pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dynamic Point Cloud Geometry Compression Using Multiscale Inter Conditional Coding
Authors: Jianqiang Wang, Dandan Ding, Hao Chen, Zhan Ma
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00

This work extends the Multiscale Sparse Representation (MSR) framework developed for static Point Cloud Geometry Compression (PCGC) to support the dynamic PCGC through the use of multiscale inter conditional coding. To this end, the reconstruction of the preceding Point Cloud Geometry (PCG) frame is progressively downscaled to generate multiscale temporal priors which are then scale-wise transferred and integrated with lower-scale spatial priors from the same frame to form the contextual information to improve occupancy probability approximation when processing the current PCG frame from one scale to another. Following the Common Test Conditions (CTC) defined in the standardization committee, the proposed method presents State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) compression performance, yielding 78% lossy BD-Rate gain to the latest standard-compliant V-PCC and 45% lossless bitrate reduction to the latest G-PCC. Even for recently-emerged learning-based solutions, our method still shows significant performance gains.
ClusterFuG: Clustering Fully connected Graphs by Multicut
Authors: Ahmed Abbas, Paul Swoboda
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Graph Clustering, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose a graph clustering formulation based on multicut (a.k.a. weighted correlation clustering) on the complete graph. Our formulation does not need specification of the graph topology as in the original sparse formulation of multicut, making our approach simpler and potentially better performing. In contrast to unweighted correlation clustering we allow for a more expressive weighted cost structure. In dense multicut, the clustering objective is given in a factorized form as inner products of node feature vectors. This allows for an efficient formulation and inference in contrast to multicut/weighted correlation clustering, which has at least quadratic representation and computation complexity when working on the complete graph. We show how to rewrite classical greedy algorithms for multicut in our dense setting and how to modify them for greater efficiency and solution quality. In particular, our algorithms scale to graphs with tens of thousands of nodes. Empirical evidence on instance segmentation on Cityscapes and clustering of ImageNet datasets shows the merits of our approach.
POSTER++: A simpler and stronger facial expression recognition network
Authors: Jiawei Mao, Rui Xu, Xuesong Yin, Yuanqi Chang, Binling Nie, Aibin Huang
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Facial expression recognition (FER) plays an important role in a variety of real-world applications such as human-computer interaction. POSTER achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in FER by effectively combining facial landmark and image features through two-stream pyramid cross-fusion design. However, the architecture of POSTER is undoubtedly complex. It causes expensive computational costs. In order to relieve the computational pressure of POSTER, in this paper, we propose POSTER++. It improves POSTER in three directions: cross-fusion, two-stream, and multi-scale feature extraction. In cross-fusion, we use window-based cross-attention mechanism replacing vanilla cross-attention mechanism. We remove the image-to-landmark branch in the two-stream design. For multi-scale feature extraction, POSTER++ combines images with landmark's multi-scale features to replace POSTER's pyramid design. Extensive experiments on several standard datasets show that our POSTER++ achieves the SOTA FER performance with the minimum computational cost. For example, POSTER++ reached 92.21% on RAF-DB, 67.49% on AffectNet (7 cls) and 63.77% on AffectNet (8 cls), respectively, using only 8.4G floating point operations (FLOPs) and 43.7M parameters (Param). This demonstrates the effectiveness of our improvements.
AdaSfM: From Coarse Global to Fine Incremental Adaptive Structure from Motion
Authors: Yu Chen, Zihao Yu, Shu Song, Tianning Yu, Jianming Li, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00

Despite the impressive results achieved by many existing Structure from Motion (SfM) approaches, there is still a need to improve the robustness, accuracy, and efficiency on large-scale scenes with many outlier matches and sparse view graphs. In this paper, we propose AdaSfM: a coarse-to-fine adaptive SfM approach that is scalable to large-scale and challenging datasets. Our approach first does a coarse global SfM which improves the reliability of the view graph by leveraging measurements from low-cost sensors such as Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) and wheel encoders. Subsequently, the view graph is divided into sub-scenes that are refined in parallel by a fine local incremental SfM regularised by the result from the coarse global SfM to improve the camera registration accuracy and alleviate scene drifts. Finally, our approach uses a threshold-adaptive strategy to align all local reconstructions to the coordinate frame of global SfM. Extensive experiments on large-scale benchmark datasets show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency.
Pushing the Limits of Fewshot Anomaly Detection in Industry Vision: Graphcore
Authors: Guoyang Xie, Jinbao Wang, Jiaqi Liu, Feng Zheng, Yaochu Jin
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

