pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accurate Segmentation of Optic Disc And Cup from Multiple Pseudo-labels by Noise-aware Learning
Authors: Tengjin Weng, Yang shen, Zhidong Zhao, Zhiming Cheng, Shuai Wang
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Segmentation

Optic disc and cup segmentation plays a crucial role in automating the screening and diagnosis of optic glaucoma. While data-driven convolutional neural networks (CNNs) show promise in this area, the inherent ambiguity of segmenting objects and background boundaries in the task of optic disc and cup segmentation leads to noisy annotations that impact model performance. To address this, we propose an innovative label-denoising method of Multiple Pseudo-labels Noise-aware Network (MPNN) for accurate optic disc and cup segmentation. Specifically, the Multiple Pseudo-labels Generation and Guided Denoising (MPGGD) module generates pseudo-labels by multiple different initialization networks trained on true labels, and the pixel-level consensus information extracted from these pseudo-labels guides to differentiate clean pixels from noisy pixels. The training framework of the MPNN is constructed by a teacher-student architecture to learn segmentation from clean pixels and noisy pixels. Particularly, such a framework adeptly leverages (i) reliable and fundamental insight from clean pixels and (ii) the supplementary knowledge within noisy pixels via multiple perturbation-based unsupervised consistency. Compared to other label-denoising methods, comprehensive experimental results on the RIGA dataset demonstrate our method's excellent performance. The code is available at https://github.com/wwwtttjjj/MPNN
Improving Adversarial Transferability via Model Alignment
Authors: Avery Ma, Amir-Massoud Farahmand, Yangchen Pan, Philip Torr, Jindong Gu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Neural networks are susceptible to adversarial perturbations that are transferable across different models. In this paper, we introduce a novel model alignment technique aimed at improving a given source model's ability in generating transferable adversarial perturbations. During the alignment process, the parameters of the source model are fine-tuned to minimize an alignment loss. This loss measures the divergence in the predictions between the source model and another, independently trained model, referred to as the witness model. To understand the effect of model alignment, we conduct a geometric analysis of the resulting changes in the loss landscape. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset, using a variety of model architectures, demonstrate that perturbations generated from aligned source models exhibit significantly higher transferability than those from the original source model.
PRS: Sharp Feature Priors for Resolution-Free Surface Remeshing
Authors: Natalia Soboleva, Olga Gorbunova, Maria Ivanova, Evgeny Burnaev, Matthias Nießner, Denis Zorin, Alexey Artemov
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

Surface reconstruction with preservation of geometric features is a challenging computer vision task. Despite significant progress in implicit shape reconstruction, state-of-the-art mesh extraction methods often produce aliased, perceptually distorted surfaces and lack scalability to high-resolution 3D shapes. We present a data-driven approach for automatic feature detection and remeshing that requires only a coarse, aliased mesh as input and scales to arbitrary resolution reconstructions. We define and learn a collection of surface-based fields to (1) capture sharp geometric features in the shape with an implicit vertexwise model and (2) approximate improvements in normals alignment obtained by applying edge-flips with an edgewise model. To support scaling to arbitrary complexity shapes, we learn our fields using local triangulated patches, fusing estimates on complete surface meshes. Our feature remeshing algorithm integrates the learned fields as sharp feature priors and optimizes vertex placement and mesh connectivity for maximum expected surface improvement. On a challenging collection of high-resolution shape reconstructions in the ABC dataset, our algorithm improves over state-of-the-art by 26% normals F-score and 42% perceptual $\text{RMSE}_{\text{v}}$.
Interpretability at Scale: Identifying Causal Mechanisms in Alpaca
Authors: Zhengxuan Wu, Atticus Geiger, Thomas Icard, Christopher Potts, Noah D. Goodman
Date: 2023-05-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Obtaining human-interpretable explanations of large, general-purpose language models is an urgent goal for AI safety. However, it is just as important that our interpretability methods are faithful to the causal dynamics underlying model behavior and able to robustly generalize to unseen inputs. Distributed Alignment Search (DAS) is a powerful gradient descent method grounded in a theory of causal abstraction that has uncovered perfect alignments between interpretable symbolic algorithms and small deep learning models fine-tuned for specific tasks. In the present paper, we scale DAS significantly by replacing the remaining brute-force search steps with learned parameters -- an approach we call Boundless DAS. This enables us to efficiently search for interpretable causal structure in large language models while they follow instructions. We apply Boundless DAS to the Alpaca model (7B parameters), which, off the shelf, solves a simple numerical reasoning problem. With Boundless DAS, we discover that Alpaca does this by implementing a causal model with two interpretable boolean variables. Furthermore, we find that the alignment of neural representations with these variables is robust to changes in inputs and instructions. These findings mark a first step toward faithfully understanding the inner-workings of our ever-growing and most widely deployed language models. Our tool is extensible to larger LLMs and is released publicly at `https://github.com/stanfordnlp/pyvene`.
Language Embedded 3D Gaussians for Open-Vocabulary Scene Understanding
Authors: Jin-Chuan Shi, Miao Wang, Hao-Bin Duan, Shao-Hua Guan
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: GPU, Inductive Bias, Novel View Synthesis, Object Localization, Quantization, Scene Understanding

