pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MMBench: Is Your Multi-modal Model an All-around Player?
Authors: YuAn Liu, Haodong Duan, Yuanhan Zhang, Bo Li, Songyang Zhang, Wangbo Zhao, Yike Yuan, Jiaqi Wang, Conghui He, Ziwei Liu, Kai Chen, Dahua Lin
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Instruction Following, Multiple-choice, Visual Question Answering

Large vision-language models (VLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress, exhibiting impressive multimodal perception and reasoning abilities. However, effectively evaluating these large VLMs remains a major challenge, hindering future development in this domain. Traditional benchmarks like VQAv2 or COCO Caption provide quantitative performance measurements but lack fine-grained ability assessment and robust evaluation metrics. Meanwhile, subjective benchmarks, such as OwlEval, offer comprehensive evaluations of a model's abilities by incorporating human labor, which is not scalable and may display significant bias. In response to these challenges, we propose MMBench, a bilingual benchmark for assessing the multi-modal capabilities of VLMs. MMBench methodically develops a comprehensive evaluation pipeline, primarily comprised of the following key features: 1. MMBench is meticulously curated with well-designed quality control schemes, surpassing existing similar benchmarks in terms of the number and variety of evaluation questions and abilities; 2. MMBench introduces a rigorous CircularEval strategy and incorporates large language models to convert free-form predictions into pre-defined choices, which helps to yield accurate evaluation results for models with limited instruction-following capabilities. 3. MMBench incorporates multiple-choice questions in both English and Chinese versions, enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of VLMs' performance under a bilingual context. To summarize, MMBench is a systematically designed objective benchmark for a robust and holistic evaluation of vision-language models. We hope MMBench will assist the research community in better evaluating their models and facilitate future progress in this area. The evalutation code of MMBench has been integrated into VLMEvalKit: https://github.com/open-compass/VLMEvalKit.
Stochastic Light Field Holography
Authors: Florian Schiffers, PRANEETH CHAKRAVARTHULA, Nathan Matsuda, Grace Kuo, Ethan Tseng, Douglas Lanman, Felix Heide, Oliver Cossairt
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00

The Visual Turing Test is the ultimate goal to evaluate the realism of holographic displays. Previous studies have focused on addressing challenges such as limited \'etendue and image quality over a large focal volume, but they have not investigated the effect of pupil sampling on the viewing experience in full 3D holograms. In this work, we tackle this problem with a novel hologram generation algorithm motivated by matching the projection operators of incoherent Light Field and coherent Wigner Function light transport. To this end, we supervise hologram computation using synthesized photographs, which are rendered on-the-fly using Light Field refocusing from stochastically sampled pupil states during optimization. The proposed method produces holograms with correct parallax and focus cues, which are important for passing the Visual Turing Test. We validate that our approach compares favorably to state-of-the-art CGH algorithms that use Light Field and Focal Stack supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly improves the realism of the viewing experience for a variety of different pupil states.
Exposing the Fake: Effective Diffusion-Generated Images Detection
Authors: RuiPeng Ma, Jinhao Duan, Fei Kong, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Image synthesis has seen significant advancements with the advent of diffusion-based generative models like Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPM) and text-to-image diffusion models. Despite their efficacy, there is a dearth of research dedicated to detecting diffusion-generated images, which could pose potential security and privacy risks. This paper addresses this gap by proposing a novel detection method called Stepwise Error for Diffusion-generated Image Detection (SeDID). Comprising statistical-based $\text{SeDID}_{\text{Stat}}$ and neural network-based $\text{SeDID}_{\text{NNs}}$, SeDID exploits the unique attributes of diffusion models, namely deterministic reverse and deterministic denoising computation errors. Our evaluations demonstrate SeDID's superior performance over existing methods when applied to diffusion models. Thus, our work makes a pivotal contribution to distinguishing diffusion model-generated images, marking a significant step in the domain of artificial intelligence security.
UGCANet: A Unified Global Context-Aware Transformer-based Network with Feature Alignment for Endoscopic Image Analysis
Authors: Pham Vu Hung, Nguyen Duy Manh, Nguyen Thi Oanh, Nguyen Thi Thuy, Dinh Viet Sang
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Medical Image Segmentation, Medical Procedure, Prognosis