In the area of fewshot anomaly detection (FSAD), efficient visual feature plays an essential role in memory bank M-based methods. However, these methods do not account for the relationship between the visual feature and its rotated visual feature, drastically limiting the anomaly detection performance. To push the limits, we reveal that rotation-invariant feature property has a significant impact in industrial-based FSAD. Specifically, we utilize graph representation in FSAD and provide a novel visual isometric invariant feature (VIIF) as anomaly measurement feature. As a result, VIIF can robustly improve the anomaly discriminating ability and can further reduce the size of redundant features stored in M by a large amount. Besides, we provide a novel model GraphCore via VIIFs that can fast implement unsupervised FSAD training and can improve the performance of anomaly detection. A comprehensive evaluation is provided for comparing GraphCore and other SOTA anomaly detection models under our proposed fewshot anomaly detection setting, which shows GraphCore can increase average AUC by 5.8%, 4.1%, 3.4%, and 1.6% on MVTec AD and by 25.5%, 22.0%, 16.9%, and 14.1% on MPDD for 1, 2, 4, and 8-shot cases, respectively.
ALIM: Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism for Noisy Partial Label Learning
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Model Optimization, Partial Label Learning, Weakly-supervised Learning

Noisy partial label learning (noisy PLL) is an important branch of weakly supervised learning. Unlike PLL where the ground-truth label must conceal in the candidate label set, noisy PLL relaxes this constraint and allows the ground-truth label may not be in the candidate label set. To address this challenging problem, most of the existing works attempt to detect noisy samples and estimate the ground-truth label for each noisy sample. However, detection errors are unavoidable. These errors can accumulate during training and continuously affect model optimization. To this end, we propose a novel framework for noisy PLL with theoretical guarantees, called ``Adjusting Label Importance Mechanism (ALIM)''. It aims to reduce the negative impact of detection errors by trading off the initial candidate set and model outputs. ALIM is a plug-in strategy that can be integrated with existing PLL approaches. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performance on noisy PLL. \textcolor[rgb]{0.93,0.0,0.47}{Our code can be found in Supplementary Material}.
Towards Equitable Representation in Text-to-Image Synthesis Models with the Cross-Cultural Understanding Benchmark (CCUB) Dataset
Authors: Zhixuan Liu, Youeun Shin, Beverley-Claire Okogwu, Youngsik Yun, Lia Coleman, Peter Schaldenbrand, Jihie Kim, Jean Oh
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering

It has been shown that accurate representation in media improves the well-being of the people who consume it. By contrast, inaccurate representations can negatively affect viewers and lead to harmful perceptions of other cultures. To achieve inclusive representation in generated images, we propose a culturally-aware priming approach for text-to-image synthesis using a small but culturally curated dataset that we collected, known here as Cross-Cultural Understanding Benchmark (CCUB) Dataset, to fight the bias prevalent in giant datasets. Our proposed approach is comprised of two fine-tuning techniques: (1) Adding visual context via fine-tuning a pre-trained text-to-image synthesis model, Stable Diffusion, on the CCUB text-image pairs, and (2) Adding semantic context via automated prompt engineering using the fine-tuned large language model, GPT-3, trained on our CCUB culturally-aware text data. CCUB dataset is curated and our approach is evaluated by people who have a personal relationship with that particular culture. Our experiments indicate that priming using both text and image is effective in improving the cultural relevance and decreasing the offensiveness of generated images while maintaining quality.
Learning Optimal Features via Partial Invariance
Authors: Moulik Choraria, Ibtihal Ferwana, Ankur Mani, Lav R. Varshney
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Learning models that are robust to distribution shifts is a key concern in the context of their real-life applicability. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is a popular framework that aims to learn robust models from multiple environments. The success of IRM requires an important assumption: the underlying causal mechanisms/features remain invariant across environments. When not satisfied, we show that IRM can over-constrain the predictor and to remedy this, we propose a relaxation via $\textit{partial invariance}$. In this work, we theoretically highlight the sub-optimality of IRM and then demonstrate how learning from a partition of training domains can help improve invariant models. Several experiments, conducted both in linear settings as well as with deep neural networks on tasks over both language and image data, allow us to verify our conclusions.
Aerial Image Object Detection With Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet)
Authors: Liya Wang, Alex Tien
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Detection In Aerial Images

