pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Lightweight Dual-Domain Attention Framework for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction
Authors: Chang Sun, Ken Deng, Yitong Liu, Hongwen Yang
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction, Image Reconstruction

Computed Tomography (CT) plays an essential role in clinical diagnosis. Due to the adverse effects of radiation on patients, the radiation dose is expected to be reduced as low as possible. Sparse sampling is an effective way, but it will lead to severe artifacts on the reconstructed CT image, thus sparse-view CT image reconstruction has been a prevailing and challenging research area. With the popularity of mobile devices, the requirements for lightweight and real-time networks are increasing rapidly. In this paper, we design a novel lightweight network called CAGAN, and propose a dual-domain reconstruction pipeline for parallel beam sparse-view CT. CAGAN is an adversarial auto-encoder, combining the Coordinate Attention unit, which preserves the spatial information of features. Also, the application of Shuffle Blocks reduces the parameters by a quarter without sacrificing its performance. In the Radon domain, the CAGAN learns the mapping between the interpolated data and fringe-free projection data. After the restored Radon data is reconstructed to an image, the image is sent into the second CAGAN trained for recovering the details, so that a high-quality image is obtained. Experiments indicate that the CAGAN strikes an excellent balance between model complexity and performance, and our pipeline outperforms the DD-Net and the DuDoNet.
Image-to-Graph Transformers for Chemical Structure Recognition
Authors: Sanghyun Yoo, Ohyun Kwon, Hoshik Lee
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00

For several decades, chemical knowledge has been published in written text, and there have been many attempts to make it accessible, for example, by transforming such natural language text to a structured format. Although the discovered chemical itself commonly represented in an image is the most important part, the correct recognition of the molecular structure from the image in literature still remains a hard problem since they are often abbreviated to reduce the complexity and drawn in many different styles. In this paper, we present a deep learning model to extract molecular structures from images. The proposed model is designed to transform the molecular image directly into the corresponding graph, which makes it capable of handling non-atomic symbols for abbreviations. Also, by end-to-end learning approach it can fully utilize many open image-molecule pair data from various sources, and hence it is more robust to image style variation than other tools. The experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the existing models with 17.1 % and 12.8 % relative improvement for well-known benchmark datasets and large molecular images that we collected from literature, respectively.
Tripartite: Tackle Noisy Labels by a More Precise Partition
Authors: Xuefeng Liang, Longshan Yao, Xingyu Liu, Ying Zhou
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Samples in large-scale datasets may be mislabeled due to various reasons, and Deep Neural Networks can easily over-fit to the noisy label data. To tackle this problem, the key point is to alleviate the harm of these noisy labels. Many existing methods try to divide training data into clean and noisy subsets in terms of loss values, and then process the noisy label data varied. One of the reasons hindering a better performance is the hard samples. As hard samples always have relatively large losses whether their labels are clean or noisy, these methods could not divide them precisely. Instead, we propose a Tripartite solution to partition training data more precisely into three subsets: hard, noisy, and clean. The partition criteria are based on the inconsistent predictions of two networks, and the inconsistency between the prediction of a network and the given label. To minimize the harm of noisy labels but maximize the value of noisy label data, we apply a low-weight learning on hard data and a self-supervised learning on noisy label data without using the given labels. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Tripartite can filter out noisy label data more precisely, and outperforms most state-of-the-art methods on five benchmark datasets, especially on real-world datasets.
HDAM: Heuristic Difference Attention Module for Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Yu Xue, Ziming Yuan
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00

