pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning Generalizable Perceptual Representations for Data-Efficient No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Suhas Srinath, Shankhanil Mitra, Shika Rao, Rajiv Soundararajan
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

No-reference (NR) image quality assessment (IQA) is an important tool in enhancing the user experience in diverse visual applications. A major drawback of state-of-the-art NR-IQA techniques is their reliance on a large number of human annotations to train models for a target IQA application. To mitigate this requirement, there is a need for unsupervised learning of generalizable quality representations that capture diverse distortions. We enable the learning of low-level quality features agnostic to distortion types by introducing a novel quality-aware contrastive loss. Further, we leverage the generalizability of vision-language models by fine-tuning one such model to extract high-level image quality information through relevant text prompts. The two sets of features are combined to effectively predict quality by training a simple regressor with very few samples on a target dataset. Additionally, we design zero-shot quality predictions from both pathways in a completely blind setting. Our experiments on diverse datasets encompassing various distortions show the generalizability of the features and their superior performance in the data-efficient and zero-shot settings. Code will be made available at https://github.com/suhas-srinath/GRepQ.
Towards Enhanced Image Inpainting: Mitigating Unwanted Object Insertion and Preserving Color Consistency
Authors: Yikai Wang, Chenjie Cao, Junqiu Yu, Ke Fan, xiangyang xue, Yanwei Fu
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Decoder, Hallucination, Image Inpainting, Object, Object Hallucination

Recent advances in image inpainting increasingly use generative models to handle large irregular masks. However, these models can create unrealistic inpainted images due to two main issues: (1) Unwanted object insertion: Even with unmasked areas as context, generative models may still generate arbitrary objects in the masked region that don't align with the rest of the image. (2) Color inconsistency: Inpainted regions often have color shifts that causes a smeared appearance, reducing image quality. Retraining the generative model could help solve these issues, but it's costly since state-of-the-art latent-based diffusion and rectified flow models require a three-stage training process: training a VAE, training a generative U-Net or transformer, and fine-tuning for inpainting. Instead, this paper proposes a post-processing approach, dubbed as ASUKA (Aligned Stable inpainting with UnKnown Areas prior), to improve inpainting models. To address unwanted object insertion, we leverage a Masked Auto-Encoder (MAE) for reconstruction-based priors. This mitigates object hallucination while maintaining the model's generation capabilities. To address color inconsistency, we propose a specialized VAE decoder that treats latent-to-image decoding as a local harmonization task, significantly reducing color shifts for color-consistent inpainting. We validate ASUKA on SD 1.5 and FLUX inpainting variants with Places2 and MISATO, our proposed diverse collection of datasets. Results show that ASUKA mitigates object hallucination and improves color consistency over standard diffusion and rectified flow models and other inpainting methods.
SiCP: Simultaneous Individual and Cooperative Perception for 3D Object Detection in Connected and Automated Vehicles
Authors: Deyuan Qu, Qi Chen, Tianyu Bai, HongSheng Lu, Heng Fan, Hao Zhang, Song Fu, Qing Yang
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Cooperative perception for connected and automated vehicles is traditionally achieved through the fusion of feature maps from two or more vehicles. However, the absence of feature maps shared from other vehicles can lead to a significant decline in 3D object detection performance for cooperative perception models compared to standalone 3D detection models. This drawback impedes the adoption of cooperative perception as vehicle resources are often insufficient to concurrently employ two perception models. To tackle this issue, we present Simultaneous Individual and Cooperative Perception (SiCP), a generic framework that supports a wide range of the state-of-the-art standalone perception backbones and enhances them with a novel Dual-Perception Network (DP-Net) designed to facilitate both individual and cooperative perception. In addition to its lightweight nature with only 0.13M parameters, DP-Net is robust and retains crucial gradient information during feature map fusion. As demonstrated in a comprehensive evaluation on the V2V4Real and OPV2V datasets, thanks to DP-Net, SiCP surpasses state-of-the-art cooperative perception solutions while preserving the performance of standalone perception solutions.
MoVQA: A Benchmark of Versatile Question-Answering for Long-Form Movie Understanding
Authors: Hongjie Zhang, Yi Liu, Lu Dong, Yifei HUANG, Zhen-Hua Ling, Yali Wang, LiMin Wang, Yu Qiao
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Video Understanding

