pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LMCap: Few-shot Multilingual Image Captioning by Retrieval Augmented Language Model Prompting
Authors: Rita Ramos, Bruno Martins, Desmond Elliott
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Multilingual image captioning has recently been tackled by training with large-scale machine translated data, which is an expensive, noisy, and time-consuming process. Without requiring any multilingual caption data, we propose LMCap, an image-blind few-shot multilingual captioning model that works by prompting a language model with retrieved captions. Specifically, instead of following the standard encoder-decoder paradigm, given an image, LMCap first retrieves the captions of similar images using a multilingual CLIP encoder. These captions are then combined into a prompt for an XGLM decoder, in order to generate captions in the desired language. In other words, the generation model does not directly process the image, instead processing retrieved captions. Experiments on the XM3600 dataset of geographically diverse images show that our model is competitive with fully-supervised multilingual captioning models, without requiring any supervised training on any captioning data.
A Survey of Label-Efficient Deep Learning for 3D Point Clouds
Authors: Aoran Xiao, Xiaoqin Zhang, Ling Shao, Shijian Lu
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Efficient Exploration, Survey, Transfer Learning, Weakly-supervised Learning

In the past decade, deep neural networks have achieved significant progress in point cloud learning. However, collecting large-scale precisely-annotated training data is extremely laborious and expensive, which hinders the scalability of existing point cloud datasets and poses a bottleneck for efficient exploration of point cloud data in various tasks and applications. Label-efficient learning offers a promising solution by enabling effective deep network training with much-reduced annotation efforts. This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of label-efficient learning of point clouds. We address three critical questions in this emerging research field: i) the importance and urgency of label-efficient learning in point cloud processing, ii) the subfields it encompasses, and iii) the progress achieved in this area. To achieve this, we propose a taxonomy that organizes label-efficient learning methods based on the data prerequisites provided by different types of labels. We categorize four typical label-efficient learning approaches that significantly reduce point cloud annotation efforts: data augmentation, domain transfer learning, weakly-supervised learning, and pretrained foundation models. For each approach, we outline the problem setup and provide an extensive literature review that showcases relevant progress and challenges. Finally, we share insights into current research challenges and potential future directions. A project associated with this survey has been built at https://github.com/xiaoaoran/3D_label_efficient_learning.
Ambiguity in solving imaging inverse problems with deep learning based operators
Authors: Davide Evangelista, Elena Morotti, Elena Loli Piccolomini, James Nagy
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring

In recent years, large convolutional neural networks have been widely used as tools for image deblurring, because of their ability in restoring images very precisely. It is well known that image deblurring is mathematically modeled as an ill-posed inverse problem and its solution is difficult to approximate when noise affects the data. Really, one limitation of neural networks for deblurring is their sensitivity to noise and other perturbations, which can lead to instability and produce poor reconstructions. In addition, networks do not necessarily take into account the numerical formulation of the underlying imaging problem, when trained end-to-end. In this paper, we propose some strategies to improve stability without losing to much accuracy to deblur images with deep-learning based methods. First, we suggest a very small neural architecture, which reduces the execution time for training, satisfying a green AI need, and does not extremely amplify noise in the computed image. Second, we introduce a unified framework where a pre-processing step balances the lack of stability of the following, neural network-based, step. Two different pre-processors are presented: the former implements a strong parameter-free denoiser, and the latter is a variational model-based regularized formulation of the latent imaging problem. This framework is also formally characterized by mathematical analysis. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the accuracy and stability of the proposed approaches for image deblurring when unknown or not-quantified noise is present; the results confirm that they improve the network stability with respect to noise. In particular, the model-based framework represents the most reliable trade-off between visual precision and robustness.
Analytical reconstructions of full-scan multiple source-translation computed tomography under large field of views
Authors: Zhisheng Wang, Yue Liu, Shunli Wang, Xingyuan Bian, Zongfeng Li, Junning Cui
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00

