pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RAIS: Robust and Accurate Interactive Segmentation via Continual Learning
Authors: Yuying Hao, Yi Liu, Juncai Peng, Haoyi Xiong, Guowei Chen, Shiyu Tang, Zeyu Chen, Baohua Lai
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Image Segmentation, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Interactive image segmentation aims at segmenting a target region through a way of human-computer interaction. Recent works based on deep learning have achieved excellent performance, while most of them focus on improving the accuracy of the training set and ignore potential improvement on the test set. In the inference phase, they tend to have a good performance on similar domains to the training set, and lack adaptability to domain shift, so they require more user efforts to obtain satisfactory results. In this work, we propose RAIS, a robust and accurate architecture for interactive segmentation with continuous learning, where the model can learn from both train and test data sets. For efficient learning on the test set, we propose a novel optimization strategy to update global and local parameters with a basic segmentation module and adaptation module, respectively. Moreover, we perform extensive experiments on several benchmarks that show our method can handle data distribution shifts and achieves SOTA performance compared with recent interactive segmentation methods. Besides, our method also shows its robustness in the datasets of remote sensing and medical imaging where the data domains are completely different between training and testing.
MGTUNet: An new UNet for colon nuclei instance segmentation and quantification
Authors: Liangrui Pan, Lian Wang, Zhichao Feng, Zhujun Xu, Liwen Xu, Shaoliang Peng
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, regression, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is among the top three malignant tumor types in terms of morbidity and mortality. Histopathological images are the gold standard for diagnosing colon cancer. Cellular nuclei instance segmentation and classification, and nuclear component regression tasks can aid in the analysis of the tumor microenvironment in colon tissue. Traditional methods are still unable to handle both types of tasks end-to-end at the same time, and have poor prediction accuracy and high application costs. This paper proposes a new UNet model for handling nuclei based on the UNet framework, called MGTUNet, which uses Mish, Group normalization and transposed convolution layer to improve the segmentation model, and a ranger optimizer to adjust the SmoothL1Loss values. Secondly, it uses different channels to segment and classify different types of nucleus, ultimately completing the nuclei instance segmentation and classification task, and the nuclei component regression task simultaneously. Finally, we did extensive comparison experiments using eight segmentation models. By comparing the three evaluation metrics and the parameter sizes of the models, MGTUNet obtained 0.6254 on PQ, 0.6359 on mPQ, and 0.8695 on R2. Thus, the experiments demonstrated that MGTUNet is now a state-of-the-art method for quantifying histopathological images of colon cancer.
Improving Segmentation of Breast Ultrasound Images: Semi Automatic Two Pointers Histogram Splitting Technique
Authors: Rasheed Abid, S. Kaisar Alam
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Automatically segmenting lesion area in breast ultrasound (BUS) images is a challenging one due to its noise, speckle and artifacts. Edge-map of BUS images also does not help because in most cases the edge-map gives no information whatsoever. Almost all segmentation technique takes the edge-map of the image as its first step, though there are a few algorithms that try to avoid edge-maps as well. Improving the edge-map of breast ultrasound images theoretically improves the chances of automatic segmentation to be more precise. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic technique of histogram splitting using two pointers. Here the user only has to select two initially guessed points denoting a circle on the region of interest (ROI). The method will automatically study the internal histogram and split it using two pointers. The output BUS image has improved edge-map and ultimately the segmentation on it is better compared to regular segmentation using same algorithm and same initialization. Also, we further processed the edge-map to have less edge-pixels to area ratio, improving the homogeneity and the chances of easy segmentation in the future.
A Multimodal Sensor Fusion Framework Robust to Missing Modalities for Person Recognition
Authors: Vijay John, Yasutomo Kawanishi
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Recognition, Sensor Fusion, Triplet

