pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Radars for Autonomous Driving: A Review of Deep Learning Methods and Challenges
Authors: Arvind Srivastav, Soumyajit Mandal
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Radar is a key component of the suite of perception sensors used for safe and reliable navigation of autonomous vehicles. Its unique capabilities include high-resolution velocity imaging, detection of agents in occlusion and over long ranges, and robust performance in adverse weather conditions. However, the usage of radar data presents some challenges: it is characterized by low resolution, sparsity, clutter, high uncertainty, and lack of good datasets. These challenges have limited radar deep learning research. As a result, current radar models are often influenced by lidar and vision models, which are focused on optical features that are relatively weak in radar data, thus resulting in under-utilization of radar's capabilities and diminishing its contribution to autonomous perception. This review seeks to encourage further deep learning research on autonomous radar data by 1) identifying key research themes, and 2) offering a comprehensive overview of current opportunities and challenges in the field. Topics covered include early and late fusion, occupancy flow estimation, uncertainty modeling, and multipath detection. The paper also discusses radar fundamentals and data representation, presents a curated list of recent radar datasets, and reviews state-of-the-art lidar and vision models relevant for radar research. For a summary of the paper and more results, visit the website: autonomous-radars.github.io.
OpenOOD v1.5: Enhanced Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Jingyang Zhang, Jingkang Yang, Pengyun Wang, Haoqi Wang, Yueqian Lin, Haoran Zhang, Yiyou Sun, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li, Ziwei Liu, Yiran Chen, Hai Li
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection is critical for the reliable operation of open-world intelligent systems. Despite the emergence of an increasing number of OOD detection methods, the evaluation inconsistencies present challenges for tracking the progress in this field. OpenOOD v1 initiated the unification of the OOD detection evaluation but faced limitations in scalability and scope. In response, this paper presents OpenOOD v1.5, a significant improvement from its predecessor that ensures accurate and standardized evaluation of OOD detection methodologies at large scale. Notably, OpenOOD v1.5 extends its evaluation capabilities to large-scale data sets (ImageNet) and foundation models (e.g., CLIP and DINOv2), and expands its scope to investigate full-spectrum OOD detection which considers semantic and covariate distribution shifts at the same time. This work also contributes in-depth analysis and insights derived from comprehensive experimental results, thereby enriching the knowledge pool of OOD detection methodologies. With these enhancements, OpenOOD v1.5 aims to drive advancements and offer a more robust and comprehensive evaluation benchmark for OOD detection research.
Neural Fine-Tuning Search for Few-Shot Learning
Authors: Panagiotis Eustratiadis, Łukasz Dudziak, Da Li, Timothy Hospedales
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Neural Architecture Search

In few-shot recognition, a classifier that has been trained on one set of classes is required to rapidly adapt and generalize to a disjoint, novel set of classes. To that end, recent studies have shown the efficacy of fine-tuning with carefully crafted adaptation architectures. However this raises the question of: How can one design the optimal adaptation strategy? In this paper, we study this question through the lens of neural architecture search (NAS). Given a pre-trained neural network, our algorithm discovers the optimal arrangement of adapters, which layers to keep frozen and which to fine-tune. We demonstrate the generality of our NAS method by applying it to both residual networks and vision transformers and report state-of-the-art performance on Meta-Dataset and Meta-Album.
Towards Motion Forecasting with Real-World Perception Inputs: Are End-to-End Approaches Competitive?
Authors: Yihong Xu, Loïck Chambon, Éloi Zablocki, Mickaël Chen, Alexandre Alahi, Matthieu Cord, Patrick Pérez
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Benchmarking, Motion Forecasting

Motion forecasting is crucial in enabling autonomous vehicles to anticipate the future trajectories of surrounding agents. To do so, it requires solving mapping, detection, tracking, and then forecasting problems, in a multi-step pipeline. In this complex system, advances in conventional forecasting methods have been made using curated data, i.e., with the assumption of perfect maps, detection, and tracking. This paradigm, however, ignores any errors from upstream modules. Meanwhile, an emerging end-to-end paradigm, that tightly integrates the perception and forecasting architectures into joint training, promises to solve this issue. However, the evaluation protocols between the two methods were so far incompatible and their comparison was not possible. In fact, conventional forecasting methods are usually not trained nor tested in real-world pipelines (e.g., with upstream detection, tracking, and mapping modules). In this work, we aim to bring forecasting models closer to the real-world deployment. First, we propose a unified evaluation pipeline for forecasting methods with real-world perception inputs, allowing us to compare conventional and end-to-end methods for the first time. Second, our in-depth study uncovers a substantial performance gap when transitioning from curated to perception-based data. In particular, we show that this gap (1) stems not only from differences in precision but also from the nature of imperfect inputs provided by perception modules, and that (2) is not trivially reduced by simply finetuning on perception outputs. Based on extensive experiments, we provide recommendations for critical areas that require improvement and guidance towards more robust motion forecasting in the real world. The evaluation library for benchmarking models under standardized and practical conditions is provided: \url{https://github.com/valeoai/MFEval}.
Robustness Analysis on Foundational Segmentation Models
Authors: Madeline Chantry Schiappa, Shehreen Azad, Sachidanand VS, Yunhao Ge, Ondrej Miksik, Yogesh S. Rawat, Vibhav Vineet
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation

