Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Blockchain Technology Performance of Asymmetric Algorithms: An Empirical Study

Blockchain technology is a transparent, and unchangeable distributed ledger. It has the potential to transform the way to interact with the digital world by allowing to construct a decentralized database that is tamper-proof. Concerns regarding the security of confidential and sensitive data being outsourced are rising. It is possible that service providers may be dishonest since unscrupulous administrators have access to, may alter, and can misuse private and sensitive data. Security precautions are necessary because sensitive data stored on public clouds has to be safeguarded. There is no mechanism to detect data changes, as data are stored in plaintext. Therefore, maintaining privacy and secrecy is impossible. It is important that data must always be kept secure, even after it has been kept on the server. Data stored on the server must be safeguarded against outsider access and, if the insider cannot be trusted, must also be safeguarded against hostile insiders. Asymmetric algorithms are employed to safeguard data during transmission. Asymmetric cryptography is required in modern security systems, and several algorithms have been devised to provide safe and effective encryption and decryption. Asymmetric algorithms are empirically compared in this study. We evaluated each algorithm's performance by taking into account criteria such as key size, memory utilization, and execution time. Our results show that while all algorithms provide safe encryption and decryption, there are significant performance disparities between them. It is determined, in particular, that ECC required the least amount of memory and had the shortest key size. The findings show that ECC's prime and binary fields created pairs of keys faster and with more security than other asymmetric algorithms with smaller bit sizes. On small, medium, and big datasets, ECC had the fastest execution time for plaintext encryption operations. These findings have important implications for the selection and deployment of asymmetric algorithms in various security systems.
The Design and Evaluation of Novel Ananimated CAPTCHA Schemes Based on Humans’ Natural Vision Capabilities

CAPTCHAs are ubiquitously found on the web these days. It is most commonly used security mechanism against bots. Numerous design variants of static text-based CAPTCHAs were proposed and implemented on the internet over the years. However due to advancements in machine learning and image processing techniques they were proved vulnerable against automated attacks. In this research a new and robust animated CAPTCHA scheme is presented which is based on human’s natural vision capabilities. The newly designed CAPTCHAs are user friendly for humans but extremely hard for bots. The security and usability is kept in mind while designing these CAPTCHAs. Various types of characters, patterns and filters are used to protect them against automated attacks. Overall, 20 types of animated CAPTCHAs are designed in this work. Further in this research, a group of participants have evaluated the usability of newly designed CAPTCHAs and solved with an average success rate of 76.85%. The analysis has proved that the proposed scheme is very much usable for humans and extremely difficult for bots.
An empirical study of performance of block cipher algorithms in cloud computing environment

The security of private and sensitive data stored in the public domain is a major problem. It is critical for the user that data be safe both in transit and even after it has been stored on the server. The data owner must be guaranteed that the data held on the service provider site is safeguarded against data theft from outsiders, and the data must be protected even from the service providers. The secret key generation is one of the most important factors for the security of any cryptographic system because the length of the key directly affects the performance and prevents various cryptographic attacks such as brute force attacks. At the application level, our developed system efficiently secures sensitive, private, and personally identifiable information by ensuring privacy and confidentiality of data at rest in the public domain. This study also compares the performance of block cipher algorithms DES, 3DES, Blowfish, and AES. It was deduced from the result that AES consumes less time when compared to other symmetric algorithms with small consistent behavior for various cryptographic operations with small, medium and big datasets..
SAMPLING: Scene-adaptive Hierarchical Multiplane Images Representation for Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image

Recent novel view synthesis methods obtain promising results for relatively small scenes, e.g., indoor environments and scenes with a few objects, but tend to fail for unbounded outdoor scenes with a single image as input. In this paper, we introduce SAMPLING, a Scene-adaptive Hierarchical Multiplane Images Representation for Novel View Synthesis from a Single Image based on improved multiplane images (MPI). Observing that depth distribution varies significantly for unbounded outdoor scenes, we employ an adaptive-bins strategy for MPI to arrange planes in accordance with each scene image. To represent intricate geometry and multi-scale details, we further introduce a hierarchical refinement branch, which results in high-quality synthesized novel views. Our method demonstrates considerable performance gains in synthesizing large-scale unbounded outdoor scenes using a single image on the KITTI dataset and generalizes well to the unseen Tanks and Temples dataset. The code and models will be made available at https://pkuvdig.github.io/SAMPLING/.
FULLER: Unified Multi-modality Multi-task 3D Perception via Multi-level Gradient Calibration

