pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MMPI: a Flexible Radiance Field Representation by Multiple Multi-plane Images Blending
Authors: Yuze He, Peng Wang, Yubin Hu, Wang Zhao, Ran Yi, Yong-Jin Liu, Wenping Wang
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

This paper presents a flexible representation of neural radiance fields based on multi-plane images (MPI), for high-quality view synthesis of complex scenes. MPI with Normalized Device Coordinate (NDC) parameterization is widely used in NeRF learning for its simple definition, easy calculation, and powerful ability to represent unbounded scenes. However, existing NeRF works that adopt MPI representation for novel view synthesis can only handle simple forward-facing unbounded scenes, where the input cameras are all observing in similar directions with small relative translations. Hence, extending these MPI-based methods to more complex scenes like large-range or even 360-degree scenes is very challenging. In this paper, we explore the potential of MPI and show that MPI can synthesize high-quality novel views of complex scenes with diverse camera distributions and view directions, which are not only limited to simple forward-facing scenes. Our key idea is to encode the neural radiance field with multiple MPIs facing different directions and blend them with an adaptive blending operation. For each region of the scene, the blending operation gives larger blending weights to those advantaged MPIs with stronger local representation abilities while giving lower weights to those with weaker representation abilities. Such blending operation automatically modulates the multiple MPIs to appropriately represent the diverse local density and color information. Experiments on the KITTI dataset and ScanNet dataset demonstrate that our proposed MMPI synthesizes high-quality images from diverse camera pose distributions and is fast to train, outperforming the previous fast-training NeRF methods for novel view synthesis. Moreover, we show that MMPI can encode extremely long trajectories and produce novel view renderings, demonstrating its potential in applications like autonomous driving.
NAYER: Noisy Layer Data Generation for Efficient and Effective Data-free Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Minh-Tuan Tran, Trung Le, Xuan-May Le, Mehrtash Harandi, Quan Hung Tran, Dinh Phung
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Data-free Knowledge Distillation, Knowledge Distillation, Language Modelling

Data-Free Knowledge Distillation (DFKD) has made significant recent strides by transferring knowledge from a teacher neural network to a student neural network without accessing the original data. Nonetheless, existing approaches encounter a significant challenge when attempting to generate samples from random noise inputs, which inherently lack meaningful information. Consequently, these models struggle to effectively map this noise to the ground-truth sample distribution, resulting in prolonging training times and low-quality outputs. In this paper, we propose a novel Noisy Layer Generation method (NAYER) which relocates the random source from the input to a noisy layer and utilizes the meaningful constant label-text embedding (LTE) as the input. LTE is generated by using the language model once, and then it is stored in memory for all subsequent training processes. The significance of LTE lies in its ability to contain substantial meaningful inter-class information, enabling the generation of high-quality samples with only a few training steps. Simultaneously, the noisy layer plays a key role in addressing the issue of diversity in sample generation by preventing the model from overemphasizing the constrained label information. By reinitializing the noisy layer in each iteration, we aim to facilitate the generation of diverse samples while still retaining the method's efficiency, thanks to the ease of learning provided by LTE. Experiments carried out on multiple datasets demonstrate that our NAYER not only outperforms the state-of-the-art methods but also achieves speeds 5 to 15 times faster than previous approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/tmtuan1307/nayer.
InFER: A Multi-Ethnic Indian Facial Expression Recognition Dataset
Authors: Syed Sameen Ahmad Rizvi, Preyansh Agrawal, Jagat Sesh Challa, Pratik Narang
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