Due to the increase in computational resources and accessibility of data, an increase in large, deep learning models trained on copious amounts of multi-modal data using self-supervised or semi-supervised learning have emerged. These ``foundation'' models are often adapted to a variety of downstream tasks like classification, object detection, and segmentation with little-to-no training on the target dataset. In this work, we perform a robustness analysis of Visual Foundation Models (VFMs) for segmentation tasks and focus on robustness against real-world distribution shift inspired perturbations. We benchmark seven state-of-the-art segmentation architectures using 2 different perturbed datasets, MS COCO-P and ADE20K-P, with 17 different perturbations with 5 severity levels each. Our findings reveal several key insights: (1) VFMs exhibit vulnerabilities to compression-induced corruptions, (2) despite not outpacing all of unimodal models in robustness, multimodal models show competitive resilience in zero-shot scenarios, and (3) VFMs demonstrate enhanced robustness for certain object categories. These observations suggest that our robustness evaluation framework sets new requirements for foundational models, encouraging further advancements to bolster their adaptability and performance. The code and dataset is available at: \url{https://tinyurl.com/fm-robust}.
Conditional Human Sketch Synthesis with Explicit Abstraction Control
Authors: Dar-Yen Chen
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel free-hand sketch synthesis approach addressing explicit abstraction control in class-conditional and photo-to-sketch synthesis. Abstraction is a vital aspect of sketches, as it defines the fundamental distinction between a sketch and an image. Previous works relied on implicit control to achieve different levels of abstraction, leading to inaccurate control and synthesized sketches deviating from human sketches. To resolve this challenge, we propose two novel abstraction control mechanisms, state embeddings and the stroke token, integrated into a transformer-based latent diffusion model (LDM). These mechanisms explicitly provide the required amount of points or strokes to the model, enabling accurate point-level and stroke-level control in synthesized sketches while preserving recognizability. Outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, our method effectively generates diverse, non-rigid and human-like sketches. The proposed approach enables coherent sketch synthesis and excels in representing human habits with desired abstraction levels, highlighting the potential of sketch synthesis for real-world applications.
Privacy Risks in Reinforcement Learning for Household Robots
Authors: Miao Li, Wenhao Ding, Ding Zhao
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Federated Learning, Navigate, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

The prominence of embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI), which empowers robots to navigate, perceive, and engage within virtual environments, has attracted significant attention, owing to the remarkable advances in computer vision and large language models. Privacy emerges as a pivotal concern within the realm of embodied AI, as the robot accesses substantial personal information. However, the issue of privacy leakage in embodied AI tasks, particularly concerning reinforcement learning algorithms, has not received adequate consideration in research. This paper aims to address this gap by proposing an attack on the training process of the value-based algorithm and the gradient-based algorithm, utilizing gradient inversion to reconstruct states, actions, and supervisory signals. The choice of using gradients for the attack is motivated by the fact that commonly employed federated learning techniques solely utilize gradients computed based on private user data to optimize models, without storing or transmitting the data to public servers. Nevertheless, these gradients contain sufficient information to potentially expose private data. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments on the AI2THOR simulator and evaluated our algorithm on active perception, a prevalent task in embodied AI. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in successfully reconstructing all information from the data in 120 room layouts. Check our website for videos.
Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection with Pre-trained Segmentation Models
Authors: Matthew Baugh, James Batten, Johanna P. Müller, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Instance Segmentation, Novelty Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, zero-shot anomaly detection, Zero Shot Segmentation

This technical report outlines our submission to the zero-shot track of the Visual Anomaly and Novelty Detection (VAND) 2023 Challenge. Building on the performance of the WINCLIP framework, we aim to enhance the system's localization capabilities by integrating zero-shot segmentation models. In addition, we perform foreground instance segmentation which enables the model to focus on the relevant parts of the image, thus allowing the models to better identify small or subtle deviations. Our pipeline requires no external data or information, allowing for it to be directly applied to new datasets. Our team (Variance Vigilance Vanguard) ranked third in the zero-shot track of the VAND challenge, and achieve an average F1-max score of 81.5/24.2 at a sample/pixel level on the VisA dataset.
A9 Intersection Dataset: All You Need for Urban 3D Camera-LiDAR Roadside Perception
Authors: Walter Zimmer, Christian Creß, Huu Tung Nguyen, Alois C. Knoll
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Autonomous Driving, Diversity

