pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Miti-DETR: Object Detection based on Transformers with Mitigatory Self-Attention Convergence
Authors: Wenchi Ma, Tianxiao Zhang, Guanghui Wang
Date: 2021-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object Detection with Transformers (DETR) and related works reach or even surpass the highly-optimized Faster-RCNN baseline with self-attention network architectures. Inspired by the evidence that pure self-attention possesses a strong inductive bias that leads to the transformer losing the expressive power with respect to network depth, we propose a transformer architecture with a mitigatory self-attention mechanism by applying possible direct mapping connections in the transformer architecture to mitigate the rank collapse so as to counteract feature expression loss and enhance the model performance. We apply this proposal in object detection tasks and develop a model named Miti-DETR. Miti-DETR reserves the inputs of each single attention layer to the outputs of that layer so that the "non-attention" information has participated in any attention propagation. The formed residual self-attention network addresses two critical issues: (1) stop the self-attention networks from degenerating to rank-1 to the maximized degree; and (2) further diversify the path distribution of parameter update so that easier attention learning is expected. Miti-DETR significantly enhances the average detection precision and convergence speed towards existing DETR-based models on the challenging COCO object detection dataset. Moreover, the proposed transformer with the residual self-attention network can be easily generalized or plugged in other related task models without specific customization.
MSHT: Multi-stage Hybrid Transformer for the ROSE Image Analysis of Pancreatic Cancer
Authors: Tianyi Zhang, Yunlu Feng, Yu Zhao, Guangda Fan, Aiming Yang, Shangqin Lyu, Peng Zhang, Fan Song, Chenbin Ma, Yangyang Sun, Youdan Feng, Guanglei Zhang
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most malignant cancers in the world, which deteriorates rapidly with very high mortality. The rapid on-site evaluation (ROSE) technique innovates the workflow by immediately analyzing the fast stained cytopathological images with on-site pathologists, which enables faster diagnosis in this time-pressured process. However, the wider expansion of ROSE diagnosis has been hindered by the lack of experienced pathologists. To overcome this problem, we propose a hybrid high-performance deep learning model to enable the automated workflow, thus freeing the occupation of the valuable time of pathologists. By firstly introducing the Transformer block into this field with our particular multi-stage hybrid design, the spatial features generated by the convolutional neural network (CNN) significantly enhance the Transformer global modeling. Turning multi-stage spatial features as global attention guidance, this design combines the robustness from the inductive bias of CNN with the sophisticated global modeling power of Transformer. A dataset of 4240 ROSE images is collected to evaluate the method in this unexplored field. The proposed multi-stage hybrid Transformer (MSHT) achieves 95.68% in classification accuracy, which is distinctively higher than the state-of-the-art models. Facing the need for interpretability, MSHT outperforms its counterparts with more accurate attention regions. The results demonstrate that the MSHT can distinguish cancer samples accurately at an unprecedented image scale, laying the foundation for deploying automatic decision systems and enabling the expansion of ROSE in clinical practice. The code and records are available at: https://github.com/sagizty/Multi-Stage-Hybrid-Transformer.
Learning Generative Vision Transformer with Energy-Based Latent Space for Saliency Prediction
Authors: Jing Zhang, Jianwen Xie, Nick Barnes, Ping Li
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2021 12
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, Saliency Prediction, Salient Object Detection, Thermal Image Segmentation

Vision transformer networks have shown superiority in many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we take a step further by proposing a novel generative vision transformer with latent variables following an informative energy-based prior for salient object detection. Both the vision transformer network and the energy-based prior model are jointly trained via Markov chain Monte Carlo-based maximum likelihood estimation, in which the sampling from the intractable posterior and prior distributions of the latent variables are performed by Langevin dynamics. Further, with the generative vision transformer, we can easily obtain a pixel-wise uncertainty map from an image, which indicates the model confidence in predicting saliency from the image. Different from the existing generative models which define the prior distribution of the latent variables as a simple isotropic Gaussian distribution, our model uses an energy-based informative prior which can be more expressive to capture the latent space of the data. We apply the proposed framework to both RGB and RGB-D salient object detection tasks. Extensive experimental results show that our framework can achieve not only accurate saliency predictions but also meaningful uncertainty maps that are consistent with the human perception.
SGTR: End-to-end Scene Graph Generation with Transformer
Authors: Rongjie Li, Songyang Zhang, Xuming He
Date: 2021-12-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: graph construction, Graph Generation, Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) remains a challenging visual understanding task due to its compositional property. Most previous works adopt a bottom-up two-stage or a point-based one-stage approach, which often suffers from high time complexity or sub-optimal designs. In this work, we propose a novel SGG method to address the aforementioned issues, formulating the task as a bipartite graph construction problem. To solve the problem, we develop a transformer-based end-to-end framework that first generates the entity and predicate proposal set, followed by inferring directed edges to form the relation triplets. In particular, we develop a new entity-aware predicate representation based on a structural predicate generator that leverages the compositional property of relationships. Moreover, we design a graph assembling module to infer the connectivity of the bipartite scene graph based on our entity-aware structure, enabling us to generate the scene graph in an end-to-end manner. Extensive experimental results show that our design is able to achieve the state-of-the-art or comparable performance on two challenging benchmarks, surpassing most of the existing approaches and enjoying higher efficiency in inference. We hope our model can serve as a strong baseline for the Transformer-based scene graph generation. Code is available: https://github.com/Scarecrow0/SGTR
Video Joint Modelling Based on Hierarchical Transformer for Co-summarization
Authors: Li Haopeng, Ke Qiuhong, Gong Mingming, Zhang Rui
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Supervised Video Summarization, Video Retrieval, Video Summarization, Video Understanding

