pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TIC-TAC: A Framework for Improved Covariance Estimation in Deep Heteroscedastic Regression
Authors: Megh Shukla, Mathieu Salzmann, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, regression

Deep heteroscedastic regression involves jointly optimizing the mean and covariance of the predicted distribution using the negative log-likelihood. However, recent works show that this may result in sub-optimal convergence due to the challenges associated with covariance estimation. While the literature addresses this by proposing alternate formulations to mitigate the impact of the predicted covariance, we focus on improving the predicted covariance itself. We study two questions: (1) Does the predicted covariance truly capture the randomness of the predicted mean? (2) In the absence of supervision, how can we quantify the accuracy of covariance estimation? We address (1) with a Taylor Induced Covariance (TIC), which captures the randomness of the predicted mean by incorporating its gradient and curvature through the second order Taylor polynomial. Furthermore, we tackle (2) by introducing a Task Agnostic Correlations (TAC) metric, which combines the notion of correlations and absolute error to evaluate the covariance. We evaluate TIC-TAC across multiple experiments spanning synthetic and real-world datasets. Our results show that not only does TIC accurately learn the covariance, it additionally facilitates an improved convergence of the negative log-likelihood. Our code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/TIC-TAC
Customize StyleGAN with One Hand Sketch
Authors: Shaocong Zhang
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00

Generating images from human sketches typically requires dedicated networks trained from scratch. In contrast, the emergence of the pre-trained Vision-Language models (e.g., CLIP) has propelled generative applications based on controlling the output imagery of existing StyleGAN models with text inputs or reference images. Parallelly, our work proposes a framework to control StyleGAN imagery with a single user sketch. In particular, we learn a conditional distribution in the latent space of a pre-trained StyleGAN model via energy-based learning and propose two novel energy functions leveraging CLIP for cross-domain semantic supervision. Once trained, our model can generate multi-modal images semantically aligned with the input sketch. Quantitative evaluations on synthesized datasets have shown that our approach improves significantly from previous methods in the one-shot regime. The superiority of our method is further underscored when experimenting with a wide range of human sketches of diverse styles and poses. Surprisingly, our models outperform the previous baseline regarding both the range of sketch inputs and image qualities despite operating with a stricter setting: with no extra training data and single sketch input.
Video Frame Interpolation with Many-to-many Splatting and Spatial Selective Refinement
Authors: Ping Hu, Simon Niklaus, Lu Zhang, Stan Sclaroff, Kate Saenko
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Motion Estimation, Video Frame Interpolation

In this work, we first propose a fully differentiable Many-to-Many (M2M) splatting framework to interpolate frames efficiently. Given a frame pair, we estimate multiple bidirectional flows to directly forward warp the pixels to the desired time step before fusing overlapping pixels. In doing so, each source pixel renders multiple target pixels and each target pixel can be synthesized from a larger area of visual context, establishing a many-to-many splatting scheme with robustness to undesirable artifacts. For each input frame pair, M2M has a minuscule computational overhead when interpolating an arbitrary number of in-between frames, hence achieving fast multi-frame interpolation. However, directly warping and fusing pixels in the intensity domain is sensitive to the quality of motion estimation and may suffer from less effective representation capacity. To improve interpolation accuracy, we further extend an M2M++ framework by introducing a flexible Spatial Selective Refinement (SSR) component, which allows for trading computational efficiency for interpolation quality and vice versa. Instead of refining the entire interpolated frame, SSR only processes difficult regions selected under the guidance of an estimated error map, thereby avoiding redundant computation. Evaluation on multiple benchmark datasets shows that our method is able to improve the efficiency while maintaining competitive video interpolation quality, and it can be adjusted to use more or less compute as needed.
Label Poisoning is All You Need
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: All, Backdoor Attack, Dataset Distillation, Knowledge Distillation

