pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Let's Think Frame by Frame with VIP: A Video Infilling and Prediction Dataset for Evaluating Video Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Vaishnavi Himakunthala, Andy Ouyang, Daniel Rose, Ryan He, Alex Mei, Yujie Lu, Chinmay Sonar, Michael Saxon, William Yang Wang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Video Prediction

Despite exciting recent results showing vision-language systems' capacity to reason about images using natural language, their capacity for video reasoning remains under-explored. We motivate framing video reasoning as the sequential understanding of a small number of keyframes, thereby leveraging the power and robustness of vision-language while alleviating the computational complexities of processing videos. To evaluate this novel application, we introduce VIP, an inference-time challenge dataset designed to explore models' reasoning capabilities through video chain-of-thought. Inspired by visually descriptive scene plays, we propose two formats for keyframe description: unstructured dense captions and structured scene descriptions that identify the focus, action, mood, objects, and setting (FAMOuS) of the keyframe. To evaluate video reasoning, we propose two tasks: Video Infilling and Video Prediction, which test abilities to generate multiple intermediate keyframes and predict future keyframes, respectively. We benchmark GPT-4, GPT-3, and VICUNA on VIP, demonstrate the performance gap in these complex video reasoning tasks, and encourage future work to prioritize language models for efficient and generalized video reasoning.
WinDB: HMD-free and Distortion-free Panoptic Video Fixation Learning
Authors: Guotao Wang, Chenglizhao Chen, Aimin Hao, Hong Qin, Deng-Ping Fan
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00

To date, the widely adopted way to perform fixation collection in panoptic video is based on a head-mounted display (HMD), where users' fixations are collected while wearing an HMD to explore the given panoptic scene freely. However, this widely-used data collection method is insufficient for training deep models to accurately predict which regions in a given panoptic are most important when it contains intermittent salient events. The main reason is that there always exist "blind zooms" when using HMD to collect fixations since the users cannot keep spinning their heads to explore the entire panoptic scene all the time. Consequently, the collected fixations tend to be trapped in some local views, leaving the remaining areas to be the "blind zooms". Therefore, fixation data collected using HMD-based methods that accumulate local views cannot accurately represent the overall global importance - the main purpose of fixations - of complex panoptic scenes. To conquer, this paper introduces the auxiliary window with a dynamic blurring (WinDB) fixation collection approach for panoptic video, which doesn't need HMD and is able to well reflect the regional-wise importance degree. Using our WinDB approach, we have released a new PanopticVideo-300 dataset, containing 300 panoptic clips covering over 225 categories. Specifically, since using WinDB to collect fixations is blind zoom free, there exists frequent and intensive "fixation shifting" - a very special phenomenon that has long been overlooked by the previous research - in our new set. Thus, we present an effective fixation shifting network (FishNet) to conquer it. All these new fixation collection tool, dataset, and network could be very potential to open a new age for fixation-related research and applications in 360o environments.
Cross3DVG: Cross-Dataset 3D Visual Grounding on Different RGB-D Scans
Authors: Taiki Miyanishi, Daichi Azuma, Shuhei Kurita, Motoki Kawanabe
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D visual grounding, Visual Grounding

We present a novel task for cross-dataset visual grounding in 3D scenes (Cross3DVG), which overcomes limitations of existing 3D visual grounding models, specifically their restricted 3D resources and consequent tendencies of overfitting a specific 3D dataset. We created RIORefer, a large-scale 3D visual grounding dataset, to facilitate Cross3DVG. It includes more than 63k diverse descriptions of 3D objects within 1,380 indoor RGB-D scans from 3RScan, with human annotations. After training the Cross3DVG model using the source 3D visual grounding dataset, we evaluate it without target labels using the target dataset with, e.g., different sensors, 3D reconstruction methods, and language annotators. Comprehensive experiments are conducted using established visual grounding models and with CLIP-based multi-view 2D and 3D integration designed to bridge gaps among 3D datasets. For Cross3DVG tasks, (i) cross-dataset 3D visual grounding exhibits significantly worse performance than learning and evaluation with a single dataset because of the 3D data and language variants across datasets. Moreover, (ii) better object detector and localization modules and fusing 3D data and multi-view CLIP-based image features can alleviate this lower performance. Our Cross3DVG task can provide a benchmark for developing robust 3D visual grounding models to handle diverse 3D scenes while leveraging deep language understanding.
Unsafe Diffusion: On the Generation of Unsafe Images and Hateful Memes From Text-To-Image Models
Authors: Yiting Qu, Xinyue Shen, Xinlei He, Michael Backes, Savvas Zannettou, Yang Zhang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00

