pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The SPACE THEA Project
Authors: Martin Spathelf, Oliver Bendel
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotional Intelligence

In some situations, no professional human contact can be available. Accordingly, one remains alone with one's problems and fears. A manned Mars flight is certainly such a situation. A voice assistant that shows empathy and assists the astronauts could be a solution. In the SPACE THEA project, a prototype with such capabilities was developed using Google Assistant and Dialogflow Essentials. The voice assistant has a personality based on characteristics such as functional intelligence, sincerity, creativity, and emotional intelligence. It proves itself in seven different scenarios designed to represent the daily lives of astronauts, addressing operational crises and human problems. The paper describes the seven scenarios in detail, and lists technical and conceptual foundations of the voice assistant. Finally, the most important results are stated and the chapters are summarized.
A Flexible Diffusion Model
Authors: Weitao Du, Tao Yang, He Zhang, Yuanqi Du
Date: 2022-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Diffusion (score-based) generative models have been widely used for modeling various types of complex data, including images, audios, and point clouds. Recently, the deep connection between forward-backward stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and diffusion-based models has been revealed, and several new variants of SDEs are proposed (e.g., sub-VP, critically-damped Langevin) along this line. Despite the empirical success of the hand-crafted fixed forward SDEs, a great quantity of proper forward SDEs remain unexplored. In this work, we propose a general framework for parameterizing the diffusion model, especially the spatial part of the forward SDE. An abstract formalism is introduced with theoretical guarantees, and its connection with previous diffusion models is leveraged. We demonstrate the theoretical advantage of our method from an optimization perspective. Numerical experiments on synthetic datasets, MINIST and CIFAR10 are also presented to validate the effectiveness of our framework.
Temporally Consistent Semantic Video Editing
Authors: Yiran Xu, Badour AlBahar, Jia-Bin Huang
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Video Editing

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have demonstrated impressive image generation quality and semantic editing capability of real images, e.g., changing object classes, modifying attributes, or transferring styles. However, applying these GAN-based editing to a video independently for each frame inevitably results in temporal flickering artifacts. We present a simple yet effective method to facilitate temporally coherent video editing. Our core idea is to minimize the temporal photometric inconsistency by optimizing both the latent code and the pre-trained generator. We evaluate the quality of our editing on different domains and GAN inversion techniques and show favorable results against the baselines.
EdgeNeXt: Efficiently Amalgamated CNN-Transformer Architecture for Mobile Vision Applications
Authors: Muhammad Maaz, Abdelrahman Shaker, Hisham Cholakkal, Salman Khan, Syed Waqas Zamir, Rao Muhammad Anwer, Fahad Shahbaz Khan
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

In the pursuit of achieving ever-increasing accuracy, large and complex neural networks are usually developed. Such models demand high computational resources and therefore cannot be deployed on edge devices. It is of great interest to build resource-efficient general purpose networks due to their usefulness in several application areas. In this work, we strive to effectively combine the strengths of both CNN and Transformer models and propose a new efficient hybrid architecture EdgeNeXt. Specifically in EdgeNeXt, we introduce split depth-wise transpose attention (STDA) encoder that splits input tensors into multiple channel groups and utilizes depth-wise convolution along with self-attention across channel dimensions to implicitly increase the receptive field and encode multi-scale features. Our extensive experiments on classification, detection and segmentation tasks, reveal the merits of the proposed approach, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with comparatively lower compute requirements. Our EdgeNeXt model with 1.3M parameters achieves 71.2% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K, outperforming MobileViT with an absolute gain of 2.2% with 28% reduction in FLOPs. Further, our EdgeNeXt model with 5.6M parameters achieves 79.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1K. The code and models are available at https://t.ly/_Vu9.
Guiding Visual Attention in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Human Eye Movements
Authors: Leonard E. van Dyck, Sebastian J. Denzler, Walter R. Gruber
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection, Object Recognition, Time Series Analysis

