm the robustness and efficacy of this newly proposed pipeline. Collectively, these contributions lay a robust foundation for the widespread adoption of vision-based 3D perception technologies in autonomous driving applications.
Authors: Mathilde Caron, Ahmet Iscen, Alireza Fathi, Cordelia Schmid
Abstract: In this paper, we address web-scale visual entity recognition, specifically the task of mapping a given query image to one of the 6 million existing entities in Wikipedia. One way of approaching a problem of such scale is using dual-encoder models (eg CLIP), where all the entity names and query images are embedded into a unified space, paving the way for an approximate k-NN search. Alternatively, it is also possible to re-purpose a captioning model to directly generate the entity names for a given image. In contrast, we introduce a novel Generative Entity Recognition (GER) framework, which given an input image learns to auto-regressively decode a semantic and discriminative ``code'' identifying the target entity. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of this GER paradigm, showcasing state-of-the-art performance on the challenging OVEN benchmark. GER surpasses strong captioning, dual-encoder, visual matching and hierarchical classification baselines, affirming its advantage in tackling the complexities of web-scale recognition.
Authors: Benedikt Blumenstiel, Viktoria Moor, Romeo Kienzler, Thomas Brunschwiler
Abstract: Image retrieval enables an efficient search through vast amounts of satellite imagery and returns similar images to a query. Deep learning models can identify images across various semantic concepts without the need for annotations. This work proposes to use Geospatial Foundation Models, like Prithvi, for remote sensing image retrieval with multiple benefits: i) the models encode multi-spectral satellite data and ii) generalize without further fine-tuning. We introduce two datasets to the retrieval task and observe a strong performance: Prithvi processes six bands and achieves a mean Average Precision of 97.62\% on BigEarthNet-43 and 44.51\% on ForestNet-12, outperforming other RGB-based models. Further, we evaluate three compression methods with binarized embeddings balancing retrieval speed and accuracy. They match the retrieval speed of much shorter hash codes while maintaining the same accuracy as floating-point embeddings but with a 32-fold compression. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/remote-sensing-image-retrieval.
URLs: https://github.com/IBM/remote-sensing-image-retrieval.
Authors: Shuai Guo, Qiuwen Wang, Yijie Gao, Rong Xie, Li Song
Abstract: Novel-view synthesis with sparse input views is important for real-world applications like AR/VR and autonomous driving. Recent methods have integrated depth information into NeRFs for sparse input synthesis, leveraging depth prior for geometric and spatial understanding. However, most existing works tend to overlook inaccuracies within depth maps and have low time efficiency. To address these issues, we propose a depth-guided robust and fast point cloud fusion NeRF for sparse inputs. We perceive radiance fields as an explicit voxel grid of features. A point cloud is constructed for each input view, characterized within the voxel grid using matrices and vectors. We accumulate the point cloud of each input view to construct the fused point cloud of the entire scene. Each voxel determines its density and appearance by referring to the point cloud of the entire scene. Through point cloud fusion and voxel grid fine-tuning, inaccuracies in depth values are refined or substituted by those from other views. Moreover, our method can achieve faster reconstruction and greater compactness through effective vector-matrix decomposition. Experimental results underline the superior performance and time efficiency of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Authors: Aisha L. Shuaibu, Ivor J. A. Simpson
Abstract: Methods for medical image registration infer geometric transformations that align pairs/groups of images by maximising an image similarity metric. This problem is ill-posed as several solutions may have equivalent likelihoods, also optimising purely for image similarity can yield implausible transformations. For these reasons regularization terms are essential to obtain meaningful registration results. However, this requires the introduction of at least one hyperparameter often termed {\lambda}, that serves as a tradeoff between loss terms. In some situations, the quality of the estimated transformation greatly depends on hyperparameter choice, and different choices may be required depending on the characteristics of the data. Analyzing the effect of these hyperparameters requires labelled data, which is not commonly available at test-time. In this paper, we propose a method for evaluating the influence of hyperparameters and subsequently selecting an optimal value for given image pairs. Our approach which we call HyperPredict, implements a Multi-Layer Perceptron that learns the effect of selecting particular hyperparameters for registering an image pair by predicting the resulting segmentation overlap and measure of deformation smoothness. This approach enables us to select optimal hyperparameters at test time without requiring labelled data, removing the need for a one-size-fits-all cross-validation approach. Furthermore, the criteria used to define optimal hyperparameter is flexible post-training, allowing us to efficiently choose specific properties. We evaluate our proposed method on the OASIS brain MR dataset using a recent deep learning approach(cLapIRN) and an algorithmic method(Niftyreg). Our results demonstrate good performance in predicting the effects of regularization hyperparameters and highlight the benefits of our image-pair specific approach to hyperparameter selection.
Authors: Zhongzhen Huang, Linda Wei, Shaoting Zhang, Xiaofan Zhang
Abstract: Combining images from multi-modalities is beneficial to explore various information in computer vision, especially in the medical domain. As an essential part of clinical diagnosis, multi-modal brain tumor segmentation aims to delineate the malignant entity involving multiple modalities. Although existing methods have shown remarkable performance in the task, the information exchange for cross-scale and high-level representations fusion in spatial and modality are limited in these methods. In this paper, we present a novel Modality Aware and Shift Mixer that integrates intra-modality and inter-modality dependencies of multi-modal images for effective and robust brain tumor segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a Modality-Aware module according to neuroimaging studies for modeling the specific modality pair relationships at low levels, and a Modality-Shift module with specific mosaic patterns is developed to explore the complex relationships across modalities at high levels via the self-attention. Experimentally, we outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches on the public Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS 2021 segmentation) dataset. Further qualitative experiments demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of MASM.
Authors: Weiyi Lv, Yuhang Huang, Ning Zhang, Ruei-Sung Lin, Mei Han, Dan Zeng
Abstract: In Multiple Object Tracking, objects often exhibit non-linear motion of acceleration and deceleration, with irregular direction changes. Tacking-by-detection (TBD) with Kalman Filter motion prediction works well in pedestrian-dominant scenarios but falls short in complex situations when multiple objects perform non-linear and diverse motion simultaneously. To tackle the complex non-linear motion, we propose a real-time diffusion-based MOT approach named DiffMOT. Specifically, for the motion predictor component, we propose a novel Decoupled Diffusion-based Motion Predictor (D MP). It models the entire distribution of various motion presented by the data as a whole. It also predicts an individual object's motion conditioning on an individual's historical motion information. Furthermore, it optimizes the diffusion process with much less sampling steps. As a MOT tracker, the DiffMOT is real-time at 22.7FPS, and also outperforms the state-of-the-art on DanceTrack and SportsMOT datasets with 63.4 and 76.2 in HOTA metrics, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, DiffMOT is the first to introduce a diffusion probabilistic model into the MOT to tackle non-linear motion prediction.
Authors: Yifang Xu, Yunzhuo Sun, Zien Xie, Benxiang Zhai, Sidan Du
Abstract: Video temporal grounding (VTG) aims to locate specific temporal segments from an untrimmed video based on a linguistic query. Most existing VTG models are trained on extensive annotated video-text pairs, a process that not only introduces human biases from the queries but also incurs significant computational costs. To tackle these challenges, we propose VTG-GPT, a GPT-based method for zero-shot VTG without training or fine-tuning. To reduce prejudice in the original query, we employ Baichuan2 to generate debiased queries. To lessen redundant information in videos, we apply MiniGPT-v2 to transform visual content into more precise captions. Finally, we devise the proposal generator and post-processing to produce accurate segments from debiased queries and image captions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VTG-GPT significantly outperforms SOTA methods in zero-shot settings and surpasses unsupervised approaches. More notably, it achieves competitive performance comparable to supervised methods. The code is available on https://github.com/YoucanBaby/VTG-GPT
Authors: Jiaxiang Cheng, Pan Xie, Xin Xia, Jiashi Li, Jie Wu, Yuxi Ren, Huixia Li, Xuefeng Xiao, Min Zheng, Lean Fu
Abstract: Recent advancement in text-to-image models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and corresponding personalized technologies (e.g., DreamBooth and LoRA) enables individuals to generate high-quality and imaginative images. However, they often suffer from limitations when generating images with resolutions outside of their trained domain. To overcome this limitation, we present the Resolution Adapter (ResAdapter), a domain-consistent adapter designed for diffusion models to generate images with unrestricted resolutions and aspect ratios. Unlike other multi-resolution generation methods that process images of static resolution with complex post-process operations, ResAdapter directly generates images with the dynamical resolution. Especially, after learning a deep understanding of pure resolution priors, ResAdapter trained on the general dataset, generates resolution-free images with personalized diffusion models while preserving their original style domain. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that ResAdapter with only 0.5M can process images with flexible resolutions for arbitrary diffusion models. More extended experiments demonstrate that ResAdapter is compatible with other modules (e.g., ControlNet, IP-Adapter and LCM-LoRA) for image generation across a broad range of resolutions, and can be integrated into other multi-resolution model (e.g., ElasticDiffusion) for efficiently generating higher-resolution images. Project link is https://res-adapter.github.io
Authors: Sangmin Lee, Bolin Lai, Fiona Ryan, Bikram Boote, James M. Rehg
Abstract: Understanding social interactions involving both verbal and non-verbal cues is essential to effectively interpret social situations. However, most prior works on multimodal social cues focus predominantly on single-person behaviors or rely on holistic visual representations that are not densely aligned to utterances in multi-party environments. They are limited in modeling the intricate dynamics of multi-party interactions. In this paper, we introduce three new challenging tasks to model the fine-grained dynamics between multiple people: speaking target identification, pronoun coreference resolution, and mentioned player prediction. We contribute extensive data annotations to curate these new challenges in social deduction game settings. Furthermore, we propose a novel multimodal baseline that leverages densely aligned language-visual representations by synchronizing visual features with their corresponding utterances. This facilitates concurrently capturing verbal and non-verbal cues pertinent to social reasoning. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach with densely aligned multimodal representations in modeling social interactions. We will release our benchmarks and source code to facilitate further research.
Authors: Hugo Bohy, Kevin El Haddad, Thierry Dutoit
Abstract: Smiles and laughs detection systems have attracted a lot of attention in the past decade contributing to the improvement of human-agent interaction systems. But very few considered these expressions as distinct, although no prior work clearly proves them to belong to the same category or not. In this work, we present a deep learning-based multimodal smile and laugh classification system, considering them as two different entities. We compare the use of audio and vision-based models as well as a fusion approach. We show that, as expected, the fusion leads to a better generalization on unseen data. We also present an in-depth analysis of the behavior of these models on the smiles and laughs intensity levels. The analyses on the intensity levels show that the relationship between smiles and laughs might not be as simple as a binary one or even grouping them in a single category, and so, a more complex approach should be taken when dealing with them. We also tackle the problem of limited resources by showing that transfer learning allows the models to improve the detection of confusing intensity levels.
Authors: Yu Sun, Dongzhan Zhou, Chen Lin, Conghui He, Wanli Ouyang, Han-Sen Zhong
Abstract: Academic documents are packed with texts, equations, tables, and figures, requiring comprehensive understanding for accurate Optical Character Recognition (OCR). While end-to-end OCR methods offer improved accuracy over layout-based approaches, they often grapple with significant repetition issues, especially with complex layouts in Out-Of-Domain (OOD) documents.To tackle this issue, we propose LOCR, a model that integrates location guiding into the transformer architecture during autoregression. We train the model on a dataset comprising over 77M text-location pairs from 125K academic document pages, including bounding boxes for words, tables and mathematical symbols. LOCR adeptly handles various formatting elements and generates content in Markdown language. It outperforms all existing methods in our test set constructed from arXiv, as measured by edit distance, BLEU, METEOR and F-measure.LOCR also reduces repetition frequency from 4.4% of pages to 0.5% in the arXiv dataset, from 13.2% to 1.3% in OOD quantum physics documents and from 8.1% to 1.8% in OOD marketing documents. Additionally, LOCR features an interactive OCR mode, facilitating the generation of complex documents through a few location prompts from human.
Authors: Zhiyi He, Wei Yao, Jie Shao, Puzuo Wang
Abstract: Fine classification of city-scale buildings from satellite remote sensing imagery is a crucial research area with significant implications for urban planning, infrastructure development, and population distribution analysis. However, the task faces big challenges due to low-resolution overhead images acquired from high altitude space-borne platforms and the long-tail sample distribution of fine-grained urban building categories, leading to severe class imbalance problem. To address these issues, we propose a deep network approach to fine-grained classification of urban buildings using open-access satellite images. A Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) based super-resolution method is first introduced to enhance the spatial resolution of satellite images, which benefits from domain-adaptive knowledge distillation. Then, a new fine-grained classification network with Category Information Balancing Module (CIBM) and Contrastive Supervision (CS) technique is proposed to mitigate the problem of class imbalance and improve the classification robustness and accuracy. Experiments on Hong Kong data set with 11 fine building types revealed promising classification results with a mean Top-1 accuracy of 60.45\%, which is on par with street-view image based approaches. Extensive ablation study shows that CIBM and CS improve Top-1 accuracy by 2.6\% and 3.5\% compared to the baseline method, respectively. And both modules can be easily inserted into other classification networks and similar enhancements have been achieved. Our research contributes to the field of urban analysis by providing a practical solution for fine classification of buildings in challenging mega city scenarios solely using open-access satellite images. The proposed method can serve as a valuable tool for urban planners, aiding in the understanding of economic, industrial, and population distribution.
Authors: Yujia Liu, Anton Obukhov, Jan Dirk Wegner, Konrad Schindler
Abstract: We present a learning-based approach to reconstruct buildings as 3D polygonal meshes from airborne LiDAR point clouds. What makes 3D building reconstruction from airborne LiDAR hard is the large diversity of building designs and especially roof shapes, the low and varying point density across the scene, and the often incomplete coverage of building facades due to occlusions by vegetation or to the viewing angle of the sensor. To cope with the diversity of shapes and inhomogeneous and incomplete object coverage, we introduce a generative model that directly predicts 3D polygonal meshes from input point clouds. Our autoregressive model, called Point2Building, iteratively builds up the mesh by generating sequences of vertices and faces. This approach enables our model to adapt flexibly to diverse geometries and building structures. Unlike many existing methods that rely heavily on pre-processing steps like exhaustive plane detection, our model learns directly from the point cloud data, thereby reducing error propagation and increasing the fidelity of the reconstruction. We experimentally validate our method on a collection of airborne LiDAR data of Zurich, Berlin and Tallinn. Our method shows good generalization to diverse urban styles.
Authors: Zheng Gao, Ioannis Patras
Abstract: Self-supervised pre-training has been proved to be effective in learning transferable representations that benefit various visual tasks. This paper asks this question: can self-supervised pre-training learn general facial representations for various facial analysis tasks? Recent efforts toward this goal are limited to treating each face image as a whole, i.e., learning consistent facial representations at the image-level, which overlooks the consistency of local facial representations (i.e., facial regions like eyes, nose, etc). In this work, we make a first attempt to propose a novel self-supervised facial representation learning framework to learn consistent global and local facial representations, Facial Region Awareness (FRA). Specifically, we explicitly enforce the consistency of facial regions by matching the local facial representations across views, which are extracted with learned heatmaps highlighting the facial regions. Inspired by the mask prediction in supervised semantic segmentation, we obtain the heatmaps via cosine similarity between the per-pixel projection of feature maps and facial mask embeddings computed from learnable positional embeddings, which leverage the attention mechanism to globally look up the facial image for facial regions. To learn such heatmaps, we formulate the learning of facial mask embeddings as a deep clustering problem by assigning the pixel features from the feature maps to them. The transfer learning results on facial classification and regression tasks show that our FRA outperforms previous pre-trained models and more importantly, using ResNet as the unified backbone for various tasks, our FRA achieves comparable or even better performance compared with SOTA methods in facial analysis tasks.
Authors: Tianxiang Chen, Zhentao Tan, Tao Gong, Qi Chu, Yue Wu, Bin Liu, Jieping Ye, Nenghai Yu
Abstract: Thanks to the development of basic models, infrared small target detection (ISTD) algorithms have made significant progress. Specifically, the structures combining convolutional networks with transformers can well extract both local and global features. At the same time, they also inherit defects from the basic model, e.g., the quadratic computational complexity of transformers, which impacts efficiency. Inspired by a recent basic model with linear complexity for long-distance modeling, called Mamba, we explore the potential of this state space model in ISTD in this paper. However, direct application is unsuitable since local features, which are critical to detecting small targets, cannot be fully exploited. Instead, we tailor a Mamba-in-Mamba (MiM-ISTD) structure for efficient ISTD. For example, we treat the local patches as "visual sentences" and further decompose them into sub-patches as "visual words" to further explore the locality. The interactions among each word in a given visual sentence will be calculated with negligible computational costs. By aggregating the word and sentence features, the representation ability of MiM-ISTD can be significantly bolstered. Experiments on NUAA-SIRST and IRSTD-1k prove the superior accuracy and efficiency of our method. Specifically, MiM-ISTD is $10 \times$ faster than the SOTA and reduces GPU memory usage by 73.4$\%$ per $2048 \times 2048$ image during inference, overcoming the computation$\&$memory constraints on performing Mamba-based understanding on high-resolution infrared images.Source code is available at https://github.com/txchen-USTC/MiM-ISTD.
Authors: Dmitry Tochilkin, David Pankratz, Zexiang Liu, Zixuan Huang, Adam Letts, Yangguang Li, Ding Liang, Christian Laforte, Varun Jampani, Yan-Pei Cao
Abstract: This technical report introduces TripoSR, a 3D reconstruction model leveraging transformer architecture for fast feed-forward 3D generation, producing 3D mesh from a single image in under 0.5 seconds. Building upon the LRM network architecture, TripoSR integrates substantial improvements in data processing, model design, and training techniques. Evaluations on public datasets show that TripoSR exhibits superior performance, both quantitatively and qualitatively, compared to other open-source alternatives. Released under the MIT license, TripoSR is intended to empower researchers, developers, and creatives with the latest advancements in 3D generative AI.
Authors: Chunwei Tian, Menghua Zheng, Bo Li, Yanning Zhang, Shichao Zhang, David Zhang
Abstract: Popular methods usually use a degradation model in a supervised way to learn a watermark removal model. However, it is true that reference images are difficult to obtain in the real world, as well as collected images by cameras suffer from noise. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a perceptive self-supervised learning network for noisy image watermark removal (PSLNet) in this paper. PSLNet depends on a parallel network to remove noise and watermarks. The upper network uses task decomposition ideas to remove noise and watermarks in sequence. The lower network utilizes the degradation model idea to simultaneously remove noise and watermarks. Specifically, mentioned paired watermark images are obtained in a self supervised way, and paired noisy images (i.e., noisy and reference images) are obtained in a supervised way. To enhance the clarity of obtained images, interacting two sub-networks and fusing obtained clean images are used to improve the effects of image watermark removal in terms of structural information and pixel enhancement. Taking into texture information account, a mixed loss uses obtained images and features to achieve a robust model of noisy image watermark removal. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed method is very effective in comparison with popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for noisy image watermark removal. Codes can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/PSLNet.
Authors: Yudi Zhang, Qi Xu, Lei Zhang
Abstract: Creating 3D textured meshes using generative artificial intelligence has garnered significant attention recently. While existing methods support text-based generative texture generation or editing on 3D meshes, they often struggle to precisely control pixels of texture images through more intuitive interaction. While 2D images can be edited generatively using drag interaction, applying this type of methods directly to 3D mesh textures still leads to issues such as the lack of local consistency among multiple views, error accumulation and long training times. To address these challenges, we propose a generative point-based 3D mesh texture editing method called DragTex. This method utilizes a diffusion model to blend locally inconsistent textures in the region near the deformed silhouette between different views, enabling locally consistent texture editing. Besides, we fine-tune a decoder to reduce reconstruction errors in the non-drag region, thereby mitigating overall error accumulation. Moreover, we train LoRA using multi-view images instead of training each view individually, which significantly shortens the training time. The experimental results show that our method effectively achieves dragging textures on 3D meshes and generates plausible textures that align with the desired intent of drag interaction.
Authors: Fangzhou Hong, Jiaxiang Tang, Ziang Cao, Min Shi, Tong Wu, Zhaoxi Chen, Tengfei Wang, Liang Pan, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu
Abstract: We present a two-stage text-to-3D generation system, namely 3DTopia, which generates high-quality general 3D assets within 5 minutes using hybrid diffusion priors. The first stage samples from a 3D diffusion prior directly learned from 3D data. Specifically, it is powered by a text-conditioned tri-plane latent diffusion model, which quickly generates coarse 3D samples for fast prototyping. The second stage utilizes 2D diffusion priors to further refine the texture of coarse 3D models from the first stage. The refinement consists of both latent and pixel space optimization for high-quality texture generation. To facilitate the training of the proposed system, we clean and caption the largest open-source 3D dataset, Objaverse, by combining the power of vision language models and large language models. Experiment results are reported qualitatively and quantitatively to show the performance of the proposed system. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/3DTopia/3DTopia
Authors: Kunyu Shi, Qi Dong, Luis Goncalves, Zhuowen Tu, Stefano Soatto
Abstract: Sequence-to-sequence vision-language models are showing promise, but their applicability is limited by their inference latency due to their autoregressive way of generating predictions. We propose a parallel decoding sequence-to-sequence vision-language model, trained with a Query-CTC loss, that marginalizes over multiple inference paths in the decoder. This allows us to model the joint distribution of tokens, rather than restricting to conditional distribution as in an autoregressive model. The resulting model, NARVL, achieves performance on-par with its state-of-the-art autoregressive counterpart, but is faster at inference time, reducing from the linear complexity associated with the sequential generation of tokens to a paradigm of constant time joint inference.
Authors: Ange Lou, Benjamin Planche, Zhongpai Gao, Yamin Li, Tianyu Luan, Hao Ding, Terrence Chen, Jack Noble, Ziyan Wu
Abstract: Addressing the intricate challenge of modeling and re-rendering dynamic scenes, most recent approaches have sought to simplify these complexities using plane-based explicit representations, overcoming the slow training time issues associated with methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and implicit representations. However, the straightforward decomposition of 4D dynamic scenes into multiple 2D plane-based representations proves insufficient for re-rendering high-fidelity scenes with complex motions. In response, we present a novel direction-aware representation (DaRe) approach that captures scene dynamics from six different directions. This learned representation undergoes an inverse dual-tree complex wavelet transformation (DTCWT) to recover plane-based information. DaReNeRF computes features for each space-time point by fusing vectors from these recovered planes. Combining DaReNeRF with a tiny MLP for color regression and leveraging volume rendering in training yield state-of-the-art performance in novel view synthesis for complex dynamic scenes. Notably, to address redundancy introduced by the six real and six imaginary direction-aware wavelet coefficients, we introduce a trainable masking approach, mitigating storage issues without significant performance decline. Moreover, DaReNeRF maintains a 2x reduction in training time compared to prior art while delivering superior performance.
Authors: Maksim Kuprashevich, Grigorii Alekseenko, Irina Tolstykh
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently gained immense popularity. Powerful commercial models like ChatGPT-4V and Gemini, as well as open-source ones such as LLaVA, are essentially general-purpose models and are applied to solve a wide variety of tasks, including those in computer vision. These neural networks possess such strong general knowledge and reasoning abilities that they have proven capable of working even on tasks for which they were not specifically trained. We compared the capabilities of the most powerful MLLMs to date: ShareGPT4V, ChatGPT, LLaVA-Next in a specialized task of age and gender estimation with our state-of-the-art specialized model, MiVOLO. We also updated MiVOLO and provide details and new metrics in this article. This comparison has yielded some interesting results and insights about the strengths and weaknesses of the participating models. Furthermore, we attempted various ways to fine-tune the ShareGPT4V model for this specific task, aiming to achieve state-of-the-art results in this particular challenge. Although such a model would not be practical in production, as it is incredibly expensive compared to a specialized model like MiVOLO, it could be very useful in some tasks, like data annotation.
Authors: Yuchen Duan, Weiyun Wang, Zhe Chen, Xizhou Zhu, Lewei Lu, Tong Lu, Yu Qiao, Hongsheng Li, Jifeng Dai, Wenhai Wang
Abstract: Transformers have revolutionized computer vision and natural language processing, but their high computational complexity limits their application in high-resolution image processing and long-context analysis. This paper introduces Vision-RWKV (VRWKV), a model adapted from the RWKV model used in the NLP field with necessary modifications for vision tasks. Similar to the Vision Transformer (ViT), our model is designed to efficiently handle sparse inputs and demonstrate robust global processing capabilities, while also scaling up effectively, accommodating both large-scale parameters and extensive datasets. Its distinctive advantage lies in its reduced spatial aggregation complexity, which renders it exceptionally adept at processing high-resolution images seamlessly, eliminating the necessity for windowing operations. Our evaluations in image classification demonstrate that VRWKV matches ViT's classification performance with significantly faster speeds and lower memory usage. In dense prediction tasks, it outperforms window-based models, maintaining comparable speeds. These results highlight VRWKV's potential as a more efficient alternative for visual perception tasks. Code is released at \url{https://github.com/OpenGVLab/Vision-RWKV}.
