GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Learning Multimodal Volumetric Features for Large-Scale Neuron Tracing
Authors: Qihua Chen; Xuejin Chen; Chenxuan Wang; Yixiong Liu; Zhiwei Xiong; Feng Wu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The current neuron reconstruction pipeline for electron microscopy (EM) data usually includes automatic image segmentation followed by extensive human expert proofreading. In this work, we aim to reduce human workload by predicting connectivity between over-segmented neuron pieces, taking both microscopy image and 3D morphology features into account, similar to human proofreading workflow. To this end, we first construct a dataset, named FlyTracing, that contains millions of pairwise connections of segments expanding the whole fly brain, which is three orders of magnitude larger than existing datasets for neuron segment connection. To learn sophisticated biological imaging features from the connectivity annotations, we propose a novel connectivity-aware contrastive learning method to generate dense volumetric EM image embedding. The learned embeddings can be easily incorporated with any point or voxel-based morphological representations for automatic neuron tracing. Extensive comparisons of different combination schemes of image and morphological representation in identifying split errors across the whole fly brain demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach, especially for the locations that contain severe imaging artifacts, such as section missing and misalignment. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Levishery/Flywire-Neuron-Tracing.
M-BEV: Masked BEV Perception for Robust Autonomous Driving
Authors: Siran Chen; Yue Ma; Yu Qiao; Yali Wang
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: 3D perception is a critical problem in autonomous driving. Recently, the Bird’s-Eye-View (BEV) approach has attracted extensive attention, due to low-cost deployment and desirable vision detection capacity. However, the existing models ignore a realistic scenario during the driving procedure, i.e., one or more view cameras may be failed, which largely deteriorates their performance. To tackle this problem, we propose a generic Masked BEV (M-BEV) perception framework, which can effectively improve robustness to this challenging scenario, by random masking and reconstructing camera views in the end-to-end training. More specifically, we develop a novel Masked View Reconstruction (MVR) module in our M-BEV. It mimics various missing cases by randomly masking features of different camera views, then leverages the original features of these views as self-supervision and reconstructs the masked ones with the distinct spatio-temporal context across camera views. Via such a plug-and-play MVR, our M-BEV is capable of learning the missing views from the resting ones, and thus well generalized for robust view recovery and accurate perception in the testing. We perform extensive experiments on the popular NuScenes benchmark, where our framework can significantly boost 3D perception performance of the state-of-the-art models on various missing view cases, e.g., for the absence of back view, our M-BEV promotes the PETRv2 model with 10.3% mAP gain.
VPDETR: End-to-End Vanishing Point DEtection TRansformers
Authors: Taiyan Chen; Xianghua Ying; Jinfa Yang; Ruibin Wang; Ruohao Guo; Bowei Xing; Ji Shi
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: In the field of vanishing point detection, previous works commonly relied on extracting and clustering straight lines or classifying candidate points as vanishing points. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end framework, called VPDETR (Vanishing Point DEtection TRansformer), that views vanishing point detection as a set prediction problem, applicable to both Manhattan and non-Manhattan world datasets. By using the positional embedding of anchor points as queries in Transformer decoders and dynamically updating them layer by layer, our method is able to directly input images and output their vanishing points without the need for explicit straight line extraction and candidate points sampling. Additionally, we introduce an orthogonal loss and a cross-prediction loss to improve accuracy on the Manhattan world datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that VPDETR achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, without requiring post-processing.
