pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deeper into Self-Supervised Monocular Indoor Depth Estimation
Authors: Chao Fan, Zhenyu Yin, Yue Li, Feiqing Zhang
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, motion prediction, Self-Supervised Learning, SSIM, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Monocular depth estimation using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has shown impressive performance in outdoor driving scenes. However, self-supervised learning of indoor depth from monocular sequences is quite challenging for researchers because of the following two main reasons. One is the large areas of low-texture regions and the other is the complex ego-motion on indoor training datasets. In this work, our proposed method, named IndoorDepth, consists of two innovations. In particular, we first propose a novel photometric loss with improved structural similarity (SSIM) function to tackle the challenge from low-texture regions. Moreover, in order to further mitigate the issue of inaccurate ego-motion prediction, multiple photometric losses at different stages are used to train a deeper pose network with two residual pose blocks. Subsequent ablation study can validate the effectiveness of each new idea. Experiments on the NYUv2 benchmark demonstrate that our IndoorDepth outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. In addition, we also validate the generalization ability of our method on ScanNet dataset. Code is availabe at https://github.com/fcntes/IndoorDepth.
Brain Decodes Deep Nets
Authors: Huzheng Yang, James Gee, Jianbo Shi
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

We developed a tool for visualizing and analyzing large pre-trained vision models by mapping them onto the brain, thus exposing their hidden inside. Our innovation arises from a surprising usage of brain encoding: predicting brain fMRI measurements in response to images. We report two findings. First, explicit mapping between the brain and deep-network features across dimensions of space, layers, scales, and channels is crucial. This mapping method, FactorTopy, is plug-and-play for any deep-network; with it, one can paint a picture of the network onto the brain (literally!). Second, our visualization shows how different training methods matter: they lead to remarkable differences in hierarchical organization and scaling behavior, growing with more data or network capacity. It also provides insight into fine-tuning: how pre-trained models change when adapting to small datasets. We found brain-like hierarchically organized network suffer less from catastrophic forgetting after fine-tuned.
Learning to Compose SuperWeights for Neural Parameter Allocation Search
Authors: Piotr Teterwak, Soren Nelson, Nikoli Dryden, Dina Bashkirova, Kate Saenko, Bryan A. Plummer
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00

Neural parameter allocation search (NPAS) automates parameter sharing by obtaining weights for a network given an arbitrary, fixed parameter budget. Prior work has two major drawbacks we aim to address. First, there is a disconnect in the sharing pattern between the search and training steps, where weights are warped for layers of different sizes during the search to measure similarity, but not during training, resulting in reduced performance. To address this, we generate layer weights by learning to compose sets of SuperWeights, which represent a group of trainable parameters. These SuperWeights are created to be large enough so they can be used to represent any layer in the network, but small enough that they are computationally efficient. The second drawback we address is the method of measuring similarity between shared parameters. Whereas prior work compared the weights themselves, we argue this does not take into account the amount of conflict between the shared weights. Instead, we use gradient information to identify layers with shared weights that wish to diverge from each other. We demonstrate that our SuperWeight Networks consistently boost performance over the state-of-the-art on the ImageNet and CIFAR datasets in the NPAS setting. We further show that our approach can generate parameters for many network architectures using the same set of weights. This enables us to support tasks like efficient ensembling and anytime prediction, outperforming fully-parameterized ensembles with 17% fewer parameters.
A Review and A Robust Framework of Data-Efficient 3D Scene Parsing with Traditional/Learned 3D Descriptors
Authors: Kangcheng Liu
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Parsing, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Existing state-of-the-art 3D point cloud understanding methods merely perform well in a fully supervised manner. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no unified framework that simultaneously solves the downstream high-level understanding tasks including both segmentation and detection, especially when labels are extremely limited. This work presents a general and simple framework to tackle point cloud understanding when labels are limited. The first contribution is that we have done extensive methodology comparisons of traditional and learned 3D descriptors for the task of weakly supervised 3D scene understanding, and validated that our adapted traditional PFH-based 3D descriptors show excellent generalization ability across different domains. The second contribution is that we proposed a learning-based region merging strategy based on the affinity provided by both the traditional/learned 3D descriptors and learned semantics. The merging process takes both low-level geometric and high-level semantic feature correlations into consideration. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework has the best performance among the three most important weakly supervised point clouds understanding tasks including semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection even when very limited number of points are labeled. Our method, termed Region Merging 3D (RM3D), has superior performance on ScanNet data-efficient learning online benchmarks and other four large-scale 3D understanding benchmarks under various experimental settings, outperforming current arts by a margin for various 3D understanding tasks without complicated learning strategies such as active learning.
TIBET: Identifying and Evaluating Biases in Text-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Aditya Chinchure, Pushkar Shukla, Gaurav Bhatt, Kiri Salij, Kartik Hosanagar, Leonid Sigal, Matthew Turk
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning

