pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Quantifying and Enhancing Multi-modal Robustness with Modality Preference
Authors: Zequn Yang, Yake Wei, Ce Liang, Di Hu
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Multi-modal models have shown a promising capability to effectively integrate information from various sources, yet meanwhile, they are found vulnerable to pervasive perturbations, such as uni-modal attacks and missing conditions. To counter these perturbations, robust multi-modal representations are highly expected, which are positioned well away from the discriminative multi-modal decision boundary. In this paper, different from conventional empirical studies, we focus on a commonly used joint multi-modal framework and theoretically discover that larger uni-modal representation margins and more reliable integration for modalities are essential components for achieving higher robustness. This discovery can further explain the limitation of multi-modal robustness and the phenomenon that multi-modal models are often vulnerable to attacks on the specific modality. Moreover, our analysis reveals how the widespread issue, that the model has different preferences for modalities, limits the multi-modal robustness by influencing the essential components and could lead to attacks on the specific modality highly effective. Inspired by our theoretical finding, we introduce a training procedure called Certifiable Robust Multi-modal Training (CRMT), which can alleviate this influence from modality preference and explicitly regulate essential components to significantly improve robustness in a certifiable manner. Our method demonstrates substantial improvements in performance and robustness compared with existing methods. Furthermore, our training procedure can be easily extended to enhance other robust training strategies, highlighting its credibility and flexibility.
Beyond DAGs: A Latent Partial Causal Model for Multimodal Learning
Authors: Yuhang Liu, Zhen Zhang, Dong Gong, Erdun Gao, Biwei Huang, Mingming Gong, Anton Van Den Hengel, Kun Zhang, Javen Qinfeng Shi
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Disentanglement, Domain Generalization, Few-Shot Learning, Representation Learning

Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are fundamental graph structures in causal modeling, but identifying the desired DAG from observational data often requires strong assumptions that may not hold in real-world scenarios, especially for latent causal models and complex multimodal data. This raises the question of whether we can relax or bypass the DAG assumption while maintaining practical utility. In this work, we propose a novel latent partial causal model for multimodal data, featuring two latent coupled variables, connected by an undirected edge, to represent the transfer of knowledge across modalities. Under specific statistical assumptions, we establish an identifiability result, demonstrating that representations learned by multimodal contrastive learning correspond to the latent coupled variables up to a trivial transformation. This result deepens our understanding of the why multimodal contrastive learning works, highlights its potential for disentanglement, and expands the utility of pre-trained models like CLIP. Synthetic experiments confirm the robustness of our findings, even when the assumptions are partially violated. Most importantly, experiments on a pre-trained CLIP model embodies disentangled representations, enabling few-shot learning and improving domain generalization across diverse real-world datasets. Together, these contributions push the boundaries of multimodal contrastive learning, both theoretically and, crucially, in practical applications.
Multi-source-free Domain Adaptation via Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Distillation
Authors: Yaxuan Song, Jianan Fan, Dongnan Liu, Weidong Cai
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Knowledge Distillation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Source Free Object Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) alleviates the domain discrepancy among data obtained from domains without accessing the data for the awareness of data privacy. However, existing conventional SFDA methods face inherent limitations in medical contexts, where medical data are typically collected from multiple institutions using various equipment. To address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, named Uncertainty-aware Adaptive Distillation (UAD) for the multi-source-free unsupervised domain adaptation (MSFDA) setting. UAD aims to perform well-calibrated knowledge distillation from (i) model level to deliver coordinated and reliable base model initialisation and (ii) instance level via model adaptation guided by high-quality pseudo-labels, thereby obtaining a high-performance target domain model. To verify its general applicability, we evaluate UAD on two image-based diagnosis benchmarks among two multi-centre datasets, where our method shows a significant performance gain compared with existing works. The code will be available soon.
Halo Reduction in Display Systems through Smoothed Local Histogram Equalization and Human Visual System Modeling
Authors: Prasoon Ambalathankandy, Yafei Ou, Masayuki Ikebe
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Halo artifacts significantly impact display quality. We propose a method to reduce halos in Local Histogram Equalization (LHE) algorithms by separately addressing dark and light variants. This approach results in visually natural images by exploring the relationship between lateral inhibition and halo artifacts in the human visual system.
GS-CLIP: Gaussian Splatting for Contrastive Language-Image-3D Pretraining from Real-World Data
Authors: Haoyuan Li, Yanpeng Zhou, Yihan Zeng, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

