pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Multiscale Object-based Superpixel Framework
Authors: Felipe Belém, Benjamin Perret, Jean Cousty, Silvio J. F. Guimarães, Alexandre Falcão
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Superpixels

Superpixel segmentation can be used as an intermediary step in many applications, often to improve object delineation and reduce computer workload. However, classical methods do not incorporate information about the desired object. Deep-learning-based approaches consider object information, but their delineation performance depends on data annotation. Additionally, the computational time of object-based methods is usually much higher than desired. In this work, we propose a novel superpixel framework, named Superpixels through Iterative CLEarcutting (SICLE), which exploits object information being able to generate a multiscale segmentation on-the-fly. SICLE starts off from seed oversampling and repeats optimal connectivity-based superpixel delineation and object-based seed removal until a desired number of superpixels is reached. It generalizes recent superpixel methods, surpassing them and other state-of-the-art approaches in efficiency and effectiveness according to multiple delineation metrics.
Visualizing Deep Neural Networks with Topographic Activation Maps
Authors: Valerie Krug, Raihan Kabir Ratul, Christopher Olson, Sebastian Stober
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Machine Learning with Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has become a successful tool in solving tasks across various fields of application. However, the complexity of DNNs makes it difficult to understand how they solve their learned task. To improve the explainability of DNNs, we adapt methods from neuroscience that analyze complex and opaque systems. Here, we draw inspiration from how neuroscience uses topographic maps to visualize brain activity. To also visualize activations of neurons in DNNs as topographic maps, we research techniques to layout the neurons in a two-dimensional space such that neurons of similar activity are in the vicinity of each other. In this work, we introduce and compare methods to obtain a topographic layout of neurons in a DNN layer. Moreover, we demonstrate how to use topographic activation maps to identify errors or encoded biases and to visualize training processes. Our novel visualization technique improves the transparency of DNN-based decision-making systems and is interpretable without expert knowledge in Machine Learning.
An effective coaxiality measurement for twist drill based on line structured light sensor
Authors: Ailing Cheng, Jiaojiao Ye, Fei Yang, Shufang Lu, Fei Gao
Date: 2021-12-18 00:00:00

Aiming at the accurate and effective coaxiality measurement for twist drill with irregular surface, an optical measurement mechanism is proposed in this paper. First, A high-precision rotation instrument based on four core units is designed, which can obtain the 3-D point cloud data of full angle for the twist drill. Second, in the data processing stage, an improved robust Gaussian mixture model is established for accurate and rapid blade back segmentation. To improve measurement efficiency, a rapid reconstruction method of the twist drill axis based on orthogonal synthesis is provided to locate the axial position of the maximum deviation from the benchmark by utilizing the extracted blade back data. Finally, by calculating the maximum radial Euclidean distance from the benchmark, the coaxiality error of the twist drill is obtained. Comparing with other measurement methods, experimental results show that our proposed method is effective with high precision of 3 um and high efficiency of less than 3 s/pc. The result demonstrate that the proposed method is effective, robust and automatic, it can be applied in many actual industrial scene.
Multi-Task Distributed Learning using Vision Transformer with Random Patch Permutation
Authors: Sangjoon Park, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Management, Multi-Task Learning

The widespread application of artificial intelligence in health research is currently hampered by limitations in data availability. Distributed learning methods such as federated learning (FL) and shared learning (SL) are introduced to solve this problem as well as data management and ownership issues with their different strengths and weaknesses. The recent proposal of federated split task-agnostic (FeSTA) learning tries to reconcile the distinct merits of FL and SL by enabling the multi-task collaboration between participants through Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture, but they suffer from higher communication overhead. To address this, here we present a multi-task distributed learning using ViT with random patch permutation. Instead of using a CNN based head as in FeSTA, p-FeSTA adopts a randomly permuting simple patch embedder, improving the multi-task learning performance without sacrificing privacy. Experimental results confirm that the proposed method significantly enhances the benefit of multi-task collaboration, communication efficiency, and privacy preservation, shedding light on practical multi-task distributed learning in the field of medical imaging.
Optimizing the Long-Term Behaviour of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Pushing and Grasping
Authors: Rodrigo Chau
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

