pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
One-Pot Multi-Frame Denoising
Authors: Lujia Jin, Shi Zhao, Lei Zhu, Qian Chen, Yanye Lu
Date: 2023-02-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity

The performance of learning-based denoising largely depends on clean supervision. However, it is difficult to obtain clean images in many scenes. On the contrary, the capture of multiple noisy frames for the same field of view is available and often natural in real life. Therefore, it is necessary to avoid the restriction of clean labels and make full use of noisy data for model training. So we propose an unsupervised learning strategy named one-pot denoising (OPD) for multi-frame images. OPD is the first proposed unsupervised multi-frame denoising (MFD) method. Different from the traditional supervision schemes including both supervised Noise2Clean (N2C) and unsupervised Noise2Noise (N2N), OPD executes mutual supervision among all of the multiple frames, which gives learning more diversity of supervision and allows models to mine deeper into the correlation among frames. N2N has also been proved to be actually a simplified case of the proposed OPD. From the perspectives of data allocation and loss function, two specific implementations, random coupling (RC) and alienation loss (AL), are respectively provided to accomplish OPD during model training. In practice, our experiments demonstrate that OPD behaves as the SOTA unsupervised denoising method and is comparable to supervised N2C methods for synthetic Gaussian and Poisson noise, and real-world optical coherence tomography (OCT) speckle noise.
ArtiFact: A Large-Scale Dataset with Artificial and Factual Images for Generalizable and Robust Synthetic Image Detection
Authors: Md Awsafur Rahman, Bishmoy Paul, Najibul Haque Sarker, Zaber Ibn Abdul Hakim, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Multi-class Classification, Synthetic Image Attribution, Synthetic Image Detection

Synthetic image generation has opened up new opportunities but has also created threats in regard to privacy, authenticity, and security. Detecting fake images is of paramount importance to prevent illegal activities, and previous research has shown that generative models leave unique patterns in their synthetic images that can be exploited to detect them. However, the fundamental problem of generalization remains, as even state-of-the-art detectors encounter difficulty when facing generators never seen during training. To assess the generalizability and robustness of synthetic image detectors in the face of real-world impairments, this paper presents a large-scale dataset named ArtiFact, comprising diverse generators, object categories, and real-world challenges. Moreover, the proposed multi-class classification scheme, combined with a filter stride reduction strategy addresses social platform impairments and effectively detects synthetic images from both seen and unseen generators. The proposed solution significantly outperforms other top teams by 8.34% on Test 1, 1.26% on Test 2, and 15.08% on Test 3 in the IEEE VIP Cup challenge at ICIP 2022, as measured by the accuracy metric.
Multi-scale Motion-Aware Module for Video Action Recognition
Authors: Huai-Wei Peng, Yu-Chee Tseng
Date: 2023-02-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ECCV Workshops 2023 2
Tasks: Action Recognition, GPU, Optical Flow Estimation, Temporal Action Localization

Due to the lengthy computing time for optical flow, recent
works have proposed to use the correlation operation as an alternative approach to extracting motion features. Although using correlation operations shows significant improvement with negligible FLOPs,
it introduces much more latency per FLOP than convolution operations and increases noticeable latency as a larger searching patch is
applied. Nonetheless, shrinking the searching patch in correlation operation is doomed to degrade its performance owing to the inability to
capture larger displacements. In this paper, we propose an effective and
low-latency Multi-Scale Motion-Aware (MSMA) module. It uses smaller
searching patches at different scales for efficiently extracting motion features from large displacements. It can be installed into and generalizes
well on different CNN backbones. When installed into TSM ResNet-50,
the MSMA module introduces ≈ 17.6% more latency on NVIDIA Tesla
V100 GPU, yet, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on SomethingSomething V1 & V2 and Diving-48.
A framework for benchmarking class-out-of-distribution detection and its application to ImageNet
Authors: Ido Galil, Mohammed Dabbah, Ran El-Yaniv
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR 2023 2
Tasks: Benchmarking, Knowledge Distillation, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

