pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Weakly Supervised Scene Text Generation for Low-resource Languages
Authors: Yangchen Xie, Xinyuan Chen, Hongjian Zhan, Palaiahankote Shivakum, Bing Yin, Cong Liu, Yue Lu
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition, Text Generation

A large number of annotated training images is crucial for training successful scene text recognition models. However, collecting sufficient datasets can be a labor-intensive and costly process, particularly for low-resource languages. To address this challenge, auto-generating text data has shown promise in alleviating the problem. Unfortunately, existing scene text generation methods typically rely on a large amount of paired data, which is difficult to obtain for low-resource languages. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised scene text generation method that leverages a few recognition-level labels as weak supervision. The proposed method is able to generate a large amount of scene text images with diverse backgrounds and font styles through cross-language generation. Our method disentangles the content and style features of scene text images, with the former representing textual information and the latter representing characteristics such as font, alignment, and background. To preserve the complete content structure of generated images, we introduce an integrated attention module. Furthermore, to bridge the style gap in the style of different languages, we incorporate a pre-trained font classifier. We evaluate our method using state-of-the-art scene text recognition models. Experiments demonstrate that our generated scene text significantly improves the scene text recognition accuracy and help achieve higher accuracy when complemented with other generative methods.
Adaptive Window Pruning for Efficient Local Motion Deblurring
Authors: Haoying Li, Jixin Zhao, Shangchen Zhou, Huajun Feng, Chongyi Li, Chen Change Loy
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring

Local motion blur commonly occurs in real-world photography due to the mixing between moving objects and stationary backgrounds during exposure. Existing image deblurring methods predominantly focus on global deblurring, inadvertently affecting the sharpness of backgrounds in locally blurred images and wasting unnecessary computation on sharp pixels, especially for high-resolution images. This paper aims to adaptively and efficiently restore high-resolution locally blurred images. We propose a local motion deblurring vision Transformer (LMD-ViT) built on adaptive window pruning Transformer blocks (AdaWPT). To focus deblurring on local regions and reduce computation, AdaWPT prunes unnecessary windows, only allowing the active windows to be involved in the deblurring processes. The pruning operation relies on the blurriness confidence predicted by a confidence predictor that is trained end-to-end using a reconstruction loss with Gumbel-Softmax re-parameterization and a pruning loss guided by annotated blur masks. Our method removes local motion blur effectively without distorting sharp regions, demonstrated by its exceptional perceptual and quantitative improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our approach substantially reduces FLOPs by 66% and achieves more than a twofold increase in inference speed compared to Transformer-based deblurring methods. We will make our code and annotated blur masks publicly available.
Visual Question Answering in Remote Sensing with Cross-Attention and Multimodal Information Bottleneck
Authors: Jayesh Songara, Shivam Pande, Shabnam Choudhury, Biplab Banerjee, Rajbabu Velmurugan
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In this research, we deal with the problem of visual question answering (VQA) in remote sensing. While remotely sensed images contain information significant for the task of identification and object detection, they pose a great challenge in their processing because of high dimensionality, volume and redundancy. Furthermore, processing image information jointly with language features adds additional constraints, such as mapping the corresponding image and language features. To handle this problem, we propose a cross attention based approach combined with information maximization. The CNN-LSTM based cross-attention highlights the information in the image and language modalities and establishes a connection between the two, while information maximization learns a low dimensional bottleneck layer, that has all the relevant information required to carry out the VQA task. We evaluate our method on two VQA remote sensing datasets of different resolutions. For the high resolution dataset, we achieve an overall accuracy of 79.11% and 73.87% for the two test sets while for the low resolution dataset, we achieve an overall accuracy of 85.98%.
A Spectral Perspective towards Understanding and Improving Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Binxiao Huang, Rui Lin, Chaofan Tao, Ngai Wong
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are incredibly vulnerable to crafted, imperceptible adversarial perturbations. While adversarial training (AT) has proven to be an effective defense approach, the AT mechanism for robustness improvement is not fully understood. This work investigates AT from a spectral perspective, adding new insights to the design of effective defenses. In particular, we show that AT induces the deep model to focus more on the low-frequency region, which retains the shape-biased representations, to gain robustness. Further, we find that the spectrum of a white-box attack is primarily distributed in regions the model focuses on, and the perturbation attacks the spectral bands where the model is vulnerable. Based on this observation, to train a model tolerant to frequency-varying perturbation, we propose a spectral alignment regularization (SAR) such that the spectral output inferred by an attacked adversarial input stays as close as possible to its natural input counterpart. Experiments demonstrate that SAR and its weight averaging (WA) extension could significantly improve the robust accuracy by 1.14% ~ 3.87% relative to the standard AT, across multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and Tiny ImageNet), and various attacks (PGD, C&W and Autoattack), without any extra data.
HOKEM: Human and Object Keypoint-based Extension Module for Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Yoshiki Ito
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection for capturing relationships between humans and objects is an important task in the semantic understanding of images. When processing human and object keypoints extracted from an image using a graph convolutional network (GCN) to detect HOI, it is crucial to extract appropriate object keypoints regardless of the object type and to design a GCN that accurately captures the spatial relationships between keypoints. This paper presents the human and object keypoint-based extension module (HOKEM) as an easy-to-use extension module to improve the accuracy of the conventional detection models. The proposed object keypoint extraction method is simple yet accurately represents the shapes of various objects. Moreover, the proposed human-object adaptive GCN (HO-AGCN), which introduces adaptive graph optimization and attention mechanism, accurately captures the spatial relationships between keypoints. Experiments using the HOI dataset, V-COCO, showed that HOKEM boosted the accuracy of an appearance-based model by a large margin.
Improving Reference-based Distinctive Image Captioning with Contrastive Rewards
Authors: Yangjun Mao, Jun Xiao, Dong Zhang, Meng Cao, Jian Shao, Yueting Zhuang, Long Chen
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Image Captioning

