pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FETV: A Benchmark for Fine-Grained Evaluation of Open-Domain Text-to-Video Generation
Authors: Yuanxin Liu, Lei LI, Shuhuai Ren, Rundong Gao, Shicheng Li, Sishuo Chen, Xu sun, Lu Hou
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Recently, open-domain text-to-video (T2V) generation models have made remarkable progress. However, the promising results are mainly shown by the qualitative cases of generated videos, while the quantitative evaluation of T2V models still faces two critical problems. Firstly, existing studies lack fine-grained evaluation of T2V models on different categories of text prompts. Although some benchmarks have categorized the prompts, their categorization either only focuses on a single aspect or fails to consider the temporal information in video generation. Secondly, it is unclear whether the automatic evaluation metrics are consistent with human standards. To address these problems, we propose FETV, a benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Text-to-Video generation. FETV is multi-aspect, categorizing the prompts based on three orthogonal aspects: the major content, the attributes to control and the prompt complexity. FETV is also temporal-aware, which introduces several temporal categories tailored for video generation. Based on FETV, we conduct comprehensive manual evaluations of four representative T2V models, revealing their pros and cons on different categories of prompts from different aspects. We also extend FETV as a testbed to evaluate the reliability of automatic T2V metrics. The multi-aspect categorization of FETV enables fine-grained analysis of the metrics' reliability in different scenarios. We find that existing automatic metrics (e.g., CLIPScore and FVD) correlate poorly with human evaluation. To address this problem, we explore several solutions to improve CLIPScore and FVD, and develop two automatic metrics that exhibit significant higher correlation with humans than existing metrics. Benchmark page: https://github.com/llyx97/FETV.
Unsupervised Polychromatic Neural Representation for CT Metal Artifact Reduction
Authors: Qing Wu, Lixuan Chen, Ce Wang, Hongjiang Wei, S. Kevin Zhou, Jingyi Yu, Yuyao Zhang
Date: 2023-06-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Metal Artifact Reduction, NeRF

Emerging neural reconstruction techniques based on tomography (e.g., NeRF, NeAT, and NeRP) have started showing unique capabilities in medical imaging. In this work, we present a novel Polychromatic neural representation (Polyner) to tackle the challenging problem of CT imaging when metallic implants exist within the human body. CT metal artifacts arise from the drastic variation of metal's attenuation coefficients at various energy levels of the X-ray spectrum, leading to a nonlinear metal effect in CT measurements. Recovering CT images from metal-affected measurements hence poses a complicated nonlinear inverse problem where empirical models adopted in previous metal artifact reduction (MAR) approaches lead to signal loss and strongly aliased reconstructions. Polyner instead models the MAR problem from a nonlinear inverse problem perspective. Specifically, we first derive a polychromatic forward model to accurately simulate the nonlinear CT acquisition process. Then, we incorporate our forward model into the implicit neural representation to accomplish reconstruction. Lastly, we adopt a regularizer to preserve the physical properties of the CT images across different energy levels while effectively constraining the solution space. Our Polyner is an unsupervised method and does not require any external training data. Experimenting with multiple datasets shows that our Polyner achieves comparable or better performance than supervised methods on in-domain datasets while demonstrating significant performance improvements on out-of-domain datasets. To the best of our knowledge, our Polyner is the first unsupervised MAR method that outperforms its supervised counterparts. The code for this work is available at: https://github.com/iwuqing/Polyner.
LayoutPrompter: Awaken the Design Ability of Large Language Models
Authors: Jiawei Lin, Jiaqi Guo, Shizhao Sun, Zijiang James Yang, Jian-Guang Lou, Dongmei Zhang
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Layout Generation

Conditional graphic layout generation, which automatically maps user constraints to high-quality layouts, has attracted widespread attention today. Although recent works have achieved promising performance, the lack of versatility and data efficiency hinders their practical applications. In this work, we propose LayoutPrompter, which leverages large language models (LLMs) to address the above problems through in-context learning. LayoutPrompter is made up of three key components, namely input-output serialization, dynamic exemplar selection and layout ranking. Specifically, the input-output serialization component meticulously designs the input and output formats for each layout generation task. Dynamic exemplar selection is responsible for selecting the most helpful prompting exemplars for a given input. And a layout ranker is used to pick the highest quality layout from multiple outputs of LLMs. We conduct experiments on all existing layout generation tasks using four public datasets. Despite the simplicity of our approach, experimental results show that LayoutPrompter can compete with or even outperform state-of-the-art approaches on these tasks without any model training or fine-tuning. This demonstrates the effectiveness of this versatile and training-free approach. In addition, the ablation studies show that LayoutPrompter is significantly superior to the training-based baseline in a low-data regime, further indicating the data efficiency of LayoutPrompter. Our project is available at https://github.com/microsoft/LayoutGeneration/tree/main/LayoutPrompter.
AKFruitData: A dual software application for Azure Kinect cameras to acquire and extract informative data in yield tests performed in fruit orchard environments
Authors: Juan Carlos Miranda, Jordi Gené-Mola, Jaume Arnó, Eduard Gregorio
Date: 2022-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: SoftwareX 2022 10

