new Diffusion Transformer Model With Compact Prior for Low-dose PET Reconstruction

Authors: Bin Huang, Xubiao Liu, Lei Fang, Qiegen Liu, Bingxuan Li

Abstract: Positron emission tomography (PET) is an advanced medical imaging technique that plays a crucial role in non-invasive clinical diagnosis. However, while reducing radiation exposure through low-dose PET scans is beneficial for patient safety, it often results in insufficient statistical data. This scarcity of data poses significant challenges for accurately reconstructing high-quality images, which are essential for reliable diagnostic outcomes. In this research, we propose a diffusion transformer model (DTM) guided by joint compact prior (JCP) to enhance the reconstruction quality of low-dose PET imaging. In light of current research findings, we present a pioneering PET reconstruction model that integrates diffusion and transformer models for joint optimization. This model combines the powerful distribution mapping abilities of diffusion models with the capacity of transformers to capture long-range dependencies, offering significant advantages for low-dose PET reconstruction. Additionally, the incorporation of the lesion refining block and penalized weighted least squares (PWLS) enhance the recovery capability of lesion regions and preserves detail information, solving blurring problems in lesion areas and texture details of most deep learning frameworks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DTM in enhancing image quality and preserving critical clinical information for low-dose PET scans. Our approach not only reduces radiation exposure risks but also provides a more reliable PET imaging tool for early disease detection and patient management.

new SpectralKAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Hyperspectral Images Change Detection

Authors: Yanheng Wang, Xiaohan Yu, Yongsheng Gao, Jianjun Sha, Jian Wang, Lianru Gao, Yonggang Zhang, Xianhui Rong

Abstract: It has been verified that deep learning methods, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), graph neural networks (GNNs), and transformers, can accurately extract features from hyperspectral images (HSIs). These algorithms perform exceptionally well on HSIs change detection (HSIs-CD). However, the downside of these impressive results is the enormous number of parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, training and test times required. In this paper, we propose an spectral Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for HSIs-CD (SpectralKAN). SpectralKAN represent a multivariate continuous function with a composition of activation functions to extract HSIs feature and classification. These activation functions are b-spline functions with different parameters that can simulate various functions. In SpectralKAN, a KAN encoder is proposed to enhance computational efficiency for HSIs. And a spatial-spectral KAN encoder is introduced, where the spatial KAN encoder extracts spatial features and compresses the spatial dimensions from patch size to one. The spectral KAN encoder then extracts spectral features and classifies them into changed and unchanged categories. We use five HSIs-CD datasets to verify the effectiveness of SpectralKAN. Experimental verification has shown that SpectralKAN maintains high HSIs-CD accuracy while requiring fewer parameters, FLOPs, GPU memory, training and testing times, thereby increasing the efficiency of HSIs-CD. The code will be available at https://github.com/yanhengwang-heu/SpectralKAN.

URLs: https://github.com/yanhengwang-heu/SpectralKAN.

new Deep learning for automated detection of breast cancer in deep ultraviolet fluorescence images with diffusion probabilistic model

Authors: Sepehr Salem Ghahfarokhi, Tyrell To, Julie Jorns, Tina Yen, Bing Yu, Dong Hye Ye

Abstract: Data limitation is a significant challenge in applying deep learning to medical images. Recently, the diffusion probabilistic model (DPM) has shown the potential to generate high-quality images by converting Gaussian random noise into realistic images. In this paper, we apply the DPM to augment the deep ultraviolet fluorescence (DUV) image dataset with an aim to improve breast cancer classification for intraoperative margin assessment. For classification, we divide the whole surface DUV image into small patches and extract convolutional features for each patch by utilizing the pre-trained ResNet. Then, we feed them into an XGBoost classifier for patch-level decisions and then fuse them with a regional importance map computed by Grad-CAM++ for whole surface-level prediction. Our experimental results show that augmenting the training dataset with the DPM significantly improves breast cancer detection performance in DUV images, increasing accuracy from 93% to 97%, compared to using Affine transformations and ProGAN.

new FALCON: Frequency Adjoint Link with CONtinuous Density Mask for Fast Single Image Dehazing

Authors: Donghyun Kim, Seil Kang, Seong Jae Hwang

Abstract: Image dehazing, addressing atmospheric interference like fog and haze, remains a pervasive challenge crucial for robust vision applications such as surveillance and remote sensing under adverse visibility. While various methodologies have evolved from early works predicting transmission matrix and atmospheric light features to deep learning and dehazing networks, they innately prioritize dehazing quality metrics, neglecting the need for real-time applicability in time-sensitive domains like autonomous driving. This work introduces FALCON (Frequency Adjoint Link with CONtinuous density mask), a single-image dehazing system achieving state-of-the-art performance on both quality and speed. Particularly, we develop a novel bottleneck module, namely, Frequency Adjoint Link, operating in the frequency space to globally expand the receptive field with minimal growth in network size. Further, we leverage the underlying haze distribution based on the atmospheric scattering model via a Continuous Density Mask (CDM) which serves as a continuous-valued mask input prior and a differentiable auxiliary loss. Comprehensive experiments involving multiple state-of-the-art methods and ablation analysis demonstrate FALCON's exceptional performance in both dehazing quality and speed (i.e., >$180 frames-per-second), quantified by metrics such as FPS, PSNR, and SSIM.

new Cross-Modal Attention Alignment Network with Auxiliary Text Description for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval

Authors: Hanwen Su, Ge Song, Kai Huang, Jiyan Wang, Ming Yang

Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval (ZS-SBIR). The prior methods tackle the problem in a two-modality setting with only category labels or even no textual information involved. However, the growing prevalence of Large-scale pre-trained Language Models (LLMs), which have demonstrated great knowledge learned from web-scale data, can provide us with an opportunity to conclude collective textual information. Our key innovation lies in the usage of text data as auxiliary information for images, thus leveraging the inherent zero-shot generalization ability that language offers. To this end, we propose an approach called Cross-Modal Attention Alignment Network with Auxiliary Text Description for zero-shot sketch-based image retrieval. The network consists of three components: (i) a Description Generation Module that generates textual descriptions for each training category by prompting an LLM with several interrogative sentences, (ii) a Feature Extraction Module that includes two ViTs for sketch and image data, a transformer for extracting tokens of sentences of each training category, finally (iii) a Cross-modal Alignment Module that exchanges the token features of both text-sketch and text-image using cross-attention mechanism, and align the tokens locally and globally. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show our superior performances over the state-of-the-art ZS-SBIR methods.

new FairMedFM: Fairness Benchmarking for Medical Imaging Foundation Models

Authors: Ruinan Jin, Zikang Xu, Yuan Zhong, Qiongsong Yao, Qi Dou, S. Kevin Zhou, Xiaoxiao Li

Abstract: The advent of foundation models (FMs) in healthcare offers unprecedented opportunities to enhance medical diagnostics through automated classification and segmentation tasks. However, these models also raise significant concerns about their fairness, especially when applied to diverse and underrepresented populations in healthcare applications. Currently, there is a lack of comprehensive benchmarks, standardized pipelines, and easily adaptable libraries to evaluate and understand the fairness performance of FMs in medical imaging, leading to considerable challenges in formulating and implementing solutions that ensure equitable outcomes across diverse patient populations. To fill this gap, we introduce FairMedFM, a fairness benchmark for FM research in medical imaging.FairMedFM integrates with 17 popular medical imaging datasets, encompassing different modalities, dimensionalities, and sensitive attributes. It explores 20 widely used FMs, with various usages such as zero-shot learning, linear probing, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and prompting in various downstream tasks -- classification and segmentation. Our exhaustive analysis evaluates the fairness performance over different evaluation metrics from multiple perspectives, revealing the existence of bias, varied utility-fairness trade-offs on different FMs, consistent disparities on the same datasets regardless FMs, and limited effectiveness of existing unfairness mitigation methods. Checkout FairMedFM's project page and open-sourced codebase, which supports extendible functionalities and applications as well as inclusive for studies on FMs in medical imaging over the long term.

new Embedded Prompt Tuning: Towards Enhanced Calibration of Pretrained Models for Medical Images

Authors: Wenqiang Zu, Shenghao Xie, Qing Zhao, Guoqi Li, Lei Ma

Abstract: Foundation models pre-trained on large-scale data have been widely witnessed to achieve success in various natural imaging downstream tasks. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods aim to adapt foundation models to new domains by updating only a small portion of parameters in order to reduce computational overhead. However, the effectiveness of these PEFT methods, especially in cross-domain few-shot scenarios, e.g., medical image analysis, has not been fully explored. In this work, we facilitate the study of the performance of PEFT when adapting foundation models to medical image classification tasks. Furthermore, to alleviate the limitations of prompt introducing ways and approximation capabilities on Transformer architectures of mainstream prompt tuning methods, we propose the Embedded Prompt Tuning (EPT) method by embedding prompt tokens into the expanded channels. We also find that there are anomalies in the feature space distribution of foundation models during pre-training process, and prompt tuning can help mitigate this negative impact. To explain this phenomenon, we also introduce a novel perspective to understand prompt tuning: \textbf{Prompt tuning is a distribution calibrator.} And we support it by analyzing patch-wise scaling and feature separation operations contained in EPT. Our experiments show that EPT outperforms several state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods by a significant margin on few-shot medical image classification tasks, and completes the fine-tuning process within highly competitive time, indicating EPT is an effective PEFT method. Our code will be released once accepted.

new GMT: A Robust Global Association Model for Multi-Target Multi-Camera Tracking

Authors: Huijie Fan, Tinghui Zhao, Qiang Wang, Baojie Fan, Yandong Tang, LianQing Liu

Abstract: In the task of multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) tracking of pedestrians, the data association problem is a key issue and main challenge, especially with complications arising from camera movements, lighting variations, and obstructions. However, most MTMC models adopt two-step approaches, thus heavily depending on the results of the first-step tracking in practical applications. Moreover, the same targets crossing different cameras may exhibit significant appearance variations, which further increases the difficulty of cross-camera matching. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a global online MTMC tracking model that addresses the dependency on the first tracking stage in two-step methods and enhances cross-camera matching. Specifically, we propose a transformer-based global MTMC association module to explore target associations across different cameras and frames, generating global trajectories directly. Additionally, to integrate the appearance and spatio-temporal features of targets, we propose a feature extraction and fusion module for MTMC tracking. This module enhances feature representation and establishes correlations between the features of targets across multiple cameras. To accommodate high scene diversity and complex lighting condition variations, we have established the VisionTrack dataset, which enables the development of models that are more generalized and robust to various environments. Our model demonstrates significant improvements over comparison methods on the VisionTrack dataset and others.

new An Expectation-Maximization Algorithm for Training Clean Diffusion Models from Corrupted Observations

Authors: Weimin Bai, Yifei Wang, Wenzheng Chen, He Sun

Abstract: Diffusion models excel in solving imaging inverse problems due to their ability to model complex image priors. However, their reliance on large, clean datasets for training limits their practical use where clean data is scarce. In this paper, we propose EMDiffusion, an expectation-maximization (EM) approach to train diffusion models from corrupted observations. Our method alternates between reconstructing clean images from corrupted data using a known diffusion model (E-step) and refining diffusion model weights based on these reconstructions (M-step). This iterative process leads the learned diffusion model to gradually converge to the true clean data distribution. We validate our method through extensive experiments on diverse computational imaging tasks, including random inpainting, denoising, and deblurring, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.

new SOOD++: Leveraging Unlabeled Data to Boost Oriented Object Detection

Authors: Dingkang Liang, Wei Hua, Chunsheng Shi, Zhikang Zou, Xiaoqing Ye, Xiang Bai

Abstract: Semi-supervised object detection (SSOD), leveraging unlabeled data to boost object detectors, has become a hot topic recently. However, existing SSOD approaches mainly focus on horizontal objects, leaving multi-oriented objects common in aerial images unexplored. At the same time, the annotation cost of multi-oriented objects is significantly higher than that of their horizontal counterparts. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Semi-supervised Oriented Object Detection method termed SOOD++. Specifically, we observe that objects from aerial images are usually arbitrary orientations, small scales, and aggregation, which inspires the following core designs: a Simple Instance-aware Dense Sampling (SIDS) strategy is used to generate comprehensive dense pseudo-labels; the Geometry-aware Adaptive Weighting (GAW) loss dynamically modulates the importance of each pair between pseudo-label and corresponding prediction by leveraging the intricate geometric information of aerial objects; we treat aerial images as global layouts and explicitly build the many-to-many relationship between the sets of pseudo-labels and predictions via the proposed Noise-driven Global Consistency (NGC). Extensive experiments conducted on various multi-oriented object datasets under various labeled settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. For example, on the DOTA-V1.5 benchmark, the proposed method outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a large margin (+2.92, +2.39, and +2.57 mAP under 10%, 20%, and 30% labeled data settings, respectively) with single-scale training and testing. More importantly, it still improves upon a strong supervised baseline with 70.66 mAP, trained using the full DOTA-V1.5 train-val set, by +1.82 mAP, resulting in a 72.48 mAP, pushing the new state-of-the-art. The code will be made available.

new Coding for Intelligence from the Perspective of Category

Authors: Wenhan Yang, Zixuan Hu, Lilang Lin, Jiaying Liu, Ling-Yu Duan

Abstract: Coding, which targets compressing and reconstructing data, and intelligence, often regarded at an abstract computational level as being centered around model learning and prediction, interweave recently to give birth to a series of significant progress. The recent trends demonstrate the potential homogeneity of these two fields, especially when deep-learning models aid these two categories for better probability modeling. For better understanding and describing from a unified perspective, inspired by the basic generally recognized principles in cognitive psychology, we formulate a novel problem of Coding for Intelligence from the category theory view. Based on the three axioms: existence of ideal coding, existence of practical coding, and compactness promoting generalization, we derive a general framework to understand existing methodologies, namely that, coding captures the intrinsic relationships of objects as much as possible, while ignoring information irrelevant to downstream tasks. This framework helps identify the challenges and essential elements in solving the specific derived Minimal Description Length (MDL) optimization problem from a broader range, providing opportunities to build a more intelligent system for handling multiple tasks/applications with coding ideas/tools. Centering on those elements, we systematically review recent processes of towards optimizing the MDL problem in more comprehensive ways from data, model, and task perspectives, and reveal their impacts on the potential CfI technical routes. After that, we also present new technique paths to fulfill CfI and provide potential solutions with preliminary experimental evidence. Last, further directions and remaining issues are discussed as well. The discussion shows our theory can reveal many phenomena and insights about large foundation models, which mutually corroborate with recent practices in feature learning.

new Blind Inversion using Latent Diffusion Priors

Authors: Weimin Bai, Siyi Chen, Wenzheng Chen, He Sun

Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for solving inverse problems due to their exceptional ability to model complex prior distributions. However, existing methods predominantly assume known forward operators (i.e., non-blind), limiting their applicability in practical settings where acquiring such operators is costly. Additionally, many current approaches rely on pixel-space diffusion models, leaving the potential of more powerful latent diffusion models (LDMs) underexplored. In this paper, we introduce LatentDEM, an innovative technique that addresses more challenging blind inverse problems using latent diffusion priors. At the core of our method is solving blind inverse problems within an iterative Expectation-Maximization (EM) framework: (1) the E-step recovers clean images from corrupted observations using LDM priors and a known forward model, and (2) the M-step estimates the forward operator based on the recovered images. Additionally, we propose two novel optimization techniques tailored for LDM priors and EM frameworks, yielding more accurate and efficient blind inversion results. As a general framework, LatentDEM supports both linear and non-linear inverse problems. Beyond common 2D image restoration tasks, it enables new capabilities in non-linear 3D inverse rendering problems. We validate LatentDEM's performance on representative 2D blind deblurring and 3D sparse-view reconstruction tasks, demonstrating its superior efficacy over prior arts.

new EndoSparse: Real-Time Sparse View Synthesis of Endoscopic Scenes using Gaussian Splatting

Authors: Chenxin Li, Brandon Y. Feng, Yifan Liu, Hengyu Liu, Cheng Wang, Weihao Yu, Yixuan Yuan

Abstract: 3D reconstruction of biological tissues from a collection of endoscopic images is a key to unlock various important downstream surgical applications with 3D capabilities. Existing methods employ various advanced neural rendering techniques for photorealistic view synthesis, but they often struggle to recover accurate 3D representations when only sparse observations are available, which is usually the case in real-world clinical scenarios. To tackle this {sparsity} challenge, we propose a framework leveraging the prior knowledge from multiple foundation models during the reconstruction process, dubbed as \textit{EndoSparse}. Experimental results indicate that our proposed strategy significantly improves the geometric and appearance quality under challenging sparse-view conditions, including using only three views. In rigorous benchmarking experiments against state-of-the-art methods, \textit{EndoSparse} achieves superior results in terms of accurate geometry, realistic appearance, and rendering efficiency, confirming the robustness to sparse-view limitations in endoscopic reconstruction. \textit{EndoSparse} signifies a steady step towards the practical deployment of neural 3D reconstruction in real-world clinical scenarios. Project page: https://endo-sparse.github.io/.

URLs: https://endo-sparse.github.io/.

new Enhancing Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Audio-Visual Guidance from Lip Reading Expert

Authors: Han EunGi, Oh Hyun-Bin, Kim Sung-Bin, Corentin Nivelet Etcheberry, Suekyeong Nam, Janghoon Joo, Tae-Hyun Oh

Abstract: Speech-driven 3D facial animation has recently garnered attention due to its cost-effective usability in multimedia production. However, most current advances overlook the intelligibility of lip movements, limiting the realism of facial expressions. In this paper, we introduce a method for speech-driven 3D facial animation to generate accurate lip movements, proposing an audio-visual multimodal perceptual loss. This loss provides guidance to train the speech-driven 3D facial animators to generate plausible lip motions aligned with the spoken transcripts. Furthermore, to incorporate the proposed audio-visual perceptual loss, we devise an audio-visual lip reading expert leveraging its prior knowledge about correlations between speech and lip motions. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through broad experiments, showing noticeable improvements in lip synchronization and lip readability performance. Codes are available at https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

URLs: https://3d-talking-head-avguide.github.io/.

new Multimodal Conditional 3D Face Geometry Generation

Authors: Christopher Otto, Prashanth Chandran, Sebastian Weiss, Markus Gross, Gaspard Zoss, Derek Bradley

Abstract: We present a new method for multimodal conditional 3D face geometry generation that allows user-friendly control over the output identity and expression via a number of different conditioning signals. Within a single model, we demonstrate 3D faces generated from artistic sketches, 2D face landmarks, Canny edges, FLAME face model parameters, portrait photos, or text prompts. Our approach is based on a diffusion process that generates 3D geometry in a 2D parameterized UV domain. Geometry generation passes each conditioning signal through a set of cross-attention layers (IP-Adapter), one set for each user-defined conditioning signal. The result is an easy-to-use 3D face generation tool that produces high resolution geometry with fine-grain user control.

new CVLUE: A New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Vision-Language Understanding Evaluation

Authors: Yuxuan Wang, Yijun Liu, Fei Yu, Chen Huang, Kexin Li, Zhiguo Wan, Wanxiang Che

Abstract: Despite the rapid development of Chinese vision-language models (VLMs), most existing Chinese vision-language (VL) datasets are constructed on Western-centric images from existing English VL datasets. The cultural bias in the images makes these datasets unsuitable for evaluating VLMs in Chinese culture. To remedy this issue, we present a new Chinese Vision- Language Understanding Evaluation (CVLUE) benchmark dataset, where the selection of object categories and images is entirely driven by Chinese native speakers, ensuring that the source images are representative of Chinese culture. The benchmark contains four distinct VL tasks ranging from image-text retrieval to visual question answering, visual grounding and visual dialogue. We present a detailed statistical analysis of CVLUE and provide a baseline performance analysis with several open-source multilingual VLMs on CVLUE and its English counterparts to reveal their performance gap between English and Chinese. Our in-depth category-level analysis reveals a lack of Chinese cultural knowledge in existing VLMs. We also find that fine-tuning on Chinese culture-related VL datasets effectively enhances VLMs' understanding of Chinese culture.

new Kolmogorov-Arnold Convolutions: Design Principles and Empirical Studies

Authors: Ivan Drokin

Abstract: The emergence of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) has sparked significant interest and debate within the scientific community. This paper explores the application of KANs in the domain of computer vision (CV). We examine the convolutional version of KANs, considering various nonlinearity options beyond splines, such as Wavelet transforms and a range of polynomials. We propose a parameter-efficient design for Kolmogorov-Arnold convolutional layers and a parameter-efficient finetuning algorithm for pre-trained KAN models, as well as KAN convolutional versions of self-attention and focal modulation layers. We provide empirical evaluations conducted on MNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, Tiny ImageNet, ImageNet1k, and HAM10000 datasets for image classification tasks. Additionally, we explore segmentation tasks, proposing U-Net-like architectures with KAN convolutions, and achieving state-of-the-art results on BUSI, GlaS, and CVC datasets. We summarized all of our findings in a preliminary design guide of KAN convolutional models for computer vision tasks. Furthermore, we investigate regularization techniques for KANs. All experimental code and implementations of convolutional layers and models, pre-trained on ImageNet1k weights are available on GitHub via this https://github.com/IvanDrokin/torch-conv-kan

URLs: https://github.com/IvanDrokin/torch-conv-kan

new Evaluation of Text-to-Video Generation Models: A Dynamics Perspective

Authors: Mingxiang Liao, Hannan Lu, Xinyu Zhang, Fang Wan, Tianyu Wang, Yuzhong Zhao, Wangmeng Zuo, Qixiang Ye, Jingdong Wang

Abstract: Comprehensive and constructive evaluation protocols play an important role in the development of sophisticated text-to-video (T2V) generation models. Existing evaluation protocols primarily focus on temporal consistency and content continuity, yet largely ignore the dynamics of video content. Dynamics are an essential dimension for measuring the visual vividness and the honesty of video content to text prompts. In this study, we propose an effective evaluation protocol, termed DEVIL, which centers on the dynamics dimension to evaluate T2V models. For this purpose, we establish a new benchmark comprising text prompts that fully reflect multiple dynamics grades, and define a set of dynamics scores corresponding to various temporal granularities to comprehensively evaluate the dynamics of each generated video. Based on the new benchmark and the dynamics scores, we assess T2V models with the design of three metrics: dynamics range, dynamics controllability, and dynamics-based quality. Experiments show that DEVIL achieves a Pearson correlation exceeding 90% with human ratings, demonstrating its potential to advance T2V generation models. Code is available at https://github.com/MingXiangL/DEVIL.

URLs: https://github.com/MingXiangL/DEVIL.

new Semantic-guided Adversarial Diffusion Model for Self-supervised Shadow Removal

Authors: Ziqi Zeng, Chen Zhao, Weiling Cai, Chenyu Dong

Abstract: Existing unsupervised methods have addressed the challenges of inconsistent paired data and tedious acquisition of ground-truth labels in shadow removal tasks. However, GAN-based training often faces issues such as mode collapse and unstable optimization. Furthermore, due to the complex mapping between shadow and shadow-free domains, merely relying on adversarial learning is not enough to capture the underlying relationship between two domains, resulting in low quality of the generated images. To address these problems, we propose a semantic-guided adversarial diffusion framework for self-supervised shadow removal, which consists of two stages. At first stage a semantic-guided generative adversarial network (SG-GAN) is proposed to carry out a coarse result and construct paired synthetic data through a cycle-consistent structure. Then the coarse result is refined with a diffusion-based restoration module (DBRM) to enhance the texture details and edge artifact at second stage. Meanwhile, we propose a multi-modal semantic prompter (MSP) that aids in extracting accurate semantic information from real images and text, guiding the shadow removal network to restore images better in SG-GAN. We conduct experiments on multiple public datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

new Comprehensive Dataset for Urban Streetlight Analysis

Authors: Eliza Femi Sherley S, Sanjay T, Shri Kaanth P, Jeffrey Samuel S

Abstract: This article includes a comprehensive collection of over 800 high-resolution streetlight images taken systematically from India's major streets, primarily in the Chennai region. The images were methodically collected following standardized methods to assure uniformity and quality. Each image has been labelled and grouped into directories based on binary class labels, which indicate whether each streetlight is functional or not. This organized dataset is intended to make it easier to train and evaluate deep neural networks, allowing for the creation of pre-trained models that have robust feature representations. Such models have several potential uses, such as improving smart city surveillance systems, automating street infrastructure monitoring, and increasing urban management efficiency. The availability of this dataset is intended to inspire future research and development in computer vision and smart city technologies, supporting innovation and practical solutions to urban infrastructure concerns. The dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/Team16Project/Street-Light-Dataset/.

URLs: https://github.com/Team16Project/Street-Light-Dataset/.

new RMS-FlowNet++: Efficient and Robust Multi-Scale Scene Flow Estimation for Large-Scale Point Clouds

Authors: Ramy Battrawy, Ren\'e Schuster, Didier Stricker

Abstract: The proposed RMS-FlowNet++ is a novel end-to-end learning-based architecture for accurate and efficient scene flow estimation that can operate on high-density point clouds. For hierarchical scene f low estimation, existing methods rely on expensive Farthest-Point-Sampling (FPS) to sample the scenes, must find large correspondence sets across the consecutive frames and/or must search for correspondences at a full input resolution. While this can improve the accuracy, it reduces the overall efficiency of these methods and limits their ability to handle large numbers of points due to memory requirements. In contrast to these methods, our architecture is based on an efficient design for hierarchical prediction of multi-scale scene flow. To this end, we develop a special flow embedding block that has two advantages over the current methods: First, a smaller correspondence set is used, and second, the use of Random-Sampling (RS) is possible. In addition, our architecture does not need to search for correspondences at a full input resolution. Exhibiting high accuracy, our RMS-FlowNet++ provides a faster prediction than state-of-the-art methods, avoids high memory requirements and enables efficient scene flow on dense point clouds of more than 250K points at once. Our comprehensive experiments verify the accuracy of RMS FlowNet++ on the established FlyingThings3D data set with different point cloud densities and validate our design choices. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our model has a competitive ability to generalize to the real-world scenes of the KITTI data set without fine-tuning.

new M$^2$IST: Multi-Modal Interactive Side-Tuning for Memory-efficient Referring Expression Comprehension

Authors: Xuyang Liu, Ting Liu, Siteng Huang, Yue Hu, Quanjun Yin, Donglin Wang, Honggang Chen

Abstract: Referring expression comprehension (REC) is a vision-language task to locate a target object in an image based on a language expression. Fully fine-tuning general-purpose pre-trained models for REC yields impressive performance but becomes increasingly costly. Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods have shown strong performance with fewer tunable parameters. However, applying PETL to REC faces two challenges: (1) insufficient interaction between pre-trained vision and language encoders, and (2) high GPU memory usage due to gradients passing through both heavy encoders. To address these issues, we present M$^2$IST: Multi-Modal Interactive Side-Tuning with M$^3$ISAs: Mixture of Multi-Modal Interactive Side-Adapters. During fine-tuning, we keep the pre-trained vision and language encoders fixed and update M$^3$ISAs on side networks to establish connections between them, thereby achieving parameter- and memory-efficient tuning for REC. Empirical results on three benchmarks show M$^2$IST achieves the best performance-parameter-memory trade-off compared to full fine-tuning and other PETL methods, with only 3.14M tunable parameters (2.11% of full fine-tuning) and 15.44GB GPU memory usage (39.61% of full fine-tuning). Source code will soon be publicly available.

new Integrated feature analysis for deep learning interpretation and class activation maps

Authors: Yanli Li, Tahereh Hassanzadeh, Denis P. Shamonin, Monique Reijnierse, Annette H. M. van der Helm-van Mil, Berend C. Stoel

Abstract: Understanding the decisions of deep learning (DL) models is essential for the acceptance of DL to risk-sensitive applications. Although methods, like class activation maps (CAMs), give a glimpse into the black box, they do miss some crucial information, thereby limiting its interpretability and merely providing the considered locations of objects. To provide more insight into the models and the influence of datasets, we propose an integrated feature analysis method, which consists of feature distribution analysis and feature decomposition, to look closer into the intermediate features extracted by DL models. This integrated feature analysis could provide information on overfitting, confounders, outliers in datasets, model redundancies and principal features extracted by the models, and provide distribution information to form a common intensity scale, which are missing in current CAM algorithms. The integrated feature analysis was applied to eight different datasets for general validation: photographs of handwritten digits, two datasets of natural images and five medical datasets, including skin photography, ultrasound, CT, X-rays and MRIs. The method was evaluated by calculating the consistency between the CAMs average class activation levels and the logits of the model. Based on the eight datasets, the correlation coefficients through our method were all very close to 100%, and based on the feature decomposition, 5%-25% of features could generate equally informative saliency maps and obtain the same model performances as using all features. This proves the reliability of the integrated feature analysis. As the proposed methods rely on very few assumptions, this is a step towards better model interpretation and a useful extension to existing CAM algorithms. Codes: https://github.com/YanliLi27/IFA

URLs: https://github.com/YanliLi27/IFA

new Unaligning Everything: Or Aligning Any Text to Any Image in Multimodal Models

Authors: Shaeke Salman, Md Montasir Bin Shams, Xiuwen Liu

Abstract: Utilizing a shared embedding space, emerging multimodal models exhibit unprecedented zero-shot capabilities. However, the shared embedding space could lead to new vulnerabilities if different modalities can be misaligned. In this paper, we extend and utilize a recently developed effective gradient-based procedure that allows us to match the embedding of a given text by minimally modifying an image. Using the procedure, we show that we can align the embeddings of distinguishable texts to any image through unnoticeable adversarial attacks in joint image-text models, revealing that semantically unrelated images can have embeddings of identical texts and at the same time visually indistinguishable images can be matched to the embeddings of very different texts. Our technique achieves 100\% success rate when it is applied to text datasets and images from multiple sources. Without overcoming the vulnerability, multimodal models cannot robustly align inputs from different modalities in a semantically meaningful way. \textbf{Warning: the text data used in this paper are toxic in nature and may be offensive to some readers.}

new Multi-View Black-Box Physical Attacks on Infrared Pedestrian Detectors Using Adversarial Infrared Grid