In a backdoor attack, an adversary injects corrupted data into a model's training dataset in order to gain control over its predictions on images with a specific attacker-defined trigger. A typical corrupted training example requires altering both the image, by applying the trigger, and the label. Models trained on clean images, therefore, were considered safe from backdoor attacks. However, in some common machine learning scenarios, the training labels are provided by potentially malicious third-parties. This includes crowd-sourced annotation and knowledge distillation. We, hence, investigate a fundamental question: can we launch a successful backdoor attack by only corrupting labels? We introduce a novel approach to design label-only backdoor attacks, which we call FLIP, and demonstrate its strengths on three datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and four architectures (ResNet-32, ResNet-18, VGG-19, and Vision Transformer). With only 2% of CIFAR-10 labels corrupted, FLIP achieves a near-perfect attack success rate of 99.4% while suffering only a 1.8% drop in the clean test accuracy. Our approach builds upon the recent advances in trajectory matching, originally introduced for dataset distillation.
A transfer learning approach with convolutional neural network for Face Mask Detection
Authors: Abolfazl Younesi, Reza Afrouzian, Yousef Seyfari
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Due to the epidemic of the coronavirus (Covid-19) and its rapid spread around the world, the world has faced an enormous crisis. To prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the World Health Organization (WHO) has introduced the use of masks and keeping social distance as the best preventive method. So, developing an automatic monitoring system for detecting facemasks in some crowded places is essential. To do this, we propose a mask recognition system based on transfer learning and Inception v3 architecture. In the proposed method, two datasets are used simultaneously for training including the Simulated Mask Face Dataset (SMFD) and MaskedFace-Net (MFN) This paper tries to increase the accuracy of the proposed system by optimally setting hyper-parameters and accurately designing the fully connected layers. The main advantage of the proposed method is that in addition to masked and unmasked faces, it can also detect cases of incorrect use of mask. Therefore, the proposed method classifies the input face images into three categories. Experimental results show the high accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method; so, this method has achieved an accuracy of 99.47% and 99.33% in training and test data respectively
Improving Multi-Person Pose Tracking with A Confidence Network
Authors: Zehua Fu, Wenhang Zuo, Zhenghui Hu, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, Pose Estimation, Pose Tracking

Human pose estimation and tracking are fundamental tasks for understanding human behaviors in videos. Existing top-down framework-based methods usually perform three-stage tasks: human detection, pose estimation and tracking. Although promising results have been achieved, these methods rely heavily on high-performance detectors and may fail to track persons who are occluded or miss-detected. To overcome these problems, in this paper, we develop a novel keypoint confidence network and a tracking pipeline to improve human detection and pose estimation in top-down approaches. Specifically, the keypoint confidence network is designed to determine whether each keypoint is occluded, and it is incorporated into the pose estimation module. In the tracking pipeline, we propose the Bbox-revision module to reduce missing detection and the ID-retrieve module to correct lost trajectories, improving the performance of the detection stage. Experimental results show that our approach is universal in human detection and pose estimation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on both PoseTrack 2017 and 2018 datasets.
TivNe-SLAM: Dynamic Mapping and Tracking via Time-Varying Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Chengyao Duan, Zhiliu Yang
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Previous attempts to integrate Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) into the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) framework either rely on the assumption of static scenes or require the ground truth camera poses, which impedes their application in real-world scenarios. This paper proposes a time-varying representation to track and reconstruct the dynamic scenes. Firstly, two processes, a tracking process and a mapping process, are maintained simultaneously in our framework. In the tracking process, all input images are uniformly sampled and then progressively trained in a self-supervised paradigm. In the mapping process, we leverage motion masks to distinguish dynamic objects from the static background, and sample more pixels from dynamic areas. Secondly, the parameter optimization for both processes is comprised of two stages: the first stage associates time with 3D positions to convert the deformation field to the canonical field. The second stage associates time with the embeddings of the canonical field to obtain colors and a Signed Distance Function (SDF). Lastly, we propose a novel keyframe selection strategy based on the overlapping rate. Our approach is evaluated on two synthetic datasets and one real-world dataset, and the experiments validate that our method achieves competitive results in both tracking and mapping when compared to existing state-of-the-art NeRF-based dynamic SLAM systems.
Dynamo-Depth: Fixing Unsupervised Depth Estimation for Dynamical Scenes
Date: 2023-10-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Motion Segmentation, Segmentation, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Unsupervised monocular depth estimation techniques have demonstrated encouraging results but typically assume that the scene is static. These techniques suffer when trained on dynamical scenes, where apparent object motion can equally be explained by hypothesizing the object's independent motion, or by altering its depth. This ambiguity causes depth estimators to predict erroneous depth for moving objects. To resolve this issue, we introduce Dynamo-Depth, an unifying approach that disambiguates dynamical motion by jointly learning monocular depth, 3D independent flow field, and motion segmentation from unlabeled monocular videos. Specifically, we offer our key insight that a good initial estimation of motion segmentation is sufficient for jointly learning depth and independent motion despite the fundamental underlying ambiguity. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on monocular depth estimation on Waymo Open and nuScenes Dataset with significant improvement in the depth of moving objects. Code and additional results are available at https://dynamo-depth.github.io.
Deep Learning-based Compressed Domain Multimedia for Man and Machine: A Taxonomy and Application to Point Cloud Classification
Authors: Abdelrahman Seleem, André F. R. Guarda, Nuno M. M. Rodrigues, Fernando Pereira
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: domain classification, Point Cloud Classification

