pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ada-NETS: Face Clustering via Adaptive Neighbour Discovery in the Structure Space
Authors: Yaohua Wang, Yaobin Zhang, Fangyi Zhang, Ming Lin, Yuqi Zhang, Senzhang Wang, Xiuyu Sun
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Clustering, Face Clustering

Face clustering has attracted rising research interest recently to take advantage of massive amounts of face images on the web. State-of-the-art performance has been achieved by Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) due to their powerful representation capacity. However, existing GCN-based methods build face graphs mainly according to kNN relations in the feature space, which may lead to a lot of noise edges connecting two faces of different classes. The face features will be polluted when messages pass along these noise edges, thus degrading the performance of GCNs. In this paper, a novel algorithm named Ada-NETS is proposed to cluster faces by constructing clean graphs for GCNs. In Ada-NETS, each face is transformed to a new structure space, obtaining robust features by considering face features of the neighbour images. Then, an adaptive neighbour discovery strategy is proposed to determine a proper number of edges connecting to each face image. It significantly reduces the noise edges while maintaining the good ones to build a graph with clean yet rich edges for GCNs to cluster faces. Experiments on multiple public clustering datasets show that Ada-NETS significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, proving its superiority and generalization. Code is available at https://github.com/damo-cv/Ada-NETS.
SCR: Smooth Contour Regression with Geometric Priors
Authors: Gaetan Bahl, Lionel Daniel, Florent Lafarge
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, regression, Semantic Segmentation

While object detection methods traditionally make use of pixel-level masks or bounding boxes, alternative representations such as polygons or active contours have recently emerged. Among them, methods based on the regression of Fourier or Chebyshev coefficients have shown high potential on freeform objects. By defining object shapes as polar functions, they are however limited to star-shaped domains. We address this issue with SCR: a method that captures resolution-free object contours as complex periodic functions. The method offers a good compromise between accuracy and compactness thanks to the design of efficient geometric shape priors. We benchmark SCR on the popular COCO 2017 instance segmentation dataset, and show its competitiveness against existing algorithms in the field. In addition, we design a compact version of our network, which we benchmark on embedded hardware with a wide range of power targets, achieving up to real-time performance.
Addressing Data Scarcity in Multimodal User State Recognition by Combining Semi-Supervised and Supervised Learning
Authors: Hendric Voß, Heiko Wersing, Stefan Kopp
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Detecting mental states of human users is crucial for the development of cooperative and intelligent robots, as it enables the robot to understand the user's intentions and desires. Despite their importance, it is difficult to obtain a large amount of high quality data for training automatic recognition algorithms as the time and effort required to collect and label such data is prohibitively high. In this paper we present a multimodal machine learning approach for detecting dis-/agreement and confusion states in a human-robot interaction environment, using just a small amount of manually annotated data. We collect a data set by conducting a human-robot interaction study and develop a novel preprocessing pipeline for our machine learning approach. By combining semi-supervised and supervised architectures, we are able to achieve an average F1-score of 81.1\% for dis-/agreement detection with a small amount of labeled data and a large unlabeled data set, while simultaneously increasing the robustness of the model compared to the supervised approach.
Consistency-Regularized Region-Growing Network for Semantic Segmentation of Urban Scenes with Point-Level Annotations
Authors: Yonghao Xu, Pedram Ghamisi
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning algorithms have obtained great success in semantic segmentation of very high-resolution (VHR) images. Nevertheless, training these models generally requires a large amount of accurate pixel-wise annotations, which is very laborious and time-consuming to collect. To reduce the annotation burden, this paper proposes a consistency-regularized region-growing network (CRGNet) to achieve semantic segmentation of VHR images with point-level annotations. The key idea of CRGNet is to iteratively select unlabeled pixels with high confidence to expand the annotated area from the original sparse points. However, since there may exist some errors and noises in the expanded annotations, directly learning from them may mislead the training of the network. To this end, we further propose the consistency regularization strategy, where a base classifier and an expanded classifier are employed. Specifically, the base classifier is supervised by the original sparse annotations, while the expanded classifier aims to learn from the expanded annotations generated by the base classifier with the region-growing mechanism. The consistency regularization is thereby achieved by minimizing the discrepancy between the predictions from both the base and the expanded classifiers. We find such a simple regularization strategy is yet very useful to control the quality of the region-growing mechanism. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed CRGNet significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods. Codes and pre-trained models are available online (https://github.com/YonghaoXu/CRGNet).
A Survey of Breast Cancer Screening Techniques: Thermography and Electrical Impedance Tomography
Authors: Juan Zuluaga-Gomez, N. Zerhouni, Z. Al Masry, C. Devalland, C. Varnier
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00

