pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mamba-ND: Selective State Space Modeling for Multi-Dimensional Data
Authors: Shufan Li, Harkanwar Singh, Aditya Grover
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Mamba, State Space Models, Weather Forecasting

In recent years, Transformers have become the de-facto architecture for sequence modeling on text and a variety of multi-dimensional data, such as images and video. However, the use of self-attention layers in a Transformer incurs prohibitive compute and memory complexity that scales quadratically w.r.t. the sequence length. A recent architecture, Mamba, based on state space models has been shown to achieve comparable performance for modeling text sequences, while scaling linearly with the sequence length. In this work, we present Mamba-ND, a generalized design extending the Mamba architecture to arbitrary multi-dimensional data. Our design alternatively unravels the input data across different dimensions following row-major orderings. We provide a systematic comparison of Mamba-ND with several other alternatives, based on prior multi-dimensional extensions such as Bi-directional LSTMs and S4ND. Empirically, we show that Mamba-ND demonstrates performance competitive with the state-of-the-art on a variety of multi-dimensional benchmarks, including ImageNet-1K classification, HMDB-51 action recognition, and ERA5 weather forecasting.
Adaptive Surface Normal Constraint for Geometric Estimation from Monocular Images
Authors: Xiaoxiao Long, Yuhang Zheng, Yupeng Zheng, Beiwen Tian, Cheng Lin, Lingjie Liu, Hao Zhao, Guyue Zhou, Wenping Wang
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Depth Estimation

We introduce a novel approach to learn geometries such as depth and surface normal from images while incorporating geometric context. The difficulty of reliably capturing geometric context in existing methods impedes their ability to accurately enforce the consistency between the different geometric properties, thereby leading to a bottleneck of geometric estimation quality. We therefore propose the Adaptive Surface Normal (ASN) constraint, a simple yet efficient method. Our approach extracts geometric context that encodes the geometric variations present in the input image and correlates depth estimation with geometric constraints. By dynamically determining reliable local geometry from randomly sampled candidates, we establish a surface normal constraint, where the validity of these candidates is evaluated using the geometric context. Furthermore, our normal estimation leverages the geometric context to prioritize regions that exhibit significant geometric variations, which makes the predicted normals accurately capture intricate and detailed geometric information. Through the integration of geometric context, our method unifies depth and surface normal estimations within a cohesive framework, which enables the generation of high-quality 3D geometry from images. We validate the superiority of our approach over state-of-the-art methods through extensive evaluations and comparisons on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets, showcasing its efficiency and robustness.
Memory Consolidation Enables Long-Context Video Understanding
Authors: Ivana Balažević, Yuge Shi, Pinelopi Papalampidi, Rahma Chaabouni, Skanda Koppula, Olivier J. Hénaff
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: EgoSchema, Video Understanding

Most transformer-based video encoders are limited to short temporal contexts due to their quadratic complexity. While various attempts have been made to extend this context, this has often come at the cost of both conceptual and computational complexity. We propose to instead re-purpose existing pre-trained video transformers by simply fine-tuning them to attend to memories derived non-parametrically from past activations. By leveraging redundancy reduction, our memory-consolidated vision transformer (MC-ViT) effortlessly extends its context far into the past and exhibits excellent scaling behavior when learning from longer videos. In doing so, MC-ViT sets a new state-of-the-art in long-context video understanding on EgoSchema, Perception Test, and Diving48, outperforming methods that benefit from orders of magnitude more parameters.
Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Continual Semantic Segmentation for Robotic Surgery
Authors: Mengya Xu, Mobarakol Islam, Long Bai, Hongliang Ren
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Continual Semantic Segmentation, Privacy Preserving, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based semantic segmentation of the robotic instruments and tissues can enhance the precision of surgical activities in robot-assisted surgery. However, in biological learning, DNNs cannot learn incremental tasks over time and exhibit catastrophic forgetting, which refers to the sharp decline in performance on previously learned tasks after learning a new one. Specifically, when data scarcity is the issue, the model shows a rapid drop in performance on previously learned instruments after learning new data with new instruments. The problem becomes worse when it limits releasing the dataset of the old instruments for the old model due to privacy concerns and the unavailability of the data for the new or updated version of the instruments for the continual learning model. For this purpose, we develop a privacy-preserving synthetic continual semantic segmentation framework by blending and harmonizing (i) open-source old instruments foreground to the synthesized background without revealing real patient data in public and (ii) new instruments foreground to extensively augmented real background. To boost the balanced logit distillation from the old model to the continual learning model, we design overlapping class-aware temperature normalization (CAT) by controlling model learning utility. We also introduce multi-scale shifted-feature distillation (SD) to maintain long and short-range spatial relationships among the semantic objects where conventional short-range spatial features with limited information reduce the power of feature distillation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on the EndoVis 2017 and 2018 instrument segmentation dataset with a generalized continual learning setting. Code is available at~\url{https://github.com/XuMengyaAmy/Synthetic_CAT_SD}.
Using YOLO v7 to Detect Kidney in Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Authors: Pouria Yazdian Anari, Fiona Obiezu, Nathan Lay, Fatemeh Dehghani Firouzabadi, Aditi Chaurasia, Mahshid Golagha, Shiva Singh, Fatemeh Homayounieh, Aryan Zahergivar, Stephanie Harmon, Evrim Turkbey, Rabindra Gautam, Kevin Ma, Maria Merino, Elizabeth C. Jones, Mark W. Ball, W. Marston Linehan, Baris Turkbey, Ashkan A. Malayeri
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Sensitivity

