pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mip-NeRF RGB-D: Depth Assisted Fast Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Arnab Dey, Yassine Ahmine, Andrew I. Comport
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Neural scene representations, such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), are based on training a multilayer perceptron (MLP) using a set of color images with known poses. An increasing number of devices now produce RGB-D(color + depth) information, which has been shown to be very important for a wide range of tasks. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate what improvements can be made to these promising implicit representations by incorporating depth information with the color images. In particular, the recently proposed Mip-NeRF approach, which uses conical frustums instead of rays for volume rendering, allows one to account for the varying area of a pixel with distance from the camera center. The proposed method additionally models depth uncertainty. This allows to address major limitations of NeRF-based approaches including improving the accuracy of geometry, reduced artifacts, faster training time, and shortened prediction time. Experiments are performed on well-known benchmark scenes, and comparisons show improved accuracy in scene geometry and photometric reconstruction, while reducing the training time by 3 - 5 times.
Physically-Based Editing of Indoor Scene Lighting from a Single Image
Authors: Zhengqin Li, Jia Shi, Sai Bi, Rui Zhu, Kalyan Sunkavalli, Miloš Hašan, Zexiang Xu, Ravi Ramamoorthi, Manmohan Chandraker
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inverse Rendering, Lighting Estimation, Neural Rendering

We present a method to edit complex indoor lighting from a single image with its predicted depth and light source segmentation masks. This is an extremely challenging problem that requires modeling complex light transport, and disentangling HDR lighting from material and geometry with only a partial LDR observation of the scene. We tackle this problem using two novel components: 1) a holistic scene reconstruction method that estimates scene reflectance and parametric 3D lighting, and 2) a neural rendering framework that re-renders the scene from our predictions. We use physically-based indoor light representations that allow for intuitive editing, and infer both visible and invisible light sources. Our neural rendering framework combines physically-based direct illumination and shadow rendering with deep networks to approximate global illumination. It can capture challenging lighting effects, such as soft shadows, directional lighting, specular materials, and interreflections. Previous single image inverse rendering methods usually entangle scene lighting and geometry and only support applications like object insertion. Instead, by combining parametric 3D lighting estimation with neural scene rendering, we demonstrate the first automatic method to achieve full scene relighting, including light source insertion, removal, and replacement, from a single image. All source code and data will be publicly released.
On Demographic Bias in Fingerprint Recognition
Authors: Akash Godbole, Steven A. Grosz, Karthik Nandakumar, Anil K. Jain
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00

Fingerprint recognition systems have been deployed globally in numerous applications including personal devices, forensics, law enforcement, banking, and national identity systems. For these systems to be socially acceptable and trustworthy, it is critical that they perform equally well across different demographic groups. In this work, we propose a formal statistical framework to test for the existence of bias (demographic differentials) in fingerprint recognition across four major demographic groups (white male, white female, black male, and black female) for two state-of-the-art (SOTA) fingerprint matchers operating in verification and identification modes. Experiments on two different fingerprint databases (with 15,468 and 1,014 subjects) show that demographic differentials in SOTA fingerprint recognition systems decrease as the matcher accuracy increases and any small bias that may be evident is likely due to certain outlier, low-quality fingerprint images.
A Sub-pixel Accurate Quantification of Joint Space Narrowing Progression in Rheumatoid Arthritis
Authors: Yafei Ou, Prasoon Ambalathankandy, Ryunosuke Furuya, Seiya Kawada, Tianyu Zeng, Yujie An, Tamotsu Kamishima, Kenichi Tamura, Masayuki Ikebe
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a chronic autoimmune disease that primarily affects peripheral synovial joints, like fingers, wrist and feet. Radiology plays a critical role in the diagnosis and monitoring of RA. Limited by the current spatial resolution of radiographic imaging, joint space narrowing (JSN) progression of RA with the same reason above can be less than one pixel per year with universal spatial resolution. Insensitive monitoring of JSN can hinder the radiologist/rheumatologist from making a proper and timely clinical judgment. In this paper, we propose a novel and sensitive method that we call partial image phase-only correlation which aims to automatically quantify JSN progression in the early stages of RA. The majority of the current literature utilizes the mean error, root-mean-square deviation and standard deviation to report the accuracy at pixel level. Our work measures JSN progression between a baseline and its follow-up finger joint images by using the phase spectrum in the frequency domain. Using this study, the mean error can be reduced to 0.0130mm when applied to phantom radiographs with ground truth, and 0.0519mm standard deviation for clinical radiography. With its sub-pixel accuracy far beyond manual measurement, we are optimistic that our work is promising for automatically quantifying JSN progression.
Support-set based Multi-modal Representation Enhancement for Video Captioning
Authors: Xiaoya Chen, Jingkuan Song, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Captioning