Distinctive Image Captioning (DIC) -- generating distinctive captions that describe the unique details of a target image -- has received considerable attention over the last few years. A recent DIC method proposes to generate distinctive captions by comparing the target image with a set of semantic-similar reference images, i.e., reference-based DIC (Ref-DIC). It aims to force the generated captions to distinguish between the target image and the reference image. To ensure Ref-DIC models really perceive the unique objects (or attributes) in target images, we propose two new Ref-DIC benchmarks and develop a Transformer-based Ref-DIC baseline TransDIC. The model only extracts visual features from the target image, but also encodes the differences between objects in the target and reference images. Taking one step further, we propose a stronger TransDIC++, which consists of an extra contrastive learning module to make full use of the reference images. This new module is model-agnostic, which can be easily incorporated into various Ref-DIC architectures. Finally, for more trustworthy benchmarking, we propose a new evaluation metric named DisCIDEr for Ref-DIC, which evaluates both the accuracy and distinctiveness of the generated captions. Experimental results demonstrate that our TransDIC++ can generate distinctive captions. Besides, it outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the two new benchmarks over different metrics.
AttResDU-Net: Medical Image Segmentation Using Attention-based Residual Double U-Net
Authors: Akib Mohammed Khan, Alif Ashrafee, Fahim Shahriar Khan, Md. Bakhtiar Hasan, Md. Hasanul Kabir
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Manually inspecting polyps from a colonoscopy for colorectal cancer or performing a biopsy on skin lesions for skin cancer are time-consuming, laborious, and complex procedures. Automatic medical image segmentation aims to expedite this diagnosis process. However, numerous challenges exist due to significant variations in the appearance and sizes of objects with no distinct boundaries. This paper proposes an attention-based residual Double U-Net architecture (AttResDU-Net) that improves on the existing medical image segmentation networks. Inspired by the Double U-Net, this architecture incorporates attention gates on the skip connections and residual connections in the convolutional blocks. The attention gates allow the model to retain more relevant spatial information by suppressing irrelevant feature representation from the down-sampling path for which the model learns to focus on target regions of varying shapes and sizes. Moreover, the residual connections help to train deeper models by ensuring better gradient flow. We conducted experiments on three datasets: CVC Clinic-DB, ISIC 2018, and the 2018 Data Science Bowl datasets and achieved Dice Coefficient scores of 94.35%, 91.68% and 92.45% respectively. Our results suggest that AttResDU-Net can be facilitated as a reliable method for automatic medical image segmentation in practice.
Introducing A Novel Method For Adaptive Thresholding In Brain Tumor Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Ali Fayzi, Mohammad Fayzi, Mostafa Forotan
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