Introduction This study explores the use of the latest You Only Look Once (YOLO V7) object detection method to enhance kidney detection in medical imaging by training and testing a modified YOLO V7 on medical image formats. Methods Study includes 878 patients with various subtypes of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) and 206 patients with normal kidneys. A total of 5657 MRI scans for 1084 patients were retrieved. 326 patients with 1034 tumors recruited from a retrospective maintained database, and bounding boxes were drawn around their tumors. A primary model was trained on 80% of annotated cases, with 20% saved for testing (primary test set). The best primary model was then used to identify tumors in the remaining 861 patients and bounding box coordinates were generated on their scans using the model. Ten benchmark training sets were created with generated coordinates on not-segmented patients. The final model used to predict the kidney in the primary test set. We reported the positive predictive value (PPV), sensitivity, and mean average precision (mAP). Results The primary training set showed an average PPV of 0.94 +/- 0.01, sensitivity of 0.87 +/- 0.04, and mAP of 0.91 +/- 0.02. The best primary model yielded a PPV of 0.97, sensitivity of 0.92, and mAP of 0.95. The final model demonstrated an average PPV of 0.95 +/- 0.03, sensitivity of 0.98 +/- 0.004, and mAP of 0.95 +/- 0.01. Conclusion Using a semi-supervised approach with a medical image library, we developed a high-performing model for kidney detection. Further external validation is required to assess the model's generalizability.
AvatarMMC: 3D Head Avatar Generation and Editing with Multi-Modal Conditioning
Authors: Wamiq Reyaz Para, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Zhenyu Li, Pradyumna Reddy, Jiankang Deng, Peter Wonka
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

We introduce an approach for 3D head avatar generation and editing with multi-modal conditioning based on a 3D Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM). 3D GANs can generate high-quality head avatars given a single or no condition. However, it is challenging to generate samples that adhere to multiple conditions of different modalities. On the other hand, LDMs excel at learning complex conditional distributions. To this end, we propose to exploit the conditioning capabilities of LDMs to enable multi-modal control over the latent space of a pre-trained 3D GAN. Our method can generate and edit 3D head avatars given a mixture of control signals such as RGB input, segmentation masks, and global attributes. This provides better control over the generation and editing of synthetic avatars both globally and locally. Experiments show that our proposed approach outperforms a solely GAN-based approach both qualitatively and quantitatively on generation and editing tasks. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to introduce multi-modal conditioning to 3D avatar generation and editing. \\href{avatarmmc-sig24.github.io}{Project Page}
TaE: Task-aware Expandable Representation for Long Tail Class Incremental Learning
Authors: Linjie Li, Zhenyu Wu, Jiaming Liu, Yang Ji
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning is dedicated to the development of deep learning models that are capable of acquiring new knowledge while retaining previously learned information. Most methods focus on balanced data distribution for each task, overlooking real-world long-tailed distributions. Therefore, Long-Tailed Class-Incremental Learning has been introduced, which trains on data where head classes have more samples than tail classes. Existing methods mainly focus on preserving representative samples from previous classes to combat catastrophic forgetting. Recently, dynamic network algorithms freeze old network structures and expand new ones, achieving significant performance. However, with the introduction of the long-tail problem, merely extending Determined blocks can lead to miscalibrated predictions, while expanding the entire backbone results in an explosion of memory size. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Task-aware Expandable (TaE) framework, dynamically allocating and updating task-specific trainable parameters to learn diverse representations from each incremental task while resisting forgetting through the majority of frozen model parameters. To further encourage the class-specific feature representation, we develop a Centroid-Enhanced (CEd) method to guide the update of these task-aware parameters. This approach is designed to adaptively allocate feature space for every class by adjusting the distance between intra- and inter-class features, which can extend to all "training from sketch" algorithms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TaE achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision-Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images
Authors: Kathleen C. Fraser, Svetlana Kiritchenko
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Story Generation, Visual Question Answering

