pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Compressive Sensing with Tensorized Autoencoder
Authors: Rakib Hyder, M. Salman Asif
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing, Denoising

Deep networks can be trained to map images into a low-dimensional latent space. In many cases, different images in a collection are articulated versions of one another; for example, same object with different lighting, background, or pose. Furthermore, in many cases, parts of images can be corrupted by noise or missing entries. In this paper, our goal is to recover images without access to the ground-truth (clean) images using the articulations as structural prior of the data. Such recovery problems fall under the domain of compressive sensing. We propose to learn autoencoder with tensor ring factorization on the the embedding space to impose structural constraints on the data. In particular, we use a tensor ring structure in the bottleneck layer of the autoencoder that utilizes the soft labels of the structured dataset. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for inpainting and denoising applications. The resulting method achieves better reconstruction quality compared to other generative prior-based self-supervised recovery approaches for compressive sensing.
MCROOD: Multi-Class Radar Out-Of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Sabri Mustafa Kahya, Muhammet Sami Yavuz, Eckehard Steinbach
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection has recently received special attention due to its critical role in safely deploying modern deep learning (DL) architectures. This work proposes a reconstruction-based multi-class OOD detector that operates on radar range doppler images (RDIs). The detector aims to classify any moving object other than a person sitting, standing, or walking as OOD. We also provide a simple yet effective pre-processing technique to detect minor human body movements like breathing. The simple idea is called respiration detector (RESPD) and eases the OOD detection, especially for human sitting and standing classes. On our dataset collected by 60GHz short-range FMCW Radar, we achieve AUROCs of 97.45%, 92.13%, and 96.58% for sitting, standing, and walking classes, respectively. We perform extensive experiments and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) OOD detection methods. Also, our pipeline performs 24 times faster than the second-best method and is very suitable for real-time processing.
NeRFlame: FLAME-based conditioning of NeRF for 3D face rendering
Authors: Wojciech Zając, Joanna Waczyńska, Piotr Borycki, Jacek Tabor, Maciej Zięba, Przemysław Spurek
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Traditional 3D face models are based on mesh representations with texture. One of the most important models is FLAME (Faces Learned with an Articulated Model and Expressions), which produces meshes of human faces that are fully controllable. Unfortunately, such models have problems with capturing geometric and appearance details. In contrast to mesh representation, the neural radiance field (NeRF) produces extremely sharp renders. However, implicit methods are hard to animate and do not generalize well to unseen expressions. It is not trivial to effectively control NeRF models to obtain face manipulation. The present paper proposes a novel approach, named NeRFlame, which combines the strengths of both NeRF and FLAME methods. Our method enables high-quality rendering capabilities of NeRF while also offering complete control over the visual appearance, similar to FLAME. In contrast to traditional NeRF-based structures that use neural networks for RGB color and volume density modeling, our approach utilizes the FLAME mesh as a distinct density volume. Consequently, color values exist only in the vicinity of the FLAME mesh. This FLAME framework is seamlessly incorporated into the NeRF architecture for predicting RGB colors, enabling our model to explicitly represent volume density and implicitly capture RGB colors.
SemARFlow: Injecting Semantics into Unsupervised Optical Flow Estimation for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Shuai Yuan, Shuzhi Yu, Hannah Kim, Carlo Tomasi
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Optical Flow Estimation, Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised optical flow estimation is especially hard near occlusions and motion boundaries and in low-texture regions. We show that additional information such as semantics and domain knowledge can help better constrain this problem. We introduce SemARFlow, an unsupervised optical flow network designed for autonomous driving data that takes estimated semantic segmentation masks as additional inputs. This additional information is injected into the encoder and into a learned upsampler that refines the flow output. In addition, a simple yet effective semantic augmentation module provides self-supervision when learning flow and its boundaries for vehicles, poles, and sky. Together, these injections of semantic information improve the KITTI-2015 optical flow test error rate from 11.80% to 8.38%. We also show visible improvements around object boundaries as well as a greater ability to generalize across datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/duke-vision/semantic-unsup-flow-release.
A New Super-Resolution Measurement of Perceptual Quality and Fidelity
Authors: Sheng Cheng
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Super-resolution results are usually measured by full-reference image quality metrics or human rating scores. However, these evaluation methods are general image quality measurement, and do not account for the nature of the super-resolution problem. In this work, we analyze the evaluation problem based on the one-to-many mapping nature of super-resolution, and propose a novel distribution-based metric for super-resolution. Starting from the distribution distance, we derive the proposed metric to make it accessible and easy to compute. Through a human subject study on super-resolution, we show that the proposed metric is highly correlated with the human perceptual quality, and better than most existing metrics. Moreover, the proposed metric has a higher correlation with the fidelity measure compared to the perception-based metrics. To understand the properties of the proposed metric, we conduct extensive evaluation in terms of its design choices, and show that the metric is robust to its design choices. Finally, we show that the metric can be used to train super-resolution networks for better perceptual quality.
Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE Loss for Learning H&E-to-IHC Stain Translation with Inconsistent Groundtruth Image Pairs
Authors: Fangda Li, Zhiqiang Hu, Wen Chen, Avinash Kak
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image-to-Image Translation, Scheduling, Translation

