pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-stream Cell Segmentation with Low-level Cues for Multi-modality Images
Authors: Wei Lou, Xinyi Yu, Chenyu Liu, Xiang Wan, Guanbin Li, SiQi Liu, Haofeng Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Segmentation

Cell segmentation for multi-modal microscopy images remains a challenge due to the complex textures, patterns, and cell shapes in these images. To tackle the problem, we first develop an automatic cell classification pipeline to label the microscopy images based on their low-level image characteristics, and then train a classification model based on the category labels. Afterward, we train a separate segmentation model for each category using the images in the corresponding category. Besides, we further deploy two types of segmentation models to segment cells with roundish and irregular shapes respectively. Moreover, an efficient and powerful backbone model is utilized to enhance the efficiency of our segmentation model. Evaluated on the Tuning Set of NeurIPS 2022 Cell Segmentation Challenge, our method achieves an F1-score of 0.8795 and the running time for all cases is within the time tolerance.
One-for-All: Towards Universal Domain Translation with a Single StyleGAN
Authors: Yong Du, Jiahui Zhan, Xinzhe Li, Junyu Dong, Sheng Chen, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Shengfeng He
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Translation

In this paper, we propose a novel translation model, UniTranslator, for transforming representations between visually distinct domains under conditions of limited training data and significant visual differences. The main idea behind our approach is leveraging the domain-neutral capabilities of CLIP as a bridging mechanism, while utilizing a separate module to extract abstract, domain-agnostic semantics from the embeddings of both the source and target realms. Fusing these abstract semantics with target-specific semantics results in a transformed embedding within the CLIP space. To bridge the gap between the disparate worlds of CLIP and StyleGAN, we introduce a new non-linear mapper, the CLIP2P mapper. Utilizing CLIP embeddings, this module is tailored to approximate the latent distribution in the StyleGAN's latent space, effectively acting as a connector between these two spaces. The proposed UniTranslator is versatile and capable of performing various tasks, including style mixing, stylization, and translations, even in visually challenging scenarios across different visual domains. Notably, UniTranslator generates high-quality translations that showcase domain relevance, diversity, and improved image quality. UniTranslator surpasses the performance of existing general-purpose models and performs well against specialized models in representative tasks. The source code and trained models will be released to the public.
The Importance of Anti-Aliasing in Tiny Object Detection
Authors: Jinlai Ning, Michael Spratling
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Tiny object detection has gained considerable attention in the research community owing to the frequent occurrence of tiny objects in numerous critical real-world scenarios. However, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used as the backbone for object detection architectures typically neglect Nyquist's sampling theorem during down-sampling operations, resulting in aliasing and degraded performance. This is likely to be a particular issue for tiny objects that occupy very few pixels and therefore have high spatial frequency features. This paper applied an existing approach WaveCNet for anti-aliasing to tiny object detection. WaveCNet addresses aliasing by replacing standard down-sampling processes in CNNs with Wavelet Pooling (WaveletPool) layers, effectively suppressing aliasing. We modify the original WaveCNet to apply WaveletPool in a consistent way in both pathways of the residual blocks in ResNets. Additionally, we also propose a bottom-heavy version of the backbone, which further improves the performance of tiny object detection while also reducing the required number of parameters by almost half. Experimental results on the TinyPerson, WiderFace, and DOTA datasets demonstrate the importance of anti-aliasing in tiny object detection and the effectiveness of the proposed method which achieves new state-of-the-art results on all three datasets. Codes and experiment results are released at https://github.com/freshn/Anti-aliasing-Tiny-Object-Detection.git.
TransY-Net:Learning Fully Transformer Networks for Change Detection of Remote Sensing Images
Authors: Tianyu Yan, Zifu Wan, Pingping Zhang, Gong Cheng, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

