pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Shortcomings of Top-Down Randomization-Based Sanity Checks for Evaluations of Deep Neural Network Explanations
Authors: Alexander Binder, Leander Weber, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Grégoire Montavon, Klaus-Robert Müller, Wojciech Samek
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1

While the evaluation of explanations is an important step towards trustworthy models, it needs to be done carefully, and the employed metrics need to be well-understood. Specifically model randomization testing is often overestimated and regarded as a sole criterion for selecting or discarding certain explanation methods. To address shortcomings of this test, we start by observing an experimental gap in the ranking of explanation methods between randomization-based sanity checks [1] and model output faithfulness measures (e.g. [25]). We identify limitations of model-randomization-based sanity checks for the purpose of evaluating explanations. Firstly, we show that uninformative attribution maps created with zero pixel-wise covariance easily achieve high scores in this type of checks. Secondly, we show that top-down model randomization preserves scales of forward pass activations with high probability. That is, channels with large activations have a high probility to contribute strongly to the output, even after randomization of the network on top of them. Hence, explanations after randomization can only be expected to differ to a certain extent. This explains the observed experimental gap. In summary, these results demonstrate the inadequacy of model-randomization-based sanity checks as a criterion to rank attribution methods.
PIC-Score: Probabilistic Interpretable Comparison Score for Optimal Matching Confidence in Single- and Multi-Biometric (Face) Recognition
Authors: Pedro C. Neto, Ana F. Sequeira, Jaime S. Cardoso, Philipp Terhörst
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Face Recognition

In the context of biometrics, matching confidence refers to the confidence that a given matching decision is correct. Since many biometric systems operate in critical decision-making processes, such as in forensics investigations, accurately and reliably stating the matching confidence becomes of high importance. Previous works on biometric confidence estimation can well differentiate between high and low confidence, but lack interpretability. Therefore, they do not provide accurate probabilistic estimates of the correctness of a decision. In this work, we propose a probabilistic interpretable comparison (PIC) score that accurately reflects the probability that the score originates from samples of the same identity. We prove that the proposed approach provides optimal matching confidence. Contrary to other approaches, it can also optimally combine multiple samples in a joint PIC score which further increases the recognition and confidence estimation performance. In the experiments, the proposed PIC approach is compared against all biometric confidence estimation methods available on four publicly available databases and five state-of-the-art face recognition systems. The results demonstrate that PIC has a significantly more accurate probabilistic interpretation than similar approaches and is highly effective for multi-biometric recognition. The code is publicly-available.
Adaptive Prototypical Networks
Authors: Manas Gogoi, Sambhavi Tiwari, Shekhar Verma
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Prototypical network for Few shot learning tries to learn an embedding function in the encoder that embeds images with similar features close to one another in the embedding space. However, in this process, the support set samples for a task are embedded independently of one other, and hence, the inter-class closeness is not taken into account. Thus, in the presence of similar-looking classes in a task, the embeddings will tend to be close to each other in the embedding space and even possibly overlap in some regions, which is not desirable for classification. In this paper, we propose an approach that intuitively pushes the embeddings of each of the classes away from the others in the meta-testing phase, thereby grouping them closely based on the distinct class labels rather than only the similarity of spatial features. This is achieved by training the encoder network for classification using the support set samples and labels of the new task. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark data sets show improvements in meta-testing accuracy when compared with Prototypical Networks and also other standard few-shot learning models.
ISIM: Iterative Self-Improved Model for Weakly Supervised Segmentation
Authors: Cenk Bircanoglu, Nafiz Arica
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation (WSSS) is a challenging task aiming to learn the segmentation labels from class-level labels. In the literature, exploiting the information obtained from Class Activation Maps (CAMs) is widely used for WSSS studies. However, as CAMs are obtained from a classification network, they are interested in the most discriminative parts of the objects, producing non-complete prior information for segmentation tasks. In this study, to obtain more coherent CAMs with segmentation labels, we propose a framework that employs an iterative approach in a modified encoder-decoder-based segmentation model, which simultaneously supports classification and segmentation tasks. As no ground-truth segmentation labels are given, the same model also generates the pseudo-segmentation labels with the help of dense Conditional Random Fields (dCRF). As a result, the proposed framework becomes an iterative self-improved model. The experiments performed with DeepLabv3 and UNet models show a significant gain on the Pascal VOC12 dataset, and the DeepLabv3 application increases the current state-of-the-art metric by %2.5. The implementation associated with the experiments can be found: https://github.com/cenkbircanoglu/isim.
SinDiffusion: Learning a Diffusion Model from a Single Natural Image
Authors: Weilun Wang, Jianmin Bao, Wengang Zhou, Dongdong Chen, Dong Chen, Lu Yuan, Houqiang Li
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation, Image Outpainting