The past few years have seen an increased interest in aerial image object detection due to its critical value to large-scale geo-scientific research like environmental studies, urban planning, and intelligence monitoring. However, the task is very challenging due to the birds-eye view perspective, complex backgrounds, large and various image sizes, different appearances of objects, and the scarcity of well-annotated datasets. Recent advances in computer vision have shown promise tackling the challenge. Specifically, Vision Transformer Detector (ViTDet) was proposed to extract multi-scale features for object detection. The empirical study shows that ViTDet's simple design achieves good performance on natural scene images and can be easily embedded into any detector architecture. To date, ViTDet's potential benefit to challenging aerial image object detection has not been explored. Therefore, in our study, 25 experiments were carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of ViTDet for aerial image object detection on three well-known datasets: Airbus Aircraft, RarePlanes, and Dataset of Object DeTection in Aerial images (DOTA). Our results show that ViTDet can consistently outperform its convolutional neural network counterparts on horizontal bounding box (HBB) object detection by a large margin (up to 17% on average precision) and that it achieves the competitive performance for oriented bounding box (OBB) object detection. Our results also establish a baseline for future research.
Object Preserving Siamese Network for Single Object Tracking on Point Clouds
Authors: Kaijie Zhao, Haitao Zhao, Zhongze Wang, Jingchao Peng, Zhengwei Hu
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Single Object Tracking, Object, Object Localization, Object Tracking

Obviously, the object is the key factor of the 3D single object tracking (SOT) task. However, previous Siamese-based trackers overlook the negative effects brought by randomly dropped object points during backbone sampling, which hinder trackers to predict accurate bounding boxes (BBoxes). Exploring an approach that seeks to maximize the preservation of object points and their object-aware features is of particular significance. Motivated by this, we propose an Object Preserving Siamese Network (OPSNet), which can significantly maintain object integrity and boost tracking performance. Firstly, the object highlighting module enhances the object-aware features and extracts discriminative features from template and search area. Then, the object-preserved sampling selects object candidates to obtain object-preserved search area seeds and drop the background points that contribute less to tracking. Finally, the object localization network precisely locates 3D BBoxes based on the object-preserved search area seeds. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method outperforms the state-of-the-art performance (9.4% and 2.5% success gain on KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset respectively).
Weakly Supervised Image Segmentation Beyond Tight Bounding Box Annotations
Authors: Juan Wang, Bin Xia
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Multiple Instance Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised image segmentation approaches in the literature usually achieve high segmentation performance using tight bounding box supervision and decrease the performance greatly when supervised by loose bounding boxes. However, compared with loose bounding box, it is much more difficult to acquire tight bounding box due to its strict requirements on the precise locations of the four sides of the box. To resolve this issue, this study investigates whether it is possible to maintain good segmentation performance when loose bounding boxes are used as supervision. For this purpose, this work extends our previous parallel transformation based multiple instance learning (MIL) for tight bounding box supervision by integrating an MIL strategy based on polar transformation to assist image segmentation. The proposed polar transformation based MIL formulation works for both tight and loose bounding boxes, in which a positive bag is defined as pixels in a polar line of a bounding box with one endpoint located inside the object enclosed by the box and the other endpoint located at one of the four sides of the box. Moreover, a weighted smooth maximum approximation is introduced to incorporate the observation that pixels closer to the origin of the polar transformation are more likely to belong to the object in the box. The proposed approach was evaluated on two public datasets using dice coefficient when bounding boxes at different precision levels were considered in the experiments. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for bounding boxes at all precision levels and is robust to mild and moderate errors in the loose bounding box annotations. The codes are available at \url{https://github.com/wangjuan313/wsis-beyond-tightBB}.
Making Reconstruction-based Method Great Again for Video Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yizhou Wang, Can Qin, Yue Bai, Yi Xu, Xu Ma, Yun Fu
Date: 2023-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection in videos is a significant yet challenging problem. Previous approaches based on deep neural networks employ either reconstruction-based or prediction-based approaches. Nevertheless, existing reconstruction-based methods 1) rely on old-fashioned convolutional autoencoders and are poor at modeling temporal dependency; 2) are prone to overfit the training samples, leading to indistinguishable reconstruction errors of normal and abnormal frames during the inference phase. To address such issues, firstly, we get inspiration from transformer and propose ${\textbf S}$patio-${\textbf T}$emporal ${\textbf A}$uto-${\textbf T}$rans-${\textbf E}$ncoder, dubbed as $\textbf{STATE}$, as a new autoencoder model for enhanced consecutive frame reconstruction. Our STATE is equipped with a specifically designed learnable convolutional attention module for efficient temporal learning and reasoning. Secondly, we put forward a novel reconstruction-based input perturbation technique during testing to further differentiate anomalous frames. With the same perturbation magnitude, the testing reconstruction error of the normal frames lowers more than that of the abnormal frames, which contributes to mitigating the overfitting problem of reconstruction. Owing to the high relevance of the frame abnormality and the objects in the frame, we conduct object-level reconstruction using both the raw frame and the corresponding optical flow patches. Finally, the anomaly score is designed based on the combination of the raw and motion reconstruction errors using perturbed inputs. Extensive experiments on benchmark video anomaly detection datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous reconstruction-based methods by a notable margin, and achieves state-of-the-art anomaly detection performance consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/wyzjack/MRMGA4VAD.
Improved knowledge distillation by utilizing backward pass knowledge in neural networks
Authors: Aref Jafari, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Ali Ghodsi
Date: 2023-01-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression

