pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering
Authors: Alexandros Xenos, Themos Stafylakis, Ioannis Patras, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA
ROSS: Radar Off-road Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Peng Jiang, Srikanth Saripalli
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

As the demand for autonomous navigation in off-road environments increases, the need for effective solutions to understand these surroundings becomes essential. In this study, we confront the inherent complexities of semantic segmentation in RADAR data for off-road scenarios. We present a novel pipeline that utilizes LIDAR data and an existing annotated off-road LIDAR dataset for generating RADAR labels, in which the RADAR data are represented as images. Validated with real-world datasets, our pragmatic approach underscores the potential of RADAR technology for navigation applications in off-road environments.
A review of individual tree crown detection and delineation from optical remote sensing images
Authors: Juepeng Zheng, Shuai Yuan, Weijia Li, Haohuan Fu, Le Yu
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Powered by the advances of optical remote sensing sensors, the production of very high spatial resolution multispectral images provides great potential for achieving cost-efficient and high-accuracy forest inventory and analysis in an automated way. Lots of studies that aim at providing an inventory to the level of each individual tree have generated a variety of methods for Individual Tree Crown Detection and Delineation (ITCD). This review covers ITCD methods for detecting and delineating individual tree crowns, and systematically reviews the past and present of ITCD-related researches applied to the optical remote sensing images. With the goal to provide a clear knowledge map of existing ITCD efforts, we conduct a comprehensive review of recent ITCD papers to build a meta-data analysis, including the algorithm, the study site, the tree species, the sensor type, the evaluation method, etc. We categorize the reviewed methods into three classes: (1) traditional image processing methods (such as local maximum filtering, image segmentation, etc.); (2) traditional machine learning methods (such as random forest, decision tree, etc.); and (3) deep learning based methods. With the deep learning-oriented approaches contributing a majority of the papers, we further discuss the deep learning-based methods as semantic segmentation and object detection methods. In addition, we discuss four ITCD-related issues to further comprehend the ITCD domain using optical remote sensing data, such as comparisons between multi-sensor based data and optical data in ITCD domain, comparisons among different algorithms and different ITCD tasks, etc. Finally, this review proposes some ITCD-related applications and a few exciting prospects and potential hot topics in future ITCD research.
Segment, Select, Correct: A Framework for Weakly-Supervised Referring Segmentation
Authors: Francisco Eiras, Kemal Oksuz, Adel Bibi, Philip H. S. Torr, Puneet K. Dokania
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Learning

Referring Image Segmentation (RIS) - the problem of identifying objects in images through natural language sentences - is a challenging task currently mostly solved through supervised learning. However, while collecting referred annotation masks is a time-consuming process, the few existing weakly-supervised and zero-shot approaches fall significantly short in performance compared to fully-supervised learning ones. To bridge the performance gap without mask annotations, we propose a novel weakly-supervised framework that tackles RIS by decomposing it into three steps: obtaining instance masks for the object mentioned in the referencing instruction (segment), using zero-shot learning to select a potentially correct mask for the given instruction (select), and bootstrapping a model which allows for fixing the mistakes of zero-shot selection (correct). In our experiments, using only the first two steps (zero-shot segment and select) outperforms other zero-shot baselines by as much as 16.5%, while our full method improves upon this much stronger baseline and sets the new state-of-the-art for weakly-supervised RIS, reducing the gap between the weakly-supervised and fully-supervised methods in some cases from around 33% to as little as 7%. Code is available at https://github.com/fgirbal/segment-select-correct.
Benchmarking Sequential Visual Input Reasoning and Prediction in Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Mingwei Zhu, Leigang Sha, Yu Shu, Kangjia Zhao, Tiancheng Zhao, Jianwei Yin
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Prediction, Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown great potential in perception and interpretation tasks, but their capabilities in predictive reasoning remain under-explored. To address this gap, we introduce a novel benchmark that assesses the predictive reasoning capabilities of MLLMs across diverse scenarios. Our benchmark targets three important domains: abstract pattern reasoning, human activity prediction, and physical interaction prediction. We further develop three evaluation methods powered by large language model to robustly quantify a model's performance in predicting and reasoning the future based on multi-visual context. Empirical experiments confirm the soundness of the proposed benchmark and evaluation methods via rigorous testing and reveal pros and cons of current popular MLLMs in the task of predictive reasoning. Lastly, our proposed benchmark provides a standardized evaluation framework for MLLMs and can facilitate the development of more advanced models that can reason and predict over complex long sequence of multimodal input.
Two-Stage Triplet Loss Training with Curriculum Augmentation for Audio-Visual Retrieval
Authors: Donghuo Zeng, Kazushi Ikeda
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Retrieval, Triplet

