pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ALGAN: Anomaly Detection by Generating Pseudo Anomalous Data via Latent Variables
Authors: Hironori Murase, Kenji Fukumizu
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Generative Adversarial Network

In many anomaly detection tasks, where anomalous data rarely appear and are difficult to collect, training using only normal data is important. Although it is possible to manually create anomalous data using prior knowledge, they may be subject to user bias. In this paper, we propose an Anomalous Latent variable Generative Adversarial Network (ALGAN) in which the GAN generator produces pseudo-anomalous data as well as fake-normal data, whereas the discriminator is trained to distinguish between normal and pseudo-anomalous data. This differs from the standard GAN discriminator, which specializes in classifying two similar classes. The training dataset contains only normal data; the latent variables are introduced in anomalous states and are input into the generator to produce diverse pseudo-anomalous data. We compared the performance of ALGAN with other existing methods on the MVTec-AD, Magnetic Tile Defects, and COIL-100 datasets. The experimental results showed that ALGAN exhibited an AUROC comparable to those of state-of-the-art methods while achieving a much faster prediction time.
End-to-End High Accuracy License Plate Recognition Based on Depthwise Separable Convolution Networks
Authors: Song-Ren Wang, Hong-Yang Shih, Zheng-Yi Shen, Wen-Kai Tai
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: License Plate Recognition

Automatic license plate recognition plays a crucial role in modern transportation systems such as for traffic monitoring and vehicle violation detection. In real-world scenarios, license plate recognition still faces many challenges and is impaired by unpredictable interference such as weather or lighting conditions. Many machine learning based ALPR solutions have been proposed to solve such challenges in recent years. However, most are not convincing, either because their results are evaluated on small or simple datasets that lack diverse surroundings, or because they require powerful hardware to achieve a reasonable frames-per-second in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a novel segmentation-free framework for license plate recognition and introduce NP-ALPR, a diverse and challenging dataset which resembles real-world scenarios. The proposed network model consists of the latest deep learning methods and state-of-the-art ideas, and benefits from a novel network architecture. It achieves higher accuracy with lower computational requirements than previous works. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method on three different datasets and show a recognition accuracy of over 99% and over 70 fps, demonstrating that our method is not only robust but also computationally efficient.
A Self-Supervised Descriptor for Image Copy Detection
Authors: Ed Pizzi, Sreya Dutta Roy, Sugosh Nagavara Ravindra, Priya Goyal, Matthijs Douze
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Copy Detection, image-classification, Image Classification

Image copy detection is an important task for content moderation. We introduce SSCD, a model that builds on a recent self-supervised contrastive training objective. We adapt this method to the copy detection task by changing the architecture and training objective, including a pooling operator from the instance matching literature, and adapting contrastive learning to augmentations that combine images. Our approach relies on an entropy regularization term, promoting consistent separation between descriptor vectors, and we demonstrate that this significantly improves copy detection accuracy. Our method produces a compact descriptor vector, suitable for real-world web scale applications. Statistical information from a background image distribution can be incorporated into the descriptor. On the recent DISC2021 benchmark, SSCD is shown to outperform both baseline copy detection models and self-supervised architectures designed for image classification by huge margins, in all settings. For example, SSCD out-performs SimCLR descriptors by 48% absolute. Code is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/sscd-copy-detection.
Rethinking the Zigzag Flattening for Image Reading
Authors: Qingsong Zhao, Yi Wang, Zhipeng Zhou, Duoqian Miao, LiMin Wang, Yu Qiao, Cairong Zhao
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Sequence ordering of word vector matters a lot to text reading, which has been proven in natural language processing (NLP). However, the rule of different sequence ordering in computer vision (CV) was not well explored, e.g., why the ``zigzag" flattening (ZF) is commonly utilized as a default option to get the image patches ordering in vision networks. Notably, when decomposing multi-scale images, the ZF could not maintain the invariance of feature point positions. To this end, we investigate the Hilbert fractal flattening (HF) as another method for sequence ordering in CV and contrast it against ZF. The HF has proven to be superior to other curves in maintaining spatial locality, when performing multi-scale transformations of dimensional space. And it can be easily plugged into most deep neural networks (DNNs). Extensive experiments demonstrate that it can yield consistent and significant performance boosts for a variety of architectures. Finally, we hope that our studies spark further research about the flattening strategy of image reading.
Offline Text-Independent Writer Identification based on word level data
Authors: Vineet Kumar, Suresh Sundaram
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel scheme to identify the authorship of a document based on handwritten input word images of an individual. Our approach is text-independent and does not place any restrictions on the size of the input word images under consideration. To begin with, we employ the SIFT algorithm to extract multiple key points at various levels of abstraction (comprising allograph, character, or combination of characters). These key points are then passed through a trained CNN network to generate feature maps corresponding to a convolution layer. However, owing to the scale corresponding to the SIFT key points, the size of a generated feature map may differ. As an alleviation to this issue, the histogram of gradients is applied on the feature map to produce a fixed representation. Typically, in a CNN, the number of filters of each convolution block increase depending on the depth of the network. Thus, extracting histogram features for each of the convolution feature map increase the dimension as well as the computational load. To address this aspect, we use an entropy-based method to learn the weights of the feature maps of a particular CNN layer during the training phase of our algorithm. The efficacy of our proposed system has been demonstrated on two publicly available databases namely CVL and IAM. We empirically show that the results obtained are promising when compared with previous works.
Learning Bayesian Sparse Networks with Full Experience Replay for Continual Learning
Authors: Dong Gong, Qingsen Yan, Yuhang Liu, Anton Van Den Hengel, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Continual Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Open Knowledge Graph Canonicalization

