pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TinyCLIP: CLIP Distillation via Affinity Mimicking and Weight Inheritance
Authors: Kan Wu, Houwen Peng, Zhenghong Zhou, Bin Xiao, Mengchen Liu, Lu Yuan, Hong Xuan, Michael Valenzuela, Xi, Chen, Xinggang Wang, Hongyang Chao, Han Hu
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

In this paper, we propose a novel cross-modal distillation method, called TinyCLIP, for large-scale language-image pre-trained models. The method introduces two core techniques: affinity mimicking and weight inheritance. Affinity mimicking explores the interaction between modalities during distillation, enabling student models to mimic teachers' behavior of learning cross-modal feature alignment in a visual-linguistic affinity space. Weight inheritance transmits the pre-trained weights from the teacher models to their student counterparts to improve distillation efficiency. Moreover, we extend the method into a multi-stage progressive distillation to mitigate the loss of informative weights during extreme compression. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of TinyCLIP, showing that it can reduce the size of the pre-trained CLIP ViT-B/32 by 50%, while maintaining comparable zero-shot performance. While aiming for comparable performance, distillation with weight inheritance can speed up the training by 1.4 - 7.8 $\times$ compared to training from scratch. Moreover, our TinyCLIP ViT-8M/16, trained on YFCC-15M, achieves an impressive zero-shot top-1 accuracy of 41.1% on ImageNet, surpassing the original CLIP ViT-B/16 by 3.5% while utilizing only 8.9% parameters. Finally, we demonstrate the good transferability of TinyCLIP in various downstream tasks. Code and models will be open-sourced at https://aka.ms/tinyclip.
TalkNCE: Improving Active Speaker Detection with Talk-Aware Contrastive Learning
Authors: Chaeyoung Jung, Suyeon Lee, Kihyun Nam, Kyeongha Rho, You Jin Kim, Youngjoon Jang, Joon Son Chung
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection, Audio-Visual Active Speaker Detection, Contrastive Learning

The goal of this work is Active Speaker Detection (ASD), a task to determine whether a person is speaking or not in a series of video frames. Previous works have dealt with the task by exploring network architectures while learning effective representations has been less explored. In this work, we propose TalkNCE, a novel talk-aware contrastive loss. The loss is only applied to part of the full segments where a person on the screen is actually speaking. This encourages the model to learn effective representations through the natural correspondence of speech and facial movements. Our loss can be jointly optimized with the existing objectives for training ASD models without the need for additional supervision or training data. The experiments demonstrate that our loss can be easily integrated into the existing ASD frameworks, improving their performance. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on AVA-ActiveSpeaker and ASW datasets.
SlowFast Network for Continuous Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Junseok Ahn, Youngjoon Jang, Joon Son Chung
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition

The objective of this work is the effective extraction of spatial and dynamic features for Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR). To accomplish this, we utilise a two-pathway SlowFast network, where each pathway operates at distinct temporal resolutions to separately capture spatial (hand shapes, facial expressions) and dynamic (movements) information. In addition, we introduce two distinct feature fusion methods, carefully designed for the characteristics of CSLR: (1) Bi-directional Feature Fusion (BFF), which facilitates the transfer of dynamic semantics into spatial semantics and vice versa; and (2) Pathway Feature Enhancement (PFE), which enriches dynamic and spatial representations through auxiliary subnetworks, while avoiding the need for extra inference time. As a result, our model further strengthens spatial and dynamic representations in parallel. We demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art performance on popular CSLR datasets, including PHOENIX14, PHOENIX14-T, and CSL-Daily.
PanoVOS: Bridging Non-panoramic and Panoramic Views with Transformer for Video Segmentation
Authors: Shilin Yan, Xiaohao Xu, Renrui Zhang, Lingyi Hong, Wenchao Chen, Wenqiang Zhang, Wei zhang
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Panoramic videos contain richer spatial information and have attracted tremendous amounts of attention due to their exceptional experience in some fields such as autonomous driving and virtual reality. However, existing datasets for video segmentation only focus on conventional planar images. To address the challenge, in this paper, we present a panoramic video dataset, PanoVOS. The dataset provides 150 videos with high video resolutions and diverse motions. To quantify the domain gap between 2D planar videos and panoramic videos, we evaluate 15 off-the-shelf video object segmentation (VOS) models on PanoVOS. Through error analysis, we found that all of them fail to tackle pixel-level content discontinues of panoramic videos. Thus, we present a Panoramic Space Consistency Transformer (PSCFormer), which can effectively utilize the semantic boundary information of the previous frame for pixel-level matching with the current frame. Extensive experiments demonstrate that compared with the previous SOTA models, our PSCFormer network exhibits a great advantage in terms of segmentation results under the panoramic setting. Our dataset poses new challenges in panoramic VOS and we hope that our PanoVOS can advance the development of panoramic segmentation/tracking.
Text-Guided Vector Graphics Customization
Authors: Peiying Zhang, Nanxuan Zhao, Jing Liao
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Vector Graphics