The cross-modal retrieval model leverages the potential of triple loss optimization to learn robust embedding spaces. However, existing methods often train these models in a singular pass, overlooking the distinction between semi-hard and hard triples in the optimization process. The oversight of not distinguishing between semi-hard and hard triples leads to suboptimal model performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach rooted in curriculum learning to address this problem. We propose a two-stage training paradigm that guides the model's learning process from semi-hard to hard triplets. In the first stage, the model is trained with a set of semi-hard triplets, starting from a low-loss base. Subsequently, in the second stage, we augment the embeddings using an interpolation technique. This process identifies potential hard negatives, alleviating issues arising from high-loss functions due to a scarcity of hard triples. Our approach then applies hard triplet mining in the augmented embedding space to further optimize the model. Extensive experimental results conducted on two audio-visual datasets show a significant improvement of approximately 9.8% in terms of average Mean Average Precision (MAP) over the current state-of-the-art method, MSNSCA, for the Audio-Visual Cross-Modal Retrieval (AV-CMR) task on the AVE dataset, indicating the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Definition-independent Formalization of Soundscapes: Towards a Formal Methodology
Authors: Mikel D. Jedrusiak, Thomas Harweg, Timo Haselhoff, Bryce T. Lawrence, Susanne Moebus, Frank Weichert
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00

Soundscapes have been studied by researchers from various disciplines, each with different perspectives, goals, approaches, and terminologies. Accordingly, depending on the field, the concept of a soundscape's components changes, consequently changing the basic definition. This results in complicating interdisciplinary communication and comparison of results. Especially when soundscape-unrelated research areas are involved. For this reason, we present a potential formalization that is independent of the underlying soundscape definition, with the goal of being able to capture the heterogeneous structure of the data as well as the different ideologies in one model. In an exemplary analysis of frequency correlation matrices for land use type detection as an alternative to features like MFCCs, we show a practical application of our presented formalization.
OpenAnnotate3D: Open-Vocabulary Auto-Labeling System for Multi-modal 3D Data
Authors: Yijie Zhou, Likun Cai, Xianhui Cheng, Zhongxue Gan, xiangyang xue, Wenchao Ding
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

In the era of big data and large models, automatic annotating functions for multi-modal data are of great significance for real-world AI-driven applications, such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Unlike traditional closed-set annotation, open-vocabulary annotation is essential to achieve human-level cognition capability. However, there are few open-vocabulary auto-labeling systems for multi-modal 3D data. In this paper, we introduce OpenAnnotate3D, an open-source open-vocabulary auto-labeling system that can automatically generate 2D masks, 3D masks, and 3D bounding box annotations for vision and point cloud data. Our system integrates the chain-of-thought capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the cross-modality capabilities of vision-language models (VLMs). To the best of our knowledge, OpenAnnotate3D is one of the pioneering works for open-vocabulary multi-modal 3D auto-labeling. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on both public and in-house real-world datasets, which demonstrate that the system significantly improves annotation efficiency compared to manual annotation while providing accurate open-vocabulary auto-annotating results.
ScalableMap: Scalable Map Learning for Online Long-Range Vectorized HD Map Construction
Authors: Jingyi Yu, Zizhao Zhang, Shengfu Xia, Jizhang Sang
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Lane Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

