pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Frustratingly Simple Approach for End-to-End Image Captioning
Authors: Ziyang Luo, Yadong Xi, Rongsheng Zhang, Jing Ma
Date: 2022-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning, Object, Text Generation

Image Captioning is a fundamental task to join vision and language, concerning about cross-modal understanding and text generation. Recent years witness the emerging attention on image captioning. Most of existing works follow a traditional two-stage training paradigm. Before training the captioning models, an extra object detector is utilized to recognize the objects in the image at first. However, they require sizeable datasets with fine-grained object annotation for training the object detector, which is a daunting task. In addition, the errors of the object detectors are easy to propagate to the following captioning models, degenerating models' performance. To alleviate such defects, we propose a frustratingly simple but highly effective end-to-end image captioning framework, Visual Conditioned GPT (VC-GPT), by connecting the pre-trained visual encoder (CLIP-ViT) and language decoder (GPT2). Different from the vanilla connection method that directly inserts the cross-attention modules into GPT2, we come up with a self-ensemble cross-modal fusion mechanism that comprehensively considers both the single- and cross-modal knowledge. As a result, we do not need extra object detectors for model training. Experimental results conducted on three popular image captioning benchmarks (MSCOCO, Flickr30k and NoCaps) demonstrate that our VC-GPT achieves either the best or the second-best performance across all evaluation metrics over extensive baseline systems.
Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Bivariate Equivalent Minimax-Concave Penalty
Authors: HongBing Zhang, Xinyi Liu, HongTao Fan, YaJing Li, Yinlin Ye
Date: 2022-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) is an important problem in computer vision and machine learning. The minimax-concave penalty (MCP) function as a non-convex relaxation has achieved good results in the LRTC problem. To makes all the constant parameters of the MCP function as variables so that futherly improving the adaptability to the change of singular values in the LRTC problem, we propose the bivariate equivalent minimax-concave penalty (BEMCP) theorem. Applying the BEMCP theorem to tensor singular values leads to the bivariate equivalent weighted tensor $\Gamma$-norm (BEWTGN) theorem, and we analyze and discuss its corresponding properties. Besides, to facilitate the solution of the LRTC problem, we give the proximal operators of the BEMCP theorem and BEWTGN. Meanwhile, we propose a BEMCP model for the LRTC problem, which is optimally solved based on alternating direction multiplier (ADMM). Finally, the proposed method is applied to the data restorations of multispectral image (MSI), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and color video (CV) in real-world, and the experimental results demonstrate that it outperforms the state-of-arts methods.
A Robust Framework for Deep Learning Approaches to Facial Emotion Recognition and Evaluation
Authors: Nyle Siddiqui, Rushit Dave, Tyler Bauer, Thomas Reither, Dylan Black, Mitchell Hanson
Date: 2022-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Facial Emotion Recognition

Facial emotion recognition is a vast and complex problem space within the domain of computer vision and thus requires a universally accepted baseline method with which to evaluate proposed models. While test datasets have served this purpose in the academic sphere real world application and testing of such models lacks any real comparison. Therefore we propose a framework in which models developed for FER can be compared and contrasted against one another in a constant standardized fashion. A lightweight convolutional neural network is trained on the AffectNet dataset a large variable dataset for facial emotion recognition and a web application is developed and deployed with our proposed framework as a proof of concept. The CNN is embedded into our application and is capable of instant real time facial emotion recognition. When tested on the AffectNet test set this model achieves high accuracy for emotion classification of eight different emotions. Using our framework the validity of this model and others can be properly tested by evaluating a model efficacy not only based on its accuracy on a sample test dataset, but also on in the wild experiments. Additionally, our application is built with the ability to save and store any image captured or uploaded to it for emotion recognition, allowing for the curation of more quality and diverse facial emotion recognition datasets.
Extracting Built Environment Features for Planning Research with Computer Vision: A Review and Discussion of State-of-the-Art Approaches
Authors: Meiqing Li, Hao Sheng
Date: 2022-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

This is an extended abstract for a presentation at The 17th International Conference on CUPUM - Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management in June 2021. This study presents an interdisciplinary synthesis of the state-of-the-art approaches in computer vision technologies to extract built environment features that could improve the robustness of empirical research in planning. We discussed the findings from the review of studies in both planning and computer science.
Understanding Deep Contrastive Learning via Coordinate-wise Optimization
Authors: Yuandong Tian
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