Authors: Kalibinuer Tiliwalidi, Chengyin Hu, Weiwen Shi

Abstract: While extensive research exists on physical adversarial attacks within the visible spectrum, studies on such techniques in the infrared spectrum are limited. Infrared object detectors are vital in modern technological applications but are susceptible to adversarial attacks, posing significant security threats. Previous studies using physical perturbations like light bulb arrays and aerogels for white-box attacks, or hot and cold patches for black-box attacks, have proven impractical or limited in multi-view support. To address these issues, we propose the Adversarial Infrared Grid (AdvGrid), which models perturbations in a grid format and uses a genetic algorithm for black-box optimization. These perturbations are cyclically applied to various parts of a pedestrian's clothing to facilitate multi-view black-box physical attacks on infrared pedestrian detectors. Extensive experiments validate AdvGrid's effectiveness, stealthiness, and robustness. The method achieves attack success rates of 80.00\% in digital environments and 91.86\% in physical environments, outperforming baseline methods. Additionally, the average attack success rate exceeds 50\% against mainstream detectors, demonstrating AdvGrid's robustness. Our analyses include ablation studies, transfer attacks, and adversarial defenses, confirming the method's superiority.

new Cross-Architecture Auxiliary Feature Space Translation for Efficient Few-Shot Personalized Object Detection

Authors: Francesco Barbato, Umberto Michieli, Jijoong Moon, Pietro Zanuttigh, Mete Ozay

Abstract: Recent years have seen object detection robotic systems deployed in several personal devices (e.g., home robots and appliances). This has highlighted a challenge in their design, i.e., they cannot efficiently update their knowledge to distinguish between general classes and user-specific instances (e.g., a dog vs. user's dog). We refer to this challenging task as Instance-level Personalized Object Detection (IPOD). The personalization task requires many samples for model tuning and optimization in a centralized server, raising privacy concerns. An alternative is provided by approaches based on recent large-scale Foundation Models, but their compute costs preclude on-device applications. In our work we tackle both problems at the same time, designing a Few-Shot IPOD strategy called AuXFT. We introduce a conditional coarse-to-fine few-shot learner to refine the coarse predictions made by an efficient object detector, showing that using an off-the-shelf model leads to poor personalization due to neural collapse. Therefore, we introduce a Translator block that generates an auxiliary feature space where features generated by a self-supervised model (e.g., DINOv2) are distilled without impacting the performance of the detector. We validate AuXFT on three publicly available datasets and one in-house benchmark designed for the IPOD task, achieving remarkable gains in all considered scenarios with excellent time-complexity trade-off: AuXFT reaches a performance of 80% its upper bound at just 32% of the inference time, 13% of VRAM and 19% of the model size.

new Efficient Cutting Tool Wear Segmentation Based on Segment Anything Model

Authors: Zongshuo Li, Ding Huo, Markus Meurer, Thomas Bergs

Abstract: Tool wear conditions impact the surface quality of the workpiece and its final geometric precision. In this research, we propose an efficient tool wear segmentation approach based on Segment Anything Model, which integrates U-Net as an automated prompt generator to streamline the processes of tool wear detection. Our evaluation covered three Point-of-Interest generation methods and further investigated the effects of variations in training dataset sizes and U-Net training intensities on resultant wear segmentation outcomes. The results consistently highlight our approach's advantage over U-Net, emphasizing its ability to achieve accurate wear segmentation even with limited training datasets. This feature underscores its potential applicability in industrial scenarios where datasets may be limited.

new Fast and Efficient: Mask Neural Fields for 3D Scene Segmentation

Authors: Zihan Gao, Lingling Li, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu, Xu Liu, Wenping Ma, Yuwei Guo, Shuyuan Yang

Abstract: Understanding 3D scenes is a crucial challenge in computer vision research with applications spanning multiple domains. Recent advancements in distilling 2D vision-language foundation models into neural fields, like NeRF and 3DGS, enables open-vocabulary segmentation of 3D scenes from 2D multi-view images without the need for precise 3D annotations. While effective, however, the per-pixel distillation of high-dimensional CLIP features introduces ambiguity and necessitates complex regularization strategies, adding inefficiencies during training. This paper presents MaskField, which enables fast and efficient 3D open-vocabulary segmentation with neural fields under weak supervision. Unlike previous methods, MaskField distills masks rather than dense high-dimensional CLIP features. MaskFields employ neural fields as binary mask generators and supervise them with masks generated by SAM and classified by coarse CLIP features. MaskField overcomes the ambiguous object boundaries by naturally introducing SAM segmented object shapes without extra regularization during training. By circumventing the direct handling of high-dimensional CLIP features during training, MaskField is particularly compatible with explicit scene representations like 3DGS. Our extensive experiments show that MaskField not only surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods but also achieves remarkably fast convergence, outperforming previous methods with just 5 minutes of training. We hope that MaskField will inspire further exploration into how neural fields can be trained to comprehend 3D scenes from 2D models.

new DaBiT: Depth and Blur informed Transformer for Joint Refocusing and Super-Resolution

Authors: Crispian Morris, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, Fan Zhang, David Bull

Abstract: In many real-world scenarios, recorded videos suffer from accidental focus blur, and while video deblurring methods exist, most specifically target motion blur. This paper introduces a framework optimised for the joint task of focal deblurring (refocusing) and video super-resolution (VSR). The proposed method employs novel map guided transformers, in addition to image propagation, to effectively leverage the continuous spatial variance of focal blur and restore the footage. We also introduce a flow re-focusing module to efficiently align relevant features between the blurry and sharp domains. Additionally, we propose a novel technique for generating synthetic focal blur data, broadening the model's learning capabilities to include a wider array of content. We have made a new benchmark dataset, DAVIS-Blur, available. This dataset, a modified extension of the popular DAVIS video segmentation set, provides realistic out-of-focus blur degradations as well as the corresponding blur maps. Comprehensive experiments on DAVIS-Blur demonstrate the superiority of our approach. We achieve state-of-the-art results with an average PSNR performance over 1.9dB greater than comparable existing video restoration methods. Our source code will be made available at https://github.com/crispianm/DaBiT

URLs: https://github.com/crispianm/DaBiT

new SGCCNet: Single-Stage 3D Object Detector With Saliency-Guided Data Augmentation and Confidence Correction Mechanism

Authors: Ao Liang, Wenyu Chen, Jian Fang, Huaici Zhao

Abstract: The single-stage point-based 3D object detectors have attracted widespread research interest due to their advantages of lightweight and fast inference speed. However, they still face challenges such as inadequate learning of low-quality objects (ILQ) and misalignment between localization accuracy and classification confidence (MLC). In this paper, we propose SGCCNet to alleviate these two issues. For ILQ, SGCCNet adopts a Saliency-Guided Data Augmentation (SGDA) strategy to enhance the robustness of the model on low-quality objects by reducing its reliance on salient features. Specifically, We construct a classification task and then approximate the saliency scores of points by moving points towards the point cloud centroid in a differentiable process. During the training process, SGCCNet will be forced to learn from low saliency features through dropping points. Meanwhile, to avoid internal covariate shift and contextual features forgetting caused by dropping points, we add a geometric normalization module and skip connection block in each stage. For MLC, we design a Confidence Correction Mechanism (CCM) specifically for point-based multi-class detectors. This mechanism corrects the confidence of the current proposal by utilizing the predictions of other key points within the local region in the post-processing stage. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the generality and effectiveness of our SGCCNet. On the KITTI \textit{test} set, SGCCNet achieves $80.82\%$ for the metric of $AP_{3D}$ on the \textit{Moderate} level, outperforming all other point-based detectors, surpassing IA-SSD and Fast Point R-CNN by $2.35\%$ and $3.42\%$, respectively. Additionally, SGCCNet demonstrates excellent portability for other point-based detectors

new CLHOP: Combined Audio-Video Learning for Horse 3D Pose and Shape Estimation

Authors: Ci Li, Elin Hernlund, Hedvig Kjellstr\"om, Silvia Zuffi

Abstract: In the monocular setting, predicting 3D pose and shape of animals typically relies solely on visual information, which is highly under-constrained. In this work, we explore using audio to enhance 3D shape and motion recovery of horses from monocular video. We test our approach on two datasets: an indoor treadmill dataset for 3D evaluation and an outdoor dataset capturing diverse horse movements, the latter being a contribution to this study. Our results show that incorporating sound with visual data leads to more accurate and robust motion regression. This study is the first to investigate audio's role in 3D animal motion recovery.

new Multi-level Reliable Guidance for Unpaired Multi-view Clustering

Authors: Like Xin, Wanqi Yang, Lei Wang, Ming Yang

Abstract: In this paper, we address the challenging problem of unpaired multi-view clustering (UMC), aiming to perform effective joint clustering using unpaired observed samples across multiple views. Commonly, traditional incomplete multi-view clustering (IMC) methods often depend on paired samples to capture complementary information between views. However, the strategy becomes impractical in UMC due to the absence of paired samples. Although some researchers have attempted to tackle the issue by preserving consistent cluster structures across views, they frequently neglect the confidence of these cluster structures, especially for boundary samples and uncertain cluster structures during the initial training. Therefore, we propose a method called Multi-level Reliable Guidance for UMC (MRG-UMC), which leverages multi-level clustering to aid in learning a trustworthy cluster structure across inner-view, cross-view, and common-view, respectively. Specifically, within each view, multi-level clustering fosters a trustworthy cluster structure across different levels and reduces clustering error. In cross-view learning, reliable view guidance enhances the confidence of the cluster structures in other views. Similarly, within the multi-level framework, the incorporation of a common view aids in aligning different views, thereby reducing the clustering error and uncertainty of cluster structure. Finally, as evidenced by extensive experiments, our method for UMC demonstrates significant efficiency improvements compared to 20 state-of-the-art methods.

new OSL-ActionSpotting: A Unified Library for Action Spotting in Sports Videos

Authors: Yassine Benzakour, Bruno Cabado, Silvio Giancola, Anthony Cioppa, Bernard Ghanem, Marc Van Droogenbroeck

Abstract: Action spotting is crucial in sports analytics as it enables the precise identification and categorization of pivotal moments in sports matches, providing insights that are essential for performance analysis and tactical decision-making. The fragmentation of existing methodologies, however, impedes the progression of sports analytics, necessitating a unified codebase to support the development and deployment of action spotting for video analysis. In this work, we introduce OSL-ActionSpotting, a Python library that unifies different action spotting algorithms to streamline research and applications in sports video analytics. OSL-ActionSpotting encapsulates various state-of-the-art techniques into a singular, user-friendly framework, offering standardized processes for action spotting and analysis across multiple datasets. We successfully integrated three cornerstone action spotting methods into OSL-ActionSpotting, achieving performance metrics that match those of the original, disparate codebases. This unification within a single library preserves the effectiveness of each method and enhances usability and accessibility for researchers and practitioners in sports analytics. By bridging the gaps between various action spotting techniques, OSL-ActionSpotting significantly contributes to the field of sports video analysis, fostering enhanced analytical capabilities and collaborative research opportunities. The scalable and modularized design of the library ensures its long-term relevance and adaptability to future technological advancements in the domain.

new Small Aerial Target Detection for Airborne Infrared Detection Systems using LightGBM and Trajectory Constraints

Authors: Xiaoliang Sun, Liangchao Guo, Wenlong Zhang, Zi Wang, Qifeng Yu

Abstract: Factors, such as rapid relative motion, clutter background, etc., make robust small aerial target detection for airborne infrared detection systems a challenge. Existing methods are facing difficulties when dealing with such cases. We consider that a continuous and smooth trajectory is critical in boosting small infrared aerial target detection performance. A simple and effective small aerial target detection method for airborne infrared detection system using light gradient boosting model (LightGBM) and trajectory constraints is proposed in this article. First, we simply formulate target candidate detection as a binary classification problem. Target candidates in every individual frame are detected via interesting pixel detection and a trained LightGBM model. Then, the local smoothness and global continuous characteristic of the target trajectory are modeled as short-strict and long-loose constraints. The trajectory constraints are used efficiently for detecting the true small infrared aerial targets from numerous target candidates. Experiments on public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than other existing methods. Furthermore, a public dataset for small aerial target detection in airborne infrared detection systems is constructed. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset has the largest data scale and richest scene types within this field.

new Formal Verification of Object Detection

Authors: Avraham Raviv, Yizhak Y. Elboher, Michelle Aluf-Medina, Yael Leibovich Weiss, Omer Cohen, Roy Assa, Guy Katz, Hillel Kugler

Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are ubiquitous in real-world applications, yet they remain vulnerable to errors and adversarial attacks. This work tackles the challenge of applying formal verification to ensure the safety of computer vision models, extending verification beyond image classification to object detection. We propose a general formulation for certifying the robustness of object detection models using formal verification and outline implementation strategies compatible with state-of-the-art verification tools. Our approach enables the application of these tools, originally designed for verifying classification models, to object detection. We define various attacks for object detection, illustrating the diverse ways adversarial inputs can compromise neural network outputs. Our experiments, conducted on several common datasets and networks, reveal potential errors in object detection models, highlighting system vulnerabilities and emphasizing the need for expanding formal verification to these new domains. This work paves the way for further research in integrating formal verification across a broader range of computer vision applications.

new Preserving Full Degradation Details for Blind Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Hongda Liu, Longguang Wang, Ye Zhang, Kaiwen Xue, Shunbo Zhou, Yulan Guo

Abstract: The performance of image super-resolution relies heavily on the accuracy of degradation information, especially under blind settings. Due to absence of true degradation models in real-world scenarios, previous methods learn distinct representations by distinguishing different degradations in a batch. However, the most significant degradation differences may provide shortcuts for the learning of representations such that subtle difference may be discarded. In this paper, we propose an alternative to learn degradation representations through reproducing degraded low-resolution (LR) images. By guiding the degrader to reconstruct input LR images, full degradation information can be encoded into the representations. In addition, we develop an energy distance loss to facilitate the learning of the degradation representations by introducing a bounded constraint. Experiments show that our representations can extract accurate and highly robust degradation information. Moreover, evaluations on both synthetic and real images demonstrate that our ReDSR achieves state-of-the-art performance for the blind SR tasks.

new GaussianStego: A Generalizable Stenography Pipeline for Generative 3D Gaussians Splatting

Authors: Chenxin Li, Hengyu Liu, Zhiwen Fan, Wuyang Li, Yifan Liu, Panwang Pan, Yixuan Yuan

Abstract: Recent advancements in large generative models and real-time neural rendering using point-based techniques pave the way for a future of widespread visual data distribution through sharing synthesized 3D assets. However, while standardized methods for embedding proprietary or copyright information, either overtly or subtly, exist for conventional visual content such as images and videos, this issue remains unexplored for emerging generative 3D formats like Gaussian Splatting. We present GaussianStego, a method for embedding steganographic information in the rendering of generated 3D assets. Our approach employs an optimization framework that enables the accurate extraction of hidden information from images rendered using Gaussian assets derived from large models, while maintaining their original visual quality. We conduct preliminary evaluations of our method across several potential deployment scenarios and discuss issues identified through analysis. GaussianStego represents an initial exploration into the novel challenge of embedding customizable, imperceptible, and recoverable information within the renders produced by current 3D generative models, while ensuring minimal impact on the rendered content's quality.

new Robot Instance Segmentation with Few Annotations for Grasping

Authors: Moshe Kimhi, David Vainshtein, Chaim Baskin, Dotan Di Castro

Abstract: The ability of robots to manipulate objects relies heavily on their aptitude for visual perception. In domains characterized by cluttered scenes and high object variability, most methods call for vast labeled datasets, laboriously hand-annotated, with the aim of training capable models. Once deployed, the challenge of generalizing to unfamiliar objects implies that the model must evolve alongside its domain. To address this, we propose a novel framework that combines Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) with Learning Through Interaction (LTI), allowing a model to learn by observing scene alterations and leverage visual consistency despite temporal gaps without requiring curated data of interaction sequences. As a result, our approach exploits partially annotated data through self-supervision and incorporates temporal context using pseudo-sequences generated from unlabeled still images. We validate our method on two common benchmarks, ARMBench mix-object-tote and OCID, where it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on ARMBench, we attain an $\text{AP}_{50}$ of $86.37$, almost a $20\%$ improvement over existing work, and obtain remarkable results in scenarios with extremely low annotation, achieving an $\text{AP}_{50}$ score of $84.89$ with just $1 \%$ of annotated data compared to $72$ presented in ARMBench on the fully annotated counterpart.

new ToCoAD: Two-Stage Contrastive Learning for Industrial Anomaly Detection

Authors: Yun Liang, Zhiguang Hu, Junjie Huang, Donglin Di, Anyang Su, Lei Fan

Abstract: Current unsupervised anomaly detection approaches perform well on public datasets but struggle with specific anomaly types due to the domain gap between pre-trained feature extractors and target-specific domains. To tackle this issue, this paper presents a two-stage training strategy, called \textbf{ToCoAD}. In the first stage, a discriminative network is trained by using synthetic anomalies in a self-supervised learning manner. This network is then utilized in the second stage to provide a negative feature guide, aiding in the training of the feature extractor through bootstrap contrastive learning. This approach enables the model to progressively learn the distribution of anomalies specific to industrial datasets, effectively enhancing its generalizability to various types of anomalies. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed two-stage training strategy, and our model produces competitive performance, achieving pixel-level AUROC scores of 98.21\%, 98.43\% and 97.70\% on MVTec AD, VisA and BTAD respectively.

new Gradient-based Class Weighting for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Dense Prediction Visual Tasks

Authors: Roberto Alcover-Couso, Marcos Escudero-Vi\~nolo, Juan C. SanMiguel, Jesus Besc\'os

Abstract: In unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where models are trained on source data (e.g., synthetic) and adapted to target data (e.g., real-world) without target annotations, addressing the challenge of significant class imbalance remains an open issue. Despite considerable progress in bridging the domain gap, existing methods often experience performance degradation when confronted with highly imbalanced dense prediction visual tasks like semantic and panoptic segmentation. This discrepancy becomes especially pronounced due to the lack of equivalent priors between the source and target domains, turning class imbalanced techniques used for other areas (e.g., image classification) ineffective in UDA scenarios. This paper proposes a class-imbalance mitigation strategy that incorporates class-weights into the UDA learning losses, but with the novelty of estimating these weights dynamically through the loss gradient, defining a Gradient-based class weighting (GBW) learning. GBW naturally increases the contribution of classes whose learning is hindered by large-represented classes, and has the advantage of being able to automatically and quickly adapt to the iteration training outcomes, avoiding explicitly curricular learning patterns common in loss-weighing strategies. Extensive experimentation validates the effectiveness of GBW across architectures (convolutional and transformer), UDA strategies (adversarial, self-training and entropy minimization), tasks (semantic and panoptic segmentation), and datasets (GTA and Synthia). Analysing the source of advantage, GBW consistently increases the recall of low represented classes.

new CSFNet: A Cosine Similarity Fusion Network for Real-Time RGB-X Semantic Segmentation of Driving Scenes

Authors: Danial Qashqai, Emad Mousavian, Shahriar Baradaran Shokouhi, Sattar Mirzakuchaki

Abstract: Semantic segmentation, as a crucial component of complex visual interpretation, plays a fundamental role in autonomous vehicle vision systems. Recent studies have significantly improved the accuracy of semantic segmentation by exploiting complementary information and developing multimodal methods. Despite the gains in accuracy, multimodal semantic segmentation methods suffer from high computational complexity and low inference speed. Therefore, it is a challenging task to implement multimodal methods in driving applications. To address this problem, we propose the Cosine Similarity Fusion Network (CSFNet) as a real-time RGB-X semantic segmentation model. Specifically, we design a Cosine Similarity Attention Fusion Module (CS-AFM) that effectively rectifies and fuses features of two modalities. The CS-AFM module leverages cross-modal similarity to achieve high generalization ability. By enhancing the fusion of cross-modal features at lower levels, CS-AFM paves the way for the use of a single-branch network at higher levels. Therefore, we use dual and single-branch architectures in an encoder, along with an efficient context module and a lightweight decoder for fast and accurate predictions. To verify the effectiveness of CSFNet, we use the Cityscapes, MFNet, and ZJU datasets for the RGB-D/T/P semantic segmentation. According to the results, CSFNet has competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods while being state-of-the-art in terms of speed among multimodal semantic segmentation models. It also achieves high efficiency due to its low parameter count and computational complexity. The source code for CSFNet will be available at https://github.com/Danial-Qashqai/CSFNet.

URLs: https://github.com/Danial-Qashqai/CSFNet.

new Learning Unsigned Distance Fields from Local Shape Functions for 3D Surface Reconstruction

Authors: Jiangbei Hu, Yanggeng Li, Fei Hou, Junhui Hou, Zhebin Zhang, Shengfa Wang, Na Lei, Ying He

Abstract: Unsigned distance fields (UDFs) provide a versatile framework for representing a diverse array of 3D shapes, encompassing both watertight and non-watertight geometries. Traditional UDF learning methods typically require extensive training on large datasets of 3D shapes, which is costly and often necessitates hyperparameter adjustments for new datasets. This paper presents a novel neural framework, LoSF-UDF, for reconstructing surfaces from 3D point clouds by leveraging local shape functions to learn UDFs. We observe that 3D shapes manifest simple patterns within localized areas, prompting us to create a training dataset of point cloud patches characterized by mathematical functions that represent a continuum from smooth surfaces to sharp edges and corners. Our approach learns features within a specific radius around each query point and utilizes an attention mechanism to focus on the crucial features for UDF estimation. This method enables efficient and robust surface reconstruction from point clouds without the need for shape-specific training. Additionally, our method exhibits enhanced resilience to noise and outliers in point clouds compared to existing methods. We present comprehensive experiments and comparisons across various datasets, including synthetic and real-scanned point clouds, to validate our method's efficacy.

new Restyling Unsupervised Concept Based Interpretable Networks with Generative Models

Authors: Jayneel Parekh, Quentin Bouniot, Pavlo Mozharovskyi, Alasdair Newson, Florence d'Alch\'e-Buc

Abstract: Developing inherently interpretable models for prediction has gained prominence in recent years. A subclass of these models, wherein the interpretable network relies on learning high-level concepts, are valued because of closeness of concept representations to human communication. However, the visualization and understanding of the learnt unsupervised dictionary of concepts encounters major limitations, specially for large-scale images. We propose here a novel method that relies on mapping the concept features to the latent space of a pretrained generative model. The use of a generative model enables high quality visualization, and naturally lays out an intuitive and interactive procedure for better interpretation of the learnt concepts. Furthermore, leveraging pretrained generative models has the additional advantage of making the training of the system more efficient. We quantitatively ascertain the efficacy of our method in terms of accuracy of the interpretable prediction network, fidelity of reconstruction, as well as faithfulness and consistency of learnt concepts. The experiments are conducted on multiple image recognition benchmarks for large-scale images. Project page available at https://jayneelparekh.github.io/VisCoIN_project_page/

URLs: https://jayneelparekh.github.io/VisCoIN_project_page/

new AdaDistill: Adaptive Knowledge Distillation for Deep Face Recognition

Authors: Fadi Boutros, Vitomir \v{S}truc, Naser Damer

Abstract: Knowledge distillation (KD) aims at improving the performance of a compact student model by distilling the knowledge from a high-performing teacher model. In this paper, we present an adaptive KD approach, namely AdaDistill, for deep face recognition. The proposed AdaDistill embeds the KD concept into the softmax loss by training the student using a margin penalty softmax loss with distilled class centers from the teacher. Being aware of the relatively low capacity of the compact student model, we propose to distill less complex knowledge at an early stage of training and more complex one at a later stage of training. This relative adjustment of the distilled knowledge is controlled by the progression of the learning capability of the student over the training iterations without the need to tune any hyper-parameters. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that AdaDistill can enhance the discriminative learning capability of the student and demonstrate superiority over various state-of-the-art competitors on several challenging benchmarks, such as IJB-B, IJB-C, and ICCV2021-MFR

new PanopticRecon: Leverage Open-vocabulary Instance Segmentation for Zero-shot Panoptic Reconstruction

Authors: Xuan Yu, Yili Liu, Chenrui Han, Sitong Mao, Shunbo Zhou, Rong Xiong, Yiyi Liao, Yue Wang

Abstract: Panoptic reconstruction is a challenging task in 3D scene understanding. However, most existing methods heavily rely on pre-trained semantic segmentation models and known 3D object bounding boxes for 3D panoptic segmentation, which is not available for in-the-wild scenes. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot panoptic reconstruction method from RGB-D images of scenes. For zero-shot segmentation, we leverage open-vocabulary instance segmentation, but it has to face partial labeling and instance association challenges. We tackle both challenges by propagating partial labels with the aid of dense generalized features and building a 3D instance graph for associating 2D instance IDs. Specifically, we exploit partial labels to learn a classifier for generalized semantic features to provide complete labels for scenes with dense distilled features. Moreover, we formulate instance association as a 3D instance graph segmentation problem, allowing us to fully utilize the scene geometry prior and all 2D instance masks to infer global unique pseudo 3D instance ID. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the indoor dataset ScanNet V2 and the outdoor dataset KITTI-360, demonstrating the effectiveness of our graph segmentation method and reconstruction network.

new Hyperspectral Pansharpening: Critical Review, Tools and Future Perspectives

Authors: Matteo Ciotola, Giuseppe Guarino, Gemine Vivone, Giovanni Poggi, Jocelyn Chanussot, Antonio Plaza, Giuseppe Scarpa

Abstract: Hyperspectral pansharpening consists of fusing a high-resolution panchromatic band and a low-resolution hyperspectral image to obtain a new image with high resolution in both the spatial and spectral domains. These remote sensing products are valuable for a wide range of applications, driving ever growing research efforts. Nonetheless, results still do not meet application demands. In part, this comes from the technical complexity of the task: compared to multispectral pansharpening, many more bands are involved, in a spectral range only partially covered by the panchromatic component and with overwhelming noise. However, another major limiting factor is the absence of a comprehensive framework for the rapid development and accurate evaluation of new methods. This paper attempts to address this issue. We started by designing a dataset large and diverse enough to allow reliable training (for data-driven methods) and testing of new methods. Then, we selected a set of state-of-the-art methods, following different approaches, characterized by promising performance, and reimplemented them in a single PyTorch framework. Finally, we carried out a critical comparative analysis of all methods, using the most accredited quality indicators. The analysis highlights the main limitations of current solutions in terms of spectral/spatial quality and computational efficiency, and suggests promising research directions. To ensure full reproducibility of the results and support future research, the framework (including codes, evaluation procedures and links to the dataset) is shared on https://github.com/matciotola/hyperspectral_pansharpening_toolbox, as a single Python-based reference benchmark toolbox.

URLs: https://github.com/matciotola/hyperspectral_pansharpening_toolbox,

new TransferAttn: Transferable-guided Attention Is All You Need for Video Domain Adaptation

Authors: Andr\'e Sacilotti, Samuel Felipe dos Santos, Nicu Sebe, Jurandy Almeida

Abstract: Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in videos is a challenging task that remains not well explored compared to image-based UDA techniques. Although vision transformers (ViT) achieve state-of-the-art performance in many computer vision tasks, their use in video domain adaptation has still been little explored. Our key idea is to use the transformer layers as a feature encoder and incorporate spatial and temporal transferability relationships into the attention mechanism. A Transferable-guided Attention (TransferAttn) framework is then developed to exploit the capacity of the transformer to adapt cross-domain knowledge from different backbones. To improve the transferability of ViT, we introduce a novel and effective module named Domain Transferable-guided Attention Block~(DTAB). DTAB compels ViT to focus on the spatio-temporal transferability relationship among video frames by changing the self-attention mechanism to a transferability attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on UCF-HMDB, Kinetics-Gameplay, and Kinetics-NEC Drone datasets with different backbones, like ResNet101, I3D, and STAM, verify the effectiveness of TransferAttn compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Also, we demonstrate that DTAB yields performance gains when applied to other state-of-the-art transformer-based UDA methods from both video and image domains. The code will be made freely available.

new Gloss2Text: Sign Language Gloss translation using LLMs and Semantically Aware Label Smoothing

Authors: Pooya Fayyazsanavi, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Jana Ko\v{s}eck\'a

Abstract: Sign language translation from video to spoken text presents unique challenges owing to the distinct grammar, expression nuances, and high variation of visual appearance across different speakers and contexts. The intermediate gloss annotations of videos aim to guide the translation process. In our work, we focus on {\em Gloss2Text} translation stage and propose several advances by leveraging pre-trained large language models (LLMs), data augmentation, and novel label-smoothing loss function exploiting gloss translation ambiguities improving significantly the performance of state-of-the-art approaches. Through extensive experiments and ablation studies on the PHOENIX Weather 2014T dataset, our approach surpasses state-of-the-art performance in {\em Gloss2Text} translation, indicating its efficacy in addressing sign language translation and suggesting promising avenues for future research and development.

new Mask and Compress: Efficient Skeleton-based Action Recognition in Continual Learning

Authors: Matteo Mosconi, Andriy Sorokin, Aniello Panariello, Angelo Porrello, Jacopo Bonato, Marco Cotogni, Luigi Sabetta, Simone Calderara, Rita Cucchiara

Abstract: The use of skeletal data allows deep learning models to perform action recognition efficiently and effectively. Herein, we believe that exploring this problem within the context of Continual Learning is crucial. While numerous studies focus on skeleton-based action recognition from a traditional offline perspective, only a handful venture into online approaches. In this respect, we introduce CHARON (Continual Human Action Recognition On skeletoNs), which maintains consistent performance while operating within an efficient framework. Through techniques like uniform sampling, interpolation, and a memory-efficient training stage based on masking, we achieve improved recognition accuracy while minimizing computational overhead. Our experiments on Split NTU-60 and the proposed Split NTU-120 datasets demonstrate that CHARON sets a new benchmark in this domain. The code is available at https://github.com/Sperimental3/CHARON.