Following on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and subsequent chat models, a new wave of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has emerged. Such models can incorporate images as input in addition to text, and perform tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, story generation, etc. Here, we examine potential gender and racial biases in such systems, based on the perceived characteristics of the people in the input images. To accomplish this, we present a new dataset PAIRS (PArallel Images for eveRyday Scenarios). The PAIRS dataset contains sets of AI-generated images of people, such that the images are highly similar in terms of background and visual content, but differ along the dimensions of gender (man, woman) and race (Black, white). By querying the LVLMs with such images, we observe significant differences in the responses according to the perceived gender or race of the person depicted.
UAV-Rain1k: A Benchmark for Raindrop Removal from UAV Aerial Imagery
Authors: Wenhui Chang, Hongming Chen, Xin He, Xiang Chen, Liangduo Shen
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Raindrop Removal, Rain Removal

Raindrops adhering to the lens of UAVs can obstruct visibility of the background scene and degrade image quality. Despite recent progress in image deraining methods and datasets, there is a lack of focus on raindrop removal from UAV aerial imagery due to the unique challenges posed by varying angles and rapid movement during drone flight. To fill the gap in this research, we first construct a new benchmark dataset for removing raindrops from UAV images, called UAV-Rain1k. In this letter, we provide a dataset generation pipeline, which includes modeling raindrop shapes using Blender, collecting background images from various UAV angles, random sampling of rain masks and etc. Based on the proposed benchmark, we further present a comprehensive evaluation of existing representative image deraining algorithms, and reveal future research opportunities worth exploring. The proposed dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/UAV-Rain1k.
Editable Scene Simulation for Autonomous Driving via Collaborative LLM-Agents
Authors: Yuxi Wei, Zi Wang, Yifan Lu, Chenxin Xu, Changxing Liu, Hao Zhao, Siheng Chen, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Lighting Estimation

Scene simulation in autonomous driving has gained significant attention because of its huge potential for generating customized data. However, existing editable scene simulation approaches face limitations in terms of user interaction efficiency, multi-camera photo-realistic rendering and external digital assets integration. To address these challenges, this paper introduces ChatSim, the first system that enables editable photo-realistic 3D driving scene simulations via natural language commands with external digital assets. To enable editing with high command flexibility,~ChatSim leverages a large language model (LLM) agent collaboration framework. To generate photo-realistic outcomes, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera neural radiance field method. Furthermore, to unleash the potential of extensive high-quality digital assets, ChatSim employs a novel multi-camera lighting estimation method to achieve scene-consistent assets' rendering. Our experiments on Waymo Open Dataset demonstrate that ChatSim can handle complex language commands and generate corresponding photo-realistic scene videos.
CTGAN: Semantic-guided Conditional Texture Generator for 3D Shapes
Authors: Yi-Ting Pan, Chai-Rong Lee, Shu-Ho Fan, Jheng-Wei Su, Jia-Bin Huang, Yung-Yu Chuang, Hung-Kuo Chu
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Texture Synthesis

The entertainment industry relies on 3D visual content to create immersive experiences, but traditional methods for creating textured 3D models can be time-consuming and subjective. Generative networks such as StyleGAN have advanced image synthesis, but generating 3D objects with high-fidelity textures is still not well explored, and existing methods have limitations. We propose the Semantic-guided Conditional Texture Generator (CTGAN), producing high-quality textures for 3D shapes that are consistent with the viewing angle while respecting shape semantics. CTGAN utilizes the disentangled nature of StyleGAN to finely manipulate the input latent codes, enabling explicit control over both the style and structure of the generated textures. A coarse-to-fine encoder architecture is introduced to enhance control over the structure of the resulting textures via input segmentation. Experimental results show that CTGAN outperforms existing methods on multiple quality metrics and achieves state-of-the-art performance on texture generation in both conditional and unconditional settings.
An Ordinal Regression Framework for a Deep Learning Based Severity Assessment for Chest Radiographs
Authors: Patrick Wienholt, Alexander Hermans, Firas Khader, Behrus Puladi, Bastian Leibe, Christiane Kuhl, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

