pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robo-ABC: Affordance Generalization Beyond Categories via Semantic Correspondence for Robot Manipulation
Authors: Yuanchen Ju, Kaizhe Hu, Guowei Zhang, Gu Zhang, Mingrun Jiang, Huazhe Xu
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Manipulation, Semantic correspondence

Enabling robotic manipulation that generalizes to out-of-distribution scenes is a crucial step toward open-world embodied intelligence. For human beings, this ability is rooted in the understanding of semantic correspondence among objects, which naturally transfers the interaction experience of familiar objects to novel ones. Although robots lack such a reservoir of interaction experience, the vast availability of human videos on the Internet may serve as a valuable resource, from which we extract an affordance memory including the contact points. Inspired by the natural way humans think, we propose Robo-ABC: when confronted with unfamiliar objects that require generalization, the robot can acquire affordance by retrieving objects that share visual or semantic similarities from the affordance memory. The next step is to map the contact points of the retrieved objects to the new object. While establishing this correspondence may present formidable challenges at first glance, recent research finds it naturally arises from pre-trained diffusion models, enabling affordance mapping even across disparate object categories. Through the Robo-ABC framework, robots may generalize to manipulate out-of-category objects in a zero-shot manner without any manual annotation, additional training, part segmentation, pre-coded knowledge, or viewpoint restrictions. Quantitatively, Robo-ABC significantly enhances the accuracy of visual affordance retrieval by a large margin of 31.6% compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) end-to-end affordance models. We also conduct real-world experiments of cross-category object-grasping tasks. Robo-ABC achieved a success rate of 85.7%, proving its capacity for real-world tasks.
CascadeV-Det: Cascade Point Voting for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Yingping Liang, Ying Fu
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Anchor-free object detectors are highly efficient in performing point-based prediction without the need for extra post-processing of anchors. However, different from the 2D grids, the 3D points used in these detectors are often far from the ground truth center, making it challenging to accurately regress the bounding boxes. To address this issue, we propose a Cascade Voting (CascadeV) strategy that provides high-quality 3D object detection with point-based prediction. Specifically, CascadeV performs cascade detection using a novel Cascade Voting decoder that combines two new components: Instance Aware Voting (IA-Voting) and a Cascade Point Assignment (CPA) module. The IA-Voting module updates the object features of updated proposal points within the bounding box using conditional inverse distance weighting. This approach prevents features from being aggregated outside the instance and helps improve the accuracy of object detection. Additionally, since model training can suffer from a lack of proposal points with high centerness, we have developed the CPA module to narrow down the positive assignment threshold with cascade stages. This approach relaxes the dependence on proposal centerness in the early stages while ensuring an ample quantity of positives with high centerness in the later stages. Experiments show that FCAF3D with our CascadeV achieves state-of-the-art 3D object detection results with 70.4\% mAP@0.25 and 51.6\% mAP@0.5 on SUN RGB-D and competitive results on ScanNet. Code will be released at https://github.com/Sharpiless/CascadeV-Det
A Deep Hierarchical Feature Sparse Framework for Occluded Person Re-Identification
Authors: Yihu Song, Shuaishi Liu
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Occluded Person Re-Identification, Person Re-Identification