State-of-the-art Text-to-Image models like Stable Diffusion and DALLE$\cdot$2 are revolutionizing how people generate visual content. At the same time, society has serious concerns about how adversaries can exploit such models to generate unsafe images. In this work, we focus on demystifying the generation of unsafe images and hateful memes from Text-to-Image models. We first construct a typology of unsafe images consisting of five categories (sexually explicit, violent, disturbing, hateful, and political). Then, we assess the proportion of unsafe images generated by four advanced Text-to-Image models using four prompt datasets. We find that these models can generate a substantial percentage of unsafe images; across four models and four prompt datasets, 14.56% of all generated images are unsafe. When comparing the four models, we find different risk levels, with Stable Diffusion being the most prone to generating unsafe content (18.92% of all generated images are unsafe). Given Stable Diffusion's tendency to generate more unsafe content, we evaluate its potential to generate hateful meme variants if exploited by an adversary to attack a specific individual or community. We employ three image editing methods, DreamBooth, Textual Inversion, and SDEdit, which are supported by Stable Diffusion. Our evaluation result shows that 24% of the generated images using DreamBooth are hateful meme variants that present the features of the original hateful meme and the target individual/community; these generated images are comparable to hateful meme variants collected from the real world. Overall, our results demonstrate that the danger of large-scale generation of unsafe images is imminent. We discuss several mitigating measures, such as curating training data, regulating prompts, and implementing safety filters, and encourage better safeguard tools to be developed to prevent unsafe generation.
MIANet: Aggregating Unbiased Instance and General Information for Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yong Yang, Qiong Chen, Yuan Feng, Tianlin Huang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, General Knowledge, Meta-Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Triplet, Word Embeddings

Existing few-shot segmentation methods are based on the meta-learning strategy and extract instance knowledge from a support set and then apply the knowledge to segment target objects in a query set. However, the extracted knowledge is insufficient to cope with the variable intra-class differences since the knowledge is obtained from a few samples in the support set. To address the problem, we propose a multi-information aggregation network (MIANet) that effectively leverages the general knowledge, i.e., semantic word embeddings, and instance information for accurate segmentation. Specifically, in MIANet, a general information module (GIM) is proposed to extract a general class prototype from word embeddings as a supplement to instance information. To this end, we design a triplet loss that treats the general class prototype as an anchor and samples positive-negative pairs from local features in the support set. The calculated triplet loss can transfer semantic similarities among language identities from a word embedding space to a visual representation space. To alleviate the model biasing towards the seen training classes and to obtain multi-scale information, we then introduce a non-parametric hierarchical prior module (HPM) to generate unbiased instance-level information via calculating the pixel-level similarity between the support and query image features. Finally, an information fusion module (IFM) combines the general and instance information to make predictions for the query image. Extensive experiments on PASCAL-5i and COCO-20i show that MIANet yields superior performance and set a new state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/Aldrich2y/MIANet.
A Two-Step Deep Learning Method for 3DCT-2DUS Kidney Registration During Breathing
Authors: Chi Yanling, Xu Yuyu, Liu Huiying, Wu Xiaoxiang, Liu Zhiqiang, Mao Jiawei, Xu Guibin, Huang Weimin
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Transfer Learning

This work proposed a novel deep registration pipeline for 3D CT and 2D U/S kidney scans of free breathing, which consists of a feature network, and a 3D-2D CNN-based registration network. The feature network has handcraft texture feature layers to reduce the semantic gap. The registration network is encoder-decoder structure with loss of feature-image-motion (FIM), which enables hierarchical regression at decoder layers and avoids multiple network concatenation. It was first pretrained with retrospective datasets cum training data generation strategy, then adapted to specific patient data under unsupervised one-cycle transfer learning in onsite application. The experiment was on 132 U/S sequences, 39 multiple phase CT and 210 public single phase CT images, and 25 pairs of CT and U/S sequences. It resulted in mean contour distance (MCD) of 0.94 mm between kidneys on CT and U/S images and MCD of 1.15 mm on CT and reference CT images. For datasets with small transformations, it resulted in MCD of 0.82 and 1.02 mm respectively. For large transformations, it resulted in MCD of 1.10 and 1.28 mm respectively. This work addressed difficulties in 3DCT-2DUS kidney registration during free breathing via novel network structures and training strategy.
Gaussian Latent Representations for Uncertainty Estimation using Mahalanobis Distance in Deep Classifiers
Authors: Aishwarya Venkataramanan, Assia Benbihi, Martin Laviale, Cedric Pradalier
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making Under Uncertainty, Representation Learning