Continual Learning (CL) methods aim to enable machine learning models to learn new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of those that have been previously mastered. Existing CL approaches often keep a buffer of previously-seen samples, perform knowledge distillation, or use regularization techniques towards this goal. Despite their performance, they still suffer from interference across tasks which leads to catastrophic forgetting. To ameliorate this problem, we propose to only activate and select sparse neurons for learning current and past tasks at any stage. More parameters space and model capacity can thus be reserved for the future tasks. This minimizes the interference between parameters for different tasks. To do so, we propose a Sparse neural Network for Continual Learning (SNCL), which employs variational Bayesian sparsity priors on the activations of the neurons in all layers. Full Experience Replay (FER) provides effective supervision in learning the sparse activations of the neurons in different layers. A loss-aware reservoir-sampling strategy is developed to maintain the memory buffer. The proposed method is agnostic as to the network structures and the task boundaries. Experiments on different datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for mitigating forgetting.
OG-SGG: Ontology-Guided Scene Graph Generation. A Case Study in Transfer Learning for Telepresence Robotics
Authors: Fernando Amodeo, Fernando Caballero, Natalia Díaz-Rodríguez, Luis Merino
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Graph Generation, Question Answering, Scene Graph Generation, Transfer Learning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Scene graph generation from images is a task of great interest to applications such as robotics, because graphs are the main way to represent knowledge about the world and regulate human-robot interactions in tasks such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Unfortunately, its corresponding area of machine learning is still relatively in its infancy, and the solutions currently offered do not specialize well in concrete usage scenarios. Specifically, they do not take existing "expert" knowledge about the domain world into account; and that might indeed be necessary in order to provide the level of reliability demanded by the use case scenarios. In this paper, we propose an initial approximation to a framework called Ontology-Guided Scene Graph Generation (OG-SGG), that can improve the performance of an existing machine learning based scene graph generator using prior knowledge supplied in the form of an ontology (specifically, using the axioms defined within); and we present results evaluated on a specific scenario founded in telepresence robotics. These results show quantitative and qualitative improvements in the generated scene graphs.
Learning Multiple Explainable and Generalizable Cues for Face Anti-spoofing
Authors: Ying Bian, Peng Zhang, Jingjing Wang, Chunmao Wang, ShiLiang Pu
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Anti-Spoofing

Although previous CNN based face anti-spoofing methods have achieved promising performance under intra-dataset testing, they suffer from poor generalization under cross-dataset testing. The main reason is that they learn the network with only binary supervision, which may learn arbitrary cues overfitting on the training dataset. To make the learned feature explainable and more generalizable, some researchers introduce facial depth and reflection map as the auxiliary supervision. However, many other generalizable cues are unexplored for face anti-spoofing, which limits their performance under cross-dataset testing. To this end, we propose a novel framework to learn multiple explainable and generalizable cues (MEGC) for face anti-spoofing. Specifically, inspired by the process of human decision, four mainly used cues by humans are introduced as auxiliary supervision including the boundary of spoof medium, moir\'e pattern, reflection artifacts and facial depth in addition to the binary supervision. To avoid extra labelling cost, corresponding synthetic methods are proposed to generate these auxiliary supervision maps. Extensive experiments on public datasets validate the effectiveness of these cues, and state-of-the-art performances are achieved by our proposed method.
OSegNet: Operational Segmentation Network for COVID-19 Detection using Chest X-ray Images
Authors: Aysen Degerli, Serkan Kiranyaz, Muhammad E. H. Chowdhury, Moncef Gabbouj
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been diagnosed automatically using Machine Learning algorithms over chest X-ray (CXR) images. However, most of the earlier studies used Deep Learning models over scarce datasets bearing the risk of overfitting. Additionally, previous studies have revealed the fact that deep networks are not reliable for classification since their decisions may originate from irrelevant areas on the CXRs. Therefore, in this study, we propose Operational Segmentation Network (OSegNet) that performs detection by segmenting COVID-19 pneumonia for a reliable diagnosis. To address the data scarcity encountered in training and especially in evaluation, this study extends the largest COVID-19 CXR dataset: QaTa-COV19 with 121,378 CXRs including 9258 COVID-19 samples with their corresponding ground-truth segmentation masks that are publicly shared with the research community. Consequently, OSegNet has achieved a detection performance with the highest accuracy of 99.65% among the state-of-the-art deep models with 98.09% precision.
Cell nuclei classification in histopathological images using hybrid OLConvNet
Authors: Suvidha Tripathi, Satish Kumar Singh
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Deep Learning, Nuclei Classification

