pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Character-Centric Story Visualization via Visual Planning and Token Alignment
Authors: Hong Chen, Rujun Han, Te-Lin Wu, Hideki Nakayama, Nanyun Peng
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Story Visualization, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Story visualization advances the traditional text-to-image generation by enabling multiple image generation based on a complete story. This task requires machines to 1) understand long text inputs and 2) produce a globally consistent image sequence that illustrates the contents of the story. A key challenge of consistent story visualization is to preserve characters that are essential in stories. To tackle the challenge, we propose to adapt a recent work that augments Vector-Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAE) with a text-tovisual-token (transformer) architecture. Specifically, we modify the text-to-visual-token module with a two-stage framework: 1) character token planning model that predicts the visual tokens for characters only; 2) visual token completion model that generates the remaining visual token sequence, which is sent to VQ-VAE for finalizing image generations. To encourage characters to appear in the images, we further train the two-stage framework with a character-token alignment objective. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method excels at preserving characters and can produce higher quality image sequences compared with the strong baselines. Codes can be found in https://github.com/sairin1202/VP-CSV
Learning Self-Regularized Adversarial Views for Self-Supervised Vision Transformers
Authors: Tao Tang, Changlin Li, Guangrun Wang, Kaicheng Yu, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Automatic data augmentation (AutoAugment) strategies are indispensable in supervised data-efficient training protocols of vision transformers, and have led to state-of-the-art results in supervised learning. Despite the success, its development and application on self-supervised vision transformers have been hindered by several barriers, including the high search cost, the lack of supervision, and the unsuitable search space. In this work, we propose AutoView, a self-regularized adversarial AutoAugment method, to learn views for self-supervised vision transformers, by addressing the above barriers. First, we reduce the search cost of AutoView to nearly zero by learning views and network parameters simultaneously in a single forward-backward step, minimizing and maximizing the mutual information among different augmented views, respectively. Then, to avoid information collapse caused by the lack of label supervision, we propose a self-regularized loss term to guarantee the information propagation. Additionally, we present a curated augmentation policy search space for self-supervised learning, by modifying the generally used search space designed for supervised learning. On ImageNet, our AutoView achieves remarkable improvement over RandAug baseline (+10.2% k-NN accuracy), and consistently outperforms sota manually tuned view policy by a clear margin (up to +1.3% k-NN accuracy). Extensive experiments show that AutoView pretraining also benefits downstream tasks (+1.2% mAcc on ADE20K Semantic Segmentation and +2.8% mAP on revisited Oxford Image Retrieval benchmark) and improves model robustness (+2.3% Top-1 Acc on ImageNet-A and +1.0% AUPR on ImageNet-O). Code and models will be available at https://github.com/Trent-tangtao/AutoView.
Efficient Cross-Modal Video Retrieval with Meta-Optimized Frames
Authors: Ning Han, Xun Yang, Ee-Peng Lim, Hao Chen, Qianru Sun
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Bilevel Optimization, Retrieval, Video Compression, Video Retrieval

Cross-modal video retrieval aims to retrieve the semantically relevant videos given a text as a query, and is one of the fundamental tasks in Multimedia. Most of top-performing methods primarily leverage Visual Transformer (ViT) to extract video features [1, 2, 3], suffering from high computational complexity of ViT especially for encoding long videos. A common and simple solution is to uniformly sample a small number (say, 4 or 8) of frames from the video (instead of using the whole video) as input to ViT. The number of frames has a strong influence on the performance of ViT, e.g., using 8 frames performs better than using 4 frames yet needs more computational resources, resulting in a trade-off. To get free from this trade-off, this paper introduces an automatic video compression method based on a bilevel optimization program (BOP) consisting of both model-level (i.e., base-level) and frame-level (i.e., meta-level) optimizations. The model-level learns a cross-modal video retrieval model whose input is the "compressed frames" learned by frame-level optimization. In turn, the frame-level optimization is through gradient descent using the meta loss of video retrieval model computed on the whole video. We call this BOP method as well as the "compressed frames" as Meta-Optimized Frames (MOF). By incorporating MOF, the video retrieval model is able to utilize the information of whole videos (for training) while taking only a small number of input frames in actual implementation. The convergence of MOF is guaranteed by meta gradient descent algorithms. For evaluation, we conduct extensive experiments of cross-modal video retrieval on three large-scale benchmarks: MSR-VTT, MSVD, and DiDeMo. Our results show that MOF is a generic and efficient method to boost multiple baseline methods, and can achieve a new state-of-the-art performance.
Bridging the Domain Gap for Multi-Agent Perception
Authors: Runsheng Xu, Jinlong Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Hongkai Yu, Jiaqi Ma
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Domain Adaptation, object-detection, Object Detection