Multi-modality fusion and multi-task learning are becoming trendy in 3D autonomous driving scenario, considering robust prediction and computation budget. However, naively extending the existing framework to the domain of multi-modality multi-task learning remains ineffective and even poisonous due to the notorious modality bias and task conflict. Previous works manually coordinate the learning framework with empirical knowledge, which may lead to sub-optima. To mitigate the issue, we propose a novel yet simple multi-level gradient calibration learning framework across tasks and modalities during optimization. Specifically, the gradients, produced by the task heads and used to update the shared backbone, will be calibrated at the backbone’s last layer to alleviate the task conflict. Before the calibrated gradients are further propagated to the modality branches of the backbone, their magnitudes will be calibrated again to the same level, ensuring the downstream tasks pay balanced attention to different modalities. Experiments on large-scale benchmark nuScenes demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, e.g., an absolute 14.4% mIoU improvement on map segmentation and 1.4% mAP improvement on 3D detection, advancing the application of 3D autonomous driving in the domain of multi-modality fusion and multi-task learning. We also discuss the links between modalities and tasks.
When Noisy Labels Meet Long Tail Dilemmas: A Representation Calibration Method

Real-world large-scale datasets are both noisily labeled and class-imbalanced. The issues seriously hurt the generalization of trained models. It is hence significant to address the simultaneous incorrect labeling and class-imbalance, i.e., the problem of learning with noisy labels on long-tailed data. Previous works develop several methods for the problem. However, they always rely on strong assumptions that are invalid or hard to be checked in practice. In this paper, to handle the problem and address the limitations of prior works, we propose a representation calibration method RCAL. Specifically, RCAL works with the representations extracted by unsupervised contrastive learning. We assume that without incorrect labeling and class imbalance, the representations of instances in each class conform to a multivariate Gaussian distribution, which is much milder and easier to be checked. Based on the assumption, we recover underlying representation distributions from polluted ones resulting from mislabeled and class-imbalanced data. Additional data points are then sampled from the recovered distributions to help generalization. Moreover, during classifier training, representation learning takes advantage of representation robustness brought by contrastive learning, which further improves the classifier performance. We derive theoretical results to discuss the effectiveness of our representation calibration. Experiments on multiple benchmarks justify our claims and confirm the superiority of the proposed method.
Once Detected, Never Lost: Surpassing Human Performance in Offline LiDAR based 3D Object Detection

This paper aims for high-performance offline LiDAR-based 3D object detection. We first observe that experienced human annotators annotate objects from a track-centric perspective. They first label objects in a track with clear shapes, and then leverage the temporal coherence to infer the annotations of obscure objects. Drawing inspiration from this, we propose a high-performance offline detector in a track-centric perspective instead of the conventional object-centric perspective. Our method features a bidirectional tracking module and a track-centric learning module. Such design allows our detector to infer and refine a complete track once the object is detected at a certain moment. We refer this characteristic to "onCe detecTed, neveR Lost" and name the proposed system CTRL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the remarkable performance of our method, surpassing the human-level annotating accuracy and previous state-of-the-art methods in the highly competitive Waymo Open Dataset leaderboard without model ensemble. The code is available at https://github.com/tusen-ai/SST.
Controllable Guide-Space for Generalizable Face Forgery Detection

Recent studies on face forgery detection have shown satisfactory performance for methods involved in training datasets, but are not ideal enough for unknown domains. This motivates many works to improve the generalization, but forgery-irrelevant information, such as image background and identity, still exists in different domain features and causes unexpected clustering, limiting the generalization. In this paper, we propose a controllable guide-space (GS) method to enhance the discrimination of different forgery domains, so as to increase the forgery relevance of features and thereby improve the generalization. The well-designed guide-space can simultaneously achieve both the proper separation of forgery domains and the large distance between real-forgery domains in an explicit and controllable manner. Moreover, for better discrimination, we use a decoupling module to weaken the interference of forgery-irrelevant correlations between domains. Furthermore, we make adjustments to the decision boundary manifold according to the clustering degree of the same domain features within the neighborhood. Extensive experiments in multiple in-domain and cross-domain settings confirm that our method can achieve state-of-the-art generalization.
LivelySpeaker: Towards Semantic-Aware Co-Speech Gesture Generation