TCI-Former: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer for Infrared Small Target Detection
Authors: Tianxiang Chen; Zhentao Tan; Qi Chu; Yue Wu; Bin Liu; Nenghai Yu
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Infrared small target detection (ISTD) is critical to national security and has been extensively applied in military areas. ISTD aims to segment small target pixels from background. Most ISTD networks focus on designing feature extraction blocks or feature fusion modules, but rarely describe the ISTD process from the feature map evolution perspective. In the ISTD process, the network attention gradually shifts towards target areas. We abstract this process as the directional movement of feature map pixels to target areas through convolution, pooling and interactions with surrounding pixels, which can be analogous to the movement of thermal particles constrained by surrounding variables and particles. In light of this analogy, we propose Thermal Conduction-Inspired Transformer (TCI-Former) based on the theoretical principles of thermal conduction. According to thermal conduction differential equation in heat dynamics, we derive the pixel movement differential equation (PMDE) in the image domain and further develop two modules: Thermal Conduction-Inspired Attention (TCIA) and Thermal Conduction Boundary Module (TCBM). TCIA incorporates finite difference method with PMDE to reach a numerical approximation so that target body features can be extracted. To further remove errors in boundary areas, TCBM is designed and supervised by boundary masks to refine target body features with fine boundary details. Experiments on IRSTD-1k and NUAA-SIRST demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Intrinsic Phase-Preserving Networks for Depth Super Resolution
Authors: Xuanhong Chen; Hang Wang; Jialiang Chen; Kairui Feng; Jinfan Liu; Xiaohang Wang; Weimin Zhang; Bingbing Ni
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Depth map super-resolution (DSR) plays an indispensable role in 3D vision. We discover an non-trivial spectral phenomenon: the components of high-resolution (HR) and low-resolution (LR) depth maps manifest the same intrinsic phase, and the spectral phase of RGB is a superset of them, which suggests that a phase-aware filter can assist in the precise use of RGB cues. Motivated by this, we propose an intrinsic phase-preserving DSR paradigm, named IPPNet, to fully exploit inter-modality collaboration in a mutually guided way. In a nutshell, a novel Phase-Preserving Filtering Module (PPFM) is developed to generate dynamic phase-aware filters according to the LR depth flow to filter out erroneous noisy components contained in RGB and then conduct depth enhancement via the modulation of the phase-preserved RGB signal.  By stacking multiple PPFM blocks, the proposed IPPNet is capable of reaching a highly competitive restoration performance.  Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets, e.g., NYU v2, RGB-D-D, reach SOTA performance and also well demonstrate the validity of the proposed phase-preserving scheme. Code: https://github.com/neuralchen/IPPNet/.
Box2Poly: Memory-Efficient Polygon Prediction of Arbitrarily Shaped and Rotated Text
Authors: Xuyang Chen; Dong Wang; Konrad Schindler; Mingwei Sun; Yongliang Wang; Nicolo Savioli; Liqiu Meng
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Recently, Transformer-based text detection techniques have sought to predict polygons by encoding the coordinates of individual boundary vertices using distinct query features. However, this approach incurs a significant memory overhead and struggles to effectively capture the intricate relationships between vertices belonging to the same instance. Consequently, irregular text layouts often lead to the prediction of outlined vertices, diminishing the quality of results. To address these challenges, we present an innovative approach rooted in Sparse R-CNN: a cascade decoding pipeline for polygon prediction. Our method ensures precision by iteratively refining polygon predictions, considering both the scale and location of preceding results. Leveraging this stabilized regression pipeline, even employing just a single feature vector to guide polygon instance regression yields promising detection results. Simultaneously, the leverage of instance-level feature proposal substantially enhances memory efficiency ( > 50% less vs. the SOTA method DPText-DETR) and reduces inference speed (> 40% less  vs. DPText-DETR) with comparable performance on benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Albertchen98/Box2Poly.git.
