pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Tracking with Human-Intent Reasoning
Authors: Jiawen Zhu, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jun-Yan He, Chenyang Li, Bin Luo, Huchuan Lu, Yifeng Geng, Xuansong Xie
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Object, Object Tracking, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Advances in perception modeling have significantly improved the performance of object tracking. However, the current methods for specifying the target object in the initial frame are either by 1) using a box or mask template, or by 2) providing an explicit language description. These manners are cumbersome and do not allow the tracker to have self-reasoning ability. Therefore, this work proposes a new tracking task -- Instruction Tracking, which involves providing implicit tracking instructions that require the trackers to perform tracking automatically in video frames. To achieve this, we investigate the integration of knowledge and reasoning capabilities from a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM) for object tracking. Specifically, we propose a tracker called TrackGPT, which is capable of performing complex reasoning-based tracking. TrackGPT first uses LVLM to understand tracking instructions and condense the cues of what target to track into referring embeddings. The perception component then generates the tracking results based on the embeddings. To evaluate the performance of TrackGPT, we construct an instruction tracking benchmark called InsTrack, which contains over one thousand instruction-video pairs for instruction tuning and evaluation. Experiments show that TrackGPT achieves competitive performance on referring video object segmentation benchmarks, such as getting a new state-of the-art performance of 66.5 $\mathcal{J}\&\mathcal{F}$ on Refer-DAVIS. It also demonstrates a superior performance of instruction tracking under new evaluation protocols. The code and models are available at \href{https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/TrackGPT}{https://github.com/jiawen-zhu/TrackGPT}.
Video Understanding with Large Language Models: A Survey
Authors: Yunlong Tang, Jing Bi, Siting Xu, Luchuan Song, Susan Liang, Teng Wang, Daoan Zhang, Jie An, Jingyang Lin, Rongyi Zhu, Ali Vosoughi, Chao Huang, Zeliang Zhang, Pinxin Liu, Mingqian Feng, Feng Zheng, JianGuo Zhang, Ping Luo, Jiebo Luo, Chenliang Xu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey, Video Understanding

With the burgeoning growth of online video platforms and the escalating volume of video content, the demand for proficient video understanding tools has intensified markedly. Given the remarkable capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in language and multimodal tasks, this survey provides a detailed overview of recent advancements in video understanding that harness the power of LLMs (Vid-LLMs). The emergent capabilities of Vid-LLMs are surprisingly advanced, particularly their ability for open-ended multi-granularity (general, temporal, and spatiotemporal) reasoning combined with commonsense knowledge, suggesting a promising path for future video understanding. We examine the unique characteristics and capabilities of Vid-LLMs, categorizing the approaches into three main types: Video Analyzer x LLM, Video Embedder x LLM, and (Analyzer + Embedder) x LLM. Furthermore, we identify five sub-types based on the functions of LLMs in Vid-LLMs: LLM as Summarizer, LLM as Manager, LLM as Text Decoder, LLM as Regressor, and LLM as Hidden Layer. Furthermore, this survey presents a comprehensive study of the tasks, datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation methodologies for Vid-LLMs. Additionally, it explores the expansive applications of Vid-LLMs across various domains, highlighting their remarkable scalability and versatility in real-world video understanding challenges. Finally, it summarizes the limitations of existing Vid-LLMs and outlines directions for future research. For more information, readers are recommended to visit the repository at https://github.com/yunlong10/Awesome-LLMs-for-Video-Understanding.
MVPatch: More Vivid Patch for Adversarial Camouflaged Attacks on Object Detectors in the Physical World
Authors: Zheng Zhou, Hongbo Zhao, Ju Liu, Qiaosheng Zhang, Liwei Geng, Shuchang Lyu, Wenquan Feng
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Recent studies have shown that Adversarial Patches (APs) can effectively manipulate object detection models. However, the conspicuous patterns often associated with these patches tend to attract human attention, posing a significant challenge. Existing research has primarily focused on enhancing attack efficacy in the physical domain while often neglecting the optimization of stealthiness and transferability. Furthermore, applying APs in real-world scenarios faces major challenges related to transferability, stealthiness, and practicality. To address these challenges, we introduce generalization theory into the context of APs, enabling our iterative process to simultaneously enhance transferability and refine visual correlation with realistic images. We propose a Dual-Perception-Based Framework (DPBF) to generate the More Vivid Patch (MVPatch), which enhances transferability, stealthiness, and practicality. The DPBF integrates two key components: the Model-Perception-Based Module (MPBM) and the Human-Perception-Based Module (HPBM), along with regularization terms. The MPBM employs ensemble strategy to reduce object confidence scores across multiple detectors, thereby improving AP transferability with robust theoretical support. Concurrently, the HPBM introduces a lightweight method for achieving visual similarity, creating natural and inconspicuous adversarial patches without relying on additional generative models. The regularization terms further enhance the practicality of the generated APs in the physical domain. Additionally, we introduce naturalness and transferability scores to provide an unbiased assessment of APs. Extensive experimental validation demonstrates that MVPatch achieves superior transferability and a natural appearance in both digital and physical domains, underscoring its effectiveness and stealthiness.
ChangeNet: Multi-Temporal Asymmetric Change Detection Dataset
Authors: Deyi Ji, Siqi Gao, Mingyuan Tao, Hongtao Lu, Feng Zhao
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Change Detection (CD) has been attracting extensive interests with the availability of bi-temporal datasets. However, due to the huge cost of multi-temporal images acquisition and labeling, existing change detection datasets are small in quantity, short in temporal, and low in practicability. Therefore, a large-scale practical-oriented dataset covering wide temporal phases is urgently needed to facilitate the community. To this end, the ChangeNet dataset is presented especially for multi-temporal change detection, along with the new task of "Asymmetric Change Detection". Specifically, ChangeNet consists of 31,000 multi-temporal images pairs, a wide range of complex scenes from 100 cities, and 6 pixel-level annotated categories, which is far superior to all the existing change detection datasets including LEVIR-CD, WHU Building CD, etc.. In addition, ChangeNet contains amounts of real-world perspective distortions in different temporal phases on the same areas, which is able to promote the practical application of change detection algorithms. The ChangeNet dataset is suitable for both binary change detection (BCD) and semantic change detection (SCD) tasks. Accordingly, we benchmark the ChangeNet dataset on six BCD methods and two SCD methods, and extensive experiments demonstrate its challenges and great significance. The dataset is available at https://github.com/jankyee/ChangeNet.
Exact Consistency Tests for Gaussian Mixture Filters using Normalized Deviation Squared Statistics
Authors: Nisar Ahmed, Luke Burks, Kailah Cabral, Alyssa Bekai Rose
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00

