pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DGNet: Dynamic Gradient-Guided Network for Water-Related Optics Image Enhancement
Authors: Jingchun Zhou, Zongxin He, Qiuping Jiang, Kui Jiang, Xianping Fu, Xuelong Li
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, SSIM, UIE

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is a challenging task due to the complex degradation caused by underwater environments. To solve this issue, previous methods often idealize the degradation process, and neglect the impact of medium noise and object motion on the distribution of image features, limiting the generalization and adaptability of the model. Previous methods use the reference gradient that is constructed from original images and synthetic ground-truth images. This may cause the network performance to be influenced by some low-quality training data. Our approach utilizes predicted images to dynamically update pseudo-labels, adding a dynamic gradient to optimize the network's gradient space. This process improves image quality and avoids local optima. Moreover, we propose a Feature Restoration and Reconstruction module (FRR) based on a Channel Combination Inference (CCI) strategy and a Frequency Domain Smoothing module (FRS). These modules decouple other degradation features while reducing the impact of various types of noise on network performance. Experiments on multiple public datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing state-of-the-art approaches, especially in achieving performance milestones: PSNR of 25.6dB and SSIM of 0.93 on the UIEB dataset. Its efficiency in terms of parameter size and inference time further attests to its broad practicality. The code will be made publicly available.
Transformer-based No-Reference Image Quality Assessment via Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jinsong Shi, Pan Gao, Jie Qin
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Quality Assessment, Inductive Bias, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) has long been a research hotspot in the field of image processing, especially No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA). Due to the powerful feature extraction ability, existing Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Transformers based NR-IQA methods have achieved considerable progress. However, they still exhibit limited capability when facing unknown authentic distortion datasets. To further improve NR-IQA performance, in this paper, a novel supervised contrastive learning (SCL) and Transformer-based NR-IQA model SaTQA is proposed. We first train a model on a large-scale synthetic dataset by SCL (no image subjective score is required) to extract degradation features of images with various distortion types and levels. To further extract distortion information from images, we propose a backbone network incorporating the Multi-Stream Block (MSB) by combining the CNN inductive bias and Transformer long-term dependence modeling capability. Finally, we propose the Patch Attention Block (PAB) to obtain the final distorted image quality score by fusing the degradation features learned from contrastive learning with the perceptual distortion information extracted by the backbone network. Experimental results on seven standard IQA datasets show that SaTQA outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for both synthetic and authentic datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/I2-Multimedia-Lab/SaTQA
Attacking the Loop: Adversarial Attacks on Graph-based Loop Closure Detection
Authors: Jonathan J. Y. Kim, Martin Urschler, Patricia J. Riddle, Jorg S. Wicker
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Loop Closure Detection

With the advancement in robotics, it is becoming increasingly common for large factories and warehouses to incorporate visual SLAM (vSLAM) enabled automated robots that operate closely next to humans. This makes any adversarial attacks on vSLAM components potentially detrimental to humans working alongside them. Loop Closure Detection (LCD) is a crucial component in vSLAM that minimizes the accumulation of drift in mapping, since even a small drift can accumulate into a significant drift over time. A prior work by Kim et al., SymbioLCD2, unified visual features and semantic objects into a single graph structure for finding loop closure candidates. While this provided a performance improvement over visual feature-based LCD, it also created a single point of vulnerability for potential graph-based adversarial attacks. Unlike previously reported visual-patch based attacks, small graph perturbations are far more challenging to detect, making them a more significant threat. In this paper, we present Adversarial-LCD, a novel black-box evasion attack framework that employs an eigencentrality-based perturbation method and an SVM-RBF surrogate model with a Weisfeiler-Lehman feature extractor for attacking graph-based LCD. Our evaluation shows that the attack performance of Adversarial-LCD with the SVM-RBF surrogate model was superior to that of other machine learning surrogate algorithms, including SVM-linear, SVM-polynomial, and Bayesian classifier, demonstrating the effectiveness of our attack framework. Furthermore, we show that our eigencentrality-based perturbation method outperforms other algorithms, such as Random-walk and Shortest-path, highlighting the efficiency of Adversarial-LCD's perturbation selection method.
MWSIS: Multimodal Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation with 2D Box Annotations for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Guangfeng Jiang, Jun Liu, Yuzhi Wu, Wenlong Liao, Tao He, Pai Peng
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Autonomous Driving, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised instance segmentation

