pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SAM on Medical Images: A Comprehensive Study on Three Prompt Modes
Authors: Dongjie Cheng, Ziyuan Qin, Zekun Jiang, Shaoting Zhang, Qicheng Lao, Kang Li
Date: 2023-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-shot Generalization

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) made an eye-catching debut recently and inspired many researchers to explore its potential and limitation in terms of zero-shot generalization capability. As the first promptable foundation model for segmentation tasks, it was trained on a large dataset with an unprecedented number of images and annotations. This large-scale dataset and its promptable nature endow the model with strong zero-shot generalization. Although the SAM has shown competitive performance on several datasets, we still want to investigate its zero-shot generalization on medical images. As we know, the acquisition of medical image annotation usually requires a lot of effort from professional practitioners. Therefore, if there exists a foundation model that can give high-quality mask prediction simply based on a few point prompts, this model will undoubtedly become the game changer for medical image analysis. To evaluate whether SAM has the potential to become the foundation model for medical image segmentation tasks, we collected more than 12 public medical image datasets that cover various organs and modalities. We also explore what kind of prompt can lead to the best zero-shot performance with different modalities. Furthermore, we find that a pattern shows that the perturbation of the box size will significantly change the prediction accuracy. Finally, Extensive experiments show that the predicted mask quality varied a lot among different datasets. And providing proper prompts, such as bounding boxes, to the SAM will significantly increase its performance.
CORSD: Class-Oriented Relational Self Distillation
Authors: Muzhou Yu, Sia Huat Tan, Kailu Wu, Runpei Dong, Linfeng Zhang, Kaisheng Ma
Date: 2023-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Relation, Relation Extraction

Knowledge distillation conducts an effective model compression method while holding some limitations:(1) the feature based distillation methods only focus on distilling the feature map but are lack of transferring the relation of data examples; (2) the relational distillation methods are either limited to the handcrafted functions for relation extraction, such as L2 norm, or weak in inter- and intra- class relation modeling. Besides, the feature divergence of heterogeneous teacher-student architectures may lead to inaccurate relational knowledge transferring. In this work, we propose a novel training framework named Class-Oriented Relational Self Distillation (CORSD) to address the limitations. The trainable relation networks are designed to extract relation of structured data input, and they enable the whole model to better classify samples by transferring the relational knowledge from the deepest layer of the model to shallow layers. Besides, auxiliary classifiers are proposed to make relation networks capture class-oriented relation that benefits classification task. Experiments demonstrate that CORSD achieves remarkable improvements. Compared to baseline, 3.8%, 1.5% and 4.5% averaged accuracy boost can be observed on CIFAR100, ImageNet and CUB-200-2011, respectively.
Outline, Then Details: Syntactically Guided Coarse-To-Fine Code Generation
Authors: Wenqing Zheng, S P Sharan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Kevin Wang, Yihan Xi, Dejia Xu, Zhangyang Wang
Date: 2023-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Program Synthesis

For a complicated algorithm, its implementation by a human programmer usually starts with outlining a rough control flow followed by iterative enrichments, eventually yielding carefully generated syntactic structures and variables in a hierarchy. However, state-of-the-art large language models generate codes in a single pass, without intermediate warm-ups to reflect the structured thought process of "outline-then-detail". Inspired by the recent success of chain-of-thought prompting, we propose ChainCoder, a program synthesis language model that generates Python code progressively, i.e. from coarse to fine in multiple passes. We first decompose source code into layout frame components and accessory components via abstract syntax tree parsing to construct a hierarchical representation. We then reform our prediction target into a multi-pass objective, each pass generates a subsequence, which is concatenated in the hierarchy. Finally, a tailored transformer architecture is leveraged to jointly encode the natural language descriptions and syntactically aligned I/O data samples. Extensive evaluations show that ChainCoder outperforms state-of-the-arts, demonstrating that our progressive generation eases the reasoning procedure and guides the language model to generate higher-quality solutions. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/VITA-Group/ChainCoder.
Molecular Design Based on Integer Programming and Splitting Data Sets by Hyperplanes
Authors: Jianshen Zhu, Naveed Ahmed Azam, Kazuya Haraguchi, Liang Zhao, Hiroshi Nagamochi, Tatsuya Akutsu
Date: 2023-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

