pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Smooth and Stepwise Self-Distillation for Object Detection
Authors: Jieren Deng, Xin Zhou, Hao Tian, Zhihong Pan, Derek Aguiar
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Distilling the structured information captured in feature maps has contributed to improved results for object detection tasks, but requires careful selection of baseline architectures and substantial pre-training. Self-distillation addresses these limitations and has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance for object detection despite making several simplifying architectural assumptions. Building on this work, we propose Smooth and Stepwise Self-Distillation (SSSD) for object detection. Our SSSD architecture forms an implicit teacher from object labels and a feature pyramid network backbone to distill label-annotated feature maps using Jensen-Shannon distance, which is smoother than distillation losses used in prior work. We additionally add a distillation coefficient that is adaptively configured based on the learning rate. We extensively benchmark SSSD against a baseline and two state-of-the-art object detector architectures on the COCO dataset by varying the coefficients and backbone and detector networks. We demonstrate that SSSD achieves higher average precision in most experimental settings, is robust to a wide range of coefficients, and benefits from our stepwise distillation procedure.
Towards Robust Image-in-Audio Deep Steganography
Authors: Jaume Ros, Margarita Geleta, Jordi Pons, Xavier Giro-i-Nieto
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

The field of steganography has experienced a surge of interest due to the recent advancements in AI-powered techniques, particularly in the context of multimodal setups that enable the concealment of signals within signals of a different nature. The primary objectives of all steganographic methods are to achieve perceptual transparency, robustness, and large embedding capacity - which often present conflicting goals that classical methods have struggled to reconcile. This paper extends and enhances an existing image-in-audio deep steganography method by focusing on improving its robustness. The proposed enhancements include modifications to the loss function, utilization of the Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), introduction of redundancy in the encoding process for error correction, and buffering of additional information in the pixel subconvolution operation. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing method in terms of robustness and perceptual transparency.
Rethinking Visual Prompt Learning as Masked Visual Token Modeling
Authors: Ning Liao, Bowen Shi, Xiaopeng Zhang, Min Cao, Junchi Yan, Qi Tian
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Prompt learning has achieved great success in efficiently exploiting large-scale pre-trained models in natural language processing (NLP). It reformulates the downstream tasks as the generative pre-training ones to achieve consistency, thus improving the performance stably. However, when transferring it to the vision area, current visual prompt learning methods are almost designed on discriminative pre-trained models, and there is also a lack of careful design to unify the forms of pre-training and downstream tasks. To explore prompt learning on the generative pre-trained visual model, as well as keeping the task consistency, we propose Visual Prompt learning as masked visual Token Modeling (VPTM) to transform the downstream visual classification into the pre-trained masked visual token prediction. In addition, we develop the prototypical verbalizer for mapping the predicted visual token with implicit semantics to explicit downstream labels. To our best knowledge, VPTM is the first visual prompt method on the generative pre-trained visual model, which achieves consistency between pre-training and downstream visual classification by task reformulation. Experiments show that VPTM outperforms other visual prompt methods and achieves excellent efficiency. Moreover, the task consistency of VPTM contributes to the robustness against prompt location, prompt length and prototype dimension, and could be deployed uniformly.
Optimization-Based Eye Tracking using Deflectometric Information
Authors: Tianfu Wang, Jiazhang Wang, Oliver Cossairt, Florian Willomitzer
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, Mixed Reality

