pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
IRGen: Generative Modeling for Image Retrieval
Authors: Yidan Zhang, Ting Zhang, Dong Chen, Yujing Wang, Qi Chen, Xing Xie, Hao Sun, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang, Fan Yang, Mao Yang, Qingmin Liao, Jingdong Wang, Baining Guo
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval

While generative modeling has become prevalent across numerous research fields, its integration into the realm of image retrieval remains largely unexplored and underjustified. In this paper, we present a novel methodology, reframing image retrieval as a variant of generative modeling and employing a sequence-to-sequence model. This approach is harmoniously aligned with the current trend towards unification in research, presenting a cohesive framework that allows for end-to-end differentiable searching. This, in turn, facilitates superior performance via direct optimization techniques. The development of our model, dubbed IRGen, addresses the critical technical challenge of converting an image into a concise sequence of semantic units, which is pivotal for enabling efficient and effective search. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on three widely-used image retrieval benchmarks as well as two million-scale datasets, yielding significant improvement compared to prior competitive retrieval methods. In addition, the notable surge in precision scores facilitated by generative modeling presents the potential to bypass the reranking phase, which is traditionally indispensable in practical retrieval workflows.
Image comparison and scaling via nonlinear elasticity
Authors: John M. Ball, Christopher L. Horner
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00

A nonlinear elasticity model for comparing images is formulated and analyzed, in which optimal transformations between images are sought as minimizers of an integral functional. The existence of minimizers in a suitable class of homeomorphisms between image domains is established under natural hypotheses. We investigate whether for linearly related images the minimization algorithm delivers the linear transformation as the unique minimizer.
Unified Mask Embedding and Correspondence Learning for Self-Supervised Video Segmentation
Authors: Liulei Li, Wenguan Wang, Tianfei Zhou, Jianwu Li, Yi Yang
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The objective of this paper is self-supervised learning of video object segmentation. We develop a unified framework which simultaneously models cross-frame dense correspondence for locally discriminative feature learning and embeds object-level context for target-mask decoding. As a result, it is able to directly learn to perform mask-guided sequential segmentation from unlabeled videos, in contrast to previous efforts usually relying on an oblique solution - cheaply "copying" labels according to pixel-wise correlations. Concretely, our algorithm alternates between i) clustering video pixels for creating pseudo segmentation labels ex nihilo; and ii) utilizing the pseudo labels to learn mask encoding and decoding for VOS. Unsupervised correspondence learning is further incorporated into this self-taught, mask embedding scheme, so as to ensure the generic nature of the learnt representation and avoid cluster degeneracy. Our algorithm sets state-of-the-arts on two standard benchmarks (i.e., DAVIS17 and YouTube-VOS), narrowing the gap between self- and fully-supervised VOS, in terms of both performance and network architecture design.
Efficient Neural Generation of 4K Masks for Homogeneous Diffusion Inpainting
Authors: Karl Schrader, Pascal Peter, Niklas Kämper, Joachim Weickert
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Image Compression

With well-selected data, homogeneous diffusion inpainting can reconstruct images from sparse data with high quality. While 4K colour images of size 3840 x 2160 can already be inpainted in real time, optimising the known data for applications like image compression remains challenging: Widely used stochastic strategies can take days for a single 4K image. Recently, a first neural approach for this so-called mask optimisation problem offered high speed and good quality for small images. It trains a mask generation network with the help of a neural inpainting surrogate. However, these mask networks can only output masks for the resolution and mask density they were trained for. We solve these problems and enable mask optimisation for high-resolution images through a neuroexplicit coarse-to-fine strategy. Additionally, we improve the training and interpretability of mask networks by including a numerical inpainting solver directly into the network. This allows to generate masks for 4K images in around 0.6 seconds while exceeding the quality of stochastic methods on practically relevant densities. Compared to popular existing approaches, this is an acceleration of up to four orders of magnitude.
Neural Refinement for Absolute Pose Regression with Feature Synthesis
Authors: Shuai Chen, Yash Bhalgat, Xinghui Li, Jiawang Bian, Kejie Li, ZiRui Wang, Victor Adrian Prisacariu
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, Pose Estimation, regression

