pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
High-Performance Transformers for Table Structure Recognition Need Early Convolutions
Authors: Shengyun Peng, Seongmin Lee, XiaoJing Wang, Rajarajeswari Balasubramaniyan, Duen Horng Chau
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Table Recognition

Table structure recognition (TSR) aims to convert tabular images into a machine-readable format, where a visual encoder extracts image features and a textual decoder generates table-representing tokens. Existing approaches use classic convolutional neural network (CNN) backbones for the visual encoder and transformers for the textual decoder. However, this hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture introduces a complex visual encoder that accounts for nearly half of the total model parameters, markedly reduces both training and inference speed, and hinders the potential for self-supervised learning in TSR. In this work, we design a lightweight visual encoder for TSR without sacrificing expressive power. We discover that a convolutional stem can match classic CNN backbone performance, with a much simpler model. The convolutional stem strikes an optimal balance between two crucial factors for high-performance TSR: a higher receptive field (RF) ratio and a longer sequence length. This allows it to "see" an appropriate portion of the table and "store" the complex table structure within sufficient context length for the subsequent transformer. We conducted reproducible ablation studies and open-sourced our code at https://github.com/poloclub/tsr-convstem to enhance transparency, inspire innovations, and facilitate fair comparisons in our domain as tables are a promising modality for representation learning.
Disentangling Quantum and Classical Contributions in Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning Architectures
Authors: Michael Kölle, Jonas Maurer, Philipp Altmann, Leo Sünkel, Jonas Stein, Claudia Linnhoff-Popien
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning, Transfer Learning

Quantum computing offers the potential for superior computational capabilities, particularly for data-intensive tasks. However, the current state of quantum hardware puts heavy restrictions on input size. To address this, hybrid transfer learning solutions have been developed, merging pre-trained classical models, capable of handling extensive inputs, with variational quantum circuits. Yet, it remains unclear how much each component -- classical and quantum -- contributes to the model's results. We propose a novel hybrid architecture: instead of utilizing a pre-trained network for compression, we employ an autoencoder to derive a compressed version of the input data. This compressed data is then channeled through the encoder part of the autoencoder to the quantum component. We assess our model's classification capabilities against two state-of-the-art hybrid transfer learning architectures, two purely classical architectures and one quantum architecture. Their accuracy is compared across four datasets: Banknote Authentication, Breast Cancer Wisconsin, MNIST digits, and AudioMNIST. Our research suggests that classical components significantly influence classification in hybrid transfer learning, a contribution often mistakenly ascribed to the quantum element. The performance of our model aligns with that of a variational quantum circuit using amplitude embedding, positioning it as a feasible alternative.
LCM-LoRA: A Universal Stable-Diffusion Acceleration Module
Authors: Simian Luo, Yiqin Tan, Suraj Patil, Daniel Gu, Patrick von Platen, Apolinário Passos, Longbo Huang, Jian Li, Hang Zhao
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Generation

Latent Consistency Models (LCMs) have achieved impressive performance in accelerating text-to-image generative tasks, producing high-quality images with minimal inference steps. LCMs are distilled from pre-trained latent diffusion models (LDMs), requiring only ~32 A100 GPU training hours. This report further extends LCMs' potential in two aspects: First, by applying LoRA distillation to Stable-Diffusion models including SD-V1.5, SSD-1B, and SDXL, we have expanded LCM's scope to larger models with significantly less memory consumption, achieving superior image generation quality. Second, we identify the LoRA parameters obtained through LCM distillation as a universal Stable-Diffusion acceleration module, named LCM-LoRA. LCM-LoRA can be directly plugged into various Stable-Diffusion fine-tuned models or LoRAs without training, thus representing a universally applicable accelerator for diverse image generation tasks. Compared with previous numerical PF-ODE solvers such as DDIM, DPM-Solver, LCM-LoRA can be viewed as a plug-in neural PF-ODE solver that possesses strong generalization abilities. Project page: https://github.com/luosiallen/latent-consistency-model.
L-WaveBlock: A Novel Feature Extractor Leveraging Wavelets for Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Mirat Shah, Vansh Jain, Anmol Chokshi, Guruprasad Parasnis, Pramod Bide
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, Image Generation

