pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
KL Regularized Normalization Framework for Low Resource Tasks
Authors: Neeraj Kumar, Ankur Narang, Brejesh lall
Date: 2022-12-21 00:00:00

Large pre-trained models, such as Bert, GPT, and Wav2Vec, have demonstrated great potential for learning representations that are transferable to a wide variety of downstream tasks . It is difficult to obtain a large quantity of supervised data due to the limited availability of resources and time. In light of this, a significant amount of research has been conducted in the area of adopting large pre-trained datasets for diverse downstream tasks via fine tuning, linear probing, or prompt tuning in low resource settings. Normalization techniques are essential for accelerating training and improving the generalization of deep neural networks and have been successfully used in a wide variety of applications. A lot of normalization techniques have been proposed but the success of normalization in low resource downstream NLP and speech tasks is limited. One of the reasons is the inability to capture expressiveness by rescaling parameters of normalization. We propose KullbackLeibler(KL) Regularized normalization (KL-Norm) which make the normalized data well behaved and helps in better generalization as it reduces over-fitting, generalises well on out of domain distributions and removes irrelevant biases and features with negligible increase in model parameters and memory overheads. Detailed experimental evaluation on multiple low resource NLP and speech tasks, demonstrates the superior performance of KL-Norm as compared to other popular normalization and regularization techniques.
Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic for Robotic Arm Control
Authors: Alberto Acuto, Paola Barillà, Ludovico Bozzolo, Matteo Conterno, Mattia Pavese, Antonio Policicchio
Date: 2022-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Reinforcement Learning is emerging as a promising approach for the continuous control task of robotic arm movement. However, the challenges of learning robust and versatile control capabilities are still far from being resolved for real-world applications, mainly because of two common issues of this learning paradigm: the exploration strategy and the slow learning speed, sometimes known as "the curse of dimensionality". This work aims at exploring and assessing the advantages of the application of Quantum Computing to one of the state-of-art Reinforcement Learning techniques for continuous control - namely Soft Actor-Critic. Specifically, the performance of a Variational Quantum Soft Actor-Critic on the movement of a virtual robotic arm has been investigated by means of digital simulations of quantum circuits. A quantum advantage over the classical algorithm has been found in terms of a significant decrease in the amount of required parameters for satisfactory model training, paving the way for further promising developments.
Evaluation for Change
Authors: Rishi Bommasani
Date: 2022-12-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Evaluation is the central means for assessing, understanding, and communicating about NLP models. In this position paper, we argue evaluation should be more than that: it is a force for driving change, carrying a sociological and political character beyond its technical dimensions. As a force, evaluation's power arises from its adoption: under our view, evaluation succeeds when it achieves the desired change in the field. Further, by framing evaluation as a force, we consider how it competes with other forces. Under our analysis, we conjecture that the current trajectory of NLP suggests evaluation's power is waning, in spite of its potential for realizing more pluralistic ambitions in the field. We conclude by discussing the legitimacy of this power, who acquires this power and how it distributes. Ultimately, we hope the research community will more aggressively harness evaluation for change.
DisCoScene: Spatially Disentangled Generative Radiance Fields for Controllable 3D-aware Scene Synthesis
Authors: Yinghao Xu, Menglei Chai, Zifan Shi, Sida Peng, Ivan Skorokhodov, Aliaksandr Siarohin, Ceyuan Yang, Yujun Shen, Hsin-Ying Lee, Bolei Zhou, Sergey Tulyakov
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: 3D-Aware Image Synthesis, Image Generation, Object

Existing 3D-aware image synthesis approaches mainly focus on generating a single canonical object and show limited capacity in composing a complex scene containing a variety of objects. This work presents DisCoScene: a 3Daware generative model for high-quality and controllable scene synthesis. The key ingredient of our method is a very abstract object-level representation (i.e., 3D bounding boxes without semantic annotation) as the scene layout prior, which is simple to obtain, general to describe various scene contents, and yet informative to disentangle objects and background. Moreover, it serves as an intuitive user control for scene editing. Based on such a prior, the proposed model spatially disentangles the whole scene into object-centric generative radiance fields by learning on only 2D images with the global-local discrimination. Our model obtains the generation fidelity and editing flexibility of individual objects while being able to efficiently compose objects and the background into a complete scene. We demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on many scene datasets, including the challenging Waymo outdoor dataset. Project page: https://snap-research.github.io/discoscene/
A Wearable Data Collection System for Studying Micro-Level E-Scooter Behavior in Naturalistic Road Environment
Authors: Avinash Prabu, Dan Shen, Renran Tian, Stanley Chien, Lingxi Li, Yaobin Chen, Rini Sherony
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00

