pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Undercover Deepfakes: Detecting Fake Segments in Videos
Authors: Sanjay Saha, Rashindrie Perera, Sachith Seneviratne, Tamasha Malepathirana, Sanka Rasnayaka, Deshani Geethika, Terence Sim, Saman Halgamuge
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

The recent renaissance in generative models, driven primarily by the advent of diffusion models and iterative improvement in GAN methods, has enabled many creative applications. However, each advancement is also accompanied by a rise in the potential for misuse. In the arena of the deepfake generation, this is a key societal issue. In particular, the ability to modify segments of videos using such generative techniques creates a new paradigm of deepfakes which are mostly real videos altered slightly to distort the truth. This paradigm has been under-explored by the current deepfake detection methods in the academic literature. In this paper, we present a deepfake detection method that can address this issue by performing deepfake prediction at the frame and video levels. To facilitate testing our method, we prepared a new benchmark dataset where videos have both real and fake frame sequences with very subtle transitions. We provide a benchmark on the proposed dataset with our detection method which utilizes the Vision Transformer based on Scaling and Shifting to learn spatial features, and a Timeseries Transformer to learn temporal features of the videos to help facilitate the interpretation of possible deepfakes. Extensive experiments on a variety of deepfake generation methods show excellent results by the proposed method on temporal segmentation and classical video-level predictions as well. In particular, the paradigm we address will form a powerful tool for the moderation of deepfakes, where human oversight can be better targeted to the parts of videos suspected of being deepfakes. All experiments can be reproduced at: github.com/rgb91/temporal-deepfake-segmentation.
Patch-wise Mixed-Precision Quantization of Vision Transformer
Authors: Junrui Xiao, Zhikai Li, Lianwei Yang, Qingyi Gu
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Sensitivity

As emerging hardware begins to support mixed bit-width arithmetic computation, mixed-precision quantization is widely used to reduce the complexity of neural networks. However, Vision Transformers (ViTs) require complex self-attention computation to guarantee the learning of powerful feature representations, which makes mixed-precision quantization of ViTs still challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel patch-wise mixed-precision quantization (PMQ) for efficient inference of ViTs. Specifically, we design a lightweight global metric, which is faster than existing methods, to measure the sensitivity of each component in ViTs to quantization errors. Moreover, we also introduce a pareto frontier approach to automatically allocate the optimal bit-precision according to the sensitivity. To further reduce the computational complexity of self-attention in inference stage, we propose a patch-wise module to reallocate bit-width of patches in each layer. Extensive experiments on the ImageNet dataset shows that our method greatly reduces the search cost and facilitates the application of mixed-precision quantization to ViTs.
WeLayout: WeChat Layout Analysis System for the ICDAR 2023 Competition on Robust Layout Segmentation in Corporate Documents
Authors: Mingliang Zhang, Zhen Cao, Juntao Liu, LiQiang Niu, Fandong Meng, Jie zhou
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Segmentation

In this paper, we introduce WeLayout, a novel system for segmenting the layout of corporate documents, which stands for WeChat Layout Analysis System. Our approach utilizes a sophisticated ensemble of DINO and YOLO models, specifically developed for the ICDAR 2023 Competition on Robust Layout Segmentation. Our method significantly surpasses the baseline, securing a top position on the leaderboard with a mAP of 70.0. To achieve this performance, we concentrated on enhancing various aspects of the task, such as dataset augmentation, model architecture, bounding box refinement, and model ensemble techniques. Additionally, we trained the data separately for each document category to ensure a higher mean submission score. We also developed an algorithm for cell matching to further improve our performance. To identify the optimal weights and IoU thresholds for our model ensemble, we employed a Bayesian optimization algorithm called the Tree-Structured Parzen Estimator. Our approach effectively demonstrates the benefits of combining query-based and anchor-free models for achieving robust layout segmentation in corporate documents.
Inter-frame Accelerate Attack against Video Interpolation Models
Authors: Junpei Liao, Zhikai Chen, Liang Yi, Wenyuan Yang, Baoyuan Wu, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Video Frame Interpolation, Video Recognition

Deep learning based video frame interpolation (VIF) method, aiming to synthesis the intermediate frames to enhance video quality, have been highly developed in the past few years. This paper investigates the adversarial robustness of VIF models. We apply adversarial attacks to VIF models and find that the VIF models are very vulnerable to adversarial examples. To improve attack efficiency, we suggest to make full use of the property of video frame interpolation task. The intuition is that the gap between adjacent frames would be small, leading to the corresponding adversarial perturbations being similar as well. Then we propose a novel attack method named Inter-frame Accelerate Attack (IAA) that initializes the perturbation as the perturbation for the previous adjacent frame and reduces the number of attack iterations. It is shown that our method can improve attack efficiency greatly while achieving comparable attack performance with traditional methods. Besides, we also extend our method to video recognition models which are higher level vision tasks and achieves great attack efficiency.
Pyramid Texture Filtering
Authors: Qing Zhang, Hao Jiang, Yongwei Nie, Wei-Shi Zheng
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Tone Mapping

