pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unpaired Deep Image Dehazing Using Contrastive Disentanglement Learning
Authors: Xiang Chen, Zhentao Fan, Pengpeng Li, Longgang Dai, Caihua Kong, Zhuoran Zheng, Yufeng Huang, Yufeng Li
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Disentanglement, Image Dehazing, Image Reconstruction, Image Restoration

We offer a practical unpaired learning based image dehazing network from an unpaired set of clear and hazy images. This paper provides a new perspective to treat image dehazing as a two-class separated factor disentanglement task, i.e, the task-relevant factor of clear image reconstruction and the task-irrelevant factor of haze-relevant distribution. To achieve the disentanglement of these two-class factors in deep feature space, contrastive learning is introduced into a CycleGAN framework to learn disentangled representations by guiding the generated images to be associated with latent factors. With such formulation, the proposed contrastive disentangled dehazing method (CDD-GAN) employs negative generators to cooperate with the encoder network to update alternately, so as to produce a queue of challenging negative adversaries. Then these negative adversaries are trained end-to-end together with the backbone representation network to enhance the discriminative information and promote factor disentanglement performance by maximizing the adversarial contrastive loss. During the training, we further show that hard negative examples can suppress the task-irrelevant factors and unpaired clear exemples can enhance the task-relevant factors, in order to better facilitate haze removal and help image restoration. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that our method performs favorably against existing unpaired dehazing baselines.
Progressive End-to-End Object Detection in Crowded Scenes
Authors: Anlin Zheng, Yuang Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi, Jian Sun
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a new query-based detection framework for crowd detection. Previous query-based detectors suffer from two drawbacks: first, multiple predictions will be inferred for a single object, typically in crowded scenes; second, the performance saturates as the depth of the decoding stage increases. Benefiting from the nature of the one-to-one label assignment rule, we propose a progressive predicting method to address the above issues. Specifically, we first select accepted queries prone to generate true positive predictions, then refine the rest noisy queries according to the previously accepted predictions. Experiments show that our method can significantly boost the performance of query-based detectors in crowded scenes. Equipped with our approach, Sparse RCNN achieves 92.0\% $\text{AP}$, 41.4\% $\text{MR}^{-2}$ and 83.2\% $\text{JI}$ on the challenging CrowdHuman \cite{shao2018crowdhuman} dataset, outperforming the box-based method MIP \cite{chu2020detection} that specifies in handling crowded scenarios. Moreover, the proposed method, robust to crowdedness, can still obtain consistent improvements on moderately and slightly crowded datasets like CityPersons \cite{zhang2017citypersons} and COCO \cite{lin2014microsoft}. Code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/megvii-model/Iter-E2EDET.
SATS: Self-Attention Transfer for Continual Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yiqiao Qiu, Yixing Shen, Zhuohao Sun, Yanchong Zheng, Xiaobin Chang, Weishi Zheng, Ruixuan Wang
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Semantic Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Overlapped 100-10, Overlapped 10-1, Overlapped 15-1, Overlapped 15-5, Overlapped 25-25, Overlapped 5-3, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Continually learning to segment more and more types of image regions is a desired capability for many intelligent systems. However, such continual semantic segmentation suffers from the same catastrophic forgetting issue as in continual classification learning. While multiple knowledge distillation strategies originally for continual classification have been well adapted to continual semantic segmentation, they only consider transferring old knowledge based on the outputs from one or more layers of deep fully convolutional networks. Different from existing solutions, this study proposes to transfer a new type of information relevant to knowledge, i.e. the relationships between elements (Eg. pixels or small local regions) within each image which can capture both within-class and between-class knowledge. The relationship information can be effectively obtained from the self-attention maps in a Transformer-style segmentation model. Considering that pixels belonging to the same class in each image often share similar visual properties, a class-specific region pooling is applied to provide more efficient relationship information for knowledge transfer. Extensive evaluations on multiple public benchmarks support that the proposed self-attention transfer method can further effectively alleviate the catastrophic forgetting issue, and its flexible combination with one or more widely adopted strategies significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solutions.
Breast Cancer Molecular Subtypes Prediction on Pathological Images with Discriminative Patch Selecting and Multi-Instance Learning
Authors: Hong Liu, Wen-Dong Xu, Zi-Hao Shang, Xiang-Dong Wang, Hai-Yan Zhou, Ke-Wen Ma, Huan Zhou, Jia-Lin Qi, Jia-Rui Jiang, Li-Lan Tan, Hui-Min Zeng, Hui-Juan Cai, Kuan-Song Wang, Yue-Liang Qian
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Weakly-supervised Learning, whole slide images