This study investigates the application of ordinal regression methods for categorizing disease severity in chest radiographs. We propose a framework that divides the ordinal regression problem into three parts: a model, a target function, and a classification function. Different encoding methods, including one-hot, Gaussian, progress-bar, and our soft-progress-bar, are applied using ResNet50 and ViT-B-16 deep learning models. We show that the choice of encoding has a strong impact on performance and that the best encoding depends on the chosen weighting of Cohen's kappa and also on the model architecture used. We make our code publicly available on GitHub.
Real-time Holistic Robot Pose Estimation with Unknown States
Authors: Shikun Ban, Juling Fan, Xiaoxuan Ma, Wentao Zhu, Yu Qiao, Yizhou Wang
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Robot Pose Estimation, valid

Estimating robot pose from RGB images is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. While previous methods have achieved promising performance, most of them presume full knowledge of robot internal states, e.g. ground-truth robot joint angles. However, this assumption is not always valid in practical situations. In real-world applications such as multi-robot collaboration or human-robot interaction, the robot joint states might not be shared or could be unreliable. On the other hand, existing approaches that estimate robot pose without joint state priors suffer from heavy computation burdens and thus cannot support real-time applications. This work introduces an efficient framework for real-time robot pose estimation from RGB images without requiring known robot states. Our method estimates camera-to-robot rotation, robot state parameters, keypoint locations, and root depth, employing a neural network module for each task to facilitate learning and sim-to-real transfer. Notably, it achieves inference in a single feed-forward pass without iterative optimization. Our approach offers a 12-time speed increase with state-of-the-art accuracy, enabling real-time holistic robot pose estimation for the first time. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Oliverbansk/Holistic-Robot-Pose-Estimation.
FuncGrasp: Learning Object-Centric Neural Grasp Functions from Single Annotated Example Object
Authors: Hanzhi Chen, Binbin Xu, Stefan Leutenegger
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

We present FuncGrasp, a framework that can infer dense yet reliable grasp configurations for unseen objects using one annotated object and single-view RGB-D observation via categorical priors. Unlike previous works that only transfer a set of grasp poses, FuncGrasp aims to transfer infinite configurations parameterized by an object-centric continuous grasp function across varying instances. To ease the transfer process, we propose Neural Surface Grasping Fields (NSGF), an effective neural representation defined on the surface to densely encode grasp configurations. Further, we exploit function-to-function transfer using sphere primitives to establish semantically meaningful categorical correspondences, which are learned in an unsupervised fashion without any expert knowledge. We showcase the effectiveness through extensive experiments in both simulators and the real world. Remarkably, our framework significantly outperforms several strong baseline methods in terms of density and reliability for generated grasps.
An Optimization-based Baseline for Rigid 2D/3D Registration Applied to Spine Surgical Navigation Using CMA-ES
Authors: Minheng Chen, Tonglong Li, Zhirun Zhang, Youyong Kong
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

A robust and efficient optimization-based 2D/3D registration framework is crucial for the navigation system of orthopedic surgical robots. It can provide precise position information of surgical instruments and implants during surgery. While artificial intelligence technology has advanced rapidly in recent years, traditional optimization-based registration methods remain indispensable in the field of 2D/3D registration.he exceptional precision of this method enables it to be considered as a post-processing step of the learning-based methods, thereby offering a reliable assurance for registration. In this paper, we present a coarse-to-fine registration framework based on the CMA-ES algorithm. We conducted intensive testing of our method using data from different parts of the spine. The results shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework on real orthopedic spine surgery clinical data. This work can be viewed as an additional extension that complements the optimization-based methods employed in our previous studies.
Learning pseudo-contractive denoisers for inverse problems
Authors: Deliang Wei, Peng Chen, Fang Li
Date: 2024-02-08 00:00:00

Deep denoisers have shown excellent performance in solving inverse problems in signal and image processing. In order to guarantee the convergence, the denoiser needs to satisfy some Lipschitz conditions like non-expansiveness. However, enforcing such constraints inevitably compromises recovery performance. This paper introduces a novel training strategy that enforces a weaker constraint on the deep denoiser called pseudo-contractiveness. By studying the spectrum of the Jacobian matrix, relationships between different denoiser assumptions are revealed. Effective algorithms based on gradient descent and Ishikawa process are derived, and further assumptions of strict pseudo-contractiveness yield efficient algorithms using half-quadratic splitting and forward-backward splitting. The proposed algorithms theoretically converge strongly to a fixed point. A training strategy based on holomorphic transformation and functional calculi is proposed to enforce the pseudo-contractive denoiser assumption. Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performance of the pseudo-contractive denoiser compared to related denoisers. The proposed methods are competitive in terms of visual effects and quantitative values.