bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Neuroevolution of a Multi-Generator GAN (Student Abstract)
Authors: Pandey Suraj
Published: March 2024

Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) have been leveraged to tackle the challenges faced while using GANs such as mode collapse, vanishing gradient, latent space search, etc. However, the existing techniques of using EA with GANs operate backpropagation and EA in isolation from each other, leaving ample room for further exploration. This paper creates a collaborative bridge between EA and GANs by exploring a neuroevolution method for utilising both EA and backpropagation-based optimisation, simultaneously, for a multi-generator GAN architecture. Experiments conducted using a standard dataset with variants of the proposed method highlight the towering impact of each of the components involved in the proposed method.
Virtual Action Actor-Critic Framework for Exploration (Student Abstract)
Authors: Park Bumgeun , Kim Taeyoung , Lai-Dang Quoc-Vinh , Har Dongsoo
Published: March 2024

Efficient exploration for an agent is challenging in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, a novel actor-critic framework namely virtual action actor-critic (VAAC), is proposed to address the challenge of efficient exploration in RL. This work is inspired by humans' ability to imagine the potential outcomes of their actions without actually taking them. In order to emulate this ability, VAAC introduces a new actor called virtual actor (VA), alongside the conventional actor-critic framework. Unlike the conventional actor, the VA takes the virtual action to anticipate the next state without interacting with the environment. With the virtual policy following a Gaussian distribution, the VA is trained to maximize the anticipated novelty of the subsequent state resulting from a virtual action. If any next state resulting from available actions does not exhibit high anticipated novelty, training the VA leads to an increase in the virtual policy entropy. Hence, high virtual policy entropy represents that there is no room for exploration. The proposed VAAC aims to maximize a modified Q function, which combines cumulative rewards and the negative sum of virtual policy entropy. Experimental results show that the VAAC improves the exploration performance compared to existing algorithms.
Partially Observable Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with AI Planning (Student Abstract)
Authors: Rozek Brandon , Lee Junkyu , Kokel Harsha , Katz Michael , Sohrabi Shirin
Published: March 2024

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) challenge reinforcement learning agents due to incomplete knowledge of the environment. Even assuming monotonicity in uncertainty, it is difficult for an agent to know how and when to stop exploring for a given task. In this abstract, we discuss how to use hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and AI Planning (AIP) to improve exploration when the agent knows possible valuations of unknown predicates and how to discover them. By encoding the uncertainty in an abstract planning model, the agent can derive a high-level plan which is then used to decompose the overall POMDP into a tree of semi-POMDPs for training. We evaluate our agent's performance on the MiniGrid domain and show how guided exploration may improve agent performance.
Faithful Trip Recommender Using Diffusion Guidance (Student Abstract)
Authors: Shu Wenzheng , Huang Yanlong , Tai Wenxin , Cheng Zhangtao , Hui Bei , Trajcevski Goce
Published: March 2024

Trip recommendation aims to plan user’s travel based on their specified preferences. Traditional heuristic and statistical approaches often fail to capture the intricate nuances of user intentions, leading to subpar performance. Recent deep-learning methods show attractive accuracy but struggle to generate faithful trajectories that match user intentions. In this work, we propose a DDPM-based incremental knowledge injection module to ensure the faithfulness of the generated trajectories. Experiments on two datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.
Diverse Yet Biased: Towards Mitigating Biases in Generative AI (Student Abstract)
Authors: Singh Akshit
Published: March 2024

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has garnered significant attention for its remarkable ability to generate text, images, and other forms of content. However, an inherent and increasingly concerning issue within generative AI systems is bias. These AI models often exhibit an Anglo-centric bias and tend to overlook the importance of diversity. This can be attributed to their training on extensive datasets sourced from the internet, which inevitably inherit the biases present in those data sources. Employing these datasets leads to AI-generated content that mirrors and perpetuates existing biases, encompassing various aspects such as gender, ethnic and cultural stereotypes. Addressing bias in generative AI is a complex challenge that necessitates substantial efforts. In order to tackle this issue, we propose a methodology for constructing moderately sized datasets with a social inclination. These datasets can be employed to rectify existing imbalances in datasets or to train models to generate socially inclusive material. Additionally, we present preliminary findings derived from training our model on these socially inclined datasets.
Confidence Is All You Need for MI Attacks (Student Abstract)
Authors: Sinha Abhishek , Tibrewal Himanshi , Gupta Mansi , Waghela Nikhar , Garg Shivank
Published: March 2024

