pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On original and latent space connectivity in deep neural networks
Authors: Boyang Gu, Anastasia Borovykh
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: All

We study whether inputs from the same class can be connected by a continuous path, in original or latent representation space, such that all points on the path are mapped by the neural network model to the same class. Understanding how the neural network views its own input space and how the latent spaces are structured has value for explainability and robustness. We show that paths, linear or nonlinear, connecting same-class inputs exist in all cases studied.
MetaMix: Meta-state Precision Searcher for Mixed-precision Activation Quantization
Authors: Han-Byul Kim, Joo Hyung Lee, Sungjoo Yoo, Hong-Seok Kim
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Mixed-precision quantization of efficient networks often suffer from activation instability encountered in the exploration of bit selections. To address this problem, we propose a novel method called MetaMix which consists of bit selection and weight training phases. The bit selection phase iterates two steps, (1) the mixed-precision-aware weight update, and (2) the bit-search training with the fixed mixed-precision-aware weights, both of which combined reduce activation instability in mixed-precision quantization and contribute to fast and high-quality bit selection. The weight training phase exploits the weights and step sizes trained in the bit selection phase and fine-tunes them thereby offering fast training. Our experiments with efficient and hard-to-quantize networks, i.e., MobileNet v2 and v3, and ResNet-18 on ImageNet show that our proposed method pushes the boundary of mixed-precision quantization, in terms of accuracy vs. operations, by outperforming both mixed- and single-precision SOTA methods.
Deep Perspective Transformation Based Vehicle Localization on Bird's Eye View
Authors: Abtin Mahyar, Hossein Motamednia, Dara Rahmati
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Driving Cars

An accurate understanding of a self-driving vehicle's surrounding environment is crucial for its navigation system. To enhance the effectiveness of existing algorithms and facilitate further research, it is essential to provide comprehensive data to the routing system. Traditional approaches rely on installing multiple sensors to simulate the environment, leading to high costs and complexity. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution by generating a top-down representation of the scene, enabling the extraction of distances and directions of other cars relative to the ego vehicle. We introduce a new synthesized dataset that offers extensive information about the ego vehicle and its environment in each frame, providing valuable resources for similar downstream tasks. Additionally, we present an architecture that transforms perspective view RGB images into bird's-eye-view maps with segmented surrounding vehicles. This approach offers an efficient and cost-effective method for capturing crucial environmental information for self-driving cars. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/IPM-HPC/Perspective-BEV-Transformer.
IMPUS: Image Morphing with Perceptually-Uniform Sampling Using Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhaoyuan Yang, Zhengyang Yu, Zhiwei Xu, Jaskirat Singh, Jing Zhang, Dylan Campbell, Peter Tu, Richard Hartley
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Image Morphing

