pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TR0N: Translator Networks for 0-Shot Plug-and-Play Conditional Generation
Authors: Zhaoyan Liu, Noel Vouitsis, Satya Krishna Gorti, Jimmy Ba, Gabriel Loaiza-Ganem
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

We propose TR0N, a highly general framework to turn pre-trained unconditional generative models, such as GANs and VAEs, into conditional models. The conditioning can be highly arbitrary, and requires only a pre-trained auxiliary model. For example, we show how to turn unconditional models into class-conditional ones with the help of a classifier, and also into text-to-image models by leveraging CLIP. TR0N learns a lightweight stochastic mapping which "translates" between the space of conditions and the latent space of the generative model, in such a way that the generated latent corresponds to a data sample satisfying the desired condition. The translated latent samples are then further improved upon through Langevin dynamics, enabling us to obtain higher-quality data samples. TR0N requires no training data nor fine-tuning, yet can achieve a zero-shot FID of 10.9 on MS-COCO, outperforming competing alternatives not only on this metric, but also in sampling speed -- all while retaining a much higher level of generality. Our code is available at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/tr0n.
Scalable, Distributed AI Frameworks: Leveraging Cloud Computing for Enhanced Deep Learning Performance and Efficiency
Authors: Neelesh Mungoli
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Cloud Computing, Feature Engineering, Management

In recent years, the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing has emerged as a promising avenue for addressing the growing computational demands of AI applications. This paper presents a comprehensive study of scalable, distributed AI frameworks leveraging cloud computing for enhanced deep learning performance and efficiency. We first provide an overview of popular AI frameworks and cloud services, highlighting their respective strengths and weaknesses. Next, we delve into the critical aspects of data storage and management in cloud-based AI systems, discussing data preprocessing, feature engineering, privacy, and security. We then explore parallel and distributed training techniques for AI models, focusing on model partitioning, communication strategies, and cloud-based training architectures. In subsequent chapters, we discuss optimization strategies for AI workloads in the cloud, covering load balancing, resource allocation, auto-scaling, and performance benchmarking. We also examine AI model deployment and serving in the cloud, outlining containerization, serverless deployment options, and monitoring best practices. To ensure the cost-effectiveness of cloud-based AI solutions, we present a thorough analysis of costs, optimization strategies, and case studies showcasing successful deployments. Finally, we summarize the key findings of this study, discuss the challenges and limitations of cloud-based AI, and identify emerging trends and future research opportunities in the field.
The Internal State of an LLM Knows When It's Lying
Authors: Amos Azaria, Tom Mitchell
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance in various tasks, one of their most prominent drawbacks is generating inaccurate or false information with a confident tone. In this paper, we provide evidence that the LLM's internal state can be used to reveal the truthfulness of statements. This includes both statements provided to the LLM, and statements that the LLM itself generates. Our approach is to train a classifier that outputs the probability that a statement is truthful, based on the hidden layer activations of the LLM as it reads or generates the statement. Experiments demonstrate that given a set of test sentences, of which half are true and half false, our trained classifier achieves an average of 71\% to 83\% accuracy labeling which sentences are true versus false, depending on the LLM base model. Furthermore, we explore the relationship between our classifier's performance and approaches based on the probability assigned to the sentence by the LLM. We show that while LLM-assigned sentence probability is related to sentence truthfulness, this probability is also dependent on sentence length and the frequencies of words in the sentence, resulting in our trained classifier providing a more reliable approach to detecting truthfulness, highlighting its potential to enhance the reliability of LLM-generated content and its practical applicability in real-world scenarios.
Towards Medical Artificial General Intelligence via Knowledge-Enhanced Multimodal Pretraining
Authors: Bingqian Lin, Zicong Chen, Mingjie Li, Haokun Lin, Hang Xu, Yi Zhu, Jianzhuang Liu, Wenjia Cai, Lei Yang, Shen Zhao, Chenfei Wu, Ling Chen, Xiaojun Chang, Yi Yang, Lei Xing, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2023-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Medical Visual Question Answering, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Medical artificial general intelligence (MAGI) enables one foundation model to solve different medical tasks, which is very practical in the medical domain. It can significantly reduce the requirement of large amounts of task-specific data by sufficiently sharing medical knowledge among different tasks. However, due to the challenges of designing strongly generalizable models with limited and complex medical data, most existing approaches tend to develop task-specific models. To take a step towards MAGI, we propose a new paradigm called Medical-knOwledge-enhanced mulTimOdal pretRaining (MOTOR). In MOTOR, we combine two kinds of basic medical knowledge, i.e., general and specific knowledge, in a complementary manner to boost the general pretraining process. As a result, the foundation model with comprehensive basic knowledge can learn compact representations from pretraining radiographic data for better cross-modal alignment. MOTOR unifies the understanding and generation, which are two kinds of core intelligence of an AI system, into a single medical foundation model, to flexibly handle more diverse medical tasks. To enable a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical multimodal benchmark including a wide range of downstream tasks, such as chest x-ray report generation and medical visual question answering. Extensive experiments on our benchmark show that MOTOR obtains promising results through simple task-oriented adaptation. The visualization shows that the injected knowledge successfully highlights key information in the medical data, demonstrating the excellent interpretability of MOTOR. Our MOTOR successfully mimics the human practice of fulfilling a "medical student" to accelerate the process of becoming a "specialist". We believe that our work makes a significant stride in realizing MAGI.
An Audit Framework for Adopting AI-Nudging on Children
Authors: Marianna Ganapini, Enrico Panai
Date: 2023-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

