pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LiDAR: Sensing Linear Probing Performance in Joint Embedding SSL Architectures
Authors: Vimal Thilak, Chen Huang, Omid Saremi, Laurent Dinh, Hanlin Goh, Preetum Nakkiran, Joshua M. Susskind, Etai Littwin
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00

Joint embedding (JE) architectures have emerged as a promising avenue for acquiring transferable data representations. A key obstacle to using JE methods, however, is the inherent challenge of evaluating learned representations without access to a downstream task, and an annotated dataset. Without efficient and reliable evaluation, it is difficult to iterate on architectural and training choices for JE methods. In this paper, we introduce LiDAR (Linear Discriminant Analysis Rank), a metric designed to measure the quality of representations within JE architectures. Our metric addresses several shortcomings of recent approaches based on feature covariance rank by discriminating between informative and uninformative features. In essence, LiDAR quantifies the rank of the Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) matrix associated with the surrogate SSL task -- a measure that intuitively captures the information content as it pertains to solving the SSL task. We empirically demonstrate that LiDAR significantly surpasses naive rank based approaches in its predictive power of optimal hyperparameters. Our proposed criterion presents a more robust and intuitive means of assessing the quality of representations within JE architectures, which we hope facilitates broader adoption of these powerful techniques in various domains.
Stable Diffusion for Data Augmentation in COCO and Weed Datasets
Authors: Boyang Deng
Date: 2023-12-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Image-to-Image Translation, object-detection, Object Detection

Generative models have increasingly impacted relative tasks, from computer vision to interior design and other fields. Stable diffusion is an outstanding diffusion model that paves the way for producing high-resolution images with thorough details from text prompts or reference images. It will be an interesting topic about gaining improvements for small datasets with image-sparse categories. This study utilized seven common categories and three widespread weed species to evaluate the efficiency of a stable diffusion model. In detail, Stable diffusion was used to generate synthetic images belonging to these classes; three techniques (i.e., Image-to-image translation, Dreambooth, and ControlNet) based on stable diffusion were leveraged for image generation with different focuses. Then, classification and detection tasks were conducted based on these synthetic images, whose performance was compared to the models trained on original images. Promising results have been achieved in some classes. This seminal study may expedite the adaption of stable diffusion models to different fields.
A Layer-Wise Tokens-to-Token Transformer Network for Improved Historical Document Image Enhancement
Authors: Risab Biswas, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Umapada Pal
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Decoder, Image Enhancement

Document image enhancement is a fundamental and important stage for attaining the best performance in any document analysis assignment because there are many degradation situations that could harm document images, making it more difficult to recognize and analyze them. In this paper, we propose \textbf{T2T-BinFormer} which is a novel document binarization encoder-decoder architecture based on a Tokens-to-token vision transformer. Each image is divided into a set of tokens with a defined length using the ViT model, which is then applied several times to model the global relationship between the tokens. However, the conventional tokenization of input data does not adequately reflect the crucial local structure between adjacent pixels of the input image, which results in low efficiency. Instead of using a simple ViT and hard splitting of images for the document image enhancement task, we employed a progressive tokenization technique to capture this local information from an image to achieve more effective results. Experiments on various DIBCO and H-DIBCO benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the existing CNN and ViT-based state-of-the-art methods. In this research, the primary area of examination is the application of the proposed architecture to the task of document binarization. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/RisabBiswas/T2T-BinFormer.
Adapting HouseDiffusion for conditional Floor Plan generation on Modified Swiss Dwellings dataset
Authors: Emanuel Kuhn
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00

Automated floor plan generation has recently gained momentum with several methods that have been proposed. The CVAAD Floor Plan Auto-Completion workshop challenge introduced MSD, a new dataset that includes existing structural walls of the building as an additional input constraint. This technical report presents an approach for extending a recent work, HouseDiffusion (arXiv:2211.13287 [cs.CV]), to the MSD dataset. The adaption involves modifying the model's transformer layers to condition on a set of wall lines. The report introduces a pre-processing pipeline to extract wall lines from the binary mask of the building structure provided as input. Additionally, it was found that a data processing procedure that simplifies all room polygons to rectangles leads to better performance. This indicates that future work should explore better representations of variable-length polygons in diffusion models. The code will be made available at a later date.
The Potential of Vision-Language Models for Content Moderation of Children's Videos
Authors: Syed Hammad Ahmed, Shengnan Hu, Gita Sukthankar
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, object-detection, Zero-Shot Learning

