pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DRED: Zero-Shot Transfer in Reinforcement Learning via Data-Regularised Environment Design
Authors: Samuel Garcin, James Doran, Shangmin Guo, Christopher G. Lucas, Stefano V. Albrecht
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Autonomous agents trained using deep reinforcement learning (RL) often lack the ability to successfully generalise to new environments, even when these environments share characteristics with the ones they have encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how the sampling of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents. We discover that, for deep actor-critic architectures sharing their base layers, prioritising levels according to their value loss minimises the mutual information between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels in the generated training data. This provides a novel theoretical justification for the regularisation achieved by certain adaptive sampling strategies. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which assume control over level generation. We find that existing UED methods can significantly shift the training distribution, which translates to low ZSG performance. To prevent both overfitting and distributional shift, we introduce data-regularised environment design (DRED). DRED generates levels using a generative model trained to approximate the ground truth distribution of an initial set of level parameters. Through its grounding, DRED achieves significant improvements in ZSG over adaptive level sampling strategies and UED methods. Our code and experimental data are available at https://github.com/uoe-agents/dred.
Psychological Assessments with Large Language Models: A Privacy-Focused and Cost-Effective Approach
Authors: Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma
Date: 2024-02-05 00:00:00

This study explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze text comments from Reddit users, aiming to achieve two primary objectives: firstly, to pinpoint critical excerpts that support a predefined psychological assessment of suicidal risk; and secondly, to summarize the material to substantiate the preassigned suicidal risk level. The work is circumscribed to the use of "open-source" LLMs that can be run locally, thereby enhancing data privacy. Furthermore, it prioritizes models with low computational requirements, making it accessible to both individuals and institutions operating on limited computing budgets. The implemented strategy only relies on a carefully crafted prompt and a grammar to guide the LLM's text completion. Despite its simplicity, the evaluation metrics show outstanding results, making it a valuable privacy-focused and cost-effective approach. This work is part of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2024 shared task.
EVA-CLIP-18B: Scaling CLIP to 18 Billion Parameters
Authors: Quan Sun, Jinsheng Wang, Qiying Yu, Yufeng Cui, Fan Zhang, Xiaosong Zhang, Xinlong Wang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Zero-Shot Transfer Image Classification

Scaling up contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) is critical for empowering both vision and multimodal models. We present EVA-CLIP-18B, the largest and most powerful open-source CLIP model to date, with 18-billion parameters. With only 6-billion training samples seen, EVA-CLIP-18B achieves an exceptional 80.7% zero-shot top-1 accuracy averaged across 27 widely recognized image classification benchmarks, outperforming its forerunner EVA-CLIP (5-billion parameters) and other open-source CLIP models by a large margin. Remarkably, we observe a consistent performance improvement with the model size scaling of EVA-CLIP, despite maintaining a constant training dataset of 2-billion image-text pairs from LAION-2B and COYO-700M. This dataset is openly available and much smaller than the in-house datasets (e.g., DFN-5B, WebLI-10B) employed in other state-of-the-art CLIP models. EVA-CLIP-18B demonstrates the potential of EVA-style weak-to-strong visual model scaling. With our model weights made publicly available, we hope to facilitate future research in vision and multimodal foundation models.
CogCoM: Train Large Vision-Language Models Diving into Details through Chain of Manipulations
Authors: Ji Qi, Ming Ding, Weihan Wang, Yushi Bai, Qingsong Lv, Wenyi Hong, Bin Xu, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated their broad effectiveness thanks to extensive training in aligning visual instructions to responses. However, such training of conclusive alignment leads models to ignore essential visual reasoning, further resulting in failures in meticulous visual problems and unfaithful responses. Drawing inspiration from human cognition in solving visual problems (e.g., marking, zoom in), this paper introduces Chain of Manipulations, a mechanism that enables VLMs to solve problems step-by-step with evidence. After training, models can solve various visual problems by eliciting intrinsic manipulations (e.g., grounding, zoom in) with results (e.g., boxes, image) actively without involving external tools, while also allowing users to trace error causes. We study the roadmap to implement this mechanism, including (1) a flexible design of manipulations upon extensive analysis, (2) an efficient automated data generation pipeline, (3) a compatible VLM architecture capable of multi-turn multi-image, and (4) a model training process for versatile capabilities. With the design, we also manually annotate 6K high-quality samples for the challenging graphical mathematical problems. Our trained model, \textbf{CogCoM}, equipped with this mechanism with 17B parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance across 9 benchmarks from 4 categories, demonstrating the effectiveness while preserving the interpretability. Our code, model weights, and collected data are publicly available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogCoM.
Instance by Instance: An Iterative Framework for Multi-instance 3D Registration
Authors: Xinyue Cao, Xiyu Zhang, Yuxin Cheng, Zhaoshuai Qi, Yanning Zhang, Jiaqi Yang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00