While several long-form VideoQA datasets have been introduced, the length of both videos used to curate questions and sub-clips of clues leveraged to answer those questions have not yet reached the criteria for genuine long-form video understanding. Moreover, their QAs are unduly narrow and modality-biased, lacking a wider view of understanding long-term video content with rich dynamics and complex narratives. To remedy this, we introduce MoVQA, a long-form movie question-answering dataset, and benchmark to assess the diverse cognitive capabilities of multimodal systems rely on multi-level temporal lengths, with considering both video length and clue length. Additionally, to take a step towards human-level understanding in long-form video, versatile and multimodal question-answering is designed from the moviegoer-perspective to assess the model capabilities on various perceptual and cognitive axes.Through analysis involving various baselines reveals a consistent trend: the performance of all methods significantly deteriorate with increasing video and clue length. Meanwhile, our established baseline method has shown some improvements, but there is still ample scope for enhancement on our challenging MoVQA dataset. We expect our MoVQA to provide a new perspective and encourage inspiring works on long-form video understanding research.
DARNet: Bridging Domain Gaps in Cross-Domain Few-Shot Segmentation with Dynamic Adaptation
Authors: Haoran Fan, Qi Fan, Maurice Pagnucco, Yang song
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, Segmentation, Specificity, Test-time Adaptation

Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to segment novel classes in a query image by using only a small number of supporting images from base classes. However, in cross-domain few-shot segmentation (CD-FSS), leveraging features from label-rich domains for resource-constrained domains poses challenges due to domain discrepancies. This work presents a Dynamically Adaptive Refine (DARNet) method that aims to balance generalization and specificity for CD-FSS. Our method includes the Channel Statistics Disruption (CSD) strategy, which perturbs feature channel statistics in the source domain, bolstering generalization to unknown target domains. Moreover, recognizing the variability across target domains, an Adaptive Refine Self-Matching (ARSM) method is also proposed to adjust the matching threshold and dynamically refine the prediction result with the self-matching method, enhancing accuracy. We also present a Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) method to refine the model's adaptability to diverse feature distributions. Our approach demonstrates superior performance against state-of-the-art methods in CD-FSS tasks.
RS-Corrector: Correcting the Racial Stereotypes in Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Yue Jiang, Yueming Lyu, Tianxiang Ma, Bo Peng, Jing Dong
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recent text-conditioned image generation models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to produce diverse and creative imagery with high visual quality. However, when pre-trained on billion-sized datasets randomly collected from the Internet, where potential biased human preferences exist, these models tend to produce images with common and recurring stereotypes, particularly for certain racial groups. In this paper, we conduct an initial analysis of the publicly available Stable Diffusion model and its derivatives, highlighting the presence of racial stereotypes. These models often generate distorted or biased images for certain racial groups, emphasizing stereotypical characteristics. To address these issues, we propose a framework called "RS-Corrector", designed to establish an anti-stereotypical preference in the latent space and update the latent code for refined generated results. The correction process occurs during the inference stage without requiring fine-tuning of the original model. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate that the introduced \themodel effectively corrects the racial stereotypes of the well-trained Stable Diffusion model while leaving the original model unchanged.
RL Dreams: Policy Gradient Optimization for Score Distillation based 3D Generation
Authors: Aradhya N. Mathur, Phu Pham, Aniket Bera, Ojaswa Sharma
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Denoising, Policy Gradient Methods, Text to 3D

3D generation has rapidly accelerated in the past decade owing to the progress in the field of generative modeling. Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) based rendering has improved 3D asset generation to a great extent. Further, the recent work of Denoising Diffusion Policy Optimization (DDPO) demonstrates that the diffusion process is compatible with policy gradient methods and has been demonstrated to improve the 2D diffusion models using an aesthetic scoring function. We first show that this aesthetic scorer acts as a strong guide for a variety of SDS-based methods and demonstrates its effectiveness in text-to-3D synthesis. Further, we leverage the DDPO approach to improve the quality of the 3D rendering obtained from 2D diffusion models. Our approach, DDPO3D, employs the policy gradient method in tandem with aesthetic scoring. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method that extends policy gradient methods to 3D score-based rendering and shows improvement across SDS-based methods such as DreamGaussian, which are currently driving research in text-to-3D synthesis. Our approach is compatible with score distillation-based methods, which would facilitate the integration of diverse reward functions into the generative process. Our project page can be accessed via https://ddpo3d.github.io.
SuperNormal: Neural Surface Reconstruction via Multi-View Normal Integration
Authors: Xu Cao, Takafumi Taketomi
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Multi-View 3D Reconstruction, Surface Reconstruction

