pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
One-shot Ultra-high-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network That Synthesizes 16K Images On A Single GPU
Authors: JunSeok Oh, Donghwee Yoon, Injung Kim
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 16k, 4k, Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network, GPU, Image Generation, Super-Resolution, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

We propose a one-shot ultra-high-resolution generative adversarial network (OUR-GAN) framework that generates non-repetitive 16K (16, 384 x 8, 640) images from a single training image and is trainable on a single consumer GPU. OUR-GAN generates an initial image that is visually plausible and varied in shape at low resolution, and then gradually increases the resolution by adding detail through super-resolution. Since OUR-GAN learns from a real ultra-high-resolution (UHR) image, it can synthesize large shapes with fine details and long-range coherence, which is difficult to achieve with conventional generative models that rely on the patch distribution learned from relatively small images. OUR-GAN can synthesize high-quality 16K images with 12.5 GB of GPU memory and 4K images with only 4.29 GB as it synthesizes a UHR image part by part through seamless subregion-wise super-resolution. Additionally, OUR-GAN improves visual coherence while maintaining diversity by applying vertical positional convolution. In experiments on the ST4K and RAISE datasets, OUR-GAN exhibited improved fidelity, visual coherency, and diversity compared with the baseline one-shot synthesis models. To the best of our knowledge, OUR-GAN is the first one-shot image synthesizer that generates non-repetitive UHR images on a single consumer GPU. The synthesized image samples are presented at https://our-gan.github.io.
Evaluating the Adversarial Robustness of Adaptive Test-time Defenses
Authors: Francesco Croce, Sven Gowal, Thomas Brunner, Evan Shelhamer, Matthias Hein, Taylan Cemgil
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, image-classification, Image Classification

Adaptive defenses, which optimize at test time, promise to improve adversarial robustness. We categorize such adaptive test-time defenses, explain their potential benefits and drawbacks, and evaluate a representative variety of the latest adaptive defenses for image classification. Unfortunately, none significantly improve upon static defenses when subjected to our careful case study evaluation. Some even weaken the underlying static model while simultaneously increasing inference computation. While these results are disappointing, we still believe that adaptive test-time defenses are a promising avenue of research and, as such, we provide recommendations for their thorough evaluation. We extend the checklist of Carlini et al. (2019) by providing concrete steps specific to adaptive defenses.
Recent Advances and Challenges in Deep Audio-Visual Correlation Learning
Authors: Luís Vilaça, Yi Yu, Paula Viana
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Audio-visual correlation learning aims to capture essential correspondences and understand natural phenomena between audio and video. With the rapid growth of deep learning, an increasing amount of attention has been paid to this emerging research issue. Through the past few years, various methods and datasets have been proposed for audio-visual correlation learning, which motivate us to conclude a comprehensive survey. This survey paper focuses on state-of-the-art (SOTA) models used to learn correlations between audio and video, but also discusses some tasks of definition and paradigm applied in AI multimedia. In addition, we investigate some objective functions frequently used for optimizing audio-visual correlation learning models and discuss how audio-visual data is exploited in the optimization process. Most importantly, we provide an extensive comparison and summarization of the recent progress of SOTA audio-visual correlation learning and discuss future research directions.
FedDrive: Generalizing Federated Learning to Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Lidia Fantauzzo, Eros Fanì, Debora Caldarola, Antonio Tavera, Fabio Cermelli, Marco Ciccone, Barbara Caputo
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Generalization, Federated Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

Semantic Segmentation is essential to make self-driving vehicles autonomous, enabling them to understand their surroundings by assigning individual pixels to known categories. However, it operates on sensible data collected from the users' cars; thus, protecting the clients' privacy becomes a primary concern. For similar reasons, Federated Learning has been recently introduced as a new machine learning paradigm aiming to learn a global model while preserving privacy and leveraging data on millions of remote devices. Despite several efforts on this topic, no work has explicitly addressed the challenges of federated learning in semantic segmentation for driving so far. To fill this gap, we propose FedDrive, a new benchmark consisting of three settings and two datasets, incorporating the real-world challenges of statistical heterogeneity and domain generalization. We benchmark state-of-the-art algorithms from the federated learning literature through an in-depth analysis, combining them with style transfer methods to improve their generalization ability. We demonstrate that correctly handling normalization statistics is crucial to deal with the aforementioned challenges. Furthermore, style transfer improves performance when dealing with significant appearance shifts. Official website: https://feddrive.github.io.
Neural Adaptive SCEne Tracing
Authors: Rui Li, Darius Rückert, Yuanhao Wang, Ramzi Idoughi, Wolfgang Heidrich
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