Computer-aided histopathological image analysis for cancer detection is a major research challenge in the medical domain. Automatic detection and classification of nuclei for cancer diagnosis impose a lot of challenges in developing state of the art algorithms due to the heterogeneity of cell nuclei and data set variability. Recently, a multitude of classification algorithms has used complex deep learning models for their dataset. However, most of these methods are rigid and their architectural arrangement suffers from inflexibility and non-interpretability. In this research article, we have proposed a hybrid and flexible deep learning architecture OLConvNet that integrates the interpretability of traditional object-level features and generalization of deep learning features by using a shallower Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named as $CNN_{3L}$. $CNN_{3L}$ reduces the training time by training fewer parameters and hence eliminating space constraints imposed by deeper algorithms. We used F1-score and multiclass Area Under the Curve (AUC) performance parameters to compare the results. To further strengthen the viability of our architectural approach, we tested our proposed methodology with state of the art deep learning architectures AlexNet, VGG16, VGG19, ResNet50, InceptionV3, and DenseNet121 as backbone networks. After a comprehensive analysis of classification results from all four architectures, we observed that our proposed model works well and perform better than contemporary complex algorithms.
Diffusion Causal Models for Counterfactual Estimation
Authors: Pedro Sanchez, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

We consider the task of counterfactual estimation from observational imaging data given a known causal structure. In particular, quantifying the causal effect of interventions for high-dimensional data with neural networks remains an open challenge. Herein we propose Diff-SCM, a deep structural causal model that builds on recent advances of generative energy-based models. In our setting, inference is performed by iteratively sampling gradients of the marginal and conditional distributions entailed by the causal model. Counterfactual estimation is achieved by firstly inferring latent variables with deterministic forward diffusion, then intervening on a reverse diffusion process using the gradients of an anti-causal predictor w.r.t the input. Furthermore, we propose a metric for evaluating the generated counterfactuals. We find that Diff-SCM produces more realistic and minimal counterfactuals than baselines on MNIST data and can also be applied to ImageNet data. Code is available https://github.com/vios-s/Diff-SCM.
Synthetic CT Skull Generation for Transcranial MR Imaging-Guided Focused Ultrasound Interventions with Conditional Adversarial Networks
Authors: Han Liu, Michelle K. Sigona, Thomas J. Manuel, Li Min Chen, Charles F. Caskey, Benoit M. Dawant
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Transcranial MRI-guided focused ultrasound (TcMRgFUS) is a therapeutic ultrasound method that focuses sound through the skull to a small region noninvasively under MRI guidance. It is clinically approved to thermally ablate regions of the thalamus and is being explored for other therapies, such as blood brain barrier opening and neuromodulation. To accurately target ultrasound through the skull, the transmitted waves must constructively interfere at the target region. However, heterogeneity of the sound speed, density, and ultrasound attenuation in different individuals' skulls requires patient-specific estimates of these parameters for optimal treatment planning. CT imaging is currently the gold standard for estimating acoustic properties of an individual skull during clinical procedures, but CT imaging exposes patients to radiation and increases the overall number of imaging procedures required for therapy. A method to estimate acoustic parameters in the skull without the need for CT would be desirable. Here, we synthesized CT images from routinely acquired T1-weighted MRI by using a 3D patch-based conditional generative adversarial network and evaluated the performance of synthesized CT images for treatment planning with transcranial focused ultrasound. We compared the performance of synthetic CT to real CT images using Kranion and k-Wave acoustic simulation. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of replacing real CT with the MR-synthesized CT for TcMRgFUS planning.
Multi-Task Conditional Imitation Learning for Autonomous Navigation at Crowded Intersections
Authors: Zeyu Zhu, Huijing Zhao
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Navigation, Imitation Learning

