pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedSN: A Federated Learning Framework over Heterogeneous LEO Satellite Networks
Authors: Zheng Lin, Zhe Chen, Zihan Fang, Xianhao Chen, Xiong Wang, Yue Gao
Date: 2023-11-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Remote Sensing Image Classification

Recently, a large number of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites have been launched and deployed successfully in space by commercial companies, such as SpaceX. Due to multimodal sensors equipped by the LEO satellites, they serve not only for communication but also for various machine learning applications, such as space modulation recognition, remote sensing image classification, etc. However, the ground station (GS) may be incapable of downloading such a large volume of raw sensing data for centralized model training due to the limited contact time with LEO satellites (e.g. 5 minutes). Therefore, federated learning (FL) has emerged as the promising solution to address this problem via on-device training. Unfortunately, to enable FL on LEO satellites, we still face three critical challenges that are i) heterogeneous computing and memory capabilities, ii) limited uplink rate, and iii) model staleness. To this end, we propose FedSN as a general FL framework to tackle the above challenges, and fully explore data diversity on LEO satellites. Specifically, we first present a novel sub-structure scheme to enable heterogeneous local model training considering different computing, memory, and communication constraints on LEO satellites. Additionally, we propose a pseudo-synchronous model aggregation strategy to dynamically schedule model aggregation for compensating model staleness. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of the FedSN, we evaluate it using space modulation recognition and remote sensing image classification tasks by leveraging the data from real-world satellite networks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FedSN framework achieves higher accuracy, lower computing, and communication overhead than the state-of-the-art benchmarks and the effectiveness of each components in FedSN.
EmerNeRF: Emergent Spatial-Temporal Scene Decomposition via Self-Supervision
Authors: Jiawei Yang, Boris Ivanovic, Or Litany, Xinshuo Weng, Seung Wook Kim, Boyi Li, Tong Che, Danfei Xu, Sanja Fidler, Marco Pavone, Yue Wang
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

We present EmerNeRF, a simple yet powerful approach for learning spatial-temporal representations of dynamic driving scenes. Grounded in neural fields, EmerNeRF simultaneously captures scene geometry, appearance, motion, and semantics via self-bootstrapping. EmerNeRF hinges upon two core components: First, it stratifies scenes into static and dynamic fields. This decomposition emerges purely from self-supervision, enabling our model to learn from general, in-the-wild data sources. Second, EmerNeRF parameterizes an induced flow field from the dynamic field and uses this flow field to further aggregate multi-frame features, amplifying the rendering precision of dynamic objects. Coupling these three fields (static, dynamic, and flow) enables EmerNeRF to represent highly-dynamic scenes self-sufficiently, without relying on ground truth object annotations or pre-trained models for dynamic object segmentation or optical flow estimation. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in sensor simulation, significantly outperforming previous methods when reconstructing static (+2.93 PSNR) and dynamic (+3.70 PSNR) scenes. In addition, to bolster EmerNeRF's semantic generalization, we lift 2D visual foundation model features into 4D space-time and address a general positional bias in modern Transformers, significantly boosting 3D perception performance (e.g., 37.50% relative improvement in occupancy prediction accuracy on average). Finally, we construct a diverse and challenging 120-sequence dataset to benchmark neural fields under extreme and highly-dynamic settings.
HIPTrack: Visual Tracking with Historical Prompts
Authors: Wenrui Cai, Qingjie Liu, Yunhong Wang
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

Trackers that follow Siamese paradigm utilize similarity matching between template and search region features for tracking. Many methods have been explored to enhance tracking performance by incorporating tracking history to better handle scenarios involving target appearance variations such as deformation and occlusion. However, the utilization of historical information in existing methods is insufficient and incomprehensive, which typically requires repetitive training and introduces a large amount of computation. In this paper, we show that by providing a tracker that follows Siamese paradigm with precise and updated historical information, a significant performance improvement can be achieved with completely unchanged parameters. Based on this, we propose a historical prompt network that uses refined historical foreground masks and historical visual features of the target to provide comprehensive and precise prompts for the tracker. We build a novel tracker called HIPTrack based on the historical prompt network, which achieves considerable performance improvements without the need to retrain the entire model. We conduct experiments on seven datasets and experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the current state-of-the-art trackers on LaSOT, LaSOText, GOT-10k and NfS. Furthermore, the historical prompt network can seamlessly integrate as a plug-and-play module into existing trackers, providing performance enhancements. The source code is available at https://github.com/WenRuiCai/HIPTrack.
LOTUS: Continual Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Through Unsupervised Skill Discovery
Authors: Weikang Wan, Yifeng Zhu, Rutav Shah, Yuke Zhu
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Lifelong learning, Robot Manipulation, Transfer Learning