In this evolving era of machine learning security, membership inference attacks have emerged as a potent threat to the confidentiality of sensitive data. In this attack, adversaries aim to determine whether a particular point was used during the training of a target model. This paper proposes a new method to gauge a data point’s membership in a model’s training set. Instead of correlating loss with membership, as is traditionally done, we have leveraged the fact that training examples generally exhibit higher confidence values when classified into their actual class. During training, the model is essentially being ’fit’ to the training data and might face particular difficulties in generalization to unseen data. This asymmetry leads to the model achieving higher confidence on the training data as it exploits the specific patterns and noise present in the training data. Our proposed approach leverages the confidence values generated by the machine-learning model. These confidence values provide a probabilistic measure of the model’s certainty in its predictions and can further be used to infer the membership of a given data point. Additionally, we also introduce another variant of our method that allows us to carry out this attack without knowing the ground truth(true class) of a given data point, thus offering an edge over existing label-dependent attack methods.
Bridging the Gap between Source Code and Requirements Using GPT (Student Abstract)
Authors: Xu Ruoyu , Xu Zhenyu , Li Gaoxiang , Sheng Victor S.
Published: March 2024

Reverse engineering involves analyzing the design, architecture, and functionality of systems, and is crucial for legacy systems. Legacy systems are outdated software systems that are still in use and often lack proper documentation, which makes their maintenance and evolution challenging. To address this, we introduce SC2Req, utilizing the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) for automated code analysis and requirement generation. This approach aims to convert source code into understandable requirements and bridge the gap between those two. Through experiments on diverse software projects, SC2Req shows the potential to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of the translation process. This approach not only facilitates faster software development and easier maintenance of legacy systems but also lays a strong foundation for future research, promoting better understanding and communication in software development.
MRMLREC: A Two-Stage Approach for Addressing Data Sparsity in MOOC Video Recommendation (Student Abstract)
Authors: Zhang Ye , Gao Yanqi , Zhou Yupeng , Wang Jianan , Yin Minghao
Published: March 2024

With the abundance of learning resources available on massive open online courses (MOOCs) platforms, the issue of interactive data sparsity has emerged as a significant challenge.This paper introduces MRMLREC, an efficient MOOC video recommendation which consists of two main stages: multi-relational representation and multi-level recommendation, aiming to solve the problem of data sparsity. In the multi-relational representation stage, MRMLREC adopts a tripartite approach, constructing relational graphs based on temporal sequences, courses-videos relation, and knowledge concepts-video relation. These graphs are processed by a Graph Convolution Network (GCN) and two variant Graph Attention Networks (GAT) to derive representations. A variant of the Long Short-Term Memory Network (LSTM) then integrates these multi-dimensional data to enhance the overall representation. The multi-level recommendation stage introduces three prediction tasks at varying levels—courses, knowledge concepts, and videos—to mitigate data sparsity and improve the interpretability of video recommendations. Beam search (BS) is employed to identify top-β items at each level, refining the subsequent level's search space and enhancing recommendation efficiency. Additionally, an optional layer offers both personalization and diversification modes, ensuring variety in recommended videos and maintaining learner engagement. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MRMLREC on two real-world instances from Xuetang X.
Using Reinforcement Learning to Iteratively Construct Road Networks from Satellite Images and GPS Data
Authors: Gallardo Isaiah
Published: March 2024

Constructing road networks manually is a time consuming and labor-intensive process. This paper proposes a new method to iteratively construct road networks using reinforcement learning from a combined tensor-based representation of satellite image and GPS trajectory data.
Fast & Fair: A Collaborative Platform for Fair Division Applications
Authors: Han Jiatong , Suksompong Warut
Published: March 2024

Fair division, the study of how to fairly allocate resources among agents, has received substantial interest in the areas of artificial intelligence and multiagent systems. While there is an extensive theoretical literature on fair division by now, the developed algorithms are still mostly confined to research papers and inaccessible to the public. We attempt to bridge this gap by developing Fast & Fair, an open-source web application that hosts a number of fair allocation algorithms with user-friendly interfaces and explainable outcomes. In contrast to existing implementations, Fast & Fair is a collaborative platform that is open to community contributions and thereby facilitates the deployment of additional algorithms.
Generation of Visual Representations for Multi-Modal Mathematical Knowledge
Authors: Wu Lianlong , Choi Seewon , Raggi Daniel , Stockdill Aaron , Garcia Garcia Grecia , Colarusso Fiorenzo , Cheng Peter C.H. , Jamnik Mateja
Published: March 2024

