pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MS-Twins: Multi-Scale Deep Self-Attention Networks for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Jing Xu
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Multi-Label Image Classification, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Although transformer is preferred in natural language processing, some studies has only been applied to the field of medical imaging in recent years. For its long-term dependency, the transformer is expected to contribute to unconventional convolution neural net conquer their inherent spatial induction bias. The lately suggested transformer-based segmentation method only uses the transformer as an auxiliary module to help encode the global context into a convolutional representation. How to optimally integrate self-attention with convolution has not been investigated in depth. To solve the problem, this paper proposes MS-Twins (Multi-Scale Twins), which is a powerful segmentation model on account of the bond of self-attention and convolution. MS-Twins can better capture semantic and fine-grained information by combining different scales and cascading features. Compared with the existing network structure, MS-Twins has made progress on the previous method based on the transformer of two in common use data sets, Synapse and ACDC. In particular, the performance of MS-Twins on Synapse is 8% higher than SwinUNet. Even compared with nnUNet, the best entirely convoluted medical image segmentation network, the performance of MS-Twins on Synapse and ACDC still has a bit advantage.
TransMed: Large Language Models Enhance Vision Transformer for Biomedical Image Classification
Authors: Kaipeng Zheng, Weiran Huang, Lichao Sun
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Few-shot learning has been studied to adapt models to tasks with very few samples. It holds profound significance, particularly in clinical tasks, due to the high annotation cost of medical images. Several works have explored few-shot learning on medical images, yet they still require a large number of medical images for pre-training models to gain domain-specific priors. Vision foundation models recently have achieved remarkable success in natural images. Hence, adapting rapidly advancing vision foundation models from natural images to few-shot clinical tasks holds great promise. MedFMC has recently organized a challenge to shed more light on this topic at NeurIPS 2023. In this work, we present our challenge solution. We observe that a simple variant of fine-tuning with partial freezing shows remarkable performance. Empirical evidence demonstrates that this approach could outperform various common fine-tuning methods under limited sample sizes. Additionally, we explore enhanced utilization of semantic supervision to boost performance. We propose a novel approach that contextualizes labels via large language models (LLMs). Our findings reveal that the context generated by LLMs significantly enhances the discrimination of semantic embeddings for similar categories, resulting in a notable performance improvement of 3%-5% in 1-shot settings compared to commonly employed one-hot labels and other semantic supervision methods. Our solution secures the 1st place in the MedFMC challenge.
Lightweight high-resolution Subject Matting in the Real World
Authors: Peng Liu, Fanyi Wang, Jingwen Su, Yanhao Zhang, GuoJun Qi
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Matting, object-detection, Object Detection

Existing saliency object detection (SOD) methods struggle to satisfy fast inference and accurate results simultaneously in high resolution scenes. They are limited by the quality of public datasets and efficient network modules for high-resolution images. To alleviate these issues, we propose to construct a saliency object matting dataset HRSOM and a lightweight network PSUNet. Considering efficient inference of mobile depolyment framework, we design a symmetric pixel shuffle module and a lightweight module TRSU. Compared to 13 SOD methods, the proposed PSUNet has the best objective performance on the high-resolution benchmark dataset. Evaluation results of objective assessment are superior compared to U$^2$Net that has 10 times of parameter amount of our network. On Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform, inference a single 640$\times$640 image only takes 113ms. And on the subjective assessment, evaluation results are better than the industry benchmark IOS16 (Lift subject from background).
Continual Learning through Networks Splitting and Merging with Dreaming-Meta-Weighted Model Fusion
Authors: Yi Sun, Xin Xu, Jian Li, Guanglei Xie, Yifei Shi, Qiang Fang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

It's challenging to balance the networks stability and plasticity in continual learning scenarios, considering stability suffers from the update of model and plasticity benefits from it. Existing works usually focus more on the stability and restrict the learning plasticity of later tasks to avoid catastrophic forgetting of learned knowledge. Differently, we propose a continual learning method named Split2MetaFusion which can achieve better trade-off by employing a two-stage strategy: splitting and meta-weighted fusion. In this strategy, a slow model with better stability, and a fast model with better plasticity are learned sequentially at the splitting stage. Then stability and plasticity are both kept by fusing the two models in an adaptive manner. Towards this end, we design an optimizer named Task-Preferred Null Space Projector(TPNSP) to the slow learning process for narrowing the fusion gap. To achieve better model fusion, we further design a Dreaming-Meta-Weighted fusion policy for better maintaining the old and new knowledge simultaneously, which doesn't require to use the previous datasets. Experimental results and analysis reported in this work demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method for maintaining networks stability and keeping its plasticity. Our code will be released.
Spatial-Contextual Discrepancy Information Compensation for GAN Inversion
Authors: Ziqiang Zhang, Yan Yan, Jing-Hao Xue, Hanzi Wang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00