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining highlights the molecular information critical to diagnostics in tissue samples. However, compared to H&E staining, IHC staining can be much more expensive in terms of both labor and the laboratory equipment required. This motivates recent research that demonstrates that the correlations between the morphological information present in the H&E-stained slides and the molecular information in the IHC-stained slides can be used for H&E-to-IHC stain translation. However, due to a lack of pixel-perfect H&E-IHC groundtruth pairs, most existing methods have resorted to relying on expert annotations. To remedy this situation, we present a new loss function, Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE (ASP), to directly deal with the input to target inconsistencies in a proposed H&E-to-IHC image-to-image translation framework. The ASP loss is built upon a patch-based contrastive learning criterion, named Supervised PatchNCE (SP), and augments it further with weight scheduling to mitigate the negative impact of noisy supervision. Lastly, we introduce the Multi-IHC Stain Translation (MIST) dataset, which contains aligned H&E-IHC patches for 4 different IHC stains critical to breast cancer diagnosis. In our experiment, we demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms existing image-to-image translation methods for stain translation to multiple IHC stains. All of our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lifangda01/AdaptiveSupervisedPatchNCE.
Deformable Cross-Attention Transformer for Medical Image Registration
Authors: Junyu Chen, Yihao Liu, Yufan He, Yong Du
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Transformers have recently shown promise for medical image applications, leading to an increasing interest in developing such models for medical image registration. Recent advancements in designing registration Transformers have focused on using cross-attention (CA) to enable a more precise understanding of spatial correspondences between moving and fixed images. Here, we propose a novel CA mechanism that computes windowed attention using deformable windows. In contrast to existing CA mechanisms that require intensive computational complexity by either computing CA globally or locally with a fixed and expanded search window, the proposed deformable CA can selectively sample a diverse set of features over a large search window while maintaining low computational complexity. The proposed model was extensively evaluated on multi-modal, mono-modal, and atlas-to-patient registration tasks, demonstrating promising performance against state-of-the-art methods and indicating its effectiveness for medical image registration. The source code for this work will be available after publication.
Spatially-varying Regularization with Conditional Transformer for Unsupervised Image Registration
Authors: Junyu Chen, Yihao Liu, Yufan He, Yong Du
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Unsupervised Image Registration

In the past, optimization-based registration models have used spatially-varying regularization to account for deformation variations in different image regions. However, deep learning-based registration models have mostly relied on spatially-invariant regularization. Here, we introduce an end-to-end framework that uses neural networks to learn a spatially-varying deformation regularizer directly from data. The hyperparameter of the proposed regularizer is conditioned into the network, enabling easy tuning of the regularization strength. The proposed method is built upon a Transformer-based model, but it can be readily adapted to any network architecture. We thoroughly evaluated the proposed approach using publicly available datasets and observed a significant performance improvement while maintaining smooth deformation. The source code of this work will be made available after publication.
Overwriting Pretrained Bias with Finetuning Data
Authors: Angelina Wang, Olga Russakovsky
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Attribute, Transfer Learning

Transfer learning is beneficial by allowing the expressive features of models pretrained on large-scale datasets to be finetuned for the target task of smaller, more domain-specific datasets. However, there is a concern that these pretrained models may come with their own biases which would propagate into the finetuned model. In this work, we investigate bias when conceptualized as both spurious correlations between the target task and a sensitive attribute as well as underrepresentation of a particular group in the dataset. Under both notions of bias, we find that (1) models finetuned on top of pretrained models can indeed inherit their biases, but (2) this bias can be corrected for through relatively minor interventions to the finetuning dataset, and often with a negligible impact to performance. Our findings imply that careful curation of the finetuning dataset is important for reducing biases on a downstream task, and doing so can even compensate for bias in the pretrained model.
Category-Level Multi-Part Multi-Joint 3D Shape Assembly
Authors: Yichen Li, Kaichun Mo, Yueqi Duan, He Wang, Jiequan Zhang, Lin Shao, Wojciech Matusik, Leonidas Guibas
Date: 2023-03-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Shape assembly composes complex shapes geometries by arranging simple part geometries and has wide applications in autonomous robotic assembly and CAD modeling. Existing works focus on geometry reasoning and neglect the actual physical assembly process of matching and fitting joints, which are the contact surfaces connecting different parts. In this paper, we consider contacting joints for the task of multi-part assembly. A successful joint-optimized assembly needs to satisfy the bilateral objectives of shape structure and joint alignment. We propose a hierarchical graph learning approach composed of two levels of graph representation learning. The part graph takes part geometries as input to build the desired shape structure. The joint-level graph uses part joints information and focuses on matching and aligning joints. The two kinds of information are combined to achieve the bilateral objectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods, achieving better shape structure and higher joint alignment accuracy.
Provably Convergent Plug-and-Play Quasi-Newton Methods
Authors: Hong Ye Tan, Subhadip Mukherjee, Junqi Tang, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb
Date: 2023-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Super-Resolution

Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods are a class of efficient iterative methods that aim to combine data fidelity terms and deep denoisers using classical optimization algorithms, such as ISTA or ADMM, with applications in inverse problems and imaging. Provable PnP methods are a subclass of PnP methods with convergence guarantees, such as fixed point convergence or convergence to critical points of some energy function. Many existing provable PnP methods impose heavy restrictions on the denoiser or fidelity function, such as non-expansiveness or strict convexity, respectively. In this work, we propose a novel algorithmic approach incorporating quasi-Newton steps into a provable PnP framework based on proximal denoisers, resulting in greatly accelerated convergence while retaining light assumptions on the denoiser. By characterizing the denoiser as the proximal operator of a weakly convex function, we show that the fixed points of the proposed quasi-Newton PnP algorithm are critical points of a weakly convex function. Numerical experiments on image deblurring and super-resolution demonstrate 2--8x faster convergence as compared to other provable PnP methods with similar reconstruction quality.
Model-tuning Via Prompts Makes NLP Models Adversarially Robust
Authors: Mrigank Raman, Pratyush Maini, J. Zico Kolter, Zachary C. Lipton, Danish Pruthi
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Language Modelling, Text Infilling

In recent years, NLP practitioners have converged on the following practice: (i) import an off-the-shelf pretrained (masked) language model; (ii) append a multilayer perceptron atop the CLS token's hidden representation (with randomly initialized weights); and (iii) fine-tune the entire model on a downstream task (MLP-FT). This procedure has produced massive gains on standard NLP benchmarks, but these models remain brittle, even to mild adversarial perturbations. In this work, we demonstrate surprising gains in adversarial robustness enjoyed by Model-tuning Via Prompts (MVP), an alternative method of adapting to downstream tasks. Rather than appending an MLP head to make output prediction, MVP appends a prompt template to the input, and makes prediction via text infilling/completion. Across 5 NLP datasets, 4 adversarial attacks, and 3 different models, MVP improves performance against adversarial substitutions by an average of 8% over standard methods and even outperforms adversarial training-based state-of-art defenses by 3.5%. By combining MVP with adversarial training, we achieve further improvements in adversarial robustness while maintaining performance on unperturbed examples. Finally, we conduct ablations to investigate the mechanism underlying these gains. Notably, we find that the main causes of vulnerability of MLP-FT can be attributed to the misalignment between pre-training and fine-tuning tasks, and the randomly initialized MLP parameters.
Learning Reduced-Order Models for Cardiovascular Simulations with Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Luca Pegolotti, Martin R. Pfaller, Natalia L. Rubio, Ke Ding, Rita Brugarolas Brufau, Eric Darve, Alison L. Marsden
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Reduced-order models based on physics are a popular choice in cardiovascular modeling due to their efficiency, but they may experience reduced accuracy when working with anatomies that contain numerous junctions or pathological conditions. We develop one-dimensional reduced-order models that simulate blood flow dynamics using a graph neural network trained on three-dimensional hemodynamic simulation data. Given the initial condition of the system, the network iteratively predicts the pressure and flow rate at the vessel centerline nodes. Our numerical results demonstrate the accuracy and generalizability of our method in physiological geometries comprising a variety of anatomies and boundary conditions. Our findings demonstrate that our approach can achieve errors below 2% and 3% for pressure and flow rate, respectively, provided there is adequate training data. As a result, our method exhibits superior performance compared to physics-based one-dimensional models, while maintaining high efficiency at inference time.
Meet in the Middle: A New Pre-training Paradigm
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Most language models (LMs) are trained and applied in an autoregressive left-to-right fashion, assuming that the next token only depends on the preceding ones. However, this assumption ignores the potential benefits of using the full sequence information during training, and the possibility of having context from both sides during inference. In this paper, we propose a new pre-training paradigm with techniques that jointly improve the training data efficiency and the capabilities of the LMs in the infilling task. The first is a training objective that aligns the predictions of a left-to-right LM with those of a right-to-left LM, trained on the same data but in reverse order. The second is a bidirectional inference procedure that enables both LMs to meet in the middle. We show the effectiveness of our pre-training paradigm with extensive experiments on both programming and natural language models, outperforming strong baselines.
Tight Non-asymptotic Inference via Sub-Gaussian Intrinsic Moment Norm
Authors: Huiming Zhang, Haoyu Wei, Guang Cheng
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00

