pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
E2E-LOAD: End-to-End Long-form Online Action Detection
Authors: Shuqiang Cao, Weixin Luo, Bairui Wang, Wei zhang, Lin Ma
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Action Detection, Form, Online Action Detection

Recently, there has been a growing trend toward feature-based approaches for Online Action Detection (OAD). However, these approaches have limitations due to their fixed backbone design, which ignores the potential capability of a trainable backbone. In this paper, we propose the first end-to-end OAD model, termed E2E-LOAD, designed to address the major challenge of OAD, namely, long-term understanding and efficient online reasoning. Specifically, our proposed approach adopts an initial spatial model that is shared by all frames and maintains a long sequence cache for inference at a low computational cost. We also advocate an asymmetric spatial-temporal model for long-form and short-form modeling effectively. Furthermore, we propose a novel and efficient inference mechanism that accelerates heavy spatial-temporal exploration. Extensive ablation studies and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Notably, we achieve 17.3 (+12.6) FPS for end-to-end OAD with 72.4%~(+1.2%), 90.3%~(+0.7%), and 48.1%~(+26.0%) mAP on THMOUS14, TVSeries, and HDD, respectively, which is 3x faster than previous approaches. The source code will be made publicly available.
Localization of Just Noticeable Difference for Image Compression
Authors: Guangan Chen, Hanhe Lin, Oliver Wiedemann, Dietmar Saupe
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

The just noticeable difference (JND) is the minimal difference between stimuli that can be detected by a person. The picture-wise just noticeable difference (PJND) for a given reference image and a compression algorithm represents the minimal level of compression that causes noticeable differences in the reconstruction. These differences can only be observed in some specific regions within the image, dubbed as JND-critical regions. Identifying these regions can improve the development of image compression algorithms. Due to the fact that visual perception varies among individuals, determining the PJND values and JND-critical regions for a target population of consumers requires subjective assessment experiments involving a sufficiently large number of observers. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for conducting such experiments using crowdsourcing. By applying this framework, we created a novel PJND dataset, KonJND++, consisting of 300 source images, compressed versions thereof under JPEG or BPG compression, and an average of 43 ratings of PJND and 129 self-reported locations of JND-critical regions for each source image. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of our proposed framework, which is easy to be adapted for collecting a large-scale dataset. The source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/angchen-dev/LocJND.
Variational Positive-incentive Noise: How Noise Benefits Models
Authors: Hongyuan Zhang, Sida Huang, Xuelong Li
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference

A large number of works aim to alleviate the impact of noise due to an underlying conventional assumption of the negative role of noise. However, some existing works show that the assumption does not always hold. In this paper, we investigate how to benefit the classical models by random noise under the framework of Positive-incentive Noise (Pi-Noise). Since the ideal objective of Pi-Noise is intractable, we propose to optimize its variational bound instead, namely variational Pi-Noise (VPN). With the variational inference, a VPN generator implemented by neural networks is designed for enhancing base models and simplifying the inference of base models, without changing the architecture of base models. Benefiting from the independent design of base models and VPN generators, the VPN generator can work with most existing models. From the experiments, it is shown that the proposed VPN generator can improve the base models. It is appealing that the trained variational VPN generator prefers to blur the irrelevant ingredients in complicated images, which meets our expectations.
Sea Ice Segmentation From SAR Data by Convolutional Transformer Networks
Authors: Nicolae-Catalin Ristea, Andrei Anghel, Mihai Datcu
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00

Sea ice is a crucial component of the Earth's climate system and is highly sensitive to changes in temperature and atmospheric conditions. Accurate and timely measurement of sea ice parameters is important for understanding and predicting the impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, the amount of satellite data acquired over ice areas is huge, making the subjective measurements ineffective. Therefore, automated algorithms must be used in order to fully exploit the continuous data feeds coming from satellites. In this paper, we present a novel approach for sea ice segmentation based on SAR satellite imagery using hybrid convolutional transformer (ConvTr) networks. We show that our approach outperforms classical convolutional networks, while being considerably more efficient than pure transformer models. ConvTr obtained a mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 63.68% on the AI4Arctic data set, assuming an inference time of 120ms for a 400 x 400 squared km product.
Enhanced Multimodal Representation Learning with Cross-modal KD
Authors: Mengxi Chen, Linyu Xing, Yu Wang, Ya zhang
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Emotion Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Representation Learning, Retrieval, Video Recognition, Video Retrieval

