pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Open-World Co-Salient Object Detection with Generative Uncertainty-aware Group Selective Exchange-Masking
Authors: Yang Wu, Shenglong Hu, Huihui Song, Kaihua Zhang, Bo Liu, Dong Liu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Co-Salient Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

The traditional definition of co-salient object detection (CoSOD) task is to segment the common salient objects in a group of relevant images. This definition is based on an assumption of group consensus consistency that is not always reasonable in the open-world setting, which results in robustness issue in the model when dealing with irrelevant images in the inputting image group under the open-word scenarios. To tackle this problem, we introduce a group selective exchange-masking (GSEM) approach for enhancing the robustness of the CoSOD model. GSEM takes two groups of images as input, each containing different types of salient objects. Based on the mixed metric we designed, GSEM selects a subset of images from each group using a novel learning-based strategy, then the selected images are exchanged. To simultaneously consider the uncertainty introduced by irrelevant images and the consensus features of the remaining relevant images in the group, we designed a latent variable generator branch and CoSOD transformer branch. The former is composed of a vector quantised-variational autoencoder to generate stochastic global variables that model uncertainty. The latter is designed to capture correlation-based local features that include group consensus. Finally, the outputs of the two branches are merged and passed to a transformer-based decoder to generate robust predictions. Taking into account that there are currently no benchmark datasets specifically designed for open-world scenarios, we constructed three open-world benchmark datasets, namely OWCoSal, OWCoSOD, and OWCoCA, based on existing datasets. By breaking the group-consistency assumption, these datasets provide effective simulations of real-world scenarios and can better evaluate the robustness and practicality of models.
Long-term Dependency for 3D Reconstruction of Freehand Ultrasound Without External Tracker
Authors: Qi Li, Ziyi Shen, Qian Li, Dean C. Barratt, Thomas Dowrick, Matthew J. Clarkson, Tom Vercauteren, Yipeng Hu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Objective: Reconstructing freehand ultrasound in 3D without any external tracker has been a long-standing challenge in ultrasound-assisted procedures. We aim to define new ways of parameterising long-term dependencies, and evaluate the performance. Methods: First, long-term dependency is encoded by transformation positions within a frame sequence. This is achieved by combining a sequence model with a multi-transformation prediction. Second, two dependency factors are proposed, anatomical image content and scanning protocol, for contributing towards accurate reconstruction. Each factor is quantified experimentally by reducing respective training variances. Results: 1) The added long-term dependency up to 400 frames at 20 frames per second (fps) indeed improved reconstruction, with an up to 82.4% lowered accumulated error, compared with the baseline performance. The improvement was found to be dependent on sequence length, transformation interval and scanning protocol and, unexpectedly, not on the use of recurrent networks with long-short term modules; 2) Decreasing either anatomical or protocol variance in training led to poorer reconstruction accuracy. Interestingly, greater performance was gained from representative protocol patterns, than from representative anatomical features. Conclusion: The proposed algorithm uses hyperparameter tuning to effectively utilise long-term dependency. The proposed dependency factors are of practical significance in collecting diverse training data, regulating scanning protocols and developing efficient networks. Significance: The proposed new methodology with publicly available volunteer data and code for parametersing the long-term dependency, experimentally shown to be valid sources of performance improvement, which could potentially lead to better model development and practical optimisation of the reconstruction application.
Mask wearing object detection algorithm based on improved YOLOv5
Authors: Peng Wen, Junhu Zhang, Haitao Li
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Wearing a mask is one of the important measures to prevent infectious diseases. However, it is difficult to detect people's mask-wearing situation in public places with high traffic flow. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a mask-wearing face detection model based on YOLOv5l. Firstly, Multi-Head Attentional Self-Convolution not only improves the convergence speed of the model but also enhances the accuracy of the model detection. Secondly, the introduction of Swin Transformer Block is able to extract more useful feature information, enhance the detection ability of small targets, and improve the overall accuracy of the model. Our designed I-CBAM module can improve target detection accuracy. In addition, using enhanced feature fusion enables the model to better adapt to object detection tasks of different scales. In the experimentation on the MASK dataset, the results show that the model proposed in this paper achieved a 1.1% improvement in mAP(0.5) and a 1.3% improvement in mAP(0.5:0.95) compared to the YOLOv5l model. Our proposed method significantly enhances the detection capability of mask-wearing.
Generalizing Medical Image Representations via Quaternion Wavelet Networks
Authors: Luigi Sigillo, Eleonora Grassucci, Aurelio Uncini, Danilo Comminiello
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis

Neural network generalizability is becoming a broad research field due to the increasing availability of datasets from different sources and for various tasks. This issue is even wider when processing medical data, where a lack of methodological standards causes large variations being provided by different imaging centers or acquired with various devices and cofactors. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel, generalizable, data- and task-agnostic framework able to extract salient features from medical images. The proposed quaternion wavelet network (QUAVE) can be easily integrated with any pre-existing medical image analysis or synthesis task, and it can be involved with real, quaternion, or hypercomplex-valued models, generalizing their adoption to single-channel data. QUAVE first extracts different sub-bands through the quaternion wavelet transform, resulting in both low-frequency/approximation bands and high-frequency/fine-grained features. Then, it weighs the most representative set of sub-bands to be involved as input to any other neural model for image processing, replacing standard data samples. We conduct an extensive experimental evaluation comprising different datasets, diverse image analysis, and synthesis tasks including reconstruction, segmentation, and modality translation. We also evaluate QUAVE in combination with both real and quaternion-valued models. Results demonstrate the effectiveness and the generalizability of the proposed framework that improves network performance while being flexible to be adopted in manifold scenarios and robust to domain shifts. The full code is available at: https://github.com/ispamm/QWT.
RoboLLM: Robotic Vision Tasks Grounded on Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Zijun Long, George Killick, Richard McCreadie, Gerardo Aragon Camarasa
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Model Selection, object-detection, Object Detection

Robotic vision applications often necessitate a wide range of visual perception tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and identification. While there have been substantial advances in these individual tasks, integrating specialized models into a unified vision pipeline presents significant engineering challenges and costs. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as novel backbones for various downstream tasks. We argue that leveraging the pre-training capabilities of MLLMs enables the creation of a simplified framework, thus mitigating the need for task-specific encoders. Specifically, the large-scale pretrained knowledge in MLLMs allows for easier fine-tuning to downstream robotic vision tasks and yields superior performance. We introduce the RoboLLM framework, equipped with a BEiT-3 backbone, to address all visual perception tasks in the ARMBench challenge-a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset about real-world warehouse scenarios. RoboLLM not only outperforms existing baselines but also substantially reduces the engineering burden associated with model selection and tuning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/longkukuhi/armbench.
Self-supervised Fetal MRI 3D Reconstruction Based on Radiation Diffusion Generation Model
Authors: Junpeng Tan, Xin Zhang, Yao Lv, Xiangmin Xu, Gang Li
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF, Super-Resolution

Although the use of multiple stacks can handle slice-to-volume motion correction and artifact removal problems, there are still several problems: 1) The slice-to-volume method usually uses slices as input, which cannot solve the problem of uniform intensity distribution and complementarity in regions of different fetal MRI stacks; 2) The integrity of 3D space is not considered, which adversely affects the discrimination and generation of globally consistent information in fetal MRI; 3) Fetal MRI with severe motion artifacts in the real-world cannot achieve high-quality super-resolution reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a novel fetal brain MRI high-quality volume reconstruction method, called the Radiation Diffusion Generation Model (RDGM). It is a self-supervised generation method, which incorporates the idea of Neural Radiation Field (NeRF) based on the coordinate generation and diffusion model based on super-resolution generation. To solve regional intensity heterogeneity in different directions, we use a pre-trained transformer model for slice registration, and then, a new regionally Consistent Implicit Neural Representation (CINR) network sub-module is proposed. CINR can generate the initial volume by combining a coordinate association map of two different coordinate mapping spaces. To enhance volume global consistency and discrimination, we introduce the Volume Diffusion Super-resolution Generation (VDSG) mechanism. The global intensity discriminant generation from volume-to-volume is carried out using the idea of diffusion generation, and CINR becomes the deviation intensity generation network of the volume-to-volume diffusion model. Finally, the experimental results on real-world fetal brain MRI stacks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.
MoConVQ: Unified Physics-Based Motion Control via Scalable Discrete Representations
Authors: Heyuan Yao, Zhenhua Song, Yuyang Zhou, Tenglong Ao, Baoquan Chen, Libin Liu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Motion Generation

In this work, we present MoConVQ, a novel unified framework for physics-based motion control leveraging scalable discrete representations. Building upon vector quantized variational autoencoders (VQ-VAE) and model-based reinforcement learning, our approach effectively learns motion embeddings from a large, unstructured dataset spanning tens of hours of motion examples. The resultant motion representation not only captures diverse motion skills but also offers a robust and intuitive interface for various applications. We demonstrate the versatility of MoConVQ through several applications: universal tracking control from various motion sources, interactive character control with latent motion representations using supervised learning, physics-based motion generation from natural language descriptions using the GPT framework, and, most interestingly, seamless integration with large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning to tackle complex and abstract tasks.
The Road to On-board Change Detection: A Lightweight Patch-Level Change Detection Network via Exploring the Potential of Pruning and Pooling
Authors: Lihui Xue, Zhihao Wang, Xueqian Wang, Gang Li
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, Feature Compression