The attention mechanism is one of the most important priori knowledge to enhance convolutional neural networks. Most attention mechanisms are bound to the convolutional layer and use local or global contextual information to recalibrate the input. This is a popular attention strategy design method. Global contextual information helps the network to consider the overall distribution, while local contextual information is more general. The contextual information makes the network pay attention to the mean or maximum value of a particular receptive field. Different from the most attention mechanism, this article proposes a novel attention mechanism with the heuristic difference attention module, HDAM. HDAM's input recalibration is based on the difference between the local and global contextual information instead of the mean and maximum values. At the same time, to make different layers have a more suitable local receptive field size and increase the exibility of the local receptive field design, we use genetic algorithm to heuristically produce local receptive fields. First, HDAM extracts the mean value of the global and local receptive fields as the corresponding contextual information. Then the difference between the global and local contextual information is calculated. Finally HDAM uses this difference to recalibrate the input. In addition, we use the heuristic ability of genetic algorithm to search for the local receptive field size of each layer. Our experiments on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 show that HDAM can use fewer parameters than other attention mechanisms to achieve higher accuracy. We implement HDAM with the Python library, Pytorch, and the code and models will be publicly available.
SODA: Site Object Detection dAtaset for Deep Learning in Construction
Authors: Rui Duan, Hui Deng, Mao Tian, Yichuan Deng, Jiarui Lin
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Computer vision-based deep learning object detection algorithms have been developed sufficiently powerful to support the ability to recognize various objects. Although there are currently general datasets for object detection, there is still a lack of large-scale, open-source dataset for the construction industry, which limits the developments of object detection algorithms as they tend to be data-hungry. Therefore, this paper develops a new large-scale image dataset specifically collected and annotated for the construction site, called Site Object Detection dAtaset (SODA), which contains 15 kinds of object classes categorized by workers, materials, machines, and layout. Firstly, more than 20,000 images were collected from multiple construction sites in different site conditions, weather conditions, and construction phases, which covered different angles and perspectives. After careful screening and processing, 19,846 images including 286,201 objects were then obtained and annotated with labels in accordance with predefined categories. Statistical analysis shows that the developed dataset is advantageous in terms of diversity and volume. Further evaluation with two widely-adopted object detection algorithms based on deep learning (YOLO v3/ YOLO v4) also illustrates the feasibility of the dataset for typical construction scenarios, achieving a maximum mAP of 81.47%. In this manner, this research contributes a large-scale image dataset for the development of deep learning-based object detection methods in the construction industry and sets up a performance benchmark for further evaluation of corresponding algorithms in this area.
Unpaired Quad-Path Cycle Consistent Adversarial Networks for Single Image Defogging
Authors: Wei Liu, Cheng Chen, Rui Jiang, Tao Lu, Zixiang Xiong
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Adversarial learning-based image defogging methods have been extensively studied in computer vision due to their remarkable performance. However, most existing methods have limited defogging capabilities for real cases because they are trained on the paired clear and synthesized foggy images of the same scenes. In addition, they have limitations in preserving vivid color and rich textual details in defogging. To address these issues, we develop a novel generative adversarial network, called quad-path cycle consistent adversarial network (QPC-Net), for single image defogging. QPC-Net consists of a Fog2Fogfree block and a Fogfree2Fog block. In each block, there are three learning-based modules, namely, fog removal, color-texture recovery, and fog synthetic, which sequentially compose dual-path that constrain each other to generate high quality images. Specifically, the color-texture recovery model is designed to exploit the self-similarity of texture and structure information by learning the holistic channel-spatial feature correlations between the foggy image with its several derived images. Moreover, in the fog synthetic module, we utilize the atmospheric scattering model to guide it to improve the generative quality by focusing on an atmospheric light optimization with a novel sky segmentation network. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that QPC-Net outperforms state-of-the-art defogging methods in terms of quantitative accuracy and subjective visual quality.
Going Deeper into Recognizing Actions in Dark Environments: A Comprehensive Benchmark Study
Authors: Yuecong Xu, Jianfei Yang, Haozhi Cao, Jianxiong Yin, Zhenghua Chen, XiaoLi Li, Zhengguo Li, Qianwen Xu
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Autonomous Driving

