pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TrustGAN: Training safe and trustworthy deep learning models through generative adversarial networks
Authors: Hélion du Mas des Bourboux
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Deep learning models have been developed for a variety of tasks and are deployed every day to work in real conditions. Some of these tasks are critical and models need to be trusted and safe, e.g. military communications or cancer diagnosis. These models are given real data, simulated data or combination of both and are trained to be highly predictive on them. However, gathering enough real data or simulating them to be representative of all the real conditions is: costly, sometimes impossible due to confidentiality and most of the time impossible. Indeed, real conditions are constantly changing and sometimes are intractable. A solution is to deploy machine learning models that are able to give predictions when they are confident enough otherwise raise a flag or abstain. One issue is that standard models easily fail at detecting out-of-distribution samples where their predictions are unreliable. We present here TrustGAN, a generative adversarial network pipeline targeting trustness. It is a deep learning pipeline which improves a target model estimation of the confidence without impacting its predictive power. The pipeline can accept any given deep learning model which outputs a prediction and a confidence on this prediction. Moreover, the pipeline does not need to modify this target model. It can thus be easily deployed in a MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) setting. The pipeline is applied here to a target classification model trained on MNIST data to recognise numbers based on images. We compare such a model when trained in the standard way and with TrustGAN. We show that on out-of-distribution samples, here FashionMNIST and CIFAR10, the estimated confidence is largely reduced. We observe similar conclusions for a classification model trained on 1D radio signals from AugMod, tested on RML2016.04C. We also publicly release the code.
Aggregated Text Transformer for Scene Text Detection
Authors: Zhao Zhou, Xiangcheng Du, Yingbin Zheng, Cheng Jin
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Scene Text Detection, Text Detection

This paper explores the multi-scale aggregation strategy for scene text detection in natural images. We present the Aggregated Text TRansformer(ATTR), which is designed to represent texts in scene images with a multi-scale self-attention mechanism. Starting from the image pyramid with multiple resolutions, the features are first extracted at different scales with shared weight and then fed into an encoder-decoder architecture of Transformer. The multi-scale image representations are robust and contain rich information on text contents of various sizes. The text Transformer aggregates these features to learn the interaction across different scales and improve text representation. The proposed method detects scene texts by representing each text instance as an individual binary mask, which is tolerant of curve texts and regions with dense instances. Extensive experiments on public scene text detection datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
CLIP-ReID: Exploiting Vision-Language Model for Image Re-Identification without Concrete Text Labels
Authors: Siyuan Li, Li Sun, Qingli Li
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Person Re-Identification, Vehicle Re-Identification

Pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have recently shown superior performances on various downstream tasks, including image classification and segmentation. However, in fine-grained image re-identification (ReID), the labels are indexes, lacking concrete text descriptions. Therefore, it remains to be determined how such models could be applied to these tasks. This paper first finds out that simply fine-tuning the visual model initialized by the image encoder in CLIP, has already obtained competitive performances in various ReID tasks. Then we propose a two-stage strategy to facilitate a better visual representation. The key idea is to fully exploit the cross-modal description ability in CLIP through a set of learnable text tokens for each ID and give them to the text encoder to form ambiguous descriptions. In the first training stage, image and text encoders from CLIP keep fixed, and only the text tokens are optimized from scratch by the contrastive loss computed within a batch. In the second stage, the ID-specific text tokens and their encoder become static, providing constraints for fine-tuning the image encoder. With the help of the designed loss in the downstream task, the image encoder is able to represent data as vectors in the feature embedding accurately. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated on several datasets for the person or vehicle ReID tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Syliz517/CLIP-ReID.
ILSGAN: Independent Layer Synthesis for Unsupervised Foreground-Background Segmentation
Authors: Qiran Zou, Yu Yang, Wing Yin Cheung, Chang Liu, Xiangyang Ji
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Object Segmentation

Unsupervised foreground-background segmentation aims at extracting salient objects from cluttered backgrounds, where Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) approaches, especially layered GANs, show great promise. However, without human annotations, they are typically prone to produce foreground and background layers with non-negligible semantic and visual confusion, dubbed "information leakage", resulting in notable degeneration of the generated segmentation mask. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple-yet-effective explicit layer independence modeling approach, termed Independent Layer Synthesis GAN (ILSGAN), pursuing independent foreground-background layer generation by encouraging their discrepancy. Specifically, it targets minimizing the mutual information between visible and invisible regions of the foreground and background to spur interlayer independence. Through in-depth theoretical and experimental analyses, we justify that explicit layer independence modeling is critical to suppressing information leakage and contributes to impressive segmentation performance gains. Also, our ILSGAN achieves strong state-of-the-art generation quality and segmentation performance on complex real-world data. Code is available at: https://github.com/qrzou/ILSGAN
Unsupervised Continual Semantic Adaptation through Neural Rendering
Authors: Zhizheng Liu, Francesco Milano, Jonas Frey, Roland Siegwart, Hermann Blum, Cesar Cadena
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, NeRF, Neural Rendering, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