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have risen to prominence in the field of deep learning, facilitating the generation of realistic data from random noise. The effectiveness of GANs often depends on the quality of feature extraction, a critical aspect of their architecture. This paper introduces L-WaveBlock, a novel and robust feature extractor that leverages the capabilities of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with deep learning methodologies. L-WaveBlock is catered to quicken the convergence of GAN generators while simultaneously enhancing their performance. The paper demonstrates the remarkable utility of L-WaveBlock across three datasets, a road satellite imagery dataset, the CelebA dataset and the GoPro dataset, showcasing its ability to ease feature extraction and make it more efficient. By utilizing DWT, L-WaveBlock efficiently captures the intricate details of both structural and textural details, and further partitions feature maps into orthogonal subbands across multiple scales while preserving essential information at the same time. Not only does it lead to faster convergence, but also gives competent results on every dataset by employing the L-WaveBlock. The proposed method achieves an Inception Score of 3.6959 and a Structural Similarity Index of 0.4261 on the maps dataset, a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of 29.05 and a Structural Similarity Index of 0.874 on the CelebA dataset. The proposed method performs competently to the state-of-the-art for the image denoising dataset, albeit not better, but still leads to faster convergence than conventional methods. With this, L-WaveBlock emerges as a robust and efficient tool for enhancing GAN-based image generation, demonstrating superior convergence speed and competitive performance across multiple datasets for image resolution, image generation and image denoising.
A Deep Learning Method for Simultaneous Denoising and Missing Wedge Reconstruction in Cryogenic Electron Tomography
Authors: Simon Wiedemann, Reinhard Heckel
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Cryogenic Electron Tomography, Denoising, Electron Tomography

Cryogenic electron tomography is a technique for imaging biological samples in 3D. A microscope collects a series of 2D projections of the sample, and the goal is to reconstruct the 3D density of the sample called the tomogram. Reconstruction is difficult as the 2D projections are noisy and can not be recorded from all directions, resulting in a missing wedge of information. Tomograms conventionally reconstructed with filtered back-projection suffer from noise and strong artifacts due to the missing wedge. Here, we propose a deep-learning approach for simultaneous denoising and missing wedge reconstruction called DeepDeWedge. The algorithm requires no ground truth data and is based on fitting a neural network to the 2D projections using a self-supervised loss. DeepDeWedge is simpler than current state-of-the-art approaches for denoising and missing wedge reconstruction, performs competitively and produces more denoised tomograms with higher overall contrast.
Embedding Space Interpolation Beyond Mini-Batch, Beyond Pairs and Beyond Examples
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Mixup refers to interpolation-based data augmentation, originally motivated as a way to go beyond empirical risk minimization (ERM). Its extensions mostly focus on the definition of interpolation and the space (input or feature) where it takes place, while the augmentation process itself is less studied. In most methods, the number of generated examples is limited to the mini-batch size and the number of examples being interpolated is limited to two (pairs), in the input space. We make progress in this direction by introducing MultiMix, which generates an arbitrarily large number of interpolated examples beyond the mini-batch size and interpolates the entire mini-batch in the embedding space. Effectively, we sample on the entire convex hull of the mini-batch rather than along linear segments between pairs of examples. On sequence data, we further extend to Dense MultiMix. We densely interpolate features and target labels at each spatial location and also apply the loss densely. To mitigate the lack of dense labels, we inherit labels from examples and weight interpolation factors by attention as a measure of confidence. Overall, we increase the number of loss terms per mini-batch by orders of magnitude at little additional cost. This is only possible because of interpolating in the embedding space. We empirically show that our solutions yield significant improvement over state-of-the-art mixup methods on four different benchmarks, despite interpolation being only linear. By analyzing the embedding space, we show that the classes are more tightly clustered and uniformly spread over the embedding space, thereby explaining the improved behavior.
SeaTurtleID2022: A long-span dataset for reliable sea turtle re-identification
Authors: Lukáš Adam, Vojtěch Čermák, Kostas Papafitsoros, Lukáš Picek
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper introduces the first public large-scale, long-span dataset with sea turtle photographs captured in the wild -- SeaTurtleID2022 (https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/wildlifedatasets/seaturtleid2022). The dataset contains 8729 photographs of 438 unique individuals collected within 13 years, making it the longest-spanned dataset for animal re-identification. All photographs include various annotations, e.g., identity, encounter timestamp, and body parts segmentation masks. Instead of standard "random" splits, the dataset allows for two realistic and ecologically motivated splits: (i) a time-aware closed-set with training, validation, and test data from different days/years, and (ii) a time-aware open-set with new unknown individuals in test and validation sets. We show that time-aware splits are essential for benchmarking re-identification methods, as random splits lead to performance overestimation. Furthermore, a baseline instance segmentation and re-identification performance over various body parts is provided. Finally, an end-to-end system for sea turtle re-identification is proposed and evaluated. The proposed system based on Hybrid Task Cascade for head instance segmentation and ArcFace-trained feature-extractor achieved an accuracy of 86.8%.
BakedAvatar: Baking Neural Fields for Real-Time Head Avatar Synthesis
Authors: Hao-Bin Duan, Miao Wang, Jin-Chuan Shi, Xu-Chuan Chen, Yan-Pei Cao
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Reenactment, NeRF

