pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Neuromorphic spintronics simulated using an unconventional data-driven Thiele equation approach
Authors: Anatole Moureaux, Simon de Wergifosse, Chloé Chopin, Flavio Abreu Araujo
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00

In this study, we developed a quantitative description of the dynamics of spin-torque vortex nano-oscillators (STVOs) through an unconventional model based on the combination of the Thiele equation approach (TEA) and data from micromagnetic simulations (MMS). Solving the STVO dynamics with our analytical model allows to accelerate the simulations by 9 orders of magnitude compared to MMS while reaching the same level of accuracy. Here, we showcase our model by simulating a STVO-based neural network for solving a classification task. We assess its performance with respect to the input signal current intensity and the level of noise that might affect such a system. Our approach is promising for accelerating the design of STVO-based neuromorphic computing devices while decreasing drastically its computational cost.
Adaptive Topological Feature via Persistent Homology: Filtration Learning for Point Clouds
Authors: Naoki Nishikawa, Yuichi Ike, Kenji Yamanishi
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Machine learning for point clouds has been attracting much attention, with many applications in various fields, such as shape recognition and material science. For enhancing the accuracy of such machine learning methods, it is often effective to incorporate global topological features, which are typically extracted by persistent homology. In the calculation of persistent homology for a point cloud, we choose a filtration for the point cloud, an increasing sequence of spaces. Since the performance of machine learning methods combined with persistent homology is highly affected by the choice of a filtration, we need to tune it depending on data and tasks. In this paper, we propose a framework that learns a filtration adaptively with the use of neural networks. In order to make the resulting persistent homology isometry-invariant, we develop a neural network architecture with such invariance. Additionally, we show a theoretical result on a finite-dimensional approximation of filtration functions, which justifies the proposed network architecture. Experimental results demonstrated the efficacy of our framework in several classification tasks.
Generation of High Spatial Resolution Terrestrial Surface from Low Spatial Resolution Elevation Contour Maps via Hierarchical Computation of Median Elevation Regions
Authors: Geetika Barman, B. S. Daya Sagar
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00

We proposed a simple yet effective morphological approach to convert a sparse Digital Elevation Model (DEM) to a dense Digital Elevation Model. The conversion is similar to that of the generation of high-resolution DEM from its low-resolution DEM. The approach involves the generation of median contours to achieve the purpose. It is a sequential step of the I) decomposition of the existing sparse Contour map into the maximum possible Threshold Elevation Region (TERs). II) Computing all possible non-negative and non-weighted Median Elevation Region (MER) hierarchically between the successive TER decomposed from a sparse contour map. III) Computing the gradient of all TER, and MER computed from previous steps would yield the predicted intermediate elevation contour at a higher spatial resolution. We presented this approach initially with some self-made synthetic data to show how the contour prediction works and then experimented with the available contour map of Washington, NH to justify its usefulness. This approach considers the geometric information of existing contours and interpolates the elevation contour at a new spatial region of a topographic surface until no elevation contours are necessary to generate. This novel approach is also very low-cost and robust as it uses elevation contours.
Fusing Hand and Body Skeletons for Human Action Recognition in Assembly
Authors: Dustin Aganian, Mona Köhler, Benedict Stephan, Markus Eisenbach, Horst-Michael Gross
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Temporal Action Localization

As collaborative robots (cobots) continue to gain popularity in industrial manufacturing, effective human-robot collaboration becomes crucial. Cobots should be able to recognize human actions to assist with assembly tasks and act autonomously. To achieve this, skeleton-based approaches are often used due to their ability to generalize across various people and environments. Although body skeleton approaches are widely used for action recognition, they may not be accurate enough for assembly actions where the worker's fingers and hands play a significant role. To address this limitation, we propose a method in which less detailed body skeletons are combined with highly detailed hand skeletons. We investigate CNNs and transformers, the latter of which are particularly adept at extracting and combining important information from both skeleton types using attention. This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach in enhancing action recognition in assembly scenarios.
Distilling Knowledge from Text-to-Image Generative Models Improves Visio-Linguistic Reasoning in CLIP
Authors: Samyadeep Basu, Shell Xu Hu, Maziar Sanjabi, Daniela Massiceti, Soheil Feizi
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image-text Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, Transfer Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Image-text contrastive models like CLIP have wide applications in zero-shot classification, image-text retrieval, and transfer learning. However, they often struggle on compositional visio-linguistic tasks (e.g., attribute-binding or object-relationships) where their performance is no better than random chance. To address this, we introduce SDS-CLIP, a lightweight and sample-efficient distillation method to enhance CLIP's compositional visio-linguistic reasoning. Our approach fine-tunes CLIP using a distillation objective borrowed from large text-to-image generative models like Stable-Diffusion, which are known for their strong visio-linguistic reasoning abilities. On the challenging Winoground benchmark, SDS-CLIP improves the visio-linguistic performance of various CLIP models by up to 7%, while on the ARO dataset, it boosts performance by up to 3%. This work underscores the potential of well-designed distillation objectives from generative models to enhance contrastive image-text models with improved visio-linguistic reasoning capabilities.
A Survey on Open-Vocabulary Detection and Segmentation: Past, Present, and Future
Authors: Chaoyang Zhu, Long Chen
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection, Panoptic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Video Understanding