In the current golden age of multimedia, human visualization is no longer the single main target, with the final consumer often being a machine which performs some processing or computer vision tasks. In both cases, deep learning plays a undamental role in extracting features from the multimedia representation data, usually producing a compressed representation referred to as latent representation. The increasing development and adoption of deep learning-based solutions in a wide area of multimedia applications have opened an exciting new vision where a common compressed multimedia representation is used for both man and machine. The main benefits of this vision are two-fold: i) improved performance for the computer vision tasks, since the effects of coding artifacts are mitigated; and ii) reduced computational complexity, since prior decoding is not required. This paper proposes the first taxonomy for designing compressed domain computer vision solutions driven by the architecture and weights compatibility with an available spatio-temporal computer vision processor. The potential of the proposed taxonomy is demonstrated for the specific case of point cloud classification by designing novel compressed domain processors using the JPEG Pleno Point Cloud Coding standard under development and adaptations of the PointGrid classifier. Experimental results show that the designed compressed domain point cloud classification solutions can significantly outperform the spatial-temporal domain classification benchmarks when applied to the decompressed data, containing coding artifacts, and even surpass their performance when applied to the original uncompressed data.
INCODE: Implicit Neural Conditioning with Prior Knowledge Embeddings
Authors: Amirhossein Kazerouni, Reza Azad, Alireza Hosseini, Dorit Merhof, Ulas Bagci
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Denoising, Image Inpainting, Super-Resolution

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have revolutionized signal representation by leveraging neural networks to provide continuous and smooth representations of complex data. However, existing INRs face limitations in capturing fine-grained details, handling noise, and adapting to diverse signal types. To address these challenges, we introduce INCODE, a novel approach that enhances the control of the sinusoidal-based activation function in INRs using deep prior knowledge. INCODE comprises a harmonizer network and a composer network, where the harmonizer network dynamically adjusts key parameters of the activation function. Through a task-specific pre-trained model, INCODE adapts the task-specific parameters to optimize the representation process. Our approach not only excels in representation, but also extends its prowess to tackle complex tasks such as audio, image, and 3D shape reconstructions, as well as intricate challenges such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs), and inverse problems, including denoising, super-resolution, inpainting, and CT reconstruction. Through comprehensive experiments, INCODE demonstrates its superiority in terms of robustness, accuracy, quality, and convergence rate, broadening the scope of signal representation. Please visit the project's website for details on the proposed method and access to the code.
Customizing 360-Degree Panoramas through Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Hai Wang, Xiaoyu Xiang, Yuchen Fan, Jing-Hao Xue
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Personalized text-to-image (T2I) synthesis based on diffusion models has attracted significant attention in recent research. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on customizing subjects or styles, neglecting the exploration of global geometry. In this study, we propose an approach that focuses on the customization of 360-degree panoramas, which inherently possess global geometric properties, using a T2I diffusion model. To achieve this, we curate a paired image-text dataset specifically designed for the task and subsequently employ it to fine-tune a pre-trained T2I diffusion model with LoRA. Nevertheless, the fine-tuned model alone does not ensure the continuity between the leftmost and rightmost sides of the synthesized images, a crucial characteristic of 360-degree panoramas. To address this issue, we propose a method called StitchDiffusion. Specifically, we perform pre-denoising operations twice at each time step of the denoising process on the stitch block consisting of the leftmost and rightmost image regions. Furthermore, a global cropping is adopted to synthesize seamless 360-degree panoramas. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our customized model combined with the proposed StitchDiffusion in generating high-quality 360-degree panoramic images. Moreover, our customized model exhibits exceptional generalization ability in producing scenes unseen in the fine-tuning dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/littlewhitesea/StitchDiffusion.
UniCat: Crafting a Stronger Fusion Baseline for Multimodal Re-Identification
Authors: Jennifer Crawford, Haoli Yin, Luke McDermott, Daniel Cummings
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Multimodal Re-Identification (ReID) is a popular retrieval task that aims to re-identify objects across diverse data streams, prompting many researchers to integrate multiple modalities into a unified representation. While such fusion promises a holistic view, our investigations shed light on potential pitfalls. We uncover that prevailing late-fusion techniques often produce suboptimal latent representations when compared to methods that train modalities in isolation. We argue that this effect is largely due to the inadvertent relaxation of the training objectives on individual modalities when using fusion, what others have termed modality laziness. We present a nuanced point-of-view that this relaxation can lead to certain modalities failing to fully harness available task-relevant information, and yet, offers a protective veil to noisy modalities, preventing them from overfitting to task-irrelevant data. Our findings also show that unimodal concatenation (UniCat) and other late-fusion ensembling of unimodal backbones, when paired with best-known training techniques, exceed the current state-of-the-art performance across several multimodal ReID benchmarks. By unveiling the double-edged sword of "modality laziness", we motivate future research in balancing local modality strengths with global representations.
A Review on the Applications of Machine Learning for Tinnitus Diagnosis Using EEG Signals
Authors: Farzaneh Ramezani, Hamidreza Bolhasani
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, EEG, Systematic Literature Review

