pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SkySense: A Multi-Modal Remote Sensing Foundation Model Towards Universal Interpretation for Earth Observation Imagery
Authors: Xin Guo, Jiangwei Lao, Bo Dang, Yingying Zhang, Lei Yu, Lixiang Ru, Liheng Zhong, Ziyuan Huang, Kang Wu, Dingxiang Hu, Huimei He, Jian Wang, Jingdong Chen, Ming Yang, Yongjun Zhang, Yansheng Li
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Earth Observation, Image Classification, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Temporal Sequences, Visual Question Answering, Zero-shot Classification (unified classes)

Prior studies on Remote Sensing Foundation Model (RSFM) reveal immense potential towards a generic model for Earth Observation. Nevertheless, these works primarily focus on a single modality without temporal and geo-context modeling, hampering their capabilities for diverse tasks. In this study, we present SkySense, a generic billion-scale model, pre-trained on a curated multi-modal Remote Sensing Imagery (RSI) dataset with 21.5 million temporal sequences. SkySense incorporates a factorized multi-modal spatiotemporal encoder taking temporal sequences of optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data as input. This encoder is pre-trained by our proposed Multi-Granularity Contrastive Learning to learn representations across different modal and spatial granularities. To further enhance the RSI representations by the geo-context clue, we introduce Geo-Context Prototype Learning to learn region-aware prototypes upon RSI's multi-modal spatiotemporal features. To our best knowledge, SkySense is the largest Multi-Modal RSFM to date, whose modules can be flexibly combined or used individually to accommodate various tasks. It demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities on a thorough evaluation encompassing 16 datasets over 7 tasks, from single- to multi-modal, static to temporal, and classification to localization. SkySense surpasses 18 recent RSFMs in all test scenarios. Specifically, it outperforms the latest models such as GFM, SatLas and Scale-MAE by a large margin, i.e., 2.76%, 3.67% and 3.61% on average respectively. We will release the pre-trained weights to facilitate future research and Earth Observation applications.
FoMo-Bench: a multi-modal, multi-scale and multi-task Forest Monitoring Benchmark for remote sensing foundation models
Authors: Nikolaos Ioannis Bountos, Arthur Ouaknine, David Rolnick
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Forests are an essential part of Earth's ecosystems and natural systems, as well as providing services on which humanity depends, yet they are rapidly changing as a result of land use decisions and climate change. Understanding and mitigating negative effects requires parsing data on forests at global scale from a broad array of sensory modalities, and recently many such problems have been approached using machine learning algorithms for remote sensing. To date, forest-monitoring problems have largely been addressed in isolation. Inspired by the rise of foundation models for computer vision and remote sensing, we here present the first unified Forest Monitoring Benchmark (FoMo-Bench). FoMo-Bench consists of 15 diverse datasets encompassing satellite, aerial, and inventory data, covering a variety of geographical regions, and including multispectral, red-green-blue, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and LiDAR data with various temporal, spatial and spectral resolutions. FoMo-Bench includes multiple types of forest-monitoring tasks, spanning classification, segmentation, and object detection. To further enhance the diversity of tasks and geographies represented in FoMo-Bench, we introduce a novel global dataset, TalloS, combining satellite imagery with ground-based annotations for tree species classification, encompassing 1,000+ categories across multiple hierarchical taxonomic levels (species, genus, family). Finally, we propose FoMo-Net, a baseline foundation model with the capacity to process any combination of commonly used spectral bands in remote sensing, across diverse ground sampling distances and geographical locations worldwide. This work aims to inspire research collaborations between machine learning and forest biology researchers in exploring scalable multi-modal and multi-task models for forest monitoring. All code and data will be made publicly available.
Focus on Your Instruction: Fine-grained and Multi-instruction Image Editing by Attention Modulation
Authors: Qin Guo, Tianwei Lin
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Denoising

Recently, diffusion-based methods, like InstructPix2Pix (IP2P), have achieved effective instruction-based image editing, requiring only natural language instructions from the user. However, these methods often inadvertently alter unintended areas and struggle with multi-instruction editing, resulting in compromised outcomes. To address these issues, we introduce the Focus on Your Instruction (FoI), a method designed to ensure precise and harmonious editing across multiple instructions without extra training or test-time optimization. In the FoI, we primarily emphasize two aspects: (1) precisely extracting regions of interest for each instruction and (2) guiding the denoising process to concentrate within these regions of interest. For the first objective, we identify the implicit grounding capability of IP2P from the cross-attention between instruction and image, then develop an effective mask extraction method. For the second objective, we introduce a cross attention modulation module for rough isolation of target editing regions and unrelated regions. Additionally, we introduce a mask-guided disentangle sampling strategy to further ensure clear region isolation. Experimental results demonstrate that FoI surpasses existing methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, especially excelling in multi-instruction editing task.
Plasticine3D: 3D Non-Rigid Editing with Text Guidance by Multi-View Embedding Optimization
Authors: Yige Chen, Teng Hu, Yizhe Tang, Siyuan Chen, Ang Chen, Ran Yi
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Plasticine3D, Text to 3D