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) allow a drastic expansion of the visibility range and decrease occlusions for autonomous driving. To obtain accurate detections, detailed labeled sensor data for training is required. Unfortunately, high-quality 3D labels of LiDAR point clouds from the infrastructure perspective of an intersection are still rare. Therefore, we provide the A9 Intersection Dataset, which consists of labeled LiDAR point clouds and synchronized camera images. Here, we recorded the sensor output from two roadside cameras and LiDARs mounted on intersection gantry bridges. The point clouds were labeled in 3D by experienced annotators. Furthermore, we provide calibration data between all sensors, which allow the projection of the 3D labels into the camera images and an accurate data fusion. Our dataset consists of 4.8k images and point clouds with more than 57.4k manually labeled 3D boxes. With ten object classes, it has a high diversity of road users in complex driving maneuvers, such as left and right turns, overtaking, and U-turns. In experiments, we provided multiple baselines for the perception tasks. Overall, our dataset is a valuable contribution to the scientific community to perform complex 3D camera-LiDAR roadside perception tasks. Find data, code, and more information at https://a9-dataset.com.
Harvard Glaucoma Fairness: A Retinal Nerve Disease Dataset for Fairness Learning and Fair Identity Normalization
Authors: Yan Luo, Yu Tian, Min Shi, Louis R. Pasquale, Lucy Q. Shen, Nazlee Zebardast, Tobias Elze, Mengyu Wang
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Feature Importance

Fairness (also known as equity interchangeably) in machine learning is important for societal well-being, but limited public datasets hinder its progress. Currently, no dedicated public medical datasets with imaging data for fairness learning are available, though minority groups suffer from more health issues. To address this gap, we introduce Harvard Glaucoma Fairness (Harvard-GF), a retinal nerve disease dataset with both 2D and 3D imaging data and balanced racial groups for glaucoma detection. Glaucoma is the leading cause of irreversible blindness globally with Blacks having doubled glaucoma prevalence than other races. We also propose a fair identity normalization (FIN) approach to equalize the feature importance between different identity groups. Our FIN approach is compared with various the-state-of-the-art fairness learning methods with superior performance in the racial, gender, and ethnicity fairness tasks with 2D and 3D imaging data, which demonstrate the utilities of our dataset Harvard-GF for fairness learning. To facilitate fairness comparisons between different models, we propose an equity-scaled performance measure, which can be flexibly used to compare all kinds of performance metrics in the context of fairness. The dataset and code are publicly accessible via \url{https://ophai.hms.harvard.edu/datasets/harvard-glaucoma-fairness-3300-samples/}.
Text Promptable Surgical Instrument Segmentation with Vision-Language Models
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Decoder, Diversity, Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel text promptable surgical instrument segmentation approach to overcome challenges associated with diversity and differentiation of surgical instruments in minimally invasive surgeries. We redefine the task as text promptable, thereby enabling a more nuanced comprehension of surgical instruments and adaptability to new instrument types. Inspired by recent advancements in vision-language models, we leverage pretrained image and text encoders as our model backbone and design a text promptable mask decoder consisting of attention- and convolution-based prompting schemes for surgical instrument segmentation prediction. Our model leverages multiple text prompts for each surgical instrument through a new mixture of prompts mechanism, resulting in enhanced segmentation performance. Additionally, we introduce a hard instrument area reinforcement module to improve image feature comprehension and segmentation precision. Extensive experiments on several surgical instrument segmentation datasets demonstrate our model's superior performance and promising generalization capability. To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of a promptable approach to surgical instrument segmentation, offering significant potential for practical application in the field of robotic-assisted surgery. Code is available at https://github.com/franciszzj/TP-SIS.
Encyclopedic VQA: Visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categories
Authors: Thomas Mensink, Jasper Uijlings, Lluis Castrejon, Arushi Goel, Felipe Cadar, Howard Zhou, Fei Sha, André Araujo, Vittorio Ferrari
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We propose Encyclopedic-VQA, a large scale visual question answering (VQA) dataset featuring visual questions about detailed properties of fine-grained categories and instances. It contains 221k unique question+answer pairs each matched with (up to) 5 images, resulting in a total of 1M VQA samples. Moreover, our dataset comes with a controlled knowledge base derived from Wikipedia, marking the evidence to support each answer. Empirically, we show that our dataset poses a hard challenge for large vision+language models as they perform poorly on our dataset: PaLI [14] is state-of-the-art on OK-VQA [37], yet it only achieves 13.0% accuracy on our dataset. Moreover, we experimentally show that progress on answering our encyclopedic questions can be achieved by augmenting large models with a mechanism that retrieves relevant information from the knowledge base. An oracle experiment with perfect retrieval achieves 87.0% accuracy on the single-hop portion of our dataset, and an automatic retrieval-augmented prototype yields 48.8%. We believe that our dataset enables future research on retrieval-augmented vision+language models. It is available at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/encyclopedic_vqa .
Transferring Knowledge for Food Image Segmentation using Transformers and Convolutions
Authors: Grant Sinha, Krish Parmar, Hilda Azimi, Amy Tai, Yuhao Chen, Alexander Wong, Pengcheng Xi
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Food image segmentation is an important task that has ubiquitous applications, such as estimating the nutritional value of a plate of food. Although machine learning models have been used for segmentation in this domain, food images pose several challenges. One challenge is that food items can overlap and mix, making them difficult to distinguish. Another challenge is the degree of inter-class similarity and intra-class variability, which is caused by the varying preparation methods and dishes a food item may be served in. Additionally, class imbalance is an inevitable issue in food datasets. To address these issues, two models are trained and compared, one based on convolutional neural networks and the other on Bidirectional Encoder representation for Image Transformers (BEiT). The models are trained and valuated using the FoodSeg103 dataset, which is identified as a robust benchmark for food image segmentation. The BEiT model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by achieving a mean intersection over union of 49.4 on FoodSeg103. This study provides insights into transfering knowledge using convolution and Transformer-based approaches in the food image domain.
Infrastructure Crack Segmentation: Boundary Guidance Method and Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Zhili He, Wang Chen, Jian Zhang, Yu-Hsing Wang
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Crack Segmentation, Segmentation