We consider the problem of evaluating dynamic consistency in discrete time probabilistic filters that approximate stochastic system state densities with Gaussian mixtures. Dynamic consistency means that the estimated probability distributions correctly describe the actual uncertainties. As such, the problem of consistency testing naturally arises in applications with regards to estimator tuning and validation. However, due to the general complexity of the density functions involved, straightforward approaches for consistency testing of mixture-based estimators have remained challenging to define and implement. This paper derives a new exact result for Gaussian mixture consistency testing within the framework of normalized deviation squared (NDS) statistics. It is shown that NDS test statistics for generic multivariate Gaussian mixture models exactly follow mixtures of generalized chi-square distributions, for which efficient computational tools are available. The accuracy and utility of the resulting consistency tests are numerically demonstrated on static and dynamic mixture estimation examples.
Comparing roughness maps generated by five roughness descriptors for LiDAR-derived digital elevation models
Authors: Lei Fan, Yang Zhao
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00

Terrain surface roughness, often described abstractly, poses challenges in quantitative characterisation with various descriptors found in the literature. This study compares five commonly used roughness descriptors, exploring correlations among their quantified terrain surface roughness maps across three terrains with distinct spatial variations. Additionally, the study investigates the impacts of spatial scales and interpolation methods on these correlations. Dense point cloud data obtained through Light Detection and Ranging technique are used in this study. The findings highlight both global pattern similarities and local pattern distinctions in the derived roughness maps, emphasizing the significance of incorporating multiple descriptors in studies where local roughness values play a crucial role in subsequent analyses. The spatial scales were found to have a smaller impact on rougher terrain, while interpolation methods had minimal influence on roughness maps derived from different descriptors.
3VL: Using Trees to Improve Vision-Language Models' Interpretability
Authors: Nir Yellinek, Leonid Karlinsky, Raja Giryes
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00

Vision-Language models (VLMs) have proven to be effective at aligning image and text representations, producing superior zero-shot results when transferred to many downstream tasks. However, these representations suffer from some key shortcomings in understanding Compositional Language Concepts (CLC), such as recognizing objects' attributes, states, and relations between different objects. Moreover, VLMs typically have poor interpretability, making it challenging to debug and mitigate compositional-understanding failures. In this work, we introduce the architecture and training technique of Tree-augmented Vision-Language (3VL) model accompanied by our proposed Anchor inference method and Differential Relevance (DiRe) interpretability tool. By expanding the text of an arbitrary image-text pair into a hierarchical tree structure using language analysis tools, 3VL allows the induction of this structure into the visual representation learned by the model, enhancing its interpretability and compositional reasoning. Additionally, we show how Anchor, a simple technique for text unification, can be used to filter nuisance factors while increasing CLC understanding performance, e.g., on the fundamental VL-Checklist benchmark. We also show how DiRe, which performs a differential comparison between VLM relevancy maps, enables us to generate compelling visualizations of the reasons for a model's success or failure. Our code is available at: https://github.com/niryellinek/3VL.
Improving Image Restoration through Removing Degradations in Textual Representations
Authors: Jingbo Lin, Zhilu Zhang, Yuxiang Wei, Dongwei Ren, Dongsheng Jiang, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration, Image to text, Rain Removal

