pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The STOIC2021 COVID-19 AI challenge: applying reusable training methodologies to private data
Authors: Luuk H. Boulogne, Julian Lorenz, Daniel Kienzle, Robin Schon, Katja Ludwig, Rainer Lienhart, Simon Jegou, Guang Li, Cong Chen, Qi Wang, Derik Shi, Mayug Maniparambil, Dominik Muller, Silvan Mertes, Niklas Schroter, Fabio Hellmann, Miriam Elia, Ine Dirks, Matias Nicolas Bossa, Abel Diaz Berenguer, Tanmoy Mukherjee, Jef Vandemeulebroucke, Hichem Sahli, Nikos Deligiannis, Panagiotis Gonidakis, Ngoc Dung Huynh, Imran Razzak, Reda Bouadjenek, Mario Verdicchio, Pasquale Borrelli, Marco Aiello, James A. Meakin, Alexander Lemm, Christoph Russ, Razvan Ionasec, Nikos Paragios, Bram van Ginneken, Marie-Pierre Revel Dubois
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Medical Image Analysis

Challenges drive the state-of-the-art of automated medical image analysis. The quantity of public training data that they provide can limit the performance of their solutions. Public access to the training methodology for these solutions remains absent. This study implements the Type Three (T3) challenge format, which allows for training solutions on private data and guarantees reusable training methodologies. With T3, challenge organizers train a codebase provided by the participants on sequestered training data. T3 was implemented in the STOIC2021 challenge, with the goal of predicting from a computed tomography (CT) scan whether subjects had a severe COVID-19 infection, defined as intubation or death within one month. STOIC2021 consisted of a Qualification phase, where participants developed challenge solutions using 2000 publicly available CT scans, and a Final phase, where participants submitted their training methodologies with which solutions were trained on CT scans of 9724 subjects. The organizers successfully trained six of the eight Final phase submissions. The submitted codebases for training and running inference were released publicly. The winning solution obtained an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for discerning between severe and non-severe COVID-19 of 0.815. The Final phase solutions of all finalists improved upon their Qualification phase solutions.HSUXJM-TNZF9CHSUXJM-TNZF9C
Weighted structure tensor total variation for image denoising
Authors: Xiuhan Sheng, Lijuan Yang, Jingya Chang
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

For image denoising problems, the structure tensor total variation (STV)-based models show good performances when compared with other competing regularization approaches. However, the STV regularizer does not couple the local information of the image and may not maintain the image details. Therefore, we employ the anisotropic weighted matrix introduced in the anisotropic total variation (ATV) model to improve the STV model. By applying the weighted matrix to the discrete gradient of the patch-based Jacobian operator in STV, our proposed weighted STV (WSTV) model can effectively capture local information from images and maintain their details during the denoising process. The optimization problem in the model is solved by a fast first-order gradient projection algorithm with a complexity result of $O(1 / i^2)$. For images with different Gaussian noise levels, the experimental results demonstrate that the WSTV model can effectively improve the quality of restored images compared to other TV and STV-based models.
IF2Net: Innately Forgetting-Free Networks for Continual Learning
Authors: Depeng Li, Tianqi Wang, Bingrong Xu, Kenji Kawaguchi, Zhigang Zeng, Ponnuthurai Nagaratnam Suganthan
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Decision Making, Sequential Decision Making

Continual learning can incrementally absorb new concepts without interfering with previously learned knowledge. Motivated by the characteristics of neural networks, in which information is stored in weights on connections, we investigated how to design an Innately Forgetting-Free Network (IF2Net) for continual learning context. This study proposed a straightforward yet effective learning paradigm by ingeniously keeping the weights relative to each seen task untouched before and after learning a new task. We first presented the novel representation-level learning on task sequences with random weights. This technique refers to tweaking the drifted representations caused by randomization back to their separate task-optimal working states, but the involved weights are frozen and reused (opposite to well-known layer-wise updates of weights). Then, sequential decision-making without forgetting can be achieved by projecting the output weight updates into the parsimonious orthogonal space, making the adaptations not disturb old knowledge while maintaining model plasticity. IF2Net allows a single network to inherently learn unlimited mapping rules without telling task identities at test time by integrating the respective strengths of randomization and orthogonalization. We validated the effectiveness of our approach in the extensive theoretical analysis and empirical study.
GAN-based Image Compression with Improved RDO Process
Authors: Fanxin Xia, Jian Jin, Lili Meng, Feng Ding, Huaxiang Zhang
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, MS-SSIM, SSIM