Cracks provide an essential indicator of infrastructure performance degradation, and achieving high-precision pixel-level crack segmentation is an issue of concern. Unlike the common research paradigms that adopt novel artificial intelligence (AI) methods directly, this paper examines the inherent characteristics of cracks so as to introduce boundary features into crack identification and then builds a boundary guidance crack segmentation model (BGCrack) with targeted structures and modules, including a high frequency module, global information modeling module, joint optimization module, etc. Extensive experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed designs and the effectiveness of the edge information in improving segmentation results. In addition, considering that notable open-source datasets mainly consist of asphalt pavement cracks because of ease of access, there is no standard and widely recognized dataset yet for steel structures, one of the primary structural forms in civil infrastructure. This paper provides a steel crack dataset that establishes a unified and fair benchmark for the identification of steel cracks.
DiffAug: A Diffuse-and-Denoise Augmentation for Training Robust Classifiers
Authors: Chandramouli Sastry, Sri Harsha Dumpala, Sageev Oore
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Out-of-Distribution Detection

We introduce DiffAug, a simple and efficient diffusion-based augmentation technique to train image classifiers for the crucial yet challenging goal of improved classifier robustness. Applying DiffAug to a given example consists of one forward-diffusion step followed by one reverse-diffusion step. Using both ResNet-50 and Vision Transformer architectures, we comprehensively evaluate classifiers trained with DiffAug and demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of single-step reverse diffusion in improving robustness to covariate shifts, certified adversarial accuracy and out of distribution detection. When we combine DiffAug with other augmentations such as AugMix and DeepAugment we demonstrate further improved robustness. Finally, building on this approach, we also improve classifier-guided diffusion wherein we observe improvements in: (i) classifier-generalization, (ii) gradient quality (i.e., improved perceptual alignment) and (iii) image generation performance. We thus introduce a computationally efficient technique for training with improved robustness that does not require any additional data, and effectively complements existing augmentation approaches.
Action Sensitivity Learning for the Ego4D Episodic Memory Challenge 2023
Authors: Jiayi Shao, Xiaohan Wang, Ruijie Quan, Yi Yang
Date: 2023-06-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Moment Queries, Natural Language Queries, Sensitivity

This report presents ReLER submission to two tracks in the Ego4D Episodic Memory Benchmark in CVPR 2023, including Natural Language Queries and Moment Queries. This solution inherits from our proposed Action Sensitivity Learning framework (ASL) to better capture discrepant information of frames. Further, we incorporate a series of stronger video features and fusion strategies. Our method achieves an average mAP of 29.34, ranking 1st in Moment Queries Challenge, and garners 19.79 mean R1, ranking 2nd in Natural Language Queries Challenge. Our code will be released.