pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding the Overfitting of the Episodic Meta-training
Authors: Siqi Hui, Sanping Zhou, Ye Deng, Jinjun Wang
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

Despite the success of two-stage few-shot classification methods, in the episodic meta-training stage, the model suffers severe overfitting. We hypothesize that it is caused by over-discrimination, i.e., the model learns to over-rely on the superficial features that fit for base class discrimination while suppressing the novel class generalization. To penalize over-discrimination, we introduce knowledge distillation techniques to keep novel generalization knowledge from the teacher model during training. Specifically, we select the teacher model as the one with the best validation accuracy during meta-training and restrict the symmetric Kullback-Leibler (SKL) divergence between the output distribution of the linear classifier of the teacher model and that of the student model. This simple approach outperforms the standard meta-training process. We further propose the Nearest Neighbor Symmetric Kullback-Leibler (NNSKL) divergence for meta-training to push the limits of knowledge distillation techniques. NNSKL takes few-shot tasks as input and penalizes the output of the nearest neighbor classifier, which possesses an impact on the relationships between query embedding and support centers. By combining SKL and NNSKL in meta-training, the model achieves even better performance and surpasses state-of-the-art results on several benchmarks.
NeuralFuse: Learning to Recover the Accuracy of Access-Limited Neural Network Inference in Low-Voltage Regimes
Authors: Hao-Lun Sun, Lei Hsiung, Nandhini Chandramoorthy, Pin-Yu Chen, Tsung-Yi Ho
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become ubiquitous in machine learning, but their energy consumption remains problematically high. An effective strategy for reducing such consumption is supply-voltage reduction, but if done too aggressively, it can lead to accuracy degradation. This is due to random bit-flips in static random access memory (SRAM), where model parameters are stored. To address this challenge, we have developed NeuralFuse, a novel add-on module that handles the energy-accuracy tradeoff in low-voltage regimes by learning input transformations and using them to generate error-resistant data representations, thereby protecting DNN accuracy in both nominal and low-voltage scenarios. As well as being easy to implement, NeuralFuse can be readily applied to DNNs with limited access, such cloud-based APIs that are accessed remotely or non-configurable hardware. Our experimental results demonstrate that, at a 1% bit-error rate, NeuralFuse can reduce SRAM access energy by up to 24% while recovering accuracy by up to 57%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to addressing low-voltage-induced bit errors that requires no model retraining.
Lightweight texture transfer based on texture feature preset
Authors: Shiqi Jiang
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

In the task of texture transfer, reference texture images typically exhibit highly repetitive texture features, and the texture transfer results from different content images under the same style also share remarkably similar texture patterns. Encoding such highly similar texture features often requires deep layers and a large number of channels, making it is also the main source of the entire model's parameter count and computational load, and inference time. We propose a lightweight texture transfer based on texture feature preset (TFP). TFP takes full advantage of the high repetitiveness of texture features by providing preset universal texture feature maps for a given style. These preset feature maps can be fused and decoded directly with shallow color transfer feature maps of any content to generate texture transfer results, thereby avoiding redundant texture information from being encoded repeatedly. The texture feature map we preset is encoded through noise input images with consistent distribution (standard normal distribution). This consistent input distribution can completely avoid the problem of texture transfer differentiation, and by randomly sampling different noise inputs, we can obtain different texture features and texture transfer results under the same reference style. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, our TFP not only produces visually superior results but also reduces the model size by 3.2-3538 times and speeds up the process by 1.8-5.6 times.
CLIPAG: Towards Generator-Free Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Roy Ganz, Michael Elad
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Perceptually Aligned Gradients (PAG) refer to an intriguing property observed in robust image classification models, wherein their input gradients align with human perception and pose semantic meanings. While this phenomenon has gained significant research attention, it was solely studied in the context of unimodal vision-only architectures. In this work, we extend the study of PAG to Vision-Language architectures, which form the foundations for diverse image-text tasks and applications. Through an adversarial robustification finetuning of CLIP, we demonstrate that robust Vision-Language models exhibit PAG in contrast to their vanilla counterparts. This work reveals the merits of CLIP with PAG (CLIPAG) in several vision-language generative tasks. Notably, we show that seamlessly integrating CLIPAG in a "plug-n-play" manner leads to substantial improvements in vision-language generative applications. Furthermore, leveraging its PAG property, CLIPAG enables text-to-image generation without any generative model, which typically requires huge generators.
Low-Light Enhancement in the Frequency Domain
Authors: Hao Chen, Zhi Jin
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection

Decreased visibility, intensive noise, and biased color are the common problems existing in low-light images. These visual disturbances further reduce the performance of high-level vision tasks, such as object detection, and tracking. To address this issue, some image enhancement methods have been proposed to increase the image contrast. However, most of them are implemented only in the spatial domain, which can be severely influenced by noise signals while enhancing. Hence, in this work, we propose a novel residual recurrent multi-wavelet convolutional neural network R2-MWCNN learned in the frequency domain that can simultaneously increase the image contrast and reduce noise signals well. This end-to-end trainable network utilizes a multi-level discrete wavelet transform to divide input feature maps into distinct frequencies, resulting in a better denoise impact. A channel-wise loss function is proposed to correct the color distortion for more realistic results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed R2-MWCNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods quantitively and qualitatively.
Boosting the Generalization Ability for Hyperspectral Image Classification using Spectral-spatial Axial Aggregation Transformer
Authors: Enzhe Zhao, Zhichang Guo, Shengzhu Shi, Yao Li, Jia Li, Dazhi Zhang
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

In the hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) task, the most commonly used model validation paradigm is partitioning the training-test dataset through pixel-wise random sampling. By training on a small amount of data, the deep learning model can achieve almost perfect accuracy. However, in our experiments, we found that the high accuracy was reached because the training and test datasets share a lot of information. On non-overlapping dataset partitions, well-performing models suffer significant performance degradation. To this end, we propose a spectral-spatial axial aggregation transformer model, namely SaaFormer, that preserves generalization across dataset partitions. SaaFormer applies a multi-level spectral extraction structure to segment the spectrum into multiple spectrum clips, such that the wavelength continuity of the spectrum across the channel are preserved. For each spectrum clip, the axial aggregation attention mechanism, which integrates spatial features along multiple spectral axes is applied to mine the spectral characteristic. The multi-level spectral extraction and the axial aggregation attention emphasize spectral characteristic to improve the model generalization. The experimental results on five publicly available datasets demonstrate that our model exhibits comparable performance on the random partition, while significantly outperforming other methods on non-overlapping partitions. Moreover, SaaFormer shows excellent performance on background classification.
Foundation Model for Endoscopy Video Analysis via Large-scale Self-supervised Pre-train
Authors: Zhao Wang, Chang Liu, Shaoting Zhang, Qi Dou
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Foundation models have exhibited remarkable success in various applications, such as disease diagnosis and text report generation. To date, a foundation model for endoscopic video analysis is still lacking. In this paper, we propose Endo-FM, a foundation model specifically developed using massive endoscopic video data. First, we build a video transformer, which captures both local and global long-range dependencies across spatial and temporal dimensions. Second, we pre-train our transformer model using global and local views via a self-supervised manner, aiming to make it robust to spatial-temporal variations and discriminative across different scenes. To develop the foundation model, we construct a large-scale endoscopy video dataset by combining 9 publicly available datasets and a privately collected dataset from Baoshan Branch of Renji Hospital in Shanghai, China. Our dataset overall consists of over 33K video clips with up to 5 million frames, encompassing various protocols, target organs, and disease types. Our pre-trained Endo-FM can be easily adopted for a given downstream task via fine-tuning by serving as the backbone. With experiments on 3 different types of downstream tasks, including classification, segmentation, and detection, our Endo-FM surpasses the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-supervised pre-training and adapter-based transfer learning methods by a significant margin, such as VCL (3.1% F1, 4.8% Dice, and 5.5% F1 for classification, segmentation, and detection) and ST-Adapter (5.9% F1, 9.6% Dice, and 9.9% F1 for classification, segmentation, and detection). Code, datasets, and models are released at https://github.com/med-air/Endo-FM.
Unified View of Damage leaves Planimetry & Analysis Using Digital Images Processing Techniques
Authors: Pijush Kanti Kumar, DeepKiran Munjal, Sunita Rani, Anurag Dutta, Liton Chandra Voumik, A. Ramamoorthy
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00

The detection of leaf diseases in plants generally involves visual observation of patterns appearing on the leaf surface. However, there are many diseases that are distinguished based on very subtle changes in these visually observable patterns. This paper attempts to identify plant leaf diseases using image processing techniques. The focus of this study is on the detection of citrus leaf canker disease. Canker is a bacterial infection of leaves. Symptoms of citrus cankers include brown spots on the leaves, often with a watery or oily appearance. The spots (called lesions in botany) are usually yellow. It is surrounded by a halo of the leaves and is found on both the top and bottom of the leaf. This paper describes various methods that have been used to detect citrus leaf canker disease. The methods used are histogram comparison and k-means clustering. Using these methods, citrus canker development was detected based on histograms generated based on leaf patterns. The results thus obtained can be used, after consultation with experts in the field of agriculture, to identify suitable treatments for the processes used.
Metric-aligned Sample Selection and Critical Feature Sampling for Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Peng Sun, Yongbin Zheng, Wenqi Wu, Wanying Xu, Shengjian Bai
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Oriented Object Detection, regression