With the help of Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) and the rapid development of neural 3D representations, some methods have been proposed to perform 3D editing such as adding additional geometries, or overwriting textures. However, generalized 3D non-rigid editing task, which requires changing both the structure (posture or composition) and appearance (texture) of the original object, remains to be challenging in 3D editing field. In this paper, we propose Plasticine3D, a novel text-guided fine-grained controlled 3D editing pipeline that can perform 3D non-rigid editing with large structure deformations. Our work divides the editing process into a geometry editing stage and a texture editing stage to achieve separate control of structure and appearance. In order to maintain the details of the original object from different viewpoints, we propose a Multi-View-Embedding (MVE) Optimization strategy to ensure that the guidance model learns the features of the original object from various viewpoints. For the purpose of fine-grained control, we propose Embedding-Fusion (EF) to blend the original characteristics with the editing objectives in the embedding space, and control the extent of editing by adjusting the fusion rate. Furthermore, in order to address the issue of gradual loss of details during the generation process under high editing intensity, as well as the problem of insignificant editing effects in some scenarios, we propose Score Projection Sampling (SPS) as a replacement of score distillation sampling, which introduces additional optimization phases for editing target enhancement and original detail maintenance, leading to better editing quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on 3D non-rigid editing tasks
SeiT++: Masked Token Modeling Improves Storage-efficient Training
Authors: Minhyun Lee, Song Park, Byeongho Heo, Dongyoon Han, Hyunjung Shim
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in Deep Neural Network (DNN) models have significantly improved performance across computer vision tasks. However, achieving highly generalizable and high-performing vision models requires expansive datasets, resulting in significant storage requirements. This storage challenge is a critical bottleneck for scaling up models. A recent breakthrough by SeiT proposed the use of Vector-Quantized (VQ) feature vectors (i.e., tokens) as network inputs for vision classification. This approach achieved 90% of the performance of a model trained on full-pixel images with only 1% of the storage. While SeiT needs labeled data, its potential in scenarios beyond fully supervised learning remains largely untapped. In this paper, we extend SeiT by integrating Masked Token Modeling (MTM) for self-supervised pre-training. Recognizing that self-supervised approaches often demand more data due to the lack of labels, we introduce TokenAdapt and ColorAdapt. These methods facilitate comprehensive token-friendly data augmentation, effectively addressing the increased data requirements of self-supervised learning. We evaluate our approach across various scenarios, including storage-efficient ImageNet-1k classification, fine-grained classification, ADE-20k semantic segmentation, and robustness benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance improvement in diverse experiments, validating the effectiveness of our method. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/seit.
Lever LM: Configuring In-Context Sequence to Lever Large Vision Language Models
Authors: Xu Yang, Yingzhe Peng, Haoxuan Ma, Shuo Xu, Chi Zhang, Yucheng Han, Hanwang Zhang
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, In-Context Learning, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Sentence, Visual Question Answering

As Archimedes famously said, ``Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world'', in this study, we propose to use a tiny Language Model (LM), \eg, a Transformer with 67M parameters, to lever much larger Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) with 9B parameters. Specifically, we use this tiny \textbf{Lever-LM} to configure effective in-context demonstration (ICD) sequences to improve the In-Context Learinng (ICL) performance of LVLMs. Previous studies show that diverse ICD configurations like the selection and ordering of the demonstrations heavily affect the ICL performance, highlighting the significance of configuring effective ICD sequences. Motivated by this and by re-considering the the process of configuring ICD sequence, we find this is a mirror process of human sentence composition and further assume that effective ICD configurations may contain internal statistical patterns that can be captured by Lever-LM. Then a dataset with effective ICD sequences is constructed to train Lever-LM. After training, given novel queries, new ICD sequences are configured by the trained Lever-LM to solve vision-language tasks through ICL. Experiments show that these ICD sequences can improve the ICL performance of two LVLMs compared with some strong baselines in Visual Question Answering and Image Captioning, validating that Lever-LM can really capture the statistical patterns for levering LVLMs. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/ForJadeForest/Lever-LM}.
GSVA: Generalized Segmentation via Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Zhuofan Xia, Dongchen Han, Yizeng Han, Xuran Pan, Shiji Song, Gao Huang
Date: 2023-12-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Segmentation, Segmentation

