pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring Limits of Diffusion-Synthetic Training with Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ryota Yoshihashi, Yuya Otsuka, Kenji Doi, Tomohiro Tanaka, Hirokatsu Kataoka
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning, Weakly supervised segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

The advance of generative models for images has inspired various training techniques for image recognition utilizing synthetic images. In semantic segmentation, one promising approach is extracting pseudo-masks from attention maps in text-to-image diffusion models, which enables real-image-and-annotation-free training. However, the pioneering training method using the diffusion-synthetic images and pseudo-masks, i.e., DiffuMask has limitations in terms of mask quality, scalability, and ranges of applicable domains. To overcome these limitations, this work introduces three techniques for diffusion-synthetic semantic segmentation training. First, reliability-aware robust training, originally used in weakly supervised learning, helps segmentation with insufficient synthetic mask quality. %Second, large-scale pretraining of whole segmentation models, not only backbones, on synthetic ImageNet-1k-class images with pixel-labels benefits downstream segmentation tasks. Second, we introduce prompt augmentation, data augmentation to the prompt text set to scale up and diversify training images with a limited text resources. Finally, LoRA-based adaptation of Stable Diffusion enables the transfer to a distant domain, e.g., auto-driving images. Experiments in PASCAL VOC, ImageNet-S, and Cityscapes show that our method effectively closes gap between real and synthetic training in semantic segmentation.
ArSDM: Colonoscopy Images Synthesis with Adaptive Refinement Semantic Diffusion Models
Authors: Yuhao Du, Yuncheng Jiang, Shuangyi Tan, Xusheng Wu, Qi Dou, Zhen Li, Guanbin Li, Xiang Wan
Date: 2023-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Colonoscopy analysis, particularly automatic polyp segmentation and detection, is essential for assisting clinical diagnosis and treatment. However, as medical image annotation is labour- and resource-intensive, the scarcity of annotated data limits the effectiveness and generalization of existing methods. Although recent research has focused on data generation and augmentation to address this issue, the quality of the generated data remains a challenge, which limits the contribution to the performance of subsequent tasks. Inspired by the superiority of diffusion models in fitting data distributions and generating high-quality data, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Refinement Semantic Diffusion Model (ArSDM) to generate colonoscopy images that benefit the downstream tasks. Specifically, ArSDM utilizes the ground-truth segmentation mask as a prior condition during training and adjusts the diffusion loss for each input according to the polyp/background size ratio. Furthermore, ArSDM incorporates a pre-trained segmentation model to refine the training process by reducing the difference between the ground-truth mask and the prediction mask. Extensive experiments on segmentation and detection tasks demonstrate the generated data by ArSDM could significantly boost the performance of baseline methods.
Variational Bayesian Imaging with an Efficient Surrogate Score-based Prior
Authors: Berthy T. Feng, Katherine L. Bouman
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

We propose a surrogate function for efficient yet principled use of score-based priors in Bayesian imaging. We consider ill-posed inverse imaging problems in which one aims for a clean image posterior given incomplete or noisy measurements. Since the measurements do not uniquely determine a true image, a prior is needed to constrain the solution space. Recent work turned score-based diffusion models into principled priors for solving ill-posed imaging problems by appealing to an ODE-based log-probability function. However, evaluating the ODE is computationally inefficient and inhibits posterior estimation of high-dimensional images. Our proposed surrogate prior is based on the evidence lower bound of a score-based diffusion model. We demonstrate the surrogate prior on variational inference for efficient approximate posterior sampling of large images. Compared to the exact prior in previous work, our surrogate accelerates optimization of the variational image distribution by at least two orders of magnitude. We also find that our principled approach gives more accurate posterior estimation than non-variational diffusion-based approaches that involve hyperparameter-tuning at inference. Our work establishes a practical path forward for using score-based diffusion models as general-purpose image priors.
Diffusion Modeling with Domain-conditioned Prior Guidance for Accelerated MRI and qMRI Reconstruction
Authors: Wanyu Bian, Albert Jang, Fang Liu
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Reconstruction, MRI Reconstruction, Quantitative MRI