Natural language supervision has been shown to be effective for zero-shot learning in many computer vision tasks, such as object detection and activity recognition. However, generating informative prompts can be challenging for more subtle tasks, such as video content moderation. This can be difficult, as there are many reasons why a video might be inappropriate, beyond violence and obscenity. For example, scammers may attempt to create junk content that is similar to popular educational videos but with no meaningful information. This paper evaluates the performance of several CLIP variations for content moderation of children's cartoons in both the supervised and zero-shot setting. We show that our proposed model (Vanilla CLIP with Projection Layer) outperforms previous work conducted on the Malicious or Benign (MOB) benchmark for video content moderation. This paper presents an in depth analysis of how context-specific language prompts affect content moderation performance. Our results indicate that it is important to include more context in content moderation prompts, particularly for cartoon videos as they are not well represented in the CLIP training data.
Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis
Authors: Jiaman Li, Alexander Clegg, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Jiajun Wu, Xavier Puig, C. Karen Liu
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object

Synthesizing semantic-aware, long-horizon, human-object interaction is critical to simulate realistic human behaviors. In this work, we address the challenging problem of generating synchronized object motion and human motion guided by language descriptions in 3D scenes. We propose Controllable Human-Object Interaction Synthesis (CHOIS), an approach that generates object motion and human motion simultaneously using a conditional diffusion model given a language description, initial object and human states, and sparse object waypoints. Here, language descriptions inform style and intent, and waypoints, which can be effectively extracted from high-level planning, ground the motion in the scene. Naively applying a diffusion model fails to predict object motion aligned with the input waypoints; it also cannot ensure the realism of interactions that require precise hand-object and human-floor contact. To overcome these problems, we introduce an object geometry loss as additional supervision to improve the matching between generated object motion and input object waypoints; we also design guidance terms to enforce contact constraints during the sampling process of the trained diffusion model. We demonstrate that our learned interaction module can synthesize realistic human-object interactions, adhering to provided textual descriptions and sparse waypoint conditions. Additionally, our module seamlessly integrates with a path planning module, enabling the generation of long-term interactions in 3D environments.
WonderJourney: Going from Anywhere to Everywhere
Authors: Hong-Xing Yu, Haoyi Duan, Junhwa Hur, Kyle Sargent, Michael Rubinstein, William T. Freeman, Forrester Cole, Deqing Sun, Noah Snavely, Jiajun Wu, Charles Herrmann
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Point Cloud Generation, Scene Generation

We introduce WonderJourney, a modularized framework for perpetual 3D scene generation. Unlike prior work on view generation that focuses on a single type of scenes, we start at any user-provided location (by a text description or an image) and generate a journey through a long sequence of diverse yet coherently connected 3D scenes. We leverage an LLM to generate textual descriptions of the scenes in this journey, a text-driven point cloud generation pipeline to make a compelling and coherent sequence of 3D scenes, and a large VLM to verify the generated scenes. We show compelling, diverse visual results across various scene types and styles, forming imaginary "wonderjourneys". Project website: https://kovenyu.com/WonderJourney/
Inpaint3D: 3D Scene Content Generation using 2D Inpainting Diffusion
Authors: Kira Prabhu, Jane Wu, Lynn Tsai, Peter Hedman, Dan B Goldman, Ben Poole, Michael Broxton
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Inpainting, NeRF, Object

This paper presents a novel approach to inpainting 3D regions of a scene, given masked multi-view images, by distilling a 2D diffusion model into a learned 3D scene representation (e.g. a NeRF). Unlike 3D generative methods that explicitly condition the diffusion model on camera pose or multi-view information, our diffusion model is conditioned only on a single masked 2D image. Nevertheless, we show that this 2D diffusion model can still serve as a generative prior in a 3D multi-view reconstruction problem where we optimize a NeRF using a combination of score distillation sampling and NeRF reconstruction losses. Predicted depth is used as additional supervision to encourage accurate geometry. We compare our approach to 3D inpainting methods that focus on object removal. Because our method can generate content to fill any 3D masked region, we additionally demonstrate 3D object completion, 3D object replacement, and 3D scene completion.
LEGO: Learning EGOcentric Action Frame Generation via Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Bolin Lai, Xiaoliang Dai, Lawrence Chen, Guan Pang, James M. Rehg, Miao Liu
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Generating instructional images of human daily actions from an egocentric viewpoint serves as a key step towards efficient skill transfer. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem -- egocentric action frame generation. The goal is to synthesize an image depicting an action in the user's context (i.e., action frame) by conditioning on a user prompt and an input egocentric image. Notably, existing egocentric action datasets lack the detailed annotations that describe the execution of actions. Additionally, existing diffusion-based image manipulation models are sub-optimal in controlling the state transition of an action in egocentric image pixel space because of the domain gap. To this end, we propose to Learn EGOcentric (LEGO) action frame generation via visual instruction tuning. First, we introduce a prompt enhancement scheme to generate enriched action descriptions from a visual large language model (VLLM) by visual instruction tuning. Then we propose a novel method to leverage image and text embeddings from the VLLM as additional conditioning to improve the performance of a diffusion model. We validate our model on two egocentric datasets -- Ego4D and Epic-Kitchens. Our experiments show substantial improvement over prior image manipulation models in both quantitative and qualitative evaluation. We also conduct detailed ablation studies and analysis to provide insights in our method. More details of the dataset and code are available on the website (https://bolinlai.github.io/Lego_EgoActGen/).
Diffusion Illusions: Hiding Images in Plain Sight
Authors: Ryan Burgert, Xiang Li, Abe Leite, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Michael S. Ryoo
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00

