pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Semantic Correspondence with Viewpoint-Guided Spherical Maps
Authors: Octave Mariotti, Oisin Mac Aodha, Hakan Bilen
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Representation Learning, Semantic correspondence

Recent progress in self-supervised representation learning has resulted in models that are capable of extracting image features that are not only effective at encoding image level, but also pixel-level, semantics. These features have been shown to be effective for dense visual semantic correspondence estimation, even outperforming fully-supervised methods. Nevertheless, current self-supervised approaches still fail in the presence of challenging image characteristics such as symmetries and repeated parts. To address these limitations, we propose a new approach for semantic correspondence estimation that supplements discriminative self-supervised features with 3D understanding via a weak geometric spherical prior. Compared to more involved 3D pipelines, our model only requires weak viewpoint information, and the simplicity of our spherical representation enables us to inject informative geometric priors into the model during training. We propose a new evaluation metric that better accounts for repeated part and symmetry-induced mistakes. We present results on the challenging SPair-71k dataset, where we show that our approach demonstrates is capable of distinguishing between symmetric views and repeated parts across many object categories, and also demonstrate that we can generalize to unseen classes on the AwA dataset.
Brain-Inspired Visual Odometry: Balancing Speed and Interpretability through a System of Systems Approach
Authors: Habib Boloorchi Tabrizi, Christopher Crick
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Causal Inference, Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry

In this study, we address the critical challenge of balancing speed and accuracy while maintaining interpretablity in visual odometry (VO) systems, a pivotal aspect in the field of autonomous navigation and robotics. Traditional VO systems often face a trade-off between computational speed and the precision of pose estimation. To tackle this issue, we introduce an innovative system that synergistically combines traditional VO methods with a specifically tailored fully connected network (FCN). Our system is unique in its approach to handle each degree of freedom independently within the FCN, placing a strong emphasis on causal inference to enhance interpretability. This allows for a detailed and accurate assessment of relative pose error (RPE) across various degrees of freedom, providing a more comprehensive understanding of parameter variations and movement dynamics in different environments. Notably, our system demonstrates a remarkable improvement in processing speed without compromising accuracy. In certain scenarios, it achieves up to a 5% reduction in Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), showcasing its ability to effectively bridge the gap between speed and accuracy that has long been a limitation in VO research. This advancement represents a significant step forward in developing more efficient and reliable VO systems, with wide-ranging applications in real-time navigation and robotic systems.
Splatter Image: Ultra-Fast Single-View 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Stanislaw Szymanowicz, Christian Rupprecht, Andrea Vedaldi
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Object Reconstruction, 3D Reconstruction, GPU, Monocular Reconstruction, Object Reconstruction, Single-View 3D Reconstruction

We introduce the \method, an ultra-efficient approach for monocular 3D object reconstruction. Splatter Image is based on Gaussian Splatting, which allows fast and high-quality reconstruction of 3D scenes from multiple images. We apply Gaussian Splatting to monocular reconstruction by learning a neural network that, at test time, performs reconstruction in a feed-forward manner, at 38 FPS. Our main innovation is the surprisingly straightforward design of this network, which, using 2D operators, maps the input image to one 3D Gaussian per pixel. The resulting set of Gaussians thus has the form an image, the Splatter Image. We further extend the method take several images as input via cross-view attention. Owning to the speed of the renderer (588 FPS), we use a single GPU for training while generating entire images at each iteration to optimize perceptual metrics like LPIPS. On several synthetic, real, multi-category and large-scale benchmark datasets, we achieve better results in terms of PSNR, LPIPS, and other metrics while training and evaluating much faster than prior works. Code, models, demo and more results are available at https://szymanowiczs.github.io/splatter-image.
Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation
Authors: Hongtao Wu, Ya Jing, Chilam Cheang, Guangzeng Chen, Jiafeng Xu, Xinghang Li, Minghuan Liu, Hang Li, Tao Kong
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Manipulation, Zero-shot Generalization

Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a straightforward GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. In the setting of zero-shot unseen scene generalization, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms baseline methods and shows strong potentials in generalization to unseen scenes and objects. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Project page: https://GR1-Manipulation.github.io
Pixel-to-Abundance Translation: Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks Based on Patch Transformer for Hyperspectral Unmixing
Authors: Li Wang, Xiaohua Zhang, Longfei Li, Hongyun Meng, Xianghai Cao
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Hyperspectral Unmixing