This study introduces a novel approach for image reconstruction based on a diffusion model conditioned on the native data domain. Our method is applied to multi-coil MRI and quantitative MRI reconstruction, leveraging the domain-conditioned diffusion model within the frequency and parameter domains. The prior MRI physics are used as embeddings in the diffusion model, enforcing data consistency to guide the training and sampling process, characterizing MRI k-space encoding in MRI reconstruction, and leveraging MR signal modeling for qMRI reconstruction. Furthermore, a gradient descent optimization is incorporated into the diffusion steps, enhancing feature learning and improving denoising. The proposed method demonstrates a significant promise, particularly for reconstructing images at high acceleration factors. Notably, it maintains great reconstruction accuracy and efficiency for static and quantitative MRI reconstruction across diverse anatomical structures. Beyond its immediate applications, this method provides potential generalization capability, making it adaptable to inverse problems across various domains.
Correlated and Multi-frequency Diffusion Modeling for Highly Under-sampled MRI Reconstruction
Authors: Yu Guan, Chuanming Yu, Shiyu Lu, Zhuoxu Cui, Dong Liang, Qiegen Liu
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI Reconstruction, TAR

Most existing MRI reconstruction methods perform tar-geted reconstruction of the entire MR image without tak-ing specific tissue regions into consideration. This may fail to emphasize the reconstruction accuracy on im-portant tissues for diagnosis. In this study, leveraging a combination of the properties of k-space data and the diffusion process, our novel scheme focuses on mining the multi-frequency prior with different strategies to pre-serve fine texture details in the reconstructed image. In addition, a diffusion process can converge more quickly if its target distribution closely resembles the noise distri-bution in the process. This can be accomplished through various high-frequency prior extractors. The finding further solidifies the effectiveness of the score-based gen-erative model. On top of all the advantages, our method improves the accuracy of MRI reconstruction and accel-erates sampling process. Experimental results verify that the proposed method successfully obtains more accurate reconstruction and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Segmentation of 3D pore space from CT images using curvilinear skeleton: application to numerical simulation of microbial decomposition
Authors: Olivier Monga, Zakaria Belghali, Mouad Klai, Lucie Druoton, Dominique Michelucci, Valerie Pot
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00

Recent advances in 3D X-ray Computed Tomographic (CT) sensors have stimulated research efforts to unveil the extremely complex micro-scale processes that control the activity of soil microorganisms. Voxel-based description (up to hundreds millions voxels) of the pore space can be extracted, from grey level 3D CT scanner images, by means of simple image processing tools. Classical methods for numerical simulation of biological dynamics using mesh of voxels, such as Lattice Boltzmann Model (LBM), are too much time consuming. Thus, the use of more compact and reliable geometrical representations of pore space can drastically decrease the computational cost of the simulations. Several recent works propose basic analytic volume primitives (e.g. spheres, generalized cylinders, ellipsoids) to define a piece-wise approximation of pore space for numerical simulation of draining, diffusion and microbial decomposition. Such approaches work well but the drawback is that it generates approximation errors. In the present work, we study another alternative where pore space is described by means of geometrically relevant connected subsets of voxels (regions) computed from the curvilinear skeleton. Indeed, many works use the curvilinear skeleton (3D medial axis) for analyzing and partitioning 3D shapes within various domains (medicine, material sciences, petroleum engineering, etc.) but only a few ones in soil sciences. Within the context of soil sciences, most studies dealing with 3D medial axis focus on the determination of pore throats. Here, we segment pore space using curvilinear skeleton in order to achieve numerical simulation of microbial decomposition (including diffusion processes). We validate simulation outputs by comparison with other methods using different pore space geometrical representations (balls, voxels).
PathLDM: Text conditioned Latent Diffusion Model for Histopathology
Authors: Srikar Yellapragada, Alexandros Graikos, Prateek Prasanna, Tahsin Kurc, Joel Saltz, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2023-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, model, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

To achieve high-quality results, diffusion models must be trained on large datasets. This can be notably prohibitive for models in specialized domains, such as computational pathology. Conditioning on labeled data is known to help in data-efficient model training. Therefore, histopathology reports, which are rich in valuable clinical information, are an ideal choice as guidance for a histopathology generative model. In this paper, we introduce PathLDM, the first text-conditioned Latent Diffusion Model tailored for generating high-quality histopathology images. Leveraging the rich contextual information provided by pathology text reports, our approach fuses image and textual data to enhance the generation process. By utilizing GPT's capabilities to distill and summarize complex text reports, we establish an effective conditioning mechanism. Through strategic conditioning and necessary architectural enhancements, we achieved a SoTA FID score of 7.64 for text-to-image generation on the TCGA-BRCA dataset, significantly outperforming the closest text-conditioned competitor with FID 30.1.
Generating Realistic Images from In-the-wild Sounds
Authors: Taegyeong Lee, Jeonghun Kang, Hyeonyu Kim, Taehwan Kim
Date: 2023-09-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Audio captioning, Sentence