GAN-based image compression schemes have shown remarkable progress lately due to their high perceptual quality at low bit rates. However, there are two main issues, including 1) the reconstructed image perceptual degeneration in color, texture, and structure as well as 2) the inaccurate entropy model. In this paper, we present a novel GAN-based image compression approach with improved rate-distortion optimization (RDO) process. To achieve this, we utilize the DISTS and MS-SSIM metrics to measure perceptual degeneration in color, texture, and structure. Besides, we absorb the discretized gaussian-laplacian-logistic mixture model (GLLMM) for entropy modeling to improve the accuracy in estimating the probability distributions of the latent representation. During the evaluation process, instead of evaluating the perceptual quality of the reconstructed image via IQA metrics, we directly conduct the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) experiment among different codecs, which fully reflects the actual perceptual results of humans. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the existing GAN-based methods and the state-of-the-art hybrid codec (i.e., VVC).
Instant Soup: Cheap Pruning Ensembles in A Single Pass Can Draw Lottery Tickets from Large Models
Authors: Ajay Jaiswal, Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen, Ying Ding, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00

Large pre-trained transformers have been receiving explosive attention in the past few years, due to their wide adaptability for numerous downstream applications via fine-tuning, but their exponentially increasing parameter counts are becoming a primary hurdle to even just fine-tune them without industry-standard hardware. Recently, Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and its variants, have been exploited to prune these large pre-trained models generating subnetworks that can achieve similar performance as their dense counterparts, but LTH pragmatism is enormously inhibited by repetitive full training and pruning routine of iterative magnitude pruning (IMP) which worsens with increasing model size. Motivated by the recent observations of model soups, which suggest that fine-tuned weights of multiple models can be merged to a better minima, we propose Instant Soup Pruning (ISP) to generate lottery ticket quality subnetworks, using a fraction of the original IMP cost by replacing the expensive intermediate pruning stages of IMP with computationally efficient weak mask generation and aggregation routine. More specifically, during the mask generation stage, ISP takes a small handful of iterations using varying training protocols and data subsets to generate many weak and noisy subnetworks, and superpose them to average out the noise creating a high-quality denoised subnetwork. Our extensive experiments and ablation on two popular large-scale pre-trained models: CLIP (unexplored in pruning till date) and BERT across multiple benchmark vision and language datasets validate the effectiveness of ISP compared to several state-of-the-art pruning methods. Codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/VITA-Group/instant_soup}
Generation of Radiology Findings in Chest X-Ray by Leveraging Collaborative Knowledge
Authors: Manuela Daniela Danu, George Marica, Sanjeev Kumar Karn, Bogdan Georgescu, Awais Mansoor, Florin Ghesu, Lucian Mihai Itu, Constantin Suciu, Sasa Grbic, Oladimeji Farri, Dorin Comaniciu
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Among all the sub-sections in a typical radiology report, the Clinical Indications, Findings, and Impression often reflect important details about the health status of a patient. The information included in Impression is also often covered in Findings. While Findings and Impression can be deduced by inspecting the image, Clinical Indications often require additional context. The cognitive task of interpreting medical images remains the most critical and often time-consuming step in the radiology workflow. Instead of generating an end-to-end radiology report, in this paper, we focus on generating the Findings from automated interpretation of medical images, specifically chest X-rays (CXRs). Thus, this work focuses on reducing the workload of radiologists who spend most of their time either writing or narrating the Findings. Unlike past research, which addresses radiology report generation as a single-step image captioning task, we have further taken into consideration the complexity of interpreting CXR images and propose a two-step approach: (a) detecting the regions with abnormalities in the image, and (b) generating relevant text for regions with abnormalities by employing a generative large language model (LLM). This two-step approach introduces a layer of interpretability and aligns the framework with the systematic reasoning that radiologists use when reviewing a CXR.
Image Harmonization with Diffusion Model
Authors: Jiajie Li, Jian Wang, Chen Wang, JinJun Xiong
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Harmonization, model

Image composition in image editing involves merging a foreground image with a background image to create a composite. Inconsistent lighting conditions between the foreground and background often result in unrealistic composites. Image harmonization addresses this challenge by adjusting illumination and color to achieve visually appealing and consistent outputs. In this paper, we present a novel approach for image harmonization by leveraging diffusion models. We conduct a comparative analysis of two conditional diffusion models, namely Classifier-Guidance and Classifier-Free. Our focus is on addressing the challenge of adjusting illumination and color in foreground images to create visually appealing outputs that seamlessly blend with the background. Through this research, we establish a solid groundwork for future investigations in the realm of diffusion model-based image harmonization.
Object counting from aerial remote sensing images: application to wildlife and marine mammals
Authors: Tanya Singh, Hugo Gangloff, Minh-Tan Pham
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Counting