A novel framework for designing the molecular structure of chemical compounds with a desired chemical property has recently been proposed. The framework infers a desired chemical graph by solving a mixed integer linear program (MILP) that simulates the computation process of a feature function defined by a two-layered model on chemical graphs and a prediction function constructed by a machine learning method. To improve the learning performance of prediction functions in the framework, we design a method that splits a given data set $\mathcal{C}$ into two subsets $\mathcal{C}^{(i)},i=1,2$ by a hyperplane in a chemical space so that most compounds in the first (resp., second) subset have observed values lower (resp., higher) than a threshold $\theta$. We construct a prediction function $\psi$ to the data set $\mathcal{C}$ by combining prediction functions $\psi_i,i=1,2$ each of which is constructed on $\mathcal{C}^{(i)}$ independently. The results of our computational experiments suggest that the proposed method improved the learning performance for several chemical properties to which a good prediction function has been difficult to construct.
ArK: Augmented Reality with Knowledge Interactive Emergent Ability
Authors: Qiuyuan Huang, Jae Sung Park, Abhinav Gupta, Paul Bennett, Ran Gong, Subhojit Som, Baolin Peng, Owais Khan Mohammed, Chris Pal, Yejin Choi, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: AI Agent, Mixed Reality, Scene Generation, Scene Understanding

Despite the growing adoption of mixed reality and interactive AI agents, it remains challenging for these systems to generate high quality 2D/3D scenes in unseen environments. The common practice requires deploying an AI agent to collect large amounts of data for model training for every new task. This process is costly, or even impossible, for many domains. In this study, we develop an infinite agent that learns to transfer knowledge memory from general foundation models (e.g. GPT4, DALLE) to novel domains or scenarios for scene understanding and generation in the physical or virtual world. The heart of our approach is an emerging mechanism, dubbed Augmented Reality with Knowledge Inference Interaction (ArK), which leverages knowledge-memory to generate scenes in unseen physical world and virtual reality environments. The knowledge interactive emergent ability (Figure 1) is demonstrated as the observation learns i) micro-action of cross-modality: in multi-modality models to collect a large amount of relevant knowledge memory data for each interaction task (e.g., unseen scene understanding) from the physical reality; and ii) macro-behavior of reality-agnostic: in mix-reality environments to improve interactions that tailor to different characterized roles, target variables, collaborative information, and so on. We validate the effectiveness of ArK on the scene generation and editing tasks. We show that our ArK approach, combined with large foundation models, significantly improves the quality of generated 2D/3D scenes, compared to baselines, demonstrating the potential benefit of incorporating ArK in generative AI for applications such as metaverse and gaming simulation.
Probabilistic 3D segmentation for aleatoric uncertainty quantification in full 3D medical data
Authors: Christiaan G. A. Viviers, Amaan M. M. Valiuddin, Peter H. N. de With, Fons van der Sommen
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Lung Nodule Segmentation, Medical Procedure, Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

Uncertainty quantification in medical images has become an essential addition to segmentation models for practical application in the real world. Although there are valuable developments in accurate uncertainty quantification methods using 2D images and slices of 3D volumes, in clinical practice, the complete 3D volumes (such as CT and MRI scans) are used to evaluate and plan the medical procedure. As a result, the existing 2D methods miss the rich 3D spatial information when resolving the uncertainty. A popular approach for quantifying the ambiguity in the data is to learn a distribution over the possible hypotheses. In recent work, this ambiguity has been modeled to be strictly Gaussian. Normalizing Flows (NFs) are capable of modelling more complex distributions and thus, better fit the embedding space of the data. To this end, we have developed a 3D probabilistic segmentation framework augmented with NFs, to enable capturing the distributions of various complexity. To test the proposed approach, we evaluate the model on the LIDC-IDRI dataset for lung nodule segmentation and quantify the aleatoric uncertainty introduced by the multi-annotator setting and inherent ambiguity in the CT data. Following this approach, we are the first to present a 3D Squared Generalized Energy Distance (GED) of 0.401 and a high 0.468 Hungarian-matched 3D IoU. The obtained results reveal the value in capturing the 3D uncertainty, using a flexible posterior distribution augmented with a Normalizing Flow. Finally, we present the aleatoric uncertainty in a visual manner with the aim to provide clinicians with additional insight into data ambiguity and facilitating more informed decision-making.
StyleAvatar: Real-time Photo-realistic Portrait Avatar from a Single Video
Authors: Lizhen Wang, Xiaochen Zhao, Jingxiang Sun, Yuxiang Zhang, Hongwen Zhang, Tao Yu, Yebin Liu
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Reenactment, Translation, Video Generation

