pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Weakly-Supervised Action Localization by Hierarchically-structured Latent Attention Modeling
Authors: Guiqin Wang, Peng Zhao, Cong Zhao, Shusen Yang, Jie Cheng, Luziwei Leng, Jianxing Liao, Qinghai Guo
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Action Localization, Multiple Instance Learning, Weakly Supervised Action Localization

Weakly-supervised action localization aims to recognize and localize action instancese in untrimmed videos with only video-level labels. Most existing models rely on multiple instance learning(MIL), where the predictions of unlabeled instances are supervised by classifying labeled bags. The MIL-based methods are relatively well studied with cogent performance achieved on classification but not on localization. Generally, they locate temporal regions by the video-level classification but overlook the temporal variations of feature semantics. To address this problem, we propose a novel attention-based hierarchically-structured latent model to learn the temporal variations of feature semantics. Specifically, our model entails two components, the first is an unsupervised change-points detection module that detects change-points by learning the latent representations of video features in a temporal hierarchy based on their rates of change, and the second is an attention-based classification model that selects the change-points of the foreground as the boundaries. To evaluate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, THUMOS-14 and ActivityNet-v1.3. The experiments show that our method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, and even achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods.
Dual Branch Deep Learning Network for Detection and Stage Grading of Diabetic Retinopathy
Authors: Hossein Shakibania, Sina Raoufi, Behnam Pourafkham, Hassan Khotanlou, Muharram Mansoorizadeh
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, Diabetic Retinopathy Grading, Sensitivity, Transfer Learning

Diabetic retinopathy is a severe complication of diabetes that can lead to permanent blindness if not treated promptly. Early and accurate diagnosis of the disease is essential for successful treatment. This paper introduces a deep learning method for the detection and stage grading of diabetic retinopathy, using a single fundus retinal image. Our model utilizes transfer learning, employing two state-of-the-art pre-trained models as feature extractors and fine-tuning them on a new dataset. The proposed model is trained on a large multi-center dataset, including the APTOS 2019 dataset, obtained from publicly available sources. It achieves remarkable performance in diabetic retinopathy detection and stage classification on the APTOS 2019, outperforming the established literature. For binary classification, the proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 98.50, a sensitivity of 99.46, and a specificity of 97.51. In stage grading, it achieves a quadratic weighted kappa of 93.00, an accuracy of 89.60, a sensitivity of 89.60, and a specificity of 97.72. The proposed approach serves as a reliable screening and stage grading tool for diabetic retinopathy, offering significant potential to enhance clinical decision-making and patient care.
On the Robustness of Open-World Test-Time Training: Self-Training with Dynamic Prototype Expansion
Authors: Yushu Li, Xun Xu, Yongyi Su, Kui Jia
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

Generalizing deep learning models to unknown target domain distribution with low latency has motivated research into test-time training/adaptation (TTT/TTA). Existing approaches often focus on improving test-time training performance under well-curated target domain data. As figured out in this work, many state-of-the-art methods fail to maintain the performance when the target domain is contaminated with strong out-of-distribution (OOD) data, a.k.a. open-world test-time training (OWTTT). The failure is mainly due to the inability to distinguish strong OOD samples from regular weak OOD samples. To improve the robustness of OWTTT we first develop an adaptive strong OOD pruning which improves the efficacy of the self-training TTT method. We further propose a way to dynamically expand the prototypes to represent strong OOD samples for an improved weak/strong OOD data separation. Finally, we regularize self-training with distribution alignment and the combination yields the state-of-the-art performance on 5 OWTTT benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Yushu-Li/OWTTT.
BLIVA: A Simple Multimodal LLM for Better Handling of Text-Rich Visual Questions
Authors: WenBo Hu, Yifan Xu, Yi Li, Weiyue Li, Zeyuan Chen, Zhuowen Tu
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: MME, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question Answering, Spatial Reasoning, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Vision Language Models (VLMs), which extend Large Language Models (LLM) by incorporating visual understanding capability, have demonstrated significant advancements in addressing open-ended visual question-answering (VQA) tasks. However, these models cannot accurately interpret images infused with text, a common occurrence in real-world scenarios. Standard procedures for extracting information from images often involve learning a fixed set of query embeddings. These embeddings are designed to encapsulate image contexts and are later used as soft prompt inputs in LLMs. Yet, this process is limited to the token count, potentially curtailing the recognition of scenes with text-rich context. To improve upon them, the present study introduces BLIVA: an augmented version of InstructBLIP with Visual Assistant. BLIVA incorporates the query embeddings from InstructBLIP and also directly projects encoded patch embeddings into the LLM, a technique inspired by LLaVA. This approach assists the model to capture intricate details potentially missed during the query decoding process. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our model, BLIVA, significantly enhances performance in processing text-rich VQA benchmarks (up to 17.76% in OCR-VQA benchmark) and in undertaking general (not particularly text-rich) VQA benchmarks (up to 7.9% in Visual Spatial Reasoning benchmark), and achieved 17.72% overall improvement in a comprehensive multimodal LLM benchmark (MME), comparing to our baseline InstructBLIP. BLIVA demonstrates significant capability in decoding real-world images, irrespective of text presence. To demonstrate the broad industry applications enabled by BLIVA, we evaluate the model using a new dataset comprising YouTube thumbnails paired with question-answer sets across 11 diverse categories. Our code and models are freely accessible at https://github.com/mlpc-ucsd/BLIVA.
TDG: Text-guided Domain Generalization
Authors: Geng Liu, Yuxi Wang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Prompt Learning