As the most fundamental scene understanding tasks, object detection and segmentation have made tremendous progress in deep learning era. Due to the expensive manual labeling cost, the annotated categories in existing datasets are often small-scale and pre-defined, i.e., state-of-the-art fully-supervised detectors and segmentors fail to generalize beyond the closed vocabulary. To resolve this limitation, in the last few years, the community has witnessed an increasing attention toward Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) and Segmentation (OVS). By ``open-vocabulary'', we mean that the models can classify objects beyond pre-defined categories. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on recent developments of OVD and OVS. A taxonomy is first developed to organize different tasks and methodologies. We find that the permission and usage of weak supervision signals can well discriminate different methodologies, including: visual-semantic space mapping, novel visual feature synthesis, region-aware training, pseudo-labeling, knowledge distillation, and transfer learning. The proposed taxonomy is universal across different tasks, covering object detection, semantic/instance/panoptic segmentation, 3D and video understanding. The main design principles, key challenges, development routes, methodology strengths, and weaknesses are thoroughly analyzed. In addition, we benchmark each task along with the vital components of each method in appendix and updated online at https://github.com/seanzhuh/awesome-open-vocabulary-detection-and-segmentation. Finally, several promising directions are provided and discussed to stimulate future research.
You've Got Two Teachers: Co-evolutionary Image and Report Distillation for Semi-supervised Anatomical Abnormality Detection in Chest X-ray
Authors: Jinghan Sun, Dong Wei, Zhe Xu, Donghuan Lu, Hong Liu, Liansheng Wang, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Pseudo Label

Chest X-ray (CXR) anatomical abnormality detection aims at localizing and characterising cardiopulmonary radiological findings in the radiographs, which can expedite clinical workflow and reduce observational oversights. Most existing methods attempted this task in either fully supervised settings which demanded costly mass per-abnormality annotations, or weakly supervised settings which still lagged badly behind fully supervised methods in performance. In this work, we propose a co-evolutionary image and report distillation (CEIRD) framework, which approaches semi-supervised abnormality detection in CXR by grounding the visual detection results with text-classified abnormalities from paired radiology reports, and vice versa. Concretely, based on the classical teacher-student pseudo label distillation (TSD) paradigm, we additionally introduce an auxiliary report classification model, whose prediction is used for report-guided pseudo detection label refinement (RPDLR) in the primary vision detection task. Inversely, we also use the prediction of the vision detection model for abnormality-guided pseudo classification label refinement (APCLR) in the auxiliary report classification task, and propose a co-evolution strategy where the vision and report models mutually promote each other with RPDLR and APCLR performed alternatively. To this end, we effectively incorporate the weak supervision by reports into the semi-supervised TSD pipeline. Besides the cross-modal pseudo label refinement, we further propose an intra-image-modal self-adaptive non-maximum suppression, where the pseudo detection labels generated by the teacher vision model are dynamically rectified by high-confidence predictions by the student. Experimental results on the public MIMIC-CXR benchmark demonstrate CEIRD's superior performance to several up-to-date weakly and semi-supervised methods.
Pixel-wise Graph Attention Networks for Person Re-identification
Authors: Wenyu Zhang, Qing Ding, Jian Hu, Yi Ma, Mingzhe Lu
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Graph Generation, Person Re-Identification