In this paper we introduce MaRE, a tool designed to generate representations in multiple modalities for a given mathematical problem while ensuring the correctness and interpretability of the transformations between different representations. The theoretical foundation for this tool is Representational Systems Theory (RST), a mathematical framework for studying the structure and transformations of representations. In MaRE’s web front-end user interface, a set of probability equations in Bayesian Notation can be rigorously transformed into Area Diagrams, Contingency Tables, and Probability Trees with just one click, utilising a back-end engine based on RST. A table of cognitive costs, based on the cognitive Representational Interpretive Structure Theory (RIST), that a representation places on a particular profile of user is produced at the same time. MaRE is general and domain independent, applicable to other representations encoded in RST. It may enhance mathematical education and research, facilitating multi-modal knowledge representation and discovery.
NarrativePlay: An Automated System for Crafting Visual Worlds in Novels for Role-Playing
Authors: Zhao Runcong , Zhang Wenjia , Li Jiazheng , Zhu Lixing , Li Yanran , He Yulan , Gui Lin
Published: March 2024

In this demo, we present NarrativePlay -- an innovative system enabling users to role-play a fictional character and interact with dynamically generated narrative environments. Unlike existing predefined sandbox approaches, NarrativePlay centres around the main storyline events extracted from the narrative, allowing users to experience the story from the perspective of a character they chose. To design versatile AI agents for diverse scenarios, we employ a framework built on a Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract detailed character traits from text. We also incorporate automatically generated visual displays of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing the overall user experience.
Frequency-Controlled Diffusion Model for Versatile Text-Guided Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Gao Xiang , Xu Zhengbo , Zhao Junhan , Liu Jiaying
Published: March 2024

Recently, text-to-image diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for image-to-image translation (I2I), allowing flexible image translation via user-provided text prompts. This paper proposes frequency-controlled diffusion model (FCDiffusion), an end-to-end diffusion-based framework contributing a novel solution to text-guided I2I from a frequency-domain perspective. At the heart of our framework is a feature-space frequency-domain filtering module based on Discrete Cosine Transform, which extracts image features carrying different DCT spectral bands to control the text-to-image generation process of the Latent Diffusion Model, realizing versatile I2I applications including style-guided content creation, image semantic manipulation, image scene translation, and image style translation. Different from related methods, FCDiffusion establishes a unified text-driven I2I framework suiting diverse I2I application scenarios simply by switching among different frequency control branches. The effectiveness and superiority of our method for text-guided I2I are demonstrated with extensive experiments both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our project is publicly available at: https://xianggao1102.github.io/FCDiffusion/.
Multi-Scene Generalized Trajectory Global Graph Solver with Composite Nodes for Multiple Object Tracking
Authors: Gao Yan , Xu Haojun , Li Jie , Wang Nannan , Gao Xinbo
Published: March 2024

The global multi-object tracking (MOT) system can consider interaction, occlusion, and other ``visual blur'' scenarios to ensure effective object tracking in long videos. Among them, graph-based tracking-by-detection paradigms achieve surprising performance. However, their fully-connected nature poses storage space requirements that challenge algorithm handling long videos. Currently, commonly used methods are still generated trajectories by building one-forward associations across frames. Such matches produced under the guidance of first-order similarity information may not be optimal from a longer-time perspective. Moreover, they often lack an end-to-end scheme for correcting mismatches. This paper proposes the Composite Node Message Passing Network (CoNo-Link), a multi-scene generalized framework for modeling ultra-long frames information for association. CoNo-Link's solution is a low-storage overhead method for building constrained connected graphs. In addition to the previous method of treating objects as nodes, the network innovatively treats object trajectories as nodes for information interaction, improving the graph neural network's feature representation capability. Specifically, we formulate the graph-building problem as a top-k selection task for some reliable objects or trajectories. Our model can learn better predictions on longer-time scales by adding composite nodes. As a result, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art in several commonly used datasets.
SDAC: A Multimodal Synthetic Dataset for Anomaly and Corner Case Detection in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Gong Lei , Zhang Yu , Xia Yingqing , Zhang Yanyong , Ji Jianmin
Published: March 2024

Nowadays, closed-set perception methods for autonomous driving perform well on datasets containing normal scenes. However, they still struggle to handle anomalies in the real world, such as unknown objects that have never been seen while training. The lack of public datasets to evaluate the model performance on anomaly and corner cases has hindered the development of reliable autonomous driving systems. Therefore, we propose a multimodal Synthetic Dataset for Anomaly and Corner case detection, called SDAC, which encompasses anomalies captured from multi-view cameras and the LiDAR sensor, providing a rich set of annotations for multiple mainstream perception tasks. SDAC is the first public dataset for autonomous driving that categorizes anomalies into object, scene, and scenario levels, allowing the evaluation under different anomalous conditions. Experiments show that closed-set models suffer significant performance drops on anomaly subsets in SDAC. Existing anomaly detection methods fail to achieve satisfactory performance, suggesting that anomaly detection remains a challenging problem. We anticipate that our SDAC dataset could foster the development of safe and reliable systems for autonomous driving.
AnomalyGPT: Detecting Industrial Anomalies Using Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Gu Zhaopeng , Zhu Bingke , Zhu Guibo , Chen Yingying , Tang Ming , Wang Jinqiao
Published: March 2024

