new Focus on Low-Resolution Information: Multi-Granular Information-Lossless Model for Low-Resolution Human Pose Estimation

Authors: Zejun Gu, Zhong-Qiu Zhao, Hao Shen, Zhao Zhang

Abstract: In real-world applications of human pose estimation, low-resolution input images are frequently encountered when the performance of the image acquisition equipment is limited or the shooting distance is too far. However, existing state-of-the-art models for human pose estimation perform poorly on low-resolution images. One key reason is the presence of downsampling layers in these models, e.g., strided convolutions and pooling layers. It further reduces the already insufficient image information. Another key reason is that the body skeleton and human kinematic information are not fully utilized. In this work, we propose a Multi-Granular Information-Lossless (MGIL) model to replace the downsampling layers to address the above issues. Specifically, MGIL employs a Fine-grained Lossless Information Extraction (FLIE) module, which can prevent the loss of local information. Furthermore, we design a Coarse-grained Information Interaction (CII) module to adequately leverage human body structural information. To efficiently fuse cross-granular information and thoroughly exploit the relationships among keypoints, we further introduce a Multi-Granular Adaptive Fusion (MGAF) mechanism. The mechanism assigns weights to features of different granularities based on the content of the image. The model is effective, flexible, and universal. We show its potential in various vision tasks with comprehensive experiments. It outperforms the SOTA methods by 7.7 mAP on COCO and performs well with different input resolutions, different backbones, and different vision tasks. The code is provided in supplementary material.

new Deep learning-based hyperspectral image reconstruction for quality assessment of agro-product

Authors: Md. Toukir Ahmed, Ocean Monjur, Mohammed Kamruzzaman

Abstract: Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has recently emerged as a promising tool for many agricultural applications; however, the technology cannot be directly used in a real-time system due to the extensive time needed to process large volumes of data. Consequently, the development of a simple, compact, and cost-effective imaging system is not possible with the current HSI systems. Therefore, the overall goal of this study was to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images through deep learning for agricultural applications. Specifically, this study used Hyperspectral Convolutional Neural Network - Dense (HSCNN-D) to reconstruct hyperspectral images from RGB images for predicting soluble solid content (SSC) in sweet potatoes. The algorithm accurately reconstructed the hyperspectral images from RGB images, with the resulting spectra closely matching the ground-truth. The partial least squares regression (PLSR) model based on reconstructed spectra outperformed the model using the full spectral range, demonstrating its potential for SSC prediction in sweet potatoes. These findings highlight the potential of deep learning-based hyperspectral image reconstruction as a low-cost, efficient tool for various agricultural uses.

new Multi-dimension Transformer with Attention-based Filtering for Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Wentao Wang, Xi Xiao, Mingjie Liu, Qing Tian, Xuanyao Huang, Qizhen Lan, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Tianyang Wang

Abstract: The accurate segmentation of medical images is crucial for diagnosing and treating diseases. Recent studies demonstrate that vision transformer-based methods have significantly improved performance in medical image segmentation, primarily due to their superior ability to establish global relationships among features and adaptability to various inputs. However, these methods struggle with the low signal-to-noise ratio inherent to medical images. Additionally, the effective utilization of channel and spatial information, which are essential for medical image segmentation, is limited by the representation capacity of self-attention. To address these challenges, we propose a multi-dimension transformer with attention-based filtering (MDT-AF), which redesigns the patch embedding and self-attention mechanism for medical image segmentation. MDT-AF incorporates an attention-based feature filtering mechanism into the patch embedding blocks and employs a coarse-to-fine process to mitigate the impact of low signal-to-noise ratio. To better capture complex structures in medical images, MDT-AF extends the self-attention mechanism to incorporate spatial and channel dimensions, enriching feature representation. Moreover, we introduce an interaction mechanism to improve the feature aggregation between spatial and channel dimensions. Experimental results on three public medical image segmentation benchmarks show that MDT-AF achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance.

new AtomGS: Atomizing Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity Radiance Field

Authors: Rong Liu, Rui Xu, Yue Hu, Meida Chen, Andrew Feng

Abstract: 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently advanced radiance field reconstruction by offering superior capabilities for novel view synthesis and real-time rendering speed. However, its strategy of blending optimization and adaptive density control might lead to sub-optimal results; it can sometimes yield noisy geometry and blurry artifacts due to prioritizing optimizing large Gaussians at the cost of adequately densifying smaller ones. To address this, we introduce AtomGS, consisting of Atomized Proliferation and Geometry-Guided Optimization. The Atomized Proliferation constrains ellipsoid Gaussians of various sizes into more uniform-sized Atom Gaussians. The strategy enhances the representation of areas with fine features by placing greater emphasis on densification in accordance with scene details. In addition, we proposed a Geometry-Guided Optimization approach that incorporates an Edge-Aware Normal Loss. This optimization method effectively smooths flat surfaces while preserving intricate details. Our evaluation shows that AtomGS outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality. Additionally, it achieves competitive accuracy in geometry reconstruction and offers a significant improvement in training speed over other SDF-based methods. More interactive demos can be found in our website (\href{https://rongliu-leo.github.io/AtomGS/}{https://rongliu-leo.github.io/AtomGS/}).

URLs: https://rongliu-leo.github.io/AtomGS/, https://rongliu-leo.github.io/AtomGS/

new GeoMask3D: Geometrically Informed Mask Selection for Self-Supervised Point Cloud Learning in 3D

Authors: Ali Bahri, Moslem Yazdanpanah, Mehrdad Noori, Milad Cheraghalikhani, Gustavo Adolfo Vargas Hakim, David Osowiechi, Farzad Beizaee, Ismail Ben Ayed, Christian Desrosiers

Abstract: We introduce a pioneering approach to self-supervised learning for point clouds, employing a geometrically informed mask selection strategy called GeoMask3D (GM3D) to boost the efficiency of Masked Auto Encoders (MAE). Unlike the conventional method of random masking, our technique utilizes a teacher-student model to focus on intricate areas within the data, guiding the model's focus toward regions with higher geometric complexity. This strategy is grounded in the hypothesis that concentrating on harder patches yields a more robust feature representation, as evidenced by the improved performance on downstream tasks. Our method also presents a complete-to-partial feature-level knowledge distillation technique designed to guide the prediction of geometric complexity utilizing a comprehensive context from feature-level information. Extensive experiments confirm our method's superiority over State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) baselines, demonstrating marked improvements in classification, and few-shot tasks.

new GarmentDreamer: 3DGS Guided Garment Synthesis with Diverse Geometry and Texture Details

Authors: Boqian Li, Xuan Li, Ying Jiang, Tianyi Xie, Feng Gao, Huamin Wang, Yin Yang, Chenfanfu Jiang

Abstract: Traditional 3D garment creation is labor-intensive, involving sketching, modeling, UV mapping, and texturing, which are time-consuming and costly. Recent advances in diffusion-based generative models have enabled new possibilities for 3D garment generation from text prompts, images, and videos. However, existing methods either suffer from inconsistencies among multi-view images or require additional processes to separate cloth from the underlying human model. In this paper, we propose GarmentDreamer, a novel method that leverages 3D Gaussian Splatting (GS) as guidance to generate wearable, simulation-ready 3D garment meshes from text prompts. In contrast to using multi-view images directly predicted by generative models as guidance, our 3DGS guidance ensures consistent optimization in both garment deformation and texture synthesis. Our method introduces a novel garment augmentation module, guided by normal and RGBA information, and employs implicit Neural Texture Fields (NeTF) combined with Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) to generate diverse geometric and texture details. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through comprehensive qualitative and quantitative experiments, showcasing the superior performance of GarmentDreamer over state-of-the-art alternatives. Our project page is available at: https://xuan-li.github.io/GarmentDreamerDemo/.

URLs: https://xuan-li.github.io/GarmentDreamerDemo/.

new EPL: Empirical Prototype Learning for Deep Face Recognition

Authors: Weijia Fan, Jiajun Wen, Xi Jia, Linlin Shen, Jiancan Zhou, Qiufu Li

Abstract: Prototype learning is widely used in face recognition, which takes the row vectors of coefficient matrix in the last linear layer of the feature extraction model as the prototypes for each class. When the prototypes are updated using the facial sample feature gradients in the model training, they are prone to being pulled away from the class center by the hard samples, resulting in decreased overall model performance. In this paper, we explicitly define prototypes as the expectations of sample features in each class and design the empirical prototypes using the existing samples in the dataset. We then devise a strategy to adaptively update these empirical prototypes during the model training based on the similarity between the sample features and the empirical prototypes. Furthermore, we propose an empirical prototype learning (EPL) method, which utilizes an adaptive margin parameter with respect to sample features. EPL assigns larger margins to the normal samples and smaller margins to the hard samples, allowing the learned empirical prototypes to better reflect the class center dominated by the normal samples and finally pull the hard samples towards the empirical prototypes through the learning. The extensive experiments on MFR, IJB-C, LFW, CFP-FP, AgeDB, and MegaFace demonstrate the effectiveness of EPL. Our code is available at $\href{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}{https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL}$.

URLs: https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL, https://github.com/WakingHours-GitHub/EPL

new Physics-based Scene Layout Generation from Human Motion

Authors: Jianan Li, Tao Huang, Qingxu Zhu, Tien-Tsin Wong

Abstract: Creating scenes for captured motions that achieve realistic human-scene interaction is crucial for 3D animation in movies or video games. As character motion is often captured in a blue-screened studio without real furniture or objects in place, there may be a discrepancy between the planned motion and the captured one. This gives rise to the need for automatic scene layout generation to relieve the burdens of selecting and positioning furniture and objects. Previous approaches cannot avoid artifacts like penetration and floating due to the lack of physical constraints. Furthermore, some heavily rely on specific data to learn the contact affordances, restricting the generalization ability to different motions. In this work, we present a physics-based approach that simultaneously optimizes a scene layout generator and simulates a moving human in a physics simulator. To attain plausible and realistic interaction motions, our method explicitly introduces physical constraints. To automatically recover and generate the scene layout, we minimize the motion tracking errors to identify the objects that can afford interaction. We use reinforcement learning to perform a dual-optimization of both the character motion imitation controller and the scene layout generator. To facilitate the optimization, we reshape the tracking rewards and devise pose prior guidance obtained from our estimated pseudo-contact labels. We evaluate our method using motions from SAMP and PROX, and demonstrate physically plausible scene layout reconstruction compared with the previous kinematics-based method.

new WorldAfford: Affordance Grounding based on Natural Language Instructions

Authors: Changmao Chen, Yuren Cong, Zhen Kan

Abstract: Affordance grounding aims to localize the interaction regions for the manipulated objects in the scene image according to given instructions. A critical challenge in affordance grounding is that the embodied agent should understand human instructions and analyze which tools in the environment can be used, as well as how to use these tools to accomplish the instructions. Most recent works primarily supports simple action labels as input instructions for localizing affordance regions, failing to capture complex human objectives. Moreover, these approaches typically identify affordance regions of only a single object in object-centric images, ignoring the object context and struggling to localize affordance regions of multiple objects in complex scenes for practical applications. To address this concern, for the first time, we introduce a new task of affordance grounding based on natural language instructions, extending it from previously using simple labels for complex human instructions. For this new task, we propose a new framework, WorldAfford. We design a novel Affordance Reasoning Chain-of-Thought Prompting to reason about affordance knowledge from LLMs more precisely and logically. Subsequently, we use SAM and CLIP to localize the objects related to the affordance knowledge in the image. We identify the affordance regions of the objects through an affordance region localization module. To benchmark this new task and validate our framework, an affordance grounding dataset, LLMaFF, is constructed. We conduct extensive experiments to verify that WorldAfford performs state-of-the-art on both the previous AGD20K and the new LLMaFF dataset. In particular, WorldAfford can localize the affordance regions of multiple objects and provide an alternative when objects in the environment cannot fully match the given instruction.

new Benchmarking Fish Dataset and Evaluation Metric in Keypoint Detection - Towards Precise Fish Morphological Assessment in Aquaculture Breeding

Authors: Weizhen Liu, Jiayu Tan, Guangyu Lan, Ao Li, Dongye Li, Le Zhao, Xiaohui Yuan, Nanqing Dong

Abstract: Accurate phenotypic analysis in aquaculture breeding necessitates the quantification of subtle morphological phenotypes. Existing datasets suffer from limitations such as small scale, limited species coverage, and inadequate annotation of keypoints for measuring refined and complex morphological phenotypes of fish body parts. To address this gap, we introduce FishPhenoKey, a comprehensive dataset comprising 23,331 high-resolution images spanning six fish species. Notably, FishPhenoKey includes 22 phenotype-oriented annotations, enabling the capture of intricate morphological phenotypes. Motivated by the nuanced evaluation of these subtle morphologies, we also propose a new evaluation metric, Percentage of Measured Phenotype (PMP). It is designed to assess the accuracy of individual keypoint positions and is highly sensitive to the phenotypes measured using the corresponding keypoints. To enhance keypoint detection accuracy, we further propose a novel loss, Anatomically-Calibrated Regularization (ACR), that can be integrated into keypoint detection models, leveraging biological insights to refine keypoint localization. Our contributions set a new benchmark in fish phenotype analysis, addressing the challenges of precise morphological quantification and opening new avenues for research in sustainable aquaculture and genetic studies. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/WeizhenLiuBioinform/Fish-Phenotype-Detect.

URLs: https://github.com/WeizhenLiuBioinform/Fish-Phenotype-Detect.

new Gaussian Control with Hierarchical Semantic Graphs in 3D Human Recovery

Authors: Hongsheng Wang, Weiyue Zhang, Sihao Liu, Xinrui Zhou, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu, Feng Lin

Abstract: Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently made progress in 3D human reconstruction, it primarily relies on 2D pixel-level supervision, overlooking the geometric complexity and topological relationships of different body parts. To address this gap, we introduce the Hierarchical Graph Human Gaussian Control (HUGS) framework for achieving high-fidelity 3D human reconstruction. Our approach involves leveraging explicitly semantic priors of body parts to ensure the consistency of geometric topology, thereby enabling the capture of the complex geometrical and topological associations among body parts. Additionally, we disentangle high-frequency features from global human features to refine surface details in body parts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method exhibits superior performance in human body reconstruction, particularly in enhancing surface details and accurately reconstructing body part junctions. Codes are available at https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/HUGS/.

URLs: https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/HUGS/.

new 3DSS-Mamba: 3D-Spectral-Spatial Mamba for Hyperspectral Image Classification

Authors: Yan He, Bing Tu, Bo Liu, Jun Li, Antonio Plaza

Abstract: Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification constitutes the fundamental research in remote sensing fields. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformers have demonstrated impressive capability in capturing spectral-spatial contextual dependencies. However, these architectures suffer from limited receptive fields and quadratic computational complexity, respectively. Fortunately, recent Mamba architectures built upon the State Space Model integrate the advantages of long-range sequence modeling and linear computational efficiency, exhibiting substantial potential in low-dimensional scenarios. Motivated by this, we propose a novel 3D-Spectral-Spatial Mamba (3DSS-Mamba) framework for HSI classification, allowing for global spectral-spatial relationship modeling with greater computational efficiency. Technically, a spectral-spatial token generation (SSTG) module is designed to convert the HSI cube into a set of 3D spectral-spatial tokens. To overcome the limitations of traditional Mamba, which is confined to modeling causal sequences and inadaptable to high-dimensional scenarios, a 3D-Spectral-Spatial Selective Scanning (3DSS) mechanism is introduced, which performs pixel-wise selective scanning on 3D hyperspectral tokens along the spectral and spatial dimensions. Five scanning routes are constructed to investigate the impact of dimension prioritization. The 3DSS scanning mechanism combined with conventional mapping operations forms the 3D-spectral-spatial mamba block (3DMB), enabling the extraction of global spectral-spatial semantic representations. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on HSI classification benchmarks.

new Customize Your Own Paired Data via Few-shot Way

Authors: Jinshu Chen, Bingchuan Li, Miao Hua, Panpan Xu, Qian He

Abstract: Existing solutions to image editing tasks suffer from several issues. Though achieving remarkably satisfying generated results, some supervised methods require huge amounts of paired training data, which greatly limits their usages. The other unsupervised methods take full advantage of large-scale pre-trained priors, thus being strictly restricted to the domains where the priors are trained on and behaving badly in out-of-distribution cases. The task we focus on is how to enable the users to customize their desired effects through only few image pairs. In our proposed framework, a novel few-shot learning mechanism based on the directional transformations among samples is introduced and expands the learnable space exponentially. Adopting a diffusion model pipeline, we redesign the condition calculating modules in our model and apply several technical improvements. Experimental results demonstrate the capabilities of our method in various cases.

new CLRKDNet: Speeding up Lane Detection with Knowledge Distillation

Authors: Weiqing Qi, Guoyang Zhao, Fulong Ma, Linwei Zheng, Ming Liu

Abstract: Road lanes are integral components of the visual perception systems in intelligent vehicles, playing a pivotal role in safe navigation. In lane detection tasks, balancing accuracy with real-time performance is essential, yet existing methods often sacrifice one for the other. To address this trade-off, we introduce CLRKDNet, a streamlined model that balances detection accuracy with real-time performance. The state-of-the-art model CLRNet has demonstrated exceptional performance across various datasets, yet its computational overhead is substantial due to its Feature Pyramid Network (FPN) and muti-layer detection head architecture. Our method simplifies both the FPN structure and detection heads, redesigning them to incorporate a novel teacher-student distillation process alongside a newly introduced series of distillation losses. This combination reduces inference time by up to 60% while maintaining detection accuracy comparable to CLRNet. This strategic balance of accuracy and speed makes CLRKDNet a viable solution for real-time lane detection tasks in autonomous driving applications.

new NOVA-3D: Non-overlapped Views for 3D Anime Character Reconstruction

Authors: Hongsheng Wang, Nanjie Yao, Xinrui Zhou, Shengyu Zhang, Huahao Xu, Fei Wu, Feng Lin

Abstract: In the animation industry, 3D modelers typically rely on front and back non-overlapped concept designs to guide the 3D modeling of anime characters. However, there is currently a lack of automated approaches for generating anime characters directly from these 2D designs. In light of this, we explore a novel task of reconstructing anime characters from non-overlapped views. This presents two main challenges: existing multi-view approaches cannot be directly applied due to the absence of overlapping regions, and there is a scarcity of full-body anime character data and standard benchmarks. To bridge the gap, we present Non-Overlapped Views for 3D \textbf{A}nime Character Reconstruction (NOVA-3D), a new framework that implements a method for view-aware feature fusion to learn 3D-consistent features effectively and synthesizes full-body anime characters from non-overlapped front and back views directly. To facilitate this line of research, we collected the NOVA-Human dataset, which comprises multi-view images and accurate camera parameters for 3D anime characters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms baseline approaches, achieving superior reconstruction of anime characters with exceptional detail fidelity. In addition, to further verify the effectiveness of our method, we applied it to the animation head reconstruction task and improved the state-of-the-art baseline to 94.453 in SSIM, 7.726 in LPIPS, and 19.575 in PSNR on average. Codes and datasets are available at https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/NOVA-3D/.

URLs: https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/NOVA-3D/.

new Active Object Detection with Knowledge Aggregation and Distillation from Large Models

Authors: Dejie Yang, Yang Liu

Abstract: Accurately detecting active objects undergoing state changes is essential for comprehending human interactions and facilitating decision-making. The existing methods for active object detection (AOD) primarily rely on visual appearance of the objects within input, such as changes in size, shape and relationship with hands. However, these visual changes can be subtle, posing challenges, particularly in scenarios with multiple distracting no-change instances of the same category. We observe that the state changes are often the result of an interaction being performed upon the object, thus propose to use informed priors about object related plausible interactions (including semantics and visual appearance) to provide more reliable cues for AOD. Specifically, we propose a knowledge aggregation procedure to integrate the aforementioned informed priors into oracle queries within the teacher decoder, offering more object affordance commonsense to locate the active object. To streamline the inference process and reduce extra knowledge inputs, we propose a knowledge distillation approach that encourages the student decoder to mimic the detection capabilities of the teacher decoder using the oracle query by replicating its predictions and attention. Our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets, namely Ego4D, Epic-Kitchens, MECCANO, and 100DOH, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in improving AOD.

new Rethink Predicting the Optical Flow with the Kinetics Perspective

Authors: Yuhao Cheng, Siru Zhang, Yiqiang Yan

Abstract: Optical flow estimation is one of the fundamental tasks in low-level computer vision, which describes the pixel-wise displacement and can be used in many other tasks. From the apparent aspect, the optical flow can be viewed as the correlation between the pixels in consecutive frames, so continuously refining the correlation volume can achieve an outstanding performance. However, it will make the method have a catastrophic computational complexity. Not only that, the error caused by the occlusion regions of the successive frames will be amplified through the inaccurate warp operation. These challenges can not be solved only from the apparent view, so this paper rethinks the optical flow estimation from the kinetics viewpoint.We propose a method combining the apparent and kinetics information from this motivation. The proposed method directly predicts the optical flow from the feature extracted from images instead of building the correlation volume, which will improve the efficiency of the whole network. Meanwhile, the proposed method involves a new differentiable warp operation that simultaneously considers the warping and occlusion. Moreover, the proposed method blends the kinetics feature with the apparent feature through the novel self-supervised loss function. Furthermore, comprehensive experiments and ablation studies prove that the proposed novel insight into how to predict the optical flow can achieve the better performance of the state-of-the-art methods, and in some metrics, the proposed method outperforms the correlation-based method, especially in situations containing occlusion and fast moving. The code will be public.

new Single Image Unlearning: Efficient Machine Unlearning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors: Jiaqi Li, Qianshan Wei, Chuanyi Zhang, Guilin Qi, Miaozeng Du, Yongrui Chen, Sheng Bi

Abstract: Machine unlearning empowers individuals with the `right to be forgotten' by removing their private or sensitive information encoded in machine learning models. However, it remains uncertain whether MU can be effectively applied to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), particularly in scenarios of forgetting the leaked visual data of concepts. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient method, Single Image Unlearning (SIU), to unlearn the visual recognition of a concept by fine-tuning a single associated image for few steps. SIU consists of two key aspects: (i) Constructing Multifaceted fine-tuning data. We introduce four targets, based on which we construct fine-tuning data for the concepts to be forgotten; (ii) Jointly training loss. To synchronously forget the visual recognition of concepts and preserve the utility of MLLMs, we fine-tune MLLMs through a novel Dual Masked KL-divergence Loss combined with Cross Entropy loss. Alongside our method, we establish MMUBench, a new benchmark for MU in MLLMs and introduce a collection of metrics for its evaluation. Experimental results on MMUBench show that SIU completely surpasses the performance of existing methods. Furthermore, we surprisingly find that SIU can avoid invasive membership inference attacks and jailbreak attacks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to explore MU in MLLMs. We will release the code and benchmark in the near future.

new CustomText: Customized Textual Image Generation using Diffusion Models

Authors: Shubham Paliwal, Arushi Jain, Monika Sharma, Vikram Jamwal, Lovekesh Vig

Abstract: Textual image generation spans diverse fields like advertising, education, product packaging, social media, information visualization, and branding. Despite recent strides in language-guided image synthesis using diffusion models, current models excel in image generation but struggle with accurate text rendering and offer limited control over font attributes. In this paper, we aim to enhance the synthesis of high-quality images with precise text customization, thereby contributing to the advancement of image generation models. We call our proposed method CustomText. Our implementation leverages a pre-trained TextDiffuser model to enable control over font color, background, and types. Additionally, to address the challenge of accurately rendering small-sized fonts, we train the ControlNet model for a consistency decoder, significantly enhancing text-generation performance. We assess the performance of CustomText in comparison to previous methods of textual image generation on the publicly available CTW-1500 dataset and a self-curated dataset for small-text generation, showcasing superior results.

new Dataset and Benchmark for Urdu Natural Scenes Text Detection, Recognition and Visual Question Answering

Authors: Hiba Maryam, Ling Fu, Jiajun Song, Tajrian ABM Shafayet, Qidi Luo, Xiang Bai, Yuliang Liu

Abstract: The development of Urdu scene text detection, recognition, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) technologies is crucial for advancing accessibility, information retrieval, and linguistic diversity in digital content, facilitating better understanding and interaction with Urdu-language visual data. This initiative seeks to bridge the gap between textual and visual comprehension. We propose a new multi-task Urdu scene text dataset comprising over 1000 natural scene images, which can be used for text detection, recognition, and VQA tasks. We provide fine-grained annotations for text instances, addressing the limitations of previous datasets for facing arbitrary-shaped texts. By incorporating additional annotation points, this dataset facilitates the development and assessment of methods that can handle diverse text layouts, intricate shapes, and non-standard orientations commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. Besides, the VQA annotations make it the first benchmark for the Urdu Text VQA method, which can prompt the development of Urdu scene text understanding. The proposed dataset is available at: https://github.com/Hiba-MeiRuan/Urdu-VQA-Dataset-/tree/main

URLs: https://github.com/Hiba-MeiRuan/Urdu-VQA-Dataset-/tree/main

new Bridging the Intent Gap: Knowledge-Enhanced Visual Generation

Authors: Yi Cheng, Ziwei Xu, Dongyun Lin, Harry Cheng, Yongkang Wong, Ying Sun, Joo Hwee Lim, Mohan Kankanhalli