The rapid advancement in deep learning over the past decade has transformed Facial Expression Recognition (FER) systems, as newer methods have been proposed that outperform the existing traditional handcrafted techniques. However, such a supervised learning approach requires a sufficiently large training dataset covering all the possible scenarios. And since most people exhibit facial expressions based upon their age group, gender, and ethnicity, a diverse facial expression dataset is needed. This becomes even more crucial while developing a FER system for the Indian subcontinent, which comprises of a diverse multi-ethnic population. In this work, we present InFER, a real-world multi-ethnic Indian Facial Expression Recognition dataset consisting of 10,200 images and 4,200 short videos of seven basic facial expressions. The dataset has posed expressions of 600 human subjects, and spontaneous/acted expressions of 6000 images crowd-sourced from the internet. To the best of our knowledge InFER is the first of its kind consisting of images from 600 subjects from very diverse ethnicity of the Indian Subcontinent. We also present the experimental results of baseline & deep FER methods on our dataset to substantiate its usability in real-world practical applications.
QUIZ: An Arbitrary Volumetric Point Matching Method for Medical Image Registration
Authors: Lin Liu, Xinxin Fan, Haoyang Liu, Chulong Zhang, Weibin Kong, Jingjing Dai, Yuming Jiang, Yaoqin Xie, Xiaokun Liang
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Rigid pre-registration involving local-global matching or other large deformation scenarios is crucial. Current popular methods rely on unsupervised learning based on grayscale similarity, but under circumstances where different poses lead to varying tissue structures, or where image quality is poor, these methods tend to exhibit instability and inaccuracies. In this study, we propose a novel method for medical image registration based on arbitrary voxel point of interest matching, called query point quizzer (QUIZ). QUIZ focuses on the correspondence between local-global matching points, specifically employing CNN for feature extraction and utilizing the Transformer architecture for global point matching queries, followed by applying average displacement for local image rigid transformation. We have validated this approach on a large deformation dataset of cervical cancer patients, with results indicating substantially smaller deviations compared to state-of-the-art methods. Remarkably, even for cross-modality subjects, it achieves results surpassing the current state-of-the-art.
Dual-Augmented Transformer Network for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Jingliang Deng, Zonghan Li
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS), a fundamental computer vision task, which aims to segment out the object within only class-level labels. The traditional methods adopt the CNN-based network and utilize the class activation map (CAM) strategy to discover the object regions. However, such methods only focus on the most discriminative region of the object, resulting in incomplete segmentation. An alternative is to explore vision transformers (ViT) to encode the image to acquire the global semantic information. Yet, the lack of transductive bias to objects is a flaw of ViT. In this paper, we explore the dual-augmented transformer network with self-regularization constraints for WSSS. Specifically, we propose a dual network with both CNN-based and transformer networks for mutually complementary learning, where both networks augment the final output for enhancement. Massive systemic evaluations on the challenging PASCAL VOC 2012 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods.
An easy zero-shot learning combination: Texture Sensitive Semantic Segmentation IceHrNet and Advanced Style Transfer Learning Strategy
Authors: Zhiyong Yang, Yuelong Zhu, Xiaoqin Zeng, Jun Zong, Xiuheng Liu, Ran Tao, Xiaofei Cong, YuFeng Yu
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Style Transfer, Transfer Learning, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

We proposed an easy method of Zero-Shot semantic segmentation by using style transfer. In this case, we successfully used a medical imaging dataset (Blood Cell Imagery) to train a model for river ice semantic segmentation. First, we built a river ice semantic segmentation dataset IPC_RI_SEG using a fixed camera and covering the entire ice melting process of the river. Second, a high-resolution texture fusion semantic segmentation network named IceHrNet is proposed. The network used HRNet as the backbone and added ASPP and Decoder segmentation heads to retain low-level texture features for fine semantic segmentation. Finally, a simple and effective advanced style transfer learning strategy was proposed, which can perform zero-shot transfer learning based on cross-domain semantic segmentation datasets, achieving a practical effect of 87% mIoU for semantic segmentation of river ice without target training dataset (25% mIoU for None Stylized, 65% mIoU for Conventional Stylized, our strategy improved by 22%). Experiments showed that the IceHrNet outperformed the state-of-the-art methods on the texture-focused dataset IPC_RI_SEG, and achieved an excellent result on the shape-focused river ice datasets. In zero-shot transfer learning, IceHrNet achieved an increase of 2 percentage points compared to other methods. Our code and model are published on https://github.com/PL23K/IceHrNet.
Decoding Realistic Images from Brain Activity with Contrastive Self-supervision and Latent Diffusion
Authors: Jingyuan Sun, Mingxiao Li, Marie-Francine Moens
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Reconstructing visual stimuli from human brain activities provides a promising opportunity to advance our understanding of the brain's visual system and its connection with computer vision models. Although deep generative models have been employed for this task, the challenge of generating high-quality images with accurate semantics persists due to the intricate underlying representations of brain signals and the limited availability of parallel data. In this paper, we propose a two-phase framework named Contrast and Diffuse (CnD) to decode realistic images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) recordings. In the first phase, we acquire representations of fMRI data through self-supervised contrastive learning. In the second phase, the encoded fMRI representations condition the diffusion model to reconstruct visual stimulus through our proposed concept-aware conditioning method. Experimental results show that CnD reconstructs highly plausible images on challenging benchmarks. We also provide a quantitative interpretation of the connection between the latent diffusion model (LDM) components and the human brain's visual system. In summary, we present an effective approach for reconstructing visual stimuli based on human brain activity and offer a novel framework to understand the relationship between the diffusion model and the human brain visual system.
RBF Weighted Hyper-Involution for RGB-D Object Detection
Authors: Mehfuz A Rahman, Jiju Peethambaran, Neil London
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Blocking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