Face reenactment methods attempt to restore and re-animate portrait videos as realistically as possible. Existing methods face a dilemma in quality versus controllability: 2D GAN-based methods achieve higher image quality but suffer in fine-grained control of facial attributes compared with 3D counterparts. In this work, we propose StyleAvatar, a real-time photo-realistic portrait avatar reconstruction method using StyleGAN-based networks, which can generate high-fidelity portrait avatars with faithful expression control. We expand the capabilities of StyleGAN by introducing a compositional representation and a sliding window augmentation method, which enable faster convergence and improve translation generalization. Specifically, we divide the portrait scenes into three parts for adaptive adjustments: facial region, non-facial foreground region, and the background. Besides, our network leverages the best of UNet, StyleGAN and time coding for video learning, which enables high-quality video generation. Furthermore, a sliding window augmentation method together with a pre-training strategy are proposed to improve translation generalization and training performance, respectively. The proposed network can converge within two hours while ensuring high image quality and a forward rendering time of only 20 milliseconds. Furthermore, we propose a real-time live system, which further pushes research into applications. Results and experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of image quality, full portrait video generation, and real-time re-animation compared to existing facial reenactment methods. Training and inference code for this paper are at https://github.com/LizhenWangT/StyleAvatar.
Generating Texture for 3D Human Avatar from a Single Image using Sampling and Refinement Networks
Authors: Sihun Cha, Kwanggyoon Seo, Amirsaman Ashtari, Junyong Noh
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Texture Synthesis

There has been significant progress in generating an animatable 3D human avatar from a single image. However, recovering texture for the 3D human avatar from a single image has been relatively less addressed. Because the generated 3D human avatar reveals the occluded texture of the given image as it moves, it is critical to synthesize the occluded texture pattern that is unseen from the source image. To generate a plausible texture map for 3D human avatars, the occluded texture pattern needs to be synthesized with respect to the visible texture from the given image. Moreover, the generated texture should align with the surface of the target 3D mesh. In this paper, we propose a texture synthesis method for a 3D human avatar that incorporates geometry information. The proposed method consists of two convolutional networks for the sampling and refining process. The sampler network fills in the occluded regions of the source image and aligns the texture with the surface of the target 3D mesh using the geometry information. The sampled texture is further refined and adjusted by the refiner network. To maintain the clear details in the given image, both sampled and refined texture is blended to produce the final texture map. To effectively guide the sampler network to achieve its goal, we designed a curriculum learning scheme that starts from a simple sampling task and gradually progresses to the task where the alignment needs to be considered. We conducted experiments to show that our method outperforms previous methods qualitatively and quantitatively.
Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease using Bottleneck Transformers
Authors: Arunima Jaiswal, Ananya Sadana
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00

Early detection of Alzheimer's Disease (AD) and its prodromal state, Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), is crucial for providing suitable treatment and preventing the disease from progressing. It can also aid researchers and clinicians to identify early biomarkers and minister new treatments that have been a subject of extensive research. The application of deep learning techniques on structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has shown promising results in diagnosing the disease. In this research, we intend to introduce a novel approach of using an ensemble of the self-attention-based Bottleneck Transformers with a sharpness aware minimizer for early detection of Alzheimer's Disease. The proposed approach has been tested on the widely accepted ADNI dataset and evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and ROC-AUC score as the performance metrics.
LCAUnet: A skin lesion segmentation network with enhanced edge and body fusion
Authors: Qisen Ma, Keming Mao, Gao Wang, Lisheng Xu, Yuhai Zhao
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Lesion Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of skin lesions in dermatoscopic images is crucial for the early diagnosis of skin cancer and improving the survival rate of patients. However, it is still a challenging task due to the irregularity of lesion areas, the fuzziness of boundaries, and other complex interference factors. In this paper, a novel LCAUnet is proposed to improve the ability of complementary representation with fusion of edge and body features, which are often paid little attentions in traditional methods. First, two separate branches are set for edge and body segmentation with CNNs and Transformer based architecture respectively. Then, LCAF module is utilized to fuse feature maps of edge and body of the same level by local cross-attention operation in encoder stage. Furthermore, PGMF module is embedded for feature integration with prior guided multi-scale adaption. Comprehensive experiments on public available dataset ISIC 2017, ISIC 2018, and PH2 demonstrate that LCAUnet outperforms most state-of-the-art methods. The ablation studies also verify the effectiveness of the proposed fusion techniques.
Racial Bias within Face Recognition: A Survey
Authors: Seyma Yucer, Furkan Tektas, Noura Al Moubayed, Toby P. Breckon
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Face Verification, Survey