Abstract: For visual content generation, discrepancies between user intentions and the generated content have been a longstanding problem. This discrepancy arises from two main factors. First, user intentions are inherently complex, with subtle details not fully captured by input prompts. The absence of such details makes it challenging for generative models to accurately reflect the intended meaning, leading to a mismatch between the desired and generated output. Second, generative models trained on visual-label pairs lack the comprehensive knowledge to accurately represent all aspects of the input data in their generated outputs. To address these challenges, we propose a knowledge-enhanced iterative refinement framework for visual content generation. We begin by analyzing and identifying the key challenges faced by existing generative models. Then, we introduce various knowledge sources, including human insights, pre-trained models, logic rules, and world knowledge, which can be leveraged to address these challenges. Furthermore, we propose a novel visual generation framework that incorporates a knowledge-based feedback module to iteratively refine the generation process. This module gradually improves the alignment between the generated content and user intentions. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework through preliminary results, highlighting the potential of knowledge-enhanced generative models for intention-aligned content generation.

new Context-Enhanced Video Moment Retrieval with Large Language Models

Authors: Weijia Liu, Bo Miao, Jiuxin Cao, Xuelin Zhu, Bo Liu, Mehwish Nasim, Ajmal Mian

Abstract: Current methods for Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) struggle to align complex situations involving specific environmental details, character descriptions, and action narratives. To tackle this issue, we propose a Large Language Model-guided Moment Retrieval (LMR) approach that employs the extensive knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve video context representation as well as cross-modal alignment, facilitating accurate localization of target moments. Specifically, LMR introduces a context enhancement technique with LLMs to generate crucial target-related context semantics. These semantics are integrated with visual features for producing discriminative video representations. Finally, a language-conditioned transformer is designed to decode free-form language queries, on the fly, using aligned video representations for moment retrieval. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LMR achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming the nearest competitor by up to 3.28\% and 4.06\% on the challenging QVHighlights and Charades-STA benchmarks, respectively. More importantly, the performance gains are significantly higher for localization of complex queries.

new Like Humans to Few-Shot Learning through Knowledge Permeation of Vision and Text

Authors: Yuyu Jia, Qing Zhou, Wei Huang, Junyu Gao, Qi Wang

Abstract: Few-shot learning aims to generalize the recognizer from seen categories to an entirely novel scenario. With only a few support samples, several advanced methods initially introduce class names as prior knowledge for identifying novel classes. However, obstacles still impede achieving a comprehensive understanding of how to harness the mutual advantages of visual and textual knowledge. In this paper, we propose a coherent Bidirectional Knowledge Permeation strategy called BiKop, which is grounded in a human intuition: A class name description offers a general representation, whereas an image captures the specificity of individuals. BiKop primarily establishes a hierarchical joint general-specific representation through bidirectional knowledge permeation. On the other hand, considering the bias of joint representation towards the base set, we disentangle base-class-relevant semantics during training, thereby alleviating the suppression of potential novel-class-relevant information. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks demonstrate the remarkable superiority of BiKop. Our code will be publicly available.

new Online Signature Recognition: A Biologically Inspired Feature Vector Splitting Approach

Authors: Marcos Faundez, Moises Diaz, Miguel Angel Ferrer

Abstract: This research introduces an innovative approach to explore the cognitive and biologically inspired underpinnings of feature vector splitting for analyzing the significance of different attributes in e-security biometric signature recognition applications. Departing from traditional methods of concatenating features into an extended set, we employ multiple splitting strategies, aligning with cognitive principles, to preserve control over the relative importance of each feature subset. Our methodology is applied to three diverse databases (MCYT100, MCYT300,and SVC) using two classifiers (vector quantization and dynamic time warping with one and five training samples). Experimentation demonstrates that the fusion of pressure data with spatial coordinates (x and y) consistently enhances performance. However, the inclusion of pen-tip angles in the same feature set yields mixed results, with performance improvements observed in select cases. This work delves into the cognitive aspects of feature fusion,shedding light on the cognitive relevance of feature vector splitting in e-security biometric applications.

new FFAM: Feature Factorization Activation Map for Explanation of 3D Detectors

Authors: Shuai Liu, Boyang Li, Zhiyu Fang, Mingyue Cui, Kai Huang

Abstract: LiDAR-based 3D object detection has made impressive progress recently, yet most existing models are black-box, lacking interpretability. Previous explanation approaches primarily focus on analyzing image-based models and are not readily applicable to LiDAR-based 3D detectors. In this paper, we propose a feature factorization activation map (FFAM) to generate high-quality visual explanations for 3D detectors. FFAM employs non-negative matrix factorization to generate concept activation maps and subsequently aggregates these maps to obtain a global visual explanation. To achieve object-specific visual explanations, we refine the global visual explanation using the feature gradient of a target object. Additionally, we introduce a voxel upsampling strategy to align the scale between the activation map and input point cloud. We qualitatively and quantitatively analyze FFAM with multiple detectors on several datasets. Experimental results validate the high-quality visual explanations produced by FFAM. The Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Say2L/FFAM.git}.

URLs: https://github.com/Say2L/FFAM.git

new S3O: A Dual-Phase Approach for Reconstructing Dynamic Shape and Skeleton of Articulated Objects from Single Monocular Video

Authors: Hao Zhang, Fang Li, Samyak Rawlekar, Narendra Ahuja

Abstract: Reconstructing dynamic articulated objects from a singular monocular video is challenging, requiring joint estimation of shape, motion, and camera parameters from limited views. Current methods typically demand extensive computational resources and training time, and require additional human annotations such as predefined parametric models, camera poses, and key points, limiting their generalizability. We propose Synergistic Shape and Skeleton Optimization (S3O), a novel two-phase method that forgoes these prerequisites and efficiently learns parametric models including visible shapes and underlying skeletons. Conventional strategies typically learn all parameters simultaneously, leading to interdependencies where a single incorrect prediction can result in significant errors. In contrast, S3O adopts a phased approach: it first focuses on learning coarse parametric models, then progresses to motion learning and detail addition. This method substantially lowers computational complexity and enhances robustness in reconstruction from limited viewpoints, all without requiring additional annotations. To address the current inadequacies in 3D reconstruction from monocular video benchmarks, we collected the PlanetZoo dataset. Our experimental evaluations on standard benchmarks and the PlanetZoo dataset affirm that S3O provides more accurate 3D reconstruction, and plausible skeletons, and reduces the training time by approximately 60% compared to the state-of-the-art, thus advancing the state of the art in dynamic object reconstruction.

new Automating Attendance Management in Human Resources: A Design Science Approach Using Computer Vision and Facial Recognition

Authors: Bao-Thien Nguyen-Tat, Minh-Quoc Bui, Vuong M. Ngo

Abstract: Haar Cascade is a cost-effective and user-friendly machine learning-based algorithm for detecting objects in images and videos. Unlike Deep Learning algorithms, which typically require significant resources and expensive computing costs, it uses simple image processing techniques like edge detection and Haar features that are easy to comprehend and implement. By combining Haar Cascade with OpenCV2 on an embedded computer like the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, this system can accurately detect and match faces in a database for attendance tracking. This system aims to achieve several specific objectives that set it apart from existing solutions. It leverages Haar Cascade, enriched with carefully selected Haar features, such as Haar-like wavelets, and employs advanced edge detection techniques. These techniques enable precise face detection and matching in both images and videos, contributing to high accuracy and robust performance. By doing so, it minimizes manual intervention and reduces errors, thereby strengthening accountability. Additionally, the integration of OpenCV2 and the NVIDIA Jetson Nano optimizes processing efficiency, making it suitable for resource-constrained environments. This system caters to a diverse range of educational institutions, including schools, colleges, vocational training centers, and various workplace settings such as small businesses, offices, and factories. ... The system's affordability and efficiency democratize attendance management technology, making it accessible to a broader audience. Consequently, it has the potential to transform attendance tracking and management practices, ultimately leading to heightened productivity and accountability. In conclusion, this system represents a groundbreaking approach to attendance tracking and management...

new PoseGravity: Pose Estimation from Points and Lines with Axis Prior

Authors: Akshay Chandrasekhar

Abstract: This paper presents a new algorithm to estimate absolute camera pose given an axis of the camera's rotation matrix. Current algorithms solve the problem via algebraic solutions on limited input domains. This paper shows that the problem can be solved efficiently by finding the intersection points of a hyperbola and the unit circle. The solution can flexibly accommodate combinations of point and line features in minimal and overconstrained configurations. In addition, the two special cases of planar and minimal configurations are identified to yield simpler closed-form solutions. Extensive experiments validate the approach.

new Scene Graph Generation Strategy with Co-occurrence Knowledge and Learnable Term Frequency

Authors: Hyeongjin Kim, Sangwon Kim, Dasom Ahn, Jong Taek Lee, Byoung Chul Ko

Abstract: Scene graph generation (SGG) is an important task in image understanding because it represents the relationships between objects in an image as a graph structure, making it possible to understand the semantic relationships between objects intuitively. Previous SGG studies used a message-passing neural networks (MPNN) to update features, which can effectively reflect information about surrounding objects. However, these studies have failed to reflect the co-occurrence of objects during SGG generation. In addition, they only addressed the long-tail problem of the training dataset from the perspectives of sampling and learning methods. To address these two problems, we propose CooK, which reflects the Co-occurrence Knowledge between objects, and the learnable term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-l-IDF) to solve the long-tail problem. We applied the proposed model to the SGG benchmark dataset, and the results showed a performance improvement of up to 3.8% compared with existing state-of-the-art models in SGGen subtask. The proposed method exhibits generalization ability from the results obtained, showing uniform performance improvement for all MPNN models.

new EmoEdit: Evoking Emotions through Image Manipulation

Authors: Jingyuan Yang, Jiawei Feng, Weibin Luo, Dani Lischinski, Daniel Cohen-Or, Hui Huang

Abstract: Affective Image Manipulation (AIM) seeks to modify user-provided images to evoke specific emotional responses. This task is inherently complex due to its twofold objective: significantly evoking the intended emotion, while preserving the original image composition. Existing AIM methods primarily adjust color and style, often failing to elicit precise and profound emotional shifts. Drawing on psychological insights, we extend AIM by incorporating content modifications to enhance emotional impact. We introduce EmoEdit, a novel two-stage framework comprising emotion attribution and image editing. In the emotion attribution stage, we leverage a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to create hierarchies of semantic factors that represent abstract emotions. In the image editing stage, the VLM identifies the most relevant factors for the provided image, and guides a generative editing model to perform affective modifications. A ranking technique that we developed selects the best edit, balancing between emotion fidelity and structure integrity. To validate EmoEdit, we assembled a dataset of 416 images, categorized into positive, negative, and neutral classes. Our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively, demonstrating superior performance compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques. Additionally, we showcase EmoEdit's potential in various manipulation tasks, including emotion-oriented and semantics-oriented editing.

new Experimental investigation of trans-scale displacement responses of wrinkle defects in fiber reinforced composite laminates

Authors: Li Ma, Shoulong Wang, Changchen Liu, Ange Wen, Kaidi Ying, Jing Guo

Abstract: Wrinkle defects were found widely exist in the field of industrial products, i.e. wind turbine blades and filament-wound composite pressure vessels. The magnitude of wrinkle wavelength varies from several millimeters to over one hundred millimeters. Locating the wrinkle defects and measuring their responses are very important to the assessment of the structures that containing wrinkle defects. A meso-mechanical modeling is presented based on the homogenization method to obtain the effective stiffness of a graded wrinkle. The finite element simulation predicts the trans-scale response of out-of-plane displacement of wrinkled laminates, where the maximum displacement ranges from nanoscale to millimeter scale. Such trans-scale effect requires different measurement approaches to observe the displacement responses. Here we employed Shearography (Speckle Pattern Shearing Interferometry) and fringe projection profilometry (FPP) method respectively according to the different magnitude of displacement. In FPP method, a displacement extraction algorithm was presented to obtain the out-of-plane displacement. The measurement sensitivity and accuracy of Shearography and FPP are compared, which provides a quantitative reference for industrial non-destructive test.

new A Multimodal Learning-based Approach for Autonomous Landing of UAV

Authors: Francisco Neves, Lu\'is Branco, Maria Pereira, Rafael Claro, Andry Pinto

Abstract: In the field of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) landing, conventional approaches fall short in delivering not only the required precision but also the resilience against environmental disturbances. Yet, learning-based algorithms can offer promising solutions by leveraging their ability to learn the intelligent behaviour from data. On one hand, this paper introduces a novel multimodal transformer-based Deep Learning detector, that can provide reliable positioning for precise autonomous landing. It surpasses standard approaches by addressing individual sensor limitations, achieving high reliability even in diverse weather and sensor failure conditions. It was rigorously validated across varying environments, achieving optimal true positive rates and average precisions of up to 90%. On the other hand, it is proposed a Reinforcement Learning (RL) decision-making model, based on a Deep Q-Network (DQN) rationale. Initially trained in sumlation, its adaptive behaviour is successfully transferred and validated in a real outdoor scenario. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates rapid inference times of approximately 5ms, validating its applicability on edge devices.

new Explainable offline automatic signature verifier to support forensic handwriting examiners

Authors: Moises Diaz, Miguel A. Ferrer, Gennaro Vessio

Abstract: Signature verification is a critical task in many applications, including forensic science, legal judgments, and financial markets. However, current signature verification systems are often difficult to explain, which can limit their acceptance in these applications. In this paper, we propose a novel explainable offline automatic signature verifier (ASV) to support forensic handwriting examiners. Our ASV is based on a universal background model (UBM) constructed from offline signature images. It allows us to assign a questioned signature to the UBM and to a reference set of known signatures using simple distance measures. This makes it possible to explain the verifier's decision in a way that is understandable to non experts. We evaluated our ASV on publicly available databases and found that it achieves competitive performance with state of the art ASVs, even when challenging 1 versus 1 comparison are considered. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to develop an explainable ASV that is also competitive in terms of performance. We believe that our ASV has the potential to improve the acceptance of signature verification in critical applications such as forensic science and legal judgments.

new Multimodal Adaptive Inference for Document Image Classification with Anytime Early Exiting

Authors: Omar Hamed, Souhail Bakkali, Marie-Francine Moens, Matthew Blaschko, Jordy Van Landeghem

Abstract: This work addresses the need for a balanced approach between performance and efficiency in scalable production environments for visually-rich document understanding (VDU) tasks. Currently, there is a reliance on large document foundation models that offer advanced capabilities but come with a heavy computational burden. In this paper, we propose a multimodal early exit (EE) model design that incorporates various training strategies, exit layer types and placements. Our goal is to achieve a Pareto-optimal balance between predictive performance and efficiency for multimodal document image classification. Through a comprehensive set of experiments, we compare our approach with traditional exit policies and showcase an improved performance-efficiency trade-off. Our multimodal EE design preserves the model's predictive capabilities, enhancing both speed and latency. This is achieved through a reduction of over 20% in latency, while fully retaining the baseline accuracy. This research represents the first exploration of multimodal EE design within the VDU community, highlighting as well the effectiveness of calibration in improving confidence scores for exiting at different layers. Overall, our findings contribute to practical VDU applications by enhancing both performance and efficiency.

new Multimodal video analysis for crowd anomaly detection using open access tourism cameras

Authors: Alejandro Dionis-Ros, Joan Vila-Franc\'es, Rafael Magdalena-Benedicto, Fernando Mateo, Antonio J. Serrano-L\'opez

Abstract: In this article, we propose the detection of crowd anomalies through the extraction of information in the form of time series from video format using a multimodal approach. Through pattern recognition algorithms and segmentation, informative measures of the number of people and image occupancy are extracted at regular intervals, which are then analyzed to obtain trends and anomalous behaviors. Specifically, through temporal decomposition and residual analysis, intervals or specific situations of unusual behaviors are identified, which can be used in decision-making and improvement of actions in sectors related to human movement such as tourism or security. The application of this methodology on the webcam of Turisme Comunitat Valenciana in the town of Morella (Comunitat Valenciana, Spain) has provided excellent results. It is shown to correctly detect specific anomalous situations and unusual overall increases during the previous weekend and during the festivities in October 2023. These results have been obtained while preserving the confidentiality of individuals at all times by using measures that maximize anonymity, without trajectory recording or person recognition.

new Text-Video Retrieval with Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning

Authors: Haonan Zhang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Yihang Duan, Xinyu Lyu, Hengtao Shen

Abstract: Adapting large-scale image-text pre-training models, e.g., CLIP, to the video domain represents the current state-of-the-art for text-video retrieval. The primary approaches involve transferring text-video pairs to a common embedding space and leveraging cross-modal interactions on specific entities for semantic alignment. Though effective, these paradigms entail prohibitive computational costs, leading to inefficient retrieval. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, Global-Local Semantic Consistent Learning (GLSCL), which capitalizes on latent shared semantics across modalities for text-video retrieval. Specifically, we introduce a parameter-free global interaction module to explore coarse-grained alignment. Then, we devise a shared local interaction module that employs several learnable queries to capture latent semantic concepts for learning fine-grained alignment. Furthermore, an Inter-Consistency Loss (ICL) is devised to accomplish the concept alignment between the visual query and corresponding textual query, and an Intra-Diversity Loss (IDL) is developed to repulse the distribution within visual (textual) queries to generate more discriminative concepts. Extensive experiments on five widely used benchmarks (i.e., MSR-VTT, MSVD, DiDeMo, LSMDC, and ActivityNet) substantiate the superior effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Remarkably, our method achieves comparable performance with SOTA as well as being nearly 220 times faster in terms of computational cost. Code is available at: https://github.com/zchoi/GLSCL.

URLs: https://github.com/zchoi/GLSCL.

new Dynamic Identity-Guided Attention Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-identification

Authors: Peng Gao, Yujian Lee, Hui Zhang, Xubo Liu, Yiyang Hu, Guquan Jing

Abstract: Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) aims to match people with the same identity between visible and infrared modalities. VI-ReID is a challenging task due to the large differences in individual appearance under different modalities. Existing methods generally try to bridge the cross-modal differences at image or feature level, which lacks exploring the discriminative embeddings. Effectively minimizing these cross-modal discrepancies relies on obtaining representations that are guided by identity and consistent across modalities, while also filtering out representations that are irrelevant to identity. To address these challenges, we introduce a dynamic identity-guided attention network (DIAN) to mine identity-guided and modality-consistent embeddings, facilitating effective bridging the gap between different modalities. Specifically, in DIAN, to pursue a semantically richer representation, we first use orthogonal projection to fuse the features from two connected coarse and fine layers. Furthermore, we first use dynamic convolution kernels to mine identity-guided and modality-consistent representations. More notably, a cross embedding balancing loss is introduced to effectively bridge cross-modal discrepancies by above embeddings. Experimental results on SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets show that DIAN achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, for indoor search on SYSU-MM01, our method achieves 86.28% rank-1 accuracy and 87.41% mAP, respectively. Our code will be available soon.

new StarLKNet: Star Mixup with Large Kernel Networks for Palm Vein Identification

Authors: Xin Jin, Hongyu Zhu, Moun\^im A. El Yacoubi, Hongchao Liao, Huafeng Qin, Yun Jiang

Abstract: As a representative of a new generation of biometrics, vein identification technology offers a high level of security and convenience. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), a prominent class of deep learning architectures, have been extensively utilized for vein identification. Since their performance and robustness are limited by small Effective Receptive Fields (e.g. 3$\times$3 kernels) and insufficient training samples, however, they are unable to extract global feature representations from vein images in an effective manner. To address these issues, we propose StarLKNet, a large kernel convolution-based palm-vein identification network, with the Mixup approach. Our StarMix learns effectively the distribution of vein features to expand samples. To enable CNNs to capture comprehensive feature representations from palm-vein images, we explored the effect of convolutional kernel size on the performance of palm-vein identification networks and designed LaKNet, a network leveraging large kernel convolution and gating mechanism. In light of the current state of knowledge, this represents an inaugural instance of the deployment of a CNN with large kernels in the domain of vein identification. Extensive experiments were conducted to validate the performance of StarLKNet on two public palm-vein datasets. The results demonstrated that StarMix provided superior augmentation, and LakNet exhibited more stable performance gains compared to mainstream approaches, resulting in the highest recognition accuracy and lowest identification error.

new RemoCap: Disentangled Representation Learning for Motion Capture

Authors: Hongsheng Wang, Lizao Zhang, Zhangnan Zhong, Shuolin Xu, Xinrui Zhou, Shengyu Zhang, Huahao Xu, Fei Wu, Feng Lin

Abstract: Reconstructing 3D human bodies from realistic motion sequences remains a challenge due to pervasive and complex occlusions. Current methods struggle to capture the dynamics of occluded body parts, leading to model penetration and distorted motion. RemoCap leverages Spatial Disentanglement (SD) and Motion Disentanglement (MD) to overcome these limitations. SD addresses occlusion interference between the target human body and surrounding objects. It achieves this by disentangling target features along the dimension axis. By aligning features based on their spatial positions in each dimension, SD isolates the target object's response within a global window, enabling accurate capture despite occlusions. The MD module employs a channel-wise temporal shuffling strategy to simulate diverse scene dynamics. This process effectively disentangles motion features, allowing RemoCap to reconstruct occluded parts with greater fidelity. Furthermore, this paper introduces a sequence velocity loss that promotes temporal coherence. This loss constrains inter-frame velocity errors, ensuring the predicted motion exhibits realistic consistency. Extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on benchmark datasets demonstrate RemoCap's superior performance in 3D human body reconstruction. On the 3DPW dataset, RemoCap surpasses all competitors, achieving the best results in MPVPE (81.9), MPJPE (72.7), and PA-MPJPE (44.1) metrics. Codes are available at https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/RemoCap/.

URLs: https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/RemoCap/.

new Leveraging Neural Radiance Fields for Pose Estimation of an Unknown Space Object during Proximity Operations

Authors: Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, Christophe De Vleeschouwer

Abstract: We address the estimation of the 6D pose of an unknown target spacecraft relative to a monocular camera, a key step towards the autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations required by future Active Debris Removal missions. We present a novel method that enables an "off-the-shelf" spacecraft pose estimator, which is supposed to known the target CAD model, to be applied on an unknown target. Our method relies on an in-the wild NeRF, i.e., a Neural Radiance Field that employs learnable appearance embeddings to represent varying illumination conditions found in natural scenes. We train the NeRF model using a sparse collection of images that depict the target, and in turn generate a large dataset that is diverse both in terms of viewpoint and illumination. This dataset is then used to train the pose estimation network. We validate our method on the Hardware-In-the-Loop images of SPEED+ that emulate lighting conditions close to those encountered on orbit. We demonstrate that our method successfully enables the training of an off-the-shelf spacecraft pose estimation network from a sparse set of images. Furthermore, we show that a network trained using our method performs similarly to a model trained on synthetic images generated using the CAD model of the target.

new Predicting the Influence of Adverse Weather on Pedestrian Detection with Automotive Radar and Lidar Sensors

Authors: Daniel Weihmayr, Fatih Sezgin, Leon Tolksdorf, Christian Birkner, Reza N. Jazar

Abstract: Pedestrians are among the most endangered traffic participants in road traffic. While pedestrian detection in nominal conditions is well established, the sensor and, therefore, the pedestrian detection performance degrades under adverse weather conditions. Understanding the influences of rain and fog on a specific radar and lidar sensor requires extensive testing, and if the sensors' specifications are altered, a retesting effort is required. These challenges are addressed in this paper, firstly by conducting comprehensive measurements collecting empirical data of pedestrian detection performance under varying rain and fog intensities in a controlled environment, and secondly, by introducing a dedicated \textit{Weather Filter} (WF) model that predicts the effects of rain and fog on a user-specified radar and lidar on pedestrian detection performance. We use a state-of-the-art baseline model representing the physical relation of sensor specifications, which, however, lacks the representation of secondary weather effects, e.g., changes in pedestrian reflectivity or droplets on a sensor, and adjust it with empirical data to account for such. We find that our measurement results are in agreement with existent literature related to weather degredation and our WF outperforms the baseline model in predicting weather effects on pedestrian detection while only requiring a minimal testing effort.

new Multi-Subject Personalization

Authors: Arushi Jain, Shubham Paliwal, Monika Sharma, Vikram Jamwal, Lovekesh Vig

Abstract: Creative story illustration requires a consistent interplay of multiple characters or objects. However, conventional text-to-image models face significant challenges while producing images featuring multiple personalized subjects. For example, they distort the subject rendering, or the text descriptions fail to render coherent subject interactions. We present Multi-Subject Personalization (MSP) to alleviate some of these challenges. We implement MSP using Stable Diffusion and assess our approach against other text-to-image models, showcasing its consistent generation of good-quality images representing intended subjects and interactions.

new C3L: Content Correlated Vision-Language Instruction Tuning Data Generation via Contrastive Learning

Authors: Ji Ma, Wei Suo, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang

Abstract: Vision-Language Instruction Tuning (VLIT) is a critical training phase for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). With the improving capabilities of open-source LVLMs, researchers have increasingly turned to generate VLIT data by using open-source LVLMs and achieved significant progress. However, such data generation approaches are bottlenecked by the following challenges: 1) Since multi-modal models tend to be influenced by prior language knowledge, directly using LVLMs to generate VLIT data would inevitably lead to low content relevance between generated data and images. 2) To improve the ability of the models to generate VLIT data, previous methods have incorporated an additional training phase to boost the generative capacity. This process hurts the generalization of the models to unseen inputs (i.e., "exposure bias" problem). In this paper, we propose a new Content Correlated VLIT data generation via Contrastive Learning (C3L). Specifically, we design a new content relevance module which enhances the content relevance between VLIT data and images by computing Image Instruction Correspondence Scores S(I2C). Moreover, a contrastive learning module is introduced to further boost the VLIT data generation capability of the LVLMs. A large number of automatic measures on four benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method.

new BIMM: Brain Inspired Masked Modeling for Video Representation Learning

Authors: Zhifan Wan, Jie Zhang, Changzhen Li, Shiguang Shan

Abstract: The visual pathway of human brain includes two sub-pathways, ie, the ventral pathway and the dorsal pathway, which focus on object identification and dynamic information modeling, respectively. Both pathways comprise multi-layer structures, with each layer responsible for processing different aspects of visual information. Inspired by visual information processing mechanism of the human brain, we propose the Brain Inspired Masked Modeling (BIMM) framework, aiming to learn comprehensive representations from videos. Specifically, our approach consists of ventral and dorsal branches, which learn image and video representations, respectively. Both branches employ the Vision Transformer (ViT) as their backbone and are trained using masked modeling method. To achieve the goals of different visual cortices in the brain, we segment the encoder of each branch into three intermediate blocks and reconstruct progressive prediction targets with light weight decoders. Furthermore, drawing inspiration from the information-sharing mechanism in the visual pathways, we propose a partial parameter sharing strategy between the branches during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BIMM achieves superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

new Cross-spectral Gated-RGB Stereo Depth Estimation

Authors: Samuel Brucker, Stefanie Walz, Mario Bijelic, Felix Heide

Abstract: Gated cameras flood-illuminate a scene and capture the time-gated impulse response of a scene. By employing nanosecond-scale gates, existing sensors are capable of capturing mega-pixel gated images, delivering dense depth improving on today's LiDAR sensors in spatial resolution and depth precision. Although gated depth estimation methods deliver a million of depth estimates per frame, their resolution is still an order below existing RGB imaging methods. In this work, we combine high-resolution stereo HDR RCCB cameras with gated imaging, allowing us to exploit depth cues from active gating, multi-view RGB and multi-view NIR sensing -- multi-view and gated cues across the entire spectrum. The resulting capture system consists only of low-cost CMOS sensors and flood-illumination. We propose a novel stereo-depth estimation method that is capable of exploiting these multi-modal multi-view depth cues, including the active illumination that is measured by the RCCB camera when removing the IR-cut filter. The proposed method achieves accurate depth at long ranges, outperforming the next best existing method by 39% for ranges of 100 to 220m in MAE on accumulated LiDAR ground-truth. Our code, models and datasets are available at https://light.princeton.edu/gatedrccbstereo/ .