This is an audit framework for AI-nudging. Unlike the static form of nudging usually discussed in the literature, we focus here on a type of nudging that uses large amounts of data to provide personalized, dynamic feedback and interfaces. We call this AI-nudging (Lanzing, 2019, p. 549; Yeung, 2017). The ultimate goal of the audit outlined here is to ensure that an AI system that uses nudges will maintain a level of moral inertia and neutrality by complying with the recommendations, requirements, or suggestions of the audit (in other words, the criteria of the audit). In the case of unintended negative consequences, the audit suggests risk mitigation mechanisms that can be put in place. In the case of unintended positive consequences, it suggests some reinforcement mechanisms. Sponsored by the IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab
ChatVideo: A Tracklet-centric Multimodal and Versatile Video Understanding System
Authors: Junke Wang, Dongdong Chen, Chong Luo, Xiyang Dai, Lu Yuan, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Understanding

Existing deep video models are limited by specific tasks, fixed input-output spaces, and poor generalization capabilities, making it difficult to deploy them in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present our vision for multimodal and versatile video understanding and propose a prototype system, \system. Our system is built upon a tracklet-centric paradigm, which treats tracklets as the basic video unit and employs various Video Foundation Models (ViFMs) to annotate their properties e.g., appearance, motion, \etc. All the detected tracklets are stored in a database and interact with the user through a database manager. We have conducted extensive case studies on different types of in-the-wild videos, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in answering various video-related problems. Our project is available at https://www.wangjunke.info/ChatVideo/
Motion-Conditioned Diffusion Model for Controllable Video Synthesis
Authors: Tsai-Shien Chen, Chieh Hubert Lin, Hung-Yu Tseng, Tsung-Yi Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, model, Motion Synthesis

Recent advancements in diffusion models have greatly improved the quality and diversity of synthesized content. To harness the expressive power of diffusion models, researchers have explored various controllable mechanisms that allow users to intuitively guide the content synthesis process. Although the latest efforts have primarily focused on video synthesis, there has been a lack of effective methods for controlling and describing desired content and motion. In response to this gap, we introduce MCDiff, a conditional diffusion model that generates a video from a starting image frame and a set of strokes, which allow users to specify the intended content and dynamics for synthesis. To tackle the ambiguity of sparse motion inputs and achieve better synthesis quality, MCDiff first utilizes a flow completion model to predict the dense video motion based on the semantic understanding of the video frame and the sparse motion control. Then, the diffusion model synthesizes high-quality future frames to form the output video. We qualitatively and quantitatively show that MCDiff achieves the state-the-of-art visual quality in stroke-guided controllable video synthesis. Additional experiments on MPII Human Pose further exhibit the capability of our model on diverse content and motion synthesis.
Make It So: Steering StyleGAN for Any Image Inversion and Editing
Authors: Anand Bhattad, Viraj Shah, Derek Hoiem, D. A. Forsyth
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00

StyleGAN's disentangled style representation enables powerful image editing by manipulating the latent variables, but accurately mapping real-world images to their latent variables (GAN inversion) remains a challenge. Existing GAN inversion methods struggle to maintain editing directions and produce realistic results. To address these limitations, we propose Make It So, a novel GAN inversion method that operates in the $\mathcal{Z}$ (noise) space rather than the typical $\mathcal{W}$ (latent style) space. Make It So preserves editing capabilities, even for out-of-domain images. This is a crucial property that was overlooked in prior methods. Our quantitative evaluations demonstrate that Make It So outperforms the state-of-the-art method PTI~\cite{roich2021pivotal} by a factor of five in inversion accuracy and achieves ten times better edit quality for complex indoor scenes.
ActorsNeRF: Animatable Few-shot Human Rendering with Generalizable NeRFs
Authors: Jiteng Mu, Shen Sang, Nuno Vasconcelos, Xiaolong Wang
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