In the remote sensing field, Change Detection (CD) aims to identify and localize the changed regions from dual-phase images over the same places. Recently, it has achieved great progress with the advances of deep learning. However, current methods generally deliver incomplete CD regions and irregular CD boundaries due to the limited representation ability of the extracted visual features. To relieve these issues, in this work we propose a novel Transformer-based learning framework named TransY-Net for remote sensing image CD, which improves the feature extraction from a global view and combines multi-level visual features in a pyramid manner. More specifically, the proposed framework first utilizes the advantages of Transformers in long-range dependency modeling. It can help to learn more discriminative global-level features and obtain complete CD regions. Then, we introduce a novel pyramid structure to aggregate multi-level visual features from Transformers for feature enhancement. The pyramid structure grafted with a Progressive Attention Module (PAM) can improve the feature representation ability with additional inter-dependencies through spatial and channel attentions. Finally, to better train the whole framework, we utilize the deeply-supervised learning with multiple boundary-aware loss functions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance on four optical and two SAR image CD benchmarks. The source code is released at https://github.com/Drchip61/TransYNet.
Diffusion-based Data Augmentation for Nuclei Image Segmentation
Authors: Xinyi Yu, Guanbin Li, Wei Lou, SiQi Liu, Xiang Wan, Yan Chen, Haofeng Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental but challenging task in the quantitative analysis of histopathology images. Although fully-supervised deep learning-based methods have made significant progress, a large number of labeled images are required to achieve great segmentation performance. Considering that manually labeling all nuclei instances for a dataset is inefficient, obtaining a large-scale human-annotated dataset is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Therefore, augmenting a dataset with only a few labeled images to improve the segmentation performance is of significant research and application value. In this paper, we introduce the first diffusion-based augmentation method for nuclei segmentation. The idea is to synthesize a large number of labeled images to facilitate training the segmentation model. To achieve this, we propose a two-step strategy. In the first step, we train an unconditional diffusion model to synthesize the Nuclei Structure that is defined as the representation of pixel-level semantic and distance transform. Each synthetic nuclei structure will serve as a constraint on histopathology image synthesis and is further post-processed to be an instance map. In the second step, we train a conditioned diffusion model to synthesize histopathology images based on nuclei structures. The synthetic histopathology images paired with synthetic instance maps will be added to the real dataset for training the segmentation model. The experimental results show that by augmenting 10% labeled real dataset with synthetic samples, one can achieve comparable segmentation results with the fully-supervised baseline. The code is released in: https://github.com/lhaof/Nudiff
Distractor-aware Event-based Tracking
Authors: Yingkai Fu, Meng Li, Wenxi Liu, Yuanchen Wang, Jiqing Zhang, BaoCai Yin, Xiaopeng Wei, Xin Yang
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Event cameras, or dynamic vision sensors, have recently achieved success from fundamental vision tasks to high-level vision researches. Due to its ability to asynchronously capture light intensity changes, event camera has an inherent advantage to capture moving objects in challenging scenarios including objects under low light, high dynamic range, or fast moving objects. Thus event camera are natural for visual object tracking. However, the current event-based trackers derived from RGB trackers simply modify the input images to event frames and still follow conventional tracking pipeline that mainly focus on object texture for target distinction. As a result, the trackers may not be robust dealing with challenging scenarios such as moving cameras and cluttered foreground. In this paper, we propose a distractor-aware event-based tracker that introduces transformer modules into Siamese network architecture (named DANet). Specifically, our model is mainly composed of a motion-aware network and a target-aware network, which simultaneously exploits both motion cues and object contours from event data, so as to discover motion objects and identify the target object by removing dynamic distractors. Our DANet can be trained in an end-to-end manner without any post-processing and can run at over 80 FPS on a single V100. We conduct comprehensive experiments on two large event tracking datasets to validate the proposed model. We demonstrate that our tracker has superior performance against the state-of-the-art trackers in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.
Partition Speeds Up Learning Implicit Neural Representations Based on Exponential-Increase Hypothesis
Authors: Ke Liu, Feng Liu, Haishuai Wang, Ning Ma, Jiajun Bu, Bo Han
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Semantic Segmentation