FashionERN: Enhance-and-Refine Network for Composed Fashion Image Retrieval
Authors: Yanzhe Chen; Huasong Zhong; Xiangteng He; Yuxin Peng; Jiahuan Zhou; Lele Cheng
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: The goal of composed fashion image retrieval is to locate a target image based on a reference image and modified text. Recent methods utilize symmetric encoders (e.g., CLIP) pre-trained on large-scale non-fashion datasets. However, the input for this task exhibits an asymmetric nature, where the reference image contains rich content while the modified text is often brief. Therefore, methods employing symmetric encoders encounter a severe phenomenon: retrieval results dominated by reference images, leading to the oversight of modified text. We propose a Fashion Enhance-and-Refine Network (FashionERN) centered around two aspects: enhancing the text encoder and refining visual semantics. We introduce a Triple-branch Modifier Enhancement model, which injects relevant information from the reference image and aligns the modified text modality with the target image modality. Furthermore, we propose a Dual-guided Vision Refinement model that retains critical visual information through text-guided refinement and self-guided refinement processes. The combination of these two models significantly mitigates the reference dominance phenomenon, ensuring accurate fulfillment of modifier requirements. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our approach's state-of-the-art performance on four commonly used datasets.
IT3D: Improved Text-to-3D Generation with Explicit View Synthesis
Authors: Yiwen Chen; Chi Zhang; Xiaofeng Yang; Zhongang Cai; Gang Yu; Lei Yang; Guosheng Lin
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Recent strides in Text-to-3D techniques have been propelled by distilling knowledge from powerful large text-to-image diffusion models (LDMs). Nonetheless, existing Text-to-3D approaches often grapple with challenges such as over-saturation, inadequate detailing, and unrealistic outputs. This study presents a novel strategy that leverages explicitly synthesized multi-view images to address these issues. Our approach involves the utilization of image-to-image pipelines, empowered by LDMs, to generate posed high-quality images based on the renderings of coarse 3D models. Although the generated images mostly alleviate the aforementioned issues, challenges such as view inconsistency and significant content variance persist due to the inherent generative nature of large diffusion models, posing extensive difficulties in leveraging these images effectively. To overcome this hurdle, we advocate integrating a discriminator alongside a novel Diffusion-GAN dual training strategy to guide the training of 3D models. For the incorporated discriminator, the synthesized multi-view images are considered real data, while the renderings of the optimized 3D models function as fake data. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments that demonstrate the effectiveness of our method over baseline approaches.
Beyond the Label Itself: Latent Labels Enhance Semi-supervised Point Cloud Panoptic Segmentation
Authors: Yujun Chen; Xin Tan; Zhizhong Zhang; Yanyun Qu; Yuan Xie
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: As the exorbitant expense of labeling autopilot datasets and the growing trend of utilizing unlabeled data, semi-supervised segmentation on point clouds becomes increasingly imperative. Intuitively, finding out more ``unspoken words'' (i.e., latent instance information) beyond the label itself should be helpful to improve performance. In this paper, we discover two types of latent labels behind the displayed label embedded in LiDAR and image data. First, in the LiDAR Branch, we propose a novel augmentation, Cylinder-Mix, which is able to augment more yet reliable samples for training. Second, in the Image Branch, we propose the Instance Position-scale Learning (IPSL) Module to learn and fuse the information of instance position and scale, which is from a 2D pre-trained detector and a type of latent label obtained from 3D to 2D projection. Finally, the two latent labels are embedded into the multi-modal panoptic segmentation network. The ablation of the IPSL module demonstrates its robust adaptability, and the experiments evaluated on SemanticKITTI and nuScenes demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art method, LaserMix.