A vast majority of conventional augmented reality devices are equipped with depth sensors. Depth images produced by such sensors contain complementary information for object detection when used with color images. Despite the benefits, it remains a complex task to simultaneously extract photometric and depth features in real time due to the immanent difference between depth and color images. Moreover, standard convolution operations are not sufficient to properly extract information directly from raw depth images leading to intermediate representations of depth which is inefficient. To address these issues, we propose a real-time and two stream RGBD object detection model. The proposed model consists of two new components: a depth guided hyper-involution that adapts dynamically based on the spatial interaction pattern in the raw depth map and an up-sampling based trainable fusion layer that combines the extracted depth and color image features without blocking the information transfer between them. We show that the proposed model outperforms other RGB-D based object detection models on NYU Depth v2 dataset and achieves comparable (second best) results on SUN RGB-D. Additionally, we introduce a new outdoor RGB-D object detection dataset where our proposed model outperforms other models. The performance evaluation on diverse synthetic data generated from CAD models and images shows the potential of the proposed model to be adapted to augmented reality based applications.
Structural Adversarial Objectives for Self-Supervised Representation Learning
Authors: Xiao Zhang, Michael Maire
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Representation Learning

Within the framework of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we propose objectives that task the discriminator for self-supervised representation learning via additional structural modeling responsibilities. In combination with an efficient smoothness regularizer imposed on the network, these objectives guide the discriminator to learn to extract informative representations, while maintaining a generator capable of sampling from the domain. Specifically, our objectives encourage the discriminator to structure features at two levels of granularity: aligning distribution characteristics, such as mean and variance, at coarse scales, and grouping features into local clusters at finer scales. Operating as a feature learner within the GAN framework frees our self-supervised system from the reliance on hand-crafted data augmentation schemes that are prevalent across contrastive representation learning methods. Across CIFAR-10/100 and an ImageNet subset, experiments demonstrate that equipping GANs with our self-supervised objectives suffices to produce discriminators which, evaluated in terms of representation learning, compete with networks trained by contrastive learning approaches.
CrossDF: Improving Cross-Domain Deepfake Detection with Deep Information Decomposition
Authors: Shanmin Yang, Hui Guo, Shu Hu, Bin Zhu, Ying Fu, Siwei Lyu, Xi Wu, Xin Wang
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

Deepfake technology poses a significant threat to security and social trust. Although existing detection methods have shown high performance in identifying forgeries within datasets that use the same deepfake techniques for both training and testing, they suffer from sharp performance degradation when faced with cross-dataset scenarios where unseen deepfake techniques are tested. To address this challenge, we propose a Deep Information Decomposition (DID) framework to enhance the performance of Cross-dataset Deepfake Detection (CrossDF). Unlike most existing deepfake detection methods, our framework prioritizes high-level semantic features over specific visual artifacts. Specifically, it adaptively decomposes facial features into deepfake-related and irrelevant information, only using the intrinsic deepfake-related information for real/fake discrimination. Moreover, it optimizes these two kinds of information to be independent with a de-correlation learning module, thereby enhancing the model's robustness against various irrelevant information changes and generalization ability to unseen forgery methods. Our extensive experimental evaluation and comparison with existing state-of-the-art detection methods validate the effectiveness and superiority of the DID framework on cross-dataset deepfake detection.
Diffusion Posterior Illumination for Ambiguity-aware Inverse Rendering
Authors: Linjie Lyu, Ayush Tewari, Marc Habermann, Shunsuke Saito, Michael Zollhöfer, Thomas Leimkühler, Christian Theobalt
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Inverse Rendering