Molecular subtypes of breast cancer are important references to personalized clinical treatment. For cost and labor savings, only one of the patient's paraffin blocks is usually selected for subsequent immunohistochemistry (IHC) to obtain molecular subtypes. Inevitable sampling error is risky due to tumor heterogeneity and could result in a delay in treatment. Molecular subtype prediction from conventional H&E pathological whole slide images (WSI) using AI method is useful and critical to assist pathologists pre-screen proper paraffin block for IHC. It's a challenging task since only WSI level labels of molecular subtypes can be obtained from IHC. Gigapixel WSIs are divided into a huge number of patches to be computationally feasible for deep learning. While with coarse slide-level labels, patch-based methods may suffer from abundant noise patches, such as folds, overstained regions, or non-tumor tissues. A weakly supervised learning framework based on discriminative patch selecting and multi-instance learning was proposed for breast cancer molecular subtype prediction from H&E WSIs. Firstly, co-teaching strategy was adopted to learn molecular subtype representations and filter out noise patches. Then, a balanced sampling strategy was used to handle the imbalance in subtypes in the dataset. In addition, a noise patch filtering algorithm that used local outlier factor based on cluster centers was proposed to further select discriminative patches. Finally, a loss function integrating patch with slide constraint information was used to finetune MIL framework on obtained discriminative patches and further improve the performance of molecular subtyping. The experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method and our models outperformed even senior pathologists, with potential to assist pathologists to pre-screen paraffin blocks for IHC in clinic.
Neural Radiance Projection
Authors: Pham Ngoc Huy, Tran Minh Quan
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The proposed method, Neural Radiance Projection (NeRP), addresses the three most fundamental shortages of training such a convolutional neural network on X-ray image segmentation: dealing with missing/limited human-annotated datasets; ambiguity on the per-pixel label; and the imbalance across positive- and negative- classes distribution. By harnessing a generative adversarial network, we can synthesize a massive amount of physics-based X-ray images, so-called Variationally Reconstructed Radiographs (VRRs), alongside their segmentation from more accurate labeled 3D Computed Tomography data. As a result, VRRs present more faithfully than other projection methods in terms of photo-realistic metrics. Adding outputs from NeRP also surpasses the vanilla UNet models trained on the same pairs of X-ray images.
Wave-SAN: Wavelet based Style Augmentation Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Yuqian Fu, Yu Xie, Yanwei Fu, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, Few-Shot Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Previous few-shot learning (FSL) works mostly are limited to natural images of general concepts and categories. These works assume very high visual similarity between the source and target classes. In contrast, the recently proposed cross-domain few-shot learning (CD-FSL) aims at transferring knowledge from general nature images of many labeled examples to novel domain-specific target categories of only a few labeled examples. The key challenge of CD-FSL lies in the huge data shift between source and target domains, which is typically in the form of totally different visual styles. This makes it very nontrivial to directly extend the classical FSL methods to address the CD-FSL task. To this end, this paper studies the problem of CD-FSL by spanning the style distributions of the source dataset. Particularly, wavelet transform is introduced to enable the decomposition of visual representations into low-frequency components such as shape and style and high-frequency components e.g., texture. To make our model robust to visual styles, the source images are augmented by swapping the styles of their low-frequency components with each other. We propose a novel Style Augmentation (StyleAug) module to implement this idea. Furthermore, we present a Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) module to ensure the predictions of style-augmented images are semantically similar to the unchanged ones. This avoids the potential semantic drift problem in exchanging the styles. Extensive experiments on two CD-FSL benchmarks show the effectiveness of our method. Our codes and models will be released.
P-STMO: Pre-Trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One Model for 3D Human Pose Estimation
Authors: Wenkang Shan, Zhenhua Liu, Xinfeng Zhang, Shanshe Wang, Siwei Ma, Wen Gao
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Denoising, Monocular 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