Authors: David Wan, Jaemin Cho, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
Abstract: Highlighting particularly relevant regions of an image can improve the performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on various vision-language (VL) tasks by guiding the model to attend more closely to these regions of interest. For example, VLMs can be given a "visual prompt", where visual markers such as bounding boxes delineate key image regions. However, current VLMs that can incorporate visual guidance are either proprietary and expensive or require costly training on curated data that includes visual prompts. We introduce Contrastive Region Guidance (CRG), a training-free guidance method that enables open-source VLMs to respond to visual prompts. CRG contrasts model outputs produced with and without visual prompts, factoring out biases revealed by the model when answering without the information required to produce a correct answer (i.e., the model's prior). CRG achieves substantial improvements in a wide variety of VL tasks: When region annotations are provided, CRG increases absolute accuracy by up to 11.1% on ViP-Bench, a collection of six diverse region-based tasks such as recognition, math, and object relationship reasoning. We also show CRG's applicability to spatial reasoning, with 10% improvement on What'sUp, as well as to compositional generalization -- improving accuracy by 11.5% and 7.5% on two challenging splits from SugarCrepe -- and to image-text alignment for generated images, where we improve by up to 8.4 AUROC and 6.8 F1 points on SeeTRUE. When reference regions are absent, CRG allows us to re-rank proposed regions in referring expression comprehension and phrase grounding benchmarks like RefCOCO/+/g and Flickr30K Entities, with an average gain of 3.2% in accuracy. Our analysis explores alternative masking strategies for CRG, quantifies CRG's probability shift, and evaluates the role of region guidance strength, empirically validating CRG's design choices.
Authors: Qiushan Guo, Shalini De Mello, Hongxu Yin, Wonmin Byeon, Ka Chun Cheung, Yizhou Yu, Ping Luo, Sifei Liu
Abstract: Vision language models (VLMs) have experienced rapid advancements through the integration of large language models (LLMs) with image-text pairs, yet they struggle with detailed regional visual understanding due to limited spatial awareness of the vision encoder, and the use of coarse-grained training data that lacks detailed, region-specific captions. To address this, we introduce RegionGPT (short as RGPT), a novel framework designed for complex region-level captioning and understanding. RGPT enhances the spatial awareness of regional representation with simple yet effective modifications to existing visual encoders in VLMs. We further improve performance on tasks requiring a specific output scope by integrating task-guided instruction prompts during both training and inference phases, while maintaining the model's versatility for general-purpose tasks. Additionally, we develop an automated region caption data generation pipeline, enriching the training set with detailed region-level captions. We demonstrate that a universal RGPT model can be effectively applied and significantly enhancing performance across a range of region-level tasks, including but not limited to complex region descriptions, reasoning, object classification, and referring expressions comprehension.
Authors: Xuweiyi Chen, Tian Xia, Sihan Xu
Abstract: Video Diffusion Models have been developed for video generation, usually integrating text and image conditioning to enhance control over the generated content. Despite the progress, ensuring consistency across frames remains a challenge, particularly when using text prompts as control conditions. To address this problem, we introduce UniCtrl, a novel, plug-and-play method that is universally applicable to improve the spatiotemporal consistency and motion diversity of videos generated by text-to-video models without additional training. UniCtrl ensures semantic consistency across different frames through cross-frame self-attention control, and meanwhile, enhances the motion quality and spatiotemporal consistency through motion injection and spatiotemporal synchronization. Our experimental results demonstrate UniCtrl's efficacy in enhancing various text-to-video models, confirming its effectiveness and universality.
Authors: Alireza Hosseini, Kiana Hooshanfar, Pouria Omrani, Reza Toosi, Ramin Toosi, Zahra Ebrahimian, Mohammad Ali Akhaee
Abstract: In the highly competitive area of product marketing, the visibility of brand logos on packaging plays a crucial role in shaping consumer perception, directly influencing the success of the product. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework to measure the brand logo's attention on a packaging design. The proposed method consists of three steps. The first step leverages YOLOv8 for precise logo detection across prominent datasets, FoodLogoDet-1500 and LogoDet-3K. The second step involves modeling the user's visual attention with a novel saliency prediction model tailored for the packaging context. The proposed saliency model combines the visual elements with text maps employing a transformers-based architecture to predict user attention maps. In the third step, by integrating logo detection with a saliency map generation, the framework provides a comprehensive brand attention score. The effectiveness of the proposed method is assessed module by module, ensuring a thorough evaluation of each component. Comparing logo detection and saliency map prediction with state-of-the-art models shows the superiority of the proposed methods. To investigate the robustness of the proposed brand attention score, we collected a unique dataset to examine previous psychophysical hypotheses related to brand visibility. the results show that the brand attention score is in line with all previous studies. Also, we introduced seven new hypotheses to check the impact of position, orientation, presence of person, and other visual elements on brand attention. This research marks a significant stride in the intersection of cognitive psychology, computer vision, and marketing, paving the way for advanced, consumer-centric packaging designs.
Authors: Benjamin Paulson, Joshua Goldshteyn, Sydney Balboni, John Cisler, Andrew Crisler, Natalia Bukowski, Julia Kalish, Theodore Colwell
Abstract: Computed tomography (CT) is a beneficial imaging tool for diagnostic purposes. CT scans provide detailed information concerning the internal anatomic structures of a patient, but present higher radiation dose and costs compared to X-ray imaging. In this paper, we build on previous research to convert orthogonal X-ray images into simulated CT volumes by exploring larger datasets and various model structures. Significant model variations include UNet architectures, custom connections, activation functions, loss functions, optimizers, and a novel back projection approach.
Authors: Chenwei Zhang, Wenran Lu, Chunhe Ni, Hongbo Wang, Jiang Wu
Abstract: With the large language model showing human-like logical reasoning and understanding ability, whether agents based on the large language model can simulate the interaction behavior of real users, so as to build a reliable virtual recommendation A/B test scene to help the application of recommendation research is an urgent, important and economic value problem. The combination of interaction design and machine learning can provide a more efficient and personalized user experience for products and services. This personalized service can meet the specific needs of users and improve user satisfaction and loyalty. Second, the interactive system can understand the user's views and needs for the product by providing a good user interface and interactive experience, and then use machine learning algorithms to improve and optimize the product. This iterative optimization process can continuously improve the quality and performance of the product to meet the changing needs of users. At the same time, designers need to consider how these algorithms and tools can be combined with interactive systems to provide a good user experience. This paper explores the potential applications of large language models, machine learning and interaction design for user interaction in recommendation systems and operating systems. By integrating these technologies, more intelligent and personalized services can be provided to meet user needs and promote continuous improvement and optimization of products. This is of great value for both recommendation research and user experience applications.
Authors: Jinxu Zhang, Yongqi Yu, Yu Zhang
Abstract: Document Visual Question Answering (DVQA) is a task that involves responding to queries based on the content of images. Existing work is limited to locating information within a single page and does not facilitate cross-page question-and-answer interaction. Furthermore, the token length limitation imposed on inputs to the model may lead to truncation of segments pertinent to the answer. In this study, we introduce a simple but effective methodology called CFRet-DVQA, which focuses on retrieval and efficient tuning to address this critical issue effectively. For that, we initially retrieve multiple segments from the document that correlate with the question at hand. Subsequently, we leverage the advanced reasoning abilities of the large language model (LLM), further augmenting its performance through instruction tuning. This approach enables the generation of answers that align with the style of the document labels. The experiments demonstrate that our methodology achieved state-of-the-art or competitive results with both single-page and multi-page documents in various fields.
Authors: Christian Raymond, Qi Chen, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang
Abstract: In this paper, we develop upon the topic of loss function learning, an emergent meta-learning paradigm that aims to learn loss functions that significantly improve the performance of the models trained under them. Specifically, we propose a new meta-learning framework for task and model-agnostic loss function learning via a hybrid search approach. The framework first uses genetic programming to find a set of symbolic loss functions. Second, the set of learned loss functions is subsequently parameterized and optimized via unrolled differentiation. The versatility and performance of the proposed framework are empirically validated on a diverse set of supervised learning tasks. Results show that the learned loss functions bring improved convergence, sample efficiency, and inference performance on tabulated, computer vision, and natural language processing problems, using a variety of task-specific neural network architectures.
Authors: Ruoqi Wang, Haitao Wang, Qiong Luo, Feng Wang, Hejun Wu
Abstract: Radio telescopes produce visibility data about celestial objects, but these data are sparse and noisy. As a result, images created on raw visibility data are of low quality. Recent studies have used deep learning models to reconstruct visibility data to get cleaner images. However, these methods rely on a substantial amount of labeled training data, which requires significant labeling effort from radio astronomers. Addressing this challenge, we propose VisRec, a model-agnostic semi-supervised learning approach to the reconstruction of visibility data. Specifically, VisRec consists of both a supervised learning module and an unsupervised learning module. In the supervised learning module, we introduce a set of data augmentation functions to produce diverse training examples. In comparison, the unsupervised learning module in VisRec augments unlabeled data and uses reconstructions from non-augmented visibility data as pseudo-labels for training. This hybrid approach allows VisRec to effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data. This way, VisRec performs well even when labeled data is scarce. Our evaluation results show that VisRec outperforms all baseline methods in reconstruction quality, robustness against common observation perturbation, and generalizability to different telescope configurations.
Authors: Jianyu Zhang, L\'eon Bottou
Abstract: It is impossible today to pretend that the practice of machine learning is compatible with the idea that training and testing data follow the same distribution. Several authors have recently used ensemble techniques to show how scenarios involving multiple data distributions are best served by representations that are both richer than those obtained by regularizing for the best in-distribution performance, and richer than those obtained under the influence of the implicit sparsity bias of common stochastic gradient procedures. This contribution investigates the use of very high dropout rates instead of ensembles to obtain such rich representations. Although training a deep network from scratch using such dropout rates is virtually impossible, fine-tuning a large pre-trained model under such conditions is not only possible but also achieves out-of-distribution performances that exceed those of both ensembles and weight averaging methods such as model soups. This result has practical significance because the importance of the fine-tuning scenario has considerably grown in recent years. This result also provides interesting insights on the nature of rich representations and on the intrinsically linear nature of fine-tuning a large network using a comparatively small dataset.
Authors: Junlin Song, Antoine Richard, Miguel Olivares-Mendez
Abstract: In robotics, motion capture systems have been widely used to measure the accuracy of localization algorithms. Moreover, this infrastructure can also be used for other computer vision tasks, such as the evaluation of Visual (-Inertial) SLAM dynamic initialization, multi-object tracking, or automatic annotation. Yet, to work optimally, these functionalities require having accurate and reliable spatial-temporal calibration parameters between the camera and the global pose sensor. In this study, we provide two novel solutions to estimate these calibration parameters. Firstly, we design an offline target-based method with high accuracy and consistency. Spatial-temporal parameters, camera intrinsic, and trajectory are optimized simultaneously. Then, we propose an online target-less method, eliminating the need for a calibration target and enabling the estimation of time-varying spatial-temporal parameters. Additionally, we perform detailed observability analysis for the target-less method. Our theoretical findings regarding observability are validated by simulation experiments and provide explainable guidelines for calibration. Finally, the accuracy and consistency of two proposed methods are evaluated with hand-held real-world datasets where traditional hand-eye calibration method do not work.
Authors: Noriaki Hirose, Dhruv Shah, Kyle Stachowicz, Ajay Sridhar, Sergey Levine
Abstract: Autonomous self-improving robots that interact and improve with experience are key to the real-world deployment of robotic systems. In this paper, we propose an online learning method, SELFI, that leverages online robot experience to rapidly fine-tune pre-trained control policies efficiently. SELFI applies online model-free reinforcement learning on top of offline model-based learning to bring out the best parts of both learning paradigms. Specifically, SELFI stabilizes the online learning process by incorporating the same model-based learning objective from offline pre-training into the Q-values learned with online model-free reinforcement learning. We evaluate SELFI in multiple real-world environments and report improvements in terms of collision avoidance, as well as more socially compliant behavior, measured by a human user study. SELFI enables us to quickly learn useful robotic behaviors with less human interventions such as pre-emptive behavior for the pedestrians, collision avoidance for small and transparent objects, and avoiding travel on uneven floor surfaces. We provide supplementary videos to demonstrate the performance of our fine-tuned policy on our project page.
Authors: Jianan Fan, Dongnan Liu, Hang Chang, Heng Huang, Mei Chen, Weidong Cai
Abstract: Machine learning holds tremendous promise for transforming the fundamental practice of scientific discovery by virtue of its data-driven nature. With the ever-increasing stream of research data collection, it would be appealing to autonomously explore patterns and insights from observational data for discovering novel classes of phenotypes and concepts. However, in the biomedical domain, there are several challenges inherently presented in the cumulated data which hamper the progress of novel class discovery. The non-i.i.d. data distribution accompanied by the severe imbalance among different groups of classes essentially leads to ambiguous and biased semantic representations. In this work, we present a geometry-constrained probabilistic modeling treatment to resolve the identified issues. First, we propose to parameterize the approximated posterior of instance embedding as a marginal von MisesFisher distribution to account for the interference of distributional latent bias. Then, we incorporate a suite of critical geometric properties to impose proper constraints on the layout of constructed embedding space, which in turn minimizes the uncontrollable risk for unknown class learning and structuring. Furthermore, a spectral graph-theoretic method is devised to estimate the number of potential novel classes. It inherits two intriguing merits compared to existent approaches, namely high computational efficiency and flexibility for taxonomy-adaptive estimation. Extensive experiments across various biomedical scenarios substantiate the effectiveness and general applicability of our method.
Authors: Sindhu Hegde, Rudrabha Mukhopadhyay, C. V. Jawahar, Vinay Namboodiri
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to address the task of synthesizing speech from silent videos of any in-the-wild speaker solely based on lip movements. The traditional approach of directly generating speech from lip videos faces the challenge of not being able to learn a robust language model from speech alone, resulting in unsatisfactory outcomes. To overcome this issue, we propose incorporating noisy text supervision using a state-of-the-art lip-to-text network that instills language information into our model. The noisy text is generated using a pre-trained lip-to-text model, enabling our approach to work without text annotations during inference. We design a visual text-to-speech network that utilizes the visual stream to generate accurate speech, which is in-sync with the silent input video. We perform extensive experiments and ablation studies, demonstrating our approach's superiority over the current state-of-the-art methods on various benchmark datasets. Further, we demonstrate an essential practical application of our method in assistive technology by generating speech for an ALS patient who has lost the voice but can make mouth movements. Our demo video, code, and additional details can be found at \url{http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/ms-l2s-itw}.
URLs: http://cvit.iiit.ac.in/research/projects/cvit-projects/ms-l2s-itw
Authors: Yeongmin Kim, Byeonghu Na, Minsang Park, JoonHo Jang, Dongjun Kim, Wanmo Kang, Il-Chul Moon
Abstract: With significant advancements in diffusion models, addressing the potential risks of dataset bias becomes increasingly important. Since generated outputs directly suffer from dataset bias, mitigating latent bias becomes a key factor in improving sample quality and proportion. This paper proposes time-dependent importance reweighting to mitigate the bias for the diffusion models. We demonstrate that the time-dependent density ratio becomes more precise than previous approaches, thereby minimizing error propagation in generative learning. While directly applying it to score-matching is intractable, we discover that using the time-dependent density ratio both for reweighting and score correction can lead to a tractable form of the objective function to regenerate the unbiased data density. Furthermore, we theoretically establish a connection with traditional score-matching, and we demonstrate its convergence to an unbiased distribution. The experimental evidence supports the usefulness of the proposed method, which outperforms baselines including time-independent importance reweighting on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, FFHQ, and CelebA with various bias settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/alsdudrla10/TIW-DSM.
Authors: Moran Yanuka, Morris Alper, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Raja Giryes
Abstract: Web-scale training on paired text-image data is becoming increasingly central to multimodal learning, but is challenged by the highly noisy nature of datasets in the wild. Standard data filtering approaches succeed in removing mismatched text-image pairs, but permit semantically related but highly abstract or subjective text. These approaches lack the fine-grained ability to isolate the most concrete samples that provide the strongest signal for learning in a noisy dataset. In this work, we propose a new metric, image caption concreteness, that evaluates caption text without an image reference to measure its concreteness and relevancy for use in multimodal learning. Our approach leverages strong foundation models for measuring visual-semantic information loss in multimodal representations. We demonstrate that this strongly correlates with human evaluation of concreteness in both single-word and sentence-level texts. Moreover, we show that curation using ICC complements existing approaches: It succeeds in selecting the highest quality samples from multimodal web-scale datasets to allow for efficient training in resource-constrained settings.
Authors: Neta Shaul, Uriel Singer, Ricky T. Q. Chen, Matthew Le, Ali Thabet, Albert Pumarola, Yaron Lipman
Abstract: This paper introduces Bespoke Non-Stationary (BNS) Solvers, a solver distillation approach to improve sample efficiency of Diffusion and Flow models. BNS solvers are based on a family of non-stationary solvers that provably subsumes existing numerical ODE solvers and consequently demonstrate considerable improvement in sample approximation (PSNR) over these baselines. Compared to model distillation, BNS solvers benefit from a tiny parameter space ($<$200 parameters), fast optimization (two orders of magnitude faster), maintain diversity of samples, and in contrast to previous solver distillation approaches nearly close the gap from standard distillation methods such as Progressive Distillation in the low-medium NFE regime. For example, BNS solver achieves 45 PSNR / 1.76 FID using 16 NFE in class-conditional ImageNet-64. We experimented with BNS solvers for conditional image generation, text-to-image generation, and text-2-audio generation showing significant improvement in sample approximation (PSNR) in all.
Authors: Inseop Chung, Kyomin Hwang, Jayeon Yoo, Nojun Kwak
Abstract: Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTA) is a challenging task that aims to adapt a source pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. In the CTA setting, a model does not know when the target domain changes, thus facing a drastic change in the distribution of streaming inputs during the test-time. The key challenge is to keep adapting the model to the continually changing target domains in an online manner. We find that a model shows highly biased predictions as it constantly adapts to the chaining distribution of the target data. It predicts certain classes more often than other classes, making inaccurate over-confident predictions. This paper mitigates this issue to improve performance in the CTA scenario. To alleviate the bias issue, we make class-wise exponential moving average target prototypes with reliable target samples and exploit them to cluster the target features class-wisely. Moreover, we aim to align the target distributions to the source distribution by anchoring the target feature to its corresponding source prototype. With extensive experiments, our proposed method achieves noteworthy performance gain when applied on top of existing CTA methods without substantial adaptation time overhead.
Authors: Rui Yang, Shunpu Zhang
Abstract: Precision in identifying and differentiating micro and macro blood vessels in the retina is crucial for the diagnosis of retinal diseases, although it poses a significant challenge. Current autoencoding-based segmentation approaches encounter limitations as they are constrained by the encoder and undergo a reduction in resolution during the encoding stage. The inability to recover lost information in the decoding phase further impedes these approaches. Consequently, their capacity to extract the retinal microvascular structure is restricted. To address this issue, we introduce Swin-Res-Net, a specialized module designed to enhance the precision of retinal vessel segmentation. Swin-Res-Net utilizes the Swin transformer which uses shifted windows with displacement for partitioning, to reduce network complexity and accelerate model convergence. Additionally, the model incorporates interactive fusion with a functional module in the Res2Net architecture. The Res2Net leverages multi-scale techniques to enlarge the receptive field of the convolutional kernel, enabling the extraction of additional semantic information from the image. This combination creates a new module that enhances the localization and separation of micro vessels in the retina. To improve the efficiency of processing vascular information, we've added a module to eliminate redundant information between the encoding and decoding steps. Our proposed architecture produces outstanding results, either meeting or surpassing those of other published models. The AUC reflects significant enhancements, achieving values of 0.9956, 0.9931, and 0.9946 in pixel-wise segmentation of retinal vessels across three widely utilized datasets: CHASE-DB1, DRIVE, and STARE, respectively. Moreover, Swin-Res-Net outperforms alternative architectures, demonstrating superior performance in both IOU and F1 measure metrics.
Authors: Daniel Duberg, Qingwen Zhang, MingKai Jia, Patric Jensfelt
Abstract: The dynamic nature of the real world is one of the main challenges in robotics. The first step in dealing with it is to detect which parts of the world are dynamic. A typical benchmark task is to create a map that contains only the static part of the world to support, for example, localization and planning. Current solutions are often applied in post-processing, where parameter tuning allows the user to adjust the setting for a specific dataset. In this paper, we propose DUFOMap, a novel dynamic awareness mapping framework designed for efficient online processing. Despite having the same parameter settings for all scenarios, it performs better or is on par with state-of-the-art methods. Ray casting is utilized to identify and classify fully observed empty regions. Since these regions have been observed empty, it follows that anything inside them at another time must be dynamic. Evaluation is carried out in various scenarios, including outdoor environments in KITTI and Argoverse 2, open areas on the KTH campus, and with different sensor types. DUFOMap outperforms the state of the art in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. The source code, benchmarks, and links to the datasets utilized are provided. See https://kin-zhang.github.io/dufomap for more details.
Authors: Sam Dauncey, Chris Holmes, Christopher Williams, Fabian Falck
Abstract: Likelihood-based deep generative models such as score-based diffusion models and variational autoencoders are state-of-the-art machine learning models approximating high-dimensional distributions of data such as images, text, or audio. One of many downstream tasks they can be naturally applied to is out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. However, seminal work by Nalisnick et al. which we reproduce showed that deep generative models consistently infer higher log-likelihoods for OOD data than data they were trained on, marking an open problem. In this work, we analyse using the gradient of a data point with respect to the parameters of the deep generative model for OOD detection, based on the simple intuition that OOD data should have larger gradient norms than training data. We formalise measuring the size of the gradient as approximating the Fisher information metric. We show that the Fisher information matrix (FIM) has large absolute diagonal values, motivating the use of chi-square distributed, layer-wise gradient norms as features. We combine these features to make a simple, model-agnostic and hyperparameter-free method for OOD detection which estimates the joint density of the layer-wise gradient norms for a given data point. We find that these layer-wise gradient norms are weakly correlated, rendering their combined usage informative, and prove that the layer-wise gradient norms satisfy the principle of (data representation) invariance. Our empirical results indicate that this method outperforms the Typicality test for most deep generative models and image dataset pairings.
Authors: Jiao Ding, Jie Chang, Renrui Han, Li Yang
Abstract: Accurate segmentation of COVID-19 CT images is crucial for reducing the severity and mortality rates associated with COVID-19 infections. In response to blurred boundaries and high variability characteristic of lesion areas in COVID-19 CT images, we introduce CDSE-UNet: a novel UNet-based segmentation model that integrates Canny operator edge detection and a dual-path SENet feature fusion mechanism. This model enhances the standard UNet architecture by employing the Canny operator for edge detection in sample images, paralleling this with a similar network structure for semantic feature extraction. A key innovation is the Double SENet Feature Fusion Block, applied across corresponding network layers to effectively combine features from both image paths. Moreover, we have developed a Multiscale Convolution approach, replacing the standard Convolution in UNet, to adapt to the varied lesion sizes and shapes. This addition not only aids in accurately classifying lesion edge pixels but also significantly improves channel differentiation and expands the capacity of the model. Our evaluations on public datasets demonstrate CDSE-UNet's superior performance over other leading models, particularly in segmenting large and small lesion areas, accurately delineating lesion edges, and effectively suppressing noise
Authors: Boyang Wang, Fengyu Yang, Xihang Yu, Chao Zhang, Hanbin Zhao
Abstract: While real-world anime super-resolution (SR) has gained increasing attention in the SR community, existing methods still adopt techniques from the photorealistic domain. In this paper, we analyze the anime production workflow and rethink how to use characteristics of it for the sake of the real-world anime SR. First, we argue that video networks and datasets are not necessary for anime SR due to the repetition use of hand-drawing frames. Instead, we propose an anime image collection pipeline by choosing the least compressed and the most informative frames from the video sources. Based on this pipeline, we introduce the Anime Production-oriented Image (API) dataset. In addition, we identify two anime-specific challenges of distorted and faint hand-drawn lines and unwanted color artifacts. We address the first issue by introducing a prediction-oriented compression module in the image degradation model and a pseudo-ground truth preparation with enhanced hand-drawn lines. In addition, we introduce the balanced twin perceptual loss combining both anime and photorealistic high-level features to mitigate unwanted color artifacts and increase visual clarity. We evaluate our method through extensive experiments on the public benchmark, showing our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by a large margin.
Authors: Marvin Li, Sitan Chen
Abstract: We develop theory to understand an intriguing property of diffusion models for image generation that we term critical windows. Empirically, it has been observed that there are narrow time intervals in sampling during which particular features of the final image emerge, e.g. the image class or background color (Ho et al., 2020b; Georgiev et al., 2023; Raya & Ambrogioni, 2023; Sclocchi et al., 2024; Biroli et al., 2024). While this is advantageous for interpretability as it implies one can localize properties of the generation to a small segment of the trajectory, it seems at odds with the continuous nature of the diffusion. We propose a formal framework for studying these windows and show that for data coming from a mixture of strongly log-concave densities, these windows can be provably bounded in terms of certain measures of inter- and intra-group separation. We also instantiate these bounds for concrete examples like well-conditioned Gaussian mixtures. Finally, we use our bounds to give a rigorous interpretation of diffusion models as hierarchical samplers that progressively "decide" output features over a discrete sequence of times. We validate our bounds with synthetic experiments. Additionally, preliminary experiments on Stable Diffusion suggest critical windows may serve as a useful tool for diagnosing fairness and privacy violations in real-world diffusion models.
Authors: Mehran Hosseini, Peyman Hosseini
Abstract: We introduce three new attention mechanisms that outperform standard multi-head attention in terms of efficiency and learning capabilities, thereby improving the performance and broader deployability of Transformer models. Our first contribution is Optimised Attention, which performs similarly to standard attention, but has 3/4 as many parameters and one matrix multiplication fewer per head. Next, we introduce Efficient Attention, which performs on par with standard attention with only 1/2 as many parameters as many parameters and two matrix multiplications fewer per head and is up to twice as fast as standard attention. Lastly, we introduce Super Attention, which surpasses standard attention by a significant margin in both vision and natural language processing tasks while having fewer parameters and matrix multiplications. In addition to providing rigorous mathematical comparisons, we evaluate the presented attention mechanisms on MNIST, CIFAR100, IMDB Movie Reviews, and Amazon Reviews datasets.
