pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Black Box Few-Shot Adaptation for Vision-Language models
Authors: Yassine Ouali, Adrian Bulat, Brais Martinez, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Prompt Learning, Re-Ranking

Vision-Language (V-L) models trained with contrastive learning to align the visual and language modalities have been shown to be strong few-shot learners. Soft prompt learning is the method of choice for few-shot downstream adaptation aiming to bridge the modality gap caused by the distribution shift induced by the new domain. While parameter-efficient, prompt learning still requires access to the model weights and can be computationally infeasible for large models with billions of parameters. To address these shortcomings, in this work, we describe a black-box method for V-L few-shot adaptation that (a) operates on pre-computed image and text features and hence works without access to the model's weights, (b) it is orders of magnitude faster at training time, (c) it is amenable to both supervised and unsupervised training, and (d) it can be even used to align image and text features computed from uni-modal models. To achieve this, we propose Linear Feature Alignment (LFA), a simple linear approach for V-L re-alignment in the target domain. LFA is initialized from a closed-form solution to a least-squares problem and then it is iteratively updated by minimizing a re-ranking loss. Despite its simplicity, our approach can even surpass soft-prompt learning methods as shown by extensive experiments on 11 image and 2 video datasets.
Decoupling Dynamic Monocular Videos for Dynamic View Synthesis
Authors: Meng You, Junhui Hou
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation

The challenge of dynamic view synthesis from dynamic monocular videos, i.e., synthesizing novel views for free viewpoints given a monocular video of a dynamic scene captured by a moving camera, mainly lies in accurately modeling the \textbf{dynamic objects} of a scene using limited 2D frames, each with a varying timestamp and viewpoint. Existing methods usually require pre-processed 2D optical flow and depth maps by off-the-shelf methods to supervise the network, making them suffer from the inaccuracy of the pre-processed supervision and the ambiguity when lifting the 2D information to 3D. In this paper, we tackle this challenge in an unsupervised fashion. Specifically, we decouple the motion of the dynamic objects into object motion and camera motion, respectively regularized by proposed unsupervised surface consistency and patch-based multi-view constraints. The former enforces the 3D geometric surfaces of moving objects to be consistent over time, while the latter regularizes their appearances to be consistent across different viewpoints. Such a fine-grained motion formulation can alleviate the learning difficulty for the network, thus enabling it to produce not only novel views with higher quality but also more accurate scene flows and depth than existing methods requiring extra supervision.
Cross-modal tumor segmentation using generative blending augmentation and self training
Authors: Guillaume Sallé, Pierre-Henri Conze, Julien Bert, Nicolas Boussion, Dimitris Visvikis, Vincent Jaouen
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Image-to-Image Translation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

\textit{Objectives}: Data scarcity and domain shifts lead to biased training sets that do not accurately represent deployment conditions. A related practical problem is cross-modal image segmentation, where the objective is to segment unlabelled images using previously labelled datasets from other imaging modalities. \textit{Methods}: We propose a cross-modal segmentation method based on conventional image synthesis boosted by a new data augmentation technique called Generative Blending Augmentation (GBA). GBA leverages a SinGAN model to learn representative generative features from a single training image to diversify realistically tumor appearances. This way, we compensate for image synthesis errors, subsequently improving the generalization power of a downstream segmentation model. The proposed augmentation is further combined to an iterative self-training procedure leveraging pseudo labels at each pass. \textit{Results}: The proposed solution ranked first for vestibular schwannoma (VS) segmentation during the validation and test phases of the MICCAI CrossMoDA 2022 challenge, with best mean Dice similarity and average symmetric surface distance measures. \textit{Conclusion and significance}: Local contrast alteration of tumor appearances and iterative self-training with pseudo labels are likely to lead to performance improvements in a variety of segmentation contexts.
High-resolution tomographic reconstruction of optical absorbance through scattering media using neural fields
Authors: Wuwei Ren, Siyuan Shen, Linlin Li, Shengyu Gao, Yuehan Wang, Liangtao Gu, Shiying Li, Xingjun Zhu, Jiahua Jiang, Jingyi Yu
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Light scattering imposes a major obstacle for imaging objects seated deeply in turbid media, such as biological tissues and foggy air. Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) tackles scattering by volumetrically recovering the optical absorbance and has shown significance in medical imaging, remote sensing and autonomous driving. A conventional DOT reconstruction paradigm necessitates discretizing the object volume into voxels at a pre-determined resolution for modelling diffuse light propagation and the resulting spatial resolution of the reconstruction is generally limited. We propose NeuDOT, a novel DOT scheme based on neural fields (NF) to continuously encode the optical absorbance within the volume and subsequently bridge the gap between model accuracy and high resolution. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that NeuDOT achieves submillimetre lateral resolution and resolves complex 3D objects at 14 mm-depth, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods. NeuDOT is a non-invasive, high-resolution and computationally efficient tomographic method, and unlocks further applications of NF involving light scattering.
Re-thinking Model Inversion Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Ngoc-Bao Nguyen, Keshigeyan Chandrasegaran, Milad Abdollahzadeh, Ngai-Man Cheung
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Face Recognition