Absolute Pose Regression (APR) methods use deep neural networks to directly regress camera poses from RGB images. However, the predominant APR architectures only rely on 2D operations during inference, resulting in limited accuracy of pose estimation due to the lack of 3D geometry constraints or priors. In this work, we propose a test-time refinement pipeline that leverages implicit geometric constraints using a robust feature field to enhance the ability of APR methods to use 3D information during inference. We also introduce a novel Neural Feature Synthesizer (NeFeS) model, which encodes 3D geometric features during training and directly renders dense novel view features at test time to refine APR methods. To enhance the robustness of our model, we introduce a feature fusion module and a progressive training strategy. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art single-image APR accuracy on indoor and outdoor datasets.
$α$Surf: Implicit Surface Reconstruction for Semi-Transparent and Thin Objects with Decoupled Geometry and Opacity
Authors: Tianhao Wu, Hanxue Liang, Fangcheng Zhong, Gernot Riegler, Shimon Vainer, Jiankang Deng, Cengiz Oztireli
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Surface Reconstruction

Implicit surface representations such as the signed distance function (SDF) have emerged as a promising approach for image-based surface reconstruction. However, existing optimization methods assume solid surfaces and are therefore unable to properly reconstruct semi-transparent surfaces and thin structures, which also exhibit low opacity due to the blending effect with the background. While neural radiance field (NeRF) based methods can model semi-transparency and achieve photo-realistic quality in synthesized novel views, their volumetric geometry representation tightly couples geometry and opacity, and therefore cannot be easily converted into surfaces without introducing artifacts. We present $\alpha$Surf, a novel surface representation with decoupled geometry and opacity for the reconstruction of semi-transparent and thin surfaces where the colors mix. Ray-surface intersections on our representation can be found in closed-form via analytical solutions of cubic polynomials, avoiding Monte-Carlo sampling and is fully differentiable by construction. Our qualitative and quantitative evaluations show that our approach can accurately reconstruct surfaces with semi-transparent and thin parts with fewer artifacts, achieving better reconstruction quality than state-of-the-art SDF and NeRF methods. Website: https://alphasurf.netlify.app/
Fuzziness-tuned: Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Examples
Authors: Xiangyuan Yang, Jie Lin, HANLIN ZHANG, Xinyu Yang, Peng Zhao
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00

With the development of adversarial attacks, adversairal examples have been widely used to enhance the robustness of the training models on deep neural networks. Although considerable efforts of adversarial attacks on improving the transferability of adversarial examples have been developed, the attack success rate of the transfer-based attacks on the surrogate model is much higher than that on victim model under the low attack strength (e.g., the attack strength $\epsilon=8/255$). In this paper, we first systematically investigated this issue and found that the enormous difference of attack success rates between the surrogate model and victim model is caused by the existence of a special area (known as fuzzy domain in our paper), in which the adversarial examples in the area are classified wrongly by the surrogate model while correctly by the victim model. Then, to eliminate such enormous difference of attack success rates for improving the transferability of generated adversarial examples, a fuzziness-tuned method consisting of confidence scaling mechanism and temperature scaling mechanism is proposed to ensure the generated adversarial examples can effectively skip out of the fuzzy domain. The confidence scaling mechanism and the temperature scaling mechanism can collaboratively tune the fuzziness of the generated adversarial examples through adjusting the gradient descent weight of fuzziness and stabilizing the update direction, respectively. Specifically, the proposed fuzziness-tuned method can be effectively integrated with existing adversarial attacks to further improve the transferability of adverarial examples without changing the time complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrated that fuzziness-tuned method can effectively enhance the transferability of adversarial examples in the latest transfer-based attacks.
A Simple Framework for 3D Occupancy Estimation in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Wanshui Gan, Ningkai Mo, Hongbin Xu, Naoto Yokoya
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, object-detection, Object Detection, Stereo Matching

The task of estimating 3D occupancy from surrounding-view images is an exciting development in the field of autonomous driving, following the success of Bird's Eye View (BEV) perception. This task provides crucial 3D attributes of the driving environment, enhancing the overall understanding and perception of the surrounding space. In this work, we present a simple framework for 3D occupancy estimation, which is a CNN-based framework designed to reveal several key factors for 3D occupancy estimation, such as network design, optimization, and evaluation. In addition, we explore the relationship between 3D occupancy estimation and other related tasks, such as monocular depth estimation and 3D reconstruction, which could advance the study of 3D perception in autonomous driving. For evaluation, we propose a simple sampling strategy to define the metric for occupancy evaluation, which is flexible for current public datasets. Moreover, we establish the benchmark in terms of the depth estimation metric, where we compare our proposed method with monocular depth estimation methods on the DDAD and Nuscenes datasets and achieve competitive performance. The relevant code will be updated in https://github.com/GANWANSHUI/SimpleOccupancy.
DialogPaint: A Dialog-based Image Editing Model
Authors: Jingxuan Wei, Shiyu Wu, Xin Jiang, Yequan Wang
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Style Transfer