Vector graphics are widely used in digital art and valued by designers for their scalability and layer-wise topological properties. However, the creation and editing of vector graphics necessitate creativity and design expertise, leading to a time-consuming process. In this paper, we propose a novel pipeline that generates high-quality customized vector graphics based on textual prompts while preserving the properties and layer-wise information of a given exemplar SVG. Our method harnesses the capabilities of large pre-trained text-to-image models. By fine-tuning the cross-attention layers of the model, we generate customized raster images guided by textual prompts. To initialize the SVG, we introduce a semantic-based path alignment method that preserves and transforms crucial paths from the exemplar SVG. Additionally, we optimize path parameters using both image-level and vector-level losses, ensuring smooth shape deformation while aligning with the customized raster image. We extensively evaluate our method using multiple metrics from vector-level, image-level, and text-level perspectives. The evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline in generating diverse customizations of vector graphics with exceptional quality. The project page is https://intchous.github.io/SVGCustomization.
Adaptive Input-image Normalization for Solving the Mode Collapse Problem in GAN-based X-ray Images
Authors: Muhammad Muneeb Saad, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Ruairi O'Reilly
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity

Biomedical image datasets can be imbalanced due to the rarity of targeted diseases. Generative Adversarial Networks play a key role in addressing this imbalance by enabling the generation of synthetic images to augment datasets. It is important to generate synthetic images that incorporate a diverse range of features to accurately represent the distribution of features present in the training imagery. Furthermore, the absence of diverse features in synthetic images can degrade the performance of machine learning classifiers. The mode collapse problem impacts Generative Adversarial Networks' capacity to generate diversified images. Mode collapse comes in two varieties: intra-class and inter-class. In this paper, both varieties of the mode collapse problem are investigated, and their subsequent impact on the diversity of synthetic X-ray images is evaluated. This work contributes an empirical demonstration of the benefits of integrating the adaptive input-image normalization with the Deep Convolutional GAN and Auxiliary Classifier GAN to alleviate the mode collapse problems. Synthetically generated images are utilized for data augmentation and training a Vision Transformer model. The classification performance of the model is evaluated using accuracy, recall, and precision scores. Results demonstrate that the DCGAN and the ACGAN with adaptive input-image normalization outperform the DCGAN and ACGAN with un-normalized X-ray images as evidenced by the superior diversity scores and classification scores.
Can We Reliably Improve the Robustness to Image Acquisition of Remote Sensing of PV Systems?
Authors: Gabriel Kasmi, Laurent Dubus, Yves-Marie Saint-Drenan, Philippe Blanc
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00

Photovoltaic (PV) energy is crucial for the decarbonization of energy systems. Due to the lack of centralized data, remote sensing of rooftop PV installations is the best option to monitor the evolution of the rooftop PV installed fleet at a regional scale. However, current techniques lack reliability and are notably sensitive to shifts in the acquisition conditions. To overcome this, we leverage the wavelet scale attribution method (WCAM), which decomposes a model's prediction in the space-scale domain. The WCAM enables us to assess on which scales the representation of a PV model rests and provides insights to derive methods that improve the robustness to acquisition conditions, thus increasing trust in deep learning systems to encourage their use for the safe integration of clean energy in electric systems.
Brain Tumor Detection Using Deep Learning Approaches
Authors: Razia Sultana Misu
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

Brain tumors are collections of abnormal cells that can develop into masses or clusters. Because they have the potential to infiltrate other tissues, they pose a risk to the patient. The main imaging technique used, MRI, may be able to identify a brain tumor with accuracy. The fast development of Deep Learning methods for use in computer vision applications has been facilitated by a vast amount of training data and improvements in model construction that offer better approximations in a supervised setting. The need for these approaches has been the main driver of this expansion. Deep learning methods have shown promise in improving the precision of brain tumor detection and classification using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The study on the use of deep learning techniques, especially ResNet50, for brain tumor identification is presented in this abstract. As a result, this study investigates the possibility of automating the detection procedure using deep learning techniques. In this study, I utilized five transfer learning models which are VGG16, VGG19, DenseNet121, ResNet50 and YOLO V4 where ResNet50 provide the best or highest accuracy 99.54%. The goal of the study is to guide researchers and medical professionals toward powerful brain tumor detecting systems by employing deep learning approaches by way of this evaluation and analysis.
SG-Bot: Object Rearrangement via Coarse-to-Fine Robotic Imagination on Scene Graphs
Authors: Guangyao Zhai, Xiaoni Cai, Dianye Huang, Yan Di, Fabian Manhardt, Federico Tombari, Nassir Navab, Benjamin Busam
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Rearrangement