Model inversion (MI) attacks aim to infer and reconstruct private training data by abusing access to a model. MI attacks have raised concerns about the leaking of sensitive information (e.g. private face images used in training a face recognition system). Recently, several algorithms for MI have been proposed to improve the attack performance. In this work, we revisit MI, study two fundamental issues pertaining to all state-of-the-art (SOTA) MI algorithms, and propose solutions to these issues which lead to a significant boost in attack performance for all SOTA MI. In particular, our contributions are two-fold: 1) We analyze the optimization objective of SOTA MI algorithms, argue that the objective is sub-optimal for achieving MI, and propose an improved optimization objective that boosts attack performance significantly. 2) We analyze "MI overfitting", show that it would prevent reconstructed images from learning semantics of training data, and propose a novel "model augmentation" idea to overcome this issue. Our proposed solutions are simple and improve all SOTA MI attack accuracy significantly. E.g., in the standard CelebA benchmark, our solutions improve accuracy by 11.8% and achieve for the first time over 90% attack accuracy. Our findings demonstrate that there is a clear risk of leaking sensitive information from deep learning models. We urge serious consideration to be given to the privacy implications. Our code, demo, and models are available at https://ngoc-nguyen-0.github.io/re-thinking_model_inversion_attacks/
On the Stability-Plasticity Dilemma of Class-Incremental Learning
Authors: Dongwan Kim, Bohyung Han
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning, Representation Learning

A primary goal of class-incremental learning is to strike a balance between stability and plasticity, where models should be both stable enough to retain knowledge learned from previously seen classes, and plastic enough to learn concepts from new classes. While previous works demonstrate strong performance on class-incremental benchmarks, it is not clear whether their success comes from the models being stable, plastic, or a mixture of both. This paper aims to shed light on how effectively recent class-incremental learning algorithms address the stability-plasticity trade-off. We establish analytical tools that measure the stability and plasticity of feature representations, and employ such tools to investigate models trained with various algorithms on large-scale class-incremental benchmarks. Surprisingly, we find that the majority of class-incremental learning algorithms heavily favor stability over plasticity, to the extent that the feature extractor of a model trained on the initial set of classes is no less effective than that of the final incremental model. Our observations not only inspire two simple algorithms that highlight the importance of feature representation analysis, but also suggest that class-incremental learning approaches, in general, should strive for better feature representation learning.
Fully Convolutional Networks for Dense Water Flow Intensity Prediction in Swedish Catchment Areas
Authors: Aleksis Pirinen, Olof Mogren, Mårten Västerdal
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00

Intensifying climate change will lead to more extreme weather events, including heavy rainfall and drought. Accurate stream flow prediction models which are adaptable and robust to new circumstances in a changing climate will be an important source of information for decisions on climate adaptation efforts, especially regarding mitigation of the risks of and damages associated with flooding. In this work we propose a machine learning-based approach for predicting water flow intensities in inland watercourses based on the physical characteristics of the catchment areas, obtained from geospatial data (including elevation and soil maps, as well as satellite imagery), in addition to temporal information about past rainfall quantities and temperature variations. We target the one-day-ahead regime, where a fully convolutional neural network model receives spatio-temporal inputs and predicts the water flow intensity in every coordinate of the spatial input for the subsequent day. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle the task of dense water flow intensity prediction; earlier works have considered predicting flow intensities at a sparse set of locations at a time. An extensive set of model evaluations and ablations are performed, which empirically justify our various design choices. Code and preprocessed data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/aleksispi/fcn-water-flow.
Label-guided Attention Distillation for Lane Segmentation
Authors: Zhikang Liu, Lanyun Zhu
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Contemporary segmentation methods are usually based on deep fully convolutional networks (FCNs). However, the layer-by-layer convolutions with a growing receptive field is not good at capturing long-range contexts such as lane markers in the scene. In this paper, we address this issue by designing a distillation method that exploits label structure when training segmentation network. The intuition is that the ground-truth lane annotations themselves exhibit internal structure. We broadcast the structure hints throughout a teacher network, i.e., we train a teacher network that consumes a lane label map as input and attempts to replicate it as output. Then, the attention maps of the teacher network are adopted as supervisors of the student segmentation network. The teacher network, with label structure information embedded, knows distinctly where the convolution layers should pay visual attention into. The proposed method is named as Label-guided Attention Distillation (LGAD). It turns out that the student network learns significantly better with LGAD than when learning alone. As the teacher network is deprecated after training, our method do not increase the inference time. Note that LGAD can be easily incorporated in any lane segmentation network.
Self-Supervised Image Denoising for Real-World Images with Context-aware Transformer
Authors: Dan Zhang, Fangfang Zhou
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising, SSIM