As one of the most popular micro-mobility options, e-scooters are spreading in hundreds of big cities and college towns in the US and worldwide. In the meantime, e-scooters are also posing new challenges to traffic safety. In general, e-scooters are suggested to be ridden in bike lanes/sidewalks or share the road with cars at the maximum speed of about 15-20 mph, which is more flexible and much faster than the pedestrains and bicyclists. These features make e-scooters challenging for human drivers, pedestrians, vehicle active safety modules, and self-driving modules to see and interact. To study this new mobility option and address e-scooter riders' and other road users' safety concerns, this paper proposes a wearable data collection system for investigating the micro-level e-Scooter motion behavior in a Naturalistic road environment. An e-Scooter-based data acquisition system has been developed by integrating LiDAR, cameras, and GPS using the robot operating system (ROS). Software frameworks are developed to support hardware interfaces, sensor operation, sensor synchronization, and data saving. The integrated system can collect data continuously for hours, meeting all the requirements including calibration accuracy and capability of collecting the vehicle and e-Scooter encountering data.
Scalable Adaptive Computation for Iterative Generation
Authors: Allan Jabri, David Fleet, Ting Chen
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Video Generation, Video Prediction

Natural data is redundant yet predominant architectures tile computation uniformly across their input and output space. We propose the Recurrent Interface Networks (RINs), an attention-based architecture that decouples its core computation from the dimensionality of the data, enabling adaptive computation for more scalable generation of high-dimensional data. RINs focus the bulk of computation (i.e. global self-attention) on a set of latent tokens, using cross-attention to read and write (i.e. route) information between latent and data tokens. Stacking RIN blocks allows bottom-up (data to latent) and top-down (latent to data) feedback, leading to deeper and more expressive routing. While this routing introduces challenges, this is less problematic in recurrent computation settings where the task (and routing problem) changes gradually, such as iterative generation with diffusion models. We show how to leverage recurrence by conditioning the latent tokens at each forward pass of the reverse diffusion process with those from prior computation, i.e. latent self-conditioning. RINs yield state-of-the-art pixel diffusion models for image and video generation, scaling to 1024X1024 images without cascades or guidance, while being domain-agnostic and up to 10X more efficient than 2D and 3D U-Nets.
Removing Objects From Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Silvan Weder, Guillermo Garcia-Hernando, Aron Monszpart, Marc Pollefeys, Gabriel Brostow, Michael Firman, Sara Vicente
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Inpainting, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) are emerging as a ubiquitous scene representation that allows for novel view synthesis. Increasingly, NeRFs will be shareable with other people. Before sharing a NeRF, though, it might be desirable to remove personal information or unsightly objects. Such removal is not easily achieved with the current NeRF editing frameworks. We propose a framework to remove objects from a NeRF representation created from an RGB-D sequence. Our NeRF inpainting method leverages recent work in 2D image inpainting and is guided by a user-provided mask. Our algorithm is underpinned by a confidence based view selection procedure. It chooses which of the individual 2D inpainted images to use in the creation of the NeRF, so that the resulting inpainted NeRF is 3D consistent. We show that our method for NeRF editing is effective for synthesizing plausible inpaintings in a multi-view coherent manner. We validate our approach using a new and still-challenging dataset for the task of NeRF inpainting.
SupeRGB-D: Zero-shot Instance Segmentation in Cluttered Indoor Environments
Authors: Evin Pınar Örnek, Aravindhan K Krishnan, Shreekant Gayaka, Cheng-Hao Kuo, Arnie Sen, Nassir Navab, Federico Tombari
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Instance Segmentation

Object instance segmentation is a key challenge for indoor robots navigating cluttered environments with many small objects. Limitations in 3D sensing capabilities often make it difficult to detect every possible object. While deep learning approaches may be effective for this problem, manually annotating 3D data for supervised learning is time-consuming. In this work, we explore zero-shot instance segmentation (ZSIS) from RGB-D data to identify unseen objects in a semantic category-agnostic manner. We introduce a zero-shot split for Tabletop Objects Dataset (TOD-Z) to enable this study and present a method that uses annotated objects to learn the ``objectness'' of pixels and generalize to unseen object categories in cluttered indoor environments. Our method, SupeRGB-D, groups pixels into small patches based on geometric cues and learns to merge the patches in a deep agglomerative clustering fashion. SupeRGB-D outperforms existing baselines on unseen objects while achieving similar performance on seen objects. We further show competitive results on the real dataset OCID. With its lightweight design (0.4 MB memory requirement), our method is extremely suitable for mobile and robotic applications. Additional DINO features can increase performance with a higher memory requirement. The dataset split and code are available at https://github.com/evinpinar/supergb-d.
Beyond SOT: Tracking Multiple Generic Objects at Once
Authors: Christoph Mayer, Martin Danelljan, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Vittorio Ferrari, Luc van Gool, Alina Kuznetsova
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Object, Object Tracking