Object rearrangement is pivotal in robotic-environment interactions, representing a significant capability in embodied AI. In this paper, we present SG-Bot, a novel rearrangement framework that utilizes a coarse-to-fine scheme with a scene graph as the scene representation. Unlike previous methods that rely on either known goal priors or zero-shot large models, SG-Bot exemplifies lightweight, real-time, and user-controllable characteristics, seamlessly blending the consideration of commonsense knowledge with automatic generation capabilities. SG-Bot employs a three-fold procedure--observation, imagination, and execution--to adeptly address the task. Initially, objects are discerned and extracted from a cluttered scene during the observation. These objects are first coarsely organized and depicted within a scene graph, guided by either commonsense or user-defined criteria. Then, this scene graph subsequently informs a generative model, which forms a fine-grained goal scene considering the shape information from the initial scene and object semantics. Finally, for execution, the initial and envisioned goal scenes are matched to formulate robotic action policies. Experimental results demonstrate that SG-Bot outperforms competitors by a large margin.
ORTexME: Occlusion-Robust Human Shape and Pose via Temporal Average Texture and Mesh Encoding
Authors: Yu Cheng, Bo wang, Robby T. Tan
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Neural Rendering, Novel View Synthesis, Pose Estimation

In 3D human shape and pose estimation from a monocular video, models trained with limited labeled data cannot generalize well to videos with occlusion, which is common in the wild videos. The recent human neural rendering approaches focusing on novel view synthesis initialized by the off-the-shelf human shape and pose methods have the potential to correct the initial human shape. However, the existing methods have some drawbacks such as, erroneous in handling occlusion, sensitive to inaccurate human segmentation, and ineffective loss computation due to the non-regularized opacity field. To address these problems, we introduce ORTexME, an occlusion-robust temporal method that utilizes temporal information from the input video to better regularize the occluded body parts. While our ORTexME is based on NeRF, to determine the reliable regions for the NeRF ray sampling, we utilize our novel average texture learning approach to learn the average appearance of a person, and to infer a mask based on the average texture. In addition, to guide the opacity-field updates in NeRF to suppress blur and noise, we propose the use of human body mesh. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves significant improvement on the challenging multi-person 3DPW dataset, where our method achieves 1.8 P-MPJPE error reduction. The SOTA rendering-based methods fail and enlarge the error up to 5.6 on the same dataset.
Autoregressive Sign Language Production: A Gloss-Free Approach with Discrete Representations
Authors: Eui Jun Hwang, Huije Lee, Jong C. Park
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Sign Language Production, Translation

Gloss-free Sign Language Production (SLP) offers a direct translation of spoken language sentences into sign language, bypassing the need for gloss intermediaries. This paper presents the Sign language Vector Quantization Network, a novel approach to SLP that leverages Vector Quantization to derive discrete representations from sign pose sequences. Our method, rooted in both manual and non-manual elements of signing, supports advanced decoding methods and integrates latent-level alignment for enhanced linguistic coherence. Through comprehensive evaluations, we demonstrate superior performance of our method over prior SLP methods and highlight the reliability of Back-Translation and Fr\'echet Gesture Distance as evaluation metrics.
SANPO: A Scene Understanding, Accessibility and Human Navigation Dataset
Authors: Sagar M. Waghmare, Kimberly Wilber, Dave Hawkey, Xuan Yang, Matthew Wilson, Stephanie Debats, Cattalyya Nuengsigkapian, Astuti Sharma, Lars Pandikow, Huisheng Wang, Hartwig Adam, Mikhail Sirotenko
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Depth Estimation, Domain Adaptation, Panoptic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Video Panoptic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Vision is essential for human navigation. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 43.3 million people were blind in 2020, and this number is projected to reach 61 million by 2050. Modern scene understanding models could empower these people by assisting them with navigation, obstacle avoidance and visual recognition capabilities. The research community needs high quality datasets for both training and evaluation to build these systems. While datasets for autonomous vehicles are abundant, there is a critical gap in datasets tailored for outdoor human navigation. This gap poses a major obstacle to the development of computer vision based Assistive Technologies. To overcome this obstacle, we present SANPO, a large-scale egocentric video dataset designed for dense prediction in outdoor human navigation environments. SANPO contains 701 stereo videos of 30+ seconds captured in diverse real-world outdoor environments across four geographic locations in the USA. Every frame has a high resolution depth map and 112K frames were annotated with temporally consistent dense video panoptic segmentation labels. The dataset also includes 1961 high-quality synthetic videos with pixel accurate depth and panoptic segmentation annotations to balance the noisy real world annotations with the high precision synthetic annotations. SANPO is already publicly available and is being used by mobile applications like Project Guideline to train mobile models that help low-vision users go running outdoors independently. To preserve anonymization during peer review, we will provide a link to our dataset upon acceptance. SANPO is available here: https://google-research-datasets.github.io/sanpo_dataset/
Information Forensics and Security: A quarter-century-long journey
Authors: Mauro Barni, Patrizio Campisi, Edward J. Delp, Gwenael Doërr, Jessica Fridrich, Nasir Memon, Fernando Pérez-González, Anderson Rocha, Luisa Verdoliva, Min Wu
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00