In recent years, great efforts have been devoted to deep imitation learning for autonomous driving control, where raw sensory inputs are directly mapped to control actions. However, navigating through densely populated intersections remains a challenging task due to uncertainty caused by uncertain traffic participants. We focus on autonomous navigation at crowded intersections that require interaction with pedestrians. A multi-task conditional imitation learning framework is proposed to adapt both lateral and longitudinal control tasks for safe and efficient interaction. A new benchmark called IntersectNav is developed and human demonstrations are provided. Empirical results show that the proposed method can achieve a success rate gain of up to 30% compared to the state-of-the-art.
An Efficient Smoothing and Thresholding Image Segmentation Framework with Weighted Anisotropic-Isotropic Total Variation
Authors: Kevin Bui, Yifei Lou, Fredrick Park, Jack Xin
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we design an efficient, multi-stage image segmentation framework that incorporates a weighted difference of anisotropic and isotropic total variation (AITV). The segmentation framework generally consists of two stages: smoothing and thresholding, thus referred to as SaT. In the first stage, a smoothed image is obtained by an AITV-regularized Mumford-Shah (MS) model, which can be solved efficiently by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with a closed-form solution of a proximal operator of the $\ell_1 -\alpha \ell_2$ regularizer. Convergence of the ADMM algorithm is analyzed. In the second stage, we threshold the smoothed image by $K$-means clustering to obtain the final segmentation result. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed segmentation framework is versatile for both grayscale and color images, efficient in producing high-quality segmentation results within a few seconds, and robust to input images that are corrupted with noise, blur, or both. We compare the AITV method with its original convex TV and nonconvex TV$^p (0<p<1)$ counterparts, showcasing the qualitative and quantitative advantages of our proposed method.
Simplified Learning of CAD Features Leveraging a Deep Residual Autoencoder
Authors: Raoul Schönhof, Jannes Elstner, Radu Manea, Steffen Tauber, Ramez Awad, Marco F. Huber
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

In the domain of computer vision, deep residual neural networks like EfficientNet have set new standards in terms of robustness and accuracy. One key problem underlying the training of deep neural networks is the immanent lack of a sufficient amount of training data. The problem worsens especially if labels cannot be generated automatically, but have to be annotated manually. This challenge occurs for instance if expert knowledge related to 3D parts should be externalized based on example models. One way to reduce the necessary amount of labeled data may be the use of autoencoders, which can be learned in an unsupervised fashion without labeled data. In this work, we present a deep residual 3D autoencoder based on the EfficientNet architecture, intended for transfer learning tasks related to 3D CAD model assessment. For this purpose, we adopted EfficientNet to 3D problems like voxel models derived from a STEP file. Striving to reduce the amount of labeled 3D data required, the networks encoder can be utilized for transfer training.
Point Cloud Denoising via Momentum Ascent in Gradient Fields
Authors: Yaping Zhao, Haitian Zheng, Zhongrui Wang, Jiebo Luo, Edmund Y. Lam
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Position

To achieve point cloud denoising, traditional methods heavily rely on geometric priors, and most learning-based approaches suffer from outliers and loss of details. Recently, the gradient-based method was proposed to estimate the gradient fields from the noisy point clouds using neural networks, and refine the position of each point according to the estimated gradient. However, the predicted gradient could fluctuate, leading to perturbed and unstable solutions, as well as a long inference time. To address these issues, we develop the momentum gradient ascent method that leverages the information of previous iterations in determining the trajectories of the points, thus improving the stability of the solution and reducing the inference time. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with a variety of point clouds, noise types, and noise levels. Code is available at: https://github.com/IndigoPurple/MAG
Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution
Authors: Ananya Kumar, aditi raghunathan, Robbie Jones, Tengyu Ma, Percy Liang
Date: 2022-02-21 00:00:00

When transferring a pretrained model to a downstream task, two popular methods are full fine-tuning (updating all the model parameters) and linear probing (updating only the last linear layer -- the "head"). It is well known that fine-tuning leads to better accuracy in-distribution (ID). However, in this paper, we find that fine-tuning can achieve worse accuracy than linear probing out-of-distribution (OOD) when the pretrained features are good and the distribution shift is large. On 10 distribution shift datasets (Breeds-Living17, Breeds-Entity30, DomainNet, CIFAR $\to$ STL, CIFAR10.1, FMoW, ImageNetV2, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-A, ImageNet-Sketch), fine-tuning obtains on average 2% higher accuracy ID but 7% lower accuracy OOD than linear probing. We show theoretically that this tradeoff between ID and OOD accuracy arises even in a simple setting: fine-tuning overparameterized two-layer linear networks. We prove that the OOD error of fine-tuning is high when we initialize with a fixed or random head -- this is because while fine-tuning learns the head, the lower layers of the neural network change simultaneously and distort the pretrained features. Our analysis suggests that the easy two-step strategy of linear probing then full fine-tuning (LP-FT), sometimes used as a fine-tuning heuristic, combines the benefits of both fine-tuning and linear probing. Empirically, LP-FT outperforms both fine-tuning and linear probing on the above datasets (1% better ID, 10% better OOD than full fine-tuning).