An increasing amount of applications rely on data-driven models that are deployed for perception tasks across a sequence of scenes. Due to the mismatch between training and deployment data, adapting the model on the new scenes is often crucial to obtain good performance. In this work, we study continual multi-scene adaptation for the task of semantic segmentation, assuming that no ground-truth labels are available during deployment and that performance on the previous scenes should be maintained. We propose training a Semantic-NeRF network for each scene by fusing the predictions of a segmentation model and then using the view-consistent rendered semantic labels as pseudo-labels to adapt the model. Through joint training with the segmentation model, the Semantic-NeRF model effectively enables 2D-3D knowledge transfer. Furthermore, due to its compact size, it can be stored in a long-term memory and subsequently used to render data from arbitrary viewpoints to reduce forgetting. We evaluate our approach on ScanNet, where we outperform both a voxel-based baseline and a state-of-the-art unsupervised domain adaptation method.
Generating 2D and 3D Master Faces for Dictionary Attacks with a Network-Assisted Latent Space Evolution
Authors: Tomer Friedlander, Ron Shmelkin, Lior Wolf
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Face Reconstruction, Face Recognition, Face Reconstruction, Face Verification

A master face is a face image that passes face-based identity authentication for a high percentage of the population. These faces can be used to impersonate, with a high probability of success, any user, without having access to any user information. We optimize these faces for 2D and 3D face verification models, by using an evolutionary algorithm in the latent embedding space of the StyleGAN face generator. For 2D face verification, multiple evolutionary strategies are compared, and we propose a novel approach that employs a neural network to direct the search toward promising samples, without adding fitness evaluations. The results we present demonstrate that it is possible to obtain a considerable coverage of the identities in the LFW or RFW datasets with less than 10 master faces, for six leading deep face recognition systems. In 3D, we generate faces using the 2D StyleGAN2 generator and predict a 3D structure using a deep 3D face reconstruction network. When employing two different 3D face recognition systems, we are able to obtain a coverage of 40%-50%. Additionally, we present the generation of paired 2D RGB and 3D master faces, which simultaneously match 2D and 3D models with high impersonation rates.
Affine Transformation Edited and Refined Deep Neural Network for Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping
Authors: Zhuang Xiong, Yang Gao, Feng Liu, Hongfu Sun
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00

Deep neural networks have demonstrated great potential in solving dipole inversion for Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM). However, the performances of most existing deep learning methods drastically degrade with mismatched sequence parameters such as acquisition orientation and spatial resolution. We propose an end-to-end AFfine Transformation Edited and Refined (AFTER) deep neural network for QSM, which is robust against arbitrary acquisition orientation and spatial resolution up to 0.6 mm isotropic at the finest. The AFTER-QSM neural network starts with a forward affine transformation layer, followed by an Unet for dipole inversion, then an inverse affine transformation layer, followed by a Residual Dense Network (RDN) for QSM refinement. Simulation and in-vivo experiments demonstrated that the proposed AFTER-QSM network architecture had excellent generalizability. It can successfully reconstruct susceptibility maps from highly oblique and anisotropic scans, leading to the best image quality assessments in simulation tests and suppressed streaking artifacts and noise levels for in-vivo experiments compared with other methods. Furthermore, ablation studies showed that the RDN refinement network significantly reduced image blurring and susceptibility underestimation due to affine transformations. In addition, the AFTER-QSM network substantially shortened the reconstruction time from minutes using conventional methods to only a few seconds.
Spatial-Temporal Attention Network for Open-Set Fine-Grained Image Recognition
Authors: Jiayin Sun, Hong Wang, Qiulei Dong
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Recognition, Open Set Learning

