pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multimodal Adaptive Distillation for Leveraging Unimodal Encoders for Vision-Language Tasks
Authors: Zhecan Wang, Noel Codella, Yen-Chun Chen, Luowei Zhou, Xiyang Dai, Bin Xiao, Jianwei Yang, Haoxuan You, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang, Lu Yuan
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Visual Entailment, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Cross-modal encoders for vision-language (VL) tasks are often pretrained with carefully curated vision-language datasets. While these datasets reach an order of 10 million samples, the labor cost is prohibitive to scale further. Conversely, unimodal encoders are pretrained with simpler annotations that are less cost-prohibitive, achieving scales of hundreds of millions to billions. As a result, unimodal encoders have achieved state-of-art (SOTA) on many downstream tasks. However, challenges remain when applying to VL tasks. The pretraining data is not optimal for cross-modal architectures and requires heavy computational resources. In addition, unimodal architectures lack cross-modal interactions that have demonstrated significant benefits for VL tasks. Therefore, how to best leverage pretrained unimodal encoders for VL tasks is still an area of active research. In this work, we propose a method to leverage unimodal vision and text encoders for VL tasks that augment existing VL approaches while conserving computational complexity. Specifically, we propose Multimodal Adaptive Distillation (MAD), which adaptively distills useful knowledge from pretrained encoders to cross-modal VL encoders. Second, to better capture nuanced impacts on VL task performance, we introduce an evaluation protocol that includes Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR), Visual Entailment (SNLI-VE), and Visual Question Answering (VQA), across a variety of data constraints and conditions of domain shift. Experiments demonstrate that MAD leads to consistent gains in the low-shot, domain-shifted, and fully-supervised conditions on VCR, SNLI-VE, and VQA, achieving SOTA performance on VCR compared to other single models pretrained with image-text data. Finally, MAD outperforms concurrent works utilizing pretrained vision encoder from CLIP. Code will be made available.
Attentions Help CNNs See Better: Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network
Authors: Shanshan Lao, Yuan Gong, Shuwei Shi, Sidi Yang, Tianhe Wu, Jiahao Wang, Weihao Xia, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Quality Assessment, Video Quality Assessment

Image quality assessment (IQA) algorithm aims to quantify the human perception of image quality. Unfortunately, there is a performance drop when assessing the distortion images generated by generative adversarial network (GAN) with seemingly realistic texture. In this work, we conjecture that this maladaptation lies in the backbone of IQA models, where patch-level prediction methods use independent image patches as input to calculate their scores separately, but lack spatial relationship modeling among image patches. Therefore, we propose an Attention-based Hybrid Image Quality Assessment Network (AHIQ) to deal with the challenge and get better performance on the GAN-based IQA task. Firstly, we adopt a two-branch architecture, including a vision transformer (ViT) branch and a convolutional neural network (CNN) branch for feature extraction. The hybrid architecture combines interaction information among image patches captured by ViT and local texture details from CNN. To make the features from shallow CNN more focused on the visually salient region, a deformable convolution is applied with the help of semantic information from the ViT branch. Finally, we use a patch-wise score prediction module to obtain the final score. The experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four standard IQA datasets and AHIQ ranked first on the Full Reference (FR) track of the NTIRE 2022 Perceptual Image Quality Assessment Challenge.
SE-GAN: Skeleton Enhanced GAN-based Model for Brush Handwriting Font Generation
Authors: Shaozu Yuan, Ruixue Liu, Meng Chen, Baoyang Chen, Zhijie Qiu, Xiaodong He
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Font Generation

Previous works on font generation mainly focus on the standard print fonts where character's shape is stable and strokes are clearly separated. There is rare research on brush handwriting font generation, which involves holistic structure changes and complex strokes transfer. To address this issue, we propose a novel GAN-based image translation model by integrating the skeleton information. We first extract the skeleton from training images, then design an image encoder and a skeleton encoder to extract corresponding features. A self-attentive refined attention module is devised to guide the model to learn distinctive features between different domains. A skeleton discriminator is involved to first synthesize the skeleton image from the generated image with a pre-trained generator, then to judge its realness to the target one. We also contribute a large-scale brush handwriting font image dataset with six styles and 15,000 high-resolution images. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results demonstrate the competitiveness of our proposed model.