Multi-instance registration is a challenging problem in computer vision and robotics, where multiple instances of an object need to be registered in a standard coordinate system. In this work, we propose the first iterative framework called instance-by-instance (IBI) for multi-instance 3D registration (MI-3DReg). It successively registers all instances in a given scenario, starting from the easiest and progressing to more challenging ones. Throughout the iterative process, outliers are eliminated continuously, leading to an increasing inlier rate for the remaining and more challenging instances. Under the IBI framework, we further propose a sparse-to-dense-correspondence-based multi-instance registration method (IBI-S2DC) to achieve robust MI-3DReg. Experiments on the synthetic and real datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of IBI and suggested the new state-of-the-art performance of IBI-S2DC, e.g., our MHF1 is 12.02%/12.35% higher than the existing state-of-the-art method ECC on the synthetic/real datasets.
SHIELD : An Evaluation Benchmark for Face Spoofing and Forgery Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Yichen Shi, Yuhao Gao, Yingxin Lai, Hongyang Wang, Jun Feng, Lei He, Jun Wan, Changsheng chen, Zitong Yu, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Face Anti-Spoofing, Multiple-choice, Object Recognition

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-related tasks, capitalizing on their visual semantic comprehension and reasoning capabilities. However, their ability to detect subtle visual spoofing and forgery clues in face attack detection tasks remains underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark, SHIELD, to evaluate MLLMs for face spoofing and forgery detection. Specifically, we design true/false and multiple-choice questions to assess MLLM performance on multimodal face data across two tasks. For the face anti-spoofing task, we evaluate three modalities (i.e., RGB, infrared, and depth) under six attack types. For the face forgery detection task, we evaluate GAN-based and diffusion-based data, incorporating visual and acoustic modalities. We conduct zero-shot and few-shot evaluations in standard and chain of thought (COT) settings. Additionally, we propose a novel multi-attribute chain of thought (MA-COT) paradigm for describing and judging various task-specific and task-irrelevant attributes of face images. The findings of this study demonstrate that MLLMs exhibit strong potential for addressing the challenges associated with the security of facial recognition technology applications.
3D Volumetric Super-Resolution in Radiology Using 3D RRDB-GAN
Authors: Juhyung Ha, Nian Wang, Surendra Maharjan, Xuhong Zhang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

This study introduces the 3D Residual-in-Residual Dense Block GAN (3D RRDB-GAN) for 3D super-resolution for radiology imagery. A key aspect of 3D RRDB-GAN is the integration of a 2.5D perceptual loss function, which contributes to improved volumetric image quality and realism. The effectiveness of our model was evaluated through 4x super-resolution experiments across diverse datasets, including Mice Brain MRH, OASIS, HCP1200, and MSD-Task-6. These evaluations, encompassing both quantitative metrics like LPIPS and FID and qualitative assessments through sample visualizations, demonstrate the models effectiveness in detailed image analysis. The 3D RRDB-GAN offers a significant contribution to medical imaging, particularly by enriching the depth, clarity, and volumetric detail of medical images. Its application shows promise in enhancing the interpretation and analysis of complex medical imagery from a comprehensive 3D perspective.
Informed Reinforcement Learning for Situation-Aware Traffic Rule Exceptions
Authors: Daniel Bogdoll, Jing Qin, Moritz Nekolla, Ahmed Abouelazm, Tim Joseph, J. Marius Zöllner
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning is a highly active research field with promising advancements. In the field of autonomous driving, however, often very simple scenarios are being examined. Common approaches use non-interpretable control commands as the action space and unstructured reward designs which lack structure. In this work, we introduce Informed Reinforcement Learning, where a structured rulebook is integrated as a knowledge source. We learn trajectories and asses them with a situation-aware reward design, leading to a dynamic reward which allows the agent to learn situations which require controlled traffic rule exceptions. Our method is applicable to arbitrary RL models. We successfully demonstrate high completion rates of complex scenarios with recent model-based agents.
U-shaped Vision Mamba for Single Image Dehazing
Authors: Zhuoran Zheng, Chen Wu
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Image Restoration, Mamba, Single Image Dehazing

