pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Object Topological Character Acquisition by Inductive Learning
Authors: Wei Hui, Liping Yu, Yiran Wei
Date: 2023-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning, Object, Object Recognition

Understanding the shape and structure of objects is undoubtedly extremely important for object recognition, but the most common pattern recognition method currently used is machine learning, which often requires a large number of training data. The problem is that this kind of object-oriented learning lacks a priori knowledge. The amount of training data and the complexity of computations are very large, and it is hard to extract explicit knowledge after learning. This is typically called "knowing how without knowing why". We adopted a method of inductive learning, hoping to derive conceptual knowledge of the shape of an object and its formal representation based on a small number of positive examples. It is clear that implementing object recognition is not based on simple physical features such as colors, edges, textures, etc., but on their common geometry, such as topologies, which are stable, persistent, and essential to recognition. In this paper, a formal representation of topological structure based on object's skeleton (RTS) was proposed and the induction process of "seeking common ground" is realized. This research helps promote the method of object recognition from empiricism to rationalism.
Enhanced Masked Image Modeling for Analysis of Dental Panoramic Radiographs
Authors: Amani Almalki, Longin Jan Latecki
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

The computer-assisted radiologic informative report has received increasing research attention to facilitate diagnosis and treatment planning for dental care providers. However, manual interpretation of dental images is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. Another barrier in dental imaging is the limited number of available images for training, which is a challenge in the era of deep learning. This study proposes a novel self-distillation (SD) enhanced self-supervised learning on top of the masked image modeling (SimMIM) Transformer, called SD-SimMIM, to improve the outcome with a limited number of dental radiographs. In addition to the prediction loss on masked patches, SD-SimMIM computes the self-distillation loss on the visible patches. We apply SD-SimMIM on dental panoramic X-rays for teeth numbering, detection of dental restorations and orthodontic appliances, and instance segmentation tasks. Our results show that SD-SimMIM outperforms other self-supervised learning methods. Furthermore, we augment and improve the annotation of an existing dataset of panoramic X-rays.
Prior-knowledge-informed deep learning for lacune detection and quantification using multi-site brain MRI
Authors: Bo Li, Jeroen de Bresser, Wiro Niessen, Matthias Van Osch, Wiesje M. van der Flier, Geert Jan Biessels, Meike W. Vernooij, Esther Bron
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00