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) is widely used to handle irregular data since it updates node features by using the structure information of graph. With the help of iterated GCN, high-order information can be obtained to further enhance the representation of nodes. However, how to apply GCN to structured data (such as pictures) has not been deeply studied. In this paper, we explore the application of graph attention networks (GAT) in image feature extraction. First of all, we propose a novel graph generation algorithm to convert images into graphs through matrix transformation. It is one magnitude faster than the algorithm based on K Nearest Neighbors (KNN). Then, GAT is used on the generated graph to update the node features. Thus, a more robust representation is obtained. These two steps are combined into a module called pixel-wise graph attention module (PGA). Since the graph obtained by our graph generation algorithm can still be transformed into a picture after processing, PGA can be well combined with CNN. Based on these two modules, we consulted the ResNet and design a pixel-wise graph attention network (PGANet). The PGANet is applied to the task of person re-identification in the datasets Market1501, DukeMTMC-reID and Occluded-DukeMTMC (outperforms state-of-the-art by 0.8\%, 1.1\% and 11\% respectively, in mAP scores). Experiment results show that it achieves the state-of-the-art performance. \href{https://github.com/wenyu1009/PGANet}{The code is available here}.
Jean-Luc Picard at Touché 2023: Comparing Image Generation, Stance Detection and Feature Matching for Image Retrieval for Arguments
Authors: Max Moebius, Maximilian Enderling, Sarah T. Bachinger
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Stance Detection

Participating in the shared task "Image Retrieval for arguments", we used different pipelines for image retrieval containing Image Generation, Stance Detection, Preselection and Feature Matching. We submitted four different runs with different pipeline layout and compare them to given baseline. Our pipelines perform similarly to the baseline.
Towards Trustworthy Dataset Distillation
Authors: Shijie Ma, Fei Zhu, Zhen Cheng, Xu-Yao Zhang
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Distillation

Efficiency and trustworthiness are two eternal pursuits when applying deep learning in real-world applications. With regard to efficiency, dataset distillation (DD) endeavors to reduce training costs by distilling the large dataset into a tiny synthetic dataset. However, existing methods merely concentrate on in-distribution (InD) classification in a closed-world setting, disregarding out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. On the other hand, OOD detection aims to enhance models' trustworthiness, which is always inefficiently achieved in full-data settings. For the first time, we simultaneously consider both issues and propose a novel paradigm called Trustworthy Dataset Distillation (TrustDD). By distilling both InD samples and outliers, the condensed datasets are capable of training models competent in both InD classification and OOD detection. To alleviate the requirement of real outlier data, we further propose to corrupt InD samples to generate pseudo-outliers, namely Pseudo-Outlier Exposure (POE). Comprehensive experiments on various settings demonstrate the effectiveness of TrustDD, and POE surpasses the state-of-the-art method Outlier Exposure (OE). Compared with the preceding DD, TrustDD is more trustworthy and applicable to open-world scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/mashijie1028/TrustDD
CG-fusion CAM: Online segmentation of laser-induced damage on large-aperture optics
Authors: Yueyue Han, Yingyan Huang, Hangcheng Dong, Fengdong Chen, Fa Zeng, Zhitao Peng, Qihua Zhu, Guodong Liu
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Online segmentation of laser-induced damage on large-aperture optics in high-power laser facilities is challenged by complicated damage morphology, uneven illumination and stray light interference. Fully supervised semantic segmentation algorithms have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but rely on plenty of pixel-level labels, which are time-consuming and labor-consuming to produce. LayerCAM, an advanced weakly supervised semantic segmentation algorithm, can generate pixel-accurate results using only image-level labels, but its scattered and partially under-activated class activation regions degrade segmentation performance. In this paper, we propose a weakly supervised semantic segmentation method with Continuous Gradient CAM and its nonlinear multi-scale fusion (CG-fusion CAM). The method redesigns the way of back-propagating gradients and non-linearly activates the multi-scale fused heatmaps to generate more fine-grained class activation maps with appropriate activation degree for different sizes of damage sites. Experiments on our dataset show that the proposed method can achieve segmentation performance comparable to that of fully supervised algorithms.
Constraining Depth Map Geometry for Multi-View Stereo: A Dual-Depth Approach with Saddle-shaped Depth Cells
Authors: Xinyi Ye, Weiyue Zhao, Tianqi Liu, Zihao Huang, Zhiguo Cao, Xin Li
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction

Learning-based multi-view stereo (MVS) methods deal with predicting accurate depth maps to achieve an accurate and complete 3D representation. Despite the excellent performance, existing methods ignore the fact that a suitable depth geometry is also critical in MVS. In this paper, we demonstrate that different depth geometries have significant performance gaps, even using the same depth prediction error. Therefore, we introduce an ideal depth geometry composed of Saddle-Shaped Cells, whose predicted depth map oscillates upward and downward around the ground-truth surface, rather than maintaining a continuous and smooth depth plane. To achieve it, we develop a coarse-to-fine framework called Dual-MVSNet (DMVSNet), which can produce an oscillating depth plane. Technically, we predict two depth values for each pixel (Dual-Depth), and propose a novel loss function and a checkerboard-shaped selecting strategy to constrain the predicted depth geometry. Compared to existing methods,DMVSNet achieves a high rank on the DTU benchmark and obtains the top performance on challenging scenes of Tanks and Temples, demonstrating its strong performance and generalization ability. Our method also points to a new research direction for considering depth geometry in MVS.
Class-relation Knowledge Distillation for Novel Class Discovery
Authors: Peiyan Gu, Chuyu Zhang, Ruijie Xu, Xuming He
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Novel Class Discovery, Relation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Transfer Learning

We tackle the problem of novel class discovery, which aims to learn novel classes without supervision based on labeled data from known classes. A key challenge lies in transferring the knowledge in the known-class data to the learning of novel classes. Previous methods mainly focus on building a shared representation space for knowledge transfer and often ignore modeling class relations. To address this, we introduce a class relation representation for the novel classes based on the predicted class distribution of a model trained on known classes. Empirically, we find that such class relation becomes less informative during typical discovery training. To prevent such information loss, we propose a novel knowledge distillation framework, which utilizes our class-relation representation to regularize the learning of novel classes. In addition, to enable a flexible knowledge distillation scheme for each data point in novel classes, we develop a learnable weighting function for the regularization, which adaptively promotes knowledge transfer based on the semantic similarity between the novel and known classes. To validate the effectiveness and generalization of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, including CIFAR100, Stanford Cars, CUB, and FGVC-Aircraft datasets. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin on almost all benchmarks. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/kleinzcy/Cr-KD-NCD}{here}.
MLF-DET: Multi-Level Fusion for Cross-Modal 3D Object Detection
Authors: Zewei Lin, Yanqing Shen, Sanping Zhou, Shitao Chen, Nanning Zheng
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Data Augmentation, object-detection, Object Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel and effective Multi-Level Fusion network, named as MLF-DET, for high-performance cross-modal 3D object DETection, which integrates both the feature-level fusion and decision-level fusion to fully utilize the information in the image. For the feature-level fusion, we present the Multi-scale Voxel Image fusion (MVI) module, which densely aligns multi-scale voxel features with image features. For the decision-level fusion, we propose the lightweight Feature-cued Confidence Rectification (FCR) module which further exploits image semantics to rectify the confidence of detection candidates. Besides, we design an effective data augmentation strategy termed Occlusion-aware GT Sampling (OGS) to reserve more sampled objects in the training scenes, so as to reduce overfitting. Extensive experiments on the KITTI dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Notably, on the extremely competitive KITTI car 3D object detection benchmark, our method reaches 82.89% moderate AP and achieves state-of-the-art performance without bells and whistles.
OPHAvatars: One-shot Photo-realistic Head Avatars
Authors: Shaoxu Li
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration

We propose a method for synthesizing photo-realistic digital avatars from only one portrait as the reference. Given a portrait, our method synthesizes a coarse talking head video using driving keypoints features. And with the coarse video, our method synthesizes a coarse talking head avatar with a deforming neural radiance field. With rendered images of the coarse avatar, our method updates the low-quality images with a blind face restoration model. With updated images, we retrain the avatar for higher quality. After several iterations, our method can synthesize a photo-realistic animatable 3D neural head avatar. The motivation of our method is deformable neural radiance field can eliminate the unnatural distortion caused by the image2video method. Our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in quantitative and qualitative studies on various subjects.
PRO-Face S: Privacy-preserving Reversible Obfuscation of Face Images via Secure Flow
Authors: Lin Yuan, Kai Liang, Xiao Pu, Yan Zhang, Jiaxu Leng, Tao Wu, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Privacy Preserving

This paper proposes a novel paradigm for facial privacy protection that unifies multiple characteristics including anonymity, diversity, reversibility and security within a single lightweight framework. We name it PRO-Face S, short for Privacy-preserving Reversible Obfuscation of Face images via Secure flow-based model. In the framework, an Invertible Neural Network (INN) is utilized to process the input image along with its pre-obfuscated form, and generate the privacy protected image that visually approximates to the pre-obfuscated one, thus ensuring privacy. The pre-obfuscation applied can be in diversified form with different strengths and styles specified by users. Along protection, a secret key is injected into the network such that the original image can only be recovered from the protection image via the same model given the correct key provided. Two modes of image recovery are devised to deal with malicious recovery attempts in different scenarios. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on three public image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over multiple state-of-the-art approaches.