Authors: Cong Geng, Tian Han, Peng-Tao Jiang, Hao Zhang, Jinwei Chen, S{\o}ren Hauberg, Bo Li
Abstract: Generative models have shown strong generation ability while efficient likelihood estimation is less explored. Energy-based models~(EBMs) define a flexible energy function to parameterize unnormalized densities efficiently but are notorious for being difficult to train. Adversarial EBMs introduce a generator to form a minimax training game to avoid expensive MCMC sampling used in traditional EBMs, but a noticeable gap between adversarial EBMs and other strong generative models still exists. Inspired by diffusion-based models, we embedded EBMs into each denoising step to split a long-generated process into several smaller steps. Besides, we employ a symmetric Jeffrey divergence and introduce a variational posterior distribution for the generator's training to address the main challenges that exist in adversarial EBMs. Our experiments show significant improvement in generation compared to existing adversarial EBMs, while also providing a useful energy function for efficient density estimation.
Authors: Shulei Ni, Yisheng Qiu, Yunchun Chen, Zihao Song, Hao Chen, Xuejian Jiang, Huaxi Chen
Abstract: In the imaging process of an astronomical telescope, the deconvolution of its beam or Point Spread Function (PSF) is a crucial task. However, deconvolution presents a classical and challenging inverse computation problem. In scenarios where the beam or PSF is complex or inaccurately measured, such as in interferometric arrays and certain radio telescopes, the resultant blurry images are often challenging to interpret visually or analyze using traditional physical detection methods. We argue that traditional methods frequently lack specific prior knowledge, thereby leading to suboptimal performance. To address this issue and achieve image deconvolution and reconstruction, we propose an unsupervised network architecture that incorporates prior physical information. The network adopts an encoder-decoder structure while leveraging the telescope's PSF as prior knowledge. During network training, we introduced accelerated Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) convolution to enable efficient processing of high-resolution input images and PSFs. We explored various classic regression networks, including autoencoder (AE) and U-Net, and conducted a comprehensive performance evaluation through comparative analysis.
Authors: Xiongri Shen, Zhenxi Song, Zhiguo Zhang
Abstract: Existing explanation results of functional connectivity (FC) are normally generated by using classification result labels and correlation analysis methods such as Pearson's correlation or gradient backward. However, the diagnostic model is still trained on the black box model and might lack the attention of FCs in important regions during the training. To enhance the explainability and improve diagnostic performance, providing prior knowledge on neurodegeneration-related regions when healthy subjects (HC) develop into subject cognitive decline (SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) for the diagnostic model is a key step. To better determine the neurodegeneration-related regions, we employ counterfactual reasoning to generate the target label FC matrices derived from source label FC and then subtract source label FC with target label FC. The counterfactual reasoning architecture is constructed by adaptive forward and backward transformer generative adversarial network (AFBT GAN), which is specifically designed by network property in FC and inverse patch embedding operation in the transformer. The specific design can make the model focus more on the current network correlation and employ the global insight of the transformer to reconstruct FC, which both help the generation of high-quality target label FC. The validation experiments are conducted on both clinical and public datasets, the generated attention map are both vital correlated to cognitive function and the diagnostic performance is also significant. The code is available at https://github.com/SXR3015/AFBT-GAN.
Authors: Fei Zhu, Shijie Ma, Zhen Cheng, Xu-Yao Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Cheng-Lin Liu
Abstract: Machine learning has achieved remarkable success in many applications. However, existing studies are largely based on the closed-world assumption, which assumes that the environment is stationary, and the model is fixed once deployed. In many real-world applications, this fundamental and rather naive assumption may not hold because an open environment is complex, dynamic, and full of unknowns. In such cases, rejecting unknowns, discovering novelties, and then incrementally learning them, could enable models to be safe and evolve continually as biological systems do. This paper provides a holistic view of open-world machine learning by investigating unknown rejection, novel class discovery, and class-incremental learning in a unified paradigm. The challenges, principles, and limitations of current methodologies are discussed in detail. Finally, we discuss several potential directions for future research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the emerging open-world machine learning paradigm, to help researchers build more powerful AI systems in their respective fields, and to promote the development of artificial general intelligence.
Authors: Wangjie Zhong, Leimin Tian, Duy Tho Le, Hamid Rezatofighi
Abstract: Social robots often rely on visual perception to understand their users and the environment. Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for computer vision have demonstrated great potentials for applying deep-learning models to enhance a social robot's visual perception. However, the high computational demands of deep-learning methods, as opposed to the more resource-efficient shallow-learning models, bring up important questions regarding their effects on real-world interaction and user experience. It is unclear how will the objective interaction performance and subjective user experience be influenced when a social robot adopts a deep-learning based visual perception model. We employed state-of-the-art human perception and tracking models to improve the visual perception function of the Pepper robot and conducted a controlled lab study and an in-the-wild human-robot interaction study to evaluate this novel perception function for following a specific user with other people present in the scene.
Authors: Lizhou Fan, Wenyue Hua, Xiang Li, Kaijie Zhu, Mingyu Jin, Lingyao Li, Haoyang Ling, Jinkui Chi, Jindong Wang, Xin Ma, Yongfeng Zhang
Abstract: Understanding the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is an important area of research. In this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark, NPHardEval4V, aimed at addressing the existing gaps in evaluating the pure reasoning abilities of MLLMs. Our benchmark aims to provide a venue to disentangle the effect of various factors such as image recognition and instruction following, from the overall performance of the models, allowing us to focus solely on evaluating their reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal significant discrepancies in reasoning abilities across different models and highlight the relatively weak performance of MLLMs compared to LLMs in terms of reasoning. We also investigate the impact of different prompting styles, including visual, text, and combined vision and text prompts, on the reasoning abilities of MLLMs, demonstrating the different impacts of multimodal inputs in model performance. Unlike traditional benchmarks, which primarily focus on static evaluations, our benchmark will update on a monthly basis to prevent overfitting and ensure a more accurate evaluation of the models. We believe that this benchmark can aid understand and guide the further development of reasoning abilities in MLLMs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lizhouf/NPHardEval4V
Authors: Mengfei Ji, Zaid Al-Ars
Abstract: As machine learning (ML) algorithms get deployed in an ever-increasing number of applications, these algorithms need to achieve better trade-offs between high accuracy, high throughput and low latency. This paper introduces NASH, a novel approach that applies neural architecture search to machine learning hardware. Using NASH, hardware designs can achieve not only high throughput and low latency but also superior accuracy performance. We present four versions of the NASH strategy in this paper, all of which show higher accuracy than the original models. The strategy can be applied to various convolutional neural networks, selecting specific model operations among many to guide the training process toward higher accuracy. Experimental results show that applying NASH on ResNet18 or ResNet34 achieves a top 1 accuracy increase of up to 3.1% and a top 5 accuracy increase of up to 2.2% compared to the non-NASH version when tested on the ImageNet data set. We also integrated this approach into the FINN hardware model synthesis tool to automate the application of our approach and the generation of the hardware model. Results show that using FINN can achieve a maximum throughput of 324.5 fps. In addition, NASH models can also result in a better trade-off between accuracy and hardware resource utilization. The accuracy-hardware (HW) Pareto curve shows that the models with the four NASH versions represent the best trade-offs achieving the highest accuracy for a given HW utilization. The code for our implementation is open-source and publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/MFJI/NASH.
Authors: Jaehoon Jang, Inha Lee, Minje Kim, Kyungdon Joo
Abstract: Indoor scenes we are living in are visually homogenous or textureless, while they inherently have structural forms and provide enough structural priors for 3D scene reconstruction. Motivated by this fact, we propose a structure-aware online signed distance fields (SDF) reconstruction framework in indoor scenes, especially under the Atlanta world (AW) assumption. Thus, we dub this incremental SDF reconstruction for AW as AiSDF. Within the online framework, we infer the underlying Atlanta structure of a given scene and then estimate planar surfel regions supporting the Atlanta structure. This Atlanta-aware surfel representation provides an explicit planar map for a given scene. In addition, based on these Atlanta planar surfel regions, we adaptively sample and constrain the structural regularity in the SDF reconstruction, which enables us to improve the reconstruction quality by maintaining a high-level structure while enhancing the details of a given scene. We evaluate the proposed AiSDF on the ScanNet and ReplicaCAD datasets, where we demonstrate that the proposed framework is capable of reconstructing fine details of objects implicitly, as well as structures explicitly in room-scale scenes.
Authors: Benjamin MissaouiHeudiasyc, Maxime NoizetHeudiasyc, Philippe XuHeudiasyc
Abstract: For autonomous navigation, high definition maps are a widely used source of information. Pole-like features encoded in HD maps such as traffic signs, traffic lights or street lights can be used as landmarks for localization. For this purpose, they first need to be detected by the vehicle using its embedded sensors. While geometric models can be used to process 3D point clouds retrieved by lidar sensors, modern image-based approaches rely on deep neural network and therefore heavily depend on annotated training data. In this paper, a 2D HD map is used to automatically annotate pole-like features in images. In the absence of height information, the map features are represented as pole bases at the ground level. We show how an additional lidar sensor can be used to filter out occluded features and refine the ground projection. We also demonstrate how an object detector can be trained to detect a pole base. To evaluate our methodology, it is first validated with data manually annotated from semantic segmentation and then compared to our own automatically generated annotated data recorded in the city of Compi{\`e}gne, France. Erratum: In the original version [1], an error occurred in the accuracy evaluation of the different models studied and the evaluation method applied on the detection results was not clearly defined. In this revision, we offer a rectification to this segment, presenting updated results, especially in terms of Mean Absolute Errors (MAE).
Authors: Akhila Krishna, Ravi Kant Gupta, Pranav Jeevan, Amit Sethi
Abstract: Gene selection plays a pivotal role in oncology research for improving outcome prediction accuracy and facilitating cost-effective genomic profiling for cancer patients. This paper introduces two gene selection strategies for deep learning-based survival prediction models. The first strategy uses a sparsity-inducing method while the second one uses importance based gene selection for identifying relevant genes. Our overall approach leverages the power of deep learning to model complex biological data structures, while sparsity-inducing methods ensure the selection process focuses on the most informative genes, minimizing noise and redundancy. Through comprehensive experimentation on diverse genomic and survival datasets, we demonstrate that our strategy not only identifies gene signatures with high predictive power for survival outcomes but can also streamlines the process for low-cost genomic profiling. The implications of this research are profound as it offers a scalable and effective tool for advancing personalized medicine and targeted cancer therapies. By pushing the boundaries of gene selection methodologies, our work contributes significantly to the ongoing efforts in cancer genomics, promising improved diagnostic and prognostic capabilities in clinical settings.
Authors: Maytus Piriyajitakonkij, Mingfei Sun, Mengmi Zhang, Wei Pan
Abstract: Robot navigation under visual corruption presents a formidable challenge. To address this, we propose a Test-time Adaptation (TTA) method, named as TTA-Nav, for point-goal navigation under visual corruptions. Our "plug-and-play" method incorporates a top-down decoder to a pre-trained navigation model. Firstly, the pre-trained navigation model gets a corrupted image and extracts features. Secondly, the top-down decoder produces the reconstruction given the high-level features extracted by the pre-trained model. Then, it feeds the reconstruction of a corrupted image back to the pre-trained model. Finally, the pre-trained model does forward pass again to output action. Despite being trained solely on clean images, the top-down decoder can reconstruct cleaner images from corrupted ones without the need for gradient-based adaptation. The pre-trained navigation model with our top-down decoder significantly enhances navigation performance across almost all visual corruptions in our benchmarks. Our method improves the success rate of point-goal navigation from the state-of-the-art result of 46% to 94% on the most severe corruption. This suggests its potential for broader application in robotic visual navigation.
Authors: Rui Louren\c{c}o, Lucas Thomaz, Eduardo A. B. Silva, Sergio M. M. Faria
Abstract: Light field cameras and multi-camera arrays have emerged as promising solutions for accurately estimating depth by passively capturing light information. This is possible because the 3D information of a scene is embedded in the 4D light field geometry. Commonly, depth estimation methods extract this information relying on gradient information, heuristic-based optimisation models, or learning-based approaches. This paper focuses mainly on explicitly understanding and exploiting 4D geometrical cues for light field depth estimation. Thus, a novel method is proposed, based on a non-learning-based optimisation approach for depth estimation that explicitly considers surface normal accuracy and occlusion regions by utilising a fully explainable 4D geometric model of the light field. The 4D model performs depth/disparity estimation by determining the orientations and analysing the intersections of key 2D planes in 4D space, which are the images of 3D-space points in the 4D light field. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms both learning-based and non-learning-based state-of-the-art methods in terms of surface normal angle accuracy, achieving a Median Angle Error on planar surfaces, on average, 26.3\% lower than the state-of-the-art, and still being competitive with state-of-the-art methods in terms of Mean Squared Error $\vc{\times}$ 100 and Badpix 0.07.
Authors: Yue Yang, Yuqi lin, Hong Liu, Wenqi Shao, Runjian Chen, Hailong Shang, Yu Wang, Yu Qiao, Kaipeng Zhang, Ping Luo
Abstract: Recent text-to-image (T2I) models have had great success, and many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate their performance and safety. However, they only consider explicit prompts while neglecting implicit prompts (hint at a target without explicitly mentioning it). These prompts may get rid of safety constraints and pose potential threats to the applications of these models. This position paper highlights the current state of T2I models toward implicit prompts. We present a benchmark named ImplicitBench and conduct an investigation on the performance and impacts of implicit prompts with popular T2I models. Specifically, we design and collect more than 2,000 implicit prompts of three aspects: General Symbols, Celebrity Privacy, and Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) Issues, and evaluate six well-known T2I models' capabilities under these implicit prompts. Experiment results show that (1) T2I models are able to accurately create various target symbols indicated by implicit prompts; (2) Implicit prompts bring potential risks of privacy leakage for T2I models. (3) Constraints of NSFW in most of the evaluated T2I models can be bypassed with implicit prompts. We call for increased attention to the potential and risks of implicit prompts in the T2I community and further investigation into the capabilities and impacts of implicit prompts, advocating for a balanced approach that harnesses their benefits while mitigating their risks.
Authors: Carlo Biffi, Giulio Antonelli, Sebastian Bernhofer, Cesare Hassan, Daizen Hirata, Mineo Iwatate, Andreas Maieron, Pietro Salvagnini, Andrea Cherubini
Abstract: Detection and diagnosis of colon polyps are key to preventing colorectal cancer. Recent evidence suggests that AI-based computer-aided detection (CADe) and computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) systems can enhance endoscopists' performance and boost colonoscopy effectiveness. However, most available public datasets primarily consist of still images or video clips, often at a down-sampled resolution, and do not accurately represent real-world colonoscopy procedures. We introduce the REAL-Colon (Real-world multi-center Endoscopy Annotated video Library) dataset: a compilation of 2.7M native video frames from sixty full-resolution, real-world colonoscopy recordings across multiple centers. The dataset contains 350k bounding-box annotations, each created under the supervision of expert gastroenterologists. Comprehensive patient clinical data, colonoscopy acquisition information, and polyp histopathological information are also included in each video. With its unprecedented size, quality, and heterogeneity, the REAL-Colon dataset is a unique resource for researchers and developers aiming to advance AI research in colonoscopy. Its openness and transparency facilitate rigorous and reproducible research, fostering the development and benchmarking of more accurate and reliable colonoscopy-related algorithms and models.
Authors: Dimitrios Kollias, Anastasios Arsenos, Stefanos Kollias
Abstract: The paper presents the DEF-AI-MIA COV19D Competition, which is organized in the framework of the 'Domain adaptation, Explainability, Fairness in AI for Medical Image Analysis (DEF-AI-MIA)' Workshop of the 2024 Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Conference. The Competition is the 4th in the series, following the first three Competitions held in the framework of ICCV 2021, ECCV 2022 and ICASSP 2023 International Conferences respectively. It includes two Challenges on: i) Covid-19 Detection and ii) Covid-19 Domain Adaptation. The Competition use data from COV19-CT-DB database, which is described in the paper and includes a large number of chest CT scan series. Each chest CT scan series consists of a sequence of 2-D CT slices, the number of which is between 50 and 700. Training, validation and test datasets have been extracted from COV19-CT-DB and provided to the participants in both Challenges. The paper presents the baseline models used in the Challenges and the performance which was obtained respectively.
Authors: Darryl Hannan, Steven C. Nesbit, Ximing Wen, Glen Smith, Qiao Zhang, Alberto Goffi, Vincent Chan, Michael J. Morris, John C. Hunninghake, Nicholas E. Villalobos, Edward Kim, Rosina O. Weber, Christopher J. MacLellan
Abstract: Detecting elevated intracranial pressure (ICP) is crucial in diagnosing and managing various neurological conditions. These fluctuations in pressure are transmitted to the optic nerve sheath (ONS), resulting in changes to its diameter, which can then be detected using ultrasound imaging devices. However, interpreting sonographic images of the ONS can be challenging. In this work, we propose two systems that actively monitor the ONS diameter throughout an ultrasound video and make a final prediction as to whether ICP is elevated. To construct our systems, we leverage subject matter expert (SME) guidance, structuring our processing pipeline according to their collection procedure, while also prioritizing interpretability and computational efficiency. We conduct a number of experiments, demonstrating that our proposed systems are able to outperform various baselines. One of our SMEs then manually validates our top system's performance, lending further credibility to our approach while demonstrating its potential utility in a clinical setting.
Authors: Damien Teney, Armand Nicolicioiu, Valentin Hartmann, Ehsan Abbasnejad
Abstract: Our understanding of the generalization capabilities of neural networks (NNs) is still incomplete. Prevailing explanations are based on implicit biases of gradient descent (GD) but they cannot account for the capabilities of models from gradient-free methods nor the simplicity bias recently observed in untrained networks. This paper seeks other sources of generalization in NNs. Findings. To understand the inductive biases provided by architectures independently from GD, we examine untrained, random-weight networks. Even simple MLPs show strong inductive biases: uniform sampling in weight space yields a very biased distribution of functions in terms of complexity. But unlike common wisdom, NNs do not have an inherent "simplicity bias". This property depends on components such as ReLUs, residual connections, and layer normalizations. Alternative architectures can be built with a bias for any level of complexity. Transformers also inherit all these properties from their building blocks. Implications. We provide a fresh explanation for the success of deep learning independent from gradient-based training. It points at promising avenues for controlling the solutions implemented by trained models.
Authors: P. Bilha Githinji, Xi Yuan, Zhenglin Chen, Ijaz Gul, Dingqi Shang, Wen Liang, Jianming Deng, Dan Zeng, Dongmei yu, Chenggang Yan, Peiwu Qin
Abstract: Realizing sufficient separability between the distributions of healthy and pathological samples is a critical obstacle for pathology detection convolutional models. Moreover, these models exhibit a bias for contrast-based images, with diminished performance on texture-based medical images. This study introduces the notion of a population-level context for pathology detection and employs a graph theoretic approach to model and incorporate it into the latent code of an autoencoder via a refinement module we term PopuSense. PopuSense seeks to capture additional intra-group variations inherent in biomedical data that a local or global context of the convolutional model might miss or smooth out. Experiments on contrast-based and texture-based images, with minimal adaptation, encounter the existing preference for intensity-based input. Nevertheless, PopuSense demonstrates improved separability in contrast-based images, presenting an additional avenue for refining representations learned by a model.
Authors: Yidong Zhao, Joao Tourais, Iain Pierce, Christian Nitsche, Thomas A. Treibel, Sebastian Weing\"artner, Artur M. Schweidtmann, Qian Tao
Abstract: Deep learning (DL)-based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance for a wide range of medical image segmentation tasks. Nevertheless, recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNNs) can be miscalibrated and overconfident, leading to "silent failures" that are risky} for clinical applications. Bayesian statistics provide an intuitive approach to DL failure detection, based on posterior probability estimation. However, Bayesian DL, and in particular the posterior estimation, is intractable for large medical image segmentation DNNs. To tackle this challenge, we propose a Bayesian learning framework by Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC), tempered by cold posterior (CP) to accommodate medical data augmentation, named HMC-CP. For HMC computation, we further propose a cyclical annealing strategy, which captures both local and global geometries of the posterior distribution, enabling highly efficient Bayesian DNN training with the same computational budget requirements as training a single DNN. The resulting Bayesian DNN outputs an ensemble segmentation along with the segmentation uncertainty. We evaluate the proposed HMC-CP extensively on cardiac magnetic resonance image (MRI) segmentation, using in-domain steady-state free precession (SSFP) cine images as well as out-of-domain datasets of quantitative $T_1$ and $T_2$ mapping.
Authors: Zijian Huang, Wenda Chu, Linyi Li, Chejian Xu, Bo Li
Abstract: Multi-sensor fusion systems (MSFs) play a vital role as the perception module in modern autonomous vehicles (AVs). Therefore, ensuring their robustness against common and realistic adversarial semantic transformations, such as rotation and shifting in the physical world, is crucial for the safety of AVs. While empirical evidence suggests that MSFs exhibit improved robustness compared to single-modal models, they are still vulnerable to adversarial semantic transformations. Despite the proposal of empirical defenses, several works show that these defenses can be attacked again by new adaptive attacks. So far, there is no certified defense proposed for MSFs. In this work, we propose the first robustness certification framework COMMIT certify robustness of multi-sensor fusion systems against semantic attacks. In particular, we propose a practical anisotropic noise mechanism that leverages randomized smoothing with multi-modal data and performs a grid-based splitting method to characterize complex semantic transformations. We also propose efficient algorithms to compute the certification in terms of object detection accuracy and IoU for large-scale MSF models. Empirically, we evaluate the efficacy of COMMIT in different settings and provide a comprehensive benchmark of certified robustness for different MSF models using the CARLA simulation platform. We show that the certification for MSF models is at most 48.39% higher than that of single-modal models, which validates the advantages of MSF models. We believe our certification framework and benchmark will contribute an important step towards certifiably robust AVs in practice.
Authors: Tammuz Dubnov, Vishal Thengane
Abstract: Efficient continual learning techniques have been a topic of significant research over the last few years. A fundamental problem with such learning is severe degradation of performance on previously learned tasks, known also as catastrophic forgetting. This paper introduces a novel method to reduce catastrophic forgetting in the context of incremental class learning called Gradient Correlation Subspace Learning (GCSL). The method detects a subspace of the weights that is least affected by previous tasks and projects the weights to train for the new task into said subspace. The method can be applied to one or more layers of a given network architectures and the size of the subspace used can be altered from layer to layer and task to task. Code will be available at \href{https://github.com/vgthengane/GCSL}{https://github.com/vgthengane/GCSL}
URLs: https://github.com/vgthengane/GCSL, https://github.com/vgthengane/GCSL
Authors: Toru Lin, Zhao-Heng Yin, Haozhi Qi, Pieter Abbeel, Jitendra Malik
Abstract: Manipulating objects with two multi-fingered hands has been a long-standing challenge in robotics, attributed to the contact-rich nature of many manipulation tasks and the complexity inherent in coordinating a high-dimensional bimanual system. In this work, we consider the problem of twisting lids of various bottle-like objects with two hands, and demonstrate that policies trained in simulation using deep reinforcement learning can be effectively transferred to the real world. With novel engineering insights into physical modeling, real-time perception, and reward design, the policy demonstrates generalization capabilities across a diverse set of unseen objects, showcasing dynamic and dexterous behaviors. Our findings serve as compelling evidence that deep reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer remains a promising approach for addressing manipulation problems of unprecedented complexity.
Authors: Xin Yang, Wenlong Shi, Haoran Dou, Jikuan Qian, Yi Wang, Wufeng Xue, Shengli Li, Dong Ni, Pheng-Ann Heng
Abstract: The 3D ultrasound (US) entrance inspires a multitude of automated prenatal examinations. However, studies about the structuralized description of the whole fetus in 3D US are still rare. In this paper, we propose to estimate the 3D pose of fetus in US volumes to facilitate its quantitative analyses in global and local scales. Given the great challenges in 3D US, including the high volume dimension, poor image quality, symmetric ambiguity in anatomical structures and large variations of fetal pose, our contribution is three-fold. (i) This is the first work about 3D pose estimation of fetus in the literature. We aim to extract the skeleton of whole fetus and assign different segments/joints with correct torso/limb labels. (ii) We propose a self-supervised learning (SSL) framework to finetune the deep network to form visually plausible pose predictions. Specifically, we leverage the landmark-based registration to effectively encode case-adaptive anatomical priors and generate evolving label proxy for supervision. (iii) To enable our 3D network perceive better contextual cues with higher resolution input under limited computing resource, we further adopt the gradient check-pointing (GCP) strategy to save GPU memory and improve the prediction. Extensively validated on a large 3D US dataset, our method tackles varying fetal poses and achieves promising results. 3D pose estimation of fetus has potentials in serving as a map to provide navigation for many advanced studies.
Authors: Li Niu, Wenyan Cong, Liu Liu, Yan Hong, Bo Zhang, Jing Liang, Liqing Zhang
Abstract: As a common image editing operation, image composition aims to combine the foreground from one image and another background image, resulting in a composite image. However, there are many issues that could make the composite images unrealistic. These issues can be summarized as the inconsistency between foreground and background, which includes appearance inconsistency (e.g., incompatible illumination), geometry inconsistency (e.g., unreasonable size), and semantic inconsistency (e.g., mismatched semantic context). Image composition task could be decomposed into multiple sub-tasks, in which each sub-task targets at one or more issues. Specifically, object placement aims to find reasonable scale, location, and shape for the foreground. Image blending aims to address the unnatural boundary between foreground and background. Image harmonization aims to adjust the illumination statistics of foreground. Shadow generation aims to generate plausible shadow for the foreground. These sub-tasks can be executed sequentially or parallelly to acquire realistic composite images. To the best of our knowledge, there is no previous survey on image composition. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive survey over the sub-tasks and combinatorial task of image composition. For each one, we summarize the existing methods, available datasets, and common evaluation metrics. Datasets and codes for image composition are summarized at https://github.com/bcmi/Awesome-Image-Composition. We have also contributed the first image composition toolbox: libcom https://github.com/bcmi/libcom, which assembles 10+ image composition related functions (e.g., image blending, image harmonization, object placement, shadow generation, generative composition). The ultimate goal of this toolbox is solving all the problems related to image composition with simple `import libcom'.
