pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Composed Image Retrieval with Text Feedback via Multi-grained Uncertainty Regularization
Authors: Yiyang Chen, Zhedong Zheng, Wei Ji, Leigang Qu, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR), Image Retrieval, Image Retrieval with Multi-Modal Query, Retrieval

We investigate composed image retrieval with text feedback. Users gradually look for the target of interest by moving from coarse to fine-grained feedback. However, existing methods merely focus on the latter, i.e., fine-grained search, by harnessing positive and negative pairs during training. This pair-based paradigm only considers the one-to-one distance between a pair of specific points, which is not aligned with the one-to-many coarse-grained retrieval process and compromises the recall rate. In an attempt to fill this gap, we introduce a unified learning approach to simultaneously modeling the coarse- and fine-grained retrieval by considering the multi-grained uncertainty. The key idea underpinning the proposed method is to integrate fine- and coarse-grained retrieval as matching data points with small and large fluctuations, respectively. Specifically, our method contains two modules: uncertainty modeling and uncertainty regularization. (1) The uncertainty modeling simulates the multi-grained queries by introducing identically distributed fluctuations in the feature space. (2) Based on the uncertainty modeling, we further introduce uncertainty regularization to adapt the matching objective according to the fluctuation range. Compared with existing methods, the proposed strategy explicitly prevents the model from pushing away potential candidates in the early stage, and thus improves the recall rate. On the three public datasets, i.e., FashionIQ, Fashion200k, and Shoes, the proposed method has achieved +4.03%, +3.38%, and +2.40% Recall@50 accuracy over a strong baseline, respectively.
Unsupervised Method for Intra-patient Registration of Brain Magnetic Resonance Images based on Objective Function Weighting by Inverse Consistency: Contribution to the BraTS-Reg Challenge
Authors: Marek Wodzinski, Artur Jurgas, Niccolo Marini, Manfredo Atzori, Henning Muller
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00

Registration of brain scans with pathologies is difficult, yet important research area. The importance of this task motivated researchers to organize the BraTS-Reg challenge, jointly with IEEE ISBI 2022 and MICCAI 2022 conferences. The organizers introduced the task of aligning pre-operative to follow-up magnetic resonance images of glioma. The main difficulties are connected with the missing data leading to large, nonrigid, and noninvertible deformations. In this work, we describe our contributions to both the editions of the BraTS-Reg challenge. The proposed method is based on combined deep learning and instance optimization approaches. First, the instance optimization enriches the state-of-the-art LapIRN method to improve the generalizability and fine-details preservation. Second, an additional objective function weighting is introduced, based on the inverse consistency. The proposed method is fully unsupervised and exhibits high registration quality and robustness. The quantitative results on the external validation set are: (i) IEEE ISBI 2022 edition: 1.85, and 0.86, (ii) MICCAI 2022 edition: 1.71, and 0.86, in terms of the mean of median absolute error and robustness respectively. The method scored the 1st place during the IEEE ISBI 2022 version of the challenge and the 3rd place during the MICCAI 2022. Future work could transfer the inverse consistency-based weighting directly into the deep network training.
Language models are good pathologists: using attention-based sequence reduction and text-pretrained transformers for efficient WSI classification
Authors: Juan I. Pisula, Katarzyna Bozek
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multiple Instance Learning

In digital pathology, Whole Slide Image (WSI) analysis is usually formulated as a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) problem. Although transformer-based architectures have been used for WSI classification, these methods require modifications to adapt them to specific challenges of this type of image data. Among these challenges is the amount of memory and compute required by deep transformer models to process long inputs, such as the thousands of image patches that can compose a WSI at $\times 10$ or $\times 20$ magnification. We introduce \textit{SeqShort}, a multi-head attention-based sequence shortening layer to summarize each WSI in a fixed- and short-sized sequence of instances, that allows us to reduce the computational costs of self-attention on long sequences, and to include positional information that is unavailable in other MIL approaches. Furthermore, we show that WSI classification performance can be improved when the downstream transformer architecture has been pre-trained on a large corpus of text data, and only fine-tuning less than 0.1\% of its parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in lymph node metastases classification and cancer subtype classification tasks, without the need of designing a WSI-specific transformer nor doing in-domain pre-training, keeping a reduced compute budget and low number of trainable parameters.
Attacking Face Recognition with T-shirts: Database, Vulnerability Assessment and Detection
Authors: M. Ibsen, C. Rathgeb, F. Brechtel, R. Klepp, K. Pöppelmann, A. George, S. Marcel, C. Busch
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Face Recognition