Utilizing the sensor characteristics of the audio, visible camera, and thermal camera, the robustness of person recognition can be enhanced. Existing multimodal person recognition frameworks are primarily formulated assuming that multimodal data is always available. In this paper, we propose a novel trimodal sensor fusion framework using the audio, visible, and thermal camera, which addresses the missing modality problem. In the framework, a novel deep latent embedding framework, termed the AVTNet, is proposed to learn multiple latent embeddings. Also, a novel loss function, termed missing modality loss, accounts for possible missing modalities based on the triplet loss calculation while learning the individual latent embeddings. Additionally, a joint latent embedding utilizing the trimodal data is learnt using the multi-head attention transformer, which assigns attention weights to the different modalities. The different latent embeddings are subsequently used to train a deep neural network. The proposed framework is validated on the Speaking Faces dataset. A comparative analysis with baseline algorithms shows that the proposed framework significantly increases the person recognition accuracy while accounting for missing modalities.
SSiT: Saliency-guided Self-supervised Image Transformer for Diabetic Retinopathy Grading
Authors: Yijin Huang, Junyan Lyu, Pujin Cheng, Roger Tam, Xiaoying Tang
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, Medical Image Analysis, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised Learning (SSL) has been widely applied to learn image representations through exploiting unlabeled images. However, it has not been fully explored in the medical image analysis field. In this work, Saliency-guided Self-Supervised image Transformer (SSiT) is proposed for Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) grading from fundus images. We novelly introduce saliency maps into SSL, with a goal of guiding self-supervised pre-training with domain-specific prior knowledge. Specifically, two saliency-guided learning tasks are employed in SSiT: (1) Saliency-guided contrastive learning is conducted based on the momentum contrast, wherein fundus images' saliency maps are utilized to remove trivial patches from the input sequences of the momentum-updated key encoder. Thus, the key encoder is constrained to provide target representations focusing on salient regions, guiding the query encoder to capture salient features. (2) The query encoder is trained to predict the saliency segmentation, encouraging the preservation of fine-grained information in the learned representations. To assess our proposed method, four publicly-accessible fundus image datasets are adopted. One dataset is employed for pre-training, while the three others are used to evaluate the pre-trained models' performance on downstream DR grading. The proposed SSiT significantly outperforms other representative state-of-the-art SSL methods on all downstream datasets and under various evaluation settings. For example, SSiT achieves a Kappa score of 81.88% on the DDR dataset under fine-tuning evaluation, outperforming all other ViT-based SSL methods by at least 9.48%.
Diffusion Models already have a Semantic Latent Space
Authors: Mingi Kwon, Jaeseok Jeong, Youngjung Uh
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation

Diffusion models achieve outstanding generative performance in various domains. Despite their great success, they lack semantic latent space which is essential for controlling the generative process. To address the problem, we propose asymmetric reverse process (Asyrp) which discovers the semantic latent space in frozen pretrained diffusion models. Our semantic latent space, named h-space, has nice properties for accommodating semantic image manipulation: homogeneity, linearity, robustness, and consistency across timesteps. In addition, we introduce a principled design of the generative process for versatile editing and quality boost ing by quantifiable measures: editing strength of an interval and quality deficiency at a timestep. Our method is applicable to various architectures (DDPM++, iD- DPM, and ADM) and datasets (CelebA-HQ, AFHQ-dog, LSUN-church, LSUN- bedroom, and METFACES). Project page: https://kwonminki.github.io/Asyrp/
Geo6D: Geometric Constraints Learning for 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Jianqiu Chen, Mingshan Sun, Ye Zheng, Tianpeng Bao, Zhenyu He, Donghai Li, Guoqiang Jin, Rui Zhao, Liwei Wu, Xiaoke Jiang
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, object-detection, Object Detection, Pose Estimation, regression, Translation

Numerous 6D pose estimation methods have been proposed that employ end-to-end regression to directly estimate the target pose parameters. Since the visible features of objects are implicitly influenced by their poses, the network allows inferring the pose by analyzing the differences in features in the visible region. However, due to the unpredictable and unrestricted range of pose variations, the implicitly learned visible feature-pose constraints are insufficiently covered by the training samples, making the network vulnerable to unseen object poses. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a novel geometric constraints learning approach called Geo6D for direct regression 6D pose estimation methods. It introduces a pose transformation formula expressed in relative offset representation, which is leveraged as geometric constraints to reconstruct the input and output targets of the network. These reconstructed data enable the network to estimate the pose based on explicit geometric constraints and relative offset representation mitigates the issue of the pose distribution gap. Extensive experimental results show that when equipped with Geo6D, the direct 6D methods achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets and demonstrate significant effectiveness, even with only 10% amount of data.
3D Human Mesh Construction Leveraging Wi-Fi
Authors: Yichao Wang, Jie Yang
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00