Text-to-Image (TTI) generative models have shown great progress in the past few years in terms of their ability to generate complex and high-quality imagery. At the same time, these models have been shown to suffer from harmful biases, including exaggerated societal biases (e.g., gender, ethnicity), as well as incidental correlations that limit such a model's ability to generate more diverse imagery. In this paper, we propose a general approach to study and quantify a broad spectrum of biases, for any TTI model and for any prompt, using counterfactual reasoning. Unlike other works that evaluate generated images on a predefined set of bias axes, our approach automatically identifies potential biases that might be relevant to the given prompt, and measures those biases. In addition, we complement quantitative scores with post-hoc explanations in terms of semantic concepts in the images generated. We show that our method is uniquely capable of explaining complex multi-dimensional biases through semantic concepts, as well as the intersectionality between different biases for any given prompt. We perform extensive user studies to illustrate that the results of our method and analysis are consistent with human judgements.
Meta ControlNet: Enhancing Task Adaptation via Meta Learning
Authors: Junjie Yang, Jinze Zhao, Peihao Wang, Zhangyang Wang, Yingbin Liang
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection, Image Generation, Meta-Learning

Diffusion-based image synthesis has attracted extensive attention recently. In particular, ControlNet that uses image-based prompts exhibits powerful capability in image tasks such as canny edge detection and generates images well aligned with these prompts. However, vanilla ControlNet generally requires extensive training of around 5000 steps to achieve a desirable control for a single task. Recent context-learning approaches have improved its adaptability, but mainly for edge-based tasks, and rely on paired examples. Thus, two important open issues are yet to be addressed to reach the full potential of ControlNet: (i) zero-shot control for certain tasks and (ii) faster adaptation for non-edge-based tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel Meta ControlNet method, which adopts the task-agnostic meta learning technique and features a new layer freezing design. Meta ControlNet significantly reduces learning steps to attain control ability from 5000 to 1000. Further, Meta ControlNet exhibits direct zero-shot adaptability in edge-based tasks without any finetuning, and achieves control within only 100 finetuning steps in more complex non-edge tasks such as Human Pose, outperforming all existing methods. The codes is available in https://github.com/JunjieYang97/Meta-ControlNet.
Motion Informed Needle Segmentation in Ultrasound Images
Authors: Raghavv Goel, Cecilia Morales, Manpreet Singh, Artur Dubrawski, John Galeotti, Howie Choset
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Segmenting a moving needle in ultrasound images is challenging due to the presence of artifacts, noise, and needle occlusion. This task becomes even more demanding in scenarios where data availability is limited. In this paper, we present a novel approach for needle segmentation for 2D ultrasound that combines classical Kalman Filter (KF) techniques with data-driven learning, incorporating both needle features and needle motion. Our method offers three key contributions. First, we propose a compatible framework that seamlessly integrates into commonly used encoder-decoder style architectures. Second, we demonstrate superior performance compared to recent state-of-the-art needle segmentation models using our novel convolutional neural network (CNN) based KF-inspired block, achieving a 15\% reduction in pixel-wise needle tip error and an 8\% reduction in length error. Third, to our knowledge we are the first to implement a learnable filter to incorporate non-linear needle motion for improving needle segmentation.
Boosting Object Detection with Zero-Shot Day-Night Domain Adaptation
Authors: Zhipeng Du, Miaojing Shi, Jiankang Deng
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning

Detecting objects in low-light scenarios presents a persistent challenge, as detectors trained on well-lit data exhibit significant performance degradation on low-light data due to low visibility. Previous methods mitigate this issue by exploring image enhancement or object detection techniques with real low-light image datasets. However, the progress is impeded by the inherent difficulties about collecting and annotating low-light images. To address this challenge, we propose to boost low-light object detection with zero-shot day-night domain adaptation, which aims to generalize a detector from well-lit scenarios to low-light ones without requiring real low-light data. Revisiting Retinex theory in the low-level vision, we first design a reflectance representation learning module to learn Retinex-based illumination invariance in images with a carefully designed illumination invariance reinforcement strategy. Next, an interchange-redecomposition-coherence procedure is introduced to improve over the vanilla Retinex image decomposition process by performing two sequential image decompositions and introducing a redecomposition cohering loss. Extensive experiments on ExDark, DARK FACE, and CODaN datasets show strong low-light generalizability of our method. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZPDu/DAI-Net.
RNb-NeuS: Reflectance and Normal-based Multi-View 3D Reconstruction
Authors: Baptiste Brument, Robin Bruneau, Yvain Quéau, Jean Mélou, François Bernard Lauze, Jean-Denis, Jean-Denis Durou, Lilian Calvet
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Multi-View 3D Reconstruction