This paper introduces a novel Pre-trained Spatial Temporal Many-to-One (P-STMO) model for 2D-to-3D human pose estimation task. To reduce the difficulty of capturing spatial and temporal information, we divide this task into two stages: pre-training (Stage I) and fine-tuning (Stage II). In Stage I, a self-supervised pre-training sub-task, termed masked pose modeling, is proposed. The human joints in the input sequence are randomly masked in both spatial and temporal domains. A general form of denoising auto-encoder is exploited to recover the original 2D poses and the encoder is capable of capturing spatial and temporal dependencies in this way. In Stage II, the pre-trained encoder is loaded to STMO model and fine-tuned. The encoder is followed by a many-to-one frame aggregator to predict the 3D pose in the current frame. Especially, an MLP block is utilized as the spatial feature extractor in STMO, which yields better performance than other methods. In addition, a temporal downsampling strategy is proposed to diminish data redundancy. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with fewer parameters and less computational overhead. For example, our P-STMO model achieves 42.1mm MPJPE on Human3.6M dataset when using 2D poses from CPN as inputs. Meanwhile, it brings a 1.5-7.1 times speedup to state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/paTRICK-swk/P-STMO.
CARETS: A Consistency And Robustness Evaluative Test Suite for VQA
Authors: Carlos E. Jimenez, Olga Russakovsky, Karthik Narasimhan
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Negation, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We introduce CARETS, a systematic test suite to measure consistency and robustness of modern VQA models through a series of six fine-grained capability tests. In contrast to existing VQA test sets, CARETS features balanced question generation to create pairs of instances to test models, with each pair focusing on a specific capability such as rephrasing, logical symmetry or image obfuscation. We evaluate six modern VQA systems on CARETS and identify several actionable weaknesses in model comprehension, especially with concepts such as negation, disjunction, or hypernym invariance. Interestingly, even the most sophisticated models are sensitive to aspects such as swapping the order of terms in a conjunction or varying the number of answer choices mentioned in the question. We release CARETS to be used as an extensible tool for evaluating multi-modal model robustness.
Task-Agnostic Robust Representation Learning
Authors: A. Tuan Nguyen, Ser Nam Lim, Philip Torr
Date: 2022-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

It has been reported that deep learning models are extremely vulnerable to small but intentionally chosen perturbations of its input. In particular, a deep network, despite its near-optimal accuracy on the clean images, often mis-classifies an image with a worst-case but humanly imperceptible perturbation (so-called adversarial examples). To tackle this problem, a great amount of research has been done to study the training procedure of a network to improve its robustness. However, most of the research so far has focused on the case of supervised learning. With the increasing popularity of self-supervised learning methods, it is also important to study and improve the robustness of their resulting representation on the downstream tasks. In this paper, we study the problem of robust representation learning with unlabeled data in a task-agnostic manner. Specifically, we first derive an upper bound on the adversarial loss of a prediction model (which is based on the learned representation) on any downstream task, using its loss on the clean data and a robustness regularizer. Moreover, the regularizer is task-independent, thus we propose to minimize it directly during the representation learning phase to make the downstream prediction model more robust. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves preferable adversarial performance compared to relevant baselines.
VPFusion: Joint 3D Volume and Pixel-Aligned Feature Fusion for Single and Multi-view 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Jisan Mahmud, Jan-Michael Frahm
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D Shape Reconstruction, Multi-View 3D Reconstruction

We introduce a unified single and multi-view neural implicit 3D reconstruction framework VPFusion. VPFusion attains high-quality reconstruction using both - 3D feature volume to capture 3D-structure-aware context, and pixel-aligned image features to capture fine local detail. Existing approaches use RNN, feature pooling, or attention computed independently in each view for multi-view fusion. RNNs suffer from long-term memory loss and permutation variance, while feature pooling or independently computed attention leads to representation in each view being unaware of other views before the final pooling step. In contrast, we show improved multi-view feature fusion by establishing transformer-based pairwise view association. In particular, we propose a novel interleaved 3D reasoning and pairwise view association architecture for feature volume fusion across different views. Using this structure-aware and multi-view-aware feature volume, we show improved 3D reconstruction performance compared to existing methods. VPFusion improves the reconstruction quality further by also incorporating pixel-aligned local image features to capture fine detail. We verify the effectiveness of VPFusion on the ShapeNet and ModelNet datasets, where we outperform or perform on-par the state-of-the-art single and multi-view 3D shape reconstruction methods.
TTCDist: Fast Distance Estimation From an Active Monocular Camera Using Time-to-Contact
Authors: Levi Burner, Nitin J. Sanket, Cornelia Fermüller, Yiannis Aloimonos
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