We propose a novel end-to-end pipeline for online long-range vectorized high-definition (HD) map construction using on-board camera sensors. The vectorized representation of HD maps, employing polylines and polygons to represent map elements, is widely used by downstream tasks. However, previous schemes designed with reference to dynamic object detection overlook the structural constraints within linear map elements, resulting in performance degradation in long-range scenarios. In this paper, we exploit the properties of map elements to improve the performance of map construction. We extract more accurate bird's eye view (BEV) features guided by their linear structure, and then propose a hierarchical sparse map representation to further leverage the scalability of vectorized map elements and design a progressive decoding mechanism and a supervision strategy based on this representation. Our approach, ScalableMap, demonstrates superior performance on the nuScenes dataset, especially in long-range scenarios, surpassing previous state-of-the-art model by 6.5 mAP while achieving 18.3 FPS. Code is available at https://github.com/jingy1yu/ScalableMap.
Single-view 3D reconstruction via inverse procedural modeling
Authors: Albert Garifullin, Nikolay Maiorov, Vladimir Frolov
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Single-View 3D Reconstruction

We propose an approach to 3D reconstruction via inverse procedural modeling and investigate two variants of this approach. The first option consists in the fitting set of input parameters using a genetic algorithm. We demonstrate the results of our work on tree models, complex objects, with the reconstruction of which most existing methods cannot handle. The second option allows us to significantly improve the precision by using gradients within memetic algorithm, differentiable rendering and also differentiable procedural generators. In our work we see 2 main contributions. First, we propose a method to join differentiable rendering and inverse procedural modeling. This gives us an opportunity to reconstruct 3D model more accurately than existing approaches when a small number of input images are available (even for single image). Second, we join both differentiable and non-differentiable procedural generators in a single framework which allow us to apply inverse procedural modeling to fairly complex generators: when gradient is available, reconstructions is precise, when gradient is not available, reconstruction is approximate, but always high quality without visual artifacts.
PSGText: Stroke-Guided Scene Text Editing with PSP Module
Authors: Felix Liawi, Yun-Da Tsai, Guan-Lun Lu, Shou-De Lin
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Scene Text Editing

Scene Text Editing (STE) aims to substitute text in an image with new desired text while preserving the background and styles of the original text. However, present techniques present a notable challenge in the generation of edited text images that exhibit a high degree of clarity and legibility. This challenge primarily stems from the inherent diversity found within various text types and the intricate textures of complex backgrounds. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a three-stage framework for transferring texts across text images. Initially, we introduce a text-swapping network that seamlessly substitutes the original text with the desired replacement. Subsequently, we incorporate a background inpainting network into our framework. This specialized network is designed to skillfully reconstruct background images, effectively addressing the voids left after the removal of the original text. This process meticulously preserves visual harmony and coherence in the background. Ultimately, the synthesis of outcomes from the text-swapping network and the background inpainting network is achieved through a fusion network, culminating in the creation of the meticulously edited final image. A demo video is included in the supplementary material.
Sync-NeRF: Generalizing Dynamic NeRFs to Unsynchronized Videos
Authors: Seoha Kim, Jeongmin Bae, Youngsik Yun, Hahyun Lee, Gun Bang, Youngjung Uh
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Recent advancements in 4D scene reconstruction using neural radiance fields (NeRF) have demonstrated the ability to represent dynamic scenes from multi-view videos. However, they fail to reconstruct the dynamic scenes and struggle to fit even the training views in unsynchronized settings. It happens because they employ a single latent embedding for a frame while the multi-view images at the same frame were actually captured at different moments. To address this limitation, we introduce time offsets for individual unsynchronized videos and jointly optimize the offsets with NeRF. By design, our method is applicable for various baselines and improves them with large margins. Furthermore, finding the offsets naturally works as synchronizing the videos without manual effort. Experiments are conducted on the common Plenoptic Video Dataset and a newly built Unsynchronized Dynamic Blender Dataset to verify the performance of our method. Project page: https://seoha-kim.github.io/sync-nerf
SILC: Improving Vision Language Pretraining with Self-Distillation
Authors: Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Yongqin Xian, Xiaohua Zhai, Lukas Hoyer, Luc van Gool, Federico Tombari
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Question Answering, Retrieval, Segmentation, Text Retrieval, Visual Question Answering, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero Shot Segmentation