Lacunes of presumed vascular origin, also referred to as lacunar infarcts, are important to assess cerebral small vessel disease and cognitive diseases such as dementia. However, visual rating of lacunes from imaging data is challenging, time-consuming, and rater-dependent, owing to their small size, sparsity, and mimics. Whereas recent developments in automatic algorithms have shown to make the detection of lacunes faster while preserving sensitivity, they also showed a large number of false positives, which makes them impractical for use in clinical practice or large-scale studies. Here, we develop a novel framework that, in addition to lacune detection, outputs a categorical burden score. This score could provide a more practical estimate of lacune presence that simplifies and effectively accelerates the imaging assessment of lacunes. We hypothesize that the combination of detection and the categorical score makes the procedure less sensitive to noisy labels.
Deep learning-based group-wise registration for longitudinal MRI analysis in glioma
Authors: Claudia Chinea Hammecher, Karin van Garderen, Marion Smits, Pieter Wesseling, Bart Westerman, Pim French, Mathilde Kouwenhoven, Roel Verhaak, Frans Vos, Esther Bron, Bo Li
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Glioma growth may be quantified with longitudinal image registration. However, the large mass-effects and tissue changes across images pose an added challenge. Here, we propose a longitudinal, learning-based, and groupwise registration method for the accurate and unbiased registration of glioma MRI. We evaluate on a dataset from the Glioma Longitudinal AnalySiS consortium and compare it to classical registration methods. We achieve comparable Dice coefficients, with more detailed registrations, while significantly reducing the runtime to under a minute. The proposed methods may serve as an alternative to classical toolboxes, to provide further insight into glioma growth.
STHG: Spatial-Temporal Heterogeneous Graph Learning for Advanced Audio-Visual Diarization
Authors: Kyle Min
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Graph Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This report introduces our novel method named STHG for the Audio-Visual Diarization task of the Ego4D Challenge 2023. Our key innovation is that we model all the speakers in a video using a single, unified heterogeneous graph learning framework. Unlike previous approaches that require a separate component solely for the camera wearer, STHG can jointly detect the speech activities of all people including the camera wearer. Our final method obtains 61.1% DER on the test set of Ego4D, which significantly outperforms all the baselines as well as last year's winner. Our submission achieved 1st place in the Ego4D Challenge 2023. We additionally demonstrate that applying the off-the-shelf speech recognition system to the diarized speech segments by STHG produces a competitive performance on the Speech Transcription task of this challenge.
MIR-GAN: Refining Frame-Level Modality-Invariant Representations with Adversarial Network for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Authors: Yuchen Hu, Chen Chen, Ruizhe Li, Heqing Zou, Eng Siong Chng
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Representation Learning, Sentiment Analysis, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) attracts a surge of research interest recently by leveraging multimodal signals to understand human speech. Mainstream approaches addressing this task have developed sophisticated architectures and techniques for multi-modality fusion and representation learning. However, the natural heterogeneity of different modalities causes distribution gap between their representations, making it challenging to fuse them. In this paper, we aim to learn the shared representations across modalities to bridge their gap. Different from existing similar methods on other multimodal tasks like sentiment analysis, we focus on the temporal contextual dependencies considering the sequence-to-sequence task setting of AVSR. In particular, we propose an adversarial network to refine frame-level modality-invariant representations (MIR-GAN), which captures the commonality across modalities to ease the subsequent multimodal fusion process. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks LRS3 and LRS2 show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-arts.
Hearing Lips in Noise: Universal Viseme-Phoneme Mapping and Transfer for Robust Audio-Visual Speech Recognition
Authors: Yuchen Hu, Ruizhe Li, Chen Chen, Chengwei Qin, Qiushi Zhu, Eng Siong Chng
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) provides a promising solution to ameliorate the noise-robustness of audio-only speech recognition with visual information. However, most existing efforts still focus on audio modality to improve robustness considering its dominance in AVSR task, with noise adaptation techniques such as front-end denoise processing. Though effective, these methods are usually faced with two practical challenges: 1) lack of sufficient labeled noisy audio-visual training data in some real-world scenarios and 2) less optimal model generality to unseen testing noises. In this work, we investigate the noise-invariant visual modality to strengthen robustness of AVSR, which can adapt to any testing noises while without dependence on noisy training data, a.k.a., unsupervised noise adaptation. Inspired by human perception mechanism, we propose a universal viseme-phoneme mapping (UniVPM) approach to implement modality transfer, which can restore clean audio from visual signals to enable speech recognition under any noisy conditions. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks LRS3 and LRS2 show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art under various noisy as well as clean conditions. In addition, we also outperform previous state-of-the-arts on visual speech recognition task.
Learn to Enhance the Negative Information in Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Zhicheng Cai, Chenglei Peng, Qiu Shen
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00

This paper proposes a learnable nonlinear activation mechanism specifically for convolutional neural network (CNN) termed as LENI, which learns to enhance the negative information in CNNs. In sharp contrast to ReLU which cuts off the negative neurons and suffers from the issue of ''dying ReLU'', LENI enjoys the capacity to reconstruct the dead neurons and reduce the information loss. Compared to improved ReLUs, LENI introduces a learnable approach to process the negative phase information more properly. In this way, LENI can enhance the model representational capacity significantly while maintaining the original advantages of ReLU. As a generic activation mechanism, LENI possesses the property of portability and can be easily utilized in any CNN models through simply replacing the activation layers with LENI block. Extensive experiments validate that LENI can improve the performance of various baseline models on various benchmark datasets by a clear margin (up to 1.24% higher top-1 accuracy on ImageNet-1k) with negligible extra parameters. Further experiments show that LENI can act as a channel compensation mechanism, offering competitive or even better performance but with fewer learned parameters than baseline models. In addition, LENI introduces the asymmetry to the model structure which contributes to the enhancement of representational capacity. Through visualization experiments, we validate that LENI can retain more information and learn more representations.
ProMIL: Probabilistic Multiple Instance Learning for Medical Imaging
Authors: Łukasz Struski, Dawid Rymarczyk, Arkadiusz Lewicki, Robert Sabiniewicz, Jacek Tabor, Bartosz Zieliński
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multiple Instance Learning

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly-supervised problem in which one label is assigned to the whole bag of instances. An important class of MIL models is instance-based, where we first classify instances and then aggregate those predictions to obtain a bag label. The most common MIL model is when we consider a bag as positive if at least one of its instances has a positive label. However, this reasoning does not hold in many real-life scenarios, where the positive bag label is often a consequence of a certain percentage of positive instances. To address this issue, we introduce a dedicated instance-based method called ProMIL, based on deep neural networks and Bernstein polynomial estimation. An important advantage of ProMIL is that it can automatically detect the optimal percentage level for decision-making. We show that ProMIL outperforms standard instance-based MIL in real-world medical applications. We make the code available.
Point-Cloud Completion with Pretrained Text-to-image Diffusion Models
Authors: Yoni Kasten, Ohad Rahamim, Gal Chechik
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Point Cloud Completion