Most existing GAN inversion methods either achieve accurate reconstruction but lack editability or offer strong editability at the cost of fidelity. Hence, how to balance the distortioneditability trade-off is a significant challenge for GAN inversion. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-contextual discrepancy information compensationbased GAN-inversion method (SDIC), which consists of a discrepancy information prediction network (DIPN) and a discrepancy information compensation network (DICN). SDIC follows a "compensate-and-edit" paradigm and successfully bridges the gap in image details between the original image and the reconstructed/edited image. On the one hand, DIPN encodes the multi-level spatial-contextual information of the original and initial reconstructed images and then predicts a spatial-contextual guided discrepancy map with two hourglass modules. In this way, a reliable discrepancy map that models the contextual relationship and captures finegrained image details is learned. On the other hand, DICN incorporates the predicted discrepancy information into both the latent code and the GAN generator with different transformations, generating high-quality reconstructed/edited images. This effectively compensates for the loss of image details during GAN inversion. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves the excellent distortion-editability trade-off at a fast inference speed for both image inversion and editing tasks.
Focus on Hiders: Exploring Hidden Threats for Enhancing Adversarial Training
Authors: Qian Li, Yuxiao Hu, Yinpeng Dong, Dongxiao Zhang, Yuntian Chen
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Adversarial training is often formulated as a min-max problem, however, concentrating only on the worst adversarial examples causes alternating repetitive confusion of the model, i.e., previously defended or correctly classified samples are not defensible or accurately classifiable in subsequent adversarial training. We characterize such non-ignorable samples as "hiders", which reveal the hidden high-risk regions within the secure area obtained through adversarial training and prevent the model from finding the real worst cases. We demand the model to prevent hiders when defending against adversarial examples for improving accuracy and robustness simultaneously. By rethinking and redefining the min-max optimization problem for adversarial training, we propose a generalized adversarial training algorithm called Hider-Focused Adversarial Training (HFAT). HFAT introduces the iterative evolution optimization strategy to simplify the optimization problem and employs an auxiliary model to reveal hiders, effectively combining the optimization directions of standard adversarial training and prevention hiders. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive weighting mechanism that facilitates the model in adaptively adjusting its focus between adversarial examples and hiders during different training periods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method based on extensive experiments, and ensure that HFAT can provide higher robustness and accuracy.
DiffuVST: Narrating Fictional Scenes with Global-History-Guided Denoising Models
Authors: Shengguang Wu, Mei Yuan, Qi Su
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation, Image to text, Sentence, Story Generation, Visual Storytelling

Recent advances in image and video creation, especially AI-based image synthesis, have led to the production of numerous visual scenes that exhibit a high level of abstractness and diversity. Consequently, Visual Storytelling (VST), a task that involves generating meaningful and coherent narratives from a collection of images, has become even more challenging and is increasingly desired beyond real-world imagery. While existing VST techniques, which typically use autoregressive decoders, have made significant progress, they suffer from low inference speed and are not well-suited for synthetic scenes. To this end, we propose a novel diffusion-based system DiffuVST, which models the generation of a series of visual descriptions as a single conditional denoising process. The stochastic and non-autoregressive nature of DiffuVST at inference time allows it to generate highly diverse narratives more efficiently. In addition, DiffuVST features a unique design with bi-directional text history guidance and multimodal adapter modules, which effectively improve inter-sentence coherence and image-to-text fidelity. Extensive experiments on the story generation task covering four fictional visual-story datasets demonstrate the superiority of DiffuVST over traditional autoregressive models in terms of both text quality and inference speed.
Efficient Cross-Domain Federated Learning by MixStyle Approximation
Authors: Manuel Röder, Leon Heller, Maximilian Münch, Frank-Michael Schleif
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