This paper is to investigate the high-quality analytical reconstructions of multiple source-translation computed tomography (mSTCT) under an extended field of view (FOV). Under the larger FOVs, the previously proposed backprojection filtration (BPF) algorithms for mSTCT, including D-BPF and S-BPF (their differences are different derivate directions along the detector and source, respectively), make some errors and artifacts in the reconstructed images due to a backprojection weighting factor and the half-scan mode, which deviates from the intention of mSTCT imaging. In this paper, to achieve reconstruction with as little error as possible under the extremely extended FOV, we combine the full-scan mSTCT (F-mSTCT) geometry with the previous BPF algorithms to study the performance and derive a suitable redundancy-weighted function for F-mSTCT. The experimental results indicate FS-BPF can get high-quality, stable images under the extremely extended FOV of imaging a large object, though it requires more projections than FD-BPF. Finally, for different practical requirements in extending FOV imaging, we give suggestions on algorithm selection.
The Tunnel Effect: Building Data Representations in Deep Neural Networks
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Continual Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Deep neural networks are widely known for their remarkable effectiveness across various tasks, with the consensus that deeper networks implicitly learn more complex data representations. This paper shows that sufficiently deep networks trained for supervised image classification split into two distinct parts that contribute to the resulting data representations differently. The initial layers create linearly-separable representations, while the subsequent layers, which we refer to as \textit{the tunnel}, compress these representations and have a minimal impact on the overall performance. We explore the tunnel's behavior through comprehensive empirical studies, highlighting that it emerges early in the training process. Its depth depends on the relation between the network's capacity and task complexity. Furthermore, we show that the tunnel degrades out-of-distribution generalization and discuss its implications for continual learning.
Towards Monocular Shape from Refraction
Authors: Antonin Sulc, Imari Sato, Bastian Goldluecke, Tali treibitz
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00

Refraction is a common physical phenomenon and has long been researched in computer vision. Objects imaged through a refractive object appear distorted in the image as a function of the shape of the interface between the media. This hinders many computer vision applications, but can be utilized for obtaining the geometry of the refractive interface. Previous approaches for refractive surface recovery largely relied on various priors or additional information like multiple images of the analyzed surface. In contrast, we claim that a simple energy function based on Snell's law enables the reconstruction of an arbitrary refractive surface geometry using just a single image and known background texture and geometry. In the case of a single point, Snell's law has two degrees of freedom, therefore to estimate a surface depth, we need additional information. We show that solving for an entire surface at once introduces implicit parameter-free spatial regularization and yields convincing results when an intelligent initial guess is provided. We demonstrate our approach through simulations and real-world experiments, where the reconstruction shows encouraging results in the single-frame monocular setting.
Data Representations' Study of Latent Image Manifolds
Authors: Ilya Kaufman, Omri Azencot
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to achieve phenomenal success in many domains, and yet their inner mechanisms are not well understood. In this paper, we investigate the curvature of image manifolds, i.e., the manifold deviation from being flat in its principal directions. We find that state-of-the-art trained convolutional neural networks for image classification have a characteristic curvature profile along layers: an initial steep increase, followed by a long phase of a plateau, and followed by another increase. In contrast, this behavior does not appear in untrained networks in which the curvature flattens. We also show that the curvature gap between the last two layers has a strong correlation with the generalization capability of the network. Moreover, we find that the intrinsic dimension of latent codes is not necessarily indicative of curvature. Finally, we observe that common regularization methods such as mixup yield flatter representations when compared to other methods. Our experiments show consistent results over a variety of deep learning architectures and multiple data sets. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/azencot-group/CRLM
Direct Learning-Based Deep Spiking Neural Networks: A Review
Authors: Yufei Guo, Xuhui Huang, Zhe Ma
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00

The spiking neural network (SNN), as a promising brain-inspired computational model with binary spike information transmission mechanism, rich spatially-temporal dynamics, and event-driven characteristics, has received extensive attention. However, its intricately discontinuous spike mechanism brings difficulty to the optimization of the deep SNN. Since the surrogate gradient method can greatly mitigate the optimization difficulty and shows great potential in directly training deep SNNs, a variety of direct learning-based deep SNN works have been proposed and achieved satisfying progress in recent years. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these direct learning-based deep SNN works, mainly categorized into accuracy improvement methods, efficiency improvement methods, and temporal dynamics utilization methods. In addition, we also divide these categorizations into finer granularities further to better organize and introduce them. Finally, the challenges and trends that may be faced in future research are prospected.
GaitGS: Temporal Feature Learning in Granularity and Span Dimension for Gait Recognition
Authors: Haijun Xiong, Yunze Deng, Bin Feng, Xinggang Wang, Wenyu Liu
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition

Gait recognition, a growing field in biological recognition technology, utilizes distinct walking patterns for accurate individual identification. However, existing methods lack the incorporation of temporal information. To reach the full potential of gait recognition, we advocate for the consideration of temporal features at varying granularities and spans. This paper introduces a novel framework, GaitGS, which aggregates temporal features simultaneously in both granularity and span dimensions. Specifically, the Multi-Granularity Feature Extractor (MGFE) is designed to capture micro-motion and macro-motion information at fine and coarse levels respectively, while the Multi-Span Feature Extractor (MSFE) generates local and global temporal representations. Through extensive experiments on two datasets, our method demonstrates state-of-the-art performance, achieving Rank-1 accuracy of 98.2%, 96.5%, and 89.7% on CASIA-B under different conditions, and 97.6% on OU-MVLP. The source code will be available at https://github.com/Haijun-Xiong/GaitGS.
VIPriors 3: Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning Challenges
Authors: Robert-Jan Bruintjes, Attila Lengyel, Marcos Baptista Rios, Osman Semih Kayhan, Davide Zambrano, Nergis Tomen, Jan van Gemert
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