When deployed for risk-sensitive tasks, deep neural networks must be able to detect instances with labels from outside the distribution for which they were trained. In this paper we present a novel framework to benchmark the ability of image classifiers to detect class-out-of-distribution instances (i.e., instances whose true labels do not appear in the training distribution) at various levels of detection difficulty. We apply this technique to ImageNet, and benchmark 525 pretrained, publicly available, ImageNet-1k classifiers. The code for generating a benchmark for any ImageNet-1k classifier, along with the benchmarks prepared for the above-mentioned 525 models is available at https://github.com/mdabbah/COOD_benchmarking. The usefulness of the proposed framework and its advantage over alternative existing benchmarks is demonstrated by analyzing the results obtained for these models, which reveals numerous novel observations including: (1) knowledge distillation consistently improves class-out-of-distribution (C-OOD) detection performance; (2) a subset of ViTs performs better C-OOD detection than any other model; (3) the language--vision CLIP model achieves good zero-shot detection performance, with its best instance outperforming 96% of all other models evaluated; (4) accuracy and in-distribution ranking are positively correlated to C-OOD detection; and (5) we compare various confidence functions for C-OOD detection. Our companion paper, also published in ICLR 2023 (What Can We Learn From The Selective Prediction And Uncertainty Estimation Performance Of 523 Imagenet Classifiers), examines the uncertainty estimation performance (ranking, calibration, and selective prediction performance) of these classifiers in an in-distribution setting.
Shape Matters: Deformable Patch Attack
Authors: Zhaoyu Chen, Bo Li, Shuang Wu, Jianghe Xu, Shouhong Ding, Wenqiang Zhang
Date: 2022-10-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: European Conference on  Computer Vision 2022 10

Though deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in computer vision, they are susceptible and vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples which can mislead DNNs to incorrect outputs. Patch attack is one of the most threatening forms, which has the potential to threaten the security of real-world systems. Previous work always assumes patches to have fixed shapes, such as circles or rectangles, and it does not consider the shape of patches as a factor in patch attacks. To explore this issue, we propose a novel Deformable Patch Representation (DPR) that can harness the geometric structure of triangles to support the differentiable mapping between contour modeling and masks. Moreover, we introduce a joint optimization algorithm, named Deformable Adversarial Patch (DAPatch), which allows simultaneous and efficient optimization of shape and texture to enhance attack performance. We show that even with a small area, a particular shape can improve attack performance. Therefore, DAPatch achieves state-of-the-art attack performance by deforming shapes on GTSRB and ILSVRC2012 across various network architectures, and the generated patches can be threatening in the real world.
Set Features for Fine-grained Anomaly Detection
Authors: Niv Cohen, Issar Tzachor, Yedid Hoshen
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Fine-grained anomaly detection has recently been dominated by segmentation based approaches. These approaches first classify each element of the sample (e.g., image patch) as normal or anomalous and then classify the entire sample as anomalous if it contains anomalous elements. However, such approaches do not extend to scenarios where the anomalies are expressed by an unusual combination of normal elements. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by proposing set features that model each sample by the distribution its elements. We compute the anomaly score of each sample using a simple density estimation method. Our simple-to-implement approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in image-level logical anomaly detection (+3.4%) and sequence-level time-series anomaly detection (+2.4%).
Graph Construction using Principal Axis Trees for Simple Graph Convolution
Authors: Mashaan Alshammari, John Stavrakakis, Adel F. Ahmed, Masahiro Takatsuka
Date: 2023-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Graph Embedding, Graph Learning, graph partitioning, Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly becoming the favorite method for graph learning. They exploit the semi-supervised nature of deep learning, and they bypass computational bottlenecks associated with traditional graph learning methods. In addition to the feature matrix $X$, GNNs need an adjacency matrix $A$ to perform feature propagation. In many cases, the adjacency matrix $A$ is missing. We introduce a graph construction scheme that constructs the adjacency matrix $A$ using unsupervised and supervised information. Unsupervised information characterizes the neighborhood around points. We used Principal Axis trees (PA-trees) as a source for unsupervised information, where we create edges between points falling onto the same leaf node. For supervised information, we used the concept of penalty and intrinsic graphs. A penalty graph connects points with different class labels, whereas an intrinsic graph connects points with the same class labels. We used the penalty and intrinsic graphs to remove or add edges to the graph constructed via PA-tree. We tested this graph construction scheme on two well-known GNNs: 1) Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and 2) Simple Graph Convolution (SGC). The experiments show that it is better to use SGC because it is faster and delivers better or the same results as GCN. We also test the effect of oversmoothing on both GCN and SGC. We found out that the level of smoothing has to be carefully selected for SGC to avoid oversmoothing.
Random Projection Forest Initialization for Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Mashaan Alshammari, John Stavrakakis, Adel F. Ahmed, Masahiro Takatsuka
Date: 2023-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Graph Embedding, Graph Learning, graph partitioning, Node Classification

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) were a great step towards extending deep learning to unstructured data such as graphs. But GCNs still need a constructed graph to work with. To solve this problem, classical graphs such as $k$-nearest neighbor are usually used to initialize the GCN. Although it is computationally efficient to construct $k$-nn graphs, the constructed graph might not be very useful for learning. In a $k$-nn graph, points are restricted to have a fixed number of edges, and all edges in the graph have equal weights. We present a new way to construct the graph and initialize the GCN. It is based on random projection forest (rpForest). rpForest enables us to assign varying weights on edges indicating varying importance, which enhanced the learning. The number of trees is a hyperparameter in rpForest. We performed spectral analysis to help us setting this parameter in the right range. In the experiments, initializing the GCN using rpForest provides better results compared to $k$-nn initialization.
Teacher Intervention: Improving Convergence of Quantization Aware Training for Ultra-Low Precision Transformers
Authors: Minsoo Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Seongmin Park, Wonyong Sung, Jungwook Choi
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