Arbitrary-oriented object detection is a relatively emerging but challenging task. Although remarkable progress has been made, there still remain many unsolved issues due to the large diversity of patterns in orientation, scale, aspect ratio, and visual appearance of objects in aerial images. Most of the existing methods adopt a coarse-grained fixed label assignment strategy and suffer from the inconsistency between the classification score and localization accuracy. First, to align the metric inconsistency between sample selection and regression loss calculation caused by fixed IoU strategy, we introduce affine transformation to evaluate the quality of samples and propose a distance-based label assignment strategy. The proposed metric-aligned selection (MAS) strategy can dynamically select samples according to the shape and rotation characteristic of objects. Second, to further address the inconsistency between classification and localization, we propose a critical feature sampling (CFS) module, which performs localization refinement on the sampling location for classification task to extract critical features accurately. Third, we present a scale-controlled smooth $L_1$ loss (SC-Loss) to adaptively select high quality samples by changing the form of regression loss function based on the statistics of proposals during training. Extensive experiments are conducted on four challenging rotated object detection datasets DOTA, FAIR1M-1.0, HRSC2016, and UCAS-AOD. The results show the state-of-the-art accuracy of the proposed detector.
SimPLe: Similarity-Aware Propagation Learning for Weakly-Supervised Breast Cancer Segmentation in DCE-MRI
Authors: Yuming Zhong, Yi Wang
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Segmentation

Breast dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) plays an important role in the screening and prognosis assessment of high-risk breast cancer. The segmentation of cancerous regions is essential useful for the subsequent analysis of breast MRI. To alleviate the annotation effort to train the segmentation networks, we propose a weakly-supervised strategy using extreme points as annotations for breast cancer segmentation. Without using any bells and whistles, our strategy focuses on fully exploiting the learning capability of the routine training procedure, i.e., the train - fine-tune - retrain process. The network first utilizes the pseudo-masks generated using the extreme points to train itself, by minimizing a contrastive loss, which encourages the network to learn more representative features for cancerous voxels. Then the trained network fine-tunes itself by using a similarity-aware propagation learning (SimPLe) strategy, which leverages feature similarity between unlabeled and positive voxels to propagate labels. Finally the network retrains itself by employing the pseudo-masks generated using previous fine-tuned network. The proposed method is evaluated on our collected DCE-MRI dataset containing 206 patients with biopsy-proven breast cancers. Experimental results demonstrate our method effectively fine-tunes the network by using the SimPLe strategy, and achieves a mean Dice value of 81%.
NCL++: Nested Collaborative Learning for Long-Tailed Visual Recognition
Authors: Zichang Tan, Jun Li, Jinhao Du, Jun Wan, Zhen Lei, Guodong Guo
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00

Long-tailed visual recognition has received increasing attention in recent years. Due to the extremely imbalanced data distribution in long-tailed learning, the learning process shows great uncertainties. For example, the predictions of different experts on the same image vary remarkably despite the same training settings. To alleviate the uncertainty, we propose a Nested Collaborative Learning (NCL++) which tackles the long-tailed learning problem by a collaborative learning. To be specific, the collaborative learning consists of two folds, namely inter-expert collaborative learning (InterCL) and intra-expert collaborative learning (IntraCL). In-terCL learns multiple experts collaboratively and concurrently, aiming to transfer the knowledge among different experts. IntraCL is similar to InterCL, but it aims to conduct the collaborative learning on multiple augmented copies of the same image within the single expert. To achieve the collaborative learning in long-tailed learning, the balanced online distillation is proposed to force the consistent predictions among different experts and augmented copies, which reduces the learning uncertainties. Moreover, in order to improve the meticulous distinguishing ability on the confusing categories, we further propose a Hard Category Mining (HCM), which selects the negative categories with high predicted scores as the hard categories. Then, the collaborative learning is formulated in a nested way, in which the learning is conducted on not just all categories from a full perspective but some hard categories from a partial perspective. Extensive experiments manifest the superiority of our method with outperforming the state-of-the-art whether with using a single model or an ensemble. The code will be publicly released.
DiffusionSTR: Diffusion Model for Scene Text Recognition
Authors: Masato Fujitake
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text, model, Scene Text Recognition