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) were originally inspired by principles of biological vision, have evolved into best current computational models of object recognition, and consequently indicate strong architectural and functional parallelism with the ventral visual pathway throughout comparisons with neuroimaging and neural time series data. As recent advances in deep learning seem to decrease this similarity, computational neuroscience is challenged to reverse-engineer the biological plausibility to obtain useful models. While previous studies have shown that biologically inspired architectures are able to amplify the human-likeness of the models, in this study, we investigate a purely data-driven approach. We use human eye tracking data to directly modify training examples and thereby guide the models' visual attention during object recognition in natural images either towards or away from the focus of human fixations. We compare and validate different manipulation types (i.e., standard, human-like, and non-human-like attention) through GradCAM saliency maps against human participant eye tracking data. Our results demonstrate that the proposed guided focus manipulation works as intended in the negative direction and non-human-like models focus on significantly dissimilar image parts compared to humans. The observed effects were highly category-specific, enhanced by animacy and face presence, developed only after feedforward processing was completed, and indicated a strong influence on face detection. With this approach, however, no significantly increased human-likeness was found. Possible applications of overt visual attention in DCNNs and further implications for theories of face detection are discussed.
H&E-based Computational Biomarker Enables Universal EGFR Screening for Lung Adenocarcinoma
Authors: Gabriele Campanella, David Ho, Ida Häggström, Anton S Becker, Jason Chang, Chad Vanderbilt, Thomas J Fuchs
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, with lung adenocarcinoma being the most prevalent form of lung cancer. EGFR positive lung adenocarcinomas have been shown to have high response rates to TKI therapy, underlying the essential nature of molecular testing for lung cancers. Despite current guidelines consider testing necessary, a large portion of patients are not routinely profiled, resulting in millions of people not receiving the optimal treatment for their lung cancer. Sequencing is the gold standard for molecular testing of EGFR mutations, but it can take several weeks for results to come back, which is not ideal in a time constrained scenario. The development of alternative screening tools capable of detecting EGFR mutations quickly and cheaply while preserving tissue for sequencing could help reduce the amount of sub-optimally treated patients. We propose a multi-modal approach which integrates pathology images and clinical variables to predict EGFR mutational status achieving an AUC of 84% on the largest clinical cohort to date. Such a computational model could be deployed at large at little additional cost. Its clinical application could reduce the number of patients who receive sub-optimal treatments by 53.1% in China, and up to 96.6% in the US.
Toward Unpaired Multi-modal Medical Image Segmentation via Learning Structured Semantic Consistency
Authors: Jie Yang, Ye Zhu, Chaoqun Wang, Zhen Li, Ruimao Zhang
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Integrating multi-modal data to promote medical image analysis has recently gained great attention. This paper presents a novel scheme to learn the mutual benefits of different modalities to achieve better segmentation results for unpaired multi-modal medical images. Our approach tackles two critical issues of this task from a practical perspective: (1) how to effectively learn the semantic consistencies of various modalities (e.g., CT and MRI), and (2) how to leverage the above consistencies to regularize the network learning while preserving its simplicity. To address (1), we leverage a carefully designed External Attention Module (EAM) to align semantic class representations and their correlations of different modalities. To solve (2), the proposed EAM is designed as an external plug-and-play one, which can be discarded once the model is optimized. We have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method on two medical image segmentation scenarios: (1) cardiac structure segmentation, and (2) abdominal multi-organ segmentation. Extensive results show that the proposed method outperforms its counterparts by a wide margin.
Semantics-Depth-Symbiosis: Deeply Coupled Semi-Supervised Learning of Semantics and Depth
Authors: Nitin Bansal, Pan Ji, Junsong Yuan, Yi Xu
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Depth Estimation, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Multi-task learning (MTL) paradigm focuses on jointly learning two or more tasks, aiming for significant improvement w.r.t model's generalizability, performance, and training/inference memory footprint. The aforementioned benefits become ever so indispensable in the case of joint training for vision-related {\bf dense} prediction tasks. In this work, we tackle the MTL problem of two dense tasks, i.e., semantic segmentation and depth estimation, and present a novel attention module called Cross-Channel Attention Module ({CCAM}), which facilitates effective feature sharing along each channel between the two tasks, leading to mutual performance gain with a negligible increase in trainable parameters. In a true symbiotic spirit, we then formulate a novel data augmentation for the semantic segmentation task using predicted depth called {AffineMix}, and a simple depth augmentation using predicted semantics called {ColorAug}. Finally, we validate the performance gain of the proposed method on the Cityscapes and ScanNet dataset, which helps us achieve state-of-the-art results for a semi-supervised joint model based on depth and semantic segmentation.
LargeKernel3D: Scaling up Kernels in 3D Sparse CNNs
Authors: Yukang Chen, Jianhui Liu, Xiangyu Zhang, Xiaojuan Qi, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advance in 2D CNNs has revealed that large kernels are important. However, when directly applying large convolutional kernels in 3D CNNs, severe difficulties are met, where those successful module designs in 2D become surprisingly ineffective on 3D networks, including the popular depth-wise convolution. To address this vital challenge, we instead propose the spatial-wise partition convolution and its large-kernel module. As a result, it avoids the optimization and efficiency issues of naive 3D large kernels. Our large-kernel 3D CNN network, LargeKernel3D, yields notable improvement in 3D tasks of semantic segmentation and object detection. It achieves 73.9% mIoU on the ScanNetv2 semantic segmentation and 72.8% NDS nuScenes object detection benchmarks, ranking 1st on the nuScenes LIDAR leaderboard. The performance further boosts to 74.2% NDS with a simple multi-modal fusion. In addition, LargeKernel3D can be scaled to 17x17x17 kernel size on Waymo 3D object detection. For the first time, we show that large kernels are feasible and essential for 3D visual tasks.
Vicinity Vision Transformer
Authors: Weixuan Sun, Zhen Qin, Hui Deng, Jianyuan Wang, Yi Zhang, Kaihao Zhang, Nick Barnes, Stan Birchfield, Lingpeng Kong, Yiran Zhong
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Vision transformers have shown great success on numerous computer vision tasks. However, its central component, softmax attention, prohibits vision transformers from scaling up to high-resolution images, due to both the computational complexity and memory footprint being quadratic. Although linear attention was introduced in natural language processing (NLP) tasks to mitigate a similar issue, directly applying existing linear attention to vision transformers may not lead to satisfactory results. We investigate this problem and find that computer vision tasks focus more on local information compared with NLP tasks. Based on this observation, we present a Vicinity Attention that introduces a locality bias to vision transformers with linear complexity. Specifically, for each image patch, we adjust its attention weight based on its 2D Manhattan distance measured by its neighbouring patches. In this case, the neighbouring patches will receive stronger attention than far-away patches. Moreover, since our Vicinity Attention requires the token length to be much larger than the feature dimension to show its efficiency advantages, we further propose a new Vicinity Vision Transformer (VVT) structure to reduce the feature dimension without degenerating the accuracy. We perform extensive experiments on the CIFAR100, ImageNet1K, and ADE20K datasets to validate the effectiveness of our method. Our method has a slower growth rate of GFlops than previous transformer-based and convolution-based networks when the input resolution increases. In particular, our approach achieves state-of-the-art image classification accuracy with 50% fewer parameters than previous methods.
Faster Diffusion Cardiac MRI with Deep Learning-based breath hold reduction
Authors: Michael Tanzer, Pedro Ferreira, Andrew Scott, Zohya Khalique, Maria Dwornik, Dudley Pennell, Guang Yang, Daniel Rueckert, Sonia Nielles-Vallespin
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Prognosis

