pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Representation in Radiography-Reports Foundation Model: A Granular Alignment Algorithm Using Masked Contrastive Learning
Authors: Weijian Huang, Cheng Li, Hong-Yu Zhou, Hao Yang, Jiarun Liu, Yong Liang, Hairong Zheng, Shaoting Zhang, Shanshan Wang
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Medical Image Analysis, Phrase Grounding, Representation Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Recently, multi-modal vision-language foundation models have gained significant attention in the medical field. While these models offer great opportunities, they still face crucial challenges, such as the requirement for fine-grained knowledge understanding in computer-aided diagnosis and the capability of utilizing very limited or even no task-specific labeled data in real-world clinical applications. In this study, we present MaCo, a masked contrastive chest X-ray foundation model that tackles these challenges. MaCo explores masked contrastive learning to simultaneously achieve fine-grained image understanding and zero-shot learning for a variety of medical imaging tasks. It designs a correlation weighting mechanism to adjust the correlation between masked chest X-ray image patches and their corresponding reports, thereby enhancing the model's representation learning capabilities. To evaluate the performance of MaCo, we conducted extensive experiments using 6 well-known open-source X-ray datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MaCo over 10 state-of-the-art approaches across tasks such as classification, segmentation, detection, and phrase grounding. These findings highlight the significant potential of MaCo in advancing a wide range of medical image analysis tasks.
Adversarial Attacks Assessment of Salient Object Detection via Symbolic Learning
Authors: Gustavo Olague, Roberto Pineda, Gerardo Ibarra-Vazquez, Matthieu Olague, Axel Martinez, Sambit Bakshi, Jonathan Vargas, Isnardo Reducindo
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Machine learning is at the center of mainstream technology and outperforms classical approaches to handcrafted feature design. Aside from its learning process for artificial feature extraction, it has an end-to-end paradigm from input to output, reaching outstandingly accurate results. However, security concerns about its robustness to malicious and imperceptible perturbations have drawn attention since its prediction can be changed entirely. Salient object detection is a research area where deep convolutional neural networks have proven effective but whose trustworthiness represents a significant issue requiring analysis and solutions to hackers' attacks. Brain programming is a kind of symbolic learning in the vein of good old-fashioned artificial intelligence. This work provides evidence that symbolic learning robustness is crucial in designing reliable visual attention systems since it can withstand even the most intense perturbations. We test this evolutionary computation methodology against several adversarial attacks and noise perturbations using standard databases and a real-world problem of a shorebird called the Snowy Plover portraying a visual attention task. We compare our methodology with five different deep learning approaches, proving that they do not match the symbolic paradigm regarding robustness. All neural networks suffer significant performance losses, while brain programming stands its ground and remains unaffected. Also, by studying the Snowy Plover, we remark on the importance of security in surveillance activities regarding wildlife protection and conservation.
Subgroup detection in linear growth curve models with generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) trees
Authors: Marjolein Fokkema, Achim Zeileis
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Growth curve models are popular tools for studying the development of a response variable within subjects over time. Heterogeneity between subjects is common in such models, and researchers are typically interested in explaining or predicting this heterogeneity. We show how generalized linear mixed effects model (GLMM) trees can be used to identify subgroups with differently shaped trajectories in linear growth curve models. Originally developed for clustered cross-sectional data, GLMM trees are extended here to longitudinal data. The resulting extended GLMM trees are directly applicable to growth curve models as an important special case. In simulated and real-world data, we assess the performance of the extensions and compare against other partitioning methods for growth curve models. Extended GLMM trees perform more accurately than the original algorithm and LongCART, and similarly accurate as structural equation model (SEM) trees. In addition, GLMM trees allow for modeling both discrete and continuous time series, are less sensitive to (mis-)specification of the random-effects structure and are much faster to compute.
Hierarchical Conditional Semi-Paired Image-to-Image Translation For Multi-Task Image Defect Correction On Shopping Websites
Authors: Moyan Li, Jinmiao Fu, Shaoyuan Xu, Huidong Liu, Jia Liu, Bryan Wang
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation

On shopping websites, product images of low quality negatively affect customer experience. Although there are plenty of work in detecting images with different defects, few efforts have been dedicated to correct those defects at scale. A major challenge is that there are thousands of product types and each has specific defects, therefore building defect specific models is unscalable. In this paper, we propose a unified Image-to-Image (I2I) translation model to correct multiple defects across different product types. Our model leverages an attention mechanism to hierarchically incorporate high-level defect groups and specific defect types to guide the network to focus on defect-related image regions. Evaluated on eight public datasets, our model reduces the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) by 24.6% in average compared with MoNCE, the state-of-the-art I2I method. Unlike public data, another practical challenge on shopping websites is that some paired images are of low quality. Therefore we design our model to be semi-paired by combining the L1 loss of paired data with the cycle loss of unpaired data. Tested on a shopping website dataset to correct three image defects, our model reduces (FID) by 63.2% in average compared with WS-I2I, the state-of-the art semi-paired I2I method.
Generalized Attacks on Face Verification Systems
Authors: Ehsan Nazari, Paula Branco, Guy-Vincent Jourdan
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Verification

