pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GPT-4V(ision) is a Human-Aligned Evaluator for Text-to-3D Generation
Authors: Tong Wu, Guandao Yang, Zhibing Li, Kai Zhang, Ziwei Liu, Leonidas Guibas, Dahua Lin, Gordon Wetzstein
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Generation, Text to 3D

Despite recent advances in text-to-3D generative methods, there is a notable absence of reliable evaluation metrics. Existing metrics usually focus on a single criterion each, such as how well the asset aligned with the input text. These metrics lack the flexibility to generalize to different evaluation criteria and might not align well with human preferences. Conducting user preference studies is an alternative that offers both adaptability and human-aligned results. User studies, however, can be very expensive to scale. This paper presents an automatic, versatile, and human-aligned evaluation metric for text-to-3D generative models. To this end, we first develop a prompt generator using GPT-4V to generate evaluating prompts, which serve as input to compare text-to-3D models. We further design a method instructing GPT-4V to compare two 3D assets according to user-defined criteria. Finally, we use these pairwise comparison results to assign these models Elo ratings. Experimental results suggest our metric strongly align with human preference across different evaluation criteria.
RudolfV: A Foundation Model by Pathologists for Pathologists
Authors: Jonas Dippel, Barbara Feulner, Tobias Winterhoff, Timo Milbich, Stephan Tietz, Simon Schallenberg, Gabriel Dernbach, Andreas Kunft, Simon Heinke, Marie-Lisa Eich, Julika Ribbat-Idel, Rosemarie Krupar, Philipp Anders, Niklas Prenißl, Philipp Jurmeister, David Horst, Lukas Ruff, Klaus-Robert Müller, Frederick Klauschen, Maximilian Alber
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: model, whole slide images

Artificial intelligence has started to transform histopathology impacting clinical diagnostics and biomedical research. However, while many computational pathology approaches have been proposed, most current AI models are limited with respect to generalization, application variety, and handling rare diseases. Recent efforts introduced self-supervised foundation models to address these challenges, yet existing approaches do not leverage pathologist knowledge by design. In this study, we present a novel approach to designing foundation models for computational pathology, incorporating pathologist expertise, semi-automated data curation, and a diverse dataset from over 15 laboratories, including 58 tissue types, and encompassing 129 different histochemical and immunohistochemical staining modalities. We demonstrate that our model "RudolfV" surpasses existing state-of-the-art foundation models across different benchmarks focused on tumor microenvironment profiling, biomarker evaluation, and reference case search while exhibiting favorable robustness properties. Our study shows how domain-specific knowledge can increase the efficiency and performance of pathology foundation models and enable novel application areas.
Fun with Flags: Robust Principal Directions via Flag Manifolds
Authors: Nathan Mankovich, Gustau Camps-Valls, Tolga Birdal
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Principal component analysis (PCA), along with its extensions to manifolds and outlier contaminated data, have been indispensable in computer vision and machine learning. In this work, we present a unifying formalism for PCA and its variants, and introduce a framework based on the flags of linear subspaces, ie a hierarchy of nested linear subspaces of increasing dimension, which not only allows for a common implementation but also yields novel variants, not explored previously. We begin by generalizing traditional PCA methods that either maximize variance or minimize reconstruction error. We expand these interpretations to develop a wide array of new dimensionality reduction algorithms by accounting for outliers and the data manifold. To devise a common computational approach, we recast robust and dual forms of PCA as optimization problems on flag manifolds. We then integrate tangent space approximations of principal geodesic analysis (tangent-PCA) into this flag-based framework, creating novel robust and dual geodesic PCA variations. The remarkable flexibility offered by the 'flagification' introduced here enables even more algorithmic variants identified by specific flag types. Last but not least, we propose an effective convergent solver for these flag-formulations employing the Stiefel manifold. Our empirical results on both real-world and synthetic scenarios, demonstrate the superiority of our novel algorithms, especially in terms of robustness to outliers on manifolds.
Behavioural Cloning in VizDoom
Authors: Ryan Spick, Timothy Bradley, Ayush Raina, Pierluigi Vito Amadori, Guy Moss
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Behavioural cloning, Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper describes methods for training autonomous agents to play the game "Doom 2" through Imitation Learning (IL) using only pixel data as input. We also explore how Reinforcement Learning (RL) compares to IL for humanness by comparing camera movement and trajectory data. Through behavioural cloning, we examine the ability of individual models to learn varying behavioural traits. We attempt to mimic the behaviour of real players with different play styles, and find we can train agents that behave aggressively, passively, or simply more human-like than traditional AIs. We propose these methods of introducing more depth and human-like behaviour to agents in video games. The trained IL agents perform on par with the average players in our dataset, whilst outperforming the worst players. While performance was not as strong as common RL approaches, it provides much stronger human-like behavioural traits to the agent.
MS-DETR: Efficient DETR Training with Mixed Supervision
Authors: Chuyang Zhao, Yifan Sun, Wenhao Wang, Qiang Chen, Errui Ding, Yi Yang, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

