pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MedGen3D: A Deep Generative Framework for Paired 3D Image and Mask Generation
Authors: Kun Han, Yifeng Xiong, Chenyu You, Pooya Khosravi, Shanlin Sun, Xiangyi Yan, James Duncan, Xiaohui Xie
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Acquiring and annotating sufficient labeled data is crucial in developing accurate and robust learning-based models, but obtaining such data can be challenging in many medical image segmentation tasks. One promising solution is to synthesize realistic data with ground-truth mask annotations. However, no prior studies have explored generating complete 3D volumetric images with masks. In this paper, we present MedGen3D, a deep generative framework that can generate paired 3D medical images and masks. First, we represent the 3D medical data as 2D sequences and propose the Multi-Condition Diffusion Probabilistic Model (MC-DPM) to generate multi-label mask sequences adhering to anatomical geometry. Then, we use an image sequence generator and semantic diffusion refiner conditioned on the generated mask sequences to produce realistic 3D medical images that align with the generated masks. Our proposed framework guarantees accurate alignment between synthetic images and segmentation maps. Experiments on 3D thoracic CT and brain MRI datasets show that our synthetic data is both diverse and faithful to the original data, and demonstrate the benefits for downstream segmentation tasks. We anticipate that MedGen3D's ability to synthesize paired 3D medical images and masks will prove valuable in training deep learning models for medical imaging tasks.
Deep Prototypical-Parts Ease Morphological Kidney Stone Identification and are Competitively Robust to Photometric Perturbations
Authors: Daniel Flores-Araiza, Francisco Lopez-Tiro, Jonathan El-Beze, Jacques Hubert, Miguel Gonzalez-Mendoza, Gilberto Ochoa-Ruiz, Christian Daul
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00

Identifying the type of kidney stones can allow urologists to determine their cause of formation, improving the prescription of appropriate treatments to diminish future relapses. Currently, the associated ex-vivo diagnosis (known as Morpho-constitutional Analysis, MCA) is time-consuming, expensive and requires a great deal of experience, as it requires a visual analysis component that is highly operator dependant. Recently, machine learning methods have been developed for in-vivo endoscopic stone recognition. Deep Learning (DL) based methods outperform non-DL methods in terms of accuracy but lack explainability. Despite this trade-off, when it comes to making high-stakes decisions, it's important to prioritize understandable Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) that suggests a course of action based on reasonable evidence, rather than a model prescribing a course of action. In this proposal, we learn Prototypical Parts (PPs) per kidney stone subtype, which are used by the DL model to generate an output classification. Using PPs in the classification task enables case-based reasoning explanations for such output, thus making the model interpretable. In addition, we modify global visual characteristics to describe their relevance to the PPs and the sensitivity of our model's performance. With this, we provide explanations with additional information at the sample, class and model levels in contrast to previous works. Although our implementation's average accuracy is lower than state-of-the-art (SOTA) non-interpretable DL models by 1.5 %, our models perform 2.8% better on perturbed images with a lower standard deviation, without adversarial training. Thus, Learning PPs has the potential to create more robust DL models.
Word-level Persian Lipreading Dataset
Authors: Javad Peymanfard, Ali Lashini, Samin Heydarian, Hossein Zeinali, Nasser Mozayani
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Lipreading, Lip Reading

Lip-reading has made impressive progress in recent years, driven by advances in deep learning. Nonetheless, the prerequisite such advances is a suitable dataset. This paper provides a new in-the-wild dataset for Persian word-level lipreading containing 244,000 videos from approximately 1,800 speakers. We evaluated the state-of-the-art method in this field and used a novel approach for word-level lip-reading. In this method, we used the AV-HuBERT model for feature extraction and obtained significantly better performance on our dataset.
Application of Self-Supervised Learning to MICA Model for Reconstructing Imperfect 3D Facial Structures
Authors: Phuong D. Nguyen, Thinh D. Le, Duong Q. Nguyen, Binh Nguyen, H. Nguyen-Xuan
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

In this study, we emphasize the integration of a pre-trained MICA model with an imperfect face dataset, employing a self-supervised learning approach. We present an innovative method for regenerating flawed facial structures, yielding 3D printable outputs that effectively support physicians in their patient treatment process. Our results highlight the model's capacity for concealing scars and achieving comprehensive facial reconstructions without discernible scarring. By capitalizing on pre-trained models and necessitating only a few hours of supplementary training, our methodology adeptly devises an optimal model for reconstructing damaged and imperfect facial features. Harnessing contemporary 3D printing technology, we institute a standardized protocol for fabricating realistic, camouflaging mask models for patients in a laboratory environment.
Universal Semi-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Classification
Authors: Lie Ju, Yicheng Wu, Wei Feng, Zhen Yu, Lin Wang, Zhuoting Zhu, ZongYuan Ge
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification, Semi-supervised Medical Image Classification