Face verification (FV) using deep neural network models has made tremendous progress in recent years, surpassing human accuracy and seeing deployment in various applications such as border control and smartphone unlocking. However, FV systems are vulnerable to Adversarial Attacks, which manipulate input images to deceive these systems in ways usually unnoticeable to humans. This paper provides an in-depth study of attacks on FV systems. We introduce the DodgePersonation Attack that formulates the creation of face images that impersonate a set of given identities while avoiding being identified as any of the identities in a separate, disjoint set. A taxonomy is proposed to provide a unified view of different types of Adversarial Attacks against FV systems, including Dodging Attacks, Impersonation Attacks, and Master Face Attacks. Finally, we propose the ''One Face to Rule Them All'' Attack which implements the DodgePersonation Attack with state-of-the-art performance on a well-known scenario (Master Face Attack) and which can also be used for the new scenarios introduced in this paper. While the state-of-the-art Master Face Attack can produce a set of 9 images to cover 43.82% of the identities in their test database, with 9 images our attack can cover 57.27% to 58.5% of these identifies while giving the attacker the choice of the identity to use to create the impersonation. Moreover, the 9 generated attack images appear identical to a casual observer.
Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning for Few-Shot Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Linhan Wang, Shuo Lei, Jianfeng He, Shengkun Wang, Min Zhang, Chang-Tien Lu
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Remote sensing image semantic segmentation is an important problem for remote sensing image interpretation. Although remarkable progress has been achieved, existing deep neural network methods suffer from the reliance on massive training data. Few-shot remote sensing semantic segmentation aims at learning to segment target objects from a query image using only a few annotated support images of the target class. Most existing few-shot learning methods stem primarily from their sole focus on extracting information from support images, thereby failing to effectively address the large variance in appearance and scales of geographic objects. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Self-Correlation and Cross-Correlation Learning Network for the few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Our model enhances the generalization by considering both self-correlation and cross-correlation between support and query images to make segmentation predictions. To further explore the self-correlation with the query image, we propose to adopt a classical spectral method to produce a class-agnostic segmentation mask based on the basic visual information of the image. Extensive experiments on two remote sensing image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our model in few-shot remote sensing image semantic segmentation. Code and models will be accessed at https://github.com/linhanwang/SCCNet.
SCD-Net: Spatiotemporal Clues Disentanglement Network for Self-supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Authors: Cong Wu, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler, Tianyang Xu, Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais, ZhenHua Feng
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Contrastive Learning, Disentanglement, Retrieval, Self-supervised Skeleton-based Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Transfer Learning

Contrastive learning has achieved great success in skeleton-based action recognition. However, most existing approaches encode the skeleton sequences as entangled spatiotemporal representations and confine the contrasts to the same level of representation. Instead, this paper introduces a novel contrastive learning framework, namely Spatiotemporal Clues Disentanglement Network (SCD-Net). Specifically, we integrate the decoupling module with a feature extractor to derive explicit clues from spatial and temporal domains respectively. As for the training of SCD-Net, with a constructed global anchor, we encourage the interaction between the anchor and extracted clues. Further, we propose a new masking strategy with structural constraints to strengthen the contextual associations, leveraging the latest development from masked image modelling into the proposed SCD-Net. We conduct extensive evaluations on the NTU-RGB+D (60&120) and PKU-MMD (I&II) datasets, covering various downstream tasks such as action recognition, action retrieval, transfer learning, and semi-supervised learning. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which outperforms the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches significantly.
Instance-Agnostic Geometry and Contact Dynamics Learning
Authors: Mengti Sun, Bowen Jiang, Bibit Bianchini, Camillo Jose Taylor, Michael Posa
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00

This work presents an instance-agnostic learning framework that fuses vision with dynamics to simultaneously learn shape, pose trajectories, and physical properties via the use of geometry as a shared representation. Unlike many contact learning approaches that assume motion capture input and a known shape prior for the collision model, our proposed framework learns an object's geometric and dynamic properties from RGBD video, without requiring either category-level or instance-level shape priors. We integrate a vision system, BundleSDF, with a dynamics system, ContactNets, and propose a cyclic training pipeline to use the output from the dynamics module to refine the poses and the geometry from the vision module, using perspective reprojection. Experiments demonstrate our framework's ability to learn the geometry and dynamics of rigid and convex objects and improve upon the current tracking framework.
Mobile Vision Transformer-based Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Goutam Yelluru Gopal, Maria A. Amer
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Object, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