We present SuperNormal, a fast, high-fidelity approach to multi-view 3D reconstruction using surface normal maps. With a few minutes, SuperNormal produces detailed surfaces on par with 3D scanners. We harness volume rendering to optimize a neural signed distance function (SDF) powered by multi-resolution hash encoding. To accelerate training, we propose directional finite difference and patch-based ray marching to approximate the SDF gradients numerically. While not compromising reconstruction quality, this strategy is nearly twice as efficient as analytical gradients and about three times faster than axis-aligned finite difference. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the superiority of SuperNormal in efficiency and accuracy compared to existing multi-view photometric stereo methods. On our captured objects, SuperNormal produces more fine-grained geometry than recent neural 3D reconstruction methods.
MimicDiffusion: Purifying Adversarial Perturbation via Mimicking Clean Diffusion Model
Authors: Kaiyu Song, Hanjiang Lai
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Adversarial Purification

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial perturbation, where an imperceptible perturbation is added to the image that can fool the DNNs. Diffusion-based adversarial purification focuses on using the diffusion model to generate a clean image against such adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, the generative process of the diffusion model is also inevitably affected by adversarial perturbation since the diffusion model is also a deep network where its input has adversarial perturbation. In this work, we propose MimicDiffusion, a new diffusion-based adversarial purification technique, that directly approximates the generative process of the diffusion model with the clean image as input. Concretely, we analyze the differences between the guided terms using the clean image and the adversarial sample. After that, we first implement MimicDiffusion based on Manhattan distance. Then, we propose two guidance to purify the adversarial perturbation and approximate the clean diffusion model. Extensive experiments on three image datasets including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet with three classifier backbones including WideResNet-70-16, WideResNet-28-10, and ResNet50 demonstrate that MimicDiffusion significantly performs better than the state-of-the-art baselines. On CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet, it achieves 92.67\%, 61.35\%, and 61.53\% average robust accuracy, which are 18.49\%, 13.23\%, and 17.64\% higher, respectively. The code is available in the supplementary material.
Segmentation of Kidney Tumors on Non-Contrast CT Images using Protuberance Detection Network
Authors: Taro Hatsutani, Akimichi Ichinose, Keigo Nakamura, Yoshiro Kitamura
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Many renal cancers are incidentally found on non-contrast CT (NCCT) images. On contrast-enhanced CT (CECT) images, most kidney tumors, especially renal cancers, have different intensity values compared to normal tissues. However, on NCCT images, some tumors called isodensity tumors, have similar intensity values to the surrounding normal tissues, and can only be detected through a change in organ shape. Several deep learning methods which segment kidney tumors from CECT images have been proposed and showed promising results. However, these methods fail to capture such changes in organ shape on NCCT images. In this paper, we present a novel framework, which can explicitly capture protruded regions in kidneys to enable a better segmentation of kidney tumors. We created a synthetic mask dataset that simulates a protuberance, and trained a segmentation network to separate the protruded regions from the normal kidney regions. To achieve the segmentation of whole tumors, our framework consists of three networks. The first network is a conventional semantic segmentation network which extracts a kidney region mask and an initial tumor region mask. The second network, which we name protuberance detection network, identifies the protruded regions from the kidney region mask. Given the initial tumor region mask and the protruded region mask, the last network fuses them and predicts the final kidney tumor mask accurately. The proposed method was evaluated on a publicly available KiTS19 dataset, which contains 108 NCCT images, and showed that our method achieved a higher dice score of 0.615 (+0.097) and sensitivity of 0.721 (+0.103) compared to 3D-UNet. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deep learning method that is specifically designed for kidney tumor segmentation on NCCT images.
Visual Grounding of Whole Radiology Reports for 3D CT Images
Authors: Akimichi Ichinose, Taro Hatsutani, Keigo Nakamura, Yoshiro Kitamura, Satoshi Iizuka, Edgar Simo-Serra, Shoji Kido, Noriyuki Tomiyama
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Visual Grounding