We introduce DialogPaint, a novel framework that bridges conversational interactions with image editing, enabling users to modify images through natural dialogue. By integrating a dialogue model with the Stable Diffusion image transformation technique, DialogPaint offers a more intuitive and interactive approach to image modifications. Our method stands out by effectively interpreting and executing both explicit and ambiguous instructions, handling tasks such as object replacement, style transfer, and color modification. Notably, DialogPaint supports iterative, multi-round editing, allowing users to refine image edits over successive interactions. Comprehensive evaluations highlight the robustness and versatility of our approach, marking a significant advancement in dialogue-driven image editing.
A Unified Continual Learning Framework with General Parameter-Efficient Tuning
Authors: Qiankun Gao, Chen Zhao, Yifan Sun, Teng Xi, Gang Zhang, Bernard Ghanem, Jian Zhang
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Continual Learning

The "pre-training $\rightarrow$ downstream adaptation" presents both new opportunities and challenges for Continual Learning (CL). Although the recent state-of-the-art in CL is achieved through Parameter-Efficient-Tuning (PET) adaptation paradigm, only prompt has been explored, limiting its application to Transformers only. In this paper, we position prompting as one instantiation of PET, and propose a unified CL framework with general PET, dubbed as Learning-Accumulation-Ensemble (LAE). PET, e.g., using Adapter, LoRA, or Prefix, can adapt a pre-trained model to downstream tasks with fewer parameters and resources. Given a PET method, our LAE framework incorporates it for CL with three novel designs. 1) Learning: the pre-trained model adapts to the new task by tuning an online PET module, along with our adaptation speed calibration to align different PET modules, 2) Accumulation: the task-specific knowledge learned by the online PET module is accumulated into an offline PET module through momentum update, 3) Ensemble: During inference, we respectively construct two experts with online/offline PET modules (which are favored by the novel/historical tasks) for prediction ensemble. We show that LAE is compatible with a battery of PET methods and gains strong CL capability. For example, LAE with Adaptor PET surpasses the prior state-of-the-art by 1.3% and 3.6% in last-incremental accuracy on CIFAR100 and ImageNet-R datasets, respectively. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/gqk/LAE}.
Confidence-aware 3D Gaze Estimation and Evaluation Metric
Authors: Qiaojie Zheng, Jiucai Zhang, Amy Zhang, Xiaoli Zhang
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Estimation

Deep learning appearance-based 3D gaze estimation is gaining popularity due to its minimal hardware requirements and being free of constraint. Unreliable and overconfident inferences, however, still limit the adoption of this gaze estimation method. To address the unreliable and overconfident issues, we introduce a confidence-aware model that predicts uncertainties together with gaze angle estimations. We also introduce a novel effectiveness evaluation method based on the causality between eye feature degradation and the rise in inference uncertainty to assess the uncertainty estimation. Our confidence-aware model demonstrates reliable uncertainty estimations while providing angular estimation accuracies on par with the state-of-the-art. Compared with the existing statistical uncertainty-angular-error evaluation metric, the proposed effectiveness evaluation approach can more effectively judge inferred uncertainties' performance at each prediction.
No Fear of Classifier Biases: Neural Collapse Inspired Federated Learning with Synthetic and Fixed Classifier
Authors: Zexi Li, Xinyi Shang, Rui He, Tao Lin, Chao Wu
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Classifier calibration, Federated Learning

Data heterogeneity is an inherent challenge that hinders the performance of federated learning (FL). Recent studies have identified the biased classifiers of local models as the key bottleneck. Previous attempts have used classifier calibration after FL training, but this approach falls short in improving the poor feature representations caused by training-time classifier biases. Resolving the classifier bias dilemma in FL requires a full understanding of the mechanisms behind the classifier. Recent advances in neural collapse have shown that the classifiers and feature prototypes under perfect training scenarios collapse into an optimal structure called simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF). Building on this neural collapse insight, we propose a solution to the FL's classifier bias problem by utilizing a synthetic and fixed ETF classifier during training. The optimal classifier structure enables all clients to learn unified and optimal feature representations even under extremely heterogeneous data. We devise several effective modules to better adapt the ETF structure in FL, achieving both high generalization and personalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet.
GlueGen: Plug and Play Multi-modal Encoders for X-to-image Generation
Authors: Can Qin, Ning Yu, Chen Xing, Shu Zhang, Zeyuan Chen, Stefano Ermon, Yun Fu, Caiming Xiong, ran Xu
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) models based on diffusion processes have achieved remarkable success in controllable image generation using user-provided captions. However, the tight coupling between the current text encoder and image decoder in T2I models makes it challenging to replace or upgrade. Such changes often require massive fine-tuning or even training from scratch with the prohibitive expense. To address this problem, we propose GlueGen, which applies a newly proposed GlueNet model to align features from single-modal or multi-modal encoders with the latent space of an existing T2I model. The approach introduces a new training objective that leverages parallel corpora to align the representation spaces of different encoders. Empirical results show that GlueNet can be trained efficiently and enables various capabilities beyond previous state-of-the-art models: 1) multilingual language models such as XLM-Roberta can be aligned with existing T2I models, allowing for the generation of high-quality images from captions beyond English; 2) GlueNet can align multi-modal encoders such as AudioCLIP with the Stable Diffusion model, enabling sound-to-image generation; 3) it can also upgrade the current text encoder of the latent diffusion model for challenging case generation. By the alignment of various feature representations, the GlueNet allows for flexible and efficient integration of new functionality into existing T2I models and sheds light on X-to-image (X2I) generation.
Uncertainty-informed Mutual Learning for Joint Medical Image Classification and Segmentation
Authors: Kai Ren, Ke Zou, Xianjie Liu, Yidi Chen, Xuedong Yuan, Xiaojing Shen, Meng Wang, Huazhu Fu
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decoder, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Classification, Segmentation

