pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Racing Control Variable Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression
Authors: Nan Jiang, Yexiang Xue
Date: 2023-09-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, regression, Symbolic Regression

Symbolic regression, as one of the most crucial tasks in AI for science, discovers governing equations from experimental data. Popular approaches based on genetic programming, Monte Carlo tree search, or deep reinforcement learning learn symbolic regression from a fixed dataset. They require massive datasets and long training time especially when learning complex equations involving many variables. Recently, Control Variable Genetic Programming (CVGP) has been introduced which accelerates the regression process by discovering equations from designed control variable experiments. However, the set of experiments is fixed a-priori in CVGP and we observe that sub-optimal selection of experiment schedules delay the discovery process significantly. To overcome this limitation, we propose Racing Control Variable Genetic Programming (Racing-CVGP), which carries out multiple experiment schedules simultaneously. A selection scheme similar to that used in selecting good symbolic equations in the genetic programming process is implemented to ensure that promising experiment schedules eventually win over the average ones. The unfavorable schedules are terminated early to save time for the promising ones. We evaluate Racing-CVGP on several synthetic and real-world datasets corresponding to true physics laws. We demonstrate that Racing-CVGP outperforms CVGP and a series of symbolic regressors which discover equations from fixed datasets.
Generative AI
Authors: Stefan Feuerriegel, Jochen Hartmann, Christian Janiesch, Patrick Zschech
Date: 2023-09-13 00:00:00

The term "generative AI" refers to computational techniques that are capable of generating seemingly new, meaningful content such as text, images, or audio from training data. The widespread diffusion of this technology with examples such as Dall-E 2, GPT-4, and Copilot is currently revolutionizing the way we work and communicate with each other. In this article, we provide a conceptualization of generative AI as an entity in socio-technical systems and provide examples of models, systems, and applications. Based on that, we introduce limitations of current generative AI and provide an agenda for Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE) research. Different from previous works, we focus on generative AI in the context of information systems, and, to this end, we discuss several opportunities and challenges that are unique to the BISE community and make suggestions for impactful directions for BISE research.
Robust e-NeRF: NeRF from Sparse & Noisy Events under Non-Uniform Motion
Authors: Weng Fei Low, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Scene Reconstruction, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Event cameras offer many advantages over standard cameras due to their distinctive principle of operation: low power, low latency, high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. Nonetheless, the success of many downstream visual applications also hinges on an efficient and effective scene representation, where Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) is seen as the leading candidate. Such promise and potential of event cameras and NeRF inspired recent works to investigate on the reconstruction of NeRF from moving event cameras. However, these works are mainly limited in terms of the dependence on dense and low-noise event streams, as well as generalization to arbitrary contrast threshold values and camera speed profiles. In this work, we propose Robust e-NeRF, a novel method to directly and robustly reconstruct NeRFs from moving event cameras under various real-world conditions, especially from sparse and noisy events generated under non-uniform motion. It consists of two key components: a realistic event generation model that accounts for various intrinsic parameters (e.g. time-independent, asymmetric threshold and refractory period) and non-idealities (e.g. pixel-to-pixel threshold variation), as well as a complementary pair of normalized reconstruction losses that can effectively generalize to arbitrary speed profiles and intrinsic parameter values without such prior knowledge. Experiments on real and novel realistically simulated sequences verify our effectiveness. Our code, synthetic dataset and improved event simulator are public.
Robust Frame-to-Frame Camera Rotation Estimation in Crowded Scenes
Authors: Fabien Delattre, David Dirnfeld, Phat Nguyen, Stephen Scarano, Michael J. Jones, Pedro Miraldo, Erik Learned-Miller
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Optical Flow Estimation

We present an approach to estimating camera rotation in crowded, real-world scenes from handheld monocular video. While camera rotation estimation is a well-studied problem, no previous methods exhibit both high accuracy and acceptable speed in this setting. Because the setting is not addressed well by other datasets, we provide a new dataset and benchmark, with high-accuracy, rigorously verified ground truth, on 17 video sequences. Methods developed for wide baseline stereo (e.g., 5-point methods) perform poorly on monocular video. On the other hand, methods used in autonomous driving (e.g., SLAM) leverage specific sensor setups, specific motion models, or local optimization strategies (lagging batch processing) and do not generalize well to handheld video. Finally, for dynamic scenes, commonly used robustification techniques like RANSAC require large numbers of iterations, and become prohibitively slow. We introduce a novel generalization of the Hough transform on SO(3) to efficiently and robustly find the camera rotation most compatible with optical flow. Among comparably fast methods, ours reduces error by almost 50\% over the next best, and is more accurate than any method, irrespective of speed. This represents a strong new performance point for crowded scenes, an important setting for computer vision. The code and the dataset are available at https://fabiendelattre.com/robust-rotation-estimation.
Replacing softmax with ReLU in Vision Transformers
Authors: Mitchell Wortsman, Jaehoon Lee, Justin Gilmer, Simon Kornblith
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00

Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence length. Our experiments training small to large vision transformers on ImageNet-21k indicate that ReLU-attention can approach or match the performance of softmax-attention in terms of scaling behavior as a function of compute.
Viewpoint Integration and Registration with Vision Language Foundation Model for Image Change Understanding
Authors: Xiaonan Lu, Jianlong Yuan, Ruigang Niu, Yuan Hu, Fan Wang
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00

Recently, the development of pre-trained vision language foundation models (VLFMs) has led to remarkable performance in many tasks. However, these models tend to have strong single-image understanding capability but lack the ability to understand multiple images. Therefore, they cannot be directly applied to cope with image change understanding (ICU), which requires models to capture actual changes between multiple images and describe them in language. In this paper, we discover that existing VLFMs perform poorly when applied directly to ICU because of the following problems: (1) VLFMs generally learn the global representation of a single image, while ICU requires capturing nuances between multiple images. (2) The ICU performance of VLFMs is significantly affected by viewpoint variations, which is caused by the altered relationships between objects when viewpoint changes. To address these problems, we propose a Viewpoint Integration and Registration method. Concretely, we introduce a fused adapter image encoder that fine-tunes pre-trained encoders by inserting designed trainable adapters and fused adapters, to effectively capture nuances between image pairs. Additionally, a viewpoint registration flow and a semantic emphasizing module are designed to reduce the performance degradation caused by viewpoint variations in the visual and semantic space, respectively. Experimental results on CLEVR-Change and Spot-the-Diff demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in all metrics.
The Impact of Different Backbone Architecture on Autonomous Vehicle Dataset
Authors: Ning Ding, Azim Eskandarian
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object detection is a crucial component of autonomous driving, and many detection applications have been developed to address this task. These applications often rely on backbone architectures, which extract representation features from inputs to perform the object detection task. The quality of the features extracted by the backbone architecture can have a significant impact on the overall detection performance. Many researchers have focused on developing new and improved backbone architectures to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of object detection applications. While these backbone architectures have shown state-of-the-art performance on generic object detection datasets like MS-COCO and PASCAL-VOC, evaluating their performance under an autonomous driving environment has not been previously explored. To address this, our study evaluates three well-known autonomous vehicle datasets, namely KITTI, NuScenes, and BDD, to compare the performance of different backbone architectures on object detection tasks.
Automated dermatoscopic pattern discovery by clustering neural network output for human-computer interaction
Authors: Lidia Talavera-Martinez, Philipp Tschandl
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diagnostic

Background: As available medical image datasets increase in size, it becomes infeasible for clinicians to review content manually for knowledge extraction. The objective of this study was to create an automated clustering resulting in human-interpretable pattern discovery. Methods: Images from the public HAM10000 dataset, including 7 common pigmented skin lesion diagnoses, were tiled into 29420 tiles and clustered via k-means using neural network-extracted image features. The final number of clusters per diagnosis was chosen by either the elbow method or a compactness metric balancing intra-lesion variance and cluster numbers. The amount of resulting non-informative clusters, defined as those containing less than six image tiles, was compared between the two methods. Results: Applying k-means, the optimal elbow cutoff resulted in a mean of 24.7 (95%-CI: 16.4-33) clusters for every included diagnosis, including 14.9% (95% CI: 0.8-29.0) non-informative clusters. The optimal cutoff, as estimated by the compactness metric, resulted in significantly fewer clusters (13.4; 95%-CI 11.8-15.1; p=0.03) and less non-informative ones (7.5%; 95% CI: 0-19.5; p=0.017). The majority of clusters (93.6%) from the compactness metric could be manually mapped to previously described dermatoscopic diagnostic patterns. Conclusions: Automatically constraining unsupervised clustering can produce an automated extraction of diagnostically relevant and human-interpretable clusters of visual patterns from a large image dataset.
Towards Practical and Efficient Image-to-Speech Captioning with Vision-Language Pre-training and Multi-modal Tokens
Authors: Minsu Kim, Jeongsoo Choi, Soumi Maiti, Jeong Hun Yeo, Shinji Watanabe, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Comprehension, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Quantization