URLs: https://github.com/Sperimental3/CHARON.

new GalLoP: Learning Global and Local Prompts for Vision-Language Models

Authors: Marc Lafon, Elias Ramzi, Cl\'ement Rambour, Nicolas Audebert, Nicolas Thome

Abstract: Prompt learning has been widely adopted to efficiently adapt vision-language models (VLMs), e.g. CLIP, for few-shot image classification. Despite their success, most prompt learning methods trade-off between classification accuracy and robustness, e.g. in domain generalization or out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. In this work, we introduce Global-Local Prompts (GalLoP), a new prompt learning method that learns multiple diverse prompts leveraging both global and local visual features. The training of the local prompts relies on local features with an enhanced vision-text alignment. To focus only on pertinent features, this local alignment is coupled with a sparsity strategy in the selection of the local features. We enforce diversity on the set of prompts using a new ``prompt dropout'' technique and a multiscale strategy on the local prompts. GalLoP outperforms previous prompt learning methods on accuracy on eleven datasets in different few shots settings and with various backbones. Furthermore, GalLoP shows strong robustness performances in both domain generalization and OOD detection, even outperforming dedicated OOD detection methods. Code and instructions to reproduce our results will be open-sourced.

new Semantic Compositions Enhance Vision-Language Contrastive Learning

Authors: Maxwell Aladago, Lorenzo Torresani, Soroush Vosoughi

Abstract: In the field of vision-language contrastive learning, models such as CLIP capitalize on matched image-caption pairs as positive examples and leverage within-batch non-matching pairs as negatives. This approach has led to remarkable outcomes in zero-shot image classification, cross-modal retrieval, and linear evaluation tasks. We show that the zero-shot classification and retrieval capabilities of CLIP-like models can be improved significantly through the introduction of semantically composite examples during pretraining. Inspired by CutMix in vision categorization, we create semantically composite image-caption pairs by merging elements from two distinct instances in the dataset via a novel procedure. Our method fuses the captions and blends 50% of each image to form a new composite sample. This simple technique (termed CLIP-C for CLIP Compositions), devoid of any additional computational overhead or increase in model parameters, significantly improves zero-shot image classification and cross-modal retrieval. The benefits of CLIP-C are particularly pronounced in settings with relatively limited pretraining data.

new StyleShot: A Snapshot on Any Style

Authors: Junyao Gao, Yanchen Liu, Yanan Sun, Yinhao Tang, Yanhong Zeng, Kai Chen, Cairong Zhao

Abstract: In this paper, we show that, a good style representation is crucial and sufficient for generalized style transfer without test-time tuning. We achieve this through constructing a style-aware encoder and a well-organized style dataset called StyleGallery. With dedicated design for style learning, this style-aware encoder is trained to extract expressive style representation with decoupling training strategy, and StyleGallery enables the generalization ability. We further employ a content-fusion encoder to enhance image-driven style transfer. We highlight that, our approach, named StyleShot, is simple yet effective in mimicking various desired styles, i.e., 3D, flat, abstract or even fine-grained styles, without test-time tuning. Rigorous experiments validate that, StyleShot achieves superior performance across a wide range of styles compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The project page is available at: https://styleshot.github.io/.

URLs: https://styleshot.github.io/.

new FORA: Fast-Forward Caching in Diffusion Transformer Acceleration

Authors: Pratheba Selvaraju, Tianyu Ding, Tianyi Chen, Ilya Zharkov, Luming Liang

Abstract: Diffusion transformers (DiT) have become the de facto choice for generating high-quality images and videos, largely due to their scalability, which enables the construction of larger models for enhanced performance. However, the increased size of these models leads to higher inference costs, making them less attractive for real-time applications. We present Fast-FORward CAching (FORA), a simple yet effective approach designed to accelerate DiT by exploiting the repetitive nature of the diffusion process. FORA implements a caching mechanism that stores and reuses intermediate outputs from the attention and MLP layers across denoising steps, thereby reducing computational overhead. This approach does not require model retraining and seamlessly integrates with existing transformer-based diffusion models. Experiments show that FORA can speed up diffusion transformers several times over while only minimally affecting performance metrics such as the IS Score and FID. By enabling faster processing with minimal trade-offs in quality, FORA represents a significant advancement in deploying diffusion transformers for real-time applications. Code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/prathebaselva/FORA.

URLs: https://github.com/prathebaselva/FORA.

new Scarecrow monitoring system:employing mobilenet ssd for enhanced animal supervision

Authors: Balaji VS, Mahi AR, Anirudh Ganapathy PS, Manju M

Abstract: Agriculture faces a growing challenge with wildlife wreaking havoc on crops, threatening sustainability. The project employs advanced object detection, the system utilizes the Mobile Net SSD model for real-time animal classification. The methodology initiates with the creation of a dataset, where each animal is represented by annotated images. The SSD Mobile Net architecture facilitates the use of a model for image classification and object detection. The model undergoes fine-tuning and optimization during training, enhancing accuracy for precise animal classification. Real-time detection is achieved through a webcam and the OpenCV library, enabling prompt identification and categorization of approaching animals. By seamlessly integrating intelligent scarecrow technology with object detection, this system offers a robust solution to field protection, minimizing crop damage and promoting precision farming. It represents a valuable contribution to agricultural sustainability, addressing the challenge of wildlife interference with crops. The implementation of the Intelligent Scarecrow Monitoring System stands as a progressive tool for proactive field management and protection, empowering farmers with an advanced solution for precision agriculture. Keywords: Machine learning, Deep Learning, Computer Vision, MobileNet SSD

new AdaOcc: Adaptive Forward View Transformation and Flow Modeling for 3D Occupancy and Flow Prediction

Authors: Dubing Chen, Wencheng Han, Jin Fang, Jianbing Shen

Abstract: In this technical report, we present our solution for the Vision-Centric 3D Occupancy and Flow Prediction track in the nuScenes Open-Occ Dataset Challenge at CVPR 2024. Our innovative approach involves a dual-stage framework that enhances 3D occupancy and flow predictions by incorporating adaptive forward view transformation and flow modeling. Initially, we independently train the occupancy model, followed by flow prediction using sequential frame integration. Our method combines regression with classification to address scale variations in different scenes, and leverages predicted flow to warp current voxel features to future frames, guided by future frame ground truth. Experimental results on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness, showcasing the effectiveness of our approach in real-world scenarios. Our single model based on Swin-Base ranks second on the public leaderboard, validating the potential of our method in advancing autonomous car perception systems.

new FoleyCrafter: Bring Silent Videos to Life with Lifelike and Synchronized Sounds

Authors: Yiming Zhang, Yicheng Gu, Yanhong Zeng, Zhening Xing, Yuancheng Wang, Zhizheng Wu, Kai Chen

Abstract: We study Neural Foley, the automatic generation of high-quality sound effects synchronizing with videos, enabling an immersive audio-visual experience. Despite its wide range of applications, existing approaches encounter limitations when it comes to simultaneously synthesizing high-quality and video-aligned (i.e.,, semantic relevant and temporal synchronized) sounds. To overcome these limitations, we propose FoleyCrafter, a novel framework that leverages a pre-trained text-to-audio model to ensure high-quality audio generation. FoleyCrafter comprises two key components: the semantic adapter for semantic alignment and the temporal controller for precise audio-video synchronization. The semantic adapter utilizes parallel cross-attention layers to condition audio generation on video features, producing realistic sound effects that are semantically relevant to the visual content. Meanwhile, the temporal controller incorporates an onset detector and a timestampbased adapter to achieve precise audio-video alignment. One notable advantage of FoleyCrafter is its compatibility with text prompts, enabling the use of text descriptions to achieve controllable and diverse video-to-audio generation according to user intents. We conduct extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on standard benchmarks to verify the effectiveness of FoleyCrafter. Models and codes are available at https://github.com/open-mmlab/FoleyCrafter.

URLs: https://github.com/open-mmlab/FoleyCrafter.

new MIA-Bench: Towards Better Instruction Following Evaluation of Multimodal LLMs

Authors: Yusu Qian, Hanrong Ye, Jean-Philippe Fauconnier, Peter Grasch, Yinfei Yang, Zhe Gan

Abstract: We introduce MIA-Bench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal large language models (MLLMs) on their ability to strictly adhere to complex instructions. Our benchmark comprises a diverse set of 400 image-prompt pairs, each crafted to challenge the models' compliance with layered instructions in generating accurate responses that satisfy specific requested patterns. Evaluation results from a wide array of state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal significant variations in performance, highlighting areas for improvement in instruction fidelity. Additionally, we create extra training data and explore supervised fine-tuning to enhance the models' ability to strictly follow instructions without compromising performance on other tasks. We hope this benchmark not only serves as a tool for measuring MLLM adherence to instructions, but also guides future developments in MLLM training methods.

new E.T. the Exceptional Trajectories: Text-to-camera-trajectory generation with character awareness

Authors: Robin Courant, Nicolas Dufour, Xi Wang, Marc Christie, Vicky Kalogeiton

Abstract: Stories and emotions in movies emerge through the effect of well-thought-out directing decisions, in particular camera placement and movement over time. Crafting compelling camera trajectories remains a complex iterative process, even for skilful artists. To tackle this, in this paper, we propose a dataset called the Exceptional Trajectories (E.T.) with camera trajectories along with character information and textual captions encompassing descriptions of both camera and character. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset of its kind. To show the potential applications of the E.T. dataset, we propose a diffusion-based approach, named DIRECTOR, which generates complex camera trajectories from textual captions that describe the relation and synchronisation between the camera and characters. To ensure robust and accurate evaluations, we train on the E.T. dataset CLaTr, a Contrastive Language-Trajectory embedding for evaluation metrics. We posit that our proposed dataset and method significantly advance the democratization of cinematography, making it more accessible to common users.

new Towards Multimodal Open-Set Domain Generalization and Adaptation through Self-supervision

Authors: Hao Dong, Eleni Chatzi, Olga Fink

Abstract: The task of open-set domain generalization (OSDG) involves recognizing novel classes within unseen domains, which becomes more challenging with multiple modalities as input. Existing works have only addressed unimodal OSDG within the meta-learning framework, without considering multimodal scenarios. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to address Multimodal Open-Set Domain Generalization (MM-OSDG) for the first time, utilizing self-supervision. To this end, we introduce two innovative multimodal self-supervised pretext tasks: Masked Cross-modal Translation and Multimodal Jigsaw Puzzles. These tasks facilitate the learning of multimodal representative features, thereby enhancing generalization and open-class detection capabilities. Additionally, we propose a novel entropy weighting mechanism to balance the loss across different modalities. Furthermore, we extend our approach to tackle also the Multimodal Open-Set Domain Adaptation (MM-OSDA) problem, especially in scenarios where unlabeled data from the target domain is available. Extensive experiments conducted under MM-OSDG, MM-OSDA, and Multimodal Closed-Set DG settings on the EPIC-Kitchens and HAC datasets demonstrate the efficacy and versatility of the proposed approach. Our source code is available at https://github.com/donghao51/MOOSA.

URLs: https://github.com/donghao51/MOOSA.

new DiffIR2VR-Zero: Zero-Shot Video Restoration with Diffusion-based Image Restoration Models

Authors: Chang-Han Yeh, Chin-Yang Lin, Zhixiang Wang, Chi-Wei Hsiao, Ting-Hsuan Chen, Yu-Lun Liu

Abstract: This paper introduces a method for zero-shot video restoration using pre-trained image restoration diffusion models. Traditional video restoration methods often need retraining for different settings and struggle with limited generalization across various degradation types and datasets. Our approach uses a hierarchical token merging strategy for keyframes and local frames, combined with a hybrid correspondence mechanism that blends optical flow and feature-based nearest neighbor matching (latent merging). We show that our method not only achieves top performance in zero-shot video restoration but also significantly surpasses trained models in generalization across diverse datasets and extreme degradations (8$\times$ super-resolution and high-standard deviation video denoising). We present evidence through quantitative metrics and visual comparisons on various challenging datasets. Additionally, our technique works with any 2D restoration diffusion model, offering a versatile and powerful tool for video enhancement tasks without extensive retraining. This research leads to more efficient and widely applicable video restoration technologies, supporting advancements in fields that require high-quality video output. See our project page for video results at https://jimmycv07.github.io/DiffIR2VR_web/.

URLs: https://jimmycv07.github.io/DiffIR2VR_web/.

new MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations

Authors: Yubo Ma, Yuhang Zang, Liangyu Chen, Meiqi Chen, Yizhu Jiao, Xinze Li, Xinyuan Lu, Ziyu Liu, Yan Ma, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Liangming Pan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Jiaqi Wang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun

Abstract: Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

URLs: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc

new Empowering 3D Visual Grounding with Reasoning Capabilities

Authors: Chenming Zhu, Tai Wang, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen, Xihui Liu

Abstract: Although great progress has been made in 3D visual grounding, current models still rely on explicit textual descriptions for grounding and lack the ability to reason human intentions from implicit instructions. We propose a new task called 3D reasoning grounding and introduce a new benchmark ScanReason which provides over 10K question-answer-location pairs from five reasoning types that require the synerization of reasoning and grounding. We further design our approach, ReGround3D, composed of the visual-centric reasoning module empowered by Multi-modal Large Language Model (MLLM) and the 3D grounding module to obtain accurate object locations by looking back to the enhanced geometry and fine-grained details from the 3D scenes. A chain-of-grounding mechanism is proposed to further boost the performance with interleaved reasoning and grounding steps during inference. Extensive experiments on the proposed benchmark validate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

cross Comparing fine-grained and coarse-grained object detection for ecology

Authors: Jess Tam, Justin Kay

Abstract: Computer vision applications are increasingly popular for wildlife monitoring tasks. While some studies focus on the monitoring of a single species, such as a particular endangered species, others monitor larger functional groups, such as predators. In our study, we used camera trap images collected in north-western New South Wales, Australia, to investigate how model results were affected by combining multiple species in single classes, and whether the addition of negative samples can improve model performance. We found that species that benefited the most from merging into a single class were mainly species that look alike morphologically, i.e. macropods. Whereas species that looked distinctively different gave mixed results when merged, e.g. merging pigs and goats together as non-native large mammals. We also found that adding negative samples improved model performance marginally in most instances, and recommend conducting a more comprehensive study to explore whether the marginal gains were random or consistent. We suggest that practitioners could classify morphologically similar species together as a functional group or higher taxonomic group to draw ecological inferences. Nevertheless, whether to merge classes or not will depend on the ecological question to be explored.

cross Scalable, Trustworthy Generative Model for Virtual Multi-Staining from H&E Whole Slide Images

Authors: Mehdi Ounissi, Ilias Sarbout, Jean-Pierre Hugot, Christine Martinez-Vinson, Dominique Berrebi, Daniel Racoceanu

Abstract: Chemical staining methods are dependable but require extensive time, expensive chemicals, and raise environmental concerns. These challenges highlight the need for alternative solutions like virtual staining, which accelerates the diagnostic process and enhances stain application flexibility. Generative AI technologies are pivotal in addressing these issues. However, the high-stakes nature of healthcare decisions, especially in computational pathology, complicates the adoption of these tools due to their opaque processes. Our work introduces the use of generative AI for virtual staining, aiming to enhance performance, trustworthiness, scalability, and adaptability in computational pathology. The methodology centers on a singular H&E encoder supporting multiple stain decoders. This design focuses on critical regions in the latent space of H&E, enabling precise synthetic stain generation. Our method, tested to generate 8 different stains from a single H&E slide, offers scalability by loading only necessary model components during production. We integrate label-free knowledge in training, using loss functions and regularization to minimize artifacts, thus improving paired/unpaired virtual staining accuracy. To build trust, we use real-time self-inspection with discriminators for each stain type, providing pathologists with confidence heat-maps. Automatic quality checks on new H&E slides ensure conformity to the trained distribution, ensuring accurate synthetic stains. Recognizing pathologists' challenges with new technologies, we have developed an open-source, cloud-based system, that allows easy virtual staining of H&E slides through a browser, addressing hardware/software issues and facilitating real-time user feedback. We also curated a novel dataset of 8 paired H&E/stains related to pediatric Crohn's disease, comprising 480 WSIs to further stimulate computational pathology research.

cross AI-Driven Skin Cancer Diagnosis: Grad-CAM and Expert Annotations for Enhanced Interpretability

Authors: Iv\'an Matas, Carmen Serrano, Francisca Silva, Amalia Serrano, Tom\'as Toledo-Pastrana, Bego\~na Acha

Abstract: An AI tool has been developed to provide interpretable support for the diagnosis of BCC via teledermatology, thus speeding up referrals and optimizing resource utilization. The interpretability is provided in two ways: on the one hand, the main BCC dermoscopic patterns are found in the image to justify the BCC/Non BCC classification. Secondly, based on the common visual XAI Grad-CAM, a clinically inspired visual explanation is developed where the relevant features for diagnosis are located. Since there is no established ground truth for BCC dermoscopic features, a standard reference is inferred from the diagnosis of four dermatologists using an Expectation Maximization (EM) based algorithm. The results demonstrate significant improvements in classification accuracy and interpretability, positioning this approach as a valuable tool for early BCC detection and referral to dermatologists. The BCC/non-BCC classification achieved an accuracy rate of 90%. For Clinically-inspired XAI results, the detection of BCC patterns useful to clinicians reaches 99% accuracy. As for the Clinically-inspired Visual XAI results, the mean of the Grad-CAM normalized value within the manually segmented clinical features is 0.57, while outside this region it is 0.16. This indicates that the model struggles to accurately identify the regions of the BCC patterns. These results prove the ability of the AI tool to provide a useful explanation.

cross Analyzing Quality, Bias, and Performance in Text-to-Image Generative Models

Authors: Nila Masrourisaadat, Nazanin Sedaghatkish, Fatemeh Sarshartehrani, Edward A. Fox

Abstract: Advances in generative models have led to significant interest in image synthesis, demonstrating the ability to generate high-quality images for a diverse range of text prompts. Despite this progress, most studies ignore the presence of bias. In this paper, we examine several text-to-image models not only by qualitatively assessing their performance in generating accurate images of human faces, groups, and specified numbers of objects but also by presenting a social bias analysis. As expected, models with larger capacity generate higher-quality images. However, we also document the inherent gender or social biases these models possess, offering a more complete understanding of their impact and limitations.

cross InfoNCE: Identifying the Gap Between Theory and Practice

Authors: Evgenia Rusak, Patrik Reizinger, Attila Juhos, Oliver Bringmann, Roland S. Zimmermann, Wieland Brendel

Abstract: Previous theoretical work on contrastive learning (CL) with InfoNCE showed that, under certain assumptions, the learned representations uncover the ground-truth latent factors. We argue these theories overlook crucial aspects of how CL is deployed in practice. Specifically, they assume that within a positive pair, all latent factors either vary to a similar extent, or that some do not vary at all. However, in practice, positive pairs are often generated using augmentations such as strong cropping to just a few pixels. Hence, a more realistic assumption is that all latent factors change, with a continuum of variability across these factors. We introduce AnInfoNCE, a generalization of InfoNCE that can provably uncover the latent factors in this anisotropic setting, broadly generalizing previous identifiability results in CL. We validate our identifiability results in controlled experiments and show that AnInfoNCE increases the recovery of previously collapsed information in CIFAR10 and ImageNet, albeit at the cost of downstream accuracy. Additionally, we explore and discuss further mismatches between theoretical assumptions and practical implementations, including extensions to hard negative mining and loss ensembles.

cross The impact of model size on catastrophic forgetting in Online Continual Learning

Authors: Eunhae Lee

Abstract: This study investigates the impact of model size on Online Continual Learning performance, with a focus on catastrophic forgetting. Employing ResNet architectures of varying sizes, the research examines how network depth and width affect model performance in class-incremental learning using the SplitCIFAR-10 dataset. Key findings reveal that larger models do not guarantee better Continual Learning performance; in fact, they often struggle more in adapting to new tasks, particularly in online settings. These results challenge the notion that larger models inherently mitigate catastrophic forgetting, highlighting the nuanced relationship between model size and Continual Learning efficacy. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of model scalability and its practical implications in Continual Learning scenarios.

cross DCSM 2.0: Deep Conditional Shape Models for Data Efficient Segmentation

Authors: Athira J Jacob, Puneet Sharma, Daniel Rueckert

Abstract: Segmentation is often the first step in many medical image analyses workflows. Deep learning approaches, while giving state-of-the-art accuracies, are data intensive and do not scale well to low data regimes. We introduce Deep Conditional Shape Models 2.0, which uses an edge detector, along with an implicit shape function conditioned on edge maps, to leverage cross-modality shape information. The shape function is trained exclusively on a source domain (contrasted CT) and applied to the target domain of interest (3D echocardiography). We demonstrate data efficiency in the target domain by varying the amounts of training data used in the edge detection stage. We observe that DCSM 2.0 outperforms the baseline at all data levels in terms of Hausdorff distances, and while using 50% or less of the training data in terms of average mesh distance, and at 10% or less of the data with the dice coefficient. The method scales well to low data regimes, with gains of up to 5% in dice coefficient, 2.58 mm in average surface distance and 21.02 mm in Hausdorff distance when using just 2% (22 volumes) of the training data.

cross SMPLOlympics: Sports Environments for Physically Simulated Humanoids

Authors: Zhengyi Luo, Jiashun Wang, Kangni Liu, Haotian Zhang, Chen Tessler, Jingbo Wang, Ye Yuan, Jinkun Cao, Zihui Lin, Fengyi Wang, Jessica Hodgins, Kris Kitani

Abstract: We present SMPLOlympics, a collection of physically simulated environments that allow humanoids to compete in a variety of Olympic sports. Sports simulation offers a rich and standardized testing ground for evaluating and improving the capabilities of learning algorithms due to the diversity and physically demanding nature of athletic activities. As humans have been competing in these sports for many years, there is also a plethora of existing knowledge on the preferred strategy to achieve better performance. To leverage these existing human demonstrations from videos and motion capture, we design our humanoid to be compatible with the widely-used SMPL and SMPL-X human models from the vision and graphics community. We provide a suite of individual sports environments, including golf, javelin throw, high jump, long jump, and hurdling, as well as competitive sports, including both 1v1 and 2v2 games such as table tennis, tennis, fencing, boxing, soccer, and basketball. Our analysis shows that combining strong motion priors with simple rewards can result in human-like behavior in various sports. By providing a unified sports benchmark and baseline implementation of state and reward designs, we hope that SMPLOlympics can help the control and animation communities achieve human-like and performant behaviors.

cross Generative Iris Prior Embedded Transformer for Iris Restoration

Authors: Yubo Huang, Jia Wang, Peipei Li, Liuyu Xiang, Peigang Li, Zhaofeng He

Abstract: Iris restoration from complexly degraded iris images, aiming to improve iris recognition performance, is a challenging problem. Due to the complex degradation, directly training a convolutional neural network (CNN) without prior cannot yield satisfactory results. In this work, we propose a generative iris prior embedded Transformer model (Gformer), in which we build a hierarchical encoder-decoder network employing Transformer block and generative iris prior. First, we tame Transformer blocks to model long-range dependencies in target images. Second, we pretrain an iris generative adversarial network (GAN) to obtain the rich iris prior, and incorporate it into the iris restoration process with our iris feature modulator. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed Gformer outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Besides, iris recognition performance has been significantly improved after applying Gformer.

cross From Local Concepts to Universals: Evaluating the Multicultural Understanding of Vision-Language Models

Authors: Mehar Bhatia, Sahithya Ravi, Aditya Chinchure, Eunjeong Hwang, Vered Shwartz

Abstract: Despite recent advancements in vision-language models, their performance remains suboptimal on images from non-western cultures due to underrepresentation in training datasets. Various benchmarks have been proposed to test models' cultural inclusivity, but they have limited coverage of cultures and do not adequately assess cultural diversity across universal as well as culture-specific local concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce the GlobalRG benchmark, comprising two challenging tasks: retrieval across universals and cultural visual grounding. The former task entails retrieving culturally diverse images for universal concepts from 50 countries, while the latter aims at grounding culture-specific concepts within images from 15 countries. Our evaluation across a wide range of models reveals that the performance varies significantly across cultures -- underscoring the necessity for enhancing multicultural understanding in vision-language models.

cross PerAct2: A Perceiver Actor Framework for Bimanual Manipulation Tasks

Authors: Markus Grotz, Mohit Shridhar, Tamim Asfour, Dieter Fox

Abstract: Bimanual manipulation is challenging due to precise spatial and temporal coordination required between two arms. While there exist several real-world bimanual systems, there is a lack of simulated benchmarks with a large task diversity for systematically studying bimanual capabilities across a wide range of tabletop tasks. This paper addresses the gap by extending RLBench to bimanual manipulation. We open-source our code and benchmark comprising 13 new tasks with 23 unique task variations, each requiring a high degree of coordination and adaptability. To kickstart the benchmark, we extended several state-of-the art methods to bimanual manipulation and also present a language-conditioned behavioral cloning agent -- PerAct2, which enables the learning and execution of bimanual 6-DoF manipulation tasks. Our novel network architecture efficiently integrates language processing with action prediction, allowing robots to understand and perform complex bimanual tasks in response to user-specified goals. Project website with code is available at: http://bimanual.github.io

URLs: http://bimanual.github.io

cross IVCA: Inter-Relation-Aware Video Complexity Analyzer

Authors: Junqi Liao, Yao Li, Zhuoyuan Li, Li Li, Dong Liu

Abstract: To meet the real-time analysis requirements of video streaming applications, we propose an inter-relation-aware video complexity analyzer (IVCA) as an extension to VCA. The IVCA addresses the limitation of VCA by considering inter-frame relations, namely motion and reference structure. First, we enhance the accuracy of temporal features by introducing feature-domain motion estimation into the IVCA. Next, drawing inspiration from the hierarchical reference structure in codecs, we design layer-aware weights to adjust the majorities of frame complexity in different layers. Additionally, we expand the scope of temporal features by considering frames that be referred to, rather than relying solely on the previous frame. Experimental results show the significant improvement in complexity estimation accuracy achieved by IVCA, with minimal time complexity increase.

cross UADSN: Uncertainty-Aware Dual-Stream Network for Facial Nerve Segmentation

Authors: Guanghao Zhu, Lin Liu, Jing Zhang, Xiaohui Du, Ruqian Hao, Juanxiu Liu

Abstract: Facial nerve segmentation is crucial for preoperative path planning in cochlear implantation surgery. Recently, researchers have proposed some segmentation methods, such as atlas-based and deep learning-based methods. However, since the facial nerve is a tubular organ with a diameter of only 1.0-1.5mm, it is challenging to locate and segment the facial nerve in CT scans. In this work, we propose an uncertainty-aware dualstream network (UADSN). UADSN consists of a 2D segmentation stream and a 3D segmentation stream. Predictions from two streams are used to identify uncertain regions, and a consistency loss is employed to supervise the segmentation of these regions. In addition, we introduce channel squeeze & spatial excitation modules into the skip connections of U-shaped networks to extract meaningful spatial information. In order to consider topologypreservation, a clDice loss is introduced into the supervised loss function. Experimental results on the facial nerve dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of UADSN and our submodules.

cross Enhancing Accuracy and Parameter-Efficiency of Neural Representations for Network Parameterization

Authors: Hongjun Choi, Jayaraman J. Thiagarajan, Ruben Glatt, Shusen Liu

Abstract: In this work, we investigate the fundamental trade-off regarding accuracy and parameter efficiency in the parameterization of neural network weights using predictor networks. We present a surprising finding that, when recovering the original model accuracy is the sole objective, it can be achieved effectively through the weight reconstruction objective alone. Additionally, we explore the underlying factors for improving weight reconstruction under parameter-efficiency constraints, and propose a novel training scheme that decouples the reconstruction objective from auxiliary objectives such as knowledge distillation that leads to significant improvements compared to state-of-the-art approaches. Finally, these results pave way for more practical scenarios, where one needs to achieve improvements on both model accuracy and predictor network parameter-efficiency simultaneously.

cross The Factuality Tax of Diversity-Intervened Text-to-Image Generation: Benchmark and Fact-Augmented Intervention

Authors: Yixin Wan, Di Wu, Haoran Wang, Kai-Wei Chang

Abstract: Prompt-based "diversity interventions" are commonly adopted to improve the diversity of Text-to-Image (T2I) models depicting individuals with various racial or gender traits. However, will this strategy result in nonfactual demographic distribution, especially when generating real historical figures? In this work, we propose DemOgraphic FActualIty Representation (DoFaiR), a benchmark to systematically quantify the trade-off between using diversity interventions and preserving demographic factuality in T2I models. DoFaiR consists of 756 meticulously fact-checked test instances to reveal the factuality tax of various diversity prompts through an automated evidence-supported evaluation pipeline. Experiments on DoFaiR unveil that diversity-oriented instructions increase the number of different gender and racial groups in DALLE-3's generations at the cost of historically inaccurate demographic distributions. To resolve this issue, we propose Fact-Augmented Intervention (FAI), which instructs a Large Language Model (LLM) to reflect on verbalized or retrieved factual information about gender and racial compositions of generation subjects in history, and incorporate it into the generation context of T2I models. By orienting model generations using the reflected historical truths, FAI significantly improves the demographic factuality under diversity interventions while preserving diversity.

cross Characterizing Continual Learning Scenarios and Strategies for Audio Analysis

Authors: Ruchi Bhatt, Pratibha Kumari, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Mukesh Saini

Abstract: Audio analysis is useful in many application scenarios. The state-of-the-art audio analysis approaches assume that the data distribution at training and deployment time will be the same. However, due to various real-life environmental factors, the data may encounter drift in its distribution or can encounter new classes in the late future. Thus, a one-time trained model might not perform adequately. In this paper, we characterize continual learning (CL) approaches in audio analysis. In this paper, we characterize continual learning (CL) approaches, intended to tackle catastrophic forgetting arising due to drifts. As there is no CL dataset for audio analysis, we use DCASE 2020 to 2023 datasets to create various CL scenarios for audio-based monitoring tasks. We have investigated the following CL and non-CL approaches: EWC, LwF, SI, GEM, A-GEM, GDumb, Replay, Naive, cumulative, and joint training. The study is very beneficial for researchers and practitioners working in the area of audio analysis for developing adaptive models. We observed that Replay achieved better results than other methods in the DCASE challenge data. It achieved an accuracy of 70.12% for the domain incremental scenario and an accuracy of 96.98% for the class incremental scenario.

cross Quantifying Spuriousness of Biased Datasets Using Partial Information Decomposition

Authors: Barproda Halder, Faisal Hamman, Pasan Dissanayake, Qiuyi Zhang, Ilia Sucholutsky, Sanghamitra Dutta

Abstract: Spurious patterns refer to a mathematical association between two or more variables in a dataset that are not causally related. However, this notion of spuriousness, which is usually introduced due to sampling biases in the dataset, has classically lacked a formal definition. To address this gap, this work presents the first information-theoretic formalization of spuriousness in a dataset (given a split of spurious and core features) using a mathematical framework called Partial Information Decomposition (PID). Specifically, we disentangle the joint information content that the spurious and core features share about another target variable (e.g., the prediction label) into distinct components, namely unique, redundant, and synergistic information. We propose the use of unique information, with roots in Blackwell Sufficiency, as a novel metric to formally quantify dataset spuriousness and derive its desirable properties. We empirically demonstrate how higher unique information in the spurious features in a dataset could lead a model into choosing the spurious features over the core features for inference, often having low worst-group-accuracy. We also propose a novel autoencoder-based estimator for computing unique information that is able to handle high-dimensional image data. Finally, we also show how this unique information in the spurious feature is reduced across several dataset-based spurious-pattern-mitigation techniques such as data reweighting and varying levels of background mixing, demonstrating a novel tradeoff between unique information (spuriousness) and worst-group-accuracy.