Point-cloud data collected in real-world applications are often incomplete. Data is typically missing due to objects being observed from partial viewpoints, which only capture a specific perspective or angle. Additionally, data can be incomplete due to occlusion and low-resolution sampling. Existing completion approaches rely on datasets of predefined objects to guide the completion of noisy and incomplete, point clouds. However, these approaches perform poorly when tested on Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) objects, that are poorly represented in the training dataset. Here we leverage recent advances in text-guided image generation, which lead to major breakthroughs in text-guided shape generation. We describe an approach called SDS-Complete that uses a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model and leverages the text semantics of a given incomplete point cloud of an object, to obtain a complete surface representation. SDS-Complete can complete a variety of objects using test-time optimization without expensive collection of 3D information. We evaluate SDS Complete on incomplete scanned objects, captured by real-world depth sensors and LiDAR scanners. We find that it effectively reconstructs objects that are absent from common datasets, reducing Chamfer loss by 50% on average compared with current methods. Project page: https://sds-complete.github.io/
GenPose: Generative Category-level Object Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models
Authors: Jiyao Zhang, Mingdong Wu, Hao Dong
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, 6D Pose Estimation using RGBD, Object, Pose Estimation, Pose Tracking

Object pose estimation plays a vital role in embodied AI and computer vision, enabling intelligent agents to comprehend and interact with their surroundings. Despite the practicality of category-level pose estimation, current approaches encounter challenges with partially observed point clouds, known as the multihypothesis issue. In this study, we propose a novel solution by reframing categorylevel object pose estimation as conditional generative modeling, departing from traditional point-to-point regression. Leveraging score-based diffusion models, we estimate object poses by sampling candidates from the diffusion model and aggregating them through a two-step process: filtering out outliers via likelihood estimation and subsequently mean-pooling the remaining candidates. To avoid the costly integration process when estimating the likelihood, we introduce an alternative method that trains an energy-based model from the original score-based model, enabling end-to-end likelihood estimation. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on the REAL275 dataset, surpassing 50% and 60% on strict 5d2cm and 5d5cm metrics, respectively. Furthermore, our method demonstrates strong generalizability to novel categories sharing similar symmetric properties without fine-tuning and can readily adapt to object pose tracking tasks, yielding comparable results to the current state-of-the-art baselines.
RetinexFlow for CT metal artifact reduction
Authors: Jiandong Su, Ce Wang, Yinsheng Li, Kun Shang, Dong Liang
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Metal Artifact Reduction

Metal artifacts is a major challenge in computed tomography (CT) imaging, significantly degrading image quality and making accurate diagnosis difficult. However, previous methods either require prior knowledge of the location of metal implants, or have modeling deviations with the mechanism of artifact formation, which limits the ability to obtain high-quality CT images. In this work, we formulate metal artifacts reduction problem as a combination of decomposition and completion tasks. And we propose RetinexFlow, which is a novel end-to-end image domain model based on Retinex theory and conditional normalizing flow, to solve it. Specifically, we first design a feature decomposition encoder for decomposing the metal implant component and inherent component, and extracting the inherent feature. Then, it uses a feature-to-image flow module to complete the metal artifact-free CT image step by step through a series of invertible transformations. These designs are incorporated in our model with a coarse-to-fine strategy, enabling it to achieve superior performance. The experimental results on on simulation and clinical datasets show our method achieves better quantitative and qualitative results, exhibiting better visual performance in artifact removal and image fidelity
Vision Guided MIMO Radar Beamforming for Enhanced Vital Signs Detection in Crowds
Authors: Shuaifeng Jiang, Ahmed Alkhateeb, Daniel W. Bliss, Yu Rong
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00

Radar as a remote sensing technology has been used to analyze human activity for decades. Despite all the great features such as motion sensitivity, privacy preservation, penetrability, and more, radar has limited spatial degrees of freedom compared to optical sensors and thus makes it challenging to sense crowded environments without prior information. In this paper, we develop a novel dual-sensing system, in which a vision sensor is leveraged to guide digital beamforming in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. Also, we develop a calibration algorithm to align the two types of sensors and show that the calibrated dual system achieves about two centimeters precision in three-dimensional space within a field of view of $75^\circ$ by $65^\circ$ and for a range of two meters. Finally, we show that the proposed approach is capable of detecting the vital signs simultaneously for a group of closely spaced subjects, sitting and standing, in a cluttered environment, which highlights a promising direction for vital signs detection in realistic environments.
Dual Adaptive Representation Alignment for Cross-domain Few-shot Learning
Authors: Yifan Zhao, Tong Zhang, Jia Li, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, cross-domain few-shot learning, Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