In this paper, we introduce a new perspective for improving image restoration by removing degradation in the textual representations of a given degraded image. Intuitively, restoration is much easier on text modality than image one. For example, it can be easily conducted by removing degradation-related words while keeping the content-aware words. Hence, we combine the advantages of images in detail description and ones of text in degradation removal to perform restoration. To address the cross-modal assistance, we propose to map the degraded images into textual representations for removing the degradations, and then convert the restored textual representations into a guidance image for assisting image restoration. In particular, We ingeniously embed an image-to-text mapper and text restoration module into CLIP-equipped text-to-image models to generate the guidance. Then, we adopt a simple coarse-to-fine approach to dynamically inject multi-scale information from guidance to image restoration networks. Extensive experiments are conducted on various image restoration tasks, including deblurring, dehazing, deraining, and denoising, and all-in-one image restoration. The results showcase that our method outperforms state-of-the-art ones across all these tasks. The codes and models are available at \url{https://github.com/mrluin/TextualDegRemoval}.
Learning Vision from Models Rivals Learning Vision from Data
Authors: Yonglong Tian, Lijie Fan, KaiFeng Chen, Dina Katabi, Dilip Krishnan, Phillip Isola
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Captioning, image-classification, Image Classification, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce SynCLR, a novel approach for learning visual representations exclusively from synthetic images and synthetic captions, without any real data. We synthesize a large dataset of image captions using LLMs, then use an off-the-shelf text-to-image model to generate multiple images corresponding to each synthetic caption. We perform visual representation learning on these synthetic images via contrastive learning, treating images sharing the same caption as positive pairs. The resulting representations transfer well to many downstream tasks, competing favorably with other general-purpose visual representation learners such as CLIP and DINO v2 in image classification tasks. Furthermore, in dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation, SynCLR outperforms previous self-supervised methods by a significant margin, e.g., improving over MAE and iBOT by 6.2 and 4.3 mIoU on ADE20k for ViT-B/16.
Predicting Parkinson's disease evolution using deep learning
Authors: Maria Frasca, Davide La Torre, Gabriella Pravettoni, Ilaria Cutica
Date: 2023-12-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Parkinson's disease is a neurological condition that occurs in nearly 1% of the world's population. The disease is manifested by a drop in dopamine production, symptoms are cognitive and behavioural and include a wide range of personality changes, depressive disorders, memory problems, and emotional dysregulation, which can occur as the disease progresses. Early diagnosis and accurate staging of the disease are essential to apply the appropriate therapeutic approaches to slow cognitive and motor decline. Currently, there is not a single blood test or biomarker available to diagnose Parkinson's disease. Magnetic resonance imaging has been used for the past three decades to diagnose and distinguish between PD and other neurological conditions. However, in recent years new possibilities have arisen: several AI algorithms have been developed to increase the precision and accuracy of differential diagnosis of PD at an early stage. To our knowledge, no AI tools have been designed to identify the stage of progression. This paper aims to fill this gap. Using the "Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative" dataset, which reports the patient's MRI and an indication of the disease stage, we developed a model to identify the level of progression. The images and the associated scores were used for training and assessing different deep-learning models. Our analysis distinguished four distinct disease progression levels based on a standard scale (Hoehn and Yah scale). The final architecture consists of the cascading of a 3DCNN network, adopted to reduce and extract the spatial characteristics of the RMI for efficient training of the successive LSTM layers, aiming at modelling the temporal dependencies among the data. Our results show that the proposed 3DCNN + LSTM model achieves state-of-the-art results by classifying the elements with 91.90\% as macro averaged OVR AUC on four classes
X Modality Assisting RGBT Object Tracking
Authors: Zhaisheng Ding, Haiyan Li, Ruichao Hou, Yanyu Liu, Shidong Xie, Dongming Zhou, Jinde Cao
Date: 2023-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Object, Object Tracking, Optical Flow Estimation, Self-Knowledge Distillation, Visual Object Tracking