We introduce LOTUS, a continual imitation learning algorithm that empowers a physical robot to continuously and efficiently learn to solve new manipulation tasks throughout its lifespan. The core idea behind LOTUS is constructing an ever-growing skill library from a sequence of new tasks with a small number of human demonstrations. LOTUS starts with a continual skill discovery process using an open-vocabulary vision model, which extracts skills as recurring patterns presented in unsegmented demonstrations. Continual skill discovery updates existing skills to avoid catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks and adds new skills to solve novel tasks. LOTUS trains a meta-controller that flexibly composes various skills to tackle vision-based manipulation tasks in the lifelong learning process. Our comprehensive experiments show that LOTUS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 11% in success rate, showing its superior knowledge transfer ability compared to prior methods. More results and videos can be found on the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Lotus/.
Occlusion-Aware 2D and 3D Centerline Detection for Urban Driving via Automatic Label Generation
Authors: David Paz, Narayanan E. Ranganatha, Srinidhi K. Srinivas, Yunchao Yao, Henrik I. Christensen
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Occlusion Handling

This research work seeks to explore and identify strategies that can determine road topology information in 2D and 3D under highly dynamic urban driving scenarios. To facilitate this exploration, we introduce a substantial dataset comprising nearly one million automatically labeled data frames. A key contribution of our research lies in developing an automatic label-generation process and an occlusion handling strategy. This strategy is designed to model a wide range of occlusion scenarios, from mild disruptions to severe blockages. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive ablation study wherein multiple centerline detection methods are developed and evaluated. This analysis not only benchmarks the performance of various approaches but also provides valuable insights into the interpretability of these methods. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our methods and assess their adaptability across different sensor configurations, highlighting their versatility and relevance in real-world scenarios. Our dataset and experimental models are publicly available.
Towards Unsupervised Object Detection From LiDAR Point Clouds
Authors: Lunjun Zhang, Anqi Joyce Yang, Yuwen Xiong, Sergio Casas, Bin Yang, Mengye Ren, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Discovery, Unsupervised Object Detection

In this paper, we study the problem of unsupervised object detection from 3D point clouds in self-driving scenes. We present a simple yet effective method that exploits (i) point clustering in near-range areas where the point clouds are dense, (ii) temporal consistency to filter out noisy unsupervised detections, (iii) translation equivariance of CNNs to extend the auto-labels to long range, and (iv) self-supervision for improving on its own. Our approach, OYSTER (Object Discovery via Spatio-Temporal Refinement), does not impose constraints on data collection (such as repeated traversals of the same location), is able to detect objects in a zero-shot manner without supervised finetuning (even in sparse, distant regions), and continues to self-improve given more rounds of iterative self-training. To better measure model performance in self-driving scenarios, we propose a new planning-centric perception metric based on distance-to-collision. We demonstrate that our unsupervised object detector significantly outperforms unsupervised baselines on PandaSet and Argoverse 2 Sensor dataset, showing promise that self-supervision combined with object priors can enable object discovery in the wild. For more information, visit the project website: https://waabi.ai/research/oyster
Efficient Model-Based Deep Learning via Network Pruning and Fine-Tuning
Authors: Chicago Y. Park, Weijie Gan, Zihao Zou, Yuyang Hu, Zhixin Sun, Ulugbek S. Kamilov
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Reconstruction, Image Super-Resolution, Network Pruning, Super-Resolution

Model-based deep learning (MBDL) is a powerful methodology for designing deep models to solve imaging inverse problems. MBDL networks can be seen as iterative algorithms that estimate the desired image using a physical measurement model and a learned image prior specified using a convolutional neural net (CNNs). The iterative nature of MBDL networks increases the test-time computational complexity, which limits their applicability in certain large-scale applications. Here we make two contributions to address this issue: First, we show how structured pruning can be adopted to reduce the number of parameters in MBDL networks. Second, we present three methods to fine-tune the pruned MBDL networks to mitigate potential performance loss. Each fine-tuning strategy has a unique benefit that depends on the presence of a pre-trained model and a high-quality ground truth. We show that our pruning and fine-tuning approach can accelerate image reconstruction using popular deep equilibrium learning (DEQ) and deep unfolding (DU) methods by 50% and 32%, respectively, with nearly no performance loss. This work thus offers a step forward for solving inverse problems by showing the potential of pruning to improve the scalability of MBDL. Code is available at https://github.com/wustl-cig/MBDL_Pruning .
Detection of keratoconus Diseases using deep Learning
Authors: AKM Enzam-Ul Haque, Golam Rabbany, Md. Siam
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diagnostic