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) such as MiniGPT-4 and LLaVA have demonstrated the capability of understanding images and achieved remarkable performance in various visual tasks. Despite their strong abilities in recognizing common objects due to extensive training datasets, they lack specific domain knowledge and have a weaker understanding of localized details within objects, which hinders their effectiveness in the Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) task. On the other hand, most existing IAD methods only provide anomaly scores and necessitate the manual setting of thresholds to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples, which restricts their practical implementation. In this paper, we explore the utilization of LVLM to address the IAD problem and propose AnomalyGPT, a novel IAD approach based on LVLM. We generate training data by simulating anomalous images and producing corresponding textual descriptions for each image. We also employ an image decoder to provide fine-grained semantic and design a prompt learner to fine-tune the LVLM using prompt embeddings. Our AnomalyGPT eliminates the need for manual threshold adjustments, thus directly assesses the presence and locations of anomalies. Additionally, AnomalyGPT supports multi-turn dialogues and exhibits impressive few-shot in-context learning capabilities. With only one normal shot, AnomalyGPT achieves the state-of-the-art performance with an accuracy of 86.1%, an image-level AUC of 94.1%, and a pixel-level AUC of 95.3% on the MVTec-AD dataset.
Improving Audio-Visual Segmentation with Bidirectional Generation
Authors: Hao Dawei , Mao Yuxin , He Bowen , Han Xiaodong , Dai Yuchao , Zhong Yiran
Published: March 2024

The aim of audio-visual segmentation (AVS) is to precisely differentiate audible objects within videos down to the pixel level. Traditional approaches often tackle this challenge by combining information from various modalities, where the contribution of each modality is implicitly or explicitly modeled. Nevertheless, the interconnections between different modalities tend to be overlooked in audio-visual modeling. In this paper, inspired by the human ability to mentally simulate the sound of an object and its visual appearance, we introduce a bidirectional generation framework. This framework establishes robust correlations between an object's visual characteristics and its associated sound, thereby enhancing the performance of AVS. To achieve this, we employ a visual-to-audio projection component that reconstructs audio features from object segmentation masks and minimizes reconstruction errors. Moreover, recognizing that many sounds are linked to object movements, we introduce an implicit volumetric motion estimation module to handle temporal dynamics that may be challenging to capture using conventional optical flow methods. To showcase the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct comprehensive experiments and analyses on the widely recognized AVSBench benchmark. As a result, we establish a new state-of-the-art performance level in the AVS benchmark, particularly excelling in the challenging MS3 subset which involves segmenting multiple sound sources. Code is released in: https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/AVS-bidirectional.
Progressive Feature Self-Reinforcement for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: He Jingxuan , Cheng Lechao , Fang Chaowei , Feng Zunlei , Mu Tingting , Song Mingli
Published: March 2024

Compared to conventional semantic segmentation with pixel-level supervision, weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels poses the challenge that it commonly focuses on the most discriminative regions, resulting in a disparity between weakly and fully supervision scenarios. A typical manifestation is the diminished precision on object boundaries, leading to deteriorated accuracy of WSSS. To alleviate this issue, we propose to adaptively partition the image content into certain regions (e.g., confident foreground and background) and uncertain regions (e.g., object boundaries and misclassified categories) for separate processing. For uncertain cues, we propose an adaptive masking strategy and seek to recover the local information with self-distilled knowledge. We further assume that confident regions should be robust enough to preserve the global semantics, and introduce a complementary self-distillation method that constrains semantic consistency between confident regions and an augmented view with the same class labels. Extensive experiments conducted on PASCAL VOC 2012 and MS COCO 2014 demonstrate that our proposed single-stage approach for WSSS not only outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts but also surpasses multi-stage methods that trade complexity for accuracy.
Enhancing RAW-to-sRGB with Decoupled Style Structure in Fourier Domain
Authors: He Xuanhua , Hu Tao , Wang Guoli , Wang Zejin , Wang Run , Zhang Qian , Yan Keyu , Chen Ziyi , Li Rui , Xie Chengjun , Zhang Jie , Zhou Man
Published: March 2024

RAW to sRGB mapping, which aims to convert RAW images from smartphones into RGB form equivalent to that of Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras, has become an important area of research. However, current methods often ignore the difference between cell phone RAW images and DSLR camera RGB images, a difference that goes beyond the color matrix and extends to spatial structure due to resolution variations. Recent methods directly rebuild color mapping and spatial structure via shared deep representation, limiting optimal performance. Inspired by Image Signal Processing (ISP) pipeline, which distinguishes image restoration and enhancement, we present a novel Neural ISP framework, named FourierISP. This approach breaks the image down into style and structure within the frequency domain, allowing for independent optimization. FourierISP is comprised of three subnetworks: Phase Enhance Subnet for structural refinement, Amplitude Refine Subnet for color learning, and Color Adaptation Subnet for blending them in a smooth manner. This approach sharpens both color and structure, and extensive evaluations across varied datasets confirm that our approach realizes state-of-the-art results. Code will be available at https://github.com/alexhe101/FourierISP.
MotionMix: Weakly-Supervised Diffusion for Controllable Motion Generation
Authors: Hoang Nhat M. , Gong Kehong , Guo Chuan , Bi Mi Michael
Published: March 2024