Currently, Transformer is the most popular architecture for image dehazing, but due to its large computational complexity, its ability to handle long-range dependency is limited on resource-constrained devices. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the U-shaped Vision Mamba (UVM-Net), an efficient single-image dehazing network. Inspired by the State Space Sequence Models (SSMs), a new deep sequence model known for its power to handle long sequences, we design a Bi-SSM block that integrates the local feature extraction ability of the convolutional layer with the ability of the SSM to capture long-range dependencies. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our method provides a more highly efficient idea of long-range dependency modeling for image dehazing as well as other image restoration tasks. The URL of the code is \url{https://github.com/zzr-idam/UVM-Net}. Our method takes only \textbf{0.009} seconds to infer a $325 \times 325$ resolution image (100FPS) without I/O handling time.
OVOR: OnePrompt with Virtual Outlier Regularization for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Wei-Cheng Huang, Chun-Fu Chen, Hsiang Hsu
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Recent works have shown that by using large pre-trained models along with learnable prompts, rehearsal-free methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) settings can achieve superior performance to prominent rehearsal-based ones. Rehearsal-free CIL methods struggle with distinguishing classes from different tasks, as those are not trained together. In this work we propose a regularization method based on virtual outliers to tighten decision boundaries of the classifier, such that confusion of classes among different tasks is mitigated. Recent prompt-based methods often require a pool of task-specific prompts, in order to prevent overwriting knowledge of previous tasks with that of the new task, leading to extra computation in querying and composing an appropriate prompt from the pool. This additional cost can be eliminated, without sacrificing accuracy, as we reveal in the paper. We illustrate that a simplified prompt-based method can achieve results comparable to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods equipped with a prompt pool, using much less learnable parameters and lower inference cost. Our regularization method has demonstrated its compatibility with different prompt-based methods, boosting those previous SOTA rehearsal-free CIL methods' accuracy on the ImageNet-R and CIFAR-100 benchmarks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/jpmorganchase/ovor.
VRMM: A Volumetric Relightable Morphable Head Model
Authors: Haotian Yang, Mingwu Zheng, Chongyang Ma, Yu-Kun Lai, Pengfei Wan, Haibin Huang
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Face Reconstruction, Face Reconstruction, model, Self-Supervised Learning

In this paper, we introduce the Volumetric Relightable Morphable Model (VRMM), a novel volumetric and parametric facial prior for 3D face modeling. While recent volumetric prior models offer improvements over traditional methods like 3D Morphable Models (3DMMs), they face challenges in model learning and personalized reconstructions. Our VRMM overcomes these by employing a novel training framework that efficiently disentangles and encodes latent spaces of identity, expression, and lighting into low-dimensional representations. This framework, designed with self-supervised learning, significantly reduces the constraints for training data, making it more feasible in practice. The learned VRMM offers relighting capabilities and encompasses a comprehensive range of expressions. We demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of VRMM through various applications like avatar generation, facial reconstruction, and animation. Additionally, we address the common issue of overfitting in generative volumetric models with a novel prior-preserving personalization framework based on VRMM. Such an approach enables high-quality 3D face reconstruction from even a single portrait input. Our experiments showcase the potential of VRMM to significantly enhance the field of 3D face modeling.
Analysis of Deep Image Prior and Exploiting Self-Guidance for Image Reconstruction
Authors: Shijun Liang, Evan Bell, Qing Qu, Rongrong Wang, Saiprasad Ravishankar
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Image Reconstruction, Image Restoration

The ability of deep image prior (DIP) to recover high-quality images from incomplete or corrupted measurements has made it popular in inverse problems in image restoration and medical imaging including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, conventional DIP suffers from severe overfitting and spectral bias effects. In this work, we first provide an analysis of how DIP recovers information from undersampled imaging measurements by analyzing the training dynamics of the underlying networks in the kernel regime for different architectures. This study sheds light on important underlying properties for DIP-based recovery. Current research suggests that incorporating a reference image as network input can enhance DIP's performance in image reconstruction compared to using random inputs. However, obtaining suitable reference images requires supervision, and raises practical difficulties. In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, we further introduce a self-driven reconstruction process that concurrently optimizes both the network weights and the input while eliminating the need for training data. Our method incorporates a novel denoiser regularization term which enables robust and stable joint estimation of both the network input and reconstructed image. We demonstrate that our self-guided method surpasses both the original DIP and modern supervised methods in terms of MR image reconstruction performance and outperforms previous DIP-based schemes for image inpainting.
Polyp-DDPM: Diffusion-Based Semantic Polyp Synthesis for Enhanced Segmentation
Authors: Zolnamar Dorjsembe, Hsing-Kuo Pao, Furen Xiao
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Segmentation

