pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Interpretable 2D Vision Models for 3D Medical Images
Authors: Alexander Ziller, Ayhan Can Erdur, Marwa Trigui, Alp Güvenir, Tamara T. Mueller, Philip Müller, Friederike Jungmann, Johannes Brandt, Jan Peeken, Rickmer Braren, Daniel Rueckert, Georgios Kaissis
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00

Training Artificial Intelligence (AI) models on 3D images presents unique challenges compared to the 2D case: Firstly, the demand for computational resources is significantly higher, and secondly, the availability of large datasets for pre-training is often limited, impeding training success. This study proposes a simple approach of adapting 2D networks with an intermediate feature representation for processing 3D images. Our method employs attention pooling to learn to assign each slice an importance weight and, by that, obtain a weighted average of all 2D slices. These weights directly quantify the contribution of each slice to the contribution and thus make the model prediction inspectable. We show on all 3D MedMNIST datasets as benchmark and two real-world datasets consisting of several hundred high-resolution CT or MRI scans that our approach performs on par with existing methods. Furthermore, we compare the in-built interpretability of our approach to HiResCam, a state-of-the-art retrospective interpretability approach.
Image Denoising and the Generative Accumulation of Photons
Authors: Alexander Krull, Hector Basevi, Benjamin Salmon, Andre Zeug, Franziska Müller, Samuel Tonks, Leela Muppala, Ales Leonardis
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We present a fresh perspective on shot noise corrupted images and noise removal. By viewing image formation as the sequential accumulation of photons on a detector grid, we show that a network trained to predict where the next photon could arrive is in fact solving the minimum mean square error (MMSE) denoising task. This new perspective allows us to make three contributions: We present a new strategy for self-supervised denoising, We present a new method for sampling from the posterior of possible solutions by iteratively sampling and adding small numbers of photons to the image. We derive a full generative model by starting this process from an empty canvas. We call this approach generative accumulation of photons (GAP). We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively on 4 new fluorescence microscopy datasets, which will be made available to the community. We find that it outperforms supervised, self-supervised and unsupervised baselines or performs on-par.
A Study on Differentiable Logic and LLMs for EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Challenge for Action Recognition 2023
Authors: Yi Cheng, Ziwei Xu, Fen Fang, Dongyun Lin, Hehe Fan, Yongkang Wong, Ying Sun, Mohan Kankanhalli
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this technical report, we present our findings from a study conducted on the EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Unsupervised Domain Adaptation task for Action Recognition. Our research focuses on the innovative application of a differentiable logic loss in the training to leverage the co-occurrence relations between verb and noun, as well as the pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate the logic rules for the adaptation to unseen action labels. Specifically, the model's predictions are treated as the truth assignment of a co-occurrence logic formula to compute the logic loss, which measures the consistency between the predictions and the logic constraints. By using the verb-noun co-occurrence matrix generated from the dataset, we observe a moderate improvement in model performance compared to our baseline framework. To further enhance the model's adaptability to novel action labels, we experiment with rules generated using GPT-3.5, which leads to a slight decrease in performance. These findings shed light on the potential and challenges of incorporating differentiable logic and LLMs for knowledge extraction in unsupervised domain adaptation for action recognition. Our final submission (entitled `NS-LLM') achieved the first place in terms of top-1 action recognition accuracy.
Multi-objective Evolutionary Search of Variable-length Composite Semantic Perturbations
Authors: Jialiang Sun, Wen Yao, Tingsong Jiang, Xiaoqian Chen
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, AutoML

Deep neural networks have proven to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adding specific perturbations on images to make wrong outputs. Designing stronger adversarial attack methods can help more reliably evaluate the robustness of DNN models. To release the harbor burden and improve the attack performance, auto machine learning (AutoML) has recently emerged as one successful technique to help automatically find the near-optimal adversarial attack strategy. However, existing works about AutoML for adversarial attacks only focus on $L_{\infty}$-norm-based perturbations. In fact, semantic perturbations attract increasing attention due to their naturalnesses and physical realizability. To bridge the gap between AutoML and semantic adversarial attacks, we propose a novel method called multi-objective evolutionary search of variable-length composite semantic perturbations (MES-VCSP). Specifically, we construct the mathematical model of variable-length composite semantic perturbations, which provides five gradient-based semantic attack methods. The same type of perturbation in an attack sequence is allowed to be performed multiple times. Besides, we introduce the multi-objective evolutionary search consisting of NSGA-II and neighborhood search to find near-optimal variable-length attack sequences. Experimental results on CIFAR10 and ImageNet datasets show that compared with existing methods, MES-VCSP can obtain adversarial examples with a higher attack success rate, more naturalness, and less time cost.
Full-resolution Lung Nodule Segmentation from Chest X-ray Images using Residual Encoder-Decoder Networks
Authors: Michael James Horry, Subrata Chakraborty, Biswajeet Pradhan, Manoranjan Paul, Jing Zhu, Prabal Datta Barua, U. Rajendra Acharya, Fang Chen, Jianlong Zhou
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Lung Nodule Segmentation, Prognosis, Sensitivity