Recurrent Affine Transformation for Text-to-image Synthesis
Authors: Senmao Ye, Fei Liu, Minkui Tan
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image synthesis aims to generate natural images conditioned on text descriptions. The main difficulty of this task lies in effectively fusing text information into the image synthesis process. Existing methods usually adaptively fuse suitable text information into the synthesis process with multiple isolated fusion blocks (e.g., Conditional Batch Normalization and Instance Normalization). However, isolated fusion blocks not only conflict with each other but also increase the difficulty of training (see first page of the supplementary). To address these issues, we propose a Recurrent Affine Transformation (RAT) for Generative Adversarial Networks that connects all the fusion blocks with a recurrent neural network to model their long-term dependency. Besides, to improve semantic consistency between texts and synthesized images, we incorporate a spatial attention model in the discriminator. Being aware of matching image regions, text descriptions supervise the generator to synthesize more relevant image contents. Extensive experiments on the CUB, Oxford-102 and COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model in comparison to state-of-the-art models \footnote{https://github.com/senmaoy/Recurrent-Affine-Transformation-for-Text-to-image-Synthesis.git}
Learning Dynamic View Synthesis With Few RGBD Cameras
Authors: Shengze Wang, Youngjoong Kwon, Yuan Shen, Qian Zhang, Andrei State, Jia-Bin Huang, Henry Fuchs
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

There have been significant advancements in dynamic novel view synthesis in recent years. However, current deep learning models often require (1) prior models (e.g., SMPL human models), (2) heavy pre-processing, or (3) per-scene optimization. We propose to utilize RGBD cameras to remove these limitations and synthesize free-viewpoint videos of dynamic indoor scenes. We generate feature point clouds from RGBD frames and then render them into free-viewpoint videos via a neural renderer. However, the inaccurate, unstable, and incomplete depth measurements induce severe distortions, flickering, and ghosting artifacts. We enforce spatial-temporal consistency via the proposed Cycle Reconstruction Consistency and Temporal Stabilization module to reduce these artifacts. We introduce a simple Regional Depth-Inpainting module that adaptively inpaints missing depth values to render complete novel views. Additionally, we present a Human-Things Interactions dataset to validate our approach and facilitate future research. The dataset consists of 43 multi-view RGBD video sequences of everyday activities, capturing complex interactions between human subjects and their surroundings. Experiments on the HTI dataset show that our method outperforms the baseline per-frame image fidelity and spatial-temporal consistency. We will release our code, and the dataset on the website soon.
Hypergraph Transformer: Weakly-supervised Multi-hop Reasoning for Knowledge-based Visual Question Answering
Authors: Yu-Jung Heo, Eun-Sol Kim, Woo Suk Choi, Byoung-Tak Zhang
Date: 2022-04-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2022 5
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Knowledge-based visual question answering (QA) aims to answer a question which requires visually-grounded external knowledge beyond image content itself. Answering complex questions that require multi-hop reasoning under weak supervision is considered as a challenging problem since i) no supervision is given to the reasoning process and ii) high-order semantics of multi-hop knowledge facts need to be captured. In this paper, we introduce a concept of hypergraph to encode high-level semantics of a question and a knowledge base, and to learn high-order associations between them. The proposed model, Hypergraph Transformer, constructs a question hypergraph and a query-aware knowledge hypergraph, and infers an answer by encoding inter-associations between two hypergraphs and intra-associations in both hypergraph itself. Extensive experiments on two knowledge-based visual QA and two knowledge-based textual QA demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for multi-hop reasoning problem. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yujungheo/kbvqa-public.
DiRA: Discriminative, Restorative, and Adversarial Learning for Self-supervised Medical Image Analysis
Authors: Fatemeh Haghighi, Mohammad Reza Hosseinzadeh Taher, Michael B. Gotway, Jianming Liang
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Discriminative learning, restorative learning, and adversarial learning have proven beneficial for self-supervised learning schemes in computer vision and medical imaging. Existing efforts, however, omit their synergistic effects on each other in a ternary setup, which, we envision, can significantly benefit deep semantic representation learning. To realize this vision, we have developed DiRA, the first framework that unites discriminative, restorative, and adversarial learning in a unified manner to collaboratively glean complementary visual information from unlabeled medical images for fine-grained semantic representation learning. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DiRA (1) encourages collaborative learning among three learning ingredients, resulting in more generalizable representation across organs, diseases, and modalities; (2) outperforms fully supervised ImageNet models and increases robustness in small data regimes, reducing annotation cost across multiple medical imaging applications; (3) learns fine-grained semantic representation, facilitating accurate lesion localization with only image-level annotation; and (4) enhances state-of-the-art restorative approaches, revealing that DiRA is a general mechanism for united representation learning. All code and pre-trained models are available at https: //github.com/JLiangLab/DiRA.