We present a simple but effective technique to smooth out textures while preserving the prominent structures. Our method is built upon a key observation -- the coarsest level in a Gaussian pyramid often naturally eliminates textures and summarizes the main image structures. This inspires our central idea for texture filtering, which is to progressively upsample the very low-resolution coarsest Gaussian pyramid level to a full-resolution texture smoothing result with well-preserved structures, under the guidance of each fine-scale Gaussian pyramid level and its associated Laplacian pyramid level. We show that our approach is effective to separate structure from texture of different scales, local contrasts, and forms, without degrading structures or introducing visual artifacts. We also demonstrate the applicability of our method on various applications including detail enhancement, image abstraction, HDR tone mapping, inverse halftoning, and LDR image enhancement.
Can SAM Boost Video Super-Resolution?
Authors: Zhihe Lu, Zeyu Xiao, Jiawang Bai, Zhiwei Xiong, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Super-Resolution, Video Super-Resolution

The primary challenge in video super-resolution (VSR) is to handle large motions in the input frames, which makes it difficult to accurately aggregate information from multiple frames. Existing works either adopt deformable convolutions or estimate optical flow as a prior to establish correspondences between frames for the effective alignment and fusion. However, they fail to take into account the valuable semantic information that can greatly enhance it; and flow-based methods heavily rely on the accuracy of a flow estimate model, which may not provide precise flows given two low-resolution frames. In this paper, we investigate a more robust and semantic-aware prior for enhanced VSR by utilizing the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a powerful foundational model that is less susceptible to image degradation. To use the SAM-based prior, we propose a simple yet effective module -- SAM-guidEd refinEment Module (SEEM), which can enhance both alignment and fusion procedures by the utilization of semantic information. This light-weight plug-in module is specifically designed to not only leverage the attention mechanism for the generation of semantic-aware feature but also be easily and seamlessly integrated into existing methods. Concretely, we apply our SEEM to two representative methods, EDVR and BasicVSR, resulting in consistently improved performance with minimal implementation effort, on three widely used VSR datasets: Vimeo-90K, REDS and Vid4. More importantly, we found that the proposed SEEM can advance the existing methods in an efficient tuning manner, providing increased flexibility in adjusting the balance between performance and the number of training parameters. Code will be open-source soon.
ParamNet: A Dynamic Parameter Network for Fast Multi-to-One Stain Normalization
Authors: Hongtao Kang, Die Luo, Li Chen, Junbo Hu, Tingwei Quan, Shaoqun Zeng, Shenghua Cheng, Xiuli Liu
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diagnostic, Parameter Prediction

In practice, digital pathology images are often affected by various factors, resulting in very large differences in color and brightness. Stain normalization can effectively reduce the differences in color and brightness of digital pathology images, thus improving the performance of computer-aided diagnostic systems. Conventional stain normalization methods rely on one or several reference images, but one or several images may not adequately represent the entire dataset. Although learning-based stain normalization methods are a general approach, they use complex deep networks, which not only greatly reduce computational efficiency, but also risk introducing artifacts. Some studies use specialized network structures to enhance computational efficiency and reliability, but these methods are difficult to apply to multi-to-one stain normalization due to insufficient network capacity. In this study, we introduced dynamic-parameter network and proposed a novel method for stain normalization, called ParamNet. ParamNet addresses the challenges of limited network capacity and computational efficiency by introducing dynamic parameters (weights and biases of convolutional layers) into the network design. By effectively leveraging these parameters, ParamNet achieves superior performance in stain normalization while maintaining computational efficiency. Results show ParamNet can normalize one whole slide image (WSI) of 100,000x100,000 within 25s. The code is available at: https://github.com/khtao/ParamNet.
Treasure What You Have: Exploiting Similarity in Deep Neural Networks for Efficient Video Processing
Authors: Hadjer Benmeziane, Halima Bouzidi, Hamza Ouarnoughi, Ozcan Ozturk, Smail Niar
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Lane Detection, Scene Parsing

