pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
High-Quality Medical Image Generation from Free-hand Sketch
Authors: Quan Huu Cap, Atsushi Fukuda
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Medical Image Generation

Generating medical images from human-drawn free-hand sketches holds promise for various important medical imaging applications. Due to the extreme difficulty in collecting free-hand sketch data in the medical domain, most deep learning-based methods have been proposed to generate medical images from the synthesized sketches (e.g., edge maps or contours of segmentation masks from real images). However, these models often fail to generalize on the free-hand sketches, leading to unsatisfactory results. In this paper, we propose a practical free-hand sketch-to-image generation model called Sketch2MedI that learns to represent sketches in StyleGAN's latent space and generate medical images from it. Thanks to the ability to encode sketches into this meaningful representation space, Sketch2MedI only requires synthesized sketches for training, enabling a cost-effective learning process. Our Sketch2MedI demonstrates a robust generalization to free-hand sketches, resulting in high-quality and realistic medical image generations. Comparative evaluations of Sketch2MedI against the pix2pix, CycleGAN, UNIT, and U-GAT-IT models show superior performance in generating pharyngeal images, both quantitative and qualitative across various metrics.
Machine Unlearning for Image-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Guihong Li, Hsiang Hsu, Chun-Fu Chen, Radu Marculescu
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Unlearning

Machine unlearning has emerged as a new paradigm to deliberately forget data samples from a given model in order to adhere to stringent regulations. However, existing machine unlearning methods have been primarily focused on classification models, leaving the landscape of unlearning for generative models relatively unexplored. This paper serves as a bridge, addressing the gap by providing a unifying framework of machine unlearning for image-to-image generative models. Within this framework, we propose a computationally-efficient algorithm, underpinned by rigorous theoretical analysis, that demonstrates negligible performance degradation on the retain samples, while effectively removing the information from the forget samples. Empirical studies on two large-scale datasets, ImageNet-1K and Places-365, further show that our algorithm does not rely on the availability of the retain samples, which further complies with data retention policy. To our best knowledge, this work is the first that represents systemic, theoretical, empirical explorations of machine unlearning specifically tailored for image-to-image generative models. Our code is available at https://github.com/jpmorganchase/l2l-generator-unlearning.
Recasting Regional Lighting for Shadow Removal
Authors: Yuhao Liu, Zhanghan Ke, Ke Xu, Fang Liu, Zhenwei Wang, Rynson W. H. Lau
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Shadow Removal

Removing shadows requires an understanding of both lighting conditions and object textures in a scene. Existing methods typically learn pixel-level color mappings between shadow and non-shadow images, in which the joint modeling of lighting and object textures is implicit and inadequate. We observe that in a shadow region, the degradation degree of object textures depends on the local illumination, while simply enhancing the local illumination cannot fully recover the attenuated textures. Based on this observation, we propose to condition the restoration of attenuated textures on the corrected local lighting in the shadow region. Specifically, We first design a shadow-aware decomposition network to estimate the illumination and reflectance layers of shadow regions explicitly. We then propose a novel bilateral correction network to recast the lighting of shadow regions in the illumination layer via a novel local lighting correction module, and to restore the textures conditioned on the corrected illumination layer via a novel illumination-guided texture restoration module. We further annotate pixel-wise shadow masks for the public SRD dataset, which originally contains only image pairs. Experiments on three benchmarks show that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art shadow removal methods.
SmartCooper: Vehicular Collaborative Perception with Adaptive Fusion and Judger Mechanism
Authors: Yuang Zhang, Haonan An, Zhengru Fang, Guowen Xu, Yuan Zhou, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

In recent years, autonomous driving has garnered significant attention due to its potential for improving road safety through collaborative perception among connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). However, time-varying channel variations in vehicular transmission environments demand dynamic allocation of communication resources. Moreover, in the context of collaborative perception, it is important to recognize that not all CAVs contribute valuable data, and some CAV data even have detrimental effects on collaborative perception. In this paper, we introduce SmartCooper, an adaptive collaborative perception framework that incorporates communication optimization and a judger mechanism to facilitate CAV data fusion. Our approach begins with optimizing the connectivity of vehicles while considering communication constraints. We then train a learnable encoder to dynamically adjust the compression ratio based on the channel state information (CSI). Subsequently, we devise a judger mechanism to filter the detrimental image data reconstructed by adaptive decoders. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm on the OpenCOOD platform. Our results demonstrate a substantial reduction in communication costs by 23.10\% compared to the non-judger scheme. Additionally, we achieve a significant improvement on the average precision of Intersection over Union (AP@IoU) by 7.15\% compared with state-of-the-art schemes.
Invariance-powered Trustworthy Defense via Remove Then Restore
Authors: Xiaowei Fu, YuHang Zhou, Lina Ma, Lei Zhang
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00