We present a diffusion-based image morphing approach with perceptually-uniform sampling (IMPUS) that produces smooth, direct and realistic interpolations given an image pair. The embeddings of two images may lie on distinct conditioned distributions of a latent diffusion model, especially when they have significant semantic difference. To bridge this gap, we interpolate in the locally linear and continuous text embedding space and Gaussian latent space. We first optimize the endpoint text embeddings and then map the images to the latent space using a probability flow ODE. Unlike existing work that takes an indirect morphing path, we show that the model adaptation yields a direct path and suppresses ghosting artifacts in the interpolated images. To achieve this, we propose a heuristic bottleneck constraint based on a novel relative perceptual path diversity score that automatically controls the bottleneck size and balances the diversity along the path with its directness. We also propose a perceptually-uniform sampling technique that enables visually smooth changes between the interpolated images. Extensive experiments validate that our IMPUS can achieve smooth, direct, and realistic image morphing and is adaptable to several other generative tasks.
InfMLLM: A Unified Framework for Visual-Language Tasks
Authors: Qiang Zhou, Zhibin Wang, Wei Chu, Yinghui Xu, Hao Li, Yuan Qi
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Captioning, Instruction Following, Question Answering, Visual Grounding, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Large language models (LLMs) have proven their remarkable versatility in handling a comprehensive range of language-centric applications. To expand LLMs' capabilities to a broader spectrum of modal inputs, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted growing interest. This work delves into enabling LLMs to tackle more vision-language-related tasks, particularly image captioning, visual question answering (VQA,) and visual grounding. To this end, we implemented a three-stage training scheme: starting with lightweight alignment pretraining, then moderate-weight multitask hybrid training, and finally, LLM fine-tuning to improve instruction following capability. Throughout the training process, the requirements on GPU memory gradually increase. To effectively manage the number of visual embeddings passed to the LLM while preserving their positional information, we introduce a straightforward visual adapter module dubbed pool-adapter. Our experiments demonstrate that preserving the positional information of visual embeddings through the pool-adapter is particularly beneficial for tasks like visual grounding. We name our proposed approach InfMLLM and have evaluated it extensively on various benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that InfMLLM achieves either state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance or performance comparable to recent MLLMs. The code and model will be made open-source at: \url{https://github.com/mightyzau/InfMLLM}.
Explainability of Vision Transformers: A Comprehensive Review and New Perspectives
Authors: Rojina Kashefi, Leili Barekatain, Mohammad Sabokrou, Fatemeh Aghaeipoor
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Transformers have had a significant impact on natural language processing and have recently demonstrated their potential in computer vision. They have shown promising results over convolution neural networks in fundamental computer vision tasks. However, the scientific community has not fully grasped the inner workings of vision transformers, nor the basis for their decision-making, which underscores the importance of explainability methods. Understanding how these models arrive at their decisions not only improves their performance but also builds trust in AI systems. This study explores different explainability methods proposed for visual transformers and presents a taxonomy for organizing them according to their motivations, structures, and application scenarios. In addition, it provides a comprehensive review of evaluation criteria that can be used for comparing explanation results, as well as explainability tools and frameworks. Finally, the paper highlights essential but unexplored aspects that can enhance the explainability of visual transformers, and promising research directions are suggested for future investment.
Q-Instruct: Improving Low-level Visual Abilities for Multi-modality Foundation Models
Authors: HaoNing Wu, ZiCheng Zhang, Erli Zhang, Chaofeng Chen, Liang Liao, Annan Wang, Kaixin Xu, Chunyi Li, Jingwen Hou, Guangtao Zhai, Geng Xue, Wenxiu Sun, Qiong Yan, Weisi Lin
Date: 2023-11-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Multi-modality foundation models, as represented by GPT-4V, have brought a new paradigm for low-level visual perception and understanding tasks, that can respond to a broad range of natural human instructions in a model. While existing foundation models have shown exciting potentials on low-level visual tasks, their related abilities are still preliminary and need to be improved. In order to enhance these models, we conduct a large-scale subjective experiment collecting a vast number of real human feedbacks on low-level vision. Each feedback follows a pathway that starts with a detailed description on the low-level visual appearance (*e.g. clarity, color, brightness* of an image, and ends with an overall conclusion, with an average length of 45 words. The constructed **Q-Pathway** dataset includes 58K detailed human feedbacks on 18,973 images with diverse low-level appearance. Moreover, to enable foundation models to robustly respond to diverse types of questions, we design a GPT-participated conversion to process these feedbacks into diverse-format 200K instruction-response pairs. Experimental results indicate that the **Q-Instruct** consistently elevates low-level perception and understanding abilities across several foundational models. We anticipate that our datasets can pave the way for a future that general intelligence can perceive, understand low-level visual appearance and evaluate visual quality like a human. Our dataset, model zoo, and demo is published at: https://q-future.github.io/Q-Instruct.
3DFusion, A real-time 3D object reconstruction pipeline based on streamed instance segmented data
Authors: Xi Sun, Derek Jacoby, Yvonne Coady
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, Instance Segmentation, Object Reconstruction, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper presents a real-time segmentation and reconstruction system that utilizes RGB-D images to generate accurate and detailed individual 3D models of objects within a captured scene. Leveraging state-of-the-art instance segmentation techniques, the system performs pixel-level segmentation on RGB-D data, effectively separating foreground objects from the background. The segmented objects are then reconstructed into distinct 3D models in a high-performance computation platform. The real-time 3D modelling can be applied across various domains, including augmented/virtual reality, interior design, urban planning, road assistance, security systems, and more. To achieve real-time performance, the paper proposes a method that effectively samples consecutive frames to reduce network load while ensuring reconstruction quality. Additionally, a multi-process SLAM pipeline is adopted for parallel 3D reconstruction, enabling efficient cutting of the clustering objects into individuals. This system employs the industry-leading framework YOLO for instance segmentation. To improve YOLO's performance and accuracy, modifications were made to resolve duplicated or false detection of similar objects, ensuring the reconstructed models align with the targets. Overall, this work establishes a robust real-time system with a significant enhancement for object segmentation and reconstruction in the indoor environment. It can potentially be extended to the outdoor scenario, opening up numerous opportunities for real-world applications.
Unsupervised and semi-supervised co-salient object detection via segmentation frequency statistics
Authors: Souradeep Chakraborty, Shujon Naha, Muhammet Bastan, Amit Kumar K C, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Co-Salient Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