In this paper, we present, Wi-Mesh, a WiFi vision-based 3D human mesh construction system. Our system leverages the advances of WiFi to visualize the shape and deformations of the human body for 3D mesh construction. In particular, it leverages multiple transmitting and receiving antennas on WiFi devices to estimate the two-dimensional angle of arrival (2D AoA) of the WiFi signal reflections to enable WiFi devices to see the physical environment as we humans do. It then extracts only the images of the human body from the physical environment and leverages deep learning models to digitize the extracted human body into a 3D mesh representation. Experimental evaluation under various indoor environments shows that Wi-Mesh achieves an average vertices location error of 2.81cm and joint position error of 2.4cm, which is comparable to the systems that utilize specialized and dedicated hardware. The proposed system has the advantage of re-using the WiFi devices that already exist in the environment for potential mass adoption. It can also work in non-line of sight (NLoS), poor lighting conditions, and baggy clothes, where the camera-based systems do not work well.
Non-Iterative Scribble-Supervised Learning with Pacing Pseudo-Masks for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Zefan Yang, Di Lin, Dong Ni, Yi Wang
Date: 2022-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Scribble-supervised medical image segmentation tackles the limitation of sparse masks. Conventional approaches alternate between: labeling pseudo-masks and optimizing network parameters. However, such iterative two-stage paradigm is unwieldy and could be trapped in poor local optima since the networks undesirably regress to the erroneous pseudo-masks. To address these issues, we propose a non-iterative method where a stream of varying (pacing) pseudo-masks teach a network via consistency training, named PacingPseudo. Our motivation lies first in a non-iterative process. Interestingly, it can be achieved gracefully by a siamese architecture, wherein a stream of pseudo-masks naturally assimilate a stream of predicted masks during training. Second, we make the consistency training effective with two necessary designs: (i) entropy regularization to obtain high-confidence pseudo-masks for effective teaching; and (ii) distorted augmentations to create discrepancy between the pseudo-mask and predicted-mask streams for consistency regularization. Third, we devise a new memory bank mechanism that provides an extra source of ensemble features to complement scarce labeled pixels. The efficacy of the proposed PacingPseudo is validated on three public medical image datasets, including the segmentation tasks of abdominal multi-organs, cardiac structures, and myocardium. Extensive experiments demonstrate our PacingPseudo improves the baseline by large margins and consistently outcompetes several previous methods. In some cases, our PacingPseudo achieves comparable performance with its fully-supervised counterparts, showing the feasibility of our method for the challenging scribble-supervised segmentation applications. The code and scribble annotations will be publicly available.
Hierarchical classification at multiple operating points
Authors: Jack Valmadre
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: General Classification

Many classification problems consider classes that form a hierarchy. Classifiers that are aware of this hierarchy may be able to make confident predictions at a coarse level despite being uncertain at the fine-grained level. While it is generally possible to vary the granularity of predictions using a threshold at inference time, most contemporary work considers only leaf-node prediction, and almost no prior work has compared methods at multiple operating points. We present an efficient algorithm to produce operating characteristic curves for any method that assigns a score to every class in the hierarchy. Applying this technique to evaluate existing methods reveals that top-down classifiers are dominated by a naive flat softmax classifier across the entire operating range. We further propose two novel loss functions and show that a soft variant of the structured hinge loss is able to significantly outperform the flat baseline. Finally, we investigate the poor accuracy of top-down classifiers and demonstrate that they perform relatively well on unseen classes. Code is available online at https://github.com/jvlmdr/hiercls.
Prophet Attention: Predicting Attention with Future Attention for Image Captioning
Authors: Fenglin Liu, Xuancheng Ren, Xian Wu, Wei Fan, Yuexian Zou, Xu sun
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning

Recently, attention based models have been used extensively in many sequence-to-sequence learning systems. Especially for image captioning, the attention based models are expected to ground correct image regions with proper generated words. However, for each time step in the decoding process, the attention based models usually use the hidden state of the current input to attend to the image regions. Under this setting, these attention models have a "deviated focus" problem that they calculate the attention weights based on previous words instead of the one to be generated, impairing the performance of both grounding and captioning. In this paper, we propose the Prophet Attention, similar to the form of self-supervision. In the training stage, this module utilizes the future information to calculate the "ideal" attention weights towards image regions. These calculated "ideal" weights are further used to regularize the "deviated" attention. In this manner, image regions are grounded with the correct words. The proposed Prophet Attention can be easily incorporated into existing image captioning models to improve their performance of both grounding and captioning. The experiments on the Flickr30k Entities and the MSCOCO datasets show that the proposed Prophet Attention consistently outperforms baselines in both automatic metrics and human evaluations. It is worth noticing that we set new state-of-the-arts on the two benchmark datasets and achieve the 1st place on the leaderboard of the online MSCOCO benchmark in terms of the default ranking score, i.e., CIDEr-c40.
Window-Based Distribution Shift Detection for Deep Neural Networks
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