Gestures are non-verbal but important behaviors accompanying people’s speech. While previous methods are able to generate speech rhythm-synchronized gestures, the semantic context of the speech is generally lacking in the gesticulations. Although semantic gestures do not occur very regularly in human speech, they are indeed the key for the audience to understand the speech context in a more immersive environment. Hence, we introduce LivelySpeaker, a framework that realizes semantics-aware co-speech gesture generation and offers several control handles. In particular, our method decouples the task into two stages: script-based gesture generation and audio-guided rhythm refinement. Specifically, the script-based gesture generation leverages the pre-trained CLIP text embeddings as the guidance for generating gestures that are highly semantically aligned with the script. Then, we devise a simple but effective diffusion-based gesture generation backbone simply using pure MLPs, that is conditioned on only audio signals and learns to gesticulate with realistic motions. We utilize such powerful prior to rhyme the script-guided gestures with the audio signals, notably in a zero-shot setting. Our novel two-stage generation framework also enables several applications, such as changing the gesticulation style, editing the co-speech gestures via textual prompting, and controlling the semantic awareness and rhythm alignment with guided diffusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework over competing methods. In addition, our core diffusion-based generative model also achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmarks. The code and model will be released to facilitate future research.
XVO: Generalized Visual Odometry via Cross-Modal Self-Training

We propose XVO, a semi-supervised learning method for training generalized monocular Visual Odometry (VO) models with robust off-the-self operation across diverse datasets and settings. In contrast to standard monocular VO approaches which often study a known calibration within a single dataset, XVO efficiently learns to recover relative pose with real-world scale from visual scene semantics, i.e., without relying on any known camera parameters. We optimize the motion estimation model via self-training from large amounts of unconstrained and heterogeneous dash camera videos available on YouTube. Our key contribution is twofold. First, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of semi-supervised training for learning a general-purpose direct VO regression network. Second, we demonstrate multi-modal supervision, including segmentation, flow, depth, and audio auxiliary prediction tasks, to facilitate generalized representations for the VO task. Specifically, we find audio prediction task to significantly enhance the semi-supervised learning process while alleviating noisy pseudo-labels, particularly in highly dynamic and out-of-domain video data. Our proposed teacher network achieves state-of-the-art performance on the commonly used KITTI benchmark despite no multi-frame optimization or knowledge of camera parameters. Combined with the proposed semi-supervised step, XVO demonstrates off-the-shelf knowledge transfer across diverse conditions on KITTI, nuScenes, and Argoverse without fine-tuning.
Ordinal Label Distribution Learning

Label distribution learning (LDL) is a recent hot topic, in which ambiguity is modeled via description degrees of the labels. However, in common LDL tasks, e.g., age estimation, labels are in an intrinsic order. The conventional LDL paradigm adopts a per-label manner for optimization, neglecting the internal sequential patterns of labels. Therefore, we propose a new paradigm, termed ordinal label distribution learning (OLDL). We model the sequential patterns of labels from aspects of spatial, semantic, and temporal order relationships. The spatial order depicts the relative position between arbitrary labels. We build cross-label transformation between distributions, which is determined by the spatial margin in labels. Labels naturally yield different semantics, so the semantic order is represented by constructing semantic correlations between arbitrary labels. The temporal order describes that the presence of labels is determined by their order, i.e. five after four. The value of a particular label contains information about previous labels, and we adopt cumulative distribution to construct this relationship. Based on these characteristics of ordinal labels, we propose the learning objectives and evaluation metrics for OLDL, namely CAD, QFD, and CJS. Comprehensive experiments conducted on four tasks demonstrate the superiority of OLDL against other existing LDL methods in both traditional and newly proposed metrics. Our project page can be found at https://downdric23.github.io/.
Make Encoder Great Again in 3D GAN Inversion through Geometry and Occlusion-Aware Encoding

3D GAN inversion aims to achieve high reconstruction fidelity and reasonable 3D geometry simultaneously from a single image input. However, existing 3D GAN inversion methods rely on time-consuming optimization for each individual case. In this work, we introduce a novel encoder-based inversion framework based on EG3D, one of the most widely-used 3D GAN models. We leverage the inherent properties of EG3D’s latent space to design a discriminator and a background depth regularization. This enables us to train a geometry-aware encoder capable of converting the input image into corresponding latent code. Additionally, we explore the feature space of EG3D and develop an adaptive refinement stage that improves the representation ability of features in EG3D to enhance the recovery of fine-grained textural details. Finally, we propose an occlusion-aware fusion operation to prevent distortion in unobserved regions. Our method achieves impressive results comparable to optimization-based methods while operating up to 500 times faster. Our framework is well-suited for applications such as semantic editing.
Boosting Whole Slide Image Classification from the Perspectives of Distribution, Correlation and Magnification