Distance estimation from vision is fundamental for a myriad of robotic applications such as navigation, manipulation, and planning. Inspired by the mammal's visual system, which gazes at specific objects, we develop two novel constraints relating time-to-contact, acceleration, and distance that we call the $\tau$-constraint and $\Phi$-constraint. They allow an active (moving) camera to estimate depth efficiently and accurately while using only a small portion of the image. The constraints are applicable to range sensing, sensor fusion, and visual servoing. We successfully validate the proposed constraints with two experiments. The first applies both constraints in a trajectory estimation task with a monocular camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Our methods achieve 30-70% less average trajectory error while running 25$\times$ and 6.2$\times$ faster than the popular Visual-Inertial Odometry methods VINS-Mono and ROVIO respectively. The second experiment demonstrates that when the constraints are used for feedback with efference copies the resulting closed loop system's eigenvalues are invariant to scaling of the applied control signal. We believe these results indicate the $\tau$ and $\Phi$ constraint's potential as the basis of robust and efficient algorithms for a multitude of robotic applications.
Skydiver: A Spiking Neural Network Accelerator Exploiting Spatio-Temporal Workload Balance
Authors: Qinyu Chen, Chang Gao, Xinyuan Fang, Haitao Luan
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are developed as a promising alternative to Artificial Neural networks (ANNs) due to their more realistic brain-inspired computing models. SNNs have sparse neuron firing over time, i.e., spatio-temporal sparsity; thus, they are useful to enable energy-efficient hardware inference. However, exploiting spatio-temporal sparsity of SNNs in hardware leads to unpredictable and unbalanced workloads, degrading the energy efficiency. In this work, we propose an FPGA-based convolutional SNN accelerator called Skydiver that exploits spatio-temporal workload balance. We propose the Approximate Proportional Relation Construction (APRC) method that can predict the relative workload channel-wisely and a Channel-Balanced Workload Schedule (CBWS) method to increase the hardware workload balance ratio to over 90%. Skydiver was implemented on a Xilinx XC7Z045 FPGA and verified on image segmentation and MNIST classification tasks. Results show improved throughput by 1.4X and 1.2X for the two tasks. Skydiver achieved 22.6 KFPS throughput, and 42.4 uJ/Image prediction energy on the classification task with 98.5% accuracy.
A deep learning pipeline for breast cancer ki-67 proliferation index scoring
Authors: Khaled Benaggoune, Zeina Al Masry, Jian Ma, Christine Devalland, L. H Mouss, Noureddine Zerhouni
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

The Ki-67 proliferation index is an essential biomarker that helps pathologists to diagnose and select appropriate treatments. However, automatic evaluation of Ki-67 is difficult due to nuclei overlapping and complex variations in their properties. This paper proposes an integrated pipeline for accurate automatic counting of Ki-67, where the impact of nuclei separation techniques is highlighted. First, semantic segmentation is performed by combining the Squeez and Excitation Resnet and Unet algorithms to extract nuclei from the background. The extracted nuclei are then divided into overlapped and non-overlapped regions based on eight geometric and statistical features. A marker-based Watershed algorithm is subsequently proposed and applied only to the overlapped regions to separate nuclei. Finally, deep features are extracted from each nucleus patch using Resnet18 and classified into positive or negative by a random forest classifier. The proposed pipeline's performance is validated on a dataset from the Department of Pathology at H\^opital Nord Franche-Comt\'e hospital.
What's the Difference? The potential for Convolutional Neural Networks for transient detection without template subtraction
Authors: Tatiana Acero-Cuellar, Federica Bianco, Gregory Dobler, Masao Sako, Helen Qu, The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Task 2

We present a study of the potential for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to enable separation of astrophysical transients from image artifacts, a task known as "real-bogus" classification without requiring a template subtracted (or difference) image which requires a computationally expensive process to generate, involving image matching on small spatial scales in large volumes of data. Using data from the Dark Energy Survey, we explore the use of CNNs to (1) automate the "real-bogus" classification, (2) reduce the computational costs of transient discovery. We compare the efficiency of two CNNs with similar architectures, one that uses "image triplets" (templates, search, and difference image) and one that takes as input the template and search only. We measure the decrease in efficiency associated with the loss of information in input finding that the testing accuracy is reduced from 96% to 91.1%. We further investigate how the latter model learns the required information from the template and search by exploring the saliency maps. Our work (1) confirms that CNNs are excellent models for "real-bogus" classification that rely exclusively on the imaging data and require no feature engineering task; (2) demonstrates that high-accuracy (> 90%) models can be built without the need to construct difference images, but some accuracy is lost. Since once trained, neural networks can generate predictions at minimal computational costs, we argue that future implementations of this methodology could dramatically reduce the computational costs in the detection of transients in synoptic surveys like Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time by bypassing the Difference Image Analysis entirely.
Generalized Rectifier Wavelet Covariance Models For Texture Synthesis
Authors: Antoine Brochard, Sixin Zhang, Stéphane Mallat
Date: 2022-03-14 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2022 4
Tasks: Texture Synthesis

State-of-the-art maximum entropy models for texture synthesis are built from statistics relying on image representations defined by convolutional neural networks (CNN). Such representations capture rich structures in texture images, outperforming wavelet-based representations in this regard. However, conversely to neural networks, wavelets offer meaningful representations, as they are known to detect structures at multiple scales (e.g. edges) in images. In this work, we propose a family of statistics built upon non-linear wavelet based representations, that can be viewed as a particular instance of a one-layer CNN, using a generalized rectifier non-linearity. These statistics significantly improve the visual quality of previous classical wavelet-based models, and allow one to produce syntheses of similar quality to state-of-the-art models, on both gray-scale and color textures.