Eye tracking is an important tool with a wide range of applications in Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR) technologies. State-of-the-art eye tracking methods are either reflection-based and track reflections of sparse point light sources, or image-based and exploit 2D features of the acquired eye image. In this work, we attempt to significantly improve reflection-based methods by utilizing pixel-dense deflectometric surface measurements in combination with optimization-based inverse rendering algorithms. Utilizing the known geometry of our deflectometric setup, we develop a differentiable rendering pipeline based on PyTorch3D that simulates a virtual eye under screen illumination. Eventually, we exploit the image-screen-correspondence information from the captured measurements to find the eye's rotation, translation, and shape parameters with our renderer via gradient descent. In general, our method does not require a specific pattern and can work with ordinary video frames of the main VR/AR/MR screen itself. We demonstrate real-world experiments with evaluated mean relative gaze errors below 0.45 degrees at a precision better than 0.11 degrees. Moreover, we show an improvement of 6X over a representative reflection-based state-of-the-art method in simulation.
Deformer: Dynamic Fusion Transformer for Robust Hand Pose Estimation
Authors: Qichen Fu, Xingyu Liu, ran Xu, Juan Carlos Niebles, Kris M. Kitani
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Hand Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Accurately estimating 3D hand pose is crucial for understanding how humans interact with the world. Despite remarkable progress, existing methods often struggle to generate plausible hand poses when the hand is heavily occluded or blurred. In videos, the movements of the hand allow us to observe various parts of the hand that may be occluded or blurred in a single frame. To adaptively leverage the visual clue before and after the occlusion or blurring for robust hand pose estimation, we propose the Deformer: a framework that implicitly reasons about the relationship between hand parts within the same image (spatial dimension) and different timesteps (temporal dimension). We show that a naive application of the transformer self-attention mechanism is not sufficient because motion blur or occlusions in certain frames can lead to heavily distorted hand features and generate imprecise keys and queries. To address this challenge, we incorporate a Dynamic Fusion Module into Deformer, which predicts the deformation of the hand and warps the hand mesh predictions from nearby frames to explicitly support the current frame estimation. Furthermore, we have observed that errors are unevenly distributed across different hand parts, with vertices around fingertips having disproportionately higher errors than those around the palm. We mitigate this issue by introducing a new loss function called maxMSE that automatically adjusts the weight of every vertex to focus the model on critical hand parts. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 10%, and is more robust to occlusions (over 14%).
Decision-BADGE: Decision-based Adversarial Batch Attack with Directional Gradient Estimation
Authors: Geunhyeok Yu, Minwoo Jeon, Hyoseok Hwang
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The susceptibility of deep neural networks (DNNs) to adversarial examples has prompted an increase in the deployment of adversarial attacks. Image-agnostic universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) are much more threatening, but many limitations exist to implementing UAPs in real-world scenarios where only binary decisions are returned. In this research, we propose Decision-BADGE, a novel method to craft universal adversarial perturbations for executing decision-based black-box attacks. To optimize perturbation with decisions, we addressed two challenges, namely the magnitude and the direction of the gradient. First, we use batch loss, differences from distributions of ground truth, and accumulating decisions in batches to determine the magnitude of the gradient. This magnitude is applied in the direction of the revised simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) to update the perturbation. This simple yet efficient method can be easily extended to score-based attacks as well as targeted attacks. Experimental validation across multiple victim models demonstrates that the Decision-BADGE outperforms existing attack methods, even image-specific and score-based attacks. In particular, our proposed method shows a superior success rate with less training time. The research also shows that Decision-BADGE can successfully deceive unseen victim models and accurately target specific classes.
Reconstruction of Cardiac Cine MRI Using Motion-Guided Deformable Alignment and Multi-Resolution Fusion
Authors: Xiaoxiang Han, Yang Chen, Qiaohong Liu, Yiman Liu, Keyan Chen, Yuanjie Lin, Weikun Zhang
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, MRI Reconstruction, SSIM

Cardiac cine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the important means to assess cardiac functions and vascular abnormalities. Mitigating artifacts arising during image reconstruction and accelerating cardiac cine MRI acquisition to obtain high-quality images is important. A novel end-to-end deep learning network is developed to improve cardiac cine MRI reconstruction. First, a U-Net is adopted to obtain the initial reconstructed images in k-space. Further to remove the motion artifacts, the motion-guided deformable alignment (MGDA) module with second-order bidirectional propagation is introduced to align the adjacent cine MRI frames by maximizing spatial-temporal information to alleviate motion artifacts. Finally, the multi-resolution fusion (MRF) module is designed to correct the blur and artifacts generated from alignment operation and obtain the last high-quality reconstructed cardiac images. At an 8$\times$ acceleration rate, the numerical measurements on the ACDC dataset are structural similarity index (SSIM) of 78.40%$\pm$.57%, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 30.46$\pm$1.22dB, and normalized mean squared error (NMSE) of 0.0468$\pm$0.0075. On the ACMRI dataset, the results are SSIM of 87.65%$\pm$4.20%, PSNR of 30.04$\pm$1.18dB, and NMSE of 0.0473$\pm$0.0072. The proposed method exhibits high-quality results with richer details and fewer artifacts for cardiac cine MRI reconstruction on different accelerations.
InfoBatch: Lossless Training Speed Up by Unbiased Dynamic Data Pruning
Authors: Ziheng Qin, Kai Wang, Zangwei Zheng, Jianyang Gu, Xiangyu Peng, Zhaopan Xu, Daquan Zhou, Lei Shang, Baigui Sun, Xuansong Xie, Yang You
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Data pruning aims to obtain lossless performances with less overall cost. A common approach is to filter out samples that make less contribution to the training. This could lead to gradient expectation bias compared to the original data. To solve this problem, we propose \textbf{InfoBatch}, a novel framework aiming to achieve lossless training acceleration by unbiased dynamic data pruning. Specifically, InfoBatch randomly prunes a portion of less informative samples based on the loss distribution and rescales the gradients of the remaining samples to approximate the original gradient. As a plug-and-play and architecture-agnostic framework, InfoBatch consistently obtains lossless training results on classification, semantic segmentation, vision pertaining, and instruction fine-tuning tasks. On CIFAR10/100, ImageNet-1K, and ADE20K, InfoBatch losslessly saves 40\% overall cost. For pertaining MAE and diffusion model, InfoBatch can respectively save 24.8\% and 27\% cost. For LLaMA instruction fine-tuning, InfoBatch is also able to save 20\% cost and is compatible with coreset selection methods. The code is publicly available at \href{https://github.com/henryqin1997/InfoBatch}{github.com/NUS-HPC-AI-Lab/InfoBatch}.
Non-aligned supervision for Real Image Dehazing
Authors: Junkai Fan, Fei Guo, Jianjun Qian, Xiang Li, Jun Li, Jian Yang
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing

Removing haze from real-world images is challenging due to unpredictable weather conditions, resulting in the misalignment of hazy and clear image pairs. In this paper, we propose an innovative dehazing framework that operates under non-aligned supervision. This framework is grounded in the atmospheric scattering model, and consists of three interconnected networks: dehazing, airlight, and transmission networks. In particular, we explore a non-alignment scenario that a clear reference image, unaligned with the input hazy image, is utilized to supervise the dehazing network. To implement this, we present a multi-scale reference loss that compares the feature representations between the referred image and the dehazed output. Our scenario makes it easier to collect hazy/clear image pairs in real-world environments, even under conditions of misalignment and shift views. To showcase the effectiveness of our scenario, we have collected a new hazy dataset including 415 image pairs captured by mobile Phone in both rural and urban areas, called "Phone-Hazy". Furthermore, we introduce a self-attention network based on mean and variance for modeling real infinite airlight, using the dark channel prior as positional guidance. Additionally, a channel attention network is employed to estimate the three-channel transmission. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our framework over existing state-of-the-art techniques in the real-world image dehazing task. Phone-Hazy and code will be available at https://fanjunkai1.github.io/projectpage/NSDNet/index.html.
X-Pruner: eXplainable Pruning for Vision Transformers
Authors: Lu Yu, Wei Xiang
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

Recently vision transformer models have become prominent models for a range of tasks. These models, however, usually suffer from intensive computational costs and heavy memory requirements, making them impractical for deployment on edge platforms. Recent studies have proposed to prune transformers in an unexplainable manner, which overlook the relationship between internal units of the model and the target class, thereby leading to inferior performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel explainable pruning framework dubbed X-Pruner, which is designed by considering the explainability of the pruning criterion. Specifically, to measure each prunable unit's contribution to predicting each target class, a novel explainability-aware mask is proposed and learned in an end-to-end manner. Then, to preserve the most informative units and learn the layer-wise pruning rate, we adaptively search the layer-wise threshold that differentiates between unpruned and pruned units based on their explainability-aware mask values. To verify and evaluate our method, we apply the X-Pruner on representative transformer models including the DeiT and Swin Transformer. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed X-Pruner outperforms the state-of-the-art black-box methods with significantly reduced computational costs and slight performance degradation.
Multimodal Multi-User Surface Recognition with the Kernel Two-Sample Test
Authors: Behnam Khojasteh, Friedrich Solowjow, Sebastian Trimpe, Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Time Series, Time Series Analysis, Two-sample testing, Vocal Bursts Valence Prediction

Machine learning and deep learning have been used extensively to classify physical surfaces through images and time-series contact data. However, these methods rely on human expertise and entail the time-consuming processes of data and parameter tuning. To overcome these challenges, we propose an easily implemented framework that can directly handle heterogeneous data sources for classification tasks. Our data-versus-data approach automatically quantifies distinctive differences in distributions in a high-dimensional space via kernel two-sample testing between two sets extracted from multimodal data (e.g., images, sounds, haptic signals). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique by benchmarking against expertly engineered classifiers for visual-audio-haptic surface recognition due to the industrial relevance, difficulty, and competitive baselines of this application; ablation studies confirm the utility of key components of our pipeline. As shown in our open-source code, we achieve 97.2% accuracy on a standard multi-user dataset with 108 surface classes, outperforming the state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm by 6% on a more difficult version of the task. The fact that our classifier obtains this performance with minimal data processing in the standard algorithm setting reinforces the powerful nature of kernel methods for learning to recognize complex patterns.
BOSS: Bones, Organs and Skin Shape Model
Authors: Karthik Shetty, Annette Birkhold, Srikrishna Jaganathan, Norbert Strobel, Bernhard Egger, Markus Kowarschik, Andreas Maier
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Objective: A digital twin of a patient can be a valuable tool for enhancing clinical tasks such as workflow automation, patient-specific X-ray dose optimization, markerless tracking, positioning, and navigation assistance in image-guided interventions. However, it is crucial that the patient's surface and internal organs are of high quality for any pose and shape estimates. At present, the majority of statistical shape models (SSMs) are restricted to a small number of organs or bones or do not adequately represent the general population. Method: To address this, we propose a deformable human shape and pose model that combines skin, internal organs, and bones, learned from CT images. By modeling the statistical variations in a pose-normalized space using probabilistic PCA while also preserving joint kinematics, our approach offers a holistic representation of the body that can benefit various medical applications. Results: We assessed our model's performance on a registered dataset, utilizing the unified shape space, and noted an average error of 3.6 mm for bones and 8.8 mm for organs. To further verify our findings, we conducted additional tests on publicly available datasets with multi-part segmentations, which confirmed the effectiveness of our model. Conclusion: This works shows that anatomically parameterized statistical shape models can be created accurately and in a computationally efficient manner. Significance: The proposed approach enables the construction of shape models that can be directly applied to various medical applications, including biomechanics and reconstruction.
Reverse Engineering Breast MRIs: Predicting Acquisition Parameters Directly from Images
Authors: Nicholas Konz, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