Domain generalization (DG) attempts to generalize a model trained on single or multiple source domains to the unseen target domain. Benefiting from the success of Visual-and-Language Pre-trained models in recent years, we argue that it is crucial for domain generalization by introducing extra text information. In this paper, we develop a novel Text-guided Domain Generalization (TDG) paradigm for domain generalization, which includes three following aspects. Specifically, we first devise an automatic words generation method to extend the description of current domains with novel domain-relevant words. Then, we embed the generated domain information into the text feature space, by the proposed prompt learning-based text feature generation method, which shares a common representation space with the image feature. Finally, we utilize both input image features and generated text features to train a specially designed classifier that generalizes well on unseen target domains, while the image encoder is also updated under the supervision of gradients back propagated from the classifier. Our experimental results show that the techniques incorporated by TDG contribute to the performance in an easy implementation manner. Experimental results on several domain generalization benchmarks show that our proposed framework achieves superior performance by effectively leveraging generated text information in domain generalization.
MDCS: More Diverse Experts with Consistency Self-distillation for Long-tailed Recognition
Authors: QiHao Zhao, Chen Jiang, Wei Hu, Fan Zhang, Jun Liu
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Diversity, Long-tail Learning

Recently, multi-expert methods have led to significant improvements in long-tail recognition (LTR). We summarize two aspects that need further enhancement to contribute to LTR boosting: (1) More diverse experts; (2) Lower model variance. However, the previous methods didn't handle them well. To this end, we propose More Diverse experts with Consistency Self-distillation (MDCS) to bridge the gap left by earlier methods. Our MDCS approach consists of two core components: Diversity Loss (DL) and Consistency Self-distillation (CS). In detail, DL promotes diversity among experts by controlling their focus on different categories. To reduce the model variance, we employ KL divergence to distill the richer knowledge of weakly augmented instances for the experts' self-distillation. In particular, we design Confident Instance Sampling (CIS) to select the correctly classified instances for CS to avoid biased/noisy knowledge. In the analysis and ablation study, we demonstrate that our method compared with previous work can effectively increase the diversity of experts, significantly reduce the variance of the model, and improve recognition accuracy. Moreover, the roles of our DL and CS are mutually reinforcing and coupled: the diversity of experts benefits from the CS, and the CS cannot achieve remarkable results without the DL. Experiments show our MDCS outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1% $\sim$ 2% on five popular long-tailed benchmarks, including CIFAR10-LT, CIFAR100-LT, ImageNet-LT, Places-LT, and iNaturalist 2018. The code is available at https://github.com/fistyee/MDCS.
VI-Net: Boosting Category-level 6D Object Pose Estimation via Learning Decoupled Rotations on the Spherical Representations
Authors: Jiehong Lin, Zewei Wei, Yabin Zhang, Kui Jia
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation using RGB, Benchmarking, Binary Classification, Object, Pose Estimation, Single Particle Analysis