Neural rendering with implicit neural networks has recently emerged as an attractive proposition for scene reconstruction, achieving excellent quality albeit at high computational cost. While the most recent generation of such methods has made progress on the rendering (inference) times, very little progress has been made on improving the reconstruction (training) times. In this work, we present Neural Adaptive Scene Tracing (NAScenT), the first neural rendering method based on directly training a hybrid explicit-implicit neural representation. NAScenT uses a hierarchical octree representation with one neural network per leaf node and combines this representation with a two-stage sampling process that concentrates ray samples where they matter most near object surfaces. As a result, NAScenT is capable of reconstructing challenging scenes including both large, sparsely populated volumes like UAV captured outdoor environments, as well as small scenes with high geometric complexity. NAScenT outperforms existing neural rendering approaches in terms of both quality and training time.
Bina-Rep Event Frames: a Simple and Effective Representation for Event-based cameras
Authors: Sami Barchid, José Mennesson, Chaabane Djéraba
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00

This paper presents "Bina-Rep", a simple representation method that converts asynchronous streams of events from event cameras to a sequence of sparse and expressive event frames. By representing multiple binary event images as a single frame of $N$-bit numbers, our method is able to obtain sparser and more expressive event frames thanks to the retained information about event orders in the original stream. Coupled with our proposed model based on a convolutional neural network, the reported results achieve state-of-the-art performance and repeatedly outperforms other common event representation methods. Our approach also shows competitive robustness against common image corruptions, compared to other representation techniques.
FusionCount: Efficient Crowd Counting via Multiscale Feature Fusion
Authors: Yiming Ma, Victor Sanchez, Tanaya Guha
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Decoder

State-of-the-art crowd counting models follow an encoder-decoder approach. Images are first processed by the encoder to extract features. Then, to account for perspective distortion, the highest-level feature map is fed to extra components to extract multiscale features, which are the input to the decoder to generate crowd densities. However, in these methods, features extracted at earlier stages during encoding are underutilised, and the multiscale modules can only capture a limited range of receptive fields, albeit with considerable computational cost. This paper proposes a novel crowd counting architecture (FusionCount), which exploits the adaptive fusion of a large majority of encoded features instead of relying on additional extraction components to obtain multiscale features. Thus, it can cover a more extensive scope of receptive field sizes and lower the computational cost. We also introduce a new channel reduction block, which can extract saliency information during decoding and further enhance the model's performance. Experiments on two benchmark databases demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art results with reduced computational complexity.
Enhance transferability of adversarial examples with model architecture
Authors: Mingyuan Fan, Wenzhong Guo, Shengxing Yu, Zuobin Ying, Ximeng Liu
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Transferability of adversarial examples is of critical importance to launch black-box adversarial attacks, where attackers are only allowed to access the output of the target model. However, under such a challenging but practical setting, the crafted adversarial examples are always prone to overfitting to the proxy model employed, presenting poor transferability. In this paper, we suggest alleviating the overfitting issue from a novel perspective, i.e., designing a fitted model architecture. Specifically, delving the bottom of the cause of poor transferability, we arguably decompose and reconstruct the existing model architecture into an effective model architecture, namely multi-track model architecture (MMA). The adversarial examples crafted on the MMA can maximumly relieve the effect of model-specified features to it and toward the vulnerable directions adopted by diverse architectures. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that the transferability of adversarial examples based on the MMA significantly surpass other state-of-the-art model architectures by up to 40% with comparable overhead.
Weakly Supervised Disentangled Representation for Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhifeng Qian, Mingyu You, Hongjun Zhou, Bin He
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Representation Learning

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning is a crucial yet challenging algorithm which enables agents to achieve multiple user-specified goals when learning a set of skills in a dynamic environment. However, it typically requires millions of the environmental interactions explored by agents, which is sample-inefficient. In the paper, we propose a skill learning framework DR-GRL that aims to improve the sample efficiency and policy generalization by combining the Disentangled Representation learning and Goal-conditioned visual Reinforcement Learning. In a weakly supervised manner, we propose a Spatial Transform AutoEncoder (STAE) to learn an interpretable and controllable representation in which different parts correspond to different object attributes (shape, color, position). Due to the high controllability of the representations, STAE can simply recombine and recode the representations to generate unseen goals for agents to practice themselves. The manifold structure of the learned representation maintains consistency with the physical position, which is beneficial for reward calculation. We empirically demonstrate that DR-GRL significantly outperforms the previous methods in sample efficiency and policy generalization. In addition, DR-GRL is also easy to expand to the real robot.
Interactive Machine Learning for Image Captioning
Authors: Mareike Hartmann, Aliki Anagnostopoulou, Daniel Sonntag
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Data Augmentation, Image Captioning