We investigate the "Visual Pushing for Grasping" (VPG) system by Zeng et al. and the "Hourglass" system by Ewerton et al., an evolution of the former. The focus of our work is the investigation of the capabilities of both systems to learn long-term rewards and policies. Zeng et al. original task only needs a limited amount of foresight. Ewerton et al. attain their best performance using an agent which only takes the most immediate action under consideration. We are interested in the ability of their models and training algorithms to accurately predict long-term Q-Values. To evaluate this ability, we design a new bin sorting task and reward function. Our task requires agents to accurately estimate future rewards and therefore use high discount factors in their Q-Value calculation. We investigate the behaviour of an adaptation of the VPG training algorithm on our task. We show that this adaptation can not accurately predict the required long-term action sequences. In addition to the limitations identified by Ewerton et al., it suffers from the known Deep Q-Learning problem of overestimated Q-Values. In an effort to solve our task, we turn to the Hourglass models and combine them with the Double Q-Learning approach. We show that this approach enables the models to accurately predict long-term action sequences when trained with large discount factors. Our results show that the Double Q-Learning technique is essential for training with very high discount factors, as the models Q-Value predictions diverge otherwise. We also experiment with different approaches for discount factor scheduling, loss calculation and exploration procedures. Our results show that the latter factors do not visibly influence the model's performance for our task.
ProbNVS: Fast Novel View Synthesis with Learned Probability-Guided Sampling
Authors: Yuemei Zhou, Tao Yu, Zerong Zheng, Ying Fu, Yebin Liu
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Novel View Synthesis

Existing state-of-the-art novel view synthesis methods rely on either fairly accurate 3D geometry estimation or sampling of the entire space for neural volumetric rendering, which limit the overall efficiency. In order to improve the rendering efficiency by reducing sampling points without sacrificing rendering quality, we propose to build a novel view synthesis framework based on learned MVS priors that enables general, fast and photo-realistic view synthesis simultaneously. Specifically, fewer but important points are sampled under the guidance of depth probability distributions extracted from the learned MVS architecture. Based on the learned probability-guided sampling, a neural volume rendering module is elaborately devised to fully aggregate source view information as well as the learned scene structures to synthesize photorealistic target view images. Finally, the rendering results in uncertain, occluded and unreferenced regions can be further improved by incorporating a confidence-aware refinement module. Experiments show that our method achieves 15 to 40 times faster rendering compared to state-of-the-art baselines, with strong generalization capacity and comparable high-quality novel view synthesis performance.
Solving ImageNet: a Unified Scheme for Training any Backbone to Top Results
Authors: Tal Ridnik, Hussam Lawen, Emanuel Ben-Baruch, Asaf Noy
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation

ImageNet serves as the primary dataset for evaluating the quality of computer-vision models. The common practice today is training each architecture with a tailor-made scheme, designed and tuned by an expert. In this paper, we present a unified scheme for training any backbone on ImageNet. The scheme, named USI (Unified Scheme for ImageNet), is based on knowledge distillation and modern tricks. It requires no adjustments or hyper-parameters tuning between different models, and is efficient in terms of training times. We test USI on a wide variety of architectures, including CNNs, Transformers, Mobile-oriented and MLP-only. On all models tested, USI outperforms previous state-of-the-art results. Hence, we are able to transform training on ImageNet from an expert-oriented task to an automatic seamless routine. Since USI accepts any backbone and trains it to top results, it also enables to perform methodical comparisons, and identify the most efficient backbones along the speed-accuracy Pareto curve. Implementation is available at:https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/Solving_ImageNet
Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmark
Authors: Gabriele Berton, Riccardo Mereu, Gabriele Trivigno, Carlo Masone, Gabriela Csurka, Torsten Sattler, Barbara Caputo
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Benchmarking, Data Augmentation, geo-localization