Existing satellite remote sensing change detection (CD) methods often crop original large-scale bi-temporal image pairs into small patch pairs and then use pixel-level CD methods to fairly process all the patch pairs. However, due to the sparsity of change in large-scale satellite remote sensing images, existing pixel-level CD methods suffer from a waste of computational cost and memory resources on lots of unchanged areas, which reduces the processing efficiency of on-board platform with extremely limited computation and memory resources. To address this issue, we propose a lightweight patch-level CD network (LPCDNet) to rapidly remove lots of unchanged patch pairs in large-scale bi-temporal image pairs. This is helpful to accelerate the subsequent pixel-level CD processing stage and reduce its memory costs. In our LPCDNet, a sensitivity-guided channel pruning method is proposed to remove unimportant channels and construct the lightweight backbone network on basis of ResNet18 network. Then, the multi-layer feature compression (MLFC) module is designed to compress and fuse the multi-level feature information of bi-temporal image patch. The output of MLFC module is fed into the fully-connected decision network to generate the predicted binary label. Finally, a weighted cross-entropy loss is utilized in the training process of network to tackle the change/unchange class imbalance problem. Experiments on two CD datasets demonstrate that our LPCDNet achieves more than 1000 frames per second on an edge computation platform, i.e., NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, which is more than 3 times that of the existing methods without noticeable CD performance loss. In addition, our method reduces more than 60% memory costs of the subsequent pixel-level CD processing stage.
A Search for Prompts: Generating Structured Answers from Contracts
Authors: Adam Roegiest, Radha Chitta, Jonathan Donnelly, Maya Lash, Alexandra Vtyurina, François Longtin
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Question Answering, In-Context Learning, Question Answering

In many legal processes being able to action on the concrete implication of a legal question can be valuable to automating human review or signalling certain conditions (e.g., alerts around automatic renewal). To support such tasks, we present a form of legal question answering that seeks to return one (or more) fixed answers for a question about a contract clause. After showing that unstructured generative question answering can have questionable outcomes for such a task, we discuss our exploration methodology for legal question answering prompts using OpenAI's \textit{GPT-3.5-Turbo} and provide a summary of insights. Using insights gleaned from our qualitative experiences, we compare our proposed template prompts against a common semantic matching approach and find that our prompt templates are far more accurate despite being less reliable in the exact response return. With some additional tweaks to prompts and the use of in-context learning, we are able to further improve the performance of our proposed strategy while maximizing the reliability of responses as best we can.
3DYoga90: A Hierarchical Video Dataset for Yoga Pose Understanding
Authors: Seonok Kim
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Benchmarking

The increasing popularity of exercises including yoga and Pilates has created a greater demand for professional exercise video datasets in the realm of artificial intelligence. In this study, we developed 3DYoga901, which is organized within a three-level label hierarchy. We have expanded the number of poses from an existing state-of-the-art dataset, increasing it from 82 to 90 poses. Our dataset includes meticulously curated RGB yoga pose videos and 3D skeleton sequences. This dataset was created by a dedicated team of six individuals, including yoga instructors. It stands out as one of the most comprehensive open datasets, featuring the largest collection of RGB videos and 3D skeleton sequences among publicly available resources. This contribution has the potential to significantly advance the field of yoga action recognition and pose assessment. Additionally, we conducted experiments to evaluate the practicality of our proposed dataset. We employed three different model variants for benchmarking purposes.
Few-shot Action Recognition with Captioning Foundation Models
Authors: Xiang Wang, Shiwei Zhang, Hangjie Yuan, Yingya Zhang, Changxin Gao, Deli Zhao, Nong Sang
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Few-Shot action recognition, Few Shot Action Recognition

Transferring vision-language knowledge from pretrained multimodal foundation models to various downstream tasks is a promising direction. However, most current few-shot action recognition methods are still limited to a single visual modality input due to the high cost of annotating additional textual descriptions. In this paper, we develop an effective plug-and-play framework called CapFSAR to exploit the knowledge of multimodal models without manually annotating text. To be specific, we first utilize a captioning foundation model (i.e., BLIP) to extract visual features and automatically generate associated captions for input videos. Then, we apply a text encoder to the synthetic captions to obtain representative text embeddings. Finally, a visual-text aggregation module based on Transformer is further designed to incorporate cross-modal spatio-temporal complementary information for reliable few-shot matching. In this way, CapFSAR can benefit from powerful multimodal knowledge of pretrained foundation models, yielding more comprehensive classification in the low-shot regime. Extensive experiments on multiple standard few-shot benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CapFSAR performs favorably against existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The code will be made publicly available.
AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion
Authors: Yitong Jiang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Tianfan Xue, Jinwei Gu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Quality Assessment, Image Restoration, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment

We present AutoDIR, an innovative all-in-one image restoration system incorporating latent diffusion. AutoDIR excels in its ability to automatically identify and restore images suffering from a range of unknown degradations. AutoDIR offers intuitive open-vocabulary image editing, empowering users to customize and enhance images according to their preferences. Specifically, AutoDIR consists of two key stages: a Blind Image Quality Assessment (BIQA) stage based on a semantic-agnostic vision-language model which automatically detects unknown image degradations for input images, an All-in-One Image Restoration (AIR) stage utilizes structural-corrected latent diffusion which handles multiple types of image degradations. Extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that AutoDIR outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for a wider range of image restoration tasks. The design of AutoDIR also enables flexible user control (via text prompt) and generalization to new tasks as a foundation model of image restoration. Project is available at: \url{https://jiangyitong.github.io/AutoDIR_webpage/}.
A Multi-Scale Spatial Transformer U-Net for Simultaneously Automatic Reorientation and Segmentation of 3D Nuclear Cardiac Images
Authors: Yangfan Ni, Duo Zhang, Gege Ma, Lijun Lu, Zhongke Huang, Wentao Zhu
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: LV Segmentation, Segmentation

Accurate reorientation and segmentation of the left ventricular (LV) is essential for the quantitative analysis of myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI), in which one critical step is to reorient the reconstructed transaxial nuclear cardiac images into standard short-axis slices for subsequent image processing. Small-scale LV myocardium (LV-MY) region detection and the diverse cardiac structures of individual patients pose challenges to LV segmentation operation. To mitigate these issues, we propose an end-to-end model, named as multi-scale spatial transformer UNet (MS-ST-UNet), that involves the multi-scale spatial transformer network (MSSTN) and multi-scale UNet (MSUNet) modules to perform simultaneous reorientation and segmentation of LV region from nuclear cardiac images. The proposed method is trained and tested using two different nuclear cardiac image modalities: 13N-ammonia PET and 99mTc-sestamibi SPECT. We use a multi-scale strategy to generate and extract image features with different scales. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the reorientation and segmentation performance. This joint learning framework promotes mutual enhancement between reorientation and segmentation tasks, leading to cutting edge performance and an efficient image processing workflow. The proposed end-to-end deep network has the potential to reduce the burden of manual delineation for cardiac images, thereby providing multimodal quantitative analysis assistance for physicists.
Expression Domain Translation Network for Cross-domain Head Reenactment
Authors: Taewoong Kang, Jeongsik Oh, Jaeseong Lee, Sunghyun Park, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2023-10-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Despite the remarkable advancements in head reenactment, the existing methods face challenges in cross-domain head reenactment, which aims to transfer human motions to domains outside the human, including cartoon characters. It is still difficult to extract motion from out-of-domain images due to the distinct appearances, such as large eyes. Recently, previous work introduced a large-scale anime dataset called AnimeCeleb and a cross-domain head reenactment model, including an optimization-based mapping function to translate the human domain's expressions to the anime domain. However, we found that the mapping function, which relies on a subset of expressions, imposes limitations on the mapping of various expressions. To solve this challenge, we introduce a novel expression domain translation network that transforms human expressions into anime expressions. Specifically, to maintain the geometric consistency of expressions between the input and output of the expression domain translation network, we employ a 3D geometric-aware loss function that reduces the distances between the vertices in the 3D mesh of the human and anime. By doing so, it forces high-fidelity and one-to-one mapping with respect to two cross-expression domains. Our method outperforms existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative analysis, marking a significant advancement in the field of cross-domain head reenactment.
Generative Adversarial Training for Text-to-Speech Synthesis Based on Raw Phonetic Input and Explicit Prosody Modelling
Authors: Tiberiu Boros, Stefan Daniel Dumitrescu, Ionut Mironica, Radu Chivereanu
Date: 2023-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis, Word Embeddings

We describe an end-to-end speech synthesis system that uses generative adversarial training. We train our Vocoder for raw phoneme-to-audio conversion, using explicit phonetic, pitch and duration modeling. We experiment with several pre-trained models for contextualized and decontextualized word embeddings and we introduce a new method for highly expressive character voice matching, based on discreet style tokens.