Representing wild sounds as images is an important but challenging task due to the lack of paired datasets between sound and images and the significant differences in the characteristics of these two modalities. Previous studies have focused on generating images from sound in limited categories or music. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to generate images from in-the-wild sounds. First, we convert sound into text using audio captioning. Second, we propose audio attention and sentence attention to represent the rich characteristics of sound and visualize the sound. Lastly, we propose a direct sound optimization with CLIPscore and AudioCLIP and generate images with a diffusion-based model. In experiments, it shows that our model is able to generate high quality images from wild sounds and outperforms baselines in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations on wild audio datasets.
Generative-based Fusion Mechanism for Multi-Modal Tracking
Authors: Zhangyong Tang, Tianyang Xu, XueFeng Zhu, Xiao-Jun Wu, Josef Kittler
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Rgb-T Tracking

Generative models (GMs) have received increasing research interest for their remarkable capacity to achieve comprehensive understanding. However, their potential application in the domain of multi-modal tracking has remained relatively unexplored. In this context, we seek to uncover the potential of harnessing generative techniques to address the critical challenge, information fusion, in multi-modal tracking. In this paper, we delve into two prominent GM techniques, namely, Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (CGANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs). Different from the standard fusion process where the features from each modality are directly fed into the fusion block, we condition these multi-modal features with random noise in the GM framework, effectively transforming the original training samples into harder instances. This design excels at extracting discriminative clues from the features, enhancing the ultimate tracking performance. To quantitatively gauge the effectiveness of our approach, we conduct extensive experiments across two multi-modal tracking tasks, three baseline methods, and three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed generative-based fusion mechanism achieves state-of-the-art performance, setting new records on LasHeR and RGBD1K.
VGDiffZero: Text-to-image Diffusion Models Can Be Zero-shot Visual Grounders
Authors: Xuyang Liu, Siteng Huang, Yachen Kang, Honggang Chen, Donglin Wang
Date: 2023-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Grounding

Large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have shown impressive capabilities for generative tasks by leveraging strong vision-language alignment from pre-training. However, most vision-language discriminative tasks require extensive fine-tuning on carefully-labeled datasets to acquire such alignment, with great cost in time and computing resources. In this work, we explore directly applying a pre-trained generative diffusion model to the challenging discriminative task of visual grounding without any fine-tuning and additional training dataset. Specifically, we propose VGDiffZero, a simple yet effective zero-shot visual grounding framework based on text-to-image diffusion models. We also design a comprehensive region-scoring method considering both global and local contexts of each isolated proposal. Extensive experiments on RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, and RefCOCOg show that VGDiffZero achieves strong performance on zero-shot visual grounding. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuyang-liu16/VGDiffZero.
Bridge Diffusion Model: bridge non-English language-native text-to-image diffusion model with English communities
Authors: Shanyuan Liu, Dawei Leng, Yuhui Yin
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, model, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-Image generation (TTI) technologies are advancing rapidly, especially in the English language communities. However, English-native TTI models inherently carry biases from English world centric training data, which creates a dilemma for development of other language-native TTI models. One common choice is fine-tuning the English-native TTI model with translated samples from non-English communities. It falls short of fully addressing the model bias problem. Alternatively, training non-English language native models from scratch can effectively resolve the English world bias, but diverges from the English TTI communities, thus not able to utilize the strides continuously gaining in the English TTI communities any more. To build non-English language native TTI model meanwhile keep compatability with the English TTI communities, we propose a novel model structure referred as "Bridge Diffusion Model" (BDM). The proposed BDM employs a backbone-branch network structure to learn the non-English language semantics while keep the latent space compatible with the English-native TTI backbone, in an end-to-end manner. The unique advantages of the proposed BDM are that it's not only adept at generating images that precisely depict non-English language semantics, but also compatible with various English-native TTI plugins, such as different checkpoints, LoRA, ControlNet, Dreambooth, and Textual Inversion, etc. Moreover, BDM can concurrently generate content seamlessly combining both non-English native and English-native semantics within a single image, fostering cultural interaction. We verify our method by applying BDM to build a Chinese-native TTI model, whereas the method is generic and applicable to any other language.
MagicProp: Diffusion-based Video Editing via Motion-aware Appearance Propagation
Authors: Hanshu Yan, Jun Hao Liew, Long Mai, Shanchuan Lin, Jiashi Feng
Date: 2023-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Editing