Video captioning is a challenging task that necessitates a thorough comprehension of visual scenes. Existing methods follow a typical one-to-one mapping, which concentrates on a limited sample space while ignoring the intrinsic semantic associations between samples, resulting in rigid and uninformative expressions. To address this issue, we propose a novel and flexible framework, namely Support-set based Multi-modal Representation Enhancement (SMRE) model, to mine rich information in a semantic subspace shared between samples. Specifically, we propose a Support-set Construction (SC) module to construct a support-set to learn underlying connections between samples and obtain semantic-related visual elements. During this process, we design a Semantic Space Transformation (SST) module to constrain relative distance and administrate multi-modal interactions in a self-supervised way. Extensive experiments on MSVD and MSR-VTT datasets demonstrate that our SMRE achieves state-of-the-art performance.
3DConvCaps: 3DUnet with Convolutional Capsule Encoder for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Minh Tran, Viet-Khoa Vo-Ho, Ngan T. H. Le
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Hippocampus, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved promising results in medical image segmentation. However, CNNs require lots of training data and are incapable of handling pose and deformation of objects. Furthermore, their pooling layers tend to discard important information such as positions as well as CNNs are sensitive to rotation and affine transformation. Capsule network is a recent new architecture that has achieved better robustness in part-whole representation learning by replacing pooling layers with dynamic routing and convolutional strides, which has shown potential results on popular tasks such as digit classification and object segmentation. In this paper, we propose a 3D encoder-decoder network with Convolutional Capsule Encoder (called 3DConvCaps) to learn lower-level features (short-range attention) with convolutional layers while modeling the higher-level features (long-range dependence) with capsule layers. Our experiments on multiple datasets including iSeg-2017, Hippocampus, and Cardiac demonstrate that our 3D 3DConvCaps network considerably outperforms previous capsule networks and 3D-UNets. We further conduct ablation studies of network efficiency and segmentation performance under various configurations of convolution layers and capsule layers at both contracting and expanding paths.
Free Lunch for Surgical Video Understanding by Distilling Self-Supervisions
Authors: Xinpeng Ding, Ziwei Liu, Xiaomeng Li
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Surgical phase recognition, Video Understanding

Self-supervised learning has witnessed great progress in vision and NLP; recently, it also attracted much attention to various medical imaging modalities such as X-ray, CT, and MRI. Existing methods mostly focus on building new pretext self-supervision tasks such as reconstruction, orientation, and masking identification according to the properties of medical images. However, the publicly available self-supervision models are not fully exploited. In this paper, we present a powerful yet efficient self-supervision framework for surgical video understanding. Our key insight is to distill knowledge from publicly available models trained on large generic datasets4 to facilitate the self-supervised learning of surgical videos. To this end, we first introduce a semantic-preserving training scheme to obtain our teacher model, which not only contains semantics from the publicly available models, but also can produce accurate knowledge for surgical data. Besides training with only contrastive learning, we also introduce a distillation objective to transfer the rich learned information from the teacher model to self-supervised learning on surgical data. Extensive experiments on two surgical phase recognition benchmarks show that our framework can significantly improve the performance of existing self-supervised learning methods. Notably, our framework demonstrates a compelling advantage under a low-data regime. Our code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/DistillingSelf.
Training Vision-Language Transformers from Captions
Authors: Liangke Gui, Yingshan Chang, Qiuyuan Huang, Subhojit Som, Alex Hauptmann, Jianfeng Gao, Yonatan Bisk
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00

Vision-Language Transformers can be learned without low-level human labels (e.g. class labels, bounding boxes, etc). Existing work, whether explicitly utilizing bounding boxes or patches, assumes that the visual backbone must first be trained on ImageNet class prediction before being integrated into a multimodal linguistic pipeline. We show that this is not necessary and introduce a new model Vision-Language from Captions (VLC) built on top of Masked Auto-Encoders that does not require this supervision. In fact, in a head-to-head comparison between ViLT, the current state-of-the-art patch-based vision-language transformer which is pretrained with supervised object classification, and our model, VLC, we find that our approach 1. outperforms ViLT on standard benchmarks, 2. provides more interpretable and intuitive patch visualizations, and 3. is competitive with many larger models that utilize ROIs trained on annotated bounding-boxes.
Bayesian Convolutional Neural Networks for Limited Data Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Image Classification
Authors: Mohammad Joshaghani, Amirabbas Davari, Faezeh Nejati Hatamian, Andreas Maier, Christian Riess
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Remote Sensing Image Classification