Existing multi-agent perception algorithms usually select to share deep neural features extracted from raw sensing data between agents, achieving a trade-off between accuracy and communication bandwidth limit. However, these methods assume all agents have identical neural networks, which might not be practical in the real world. The transmitted features can have a large domain gap when the models differ, leading to a dramatic performance drop in multi-agent perception. In this paper, we propose the first lightweight framework to bridge such domain gaps for multi-agent perception, which can be a plug-in module for most existing systems while maintaining confidentiality. Our framework consists of a learnable feature resizer to align features in multiple dimensions and a sparse cross-domain transformer for domain adaption. Extensive experiments on the public multi-agent perception dataset V2XSet have demonstrated that our method can effectively bridge the gap for features from different domains and outperform other baseline methods significantly by at least 8% for point-cloud-based 3D object detection.
Navigating Memory Construction by Global Pseudo-Task Simulation for Continual Learning
Authors: Yejia Liu, Wang Zhu, Shaolei Ren
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Continual Learning

Continual learning faces a crucial challenge of catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, experience replay (ER) that maintains a tiny subset of samples from previous tasks has been commonly used. Existing ER works usually focus on refining the learning objective for each task with a static memory construction policy. In this paper, we formulate the dynamic memory construction in ER as a combinatorial optimization problem, which aims at directly minimizing the global loss across all experienced tasks. We first apply three tactics to solve the problem in the offline setting as a starting point. To provide an approximate solution to this problem in the online continual learning setting, we further propose the Global Pseudo-task Simulation (GPS), which mimics future catastrophic forgetting of the current task by permutation. Our empirical results and analyses suggest that the GPS consistently improves accuracy across four commonly used vision benchmarks. We have also shown that our GPS can serve as the unified framework for integrating various memory construction policies in existing ER works.
TransVisDrone: Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Vision-based Drone-to-Drone Detection in Aerial Videos
Authors: Tushar Sangam, Ishan Rajendrakumar Dave, Waqas Sultani, Mubarak Shah
Date: 2022-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Edge-computing

Drone-to-drone detection using visual feed has crucial applications, such as detecting drone collisions, detecting drone attacks, or coordinating flight with other drones. However, existing methods are computationally costly, follow non-end-to-end optimization, and have complex multi-stage pipelines, making them less suitable for real-time deployment on edge devices. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework, \textit{TransVisDrone}, that provides an end-to-end solution with higher computational efficiency. We utilize CSPDarkNet-53 network to learn object-related spatial features and VideoSwin model to improve drone detection in challenging scenarios by learning spatio-temporal dependencies of drone motion. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on three challenging real-world datasets (Average Precision@0.5IOU): NPS 0.95, FLDrones 0.75, and AOT 0.80, and a higher throughput than previous methods. We also demonstrate its deployment capability on edge devices and its usefulness in detecting drone-collision (encounter). Project: \url{https://tusharsangam.github.io/TransVisDrone-project-page/}.
mRI: Multi-modal 3D Human Pose Estimation Dataset using mmWave, RGB-D, and Inertial Sensors
Authors: Sizhe An, Yin Li, Umit Ogras
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Action Detection, Action Understanding, Pose Estimation

The ability to estimate 3D human body pose and movement, also known as human pose estimation (HPE), enables many applications for home-based health monitoring, such as remote rehabilitation training. Several possible solutions have emerged using sensors ranging from RGB cameras, depth sensors, millimeter-Wave (mmWave) radars, and wearable inertial sensors. Despite previous efforts on datasets and benchmarks for HPE, few dataset exploits multiple modalities and focuses on home-based health monitoring. To bridge the gap, we present mRI, a multi-modal 3D human pose estimation dataset with mmWave, RGB-D, and Inertial Sensors. Our dataset consists of over 160k synchronized frames from 20 subjects performing rehabilitation exercises and supports the benchmarks of HPE and action detection. We perform extensive experiments using our dataset and delineate the strength of each modality. We hope that the release of mRI can catalyze the research in pose estimation, multi-modal learning, and action understanding, and more importantly facilitate the applications of home-based health monitoring.
Video in 10 Bits: Few-Bit VideoQA for Efficiency and Privacy
Authors: Shiyuan Huang, Robinson Piramuthu, Shih-Fu Chang, Gunnar A. Sigurdsson
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Compression, Question Answering, Video Question Answering