In this paper, we address the detection of co-occurring salient objects (CoSOD) in an image group using frequency statistics in an unsupervised manner, which further enable us to develop a semi-supervised method. While previous works have mostly focused on fully supervised CoSOD, less attention has been allocated to detecting co-salient objects when limited segmentation annotations are available for training. Our simple yet effective unsupervised method US-CoSOD combines the object co-occurrence frequency statistics of unsupervised single-image semantic segmentations with salient foreground detections using self-supervised feature learning. For the first time, we show that a large unlabeled dataset e.g. ImageNet-1k can be effectively leveraged to significantly improve unsupervised CoSOD performance. Our unsupervised model is a great pre-training initialization for our semi-supervised model SS-CoSOD, especially when very limited labeled data is available for training. To avoid propagating erroneous signals from predictions on unlabeled data, we propose a confidence estimation module to guide our semi-supervised training. Extensive experiments on three CoSOD benchmark datasets show that both of our unsupervised and semi-supervised models outperform the corresponding state-of-the-art models by a significant margin (e.g., on the Cosal2015 dataset, our US-CoSOD model has an 8.8% F-measure gain over a SOTA unsupervised co-segmentation model and our SS-CoSOD model has an 11.81% F-measure gain over a SOTA semi-supervised CoSOD model).
Traffic Sign Recognition Using Local Vision Transformer
Authors: Ali Farzipour, Omid Nejati Manzari, Shahriar B. Shokouhi
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Driving Cars, Traffic Sign Recognition

Recognition of traffic signs is a crucial aspect of self-driving cars and driver assistance systems, and machine vision tasks such as traffic sign recognition have gained significant attention. CNNs have been frequently used in machine vision, but introducing vision transformers has provided an alternative approach to global feature learning. This paper proposes a new novel model that blends the advantages of both convolutional and transformer-based networks for traffic sign recognition. The proposed model includes convolutional blocks for capturing local correlations and transformer-based blocks for learning global dependencies. Additionally, a locality module is incorporated to enhance local perception. The performance of the suggested model is evaluated on the Persian Traffic Sign Dataset and German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark and compared with SOTA convolutional and transformer-based models. The experimental evaluations demonstrate that the hybrid network with the locality module outperforms pure transformer-based models and some of the best convolutional networks in accuracy. Specifically, our proposed final model reached 99.66% accuracy in the German traffic sign recognition benchmark and 99.8% in the Persian traffic sign dataset, higher than the best convolutional models. Moreover, it outperforms existing CNNs and ViTs while maintaining fast inference speed. Consequently, the proposed model proves to be significantly faster and more suitable for real-world applications.
Back to Basics: Fast Denoising Iterative Algorithm
Authors: Deborah Pereg
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We introduce Back to Basics (BTB), a fast iterative algorithm for noise reduction. Our method is computationally efficient, does not require training or ground truth data, and can be applied in the presence of independent noise, as well as correlated (coherent) noise, where the noise level is unknown. We examine three study cases: natural image denoising in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise, Poisson-distributed image denoising, and speckle suppression in optical coherence tomography (OCT). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively improve image quality, in challenging noise settings. Theoretical guarantees are provided for convergence stability.
A 3D Conditional Diffusion Model for Image Quality Transfer -- An Application to Low-Field MRI
Authors: Seunghoi Kim, Henry F. J. Tregidgo, Ahmed K. Eldaly, Matteo Figini, Daniel C. Alexander
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00

Low-field (LF) MRI scanners (<1T) are still prevalent in settings with limited resources or unreliable power supply. However, they often yield images with lower spatial resolution and contrast than high-field (HF) scanners. This quality disparity can result in inaccurate clinician interpretations. Image Quality Transfer (IQT) has been developed to enhance the quality of images by learning a mapping function between low and high-quality images. Existing IQT models often fail to restore high-frequency features, leading to blurry output. In this paper, we propose a 3D conditional diffusion model to improve 3D volumetric data, specifically LF MR images. Additionally, we incorporate a cross-batch mechanism into the self-attention and padding of our network, ensuring broader contextual awareness even under small 3D patches. Experiments on the publicly available Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset for IQT and brain parcellation demonstrate that our model outperforms existing methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. The code is publicly available at \url{https://github.com/edshkim98/DiffusionIQT}.
Computer Vision for Particle Size Analysis of Coarse-Grained Soils
Authors: Sompote Youwai, Parchya Makam
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Sand