Gastrointestinal endoscopy is a medical procedure that utilizes a flexible tube equipped with a camera and other instruments to examine the digestive tract. This minimally invasive technique allows for diagnosing and managing various gastrointestinal conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, gastrointestinal bleeding, and colon cancer. The early detection and identification of lesions in the upper gastrointestinal tract and the identification of malignant polyps that may pose a risk of cancer development are critical components of gastrointestinal endoscopy's diagnostic and therapeutic applications. Therefore, enhancing the detection rates of gastrointestinal disorders can significantly improve a patient's prognosis by increasing the likelihood of timely medical intervention, which may prolong the patient's lifespan and improve overall health outcomes. This paper presents a novel Transformer-based deep neural network designed to perform multiple tasks simultaneously, thereby enabling accurate identification of both upper gastrointestinal tract lesions and colon polyps. Our approach proposes a unique global context-aware module and leverages the powerful MiT backbone, along with a feature alignment block, to enhance the network's representation capability. This novel design leads to a significant improvement in performance across various endoscopic diagnosis tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
On the Importance of Denoising when Learning to Compress Images
Authors: Benoit Brummer, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Image noise is ubiquitous in photography. However, image noise is not compressible nor desirable, thus attempting to convey the noise in compressed image bitstreams yields sub-par results in both rate and distortion. We propose to explicitly learn the image denoising task when training a codec. Therefore, we leverage the Natural Image Noise Dataset, which offers a wide variety of scenes captured with various ISO numbers, leading to different noise levels, including insignificant ones. Given this training set, we supervise the codec with noisy-clean image pairs, and show that a single model trained based on a mixture of images with variable noise levels appears to yield best-in-class results with both noisy and clean images, achieving better rate-distortion than a compression-only model or even than a pair of denoising-then-compression models with almost one order of magnitude fewer GMac operations.
SepVAE: a contrastive VAE to separate pathological patterns from healthy ones
Authors: Robin Louiset, Edouard Duchesnay, Antoine Grigis, Benoit Dufumier, Pietro Gori
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00

Contrastive Analysis VAE (CA-VAEs) is a family of Variational auto-encoders (VAEs) that aims at separating the common factors of variation between a background dataset (BG) (i.e., healthy subjects) and a target dataset (TG) (i.e., patients) from the ones that only exist in the target dataset. To do so, these methods separate the latent space into a set of salient features (i.e., proper to the target dataset) and a set of common features (i.e., exist in both datasets). Currently, all models fail to prevent the sharing of information between latent spaces effectively and to capture all salient factors of variation. To this end, we introduce two crucial regularization losses: a disentangling term between common and salient representations and a classification term between background and target samples in the salient space. We show a better performance than previous CA-VAEs methods on three medical applications and a natural images dataset (CelebA). Code and datasets are available on GitHub https://github.com/neurospin-projects/2023_rlouiset_sepvae.
CellGAN: Conditional Cervical Cell Synthesis for Augmenting Cytopathological Image Classification
Authors: Zhenrong Shen, Maosong Cao, Sheng Wang, Lichi Zhang, Qian Wang
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Generation, whole slide images

Automatic examination of thin-prep cytologic test (TCT) slides can assist pathologists in finding cervical abnormality for accurate and efficient cancer screening. Current solutions mostly need to localize suspicious cells and classify abnormality based on local patches, concerning the fact that whole slide images of TCT are extremely large. It thus requires many annotations of normal and abnormal cervical cells, to supervise the training of the patch-level classifier for promising performance. In this paper, we propose CellGAN to synthesize cytopathological images of various cervical cell types for augmenting patch-level cell classification. Built upon a lightweight backbone, CellGAN is equipped with a non-linear class mapping network to effectively incorporate cell type information into image generation. We also propose the Skip-layer Global Context module to model the complex spatial relationship of the cells, and attain high fidelity of the synthesized images through adversarial learning. Our experiments demonstrate that CellGAN can produce visually plausible TCT cytopathological images for different cell types. We also validate the effectiveness of using CellGAN to greatly augment patch-level cell classification performance.
Large Class Separation is not what you need for Relational Reasoning-based OOD Detection
Authors: Lorenzo Li Lu, Giulia D'Ascenzi, Francesco Cappio Borlino, Tatiana Tommasi
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Relational Reasoning