While NeRF-based human representations have shown impressive novel view synthesis results, most methods still rely on a large number of images / views for training. In this work, we propose a novel animatable NeRF called ActorsNeRF. It is first pre-trained on diverse human subjects, and then adapted with few-shot monocular video frames for a new actor with unseen poses. Building on previous generalizable NeRFs with parameter sharing using a ConvNet encoder, ActorsNeRF further adopts two human priors to capture the large human appearance, shape, and pose variations. Specifically, in the encoded feature space, we will first align different human subjects in a category-level canonical space, and then align the same human from different frames in an instance-level canonical space for rendering. We quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrate that ActorsNeRF significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art on few-shot generalization to new people and poses on multiple datasets. Project Page: https://jitengmu.github.io/ActorsNeRF/
IconShop: Text-Guided Vector Icon Synthesis with Autoregressive Transformers
Authors: Ronghuan Wu, Wanchao Su, Kede Ma, Jing Liao
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, Vector Graphics

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a popular vector image format that offers good support for interactivity and animation. Despite its appealing characteristics, creating custom SVG content can be challenging for users due to the steep learning curve required to understand SVG grammars or get familiar with professional editing software. Recent advancements in text-to-image generation have inspired researchers to explore vector graphics synthesis using either image-based methods (i.e., text -> raster image -> vector graphics) combining text-to-image generation models with image vectorization, or language-based methods (i.e., text -> vector graphics script) through pretrained large language models. However, these methods still suffer from limitations in terms of generation quality, diversity, and flexibility. In this paper, we introduce IconShop, a text-guided vector icon synthesis method using autoregressive transformers. The key to success of our approach is to sequentialize and tokenize SVG paths (and textual descriptions as guidance) into a uniquely decodable token sequence. With that, we are able to fully exploit the sequence learning power of autoregressive transformers, while enabling both unconditional and text-conditioned icon synthesis. Through standard training to predict the next token on a large-scale vector icon dataset accompanied by textural descriptions, the proposed IconShop consistently exhibits better icon synthesis capability than existing image-based and language-based methods both quantitatively and qualitatively. Meanwhile, we observe a dramatic improvement in generation diversity, which is validated by the objective Uniqueness and Novelty measures. More importantly, we demonstrate the flexibility of IconShop with multiple novel icon synthesis tasks, including icon editing, icon interpolation, icon semantic combination, and icon design auto-suggestion.
Learning Articulated Shape with Keypoint Pseudo-labels from Web Images
Authors: Anastasis Stathopoulos, Georgios Pavlakos, Ligong Han, Dimitris Metaxas
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Keypoint Estimation, Object

This paper shows that it is possible to learn models for monocular 3D reconstruction of articulated objects (e.g., horses, cows, sheep), using as few as 50-150 images labeled with 2D keypoints. Our proposed approach involves training category-specific keypoint estimators, generating 2D keypoint pseudo-labels on unlabeled web images, and using both the labeled and self-labeled sets to train 3D reconstruction models. It is based on two key insights: (1) 2D keypoint estimation networks trained on as few as 50-150 images of a given object category generalize well and generate reliable pseudo-labels; (2) a data selection mechanism can automatically create a "curated" subset of the unlabeled web images that can be used for training -- we evaluate four data selection methods. Coupling these two insights enables us to train models that effectively utilize web images, resulting in improved 3D reconstruction performance for several articulated object categories beyond the fully-supervised baseline. Our approach can quickly bootstrap a model and requires only a few images labeled with 2D keypoints. This requirement can be easily satisfied for any new object category. To showcase the practicality of our approach for predicting the 3D shape of arbitrary object categories, we annotate 2D keypoints on giraffe and bear images from COCO -- the annotation process takes less than 1 minute per image.
Unified Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Single- and Multi-Modal Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Xin Chen, Ben Kang, Jiawen Zhu, Dong Wang, Houwen Peng, Huchuan Lu
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Decoder, Object, Object Tracking, Rgb-T Tracking, Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

In this paper, we introduce a new sequence-to-sequence learning framework for RGB-based and multi-modal object tracking. First, we present SeqTrack for RGB-based tracking. It casts visual tracking as a sequence generation task, forecasting object bounding boxes in an autoregressive manner. This differs from previous trackers, which depend on the design of intricate head networks, such as classification and regression heads. SeqTrack employs a basic encoder-decoder transformer architecture. The encoder utilizes a bidirectional transformer for feature extraction, while the decoder generates bounding box sequences autoregressively using a causal transformer. The loss function is a plain cross-entropy. Second, we introduce SeqTrackv2, a unified sequence-to-sequence framework for multi-modal tracking tasks. Expanding upon SeqTrack, SeqTrackv2 integrates a unified interface for auxiliary modalities and a set of task-prompt tokens to specify the task. This enables it to manage multi-modal tracking tasks using a unified model and parameter set. This sequence learning paradigm not only simplifies the tracking framework, but also showcases superior performance across 14 challenging benchmarks spanning five single- and multi-modal tracking tasks. The code and models are available at https://github.com/chenxin-dlut/SeqTrackv2.
$π$-Tuning: Transferring Multimodal Foundation Models with Optimal Multi-task Interpolation
Authors: Chengyue Wu, Teng Wang, Yixiao Ge, Zeyu Lu, Ruisong Zhou, Ying Shan, Ping Luo
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Transfer Learning