cross A Medical Low-Back Pain Physical Rehabilitation Dataset for Human Body Movement Analysis

Authors: Sao Mai Nguyen, Maxime Devanne, Olivier Remy-Neris, Mathieu Lempereur, Andr\'e Thepaut

Abstract: While automatic monitoring and coaching of exercises are showing encouraging results in non-medical applications, they still have limitations such as errors and limited use contexts. To allow the development and assessment of physical rehabilitation by an intelligent tutoring system, we identify in this article four challenges to address and propose a medical dataset of clinical patients carrying out low back-pain rehabilitation exercises. The dataset includes 3D Kinect skeleton positions and orientations, RGB videos, 2D skeleton data, and medical annotations to assess the correctness, and error classification and localisation of body part and timespan. Along this dataset, we perform a complete research path, from data collection to processing, and finally a small benchmark. We evaluated on the dataset two baseline movement recognition algorithms, pertaining to two different approaches: the probabilistic approach with a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), and the deep learning approach with a Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). This dataset is valuable because it includes rehabilitation relevant motions in a clinical setting with patients in their rehabilitation program, using a cost-effective, portable, and convenient sensor, and because it shows the potential for improvement on these challenges.

cross AI-powered multimodal modeling of personalized hemodynamics in aortic stenosis

Authors: Caglar Ozturk, Daniel H. Pak, Luca Rosalia, Debkalpa Goswami, Mary E. Robakowski, Raymond McKay, Christopher T. Nguyen, James S. Duncan, Ellen T. Roche

Abstract: Aortic stenosis (AS) is the most common valvular heart disease in developed countries. High-fidelity preclinical models can improve AS management by enabling therapeutic innovation, early diagnosis, and tailored treatment planning. However, their use is currently limited by complex workflows necessitating lengthy expert-driven manual operations. Here, we propose an AI-powered computational framework for accelerated and democratized patient-specific modeling of AS hemodynamics from computed tomography. First, we demonstrate that our automated meshing algorithms can generate task-ready geometries for both computational and benchtop simulations with higher accuracy and 100 times faster than existing approaches. Then, we show that our approach can be integrated with fluid-structure interaction and soft robotics models to accurately recapitulate a broad spectrum of clinical hemodynamic measurements of diverse AS patients. The efficiency and reliability of these algorithms make them an ideal complementary tool for personalized high-fidelity modeling of AS biomechanics, hemodynamics, and treatment planning.

cross Accelerating Longitudinal MRI using Prior Informed Latent Diffusion

Authors: Yonatan Urman, Zachary Shah, Ashwin Kumar, Bruno P. Soares, Kawin Setsompop

Abstract: MRI is a widely used ionization-free soft-tissue imaging modality, often employed repeatedly over a patient's lifetime. However, prolonged scanning durations, among other issues, can limit availability and accessibility. In this work, we aim to substantially reduce scan times by leveraging prior scans of the same patient. These prior scans typically contain considerable shared information with the current scan, thereby enabling higher acceleration rates when appropriately utilized. We propose a prior informed reconstruction method with a trained diffusion model in conjunction with data-consistency steps. Our method can be trained with unlabeled image data, eliminating the need for a dataset of either k-space measurements or paired longitudinal scans as is required of other learning-based methods. We demonstrate superiority of our method over previously suggested approaches in effectively utilizing prior information without over-biasing prior consistency, which we validate on both an open-source dataset of healthy patients as well as several longitudinal cases of clinical interest.

cross Privacy-Preserving and Trustworthy Deep Learning for Medical Imaging

Authors: Kiarash Sedghighadikolaei, Attila A Yavuz

Abstract: The shift towards efficient and automated data analysis through Machine Learning (ML) has notably impacted healthcare systems, particularly Radiomics. Radiomics leverages ML to analyze medical images accurately and efficiently for precision medicine. Current methods rely on Deep Learning (DL) to improve performance and accuracy (Deep Radiomics). Given the sensitivity of medical images, ensuring privacy throughout the Deep Radiomics pipeline-from data generation and collection to model training and inference-is essential, especially when outsourced. Thus, Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are crucial tools for Deep Radiomics. Previous studies and systematization efforts have either broadly overviewed PETs and their applications or mainly focused on subsets of PETs for ML algorithms. In Deep Radiomics, where efficiency, accuracy, and privacy are crucial, many PETs, while theoretically applicable, may not be practical without specialized optimizations or hybrid designs. Additionally, not all DL models are suitable for Radiomics. Consequently, there is a need for specialized studies that investigate and systematize the effective and practical integration of PETs into the Deep Radiomics pipeline. This work addresses this research gap by (1) classifying existing PETs, presenting practical hybrid PETS constructions, and a taxonomy illustrating their potential integration with the Deep Radiomics pipeline, with comparative analyses detailing assumptions, architectural suitability, and security, (2) Offering technical insights, describing potential challenges and means of combining PETs into the Deep Radiomics pipeline, including integration strategies, subtilities, and potential challenges, (3) Proposing potential research directions, identifying challenges, and suggesting solutions to enhance the PETs in Deep Radiomics.

cross Fully invertible hyperbolic neural networks for segmenting large-scale surface and sub-surface data

Authors: Bas Peters, Eldad Haber, Keegan Lensink

Abstract: The large spatial/temporal/frequency scale of geoscience and remote-sensing datasets causes memory issues when using convolutional neural networks for (sub-) surface data segmentation. Recently developed fully reversible or fully invertible networks can mostly avoid memory limitations by recomputing the states during the backward pass through the network. This results in a low and fixed memory requirement for storing network states, as opposed to the typical linear memory growth with network depth. This work focuses on a fully invertible network based on the telegraph equation. While reversibility saves the major amount of memory used in deep networks by the data, the convolutional kernels can take up most memory if fully invertible networks contain multiple invertible pooling/coarsening layers. We address the explosion of the number of convolutional kernels by combining fully invertible networks with layers that contain the convolutional kernels in a compressed form directly. A second challenge is that invertible networks output a tensor the same size as its input. This property prevents the straightforward application of invertible networks to applications that map between different input-output dimensions, need to map to outputs with more channels than present in the input data, or desire outputs that decrease/increase the resolution compared to the input data. However, we show that by employing invertible networks in a non-standard fashion, we can still use them for these tasks. Examples in hyperspectral land-use classification, airborne geophysical surveying, and seismic imaging illustrate that we can input large data volumes in one chunk and do not need to work on small patches, use dimensionality reduction, or employ methods that classify a patch to a single central pixel.

cross HATs: Hierarchical Adaptive Taxonomy Segmentation for Panoramic Pathology Image Analysis

Authors: Ruining Deng, Quan Liu, Can Cui, Tianyuan Yao, Juming Xiong, Shunxing Bao, Hao Li, Mengmeng Yin, Yu Wang, Shilin Zhao, Yucheng Tang, Haichun Yang, Yuankai Huo

Abstract: Panoramic image segmentation in computational pathology presents a remarkable challenge due to the morphologically complex and variably scaled anatomy. For instance, the intricate organization in kidney pathology spans multiple layers, from regions like the cortex and medulla to functional units such as glomeruli, tubules, and vessels, down to various cell types. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Adaptive Taxonomy Segmentation (HATs) method, which is designed to thoroughly segment panoramic views of kidney structures by leveraging detailed anatomical insights. Our approach entails (1) the innovative HATs technique which translates spatial relationships among 15 distinct object classes into a versatile "plug-and-play" loss function that spans across regions, functional units, and cells, (2) the incorporation of anatomical hierarchies and scale considerations into a unified simple matrix representation for all panoramic entities, (3) the adoption of the latest AI foundation model (EfficientSAM) as a feature extraction tool to boost the model's adaptability, yet eliminating the need for manual prompt generation in conventional segment anything model (SAM). Experimental findings demonstrate that the HATs method offers an efficient and effective strategy for integrating clinical insights and imaging precedents into a unified segmentation model across more than 15 categories. The official implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/HATs.

URLs: https://github.com/hrlblab/HATs.

cross Learning Granularity-Aware Affordances from Human-Object Interaction for Tool-Based Functional Grasping in Dexterous Robotics

Authors: Fan Yang, Wenrui Chen, Kailun Yang, Haoran Lin, DongSheng Luo, Conghui Tang, Zhiyong Li, Yaonan Wang

Abstract: To enable robots to use tools, the initial step is teaching robots to employ dexterous gestures for touching specific areas precisely where tasks are performed. Affordance features of objects serve as a bridge in the functional interaction between agents and objects. However, leveraging these affordance cues to help robots achieve functional tool grasping remains unresolved. To address this, we propose a granularity-aware affordance feature extraction method for locating functional affordance areas and predicting dexterous coarse gestures. We study the intrinsic mechanisms of human tool use. On one hand, we use fine-grained affordance features of object-functional finger contact areas to locate functional affordance regions. On the other hand, we use highly activated coarse-grained affordance features in hand-object interaction regions to predict grasp gestures. Additionally, we introduce a model-based post-processing module that includes functional finger coordinate localization, finger-to-end coordinate transformation, and force feedback-based coarse-to-fine grasping. This forms a complete dexterous robotic functional grasping framework GAAF-Dex, which learns Granularity-Aware Affordances from human-object interaction for tool-based Functional grasping in Dexterous Robotics. Unlike fully-supervised methods that require extensive data annotation, we employ a weakly supervised approach to extract relevant cues from exocentric (Exo) images of hand-object interactions to supervise feature extraction in egocentric (Ego) images. We have constructed a small-scale dataset, FAH, which includes near 6K images of functional hand-object interaction Exo- and Ego images of 18 commonly used tools performing 6 tasks. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yangfan293/GAAF-DEX.

URLs: https://github.com/yangfan293/GAAF-DEX.

cross CAMON: Cooperative Agents for Multi-Object Navigation with LLM-based Conversations

Authors: Pengying Wu, Yao Mu, Kangjie Zhou, Ji Ma, Junting Chen, Chang Liu

Abstract: Visual navigation tasks are critical for household service robots. As these tasks become increasingly complex, effective communication and collaboration among multiple robots become imperative to ensure successful completion. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable comprehension and planning abilities in the context of embodied agents. However, their application in household scenarios, specifically in the use of multiple agents collaborating to complete complex navigation tasks through communication, remains unexplored. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework for decentralized multi-agent navigation, leveraging LLM-enabled communication and collaboration. By designing the communication-triggered dynamic leadership organization structure, we achieve faster team consensus with fewer communication instances, leading to better navigation effectiveness and collaborative exploration efficiency. With the proposed novel communication scheme, our framework promises to be conflict-free and robust in multi-object navigation tasks, even when there is a surge in team size.

cross A Review of Image Processing Methods in Prostate Ultrasound

Authors: Haiqiao Wang, Hong Wu, Zhuoyuan Wang, Peiyan Yue, Dong Ni, Pheng-Ann Heng, Yi Wang

Abstract: Prostate cancer (PCa) poses a significant threat to men's health, with early diagnosis being crucial for improving prognosis and reducing mortality rates. Transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) plays a vital role in the diagnosis and image-guided intervention of PCa.To facilitate physicians with more accurate and efficient computer-assisted diagnosis and interventions, many image processing algorithms in TRUS have been proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performance in several tasks, including prostate gland segmentation, prostate image registration, PCa classification and detection, and interventional needle detection.The rapid development of these algorithms over the past two decades necessitates a comprehensive summary. In consequence, this survey provides a systematic analysis of this field, outlining the evolution of image processing methods in the context of TRUS image analysis and meanwhile highlighting their relevant contributions. Furthermore, this survey discusses current challenges and suggests future research directions to possibly advance this field further.

cross ASPS: Augmented Segment Anything Model for Polyp Segmentation

Authors: Huiqian Li, Dingwen Zhang, Jieru Yao, Longfei Han, Zhongyu Li, Junwei Han

Abstract: Polyp segmentation plays a pivotal role in colorectal cancer diagnosis. Recently, the emergence of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has introduced unprecedented potential for polyp segmentation, leveraging its powerful pre-training capability on large-scale datasets. However, due to the domain gap between natural and endoscopy images, SAM encounters two limitations in achieving effective performance in polyp segmentation. Firstly, its Transformer-based structure prioritizes global and low-frequency information, potentially overlooking local details, and introducing bias into the learned features. Secondly, when applied to endoscopy images, its poor out-of-distribution (OOD) performance results in substandard predictions and biased confidence output. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel approach named Augmented SAM for Polyp Segmentation (ASPS), equipped with two modules: Cross-branch Feature Augmentation (CFA) and Uncertainty-guided Prediction Regularization (UPR). CFA integrates a trainable CNN encoder branch with a frozen ViT encoder, enabling the integration of domain-specific knowledge while enhancing local features and high-frequency details. Moreover, UPR ingeniously leverages SAM's IoU score to mitigate uncertainty during the training procedure, thereby improving OOD performance and domain generalization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of the proposed method in improving SAM's performance in polyp segmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/HuiqianLi/ASPS.

URLs: https://github.com/HuiqianLi/ASPS.

cross Analysis of Modern Computer Vision Models for Blood Cell Classification

Authors: Alexander Kim (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Ryan Kim (William Fremd High School)

Abstract: The accurate classification of white blood cells and related blood components is crucial for medical diagnoses. While traditional manual examinations and automated hematology analyzers have been widely used, they are often slow and prone to errors. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown promise for addressing these limitations. Earlier studies have demonstrated the viability of convolutional neural networks such as DenseNet, ResNet, and VGGNet for this task. Building on these foundations, our work employs more recent and efficient models to achieve rapid and accurate results. Specifically, this study used state-of-the-art architectures, including MaxVit, EfficientVit, EfficientNet, EfficientNetV2, and MobileNetV3. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of these models in WBC classification, potentially offering a more efficient and reliable alternative to current methods. Our approach not only addresses the speed and accuracy concerns of traditional techniques but also explores the applicability of innovative deep learning models in hematological analysis.

cross Heterogeneous Graph-based Framework with Disentangled Representations Learning for Multi-target Cross Domain Recommendation

Authors: Xiaopeng Liu, Juan Zhang, Chongqi Ren, Shenghui Xu, Zhaoming Pan, Zhimin Zhang

Abstract: CDR (Cross-Domain Recommendation), i.e., leveraging information from multiple domains, is a critical solution to data sparsity problem in recommendation system. The majority of previous research either focused on single-target CDR (STCDR) by utilizing data from the source domains to improve the model's performance on the target domain, or applied dual-target CDR (DTCDR) by integrating data from the source and target domains. In addition, multi-target CDR (MTCDR) is a generalization of DTCDR, which is able to capture the link among different domains. In this paper we present HGDR (Heterogeneous Graph-based Framework with Disentangled Representations Learning), an end-to-end heterogeneous network architecture where graph convolutional layers are applied to model relations among different domains, meanwhile utilizes the idea of disentangling representation for domain-shared and domain-specifc information. First, a shared heterogeneous graph is generated by gathering users and items from several domains without any further side information. Second, we use HGDR to compute disentangled representations for users and items in all domains.Experiments on real-world datasets and online A/B tests prove that our proposed model can transmit information among domains effectively and reach the SOTA performance.

cross Object Segmentation from Open-Vocabulary Manipulation Instructions Based on Optimal Transport Polygon Matching with Multimodal Foundation Models

Authors: Takayuki Nishimura, Katsuyuki Kuyo, Motonari Kambara, Komei Sugiura

Abstract: We consider the task of generating segmentation masks for the target object from an object manipulation instruction, which allows users to give open vocabulary instructions to domestic service robots. Conventional segmentation generation approaches often fail to account for objects outside the camera's field of view and cases in which the order of vertices differs but still represents the same polygon, which leads to erroneous mask generation. In this study, we propose a novel method that generates segmentation masks from open vocabulary instructions. We implement a novel loss function using optimal transport to prevent significant loss where the order of vertices differs but still represents the same polygon. To evaluate our approach, we constructed a new dataset based on the REVERIE dataset and Matterport3D dataset. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with existing mask generation methods. Remarkably, our best model achieved a +16.32% improvement on the dataset compared with a representative polygon-based method.

cross Swish-T:Enhancing Swish Activation with Tanh Bias for Improved Neural Network Performance

Authors: Youngmin Seo, Jinha Kim, Unsang Park

Abstract: We propose the Swish-T family, an enhancement of the existing non-monotonic activation function Swish. Swish-T is defined by adding a Tanh bias to the original Swish function. This modification creates a family of Swish-T variants, each designed to excel in different tasks, showcasing specific advantages depending on the application context. The Tanh bias allows for broader acceptance of negative values during initial training stages, offering a smoother non-monotonic curve than the original Swish. We ultimately propose the Swish-T$_{\textbf{C}}$ function, while Swish-T and Swish-T$_{\textbf{B}}$, byproducts of Swish-T$_{\textbf{C}}$, also demonstrate satisfactory performance. Furthermore, our ablation study shows that using Swish-T$_{\textbf{C}}$ as a non-parametric function can still achieve high performance. The superiority of the Swish-T family has been empirically demonstrated across various models and benchmark datasets, including MNIST, Fashion MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. The code is publicly available at "https://github.com/ictseoyoungmin/Swish-T-pytorch".

URLs: https://github.com/ictseoyoungmin/Swish-T-pytorch

cross Overcoming Common Flaws in the Evaluation of Selective Classification Systems

Authors: Jeremias Traub, Till J. Bungert, Carsten T. L\"uth, Michael Baumgartner, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Lena Maier-Hein, Paul F Jaeger

Abstract: Selective Classification, wherein models can reject low-confidence predictions, promises reliable translation of machine-learning based classification systems to real-world scenarios such as clinical diagnostics. While current evaluation of these systems typically assumes fixed working points based on pre-defined rejection thresholds, methodological progress requires benchmarking the general performance of systems akin to the $\mathrm{AUROC}$ in standard classification. In this work, we define 5 requirements for multi-threshold metrics in selective classification regarding task alignment, interpretability, and flexibility, and show how current approaches fail to meet them. We propose the Area under the Generalized Risk Coverage curve ($\mathrm{AUGRC}$), which meets all requirements and can be directly interpreted as the average risk of undetected failures. We empirically demonstrate the relevance of $\mathrm{AUGRC}$ on a comprehensive benchmark spanning 6 data sets and 13 confidence scoring functions. We find that the proposed metric substantially changes metric rankings on 5 out of the 6 data sets.

cross Human-like object concept representations emerge naturally in multimodal large language models

Authors: Changde Du, Kaicheng Fu, Bincheng Wen, Yi Sun, Jie Peng, Wei Wei, Ying Gao, Shengpei Wang, Chuncheng Zhang, Jinpeng Li, Shuang Qiu, Le Chang, Huiguang He

Abstract: The conceptualization and categorization of natural objects in the human mind have long intrigued cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, offering crucial insights into human perception and cognition. Recently, the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised the attractive question of whether these models can also develop human-like object representations through exposure to vast amounts of linguistic and multimodal data. In this study, we combined behavioral and neuroimaging analysis methods to uncover how the object concept representations in LLMs correlate with those of humans. By collecting large-scale datasets of 4.7 million triplet judgments from LLM and Multimodal LLM (MLLM), we were able to derive low-dimensional embeddings that capture the underlying similarity structure of 1,854 natural objects. The resulting 66-dimensional embeddings were found to be highly stable and predictive, and exhibited semantic clustering akin to human mental representations. Interestingly, the interpretability of the dimensions underlying these embeddings suggests that LLM and MLLM have developed human-like conceptual representations of natural objects. Further analysis demonstrated strong alignment between the identified model embeddings and neural activity patterns in many functionally defined brain ROIs (e.g., EBA, PPA, RSC and FFA). This provides compelling evidence that the object representations in LLMs, while not identical to those in the human, share fundamental commonalities that reflect key schemas of human conceptual knowledge. This study advances our understanding of machine intelligence and informs the development of more human-like artificial cognitive systems.

cross Learning 3D Gaussians for Extremely Sparse-View Cone-Beam CT Reconstruction

Authors: Yiqun Lin, Hualiang Wang, Jixiang Chen, Xiaomeng Li

Abstract: Cone-Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is an indispensable technique in medical imaging, yet the associated radiation exposure raises concerns in clinical practice. To mitigate these risks, sparse-view reconstruction has emerged as an essential research direction, aiming to reduce the radiation dose by utilizing fewer projections for CT reconstruction. Although implicit neural representations have been introduced for sparse-view CBCT reconstruction, existing methods primarily focus on local 2D features queried from sparse projections, which is insufficient to process the more complicated anatomical structures, such as the chest. To this end, we propose a novel reconstruction framework, namely DIF-Gaussian, which leverages 3D Gaussians to represent the feature distribution in the 3D space, offering additional 3D spatial information to facilitate the estimation of attenuation coefficients. Furthermore, we incorporate test-time optimization during inference to further improve the generalization capability of the model. We evaluate DIF-Gaussian on two public datasets, showing significantly superior reconstruction performance than previous state-of-the-art methods.

cross Cross-Slice Attention and Evidential Critical Loss for Uncertainty-Aware Prostate Cancer Detection

Authors: Alex Ling Yu Hung, Haoxin Zheng, Kai Zhao, Kaifeng Pang, Demetri Terzopoulos, Kyunghyun Sung

Abstract: Current deep learning-based models typically analyze medical images in either 2D or 3D albeit disregarding volumetric information or suffering sub-optimal performance due to the anisotropic resolution of MR data. Furthermore, providing an accurate uncertainty estimation is beneficial to clinicians, as it indicates how confident a model is about its prediction. We propose a novel 2.5D cross-slice attention model that utilizes both global and local information, along with an evidential critical loss, to perform evidential deep learning for the detection in MR images of prostate cancer, one of the most common cancers and a leading cause of cancer-related death in men. We perform extensive experiments with our model on two different datasets and achieve state-of-the-art performance in prostate cancer detection along with improved epistemic uncertainty estimation. The implementation of the model is available at https://github.com/aL3x-O-o-Hung/GLCSA_ECLoss.

URLs: https://github.com/aL3x-O-o-Hung/GLCSA_ECLoss.

cross Benchmarking Predictive Coding Networks -- Made Simple

Authors: Luca Pinchetti, Chang Qi, Oleh Lokshyn, Gaspard Olivers, Cornelius Emde, Mufeng Tang, Amine M'Charrak, Simon Frieder, Bayar Menzat, Rafal Bogacz, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Tommaso Salvatori

Abstract: In this work, we tackle the problems of efficiency and scalability for predictive coding networks in machine learning. To do so, we first propose a library called PCX, whose focus lies on performance and simplicity, and provides a user-friendly, deep-learning oriented interface. Second, we use PCX to implement a large set of benchmarks for the community to use for their experiments. As most works propose their own tasks and architectures, do not compare one against each other, and focus on small-scale tasks, a simple and fast open-source library adopted by the whole community would address all of these concerns. Third, we perform extensive benchmarks using multiple algorithms, setting new state-of-the-art results in multiple tasks and datasets, as well as highlighting limitations inherent to PC that should be addressed. Thanks to the efficiency of PCX, we are able to analyze larger architectures than commonly used, providing baselines to galvanize community efforts towards one of the main open problems in the field: scalability. The code for PCX is available at \textit{https://github.com/liukidar/pcax}.

URLs: https://github.com/liukidar/pcax

cross MARS: Multimodal Active Robotic Sensing for Articulated Characterization

Authors: Hongliang Zeng, Ping Zhang, Chengjiong Wu, Jiahua Wang, Tingyu Ye, Fang Li

Abstract: Precise perception of articulated objects is vital for empowering service robots. Recent studies mainly focus on point cloud, a single-modal approach, often neglecting vital texture and lighting details and assuming ideal conditions like optimal viewpoints, unrepresentative of real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce MARS, a novel framework for articulated object characterization. It features a multi-modal fusion module utilizing multi-scale RGB features to enhance point cloud features, coupled with reinforcement learning-based active sensing for autonomous optimization of observation viewpoints. In experiments conducted with various articulated object instances from the PartNet-Mobility dataset, our method outperformed current state-of-the-art methods in joint parameter estimation accuracy. Additionally, through active sensing, MARS further reduces errors, demonstrating enhanced efficiency in handling suboptimal viewpoints. Furthermore, our method effectively generalizes to real-world articulated objects, enhancing robot interactions. Code is available at https://github.com/robhlzeng/MARS.

URLs: https://github.com/robhlzeng/MARS.

cross We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning?

Authors: Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, Minhui Wu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Yifan Zhang, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Muxi Diao, Zhimin Bao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang

Abstract: Visual mathematical reasoning, as a fundamental visual reasoning ability, has received widespread attention from the Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) community. Existing benchmarks, such as MathVista and MathVerse, focus more on the result-oriented performance but neglect the underlying principles in knowledge acquisition and generalization. Inspired by human-like mathematical reasoning, we introduce WE-MATH, the first benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles beyond end-to-end performance. We meticulously collect and categorize 6.5K visual math problems, spanning 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts and five layers of knowledge granularity. We decompose composite problems into sub-problems according to the required knowledge concepts and introduce a novel four-dimensional metric, namely Insufficient Knowledge (IK), Inadequate Generalization (IG), Complete Mastery (CM), and Rote Memorization (RM), to hierarchically assess inherent issues in LMMs' reasoning process. With WE-MATH, we conduct a thorough evaluation of existing LMMs in visual mathematical reasoning and reveal a negative correlation between solving steps and problem-specific performance. We confirm the IK issue of LMMs can be effectively improved via knowledge augmentation strategies. More notably, the primary challenge of GPT-4o has significantly transitioned from IK to IG, establishing it as the first LMM advancing towards the knowledge generalization stage. In contrast, other LMMs exhibit a marked inclination towards Rote Memorization - they correctly solve composite problems involving multiple knowledge concepts yet fail to answer sub-problems. We anticipate that WE-MATH will open new pathways for advancements in visual mathematical reasoning for LMMs. The WE-MATH data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/We-Math/We-Math.

URLs: https://github.com/We-Math/We-Math.

cross Multi-State-Action Tokenisation in Decision Transformers for Multi-Discrete Action Spaces

Authors: Perusha Moodley, Pramod Kaushik, Dhillu Thambi, Mark Trovinger, Praveen Paruchuri, Xia Hong, Benjamin Rosman

Abstract: Decision Transformers, in their vanilla form, struggle to perform on image-based environments with multi-discrete action spaces. Although enhanced Decision Transformer architectures have been developed to improve performance, these methods have not specifically addressed this problem of multi-discrete action spaces which hampers existing Decision Transformer architectures from learning good representations. To mitigate this, we propose Multi-State Action Tokenisation (M-SAT), an approach for tokenising actions in multi-discrete action spaces that enhances the model's performance in such environments. Our approach involves two key changes: disentangling actions to the individual action level and tokenising the actions with auxiliary state information. These two key changes also improve individual action level interpretability and visibility within the attention layers. We demonstrate the performance gains of M-SAT on challenging ViZDoom environments with multi-discrete action spaces and image-based state spaces, including the Deadly Corridor and My Way Home scenarios, where M-SAT outperforms the baseline Decision Transformer without any additional data or heavy computational overheads. Additionally, we find that removing positional encoding does not adversely affect M-SAT's performance and, in some cases, even improves it.

cross Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion

Authors: Boyuan Chen, Diego Marti Monso, Yilun Du, Max Simchowitz, Russ Tedrake, Vincent Sitzmann

Abstract: This paper presents Diffusion Forcing, a new training paradigm where a diffusion model is trained to denoise a set of tokens with independent per-token noise levels. We apply Diffusion Forcing to sequence generative modeling by training a causal next-token prediction model to generate one or several future tokens without fully diffusing past ones. Our approach is shown to combine the strengths of next-token prediction models, such as variable-length generation, with the strengths of full-sequence diffusion models, such as the ability to guide sampling to desirable trajectories. Our method offers a range of additional capabilities, such as (1) rolling-out sequences of continuous tokens, such as video, with lengths past the training horizon, where baselines diverge and (2) new sampling and guiding schemes that uniquely profit from Diffusion Forcing's variable-horizon and causal architecture, and which lead to marked performance gains in decision-making and planning tasks. In addition to its empirical success, our method is proven to optimize a variational lower bound on the likelihoods of all subsequences of tokens drawn from the true joint distribution. Project website: https://boyuan.space/diffusion-forcing

URLs: https://boyuan.space/diffusion-forcing

cross Neurovascular Segmentation in sOCT with Deep Learning and Synthetic Training Data

Authors: Etienne Chollet, Ya\"el Balbastre, Chiara Mauri, Caroline Magnain, Bruce Fischl, Hui Wang

Abstract: Microvascular anatomy is known to be involved in various neurological disorders. However, understanding these disorders is hindered by the lack of imaging modalities capable of capturing the comprehensive three-dimensional vascular network structure at microscopic resolution. With a lateral resolution of $<=$20 {\textmu}m and ability to reconstruct large tissue blocks up to tens of cubic centimeters, serial-section optical coherence tomography (sOCT) is well suited for this task. This method uses intrinsic optical properties to visualize the vessels and therefore does not possess a specific contrast, which complicates the extraction of accurate vascular models. The performance of traditional vessel segmentation methods is heavily degraded in the presence of substantial noise and imaging artifacts and is sensitive to domain shifts, while convolutional neural networks (CNNs) require extensive labeled data and are also sensitive the precise intensity characteristics of the data that they are trained on. Building on the emerging field of synthesis-based training, this study demonstrates a synthesis engine for neurovascular segmentation in sOCT images. Characterized by minimal priors and high variance sampling, our highly generalizable method tested on five distinct sOCT acquisitions eliminates the need for manual annotations while attaining human-level precision. Our approach comprises two phases: label synthesis and label-to-image transformation. We demonstrate the efficacy of the former by comparing it to several more realistic sets of training labels, and the latter by an ablation study of synthetic noise and artifact models.

cross FastCLIP: A Suite of Optimization Techniques to Accelerate CLIP Training with Limited Resources

Authors: Xiyuan Wei, Fanjiang Ye, Ori Yonay, Xingyu Chen, Baixi Sun, Dingwen Tao, Tianbao Yang

Abstract: Existing studies of training state-of-the-art Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) models on large-scale data involve hundreds of or even thousands of GPUs due to the requirement of a large batch size. However, such a large amount of resources is not accessible to most people. While advanced compositional optimization techniques for optimizing global contrastive losses have been demonstrated effective for removing the requirement of large batch size, their performance on large-scale data remains underexplored and not optimized. To bridge the gap, this paper explores several aspects of CLIP training with limited resources (e.g., up to tens of GPUs). First, we introduce FastCLIP, a general CLIP training framework built on advanced compositional optimization techniques while designed and optimized for the distributed setting. Our framework is equipped with an efficient gradient reduction strategy to reduce communication overhead. Second, to further boost training efficiency, we investigate three components of the framework from an optimization perspective: the schedule of the inner learning rate, the update rules of the temperature parameter and the model parameters, respectively. Experiments on different strategies for each component shed light on how to conduct CLIP training more efficiently. Finally, we benchmark the performance of FastCLIP and the state-of-the-art training baseline (OpenCLIP) on different compute scales up to 32 GPUs on 8 nodes, and three data scales ranging from 2.7 million, 9.1 million to 315 million image-text pairs to demonstrate the significant improvement of FastCLIP in the resource-limited setting. We release the code of FastCLIP at https://github.com/Optimization-AI/fast_clip .