While action recognition (AR) has gained large improvements with the introduction of large-scale video datasets and the development of deep neural networks, AR models robust to challenging environments in real-world scenarios are still under-explored. We focus on the task of action recognition in dark environments, which can be applied to fields such as surveillance and autonomous driving at night. Intuitively, current deep networks along with visual enhancement techniques should be able to handle AR in dark environments, however, it is observed that this is not always the case in practice. To dive deeper into exploring solutions for AR in dark environments, we launched the UG2+ Challenge Track 2 (UG2-2) in IEEE CVPR 2021, with a goal of evaluating and advancing the robustness of AR models in dark environments. The challenge builds and expands on top of a novel ARID dataset, the first dataset for the task of dark video AR, and guides models to tackle such a task in both fully and semi-supervised manners. Baseline results utilizing current AR models and enhancement methods are reported, justifying the challenging nature of this task with substantial room for improvements. Thanks to the active participation from the research community, notable advances have been made in participants' solutions, while analysis of these solutions helped better identify possible directions to tackle the challenge of AR in dark environments.
BP-Triplet Net for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation: A Bayesian Perspective
Authors: Shanshan Wang, Lei Zhang, Pichao Wang
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Metric Learning, Triplet, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Triplet loss, one of the deep metric learning (DML) methods, is to learn the embeddings where examples from the same class are closer than examples from different classes. Motivated by DML, we propose an effective BP-Triplet Loss for unsupervised domain adaption (UDA) from the perspective of Bayesian learning and we name the model as BP-Triplet Net. In previous metric learning based methods for UDA, sample pairs across domains are treated equally, which is not appropriate due to the domain bias. In our work, considering the different importance of pair-wise samples for both feature learning and domain alignment, we deduce our BP-Triplet loss for effective UDA from the perspective of Bayesian learning. Our BP-Triplet loss adjusts the weights of pair-wise samples in intra domain and inter domain. Especially, it can self attend to the hard pairs (including hard positive pair and hard negative pair). Together with the commonly used adversarial loss for domain alignment, the quality of target pseudo labels is progressively improved. Our method achieved low joint error of the ideal source and target hypothesis. The expected target error can then be upper bounded following Ben-David s theorem. Comprehensive evaluations on five benchmark datasets, handwritten digits, Office31, ImageCLEF-DA, Office-Home and VisDA-2017 demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for UDA.
C2N: Practical Generative Noise Modeling for Real-World Denoising
Authors: Geonwoon Jang, Wooseok Lee, Sanghyun Son, Kyoung Mu Lee
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2021 10
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Generation

Learning-based image denoising methods have been bounded to situations where well-aligned noisy and clean images are given, or samples are synthesized from predetermined noise models, e.g., Gaussian. While recent generative noise modeling methods aim to simulate the unknown distribution of real-world noise, several limitations still exist. In a practical scenario, a noise generator should learn to simulate the general and complex noise distribution without using paired noisy and clean images. However, since existing methods are constructed on the unrealistic assumption of real-world noise, they tend to generate implausible patterns and cannot express complicated noise maps. Therefore, we introduce a Clean-to-Noisy image generation framework, namely C2N, to imitate complex real-world noise without using any paired examples. We construct the noise generator in C2N accordingly with each component of real-world noise characteristics to express a wide range of noise accurately. Combined with our C2N, conventional denoising CNNs can be trained to outperform existing unsupervised methods on challenging real-world benchmarks by a large margin.
SPNet: A novel deep neural network for retinal vessel segmentation based on shared decoder and pyramid-like loss
Authors: Geng-Xin Xu, Chuan-Xian Ren
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Retinal Vessel Segmentation, Segmentation

Segmentation of retinal vessel images is critical to the diagnosis of retinopathy. Recently, convolutional neural networks have shown significant ability to extract the blood vessel structure. However, it remains challenging to refined segmentation for the capillaries and the edges of retinal vessels due to thickness inconsistencies and blurry boundaries. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network for retinal vessel segmentation based on shared decoder and pyramid-like loss (SPNet) to address the above problems. Specifically, we introduce a decoder-sharing mechanism to capture multi-scale semantic information, where feature maps at diverse scales are decoded through a sequence of weight-sharing decoder modules. Also, to strengthen characterization on the capillaries and the edges of blood vessels, we define a residual pyramid architecture which decomposes the spatial information in the decoding phase. A pyramid-like loss function is designed to compensate possible segmentation errors progressively. Experimental results on public benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms the backbone network and the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the regions of the capillaries and the vessel contours. In addition, performances on cross-datasets verify that SPNet shows stronger generalization ability.
PMP-Net++: Point Cloud Completion by Transformer-Enhanced Multi-step Point Moving Paths
Authors: Xin Wen, Peng Xiang, Zhizhong Han, Yan-Pei Cao, Pengfei Wan, Wen Zheng, Yu-Shen Liu
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion, Representation Learning

Point cloud completion concerns to predict missing part for incomplete 3D shapes. A common strategy is to generate complete shape according to incomplete input. However, unordered nature of point clouds will degrade generation of high-quality 3D shapes, as detailed topology and structure of unordered points are hard to be captured during the generative process using an extracted latent code. We address this problem by formulating completion as point cloud deformation process. Specifically, we design a novel neural network, named PMP-Net++, to mimic behavior of an earth mover. It moves each point of incomplete input to obtain a complete point cloud, where total distance of point moving paths (PMPs) should be the shortest. Therefore, PMP-Net++ predicts unique PMP for each point according to constraint of point moving distances. The network learns a strict and unique correspondence on point-level, and thus improves quality of predicted complete shape. Moreover, since moving points heavily relies on per-point features learned by network, we further introduce a transformer-enhanced representation learning network, which significantly improves completion performance of PMP-Net++. We conduct comprehensive experiments in shape completion, and further explore application on point cloud up-sampling, which demonstrate non-trivial improvement of PMP-Net++ over state-of-the-art point cloud completion/up-sampling methods.
Highlighting Object Category Immunity for the Generalization of Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Xinpeng Liu, Yong-Lu Li, Cewu Lu
Date: 2022-02-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object, Uncertainty Quantification