We present SinDiffusion, leveraging denoising diffusion models to capture internal distribution of patches from a single natural image. SinDiffusion significantly improves the quality and diversity of generated samples compared with existing GAN-based approaches. It is based on two core designs. First, SinDiffusion is trained with a single model at a single scale instead of multiple models with progressive growing of scales which serves as the default setting in prior work. This avoids the accumulation of errors, which cause characteristic artifacts in generated results. Second, we identify that a patch-level receptive field of the diffusion network is crucial and effective for capturing the image's patch statistics, therefore we redesign the network structure of the diffusion model. Coupling these two designs enables us to generate photorealistic and diverse images from a single image. Furthermore, SinDiffusion can be applied to various applications, i.e., text-guided image generation, and image outpainting, due to the inherent capability of diffusion models. Extensive experiments on a wide range of images demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method for modeling the patch distribution.
Dynamic Depth-Supervised NeRF for Multi-View RGB-D Operating Room Images
Authors: Beerend G. A. Gerats, Jelmer M. Wolterink, Ivo A. M. J. Broeders
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, NeRF, SSIM

The operating room (OR) is an environment of interest for the development of sensing systems, enabling the detection of people, objects, and their semantic relations. Due to frequent occlusions in the OR, these systems often rely on input from multiple cameras. While increasing the number of cameras generally increases algorithm performance, there are hard limitations to the number and locations of cameras in the OR. Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) can be used to render synthetic views from arbitrary camera positions, virtually enlarging the number of cameras in the dataset. In this work, we explore the use of NeRF for view synthesis of dynamic scenes in the OR, and we show that regularisation with depth supervision from RGB-D sensor data results in higher image quality. We optimise a dynamic depth-supervised NeRF with up to six synchronised cameras that capture the surgical field in five distinct phases before and during a knee replacement surgery. We qualitatively inspect views rendered by a virtual camera that moves 180 degrees around the surgical field at differing time values. Quantitatively, we evaluate view synthesis from an unseen camera position in terms of PSNR, SSIM and LPIPS for the colour channels and in MAE and error percentage for the estimated depth. We find that NeRFs can be used to generate geometrically consistent views, also from interpolated camera positions and at interpolated time intervals. Views are generated from an unseen camera pose with an average PSNR of 18.2 and a depth estimation error of 2.0%. Our results show the potential of a dynamic NeRF for view synthesis in the OR and stress the relevance of depth supervision in a clinical setting.
Multi-task Learning for Camera Calibration
Authors: Talha Hanif Butt, Murtaza Taj
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Camera Calibration, Multi-Task Learning

For a number of tasks, such as 3D reconstruction, robotic interface, autonomous driving, etc., camera calibration is essential. In this study, we present a unique method for predicting intrinsic (principal point offset and focal length) and extrinsic (baseline, pitch, and translation) properties from a pair of images. We suggested a novel method where camera model equations are represented as a neural network in a multi-task learning framework, in contrast to existing methods, which build a comprehensive solution. By reconstructing the 3D points using a camera model neural network and then using the loss in reconstruction to obtain the camera specifications, this innovative camera projection loss (CPL) method allows us that the desired parameters should be estimated. As far as we are aware, our approach is the first one that uses an approach to multi-task learning that includes mathematical formulas in a framework for learning to estimate camera parameters to predict both the extrinsic and intrinsic parameters jointly. Additionally, we provided a new dataset named as CVGL Camera Calibration Dataset [1] which has been collected using the CARLA Simulator [2]. Actually, we show that our suggested strategy out performs both conventional methods and methods based on deep learning on 6 out of 10 parameters that were assessed using both real and synthetic data. Our code and generated dataset are available at https://github.com/thanif/Camera-Calibration-through-Camera-Projection-Loss.
Progressive Learning with Cross-Window Consistency for Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Bo Dang, Yansheng Li, Yongjun Zhang, Jiayi Ma
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semi-supervised semantic segmentation focuses on the exploration of a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data, which is more in line with the demands of real-world image understanding applications. However, it is still hindered by the inability to fully and effectively leverage unlabeled images. In this paper, we reveal that cross-window consistency (CWC) is helpful in comprehensively extracting auxiliary supervision from unlabeled data. Additionally, we propose a novel CWC-driven progressive learning framework to optimize the deep network by mining weak-to-strong constraints from massive unlabeled data. More specifically, this paper presents a biased cross-window consistency (BCC) loss with an importance factor, which helps the deep network explicitly constrain confidence maps from overlapping regions in different windows to maintain semantic consistency with larger contexts. In addition, we propose a dynamic pseudo-label memory bank (DPM) to provide high-consistency and high-reliability pseudo-labels to further optimize the network. Extensive experiments on three representative datasets of urban views, medical scenarios, and satellite scenes demonstrate our framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with a large margin. Code will be available publicly.
Accuracy Prediction for NAS Acceleration using Feature Selection and Extrapolation
Authors: Tal Hakim
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, regression