URLs: https://github.com/Optimization-AI/fast_clip

cross ColPali: Efficient Document Retrieval with Vision Language Models

Authors: Manuel Faysse, Hugues Sibille, Tony Wu, Gautier Viaud, C\'eline Hudelot, Pierre Colombo

Abstract: Documents are visually rich structures that convey information through text, as well as tables, figures, page layouts, or fonts. While modern document retrieval systems exhibit strong performance on query-to-text matching, they struggle to exploit visual cues efficiently, hindering their performance on practical document retrieval applications such as Retrieval Augmented Generation. To benchmark current systems on visually rich document retrieval, we introduce the Visual Document Retrieval Benchmark ViDoRe, composed of various page-level retrieving tasks spanning multiple domains, languages, and settings. The inherent shortcomings of modern systems motivate the introduction of a new retrieval model architecture, ColPali, which leverages the document understanding capabilities of recent Vision Language Models to produce high-quality contextualized embeddings solely from images of document pages. Combined with a late interaction matching mechanism, ColPali largely outperforms modern document retrieval pipelines while being drastically faster and end-to-end trainable.

cross The Balanced-Pairwise-Affinities Feature Transform

Authors: Daniel Shalam, Simon Korman

Abstract: The Balanced-Pairwise-Affinities (BPA) feature transform is designed to upgrade the features of a set of input items to facilitate downstream matching or grouping related tasks. The transformed set encodes a rich representation of high order relations between the input features. A particular min-cost-max-flow fractional matching problem, whose entropy regularized version can be approximated by an optimal transport (OT) optimization, leads to a transform which is efficient, differentiable, equivariant, parameterless and probabilistically interpretable. While the Sinkhorn OT solver has been adapted extensively in many contexts, we use it differently by minimizing the cost between a set of features to $itself$ and using the transport plan's $rows$ as the new representation. Empirically, the transform is highly effective and flexible in its use and consistently improves networks it is inserted into, in a variety of tasks and training schemes. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results in few-shot classification, unsupervised image clustering and person re-identification. Code is available at \url{github.com/DanielShalam/BPA}.

cross Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning

Authors: Siwei Li, Yifan Yang, Yifei Shen, Fangyun Wei, Zongqing Lu, Lili Qiu, Yuqing Yang

Abstract: Efficient fine-tuning plays a fundamental role in modern large models, with low-rank adaptation emerging as a particularly promising approach. However, the existing variants of LoRA are hampered by limited expressiveness, a tendency to overfit, and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings. This paper presents LoRA Slow Cascade Learning (LoRASC), an innovative technique designed to enhance LoRA's expressiveness and generalization capabilities while preserving its training efficiency. Our approach augments expressiveness through a cascaded learning strategy that enables a mixture-of-low-rank adaptation, thereby increasing the model's ability to capture complex patterns. Additionally, we introduce a slow-fast update mechanism and cascading noisy tuning to bolster generalization. The extensive experiments on various language and vision datasets, as well as robustness benchmarks, demonstrate that the proposed method not only significantly outperforms existing baselines, but also mitigates overfitting, enhances model stability, and improves OOD robustness. Code will be release in https://github.com/microsoft/LoRASC very soon.

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

cross Centerline Boundary Dice Loss for Vascular Segmentation

Authors: Pengcheng Shi, Jiesi Hu, Yanwu Yang, Zilve Gao, Wei Liu, Ting Ma

Abstract: Vascular segmentation in medical imaging plays a crucial role in analysing morphological and functional assessments. Traditional methods, like the centerline Dice (clDice) loss, ensure topology preservation but falter in capturing geometric details, especially under translation and deformation. The combination of clDice with traditional Dice loss can lead to diameter imbalance, favoring larger vessels. Addressing these challenges, we introduce the centerline boundary Dice (cbDice) loss function, which harmonizes topological integrity and geometric nuances, ensuring consistent segmentation across various vessel sizes. cbDice enriches the clDice approach by including boundary-aware aspects, thereby improving geometric detail recognition. It matches the performance of the boundary difference over union (B-DoU) loss through a mask-distance-based approach, enhancing traslation sensitivity. Crucially, cbDice incorporates radius information from vascular skeletons, enabling uniform adaptation to vascular diameter changes and maintaining balance in branch growth and fracture impacts. Furthermore, we conducted a theoretical analysis of clDice variants (cl-X-Dice). We validated cbDice's efficacy on three diverse vascular segmentation datasets, encompassing both 2D and 3D, and binary and multi-class segmentation. Particularly, the method integrated with cbDice demonstrated outstanding performance on the MICCAI 2023 TopCoW Challenge dataset. Our code is made publicly available at: https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/cbDice.

URLs: https://github.com/PengchengShi1220/cbDice.

cross Improving Diffusion Inverse Problem Solving with Decoupled Noise Annealing

Authors: Bingliang Zhang, Wenda Chu, Julius Berner, Chenlin Meng, Anima Anandkumar, Yang Song

Abstract: Diffusion models have recently achieved success in solving Bayesian inverse problems with learned data priors. Current methods build on top of the diffusion sampling process, where each denoising step makes small modifications to samples from the previous step. However, this process struggles to correct errors from earlier sampling steps, leading to worse performance in complicated nonlinear inverse problems, such as phase retrieval. To address this challenge, we propose a new method called Decoupled Annealing Posterior Sampling (DAPS) that relies on a novel noise annealing process. Specifically, we decouple consecutive steps in a diffusion sampling trajectory, allowing them to vary considerably from one another while ensuring their time-marginals anneal to the true posterior as we reduce noise levels. This approach enables the exploration of a larger solution space, improving the success rate for accurate reconstructions. We demonstrate that DAPS significantly improves sample quality and stability across multiple image restoration tasks, particularly in complicated nonlinear inverse problems. For example, we achieve a PSNR of 30.72dB on the FFHQ 256 dataset for phase retrieval, which is an improvement of 9.12dB compared to existing methods.

cross xLSTM-UNet can be an Effective 2D \& 3D Medical Image Segmentation Backbone with Vision-LSTM (ViL) better than its Mamba Counterpart

Authors: Tianrun Chen, Chaotao Ding, Lanyun Zhu, Tao Xu, Deyi Ji, Ying Zang, Zejian Li

Abstract: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViT) have been pivotal in biomedical image segmentation, yet their ability to manage long-range dependencies remains constrained by inherent locality and computational overhead. To overcome these challenges, in this technical report, we first propose xLSTM-UNet, a UNet structured deep learning neural network that leverages Vision-LSTM (xLSTM) as its backbone for medical image segmentation. xLSTM is a recently proposed as the successor of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and have demonstrated superior performance compared to Transformers and State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba in Neural Language Processing (NLP) and image classification (as demonstrated in Vision-LSTM, or ViL implementation). Here, xLSTM-UNet we designed extend the success in biomedical image segmentation domain. By integrating the local feature extraction strengths of convolutional layers with the long-range dependency capturing abilities of xLSTM, xLSTM-UNet offers a robust solution for comprehensive image analysis. We validate the efficacy of xLSTM-UNet through experiments. Our findings demonstrate that xLSTM-UNet consistently surpasses the performance of leading CNN-based, Transformer-based, and Mamba-based segmentation networks in multiple datasets in biomedical segmentation including organs in abdomen MRI, instruments in endoscopic images, and cells in microscopic images. With comprehensive experiments performed, this technical report highlights the potential of xLSTM-based architectures in advancing biomedical image analysis in both 2D and 3D. The code, models, and datasets are publicly available at \href{http://tianrun-chen.github.io/xLSTM-UNet/}{http://tianrun-chen.github.io/xLSTM-Unet/}

URLs: http://tianrun-chen.github.io/xLSTM-UNet/, http://tianrun-chen.github.io/xLSTM-Unet/

replace Outlier-Robust Geometric Perception: A Novel Thresholding-Based Estimator with Intra-Class Variance Maximization

Authors: Lei Sun

Abstract: Geometric perception problems are fundamental tasks in robotics and computer vision. In real-world applications, they often encounter the inevitable issue of outliers, preventing traditional algorithms from making correct estimates. In this paper, we present a novel general-purpose robust estimator TIVM (Thresholding with Intra-class Variance Maximization) that can collaborate with standard non-minimal solvers to efficiently reject outliers for geometric perception problems. First, we introduce the technique of intra-class variance maximization to design a dynamic 2-group thresholding method on the measurement residuals, aiming to distinctively separate inliers from outliers. Then, we develop an iterative framework that robustly optimizes the model by approaching the pure-inlier group using a multi-layered dynamic thresholding strategy as subroutine, in which a self-adaptive mechanism for layer-number tuning is further employed to minimize the user-defined parameters. We validate the proposed estimator on 3 classic geometric perception problems: rotation averaging, point cloud registration and category-level perception, and experiments show that it is robust against 70--90\% of outliers and can converge typically in only 3--15 iterations, much faster than state-of-the-art robust solvers such as RANSAC, GNC and ADAPT. Furthermore, another highlight is that: our estimator can retain approximately the same level of robustness even when the inlier-noise statistics of the problem are fully unknown.

replace Simplex Clustering via sBeta with Applications to Online Adjustment of Black-Box Predictions

Authors: Florent Chiaroni, Malik Boudiaf, Amar Mitiche, Ismail Ben Ayed

Abstract: We explore clustering the softmax predictions of deep neural networks and introduce a novel probabilistic clustering method, referred to as k-sBetas. In the general context of clustering discrete distributions, the existing methods focused on exploring distortion measures tailored to simplex data, such as the KL divergence, as alternatives to the standard Euclidean distance. We provide a general maximum a posteriori (MAP) perspective of clustering distributions, emphasizing that the statistical models underlying the existing distortion-based methods may not be descriptive enough. Instead, we optimize a mixed-variable objective measuring data conformity within each cluster to the introduced sBeta density function, whose parameters are constrained and estimated jointly with binary assignment variables. Our versatile formulation approximates various parametric densities for modeling simplex data and enables the control of the cluster-balance bias. This yields highly competitive performances for the unsupervised adjustment of black-box model predictions in various scenarios. Our code and comparisons with the existing simplex-clustering approaches and our introduced softmax-prediction benchmarks are publicly available: https://github.com/fchiaroni/Clustering_Softmax_Predictions.

URLs: https://github.com/fchiaroni/Clustering_Softmax_Predictions.

replace Local-Aware Global Attention Network for Person Re-Identification Based on Body and Hand Images

Authors: Nathanael L. Baisa

Abstract: Learning representative, robust and discriminative information from images is essential for effective person re-identification (Re-Id). In this paper, we propose a compound approach for end-to-end discriminative deep feature learning for person Re-Id based on both body and hand images. We carefully design the Local-Aware Global Attention Network (LAGA-Net), a multi-branch deep network architecture consisting of one branch for spatial attention, one branch for channel attention, one branch for global feature representations and another branch for local feature representations. The attention branches focus on the relevant features of the image while suppressing the irrelevant backgrounds. In order to overcome the weakness of the attention mechanisms, equivariant to pixel shuffling, we integrate relative positional encodings into the spatial attention module to capture the spatial positions of pixels. The global branch intends to preserve the global context or structural information. For the the local branch, which intends to capture the fine-grained information, we perform uniform partitioning to generate stripes on the conv-layer horizontally. We retrieve the parts by conducting a soft partition without explicitly partitioning the images or requiring external cues such as pose estimation. A set of ablation study shows that each component contributes to the increased performance of the LAGA-Net. Extensive evaluations on four popular body-based person Re-Id benchmarks and two publicly available hand datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

replace IntegratedPIFu: Integrated Pixel Aligned Implicit Function for Single-view Human Reconstruction

Authors: Kennard Yanting Chan, Guosheng Lin, Haiyu Zhao, Weisi Lin

Abstract: We propose IntegratedPIFu, a new pixel aligned implicit model that builds on the foundation set by PIFuHD. IntegratedPIFu shows how depth and human parsing information can be predicted and capitalised upon in a pixel-aligned implicit model. In addition, IntegratedPIFu introduces depth oriented sampling, a novel training scheme that improve any pixel aligned implicit model ability to reconstruct important human features without noisy artefacts. Lastly, IntegratedPIFu presents a new architecture that, despite using less model parameters than PIFuHD, is able to improves the structural correctness of reconstructed meshes. Our results show that IntegratedPIFu significantly outperforms existing state of the arts methods on single view human reconstruction. Our code has been made available online.

replace Training-Free Acceleration of ViTs with Delayed Spatial Merging

Authors: Jung Hwan Heo, Seyedarmin Azizi, Arash Fayyazi, Massoud Pedram

Abstract: Token merging has emerged as a new paradigm that can accelerate the inference of Vision Transformers (ViTs) without any retraining or fine-tuning. To push the frontier of training-free acceleration in ViTs, we improve token merging by adding the perspectives of 1) activation outliers and 2) hierarchical representations. Through a careful analysis of the attention behavior in ViTs, we characterize a delayed onset of the convergent attention phenomenon, which makes token merging undesirable in the bottom blocks of ViTs. Moreover, we augment token merging with a hierarchical processing scheme to capture multi-scale redundancy between visual tokens. Combining these two insights, we build a unified inference framework called DSM: Delayed Spatial Merging. We extensively evaluate DSM on various ViT model scales (Tiny to Huge) and tasks (ImageNet-1k and transfer learning), achieving up to 1.8$\times$ FLOP reduction and 1.6$\times$ throughput speedup at a negligible loss while being two orders of magnitude faster than existing methods.

replace Patch-Prompt Aligned Bayesian Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models

Authors: Xinyang Liu, Dongsheng Wang, Bowei Fang, Miaoge Li, Zhibin Duan, Yishi Xu, Bo Chen, Mingyuan Zhou

Abstract: For downstream applications of vision-language pre-trained models, there has been significant interest in constructing effective prompts. Existing works on prompt engineering, which either require laborious manual designs or optimize the prompt tuning as a point estimation problem, may fail to describe diverse characteristics of categories and limit their applications. We introduce a Bayesian probabilistic resolution to prompt tuning, where the label-specific stochastic prompts are generated hierarchically by first sampling a latent vector from an underlying distribution and then employing a lightweight generative model. Importantly, we semantically regularize the tuning process by minimizing the statistical distance between the visual patches and linguistic prompts, which pushes the stochastic label representations to faithfully capture diverse visual concepts, instead of overfitting the training categories. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach on four tasks: few-shot image recognition, base-to-new generalization, dataset transfer learning, and domain shifts. Extensive results over 15 datasets show promising transferability and generalization performance of our proposed model, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

replace 3D Human Mesh Estimation from Virtual Markers

Authors: Xiaoxuan Ma, Jiajun Su, Chunyu Wang, Wentao Zhu, Yizhou Wang

Abstract: Inspired by the success of volumetric 3D pose estimation, some recent human mesh estimators propose to estimate 3D skeletons as intermediate representations, from which, the dense 3D meshes are regressed by exploiting the mesh topology. However, body shape information is lost in extracting skeletons, leading to mediocre performance. The advanced motion capture systems solve the problem by placing dense physical markers on the body surface, which allows to extract realistic meshes from their non-rigid motions. However, they cannot be applied to wild images without markers. In this work, we present an intermediate representation, named virtual markers, which learns 64 landmark keypoints on the body surface based on the large-scale mocap data in a generative style, mimicking the effects of physical markers. The virtual markers can be accurately detected from wild images and can reconstruct the intact meshes with realistic shapes by simple interpolation. Our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three datasets. In particular, it surpasses the existing methods by a notable margin on the SURREAL dataset, which has diverse body shapes. Code is available at https://github.com/ShirleyMaxx/VirtualMarker

URLs: https://github.com/ShirleyMaxx/VirtualMarker

replace Progressive Visual Prompt Learning with Contrastive Feature Re-formation

Authors: Chen Xu, Yuhan Zhu, Haocheng Shen, Fengyuan Shi, Boheng Chen, Yixuan Liao, Xiaoxin Chen, Limin Wang

Abstract: Prompt learning has been designed as an alternative to fine-tuning for adapting Vision-language (V-L) models to the downstream tasks. Previous works mainly focus on text prompt while visual prompt works are limited for V-L models. The existing visual prompt methods endure either mediocre performance or unstable training process, indicating the difficulty of visual prompt learning. In this paper, we propose a new Progressive Visual Prompt (ProVP) structure to strengthen the interactions among prompts of different layers. More importantly, our ProVP could effectively propagate the image embeddings to deep layers and behave partially similar to an instance adaptive prompt method. To alleviate generalization deterioration, we further propose a new contrastive feature re-formation, which prevents the serious deviation of the prompted visual feature from the fixed CLIP visual feature distribution. Combining both, our method (ProVP-Ref) is evaluated on 11 image benchmark datasets and achieves 7/11 state-of-theart results on both few-shot and base-to-novel settings. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate the superior performance of visual prompts in V-L models to previous prompt-based methods in downstream tasks. Meanwhile, it implies that our ProVP-Ref shows the best capability to adapt and to generalize.

replace IDLS: Inverse Depth Line based Visual-Inertial SLAM

Authors: Wanting Li, Shuo Wang, Yongcai Wang, Yu Shao, Xuewei Bai, Deying Li

Abstract: For robust visual-inertial SLAM in perceptually-challenging indoor environments,recent studies exploit line features to extract descriptive information about scene structure to deal with the degeneracy of point features. But existing point-line-based SLAM methods mainly use Pl\"ucker matrix or orthogonal representation to represent a line, which needs to calculate at least four variables to determine a line. Given the numerous line features to determine in each frame, the overly flexible line representation increases the computation burden and comprises the accuracy of the results. In this paper, we propose inverse depth representation for a line, which models each extracted line feature using only two variables, i.e., the inverse depths of the two ending points. It exploits the fact that the projected line's pixel coordinates on the image plane are rather accurate, which partially restrict the line. Using this compact line presentation, Inverse Depth Line SLAM (IDLS) is proposed to track the line features in SLAM in an accurate and efficient way. A robust line triangulation method and a novel line re-projection error model are introduced. And a two-step optimization method is proposed to firstly determine the lines and then to estimate the camera poses in each frame. IDLS is extensively evaluated in multiple perceptually-challenging datasets. The results show it is more accurate, robust, and needs lower computational overhead than the current state-of-the-art of point-line-based SLAM methods.

replace Bytes Are All You Need: Transformers Operating Directly On File Bytes

Authors: Maxwell Horton, Sachin Mehta, Ali Farhadi, Mohammad Rastegari

Abstract: Modern deep learning approaches usually utilize modality-specific processing. For example, the most common deep learning approach to image classification involves decoding image file bytes into an RGB tensor which is passed into a neural network. Instead, we investigate modality-independent representation learning by performing classification directly on file bytes, without the need for decoding files at inference time. This enables models to operate on various modalities without any hand-designed, modality-specific processing. Our model, ByteFormer, improves ImageNet Top-1 classification accuracy by $5\%$ (from $72.2\%$ to $77.33\%$) relative to DeIT models of similar size. Compared to Perceiver IO, our model requires absolutely no modality-specific processing at inference time, and uses an order of magnitude fewer parameters at equivalent accuracy on ImageNet. We demonstrate that the same ByteFormer architecture can perform audio classification without modifications or modality-specific preprocessing. We achieve $95.42\%$ classification accuracy on the Speech Commands V2 dataset (comparable to the state-of-the-art accuracy of $98.7\%$). Additionally, we demonstrate that ByteFormer can operate jointly on images and audio, handling joint classification without explicit knowledge of the input modality. We release our code at https://github.com/apple/corenet/tree/main/projects/byteformer.

URLs: https://github.com/apple/corenet/tree/main/projects/byteformer.

replace Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP

Authors: Samyadeep Basu, Shell Xu Hu, Maziar Sanjabi, Daniela Massiceti, Soheil Feizi

Abstract: Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP's compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.

replace Semihierarchical Reconstruction and Weak-area Revisiting for Robotic Visual Seafloor Mapping

Authors: Mengkun She, Yifan Song, David Nakath, Kevin K\"oser

Abstract: Despite impressive results achieved by many on-land visual mapping algorithms in the recent decades, transferring these methods from land to the deep sea remains a challenge due to harsh environmental conditions. Images captured by autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), equipped with high-resolution cameras and artificial illumination systems, often suffer from heterogeneous illumination and quality degradation caused by attenuation and scattering, on top of refraction of light rays. These challenges often result in the failure of on-land SLAM approaches when applied underwater or cause SfM approaches to exhibit drifting or omit challenging images. Consequently, this leads to gaps, jumps, or weakly reconstructed areas. In this work, we present a navigation-aided hierarchical reconstruction approach to facilitate the automated robotic 3D reconstruction of hectares of seafloor. Our hierarchical approach combines the advantages of SLAM and global SfM that is much more efficient than incremental SfM, while ensuring the completeness and consistency of the global map. This is achieved through identifying and revisiting problematic or weakly reconstructed areas, avoiding to omit images and making better use of limited dive time. The proposed system has been extensively tested and evaluated during several research cruises, demonstrating its robustness and practicality in real-world conditions.

replace RoadFormer: Duplex Transformer for RGB-Normal Semantic Road Scene Parsing

Authors: Jiahang Li, Yikang Zhang, Peng Yun, Guangliang Zhou, Qijun Chen, Rui Fan

Abstract: The recent advancements in deep convolutional neural networks have shown significant promise in the domain of road scene parsing. Nevertheless, the existing works focus primarily on freespace detection, with little attention given to hazardous road defects that could compromise both driving safety and comfort. In this paper, we introduce RoadFormer, a novel Transformer-based data-fusion network developed for road scene parsing. RoadFormer utilizes a duplex encoder architecture to extract heterogeneous features from both RGB images and surface normal information. The encoded features are subsequently fed into a novel heterogeneous feature synergy block for effective feature fusion and recalibration. The pixel decoder then learns multi-scale long-range dependencies from the fused and recalibrated heterogeneous features, which are subsequently processed by a Transformer decoder to produce the final semantic prediction. Additionally, we release SYN-UDTIRI, the first large-scale road scene parsing dataset that contains over 10,407 RGB images, dense depth images, and the corresponding pixel-level annotations for both freespace and road defects of different shapes and sizes. Extensive experimental evaluations conducted on our SYN-UDTIRI dataset, as well as on three public datasets, including KITTI road, CityScapes, and ORFD, demonstrate that RoadFormer outperforms all other state-of-the-art networks for road scene parsing. Specifically, RoadFormer ranks first on the KITTI road benchmark. Our source code, created dataset, and demo video are publicly available at mias.group/RoadFormer.

replace Exploring the Potential of Multi-Modal AI for Driving Hazard Prediction

Authors: Korawat Charoenpitaks, Van-Quang Nguyen, Masanori Suganuma, Masahiro Takahashi, Ryoma Niihara, Takayuki Okatani

Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of predicting hazards that drivers may encounter while driving a car. We formulate it as a task of anticipating impending accidents using a single input image captured by car dashcams. Unlike existing approaches to driving hazard prediction that rely on computational simulations or anomaly detection from videos, this study focuses on high-level inference from static images. The problem needs predicting and reasoning about future events based on uncertain observations, which falls under visual abductive reasoning. To enable research in this understudied area, a new dataset named the DHPR (Driving Hazard Prediction and Reasoning) dataset is created. The dataset consists of 15K dashcam images of street scenes, and each image is associated with a tuple containing car speed, a hypothesized hazard description, and visual entities present in the scene. These are annotated by human annotators, who identify risky scenes and provide descriptions of potential accidents that could occur a few seconds later. We present several baseline methods and evaluate their performance on our dataset, identifying remaining issues and discussing future directions. This study contributes to the field by introducing a novel problem formulation and dataset, enabling researchers to explore the potential of multi-modal AI for driving hazard prediction.

replace Fast-DiM: Towards Fast Diffusion Morphs

Authors: Zander W. Blasingame, Chen Liu

Abstract: Diffusion Morphs (DiM) are a recent state-of-the-art method for creating high quality face morphs; however, they require a high number of network function evaluations (NFE) to create the morphs. We propose a new DiM pipeline, Fast-DiM, which can create morphs of a similar quality but with fewer NFE. We investigate the ODE solvers used to solve the Probability Flow ODE and the impact they have on the the creation of face morphs. Additionally, we employ an alternative method for encoding images into the latent space of the Diffusion model by solving the Probability Flow ODE as time runs forwards. Our experiments show that we can reduce the NFE by upwards of 85% in the encoding process while experiencing only 1.6\% reduction in Mated Morph Presentation Match Rate (MMPMR). Likewise, we showed we could cut NFE, in the sampling process, in half with only a maximal reduction of 0.23% in MMPMR.

replace Towards objective and systematic evaluation of bias in artificial intelligence for medical imaging

Authors: Emma A. M. Stanley, Raissa Souza, Anthony Winder, Vedant Gulve, Kimberly Amador, Matthias Wilms, Nils D. Forkert

Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) models trained using medical images for clinical tasks often exhibit bias in the form of disparities in performance between subgroups. Since not all sources of biases in real-world medical imaging data are easily identifiable, it is challenging to comprehensively assess how those biases are encoded in models, and how capable bias mitigation methods are at ameliorating performance disparities. In this article, we introduce a novel analysis framework for systematically and objectively investigating the impact of biases in medical images on AI models. We developed and tested this framework for conducting controlled in silico trials to assess bias in medical imaging AI using a tool for generating synthetic magnetic resonance images with known disease effects and sources of bias. The feasibility is showcased by using three counterfactual bias scenarios to measure the impact of simulated bias effects on a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier and the efficacy of three bias mitigation strategies. The analysis revealed that the simulated biases resulted in expected subgroup performance disparities when the CNN was trained on the synthetic datasets. Moreover, reweighing was identified as the most successful bias mitigation strategy for this setup, and we demonstrated how explainable AI methods can aid in investigating the manifestation of bias in the model using this framework. Developing fair AI models is a considerable challenge given that many and often unknown sources of biases can be present in medical imaging datasets. In this work, we present a novel methodology to objectively study the impact of biases and mitigation strategies on deep learning pipelines, which can support the development of clinical AI that is robust and responsible.

replace CILF-CIAE: CLIP-driven Image-Language Fusion for Correcting Inverse Age Estimation

Authors: Yuntao Shou, Wei Ai, Tao Meng, Keqin Li

Abstract: The age estimation task aims to predict the age of an individual by analyzing facial features in an image. The development of age estimation can improve the efficiency and accuracy of various applications (e.g., age verification and secure access control, etc.). In recent years, contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) has been widely used in various multimodal tasks and has made some progress in the field of age estimation. However, existing CLIP-based age estimation methods require high memory usage (quadratic complexity) when globally modeling images, and lack an error feedback mechanism to prompt the model about the quality of age prediction results. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel CLIP-driven Image-Language Fusion for Correcting Inverse Age Estimation (CILF-CIAE). Specifically, we first introduce the CLIP model to extract image features and text semantic information respectively, and map them into a highly semantically aligned high-dimensional feature space. Next, we designed a new Transformer architecture (i.e., FourierFormer) to achieve channel evolution and spatial interaction of images, and to fuse image and text semantic information. Compared with the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism, the proposed Fourierformer is of linear log complexity. To further narrow the semantic gap between image and text features, we utilize an efficient contrastive multimodal learning module that supervises the multimodal fusion process of FourierFormer through contrastive loss for image-text matching, thereby improving the interaction effect between different modalities. Finally, we introduce reversible age estimation, which uses end-to-end error feedback to reduce the error rate of age predictions. Through extensive experiments on multiple data sets, CILF-CIAE has achieved better age prediction results.

replace An Efficient Instance Segmentation Framework Based on Oriented Bounding Boxes

Authors: Zhen Zhou, Junfeng Fan, Yunkai Ma, Sihan Zhao, Fengshui Jing, Min Tan

Abstract: Instance segmentation for completely occluded objects and dense objects in robot vision measurement are two challenging tasks. To uniformly deal with them, this paper proposes a unified coarse-to-fine instance segmentation framework, CFNet, which uses box prompt-based segmentation foundation models (BSMs), e.g., Segment Anything Model. Specifically, CFNet first detects oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) to distinguish instances and provide coarse localization information. Then, it predicts OBB prompt-related masks for fine segmentation. CFNet performs instance segmentation with OBBs that only contain partial object boundaries on occluders to predict occluded object instances, which overcomes the difficulty of existing amodal instance segmentation methods in directly predicting occluded objects. In addition, since OBBs only serve as prompts, CFNet alleviates the over-dependence on bounding box detection performance of current instance segmentation methods using OBBs for dense objects. Moreover, to enable BSMs to handle OBB prompts, we propose a novel OBB prompt encoder. To make CFNet more lightweight, we perform knowledge distillation on it and introduce a Gaussian label smoothing method for teacher model outputs. Experiments demonstrate that CFNet outperforms current instance segmentation methods on both industrial and public datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/zhen6618/OBBInstanceSegmentation.

URLs: https://github.com/zhen6618/OBBInstanceSegmentation.

replace Instruction-Guided Scene Text Recognition

Authors: Yongkun Du, Zhineng Chen, Yuchen Su, Caiyan Jia, Yu-Gang Jiang

Abstract: Multi-modal models show appealing performance in visual recognition tasks recently, as free-form text-guided training evokes the ability to understand fine-grained visual content. However, current models are either inefficient or cannot be trivially upgraded to scene text recognition (STR) due to the composition difference between natural and text images. We propose a novel instruction-guided scene text recognition (IGTR) paradigm that formulates STR as an instruction learning problem and understands text images by predicting character attributes, e.g., character frequency, position, etc. IGTR first devises $\left \langle condition,question,answer\right \rangle$ instruction triplets, providing rich and diverse descriptions of character attributes. To effectively learn these attributes through question-answering, IGTR develops lightweight instruction encoder, cross-modal feature fusion module and multi-task answer head, which guides nuanced text image understanding. Furthermore, IGTR realizes different recognition pipelines simply by using different instructions, enabling a character-understanding-based text reasoning paradigm that considerably differs from current methods. Experiments on English and Chinese benchmarks show that IGTR outperforms existing models by significant margins, while maintaining a small model size and efficient inference speed. Moreover, by adjusting the sampling of instructions, IGTR offers an elegant way to tackle the recognition of both rarely appearing and morphologically similar characters, which were previous challenges. Code at \href{https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR}{this http URL}.