URLs: https://github.com/bcmi/Awesome-Image-Composition., https://github.com/bcmi/libcom,
Authors: Eleonora Lopez, Eleonora Grassucci, Martina Valleriani, Danilo Comminiello
Abstract: Traditionally, deep learning methods for breast cancer classification perform a single-view analysis. However, radiologists simultaneously analyze all four views that compose a mammography exam, owing to the correlations contained in mammography views, which present crucial information for identifying tumors. In light of this, some studies have started to propose multi-view methods. Nevertheless, in such existing architectures, mammogram views are processed as independent images by separate convolutional branches, thus losing correlations among them. To overcome such limitations, in this paper, we propose a methodological approach for multi-view breast cancer classification based on parameterized hypercomplex neural networks. Thanks to hypercomplex algebra properties, our networks are able to model, and thus leverage, existing correlations between the different views that comprise a mammogram, thus mimicking the reading process performed by clinicians. This happens because hypercomplex networks capture both global properties, as standard neural models, as well as local relations, i.e., inter-view correlations, which real-valued networks fail at modeling. We define architectures designed to process two-view exams, namely PHResNets, and four-view exams, i.e., PHYSEnet and PHYBOnet. Through an extensive experimental evaluation conducted with publicly available datasets, we demonstrate that our proposed models clearly outperform real-valued counterparts and state-of-the-art methods, proving that breast cancer classification benefits from the proposed multi-view architectures. We also assess the method generalizability beyond mammogram analysis by considering different benchmarks, as well as a finer-scaled task such as segmentation. Full code and pretrained models for complete reproducibility of our experiments are freely available at https://github.com/ispamm/PHBreast.
Authors: Pedro C. Neto, Tiago Gon\c{c}alves, Jo\~ao Ribeiro Pinto, Wilson Silva, Ana F. Sequeira, Arun Ross, Jaime S. Cardoso
Abstract: As two sides of the same coin, causality and explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) were initially proposed and developed with different goals. However, the latter can only be complete when seen through the lens of the causality framework. As such, we propose a novel causality-inspired framework for xAI that creates an environment for the development of xAI approaches. To show its applicability, biometrics was used as case study. For this, we have analysed 81 research papers on a myriad of biometric modalities and different tasks. We have categorised each of these methods according to our novel xAI Ladder and discussed the future directions of the field.
Authors: Jun Wang, Abhir Bhalerao, Terry Yin, Simon See, Yulan He
Abstract: Radiology report generation (RRG) has gained increasing research attention because of its huge potential to mitigate medical resource shortages and aid the process of disease decision making by radiologists. Recent advancements in RRG are largely driven by improving a model's capabilities in encoding single-modal feature representations, while few studies explicitly explore the cross-modal alignment between image regions and words. Radiologists typically focus first on abnormal image regions before composing the corresponding text descriptions, thus cross-modal alignment is of great importance to learn a RRG model which is aware of abnormalities in the image. Motivated by this, we propose a Class Activation Map guided Attention Network (CAMANet) which explicitly promotes crossmodal alignment by employing aggregated class activation maps to supervise cross-modal attention learning, and simultaneously enrich the discriminative information. CAMANet contains three complementary modules: a Visual Discriminative Map Generation module to generate the importance/contribution of each visual token; Visual Discriminative Map Assisted Encoder to learn the discriminative representation and enrich the discriminative information; and a Visual Textual Attention Consistency module to ensure the attention consistency between the visual and textual tokens, to achieve the cross-modal alignment. Experimental results demonstrate that CAMANet outperforms previous SOTA methods on two commonly used RRG benchmarks.
Authors: Nimrod Shabtay, Eli Schwartz, Raja Giryes
Abstract: In Deep Image Prior (DIP), a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is fitted to map a latent space to a degraded (e.g. noisy) image but in the process learns to reconstruct the clean image. This phenomenon is attributed to CNN's internal image-prior. We revisit the DIP framework, examining it from the perspective of a neural implicit representation. Motivated by this perspective, we replace the random or learned latent with Fourier-Features (Positional Encoding). We show that thanks to the Fourier features properties, we can replace the convolution layers with simple pixel-level MLPs. We name this scheme ``Positional Encoding Image Prior" (PIP) and exhibit that it performs very similarly to DIP on various image-reconstruction tasks with much less parameters required. Additionally, we demonstrate that PIP can be easily extended to videos, where 3D-DIP struggles and suffers from instability. Code and additional examples for all tasks, including videos, are available on the project page https://nimrodshabtay.github.io/PIP/
Authors: Rim Rekik, Mathieu Marsot, Anne-H\'el\`ene Olivier, Jean-S\'ebastien Franco, Stefanie Wuhrer
Abstract: We present a data-driven framework for unsupervised human motion retargeting that animates a target subject with the motion of a source subject. Our method is correspondence-free, requiring neither spatial correspondences between the source and target shapes nor temporal correspondences between different frames of the source motion. This allows to animate a target shape with arbitrary sequences of humans in motion, possibly captured using 4D acquisition platforms or consumer devices. Our method unifies the advantages of two existing lines of work, namely skeletal motion retargeting, which leverages long-term temporal context, and surface-based retargeting, which preserves surface details, by combining a geometry-aware deformation model with a skeleton-aware motion transfer approach. This allows to take into account long-term temporal context while accounting for surface details. During inference, our method runs online, i.e. input can be processed in a serial way, and retargeting is performed in a single forward pass per frame. Experiments show that including long-term temporal context during training improves the method's accuracy for skeletal motion and detail preservation. Furthermore, our method generalizes to unobserved motions and body shapes. We demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on two test datasets and that it can be used to animate human models with the output of a multi-view acquisition platform. Code is available at \url{https://gitlab.inria.fr/rrekikdi/human-motion-retargeting2023}.
URLs: https://gitlab.inria.fr/rrekikdi/human-motion-retargeting2023
Authors: Nikita Morozov, Denis Rakitin, Oleg Desheulin, Dmitry Vetrov, Kirill Struminsky
Abstract: In view synthesis, a neural radiance field approximates underlying density and radiance fields based on a sparse set of scene pictures. To generate a pixel of a novel view, it marches a ray through the pixel and computes a weighted sum of radiance emitted from a dense set of ray points. This rendering algorithm is fully differentiable and facilitates gradient-based optimization of the fields. However, in practice, only a tiny opaque portion of the ray contributes most of the radiance to the sum. We propose a simple end-to-end differentiable sampling algorithm based on inverse transform sampling. It generates samples according to the probability distribution induced by the density field and picks non-transparent points on the ray. We utilize the algorithm in two ways. First, we propose a novel rendering approach based on Monte Carlo estimates. This approach allows for evaluating and optimizing a neural radiance field with just a few radiance field calls per ray. Second, we use the sampling algorithm to modify the hierarchical scheme proposed in the original NeRF work. We show that our modification improves reconstruction quality of hierarchical models, at the same time simplifying the training procedure by removing the need for auxiliary proposal network losses.
Authors: Huanran Chen, Yichi Zhang, Yinpeng Dong, Xiao Yang, Hang Su, Jun Zhu
Abstract: It is widely recognized that deep learning models lack robustness to adversarial examples. An intriguing property of adversarial examples is that they can transfer across different models, which enables black-box attacks without any knowledge of the victim model. An effective strategy to improve the transferability is attacking an ensemble of models. However, previous works simply average the outputs of different models, lacking an in-depth analysis on how and why model ensemble methods can strongly improve the transferability. In this paper, we rethink the ensemble in adversarial attacks and define the common weakness of model ensemble with two properties: 1) the flatness of loss landscape; and 2) the closeness to the local optimum of each model. We empirically and theoretically show that both properties are strongly correlated with the transferability and propose a Common Weakness Attack (CWA) to generate more transferable adversarial examples by promoting these two properties. Experimental results on both image classification and object detection tasks validate the effectiveness of our approach to improving the adversarial transferability, especially when attacking adversarially trained models. We also successfully apply our method to attack a black-box large vision-language model -- Google's Bard, showing the practical effectiveness. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/AdversarialAttacks}.
Authors: Zixiang Zhou, Dongqiangzi Ye, Weijia Chen, Yufei Xie, Yu Wang, Panqu Wang, Hassan Foroosh
Abstract: There is a recent trend in the LiDAR perception field towards unifying multiple tasks in a single strong network with improved performance, as opposed to using separate networks for each task. In this paper, we introduce a new LiDAR multi-task learning paradigm based on the transformer. The proposed LiDARFormer utilizes cross-space global contextual feature information and exploits cross-task synergy to boost the performance of LiDAR perception tasks across multiple large-scale datasets and benchmarks. Our novel transformer-based framework includes a cross-space transformer module that learns attentive features between the 2D dense Bird's Eye View (BEV) and 3D sparse voxel feature maps. Additionally, we propose a transformer decoder for the segmentation task to dynamically adjust the learned features by leveraging the categorical feature representations. Furthermore, we combine the segmentation and detection features in a shared transformer decoder with cross-task attention layers to enhance and integrate the object-level and class-level features. LiDARFormer is evaluated on the large-scale nuScenes and the Waymo Open datasets for both 3D detection and semantic segmentation tasks, and it outperforms all previously published methods on both tasks. Notably, LiDARFormer achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 76.4% L2 mAPH and 74.3% NDS on the challenging Waymo and nuScenes detection benchmarks for a single model LiDAR-only method.
Authors: Ukcheol Shin, Kyunghyun Lee, In So Kweon, Jean Oh
Abstract: RGB-thermal semantic segmentation is one potential solution to achieve reliable semantic scene understanding in adverse weather and lighting conditions. However, the previous studies mostly focus on designing a multi-modal fusion module without consideration of the nature of multi-modality inputs. Therefore, the networks easily become over-reliant on a single modality, making it difficult to learn complementary and meaningful representations for each modality. This paper proposes 1) a complementary random masking strategy of RGB-T images and 2) self-distillation loss between clean and masked input modalities. The proposed masking strategy prevents over-reliance on a single modality. It also improves the accuracy and robustness of the neural network by forcing the network to segment and classify objects even when one modality is partially available. Also, the proposed self-distillation loss encourages the network to extract complementary and meaningful representations from a single modality or complementary masked modalities. Based on the proposed method, we achieve state-of-the-art performance over three RGB-T semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/UkcheolShin/CRM_RGBTSeg.
Authors: Yuhao Huang, Sanping Zhou, Junjie Zhang, Jinpeng Dong, Nanning Zheng
Abstract: Efficient representation of point clouds is fundamental for LiDAR-based 3D object detection. While recent grid-based detectors often encode point clouds into either voxels or pillars, the distinctions between these approaches remain underexplored. In this paper, we quantify the differences between the current encoding paradigms and highlight the limited vertical learning within. To tackle these limitations, we introduce a hybrid Voxel-Pillar Fusion network (VPF), which synergistically combines the unique strengths of both voxels and pillars. Specifically, we first develop a sparse voxel-pillar encoder that encodes point clouds into voxel and pillar features through 3D and 2D sparse convolutions respectively, and then introduce the Sparse Fusion Layer (SFL), facilitating bidirectional interaction between sparse voxel and pillar features. Our efficient, fully sparse method can be seamlessly integrated into both dense and sparse detectors. Leveraging this powerful yet straightforward framework, VPF delivers competitive performance, achieving real-time inference speeds on the nuScenes and Waymo Open Dataset. The code will be available.
Authors: Zhiyuan Cheng, Hongjun Choi, James Liang, Shiwei Feng, Guanhong Tao, Dongfang Liu, Michael Zuzak, Xiangyu Zhang
Abstract: Multi-sensor fusion (MSF) is widely used in autonomous vehicles (AVs) for perception, particularly for 3D object detection with camera and LiDAR sensors. The purpose of fusion is to capitalize on the advantages of each modality while minimizing its weaknesses. Advanced deep neural network (DNN)-based fusion techniques have demonstrated the exceptional and industry-leading performance. Due to the redundant information in multiple modalities, MSF is also recognized as a general defence strategy against adversarial attacks. In this paper, we attack fusion models from the camera modality that is considered to be of lesser importance in fusion but is more affordable for attackers. We argue that the weakest link of fusion models depends on their most vulnerable modality, and propose an attack framework that targets advanced camera-LiDAR fusion-based 3D object detection models through camera-only adversarial attacks. Our approach employs a two-stage optimization-based strategy that first thoroughly evaluates vulnerable image areas under adversarial attacks, and then applies dedicated attack strategies for different fusion models to generate deployable patches. The evaluations with six advanced camera-LiDAR fusion models and one camera-only model indicate that our attacks successfully compromise all of them. Our approach can either decrease the mean average precision (mAP) of detection performance from 0.824 to 0.353, or degrade the detection score of a target object from 0.728 to 0.156, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed attack framework. Code is available.
Authors: Zhicheng Wang, Liwen Xiao, Zhiguo Cao, Hao Lu
Abstract: Class-agnostic counting (CAC) aims to count objects of interest from a query image given few exemplars. This task is typically addressed by extracting the features of query image and exemplars respectively and then matching their feature similarity, leading to an extract-then-match paradigm. In this work, we show that CAC can be simplified in an extract-and-match manner, particularly using a vision transformer (ViT) where feature extraction and similarity matching are executed simultaneously within the self-attention. We reveal the rationale of such simplification from a decoupled view of the self-attention. The resulting model, termed CACViT, simplifies the CAC pipeline into a single pretrained plain ViT. Further, to compensate the loss of the scale and the order-of-magnitude information due to resizing and normalization in plain ViT, we present two effective strategies for scale and magnitude embedding. Extensive experiments on the FSC147 and the CARPK datasets show that CACViT significantly outperforms state-of-the art CAC approaches in both effectiveness (23.60% error reduction) and generalization, which suggests CACViT provides a concise and strong baseline for CAC. Code will be available.
Authors: Yuxuan Zhou, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jun-Yan He, Bin Luo, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie
Abstract: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) have long defined the state-of-the-art in skeleton-based action recognition, leveraging their ability to unravel the complex dynamics of human joint topology through the graph's adjacency matrix. However, an inherent flaw has come to light in these cutting-edge models: they tend to optimize the adjacency matrix jointly with the model weights. This process, while seemingly efficient, causes a gradual decay of bone connectivity data, culminating in a model indifferent to the very topology it sought to map. As a remedy, we propose a threefold strategy: (1) We forge an innovative pathway that encodes bone connectivity by harnessing the power of graph distances. This approach preserves the vital topological nuances often lost in conventional GCNs. (2) We highlight an oft-overlooked feature - the temporal mean of a skeletal sequence, which, despite its modest guise, carries highly action-specific information. (3) Our investigation revealed strong variations in joint-to-joint relationships across different actions. This finding exposes the limitations of a single adjacency matrix in capturing the variations of relational configurations emblematic of human movement, which we remedy by proposing an efficient refinement to Graph Convolutions (GC) - the BlockGC. This evolution slashes parameters by a substantial margin (above 40%), while elevating performance beyond original GCNs. Our full model, the BlockGCN, establishes new standards in skeleton-based action recognition for small model sizes. Its high accuracy, notably on the large-scale NTU RGB+D 120 dataset, stand as compelling proof of the efficacy of BlockGCN.
Authors: Chenjie Cao, Yunuo Cai, Qiaole Dong, Yikai Wang, Yanwei Fu
Abstract: This paper introduces LeftRefill, an innovative approach to efficiently harness large Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models for reference-guided image synthesis. As the name implies, LeftRefill horizontally stitches reference and target views together as a whole input. The reference image occupies the left side, while the target canvas is positioned on the right. Then, LeftRefill paints the right-side target canvas based on the left-side reference and specific task instructions. Such a task formulation shares some similarities with contextual inpainting, akin to the actions of a human painter. This novel formulation efficiently learns both structural and textured correspondence between reference and target without other image encoders or adapters. We inject task and view information through cross-attention modules in T2I models, and further exhibit multi-view reference ability via the re-arranged self-attention modules. These enable LeftRefill to perform consistent generation as a generalized model without requiring test-time fine-tuning or model modifications. Thus, LeftRefill can be seen as a simple yet unified framework to address reference-guided synthesis. As an exemplar, we leverage LeftRefill to address two different challenges: reference-guided inpainting and novel view synthesis, based on the pre-trained StableDiffusion. Codes and models are released at https://github.com/ewrfcas/LeftRefill.
Authors: Long Lian, Boyi Li, Adam Yala, Trevor Darrell
Abstract: Recent advancements in text-to-image diffusion models have yielded impressive results in generating realistic and diverse images. However, these models still struggle with complex prompts, such as those that involve numeracy and spatial reasoning. This work proposes to enhance prompt understanding capabilities in diffusion models. Our method leverages a pretrained large language model (LLM) for grounded generation in a novel two-stage process. In the first stage, the LLM generates a scene layout that comprises captioned bounding boxes from a given prompt describing the desired image. In the second stage, a novel controller guides an off-the-shelf diffusion model for layout-grounded image generation. Both stages utilize existing pretrained models without additional model parameter optimization. Our method significantly outperforms the base diffusion model and several strong baselines in accurately generating images according to prompts that require various capabilities, doubling the generation accuracy across four tasks on average. Furthermore, our method enables instruction-based multi-round scene specification and can handle prompts in languages not supported by the underlying diffusion model. We anticipate that our method will unleash users' creativity by accurately following more complex prompts. Our code, demo, and benchmark are available at: https://llm-grounded-diffusion.github.io
Authors: Beomsu Kim, Gihyun Kwon, Kwanyoung Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Abstract: Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models which simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generate data from noise. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress, they have limitations in unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation tasks due to the Gaussian prior assumption. Schr\"{o}dinger Bridge (SB), which learns an SDE to translate between two arbitrary distributions, have risen as an attractive solution to this problem. Yet, to our best knowledge, none of SB models so far have been successful at unpaired translation between high-resolution images. In this work, we propose Unpaired Neural Schr\"{o}dinger Bridge (UNSB), which expresses the SB problem as a sequence of adversarial learning problems. This allows us to incorporate advanced discriminators and regularization to learn a SB between unpaired data. We show that UNSB is scalable and successfully solves various unpaired I2I translation tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/cyclomon/UNSB}
Authors: Chang Liu, Haoning Wu, Yujie Zhong, Xiaoyun Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie
Abstract: Generative models have recently exhibited exceptional capabilities in text-to-image generation, but still struggle to generate image sequences coherently. In this work, we focus on a novel, yet challenging task of generating a coherent image sequence based on a given storyline, denoted as open-ended visual storytelling. We make the following three contributions: (i) to fulfill the task of visual storytelling, we propose a learning-based auto-regressive image generation model, termed as StoryGen, with a novel vision-language context module, that enables to generate the current frame by conditioning on the corresponding text prompt and preceding image-caption pairs; (ii) to address the data shortage of visual storytelling, we collect paired image-text sequences by sourcing from online videos and open-source E-books, establishing processing pipeline for constructing a large-scale dataset with diverse characters, storylines, and artistic styles, named StorySalon; (iii) Quantitative experiments and human evaluations have validated the superiority of our StoryGen, where we show StoryGen can generalize to unseen characters without any optimization, and generate image sequences with coherent content and consistent character. Code, dataset, and models are available at https://haoningwu3639.github.io/StoryGen_Webpage/
Authors: Yihan Wen, Xianping Ma, Xiaokang Zhang, Man-On Pun
Abstract: Deep learning (DL)-based methods have recently shown great promise in bitemporal change detection (CD). Existing discriminative methods based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers rely on discriminative representation learning for change recognition while struggling with exploring local and long-range contextual dependencies. As a result, it is still challenging to obtain fine-grained and robust CD maps in diverse ground scenes. To cope with this challenge, this work proposes a generative change detection model called GCD-DDPM to directly generate CD maps by exploiting the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM), instead of classifying each pixel into changed or unchanged categories. Furthermore, the Difference Conditional Encoder (DCE), is designed to guide the generation of CD maps by exploiting multi-level difference features. Leveraging the variational inference (VI) procedure, GCD-DDPM can adaptively re-calibrate the CD results through an iterative inference process, while accurately distinguishing subtle and irregular changes in diverse scenes. Finally, a Noise Suppression-based Semantic Enhancer (NSSE) is specifically designed to mitigate noise in the current step's change-aware feature representations from the CD Encoder. This refinement, serving as an attention map, can guide subsequent iterations while enhancing CD accuracy. Extensive experiments on four high-resolution CD datasets confirm the superior performance of the proposed GCD-DDPM. The code for this work will be available at https://github.com/udrs/GCD.
Authors: Chen Cai, Suchen Wang, Kim-hui Yap, Yi Wang
Abstract: Weakly-supervised grounded image captioning (WSGIC) aims to generate the caption and ground (localize) predicted object words in the input image without using bounding box supervision. Recent two-stage solutions mostly apply a bottom-up pipeline: (1) encode the input image into multiple region features using an object detector; (2) leverage region features for captioning and grounding. However, utilizing independent proposals produced by object detectors tends to make the subsequent grounded captioner overfitted in finding the correct object words, overlooking the relation between objects, and selecting incompatible proposal regions for grounding. To address these issues, we propose a one-stage weakly-supervised grounded captioner that directly takes the RGB image as input to perform captioning and grounding at the top-down image level. Specifically, we encode the image into visual token representations and propose a Recurrent Grounding Module (RGM) in the decoder to obtain precise Visual Language Attention Maps (VLAMs), which recognize the spatial locations of the objects. In addition, we explicitly inject a relation module into our one-stage framework to encourage relation understanding through multi-label classification. This relation semantics served as contextual information facilitating the prediction of relation and object words in the caption. We observe that the relation semantic not only assists the grounded captioner in generating a more accurate caption but also improves the grounding performance. We validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on two challenging datasets (Flick30k Entities captioning and MSCOCO captioning). The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art grounding performance.
Authors: Zhenghang Yuan, Lichao Mou, Yuansheng Hua, Xiao Xiang Zhu
Abstract: Localizing desired objects from remote sensing images is of great use in practical applications. Referring image segmentation, which aims at segmenting out the objects to which a given expression refers, has been extensively studied in natural images. However, almost no research attention is given to this task of remote sensing imagery. Considering its potential for real-world applications, in this paper, we introduce referring remote sensing image segmentation (RRSIS) to fill in this gap and make some insightful explorations. Specifically, we create a new dataset, called RefSegRS, for this task, enabling us to evaluate different methods. Afterward, we benchmark referring image segmentation methods of natural images on the RefSegRS dataset and find that these models show limited efficacy in detecting small and scattered objects. To alleviate this issue, we propose a language-guided cross-scale enhancement (LGCE) module that utilizes linguistic features to adaptively enhance multi-scale visual features by integrating both deep and shallow features. The proposed dataset, benchmarking results, and the designed LGCE module provide insights into the design of a better RRSIS model. We will make our dataset and code publicly available.
Authors: Hadi Alzayer, Kevin Zhang, Brandon Feng, Christopher Metzler, Jia-Bin Huang
Abstract: The reflective nature of the human eye is an underappreciated source of information about what the world around us looks like. By imaging the eyes of a moving person, we can collect multiple views of a scene outside the camera's direct line of sight through the reflections in the eyes. In this paper, we reconstruct a 3D scene beyond the camera's line of sight using portrait images containing eye reflections. This task is challenging due to 1) the difficulty of accurately estimating eye poses and 2) the entangled appearance of the eye iris and the scene reflections. Our method jointly refines the cornea poses, the radiance field depicting the scene, and the observer's eye iris texture. We further propose a simple regularization prior on the iris texture pattern to improve reconstruction quality. Through various experiments on synthetic and real-world captures featuring people with varied eye colors, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to recover 3D scenes using eye reflections.
Authors: Dongqiangzi Ye, Yufei Xie, Weijia Chen, Zixiang Zhou, Lingting Ge, Hassan Foroosh
Abstract: Due to the difficulty of acquiring large-scale 3D human keypoint annotation, previous methods for 3D human pose estimation (HPE) have often relied on 2D image features and sequential 2D annotations. Furthermore, the training of these networks typically assumes the prediction of a human bounding box and the accurate alignment of 3D point clouds with 2D images, making direct application in real-world scenarios challenging. In this paper, we present the 1st framework for end-to-end 3D human pose estimation, named LPFormer, which uses only LiDAR as its input along with its corresponding 3D annotations. LPFormer consists of two stages: firstly, it identifies the human bounding box and extracts multi-level feature representations, and secondly, it utilizes a transformer-based network to predict human keypoints based on these features. Our method demonstrates that 3D HPE can be seamlessly integrated into a strong LiDAR perception network and benefit from the features extracted by the network. Experimental results on the Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance, and improvements even compared to previous multi-modal solutions.
Authors: Dongshen Han, Seungkyu Lee, Chaoning Zhang, Heechan Yoon, Hyukmin Kwon, Hyun-Cheol Kim, Hyon-Gon Choo
Abstract: Glass surfaces of transparent objects and mirrors are not able to be uniquely and explicitly characterized by their visual appearances because they contain the visual appearance of other reflected or transmitted surfaces as well. Detecting glass regions from a single-color image is a challenging task. Recent deep-learning approaches have paid attention to the description of glass surface boundary where the transition of visual appearances between glass and non-glass surfaces are observed. In this work, we analytically investigate how glass surface boundary helps to characterize glass objects. Inspired by prior semantic segmentation approaches with challenging image types such as X-ray or CT scans, we propose separated internal-external boundary attention modules that individually learn and selectively integrate visual characteristics of the inside and outside region of glass surface from a single color image. Our proposed method is evaluated on six public benchmarks comparing with state-of-the-art methods showing promising results.