Diffusion Tensor Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (DT-CMR) enables us to probe the microstructural arrangement of cardiomyocytes within the myocardium in vivo and non-invasively, which no other imaging modality allows. This innovative technology could revolutionise the ability to perform cardiac clinical diagnosis, risk stratification, prognosis and therapy follow-up. However, DT-CMR is currently inefficient with over six minutes needed to acquire a single 2D static image. Therefore, DT-CMR is currently confined to research but not used clinically. We propose to reduce the number of repetitions needed to produce DT-CMR datasets and subsequently de-noise them, decreasing the acquisition time by a linear factor while maintaining acceptable image quality. Our proposed approach, based on Generative Adversarial Networks, Vision Transformers, and Ensemble Learning, performs significantly and considerably better than previous proposed approaches, bringing single breath-hold DT-CMR closer to reality.
QuantFace: Towards Lightweight Face Recognition by Synthetic Data Low-bit Quantization
Authors: Fadi Boutros, Naser Damer, Arjan Kuijper
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Lightweight Face Recognition, Quantization

Deep learning-based face recognition models follow the common trend in deep neural networks by utilizing full-precision floating-point networks with high computational costs. Deploying such networks in use-cases constrained by computational requirements is often infeasible due to the large memory required by the full-precision model. Previous compact face recognition approaches proposed to design special compact architectures and train them from scratch using real training data, which may not be available in a real-world scenario due to privacy concerns. We present in this work the QuantFace solution based on low-bit precision format model quantization. QuantFace reduces the required computational cost of the existing face recognition models without the need for designing a particular architecture or accessing real training data. QuantFace introduces privacy-friendly synthetic face data to the quantization process to mitigate potential privacy concerns and issues related to the accessibility to real training data. Through extensive evaluation experiments on seven benchmarks and four network architectures, we demonstrate that QuantFace can successfully reduce the model size up to 5x while maintaining, to a large degree, the verification performance of the full-precision model without accessing real training datasets.
SFace: Privacy-friendly and Accurate Face Recognition using Synthetic Data
Authors: Fadi Boutros, Marco Huber, Patrick Siebke, Tim Rieber, Naser Damer
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Generative Adversarial Network, Multi-class Classification, Transfer Learning