The introduction of robust backbones, such as Vision Transformers, has improved the performance of object tracking algorithms in recent years. However, these state-of-the-art trackers are computationally expensive since they have a large number of model parameters and rely on specialized hardware (e.g., GPU) for faster inference. On the other hand, recent lightweight trackers are fast but are less accurate, especially on large-scale datasets. We propose a lightweight, accurate, and fast tracking algorithm using Mobile Vision Transformers (MobileViT) as the backbone for the first time. We also present a novel approach of fusing the template and search region representations in the MobileViT backbone, thereby generating superior feature encoding for target localization. The experimental results show that our MobileViT-based Tracker, MVT, surpasses the performance of recent lightweight trackers on the large-scale datasets GOT10k and TrackingNet, and with a high inference speed. In addition, our method outperforms the popular DiMP-50 tracker despite having 4.7 times fewer model parameters and running at 2.8 times its speed on a GPU. The tracker code and models are available at https://github.com/goutamyg/MVT
KD-FixMatch: Knowledge Distillation Siamese Neural Networks
Authors: Chien-Chih Wang, Shaoyuan Xu, Jinmiao Fu, Yang Liu, Bryan Wang
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has become a crucial approach in deep learning as a way to address the challenge of limited labeled data. The success of deep neural networks heavily relies on the availability of large-scale high-quality labeled data. However, the process of data labeling is time-consuming and unscalable, leading to shortages in labeled data. SSL aims to tackle this problem by leveraging additional unlabeled data in the training process. One of the popular SSL algorithms, FixMatch, trains identical weight-sharing teacher and student networks simultaneously using a siamese neural network (SNN). However, it is prone to performance degradation when the pseudo labels are heavily noisy in the early training stage. We present KD-FixMatch, a novel SSL algorithm that addresses the limitations of FixMatch by incorporating knowledge distillation. The algorithm utilizes a combination of sequential and simultaneous training of SNNs to enhance performance and reduce performance degradation. Firstly, an outer SNN is trained using labeled and unlabeled data. After that, the network of the well-trained outer SNN generates pseudo labels for the unlabeled data, from which a subset of unlabeled data with trusted pseudo labels is then carefully created through high-confidence sampling and deep embedding clustering. Finally, an inner SNN is trained with the labeled data, the unlabeled data, and the subset of unlabeled data with trusted pseudo labels. Experiments on four public data sets demonstrate that KD-FixMatch outperforms FixMatch in all cases. Our results indicate that KD-FixMatch has a better training starting point that leads to improved model performance compared to FixMatch.
SHIFT3D: Synthesizing Hard Inputs For Tricking 3D Detectors
Authors: Hongge Chen, Zhao Chen, Gregory P. Meyer, Dennis Park, Carl Vondrick, Ashish Shrivastava, Yuning Chai
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object

We present SHIFT3D, a differentiable pipeline for generating 3D shapes that are structurally plausible yet challenging to 3D object detectors. In safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, discovering such novel challenging objects can offer insight into unknown vulnerabilities of 3D detectors. By representing objects with a signed distanced function (SDF), we show that gradient error signals allow us to smoothly deform the shape or pose of a 3D object in order to confuse a downstream 3D detector. Importantly, the objects generated by SHIFT3D physically differ from the baseline object yet retain a semantically recognizable shape. Our approach provides interpretable failure modes for modern 3D object detectors, and can aid in preemptive discovery of potential safety risks within 3D perception systems before these risks become critical failures.
Divergences in Color Perception between Deep Neural Networks and Humans
Authors: Ethan O. Nadler, Elise Darragh-Ford, Bhargav Srinivasa Desikan, Christian Conaway, Mark Chu, Tasker Hull, Douglas Guilbeault
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Object Recognition, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly proposed as models of human vision, bolstered by their impressive performance on image classification and object recognition tasks. Yet, the extent to which DNNs capture fundamental aspects of human vision such as color perception remains unclear. Here, we develop novel experiments for evaluating the perceptual coherence of color embeddings in DNNs, and we assess how well these algorithms predict human color similarity judgments collected via an online survey. We find that state-of-the-art DNN architectures $-$ including convolutional neural networks and vision transformers $-$ provide color similarity judgments that strikingly diverge from human color judgments of (i) images with controlled color properties, (ii) images generated from online searches, and (iii) real-world images from the canonical CIFAR-10 dataset. We compare DNN performance against an interpretable and cognitively plausible model of color perception based on wavelet decomposition, inspired by foundational theories in computational neuroscience. While one deep learning model $-$ a convolutional DNN trained on a style transfer task $-$ captures some aspects of human color perception, our wavelet algorithm provides more coherent color embeddings that better predict human color judgments compared to all DNNs we examine. These results hold when altering the high-level visual task used to train similar DNN architectures (e.g., image classification versus image segmentation), as well as when examining the color embeddings of different layers in a given DNN architecture. These findings break new ground in the effort to analyze the perceptual representations of machine learning algorithms and to improve their ability to serve as cognitively plausible models of human vision. Implications for machine learning, human perception, and embodied cognition are discussed.
Blendshapes GHUM: Real-time Monocular Facial Blendshape Prediction
Authors: Ivan Grishchenko, Geng Yan, Eduard Gabriel Bazavan, Andrei Zanfir, Nikolai Chinaev, Karthik Raveendran, Matthias Grundmann, Cristian Sminchisescu
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