Authors: Ivano Donadi, Alberto Pretto
Abstract: Object pose estimation is a fundamental computer vision task exploited in several robotics and augmented reality applications. Many established approaches rely on predicting 2D-3D keypoint correspondences using RANSAC (Random sample consensus) and estimating the object pose using the PnP (Perspective-n-Point) algorithm. Being RANSAC non-differentiable, correspondences cannot be directly learned in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we address the stereo image-based object pose estimation problem by i) introducing a differentiable RANSAC layer into a well-known monocular pose estimation network; ii) exploiting an uncertainty-driven multi-view PnP solver which can fuse information from multiple views. We evaluate our approach on a challenging public stereo object pose estimation dataset and a custom-built dataset we call Transparent Tableware Dataset (TTD), yielding state-of-the-art results against other recent approaches. Furthermore, in our ablation study, we show that the differentiable RANSAC layer plays a significant role in the accuracy of the proposed method. We release with this paper the code of our method and the TTD dataset.
Authors: Martina Paccini, Giacomo Paschina, Stefano De Beni, Andrei Stefanov, Velizar Kolev, Giuseppe Patan\`e
Abstract: This paper presents an innovative automatic fusion imaging system that combines 3D CT/MR images with real-time ultrasound (US) acquisition. The system eliminates the need for external physical markers and complex training, making image fusion feasible for physicians with different experience levels. The integrated system involves a portable 3D camera for patient-specific surface acquisition, an electromagnetic tracking system, and US components. The fusion algorithm comprises two main parts: skin segmentation and rigid co-registration, both integrated into the US machine. The co-registration software aligns the surface extracted from CT/MR images with patient-specific coordinates, facilitating rapid and effective fusion. Experimental testing in different settings validates the system's accuracy, computational efficiency, noise robustness, and operator independence. The co-registration error remains under the acceptable range of~$1$ cm.
Authors: Guilherme Schardong, Tiago Novello, Hallison Paz, Iurii Medvedev, Vin\'icius da Silva, Luiz Velho, Nuno Gon\c{c}alves
Abstract: Face morphing is a problem in computer graphics with numerous artistic and forensic applications. It is challenging due to variations in pose, lighting, gender, and ethnicity. This task consists of a warping for feature alignment and a blending for a seamless transition between the warped images. We propose to leverage coord-based neural networks to represent such warpings and blendings of face images. During training, we exploit the smoothness and flexibility of such networks by combining energy functionals employed in classical approaches without discretizations. Additionally, our method is time-dependent, allowing a continuous warping/blending of the images. During morphing inference, we need both direct and inverse transformations of the time-dependent warping. The first (second) is responsible for warping the target (source) image into the source (target) image. Our neural warping stores those maps in a single network dismissing the need for inverting them. The results of our experiments indicate that our method is competitive with both classical and generative models under the lens of image quality and face-morphing detectors. Aesthetically, the resulting images present a seamless blending of diverse faces not yet usual in the literature.
Authors: Henghao Zhao, Kevin Qinghong Lin, Rui Yan, Zechao Li
Abstract: Video moment retrieval and highlight detection have received attention in the current era of video content proliferation, aiming to localize moments and estimate clip relevances based on user-specific queries. Given that the video content is continuous in time, there is often a lack of clear boundaries between temporal events in a video. This boundary ambiguity makes it challenging for the model to learn text-video clip correspondences, resulting in the subpar performance of existing methods in predicting target segments. To alleviate this problem, we propose to solve the two tasks jointly from the perspective of denoising generation. Moreover, the target boundary can be localized clearly by iterative refinement from coarse to fine. Specifically, a novel framework, DiffusionVMR, is proposed to redefine the two tasks as a unified conditional denoising generation process by combining the diffusion model. During training, Gaussian noise is added to corrupt the ground truth, with noisy candidates produced as input. The model is trained to reverse this noise addition process. In the inference phase, DiffusionVMR initiates directly from Gaussian noise and progressively refines the proposals from the noise to the meaningful output. Notably, the proposed DiffusionVMR inherits the advantages of diffusion models that allow for iteratively refined results during inference, enhancing the boundary transition from coarse to fine. Furthermore, the training and inference of DiffusionVMR are decoupled. An arbitrary setting can be used in DiffusionVMR during inference without consistency with the training phase. Extensive experiments conducted on five widely-used benchmarks (i.e., QVHighlight, Charades-STA, TACoS, YouTubeHighlights and TVSum) across two tasks (moment retrieval and/or highlight detection) demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed DiffusionVMR.
Authors: Sepideh Afshar, Nachiket Deo, Akshay Bhagat, Titas Chakraborty, Yunming Shao, Balarama Raju Buddharaju, Adwait Deshpande, Henggang Cui
Abstract: Trajectory prediction plays a crucial role in the autonomous driving stack by enabling autonomous vehicles to anticipate the motion of surrounding agents. Goal-based prediction models have gained traction in recent years for addressing the multimodal nature of future trajectories. Goal-based prediction models simplify multimodal prediction by first predicting 2D goal locations of agents and then predicting trajectories conditioned on each goal. However, a single 2D goal location serves as a weak inductive bias for predicting the whole trajectory, often leading to poor map compliance, i.e., part of the trajectory going off-road or breaking traffic rules. In this paper, we improve upon goal-based prediction by proposing the Path-based prediction (PBP) approach. PBP predicts a discrete probability distribution over reference paths in the HD map using the path features and predicts trajectories in the path-relative Frenet frame. We applied the PBP trajectory decoder on top of the HiVT scene encoder and report results on the Argoverse dataset. Our experiments show that PBP achieves competitive performance on the standard trajectory prediction metrics, while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines in terms of map compliance.
Authors: Eden Belouadah, Arnaud Dapogny, Kevin Bailly
Abstract: Class-Incremental learning (CIL) refers to the ability of artificial agents to integrate new classes as they appear in a stream. It is particularly interesting in evolving environments where agents have limited access to memory and computational resources. The main challenge of incremental learning is catastrophic forgetting, the inability of neural networks to retain past knowledge when learning a new one. Unfortunately, most existing class-incremental methods for object detection are applied to two-stage algorithms such as Faster-RCNN, and rely on rehearsal memory to retain past knowledge. We argue that those are not realistic, and more effort should be dedicated to anchor-free and rehearsal-free object detection. In this context, we propose MultIOD, a class-incremental object detector based on CenterNet. Our main contributions are: (1) we propose a multihead feature pyramid and multihead detection architecture to efficiently separate class representations, (2) we employ transfer learning between classes learned initially and those learned incrementally to tackle catastrophic forgetting, and (3) we use a class-wise non-max-suppression as a post-processing technique to remove redundant boxes. Results show that our method outperforms a range of state-of-the-art methods on two Pascal VOC datasets, while reducing memory footprint by more than half.
Authors: Tengyang Chen, Jiangtao Ren
Abstract: In the domain of traffic safety and road maintenance, precise detection of road damage is crucial for ensuring safe driving and prolonging road durability. However, current methods often fall short due to limited data. Prior attempts have used Generative Adversarial Networks to generate damage with diverse shapes and manually integrate it into appropriate positions. However, the problem has not been well explored and is faced with two challenges. First, they only enrich the location and shape of damage while neglect the diversity of severity levels, and the realism still needs further improvement. Second, they require a significant amount of manual effort. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative approach. In addition to using GAN to generate damage with various shapes, we further employ texture synthesis techniques to extract road textures. These two elements are then mixed with different weights, allowing us to control the severity of the synthesized damage, which are then embedded back into the original images via Poisson blending. Our method ensures both richness of damage severity and a better alignment with the background. To save labor costs, we leverage structural similarity for automated sample selection during embedding. Each augmented data of an original image contains versions with varying severity levels. We implement a straightforward screening strategy to mitigate distribution drift. Experiments are conducted on a public road damage dataset. The proposed method not only eliminates the need for manual labor but also achieves remarkable enhancements, improving the mAP by 4.1% and the F1-score by 4.5%.
Authors: Kazuto Nakashima, Ryo Kurazume
Abstract: Generative modeling of 3D LiDAR data is an emerging task with promising applications for autonomous mobile robots, such as scalable simulation, scene manipulation, and sparse-to-dense completion of LiDAR point clouds. While existing approaches have demonstrated the feasibility of image-based LiDAR data generation using deep generative models, they still struggle with fidelity and training stability. In this work, we present R2DM, a novel generative model for LiDAR data that can generate diverse and high-fidelity 3D scene point clouds based on the image representation of range and reflectance intensity. Our method is built upon denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs), which have shown impressive results among generative model frameworks in recent years. To effectively train DDPMs in the LiDAR domain, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of data representation, loss functions, and spatial inductive biases. Leveraging our R2DM model, we also introduce a flexible LiDAR completion pipeline based on the powerful capabilities of DDPMs. We demonstrate that our method surpasses existing methods in generating tasks on the KITTI-360 and KITTI-Raw datasets, as well as in the completion task on the KITTI-360 dataset. Our project page can be found at https://kazuto1011.github.io/r2dm.
Authors: Mingjie Pan, Jiaming Liu, Renrui Zhang, Peixiang Huang, Xiaoqi Li, Bing Wang, Hongwei Xie, Li Liu, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract: 3D occupancy prediction holds significant promise in the fields of robot perception and autonomous driving, which quantifies 3D scenes into grid cells with semantic labels. Recent works mainly utilize complete occupancy labels in 3D voxel space for supervision. However, the expensive annotation process and sometimes ambiguous labels have severely constrained the usability and scalability of 3D occupancy models. To address this, we present RenderOcc, a novel paradigm for training 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels. Specifically, we extract a NeRF-style 3D volume representation from multi-view images, and employ volume rendering techniques to establish 2D renderings, thus enabling direct 3D supervision from 2D semantics and depth labels. Additionally, we introduce an Auxiliary Ray method to tackle the issue of sparse viewpoints in autonomous driving scenarios, which leverages sequential frames to construct comprehensive 2D rendering for each object. To our best knowledge, RenderOcc is the first attempt to train multi-view 3D occupancy models only using 2D labels, reducing the dependence on costly 3D occupancy annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RenderOcc achieves comparable performance to models fully supervised with 3D labels, underscoring the significance of this approach in real-world applications.
Authors: Allan Wang, Daisuke Sato, Yasser Corzo, Sonya Simkin, Abhijat Biswas, Aaron Steinfeld
Abstract: Social navigation and pedestrian behavior research has shifted towards machine learning-based methods and converged on the topic of modeling inter-pedestrian interactions and pedestrian-robot interactions. For this, large-scale datasets that contain rich information are needed. We describe a portable data collection system, coupled with a semi-autonomous labeling pipeline. As part of the pipeline, we designed a label correction web app that facilitates human verification of automated pedestrian tracking outcomes. Our system enables large-scale data collection in diverse environments and fast trajectory label production. Compared with existing pedestrian data collection methods, our system contains three components: a combination of top-down and ego-centric views, natural human behavior in the presence of a socially appropriate "robot", and human-verified labels grounded in the metric space. To the best of our knowledge, no prior data collection system has a combination of all three components. We further introduce our ever-expanding dataset from the ongoing data collection effort -- the TBD Pedestrian Dataset and show that our collected data is larger in scale, contains richer information when compared to prior datasets with human-verified labels, and supports new research opportunities.
Authors: Ziqiao Shang, Li Yu
Abstract: 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: Guanqi Zhan, Chuanxia Zheng, Weidi Xie, Andrew Zisserman
Abstract: Recent advances in generative models like Stable Diffusion enable the generation of highly photo-realistic images. Our objective in this paper is to probe the diffusion network to determine to what extent it 'understands' different properties of the 3D scene depicted in an image. To this end, we make the following contributions: (i) We introduce a protocol to evaluate whether features of an off-the-shelf diffusion model encode a number of physical 'properties' of the 3D scene, by training discriminative classifiers on the features for these properties. The probes are applied on datasets of real images with annotations for the property. (ii) We apply this protocol to properties covering scene geometry, scene material, support relations, lighting, and view dependent measures. (iii) We find that features from Stable Diffusion are good for discriminative learning of a number of properties, including scene geometry, support relations, shadows and depth, but less performant for occlusion and material. (iv) We also apply the probes to other networks trained at large-scale, including DINO, CLIP and VQGAN, and find that DINOv2 has a similar performance to Stable Diffusion, while outperforming DINOv1, CLIP and VQGAN.
Authors: Tim Lebailly, Thomas Stegm\"uller, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Jean-Philippe Thiran, Tinne Tuytelaars
Abstract: Leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval for self-supervised representation learning has proven beneficial with object-centric images. However, this approach faces limitations when applied to scene-centric datasets, where multiple objects within an image are only implicitly captured in the global representation. Such global bootstrapping can lead to undesirable entanglement of object representations. Furthermore, even object-centric datasets stand to benefit from a finer-grained bootstrapping approach. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel Cross-Image Object-Level Bootstrapping method tailored to enhance dense visual representation learning. By employing object-level nearest neighbor bootstrapping throughout the training, CrIBo emerges as a notably strong and adequate candidate for in-context learning, leveraging nearest neighbor retrieval at test time. CrIBo shows state-of-the-art performance on the latter task while being highly competitive in more standard downstream segmentation tasks. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/tileb1/CrIBo.
Authors: Jinwoo Kim, Janghyuk Choi, Jaehyun Kang, Changyeon Lee, Ho-Jin Choi, Seon Joo Kim
Abstract: The binding problem in artificial neural networks is actively explored with the goal of achieving human-level recognition skills through the comprehension of the world in terms of symbol-like entities. Especially in the field of computer vision, object-centric learning (OCL) is extensively researched to better understand complex scenes by acquiring object representations or slots. While recent studies in OCL have made strides with complex images or videos, the interpretability and interactivity over object representation remain largely uncharted, still holding promise in the field of OCL. In this paper, we introduce a novel method, Slot Attention with Image Augmentation (SlotAug), to explore the possibility of learning interpretable controllability over slots in a self-supervised manner by utilizing an image augmentation strategy. We also devise the concept of sustainability in controllable slots by introducing iterative and reversible controls over slots with two proposed submethods: Auxiliary Identity Manipulation and Slot Consistency Loss. Extensive empirical studies and theoretical validation confirm the effectiveness of our approach, offering a novel capability for interpretable and sustainable control of object representations.
Authors: Siqi Kou, Lei Gan, Dequan Wang, Chongxuan Li, Zhijie Deng
Abstract: Diffusion models have impressive image generation capability, but low-quality generations still exist, and their identification remains challenging due to the lack of a proper sample-wise metric. To address this, we propose BayesDiff, a pixel-wise uncertainty estimator for generations from diffusion models based on Bayesian inference. In particular, we derive a novel uncertainty iteration principle to characterize the uncertainty dynamics in diffusion, and leverage the last-layer Laplace approximation for efficient Bayesian inference. The estimated pixel-wise uncertainty can not only be aggregated into a sample-wise metric to filter out low-fidelity images but also aids in augmenting successful generations and rectifying artifacts in failed generations in text-to-image tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of BayesDiff and its promise for practical applications.
Authors: Dehao Yuan, Furong Huang, Cornelia Ferm\"uller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Abstract: We propose Hyper-Dimensional Function Encoding (HDFE). Given samples of a continuous object (e.g. a function), HDFE produces an explicit vector representation of the given object, invariant to the sample distribution and density. Sample distribution and density invariance enables HDFE to consistently encode continuous objects regardless of their sampling, and therefore allows neural networks to receive continuous objects as inputs for machine learning tasks, such as classification and regression. Besides, HDFE does not require any training and is proved to map the object into an organized embedding space, which facilitates the training of the downstream tasks. In addition, the encoding is decodable, which enables neural networks to regress continuous objects by regressing their encodings. Therefore, HDFE serves as an interface for processing continuous objects. We apply HDFE to function-to-function mapping, where vanilla HDFE achieves competitive performance as the state-of-the-art algorithm. We apply HDFE to point cloud surface normal estimation, where a simple replacement from PointNet to HDFE leads to immediate 12% and 15% error reductions in two benchmarks. In addition, by integrating HDFE into the PointNet-based SOTA network, we improve the SOTA baseline by 2.5% and 1.7% in the same benchmarks.
Authors: Xuhai Chen, Jiangning Zhang, Guanzhong Tian, Haoyang He, Wuhao Zhang, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Yong Liu
Abstract: This paper considers zero-shot Anomaly Detection (AD), performing AD without reference images of the test objects. We propose a framework called CLIP-AD to leverage the zero-shot capabilities of the large vision-language model CLIP. Firstly, we reinterpret the text prompts design from a distributional perspective and propose a Representative Vector Selection (RVS) paradigm to obtain improved text features. Secondly, we note opposite predictions and irrelevant highlights in the direct computation of the anomaly maps. To address these issues, we introduce a Staged Dual-Path model (SDP) that leverages features from various levels and applies architecture and feature surgery. Lastly, delving deeply into the two phenomena, we point out that the image and text features are not aligned in the joint embedding space. Thus, we introduce a fine-tuning strategy by adding linear layers and construct an extended model SDP+, further enhancing the performance. Abundant experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, e.g., on MVTec-AD, SDP outperforms the SOTA WinCLIP by +4.2/+10.7 in segmentation metrics F1-max/PRO, while SDP+ achieves +8.3/+20.5 improvements.
Authors: Lijian Xu, Ziyu Ni, Xinglong Liu, Xiaosong Wang, Hongsheng Li, Shaoting Zhang
Abstract: The emergence of multi-modal deep learning models has made significant impacts on clinical applications in the last decade. However, the majority of models are limited to single-tasking, without considering disease diagnosis is indeed a multi-task procedure. Here, we demonstrate a unified transformer model specifically designed for multi-modal clinical tasks by incorporating customized instruction tuning. We first compose a multi-task training dataset comprising 13.4 million instruction and ground-truth pairs (with approximately one million radiographs) for the customized tuning, involving both image- and pixel-level tasks. Thus, we can unify the various vision-intensive tasks in a single training framework with homogeneous model inputs and outputs to increase clinical interpretability in one reading. Finally, we demonstrate the overall superior performance of our model compared to prior arts on various chest X-ray benchmarks across multi-tasks in both direct inference and finetuning settings. Three radiologists further evaluate the generated reports against the recorded ones, which also exhibit the enhanced explainability of our multi-task model.
Authors: Yibin Wang, Weizhong Zhang, Jianwei Zheng, Cheng Jin
Abstract: Current subject-driven image generation methods encounter significant challenges in person-centric image generation. The reason is that they learn the semantic scene and person generation by fine-tuning a common pre-trained diffusion, which involves an irreconcilable training imbalance. Precisely, to generate realistic persons, they need to sufficiently tune the pre-trained model, which inevitably causes the model to forget the rich semantic scene prior and makes scene generation over-fit to the training data. Moreover, even with sufficient fine-tuning, these methods can still not generate high-fidelity persons since joint learning of the scene and person generation also lead to quality compromise. In this paper, we propose Face-diffuser, an effective collaborative generation pipeline to eliminate the above training imbalance and quality compromise. Specifically, we first develop two specialized pre-trained diffusion models, i.e., Text-driven Diffusion Model (TDM) and Subject-augmented Diffusion Model (SDM), for scene and person generation, respectively. The sampling process is divided into three sequential stages, i.e., semantic scene construction, subject-scene fusion, and subject enhancement. The first and last stages are performed by TDM and SDM respectively. The subject-scene fusion stage, that is the collaboration achieved through a novel and highly effective mechanism, Saliency-adaptive Noise Fusion (SNF). Specifically, it is based on our key observation that there exists a robust link between classifier-free guidance responses and the saliency of generated images. In each time step, SNF leverages the unique strengths of each model and allows for the spatial blending of predicted noises from both models automatically in a saliency-aware manner. Extensive experiments confirm the impressive effectiveness and robustness of the Face-diffuser.
Authors: Siyuan Liang, Mingli Zhu, Aishan Liu, Baoyuan Wu, Xiaochun Cao, Ee-Chien Chang
Abstract: Studying backdoor attacks is valuable for model copyright protection and enhancing defenses. While existing backdoor attacks have successfully infected multimodal contrastive learning models such as CLIP, they can be easily countered by specialized backdoor defenses for MCL models. This paper reveals the threats in this practical scenario that backdoor attacks can remain effective even after defenses and introduces the \emph{\toolns} attack, which is resistant to backdoor detection and model fine-tuning defenses. To achieve this, we draw motivations from the perspective of the Bayesian rule and propose a dual-embedding guided framework for backdoor attacks. Specifically, we ensure that visual trigger patterns approximate the textual target semantics in the embedding space, making it challenging to detect the subtle parameter variations induced by backdoor learning on such natural trigger patterns. Additionally, we optimize the visual trigger patterns to align the poisoned samples with target vision features in order to hinder the backdoor unlearning through clean fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our attack significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines (+45.3% ASR) in the presence of SoTA backdoor defenses, rendering these mitigation and detection strategies virtually ineffective. Furthermore, our approach effectively attacks some more rigorous scenarios like downstream tasks. We believe that this paper raises awareness regarding the potential threats associated with the practical application of multimodal contrastive learning and encourages the development of more robust defense mechanisms.
Authors: Daichi Horita, Naoto Inoue, Kotaro Kikuchi, Kota Yamaguchi, Kiyoharu Aizawa
Abstract: Content-aware graphic layout generation aims to automatically arrange visual elements along with a given content, such as an e-commerce product image. In this paper, we argue that the current layout generation approaches suffer from the limited training data for the high-dimensional layout structure. We show that a simple retrieval augmentation can significantly improve the generation quality. Our model, which is named Retrieval-Augmented Layout Transformer (RALF), retrieves nearest neighbor layout examples based on an input image and feeds these results into an autoregressive generator. Our model can apply retrieval augmentation to various controllable generation tasks and yield high-quality layouts within a unified architecture. Our extensive experiments show that RALF successfully generates content-aware layouts in both constrained and unconstrained settings and significantly outperforms the baselines.
Authors: L\'eo Lebrat, Rodrigo Santa Cruz, Remi Chierchia, Yulia Arzhaeva, Mohammad Ali Armin, Joshua Goldsmith, Jeremy Oorloff, Prithvi Reddy, Chuong Nguyen, Lars Petersson, Michelle Barakat-Johnson, Georgina Luscombe, Clinton Fookes, Olivier Salvado, David Ahmedt-Aristizabal
Abstract: Wound management poses a significant challenge, particularly for bedridden patients and the elderly. Accurate diagnostic and healing monitoring can significantly benefit from modern image analysis, providing accurate and precise measurements of wounds. Despite several existing techniques, the shortage of expansive and diverse training datasets remains a significant obstacle to constructing machine learning-based frameworks. This paper introduces Syn3DWound, an open-source dataset of high-fidelity simulated wounds with 2D and 3D annotations. We propose baseline methods and a benchmarking framework for automated 3D morphometry analysis and 2D/3D wound segmentation.
Authors: Qi Ma, Danda Pani Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Luc Van Gool
Abstract: In this paper, we showcase the effectiveness of optimizing monocular camera poses as a continuous function of time. The camera poses are represented using an implicit neural function which maps the given time to the corresponding camera pose. The mapped camera poses are then used for the downstream tasks where joint camera pose optimization is also required. While doing so, the network parameters -- that implicitly represent camera poses -- are optimized. We exploit the proposed method in four diverse experimental settings, namely, (1) NeRF from noisy poses; (2) NeRF from asynchronous Events; (3) Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (vSLAM); and (4) vSLAM with IMUs. In all four settings, the proposed method performs significantly better than the compared baselines and the state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, using the assumption of continuous motion, changes in pose may actually live in a manifold that has lower than 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) is also realized. We call this low DOF motion representation as the \emph{intrinsic motion} and use the approach in vSLAM settings, showing impressive camera tracking performance.
Authors: Guillaume Le Moing, Jean Ponce, Cordelia Schmid
Abstract: Recent approaches to point tracking are able to recover the trajectory of any scene point through a large portion of a video despite the presence of occlusions. They are, however, too slow in practice to track every point observed in a single frame in a reasonable amount of time. This paper introduces DOT, a novel, simple and efficient method for solving this problem. It first extracts a small set of tracks from key regions at motion boundaries using an off-the-shelf point tracking algorithm. Given source and target frames, DOT then computes rough initial estimates of a dense flow field and visibility mask through nearest-neighbor interpolation, before refining them using a learnable optical flow estimator that explicitly handles occlusions and can be trained on synthetic data with ground-truth correspondences. We show that DOT is significantly more accurate than current optical flow techniques, outperforms sophisticated "universal" trackers like OmniMotion, and is on par with, or better than, the best point tracking algorithms like CoTracker while being at least two orders of magnitude faster. Quantitative and qualitative experiments with synthetic and real videos validate the promise of the proposed approach. Code, data, and videos showcasing the capabilities of our approach are available in the project webpage: https://16lemoing.github.io/dot .
Authors: Zhixiang Wei, Lin Chen, Yi Jin, Xiaoxiao Ma, Tianle Liu, Pengyang Ling, Ben Wang, Huaian Chen, Jinjin Zheng
Abstract: In this paper, we first assess and harness various Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) in the context of Domain Generalized Semantic Segmentation (DGSS). Driven by the motivation that Leveraging Stronger pre-trained models and Fewer trainable parameters for Superior generalizability, we introduce a robust fine-tuning approach, namely Rein, to parameter-efficiently harness VFMs for DGSS. Built upon a set of trainable tokens, each linked to distinct instances, Rein precisely refines and forwards the feature maps from each layer to the next layer within the backbone. This process produces diverse refinements for different categories within a single image. With fewer trainable parameters, Rein efficiently fine-tunes VFMs for DGSS tasks, surprisingly surpassing full parameter fine-tuning. Extensive experiments across various settings demonstrate that Rein significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, with just an extra 1% of trainable parameters within the frozen backbone, Rein achieves a mIoU of 68.1% on the Cityscapes, without accessing any real urban-scene datasets.Code is available at https://github.com/w1oves/Rein.git.