We explore the problem of computationally generating special `prime' images that produce optical illusions when physically arranged and viewed in a certain way. First, we propose a formal definition for this problem. Next, we introduce Diffusion Illusions, the first comprehensive pipeline designed to automatically generate a wide range of these illusions. Specifically, we both adapt the existing `score distillation loss' and propose a new `dream target loss' to optimize a group of differentially parametrized prime images, using a frozen text-to-image diffusion model. We study three types of illusions, each where the prime images are arranged in different ways and optimized using the aforementioned losses such that images derived from them align with user-chosen text prompts or images. We conduct comprehensive experiments on these illusions and verify the effectiveness of our proposed method qualitatively and quantitatively. Additionally, we showcase the successful physical fabrication of our illusions -- as they are all designed to work in the real world. Our code and examples are publicly available at our interactive project website: https://diffusionillusions.com
AVID: Any-Length Video Inpainting with Diffusion Model
Authors: Zhixing Zhang, Bichen Wu, Xiaoyan Wang, Yaqiao Luo, Luxin Zhang, Yinan Zhao, Peter Vajda, Dimitris Metaxas, Licheng Yu
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Inpainting, model, Video Inpainting

Recent advances in diffusion models have successfully enabled text-guided image inpainting. While it seems straightforward to extend such editing capability into the video domain, there have been fewer works regarding text-guided video inpainting. Given a video, a masked region at its initial frame, and an editing prompt, it requires a model to do infilling at each frame following the editing guidance while keeping the out-of-mask region intact. There are three main challenges in text-guided video inpainting: ($i$) temporal consistency of the edited video, ($ii$) supporting different inpainting types at different structural fidelity levels, and ($iii$) dealing with variable video length. To address these challenges, we introduce Any-Length Video Inpainting with Diffusion Model, dubbed as AVID. At its core, our model is equipped with effective motion modules and adjustable structure guidance, for fixed-length video inpainting. Building on top of that, we propose a novel Temporal MultiDiffusion sampling pipeline with a middle-frame attention guidance mechanism, facilitating the generation of videos with any desired duration. Our comprehensive experiments show our model can robustly deal with various inpainting types at different video duration ranges, with high quality. More visualization results are made publicly available at https://zhang-zx.github.io/AVID/ .
Seeing the random forest through the decision trees. Supporting learning health systems from histopathology with machine learning models: Challenges and opportunities
Authors: Ricardo Gonzalez, Ashirbani Saha, Clinton J. V. Campbell, Peyman Nejat, Cynthia Lokker, Andrew P. Norgan
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00

This paper discusses some overlooked challenges faced when working with machine learning models for histopathology and presents a novel opportunity to support "Learning Health Systems" with them. Initially, the authors elaborate on these challenges after separating them according to their mitigation strategies: those that need innovative approaches, time, or future technological capabilities and those that require a conceptual reappraisal from a critical perspective. Then, a novel opportunity to support "Learning Health Systems" by integrating hidden information extracted by ML models from digitalized histopathology slides with other healthcare big data is presented.
SurfaceAug: Closing the Gap in Multimodal Ground Truth Sampling
Authors: Ryan Rubel, Nathan Clark, Andrew Dudash
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Object

Despite recent advances in both model architectures and data augmentation, multimodal object detectors still barely outperform their LiDAR-only counterparts. This shortcoming has been attributed to a lack of sufficiently powerful multimodal data augmentation. To address this, we present SurfaceAug, a novel ground truth sampling algorithm. SurfaceAug pastes objects by resampling both images and point clouds, enabling object-level transformations in both modalities. We evaluate our algorithm by training a multimodal detector on KITTI and compare its performance to previous works. We show experimentally that SurfaceAug outperforms existing methods on car detection tasks and establishes a new state of the art for multimodal ground truth sampling.
XCube: Large-Scale 3D Generative Modeling using Sparse Voxel Hierarchies
Authors: Xuanchi Ren, Jiahui Huang, Xiaohui Zeng, Ken Museth, Sanja Fidler, Francis Williams
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Shape Generation, Scene Generation, Text to 3D