Pre-trained Transformer models such as BERT have shown great success in a wide range of applications, but at the cost of substantial increases in model complexity. Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a promising method to lower the implementation cost and energy consumption. However, aggressive quantization below 2-bit causes considerable accuracy degradation due to unstable convergence, especially when the downstream dataset is not abundant. This work proposes a proactive knowledge distillation method called Teacher Intervention (TI) for fast converging QAT of ultra-low precision pre-trained Transformers. TI intervenes layer-wise signal propagation with the intact signal from the teacher to remove the interference of propagated quantization errors, smoothing loss surface of QAT and expediting the convergence. Furthermore, we propose a gradual intervention mechanism to stabilize the recovery of subsections of Transformer layers from quantization. The proposed schemes enable fast convergence of QAT and improve the model accuracy regardless of the diverse characteristics of downstream fine-tuning tasks. We demonstrate that TI consistently achieves superior accuracy with significantly lower fine-tuning iterations on well-known Transformers of natural language processing as well as computer vision compared to the state-of-the-art QAT methods.
FTM: A Frame-level Timeline Modeling Method for Temporal Graph Representation Learning
Authors: Bowen Cao, Qichen Ye, Weiyuan Xu, Yuexian Zou
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Learning representations for graph-structured data is essential for graph analytical tasks. While remarkable progress has been made on static graphs, researches on temporal graphs are still in its beginning stage. The bottleneck of the temporal graph representation learning approach is the neighborhood aggregation strategy, based on which graph attributes share and gather information explicitly. Existing neighborhood aggregation strategies fail to capture either the short-term features or the long-term features of temporal graph attributes, leading to unsatisfactory model performance and even poor robustness and domain generality of the representation learning method. To address this problem, we propose a Frame-level Timeline Modeling (FTM) method that helps to capture both short-term and long-term features and thus learns more informative representations on temporal graphs. In particular, we present a novel link-based framing technique to preserve the short-term features and then incorporate a timeline aggregator module to capture the intrinsic dynamics of graph evolution as long-term features. Our method can be easily assembled with most temporal GNNs. Extensive experiments on common datasets show that our method brings great improvements to the capability, robustness, and domain generality of backbone methods in downstream tasks. Our code can be found at https://github.com/yeeeqichen/FTM.
Region-Aware Diffusion for Zero-shot Text-driven Image Editing
Authors: Nisha Huang, Fan Tang, WeiMing Dong, Tong-Yee Lee, Changsheng Xu
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation

Image manipulation under the guidance of textual descriptions has recently received a broad range of attention. In this study, we focus on the regional editing of images with the guidance of given text prompts. Different from current mask-based image editing methods, we propose a novel region-aware diffusion model (RDM) for entity-level image editing, which could automatically locate the region of interest and replace it following given text prompts. To strike a balance between image fidelity and inference speed, we design the intensive diffusion pipeline by combing latent space diffusion and enhanced directional guidance. In addition, to preserve image content in non-edited regions, we introduce regional-aware entity editing to modify the region of interest and preserve the out-of-interest region. We validate the proposed RDM beyond the baseline methods through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments. The results show that RDM outperforms the previous approaches in terms of visual quality, overall harmonization, non-editing region content preservation, and text-image semantic consistency. The codes are available at https://github.com/haha-lisa/RDM-Region-Aware-Diffusion-Model.
Change is Hard: A Closer Look at Subpopulation Shift
Authors: Yuzhe Yang, Haoran Zhang, Dina Katabi, Marzyeh Ghassemi
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection

Machine learning models often perform poorly on subgroups that are underrepresented in the training data. Yet, little is understood on the variation in mechanisms that cause subpopulation shifts, and how algorithms generalize across such diverse shifts at scale. In this work, we provide a fine-grained analysis of subpopulation shift. We first propose a unified framework that dissects and explains common shifts in subgroups. We then establish a comprehensive benchmark of 20 state-of-the-art algorithms evaluated on 12 real-world datasets in vision, language, and healthcare domains. With results obtained from training over 10,000 models, we reveal intriguing observations for future progress in this space. First, existing algorithms only improve subgroup robustness over certain types of shifts but not others. Moreover, while current algorithms rely on group-annotated validation data for model selection, we find that a simple selection criterion based on worst-class accuracy is surprisingly effective even without any group information. Finally, unlike existing works that solely aim to improve worst-group accuracy (WGA), we demonstrate the fundamental tradeoff between WGA and other important metrics, highlighting the need to carefully choose testing metrics. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/YyzHarry/SubpopBench.
VoxFormer: Sparse Voxel Transformer for Camera-based 3D Semantic Scene Completion
Authors: Yiming Li, Zhiding Yu, Christopher Choy, Chaowei Xiao, Jose M. Alvarez, Sanja Fidler, Chen Feng, Anima Anandkumar
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, 3D Semantic Scene Completion, 3D Semantic Scene Completion from a single RGB image, Depth Estimation, GPU