Tinnitus is a prevalent hearing disorder that can be caused by various factors such as age, hearing loss, exposure to loud noises, ear infections or tumors, certain medications, head or neck injuries, and psychological conditions like anxiety and depression. While not every patient requires medical attention, about 20% of sufferers seek clinical intervention. Early diagnosis is crucial for effective treatment. New developments have been made in tinnitus detection to aid in early detection of this illness. Over the past few years, there has been a notable growth in the usage of electroencephalography (EEG) to study variations in oscillatory brain activity related to tinnitus. However, the results obtained from numerous studies vary greatly, leading to conflicting conclusions. Currently, clinicians rely solely on their expertise to identify individuals with tinnitus. Researchers in this field have incorporated various data modalities and machine-learning techniques to aid clinicians in identifying tinnitus characteristics and classifying people with tinnitus. The purpose of writing this article is to review articles that focus on using machine learning (ML) to identify or predict tinnitus patients using EEG signals as input data. We have evaluated 11 articles published between 2016 and 2023 using a systematic literature review (SLR) method. This article arranges perfect summaries of all the research reviewed and compares the significant aspects of each. Additionally, we performed statistical analyses to gain a deeper comprehension of the most recent research in this area. Almost all of the reviewed articles followed a five-step procedure to achieve the goal of tinnitus. Disclosure. Finally, we discuss the open affairs and challenges in this method of tinnitus recognition or prediction and suggest future directions for research.
PrObeD: Proactive Object Detection Wrapper
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Previous research in $2D$ object detection focuses on various tasks, including detecting objects in generic and camouflaged images. These works are regarded as passive works for object detection as they take the input image as is. However, convergence to global minima is not guaranteed to be optimal in neural networks; therefore, we argue that the trained weights in the object detector are not optimal. To rectify this problem, we propose a wrapper based on proactive schemes, PrObeD, which enhances the performance of these object detectors by learning a signal. PrObeD consists of an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder network generates an image-dependent signal termed templates to encrypt the input images, and the decoder recovers this template from the encrypted images. We propose that learning the optimum template results in an object detector with an improved detection performance. The template acts as a mask to the input images to highlight semantics useful for the object detector. Finetuning the object detector with these encrypted images enhances the detection performance for both generic and camouflaged. Our experiments on MS-COCO, CAMO, COD$10$K, and NC$4$K datasets show improvement over different detectors after applying PrObeD. Our models/codes are available at https://github.com/vishal3477/Proactive-Object-Detection.
CityRefer: Geography-aware 3D Visual Grounding Dataset on City-scale Point Cloud Data
Authors: Taiki Miyanishi, Fumiya Kitamori, Shuhei Kurita, Jungdae Lee, Motoaki Kawanabe, Nakamasa Inoue
Date: 2023-10-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: 3D visual grounding, Autonomous Vehicles, Visual Grounding

City-scale 3D point cloud is a promising way to express detailed and complicated outdoor structures. It encompasses both the appearance and geometry features of segmented city components, including cars, streets, and buildings, that can be utilized for attractive applications such as user-interactive navigation of autonomous vehicles and drones. However, compared to the extensive text annotations available for images and indoor scenes, the scarcity of text annotations for outdoor scenes poses a significant challenge for achieving these applications. To tackle this problem, we introduce the CityRefer dataset for city-level visual grounding. The dataset consists of 35k natural language descriptions of 3D objects appearing in SensatUrban city scenes and 5k landmarks labels synchronizing with OpenStreetMap. To ensure the quality and accuracy of the dataset, all descriptions and labels in the CityRefer dataset are manually verified. We also have developed a baseline system that can learn encoded language descriptions, 3D object instances, and geographical information about the city's landmarks to perform visual grounding on the CityRefer dataset. To the best of our knowledge, the CityRefer dataset is the largest city-level visual grounding dataset for localizing specific 3D objects.