Controllable generation of 3D human motions becomes an important topic as the world embraces digital transformation. Existing works, though making promising progress with the advent of diffusion models, heavily rely on meticulously captured and annotated (e.g., text) high-quality motion corpus, a resource-intensive endeavor in the real world. This motivates our proposed MotionMix, a simple yet effective weakly-supervised diffusion model that leverages both noisy and unannotated motion sequences. Specifically, we separate the denoising objectives of a diffusion model into two stages: obtaining conditional rough motion approximations in the initial T-T* steps by learning the noisy annotated motions, followed by the unconditional refinement of these preliminary motions during the last T* steps using unannotated motions. Notably, though learning from two sources of imperfect data, our model does not compromise motion generation quality compared to fully supervised approaches that access gold data. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that our MotionMix, as a versatile framework, consistently achieves state-of-the-art performances on text-to-motion, action-to-motion, and music-to-dance tasks.
Learning Subject-Aware Cropping by Outpainting Professional Photos
Authors: Hong James , Yuan Lu , Gharbi Michaël , Fisher Matthew , Fatahalian Kayvon
Published: March 2024

How to frame (or crop) a photo often depends on the image subject and its context; e.g., a human portrait. Recent works have defined the subject-aware image cropping task as a nuanced and practical version of image cropping. We propose a weakly-supervised approach (GenCrop) to learn what makes a high-quality, subject-aware crop from professional stock images. Unlike supervised prior work, GenCrop requires no new manual annotations beyond the existing stock image collection. The key challenge in learning from this data, however, is that the images are already cropped and we do not know what regions were removed. Our insight is to combine a library of stock images with a modern, pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. The stock image collection provides diversity, and its images serve as pseudo-labels for a good crop. The text-image diffusion model is used to out-paint (i.e., outward inpainting) realistic uncropped images. Using this procedure, we are able to automatically generate a large dataset of cropped-uncropped training pairs to train a cropping model. Despite being weakly-supervised, GenCrop is competitive with state-of-the-art supervised methods and significantly better than comparable weakly-supervised baselines on quantitative and qualitative evaluation metrics.
BLIVA: A Simple Multimodal LLM for Better Handling of Text-Rich Visual Questions
Authors: Hu Wenbo , Xu Yifan , Li Yi , Li Weiyue , Chen Zeyuan , Tu Zhuowen
Published: March 2024

Vision Language Models (VLMs), which extend Large Language Models (LLM) by incorporating visual understanding capability, have demonstrated significant advancements in addressing open-ended visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. However, these models cannot accurately interpret images infused with text, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. Standard procedures for extracting information from images often involve learning a fixed set of query embeddings. These embeddings are designed to encapsulate image contexts and are later used as soft prompt inputs in LLMs. Yet, this process is limited to the token count, potentially curtailing the recognition of scenes with text-rich context. To improve upon them, the present study introduces BLIVA: an augmented version of InstructBLIP with Visual Assistant. BLIVA incorporates the query embeddings from InstructBLIP and also directly projects encoded patch embeddings into the LLM, a technique inspired by LLaVA. This approach assists the model to capture intricate details potentially missed during the query decoding process. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our model, BLIVA, significantly enhances performance in processing text-rich VQA benchmarks (up to 17.76% in OCR-VQA benchmark) and in undertaking general (not particularly text-rich) VQA benchmarks (up to 7.9% in Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark), and achieved 17.72% overall improvement in a comprehensive multimodal LLM benchmark (MME), comparing to our baseline InstructBLIP. BLIVA demonstrates significant capability in decoding real-world images, irrespective of text presence. To demonstrate the broad industry applications enabled by BLIVA, we evaluate the model using a new dataset comprising YouTube thumbnails paired with question-answer sets across 11 diverse categories. For researchers interested in further exploration, our code and models are freely accessible at https://github.com/mlpc-ucsd/BLIVA.
NeuSurf: On-Surface Priors for Neural Surface Reconstruction from Sparse Input Views
Authors: Huang Han , Wu Yulun , Zhou Junsheng , Gao Ge , Gu Ming , Liu Yu-Shen
Published: March 2024

