pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SILT: Shadow-aware Iterative Label Tuning for Learning to Detect Shadows from Noisy Labels
Authors: Han Yang, Tianyu Wang, Xiaowei Hu, Chi-Wing Fu
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Shadow Detection

Existing shadow detection datasets often contain missing or mislabeled shadows, which can hinder the performance of deep learning models trained directly on such data. To address this issue, we propose SILT, the Shadow-aware Iterative Label Tuning framework, which explicitly considers noise in shadow labels and trains the deep model in a self-training manner. Specifically, we incorporate strong data augmentations with shadow counterfeiting to help the network better recognize non-shadow regions and alleviate overfitting. We also devise a simple yet effective label tuning strategy with global-local fusion and shadow-aware filtering to encourage the network to make significant refinements on the noisy labels. We evaluate the performance of SILT by relabeling the test set of the SBU dataset and conducting various experiments. Our results show that even a simple U-Net trained with SILT can outperform all state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. When trained on SBU / UCF / ISTD, our network can successfully reduce the Balanced Error Rate by 25.2% / 36.9% / 21.3% over the best state-of-the-art method.
HarvestNet: A Dataset for Detecting Smallholder Farming Activity Using Harvest Piles and Remote Sensing
Authors: Jonathan Xu, Amna Elmustafa, Liya Weldegebriel, Emnet Negash, Richard Lee, Chenlin Meng, Stefano Ermon, David Lobell
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k

Small farms contribute to a large share of the productive land in developing countries. In regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, where 80\% of farms are small (under 2 ha in size), the task of mapping smallholder cropland is an important part of tracking sustainability measures such as crop productivity. However, the visually diverse and nuanced appearance of small farms has limited the effectiveness of traditional approaches to cropland mapping. Here we introduce a new approach based on the detection of harvest piles characteristic of many smallholder systems throughout the world. We present HarvestNet, a dataset for mapping the presence of farms in the Ethiopian regions of Tigray and Amhara during 2020-2023, collected using expert knowledge and satellite images, totaling 7k hand-labeled images and 2k ground-collected labels. We also benchmark a set of baselines, including SOTA models in remote sensing, with our best models having around 80\% classification performance on hand labelled data and 90\% and 98\% accuracy on ground truth data for Tigray and Amhara, respectively. We also perform a visual comparison with a widely used pre-existing coverage map and show that our model detects an extra 56,621 hectares of cropland in Tigray. We conclude that remote sensing of harvest piles can contribute to more timely and accurate cropland assessments in food insecure regions. The dataset can be accessed through https://figshare.com/s/45a7b45556b90a9a11d2, while the code for the dataset and benchmarks is publicly available at https://github.com/jonxuxu/harvest-piles
Manipulating Embeddings of Stable Diffusion Prompts
Authors: Niklas Deckers, Julia Peters, Martin Potthast
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Navigate, Prompt Engineering

Prompt engineering is still the primary way for users of generative text-to-image models to manipulate generated images in a targeted way. Based on treating the model as a continuous function and by passing gradients between the image space and the prompt embedding space, we propose and analyze a new method to directly manipulate the embedding of a prompt instead of the prompt text. We then derive three practical interaction tools to support users with image generation: (1) Optimization of a metric defined in the image space that measures, for example, the image style. (2) Supporting a user in creative tasks by allowing them to navigate in the image space along a selection of directions of "near" prompt embeddings. (3) Changing the embedding of the prompt to include information that a user has seen in a particular seed but has difficulty describing in the prompt. Compared to prompt engineering, user-driven prompt embedding manipulation enables a more fine-grained, targeted control that integrates a user's intentions. Our user study shows that our methods are considered less tedious and that the resulting images are often preferred.
DR-Tune: Improving Fine-tuning of Pretrained Visual Models by Distribution Regularization with Semantic Calibration
Authors: Nan Zhou, Jiaxin Chen, Di Huang
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: General Knowledge, image-classification, Image Classification