In this paper, we propose methods to build a powerful and efficient Image-to-Speech captioning (Im2Sp) model. To this end, we start with importing the rich knowledge related to image comprehension and language modeling from a large-scale pre-trained vision-language model into Im2Sp. We set the output of the proposed Im2Sp as discretized speech units, i.e., the quantized speech features of a self-supervised speech model. The speech units mainly contain linguistic information while suppressing other characteristics of speech. This allows us to incorporate the language modeling capability of the pre-trained vision-language model into the spoken language modeling of Im2Sp. With the vision-language pre-training strategy, we set new state-of-the-art Im2Sp performances on two widely used benchmark databases, COCO and Flickr8k. Then, we further improve the efficiency of the Im2Sp model. Similar to the speech unit case, we convert the original image into image units, which are derived through vector quantization of the raw image. With these image units, we can drastically reduce the required data storage for saving image data to just 0.8% when compared to the original image data in terms of bits. Demo page: https://ms-dot-k.github.io/Image-to-Speech-Captioning.
Breathing New Life into 3D Assets with Generative Repainting
Authors: Tianfu Wang, Menelaos Kanakis, Konrad Schindler, Luc van Gool, Anton Obukhov
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00

Diffusion-based text-to-image models ignited immense attention from the vision community, artists, and content creators. Broad adoption of these models is due to significant improvement in the quality of generations and efficient conditioning on various modalities, not just text. However, lifting the rich generative priors of these 2D models into 3D is challenging. Recent works have proposed various pipelines powered by the entanglement of diffusion models and neural fields. We explore the power of pretrained 2D diffusion models and standard 3D neural radiance fields as independent, standalone tools and demonstrate their ability to work together in a non-learned fashion. Such modularity has the intrinsic advantage of eased partial upgrades, which became an important property in such a fast-paced domain. Our pipeline accepts any legacy renderable geometry, such as textured or untextured meshes, orchestrates the interaction between 2D generative refinement and 3D consistency enforcement tools, and outputs a painted input geometry in several formats. We conduct a large-scale study on a wide range of objects and categories from the ShapeNetSem dataset and demonstrate the advantages of our approach, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://www.obukhov.ai/repainting_3d_assets
Generalised Diffusion Probabilistic Scale-Spaces
Authors: Pascal Peter
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00

Diffusion probabilistic models excel at sampling new images from learned distributions. Originally motivated by drift-diffusion concepts from physics, they apply image perturbations such as noise and blur in a forward process that results in a tractable probability distribution. A corresponding learned reverse process generates images and can be conditioned on side information, which leads to a wide variety of practical applications. Most of the research focus currently lies on practice-oriented extensions. In contrast, the theoretical background remains largely unexplored, in particular the relations to drift-diffusion. In order to shed light on these connections to classical image filtering, we propose a generalised scale-space theory for diffusion probabilistic models. Moreover, we show conceptual and empirical connections to diffusion and osmosis filters.
OccupancyDETR: Using DETR for Mixed Dense-sparse 3D Occupancy Prediction
Authors: Yupeng Jia, Jie He, Runze Chen, Fang Zhao, Haiyong Luo
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Scene Completion, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

Visual-based 3D semantic occupancy perception is a key technology for robotics, including autonomous vehicles, offering an enhanced understanding of the environment by 3D. This approach, however, typically requires more computational resources than BEV or 2D methods. We propose a novel 3D semantic occupancy perception method, OccupancyDETR, which utilizes a DETR-like object detection, a mixed dense-sparse 3D occupancy decoder. Our approach distinguishes between foreground and background within a scene. Initially, foreground objects are detected using the DETR-like object detection. Subsequently, queries for both foreground and background objects are fed into the mixed dense-sparse 3D occupancy decoder, performing upsampling in dense and sparse methods, respectively. Finally, a MaskFormer is utilized to infer the semantics of the background voxels. Our approach strikes a balance between efficiency and accuracy, achieving faster inference times, lower resource consumption, and improved performance for small object detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on the SemanticKITTI dataset, showcasing an mIoU of 14 and a processing speed of 10 FPS, thereby presenting a promising solution for real-time 3D semantic occupancy perception.
YCB-Ev 1.1: Event-vision dataset for 6DoF object pose estimation
Authors: Pavel Rojtberg, Thomas Pöllabauer
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Our work introduces the YCB-Ev dataset, which contains synchronized RGB-D frames and event data that enables evaluating 6DoF object pose estimation algorithms using these modalities. This dataset provides ground truth 6DoF object poses for the same 21 YCB objects that were used in the YCB-Video (YCB-V) dataset, allowing for cross-dataset algorithm performance evaluation. The dataset consists of 21 synchronized event and RGB-D sequences, totalling 13,851 frames (7 minutes and 43 seconds of event data). Notably, 12 of these sequences feature the same object arrangement as the YCB-V subset used in the BOP challenge. Ground truth poses are generated by detecting objects in the RGB-D frames, interpolating the poses to align with the event timestamps, and then transferring them to the event coordinate frame using extrinsic calibration. Our dataset is the first to provide ground truth 6DoF pose data for event streams. Furthermore, we evaluate the generalization capabilities of two state-of-the-art algorithms, which were pre-trained for the BOP challenge, using our novel YCB-V sequences. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/paroj/ycbev.
3D Arterial Segmentation via Single 2D Projections and Depth Supervision in Contrast-Enhanced CT Images
Authors: Alina F. Dima, Veronika A. Zimmer, Martin J. Menten, Hongwei Bran Li, Markus Graf, Tristan Lemke, Philipp Raffler, Robert Graf, Jan S. Kirschke, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Automated segmentation of the blood vessels in 3D volumes is an essential step for the quantitative diagnosis and treatment of many vascular diseases. 3D vessel segmentation is being actively investigated in existing works, mostly in deep learning approaches. However, training 3D deep networks requires large amounts of manual 3D annotations from experts, which are laborious to obtain. This is especially the case for 3D vessel segmentation, as vessels are sparse yet spread out over many slices and disconnected when visualized in 2D slices. In this work, we propose a novel method to segment the 3D peripancreatic arteries solely from one annotated 2D projection per training image with depth supervision. We perform extensive experiments on the segmentation of peripancreatic arteries on 3D contrast-enhanced CT images and demonstrate how well we capture the rich depth information from 2D projections. We demonstrate that by annotating a single, randomly chosen projection for each training sample, we obtain comparable performance to annotating multiple 2D projections, thereby reducing the annotation effort. Furthermore, by mapping the 2D labels to the 3D space using depth information and incorporating this into training, we almost close the performance gap between 3D supervision and 2D supervision. Our code is available at: https://github.com/alinafdima/3Dseg-mip-depth.
PoseFix: Correcting 3D Human Poses with Natural Language
Authors: Ginger Delmas, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Francesc Moreno-Noguer, Grégory Rogez
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Text Generation