One of the most significant challenges in the field of deep learning and medical image segmentation is to determine an appropriate threshold for classifying each pixel. This threshold is a value above which the model's output is considered to belong to a specific class. Manual thresholding based on personal experience is error-prone and time-consuming, particularly for complex problems such as medical images. Traditional methods for thresholding are not effective for determining the threshold value for such problems. To tackle this challenge, automatic thresholding methods using deep learning have been proposed. However, the main issue with these methods is that they often determine the threshold value statically without considering changes in input data. Since input data can be dynamic and may change over time, threshold determination should be adaptive and consider input data and environmental conditions.
A ground-based dataset and a diffusion model for on-orbit low-light image enhancement
Authors: Yiman Zhu, Lu Wang, Jingyi Yuan, Yu Guo
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity, Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

On-orbit service is important for maintaining the sustainability of space environment. Space-based visible camera is an economical and lightweight sensor for situation awareness during on-orbit service. However, it can be easily affected by the low illumination environment. Recently, deep learning has achieved remarkable success in image enhancement of natural images, but seldom applied in space due to the data bottleneck. In this article, we first propose a dataset of the Beidou Navigation Satellite for on-orbit low-light image enhancement (LLIE). In the automatic data collection scheme, we focus on reducing domain gap and improving the diversity of the dataset. we collect hardware in-the-loop images based on a robotic simulation testbed imitating space lighting conditions. To evenly sample poses of different orientation and distance without collision, a collision-free working space and pose stratified sampling is proposed. Afterwards, a novel diffusion model is proposed. To enhance the image contrast without over-exposure and blurring details, we design a fused attention to highlight the structure and dark region. Finally, we compare our method with previous methods using our dataset, which indicates that our method has a better capacity in on-orbit LLIE.
On Evaluating the Adversarial Robustness of Semantic Segmentation Models
Authors: Levente Halmosi, Mark Jelasity
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Achieving robustness against adversarial input perturbation is an important and intriguing problem in machine learning. In the area of semantic image segmentation, a number of adversarial training approaches have been proposed as a defense against adversarial perturbation, but the methodology of evaluating the robustness of the models is still lacking, compared to image classification. Here, we demonstrate that, just like in image classification, it is important to evaluate the models over several different and hard attacks. We propose a set of gradient based iterative attacks and show that it is essential to perform a large number of iterations. We include attacks against the internal representations of the models as well. We apply two types of attacks: maximizing the error with a bounded perturbation, and minimizing the perturbation for a given level of error. Using this set of attacks, we show for the first time that a number of models in previous work that are claimed to be robust are in fact not robust at all. We then evaluate simple adversarial training algorithms that produce reasonably robust models even under our set of strong attacks. Our results indicate that a key design decision to achieve any robustness is to use only adversarial examples during training. However, this introduces a trade-off between robustness and accuracy.
Enhancing Mapless Trajectory Prediction through Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Yuning Wang, Pu Zhang, Lei Bai, Jianru Xue
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Knowledge Distillation, Prediction, Trajectory Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction

Scene information plays a crucial role in trajectory forecasting systems for autonomous driving by providing semantic clues and constraints on potential future paths of traffic agents. Prevalent trajectory prediction techniques often take high-definition maps (HD maps) as part of the inputs to provide scene knowledge. Although HD maps offer accurate road information, they may suffer from the high cost of annotation or restrictions of law that limits their widespread use. Therefore, those methods are still expected to generate reliable prediction results in mapless scenarios. In this paper, we tackle the problem of improving the consistency of multi-modal prediction trajectories and the real road topology when map information is unavailable during the test phase. Specifically, we achieve this by training a map-based prediction teacher network on the annotated samples and transferring the knowledge to a student mapless prediction network using a two-fold knowledge distillation framework. Our solution is generalizable for common trajectory prediction networks and does not bring extra computation burden. Experimental results show that our method stably improves prediction performance in mapless mode on many widely used state-of-the-art trajectory prediction baselines, compensating for the gaps caused by the absence of HD maps. Qualitative visualization results demonstrate that our approach helps infer unseen map information.
BiFF: Bi-level Future Fusion with Polyline-based Coordinate for Interactive Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Yiyao Zhu, Di Luan, Shaojie Shen
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting future trajectories of surrounding agents is essential for safety-critical autonomous driving. Most existing work focuses on predicting marginal trajectories for each agent independently. However, it has rarely been explored in predicting joint trajectories for interactive agents. In this work, we propose Bi-level Future Fusion (BiFF) to explicitly capture future interactions between interactive agents. Concretely, BiFF fuses the high-level future intentions followed by low-level future behaviors. Then the polyline-based coordinate is specifically designed for multi-agent prediction to ensure data efficiency, frame robustness, and prediction accuracy. Experiments show that BiFF achieves state-of-the-art performance on the interactive prediction benchmark of Waymo Open Motion Dataset.
DomainStudio: Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models for Domain-Driven Image Generation using Limited Data
Authors: Jingyuan Zhu, Huimin Ma, Jiansheng Chen, Jian Yuan
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation

Denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) have been proven capable of synthesizing high-quality images with remarkable diversity when trained on large amounts of data. Typical diffusion models and modern large-scale conditional generative models like text-to-image generative models are vulnerable to overfitting when fine-tuned on extremely limited data. Existing works have explored subject-driven generation using a reference set containing a few images. However, few prior works explore DDPM-based domain-driven generation, which aims to learn the common features of target domains while maintaining diversity. This paper proposes a novel DomainStudio approach to adapt DDPMs pre-trained on large-scale source datasets to target domains using limited data. It is designed to keep the diversity of subjects provided by source domains and get high-quality and diverse adapted samples in target domains. We propose to keep the relative distances between adapted samples to achieve considerable generation diversity. In addition, we further enhance the learning of high-frequency details for better generation quality. Our approach is compatible with both unconditional and conditional diffusion models. This work makes the first attempt to realize unconditional few-shot image generation with diffusion models, achieving better quality and greater diversity than current state-of-the-art GAN-based approaches. Moreover, this work also significantly relieves overfitting for conditional generation and realizes high-quality domain-driven generation, further expanding the applicable scenarios of modern large-scale text-to-image models.
A Gated Cross-domain Collaborative Network for Underwater Object Detection
Authors: Linhui Dai, Hong Liu, Pinhao Song, Mengyuan Liu
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection, UIE

Underwater object detection (UOD) plays a significant role in aquaculture and marine environmental protection. Considering the challenges posed by low contrast and low-light conditions in underwater environments, several underwater image enhancement (UIE) methods have been proposed to improve the quality of underwater images. However, only using the enhanced images does not improve the performance of UOD, since it may unavoidably remove or alter critical patterns and details of underwater objects. In contrast, we believe that exploring the complementary information from the two domains is beneficial for UOD. The raw image preserves the natural characteristics of the scene and texture information of the objects, while the enhanced image improves the visibility of underwater objects. Based on this perspective, we propose a Gated Cross-domain Collaborative Network (GCC-Net) to address the challenges of poor visibility and low contrast in underwater environments, which comprises three dedicated components. Firstly, a real-time UIE method is employed to generate enhanced images, which can improve the visibility of objects in low-contrast areas. Secondly, a cross-domain feature interaction module is introduced to facilitate the interaction and mine complementary information between raw and enhanced image features. Thirdly, to prevent the contamination of unreliable generated results, a gated feature fusion module is proposed to adaptively control the fusion ratio of cross-domain information. Our method presents a new UOD paradigm from the perspective of cross-domain information interaction and fusion. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCC-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on four underwater datasets.
Scribble-supervised Cell Segmentation Using Multiscale Contrastive Regularization
Authors: Hyun-Jic Oh, Kanggeun Lee, Won-Ki Jeong
Date: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Current state-of-the-art supervised deep learning-based segmentation approaches have demonstrated superior performance in medical image segmentation tasks. However, such supervised approaches require fully annotated pixel-level ground-truth labels, which are labor-intensive and time-consuming to acquire. Recently, Scribble2Label (S2L) demonstrated that using only a handful of scribbles with self-supervised learning can generate accurate segmentation results without full annotation. However, owing to the relatively small size of scribbles, the model is prone to overfit and the results may be biased to the selection of scribbles. In this work, we address this issue by employing a novel multiscale contrastive regularization term for S2L. The main idea is to extract features from intermediate layers of the neural network for contrastive loss so that structures at various scales can be effectively separated. To verify the efficacy of our method, we conducted ablation studies on well-known datasets, such as Data Science Bowl 2018 and MoNuSeg. The results show that the proposed multiscale contrastive loss is effective in improving the performance of S2L, which is comparable to that of the supervised learning segmentation method.