Most existing methods tackle the problem of occluded person re-identification (ReID) by utilizing auxiliary models, resulting in a complicated and inefficient ReID framework that is unacceptable for real-time applications. In this work, a speed-up person ReID framework named SUReID is proposed to mitigate occlusion interference while speeding up inference. The SUReID consists of three key components: hierarchical token sparsification (HTS) strategy, non-parametric feature alignment knowledge distillation (NPKD), and noise occlusion data augmentation (NODA). The HTS strategy works by pruning the redundant tokens in the vision transformer to achieve highly effective self-attention computation and eliminate interference from occlusions or background noise. However, the pruned tokens may contain human part features that contaminate the feature representation and degrade the performance. To solve this problem, the NPKD is employed to supervise the HTS strategy, retaining more discriminative tokens and discarding meaningless ones. Furthermore, the NODA is designed to introduce more noisy samples, which further trains the ability of the HTS to disentangle different tokens. Experimental results show that the SUReID achieves superior performance with surprisingly fast inference.
Semantic Segmentation in Multiple Adverse Weather Conditions with Domain Knowledge Retention
Authors: Xin Yang, Wending Yan, Yuan Yuan, Michael Bi Mi, Robby T. Tan
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Multi-target Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Semantic segmentation's performance is often compromised when applied to unlabeled adverse weather conditions. Unsupervised domain adaptation is a potential approach to enhancing the model's adaptability and robustness to adverse weather. However, existing methods encounter difficulties when sequentially adapting the model to multiple unlabeled adverse weather conditions. They struggle to acquire new knowledge while also retaining previously learned knowledge.To address these problems, we propose a semantic segmentation method for multiple adverse weather conditions that incorporates adaptive knowledge acquisition, pseudolabel blending, and weather composition replay. Our adaptive knowledge acquisition enables the model to avoid learning from extreme images that could potentially cause the model to forget. In our approach of blending pseudo-labels, we not only utilize the current model but also integrate the previously learned model into the ongoing learning process. This collaboration between the current teacher and the previous model enhances the robustness of the pseudo-labels for the current target. Our weather composition replay mechanism allows the model to continuously refine its previously learned weather information while simultaneously learning from the new target domain. Our method consistently outperforms the stateof-the-art methods, and obtains the best performance with averaged mIoU (%) of 65.7 and the lowest forgetting (%) of 3.6 against 60.1 and 11.3, on the ACDC datasets for a four-target continual multi-target domain adaptation.
Concept-Guided Prompt Learning for Generalization in Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yi Zhang, Ce Zhang, Ke Yu, Yushun Tang, Zhihai He
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) model has exhibited remarkable efficacy in establishing cross-modal connections between texts and images, yielding impressive performance across a broad spectrum of downstream applications through fine-tuning. However, for generalization tasks, the current fine-tuning methods for CLIP, such as CoOp and CoCoOp, demonstrate relatively low performance on some fine-grained datasets. We recognize the underlying reason is that these previous methods only projected global features into the prompt, neglecting the various visual concepts, such as colors, shapes, and sizes, which are naturally transferable across domains and play a crucial role in generalization tasks. To address this issue, in this work, we propose Concept-Guided Prompt Learning (CPL) for vision-language models. Specifically, we leverage the well-learned knowledge of CLIP to create a visual concept cache to enable concept-guided prompting. In order to refine the text features, we further develop a projector that transforms multi-level visual features into text features. We observe that this concept-guided prompt learning approach is able to achieve enhanced consistency between visual and linguistic modalities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our CPL method significantly improves generalization capabilities compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
Mask-adaptive Gated Convolution and Bi-directional Progressive Fusion Network for Depth Completion
Authors: Tingxuan Huang, Jiacheng Miao, Shizhuo Deng, Tong, Dongyue Chen
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Completion

Depth completion is a critical task for handling depth images with missing pixels, which can negatively impact further applications. Recent approaches have utilized Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to reconstruct depth images with the assistance of color images. However, vanilla convolution has non-negligible drawbacks in handling missing pixels. To solve this problem, we propose a new model for depth completion based on an encoder-decoder structure. Our model introduces two key components: the Mask-adaptive Gated Convolution (MagaConv) architecture and the Bi-directional Progressive Fusion (BP-Fusion) module. The MagaConv architecture is designed to acquire precise depth features by modulating convolution operations with iteratively updated masks, while the BP-Fusion module progressively integrates depth and color features, utilizing consecutive bi-directional fusion structures in a global perspective. Extensive experiments on popular benchmarks, including NYU-Depth V2, DIML, and SUN RGB-D, demonstrate the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art methods. We achieved remarkable performance in completing depth maps and outperformed existing approaches in terms of accuracy and reliability.
BoNuS: Boundary Mining for Nuclei Segmentation with Partial Point Labels
Authors: Yi Lin, Zeyu Wang, Dong Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Hao Chen
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, Segmentation

Nuclei segmentation is a fundamental prerequisite in the digital pathology workflow. The development of automated methods for nuclei segmentation enables quantitative analysis of the wide existence and large variances in nuclei morphometry in histopathology images. However, manual annotation of tens of thousands of nuclei is tedious and time-consuming, which requires significant amount of human effort and domain-specific expertise. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose a weakly-supervised nuclei segmentation method that only requires partial point labels of nuclei. Specifically, we propose a novel boundary mining framework for nuclei segmentation, named BoNuS, which simultaneously learns nuclei interior and boundary information from the point labels. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel boundary mining loss, which guides the model to learn the boundary information by exploring the pairwise pixel affinity in a multiple-instance learning manner. Then, we consider a more challenging problem, i.e., partial point label, where we propose a nuclei detection module with curriculum learning to detect the missing nuclei with prior morphological knowledge. The proposed method is validated on three public datasets, MoNuSeg, CPM, and CoNIC datasets. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method to the state-of-the-art weakly-supervised nuclei segmentation methods. Code: https://github.com/hust-linyi/bonus.
Improved Implicit Neural Representation with Fourier Reparameterized Training
Authors: Kexuan Shi, Xingyu Zhou, Shuhang Gu
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Implicit Neural Representation (INR) as a mighty representation paradigm has achieved success in various computer vision tasks recently. Due to the low-frequency bias issue of vanilla multi-layer perceptron (MLP), existing methods have investigated advanced techniques, such as positional encoding and periodic activation function, to improve the accuracy of INR. In this paper, we connect the network training bias with the reparameterization technique and theoretically prove that weight reparameterization could provide us a chance to alleviate the spectral bias of MLP. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose a Fourier reparameterization method which learns coefficient matrix of fixed Fourier bases to compose the weights of MLP. We evaluate the proposed Fourier reparameterization method on different INR tasks with various MLP architectures, including vanilla MLP, MLP with positional encoding and MLP with advanced activation function, etc. The superiority approximation results on different MLP architectures clearly validate the advantage of our proposed method. Armed with our Fourier reparameterization method, better INR with more textures and less artifacts can be learned from the training data.
Cross Domain Early Crop Mapping using CropSTGAN
Authors: Yiqun Wang, Hui Huang, Radu State
Date: 2024-01-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Crop Classification, Generative Adversarial Network