Scale-Equivariant Unrolled Neural Networks for Data-Efficient Accelerated MRI Reconstruction
Authors: Beliz Gunel, Arda Sahiner, Arjun D. Desai, Akshay S. Chaudhari, Shreyas Vasanawala, Mert Pilanci, John Pauly
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction

Unrolled neural networks have enabled state-of-the-art reconstruction performance and fast inference times for the accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction task. However, these approaches depend on fully-sampled scans as ground truth data which is either costly or not possible to acquire in many clinical medical imaging applications; hence, reducing dependence on data is desirable. In this work, we propose modeling the proximal operators of unrolled neural networks with scale-equivariant convolutional neural networks in order to improve the data-efficiency and robustness to drifts in scale of the images that might stem from the variability of patient anatomies or change in field-of-view across different MRI scanners. Our approach demonstrates strong improvements over the state-of-the-art unrolled neural networks under the same memory constraints both with and without data augmentations on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scaled images without significantly increasing the train or inference time.
PreTraM: Self-Supervised Pre-training via Connecting Trajectory and Map
Authors: Chenfeng Xu, Tian Li, Chen Tang, Lingfeng Sun, Kurt Keutzer, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Alireza Fathi, Wei Zhan
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Trajectory Forecasting

Deep learning has recently achieved significant progress in trajectory forecasting. However, the scarcity of trajectory data inhibits the data-hungry deep-learning models from learning good representations. While mature representation learning methods exist in computer vision and natural language processing, these pre-training methods require large-scale data. It is hard to replicate these approaches in trajectory forecasting due to the lack of adequate trajectory data (e.g., 34K samples in the nuScenes dataset). To work around the scarcity of trajectory data, we resort to another data modality closely related to trajectories-HD-maps, which is abundantly provided in existing datasets. In this paper, we propose PreTraM, a self-supervised pre-training scheme via connecting trajectories and maps for trajectory forecasting. Specifically, PreTraM consists of two parts: 1) Trajectory-Map Contrastive Learning, where we project trajectories and maps to a shared embedding space with cross-modal contrastive learning, and 2) Map Contrastive Learning, where we enhance map representation with contrastive learning on large quantities of HD-maps. On top of popular baselines such as AgentFormer and Trajectron++, PreTraM boosts their performance by 5.5% and 6.9% relatively in FDE-10 on the challenging nuScenes dataset. We show that PreTraM improves data efficiency and scales well with model size.
Learning Sequential Latent Variable Models from Multimodal Time Series Data
Authors: Oliver Limoyo, Trevor Ablett, Jonathan Kelly
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Sequential modelling of high-dimensional data is an important problem that appears in many domains including model-based reinforcement learning and dynamics identification for control. Latent variable models applied to sequential data (i.e., latent dynamics models) have been shown to be a particularly effective probabilistic approach to solve this problem, especially when dealing with images. However, in many application areas (e.g., robotics), information from multiple sensing modalities is available -- existing latent dynamics methods have not yet been extended to effectively make use of such multimodal sequential data. Multimodal sensor streams can be correlated in a useful manner and often contain complementary information across modalities. In this work, we present a self-supervised generative modelling framework to jointly learn a probabilistic latent state representation of multimodal data and the respective dynamics. Using synthetic and real-world datasets from a multimodal robotic planar pushing task, we demonstrate that our approach leads to significant improvements in prediction and representation quality. Furthermore, we compare to the common learning baseline of concatenating each modality in the latent space and show that our principled probabilistic formulation performs better. Finally, despite being fully self-supervised, we demonstrate that our method is nearly as effective as an existing supervised approach that relies on ground truth labels.