Knowledge distillation (KD) is one of the prominent techniques for model compression. In this method, the knowledge of a large network (teacher) is distilled into a model (student) with usually significantly fewer parameters. KD tries to better-match the output of the student model to that of the teacher model based on the knowledge extracts from the forward pass of the teacher network. Although conventional KD is effective for matching the two networks over the given data points, there is no guarantee that these models would match in other areas for which we do not have enough training samples. In this work, we address that problem by generating new auxiliary training samples based on extracting knowledge from the backward pass of the teacher in the areas where the student diverges greatly from the teacher. We compute the difference between the teacher and the student and generate new data samples that maximize the divergence. This is done by perturbing data samples in the direction of the gradient of the difference between the student and the teacher. Augmenting the training set by adding this auxiliary improves the performance of KD significantly and leads to a closer match between the student and the teacher. Using this approach, when data samples come from a discrete domain, such as applications of natural language processing (NLP) and language understanding, is not trivial. However, we show how this technique can be used successfully in such applications. We evaluated the performance of our method on various tasks in computer vision and NLP domains and got promising results.
Polynomial Preconditioning for Gradient Methods
Authors: Nikita Doikov, Anton Rodomanov
Date: 2023-01-30 00:00:00

We study first-order methods with preconditioning for solving structured nonlinear convex optimization problems. We propose a new family of preconditioners generated by symmetric polynomials. They provide first-order optimization methods with a provable improvement of the condition number, cutting the gaps between highest eigenvalues, without explicit knowledge of the actual spectrum. We give a stochastic interpretation of this preconditioning in terms of coordinate volume sampling and compare it with other classical approaches, including the Chebyshev polynomials. We show how to incorporate a polynomial preconditioning into the Gradient and Fast Gradient Methods and establish the corresponding global complexity bounds. Finally, we propose a simple adaptive search procedure that automatically chooses the best possible polynomial preconditioning for the Gradient Method, minimizing the objective along a low-dimensional Krylov subspace. Numerical experiments confirm the efficiency of our preconditioning strategies for solving various machine learning problems.
Robust empirical risk minimization via Newton's method
Authors: Eirini Ioannou, Muni Sreenivas Pydi, Po-Ling Loh
Date: 2023-01-30 00:00:00

A new variant of Newton's method for empirical risk minimization is studied, where at each iteration of the optimization algorithm, the gradient and Hessian of the objective function are replaced by robust estimators taken from existing literature on robust mean estimation for multivariate data. After proving a general theorem about the convergence of successive iterates to a small ball around the population-level minimizer, consequences of the theory in generalized linear models are studied when data are generated from Huber's epsilon-contamination model and/or heavytailed distributions. An algorithm for obtaining robust Newton directions based on the conjugate gradient method is also proposed, which may be more appropriate for high-dimensional settings, and conjectures about the convergence of the resulting algorithm are offered. Compared to robust gradient descent, the proposed algorithm enjoys the faster rates of convergence for successive iterates often achieved by second-order algorithms for convex problems, i.e., quadratic convergence in a neighborhood of the optimum, with a stepsize that may be chosen adaptively via backtracking linesearch.
Learning Control from Raw Position Measurements
Authors: Fabio Amadio, Alberto Dalla Libera, Daniel Nikovski, Ruggero Carli, Diego Romeres
Date: 2023-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Position

We propose a Model-Based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) algorithm named VF-MC-PILCO, specifically designed for application to mechanical systems where velocities cannot be directly measured. This circumstance, if not adequately considered, can compromise the success of MBRL approaches. To cope with this problem, we define a velocity-free state formulation which consists of the collection of past positions and inputs. Then, VF-MC-PILCO uses Gaussian Process Regression to model the dynamics of the velocity-free state and optimizes the control policy through a particle-based policy gradient approach. We compare VF-MC-PILCO with our previous MBRL algorithm, MC-PILCO4PMS, which handles the lack of direct velocity measurements by modeling the presence of velocity estimators. Results on both simulated (cart-pole and UR5 robot) and real mechanical systems (Furuta pendulum and a ball-and-plate rig) show that the two algorithms achieve similar results. Conveniently, VF-MC-PILCO does not require the design and implementation of state estimators, which can be a challenging and time-consuming activity to be performed by an expert user.