pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AG-CRC: Anatomy-Guided Colorectal Cancer Segmentation in CT with Imperfect Anatomical Knowledge
Authors: Rongzhao Zhang, Zhian Bai, Ruoying Yu, Wenrao Pang, Lingyun Wang, Lifeng Zhu, Xiaofan Zhang, huan zhang, Weiguo Hu
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Computed Tomography (CT), Image Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

When delineating lesions from medical images, a human expert can always keep in mind the anatomical structure behind the voxels. However, although high-quality (though not perfect) anatomical information can be retrieved from computed tomography (CT) scans with modern deep learning algorithms, it is still an open problem how these automatically generated organ masks can assist in addressing challenging lesion segmentation tasks, such as the segmentation of colorectal cancer (CRC). In this paper, we develop a novel Anatomy-Guided segmentation framework to exploit the auto-generated organ masks to aid CRC segmentation from CT, namely AG-CRC. First, we obtain multi-organ segmentation (MOS) masks with existing MOS models (e.g., TotalSegmentor) and further derive a more robust organ of interest (OOI) mask that may cover most of the colon-rectum and CRC voxels. Then, we propose an anatomy-guided training patch sampling strategy by optimizing a heuristic gain function that considers both the proximity of important regions (e.g., the tumor or organs of interest) and sample diversity. Third, we design a novel self-supervised learning scheme inspired by the topology of tubular organs like the colon to boost the model performance further. Finally, we employ a masked loss scheme to guide the model to focus solely on the essential learning region. We extensively evaluate the proposed method on two CRC segmentation datasets, where substantial performance improvement (5% to 9% in Dice) is achieved over current state-of-the-art medical image segmentation models, and the ablation studies further evidence the efficacy of every proposed component.
EasyPhoto: Your Smart AI Photo Generator
Authors: Ziheng Wu, Jiaqi Xu, Xinyi Zou, Kunzhe Huang, Xing Shi, Jun Huang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00

Stable Diffusion web UI (SD-WebUI) is a comprehensive project that provides a browser interface based on Gradio library for Stable Diffusion models. In this paper, We propose a novel WebUI plugin called EasyPhoto, which enables the generation of AI portraits. By training a digital doppelganger of a specific user ID using 5 to 20 relevant images, the finetuned model (according to the trained LoRA model) allows for the generation of AI photos using arbitrary templates. Our current implementation supports the modification of multiple persons and different photo styles. Furthermore, we allow users to generate fantastic template image with the strong SDXL model, enhancing EasyPhoto's capabilities to deliver more diverse and satisfactory results. The source code for EasyPhoto is available at: https://github.com/aigc-apps/sd-webui-EasyPhoto. We also support a webui-free version by using diffusers: https://github.com/aigc-apps/EasyPhoto. We are continuously enhancing our efforts to expand the EasyPhoto pipeline, making it suitable for any identification (not limited to just the face), and we enthusiastically welcome any intriguing ideas or suggestions.
Exploring the Potential of Multi-Modal AI for Driving Hazard Prediction
Authors: Korawat Charoenpitaks, Van-Quang Nguyen, Masanori Suganuma, Masahiro Takahashi, Ryoma Niihara, Takayuki Okatani
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Visual Abductive Reasoning

This paper addresses the problem of predicting hazards that drivers may encounter while driving a car. We formulate it as a task of anticipating impending accidents using a single input image captured by car dashcams. Unlike existing approaches to driving hazard prediction that rely on computational simulations or anomaly detection from videos, this study focuses on high-level inference from static images. The problem needs predicting and reasoning about future events based on uncertain observations, which falls under visual abductive reasoning. To enable research in this understudied area, a new dataset named the DHPR (Driving Hazard Prediction and Reasoning) dataset is created. The dataset consists of 15K dashcam images of street scenes, and each image is associated with a tuple containing car speed, a hypothesized hazard description, and visual entities present in the scene. These are annotated by human annotators, who identify risky scenes and provide descriptions of potential accidents that could occur a few seconds later. We present several baseline methods and evaluate their performance on our dataset, identifying remaining issues and discussing future directions. This study contributes to the field by introducing a novel problem formulation and dataset, enabling researchers to explore the potential of multi-modal AI for driving hazard prediction.
Learning to Rank Onset-Occurring-Offset Representations for Micro-Expression Recognition
Authors: Jie Zhu, Yuan Zong, Jingang Shi, Cheng Lu, Hongli Chang, Wenming Zheng
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning-To-Rank, Micro Expression Recognition, Micro-Expression Recognition