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted much attention since it reduces the expensive costs of collecting adequate well-labeled training data, especially for deep learning methods. However, traditional SSL is built upon an assumption that labeled and unlabeled data should be from the same distribution \textit{e.g.,} classes and domains. However, in practical scenarios, unlabeled data would be from unseen classes or unseen domains, and it is still challenging to exploit them by existing SSL methods. Therefore, in this paper, we proposed a unified framework to leverage these unseen unlabeled data for open-scenario semi-supervised medical image classification. We first design a novel scoring mechanism, called dual-path outliers estimation, to identify samples from unseen classes. Meanwhile, to extract unseen-domain samples, we then apply an effective variational autoencoder (VAE) pre-training. After that, we conduct domain adaptation to fully exploit the value of the detected unseen-domain samples to boost semi-supervised training. We evaluated our proposed framework on dermatology and ophthalmology tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate our model can achieve superior classification performance in various medical SSL scenarios. The code implementations are accessible at: https://github.com/PyJulie/USSL4MIC.
Polygonizer: An auto-regressive building delineator
Authors: Maxim Khomiakov, Michael Riis Andersen, Jes Frellsen
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

In geospatial planning, it is often essential to represent objects in a vectorized format, as this format easily translates to downstream tasks such as web development, graphics, or design. While these problems are frequently addressed using semantic segmentation, which requires additional post-processing to vectorize objects in a non-trivial way, we present an Image-to-Sequence model that allows for direct shape inference and is ready for vector-based workflows out of the box. We demonstrate the model's performance in various ways, including perturbations to the image input that correspond to variations or artifacts commonly encountered in remote sensing applications. Our model outperforms prior works when using ground truth bounding boxes (one object per image), achieving the lowest maximum tangent angle error.
POEM: Reconstructing Hand in a Point Embedded Multi-view Stereo
Authors: Lixin Yang, Jian Xu, Licheng Zhong, Xinyu Zhan, Zhicheng Wang, Kejian Wu, Cewu Lu
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

Enable neural networks to capture 3D geometrical-aware features is essential in multi-view based vision tasks. Previous methods usually encode the 3D information of multi-view stereo into the 2D features. In contrast, we present a novel method, named POEM, that directly operates on the 3D POints Embedded in the Multi-view stereo for reconstructing hand mesh in it. Point is a natural form of 3D information and an ideal medium for fusing features across views, as it has different projections on different views. Our method is thus in light of a simple yet effective idea, that a complex 3D hand mesh can be represented by a set of 3D points that 1) are embedded in the multi-view stereo, 2) carry features from the multi-view images, and 3) encircle the hand. To leverage the power of points, we design two operations: point-based feature fusion and cross-set point attention mechanism. Evaluation on three challenging multi-view datasets shows that POEM outperforms the state-of-the-art in hand mesh reconstruction. Code and models are available for research at https://github.com/lixiny/POEM.
Exploring the Connection between Robust and Generative Models
Authors: Senad Beadini, Iacopo Masi
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00

We offer a study that connects robust discriminative classifiers trained with adversarial training (AT) with generative modeling in the form of Energy-based Models (EBM). We do so by decomposing the loss of a discriminative classifier and showing that the discriminative model is also aware of the input data density. Though a common assumption is that adversarial points leave the manifold of the input data, our study finds out that, surprisingly, untargeted adversarial points in the input space are very likely under the generative model hidden inside the discriminative classifier -- have low energy in the EBM. We present two evidence: untargeted attacks are even more likely than the natural data and their likelihood increases as the attack strength increases. This allows us to easily detect them and craft a novel attack called High-Energy PGD that fools the classifier yet has energy similar to the data set. The code is available at github.com/senad96/Robust-Generative
NeBLa: Neural Beer-Lambert for 3D Reconstruction of Oral Structures from Panoramic Radiographs
Authors: Sihwa Park, Seongjun Kim, Doeyoung Kwon, Yohan Jang, In-Seok Song, Seung Jun Baek
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Translation