Video summarization aims to automatically generate a summary (storyboard or video skim) of a video, which can facilitate large-scale video retrieval and browsing. Most of the existing methods perform video summarization on individual videos, which neglects the correlations among similar videos. Such correlations, however, are also informative for video understanding and video summarization. To address this limitation, we propose Video Joint Modelling based on Hierarchical Transformer (VJMHT) for co-summarization, which takes into consideration the semantic dependencies across videos. Specifically, VJMHT consists of two layers of Transformer: the first layer extracts semantic representation from individual shots of similar videos, while the second layer performs shot-level video joint modelling to aggregate cross-video semantic information. By this means, complete cross-video high-level patterns are explicitly modelled and learned for the summarization of individual videos. Moreover, Transformer-based video representation reconstruction is introduced to maximize the high-level similarity between the summary and the original video. Extensive experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed modules and the superiority of VJMHT in terms of F-measure and rank-based evaluation.
Multimodal Image Synthesis and Editing: The Generative AI Era
Authors: Fangneng Zhan, Yingchen Yu, Rongliang Wu, Jiahui Zhang, Shijian Lu, Lingjie Liu, Adam Kortylewski, Christian Theobalt, Eric Xing
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Survey

As information exists in various modalities in real world, effective interaction and fusion among multimodal information plays a key role for the creation and perception of multimodal data in computer vision and deep learning research. With superb power in modeling the interaction among multimodal information, multimodal image synthesis and editing has become a hot research topic in recent years. Instead of providing explicit guidance for network training, multimodal guidance offers intuitive and flexible means for image synthesis and editing. On the other hand, this field is also facing several challenges in alignment of multimodal features, synthesis of high-resolution images, faithful evaluation metrics, etc. In this survey, we comprehensively contextualize the advance of the recent multimodal image synthesis and editing and formulate taxonomies according to data modalities and model types. We start with an introduction to different guidance modalities in image synthesis and editing, and then describe multimodal image synthesis and editing approaches extensively according to their model types. After that, we describe benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics as well as corresponding experimental results. Finally, we provide insights about the current research challenges and possible directions for future research. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/fnzhan/Generative-AI.
High-Fidelity Point Cloud Completion with Low-Resolution Recovery and Noise-Aware Upsampling
Authors: Ren-Wu Li, Bo wang, Chun-Peng Li, Ling-Xiao Zhang, Lin Gao
Date: 2021-12-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion

Completing an unordered partial point cloud is a challenging task. Existing approaches that rely on decoding a latent feature to recover the complete shape, often lead to the completed point cloud being over-smoothing, losing details, and noisy. Instead of decoding a whole shape, we propose to decode and refine a low-resolution (low-res) point cloud first, and then performs a patch-wise noise-aware upsampling rather than interpolating the whole sparse point cloud at once, which tends to lose details. Regarding the possibility of lacking details of the initially decoded low-res point cloud, we propose an iterative refinement to recover the geometric details and a symmetrization process to preserve the trustworthy information from the input partial point cloud. After obtaining a sparse and complete point cloud, we propose a patch-wise upsampling strategy. Patch-based upsampling allows to better recover fine details unlike decoding a whole shape, however, the existing upsampling methods are not applicable to completion task due to the data discrepancy (i.e., input sparse data here is not from ground-truth). Therefore, we propose a patch extraction approach to generate training patch pairs between the sparse and ground-truth point clouds, and an outlier removal step to suppress the noisy points from the sparse point cloud. Together with the low-res recovery, our whole method is able to achieve high-fidelity point cloud completion. Comprehensive evaluations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its individual components.
Decomposing the Deep: Finding Class Specific Filters in Deep CNNs
Authors: Akshay Badola, Cherian Roy, Vineet Padmanabhan, Rajendra Lal
Date: 2021-12-14 00:00:00