URLs: https://light.princeton.edu/gatedrccbstereo/

new Self-Supervised Modality-Agnostic Pre-Training of Swin Transformers

Authors: Abhiroop Talasila, Maitreya Maity, U. Deva Priyakumar

Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training has emerged as a transformative paradigm, displaying remarkable advancements in various domains. However, the susceptibility to domain shift, where pre-training data distribution differs from fine-tuning, poses a significant obstacle. To address this, we augment the Swin Transformer to learn from different medical imaging modalities, enhancing downstream performance. Our model, dubbed SwinFUSE (Swin Multi-Modal Fusion for UnSupervised Enhancement), offers three key advantages: (i) it learns from both Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) during pre-training, resulting in complementary feature representations; (ii) a domain-invariance module (DIM) that effectively highlights salient input regions, enhancing adaptability; (iii) exhibits remarkable generalizability, surpassing the confines of tasks it was initially pre-trained on. Our experiments on two publicly available 3D segmentation datasets show a modest 1-2% performance trade-off compared to single-modality models, yet significant out-performance of up to 27% on out-of-distribution modality. This substantial improvement underscores our proposed approach's practical relevance and real-world applicability. Code is available at: https://github.com/devalab/SwinFUSE

URLs: https://github.com/devalab/SwinFUSE

new Generalize Polyp Segmentation via Inpainting across Diverse Backgrounds and Pseudo-Mask Refinement

Authors: Jiajian Ma, Fangqi Lu, Silin Huang, Song Wu, Zhen Li

Abstract: Inpainting lesions within different normal backgrounds is a potential method of addressing the generalization problem, which is crucial for polyp segmentation models. However, seamlessly introducing polyps into complex endoscopic environments while simultaneously generating accurate pseudo-masks remains a challenge for current inpainting methods. To address these issues, we first leverage the pre-trained Stable Diffusion Inpaint and ControlNet, to introduce a robust generative model capable of inpainting polyps across different backgrounds. Secondly, we utilize the prior that synthetic polyps are confined to the inpainted region, to establish an inpainted region-guided pseudo-mask refinement network. We also propose a sample selection strategy that prioritizes well-aligned and hard synthetic cases for further model fine-tuning. Experiments demonstrate that our inpainting model outperformed baseline methods both qualitatively and quantitatively in inpainting quality. Moreover, our data augmentation strategy significantly enhances the performance of polyp segmentation models on external datasets, achieving or surpassing the level of fully supervised training benchmarks in that domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/497662892/PolypInpainter.

URLs: https://github.com/497662892/PolypInpainter.

new Anticipating Object State Changes

Authors: Victoria Manousaki, Konstantinos Bacharidis, Filippos Gouidis, Konstantinos Papoutsakis, Dimitris Plexousakis, Antonis Argyros

Abstract: Anticipating object state changes in images and videos is a challenging problem whose solution has important implications in vision-based scene understanding, automated monitoring systems, and action planning. In this work, we propose the first method for solving this problem. The proposed method predicts object state changes that will occur in the near future as a result of yet unseen human actions. To address this new problem, we propose a novel framework that integrates learnt visual features that represent the recent visual information, with natural language (NLP) features that represent past object state changes and actions. Leveraging the extensive and challenging Ego4D dataset which provides a large-scale collection of first-person perspective videos across numerous interaction scenarios, we introduce new curated annotation data for the object state change anticipation task (OSCA), noted as Ego4D-OSCA. An extensive experimental evaluation was conducted that demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed method in predicting object state changes in dynamic scenarios. The proposed work underscores the potential of integrating video and linguistic cues to enhance the predictive performance of video understanding systems. Moreover, it lays the groundwork for future research on the new task of object state change anticipation. The source code and the new annotation data (Ego4D-OSCA) will be made publicly available.

new Adaptive local boundary conditions to improve Deformable Image Registration

Authors: Elo\"ise Inacio, Luc Lafitte, Laurent Facq, Clair Poignard, Baudouin Denis de Senneville

Abstract: Objective: In medical imaging, it is often crucial to accurately assess and correct movement during image-guided therapy. Deformable image registration (DIR) consists in estimating the required spatial transformation to align a moving image with a fixed one. However, it is acknowledged that, boundary conditions applied to the solution are critical in preventing mis-registration. Despite the extensive research on registration techniques, relatively few have addressed the issue of boundary conditions in the context of medical DIR. Our aim is a step towards customizing boundary conditions to suit the diverse registration tasks at hand. Approach: We propose a generic, locally adaptive, Robin-type condition enabling to balance between Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, depending on incoming/outgoing flow fields on the image boundaries. The proposed framework is entirely automatized through the determination of a reduced set of hyperparameters optimized via energy minimization. Main results: The proposed approach was tested on a mono-modal CT thorax registration task and an abdominal CT to MRI registration task. For the first task, we observed a relative improvement in terms of target registration error of up to 12% (mean 4%), compared to homogeneous Dirichlet and homogeneous Neumann. For the second task, the automatic framework provides results closed to the best achievable. Significance: This study underscores the importance of tailoring the registration problem at the image boundaries. In this research, we introduce a novel method to adapt the boundary conditions on a voxel-by-voxel basis, yielding optimized results in two distinct tasks: mono-modal CT thorax registration and abdominal CT to MRI registration. The proposed framework enables optimized boundary conditions in image registration without any a priori assumptions regarding the images or the motion.

new DisenStudio: Customized Multi-subject Text-to-Video Generation with Disentangled Spatial Control

Authors: Hong Chen, Xin Wang, Yipeng Zhang, Yuwei Zhou, Zeyang Zhang, Siao Tang, Wenwu Zhu

Abstract: Generating customized content in videos has received increasing attention recently. However, existing works primarily focus on customized text-to-video generation for single subject, suffering from subject-missing and attribute-binding problems when the video is expected to contain multiple subjects. Furthermore, existing models struggle to assign the desired actions to the corresponding subjects (action-binding problem), failing to achieve satisfactory multi-subject generation performance. To tackle the problems, in this paper, we propose DisenStudio, a novel framework that can generate text-guided videos for customized multiple subjects, given few images for each subject. Specifically, DisenStudio enhances a pretrained diffusion-based text-to-video model with our proposed spatial-disentangled cross-attention mechanism to associate each subject with the desired action. Then the model is customized for the multiple subjects with the proposed motion-preserved disentangled finetuning, which involves three tuning strategies: multi-subject co-occurrence tuning, masked single-subject tuning, and multi-subject motion-preserved tuning. The first two strategies guarantee the subject occurrence and preserve their visual attributes, and the third strategy helps the model maintain the temporal motion-generation ability when finetuning on static images. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate our proposed DisenStudio significantly outperforms existing methods in various metrics. Additionally, we show that DisenStudio can be used as a powerful tool for various controllable generation applications.

new MOSS: Motion-based 3D Clothed Human Synthesis from Monocular Video

Authors: Hongsheng Wang, Xiang Cai, Xi Sun, Jinhong Yue, Shengyu Zhang, Feng Lin, Fei Wu

Abstract: Single-view clothed human reconstruction holds a central position in virtual reality applications, especially in contexts involving intricate human motions. It presents notable challenges in achieving realistic clothing deformation. Current methodologies often overlook the influence of motion on surface deformation, resulting in surfaces lacking the constraints imposed by global motion. To overcome these limitations, we introduce an innovative framework, Motion-Based 3D Clothed Humans Synthesis (MOSS), which employs kinematic information to achieve motion-aware Gaussian split on the human surface. Our framework consists of two modules: Kinematic Gaussian Locating Splatting (KGAS) and Surface Deformation Detector (UID). KGAS incorporates matrix-Fisher distribution to propagate global motion across the body surface. The density and rotation factors of this distribution explicitly control the Gaussians, thereby enhancing the realism of the reconstructed surface. Additionally, to address local occlusions in single-view, based on KGAS, UID identifies significant surfaces, and geometric reconstruction is performed to compensate for these deformations. Experimental results demonstrate that MOSS achieves state-of-the-art visual quality in 3D clothed human synthesis from monocular videos. Notably, we improve the Human NeRF and the Gaussian Splatting by 33.94% and 16.75% in LPIPS* respectively. Codes are available at https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/MOSS/.

URLs: https://wanghongsheng01.github.io/MOSS/.

new A Survey of Deep Learning-based Radiology Report Generation Using Multimodal Data

Authors: Xinyi Wang, Grazziela Figueredo, Ruizhe Li, Wei Emma Zhang, Weitong Chen, Xin Chen

Abstract: Automatic radiology report generation can alleviate the workload for physicians and minimize regional disparities in medical resources, therefore becoming an important topic in the medical image analysis field. It is a challenging task, as the computational model needs to mimic physicians to obtain information from multi-modal input data (i.e., medical images, clinical information, medical knowledge, etc.), and produce comprehensive and accurate reports. Recently, numerous works emerged to address this issue using deep learning-based methods, such as transformers, contrastive learning, and knowledge-base construction. This survey summarizes the key techniques developed in the most recent works and proposes a general workflow for deep learning-based report generation with five main components, including multi-modality data acquisition, data preparation, feature learning, feature fusion/interaction, and report generation. The state-of-the-art methods for each of these components are highlighted. Additionally, training strategies, public datasets, evaluation methods, current challenges, and future directions in this field are summarized. We have also conducted a quantitative comparison between different methods under the same experimental setting. This is the most up-to-date survey that focuses on multi-modality inputs and data fusion for radiology report generation. The aim is to provide comprehensive and rich information for researchers interested in automatic clinical report generation and medical image analysis, especially when using multimodal inputs, and assist them in developing new algorithms to advance the field.

new Weakly supervised alignment and registration of MR-CT for cervical cancer radiotherapy

Authors: Jjahao Zhang, Yin Gu, Deyu Sun, Yuhua Gao, Ming Gao, Ming Cui, Teng Zhang, He Ma

Abstract: Cervical cancer is one of the leading causes of death in women, and brachytherapy is currently the primary treatment method. However, it is important to precisely define the extent of paracervical tissue invasion to improve cancer diagnosis and treatment options. The fusion of the information characteristics of both computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) modalities may be useful in achieving a precise outline of the extent of paracervical tissue invasion. Registration is the initial step in information fusion. However, when aligning multimodal images with varying depths, manual alignment is prone to large errors and is time-consuming. Furthermore, the variations in the size of the Region of Interest (ROI) and the shape of multimodal images pose a significant challenge for achieving accurate registration.In this paper, we propose a preliminary spatial alignment algorithm and a weakly supervised multimodal registration network. The spatial position alignment algorithm efficiently utilizes the limited annotation information in the two modal images provided by the doctor to automatically align multimodal images with varying depths. By utilizing aligned multimodal images for weakly supervised registration and incorporating pyramidal features and cost volume to estimate the optical flow, the results indicate that the proposed method outperforms traditional volume rendering alignment methods and registration networks in various evaluation metrics. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our model in multimodal image registration.

new Inconsistency-Aware Cross-Attention for Audio-Visual Fusion in Dimensional Emotion Recognition

Authors: R Gnana Praveen, Jahangir Alam

Abstract: Leveraging complementary relationships across modalities has recently drawn a lot of attention in multimodal emotion recognition. Most of the existing approaches explored cross-attention to capture the complementary relationships across the modalities. However, the modalities may also exhibit weak complementary relationships, which may deteriorate the cross-attended features, resulting in poor multimodal feature representations. To address this problem, we propose Inconsistency-Aware Cross-Attention (IACA), which can adaptively select the most relevant features on-the-fly based on the strong or weak complementary relationships across audio and visual modalities. Specifically, we design a two-stage gating mechanism that can adaptively select the appropriate relevant features to deal with weak complementary relationships. Extensive experiments are conducted on the challenging Aff-Wild2 dataset to show the robustness of the proposed model.

new Influence of Water Droplet Contamination for Transparency Segmentation

Authors: Volker Knauthe, Paul Weitz, Thomas P\"ollabauer, Tristan Wirth, Arne Rak, Arjan Kuijper, Dieter W. Fellner

Abstract: Computer vision techniques are on the rise for industrial applications, like process supervision and autonomous agents, e.g., in the healthcare domain and dangerous environments. While the general usability of these techniques is high, there are still challenging real-world use-cases. Especially transparent structures, which can appear in the form of glass doors, protective casings or everyday objects like glasses, pose a challenge for computer vision methods. This paper evaluates the combination of transparent objects in conjunction with (naturally occurring) contamination through environmental effects like hazing. We introduce a novel publicly available dataset containing 489 images incorporating three grades of water droplet contamination on transparent structures and examine the resulting influence on transparency handling. Our findings show, that contaminated transparent objects are easier to segment and that we are able to distinguish between different severity levels of contamination with a current state-of-the art machine-learning model. This in turn opens up the possibility to enhance computer vision systems regarding resilience against, e.g., datashifts through contaminated protection casings or implement an automated cleaning alert.

new Transparency Distortion Robustness for SOTA Image Segmentation Tasks

Authors: Volker Knauthe, Arne Rak, Tristan Wirth, Thomas P\"ollabauer, Simon Metzler, Arjan Kuijper, Dieter W. Fellner

Abstract: Semantic Image Segmentation facilitates a multitude of real-world applications ranging from autonomous driving over industrial process supervision to vision aids for human beings. These models are usually trained in a supervised fashion using example inputs. Distribution Shifts between these examples and the inputs in operation may cause erroneous segmentations. The robustness of semantic segmentation models against distribution shifts caused by differing camera or lighting setups, lens distortions, adversarial inputs and image corruptions has been topic of recent research. However, robustness against spatially varying radial distortion effects that can be caused by uneven glass structures (e.g. windows) or the chaotic refraction in heated air has not been addressed by the research community yet. We propose a method to synthetically augment existing datasets with spatially varying distortions. Our experiments show, that these distortion effects degrade the performance of state-of-the-art segmentation models. Pretraining and enlarged model capacities proof to be suitable strategies for mitigating performance degradation to some degree, while fine-tuning on distorted images only leads to marginal performance improvements.

new Diffusion-RSCC: Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Change Captioning in Remote Sensing Images

Authors: Xiaofei Yu, Yitong Li, Jie Ma

Abstract: Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims at generating human-like language to describe the semantic changes between bi-temporal remote sensing image pairs. It provides valuable insights into environmental dynamics and land management. Unlike conventional change captioning task, RSICC involves not only retrieving relevant information across different modalities and generating fluent captions, but also mitigating the impact of pixel-level differences on terrain change localization. The pixel problem due to long time span decreases the accuracy of generated caption. Inspired by the remarkable generative power of diffusion model, we propose a probabilistic diffusion model for RSICC to solve the aforementioned problems. In training process, we construct a noise predictor conditioned on cross modal features to learn the distribution from the real caption distribution to the standard Gaussian distribution under the Markov chain. Meanwhile, a cross-mode fusion and a stacking self-attention module are designed for noise predictor in the reverse process. In testing phase, the well-trained noise predictor helps to estimate the mean value of the distribution and generate change captions step by step. Extensive experiments on the LEVIR-CC dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our Diffusion-RSCC and its individual components. The quantitative results showcase superior performance over existing methods across both traditional and newly augmented metrics. The code and materials will be available online at https://github.com/Fay-Y/Diffusion-RSCC.

URLs: https://github.com/Fay-Y/Diffusion-RSCC.

new DARK: Denoising, Amplification, Restoration Kit

Authors: Zhuoheng Li, Yuheng Pan, Houcheng Yu, Zhiheng Zhang

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel lightweight computational framework for enhancing images under low-light conditions, utilizing advanced machine learning and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Traditional enhancement techniques often fail to adequately address issues like noise, color distortion, and detail loss in challenging lighting environments. Our approach leverages insights from the Retinex theory and recent advances in image restoration networks to develop a streamlined model that efficiently processes illumination components and integrates context-sensitive enhancements through optimized convolutional blocks. This results in significantly improved image clarity and color fidelity, while avoiding over-enhancement and unnatural color shifts. Crucially, our model is designed to be lightweight, ensuring low computational demand and suitability for real-time applications on standard consumer hardware. Performance evaluations confirm that our model not only surpasses existing methods in enhancing low-light images but also maintains a minimal computational footprint.

new An Empirical Study and Analysis of Text-to-Image Generation Using Large Language Model-Powered Textual Representation

Authors: Zhiyu Tan, Mengping Yang, Luozheng Qin, Hao Yang, Ye Qian, Qiang Zhou, Cheng Zhang, Hao Li

Abstract: One critical prerequisite for faithful text-to-image generation is the accurate understanding of text inputs. Existing methods leverage the text encoder of the CLIP model to represent input prompts. However, the pre-trained CLIP model can merely encode English with a maximum token length of 77. Moreover, the model capacity of the text encoder from CLIP is relatively limited compared to Large Language Models (LLMs), which offer multilingual input, accommodate longer context, and achieve superior text representation. In this paper, we investigate LLMs as the text encoder to improve the language understanding in text-to-image generation. Unfortunately, training text-to-image generative model with LLMs from scratch demands significant computational resources and data. To this end, we introduce a three-stage training pipeline that effectively and efficiently integrates the existing text-to-image model with LLMs. Specifically, we propose a lightweight adapter that enables fast training of the text-to-image model using the textual representations from LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model supports not only multilingual but also longer input context with superior image generation quality.

new On Image Registration and Subpixel Estimation

Authors: Serap A. Savari

Abstract: Image registration is a classical problem in machine vision which seeks methods to align discrete images of the same scene to subpixel accuracy in general situations. As with all estimation problems, the underlying difficulty is the partial information available about the ground truth. We consider a basic and idealized one-dimensional image registration problem motivated by questions about measurement and about quantization, and we demonstrate that the extent to which subinterval/subpixel inferences can be made in this setting depends on a type of complexity associated with the function of interest, the relationship between the function and the pixel size, and the number of distinct sampling count observations available.

new Pytorch-Wildlife: A Collaborative Deep Learning Framework for Conservation

Authors: Andres Hernandez, Zhongqi Miao, Luisa Vargas, Rahul Dodhia, Juan Lavista

Abstract: The alarming decline in global biodiversity, driven by various factors, underscores the urgent need for large-scale wildlife monitoring. In response, scientists have turned to automated deep learning methods for data processing in wildlife monitoring. However, applying these advanced methods in real-world scenarios is challenging due to their complexity and the need for specialized knowledge, primarily because of technical challenges and interdisciplinary barriers. To address these challenges, we introduce Pytorch-Wildlife, an open-source deep learning platform built on PyTorch. It is designed for creating, modifying, and sharing powerful AI models. This platform emphasizes usability and accessibility, making it accessible to individuals with limited or no technical background. It also offers a modular codebase to simplify feature expansion and further development. Pytorch-Wildlife offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface, accessible through local installation or Hugging Face, for animal detection and classification in images and videos. As two real-world applications, Pytorch-Wildlife has been utilized to train animal classification models for species recognition in the Amazon Rainforest and for invasive opossum recognition in the Galapagos Islands. The Opossum model achieves 98% accuracy, and the Amazon model has 92% recognition accuracy for 36 animals in 90% of the data. As Pytorch-Wildlife evolves, we aim to integrate more conservation tasks, addressing various environmental challenges. Pytorch-Wildlife is available at https://github.com/microsoft/CameraTraps.

URLs: https://github.com/microsoft/CameraTraps.

new AMFD: Distillation via Adaptive Multimodal Fusion for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection

Authors: Zizhao Chen, Yeqiang Qian, Xiaoxiao Yang, Chunxiang Wang, Ming Yang

Abstract: Multispectral pedestrian detection has been shown to be effective in improving performance within complex illumination scenarios. However, prevalent double-stream networks in multispectral detection employ two separate feature extraction branches for multi-modal data, leading to nearly double the inference time compared to single-stream networks utilizing only one feature extraction branch. This increased inference time has hindered the widespread employment of multispectral pedestrian detection in embedded devices for autonomous systems. To address this limitation, various knowledge distillation methods have been proposed. However, traditional distillation methods focus only on the fusion features and ignore the large amount of information in the original multi-modal features, thereby restricting the student network's performance. To tackle the challenge, we introduce the Adaptive Modal Fusion Distillation (AMFD) framework, which can fully utilize the original modal features of the teacher network. Specifically, a Modal Extraction Alignment (MEA) module is utilized to derive learning weights for student networks, integrating focal and global attention mechanisms. This methodology enables the student network to acquire optimal fusion strategies independent from that of teacher network without necessitating an additional feature fusion module. Furthermore, we present the SMOD dataset, a well-aligned challenging multispectral dataset for detection. Extensive experiments on the challenging KAIST, LLVIP and SMOD datasets are conducted to validate the effectiveness of AMFD. The results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in both reducing log-average Miss Rate and improving mean Average Precision. The code is available at https://github.com/bigD233/AMFD.git.

