pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Dynamic and Small Objects Refinement for Unsupervised Domain Adaptative Nighttime Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jingyi Pan, Sihang Li, Yucheng Chen, Jinjing Zhu, Lin Wang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Contrastive Learning, Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Nighttime semantic segmentation plays a crucial role in practical applications, such as autonomous driving, where it frequently encounters difficulties caused by inadequate illumination conditions and the absence of well-annotated datasets. Moreover, semantic segmentation models trained on daytime datasets often face difficulties in generalizing effectively to nighttime conditions. Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) has shown the potential to address the challenges and achieved remarkable results for nighttime semantic segmentation. However, existing methods still face limitations in 1) their reliance on style transfer or relighting models, which struggle to generalize to complex nighttime environments, and 2) their ignorance of dynamic and small objects like vehicles and poles, which are difficult to be directly learned from other domains. This paper proposes a novel UDA method that refines both label and feature levels for dynamic and small objects for nighttime semantic segmentation. First, we propose a dynamic and small object refinement module to complement the knowledge of dynamic and small objects from the source domain to target the nighttime domain. These dynamic and small objects are normally context-inconsistent in under-exposed conditions. Then, we design a feature prototype alignment module to reduce the domain gap by deploying contrastive learning between features and prototypes of the same class from different domains, while re-weighting the categories of dynamic and small objects. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms prior arts by a large margin for nighttime segmentation. Project page: https://rorisis.github.io/DSRNSS/.
Keep Moving: identifying task-relevant subspaces to maximise plasticity for newly learned tasks
Authors: Daniel Anthes, Sushrut Thorat, Peter König, Tim C. Kietzmann
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Diagnostic

Continual learning algorithms strive to acquire new knowledge while preserving prior information. Often, these algorithms emphasise stability and restrict network updates upon learning new tasks. In many cases, such restrictions come at a cost to the model's plasticity, i.e. the model's ability to adapt to the requirements of a new task. But is all change detrimental? Here, we approach this question by proposing that activation spaces in neural networks can be decomposed into two subspaces: a readout range in which change affects prior tasks and a null space in which change does not alter prior performance. Based on experiments with this novel technique, we show that, indeed, not all activation change is associated with forgetting. Instead, only change in the subspace visible to the readout of a task can lead to decreased stability, while restricting change outside of this subspace is associated only with a loss of plasticity. Analysing various commonly used algorithms, we show that regularisation-based techniques do not fully disentangle the two spaces and, as a result, restrict plasticity more than need be. We expand our results by investigating a linear model in which we can manipulate learning in the two subspaces directly and thus causally link activation changes to stability and plasticity. For hierarchical, nonlinear cases, we present an approximation that enables us to estimate functionally relevant subspaces at every layer of a deep nonlinear network, corroborating our previous insights. Together, this work provides novel means to derive insights into the mechanisms behind stability and plasticity in continual learning and may serve as a diagnostic tool to guide developments of future continual learning algorithms that stabilise inference while allowing maximal space for learning.
Activate and Reject: Towards Safe Domain Generalization under Category Shift
Authors: Chaoqi Chen, Luyao Tang, Leitian Tao, Hong-Yu Zhou, Yue Huang, Xiaoguang Han, Yizhou Yu
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Albeit the notable performance on in-domain test points, it is non-trivial for deep neural networks to attain satisfactory accuracy when deploying in the open world, where novel domains and object classes often occur. In this paper, we study a practical problem of Domain Generalization under Category Shift (DGCS), which aims to simultaneously detect unknown-class samples and classify known-class samples in the target domains. Compared to prior DG works, we face two new challenges: 1) how to learn the concept of ``unknown'' during training with only source known-class samples, and 2) how to adapt the source-trained model to unseen environments for safe model deployment. To this end, we propose a novel Activate and Reject (ART) framework to reshape the model's decision boundary to accommodate unknown classes and conduct post hoc modification to further discriminate known and unknown classes using unlabeled test data. Specifically, during training, we promote the response to the unknown by optimizing the unknown probability and then smoothing the overall output to mitigate the overconfidence issue. At test time, we introduce a step-wise online adaptation method that predicts the label by virtue of the cross-domain nearest neighbor and class prototype information without updating the network's parameters or using threshold-based mechanisms. Experiments reveal that ART consistently improves the generalization capability of deep networks on different vision tasks. For image classification, ART improves the H-score by 6.1% on average compared to the previous best method. For object detection and semantic segmentation, we establish new benchmarks and achieve competitive performance.
Memory-Constrained Semantic Segmentation for Ultra-High Resolution UAV Imagery
Authors: Qi Li, Jiaxin Cai, Yuanlong Yu, Jason Gu, Jia Pan, Wenxi Liu
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Amidst the swift advancements in photography and sensor technologies, high-definition cameras have become commonplace in the deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for diverse operational purposes. Within the domain of UAV imagery analysis, the segmentation of ultra-high resolution images emerges as a substantial and intricate challenge, especially when grappling with the constraints imposed by GPU memory-restricted computational devices. This paper delves into the intricate problem of achieving efficient and effective segmentation of ultra-high resolution UAV imagery, while operating under stringent GPU memory limitation. The strategy of existing approaches is to downscale the images to achieve computationally efficient segmentation. However, this strategy tends to overlook smaller, thinner, and curvilinear regions. To address this problem, we propose a GPU memory-efficient and effective framework for local inference without accessing the context beyond local patches. In particular, we introduce a novel spatial-guided high-resolution query module, which predicts pixel-wise segmentation results with high quality only by querying nearest latent embeddings with the guidance of high-resolution information. Additionally, we present an efficient memory-based interaction scheme to correct potential semantic bias of the underlying high-resolution information by associating cross-image contextual semantics. For evaluation of our approach, we perform comprehensive experiments over public benchmarks and achieve superior performance under both conditions of small and large GPU memory usage limitations. We will release the model and codes in the future.
A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Neural Image Deblurring
Authors: Sajjad Amrollahi Biyouki, Hoon Hwangbo
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Deblurring, Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Survey