Instance segmentation is a fundamental research in computer vision, especially in autonomous driving. However, manual mask annotation for instance segmentation is quite time-consuming and costly. To address this problem, some prior works attempt to apply weakly supervised manner by exploring 2D or 3D boxes. However, no one has ever successfully segmented 2D and 3D instances simultaneously by only using 2D box annotations, which could further reduce the annotation cost by an order of magnitude. Thus, we propose a novel framework called Multimodal Weakly Supervised Instance Segmentation (MWSIS), which incorporates various fine-grained label generation and correction modules for both 2D and 3D modalities to improve the quality of pseudo labels, along with a new multimodal cross-supervision approach, named Consistency Sparse Cross-modal Supervision (CSCS), to reduce the inconsistency of multimodal predictions by response distillation. Particularly, transferring the 3D backbone to downstream tasks not only improves the performance of the 3D detectors, but also outperforms fully supervised instance segmentation with only 5% fully supervised annotations. On the Waymo dataset, the proposed framework demonstrates significant improvements over the baseline, especially achieving 2.59% mAP and 12.75% mAP increases for 2D and 3D instance segmentation tasks, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/jiangxb98/mwsis-plugin.
On the notion of Hallucinations from the lens of Bias and Validity in Synthetic CXR Images
Authors: Gauri Bhardwaj, Yuvaraj Govindarajulu, Sundaraparipurnan Narayanan, Pavan Kulkarni, Manojkumar Parmar
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diagnostic, Fairness

Medical imaging has revolutionized disease diagnosis, yet the potential is hampered by limited access to diverse and privacy-conscious datasets. Open-source medical datasets, while valuable, suffer from data quality and clinical information disparities. Generative models, such as diffusion models, aim to mitigate these challenges. At Stanford, researchers explored the utility of a fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model (RoentGen) for medical imaging data augmentation. Our work examines specific considerations to expand the Stanford research question, Could Stable Diffusion Solve a Gap in Medical Imaging Data? from the lens of bias and validity of the generated outcomes. We leveraged RoentGen to produce synthetic Chest-XRay (CXR) images and conducted assessments on bias, validity, and hallucinations. Diagnostic accuracy was evaluated by a disease classifier, while a COVID classifier uncovered latent hallucinations. The bias analysis unveiled disparities in classification performance among various subgroups, with a pronounced impact on the Female Hispanic subgroup. Furthermore, incorporating race and gender into input prompts exacerbated fairness issues in the generated images. The quality of synthetic images exhibited variability, particularly in certain disease classes, where there was more significant uncertainty compared to the original images. Additionally, we observed latent hallucinations, with approximately 42% of the images incorrectly indicating COVID, hinting at the presence of hallucinatory elements. These identifications provide new research directions towards interpretability of synthetic CXR images, for further understanding of associated risks and patient safety in medical applications.
CLASS-M: Adaptive stain separation-based contrastive learning with pseudo-labeling for histopathological image classification
Authors: Bodong Zhang, Hamid Manoochehri, Man Minh Ho, Fahimeh Fooladgar, Yosep Chong, Beatrice S. Knudsen, Deepika Sirohi, Tolga Tasdizen
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Histopathological Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Weakly-supervised Learning

Histopathological image classification is an important task in medical image analysis. Recent approaches generally rely on weakly supervised learning due to the ease of acquiring case-level labels from pathology reports. However, patch-level classification is preferable in applications where only a limited number of cases are available or when local prediction accuracy is critical. On the other hand, acquiring extensive datasets with localized labels for training is not feasible. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised patch-level histopathological image classification model, named CLASS-M, that does not require extensively labeled datasets. CLASS-M is formed by two main parts: a contrastive learning module that uses separated Hematoxylin and Eosin images generated through an adaptive stain separation process, and a module with pseudo-labels using MixUp. We compare our model with other state-of-the-art models on two clear cell renal cell carcinoma datasets. We demonstrate that our CLASS-M model has the best performance on both datasets. Our code is available at github.com/BzhangURU/Paper_CLASS-M/tree/main
Hallucination Augmented Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Chaoya Jiang, Haiyang Xu, Mengfan Dong, Jiaxing Chen, Wei Ye, Ming Yan, Qinghao Ye, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Shikun Zhang
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Representation Learning, Visual Question Answering