This paper presents Diffusion Model for Scene Text Recognition (DiffusionSTR), an end-to-end text recognition framework using diffusion models for recognizing text in the wild. While existing studies have viewed the scene text recognition task as an image-to-text transformation, we rethought it as a text-text one under images in a diffusion model. We show for the first time that the diffusion model can be applied to text recognition. Furthermore, experimental results on publicly available datasets show that the proposed method achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Dynamic-Resolution Model Learning for Object Pile Manipulation
Authors: YiXuan Wang, Yunzhu Li, Katherine Driggs-Campbell, Li Fei-Fei, Jiajun Wu
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Predictive Control, Object

Dynamics models learned from visual observations have shown to be effective in various robotic manipulation tasks. One of the key questions for learning such dynamics models is what scene representation to use. Prior works typically assume representation at a fixed dimension or resolution, which may be inefficient for simple tasks and ineffective for more complicated tasks. In this work, we investigate how to learn dynamic and adaptive representations at different levels of abstraction to achieve the optimal trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. Specifically, we construct dynamic-resolution particle representations of the environment and learn a unified dynamics model using graph neural networks (GNNs) that allows continuous selection of the abstraction level. During test time, the agent can adaptively determine the optimal resolution at each model-predictive control (MPC) step. We evaluate our method in object pile manipulation, a task we commonly encounter in cooking, agriculture, manufacturing, and pharmaceutical applications. Through comprehensive evaluations both in the simulation and the real world, we show that our method achieves significantly better performance than state-of-the-art fixed-resolution baselines at the gathering, sorting, and redistribution of granular object piles made with various instances like coffee beans, almonds, corn, etc.
Streaming egocentric action anticipation: An evaluation scheme and approach
Authors: Antonino Furnari, Giovanni Maria Farinella
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Anticipation, Knowledge Distillation

Egocentric action anticipation aims to predict the future actions the camera wearer will perform from the observation of the past. While predictions about the future should be available before the predicted events take place, most approaches do not pay attention to the computational time required to make such predictions. As a result, current evaluation schemes assume that predictions are available right after the input video is observed, i.e., presuming a negligible runtime, which may lead to overly optimistic evaluations. We propose a streaming egocentric action evaluation scheme which assumes that predictions are performed online and made available only after the model has processed the current input segment, which depends on its runtime. To evaluate all models considering the same prediction horizon, we hence propose that slower models should base their predictions on temporal segments sampled ahead of time. Based on the observation that model runtime can affect performance in the considered streaming evaluation scenario, we further propose a lightweight action anticipation model based on feed-forward 3D CNNs which is optimized using knowledge distillation techniques with a novel past-to-future distillation loss. Experiments on the three popular datasets EPIC-KITCHENS-55, EPIC-KITCHENS-100 and EGTEA Gaze+ show that (i) the proposed evaluation scheme induces a different ranking on state-of-the-art methods as compared to classic evaluations, (ii) lightweight approaches tend to outmatch more computationally expensive ones, and (iii) the proposed model based on feed-forward 3D CNNs and knowledge distillation outperforms current art in the streaming egocentric action anticipation scenario.
BinaryViT: Pushing Binary Vision Transformers Towards Convolutional Models
Authors: Phuoc-Hoan Charles Le, Xinlin Li
Date: 2023-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Image Classification, Stochastic Optimization

With the increasing popularity and the increasing size of vision transformers (ViTs), there has been an increasing interest in making them more efficient and less computationally costly for deployment on edge devices with limited computing resources. Binarization can be used to help reduce the size of ViT models and their computational cost significantly, using popcount operations when the weights and the activations are in binary. However, ViTs suffer a larger performance drop when directly applying convolutional neural network (CNN) binarization methods or existing binarization methods to binarize ViTs compared to CNNs on datasets with a large number of classes such as ImageNet-1k. With extensive analysis, we find that binary vanilla ViTs such as DeiT miss out on a lot of key architectural properties that CNNs have that allow binary CNNs to have much higher representational capability than binary vanilla ViT. Therefore, we propose BinaryViT, in which inspired by the CNN architecture, we include operations from the CNN architecture into a pure ViT architecture to enrich the representational capability of a binary ViT without introducing convolutions. These include an average pooling layer instead of a token pooling layer, a block that contains multiple average pooling branches, an affine transformation right before the addition of each main residual connection, and a pyramid structure. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1k dataset show the effectiveness of these operations that allow a binary pure ViT model to be competitive with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) binary CNN models.