With the advent of interconnected and sensor-equipped edge devices, Federated Learning (FL) has gained significant attention, enabling decentralized learning while maintaining data privacy. However, FL faces two challenges in real-world tasks: expensive data labeling and domain shift between source and target samples. In this paper, we introduce a privacy-preserving, resource-efficient FL concept for client adaptation in hardware-constrained environments. Our approach includes server model pre-training on source data and subsequent fine-tuning on target data via low-end clients. The local client adaptation process is streamlined by probabilistic mixing of instance-level feature statistics approximated from source and target domain data. The adapted parameters are transferred back to the central server and globally aggregated. Preliminary results indicate that our method reduces computational and transmission costs while maintaining competitive performance on downstream tasks.
Template Free Reconstruction of Human-object Interaction with Procedural Interaction Generation
Authors: Xianghui Xie, Bharat Lal Bhatnagar, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object

Reconstructing human-object interaction in 3D from a single RGB image is a challenging task and existing data driven methods do not generalize beyond the objects present in the carefully curated 3D interaction datasets. Capturing large-scale real data to learn strong interaction and 3D shape priors is very expensive due to the combinatorial nature of human-object interactions. In this paper, we propose ProciGen (Procedural interaction Generation), a method to procedurally generate datasets with both, plausible interaction and diverse object variation. We generate 1M+ human-object interaction pairs in 3D and leverage this large-scale data to train our HDM (Hierarchical Diffusion Model), a novel method to reconstruct interacting human and unseen objects, without any templates. Our HDM is an image-conditioned diffusion model that learns both realistic interaction and highly accurate human and object shapes. Experiments show that our HDM trained with ProciGen significantly outperforms prior methods that requires template meshes and that our dataset allows training methods with strong generalization ability to unseen object instances. Our code and data are released.
ThinkBot: Embodied Instruction Following with Thought Chain Reasoning
Authors: Guanxing Lu, Ziwei Wang, Changliu Liu, Jiwen Lu, Yansong Tang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) requires agents to complete human instruction by interacting objects in complicated surrounding environments. Conventional methods directly consider the sparse human instruction to generate action plans for agents, which usually fail to achieve human goals because of the instruction incoherence in action descriptions. On the contrary, we propose ThinkBot that reasons the thought chain in human instruction to recover the missing action descriptions, so that the agent can successfully complete human goals by following the coherent instruction. Specifically, we first design an instruction completer based on large language models to recover the missing actions with interacted objects between consecutive human instruction, where the perceived surrounding environments and the completed sub-goals are considered for instruction completion. Based on the partially observed scene semantic maps, we present an object localizer to infer the position of interacted objects for agents to achieve complex human goals. Extensive experiments in the simulated environment show that our ThinkBot outperforms the state-of-the-art EIF methods by a sizable margin in both success rate and execution efficiency.
MaxQ: Multi-Axis Query for N:M Sparsity Network
Authors: Jingyang Xiang, Siqi Li, JunHao Chen, Zhuangzhi Chen, Tianxin Huang, Linpeng Peng, Yong liu
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

N:M sparsity has received increasing attention due to its remarkable performance and latency trade-off compared with structured and unstructured sparsity. However, existing N:M sparsity methods do not differentiate the relative importance of weights among blocks and leave important weights underappreciated. Besides, they directly apply N:M sparsity to the whole network, which will cause severe information loss. Thus, they are still sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose an efficient and effective Multi-Axis Query methodology, dubbed as MaxQ, to rectify these problems. During the training, MaxQ employs a dynamic approach to generate soft N:M masks, considering the weight importance across multiple axes. This method enhances the weights with more importance and ensures more effective updates. Meanwhile, a sparsity strategy that gradually increases the percentage of N:M weight blocks is applied, which allows the network to heal from the pruning-induced damage progressively. During the runtime, the N:M soft masks can be precomputed as constants and folded into weights without causing any distortion to the sparse pattern and incurring additional computational overhead. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that MaxQ achieves consistent improvements across diverse CNN architectures in various computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. For ResNet50 with 1:16 sparse pattern, MaxQ can achieve 74.6\% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet and improve by over 2.8\% over the state-of-the-art. Codes and checkpoints are available at \url{https://github.com/JingyangXiang/MaxQ}.
Adjustable Robust Transformer for High Myopia Screening in Optical Coherence Tomography
Authors: Xiao Ma, Zetian Zhang, Zexuan Ji, Kun Huang, Na Su, Songtao Yuan, Qiang Chen
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00