Anthropogenic activities pose threats to wildlife and marine fauna, prompting the need for efficient animal counting methods. This research study utilizes deep learning techniques to automate counting tasks. Inspired by previous studies on crowd and animal counting, a UNet model with various backbones is implemented, which uses Gaussian density maps for training, bypassing the need of training a detector. The new model is applied to the task of counting dolphins and elephants in aerial images. Quantitative evaluation shows promising results, with the EfficientNet-B5 backbone achieving the best performance for African elephants and the ResNet18 backbone for dolphins. The model accurately locates animals despite complex image background conditions. By leveraging artificial intelligence, this research contributes to wildlife conservation efforts and enhances coexistence between humans and wildlife through efficient object counting without detection from aerial remote sensing.
Development of a Deep Learning System for Intra-Operative Identification of Cancer Metastases
Authors: Thomas Schnelldorfer, Janil Castro, Atoussa Goldar-Najafi, LiPing Liu
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00

For several cancer patients, operative resection with curative intent can end up in early recurrence of the cancer. Current limitations in peri-operative cancer staging and especially intra-operative misidentification of visible metastases is likely the main reason leading to unnecessary operative interventions in the affected individuals. Here, we evaluate whether an artificial intelligence (AI) system can improve recognition of peritoneal surface metastases on routine staging laparoscopy images from patients with gastrointestinal malignancies. In a simulated setting evaluating biopsied peritoneal lesions, a prototype deep learning surgical guidance system outperformed oncologic surgeons in identifying peritoneal surface metastases. In this environment the developed AI model would have improved the identification of metastases by 5% while reducing the number of unnecessary biopsies by 28% compared to current standard practice. Evaluating non-biopsied peritoneal lesions, the findings support the possibility that the AI system could identify peritoneal surface metastases that were falsely deemed benign in clinical practice. Our findings demonstrate the technical feasibility of an AI system for intra-operative identification of peritoneal surface metastases, but require future assessment in a multi-institutional clinical setting.
Ladder: A software to label images, detect objects and deploy models recurrently for object detection
Authors: Zhou Tang, Zhiwu Zhang
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Object Detection (OD) is a computer vision technology that can locate and classify objects in images and videos, which has the potential to significantly improve efficiency in precision agriculture. To simplify OD application process, we developed Ladder - a software that provides users with a friendly graphic user interface (GUI) that allows for efficient labelling of training datasets, training OD models, and deploying the trained model. Ladder was designed with an interactive recurrent framework that leverages predictions from a pre-trained OD model as the initial image labeling. After adding human labels, the newly labeled images can be added into the training data to retrain the OD model. With the same GUI, users can also deploy well-trained OD models by loading the model weight file to detect new images. We used Ladder to develop a deep learning model to access wheat stripe rust in RGB (red, green, blue) images taken by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Ladder employs OD to directly evaluate different severity levels of wheat stripe rust in field images, eliminating the need for photo stitching process for UAVs-based images. The accuracy for low, medium and high severity scores were 72%, 50% and 80%, respectively. This case demonstrates how Ladder empowers OD in precision agriculture and crop breeding.
Residual Spatial Fusion Network for RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ping Li, Junjie Chen, Binbin Lin, Xianghua Xu
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Saliency Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Thermal Image Segmentation

Semantic segmentation plays an important role in widespread applications such as autonomous driving and robotic sensing. Traditional methods mostly use RGB images which are heavily affected by lighting conditions, \eg, darkness. Recent studies show thermal images are robust to the night scenario as a compensating modality for segmentation. However, existing works either simply fuse RGB-Thermal (RGB-T) images or adopt the encoder with the same structure for both the RGB stream and the thermal stream, which neglects the modality difference in segmentation under varying lighting conditions. Therefore, this work proposes a Residual Spatial Fusion Network (RSFNet) for RGB-T semantic segmentation. Specifically, we employ an asymmetric encoder to learn the compensating features of the RGB and the thermal images. To effectively fuse the dual-modality features, we generate the pseudo-labels by saliency detection to supervise the feature learning, and develop the Residual Spatial Fusion (RSF) module with structural re-parameterization to learn more promising features by spatially fusing the cross-modality features. RSF employs a hierarchical feature fusion to aggregate multi-level features, and applies the spatial weights with the residual connection to adaptively control the multi-spectral feature fusion by the confidence gate. Extensive experiments were carried out on two benchmarks, \ie, MFNet database and PST900 database. The results have shown the state-of-the-art segmentation performance of our method, which achieves a good balance between accuracy and speed.
LLMVA-GEBC: Large Language Model with Video Adapter for Generic Event Boundary Captioning
Authors: Yunlong Tang, Jinrui Zhang, Xiangchen Wang, Teng Wang, Feng Zheng
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Video Captioning