Synthesizing photorealistic 4D human head avatars from videos is essential for VR/AR, telepresence, and video game applications. Although existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods achieve high-fidelity results, the computational expense limits their use in real-time applications. To overcome this limitation, we introduce BakedAvatar, a novel representation for real-time neural head avatar synthesis, deployable in a standard polygon rasterization pipeline. Our approach extracts deformable multi-layer meshes from learned isosurfaces of the head and computes expression-, pose-, and view-dependent appearances that can be baked into static textures for efficient rasterization. We thus propose a three-stage pipeline for neural head avatar synthesis, which includes learning continuous deformation, manifold, and radiance fields, extracting layered meshes and textures, and fine-tuning texture details with differential rasterization. Experimental results demonstrate that our representation generates synthesis results of comparable quality to other state-of-the-art methods while significantly reducing the inference time required. We further showcase various head avatar synthesis results from monocular videos, including view synthesis, face reenactment, expression editing, and pose editing, all at interactive frame rates.
Object-centric Cross-modal Feature Distillation for Event-based Object Detection
Authors: Lei LI, Alexander Liniger, Mario Millhaeusler, Vagia Tsiminaki, Yuanyou Li, Dengxin Dai
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection

Event cameras are gaining popularity due to their unique properties, such as their low latency and high dynamic range. One task where these benefits can be crucial is real-time object detection. However, RGB detectors still outperform event-based detectors due to the sparsity of the event data and missing visual details. In this paper, we develop a novel knowledge distillation approach to shrink the performance gap between these two modalities. To this end, we propose a cross-modality object detection distillation method that by design can focus on regions where the knowledge distillation works best. We achieve this by using an object-centric slot attention mechanism that can iteratively decouple features maps into object-centric features and corresponding pixel-features used for distillation. We evaluate our novel distillation approach on a synthetic and a real event dataset with aligned grayscale images as a teacher modality. We show that object-centric distillation allows to significantly improve the performance of the event-based student object detector, nearly halving the performance gap with respect to the teacher.
Retinal OCT Synthesis with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models for Layer Segmentation
Authors: Yuli Wu, Weidong He, Dennis Eschweiler, Ningxin Dou, Zixin Fan, Shengli Mi, Peter Walter, Johannes Stegmaier
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Segmentation

Modern biomedical image analysis using deep learning often encounters the challenge of limited annotated data. To overcome this issue, deep generative models can be employed to synthesize realistic biomedical images. In this regard, we propose an image synthesis method that utilizes denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) to automatically generate retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images. By providing rough layer sketches, the trained DDPMs can generate realistic circumpapillary OCT images. We further find that more accurate pseudo labels can be obtained through knowledge adaptation, which greatly benefits the segmentation task. Through this, we observe a consistent improvement in layer segmentation accuracy, which is validated using various neural networks. Furthermore, we have discovered that a layer segmentation model trained solely with synthesized images can achieve comparable results to a model trained exclusively with real images. These findings demonstrate the promising potential of DDPMs in reducing the need for manual annotations of retinal OCT images.
Robust Retraining-free GAN Fingerprinting via Personalized Normalization
Authors: Jianwei Fei, Zhihua Xia, Benedetta Tondi, Mauro Barni
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00

In recent years, there has been significant growth in the commercial applications of generative models, licensed and distributed by model developers to users, who in turn use them to offer services. In this scenario, there is a need to track and identify the responsible user in the presence of a violation of the license agreement or any kind of malicious usage. Although there are methods enabling Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to include invisible watermarks in the images they produce, generating a model with a different watermark, referred to as a fingerprint, for each user is time- and resource-consuming due to the need to retrain the model to include the desired fingerprint. In this paper, we propose a retraining-free GAN fingerprinting method that allows model developers to easily generate model copies with the same functionality but different fingerprints. The generator is modified by inserting additional Personalized Normalization (PN) layers whose parameters (scaling and bias) are generated by two dedicated shallow networks (ParamGen Nets) taking the fingerprint as input. A watermark decoder is trained simultaneously to extract the fingerprint from the generated images. The proposed method can embed different fingerprints inside the GAN by just changing the input of the ParamGen Nets and performing a feedforward pass, without finetuning or retraining. The performance of the proposed method in terms of robustness against both model-level and image-level attacks is also superior to the state-of-the-art.
Using ResNet to Utilize 4-class T2-FLAIR Slice Classification Based on the Cholinergic Pathways Hyperintensities Scale for Pathological Aging
Authors: Wei-Chun Kevin Tsai, Yi-Chien Liu, Ming-Chun Yu, Chia-Ju Chou, Sui-Hing Yan, Yang-Teng Fan, Yan-Hsiang Huang, Yen-Ling Chiu, Yi-Fang Chuang, Ran-Zan Wang, Yao-Chia Shih
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00