Particle size analysis (PSA) is a fundamental technique for evaluating the physical characteristics of soils. However, traditional methods like sieving can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this study, we present a novel approach that utilizes computer vision (CV) and the Python programming language for PSA of coarse-grained soils, employing a standard mobile phone camera. By eliminating the need for a high-performance camera, our method offers convenience and cost savings. Our methodology involves using the OPENCV library to detect and measure soil particles in digital photographs taken under ordinary lighting conditions. For accurate particle size determination, a calibration target with known dimensions is placed on a plain paper alongside 20 different sand samples. The proposed method is compared with traditional sieve analysis and exhibits satisfactory performance for soil particles larger than 2 mm, with a mean absolute percent error (MAPE) of approximately 6%. However, particles smaller than 2 mm result in higher MAPE, reaching up to 60%. To address this limitation, we recommend using a higher-resolution camera to capture images of the smaller soil particles. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages, limitations, and potential future improvements of our method. Remarkably, the program can be executed on a mobile phone, providing immediate results without the need to send soil samples to a laboratory. This field-friendly feature makes our approach highly convenient for on-site usage, outside of a traditional laboratory setting. Ultimately, this novel method represents an initial disruption to the industry, enabling efficient particle size analysis of soil without the reliance on laboratory-based sieve analysis. KEYWORDS: Computer vision, Grain size, ARUCO
PerceptionGPT: Effectively Fusing Visual Perception into LLM
Authors: Renjie Pi, Lewei Yao, Jiahui Gao, Jipeng Zhang, Tong Zhang
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: GPU

The integration of visual inputs with large language models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in multi-modal capabilities, giving rise to visual large language models (VLLMs). However, effectively harnessing VLLMs for intricate visual perception tasks remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel end-to-end framework named PerceptionGPT, which efficiently and effectively equips the VLLMs with visual perception abilities by leveraging the representation power of LLMs' token embedding. Our proposed method treats the token embedding of the LLM as the carrier of spatial information, then leverage lightweight visual task encoders and decoders to perform visual perception tasks (e.g., detection, segmentation). Our approach significantly alleviates the training difficulty suffered by previous approaches that formulate the visual outputs as discrete tokens, and enables achieving superior performance with fewer trainable parameters, less training data and shorted training time. Moreover, as only one token embedding is required to decode the visual outputs, the resulting sequence length during inference is significantly reduced. Consequently, our approach enables accurate and flexible representations, seamless integration of visual perception tasks, and efficient handling of a multiple of visual outputs. We validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach through extensive experiments. The results demonstrate significant improvements over previous methods with much fewer trainable parameters and GPU hours, which facilitates future research in enabling LLMs with visual perception abilities.
Swin UNETR++: Advancing Transformer-Based Dense Dose Prediction Towards Fully Automated Radiation Oncology Treatments
Authors: Kuancheng Wang, Hai Siong Tan, Rafe McBeth
Date: 2023-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Tumor Segmentation

The field of Radiation Oncology is uniquely positioned to benefit from the use of artificial intelligence to fully automate the creation of radiation treatment plans for cancer therapy. This time-consuming and specialized task combines patient imaging with organ and tumor segmentation to generate a 3D radiation dose distribution to meet clinical treatment goals, similar to voxel-level dense prediction. In this work, we propose Swin UNETR++, that contains a lightweight 3D Dual Cross-Attention (DCA) module to capture the intra and inter-volume relationships of each patient's unique anatomy, which fully convolutional neural networks lack. Our model was trained, validated, and tested on the Open Knowledge-Based Planning dataset. In addition to metrics of Dose Score $\overline{S_{\text{Dose}}}$ and DVH Score $\overline{S_{\text{DVH}}}$ that quantitatively measure the difference between the predicted and ground-truth 3D radiation dose distribution, we propose the qualitative metrics of average volume-wise acceptance rate $\overline{R_{\text{VA}}}$ and average patient-wise clinical acceptance rate $\overline{R_{\text{PA}}}$ to assess the clinical reliability of the predictions. Swin UNETR++ demonstrates near-state-of-the-art performance on validation and test dataset (validation: $\overline{S_{\text{DVH}}}$=1.492 Gy, $\overline{S_{\text{Dose}}}$=2.649 Gy, $\overline{R_{\text{VA}}}$=88.58%, $\overline{R_{\text{PA}}}$=100.0%; test: $\overline{S_{\text{DVH}}}$=1.634 Gy, $\overline{S_{\text{Dose}}}$=2.757 Gy, $\overline{R_{\text{VA}}}$=90.50%, $\overline{R_{\text{PA}}}$=98.0%), establishing a basis for future studies to translate 3D dose predictions into a deliverable treatment plan, facilitating full automation.