Image-Text pretraining on web-scale image caption datasets has become the default recipe for open vocabulary classification and retrieval models thanks to the success of CLIP and its variants. Several works have also used CLIP features for dense prediction tasks and have shown the emergence of open-set abilities. However, the contrastive objective used by these models only focuses on image-text alignment and does not incentivise image feature learning for dense prediction tasks. In this work, we introduce SILC, a novel framework for vision language pretraining. SILC improves image-text contrastive learning with the simple addition of local-to-global correspondence learning by self-distillation. We show that distilling local image features from an exponential moving average (EMA) teacher model significantly improves model performance on dense predictions tasks like detection and segmentation, while also providing improvements on image-level tasks such as classification and retrieval. SILC models sets a new state of the art for zero-shot classification, few shot classification, image and text retrieval, zero-shot segmentation, and open vocabulary segmentation. We further show that SILC features greatly benefit open vocabulary detection, captioning and visual question answering.
EarlyBird: Early-Fusion for Multi-View Tracking in the Bird's Eye View
Authors: Torben Teepe, Philipp Wolters, Johannes Gilg, Fabian Herzog, Gerhard Rigoll
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Multi-Object Tracking, multi-view detection, Multiview Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Multi-view aggregation promises to overcome the occlusion and missed detection challenge in multi-object detection and tracking. Recent approaches in multi-view detection and 3D object detection made a huge performance leap by projecting all views to the ground plane and performing the detection in the Bird's Eye View (BEV). In this paper, we investigate if tracking in the BEV can also bring the next performance breakthrough in Multi-Target Multi-Camera (MTMC) tracking. Most current approaches in multi-view tracking perform the detection and tracking task in each view and use graph-based approaches to perform the association of the pedestrian across each view. This spatial association is already solved by detecting each pedestrian once in the BEV, leaving only the problem of temporal association. For the temporal association, we show how to learn strong Re-Identification (re-ID) features for each detection. The results show that early-fusion in the BEV achieves high accuracy for both detection and tracking. EarlyBird outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and improves the current state-of-the-art on Wildtrack by +4.6 MOTA and +5.6 IDF1.
DeepFDR: A Deep Learning-based False Discovery Rate Control Method for Neuroimaging Data
Authors: Taehyo Kim, Hai Shu, Qiran Jia, Mony J. de Leon
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Deep Learning, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Voxel-based multiple testing is widely used in neuroimaging data analysis. Traditional false discovery rate (FDR) control methods often ignore the spatial dependence among the voxel-based tests and thus suffer from substantial loss of testing power. While recent spatial FDR control methods have emerged, their validity and optimality remain questionable when handling the complex spatial dependencies of the brain. Concurrently, deep learning methods have revolutionized image segmentation, a task closely related to voxel-based multiple testing. In this paper, we propose DeepFDR, a novel spatial FDR control method that leverages unsupervised deep learning-based image segmentation to address the voxel-based multiple testing problem. Numerical studies, including comprehensive simulations and Alzheimer's disease FDG-PET image analysis, demonstrate DeepFDR's superiority over existing methods. DeepFDR not only excels in FDR control and effectively diminishes the false nondiscovery rate, but also boasts exceptional computational efficiency highly suited for tackling large-scale neuroimaging data.
DeepFracture: A Generative Approach for Predicting Brittle Fractures with Neural Discrete Representation Learning
Authors: Yuhang Huang, Takashi Kanai
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Representation Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In the field of brittle fracture animation, generating realistic destruction animations using physics-based simulation methods is computationally expensive. While techniques based on Voronoi diagrams or pre-fractured patterns are effective for real-time applications, they fail to incorporate collision conditions when determining fractured shapes during runtime. This paper introduces a novel learning-based approach for predicting fractured shapes based on collision dynamics at runtime. Our approach seamlessly integrates realistic brittle fracture animations with rigid body simulations, utilising boundary element method (BEM) brittle fracture simulations to generate training data. To integrate collision scenarios and fractured shapes into a deep learning framework, we introduce generative geometric segmentation, distinct from both instance and semantic segmentation, to represent 3D fragment shapes. We propose an eight-dimensional latent code to address the challenge of optimising multiple discrete fracture pattern targets that share similar continuous collision latent codes. This code will follow a discrete normal distribution corresponding to a specific fracture pattern within our latent impulse representation design. This adaptation enables the prediction of fractured shapes using neural discrete representation learning. Our experimental results show that our approach generates considerably more detailed brittle fractures than existing techniques, while the computational time is typically reduced compared to traditional simulation methods at comparable resolutions.