Open-vocabulary querying in 3D space is challenging but essential for scene understanding tasks such as object localization and segmentation. Language-embedded scene representations have made progress by incorporating language features into 3D spaces. However, their efficacy heavily depends on neural networks that are resource-intensive in training and rendering. Although recent 3D Gaussians offer efficient and high-quality novel view synthesis, directly embedding language features in them leads to prohibitive memory usage and decreased performance. In this work, we introduce Language Embedded 3D Gaussians, a novel scene representation for open-vocabulary query tasks. Instead of embedding high-dimensional raw semantic features on 3D Gaussians, we propose a dedicated quantization scheme that drastically alleviates the memory requirement, and a novel embedding procedure that achieves smoother yet high accuracy query, countering the multi-view feature inconsistencies and the high-frequency inductive bias in point-based representations. Our comprehensive experiments show that our representation achieves the best visual quality and language querying accuracy across current language-embedded representations, while maintaining real-time rendering frame rates on a single desktop GPU.
HOLD: Category-agnostic 3D Reconstruction of Interacting Hands and Objects from Video
Authors: Zicong Fan, Maria Parelli, Maria Eleni Kadoglou, Muhammed Kocabas, Xu Chen, Michael J. Black, Otmar Hilliges
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Object, Object Reconstruction

Since humans interact with diverse objects every day, the holistic 3D capture of these interactions is important to understand and model human behaviour. However, most existing methods for hand-object reconstruction from RGB either assume pre-scanned object templates or heavily rely on limited 3D hand-object data, restricting their ability to scale and generalize to more unconstrained interaction settings. To this end, we introduce HOLD -- the first category-agnostic method that reconstructs an articulated hand and object jointly from a monocular interaction video. We develop a compositional articulated implicit model that can reconstruct disentangled 3D hand and object from 2D images. We also further incorporate hand-object constraints to improve hand-object poses and consequently the reconstruction quality. Our method does not rely on 3D hand-object annotations while outperforming fully-supervised baselines in both in-the-lab and challenging in-the-wild settings. Moreover, we qualitatively show its robustness in reconstructing from in-the-wild videos. Code: https://github.com/zc-alexfan/hold
VTimeLLM: Empower LLM to Grasp Video Moments
Authors: Bin Huang, Xin Wang, Hong Chen, Zihan Song, Wenwu Zhu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Dense Video Captioning, Temporal Relation Extraction, VCGBench-Diverse, Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking, Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Consistency), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Contextual Understanding), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Correctness of Information), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Detail Orientation)), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Temporal Understanding), Video Captioning, Video Grounding, Video Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable text understanding capabilities, which have been extended as Video LLMs to handle video data for comprehending visual details. However, existing Video LLMs can only provide a coarse description of the entire video, failing to capture the precise start and end time boundary of specific events. In this paper, we solve this issue via proposing VTimeLLM, a novel Video LLM designed for fine-grained video moment understanding and reasoning with respect to time boundary. Specifically, our VTimeLLM adopts a boundary-aware three-stage training strategy, which respectively utilizes image-text pairs for feature alignment, multiple-event videos to increase temporal-boundary awareness, and high-quality video-instruction tuning to further improve temporal understanding ability as well as align with human intents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that in fine-grained time-related comprehension tasks for videos such as Temporal Video Grounding and Dense Video Captioning, VTimeLLM significantly outperforms existing Video LLMs. Besides, benefits from the fine-grained temporal understanding of the videos further enable VTimeLLM to beat existing Video LLMs in video dialogue benchmark, showing its superior cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities.
Layered Rendering Diffusion Model for Controllable Zero-Shot Image Synthesis
Authors: Zipeng Qi, Guoxi Huang, Chenyang Liu, Fei Ye
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