Panoramic radiography (Panoramic X-ray, PX) is a widely used imaging modality for dental examination. However, PX only provides a flattened 2D image, lacking in a 3D view of the oral structure. In this paper, we propose NeBLa (Neural Beer-Lambert) to estimate 3D oral structures from real-world PX. NeBLa tackles full 3D reconstruction for varying subjects (patients) where each reconstruction is based only on a single panoramic image. We create an intermediate representation called simulated PX (SimPX) from 3D Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) data based on the Beer-Lambert law of X-ray rendering and rotational principles of PX imaging. SimPX aims at not only truthfully simulating PX, but also facilitates the reverting process back to 3D data. We propose a novel neural model based on ray tracing which exploits both global and local input features to convert SimPX to 3D output. At inference, a real PX image is translated to a SimPX-style image with semantic regularization, and the translated image is processed by generation module to produce high-quality outputs. Experiments show that NeBLa outperforms prior state-of-the-art in reconstruction tasks both quantitatively and qualitatively. Unlike prior methods, NeBLa does not require any prior information such as the shape of dental arches, nor the matched PX-CBCT dataset for training, which is difficult to obtain in clinical practice. Our code is available at https://github.com/sihwa-park/nebla.
Attack-Augmentation Mixing-Contrastive Skeletal Representation Learning
Authors: Binqian Xu, Xiangbo Shu, Jiachao Zhang, Rui Yan, Guo-Sen Xie
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Representation Learning, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Unsupervised Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Contrastive learning, relying on effective positive and negative sample pairs, is beneficial to learn informative skeleton representations in unsupervised skeleton-based action recognition. To achieve these positive and negative pairs, existing weak/strong data augmentation methods have to randomly change the appearance of skeletons for indirectly pursuing semantic perturbations. However, such approaches have two limitations: i) solely perturbing appearance cannot well capture the intrinsic semantic information of skeletons, and ii) randomly perturbation may change the original positive/negative pairs to soft positive/negative ones. To address the above dilemma, we start the first attempt to explore an attack-based augmentation scheme that additionally brings in direct semantic perturbation, for constructing hard positive pairs and further assisting in constructing hard negative pairs. In particular, we propose a novel Attack-Augmentation Mixing-Contrastive skeletal representation learning (A$^2$MC) to contrast hard positive features and hard negative features for learning more robust skeleton representations. In A$^2$MC, Attack-Augmentation (Att-Aug) is designed to collaboratively perform targeted and untargeted perturbations of skeletons via attack and augmentation respectively, for generating high-quality hard positive features. Meanwhile, Positive-Negative Mixer (PNM) is presented to mix hard positive features and negative features for generating hard negative features, which are adopted for updating the mixed memory banks. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that A$^2$MC is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods. The code will be accessible on A$^2$MC (https://github.com/1xbq1/A2MC).
Region-Aware Portrait Retouching with Sparse Interactive Guidance
Authors: Huimin Zeng, Jie Huang, Jiacheng Li, Zhiwei Xiong
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00

Portrait retouching aims to improve the aesthetic quality of input portrait photos and especially requires human-region priority. The deep learning-based methods largely elevate the retouching efficiency and provide promising retouched results. However, existing portrait retouching methods focus on automatic retouching, which treats all human-regions equally and ignores users' preferences for specific individuals, thus suffering from limited flexibility in interactive scenarios. In this work, we emphasize the importance of users' intents and explore the interactive portrait retouching task. Specifically, we propose a region-aware retouching framework with two branches: an automatic branch and an interactive branch. The automatic branch involves an encoding-decoding process, which searches region candidates and performs automatic region-aware retouching without user guidance. The interactive branch encodes sparse user guidance into a priority condition vector and modulates latent features with a region selection module to further emphasize the user-specified regions. Experimental results show that our interactive branch effectively captures users' intents and generalizes well to unseen scenes with sparse user guidance, while our automatic branch also outperforms the state-of-the-art retouching methods due to improved region-awareness.
Arithmetic Intensity Balancing Convolution for Hardware-aware Efficient Block Design
Authors: Shinkook Choi, Junkyeong Choi
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

As deep learning advances, edge devices and lightweight neural networks are becoming more important. To reduce latency in the AI accelerator, it's essential to not only reduce FLOPs but also enhance hardware performance. We proposed an arithmetic intensity balancing convolution (ABConv) to address the issue of the overall intensity being limited by the small weight arithmetic intensity for convolution with a small spatial size. ABConv increased the maximum bound of overall arithmetic intensity and significantly reduced latency, without sacrificing accuracy. We tested the latency and hardware performance of ABConv on the Arm Ethos-U65 NPU in various configurations and used it to replace some of MobileNetV1 and ResNet50 in image classification for CIFAR100.
Progressive Volume Distillation with Active Learning for Efficient NeRF Architecture Conversion
Authors: Shuangkang Fang, Yufeng Wang, Yi Yang, Weixin Xu, Heng Wang, Wenrui Ding, Shuchang Zhou
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have been widely adopted as practical and versatile representations for 3D scenes, facilitating various downstream tasks. However, different architectures, including the plain Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Tensors, low-rank Tensors, Hashtables, and their combinations, entail distinct trade-offs. For instance, representations based on Hashtables enable faster rendering but lack clear geometric meaning, thereby posing challenges for spatial-relation-aware editing. To address this limitation and maximize the potential of each architecture, we propose Progressive Volume Distillation with Active Learning (PVD-AL), a systematic distillation method that enables any-to-any conversion between diverse architectures. PVD-AL decomposes each structure into two parts and progressively performs distillation from shallower to deeper volume representation, leveraging effective information retrieved from the rendering process. Additionally, a three-level active learning technique provides continuous feedback from teacher to student during the distillation process, achieving high-performance outcomes. Experimental evidence showcases the effectiveness of our method across multiple benchmark datasets. For instance, PVD-AL can distill an MLP-based model from a Hashtables-based model at a 10~20X faster speed and 0.8dB~2dB higher PSNR than training the MLP-based model from scratch. Moreover, PVD-AL permits the fusion of diverse features among distinct structures, enabling models with multiple editing properties and providing a more efficient model to meet real-time requirements like mobile devices. Project website: https://sk-fun.fun/PVD-AL.
Analysis of Sampling Strategies for Implicit 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Q. Liu, X. Yang
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