This paper explores the tasks of leveraging auxiliary modalities which are only available at training to enhance multimodal representation learning through cross-modal Knowledge Distillation (KD). The widely adopted mutual information maximization-based objective leads to a short-cut solution of the weak teacher, i.e., achieving the maximum mutual information by simply making the teacher model as weak as the student model. To prevent such a weak solution, we introduce an additional objective term, i.e., the mutual information between the teacher and the auxiliary modality model. Besides, to narrow down the information gap between the student and teacher, we further propose to minimize the conditional entropy of the teacher given the student. Novel training schemes based on contrastive learning and adversarial learning are designed to optimize the mutual information and the conditional entropy, respectively. Experimental results on three popular multimodal benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed method outperforms a range of state-of-the-art approaches for video recognition, video retrieval and emotion classification.
NeuS-PIR: Learning Relightable Neural Surface using Pre-Integrated Rendering
Authors: Shi Mao, Chenming Wu, Zhelun Shen, Yifan Wang, Dayan Wu, Liangjun Zhang
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, NeRF

This paper presents a method, namely NeuS-PIR, for recovering relightable neural surfaces using pre-integrated rendering from multi-view images or video. Unlike methods based on NeRF and discrete meshes, our method utilizes implicit neural surface representation to reconstruct high-quality geometry, which facilitates the factorization of the radiance field into two components: a spatially varying material field and an all-frequency lighting representation. This factorization, jointly optimized using an adapted differentiable pre-integrated rendering framework with material encoding regularization, in turn addresses the ambiguity of geometry reconstruction and leads to better disentanglement and refinement of each scene property. Additionally, we introduced a method to distil indirect illumination fields from the learned representations, further recovering the complex illumination effect like inter-reflection. Consequently, our method enables advanced applications such as relighting, which can be seamlessly integrated with modern graphics engines. Qualitative and quantitative experiments have shown that NeuS-PIR outperforms existing methods across various tasks on both synthetic and real datasets. Source code is available at https://github.com/Sheldonmao/NeuSPIR
UOD: Universal One-shot Detection of Anatomical Landmarks
Authors: Heqin Zhu, Quan Quan, Qingsong Yao, Zaiyi Liu, S. Kevin Zhou
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Learning

One-shot medical landmark detection gains much attention and achieves great success for its label-efficient training process. However, existing one-shot learning methods are highly specialized in a single domain and suffer domain preference heavily in the situation of multi-domain unlabeled data. Moreover, one-shot learning is not robust that it faces performance drop when annotating a sub-optimal image. To tackle these issues, we resort to developing a domain-adaptive one-shot landmark detection framework for handling multi-domain medical images, named Universal One-shot Detection (UOD). UOD consists of two stages and two corresponding universal models which are designed as combinations of domain-specific modules and domain-shared modules. In the first stage, a domain-adaptive convolution model is self-supervised learned to generate pseudo landmark labels. In the second stage, we design a domain-adaptive transformer to eliminate domain preference and build the global context for multi-domain data. Even though only one annotated sample from each domain is available for training, the domain-shared modules help UOD aggregate all one-shot samples to detect more robust and accurate landmarks. We investigated both qualitatively and quantitatively the proposed UOD on three widely-used public X-ray datasets in different anatomical domains (i.e., head, hand, chest) and obtained state-of-the-art performances in each domain. The code is available at https://github.com/heqin-zhu/UOD_universal_oneshot_detection.
Revisiting and Advancing Adversarial Training Through A Simple Baseline
Authors: Hong Liu
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Adversarial Robustness, Data Augmentation

In this paper, we delve into the essential components of adversarial training which is a pioneering defense technique against adversarial attacks. We indicate that some factors such as the loss function, learning rate scheduler, and data augmentation, which are independent of the model architecture, will influence adversarial robustness and generalization. When these factors are controlled for, we introduce a simple baseline approach, termed SimpleAT, that performs competitively with recent methods and mitigates robust overfitting. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR-10/100 and Tiny-ImageNet, which validate the robustness of SimpleAT against state-of-the-art adversarial attackers such as AutoAttack. Our results also demonstrate that SimpleAT exhibits good performance in the presence of various image corruptions, such as those found in the CIFAR-10-C. In addition, we empirically show that SimpleAT is capable of reducing the variance in model predictions, which is considered the primary contributor to robust overfitting. Our results also reveal the connections between SimpleAT and many advanced state-of-the-art adversarial defense methods.
Intrusion Detection: A Deep Learning Approach
Authors: Ishaan Shivhare, Joy Purohit, Vinay Jogani, Samina Attari, Dr. Madhav Chandane
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Intrusion Detection