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have been shown to efficiently integrate natural language with visual information to handle multi-modal tasks. However, MLLMs still face a fundamental limitation of hallucinations, where they tend to generate erroneous or fabricated information. In this paper, we address hallucinations in MLLMs from a novel perspective of representation learning. We first analyzed the representation distribution of textual and visual tokens in MLLM, revealing two important findings: 1) there is a significant gap between textual and visual representations, indicating unsatisfactory cross-modal representation alignment; 2) representations of texts that contain and do not contain hallucinations are entangled, making it challenging to distinguish them. These two observations inspire us with a simple yet effective method to mitigate hallucinations. Specifically, we introduce contrastive learning into MLLMs and use text with hallucination as hard negative examples, naturally bringing representations of non-hallucinative text and visual samples closer while pushing way representations of non-hallucinating and hallucinative text. We evaluate our method quantitatively and qualitatively, showing its effectiveness in reducing hallucination occurrences and improving performance across multiple benchmarks. On the MMhal-Bench benchmark, our method obtains a 34.66% /29.5% improvement over the baseline MiniGPT-4/LLaVA. Our code is available on https://github.com/X-PLUG/mPLUG-HalOwl/tree/main/hacl.
Remote Sensing Vision-Language Foundation Models without Annotations via Ground Remote Alignment
Authors: Utkarsh Mall, Cheng Perng Phoo, Meilin Kelsey Liu, Carl Vondrick, Bharath Hariharan, Kavita Bala
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Open Vocabulary Image Classification, Question Answering, Retrieval, Segmentation, Visual Question Answering

We introduce a method to train vision-language models for remote-sensing images without using any textual annotations. Our key insight is to use co-located internet imagery taken on the ground as an intermediary for connecting remote-sensing images and language. Specifically, we train an image encoder for remote sensing images to align with the image encoder of CLIP using a large amount of paired internet and satellite images. Our unsupervised approach enables the training of a first-of-its-kind large-scale vision language model (VLM) for remote sensing images at two different resolutions. We show that these VLMs enable zero-shot, open-vocabulary image classification, retrieval, segmentation and visual question answering for satellite images. On each of these tasks, our VLM trained without textual annotations outperforms existing VLMs trained with supervision, with gains of up to 20% for classification and 80% for segmentation.
PatchMorph: A Stochastic Deep Learning Approach for Unsupervised 3D Brain Image Registration with Small Patches
Authors: Henrik Skibbe, Michal Byra, Akiya Watakabe, Tetsuo Yamamori, Marco Reisert
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Registration

We introduce "PatchMorph," an new stochastic deep learning algorithm tailored for unsupervised 3D brain image registration. Unlike other methods, our method uses compact patches of a constant small size to derive solutions that can combine global transformations with local deformations. This approach minimizes the memory footprint of the GPU during training, but also enables us to operate on numerous amounts of randomly overlapping small patches during inference to mitigate image and patch boundary problems. PatchMorph adeptly handles world coordinate transformations between two input images, accommodating variances in attributes such as spacing, array sizes, and orientations. The spatial resolution of patches transitions from coarse to fine, addressing both global and local attributes essential for aligning the images. Each patch offers a unique perspective, together converging towards a comprehensive solution. Experiments on human T1 MRI brain images and marmoset brain images from serial 2-photon tomography affirm PatchMorph's superior performance.
IA2U: A Transfer Plugin with Multi-Prior for In-Air Model to Underwater
Authors: Jingchun Zhou, Qilin Gai, Kin-Man Lam, Xianping Fu
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection

In underwater environments, variations in suspended particle concentration and turbidity cause severe image degradation, posing significant challenges to image enhancement (IE) and object detection (OD) tasks. Currently, in-air image enhancement and detection methods have made notable progress, but their application in underwater conditions is limited due to the complexity and variability of these environments. Fine-tuning in-air models saves high overhead and has more optional reference work than building an underwater model from scratch. To address these issues, we design a transfer plugin with multiple priors for converting in-air models to underwater applications, named IA2U. IA2U enables efficient application in underwater scenarios, thereby improving performance in Underwater IE and OD. IA2U integrates three types of underwater priors: the water type prior that characterizes the degree of image degradation, such as color and visibility; the degradation prior, focusing on differences in details and textures; and the sample prior, considering the environmental conditions at the time of capture and the characteristics of the photographed object. Utilizing a Transformer-like structure, IA2U employs these priors as query conditions and a joint task loss function to achieve hierarchical enhancement of task-level underwater image features, therefore considering the requirements of two different tasks, IE and OD. Experimental results show that IA2U combined with an in-air model can achieve superior performance in underwater image enhancement and object detection tasks. The code will be made publicly available.
READ: Recurrent Adapter with Partial Video-Language Alignment for Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning in Low-Resource Video-Language Modeling
Authors: Thong Nguyen, Xiaobao Wu, Xinshuai Dong, Khoi Le, Zhiyuan Hu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, See-Kiong Ng, Luu Anh Tuan
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Transfer Learning