Spectral unmixing is a significant challenge in hyperspectral image processing. Existing unmixing methods utilize prior knowledge about the abundance distribution to solve the regularization optimization problem, where the difficulty lies in choosing appropriate prior knowledge and solving the complex regularization optimization problem. To solve these problems, we propose a hyperspectral conditional generative adversarial network (HyperGAN) method as a generic unmixing framework, based on the following assumption: the unmixing process from pixel to abundance can be regarded as a transformation of two modalities with an internal specific relationship. The proposed HyperGAN is composed of a generator and discriminator, the former completes the modal conversion from mixed hyperspectral pixel patch to the abundance of corresponding endmember of the central pixel and the latter is used to distinguish whether the distribution and structure of generated abundance are the same as the true ones. We propose hyperspectral image (HSI) Patch Transformer as the main component of the generator, which utilize adaptive attention score to capture the internal pixels correlation of the HSI patch and leverage the spatial-spectral information in a fine-grained way to achieve optimization of the unmixing process. Experiments on synthetic data and real hyperspectral data achieve impressive results compared to state-of-the-art competitors.
Investigating Color Illusions from the Perspective of Computational Color Constancy
Authors: Oguzhan Ulucan, Diclehan Ulucan, Marc Ebner
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Color Constancy

Color constancy and color illusion perception are two phenomena occurring in the human visual system, which can help us reveal unknown mechanisms of human perception. For decades computer vision scientists have developed numerous color constancy methods, which estimate the reflectance of the surface by discounting the illuminant. However, color illusions have not been analyzed in detail in the field of computational color constancy, which we find surprising since the relationship they share is significant and may let us design more robust systems. We argue that any model that can reproduce our sensation on color illusions should also be able to provide pixel-wise estimates of the light source. In other words, we suggest that the analysis of color illusions helps us to improve the performance of the existing global color constancy methods, and enable them to provide pixel-wise estimates for scenes illuminated by multiple light sources. In this study, we share the outcomes of our investigation in which we take several color constancy methods and modify them to reproduce the behavior of the human visual system on color illusions. Also, we show that parameters purely extracted from illusions are able to improve the performance of color constancy methods. A noteworthy outcome is that our strategy based on the investigation of color illusions outperforms the state-of-the-art methods that are specifically designed to transform global color constancy algorithms into multi-illuminant algorithms.
ASSISTGUI: Task-Oriented Desktop Graphical User Interface Automation
Authors: Difei Gao, Lei Ji, Zechen Bai, Mingyu Ouyang, Peiran Li, Dongxing Mao, Qinchen Wu, Weichen Zhang, Peiyi Wang, Xiangwu Guo, Hengxu Wang, Luowei Zhou, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation holds significant promise for assisting users with complex tasks, thereby boosting human productivity. Existing works leveraging Large Language Model (LLM) or LLM-based AI agents have shown capabilities in automating tasks on Android and Web platforms. However, these tasks are primarily aimed at simple device usage and entertainment operations. This paper presents a novel benchmark, AssistGUI, to evaluate whether models are capable of manipulating the mouse and keyboard on the Windows platform in response to user-requested tasks. We carefully collected a set of 100 tasks from nine widely-used software applications, such as, After Effects and MS Word, each accompanied by the necessary project files for better evaluation. Moreover, we propose an advanced Actor-Critic Embodied Agent framework, which incorporates a sophisticated GUI parser driven by an LLM-agent and an enhanced reasoning mechanism adept at handling lengthy procedural tasks. Our experimental results reveal that our GUI Parser and Reasoning mechanism outshine existing methods in performance. Nevertheless, the potential remains substantial, with the best model attaining only a 46% success rate on our benchmark. We conclude with a thorough analysis of the current methods' limitations, setting the stage for future breakthroughs in this domain.
Optimizing Ego Vehicle Trajectory Prediction: The Graph Enhancement Approach
Authors: Sushil Sharma, Aryan Singh, Ganesh Sistu, Mark Halton, Ciarán Eising
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Predicting the trajectory of an ego vehicle is a critical component of autonomous driving systems. Current state-of-the-art methods typically rely on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) and sequential models to process front-view images for future trajectory prediction. However, these approaches often struggle with perspective issues affecting object features in the scene. To address this, we advocate for the use of Bird's Eye View (BEV) perspectives, which offer unique advantages in capturing spatial relationships and object homogeneity. In our work, we leverage Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and positional encoding to represent objects in a BEV, achieving competitive performance compared to traditional DNN-based methods. While the BEV-based approach loses some detailed information inherent to front-view images, we balance this by enriching the BEV data by representing it as a graph where relationships between the objects in a scene are captured effectively.
Exploring Multimodal Large Language Models for Radiology Report Error-checking
Authors: Jinge Wu, Yunsoo Kim, Eva C. Keller, Jamie Chow, Adam P. Levine, Nikolas Pontikos, Zina Ibrahim, Paul Taylor, Michelle C. Williams, Honghan Wu
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