The third edition of the "VIPriors: Visual Inductive Priors for Data-Efficient Deep Learning" workshop featured four data-impaired challenges, focusing on addressing the limitations of data availability in training deep learning models for computer vision tasks. The challenges comprised of four distinct data-impaired tasks, where participants were required to train models from scratch using a reduced number of training samples. The primary objective was to encourage novel approaches that incorporate relevant inductive biases to enhance the data efficiency of deep learning models. To foster creativity and exploration, participants were strictly prohibited from utilizing pre-trained checkpoints and other transfer learning techniques. Significant advancements were made compared to the provided baselines, where winning solutions surpassed the baselines by a considerable margin in all four tasks. These achievements were primarily attributed to the effective utilization of extensive data augmentation policies, model ensembling techniques, and the implementation of data-efficient training methods, including self-supervised representation learning. This report highlights the key aspects of the challenges and their outcomes.
Signal Is Harder To Learn Than Bias: Debiasing with Focal Loss
Authors: Moritz Vandenhirtz, Laura Manduchi, Ričards Marcinkevičs, Julia E. Vogt
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Domain Generalization, Unfairness Detection

Spurious correlations are everywhere. While humans often do not perceive them, neural networks are notorious for learning unwanted associations, also known as biases, instead of the underlying decision rule. As a result, practitioners are often unaware of the biased decision-making of their classifiers. Such a biased model based on spurious correlations might not generalize to unobserved data, leading to unintended, adverse consequences. We propose Signal is Harder (SiH), a variational-autoencoder-based method that simultaneously trains a biased and unbiased classifier using a novel, disentangling reweighting scheme inspired by the focal loss. Using the unbiased classifier, SiH matches or improves upon the performance of state-of-the-art debiasing methods. To improve the interpretability of our technique, we propose a perturbation scheme in the latent space for visualizing the bias that helps practitioners become aware of the sources of spurious correlations.
Unveiling Cross Modality Bias in Visual Question Answering: A Causal View with Possible Worlds VQA
Authors: Ali Vosoughi, Shijian Deng, Songyang Zhang, Yapeng Tian, Chenliang Xu, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Inference, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

To increase the generalization capability of VQA systems, many recent studies have tried to de-bias spurious language or vision associations that shortcut the question or image to the answer. Despite these efforts, the literature fails to address the confounding effect of vision and language simultaneously. As a result, when they reduce bias learned from one modality, they usually increase bias from the other. In this paper, we first model a confounding effect that causes language and vision bias simultaneously, then propose a counterfactual inference to remove the influence of this effect. The model trained in this strategy can concurrently and efficiently reduce vision and language bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to reduce biases resulting from confounding effects of vision and language in VQA, leveraging causal explain-away relations. We accompany our method with an explain-away strategy, pushing the accuracy of the questions with numerical answers results compared to existing methods that have been an open problem. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in VQA-CP v2 datasets.
A Multi-Modal Transformer Network for Action Detection
Authors: Matthew Korban, Scott T. Acton, Peter Youngs
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Optical Flow Estimation

This paper proposes a novel multi-modal transformer network for detecting actions in untrimmed videos. To enrich the action features, our transformer network utilizes a new multi-modal attention mechanism that computes the correlations between different spatial and motion modalities combinations. Exploring such correlations for actions has not been attempted previously. To use the motion and spatial modality more effectively, we suggest an algorithm that corrects the motion distortion caused by camera movement. Such motion distortion, common in untrimmed videos, severely reduces the expressive power of motion features such as optical flow fields. Our proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks, THUMOS14 and ActivityNet. We also conducted comparative experiments on our new instructional activity dataset, including a large set of challenging classroom videos captured from elementary schools.
Point-GCC: Universal Self-supervised 3D Scene Pre-training via Geometry-Color Contrast
Authors: Guofan Fan, Zekun Qi, Wenkai Shi, Kaisheng Ma
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, 3D Object Detection, 3D Semantic Segmentation, Deep Clustering, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Transfer Learning, Unsupervised 3D Semantic Segmentation