This paper focuses on the research of micro-expression recognition (MER) and proposes a flexible and reliable deep learning method called learning to rank onset-occurring-offset representations (LTR3O). The LTR3O method introduces a dynamic and reduced-size sequence structure known as 3O, which consists of onset, occurring, and offset frames, for representing micro-expressions (MEs). This structure facilitates the subsequent learning of ME-discriminative features. A noteworthy advantage of the 3O structure is its flexibility, as the occurring frame is randomly extracted from the original ME sequence without the need for accurate frame spotting methods. Based on the 3O structures, LTR3O generates multiple 3O representation candidates for each ME sample and incorporates well-designed modules to measure and calibrate their emotional expressiveness. This calibration process ensures that the distribution of these candidates aligns with that of macro-expressions (MaMs) over time. Consequently, the visibility of MEs can be implicitly enhanced, facilitating the reliable learning of more discriminative features for MER. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of LTR3O using three widely-used ME databases: CASME II, SMIC, and SAMM. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superior performance of LTR3O, particularly in terms of its flexibility and reliability, when compared to recent state-of-the-art MER methods.
HalluciDet: Hallucinating RGB Modality for Person Detection Through Privileged Information
Authors: Heitor Rapela Medeiros, Fidel A. Guerrero Pena, Masih Aminbeidokhti, Thomas Dubail, Eric Granger, Marco Pedersoli
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection, Translation

A powerful way to adapt a visual recognition model to a new domain is through image translation. However, common image translation approaches only focus on generating data from the same distribution as the target domain. Given a cross-modal application, such as pedestrian detection from aerial images, with a considerable shift in data distribution between infrared (IR) to visible (RGB) images, a translation focused on generation might lead to poor performance as the loss focuses on irrelevant details for the task. In this paper, we propose HalluciDet, an IR-RGB image translation model for object detection. Instead of focusing on reconstructing the original image on the IR modality, it seeks to reduce the detection loss of an RGB detector, and therefore avoids the need to access RGB data. This model produces a new image representation that enhances objects of interest in the scene and greatly improves detection performance. We empirically compare our approach against state-of-the-art methods for image translation and for fine-tuning on IR, and show that our HalluciDet improves detection accuracy in most cases by exploiting the privileged information encoded in a pre-trained RGB detector. Code: https://github.com/heitorrapela/HalluciDet
VLATTACK: Multimodal Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Tasks via Pre-trained Models
Authors: Ziyi Yin, Muchao Ye, Tianrong Zhang, Tianyu Du, Jinguo Zhu, Han Liu, Jinghui Chen, Ting Wang, Fenglong Ma
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Vision-Language (VL) pre-trained models have shown their superiority on many multimodal tasks. However, the adversarial robustness of such models has not been fully explored. Existing approaches mainly focus on exploring the adversarial robustness under the white-box setting, which is unrealistic. In this paper, we aim to investigate a new yet practical task to craft image and text perturbations using pre-trained VL models to attack black-box fine-tuned models on different downstream tasks. Towards this end, we propose VLATTACK to generate adversarial samples by fusing perturbations of images and texts from both single-modal and multimodal levels. At the single-modal level, we propose a new block-wise similarity attack (BSA) strategy to learn image perturbations for disrupting universal representations. Besides, we adopt an existing text attack strategy to generate text perturbations independent of the image-modal attack. At the multimodal level, we design a novel iterative cross-search attack (ICSA) method to update adversarial image-text pairs periodically, starting with the outputs from the single-modal level. We conduct extensive experiments to attack five widely-used VL pre-trained models for six tasks. Experimental results show that VLATTACK achieves the highest attack success rates on all tasks compared with state-of-the-art baselines, which reveals a blind spot in the deployment of pre-trained VL models. Source codes can be found at https://github.com/ericyinyzy/VLAttack.
X-Transfer: A Transfer Learning-Based Framework for GAN-Generated Fake Image Detection
Authors: Lei Zhang, Hao Chen, Shu Hu, Bin Zhu, Ching Sheng Lin, Xi Wu, Jinrong Hu, Xin Wang
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake Image Detection, Image Generation, Transfer Learning