URLs: https://github.com/bigD233/AMFD.git.

new Face Adapter for Pre-Trained Diffusion Models with Fine-Grained ID and Attribute Control

Authors: Yue Han, Junwei Zhu, Keke He, Xu Chen, Yanhao Ge, Wei Li, Xiangtai Li, Jiangning Zhang, Chengjie Wang, Yong Liu

Abstract: Current face reenactment and swapping methods mainly rely on GAN frameworks, but recent focus has shifted to pre-trained diffusion models for their superior generation capabilities. However, training these models is resource-intensive, and the results have not yet achieved satisfactory performance levels. To address this issue, we introduce Face-Adapter, an efficient and effective adapter designed for high-precision and high-fidelity face editing for pre-trained diffusion models. We observe that both face reenactment/swapping tasks essentially involve combinations of target structure, ID and attribute. We aim to sufficiently decouple the control of these factors to achieve both tasks in one model. Specifically, our method contains: 1) A Spatial Condition Generator that provides precise landmarks and background; 2) A Plug-and-play Identity Encoder that transfers face embeddings to the text space by a transformer decoder. 3) An Attribute Controller that integrates spatial conditions and detailed attributes. Face-Adapter achieves comparable or even superior performance in terms of motion control precision, ID retention capability, and generation quality compared to fully fine-tuned face reenactment/swapping models. Additionally, Face-Adapter seamlessly integrates with various StableDiffusion models.

new BiomedParse: a biomedical foundation model for image parsing of everything everywhere all at once

Authors: Theodore Zhao, Yu Gu, Jianwei Yang, Naoto Usuyama, Ho Hin Lee, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Angela Crabtree, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Mu Wei, Hoifung Poon, Sheng Wang

Abstract: Biomedical image analysis is fundamental for biomedical discovery in cell biology, pathology, radiology, and many other biomedical domains. Holistic image analysis comprises interdependent subtasks such as segmentation, detection, and recognition of relevant objects. Here, we propose BiomedParse, a biomedical foundation model for imaging parsing that can jointly conduct segmentation, detection, and recognition for 82 object types across 9 imaging modalities. Through joint learning, we can improve accuracy for individual tasks and enable novel applications such as segmenting all relevant objects in an image through a text prompt, rather than requiring users to laboriously specify the bounding box for each object. We leveraged readily available natural-language labels or descriptions accompanying those datasets and use GPT-4 to harmonize the noisy, unstructured text information with established biomedical object ontologies. We created a large dataset comprising over six million triples of image, segmentation mask, and textual description. On image segmentation, we showed that BiomedParse is broadly applicable, outperforming state-of-the-art methods on 102,855 test image-mask-label triples across 9 imaging modalities (everything). On object detection, which aims to locate a specific object of interest, BiomedParse again attained state-of-the-art performance, especially on objects with irregular shapes (everywhere). On object recognition, which aims to identify all objects in a given image along with their semantic types, we showed that BiomedParse can simultaneously segment and label all biomedical objects in an image (all at once). In summary, BiomedParse is an all-in-one tool for biomedical image analysis by jointly solving segmentation, detection, and recognition for all major biomedical image modalities, paving the path for efficient and accurate image-based biomedical discovery.

new Personalized Residuals for Concept-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

Authors: Cusuh Ham, Matthew Fisher, James Hays, Nicholas Kolkin, Yuchen Liu, Richard Zhang, Tobias Hinz

Abstract: We present personalized residuals and localized attention-guided sampling for efficient concept-driven generation using text-to-image diffusion models. Our method first represents concepts by freezing the weights of a pretrained text-conditioned diffusion model and learning low-rank residuals for a small subset of the model's layers. The residual-based approach then directly enables application of our proposed sampling technique, which applies the learned residuals only in areas where the concept is localized via cross-attention and applies the original diffusion weights in all other regions. Localized sampling therefore combines the learned identity of the concept with the existing generative prior of the underlying diffusion model. We show that personalized residuals effectively capture the identity of a concept in ~3 minutes on a single GPU without the use of regularization images and with fewer parameters than previous models, and localized sampling allows using the original model as strong prior for large parts of the image.

new OmniGlue: Generalizable Feature Matching with Foundation Model Guidance

Authors: Hanwen Jiang, Arjun Karpur, Bingyi Cao, Qixing Huang, Andre Araujo

Abstract: The image matching field has been witnessing a continuous emergence of novel learnable feature matching techniques, with ever-improving performance on conventional benchmarks. However, our investigation shows that despite these gains, their potential for real-world applications is restricted by their limited generalization capabilities to novel image domains. In this paper, we introduce OmniGlue, the first learnable image matcher that is designed with generalization as a core principle. OmniGlue leverages broad knowledge from a vision foundation model to guide the feature matching process, boosting generalization to domains not seen at training time. Additionally, we propose a novel keypoint position-guided attention mechanism which disentangles spatial and appearance information, leading to enhanced matching descriptors. We perform comprehensive experiments on a suite of $7$ datasets with varied image domains, including scene-level, object-centric and aerial images. OmniGlue's novel components lead to relative gains on unseen domains of $20.9\%$ with respect to a directly comparable reference model, while also outperforming the recent LightGlue method by $9.5\%$ relatively.Code and model can be found at https://hwjiang1510.github.io/OmniGlue

URLs: https://hwjiang1510.github.io/OmniGlue

cross Influence based explainability of brain tumors segmentation in multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Authors: Tommaso Torda, Andrea Ciardiello, Simona Gargiulo, Greta Grillo, Simone Scardapane, Cecilia Voena, Stefano Giagu

Abstract: In recent years Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a fundamental tool in medical applications. Despite this rapid development, deep neural networks remain black boxes that are difficult to explain, and this represents a major limitation for their use in clinical practice. We focus on the segmentation of medical images task, where most explainability methods proposed so far provide a visual explanation in terms of an input saliency map. The aim of this work is to extend, implement and test instead an influence-based explainability algorithm, TracIn, proposed originally for classification tasks, in a challenging clinical problem, i.e., multiclass segmentation of tumor brains in multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging. We verify the faithfulness of the proposed algorithm linking the similarities of the latent representation of the network to the TracIn output. We further test the capacity of the algorithm to provide local and global explanations, and we suggest that it can be adopted as a tool to select the most relevant features used in the decision process. The method is generalizable for all semantic segmentation tasks where classes are mutually exclusive, which is the standard framework in these cases.

cross Cascaded Multi-path Shortcut Diffusion Model for Medical Image Translation

Authors: Yinchi Zhou, Tianqi Chen, Jun Hou, Huidong Xie, Nicha C. Dvornek, S. Kevin Zhou, David L. Wilson, James S. Duncan, Chi Liu, Bo Zhou

Abstract: Image-to-image translation is a vital component in medical imaging processing, with many uses in a wide range of imaging modalities and clinical scenarios. Previous methods include Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs), which offer realism but suffer from instability and lack uncertainty estimation. Even though both GAN and DM methods have individually exhibited their capability in medical image translation tasks, the potential of combining a GAN and DM to further improve translation performance and to enable uncertainty estimation remains largely unexplored. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a Cascade Multi-path Shortcut Diffusion Model (CMDM) for high-quality medical image translation and uncertainty estimation. To reduce the required number of iterations and ensure robust performance, our method first obtains a conditional GAN-generated prior image that will be used for the efficient reverse translation with a DM in the subsequent step. Additionally, a multi-path shortcut diffusion strategy is employed to refine translation results and estimate uncertainty. A cascaded pipeline further enhances translation quality, incorporating residual averaging between cascades. We collected three different medical image datasets with two sub-tasks for each dataset to test the generalizability of our approach. Our experimental results found that CMDM can produce high-quality translations comparable to state-of-the-art methods while providing reasonable uncertainty estimations that correlate well with the translation error.

cross Estimation of FFR in coronary arteries with deep learning

Authors: Patryk Rygiel

Abstract: Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the most common causes of death in the European Union and the USA. The crucial biomarker in its diagnosis is called Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR) and its in-vivo measurement is obtained via an invasive diagnostic technique in the form of coronagraphy. In order to address the invasive drawbacks associated with a procedure, a new approach virtual FFR (vFFR) measurement has emerged in recent years. This technique involves using computed tomography angiography (CTA) to obtain virtual measurements of FFR. By utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), vFFR estimates can be derived from CTA data, providing a promising in-silico alternative to traditional methods. However, the widespread adoption of vFFR from CTA as a diagnostic technique is hindered by two main challenges: time and computational requirements. In this work, we explore the usage of deep learning techniques as surrogate CFD engine models in the task of vFFR estimation in coronary arteries to drastically limit the required time and computational costs without a major drop in quality. We propose a novel approach to vFFR estimation by representing the input vessel geometry as a point cloud and utilizing the hybrid neural network that learns geometry representation based on both explicitly and implicitly given features. We evaluate the method from the clinical point of view and showcase that it can serve as a compelling replacement for commonly utilized CFD-based approaches.

cross Mammo-CLIP: A Vision Language Foundation Model to Enhance Data Efficiency and Robustness in Mammography

Authors: Shantanu Ghosh, Clare B. Poynton, Shyam Visweswaran, Kayhan Batmanghelich

Abstract: The lack of large and diverse training data on Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) in breast cancer detection has been one of the concerns that impedes the adoption of the system. Recently, pre-training with large-scale image text datasets via Vision-Language models (VLM) (\eg CLIP) partially addresses the issue of robustness and data efficiency in computer vision (CV). This paper proposes Mammo-CLIP, the first VLM pre-trained on a substantial amount of screening mammogram-report pairs, addressing the challenges of dataset diversity and size. Our experiments on two public datasets demonstrate strong performance in classifying and localizing various mammographic attributes crucial for breast cancer detection, showcasing data efficiency and robustness similar to CLIP in CV. We also propose Mammo-FActOR, a novel feature attribution method, to provide spatial interpretation of representation with sentence-level granularity within mammography reports. Code is available publicly: \url{https://github.com/batmanlab/Mammo-CLIP}.

URLs: https://github.com/batmanlab/Mammo-CLIP

cross SEL-CIE: Knowledge-Guided Self-Supervised Learning Framework for CIE-XYZ Reconstruction from Non-Linear sRGB Images

Authors: Shir Barzel, Moshe Salhov, Ofir Lindenbaum, Amir Averbuch

Abstract: Modern cameras typically offer two types of image states: a minimally processed linear raw RGB image representing the raw sensor data, and a highly-processed non-linear image state, such as the sRGB state. The CIE-XYZ color space is a device-independent linear space used as part of the camera pipeline and can be helpful for computer vision tasks, such as image deblurring, dehazing, and color recognition tasks in medical applications, where color accuracy is important. However, images are usually saved in non-linear states, and achieving CIE-XYZ color images using conventional methods is not always possible. To tackle this issue, classical methodologies have been developed that focus on reversing the acquisition pipeline. More recently, supervised learning has been employed, using paired CIE-XYZ and sRGB representations of identical images. However, obtaining a large-scale dataset of CIE-XYZ and sRGB pairs can be challenging. To overcome this limitation and mitigate the reliance on large amounts of paired data, self-supervised learning (SSL) can be utilized as a substitute for relying solely on paired data. This paper proposes a framework for using SSL methods alongside paired data to reconstruct CIE-XYZ images and re-render sRGB images, outperforming existing approaches. The proposed framework is applied to the sRGB2XYZ dataset.

cross Perturbing the Gradient for Alleviating Meta Overfitting

Authors: Manas Gogoi, Sambhavi Tiwari, Shekhar Verma

Abstract: The reason for Meta Overfitting can be attributed to two factors: Mutual Non-exclusivity and the Lack of diversity, consequent to which a single global function can fit the support set data of all the meta-training tasks and fail to generalize to new unseen tasks. This issue is evidenced by low error rates on the meta-training tasks, but high error rates on new tasks. However, there can be a number of novel solutions to this problem keeping in mind any of the two objectives to be attained, i.e. to increase diversity in the tasks and to reduce the confidence of the model for some of the tasks. In light of the above, this paper proposes a number of solutions to tackle meta-overfitting on few-shot learning settings, such as few-shot sinusoid regression and few shot classification. Our proposed approaches demonstrate improved generalization performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines for learning in a non-mutually exclusive task setting. Overall, this paper aims to provide insights into tackling overfitting in meta-learning and to advance the field towards more robust and generalizable models.

cross Hierarchical SegNet with Channel and Context Attention for Accurate Lung Segmentation in Chest X-ray Images

Authors: Mohammad Ali Labbaf Khaniki, Nazanin Mahjourian, Mohammad Manthouri

Abstract: Lung segmentation in chest X-ray images is a critical task in medical image analysis, enabling accurate diagnosis and treatment of various lung diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for lung segmentation by integrating Hierarchical SegNet with a proposed multi-modal attention mechanism. The channel attention mechanism highlights specific feature maps or channels crucial for lung region segmentation, while the context attention mechanism adaptively weighs the importance of different spatial regions. By combining both mechanisms, the proposed mechanism enables the model to better capture complex patterns and relationships between various features, leading to improved segmentation accuracy and better feature representation. Furthermore, an attention gating mechanism is employed to integrate attention information with encoder features, allowing the model to adaptively weigh the importance of different attention features and ignore irrelevant ones. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in lung segmentation tasks, outperforming existing methods. The proposed approach has the potential to improve the accuracy and efficiency of lung disease diagnosis and treatment, and can be extended to other medical image analysis tasks.

cross Paired Conditional Generative Adversarial Network for Highly Accelerated Liver 4D MRI

Authors: Di Xu, Xin Miao, Hengjie Liu, Jessica E. Scholey, Wensha Yang, Mary Feng, Michael Ohliger, Hui Lin, Yi Lao, Yang Yang, Ke Sheng

Abstract: Purpose: 4D MRI with high spatiotemporal resolution is desired for image-guided liver radiotherapy. Acquiring densely sampling k-space data is time-consuming. Accelerated acquisition with sparse samples is desirable but often causes degraded image quality or long reconstruction time. We propose the Reconstruct Paired Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (Re-Con-GAN) to shorten the 4D MRI reconstruction time while maintaining the reconstruction quality. Methods: Patients who underwent free-breathing liver 4D MRI were included in the study. Fully- and retrospectively under-sampled data at 3, 6 and 10 times (3x, 6x and 10x) were first reconstructed using the nuFFT algorithm. Re-Con-GAN then trained input and output in pairs. Three types of networks, ResNet9, UNet and reconstruction swin transformer, were explored as generators. PatchGAN was selected as the discriminator. Re-Con-GAN processed the data (3D+t) as temporal slices (2D+t). A total of 48 patients with 12332 temporal slices were split into training (37 patients with 10721 slices) and test (11 patients with 1611 slices). Results: Re-Con-GAN consistently achieved comparable/better PSNR, SSIM, and RMSE scores compared to CS/UNet models. The inference time of Re-Con-GAN, UNet and CS are 0.15s, 0.16s, and 120s. The GTV detection task showed that Re-Con-GAN and CS, compared to UNet, better improved the dice score (3x Re-Con-GAN 80.98%; 3x CS 80.74%; 3x UNet 79.88%) of unprocessed under-sampled images (3x 69.61%). Conclusion: A generative network with adversarial training is proposed with promising and efficient reconstruction results demonstrated on an in-house dataset. The rapid and qualitative reconstruction of 4D liver MR has the potential to facilitate online adaptive MR-guided radiotherapy for liver cancer.

cross Large-Scale Multi-Center CT and MRI Segmentation of Pancreas with Deep Learning

Authors: Zheyuan Zhang, Elif Keles, Gorkem Durak, Yavuz Taktak, Onkar Susladkar, Vandan Gorade, Debesh Jha, Asli C. Ormeci, Alpay Medetalibeyoglu, Lanhong Yao, Bin Wang, Ilkin Sevgi Isler, Linkai Peng, Hongyi Pan, Camila Lopes Vendrami, Amir Bourhani, Yury Velichko, Boqing Gong, Concetto Spampinato, Ayis Pyrros, Pallavi Tiwari, Derk C. F. Klatte, Megan Engels, Sanne Hoogenboom, Candice W. Bolan, Emil Agarunov, Nassier Harfouch, Chenchan Huang, Marco J. Bruno, Ivo Schoots, Rajesh N. Keswani, Frank H. Miller, Tamas Gonda, Cemal Yazici, Temel Tirkes, Baris Turkbey, Michael B. Wallace, Ulas Bagci

Abstract: Automated volumetric segmentation of the pancreas on cross-sectional imaging is needed for diagnosis and follow-up of pancreatic diseases. While CT-based pancreatic segmentation is more established, MRI-based segmentation methods are understudied, largely due to a lack of publicly available datasets, benchmarking research efforts, and domain-specific deep learning methods. In this retrospective study, we collected a large dataset (767 scans from 499 participants) of T1-weighted (T1W) and T2-weighted (T2W) abdominal MRI series from five centers between March 2004 and November 2022. We also collected CT scans of 1,350 patients from publicly available sources for benchmarking purposes. We developed a new pancreas segmentation method, called PanSegNet, combining the strengths of nnUNet and a Transformer network with a new linear attention module enabling volumetric computation. We tested PanSegNet's accuracy in cross-modality (a total of 2,117 scans) and cross-center settings with Dice and Hausdorff distance (HD95) evaluation metrics. We used Cohen's kappa statistics for intra and inter-rater agreement evaluation and paired t-tests for volume and Dice comparisons, respectively. For segmentation accuracy, we achieved Dice coefficients of 88.3% (std: 7.2%, at case level) with CT, 85.0% (std: 7.9%) with T1W MRI, and 86.3% (std: 6.4%) with T2W MRI. There was a high correlation for pancreas volume prediction with R^2 of 0.91, 0.84, and 0.85 for CT, T1W, and T2W, respectively. We found moderate inter-observer (0.624 and 0.638 for T1W and T2W MRI, respectively) and high intra-observer agreement scores. All MRI data is made available at https://osf.io/kysnj/. Our source code is available at https://github.com/NUBagciLab/PaNSegNet.

URLs: https://osf.io/kysnj/., https://github.com/NUBagciLab/PaNSegNet.

cross Diffusion for World Modeling: Visual Details Matter in Atari

Authors: Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, Vincent Micheli, Anssi Kanervisto, Amos Storkey, Tim Pearce, Fran\c{c}ois Fleuret

Abstract: World models constitute a promising approach for training reinforcement learning agents in a safe and sample-efficient manner. Recent world models predominantly operate on sequences of discrete latent variables to model environment dynamics. However, this compression into a compact discrete representation may ignore visual details that are important for reinforcement learning. Concurrently, diffusion models have become a dominant approach for image generation, challenging well-established methods modeling discrete latents. Motivated by this paradigm shift, we introduce DIAMOND (DIffusion As a Model Of eNvironment Dreams), a reinforcement learning agent trained in a diffusion world model. We analyze the key design choices that are required to make diffusion suitable for world modeling, and demonstrate how improved visual details can lead to improved agent performance. DIAMOND achieves a mean human normalized score of 1.46 on the competitive Atari 100k benchmark; a new best for agents trained entirely within a world model. To foster future research on diffusion for world modeling, we release our code, agents and playable world models at https://github.com/eloialonso/diamond.

URLs: https://github.com/eloialonso/diamond.

cross Mutual Information Analysis in Multimodal Learning Systems

Authors: Hadi Hadizadeh, S. Faegheh Yeganli, Bahador Rashidi, Ivan V. Baji\'c

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a significant increase in applications of multimodal signal processing and analysis, largely driven by the increased availability of multimodal datasets and the rapid progress in multimodal learning systems. Well-known examples include autonomous vehicles, audiovisual generative systems, vision-language systems, and so on. Such systems integrate multiple signal modalities: text, speech, images, video, LiDAR, etc., to perform various tasks. A key issue for understanding such systems is the relationship between various modalities and how it impacts task performance. In this paper, we employ the concept of mutual information (MI) to gain insight into this issue. Taking advantage of the recent progress in entropy modeling and estimation, we develop a system called InfoMeter to estimate MI between modalities in a multimodal learning system. We then apply InfoMeter to analyze a multimodal 3D object detection system over a large-scale dataset for autonomous driving. Our experiments on this system suggest that a lower MI between modalities is beneficial for detection accuracy. This new insight may facilitate improvements in the development of future multimodal learning systems.

cross Is Dataset Quality Still a Concern in Diagnosis Using Large Foundation Model?

Authors: Ziqin Lin, Heng Li, Zinan Li, Huazhu Fu, Jiang Liu

Abstract: Recent advancements in pre-trained large foundation models (LFM) have yielded significant breakthroughs across various domains, including natural language processing and computer vision. These models have been particularly impactful in the domain of medical diagnostic tasks. With abundant unlabeled data, an LFM has been developed for fundus images using the Vision Transformer (VIT) and a self-supervised learning framework. This LFM has shown promising performance in fundus disease diagnosis across multiple datasets. On the other hand, deep learning models have long been challenged by dataset quality issues, such as image quality and dataset bias. To investigate the influence of data quality on LFM, we conducted explorations in two fundus diagnosis tasks using datasets of varying quality. Specifically, we explored the following questions: Is LFM more robust to image quality? Is LFM affected by dataset bias? Can fine-tuning techniques alleviate these effects? Our investigation found that LFM exhibits greater resilience to dataset quality issues, including image quality and dataset bias, compared to typical convolutional networks. Furthermore, we discovered that overall fine-tuning is an effective adapter for LFM to mitigate the impact of dataset quality issues.

cross LAGA: Layered 3D Avatar Generation and Customization via Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Jia Gong, Shenyu Ji, Lin Geng Foo, Kang Chen, Hossein Rahmani, Jun Liu

Abstract: Creating and customizing a 3D clothed avatar from textual descriptions is a critical and challenging task. Traditional methods often treat the human body and clothing as inseparable, limiting users' ability to freely mix and match garments. In response to this limitation, we present LAyered Gaussian Avatar (LAGA), a carefully designed framework enabling the creation of high-fidelity decomposable avatars with diverse garments. By decoupling garments from avatar, our framework empowers users to conviniently edit avatars at the garment level. Our approach begins by modeling the avatar using a set of Gaussian points organized in a layered structure, where each layer corresponds to a specific garment or the human body itself. To generate high-quality garments for each layer, we introduce a coarse-to-fine strategy for diverse garment generation and a novel dual-SDS loss function to maintain coherence between the generated garments and avatar components, including the human body and other garments. Moreover, we introduce three regularization losses to guide the movement of Gaussians for garment transfer, allowing garments to be freely transferred to various avatars. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that our approach surpasses existing methods in the generation of 3D clothed humans.

cross Nearest is Not Dearest: Towards Practical Defense against Quantization-conditioned Backdoor Attacks

Authors: Boheng Li, Yishuo Cai, Haowei Li, Feng Xue, Zhifeng Li, Yiming Li

Abstract: Model quantization is widely used to compress and accelerate deep neural networks. However, recent studies have revealed the feasibility of weaponizing model quantization via implanting quantization-conditioned backdoors (QCBs). These special backdoors stay dormant on released full-precision models but will come into effect after standard quantization. Due to the peculiarity of QCBs, existing defenses have minor effects on reducing their threats or are even infeasible. In this paper, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of QCBs. We reveal that the activation of existing QCBs primarily stems from the nearest rounding operation and is closely related to the norms of neuron-wise truncation errors (i.e., the difference between the continuous full-precision weights and its quantized version). Motivated by these insights, we propose Error-guided Flipped Rounding with Activation Preservation (EFRAP), an effective and practical defense against QCBs. Specifically, EFRAP learns a non-nearest rounding strategy with neuron-wise error norm and layer-wise activation preservation guidance, flipping the rounding strategies of neurons crucial for backdoor effects but with minimal impact on clean accuracy. Extensive evaluations on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our EFRAP can defeat state-of-the-art QCB attacks under various settings. Code is available at https://github.com/AntigoneRandy/QuantBackdoor_EFRAP.

URLs: https://github.com/AntigoneRandy/QuantBackdoor_EFRAP.

cross Talk2Radar: Bridging Natural Language with 4D mmWave Radar for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension

Authors: Runwei Guan, Ruixiao Zhang, Ningwei Ouyang, Jianan Liu, Ka Lok Man, Xiaohao Cai, Ming Xu, Jeremy Smith, Eng Gee Lim, Yutao Yue, Hui Xiong

Abstract: Embodied perception is essential for intelligent vehicles and robots, enabling more natural interaction and task execution. However, these advancements currently embrace vision level, rarely focusing on using 3D modeling sensors, which limits the full understanding of surrounding objects with multi-granular characteristics. Recently, as a promising automotive sensor with affordable cost, 4D Millimeter-Wave radar provides denser point clouds than conventional radar and perceives both semantic and physical characteristics of objects, thus enhancing the reliability of perception system. To foster the development of natural language-driven context understanding in radar scenes for 3D grounding, we construct the first dataset, Talk2Radar, which bridges these two modalities for 3D Referring Expression Comprehension. Talk2Radar contains 8,682 referring prompt samples with 20,558 referred objects. Moreover, we propose a novel model, T-RadarNet for 3D REC upon point clouds, achieving state-of-the-art performances on Talk2Radar dataset compared with counterparts, where Deformable-FPN and Gated Graph Fusion are meticulously designed for efficient point cloud feature modeling and cross-modal fusion between radar and text features, respectively. Further, comprehensive experiments are conducted to give a deep insight into radar-based 3D REC. We release our project at https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Talk2Radar.

URLs: https://github.com/GuanRunwei/Talk2Radar.

cross SmartFlow: Robotic Process Automation using LLMs

Authors: Arushi Jain, Shubham Paliwal, Monika Sharma, Lovekesh Vig, Gautam Shroff

Abstract: Robotic Process Automation (RPA) systems face challenges in handling complex processes and diverse screen layouts that require advanced human-like decision-making capabilities. These systems typically rely on pixel-level encoding through drag-and-drop or automation frameworks such as Selenium to create navigation workflows, rather than visual understanding of screen elements. In this context, we present SmartFlow, an AI-based RPA system that uses pre-trained large language models (LLMs) coupled with deep-learning based image understanding. Our system can adapt to new scenarios, including changes in the user interface and variations in input data, without the need for human intervention. SmartFlow uses computer vision and natural language processing to perceive visible elements on the graphical user interface (GUI) and convert them into a textual representation. This information is then utilized by LLMs to generate a sequence of actions that are executed by a scripting engine to complete an assigned task. To assess the effectiveness of SmartFlow, we have developed a dataset that includes a set of generic enterprise applications with diverse layouts, which we are releasing for research use. Our evaluations on this dataset demonstrate that SmartFlow exhibits robustness across different layouts and applications. SmartFlow can automate a wide range of business processes such as form filling, customer service, invoice processing, and back-office operations. SmartFlow can thus assist organizations in enhancing productivity by automating an even larger fraction of screen-based workflows. The demo-video and dataset are available at https://smartflow-4c5a0a.webflow.io/.