Fully fine-tuning pretrained large-scale transformer models has become a popular paradigm for video-language modeling tasks, such as temporal language grounding and video-language summarization. With a growing number of tasks and limited training data, such full fine-tuning approach leads to costly model storage and unstable training. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce lightweight adapters to the pre-trained model and only update them at fine-tuning time. However, existing adapters fail to capture intrinsic temporal relations among video frames or textual words. Moreover, they neglect the preservation of critical task-related information that flows from the raw video-language input into the adapter's low-dimensional space. To address these issues, we first propose a novel REcurrent ADapter (READ) that employs recurrent computation to enable temporal modeling capability. Second, we propose Partial Video-Language Alignment (PVLA) objective via the use of partial optimal transport to maintain task-related information flowing into our READ modules. We validate our READ framework through extensive experiments where READ significantly outperforms all existing fine-tuning strategies on multiple low-resource temporal language grounding and video-language summarization benchmarks. The code, model, and data have been made available at https://nguyentthong.github.io/READ.
MaTe3D: Mask-guided Text-based 3D-aware Portrait Editing
Authors: Kangneng Zhou, Daiheng Gao, Xuan Wang, Jie Zhang, Peng Zhang, Xusen Sun, Longhao Zhang, Shiqi Yang, Bang Zhang, Liefeng Bo, Yaxing Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00

3D-aware portrait editing has a wide range of applications in multiple fields. However, current approaches are limited due that they can only perform mask-guided or text-based editing. Even by fusing the two procedures into a model, the editing quality and stability cannot be ensured. To address this limitation, we propose \textbf{MaTe3D}: mask-guided text-based 3D-aware portrait editing. In this framework, first, we introduce a new SDF-based 3D generator which learns local and global representations with proposed SDF and density consistency losses. This enhances masked-based editing in local areas; second, we present a novel distillation strategy: Conditional Distillation on Geometry and Texture (CDGT). Compared to exiting distillation strategies, it mitigates visual ambiguity and avoids mismatch between texture and geometry, thereby producing stable texture and convincing geometry while editing. Additionally, we create the CatMask-HQ dataset, a large-scale high-resolution cat face annotation for exploration of model generalization and expansion. We perform expensive experiments on both the FFHQ and CatMask-HQ datasets to demonstrate the editing quality and stability of the proposed method. Our method faithfully generates a 3D-aware edited face image based on a modified mask and a text prompt. Our code and models will be publicly released.
WaterHE-NeRF: Water-ray Tracing Neural Radiance Fields for Underwater Scene Reconstruction
Authors: Jingchun Zhou, Tianyu Liang, Dehuan Zhang, Zongxin He
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration, NeRF

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) technology demonstrates immense potential in novel viewpoint synthesis tasks, due to its physics-based volumetric rendering process, which is particularly promising in underwater scenes. Addressing the limitations of existing underwater NeRF methods in handling light attenuation caused by the water medium and the lack of real Ground Truth (GT) supervision, this study proposes WaterHE-NeRF. We develop a new water-ray tracing field by Retinex theory that precisely encodes color, density, and illuminance attenuation in three-dimensional space. WaterHE-NeRF, through its illuminance attenuation mechanism, generates both degraded and clear multi-view images and optimizes image restoration by combining reconstruction loss with Wasserstein distance. Additionally, the use of histogram equalization (HE) as pseudo-GT enhances the network's accuracy in preserving original details and color distribution. Extensive experiments on real underwater datasets and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of WaterHE-NeRF. Our code will be made publicly available.
Benchmarking Deep Learning Classifiers for SAR Automatic Target Recognition
Authors: Jacob Fein-Ashley, Tian Ye, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna, Carl Busart
Date: 2023-12-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Learning, Graph Neural Network

Synthetic Aperture Radar SAR Automatic Target Recognition ATR is a key technique of remote-sensing image recognition which can be supported by deep neural networks The existing works of SAR ATR mostly focus on improving the accuracy of the target recognition while ignoring the systems performance in terms of speed and storage which is critical to real-world applications of SAR ATR For decision-makers aiming to identify a proper deep learning model to deploy in a SAR ATR system it is important to understand the performance of different candidate deep learning models and determine the best model accordingly This paper comprehensively benchmarks several advanced deep learning models for SAR ATR with multiple distinct SAR imagery datasets Specifically we train and test five SAR image classifiers based on Residual Neural Networks ResNet18 ResNet34 ResNet50 Graph Neural Network GNN and Vision Transformer for Small-Sized Datasets (SS-ViT) We select three datasets MSTAR GBSAR and SynthWakeSAR that offer heterogeneity We evaluate and compare the five classifiers concerning their classification accuracy runtime performance in terms of inference throughput and analytical performance in terms of number of parameters number of layers model size and number of operations Experimental results show that the GNN classifier outperforms with respect to throughput and latency However it is also shown that no clear model winner emerges from all of our chosen metrics and a one model rules all case is doubtful in the domain of SAR ATR