Standard recognition approaches are unable to deal with novel categories at test time. Their overconfidence on the known classes makes the predictions unreliable for safety-critical applications such as healthcare or autonomous driving. Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) detection methods provide a solution by identifying semantic novelty. Most of these methods leverage a learning stage on the known data, which means training (or fine-tuning) a model to capture the concept of normality. This process is clearly sensitive to the amount of available samples and might be computationally expensive for on-board systems. A viable alternative is that of evaluating similarities in the embedding space produced by large pre-trained models without any further learning effort. We focus exactly on such a fine-tuning-free OOD detection setting. This works presents an in-depth analysis of the recently introduced relational reasoning pre-training and investigates the properties of the learned embedding, highlighting the existence of a correlation between the inter-class feature distance and the OOD detection accuracy. As the class separation depends on the chosen pre-training objective, we propose an alternative loss function to control the inter-class margin, and we show its advantage with thorough experiments.
Smart Infrastructure: A Research Junction
Authors: Manuel Hetzel, Hannes Reichert, Konrad Doll, Bernhard Sick
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Synthetic Data Generation

Complex inner-city junctions are among the most critical traffic areas for injury and fatal accidents. The development of highly automated driving (HAD) systems struggles with the complex and hectic everyday life within those areas. Sensor-equipped smart infrastructures, which can communicate and cooperate with vehicles, are essential to enable a holistic scene understanding to resolve occlusions drivers and vehicle perception systems for themselves can not cover. We introduce an intelligent research infrastructure equipped with visual sensor technology, located at a public inner-city junction in Aschaffenburg, Germany. A multiple-view camera system monitors the traffic situation to perceive road users' behavior. Both motorized and non-motorized traffic is considered. The system is used for research in data generation, evaluating new HAD sensors systems, algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) training strategies using real-, synthetic- and augmented data. In addition, the junction features a highly accurate digital twin. Real-world data can be taken into the digital twin for simulation purposes and synthetic data generation.
The IMPTC Dataset: An Infrastructural Multi-Person Trajectory and Context Dataset
Authors: Manuel Hetzel, Hannes Reichert, Günther Reitberger, Erich Fuchs, Konrad Doll, Bernhard Sick
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding

Inner-city intersections are among the most critical traffic areas for injury and fatal accidents. Automated vehicles struggle with the complex and hectic everyday life within those areas. Sensor-equipped smart infrastructures, which can cooperate with vehicles, can benefit automated traffic by extending the perception capabilities of drivers and vehicle perception systems. Additionally, they offer the opportunity to gather reproducible and precise data of a holistic scene understanding, including context information as a basis for training algorithms for various applications in automated traffic. Therefore, we introduce the Infrastructural Multi-Person Trajectory and Context Dataset (IMPTC). We use an intelligent public inner-city intersection in Germany with visual sensor technology. A multi-view camera and LiDAR system perceives traffic situations and road users' behavior. Additional sensors monitor contextual information like weather, lighting, and traffic light signal status. The data acquisition system focuses on Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs) and multi-agent interaction. The resulting dataset consists of eight hours of measurement data. It contains over 2,500 VRU trajectories, including pedestrians, cyclists, e-scooter riders, strollers, and wheelchair users, and over 20,000 vehicle trajectories at different day times, weather conditions, and seasons. In addition, to enable the entire stack of research capabilities, the dataset includes all data, starting from the sensor-, calibration- and detection data until trajectory and context data. The dataset is continuously expanded and is available online for non-commercial research at https://github.com/kav-institute/imptc-dataset.
Learning Kernel-Modulated Neural Representation for Efficient Light Field Compression
Authors: Jinglei Shi, Yihong Xu, Christine Guillemot
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Quantization, Tensor Decomposition

Light field is a type of image data that captures the 3D scene information by recording light rays emitted from a scene at various orientations. It offers a more immersive perception than classic 2D images but at the cost of huge data volume. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the visual characteristics of Sub-Aperture Images (SAIs) of light field and design a compact neural network representation for the light field compression task. The network backbone takes randomly initialized noise as input and is supervised on the SAIs of the target light field. It is composed of two types of complementary kernels: descriptive kernels (descriptors) that store scene description information learned during training, and modulatory kernels (modulators) that control the rendering of different SAIs from the queried perspectives. To further enhance compactness of the network meanwhile retain high quality of the decoded light field, we accordingly introduce modulator allocation and kernel tensor decomposition mechanisms, followed by non-uniform quantization and lossless entropy coding techniques, to finally form an efficient compression pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by a significant margin in the light field compression task. Moreover, after aligning descriptors, the modulators learned from one light field can be transferred to new light fields for rendering dense views, indicating a potential solution for view synthesis task.
Recognizing student identification numbers from the matrix templates using a modified U-net architecture
Authors: Filip Pavičić
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00

