pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multiscale Vision Transformers meet Bipartite Matching for efficient single-stage Action Localization
Authors: Ioanna Ntinou, Enrique Sanchez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Action Localization

Action Localization is a challenging problem that combines detection and recognition tasks, which are often addressed separately. State-of-the-art methods rely on off-the-shelf bounding box detections pre-computed at high resolution, and propose transformer models that focus on the classification task alone. Such two-stage solutions are prohibitive for real-time deployment. On the other hand, single-stage methods target both tasks by devoting part of the network (generally the backbone) to sharing the majority of the workload, compromising performance for speed. These methods build on adding a DETR head with learnable queries that after cross- and self-attention can be sent to corresponding MLPs for detecting a person's bounding box and action. However, DETR-like architectures are challenging to train and can incur in big complexity. In this paper, we observe that \textbf{a straight bipartite matching loss can be applied to the output tokens of a vision transformer}. This results in a backbone + MLP architecture that can do both tasks without the need of an extra encoder-decoder head and learnable queries. We show that a single MViTv2-S architecture trained with bipartite matching to perform both tasks surpasses the same MViTv2-S when trained with RoI align on pre-computed bounding boxes. With a careful design of token pooling and the proposed training pipeline, our Bipartite-Matching Vision Transformer model, \textbf{BMViT}, achieves +3 mAP on AVA2.2. w.r.t. the two-stage MViTv2-S counterpart. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/IoannaNti/BMViT}{https://github.com/IoannaNti/BMViT}
FlowVid: Taming Imperfect Optical Flows for Consistent Video-to-Video Synthesis
Authors: Feng Liang, Bichen Wu, Jialiang Wang, Licheng Yu, Kunpeng Li, Yinan Zhao, Ishan Misra, Jia-Bin Huang, Peizhao Zhang, Peter Vajda, Diana Marculescu
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Video-to-Video Synthesis

Diffusion models have transformed the image-to-image (I2I) synthesis and are now permeating into videos. However, the advancement of video-to-video (V2V) synthesis has been hampered by the challenge of maintaining temporal consistency across video frames. This paper proposes a consistent V2V synthesis framework by jointly leveraging spatial conditions and temporal optical flow clues within the source video. Contrary to prior methods that strictly adhere to optical flow, our approach harnesses its benefits while handling the imperfection in flow estimation. We encode the optical flow via warping from the first frame and serve it as a supplementary reference in the diffusion model. This enables our model for video synthesis by editing the first frame with any prevalent I2I models and then propagating edits to successive frames. Our V2V model, FlowVid, demonstrates remarkable properties: (1) Flexibility: FlowVid works seamlessly with existing I2I models, facilitating various modifications, including stylization, object swaps, and local edits. (2) Efficiency: Generation of a 4-second video with 30 FPS and 512x512 resolution takes only 1.5 minutes, which is 3.1x, 7.2x, and 10.5x faster than CoDeF, Rerender, and TokenFlow, respectively. (3) High-quality: In user studies, our FlowVid is preferred 45.7% of the time, outperforming CoDeF (3.5%), Rerender (10.2%), and TokenFlow (40.4%).
Shape-IoU: More Accurate Metric considering Bounding Box Shape and Scale
Authors: Hao Zhang, Shuaijie Zhang
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, regression

As an important component of the detector localization branch, bounding box regression loss plays a significant role in object detection tasks. The existing bounding box regression methods usually consider the geometric relationship between the GT box and the predicted box, and calculate the loss by using the relative position and shape of the bounding boxes, while ignoring the influence of inherent properties such as the shape and scale of the bounding boxes on bounding box regression. In order to make up for the shortcomings of existing research, this article proposes a bounding box regression method that focuses on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself. Firstly, we analyzed the regression characteristics of the bounding boxes and found that the shape and scale factors of the bounding boxes themselves will have an impact on the regression results. Based on the above conclusions, we propose the Shape IoU method, which can calculate the loss by focusing on the shape and scale of the bounding box itself, thereby making the bounding box regression more accurate. Finally, we validated our method through a large number of comparative experiments, which showed that our method can effectively improve detection performance and outperform existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance in different detection tasks.Code is available at https://github.com/malagoutou/Shape-IoU
Visual Point Cloud Forecasting enables Scalable Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zetong Yang, Li Chen, Yanan sun, Hongyang Li
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, Autonomous Driving, Motion Forecasting