Driven by abundant satellite imagery, machine learning-based approaches have recently been promoted to generate high-resolution crop cultivation maps to support many agricultural applications. One of the major challenges faced by these approaches is the limited availability of ground truth labels. In the absence of ground truth, existing work usually adopts the "direct transfer strategy" that trains a classifier using historical labels collected from other regions and then applies the trained model to the target region. Unfortunately, the spectral features of crops exhibit inter-region and inter-annual variability due to changes in soil composition, climate conditions, and crop progress, the resultant models perform poorly on new and unseen regions or years. Despite recent efforts, such as the application of the deep adaptation neural network (DANN) model structure in the deep adaptation crop classification network (DACCN), to tackle the above cross-domain challenges, their effectiveness diminishes significantly when there is a large dissimilarity between the source and target regions. This paper introduces the Crop Mapping Spectral-temporal Generative Adversarial Neural Network (CropSTGAN), a novel solution for cross-domain challenges, that doesn't require target domain labels. CropSTGAN learns to transform the target domain's spectral features to those of the source domain, effectively bridging large dissimilarities. Additionally, it employs an identity loss to maintain the intrinsic local structure of the data. Comprehensive experiments across various regions and years demonstrate the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed approach. In experiments, CropSTGAN is benchmarked against various state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Notably, CropSTGAN significantly outperforms these methods in scenarios with large data distribution dissimilarities between the target and source domains.
A Strong Inductive Bias: Gzip for binary image classification
Authors: Marco Scilipoti, Marina Fuster, Rodrigo Ramele
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Inductive Bias

Deep learning networks have become the de-facto standard in Computer Vision for industry and research. However, recent developments in their cousin, Natural Language Processing (NLP), have shown that there are areas where parameter-less models with strong inductive biases can serve as computationally cheaper and simpler alternatives. We propose such a model for binary image classification: a nearest neighbor classifier combined with a general purpose compressor like Gzip. We test and compare it against popular deep learning networks like Resnet, EfficientNet and Mobilenet and show that it achieves better accuracy and utilizes significantly less space, more than two order of magnitude, within a few-shot setting. As a result, we believe that this underlines the untapped potential of models with stronger inductive biases in few-shot scenarios.
Knee or ROC
Authors: Veronica Wendt, Byunggu Yu, Caleb Kelly, Junwhan Kim
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Self-attention transformers have demonstrated accuracy for image classification with smaller data sets. However, a limitation is that tests to-date are based upon single class image detection with known representation of image populations. For instances where the input image classes may be greater than one and test sets that lack full information on representation of image populations, accuracy calculations must adapt. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) accuracy thresh-old can address the instances of multi-class input images. However, this approach is unsuitable in instances where image population representation is unknown. We consider calculating accuracy using the knee method to determine threshold values on an ad-hoc basis. Results of ROC curve and knee thresholds for a multi-class data set, created from CIFAR-10 images, are discussed for multi-class image detection.
Generation of Synthetic Images for Pedestrian Detection Using a Sequence of GANs
Authors: Viktor Seib, Malte Roosen, Ida Germann, Stefan Wirtz, Dietrich Paulus
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Pedestrian Detection

Creating annotated datasets demands a substantial amount of manual effort. In this proof-of-concept work, we address this issue by proposing a novel image generation pipeline. The pipeline consists of three distinct generative adversarial networks (previously published), combined in a novel way to augment a dataset for pedestrian detection. Despite the fact that the generated images are not always visually pleasant to the human eye, our detection benchmark reveals that the results substantially surpass the baseline. The presented proof-of-concept work was done in 2020 and is now published as a technical report after a three years retention period.
Harnessing Machine Learning for Discerning AI-Generated Synthetic Images
Authors: Yuyang Wang, Yizhi Hao, Amando Xu Cong
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Image Detection, Transfer Learning