The emergence of low-cost 3D sensors, and particularly RGB-D cameras, together with recent advances in artificial intelligence, is currently driving the development of in-field methods for fruit detection, size measurement and yield estimation. However, as the performance of these methods depends on the availability of quality fruit datasets, the development of ad-hoc software to use RGB-D cameras in agricultural environments is essential. The AKFruitData software introduced in this work aims to facilitate use of the Azure Kinect RGB-D camera for testing in field trials. This software presents a dual structure that addresses both the data acquisition and the data creation stages. The acquisition software (AK_ACQS) allows different sensors to be activated simultaneously in addition to the Azure Kinect. Then, the extraction software (AK_FRAEX) allows videos generated with the Azure Kinect camera to be processed to create the datasets, making available colour, depth, IR and point cloud metadata. AKFruitData has been used by the authors to acquire and extract data from apple fruit trees for subsequent fruit yield estimation. Moreover, this software can also be applied to many other areas in the framework of precision agriculture, thus making it a very useful tool for all researchers working in fruit growing.
AKFruitYield: Modular benchmarking and video analysis software for Azure Kinect cameras for fruit size and fruit yield estimation in apple orchards
Authors: Juan Carlos Miranda, Jaume Arnó, Jordi Gené-Mola, Spyros Fountas, Eduard Gregorio
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: SoftwareX 2023 10
Tasks: Benchmarking

AKFruitYield is a modular software that allows orchard data from RGB-D Azure Kinect cameras to be processed for fruit size and fruit yield estimation. Specifically, two modules have been developed: i) AK_SW_BENCHMARKER that makes it possible to apply different sizing algorithms and allometric yield prediction models to manually labelled color and depth tree images; and ii) AK_VIDEO_ANALYSER that analyses videos on which to automatically detect apples, estimate their size and predict yield at the plot or per hectare scale using the appropriate algorithms. Both modules have easy-to-use graphical interfaces and provide reports that can subsequently be used by other analysis tools.
Adapting Segment Anything Model (SAM) through Prompt-based Learning for Enhanced Protein Identification in Cryo-EM Micrographs
Authors: Fei He, Zhiyuan Yang, Mingyue Gao, Biplab Poudel, Newgin Sam Ebin Sam Dhas, Rajan Gyawali, Ashwin Dhakal, Jianlin Cheng, Dong Xu
Date: 2023-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) remains pivotal in structural biology, yet the task of protein particle picking, integral for 3D protein structure construction, is laden with manual inefficiencies. While recent AI tools such as Topaz and crYOLO are advancing the field, they do not fully address the challenges of cryo-EM images, including low contrast, complex shapes, and heterogeneous conformations. This study explored prompt-based learning to adapt the state-of-the-art image segmentation foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) for cryo-EM. This focus was driven by the desire to optimize model performance with a small number of labeled data without altering pre-trained parameters, aiming for a balance between adaptability and foundational knowledge retention. Through trials with three prompt-based learning strategies, namely head prompt, prefix prompt, and encoder prompt, we observed enhanced performance and reduced computational requirements compared to the fine-tuning approach. This work not only highlights the potential of prompting SAM in protein identification from cryo-EM micrographs but also suggests its broader promise in biomedical image segmentation and object detection.
ChatTraffic: Text-to-Traffic Generation via Diffusion Model
Authors: Chengyang Zhang, Yong Zhang, Qitan Shao, Bo Li, Yisheng Lv, Xinglin Piao, BaoCai Yin
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Prediction, Traffic Prediction