Myopia is a manifestation of visual impairment caused by an excessively elongated eyeball. Image data is critical material for studying high myopia and pathological myopia. Measurements of spherical equivalent and axial length are the gold standards for identifying high myopia, but the available image data for matching them is scarce. In addition, the criteria for defining high myopia vary from study to study, and therefore the inclusion of samples in automated screening efforts requires an appropriate assessment of interpretability. In this work, we propose a model called adjustable robust transformer (ARTran) for high myopia screening of optical coherence tomography (OCT) data. Based on vision transformer, we propose anisotropic patch embedding (APE) to capture more discriminative features of high myopia. To make the model effective under variable screening conditions, we propose an adjustable class embedding (ACE) to replace the fixed class token, which changes the output to adapt to different conditions. Considering the confusion of the data at high myopia and low myopia threshold, we introduce the label noise learning strategy and propose a shifted subspace transition matrix (SST) to enhance the robustness of the model. Besides, combining the two structures proposed above, the model can provide evidence for uncertainty evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed method. Code is available at: https://github.com/maxiao0234/ARTran.
Edge Wasserstein Distance Loss for Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Yuke Zhu, Yumeng Ruan, Zihua Xiong, Sheng Guo
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Oriented Object Detection, regression

Regression loss design is an essential topic for oriented object detection. Due to the periodicity of the angle and the ambiguity of width and height definition, traditional L1-distance loss and its variants have been suffered from the metric discontinuity and the square-like problem. As a solution, the distribution based methods show significant advantages by representing oriented boxes as distributions. Differing from exploited the Gaussian distribution to get analytical form of distance measure, we propose a novel oriented regression loss, Wasserstein Distance(EWD) loss, to alleviate the square-like problem. Specifically, for the oriented box(OBox) representation, we choose a specially-designed distribution whose probability density function is only nonzero over the edges. On this basis, we develop Wasserstein distance as the measure. Besides, based on the edge representation of OBox, the EWD loss can be generalized to quadrilateral and polynomial regression scenarios. Experiments on multiple popular datasets and different detectors show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Open-Pose 3D Zero-Shot Learning: Benchmark and Challenges
Authors: Weiguang Zhao, Guanyu Yang, Rui Zhang, Chenru Jiang, Chaolong Yang, Yuyao Yan, Amir Hussain, Kaizhu Huang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Classification, Classification, Transfer Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

With the explosive 3D data growth, the urgency of utilizing zero-shot learning to facilitate data labeling becomes evident. Recently, methods transferring language or language-image pre-training models like Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) to 3D vision have made significant progress in the 3D zero-shot classification task. These methods primarily focus on 3D object classification with an aligned pose; such a setting is, however, rather restrictive, which overlooks the recognition of 3D objects with open poses typically encountered in real-world scenarios, such as an overturned chair or a lying teddy bear. To this end, we propose a more realistic and challenging scenario named open-pose 3D zero-shot classification, focusing on the recognition of 3D objects regardless of their orientation. First, we revisit the current research on 3D zero-shot classification, and propose two benchmark datasets specifically designed for the open-pose setting. We empirically validate many of the most popular methods in the proposed open-pose benchmark. Our investigations reveal that most current 3D zero-shot classification models suffer from poor performance, indicating a substantial exploration room towards the new direction. Furthermore, we study a concise pipeline with an iterative angle refinement mechanism that automatically optimizes one ideal angle to classify these open-pose 3D objects. In particular, to make validation more compelling and not just limited to existing CLIP-based methods, we also pioneer the exploration of knowledge transfer based on Diffusion models. While the proposed solutions can serve as a new benchmark for open-pose 3D zero-shot classification, we discuss the complexities and challenges of this scenario that remain for further research development. The code is available publicly at https://github.com/weiguangzhao/Diff-OP3D.
Vision-language Assisted Attribute Learning
Authors: Kongming Liang, Xinran Wang, Rui Wang, Donghui Gao, Ling Jin, Weidong Liu, Xiatian Zhu, Zhanyu Ma, Jun Guo
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Missing Labels, Model Optimization

Attribute labeling at large scale is typically incomplete and partial, posing significant challenges to model optimization. Existing attribute learning methods often treat the missing labels as negative or simply ignore them all during training, either of which could hamper the model performance to a great extent. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we leverage the available vision-language knowledge to explicitly disclose the missing labels for enhancing model learning. Given an image, we predict the likelihood of each missing attribute label assisted by an off-the-shelf vision-language model, and randomly select to ignore those with high scores in training. Our strategy strikes a good balance between fully ignoring and negatifying the missing labels, as these high scores are found to be informative on revealing label ambiguity. Extensive experiments show that our proposed vision-language assisted loss can achieve state-of-the-art performance on the newly cleaned VAW dataset. Qualitative evaluation demonstrates the ability of the proposed method in predicting more complete attributes.