In the realm of digital media, the advent of AI-generated synthetic images has introduced significant challenges in distinguishing between real and fabricated visual content. These images, often indistinguishable from authentic ones, pose a threat to the credibility of digital media, with potential implications for disinformation and fraud. Our research addresses this challenge by employing machine learning techniques to discern between AI-generated and genuine images. Central to our approach is the CIFAKE dataset, a comprehensive collection of images labeled as "Real" and "Fake". We refine and adapt advanced deep learning architectures like ResNet, VGGNet, and DenseNet, utilizing transfer learning to enhance their precision in identifying synthetic images. We also compare these with a baseline model comprising a vanilla Support Vector Machine (SVM) and a custom Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The experimental results were significant, demonstrating that our optimized deep learning models outperform traditional methods, with DenseNet achieving an accuracy of 97.74%. Our application study contributes by applying and optimizing these advanced models for synthetic image detection, conducting a comparative analysis using various metrics, and demonstrating their superior capability in identifying AI-generated images over traditional machine learning techniques. This research not only advances the field of digital media integrity but also sets a foundation for future explorations into the ethical and technical dimensions of AI-generated content in digital media.
Beyond Traditional Approaches: Multi-Task Network for Breast Ultrasound Diagnosis
Authors: Dat T. Chung, Minh-Anh Dang, Mai-Anh Vu, Minh T. Nguyen, Thanh-Huy Nguyen, Vinh Q. Dinh
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Classification, Cancer Classification, GPU, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Breast Ultrasound plays a vital role in cancer diagnosis as a non-invasive approach with cost-effective. In recent years, with the development of deep learning, many CNN-based approaches have been widely researched in both tumor localization and cancer classification tasks. Even though previous single models achieved great performance in both tasks, these methods have some limitations in inference time, GPU requirement, and separate fine-tuning for each model. In this study, we aim to redesign and build end-to-end multi-task architecture to conduct both segmentation and classification. With our proposed approach, we achieved outstanding performance and time efficiency, with 79.8% and 86.4% in DeepLabV3+ architecture in the segmentation task.
MapNeXt: Revisiting Training and Scaling Practices for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction
Authors: Toyota Li
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Online Vectorized HD Map Construction

High-Definition (HD) maps are pivotal to autopilot navigation. Integrating the capability of lightweight HD map construction at runtime into a self-driving system recently emerges as a promising direction. In this surge, vision-only perception stands out, as a camera rig can still perceive the stereo information, let alone its appealing signature of portability and economy. The latest MapTR architecture solves the online HD map construction task in an end-to-end fashion but its potential is yet to be explored. In this work, we present a full-scale upgrade of MapTR and propose MapNeXt, the next generation of HD map learning architecture, delivering major contributions from the model training and scaling perspectives. After shedding light on the training dynamics of MapTR and exploiting the supervision from map elements thoroughly, MapNeXt-Tiny raises the mAP of MapTR-Tiny from 49.0% to 54.8%, without any architectural modifications. Enjoying the fruit of map segmentation pre-training, MapNeXt-Base further lifts the mAP up to 63.9% that has already outperformed the prior art, a multi-modality MapTR, by 1.4% while being $\sim1.8\times$ faster. Towards pushing the performance frontier to the next level, we draw two conclusions on practical model scaling: increased query favors a larger decoder network for adequate digestion; a large backbone steadily promotes the final accuracy without bells and whistles. Building upon these two rules of thumb, MapNeXt-Huge achieves state-of-the-art performance on the challenging nuScenes benchmark. Specifically, we push the mapless vision-only single-model performance to be over 78% for the first time, exceeding the best model from existing methods by 16%.
RSUD20K: A Dataset for Road Scene Understanding In Autonomous Driving
Authors: Hasib Zunair, Shakib Khan, A. Ben Hamza
Date: 2024-01-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Benchmarking, Object, road scene understanding, Scene Understanding

Road scene understanding is crucial in autonomous driving, enabling machines to perceive the visual environment. However, recent object detectors tailored for learning on datasets collected from certain geographical locations struggle to generalize across different locations. In this paper, we present RSUD20K, a new dataset for road scene understanding, comprised of over 20K high-resolution images from the driving perspective on Bangladesh roads, and includes 130K bounding box annotations for 13 objects. This challenging dataset encompasses diverse road scenes, narrow streets and highways, featuring objects from different viewpoints and scenes from crowded environments with densely cluttered objects and various weather conditions. Our work significantly improves upon previous efforts, providing detailed annotations and increased object complexity. We thoroughly examine the dataset, benchmarking various state-of-the-art object detectors and exploring large vision models as image annotators.