pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Source Collaborative Gradient Discrepancy Minimization for Federated Domain Generalization
Authors: Yikang Wei, Yahong Han
Date: 2024-01-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Domain Generalization

Federated Domain Generalization aims to learn a domain-invariant model from multiple decentralized source domains for deployment on unseen target domain. Due to privacy concerns, the data from different source domains are kept isolated, which poses challenges in bridging the domain gap. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-source Collaborative Gradient Discrepancy Minimization (MCGDM) method for federated domain generalization. Specifically, we propose intra-domain gradient matching between the original images and augmented images to avoid overfitting the domain-specific information within isolated domains. Additionally, we propose inter-domain gradient matching with the collaboration of other domains, which can further reduce the domain shift across decentralized domains. Combining intra-domain and inter-domain gradient matching, our method enables the learned model to generalize well on unseen domains. Furthermore, our method can be extended to the federated domain adaptation task by fine-tuning the target model on the pseudo-labeled target domain. The extensive experiments on federated domain generalization and adaptation indicate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly.
ELRT: Efficient Low-Rank Training for Compact Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Yang Sui, Miao Yin, Yu Gong, Jinqi Xiao, Huy Phan, Bo Yuan
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Low-rank compression, Model Compression

Low-rank compression, a popular model compression technique that produces compact convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with low rankness, has been well-studied in the literature. On the other hand, low-rank training, as an alternative way to train low-rank CNNs from scratch, has been exploited little yet. Unlike low-rank compression, low-rank training does not need pre-trained full-rank models, and the entire training phase is always performed on the low-rank structure, bringing attractive benefits for practical applications. However, the existing low-rank training solutions still face several challenges, such as a considerable accuracy drop and/or still needing to update full-size models during the training. In this paper, we perform a systematic investigation on low-rank CNN training. By identifying the proper low-rank format and performance-improving strategy, we propose ELRT, an efficient low-rank training solution for high-accuracy, high-compactness, low-rank CNN models. Our extensive evaluation results for training various CNNs on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ELRT.
Analyzing and Mitigating Bias for Vulnerable Classes: Towards Balanced Representation in Dataset
Authors: Dewant Katare, David Solans Noguero, Souneil Park, Nicolas Kourtellis, Marijn Janssen, Aaron Yi Ding
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Fairness, Model Optimization

The accuracy and fairness of perception systems in autonomous driving are essential, especially for vulnerable road users such as cyclists, pedestrians, and motorcyclists who face significant risks in urban driving environments. While mainstream research primarily enhances class performance metrics, the hidden traits of bias inheritance in the AI models, class imbalances and disparities within the datasets are often overlooked. Our research addresses these issues by investigating class imbalances among vulnerable road users, with a focus on analyzing class distribution, evaluating performance, and assessing bias impact. Utilizing popular CNN models and Vision Transformers (ViTs) with the nuScenes dataset, our performance evaluation indicates detection disparities for underrepresented classes. Compared to related work, we focus on metric-specific and Cost-Sensitive learning for model optimization and bias mitigation, which includes data augmentation and resampling. Using the proposed mitigation approaches, we see improvement in IoU(\%) and NDS(\%) metrics from 71.3 to 75.6 and 80.6 to 83.7 for the CNN model. Similarly, for ViT, we observe improvement in IoU and NDS metrics from 74.9 to 79.2 and 83.8 to 87.1. This research contributes to developing reliable models while enhancing inclusiveness for minority classes in datasets.
Reconstructing the Invisible: Video Frame Restoration through Siamese Masked Conditional Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Yongchen Zhou, Richard Jiang
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Missing Elements

In the domain of computer vision, the restoration of missing information in video frames is a critical challenge, particularly in applications such as autonomous driving and surveillance systems. This paper introduces the Siamese Masked Conditional Variational Autoencoder (SiamMCVAE), leveraging a siamese architecture with twin encoders based on vision transformers. This innovative design enhances the model's ability to comprehend lost content by capturing intrinsic similarities between paired frames. SiamMCVAE proficiently reconstructs missing elements in masked frames, effectively addressing issues arising from camera malfunctions through variational inferences. Experimental results robustly demonstrate the model's effectiveness in restoring missing information, thus enhancing the resilience of computer vision systems. The incorporation of Siamese Vision Transformer (SiamViT) encoders in SiamMCVAE exemplifies promising potential for addressing real-world challenges in computer vision, reinforcing the adaptability of autonomous systems in dynamic environments.
Inflation with Diffusion: Efficient Temporal Adaptation for Text-to-Video Super-Resolution
Authors: Xin Yuan, Jinoo Baek, Keyang Xu, Omer Tov, Hongliang Fei
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Generation, Video Super-Resolution