Building a large-scale training dataset is an essential problem in the development of medical image recognition systems. Visual grounding techniques, which automatically associate objects in images with corresponding descriptions, can facilitate labeling of large number of images. However, visual grounding of radiology reports for CT images remains challenging, because so many kinds of anomalies are detectable via CT imaging, and resulting report descriptions are long and complex. In this paper, we present the first visual grounding framework designed for CT image and report pairs covering various body parts and diverse anomaly types. Our framework combines two components of 1) anatomical segmentation of images, and 2) report structuring. The anatomical segmentation provides multiple organ masks of given CT images, and helps the grounding model recognize detailed anatomies. The report structuring helps to accurately extract information regarding the presence, location, and type of each anomaly described in corresponding reports. Given the two additional image/report features, the grounding model can achieve better localization. In the verification process, we constructed a large-scale dataset with region-description correspondence annotations for 10,410 studies of 7,321 unique patients. We evaluated our framework using grounding accuracy, the percentage of correctly localized anomalies, as a metric and demonstrated that the combination of the anatomical segmentation and the report structuring improves the performance with a large margin over the baseline model (66.0% vs 77.8%). Comparison with the prior techniques also showed higher performance of our method.
User-Aware Prefix-Tuning is a Good Learner for Personalized Image Captioning
Authors: Xuan Wang, Guanhong Wang, Wenhao Chai, Jiayu Zhou, Gaoang Wang
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Image captioning bridges the gap between vision and language by automatically generating natural language descriptions for images. Traditional image captioning methods often overlook the preferences and characteristics of users. Personalized image captioning solves this problem by incorporating user prior knowledge into the model, such as writing styles and preferred vocabularies. Most existing methods emphasize the user context fusion process by memory networks or transformers. However, these methods ignore the distinct domains of each dataset. Therefore, they need to update the entire caption model parameters when meeting new samples, which is time-consuming and calculation-intensive. To address this challenge, we propose a novel personalized image captioning framework that leverages user context to consider personality factors. Additionally, our framework utilizes the prefix-tuning paradigm to extract knowledge from a frozen large language model, reducing the gap between different language domains. Specifically, we employ CLIP to extract the visual features of an image and align the semantic space using a query-guided mapping network. By incorporating the transformer layer, we merge the visual features with the user's contextual prior knowledge to generate informative prefixes. Moreover, we employ GPT-2 as the frozen large language model. With a small number of parameters to be trained, our model performs efficiently and effectively. Our model outperforms existing baseline models on Instagram and YFCC100M datasets across five evaluation metrics, demonstrating its superiority, including twofold improvements in metrics such as BLEU-4 and CIDEr.
Reality's Canvas, Language's Brush: Crafting 3D Avatars from Monocular Video
Authors: Yuchen Rao, Eduardo Perez Pellitero, Benjamin Busam, Yiren Zhou, Jifei Song
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, NeRF

Recent advancements in 3D avatar generation excel with multi-view supervision for photorealistic models. However, monocular counterparts lag in quality despite broader applicability. We propose ReCaLaB to close this gap. ReCaLaB is a fully-differentiable pipeline that learns high-fidelity 3D human avatars from just a single RGB video. A pose-conditioned deformable NeRF is optimized to volumetrically represent a human subject in canonical T-pose. The canonical representation is then leveraged to efficiently associate neural textures using 2D-3D correspondences. This enables the separation of diffused color generation and lighting correction branches that jointly compose an RGB prediction. The design allows to control intermediate results for human pose, body shape, texture, and lighting with text prompts. An image-conditioned diffusion model thereby helps to animate appearance and pose of the 3D avatar to create video sequences with previously unseen human motion. Extensive experiments show that ReCaLaB outperforms previous monocular approaches in terms of image quality for image synthesis tasks. Moreover, natural language offers an intuitive user interface for creative manipulation of 3D human avatars.
Image Synthesis-based Late Stage Cancer Augmentation and Semi-Supervised Segmentation for MRI Rectal Cancer Staging
Authors: Saeko Sasuga, Akira Kudo, Yoshiro Kitamura, Satoshi Iizuka, Edgar Simo-Serra, Atsushi Hamabe, Masayuki Ishii, Ichiro Takemasa
Date: 2023-12-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Specificity

Rectal cancer is one of the most common diseases and a major cause of mortality. For deciding rectal cancer treatment plans, T-staging is important. However, evaluating the index from preoperative MRI images requires high radiologists' skill and experience. Therefore, the aim of this study is to segment the mesorectum, rectum, and rectal cancer region so that the system can predict T-stage from segmentation results. Generally, shortage of large and diverse dataset and high quality annotation are known to be the bottlenecks in computer aided diagnostics development. Regarding rectal cancer, advanced cancer images are very rare, and per-pixel annotation requires high radiologists' skill and time. Therefore, it is not feasible to collect comprehensive disease patterns in a training dataset. To tackle this, we propose two kinds of approaches of image synthesis-based late stage cancer augmentation and semi-supervised learning which is designed for T-stage prediction. In the image synthesis data augmentation approach, we generated advanced cancer images from labels. The real cancer labels were deformed to resemble advanced cancer labels by artificial cancer progress simulation. Next, we introduce a T-staging loss which enables us to train segmentation models from per-image T-stage labels. The loss works to keep inclusion/invasion relationships between rectum and cancer region consistent to the ground truth T-stage. The verification tests show that the proposed method obtains the best sensitivity (0.76) and specificity (0.80) in distinguishing between over T3 stage and underT2. In the ablation studies, our semi-supervised learning approach with the T-staging loss improved specificity by 0.13. Adding the image synthesis-based data augmentation improved the DICE score of invasion cancer area by 0.08 from baseline.