In Video Question Answering (VideoQA), answering general questions about a video requires its visual information. Yet, video often contains redundant information irrelevant to the VideoQA task. For example, if the task is only to answer questions similar to "Is someone laughing in the video?", then all other information can be discarded. This paper investigates how many bits are really needed from the video in order to do VideoQA by introducing a novel Few-Bit VideoQA problem, where the goal is to accomplish VideoQA with few bits of video information (e.g., 10 bits). We propose a simple yet effective task-specific feature compression approach to solve this problem. Specifically, we insert a lightweight Feature Compression Module (FeatComp) into a VideoQA model which learns to extract task-specific tiny features as little as 10 bits, which are optimal for answering certain types of questions. We demonstrate more than 100,000-fold storage efficiency over MPEG4-encoded videos and 1,000-fold over regular floating point features, with just 2.0-6.6% absolute loss in accuracy, which is a surprising and novel finding. Finally, we analyze what the learned tiny features capture and demonstrate that they have eliminated most of the non-task-specific information, and introduce a Bit Activation Map to visualize what information is being stored. This decreases the privacy risk of data by providing k-anonymity and robustness to feature-inversion techniques, which can influence the machine learning community, allowing us to store data with privacy guarantees while still performing the task effectively.
Semantic Video Moments Retrieval at Scale: A New Task and a Baseline
Authors: Na Li
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Video Retrieval

Motivated by the increasing need of saving search effort by obtaining relevant video clips instead of whole videos, we propose a new task, named Semantic Video Moments Retrieval at scale (SVMR), which aims at finding relevant videos coupled with re-localizing the video clips in them. Instead of a simple combination of video retrieval and video re-localization, our task is more challenging because of several essential aspects. In the 1st stage, our SVMR should take into account the fact that: 1) a positive candidate long video can contain plenty of irrelevant clips which are also semantically meaningful. 2) a long video can be positive to two totally different query clips if it contains clips relevant to two queries. The 2nd re-localization stage also exhibits different assumptions from existing video re-localization tasks, which hold an assumption that the reference video must contain semantically similar segments corresponding to the query clip. Instead, in our scenario, the retrieved long video can be a false positive one due to the inaccuracy of the first stage. To address these challenges, we propose our two-stage baseline solution of candidate videos retrieval followed by a novel attention-based query-reference semantically alignment framework to re-localize target clips from candidate videos. Furthermore, we build two more appropriate benchmark datasets from the off-the-shelf ActivityNet-1.3 and HACS for a thorough evaluation of SVMR models. Extensive experiments are carried out to show that our solution outperforms several reference solutions.
RoS-KD: A Robust Stochastic Knowledge Distillation Approach for Noisy Medical Imaging
Authors: Ajay Jaiswal, Kumar Ashutosh, Justin F Rousseau, Yifan Peng, Zhangyang Wang, Ying Ding
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Lesion Classification

AI-powered Medical Imaging has recently achieved enormous attention due to its ability to provide fast-paced healthcare diagnoses. However, it usually suffers from a lack of high-quality datasets due to high annotation cost, inter-observer variability, human annotator error, and errors in computer-generated labels. Deep learning models trained on noisy labelled datasets are sensitive to the noise type and lead to less generalization on the unseen samples. To address this challenge, we propose a Robust Stochastic Knowledge Distillation (RoS-KD) framework which mimics the notion of learning a topic from multiple sources to ensure deterrence in learning noisy information. More specifically, RoS-KD learns a smooth, well-informed, and robust student manifold by distilling knowledge from multiple teachers trained on overlapping subsets of training data. Our extensive experiments on popular medical imaging classification tasks (cardiopulmonary disease and lesion classification) using real-world datasets, show the performance benefit of RoS-KD, its ability to distill knowledge from many popular large networks (ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, MobileNet-V2) in a comparatively small network, and its robustness to adversarial attacks (PGD, FSGM). More specifically, RoS-KD achieves >2% and >4% improvement on F1-score for lesion classification and cardiopulmonary disease classification tasks, respectively, when the underlying student is ResNet-18 against recent competitive knowledge distillation baseline. Additionally, on cardiopulmonary disease classification task, RoS-KD outperforms most of the SOTA baselines by ~1% gain in AUC score.
Machine-Learning Love: classifying the equation of state of neutron stars with Transformers
Authors: Gonçalo Gonçalves, Márcio Ferreira, João Aveiro, Antonio Onofre, Felipe F. Freitas, Constança Providência, José A. Font
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00

