pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
JPPF: Multi-task Fusion for Consistent Panoptic-Part Segmentation
Authors: Shishir Muralidhara, Sravan Kumar Jagadeesh, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Panoptic Segmentation, Part-aware Panoptic Segmentation, Representation Learning

Part-aware panoptic segmentation is a problem of computer vision that aims to provide a semantic understanding of the scene at multiple levels of granularity. More precisely, semantic areas, object instances, and semantic parts are predicted simultaneously. In this paper, we present our Joint Panoptic Part Fusion (JPPF) that combines the three individual segmentations effectively to obtain a panoptic-part segmentation. Two aspects are of utmost importance for this: First, a unified model for the three problems is desired that allows for mutually improved and consistent representation learning. Second, balancing the combination so that it gives equal importance to all individual results during fusion. Our proposed JPPF is parameter-free and dynamically balances its input. The method is evaluated and compared on the Cityscapes Panoptic Parts (CPP) and Pascal Panoptic Parts (PPP) datasets in terms of PartPQ and Part-Whole Quality (PWQ). In extensive experiments, we verify the importance of our fair fusion, highlight its most significant impact for areas that can be further segmented into parts, and demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our design without fine-tuning on 5 additional datasets.
Anatomy and Physiology of Artificial Intelligence in PET Imaging
Authors: Tyler J. Bradshaw, Alan B. McMillan
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Generation, Image Reconstruction

The influence of artificial intelligence (AI) within the field of nuclear medicine has been rapidly growing. Many researchers and clinicians are seeking to apply AI within PET, and clinicians will soon find themselves engaging with AI-based applications all along the chain of molecular imaging, from image reconstruction to enhanced reporting. This expanding presence of AI in PET imaging will result in greater demand for educational resources for those unfamiliar with AI. The objective of this article to is provide an illustrated guide to the core principles of modern AI, with specific focus on aspects that are most likely to be encountered in PET imaging. We describe convolutional neural networks, algorithm training, and explain the components of the commonly used U-Net for segmentation and image synthesis.
Cancer-Net PCa-Gen: Synthesis of Realistic Prostate Diffusion Weighted Imaging Data via Anatomic-Conditional Controlled Latent Diffusion
Authors: Aditya Sridhar, Chi-en Amy Tai, Hayden Gunraj, Yuhao Chen, Alexander Wong
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