This paper proposes one of the first clinical applications of multimodal large language models (LLMs) as an assistant for radiologists to check errors in their reports. We created an evaluation dataset from real-world radiology datasets (including X-rays and CT scans). A subset of original reports was modified to contain synthetic errors by introducing three types of mistakes: "insert", "remove", and "substitute". The evaluation contained two difficulty levels: SIMPLE for binary error-checking and COMPLEX for identifying error types. At the SIMPLE level, our fine-tuned model significantly enhanced performance by 47.4% and 25.4% on MIMIC-CXR and IU X-ray data, respectively. This performance boost is also observed in unseen modality, CT scans, as the model performed 19.46% better than the baseline model. The model also surpassed the domain expert's accuracy in the MIMIC-CXR dataset by 1.67%. Notably, among the subsets (N=21) of the test set where a clinician did not achieve the correct conclusion, the LLaVA ensemble mode correctly identified 71.4% of these cases. However, all models performed poorly in identifying mistake types, underscoring the difficulty of the COMPLEX level. This study marks a promising step toward utilizing multimodal LLMs to enhance diagnostic accuracy in radiology. The ensemble model demonstrated comparable performance to clinicians, even capturing errors overlooked by humans.
SpecNeRF: Gaussian Directional Encoding for Specular Reflections
Authors: Li Ma, Vasu Agrawal, Haithem Turki, Changil Kim, Chen Gao, Pedro Sander, Michael Zollhöfer, Christian Richardt
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Neural radiance fields have achieved remarkable performance in modeling the appearance of 3D scenes. However, existing approaches still struggle with the view-dependent appearance of glossy surfaces, especially under complex lighting of indoor environments. Unlike existing methods, which typically assume distant lighting like an environment map, we propose a learnable Gaussian directional encoding to better model the view-dependent effects under near-field lighting conditions. Importantly, our new directional encoding captures the spatially-varying nature of near-field lighting and emulates the behavior of prefiltered environment maps. As a result, it enables the efficient evaluation of preconvolved specular color at any 3D location with varying roughness coefficients. We further introduce a data-driven geometry prior that helps alleviate the shape radiance ambiguity in reflection modeling. We show that our Gaussian directional encoding and geometry prior significantly improve the modeling of challenging specular reflections in neural radiance fields, which helps decompose appearance into more physically meaningful components.
SEER-ZSL: Semantic Encoder-Enhanced Representations for Generalized Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: William Heyden, Habib Ullah, M. Salman Siddiqui, Fadi Al Machot
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) presents the challenge of identifying categories not seen during training. This task is crucial in domains where it is costly, prohibited, or simply not feasible to collect training data. ZSL depends on a mapping between the visual space and available semantic information. Prior works learn a mapping between spaces that can be exploited during inference. We contend, however, that the disparity between meticulously curated semantic spaces and the inherently noisy nature of real-world data remains a substantial and unresolved challenge. In this paper, we address this by introducing a Semantic Encoder-Enhanced Representations for Zero-Shot Learning (SEER-ZSL). We propose a hybrid strategy to address the generalization gap. First, we aim to distill meaningful semantic information using a probabilistic encoder, enhancing the semantic consistency and robustness. Second, we distill the visual space by exploiting the learned data distribution through an adversarially trained generator. Finally, we align the distilled information, enabling a mapping of unseen categories onto the true data manifold. We demonstrate empirically that this approach yields a model that outperforms the state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of both generalization and benchmarks across diverse settings with small, medium, and large datasets. The complete code is available on GitHub.
MoSAR: Monocular Semi-Supervised Model for Avatar Reconstruction using Differentiable Shading
Authors: Abdallah Dib, Luiz Gustavo Hafemann, Emeline Got, Trevor Anderson, Amin Fadaeinejad, Rafael M. O. Cruz, Marc-Andre Carbonneau
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Face Reconstruction