Generic Object Tracking (GOT) is the problem of tracking target objects, specified by bounding boxes in the first frame of a video. While the task has received much attention in the last decades, researchers have almost exclusively focused on the single object setting. Multi-object GOT benefits from a wider applicability, rendering it more attractive in real-world applications. We attribute the lack of research interest into this problem to the absence of suitable benchmarks. In this work, we introduce a new large-scale GOT benchmark, LaGOT, containing multiple annotated target objects per sequence. Our benchmark allows users to tackle key remaining challenges in GOT, aiming to increase robustness and reduce computation through joint tracking of multiple objects simultaneously. In addition, we propose a transformer-based GOT tracker baseline capable of joint processing of multiple objects through shared computation. Our approach achieves a 4x faster run-time in case of 10 concurrent objects compared to tracking each object independently and outperforms existing single object trackers on our new benchmark. In addition, our approach achieves highly competitive results on single-object GOT datasets, setting a new state of the art on TrackingNet with a success rate AUC of 84.4%. Our benchmark, code, and trained models will be made publicly available.
Fully 3D Implementation of the End-to-end Deep Image Prior-based PET Image Reconstruction Using Block Iterative Algorithm
Authors: Fumio Hashimoto, Yuya Onishi, Kibo Ote, Hideaki Tashima, Taiga Yamaya
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

Deep image prior (DIP) has recently attracted attention owing to its unsupervised positron emission tomography (PET) image reconstruction, which does not require any prior training dataset. In this paper, we present the first attempt to implement an end-to-end DIP-based fully 3D PET image reconstruction method that incorporates a forward-projection model into a loss function. To implement a practical fully 3D PET image reconstruction, which could not be performed due to a graphics processing unit memory limitation, we modify the DIP optimization to block-iteration and sequentially learn an ordered sequence of block sinograms. Furthermore, the relative difference penalty (RDP) term was added to the loss function to enhance the quantitative PET image accuracy. We evaluated our proposed method using Monte Carlo simulation with [$^{18}$F]FDG PET data of a human brain and a preclinical study on monkey brain [$^{18}$F]FDG PET data. The proposed method was compared with the maximum-likelihood expectation maximization (EM), maximum-a-posterior EM with RDP, and hybrid DIP-based PET reconstruction methods. The simulation results showed that the proposed method improved the PET image quality by reducing statistical noise and preserved a contrast of brain structures and inserted tumor compared with other algorithms. In the preclinical experiment, finer structures and better contrast recovery were obtained by the proposed method. This indicated that the proposed method can produce high-quality images without a prior training dataset. Thus, the proposed method is a key enabling technology for the straightforward and practical implementation of end-to-end DIP-based fully 3D PET image reconstruction.
Jamdani Motif Generation using Conditional GAN
Authors: MD Tanvir Rouf Shawon, Raihan Tanvir, Humaira Ferdous Shifa, Susmoy Kar, Mohammad Imrul Jubair
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Jamdani is the strikingly patterned textile heritage of Bangladesh. The exclusive geometric motifs woven on the fabric are the most attractive part of this craftsmanship having a remarkable influence on textile and fine art. In this paper, we have developed a technique based on the Generative Adversarial Network that can learn to generate entirely new Jamdani patterns from a collection of Jamdani motifs that we assembled, the newly formed motifs can mimic the appearance of the original designs. Users can input the skeleton of a desired pattern in terms of rough strokes and our system finalizes the input by generating the complete motif which follows the geometric structure of real Jamdani ones. To serve this purpose, we collected and preprocessed a dataset containing a large number of Jamdani motifs images from authentic sources via fieldwork and applied a state-of-the-art method called pix2pix to it. To the best of our knowledge, this dataset is currently the only available dataset of Jamdani motifs in digital format for computer vision research. Our experimental results of the pix2pix model on this dataset show satisfactory outputs of computer-generated images of Jamdani motifs and we believe that our work will open a new avenue for further research.
Automatically Annotating Indoor Images with CAD Models via RGB-D Scans
Authors: Stefan Ainetter, Sinisa Stekovic, Friedrich Fraundorfer, Vincent Lepetit
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Retrieval, Pose Estimation, Pose Retrieval

We present an automatic method for annotating images of indoor scenes with the CAD models of the objects by relying on RGB-D scans. Through a visual evaluation by 3D experts, we show that our method retrieves annotations that are at least as accurate as manual annotations, and can thus be used as ground truth without the burden of manually annotating 3D data. We do this using an analysis-by-synthesis approach, which compares renderings of the CAD models with the captured scene. We introduce a 'cloning procedure' that identifies objects that have the same geometry, to annotate these objects with the same CAD models. This allows us to obtain complete annotations for the ScanNet dataset and the recent ARKitScenes dataset.
Deep Simplex Classifier for Maximizing the Margin in Both Euclidean and Angular Spaces
Authors: Hakan Cevikalp, Hasan Saribas
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Open Set Learning