Network intrusions are a significant problem in all industries today. A critical part of the solution is being able to effectively detect intrusions. With recent advances in artificial intelligence, current research has begun adopting deep learning approaches for intrusion detection. Current approaches for multi-class intrusion detection include the use of a deep neural network. However, it fails to take into account spatial relationships between the data objects and long term dependencies present in the dataset. The paper proposes a novel architecture to combat intrusion detection that has a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) module, along with a Long Short Term Memory(LSTM) module and with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classification function. The analysis is followed by a comparison of both conventional machine learning techniques and deep learning methodologies, which highlights areas that could be further explored.
Learning to Estimate 6DoF Pose from Limited Data: A Few-Shot, Generalizable Approach using RGB Images
Authors: Panwang Pan, Zhiwen Fan, Brandon Y. Feng, Peihao Wang, Chenxin Li, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation

The accurate estimation of six degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) object poses is essential for many applications in robotics and augmented reality. However, existing methods for 6DoF pose estimation often depend on CAD templates or dense support views, restricting their usefulness in realworld situations. In this study, we present a new cascade framework named Cas6D for few-shot 6DoF pose estimation that is generalizable and uses only RGB images. To address the false positives of target object detection in the extreme few-shot setting, our framework utilizes a selfsupervised pre-trained ViT to learn robust feature representations. Then, we initialize the nearest top-K pose candidates based on similarity score and refine the initial poses using feature pyramids to formulate and update the cascade warped feature volume, which encodes context at increasingly finer scales. By discretizing the pose search range using multiple pose bins and progressively narrowing the pose search range in each stage using predictions from the previous stage, Cas6D can overcome the large gap between pose candidates and ground truth poses, which is a common failure mode in sparse-view scenarios. Experimental results on the LINEMOD and GenMOP datasets demonstrate that Cas6D outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 9.2% and 3.8% accuracy (Proj-5) under the 32-shot setting compared to OnePose++ and Gen6D.
I See Dead People: Gray-Box Adversarial Attack on Image-To-Text Models
Authors: Raz Lapid, Moshe Sipper
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Decoder, image-classification, Image Classification, Image to text, Language Modelling

Modern image-to-text systems typically adopt the encoder-decoder framework, which comprises two main components: an image encoder, responsible for extracting image features, and a transformer-based decoder, used for generating captions. Taking inspiration from the analysis of neural networks' robustness against adversarial perturbations, we propose a novel gray-box algorithm for creating adversarial examples in image-to-text models. Unlike image classification tasks that have a finite set of class labels, finding visually similar adversarial examples in an image-to-text task poses greater challenges because the captioning system allows for a virtually infinite space of possible captions. In this paper, we present a gray-box adversarial attack on image-to-text, both untargeted and targeted. We formulate the process of discovering adversarial perturbations as an optimization problem that uses only the image-encoder component, meaning the proposed attack is language-model agnostic. Through experiments conducted on the ViT-GPT2 model, which is the most-used image-to-text model in Hugging Face, and the Flickr30k dataset, we demonstrate that our proposed attack successfully generates visually similar adversarial examples, both with untargeted and targeted captions. Notably, our attack operates in a gray-box manner, requiring no knowledge about the decoder module. We also show that our attacks fool the popular open-source platform Hugging Face.
Binary Radiance Fields
Authors: Seungjoo Shin, Jaesik Park
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Binarization, NeRF

In this paper, we propose \textit{binary radiance fields} (BiRF), a storage-efficient radiance field representation employing binary feature encoding that encodes local features using binary encoding parameters in a format of either $+1$ or $-1$. This binarization strategy lets us represent the feature grid with highly compact feature encoding and a dramatic reduction in storage size. Furthermore, our 2D-3D hybrid feature grid design enhances the compactness of feature encoding as the 3D grid includes main components while 2D grids capture details. In our experiments, binary radiance field representation successfully outperforms the reconstruction performance of state-of-the-art (SOTA) efficient radiance field models with lower storage allocation. In particular, our model achieves impressive results in static scene reconstruction, with a PSNR of 32.03 dB for Synthetic-NeRF scenes, 34.48 dB for Synthetic-NSVF scenes, 28.20 dB for Tanks and Temples scenes while only utilizing 0.5 MB of storage space, respectively. We hope the proposed binary radiance field representation will make radiance fields more accessible without a storage bottleneck.
Parametric Implicit Face Representation for Audio-Driven Facial Reenactment
Authors: Ricong Huang, Peiwen Lai, Yipeng Qin, Guanbin Li
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Image Inpainting