URLs: https://smartflow-4c5a0a.webflow.io/.

cross Spatial-aware Attention Generative Adversarial Network for Semi-supervised Anomaly Detection in Medical Image

Authors: Zerui Zhang, Zhichao Sun, Zelong Liu, Bo Du, Rui Yu, Zhou Zhao, Yongchao Xu

Abstract: Medical anomaly detection is a critical research area aimed at recognizing abnormal images to aid in diagnosis.Most existing methods adopt synthetic anomalies and image restoration on normal samples to detect anomaly. The unlabeled data consisting of both normal and abnormal data is not well explored. We introduce a novel Spatial-aware Attention Generative Adversarial Network (SAGAN) for one-class semi-supervised generation of health images.Our core insight is the utilization of position encoding and attention to accurately focus on restoring abnormal regions and preserving normal regions. To fully utilize the unlabelled data, SAGAN relaxes the cyclic consistency requirement of the existing unpaired image-to-image conversion methods, and generates high-quality health images corresponding to unlabeled data, guided by the reconstruction of normal images and restoration of pseudo-anomaly images.Subsequently, the discrepancy between the generated healthy image and the original image is utilized as an anomaly score.Extensive experiments on three medical datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAGAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

cross Implicit-ARAP: Efficient Handle-Guided Deformation of High-Resolution Meshes and Neural Fields via Local Patch Meshing

Authors: Daniele Baieri, Filippo Maggioli, Zorah L\"ahner, Simone Melzi, Emanuele Rodol\`a

Abstract: In this work, we present the local patch mesh representation for neural signed distance fields. This technique allows to discretize local regions of the level sets of an input SDF by projecting and deforming flat patch meshes onto the level set surface, using exclusively the SDF information and its gradient. Our analysis reveals this method to be more accurate than the standard marching cubes algorithm for approximating the implicit surface. Then, we apply this representation in the setting of handle-guided deformation: we introduce two distinct pipelines, which make use of 3D neural fields to compute As-Rigid-As-Possible deformations of both high-resolution meshes and neural fields under a given set of constraints. We run a comprehensive evaluation of our method and various baselines for neural field and mesh deformation which show both pipelines achieve impressive efficiency and notable improvements in terms of quality of results and robustness. With our novel pipeline, we introduce a scalable approach to solve a well-established geometry processing problem on high-resolution meshes, and pave the way for extending other geometric tasks to the domain of implicit surfaces via local patch meshing.

cross Comprehensive Multimodal Deep Learning Survival Prediction Enabled by a Transformer Architecture: A Multicenter Study in Glioblastoma

Authors: Ahmed Gomaa, Yixing Huang, Amr Hagag, Charlotte Schmitter, Daniel H\"ofler, Thomas Weissmann, Katharina Breininger, Manuel Schmidt, Jenny Stritzelberger, Daniel Delev, Roland Coras, Arnd D\"orfler, Oliver Schnell, Benjamin Frey, Udo S. Gaipl, Sabine Semrau, Christoph Bert, Rainer Fietkau, Florian Putz

Abstract: Background: This research aims to improve glioblastoma survival prediction by integrating MR images, clinical and molecular-pathologic data in a transformer-based deep learning model, addressing data heterogeneity and performance generalizability. Method: We propose and evaluate a transformer-based non-linear and non-proportional survival prediction model. The model employs self-supervised learning techniques to effectively encode the high-dimensional MRI input for integration with non-imaging data using cross-attention. To demonstrate model generalizability, the model is assessed with the time-dependent concordance index (Cdt) in two training setups using three independent public test sets: UPenn-GBM, UCSF-PDGM, and RHUH-GBM, each comprising 378, 366, and 36 cases, respectively. Results: The proposed transformer model achieved promising performance for imaging as well as non-imaging data, effectively integrating both modalities for enhanced performance (UPenn-GBM test-set, imaging Cdt 0.645, multimodal Cdt 0.707) while outperforming state-of-the-art late-fusion 3D-CNN-based models. Consistent performance was observed across the three independent multicenter test sets with Cdt values of 0.707 (UPenn-GBM, internal test set), 0.672 (UCSF-PDGM, first external test set) and 0.618 (RHUH-GBM, second external test set). The model achieved significant discrimination between patients with favorable and unfavorable survival for all three datasets (logrank p 1.9\times{10}^{-8}, 9.7\times{10}^{-3}, and 1.2\times{10}^{-2}). Conclusions: The proposed transformer-based survival prediction model integrates complementary information from diverse input modalities, contributing to improved glioblastoma survival prediction compared to state-of-the-art methods. Consistent performance was observed across institutions supporting model generalizability.

replace Learning from One and Only One Shot

Authors: Haizi Yu, Igor Mineyev, Lav R. Varshney, James A. Evans

Abstract: Humans can generalize from only a few examples and from little pretraining on similar tasks. Yet, machine learning (ML) typically requires large data to learn or pre-learn to transfer. Motivated by nativism and artificial general intelligence, we directly model human-innate priors in abstract visual tasks such as character and doodle recognition. This yields a white-box model that learns general-appearance similarity by mimicking how humans naturally ``distort'' an object at first sight. Using just nearest-neighbor classification on this cognitively-inspired similarity space, we achieve human-level recognition with only $1$--$10$ examples per class and no pretraining. This differs from few-shot learning that uses massive pretraining. In the tiny-data regime of MNIST, EMNIST, Omniglot, and QuickDraw benchmarks, we outperform both modern neural networks and classical ML. For unsupervised learning, by learning the non-Euclidean, general-appearance similarity space in a $k$-means style, we achieve multifarious visual realizations of abstract concepts by generating human-intuitive archetypes as cluster centroids.

replace Multimodal Prototype-Enhanced Network for Few-Shot Action Recognition

Authors: Xinzhe Ni, Yong Liu, Hao Wen, Yatai Ji, Jing Xiao, Yujiu Yang

Abstract: Current methods for few-shot action recognition mainly fall into the metric learning framework following ProtoNet, which demonstrates the importance of prototypes. Although they achieve relatively good performance, the effect of multimodal information is ignored, e.g. label texts. In this work, we propose a novel MultimOdal PRototype-ENhanced Network (MORN), which uses the semantic information of label texts as multimodal information to enhance prototypes. A CLIP visual encoder and a frozen CLIP text encoder are introduced to obtain features with good multimodal initialization. Then in the visual flow, visual prototypes are computed by a visual prototype-computed module. In the text flow, a semantic-enhanced (SE) module and an inflating operation are used to obtain text prototypes. The final multimodal prototypes are then computed by a multimodal prototype-enhanced (MPE) module. Besides, we define a PRototype SImilarity DiffErence (PRIDE) to evaluate the quality of prototypes, which is used to verify our improvement on the prototype level and effectiveness of MORN. We conduct extensive experiments on four popular few-shot action recognition datasets: HMDB51, UCF101, Kinetics and SSv2, and MORN achieves state-of-the-art results. When plugging PRIDE into the training stage, the performance can be further improved.

replace Seeing a Rose in Five Thousand Ways

Authors: Yunzhi Zhang, Shangzhe Wu, Noah Snavely, Jiajun Wu

Abstract: What is a rose, visually? A rose comprises its intrinsics, including the distribution of geometry, texture, and material specific to its object category. With knowledge of these intrinsic properties, we may render roses of different sizes and shapes, in different poses, and under different lighting conditions. In this work, we build a generative model that learns to capture such object intrinsics from a single image, such as a photo of a bouquet. Such an image includes multiple instances of an object type. These instances all share the same intrinsics, but appear different due to a combination of variance within these intrinsics and differences in extrinsic factors, such as pose and illumination. Experiments show that our model successfully learns object intrinsics (distribution of geometry, texture, and material) for a wide range of objects, each from a single Internet image. Our method achieves superior results on multiple downstream tasks, including intrinsic image decomposition, shape and image generation, view synthesis, and relighting.

replace Hierarchical Training of Deep Neural Networks Using Early Exiting

Authors: Yamin Sepehri, Pedram Pad, Ahmet Caner Y\"uz\"ug\"uler, Pascal Frossard, L. Andrea Dunbar

Abstract: Deep neural networks provide state-of-the-art accuracy for vision tasks but they require significant resources for training. Thus, they are trained on cloud servers far from the edge devices that acquire the data. This issue increases communication cost, runtime and privacy concerns. In this study, a novel hierarchical training method for deep neural networks is proposed that uses early exits in a divided architecture between edge and cloud workers to reduce the communication cost, training runtime and privacy concerns. The method proposes a brand-new use case for early exits to separate the backward pass of neural networks between the edge and the cloud during the training phase. We address the issues of most available methods that due to the sequential nature of the training phase, cannot train the levels of hierarchy simultaneously or they do it with the cost of compromising privacy. In contrast, our method can use both edge and cloud workers simultaneously, does not share the raw input data with the cloud and does not require communication during the backward pass. Several simulations and on-device experiments for different neural network architectures demonstrate the effectiveness of this method. It is shown that the proposed method reduces the training runtime for VGG-16 and ResNet-18 architectures by 29% and 61% in CIFAR-10 classification and by 25% and 81% in Tiny ImageNet classification when the communication with the cloud is done over a low bit rate channel. This gain in the runtime is achieved whilst the accuracy drop is negligible. This method is advantageous for online learning of high-accuracy deep neural networks on sensor-holding low-resource devices such as mobile phones or robots as a part of an edge-cloud system, making them more flexible in facing new tasks and classes of data.

replace Parents and Children: Distinguishing Multimodal DeepFakes from Natural Images

Authors: Roberto Amoroso, Davide Morelli, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Alberto Del Bimbo, Rita Cucchiara

Abstract: Recent advancements in diffusion models have enabled the generation of realistic deepfakes from textual prompts in natural language. While these models have numerous benefits across various sectors, they have also raised concerns about the potential misuse of fake images and cast new pressures on fake image detection. In this work, we pioneer a systematic study on deepfake detection generated by state-of-the-art diffusion models. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the performance of contrastive and classification-based visual features, respectively extracted from CLIP-based models and ResNet or ViT-based architectures trained on image classification datasets. Our results demonstrate that fake images share common low-level cues, which render them easily recognizable. Further, we devise a multimodal setting wherein fake images are synthesized by different textual captions, which are used as seeds for a generator. Under this setting, we quantify the performance of fake detection strategies and introduce a contrastive-based disentangling method that lets us analyze the role of the semantics of textual descriptions and low-level perceptual cues. Finally, we release a new dataset, called COCOFake, containing about 1.2M images generated from the original COCO image-caption pairs using two recent text-to-image diffusion models, namely Stable Diffusion v1.4 and v2.0.

replace Robust Classification via a Single Diffusion Model

Authors: Huanran Chen, Yinpeng Dong, Zhengyi Wang, Xiao Yang, Chengqi Duan, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

Abstract: Diffusion models have been applied to improve adversarial robustness of image classifiers by purifying the adversarial noises or generating realistic data for adversarial training. However, diffusion-based purification can be evaded by stronger adaptive attacks while adversarial training does not perform well under unseen threats, exhibiting inevitable limitations of these methods. To better harness the expressive power of diffusion models, this paper proposes Robust Diffusion Classifier (RDC), a generative classifier that is constructed from a pre-trained diffusion model to be adversarially robust. RDC first maximizes the data likelihood of a given input and then predicts the class probabilities of the optimized input using the conditional likelihood estimated by the diffusion model through Bayes' theorem. To further reduce the computational cost, we propose a new diffusion backbone called multi-head diffusion and develop efficient sampling strategies. As RDC does not require training on particular adversarial attacks, we demonstrate that it is more generalizable to defend against multiple unseen threats. In particular, RDC achieves $75.67\%$ robust accuracy against various $\ell_\infty$ norm-bounded adaptive attacks with $\epsilon_\infty=8/255$ on CIFAR-10, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art adversarial training models by $+4.77\%$. The results highlight the potential of generative classifiers by employing pre-trained diffusion models for adversarial robustness compared with the commonly studied discriminative classifiers. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/huanranchen/DiffusionClassifier}.

URLs: https://github.com/huanranchen/DiffusionClassifier

replace GEM: Boost Simple Network for Glass Surface Segmentation via Vision Foundation Models

Authors: Jing Hao, Moyun Liu, Jinrong Yang, Kuo Feng Hung

Abstract: Detecting glass regions is a challenging task due to the inherent ambiguity in their transparency and reflective characteristics. Current solutions in this field remain rooted in conventional deep learning paradigms, requiring the construction of annotated datasets and the design of network architectures. However, the evident drawback with these mainstream solutions lies in the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of curating datasets, alongside the increasing complexity of model structures. In this paper, we propose to address these issues by fully harnessing the capabilities of two existing vision foundation models (VFMs): Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Model (SAM). Firstly, we construct a Synthetic but photorealistic large-scale Glass Surface Detection dataset, dubbed S-GSD, without any labour cost via Stable Diffusion. This dataset consists of four different scales, consisting of 168k images totally with precise masks. Besides, based on the powerful segmentation ability of SAM, we devise a simple Glass surface sEgMentor named GEM, which follows the simple query-based encoder-decoder architecture. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on the large-scale glass segmentation dataset GSD-S. Our GEM establishes a new state-of-the-art performance with the help of these two VFMs, surpassing the best-reported method GlassSemNet with an IoU improvement of 2.1%. Additionally, extensive experiments demonstrate that our synthetic dataset S-GSD exhibits remarkable performance in zero-shot and transfer learning settings. Codes, datasets and models are publicly available at: https://github.com/isbrycee/GEM

URLs: https://github.com/isbrycee/GEM

replace Investigating and Improving Latent Density Segmentation Models for Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in Medical Imaging

Authors: M. M. Amaan Valiuddin, Christiaan G. A. Viviers, Ruud J. G. van Sloun, Peter H. N. de With, Fons van der Sommen

Abstract: Data uncertainties, such as sensor noise, occlusions or limitations in the acquisition method can introduce irreducible ambiguities in images, which result in varying, yet plausible, semantic hypotheses. In Machine Learning, this ambiguity is commonly referred to as aleatoric uncertainty. In image segmentation, latent density models can be utilized to address this problem. The most popular approach is the Probabilistic U-Net (PU-Net), which uses latent Normal densities to optimize the conditional data log-likelihood Evidence Lower Bound. In this work, we demonstrate that the PU-Net latent space is severely sparse and heavily under-utilized. To address this, we introduce mutual information maximization and entropy-regularized Sinkhorn Divergence in the latent space to promote homogeneity across all latent dimensions, effectively improving gradient-descent updates and latent space informativeness. Our results show that by applying this on public datasets of various clinical segmentation problems, our proposed methodology receives up to 11% performance gains compared against preceding latent variable models for probabilistic segmentation on the Hungarian-Matched Intersection over Union. The results indicate that encouraging a homogeneous latent space significantly improves latent density modeling for medical image segmentation.

replace CoVR: Learning Composed Video Retrieval from Web Video Captions

Authors: Lucas Ventura, Antoine Yang, Cordelia Schmid, G\"ul Varol

Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR) has recently gained popularity as a task that considers both text and image queries together, to search for relevant images in a database. Most CoIR approaches require manually annotated datasets, comprising image-text-image triplets, where the text describes a modification from the query image to the target image. However, manual curation of CoIR triplets is expensive and prevents scalability. In this work, we instead propose a scalable automatic dataset creation methodology that generates triplets given video-caption pairs, while also expanding the scope of the task to include composed video retrieval (CoVR). To this end, we mine paired videos with a similar caption from a large database, and leverage a large language model to generate the corresponding modification text. Applying this methodology to the extensive WebVid2M collection, we automatically construct our WebVid-CoVR dataset, resulting in 1.6 million triplets. Moreover, we introduce a new benchmark for CoVR with a manually annotated evaluation set, along with baseline results. Our experiments further demonstrate that training a CoVR model on our dataset effectively transfers to CoIR, leading to improved state-of-the-art performance in the zero-shot setup on both the CIRR and FashionIQ benchmarks. Our code, datasets, and models are publicly available at https://imagine.enpc.fr/~ventural/covr.

URLs: https://imagine.enpc.fr/

replace IAIFNet: An Illumination-Aware Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network

Authors: Qiao Yang, Yu Zhang, Jian Zhang, Zijing Zhao, Shunli Zhang, Jinqiao Wang, Junzhe Chen

Abstract: Infrared and visible image fusion (IVIF) is used to generate fusion images with comprehensive features of both images, which is beneficial for downstream vision tasks. However, current methods rarely consider the illumination condition in low-light environments, and the targets in the fused images are often not prominent. To address the above issues, we propose an Illumination-Aware Infrared and Visible Image Fusion Network, named as IAIFNet. In our framework, an illumination enhancement network first estimates the incident illumination maps of input images. Afterwards, with the help of proposed adaptive differential fusion module (ADFM) and salient target aware module (STAM), an image fusion network effectively integrates the salient features of the illumination-enhanced infrared and visible images into a fusion image of high visual quality. Extensive experimental results verify that our method outperforms five state-of-the-art methods of fusing infrared and visible images.

replace Towards Long-Range 3D Object Detection for Autonomous Vehicles

Authors: Ajinkya Khoche, Laura Pereira S\'anchez, Nazre Batool, Sina Sharif Mansouri, Patric Jensfelt

Abstract: 3D object detection at long range is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of self driving vehicles, allowing them to accurately perceive and react to objects, obstacles, and potential hazards from a distance. But most current state of the art LiDAR based methods are range limited due to sparsity at long range, which generates a form of domain gap between points closer to and farther away from the ego vehicle. Another related problem is the label imbalance for faraway objects, which inhibits the performance of Deep Neural Networks at long range. To address the above limitations, we investigate two ways to improve long range performance of current LiDAR based 3D detectors. First, we combine two 3D detection networks, referred to as range experts, one specializing at near to mid range objects, and one at long range 3D detection. To train a detector at long range under a scarce label regime, we further weigh the loss according to the labelled point's distance from ego vehicle. Second, we augment LiDAR scans with virtual points generated using Multimodal Virtual Points (MVP), a readily available image-based depth completion algorithm. Our experiments on the long range Argoverse2 (AV2) dataset indicate that MVP is more effective in improving long range performance, while maintaining a straightforward implementation. On the other hand, the range experts offer a computationally efficient and simpler alternative, avoiding dependency on image-based segmentation networks and perfect camera-LiDAR calibration.

replace Sync-NeRF: Generalizing Dynamic NeRFs to Unsynchronized Videos

Authors: Seoha Kim, Jeongmin Bae, Youngsik Yun, Hahyun Lee, Gun Bang, Youngjung Uh

Abstract: Recent advancements in 4D scene reconstruction using neural radiance fields (NeRF) have demonstrated the ability to represent dynamic scenes from multi-view videos. However, they fail to reconstruct the dynamic scenes and struggle to fit even the training views in unsynchronized settings. It happens because they employ a single latent embedding for a frame while the multi-view images at the same frame were actually captured at different moments. To address this limitation, we introduce time offsets for individual unsynchronized videos and jointly optimize the offsets with NeRF. By design, our method is applicable for various baselines and improves them with large margins. Furthermore, finding the offsets naturally works as synchronizing the videos without manual effort. Experiments are conducted on the common Plenoptic Video Dataset and a newly built Unsynchronized Dynamic Blender Dataset to verify the performance of our method. Project page: https://seoha-kim.github.io/sync-nerf

URLs: https://seoha-kim.github.io/sync-nerf

replace Salient Object Detection in RGB-D Videos

Authors: Ao Mou, Yukang Lu, Jiahao He, Dingyao Min, Keren Fu, Qijun Zhao

Abstract: Given the widespread adoption of depth-sensing acquisition devices, RGB-D videos and related data/media have gained considerable traction in various aspects of daily life. Consequently, conducting salient object detection (SOD) in RGB-D videos presents a highly promising and evolving avenue. Despite the potential of this area, SOD in RGB-D videos remains somewhat under-explored, with RGB-D SOD and video SOD (VSOD) traditionally studied in isolation. To explore this emerging field, this paper makes two primary contributions: the dataset and the model. On one front, we construct the RDVS dataset, a new RGB-D VSOD dataset with realistic depth and characterized by its diversity of scenes and rigorous frame-by-frame annotations. We validate the dataset through comprehensive attribute and object-oriented analyses, and provide training and testing splits. Moreover, we introduce DCTNet+, a three-stream network tailored for RGB-D VSOD, with an emphasis on RGB modality and treats depth and optical flow as auxiliary modalities. In pursuit of effective feature enhancement, refinement, and fusion for precise final prediction, we propose two modules: the multi-modal attention module (MAM) and the refinement fusion module (RFM). To enhance interaction and fusion within RFM, we design a universal interaction module (UIM) and then integrate holistic multi-modal attentive paths (HMAPs) for refining multi-modal low-level features before reaching RFMs. Comprehensive experiments, conducted on pseudo RGB-D video datasets alongside our RDVS, highlight the superiority of DCTNet+ over 17 VSOD models and 14 RGB-D SOD models. Ablation experiments were performed on both pseudo and realistic RGB-D video datasets to demonstrate the advantages of individual modules as well as the necessity of introducing realistic depth. Our code together with RDVS dataset will be available at https://github.com/kerenfu/RDVS/.

URLs: https://github.com/kerenfu/RDVS/.

replace RISAM: Referring Image Segmentation via Mutual-Aware Attention Features

Authors: Mengxi Zhang, Yiming Liu, Xiangjun Yin, Huanjing Yue, Jingyu Yang

Abstract: Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to segment a particular region based on a language expression prompt. Existing methods incorporate linguistic features into visual features and obtain multi-modal features for mask decoding. However, these methods may segment the visually salient entity instead of the correct referring region, as the multi-modal features are dominated by the abundant visual context. In this paper, we propose MARIS, a referring image segmentation method that leverages the Segment Anything Model (SAM) and introduces a mutual-aware attention mechanism to enhance the cross-modal fusion via two parallel branches. Specifically, our mutual-aware attention mechanism consists of Vision-Guided Attention and Language-Guided Attention, which bidirectionally model the relationship between visual and linguistic features. Correspondingly, we design a Mask Decoder to enable explicit linguistic guidance for more consistent segmentation with the language expression. To this end, a multi-modal query token is proposed to integrate linguistic information and interact with visual information simultaneously. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art RIS methods. Our code will be publicly available.

replace SARA: Controllable Makeup Transfer with Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive Normalization

Authors: Xiaojing Zhong, Xinyi Huang, Zhonghua Wu, Guosheng Lin, Qingyao Wu

Abstract: Makeup transfer is a process of transferring the makeup style from a reference image to the source images, while preserving the source images' identities. This technique is highly desirable and finds many applications. However, existing methods lack fine-level control of the makeup style, making it challenging to achieve high-quality results when dealing with large spatial misalignments. To address this problem, we propose a novel Spatial Alignment and Region-Adaptive normalization method (SARA) in this paper. Our method generates detailed makeup transfer results that can handle large spatial misalignments and achieve part-specific and shade-controllable makeup transfer. Specifically, SARA comprises three modules: Firstly, a spatial alignment module that preserves the spatial context of makeup and provides a target semantic map for guiding the shape-independent style codes. Secondly, a region-adaptive normalization module that decouples shape and makeup style using per-region encoding and normalization, which facilitates the elimination of spatial misalignments. Lastly, a makeup fusion module blends identity features and makeup style by injecting learned scale and bias parameters. Experimental results show that our SARA method outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public datasets.

replace SqueezeSAM: User friendly mobile interactive segmentation

Authors: Balakrishnan Varadarajan, Bilge Soran, Forrest Iandola, Xiaoyu Xiang, Yunyang Xiong, Lemeng Wu, Chenchen Zhu, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra

Abstract: The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been a cornerstone in the field of interactive segmentation, propelling significant progress in generative AI, computational photography, and medical imaging. Despite its ability to process arbitrary user input and generate corresponding segmentation masks, SAM's 600 million parameter architecture, based on ViT-H, is not compatible with current mobile hardware due to its high computational demands and large model size. Our research aims to adapt SAM for use in mobile photography applications. To this end, we have developed a fully convolutional SqueezeSAM model architecture, which is 62.5 times faster and 31.6 times smaller than the original SAM, making it a viable solution for mobile applications. Furthermore, our tiny model achieves an mIOU within 1% of the original VIT-H architecture. Automated segmentation holds significant value in the creation flow for photography applications, as evidenced by its adoption by leading industry players like apple and capcut. To facilitate this automation, we employ salient object detection and simulate potential user clicks for foreground object selection, generating an initial segmentation mask that users can subsequently edit interactively. A common user expectation is that a click on a specific part of an object will result in the segmentation of the entire object. For example, a click on a person's t-shirt in a photo should ideally segment the entire person, not just the t-shirt. However, SAM typically only segments the clicked area. We address this limitation through a novel data augmentation scheme. Consequently, if a user clicks on a person holding a basketball, both the person and the basketball are segmented together, aligning with user expectations and enhancing the overall user experience.

replace CLIP in Medical Imaging: A Comprehensive Survey

Authors: Zihao Zhao, Yuxiao Liu, Han Wu, Yonghao Li, Sheng Wang, Lin Teng, Disheng Liu, Zhiming Cui, Qian Wang, Dinggang Shen

Abstract: Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), a simple yet effective pre-training paradigm, successfully introduces text supervision to vision models. It has shown promising results across various tasks, attributable to its generalizability and interpretability. The use of CLIP has recently gained increasing interest in the medical imaging domain, serving both as a pre-training paradigm for aligning medical vision and language, and as a critical component in diverse clinical tasks. With the aim of facilitating a deeper understanding of this promising direction, this survey offers an in-depth exploration of the CLIP paradigm within the domain of medical imaging, regarding both refined CLIP pre-training and CLIP-driven applications. In this study, We (1) start with a brief introduction to the fundamentals of CLIP methodology. (2) Then, we investigate the adaptation of CLIP pre-training in the medical domain, focusing on how to optimize CLIP given characteristics of medical images and reports. (3) Furthermore, we explore the practical utilization of CLIP pre-trained models in various tasks, including classification, dense prediction, and cross-modal tasks. (4) Finally, we discuss existing limitations of CLIP in the context of medical imaging and propose forward-looking directions to address the demands of medical imaging domain. We expect that this comprehensive survey will provide researchers in the field of medical image analysis with a holistic understanding of the CLIP paradigm and its potential implications. The project page can be found on https://github.com/zhaozh10/Awesome-CLIP-in-Medical-Imaging.