Breast cancer is a disease that threatens many women's life, thus, early and accurate detection plays a key role in reducing the mortality rate. Mammography stands as the reference technique for breast cancer screening; nevertheless, many countries still lack access to mammograms due to economic, social, and cultural issues. Last advances in computational tools, infrared cameras, and devices for bio-impedance quantification allowed the development of parallel techniques like thermography, infrared imaging, and electrical impedance tomography, these being faster, reliable and cheaper. In the last decades, these have been considered as complement procedures for breast cancer diagnosis, where many studies concluded that false positive and false negative rates are greatly reduced. This work aims to review the last breakthroughs about the three above-mentioned techniques describing the benefits of mixing several computational skills to obtain a better global performance. In addition, we provide a comparison between several machine learning techniques applied to breast cancer diagnosis going from logistic regression, decision trees, and random forest to artificial, deep, and convolutional neural networks. Finally, it is mentioned several recommendations for 3D breast simulations, pre-processing techniques, biomedical devices in the research field, prediction of tumor location and size.
Navigating to Objects in Unseen Environments by Distance Prediction
Authors: Minzhao Zhu, Binglei Zhao, Tao Kong
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Object, Prediction

Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) task is to navigate an agent to an object category in unseen environments without a pre-built map. In this paper, we solve this task by predicting the distance to the target using semantically-related objects as cues. Based on the estimated distance to the target object, our method directly choose optimal mid-term goals that are more likely to have a shorter path to the target. Specifically, based on the learned knowledge, our model takes a bird's-eye view semantic map as input, and estimates the path length from the frontier map cells to the target object. With the estimated distance map, the agent could simultaneously explore the environment and navigate to the target objects based on a simple human-designed strategy. Empirical results in visually realistic simulation environments show that the proposed method outperforms a wide range of baselines on success rate and efficiency. Real-robot experiment also demonstrates that our method generalizes well to the real world. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R79pWVGFKS4
Binary Neural Networks as a general-propose compute paradigm for on-device computer vision
Authors: Guhong Nie, Lirui Xiao, Menglong Zhu, Dongliang Chu, Yue Shen, Peng Li, Kang Yang, Li Du, Bo Chen
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Super-Resolution

For binary neural networks (BNNs) to become the mainstream on-device computer vision algorithm, they must achieve a superior speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff than 8-bit quantization and establish a similar degree of general applicability in vision tasks. To this end, we propose a BNN framework comprising 1) a minimalistic inference scheme for hardware-friendliness, 2) an over-parameterized training scheme for high accuracy, and 3) a simple procedure to adapt to different vision tasks. The resultant framework overtakes 8-bit quantization in the speed-vs-accuracy tradeoff for classification, detection, segmentation, super-resolution and matching: our BNNs not only retain the accuracy levels of their 8-bit baselines but also showcase 1.3-2.4$\times$ faster FPS on mobile CPUs. Similar conclusions can be drawn for prototypical systolic-array-based AI accelerators, where our BNNs promise 2.8-7$\times$ fewer execution cycles than 8-bit and 2.1-2.7$\times$ fewer cycles than alternative BNN designs. These results suggest that the time for large-scale BNN adoption could be upon us.
What's Cracking? A Review and Analysis of Deep Learning Methods for Structural Crack Segmentation, Detection and Quantification
Authors: Jacob König, Mark Jenkins, Mike Mannion, Peter Barrie, Gordon Morison
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Crack Segmentation, Structural Health Monitoring

Surface cracks are a very common indicator of potential structural faults. Their early detection and monitoring is an important factor in structural health monitoring. Left untreated, they can grow in size over time and require expensive repairs or maintenance. With recent advances in computer vision and deep learning algorithms, the automatic detection and segmentation of cracks for this monitoring process have become a major topic of interest. This review aims to give researchers an overview of the published work within the field of crack analysis algorithms that make use of deep learning. It outlines the various tasks that are solved through applying computer vision algorithms to surface cracks in a structural health monitoring setting and also provides in-depth reviews of recent fully, semi and unsupervised approaches that perform crack classification, detection, segmentation and quantification. Additionally, this review also highlights popular datasets used for cracks and the metrics that are used to evaluate the performance of those algorithms. Finally, potential research gaps are outlined and further research directions are provided.
Self-Paced Imbalance Rectification for Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Zhiheng Liu, Kai Zhu, Yang Cao
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning, Representation Learning

