pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unsupervised Video Summarization via Iterative Training and Simplified GAN
Authors: Hanqing Li, Diego Klabjan, Jean Utke
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection, Unsupervised Video Summarization, Video Summarization

This paper introduces a new, unsupervised method for automatic video summarization using ideas from generative adversarial networks but eliminating the discriminator, having a simple loss function, and separating training of different parts of the model. An iterative training strategy is also applied by alternately training the reconstructor and the frame selector for multiple iterations. Furthermore, a trainable mask vector is added to the model in summary generation during training and evaluation. The method also includes an unsupervised model selection algorithm. Results from experiments on two public datasets (SumMe and TVSum) and four datasets we created (Soccer, LoL, MLB, and ShortMLB) demonstrate the effectiveness of each component on the model performance, particularly the iterative training strategy. Evaluations and comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods highlight the advantages of the proposed method in performance, stability, and training efficiency.
Combinatorial Hodge Theory in Simplicial Signal Processing -- DAFx2023 Lecture Notes
Authors: Georg Essl
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00

Lecture notes of a tutorial on Combinatorial Hodge Theory in Simplicial Signal Processing held at international conference for digital audio effects (DAFx-23) in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Personalizing Keyword Spotting with Speaker Information
Authors: Beltrán Labrador, Pai Zhu, Guanlong Zhao, Angelo Scorza Scarpati, Quan Wang, Alicia Lozano-Diez, Alex Park, Ignacio López Moreno
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting, Speaker Recognition, Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

Keyword spotting systems often struggle to generalize to a diverse population with various accents and age groups. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that integrates speaker information into keyword spotting using Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), a recent method for learning from multiple sources of information. We explore both Text-Dependent and Text-Independent speaker recognition systems to extract speaker information, and we experiment on extracting this information from both the input audio and pre-enrolled user audio. We evaluate our systems on a diverse dataset and achieve a substantial improvement in keyword detection accuracy, particularly among underrepresented speaker groups. Moreover, our proposed approach only requires a small 1% increase in the number of parameters, with a minimum impact on latency and computational cost, which makes it a practical solution for real-world applications.
DeepInspect: An AI-Powered Defect Detection for Manufacturing Industries
Authors: Arti Kumbhar, Amruta Chougule, Priya Lokhande, Saloni Navaghane, Aditi Burud, Saee Nimbalkar
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection

Utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), our system introduces an innovative approach to defect detection in manufacturing. This technology excels in precisely identifying faults by extracting intricate details from product photographs, utilizing RNNs to detect evolving errors and generating synthetic defect data to bolster the model's robustness and adaptability across various defect scenarios. The project leverages a deep learning framework to automate real-time flaw detection in the manufacturing process. It harnesses extensive datasets of annotated images to discern complex defect patterns. This integrated system seamlessly fits into production workflows, thereby boosting efficiency and elevating product quality. As a result, it reduces waste and operational costs, ultimately enhancing market competitiveness.
Learning Disentangled Speech Representations
Authors: Yusuf Brima, Ulf Krumnack, Simone Pika, Gunther Heidemann
Date: 2023-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Disentanglement, Informativeness, Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning

Disentangled representation learning in speech processing has lagged behind other domains, largely due to the lack of datasets with annotated generative factors for robust evaluation. To address this, we propose SynSpeech, a novel large-scale synthetic speech dataset specifically designed to enable research on disentangled speech representations. SynSpeech includes controlled variations in speaker identity, spoken text, and speaking style, with three dataset versions to support experimentation at different levels of complexity. In this study, we present a comprehensive framework to evaluate disentangled representation learning techniques, applying both linear probing and established supervised disentanglement metrics to assess the modularity, compactness, and informativeness of the representations learned by a state-of-the-art model. Using the RAVE model as a test case, we find that SynSpeech facilitates benchmarking across a range of factors, achieving promising disentanglement of simpler features like gender and speaking style, while highlighting challenges in isolating complex attributes like speaker identity. This benchmark dataset and evaluation framework fills a critical gap, supporting the development of more robust and interpretable speech representation learning methods.
Inertial Guided Uncertainty Estimation of Feature Correspondence in Visual-Inertial Odometry/SLAM
Authors: Seongwook Yoon, Jaehyun Kim, Sanghoon Sull
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Visual Odometry