Recently, neural implicit functions have demonstrated remarkable results in the field of multi-view reconstruction. However, most existing methods are tailored for dense views and exhibit unsatisfactory performance when dealing with sparse views. Several latest methods have been proposed for generalizing implicit reconstruction to address the sparse view reconstruction task, but they still suffer from high training costs and are merely valid under carefully selected perspectives. In this paper, we propose a novel sparse view reconstruction framework that leverages on-surface priors to achieve highly faithful surface reconstruction. Specifically, we design several constraints on global geometry alignment and local geometry refinement for jointly optimizing coarse shapes and fine details. To achieve this, we train a neural network to learn a global implicit field from the on-surface points obtained from SfM and then leverage it as a coarse geometric constraint. To exploit local geometric consistency, we project on-surface points onto seen and unseen views, treating the consistent loss of projected features as a fine geometric constraint. The experimental results with DTU and BlendedMVS datasets in two prevalent sparse settings demonstrate significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods.
Sunshine to Rainstorm: Cross-Weather Knowledge Distillation for Robust 3D Object Detection
Authors: Huang Xun , Wu Hai , Li Xin , Fan Xiaoliang , Wen Chenglu , Wang Cheng
Published: March 2024

LiDAR-based 3D object detection models inevitably struggle under rainy conditions due to the degraded and noisy scanning signals. Previous research has attempted to address this by simulating the noise from rain to improve the robustness of detection models. However, significant disparities exist between simulated and actual rain-impacted data points. In this work, we propose a novel rain simulation method, termed DRET, that unifies Dynamics and Rainy Environment Theory to provide a cost-effective means of expanding the available realistic rain data for 3D detection training. Furthermore, we present a Sunny-to-Rainy Knowledge Distillation (SRKD) approach to enhance 3D detection under rainy conditions. Extensive experiments on the Waymo-Open-Dataset show that, when combined with the state-of-the-art DSVT model and other classical 3D detectors, our proposed framework demonstrates significant detection accuracy improvements, without losing efficiency. Remarkably, our framework also improves detection capabilities under sunny conditions, therefore offering a robust solution for 3D detection regardless of whether the weather is rainy or sunny.
Transferable Video Moment Localization by Moment-Guided Query Prompting
Authors: Jiang Hao , Yizhang Yang , Mu Yadong
Published: March 2024

Video moment localization stands as a crucial task within the realm of computer vision, entailing the identification of temporal moments in untrimmed videos that bear semantic relevance to the supplied natural language queries. This work delves into a relatively unexplored facet of the task: the transferability of video moment localization models. This concern is addressed by evaluating moment localization models within a cross-domain transfer setting. In this setup, we curate multiple datasets distinguished by substantial domain gaps. The model undergoes training on one of these datasets, while validation and testing are executed using the remaining datasets. To confront the challenges inherent in this scenario, we draw inspiration from the recently introduced large-scale pre-trained vision-language models. Our focus is on exploring how the strategic utilization of these resources can bolster the capabilities of a model designed for video moment localization. Nevertheless, the distribution of language queries in video moment localization usually diverges from the text used by pre-trained models, exhibiting distinctions in aspects such as length, content, expression, and more. To mitigate the gap, this work proposes a Moment-Guided Query Prompting (MGQP) method for video moment localization. Our key idea is to generate multiple distinct and complementary prompt primitives through stratification of the original queries. Our approach is comprised of a prompt primitive constructor, a multimodal prompt refiner, and a holistic prompt incorporator. We carry out extensive experiments on Charades-STA, TACoS, DiDeMo, and YouCookII datasets, and investigate the efficacy of the proposed method using various pre-trained models, such as CLIP, ActionCLIP, CLIP4Clip, and VideoCLIP. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Rethinking Robustness of Model Attributions
Authors: Kamath Sandesh , Mittal Sankalp , Deshpande Amit , Balasubramanian Vineeth N
Published: March 2024

For machine learning models to be reliable and trustworthy, their decisions must be interpretable. As these models find increasing use in safety-critical applications, it is important that not just the model predictions but also their explanations (as feature attributions) be robust to small human-imperceptible input perturbations. Recent works have shown that many attribution methods are fragile and have proposed improvements in either these methods or the model training. We observe two main causes for fragile attributions: first, the existing metrics of robustness (e.g., top-k intersection) overpenalize even reasonable local shifts in attribution, thereby making random perturbations to appear as a strong attack, and second, the attribution can be concentrated in a small region even when there are multiple important parts in an image. To rectify this, we propose simple ways to strengthen existing metrics and attribution methods that incorporate locality of pixels in robustness metrics and diversity of pixel locations in attributions. Towards the role of model training in attributional robustness, we empirically observe that adversarially trained models have more robust attributions on smaller datasets, however, this advantage disappears in larger datasets. Code is made available at https://github.com/ksandeshk/LENS.
VLCounter: Text-Aware Visual Representation for Zero-Shot Object Counting
Authors: Kang Seunggu , Moon WonJun , Kim Euiyeon , Heo Jae-Pil
Published: March 2024