We present Blendshapes GHUM, an on-device ML pipeline that predicts 52 facial blendshape coefficients at 30+ FPS on modern mobile phones, from a single monocular RGB image and enables facial motion capture applications like virtual avatars. Our main contributions are: i) an annotation-free offline method for obtaining blendshape coefficients from real-world human scans, ii) a lightweight real-time model that predicts blendshape coefficients based on facial landmarks.
GlobalDoc: A Cross-Modal Vision-Language Framework for Real-World Document Image Retrieval and Classification
Authors: Souhail Bakkali, Sanket Biswas, Zuheng Ming, Mickaël Coustaty, Marçal Rusiñol, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Josep Lladós
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: document-image-classification, Document Image Classification, document understanding, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval, Representation Learning

Visual document understanding (VDU) has rapidly advanced with the development of powerful multi-modal language models. However, these models typically require extensive document pre-training data to learn intermediate representations and often suffer a significant performance drop in real-world online industrial settings. A primary issue is their heavy reliance on OCR engines to extract local positional information within document pages, which limits the models' ability to capture global information and hinders their generalizability, flexibility, and robustness. In this paper, we introduce GlobalDoc, a cross-modal transformer-based architecture pre-trained in a self-supervised manner using three novel pretext objective tasks. GlobalDoc improves the learning of richer semantic concepts by unifying language and visual representations, resulting in more transferable models. For proper evaluation, we also propose two novel document-level downstream VDU tasks, Few-Shot Document Image Classification (DIC) and Content-based Document Image Retrieval (DIR), designed to simulate industrial scenarios more closely. Extensive experimentation has been conducted to demonstrate GlobalDoc's effectiveness in practical settings.
Evaluating the Reliability of CNN Models on Classifying Traffic and Road Signs using LIME
Authors: Md. Atiqur Rahman, Ahmed Saad Tanim, Sanjid Islam, Fahim Pranto, G. M. Shahariar, Md. Tanvir Rouf Shawon
Date: 2023-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Categorization

The objective of this investigation is to evaluate and contrast the effectiveness of four state-of-the-art pre-trained models, ResNet-34, VGG-19, DenseNet-121, and Inception V3, in classifying traffic and road signs with the utilization of the GTSRB public dataset. The study focuses on evaluating the accuracy of these models' predictions as well as their ability to employ appropriate features for image categorization. To gain insights into the strengths and limitations of the model's predictions, the study employs the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) framework. The findings of this experiment indicate that LIME is a crucial tool for improving the interpretability and dependability of machine learning models for image identification, regardless of the models achieving an f1 score of 0.99 on classifying traffic and road signs. The conclusion of this study has important ramifications for how these models are used in practice, as it is crucial to ensure that model predictions are founded on the pertinent image features.
Gromov-Hausdorff Distances for Comparing Product Manifolds of Model Spaces
Authors: Haitz Saez de Ocariz Borde, Alvaro Arroyo, Ismael Morales, Ingmar Posner, Xiaowen Dong
Date: 2023-09-09 00:00:00

Recent studies propose enhancing machine learning models by aligning the geometric characteristics of the latent space with the underlying data structure. Instead of relying solely on Euclidean space, researchers have suggested using hyperbolic and spherical spaces with constant curvature, or their combinations (known as product manifolds), to improve model performance. However, there exists no principled technique to determine the best latent product manifold signature, which refers to the choice and dimensionality of manifold components. To address this, we introduce a novel notion of distance between candidate latent geometries using the Gromov-Hausdorff distance from metric geometry. We propose using a graph search space that uses the estimated Gromov-Hausdorff distances to search for the optimal latent geometry. In this work we focus on providing a description of an algorithm to compute the Gromov-Hausdorff distance between model spaces and its computational implementation.