This paper introduces a versatile paradigm for integrating multi-view reflectance (optional) and normal maps acquired through photometric stereo. Our approach employs a pixel-wise joint re-parameterization of reflectance and normal, considering them as a vector of radiances rendered under simulated, varying illumination. This re-parameterization enables the seamless integration of reflectance and normal maps as input data in neural volume rendering-based 3D reconstruction while preserving a single optimization objective. In contrast, recent multi-view photometric stereo (MVPS) methods depend on multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. Despite its apparent simplicity, our proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in MVPS benchmarks across F-score, Chamfer distance, and mean angular error metrics. Notably, it significantly improves the detailed 3D reconstruction of areas with high curvature or low visibility.
A Comparative Analysis Towards Melanoma Classification Using Transfer Learning by Analyzing Dermoscopic Images
Authors: Md. Fahim Uddin, Nafisa Tafshir, Mohammad Monirujjaman Khan
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Melanoma is a sort of skin cancer that starts in the cells known as melanocytes. It is more dangerous than other types of skin cancer because it can spread to other organs. Melanoma can be fatal if it spreads to other parts of the body. Early detection is the key to cure, but it requires the skills of skilled doctors to diagnose it. This paper presents a system that combines deep learning techniques with established transfer learning methods to enable skin lesions classification and diagnosis of melanoma skin lesions. Using Convolutional Neural Networks, it presents a method for categorizing melanoma images into benign and malignant images in this research (CNNs). Researchers used 'Deep Learning' techniques to train an expansive number of photos & essentially to get the expected result deep neural networks to need to be trained with a huge number of parameters as dermoscopic images are sensitive & very hard to classify. This paper, has been emphasized building models with less complexity and comparatively better accuracy with limited datasets & partially fewer deep networks so that the system can predict Melanoma at ease from input dermoscopic images as correctly as possible within devices with less computational power. The dataset has been obtained from ISIC Archive. Multiple pre-trained models ResNet101, DenseNet, EfficientNet, InceptionV3 have been implemented using transfer learning techniques to complete the comparative analysis & every model achieved good accuracy. Before training the models, the data has been augmented by multiple parameters to improve the accuracy. Moreover, the results are better than the previous state-of-the-art approaches & adequate to predict melanoma. Among these architectures, DenseNet performed better than the others which gives a validation accuracy of 96.64%, validation loss of 9.43% & test set accuracy of 99.63%.
Neural Parametric Gaussians for Monocular Non-Rigid Object Reconstruction
Authors: Devikalyan Das, Christopher Wewer, Raza Yunus, Eddy Ilg, Jan Eric Lenssen
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object, Object Reconstruction

Reconstructing dynamic objects from monocular videos is a severely underconstrained and challenging problem, and recent work has approached it in various directions. However, owing to the ill-posed nature of this problem, there has been no solution that can provide consistent, high-quality novel views from camera positions that are significantly different from the training views. In this work, we introduce Neural Parametric Gaussians (NPGs) to take on this challenge by imposing a two-stage approach: first, we fit a low-rank neural deformation model, which then is used as regularization for non-rigid reconstruction in the second stage. The first stage learns the object's deformations such that it preserves consistency in novel views. The second stage obtains high reconstruction quality by optimizing 3D Gaussians that are driven by the coarse model. To this end, we introduce a local 3D Gaussian representation, where temporally shared Gaussians are anchored in and deformed by local oriented volumes. The resulting combined model can be rendered as radiance fields, resulting in high-quality photo-realistic reconstructions of the non-rigidly deforming objects. We demonstrate that NPGs achieve superior results compared to previous works, especially in challenging scenarios with few multi-view cues.
Efficient Expansion and Gradient Based Task Inference for Replay Free Incremental Learning
Authors: Soumya Roy, Vinay K Verma, Deepak Gupta
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning, Transfer Learning