Human-Object Interaction (HOI) detection plays a core role in activity understanding. As a compositional learning problem (human-verb-object), studying its generalization matters. However, widely-used metric mean average precision (mAP) fails to model the compositional generalization well. Thus, we propose a novel metric, mPD (mean Performance Degradation), as a complementary of mAP to evaluate the performance gap among compositions of different objects and the same verb. Surprisingly, mPD reveals that previous methods usually generalize poorly. With mPD as a cue, we propose Object Category (OC) Immunity to boost HOI generalization. The idea is to prevent model from learning spurious object-verb correlations as a short-cut to over-fit the train set. To achieve OC-immunity, we propose an OC-immune network that decouples the inputs from OC, extracts OC-immune representations, and leverages uncertainty quantification to generalize to unseen objects. In both conventional and zero-shot experiments, our method achieves decent improvements. To fully evaluate the generalization, we design a new and more difficult benchmark, on which we present significant advantage. The code is available at https://github.com/Foruck/OC-Immunity.
Modern Augmented Reality: Applications, Trends, and Future Directions
Authors: Shervin Minaee, Xiaodan Liang, Shuicheng Yan
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00

Augmented reality (AR) is one of the relatively old, yet trending areas in the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics with numerous applications in several areas, from gaming and entertainment, to education and healthcare. Although it has been around for nearly fifty years, it has seen a lot of interest by the research community in the recent years, mainly because of the huge success of deep learning models for various computer vision and AR applications, which made creating new generations of AR technologies possible. This work tries to provide an overview of modern augmented reality, from both application-level and technical perspective. We first give an overview of main AR applications, grouped into more than ten categories. We then give an overview of around 100 recent promising machine learning based works developed for AR systems, such as deep learning works for AR shopping (clothing, makeup), AR based image filters (such as Snapchat's lenses), AR animations, and more. In the end we discuss about some of the current challenges in AR domain, and the future directions in this area.
Learning Representations Robust to Group Shifts and Adversarial Examples
Authors: Ming-Chang Chiu, Xuezhe Ma
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Despite the high performance achieved by deep neural networks on various tasks, extensive studies have demonstrated that small tweaks in the input could fail the model predictions. This issue of deep neural networks has led to a number of methods to improve model robustness, including adversarial training and distributionally robust optimization. Though both of these two methods are geared towards learning robust models, they have essentially different motivations: adversarial training attempts to train deep neural networks against perturbations, while distributional robust optimization aims at improving model performance on the most difficult "uncertain distributions". In this work, we propose an algorithm that combines adversarial training and group distribution robust optimization to improve robust representation learning. Experiments on three image benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed method achieves superior results on robust metrics without sacrificing much of the standard measures.
A Molecular Prior Distribution for Bayesian Inference Based on Wilson Statistics
Authors: Marc Aurèle Gilles, Amit Singer
Date: 2022-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Cryogenic Electron Microscopy (cryo-EM)

Background and Objective: Wilson statistics describe well the power spectrum of proteins at high frequencies. Therefore, it has found several applications in structural biology, e.g., it is the basis for sharpening steps used in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM). A recent paper gave the first rigorous proof of Wilson statistics based on a formalism of Wilson's original argument. This new analysis also leads to statistical estimates of the scattering potential of proteins that reveal a correlation between neighboring Fourier coefficients. Here we exploit these estimates to craft a novel prior that can be used for Bayesian inference of molecular structures. Methods: We describe the properties of the prior and the computation of its hyperparameters. We then evaluate the prior on two synthetic linear inverse problems, and compare against a popular prior in cryo-EM reconstruction at a range of SNRs. Results: We show that the new prior effectively suppresses noise and fills-in low SNR regions in the spectral domain. Furthermore, it improves the resolution of estimates on the problems considered for a wide range of SNR and produces Fourier Shell Correlation curves that are insensitive to masking effects. Conclusions: We analyze the assumptions in the model, discuss relations to other regularization strategies, and postulate on potential implications for structure determination in cryo-EM.