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death and early diagnosis is associated with a positive prognosis. Chest X-ray (CXR) provides an inexpensive imaging mode for lung cancer diagnosis. Suspicious nodules are difficult to distinguish from vascular and bone structures using CXR. Computer vision has previously been proposed to assist human radiologists in this task, however, leading studies use down-sampled images and computationally expensive methods with unproven generalization. Instead, this study localizes lung nodules using efficient encoder-decoder neural networks that process full resolution images to avoid any signal loss resulting from down-sampling. Encoder-decoder networks are trained and tested using the JSRT lung nodule dataset. The networks are used to localize lung nodules from an independent external CXR dataset. Sensitivity and false positive rates are measured using an automated framework to eliminate any observer subjectivity. These experiments allow for the determination of the optimal network depth, image resolution and pre-processing pipeline for generalized lung nodule localization. We find that nodule localization is influenced by subtlety, with more subtle nodules being detected in earlier training epochs. Therefore, we propose a novel self-ensemble model from three consecutive epochs centered on the validation optimum. This ensemble achieved a sensitivity of 85% in 10-fold internal testing with false positives of 8 per image. A sensitivity of 81% is achieved at a false positive rate of 6 following morphological false positive reduction. This result is comparable to more computationally complex systems based on linear and spatial filtering, but with a sub-second inference time that is faster than other methods. The proposed algorithm achieved excellent generalization results against an external dataset with sensitivity of 77% at a false positive rate of 7.6.
Quantum Image Denoising: A Framework via Boltzmann Machines, QUBO, and Quantum Annealing
Authors: Phillip Kerger, Ryoji Miyazaki
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

We investigate a framework for binary image denoising via restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) that introduces a denoising objective in quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) form and is well-suited for quantum annealing. The denoising objective is attained by balancing the distribution learned by a trained RBM with a penalty term for derivations from the noisy image. We derive the statistically optimal choice of the penalty parameter assuming the target distribution has been well-approximated, and further suggest an empirically supported modification to make the method robust to that idealistic assumption. We also show under additional assumptions that the denoised images attained by our method are, in expectation, strictly closer to the noise-free images than the noisy images are. While we frame the model as an image denoising model, it can be applied to any binary data. As the QUBO formulation is well-suited for implementation on quantum annealers, we test the model on a D-Wave Advantage machine, and also test on data too large for current quantum annealers by approximating QUBO solutions through classical heuristics.
Domain-adaptive Person Re-identification without Cross-camera Paired Samples
Authors: Huafeng Li, Yanmei Mao, Yafei Zhang, Guanqiu Qi, Zhengtao Yu
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptive Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification

Existing person re-identification (re-ID) research mainly focuses on pedestrian identity matching across cameras in adjacent areas. However, in reality, it is inevitable to face the problem of pedestrian identity matching across long-distance scenes. The cross-camera pedestrian samples collected from long-distance scenes often have no positive samples. It is extremely challenging to use cross-camera negative samples to achieve cross-region pedestrian identity matching. Therefore, a novel domain-adaptive person re-ID method that focuses on cross-camera consistent discriminative feature learning under the supervision of unpaired samples is proposed. This method mainly includes category synergy co-promotion module (CSCM) and cross-camera consistent feature learning module (CCFLM). In CSCM, a task-specific feature recombination (FRT) mechanism is proposed. This mechanism first groups features according to their contributions to specific tasks. Then an interactive promotion learning (IPL) scheme between feature groups is developed and embedded in this mechanism to enhance feature discriminability. Since the control parameters of the specific task model are reduced after division by task, the generalization ability of the model is improved. In CCFLM, instance-level feature distribution alignment and cross-camera identity consistent learning methods are constructed. Therefore, the supervised model training is achieved under the style supervision of the target domain by exchanging styles between source-domain samples and target-domain samples, and the challenges caused by the lack of cross-camera paired samples are solved by utilizing cross-camera similar samples. In experiments, three challenging datasets are used as target domains, and the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through four experimental settings.
Optimised Least Squares Approach for Accurate Polygon and Ellipse Fitting
Authors: Yiming Quan, Shian Chen
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00