The Cholinergic Pathways Hyperintensities Scale (CHIPS) is a visual rating scale used to assess the extent of cholinergic white matter hyperintensities in T2-FLAIR images, serving as an indicator of dementia severity. However, the manual selection of four specific slices for rating throughout the entire brain is a time-consuming process. Our goal was to develop a deep learning-based model capable of automatically identifying the four slices relevant to CHIPS. To achieve this, we trained a 4-class slice classification model (BSCA) using the ADNI T2-FLAIR dataset (N=150) with the assistance of ResNet. Subsequently, we tested the model's performance on a local dataset (N=30). The results demonstrated the efficacy of our model, with an accuracy of 99.82% and an F1-score of 99.83%. This achievement highlights the potential impact of BSCA as an automatic screening tool, streamlining the selection of four specific T2-FLAIR slices that encompass white matter landmarks along the cholinergic pathways. Clinicians can leverage this tool to assess the risk of clinical dementia development efficiently.
3DStyle-Diffusion: Pursuing Fine-grained Text-driven 3D Stylization with 2D Diffusion Models
Authors: Haibo Yang, Yang Chen, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Zhineng Chen, Tao Mei
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

3D content creation via text-driven stylization has played a fundamental challenge to multimedia and graphics community. Recent advances of cross-modal foundation models (e.g., CLIP) have made this problem feasible. Those approaches commonly leverage CLIP to align the holistic semantics of stylized mesh with the given text prompt. Nevertheless, it is not trivial to enable more controllable stylization of fine-grained details in 3D meshes solely based on such semantic-level cross-modal supervision. In this work, we propose a new 3DStyle-Diffusion model that triggers fine-grained stylization of 3D meshes with additional controllable appearance and geometric guidance from 2D Diffusion models. Technically, 3DStyle-Diffusion first parameterizes the texture of 3D mesh into reflectance properties and scene lighting using implicit MLP networks. Meanwhile, an accurate depth map of each sampled view is achieved conditioned on 3D mesh. Then, 3DStyle-Diffusion leverages a pre-trained controllable 2D Diffusion model to guide the learning of rendered images, encouraging the synthesized image of each view semantically aligned with text prompt and geometrically consistent with depth map. This way elegantly integrates both image rendering via implicit MLP networks and diffusion process of image synthesis in an end-to-end fashion, enabling a high-quality fine-grained stylization of 3D meshes. We also build a new dataset derived from Objaverse and the evaluation protocol for this task. Through both qualitative and quantitative experiments, we validate the capability of our 3DStyle-Diffusion. Source code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/yanghb22-fdu/3DStyle-Diffusion-Official}.
ControlStyle: Text-Driven Stylized Image Generation Using Diffusion Priors
Authors: Jingwen Chen, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Tao Mei
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Style Transfer, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recently, the multimedia community has witnessed the rise of diffusion models trained on large-scale multi-modal data for visual content creation, particularly in the field of text-to-image generation. In this paper, we propose a new task for ``stylizing'' text-to-image models, namely text-driven stylized image generation, that further enhances editability in content creation. Given input text prompt and style image, this task aims to produce stylized images which are both semantically relevant to input text prompt and meanwhile aligned with the style image in style. To achieve this, we present a new diffusion model (ControlStyle) via upgrading a pre-trained text-to-image model with a trainable modulation network enabling more conditions of text prompts and style images. Moreover, diffusion style and content regularizations are simultaneously introduced to facilitate the learning of this modulation network with these diffusion priors, pursuing high-quality stylized text-to-image generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our ControlStyle in producing more visually pleasing and artistic results, surpassing a simple combination of text-to-image model and conventional style transfer techniques.
Control3D: Towards Controllable Text-to-3D Generation
Authors: Yang Chen, Yingwei Pan, Yehao Li, Ting Yao, Tao Mei
Date: 2023-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, NeRF, Text to 3D

Recent remarkable advances in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have inspired a significant breakthrough in text-to-3D generation, pursuing 3D content creation solely from a given text prompt. However, existing text-to-3D techniques lack a crucial ability in the creative process: interactively control and shape the synthetic 3D contents according to users' desired specifications (e.g., sketch). To alleviate this issue, we present the first attempt for text-to-3D generation conditioning on the additional hand-drawn sketch, namely Control3D, which enhances controllability for users. In particular, a 2D conditioned diffusion model (ControlNet) is remoulded to guide the learning of 3D scene parameterized as NeRF, encouraging each view of 3D scene aligned with the given text prompt and hand-drawn sketch. Moreover, we exploit a pre-trained differentiable photo-to-sketch model to directly estimate the sketch of the rendered image over synthetic 3D scene. Such estimated sketch along with each sampled view is further enforced to be geometrically consistent with the given sketch, pursuing better controllable text-to-3D generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposal can generate accurate and faithful 3D scenes that align closely with the input text prompts and sketches.