Visual Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning
Authors: Zhenfang Chen; Qinhong Zhou; Yikang Shen; Yining Hong; Zhiqing Sun; Dan Gutfreund; Chuang Gan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Knowledge-based visual reasoning remains a daunting task since it not only requires machines to interpret the concepts and relationships from visual scenes but also associate them with external world knowledge to conduct a chain of reasoning on open-world questions. Previous works, however, treat visual perception and language-based reasoning as two independent modules, failing to attend to both modules throughout all stages of reasoning. To this end, we propose Visual Chain-of-thought Prompting (VCTP) for knowledge-based reasoning, which involves the interaction between visual content and natural language in an iterative step-by-step reasoning manner. VCTP contains three stages, see, think, and confirm. The see stage scans the image and grounds the visual concept candidates with a visual perception model. The think stage adopts a pre-trained large language model (LLM) to attend to key visual concepts from natural language questions adaptively. It then transforms key visual context into text context for prompting with a visual captioning model, and adopts the LLM to generate the answer. The confirm stage further uses the LLM to generate the supporting rationale to the answer, which is then passed through a cross-modality classifier to verify that it’s consistent with the visual context. We iterate through the think-confirm stages to ensure the verified rationale is consistent with the answer. We conduct experiments on a range of knowledge-based visual reasoning datasets. We found our VCTP enjoys several benefits, 1). it achieves better performance than the previous few-shot learning baselines; 2). it enjoys the total transparency and trustworthiness of the whole reasoning process by providing rationales for each reasoning step; 3). it is computation-efficient compared with other fine-tuning baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/UMass-Foundation-Model/VisualCoT.git
Blind Face Restoration under Extreme Conditions: Leveraging 3D-2D Prior Fusion for Superior Structural and Texture Recovery
Authors: Zhengrui Chen; Liying Lu; Ziyang Yuan; Yiming Zhu; Yu Li; Chun Yuan; Weihong Deng
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Blind face restoration under extreme conditions involves reconstructing high-quality face images from severely degraded inputs. These input images are often in poor quality and have extreme facial poses, leading to errors in facial structure and unnatural artifacts within the restored images. In this paper, we show that utilizing 3D priors effectively compensates for structure knowledge deficiencies in 2D priors while preserving the texture details. Based on this, we introduce FREx (Face Restoration under Extreme conditions) that combines structure-accurate 3D priors and texture-rich 2D priors in pretrained generative networks for blind face restoration under extreme conditions. To fuse the different information in 3D and 2D priors, we introduce an adaptive weight module that adjusts the importance of features based on the input image's condition. With this approach, our model can restore structure-accurate and natural-looking faces even when the images have lost a lot of information due to degradation and extreme pose. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our methods.
CamoDiffusion: Camouflaged Object Detection via Conditional Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhongxi Chen; Ke Sun; Xianming Lin
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is a challenging task in computer vision due to the high similarity between camouflaged objects and their surroundings. Existing COD methods struggle with nuanced object boundaries and overconfident incorrect predictions. In response, we propose a new paradigm that treats COD as a conditional mask-generation task leveraging diffusion models. Our method, dubbed CamoDiffusion, employs the denoising process to progressively refine predictions while incorporating image conditions. Due to the stochastic sampling process of diffusion, our model is capable of sampling multiple possible predictions, avoiding the problem of overconfident point estimation. Moreover, we develop specialized network architecture, training, and sampling strategies, to enhance the model’s expressive power, refinement capabilities and suppress overconfident mis-segmentations, thus aptly tailoring the diffusion model to the demands of COD. Extensive experiments on three COD datasets attest to the superior performance of our model compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on the most challenging COD10K dataset, where our approach achieves 0.019 in terms of MAE. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/Rapisurazurite/CamoDiffusion.
DreamIdentity: Enhanced Editability for Efficient Face-Identity Preserved Image Generation
Authors: Zhuowei Chen; Shancheng Fang; Wei Liu; Qian He; Mengqi Huang; Zhendong Mao
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: While large-scale pre-trained text-to-image models can synthesize diverse and high-quality human-centric images, an intractable problem is how to preserve the face identity and follow the text prompts simultaneously for conditioned input face images and texts. Despite existing encoder-based methods achieving high efficiency and decent face similarity, the generated image often fails to follow the textual prompts. To ease this editability issue, we present DreamIdentity, to learn edit-friendly and accurate face-identity representations in the word embedding space. Specifically, we propose self-augmented editability learning to enhance the editability for projected embedding, which is achieved by constructing paired generated celebrity's face and edited celebrity images for training, aiming at transferring mature editability of off-the-shelf text-to-image models in celebrity to unseen identities. Furthermore, we design a novel dedicated face-identity encoder to learn an accurate representation of human faces, which applies multi-scale ID-aware features followed by a multi-embedding projector to generate the pseudo words in the text embedding space directly. Extensive experiments show that our method can generate more text-coherent and ID-preserved images with negligible time overhead compared to the standard text-to-image generation process.