Few-shot learning aims to recognize novel queries with limited support samples by learning from base knowledge. Recent progress in this setting assumes that the base knowledge and novel query samples are distributed in the same domains, which are usually infeasible for realistic applications. Toward this issue, we propose to address the cross-domain few-shot learning problem where only extremely few samples are available in target domains. Under this realistic setting, we focus on the fast adaptation capability of meta-learners by proposing an effective dual adaptive representation alignment approach. In our approach, a prototypical feature alignment is first proposed to recalibrate support instances as prototypes and reproject these prototypes with a differentiable closed-form solution. Therefore feature spaces of learned knowledge can be adaptively transformed to query spaces by the cross-instance and cross-prototype relations. Besides the feature alignment, we further present a normalized distribution alignment module, which exploits prior statistics of query samples for solving the covariant shifts among the support and query samples. With these two modules, a progressive meta-learning framework is constructed to perform the fast adaptation with extremely few-shot samples while maintaining its generalization capabilities. Experimental evidence demonstrates our approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on 4 CDFSL benchmarks and 4 fine-grained cross-domain benchmarks.
QCNeXt: A Next-Generation Framework For Joint Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Zikang Zhou, Zihao Wen, JianPing Wang, Yung-Hui Li, Yu-Kai Huang
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decoder, Motion Forecasting, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction, Translation

Estimating the joint distribution of on-road agents' future trajectories is essential for autonomous driving. In this technical report, we propose a next-generation framework for joint multi-agent trajectory prediction called QCNeXt. First, we adopt the query-centric encoding paradigm for the task of joint multi-agent trajectory prediction. Powered by this encoding scheme, our scene encoder is equipped with permutation equivariance on the set elements, roto-translation invariance in the space dimension, and translation invariance in the time dimension. These invariance properties not only enable accurate multi-agent forecasting fundamentally but also empower the encoder with the capability of streaming processing. Second, we propose a multi-agent DETR-like decoder, which facilitates joint multi-agent trajectory prediction by modeling agents' interactions at future time steps. For the first time, we show that a joint prediction model can outperform marginal prediction models even on the marginal metrics, which opens up new research opportunities in trajectory prediction. Our approach ranks 1st on the Argoverse 2 multi-agent motion forecasting benchmark, winning the championship of the Argoverse Challenge at the CVPR 2023 Workshop on Autonomous Driving.
Structure-Sensitive Graph Dictionary Embedding for Graph Classification
Authors: Guangbu Liu, Tong Zhang, Xudong Wang, Wenting Zhao, Chuanwei Zhou, Zhen Cui
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Graph Classification, Variational Inference

Graph structure expression plays a vital role in distinguishing various graphs. In this work, we propose a Structure-Sensitive Graph Dictionary Embedding (SS-GDE) framework to transform input graphs into the embedding space of a graph dictionary for the graph classification task. Instead of a plain use of a base graph dictionary, we propose the variational graph dictionary adaptation (VGDA) to generate a personalized dictionary (named adapted graph dictionary) for catering to each input graph. In particular, for the adaptation, the Bernoulli sampling is introduced to adjust substructures of base graph keys according to each input, which increases the expression capacity of the base dictionary tremendously. To make cross-graph measurement sensitive as well as stable, multi-sensitivity Wasserstein encoding is proposed to produce the embeddings by designing multi-scale attention on optimal transport. To optimize the framework, we introduce mutual information as the objective, which further deduces to variational inference of the adapted graph dictionary. We perform our SS-GDE on multiple datasets of graph classification, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority over the state-of-the-art methods.
A Study on Quantifying Sim2Real Image Gap in Autonomous Driving Simulations Using Lane Segmentation Attention Map Similarity
Authors: Seongjeong Park, Jinu Pahk, Lennart Lorenz Freimuth Jahn, Yongseob Lim, Jinung An, Gyeungho Choi
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Autonomous driving simulations require highly realistic images. Our preliminary study found that when the CARLA Simulator image was made more like reality by using DCLGAN, the performance of the lane recognition model improved to levels comparable to real-world driving. It was also confirmed that the vehicle's ability to return to the center of the lane after deviating from it improved significantly. However, there is currently no agreed-upon metric for quantitatively evaluating the realism of simulation images. To address this issue, based on the idea that FID (Fr\'echet Inception Distance) measures the feature vector distribution distance using a pre-trained model, this paper proposes a metric that measures the similarity of simulation road images using the attention map from the self-attention distillation process of ENet-SAD. Finally, this paper verified the suitability of the measurement method by applying it to the image of the CARLA map that implemented a realworld autonomous driving test road.