In contrast to extensive studies on general vision, pre-training for scalable visual autonomous driving remains seldom explored. Visual autonomous driving applications require features encompassing semantics, 3D geometry, and temporal information simultaneously for joint perception, prediction, and planning, posing dramatic challenges for pre-training. To resolve this, we bring up a new pre-training task termed as visual point cloud forecasting - predicting future point clouds from historical visual input. The key merit of this task captures the synergic learning of semantics, 3D structures, and temporal dynamics. Hence it shows superiority in various downstream tasks. To cope with this new problem, we present ViDAR, a general model to pre-train downstream visual encoders. It first extracts historical embeddings by the encoder. These representations are then transformed to 3D geometric space via a novel Latent Rendering operator for future point cloud prediction. Experiments show significant gain in downstream tasks, e.g., 3.1% NDS on 3D detection, ~10% error reduction on motion forecasting, and ~15% less collision rate on planning.
Motion State: A New Benchmark Multiple Object Tracking
Authors: Yang Feng, Liao Pan, Wu Di, Liu Bo, Zhang Xingle
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, Multiple Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

In the realm of video analysis, the field of multiple object tracking (MOT) assumes paramount importance, with the motion state of objects-whether static or dynamic relative to the ground-holding practical significance across diverse scenarios. However, the extant literature exhibits a notable dearth in the exploration of this aspect. Deep learning methodologies encounter challenges in accurately discerning object motion states, while conventional approaches reliant on comprehensive mathematical modeling may yield suboptimal tracking accuracy. To address these challenges, we introduce a Model-Data-Driven Motion State Judgment Object Tracking Method (MoD2T). This innovative architecture adeptly amalgamates traditional mathematical modeling with deep learning-based multi-object tracking frameworks. The integration of mathematical modeling and deep learning within MoD2T enhances the precision of object motion state determination, thereby elevating tracking accuracy. Our empirical investigations comprehensively validate the efficacy of MoD2T across varied scenarios, encompassing unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance and street-level tracking. Furthermore, to gauge the method's adeptness in discerning object motion states, we introduce the Motion State Validation F1 (MVF1) metric. This novel performance metric aims to quantitatively assess the accuracy of motion state classification, furnishing a comprehensive evaluation of MoD2T's performance. Elaborate experimental validations corroborate the rationality of MVF1. In order to holistically appraise MoD2T's performance, we meticulously annotate several renowned datasets and subject MoD2T to stringent testing. Remarkably, under conditions characterized by minimal or moderate camera motion, the achieved MVF1 values are particularly noteworthy, with exemplars including 0.774 for the KITTI dataset, 0.521 for MOT17, and 0.827 for UAVDT.
One-Shot Multi-Rate Pruning of Graph Convolutional Networks
Authors: Hichem Sahbi
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00

In this paper, we devise a novel lightweight Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) design dubbed as Multi-Rate Magnitude Pruning (MRMP) that jointly trains network topology and weights. Our method is variational and proceeds by aligning the weight distribution of the learned networks with an a priori distribution. In the one hand, this allows implementing any fixed pruning rate, and also enhancing the generalization performances of the designed lightweight GCNs. In the other hand, MRMP achieves a joint training of multiple GCNs, on top of shared weights, in order to extrapolate accurate networks at any targeted pruning rate without retraining their weights. Extensive experiments conducted on the challenging task of skeleton-based recognition show a substantial gain of our lightweight GCNs particularly at very high pruning regimes.
P2M2-Net: Part-Aware Prompt-Guided Multimodal Point Cloud Completion
Authors: Linlian Jiang, Pan Chen, Ye Wang, Tieru Wu, Rui Ma
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion

Inferring missing regions from severely occluded point clouds is highly challenging. Especially for 3D shapes with rich geometry and structure details, inherent ambiguities of the unknown parts are existing. Existing approaches either learn a one-to-one mapping in a supervised manner or train a generative model to synthesize the missing points for the completion of 3D point cloud shapes. These methods, however, lack the controllability for the completion process and the results are either deterministic or exhibiting uncontrolled diversity. Inspired by the prompt-driven data generation and editing, we propose a novel prompt-guided point cloud completion framework, coined P2M2-Net, to enable more controllable and more diverse shape completion. Given an input partial point cloud and a text prompt describing the part-aware information such as semantics and structure of the missing region, our Transformer-based completion network can efficiently fuse the multimodal features and generate diverse results following the prompt guidance. We train the P2M2-Net on a new large-scale PartNet-Prompt dataset and conduct extensive experiments on two challenging shape completion benchmarks. Quantitative and qualitative results show the efficacy of incorporating prompts for more controllable part-aware point cloud completion and generation. Code and data are available at https://github.com/JLU-ICL/P2M2-Net.
Distribution-based Low-rank Embedding
Authors: Bardia Yousefi
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Breast Cancer Detection