Geometry and color information provided by the point clouds are both crucial for 3D scene understanding. Two pieces of information characterize the different aspects of point clouds, but existing methods lack an elaborate design for the discrimination and relevance. Hence we explore a 3D self-supervised paradigm that can better utilize the relations of point cloud information. Specifically, we propose a universal 3D scene pre-training framework via Geometry-Color Contrast (Point-GCC), which aligns geometry and color information using a Siamese network. To take care of actual application tasks, we design (i) hierarchical supervision with point-level contrast and reconstruct and object-level contrast based on the novel deep clustering module to close the gap between pre-training and downstream tasks; (ii) architecture-agnostic backbone to adapt for various downstream models. Benefiting from the object-level representation associated with downstream tasks, Point-GCC can directly evaluate model performance and the result demonstrates the effectiveness of our methods. Transfer learning results on a wide range of tasks also show consistent improvements across all datasets. e.g., new state-of-the-art object detection results on SUN RGB-D and S3DIS datasets. Codes will be released at https://github.com/Asterisci/Point-GCC.
XTransCT: Ultra-Fast Volumetric CT Reconstruction using Two Orthogonal X-Ray Projections for Image-guided Radiation Therapy via a Transformer Network
Authors: Chulong Zhang, Lin Liu, Jingjing Dai, Xuan Liu, Wenfeng He, Yinping Chan, Yaoqin Xie, Feng Chi, Xiaokun Liang
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), CT Reconstruction, Image Reconstruction

Computed tomography (CT) scans offer a detailed, three-dimensional representation of patients' internal organs. However, conventional CT reconstruction techniques necessitate acquiring hundreds or thousands of x-ray projections through a complete rotational scan of the body, making navigation or positioning during surgery infeasible. In image-guided radiation therapy, a method that reconstructs ultra-sparse X-ray projections into CT images, we can exploit the substantially reduced radiation dose and minimize equipment burden for localization and navigation. In this study, we introduce a novel Transformer architecture, termed XTransCT, devised to facilitate real-time reconstruction of CT images from two-dimensional X-ray images. We assess our approach regarding image quality and structural reliability using a dataset of fifty patients, supplied by a hospital, as well as the larger public dataset LIDC-IDRI, which encompasses thousands of patients. Additionally, we validated our algorithm's generalizability on the LNDb dataset. Our findings indicate that our algorithm surpasses other methods in image quality, structural precision, and generalizability. Moreover, in comparison to previous 3D convolution-based approaches, we note a substantial speed increase of approximately 300 %, achieving 44 ms per 3D image reconstruction.
Intelligible Lip-to-Speech Synthesis with Speech Units
Authors: Jeongsoo Choi, Minsu Kim, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Lip to Speech Synthesis, Speech Synthesis

In this paper, we propose a novel Lip-to-Speech synthesis (L2S) framework, for synthesizing intelligible speech from a silent lip movement video. Specifically, to complement the insufficient supervisory signal of the previous L2S model, we propose to use quantized self-supervised speech representations, named speech units, as an additional prediction target for the L2S model. Therefore, the proposed L2S model is trained to generate multiple targets, mel-spectrogram and speech units. As the speech units are discrete while mel-spectrogram is continuous, the proposed multi-target L2S model can be trained with strong content supervision, without using text-labeled data. Moreover, to accurately convert the synthesized mel-spectrogram into a waveform, we introduce a multi-input vocoder that can generate a clear waveform even from blurry and noisy mel-spectrogram by referring to the speech units. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method in L2S.
Dense and Aligned Captions (DAC) Promote Compositional Reasoning in VL Models
Date: 2023-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Cross-Modal Retrieval, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Vision and Language (VL) models offer an effective method for aligning representation spaces of images and text, leading to numerous applications such as cross-modal retrieval, visual question answering, captioning, and more. However, the aligned image-text spaces learned by all the popular VL models are still suffering from the so-called `object bias' - their representations behave as `bags of nouns', mostly ignoring or downsizing the attributes, relations, and states of objects described/appearing in texts/images. Although some great attempts at fixing these `compositional reasoning' issues were proposed in the recent literature, the problem is still far from being solved. In this paper, we uncover two factors limiting the VL models' compositional reasoning performance. These two factors are properties of the paired VL dataset used for finetuning and pre-training the VL model: (i) the caption quality, or in other words `image-alignment', of the texts; and (ii) the `density' of the captions in the sense of mentioning all the details appearing on the image. We propose a fine-tuning approach for automatically treating these factors leveraging a standard VL dataset (CC3M). Applied to CLIP, we demonstrate its significant compositional reasoning performance increase of up to $\sim27\%$ over the base model, up to $\sim20\%$ over the strongest baseline, and by $6.7\%$ on average.