Authors: Zijian Chen, Wei Sun, Haoning Wu, Zicheng Zhang, Jun Jia, Zhongpeng Ji, Fengyu Sun, Shangling Jui, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai, Wenjun Zhang
Abstract: The proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Images (AGIs) has greatly expanded the Image Naturalness Assessment (INA) problem. Different from early definitions that mainly focus on tone-mapped images with limited distortions (e.g., exposure, contrast, and color reproduction), INA on AI-generated images is especially challenging as it has more diverse contents and could be affected by factors from multiple perspectives, including low-level technical distortions and high-level rationality distortions. In this paper, we take the first step to benchmark and assess the visual naturalness of AI-generated images. First, we construct the AI-Generated Image Naturalness (AGIN) database by conducting a large-scale subjective study to collect human opinions on the overall naturalness as well as perceptions from technical and rationality perspectives. AGIN verifies that naturalness is universally and disparately affected by technical and rationality distortions. Second, we propose the Joint Objective Image Naturalness evaluaTor (JOINT), to automatically predict the naturalness of AGIs that aligns human ratings. Specifically, JOINT imitates human reasoning in naturalness evaluation by jointly learning both technical and rationality features. We demonstrate that JOINT significantly outperforms baselines for providing more subjectively consistent results on naturalness assessment.
Authors: Renao Yan, Qiehe Sun, Cheng Jin, Yiqing Liu, Yonghong He, Tian Guan, Hao Chen
Abstract: In computational pathology, whole slide image (WSI) classification presents a formidable challenge due to its gigapixel resolution and limited fine-grained annotations. Multiple instance learning (MIL) offers a weakly supervised solution, yet refining instance-level information from bag-level labels remains complex. While most of the conventional MIL methods use attention scores to estimate instance importance scores (IIS) which contribute to the prediction of the slide labels, these often lead to skewed attention distributions and inaccuracies in identifying crucial instances. To address these issues, we propose a new approach inspired by cooperative game theory: employing Shapley values to assess each instance's contribution, thereby improving IIS estimation. The computation of the Shapley value is then accelerated using attention, meanwhile retaining the enhanced instance identification and prioritization. We further introduce a framework for the progressive assignment of pseudo bags based on estimated IIS, encouraging more balanced attention distributions in MIL models. Our extensive experiments on CAMELYON-16, BRACS, and TCGA-LUNG datasets show our method's superiority over existing state-of-the-art approaches, offering enhanced interpretability and class-wise insights. We will release the code upon acceptance.
Authors: Yiran Qin, Enshen Zhou, Qichang Liu, Zhenfei Yin, Lu Sheng, Ruimao Zhang, Yu Qiao, Jing Shao
Abstract: It is a long-lasting goal to design an embodied system that can solve long-horizon open-world tasks in human-like ways. However, existing approaches usually struggle with compound difficulties caused by the logic-aware decomposition and context-aware execution of these tasks. To this end, we introduce MP5, an open-ended multimodal embodied system built upon the challenging Minecraft simulator, which can decompose feasible sub-objectives, design sophisticated situation-aware plans, and perform embodied action control, with frequent communication with a goal-conditioned active perception scheme. Specifically, MP5 is developed on top of recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), and the system is modulated into functional modules that can be scheduled and collaborated to ultimately solve pre-defined context- and process-dependent tasks. Extensive experiments prove that MP5 can achieve a 22% success rate on difficult process-dependent tasks and a 91% success rate on tasks that heavily depend on the context. Moreover, MP5 exhibits a remarkable ability to address many open-ended tasks that are entirely novel.
Authors: Chunlin Yu, Ye Shi, Jingya Wang
Abstract: Previous endeavors in self-supervised learning have enlightened the research of deep clustering from an instance discrimination perspective. Built upon this foundation, recent studies further highlight the importance of grouping semantically similar instances. One effective method to achieve this is by promoting the semantic structure preserved by neighborhood consistency. However, the samples in the local neighborhood may be limited due to their close proximity to each other, which may not provide substantial and diverse supervision signals. Inspired by the versatile re-ranking methods in the context of image retrieval, we propose to employ an efficient online re-ranking process to mine more informative neighbors in a Contextually Affinitive (ConAff) Neighborhood, and then encourage the cross-view neighborhood consistency. To further mitigate the intrinsic neighborhood noises near cluster boundaries, we propose a progressively relaxed boundary filtering strategy to circumvent the issues brought by noisy neighbors. Our method can be easily integrated into the generic self-supervised frameworks and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on several popular benchmarks.
Authors: Kezheng Xiong, Maoji Zheng, Qingshan Xu, Chenglu Wen, Siqi Shen, Cheng Wang
Abstract: Point cloud registration, a fundamental task in 3D computer vision, has remained largely unexplored in cross-source point clouds and unstructured scenes. The primary challenges arise from noise, outliers, and variations in scale and density. However, neglected geometric natures of point clouds restricts the performance of current methods. In this paper, we propose a novel method termed SPEAL to leverage skeletal representations for effective learning of intrinsic topologies of point clouds, facilitating robust capture of geometric intricacy. Specifically, we design the Skeleton Extraction Module to extract skeleton points and skeletal features in an unsupervised manner, which is inherently robust to noise and density variances. Then, we propose the Skeleton-Aware GeoTransformer to encode high-level skeleton-aware features. It explicitly captures the topological natures and inter-point-cloud skeletal correlations with the noise-robust and density-invariant skeletal representations. Next, we introduce the Correspondence Dual-Sampler to facilitate correspondences by augmenting the correspondence set with skeletal correspondences. Furthermore, we construct a challenging novel large-scale cross-source point cloud dataset named KITTI CrossSource for benchmarking cross-source point cloud registration methods. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments are conducted to demonstrate our approach's superiority and robustness on both cross-source and same-source datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to facilitate point cloud registration with skeletal geometric priors.
Authors: Yuzhe Zhang, Jiawei Zhang, Hao Li, Zhouxia Wang, Luwei Hou, Dongqing Zou, Liheng Bian
Abstract: Recovering degraded low-resolution text images is challenging, especially for Chinese text images with complex strokes and severe degradation in real-world scenarios. Ensuring both text fidelity and style realness is crucial for high-quality text image super-resolution. Recently, diffusion models have achieved great success in natural image synthesis and restoration due to their powerful data distribution modeling abilities and data generation capabilities. In this work, we propose an Image Diffusion Model (IDM) to restore text images with realistic styles. For diffusion models, they are not only suitable for modeling realistic image distribution but also appropriate for learning text distribution. Since text prior is important to guarantee the correctness of the restored text structure according to existing arts, we also propose a Text Diffusion Model (TDM) for text recognition which can guide IDM to generate text images with correct structures. We further propose a Mixture of Multi-modality module (MoM) to make these two diffusion models cooperate with each other in all the diffusion steps. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our Diffusion-based Blind Text Image Super-Resolution (DiffTSR) can restore text images with more accurate text structures as well as more realistic appearances simultaneously.
Authors: David Ahmedt-Aristizabal, Mohammad Ali Armin, Zeeshan Hayder, Norberto Garcia-Cairasco, Lars Petersson, Clinton Fookes, Simon Denman, Aileen McGonigal
Abstract: Seizure events can manifest as transient disruptions in the control of movements which may be organized in distinct behavioral sequences, accompanied or not by other observable features such as altered facial expressions. The analysis of these clinical signs, referred to as semiology, is subject to observer variations when specialists evaluate video-recorded events in the clinical setting. To enhance the accuracy and consistency of evaluations, computer-aided video analysis of seizures has emerged as a natural avenue. In the field of medical applications, deep learning and computer vision approaches have driven substantial advancements. Historically, these approaches have been used for disease detection, classification, and prediction using diagnostic data; however, there has been limited exploration of their application in evaluating video-based motion detection in the clinical epileptology setting. While vision-based technologies do not aim to replace clinical expertise, they can significantly contribute to medical decision-making and patient care by providing quantitative evidence and decision support. Behavior monitoring tools offer several advantages such as providing objective information, detecting challenging-to-observe events, reducing documentation efforts, and extending assessment capabilities to areas with limited expertise. The main applications of these could be (1) improved seizure detection methods; (2) refined semiology analysis for predicting seizure type and cerebral localization. In this paper, we detail the foundation technologies used in vision-based systems in the analysis of seizure videos, highlighting their success in semiology detection and analysis, focusing on work published in the last 7 years. Additionally, we illustrate how existing technologies can be interconnected through an integrated system for video-based semiology analysis.
Authors: Huafeng Qin, Xin Jin, Yun Jiang, Mounim A. El-Yacoubi, Xinbo Gao
Abstract: Data mixing augmentation has been widely applied to improve the generalization ability of deep neural networks. Recently, offline data mixing augmentation, e.g. handcrafted and saliency information-based mixup, has been gradually replaced by automatic mixing approaches. Through minimizing two sub-tasks, namely, mixed sample generation and mixup classification in an end-to-end way, AutoMix significantly improves accuracy on image classification tasks. However, as the optimization objective is consistent for the two sub-tasks, this approach is prone to generating consistent instead of diverse mixed samples, which results in overfitting for target task training. In this paper, we propose AdAutomixup, an adversarial automatic mixup augmentation approach that generates challenging samples to train a robust classifier for image classification, by alternatively optimizing the classifier and the mixup sample generator. AdAutomixup comprises two modules, a mixed example generator, and a target classifier. The mixed sample generator aims to produce hard mixed examples to challenge the target classifier, while the target classifier's aim is to learn robust features from hard mixed examples to improve generalization. To prevent the collapse of the inherent meanings of images, we further introduce an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher and cosine similarity to train AdAutomixup in an end-to-end way. Extensive experiments on seven image benchmarks consistently prove that our approach outperforms the state of the art in various classification scenarios. The source code is available at https://github.com/JinXins/Adversarial-AutoMixup.
Authors: Shinan Zou, Chao Fan, Jianbo Xiong, Chuanfu Shen, Shiqi Yu, Jin Tang
Abstract: Gait datasets are essential for gait research. However, this paper observes that present benchmarks, whether conventional constrained or emerging real-world datasets, fall short regarding covariate diversity. To bridge this gap, we undertake an arduous 20-month effort to collect a cross-covariate gait recognition (CCGR) dataset. The CCGR dataset has 970 subjects and about 1.6 million sequences; almost every subject has 33 views and 53 different covariates. Compared to existing datasets, CCGR has both population and individual-level diversity. In addition, the views and covariates are well labeled, enabling the analysis of the effects of different factors. CCGR provides multiple types of gait data, including RGB, parsing, silhouette, and pose, offering researchers a comprehensive resource for exploration. In order to delve deeper into addressing cross-covariate gait recognition, we propose parsing-based gait recognition (ParsingGait) by utilizing the newly proposed parsing data. We have conducted extensive experiments. Our main results show: 1) Cross-covariate emerges as a pivotal challenge for practical applications of gait recognition. 2) ParsingGait demonstrates remarkable potential for further advancement. 3) Alarmingly, existing SOTA methods achieve less than 43% accuracy on the CCGR, highlighting the urgency of exploring cross-covariate gait recognition. Link: https://github.com/ShinanZou/CCGR.
Authors: Yuexing Han, Liheng Ruan, Bing Wang
Abstract: Images generated by most of generative models trained with limited data often exhibit deficiencies in either fidelity, diversity, or both. One effective solution to address the limitation is few-shot generative model adaption. However, the type of approaches typically rely on a large-scale pre-trained model, serving as a source domain, to facilitate information transfer to the target domain. In this paper, we propose a method called Information Transfer from the Built Geodesic Surface (ITBGS), which contains two module: Feature Augmentation on Geodesic Surface (FAGS); Interpolation and Regularization (I\&R). With the FAGS module, a pseudo-source domain is created by projecting image features from the training dataset into the Pre-Shape Space, subsequently generating new features on the Geodesic surface. Thus, no pre-trained models is needed for the adaption process during the training of generative models with FAGS. I\&R module are introduced for supervising the interpolated images and regularizing their relative distances, respectively, to further enhance the quality of generated images. Through qualitative and quantitative experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method consistently achieves optimal or comparable results across a diverse range of semantically distinct datasets, even in extremely few-shot scenarios.
Authors: Yonghui Tan, Xiaolong Li, Yishu Chen, Jinquan Ai
Abstract: The purpose of remote sensing image change detection (RSCD) is to detect differences between bi-temporal images taken at the same place. Deep learning has been extensively used to RSCD tasks, yielding significant results in terms of result recognition. However, due to the shooting angle of the satellite, the impacts of thin clouds, and certain lighting conditions, the problem of fuzzy edges in the change region in some remote sensing photographs cannot be properly handled using current RSCD algorithms. To solve this issue, we proposed a Body Decouple Multi-Scale by fearure Aggregation change detection (BD-MSA), a novel model that collects both global and local feature map information in the channel and space dimensions of the feature map during the training and prediction phases. This approach allows us to successfully extract the change region's boundary information while also divorcing the change region's main body from its boundary. Numerous studies have shown that the assessment metrics and evaluation effects of the model described in this paper on the publicly available datasets DSIFN-CD, S2Looking and WHU-CD are the best when compared to other models.
Authors: Changtai Li, Xu Han, Chao Yao, Xiaojuan Ban
Abstract: Efficient and accurate extraction of microstructures in micrographs of materials is essential in process optimization and the exploration of structure-property relationships. Deep learning-based image segmentation techniques that rely on manual annotation are laborious and time-consuming and hardly meet the demand for model transferability and generalization on various source images. Segment Anything Model (SAM), a large visual model with powerful deep feature representation and zero-shot generalization capabilities, has provided new solutions for image segmentation. In this paper, we propose MatSAM, a general and efficient microstructure extraction solution based on SAM. A simple yet effective point-based prompt generation strategy is designed, grounded on the distribution and shape of microstructures. Specifically, in an unsupervised and training-free way, it adaptively generates prompt points for different microscopy images, fuses the centroid points of the coarsely extracted region of interest (ROI) and native grid points, and integrates corresponding post-processing operations for quantitative characterization of microstructures of materials. For common microstructures including grain boundary and multiple phases, MatSAM achieves superior zero-shot segmentation performance to conventional rule-based methods and is even preferable to supervised learning methods evaluated on 16 microscopy datasets whose micrographs are imaged by the optical microscope (OM) and scanning electron microscope (SEM). Especially, on 4 public datasets, MatSAM shows unexpected competitive segmentation performance against their specialist models. We believe that, without the need for human labeling, MatSAM can significantly reduce the cost of quantitative characterization and statistical analysis of extensive microstructures of materials, and thus accelerate the design of new materials.
Authors: Tianyi Zhao, Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei
Abstract: Object detection in visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) images has been widely applied in recent years. Leveraging the complementary characteristics of RGB and IR images, the object detector provides reliable and robust object localization from day to night. Existing fusion strategies directly inject RGB and IR images into convolution neural networks, leading to inferior detection performance. Since the RGB and IR features have modality-specific noise, these strategies will worsen the fused features along with the propagation. Inspired by the mechanism of human brain processing multimodal information, this work introduces a new coarse-to-fine perspective to purify and fuse two modality features. Specifically, following this perspective, we design a Redundant Spectrum Removal module to coarsely remove interfering information within each modality and a Dynamic Feature Selection module to finely select the desired features for feature fusion. To verify the effectiveness of the coarse-to-fine fusion strategy, we construct a new object detector called Removal and Selection Detector (RSDet). Extensive experiments on three RGB-IR object detection datasets verify the superior performance of our method.
Authors: Yuang Zhang, Haonan An, Zhengru Fang, Guowen Xu, Yuan Zhou, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Abstract: In recent years, autonomous driving has garnered significant attention due to its potential for improving road safety through collaborative perception among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, time-varying channel variations in vehicular transmission environments demand dynamic allocation of communication resources. Moreover, in the context of collaborative perception, it is important to recognize that not all CAVs contribute valuable data, and some CAV data even have detrimental effects on collaborative perception. In this paper, we introduce SmartCooper, an adaptive collaborative perception framework that incorporates communication optimization and a judger mechanism to facilitate CAV data fusion. Our approach begins with optimizing the connectivity of vehicles while considering communication constraints. We then train a learnable encoder to dynamically adjust the compression ratio based on the channel state information (CSI). Subsequently, we devise a judger mechanism to filter the detrimental image data reconstructed by adaptive decoders. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on the OpenCOOD platform. Our results demonstrate a substantial reduction in communication costs by 23.10\% compared to the non-judger scheme. Additionally, we achieve a significant improvement on the average precision of Intersection over Union (AP@IoU) by 7.15\% compared with state-of-the-art schemes.
Authors: Juan Nathaniel, Yongquan Qu, Tung Nguyen, Sungduk Yu, Julius Busecke, Aditya Grover, Pierre Gentine
Abstract: Accurate prediction of climate in the subseasonal-to-seasonal scale is crucial for disaster readiness, reduced economic risk, and improved policy-making amidst climate change. Yet, S2S prediction remains challenging due to the chaotic nature of such system. At present, existing benchmarks for weather and climate applications, tend to (1) have shorter forecasting range of up-to 14 days, (2) do not include a wide range of operational baseline forecasts, and (3) lack physics-based constraints for explainability. Thus, we propose ChaosBench, a large-scale, multi-channel, physics-based benchmark for S2S prediction. ChaosBench has over 460K frames of real-world observations and simulations, each with 60 variable-channels and spanning for up-to 45 years. We also propose several physics-based, in addition to vision-based metrics, that enables for a more physically-consistent model. Furthermore, we include a diverse set of physics-based forecasts from 4 national weather agencies as baselines to our data-driven counterpart. We establish two tasks that vary in complexity: full and sparse dynamics prediction. Our benchmark is one of the first to perform large-scale evaluation on existing models including PanguWeather, FourCastNetV2, GraphCast, and ClimaX, and finds methods originally developed for weather-scale applications fails on S2S task: they perform much worse than just simply taking the long-term climatological averages. We release our benchmark code and datasets at https://leap-stc.github.io/ChaosBench.
Authors: Bumsoo Kim, Abdul Muqeet, Kyuchul Lee, Sanghyun Seo
Abstract: Face re-aging is a prominent field in computer vision and graphics, with significant applications in photorealistic domains such as movies, advertising, and live streaming. Recently, the need to apply face re-aging to non-photorealistic images, like comics, illustrations, and animations, has emerged as an extension in various entertainment sectors. However, the absence of a network capable of seamlessly editing the apparent age on NPR images means that these tasks have been confined to a naive approach, applying each task sequentially. This often results in unpleasant artifacts and a loss of facial attributes due to domain discrepancies. In this paper, we introduce a novel one-stage method for face re-aging combined with portrait style transfer, executed in a single generative step. We leverage existing face re-aging and style transfer networks, both trained within the same PR domain. Our method uniquely fuses distinct latent vectors, each responsible for managing aging-related attributes and NPR appearance. Adopting an exemplar-based approach, our method offers greater flexibility than domain-level fine-tuning approaches, which typically require separate training or fine-tuning for each domain. This effectively addresses the limitation of requiring paired datasets for re-aging and domain-level, data-driven approaches for stylization. Our experiments show that our model can effortlessly generate re-aged images while simultaneously transferring the style of examples, maintaining both natural appearance and controllability.
Authors: Mingrui Li, Shuhong Liu, Heng Zhou, Guohao Zhu, Na Cheng, Hongyu Wang
Abstract: Semantic understanding plays a crucial role in Dense Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Recent advancements that integrate Gaussian Splatting into SLAM systems have demonstrated its effectiveness in generating high-quality renderings. Building on this progress, we propose SGS-SLAM which provides precise 3D semantic segmentation alongside high-fidelity reconstructions. Specifically, we propose to employ multi-channel optimization during the mapping process, integrating appearance, geometric, and semantic constraints with key-frame optimization to enhance reconstruction quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SGS-SLAM delivers state-of-the-art performance in camera pose estimation, map reconstruction, and semantic segmentation. It outperforms existing methods by a large margin meanwhile preserving real-time rendering ability.
Authors: Chengzhi Liu, Zheng Tao, Zihong Luo, Chenghao Liu
Abstract: Time series analysis and modelling constitute a crucial research area. Traditional artificial neural networks struggle with complex, non-stationary time series data due to high computational complexity, limited ability to capture temporal information, and difficulty in handling event-driven data. To address these challenges, we propose a Multi-modal Time Series Analysis Model Based on Spiking Neural Network (MTSA-SNN). The Pulse Encoder unifies the encoding of temporal images and sequential information in a common pulse-based representation. The Joint Learning Module employs a joint learning function and weight allocation mechanism to fuse information from multi-modal pulse signals complementary. Additionally, we incorporate wavelet transform operations to enhance the model's ability to analyze and evaluate temporal information. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieved superior performance on three complex time-series tasks. This work provides an effective event-driven approach to overcome the challenges associated with analyzing intricate temporal information. Access to the source code is available at https://github.com/Chenngzz/MTSA-SNN}{https://github.com/Chenngzz/MTSA-SNN
URLs: https://github.com/Chenngzz/MTSA-SNN, https://github.com/Chenngzz/MTSA-SNN
Authors: Bumsoo Kim, Sanghyun Byun, Yonghoon Jung, Wonseop Shin, Sareer UI Amin, Sanghyun Seo
Abstract: In this paper, we first present the character texture generation system \textit{Minecraft-ify}, specified to Minecraft video game toward in-game application. Ours can generate face-focused image for texture mapping tailored to 3D virtual character having cube manifold. While existing projects or works only generate texture, proposed system can inverse the user-provided real image, or generate average/random appearance from learned distribution. Moreover, it can be manipulated with text-guidance using StyleGAN and StyleCLIP. These features provide a more extended user experience with enlarged freedom as a user-friendly AI-tool. Project page can be found at https://gh-bumsookim.github.io/Minecraft-ify/
Authors: Jinsung Jeon, Hyundong Jin, Jonghyun Choi, Sanghyun Hong, Dongeun Lee, Kookjin Lee, Noseong Park
Abstract: A standard practice in developing image recognition models is to train a model on a specific image resolution and then deploy it. However, in real-world inference, models often encounter images different from the training sets in resolution and/or subject to natural variations such as weather changes, noise types and compression artifacts. While traditional solutions involve training multiple models for different resolutions or input variations, these methods are computationally expensive and thus do not scale in practice. To this end, we propose a novel neural network model, parallel-structured and all-component Fourier neural operator (PAC-FNO), that addresses the problem. Unlike conventional feed-forward neural networks, PAC-FNO operates in the frequency domain, allowing it to handle images of varying resolutions within a single model. We also propose a two-stage algorithm for training PAC-FNO with a minimal modification to the original, downstream model. Moreover, the proposed PAC-FNO is ready to work with existing image recognition models. Extensively evaluating methods with seven image recognition benchmarks, we show that the proposed PAC-FNO improves the performance of existing baseline models on images with various resolutions by up to 77.1% and various types of natural variations in the images at inference.
Authors: Junnan Dong, Qinggang Zhang, Huachi Zhou, Daochen Zha, Pai Zheng, Xiao Huang
Abstract: Knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) has been extensively studied to answer visual questions with external knowledge, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs). While several attempts have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) as an implicit knowledge source, it remains challenging since LLMs may generate hallucinations. Moreover, multiple knowledge sources, e.g., images, KGs and LLMs, cannot be readily aligned for complex scenarios. To tackle these, we present a novel modality-aware integration with LLMs for KVQA (MAIL). It carefully leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning. Specifically, (i) we propose a two-stage prompting strategy with LLMs to densely embody the image into a scene graph with detailed visual features; (ii) We construct a coupled concept graph by linking the mentioned entities with external facts. (iii) A tailored pseudo-siamese graph medium fusion is designed for sufficient multimodal fusion. We utilize the shared mentioned entities in two graphs as mediums to bridge a tight inter-modal exchange, while maximally preserving insightful intra-modal learning by constraining the fusion within mediums. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show the superiority of MAIL with 24x less resources.
Authors: Zhi-Yi Lin, Bofan Lyu, Judith Cueto Fernandez, Eline van der Kruk, Ajay Seth, Xucong Zhang
Abstract: Accurate 3D kinematics estimation of human body is crucial in various applications for human health and mobility, such as rehabilitation, injury prevention, and diagnosis, as it helps to understand the biomechanical loading experienced during movement. Conventional marker-based motion capture is expensive in terms of financial investment, time, and the expertise required. Moreover, due to the scarcity of datasets with accurate annotations, existing markerless motion capture methods suffer from challenges including unreliable 2D keypoint detection, limited anatomic accuracy, and low generalization capability. In this work, we propose a novel biomechanics-aware network that directly outputs 3D kinematics from two input views with consideration of biomechanical prior and spatio-temporal information. To train the model, we create synthetic dataset ODAH with accurate kinematics annotations generated by aligning the body mesh from the SMPL-X model and a full-body OpenSim skeletal model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach, only trained on synthetic data, outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods when evaluated across multiple datasets, revealing a promising direction for enhancing video-based human motion capture
Authors: Shanchuan Lin, Anran Wang, Xiao Yang
Abstract: We propose a diffusion distillation method that achieves new state-of-the-art in one-step/few-step 1024px text-to-image generation based on SDXL. Our method combines progressive and adversarial distillation to achieve a balance between quality and mode coverage. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical analysis, discriminator design, model formulation, and training techniques. We open-source our distilled SDXL-Lightning models both as LoRA and full UNet weights.
Authors: Li Zhang, Youwei Liang, Ruiyi Zhang, Pengtao Xie
Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation model pretrained on millions of images and segmentation masks, has significantly advanced semantic segmentation, a fundamental task in computer vision. Despite its strengths, SAM encounters two major challenges. Firstly, it struggles with segmenting specific objects autonomously, as it relies on users to manually input prompts like points or bounding boxes to identify targeted objects. Secondly, SAM faces challenges in excelling at specific downstream tasks, like medical imaging, due to a disparity between the distribution of its pretraining data, which predominantly consists of general-domain images, and the data used in downstream tasks. Current solutions to these problems, which involve finetuning SAM, often lead to overfitting, a notable issue in scenarios with very limited data, like in medical imaging. To overcome these limitations, we introduce BLO-SAM, which finetunes SAM based on bi-level optimization (BLO). Our approach allows for automatic image segmentation without the need for manual prompts, by optimizing a learnable prompt embedding. Furthermore, it significantly reduces the risk of overfitting by training the model's weight parameters and the prompt embedding on two separate subsets of the training dataset, each at a different level of optimization. We apply BLO-SAM to diverse semantic segmentation tasks in general and medical domains. The results demonstrate BLO-SAM's superior performance over various state-of-the-art image semantic segmentation methods.