The use of the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) model for gravitational-wave data analysis is investigated. The AST machine-learning model is a convolution-free classifier that captures long-range global dependencies through a purely attention-based mechanism. In this paper a model is applied to a simulated dataset of inspiral gravitational wave signals from binary neutron star coalescences, built from five distinct, cold equations of state (EOS) of nuclear matter. From the analysis of the mass dependence of the tidal deformability parameter for each EOS class it is shown that the AST model achieves a promising performance in correctly classifying the EOS purely from the gravitational wave signals, especially when the component masses of the binary system are in the range $[1,1.5]M_{\odot}$. Furthermore, the generalization ability of the model is investigated by using gravitational-wave signals from a new EOS not used during the training of the model, achieving fairly satisfactory results. Overall, the results, obtained using the simplified setup of noise-free waveforms, show that the AST model, once trained, might allow for the instantaneous inference of the cold nuclear matter EOS directly from the inspiral gravitational-wave signals produced in binary neutron star coalescences.
Variant Parallelism: Lightweight Deep Convolutional Models for Distributed Inference on IoT Devices
Authors: Navidreza Asadi, Maziar Goudarzi
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, Object Recognition

Two major techniques are commonly used to meet real-time inference limitations when distributing models across resource-constrained IoT devices: (1) model parallelism (MP) and (2) class parallelism (CP). In MP, transmitting bulky intermediate data (orders of magnitude larger than input) between devices imposes huge communication overhead. Although CP solves this problem, it has limitations on the number of sub-models. In addition, both solutions are fault intolerant, an issue when deployed on edge devices. We propose variant parallelism (VP), an ensemble-based deep learning distribution method where different variants of a main model are generated and can be deployed on separate machines. We design a family of lighter models around the original model, and train them simultaneously to improve accuracy over single models. Our experimental results on six common mid-sized object recognition datasets demonstrate that our models can have 5.8-7.1x fewer parameters, 4.3-31x fewer multiply-accumulations (MACs), and 2.5-13.2x less response time on atomic inputs compared to MobileNetV2 while achieving comparable or higher accuracy. Our technique easily generates several variants of the base architecture. Each variant returns only 2k outputs 1 <= k <= (#classes/2), representing Top-k classes, instead of tons of floating point values required in MP. Since each variant provides a full-class prediction, our approach maintains higher availability compared with MP and CP in presence of failure.
Improving the Intra-class Long-tail in 3D Detection via Rare Example Mining
Authors: Chiyu Max Jiang, Mahyar Najibi, Charles R. Qi, Yin Zhou, Dragomir Anguelov
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Active Learning, Density Estimation, imbalanced classification, object-detection, Object Detection

Continued improvements in deep learning architectures have steadily advanced the overall performance of 3D object detectors to levels on par with humans for certain tasks and datasets, where the overall performance is mostly driven by common examples. However, even the best performing models suffer from the most naive mistakes when it comes to rare examples that do not appear frequently in the training data, such as vehicles with irregular geometries. Most studies in the long-tail literature focus on class-imbalanced classification problems with known imbalanced label counts per class, but they are not directly applicable to the intra-class long-tail examples in problems with large intra-class variations such as 3D object detection, where instances with the same class label can have drastically varied properties such as shapes and sizes. Other works propose to mitigate this problem using active learning based on the criteria of uncertainty, difficulty, or diversity. In this study, we identify a new conceptual dimension - rareness - to mine new data for improving the long-tail performance of models. We show that rareness, as opposed to difficulty, is the key to data-centric improvements for 3D detectors, since rareness is the result of a lack in data support while difficulty is related to the fundamental ambiguity in the problem. We propose a general and effective method to identify the rareness of objects based on density estimation in the feature space using flow models, and propose a principled cost-aware formulation for mining rare object tracks, which improves overall model performance, but more importantly - significantly improves the performance for rare objects (by 30.97\%
MIXER: Multiattribute, Multiway Fusion of Uncertain Pairwise Affinities
Authors: Parker C. Lusk, Kaveh Fathian, Jonathan P. How
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization

We present a multiway fusion algorithm capable of directly processing uncertain pairwise affinities. In contrast to existing works that require initial pairwise associations, our MIXER algorithm improves accuracy by leveraging the additional information provided by pairwise affinities. Our main contribution is a multiway fusion formulation that is particularly suited to processing non-binary affinities and a novel continuous relaxation whose solutions are guaranteed to be binary, thus avoiding the typical, but potentially problematic, solution binarization steps that may cause infeasibility. A crucial insight of our formulation is that it allows for three modes of association, ranging from non-match, undecided, and match. Exploiting this insight allows fusion to be delayed for some data pairs until more information is available, which is an effective feature for fusion of data with multiple attributes/information sources. We evaluate MIXER on typical synthetic data and benchmark datasets and show increased accuracy against the state of the art in multiway matching, especially in noisy regimes with low observation redundancy. Additionally, we collect RGB data of cars in a parking lot to demonstrate MIXER's ability to fuse data having multiple attributes (color, visual appearance, and bounding box). On this challenging dataset, MIXER achieves 74% F1 accuracy and is 49x faster than the next best algorithm, which has 42% accuracy. Open source code is available at https://github.com/mit-acl/mixer.