The classification loss functions used in deep neural network classifiers can be grouped into two categories based on maximizing the margin in either Euclidean or angular spaces. Euclidean distances between sample vectors are used during classification for the methods maximizing the margin in Euclidean spaces whereas the Cosine similarity distance is used during the testing stage for the methods maximizing margin in the angular spaces. This paper introduces a novel classification loss that maximizes the margin in both the Euclidean and angular spaces at the same time. This way, the Euclidean and Cosine distances will produce similar and consistent results and complement each other, which will in turn improve the accuracies. The proposed loss function enforces the samples of classes to cluster around the centers that represent them. The centers approximating classes are chosen from the boundary of a hypersphere, and the pairwise distances between class centers are always equivalent. This restriction corresponds to choosing centers from the vertices of a regular simplex. There is not any hyperparameter that must be set by the user in the proposed loss function, therefore the use of the proposed method is extremely easy for classical classification problems. Moreover, since the class samples are compactly clustered around their corresponding means, the proposed classifier is also very suitable for open set recognition problems where test samples can come from the unknown classes that are not seen in the training phase. Experimental studies show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art accuracies on open set recognition despite its simplicity.
Depth Estimation maps of lidar and stereo images
Authors: Fei Wu, Luoyu Chen
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Stereo Depth Estimation

This paper as technology report is focusing on evaluation and performance about depth estimations based on lidar data and stereo images(front left and front right). The lidar 3d cloud data and stereo images are provided by ford. In addition, this paper also will explain some details about optimization for depth estimation performance. And some reasons why not use machine learning to do depth estimation, replaced by pure mathmatics to do stereo depth estimation. The structure of this paper is made of by following:(1) Performance: to discuss and evaluate about depth maps created from stereo images and 3D cloud points, and relationships analysis for alignment and errors;(2) Depth estimation by stereo images: to explain the methods about how to use stereo images to estimate depth;(3)Depth estimation by lidar: to explain the methods about how to use 3d cloud datas to estimate depth;In summary, this report is mainly to show the performance of depth maps and their approaches, analysis for them.
GOOD: Exploring Geometric Cues for Detecting Objects in an Open World
Authors: Haiwen Huang, Andreas Geiger, Dan Zhang
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Class-agnostic Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Open World Object Detection

We address the task of open-world class-agnostic object detection, i.e., detecting every object in an image by learning from a limited number of base object classes. State-of-the-art RGB-based models suffer from overfitting the training classes and often fail at detecting novel-looking objects. This is because RGB-based models primarily rely on appearance similarity to detect novel objects and are also prone to overfitting short-cut cues such as textures and discriminative parts. To address these shortcomings of RGB-based object detectors, we propose incorporating geometric cues such as depth and normals, predicted by general-purpose monocular estimators. Specifically, we use the geometric cues to train an object proposal network for pseudo-labeling unannotated novel objects in the training set. Our resulting Geometry-guided Open-world Object Detector (GOOD) significantly improves detection recall for novel object categories and already performs well with only a few training classes. Using a single "person" class for training on the COCO dataset, GOOD surpasses SOTA methods by 5.0% AR@100, a relative improvement of 24%.
Reversible Column Networks
Authors: Yuxuan Cai, Yizhuang Zhou, Qi Han, Jianjian Sun, Xiangwen Kong, Jun Li, Xiangyu Zhang
Date: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose a new neural network design paradigm Reversible Column Network (RevCol). The main body of RevCol is composed of multiple copies of subnetworks, named columns respectively, between which multi-level reversible connections are employed. Such architectural scheme attributes RevCol very different behavior from conventional networks: during forward propagation, features in RevCol are learned to be gradually disentangled when passing through each column, whose total information is maintained rather than compressed or discarded as other network does. Our experiments suggest that CNN-style RevCol models can achieve very competitive performances on multiple computer vision tasks such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, especially with large parameter budget and large dataset. For example, after ImageNet-22K pre-training, RevCol-XL obtains 88.2% ImageNet-1K accuracy. Given more pre-training data, our largest model RevCol-H reaches 90.0% on ImageNet-1K, 63.8% APbox on COCO detection minival set, 61.0% mIoU on ADE20k segmentation. To our knowledge, it is the best COCO detection and ADE20k segmentation result among pure (static) CNN models. Moreover, as a general macro architecture fashion, RevCol can also be introduced into transformers or other neural networks, which is demonstrated to improve the performances in both computer vision and NLP tasks. We release code and models at https://github.com/megvii-research/RevCol