One of the most serious corneal disorders, keratoconus is difficult to diagnose in its early stages and can result in blindness. This illness, which often appears in the second decade of life, affects people of all sexes and races. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), one of the deep learning approaches, have recently come to light as particularly promising tools for the accurate and timely diagnosis of keratoconus. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how well different D-CNN models identified keratoconus-related diseases. To be more precise, we compared five different CNN-based deep learning architectures (DenseNet201, InceptionV3, MobileNetV2, VGG19, Xception). In our comprehensive experimental analysis, the DenseNet201-based model performed very well in keratoconus disease identification in our extensive experimental research. This model outperformed its D-CNN equivalents, with an astounding accuracy rate of 89.14% in three crucial classes: Keratoconus, Normal, and Suspect. The results demonstrate not only the stability and robustness of the model but also its practical usefulness in real-world applications for accurate and dependable keratoconus identification. In addition, D-CNN DenseNet201 performs extraordinarily well in terms of precision, recall rates, and F1 scores in addition to accuracy. These measures validate the model's usefulness as an effective diagnostic tool by highlighting its capacity to reliably detect instances of keratoconus and to reduce false positives and negatives.
Leveraging Large-Scale Pretrained Vision Foundation Models for Label-Efficient 3D Point Cloud Segmentation
Authors: Shichao Dong, Fayao Liu, Guosheng Lin
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Point Cloud Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Unsupervised Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero Shot Segmentation

Recently, large-scale pre-trained models such as Segment-Anything Model (SAM) and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) have demonstrated remarkable success and revolutionized the field of computer vision. These foundation vision models effectively capture knowledge from a large-scale broad data with their vast model parameters, enabling them to perform zero-shot segmentation on previously unseen data without additional training. While they showcase competence in 2D tasks, their potential for enhancing 3D scene understanding remains relatively unexplored. To this end, we present a novel framework that adapts various foundational models for the 3D point cloud segmentation task. Our approach involves making initial predictions of 2D semantic masks using different large vision models. We then project these mask predictions from various frames of RGB-D video sequences into 3D space. To generate robust 3D semantic pseudo labels, we introduce a semantic label fusion strategy that effectively combines all the results via voting. We examine diverse scenarios, like zero-shot learning and limited guidance from sparse 2D point labels, to assess the pros and cons of different vision foundation models. Our approach is experimented on ScanNet dataset for 3D indoor scenes, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of adopting general 2D foundation models on solving 3D point cloud segmentation tasks.
Optimal Image Transport on Sparse Dictionaries
Authors: Junqing Huang, Haihui Wang, Andreas Weiermann, Michael Ruzhansky
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Style Transfer

In this paper, we derive a novel optimal image transport algorithm over sparse dictionaries by taking advantage of Sparse Representation (SR) and Optimal Transport (OT). Concisely, we design a unified optimization framework in which the individual image features (color, textures, styles, etc.) are encoded using sparse representation compactly, and an optimal transport plan is then inferred between two learned dictionaries in accordance with the encoding process. This paradigm gives rise to a simple but effective way for simultaneous image representation and transformation, which is also empirically solvable because of the moderate size of sparse coding and optimal transport sub-problems. We demonstrate its versatility and many benefits to different image-to-image translation tasks, in particular image color transform and artistic style transfer, and show the plausible results for photo-realistic transferred effects.
Depth-guided Free-space Segmentation for a Mobile Robot
Authors: Christos Sevastopoulos, Joey Hussain, Stasinos Konstantopoulos, Vangelis Karkaletsis, Fillia Makedon
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Superpixels

Accurate indoor free-space segmentation is a challenging task due to the complexity and the dynamic nature that indoor environments exhibit. We propose an indoors free-space segmentation method that associates large depth values with navigable regions. Our method leverages an unsupervised masking technique that, using positive instances, generates segmentation labels based on textural homogeneity and depth uniformity. Moreover, we generate superpixels corresponding to areas of higher depth and align them with features extracted from a Dense Prediction Transformer (DPT). Using the estimated free-space masks and the DPT feature representation, a SegFormer model is fine-tuned on our custom-collected indoor dataset. Our experiments demonstrate sufficient performance in intricate scenarios characterized by cluttered obstacles and challenging identification of free space.
ProS: Facial Omni-Representation Learning via Prototype-based Self-Distillation
Authors: Xing Di, Yiyu Zheng, Xiaoming Liu, Yu Cheng
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Representation Learning