In the training process of the implicit 3D reconstruction network, the choice of spatial query points' sampling strategy affects the final performance of the model. Different works have differences in the selection of sampling strategies, not only in the spatial distribution of query points but also in the order of magnitude difference in the density of query points. For how to select the sampling strategy of query points, current works are more akin to an enumerating operation to find the optimal solution, which seriously affects work efficiency. In this work, we explored the relationship between sampling strategy and network final performance through classification analysis and experimental comparison from three aspects: the relationship between network type and sampling strategy, the relationship between implicit function and sampling strategy, and the impact of sampling density on model performance. In addition, we also proposed two methods, linear sampling and distance mask, to improve the sampling strategy of query points, making it more general and robust.
RIDCP: Revitalizing Real Image Dehazing via High-Quality Codebook Priors
Authors: Rui-Qi Wu, Zheng-Peng Duan, Chun-Le Guo, Zhi Chai, Chong-Yi Li
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Dehazing, Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction

Existing dehazing approaches struggle to process real-world hazy images owing to the lack of paired real data and robust priors. In this work, we present a new paradigm for real image dehazing from the perspectives of synthesizing more realistic hazy data and introducing more robust priors into the network. Specifically, (1) instead of adopting the de facto physical scattering model, we rethink the degradation of real hazy images and propose a phenomenological pipeline considering diverse degradation types. (2) We propose a Real Image Dehazing network via high-quality Codebook Priors (RIDCP). Firstly, a VQGAN is pre-trained on a large-scale high-quality dataset to obtain the discrete codebook, encapsulating high-quality priors (HQPs). After replacing the negative effects brought by haze with HQPs, the decoder equipped with a novel normalized feature alignment module can effectively utilize high-quality features and produce clean results. However, although our degradation pipeline drastically mitigates the domain gap between synthetic and real data, it is still intractable to avoid it, which challenges HQPs matching in the wild. Thus, we re-calculate the distance when matching the features to the HQPs by a controllable matching operation, which facilitates finding better counterparts. We provide a recommendation to control the matching based on an explainable solution. Users can also flexibly adjust the enhancement degree as per their preference. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our data synthesis pipeline and the superior performance of RIDCP in real image dehazing.
Uncertainty-inspired Open Set Learning for Retinal Anomaly Identification
Authors: Meng Wang, Tian Lin, Lianyu Wang, Aidi Lin, Ke Zou, Xinxing Xu, Yi Zhou, Yuanyuan Peng, Qingquan Meng, Yiming Qian, Guoyao Deng, Zhiqun Wu, Junhong Chen, Jianhong Lin, Mingzhi Zhang, Weifang Zhu, Changqing Zhang, Daoqiang Zhang, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Yong liu, Chi Pui Pang, Xinjian Chen, Haoyu Chen, Huazhu Fu
Date: 2023-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Classification, Open Set Learning

Failure to recognize samples from the classes unseen during training is a major limitation of artificial intelligence in the real-world implementation for recognition and classification of retinal anomalies. We established an uncertainty-inspired open-set (UIOS) model, which was trained with fundus images of 9 retinal conditions. Besides assessing the probability of each category, UIOS also calculated an uncertainty score to express its confidence. Our UIOS model with thresholding strategy achieved an F1 score of 99.55%, 97.01% and 91.91% for the internal testing set, external target categories (TC)-JSIEC dataset and TC-unseen testing set, respectively, compared to the F1 score of 92.20%, 80.69% and 64.74% by the standard AI model. Furthermore, UIOS correctly predicted high uncertainty scores, which would prompt the need for a manual check in the datasets of non-target categories retinal diseases, low-quality fundus images, and non-fundus images. UIOS provides a robust method for real-world screening of retinal anomalies.