URLs: https://github.com/Topdu/OpenOCR

replace AdaTreeFormer: Few Shot Domain Adaptation for Tree Counting from a Single High-Resolution Image

Authors: Hamed Amini Amirkolaee, Miaojing Shi, Lianghua He, Mark Mulligan

Abstract: The process of estimating and counting tree density using only a single aerial or satellite image is a difficult task in the fields of photogrammetry and remote sensing. However, it plays a crucial role in the management of forests. The huge variety of trees in varied topography severely hinders tree counting models to perform well. The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework that is learnt from the source domain with sufficient labeled trees and is adapted to the target domain with only a limited number of labeled trees. Our method, termed as AdaTreeFormer, contains one shared encoder with a hierarchical feature extraction scheme to extract robust features from the source and target domains. It also consists of three subnets: two for extracting self-domain attention maps from source and target domains respectively and one for extracting cross-domain attention maps. For the latter, an attention-to-adapt mechanism is introduced to distill relevant information from different domains while generating tree density maps; a hierarchical cross-domain feature alignment scheme is proposed that progressively aligns the features from the source and target domains. We also adopt adversarial learning into the framework to further reduce the gap between source and target domains. Our AdaTreeFormer is evaluated on six designed domain adaptation tasks using three tree counting datasets, \ie Jiangsu, Yosemite, and London. Experimental results show that AdaTreeFormer significantly surpasses the state of the art, \eg in the cross domain from the Yosemite to Jiangsu dataset, it achieves a reduction of 15.9 points in terms of the absolute counting errors and an increase of 10.8\% in the accuracy of the detected trees' locations. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/HAAClassic/AdaTreeFormer.

URLs: https://github.com/HAAClassic/AdaTreeFormer.

replace ConsistI2V: Enhancing Visual Consistency for Image-to-Video Generation

Authors: Weiming Ren, Huan Yang, Ge Zhang, Cong Wei, Xinrun Du, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen

Abstract: Image-to-video (I2V) generation aims to use the initial frame (alongside a text prompt) to create a video sequence. A grand challenge in I2V generation is to maintain visual consistency throughout the video: existing methods often struggle to preserve the integrity of the subject, background, and style from the first frame, as well as ensure a fluid and logical progression within the video narrative. To mitigate these issues, we propose ConsistI2V, a diffusion-based method to enhance visual consistency for I2V generation. Specifically, we introduce (1) spatiotemporal attention over the first frame to maintain spatial and motion consistency, (2) noise initialization from the low-frequency band of the first frame to enhance layout consistency. These two approaches enable ConsistI2V to generate highly consistent videos. We also extend the proposed approaches to show their potential to improve consistency in auto-regressive long video generation and camera motion control. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we propose I2V-Bench, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark for I2V generation. Our automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of ConsistI2V over existing methods.

replace A Geometric Algorithm for Tubular Shape Reconstruction from Skeletal Representation

Authors: Guoqing Zhang, Yang Li

Abstract: We introduce a novel approach for the reconstruction of tubular shapes from skeletal representations. Our method processes all skeletal points as a whole, eliminating the need for splitting input structure into multiple segments. We represent the tubular shape as a truncated signed distance function (TSDF) in a voxel hashing manner, in which the signed distance between a voxel center and the object is computed through a simple geometric algorithm. Our method does not involve any surface sampling scheme or solving large matrix equations, and therefore is a faster and more elegant solution for tubular shape reconstruction compared to other approaches. Experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/Dragon.

URLs: https://github.com/wlsdzyzl/Dragon.

replace IDTrust: Deep Identity Document Quality Detection with Bandpass Filtering

Authors: Musab Al-Ghadi, Joris Voerman, Souhail Bakkali, Micka\"el Coustaty, Nicolas Sidere, Xavier St-Georges

Abstract: The increasing use of digital technologies and mobile-based registration procedures highlights the vital role of personal identity documents (IDs) in verifying users and safeguarding sensitive information. However, the rise in counterfeit ID production poses a significant challenge, necessitating the development of reliable and efficient automated verification methods. This paper introduces IDTrust, a deep-learning framework for assessing the quality of IDs. IDTrust is a system that enhances the quality of identification documents by using a deep learning-based approach. This method eliminates the need for relying on original document patterns for quality checks and pre-processing steps for alignment. As a result, it offers significant improvements in terms of dataset applicability. By utilizing a bandpass filtering-based method, the system aims to effectively detect and differentiate ID quality. Comprehensive experiments on the MIDV-2020 and L3i-ID datasets identify optimal parameters, significantly improving discrimination performance and effectively distinguishing between original and scanned ID documents.

replace Unleashing the Power of Meta-tuning for Few-shot Generalization Through Sparse Interpolated Experts

Authors: Shengzhuang Chen, Jihoon Tack, Yunqiao Yang, Yee Whye Teh, Jonathan Richard Schwarz, Ying Wei

Abstract: Recent successes suggest that parameter-efficient fine-tuning of foundation models as the state-of-the-art method for transfer learning in vision, replacing the rich literature of alternatives such as meta-learning. In trying to harness the best of both worlds, meta-tuning introduces a subsequent optimization stage of foundation models but has so far only shown limited success and crucially tends to underperform on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks. In this paper, we introduce Sparse MetA-Tuning (SMAT), a method inspired by sparse mixture-of-experts approaches and trained to isolate subsets of pre-trained parameters automatically for meta-tuning on each task. SMAT successfully overcomes OOD sensitivity and delivers on the promise of enhancing the transfer abilities of vision foundation models beyond parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We establish new state-of-the-art results on a challenging combination of Meta-Dataset augmented with additional OOD tasks in both zero-shot and gradient-based adaptation settings. In addition, we provide a thorough analysis of the superiority of learned over hand-designed sparsity patterns for sparse expert methods and the pivotal importance of the sparsity level in balancing between in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization. Our code is publicly available.

replace DynamicGlue: Epipolar and Time-Informed Data Association in Dynamic Environments using Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Theresa Huber, Simon Schaefer, Stefan Leutenegger

Abstract: The assumption of a static environment is common in many geometric computer vision tasks like SLAM but limits their applicability in highly dynamic scenes. Since these tasks rely on identifying point correspondences between input images within the static part of the environment, we propose a graph neural network-based sparse feature matching network designed to perform robust matching under challenging conditions while excluding keypoints on moving objects. We employ a similar scheme of attentional aggregation over graph edges to enhance keypoint representations as state-of-the-art feature-matching networks but augment the graph with epipolar and temporal information and vastly reduce the number of graph edges. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised training scheme to extract pseudo labels for image pairs in dynamic environments from exclusively unprocessed visual-inertial data. A series of experiments show the superior performance of our network as it excludes keypoints on moving objects compared to state-of-the-art feature matching networks while still achieving similar results regarding conventional matching metrics. When integrated into a SLAM system, our network significantly improves performance, especially in highly dynamic scenes.

replace Training morphological neural networks with gradient descent: some theoretical insights

Authors: Samy Blusseau (CMM)

Abstract: Morphological neural networks, or layers, can be a powerful tool to boost the progress in mathematical morphology, either on theoretical aspects such as the representation of complete lattice operators, or in the development of image processing pipelines. However, these architectures turn out to be difficult to train when they count more than a few morphological layers, at least within popular machine learning frameworks which use gradient descent based optimization algorithms. In this paper we investigate the potential and limitations of differentiation based approaches and back-propagation applied to morphological networks, in light of the non-smooth optimization concept of Bouligand derivative. We provide insights and first theoretical guidelines, in particular regarding initialization and learning rates.

replace VMRNN: Integrating Vision Mamba and LSTM for Efficient and Accurate Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Authors: Yujin Tang, Peijie Dong, Zhenheng Tang, Xiaowen Chu, Junwei Liang

Abstract: Combining CNNs or ViTs, with RNNs for spatiotemporal forecasting, has yielded unparalleled results in predicting temporal and spatial dynamics. However, modeling extensive global information remains a formidable challenge; CNNs are limited by their narrow receptive fields, and ViTs struggle with the intensive computational demands of their attention mechanisms. The emergence of recent Mamba-based architectures has been met with enthusiasm for their exceptional long-sequence modeling capabilities, surpassing established vision models in efficiency and accuracy, which motivates us to develop an innovative architecture tailored for spatiotemporal forecasting. In this paper, we propose the VMRNN cell, a new recurrent unit that integrates the strengths of Vision Mamba blocks with LSTM. We construct a network centered on VMRNN cells to tackle spatiotemporal prediction tasks effectively. Our extensive evaluations show that our proposed approach secures competitive results on a variety of tasks while maintaining a smaller model size. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyyujintang/VMRNN-PyTorch.

URLs: https://github.com/yyyujintang/VMRNN-PyTorch.

replace InstantSplat: Unbounded Sparse-view Pose-free Gaussian Splatting in 40 Seconds

Authors: Zhiwen Fan, Wenyan Cong, Kairun Wen, Kevin Wang, Jian Zhang, Xinghao Ding, Danfei Xu, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Georgios Pavlakos, Zhangyang Wang, Yue Wang

Abstract: While novel view synthesis (NVS) from a sparse set of images has advanced significantly in 3D computer vision, it relies on precise initial estimation of camera parameters using Structure-from-Motion (SfM). For instance, the recently developed Gaussian Splatting depends heavily on the accuracy of SfM-derived points and poses. However, SfM processes are time-consuming and often prove unreliable in sparse-view scenarios, where matched features are scarce, leading to accumulated errors and limited generalization capability across datasets. In this study, we introduce a novel and efficient framework to enhance robust NVS from sparse-view images. Our framework, InstantSplat, integrates multi-view stereo(MVS) predictions with point-based representations to construct 3D Gaussians of large-scale scenes from sparse-view data within seconds, addressing the aforementioned performance and efficiency issues by SfM. Specifically, InstantSplat generates densely populated surface points across all training views and determines the initial camera parameters using pixel-alignment. Nonetheless, the MVS points are not globally accurate, and the pixel-wise prediction from all views results in an excessive Gaussian number, yielding a overparameterized scene representation that compromises both training speed and accuracy. To address this issue, we employ a grid-based, confidence-aware Farthest Point Sampling to strategically position point primitives at representative locations in parallel. Next, we enhance pose accuracy and tune scene parameters through a gradient-based joint optimization framework from self-supervision. By employing this simplified framework, InstantSplat achieves a substantial reduction in training time, from hours to mere seconds, and demonstrates robust performance across various numbers of views in diverse datasets.

replace A Linear Time and Space Local Point Cloud Geometry Encoder via Vectorized Kernel Mixture (VecKM)

Authors: Dehao Yuan, Cornelia Ferm\"uller, Tahseen Rabbani, Furong Huang, Yiannis Aloimonos

Abstract: We propose VecKM, a local point cloud geometry encoder that is descriptive and efficient to compute. VecKM leverages a unique approach by vectorizing a kernel mixture to represent the local point cloud. Such representation's descriptiveness is supported by two theorems that validate its ability to reconstruct and preserve the similarity of the local shape. Unlike existing encoders downsampling the local point cloud, VecKM constructs the local geometry encoding using all neighboring points, producing a more descriptive encoding. Moreover, VecKM is efficient to compute and scalable to large point cloud inputs: VecKM reduces the memory cost from $(n^2+nKd)$ to $(nd+np)$; and reduces the major runtime cost from computing $nK$ MLPs to $n$ MLPs, where $n$ is the size of the point cloud, $K$ is the neighborhood size, $d$ is the encoding dimension, and $p$ is a marginal factor. The efficiency is due to VecKM's unique factorizable property that eliminates the need of explicitly grouping points into neighbors. In the normal estimation task, VecKM demonstrates not only 100x faster inference speed but also highest accuracy and strongest robustness. In classification and segmentation tasks, integrating VecKM as a preprocessing module achieves consistently better performance than the PointNet, PointNet++, and point transformer baselines, and runs consistently faster by up to 10 times.

replace WebXR, A-Frame and Networked-Aframe as a Basis for an Open Metaverse: A Conceptual Architecture

Authors: Giuseppe Macario

Abstract: This work proposes a WebXR-based cross-platform conceptual architecture, leveraging the A-Frame and Networked-Aframe frameworks, in order to facilitate the development of an open, accessible, and interoperable metaverse. By introducing the concept of spatial web app, this research contributes to the discourse on the metaverse, offering an architecture that democratizes access to virtual environments and extended reality through the web, and aligns with Tim Berners-Lee's original vision of the World Wide Web as an open platform in the digital realm.

replace Fortify the Guardian, Not the Treasure: Resilient Adversarial Detectors

Authors: Raz Lapid, Almog Dubin, Moshe Sipper

Abstract: This paper presents RADAR-Robust Adversarial Detection via Adversarial Retraining-an approach designed to enhance the robustness of adversarial detectors against adaptive attacks, while maintaining classifier performance. An adaptive attack is one where the attacker is aware of the defenses and adapts their strategy accordingly. Our proposed method leverages adversarial training to reinforce the ability to detect attacks, without compromising clean accuracy. During the training phase, we integrate into the dataset adversarial examples, which were optimized to fool both the classifier and the adversarial detector, enabling the adversarial detector to learn and adapt to potential attack scenarios. Experimental evaluations on the CIFAR-10 and SVHN datasets demonstrate that our proposed algorithm significantly improves a detector's ability to accurately identify adaptive adversarial attacks -- without sacrificing clean accuracy.

replace DreamPBR: Text-driven Generation of High-resolution SVBRDF with Multi-modal Guidance

Authors: Linxuan Xin, Zheng Zhang, Jinfu Wei, Wei Gao, Duan Gao

Abstract: Prior material creation methods had limitations in producing diverse results mainly because reconstruction-based methods relied on real-world measurements and generation-based methods were trained on relatively small material datasets. To address these challenges, we propose DreamPBR, a novel diffusion-based generative framework designed to create spatially-varying appearance properties guided by text and multi-modal controls, providing high controllability and diversity in material generation. Key to achieving diverse and high-quality PBR material generation lies in integrating the capabilities of recent large-scale vision-language models trained on billions of text-image pairs, along with material priors derived from hundreds of PBR material samples. We utilize a novel material Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) to establish the mapping between albedo maps and the corresponding latent space. The latent representation is then decoded into full SVBRDF parameter maps using a rendering-aware PBR decoder. Our method supports tileable generation through convolution with circular padding. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-modal guidance module, which includes pixel-aligned guidance, style image guidance, and 3D shape guidance, to enhance the control capabilities of the material LDM. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DreamPBR in material creation, showcasing its versatility and user-friendliness on a wide range of controllable generation and editing applications.

replace BMapEst: Estimation of Brain Tissue Probability Maps using a Differentiable MRI Simulator

Authors: Utkarsh Gupta, Emmanouil Nikolakakis, Moritz Zaiss, Razvan Marinescu

Abstract: Reconstructing digital brain phantoms in the form of voxel-based, multi-channeled tissue probability maps for individual subjects is essential for capturing brain anatomical variability, understanding neurological diseases, as well as for testing image processing methods. We demonstrate the first framework that estimates brain tissue probability maps (Grey Matter - GM, White Matter - WM, and Cerebrospinal fluid - CSF) with the help of a Physics-based differentiable MRI simulator that models the magnetization signal at each voxel in the volume. Given an observed $T_1$/$T_2$-weighted MRI scan, the corresponding clinical MRI sequence, and the MRI differentiable simulator, we estimate the simulator's input probability maps by back-propagating the L2 loss between the simulator's output and the $T_1$/$T_2$-weighted scan. This approach has the significant advantage of not relying on any training data and instead uses the strong inductive bias of the MRI simulator. We tested the model on 20 scans from the BrainWeb database and demonstrated a highly accurate reconstruction of GM, WM, and CSF. Our source code is available online: https://github.com/BioMedAI-UCSC/BMapEst.

URLs: https://github.com/BioMedAI-UCSC/BMapEst.

replace AnoFPDM: Anomaly Segmentation with Forward Process of Diffusion Models for Brain MRI

Authors: Yiming Che, Fazle Rafsani, Jay Shah, Md Mahfuzur Rahman Siddiquee, Teresa Wu

Abstract: Weakly-supervised diffusion models (DMs) in anomaly segmentation, leveraging image-level labels, have attracted significant attention for their superior performance compared to unsupervised methods. It eliminates the need for pixel-level labels in training, offering a more cost-effective alternative to supervised methods. However, existing methods are not fully weakly-supervised because they heavily rely on costly pixel-level labels for hyperparameter tuning in inference. To tackle this challenge, we introduce Anomaly Segmentation with Forward Process of Diffusion Models (AnoFPDM), a fully weakly-supervised framework that operates without the need of pixel-level labels. Leveraging the unguided forward process as a reference for the guided forward process, we select hyperparameters such as the noise scale, the threshold for segmentation and the guidance strength. We aggregate anomaly maps from guided forward process, enhancing the signal strength of anomalous regions. Remarkably, our proposed method outperforms recent state-of-the-art weakly-supervised approaches, even without utilizing pixel-level labels.

replace SemanticFormer: Holistic and Semantic Traffic Scene Representation for Trajectory Prediction using Knowledge Graphs

Authors: Zhigang Sun, Zixu Wang, Lavdim Halilaj, Juergen Luettin

Abstract: Trajectory prediction in autonomous driving relies on accurate representation of all relevant contexts of the driving scene, including traffic participants, road topology, traffic signs, as well as their semantic relations to each other. Despite increased attention to this issue, most approaches in trajectory prediction do not consider all of these factors sufficiently. We present SemanticFormer, an approach for predicting multimodal trajectories by reasoning over a semantic traffic scene graph using a hybrid approach. It utilizes high-level information in the form of meta-paths, i.e. trajectories on which an agent is allowed to drive from a knowledge graph which is then processed by a novel pipeline based on multiple attention mechanisms to predict accurate trajectories. SemanticFormer comprises a hierarchical heterogeneous graph encoder to capture spatio-temporal and relational information across agents as well as between agents and road elements. Further, it includes a predictor to fuse different encodings and decode trajectories with probabilities. Finally, a refinement module assesses permitted meta-paths of trajectories and speed profiles to obtain final predicted trajectories. Evaluation of the nuScenes benchmark demonstrates improved performance compared to several SOTA methods. In addition, we demonstrate that our knowledge graph can be easily added to two graph-based existing SOTA methods, namely VectorNet and Laformer, replacing their original homogeneous graphs. The evaluation results suggest that by adding our knowledge graph the performance of the original methods is enhanced by 5% and 4%, respectively.

replace Predictive Accuracy-Based Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Jun Shi, Shulan Ruan, Ziqi Zhu, Minfan Zhao, Hong An, Xudong Xue, Bing Yan

Abstract: Active learning is considered a viable solution to alleviate the contradiction between the high dependency of deep learning-based segmentation methods on annotated data and the expensive pixel-level annotation cost of medical images. However, most existing methods suffer from unreliable uncertainty assessment and the struggle to balance diversity and informativeness, leading to poor performance in segmentation tasks. In response, we propose an efficient Predictive Accuracy-based Active Learning (PAAL) method for medical image segmentation, first introducing predictive accuracy to define uncertainty. Specifically, PAAL mainly consists of an Accuracy Predictor (AP) and a Weighted Polling Strategy (WPS). The former is an attached learnable module that can accurately predict the segmentation accuracy of unlabeled samples relative to the target model with the predicted posterior probability. The latter provides an efficient hybrid querying scheme by combining predicted accuracy and feature representation, aiming to ensure the uncertainty and diversity of the acquired samples. Extensive experiment results on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of PAAL. PAAL achieves comparable accuracy to fully annotated data while reducing annotation costs by approximately 50% to 80%, showcasing significant potential in clinical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/shijun18/PAAL-MedSeg.

URLs: https://github.com/shijun18/PAAL-MedSeg.

replace Harnessing the Power of MLLMs for Transferable Text-to-Image Person ReID

Authors: Wentao Tan, Changxing Ding, Jiayu Jiang, Fei Wang, Yibing Zhan, Dapeng Tao

Abstract: Text-to-image person re-identification (ReID) retrieves pedestrian images according to textual descriptions. Manually annotating textual descriptions is time-consuming, restricting the scale of existing datasets and therefore the generalization ability of ReID models. As a result, we study the transferable text-to-image ReID problem, where we train a model on our proposed large-scale database and directly deploy it to various datasets for evaluation. We obtain substantial training data via Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Moreover, we identify and address two key challenges in utilizing the obtained textual descriptions. First, an MLLM tends to generate descriptions with similar structures, causing the model to overfit specific sentence patterns. Thus, we propose a novel method that uses MLLMs to caption images according to various templates. These templates are obtained using a multi-turn dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM). Therefore, we can build a large-scale dataset with diverse textual descriptions. Second, an MLLM may produce incorrect descriptions. Hence, we introduce a novel method that automatically identifies words in a description that do not correspond with the image. This method is based on the similarity between one text and all patch token embeddings in the image. Then, we mask these words with a larger probability in the subsequent training epoch, alleviating the impact of noisy textual descriptions. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods significantly boost the direct transfer text-to-image ReID performance. Benefiting from the pre-trained model weights, we also achieve state-of-the-art performance in the traditional evaluation settings.

replace Towards Robust Physical-world Backdoor Attacks on Lane Detection

Authors: Xinwei Zhang, Aishan Liu, Tianyuan Zhang, Siyuan Liang, Xianglong Liu

Abstract: Deep learning-based lane detection (LD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, such as adaptive cruise control. However, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attack methods on LD exhibit limited effectiveness in dynamic real-world scenarios, primarily because they fail to consider dynamic scene factors, including changes in driving perspectives (e.g., viewpoint transformations) and environmental conditions (e.g., weather or lighting changes). To tackle this issue, this paper introduces BadLANE, a dynamic scene adaptation backdoor attack for LD designed to withstand changes in real-world dynamic scene factors. To address the challenges posed by changing driving perspectives, we propose an amorphous trigger pattern composed of shapeless pixels. This trigger design allows the backdoor to be activated by various forms or shapes of mud spots or pollution on the road or lens, enabling adaptation to changes in vehicle observation viewpoints during driving. To mitigate the effects of environmental changes, we design a meta-learning framework to train meta-generators tailored to different environmental conditions. These generators produce meta-triggers that incorporate diverse environmental information, such as weather or lighting conditions, as the initialization of the trigger patterns for backdoor implantation, thus enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on various commonly used LD models in both digital and physical domains validate the effectiveness of our attacks, outperforming other baselines significantly (+25.15% on average in Attack Success Rate). Our codes will be available upon paper publication.

replace CDFormer:When Degradation Prediction Embraces Diffusion Model for Blind Image Super-Resolution

Authors: Qingguo Liu, Chenyi Zhuang, Pan Gao, Jie Qin

Abstract: Existing Blind image Super-Resolution (BSR) methods focus on estimating either kernel or degradation information, but have long overlooked the essential content details. In this paper, we propose a novel BSR approach, Content-aware Degradation-driven Transformer (CDFormer), to capture both degradation and content representations. However, low-resolution images cannot provide enough content details, and thus we introduce a diffusion-based module $CDFormer_{diff}$ to first learn Content Degradation Prior (CDP) in both low- and high-resolution images, and then approximate the real distribution given only low-resolution information. Moreover, we apply an adaptive SR network $CDFormer_{SR}$ that effectively utilizes CDP to refine features. Compared to previous diffusion-based SR methods, we treat the diffusion model as an estimator that can overcome the limitations of expensive sampling time and excessive diversity. Experiments show that CDFormer can outperform existing methods, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks under blind settings. Codes and models will be available at \href{https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/CDFormer}{https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/CDFormer}.

URLs: https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/CDFormer, https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/CDFormer

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

Authors: G Rajasekhar, 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.

replace VTG-LLM: Integrating Timestamp Knowledge into Video LLMs for Enhanced Video Temporal Grounding

Authors: Yongxin Guo, Jingyu Liu, Mingda Li, Xiaoying Tang, Xi Chen, Bo Zhao

Abstract: Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) focuses on accurately identifying event timestamps within a particular video based on a linguistic query, playing a vital role in downstream tasks such as video browsing and editing. While Video Large Language Models (video LLMs) have made significant progress in understanding video content, they often face challenges in accurately pinpointing timestamps within videos, which limits their performance on VTG tasks. Therefore, to improve video LLMs' ability to effectively locate timestamps, we argue that two critical aspects need to be enhanced. First, it is essential to have high-quality instructional tuning datasets that encompass mainstream VTG tasks. Second, directly incorporating timestamp knowledge into video LLMs is crucial, as it enables models to efficiently comprehend timestamp information. To address these needs, we first introduce VTG-IT-120K, a high-quality and comprehensive instruction tuning dataset that covers VTG tasks such as moment retrieval, dense video captioning, video summarization, and video highlight detection. Furthermore, we propose a specially designed video LLM model for VTG tasks, VTG-LLM, which (1) effectively integrates timestamp knowledge into visual tokens; (2) incorporates absolute-time tokens that specifically handle timestamp knowledge, thereby avoiding concept shifts; and (3) introduces a lightweight, high-performance slot-based token compression method to facilitate the sampling of more video frames. Comprehensive experiments showcase the superior performance of VTG-LLM in comparison to other video LLM methods across various VTG tasks. Our code and datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/gyxxyg/VTG-LLM}.

URLs: https://github.com/gyxxyg/VTG-LLM

replace Video Anomaly Detection in 10 Years: A Survey and Outlook

Authors: Moshira Abdalla, Sajid Javed, Muaz Al Radi, Anwaar Ulhaq, Naoufel Werghi

Abstract: Video anomaly detection (VAD) holds immense importance across diverse domains such as surveillance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. While numerous surveys focus on conventional VAD methods, they often lack depth in exploring specific approaches and emerging trends. This survey explores deep learning-based VAD, expanding beyond traditional supervised training paradigms to encompass emerging weakly supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised approaches. A prominent feature of this review is the investigation of core challenges within the VAD paradigms including large-scale datasets, features extraction, learning methods, loss functions, regularization, and anomaly score prediction. Moreover, this review also investigates the vision language models (VLMs) as potent feature extractors for VAD. VLMs integrate visual data with textual descriptions or spoken language from videos, enabling a nuanced understanding of scenes crucial for anomaly detection. By addressing these challenges and proposing future research directions, this review aims to foster the development of robust and efficient VAD systems leveraging the capabilities of VLMs for enhanced anomaly detection in complex real-world scenarios. This comprehensive analysis seeks to bridge existing knowledge gaps, provide researchers with valuable insights, and contribute to shaping the future of VAD research.

replace Is Synthetic Data all We Need? Benchmarking the Robustness of Models Trained with Synthetic Images

Authors: Krishnakant Singh, Thanush Navaratnam, Jannik Holmer, Simone Schaub-Meyer, Stefan Roth

Abstract: A long-standing challenge in developing machine learning approaches has been the lack of high-quality labeled data. Recently, models trained with purely synthetic data, here termed synthetic clones, generated using large-scale pre-trained diffusion models have shown promising results in overcoming this annotation bottleneck. As these synthetic clone models progress, they are likely to be deployed in challenging real-world settings, yet their suitability remains understudied. Our work addresses this gap by providing the first benchmark for three classes of synthetic clone models, namely supervised, self-supervised, and multi-modal ones, across a range of robustness measures. We show that existing synthetic self-supervised and multi-modal clones are comparable to or outperform state-of-the-art real-image baselines for a range of robustness metrics - shape bias, background bias, calibration, etc. However, we also find that synthetic clones are much more susceptible to adversarial and real-world noise than models trained with real data. To address this, we find that combining both real and synthetic data further increases the robustness, and that the choice of prompt used for generating synthetic images plays an important part in the robustness of synthetic clones.

replace Topo4D: Topology-Preserving Gaussian Splatting for High-Fidelity 4D Head Capture

Authors: Xuanchen Li, Yuhao Cheng, Xingyu Ren, Haozhe Jia, Di Xu, Wenhan Zhu, Yichao Yan

Abstract: 4D head capture aims to generate dynamic topological meshes and corresponding texture maps from videos, which is widely utilized in movies and games for its ability to simulate facial muscle movements and recover dynamic textures in pore-squeezing. The industry often adopts the method involving multi-view stereo and non-rigid alignment. However, this approach is prone to errors and heavily reliant on time-consuming manual processing by artists. To simplify this process, we propose Topo4D, a novel framework for automatic geometry and texture generation, which optimizes densely aligned 4D heads and 8K texture maps directly from calibrated multi-view time-series images. Specifically, we first represent the time-series faces as a set of dynamic 3D Gaussians with fixed topology in which the Gaussian centers are bound to the mesh vertices. Afterward, we perform alternative geometry and texture optimization frame-by-frame for high-quality geometry and texture learning while maintaining temporal topology stability. Finally, we can extract dynamic facial meshes in regular wiring arrangement and high-fidelity textures with pore-level details from the learned Gaussians. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves superior results than the current SOTA face reconstruction methods both in the quality of meshes and textures. Project page: https://xuanchenli.github.io/Topo4D/.