DETR accomplishes end-to-end object detection through iteratively generating multiple object candidates based on image features and promoting one candidate for each ground-truth object. The traditional training procedure using one-to-one supervision in the original DETR lacks direct supervision for the object detection candidates. We aim at improving the DETR training efficiency by explicitly supervising the candidate generation procedure through mixing one-to-one supervision and one-to-many supervision. Our approach, namely MS-DETR, is simple, and places one-to-many supervision to the object queries of the primary decoder that is used for inference. In comparison to existing DETR variants with one-to-many supervision, such as Group DETR and Hybrid DETR, our approach does not need additional decoder branches or object queries. The object queries of the primary decoder in our approach directly benefit from one-to-many supervision and thus are superior in object candidate prediction. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms related DETR variants, such as DN-DETR, Hybrid DETR, and Group DETR, and the combination with related DETR variants further improves the performance.
Multi-scale attention-based instance segmentation for measuring crystals with large size variation
Authors: Theresa Neubauer, Astrid Berg, Maria Wimmer, Dimitrios Lenis, David Major, Philip Matthias Winter, Gaia Romana De Paolis, Johannes Novotny, Daniel Lüftner, Katja Reinharter, Katja Bühler
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Quantitative measurement of crystals in high-resolution images allows for important insights into underlying material characteristics. Deep learning has shown great progress in vision-based automatic crystal size measurement, but current instance segmentation methods reach their limits with images that have large variation in crystal size or hard to detect crystal boundaries. Even small image segmentation errors, such as incorrectly fused or separated segments, can significantly lower the accuracy of the measured results. Instead of improving the existing pixel-wise boundary segmentation methods, we propose to use an instance-based segmentation method, which gives more robust segmentation results to improve measurement accuracy. Our novel method enhances flow maps with a size-aware multi-scale attention module. The attention module adaptively fuses information from multiple scales and focuses on the most relevant scale for each segmented image area. We demonstrate that our proposed attention fusion strategy outperforms state-of-the-art instance and boundary segmentation methods, as well as simple average fusion of multi-scale predictions. We evaluate our method on a refractory raw material dataset of high-resolution images with large variation in crystal size and show that our model can be used to calculate the crystal size more accurately than existing methods.
SNeurodCNN: Structure-focused Neurodegeneration Convolutional Neural Network for Modelling and Classification of Alzheimer's Disease
Authors: Simisola Odimayo, Chollette C. Olisah, Khadija Mohammed
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Sensitivity, Specificity