3D Shape represented as point cloud has achieve advancements in multimodal pre-training to align image and language descriptions, which is curial to object identification, classification, and retrieval. However, the discrete representations of point cloud lost the object's surface shape information and creates a gap between rendering results and 2D correspondences. To address this problem, we propose GS-CLIP for the first attempt to introduce 3DGS (3D Gaussian Splatting) into multimodal pre-training to enhance 3D representation. GS-CLIP leverages a pre-trained vision-language model for a learned common visual and textual space on massive real world image-text pairs and then learns a 3D Encoder for aligning 3DGS optimized per object. Additionally, a novel Gaussian-Aware Fusion is proposed to extract and fuse global explicit feature. As a general framework for language-image-3D pre-training, GS-CLIP is agnostic to 3D backbone networks. Experiments on challenging shows that GS-CLIP significantly improves the state-of-the-art, outperforming the previously best results.
The Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) Dataset
Authors: Henry Pinkard, Cherry Liu, Fanice Nyatigo, Daniel A. Fletcher, Laura Waller
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Computational microscopy, in which hardware and algorithms of an imaging system are jointly designed, shows promise for making imaging systems that cost less, perform more robustly, and collect new types of information. Often, the performance of computational imaging systems, especially those that incorporate machine learning, is sample-dependent. Thus, standardized datasets are an essential tool for comparing the performance of different approaches. Here, we introduce the Berkeley Single Cell Computational Microscopy (BSCCM) dataset, which contains over ~12,000,000 images of 400,000 of individual white blood cells. The dataset contains images captured with multiple illumination patterns on an LED array microscope and fluorescent measurements of the abundance of surface proteins that mark different cell types. We hope this dataset will provide a valuable resource for the development and testing of new algorithms in computational microscopy and computer vision with practical biomedical applications.
Masked LoGoNet: Fast and Accurate 3D Image Analysis for Medical Domain
Authors: Amin Karimi Monsefi, Payam Karisani, Mengxi Zhou, Stacey Choi, Nathan Doble, Heng Ji, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Rajiv Ramnath
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Multi-Task Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Standard modern machine-learning-based imaging methods have faced challenges in medical applications due to the high cost of dataset construction and, thereby, the limited labeled training data available. Additionally, upon deployment, these methods are usually used to process a large volume of data on a daily basis, imposing a high maintenance cost on medical facilities. In this paper, we introduce a new neural network architecture, termed LoGoNet, with a tailored self-supervised learning (SSL) method to mitigate such challenges. LoGoNet integrates a novel feature extractor within a U-shaped architecture, leveraging Large Kernel Attention (LKA) and a dual encoding strategy to capture both long-range and short-range feature dependencies adeptly. This is in contrast to existing methods that rely on increasing network capacity to enhance feature extraction. This combination of novel techniques in our model is especially beneficial in medical image segmentation, given the difficulty of learning intricate and often irregular body organ shapes, such as the spleen. Complementary, we propose a novel SSL method tailored for 3D images to compensate for the lack of large labeled datasets. The method combines masking and contrastive learning techniques within a multi-task learning framework and is compatible with both Vision Transformer (ViT) and CNN-based models. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methods in numerous tasks across two standard datasets (i.e., BTCV and MSD). Benchmark comparisons with eight state-of-the-art models highlight LoGoNet's superior performance in both inference time and accuracy.
Target Recognition Algorithm for Monitoring Images in Electric Power Construction Process
Authors: Hao Song, Wei Lin, Wei Song, Man Wang
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

To enhance precision and comprehensiveness in identifying targets in electric power construction monitoring video, a novel target recognition algorithm utilizing infrared imaging is explored. This algorithm employs a color processing technique based on a local linear mapping method to effectively recolor monitoring images. The process involves three key steps: color space conversion, color transfer, and pseudo-color encoding. It is designed to accentuate targets in the infrared imaging. For the refined identification of these targets, the algorithm leverages a support vector machine approach, utilizing an optimal hyperplane to accurately predict target types. We demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm, which achieves high target recognition accuracy in both outdoor and indoor electric power construction monitoring scenarios. It maintains a false recognition rate below 3% across various environments.
Domain Generalization with Small Data
Authors: Kecheng Chen, Elena Gal, Hong Yan, Haoliang Li
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