Our winning entry for the CVPR 2023 Generic Event Boundary Captioning (GEBC) competition is detailed in this paper. Unlike conventional video captioning tasks, GEBC demands that the captioning model possess an understanding of immediate changes in status around the designated video boundary, making it a difficult task. This paper proposes an effective model LLMVA-GEBC (Large Language Model with Video Adapter for Generic Event Boundary Captioning): (1) We utilize a pretrained LLM for generating human-like captions with high quality. (2) To adapt the model to the GEBC task, we take the video Q-former as an adapter and train it with the frozen visual feature extractors and LLM. Our proposed method achieved a 76.14 score on the test set and won the first place in the challenge. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/LLMVA-GEBC .
MA-NeRF: Motion-Assisted Neural Radiance Fields for Face Synthesis from Sparse Images
Authors: Weichen Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Yukang Cao, Wensen Feng, Chun Yuan
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

We address the problem of photorealistic 3D face avatar synthesis from sparse images. Existing Parametric models for face avatar reconstruction struggle to generate details that originate from inputs. Meanwhile, although current NeRF-based avatar methods provide promising results for novel view synthesis, they fail to generalize well for unseen expressions. We improve from NeRF and propose a novel framework that, by leveraging the parametric 3DMM models, can reconstruct a high-fidelity drivable face avatar and successfully handle the unseen expressions. At the core of our implementation are structured displacement feature and semantic-aware learning module. Our structured displacement feature will introduce the motion prior as an additional constraints and help perform better for unseen expressions, by constructing displacement volume. Besides, the semantic-aware learning incorporates multi-level prior, e.g., semantic embedding, learnable latent code, to lift the performance to a higher level. Thorough experiments have been doen both quantitatively and qualitatively to demonstrate the design of our framework, and our method achieves much better results than the current state-of-the-arts.
Fast Fourier Inception Networks for Occluded Video Prediction
Authors: Ping Li, Chenhan Zhang, Xianghua Xu
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Video Prediction

Video prediction is a pixel-level task that generates future frames by employing the historical frames. There often exist continuous complex motions, such as object overlapping and scene occlusion in video, which poses great challenges to this task. Previous works either fail to well capture the long-term temporal dynamics or do not handle the occlusion masks. To address these issues, we develop the fully convolutional Fast Fourier Inception Networks for video prediction, termed \textit{FFINet}, which includes two primary components, \ie, the occlusion inpainter and the spatiotemporal translator. The former adopts the fast Fourier convolutions to enlarge the receptive field, such that the missing areas (occlusion) with complex geometric structures are filled by the inpainter. The latter employs the stacked Fourier transform inception module to learn the temporal evolution by group convolutions and the spatial movement by channel-wise Fourier convolutions, which captures both the local and the global spatiotemporal features. This encourages generating more realistic and high-quality future frames. To optimize the model, the recovery loss is imposed to the objective, \ie, minimizing the mean square error between the ground-truth frame and the recovery frame. Both quantitative and qualitative experimental results on five benchmarks, including Moving MNIST, TaxiBJ, Human3.6M, Caltech Pedestrian, and KTH, have demonstrated the superiority of the proposed approach. Our code is available at GitHub.
Efficient HDR Reconstruction from Real-World Raw Images
Authors: Qirui Yang, Yihao Liu, Qihua Chen, Huanjing Yue, Kun Li, Jingyu Yang
Date: 2023-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Denoising, GPU, HDR Reconstruction, SSIM

The widespread usage of high-definition screens on edge devices stimulates a strong demand for efficient high dynamic range (HDR) algorithms. However, many existing HDR methods either deliver unsatisfactory results or consume too much computational and memory resources, hindering their application to high-resolution images (usually with more than 12 megapixels) in practice. In addition, existing HDR dataset collection methods often are labor-intensive. In this work, in a new aspect, we discover an excellent opportunity for HDR reconstructing directly from raw images and investigating novel neural network structures that benefit the deployment of mobile devices. Our key insights are threefold: (1) we develop a lightweight-efficient HDR model, RepUNet, using the structural re-parameterization technique to achieve fast and robust HDR; (2) we design a new computational raw HDR data formation pipeline and construct a real-world raw HDR dataset, RealRaw-HDR; (3) we propose a plug-and-play motion alignment loss to mitigate motion ghosting under limited bandwidth conditions. Our model contains less than 830K parameters and takes less than 3 ms to process an image of 4K resolution using one RTX 3090 GPU. While being highly efficient, our model also outperforms the state-of-the-art HDR methods in terms of PSNR, SSIM, and a color difference metric.