Triggered by the success of transformers in various visual tasks, the spatial self-attention mechanism has recently attracted more and more attention in the computer vision community. However, we empirically found that a typical vision transformer with the spatial self-attention mechanism could not learn accurate attention maps for distinguishing different categories of fine-grained images. To address this problem, motivated by the temporal attention mechanism in brains, we propose a spatial-temporal attention network for learning fine-grained feature representations, called STAN, where the features learnt by implementing a sequence of spatial self-attention operations corresponding to multiple moments are aggregated progressively. The proposed STAN consists of four modules: a self-attention backbone module for learning a sequence of features with self-attention operations, a spatial feature self-organizing module for facilitating the model training, a spatial-temporal feature learning module for aggregating the re-organized features via a Long Short-Term Memory network, and a context-aware module that is implemented as the forget block of the spatial-temporal feature learning module for preserving/forgetting the long-term memory by utilizing contextual information. Then, we propose a STAN-based method for open-set fine-grained recognition by integrating the proposed STAN network with a linear classifier, called STAN-OSFGR. Extensive experimental results on 3 fine-grained datasets and 2 coarse-grained datasets demonstrate that the proposed STAN-OSFGR outperforms 9 state-of-the-art open-set recognition methods significantly in most cases.
XKD: Cross-modal Knowledge Distillation with Domain Alignment for Video Representation Learning
Authors: Pritam Sarkar, Ali Etemad
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Action Recognition, Self-Supervised Action Recognition Linear, Sound Classification, Transfer Learning

We present XKD, a novel self-supervised framework to learn meaningful representations from unlabelled videos. XKD is trained with two pseudo objectives. First, masked data reconstruction is performed to learn modality-specific representations from audio and visual streams. Next, self-supervised cross-modal knowledge distillation is performed between the two modalities through a teacher-student setup to learn complementary information. We introduce a novel domain alignment strategy to tackle domain discrepancy between audio and visual modalities enabling effective cross-modal knowledge distillation. Additionally, to develop a general-purpose network capable of handling both audio and visual streams, modality-agnostic variants of XKD are introduced, which use the same pretrained backbone for different audio and visual tasks. Our proposed cross-modal knowledge distillation improves video action classification by $8\%$ to $14\%$ on UCF101, HMDB51, and Kinetics400. Additionally, XKD improves multimodal action classification by $5.5\%$ on Kinetics-Sound. XKD shows state-of-the-art performance in sound classification on ESC50, achieving top-1 accuracy of $96.5\%$.
Generative Modeling in Sinogram Domain for Sparse-view CT Reconstruction
Authors: Bing Guan, Cailian Yang, Liu Zhang, Shanzhou Niu, Minghui Zhang, Yuhao Wang, Weiwen Wu, Qiegen Liu
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction, Image Reconstruction

The radiation dose in computed tomography (CT) examinations is harmful for patients but can be significantly reduced by intuitively decreasing the number of projection views. Reducing projection views usually leads to severe aliasing artifacts in reconstructed images. Previous deep learning (DL) techniques with sparse-view data require sparse-view/full-view CT image pairs to train the network with supervised manners. When the number of projection view changes, the DL network should be retrained with updated sparse-view/full-view CT image pairs. To relieve this limitation, we present a fully unsupervised score-based generative model in sinogram domain for sparse-view CT reconstruction. Specifically, we first train a score-based generative model on full-view sinogram data and use multi-channel strategy to form highdimensional tensor as the network input to capture their prior distribution. Then, at the inference stage, the stochastic differential equation (SDE) solver and data-consistency step were performed iteratively to achieve fullview projection. Filtered back-projection (FBP) algorithm was used to achieve the final image reconstruction. Qualitative and quantitative studies were implemented to evaluate the presented method with several CT data. Experimental results demonstrated that our method achieved comparable or better performance than the supervised learning counterparts.
Mutual Guidance and Residual Integration for Image Enhancement
Authors: Kun Zhou, Kenkun Liu, Wenbo Li, Xiaoguang Han, Jiangbo Lu
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Enhancement, Philosophy

Previous studies show the necessity of global and local adjustment for image enhancement. However, existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformer-based models face great challenges in balancing the computational efficiency and effectiveness of global-local information usage. Especially, existing methods typically adopt the global-to-local fusion mode, ignoring the importance of bidirectional interactions. To address those issues, we propose a novel mutual guidance network (MGN) to perform effective bidirectional global-local information exchange while keeping a compact architecture. In our design, we adopt a two-branch framework where one branch focuses more on modeling global relations while the other is committed to processing local information. Then, we develop an efficient attention-based mutual guidance approach throughout our framework for bidirectional global-local interactions. As a result, both the global and local branches can enjoy the merits of mutual information aggregation. Besides, to further refine the results produced by our MGN, we propose a novel residual integration scheme following the divide-and-conquer philosophy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, which achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public image enhancement benchmarks.
Learning Detailed Radiance Manifolds for High-Fidelity and 3D-Consistent Portrait Synthesis from Monocular Image
Authors: Yu Deng, Baoyuan Wang, Heung-Yeung Shum
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation, Novel View Synthesis