Adversarial attacks pose a challenge to the deployment of deep neural networks (DNNs), while previous defense models overlook the generalization to various attacks. Inspired by targeted therapies for cancer, we view adversarial samples as local lesions of natural benign samples, because a key finding is that salient attack in an adversarial sample dominates the attacking process, while trivial attack unexpectedly provides trustworthy evidence for obtaining generalizable robustness. Based on this finding, a Pixel Surgery and Semantic Regeneration (PSSR) model following the targeted therapy mechanism is developed, which has three merits: 1) To remove the salient attack, a score-based Pixel Surgery module is proposed, which retains the trivial attack as a kind of invariance information. 2) To restore the discriminative content, a Semantic Regeneration module based on a conditional alignment extrapolator is proposed, which achieves pixel and semantic consistency. 3) To further harmonize robustness and accuracy, an intractable problem, a self-augmentation regularizer with adversarial R-drop is designed. Experiments on numerous benchmarks show the superiority of PSSR.
Self-supervised learning of video representations from a child's perspective
Authors: A. Emin Orhan, Wentao Wang, Alex N. Wang, Mengye Ren, Brenden M. Lake
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning

Children learn powerful internal models of the world around them from a few years of egocentric visual experience. Can such internal models be learned from a child's visual experience with highly generic learning algorithms or do they require strong inductive biases? Recent advances in collecting large-scale, longitudinal, developmentally realistic video datasets and generic self-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms are allowing us to begin to tackle this nature vs. nurture question. However, existing work typically focuses on image-based SSL algorithms and visual capabilities that can be learned from static images (e.g. object recognition), thus ignoring temporal aspects of the world. To close this gap, here we train self-supervised video models on longitudinal, egocentric headcam recordings collected from a child over a two year period in their early development (6-31 months). The resulting models are highly effective at facilitating the learning of action concepts from a small number of labeled examples; they have favorable data size scaling properties; and they display emergent video interpolation capabilities. Video models also learn more accurate and more robust object representations than image-based models trained with the exact same data. These results suggest that important temporal aspects of a child's internal model of the world may be learnable from their visual experience using highly generic learning algorithms and without strong inductive biases.
Comparative Evaluation of Traditional and Deep Learning-Based Segmentation Methods for Spoil Pile Delineation Using UAV Images
Authors: Sureka Thiruchittampalam, Bikram P. Banerjee, Nancy F. Glenn, Simit Raval
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Segmentation

The stability of mine dumps is contingent upon the precise arrangement of spoil piles, taking into account their geological and geotechnical attributes. Yet, on-site characterisation of individual piles poses a formidable challenge. The utilisation of image-based techniques for spoil pile characterisation, employing remotely acquired data through unmanned aerial systems, is a promising complementary solution. Image processing, such as object-based classification and feature extraction, are dependent upon effective segmentation. This study refines and juxtaposes various segmentation approaches, specifically colour-based and morphology-based techniques. The objective is to enhance and evaluate avenues for object-based analysis for spoil characterisation within the context of mining environments. Furthermore, a comparative analysis is conducted between conventional segmentation approaches and those rooted in deep learning methodologies. Among the diverse segmentation approaches evaluated, the morphology-based deep learning segmentation approach, Segment Anything Model (SAM), exhibited superior performance in comparison to other approaches. This outcome underscores the efficacy of incorporating advanced morphological and deep learning techniques for accurate and efficient spoil pile characterisation. The findings of this study contribute valuable insights to the optimisation of segmentation strategies, thereby advancing the application of image-based techniques for the characterisation of spoil piles in mining environments.
FineBio: A Fine-Grained Video Dataset of Biological Experiments with Hierarchical Annotation
Authors: Takuma Yagi, Misaki Ohashi, Yifei HUANG, Ryosuke Furuta, Shungo Adachi, Toutai Mitsuyama, Yoichi Sato
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