Face recognition systems are widely deployed for biometric authentication. Despite this, it is well-known that, without any safeguards, face recognition systems are highly vulnerable to presentation attacks. In response to this security issue, several promising methods for detecting presentation attacks have been proposed which show high performance on existing benchmarks. However, an ongoing challenge is the generalization of presentation attack detection methods to unseen and new attack types. To this end, we propose a new T-shirt Face Presentation Attack (TFPA) database of 1,608 T-shirt attacks using 100 unique presentation attack instruments. In an extensive evaluation, we show that this type of attack can compromise the security of face recognition systems and that some state-of-the-art attack detection mechanisms trained on popular benchmarks fail to robustly generalize to the new attacks. Further, we propose three new methods for detecting T-shirt attack images, one which relies on the statistical differences between depth maps of bona fide images and T-shirt attacks, an anomaly detection approach trained on features only extracted from bona fide RGB images, and a fusion approach which achieves competitive detection performance.
FAPM: Fast Adaptive Patch Memory for Real-time Industrial Anomaly Detection
Authors: Donghyeong Kim, Chaewon Park, Suhwan Cho, Sangyoun Lee
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Feature embedding-based methods have shown exceptional performance in detecting industrial anomalies by comparing features of target images with normal images. However, some methods do not meet the speed requirements of real-time inference, which is crucial for real-world applications. To address this issue, we propose a new method called Fast Adaptive Patch Memory (FAPM) for real-time industrial anomaly detection. FAPM utilizes patch-wise and layer-wise memory banks that store the embedding features of images at the patch and layer level, respectively, which eliminates unnecessary repetitive computations. We also propose patch-wise adaptive coreset sampling for faster and more accurate detection. FAPM performs well in both accuracy and speed compared to other state-of-the-art methods
An Inter-observer consistent deep adversarial training for visual scanpath prediction
Authors: Mohamed Amine Kerkouri, Marouane Tliba, Aladine Chetouani, Alessandro Bruno
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Scanpath prediction

The visual scanpath is a sequence of points through which the human gaze moves while exploring a scene. It represents the fundamental concepts upon which visual attention research is based. As a result, the ability to predict them has emerged as an important task in recent years. In this paper, we propose an inter-observer consistent adversarial training approach for scanpath prediction through a lightweight deep neural network. The adversarial method employs a discriminative neural network as a dynamic loss that is better suited to model the natural stochastic phenomenon while maintaining consistency between the distributions related to the subjective nature of scanpaths traversed by different observers. Through extensive testing, we show the competitiveness of our approach in regard to state-of-the-art methods.
Self-Supervised Image Restoration with Blurry and Noisy Pairs
Authors: Zhilu Zhang, Rongjian Xu, Ming Liu, Zifei Yan, WangMeng Zuo
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration

When taking photos under an environment with insufficient light, the exposure time and the sensor gain usually require to be carefully chosen to obtain images with satisfying visual quality. For example, the images with high ISO usually have inescapable noise, while the long-exposure ones may be blurry due to camera shake or object motion. Existing solutions generally suggest to seek a balance between noise and blur, and learn denoising or deblurring models under either full- or self-supervision. However, the real-world training pairs are difficult to collect, and the self-supervised methods merely rely on blurry or noisy images are limited in performance. In this work, we tackle this problem by jointly leveraging the short-exposure noisy image and the long-exposure blurry image for better image restoration. Such setting is practically feasible due to that short-exposure and long-exposure images can be either acquired by two individual cameras or synthesized by a long burst of images. Moreover, the short-exposure images are hardly blurry, and the long-exposure ones have negligible noise. Their complementarity makes it feasible to learn restoration model in a self-supervised manner. Specifically, the noisy images can be used as the supervision information for deblurring, while the sharp areas in the blurry images can be utilized as the auxiliary supervision information for self-supervised denoising. By learning in a collaborative manner, the deblurring and denoising tasks in our method can benefit each other. Experiments on synthetic and real-world images show the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method. Codes are available at https://github.com/cszhilu1998/SelfIR.
Bayesian Layer Graph Convolutioanl Network for Hyperspetral Image Classification
Authors: Mingyang Zhang, Ziqi Di, Maoguo Gong, Yue Wu, Hao Li, Xiangming Jiang
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Generative Adversarial Network, image-classification, Image Classification