We present XCube (abbreviated as $\mathcal{X}^3$), a novel generative model for high-resolution sparse 3D voxel grids with arbitrary attributes. Our model can generate millions of voxels with a finest effective resolution of up to $1024^3$ in a feed-forward fashion without time-consuming test-time optimization. To achieve this, we employ a hierarchical voxel latent diffusion model which generates progressively higher resolution grids in a coarse-to-fine manner using a custom framework built on the highly efficient VDB data structure. Apart from generating high-resolution objects, we demonstrate the effectiveness of XCube on large outdoor scenes at scales of 100m$\times$100m with a voxel size as small as 10cm. We observe clear qualitative and quantitative improvements over past approaches. In addition to unconditional generation, we show that our model can be used to solve a variety of tasks such as user-guided editing, scene completion from a single scan, and text-to-3D. The source code and more results can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/xcube/.
SYNC-CLIP: Synthetic Data Make CLIP Generalize Better in Data-Limited Scenarios
Authors: Mushui Liu, Weijie He, Ziqian Lu, Yunlong Yu
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Prompt learning is a powerful technique for transferring Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP to downstream tasks. However, the prompt-based methods that are fine-tuned solely with base classes may struggle to generalize to novel classes in open-vocabulary scenarios, especially when data are limited. To address this issue, we propose an innovative approach called SYNC-CLIP that leverages SYNthetiC data for enhancing the generalization capability of CLIP. Based on the observation of the distribution shift between the real and synthetic samples, we treat real and synthetic samples as distinct domains and propose to optimize separate domain prompts to capture domain-specific information, along with the shared visual prompts to preserve the semantic consistency between two domains. By aligning the cross-domain features, the synthetic data from novel classes can provide implicit guidance to rebalance the decision boundaries. Experimental results on three model generalization tasks demonstrate that our method performs very competitively across various benchmarks. Notably, SYNC-CLIP outperforms the state-of-the-art competitor PromptSRC by an average improvement of 3.0% on novel classes across 11 datasets in open-vocabulary scenarios.
How Low Can You Go? Surfacing Prototypical In-Distribution Samples for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection
Authors: Felix Meissen, Johannes Getzner, Alexander Ziller, Özgün Turgut, Georgios Kaissis, Martin J. Menten, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Defect Detection, Pneumonia Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) alleviates large labeling efforts by training exclusively on unlabeled in-distribution data and detecting outliers as anomalies. Generally, the assumption prevails that large training datasets allow the training of higher-performing UAD models. However, in this work, we show that UAD with extremely few training samples can already match -- and in some cases even surpass -- the performance of training with the whole training dataset. Building upon this finding, we propose an unsupervised method to reliably identify prototypical samples to further boost UAD performance. We demonstrate the utility of our method on seven different established UAD benchmarks from computer vision, industrial defect detection, and medicine. With just 25 selected samples, we even exceed the performance of full training in $25/67$ categories in these benchmarks. Additionally, we show that the prototypical in-distribution samples identified by our proposed method generalize well across models and datasets and that observing their sample selection criteria allows for a successful manual selection of small subsets of high-performing samples. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/uad_prototypical_samples/
Single Image Reflection Removal with Reflection Intensity Prior Knowledge
Authors: Dongshen Han, Seungkyu Lee, Chaoning Zhang, Heechan Yoon, Hyukmin Kwon, HyunCheol Kim, HyonGon Choo
Date: 2023-12-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Reflection Removal

Single Image Reflection Removal (SIRR) in real-world images is a challenging task due to diverse image degradations occurring on the glass surface during light transmission and reflection. Many existing methods rely on specific prior assumptions to resolve the problem. In this paper, we propose a general reflection intensity prior that captures the intensity of the reflection phenomenon and demonstrate its effectiveness. To learn the reflection intensity prior, we introduce the Reflection Prior Extraction Network (RPEN). By segmenting images into regional patches, RPEN learns non-uniform reflection prior in an image. We propose Prior-based Reflection Removal Network (PRRN) using a simple transformer U-Net architecture that adapts reflection prior fed from RPEN. Experimental results on real-world benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach achieving state-of-the-art accuracy in SIRR.