URLs: https://github.com/zhaozh10/Awesome-CLIP-in-Medical-Imaging.

replace ID-Blau: Image Deblurring by Implicit Diffusion-based reBLurring AUgmentation

Authors: Jia-Hao Wu, Fu-Jen Tsai, Yan-Tsung Peng, Chung-Chi Tsai, Chia-Wen Lin, Yen-Yu Lin

Abstract: Image deblurring aims to remove undesired blurs from an image captured in a dynamic scene. Much research has been dedicated to improving deblurring performance through model architectural designs. However, there is little work on data augmentation for image deblurring. Since continuous motion causes blurred artifacts during image exposure, we aspire to develop a groundbreaking blur augmentation method to generate diverse blurred images by simulating motion trajectories in a continuous space. This paper proposes Implicit Diffusion-based reBLurring AUgmentation (ID-Blau), utilizing a sharp image paired with a controllable blur condition map to produce a corresponding blurred image. We parameterize the blur patterns of a blurred image with their orientations and magnitudes as a pixel-wise blur condition map to simulate motion trajectories and implicitly represent them in a continuous space. By sampling diverse blur conditions, ID-Blau can generate various blurred images unseen in the training set. Experimental results demonstrate that ID-Blau can produce realistic blurred images for training and thus significantly improve performance for state-of-the-art deblurring models. The source code is available at https://github.com/plusgood-steven/ID-Blau.

URLs: https://github.com/plusgood-steven/ID-Blau.

replace Lift-Attend-Splat: Bird's-eye-view camera-lidar fusion using transformers

Authors: James Gunn, Zygmunt Lenyk, Anuj Sharma, Andrea Donati, Alexandru Buburuzan, John Redford, Romain Mueller

Abstract: Combining complementary sensor modalities is crucial to providing robust perception for safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving (AD). Recent state-of-the-art camera-lidar fusion methods for AD rely on monocular depth estimation which is a notoriously difficult task compared to using depth information from the lidar directly. Here, we find that this approach does not leverage depth as expected and show that naively improving depth estimation does not lead to improvements in object detection performance. Strikingly, we also find that removing depth estimation altogether does not degrade object detection performance substantially, suggesting that relying on monocular depth could be an unnecessary architectural bottleneck during camera-lidar fusion. In this work, we introduce a novel fusion method that bypasses monocular depth estimation altogether and instead selects and fuses camera and lidar features in a bird's-eye-view grid using a simple attention mechanism. We show that our model can modulate its use of camera features based on the availability of lidar features and that it yields better 3D object detection on the nuScenes dataset than baselines relying on monocular depth estimation.

replace Pixel-Level Change Detection Pseudo-Label Learning for Remote Sensing Change Captioning

Authors: Chenyang Liu, Keyan Chen, Zipeng Qi, Haotian Zhang, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi

Abstract: The existing methods for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) perform well in simple scenes but exhibit poorer performance in complex scenes. This limitation is primarily attributed to the model's constrained visual ability to distinguish and locate changes. Acknowledging the inherent correlation between change detection (CD) and RSICC tasks, we believe pixel-level CD is significant for describing the differences between images through language. Regrettably, the current RSICC dataset lacks readily available pixel-level CD labels. To address this deficiency, we leverage a model trained on existing CD datasets to derive CD pseudo-labels. We propose an innovative network with an auxiliary CD branch, supervised by pseudo-labels. Furthermore, a semantic fusion augment (SFA) module is proposed to fuse the feature information extracted by the CD branch, thereby facilitating the nuanced description of changes. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and validate that learning pixel-level CD pseudo-labels significantly contributes to change captioning. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Pix4Cap

URLs: https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/Pix4Cap

replace Learning Keypoints for Robotic Cloth Manipulation using Synthetic Data

Authors: Thomas Lips, Victor-Louis De Gusseme, Francis wyffels

Abstract: Assistive robots should be able to wash, fold or iron clothes. However, due to the variety, deformability and self-occlusions of clothes, creating robot systems for cloth manipulation is challenging. Synthetic data is a promising direction to improve generalization, but the sim-to-real gap limits its effectiveness. To advance the use of synthetic data for cloth manipulation tasks such as robotic folding, we present a synthetic data pipeline to train keypoint detectors for almost-flattened cloth items. To evaluate its performance, we have also collected a real-world dataset. We train detectors for both T-shirts, towels and shorts and obtain an average precision of 64% and an average keypoint distance of 18 pixels. Fine-tuning on real-world data improves performance to 74% mAP and an average distance of only 9 pixels. Furthermore, we describe failure modes of the keypoint detectors and compare different approaches to obtain cloth meshes and materials. We also quantify the remaining sim-to-real gap and argue that further improvements to the fidelity of cloth assets will be required to further reduce this gap. The code, dataset and trained models are available

replace AONeuS: A Neural Rendering Framework for Acoustic-Optical Sensor Fusion

Authors: Mohamad Qadri, Kevin Zhang, Akshay Hinduja, Michael Kaess, Adithya Pediredla, Christopher A. Metzler

Abstract: Underwater perception and 3D surface reconstruction are challenging problems with broad applications in construction, security, marine archaeology, and environmental monitoring. Treacherous operating conditions, fragile surroundings, and limited navigation control often dictate that submersibles restrict their range of motion and, thus, the baseline over which they can capture measurements. In the context of 3D scene reconstruction, it is well-known that smaller baselines make reconstruction more challenging. Our work develops a physics-based multimodal acoustic-optical neural surface reconstruction framework (AONeuS) capable of effectively integrating high-resolution RGB measurements with low-resolution depth-resolved imaging sonar measurements. By fusing these complementary modalities, our framework can reconstruct accurate high-resolution 3D surfaces from measurements captured over heavily-restricted baselines. Through extensive simulations and in-lab experiments, we demonstrate that AONeuS dramatically outperforms recent RGB-only and sonar-only inverse-differentiable-rendering--based surface reconstruction methods. A website visualizing the results of our paper is located at this address: https://aoneus.github.io/

URLs: https://aoneus.github.io/

replace Human Video Translation via Query Warping

Authors: Haiming Zhu, Yangyang Xu, Shengfeng He

Abstract: In this paper, we present QueryWarp, a novel framework for temporally coherent human motion video translation. Existing diffusion-based video editing approaches that rely solely on key and value tokens to ensure temporal consistency, which scarifies the preservation of local and structural regions. In contrast, we aim to consider complementary query priors by constructing the temporal correlations among query tokens from different frames. Initially, we extract appearance flows from source poses to capture continuous human foreground motion. Subsequently, during the denoising process of the diffusion model, we employ appearance flows to warp the previous frame's query token, aligning it with the current frame's query. This query warping imposes explicit constraints on the outputs of self-attention layers, effectively guaranteeing temporally coherent translation. We perform experiments on various human motion video translation tasks, and the results demonstrate that our QueryWarp framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

replace NiNformer: A Network in Network Transformer with Token Mixing Generated Gating Function

Authors: Abdullah Nazhat Abdullah, Tarkan Aydin

Abstract: The attention mechanism is the main component of the transformer architecture, and since its introduction, it has led to significant advancements in deep learning that span many domains and multiple tasks. The attention mechanism was utilized in computer vision as the Vision Transformer ViT, and its usage has expanded into many tasks in the vision domain, such as classification, segmentation, object detection, and image generation. While this mechanism is very expressive and capable, it comes with the drawback of being computationally expensive and requiring datasets of considerable size for effective optimization. To address these shortcomings, many designs have been proposed in the literature to reduce the computational burden and alleviate the data size requirements. Examples of such attempts in the vision domain are the MLP-Mixer, the Conv-Mixer, the Perciver-IO, and many more. This paper introduces a new computational block as an alternative to the standard ViT block that reduces the compute burdens by replacing the normal attention layers with a Network in Network structure that enhances the static approach of the MLP-Mixer with a dynamic system of learning an element-wise gating function by a token mixing process. Extensive experimentation shows that the proposed design provides better performance than the baseline architectures on multiple datasets applied in the image classification task of the vision domain.

replace GSEdit: Efficient Text-Guided Editing of 3D Objects via Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Francesco Palandra, Andrea Sanchietti, Daniele Baieri, Emanuele Rodol\`a

Abstract: We present GSEdit, a pipeline for text-guided 3D object editing based on Gaussian Splatting models. Our method enables the editing of the style and appearance of 3D objects without altering their main details, all in a matter of minutes on consumer hardware. We tackle the problem by leveraging Gaussian splatting to represent 3D scenes, and we optimize the model while progressively varying the image supervision by means of a pretrained image-based diffusion model. The input object may be given as a 3D triangular mesh, or directly provided as Gaussians from a generative model such as DreamGaussian. GSEdit ensures consistency across different viewpoints, maintaining the integrity of the original object's information. Compared to previously proposed methods relying on NeRF-like MLP models, GSEdit stands out for its efficiency, making 3D editing tasks much faster. Our editing process is refined via the application of the SDS loss, ensuring that our edits are both precise and accurate. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that GSEdit effectively alters object shape and appearance following the given textual instructions while preserving their coherence and detail.

replace E2E-MFD: Towards End-to-End Synchronous Multimodal Fusion Detection

Authors: Jiaqing Zhang, Mingxiang Cao, Xue Yang, Weiying Xie, Jie Lei, Daixun Li, Wenbo Huang, Yunsong Li

Abstract: Multimodal image fusion and object detection are crucial for autonomous driving. While current methods have advanced the fusion of texture details and semantic information, their complex training processes hinder broader applications. Addressing this challenge, we introduce E2E-MFD, a novel end-to-end algorithm for multimodal fusion detection. E2E-MFD streamlines the process, achieving high performance with a single training phase. It employs synchronous joint optimization across components to avoid suboptimal solutions tied to individual tasks. Furthermore, it implements a comprehensive optimization strategy in the gradient matrix for shared parameters, ensuring convergence to an optimal fusion detection configuration. Our extensive testing on multiple public datasets reveals E2E-MFD's superior capabilities, showcasing not only visually appealing image fusion but also impressive detection outcomes, such as a 3.9% and 2.0% mAP50 increase on horizontal object detection dataset M3FD and oriented object detection dataset DroneVehicle, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

replace SPTNet: An Efficient Alternative Framework for Generalized Category Discovery with Spatial Prompt Tuning

Authors: Hongjun Wang, Sagar Vaze, Kai Han

Abstract: Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabelled images from both `seen' and `unseen' classes by transferring knowledge from a set of labelled `seen' class images. A key theme in existing GCD approaches is adapting large-scale pre-trained models for the GCD task. An alternate perspective, however, is to adapt the data representation itself for better alignment with the pre-trained model. As such, in this paper, we introduce a two-stage adaptation approach termed SPTNet, which iteratively optimizes model parameters (i.e., model-finetuning) and data parameters (i.e., prompt learning). Furthermore, we propose a novel spatial prompt tuning method (SPT) which considers the spatial property of image data, enabling the method to better focus on object parts, which can transfer between seen and unseen classes. We thoroughly evaluate our SPTNet on standard benchmarks and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing GCD methods. Notably, we find our method achieves an average accuracy of 61.4% on the SSB, surpassing prior state-of-the-art methods by approximately 10%. The improvement is particularly remarkable as our method yields extra parameters amounting to only 0.117% of those in the backbone architecture. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/sptnet.

URLs: https://visual-ai.github.io/sptnet.

replace Ship in Sight: Diffusion Models for Ship-Image Super Resolution

Authors: Luigi Sigillo, Riccardo Fosco Gramaccioni, Alessandro Nicolosi, Danilo Comminiello

Abstract: In recent years, remarkable advancements have been achieved in the field of image generation, primarily driven by the escalating demand for high-quality outcomes across various image generation subtasks, such as inpainting, denoising, and super resolution. A major effort is devoted to exploring the application of super-resolution techniques to enhance the quality of low-resolution images. In this context, our method explores in depth the problem of ship image super resolution, which is crucial for coastal and port surveillance. We investigate the opportunity given by the growing interest in text-to-image diffusion models, taking advantage of the prior knowledge that such foundation models have already learned. In particular, we present a diffusion-model-based architecture that leverages text conditioning during training while being class-aware, to best preserve the crucial details of the ships during the generation of the super-resoluted image. Since the specificity of this task and the scarcity availability of off-the-shelf data, we also introduce a large labeled ship dataset scraped from online ship images, mostly from ShipSpotting\footnote{\url{www.shipspotting.com}} website. Our method achieves more robust results than other deep learning models previously employed for super resolution, as proven by the multiple experiments performed. Moreover, we investigate how this model can benefit downstream tasks, such as classification and object detection, thus emphasizing practical implementation in a real-world scenario. Experimental results show flexibility, reliability, and impressive performance of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods for different tasks. The code is available at: https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/ShipinSight .

URLs: https://github.com/LuigiSigillo/ShipinSight

replace Bringing Textual Prompt to AI-Generated Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Bowen Qu, Haohui Li, Wei Gao

Abstract: AI-Generated Images (AGIs) have inherent multimodal nature. Unlike traditional image quality assessment (IQA) on natural scenarios, AGIs quality assessment (AGIQA) takes the correspondence of image and its textual prompt into consideration. This is coupled in the ground truth score, which confuses the unimodal IQA methods. To solve this problem, we introduce IP-IQA (AGIs Quality Assessment via Image and Prompt), a multimodal framework for AGIQA via corresponding image and prompt incorporation. Specifically, we propose a novel incremental pretraining task named Image2Prompt for better understanding of AGIs and their corresponding textual prompts. An effective and efficient image-prompt fusion module, along with a novel special [QA] token, are also applied. Both are plug-and-play and beneficial for the cooperation of image and its corresponding prompt. Experiments demonstrate that our IP-IQA achieves the state-of-the-art on AGIQA-1k and AGIQA-3k datasets. Code will be available at https://github.com/Coobiw/IP-IQA.

URLs: https://github.com/Coobiw/IP-IQA.

replace TTD: Text-Tag Self-Distillation Enhancing Image-Text Alignment in CLIP to Alleviate Single Tag Bias

Authors: Sanghyun Jo, Soohyun Ryu, Sungyub Kim, Eunho Yang, Kyungsu Kim

Abstract: We identify a critical bias in contemporary CLIP-based models, which we denote as single tag bias. This bias manifests as a disproportionate focus on a singular tag (word) while neglecting other pertinent tags, stemming from CLIP's text embeddings that prioritize one specific tag in image-text relationships. When deconstructing text into individual tags, only one tag tends to have high relevancy with CLIP's image embedding, leading to biased tag relevancy. In this paper, we introduce a novel two-step fine-tuning approach, Text-Tag Self-Distillation (TTD), to address this challenge. TTD first extracts image-relevant tags from text based on their similarity to the nearest pixels then employs a self-distillation strategy to align combined masks with the text-derived mask. This approach ensures the unbiased image-text alignment of the CLIP-based models using only image-text pairs without necessitating additional supervision. Our technique demonstrates model-agnostic improvements in multi-tag classification and segmentation tasks, surpassing competing methods that rely on external resources. The code is available at https://github.com/shjo-april/TTD.

URLs: https://github.com/shjo-april/TTD.

replace LetsGo: Large-Scale Garage Modeling and Rendering via LiDAR-Assisted Gaussian Primitives

Authors: Jiadi Cui, Junming Cao, Fuqiang Zhao, Zhipeng He, Yifan Chen, Yuhui Zhong, Lan Xu, Yujiao Shi, Yingliang Zhang, Jingyi Yu

Abstract: Large garages are ubiquitous yet intricate scenes that present unique challenges due to their monotonous colors, repetitive patterns, reflective surfaces, and transparent vehicle glass. Conventional Structure from Motion (SfM) methods for camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction often fail in these environments due to poor correspondence construction. To address these challenges, we introduce LetsGo, a LiDAR-assisted Gaussian splatting framework for large-scale garage modeling and rendering. We develop a handheld scanner, Polar, equipped with IMU, LiDAR, and a fisheye camera, to facilitate accurate data acquisition. Using this Polar device, we present the GarageWorld dataset, consisting of eight expansive garage scenes with diverse geometric structures, which will be made publicly available for further research. Our approach demonstrates that LiDAR point clouds collected by the Polar device significantly enhance a suite of 3D Gaussian splatting algorithms for garage scene modeling and rendering. We introduce a novel depth regularizer that effectively eliminates floating artifacts in rendered images. Additionally, we propose a multi-resolution 3D Gaussian representation designed for Level-of-Detail (LOD) rendering. This includes adapted scaling factors for individual levels and a random-resolution-level training scheme to optimize the Gaussians across different resolutions. This representation enables efficient rendering of large-scale garage scenes on lightweight devices via a web-based renderer. Experimental results on our GarageWorld dataset, as well as on ScanNet++ and KITTI-360, demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of rendering quality and resource efficiency.

replace Exploring Diverse Methods in Visual Question Answering

Authors: Panfeng Li, Qikai Yang, Xieming Geng, Wenjing Zhou, Zhicheng Ding, Yi Nian

Abstract: This study explores innovative methods for improving Visual Question Answering (VQA) using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), autoencoders, and attention mechanisms. Leveraging a balanced VQA dataset, we investigate three distinct strategies. Firstly, GAN-based approaches aim to generate answer embeddings conditioned on image and question inputs, showing potential but struggling with more complex tasks. Secondly, autoencoder-based techniques focus on learning optimal embeddings for questions and images, achieving comparable results with GAN due to better ability on complex questions. Lastly, attention mechanisms, incorporating Multimodal Compact Bilinear pooling (MCB), address language priors and attention modeling, albeit with a complexity-performance trade-off. This study underscores the challenges and opportunities in VQA and suggests avenues for future research, including alternative GAN formulations and attentional mechanisms.

replace RetinaRegNet: A Versatile Approach for Retinal Image Registration

Authors: Vishal Balaji Sivaraman, Muhammad Imran, Qingyue Wei, Preethika Muralidharan, Michelle R. Tamplin, Isabella M . Grumbach, Randy H. Kardon, Jui-Kai Wang, Yuyin Zhou, Wei Shao

Abstract: We introduce the RetinaRegNet model, which can achieve state-of-the-art performance across various retinal image registration tasks. RetinaRegNet does not require training on any retinal images. It begins by establishing point correspondences between two retinal images using image features derived from diffusion models. This process involves the selection of feature points from the moving image using the SIFT algorithm alongside random point sampling. For each selected feature point, a 2D correlation map is computed by assessing the similarity between the feature vector at that point and the feature vectors of all pixels in the fixed image. The pixel with the highest similarity score in the correlation map corresponds to the feature point in the moving image. To remove outliers in the estimated point correspondences, we first applied an inverse consistency constraint, followed by a transformation-based outlier detector. This method proved to outperform the widely used random sample consensus (RANSAC) outlier detector by a significant margin. To handle large deformations, we utilized a two-stage image registration framework. A homography transformation was used in the first stage and a more accurate third-order polynomial transformation was used in the second stage. The model's effectiveness was demonstrated across three retinal image datasets: color fundus images, fluorescein angiography images, and laser speckle flowgraphy images. RetinaRegNet outperformed current state-of-the-art methods in all three datasets. It was especially effective for registering image pairs with large displacement and scaling deformations. This innovation holds promise for various applications in retinal image analysis. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mirthAI/RetinaRegNet .

URLs: https://github.com/mirthAI/RetinaRegNet

replace Commonsense Prototype for Outdoor Unsupervised 3D Object Detection

Authors: Hai Wu, Shijia Zhao, Xun Huang, Chenglu Wen, Xin Li, Cheng Wang

Abstract: The prevalent approaches of unsupervised 3D object detection follow cluster-based pseudo-label generation and iterative self-training processes. However, the challenge arises due to the sparsity of LiDAR scans, which leads to pseudo-labels with erroneous size and position, resulting in subpar detection performance. To tackle this problem, this paper introduces a Commonsense Prototype-based Detector, termed CPD, for unsupervised 3D object detection. CPD first constructs Commonsense Prototype (CProto) characterized by high-quality bounding box and dense points, based on commonsense intuition. Subsequently, CPD refines the low-quality pseudo-labels by leveraging the size prior from CProto. Furthermore, CPD enhances the detection accuracy of sparsely scanned objects by the geometric knowledge from CProto. CPD outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised 3D detectors on Waymo Open Dataset (WOD), PandaSet, and KITTI datasets by a large margin. Besides, by training CPD on WOD and testing on KITTI, CPD attains 90.85% and 81.01% 3D Average Precision on easy and moderate car classes, respectively. These achievements position CPD in close proximity to fully supervised detectors, highlighting the significance of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/hailanyi/CPD.

URLs: https://github.com/hailanyi/CPD.

replace RSCaMa: Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning with State Space Model

Authors: Chenyang Liu, Keyan Chen, Bowen Chen, Haotian Zhang, Zhengxia Zou, Zhenwei Shi

Abstract: Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning (RSICC) aims to describe surface changes between multi-temporal remote sensing images in language, including the changed object categories, locations, and dynamics of changing objects (e.g., added or disappeared). This poses challenges to spatial and temporal modeling of bi-temporal features. Despite previous methods progressing in the spatial change perception, there are still weaknesses in joint spatial-temporal modeling. To address this, in this paper, we propose a novel RSCaMa model, which achieves efficient joint spatial-temporal modeling through multiple CaMa layers, enabling iterative refinement of bi-temporal features. To achieve efficient spatial modeling, we introduce the recently popular Mamba (a state space model) with a global receptive field and linear complexity into the RSICC task and propose the Spatial Difference-aware SSM (SD-SSM), overcoming limitations of previous CNN- and Transformer-based methods in the receptive field and computational complexity. SD-SSM enhances the model's ability to capture spatial changes sharply. In terms of efficient temporal modeling, considering the potential correlation between the temporal scanning characteristics of Mamba and the temporality of the RSICC, we propose the Temporal-Traversing SSM (TT-SSM), which scans bi-temporal features in a temporal cross-wise manner, enhancing the model's temporal understanding and information interaction. Experiments validate the effectiveness of the efficient joint spatial-temporal modeling and demonstrate the outstanding performance of RSCaMa and the potential of the Mamba in the RSICC task. Additionally, we systematically compare three different language decoders, including Mamba, GPT-style decoder, and Transformer decoder, providing valuable insights for future RSICC research. The code will be available at \emph{\url{https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/RSCaMa}}

URLs: https://github.com/Chen-Yang-Liu/RSCaMa

replace Joint Identity Verification and Pose Alignment for Partial Fingerprints

Authors: Xiongjun Guan, Zhiyu Pan, Jianjiang Feng, Jie Zhou

Abstract: Currently, portable electronic devices are becoming more and more popular. For lightweight considerations, their fingerprint recognition modules usually use limited-size sensors. However, partial fingerprints have few matchable features, especially when there are differences in finger pressing posture or image quality, which makes partial fingerprint verification challenging. Most existing methods regard fingerprint position rectification and identity verification as independent tasks, ignoring the coupling relationship between them -- relative pose estimation typically relies on paired features as anchors, and authentication accuracy tends to improve with more precise pose alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for joint identity verification and pose alignment of partial fingerprint pairs, aiming to leverage their inherent correlation to improve each other. To achieve this, we present a multi-task CNN (Convolutional Neural Network)-Transformer hybrid network, and design a pre-training task to enhance the feature extraction capability. Experiments on multiple public datasets (NIST SD14, FVC2002 DB1A & DB3A, FVC2004 DB1A & DB2A, FVC2006 DB1A) and an in-house dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both partial fingerprint verification and relative pose estimation, while being more efficient than previous methods.

replace HARIS: Human-Like Attention for Reference Image Segmentation

Authors: Mengxi Zhang, Heqing Lian, Yiming Liu, Jie Chen

Abstract: Referring image segmentation (RIS) aims to locate the particular region corresponding to the language expression. Existing methods incorporate features from different modalities in a \emph{bottom-up} manner. This design may get some unnecessary image-text pairs, which leads to an inaccurate segmentation mask. In this paper, we propose a referring image segmentation method called HARIS, which introduces the Human-Like Attention mechanism and uses the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) framework. To be specific, the Human-Like Attention gets a \emph{feedback} signal from multi-modal features, which makes the network center on the specific objects and discard the irrelevant image-text pairs. Besides, we introduce the PEFT framework to preserve the zero-shot ability of pre-trained encoders. Extensive experiments on three widely used RIS benchmarks and the PhraseCut dataset demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and great zero-shot ability.

replace CSTA: CNN-based Spatiotemporal Attention for Video Summarization

Authors: Jaewon Son, Jaehun Park, Kwangsu Kim

Abstract: Video summarization aims to generate a concise representation of a video, capturing its essential content and key moments while reducing its overall length. Although several methods employ attention mechanisms to handle long-term dependencies, they often fail to capture the visual significance inherent in frames. To address this limitation, we propose a CNN-based SpatioTemporal Attention (CSTA) method that stacks each feature of frames from a single video to form image-like frame representations and applies 2D CNN to these frame features. Our methodology relies on CNN to comprehend the inter and intra-frame relations and to find crucial attributes in videos by exploiting its ability to learn absolute positions within images. In contrast to previous work compromising efficiency by designing additional modules to focus on spatial importance, CSTA requires minimal computational overhead as it uses CNN as a sliding window. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (SumMe and TVSum) demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer MACs compared to previous methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/thswodnjs3/CSTA.