Zero-Shot Object Counting~(ZSOC) aims to count referred instances of arbitrary classes in a query image without human-annotated exemplars. To deal with ZSOC, preceding studies proposed a two-stage pipeline: discovering exemplars and counting. However, there remains a challenge of vulnerability to error propagation of the sequentially designed two-stage process. In this work, we propose an one-stage baseline, Visual-Language Baseline (VLBase), exploring the implicit association of the semantic-patch embeddings of CLIP. Subsequently, we extend the VLBase to Visual-language Counter (VLCounter) by incorporating three modules devised to tailor VLBase for object counting. First, we introduce Semantic-conditioned Prompt Tuning (SPT) within the image encoder to acquire target-highlighted representations. Second, Learnable Affine Transformation (LAT) is employed to translate the semantic-patch similarity map to be appropriate for the counting task. Lastly, we transfer the layer-wisely encoded features to the decoder through Segment-aware Skip Connection (SaSC) to keep the generalization capability for unseen classes. Through extensive experiments on FSC147, CARPK, and PUCPR+, we demonstrate the benefits of our end-to-end framework, VLCounter. Code is available at https://github.com/seunggu0305/VLCounter
MFOS: Model-Free & One-Shot Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Lee JongMin , Cabon Yohann , Brégier Romain , Yoo Sungjoo , Revaud Jerome
Published: March 2024

Existing learning-based methods for object pose estimation in RGB images are mostly model-specific or category based. They lack the capability to generalize to new object categories at test time, hence severely hindering their practicability and scalability. Notably, recent attempts have been made to solve this issue, but they still require accurate 3D data of the object surface at both train and test time. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that can estimate in a single forward pass the pose of objects never seen during training, given minimum input. In contrast to existing state-of-the-art approaches, which rely on task-specific modules, our proposed model is entirely based on a transformer architecture, which can benefit from recently proposed 3D-geometry general pretraining. We conduct extensive experiments and report state-of-the-art one-shot performance on the challenging LINEMOD benchmark. Finally, extensive ablations allow us to determine good practices with this relatively new type of architecture in the field.
Noise-Free Optimization in Early Training Steps for Image Super-resolution
Authors: Lee MinKyu , Heo Jae-Pil
Published: March 2024

Recent deep-learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods have shown impressive performance whereas typical methods train their networks by minimizing the pixel-wise distance with respect to a given high-resolution (HR) image. However, despite the basic training scheme being the predominant choice, its use in the context of ill-posed inverse problems has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we aim to provide a better comprehension of the underlying constituent by decomposing target HR images into two subcomponents: (1) the optimal centroid which is the expectation over multiple potential HR images, and (2) the inherent noise defined as the residual between the HR image and the centroid. Our findings show that the current training scheme cannot capture the ill-posed nature of SISR and becomes vulnerable to the inherent noise term, especially during early training steps. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel optimization method that can effectively remove the inherent noise term in the early steps of vanilla training by estimating the optimal centroid and directly optimizing toward the estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance the stability of vanilla training, leading to overall performance gain. Codes are available at github.com/2minkyulee/ECO.
Spectrum Translation for Refinement of Image Generation (STIG) Based on Contrastive Learning and Spectral Filter Profile
Authors: Lee Seokjun , Jung Seung-Won , Seo Hyunseok
Published: March 2024

Currently, image generation and synthesis have remarkably progressed with generative models. Despite photo-realistic results, intrinsic discrepancies are still observed in the frequency domain. The spectral discrepancy appeared not only in generative adversarial networks but in diffusion models. In this study, we propose a framework to effectively mitigate the disparity in frequency domain of the generated images to improve generative performance of both GAN and diffusion models. This is realized by spectrum translation for the refinement of image generation (STIG) based on contrastive learning. We adopt theoretical logic of frequency components in various generative networks. The key idea, here, is to refine the spectrum of the generated image via the concept of image-to-image translation and contrastive learning in terms of digital signal processing. We evaluate our framework across eight fake image datasets and various cutting-edge models to demonstrate the effectiveness of STIG. Our framework outperforms other cutting-edges showing significant decreases in FID and log frequency distance of spectrum. We further emphasize that STIG improves image quality by decreasing the spectral anomaly. Additionally, validation results present that the frequency-based deepfake detector confuses more in the case where fake spectrums are manipulated by STIG.
Few-Shot Neural Radiance Fields under Unconstrained Illumination
Authors: Lee SeokYeong , Choi JunYong , Kim Seungryong , Kim Ig-Jae , Cho Junghyun
Published: March 2024