Visual odometry and Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) has been studied as one of the most important tasks in the areas of computer vision and robotics, to contribute to autonomous navigation and augmented reality systems. In case of feature-based odometry/SLAM, a moving visual sensor observes a set of 3D points from different viewpoints, correspondences between the projected 2D points in each image are usually established by feature tracking and matching. However, since the corresponding point could be erroneous and noisy, reliable uncertainty estimation can improve the accuracy of odometry/SLAM methods. In addition, inertial measurement unit is utilized to aid the visual sensor in terms of Visual-Inertial fusion. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the uncertainty of feature correspondence using an inertial guidance robust to image degradation caused by motion blur, illumination change and occlusion. Modeling a guidance distribution to sample possible correspondence, we fit the distribution to an energy function based on image error, yielding more robust uncertainty than conventional methods. We also demonstrate the feasibility of our approach by incorporating it into one of recent visual-inertial odometry/SLAM algorithms for public datasets.
Unsupervised convolutional neural network fusion approach for change detection in remote sensing images
Authors: Weidong Yan, Pei Yan, Li Cao
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

With the rapid development of deep learning, a variety of change detection methods based on deep learning have emerged in recent years. However, these methods usually require a large number of training samples to train the network model, so it is very expensive. In this paper, we introduce a completely unsupervised shallow convolutional neural network (USCNN) fusion approach for change detection. Firstly, the bi-temporal images are transformed into different feature spaces by using convolution kernels of different sizes to extract multi-scale information of the images. Secondly, the output features of bi-temporal images at the same convolution kernels are subtracted to obtain the corresponding difference images, and the difference feature images at the same scale are fused into one feature image by using 1 * 1 convolution layer. Finally, the output features of different scales are concatenated and a 1 * 1 convolution layer is used to fuse the multi-scale information of the image. The model parameters are obtained by a redesigned sparse function. Our model has three features: the entire training process is conducted in an unsupervised manner, the network architecture is shallow, and the objective function is sparse. Thus, it can be seen as a kind of lightweight network model. Experimental results on four real remote sensing datasets indicate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Image Generation and Learning Strategy for Deep Document Forgery Detection
Authors: Yamato Okamoto, Osada Genki, Iu Yahiro, Rintaro Hasegawa, Peifei Zhu, Hirokatsu Kataoka
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Self-Supervised Learning

In recent years, document processing has flourished and brought numerous benefits. However, there has been a significant rise in reported cases of forged document images. Specifically, recent advancements in deep neural network (DNN) methods for generative tasks may amplify the threat of document forgery. Traditional approaches for forged document images created by prevalent copy-move methods are unsuitable against those created by DNN-based methods, as we have verified. To address this issue, we construct a training dataset of document forgery images, named FD-VIED, by emulating possible attacks, such as text addition, removal, and replacement with recent DNN-methods. Additionally, we introduce an effective pre-training approach through self-supervised learning with both natural images and document images. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approach enhances detection performance.
Improved Topological Preservation in 3D Axon Segmentation and Centerline Detection using Geometric Assessment-driven Topological Smoothing (GATS)
Authors: Nina I. Shamsi, Alex S. Xu, Lars A. Gjesteby, Laura J. Brattain
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Line Detection, Segmentation

Automated axon tracing via fully supervised learning requires large amounts of 3D brain imagery, which is time consuming and laborious to obtain. It also requires expertise. Thus, there is a need for more efficient segmentation and centerline detection techniques to use in conjunction with automated annotation tools. Topology-preserving methods ensure that segmented components maintain geometric connectivity, which is especially meaningful for applications where volumetric data is used, and these methods often make use of morphological thinning algorithms as the thinned outputs can be useful for both segmentation and centerline detection of curvilinear structures. Current morphological thinning approaches used in conjunction with topology-preserving methods are prone to over-thinning and require manual configuration of hyperparameters. We propose an automated approach for morphological smoothing using geometric assessment of the radius of tubular structures in brain microscopy volumes, and apply average pooling to prevent over-thinning. We use this approach to formulate a loss function, which we call Geo-metric Assessment-driven Topological Smoothing loss, or GATS. Our approach increased segmentation and center-line detection evaluation metrics by 2%-5% across multiple datasets, and improved the Betti error rates by 9%. Our ablation study showed that geometric assessment of tubular structures achieved higher segmentation and centerline detection scores, and using average pooling for morphological smoothing in place of thinning algorithms reduced the Betti errors. We observed increased topological preservation during automated annotation of 3D axons volumes from models trained with GATS.
Instruct Me More! Random Prompting for Visual In-Context Learning
Authors: Jiahao Zhang, Bowen Wang, Liangzhi Li, Yuta Nakashima, Hajime Nagahara
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Foreground Segmentation, In-Context Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Large-scale models trained on extensive datasets, have emerged as the preferred approach due to their high generalizability across various tasks. In-context learning (ICL), a popular strategy in natural language processing, uses such models for different tasks by providing instructive prompts but without updating model parameters. This idea is now being explored in computer vision, where an input-output image pair (called an in-context pair) is supplied to the model with a query image as a prompt to exemplify the desired output. The efficacy of visual ICL often depends on the quality of the prompts. We thus introduce a method coined Instruct Me More (InMeMo), which augments in-context pairs with a learnable perturbation (prompt), to explore its potential. Our experiments on mainstream tasks reveal that InMeMo surpasses the current state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, compared to the baseline without learnable prompt, InMeMo boosts mIoU scores by 7.35 and 15.13 for foreground segmentation and single object detection tasks, respectively. Our findings suggest that InMeMo offers a versatile and efficient way to enhance the performance of visual ICL with lightweight training. Code is available at https://github.com/Jackieam/InMeMo.
A Fast Algorithm for Low Rank + Sparse column-wise Compressive Sensing
Authors: Silpa Babu, Namrata Vaswani
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