In Canada, prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men and accounted for 20% of new cancer cases for this demographic in 2022. Due to recent successes in leveraging machine learning for clinical decision support, there has been significant interest in the development of deep neural networks for prostate cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning using diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) data. A major challenge hindering widespread adoption in clinical use is poor generalization of such networks due to scarcity of large-scale, diverse, balanced prostate imaging datasets for training such networks. In this study, we explore the efficacy of latent diffusion for generating realistic prostate DWI data through the introduction of an anatomic-conditional controlled latent diffusion strategy. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to leverage conditioning for synthesis of prostate cancer imaging. Experimental results show that the proposed strategy, which we call Cancer-Net PCa-Gen, enhances synthesis of diverse prostate images through controllable tumour locations and better anatomical and textural fidelity. These crucial features make it well-suited for augmenting real patient data, enabling neural networks to be trained on a more diverse and comprehensive data distribution. The Cancer-Net PCa-Gen framework and sample images have been made publicly available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/deetsadi/cancer-net-pca-gen-dataset as a part of a global open-source initiative dedicated to accelerating advancement in machine learning to aid clinicians in the fight against cancer.
DiffCAD: Weakly-Supervised Probabilistic CAD Model Retrieval and Alignment from an RGB Image
Authors: Daoyi Gao, Dávid Rozenberszki, Stefan Leutenegger, Angela Dai
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Perceiving 3D structures from RGB images based on CAD model primitives can enable an effective, efficient 3D object-based representation of scenes. However, current approaches rely on supervision from expensive annotations of CAD models associated with real images, and encounter challenges due to the inherent ambiguities in the task -- both in depth-scale ambiguity in monocular perception, as well as inexact matches of CAD database models to real observations. We thus propose DiffCAD, the first weakly-supervised probabilistic approach to CAD retrieval and alignment from an RGB image. We formulate this as a conditional generative task, leveraging diffusion to learn implicit probabilistic models capturing the shape, pose, and scale of CAD objects in an image. This enables multi-hypothesis generation of different plausible CAD reconstructions, requiring only a few hypotheses to characterize ambiguities in depth/scale and inexact shape matches. Our approach is trained only on synthetic data, leveraging monocular depth and mask estimates to enable robust zero-shot adaptation to various real target domains. Despite being trained solely on synthetic data, our multi-hypothesis approach can even surpass the supervised state-of-the-art on the Scan2CAD dataset by 5.9% with 8 hypotheses.
Learning Triangular Distribution in Visual World
Authors: Ping Chen, Xingpeng Zhang, Chengtao Zhou, Dichao Fan, Peng Tu, Le Zhang, Yanlin Qian
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Convolution neural network is successful in pervasive vision tasks, including label distribution learning, which usually takes the form of learning an injection from the non-linear visual features to the well-defined labels. However, how the discrepancy between features is mapped to the label discrepancy is ambient, and its correctness is not guaranteed.To address these problems, we study the mathematical connection between feature and its label, presenting a general and simple framework for label distribution learning. We propose a so-called Triangular Distribution Transform (TDT) to build an injective function between feature and label, guaranteeing that any symmetric feature discrepancy linearly reflects the difference between labels. The proposed TDT can be used as a plug-in in mainstream backbone networks to address different label distribution learning tasks. Experiments on Facial Age Recognition, Illumination Chromaticity Estimation, and Aesthetics assessment show that TDT achieves on-par or better results than the prior arts.
Overcoming Label Noise for Source-free Unsupervised Video Domain Adaptation
Authors: Avijit Dasgupta, C. V. Jawahar, Karteek Alahari
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Despite the progress seen in classification methods, current approaches for handling videos with distribution shifts in source and target domains remain source-dependent as they require access to the source data during the adaptation stage. In this paper, we present a self-training based source-free video domain adaptation approach to address this challenge by bridging the gap between the source and the target domains. We use the source pre-trained model to generate pseudo-labels for the target domain samples, which are inevitably noisy. Thus, we treat the problem of source-free video domain adaptation as learning from noisy labels and argue that the samples with correct pseudo-labels can help us in adaptation. To this end, we leverage the cross-entropy loss as an indicator of the correctness of the pseudo-labels and use the resulting small-loss samples from the target domain for fine-tuning the model. We further enhance the adaptation performance by implementing a teacher-student framework, in which the teacher, which is updated gradually, produces reliable pseudo-labels. Meanwhile, the student undergoes fine-tuning on the target domain videos using these generated pseudo-labels to improve its performance. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our methods, termed as CleanAdapt, CleanAdapt + TS, achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming the existing approaches on various open datasets. Our source code is publicly available at https://avijit9.github.io/CleanAdapt.
AR-Diffusion: Auto-Regressive Diffusion Model for Text Generation
Authors: Tong Wu, Zhihao Fan, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Jian Jiao, Hai-Tao Zheng, Juntao Li, Zhongyu Wei, Jian Guo, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
Date: 2023-05-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Denoising, Image Generation, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Text Summarization

Diffusion models have gained significant attention in the realm of image generation due to their exceptional performance. Their success has been recently expanded to text generation via generating all tokens within a sequence concurrently. However, natural language exhibits a far more pronounced sequential dependency in comparison to images, and the majority of existing language models are trained with a left-to-right auto-regressive approach. To account for the inherent sequential characteristic of natural language, we introduce Auto-Regressive Diffusion (AR-Diffusion). AR-Diffusion ensures that the generation of tokens on the right depends on the generated ones on the left, a mechanism achieved through employing a dynamic number of denoising steps that vary based on token position. This results in tokens on the left undergoing fewer denoising steps than those on the right, thereby enabling them to generate earlier and subsequently influence the generation of tokens on the right. In a series of experiments on various text generation tasks, including text summarization, machine translation, and common sense generation, AR-Diffusion clearly demonstrated its superiority over existing diffusion language models and that it can be $100\times\sim600\times$ faster when achieving comparable results. Our code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/AR-diffusion.
Leveraging Local Patch Alignment to Seam-cutting for Large Parallax Image Stitching
Authors: Tianli Liao, Chenyang Zhao, Lei LI, Heling Cao
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Stitching

Seam cutting methods have been proven effective in the composition step of image stitching, especially for images with parallax. However, current seam cutting can be seen as the subsequent step after the image alignment is settled. Its effectiveness usually depends on the fact that images can be roughly aligned such that a local region exists where an unnoticeable seam can be found. Current alignment methods often fall short of expectations for images with large parallax, and most efforts are devoted to improving the alignment accuracy. In this paper, we argue that by adding a simple Local Patch Alignment Module (LPAM) into the seam cutting, the final result can be efficiently improved for large parallax image stitching. Concretely, we first evaluate the quality of pixels along the estimated seam of the seam cutting method. Then, for pixels with low qualities, we separate their enclosing patches in the aligned images and locally align them by constructing modified dense correspondences via SIFT flow. Finally, we composite the aligned patches via seam cutting and merge them into the original aligned result to generate the final mosaic. Experiments show that introducing LPAM can effectively and efficiently improve the stitching results.
Periodic Vibration Gaussian: Dynamic Urban Scene Reconstruction and Real-time Rendering
Authors: Yurui Chen, Chun Gu, Junzhe Jiang, Xiatian Zhu, Li Zhang
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis, Optical Flow Estimation, Representation Learning