Rotation estimation of high precision from an RGB-D object observation is a huge challenge in 6D object pose estimation, due to the difficulty of learning in the non-linear space of SO(3). In this paper, we propose a novel rotation estimation network, termed as VI-Net, to make the task easier by decoupling the rotation as the combination of a viewpoint rotation and an in-plane rotation. More specifically, VI-Net bases the feature learning on the sphere with two individual branches for the estimates of two factorized rotations, where a V-Branch is employed to learn the viewpoint rotation via binary classification on the spherical signals, while another I-Branch is used to estimate the in-plane rotation by transforming the signals to view from the zenith direction. To process the spherical signals, a Spherical Feature Pyramid Network is constructed based on a novel design of SPAtial Spherical Convolution (SPA-SConv), which settles the boundary problem of spherical signals via feature padding and realizesviewpoint-equivariant feature extraction by symmetric convolutional operations. We apply the proposed VI-Net to the challenging task of category-level 6D object pose estimation for predicting the poses of unknown objects without available CAD models; experiments on the benchmarking datasets confirm the efficacy of our method, which outperforms the existing ones with a large margin in the regime of high precision.
EGANS: Evolutionary Generative Adversarial Network Search for Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Shiming Chen, Shihuang Chen, Wenjin Hou, Weiping Ding, Xinge You
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Neural Architecture Search, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to recognize the novel classes which cannot be collected for training a prediction model. Accordingly, generative models (e.g., generative adversarial network (GAN)) are typically used to synthesize the visual samples conditioned by the class semantic vectors and achieve remarkable progress for ZSL. However, existing GAN-based generative ZSL methods are based on hand-crafted models, which cannot adapt to various datasets/scenarios and fails to model instability. To alleviate these challenges, we propose evolutionary generative adversarial network search (termed EGANS) to automatically design the generative network with good adaptation and stability, enabling reliable visual feature sample synthesis for advancing ZSL. Specifically, we adopt cooperative dual evolution to conduct a neural architecture search for both generator and discriminator under a unified evolutionary adversarial framework. EGANS is learned by two stages: evolution generator architecture search and evolution discriminator architecture search. During the evolution generator architecture search, we adopt a many-to-one adversarial training strategy to evolutionarily search for the optimal generator. Then the optimal generator is further applied to search for the optimal discriminator in the evolution discriminator architecture search with a similar evolution search algorithm. Once the optimal generator and discriminator are searched, we entail them into various generative ZSL baselines for ZSL classification. Extensive experiments show that EGANS consistently improve existing generative ZSL methods on the standard CUB, SUN, AWA2 and FLO datasets. The significant performance gains indicate that the evolutionary neural architecture search explores a virgin field in ZSL.
Noisy-Correspondence Learning for Text-to-Image Person Re-identification
Authors: Yang Qin, Yingke Chen, Dezhong Peng, Xi Peng, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Peng Hu
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Person Re-Identification, Text based Person Retrieval, Text-based Person Retrieval with Noisy Correspondence, Triplet