URLs: https://xuanchenli.github.io/Topo4D/.

replace ViDiT-Q: Efficient and Accurate Quantization of Diffusion Transformers for Image and Video Generation

Authors: Tianchen Zhao, Tongcheng Fang, Enshu Liu, Rui Wan, Widyadewi Soedarmadji, Shiyao Li, Zinan Lin, Guohao Dai, Shengen Yan, Huazhong Yang, Xuefei Ning, Yu Wang

Abstract: Diffusion transformers (DiTs) have exhibited remarkable performance in visual generation tasks, such as generating realistic images or videos based on textual instructions. However, larger model sizes and multi-frame processing for video generation lead to increased computational and memory costs, posing challenges for practical deployment on edge devices. Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is an effective method for reducing memory costs and computational complexity. When quantizing diffusion transformers, we find that applying existing diffusion quantization methods designed for U-Net faces challenges in preserving quality. After analyzing the major challenges for quantizing diffusion transformers, we design an improved quantization scheme: "ViDiT-Q": Video and Image Diffusion Transformer Quantization) to address these issues. Furthermore, we identify highly sensitive layers and timesteps hinder quantization for lower bit-widths. To tackle this, we improve ViDiT-Q with a novel metric-decoupled mixed-precision quantization method (ViDiT-Q-MP). We validate the effectiveness of ViDiT-Q across a variety of text-to-image and video models. While baseline quantization methods fail at W8A8 and produce unreadable content at W4A8, ViDiT-Q achieves lossless W8A8 quantization. ViDiTQ-MP achieves W4A8 with negligible visual quality degradation, resulting in a 2.5x memory optimization and a 1.5x latency speedup.

replace PosterLLaVa: Constructing a Unified Multi-modal Layout Generator with LLM

Authors: Tao Yang, Yingmin Luo, Zhongang Qi, Yang Wu, Ying Shan, Chang Wen Chen

Abstract: Layout generation is the keystone in achieving automated graphic design, requiring arranging the position and size of various multi-modal design elements in a visually pleasing and constraint-following manner. Previous approaches are either inefficient for large-scale applications or lack flexibility for varying design requirements. Our research introduces a unified framework for automated graphic layout generation, leveraging the multi-modal large language model (MLLM) to accommodate diverse design tasks. In contrast, our data-driven method employs structured text (JSON format) and visual instruction tuning to generate layouts under specific visual and textual constraints, including user-defined natural language specifications. We conducted extensive experiments and achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public multi-modal layout generation benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method. Moreover, recognizing existing datasets' limitations in capturing the complexity of real-world graphic designs, we propose two new datasets for much more challenging tasks (user-constrained generation and complicated poster), further validating our model's utility in real-life settings. Marking by its superior accessibility and adaptability, this approach further automates large-scale graphic design tasks. The code and datasets will be publicly available on https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

URLs: https://github.com/posterllava/PosterLLaVA.

replace DifAttack++: Query-Efficient Black-Box Adversarial Attack via Hierarchical Disentangled Feature Space in Cross-Domain

Authors: Jun Liu, Jiantao Zhou, Jiandian Zeng, Jinyu Tian, Zheng Li

Abstract: This work investigates efficient score-based black-box adversarial attacks with a high Attack Success Rate (\textbf{ASR}) and good generalizability. We design a novel attack method based on a hierarchical DIsentangled Feature space, called \textbf{DifAttack++}, which differs significantly from the existing ones operating over the entire feature space. Specifically, DifAttack++ firstly disentangles an image's latent feature into an Adversarial Feature (\textbf{AF}) and a Visual Feature (\textbf{VF}) via an autoencoder equipped with our specially designed Hierarchical Decouple-Fusion (\textbf{HDF}) module, where the AF dominates the adversarial capability of an image, while the VF largely determines its visual appearance. We train such two autoencoders for the clean and adversarial image domains (i.e., cross-domain) respectively to achieve image reconstructions and feature disentanglement, by using pairs of clean images and their Adversarial Examples (\textbf{AE}s) generated from available surrogate models via white-box attack methods. Eventually, in the black-box attack stage, DifAttack++ iteratively optimizes the AF according to the query feedback from the victim model until a successful AE is generated, while keeping the VF unaltered. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our DifAttack++ leads to superior ASR and query efficiency than state-of-the-art methods, meanwhile exhibiting much better visual quality of AEs. The code is available at https://github.com/csjunjun/DifAttack.git.

URLs: https://github.com/csjunjun/DifAttack.git.

replace Jailbreak Vision Language Models via Bi-Modal Adversarial Prompt

Authors: Zonghao Ying, Aishan Liu, Tianyuan Zhang, Zhengmin Yu, Siyuan Liang, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao

Abstract: In the realm of large vision language models (LVLMs), jailbreak attacks serve as a red-teaming approach to bypass guardrails and uncover safety implications. Existing jailbreaks predominantly focus on the visual modality, perturbing solely visual inputs in the prompt for attacks. However, they fall short when confronted with aligned models that fuse visual and textual features simultaneously for generation. To address this limitation, this paper introduces the Bi-Modal Adversarial Prompt Attack (BAP), which executes jailbreaks by optimizing textual and visual prompts cohesively. Initially, we adversarially embed universally harmful perturbations in an image, guided by a few-shot query-agnostic corpus (e.g., affirmative prefixes and negative inhibitions). This process ensures that image prompt LVLMs to respond positively to any harmful queries. Subsequently, leveraging the adversarial image, we optimize textual prompts with specific harmful intent. In particular, we utilize a large language model to analyze jailbreak failures and employ chain-of-thought reasoning to refine textual prompts through a feedback-iteration manner. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conducted extensive evaluations on various datasets and LVLMs, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms other methods by large margins (+29.03% in attack success rate on average). Additionally, we showcase the potential of our attacks on black-box commercial LVLMs, such as Gemini and ChatGLM.

replace MotionClone: Training-Free Motion Cloning for Controllable Video Generation

Authors: Pengyang Ling, Jiazi Bu, Pan Zhang, Xiaoyi Dong, Yuhang Zang, Tong Wu, Huaian Chen, Jiaqi Wang, Yi Jin

Abstract: Motion-based controllable text-to-video generation involves motions to control the video generation. Previous methods typically require the training of models to encode motion cues or the fine-tuning of video diffusion models. However, these approaches often result in suboptimal motion generation when applied outside the trained domain. In this work, we propose MotionClone, a training-free framework that enables motion cloning from a reference video to control text-to-video generation. We employ temporal attention in video inversion to represent the motions in the reference video and introduce primary temporal-attention guidance to mitigate the influence of noisy or very subtle motions within the attention weights. Furthermore, to assist the generation model in synthesizing reasonable spatial relationships and enhance its prompt-following capability, we propose a location-aware semantic guidance mechanism that leverages the coarse location of the foreground from the reference video and original classifier-free guidance features to guide the video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MotionClone exhibits proficiency in both global camera motion and local object motion, with notable superiority in terms of motion fidelity, textual alignment, and temporal consistency.

replace Which Backbone to Use: A Resource-efficient Domain Specific Comparison for Computer Vision

Authors: Pranav Jeevan, Amit Sethi

Abstract: In contemporary computer vision applications, particularly image classification, architectural backbones pre-trained on large datasets like ImageNet are commonly employed as feature extractors. Despite the widespread use of these pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs), there remains a gap in understanding the performance of various resource-efficient backbones across diverse domains and dataset sizes. Our study systematically evaluates multiple lightweight, pre-trained CNN backbones under consistent training settings across a variety of datasets, including natural images, medical images, galaxy images, and remote sensing images. This comprehensive analysis aims to aid machine learning practitioners in selecting the most suitable backbone for their specific problem, especially in scenarios involving small datasets where fine-tuning a pre-trained network is crucial. Even though attention-based architectures are gaining popularity, we observed that they tend to perform poorly under low data finetuning tasks compared to CNNs. We also observed that some CNN architectures such as ConvNeXt, RegNet and EfficientNet performs well compared to others on a diverse set of domains consistently. Our findings provide actionable insights into the performance trade-offs and effectiveness of different backbones, facilitating informed decision-making in model selection for a broad spectrum of computer vision domains. Our code is available here: https://github.com/pranavphoenix/Backbones

URLs: https://github.com/pranavphoenix/Backbones

replace Adaptively Bypassing Vision Transformer Blocks for Efficient Visual Tracking

Authors: Xiangyang Yang, Dan Zeng, Xucheng Wang, You Wu, Hengzhou Ye, Qijun Zhao, Shuiwang Li

Abstract: Empowered by transformer-based models, visual tracking has advanced significantly. However, the slow speed of current trackers limits their applicability on devices with constrained computational resources. To address this challenge, we introduce ABTrack, an adaptive computation framework that adaptively bypassing transformer blocks for efficient visual tracking. The rationale behind ABTrack is rooted in the observation that semantic features or relations do not uniformly impact the tracking task across all abstraction levels. Instead, this impact varies based on the characteristics of the target and the scene it occupies. Consequently, disregarding insignificant semantic features or relations at certain abstraction levels may not significantly affect the tracking accuracy. We propose a Bypass Decision Module (BDM) to determine if a transformer block should be bypassed, which adaptively simplifies the architecture of ViTs and thus speeds up the inference process. To counteract the time cost incurred by the BDMs and further enhance the efficiency of ViTs, we introduce a novel ViT pruning method to reduce the dimension of the latent representation of tokens in each transformer block. Extensive experiments on multiple tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method and show that it achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code is released at: https://github.com/xyyang317/ABTrack.

URLs: https://github.com/xyyang317/ABTrack.

replace Flash-VStream: Memory-Based Real-Time Understanding for Long Video Streams

Authors: Haoji Zhang, Yiqin Wang, Yansong Tang, Yong Liu, Jiashi Feng, Jifeng Dai, Xiaojie Jin

Abstract: Benefiting from the advancements in large language models and cross-modal alignment, existing multi-modal video understanding methods have achieved prominent performance in offline scenario. However, online video streams, as one of the most common media forms in the real world, have seldom received attention. Compared to offline videos, the 'dynamic' nature of online video streams poses challenges for the direct application of existing models and introduces new problems, such as the storage of extremely long-term information, interaction between continuous visual content and 'asynchronous' user questions. Therefore, in this paper we present Flash-VStream, a video-language model that simulates the memory mechanism of human. Our model is able to process extremely long video streams in real-time and respond to user queries simultaneously. Compared to existing models, Flash-VStream achieves significant reductions in inference latency and VRAM consumption, which is intimately related to performing understanding of online streaming video. In addition, given that existing video understanding benchmarks predominantly concentrate on offline scenario, we propose VStream-QA, a novel question answering benchmark specifically designed for online video streaming understanding. Comparisons with popular existing methods on the proposed benchmark demonstrate the superiority of our method for such challenging setting. To verify the generalizability of our approach, we further evaluate it on existing video understanding benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art performance in offline scenarios as well. All code, models, and datasets are available at the https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/

URLs: https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page/

replace Scene Graph Generation in Large-Size VHR Satellite Imagery: A Large-Scale Dataset and A Context-Aware Approach

Authors: Yansheng Li, Linlin Wang, Tingzhu Wang, Xue Yang, Junwei Luo, Qi Wang, Youming Deng, Wenbin Wang, Xian Sun, Haifeng Li, Bo Dang, Yongjun Zhang, Yi Yu, Junchi Yan

Abstract: Scene graph generation (SGG) in satellite imagery (SAI) benefits promoting intelligent understanding of geospatial scenarios from perception to cognition. In SAI, objects exhibit great variations in scales and aspect ratios, and there exist rich relationships between objects (even between spatially disjoint objects), which makes it necessary to holistically conduct SGG in large-size very-high-resolution (VHR) SAI. However, the lack of SGG datasets with large-size VHR SAI has constrained the advancement of SGG in SAI. Due to the complexity of large-size VHR SAI, mining triplets in large-size VHR SAI heavily relies on long-range contextual reasoning. Consequently, SGG models designed for small-size natural imagery are not directly applicable to large-size VHR SAI. To address the scarcity of datasets, this paper constructs a large-scale dataset for SGG in large-size VHR SAI with image sizes ranging from 512 x 768 to 27,860 x 31,096 pixels, named RSG, encompassing over 210,000 objects and more than 400,000 triplets. To realize SGG in large-size VHR SAI, we propose a context-aware cascade cognition (CAC) framework to understand SAI at three levels: object detection (OBD), pair pruning and relationship prediction. As a fundamental prerequisite for SGG in large-size SAI, a holistic multi-class object detection network (HOD-Net) that can flexibly integrate multi-scale contexts is proposed. With the consideration that there exist a huge amount of object pairs in large-size SAI but only a minority of object pairs contain meaningful relationships, we design a pair proposal generation (PPG) network via adversarial reconstruction to select high-value pairs. Furthermore, a relationship prediction network with context-aware messaging (RPCM) is proposed to predict the relationship types of these pairs.

replace Learning to Adapt Foundation Model DINOv2 for Capsule Endoscopy Diagnosis

Authors: Bowen Zhang, Ying Chen, Long Bai, Yan Zhao, Yuxiang Sun, Yixuan Yuan, Jianhua Zhang, Hongliang Ren

Abstract: Foundation models have become prominent in computer vision, achieving notable success in various tasks. However, their effectiveness largely depends on pre-training with extensive datasets. Applying foundation models directly to small datasets of capsule endoscopy images from scratch is challenging. Pre-training on broad, general vision datasets is crucial for successfully fine-tuning our model for specific tasks. In this work, we introduce a simplified approach called Adapt foundation models with a low-rank adaptation (LoRA) technique for easier customization. Our method, inspired by the DINOv2 foundation model, applies low-rank adaptation learning to tailor foundation models for capsule endoscopy diagnosis effectively. Unlike traditional fine-tuning methods, our strategy includes LoRA layers designed to absorb specific surgical domain knowledge. During the training process, we keep the main model (the backbone encoder) fixed and focus on optimizing the LoRA layers and the disease classification component. We tested our method on two publicly available datasets for capsule endoscopy disease classification. The results were impressive, with our model achieving 97.75% accuracy on the Kvasir-Capsule dataset and 98.81% on the Kvasirv2 dataset. Our solution demonstrates that foundation models can be adeptly adapted for capsule endoscopy diagnosis, highlighting that mere reliance on straightforward fine-tuning or pre-trained models from general computer vision tasks is inadequate for such specific applications.

replace Technique Report of CVPR 2024 PBDL Challenges

Authors: Ying Fu, Yu Li, Shaodi You, Boxin Shi, Jose Alvarez, Coert van Gemeren, Linwei Chen, Yunhao Zou, Zichun Wang, Yichen Li, Yuze Han, Yingkai Zhang, Jianan Wang, Qinglin Liu, Wei Yu, Xiaoqian Lv, Jianing Li, Shengping Zhang, Xiangyang Ji, Yuanpei Chen, Yuhan Zhang, Weihang Peng, Liwen Zhang, Zhe Xu, Dingyong Gou, Cong Li, Senyan Xu, Yunkang Zhang, Siyuan Jiang, Xiaoqiang Lu, Licheng Jiao, Fang Liu, Xu Liu, Lingling Li, Wenping Ma, Shuyuan Yang, Haiyang Xie, Jian Zhao, Shihuang Huang, Peng Cheng, Xi Shen, Zheng Wang, Shuai An, Caizhi Zhu, Xuelong Li, Tao Zhang, Liang Li, Yu Liu, Chenggang Yan, Gengchen Zhang, Linyan Jiang, Bingyi Song, Zhuoyu An, Haibo Lei, Qing Luo, Jie Song, Yuan Liu, Qihang Li, Haoyuan Zhang, Lingfeng Wang, Wei Chen, Aling Luo, Cheng Li, Jun Cao, Shu Chen, Zifei Dou, Xinyu Liu, Jing Zhang, Kexin Zhang, Yuting Yang, Xuejian Gou, Qinliang Wang, Yang Liu, Shizhan Zhao, Yanzhao Zhang, Libo Yan, Yuwei Guo, Guoxin Li, Qiong Gao, Chenyue Che, Long Sun, Xiang Chen, Hao Li, Jinshan Pan, Chuanlong Xie, Hongming Chen, Mingrui Li, Tianchen Deng, Jingwei Huang, Yufeng Li, Fei Wan, Bingxin Xu, Jian Cheng, Hongzhe Liu, Cheng Xu, Yuxiang Zou, Weiguo Pan, Songyin Dai, Sen Jia, Junpei Zhang, Puhua Chen, Qihang Li

Abstract: The intersection of physics-based vision and deep learning presents an exciting frontier for advancing computer vision technologies. By leveraging the principles of physics to inform and enhance deep learning models, we can develop more robust and accurate vision systems. Physics-based vision aims to invert the processes to recover scene properties such as shape, reflectance, light distribution, and medium properties from images. In recent years, deep learning has shown promising improvements for various vision tasks, and when combined with physics-based vision, these approaches can enhance the robustness and accuracy of vision systems. This technical report summarizes the outcomes of the Physics-Based Vision Meets Deep Learning (PBDL) 2024 challenge, held in CVPR 2024 workshop. The challenge consisted of eight tracks, focusing on Low-Light Enhancement and Detection as well as High Dynamic Range (HDR) Imaging. This report details the objectives, methodologies, and results of each track, highlighting the top-performing solutions and their innovative approaches.

replace Holmes-VAD: Towards Unbiased and Explainable Video Anomaly Detection via Multi-modal LLM

Authors: Huaxin Zhang, Xiaohao Xu, Xiang Wang, Jialong Zuo, Chuchu Han, Xiaonan Huang, Changxin Gao, Yuehuan Wang, Nong Sang

Abstract: Towards open-ended Video Anomaly Detection (VAD), existing methods often exhibit biased detection when faced with challenging or unseen events and lack interpretability. To address these drawbacks, we propose Holmes-VAD, a novel framework that leverages precise temporal supervision and rich multimodal instructions to enable accurate anomaly localization and comprehensive explanations. Firstly, towards unbiased and explainable VAD system, we construct the first large-scale multimodal VAD instruction-tuning benchmark, i.e., VAD-Instruct50k. This dataset is created using a carefully designed semi-automatic labeling paradigm. Efficient single-frame annotations are applied to the collected untrimmed videos, which are then synthesized into high-quality analyses of both abnormal and normal video clips using a robust off-the-shelf video captioner and a large language model (LLM). Building upon the VAD-Instruct50k dataset, we develop a customized solution for interpretable video anomaly detection. We train a lightweight temporal sampler to select frames with high anomaly response and fine-tune a multimodal large language model (LLM) to generate explanatory content. Extensive experimental results validate the generality and interpretability of the proposed Holmes-VAD, establishing it as a novel interpretable technique for real-world video anomaly analysis. To support the community, our benchmark and model will be publicly available at https://holmesvad.github.io.

URLs: https://holmesvad.github.io.

replace Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment

Authors: Hejie Cui, Lingjun Mao, Xin Liang, Jieyu Zhang, Hui Ren, Quanzheng Li, Xiang Li, Carl Yang

Abstract: Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models have showcased impressive capabilities in understanding and reasoning with visual and textual information. Adapting these foundation models trained for general usage to specialized domains like biomedicine requires large-scale domain-specific instruction datasets. While existing works have explored curating such datasets automatically, the resultant datasets are not explicitly aligned with domain expertise. In this work, we propose a data-centric framework, Biomedical Visual Instruction Tuning with Clinician Preference Alignment (BioMed-VITAL), that incorporates clinician preferences into both stages of generating and selecting instruction data for tuning biomedical multimodal foundation models. First, during the generation stage, we prompt the GPT-4V generator with a diverse set of clinician-selected demonstrations for preference-aligned data candidate generation. Then, during the selection phase, we train a separate selection model, which explicitly distills clinician and policy-guided model preferences into a rating function to select high-quality data for medical instruction tuning. Results show that the model tuned with the instruction-following data from our method demonstrates a significant improvement in open visual chat (18.5% relatively) and medical VQA (win rate up to 81.73%). Our instruction-following data and models are available at BioMed-VITAL.github.io.

replace Evaluation of Deep Learning Semantic Segmentation for Land Cover Mapping on Multispectral, Hyperspectral and High Spatial Aerial Imagery

Authors: Ilham Adi Panuntun, Ying-Nong Chen, Ilham Jamaluddin, Thi Linh Chi Tran

Abstract: In the rise of climate change, land cover mapping has become such an urgent need in environmental monitoring. The accuracy of land cover classification has gotten increasingly based on the improvement of remote sensing data. Land cover classification using satellite imageries has been explored and become more prevalent in recent years, but the methodologies remain some drawbacks of subjective and time-consuming. Some deep learning techniques have been utilized to overcome these limitations. However, most studies implemented just one image type to evaluate algorithms for land cover mapping. Therefore, our study conducted deep learning semantic segmentation in multispectral, hyperspectral, and high spatial aerial image datasets for landcover mapping. This research implemented a semantic segmentation method such as Unet, Linknet, FPN, and PSPnet for categorizing vegetation, water, and others (i.e., soil and impervious surface). The LinkNet model obtained high accuracy in IoU (Intersection Over Union) at 0.92 in all datasets, which is comparable with other mentioned techniques. In evaluation with different image types, the multispectral images showed higher performance with the IoU, and F1-score are 0.993 and 0.997, respectively. Our outcome highlighted the efficiency and broad applicability of LinkNet and multispectral image on land cover classification. This research contributes to establishing an approach on landcover segmentation via open source for long-term future application.

replace E-ANT: A Large-Scale Dataset for Efficient Automatic GUI NavigaTion

Authors: Ke Wang, Tianyu Xia, Zhangxuan Gu, Yi Zhao, Shuheng Shen, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang, Ke Xu

Abstract: Online GUI navigation on mobile devices has driven a lot of attention recent years since it contributes to many real-world applications. With the rapid development of large language models (LLM), multimodal large language models (MLLM) have tremendous potential on this task. However, existing MLLMs need high quality data to improve its abilities of making the correct navigation decisions according to the human user inputs. In this paper, we developed a novel and highly valuable dataset, named \textbf{E-ANT}, as the first Chinese GUI navigation dataset that contains real human behaviour and high quality screenshots with annotations, containing nearly 40,000 real human traces over 5000+ different tinyAPPs. Furthermore, we evaluate various powerful MLLMs on E-ANT and show their experiments results with sufficient ablations. We believe that our proposed dataset will be beneficial for both the evaluation and development of GUI navigation and LLM/MLLM decision-making capabilities.

replace PUDD: Towards Robust Multi-modal Prototype-based Deepfake Detection

Authors: Alvaro Lopez Pellcier, Yi Li, Plamen Angelov

Abstract: Deepfake techniques generate highly realistic data, making it challenging for humans to discern between actual and artificially generated images. Recent advancements in deep learning-based deepfake detection methods, particularly with diffusion models, have shown remarkable progress. However, there is a growing demand for real-world applications to detect unseen individuals, deepfake techniques, and scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose a Prototype-based Unified Framework for Deepfake Detection (PUDD). PUDD offers a detection system based on similarity, comparing input data against known prototypes for video classification and identifying potential deepfakes or previously unseen classes by analyzing drops in similarity. Our extensive experiments reveal three key findings: (1) PUDD achieves an accuracy of 95.1% on Celeb-DF, outperforming state-of-the-art deepfake detection methods; (2) PUDD leverages image classification as the upstream task during training, demonstrating promising performance in both image classification and deepfake detection tasks during inference; (3) PUDD requires only 2.7 seconds for retraining on new data and emits 10$^{5}$ times less carbon compared to the state-of-the-art model, making it significantly more environmentally friendly.

replace A Simple Framework for Open-Vocabulary Zero-Shot Segmentation

Authors: Thomas Stegm\"uller, Tim Lebailly, Nikola Dukic, Behzad Bozorgtabar, Tinne Tuytelaars, Jean-Philippe Thiran

Abstract: Zero-shot classification capabilities naturally arise in models trained within a vision-language contrastive framework. Despite their classification prowess, these models struggle in dense tasks like zero-shot open-vocabulary segmentation. This deficiency is often attributed to the absence of localization cues in captions and the intertwined nature of the learning process, which encompasses both image representation learning and cross-modality alignment. To tackle these issues, we propose SimZSS, a Simple framework for open-vocabulary Zero-Shot Segmentation. The method is founded on two key principles: i) leveraging frozen vision-only models that exhibit spatial awareness while exclusively aligning the text encoder and ii) exploiting the discrete nature of text and linguistic knowledge to pinpoint local concepts within captions. By capitalizing on the quality of the visual representations, our method requires only image-caption pairs datasets and adapts to both small curated and large-scale noisy datasets. When trained on COCO Captions across 8 GPUs, SimZSS achieves state-of-the-art results on 7 out of 8 benchmark datasets in less than 15 minutes.

replace EmoLLM: Multimodal Emotional Understanding Meets Large Language Models

Authors: Qu Yang, Mang Ye, Bo Du

Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on objective multimodal perception tasks, but their ability to interpret subjective, emotionally nuanced multimodal content remains largely unexplored. Thus, it impedes their ability to effectively understand and react to the intricate emotions expressed by humans through multimodal media. To bridge this gap, we introduce EmoBench, the first comprehensive benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the emotional capabilities of MLLMs across five popular emotional tasks, using a diverse dataset of 287k images and videos paired with corresponding textual instructions. Meanwhile, we propose EmoLLM, a novel model for multimodal emotional understanding, incorporating with two core techniques. 1) Multi-perspective Visual Projection, it captures diverse emotional cues from visual data from multiple perspectives. 2) EmoPrompt, it guides MLLMs to reason about emotions in the correct direction. Experimental results demonstrate that EmoLLM significantly elevates multimodal emotional understanding performance, with an average improvement of 12.1% across multiple foundation models on EmoBench. Our work contributes to the advancement of MLLMs by facilitating a deeper and more nuanced comprehension of intricate human emotions, paving the way for the development of artificial emotional intelligence capabilities with wide-ranging applications in areas such as human-computer interaction, mental health support, and empathetic AI systems. Code, data, and model will be released.

replace Geometry-Aware Score Distillation via 3D Consistent Noising and Gradient Consistency Modeling

Authors: Min-Seop Kwak, Donghoon Ahn, Ines Hyeonsu Kim, Jin-Hwa Kim, Seungryong Kim

Abstract: Score distillation sampling (SDS), the methodology in which the score from pretrained 2D diffusion models is distilled into 3D representation, has recently brought significant advancements in text-to-3D generation task. However, this approach is still confronted with critical geometric inconsistency problems such as the Janus problem. Starting from a hypothesis that such inconsistency problems may be induced by multiview inconsistencies between 2D scores predicted from various viewpoints, we introduce GSD, a simple and general plug-and-play framework for incorporating 3D consistency and therefore geometry awareness into the SDS process. Our methodology is composed of three components: 3D consistent noising, designed to produce 3D consistent noise maps that perfectly follow the standard Gaussian distribution, geometry-based gradient warping for identifying correspondences between predicted gradients of different viewpoints, and novel gradient consistency loss to optimize the scene geometry toward producing more consistent gradients. We demonstrate that our method significantly improves performance, successfully addressing the geometric inconsistency problems in text-to-3D generation task with minimal computation cost and being compatible with existing score distillation-based models. Our project page is available at https://ku-cvlab.github.io/GSD/.

URLs: https://ku-cvlab.github.io/GSD/.

replace Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision

Authors: Peiyuan Zhang, Kaichen Zhang, Bo Li, Guangtao Zeng, Jingkang Yang, Yuanhan Zhang, Ziyue Wang, Haoran Tan, Chunyuan Li, Ziwei Liu

Abstract: Video sequences offer valuable temporal information, but existing large multimodal models (LMMs) fall short in understanding extremely long videos. Many works address this by reducing the number of visual tokens using visual resamplers. Alternatively, in this paper, we approach this problem from the perspective of the language model. By simply extrapolating the context length of the language backbone, we enable LMMs to comprehend orders of magnitude more visual tokens without any video training. We call this phenomenon long context transfer and carefully ablate its properties. To effectively measure LMMs' ability to generalize to long contexts in the vision modality, we develop V-NIAH (Visual Needle-In-A-Haystack), a purely synthetic long vision benchmark inspired by the language model's NIAH test. Our proposed Long Video Assistant (LongVA) can process 2000 frames or over 200K visual tokens without additional complexities. With its extended context length, LongVA achieves state-of-the-art performance on Video-MME among 7B-scale models by densely sampling more input frames. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/LongVA.

URLs: https://github.com/EvolvingLMMs-Lab/LongVA.

replace EgoVideo: Exploring Egocentric Foundation Model and Downstream Adaptation

Authors: Baoqi Pei, Guo Chen, Jilan Xu, Yuping He, Yicheng Liu, Kanghua Pan, Yifei Huang, Yali Wang, Tong Lu, Limin Wang, Yu Qiao

Abstract: In this report, we present our solutions to the EgoVis Challenges in CVPR 2024, including five tracks in the Ego4D challenge and three tracks in the EPIC-Kitchens challenge. Building upon the video-language two-tower model and leveraging our meticulously organized egocentric video data, we introduce a novel foundation model called EgoVideo. This model is specifically designed to cater to the unique characteristics of egocentric videos and provides strong support for our competition submissions. In the Ego4D challenges, we tackle various tasks including Natural Language Queries, Step Grounding, Moment Queries, Short-term Object Interaction Anticipation, and Long-term Action Anticipation. In addition, we also participate in the EPIC-Kitchens challenge, where we engage in the Action Recognition, Multiple Instance Retrieval, and Domain Adaptation for Action Recognition tracks. By adapting EgoVideo to these diverse tasks, we showcase its versatility and effectiveness in different egocentric video analysis scenarios, demonstrating the powerful representation ability of EgoVideo as an egocentric foundation model. Our codebase and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/OpenGVLab/EgoVideo.