Authors: Ling Yang, Zhilong Zhang, Zhaochen Yu, Jingwei Liu, Minkai Xu, Stefano Ermon, Bin Cui
Abstract: Conditional diffusion models have exhibited superior performance in high-fidelity text-guided visual generation and editing. Nevertheless, prevailing text-guided visual diffusion models primarily focus on incorporating text-visual relationships exclusively into the reverse process, often disregarding their relevance in the forward process. This inconsistency between forward and reverse processes may limit the precise conveyance of textual semantics in visual synthesis results. To address this issue, we propose a novel and general contextualized diffusion model (ContextDiff) by incorporating the cross-modal context encompassing interactions and alignments between text condition and visual sample into forward and reverse processes. We propagate this context to all timesteps in the two processes to adapt their trajectories, thereby facilitating cross-modal conditional modeling. We generalize our contextualized diffusion to both DDPMs and DDIMs with theoretical derivations, and demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in evaluations with two challenging tasks: text-to-image generation, and text-to-video editing. In each task, our ContextDiff achieves new state-of-the-art performance, significantly enhancing the semantic alignment between text condition and generated samples, as evidenced by quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/YangLing0818/ContextDiff
Authors: Haoning Wu, Hanwei Zhu, Zicheng Zhang, Erli Zhang, Chaofeng Chen, Liang Liao, Chunyi Li, Annan Wang, Wenxiu Sun, Qiong Yan, Xiaohong Liu, Guangtao Zhai, Shiqi Wang, Weisi Lin
Abstract: Comparative settings (e.g. pairwise choice, listwise ranking) have been adopted by a wide range of subjective studies for image quality assessment (IQA), as it inherently standardizes the evaluation criteria across different observers and offer more clear-cut responses. In this work, we extend the edge of emerging large multi-modality models (LMMs) to further advance visual quality comparison into open-ended settings, that 1) can respond to open-range questions on quality comparison; 2) can provide detailed reasonings beyond direct answers. To this end, we propose the Co-Instruct. To train this first-of-its-kind open-source open-ended visual quality comparer, we collect the Co-Instruct-562K dataset, from two sources: (a) LLM-merged single image quality description, (b) GPT-4V "teacher" responses on unlabeled data. Furthermore, to better evaluate this setting, we propose the MICBench, the first benchmark on multi-image comparison for LMMs. We demonstrate that Co-Instruct not only achieves in average 30% higher accuracy than state-of-the-art open-source LMMs, but also outperforms GPT-4V (its teacher), on both existing related benchmarks and the proposed MICBench. Our model is published at https://huggingface.co/q-future/co-instruct.
Authors: Lvmin Zhang, Maneesh Agrawala
Abstract: We present LayerDiffuse, an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock.
Authors: Majid Memari, Khaled R. Ahmed, Shahram Rahimi, Noorbakhsh Amiri Golilarz
Abstract: This research addresses a critical challenge in the field of generative models, particularly in the generation and evaluation of synthetic images. Given the inherent complexity of generative models and the absence of a standardized procedure for their comparison, our study introduces a pioneering algorithm to objectively assess the realism of synthetic images. This approach significantly enhances the evaluation methodology by refining the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) score, allowing for a more precise and subjective assessment of image quality. Our algorithm is particularly tailored to address the challenges in generating and evaluating realistic images of Arabic handwritten digits, a task that has traditionally been near-impossible due to the subjective nature of realism in image generation. By providing a systematic and objective framework, our method not only enables the comparison of different generative models but also paves the way for improvements in their design and output. This breakthrough in evaluation and comparison is crucial for advancing the field of OCR, especially for scripts that present unique complexities, and sets a new standard in the generation and assessment of high-quality synthetic images.
Authors: Ling Yang, Haotian Qian, Zhilong Zhang, Jingwei Liu, Bin Cui
Abstract: Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional efficacy in various generative applications. While existing models focus on minimizing a weighted sum of denoising score matching losses for data distribution modeling, their training primarily emphasizes instance-level optimization, overlooking valuable structural information within each mini-batch, indicative of pair-wise relationships among samples. To address this limitation, we introduce Structure-guided Adversarial training of Diffusion Models (SADM). In this pioneering approach, we compel the model to learn manifold structures between samples in each training batch. To ensure the model captures authentic manifold structures in the data distribution, we advocate adversarial training of the diffusion generator against a novel structure discriminator in a minimax game, distinguishing real manifold structures from the generated ones. SADM substantially improves existing diffusion transformers (DiT) and outperforms existing methods in image generation and cross-domain fine-tuning tasks across 12 datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.58 and 2.11 on ImageNet for class-conditional image generation at resolutions of 256x256 and 512x512, respectively.
Authors: Deshan Gong, Ningtao Mao, He Wang
Abstract: We propose a new method for cloth digitalization. Deviating from existing methods which learn from data captured under relatively casual settings, we propose to learn from data captured in strictly tested measuring protocols, and find plausible physical parameters of the cloths. However, such data is currently absent, so we first propose a new dataset with accurate cloth measurements. Further, the data size is considerably smaller than the ones in current deep learning, due to the nature of the data capture process. To learn from small data, we propose a new Bayesian differentiable cloth model to estimate the complex material heterogeneity of real cloths. It can provide highly accurate digitalization from very limited data samples. Through exhaustive evaluation and comparison, we show our method is accurate in cloth digitalization, efficient in learning from limited data samples, and general in capturing material variations. Code and data are available https://github.com/realcrane/Bayesian-Differentiable-Physics-for-Cloth-Digitalization
URLs: https://github.com/realcrane/Bayesian-Differentiable-Physics-for-Cloth-Digitalization
Authors: Mincheol Park, Dongjin Kim, Cheonjun Park, Yuna Park, Gyeong Eun Gong, Won Woo Ro, Suhyun Kim
Abstract: Channel pruning is widely accepted to accelerate modern convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The resulting pruned model benefits from its immediate deployment on general-purpose software and hardware resources. However, its large pruning granularity, specifically at the unit of a convolution filter, often leads to undesirable accuracy drops due to the inflexibility of deciding how and where to introduce sparsity to the CNNs. In this paper, we propose REPrune, a novel channel pruning technique that emulates kernel pruning, fully exploiting the finer but structured granularity. REPrune identifies similar kernels within each channel using agglomerative clustering. Then, it selects filters that maximize the incorporation of kernel representatives while optimizing the maximum cluster coverage problem. By integrating with a simultaneous training-pruning paradigm, REPrune promotes efficient, progressive pruning throughout training CNNs, avoiding the conventional train-prune-finetune sequence. Experimental results highlight that REPrune performs better in computer vision tasks than existing methods, effectively achieving a balance between acceleration ratio and performance retention.
Authors: Xiaosong Wang, Xiaofan Zhang, Guotai Wang, Junjun He, Zhongyu Li, Wentao Zhu, Yi Guo, Qi Dou, Xiaoxiao Li, Dequan Wang, Liang Hong, Qicheng Lao, Tong Ruan, Yukun Zhou, Yixue Li, Jie Zhao, Kang Li, Xin Sun, Lifeng Zhu, Shaoting Zhang
Abstract: The emerging trend of advancing generalist artificial intelligence, such as GPTv4 and Gemini, has reshaped the landscape of research (academia and industry) in machine learning and many other research areas. However, domain-specific applications of such foundation models (e.g., in medicine) remain untouched or often at their very early stages. It will require an individual set of transfer learning and model adaptation techniques by further expanding and injecting these models with domain knowledge and data. The development of such technologies could be largely accelerated if the bundle of data, algorithms, and pre-trained foundation models were gathered together and open-sourced in an organized manner. In this work, we present OpenMEDLab, an open-source platform for multi-modality foundation models. It encapsulates not only solutions of pioneering attempts in prompting and fine-tuning large language and vision models for frontline clinical and bioinformatic applications but also building domain-specific foundation models with large-scale multi-modal medical data. Importantly, it opens access to a group of pre-trained foundation models for various medical image modalities, clinical text, protein engineering, etc. Inspiring and competitive results are also demonstrated for each collected approach and model in a variety of benchmarks for downstream tasks. We welcome researchers in the field of medical artificial intelligence to continuously contribute cutting-edge methods and models to OpenMEDLab, which can be accessed via https://github.com/openmedlab.
Authors: Chao Wu, Xiaobin Chang, Ruixuan Wang
Abstract: Deep neural networks often severely forget previously learned knowledge when learning new knowledge. Various continual learning (CL) methods have been proposed to handle such a catastrophic forgetting issue from different perspectives and achieved substantial improvements.In this paper, a novel two-branch continual learning framework is proposed to further enhance most existing CL methods. Specifically, the main branch can be any existing CL model and the newly introduced side branch is a lightweight convolutional network. The output of each main branch block is modulated by the output of the corresponding side branch block. Such a simple two-branch model can then be easily implemented and learned with the vanilla optimization setting without whistles and bells.Extensive experiments with various settings on multiple image datasets show that the proposed framework yields consistent improvements over state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Juan Zhang, Jiahao Chen, Cheng Wang, Zhiwang Yu, Tangquan Qi, Di Wu
Abstract: Despite numerous completed studies, achieving high fidelity talking face generation with highly synchronized lip movements corresponding to arbitrary audio remains a significant challenge in the field. The shortcomings of published studies continue to confuse many researchers. This paper introduces G4G, a generic framework for high fidelity talking face generation with fine-grained intra-modal alignment. G4G can reenact the high fidelity of original video while producing highly synchronized lip movements regardless of given audio tones or volumes. The key to G4G's success is the use of a diagonal matrix to enhance the ordinary alignment of audio-image intra-modal features, which significantly increases the comparative learning between positive and negative samples. Additionally, a multi-scaled supervision module is introduced to comprehensively reenact the perceptional fidelity of original video across the facial region while emphasizing the synchronization of lip movements and the input audio. A fusion network is then used to further fuse the facial region and the rest. Our experimental results demonstrate significant achievements in reenactment of original video quality as well as highly synchronized talking lips. G4G is an outperforming generic framework that can produce talking videos competitively closer to ground truth level than current state-of-the-art methods.
Authors: Changho Choi, Minho Kim, Junhyeok Lee, Hyoung-Kyu Song, Younggeun Kim, Seungryong Kim
Abstract: We propose LatentSwap, a simple face swapping framework generating a face swap latent code of a given generator. Utilizing randomly sampled latent codes, our framework is light and does not require datasets besides employing the pre-trained models, with the training procedure also being fast and straightforward. The loss objective consists of only three terms, and can effectively control the face swap results between source and target images. By attaching a pre-trained GAN inversion model independent to the model and using the StyleGAN2 generator, our model produces photorealistic and high-resolution images comparable to other competitive face swap models. We show that our framework is applicable to other generators such as StyleNeRF, paving a way to 3D-aware face swapping and is also compatible with other downstream StyleGAN2 generator tasks. The source code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/usingcolor/LatentSwap}.
Authors: Fahimeh Hosseini Noohdani, Parsa Hosseini, Aryan Yazdan Parast, Hamidreza Yaghoubi Araghi, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah
Abstract: While standard Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) training is proven effective for image classification on in-distribution data, it fails to perform well on out-of-distribution samples. One of the main sources of distribution shift for image classification is the compositional nature of images. Specifically, in addition to the main object or component(s) determining the label, some other image components usually exist, which may lead to the shift of input distribution between train and test environments. More importantly, these components may have spurious correlations with the label. To address this issue, we propose Decompose-and-Compose (DaC), which improves robustness to correlation shift by a compositional approach based on combining elements of images. Based on our observations, models trained with ERM usually highly attend to either the causal components or the components having a high spurious correlation with the label (especially in datapoints on which models have a high confidence). In fact, according to the amount of spurious correlation and the easiness of classification based on the causal or non-causal components, the model usually attends to one of these more (on samples with high confidence). Following this, we first try to identify the causal components of images using class activation maps of models trained with ERM. Afterward, we intervene on images by combining them and retraining the model on the augmented data, including the counterfactual ones. Along with its high interpretability, this work proposes a group-balancing method by intervening on images without requiring group labels or information regarding the spurious features during training. The method has an overall better worst group accuracy compared to previous methods with the same amount of supervision on the group labels in correlation shift.
Authors: Dongliang Cao, Marvin Eisenberger, Nafie El Amrani, Daniel Cremers, Florian Bernard
Abstract: Although 3D shape matching and interpolation are highly interrelated, they are often studied separately and applied sequentially to relate different 3D shapes, thus resulting in sub-optimal performance. In this work we present a unified framework to predict both point-wise correspondences and shape interpolation between 3D shapes. To this end, we combine the deep functional map framework with classical surface deformation models to map shapes in both spectral and spatial domains. On the one hand, by incorporating spatial maps, our method obtains more accurate and smooth point-wise correspondences compared to previous functional map methods for shape matching. On the other hand, by introducing spectral maps, our method gets rid of commonly used but computationally expensive geodesic distance constraints that are only valid for near-isometric shape deformations. Furthermore, we propose a novel test-time adaptation scheme to capture both pose-dominant and shape-dominant deformations. Using different challenging datasets, we demonstrate that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for both shape matching and interpolation, even compared to supervised approaches.
Authors: Shresth Grover, Vibhav Vineet, Yogesh S Rawat
Abstract: In this work we present a novel task of understanding unintentional human activities in videos. We formalize this problem as a reasoning task under zero-shot scenario, where given a video of an unintentional activity we want to know why it transitioned from intentional to unintentional. We first evaluate the effectiveness of current state-of-the-art Large Multimodal Models on this reasoning task and observe that they suffer from hallucination. We further propose a novel prompting technique,termed as Dream of Thoughts (DoT), which allows the model to navigate through hallucinated thoughts to achieve better reasoning. To evaluate the performance on this task, we also introduce three different specialized metrics designed to quantify the models reasoning capability. We perform our experiments on two different datasets, OOPs and UCF-Crimes, and our findings show that DOT prompting technique is able to outperform standard prompting, while minimizing hallucinations.
Authors: Lei Li, Yuqi Wang, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Xiachong Feng, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu
Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs), exemplified by GPT-4V, excel across diverse tasks involving concrete images from natural scenes. However, their ability to interpret abstract figures, such as geometry shapes and scientific plots, remains limited due to a scarcity of training datasets in scientific domains. To fill this gap, we introduce Multimodal ArXiv, consisting of ArXivCap and ArXivQA, for enhancing LVLMs scientific comprehension. ArXivCap is a figure-caption dataset comprising 6.4M images and 3.9M captions sourced from 572K ArXiv papers spanning various scientific domains. Drawing from ArXivCap, we introduce ArXivQA, a question-answering dataset generated by prompting GPT-4V based on scientific figures. ArXivQA greatly enhances LVLMs' mathematical reasoning capabilities, achieving a 10.4% absolute accuracy gain on a multimodal mathematical reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, employing ArXivCap, we devise four vision-to-text tasks for benchmarking LVLMs. Evaluation results with state-of-the-art LVLMs underscore their struggle with the nuanced semantics of academic figures, with domain-specific training yielding substantial performance gains. Our error analysis uncovers misinterpretations of visual context, recognition errors, and the production of overly simplified captions by current LVLMs, shedding light on future improvements.
Authors: Junjie Guo, Chenqiang Gao, Fangcen Liu, Deyu Meng
Abstract: Infrared-visible object detection aims to achieve robust even full-day object detection by fusing the complementary information of infrared and visible images. However, highly dynamically variable complementary characteristics and commonly existing modality misalignment make the fusion of complementary information difficult. In this paper, we propose a Dynamic Adaptive Multispectral Detection Transformer (DAMS-DETR) based on DETR to simultaneously address these two challenges. Specifically, we propose a Modality Competitive Query Selection strategy to provide useful prior information. This strategy can dynamically select basic salient modality feature representation for each object. To effectively mine the complementary information and adapt to misalignment situations, we propose a Multispectral Deformable Cross-attention module to adaptively sample and aggregate multi-semantic level features of infrared and visible images for each object. In addition, we further adopt the cascade structure of DETR to better mine complementary information. Experiments on four public datasets of different scenes demonstrate significant improvements compared to other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/gjj45/DAMS-DETR.
Authors: Yang Zhou, Zichong Chen, Hui Huang
Abstract: This paper addresses the complex issue of one-shot face stylization, focusing on the simultaneous consideration of appearance and structure, where previous methods have fallen short. We explore deformation-aware face stylization that diverges from traditional single-image style reference, opting for a real-style image pair instead. The cornerstone of our method is the utilization of a self-supervised vision transformer, specifically DINO-ViT, to establish a robust and consistent facial structure representation across both real and style domains. Our stylization process begins by adapting the StyleGAN generator to be deformation-aware through the integration of spatial transformers (STN). We then introduce two innovative constraints for generator fine-tuning under the guidance of DINO semantics: i) a directional deformation loss that regulates directional vectors in DINO space, and ii) a relative structural consistency constraint based on DINO token self-similarities, ensuring diverse generation. Additionally, style-mixing is employed to align the color generation with the reference, minimizing inconsistent correspondences. This framework delivers enhanced deformability for general one-shot face stylization, achieving notable efficiency with a fine-tuning duration of approximately 10 minutes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art one-shot face stylization methods. Code is available at https://github.com/zichongc/DoesFS
Authors: Yi Wang, Haoran Dou, Xiaowei Hu, Lei Zhu, Xin Yang, Ming Xu, Jing Qin, Pheng-Ann Heng, Tianfu Wang, Dong Ni
Abstract: Automatic prostate segmentation in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images is of essential importance for image-guided prostate interventions and treatment planning. However, developing such automatic solutions remains very challenging due to the missing/ambiguous boundary and inhomogeneous intensity distribution of the prostate in TRUS, as well as the large variability in prostate shapes. This paper develops a novel 3D deep neural network equipped with attention modules for better prostate segmentation in TRUS by fully exploiting the complementary information encoded in different layers of the convolutional neural network (CNN). Our attention module utilizes the attention mechanism to selectively leverage the multilevel features integrated from different layers to refine the features at each individual layer, suppressing the non-prostate noise at shallow layers of the CNN and increasing more prostate details into features at deep layers. Experimental results on challenging 3D TRUS volumes show that our method attains satisfactory segmentation performance. The proposed attention mechanism is a general strategy to aggregate multi-level deep features and has the potential to be used for other medical image segmentation tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/wulalago/DAF3D.
Authors: Haoran Dou, Xin Yang, Jikuan Qian, Wufeng Xue, Hao Qin, Xu Wang, Lequan Yu, Shujun Wang, Yi Xiong, Pheng-Ann Heng, Dong Ni
Abstract: Standard plane localization is crucial for ultrasound (US) diagnosis. In prenatal US, dozens of standard planes are manually acquired with a 2D probe. It is time-consuming and operator-dependent. In comparison, 3D US containing multiple standard planes in one shot has the inherent advantages of less user-dependency and more efficiency. However, manual plane localization in US volume is challenging due to the huge search space and large fetal posture variation. In this study, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework to automatically localize fetal brain standard planes in 3D US. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we equip the RL framework with a landmark-aware alignment module to provide warm start and strong spatial bounds for the agent actions, thus ensuring its effectiveness. Second, instead of passively and empirically terminating the agent inference, we propose a recurrent neural network based strategy for active termination of the agent's interaction procedure. This improves both the accuracy and efficiency of the localization system. Extensively validated on our in-house large dataset, our approach achieves the accuracy of 3.4mm/9.6{\deg} and 2.7mm/9.1{\deg} for the transcerebellar and transthalamic plane localization, respectively. Ourproposed RL framework is general and has the potential to improve the efficiency and standardization of US scanning.
Authors: Mingjie Li, Rui Liu, Guangsi Shi, Mingfei Han, Changling Li, Lina Yao, Xiaojun Chang, Ling Chen
Abstract: Long-term time-series forecasting (LTSF) plays a crucial role in various practical applications. Transformer and its variants have become the de facto backbone for LTSF, offering exceptional capabilities in processing long sequence data. However, existing Transformer-based models, such as Fedformer and Informer, often achieve their best performances on validation sets after just a few epochs, indicating potential underutilization of the Transformer's capacity. One of the reasons that contribute to this overfitting is data redundancy arising from the rolling forecasting settings in the data augmentation process, particularly evident in longer sequences with highly similar adjacent data. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to address this issue by employing curriculum learning and introducing a memory-driven decoder. Specifically, we progressively introduce Bernoulli noise to the training samples, which effectively breaks the high similarity between adjacent data points. To further enhance forecasting accuracy, we introduce a memory-driven decoder. This component enables the model to capture seasonal tendencies and dependencies in the time-series data and leverages temporal relationships to facilitate the forecasting process. The experimental results on six real-life LTSF benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can be seamlessly plugged into varying Transformer-based models, with our approach enhancing the LTSF performances of various Transformer-based models by maximally 30%.
Authors: Haoran Dou, Seppo Virtanen, Nishant Ravikumar, Alejandro F. Frangi
Abstract: Generating virtual populations of anatomy that capture sufficient variability while remaining plausible is essential for conducting in-silico trials of medical devices. However, not all anatomical shapes of interest are always available for each individual in a population. Hence, missing/partially-overlapping anatomical information is often available across individuals in a population. We introduce a generative shape model for complex anatomical structures, learnable from datasets of unpaired datasets. The proposed generative model can synthesise complete whole complex shape assemblies coined virtual chimaeras, as opposed to natural human chimaeras. We applied this framework to build virtual chimaeras from databases of whole-heart shape assemblies that each contribute samples for heart substructures. Specifically, we propose a generative shape compositional framework which comprises two components - a part-aware generative shape model which captures the variability in shape observed for each structure of interest in the training population; and a spatial composition network which assembles/composes the structures synthesised by the former into multi-part shape assemblies (viz. virtual chimaeras). We also propose a novel self supervised learning scheme that enables the spatial composition network to be trained with partially overlapping data and weak labels. We trained and validated our approach using shapes of cardiac structures derived from cardiac magnetic resonance images available in the UK Biobank. Our approach significantly outperforms a PCA-based shape model (trained with complete data) in terms of generalisability and specificity. This demonstrates the superiority of the proposed approach as the synthesised cardiac virtual populations are more plausible and capture a greater degree of variability in shape than those generated by the PCA-based shape model.
Authors: Wei Tang, Kangning Cui, Raymond H. Chan
Abstract: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a leading global cause of blindness. Early detection of hard exudates plays a crucial role in identifying DR, which aids in treating diabetes and preventing vision loss. However, the unique characteristics of hard exudates, ranging from their inconsistent shapes to indistinct boundaries, pose significant challenges to existing segmentation techniques. To address these issues, we present a novel supervised contrastive learning framework to optimize hard exudate segmentation. Specifically, we introduce a patch-wise density contrasting scheme to distinguish between areas with varying lesion concentrations, and therefore improve the model's proficiency in segmenting small lesions. To handle the ambiguous boundaries, we develop a discriminative edge inspection module to dynamically analyze the pixels that lie around the boundaries and accurately delineate the exudates. Upon evaluation using the IDRiD dataset and comparison with state-of-the-art frameworks, our method exhibits its effectiveness and shows potential for computer-assisted hard exudate detection. The code to replicate experiments is available at github.com/wetang7/HECL/.
Authors: Jifan Zhang, Yifang Chen, Gregory Canal, Stephen Mussmann, Arnav M. Das, Gantavya Bhatt, Yinglun Zhu, Jeffrey Bilmes, Simon Shaolei Du, Kevin Jamieson, Robert D Nowak
Abstract: Labeled data are critical to modern machine learning applications, but obtaining labels can be expensive. To mitigate this cost, machine learning methods, such as transfer learning, semi-supervised learning and active learning, aim to be label-efficient: achieving high predictive performance from relatively few labeled examples. While obtaining the best label-efficiency in practice often requires combinations of these techniques, existing benchmark and evaluation frameworks do not capture a concerted combination of all such techniques. This paper addresses this deficiency by introducing LabelBench, a new computationally-efficient framework for joint evaluation of multiple label-efficient learning techniques. As an application of LabelBench, we introduce a novel benchmark of state-of-the-art active learning methods in combination with semi-supervised learning for fine-tuning pretrained vision transformers. Our benchmark demonstrates better label-efficiencies than previously reported in active learning. LabelBench's modular codebase is open-sourced for the broader community to contribute label-efficient learning methods and benchmarks. The repository can be found at: https://github.com/EfficientTraining/LabelBench.
Authors: Jensen Gao, Bidipta Sarkar, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Jiajun Wu, Brian Ichter, Anirudha Majumdar, Dorsa Sadigh
Abstract: Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have led to improved performance on tasks such as visual question answering and image captioning. Consequently, these models are now well-positioned to reason about the physical world, particularly within domains such as robotic manipulation. However, current VLMs are limited in their understanding of the physical concepts (e.g., material, fragility) of common objects, which restricts their usefulness for robotic manipulation tasks that involve interaction and physical reasoning about such objects. To address this limitation, we propose PhysObjects, an object-centric dataset of 39.6K crowd-sourced and 417K automated physical concept annotations of common household objects. We demonstrate that fine-tuning a VLM on PhysObjects improves its understanding of physical object concepts, including generalization to held-out concepts, by capturing human priors of these concepts from visual appearance. We incorporate this physically grounded VLM in an interactive framework with a large language model-based robotic planner, and show improved planning performance on tasks that require reasoning about physical object concepts, compared to baselines that do not leverage physically grounded VLMs. We additionally illustrate the benefits of our physically grounded VLM on a real robot, where it improves task success rates. We release our dataset and provide further details and visualizations of our results at https://iliad.stanford.edu/pg-vlm/.