The visual models pretrained on large-scale benchmarks encode general knowledge and prove effective in building more powerful representations for downstream tasks. Most existing approaches follow the fine-tuning paradigm, either by initializing or regularizing the downstream model based on the pretrained one. The former fails to retain the knowledge in the successive fine-tuning phase, thereby prone to be over-fitting, and the latter imposes strong constraints to the weights or feature maps of the downstream model without considering semantic drift, often incurring insufficient optimization. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, namely distribution regularization with semantic calibration (DR-Tune). It employs distribution regularization by enforcing the downstream task head to decrease its classification error on the pretrained feature distribution, which prevents it from over-fitting while enabling sufficient training of downstream encoders. Furthermore, to alleviate the interference by semantic drift, we develop the semantic calibration (SC) module to align the global shape and class centers of the pretrained and downstream feature distributions. Extensive experiments on widely used image classification datasets show that DR-Tune consistently improves the performance when combing with various backbones under different pretraining strategies. Code is available at: https://github.com/weeknan/DR-Tune.
Head-Tail Cooperative Learning Network for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation
Authors: Lei Wang, Zejian yuan, Yao Lu, Badong Chen
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation, Prediction, Scene Graph Generation, Self-Supervised Learning, Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) as a critical task in image understanding, facing the challenge of head-biased prediction caused by the long-tail distribution of predicates. However, current unbiased SGG methods can easily prioritize improving the prediction of tail predicates while ignoring the substantial sacrifice in the prediction of head predicates, leading to a shift from head bias to tail bias. To address this issue, we propose a model-agnostic Head-Tail Collaborative Learning (HTCL) network that includes head-prefer and tail-prefer feature representation branches that collaborate to achieve accurate recognition of both head and tail predicates. We also propose a self-supervised learning approach to enhance the prediction ability of the tail-prefer feature representation branch by constraining tail-prefer predicate features. Specifically, self-supervised learning converges head predicate features to their class centers while dispersing tail predicate features as much as possible through contrast learning and head center loss. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our HTCL by applying it to various SGG models on VG150, Open Images V6 and GQA200 datasets. The results show that our method achieves higher mean Recall with a minimal sacrifice in Recall and achieves a new state-of-the-art overall performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/wanglei0618/HTCL.
Large Multilingual Models Pivot Zero-Shot Multimodal Learning across Languages
Authors: Jinyi Hu, Yuan YAO, Chongyi Wang, Shan Wang, Yinxu Pan, Qianyu Chen, Tianyu Yu, Hanghao Wu, Yue Zhao, Haoye Zhang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Jiao Xue, Dahai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image to text, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Recently there has been a significant surge in multimodal learning in terms of both image-to-text and text-to-image generation. However, the success is typically limited to English, leaving other languages largely behind. Building a competitive counterpart in other languages is highly challenging due to the low-resource nature of non-English multimodal data (i.e., lack of large-scale, high-quality image-text data). In this work, we propose MPM, an effective training paradigm for training large multimodal models in non-English languages. MPM demonstrates that Multilingual language models can Pivot zero-shot Multimodal learning across languages. Specifically, based on a strong multilingual large language model, multimodal models pretrained on English-only image-text data can well generalize to other languages in a (quasi)-zero-shot manner, even surpassing models trained on image-text data in native languages. Taking Chinese as a practice of MPM, we build large multimodal models VisCPM in image-to-text and text-to-image generation, which achieve state-of-the-art (open-source) performance in Chinese. To facilitate future research, we open-source codes and model weights at https://github.com/OpenBMB/VisCPM.git.
RefEgo: Referring Expression Comprehension Dataset from First-Person Perception of Ego4D
Authors: Shuhei Kurita, Naoki Katsura, Eri Onami
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Object, Object Tracking, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension

Grounding textual expressions on scene objects from first-person views is a truly demanding capability in developing agents that are aware of their surroundings and behave following intuitive text instructions. Such capability is of necessity for glass-devices or autonomous robots to localize referred objects in the real-world. In the conventional referring expression comprehension tasks of images, however, datasets are mostly constructed based on the web-crawled data and don't reflect diverse real-world structures on the task of grounding textual expressions in diverse objects in the real world. Recently, a massive-scale egocentric video dataset of Ego4D was proposed. Ego4D covers around the world diverse real-world scenes including numerous indoor and outdoor situations such as shopping, cooking, walking, talking, manufacturing, etc. Based on egocentric videos of Ego4D, we constructed a broad coverage of the video-based referring expression comprehension dataset: RefEgo. Our dataset includes more than 12k video clips and 41 hours for video-based referring expression comprehension annotation. In experiments, we combine the state-of-the-art 2D referring expression comprehension models with the object tracking algorithm, achieving the video-wise referred object tracking even in difficult conditions: the referred object becomes out-of-frame in the middle of the video or multiple similar objects are presented in the video. Codes are available at https://github.com/shuheikurita/RefEgo
Distribution-Aware Calibration for Object Detection with Noisy Bounding Boxes
Authors: Donghao Zhou, Jialin Li, Jinpeng Li, Jiancheng Huang, Qiang Nie, Yong liu, Bin-Bin Gao, Qiong Wang, Pheng-Ann Heng, Guangyong Chen
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Large-scale well-annotated datasets are of great importance for training an effective object detector. However, obtaining accurate bounding box annotations is laborious and demanding. Unfortunately, the resultant noisy bounding boxes could cause corrupt supervision signals and thus diminish detection performance. Motivated by the observation that the real ground-truth is usually situated in the aggregation region of the proposals assigned to a noisy ground-truth, we propose DIStribution-aware CalibratiOn (DISCO) to model the spatial distribution of proposals for calibrating supervision signals. In DISCO, spatial distribution modeling is performed to statistically extract the potential locations of objects. Based on the modeled distribution, three distribution-aware techniques, i.e., distribution-aware proposal augmentation (DA-Aug), distribution-aware box refinement (DA-Ref), and distribution-aware confidence estimation (DA-Est), are developed to improve classification, localization, and interpretability, respectively. Extensive experiments on large-scale noisy image datasets (i.e., Pascal VOC and MS-COCO) demonstrate that DISCO can achieve state-of-the-art detection performance, especially at high noise levels. Code is available at https://github.com/Correr-Zhou/DISCO.
StofNet: Super-resolution Time of Flight Network
Authors: Christopher Hahne, Michel Hayoz, Raphael Sznitman
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Time of Flight (ToF) is a prevalent depth sensing technology in the fields of robotics, medical imaging, and non-destructive testing. Yet, ToF sensing faces challenges from complex ambient conditions making an inverse modelling from the sparse temporal information intractable. This paper highlights the potential of modern super-resolution techniques to learn varying surroundings for a reliable and accurate ToF detection. Unlike existing models, we tailor an architecture for sub-sample precise semi-global signal localization by combining super-resolution with an efficient residual contraction block to balance between fine signal details and large scale contextual information. We consolidate research on ToF by conducting a benchmark comparison against six state-of-the-art methods for which we employ two publicly available datasets. This includes the release of our SToF-Chirp dataset captured by an airborne ultrasound transducer. Results showcase the superior performance of our proposed StofNet in terms of precision, reliability and model complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/hahnec/stofnet.
Multi-stage Factorized Spatio-Temporal Representation for RGB-D Action and Gesture Recognition
Authors: Yujun Ma, Benjia Zhou, Ruili Wang, Pichao Wang
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Recognition, Scene Understanding

RGB-D action and gesture recognition remain an interesting topic in human-centered scene understanding, primarily due to the multiple granularities and large variation in human motion. Although many RGB-D based action and gesture recognition approaches have demonstrated remarkable results by utilizing highly integrated spatio-temporal representations across multiple modalities (i.e., RGB and depth data), they still encounter several challenges. Firstly, vanilla 3D convolution makes it hard to capture fine-grained motion differences between local clips under different modalities. Secondly, the intricate nature of highly integrated spatio-temporal modeling can lead to optimization difficulties. Thirdly, duplicate and unnecessary information can add complexity and complicate entangled spatio-temporal modeling. To address the above issues, we propose an innovative heuristic architecture called Multi-stage Factorized Spatio-Temporal (MFST) for RGB-D action and gesture recognition. The proposed MFST model comprises a 3D Central Difference Convolution Stem (CDC-Stem) module and multiple factorized spatio-temporal stages. The CDC-Stem enriches fine-grained temporal perception, and the multiple hierarchical spatio-temporal stages construct dimension-independent higher-order semantic primitives. Specifically, the CDC-Stem module captures bottom-level spatio-temporal features and passes them successively to the following spatio-temporal factored stages to capture the hierarchical spatial and temporal features through the Multi- Scale Convolution and Transformer (MSC-Trans) hybrid block and Weight-shared Multi-Scale Transformer (WMS-Trans) block. The seamless integration of these innovative designs results in a robust spatio-temporal representation that outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on RGB-D action and gesture recognition datasets.
Local Distortion Aware Efficient Transformer Adaptation for Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Kangmin Xu, Liang Liao, Jing Xiao, Chaofeng Chen, HaoNing Wu, Qiong Yan, Weisi Lin
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Inductive Bias, Local Distortion