URLs: https://github.com/OpenGVLab/EgoVideo.

replace VIPriors 4: Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning Challenges

Authors: Robert-Jan Bruintjes, Attila Lengyel, Marcos Baptista Rios, Osman Semih Kayhan, Davide Zambrano, Nergis Tomen, Jan van Gemert

Abstract: The fourth edition of the "VIPriors: Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning" workshop features two data-impaired challenges. These challenges address the problem of training deep learning models for computer vision tasks with limited data. Participants are limited to training models from scratch using a low number of training samples and are not allowed to use any form of transfer learning. We aim to stimulate the development of novel approaches that incorporate inductive biases to improve the data efficiency of deep learning models. Significant advancements are made compared to the provided baselines, where winning solutions surpass the baselines by a considerable margin in both tasks. As in previous editions, these achievements are primarily attributed to heavy use of data augmentation policies and large model ensembles, though novel prior-based methods seem to contribute more to successful solutions compared to last year. This report highlights the key aspects of the challenges and their outcomes.

replace Vox-UDA: Voxel-wise Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Cryo-Electron Subtomogram Segmentation with Denoised Pseudo Labeling

Authors: Haoran Li, Xingjian Li, Jiahua Shi, Huaming Chen, Bo Du, Daisuke Kihara, Johan Barthelemy, Jun Shen, Min Xu

Abstract: Cryo-Electron Tomography (cryo-ET) is a 3D imaging technology facilitating the study of macromolecular structures at near-atomic resolution. Recent volumetric segmentation approaches on cryo-ET images have drawn widespread interest in biological sector. However, existing methods heavily rely on manually labeled data, which requires highly professional skills, thereby hindering the adoption of fully-supervised approaches for cryo-ET images. Some unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches have been designed to enhance the segmentation network performance using unlabeled data. However, applying these methods directly to cryo-ET images segmentation tasks remains challenging due to two main issues: 1) the source data, usually obtained through simulation, contain a certain level of noise, while the target data, directly collected from raw-data from real-world scenario, have unpredictable noise levels. 2) the source data used for training typically consists of known macromoleculars, while the target domain data are often unknown, causing the model's segmenter to be biased towards these known macromolecules, leading to a domain shift problem. To address these challenges, in this work, we introduce the first voxel-wise unsupervised domain adaptation approach, termed Vox-UDA, specifically for cryo-ET subtomogram segmentation. Vox-UDA incorporates a noise generation module to simulate target-like noises in the source dataset for cross-noise level adaptation. Additionally, we propose a denoised pseudo-labeling strategy based on improved Bilateral Filter to alleviate the domain shift problem. Experimental results on both simulated and real cryo-ET subtomogram datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art UDA methods.

replace Segment Anything Model for automated image data annotation: empirical studies using text prompts from Grounding DINO

Authors: Fuseini Mumuni, Alhassan Mumuni

Abstract: Grounding DINO and the Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved impressive performance in zero-shot object detection and image segmentation, respectively. Together, they have a great potential to revolutionize applications in zero-shot semantic segmentation or data annotation. Yet, in specialized domains like medical image segmentation, objects of interest (e.g., organs, tissues, and tumors) may not fall in existing class names. To address this problem, the referring expression comprehension (REC) ability of Grounding DINO is leveraged to detect arbitrary targets by their language descriptions. However, recent studies have highlighted severe limitation of the REC framework in this application setting owing to its tendency to make false positive predictions when the target is absent in the given image. And, while this bottleneck is central to the prospect of open-set semantic segmentation, it is still largely unknown how much improvement can be achieved by studying the prediction errors. To this end, we perform empirical studies on six publicly available datasets across different domains and reveal that these errors consistently follow a predictable pattern and can, thus, be mitigated by a simple strategy. Specifically, we show that false positive detections with appreciable confidence scores generally occupy large image areas and can usually be filtered by their relative sizes. More importantly, we expect these observations to inspire future research in improving REC-based detection and automated segmentation. Meanwhile, we evaluate the performance of SAM on multiple datasets from various specialized domains and report significant improvements in segmentation performance and annotation time savings over manual approaches.

replace Woven Fabric Capture with a Reflection-Transmission Photo Pair

Authors: Yingjie Tang, Zixuan Li, Milo\v{s} Ha\v{s}an, Jian Yang, Beibei Wang

Abstract: Digitizing woven fabrics would be valuable for many applications, from digital humans to interior design. Previous work introduces a lightweight woven fabric acquisition approach by capturing a single reflection image and estimating the fabric parameters with a differentiable geometric and shading model. The renderings of the estimated fabric parameters can closely match the photo; however, the captured reflection image is insufficient to fully characterize the fabric sample reflectance. For instance, fabrics with different thicknesses might have similar reflection images but lead to significantly different transmission. We propose to recover the woven fabric parameters from two captured images: reflection and transmission. At the core of our method is a differentiable bidirectional scattering distribution function (BSDF) model, handling reflection and transmission, including single and multiple scattering. We propose a two-layer model, where the single scattering uses an SGGX phase function as in previous work, and multiple scattering uses a new azimuthally-invariant microflake definition, which we term ASGGX. This new fabric BSDF model closely matches real woven fabrics in both reflection and transmission. We use a simple setup for capturing reflection and transmission photos with a cell phone camera and two point lights, and estimate the fabric parameters via a lightweight network, together with a differentiable optimization. We also model the out-of-focus effects explicitly with a simple solution to match the thin-lens camera better. As a result, the renderings of the estimated parameters can agree with the input images on both reflection and transmission for the first time. The code for this paper is at https://github.com/lxtyin/FabricBTDF-Recovery.

URLs: https://github.com/lxtyin/FabricBTDF-Recovery.

replace YOLOv10 to Its Genesis: A Decadal and Comprehensive Review of The You Only Look Once Series

Authors: Ranjan Sapkota, Rizwan Qureshi, Marco Flores Calero, Chetan Badjugar, Upesh Nepal, Alwin Poulose, Peter Zeno, Uday Bhanu Prakash Vaddevolu, Hong Yan, Manoj Karkee

Abstract: This review systematically examines the progression of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) object detection algorithms from YOLOv1 to the recently unveiled YOLOv10. Employing a reverse chronological analysis, this study examines the advancements introduced by YOLO algorithms, beginning with YOLOv10 and progressing through YOLOv9, YOLOv8, and subsequent versions to explore each version's contributions to enhancing speed, accuracy, and computational efficiency in real-time object detection. The study highlights the transformative impact of YOLO across five critical application areas: automotive safety, healthcare, industrial manufacturing, surveillance, and agriculture. By detailing the incremental technological advancements in subsequent YOLO versions, this review chronicles the evolution of YOLO, and discusses the challenges and limitations in each earlier versions. The evolution signifies a path towards integrating YOLO with multimodal, context-aware, and General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) systems for the next YOLO decade, promising significant implications for future developments in AI-driven applications.

replace A Survey on Deep Clustering: From the Prior Perspective

Authors: Yiding Lu, Haobin Li, Yunfan Li, Yijie Lin, Xi Peng

Abstract: Facilitated by the powerful feature extraction ability of neural networks, deep clustering has achieved great success in analyzing high-dimensional and complex real-world data. The performance of deep clustering methods is affected by various factors such as network structures and learning objectives. However, as pointed out in this survey, the essence of deep clustering lies in the incorporation and utilization of prior knowledge, which is largely ignored by existing works. From pioneering deep clustering methods based on data structure assumptions to recent contrastive clustering methods based on data augmentation invariances, the development of deep clustering intrinsically corresponds to the evolution of prior knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of deep clustering methods by categorizing them into six types of prior knowledge. We find that in general the prior innovation follows two trends, namely, i) from mining to constructing, and ii) from internal to external. Besides, we provide a benchmark on five widely-used datasets and analyze the performance of methods with diverse priors. By providing a novel prior knowledge perspective, we hope this survey could provide some novel insights and inspire future research in the deep clustering community.

replace GRACE: Graph-Regularized Attentive Convolutional Entanglement with Laplacian Smoothing for Robust DeepFake Video Detection

Authors: Chih-Chung Hsu, Shao-Ning Chen, Mei-Hsuan Wu, Yi-Fang Wang, Chia-Ming Lee, Yi-Shiuan Chou

Abstract: As DeepFake video manipulation techniques escalate, posing profound threats, the urgent need to develop efficient detection strategies is underscored. However, one particular issue lies with facial images being mis-detected, often originating from degraded videos or adversarial attacks, leading to unexpected temporal artifacts that can undermine the efficacy of DeepFake video detection techniques. This paper introduces a novel method for robust DeepFake video detection, harnessing the power of the proposed Graph-Regularized Attentive Convolutional Entanglement (GRACE) based on the graph convolutional network with graph Laplacian to address the aforementioned challenges. First, conventional Convolution Neural Networks are deployed to perform spatiotemporal features for the entire video. Then, the spatial and temporal features are mutually entangled by constructing a graph with sparse constraint, enforcing essential features of valid face images in the noisy face sequences remaining, thus augmenting stability and performance for DeepFake video detection. Furthermore, the Graph Laplacian prior is proposed in the graph convolutional network to remove the noise pattern in the feature space to further improve the performance. Comprehensive experiments are conducted to illustrate that our proposed method delivers state-of-the-art performance in DeepFake video detection under noisy face sequences. The source code is available at https://github.com/ming053l/GRACE.

URLs: https://github.com/ming053l/GRACE.

replace-cross AdaCL:Adaptive Continual Learning

Authors: Elif Ceren Gok Yildirim, Murat Onur Yildirim, Mert Kilickaya, Joaquin Vanschoren

Abstract: Class-Incremental Learning aims to update a deep classifier to learn new categories while maintaining or improving its accuracy on previously observed classes. Common methods to prevent forgetting previously learned classes include regularizing the neural network updates and storing exemplars in memory, which come with hyperparameters such as the learning rate, regularization strength, or the number of exemplars. However, these hyperparameters are usually only tuned at the start and then kept fixed throughout the learning sessions, ignoring the fact that newly encountered tasks may have varying levels of novelty or difficulty. This study investigates the necessity of hyperparameter `adaptivity' in Class-Incremental Learning: the ability to dynamically adjust hyperparameters such as the learning rate, regularization strength, and memory size according to the properties of the new task at hand. We propose AdaCL, a Bayesian Optimization-based approach to automatically and efficiently determine the optimal values for those parameters with each learning task. We show that adapting hyperpararmeters on each new task leads to improvement in accuracy, forgetting and memory. Code is available at https://github.com/ElifCerenGokYildirim/AdaCL.

URLs: https://github.com/ElifCerenGokYildirim/AdaCL.

replace-cross Framing image registration as a landmark detection problem for label-noise-aware task representation (HitR)

Authors: Diana Waldmannstetter, Ivan Ezhov, Benedikt Wiestler, Francesco Campi, Ivan Kukuljan, Stefan Ehrlich, Shankeeth Vinayahalingam, Bhakti Baheti, Satrajit Chakrabarty, Ujjwal Baid, Spyridon Bakas, Julian Schwarting, Marie Metz, Jan S. Kirschke, Daniel Rueckert, Rolf A. Heckemann, Marie Piraud, Bjoern H. Menze, Florian Kofler

Abstract: Accurate image registration is pivotal in biomedical image analysis, where selecting suitable registration algorithms demands careful consideration. While numerous algorithms are available, the evaluation metrics to assess their performance have remained relatively static. This study addresses this challenge by introducing a novel evaluation metric termed Landmark Hit Rate (HitR), which focuses on the clinical relevance of image registration accuracy. Unlike traditional metrics such as Target Registration Error, which emphasize subresolution differences, HitR considers whether registration algorithms successfully position landmarks within defined confidence zones. This paradigm shift acknowledges the inherent annotation noise in medical images, allowing for more meaningful assessments. To equip HitR with label-noise-awareness, we propose defining these confidence zones based on an Inter-rater Variance analysis. Consequently, hit rate curves are computed for varying landmark zone sizes, enabling performance measurement for a task-specific level of accuracy. Our approach offers a more realistic and meaningful assessment of image registration algorithms, reflecting their suitability for clinical and biomedical applications.

replace-cross Deep Active Audio Feature Learning in Resource-Constrained Environments

Authors: Md Mohaimenuzzaman, Christoph Bergmeir, Bernd Meyer

Abstract: The scarcity of labelled data makes training Deep Neural Network (DNN) models in bioacoustic applications challenging. In typical bioacoustics applications, manually labelling the required amount of data can be prohibitively expensive. To effectively identify both new and current classes, DNN models must continue to learn new features from a modest amount of fresh data. Active Learning (AL) is an approach that can help with this learning while requiring little labelling effort. Nevertheless, the use of fixed feature extraction approaches limits feature quality, resulting in underutilization of the benefits of AL. We describe an AL framework that addresses this issue by incorporating feature extraction into the AL loop and refining the feature extractor after each round of manual annotation. In addition, we use raw audio processing rather than spectrograms, which is a novel approach. Experiments reveal that the proposed AL framework requires 14.3%, 66.7%, and 47.4% less labelling effort on benchmark audio datasets ESC-50, UrbanSound8k, and InsectWingBeat, respectively, for a large DNN model and similar savings on a microcontroller-based counterpart. Furthermore, we showcase the practical relevance of our study by incorporating data from conservation biology projects. All codes are publicly available on GitHub.

replace-cross Fine-tuning can cripple your foundation model; preserving features may be the solution

Authors: Jishnu Mukhoti, Yarin Gal, Philip H. S. Torr, Puneet K. Dokania

Abstract: Pre-trained foundation models, due to their enormous capacity and exposure to vast amounts of data during pre-training, are known to have learned plenty of real-world concepts. An important step in making these pre-trained models effective on downstream tasks is to fine-tune them on related datasets. While various fine-tuning methods have been devised and have been shown to be highly effective, we observe that a fine-tuned model's ability to recognize concepts on tasks $\textit{different}$ from the downstream one is reduced significantly compared to its pre-trained counterpart. This is an undesirable effect of fine-tuning as a substantial amount of resources was used to learn these pre-trained concepts in the first place. We call this phenomenon ''concept forgetting'' and via experiments show that most end-to-end fine-tuning approaches suffer heavily from this side effect. To this end, we propose a simple fix to this problem by designing a new fine-tuning method called $\textit{LDIFS}$ (short for $\ell_2$ distance in feature space) that, while learning new concepts related to the downstream task, allows a model to preserve its pre-trained knowledge as well. Through extensive experiments on 10 fine-tuning tasks we show that $\textit{LDIFS}$ significantly reduces concept forgetting. Additionally, we show that LDIFS is highly effective in performing continual fine-tuning on a sequence of tasks as well, in comparison with both fine-tuning as well as continual learning baselines.

replace-cross PneumoLLM: Harnessing the Power of Large Language Model for Pneumoconiosis Diagnosis

Authors: Meiyue Song, Zhihua Yu, Jiaxin Wang, Jiarui Wang, Yuting Lu, Baicun Li, Xiaoxu Wang, Qinghua Huang, Zhijun Li, Nikolaos I. Kanellakis, Jiangfeng Liu, Jing Wang, Binglu Wang, Juntao Yang

Abstract: The conventional pretraining-and-finetuning paradigm, while effective for common diseases with ample data, faces challenges in diagnosing data-scarce occupational diseases like pneumoconiosis. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibits unprecedented ability when conducting multiple tasks in dialogue, bringing opportunities to diagnosis. A common strategy might involve using adapter layers for vision-language alignment and diagnosis in a dialogic manner. Yet, this approach often requires optimization of extensive learnable parameters in the text branch and the dialogue head, potentially diminishing the LLMs' efficacy, especially with limited training data. In our work, we innovate by eliminating the text branch and substituting the dialogue head with a classification head. This approach presents a more effective method for harnessing LLMs in diagnosis with fewer learnable parameters. Furthermore, to balance the retention of detailed image information with progression towards accurate diagnosis, we introduce the contextual multi-token engine. This engine is specialized in adaptively generating diagnostic tokens. Additionally, we propose the information emitter module, which unidirectionally emits information from image tokens to diagnosis tokens. Comprehensive experiments validate the superiority of our methods and the effectiveness of proposed modules. Our codes can be found at https://github.com/CodeMonsterPHD/PneumoLLM/tree/main.

URLs: https://github.com/CodeMonsterPHD/PneumoLLM/tree/main.

replace-cross Recovering the Pre-Fine-Tuning Weights of Generative Models

Authors: Eliahu Horwitz, Jonathan Kahana, Yedid Hoshen

Abstract: The dominant paradigm in generative modeling consists of two steps: i) pre-training on a large-scale but unsafe dataset, ii) aligning the pre-trained model with human values via fine-tuning. This practice is considered safe, as no current method can recover the unsafe, pre-fine-tuning model weights. In this paper, we demonstrate that this assumption is often false. Concretely, we present Spectral DeTuning, a method that can recover the weights of the pre-fine-tuning model using a few low-rank (LoRA) fine-tuned models. In contrast to previous attacks that attempt to recover pre-fine-tuning capabilities, our method aims to recover the exact pre-fine-tuning weights. Our approach exploits this new vulnerability against large-scale models such as a personalized Stable Diffusion and an aligned Mistral.

replace-cross Challenging Forgets: Unveiling the Worst-Case Forget Sets in Machine Unlearning

Authors: Chongyu Fan, Jiancheng Liu, Alfred Hero, Sijia Liu

Abstract: The trustworthy machine learning (ML) community is increasingly recognizing the crucial need for models capable of selectively 'unlearning' data points after training. This leads to the problem of machine unlearning (MU), aiming to eliminate the influence of chosen data points on model performance, while still maintaining the model's utility post-unlearning. Despite various MU methods for data influence erasure, evaluations have largely focused on random data forgetting, ignoring the vital inquiry into which subset should be chosen to truly gauge the authenticity of unlearning performance. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new evaluative angle for MU from an adversarial viewpoint. We propose identifying the data subset that presents the most significant challenge for influence erasure, i.e., pinpointing the worst-case forget set. Utilizing a bi-level optimization principle, we amplify unlearning challenges at the upper optimization level to emulate worst-case scenarios, while simultaneously engaging in standard training and unlearning at the lower level, achieving a balance between data influence erasure and model utility. Our proposal offers a worst-case evaluation of MU's resilience and effectiveness. Through extensive experiments across different datasets (including CIFAR-10, 100, CelebA, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet) and models (including both image classifiers and generative models), we expose critical pros and cons in existing (approximate) unlearning strategies. Our results illuminate the complex challenges of MU in practice, guiding the future development of more accurate and robust unlearning algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-WorstCase.

URLs: https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-WorstCase.

replace-cross WIA-LD2ND: Wavelet-based Image Alignment for Self-supervised Low-Dose CT Denoising

Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Yuliang Gu, Zhou Zhao, Bo Du, Yongchao Xu, Rui Yu

Abstract: In clinical examinations and diagnoses, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is crucial for minimizing health risks compared with normal-dose computed tomography (NDCT). However, reducing the radiation dose compromises the signal-to-noise ratio, leading to degraded quality of CT images. To address this, we analyze LDCT denoising task based on experimental results from the frequency perspective, and then introduce a novel self-supervised CT image denoising method called WIA-LD2ND, only using NDCT data. The proposed WIA-LD2ND comprises two modules: Wavelet-based Image Alignment (WIA) and Frequency-Aware Multi-scale Loss (FAM). First, WIA is introduced to align NDCT with LDCT by mainly adding noise to the high-frequency components, which is the main difference between LDCT and NDCT. Second, to better capture high-frequency components and detailed information, Frequency-Aware Multi-scale Loss (FAM) is proposed by effectively utilizing multi-scale feature space. Extensive experiments on two public LDCT denoising datasets demonstrate that our WIA-LD2ND, only uses NDCT, outperforms existing several state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and self-supervised methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/zhaohaoyu376/WI-LD2ND.

URLs: https://github.com/zhaohaoyu376/WI-LD2ND.

replace-cross MoreStyle: Relax Low-frequency Constraint of Fourier-based Image Reconstruction in Generalizable Medical Image Segmentation

Authors: Haoyu Zhao, Wenhui Dong, Rui Yu, Zhou Zhao, Du Bo, Yongchao Xu

Abstract: The task of single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation is crucial due to frequent domain shifts in clinical image datasets. To address the challenge of poor generalization across different domains, we introduce a Plug-and-Play module for data augmentation called MoreStyle. MoreStyle diversifies image styles by relaxing low-frequency constraints in Fourier space, guiding the image reconstruction network. With the help of adversarial learning, MoreStyle further expands the style range and pinpoints the most intricate style combinations within latent features. To handle significant style variations, we introduce an uncertainty-weighted loss. This loss emphasizes hard-to-classify pixels resulting only from style shifts while mitigating true hard-to-classify pixels in both MoreStyle-generated and original images. Extensive experiments on two widely used benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed MoreStyle effectively helps to achieve good domain generalization ability, and has the potential to further boost the performance of some state-of-the-art SDG methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/zhaohaoyu376/morestyle.

URLs: https://github.com/zhaohaoyu376/morestyle.

replace-cross Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge Models for High-Quality MR-to-CT Synthesis for Head and Neck Proton Treatment Planning

Authors: Muheng Li, Xia Li, Sairos Safai, Damien Weber, Antony Lomax, Ye Zhang

Abstract: In recent advancements in proton therapy, MR-based treatment planning is gaining momentum to minimize additional radiation exposure compared to traditional CT-based methods. This transition highlights the critical need for accurate MR-to-CT image synthesis, which is essential for precise proton dose calculations. Our research introduces the Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridge Models (DSBM), an innovative approach for high-quality MR-to-CT synthesis. DSBM learns the nonlinear diffusion processes between MR and CT data distributions. This method improves upon traditional diffusion models by initiating synthesis from the prior distribution rather than the Gaussian distribution, enhancing both generation quality and efficiency. We validated the effectiveness of DSBM on a head and neck cancer dataset, demonstrating its superiority over traditional image synthesis methods through both image-level and dosimetric-level evaluations. The effectiveness of DSBM in MR-based proton treatment planning highlights its potential as a valuable tool in various clinical scenarios.

replace-cross Training-Free Deepfake Voice Recognition by Leveraging Large-Scale Pre-Trained Models

Authors: Alessandro Pianese, Davide Cozzolino, Giovanni Poggi, Luisa Verdoliva

Abstract: Generalization is a main issue for current audio deepfake detectors, which struggle to provide reliable results on out-of-distribution data. Given the speed at which more and more accurate synthesis methods are developed, it is very important to design techniques that work well also on data they were not trained for. In this paper we study the potential of large-scale pre-trained models for audio deepfake detection, with special focus on generalization ability. To this end, the detection problem is reformulated in a speaker verification framework and fake audios are exposed by the mismatch between the voice sample under test and the voice of the claimed identity. With this paradigm, no fake speech sample is necessary in training, cutting off any link with the generation method at the root, and ensuring full generalization ability. Features are extracted by general-purpose large pre-trained models, with no need for training or fine-tuning on specific fake detection or speaker verification datasets. At detection time only a limited set of voice fragments of the identity under test is required. Experiments on several datasets widespread in the community show that detectors based on pre-trained models achieve excellent performance and show strong generalization ability, rivaling supervised methods on in-distribution data and largely overcoming them on out-of-distribution data.

replace-cross SketchQL Demonstration: Zero-shot Video Moment Querying with Sketches

Authors: Renzhi Wu, Pramod Chunduri, Dristi J Shah, Ashmitha Julius Aravind, Ali Payani, Xu Chu, Joy Arulraj, Kexin Rong

Abstract: In this paper, we will present SketchQL, a video database management system (VDBMS) for retrieving video moments with a sketch-based query interface. This novel interface allows users to specify object trajectory events with simple mouse drag-and-drop operations. Users can use trajectories of single objects as building blocks to compose complex events. Using a pre-trained model that encodes trajectory similarity, SketchQL achieves zero-shot video moments retrieval by performing similarity searches over the video to identify clips that are the most similar to the visual query. In this demonstration, we introduce the graphic user interface of SketchQL and detail its functionalities and interaction mechanisms. We also demonstrate the end-to-end usage of SketchQL from query composition to video moments retrieval using real-world scenarios.

replace-cross Research on Foundation Model for Spatial Data Intelligence: China's 2024 White Paper on Strategic Development of Spatial Data Intelligence

Authors: Shaohua Wang (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xing Xie (Microsoft Research Asia), Yong Li (Tsinghua University), Danhuai Guo (Beijing University of Chemical Technology), Zhi Cai (Beijing University of Technology), Yu Liu (Peking University), Yang Yue (Shenzhen University), Xiao Pan (Shijiazhuang Tiedao University), Feng Lu (Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Huayi Wu (Wuhan University), Zhipeng Gui (Wuhan University), Zhiming Ding (Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Bolong Zheng (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Fuzheng Zhang (Kuaishou Natural Language Processing Center and Audio Center), Tao Qin (Microsoft Research Asia), Jingyuan Wang (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Chuang Tao (Shanghai Figure Interesting Information Technology Co., Ltd), Zhengchao Chen (Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Hao Lu (SuperMap Software Co., Ltd), Jiayi Li (Wuhan University), Hongyang Chen (Zhejiang Lab), Peng Yue (Wuhan University), Wenhao Yu (China University of Geosciences), Yao Yao (China University of Geosciences), Leilei Sun (Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics), Yong Zhang (Beijing University of Technology), Longbiao Chen (Xiamen University), Xiaoping Du (Key Laboratory of Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences), Xiang Li (East China Normal University), Xueying Zhang (Nanjing Normal University), Kun Qin (Wuhan University), Zhaoya Gong (Peking University), Weihua Dong (Beijing Normal University), Xiaofeng Meng (Renmin University of China)

Abstract: This report focuses on spatial data intelligent large models, delving into the principles, methods, and cutting-edge applications of these models. It provides an in-depth discussion on the definition, development history, current status, and trends of spatial data intelligent large models, as well as the challenges they face. The report systematically elucidates the key technologies of spatial data intelligent large models and their applications in urban environments, aerospace remote sensing, geography, transportation, and other scenarios. Additionally, it summarizes the latest application cases of spatial data intelligent large models in themes such as urban development, multimodal systems, remote sensing, smart transportation, and resource environments. Finally, the report concludes with an overview and outlook on the development prospects of spatial data intelligent large models.

replace-cross Common and Rare Fundus Diseases Identification Using Vision-Language Foundation Model with Knowledge of Over 400 Diseases

Authors: Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Aidi Lin, Kai Yu, Yuanyuan Peng, Lianyu Wang, Cheng Chen, Ke Zou, Huiyu Liang, Man Chen, Xue Yao, Meiqin Zhang, Binwei Huang, Chaoxin Zheng, Peixin Zhang, Wei Chen, Yilong Luo, Yifan Chen, Honghe Xia, Tingkun Shi, Qi Zhang, Jinming Guo, Xiaolin Chen, Jingcheng Wang, Yih Chung Tham, Dianbo Liu, Wendy Wong, Sahil Thakur, Beau Fenner, Danqi Fang, Siying Liu, Qingyun Liu, Yuqiang Huang, Hongqiang Zeng, Yanda Meng, Yukun Zhou, Zehua Jiang, Minghui Qiu, Changqing Zhang, Xinjian Chen, Sophia Y Wang, Cecilia S Lee, Lucia Sobrin, Carol Y Cheung, Chi Pui Pang, Pearse A Keane, Ching-Yu Cheng, Haoyu Chen, Huazhu Fu

Abstract: Previous foundation models for retinal images were pre-trained with limited disease categories and knowledge base. Here we introduce RetiZero, a vision-language foundation model that leverages knowledge from over 400 fundus diseases. To RetiZero's pre-training, we compiled 341,896 fundus images paired with text descriptions, sourced from public datasets, ophthalmic literature, and online resources, encompassing a diverse range of diseases across multiple ethnicities and countries. RetiZero exhibits superior performance in several downstream tasks, including zero-shot disease recognition, image-to-image retrieval, and internal- and cross-domain disease identification. In zero-shot scenarios, RetiZero achieves Top5 accuracy scores of 0.8430 for 15 fundus diseases and 0.7561 for 52 fundus diseases. For image retrieval, it achieves Top5 scores of 0.9500 and 0.8860 for the same disease sets, respectively. Clinical evaluations show that RetiZero's Top3 zero-shot performance surpasses the average of 19 ophthalmologists from Singapore, China and the United States. Furthermore, RetiZero significantly enhances clinicians' accuracy in diagnosing fundus disease. These findings underscore the value of integrating the RetiZero foundation model into clinical settings, where a variety of fundus diseases are encountered.

replace-cross Multimodal Learning With Intraoperative CBCT & Variably Aligned Preoperative CT Data To Improve Segmentation

Authors: Maximilian E. Tschuchnig, Philipp Steininger, Michael Gadermayr

Abstract: Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is an important tool facilitating computer aided interventions, despite often suffering from artifacts that pose challenges for accurate interpretation. While the degraded image quality can affect downstream segmentation, the availability of high quality, preoperative scans represents potential for improvements. Here we consider a setting where preoperative CT and intraoperative CBCT scans are available, however, the alignment (registration) between the scans is imperfect. We propose a multimodal learning method that fuses roughly aligned CBCT and CT scans and investigate the effect of CBCT quality and misalignment on the final segmentation performance. For that purpose, we make use of a synthetically generated data set containing real CT and synthetic CBCT volumes. As an application scenario, we focus on liver and liver tumor segmentation. We show that the fusion of preoperative CT and simulated, intraoperative CBCT mostly improves segmentation performance (compared to using intraoperative CBCT only) and that even clearly misaligned preoperative data has the potential to improve segmentation performance.

replace-cross Deciphering the Definition of Adversarial Robustness for post-hoc OOD Detectors

Authors: Peter Lorenz, Mario Fernandez, Jens M\"uller, Ullrich K\"othe

Abstract: Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs is critical for safely deploying deep learning models in real-world scenarios. In recent years, many OOD detectors have been developed, and even the benchmarking has been standardized, i.e. OpenOOD. The number of post-hoc detectors is growing fast and showing an option to protect a pre-trained classifier against natural distribution shifts, claiming to be ready for real-world scenarios. However, its efficacy in handling adversarial examples has been neglected in the majority of studies. This paper investigates the adversarial robustness of the 16 post-hoc detectors on several evasion attacks and discuss a roadmap towards adversarial defense in OOD detectors.

replace-cross Fuzzy Attention-based Border Rendering Network for Lung Organ Segmentation

Authors: Sheng Zhang, Yang Nan, Yingying Fang, Shiyi Wang, Xiaodan Xing, Zhifan Gao, Guang Yang

Abstract: Automatic lung organ segmentation on CT images is crucial for lung disease diagnosis. However, the unlimited voxel values and class imbalance of lung organs can lead to false-negative/positive and leakage issues in advanced methods. Additionally, some slender lung organs are easily lost during the recycled down/up-sample procedure, e.g., bronchioles & arterioles, causing severe discontinuity issue. Inspired by these, this paper introduces an effective lung organ segmentation method called Fuzzy Attention-based Border Rendering (FABR) network. Since fuzzy logic can handle the uncertainty in feature extraction, hence the fusion of deep networks and fuzzy sets should be a viable solution for better performance. Meanwhile, unlike prior top-tier methods that operate on all regular dense points, our FABR depicts lung organ regions as cube-trees, focusing only on recycle-sampled border vulnerable points, rendering the severely discontinuous, false-negative/positive organ regions with a novel Global-Local Cube-tree Fusion (GLCF) module. All experimental results, on four challenging datasets of airway & artery, demonstrate that our method can achieve the favorable performance significantly.

replace-cross SRViT: Vision Transformers for Estimating Radar Reflectivity from Satellite Observations at Scale

Authors: Jason Stock, Kyle Hilburn, Imme Ebert-Uphoff, Charles Anderson

Abstract: We introduce a transformer-based neural network to generate high-resolution (3km) synthetic radar reflectivity fields at scale from geostationary satellite imagery. This work aims to enhance short-term convective-scale forecasts of high-impact weather events and aid in data assimilation for numerical weather prediction over the United States. Compared to convolutional approaches, which have limited receptive fields, our results show improved sharpness and higher accuracy across various composite reflectivity thresholds. Additional case studies over specific atmospheric phenomena support our quantitative findings, while a novel attribution method is introduced to guide domain experts in understanding model outputs.