URLs: https://github.com/thswodnjs3/CSTA.

replace Gaussian Head & Shoulders: High Fidelity Neural Upper Body Avatars with Anchor Gaussian Guided Texture Warping

Authors: Tianhao Wu, Jing Yang, Zhilin Guo, Jingyi Wan, Fangcheng Zhong, Cengiz Oztireli

Abstract: By equipping the most recent 3D Gaussian Splatting representation with head 3D morphable models (3DMM), existing methods manage to create head avatars with high fidelity. However, most existing methods only reconstruct a head without the body, substantially limiting their application scenarios. We found that naively applying Gaussians to model the clothed chest and shoulders tends to result in blurry reconstruction and noisy floaters under novel poses. This is because of the fundamental limitation of Gaussians and point clouds -- each Gaussian or point can only have a single directional radiance without spatial variance, therefore an unnecessarily large number of them is required to represent complicated spatially varying texture, even for simple geometry. In contrast, we propose to model the body part with a neural texture that consists of coarse and pose-dependent fine colors. To properly render the body texture for each view and pose without accurate geometry nor UV mapping, we optimize another sparse set of Gaussians as anchors that constrain the neural warping field that maps image plane coordinates to the texture space. We demonstrate that Gaussian Head & Shoulders can fit the high-frequency details on the clothed upper body with high fidelity and potentially improve the accuracy and fidelity of the head region. We evaluate our method with casual phone-captured and internet videos and show our method archives superior reconstruction quality and robustness in both self and cross reenactment tasks. To fully utilize the efficient rendering speed of Gaussian splatting, we additionally propose an accelerated inference method of our trained model without Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) queries and reach a stable rendering speed of around 130 FPS for any subjects.

replace Sheet Music Transformer ++: End-to-End Full-Page Optical Music Recognition for Pianoform Sheet Music

Authors: Antonio R\'ios-Vila, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, David Rizo, Thierry Paquet

Abstract: Optical Music Recognition is a field that has progressed significantly, bringing accurate systems that transcribe effectively music scores into digital formats. Despite this, there are still several limitations that hinder OMR from achieving its full potential. Specifically, state of the art OMR still depends on multi-stage pipelines for performing full-page transcription, as well as it has only been demonstrated in monophonic cases, leaving behind very relevant engravings. In this work, we present the Sheet Music Transformer++, an end-to-end model that is able to transcribe full-page polyphonic music scores without the need of a previous Layout Analysis step. This is done thanks to an extensive curriculum learning-based pretraining with synthetic data generation. We conduct several experiments on a full-page extension of a public polyphonic transcription dataset. The experimental outcomes confirm that the model is competent at transcribing full-page pianoform scores, marking a noteworthy milestone in end-to-end OMR transcription.

replace-cross Spatial and Modal Optimal Transport for Fast Cross-Modal MRI Reconstruction

Authors: Qi Wang, Zhijie Wen, Jun Shi, Qian Wang, Dinggang Shen, Shihui Ying

Abstract: Multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a crucial role in comprehensive disease diagnosis in clinical medicine. However, acquiring certain modalities, such as T2-weighted images (T2WIs), is time-consuming and prone to be with motion artifacts. It negatively impacts subsequent multi-modal image analysis. To address this issue, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework that utilizes T1-weighted images (T1WIs) as auxiliary modalities to expedite T2WIs' acquisitions. While image pre-processing is capable of mitigating misalignment, improper parameter selection leads to adverse pre-processing effects, requiring iterative experimentation and adjustment. To overcome this shortage, we employ Optimal Transport (OT) to synthesize T2WIs by aligning T1WIs and performing cross-modal synthesis, effectively mitigating spatial misalignment effects. Furthermore, we adopt an alternating iteration framework between the reconstruction task and the cross-modal synthesis task to optimize the final results. Then, we prove that the reconstructed T2WIs and the synthetic T2WIs become closer on the T2 image manifold with iterations increasing, and further illustrate that the improved reconstruction result enhances the synthesis process, whereas the enhanced synthesis result improves the reconstruction process. Finally, experimental results from FastMRI and internal datasets confirm the effectiveness of our method, demonstrating significant improvements in image reconstruction quality even at low sampling rates.

replace-cross Multi-omics Prediction from High-content Cellular Imaging with Deep Learning

Authors: Rahil Mehrizi, Arash Mehrjou, Maryana Alegro, Yi Zhao, Benedetta Carbone, Carl Fishwick, Johanna Vappiani, Jing Bi, Siobhan Sanford, Hakan Keles, Marcus Bantscheff, Cuong Nguyen, Patrick Schwab

Abstract: High-content cellular imaging, transcriptomics, and proteomics data provide rich and complementary views on the molecular layers of biology that influence cellular states and function. However, the biological determinants through which changes in multi-omics measurements influence cellular morphology have not yet been systematically explored, and the degree to which cell imaging could potentially enable the prediction of multi-omics directly from cell imaging data is therefore currently unclear. Here, we address the question of whether it is possible to predict bulk multi-omics measurements directly from cell images using Image2Omics - a deep learning approach that predicts multi-omics in a cell population directly from high-content images of cells stained with multiplexed fluorescent dyes. We perform an experimental evaluation in gene-edited macrophages derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) under multiple stimulation conditions and demonstrate that Image2Omics achieves significantly better performance in predicting transcriptomics and proteomics measurements directly from cell images than predictions based on the mean observed training set abundance. We observed significant predictability of abundances for 4927 (18.72%; 95% CI: 6.52%, 35.52%) and 3521 (13.38%; 95% CI: 4.10%, 32.21%) transcripts out of 26137 in M1 and M2-stimulated macrophages respectively and for 422 (8.46%; 95% CI: 0.58%, 25.83%) and 697 (13.98%; 95% CI: 2.41%, 32.83%) proteins out of 4986 in M1 and M2-stimulated macrophages respectively. Our results show that some transcript and protein abundances are predictable from cell imaging and that cell imaging may potentially, in some settings and depending on the mechanisms of interest and desired performance threshold, even be a scalable and resource-efficient substitute for multi-omics measurements.

replace-cross High-Resolution Cranial Defect Reconstruction by Iterative, Low-Resolution, Point Cloud Completion Transformers

Authors: Marek Wodzinski, Mateusz Daniol, Daria Hemmerling, Miroslaw Socha

Abstract: Each year thousands of people suffer from various types of cranial injuries and require personalized implants whose manual design is expensive and time-consuming. Therefore, an automatic, dedicated system to increase the availability of personalized cranial reconstruction is highly desirable. The problem of the automatic cranial defect reconstruction can be formulated as the shape completion task and solved using dedicated deep networks. Currently, the most common approach is to use the volumetric representation and apply deep networks dedicated to image segmentation. However, this approach has several limitations and does not scale well into high-resolution volumes, nor takes into account the data sparsity. In our work, we reformulate the problem into a point cloud completion task. We propose an iterative, transformer-based method to reconstruct the cranial defect at any resolution while also being fast and resource-efficient during training and inference. We compare the proposed methods to the state-of-the-art volumetric approaches and show superior performance in terms of GPU memory consumption while maintaining high-quality of the reconstructed defects.

replace-cross Shape of my heart: Cardiac models through learned signed distance functions

Authors: Jan Verh\"ulsdonk, Thomas Grandits, Francisco Sahli Costabal, Thomas Pinetz, Rolf Krause, Angelo Auricchio, Gundolf Haase, Simone Pezzuto, Alexander Effland

Abstract: The efficient construction of anatomical models is one of the major challenges of patient-specific in-silico models of the human heart. Current methods frequently rely on linear statistical models, allowing no advanced topological changes, or requiring medical image segmentation followed by a meshing pipeline, which strongly depends on image resolution, quality, and modality. These approaches are therefore limited in their transferability to other imaging domains. In this work, the cardiac shape is reconstructed by means of three-dimensional deep signed distance functions with Lipschitz regularity. For this purpose, the shapes of cardiac MRI reconstructions are learned to model the spatial relation of multiple chambers. We demonstrate that this approach is also capable of reconstructing anatomical models from partial data, such as point clouds from a single ventricle, or modalities different from the trained MRI, such as the electroanatomical mapping (EAM).

replace-cross Neural Bounding

Authors: Stephanie Wenxin Liu, Michael Fischer, Paul D. Yoo, Tobias Ritschel

Abstract: Bounding volumes are an established concept in computer graphics and vision tasks but have seen little change since their early inception. In this work, we study the use of neural networks as bounding volumes. Our key observation is that bounding, which so far has primarily been considered a problem of computational geometry, can be redefined as a problem of learning to classify space into free or occupied. This learning-based approach is particularly advantageous in high-dimensional spaces, such as animated scenes with complex queries, where neural networks are known to excel. However, unlocking neural bounding requires a twist: allowing -- but also limiting -- false positives, while ensuring that the number of false negatives is strictly zero. We enable such tight and conservative results using a dynamically-weighted asymmetric loss function. Our results show that our neural bounding produces up to an order of magnitude fewer false positives than traditional methods. In addition, we propose an extension of our bounding method using early exits that accelerates query speeds by 25%. We also demonstrate that our approach is applicable to non-deep learning models that train within seconds. Our project page is at: https://wenxin-liu.github.io/neural_bounding/.

URLs: https://wenxin-liu.github.io/neural_bounding/.

replace-cross Gemini: A Family of Highly Capable Multimodal Models

Authors: Gemini Team, Rohan Anil, Sebastian Borgeaud, Jean-Baptiste Alayrac, Jiahui Yu, Radu Soricut, Johan Schalkwyk, Andrew M. Dai, Anja Hauth, Katie Millican, David Silver, Melvin Johnson, Ioannis Antonoglou, Julian Schrittwieser, Amelia Glaese, Jilin Chen, Emily Pitler, Timothy Lillicrap, Angeliki Lazaridou, Orhan Firat, James Molloy, Michael Isard, Paul R. Barham, Tom Hennigan, Benjamin Lee, Fabio Viola, Malcolm Reynolds, Yuanzhong Xu, Ryan Doherty, Eli Collins, Clemens Meyer, Eliza Rutherford, Erica Moreira, Kareem Ayoub, Megha Goel, Jack Krawczyk, Cosmo Du, Ed Chi, Heng-Tze Cheng, Eric Ni, Purvi Shah, Patrick Kane, Betty Chan, Manaal Faruqui, Aliaksei Severyn, Hanzhao Lin, YaGuang Li, Yong Cheng, Abe Ittycheriah, Mahdis Mahdieh, Mia Chen, Pei Sun, Dustin Tran, Sumit Bagri, Balaji Lakshminarayanan, Jeremiah Liu, Andras Orban, Fabian G\"ura, Hao Zhou, Xinying Song, Aurelien Boffy, Harish Ganapathy, Steven Zheng, HyunJeong Choe, \'Agoston Weisz, Tao Zhu, Yifeng Lu, Siddharth Gopal, Jarrod Kahn, Maciej Kula, Jeff Pitman, Rushin Shah, Emanuel Taropa, Majd Al Merey, Martin Baeuml, Zhifeng Chen, Laurent El Shafey, Yujing Zhang, Olcan Sercinoglu, George Tucker, Enrique Piqueras, Maxim Krikun, Iain Barr, Nikolay Savinov, Ivo Danihelka, Becca Roelofs, Ana\"is White, Anders Andreassen, Tamara von Glehn, Lakshman Yagati, Mehran Kazemi, Lucas Gonzalez, Misha Khalman, Jakub Sygnowski, Alexandre Frechette, Charlotte Smith, Laura Culp, Lev Proleev, Yi Luan, Xi Chen, James Lottes, Nathan Schucher, Federico Lebron, Alban Rrustemi, Natalie Clay, Phil Crone, Tomas Kocisky, Jeffrey Zhao, Bartek Perz, Dian Yu, Heidi Howard, Adam Bloniarz, Jack W. Rae, Han Lu, Laurent Sifre, Marcello Maggioni, Fred Alcober, Dan Garrette, Megan Barnes, Shantanu Thakoor, Jacob Austin, Gabriel Barth-Maron, William Wong, Rishabh Joshi, Rahma Chaabouni, Deeni Fatiha, Arun Ahuja, Gaurav Singh Tomar, Evan Senter, Martin Chadwick, Ilya Kornakov, Nithya Attaluri, I\~naki Iturrate, Ruibo Liu, Yunxuan Li, Sarah Cogan, Jeremy Chen, Chao Jia, Chenjie Gu, Qiao Zhang, Jordan Grimstad, Ale Jakse Hartman, Xavier Garcia, Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai, Jacob Devlin, Michael Laskin, Diego de Las Casas, Dasha Valter, Connie Tao, Lorenzo Blanco, Adri\`a Puigdom\`enech Badia, David Reitter, Mianna Chen, Jenny Brennan, Clara Rivera, Sergey Brin, Shariq Iqbal, Gabriela Surita, Jane Labanowski, Abhi Rao, Stephanie Winkler, Emilio Parisotto, Yiming Gu, Kate Olszewska, Ravi Addanki, Antoine Miech, Annie Louis, Denis Teplyashin, Geoff Brown, Elliot Catt, Jan Balaguer, Jackie Xiang, Pidong Wang, Zoe Ashwood, Anton Briukhov, Albert Webson, Sanjay Ganapathy, Smit Sanghavi, Ajay Kannan, Ming-Wei Chang, Axel Stjerngren, Josip Djolonga, Yuting Sun, Ankur Bapna, Matthew Aitchison, Pedram Pejman, Henryk Michalewski, Tianhe Yu, Cindy Wang, Juliette Love, Junwhan Ahn, Dawn Bloxwich, Kehang Han, Peter Humphreys, Thibault Sellam, James Bradbury, Varun Godbole, Sina Samangooei, Bogdan Damoc, Alex Kaskasoli, S\'ebastien M. R. Arnold, Vijay Vasudevan, Shubham Agrawal, Jason Riesa, Dmitry Lepikhin, Richard Tanburn, Srivatsan Srinivasan, Hyeontaek Lim, Sarah Hodkinson, Pranav Shyam, Johan Ferret, Steven Hand, Ankush Garg, Tom Le Paine, Jian Li, Yujia Li, Minh Giang, Alexander Neitz, Zaheer Abbas, Sarah York, Machel Reid, Elizabeth Cole, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Dipanjan Das, Dominika Rogozi\'nska, Vitaliy Nikolaev, Pablo Sprechmann, Zachary Nado, Lukas Zilka, Flavien Prost, Luheng He, Marianne Monteiro, Gaurav Mishra, Chris Welty, Josh Newlan, Dawei Jia, Miltiadis Allamanis, Clara Huiyi Hu, Raoul de Liedekerke, Justin Gilmer, Carl Saroufim, Shruti Rijhwani, Shaobo Hou, Disha Shrivastava, Anirudh Baddepudi, Alex Goldin, Adnan Ozturel, Albin Cassirer, Yunhan Xu, Daniel Sohn, Devendra Sachan, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Craig Swanson, Dessie Petrova, Shashi Narayan, Arthur Guez, Siddhartha Brahma, Jessica Landon, Miteyan Patel, Ruizhe Zhao, Kevin Villela, Luyu Wang, Wenhao Jia, Matthew Rahtz, Mai Gim\'enez, Legg Yeung, James Keeling, Petko Georgiev, Diana Mincu, Boxi Wu, Salem Haykal, Rachel Saputro, Kiran Vodrahalli, James Qin, Zeynep Cankara, Abhanshu Sharma, Nick Fernando, Will Hawkins, Behnam Neyshabur, Solomon Kim, Adrian Hutter, Priyanka Agrawal, Alex Castro-Ros, George van den Driessche, Tao Wang, Fan Yang, Shuo-yiin Chang, Paul Komarek, Ross McIlroy, Mario Lu\v{c}i\'c, Guodong Zhang, Wael Farhan, Michael Sharman, Paul Natsev, Paul Michel, Yamini Bansal, Siyuan Qiao, Kris Cao, Siamak Shakeri, Christina Butterfield, Justin Chung, Paul Kishan Rubenstein, Shivani Agrawal, Arthur Mensch, Kedar Soparkar, Karel Lenc, Timothy Chung, Aedan Pope, Loren Maggiore, Jackie Kay, Priya Jhakra, Shibo Wang, Joshua Maynez, Mary Phuong, Taylor Tobin, Andrea Tacchetti, Maja Trebacz, Kevin Robinson, Yash Katariya, Sebastian Riedel, Paige Bailey, Kefan Xiao, Nimesh Ghelani, Lora Aroyo, Ambrose Slone, Neil Houlsby, Xuehan Xiong, Zhen Yang, Elena Gribovskaya, Jonas Adler, Mateo Wirth, Lisa Lee, Music Li, Thais Kagohara, Jay Pavagadhi, Sophie Bridgers, Anna Bortsova, Sanjay Ghemawat, Zafarali Ahmed, Tianqi Liu, Richard Powell, Vijay Bolina, Mariko Iinuma, Polina Zablotskaia, James Besley, Da-Woon Chung, Timothy Dozat, Ramona Comanescu, Xiance Si, Jeremy Greer, Guolong Su, Martin Polacek, Rapha\"el Lopez Kaufman, Simon Tokumine, Hexiang Hu, Elena Buchatskaya, Yingjie Miao, Mohamed Elhawaty, Aditya Siddhant, Nenad Tomasev, Jinwei Xing, Christina Greer, Helen Miller, Shereen Ashraf, Aurko Roy, Zizhao Zhang, Ada Ma, Angelos Filos, Milos Besta, Rory Blevins, Ted Klimenko, Chih-Kuan Yeh, Soravit Changpinyo, Jiaqi Mu, Oscar Chang, Mantas Pajarskas, Carrie Muir, Vered Cohen, Charline Le Lan, Krishna Haridasan, Amit Marathe, Steven Hansen, Sholto Douglas, Rajkumar Samuel, Mingqiu Wang, Sophia Austin, Chang Lan, Jiepu Jiang, Justin Chiu, Jaime Alonso Lorenzo, Lars Lowe Sj\"osund, S\'ebastien Cevey, Zach Gleicher, Thi Avrahami, Anudhyan Boral, Hansa Srinivasan, Vittorio Selo, Rhys May, Konstantinos Aisopos, L\'eonard Hussenot, Livio Baldini Soares, Kate Baumli, Michael B. Chang, Adri\`a Recasens, Ben Caine, Alexander Pritzel, Filip Pavetic, Fabio Pardo, Anita Gergely, Justin Frye, Vinay Ramasesh, Dan Horgan, Kartikeya Badola, Nora Kassner, Subhrajit Roy, Ethan Dyer, V\'ictor Campos Campos, Alex Tomala, Yunhao Tang, Dalia El Badawy, Elspeth White, Basil Mustafa, Oran Lang, Abhishek Jindal, Sharad Vikram, Zhitao Gong, Sergi Caelles, Ross Hemsley, Gregory Thornton, Fangxiaoyu Feng, Wojciech Stokowiec, Ce Zheng, Phoebe Thacker, \c{C}a\u{g}lar \"Unl\"u, Zhishuai Zhang, Mohammad Saleh, James Svensson, Max Bileschi, Piyush Patil, Ankesh Anand, Roman Ring, Katerina Tsihlas, Arpi Vezer, Marco Selvi, Toby Shevlane, Mikel Rodriguez, Tom Kwiatkowski, Samira Daruki, Keran Rong, Allan Dafoe, Nicholas FitzGerald, Keren Gu-Lemberg, Mina Khan, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Marie Pellat, Vladimir Feinberg, James Cobon-Kerr, Tara Sainath, Maribeth Rauh, Sayed Hadi Hashemi, Richard Ives, Yana Hasson, Eric Noland, Yuan Cao, Nathan Byrd, Le Hou, Qingze Wang, Thibault Sottiaux, Michela Paganini, Jean-Baptiste Lespiau, Alexandre Moufarek, Samer Hassan, Kaushik Shivakumar, Joost van Amersfoort, Amol Mandhane, Pratik Joshi, Anirudh Goyal, Matthew Tung, Andrew Brock, Hannah Sheahan, Vedant Misra, Cheng Li, Nemanja Raki\'cevi\'c, Mostafa Dehghani, Fangyu Liu, Sid Mittal, Junhyuk Oh, Seb Noury, Eren Sezener, Fantine Huot, Matthew Lamm, Nicola De Cao, Charlie Chen, Sidharth Mudgal, Romina Stella, Kevin Brooks, Gautam Vasudevan, Chenxi Liu, Mainak Chain, Nivedita Melinkeri, Aaron Cohen, Venus Wang, Kristie Seymore, Sergey Zubkov, Rahul Goel, Summer Yue, Sai Krishnakumaran, Brian Albert, Nate Hurley, Motoki Sano, Anhad Mohananey, Jonah Joughin, Egor Filonov, Tomasz K\k{e}pa, Yomna Eldawy, Jiawern Lim, Rahul Rishi, Shirin Badiezadegan, Taylor Bos, Jerry Chang, Sanil Jain, Sri Gayatri Sundara Padmanabhan, Subha Puttagunta, Kalpesh Krishna, Leslie Baker, Norbert Kalb, Vamsi Bedapudi, Adam Kurzrok, Shuntong Lei, Anthony Yu, Oren Litvin, Xiang Zhou, Zhichun Wu, Sam Sobell, Andrea Siciliano, Alan Papir, Robby Neale, Jonas Bragagnolo, Tej Toor, Tina Chen, Valentin Anklin, Feiran Wang, Richie Feng, Milad Gholami, Kevin Ling, Lijuan Liu, Jules Walter, Hamid Moghaddam, Arun Kishore, Jakub Adamek, Tyler Mercado, Jonathan Mallinson, Siddhinita Wandekar, Stephen Cagle, Eran Ofek, Guillermo Garrido, Clemens Lombriser, Maksim Mukha, Botu Sun, Hafeezul Rahman Mohammad, Josip Matak, Yadi Qian, Vikas Peswani, Pawel Janus, Quan Yuan, Leif Schelin, Oana David, Ankur Garg, Yifan He, Oleksii Duzhyi, Anton \"Algmyr, Timoth\'ee Lottaz, Qi Li, Vikas Yadav, Luyao Xu, Alex Chinien, Rakesh Shivanna, Aleksandr Chuklin, Josie Li, Carrie Spadine, Travis Wolfe, Kareem Mohamed, Subhabrata Das, Zihang Dai, Kyle He, Daniel von Dincklage, Shyam Upadhyay, Akanksha Maurya, Luyan Chi, Sebastian Krause, Khalid Salama, Pam G Rabinovitch, Pavan Kumar Reddy M, Aarush Selvan, Mikhail Dektiarev, Golnaz Ghiasi, Erdem Guven, Himanshu Gupta, Boyi Liu, Deepak Sharma, Idan Heimlich Shtacher, Shachi Paul, Oscar Akerlund, Fran\c{c}ois-Xavier Aubet, Terry Huang, Chen Zhu, Eric Zhu, Elico Teixeira, Matthew Fritze, Francesco Bertolini, Liana-Eleonora Marinescu, Martin B\"olle, Dominik Paulus, Khyatti Gupta, Tejasi Latkar, Max Chang, Jason Sanders, Roopa Wilson, Xuewei Wu, Yi-Xuan Tan, Lam Nguyen Thiet, Tulsee Doshi, Sid Lall, Swaroop Mishra, Wanming Chen, Thang Luong, Seth Benjamin, Jasmine Lee, Ewa Andrejczuk, Dominik Rabiej, Vipul Ranjan, Krzysztof Styrc, Pengcheng Yin, Jon Simon, Malcolm Rose Harriott, Mudit Bansal, Alexei Robsky, Geoff Bacon, David Greene, Daniil Mirylenka, Chen Zhou, Obaid Sarvana, Abhimanyu Goyal, Samuel Andermatt, Patrick Siegler, Ben Horn, Assaf Israel, Francesco Pongetti, Chih-Wei "Louis" Chen, Marco Selvatici, Pedro Silva, Kathie Wang, Jackson Tolins, Kelvin Guu, Roey Yogev, Xiaochen Cai, Alessandro Agostini, Maulik Shah, Hung Nguyen, Noah \'O Donnaile, S\'ebastien Pereira, Linda Friso, Adam Stambler, Adam Kurzrok, Chenkai Kuang, Yan Romanikhin, Mark Geller, ZJ Yan, Kane Jang, Cheng-Chun Lee, Wojciech Fica, Eric Malmi, Qijun Tan, Dan Banica, Daniel Balle, Ryan Pham, Yanping Huang, Diana Avram, Hongzhi Shi, Jasjot Singh, Chris Hidey, Niharika Ahuja, Pranab Saxena, Dan Dooley, Srividya Pranavi Potharaju, Eileen O'Neill, Anand Gokulchandran, Ryan Foley, Kai Zhao, Mike Dusenberry, Yuan Liu, Pulkit Mehta, Ragha Kotikalapudi, Chalence Safranek-Shrader, Andrew Goodman, Joshua Kessinger, Eran Globen, Prateek Kolhar, Chris Gorgolewski, Ali Ibrahim, Yang Song, Ali Eichenbaum, Thomas Brovelli, Sahitya Potluri, Preethi Lahoti, Cip Baetu, Ali Ghorbani, Charles Chen, Andy Crawford, Shalini Pal, Mukund Sridhar, Petru Gurita, Asier Mujika, Igor Petrovski, Pierre-Louis Cedoz, Chenmei Li, Shiyuan Chen, Niccol\`o Dal Santo, Siddharth Goyal, Jitesh Punjabi, Karthik Kappaganthu, Chester Kwak, Pallavi LV, Sarmishta Velury, Himadri Choudhury, Jamie Hall, Premal Shah, Ricardo Figueira, Matt Thomas, Minjie Lu, Ting Zhou, Chintu Kumar, Thomas Jurdi, Sharat Chikkerur, Yenai Ma, Adams Yu, Soo Kwak, Victor \"Ahdel, Sujeevan Rajayogam, Travis Choma, Fei Liu, Aditya Barua, Colin Ji, Ji Ho Park, Vincent Hellendoorn, Alex Bailey, Taylan Bilal, Huanjie Zhou, Mehrdad Khatir, Charles Sutton, Wojciech Rzadkowski, Fiona Macintosh, Konstantin Shagin, Paul Medina, Chen Liang, Jinjing Zhou, Pararth Shah, Yingying Bi, Attila Dankovics, Shipra Banga, Sabine Lehmann, Marissa Bredesen, Zifan Lin, John Eric Hoffmann, Jonathan Lai, Raynald Chung, Kai Yang, Nihal Balani, Arthur Bra\v{z}inskas, Andrei Sozanschi, Matthew Hayes, H\'ector Fern\'andez Alcalde, Peter Makarov, Will Chen, Antonio Stella, Liselotte Snijders, Michael Mandl, Ante K\"arrman, Pawe{\l} Nowak, Xinyi Wu, Alex Dyck, Krishnan Vaidyanathan, Raghavender R, Jessica Mallet, Mitch Rudominer, Eric Johnston, Sushil Mittal, Akhil Udathu, Janara Christensen, Vishal Verma, Zach Irving, Andreas Santucci, Gamaleldin Elsayed, Elnaz Davoodi, Marin Georgiev, Ian Tenney, Nan Hua, Geoffrey Cideron, Edouard Leurent, Mahmoud Alnahlawi, Ionut Georgescu, Nan Wei, Ivy Zheng, Dylan Scandinaro, Heinrich Jiang, Jasper Snoek, Mukund Sundararajan, Xuezhi Wang, Zack Ontiveros, Itay Karo, Jeremy Cole, Vinu Rajashekhar, Lara Tumeh, Eyal Ben-David, Rishub Jain, Jonathan Uesato, Romina Datta, Oskar Bunyan, Shimu Wu, John Zhang, Piotr Stanczyk, Ye Zhang, David Steiner, Subhajit Naskar, Michael Azzam, Matthew Johnson, Adam Paszke, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Jaume Sanchez Elias, Afroz Mohiuddin, Faizan Muhammad, Jin Miao, Andrew Lee, Nino Vieillard, Jane Park, Jiageng Zhang, Jeff Stanway, Drew Garmon, Abhijit Karmarkar, Zhe Dong, Jong Lee, Aviral Kumar, Luowei Zhou, Jonathan Evens, William Isaac, Geoffrey Irving, Edward Loper, Michael Fink, Isha Arkatkar, Nanxin Chen, Izhak Shafran, Ivan Petrychenko, Zhe Chen, Johnson Jia, Anselm Levskaya, Zhenkai Zhu, Peter Grabowski, Yu Mao, Alberto Magni, Kaisheng Yao, Javier Snaider, Norman Casagrande, Evan Palmer, Paul Suganthan, Alfonso Casta\~no, Irene Giannoumis, Wooyeol Kim, Miko{\l}aj Rybi\'nski, Ashwin Sreevatsa, Jennifer Prendki, David Soergel, Adrian Goedeckemeyer, Willi Gierke, Mohsen Jafari, Meenu Gaba, Jeremy Wiesner, Diana Gage Wright, Yawen Wei, Harsha Vashisht, Yana Kulizhskaya, Jay Hoover, Maigo Le, Lu Li, Chimezie Iwuanyanwu, Lu Liu, Kevin Ramirez, Andrey Khorlin, Albert Cui, Tian LIN, Marcus Wu, Ricardo Aguilar, Keith Pallo, Abhishek Chakladar, Ginger Perng, Elena Allica Abellan, Mingyang Zhang, Ishita Dasgupta, Nate Kushman, Ivo Penchev, Alena Repina, Xihui Wu, Tom van der Weide, Priya Ponnapalli, Caroline Kaplan, Jiri Simsa, Shuangfeng Li, Olivier Dousse, Fan Yang, Jeff Piper, Nathan Ie, Rama Pasumarthi, Nathan Lintz, Anitha Vijayakumar, Daniel Andor, Pedro Valenzuela, Minnie Lui, Cosmin Paduraru, Daiyi Peng, Katherine Lee, Shuyuan Zhang, Somer Greene, Duc Dung Nguyen, Paula Kurylowicz, Cassidy Hardin, Lucas Dixon, Lili Janzer, Kiam Choo, Ziqiang Feng, Biao Zhang, Achintya Singhal, Dayou Du, Dan McKinnon, Natasha Antropova, Tolga Bolukbasi, Orgad Keller, David Reid, Daniel Finchelstein, Maria Abi Raad, Remi Crocker, Peter Hawkins, Robert Dadashi, Colin Gaffney, Ken Franko, Anna Bulanova, R\'emi Leblond, Shirley Chung, Harry Askham, Luis C. Cobo, Kelvin Xu, Felix Fischer, Jun Xu, Christina Sorokin, Chris Alberti, Chu-Cheng Lin, Colin Evans, Alek Dimitriev, Hannah Forbes, Dylan Banarse, Zora Tung, Mark Omernick, Colton Bishop, Rachel Sterneck, Rohan Jain, Jiawei Xia, Ehsan Amid, Francesco Piccinno, Xingyu Wang, Praseem Banzal, Daniel J. Mankowitz, Alex Polozov, Victoria Krakovna, Sasha Brown, MohammadHossein Bateni, Dennis Duan, Vlad Firoiu, Meghana Thotakuri, Tom Natan, Matthieu Geist, Ser tan Girgin, Hui Li, Jiayu Ye, Ofir Roval, Reiko Tojo, Michael Kwong, James Lee-Thorp, Christopher Yew, Danila Sinopalnikov, Sabela Ramos, John Mellor, Abhishek Sharma, Kathy Wu, David Miller, Nicolas Sonnerat, Denis Vnukov, Rory Greig, Jennifer Beattie, Emily Caveness, Libin Bai, Julian Eisenschlos, Alex Korchemniy, Tomy Tsai, Mimi Jasarevic, Weize Kong, Phuong Dao, Zeyu Zheng, Frederick Liu, Fan Yang, Rui Zhu, Tian Huey Teh, Jason Sanmiya, Evgeny Gladchenko, Nejc Trdin, Daniel Toyama, Evan Rosen, Sasan Tavakkol, Linting Xue, Chen Elkind, Oliver Woodman, John Carpenter, George Papamakarios, Rupert Kemp, Sushant Kafle, Tanya Grunina, Rishika Sinha, Alice Talbert, Diane Wu, Denese Owusu-Afriyie, Cosmo Du, Chloe Thornton, Jordi Pont-Tuset, Pradyumna Narayana, Jing Li, Saaber Fatehi, John Wieting, Omar Ajmeri, Benigno Uria, Yeongil Ko, Laura Knight, Am\'elie H\'eliou, Ning Niu, Shane Gu, Chenxi Pang, Yeqing Li, Nir Levine, Ariel Stolovich, Rebeca Santamaria-Fernandez, Sonam Goenka, Wenny Yustalim, Robin Strudel, Ali Elqursh, Charlie Deck, Hyo Lee, Zonglin Li, Kyle Levin, Raphael Hoffmann, Dan Holtmann-Rice, Olivier Bachem, Sho Arora, Christy Koh, Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Siim P\~oder, Mukarram Tariq, Yanhua Sun, Lucian Ionita, Mojtaba Seyedhosseini, Pouya Tafti, Zhiyu Liu, Anmol Gulati, Jasmine Liu, Xinyu Ye, Bart Chrzaszcz, Lily Wang, Nikhil Sethi, Tianrun Li, Ben Brown, Shreya Singh, Wei Fan, Aaron Parisi, Joe Stanton, Vinod Koverkathu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Yunjie Li, TJ Lu, Abe Ittycheriah, Prakash Shroff, Mani Varadarajan, Sanaz Bahargam, Rob Willoughby, David Gaddy, Guillaume Desjardins, Marco Cornero, Brona Robenek, Bhavishya Mittal, Ben Albrecht, Ashish Shenoy, Fedor Moiseev, Henrik Jacobsson, Alireza Ghaffarkhah, Morgane Rivi\`ere, Alanna Walton, Cl\'ement Crepy, Alicia Parrish, Zongwei Zhou, Clement Farabet, Carey Radebaugh, Praveen Srinivasan, Claudia van der Salm, Andreas Fidjeland, Salvatore Scellato, Eri Latorre-Chimoto, Hanna Klimczak-Pluci\'nska, David Bridson, Dario de Cesare, Tom Hudson, Piermaria Mendolicchio, Lexi Walker, Alex Morris, Matthew Mauger, Alexey Guseynov, Alison Reid, Seth Odoom, Lucia Loher, Victor Cotruta, Madhavi Yenugula, Dominik Grewe, Anastasia Petrushkina, Tom Duerig, Antonio Sanchez, Steve Yadlowsky, Amy Shen, Amir Globerson, Lynette Webb, Sahil Dua, Dong Li, Surya Bhupatiraju, Dan Hurt, Haroon Qureshi, Ananth Agarwal, Tomer Shani, Matan Eyal, Anuj Khare, Shreyas Rammohan Belle, Lei Wang, Chetan Tekur, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Jinliang Wei, Ruoxin Sang, Brennan Saeta, Tyler Liechty, Yi Sun, Yao Zhao, Stephan Lee, Pandu Nayak, Doug Fritz, Manish Reddy Vuyyuru, John Aslanides, Nidhi Vyas, Martin Wicke, Xiao Ma, Evgenii Eltyshev, Nina Martin, Hardie Cate, James Manyika, Keyvan Amiri, Yelin Kim, Xi Xiong, Kai Kang, Florian Luisier, Nilesh Tripuraneni, David Madras, Mandy Guo, Austin Waters, Oliver Wang, Joshua Ainslie, Jason Baldridge, Han Zhang, Garima Pruthi, Jakob Bauer, Feng Yang, Riham Mansour, Jason Gelman, Yang Xu, George Polovets, Ji Liu, Honglong Cai, Warren Chen, XiangHai Sheng, Emily Xue, Sherjil Ozair, Christof Angermueller, Xiaowei Li, Anoop Sinha, Weiren Wang, Julia Wiesinger, Emmanouil Koukoumidis, Yuan Tian, Anand Iyer, Madhu Gurumurthy, Mark Goldenson, Parashar Shah, MK Blake, Hongkun Yu, Anthony Urbanowicz, Jennimaria Palomaki, Chrisantha Fernando, Ken Durden, Harsh Mehta, Nikola Momchev, Elahe Rahimtoroghi, Maria Georgaki, Amit Raul, Sebastian Ruder, Morgan Redshaw, Jinhyuk Lee, Denny Zhou, Komal Jalan, Dinghua Li, Blake Hechtman, Parker Schuh, Milad Nasr, Kieran Milan, Vladimir Mikulik, Juliana Franco, Tim Green, Nam Nguyen, Joe Kelley, Aroma Mahendru, Andrea Hu, Joshua Howland, Ben Vargas, Jeffrey Hui, Kshitij Bansal, Vikram Rao, Rakesh Ghiya, Emma Wang, Ke Ye, Jean Michel Sarr, Melanie Moranski Preston, Madeleine Elish, Steve Li, Aakash Kaku, Jigar Gupta, Ice Pasupat, Da-Cheng Juan, Milan Someswar, Tejvi M., Xinyun Chen, Aida Amini, Alex Fabrikant, Eric Chu, Xuanyi Dong, Amruta Muthal, Senaka Buthpitiya, Sarthak Jauhari, Nan Hua, Urvashi Khandelwal, Ayal Hitron, Jie Ren, Larissa Rinaldi, Shahar Drath, Avigail Dabush, Nan-Jiang Jiang, Harshal Godhia, Uli Sachs, Anthony Chen, Yicheng Fan, Hagai Taitelbaum, Hila Noga, Zhuyun Dai, James Wang, Chen Liang, Jenny Hamer, Chun-Sung Ferng, Chenel Elkind, Aviel Atias, Paulina Lee, V\'it List\'ik, Mathias Carlen, Jan van de Kerkhof, Marcin Pikus, Krunoslav Zaher, Paul M\"uller, Sasha Zykova, Richard Stefanec, Vitaly Gatsko, Christoph Hirnschall, Ashwin Sethi, Xingyu Federico Xu, Chetan Ahuja, Beth Tsai, Anca Stefanoiu, Bo Feng, Keshav Dhandhania, Manish Katyal, Akshay Gupta, Atharva Parulekar, Divya Pitta, Jing Zhao, Vivaan Bhatia, Yashodha Bhavnani, Omar Alhadlaq, Xiaolin Li, Peter Danenberg, Dennis Tu, Alex Pine, Vera Filippova, Abhipso Ghosh, Ben Limonchik, Bhargava Urala, Chaitanya Krishna Lanka, Derik Clive, Yi Sun, Edward Li, Hao Wu, Kevin Hongtongsak, Ianna Li, Kalind Thakkar, Kuanysh Omarov, Kushal Majmundar, Michael Alverson, Michael Kucharski, Mohak Patel, Mudit Jain, Maksim Zabelin, Paolo Pelagatti, Rohan Kohli, Saurabh Kumar, Joseph Kim, Swetha Sankar, Vineet Shah, Lakshmi Ramachandruni, Xiangkai Zeng, Ben Bariach, Laura Weidinger, Tu Vu, Amar Subramanya, Sissie Hsiao, Demis Hassabis, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Adam Sadovsky, Quoc Le, Trevor Strohman, Yonghui Wu, Slav Petrov, Jeffrey Dean, Oriol Vinyals