This paper focuses studies the following low rank + sparse (LR+S) column-wise compressive sensing problem. We aim to recover an $n \times q$ matrix, $\X^* =[ \x_1^*, \x_2^*, \cdots , \x_q^*]$ from $m$ independent linear projections of each of its $q$ columns, given by $\y_k :=\A_k\x_k^*$, $k \in [q]$. Here, $\y_k$ is an $m$-length vector with $m < n$. We assume that the matrix $\X^*$ can be decomposed as $\X^*=\L^*+\S^*$, where $\L^*$ is a low rank matrix of rank $r << \min(n,q)$ and $\S^*$ is a sparse matrix. Each column of $\S$ contains $\rho$ non-zero entries. The matrices $\A_k$ are known and mutually independent for different $k$. To address this recovery problem, we propose a novel fast GD-based solution called AltGDmin-LR+S, which is memory and communication efficient. We numerically evaluate its performance by conducting a detailed simulation-based study.
Random Field Augmentations for Self-Supervised Representation Learning
Authors: Philip Andrew Mansfield, Arash Afkanpour, Warren Richard Morningstar, Karan Singhal
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Self-supervised representation learning is heavily dependent on data augmentations to specify the invariances encoded in representations. Previous work has shown that applying diverse data augmentations is crucial to downstream performance, but augmentation techniques remain under-explored. In this work, we propose a new family of local transformations based on Gaussian random fields to generate image augmentations for self-supervised representation learning. These transformations generalize the well-established affine and color transformations (translation, rotation, color jitter, etc.) and greatly increase the space of augmentations by allowing transformation parameter values to vary from pixel to pixel. The parameters are treated as continuous functions of spatial coordinates, and modeled as independent Gaussian random fields. Empirical results show the effectiveness of the new transformations for self-supervised representation learning. Specifically, we achieve a 1.7% top-1 accuracy improvement over baseline on ImageNet downstream classification, and a 3.6% improvement on out-of-distribution iNaturalist downstream classification. However, due to the flexibility of the new transformations, learned representations are sensitive to hyperparameters. While mild transformations improve representations, we observe that strong transformations can degrade the structure of an image, indicating that balancing the diversity and strength of augmentations is important for improving generalization of learned representations.
Spatio-Temporal Similarity Measure based Multi-Task Learning for Predicting Alzheimer's Disease Progression using MRI Data
Authors: Xulong Wang, Yu Zhang, Menghui Zhou, Tong Liu, Jun Qi, Po Yang
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

Identifying and utilising various biomarkers for tracking Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression have received many recent attentions and enable helping clinicians make the prompt decisions. Traditional progression models focus on extracting morphological biomarkers in regions of interest (ROIs) from MRI/PET images, such as regional average cortical thickness and regional volume. They are effective but ignore the relationships between brain ROIs over time, which would lead to synergistic deterioration. For exploring the synergistic deteriorating relationship between these biomarkers, in this paper, we propose a novel spatio-temporal similarity measure based multi-task learning approach for effectively predicting AD progression and sensitively capturing the critical relationships between biomarkers. Specifically, we firstly define a temporal measure for estimating the magnitude and velocity of biomarker change over time, which indicate a changing trend(temporal). Converting this trend into the vector, we then compare this variability between biomarkers in a unified vector space(spatial). The experimental results show that compared with directly ROI based learning, our proposed method is more effective in predicting disease progression. Our method also enables performing longitudinal stability selection to identify the changing relationships between biomarkers, which play a key role in disease progression. We prove that the synergistic deteriorating biomarkers between cortical volumes or surface areas have a significant effect on the cognitive prediction.
FusionViT: Hierarchical 3D Object Detection via LiDAR-Camera Vision Transformer Fusion
Authors: Xinhao Xiang, Jiawei Zhang
Date: 2023-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Traffic Object Detection