Monocular Depth Estimation Using Cues Inspired by Biological Vision Systems
Authors: Dylan Auty, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Instance Segmentation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Monocular depth estimation (MDE) aims to transform an RGB image of a scene into a pixelwise depth map from the same camera view. It is fundamentally ill-posed due to missing information: any single image can have been taken from many possible 3D scenes. Part of the MDE task is, therefore, to learn which visual cues in the image can be used for depth estimation, and how. With training data limited by cost of annotation or network capacity limited by computational power, this is challenging. In this work we demonstrate that explicitly injecting visual cue information into the model is beneficial for depth estimation. Following research into biological vision systems, we focus on semantic information and prior knowledge of object sizes and their relations, to emulate the biological cues of relative size, familiar size, and absolute size. We use state-of-the-art semantic and instance segmentation models to provide external information, and exploit language embeddings to encode relational information between classes. We also provide a prior on the average real-world size of objects. This external information overcomes the limitation in data availability, and ensures that the limited capacity of a given network is focused on known-helpful cues, therefore improving performance. We experimentally validate our hypothesis and evaluate the proposed model on the widely used NYUD2 indoor depth estimation benchmark. The results show improvements in depth prediction when the semantic information, size prior and instance size are explicitly provided along with the RGB images, and our method can be easily adapted to any depth estimation system.
The 6th AI City Challenge
Authors: Milind Naphade, Shuo Wang, David C. Anastasiu, Zheng Tang, Ming-Ching Chang, Yue Yao, Liang Zheng, Mohammed Shaiqur Rahman, Archana Venkatachalapathy, Anuj Sharma, Qi Feng, Vitaly Ablavsky, Stan Sclaroff, Pranamesh Chakraborty, Alice Li, Shangru Li, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

The 6th edition of the AI City Challenge specifically focuses on problems in two domains where there is tremendous unlocked potential at the intersection of computer vision and artificial intelligence: Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS), and brick and mortar retail businesses. The four challenge tracks of the 2022 AI City Challenge received participation requests from 254 teams across 27 countries. Track 1 addressed city-scale multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) vehicle tracking. Track 2 addressed natural-language-based vehicle track retrieval. Track 3 was a brand new track for naturalistic driving analysis, where the data were captured by several cameras mounted inside the vehicle focusing on driver safety, and the task was to classify driver actions. Track 4 was another new track aiming to achieve retail store automated checkout using only a single view camera. We released two leader boards for submissions based on different methods, including a public leader board for the contest, where no use of external data is allowed, and a general leader board for all submitted results. The top performance of participating teams established strong baselines and even outperformed the state-of-the-art in the proposed challenge tracks.
Contrastive Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Dian Chen, Dequan Wang, Trevor Darrell, Sayna Ebrahimi
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Test-time Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Test-time adaptation is a special setting of unsupervised domain adaptation where a trained model on the source domain has to adapt to the target domain without accessing source data. We propose a novel way to leverage self-supervised contrastive learning to facilitate target feature learning, along with an online pseudo labeling scheme with refinement that significantly denoises pseudo labels. The contrastive learning task is applied jointly with pseudo labeling, contrasting positive and negative pairs constructed similarly as MoCo but with source-initialized encoder, and excluding same-class negative pairs indicated by pseudo labels. Meanwhile, we produce pseudo labels online and refine them via soft voting among their nearest neighbors in the target feature space, enabled by maintaining a memory queue. Our method, AdaContrast, achieves state-of-the-art performance on major benchmarks while having several desirable properties compared to existing works, including memory efficiency, insensitivity to hyper-parameters, and better model calibration. Project page: sites.google.com/view/adacontrast.
Interactive Segmentation and Visualization for Tiny Objects in Multi-megapixel Images
Authors: Chengyuan Xu, Boning Dong, Noah Stier, Curtis McCully, D. Andrew Howell, Pradeep Sen, Tobias Höllerer
Date: 2022-04-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: GPU, Image Segmentation, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce an interactive image segmentation and visualization framework for identifying, inspecting, and editing tiny objects (just a few pixels wide) in large multi-megapixel high-dynamic-range (HDR) images. Detecting cosmic rays (CRs) in astronomical observations is a cumbersome workflow that requires multiple tools, so we developed an interactive toolkit that unifies model inference, HDR image visualization, segmentation mask inspection and editing into a single graphical user interface. The feature set, initially designed for astronomical data, makes this work a useful research-supporting tool for human-in-the-loop tiny-object segmentation in scientific areas like biomedicine, materials science, remote sensing, etc., as well as computer vision. Our interface features mouse-controlled, synchronized, dual-window visualization of the image and the segmentation mask, a critical feature for locating tiny objects in multi-megapixel images. The browser-based tool can be readily hosted on the web to provide multi-user access and GPU acceleration for any device. The toolkit can also be used as a high-precision annotation tool, or adapted as the frontend for an interactive machine learning framework. Our open-source dataset, CR detection model, and visualization toolkit are available at https://github.com/cy-xu/cosmic-conn.