A key challenge for novel view synthesis of monocular portrait images is 3D consistency under continuous pose variations. Most existing methods rely on 2D generative models which often leads to obvious 3D inconsistency artifacts. We present a 3D-consistent novel view synthesis approach for monocular portrait images based on a recent proposed 3D-aware GAN, namely Generative Radiance Manifolds (GRAM), which has shown strong 3D consistency at multiview image generation of virtual subjects via the radiance manifolds representation. However, simply learning an encoder to map a real image into the latent space of GRAM can only reconstruct coarse radiance manifolds without faithful fine details, while improving the reconstruction fidelity via instance-specific optimization is time-consuming. We introduce a novel detail manifolds reconstructor to learn 3D-consistent fine details on the radiance manifolds from monocular images, and combine them with the coarse radiance manifolds for high-fidelity reconstruction. The 3D priors derived from the coarse radiance manifolds are used to regulate the learned details to ensure reasonable synthesized results at novel views. Trained on in-the-wild 2D images, our method achieves high-fidelity and 3D-consistent portrait synthesis largely outperforming the prior art.
AFR-Net: Attention-Driven Fingerprint Recognition Network
Authors: Steven A. Grosz, Anil K. Jain
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00

The use of vision transformers (ViT) in computer vision is increasing due to limited inductive biases (e.g., locality, weight sharing, etc.) and increased scalability compared to other deep learning methods. This has led to some initial studies on the use of ViT for biometric recognition, including fingerprint recognition. In this work, we improve on these initial studies for transformers in fingerprint recognition by i.) evaluating additional attention-based architectures, ii.) scaling to larger and more diverse training and evaluation datasets, and iii.) combining the complimentary representations of attention-based and CNN-based embeddings for improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) fingerprint recognition (both authentication and identification). Our combined architecture, AFR-Net (Attention-Driven Fingerprint Recognition Network), outperforms several baseline transformer and CNN-based models, including a SOTA commercial fingerprint system, Verifinger v12.3, across intra-sensor, cross-sensor, and latent to rolled fingerprint matching datasets. Additionally, we propose a realignment strategy using local embeddings extracted from intermediate feature maps within the networks to refine the global embeddings in low certainty situations, which boosts the overall recognition accuracy significantly across each of the models. This realignment strategy requires no additional training and can be applied as a wrapper to any existing deep learning network (including attention-based, CNN-based, or both) to boost its performance.
FFHQ-UV: Normalized Facial UV-Texture Dataset for 3D Face Reconstruction
Authors: Haoran Bai, Di Kang, Haoxian Zhang, Jinshan Pan, Linchao Bao
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Face Reconstruction, Decoder, Face Reconstruction

We present a large-scale facial UV-texture dataset that contains over 50,000 high-quality texture UV-maps with even illuminations, neutral expressions, and cleaned facial regions, which are desired characteristics for rendering realistic 3D face models under different lighting conditions. The dataset is derived from a large-scale face image dataset namely FFHQ, with the help of our fully automatic and robust UV-texture production pipeline. Our pipeline utilizes the recent advances in StyleGAN-based facial image editing approaches to generate multi-view normalized face images from single-image inputs. An elaborated UV-texture extraction, correction, and completion procedure is then applied to produce high-quality UV-maps from the normalized face images. Compared with existing UV-texture datasets, our dataset has more diverse and higher-quality texture maps. We further train a GAN-based texture decoder as the nonlinear texture basis for parametric fitting based 3D face reconstruction. Experiments show that our method improves the reconstruction accuracy over state-of-the-art approaches, and more importantly, produces high-quality texture maps that are ready for realistic renderings. The dataset, code, and pre-trained texture decoder are publicly available at https://github.com/csbhr/FFHQ-UV.
DATE: Dual Assignment for End-to-End Fully Convolutional Object Detection
Authors: Yiqun Chen, Qiang Chen, Qinghao Hu, Jian Cheng
Date: 2022-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Fully convolutional detectors discard the one-to-many assignment and adopt a one-to-one assigning strategy to achieve end-to-end detection but suffer from the slow convergence issue. In this paper, we revisit these two assignment methods and find that bringing one-to-many assignment back to end-to-end fully convolutional detectors helps with model convergence. Based on this observation, we propose {\em \textbf{D}ual \textbf{A}ssignment} for end-to-end fully convolutional de\textbf{TE}ction (DATE). Our method constructs two branches with one-to-many and one-to-one assignment during training and speeds up the convergence of the one-to-one assignment branch by providing more supervision signals. DATE only uses the branch with the one-to-one matching strategy for model inference, which doesn't bring inference overhead. Experimental results show that Dual Assignment gives nontrivial improvements and speeds up model convergence upon OneNet and DeFCN. Code: https://github.com/YiqunChen1999/date.