Image deblurring tries to eliminate degradation elements of an image causing blurriness and improve the quality of an image for better texture and object visualization. Traditionally, prior-based optimization approaches predominated in image deblurring, but deep neural networks recently brought a major breakthrough in the field. In this paper, we comprehensively review the recent progress of the deep neural architectures in both blind and non-blind image deblurring. We outline the most popular deep neural network structures used in deblurring applications, describe their strengths and novelties, summarize performance metrics, and introduce broadly used datasets. In addition, we discuss the current challenges and research gaps in this domain and suggest potential research directions for future works.
Reinforced UI Instruction Grounding: Towards a Generic UI Task Automation API
Authors: Zhizheng Zhang, Wenxuan Xie, Xiaoyi Zhang, Yan Lu
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, document understanding, Image to text, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened countless possibilities in automating numerous AI tasks by connecting LLMs to various domain-specific models or APIs, where LLMs serve as dispatchers while domain-specific models or APIs are action executors. Despite the vast numbers of domain-specific models/APIs, they still struggle to comprehensively cover super diverse automation demands in the interaction between human and User Interfaces (UIs). In this work, we build a multimodal model to ground natural language instructions in given UI screenshots as a generic UI task automation executor. This metadata-free grounding model, consisting of a visual encoder and a language decoder, is first pretrained on well studied document understanding tasks and then learns to decode spatial information from UI screenshots in a promptable way. To facilitate the exploitation of image-to-text pretrained knowledge, we follow the pixel-to-sequence paradigm to predict geometric coordinates in a sequence of tokens using a language decoder. We further propose an innovative Reinforcement Learning (RL) based algorithm to supervise the tokens in such sequence jointly with visually semantic metrics, which effectively strengthens the spatial decoding capability of the pixel-to-sequence paradigm. Extensive experiments demonstrate our proposed reinforced UI instruction grounding model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin and shows the potential as a generic UI task automation API.
Generalized Robust Test-Time Adaptation in Continuous Dynamic Scenarios
Authors: Shuang Li, Longhui Yuan, Binhui Xie, Tao Yang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) adapts the pre-trained models to test distributions during the inference phase exclusively employing unlabeled test data streams, which holds great value for the deployment of models in real-world applications. Numerous studies have achieved promising performance on simplistic test streams, characterized by independently and uniformly sampled test data originating from a fixed target data distribution. However, these methods frequently prove ineffective in practical scenarios, where both continual covariate shift and continual label shift occur simultaneously, i.e., data and label distributions change concurrently and continually over time. In this study, a more challenging Practical Test-Time Adaptation (PTTA) setup is introduced, which takes into account the concurrent presence of continual covariate shift and continual label shift, and we propose a Generalized Robust Test-Time Adaptation (GRoTTA) method to effectively address the difficult problem. We start by steadily adapting the model through Robust Parameter Adaptation to make balanced predictions for test samples. To be specific, firstly, the effects of continual label shift are eliminated by enforcing the model to learn from a uniform label distribution and introducing recalibration of batch normalization to ensure stability. Secondly, the continual covariate shift is alleviated by employing a source knowledge regularization with the teacher-student model to update parameters. Considering the potential information in the test stream, we further refine the balanced predictions by Bias-Guided Output Adaptation, which exploits latent structure in the feature space and is adaptive to the imbalanced label distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate GRoTTA outperforms the existing competitors by a large margin under PTTA setting, rendering it highly conducive for adoption in real-world applications.
UFD-PRiME: Unsupervised Joint Learning of Optical Flow and Stereo Depth through Pixel-Level Rigid Motion Estimation
Authors: Shuai Yuan, Carlo Tomasi
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