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have remarkably advanced in diverse domains, especially image generation and editing. However, the misuse of GANs for generating deceptive images, such as face replacement, raises significant security concerns, which have gained widespread attention. Therefore, it is urgent to develop effective detection methods to distinguish between real and fake images. Current research centers around the application of transfer learning. Nevertheless, it encounters challenges such as knowledge forgetting from the original dataset and inadequate performance when dealing with imbalanced data during training. To alleviate this issue, this paper introduces a novel GAN-generated image detection algorithm called X-Transfer, which enhances transfer learning by utilizing two neural networks that employ interleaved parallel gradient transmission. In addition, we combine AUC loss and cross-entropy loss to improve the model's performance. We carry out comprehensive experiments on multiple facial image datasets. The results show that our model outperforms the general transferring approach, and the best metric achieves 99.04%, which is increased by approximately 10%. Furthermore, we demonstrate excellent performance on non-face datasets, validating its generality and broader application prospects.
Metadata-Conditioned Generative Models to Synthesize Anatomically-Plausible 3D Brain MRIs
Authors: Wei Peng, Tomas Bosschieter, Jiahong Ouyang, Robert Paul, Ehsan Adeli, Qingyu Zhao, Kilian M. Pohl
Date: 2023-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Generative AI models hold great potential in creating synthetic brain MRIs that advance neuroimaging studies by, for example, enriching data diversity. However, the mainstay of AI research only focuses on optimizing the visual quality (such as signal-to-noise ratio) of the synthetic MRIs while lacking insights into their relevance to neuroscience. To gain these insights with respect to T1-weighted MRIs, we first propose a new generative model, BrainSynth, to synthesize metadata-conditioned (e.g., age- and sex-specific) MRIs that achieve state-of-the-art visual quality. We then extend our evaluation with a novel procedure to quantify anatomical plausibility, i.e., how well the synthetic MRIs capture macrostructural properties of brain regions, and how accurately they encode the effects of age and sex. Results indicate that more than half of the brain regions in our synthetic MRIs are anatomically accurate, i.e., with a small effect size between real and synthetic MRIs. Moreover, the anatomical plausibility varies across cortical regions according to their geometric complexity. As is, our synthetic MRIs can significantly improve the training of a Convolutional Neural Network to identify accelerated aging effects in an independent study. These results highlight the opportunities of using generative AI to aid neuroimaging research and point to areas for further improvement.
SlotGNN: Unsupervised Discovery of Multi-Object Representations and Visual Dynamics
Authors: Alireza Rezazadeh, Athreyi Badithela, Karthik Desingh, Changhyun Choi
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Object Rearrangement, Spatial Reasoning

Learning multi-object dynamics from visual data using unsupervised techniques is challenging due to the need for robust, object representations that can be learned through robot interactions. This paper presents a novel framework with two new architectures: SlotTransport for discovering object representations from RGB images and SlotGNN for predicting their collective dynamics from RGB images and robot interactions. Our SlotTransport architecture is based on slot attention for unsupervised object discovery and uses a feature transport mechanism to maintain temporal alignment in object-centric representations. This enables the discovery of slots that consistently reflect the composition of multi-object scenes. These slots robustly bind to distinct objects, even under heavy occlusion or absence. Our SlotGNN, a novel unsupervised graph-based dynamics model, predicts the future state of multi-object scenes. SlotGNN learns a graph representation of the scene using the discovered slots from SlotTransport and performs relational and spatial reasoning to predict the future appearance of each slot conditioned on robot actions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SlotTransport in learning object-centric features that accurately encode both visual and positional information. Further, we highlight the accuracy of SlotGNN in downstream robotic tasks, including challenging multi-object rearrangement and long-horizon prediction. Finally, our unsupervised approach proves effective in the real world. With only minimal additional data, our framework robustly predicts slots and their corresponding dynamics in real-world control tasks.
An Algorithm to Train Unrestricted Sequential Discrete Morphological Neural Networks
Authors: Diego Marcondes, Mariana Feldman, Junior Barrera
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00

There have been attempts to insert mathematical morphology (MM) operators into convolutional neural networks (CNN), and the most successful endeavor to date has been the morphological neural networks (MNN). Although MNN have performed better than CNN in solving some problems, they inherit their black-box nature. Furthermore, in the case of binary images, they are approximations that loose the Boolean lattice structure of MM operators and, thus, it is not possible to represent a specific class of W-operators with desired properties. In a recent work, we proposed the Discrete Morphological Neural Networks (DMNN) for binary image transformation to represent specific classes of W-operators and estimate them via machine learning. We also proposed a stochastic lattice descent algorithm (SLDA) to learn the parameters of Canonical Discrete Morphological Neural Networks (CDMNN), whose architecture is composed only of operators that can be decomposed as the supremum, infimum, and complement of erosions and dilations. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to learn unrestricted sequential DMNN, whose architecture is given by the composition of general W-operators. We illustrate the algorithm in a practical example.
Universal Humanoid Motion Representations for Physics-Based Control
Authors: Zhengyi Luo, Jinkun Cao, Josh Merel, Alexander Winkler, Jing Huang, Kris Kitani, Weipeng Xu
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Humanoid Control