Information Forensics and Security (IFS) is an active R&D area whose goal is to ensure that people use devices, data, and intellectual properties for authorized purposes and to facilitate the gathering of solid evidence to hold perpetrators accountable. For over a quarter century since the 1990s, the IFS research area has grown tremendously to address the societal needs of the digital information era. The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has emerged as an important hub and leader in this area, and the article below celebrates some landmark technical contributions. In particular, we highlight the major technological advances on some selected focus areas in the field developed in the last 25 years from the research community and present future trends.
Vulnerability of 3D Face Recognition Systems to Morphing Attacks
Authors: Sanjeet Vardam, Luuk Spreeuwers
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Image Morphing

In recent years face recognition systems have been brought to the mainstream due to development in hardware and software. Consistent efforts are being made to make them better and more secure. This has also brought developments in 3D face recognition systems at a rapid pace. These 3DFR systems are expected to overcome certain vulnerabilities of 2DFR systems. One such problem that the domain of 2DFR systems face is face image morphing. A substantial amount of research is being done for generation of high quality face morphs along with detection of attacks from these morphs. Comparatively the understanding of vulnerability of 3DFR systems against 3D face morphs is less. But at the same time an expectation is set from 3DFR systems to be more robust against such attacks. This paper attempts to research and gain more information on this matter. The paper describes a couple of methods that can be used to generate 3D face morphs. The face morphs that are generated using this method are then compared to the contributing faces to obtain similarity scores. The highest MMPMR is obtained around 40% with RMMR of 41.76% when 3DFRS are attacked with look-a-like morphs.
AutoPET Challenge 2023: Sliding Window-based Optimization of U-Net
Authors: Matthias Hadlich, Zdravko Marinov, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Tumor segmentation in medical imaging is crucial and relies on precise delineation. Fluorodeoxyglucose Positron-Emission Tomography (FDG-PET) is widely used in clinical practice to detect metabolically active tumors. However, FDG-PET scans may misinterpret irregular glucose consumption in healthy or benign tissues as cancer. Combining PET with Computed Tomography (CT) can enhance tumor segmentation by integrating metabolic and anatomic information. FDG-PET/CT scans are pivotal for cancer staging and reassessment, utilizing radiolabeled fluorodeoxyglucose to highlight metabolically active regions. Accurately distinguishing tumor-specific uptake from physiological uptake in normal tissues is a challenging aspect of precise tumor segmentation. The AutoPET challenge addresses this by providing a dataset of 1014 FDG-PET/CT studies, encouraging advancements in accurate tumor segmentation and analysis within the FDG-PET/CT domain. Code: https://github.com/matt3o/AutoPET2-Submission/
Exploiting CLIP-based Multi-modal Approach for Artwork Classification and Retrieval
Authors: Alberto Baldrati, Marco Bertini, Tiberio Uricchio, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2023-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Given the recent advances in multimodal image pretraining where visual models trained with semantically dense textual supervision tend to have better generalization capabilities than those trained using categorical attributes or through unsupervised techniques, in this work we investigate how recent CLIP model can be applied in several tasks in artwork domain. We perform exhaustive experiments on the NoisyArt dataset which is a dataset of artwork images crawled from public resources on the web. On such dataset CLIP achieves impressive results on (zero-shot) classification and promising results in both artwork-to-artwork and description-to-artwork domain.