We show that Contrastive Learning (CL) under a broad family of loss functions (including InfoNCE) has a unified formulation of coordinate-wise optimization on the network parameter $\boldsymbol{\theta}$ and pairwise importance $\alpha$, where the \emph{max player} $\boldsymbol{\theta}$ learns representation for contrastiveness, and the \emph{min player} $\alpha$ puts more weights on pairs of distinct samples that share similar representations. The resulting formulation, called $\alpha$-CL, unifies not only various existing contrastive losses, which differ by how sample-pair importance $\alpha$ is constructed, but also is able to extrapolate to give novel contrastive losses beyond popular ones, opening a new avenue of contrastive loss design. These novel losses yield comparable (or better) performance on CIFAR10, STL-10 and CIFAR-100 than classic InfoNCE. Furthermore, we also analyze the max player in detail: we prove that with fixed $\alpha$, max player is equivalent to Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for deep linear network, and almost all local minima are global and rank-1, recovering optimal PCA solutions. Finally, we extend our analysis on max player to 2-layer ReLU networks, showing that its fixed points can have higher ranks.
A Stochastic Bundle Method for Interpolating Networks
Authors: Alasdair Paren, Leonard Berrada, Rudra P. K. Poudel, M. Pawan Kumar
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00

We propose a novel method for training deep neural networks that are capable of interpolation, that is, driving the empirical loss to zero. At each iteration, our method constructs a stochastic approximation of the learning objective. The approximation, known as a bundle, is a pointwise maximum of linear functions. Our bundle contains a constant function that lower bounds the empirical loss. This enables us to compute an automatic adaptive learning rate, thereby providing an accurate solution. In addition, our bundle includes linear approximations computed at the current iterate and other linear estimates of the DNN parameters. The use of these additional approximations makes our method significantly more robust to its hyperparameters. Based on its desirable empirical properties, we term our method Bundle Optimisation for Robust and Accurate Training (BORAT). In order to operationalise BORAT, we design a novel algorithm for optimising the bundle approximation efficiently at each iteration. We establish the theoretical convergence of BORAT in both convex and non-convex settings. Using standard publicly available data sets, we provide a thorough comparison of BORAT to other single hyperparameter optimisation algorithms. Our experiments demonstrate BORAT matches the state-of-the-art generalisation performance for these methods and is the most robust.
Transfer Learning for Estimation of Pendubot Angular Position Using Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Sina Khanagha
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Position, Transfer Learning

In this paper, a machine learning based approach is introduced to estimate pendubot angular position from its captured images. Initially, a baseline algorithm is introduced to estimate the angle using conventional image processing techniques. The baseline algorithm performs well for the cases that the pendubot is not moving fast. However, when moving quickly due to a free fall, the pendubot appears as a blurred object in the captured image in a way that the baseline algorithm fails to estimate the angle. Consequently, a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based algorithm is introduced to cope with this challenge. The approach relies on the concept of transfer learning to allow the training of the DNN on a very small fine-tuning dataset. The base algorithm is used to create the ground truth labels of the fine-tuning dataset. Experimental results on the held-out evaluation set show that the proposed approach achieves a median absolute error of 0.02 and 0.06 degrees for the sharp and blurry images respectively.
Self Semi Supervised Neural Architecture Search for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Loïc Pauletto, Massih-Reza Amini, Nicolas Winckler
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a Neural Architecture Search strategy based on self supervision and semi-supervised learning for the task of semantic segmentation. Our approach builds an optimized neural network (NN) model for this task by jointly solving a jigsaw pretext task discovered with self-supervised learning over unlabeled training data, and, exploiting the structure of the unlabeled data with semi-supervised learning. The search of the architecture of the NN model is performed by dynamic routing using a gradient descent algorithm. Experiments on the Cityscapes and PASCAL VOC 2012 datasets demonstrate that the discovered neural network is more efficient than a state-of-the-art hand-crafted NN model with four times less floating operations.
Image Classification using Graph Neural Network and Multiscale Wavelet Superpixels
Authors: Varun Vasudevan, Maxime Bassenne, Md Tauhidul Islam, Lei Xing
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, image-classification, Image Classification, Superpixels