This paper presents a novel approach, called Prototype-based Self-Distillation (ProS), for unsupervised face representation learning. The existing supervised methods heavily rely on a large amount of annotated training facial data, which poses challenges in terms of data collection and privacy concerns. To address these issues, we propose ProS, which leverages a vast collection of unlabeled face images to learn a comprehensive facial omni-representation. In particular, ProS consists of two vision-transformers (teacher and student models) that are trained with different augmented images (cropping, blurring, coloring, etc.). Besides, we build a face-aware retrieval system along with augmentations to obtain the curated images comprising predominantly facial areas. To enhance the discrimination of learned features, we introduce a prototype-based matching loss that aligns the similarity distributions between features (teacher or student) and a set of learnable prototypes. After pre-training, the teacher vision transformer serves as a backbone for downstream tasks, including attribute estimation, expression recognition, and landmark alignment, achieved through simple fine-tuning with additional layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on various tasks, both in full and few-shot settings. Furthermore, we investigate pre-training with synthetic face images, and ProS exhibits promising performance in this scenario as well.
Contrast-Agnostic Groupwise Registration by Robust PCA for Quantitative Cardiac MRI
Authors: Xinqi Li, Yi Zhang, Yidong Zhao, Jan van Gemert, Qian Tao
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Quantitative MRI

Quantitative cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is an increasingly important diagnostic tool for cardiovascular diseases. Yet, co-registration of all baseline images within the quantitative MRI sequence is essential for the accuracy and precision of quantitative maps. However, co-registering all baseline images from a quantitative cardiac MRI sequence remains a nontrivial task because of the simultaneous changes in intensity and contrast, in combination with cardiac and respiratory motion. To address the challenge, we propose a novel motion correction framework based on robust principle component analysis (rPCA) that decomposes quantitative cardiac MRI into low-rank and sparse components, and we integrate the groupwise CNN-based registration backbone within the rPCA framework. The low-rank component of rPCA corresponds to the quantitative mapping (i.e. limited degree of freedom in variation), while the sparse component corresponds to the residual motion, making it easier to formulate and solve the groupwise registration problem. We evaluated our proposed method on cardiac T1 mapping by the modified Look-Locker inversion recovery (MOLLI) sequence, both before and after the Gadolinium contrast agent administration. Our experiments showed that our method effectively improved registration performance over baseline methods without introducing rPCA, and reduced quantitative mapping error in both in-domain (pre-contrast MOLLI) and out-of-domain (post-contrast MOLLI) inference. The proposed rPCA framework is generic and can be integrated with other registration backbones.
End-to-End assessment of AR-assisted neurosurgery systems
Authors: Mahdi Bagheri, Farhad Piri, Hadi Digale, Saem Sattarzadeh, Mohammad Reza Mohammadi
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00

Augmented Reality (AR) has emerged as a significant advancement in surgical procedures, offering a solution to the challenges posed by traditional neuronavigation methods. These conventional techniques often necessitate surgeons to split their focus between the surgical site and a separate monitor that displays guiding images. Over the years, many systems have been developed to register and track the hologram at the targeted locations, each employed its own evaluation technique. On the other hand, hologram displacement measurement is not a straightforward task because of various factors such as occlusion, Vengence-Accomodation Conflict, and unstable holograms in space. In this study, we explore and classify different techniques for assessing an AR-assisted neurosurgery system and propose a new technique to systematize the assessment procedure. Moreover, we conduct a deeper investigation to assess surgeon error in the pre- and intra-operative phases of the surgery based on the respective feedback given. We found that although the system can undergo registration and tracking errors, physical feedback can significantly reduce the error caused by hologram displacement. However, the lack of visual feedback on the hologram does not have a significant effect on the user 3D perception.
LLM-driven Multimodal Target Volume Contouring in Radiation Oncology
Authors: Yujin Oh, Sangjoon Park, Hwa Kyung Byun, Yeona Cho, Ik Jae Lee, Jin Sung Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2023-11-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Organ Segmentation

Target volume contouring for radiation therapy is considered significantly more challenging than the normal organ segmentation tasks as it necessitates the utilization of both image and text-based clinical information. Inspired by the recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) that can facilitate the integration of the textural information and images, here we present a novel LLM-driven multimodal AI, namely LLMSeg, that utilizes the clinical text information and is applicable to the challenging task of target volume contouring for radiation therapy, and validate it within the context of breast cancer radiation therapy target volume contouring. Using external validation and data-insufficient environments, which attributes highly conducive to real-world applications, we demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits markedly improved performance compared to conventional unimodal AI models, particularly exhibiting robust generalization performance and data efficiency. To our best knowledge, this is the first LLM-driven multimodal AI model that integrates the clinical text information into target volume delineation for radiation oncology.