Exemplar-based class-incremental learning is to recognize new classes while not forgetting old ones, whose samples can only be saved in limited memory. The ratio fluctuation of new samples to old exemplars, which is caused by the variation of memory capacity at different environments, will bring challenges to stabilize the incremental optimization process. To address this problem, we propose a novel self-paced imbalance rectification scheme, which dynamically maintains the incremental balance during the representation learning phase. Specifically, our proposed scheme consists of a frequency compensation strategy that adjusts the logits margin between old and new classes with the corresponding number ratio to strengthen the expression ability of the old classes, and an inheritance transfer strategy to reduce the representation confusion by estimating the similarity of different classes in the old embedding space. Furthermore, a chronological attenuation mechanism is proposed to mitigate the repetitive optimization of the older classes at multiple step-wise increments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate stable incremental performance, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art methods.
Network Comparison Study of Deep Activation Feature Discriminability with Novel Objects
Authors: Michael Karnes, Alper Yilmaz
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Feature extraction has always been a critical component of the computer vision field. More recently, state-of-the-art computer visions algorithms have incorporated Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in feature extracting roles, creating Deep Convolutional Activation Features (DeCAF). The transferability of DNN knowledge domains has enabled the wide use of pretrained DNN feature extraction for applications with novel object classes, especially those with limited training data. This study analyzes the general discriminability of novel object visual appearances encoded into the DeCAF space of six of the leading visual recognition DNN architectures. The results of this study characterize the Mahalanobis distances and cosine similarities between DeCAF object manifolds across two visual object tracking benchmark data sets. The backgrounds surrounding each object are also included as an object classes in the manifold analysis, providing a wider range of novel classes. This study found that different network architectures led to different network feature focuses that must to be considered in the network selection process. These results are generated from the VOT2015 and UAV123 benchmark data sets; however, the proposed methods can be applied to efficiently compare estimated network performance characteristics for any labeled visual data set.
Quality Metric Guided Portrait Line Drawing Generation from Unpaired Training Data
Authors: Ran Yi, Yong-Jin Liu, Yu-Kun Lai, Paul L. Rosin
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00

Face portrait line drawing is a unique style of art which is highly abstract and expressive. However, due to its high semantic constraints, many existing methods learn to generate portrait drawings using paired training data, which is costly and time-consuming to obtain. In this paper, we propose a novel method to automatically transform face photos to portrait drawings using unpaired training data with two new features; i.e., our method can (1) learn to generate high quality portrait drawings in multiple styles using a single network and (2) generate portrait drawings in a "new style" unseen in the training data. To achieve these benefits, we (1) propose a novel quality metric for portrait drawings which is learned from human perception, and (2) introduce a quality loss to guide the network toward generating better looking portrait drawings. We observe that existing unpaired translation methods such as CycleGAN tend to embed invisible reconstruction information indiscriminately in the whole drawings due to significant information imbalance between the photo and portrait drawing domains, which leads to important facial features missing. To address this problem, we propose a novel asymmetric cycle mapping that enforces the reconstruction information to be visible and only embedded in the selected facial regions. Along with localized discriminators for important facial regions, our method well preserves all important facial features in the generated drawings. Generator dissection further explains that our model learns to incorporate face semantic information during drawing generation. Extensive experiments including a user study show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
A Novel Image Descriptor with Aggregated Semantic Skeleton Representation for Long-term Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Nie Jiwei, Feng Joe-Mei, Xue Dingyu, Pan Feng, Liu Wei, Hu Jun, Cheng Shuai
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Visual Place Recognition