Deep learning has enabled various Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Still, designing models with high accuracy and computational efficiency remains a significant challenge, especially in real-time video processing applications. Such applications exhibit high inter- and intra-frame redundancy, allowing further improvement. This paper proposes a similarity-aware training methodology that exploits data redundancy in video frames for efficient processing. Our approach introduces a per-layer regularization that enhances computation reuse by increasing the similarity of weights during training. We validate our methodology on two critical real-time applications, lane detection and scene parsing. We observe an average compression ratio of approximately 50% and a speedup of \sim 1.5x for different models while maintaining the same accuracy.
Towards L-System Captioning for Tree Reconstruction
Authors: Jannes S. Magnusson, Anna Hilsmann, Peter Eisert
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

This work proposes a novel concept for tree and plant reconstruction by directly inferring a Lindenmayer-System (L-System) word representation from image data in an image captioning approach. We train a model end-to-end which is able to translate given images into L-System words as a description of the displayed tree. To prove this concept, we demonstrate the applicability on 2D tree topologies. Transferred to real image data, this novel idea could lead to more efficient, accurate and semantically meaningful tree and plant reconstruction without using error-prone point cloud extraction, and other processes usually utilized in tree reconstruction. Furthermore, this approach bypasses the need for a predefined L-System grammar and enables species-specific L-System inference without biological knowledge.
SENDD: Sparse Efficient Neural Depth and Deformation for Tissue Tracking
Authors: Adam Schmidt, Omid Mohareri, Simon DiMaio, Septimiu E. Salcudean
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation

Deformable tracking and real-time estimation of 3D tissue motion is essential to enable automation and image guidance applications in robotically assisted surgery. Our model, Sparse Efficient Neural Depth and Deformation (SENDD), extends prior 2D tracking work to estimate flow in 3D space. SENDD introduces novel contributions of learned detection, and sparse per-point depth and 3D flow estimation, all with less than half a million parameters. SENDD does this by using graph neural networks of sparse keypoint matches to estimate both depth and 3D flow anywhere. We quantify and benchmark SENDD on a comprehensively labelled tissue dataset, and compare it to an equivalent 2D flow model. SENDD performs comparably while enabling applications that 2D flow cannot. SENDD can track points and estimate depth at 10fps on an NVIDIA RTX 4000 for 1280 tracked (query) points and its cost scales linearly with an increasing/decreasing number of points. SENDD enables multiple downstream applications that require estimation of 3D motion in stereo endoscopy.
Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars
Authors: Zhengyi Luo, Jinkun Cao, Alexander Winkler, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Humanoid Control

We present a physics-based humanoid controller that achieves high-fidelity motion imitation and fault-tolerant behavior in the presence of noisy input (e.g. pose estimates from video or generated from language) and unexpected falls. Our controller scales up to learning ten thousand motion clips without using any external stabilizing forces and learns to naturally recover from fail-state. Given reference motion, our controller can perpetually control simulated avatars without requiring resets. At its core, we propose the progressive multiplicative control policy (PMCP), which dynamically allocates new network capacity to learn harder and harder motion sequences. PMCP allows efficient scaling for learning from large-scale motion databases and adding new tasks, such as fail-state recovery, without catastrophic forgetting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our controller by using it to imitate noisy poses from video-based pose estimators and language-based motion generators in a live and real-time multi-person avatar use case.
Continual Facial Expression Recognition: A Benchmark
Authors: Nikhil Churamani, Tolga Dimlioglu, German I. Parisi, Hatice Gunes
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Understanding human affective behaviour, especially in the dynamics of real-world settings, requires Facial Expression Recognition (FER) models to continuously adapt to individual differences in user expression, contextual attributions, and the environment. Current (deep) Machine Learning (ML)-based FER approaches pre-trained in isolation on benchmark datasets fail to capture the nuances of real-world interactions where data is available only incrementally, acquired by the agent or robot during interactions. New learning comes at the cost of previous knowledge, resulting in catastrophic forgetting. Lifelong or Continual Learning (CL), on the other hand, enables adaptability in agents by being sensitive to changing data distributions, integrating new information without interfering with previously learnt knowledge. Positing CL as an effective learning paradigm for FER, this work presents the Continual Facial Expression Recognition (ConFER) benchmark that evaluates popular CL techniques on FER tasks. It presents a comparative analysis of several CL-based approaches on popular FER datasets such as CK+, RAF-DB, and AffectNet and present strategies for a successful implementation of ConFER for Affective Computing (AC) research. CL techniques, under different learning settings, are shown to achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across several datasets, thus motivating a discussion on the benefits of applying CL principles towards human behaviour understanding, particularly from facial expressions, as well the challenges entailed.
An Empirical Study on the Robustness of the Segment Anything Model (SAM)
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Yun Zhao, Linda Petzold
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a foundation model for general image segmentation. Although it exhibits impressive performance predominantly on natural images, understanding its robustness against various image perturbations and domains is critical for real-world applications where such challenges frequently arise. In this study we conduct a comprehensive robustness investigation of SAM under diverse real-world conditions. Our experiments encompass a wide range of image perturbations. Our experimental results demonstrate that SAM's performance generally declines under perturbed images, with varying degrees of vulnerability across different perturbations. By customizing prompting techniques and leveraging domain knowledge based on the unique characteristics of each dataset, the model's resilience to these perturbations can be enhanced, addressing dataset-specific challenges. This work sheds light on the limitations and strengths of SAM in real-world applications, promoting the development of more robust and versatile image segmentation solutions.
Analyzing Bias in Diffusion-based Face Generation Models
Authors: Malsha V. Perera, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Face Generation, Generative Adversarial Network, Synthetic Data Generation