In this paper, we propose a new open-source benchmarking framework for Visual Geo-localization (VG) that allows to build, train, and test a wide range of commonly used architectures, with the flexibility to change individual components of a geo-localization pipeline. The purpose of this framework is twofold: i) gaining insights into how different components and design choices in a VG pipeline impact the final results, both in terms of performance (recall@N metric) and system requirements (such as execution time and memory consumption); ii) establish a systematic evaluation protocol for comparing different methods. Using the proposed framework, we perform a large suite of experiments which provide criteria for choosing backbone, aggregation and negative mining depending on the use-case and requirements. We also assess the impact of engineering techniques like pre/post-processing, data augmentation and image resizing, showing that better performance can be obtained through somewhat simple procedures: for example, downscaling the images' resolution to 80% can lead to similar results with a 36% savings in extraction time and dataset storage requirement. Code and trained models are available at https://deep-vg-bench.herokuapp.com/.
Task-Aware Active Learning for Endoscopic Image Analysis
Authors: Shrawan Kumar Thapa, Pranav Poudel, Binod Bhattarai, Danail Stoyanov
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Depth Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation of polyps and depth estimation are two important research problems in endoscopic image analysis. One of the main obstacles to conduct research on these research problems is lack of annotated data. Endoscopic annotations necessitate the specialist knowledge of expert endoscopists and due to this, it can be difficult to organise, expensive and time consuming. To address this problem, we investigate an active learning paradigm to reduce the number of training examples by selecting the most discriminative and diverse unlabelled examples for the task taken into consideration. Most of the existing active learning pipelines are task-agnostic in nature and are often sub-optimal to the end task. In this paper, we propose a novel task-aware active learning pipeline and applied for two important tasks in endoscopic image analysis: semantic segmentation and depth estimation. We compared our method with the competitive baselines. From the experimental results, we observe a substantial improvement over the compared baselines. Codes are available at https://github.com/thetna/endo-active-learn.
Incremental Prototype Tuning for Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Jieren Deng, Jianhua Hu, Haojian Zhang, Yunkuan Wang
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Class incremental learning(CIL) has attracted much attention, but most existing related works focus on fine-tuning the entire representation model, which inevitably results in much catastrophic forgetting. In the contrast, with a semantic-rich pre-trained representation model, parameter-additional-tuning (PAT) only changes very few parameters to learn new visual concepts. Recent studies have proved that PAT-based CIL can naturally avoid fighting against forgetting by replaying or distilling like most of the existing methods. However, we find that PAT-based CIL still faces serious semantic drift, the high-level forgetting problem caused by classifier learning bias at different learning phases, which significantly reduces the performance of PAT-based CIL. To address this problem, we propose Incremental Prototype Tuning (IPT), a simple but effective method that tunes category prototypes for classification and learning example prototypes to compensate for semantic drift. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively compensate for semantic drift. Combined with well-pre-trained Vit backbones and other PAT methods, IPT surpasses the state-of-the-art baselines on mainstream incremental learning benchmarks.
Surface Vision Transformers: Flexible Attention-Based Modelling of Biomedical Surfaces
Authors: Simon Dahan, Hao Xu, Logan Z. J. Williams, Abdulah Fawaz, Chunhui Yang, Timothy S. Coalson, Michelle C. Williams, David E. Newby, A. David Edwards, Matthew F. Glasser, Alistair A. Young, Daniel Rueckert, Emma C. Robinson
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation

Recent state-of-the-art performances of Vision Transformers (ViT) in computer vision tasks demonstrate that a general-purpose architecture, which implements long-range self-attention, could replace the local feature learning operations of convolutional neural networks. In this paper, we extend ViTs to surfaces by reformulating the task of surface learning as a sequence-to-sequence learning problem, by proposing patching mechanisms for general surface meshes. Sequences of patches are then processed by a transformer encoder and used for classification or regression. We validate our method on a range of different biomedical surface domains and tasks: brain age prediction in the developing Human Connectome Project (dHCP), fluid intelligence prediction in the Human Connectome Project (HCP), and coronary artery calcium score classification using surfaces from the Scottish Computed Tomography of the Heart (SCOT-HEART) dataset, and investigate the impact of pretraining and data augmentation on model performance. Results suggest that Surface Vision Transformers (SiT) demonstrate consistent improvement over geometric deep learning methods for brain age and fluid intelligence prediction and achieve comparable performance on calcium score classification to standard metrics used in clinical practice. Furthermore, analysis of transformer attention maps offers clear and individualised predictions of the features driving each task. Code is available on Github: https://github.com/metrics-lab/surface-vision-transformers
Tencent Text-Video Retrieval: Hierarchical Cross-Modal Interactions with Multi-Level Representations
Authors: Jie Jiang, Shaobo Min, Weijie Kong, Dihong Gong, Hongfa Wang, Zhifeng Li, Wei Liu
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Denoising, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence Embeddings, Video Retrieval

Text-Video Retrieval plays an important role in multi-modal understanding and has attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most existing methods focus on constructing contrastive pairs between whole videos and complete caption sentences, while overlooking fine-grained cross-modal relationships, e.g., clip-phrase or frame-word. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named Hierarchical Cross-Modal Interaction (HCMI), to explore multi-level cross-modal relationships among video-sentence, clip-phrase, and frame-word for text-video retrieval. Considering intrinsic semantic frame relations, HCMI performs self-attention to explore frame-level correlations and adaptively cluster correlated frames into clip-level and video-level representations. In this way, HCMI constructs multi-level video representations for frame-clip-video granularities to capture fine-grained video content, and multi-level text representations at word-phrase-sentence granularities for the text modality. With multi-level representations for video and text, hierarchical contrastive learning is designed to explore fine-grained cross-modal relationships, i.e., frame-word, clip-phrase, and video-sentence, which enables HCMI to achieve a comprehensive semantic comparison between video and text modalities. Further boosted by adaptive label denoising and marginal sample enhancement, HCMI achieves new state-of-the-art results on various benchmarks, e.g., Rank@1 of 55.0%, 58.2%, 29.7%, 52.1%, and 57.3% on MSR-VTT, MSVD, LSMDC, DiDemo, and ActivityNet, respectively.
Detection of Distracted Driver using Convolution Neural Network
Authors: Narayana Darapaneni, Jai Arora, MoniShankar Hazra, Naman Vig, Simrandeep Singh Gandhi, Saurabh Gupta, Anwesh Reddy Paduri
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00