We propose an approach for interactive learning for an image captioning model. As human feedback is expensive and modern neural network based approaches often require large amounts of supervised data to be trained, we envision a system that exploits human feedback as good as possible by multiplying the feedback using data augmentation methods, and integrating the resulting training examples into the model in a smart way. This approach has three key components, for which we need to find suitable practical implementations: feedback collection, data augmentation, and model update. We outline our idea and review different possibilities to address these tasks.
Using Multi-scale SwinTransformer-HTC with Data augmentation in CoNIC Challenge
Authors: Chia-Yen Lee, Hsiang-Chin Chien, Ching-Ping Wang, Hong Yen, Kai-Wen Zhen, Hong-Kun Lin
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide, so early pathological examination is very important. However, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive to identify the number and type of cells on H&E images in clinical. Therefore, automatic segmentation and classification task and counting the cellular composition of H&E images from pathological sections is proposed by CoNIC Challenge 2022. We proposed a multi-scale Swin transformer with HTC for this challenge, and also applied the known normalization methods to generate more augmentation data. Finally, our strategy showed that the multi-scale played a crucial role to identify different scale features and the augmentation arose the recognition of model.
Point Set Self-Embedding
Authors: Ruihui Li, Xianzhi Li, Tien-Tsin Wong, Chi-Wing Fu
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00

This work presents an innovative method for point set self-embedding, that encodes the structural information of a dense point set into its sparser version in a visual but imperceptible form. The self-embedded point set can function as the ordinary downsampled one and be visualized efficiently on mobile devices. Particularly, we can leverage the self-embedded information to fully restore the original point set for detailed analysis on remote servers. This task is challenging since both the self-embedded point set and the restored point set should resemble the original one. To achieve a learnable self-embedding scheme, we design a novel framework with two jointly-trained networks: one to encode the input point set into its self-embedded sparse point set and the other to leverage the embedded information for inverting the original point set back. Further, we develop a pair of up-shuffle and down-shuffle units in the two networks, and formulate loss terms to encourage the shape similarity and point distribution in the results. Extensive qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic and real-scanned datasets.
Name Your Style: An Arbitrary Artist-aware Image Style Transfer
Authors: Zhi-Song Liu, Li-Wen Wang, Wan-Chi Siu, Vicky Kalogeiton
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Image style transfer has attracted widespread attention in the past few years. Despite its remarkable results, it requires additional style images available as references, making it less flexible and inconvenient. Using text is the most natural way to describe the style. More importantly, text can describe implicit abstract styles, like styles of specific artists or art movements. In this paper, we propose a text-driven image style transfer (TxST) that leverages advanced image-text encoders to control arbitrary style transfer. We introduce a contrastive training strategy to effectively extract style descriptions from the image-text model (i.e., CLIP), which aligns stylization with the text description. To this end, we also propose a novel and efficient attention module that explores cross-attentions to fuse style and content features. Finally, we achieve an arbitrary artist-aware image style transfer to learn and transfer specific artistic characters such as Picasso, oil painting, or a rough sketch. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on both image and textual styles. Moreover, it can mimic the styles of one or many artists to achieve attractive results, thus highlighting a promising direction in image style transfer.
ConvNeXt-backbone HoVerNet for nuclei segmentation and classification
Authors: Jiachen Li, Chixin Wang, Banban Huang, Zekun Zhou
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Semantic Segmentation, valid