Interpretability of Deep Neural Networks has become a major area of exploration. Although these networks have achieved state of the art accuracy in many tasks, it is extremely difficult to interpret and explain their decisions. In this work we analyze the final and penultimate layers of Deep Convolutional Networks and provide an efficient method for identifying subsets of features that contribute most towards the network's decision for a class. We demonstrate that the number of such features per class is much lower in comparison to the dimension of the final layer and therefore the decision surface of Deep CNNs lies on a low dimensional manifold and is proportional to the network depth. Our methods allow to decompose the final layer into separate subspaces which is far more interpretable and has a lower computational cost as compared to the final layer of the full network.
On the Evolution of the MCTS Upper Confidence Bounds for Trees by Means of Evolutionary Algorithms in the Game of Carcassonne
Authors: Edgar Galván, Gavin Simpson
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a sampling best-first method to search for optimal decisions. The MCTS's popularity is based on its extraordinary results in the challenging two-player based game Go, a game considered much harder than Chess and that until very recently was considered infeasible for Artificial Intelligence methods. The success of MCTS depends heavily on how the tree is built and the selection process plays a fundamental role in this. One particular selection mechanism that has proved to be reliable is based on the Upper Confidence Bounds for Trees, commonly referred as UCT. The UCT attempts to nicely balance exploration and exploitation by considering the values stored in the statistical tree of the MCTS. However, some tuning of the MCTS UCT is necessary for this to work well. In this work, we use Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) to evolve mathematical expressions with the goal to substitute the UCT mathematical expression. We compare our proposed approach, called Evolution Strategy in MCTS (ES-MCTS) against five variants of the MCTS UCT, three variants of the star-minimax family of algorithms as well as a random controller in the Game of Carcassonne. We also use a variant of our proposed EA-based controller, dubbed ES partially integrated in MCTS. We show how the ES-MCTS controller, is able to outperform all these 10 intelligent controllers, including robust MCTS UCT controllers.
MSeg: A Composite Dataset for Multi-domain Semantic Segmentation
Authors: John Lambert, Zhuang Liu, Ozan Sener, James Hays, Vladlen Koltun
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2020 6
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Instance Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present MSeg, a composite dataset that unifies semantic segmentation datasets from different domains. A naive merge of the constituent datasets yields poor performance due to inconsistent taxonomies and annotation practices. We reconcile the taxonomies and bring the pixel-level annotations into alignment by relabeling more than 220,000 object masks in more than 80,000 images, requiring more than 1.34 years of collective annotator effort. The resulting composite dataset enables training a single semantic segmentation model that functions effectively across domains and generalizes to datasets that were not seen during training. We adopt zero-shot cross-dataset transfer as a benchmark to systematically evaluate a model's robustness and show that MSeg training yields substantially more robust models in comparison to training on individual datasets or naive mixing of datasets without the presented contributions. A model trained on MSeg ranks first on the WildDash-v1 leaderboard for robust semantic segmentation, with no exposure to WildDash data during training. We evaluate our models in the 2020 Robust Vision Challenge (RVC) as an extreme generalization experiment. MSeg training sets include only three of the seven datasets in the RVC; more importantly, the evaluation taxonomy of RVC is different and more detailed. Surprisingly, our model shows competitive performance and ranks second. To evaluate how close we are to the grand aim of robust, efficient, and complete scene understanding, we go beyond semantic segmentation by training instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation models using our dataset. Moreover, we also evaluate various engineering design decisions and metrics, including resolution and computational efficiency. Although our models are far from this grand aim, our comprehensive evaluation is crucial for progress. We share all the models and code with the community.
Automatic Configuration for Optimal Communication Scheduling in DNN Training
Authors: Yiqing Ma, Hao Wang, Yiming Zhang, Kai Chen
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Scheduling