This paper addresses the issue of modifying the visual appearance of videos while preserving their motion. A novel framework, named MagicProp, is proposed, which disentangles the video editing process into two stages: appearance editing and motion-aware appearance propagation. In the first stage, MagicProp selects a single frame from the input video and applies image-editing techniques to modify the content and/or style of the frame. The flexibility of these techniques enables the editing of arbitrary regions within the frame. In the second stage, MagicProp employs the edited frame as an appearance reference and generates the remaining frames using an autoregressive rendering approach. To achieve this, a diffusion-based conditional generation model, called PropDPM, is developed, which synthesizes the target frame by conditioning on the reference appearance, the target motion, and its previous appearance. The autoregressive editing approach ensures temporal consistency in the resulting videos. Overall, MagicProp combines the flexibility of image-editing techniques with the superior temporal consistency of autoregressive modeling, enabling flexible editing of object types and aesthetic styles in arbitrary regions of input videos while maintaining good temporal consistency across frames. Extensive experiments in various video editing scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of MagicProp.
A Multimodal Analysis of Influencer Content on Twitter
Authors: Danae Sánchez Villegas, Catalina Goanta, Nikolaos Aletras
Date: 2023-09-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing

Influencer marketing involves a wide range of strategies in which brands collaborate with popular content creators (i.e., influencers) to leverage their reach, trust, and impact on their audience to promote and endorse products or services. Because followers of influencers are more likely to buy a product after receiving an authentic product endorsement rather than an explicit direct product promotion, the line between personal opinions and commercial content promotion is frequently blurred. This makes automatic detection of regulatory compliance breaches related to influencer advertising (e.g., misleading advertising or hidden sponsorships) particularly difficult. In this work, we (1) introduce a new Twitter (now X) dataset consisting of 15,998 influencer posts mapped into commercial and non-commercial categories for assisting in the automatic detection of commercial influencer content; (2) experiment with an extensive set of predictive models that combine text and visual information showing that our proposed cross-attention approach outperforms state-of-the-art multimodal models; and (3) conduct a thorough analysis of strengths and limitations of our models. We show that multimodal modeling is useful for identifying commercial posts, reducing the amount of false positives, and capturing relevant context that aids in the discovery of undisclosed commercial posts.
DiverseMotion: Towards Diverse Human Motion Generation via Discrete Diffusion
Authors: Yunhong Lou, Linchao Zhu, Yaxiong Wang, Xiaohan Wang, Yi Yang
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modelling, Motion Generation, Motion Synthesis

We present DiverseMotion, a new approach for synthesizing high-quality human motions conditioned on textual descriptions while preserving motion diversity.Despite the recent significant process in text-based human motion generation,existing methods often prioritize fitting training motions at the expense of action diversity. Consequently, striking a balance between motion quality and diversity remains an unresolved challenge. This problem is compounded by two key factors: 1) the lack of diversity in motion-caption pairs in existing benchmarks and 2) the unilateral and biased semantic understanding of the text prompt, focusing primarily on the verb component while neglecting the nuanced distinctions indicated by other words.In response to the first issue, we construct a large-scale Wild Motion-Caption dataset (WMC) to extend the restricted action boundary of existing well-annotated datasets, enabling the learning of diverse motions through a more extensive range of actions. To this end, a motion BLIP is trained upon a pretrained vision-language model, then we automatically generate diverse motion captions for the collected motion sequences. As a result, we finally build a dataset comprising 8,888 motions coupled with 141k text.To comprehensively understand the text command, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic Aggregation (HSA) module to capture the fine-grained semantics.Finally,we involve the above two designs into an effective Motion Discrete Diffusion (MDD) framework to strike a balance between motion quality and diversity. Extensive experiments on HumanML3D and KIT-ML show that our DiverseMotion achieves the state-of-the-art motion quality and competitive motion diversity. Dataset, code, and pretrained models will be released to reproduce all of our results.
Improving Visual Quality and Transferability of Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition Simultaneously with Adversarial Restoration
Authors: Fengfan Zhou, Hefei Ling, Yuxuan Shi, Jiazhong Chen, Ping Li
Date: 2023-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Face Recognition

Adversarial face examples possess two critical properties: Visual Quality and Transferability. However, existing approaches rarely address these properties simultaneously, leading to subpar results. To address this issue, we propose a novel adversarial attack technique known as Adversarial Restoration (AdvRestore), which enhances both visual quality and transferability of adversarial face examples by leveraging a face restoration prior. In our approach, we initially train a Restoration Latent Diffusion Model (RLDM) designed for face restoration. Subsequently, we employ the inference process of RLDM to generate adversarial face examples. The adversarial perturbations are applied to the intermediate features of RLDM. Additionally, by treating RLDM face restoration as a sibling task, the transferability of the generated adversarial face examples is further improved. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed attack method.