In recent years, the development of deep learning has been pushing image denoising to a new level. Among them, self-supervised denoising is increasingly popular because it does not require any prior knowledge. Most of the existing self-supervised methods are based on convolutional neural networks (CNN), which are restricted by the locality of the receptive field and would cause color shifts or textures loss. In this paper, we propose a novel Denoise Transformer for real-world image denoising, which is mainly constructed with Context-aware Denoise Transformer (CADT) units and Secondary Noise Extractor (SNE) block. CADT is designed as a dual-branch structure, where the global branch uses a window-based Transformer encoder to extract the global information, while the local branch focuses on the extraction of local features with small receptive field. By incorporating CADT as basic components, we build a hierarchical network to directly learn the noise distribution information through residual learning and obtain the first stage denoised output. Then, we design SNE in low computation for secondary global noise extraction. Finally the blind spots are collected from the Denoise Transformer output and reconstructed, forming the final denoised image. Extensive experiments on the real-world SIDD benchmark achieve 50.62/0.990 for PSNR/SSIM, which is competitive with the current state-of-the-art method and only 0.17/0.001 lower. Visual comparisons on public sRGB, Raw-RGB and greyscale datasets prove that our proposed Denoise Transformer has a competitive performance, especially on blurred textures and low-light images, without using additional knowledge, e.g., noise level or noise type, regarding the underlying unknown noise.
Primitive Simultaneous Optimization of Similarity Metrics for Image Registration
Authors: Diana Waldmannstetter, Benedikt Wiestler, Julian Schwarting, Ivan Ezhov, Marie Metz, Spyridon Bakas, Bhakti Baheti, Satrajit Chakrabarty, Daniel Rueckert, Jan S. Kirschke, Rolf A. Heckemann, Marie Piraud, Bjoern H. Menze, Florian Kofler
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Semantic Segmentation

Even though simultaneous optimization of similarity metrics is a standard procedure in the field of semantic segmentation, surprisingly, this is much less established for image registration. To help closing this gap in the literature, we investigate in a complex multi-modal 3D setting whether simultaneous optimization of registration metrics, here implemented by means of primitive summation, can benefit image registration. We evaluate two challenging datasets containing collections of pre- to post-operative and pre- to intra-operative MR images of glioma. Employing the proposed optimization, we demonstrate improved registration accuracy in terms of TRE on expert neuroradiologists' landmark annotations.
MM-BSN: Self-Supervised Image Denoising for Real-World with Multi-Mask based on Blind-Spot Network
Authors: Dan Zhang, Fangfang Zhou, Yuwen Jiang, Zhengming Fu
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Recent advances in deep learning have been pushing image denoising techniques to a new level. In self-supervised image denoising, blind-spot network (BSN) is one of the most common methods. However, most of the existing BSN algorithms use a dot-based central mask, which is recognized as inefficient for images with large-scale spatially correlated noise. In this paper, we give the definition of large-noise and propose a multi-mask strategy using multiple convolutional kernels masked in different shapes to further break the noise spatial correlation. Furthermore, we propose a novel self-supervised image denoising method that combines the multi-mask strategy with BSN (MM-BSN). We show that different masks can cause significant performance differences, and the proposed MM-BSN can efficiently fuse the features extracted by multi-masked layers, while recovering the texture structures destroyed by multi-masking and information transmission. Our MM-BSN can be used to address the problem of large-noise denoising, which cannot be efficiently handled by other BSN methods. Extensive experiments on public real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed MM-BSN achieves state-of-the-art performance among self-supervised and even unpaired image denoising methods for sRGB images denoising, without any labelling effort or prior knowledge. Code can be found in https://github.com/dannie125/MM-BSN.
Multi-Channel Time-Series Person and Soft-Biometric Identification
Authors: Nilah Ravi Nair, Fernando Moya Rueda, Christopher Reining, Gernot A. Fink
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Activity Recognition, Attribute, Human Activity Recognition, Person Identification, Time Series