Alzheimer's disease (AD), the predominant form of dementia, is a growing global challenge, emphasizing the urgent need for accurate and early diagnosis. Current clinical diagnoses rely on radiologist expert interpretation, which is prone to human error. Deep learning has thus far shown promise for early AD diagnosis. However, existing methods often overlook focal structural atrophy critical for enhanced understanding of the cerebral cortex neurodegeneration. This paper proposes a deep learning framework that includes a novel structure-focused neurodegeneration CNN architecture named SNeurodCNN and an image brightness enhancement preprocessor using gamma correction. The SNeurodCNN architecture takes as input the focal structural atrophy features resulting from segmentation of brain structures captured through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). As a result, the architecture considers only necessary CNN components, which comprises of two downsampling convolutional blocks and two fully connected layers, for achieving the desired classification task, and utilises regularisation techniques to regularise learnable parameters. Leveraging mid-sagittal and para-sagittal brain image viewpoints from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) dataset, our framework demonstrated exceptional performance. The para-sagittal viewpoint achieved 97.8% accuracy, 97.0% specificity, and 98.5% sensitivity, while the mid-sagittal viewpoint offered deeper insights with 98.1% accuracy, 97.2% specificity, and 99.0% sensitivity. Model analysis revealed the ability of SNeurodCNN to capture the structural dynamics of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and AD in the frontal lobe, occipital lobe, cerebellum, temporal, and parietal lobe, suggesting its potential as a brain structural change digi-biomarker for early AD diagnosis. This work can be reproduced using code we made available on GitHub.
D3PRefiner: A Diffusion-based Denoise Method for 3D Human Pose Refinement
Authors: Danqi Yan, Qing Gao, Yuepeng Qian, Xinxing Chen, Chenglong Fu, Yuquan Leng
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Three-dimensional (3D) human pose estimation using a monocular camera has gained increasing attention due to its ease of implementation and the abundance of data available from daily life. However, owing to the inherent depth ambiguity in images, the accuracy of existing monocular camera-based 3D pose estimation methods remains unsatisfactory, and the estimated 3D poses usually include much noise. By observing the histogram of this noise, we find each dimension of the noise follows a certain distribution, which indicates the possibility for a neural network to learn the mapping between noisy poses and ground truth poses. In this work, in order to obtain more accurate 3D poses, a Diffusion-based 3D Pose Refiner (D3PRefiner) is proposed to refine the output of any existing 3D pose estimator. We first introduce a conditional multivariate Gaussian distribution to model the distribution of noisy 3D poses, using paired 2D poses and noisy 3D poses as conditions to achieve greater accuracy. Additionally, we leverage the architecture of current diffusion models to convert the distribution of noisy 3D poses into ground truth 3D poses. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, two state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence 3D pose estimators are used as basic 3D pose estimation models, and the proposed method is evaluated on different types of 2D poses and different lengths of the input sequence. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed architecture can significantly improve the performance of current sequence-to-sequence 3D pose estimators, with a reduction of at least 10.3% in the mean per joint position error (MPJPE) and at least 11.0% in the Procrustes MPJPE (P-MPJPE).
Attention-Guided Erasing: A Novel Augmentation Method for Enhancing Downstream Breast Density Classification
Authors: Adarsh Bhandary Panambur, Hui Yu, Sheethal Bhat, Prathmesh Madhu, Siming Bayer, Andreas Maier
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: breast density classification, Data Augmentation, Transfer Learning

The assessment of breast density is crucial in the context of breast cancer screening, especially in populations with a higher percentage of dense breast tissues. This study introduces a novel data augmentation technique termed Attention-Guided Erasing (AGE), devised to enhance the downstream classification of four distinct breast density categories in mammography following the BI-RADS recommendation in the Vietnamese cohort. The proposed method integrates supplementary information during transfer learning, utilizing visual attention maps derived from a vision transformer backbone trained using the self-supervised DINO method. These maps are utilized to erase background regions in the mammogram images, unveiling only the potential areas of dense breast tissues to the network. Through the incorporation of AGE during transfer learning with varying random probabilities, we consistently surpass classification performance compared to scenarios without AGE and the traditional random erasing transformation. We validate our methodology using the publicly available VinDr-Mammo dataset. Specifically, we attain a mean F1-score of 0.5910, outperforming values of 0.5594 and 0.5691 corresponding to scenarios without AGE and with random erasing (RE), respectively. This superiority is further substantiated by t-tests, revealing a p-value of p<0.0001, underscoring the statistical significance of our approach.
RoboFusion: Towards Robust Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection via SAM
Authors: Ziying Song, Guoxing Zhang, Lin Liu, Lei Yang, Shaoqing Xu, Caiyan Jia, Feiyang Jia, Li Wang
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Multi-modal 3D object detectors are dedicated to exploring secure and reliable perception systems for autonomous driving (AD).Although achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on clean benchmark datasets, they tend to overlook the complexity and harsh conditions of real-world environments. With the emergence of visual foundation models (VFMs), opportunities and challenges are presented for improving the robustness and generalization of multi-modal 3D object detection in AD. Therefore, we propose RoboFusion, a robust framework that leverages VFMs like SAM to tackle out-of-distribution (OOD) noise scenarios. We first adapt the original SAM for AD scenarios named SAM-AD. To align SAM or SAM-AD with multi-modal methods, we then introduce AD-FPN for upsampling the image features extracted by SAM. We employ wavelet decomposition to denoise the depth-guided images for further noise reduction and weather interference. At last, we employ self-attention mechanisms to adaptively reweight the fused features, enhancing informative features while suppressing excess noise. In summary, RoboFusion significantly reduces noise by leveraging the generalization and robustness of VFMs, thereby enhancing the resilience of multi-modal 3D object detection. Consequently, RoboFusion achieves SOTA performance in noisy scenarios, as demonstrated by the KITTI-C and nuScenes-C benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/adept-thu/RoboFusion.
STAIR: Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with Auditable Intermediate Results for Video Question Answering
Authors: Yueqian Wang, Yuxuan Wang, Kai Chen, Dongyan Zhao
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Video Question Answering