This manuscript gives a brief description of the algorithm used to participate in CoNIC Challenge 2022. After the baseline was made available, we follow the method in it and replace the ResNet baseline with ConvNeXt one. Moreover, we propose to first convert RGB space to Haematoxylin-Eosin-DAB(HED) space, then use Haematoxylin composition of origin image to smooth semantic one hot label. Afterwards, nuclei distribution of train and valid set are explored to select the best fold split for training model for final test phase submission. Results on validation set shows that even with channel of each stage smaller in number, HoVerNet with ConvNeXt-tiny backbone still improves the mPQ+ by 0.04 and multi r2 by 0.0144
Towards A Device-Independent Deep Learning Approach for the Automated Segmentation of Sonographic Fetal Brain Structures: A Multi-Center and Multi-Device Validation
Authors: Abhi Lad, Adithya Narayan, Hari Shankar, Shefali Jain, Pooja Punjani Vyas, Divya Singh, Nivedita Hegde, Jagruthi Atada, Jens Thang, Saw Shier Nee, Arunkumar Govindarajan, Roopa PS, Muralidhar V Pai, Akhila Vasudeva, Prathima Radhakrishnan, Sripad Krishna Devalla
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Data Augmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Quality assessment of prenatal ultrasonography is essential for the screening of fetal central nervous system (CNS) anomalies. The interpretation of fetal brain structures is highly subjective, expertise-driven, and requires years of training experience, limiting quality prenatal care for all pregnant mothers. With recent advancement in Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically deep learning (DL), assistance in precise anatomy identification through semantic segmentation essential for the reliable assessment of growth and neurodevelopment, and detection of structural abnormalities have been proposed. However, existing works only identify certain structures (e.g., cavum septum pellucidum, lateral ventricles, cerebellum) from either of the axial views (transventricular, transcerebellar), limiting the scope for a thorough anatomical assessment as per practice guidelines necessary for the screening of CNS anomalies. Further, existing works do not analyze the generalizability of these DL algorithms across images from multiple ultrasound devices and centers, thus, limiting their real-world clinical impact. In this study, we propose a DL based segmentation framework for the automated segmentation of 10 key fetal brain structures from 2 axial planes from fetal brain USG images (2D). We developed a custom U-Net variant that uses inceptionv4 block as a feature extractor and leverages custom domain-specific data augmentation. Quantitatively, the mean (10 structures; test sets 1/2/3/4) Dice-coefficients were: 0.827, 0.802, 0.731, 0.783. Irrespective of the USG device/center, the DL segmentations were qualitatively comparable to their manual segmentations. The proposed DL system offered a promising and generalizable performance (multi-centers, multi-device) and also presents evidence in support of device-induced variation in image quality (a challenge to generalizibility) by using UMAP analysis.
Towards Class-agnostic Tracking Using Feature Decorrelation in Point Clouds
Authors: Shengjing Tian, Jun Liu, Xiuping Liu
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Object Tracking

Single object tracking in point clouds has been attracting more and more attention owing to the presence of LiDAR sensors in 3D vision. However, the existing methods based on deep neural networks focus mainly on training different models for different categories, which makes them unable to perform well in real-world applications when encountering classes unseen during the training phase. In this work, we investigate a more challenging task in the LiDAR point clouds, class-agnostic tracking, where a general model is supposed to be learned for any specified targets of both observed and unseen categories. In particular, we first investigate the class-agnostic performances of the state-of-the-art trackers via exposing the unseen categories to them during testing, finding that a key factor for class-agnostic tracking is how to constrain fused features between the template and search region to maintain generalization when the distribution is shifted from observed to unseen classes. Therefore, we propose a feature decorrelation method to address this problem, which eliminates the spurious correlations of the fused features through a set of learned weights and further makes the search region consistent among foreground points and distinctive between foreground and background points. Experiments on the KITTI and NuScenes demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve considerable improvements by benchmarking against the advanced trackers P2B and BAT, especially when tracking unseen objects.
PartAfford: Part-level Affordance Discovery from 3D Objects
Authors: Chao Xu, Yixin Chen, He Wang, Song-Chun Zhu, Yixin Zhu, Siyuan Huang
Date: 2022-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Understanding what objects could furnish for humans-namely, learning object affordance-is the crux to bridge perception and action. In the vision community, prior work primarily focuses on learning object affordance with dense (e.g., at a per-pixel level) supervision. In stark contrast, we humans learn the object affordance without dense labels. As such, the fundamental question to devise a computational model is: What is the natural way to learn the object affordance from visual appearance and geometry with humanlike sparse supervision? In this work, we present a new task of part-level affordance discovery (PartAfford): Given only the affordance labels per object, the machine is tasked to (i) decompose 3D shapes into parts and (ii) discover how each part of the object corresponds to a certain affordance category. We propose a novel learning framework for PartAfford, which discovers part-level representations by leveraging only the affordance set supervision and geometric primitive regularization, without dense supervision. The proposed approach consists of two main components: (i) an abstraction encoder with slot attention for unsupervised clustering and abstraction, and (ii) an affordance decoder with branches for part reconstruction, affordance prediction, and cuboidal primitive regularization. To learn and evaluate PartAfford, we construct a part-level, cross-category 3D object affordance dataset, annotated with 24 affordance categories shared among >25, 000 objects. We demonstrate that our method enables both the abstraction of 3D objects and part-level affordance discovery, with generalizability to difficult and cross-category examples. Further ablations reveal the contribution of each component.