Predicting the accuracy of candidate neural architectures is an important capability of NAS-based solutions. When a candidate architecture has properties that are similar to other known architectures, the prediction task is rather straightforward using off-the-shelf regression algorithms. However, when a candidate architecture lies outside of the known space of architectures, a regression model has to perform extrapolated predictions, which is not only a challenging task, but also technically impossible using the most popular regression algorithm families, which are based on decision trees. In this work, we are trying to address two problems. The first one is improving regression accuracy using feature selection, whereas the other one is the evaluation of regression algorithms on extrapolating accuracy prediction tasks. We extend the NAAP-440 dataset with new tabular features and introduce NAAP-440e, which we use for evaluation. We observe a dramatic improvement from the old baseline, namely, the new baseline requires 3x shorter training processes of candidate architectures, while maintaining the same mean-absolute-error and achieving almost 2x fewer monotonicity violations, compared to the old baseline's best reported performance. The extended dataset and code used in the study have been made public in the NAAP-440 repository.
X$^2$-VLM: All-In-One Pre-trained Model For Vision-Language Tasks
Authors: Yan Zeng, Xinsong Zhang, Hang Li, Jiawei Wang, Jipeng Zhang, Wangchunshu Zhou
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Cross-Modal Retrieval, Image Captioning, Text to Video Retrieval, Video Question Answering, Video Retrieval, Visual Grounding, Visual Question Answering (VQA), Visual Reasoning, XLM-R

Vision language pre-training aims to learn alignments between vision and language from a large amount of data. Most existing methods only learn image-text alignments. Some others utilize pre-trained object detectors to leverage vision language alignments at the object level. In this paper, we propose to learn multi-grained vision language alignments by a unified pre-training framework that learns multi-grained aligning and multi-grained localization simultaneously. Based on it, we present X$^2$-VLM, an all-in-one model with a flexible modular architecture, in which we further unify image-text pre-training and video-text pre-training in one model. X$^2$-VLM is able to learn unlimited visual concepts associated with diverse text descriptions. Experiment results show that X$^2$-VLM performs the best on base and large scale for both image-text and video-text tasks, making a good trade-off between performance and model scale. Moreover, we show that the modular design of X$^2$-VLM results in high transferability for it to be utilized in any language or domain. For example, by simply replacing the text encoder with XLM-R, X$^2$-VLM outperforms state-of-the-art multilingual multi-modal pre-trained models without any multilingual pre-training. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/zengyan-97/X2-VLM.
DeepJoin: Learning a Joint Occupancy, Signed Distance, and Normal Field Function for Shape Repair
Authors: Nikolas Lamb, Sean Banerjee, Natasha Kholgade Banerjee
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00

We introduce DeepJoin, an automated approach to generate high-resolution repairs for fractured shapes using deep neural networks. Existing approaches to perform automated shape repair operate exclusively on symmetric objects, require a complete proxy shape, or predict restoration shapes using low-resolution voxels which are too coarse for physical repair. We generate a high-resolution restoration shape by inferring a corresponding complete shape and a break surface from an input fractured shape. We present a novel implicit shape representation for fractured shape repair that combines the occupancy function, signed distance function, and normal field. We demonstrate repairs using our approach for synthetically fractured objects from ShapeNet, 3D scans from the Google Scanned Objects dataset, objects in the style of ancient Greek pottery from the QP Cultural Heritage dataset, and real fractured objects. We outperform three baseline approaches in terms of chamfer distance and normal consistency. Unlike existing approaches and restorations using subtraction, DeepJoin restorations do not exhibit surface artifacts and join closely to the fractured region of the fractured shape. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Terascale-All-sensing-Research-Studio/DeepJoin.
Gait Recognition in Large-scale Free Environment via Single LiDAR
Authors: Xiao Han, Yiming Ren, Peishan Cong, Yujing Sun, Jingya Wang, Lan Xu, Yuexin Ma
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition, Gait Recognition in the Wild