In a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) system, a loop-closure can eliminate accumulated errors, which is accomplished by Visual Place Recognition (VPR), a task that retrieves the current scene from a set of pre-stored sequential images through matching specific scene-descriptors. In urban scenes, the appearance variation caused by seasons and illumination has brought great challenges to the robustness of scene descriptors. Semantic segmentation images can not only deliver the shape information of objects but also their categories and spatial relations that will not be affected by the appearance variation of the scene. Innovated by the Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptor (VLAD), in this paper, we propose a novel image descriptor with aggregated semantic skeleton representation (SSR), dubbed SSR-VLAD, for the VPR under drastic appearance-variation of environments. The SSR-VLAD of one image aggregates the semantic skeleton features of each category and encodes the spatial-temporal distribution information of the image semantic information. We conduct a series of experiments on three public datasets of challenging urban scenes. Compared with four state-of-the-art VPR methods- CoHOG, NetVLAD, LOST-X, and Region-VLAD, VPR by matching SSR-VLAD outperforms those methods and maintains competitive real-time performance at the same time.
Trained Model in Supervised Deep Learning is a Conditional Risk Minimizer
Authors: Yutong Xie, Dufan Wu, Bin Dong, Quanzheng Li
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

We proved that a trained model in supervised deep learning minimizes the conditional risk for each input (Theorem 2.1). This property provided insights into the behavior of trained models and established a connection between supervised and unsupervised learning in some cases. In addition, when the labels are intractable but can be written as a conditional risk minimizer, we proved an equivalent form of the original supervised learning problem with accessible labels (Theorem 2.2). We demonstrated that many existing works, such as Noise2Score, Noise2Noise and score function estimation can be explained by our theorem. Moreover, we derived a property of classification problem with noisy labels using Theorem 2.1 and validated it using MNIST dataset. Furthermore, We proposed a method to estimate uncertainty in image super-resolution based on Theorem 2.2 and validated it using ImageNet dataset. Our code is available on github.
How to Understand Masked Autoencoders
Authors: Shuhao Cao, Peng Xu, David A. Clifton
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

"Masked Autoencoders (MAE) Are Scalable Vision Learners" revolutionizes the self-supervised learning method in that it not only achieves the state-of-the-art for image pre-training, but is also a milestone that bridges the gap between visual and linguistic masked autoencoding (BERT-style) pre-trainings. However, to our knowledge, to date there are no theoretical perspectives to explain the powerful expressivity of MAE. In this paper, we, for the first time, propose a unified theoretical framework that provides a mathematical understanding for MAE. Specifically, we explain the patch-based attention approaches of MAE using an integral kernel under a non-overlapping domain decomposition setting. To help the research community to further comprehend the main reasons of the great success of MAE, based on our framework, we pose five questions and answer them with mathematical rigor using insights from operator theory.
Causal Scene BERT: Improving object detection by searching for challenging groups of data
Authors: Cinjon Resnick, Or Litany, Amlan Kar, Karsten Kreis, James Lucas, Kyunghyun Cho, Sanja Fidler
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, object-detection, Object Detection

Modern computer vision applications rely on learning-based perception modules parameterized with neural networks for tasks like object detection. These modules frequently have low expected error overall but high error on atypical groups of data due to biases inherent in the training process. In building autonomous vehicles (AV), this problem is an especially important challenge because their perception modules are crucial to the overall system performance. After identifying failures in AV, a human team will comb through the associated data to group perception failures that share common causes. More data from these groups is then collected and annotated before retraining the model to fix the issue. In other words, error groups are found and addressed in hindsight. Our main contribution is a pseudo-automatic method to discover such groups in foresight by performing causal interventions on simulated scenes. To keep our interventions on the data manifold, we utilize masked language models. We verify that the prioritized groups found via intervention are challenging for the object detector and show that retraining with data collected from these groups helps inordinately compared to adding more IID data. We also plan to release software to run interventions in simulated scenes, which we hope will benefit the causality community.
Model and predict age and sex in healthy subjects using brain white matter features: A deep learning approach
Authors: Hao He, Fan Zhang, Steve Pieper, Nikos Makris, Yogesh Rathi, William Wells III, Lauren J. O'Donnell
Date: 2022-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffusion  MRI

The human brain's white matter (WM) structure is of immense interest to the scientific community. Diffusion MRI gives a powerful tool to describe the brain WM structure noninvasively. To potentially enable monitoring of age-related changes and investigation of sex-related brain structure differences on the mapping between the brain connectome and healthy subjects' age and sex, we extract fiber-cluster-based diffusion features and predict sex and age with a novel ensembled neural network classifier. We conduct experiments on the Human Connectome Project (HCP) young adult dataset and show that our model achieves 94.82% accuracy in sex prediction and 2.51 years MAE in age prediction. We also show that the fractional anisotropy (FA) is the most predictive of sex, while the number of fibers is the most predictive of age and the combination of different features can improve the model performance.