Recent works show that the data distribution in a network's latent space is useful for estimating classification uncertainty and detecting Out-of-distribution (OOD) samples. To obtain a well-regularized latent space that is conducive for uncertainty estimation, existing methods bring in significant changes to model architectures and training procedures. In this paper, we present a lightweight, fast, and high-performance regularization method for Mahalanobis distance-based uncertainty prediction, and that requires minimal changes to the network's architecture. To derive Gaussian latent representation favourable for Mahalanobis Distance calculation, we introduce a self-supervised representation learning method that separates in-class representations into multiple Gaussians. Classes with non-Gaussian representations are automatically identified and dynamically clustered into multiple new classes that are approximately Gaussian. Evaluation on standard OOD benchmarks shows that our method achieves state-of-the-art results on OOD detection with minimal inference time, and is very competitive on predictive probability calibration. Finally, we show the applicability of our method to a real-life computer vision use case on microorganism classification.
SAR-to-Optical Image Translation via Thermodynamics-inspired Network
Authors: Mingjin Zhang, Jiamin Xu, Chengyu He, Wenteng Shang, Yunsong Li, Xinbo Gao
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is prevalent in the remote sensing field but is difficult to interpret in human visual perception. Recently, SAR-to-optical (S2O) image conversion methods have provided a prospective solution for interpretation. However, since there is a huge domain difference between optical and SAR images, they suffer from low image quality and geometric distortion in the produced optical images. Motivated by the analogy between pixels during the S2O image translation and molecules in a heat field, Thermodynamics-inspired Network for SAR-to-Optical Image Translation (S2O-TDN) is proposed in this paper. Specifically, we design a Third-order Finite Difference (TFD) residual structure in light of the TFD equation of thermodynamics, which allows us to efficiently extract inter-domain invariant features and facilitate the learning of the nonlinear translation mapping. In addition, we exploit the first law of thermodynamics (FLT) to devise an FLT-guided branch that promotes the state transition of the feature values from the unstable diffusion state to the stable one, aiming to regularize the feature diffusion and preserve image structures during S2O image translation. S2O-TDN follows an explicit design principle derived from thermodynamic theory and enjoys the advantage of explainability. Experiments on the public SEN1-2 dataset show the advantages of the proposed S2O-TDN over the current methods with more delicate textures and higher quantitative results.
WaveDM: Wavelet-Based Diffusion Models for Image Restoration
Authors: Yi Huang, Jiancheng Huang, Jianzhuang Liu, Mingfu Yan, Yu Dong, Jiaxi Lv, Chaoqi Chen, Shifeng Chen
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration, Raindrop Removal, Rain Removal

Latest diffusion-based methods for many image restoration tasks outperform traditional models, but they encounter the long-time inference problem. To tackle it, this paper proposes a Wavelet-Based Diffusion Model (WaveDM). WaveDM learns the distribution of clean images in the wavelet domain conditioned on the wavelet spectrum of degraded images after wavelet transform, which is more time-saving in each step of sampling than modeling in the spatial domain. To ensure restoration performance, a unique training strategy is proposed where the low-frequency and high-frequency spectrums are learned using distinct modules. In addition, an Efficient Conditional Sampling (ECS) strategy is developed from experiments, which reduces the number of total sampling steps to around 5. Evaluations on twelve benchmark datasets including image raindrop removal, rain steaks removal, dehazing, defocus deblurring, demoir\'eing, and denoising demonstrate that WaveDM achieves state-of-the-art performance with the efficiency that is comparable to traditional one-pass methods and over 100$\times$ faster than existing image restoration methods using vanilla diffusion models.
Leveraging BEV Representation for 360-degree Visual Place Recognition
Authors: Xuecheng Xu, Yanmei Jiao, Sha Lu, Xiaqing Ding, Rong Xiong, Yue Wang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion, Visual Place Recognition

This paper investigates the advantages of using Bird's Eye View (BEV) representation in 360-degree visual place recognition (VPR). We propose a novel network architecture that utilizes the BEV representation in feature extraction, feature aggregation, and vision-LiDAR fusion, which bridges visual cues and spatial awareness. Our method extracts image features using standard convolutional networks and combines the features according to pre-defined 3D grid spatial points. To alleviate the mechanical and time misalignments between cameras, we further introduce deformable attention to learn the compensation. Upon the BEV feature representation, we then employ the polar transform and the Discrete Fourier transform for aggregation, which is shown to be rotation-invariant. In addition, the image and point cloud cues can be easily stated in the same coordinates, which benefits sensor fusion for place recognition. The proposed BEV-based method is evaluated in ablation and comparative studies on two datasets, including on-the-road and off-the-road scenarios. The experimental results verify the hypothesis that BEV can benefit VPR by its superior performance compared to baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first trial of employing BEV representation in this task.
Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning in Image-Text-Graph Space for Improved Vision-Language Compositionality
Authors: Harman Singh, Pengchuan Zhang, Qifan Wang, Mengjiao Wang, Wenhan Xiong, Jingfei Du, Yu Chen
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Contrastive Learning, Image Retrieval, Relation, Representation Learning, Systematic Generalization