$\textit{Implicit neural representations}$ (INRs) aim to learn a $\textit{continuous function}$ (i.e., a neural network) to represent an image, where the input and output of the function are pixel coordinates and RGB/Gray values, respectively. However, images tend to consist of many objects whose colors are not perfectly consistent, resulting in the challenge that image is actually a $\textit{discontinuous piecewise function}$ and cannot be well estimated by a continuous function. In this paper, we empirically investigate that if a neural network is enforced to fit a discontinuous piecewise function to reach a fixed small error, the time costs will increase exponentially with respect to the boundaries in the spatial domain of the target signal. We name this phenomenon the $\textit{exponential-increase}$ hypothesis. Under the $\textit{exponential-increase}$ hypothesis, learning INRs for images with many objects will converge very slowly. To address this issue, we first prove that partitioning a complex signal into several sub-regions and utilizing piecewise INRs to fit that signal can significantly speed up the convergence. Based on this fact, we introduce a simple partition mechanism to boost the performance of two INR methods for image reconstruction: one for learning INRs, and the other for learning-to-learn INRs. In both cases, we partition an image into different sub-regions and dedicate smaller networks for each part. In addition, we further propose two partition rules based on regular grids and semantic segmentation maps, respectively. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed partitioning methods in terms of learning INR for a single image (ordinary learning framework) and the learning-to-learn framework.
Prompt-based Grouping Transformer for Nucleus Detection and Classification
Authors: Junjia Huang, Haofeng Li, Weijun Sun, Xiang Wan, Guanbin Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Automatic nuclei detection and classification can produce effective information for disease diagnosis. Most existing methods classify nuclei independently or do not make full use of the semantic similarity between nuclei and their grouping features. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end nuclei detection and classification framework based on a grouping transformer-based classifier. The nuclei classifier learns and updates the representations of nuclei groups and categories via hierarchically grouping the nucleus embeddings. Then the cell types are predicted with the pairwise correlations between categorical embeddings and nucleus features. For the efficiency of the fully transformer-based framework, we take the nucleus group embeddings as the input prompts of backbone, which helps harvest grouping guided features by tuning only the prompts instead of the whole backbone. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the existing models on three datasets.
ASC: Appearance and Structure Consistency for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation
Authors: Zihang Xu, Haifan Gong, Xiang Wan, Haofeng Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, MRI segmentation, Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Automatic tissue segmentation of fetal brain images is essential for the quantitative analysis of prenatal neurodevelopment. However, producing voxel-level annotations of fetal brain imaging is time-consuming and expensive. To reduce labeling costs, we propose a practical unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) setting that adapts the segmentation labels of high-quality fetal brain atlases to unlabeled fetal brain MRI data from another domain. To address the task, we propose a new UDA framework based on Appearance and Structure Consistency, named ASC. We adapt the segmentation model to the appearances of different domains by constraining the consistency before and after a frequency-based image transformation, which is to swap the appearance between brain MRI data and atlases. Consider that even in the same domain, the fetal brain images of different gestational ages could have significant variations in the anatomical structures. To make the model adapt to the structural variations in the target domain, we further encourage prediction consistency under different structural perturbations. Extensive experiments on FeTA 2021 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our ASC in comparison to registration-based, semi-supervised learning-based, and existing UDA-based methods.
Can Language Models Laugh at YouTube Short-form Videos?
Authors: Dayoon Ko, Sangho Lee, Gunhee Kim
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

As short-form funny videos on social networks are gaining popularity, it becomes demanding for AI models to understand them for better communication with humans. Unfortunately, previous video humor datasets target specific domains, such as speeches or sitcoms, and mostly focus on verbal cues. We curate a user-generated dataset of 10K multimodal funny videos from YouTube, called ExFunTube. Using a video filtering pipeline with GPT-3.5, we verify both verbal and visual elements contributing to humor. After filtering, we annotate each video with timestamps and text explanations for funny moments. Our ExFunTube is unique over existing datasets in that our videos cover a wide range of domains with various types of humor that necessitate a multimodal understanding of the content. Also, we develop a zero-shot video-to-text prompting to maximize video humor understanding of large language models (LLMs). With three different evaluation methods using automatic scores, rationale quality experiments, and human evaluations, we show that our prompting significantly improves LLMs' ability for humor explanation.
Visual-Attribute Prompt Learning for Progressive Mild Cognitive Impairment Prediction
Authors: Luoyao Kang, Haifan Gong, Xiang Wan, Haofeng Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Prompt Learning

Deep learning (DL) has been used in the automatic diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer's Disease (AD) with brain imaging data. However, previous methods have not fully exploited the relation between brain image and clinical information that is widely adopted by experts in practice. To exploit the heterogeneous features from imaging and tabular data simultaneously, we propose the Visual-Attribute Prompt Learning-based Transformer (VAP-Former), a transformer-based network that efficiently extracts and fuses the multi-modal features with prompt fine-tuning. Furthermore, we propose a Prompt fine-Tuning (PT) scheme to transfer the knowledge from AD prediction task for progressive MCI (pMCI) diagnosis. In details, we first pre-train the VAP-Former without prompts on the AD diagnosis task and then fine-tune the model on the pMCI detection task with PT, which only needs to optimize a small amount of parameters while keeping the backbone frozen. Next, we propose a novel global prompt token for the visual prompts to provide global guidance to the multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments not only show the superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods in pMCI prediction but also demonstrate that the global prompt can make the prompt learning process more effective and stable. Interestingly, the proposed prompt learning model even outperforms the fully fine-tuning baseline on transferring the knowledge from AD to pMCI.
Affine-Consistent Transformer for Multi-Class Cell Nuclei Detection
Authors: Junjia Huang, Haofeng Li, Xiang Wan, Guanbin Li
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