ByteScheduler partitions and rearranges tensor transmissions to improve the communication efficiency of distributed Deep Neural Network (DNN) training. The configuration of hyper-parameters (i.e., the partition size and the credit size) is critical to the effectiveness of partitioning and rearrangement. Currently, ByteScheduler adopts Bayesian Optimization (BO) to find the optimal configuration for the hyper-parameters beforehand. In practice, however, various runtime factors (e.g., worker node status and network conditions) change over time, making the statically-determined one-shot configuration result suboptimal for real-world DNN training. To address this problem, we present a real-time configuration method (called AutoByte) that automatically and timely searches the optimal hyper-parameters as the training systems dynamically change. AutoByte extends the ByteScheduler framework with a meta-network, which takes the system's runtime statistics as its input and outputs predictions for speedups under specific configurations. Evaluation results on various DNN models show that AutoByte can dynamically tune the hyper-parameters with low resource usage, and deliver up to 33.2\% higher performance than the best static configuration in ByteScheduler.
Duck swarm algorithm: theory, numerical optimization, and applications
Authors: Mengjian Zhang, Guihua Wen
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00

A swarm intelligence-based optimization algorithm, named Duck Swarm Algorithm (DSA), is proposed in this study, which is inspired by the searching for food sources and foraging behaviors of the duck swarm. Two rules are modeled from the finding food and foraging of the duck, which corresponds to the exploration and exploitation phases of the proposed DSA, respectively. The performance of the DSA is verified by using multiple CEC benchmark functions, where its statistical (best, mean, standard deviation, and average running-time) results are compared with seven well-known algorithms like Particle swarm optimization (PSO), Firefly algorithm (FA), Chicken swarm optimization (CSO), Grey wolf optimizer (GWO), Sine cosine algorithm (SCA), and Marine-predators algorithm (MPA), and Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA). Moreover, the Wilcoxon rank-sum test, Friedman test, and convergence curves of the comparison results are utilized to prove the superiority of the DSA against other algorithms. The results demonstrate that DSA is a high-performance optimization method in terms of convergence speed and exploration-exploitation balance for solving the numerical optimization problems. Also, DSA is applied for the optimal design of six engineering constrained optimization problems and the node optimization deployment task of the Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Overall, the comparison results revealed that the DSA is a promising and very competitive algorithm for solving different optimization problems.
Extracting knowledge from features with multilevel abstraction
Authors: Jinhong Lin, Zhaoyang Li
Date: 2021-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Self-Knowledge Distillation

Knowledge distillation aims at transferring the knowledge from a large teacher model to a small student model with great improvements of the performance of the student model. Therefore, the student network can replace the teacher network to deploy on low-resource devices since the higher performance, lower number of parameters and shorter inference time. Self-knowledge distillation (SKD) attracts a great attention recently that a student model itself is a teacher model distilling knowledge from. To the best of our knowledge, self knowledge distillation can be divided into two main streams: data augmentation and refined knowledge auxiliary. In this paper, we purpose a novel SKD method in a different way from the main stream methods. Our method distills knowledge from multilevel abstraction features. Experiments and ablation studies show its great effectiveness and generalization on various kinds of tasks with various kinds of model structures. Our codes have been released on GitHub.
Towards More Effective PRM-based Crowd Counting via A Multi-resolution Fusion and Attention Network
Authors: Usman Sajid, Guanghui Wang
Date: 2021-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

The paper focuses on improving the recent plug-and-play patch rescaling module (PRM) based approaches for crowd counting. In order to make full use of the PRM potential and obtain more reliable and accurate results for challenging images with crowd-variation, large perspective, extreme occlusions, and cluttered background regions, we propose a new PRM based multi-resolution and multi-task crowd counting network by exploiting the PRM module with more effectiveness and potency. The proposed model consists of three deep-layered branches with each branch generating feature maps of different resolutions. These branches perform a feature-level fusion across each other to build the vital collective knowledge to be used for the final crowd estimate. Additionally, early-stage feature maps undergo visual attention to strengthen the later-stage channels understanding of the foreground regions. The integration of these deep branches with the PRM module and the early-attended blocks proves to be more effective than the original PRM based schemes through extensive numerical and visual evaluations on four benchmark datasets. The proposed approach yields a significant improvement by a margin of 12.6% in terms of the RMSE evaluation criterion. It also outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-dataset evaluations.
A Brief History of Updates of Answer-Set Programs
Authors: João Leite, Martin Slota
Date: 2021-12-27 00:00:00

Over the last couple of decades, there has been a considerable effort devoted to the problem of updating logic programs under the stable model semantics (a.k.a. answer-set programs) or, in other words, the problem of characterising the result of bringing up-to-date a logic program when the world it describes changes. Whereas the state-of-the-art approaches are guided by the same basic intuitions and aspirations as belief updates in the context of classical logic, they build upon fundamentally different principles and methods, which have prevented a unifying framework that could embrace both belief and rule updates. In this paper, we will overview some of the main approaches and results related to answer-set programming updates, while pointing out some of the main challenges that research in this topic has faced.