In this paper, we introduce a new challenge for synthesizing novel view images in practical environments with limited input multi-view images and varying lighting conditions. Neural radiance fields (NeRF), one of the pioneering works for this task, demand an extensive set of multi-view images taken under constrained illumination, which is often unattainable in real-world settings. While some previous works have managed to synthesize novel views given images with different illumination, their performance still relies on a substantial number of input multi-view images. To address this problem, we suggest ExtremeNeRF, which utilizes multi-view albedo consistency, supported by geometric alignment. Specifically, we extract intrinsic image components that should be illumination-invariant across different views, enabling direct appearance comparison between the input and novel view under unconstrained illumination. We offer thorough experimental results for task evaluation, employing the newly created NeRF Extreme benchmark—the first in-the-wild benchmark for novel view synthesis under multiple viewing directions and varying illuminations.
Few-Shot Learning from Augmented Label-Uncertain Queries in Bongard-HOI
Authors: Lei Qinqian , Wang Bo , Tan Robby T.
Published: March 2024

Detecting human-object interactions (HOI) in a few-shot setting remains a challenge. Existing meta-learning methods struggle to extract representative features for classification due to the limited data, while existing few-shot HOI models rely on HOI text labels for classification. Moreover, some query images may display visual similarity to those outside their class, such as similar backgrounds between different HOI classes. This makes learning more challenging, especially with limited samples. Bongard-HOI epitomizes this HOI few-shot problem, making it the benchmark we focus on in this paper. In our proposed method, we introduce novel label-uncertain query augmentation techniques to enhance the diversity of the query inputs, aiming to distinguish the positive HOI class from the negative ones. As these augmented inputs may or may not have the same class label as the original inputs, their class label is unknown. Those belonging to a different class become hard samples due to their visual similarity to the original ones. Additionally, we introduce a novel pseudo-label generation technique that enables a mean teacher model to learn from the augmented label-uncertain inputs. We propose to augment the negative support set for the student model to enrich the semantic information, fostering diversity that challenges and enhances the student’s learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method sets a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance by achieving 68.74% accuracy on the Bongard-HOI benchmark, a significant improvement over the existing SOTA of 66.59%. In our evaluation on HICO-FS, a more general few-shot recognition dataset, our method achieves 73.27% accuracy, outperforming the previous SOTA of 71.20% in the 5- way 5-shot task.
Removing Interference and Recovering Content Imaginatively for Visible Watermark Removal
Authors: Leng Yicheng , Fang Chaowei , Li Gen , Fang Yixiang , Li Guanbin
Published: March 2024

Visible watermarks, while instrumental in protecting image copyrights, frequently distort the underlying content, complicating tasks like scene interpretation and image editing. Visible watermark removal aims to eliminate the interference of watermarks and restore the background content. However, existing methods often implement watermark component removal and background restoration tasks within a singular branch, leading to residual watermarks in the predictions and ignoring cases where watermarks heavily obscure the background. To address these limitations, this study introduces the Removing Interference and Recovering Content Imaginatively (RIRCI) framework. RIRCI embodies a two-stage approach: the initial phase centers on discerning and segregating the watermark component, while the subsequent phase focuses on background content restoration. To achieve meticulous background restoration, our proposed model employs a dual-path network capable of fully exploring the intrinsic background information beneath semi-transparent watermarks and peripheral contextual information from unaffected regions. Moreover, a Global and Local Context Interaction module is built upon multi-layer perceptrons and bidirectional feature transformation for comprehensive representation modeling in the background restoration phase. The efficacy of our approach is empirically validated across two large-scale datasets, and our findings reveal a marked enhancement over existing watermark removal techniques.
Data Roaming and Quality Assessment for Composed Image Retrieval
Authors: Levy Matan , Ben-Ari Rami , Darshan Nir , Lischinski Dani
Published: March 2024

The task of Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR) involves queries that combine image and text modalities, allowing users to express their intent more effectively. However, current CoIR datasets are orders of magnitude smaller compared to other vision and language (V&L) datasets. Additionally, some of these datasets have noticeable issues, such as queries containing redundant modalities. To address these shortcomings, we introduce the Large Scale Composed Image Retrieval (LaSCo) dataset, a new CoIR dataset which is ten times larger than existing ones. Pre-training on our LaSCo, shows a noteworthy improvement in performance, even in zero-shot. Furthermore, we propose a new approach for analyzing CoIR datasets and methods, which detects modality redundancy or necessity, in queries.
We also introduce a new CoIR baseline, the Cross-Attention driven Shift Encoder (CASE). This baseline allows for early fusion of modalities using a cross-attention module and employs an additional auxiliary task during training. Our experiments demonstrate that this new baseline outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on established benchmarks like FashionIQ and CIRR.