Text-to-image person re-identification (TIReID) is a compelling topic in the cross-modal community, which aims to retrieve the target person based on a textual query. Although numerous TIReID methods have been proposed and achieved promising performance, they implicitly assume the training image-text pairs are correctly aligned, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. In practice, the image-text pairs inevitably exist under-correlated or even false-correlated, a.k.a noisy correspondence (NC), due to the low quality of the images and annotation errors. To address this problem, we propose a novel Robust Dual Embedding method (RDE) that can learn robust visual-semantic associations even with NC. Specifically, RDE consists of two main components: 1) A Confident Consensus Division (CCD) module that leverages the dual-grained decisions of dual embedding modules to obtain a consensus set of clean training data, which enables the model to learn correct and reliable visual-semantic associations. 2) A Triplet Alignment Loss (TAL) relaxes the conventional Triplet Ranking loss with the hardest negative samples to a log-exponential upper bound over all negative ones, thus preventing the model collapse under NC and can also focus on hard-negative samples for promising performance. We conduct extensive experiments on three public benchmarks, namely CUHK-PEDES, ICFG-PEDES, and RSTPReID, to evaluate the performance and robustness of our RDE. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results both with and without synthetic noisy correspondences on all three datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/QinYang79/RDE.
Physics-Guided Human Motion Capture with Pose Probability Modeling
Authors: Jingyi Ju, Buzhen Huang, Chen Zhu, Zhihao LI, Yangang Wang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Incorporating physics in human motion capture to avoid artifacts like floating, foot sliding, and ground penetration is a promising direction. Existing solutions always adopt kinematic results as reference motions, and the physics is treated as a post-processing module. However, due to the depth ambiguity, monocular motion capture inevitably suffers from noises, and the noisy reference often leads to failure for physics-based tracking. To address the obstacles, our key-idea is to employ physics as denoising guidance in the reverse diffusion process to reconstruct physically plausible human motion from a modeled pose probability distribution. Specifically, we first train a latent gaussian model that encodes the uncertainty of 2D-to-3D lifting to facilitate reverse diffusion. Then, a physics module is constructed to track the motion sampled from the distribution. The discrepancies between the tracked motion and image observation are used to provide explicit guidance for the reverse diffusion model to refine the motion. With several iterations, the physics-based tracking and kinematic denoising promote each other to generate a physically plausible human motion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous physics-based methods in both joint accuracy and success rate. More information can be found at \url{https://github.com/Me-Ditto/Physics-Guided-Mocap}.
DiffusionTrack: Diffusion Model For Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Run Luo, Zikai Song, Lintao Ma, JinLin Wei, Wei Yang, Min Yang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, model, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking (MOT) is a challenging vision task that aims to detect individual objects within a single frame and associate them across multiple frames. Recent MOT approaches can be categorized into two-stage tracking-by-detection (TBD) methods and one-stage joint detection and tracking (JDT) methods. Despite the success of these approaches, they also suffer from common problems, such as harmful global or local inconsistency, poor trade-off between robustness and model complexity, and lack of flexibility in different scenes within the same video. In this paper we propose a simple but robust framework that formulates object detection and association jointly as a consistent denoising diffusion process from paired noise boxes to paired ground-truth boxes. This novel progressive denoising diffusion strategy substantially augments the tracker's effectiveness, enabling it to discriminate between various objects. During the training stage, paired object boxes diffuse from paired ground-truth boxes to random distribution, and the model learns detection and tracking simultaneously by reversing this noising process. In inference, the model refines a set of paired randomly generated boxes to the detection and tracking results in a flexible one-step or multi-step denoising diffusion process. Extensive experiments on three widely used MOT benchmarks, including MOT17, MOT20, and Dancetrack, demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.
Scalable Video Object Segmentation with Simplified Framework
Authors: Qiangqiang Wu, Tianyu Yang, Wei Wu, Antoni Chan
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Object, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The current popular methods for video object segmentation (VOS) implement feature matching through several hand-crafted modules that separately perform feature extraction and matching. However, the above hand-crafted designs empirically cause insufficient target interaction, thus limiting the dynamic target-aware feature learning in VOS. To tackle these limitations, this paper presents a scalable Simplified VOS (SimVOS) framework to perform joint feature extraction and matching by leveraging a single transformer backbone. Specifically, SimVOS employs a scalable ViT backbone for simultaneous feature extraction and matching between query and reference features. This design enables SimVOS to learn better target-ware features for accurate mask prediction. More importantly, SimVOS could directly apply well-pretrained ViT backbones (e.g., MAE) for VOS, which bridges the gap between VOS and large-scale self-supervised pre-training. To achieve a better performance-speed trade-off, we further explore within-frame attention and propose a new token refinement module to improve the running speed and save computational cost. Experimentally, our SimVOS achieves state-of-the-art results on popular video object segmentation benchmarks, i.e., DAVIS-2017 (88.0% J&F), DAVIS-2016 (92.9% J&F) and YouTube-VOS 2019 (84.2% J&F), without applying any synthetic video or BL30K pre-training used in previous VOS approaches.
Towards a High-Performance Object Detector: Insights from Drone Detection Using ViT and CNN-based Deep Learning Models
Authors: Junyang Zhang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Transfer Learning

Accurate drone detection is strongly desired in drone collision avoidance, drone defense and autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) self-landing. With the recent emergence of the Vision Transformer (ViT), this critical task is reassessed in this paper using a UAV dataset composed of 1359 drone photos. We construct various CNN and ViT-based models, demonstrating that for single-drone detection, a basic ViT can achieve performance 4.6 times more robust than our best CNN-based transfer learning models. By implementing the state-of-the-art You Only Look Once (YOLO v7, 200 epochs) and the experimental ViT-based You Only Look At One Sequence (YOLOS, 20 epochs) in multi-drone detection, we attain impressive 98% and 96% mAP values, respectively. We find that ViT outperforms CNN at the same epoch, but also requires more training data, computational power, and sophisticated, performance-oriented designs to fully surpass the capabilities of cutting-edge CNN detectors. We summarize the distinct characteristics of ViT and CNN models to aid future researchers in developing more efficient deep learning models.
Spatial-Temporal Alignment Network for Action Recognition
Authors: Jinhui Ye, Junwei Liang
Date: 2023-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition

This paper studies introducing viewpoint invariant feature representations in existing action recognition architecture. Despite significant progress in action recognition, efficiently handling geometric variations in large-scale datasets remains challenging. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Alignment Network (STAN), which explicitly learns geometric invariant representations for action recognition. Notably, the STAN model is light-weighted and generic, which could be plugged into existing action recognition models (e.g., MViTv2) with a low extra computational cost. We test our STAN model on widely-used datasets like UCF101 and HMDB51. The experimental results show that the STAN model can consistently improve the state-of-the-art models in action recognition tasks in trained-from-scratch settings.