This paper proposes a simple but highly efficient expansion-based model for continual learning. The recent feature transformation, masking and factorization-based methods are efficient, but they grow the model only over the global or shared parameter. Therefore, these approaches do not fully utilize the previously learned information because the same task-specific parameter forgets the earlier knowledge. Thus, these approaches show limited transfer learning ability. Moreover, most of these models have constant parameter growth for all tasks, irrespective of the task complexity. Our work proposes a simple filter and channel expansion based method that grows the model over the previous task parameters and not just over the global parameter. Therefore, it fully utilizes all the previously learned information without forgetting, which results in better knowledge transfer. The growth rate in our proposed model is a function of task complexity; therefore for a simple task, the model has a smaller parameter growth while for complex tasks, the model requires more parameters to adapt to the current task. Recent expansion based models show promising results for task incremental learning (TIL). However, for class incremental learning (CIL), prediction of task id is a crucial challenge; hence, their results degrade rapidly as the number of tasks increase. In this work, we propose a robust task prediction method that leverages entropy weighted data augmentations and the models gradient using pseudo labels. We evaluate our model on various datasets and architectures in the TIL, CIL and generative continual learning settings. The proposed approach shows state-of-the-art results in all these settings. Our extensive ablation studies show the efficacy of the proposed components.
SASSL: Enhancing Self-Supervised Learning via Neural Style Transfer
Authors: Renan A. Rojas-Gomez, Karan Singhal, Ali Etemad, Alex Bijamov, Warren R. Morningstar, Philip Andrew Mansfield
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Self-Supervised Learning, Style Transfer, Transfer Learning

Existing data augmentation in self-supervised learning, while diverse, fails to preserve the inherent structure of natural images. This results in distorted augmented samples with compromised semantic information, ultimately impacting downstream performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose SASSL: Style Augmentations for Self Supervised Learning, a novel data augmentation technique based on Neural Style Transfer. SASSL decouples semantic and stylistic attributes in images and applies transformations exclusively to their style while preserving content, generating diverse samples that better retain semantic information. SASSL boosts top-1 image classification accuracy on ImageNet by up to 2 percentage points compared to established self-supervised methods like MoCo, SimCLR, and BYOL, while achieving superior transfer learning performance across various datasets. Because SASSL can be performed asynchronously as part of the data augmentation pipeline, these performance impacts can be obtained with no change in pretraining throughput.
IDPL-PFOD2: A New Large-Scale Dataset for Printed Farsi Optical Character Recognition
Authors: Fatemeh Asadi-zeydabadi, Ali Afkari-Fahandari, Amin Faraji, Elham Shabaninia, Hossein Nezamabadi-pour
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Printed Text Recognition

Optical Character Recognition is a technique that converts document images into searchable and editable text, making it a valuable tool for processing scanned documents. While the Farsi language stands as a prominent and official language in Asia, efforts to develop efficient methods for recognizing Farsi printed text have been relatively limited. This is primarily attributed to the languages distinctive features, such as cursive form, the resemblance between certain alphabet characters, and the presence of numerous diacritics and dot placement. On the other hand, given the substantial training sample requirements of deep-based architectures for effective performance, the development of such datasets holds paramount significance. In light of these concerns, this paper aims to present a novel large-scale dataset, IDPL-PFOD2, tailored for Farsi printed text recognition. The dataset comprises 2003541 images featuring a wide variety of fonts, styles, and sizes. This dataset is an extension of the previously introduced IDPL-PFOD dataset, offering a substantial increase in both volume and diversity. Furthermore, the datasets effectiveness is assessed through the utilization of both CRNN-based and Vision Transformer architectures. The CRNN-based model achieves a baseline accuracy rate of 78.49% and a normalized edit distance of 97.72%, while the Vision Transformer architecture attains an accuracy of 81.32% and a normalized edit distance of 98.74%.
Virtual Category Learning: A Semi-Supervised Learning Method for Dense Prediction with Extremely Limited Labels
Authors: Changrui Chen, Jungong Han, Kurt Debattista
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Due to the costliness of labelled data in real-world applications, semi-supervised learning, underpinned by pseudo labelling, is an appealing solution. However, handling confusing samples is nontrivial: discarding valuable confusing samples would compromise the model generalisation while using them for training would exacerbate the issue of confirmation bias caused by the resulting inevitable mislabelling. To solve this problem, this paper proposes to use confusing samples proactively without label correction. Specifically, a Virtual Category (VC) is assigned to each confusing sample in such a way that it can safely contribute to the model optimisation even without a concrete label. This provides an upper bound for inter-class information sharing capacity, which eventually leads to a better embedding space. Extensive experiments on two mainstream dense prediction tasks -- semantic segmentation and object detection, demonstrate that the proposed VC learning significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art, especially when only very few labels are available. Our intriguing findings highlight the usage of VC learning in dense vision tasks.