pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Post-training Model Quantization Using GANs for Synthetic Data Generation
Authors: Athanasios Masouris, Mansi Sharma, Adrian Boguszewski, Alexander Kozlov, Zhuo Wu, Raymond Lo
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Synthetic Data Generation

Quantization is a widely adopted technique for deep neural networks to reduce the memory and computational resources required. However, when quantized, most models would need a suitable calibration process to keep their performance intact, which requires data from the target domain, such as a fraction of the dataset used in model training and model validation (i.e. calibration dataset). In this study, we investigate the use of synthetic data as a substitute for the calibration with real data for the quantization method. We propose a data generation method based on Generative Adversarial Networks that are trained prior to the model quantization step. We compare the performance of models quantized using data generated by StyleGAN2-ADA and our pre-trained DiStyleGAN, with quantization using real data and an alternative data generation method based on fractal images. Overall, the results of our experiments demonstrate the potential of leveraging synthetic data for calibration during the quantization process. In our experiments, the percentage of accuracy degradation of the selected models was less than 0.6%, with our best performance achieved on MobileNetV2 (0.05%). The code is available at: https://github.com/ThanosM97/gsoc2022-openvino
Autonomous Stabilization of Retinal Videos for Streamlining Assessment of Spontaneous Venous Pulsations
Authors: Hongwei Sheng, Xin Yu, Feiyu Wang, MD Wahiduzzaman Khan, Hexuan Weng, Sahar Shariflou, S. Mojtaba Golzan
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Template Matching, Temporal Localization, Video Stabilization

Spontaneous retinal Venous Pulsations (SVP) are rhythmic changes in the caliber of the central retinal vein and are observed in the optic disc region (ODR) of the retina. Its absence is a critical indicator of various ocular or neurological abnormalities. Recent advances in imaging technology have enabled the development of portable smartphone-based devices for observing the retina and assessment of SVPs. However, the quality of smartphone-based retinal videos is often poor due to noise and image jitting, which in return, can severely obstruct the observation of SVPs. In this work, we developed a fully automated retinal video stabilization method that enables the examination of SVPs captured by various mobile devices. Specifically, we first propose an ODR Spatio-Temporal Localization (ODR-STL) module to localize visible ODR and remove noisy and jittering frames. Then, we introduce a Noise-Aware Template Matching (NATM) module to stabilize high-quality video segments at a fixed position in the field of view. After the processing, the SVPs can be easily observed in the stabilized videos, significantly facilitating user observations. Furthermore, our method is cost-effective and has been tested in both subjective and objective evaluations. Both of the evaluations support its effectiveness in facilitating the observation of SVPs. This can improve the timely diagnosis and treatment of associated diseases, making it a valuable tool for eye health professionals.
FusionDepth: Complement Self-Supervised Monocular Depth Estimation with Cost Volume
Authors: Zhuofei Huang, Jianlin Liu, Shang Xu, Ying Chen, Yong liu
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Stereo Depth Estimation

Multi-view stereo depth estimation based on cost volume usually works better than self-supervised monocular depth estimation except for moving objects and low-textured surfaces. So in this paper, we propose a multi-frame depth estimation framework which monocular depth can be refined continuously by multi-frame sequential constraints, leveraging a Bayesian fusion layer within several iterations. Both monocular and multi-view networks can be trained with no depth supervision. Our method also enhances the interpretability when combining monocular estimation with multi-view cost volume. Detailed experiments show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art unsupervised methods utilizing single or multiple frames at test time on KITTI benchmark.
Brain Tumor Detection using Swin Transformers
Authors: Prateek A. Meshram, Suraj Joshi, Devarshi Mahajan
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

The first MRI scan was done in the year 1978 by researchers at EML Laboratories. As per an estimate, approximately 251,329 people died due to primary cancerous brain and CNS (Central Nervous System) Tumors in the year 2020. It has been recommended by various medical professionals that brain tumor detection at an early stage would help in saving many lives. Whenever radiologists deal with a brain MRI they try to diagnose it with the histological subtype which is quite subjective and here comes the major issue. Upon that, in developing countries like India, where there is 1 doctor for every 1151 people, the need for efficient diagnosis to help radiologists and doctors come into picture. In our approach, we aim to solve the problem using swin transformers and deep learning to detect, classify, locate and provide the size of the tumor in the particular MRI scan which would assist the doctors and radiologists in increasing their efficiency. At the end, the medics would be able to download the predictions and measures in a PDF (Portable Document Format). Keywords: brain tumor, transformers, classification, medical, deep learning, detection
A Survey on the Robustness of Computer Vision Models against Common Corruptions
Authors: Shunxin Wang, Raymond Veldhuis, Christoph Brune, Nicola Strisciuglio
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning

The performance of computer vision models are susceptible to unexpected changes in input images caused by sensor errors or extreme imaging environments, known as common corruptions (e.g. noise, blur, illumination changes). These corruptions can significantly hinder the reliability of these models when deployed in real-world scenarios, yet they are often overlooked when testing model generalization and robustness. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of methods that improve the robustness of computer vision models against common corruptions. We categorize methods into three groups based on the model components and training methods they target: data augmentation, learning strategies, and network components. We release a unified benchmark framework (available at \url{https://github.com/nis-research/CorruptionBenchCV}) to compare robustness performance across several datasets, and we address the inconsistencies of evaluation practices in the literature. Our experimental analysis highlights the base corruption robustness of popular vision backbones, revealing that corruption robustness does not necessarily scale with model size and data size. Large models gain negligible robustness improvements, considering the increased computational requirements. To achieve generalizable and robust computer vision models, we foresee the need of developing new learning strategies that efficiently exploit limited data and mitigate unreliable learning behaviors.
InfoMetIC: An Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption Evaluation
Authors: Anwen Hu, ShiZhe Chen, Liang Zhang, Qin Jin
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Image Captioning

Automatic image captioning evaluation is critical for benchmarking and promoting advances in image captioning research. Existing metrics only provide a single score to measure caption qualities, which are less explainable and informative. Instead, we humans can easily identify the problems of captions in details, e.g., which words are inaccurate and which salient objects are not described, and then rate the caption quality. To support such informative feedback, we propose an Informative Metric for Reference-free Image Caption evaluation (InfoMetIC). Given an image and a caption, InfoMetIC is able to report incorrect words and unmentioned image regions at fine-grained level, and also provide a text precision score, a vision recall score and an overall quality score at coarse-grained level. The coarse-grained score of InfoMetIC achieves significantly better correlation with human judgements than existing metrics on multiple benchmarks. We also construct a token-level evaluation dataset and demonstrate the effectiveness of InfoMetIC in fine-grained evaluation. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/HAWLYQ/InfoMetIC.
MMoT: Mixture-of-Modality-Tokens Transformer for Composed Multimodal Conditional Image Synthesis
Authors: Jianbin Zheng, Daqing Liu, Chaoyue Wang, Minghui Hu, Zuopeng Yang, Changxing Ding, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Existing multimodal conditional image synthesis (MCIS) methods generate images conditioned on any combinations of various modalities that require all of them must be exactly conformed, hindering the synthesis controllability and leaving the potential of cross-modality under-exploited. To this end, we propose to generate images conditioned on the compositions of multimodal control signals, where modalities are imperfectly complementary, i.e., composed multimodal conditional image synthesis (CMCIS). Specifically, we observe two challenging issues of the proposed CMCIS task, i.e., the modality coordination problem and the modality imbalance problem. To tackle these issues, we introduce a Mixture-of-Modality-Tokens Transformer (MMoT) that adaptively fuses fine-grained multimodal control signals, a multimodal balanced training loss to stabilize the optimization of each modality, and a multimodal sampling guidance to balance the strength of each modality control signal. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that MMoT achieves superior performance on both unimodal conditional image synthesis (UCIS) and MCIS tasks with high-quality and faithful image synthesis on complex multimodal conditions. The project website is available at https://jabir-zheng.github.io/MMoT.
DMNR: Unsupervised De-noising of Point Clouds Corrupted by Airborne Particles
Authors: Chu Chen, Yanqi Ma, Bingcheng Dong, Junjie Cao
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Semantic Segmentation