Authors: Hui Zhang, Sammy Christen, Zicong Fan, Luocheng Zheng, Jemin Hwangbo, Jie Song, Otmar Hilliges
Abstract: We present ArtiGrasp, a novel method to synthesize bi-manual hand-object interactions that include grasping and articulation. This task is challenging due to the diversity of the global wrist motions and the precise finger control that are necessary to articulate objects. ArtiGrasp leverages reinforcement learning and physics simulations to train a policy that controls the global and local hand pose. Our framework unifies grasping and articulation within a single policy guided by a single hand pose reference. Moreover, to facilitate the training of the precise finger control required for articulation, we present a learning curriculum with increasing difficulty. It starts with single-hand manipulation of stationary objects and continues with multi-agent training including both hands and non-stationary objects. To evaluate our method, we introduce Dynamic Object Grasping and Articulation, a task that involves bringing an object into a target articulated pose. This task requires grasping, relocation, and articulation. We show our method's efficacy towards this task. We further demonstrate that our method can generate motions with noisy hand-object pose estimates from an off-the-shelf image-based regressor.
Authors: Hongbo Zhao, Yikang Zhang, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan
Abstract: Accurate estimation of stereo camera extrinsic parameters is the key to guarantee the performance of stereo matching algorithms. In prior arts, the online self-calibration of stereo cameras has commonly been formulated as a specialized visual odometry problem, without taking into account the principles of stereo rectification. In this paper, we first delve deeply into the concept of rectifying homography, which serves as the cornerstone for the development of our novel stereo camera online self-calibration algorithm, for cases where only a single pair of images is available. Furthermore, we introduce a simple yet effective solution for global optimum extrinsic parameter estimation in the presence of stereo video sequences. Additionally, we emphasize the impracticality of using three Euler angles and three components in the translation vectors for performance quantification. Instead, we introduce four new evaluation metrics to quantify the robustness and accuracy of extrinsic parameter estimation, applicable to both single-pair and multi-pair cases. Extensive experiments conducted across indoor and outdoor environments using various experimental setups validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The comprehensive evaluation results demonstrate its superior performance in comparison to the baseline algorithm. Our source code, demo video, and supplement are publicly available at mias.group/StereoCalibrator.
Authors: Hanjiang Hu, Zuxin Liu, Linyi Li, Jiacheng Zhu, Ding Zhao
Abstract: Deep learning-based visual perception models lack robustness when faced with camera motion perturbations in practice. The current certification process for assessing robustness is costly and time-consuming due to the extensive number of image projections required for Monte Carlo sampling in the 3D camera motion space. To address these challenges, we present a novel, efficient, and practical framework for certifying the robustness of 3D-2D projective transformations against camera motion perturbations. Our approach leverages a smoothing distribution over the 2D pixel space instead of in the 3D physical space, eliminating the need for costly camera motion sampling and significantly enhancing the efficiency of robustness certifications. With the pixel-wise smoothed classifier, we are able to fully upper bound the projection errors using a technique of uniform partitioning in camera motion space. Additionally, we extend our certification framework to a more general scenario where only a single-frame point cloud is required in the projection oracle. Through extensive experimentation, we validate the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency enabled by our proposed method. Remarkably, our approach achieves approximately 80% certified accuracy while utilizing only 30% of the projected image frames. The code is available at https://github.com/HanjiangHu/pixel-wise-smoothing.
Authors: Xinhang Wan, Jiyuan Liu, Hao Yu, Ao Li, Xinwang Liu, Ke Liang, Zhibin Dong, En Zhu
Abstract: Multi-view clustering thrives in applications where views are collected in advance by extracting consistent and complementary information among views. However, it overlooks scenarios where data views are collected sequentially, i.e., real-time data. Due to privacy issues or memory burden, previous views are not available with time in these situations. Some methods are proposed to handle it but are trapped in a stability-plasticity dilemma. In specific, these methods undergo a catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge when a new view is attained. Such a catastrophic forgetting problem (CFP) would cause the consistent and complementary information hard to get and affect the clustering performance. To tackle this, we propose a novel method termed Contrastive Continual Multi-view Clustering with Filtered Structural Fusion (CCMVC-FSF). Precisely, considering that data correlations play a vital role in clustering and prior knowledge ought to guide the clustering process of a new view, we develop a data buffer with fixed size to store filtered structural information and utilize it to guide the generation of a robust partition matrix via contrastive learning. Furthermore, we theoretically connect CCMVC-FSF with semi-supervised learning and knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments exhibit the excellence of the proposed method.
Authors: Jiazhao Zhang, Nandiraju Gireesh, Jilong Wang, Xiaomeng Fang, Chaoyi Xu, Weiguang Chen, Liu Dai, He Wang
Abstract: Mobile manipulation constitutes a fundamental task for robotic assistants and garners significant attention within the robotics community. A critical challenge inherent in mobile manipulation is the effective observation of the target while approaching it for grasping. In this work, we propose a graspability-aware mobile manipulation approach powered by an online grasping pose fusion framework that enables a temporally consistent grasping observation. Specifically, the predicted grasping poses are online organized to eliminate the redundant, outlier grasping poses, which can be encoded as a grasping pose observation state for reinforcement learning. Moreover, on-the-fly fusing the grasping poses enables a direct assessment of graspability, encompassing both the quantity and quality of grasping poses.
Authors: Thanh Phuong Vu, Tien Nhat Nguyen, N. Minh Nhat Hoang, Gia Minh Hoang
Abstract: Alzheimer's disease is one of the most common types of neurodegenerative disease, characterized by the accumulation of amyloid-beta plaque and tau tangles. Recently, deep learning approaches have shown promise in Alzheimer's disease diagnosis. In this study, we propose a reproducible model that utilizes a 3D convolutional neural network with a dual attention module for Alzheimer's disease classification. We trained the model in the ADNI database and verified the generalizability of our method in two independent datasets (AIBL and OASIS1). Our method achieved state-of-the-art classification performance, with an accuracy of 91.94% for MCI progression classification and 96.30% for Alzheimer's disease classification on the ADNI dataset. Furthermore, the model demonstrated good generalizability, achieving an accuracy of 86.37% on the AIBL dataset and 83.42% on the OASIS1 dataset. These results indicate that our proposed approach has competitive performance and generalizability when compared to recent studies in the field.
Authors: Chaoquan Jiang, Jinqiang Wang, Rui Hu, Jitao Sang
Abstract: Vision models with high overall accuracy often exhibit systematic errors in specific scenarios, posing potential serious safety concerns. Diagnosing bugs of vision models is gaining increased attention, however traditional diagnostic approaches require annotation efforts (eg rich metadata accompanying each samples of CelebA). To address this issue,We propose a language-assisted diagnostic method that uses texts instead of images to diagnose bugs in vision models based on multi-modal models (eg CLIP). Our approach connects the embedding space of CLIP with the buggy vision model to be diagnosed; meanwhile, utilizing a shared classifier and the cross-modal transferability of embedding space from CLIP, the text-branch of CLIP become a proxy model to find bugs in the buggy model. The proxy model can classify texts paired with images. During the diagnosis, a Large Language Model (LLM) is employed to obtain task-relevant corpora, and this corpora is used to extract keywords. Descriptions constructed with templates containing these keywords serve as input text to probe errors in the proxy model. Finally, we validate the ability to diagnose existing visual models using language on the Waterbirds and CelebA datasets, we can identify bugs comprehensible to human experts, uncovering not only known bugs but also previously unknown ones.
Authors: Pietro Bonazzi, Yawei Li, Sizhen Bian, Michele Magno
Abstract: This paper addresses the growing interest in deploying deep learning models directly in-sensor. We present "Q-Segment", a quantized real-time segmentation algorithm, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation on a low-power edge vision platform with an in-sensors processor, the Sony IMX500. One of the main goals of the model is to achieve end-to-end image segmentation for vessel-based medical diagnosis. Deployed on the IMX500 platform, Q-Segment achieves ultra-low inference time in-sensor only 0.23 ms and power consumption of only 72mW. We compare the proposed network with state-of-the-art models, both float and quantized, demonstrating that the proposed solution outperforms existing networks on various platforms in computing efficiency, e.g., by a factor of 75x compared to ERFNet. The network employs an encoder-decoder structure with skip connections, and results in a binary accuracy of 97.25% and an Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC) of 96.97% on the CHASE dataset. We also present a comparison of the IMX500 processing core with the Sony Spresense, a low-power multi-core ARM Cortex-M microcontroller, and a single-core ARM Cortex-M4 showing that it can achieve in-sensor processing with end-to-end low latency (17 ms) and power concumption (254mW). This research contributes valuable insights into edge-based image segmentation, laying the foundation for efficient algorithms tailored to low-power environments.
Authors: Nikhil Parthasarathy, Olivier J. H\'enaff, Eero P. Simoncelli
Abstract: Human ability to recognize complex visual patterns arises through transformations performed by successive areas in the ventral visual cortex. Deep neural networks trained end-to-end for object recognition approach human capabilities, and offer the best descriptions to date of neural responses in the late stages of the hierarchy. But these networks provide a poor account of the early stages, compared to traditional hand-engineered models, or models optimized for coding efficiency or prediction. Moreover, the gradient backpropagation used in end-to-end learning is generally considered to be biologically implausible. Here, we overcome both of these limitations by developing a bottom-up self-supervised training methodology that operates independently on successive layers. Specifically, we maximize feature similarity between pairs of locally-deformed natural image patches, while decorrelating features across patches sampled from other images. Crucially, the deformation amplitudes are adjusted proportionally to receptive field sizes in each layer, thus matching the task complexity to the capacity at each stage of processing. In comparison with architecture-matched versions of previous models, we demonstrate that our layerwise complexity-matched learning (LCL) formulation produces a two-stage model (LCL-V2) that is better aligned with selectivity properties and neural activity in primate area V2. We demonstrate that the complexity-matched learning paradigm is critical for the emergence of the improved biological alignment. Finally, when the two-stage model is used as a fixed front-end for a deep network trained to perform object recognition, the resultant model (LCL-V2Net) is significantly better than standard end-to-end self-supervised, supervised, and adversarially-trained models in terms of generalization to out-of-distribution tasks and alignment with human behavior.
Authors: Jinge Wu, Yunsoo Kim, Eva C. Keller, Jamie Chow, Adam P. Levine, Nikolas Pontikos, Zina Ibrahim, Paul Taylor, Michelle C. Williams, Honghan Wu
Abstract: This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from real-world radiology datasets (including X-rays and CT scans). A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing three types of mistakes: "insert", "remove", and "substitute". The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. At the SIMPLE level, our fine-tuned model significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-ray data, respectively. This performance boost is also observed in unseen modality, CT scans, as the model performed 19.46% better than the baseline model. The model also surpassed the domain expert's accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. However, all models performed poorly in identifying mistake types, underscoring the difficulty of the COMPLEX level. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multimodal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans.
Authors: Emanuele Sansone, Robin Manhaeve
Abstract: Self-supervised learning is a popular and powerful method for utilizing large amounts of unlabeled data, for which a wide variety of training objectives have been proposed in the literature. In this study, we perform a Bayesian analysis of state-of-the-art self-supervised learning objectives, elucidating the underlying probabilistic graphical models in each class and presenting a standardized methodology for their derivation from first principles. The analysis also indicates a natural means of integrating self-supervised learning with likelihood-based generative models. We instantiate this concept within the realm of cluster-based self-supervised learning and energy models, introducing a novel lower bound which is proven to reliably penalize the most important failure modes. Furthermore, this newly proposed lower bound enables the training of a standard backbone architecture without the necessity for asymmetric elements such as stop gradients, momentum encoders, or specialized clustering layers - typically introduced to avoid learning trivial solutions. Our theoretical findings are substantiated through experiments on synthetic and real-world data, including SVHN, CIFAR10, and CIFAR100, thus showing that our objective function allows to outperform existing self-supervised learning strategies in terms of clustering, generation and out-of-distribution detection performance by a wide margin. We also demonstrate that GEDI can be integrated into a neuro-symbolic framework to mitigate the reasoning shortcut problem and to learn higher quality symbolic representations thanks to the enhanced classification performance.
Authors: Baiyang Dai, Jiamin Yang, Hari Shroff, Patrick La Riviere
Abstract: Determining cell identities in imaging sequences is an important yet challenging task. The conventional method for cell identification is via cell tracking, which is complex and can be time-consuming. In this study, we propose an innovative approach to cell identification during early $\textit{C. elegans}$ embryogenesis using machine learning. Cell identification during $\textit{C. elegans}$ embryogenesis would provide insights into neural development with implications for higher organisms including humans. We employed random forest, MLP, and LSTM models, and tested cell classification accuracy on 3D time-lapse confocal datasets spanning the first 4 hours of embryogenesis. By leveraging a small number of spatial-temporal features of individual cells, including cell trajectory and cell fate information, our models achieve an accuracy of over 91%, even with limited data. We also determine the most important feature contributions and can interpret these features in the context of biological knowledge. Our research demonstrates the success of predicting cell identities in time-lapse imaging sequences directly from simple spatio-temporal features.
Authors: Debesh Jha, Nikhil Kumar Tomar, Koushik Biswas, Gorkem Durak, Alpay Medetalibeyoglu, Matthew Antalek, Yury Velichko, Daniela Ladner, Amir Borhani, Ulas Bagci
Abstract: Accurate liver segmentation from CT scans is essential for effective diagnosis and treatment planning. Computer-aided diagnosis systems promise to improve the precision of liver disease diagnosis, disease progression, and treatment planning. In response to the need, we propose a novel deep learning approach, \textit{\textbf{PVTFormer}}, that is built upon a pretrained pyramid vision transformer (PVT v2) combined with advanced residual upsampling and decoder block. By integrating a refined feature channel approach with a hierarchical decoding strategy, PVTFormer generates high quality segmentation masks by enhancing semantic features. Rigorous evaluation of the proposed method on Liver Tumor Segmentation Benchmark (LiTS) 2017 demonstrates that our proposed architecture not only achieves a high dice coefficient of 86.78\%, mIoU of 78.46\%, but also obtains a low HD of 3.50. The results underscore PVTFormer's efficacy in setting a new benchmark for state-of-the-art liver segmentation methods. The source code of the proposed PVTFormer is available at \url{https://github.com/DebeshJha/PVTFormer}.
Authors: Fabian Bongratz, Anne-Marie Rickmann, Christian Wachinger
Abstract: 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: Iain Xie Weissburg, Mehir Arora, Xinyi Wang, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang
Abstract: As the number of accepted papers at AI and ML conferences reaches into the thousands, it has become unclear how researchers access and read research publications. In this paper, we investigate the role of social media influencers in enhancing the visibility of machine learning research, particularly the citation counts of papers they share. We have compiled a comprehensive dataset of over 8,000 papers, spanning tweets from December 2018 to October 2023, alongside controls precisely matched by 9 key covariates. Our statistical and causal inference analysis reveals a significant increase in citations for papers endorsed by these influencers, with median citation counts 2-3 times higher than those of the control group. Additionally, the study delves into the geographic, gender, and institutional diversity of highlighted authors. Given these findings, we advocate for a responsible approach to curation, encouraging influencers to uphold the journalistic standard that includes showcasing diverse research topics, authors, and institutions.
Authors: Matthew Gadd, Paul Newman
Abstract: Radar place recognition often involves encoding a live scan as a vector and matching this vector to a database in order to recognise that the vehicle is in a location that it has visited before. Radar is inherently robust to lighting or weather conditions, but place recognition with this sensor is still affected by: (1) viewpoint variation, i.e. translation and rotation, (2) sensor artefacts or "noises". For 360-degree scanning radar, rotation is readily dealt with by in some way aggregating across azimuths. Also, we argue in this work that it is more critical to deal with the richness of representation and sensor noises than it is to deal with translational invariance - particularly in urban driving where vehicles predominantly follow the same lane when repeating a route. In our method, for computational efficiency, we use only the polar representation. For partial translation invariance and robustness to signal noise, we use only a one-dimensional Fourier Transform along radial returns. We also achieve rotational invariance and a very discriminative descriptor space by building a vector of locally aggregated descriptors. Our method is more comprehensively tested than all prior radar place recognition work - over an exhaustive combination of all 870 pairs of trajectories from 30 Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset sequences (each approximately 10 km). Code and detailed results are provided at github.com/mttgdd/open-radvlad, as an open implementation and benchmark for future work in this area. We achieve a median of 91.52% in Recall@1, outstripping the 69.55% for the only other open implementation, RaPlace, and at a fraction of its computational cost (relying on fewer integral transforms e.g. Radon, Fourier, and inverse Fourier).
Authors: Yue Zhou, Chenlu Guo, Xu Wang, Yi Chang, Yuan Wu
Abstract: Large models, encompassing large language and diffusion models, have shown exceptional promise in approximating human-level intelligence, garnering significant interest from both academic and industrial spheres. However, the training of these large models necessitates vast quantities of high-quality data, and with continuous updates to these models, the existing reservoir of high-quality data may soon be depleted. This challenge has catalyzed a surge in research focused on data augmentation methods. Leveraging large models, these data augmentation techniques have outperformed traditional approaches. This paper offers an exhaustive review of large model-driven data augmentation methods, adopting a comprehensive perspective. We begin by establishing a classification of relevant studies into three main categories: image augmentation, text augmentation, and paired data augmentation. Following this, we delve into various data post-processing techniques pertinent to large model-based data augmentation. Our discussion then expands to encompass the array of applications for these data augmentation methods within natural language processing, computer vision, and audio signal processing. We proceed to evaluate the successes and limitations of large model-based data augmentation across different scenarios. Concluding our review, we highlight prospective challenges and avenues for future exploration in the field of data augmentation. Our objective is to furnish researchers with critical insights, ultimately contributing to the advancement of more sophisticated large models. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at: https://github.com/MLGroup-JLU/LLM-data-aug-survey.
Authors: Adane Nega Tarekegn, Mohib Ullah, Faouzi Alaya Cheikh
Abstract: Multi-label learning is a rapidly growing research area that aims to predict multiple labels from a single input data point. In the era of big data, tasks involving multi-label classification (MLC) or ranking present significant and intricate challenges, capturing considerable attention in diverse domains. Inherent difficulties in MLC include dealing with high-dimensional data, addressing label correlations, and handling partial labels, for which conventional methods prove ineffective. Recent years have witnessed a notable increase in adopting deep learning (DL) techniques to address these challenges more effectively in MLC. Notably, there is a burgeoning effort to harness the robust learning capabilities of DL for improved modelling of label dependencies and other challenges in MLC. However, it is noteworthy that comprehensive studies specifically dedicated to DL for multi-label learning are limited. Thus, this survey aims to thoroughly review recent progress in DL for multi-label learning, along with a summary of open research problems in MLC. The review consolidates existing research efforts in DL for MLC,including deep neural networks, transformers, autoencoders, and convolutional and recurrent architectures. Finally, the study presents a comparative analysis of the existing methods to provide insightful observations and stimulate future research directions in this domain.
Authors: Yinghao Song, Zhiyuan Cao, Wanhong Xiang, Sifan Long, Bo Yang, Hongwei Ge, Yanchun Liang, Chunguo Wu
Abstract: Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) restores the color and brightness of underexposed images. Supervised methods suffer from high costs in collecting low/normal-light image pairs. Unsupervised methods invest substantial effort in crafting complex loss functions. We address these two challenges through the proposed TroubleMaker Learning (TML) strategy, which employs normal-light images as inputs for training. TML is simple: we first dim the input and then increase its brightness. TML is based on two core components. First, the troublemaker model (TM) constructs pseudo low-light images from normal images to relieve the cost of pairwise data. Second, the predicting model (PM) enhances the brightness of pseudo low-light images. Additionally, we incorporate an enhancing model (EM) to further improve the visual performance of PM outputs. Moreover, in LLIE tasks, characterizing global element correlations is important because more information on the same object can be captured. CNN cannot achieve this well, and self-attention has high time complexity. Accordingly, we propose Global Dynamic Convolution (GDC) with O(n) time complexity, which essentially imitates the partial calculation process of self-attention to formulate elementwise correlations. Based on the GDC module, we build the UGDC model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that UGDC trained with TML can achieve competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches on public datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Rainbowman0/TML_LLIE.
Authors: Jiajun Zeng, Dong Ni, Ruobing Huang
Abstract: Breast lesion segmentation from breast ultrasound (BUS) videos could assist in early diagnosis and treatment. Existing video object segmentation (VOS) methods usually require dense annotation, which is often inaccessible for medical datasets. Furthermore, they suffer from accumulative errors and a lack of explicit space-time awareness. In this work, we propose a novel two-shot training paradigm for BUS video segmentation. It not only is able to capture free-range space-time consistency but also utilizes a source-dependent augmentation scheme. This label-efficient learning framework is validated on a challenging in-house BUS video dataset. Results showed that it gained comparable performance to the fully annotated ones given only 1.9% training labels.
Authors: Haoyu Li, Hao Wu, Badong Chen
Abstract: Reconstructing visual stimuli from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) based on Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) provides a fine-grained retrieval of the brain. A challenge persists in reconstructing a cohesive alignment of details (such as structure, background, texture, color, etc.). Moreover, LDMs would generate different image results even under the same conditions. For these, we first uncover the neuroscientific perspective of LDM-based methods that is top-down creation based on pre-trained knowledge from massive images but lack of detail-driven bottom-up perception resulting in unfaithful details. We propose NeuralDiffuser which introduces primary visual feature guidance to provide detail cues in the form of gradients, extending the bottom-up process for LDM-based methods to achieve faithful semantics and details. We also developed a novel guidance strategy to ensure the consistency of repeated reconstructions rather than a variety of results. We obtain the state-of-the-art performance of NeuralDiffuser on the Natural Senses Dataset (NSD), which offers more faithful details and consistent results.
Authors: Jun Wang, Yuzhe Qin, Kaiming Kuang, Yigit Korkmaz, Akhilan Gurumoorthy, Hao Su, Xiaolong Wang
Abstract: We introduce CyberDemo, a novel approach to robotic imitation learning that leverages simulated human demonstrations for real-world tasks. By incorporating extensive data augmentation in a simulated environment, CyberDemo outperforms traditional in-domain real-world demonstrations when transferred to the real world, handling diverse physical and visual conditions. Regardless of its affordability and convenience in data collection, CyberDemo outperforms baseline methods in terms of success rates across various tasks and exhibits generalizability with previously unseen objects. For example, it can rotate novel tetra-valve and penta-valve, despite human demonstrations only involving tri-valves. Our research demonstrates the significant potential of simulated human demonstrations for real-world dexterous manipulation tasks. More details can be found at https://cyber-demo.github.io
Authors: Antonio Sclocchi, Alessandro Favero, Matthieu Wyart
Abstract: Understanding the structure of real data is paramount in advancing modern deep-learning methodologies. Natural data such as images are believed to be composed of features organised in a hierarchical and combinatorial manner, which neural networks capture during learning. Recent advancements show that diffusion models can generate high-quality images, hinting at their ability to capture this underlying structure. We study this phenomenon in a hierarchical generative model of data. We find that the backward diffusion process acting after a time $t$ is governed by a phase transition at some threshold time, where the probability of reconstructing high-level features, like the class of an image, suddenly drops. Instead, the reconstruction of low-level features, such as specific details of an image, evolves smoothly across the whole diffusion process. This result implies that at times beyond the transition, the class has changed but the generated sample may still be composed of low-level elements of the initial image. We validate these theoretical insights through numerical experiments on class-unconditional ImageNet diffusion models. Our analysis characterises the relationship between time and scale in diffusion models and puts forward generative models as powerful tools to model combinatorial data properties.
Authors: Xin Wang, Shu Hu, Heng Fan, Hongtu Zhu, Xin Li
Abstract: Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), as a pioneering technique in computer vision, offer great potential to revolutionize medical imaging by synthesizing three-dimensional representations from the projected two-dimensional image data. However, they face unique challenges when applied to medical applications. This paper presents a comprehensive examination of applications of NeRFs in medical imaging, highlighting four imminent challenges, including fundamental imaging principles, inner structure requirement, object boundary definition, and color density significance. We discuss current methods on different organs and discuss related limitations. We also review several datasets and evaluation metrics and propose several promising directions for future research.
Authors: Jonas Frey, Shehryar Khattak, Manthan Patel, Deegan Atha, Julian Nubert, Curtis Padgett, Marco Hutter, Patrick Spieler
Abstract: Autonomous navigation at high speeds in off-road environments necessitates robots to comprehensively understand their surroundings using onboard sensing only. The extreme conditions posed by the off-road setting can cause degraded camera image quality due to poor lighting and motion blur, as well as limited sparse geometric information available from LiDAR sensing when driving at high speeds. In this work, we present RoadRunner, a novel framework capable of predicting terrain traversability and an elevation map directly from camera and LiDAR sensor inputs. RoadRunner enables reliable autonomous navigation, by fusing sensory information, handling of uncertainty, and generation of contextually informed predictions about the geometry and traversability of the terrain while operating at low latency. In contrast to existing methods relying on classifying handcrafted semantic classes and using heuristics to predict traversability costs, our method is trained end-to-end in a self-supervised fashion. The RoadRunner network architecture builds upon popular sensor fusion network architectures from the autonomous driving domain, which embed LiDAR and camera information into a common Bird's Eye View perspective. Training is enabled by utilizing an existing traversability estimation stack to generate training data in hindsight in a scalable manner from real-world off-road driving datasets. Furthermore, RoadRunner improves the system latency by a factor of roughly 4, from 500 ms to 140 ms, while improving the accuracy for traversability costs and elevation map predictions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RoadRunner in enabling safe and reliable off-road navigation at high speeds in multiple real-world driving scenarios through unstructured desert environments.