To deploy and operate deep neural models in production, the quality of their predictions, which might be contaminated benignly or manipulated maliciously by input distributional deviations, must be monitored and assessed. Specifically, we study the case of monitoring the healthy operation of a deep neural network (DNN) receiving a stream of data, with the aim of detecting input distributional deviations over which the quality of the network's predictions is potentially damaged. Using selective prediction principles, we propose a distribution deviation detection method for DNNs. The proposed method is derived from a tight coverage generalization bound computed over a sample of instances drawn from the true underlying distribution. Based on this bound, our detector continuously monitors the operation of the network out-of-sample over a test window and fires off an alarm whenever a deviation is detected. Our novel detection method performs on-par or better than the state-of-the-art, while consuming substantially lower computation time (five orders of magnitude reduction) and space complexities. Unlike previous methods, which require at least linear dependence on the size of the source distribution for each detection, rendering them inapplicable to ``Google-Scale'' datasets, our approach eliminates this dependence, making it suitable for real-world applications.
MMRNet: Improving Reliability for Multimodal Object Detection and Segmentation for Bin Picking via Multimodal Redundancy
Authors: Yuhao Chen, Hayden Gunraj, E. Zhixuan Zeng, Robbie Meyer, Maximilian Gilles, Alexander Wong
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, object-detection, Object Detection

Recently, there has been tremendous interest in industry 4.0 infrastructure to address labor shortages in global supply chains. Deploying artificial intelligence-enabled robotic bin picking systems in real world has become particularly important for reducing stress and physical demands of workers while increasing speed and efficiency of warehouses. To this end, artificial intelligence-enabled robotic bin picking systems may be used to automate order picking, but with the risk of causing expensive damage during an abnormal event such as sensor failure. As such, reliability becomes a critical factor for translating artificial intelligence research to real world applications and products. In this paper, we propose a reliable object detection and segmentation system with MultiModal Redundancy (MMRNet) for tackling object detection and segmentation for robotic bin picking using data from different modalities. This is the first system that introduces the concept of multimodal redundancy to address sensor failure issues during deployment. In particular, we realize the multimodal redundancy framework with a gate fusion module and dynamic ensemble learning. Finally, we present a new label-free multi-modal consistency (MC) score that utilizes the output from all modalities to measure the overall system output reliability and uncertainty. Through experiments, we demonstrate that in an event of missing modality, our system provides a much more reliable performance compared to baseline models. We also demonstrate that our MC score is a more reliability indicator for outputs during inference time compared to the model generated confidence scores that are often over-confident.
Prompting through Prototype: A Prototype-based Prompt Learning on Pretrained Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yue Zhang, Hongliang Fei, Dingcheng Li, Tan Yu, Ping Li
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Prompt Learning

Prompt learning is a new learning paradigm which reformulates downstream tasks as similar pretraining tasks on pretrained models by leveraging textual prompts. Recent works have demonstrated that prompt learning is particularly useful for few-shot learning, where there is limited training data. Depending on the granularity of prompts, those methods can be roughly divided into task-level prompting and instance-level prompting. Task-level prompting methods learn one universal prompt for all input samples, which is efficient but ineffective to capture subtle differences among different classes. Instance-level prompting methods learn a specific prompt for each input, though effective but inefficient. In this work, we develop a novel prototype-based prompt learning method to overcome the above limitations. In particular, we focus on few-shot image recognition tasks on pretrained vision-language models (PVLMs) and develop a method of prompting through prototype (PTP), where we define $K$ image prototypes and $K$ prompt prototypes. In PTP, the image prototype represents a centroid of a certain image cluster in the latent space and a prompt prototype is defined as a soft prompt in the continuous space. The similarity between a query image and an image prototype determines how much this prediction relies on the corresponding prompt prototype. Hence, in PTP, similar images will utilize similar prompting ways. Through extensive experiments on seven real-world benchmarks, we show that PTP is an effective method to leverage the latent knowledge and adaptive to various PVLMs. Moreover, through detailed analysis, we discuss pros and cons for prompt learning and parameter-efficient fine-tuning under the context of few-shot learning.
Scene Text Recognition with Semantics
Authors: Joshua Cesare Placidi, Yishu Miao, Zixu Wang, Lucia Specia
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Text Recognition

Scene Text Recognition (STR) models have achieved high performance in recent years on benchmark datasets where text images are presented with minimal noise. Traditional STR recognition pipelines take a cropped image as sole input and attempt to identify the characters present. This infrastructure can fail in instances where the input image is noisy or the text is partially obscured. This paper proposes using semantic information from the greater scene to contextualise predictions. We generate semantic vectors using object tags and fuse this information into a transformer-based architecture. The results demonstrate that our multimodal approach yields higher performance than traditional benchmark models, particularly on noisy instances.