Inverse rendering, the process of inferring scene properties from images, is a challenging inverse problem. The task is ill-posed, as many different scene configurations can give rise to the same image. Most existing solutions incorporate priors into the inverse-rendering pipeline to encourage plausible solutions, but they do not consider the inherent ambiguities and the multi-modal distribution of possible decompositions. In this work, we propose a novel scheme that integrates a denoising diffusion probabilistic model pre-trained on natural illumination maps into an optimization framework involving a differentiable path tracer. The proposed method allows sampling from combinations of illumination and spatially-varying surface materials that are, both, natural and explain the image observations. We further conduct an extensive comparative study of different priors on illumination used in previous work on inverse rendering. Our method excels in recovering materials and producing highly realistic and diverse environment map samples that faithfully explain the illumination of the input images.
Distilling Inductive Bias: Knowledge Distillation Beyond Model Compression
Authors: Gousia Habib, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Brejesh lall
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Knowledge Distillation, model, Model Compression

With the rapid development of computer vision, Vision Transformers (ViTs) offer the tantalizing prospect of unified information processing across visual and textual domains. But due to the lack of inherent inductive biases in ViTs, they require enormous amount of data for training. To make their applications practical, we introduce an innovative ensemble-based distillation approach distilling inductive bias from complementary lightweight teacher models. Prior systems relied solely on convolution-based teaching. However, this method incorporates an ensemble of light teachers with different architectural tendencies, such as convolution and involution, to instruct the student transformer jointly. Because of these unique inductive biases, instructors can accumulate a wide range of knowledge, even from readily identifiable stored datasets, which leads to enhanced student performance. Our proposed framework also involves precomputing and storing logits in advance, essentially the unnormalized predictions of the model. This optimization can accelerate the distillation process by eliminating the need for repeated forward passes during knowledge distillation, significantly reducing the computational burden and enhancing efficiency.
Deep Active Learning with Noisy Oracle in Object Detection
Authors: Marius Schubert, Tobias Riedlinger, Karsten Kahl, Matthias Rottmann
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Obtaining annotations for complex computer vision tasks such as object detection is an expensive and time-intense endeavor involving a large number of human workers or expert opinions. Reducing the amount of annotations required while maintaining algorithm performance is, therefore, desirable for machine learning practitioners and has been successfully achieved by active learning algorithms. However, it is not merely the amount of annotations which influences model performance but also the annotation quality. In practice, the oracles that are queried for new annotations frequently contain significant amounts of noise. Therefore, cleansing procedures are oftentimes necessary to review and correct given labels. This process is subject to the same budget as the initial annotation itself since it requires human workers or even domain experts. Here, we propose a composite active learning framework including a label review module for deep object detection. We show that utilizing part of the annotation budget to correct the noisy annotations partially in the active dataset leads to early improvements in model performance, especially when coupled with uncertainty-based query strategies. The precision of the label error proposals has a significant influence on the measured effect of the label review. In our experiments we achieve improvements of up to 4.5 mAP points of object detection performance by incorporating label reviews at equal annotation budget.
InstructCV: Instruction-Tuned Text-to-Image Diffusion Models as Vision Generalists
Authors: Yulu Gan, Sungwoo Park, Alexander Schubert, Anthony Philippakis, Ahmed M. Alaa
Date: 2023-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Image Generation, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, object-detection, Object Detection, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recent advances in generative diffusion models have enabled text-controlled synthesis of realistic and diverse images with impressive quality. Despite these remarkable advances, the application of text-to-image generative models in computer vision for standard visual recognition tasks remains limited. The current de facto approach for these tasks is to design model architectures and loss functions that are tailored to the task at hand. In this paper, we develop a unified language interface for computer vision tasks that abstracts away task-specific design choices and enables task execution by following natural language instructions. Our approach involves casting multiple computer vision tasks as text-to-image generation problems. Here, the text represents an instruction describing the task, and the resulting image is a visually-encoded task output. To train our model, we pool commonly-used computer vision datasets covering a range of tasks, including segmentation, object detection, depth estimation, and classification. We then use a large language model to paraphrase prompt templates that convey the specific tasks to be conducted on each image, and through this process, we create a multi-modal and multi-task training dataset comprising input and output images along with annotated instructions. Following the InstructPix2Pix architecture, we apply instruction-tuning to a text-to-image diffusion model using our constructed dataset, steering its functionality from a generative model to an instruction-guided multi-task vision learner. Experiments demonstrate that our model, dubbed InstructCV, performs competitively compared to other generalist and task-specific vision models. Moreover, it exhibits compelling generalization capabilities to unseen data, categories, and user instructions.