Foundation models have achieved great advances in multi-task learning with a unified interface of unimodal and multimodal tasks. However, the potential of such multi-task learners has not been exploited during transfer learning. In this work, we present a universal parameter-efficient transfer learning method, termed Predict-Interpolate Tuning ($\pi$-Tuning), for vision, language, and vision-language tasks. It aggregates the parameters of lightweight task-specific experts learned from similar tasks to aid the target downstream task. The task similarities are predicted in a unified modality-independent space, yielding a scalable graph to demonstrate task relationships. $\pi$-Tuning has several appealing benefits. First, it flexibly explores both intra- and inter-modal transferability between similar tasks to improve the accuracy and robustness of transfer learning, especially in data-scarce scenarios. Second, it offers a systematical solution for transfer learning with multi-task prediction-and-then-interpolation, compatible with diverse types of parameter-efficient experts, such as prompt and adapter. Third, an extensive study of task-level mutual benefits on 14 unimodal and 6 multimodal datasets shows that $\pi$-Tuning surpasses fine-tuning and other parameter-efficient transfer learning methods both in full-shot and low-shot regimes. The task graph also enables an in-depth interpretable analysis of task transferability across modalities. The code will be available at https://github.com/TencentARC/pi-Tuning.
Co-SLAM: Joint Coordinate and Sparse Parametric Encodings for Neural Real-Time SLAM
Authors: Hengyi Wang, Jingwen Wang, Lourdes Agapito
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

We present Co-SLAM, a neural RGB-D SLAM system based on a hybrid representation, that performs robust camera tracking and high-fidelity surface reconstruction in real time. Co-SLAM represents the scene as a multi-resolution hash-grid to exploit its high convergence speed and ability to represent high-frequency local features. In addition, Co-SLAM incorporates one-blob encoding, to encourage surface coherence and completion in unobserved areas. This joint parametric-coordinate encoding enables real-time and robust performance by bringing the best of both worlds: fast convergence and surface hole filling. Moreover, our ray sampling strategy allows Co-SLAM to perform global bundle adjustment over all keyframes instead of requiring keyframe selection to maintain a small number of active keyframes as competing neural SLAM approaches do. Experimental results show that Co-SLAM runs at 10-17Hz and achieves state-of-the-art scene reconstruction results, and competitive tracking performance in various datasets and benchmarks (ScanNet, TUM, Replica, Synthetic RGBD). Project page: https://hengyiwang.github.io/projects/CoSLAM
Zero-shot Unsupervised Transfer Instance Segmentation
Authors: Gyungin Shin, Samuel Albanie, Weidi Xie
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmentation is a core computer vision competency, with applications spanning a broad range of scientifically and economically valuable domains. To date, however, the prohibitive cost of annotation has limited the deployment of flexible segmentation models. In this work, we propose Zero-shot Unsupervised Transfer Instance Segmentation (ZUTIS), a framework that aims to meet this challenge. The key strengths of ZUTIS are: (i) no requirement for instance-level or pixel-level annotations; (ii) an ability of zero-shot transfer, i.e., no assumption on access to a target data distribution; (iii) a unified framework for semantic and instance segmentations with solid performance on both tasks compared to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. While comparing to previous work, we show ZUTIS achieves a gain of 2.2 mask AP on COCO-20K and 14.5 mIoU on ImageNet-S with 919 categories for instance and semantic segmentations, respectively. The code is made publicly available.
Structure Analysis of the FRP Rebar Using Computer Vision Techniques
Authors: Juraj Lagin, Simon Bilik
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00

In this paper we present a method to analyze the inner structure of the composite FRP rebar, namely the shift of the real center of gravity with a respect to the geometrical center of rebar and changes of cross-sectional characteristics. We propose an automated pipeline based on classical computer vision techniques and on the ratio between the glass fibers and epoxy filament in the analyzed cross-section to compute the shift vector of the real center of gravity in respect to the geometrical center together with the cross-section area and its principal moments. We discuss the achieved results over two cross sections in a different portion of the rebar and in the end, we suggest possible direction and improvements for our future work. We also made our code publicly available.