This study introduces Polyp-DDPM, a diffusion-based method for generating realistic images of polyps conditioned on masks, aimed at enhancing the segmentation of gastrointestinal (GI) tract polyps. Our approach addresses the challenges of data limitations, high annotation costs, and privacy concerns associated with medical images. By conditioning the diffusion model on segmentation masks-binary masks that represent abnormal areas-Polyp-DDPM outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of image quality (achieving a Frechet Inception Distance (FID) score of 78.47, compared to scores above 83.79) and segmentation performance (achieving an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.7156, versus less than 0.6694 for synthetic images from baseline models and 0.7067 for real data). Our method generates a high-quality, diverse synthetic dataset for training, thereby enhancing polyp segmentation models to be comparable with real images and offering greater data augmentation capabilities to improve segmentation models. The source code and pretrained weights for Polyp-DDPM are made publicly available at https://github.com/mobaidoctor/polyp-ddpm.
Privacy Leakage on DNNs: A Survey of Model Inversion Attacks and Defenses
Authors: Hao Fang, Yixiang Qiu, Hongyao Yu, Wenbo Yu, Jiawei Kong, Baoli Chong, Bin Chen, Xuan Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Ke Xu
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have revolutionized various domains with their exceptional performance across numerous applications. However, Model Inversion (MI) attacks, which disclose private information about the training dataset by abusing access to the trained models, have emerged as a formidable privacy threat. Given a trained network, these attacks enable adversaries to reconstruct high-fidelity data that closely aligns with the private training samples, posing significant privacy concerns. Despite the rapid advances in the field, we lack a comprehensive and systematic overview of existing MI attacks and defenses. To fill this gap, this paper thoroughly investigates this realm and presents a holistic survey. Firstly, our work briefly reviews early MI studies on traditional machine learning scenarios. We then elaborately analyze and compare numerous recent attacks and defenses on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) across multiple modalities and learning tasks. By meticulously analyzing their distinctive features, we summarize and classify these methods into different categories and provide a novel taxonomy. Finally, this paper discusses promising research directions and presents potential solutions to open issues. To facilitate further study on MI attacks and defenses, we have implemented an open-source model inversion toolbox on GitHub (https://github.com/ffhibnese/Model-Inversion-Attack-ToolBox).
YOLOPoint Joint Keypoint and Object Detection
Authors: Anton Backhaus, Thorsten Luettel, Hans-Joachim Wuensche
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Visual Odometry

Intelligent vehicles of the future must be capable of understanding and navigating safely through their surroundings. Camera-based vehicle systems can use keypoints as well as objects as low- and high-level landmarks for GNSS-independent SLAM and visual odometry. To this end we propose YOLOPoint, a convolutional neural network model that simultaneously detects keypoints and objects in an image by combining YOLOv5 and SuperPoint to create a single forward-pass network that is both real-time capable and accurate. By using a shared backbone and a light-weight network structure, YOLOPoint is able to perform competitively on both the HPatches and KITTI benchmarks.
Controllable Diverse Sampling for Diffusion Based Motion Behavior Forecasting
Authors: Yiming Xu, Hao Cheng, Monika Sester
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Denoising, Diversity, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

In autonomous driving tasks, trajectory prediction in complex traffic environments requires adherence to real-world context conditions and behavior multimodalities. Existing methods predominantly rely on prior assumptions or generative models trained on curated data to learn road agents' stochastic behavior bounded by scene constraints. However, they often face mode averaging issues due to data imbalance and simplistic priors, and could even suffer from mode collapse due to unstable training and single ground truth supervision. These issues lead the existing methods to a loss of predictive diversity and adherence to the scene constraints. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel trajectory generator named Controllable Diffusion Trajectory (CDT), which integrates map information and social interactions into a Transformer-based conditional denoising diffusion model to guide the prediction of future trajectories. To ensure multimodality, we incorporate behavioral tokens to direct the trajectory's modes, such as going straight, turning right or left. Moreover, we incorporate the predicted endpoints as an alternative behavioral token into the CDT model to facilitate the prediction of accurate trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Argoverse 2 benchmark demonstrate that CDT excels in generating diverse and scene-compliant trajectories in complex urban settings.
A comparison between humans and AI at recognizing objects in unusual poses
Authors: Netta Ollikka, Amro Abbas, Andrea Perin, Markku Kilpeläinen, Stéphane Deny
Date: 2024-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

Deep learning is closing the gap with human vision on several object recognition benchmarks. Here we investigate this gap for challenging images where objects are seen in unusual poses. We find that humans excel at recognizing objects in such poses. In contrast, state-of-the-art deep networks for vision (EfficientNet, SWAG, ViT, SWIN, BEiT, ConvNext) and state-of-the-art large vision-language models (Claude 3.5, Gemini 1.5, GPT-4) are systematically brittle on unusual poses, with the exception of Gemini showing excellent robustness in that condition. As we limit image exposure time, human performance degrades to the level of deep networks, suggesting that additional mental processes (requiring additional time) are necessary to identify objects in unusual poses. An analysis of error patterns of humans vs. networks reveals that even time-limited humans are dissimilar to feed-forward deep networks. In conclusion, our comparison reveals that humans and deep networks rely on different mechanisms for recognizing objects in unusual poses. Understanding the nature of the mental processes taking place during extra viewing time may be key to reproduce the robustness of human vision in silico.