Recent deep face recognition models proposed in the literature utilized large-scale public datasets such as MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2 for training very deep neural networks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on mainstream benchmarks. Recently, many of these datasets, e.g., MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2, are retracted due to credible privacy and ethical concerns. This motivates this work to propose and investigate the feasibility of using a privacy-friendly synthetically generated face dataset to train face recognition models. Towards this end, we utilize a class-conditional generative adversarial network to generate class-labeled synthetic face images, namely SFace. To address the privacy aspect of using such data to train a face recognition model, we provide extensive evaluation experiments on the identity relation between the synthetic dataset and the original authentic dataset used to train the generative model. Our reported evaluation proved that associating an identity of the authentic dataset to one with the same class label in the synthetic dataset is hardly possible. We also propose to train face recognition on our privacy-friendly dataset, SFace, using three different learning strategies, multi-class classification, label-free knowledge transfer, and combined learning of multi-class classification and knowledge transfer. The reported evaluation results on five authentic face benchmarks demonstrated that the privacy-friendly synthetic dataset has high potential to be used for training face recognition models, achieving, for example, a verification accuracy of 91.87\% on LFW using multi-class classification and 99.13\% using the combined learning strategy.
Bi-Calibration Networks for Weakly-Supervised Video Representation Learning
Authors: Fuchen Long, Ting Yao, Zhaofan Qiu, Xinmei Tian, Jiebo Luo, Tao Mei
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

The leverage of large volumes of web videos paired with the searched queries or surrounding texts (e.g., title) offers an economic and extensible alternative to supervised video representation learning. Nevertheless, modeling such weakly visual-textual connection is not trivial due to query polysemy (i.e., many possible meanings for a query) and text isomorphism (i.e., same syntactic structure of different text). In this paper, we introduce a new design of mutual calibration between query and text to boost weakly-supervised video representation learning. Specifically, we present Bi-Calibration Networks (BCN) that novelly couples two calibrations to learn the amendment from text to query and vice versa. Technically, BCN executes clustering on all the titles of the videos searched by an identical query and takes the centroid of each cluster as a text prototype. The query vocabulary is built directly on query words. The video-to-text/video-to-query projections over text prototypes/query vocabulary then start the text-to-query or query-to-text calibration to estimate the amendment to query or text. We also devise a selection scheme to balance the two corrections. Two large-scale web video datasets paired with query and title for each video are newly collected for weakly-supervised video representation learning, which are named as YOVO-3M and YOVO-10M, respectively. The video features of BCN learnt on 3M web videos obtain superior results under linear model protocol on downstream tasks. More remarkably, BCN trained on the larger set of 10M web videos with further fine-tuning leads to 1.6%, and 1.8% gains in top-1 accuracy on Kinetics-400, and Something-Something V2 datasets over the state-of-the-art TDN, and ACTION-Net methods with ImageNet pre-training. Source code and datasets are available at \url{https://github.com/FuchenUSTC/BCN}.
Learning to Estimate and Refine Fluid Motion with Physical Dynamics
Authors: Mingrui Zhang, Jianhong Wang, James Tlhomole, Matthew D. Piggott
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation, Optical Flow Estimation

Extracting information on fluid motion directly from images is challenging. Fluid flow represents a complex dynamic system governed by the Navier-Stokes equations. General optical flow methods are typically designed for rigid body motion, and thus struggle if applied to fluid motion estimation directly. Further, optical flow methods only focus on two consecutive frames without utilising historical temporal information, while the fluid motion (velocity field) can be considered a continuous trajectory constrained by time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs). This discrepancy has the potential to induce physically inconsistent estimations. Here we propose an unsupervised learning based prediction-correction scheme for fluid flow estimation. An estimate is first given by a PDE-constrained optical flow predictor, which is then refined by a physical based corrector. The proposed approach outperforms optical flow methods and shows competitive results compared to existing supervised learning based methods on a benchmark dataset. Furthermore, the proposed approach can generalize to complex real-world fluid scenarios where ground truth information is effectively unknowable. Finally, experiments demonstrate that the physical corrector can refine flow estimates by mimicking the operator splitting method commonly utilised in fluid dynamical simulation.
An Overview of Privacy-enhancing Technologies in Biometric Recognition
Authors: Pietro Melzi, Christian Rathgeb, Ruben Tolosana, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Christoph Busch
Date: 2022-06-21 00:00:00

Privacy-enhancing technologies are technologies that implement fundamental data protection principles. With respect to biometric recognition, different types of privacy-enhancing technologies have been introduced for protecting stored biometric data which are generally classified as sensitive. In this regard, various taxonomies and conceptual categorizations have been proposed and standardization activities have been carried out. However, these efforts have mainly been devoted to certain sub-categories of privacy-enhancing technologies and therefore lack generalization. This work provides an overview of concepts of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics in a unified framework. Key aspects and differences between existing concepts are highlighted in detail at each processing step. Fundamental properties and limitations of existing approaches are discussed and related to data protection techniques and principles. Moreover, scenarios and methods for the assessment of privacy-enhancing technologies for biometrics are presented. This paper is meant as a point of entry to the field of biometric data protection and is directed towards experienced researchers as well as non-experts.