LiDAR sensors are critical for autonomous driving and robotics applications due to their ability to provide accurate range measurements and their robustness to lighting conditions. However, airborne particles, such as fog, rain, snow, and dust, will degrade its performance and it is inevitable to encounter these inclement environmental conditions outdoors. It would be a straightforward approach to remove them by supervised semantic segmentation. But annotating these particles point wisely is too laborious. To address this problem and enhance the perception under inclement conditions, we develop two dynamic filtering methods called Dynamic Multi-threshold Noise Removal (DMNR) and DMNR-H by accurate analysis of the position distribution and intensity characteristics of noisy points and clean points on publicly available WADS and DENSE datasets. Both DMNR and DMNR-H outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by a significant margin on the two datasets and are slightly better than supervised deep learning-based methods. Furthermore, our methods are more robust to different LiDAR sensors and airborne particles, such as snow and fog.
Uncertainty-Aware Semi-Supervised Learning for Prostate MRI Zonal Segmentation
Authors: Matin Hosseinzadeh, Anindo Saha, Joeran Bosma, Henkjan Huisman
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Quality of deep convolutional neural network predictions strongly depends on the size of the training dataset and the quality of the annotations. Creating annotations, especially for 3D medical image segmentation, is time-consuming and requires expert knowledge. We propose a novel semi-supervised learning (SSL) approach that requires only a relatively small number of annotations while being able to use the remaining unlabeled data to improve model performance. Our method uses a pseudo-labeling technique that employs recent deep learning uncertainty estimation models. By using the estimated uncertainty, we were able to rank pseudo-labels and automatically select the best pseudo-annotations generated by the supervised model. We applied this to prostate zonal segmentation in T2-weighted MRI scans. Our proposed model outperformed the semi-supervised model in experiments with the ProstateX dataset and an external test set, by leveraging only a subset of unlabeled data rather than the full collection of 4953 cases, our proposed model demonstrated improved performance. The segmentation dice similarity coefficient in the transition zone and peripheral zone increased from 0.835 and 0.727 to 0.852 and 0.751, respectively, for fully supervised model and the uncertainty-aware semi-supervised learning model (USSL). Our USSL model demonstrates the potential to allow deep learning models to be trained on large datasets without requiring full annotation. Our code is available at https://github.com/DIAGNijmegen/prostateMR-USSL.
FusionBooster: A Unified Image Fusion Boosting Paradigm
Authors: Chunyang Cheng, Tianyang Xu, Xiao-Jun Wu, Hui Li, Xi Li, Josef Kittler
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

In recent years, numerous ideas have emerged for designing a mutually reinforcing mechanism or extra stages for the image fusion task, ignoring the inevitable gaps between different vision tasks and the computational burden. We argue that there is a scope to improve the fusion performance with the help of the FusionBooster, a model specifically designed for the fusion task. In particular, our booster is based on the divide-and-conquer strategy controlled by an information probe. The booster is composed of three building blocks: the probe units, the booster layer, and the assembling module. Given the result produced by a backbone method, the probe units assess the fused image and divide the results according to their information content. This is instrumental in identifying missing information, as a step to its recovery. The recovery of the degraded components along with the fusion guidance are the role of the booster layer. Lastly, the assembling module is responsible for piecing these advanced components together to deliver the output. We use concise reconstruction loss functions in conjunction with lightweight autoencoder models to formulate the learning task, with marginal computational complexity increase. The experimental results obtained in various fusion tasks, as well as downstream detection tasks, consistently demonstrate that the proposed FusionBooster significantly improves the performance. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/AWCXV/FusionBooster.
Enhancing the Performance of Transformer-based Spiking Neural Networks by SNN-optimized Downsampling with Precise Gradient Backpropagation
Authors: Chenlin Zhou, Han Zhang, Zhaokun Zhou, Liutao Yu, Zhengyu Ma, Huihui Zhou, Xiaopeng Fan, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

Deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) have drawn much attention in recent years because of their low power consumption, biological rationality and event-driven property. However, state-of-the-art deep SNNs (including Spikformer and Spikingformer) suffer from a critical challenge related to the imprecise gradient backpropagation. This problem arises from the improper design of downsampling modules in these networks, and greatly hampering the overall model performance. In this paper, we propose ConvBN-MaxPooling-LIF (CML), an SNN-optimized downsampling with precise gradient backpropagation. We prove that CML can effectively overcome the imprecision of gradient backpropagation from a theoretical perspective. In addition, we evaluate CML on ImageNet, CIFAR10, CIFAR100, CIFAR10-DVS, DVS128-Gesture datasets, and show state-of-the-art performance on all these datasets with significantly enhanced performances compared with Spikingformer. For instance, our model achieves 77.64 $\%$ on ImageNet, 96.04 $\%$ on CIFAR10, 81.4$\%$ on CIFAR10-DVS, with + 1.79$\%$ on ImageNet, +1.16$\%$ on CIFAR100 compared with Spikingformer.
iEdit: Localised Text-guided Image Editing with Weak Supervision
Authors: Rumeysa Bodur, Erhan Gundogdu, Binod Bhattarai, Tae-Kyun Kim, Michael Donoser, Loris Bazzani
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Descriptive, GPU, text-guided-image-editing