Humans can easily imagine the complete 3D geometry of occluded objects and scenes. This appealing ability is vital for recognition and understanding. To enable such capability in AI systems, we propose VoxFormer, a Transformer-based semantic scene completion framework that can output complete 3D volumetric semantics from only 2D images. Our framework adopts a two-stage design where we start from a sparse set of visible and occupied voxel queries from depth estimation, followed by a densification stage that generates dense 3D voxels from the sparse ones. A key idea of this design is that the visual features on 2D images correspond only to the visible scene structures rather than the occluded or empty spaces. Therefore, starting with the featurization and prediction of the visible structures is more reliable. Once we obtain the set of sparse queries, we apply a masked autoencoder design to propagate the information to all the voxels by self-attention. Experiments on SemanticKITTI show that VoxFormer outperforms the state of the art with a relative improvement of 20.0% in geometry and 18.1% in semantics and reduces GPU memory during training to less than 16GB. Our code is available on https://github.com/NVlabs/VoxFormer.
Side Adapter Network for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mengde Xu, Zheng Zhang, Fangyun Wei, Han Hu, Xiang Bai
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Language Modelling, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero Shot Segmentation

This paper presents a new framework for open-vocabulary semantic segmentation with the pre-trained vision-language model, named Side Adapter Network (SAN). Our approach models the semantic segmentation task as a region recognition problem. A side network is attached to a frozen CLIP model with two branches: one for predicting mask proposals, and the other for predicting attention bias which is applied in the CLIP model to recognize the class of masks. This decoupled design has the benefit CLIP in recognizing the class of mask proposals. Since the attached side network can reuse CLIP features, it can be very light. In addition, the entire network can be trained end-to-end, allowing the side network to be adapted to the frozen CLIP model, which makes the predicted mask proposals CLIP-aware. Our approach is fast, accurate, and only adds a few additional trainable parameters. We evaluate our approach on multiple semantic segmentation benchmarks. Our method significantly outperforms other counterparts, with up to 18 times fewer trainable parameters and 19 times faster inference speed. We hope our approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in open-vocabulary semantic segmentation. The code will be available at https://github.com/MendelXu/SAN.
Learning Neural Volumetric Representations of Dynamic Humans in Minutes
Authors: Chen Geng, Sida Peng, Zhen Xu, Hujun Bao, Xiaowei Zhou
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: GPU, NeRF

This paper addresses the challenge of quickly reconstructing free-viewpoint videos of dynamic humans from sparse multi-view videos. Some recent works represent the dynamic human as a canonical neural radiance field (NeRF) and a motion field, which are learned from videos through differentiable rendering. But the per-scene optimization generally requires hours. Other generalizable NeRF models leverage learned prior from datasets and reduce the optimization time by only finetuning on new scenes at the cost of visual fidelity. In this paper, we propose a novel method for learning neural volumetric videos of dynamic humans from sparse view videos in minutes with competitive visual quality. Specifically, we define a novel part-based voxelized human representation to better distribute the representational power of the network to different human parts. Furthermore, we propose a novel 2D motion parameterization scheme to increase the convergence rate of deformation field learning. Experiments demonstrate that our model can be learned 100 times faster than prior per-scene optimization methods while being competitive in the rendering quality. Training our model on a $512 \times 512$ video with 100 frames typically takes about 5 minutes on a single RTX 3090 GPU. The code will be released on our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/instant_nvr
Concept Learning for Interpretable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Renos Zabounidis, Joseph Campbell, Simon Stepputtis, Dana Hughes, Katia Sycara
Date: 2023-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Multi-agent robotic systems are increasingly operating in real-world environments in close proximity to humans, yet are largely controlled by policy models with inscrutable deep neural network representations. We introduce a method for incorporating interpretable concepts from a domain expert into models trained through multi-agent reinforcement learning, by requiring the model to first predict such concepts then utilize them for decision making. This allows an expert to both reason about the resulting concept policy models in terms of these high-level concepts at run-time, as well as intervene and correct mispredictions to improve performance. We show that this yields improved interpretability and training stability, with benefits to policy performance and sample efficiency in a simulated and real-world cooperative-competitive multi-agent game.