Traffic prediction is one of the most significant foundations in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Traditional traffic prediction methods rely only on historical traffic data to predict traffic trends and face two main challenges. 1) insensitivity to unusual events. 2) limited performance in long-term prediction. In this work, we explore how generative models combined with text describing the traffic system can be applied for traffic generation, and name the task Text-to-Traffic Generation (TTG). The key challenge of the TTG task is how to associate text with the spatial structure of the road network and traffic data for generating traffic situations. To this end, we propose ChatTraffic, the first diffusion model for text-to-traffic generation. To guarantee the consistency between synthetic and real data, we augment a diffusion model with the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) to extract spatial correlations of traffic data. In addition, we construct a large dataset containing text-traffic pairs for the TTG task. We benchmarked our model qualitatively and quantitatively on the released dataset. The experimental results indicate that ChatTraffic can generate realistic traffic situations from the text. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/ChyaZhang/ChatTraffic.
Learning Noise-Robust Joint Representation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Incomplete Data Scenarios
Authors: Qi Fan, Haolin Zuo, Rui Liu, Zheng Lian, Guanglai Gao
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition (MER) in practical scenarios is significantly challenged by the presence of missing or incomplete data across different modalities. To overcome these challenges, researchers have aimed to simulate incomplete conditions during the training phase to enhance the system's overall robustness. Traditional methods have often involved discarding data or substituting data segments with zero vectors to approximate these incompletenesses. However, such approaches neither accurately represent real-world conditions nor adequately address the issue of noisy data availability. For instance, a blurry image cannot be simply replaced with zero vectors, and still retain information. To tackle this issue and develop a more precise MER system, we introduce a novel noise-robust MER model that effectively learns robust multimodal joint representations from noisy data. This approach includes two pivotal components: firstly, a noise scheduler that adjusts the type and level of noise in the data to emulate various realistic incomplete situations. Secondly, a Variational AutoEncoder (VAE)-based module is employed to reconstruct these robust multimodal joint representations from the noisy inputs. Notably, the introduction of the noise scheduler enables the exploration of an entirely new type of incomplete data condition, which is impossible with existing methods. Extensive experimental evaluations on the benchmark datasets IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI demonstrate the effectiveness of the noise scheduler and the excellent performance of our proposed model.
Modelling wildland fire burn severity in California using a spatial Super Learner approach
Authors: Nicholas Simafranca, Bryant Willoughby, Erin O'Neil, Sophie Farr, Brian J Reich, Naomi Giertych, Margaret Johnson, Madeleine Pascolini-Campbell
Date: 2023-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fire Detection, Interpretable Machine Learning

Given the increasing prevalence of wildland fires in the Western US, there is a critical need to develop tools to understand and accurately predict burn severity. We develop a machine learning model to predict post-fire burn severity using pre-fire remotely sensed data. Hydrological, ecological, and topographical variables collected from four regions of California - the sites of the Kincade fire (2019), the CZU Lightning Complex fire (2020), the Windy fire (2021), and the KNP Fire (2021) - are used as predictors of the difference normalized burn ratio. We hypothesize that a Super Learner (SL) algorithm that accounts for spatial autocorrelation using Vecchia's Gaussian approximation will accurately model burn severity. In all combinations of test and training sets explored, the results of our model showed the SL algorithm outperformed standard Linear Regression methods. After fitting and verifying the performance of the SL model, we use interpretable machine learning tools to determine the main drivers of severe burn damage, including greenness, elevation and fire weather variables. These findings provide actionable insights that enable communities to strategize interventions, such as early fire detection systems, pre-fire season vegetation clearing activities, and resource allocation during emergency responses. When implemented, this model has the potential to minimize the loss of human life, property, resources, and ecosystems in California.
Segment Every Out-of-Distribution Object
Authors: Wenjie Zhao, Jia Li, Xin Dong, Yu Xiang, Yunhui Guo
Date: 2023-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation models, while effective for in-distribution categories, face challenges in real-world deployment due to encountering out-of-distribution (OoD) objects. Detecting these OoD objects is crucial for safety-critical applications. Existing methods rely on anomaly scores, but choosing a suitable threshold for generating masks presents difficulties and can lead to fragmentation and inaccuracy. This paper introduces a method to convert anomaly \textbf{S}core \textbf{T}o segmentation \textbf{M}ask, called S2M, a simple and effective framework for OoD detection in semantic segmentation. Unlike assigning anomaly scores to pixels, S2M directly segments the entire OoD object. By transforming anomaly scores into prompts for a promptable segmentation model, S2M eliminates the need for threshold selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that S2M outperforms the state-of-the-art by approximately 20% in IoU and 40% in mean F1 score, on average, across various benchmarks including Fishyscapes, Segment-Me-If-You-Can, and RoadAnomaly datasets.
Brain-ID: Learning Contrast-agnostic Anatomical Representations for Brain Imaging
Authors: Peirong Liu, Oula Puonti, Xiaoling Hu, Daniel C. Alexander, Juan E. Iglesias
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Brain Segmentation, Representation Learning, Super-Resolution