Generalized Referring Expression Segmentation (GRES) extends the scope of classic RES to refer to multiple objects in one expression or identify the empty targets absent in the image. GRES poses challenges in modeling the complex spatial relationships of the instances in the image and identifying non-existing referents. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently shown tremendous progress in these complicated vision-language tasks. Connecting Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision models, MLLMs are proficient in understanding contexts with visual inputs. Among them, LISA, as a representative, adopts a special [SEG] token to prompt a segmentation mask decoder, e.g., SAM, to enable MLLMs in the RES task. However, existing solutions to GRES remain unsatisfactory since current segmentation MLLMs cannot correctly handle the cases where users might reference multiple subjects in a singular prompt or provide descriptions incongruent with any image target. In this paper, we propose Generalized Segmentation Vision Assistant (GSVA) to address this gap. Specifically, GSVA reuses the [SEG] token to prompt the segmentation model towards supporting multiple mask references simultaneously and innovatively learns to generate a [REJ] token to reject the null targets explicitly. Experiments validate GSVA's efficacy in resolving the GRES issue, marking a notable enhancement and setting a new record on the GRES benchmark gRefCOCO dataset. GSVA also proves effective across various classic referring segmentation and comprehension tasks.
ADA-YOLO: Dynamic Fusion of YOLOv8 and Adaptive Heads for Precise Image Detection and Diagnosis
Authors: Shun Liu, Jianan Zhang, Ruocheng Song, Teik Toe Teoh
Date: 2023-12-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Blood Cell Count, Edge-computing, Medical Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object detection and localization are crucial tasks for biomedical image analysis, particularly in the field of hematology where the detection and recognition of blood cells are essential for diagnosis and treatment decisions. While attention-based methods have shown significant progress in object detection in various domains, their application in medical object detection has been limited due to the unique challenges posed by medical imaging datasets. To address this issue, we propose ADA-YOLO, a light-weight yet effective method for medical object detection that integrates attention-based mechanisms with the YOLOv8 architecture. Our proposed method leverages the dynamic feature localisation and parallel regression for computer vision tasks through \textit{adaptive head} module. Empirical experiments were conducted on the Blood Cell Count and Detection (BCCD) dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of ADA-YOLO. The results showed that ADA-YOLO outperforms the YOLOv8 model in mAP (mean average precision) on the BCCD dataset by using more than 3 times less space than YOLOv8. This indicates that our proposed method is effective. Moreover, the light-weight nature of our proposed method makes it suitable for deployment in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices or edge computing systems. which could ultimately lead to improved diagnosis and treatment outcomes in the field of hematology.
Variable Importance in High-Dimensional Settings Requires Grouping
Authors: Ahmad Chamma, Bertrand Thirion, Denis A. Engemann
Date: 2023-12-18 00:00:00

Explaining the decision process of machine learning algorithms is nowadays crucial for both model's performance enhancement and human comprehension. This can be achieved by assessing the variable importance of single variables, even for high-capacity non-linear methods, e.g. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). While only removal-based approaches, such as Permutation Importance (PI), can bring statistical validity, they return misleading results when variables are correlated. Conditional Permutation Importance (CPI) bypasses PI's limitations in such cases. However, in high-dimensional settings, where high correlations between the variables cancel their conditional importance, the use of CPI as well as other methods leads to unreliable results, besides prohibitive computation costs. Grouping variables statistically via clustering or some prior knowledge gains some power back and leads to better interpretations. In this work, we introduce BCPI (Block-Based Conditional Permutation Importance), a new generic framework for variable importance computation with statistical guarantees handling both single and group cases. Furthermore, as handling groups with high cardinality (such as a set of observations of a given modality) are both time-consuming and resource-intensive, we also introduce a new stacking approach extending the DNN architecture with sub-linear layers adapted to the group structure. We show that the ensuing approach extended with stacking controls the type-I error even with highly-correlated groups and shows top accuracy across benchmarks. Furthermore, we perform a real-world data analysis in a large-scale medical dataset where we aim to show the consistency between our results and the literature for a biomarker prediction.
Compositional Inductive Invariant Based Verification of Neural Network Controlled Systems
Authors: Yuhao Zhou, Stavros Tripakis
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00

The integration of neural networks into safety-critical systems has shown great potential in recent years. However, the challenge of effectively verifying the safety of Neural Network Controlled Systems (NNCS) persists. This paper introduces a novel approach to NNCS safety verification, leveraging the inductive invariant method. Verifying the inductiveness of a candidate inductive invariant in the context of NNCS is hard because of the scale and nonlinearity of neural networks. Our compositional method makes this verification process manageable by decomposing the inductiveness proof obligation into smaller, more tractable subproblems. Alongside the high-level method, we present an algorithm capable of automatically verifying the inductiveness of given candidates by automatically inferring the necessary decomposition predicates. The algorithm significantly outperforms the baseline method and shows remarkable reductions in execution time in our case studies, shortening the verification time from hours (or timeout) to seconds.
Ocean Data Quality Assessment through Outlier Detection-enhanced Active Learning
Authors: Na Li, Yiyang Qi, Ruyue Xin, Zhiming Zhao
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Outlier Detection