Prior studies using graph neural networks (GNNs) for image classification have focused on graphs generated from a regular grid of pixels or similar-sized superpixels. In the latter, a single target number of superpixels is defined for an entire dataset irrespective of differences across images and their intrinsic multiscale structure. On the contrary, this study investigates image classification using graphs generated from an image-specific number of multiscale superpixels. We propose WaveMesh, a new wavelet-based superpixeling algorithm, where the number and sizes of superpixels in an image are systematically computed based on its content. WaveMesh superpixel graphs are structurally different from similar-sized superpixel graphs. We use SplineCNN, a state-of-the-art network for image graph classification, to compare WaveMesh and similar-sized superpixels. Using SplineCNN, we perform extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets under three local-pooling settings: 1) no pooling, 2) GraclusPool, and 3) WavePool, a novel spatially heterogeneous pooling scheme tailored to WaveMesh superpixels. Our experiments demonstrate that SplineCNN learns from multiscale WaveMesh superpixels on-par with similar-sized superpixels. In all WaveMesh experiments, GraclusPool performs poorer than no pooling / WavePool, indicating that poor choice of pooling can result in inferior performance while learning from multiscale superpixels.
ADC-Net: An Open-Source Deep Learning Network for Automated Dispersion Compensation in Optical Coherence Tomography
Authors: Shaiban Ahmed, David Le, Taeyoon Son, Tobiloba Adejumo, Xincheng Yao, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Ophthalmology, Visual Science, University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, MS-SSIM, SSIM

Chromatic dispersion is a common problem to degrade the system resolution in optical coherence tomography (OCT). This study is to develop a deep learning network for automated dispersion compensation (ADC-Net) in OCT. The ADC-Net is based on a redesigned UNet architecture which employs an encoder-decoder pipeline. The input section encompasses partially compensated OCT B-scans with individual retinal layers optimized. Corresponding output is a fully compensated OCT B-scans with all retinal layers optimized. Two numeric parameters, i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index metric computed at multiple scales (MS-SSIM), were used for objective assessment of the ADC-Net performance. Comparative analysis of training models, including single, three, five, seven and nine input channels were implemented. The five-input channels implementation was observed as the optimal mode for ADC-Net training to achieve robust dispersion compensation in OCT
Semantic-assisted image compression
Authors: Qizheng Sun, Caili Guo, Yang Yang, Jiujiu Chen, Xijun Xue
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Conventional image compression methods typically aim at pixel-level consistency while ignoring the performance of downstream AI tasks.To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Semantic-Assisted Image Compression method (SAIC), which can maintain semantic-level consistency to enable high performance of downstream AI tasks.To this end, we train the compression network using semantic-level loss function. In particular, semantic-level loss is measured using gradient-based semantic weights mechanism (GSW). GSW directly consider downstream AI tasks' perceptual results. Then, this paper proposes a semantic-level distortion evaluation metric to quantify the amount of semantic information retained during the compression process. Experimental results show that the proposed SAIC method can retain more semantic-level information and achieve better performance of downstream AI tasks compared to the traditional deep learning-based method and the advanced perceptual method at the same compression ratio.
Exact Decomposition of Joint Low Rankness and Local Smoothness Plus Sparse Matrices
Authors: Jiangjun Peng, Yao Wang, Hongying Zhang, Jianjun Wang, Deyu Meng
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00

It is known that the decomposition in low-rank and sparse matrices (\textbf{L+S} for short) can be achieved by several Robust PCA techniques. Besides the low rankness, the local smoothness (\textbf{LSS}) is a vitally essential prior for many real-world matrix data such as hyperspectral images and surveillance videos, which makes such matrices have low-rankness and local smoothness properties at the same time. This poses an interesting question: Can we make a matrix decomposition in terms of \textbf{L\&LSS +S } form exactly? To address this issue, we propose in this paper a new RPCA model based on three-dimensional correlated total variation regularization (3DCTV-RPCA for short) by fully exploiting and encoding the prior expression underlying such joint low-rank and local smoothness matrices. Specifically, using a modification of Golfing scheme, we prove that under some mild assumptions, the proposed 3DCTV-RPCA model can decompose both components exactly, which should be the first theoretical guarantee among all such related methods combining low rankness and local smoothness. In addition, by utilizing Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), we propose an efficient ADMM algorithm with a solid convergence guarantee for solving the resulting optimization problem. Finally, a series of experiments on both simulations and real applications are carried out to demonstrate the general validity of the proposed 3DCTV-RPCA model.
FedMed-ATL: Misaligned Unpaired Brain Image Synthesis via Affine Transform Loss
Authors: Jinbao Wang, Guoyang Xie, Yawen Huang, Yefeng Zheng, Yaochu Jin, Feng Zheng
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Self-Supervised Learning