Image Quality Assessment (IQA) constitutes a fundamental task within the field of computer vision, yet it remains an unresolved challenge, owing to the intricate distortion conditions, diverse image contents, and limited availability of data. Recently, the community has witnessed the emergence of numerous large-scale pretrained foundation models, which greatly benefit from dramatically increased data and parameter capacities. However, it remains an open problem whether the scaling law in high-level tasks is also applicable to IQA task which is closely related to low-level clues. In this paper, we demonstrate that with proper injection of local distortion features, a larger pretrained and fixed foundation model performs better in IQA tasks. Specifically, for the lack of local distortion structure and inductive bias of vision transformer (ViT), alongside the large-scale pretrained ViT, we use another pretrained convolution neural network (CNN), which is well known for capturing the local structure, to extract multi-scale image features. Further, we propose a local distortion extractor to obtain local distortion features from the pretrained CNN and a local distortion injector to inject the local distortion features into ViT. By only training the extractor and injector, our method can benefit from the rich knowledge in the powerful foundation models and achieve state-of-the-art performance on popular IQA datasets, indicating that IQA is not only a low-level problem but also benefits from stronger high-level features drawn from large-scale pretrained models.
Progressive Feature Mining and External Knowledge-Assisted Text-Pedestrian Image Retrieval
Authors: Huafeng Li, Shedan Yang, Yafei Zhang, Dapeng Tao, Zhengtao Yu
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Text-Pedestrian Image Retrieval aims to use the text describing pedestrian appearance to retrieve the corresponding pedestrian image. This task involves not only modality discrepancy, but also the challenge of the textual diversity of pedestrians with the same identity. At present, although existing research progress has been made in text-pedestrian image retrieval, these methods do not comprehensively consider the above-mentioned problems. Considering these, this paper proposes a progressive feature mining and external knowledge-assisted feature purification method. Specifically, we use a progressive mining mode to enable the model to mine discriminative features from neglected information, thereby avoiding the loss of discriminative information and improving the expression ability of features. In addition, to further reduce the negative impact of modal discrepancy and text diversity on cross-modal matching, we propose to use other sample knowledge of the same modality, i.e., external knowledge to enhance identity-consistent features and weaken identity-inconsistent features. This process purifies features and alleviates the interference caused by textual diversity and negative sample correlation features of the same modal. Extensive experiments on three challenging datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method, and the retrieval performance even surpasses that of the large-scale model-based method on large-scale datasets.
RankMixup: Ranking-Based Mixup Training for Network Calibration
Authors: Jongyoun Noh, Hyekang Park, Junghyup Lee, Bumsub Ham
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1

Network calibration aims to accurately estimate the level of confidences, which is particularly important for employing deep neural networks in real-world systems. Recent approaches leverage mixup to calibrate the network's predictions during training. However, they do not consider the problem that mixtures of labels in mixup may not accurately represent the actual distribution of augmented samples. In this paper, we present RankMixup, a novel mixup-based framework alleviating the problem of the mixture of labels for network calibration. To this end, we propose to use an ordinal ranking relationship between raw and mixup-augmented samples as an alternative supervisory signal to the label mixtures for network calibration. We hypothesize that the network should estimate a higher level of confidence for the raw samples than the augmented ones (Fig.1). To implement this idea, we introduce a mixup-based ranking loss (MRL) that encourages lower confidences for augmented samples compared to raw ones, maintaining the ranking relationship. We also propose to leverage the ranking relationship among multiple mixup-augmented samples to further improve the calibration capability. Augmented samples with larger mixing coefficients are expected to have higher confidences and vice versa (Fig.1). That is, the order of confidences should be aligned with that of mixing coefficients. To this end, we introduce a novel loss, M-NDCG, in order to reduce the number of misaligned pairs of the coefficients and confidences. Extensive experimental results on standard benchmarks for network calibration demonstrate the effectiveness of RankMixup.
Multi-Modal Multi-Task (3MT) Road Segmentation
Authors: Erkan Milli, Özgür Erkent, Asım Egemen Yılmaz
Date: 2023-08-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Road Segmentation

Multi-modal systems have the capacity of producing more reliable results than systems with a single modality in road detection due to perceiving different aspects of the scene. We focus on using raw sensor inputs instead of, as it is typically done in many SOTA works, leveraging architectures that require high pre-processing costs such as surface normals or dense depth predictions. By using raw sensor inputs, we aim to utilize a low-cost model thatminimizes both the pre-processing andmodel computation costs. This study presents a cost-effective and highly accurate solution for road segmentation by integrating data from multiple sensorswithin a multi-task learning architecture.Afusion architecture is proposed in which RGB and LiDAR depth images constitute the inputs of the network. Another contribution of this study is to use IMU/GNSS (inertial measurement unit/global navigation satellite system) inertial navigation system whose data is collected synchronously and calibrated with a LiDAR-camera to compute aggregated dense LiDAR depth images. It has been demonstrated by experiments on the KITTI dataset that the proposed method offers fast and high-performance solutions. We have also shown the performance of our method on Cityscapes where raw LiDAR data is not available. The segmentation results obtained for both full and half resolution images are competitive with existing methods. Therefore, we conclude that our method is not dependent only on raw LiDAR data; rather, it can be used with different sensor modalities. The inference times obtained in all experiments are very promising for real-time experiments.