We propose an efficient diffusion-based text-to-video super-resolution (SR) tuning approach that leverages the readily learned capacity of pixel level image diffusion model to capture spatial information for video generation. To accomplish this goal, we design an efficient architecture by inflating the weightings of the text-to-image SR model into our video generation framework. Additionally, we incorporate a temporal adapter to ensure temporal coherence across video frames. We investigate different tuning approaches based on our inflated architecture and report trade-offs between computational costs and super-resolution quality. Empirical evaluation, both quantitative and qualitative, on the Shutterstock video dataset, demonstrates that our approach is able to perform text-to-video SR generation with good visual quality and temporal consistency. To evaluate temporal coherence, we also present visualizations in video format in https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YVc-KMSJqOrEUdQWVaI-Yfu8Vsfu_1aO?usp=sharing .
DataViz3D: An Novel Method Leveraging Online Holographic Modeling for Extensive Dataset Preprocessing and Visualization
Authors: Jinli Duan
Date: 2024-01-18 00:00:00

DataViz3D is an innovative online software that transforms complex datasets into interactive 3D spatial models using holographic technology. This tool enables users to generate scatter plot within a 3D space, accurately mapped to the XYZ coordinates of the dataset, providing a vivid and intuitive understanding of the spatial relationships inherent in the data. DataViz3D's user friendly interface makes advanced 3D modeling and holographic visualization accessible to a wide range of users, fostering new opportunities for collaborative research and education across various disciplines.
Learning to Robustly Reconstruct Low-light Dynamic Scenes from Spike Streams
Authors: Liwen Hu, Ziluo Ding, Mianzhi Liu, Lei Ma, Tiejun Huang
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00

As a neuromorphic sensor with high temporal resolution, spike camera can generate continuous binary spike streams to capture per-pixel light intensity. We can use reconstruction methods to restore scene details in high-speed scenarios. However, due to limited information in spike streams, low-light scenes are difficult to effectively reconstruct. In this paper, we propose a bidirectional recurrent-based reconstruction framework, including a Light-Robust Representation (LR-Rep) and a fusion module, to better handle such extreme conditions. LR-Rep is designed to aggregate temporal information in spike streams, and a fusion module is utilized to extract temporal features. Additionally, we have developed a reconstruction benchmark for high-speed low-light scenes. Light sources in the scenes are carefully aligned to real-world conditions. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method, which also generalizes well to real spike streams. Related codes and proposed datasets will be released after publication.
CBVS: A Large-Scale Chinese Image-Text Benchmark for Real-World Short Video Search Scenarios
Authors: Xiangshuo Qiao, Xianxin Li, Xiaozhe Qu, Jie Zhang, Yang Liu, Yu Luo, Cihang Jin, Jin Ma
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Image Retrieval

Vision-Language Models pre-trained on large-scale image-text datasets have shown superior performance in downstream tasks such as image retrieval. Most of the images for pre-training are presented in the form of open domain common-sense visual elements. Differently, video covers in short video search scenarios are presented as user-originated contents that provide important visual summaries of videos. In addition, a portion of the video covers come with manually designed cover texts that provide semantic complements. In order to fill in the gaps in short video cover data, we establish the first large-scale cover-text benchmark for Chinese short video search scenarios. Specifically, we release two large-scale datasets CBVS-5M/10M to provide short video covers, and the manual fine-labeling dataset CBVS-20K to provide real user queries, which serves as an image-text benchmark test in the Chinese short video search field. To integrate the semantics of cover text in the case of modality missing, we propose UniCLIP where cover texts play a guiding role during training, however are not relied upon by inference. Extensive evaluation on CBVS-20K demonstrates the excellent performance of our proposal. UniCLIP has been deployed to Tencent's online video search systems with hundreds of millions of visits and achieved significant gains. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/QQBrowserVideoSearch/CBVS-UniCLIP.
Enhancing medical vision-language contrastive learning via inter-matching relation modelling
Authors: Mingjian Li, Mingyuan Meng, Michael Fulham, David Dagan Feng, Lei Bi, Jinman Kim
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Cross-Modal Retrieval, Relation, Representation Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Medical image representations can be learned through medical vision-language contrastive learning (mVLCL) where medical imaging reports are used as weak supervision through image-text alignment. These learned image representations can be transferred to and benefit various downstream medical vision tasks such as disease classification and segmentation. Recent mVLCL methods attempt to align image sub-regions and the report keywords as local-matchings. However, these methods aggregate all local-matchings via simple pooling operations while ignoring the inherent relations between them. These methods therefore fail to reason between local-matchings that are semantically related, e.g., local-matchings that correspond to the disease word and the location word (semantic-relations), and also fail to differentiate such clinically important local-matchings from others that correspond to less meaningful words, e.g., conjunction words (importance-relations). Hence, we propose a mVLCL method that models the inter-matching relations between local-matchings via a relation-enhanced contrastive learning framework (RECLF). In RECLF, we introduce a semantic-relation reasoning module (SRM) and an importance-relation reasoning module (IRM) to enable more fine-grained report supervision for image representation learning. We evaluated our method using four public benchmark datasets on four downstream tasks, including segmentation, zero-shot classification, supervised classification, and cross-modal retrieval. Our results demonstrated the superiority of our RECLF over the state-of-the-art mVLCL methods with consistent improvements across single-modal and cross-modal tasks. These results suggest that our RECLF, by modelling the inter-matching relations, can learn improved medical image representations with better generalization capabilities.
GMC-IQA: Exploiting Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency for No-reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Zewen Chen, Juan Wang, Bing Li, Chunfeng Yuan, Weiming Hu, Junxian Liu, Peng Li, Yan Wang, Youqun Zhang, Congxuan Zhang
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