Ocean and climate research benefits from global ocean observation initiatives such as Argo, GLOSS, and EMSO. The Argo network, dedicated to ocean profiling, generates a vast volume of observatory data. However, data quality issues from sensor malfunctions and transmission errors necessitate stringent quality assessment. Existing methods, including machine learning, fall short due to limited labeled data and imbalanced datasets. To address these challenges, we propose an ODEAL framework for ocean data quality assessment, employing AL to reduce human experts' workload in the quality assessment workflow and leveraging outlier detection algorithms for effective model initialization. We also conduct extensive experiments on five large-scale realistic Argo datasets to gain insights into our proposed method, including the effectiveness of AL query strategies and the initial set construction approach. The results suggest that our framework enhances quality assessment efficiency by up to 465.5% with the uncertainty-based query strategy compared to random sampling and minimizes overall annotation costs by up to 76.9% using the initial set built with outlier detectors.
DePRL: Achieving Linear Convergence Speedup in Personalized Decentralized Learning with Shared Representations
Authors: Guojun Xiong, Gang Yan, Shiqiang Wang, Jian Li
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning Theory, Representation Learning

Decentralized learning has emerged as an alternative method to the popular parameter-server framework which suffers from high communication burden, single-point failure and scalability issues due to the need of a central server. However, most existing works focus on a single shared model for all workers regardless of the data heterogeneity problem, rendering the resulting model performing poorly on individual workers. In this work, we propose a novel personalized decentralized learning algorithm named DePRL via shared representations. Our algorithm relies on ideas from representation learning theory to learn a low-dimensional global representation collaboratively among all workers in a fully decentralized manner, and a user-specific low-dimensional local head leading to a personalized solution for each worker. We show that DePRL achieves, for the first time, a provable linear speedup for convergence with general non-linear representations (i.e., the convergence rate is improved linearly with respect to the number of workers). Experimental results support our theoretical findings showing the superiority of our method in data heterogeneous environments.
A mathematical perspective on Transformers
Authors: Borjan Geshkovski, Cyril Letrouit, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00

Transformers play a central role in the inner workings of large language models. We develop a mathematical framework for analyzing Transformers based on their interpretation as interacting particle systems, which reveals that clusters emerge in long time. Our study explores the underlying theory and offers new perspectives for mathematicians as well as computer scientists.
Learning Discrete-Time Major-Minor Mean Field Games
Authors: Kai Cui, Gökçe Dayanıklı, Mathieu Laurière, Matthieu Geist, Olivier Pietquin, Heinz Koeppl
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00

Recent techniques based on Mean Field Games (MFGs) allow the scalable analysis of multi-player games with many similar, rational agents. However, standard MFGs remain limited to homogeneous players that weakly influence each other, and cannot model major players that strongly influence other players, severely limiting the class of problems that can be handled. We propose a novel discrete time version of major-minor MFGs (M3FGs), along with a learning algorithm based on fictitious play and partitioning the probability simplex. Importantly, M3FGs generalize MFGs with common noise and can handle not only random exogeneous environment states but also major players. A key challenge is that the mean field is stochastic and not deterministic as in standard MFGs. Our theoretical investigation verifies both the M3FG model and its algorithmic solution, showing firstly the well-posedness of the M3FG model starting from a finite game of interest, and secondly convergence and approximation guarantees of the fictitious play algorithm. Then, we empirically verify the obtained theoretical results, ablating some of the theoretical assumptions made, and show successful equilibrium learning in three example problems. Overall, we establish a learning framework for a novel and broad class of tractable games.
Attention-Driven Multichannel Speech Enhancement in Moving Sound Source Scenarios
Authors: Yuzhu Wang, Archontis Politis, Tuomas Virtanen
Date: 2023-12-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Enhancement

Current multichannel speech enhancement algorithms typically assume a stationary sound source, a common mismatch with reality that limits their performance in real-world scenarios. This paper focuses on attention-driven spatial filtering techniques designed for dynamic settings. Specifically, we study the application of linear and nonlinear attention-based methods for estimating time-varying spatial covariance matrices used to design the filters. We also investigate the direct estimation of spatial filters by attention-based methods without explicitly estimating spatial statistics. The clean speech clips from WSJ0 are employed for simulating speech signals of moving speakers in a reverberant environment. The experimental dataset is built by mixing the simulated speech signals with multichannel real noise from CHiME-3. Evaluation results show that the attention-driven approaches are robust and consistently outperform conventional spatial filtering approaches in both static and dynamic sound environments.