For 3D object detection, both camera and lidar have been demonstrated to be useful sensory devices for providing complementary information about the same scenery with data representations in different modalities, e.g., 2D RGB image vs 3D point cloud. An effective representation learning and fusion of such multi-modal sensor data is necessary and critical for better 3D object detection performance. To solve the problem, in this paper, we will introduce a novel vision transformer-based 3D object detection model, namely FusionViT. Different from the existing 3D object detection approaches, FusionViT is a pure-ViT based framework, which adopts a hierarchical architecture by extending the transformer model to embed both images and point clouds for effective representation learning. Such multi-modal data embedding representations will be further fused together via a fusion vision transformer model prior to feeding the learned features to the object detection head for both detection and localization of the 3D objects in the input scenery. To demonstrate the effectiveness of FusionViT, extensive experiments have been done on real-world traffic object detection benchmark datasets KITTI and Waymo Open. Notably, our FusionViT model can achieve state-of-the-art performance and outperforms not only the existing baseline methods that merely rely on camera images or lidar point clouds, but also the latest multi-modal image-point cloud deep fusion approaches.
Unsupervised Region-Growing Network for Object Segmentation in Atmospheric Turbulence
Authors: Dehao Qin, Ripon Saha, Suren Jayasuriya, Jinwei Ye, Nianyi Li
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Moving object segmentation in the presence of atmospheric turbulence is highly challenging due to turbulence-induced irregular and time-varying distortions. In this paper, we present an unsupervised approach for segmenting moving objects in videos downgraded by atmospheric turbulence. Our key approach is a detect-then-grow scheme: we first identify a small set of moving object pixels with high confidence, then gradually grow a foreground mask from those seeds to segment all moving objects. This method leverages rigid geometric consistency among video frames to disentangle different types of motions, and then uses the Sampson distance to initialize the seedling pixels. After growing per-frame foreground masks, we use spatial grouping loss and temporal consistency loss to further refine the masks in order to ensure their spatio-temporal consistency. Our method is unsupervised and does not require training on labeled data. For validation, we collect and release the first real-captured long-range turbulent video dataset with ground truth masks for moving objects. Results show that our method achieves good accuracy in segmenting moving objects and is robust for long-range videos with various turbulence strengths.
Predicting Age from White Matter Diffusivity with Residual Learning
Authors: Chenyu Gao, Michael E. Kim, Ho Hin Lee, Qi Yang, Nazirah Mohd Khairi, Praitayini Kanakaraj, Nancy R. Newlin, Derek B. Archer, Angela L. Jefferson, Warren D. Taylor, Brian D. Boyd, Lori L. Beason-Held, Susan M. Resnick, The BIOCARD Study Team, Yuankai Huo, Katherine D. Van Schaik, Kurt G. Schilling, Daniel Moyer, Ivana Išgum, Bennett A. Landman
Date: 2023-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Age Estimation

Imaging findings inconsistent with those expected at specific chronological age ranges may serve as early indicators of neurological disorders and increased mortality risk. Estimation of chronological age, and deviations from expected results, from structural MRI data has become an important task for developing biomarkers that are sensitive to such deviations. Complementary to structural analysis, diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) has proven effective in identifying age-related microstructural changes within the brain white matter, thereby presenting itself as a promising additional modality for brain age prediction. Although early studies have sought to harness DTI's advantages for age estimation, there is no evidence that the success of this prediction is owed to the unique microstructural and diffusivity features that DTI provides, rather than the macrostructural features that are also available in DTI data. Therefore, we seek to develop white-matter-specific age estimation to capture deviations from normal white matter aging. Specifically, we deliberately disregard the macrostructural information when predicting age from DTI scalar images, using two distinct methods. The first method relies on extracting only microstructural features from regions of interest. The second applies 3D residual neural networks (ResNets) to learn features directly from the images, which are non-linearly registered and warped to a template to minimize macrostructural variations. When tested on unseen data, the first method yields mean absolute error (MAE) of 6.11 years for cognitively normal participants and MAE of 6.62 years for cognitively impaired participants, while the second method achieves MAE of 4.69 years for cognitively normal participants and MAE of 4.96 years for cognitively impaired participants. We find that the ResNet model captures subtler, non-macrostructural features for brain age prediction.