Due to the subjective nature of image quality assessment (IQA), assessing which image has better quality among a sequence of images is more reliable than assigning an absolute mean opinion score for an image. Thus, IQA models are evaluated by global correlation consistency (GCC) metrics like PLCC and SROCC, rather than mean opinion consistency (MOC) metrics like MAE and MSE. However, most existing methods adopt MOC metrics to define their loss functions, due to the infeasible computation of GCC metrics during training. In this work, we construct a novel loss function and network to exploit Global-correlation and Mean-opinion Consistency, forming a GMC-IQA framework. Specifically, we propose a novel GCC loss by defining a pairwise preference-based rank estimation to solve the non-differentiable problem of SROCC and introducing a queue mechanism to reserve previous data to approximate the global results of the whole data. Moreover, we propose a mean-opinion network, which integrates diverse opinion features to alleviate the randomness of weight learning and enhance the model robustness. Experiments indicate that our method outperforms SOTA methods on multiple authentic datasets with higher accuracy and generalization. We also adapt the proposed loss to various networks, which brings better performance and more stable training.
Exploring Color Invariance through Image-Level Ensemble Learning
Authors: Yunpeng Gong, Jiaquan Li, Lifei Chen, Min Jiang
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Ensemble Learning, Person Re-Identification, Semantic Segmentation

In the field of computer vision, the persistent presence of color bias, resulting from fluctuations in real-world lighting and camera conditions, presents a substantial challenge to the robustness of models. This issue is particularly pronounced in complex wide-area surveillance scenarios, such as person re-identification and industrial dust segmentation, where models often experience a decline in performance due to overfitting on color information during training, given the presence of environmental variations. Consequently, there is a need to effectively adapt models to cope with the complexities of camera conditions. To address this challenge, this study introduces a learning strategy named Random Color Erasing, which draws inspiration from ensemble learning. This strategy selectively erases partial or complete color information in the training data without disrupting the original image structure, thereby achieving a balanced weighting of color features and other features within the neural network. This approach mitigates the risk of overfitting and enhances the model's ability to handle color variation, thereby improving its overall robustness. The approach we propose serves as an ensemble learning strategy, characterized by robust interpretability. A comprehensive analysis of this methodology is presented in this paper. Across various tasks such as person re-identification and semantic segmentation, our approach consistently improves strong baseline methods. Notably, in comparison to existing methods that prioritize color robustness, our strategy significantly enhances performance in cross-domain scenarios. The code available at \url{https://github.com/layumi/Person\_reID\_baseline\_pytorch/blob/master/random\_erasing.py} or \url{https://github.com/finger-monkey/Data-Augmentation}.
Focaler-IoU: More Focused Intersection over Union Loss
Authors: Hao Zhang, Shuaijie Zhang
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, regression

Bounding box regression plays a crucial role in the field of object detection, and the positioning accuracy of object detection largely depends on the loss function of bounding box regression. Existing researchs improve regression performance by utilizing the geometric relationship between bounding boxes, while ignoring the impact of difficult and easy sample distribution on bounding box regression. In this article, we analyzed the impact of difficult and easy sample distribution on regression results, and then proposed Focaler-IoU, which can improve detector performance in different detection tasks by focusing on different regression samples. Finally, comparative experiments were conducted using existing advanced detectors and regression methods for different detection tasks, and the detection performance was further improved by using the method proposed in this paper.Code is available at \url{https://github.com/malagoutou/Focaler-IoU}.
On mitigating stability-plasticity dilemma in CLIP-guided image morphing via geodesic distillation loss
Authors: Yeongtak Oh, Saehyung Lee, Uiwon Hwang, Sungroh Yoon
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Morphing