Both optical flow and stereo disparities are image matches and can therefore benefit from joint training. Depth and 3D motion provide geometric rather than photometric information and can further improve optical flow. Accordingly, we design a first network that estimates flow and disparity jointly and is trained without supervision. A second network, trained with optical flow from the first as pseudo-labels, takes disparities from the first network, estimates 3D rigid motion at every pixel, and reconstructs optical flow again. A final stage fuses the outputs from the two networks. In contrast with previous methods that only consider camera motion, our method also estimates the rigid motions of dynamic objects, which are of key interest in applications. This leads to better optical flow with visibly more detailed occlusions and object boundaries as a result. Our unsupervised pipeline achieves 7.36% optical flow error on the KITTI-2015 benchmark and outperforms the previous state-of-the-art 9.38% by a wide margin. It also achieves slightly better or comparable stereo depth results. Code will be made available.
Multi-scale MRI reconstruction via dilated ensemble networks
Authors: Wendi Ma, Marlon Bran Lorenzana, Wei Dai, Hongfu Sun, Shekhar S. Chandra
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction

As aliasing artefacts are highly structural and non-local, many MRI reconstruction networks use pooling to enlarge filter coverage and incorporate global context. However, this inadvertently impedes fine detail recovery as downsampling creates a resolution bottleneck. Moreover, real and imaginary features are commonly split into separate channels, discarding phase information particularly important to high frequency textures. In this work, we introduce an efficient multi-scale reconstruction network using dilated convolutions to preserve resolution and experiment with a complex-valued version using complex convolutions. Inspired by parallel dilated filters, multiple receptive fields are processed simultaneously with branches that see both large structural artefacts and fine local features. We also adopt dense residual connections for feature aggregation to efficiently increase scale and the deep cascade global architecture to reduce overfitting. The real-valued version of this model outperformed common reconstruction architectures as well as a state-of-the-art multi-scale network whilst being three times more efficient. The complex-valued network yielded better qualitative results when more phase information was present.
Tree-GPT: Modular Large Language Model Expert System for Forest Remote Sensing Image Understanding and Interactive Analysis
Authors: Siqi Du, Shengjun Tang, Weixi Wang, Xiaoming Li, Renzhong Guo
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This paper introduces a novel framework, Tree-GPT, which incorporates Large Language Models (LLMs) into the forestry remote sensing data workflow, thereby enhancing the efficiency of data analysis. Currently, LLMs are unable to extract or comprehend information from images and may generate inaccurate text due to a lack of domain knowledge, limiting their use in forestry data analysis. To address this issue, we propose a modular LLM expert system, Tree-GPT, that integrates image understanding modules, domain knowledge bases, and toolchains. This empowers LLMs with the ability to comprehend images, acquire accurate knowledge, generate code, and perform data analysis in a local environment. Specifically, the image understanding module extracts structured information from forest remote sensing images by utilizing automatic or interactive generation of prompts to guide the Segment Anything Model (SAM) in generating and selecting optimal tree segmentation results. The system then calculates tree structural parameters based on these results and stores them in a database. Upon receiving a specific natural language instruction, the LLM generates code based on a thought chain to accomplish the analysis task. The code is then executed by an LLM agent in a local environment and . For ecological parameter calculations, the system retrieves the corresponding knowledge from the knowledge base and inputs it into the LLM to guide the generation of accurate code. We tested this system on several tasks, including Search, Visualization, and Machine Learning Analysis. The prototype system performed well, demonstrating the potential for dynamic usage of LLMs in forestry research and environmental sciences.
SeeDS: Semantic Separable Diffusion Synthesizer for Zero-shot Food Detection
Authors: Pengfei Zhou, Weiqing Min, Yang Zhang, Jiajun Song, Ying Jin, Shuqiang Jiang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Food recommendation, Generalized Zero-Shot Object Detection, Generalized Zero-Shot Object Detection on MS-COCO, Object Detection, Zero-Shot Object Detection