In non-asymptotic learning, variance-type parameters of sub-Gaussian distributions are of paramount importance. However, directly estimating these parameters using the empirical moment generating function (MGF) is infeasible. To address this, we suggest using the sub-Gaussian intrinsic moment norm [Buldygin and Kozachenko (2000), Theorem 1.3] achieved by maximizing a sequence of normalized moments. Significantly, the suggested norm can not only reconstruct the exponential moment bounds of MGFs but also provide tighter sub-Gaussian concentration inequalities. In practice, we provide an intuitive method for assessing whether data with a finite sample size is sub-Gaussian, utilizing the sub-Gaussian plot. The intrinsic moment norm can be robustly estimated via a simple plug-in approach. Our theoretical findings are also applicable to reinforcement learning, including the multi-armed bandit scenario.
Channel Estimation for Underwater Visible Light Communication: A Sparse Learning Perspective
Authors: Younan Mou, Sicong Liu
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: compressed sensing, Sparse Learning

The underwater propagation environment for visible light signals is affected by complex factors such as absorption, shadowing, and reflection, making it very challengeable to achieve effective underwater visible light communication (UVLC) channel estimation. It is difficult for the UVLC channel to be sparse represented in the time and frequency domains, which limits the chance of using sparse signal processing techniques to achieve better performance of channel estimation. To this end, a compressed sensing (CS) based framework is established in this paper by fully exploiting the sparsity of the underwater visible light channel in the distance domain of the propagation links. In order to solve the sparse recovery problem and achieve more accurate UVLC channel estimation, a sparse learning based underwater visible light channel estimation (SL-UVCE) scheme is proposed. Specifically, a deep-unfolding neural network mimicking the classical iterative sparse recovery algorithm of approximate message passing (AMP) is employed, which decomposes the iterations of AMP into a series of layers with different learnable parameters. Compared with the existing non-CS-based and CS-based schemes, the proposed scheme shows better performance of accuracy in channel estimation, especially in severe conditions such as insufficient measurement pilots and large number of multipath components.
Improved Tree Search for Automatic Program Synthesis
Authors: Aran Carmon, Lior Wolf
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Program Synthesis, valid

In the task of automatic program synthesis, one obtains pairs of matching inputs and outputs and generates a computer program, in a particular domain-specific language (DSL), which given each sample input returns the matching output. A key element is being able to perform an efficient search in the space of valid programs. Here, we suggest a variant of MCTS that leads to state of the art results on two vastly different DSLs. The exploration method we propose includes multiple contributions: a modified visit count, a preprocessing procedure for the training dataset, and encoding the part of the program that was already executed.
Tighter Lower Bounds for Shuffling SGD: Random Permutations and Beyond
Authors: Jaeyoung Cha, Jaewook Lee, Chulhee Yun
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00

We study convergence lower bounds of without-replacement stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for solving smooth (strongly-)convex finite-sum minimization problems. Unlike most existing results focusing on final iterate lower bounds in terms of the number of components $n$ and the number of epochs $K$, we seek bounds for arbitrary weighted average iterates that are tight in all factors including the condition number $\kappa$. For SGD with Random Reshuffling, we present lower bounds that have tighter $\kappa$ dependencies than existing bounds. Our results are the first to perfectly close the gap between lower and upper bounds for weighted average iterates in both strongly-convex and convex cases. We also prove weighted average iterate lower bounds for arbitrary permutation-based SGD, which apply to all variants that carefully choose the best permutation. Our bounds improve the existing bounds in factors of $n$ and $\kappa$ and thereby match the upper bounds shown for a recently proposed algorithm called GraB.
Differential Good Arm Identification
Authors: Yun-Da Tsai, Tzu-Hsien Tsai, Shou-De Lin
Date: 2023-03-13 00:00:00

This paper targets a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem called good arm identification (GAI). GAI is a pure-exploration bandit problem with the goal to output as many good arms using as few samples as possible, where a good arm is defined as an arm whose expected reward is greater than a given threshold. In this work, we propose DGAI - a differentiable good arm identification algorithm to improve the sample complexity of the state-of-the-art HDoC algorithm in a data-driven fashion. We also showed that the DGAI can further boost the performance of a general multi-arm bandit (MAB) problem given a threshold as a prior knowledge to the arm set. Extensive experiments confirm that our algorithm outperform the baseline algorithms significantly in both synthetic and real world datasets for both GAI and MAB tasks.