Contrastively trained vision-language models have achieved remarkable progress in vision and language representation learning, leading to state-of-the-art models for various downstream multimodal tasks. However, recent research has highlighted severe limitations of these models in their ability to perform compositional reasoning over objects, attributes, and relations. Scene graphs have emerged as an effective way to understand images compositionally. These are graph-structured semantic representations of images that contain objects, their attributes, and relations with other objects in a scene. In this work, we consider the scene graph parsed from text as a proxy for the image scene graph and propose a graph decomposition and augmentation framework along with a coarse-to-fine contrastive learning objective between images and text that aligns sentences of various complexities to the same image. Along with this, we propose novel negative mining techniques in the scene graph space for improving attribute binding and relation understanding. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach that significantly improves attribute binding, relation understanding, systematic generalization, and productivity on multiple recently proposed benchmarks (For example, improvements upto $18\%$ for systematic generalization, $16.5\%$ for relation understanding over a strong baseline), while achieving similar or better performance than CLIP on various general multimodal tasks.
Online Open-set Semi-supervised Object Detection with Dual Competing Head
Authors: Zerun Wang, Ling Xiao, Liuyu Xiang, Zhaotian Weng, Toshihiko Yamasaki
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Semi-Supervised Object Detection

Open-set semi-supervised object detection (OSSOD) task leverages practical open-set unlabeled datasets that comprise both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) instances for conducting semi-supervised object detection (SSOD). The main challenge in OSSOD is distinguishing and filtering the OOD instances (i.e., outliers) during pseudo-labeling since OODs will affect the performance. The only OSSOD work employs an additional offline OOD detection network trained solely with labeled data to solve this problem. However, the limited labeled data restricts the potential for improvement. Meanwhile, the offline strategy results in low efficiency. To alleviate these issues, this paper proposes an end-to-end online OSSOD framework that improves performance and efficiency: 1) We propose a semi-supervised outlier filtering method that more effectively filters the OOD instances using both labeled and unlabeled data. 2) We propose a threshold-free Dual Competing OOD head that further improves the performance by suppressing the error accumulation during semi-supervised outlier filtering. 3) Our proposed method is an online end-to-end trainable OSSOD framework. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on several OSSOD benchmarks compared to existing methods. Moreover, additional experiments show that our method is more efficient and can be easily applied to different SSOD frameworks to boost their performance.
Generalizable Synthetic Image Detection via Language-guided Contrastive Learning
Authors: Haiwei Wu, Jiantao Zhou, Shile Zhang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Generation, Synthetic Image Detection

The heightened realism of AI-generated images can be attributed to the rapid development of synthetic models, including generative adversarial networks (GANs) and diffusion models (DMs). The malevolent use of synthetic images, such as the dissemination of fake news or the creation of fake profiles, however, raises significant concerns regarding the authenticity of images. Though many forensic algorithms have been developed for detecting synthetic images, their performance, especially the generalization capability, is still far from being adequate to cope with the increasing number of synthetic models. In this work, we propose a simple yet very effective synthetic image detection method via a language-guided contrastive learning and a new formulation of the detection problem. We first augment the training images with carefully-designed textual labels, enabling us to use a joint image-text contrastive learning for the forensic feature extraction. In addition, we formulate the synthetic image detection as an identification problem, which is vastly different from the traditional classification-based approaches. It is shown that our proposed LanguAge-guided SynThEsis Detection (LASTED) model achieves much improved generalizability to unseen image generation models and delivers promising performance that far exceeds state-of-the-art competitors by +22.66% accuracy and +15.24% AUC. The code is available at https://github.com/HighwayWu/LASTED.
UPNet: Uncertainty-based Picking Deep Learning Network for Robust First Break Picking
Authors: Hongtao Wang, Jiangshe Zhang, Xiaoli Wei, Li Long, Chunxia Zhang
Date: 2023-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Uncertainty Quantification

In seismic exploration, first break (FB) picking is a crucial aspect in the determination of subsurface velocity models, significantly influencing the placement of wells. Many deep neural networks (DNNs)-based automatic picking methods have been proposed to accelerate this processing. Significantly, the segmentation-based DNN methods provide a segmentation map and then estimate FB from the map using a picking threshold. However, the uncertainty of the results picked by DNNs still needs to be analyzed. Thus, the automatic picking methods applied in field datasets can not ensure robustness, especially in the case of a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this paper, we introduce uncertainty quantification into the FB picking task and propose a novel uncertainty-based picking deep learning network called UPNet. UPNet not only estimates the uncertainty of network output but also can filter the pickings with low confidence. Many experiments evaluate that UPNet exhibits higher accuracy and robustness than the deterministic DNN-based model, achieving State-of-the-Art (SOTA) performance in field surveys. In addition, we verify that the measurement uncertainty is meaningful, which can provide a reference for human decision-making.