The early detection of breast abnormalities is a matter of critical significance. Notably, infrared thermography has emerged as a valuable tool in breast cancer screening and clinical breast examination (CBE). Measuring heterogeneous thermal patterns is the key to incorporating computational dynamic thermography, which can be achieved by matrix factorization techniques. These approaches focus on extracting the predominant thermal patterns from the entire thermal sequence. Yet, the task of singling out the dominant image that effectively represents the prevailing temporal changes remains a challenging pursuit within the field of computational thermography. In this context, we propose applying James-Stein for eigenvector (JSE) and Weibull embedding approaches, as two novel strategies in response to this challenge. The primary objective is to create a low-dimensional (LD) representation of the thermal data stream. This LD approximation serves as the foundation for extracting thermomics and training a classification model with optimized hyperparameters, for early breast cancer detection. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of various embedding adjuncts to matrix factorization methods. The results of the proposed method indicate an enhancement in the projection of the predominant basis vector, yielding classification accuracy of 81.7% (+/-5.2%) using Weibull embedding, which outperformed other embedding approaches we proposed previously. In comparison analysis, Sparse PCT and Deep SemiNMF showed the highest accuracies having 80.9% and 78.6%, respectively. These findings suggest that JSE and Weibull embedding techniques substantially help preserve crucial thermal patterns as a biomarker leading to improved CBE and enabling the very early detection of breast cancer.
A Fully Automated Pipeline Using Swin Transformers for Deep Learning-Based Blood Segmentation on Head CT Scans After Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage
Authors: Sergio Garcia Garcia, Santiago Cepeda, Ignacio Arrese, Rosario Sarabia
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Sensitivity, Specificity

Background: Accurate volumetric assessment of spontaneous subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a labor-intensive task performed with current manual and semiautomatic methods that might be relevant for its clinical and prognostic implications. In the present research, we sought to develop and validate an artificial intelligence-driven, fully automated blood segmentation tool for SAH patients via noncontrast computed tomography (NCCT) scans employing a transformer-based Swin UNETR architecture. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed NCCT scans from patients with confirmed aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) utilizing the Swin UNETR for segmentation. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated against manually segmented ground truth data using metrics such as Dice score, intersection over union (IoU), the volumetric similarity index (VSI), the symmetric average surface distance (SASD), and sensitivity and specificity. A validation cohort from an external institution was included to test the generalizability of the model. Results: The model demonstrated high accuracy with robust performance metrics across the internal and external validation cohorts. Notably, it achieved high Dice coefficient (0.873), IoU (0.810), VSI (0.840), sensitivity (0.821) and specificity (0.996) values and a low SASD (1.866), suggesting proficiency in segmenting blood in SAH patients. The model's efficiency was reflected in its processing speed, indicating potential for real-time applications. Conclusions: Our Swin UNETR-based model offers significant advances in the automated segmentation of blood after aSAH on NCCT images. Despite the computational intensity, the model operates effectively on standard hardware with a user-friendly interface, facilitating broader clinical adoption. Further validation across diverse datasets is warranted to confirm its clinical reliability.
Distance Guided Generative Adversarial Network for Explainable Binary Classifications
Authors: Xiangyu Xiong, Yue Sun, Xiaohong Liu, Wei Ke, Chan-Tong Lam, Jiangang Chen, Mingfeng Jiang, Mingwei Wang, Hui Xie, Tong Tong, Qinquan Gao, Hao Chen, Tao Tan
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification, Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Multi-class Classification

Despite the potential benefits of data augmentation for mitigating the data insufficiency, traditional augmentation methods primarily rely on the prior intra-domain knowledge. On the other hand, advanced generative adversarial networks (GANs) generate inter-domain samples with limited variety. These previous methods make limited contributions to describing the decision boundaries for binary classification. In this paper, we propose a distance guided GAN (DisGAN) which controls the variation degrees of generated samples in the hyperplane space. Specifically, we instantiate the idea of DisGAN by combining two ways. The first way is vertical distance GAN (VerDisGAN) where the inter-domain generation is conditioned on the vertical distances. The second way is horizontal distance GAN (HorDisGAN) where the intra-domain generation is conditioned on the horizontal distances. Furthermore, VerDisGAN can produce the class-specific regions by mapping the source images to the hyperplane. Experimental results show that DisGAN consistently outperforms the GAN-based augmentation methods with explainable binary classification. The proposed method can apply to different classification architectures and has potential to extend to multi-class classification.
RS-DGC: Exploring Neighborhood Statistics for Dynamic Gradient Compression on Remote Sensing Image Interpretation
Authors: Weiying Xie, Zixuan Wang, Jitao Ma, Daixun Li, Yunsong Li
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation

Distributed deep learning has recently been attracting more attention in remote sensing (RS) applications due to the challenges posed by the increased amount of open data that are produced daily by Earth observation programs. However, the high communication costs of sending model updates among multiple nodes are a significant bottleneck for scalable distributed learning. Gradient sparsification has been validated as an effective gradient compression (GC) technique for reducing communication costs and thus accelerating the training speed. Existing state-of-the-art gradient sparsification methods are mostly based on the "larger-absolute-more-important" criterion, ignoring the importance of small gradients, which is generally observed to affect the performance. Inspired by informative representation of manifold structures from neighborhood information, we propose a simple yet effective dynamic gradient compression scheme leveraging neighborhood statistics indicator for RS image interpretation, termed RS-DGC. We first enhance the interdependence between gradients by introducing the gradient neighborhood to reduce the effect of random noise. The key component of RS-DGC is a Neighborhood Statistical Indicator (NSI), which can quantify the importance of gradients within a specified neighborhood on each node to sparsify the local gradients before gradient transmission in each iteration. Further, a layer-wise dynamic compression scheme is proposed to track the importance changes of each layer in real time. Extensive downstream tasks validate the superiority of our method in terms of intelligent interpretation of RS images. For example, we achieve an accuracy improvement of 0.51% with more than 50 times communication compression on the NWPU-RESISC45 dataset using VGG-19 network.
Noise-free Optimization in Early Training Steps for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: MinKyu Lee, Jae-Pil Heo
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recent deep-learning-based single image super-resolution (SISR) methods have shown impressive performance whereas typical methods train their networks by minimizing the pixel-wise distance with respect to a given high-resolution (HR) image. However, despite the basic training scheme being the predominant choice, its use in the context of ill-posed inverse problems has not been thoroughly investigated. In this work, we aim to provide a better comprehension of the underlying constituent by decomposing target HR images into two subcomponents: (1) the optimal centroid which is the expectation over multiple potential HR images, and (2) the inherent noise defined as the residual between the HR image and the centroid. Our findings show that the current training scheme cannot capture the ill-posed nature of SISR and becomes vulnerable to the inherent noise term, especially during early training steps. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel optimization method that can effectively remove the inherent noise term in the early steps of vanilla training by estimating the optimal centroid and directly optimizing toward the estimation. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively enhance the stability of vanilla training, leading to overall performance gain. Codes are available at github.com/2minkyulee/ECO.
QGFace: Quality-Guided Joint Training For Mixed-Quality Face Recognition
Authors: Youzhe Song, Feng Wang
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Face Recognition

The quality of a face crop in an image is decided by many factors such as camera resolution, distance, and illumination condition. This makes the discrimination of face images with different qualities a challenging problem in realistic applications. However, most existing approaches are designed specifically for high-quality (HQ) or low-quality (LQ) images, and the performances would degrade for the mixed-quality images. Besides, many methods ask for pre-trained feature extractors or other auxiliary structures to support the training and the evaluation. In this paper, we point out that the key to better understand both the HQ and the LQ images simultaneously is to apply different learning methods according to their qualities. We propose a novel quality-guided joint training approach for mixed-quality face recognition, which could simultaneously learn the images of different qualities with a single encoder. Based on quality partition, classification-based method is employed for HQ data learning. Meanwhile, for the LQ images which lack identity information, we learn them with self-supervised image-image contrastive learning. To effectively catch up the model update and improve the discriminability of contrastive learning in our joint training scenario, we further propose a proxy-updated real-time queue to compose the contrastive pairs with features from the genuine encoder. Experiments on the low-quality datasets SCface and Tinyface, the mixed-quality dataset IJB-B, and five high-quality datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach in recognizing face images of different qualities.
HEAP: Unsupervised Object Discovery and Localization with Contrastive Grouping
Authors: Xin Zhang, Jinheng Xie, Yuan Yuan, Michael Bi Mi, Robby T. Tan
Date: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Saliency Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Unsupervised object discovery and localization aims to detect or segment objects in an image without any supervision. Recent efforts have demonstrated a notable potential to identify salient foreground objects by utilizing self-supervised transformer features. However, their scopes only build upon patch-level features within an image, neglecting region/image-level and cross-image relationships at a broader scale. Moreover, these methods cannot differentiate various semantics from multiple instances. To address these problems, we introduce Hierarchical mErging framework via contrAstive grouPing (HEAP). Specifically, a novel lightweight head with cross-attention mechanism is designed to adaptively group intra-image patches into semantically coherent regions based on correlation among self-supervised features. Further, to ensure the distinguishability among various regions, we introduce a region-level contrastive clustering loss to pull closer similar regions across images. Also, an image-level contrastive loss is present to push foreground and background representations apart, with which foreground objects and background are accordingly discovered. HEAP facilitates efficient hierarchical image decomposition, which contributes to more accurate object discovery while also enabling differentiation among objects of various classes. Extensive experimental results on semantic segmentation retrieval, unsupervised object discovery, and saliency detection tasks demonstrate that HEAP achieves state-of-the-art performance.