Reconstructing an avatar from a portrait image has many applications in multimedia, but remains a challenging research problem. Extracting reflectance maps and geometry from one image is ill-posed: recovering geometry is a one-to-many mapping problem and reflectance and light are difficult to disentangle. Accurate geometry and reflectance can be captured under the controlled conditions of a light stage, but it is costly to acquire large datasets in this fashion. Moreover, training solely with this type of data leads to poor generalization with in-the-wild images. This motivates the introduction of MoSAR, a method for 3D avatar generation from monocular images. We propose a semi-supervised training scheme that improves generalization by learning from both light stage and in-the-wild datasets. This is achieved using a novel differentiable shading formulation. We show that our approach effectively disentangles the intrinsic face parameters, producing relightable avatars. As a result, MoSAR estimates a richer set of skin reflectance maps, and generates more realistic avatars than existing state-of-the-art methods. We also introduce a new dataset, named FFHQ-UV-Intrinsics, the first public dataset providing intrinsic face attributes at scale (diffuse, specular, ambient occlusion and translucency maps) for a total of 10k subjects. The project website and the dataset are available on the following link: https://ubisoft-laforge.github.io/character/mosar/
Perception Test 2023: A Summary of the First Challenge And Outcome
Authors: Joseph Heyward, João Carreira, Dima Damen, Andrew Zisserman, Viorica Pătrăucean
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Grounded Video Question Answering, Multiple-choice, Object Tracking, Point Tracking, Question Answering, Video Question Answering

The First Perception Test challenge was held as a half-day workshop alongside the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023, with the goal of benchmarking state-of-the-art video models on the recently proposed Perception Test benchmark. The challenge had six tracks covering low-level and high-level tasks, with both a language and non-language interface, across video, audio, and text modalities, and covering: object tracking, point tracking, temporal action localisation, temporal sound localisation, multiple-choice video question-answering, and grounded video question-answering. We summarise in this report the task descriptions, metrics, baselines, and results.
BEVSeg2TP: Surround View Camera Bird's-Eye-View Based Joint Vehicle Segmentation and Ego Vehicle Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Sushil Sharma, Arindam Das, Ganesh Sistu, Mark Halton, Ciarán Eising
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Decoder, Prediction, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction is, naturally, a key task for vehicle autonomy. While the number of traffic rules is limited, the combinations and uncertainties associated with each agent's behaviour in real-world scenarios are nearly impossible to encode. Consequently, there is a growing interest in learning-based trajectory prediction. The proposed method in this paper predicts trajectories by considering perception and trajectory prediction as a unified system. In considering them as unified tasks, we show that there is the potential to improve the performance of perception. To achieve these goals, we present BEVSeg2TP - a surround-view camera bird's-eye-view-based joint vehicle segmentation and ego vehicle trajectory prediction system for autonomous vehicles. The proposed system uses a network trained on multiple camera views. The images are transformed using several deep learning techniques to perform semantic segmentation of objects, including other vehicles, in the scene. The segmentation outputs are fused across the camera views to obtain a comprehensive representation of the surrounding vehicles from the bird's-eye-view perspective. The system further predicts the future trajectory of the ego vehicle using a spatiotemporal probabilistic network (STPN) to optimize trajectory prediction. This network leverages information from encoder-decoder transformers and joint vehicle segmentation.
Point Deformable Network with Enhanced Normal Embedding for Point Cloud Analysis
Authors: Xingyilang Yin, Xi Yang, Liangchen Liu, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao
Date: 2023-12-20 00:00:00

Recently MLP-based methods have shown strong performance in point cloud analysis. Simple MLP architectures are able to learn geometric features in local point groups yet fail to model long-range dependencies directly. In this paper, we propose Point Deformable Network (PDNet), a concise MLP-based network that can capture long-range relations with strong representation ability. Specifically, we put forward Point Deformable Aggregation Module (PDAM) to improve representation capability in both long-range dependency and adaptive aggregation among points. For each query point, PDAM aggregates information from deformable reference points rather than points in limited local areas. The deformable reference points are generated data-dependent, and we initialize them according to the input point positions. Additional offsets and modulation scalars are learned on the whole point features, which shift the deformable reference points to the regions of interest. We also suggest estimating the normal vector for point clouds and applying Enhanced Normal Embedding (ENE) to the geometric extractors to improve the representation ability of single-point. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our PDNet.