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high dimensionality of humanoids and the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a narrow range of movement styles (e.g. locomotion, game characters) from specialized motion datasets. This limited scope hampers their applicability in complex tasks. We close this gap by significantly increasing the coverage of our motion representation space. To achieve this, we first learn a motion imitator that can imitate all of human motion from a large, unstructured motion dataset. We then create our motion representation by distilling skills directly from the imitator. This is achieved by using an encoder-decoder structure with a variational information bottleneck. Additionally, we jointly learn a prior conditioned on proprioception (humanoid's own pose and velocities) to improve model expressiveness and sampling efficiency for downstream tasks. By sampling from the prior, we can generate long, stable, and diverse human motions. Using this latent space for hierarchical RL, we show that our policies solve tasks using human-like behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion representation by solving generative tasks (e.g. strike, terrain traversal) and motion tracking using VR controllers.
Knolling Bot: Learning Robotic Object Arrangement from Tidy Demonstrations
Authors: Yuhang Hu, Zhizhuo Zhang, Xinyue Zhu, Ruibo Liu, Philippe Wyder, Hod Lipson
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Position, Self-Supervised Learning

Addressing the challenge of organizing scattered items in domestic spaces is complicated by the diversity and subjective nature of tidiness. Just as the complexity of human language allows for multiple expressions of the same idea, household tidiness preferences and organizational patterns vary widely, so presetting object locations would limit the adaptability to new objects and environments. Inspired by advancements in natural language processing (NLP), this paper introduces a self-supervised learning framework that allows robots to understand and replicate the concept of tidiness from demonstrations of well-organized layouts, akin to using conversational datasets to train Large Language Models(LLM). We leverage a transformer neural network to predict the placement of subsequent objects. We demonstrate a ``knolling'' system with a robotic arm and an RGB camera to organize items of varying sizes and quantities on a table. Our method not only trains a generalizable concept of tidiness, enabling the model to provide diverse solutions and adapt to different numbers of objects, but it can also incorporate human preferences to generate customized tidy tables without explicit target positions for each object.
VTON-IT: Virtual Try-On using Image Translation
Authors: Santosh Adhikari, Bishnu Bhusal, Prashant Ghimire, Anil Shrestha
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Semantic Segmentation, Translation, Virtual Try-on

Virtual Try-On (trying clothes virtually) is a promising application of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). However, it is an arduous task to transfer the desired clothing item onto the corresponding regions of a human body because of varying body size, pose, and occlusions like hair and overlapped clothes. In this paper, we try to produce photo-realistic translated images through semantic segmentation and a generative adversarial architecture-based image translation network. We present a novel image-based Virtual Try-On application VTON-IT that takes an RGB image, segments desired body part, and overlays target cloth over the segmented body region. Most state-of-the-art GAN-based Virtual Try-On applications produce unaligned pixelated synthesis images on real-life test images. However, our approach generates high-resolution natural images with detailed textures on such variant images.
MeSa: Masked, Geometric, and Supervised Pre-training for Monocular Depth Estimation
Authors: Muhammad Osama Khan, Junbang Liang, Chun-Kai Wang, Shan Yang, Yu Lou
Date: 2023-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Self-Supervised Learning

Pre-training has been an important ingredient in developing strong monocular depth estimation models in recent years. For instance, self-supervised learning (SSL) is particularly effective by alleviating the need for large datasets with dense ground-truth depth maps. However, despite these improvements, our study reveals that the later layers of the SOTA SSL method are actually suboptimal. By examining the layer-wise representations, we demonstrate significant changes in these later layers during fine-tuning, indicating the ineffectiveness of their pre-trained features for depth estimation. To address these limitations, we propose MeSa, a comprehensive framework that leverages the complementary strengths of masked, geometric, and supervised pre-training. Hence, MeSa benefits from not only general-purpose representations learnt via masked pre training but also specialized depth-specific features acquired via geometric and supervised pre-training. Our CKA layer-wise analysis confirms that our pre-training strategy indeed produces improved representations for the later layers, overcoming the drawbacks of the SOTA SSL method. Furthermore, via experiments on the NYUv2 and IBims-1 datasets, we demonstrate that these enhanced representations translate to performance improvements in both the in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. We also investigate the influence of the pre-training dataset and demonstrate the efficacy of pre-training on LSUN, which yields significantly better pre-trained representations. Overall, our approach surpasses the masked pre-training SSL method by a substantial margin of 17.1% on the RMSE. Moreover, even without utilizing any recently proposed techniques, MeSa also outperforms the most recent methods and establishes a new state-of-the-art for monocular depth estimation on the challenging NYUv2 dataset.