This paper introduces innovative solutions to enhance spatial controllability in diffusion models reliant on text queries. We first introduce vision guidance as a foundational spatial cue within the perturbed distribution. This significantly refines the search space in a zero-shot paradigm to focus on the image sampling process adhering to the spatial layout conditions. To precisely control the spatial layouts of multiple visual concepts with the employment of vision guidance, we propose a universal framework, Layered Rendering Diffusion (LRDiff), which constructs an image-rendering process with multiple layers, each of which applies the vision guidance to instructively estimate the denoising direction for a single object. Such a layered rendering strategy effectively prevents issues like unintended conceptual blending or mismatches while allowing for more coherent and contextually accurate image synthesis. The proposed method offers a more efficient and accurate means of synthesising images that align with specific layout and contextual requirements. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our method outperforms existing techniques, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in two specific layout-to-image tasks: bounding box-to-image and instance maskto-image. Furthermore, we extend the proposed framework to enable spatially controllable editing
E2PNet: Event to Point Cloud Registration with Spatio-Temporal Representation Learning
Authors: Xiuhong Lin, Changjie Qiu, Zhipeng Cai, Siqi Shen, Yu Zang, Weiquan Liu, Xuesheng Bian, Matthias Müller, Cheng Wang
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Object Recognition, Point Cloud Registration, Representation Learning

Event cameras have emerged as a promising vision sensor in recent years due to their unparalleled temporal resolution and dynamic range. While registration of 2D RGB images to 3D point clouds is a long-standing problem in computer vision, no prior work studies 2D-3D registration for event cameras. To this end, we propose E2PNet, the first learning-based method for event-to-point cloud registration. The core of E2PNet is a novel feature representation network called Event-Points-to-Tensor (EP2T), which encodes event data into a 2D grid-shaped feature tensor. This grid-shaped feature enables matured RGB-based frameworks to be easily used for event-to-point cloud registration, without changing hyper-parameters and the training procedure. EP2T treats the event input as spatio-temporal point clouds. Unlike standard 3D learning architectures that treat all dimensions of point clouds equally, the novel sampling and information aggregation modules in EP2T are designed to handle the inhomogeneity of the spatial and temporal dimensions. Experiments on the MVSEC and VECtor datasets demonstrate the superiority of E2PNet over hand-crafted and other learning-based methods. Compared to RGB-based registration, E2PNet is more robust to extreme illumination or fast motion due to the use of event data. Beyond 2D-3D registration, we also show the potential of EP2T for other vision tasks such as flow estimation, event-to-image reconstruction and object recognition. The source code can be found at: https://github.com/Xmu-qcj/E2PNet.
TeG-DG: Textually Guided Domain Generalization for Face Anti-Spoofing
Authors: Lianrui Mu, Jianhong Bai, Xiaoxuan He, Jiangnan Ye, Xiaoyu Liang, Yuchen Yang, Jiedong Zhuang, Haoji Hu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Face Anti-Spoofing

Enhancing the domain generalization performance of Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) techniques has emerged as a research focus. Existing methods are dedicated to extracting domain-invariant features from various training domains. Despite the promising performance, the extracted features inevitably contain residual style feature bias (e.g., illumination, capture device), resulting in inferior generalization performance. In this paper, we propose an alternative and effective solution, the Textually Guided Domain Generalization (TeG-DG) framework, which can effectively leverage text information for cross-domain alignment. Our core insight is that text, as a more abstract and universal form of expression, can capture the commonalities and essential characteristics across various attacks, bridging the gap between different image domains. Contrary to existing vision-language models, the proposed framework is elaborately designed to enhance the domain generalization ability of the FAS task. Concretely, we first design a Hierarchical Attention Fusion (HAF) module to enable adaptive aggregation of visual features at different levels; Then, a Textual-Enhanced Visual Discriminator (TEVD) is proposed for not only better alignment between the two modalities but also to regularize the classifier with unbiased text features. TeG-DG significantly outperforms previous approaches, especially in situations with extremely limited source domain data (~14% and ~12% improvements on HTER and AUC respectively), showcasing impressive few-shot performance.
CAT-DM: Controllable Accelerated Virtual Try-on with Diffusion Model
Authors: Jianhao Zeng, Dan Song, Weizhi Nie, Hongshuo Tian, Tongtong Wang, AnAn Liu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Virtual Try-on

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) dominate the research field in image-based virtual try-on, but have not resolved problems such as unnatural deformation of garments and the blurry generation quality. While the generative quality of diffusion models is impressive, achieving controllability poses a significant challenge when applying it to virtual try-on and multiple denoising iterations limit its potential for real-time applications. In this paper, we propose Controllable Accelerated virtual Try-on with Diffusion Model (CAT-DM). To enhance the controllability, a basic diffusion-based virtual try-on network is designed, which utilizes ControlNet to introduce additional control conditions and improves the feature extraction of garment images. In terms of acceleration, CAT-DM initiates a reverse denoising process with an implicit distribution generated by a pre-trained GAN-based model. Compared with previous try-on methods based on diffusion models, CAT-DM not only retains the pattern and texture details of the inshop garment but also reduces the sampling steps without compromising generation quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of CAT-DM against both GANbased and diffusion-based methods in producing more realistic images and accurately reproducing garment patterns.
MV-CLIP: Multi-View CLIP for Zero-shot 3D Shape Recognition
Authors: Dan Song, Xinwei Fu, Ning Liu, Weizhi Nie, Wenhui Li, Lanjun Wang, You Yang, AnAn Liu
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Classification, 3D Shape Recognition, Zero-shot 3D classification