This study presents a generalised least squares based method for fitting polygons and ellipses to data points. The method is based on a trigonometric fitness function that approximates a unit shape accurately, making it applicable to various geometric shapes with minimal fitting parameters. Furthermore, the proposed method does not require any constraints and can handle incomplete data. The method is validated on synthetic and real-world data sets and compared with the existing methods in the literature for polygon and ellipse fitting. The test results show that the method achieves high accuracy and outperforms the referenced methods in terms of root-mean-square error, especially for noise-free data. The proposed method is a powerful tool for shape fitting in computer vision and geometry processing applications.
Free-Form Composition Networks for Egocentric Action Recognition
Authors: Haoran Wang, Qinghua Cheng, Baosheng Yu, Yibing Zhan, Dapeng Tao, Liang Ding, Haibin Ling
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Form, Temporal Action Localization

Egocentric action recognition is gaining significant attention in the field of human action recognition. In this paper, we address data scarcity issue in egocentric action recognition from a compositional generalization perspective. To tackle this problem, we propose a free-form composition network (FFCN) that can simultaneously learn disentangled verb, preposition, and noun representations, and then use them to compose new samples in the feature space for rare classes of action videos. First, we use a graph to capture the spatial-temporal relations among different hand/object instances in each action video. We thus decompose each action into a set of verb and preposition spatial-temporal representations using the edge features in the graph. The temporal decomposition extracts verb and preposition representations from different video frames, while the spatial decomposition adaptively learns verb and preposition representations from action-related instances in each frame. With these spatial-temporal representations of verbs and prepositions, we can compose new samples for those rare classes in a free-form manner, which is not restricted to a rigid form of a verb and a noun. The proposed FFCN can directly generate new training data samples for rare classes, hence significantly improve action recognition performance. We evaluated our method on three popular egocentric action recognition datasets, Something-Something V2, H2O, and EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for handling data scarcity problems, including long-tailed and few-shot egocentric action recognition.
AvatarFusion: Zero-shot Generation of Clothing-Decoupled 3D Avatars Using 2D Diffusion
Authors: Shuo Huang, Zongxin Yang, Liangting Li, Yi Yang, Jia Jia
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00

Large-scale pre-trained vision-language models allow for the zero-shot text-based generation of 3D avatars. The previous state-of-the-art method utilized CLIP to supervise neural implicit models that reconstructed a human body mesh. However, this approach has two limitations. Firstly, the lack of avatar-specific models can cause facial distortion and unrealistic clothing in the generated avatars. Secondly, CLIP only provides optimization direction for the overall appearance, resulting in less impressive results. To address these limitations, we propose AvatarFusion, the first framework to use a latent diffusion model to provide pixel-level guidance for generating human-realistic avatars while simultaneously segmenting clothing from the avatar's body. AvatarFusion includes the first clothing-decoupled neural implicit avatar model that employs a novel Dual Volume Rendering strategy to render the decoupled skin and clothing sub-models in one space. We also introduce a novel optimization method, called Pixel-Semantics Difference-Sampling (PS-DS), which semantically separates the generation of body and clothes, and generates a variety of clothing styles. Moreover, we establish the first benchmark for zero-shot text-to-avatar generation. Our experimental results demonstrate that our framework outperforms previous approaches, with significant improvements observed in all metrics. Additionally, since our model is clothing-decoupled, we can exchange the clothes of avatars. Code are available on our project page https://hansenhuang0823.github.io/AvatarFusion.
WaterScenes: A Multi-Task 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Dataset and Benchmarks for Autonomous Driving on Water Surfaces
Authors: Shanliang Yao, Runwei Guan, Zhaodong Wu, Yi Ni, Zile Huang, Ryan Wen Liu, Yong Yue, Weiping Ding, Eng Gee Lim, Hyungjoon Seo, Ka Lok Man, Jieming Ma, Xiaohui Zhu, Yutao Yue
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Instance Segmentation, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Autonomous driving on water surfaces plays an essential role in executing hazardous and time-consuming missions, such as maritime surveillance, survivors rescue, environmental monitoring, hydrography mapping and waste cleaning. This work presents WaterScenes, the first multi-task 4D radar-camera fusion dataset for autonomous driving on water surfaces. Equipped with a 4D radar and a monocular camera, our Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) proffers all-weather solutions for discerning object-related information, including color, shape, texture, range, velocity, azimuth, and elevation. Focusing on typical static and dynamic objects on water surfaces, we label the camera images and radar point clouds at pixel-level and point-level, respectively. In addition to basic perception tasks, such as object detection, instance segmentation and semantic segmentation, we also provide annotations for free-space segmentation and waterline segmentation. Leveraging the multi-task and multi-modal data, we conduct benchmark experiments on the uni-modality of radar and camera, as well as the fused modalities. Experimental results demonstrate that 4D radar-camera fusion can considerably improve the accuracy and robustness of perception on water surfaces, especially in adverse lighting and weather conditions. WaterScenes dataset is public on https://waterscenes.github.io.
On the ability of CNNs to extract color invariant intensity based features for image classification
Authors: Pradyumna Elavarthi, James Lee, Anca Ralescu
Date: 2023-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in vision-related tasks. However, their susceptibility to failing when inputs deviate from the training distribution is well-documented. Recent studies suggest that CNNs exhibit a bias toward texture instead of object shape in image classification tasks, and that background information may affect predictions. This paper investigates the ability of CNNs to adapt to different color distributions in an image while maintaining context and background. The results of our experiments on modified MNIST and FashionMNIST data demonstrate that changes in color can substantially affect classification accuracy. The paper explores the effects of various regularization techniques on generalization error across datasets and proposes a minor architectural modification utilizing the dropout regularization in a novel way that enhances model reliance on color-invariant intensity-based features for improved classification accuracy. Overall, this work contributes to ongoing efforts to understand the limitations and challenges of CNNs in image classification tasks and offers potential solutions to enhance their performance.
Single-Class Target-Specific Attack against Interpretable Deep Learning Systems
Authors: Eldor Abdukhamidov, Mohammed Abuhamad, George K. Thiruvathukal, Hyoungshick Kim, Tamer Abuhmed
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Deep Learning