The existence of completely aligned and paired multi-modal neuroimaging data has proved its effectiveness in the diagnosis of brain diseases. However, collecting the full set of well-aligned and paired data is impractical, since the practical difficulties may include high cost, long time acquisition, image corruption, and privacy issues. Previously, the misaligned unpaired neuroimaging data (termed as MUD) are generally treated as noisy label. However, such a noisy label-based method fail to accomplish well when misaligned data occurs distortions severely. For example, the angle of rotation is different. In this paper, we propose a novel federated self-supervised learning (FedMed) for brain image synthesis. An affine transform loss (ATL) was formulated to make use of severely distorted images without violating privacy legislation for the hospital. We then introduce a new data augmentation procedure for self-supervised training and fed it into three auxiliary heads, namely auxiliary rotation, auxiliary translation and auxiliary scaling heads. The proposed method demonstrates the advanced performance in both the quality of our synthesized results under a severely misaligned and unpaired data setting, and better stability than other GAN-based algorithms. The proposed method also reduces the demand for deformable registration while encouraging to leverage the misaligned and unpaired data. Experimental results verify the outstanding performance of our learning paradigm compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Volley Revolver: A Novel Matrix-Encoding Method for Privacy-Preserving Neural Networks (Inference)
Authors: John Chiang
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Privacy Preserving

In this work, we present a novel matrix-encoding method that is particularly convenient for neural networks to make predictions in a privacy-preserving manner using homomorphic encryption. Based on this encoding method, we implement a convolutional neural network for handwritten image classification over encryption. For two matrices $A$ and $B$ to perform homomorphic multiplication, the main idea behind it, in a simple version, is to encrypt matrix $A$ and the transpose of matrix $B$ into two ciphertexts respectively. With additional operations, the homomorphic matrix multiplication can be calculated over encrypted matrices efficiently. For the convolution operation, we in advance span each convolution kernel to a matrix space of the same size as the input image so as to generate several ciphertexts, each of which is later used together with the ciphertext encrypting input images for calculating some of the final convolution results. We accumulate all these intermediate results and thus complete the convolution operation. In a public cloud with 40 vCPUs, our convolutional neural network implementation on the MNIST testing dataset takes $\sim$ 287 seconds to compute ten likelihoods of 32 encrypted images of size $28 \times 28$ simultaneously. The data owner only needs to upload one ciphertext ($\sim 19.8$ MB) encrypting these 32 images to the public cloud.
Scale-arbitrary Invertible Image Downscaling
Authors: Jinbo Xing, WenBo Hu, Tien-Tsin Wong
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Conventional social media platforms usually downscale the HR images to restrict their resolution to a specific size for saving transmission/storage cost, which leads to the super-resolution (SR) being highly ill-posed. Recent invertible image downscaling methods jointly model the downscaling/upscaling problems and achieve significant improvements. However, they only consider fixed integer scale factors that cannot downscale HR images with various resolutions to meet the resolution restriction of social media platforms. In this paper, we propose a scale-Arbitrary Invertible image Downscaling Network (AIDN), to natively downscale HR images with arbitrary scale factors. Meanwhile, the HR information is embedded in the downscaled low-resolution (LR) counterparts in a nearly imperceptible form such that our AIDN can also restore the original HR images solely from the LR images. The key to supporting arbitrary scale factors is our proposed Conditional Resampling Module (CRM) that conditions the downscaling/upscaling kernels and sampling locations on both scale factors and image content. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our AIDN achieves top performance for invertible downscaling with both arbitrary integer and non-integer scale factors. Code will be released upon publication.
Rebalancing Batch Normalization for Exemplar-based Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Sungmin Cha, Sungjun Cho, Dasol Hwang, Sunwon Hong, Moontae Lee, Taesup Moon
Date: 2022-01-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning

Batch Normalization (BN) and its variants has been extensively studied for neural nets in various computer vision tasks, but relatively little work has been dedicated to studying the effect of BN in continual learning. To that end, we develop a new update patch for BN, particularly tailored for the exemplar-based class-incremental learning (CIL). The main issue of BN in CIL is the imbalance of training data between current and past tasks in a mini-batch, which makes the empirical mean and variance as well as the learnable affine transformation parameters of BN heavily biased toward the current task -- contributing to the forgetting of past tasks. While one of the recent BN variants has been developed for "online" CIL, in which the training is done with a single epoch, we show that their method does not necessarily bring gains for "offline" CIL, in which a model is trained with multiple epochs on the imbalanced training data. The main reason for the ineffectiveness of their method lies in not fully addressing the data imbalance issue, especially in computing the gradients for learning the affine transformation parameters of BN. Accordingly, our new hyperparameter-free variant, dubbed as Task-Balanced BN (TBBN), is proposed to more correctly resolve the imbalance issue by making a horizontally-concatenated task-balanced batch using both reshape and repeat operations during training. Based on our experiments on class incremental learning of CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, and five dissimilar task datasets, we demonstrate that our TBBN, which works exactly the same as the vanilla BN in the inference time, is easily applicable to most existing exemplar-based offline CIL algorithms and consistently outperforms other BN variants.