Abstract: This report introduces a new family of multimodal models, Gemini, that exhibit remarkable capabilities across image, audio, video, and text understanding. The Gemini family consists of Ultra, Pro, and Nano sizes, suitable for applications ranging from complex reasoning tasks to on-device memory-constrained use-cases. Evaluation on a broad range of benchmarks shows that our most-capable Gemini Ultra model advances the state of the art in 30 of 32 of these benchmarks - notably being the first model to achieve human-expert performance on the well-studied exam benchmark MMLU, and improving the state of the art in every one of the 20 multimodal benchmarks we examined. We believe that the new capabilities of the Gemini family in cross-modal reasoning and language understanding will enable a wide variety of use cases. We discuss our approach toward post-training and deploying Gemini models responsibly to users through services including Gemini, Gemini Advanced, Google AI Studio, and Cloud Vertex AI.

replace-cross Agile But Safe: Learning Collision-Free High-Speed Legged Locomotion

Authors: Tairan He, Chong Zhang, Wenli Xiao, Guanqi He, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi

Abstract: Legged robots navigating cluttered environments must be jointly agile for efficient task execution and safe to avoid collisions with obstacles or humans. Existing studies either develop conservative controllers (< 1.0 m/s) to ensure safety, or focus on agility without considering potentially fatal collisions. This paper introduces Agile But Safe (ABS), a learning-based control framework that enables agile and collision-free locomotion for quadrupedal robots. ABS involves an agile policy to execute agile motor skills amidst obstacles and a recovery policy to prevent failures, collaboratively achieving high-speed and collision-free navigation. The policy switch in ABS is governed by a learned control-theoretic reach-avoid value network, which also guides the recovery policy as an objective function, thereby safeguarding the robot in a closed loop. The training process involves the learning of the agile policy, the reach-avoid value network, the recovery policy, and an exteroception representation network, all in simulation. These trained modules can be directly deployed in the real world with onboard sensing and computation, leading to high-speed and collision-free navigation in confined indoor and outdoor spaces with both static and dynamic obstacles.

replace-cross Assessing the Efficacy of Invisible Watermarks in AI-Generated Medical Images

Authors: Xiaodan Xing, Huiyu Zhou, Yingying Fang, Guang Yang

Abstract: AI-generated medical images are gaining growing popularity due to their potential to address the data scarcity challenge in the real world. However, the issue of accurate identification of these synthetic images, particularly when they exhibit remarkable realism with their real copies, remains a concern. To mitigate this challenge, image generators such as DALLE and Imagen, have integrated digital watermarks aimed at facilitating the discernment of synthetic images' authenticity. These watermarks are embedded within the image pixels and are invisible to the human eye while remains their detectability. Nevertheless, a comprehensive investigation into the potential impact of these invisible watermarks on the utility of synthetic medical images has been lacking. In this study, we propose the incorporation of invisible watermarks into synthetic medical images and seek to evaluate their efficacy in the context of downstream classification tasks. Our goal is to pave the way for discussions on the viability of such watermarks in boosting the detectability of synthetic medical images, fortifying ethical standards, and safeguarding against data pollution and potential scams.

replace-cross Text-centric Alignment for Multi-Modality Learning

Authors: Yun-Da Tsai, Ting-Yu Yen, Pei-Fu Guo, Zhe-Yan Li, Shou-De Lin

Abstract: This research paper addresses the challenge of modality mismatch in multimodal learning, where the modalities available during inference differ from those available at training. We propose the Text-centric Alignment for Multi-Modality Learning (TAMML) approach, an innovative method that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) with in-context learning and foundation models to enhance the generalizability of multimodal systems under these conditions. By leveraging the unique properties of text as a unified semantic space, TAMML demonstrates significant improvements in handling unseen, diverse, and unpredictable modality combinations. TAMML not only adapts to varying modalities but also maintains robust performance, showcasing the potential of foundation models in overcoming the limitations of traditional fixed-modality frameworks in embedding representations. This study contributes to the field by offering a flexible, effective solution for real-world applications where modality availability is dynamic and uncertain.

replace-cross m2mKD: Module-to-Module Knowledge Distillation for Modular Transformers

Authors: Ka Man Lo, Yiming Liang, Wenyu Du, Yuantao Fan, Zili Wang, Wenhao Huang, Lei Ma, Jie Fu

Abstract: Modular neural architectures are gaining attention for their powerful generalization and efficient adaptation to new domains. However, training these models poses challenges due to optimization difficulties arising from intrinsic sparse connectivity. Leveraging knowledge from monolithic models through techniques like knowledge distillation can facilitate training and enable integration of diverse knowledge. Nevertheless, conventional knowledge distillation approaches are not tailored to modular models and struggle with unique architectures and enormous parameter counts. Motivated by these challenges, we propose module-to-module knowledge distillation (m2mKD) for transferring knowledge between modules. m2mKD combines teacher modules of a pretrained monolithic model and student modules of a modular model with a shared meta model respectively to encourage the student module to mimic the behaviour of the teacher module. We evaluate m2mKD on two modular neural architectures: Neural Attentive Circuits (NACs) and Vision Mixture-of-Experts (V-MoE). Applying m2mKD to NACs yields significant improvements in IID accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet (up to 5.6%) and OOD robustness on Tiny-ImageNet-R (up to 4.2%). Additionally, the V-MoE-Base model trained with m2mKD achieves 3.5% higher accuracy than end-to-end training on ImageNet-1k. Code is available at https://github.com/kamanphoebe/m2mKD.

URLs: https://github.com/kamanphoebe/m2mKD.

replace-cross View-Consistent 3D Editing with Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Yuxuan Wang, Xuanyu Yi, Zike Wu, Na Zhao, Long Chen, Hanwang Zhang

Abstract: The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has revolutionized 3D editing, offering efficient, high-fidelity rendering and enabling precise local manipulations. Currently, diffusion-based 2D editing models are harnessed to modify multi-view rendered images, which then guide the editing of 3DGS models. However, this approach faces a critical issue of multi-view inconsistency, where the guidance images exhibit significant discrepancies across views, leading to mode collapse and visual artifacts of 3DGS. To this end, we introduce View-consistent Editing (VcEdit), a novel framework that seamlessly incorporates 3DGS into image editing processes, ensuring multi-view consistency in edited guidance images and effectively mitigating mode collapse issues. VcEdit employs two innovative consistency modules: the Cross-attention Consistency Module and the Editing Consistency Module, both designed to reduce inconsistencies in edited images. By incorporating these consistency modules into an iterative pattern, VcEdit proficiently resolves the issue of multi-view inconsistency, facilitating high-quality 3DGS editing across a diverse range of scenes. Further code and video results are re- leased at http://yuxuanw.me/vcedit/.

URLs: http://yuxuanw.me/vcedit/.

replace-cross On the Efficiency of Convolutional Neural Networks

Authors: Andrew Lavin

Abstract: Since the breakthrough performance of AlexNet in 2012, convolutional neural networks (convnets) have grown into extremely powerful vision models. Deep learning researchers have used convnets to perform vision tasks with accuracy that was unachievable a decade ago. Confronted with the immense computation that convnets use, deep learning researchers also became interested in efficiency. However, the engineers who deployed efficient convnets soon realized that they were slower than the previous generation, despite using fewer operations. Many reverted to older models that ran faster. Hence researchers switched the objective of their search from arithmetic complexity to latency and produced a new wave of models that performed better. Paradoxically, these models also used more operations. Skepticism grew among researchers and engineers alike about the relevance of arithmetic complexity. Contrary to the prevailing view that latency and arithmetic complexity are irreconcilable, a simple formula relates both through computational efficiency. This insight enabled us to co-optimize the separate factors that determine latency. We observed that the degenerate conv2d layers that produce the best accuracy--complexity trade-off also use significant memory resources and have low computational efficiency. We devised block fusion algorithms to implement all the layers of a residual block in a single kernel, thereby creating temporal locality, avoiding communication, and reducing workspace size. Our ConvFirst model with block-fusion kernels has less arithmetic complexity and greater computational efficiency than baseline models and kernels, and ran approximately four times as fast as ConvNeXt. We also created novel tools, including efficiency gap plots and waterline analysis. Our unified approach to convnet efficiency envisions a new era of models and kernels that achieve greater accuracy at lower cost.

replace-cross A Conformal Prediction Score that is Robust to Label Noise

Authors: Coby Penso, Jacob Goldberger

Abstract: Conformal Prediction (CP) quantifies network uncertainty by building a small prediction set with a pre-defined probability that the correct class is within this set. In this study we tackle the problem of CP calibration based on a validation set with noisy labels. We introduce a conformal score that is robust to label noise. The noise-free conformal score is estimated using the noisy labeled data and the noise level. In the test phase the noise-free score is used to form the prediction set. We applied the proposed algorithm to several standard medical imaging classification datasets. We show that our method outperforms current methods by a large margin, in terms of the average size of the prediction set, while maintaining the required coverage.

replace-cross Can we Defend Against the Unknown? An Empirical Study About Threshold Selection for Neural Network Monitoring

Authors: Khoi Tran Dang, Kevin Delmas, J\'er\'emie Guiochet, Joris Gu\'erin

Abstract: With the increasing use of neural networks in critical systems, runtime monitoring becomes essential to reject unsafe predictions during inference. Various techniques have emerged to establish rejection scores that maximize the separability between the distributions of safe and unsafe predictions. The efficacy of these approaches is mostly evaluated using threshold-agnostic metrics, such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. However, in real-world applications, an effective monitor also requires identifying a good threshold to transform these scores into meaningful binary decisions. Despite the pivotal importance of threshold optimization, this problem has received little attention. A few studies touch upon this question, but they typically assume that the runtime data distribution mirrors the training distribution, which is a strong assumption as monitors are supposed to safeguard a system against potentially unforeseen threats. In this work, we present rigorous experiments on various image datasets to investigate: 1. The effectiveness of monitors in handling unforeseen threats, which are not available during threshold adjustments. 2. Whether integrating generic threats into the threshold optimization scheme can enhance the robustness of monitors.

replace-cross Deep Blur Multi-Model (DeepBlurMM) - a strategy to mitigate the impact of image blur on deep learning model performance in histopathology image analysis

Authors: Yujie Xiang, Bojing Liu, Mattias Rantalainen

Abstract: AI-based analysis of histopathology whole slide images (WSIs) is central in computational pathology. However, image quality, including unsharp areas of WSIs, impacts model performance. We investigate the impact of blur and propose a multi-model approach to mitigate negative impact of unsharp image areas. In this study, we use a simulation approach, evaluating model performance under varying levels of added Gaussian blur to image tiles from >900 H&E-stained breast cancer WSIs. To reduce impact of blur, we propose a novel multi-model approach (DeepBlurMM) where multiple models trained on data with variable amounts of Gaussian blur are used to predict tiles based on their blur levels. Using histological grade as a principal example, we found that models trained with mildly blurred tiles improved performance over the base model when moderate-high blur was present. DeepBlurMM outperformed the base model in presence of moderate blur across all tiles (AUC:0.764 vs. 0.710), and in presence of a mix of low, moderate, and high blur across tiles (AUC:0.821 vs. 0.789). Unsharp image tiles in WSIs impact prediction performance. DeepBlurMM improved prediction performance under some conditions and has the potential to increase quality in both research and clinical applications.