Automatically producing instructions to modify one's posture could open the door to endless applications, such as personalized coaching and in-home physical therapy. Tackling the reverse problem (i.e., refining a 3D pose based on some natural language feedback) could help for assisted 3D character animation or robot teaching, for instance. Although a few recent works explore the connections between natural language and 3D human pose, none focus on describing 3D body pose differences. In this paper, we tackle the problem of correcting 3D human poses with natural language. To this end, we introduce the PoseFix dataset, which consists of several thousand paired 3D poses and their corresponding text feedback, that describe how the source pose needs to be modified to obtain the target pose. We demonstrate the potential of this dataset on two tasks: (1) text-based pose editing, that aims at generating corrected 3D body poses given a query pose and a text modifier; and (2) correctional text generation, where instructions are generated based on the differences between two body poses.
TreeLearn: A deep learning method for segmenting individual trees from ground-based LiDAR forest point clouds
Authors: Jonathan Henrich, Jan van Delden, Dominik Seidel, Thomas Kneib, Alexander Ecker
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Laser-scanned point clouds of forests make it possible to extract valuable information for forest management. To consider single trees, a forest point cloud needs to be segmented into individual tree point clouds. Existing segmentation methods are usually based on hand-crafted algorithms, such as identifying trunks and growing trees from them, and face difficulties in dense forests with overlapping tree crowns. In this study, we propose TreeLearn, a deep learning-based approach for tree instance segmentation of forest point clouds. TreeLearn is trained on already segmented point clouds in a data-driven manner, making it less reliant on predefined features and algorithms. Furthermore, TreeLearn is implemented as a fully automatic pipeline and does not rely on extensive hyperparameter tuning, which makes it easy to use. Additionally, we introduce a new manually segmented benchmark forest dataset containing 156 full trees. The data is generated by mobile laser scanning and contributes to create a larger and more diverse data basis for model development and fine-grained instance segmentation evaluation. We trained TreeLearn on forest point clouds of 6665 trees, labeled using the Lidar360 software. An evaluation on the benchmark dataset shows that TreeLearn performs as well as the algorithm used to generate its training data. Furthermore, the performance can be vastly improved by fine-tuning the model using manually annotated datasets. We evaluate TreeLearn on our benchmark dataset and the Wytham Woods dataset, outperforming the recent SegmentAnyTree, ForAINet and TLS2Trees methods. The TreeLearn code and all datasets that were created in the course of this work are made publicly available.
Segment Anything Model for Brain Tumor Segmentation
Authors: Peng Zhang, Yaping Wang
Date: 2023-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Image Segmentation, model, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Glioma is a prevalent brain tumor that poses a significant health risk to individuals. Accurate segmentation of brain tumor is essential for clinical diagnosis and treatment. The Segment Anything Model(SAM), released by Meta AI, is a fundamental model in image segmentation and has excellent zero-sample generalization capabilities. Thus, it is interesting to apply SAM to the task of brain tumor segmentation. In this study, we evaluated the performance of SAM on brain tumor segmentation and found that without any model fine-tuning, there is still a gap between SAM and the current state-of-the-art(SOTA) model.