Deep Linear Array Pushbroom Image Restoration: A Degradation Pipeline and Jitter-Aware Restoration Network
Authors: Zida Chen; Ziran Zhang; Haoying Li; Menghao Li; Yueting Chen; Qi Li; Huajun Feng; Zhihai Xu; Shiqi Chen
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Linear Array Pushbroom (LAP) imaging technology is widely used in the realm of remote sensing. However, images acquired through LAP always suffer from distortion and blur because of camera jitter. Traditional methods for restoring LAP images, such as algorithms estimating the point spread function (PSF), exhibit limited performance. To tackle this issue, we propose a Jitter-Aware Restoration Network (JARNet), to remove the distortion and blur in two stages. In the first stage, we formulate an Optical Flow Correction (OFC) block to refine the optical flow of the degraded LAP images, resulting in pre-corrected images where most of the distortions are alleviated. In the second stage, for further enhancement of the pre-corrected images, we integrate two jitter-aware techniques within the Spatial and Frequency Residual (SFRes) block: 1) introducing Coordinate Attention (CoA) to the SFRes block in order to capture the jitter state in orthogonal direction; 2) manipulating image features in both spatial and frequency domains to leverage local and global priors. Additionally, we develop a data synthesis pipeline, which applies Continue Dynamic Shooting Model (CDSM) to simulate realistic degradation in LAP images. Both the proposed JARNet and LAP image synthesis pipeline establish a foundation for addressing this intricate challenge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed two-stage method outperforms state-of-the-art image restoration models. Code is available at https://github.com/JHW2000/JARNet.
Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for Efficient Optical Flow Estimation
Authors: Ri Cheng; Ruian He; Xuhao Jiang; Shili Zhou; Weimin Tan; Bo Yan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: Existing recurrent optical flow estimation networks are computationally expensive since they use a fixed large number of iterations to update the flow field for each sample. An efficient network should skip iterations when the flow improvement is limited. In this paper, we develop a Context-Aware Iteration Policy Network for efficient optical flow estimation, which determines the optimal number of iterations per sample. The policy network achieves this by learning contextual information to realize whether flow improvement is bottlenecked or minimal. On the one hand, we use iteration embedding and historical hidden cell, which include previous iterations information, to convey how flow has changed from previous iterations. On the other hand, we use the incremental loss to make the policy network implicitly perceive the magnitude of optical flow improvement in the subsequent iteration. Furthermore, the computational complexity in our dynamic network is controllable, allowing us to satisfy various resource preferences with a single trained model. Our policy network can be easily integrated into state-of-the-art optical flow networks. Extensive experiments show that our method maintains performance while reducing FLOPs by about 40%/20% for the Sintel/KITTI datasets.
SparseGNV: Generating Novel Views of Indoor Scenes with Sparse RGB-D Images
Authors: Weihao Cheng; Yan-Pei Cao; Ying Shan
Venue: AAAI 2024 (main)

Abstract: We study to generate novel views of indoor scenes given sparse input views. The challenge is to achieve both photorealism and view consistency. We present SparseGNV: a learning framework that incorporates 3D structures and image generative models to generate novel views with three modules. The first module builds a neural point cloud as underlying geometry, providing scene context and guidance for the target novel view. The second module utilizes a transformer-based network to map the scene context and the guidance into a shared latent space and autoregressively decodes the target view in the form of discrete image tokens. The third module reconstructs the tokens back to the image of the target view. SparseGNV is trained across a large-scale indoor scene dataset to learn generalizable priors. Once trained, it can efficiently generate novel views of an unseen indoor scene in a feed-forward manner. We evaluate SparseGNV on real-world indoor scenes and demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods based on either neural radiance fields or conditional image generation.