The image acquisition parameters (IAPs) used to create MRI scans are central to defining the appearance of the images. Deep learning models trained on data acquired using certain parameters might not generalize well to images acquired with different parameters. Being able to recover such parameters directly from an image could help determine whether a deep learning model is applicable, and could assist with data harmonization and/or domain adaptation. Here, we introduce a neural network model that can predict many complex IAPs used to generate an MR image with high accuracy solely using the image, with a single forward pass. These predicted parameters include field strength, echo and repetition times, acquisition matrix, scanner model, scan options, and others. Even challenging parameters such as contrast agent type can be predicted with good accuracy. We perform a variety of experiments and analyses of our model's ability to predict IAPs on many MRI scans of new patients, and demonstrate its usage in a realistic application. Predicting IAPs from the images is an important step toward better understanding the relationship between image appearance and IAPs. This in turn will advance the understanding of many concepts related to the generalizability of neural network models on medical images, including domain shift, domain adaptation, and data harmonization.
Robotic Fabric Flattening with Wrinkle Direction Detection
Authors: Yulei Qiu, Jihong Zhu, Cosimo Della Santina, Michael Gienger, Jens Kober
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deformable Object Manipulation

Deformable Object Manipulation (DOM) is an important field of research as it contributes to practical tasks such as automatic cloth handling, cable routing, surgical operation, etc. Perception is considered one of the major challenges in DOM due to the complex dynamics and high degree of freedom of deformable objects. In this paper, we develop a novel image-processing algorithm based on Gabor filters to extract useful features from cloth, and based on this, devise a strategy for cloth flattening tasks. We also evaluate the overall framework experimentally and compare it with three human operators. The results show that our algorithm can determine the direction of wrinkles on the cloth accurately in simulation as well as in real robot experiments. Furthermore, our dewrinkling strategy compares favorably to baseline methods. The experiment video is available on https://sites.google.com/view/robotic-fabric-flattening/home
O2RNet: Occluder-Occludee Relational Network for Robust Apple Detection in Clustered Orchard Environments
Authors: Pengyu Chu, Zhaojian Li, Kaixiang Zhang, Dong Chen, Kyle Lammers, Renfu Lu
Date: 2023-03-08 00:00:00

Automated apple harvesting has attracted significant research interest in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize the apple industry, addressing the issues of shortage and high costs in labor. One key technology to fully enable efficient automated harvesting is accurate and robust apple detection, which is challenging due to complex orchard environments that involve varying lighting conditions and foliage/branch occlusions. Furthermore, clustered apples are common in the orchard, which brings additional challenges as the clustered apples may be identified as one apple. This will cause issues in localization for subsequent robotic operations. In this paper, we present the development of a novel deep learning-based apple detection framework, Occluder-Occludee Relational Network (O2RNet), for robust detection of apples in such clustered environments. This network exploits the occuluder-occludee relationship modeling head by introducing a feature expansion structure to enable the combination of layered traditional detectors to split clustered apples and foliage occlusions. More specifically, we collect a comprehensive apple orchard image dataset under different lighting conditions (overcast, front lighting, and back lighting) with frequent apple occlusions. We then develop a novel occlusion-aware network for apple detection, in which a feature expansion structure is incorporated into the convolutional neural networks to extract additional features generated by the original network for occluded apples. Comprehensive evaluations are performed, which show that the developed O2RNet outperforms state-of-the-art models with a higher accuracy of 94\% and a higher F1-score of 0.88 on apple detection.