Recent learning-based approaches have made astonishing advances in calibrated medical imaging like computerized tomography (CT), yet they struggle to generalize in uncalibrated modalities -- notably magnetic resonance (MR) imaging, where performance is highly sensitive to the differences in MR contrast, resolution, and orientation. This prevents broad applicability to diverse real-world clinical protocols. We introduce Brain-ID, an anatomical representation learning model for brain imaging. With the proposed "mild-to-severe" intra-subject generation, Brain-ID is robust to the subject-specific brain anatomy regardless of the appearance of acquired images (e.g., contrast, deformation, resolution, artifacts). Trained entirely on synthetic data, Brain-ID readily adapts to various downstream tasks through only one layer. We present new metrics to validate the intra- and inter-subject robustness of Brain-ID features, and evaluate their performance on four downstream applications, covering contrast-independent (anatomy reconstruction/contrast synthesis, brain segmentation), and contrast-dependent (super-resolution, bias field estimation) tasks. Extensive experiments on six public datasets demonstrate that Brain-ID achieves state-of-the-art performance in all tasks on different MRI modalities and CT, and more importantly, preserves its performance on low-resolution and small datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/peirong26/Brain-ID.
Mission-driven Exploration for Accelerated Deep Reinforcement Learning with Temporal Logic Task Specifications
Authors: Jun Wang, Hosein Hasanbeig, Kaiyuan Tan, Zihe Sun, Yiannis Kantaros
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Robot Navigation

This paper addresses the problem of designing optimal control policies for mobile robots with mission and safety requirements specified using Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). We consider robots with unknown stochastic dynamics operating in environments with unknown geometric structure. The robots are equipped with sensors allowing them to detect obstacles. Our goal is to synthesize a control policy that maximizes the probability of satisfying an LTL-encoded task in the presence of motion and environmental uncertainty. Several deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have been proposed recently to address similar problems. A common limitation in related works is that of slow learning performance. In order to address this issue, we propose a novel DRL algorithm, which has the capability to learn control policies at a notably faster rate compared to similar methods. Its sample efficiency is due to a mission-driven exploration strategy that prioritizes exploration towards directions that may contribute to mission accomplishment. Identifying these directions relies on an automaton representation of the LTL task as well as a learned neural network that (partially) models the unknown system dynamics. We provide comparative experiments demonstrating the efficiency of our algorithm on robot navigation tasks in unknown environments.
Panoptic Video Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Jingkang Yang, Wenxuan Peng, Xiangtai Li, Zujin Guo, Liangyu Chen, Bo Li, Zheng Ma, Kaiyang Zhou, Wayne Zhang, Chen Change Loy, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Graph Generation, Panoptic Scene Graph Generation, Panoptic Segmentation, Scene Graph Generation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Video scene graph generation, Video Understanding

Towards building comprehensive real-world visual perception systems, we propose and study a new problem called panoptic scene graph generation (PVSG). PVSG relates to the existing video scene graph generation (VidSGG) problem, which focuses on temporal interactions between humans and objects grounded with bounding boxes in videos. However, the limitation of bounding boxes in detecting non-rigid objects and backgrounds often causes VidSGG to miss key details crucial for comprehensive video understanding. In contrast, PVSG requires nodes in scene graphs to be grounded by more precise, pixel-level segmentation masks, which facilitate holistic scene understanding. To advance research in this new area, we contribute the PVSG dataset, which consists of 400 videos (289 third-person + 111 egocentric videos) with a total of 150K frames labeled with panoptic segmentation masks as well as fine, temporal scene graphs. We also provide a variety of baseline methods and share useful design practices for future work.
No Representation Rules Them All in Category Discovery
Date: 2023-11-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: All, Clustering, Representation Learning

In this paper we tackle the problem of Generalized Category Discovery (GCD). Specifically, given a dataset with labelled and unlabelled images, the task is to cluster all images in the unlabelled subset, whether or not they belong to the labelled categories. Our first contribution is to recognize that most existing GCD benchmarks only contain labels for a single clustering of the data, making it difficult to ascertain whether models are using the available labels to solve the GCD task, or simply solving an unsupervised clustering problem. As such, we present a synthetic dataset, named 'Clevr-4', for category discovery. Clevr-4 contains four equally valid partitions of the data, i.e based on object shape, texture, color or count. To solve the task, models are required to extrapolate the taxonomy specified by the labelled set, rather than simply latching onto a single natural grouping of the data. We use this dataset to demonstrate the limitations of unsupervised clustering in the GCD setting, showing that even very strong unsupervised models fail on Clevr-4. We further use Clevr-4 to examine the weaknesses of existing GCD algorithms, and propose a new method which addresses these shortcomings, leveraging consistent findings from the representation learning literature to do so. Our simple solution, which is based on 'mean teachers' and termed $\mu$GCD, substantially outperforms implemented baselines on Clevr-4. Finally, when we transfer these findings to real data on the challenging Semantic Shift Benchmark (SSB), we find that $\mu$GCD outperforms all prior work, setting a new state-of-the-art. For the project webpage, see https://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/data/clevr4/