Diffusion models are becoming increasingly popular in synthetic data generation and image editing applications. However, these models can amplify existing biases and propagate them to downstream applications. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the sources of bias in their outputs. In this paper, we investigate the presence of bias in diffusion-based face generation models with respect to attributes such as gender, race, and age. Moreover, we examine how dataset size affects the attribute composition and perceptual quality of both diffusion and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based face generation models across various attribute classes. Our findings suggest that diffusion models tend to worsen distribution bias in the training data for various attributes, which is heavily influenced by the size of the dataset. Conversely, GAN models trained on balanced datasets with a larger number of samples show less bias across different attributes.
Local Region-to-Region Mapping-based Approach to Classify Articulated Objects
Authors: Ayush Aggarwal, Rustam Stolkin, Naresh Marturi
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Autonomous robots operating in real-world environments encounter a variety of objects that can be both rigid and articulated in nature. Having knowledge of these specific object properties not only helps in designing appropriate manipulation strategies but also aids in developing reliable tracking and pose estimation techniques for many robotic and vision applications. In this context, this paper presents a registration-based local region-to-region mapping approach to classify an object as either articulated or rigid. Using the point clouds of the intended object, the proposed method performs classification by estimating unique local transformations between point clouds over the observed sequence of movements of the object. The significant advantage of the proposed method is that it is a constraint-free approach that can classify any articulated object and is not limited to a specific type of articulation. Additionally, it is a model-free approach with no learning components, which means it can classify whether an object is articulated without requiring any object models or labelled data. We analyze the performance of the proposed method on two publicly available benchmark datasets with a combination of articulated and rigid objects. It is observed that the proposed method can classify articulated and rigid objects with good accuracy.
HyperE2VID: Improving Event-Based Video Reconstruction via Hypernetworks
Authors: Burak Ercan, Onur Eker, Canberk Saglam, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem
Date: 2023-05-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-Based Video Reconstruction, Video Reconstruction

Event-based cameras are becoming increasingly popular for their ability to capture high-speed motion with low latency and high dynamic range. However, generating videos from events remains challenging due to the highly sparse and varying nature of event data. To address this, in this study, we propose HyperE2VID, a dynamic neural network architecture for event-based video reconstruction. Our approach uses hypernetworks to generate per-pixel adaptive filters guided by a context fusion module that combines information from event voxel grids and previously reconstructed intensity images. We also employ a curriculum learning strategy to train the network more robustly. Our comprehensive experimental evaluations across various benchmark datasets reveal that HyperE2VID not only surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction quality but also achieves this with fewer parameters, reduced computational requirements, and accelerated inference times.
A statistical approach to detect sensitive features in a group fairness setting
Authors: Guilherme Dean Pelegrina, Miguel Couceiro, Leonardo Tomazeli Duarte
Date: 2023-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The use of machine learning models in decision support systems with high societal impact raised concerns about unfair (disparate) results for different groups of people. When evaluating such unfair decisions, one generally relies on predefined groups that are determined by a set of features that are considered sensitive. However, such an approach is subjective and does not guarantee that these features are the only ones to be considered as sensitive nor that they entail unfair (disparate) outcomes. In this paper, we propose a preprocessing step to address the task of automatically recognizing sensitive features that does not require a trained model to verify unfair results. Our proposal is based on the Hilber-Schmidt independence criterion, which measures the statistical dependence of variable distributions. We hypothesize that if the dependence between the label vector and a candidate is high for a sensitive feature, then the information provided by this feature will entail disparate performance measures between groups. Our empirical results attest our hypothesis and show that several features considered as sensitive in the literature do not necessarily entail disparate (unfair) results.