This paper presents an innovative approach to student identification during exams and knowledge tests, which overcomes the limitations of the traditional personal information entry method. The proposed method employs a matrix template on the designated section of the exam, where squares containing numbers are selectively blackened. The methodology involves the development of a neural network specifically designed for recognizing students' personal identification numbers. The neural network utilizes a specially adapted U-Net architecture, trained on an extensive dataset comprising images of blackened tables. The network demonstrates proficiency in recognizing the patterns and arrangement of blackened squares, accurately interpreting the information inscribed within them. Additionally, the model exhibits high accuracy in correctly identifying entered student personal numbers and effectively detecting erroneous entries within the table. This approach offers multiple advantages. Firstly, it significantly accelerates the exam marking process by automatically extracting identifying information from the blackened tables, eliminating the need for manual entry and minimizing the potential for errors. Secondly, the method automates the identification process, thereby reducing administrative effort and expediting data processing. The introduction of this innovative identification system represents a notable advancement in the field of exams and knowledge tests, replacing the conventional manual entry of personal data with a streamlined, efficient, and accurate identification process.
RFENet: Towards Reciprocal Feature Evolution for Glass Segmentation
Authors: Ke Fan, Changan Wang, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Ran Yi, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Glass-like objects are widespread in daily life but remain intractable to be segmented for most existing methods. The transparent property makes it difficult to be distinguished from background, while the tiny separation boundary further impedes the acquisition of their exact contour. In this paper, by revealing the key co-evolution demand of semantic and boundary learning, we propose a Selective Mutual Evolution (SME) module to enable the reciprocal feature learning between them. Then to exploit the global shape context, we propose a Structurally Attentive Refinement (SAR) module to conduct a fine-grained feature refinement for those ambiguous points around the boundary. Finally, to further utilize the multi-scale representation, we integrate the above two modules into a cascaded structure and then introduce a Reciprocal Feature Evolution Network (RFENet) for effective glass-like object segmentation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our RFENet achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular public datasets.
AICT: An Adaptive Image Compression Transformer
Authors: Ahmed Ghorbel, Wassim Hamidouche, Luce Morin
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Compression, Long-range modeling

Motivated by the efficiency investigation of the Tranformer-based transform coding framework, namely SwinT-ChARM, we propose to enhance the latter, as first, with a more straightforward yet effective Tranformer-based channel-wise auto-regressive prior model, resulting in an absolute image compression transformer (ICT). Current methods that still rely on ConvNet-based entropy coding are limited in long-range modeling dependencies due to their local connectivity and an increasing number of architectural biases and priors. On the contrary, the proposed ICT can capture both global and local contexts from the latent representations and better parameterize the distribution of the quantized latents. Further, we leverage a learnable scaling module with a sandwich ConvNeXt-based pre/post-processor to accurately extract more compact latent representation while reconstructing higher-quality images. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets showed that the proposed adaptive image compression transformer (AICT) framework significantly improves the trade-off between coding efficiency and decoder complexity over the versatile video coding (VVC) reference encoder (VTM-18.0) and the neural codec SwinT-ChARM.
Operational Support Estimator Networks
Authors: Mete Ahishali, Mehmet Yamac, Serkan Kiranyaz, Moncef Gabbouj
Date: 2023-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Computational Efficiency

In this work, we propose a novel approach called Operational Support Estimator Networks (OSENs) for the support estimation task. Support Estimation (SE) is defined as finding the locations of non-zero elements in sparse signals. By its very nature, the mapping between the measurement and sparse signal is a non-linear operation. Traditional support estimators rely on computationally expensive iterative signal recovery techniques to achieve such non-linearity. Contrary to the convolutional layers, the proposed OSEN approach consists of operational layers that can learn such complex non-linearities without the need for deep networks. In this way, the performance of non-iterative support estimation is greatly improved. Moreover, the operational layers comprise so-called generative super neurons with non-local kernels. The kernel location for each neuron/feature map is optimized jointly for the SE task during training. We evaluate the OSENs in three different applications: i. support estimation from Compressive Sensing (CS) measurements, ii. representation-based classification, and iii. learning-aided CS reconstruction where the output of OSENs is used as prior knowledge to the CS algorithm for enhanced reconstruction. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves computational efficiency and outperforms competing methods, especially at low measurement rates by significant margins. The software implementation is shared at https://github.com/meteahishali/OSEN.