Employing deep neural networks for Hyperspectral remote sensing (HSRS) image classification is a challenging task. HSRS images have high dimensionality and a large number of channels with substantial redundancy between channels. In addition, the training data for classifying HSRS images is limited and the amount of available training data is much smaller compared to other classification tasks. These factors complicate the training process of deep neural networks with many parameters and cause them to not perform well even compared to conventional models. Moreover, convolutional neural networks produce over-confident predictions, which is highly undesirable considering the aforementioned problem. In this work, we use for HSRS image classification a special class of deep neural networks, namely a Bayesian neural network (BNN). To the extent of our knowledge, this is the first time that BNNs are used in HSRS image classification. BNNs inherently provide a measure for uncertainty. We perform extensive experiments on the Pavia Centre, Salinas, and Botswana datasets. We show that a BNN outperforms a standard convolutional neural network (CNN) and an off-the-shelf Random Forest (RF). Further experiments underline that the BNN is more stable and robust to model pruning, and that the uncertainty is higher for samples with higher expected prediction error.
Computing the ensemble spread from deterministic weather predictions using conditional generative adversarial networks
Authors: Rüdiger Brecht, Alex Bihlo
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Prediction, Weather Forecasting

Ensemble prediction systems are an invaluable tool for weather forecasting. Practically, ensemble predictions are obtained by running several perturbations of the deterministic control forecast. However, ensemble prediction is associated with a high computational cost and often involves statistical post-processing steps to improve its quality. Here we propose to use deep-learning-based algorithms to learn the statistical properties of an ensemble prediction system, the ensemble spread, given only the deterministic control forecast. Thus, once trained, the costly ensemble prediction system will not be needed anymore to obtain future ensemble forecasts, and the statistical properties of the ensemble can be derived from a single deterministic forecast. We adapt the classical pix2pix architecture to a three-dimensional model and also experiment with a shared latent space encoder-decoder model, and train them against several years of operational (ensemble) weather forecasts for the 500 hPa geopotential height. The results demonstrate that the trained models indeed allow obtaining a highly accurate ensemble spread from the control forecast only.
Learning Rate Curriculum
Authors: Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2022-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Classification, QNLI, RTE, Speech Emotion Recognition

Most curriculum learning methods require an approach to sort the data samples by difficulty, which is often cumbersome to perform. In this work, we propose a novel curriculum learning approach termed Learning Rate Curriculum (LeRaC), which leverages the use of a different learning rate for each layer of a neural network to create a data-agnostic curriculum during the initial training epochs. More specifically, LeRaC assigns higher learning rates to neural layers closer to the input, gradually decreasing the learning rates as the layers are placed farther away from the input. The learning rates increase at various paces during the first training iterations, until they all reach the same value. From this point on, the neural model is trained as usual. This creates a model-level curriculum learning strategy that does not require sorting the examples by difficulty and is compatible with any neural network, generating higher performance levels regardless of the architecture. We conduct comprehensive experiments on 12 data sets from the computer vision (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, ImageNet-200, Food-101, UTKFace, PASCAL VOC), language (BoolQ, QNLI, RTE) and audio (ESC-50, CREMA-D) domains, considering various convolutional (ResNet-18, Wide-ResNet-50, DenseNet-121, YOLOv5), recurrent (LSTM) and transformer (CvT, BERT, SepTr) architectures. We compare our approach with the conventional training regime, as well as with Curriculum by Smoothing (CBS), a state-of-the-art data-agnostic curriculum learning approach. Unlike CBS, our performance improvements over the standard training regime are consistent across all data sets and models. Furthermore, we significantly surpass CBS in terms of training time (there is no additional cost over the standard training regime for LeRaC). Our code is freely available at: https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/LeRaC.
Exploring the Adjugate Matrix Approach to Quaternion Pose Extraction
Authors: Andrew J. Hanson, Sonya M. Hanson
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Point Cloud Matching, Pose Estimation

Quaternions are important for a wide variety of rotation-related problems in computer graphics, machine vision, and robotics. We study the nontrivial geometry of the relationship between quaternions and rotation matrices by exploiting the adjugate matrix of the characteristic equation of a related eigenvalue problem to obtain the manifold of the space of a quaternion eigenvector. We argue that quaternions parameterized by their corresponding rotation matrices cannot be expressed, for example, in machine learning tasks, as single-valued functions: the quaternion solution must instead be treated as a manifold, with different algebraic solutions for each of several single-valued sectors represented by the adjugate matrix. We conclude with novel constructions exploiting the quaternion adjugate variables to revisit several classic pose estimation applications: 2D point-cloud matching, 2D point-cloud-to-projection matching, 3D point-cloud matching, 3D orthographic point-cloud-to-projection matching, and 3D perspective point-cloud-to-projection matching. We find an exact solution to the 3D orthographic least squares pose extraction problem, and apply it successfully also to the perspective pose extraction problem with results that improve on existing methods.
Dark solitons in Bose-Einstein condensates: a dataset for many-body physics research
Authors: Amilson R. Fritsch, Shangjie Guo, Sophia M. Koh, I. B. Spielman, Justyna P. Zwolak
Date: 2022-05-17 00:00:00