Food detection is becoming a fundamental task in food computing that supports various multimedia applications, including food recommendation and dietary monitoring. To deal with real-world scenarios, food detection needs to localize and recognize novel food objects that are not seen during training, demanding Zero-Shot Detection (ZSD). However, the complexity of semantic attributes and intra-class feature diversity poses challenges for ZSD methods in distinguishing fine-grained food classes. To tackle this, we propose the Semantic Separable Diffusion Synthesizer (SeeDS) framework for Zero-Shot Food Detection (ZSFD). SeeDS consists of two modules: a Semantic Separable Synthesizing Module (S$^3$M) and a Region Feature Denoising Diffusion Model (RFDDM). The S$^3$M learns the disentangled semantic representation for complex food attributes from ingredients and cuisines, and synthesizes discriminative food features via enhanced semantic information. The RFDDM utilizes a novel diffusion model to generate diversified region features and enhances ZSFD via fine-grained synthesized features. Extensive experiments show the state-of-the-art ZSFD performance of our proposed method on two food datasets, ZSFooD and UECFOOD-256. Moreover, SeeDS also maintains effectiveness on general ZSD datasets, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. The code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/LanceZPF/SeeDS.
PatchProto Networks for Few-shot Visual Anomaly Classification
Authors: Jian Wang, Yue Zhuo
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Classification, Classification, Few-Shot Learning

The visual anomaly diagnosis can automatically analyze the defective products, which has been widely applied in industrial quality inspection. The anomaly classification can classify the defective products into different categories. However, the anomaly samples are hard to access in practice, which impedes the training of canonical machine learning models. This paper studies a practical issue that anomaly samples for training are extremely scarce, i.e., few-shot learning (FSL). Utilizing the sufficient normal samples, we propose PatchProto networks for few-shot anomaly classification. Different from classical FSL methods, PatchProto networks only extract CNN features of defective regions of interest, which serves as the prototypes for few-shot learning. Compared with basic few-shot classifier, the experiment results on MVTec-AD dataset show PatchProto networks significantly improve the few-shot anomaly classification accuracy.
Targeted Attack Improves Protection against Unauthorized Diffusion Customization
Authors: BoYang Zheng, Chumeng Liang, Xiaoyu Wu
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Image Generation, Misinformation

Diffusion models build a new milestone for image generation yet raising public concerns, for they can be fine-tuned on unauthorized images for customization. Protection based on adversarial attacks rises to encounter this unauthorized diffusion customization, by adding protective watermarks to images and poisoning diffusion models. However, current protection, leveraging untargeted attacks, does not appear to be effective enough. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective improvement for the protection against unauthorized diffusion customization by introducing targeted attacks. We show that by carefully selecting the target, targeted attacks significantly outperform untargeted attacks in poisoning diffusion models and degrading the customization image quality. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our method on two mainstream customization methods of diffusion models, compared to existing protections. To explain the surprising success of targeted attacks, we delve into the mechanism of attack-based protections and propose a hypothesis based on our observation, which enhances the comprehension of attack-based protections. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to both reveal the vulnerability of diffusion models to targeted attacks and leverage targeted attacks to enhance protection against unauthorized diffusion customization. Our code is available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/psyker-team/mist-v2}.
High Visual-Fidelity Learned Video Compression
Authors: Meng Li, Yibo Shi, Jing Wang, Yunqi Huang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Compression

With the growing demand for video applications, many advanced learned video compression methods have been developed, outperforming traditional methods in terms of objective quality metrics such as PSNR. Existing methods primarily focus on objective quality but tend to overlook perceptual quality. Directly incorporating perceptual loss into a learned video compression framework is nontrivial and raises several perceptual quality issues that need to be addressed. In this paper, we investigated these issues in learned video compression and propose a novel High Visual-Fidelity Learned Video Compression framework (HVFVC). Specifically, we design a novel confidence-based feature reconstruction method to address the issue of poor reconstruction in newly-emerged regions, which significantly improves the visual quality of the reconstruction. Furthermore, we present a periodic compensation loss to mitigate the checkerboard artifacts related to deconvolution operation and optimization. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed HVFVC achieves excellent perceptual quality, outperforming the latest VVC standard with only 50% required bitrate.