In the development of science, accurate and reproducible documentation of the experimental process is crucial. Automatic recognition of the actions in experiments from videos would help experimenters by complementing the recording of experiments. Towards this goal, we propose FineBio, a new fine-grained video dataset of people performing biological experiments. The dataset consists of multi-view videos of 32 participants performing mock biological experiments with a total duration of 14.5 hours. One experiment forms a hierarchical structure, where a protocol consists of several steps, each further decomposed into a set of atomic operations. The uniqueness of biological experiments is that while they require strict adherence to steps described in each protocol, there is freedom in the order of atomic operations. We provide hierarchical annotation on protocols, steps, atomic operations, object locations, and their manipulation states, providing new challenges for structured activity understanding and hand-object interaction recognition. To find out challenges on activity understanding in biological experiments, we introduce baseline models and results on four different tasks, including (i) step segmentation, (ii) atomic operation detection (iii) object detection, and (iv) manipulated/affected object detection. Dataset and code are available from https://github.com/aistairc/FineBio.
MEIA: Multimodal Embodied Perception and Interaction in Unknown Environments
Authors: Yang Liu, Xinshuai Song, Kaixuan Jiang, Weixing Chen, Jingzhou Luo, Guanbin Li, Liang Lin
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Embodied Question Answering, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Zero-Shot Learning

With the surge in the development of large language models, embodied intelligence has attracted increasing attention. Nevertheless, prior works on embodied intelligence typically encode scene or historical memory in an unimodal manner, either visual or linguistic, which complicates the alignment of the model's action planning with embodied control. To overcome this limitation, we introduce the Multimodal Embodied Interactive Agent (MEIA), capable of translating high-level tasks expressed in natural language into a sequence of executable actions. Specifically, we propose a novel Multimodal Environment Memory (MEM) module, facilitating the integration of embodied control with large models through the visual-language memory of scenes. This capability enables MEIA to generate executable action plans based on diverse requirements and the robot's capabilities. Furthermore, we construct an embodied question answering dataset based on a dynamic virtual cafe environment with the help of the large language model. In this virtual environment, we conduct several experiments, utilizing multiple large models through zero-shot learning, and carefully design scenarios for various situations. The experimental results showcase the promising performance of our MEIA in various embodied interactive tasks.
Guided Interpretable Facial Expression Recognition via Spatial Action Unit Cues
Authors: Soufiane Belharbi, Marco Pedersoli, Alessandro Lameiras Koerich, Simon Bacon, Eric Granger
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Although state-of-the-art classifiers for facial expression recognition (FER) can achieve a high level of accuracy, they lack interpretability, an important feature for end-users. Experts typically associate spatial action units (\aus) from a codebook to facial regions for the visual interpretation of expressions. In this paper, the same expert steps are followed. A new learning strategy is proposed to explicitly incorporate \au cues into classifier training, allowing to train deep interpretable models. During training, this \au codebook is used, along with the input image expression label, and facial landmarks, to construct a \au heatmap that indicates the most discriminative image regions of interest w.r.t the facial expression. This valuable spatial cue is leveraged to train a deep interpretable classifier for FER. This is achieved by constraining the spatial layer features of a classifier to be correlated with \au heatmaps. Using a composite loss, the classifier is trained to correctly classify an image while yielding interpretable visual layer-wise attention correlated with \au maps, simulating the expert decision process. Our strategy only relies on image class expression for supervision, without additional manual annotations. Our new strategy is generic, and can be applied to any deep CNN- or transformer-based classifier without requiring any architectural change or significant additional training time. Our extensive evaluation on two public benchmarks \rafdb, and \affectnet datasets shows that our proposed strategy can improve layer-wise interpretability without degrading classification performance. In addition, we explore a common type of interpretable classifiers that rely on class activation mapping (CAM) methods, and show that our approach can also improve CAM interpretability.
Understanding Neural Network Systems for Image Analysis using Vector Spaces and Inverse Maps
Authors: Rebecca Pattichis, Marios S. Pattichis
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00

There is strong interest in developing mathematical methods that can be used to understand complex neural networks used in image analysis. In this paper, we introduce techniques from Linear Algebra to model neural network layers as maps between signal spaces. First, we demonstrate how signal spaces can be used to visualize weight spaces and convolutional layer kernels. We also demonstrate how residual vector spaces can be used to further visualize information lost at each layer. Second, we study invertible networks using vector spaces for computing input images that yield specific outputs. We demonstrate our approach on two invertible networks and ResNet18.
A Survey on Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Hanchao Liu, Wenyuan Xue, Yifei Chen, Dapeng Chen, Xiutian Zhao, Ke Wang, Liping Hou, Rongjun Li, Wei Peng
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Survey