Audio-driven facial reenactment is a crucial technique that has a range of applications in film-making, virtual avatars and video conferences. Existing works either employ explicit intermediate face representations (e.g., 2D facial landmarks or 3D face models) or implicit ones (e.g., Neural Radiance Fields), thus suffering from the trade-offs between interpretability and expressive power, hence between controllability and quality of the results. In this work, we break these trade-offs with our novel parametric implicit face representation and propose a novel audio-driven facial reenactment framework that is both controllable and can generate high-quality talking heads. Specifically, our parametric implicit representation parameterizes the implicit representation with interpretable parameters of 3D face models, thereby taking the best of both explicit and implicit methods. In addition, we propose several new techniques to improve the three components of our framework, including i) incorporating contextual information into the audio-to-expression parameters encoding; ii) using conditional image synthesis to parameterize the implicit representation and implementing it with an innovative tri-plane structure for efficient learning; iii) formulating facial reenactment as a conditional image inpainting problem and proposing a novel data augmentation technique to improve model generalizability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate more realistic results than previous methods with greater fidelity to the identities and talking styles of speakers.
Action Recognition with Multi-stream Motion Modeling and Mutual Information Maximization
Authors: Yuheng Yang, Haipeng Chen, Zhenguang Liu, Yingda Lyu, Beibei Zhang, Shuang Wu, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Action recognition has long been a fundamental and intriguing problem in artificial intelligence. The task is challenging due to the high dimensionality nature of an action, as well as the subtle motion details to be considered. Current state-of-the-art approaches typically learn from articulated motion sequences in the straightforward 3D Euclidean space. However, the vanilla Euclidean space is not efficient for modeling important motion characteristics such as the joint-wise angular acceleration, which reveals the driving force behind the motion. Moreover, current methods typically attend to each channel equally and lack theoretical constrains on extracting task-relevant features from the input. In this paper, we seek to tackle these challenges from three aspects: (1) We propose to incorporate an acceleration representation, explicitly modeling the higher-order variations in motion. (2) We introduce a novel Stream-GCN network equipped with multi-stream components and channel attention, where different representations (i.e., streams) supplement each other towards a more precise action recognition while attention capitalizes on those important channels. (3) We explore feature-level supervision for maximizing the extraction of task-relevant information and formulate this into a mutual information loss. Empirically, our approach sets the new state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets, NTU RGB+D, NTU RGB+D 120, and NW-UCLA. Our code is anonymously released at https://github.com/ActionR-Group/Stream-GCN, hoping to inspire the community.
Marking anything: application of point cloud in extracting video target features
Authors: Xiangchun Xu
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Object Tracking, Retrieval

Extracting retrievable features from video is of great significance for structured video database construction, video copyright protection and fake video rumor refutation. Inspired by point cloud data processing, this paper proposes a method for marking anything (MA) in the video, which can extract the contour features of any target in the video and convert it into a feature vector with a length of 256 that can be retrieved. The algorithm uses YOLO-v8 algorithm, multi-object tracking algorithm and PointNet++ to extract contour of the video detection target to form spatial point cloud data. Then extract the point cloud feature vector and use it as the retrievable feature of the video detection target. In order to verify the effectiveness and robustness of contour feature, some datasets are crawled from Dou Yin and Kinetics-700 dataset as experimental data. For Dou Yin's homogenized videos, the proposed contour features achieve retrieval accuracy higher than 97% in Top1 return mode. For videos from Kinetics 700, the contour feature also showed good robustness for partial clip mode video tracing.
DenseLight: Efficient Control for Large-scale Traffic Signals with Dense Feedback
Authors: Junfan Lin, Yuying Zhu, Lingbo Liu, Yang Liu, Guanbin Li, Liang Lin
Date: 2023-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

Traffic Signal Control (TSC) aims to reduce the average travel time of vehicles in a road network, which in turn enhances fuel utilization efficiency, air quality, and road safety, benefiting society as a whole. Due to the complexity of long-horizon control and coordination, most prior TSC methods leverage deep reinforcement learning (RL) to search for a control policy and have witnessed great success. However, TSC still faces two significant challenges. 1) The travel time of a vehicle is delayed feedback on the effectiveness of TSC policy at each traffic intersection since it is obtained after the vehicle has left the road network. Although several heuristic reward functions have been proposed as substitutes for travel time, they are usually biased and not leading the policy to improve in the correct direction. 2) The traffic condition of each intersection is influenced by the non-local intersections since vehicles traverse multiple intersections over time. Therefore, the TSC agent is required to leverage both the local observation and the non-local traffic conditions to predict the long-horizontal traffic conditions of each intersection comprehensively. To address these challenges, we propose DenseLight, a novel RL-based TSC method that employs an unbiased reward function to provide dense feedback on policy effectiveness and a non-local enhanced TSC agent to better predict future traffic conditions for more precise traffic control. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that DenseLight can consistently outperform advanced baselines on various road networks with diverse traffic flows. The code is available at https://github.com/junfanlin/DenseLight.