Large-scale language-vision pre-training models, such as CLIP, have achieved remarkable text-guided image morphing results by leveraging several unconditional generative models. However, existing CLIP-guided image morphing methods encounter difficulties when morphing photorealistic images. Specifically, existing guidance fails to provide detailed explanations of the morphing regions within the image, leading to misguidance. In this paper, we observed that such misguidance could be effectively mitigated by simply using a proper regularization loss. Our approach comprises two key components: 1) a geodesic cosine similarity loss that minimizes inter-modality features (i.e., image and text) on a projected subspace of CLIP space, and 2) a latent regularization loss that minimizes intra-modality features (i.e., image and image) on the image manifold. By replacing the na\"ive directional CLIP loss in a drop-in replacement manner, our method achieves superior morphing results on both images and videos for various benchmarks, including CLIP-inversion.
NWPU-MOC: A Benchmark for Fine-grained Multi-category Object Counting in Aerial Images
Authors: Junyu Gao, Liangliang Zhao, Xuelong Li
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Counting

Object counting is a hot topic in computer vision, which aims to estimate the number of objects in a given image. However, most methods only count objects of a single category for an image, which cannot be applied to scenes that need to count objects with multiple categories simultaneously, especially in aerial scenes. To this end, this paper introduces a Multi-category Object Counting (MOC) task to estimate the numbers of different objects (cars, buildings, ships, etc.) in an aerial image. Considering the absence of a dataset for this task, a large-scale Dataset (NWPU-MOC) is collected, consisting of 3,416 scenes with a resolution of 1024 $\times$ 1024 pixels, and well-annotated using 14 fine-grained object categories. Besides, each scene contains RGB and Near Infrared (NIR) images, of which the NIR spectrum can provide richer characterization information compared with only the RGB spectrum. Based on NWPU-MOC, the paper presents a multi-spectrum, multi-category object counting framework, which employs a dual-attention module to fuse the features of RGB and NIR and subsequently regress multi-channel density maps corresponding to each object category. In addition, to modeling the dependency between different channels in the density map with each object category, a spatial contrast loss is designed as a penalty for overlapping predictions at the same spatial position. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with some mainstream counting algorithms. The dataset, code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/lyongo/NWPU-MOC.
Learning Position-Aware Implicit Neural Network for Real-World Face Inpainting
Authors: Bo Zhao, Huan Yang, Jianlong Fu
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Facial Inpainting, Position

Face inpainting requires the model to have a precise global understanding of the facial position structure. Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of deep learning backbones, recent works in face inpainting have achieved decent performance in ideal setting (square shape with $512px$). However, existing methods often produce a visually unpleasant result, especially in the position-sensitive details (e.g., eyes and nose), when directly applied to arbitrary-shaped images in real-world scenarios. The visually unpleasant position-sensitive details indicate the shortcomings of existing methods in terms of position information processing capability. In this paper, we propose an \textbf{I}mplicit \textbf{N}eural \textbf{I}npainting \textbf{N}etwork (IN$^2$) to handle arbitrary-shape face images in real-world scenarios by explicit modeling for position information. Specifically, a downsample processing encoder is proposed to reduce information loss while obtaining the global semantic feature. A neighbor hybrid attention block is proposed with a hybrid attention mechanism to improve the facial understanding ability of the model without restricting the shape of the input. Finally, an implicit neural pyramid decoder is introduced to explicitly model position information and bridge the gap between low-resolution features and high-resolution output. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method in real-world face inpainting task.
Symbol as Points: Panoptic Symbol Spotting via Point-based Representation
Authors: Wenlong Liu, Tianyu Yang, YuHan Wang, QiZhi Yu, Lei Zhang
Date: 2024-01-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Segmentation, Vector Graphics

This work studies the problem of panoptic symbol spotting, which is to spot and parse both countable object instances (windows, doors, tables, etc.) and uncountable stuff (wall, railing, etc.) from computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Existing methods typically involve either rasterizing the vector graphics into images and using image-based methods for symbol spotting, or directly building graphs and using graph neural networks for symbol recognition. In this paper, we take a different approach, which treats graphic primitives as a set of 2D points that are locally connected and use point cloud segmentation methods to tackle it. Specifically, we utilize a point transformer to extract the primitive features and append a mask2former-like spotting head to predict the final output. To better use the local connection information of primitives and enhance their discriminability, we further propose the attention with connection module (ACM) and contrastive connection learning scheme (CCL). Finally, we propose a KNN interpolation mechanism for the mask attention module of the spotting head to better handle primitive mask downsampling, which is primitive-level in contrast to pixel-level for the image. Our approach, named SymPoint, is simple yet effective, outperforming recent state-of-the-art method GAT-CADNet by an absolute increase of 9.6% PQ and 10.4% RQ on the FloorPlanCAD dataset. The source code and models will be available at https://github.com/nicehuster/SymPoint.