In this work, we propose to tackle the problem of domain generalization in the context of \textit{insufficient samples}. Instead of extracting latent feature embeddings based on deterministic models, we propose to learn a domain-invariant representation based on the probabilistic framework by mapping each data point into probabilistic embeddings. Specifically, we first extend empirical maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) to a novel probabilistic MMD that can measure the discrepancy between mixture distributions (i.e., source domains) consisting of a series of latent distributions rather than latent points. Moreover, instead of imposing the contrastive semantic alignment (CSA) loss based on pairs of latent points, a novel probabilistic CSA loss encourages positive probabilistic embedding pairs to be closer while pulling other negative ones apart. Benefiting from the learned representation captured by probabilistic models, our proposed method can marriage the measurement on the \textit{distribution over distributions} (i.e., the global perspective alignment) and the distribution-based contrastive semantic alignment (i.e., the local perspective alignment). Extensive experimental results on three challenging medical datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method in the context of insufficient data compared with state-of-the-art methods.
HeadStudio: Text to Animatable Head Avatars with 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Zhenglin Zhou, Fan Ma, Hehe Fan, Zongxin Yang, Yi Yang
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Creating digital avatars from textual prompts has long been a desirable yet challenging task. Despite the promising results achieved with 2D diffusion priors, current methods struggle to create high-quality and consistent animated avatars efficiently. Previous animatable head models like FLAME have difficulty in accurately representing detailed texture and geometry. Additionally, high-quality 3D static representations face challenges in semantically driving with dynamic priors. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{HeadStudio}, a novel framework that utilizes 3D Gaussian splatting to generate realistic and animatable avatars from text prompts. Firstly, we associate 3D Gaussians with animatable head prior model, facilitating semantic animation on high-quality 3D representations. To ensure consistent animation, we further enhance the optimization from initialization, distillation, and regularization to jointly learn the shape, texture, and animation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of HeadStudio in generating animatable avatars from textual prompts, exhibiting appealing appearances. The avatars are capable of rendering high-quality real-time ($\geq 40$ fps) novel views at a resolution of 1024. Moreover, These avatars can be smoothly driven by real-world speech and video. We hope that HeadStudio can enhance digital avatar creation and gain popularity in the community. Code is at: https://github.com/ZhenglinZhou/HeadStudio.
SIR: Multi-view Inverse Rendering with Decomposable Shadow for Indoor Scenes
Authors: Xiaokang Wei, Zhuoman Liu, Yan Luximon
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering

We propose SIR, an efficient method to decompose differentiable shadows for inverse rendering on indoor scenes using multi-view data, addressing the challenges in accurately decomposing the materials and lighting conditions. Unlike previous methods that struggle with shadow fidelity in complex lighting environments, our approach explicitly learns shadows for enhanced realism in material estimation under unknown light positions. Utilizing posed HDR images as input, SIR employs an SDF-based neural radiance field for comprehensive scene representation. Then, SIR integrates a shadow term with a three-stage material estimation approach to improve SVBRDF quality. Specifically, SIR is designed to learn a differentiable shadow, complemented by BRDF regularization, to optimize inverse rendering accuracy. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world indoor scenes demonstrate the superior performance of SIR over existing methods in both quantitative metrics and qualitative analysis. The significant decomposing ability of SIR enables sophisticated editing capabilities like free-view relighting, object insertion, and material replacement. The code and data are available at https://xiaokangwei.github.io/SIR/.
TETRIS: Towards Exploring the Robustness of Interactive Segmentation
Authors: Andrey Moskalenko, Vlad Shakhuro, Anna Vorontsova, Anton Konushin, Anton Antonov, Alexander Krapukhin, Denis Shepelev, Konstantin Soshin
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Robustness, Common Sense Reasoning, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation

Interactive segmentation methods rely on user inputs to iteratively update the selection mask. A click specifying the object of interest is arguably the most simple and intuitive interaction type, and thereby the most common choice for interactive segmentation. However, user clicking patterns in the interactive segmentation context remain unexplored. Accordingly, interactive segmentation evaluation strategies rely more on intuition and common sense rather than empirical studies (e.g., assuming that users tend to click in the center of the area with the largest error). In this work, we conduct a real user study to investigate real user clicking patterns. This study reveals that the intuitive assumption made in the common evaluation strategy may not hold. As a result, interactive segmentation models may show high scores in the standard benchmarks, but it does not imply that they would perform well in a real world scenario. To assess the applicability of interactive segmentation methods, we propose a novel evaluation strategy providing a more comprehensive analysis of a model's performance. To this end, we propose a methodology for finding extreme user inputs by a direct optimization in a white-box adversarial attack on the interactive segmentation model. Based on the performance with such adversarial user inputs, we assess the robustness of interactive segmentation models w.r.t click positions. Besides, we introduce a novel benchmark for measuring the robustness of interactive segmentation, and report the results of an extensive evaluation of dozens of models.
ContPhy: Continuum Physical Concept Learning and Reasoning from Videos
Authors: Zhicheng Zheng, Xin Yan, Zhenfang Chen, Jingzhou Wang, Qin Zhi Eddie Lim, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Chuang Gan
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