Modeling dynamic, large-scale urban scenes is challenging due to their highly intricate geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics in both space and time. Prior methods often employ high-level architectural priors, separating static and dynamic elements, resulting in suboptimal capture of their synergistic interactions. To address this challenge, we present a unified representation model, called Periodic Vibration Gaussian (PVG). PVG builds upon the efficient 3D Gaussian splatting technique, originally designed for static scene representation, by introducing periodic vibration-based temporal dynamics. This innovation enables PVG to elegantly and uniformly represent the characteristics of various objects and elements in dynamic urban scenes. To enhance temporally coherent and large scene representation learning with sparse training data, we introduce a novel temporal smoothing mechanism and a position-aware adaptive control strategy respectively. Extensive experiments on Waymo Open Dataset and KITTI benchmarks demonstrate that PVG surpasses state-of-the-art alternatives in both reconstruction and novel view synthesis for both dynamic and static scenes. Notably, PVG achieves this without relying on manually labeled object bounding boxes or expensive optical flow estimation. Moreover, PVG exhibits 900-fold acceleration in rendering over the best alternative.
FediOS: Decoupling Orthogonal Subspaces for Personalization in Feature-skew Federated Learning
Authors: Lingzhi Gao, Zexi Li, Yang Lu, Chao Wu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Personalized Federated Learning

Personalized federated learning (pFL) enables collaborative training among multiple clients to enhance the capability of customized local models. In pFL, clients may have heterogeneous (also known as non-IID) data, which poses a key challenge in how to decouple the data knowledge into generic knowledge for global sharing and personalized knowledge for preserving local personalization. A typical way of pFL focuses on label distribution skew, and they adopt a decoupling scheme where the model is split into a common feature extractor and two prediction heads (generic and personalized). However, such a decoupling scheme cannot solve the essential problem of feature skew heterogeneity, because a common feature extractor cannot decouple the generic and personalized features. Therefore, in this paper, we rethink the architecture decoupling design for feature-skew pFL and propose an effective pFL method called FediOS. In FediOS, we reformulate the decoupling into two feature extractors (generic and personalized) and one shared prediction head. Orthogonal projections are used for clients to map the generic features into one common subspace and scatter the personalized features into different subspaces to achieve decoupling for them. In addition, a shared prediction head is trained to balance the importance of generic and personalized features during inference. Extensive experiments on four vision datasets demonstrate our method reaches state-of-the-art pFL performances under feature skew heterogeneity.
Heterogeneous Graph-based Trajectory Prediction using Local Map Context and Social Interactions
Authors: Daniel Grimm, Maximilian Zipfl, Felix Hertlein, Alexander Naumann, Jürgen Lüttin, Steffen Thoma, Stefan Schmid, Lavdim Halilaj, Achim Rettinger, J. Marius Zöllner
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Relation, Trajectory Prediction

Precisely predicting the future trajectories of surrounding traffic participants is a crucial but challenging problem in autonomous driving, due to complex interactions between traffic agents, map context and traffic rules. Vector-based approaches have recently shown to achieve among the best performances on trajectory prediction benchmarks. These methods model simple interactions between traffic agents but don't distinguish between relation-type and attributes like their distance along the road. Furthermore, they represent lanes only by sequences of vectors representing center lines and ignore context information like lane dividers and other road elements. We present a novel approach for vector-based trajectory prediction that addresses these shortcomings by leveraging three crucial sources of information: First, we model interactions between traffic agents by a semantic scene graph, that accounts for the nature and important features of their relation. Second, we extract agent-centric image-based map features to model the local map context. Finally, we generate anchor paths to enforce the policy in multi-modal prediction to permitted trajectories only. Each of these three enhancements shows advantages over the baseline model HoliGraph.
Match me if you can: Semi-Supervised Semantic Correspondence Learning with Unpaired Images
Authors: Jiwon Kim, Byeongho Heo, Sangdoo Yun, Seungryong Kim, Dongyoon Han
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic correspondence