Multi-class cell nuclei detection is a fundamental prerequisite in the diagnosis of histopathology. It is critical to efficiently locate and identify cells with diverse morphology and distributions in digital pathological images. Most existing methods take complex intermediate representations as learning targets and rely on inflexible post-refinements while paying less attention to various cell density and fields of view. In this paper, we propose a novel Affine-Consistent Transformer (AC-Former), which directly yields a sequence of nucleus positions and is trained collaboratively through two sub-networks, a global and a local network. The local branch learns to infer distorted input images of smaller scales while the global network outputs the large-scale predictions as extra supervision signals. We further introduce an Adaptive Affine Transformer (AAT) module, which can automatically learn the key spatial transformations to warp original images for local network training. The AAT module works by learning to capture the transformed image regions that are more valuable for training the model. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art algorithms on various benchmarks.
MMTF-DES: A Fusion of Multimodal Transformer Models for Desire, Emotion, and Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Data
Authors: Abdul Aziz, Nihad Karim Chowdhury, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Abu Nowshed Chy, Md. Jawad Siddique
Date: 2023-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotional Intelligence, Emotion Recognition, Sentiment Analysis

Desire is a set of human aspirations and wishes that comprise verbal and cognitive aspects that drive human feelings and behaviors, distinguishing humans from other animals. Understanding human desire has the potential to be one of the most fascinating and challenging research domains. It is tightly coupled with sentiment analysis and emotion recognition tasks. It is beneficial for increasing human-computer interactions, recognizing human emotional intelligence, understanding interpersonal relationships, and making decisions. However, understanding human desire is challenging and under-explored because ways of eliciting desire might be different among humans. The task gets more difficult due to the diverse cultures, countries, and languages. Prior studies overlooked the use of image-text pairwise feature representation, which is crucial for the task of human desire understanding. In this research, we have proposed a unified multimodal transformer-based framework with image-text pair settings to identify human desire, sentiment, and emotion. The core of our proposed method lies in the encoder module, which is built using two state-of-the-art multimodal transformer models. These models allow us to extract diverse features. To effectively extract visual and contextualized embedding features from social media image and text pairs, we conducted joint fine-tuning of two pre-trained multimodal transformer models: Vision-and-Language Transformer (ViLT) and Vision-and-Augmented-Language Transformer (VAuLT). Subsequently, we use an early fusion strategy on these embedding features to obtain combined diverse feature representations of the image-text pair. This consolidation incorporates diverse information about this task, enabling us to robustly perceive the context and image pair from multiple perspectives.
Zero-shot Learning of Individualized Task Contrast Prediction from Resting-state Functional Connectomes
Authors: Minh Nguyen, Gia H. Ngo, Mert R. Sabuncu
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

Given sufficient pairs of resting-state and task-evoked fMRI scans from subjects, it is possible to train ML models to predict subject-specific task-evoked activity using resting-state functional MRI (rsfMRI) scans. However, while rsfMRI scans are relatively easy to collect, obtaining sufficient task fMRI scans is much harder as it involves more complex experimental designs and procedures. Thus, the reliance on scarce paired data limits the application of current techniques to only tasks seen during training. We show that this reliance can be reduced by leveraging group-average contrasts, enabling zero-shot predictions for novel tasks. Our approach, named OPIC (short for Omni-Task Prediction of Individual Contrasts), takes as input a subject's rsfMRI-derived connectome and a group-average contrast, to produce a prediction of the subject-specific contrast. Similar to zero-shot learning in large language models using special inputs to obtain answers for novel natural language processing tasks, inputting group-average contrasts guides the OPIC model to generalize to novel tasks unseen in training. Experimental results show that OPIC's predictions for novel tasks are not only better than simple group-averages, but are also competitive with a state-of-the-art model's in-domain predictions that was trained using in-domain tasks' data.
Concept-based Anomaly Detection in Retail Stores for Automatic Correction using Mobile Robots
Authors: Aditya Kapoor, Vartika Sengar, Nijil George, Vighnesh Vatsal, Jayavardhana Gubbi, Balamuralidhar P, Arpan Pal
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Management, Outlier Detection

Tracking of inventory and rearrangement of misplaced items are some of the most labor-intensive tasks in a retail environment. While there have been attempts at using vision-based techniques for these tasks, they mostly use planogram compliance for detection of any anomalies, a technique that has been found lacking in robustness and scalability. Moreover, existing systems rely on human intervention to perform corrective actions after detection. In this paper, we present Co-AD, a Concept-based Anomaly Detection approach using a Vision Transformer (ViT) that is able to flag misplaced objects without using a prior knowledge base such as a planogram. It uses an auto-encoder architecture followed by outlier detection in the latent space. Co-AD has a peak success rate of 89.90% on anomaly detection image sets of retail objects drawn from the RP2K dataset, compared to 80.81% on the best-performing baseline of a standard ViT auto-encoder. To demonstrate its utility, we describe a robotic mobile manipulation pipeline to autonomously correct the anomalies flagged by Co-AD. This work is ultimately aimed towards developing autonomous mobile robot solutions that reduce the need for human intervention in retail store management.