Multi-channel time-series datasets are popular in the context of human activity recognition (HAR). On-body device (OBD) recordings of human movements are often preferred for HAR applications not only for their reliability but as an approach for identity protection, e.g., in industrial settings. Contradictory, the gait activity is a biometric, as the cyclic movement is distinctive and collectable. In addition, the gait cycle has proven to contain soft-biometric information of human groups, such as age and height. Though general human movements have not been considered a biometric, they might contain identity information. This work investigates person and soft-biometrics identification from OBD recordings of humans performing different activities using deep architectures. Furthermore, we propose the use of attribute representation for soft-biometric identification. We evaluate the method on four datasets of multi-channel time-series HAR, measuring the performance of a person and soft-biometrics identification and its relation concerning performed activities. We find that person identification is not limited to gait activity. The impact of activities on the identification performance was found to be training and dataset specific. Soft-biometric based attribute representation shows promising results and emphasis the necessity of larger datasets.
HALO: Hazard-Aware Landing Optimization for Autonomous Systems
Authors: Christopher R. Hayner, Samuel C. Buckner, Daniel Broyles, Evelyn Madewell, Karen Leung, Behcet Acikmese
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00

With autonomous aerial vehicles enacting safety-critical missions, such as the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, the tasks of automatically identifying and reasoning about potentially hazardous landing sites is paramount. This paper presents a coupled perception-planning solution which addresses the hazard detection, optimal landing trajectory generation, and contingency planning challenges encountered when landing in uncertain environments. Specifically, we develop and combine two novel algorithms, Hazard-Aware Landing Site Selection (HALSS) and Adaptive Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization (Adaptive-DDTO), to address the perception and planning challenges, respectively. The HALSS framework processes point cloud information to identify feasible safe landing zones, while Adaptive-DDTO is a multi-target contingency planner that adaptively replans as new perception information is received. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach using a simulated Martian environment and show that our coupled perception-planning method achieves greater landing success whilst being more fuel efficient compared to a nonadaptive DDTO approach.
Untargeted Near-collision Attacks on Biometrics: Real-world Bounds and Theoretical Limits
Authors: Axel Durbet, Paul-Marie Grollemund, Kevin Thiry-Atighehchi
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00

A biometric recognition system can operate in two distinct modes: identification or verification. In the first mode, the system recognizes an individual by searching the enrolled templates of all the users for a match. In the second mode, the system validates a user's identity claim by comparing the fresh provided template with the enrolled template. The biometric transformation schemes usually produce binary templates that are better handled by cryptographic schemes, and the comparison is based on a distance that leaks information about the similarities between two biometric templates. Both the experimentally determined false match rate and false non-match rate through recognition threshold adjustment define the recognition accuracy, and hence the security of the system. To our knowledge, few works provide a formal treatment of security in case of minimal information leakage, i.e., the binary outcome of a comparison with a threshold. In this paper, we focus on untargeted attacks that can be carried out both online and offline, and in both identification and verification modes. On the first hand, we focus our analysis on the accuracy metrics of biometric systems. We provide the complexity of untargeted attacks using the False Match Rate (FMR) and the False Positive Identification Rate (FPIR) to address the security of these systems. Studying near-collisions with these metrics allows us to estimate the maximum number of users in a database, given a chosen FMR, to preserve the security and the accuracy. These results are evaluated on systems from the literature. On the other hand, we rely on probabilistic modelling to assess the theoretical security limits of biometric systems. The study of this metric space, and system parameters (template size, threshold and database size), gives us the complexity of untargeted attacks and the probability of a near-collision.
MESAHA-Net: Multi-Encoders based Self-Adaptive Hard Attention Network with Maximum Intensity Projections for Lung Nodule Segmentation in CT Scan
Authors: Muhammad Usman, Azka Rehman, Abdullah Shahid, Siddique Latif, Shi Sub Byon, Sung Hyun Kim, Tariq Mahmood Khan, Yeong Gil Shin
Date: 2023-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Decoder, Hard Attention, Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Lung Nodule Segmentation, Segmentation

Accurate lung nodule segmentation is crucial for early-stage lung cancer diagnosis, as it can substantially enhance patient survival rates. Computed tomography (CT) images are widely employed for early diagnosis in lung nodule analysis. However, the heterogeneity of lung nodules, size diversity, and the complexity of the surrounding environment pose challenges for developing robust nodule segmentation methods. In this study, we propose an efficient end-to-end framework, the multi-encoder-based self-adaptive hard attention network (MESAHA-Net), for precise lung nodule segmentation in CT scans. MESAHA-Net comprises three encoding paths, an attention block, and a decoder block, facilitating the integration of three types of inputs: CT slice patches, forward and backward maximum intensity projection (MIP) images, and region of interest (ROI) masks encompassing the nodule. By employing a novel adaptive hard attention mechanism, MESAHA-Net iteratively performs slice-by-slice 2D segmentation of lung nodules, focusing on the nodule region in each slice to generate 3D volumetric segmentation of lung nodules. The proposed framework has been comprehensively evaluated on the LIDC-IDRI dataset, the largest publicly available dataset for lung nodule segmentation. The results demonstrate that our approach is highly robust for various lung nodule types, outperforming previous state-of-the-art techniques in terms of segmentation accuracy and computational complexity, rendering it suitable for real-time clinical implementation.