Human gait recognition is crucial in multimedia, enabling identification through walking patterns without direct interaction, enhancing the integration across various media forms in real-world applications like smart homes, healthcare and non-intrusive security. LiDAR's ability to capture depth makes it pivotal for robotic perception and holds promise for real-world gait recognition. In this paper, based on a single LiDAR, we present the Hierarchical Multi-representation Feature Interaction Network (HMRNet) for robust gait recognition. Prevailing LiDAR-based gait datasets primarily derive from controlled settings with predefined trajectory, remaining a gap with real-world scenarios. To facilitate LiDAR-based gait recognition research, we introduce FreeGait, a comprehensive gait dataset from large-scale, unconstrained settings, enriched with multi-modal and varied 2D/3D data. Notably, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on prior dataset (SUSTech1K) and on FreeGait.
Real-time Neural Radiance Talking Portrait Synthesis via Audio-spatial Decomposition
Authors: Jiaxiang Tang, Kaisiyuan Wang, Hang Zhou, Xiaokang Chen, Dongliang He, Tianshu Hu, Jingtuo Liu, Gang Zeng, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Talking Face Generation

While dynamic Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have shown success in high-fidelity 3D modeling of talking portraits, the slow training and inference speed severely obstruct their potential usage. In this paper, we propose an efficient NeRF-based framework that enables real-time synthesizing of talking portraits and faster convergence by leveraging the recent success of grid-based NeRF. Our key insight is to decompose the inherently high-dimensional talking portrait representation into three low-dimensional feature grids. Specifically, a Decomposed Audio-spatial Encoding Module models the dynamic head with a 3D spatial grid and a 2D audio grid. The torso is handled with another 2D grid in a lightweight Pseudo-3D Deformable Module. Both modules focus on efficiency under the premise of good rendering quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can generate realistic and audio-lips synchronized talking portrait videos, while also being highly efficient compared to previous methods.
U-Flow: A U-shaped Normalizing Flow for Anomaly Detection with Unsupervised Threshold
Authors: Matías Tailanian, Álvaro Pardo, Pablo Musé
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Anomaly Segmentation, Segmentation

In this work we propose a one-class self-supervised method for anomaly segmentation in images that benefits both from a modern machine learning approach and a more classic statistical detection theory. The method consists of four phases. First, features are extracted using a multi-scale image Transformer architecture. Then, these features are fed into a U-shaped Normalizing Flow (NF) that lays the theoretical foundations for the subsequent phases. The third phase computes a pixel-level anomaly map from the NF embedding, and the last phase performs a segmentation based on the a contrario framework. This multiple hypothesis testing strategy permits the derivation of robust unsupervised detection thresholds, which are crucial in real-world applications where an operational point is needed. The segmentation results are evaluated using the Mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) metric, and for assessing the generated anomaly maps we report the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC), as well as the Area Under the Per-Region-Overlap curve (AUPRO). Extensive experimentation in various datasets shows that the proposed approach produces state-of-the-art results for all metrics and all datasets, ranking first in most MVTec-AD categories, with a mean pixel-level AUROC of 98.74%. Code and trained models are available at https:// github.com/mtailanian/uflow.
GlowGAN: Unsupervised Learning of HDR Images from LDR Images in the Wild
Authors: Chao Wang, Ana Serrano, Xingang Pan, Bin Chen, Hans-Peter Seidel, Christian Theobalt, Karol Myszkowski, Thomas Leimkuehler
Date: 2022-11-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, inverse tone mapping, Inverse-Tone-Mapping, Tone Mapping

Most in-the-wild images are stored in Low Dynamic Range (LDR) form, serving as a partial observation of the High Dynamic Range (HDR) visual world. Despite limited dynamic range, these LDR images are often captured with different exposures, implicitly containing information about the underlying HDR image distribution. Inspired by this intuition, in this work we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first method for learning a generative model of HDR images from in-the-wild LDR image collections in a fully unsupervised manner. The key idea is to train a generative adversarial network (GAN) to generate HDR images which, when projected to LDR under various exposures, are indistinguishable from real LDR images. The projection from HDR to LDR is achieved via a camera model that captures the stochasticity in exposure and camera response function. Experiments show that our method GlowGAN can synthesize photorealistic HDR images in many challenging cases such as landscapes, lightning, or windows, where previous supervised generative models produce overexposed images. We further demonstrate the new application of unsupervised inverse tone mapping (ITM) enabled by GlowGAN. Our ITM method does not need HDR images or paired multi-exposure images for training, yet it reconstructs more plausible information for overexposed regions than state-of-the-art supervised learning models trained on such data.