Classification and segmentation are crucial in medical image analysis as they enable accurate diagnosis and disease monitoring. However, current methods often prioritize the mutual learning features and shared model parameters, while neglecting the reliability of features and performances. In this paper, we propose a novel Uncertainty-informed Mutual Learning (UML) framework for reliable and interpretable medical image analysis. Our UML introduces reliability to joint classification and segmentation tasks, leveraging mutual learning with uncertainty to improve performance. To achieve this, we first use evidential deep learning to provide image-level and pixel-wise confidences. Then, an Uncertainty Navigator Decoder is constructed for better using mutual features and generating segmentation results. Besides, an Uncertainty Instructor is proposed to screen reliable masks for classification. Overall, UML could produce confidence estimation in features and performance for each link (classification and segmentation). The experiments on the public datasets demonstrate that our UML outperforms existing methods in terms of both accuracy and robustness. Our UML has the potential to explore the development of more reliable and explainable medical image analysis models. We will release the codes for reproduction after acceptance.
ShaRPy: Shape Reconstruction and Hand Pose Estimation from RGB-D with Uncertainty
Authors: Vanessa Wirth, Anna-Maria Liphardt, Birte Coppers, Johanna Bräunig, Simon Heinrich, Sigrid Leyendecker, Arnd Kleyer, Georg Schett, Martin Vossiek, Bernhard Egger, Marc Stamminger
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Gesture Recognition, Hand Pose Estimation, Keypoint Detection, Pose Estimation, Pose Tracking

Despite their potential, markerless hand tracking technologies are not yet applied in practice to the diagnosis or monitoring of the activity in inflammatory musculoskeletal diseases. One reason is that the focus of most methods lies in the reconstruction of coarse, plausible poses, whereas in the clinical context, accurate, interpretable, and reliable results are required. Therefore, we propose ShaRPy, the first RGB-D Shape Reconstruction and hand Pose tracking system, which provides uncertainty estimates of the computed pose, e.g., when a finger is hidden or its estimate is inconsistent with the observations in the input, to guide clinical decision-making. Besides pose, ShaRPy approximates a personalized hand shape, promoting a more realistic and intuitive understanding of its digital twin. Our method requires only a light-weight setup with a single consumer-level RGB-D camera yet it is able to distinguish similar poses with only small joint angle deviations in a metrically accurate space. This is achieved by combining a data-driven dense correspondence predictor with traditional energy minimization. To bridge the gap between interactive visualization and biomedical simulation we leverage a parametric hand model in which we incorporate biomedical constraints and optimize for both, its pose and hand shape. We evaluate ShaRPy on a keypoint detection benchmark and show qualitative results of hand function assessments for activity monitoring of musculoskeletal diseases.
Multi-modal Expression Recognition with Ensemble Method
Authors: Chuanhe Liu, Xinjie Zhang, Xiaolong Liu, Tenggan Zhang, Liyu Meng, Yuchen Liu, Yuanyuan Deng, Wenqiang Jiang
Date: 2023-03-17 00:00:00

This paper presents our submission to the Expression Classification Challenge of the fifth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) Competition. In our method, multimodal feature combinations extracted by several different pre-trained models are applied to capture more effective emotional information. For these combinations of visual and audio modal features, we utilize two temporal encoders to explore the temporal contextual information in the data. In addition, we employ several ensemble strategies for different experimental settings to obtain the most accurate expression recognition results. Our system achieves the average F1 Score of 0.45774 on the validation set.