We introduce the Continuum Physical Dataset (ContPhy), a novel benchmark for assessing machine physical commonsense. ContPhy complements existing physical reasoning benchmarks by encompassing the inference of diverse physical properties, such as mass and density, across various scenarios and predicting corresponding dynamics. We evaluated a range of AI models and found that they still struggle to achieve satisfactory performance on ContPhy, which shows that the current AI models still lack physical commonsense for the continuum, especially soft-bodies, and illustrates the value of the proposed dataset. We also introduce an oracle model (ContPRO) that marries the particle-based physical dynamic models with the recent large language models, which enjoy the advantages of both models, precise dynamic predictions, and interpretable reasoning. ContPhy aims to spur progress in perception and reasoning within diverse physical settings, narrowing the divide between human and machine intelligence in understanding the physical world. Project page: https://physical-reasoning-project.github.io
Spatially-Attentive Patch-Hierarchical Network with Adaptive Sampling for Motion Deblurring
Authors: Maitreya Suin, Kuldeep Purohit, A. N. Rajagopalan
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring

This paper tackles the problem of motion deblurring of dynamic scenes. Although end-to-end fully convolutional designs have recently advanced the state-of-the-art in non-uniform motion deblurring, their performance-complexity trade-off is still sub-optimal. Most existing approaches achieve a large receptive field by increasing the number of generic convolution layers and kernel size. In this work, we propose a pixel adaptive and feature attentive design for handling large blur variations across different spatial locations and process each test image adaptively. We design a content-aware global-local filtering module that significantly improves performance by considering not only global dependencies but also by dynamically exploiting neighboring pixel information. We further introduce a pixel-adaptive non-uniform sampling strategy that implicitly discovers the difficult-to-restore regions present in the image and, in turn, performs fine-grained refinement in a progressive manner. Extensive qualitative and quantitative comparisons with prior art on deblurring benchmarks demonstrate that our approach performs favorably against the state-of-the-art deblurring algorithms.
CLR-Face: Conditional Latent Refinement for Blind Face Restoration Using Score-Based Diffusion Models
Authors: Maitreya Suin, Rama Chellappa
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration, Disentanglement, Face Recognition

Recent generative-prior-based methods have shown promising blind face restoration performance. They usually project the degraded images to the latent space and then decode high-quality faces either by single-stage latent optimization or directly from the encoding. Generating fine-grained facial details faithful to inputs remains a challenging problem. Most existing methods produce either overly smooth outputs or alter the identity as they attempt to balance between generation and reconstruction. This may be attributed to the typical trade-off between quality and resolution in the latent space. If the latent space is highly compressed, the decoded output is more robust to degradations but shows worse fidelity. On the other hand, a more flexible latent space can capture intricate facial details better, but is extremely difficult to optimize for highly degraded faces using existing techniques. To address these issues, we introduce a diffusion-based-prior inside a VQGAN architecture that focuses on learning the distribution over uncorrupted latent embeddings. With such knowledge, we iteratively recover the clean embedding conditioning on the degraded counterpart. Furthermore, to ensure the reverse diffusion trajectory does not deviate from the underlying identity, we train a separate Identity Recovery Network and use its output to constrain the reverse diffusion process. Specifically, using a learnable latent mask, we add gradients from a face-recognition network to a subset of latent features that correlates with the finer identity-related details in the pixel space, leaving the other features untouched. Disentanglement between perception and fidelity in the latent space allows us to achieve the best of both worlds. We perform extensive evaluations on multiple real and synthetic datasets to validate the superiority of our approach.
CLIP-Loc: Multi-modal Landmark Association for Global Localization in Object-based Maps
Authors: Shigemichi Matsuzaki, Takuma Sugino, Kazuhito Tanaka, Zijun Sha, Shintaro Nakaoka, Shintaro Yoshizawa, Kazuhiro Shintani
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Object

This paper describes a multi-modal data association method for global localization using object-based maps and camera images. In global localization, or relocalization, using object-based maps, existing methods typically resort to matching all possible combinations of detected objects and landmarks with the same object category, followed by inlier extraction using RANSAC or brute-force search. This approach becomes infeasible as the number of landmarks increases due to the exponential growth of correspondence candidates. In this paper, we propose labeling landmarks with natural language descriptions and extracting correspondences based on conceptual similarity with image observations using a Vision Language Model (VLM). By leveraging detailed text information, our approach efficiently extracts correspondences compared to methods using only object categories. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method enables more accurate global localization with fewer iterations compared to baseline methods, exhibiting its efficiency.