Bag-based multiple instance learning (MIL) methods have become the mainstream for Whole Slide Image (WSI) classification. However, there are still three important issues that have not been fully addressed: (1) positive bags with a low positive instance ratio are prone to the influence of a large number of negative instances; (2) the correlation between local and global features of pathology images has not been fully modeled; and (3) there is a lack of effective information interaction between different magnifications. In this paper, we propose MILBooster, a powerful dual-scale multi-stage MIL framework to address these issues from the perspectives of distribution, correlation, and magnification. Specifically, to address issue (1), we propose a plug-and-play bag filter that effectively increases the positive instance ratio of positive bags. For issue (2), we propose a novel window-based Transformer architecture called PiceBlock to model the correlation between local and global features of pathology images. For issue (3), we propose a dual-branch architecture to process different magnifications and design an information interaction module called Scale Mixer for efficient information interaction between them. We conducted extensive experiments on four clinical WSI classification tasks using three datasets. MILBooster achieved new state-of-the-art performance on all these tasks. Codes will be available at https://github.com/miccaiif/MILBooster.
FaceCLIPNeRF: Text-driven 3D Face Manipulation using Deformable Neural Radiance Fields

As recent advances in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have enabled high-fidelity 3D face reconstruction and novel view synthesis, its manipulation also became an essential task in 3D vision. However, existing manipulation methods require extensive human labor, such as a user-provided semantic mask and manual attribute search unsuitable for non-expert users. Instead, our approach is designed to require a single text to manipulate a face reconstructed with NeRF. To do so, we first train a scene manipulator, a latent code-conditional deformable NeRF, over a dynamic scene to control a face deformation using the latent code. However, representing a scene deformation with a single latent code is unfavorable for compositing local deformations observed in different instances. As so, our proposed Position-conditional Anchor Compositor (PAC) learns to represent a manipulated scene with spatially varying latent codes. Their renderings with the scene manipulator are then optimized to yield high cosine similarity to a target text in CLIP embedding space for text-driven manipulation. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to address the text-driven manipulation of a face reconstructed with NeRF. Extensive results, comparisons, and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
EDAPS: Enhanced Domain-Adaptive Panoptic Segmentation

With autonomous industries on the rise, domain adaptation of the visual perception stack is an important research direction due to the cost savings promise. Much prior art was dedicated to domain-adaptive semantic segmentation in the synthetic-to-real context. Despite being a crucial output of the perception stack, panoptic segmentation has been largely overlooked by the domain adaptation community. Therefore, we revisit well-performing domain adaptation strategies from other fields, adapt them to panoptic segmentation, and show that they can effectively enhance panoptic domain adaptation. Further, we study the panoptic network design and propose a novel architecture (EDAPS) designed explicitly for domain-adaptive panoptic segmentation. It uses a shared, domain-robust transformer encoder to facilitate the joint adaptation of semantic and instance features, but task-specific decoders tailored for the specific requirements of both domain-adaptive semantic and instance segmentation. As a result, the performance gap seen in challenging panoptic benchmarks is substantially narrowed. EDAPS significantly improves the state-of-the-art performance for panoptic segmentation UDA by a large margin of 20% on SYNTHIA-to-Cityscapes and even 72% on the more challenging SYNTHIA-to-Mapillary Vistas. The implementation is available at https://github.com/susaha/edaps.
Learning with Diversity: Self-Expanded Equalization for Better Generalized Deep Metric Learning

Exploring good generalization ability is essential in deep metric learning (DML). Most existing DML methods focus on improving the model robustness against category shift to keep the performance on unseen categories. However, in addition to category shift, domain shift also widely exists in real-world scenarios. Therefore, learning better generalization ability for the DML model is still a challenging yet realistic problem. In this paper, we propose a new self-expanded equalization (SEE) method to effectively generalize the DML model to both unseen categories and domains. Specifically, we take a ‘min-max’ strategy combined with a proxy-based loss to adaptively augment diverse out-of-distribution samples that vastly expand the span of original training data. To take full advantage of the implicit cross-domain relations between source and augmented samples, we introduce a domain-aware equalization module to induce the domain-invariant distance metric by regularizing the feature distribution in the metric space. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks and a large-scale multi-domain dataset demonstrate the superiority of our SEE over the existing DML methods.
Parametric Classification for Generalized Category Discovery: A Baseline Study

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to discover novel categories in unlabelled datasets using knowledge learned from labelled samples. Previous studies argued that parametric classifiers are prone to overfitting to seen categories, and endorsed using a non-parametric classifier formed with semi-supervised k-means. However, in this study, we investigate the failure of parametric classifiers, verify the effectiveness of previous design choices when high-quality supervision is available, and identify unreliable pseudo-labels as a key problem. We demonstrate that two prediction biases exist: the classifier tends to predict seen classes more often, and produces an imbalanced distribution across seen and novel categories. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet effective parametric classification method that benefits from entropy regularisation, achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple GCD benchmarks and shows strong robustness to unknown class numbers. We hope the investigation and proposed simple framework can serve as a strong baseline to facilitate future studies in this field. Our code is available at: https://github.com/CVMI-Lab/SimGCD.