Recently we have witnessed the rapid development of video question answering models. However, most models can only handle simple videos in terms of temporal reasoning, and their performance tends to drop when answering temporal-reasoning questions on long and informative videos. To tackle this problem we propose STAIR, a Spatial-Temporal Reasoning model with Auditable Intermediate Results for video question answering. STAIR is a neural module network, which contains a program generator to decompose a given question into a hierarchical combination of several sub-tasks, and a set of lightweight neural modules to complete each of these sub-tasks. Though neural module networks are already widely studied on image-text tasks, applying them to videos is a non-trivial task, as reasoning on videos requires different abilities. In this paper, we define a set of basic video-text sub-tasks for video question answering and design a set of lightweight modules to complete them. Different from most prior works, modules of STAIR return intermediate outputs specific to their intentions instead of always returning attention maps, which makes it easier to interpret and collaborate with pre-trained models. We also introduce intermediate supervision to make these intermediate outputs more accurate. We conduct extensive experiments on several video question answering datasets under various settings to show STAIR's performance, explainability, compatibility with pre-trained models, and applicability when program annotations are not available. Code: https://github.com/yellow-binary-tree/STAIR
A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Guikun Chen, Wenguan Wang
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Survey

3D Gaussian splatting (GS) has emerged as a transformative technique in explicit radiance field and computer graphics. This innovative approach, characterized by the use of millions of learnable 3D Gaussians, represents a significant departure from mainstream neural radiance field approaches, which predominantly use implicit, coordinate-based models to map spatial coordinates to pixel values. 3D GS, with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering algorithm, not only promises real-time rendering capability but also introduces unprecedented levels of editability. This positions 3D GS as a potential game-changer for the next generation of 3D reconstruction and representation. In the present paper, we provide the first systematic overview of the recent developments and critical contributions in the domain of 3D GS. We begin with a detailed exploration of the underlying principles and the driving forces behind the emergence of 3D GS, laying the groundwork for understanding its significance. A focal point of our discussion is the practical applicability of 3D GS. By enabling unprecedented rendering speed, 3D GS opens up a plethora of applications, ranging from virtual reality to interactive media and beyond. This is complemented by a comparative analysis of leading 3D GS models, evaluated across various benchmark tasks to highlight their performance and practical utility. The survey concludes by identifying current challenges and suggesting potential avenues for future research. Through this survey, we aim to provide a valuable resource for both newcomers and seasoned researchers, fostering further exploration and advancement in explicit radiance field.
A New Dataset and a Distractor-Aware Architecture for Transparent Object Tracking
Authors: Alan Lukezic, Ziga Trojer, Jiri Matas, Matej Kristan
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, Object, Object Tracking, Transparent objects

Performance of modern trackers degrades substantially on transparent objects compared to opaque objects. This is largely due to two distinct reasons. Transparent objects are unique in that their appearance is directly affected by the background. Furthermore, transparent object scenes often contain many visually similar objects (distractors), which often lead to tracking failure. However, development of modern tracking architectures requires large training sets, which do not exist in transparent object tracking. We present two contributions addressing the aforementioned issues. We propose the first transparent object tracking training dataset Trans2k that consists of over 2k sequences with 104,343 images overall, annotated by bounding boxes and segmentation masks. Standard trackers trained on this dataset consistently improve by up to 16%. Our second contribution is a new distractor-aware transparent object tracker (DiTra) that treats localization accuracy and target identification as separate tasks and implements them by a novel architecture. DiTra sets a new state-of-the-art in transparent object tracking and generalizes well to opaque objects.
Gramformer: Learning Crowd Counting via Graph-Modulated Transformer
Authors: Hui Lin, Zhiheng Ma, Xiaopeng Hong, Qinnan Shangguan, Deyu Meng
Date: 2024-01-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

Transformer has been popular in recent crowd counting work since it breaks the limited receptive field of traditional CNNs. However, since crowd images always contain a large number of similar patches, the self-attention mechanism in Transformer tends to find a homogenized solution where the attention maps of almost all patches are identical. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing Gramformer: a graph-modulated transformer to enhance the network by adjusting the attention and input node features respectively on the basis of two different types of graphs. Firstly, an attention graph is proposed to diverse attention maps to attend to complementary information. The graph is building upon the dissimilarities between patches, modulating the attention in an anti-similarity fashion. Secondly, a feature-based centrality encoding is proposed to discover the centrality positions or importance of nodes. We encode them with a proposed centrality indices scheme to modulate the node features and similarity relationships. Extensive experiments on four challenging crowd counting datasets have validated the competitiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at {https://github.com/LoraLinH/Gramformer}.