In recent years, research on hyperspectral image (HSI) classification has continuous progress on introducing deep network models, and recently the graph convolutional network (GCN) based models have shown impressive performance. However, these deep learning frameworks based on point estimation suffer from low generalization and inability to quantify the classification results uncertainty. On the other hand, simply applying the Bayesian Neural Network (BNN) based on distribution estimation to classify the HSI is unable to achieve high classification accuracy due to the large amount of parameters. In this paper, we design a Bayesian layer with Bayesian idea as an insertion layer into point estimation based neural networks, and propose a Bayesian Layer Graph Convolutional Network (BLGCN) model by combining graph convolution operations, which can effectively extract graph information and estimate the uncertainty of classification results. Moreover, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is built to solve the sample imbalance problem of HSI dataset. Finally, we design a dynamic control training strategy based on the confidence interval of the classification results, which will terminate the training early when the confidence interval reaches the preseted threshold. The experimental results show that our model achieves a balance between high classification accuracy and strong generalization. In addition, it can quantifies the uncertainty of the classification results.
SVS: Adversarial refinement for sparse novel view synthesis
Authors: Violeta Menéndez González, Andrew Gilbert, Graeme Phillipson, Stephen Jolly, Simon Hadfield
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

This paper proposes Sparse View Synthesis. This is a view synthesis problem where the number of reference views is limited, and the baseline between target and reference view is significant. Under these conditions, current radiance field methods fail catastrophically due to inescapable artifacts such 3D floating blobs, blurring and structural duplication, whenever the number of reference views is limited, or the target view diverges significantly from the reference views. Advances in network architecture and loss regularisation are unable to satisfactorily remove these artifacts. The occlusions within the scene ensure that the true contents of these regions is simply not available to the model. In this work, we instead focus on hallucinating plausible scene contents within such regions. To this end we unify radiance field models with adversarial learning and perceptual losses. The resulting system provides up to 60% improvement in perceptual accuracy compared to current state-of-the-art radiance field models on this problem.
A Novel Sampling Scheme for Text- and Image-Conditional Image Synthesis in Quantized Latent Spaces
Authors: Dominic Rampas, Pablo Pernias, Marc Aubreville
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recent advancements in the domain of text-to-image synthesis have culminated in a multitude of enhancements pertaining to quality, fidelity, and diversity. Contemporary techniques enable the generation of highly intricate visuals which rapidly approach near-photorealistic quality. Nevertheless, as progress is achieved, the complexity of these methodologies increases, consequently intensifying the comprehension barrier between individuals within the field and those external to it. In an endeavor to mitigate this disparity, we propose a streamlined approach for text-to-image generation, which encompasses both the training paradigm and the sampling process. Despite its remarkable simplicity, our method yields aesthetically pleasing images with few sampling iterations, allows for intriguing ways for conditioning the model, and imparts advantages absent in state-of-the-art techniques. To demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in achieving outcomes comparable to existing works, we have trained a one-billion parameter text-conditional model, which we refer to as "Paella". In the interest of fostering future exploration in this field, we have made our source code and models publicly accessible for the research community.
Learning to Model Multimodal Semantic Alignment for Story Visualization
Authors: Bowen Li, Thomas Lukasiewicz
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Sentence, Story Visualization

Story visualization aims to generate a sequence of images to narrate each sentence in a multi-sentence story, where the images should be realistic and keep global consistency across dynamic scenes and characters. Current works face the problem of semantic misalignment because of their fixed architecture and diversity of input modalities. To address this problem, we explore the semantic alignment between text and image representations by learning to match their semantic levels in the GAN-based generative model. More specifically, we introduce dynamic interactions according to learning to dynamically explore various semantic depths and fuse the different-modal information at a matched semantic level, which thus relieves the text-image semantic misalignment problem. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate the improvements of our approach, neither using segmentation masks nor auxiliary captioning networks, on image quality and story consistency, compared with state-of-the-art methods.
CurvPnP: Plug-and-play Blind Image Restoration with Deep Curvature Denoiser
Authors: Yutong Li, Yuping Duan
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Noise Estimation, Super-Resolution

Due to the development of deep learning-based denoisers, the plug-and-play strategy has achieved great success in image restoration problems. However, existing plug-and-play image restoration methods are designed for non-blind Gaussian denoising such as zhang et al (2022), the performance of which visibly deteriorate for unknown noises. To push the limits of plug-and-play image restoration, we propose a novel framework with blind Gaussian prior, which can deal with more complicated image restoration problems in the real world. More specifically, we build up a new image restoration model by regarding the noise level as a variable, which is implemented by a two-stage blind Gaussian denoiser consisting of a noise estimation subnetwork and a denoising subnetwork, where the noise estimation subnetwork provides the noise level to the denoising subnetwork for blind noise removal. We also introduce the curvature map into the encoder-decoder architecture and the supervised attention module to achieve a highly flexible and effective convolutional neural network. The experimental results on image denoising, deblurring and single-image super-resolution are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our deep curvature denoiser and the resulting plug-and-play blind image restoration method over the state-of-the-art model-based and learning-based methods. Our model is shown to be able to recover the fine image details and tiny structures even when the noise level is unknown for different image restoration tasks. The source codes are available at https://github.com/Duanlab123/CurvPnP.
Robustifying Deep Vision Models Through Shape Sensitization
Authors: Aditay Tripathi, Rishubh Singh, Anirban Chakraborty, Pradeep Shenoy
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation

Recent work has shown that deep vision models tend to be overly dependent on low-level or "texture" features, leading to poor generalization. Various data augmentation strategies have been proposed to overcome this so-called texture bias in DNNs. We propose a simple, lightweight adversarial augmentation technique that explicitly incentivizes the network to learn holistic shapes for accurate prediction in an object classification setting. Our augmentations superpose edgemaps from one image onto another image with shuffled patches, using a randomly determined mixing proportion, with the image label of the edgemap image. To classify these augmented images, the model needs to not only detect and focus on edges but distinguish between relevant and spurious edges. We show that our augmentations significantly improve classification accuracy and robustness measures on a range of datasets and neural architectures. As an example, for ViT-S, We obtain absolute gains on classification accuracy gains up to 6%. We also obtain gains of up to 28% and 8.5% on natural adversarial and out-of-distribution datasets like ImageNet-A (for ViT-B) and ImageNet-R (for ViT-S), respectively. Analysis using a range of probe datasets shows substantially increased shape sensitivity in our trained models, explaining the observed improvement in robustness and classification accuracy.
Zero-shot Image Captioning by Anchor-augmented Vision-Language Space Alignment
Authors: Junyang Wang, Yi Zhang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Jitao Sang
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Captioning, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training) has shown remarkable zero-shot transfer capabilities in cross-modal correlation tasks such as visual classification and image retrieval. However, its performance in cross-modal generation tasks like zero-shot image captioning remains unsatisfied. In this work, we discuss that directly employing CLIP for zero-shot image captioning relies more on the textual modality in context and largely ignores the visual information, which we call \emph{contextual language prior}. To address this, we propose Cross-modal Language Models (CLMs) to facilitate unsupervised cross-modal learning. We further propose Anchor Augment to guide the generative model's attention to the fine-grained information in the representation of CLIP. Experiments on MS COCO and Flickr 30K validate the promising performance of proposed approach in both captioning quality and computational efficiency.
MLIC: Multi-Reference Entropy Model for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Wei Jiang, Jiayu Yang, Yongqi Zhai, Peirong Ning, Feng Gao, Ronggang Wang
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

Recently, learned image compression has achieved remarkable performance. The entropy model, which estimates the distribution of the latent representation, plays a crucial role in boosting rate-distortion performance. However, most entropy models only capture correlations in one dimension, while the latent representation contain channel-wise, local spatial, and global spatial correlations. To tackle this issue, we propose the Multi-Reference Entropy Model (MEM) and the advanced version, MEM$^+$. These models capture the different types of correlations present in latent representation. Specifically, We first divide the latent representation into slices. When decoding the current slice, we use previously decoded slices as context and employ the attention map of the previously decoded slice to predict global correlations in the current slice. To capture local contexts, we introduce two enhanced checkerboard context capturing techniques that avoids performance degradation. Based on MEM and MEM$^+$, we propose image compression models MLIC and MLIC$^+$. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our MLIC and MLIC$^+$ models achieve state-of-the-art performance, reducing BD-rate by $8.05\%$ and $11.39\%$ on the Kodak dataset compared to VTM-17.0 when measured in PSNR. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiangWeibeta/MLIC.
The Role of Local Alignment and Uniformity in Image-Text Contrastive Learning on Medical Images
Authors: Philip Müller, Georgios Kaissis, Daniel Rueckert
Date: 2022-11-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Image-text contrastive learning has proven effective for pretraining medical image models. When targeting localized downstream tasks like semantic segmentation or object detection, additional local contrastive losses that align image regions with sentences have shown promising results. We study how local contrastive losses are related to global (per-sample) contrastive losses and which effects they have on localized medical downstream tasks. Based on a theoretical comparison, we propose to remove some components of local losses and replace others by a novel distribution prior which enforces uniformity of representations within each sample. We empirically study this approach on chest X-ray tasks and find it to be very effective, outperforming methods without local losses on 12 of 18 tasks.