Semantic correspondence methods have advanced to obtaining high-quality correspondences employing complicated networks, aiming to maximize the model capacity. However, despite the performance improvements, they may remain constrained by the scarcity of training keypoint pairs, a consequence of the limited training images and the sparsity of keypoints. This paper builds on the hypothesis that there is an inherent data-hungry matter in learning semantic correspondences and uncovers the models can be more trained by employing densified training pairs. We demonstrate a simple machine annotator reliably enriches paired key points via machine supervision, requiring neither extra labeled key points nor trainable modules from unlabeled images. Consequently, our models surpass current state-of-the-art models on semantic correspondence learning benchmarks like SPair-71k, PF-PASCAL, and PF-WILLOW and enjoy further robustness on corruption benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/matchme.
A Simple Video Segmenter by Tracking Objects Along Axial Trajectories
Authors: Ju He, Qihang Yu, Inkyu Shin, Xueqing Deng, Alan Yuille, Xiaohui Shen, Liang-Chieh Chen
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Object, Object Tracking, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Video Classification, Video Panoptic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Video segmentation requires consistently segmenting and tracking objects over time. Due to the quadratic dependency on input size, directly applying self-attention to video segmentation with high-resolution input features poses significant challenges, often leading to insufficient GPU memory capacity. Consequently, modern video segmenters either extend an image segmenter without incorporating any temporal attention or resort to window space-time attention in a naive manner. In this work, we present Axial-VS, a general and simple framework that enhances video segmenters by tracking objects along axial trajectories. The framework tackles video segmentation through two sub-tasks: short-term within-clip segmentation and long-term cross-clip tracking. In the first step, Axial-VS augments an off-the-shelf clip-level video segmenter with the proposed axial-trajectory attention, sequentially tracking objects along the height- and width-trajectories within a clip, thereby enhancing temporal consistency by capturing motion trajectories. The axial decomposition significantly reduces the computational complexity for dense features, and outperforms the window space-time attention in segmentation quality. In the second step, we further employ axial-trajectory attention to the object queries in clip-level segmenters, which are learned to encode object information, thereby aiding object tracking across different clips and achieving consistent segmentation throughout the video. Without bells and whistles, Axial-VS showcases state-of-the-art results on video segmentation benchmarks, emphasizing its effectiveness in addressing the limitations of modern clip-level video segmenters. Code and models are available at https://github.com/TACJu/Axial-VS.
Union-over-Intersections: Object Detection beyond Winner-Takes-All
Authors: Aritra Bhowmik, Pascal Mettes, Martin R. Oswald, Cees G. M. Snoek
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Instance Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Localization, regression, Semantic Segmentation

This paper revisits the problem of predicting box locations in object detection architectures. Typically, each box proposal or box query aims to directly maximize the intersection-over-union score with the ground truth, followed by a winner-takes-all non-maximum suppression where only the highest scoring box in each region is retained. We observe that both steps are sub-optimal: the first involves regressing proposals to the entire ground truth, which is a difficult task even with large receptive fields, and the second neglects valuable information from boxes other than the top candidate. Instead of regressing proposals to the whole ground truth, we propose a simpler approach: regress only to the area of intersection between the proposal and the ground truth. This avoids the need for proposals to extrapolate beyond their visual scope, improving localization accuracy. Rather than adopting a winner-takes-all strategy, we take the union over the regressed intersections of all boxes in a region to generate the final box outputs. Our plug-and-play method integrates seamlessly into proposal-based, grid-based, and query-based detection architectures with minimal modifications, consistently improving object localization and instance segmentation. We demonstrate its broad applicability and versatility across various detection and segmentation tasks.
DifAugGAN: A Practical Diffusion-style Data Augmentation for GAN-based Single Image Super-resolution
Authors: Axi Niu, Kang Zhang, Joshua Tian Jin Tee, Trung X. Pham, Jinqiu Sun, Chang D. Yoo, In So Kweon, Yanning Zhang
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Data Augmentation, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

It is well known the adversarial optimization of GAN-based image super-resolution (SR) methods makes the preceding SR model generate unpleasant and undesirable artifacts, leading to large distortion. We attribute the cause of such distortions to the poor calibration of the discriminator, which hampers its ability to provide meaningful feedback to the generator for learning high-quality images. To address this problem, we propose a simple but non-travel diffusion-style data augmentation scheme for current GAN-based SR methods, known as DifAugGAN. It involves adapting the diffusion process in generative diffusion models for improving the calibration of the discriminator during training motivated by the successes of data augmentation schemes in the field to achieve good calibration. Our DifAugGAN can be a Plug-and-Play strategy for current GAN-based SISR methods to improve the calibration of the discriminator and thus improve SR performance. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of DifAugGAN over state-of-the-art GAN-based SISR methods across both synthetic and real-world datasets, showcasing notable advancements in both qualitative and quantitative results.