Recent development of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) has attracted growing attention within the AI landscape for its practical implementation potential. However, ``hallucination'', or more specifically, the misalignment between factual visual content and corresponding textual generation, poses a significant challenge of utilizing LVLMs. In this comprehensive survey, we dissect LVLM-related hallucinations in an attempt to establish an overview and facilitate future mitigation. Our scrutiny starts with a clarification of the concept of hallucinations in LVLMs, presenting a variety of hallucination symptoms and highlighting the unique challenges inherent in LVLM hallucinations. Subsequently, we outline the benchmarks and methodologies tailored specifically for evaluating hallucinations unique to LVLMs. Additionally, we delve into an investigation of the root causes of these hallucinations, encompassing insights from the training data and model components. We also critically review existing methods for mitigating hallucinations. The open questions and future directions pertaining to hallucinations within LVLMs are discussed to conclude this survey.
LRDif: Diffusion Models for Under-Display Camera Emotion Recognition
Authors: Zhifeng Wang, Kaihao Zhang, Ramesh Sankaranarayana
Date: 2024-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

This study introduces LRDif, a novel diffusion-based framework designed specifically for facial expression recognition (FER) within the context of under-display cameras (UDC). To address the inherent challenges posed by UDC's image degradation, such as reduced sharpness and increased noise, LRDif employs a two-stage training strategy that integrates a condensed preliminary extraction network (FPEN) and an agile transformer network (UDCformer) to effectively identify emotion labels from UDC images. By harnessing the robust distribution mapping capabilities of Diffusion Models (DMs) and the spatial dependency modeling strength of transformers, LRDif effectively overcomes the obstacles of noise and distortion inherent in UDC environments. Comprehensive experiments on standard FER datasets including RAF-DB, KDEF, and FERPlus, LRDif demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its potential in advancing FER applications. This work not only addresses a significant gap in the literature by tackling the UDC challenge in FER but also sets a new benchmark for future research in the field.
Capacity Constraint Analysis Using Object Detection for Smart Manufacturing
Authors: Hafiz Mughees Ahmad, Afshin Rahimi, Khizer Hayat
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

The increasing popularity of Deep Learning (DL) based Object Detection (OD) methods and their real-world applications have opened new venues in smart manufacturing. Traditional industries struck by capacity constraints after Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) require non-invasive methods for in-depth operations' analysis to optimize and increase their revenue. In this study, we have initially developed a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based OD model to tackle this issue. This model is trained to accurately identify the presence of chairs and individuals on the production floor. The identified objects are then passed to the CNN based tracker, which tracks them throughout their life cycle in the workstation. The extracted meta-data is further processed through a novel framework for the capacity constraint analysis. We identified that the Station C is only 70.6% productive through 6 months. Additionally, the time spent at each station is recorded and aggregated for each object. This data proves helpful in conducting annual audits and effectively managing labor and material over time.
Spectral Norm of Convolutional Layers with Circular and Zero Paddings
Authors: Blaise Delattre, Quentin Barthélemy, Alexandre Allauzen
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00

This paper leverages the use of \emph{Gram iteration} an efficient, deterministic, and differentiable method for computing spectral norm with an upper bound guarantee. Designed for circular convolutional layers, we generalize the use of the Gram iteration to zero padding convolutional layers and prove its quadratic convergence. We also provide theorems for bridging the gap between circular and zero padding convolution's spectral norm. We design a \emph{spectral rescaling} that can be used as a competitive $1$-Lipschitz layer that enhances network robustness. Demonstrated through experiments, our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in precision, computational cost, and scalability. The code of experiments is available at https://github.com/blaisedelattre/lip4conv.
Geometry aware 3D generation from in-the-wild images in ImageNet
Authors: Qijia Shen, Guangrun Wang
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, 3D geometry

Generating accurate 3D models is a challenging problem that traditionally requires explicit learning from 3D datasets using supervised learning. Although recent advances have shown promise in learning 3D models from 2D images, these methods often rely on well-structured datasets with multi-view images of each instance or camera pose information. Furthermore, these datasets usually contain clean backgrounds with simple shapes, making them expensive to acquire and hard to generalize, which limits the applicability of these methods. To overcome these limitations, we propose a method for reconstructing 3D geometry from the diverse and unstructured Imagenet dataset without camera pose information. We use an efficient triplane representation to learn 3D models from 2D images and modify the architecture of the generator backbone based on StyleGAN2 to adapt to the highly diverse dataset. To prevent mode collapse and improve the training stability on diverse data, we propose to use multi-view discrimination. The trained generator can produce class-conditional 3D models as well as renderings from arbitrary viewpoints. The class-conditional generation results demonstrate significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art method. Additionally, using PTI, we can efficiently reconstruct the whole 3D geometry from single-view images.