Large-scale pre-trained models have demonstrated impressive performance in vision and language tasks within open-world scenarios. Due to the lack of comparable pre-trained models for 3D shapes, recent methods utilize language-image pre-training to realize zero-shot 3D shape recognition. However, due to the modality gap, pretrained language-image models are not confident enough in the generalization to 3D shape recognition. Consequently, this paper aims to improve the confidence with view selection and hierarchical prompts. Leveraging the CLIP model as an example, we employ view selection on the vision side by identifying views with high prediction confidence from multiple rendered views of a 3D shape. On the textual side, the strategy of hierarchical prompts is proposed for the first time. The first layer prompts several classification candidates with traditional class-level descriptions, while the second layer refines the prediction based on function-level descriptions or further distinctions between the candidates. Remarkably, without the need for additional training, our proposed method achieves impressive zero-shot 3D classification accuracies of 84.44%, 91.51%, and 66.17% on ModelNet40, ModelNet10, and ShapeNet Core55, respectively. Furthermore, we will make the code publicly available to facilitate reproducibility and further research in this area.
RainAI -- Precipitation Nowcasting from Satellite Data
Authors: Rafael Pablos Sarabia, Joachim Nyborg, Morten Birk, Ira Assent
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00

This paper presents a solution to the Weather4Cast 2023 competition, where the goal is to forecast high-resolution precipitation with an 8-hour lead time using lower-resolution satellite radiance images. We propose a simple, yet effective method for spatiotemporal feature learning using a 2D U-Net model, that outperforms the official 3D U-Net baseline in both performance and efficiency. We place emphasis on refining the dataset, through importance sampling and dataset preparation, and show that such techniques have a significant impact on performance. We further study an alternative cross-entropy loss function that improves performance over the standard mean squared error loss, while also enabling models to produce probabilistic outputs. Additional techniques are explored regarding the generation of predictions at different lead times, specifically through Conditioning Lead Time. Lastly, to generate high-resolution forecasts, we evaluate standard and learned upsampling methods. The code and trained parameters are available at https://github.com/rafapablos/w4c23-rainai.
On Exact Inversion of DPM-Solvers
Authors: Seongmin Hong, Kyeonghyun Lee, Suh Yoon Jeon, Hyewon Bae, Se Young Chun
Date: 2023-11-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Denoising

Diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) are a key component in modern generative models. DPM-solvers have achieved reduced latency and enhanced quality significantly, but have posed challenges to find the exact inverse (i.e., finding the initial noise from the given image). Here we investigate the exact inversions for DPM-solvers and propose algorithms to perform them when samples are generated by the first-order as well as higher-order DPM-solvers. For each explicit denoising step in DPM-solvers, we formulated the inversions using implicit methods such as gradient descent or forward step method to ensure the robustness to large classifier-free guidance unlike the prior approach using fixed-point iteration. Experimental results demonstrated that our proposed exact inversion methods significantly reduced the error of both image and noise reconstructions, greatly enhanced the ability to distinguish invisible watermarks and well prevented unintended background changes consistently during image editing. Project page: \url{https://smhongok.github.io/inv-dpm.html}.
MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers
Authors: Lili Yu, Dániel Simig, Colin Flaherty, Armen Aghajanyan, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis
Date: 2023-05-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Decoder, Density Estimation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Autoregressive transformers are spectacular models for short sequences but scale poorly to long sequences such as high-resolution images, podcasts, code, or books. We proposed Megabyte, a multi-scale decoder architecture that enables end-to-end differentiable modeling of sequences of over one million bytes. Megabyte segments sequences into patches and uses a local submodel within patches and a global model between patches. This enables sub-quadratic self-attention, much larger feedforward layers for the same compute, and improved parallelism during decoding -- unlocking better performance at reduced cost for both training and generation. Extensive experiments show that Megabyte allows byte-level models to perform competitively with subword models on long context language modeling, achieve state-of-the-art density estimation on ImageNet, and model audio from raw files. Together, these results establish the viability of tokenization-free autoregressive sequence modeling at scale.