Diffusion models (DMs) can generate realistic images with text guidance using large-scale datasets. However, they demonstrate limited controllability in the output space of the generated images. We propose a novel learning method for text-guided image editing, namely \texttt{iEdit}, that generates images conditioned on a source image and a textual edit prompt. As a fully-annotated dataset with target images does not exist, previous approaches perform subject-specific fine-tuning at test time or adopt contrastive learning without a target image, leading to issues on preserving the fidelity of the source image. We propose to automatically construct a dataset derived from LAION-5B, containing pseudo-target images with their descriptive edit prompts given input image-caption pairs. This dataset gives us the flexibility of introducing a weakly-supervised loss function to generate the pseudo-target image from the latent noise of the source image conditioned on the edit prompt. To encourage localised editing and preserve or modify spatial structures in the image, we propose a loss function that uses segmentation masks to guide the editing during training and optionally at inference. Our model is trained on the constructed dataset with 200K samples and constrained GPU resources. It shows favourable results against its counterparts in terms of image fidelity, CLIP alignment score and qualitatively for editing both generated and real images.
Deep Learning for Predicting Progression of Patellofemoral Osteoarthritis Based on Lateral Knee Radiographs, Demographic Data and Symptomatic Assessments
Authors: Neslihan Bayramoglu, Martin Englund, Ida K. Haugen, Muneaki Ishijima, Simo Saarakkala
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

In this study, we propose a novel framework that utilizes deep learning (DL) and attention mechanisms to predict the radiographic progression of patellofemoral osteoarthritis (PFOA) over a period of seven years. This study included subjects (1832 subjects, 3276 knees) from the baseline of the MOST study. PF joint regions-of-interest were identified using an automated landmark detection tool (BoneFinder) on lateral knee X-rays. An end-to-end DL method was developed for predicting PFOA progression based on imaging data in a 5-fold cross-validation setting. A set of baselines based on known risk factors were developed and analyzed using gradient boosting machine (GBM). Risk factors included age, sex, BMI and WOMAC score, and the radiographic osteoarthritis stage of the tibiofemoral joint (KL score). Finally, we trained an ensemble model using both imaging and clinical data. Among the individual models, the performance of our deep convolutional neural network attention model achieved the best performance with an AUC of 0.856 and AP of 0.431; slightly outperforming the deep learning approach without attention (AUC=0.832, AP= 0.4) and the best performing reference GBM model (AUC=0.767, AP= 0.334). The inclusion of imaging data and clinical variables in an ensemble model allowed statistically more powerful prediction of PFOA progression (AUC = 0.865, AP=0.447), although the clinical significance of this minor performance gain remains unknown. This study demonstrated the potential of machine learning models to predict the progression of PFOA using imaging and clinical variables. These models could be used to identify patients who are at high risk of progression and prioritize them for new treatments. However, even though the accuracy of the models were excellent in this study using the MOST dataset, they should be still validated using external patient cohorts in the future.
A Hybrid of Generative and Discriminative Models Based on the Gaussian-coupled Softmax Layer
Authors: Hideaki Hayashi
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00

Generative models have advantageous characteristics for classification tasks such as the availability of unsupervised data and calibrated confidence, whereas discriminative models have advantages in terms of the simplicity of their model structures and learning algorithms and their ability to outperform their generative counterparts. In this paper, we propose a method to train a hybrid of discriminative and generative models in a single neural network (NN), which exhibits the characteristics of both models. The key idea is the Gaussian-coupled softmax layer, which is a fully connected layer with a softmax activation function coupled with Gaussian distributions. This layer can be embedded into an NN-based classifier and allows the classifier to estimate both the class posterior distribution and the class-conditional data distribution. We demonstrate that the proposed hybrid model can be applied to semi-supervised learning and confidence calibration.
Multi-stage Progressive Reasoning for Dunhuang Murals Inpainting
Authors: Wenjie Liu, Baokai Liu, Shiqiang Du, Yuqing Shi, Jiacheng Li, Jianhua Wang
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

Dunhuang murals suffer from fading, breakage, surface brittleness and extensive peeling affected by prolonged environmental erosion. Image inpainting techniques are widely used in the field of digital mural inpainting. Generally speaking, for mural inpainting tasks with large area damage, it is challenging for any image inpainting method. In this paper, we design a multi-stage progressive reasoning network (MPR-Net) containing global to local receptive fields for murals inpainting. This network is capable of recursively inferring the damage boundary and progressively tightening the regional texture constraints. Moreover, to adaptively fuse plentiful information at various scales of murals, a multi-scale feature aggregation module (MFA) is designed to empower the capability to select the significant features. The execution of the model is similar to the process of a mural restorer (i.e., inpainting the structure of the damaged mural globally first and then adding the local texture details further). Our method has been evaluated through both qualitative and quantitative experiments, and the results demonstrate that it outperforms state-of-the-art image inpainting methods.