In this paper, we present a novel Single-class target-specific Adversarial attack called SingleADV. The goal of SingleADV is to generate a universal perturbation that deceives the target model into confusing a specific category of objects with a target category while ensuring highly relevant and accurate interpretations. The universal perturbation is stochastically and iteratively optimized by minimizing the adversarial loss that is designed to consider both the classifier and interpreter costs in targeted and non-targeted categories. In this optimization framework, ruled by the first- and second-moment estimations, the desired loss surface promotes high confidence and interpretation score of adversarial samples. By avoiding unintended misclassification of samples from other categories, SingleADV enables more effective targeted attacks on interpretable deep learning systems in both white-box and black-box scenarios. To evaluate the effectiveness of SingleADV, we conduct experiments using four different model architectures (ResNet-50, VGG-16, DenseNet-169, and Inception-V3) coupled with three interpretation models (CAM, Grad, and MASK). Through extensive empirical evaluation, we demonstrate that SingleADV effectively deceives the target deep learning models and their associated interpreters under various conditions and settings. Our experimental results show that the performance of SingleADV is effective, with an average fooling ratio of 0.74 and an adversarial confidence level of 0.78 in generating deceptive adversarial samples. Furthermore, we discuss several countermeasures against SingleADV, including a transfer-based learning approach and existing preprocessing defenses.
Early Autism Diagnosis based on Path Signature and Siamese Unsupervised Feature Compressor
Authors: Zhuowen Yin, Xinyao Ding, Xin Zhang, Zhengwang Wu, Li Wang, Xiangmin Xu, Gang Li
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been emerging as a growing public health threat. Early diagnosis of ASD is crucial for timely, effective intervention and treatment. However, conventional diagnosis methods based on communications and behavioral patterns are unreliable for children younger than 2 years of age. Given evidences of neurodevelopmental abnormalities in ASD infants, we resort to a novel deep learning-based method to extract key features from the inherently scarce, class-imbalanced, and heterogeneous structural MR images for early autism diagnosis. Specifically, we propose a Siamese verification framework to extend the scarce data, and an unsupervised compressor to alleviate data imbalance by extracting key features. We also proposed weight constraints to cope with sample heterogeneity by giving different samples different voting weights during validation, and we used Path Signature to unravel meaningful developmental features from the two-time point data longitudinally. We further extracted machine learning focused brain regions for autism diagnosis. Extensive experiments have shown that our method performed well under practical scenarios, transcending existing machine learning methods and providing anatomical insights for autism early diagnosis.
Discovering Image Usage Online: A Case Study With "Flatten the Curve''
Authors: Shawn M. Jones, Diane Oyen
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval

Understanding the spread of images across the web helps us understand the reuse of scientific visualizations and their relationship with the public. The "Flatten the Curve" graphic was heavily used during the COVID-19 pandemic to convey a complex concept in a simple form. It displays two curves comparing the impact on case loads for medical facilities if the populace either adopts or fails to adopt protective measures during a pandemic. We use five variants of the "Flatten the Curve" image as a case study for viewing the spread of an image online. To evaluate its spread, we leverage three information channels: reverse image search engines, social media, and web archives. Reverse image searches give us a current view into image reuse. Social media helps us understand a variant's popularity over time. Web archives help us see when it was preserved, highlighting a view of popularity for future researchers. Our case study leverages document URLs can be used as a proxy for images when studying the spread of images online.