Learning robust multi-modal feature representations is critical for boosting tracking performance. To this end, we propose a novel X Modality Assisting Network (X-Net) to shed light on the impact of the fusion paradigm by decoupling the visual object tracking into three distinct levels, facilitating subsequent processing. Firstly, to tackle the feature learning hurdles stemming from significant differences between RGB and thermal modalities, a plug-and-play pixel-level generation module (PGM) is proposed based on self-knowledge distillation learning, which effectively generates X modality to bridge the gap between the dual patterns while reducing noise interference. Subsequently, to further achieve the optimal sample feature representation and facilitate cross-modal interactions, we propose a feature-level interaction module (FIM) that incorporates a mixed feature interaction transformer and a spatial-dimensional feature translation strategy. Ultimately, aiming at random drifting due to missing instance features, we propose a flexible online optimized strategy called the decision-level refinement module (DRM), which contains optical flow and refinement mechanisms. Experiments are conducted on three benchmarks to verify that the proposed X-Net outperforms state-of-the-art trackers.
Principled Gradient-based Markov Chain Monte Carlo for Text Generation
Authors: Li Du, Afra Amini, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Xinyan Velocity Yu, Jason Eisner, Holden Lee, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Recent papers have demonstrated the possibility of energy-based text generation by adapting gradient-based sampling algorithms, a paradigm of MCMC algorithms that promises fast convergence. However, as we show in this paper, previous attempts on this approach to text generation all fail to sample correctly from the target language model distributions. To address this limitation, we consider the problem of designing text samplers that are faithful, meaning that they have the target text distribution as its limiting distribution. We propose several faithful gradient-based sampling algorithms to sample from the target energy-based text distribution correctly, and study their theoretical properties. Through experiments on various forms of text generation, we demonstrate that faithful samplers are able to generate more fluent text while adhering to the control objectives better.
Malware Detection in IOT Systems Using Machine Learning Techniques
Authors: Ali Mehrban, Pegah Ahadian
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection

Malware detection in IoT environments necessitates robust methodologies. This study introduces a CNN-LSTM hybrid model for IoT malware identification and evaluates its performance against established methods. Leveraging K-fold cross-validation, the proposed approach achieved 95.5% accuracy, surpassing existing methods. The CNN algorithm enabled superior learning model construction, and the LSTM classifier exhibited heightened accuracy in classification. Comparative analysis against prevalent techniques demonstrated the efficacy of the proposed model, highlighting its potential for enhancing IoT security. The study advocates for future exploration of SVMs as alternatives, emphasizes the need for distributed detection strategies, and underscores the importance of predictive analyses for a more powerful IOT security. This research serves as a platform for developing more resilient security measures in IoT ecosystems.
Data Augmentation for Supervised Graph Outlier Detection via Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Kay Liu, Hengrui Zhang, Ziqing Hu, Fangxin Wang, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Denoising, Graph Outlier Detection, Outlier Detection

A fundamental challenge confronting supervised graph outlier detection algorithms is the prevalent problem of class imbalance, where the scarcity of outlier instances compared to normal instances often results in suboptimal performance. Recently, generative models, especially diffusion models, have demonstrated their efficacy in synthesizing high-fidelity images. Despite their extraordinary generation quality, their potential in data augmentation for supervised graph outlier detection remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce GODM, a novel data augmentation for mitigating class imbalance in supervised Graph Outlier detection via latent Diffusion Models. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple datasets substantiate the effectiveness and efficiency of GODM. The case study further demonstrated the generation quality of our synthetic data. To foster accessibility and reproducibility, we encapsulate GODM into a plug-and-play package and release it at PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/godm/.
User Strategization and Trustworthy Algorithms
Authors: Sarah H. Cen, Andrew Ilyas, Aleksander Madry
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Recommendation Systems

Many human-facing algorithms -- including those that power recommender systems or hiring decision tools -- are trained on data provided by their users. The developers of these algorithms commonly adopt the assumption that the data generating process is exogenous: that is, how a user reacts to a given prompt (e.g., a recommendation or hiring suggestion) depends on the prompt and not on the algorithm that generated it. For example, the assumption that a person's behavior follows a ground-truth distribution is an exogeneity assumption. In practice, when algorithms interact with humans, this assumption rarely holds because users can be strategic. Recent studies document, for example, TikTok users changing their scrolling behavior after learning that TikTok uses it to curate their feed, and Uber drivers changing how they accept and cancel rides in response to changes in Uber's algorithm. Our work studies the implications of this strategic behavior by modeling the interactions between a user and their data-driven platform as a repeated, two-player game. We first find that user strategization can actually help platforms in the short term. We then show that it corrupts platforms' data and ultimately hurts their ability to make counterfactual decisions. We connect this phenomenon to user trust, and show that designing trustworthy algorithms can go hand in hand with accurate estimation. Finally, we provide a formalization of trustworthiness that inspires potential interventions.