We establish a dataset of over $1.6\times10^4$ experimental images of Bose--Einstein condensates containing solitonic excitations to enable machine learning (ML) for many-body physics research. About $33~\%$ of this dataset has manually assigned and carefully curated labels. The remainder is automatically labeled using SolDet -- an implementation of a physics-informed ML data analysis framework -- consisting of a convolutional-neural-network-based classifier and OD as well as a statistically motivated physics-informed classifier and a quality metric. This technical note constitutes the definitive reference of the dataset, providing an opportunity for the data science community to develop more sophisticated analysis tools, to further understand nonlinear many-body physics, and even advance cold atom experiments.
Understanding Gradient Descent on Edge of Stability in Deep Learning
Authors: Sanjeev Arora, Zhiyuan Li, Abhishek Panigrahi
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Deep learning experiments by Cohen et al. [2021] using deterministic Gradient Descent (GD) revealed an Edge of Stability (EoS) phase when learning rate (LR) and sharpness (i.e., the largest eigenvalue of Hessian) no longer behave as in traditional optimization. Sharpness stabilizes around $2/$LR and loss goes up and down across iterations, yet still with an overall downward trend. The current paper mathematically analyzes a new mechanism of implicit regularization in the EoS phase, whereby GD updates due to non-smooth loss landscape turn out to evolve along some deterministic flow on the manifold of minimum loss. This is in contrast to many previous results about implicit bias either relying on infinitesimal updates or noise in gradient. Formally, for any smooth function $L$ with certain regularity condition, this effect is demonstrated for (1) Normalized GD, i.e., GD with a varying LR $\eta_t =\frac{\eta}{\| \nabla L(x(t)) \|}$ and loss $L$; (2) GD with constant LR and loss $\sqrt{L- \min_x L(x)}$. Both provably enter the Edge of Stability, with the associated flow on the manifold minimizing $\lambda_{1}(\nabla^2 L)$. The above theoretical results have been corroborated by an experimental study.
Overcoming Language Disparity in Online Content Classification with Multimodal Learning
Authors: Gaurav Verma, Rohit Mujumdar, Zijie J. Wang, Munmun De Choudhury, Srijan Kumar
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Text Detection

Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have revolutionized the way researchers and practitioners address crucial societal problems. Large language models are now the standard to develop state-of-the-art solutions for text detection and classification tasks. However, the development of advanced computational techniques and resources is disproportionately focused on the English language, sidelining a majority of the languages spoken globally. While existing research has developed better multilingual and monolingual language models to bridge this language disparity between English and non-English languages, we explore the promise of incorporating the information contained in images via multimodal machine learning. Our comparative analyses on three detection tasks focusing on crisis information, fake news, and emotion recognition, as well as five high-resource non-English languages, demonstrate that: (a) detection frameworks based on pre-trained large language models like BERT and multilingual-BERT systematically perform better on the English language compared against non-English languages, and (b) including images via multimodal learning bridges this performance gap. We situate our findings with respect to existing work on the pitfalls of large language models, and discuss their theoretical and practical implications. Resources for this paper are available at https://multimodality-language-disparity.github.io/.
Foundation Posteriors for Approximate Probabilistic Inference
Authors: Mike Wu, Noah Goodman
Date: 2022-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Variational Inference

Probabilistic programs provide an expressive representation language for generative models. Given a probabilistic program, we are interested in the task of posterior inference: estimating a latent variable given a set of observed variables. Existing techniques for inference in probabilistic programs often require choosing many hyper-parameters, are computationally expensive, and/or only work for restricted classes of programs. Here we formulate inference as masked language modeling: given a program, we generate a supervised dataset of variables and assignments, and randomly mask a subset of the assignments. We then train a neural network to unmask the random values, defining an approximate posterior distribution. By optimizing a single neural network across a range of programs we amortize the cost of training, yielding a "foundation" posterior able to do zero-shot inference for new programs. The foundation posterior can also be fine-tuned for a particular program and dataset by optimizing a variational inference objective. We show the efficacy of the approach, zero-shot and fine-tuned, on a benchmark of STAN programs.