With over 50 million car sales annually and over 1.3 million deaths every year due to motor accidents we have chosen this space. India accounts for 11 per cent of global death in road accidents. Drivers are held responsible for 78% of accidents. Road safety problems in developing countries is a major concern and human behavior is ascribed as one of the main causes and accelerators of road safety problems. Driver distraction has been identified as the main reason for accidents. Distractions can be caused due to reasons such as mobile usage, drinking, operating instruments, facial makeup, social interaction. For the scope of this project, we will focus on building a highly efficient ML model to classify different driver distractions at runtime using computer vision. We would also analyze the overall speed and scalability of the model in order to be able to set it up on an edge device. We use CNN, VGG-16, RestNet50 and ensemble of CNN to predict the classes.
ECCV Caption: Correcting False Negatives by Collecting Machine-and-Human-verified Image-Caption Associations for MS-COCO
Authors: Sanghyuk Chun, Wonjae Kim, Song Park, Minsuk Chang, Seong Joon Oh
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text matching, Text Matching

Image-Text matching (ITM) is a common task for evaluating the quality of Vision and Language (VL) models. However, existing ITM benchmarks have a significant limitation. They have many missing correspondences, originating from the data construction process itself. For example, a caption is only matched with one image although the caption can be matched with other similar images and vice versa. To correct the massive false negatives, we construct the Extended COCO Validation (ECCV) Caption dataset by supplying the missing associations with machine and human annotators. We employ five state-of-the-art ITM models with diverse properties for our annotation process. Our dataset provides x3.6 positive image-to-caption associations and x8.5 caption-to-image associations compared to the original MS-COCO. We also propose to use an informative ranking-based metric mAP@R, rather than the popular Recall@K (R@K). We re-evaluate the existing 25 VL models on existing and proposed benchmarks. Our findings are that the existing benchmarks, such as COCO 1K R@K, COCO 5K R@K, CxC R@1 are highly correlated with each other, while the rankings change when we shift to the ECCV mAP@R. Lastly, we delve into the effect of the bias introduced by the choice of machine annotator. Source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/eccv-caption
Event Transformer. A sparse-aware solution for efficient event data processing
Authors: Alberto Sabater, Luis Montesano, Ana C. Murillo
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Gesture Recognition, GPU

Event cameras are sensors of great interest for many applications that run in low-resource and challenging environments. They log sparse illumination changes with high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, while they present minimal power consumption. However, top-performing methods often ignore specific event-data properties, leading to the development of generic but computationally expensive algorithms. Efforts toward efficient solutions usually do not achieve top-accuracy results for complex tasks. This work proposes a novel framework, Event Transformer (EvT), that effectively takes advantage of event-data properties to be highly efficient and accurate. We introduce a new patch-based event representation and a compact transformer-like architecture to process it. EvT is evaluated on different event-based benchmarks for action and gesture recognition. Evaluation results show better or comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art while requiring significantly less computation resources, which makes EvT able to work with minimal latency both on GPU and CPU.
Learning Online Multi-Sensor Depth Fusion
Authors: Erik Sandström, Martin R. Oswald, Suryansh Kumar, Silvan Weder, Fisher Yu, Cristian Sminchisescu, Luc van Gool
Date: 2022-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Mixed Reality, Surface Reconstruction

Many hand-held or mixed reality devices are used with a single sensor for 3D reconstruction, although they often comprise multiple sensors. Multi-sensor depth fusion is able to substantially improve the robustness and accuracy of 3D reconstruction methods, but existing techniques are not robust enough to handle sensors which operate with diverse value ranges as well as noise and outlier statistics. To this end, we introduce SenFuNet, a depth fusion approach that learns sensor-specific noise and outlier statistics and combines the data streams of depth frames from different sensors in an online fashion. Our method fuses multi-sensor depth streams regardless of time synchronization and calibration and generalizes well with little training data. We conduct experiments with various sensor combinations on the real-world CoRBS and Scene3D datasets, as well as the Replica dataset. Experiments demonstrate that our fusion strategy outperforms traditional and recent online depth fusion approaches. In addition, the combination of multiple sensors yields more robust outlier handling and more precise surface reconstruction than the use of a single sensor. The source code and data are available at https://github.com/tfy14esa/SenFuNet.