Facial recognition is one of the most academically studied and industrially developed areas within computer vision where we readily find associated applications deployed globally. This widespread adoption has uncovered significant performance variation across subjects of different racial profiles leading to focused research attention on racial bias within face recognition spanning both current causation and future potential solutions. In support, this study provides an extensive taxonomic review of research on racial bias within face recognition exploring every aspect and stage of the face recognition processing pipeline. Firstly, we discuss the problem definition of racial bias, starting with race definition, grouping strategies, and the societal implications of using race or race-related groupings. Secondly, we divide the common face recognition processing pipeline into four stages: image acquisition, face localisation, face representation, face verification and identification, and review the relevant corresponding literature associated with each stage. The overall aim is to provide comprehensive coverage of the racial bias problem with respect to each and every stage of the face recognition processing pipeline whilst also highlighting the potential pitfalls and limitations of contemporary mitigation strategies that need to be considered within future research endeavours or commercial applications alike.
GeneFace++: Generalized and Stable Real-Time Audio-Driven 3D Talking Face Generation
Authors: Zhenhui Ye, Jinzheng He, Ziyue Jiang, Rongjie Huang, Jiawei Huang, Jinglin Liu, Yi Ren, Xiang Yin, Zejun Ma, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, motion prediction, NeRF, Talking Face Generation

Generating talking person portraits with arbitrary speech audio is a crucial problem in the field of digital human and metaverse. A modern talking face generation method is expected to achieve the goals of generalized audio-lip synchronization, good video quality, and high system efficiency. Recently, neural radiance field (NeRF) has become a popular rendering technique in this field since it could achieve high-fidelity and 3D-consistent talking face generation with a few-minute-long training video. However, there still exist several challenges for NeRF-based methods: 1) as for the lip synchronization, it is hard to generate a long facial motion sequence of high temporal consistency and audio-lip accuracy; 2) as for the video quality, due to the limited data used to train the renderer, it is vulnerable to out-of-domain input condition and produce bad rendering results occasionally; 3) as for the system efficiency, the slow training and inference speed of the vanilla NeRF severely obstruct its usage in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose GeneFace++ to handle these challenges by 1) utilizing the pitch contour as an auxiliary feature and introducing a temporal loss in the facial motion prediction process; 2) proposing a landmark locally linear embedding method to regulate the outliers in the predicted motion sequence to avoid robustness issues; 3) designing a computationally efficient NeRF-based motion-to-video renderer to achieves fast training and real-time inference. With these settings, GeneFace++ becomes the first NeRF-based method that achieves stable and real-time talking face generation with generalized audio-lip synchronization. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of subjective and objective evaluation. Video samples are available at https://genefaceplusplus.github.io .
Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Ivan Martinović
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is an important and well-known task in the field of computer vision, in which we attempt to assign a corresponding semantic class to each input element. When it comes to semantic segmentation of 2D images, the input elements are pixels. On the other hand, the input can also be a point cloud, where one input element represents one point in the input point cloud. By the term point cloud, we refer to a set of points defined by spatial coordinates with respect to some reference coordinate system. In addition to the position of points in space, other features can also be defined for each point, such as RGB components. In this paper, we conduct semantic segmentation on the S3DIS dataset, where each point cloud represents one room. We train models on the S3DIS dataset, namely PointCNN, PointNet++, Cylinder3D, Point Transformer, and RepSurf. We compare the obtained results with respect to standard evaluation metrics for semantic segmentation and present a comparison of the models based on inference speed.
RViDeformer: Efficient Raw Video Denoising Transformer with a Larger Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Huanjing Yue, Cong Cao, Lei Liao, Jingyu Yang
Date: 2023-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Denoising, Video Denoising

In recent years, raw video denoising has garnered increased attention due to the consistency with the imaging process and well-studied noise modeling in the raw domain. However, two problems still hinder the denoising performance. Firstly, there is no large dataset with realistic motions for supervised raw video denoising, as capturing noisy and clean frames for real dynamic scenes is difficult. To address this, we propose recapturing existing high-resolution videos displayed on a 4K screen with high-low ISO settings to construct noisy-clean paired frames. In this way, we construct a video denoising dataset (named as ReCRVD) with 120 groups of noisy-clean videos, whose ISO values ranging from 1600 to 25600. Secondly, while non-local temporal-spatial attention is beneficial for denoising, it often leads to heavy computation costs. We propose an efficient raw video denoising transformer network (RViDeformer) that explores both short and long-distance correlations. Specifically, we propose multi-branch spatial and temporal attention modules, which explore the patch correlations from local window, local low-resolution window, global downsampled window, and neighbor-involved window, and then they are fused together. We employ reparameterization to reduce computation costs. Our network is trained in both supervised and unsupervised manners, achieving the best performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the model trained with our proposed dataset (ReCRVD) outperforms the model trained with previous benchmark dataset (CRVD) when evaluated on the real-world outdoor noisy videos. Our code and dataset will be released after the acceptance of this work.