pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Prompt-guided Scene Generation for 3D Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Majid Nasiri, Ali Cheraghian, Townim Faisal Chowdhury, Sahar Ahmadi, Morteza Saberi, Shafin Rahman
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Scene Generation, Zero-Shot Learning

Zero-shot learning on 3D point cloud data is a related underexplored problem compared to its 2D image counterpart. 3D data brings new challenges for ZSL due to the unavailability of robust pre-trained feature extraction models. To address this problem, we propose a prompt-guided 3D scene generation and supervision method that augments 3D data to learn the network better, exploring the complex interplay of seen and unseen objects. First, we merge point clouds of two 3D models in certain ways described by a prompt. The prompt acts like the annotation describing each 3D scene. Later, we perform contrastive learning to train our proposed architecture in an end-to-end manner. We argue that 3D scenes can relate objects more efficiently than single objects because popular language models (like BERT) can achieve high performance when objects appear in a context. Our proposed prompt-guided scene generation method encapsulates data augmentation and prompt-based annotation/captioning to improve 3D ZSL performance. We have achieved state-of-the-art ZSL and generalized ZSL performance on synthetic (ModelNet40, ModelNet10) and real-scanned (ScanOjbectNN) 3D object datasets.
Correlated Feature Aggregation by Region Helps Distinguish Aggressive from Indolent Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma Subtypes on CT
Authors: Karin Stacke, Indrani Bhattacharya, Justin R. Tse, James D. Brooks, Geoffrey A. Sonn, Mirabela Rusu
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification

Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is a common cancer that varies in clinical behavior. Indolent RCC is often low-grade without necrosis and can be monitored without treatment. Aggressive RCC is often high-grade and can cause metastasis and death if not promptly detected and treated. While most kidney cancers are detected on CT scans, grading is based on histology from invasive biopsy or surgery. Determining aggressiveness on CT images is clinically important as it facilitates risk stratification and treatment planning. This study aims to use machine learning methods to identify radiology features that correlate with features on pathology to facilitate assessment of cancer aggressiveness on CT images instead of histology. This paper presents a novel automated method, Correlated Feature Aggregation By Region (CorrFABR), for classifying aggressiveness of clear cell RCC by leveraging correlations between radiology and corresponding unaligned pathology images. CorrFABR consists of three main steps: (1) Feature Aggregation where region-level features are extracted from radiology and pathology images, (2) Fusion where radiology features correlated with pathology features are learned on a region level, and (3) Prediction where the learned correlated features are used to distinguish aggressive from indolent clear cell RCC using CT alone as input. Thus, during training, CorrFABR learns from both radiology and pathology images, but during inference, CorrFABR will distinguish aggressive from indolent clear cell RCC using CT alone, in the absence of pathology images. CorrFABR improved classification performance over radiology features alone, with an increase in binary classification F1-score from 0.68 (0.04) to 0.73 (0.03). This demonstrates the potential of incorporating pathology disease characteristics for improved classification of aggressiveness of clear cell RCC on CT images.
Increasing Model Generalizability for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Mohammad Rostami
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, model, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

A dominant approach for addressing unsupervised domain adaptation is to map data points for the source and the target domains into an embedding space which is modeled as the output-space of a shared deep encoder. The encoder is trained to make the embedding space domain-agnostic to make a source-trained classifier generalizable on the target domain. A secondary mechanism to improve UDA performance further is to make the source domain distribution more compact to improve model generalizability. We demonstrate that increasing the interclass margins in the embedding space can help to develop a UDA algorithm with improved performance. We estimate the internally learned multi-modal distribution for the source domain, learned as a result of pretraining, and use it to increase the interclass class separation in the source domain to reduce the effect of domain shift. We demonstrate that using our approach leads to improved model generalizability on four standard benchmark UDA image classification datasets and compares favorably against exiting methods.
Is Complexity Required for Neural Network Pruning? A Case Study on Global Magnitude Pruning
Authors: Manas Gupta, Efe Camci, Vishandi Rudy Keneta, Abhishek Vaidyanathan, Ritwik Kanodia, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Wu Min, Lin Jie
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

Pruning neural networks has become popular in the last decade when it was shown that a large number of weights can be safely removed from modern neural networks without compromising accuracy. Numerous pruning methods have been proposed since, each claiming to be better than prior art, however, at the cost of increasingly complex pruning methodologies. These methodologies include utilizing importance scores, getting feedback through back-propagation or having heuristics-based pruning rules amongst others. In this work, we question whether this pattern of introducing complexity is really necessary to achieve better pruning results. We benchmark these SOTA techniques against a simple pruning baseline, namely, Global Magnitude Pruning (Global MP), that ranks weights in order of their magnitudes and prunes the smallest ones. Surprisingly, we find that vanilla Global MP performs very well against the SOTA techniques. When considering sparsity-accuracy trade-off, Global MP performs better than all SOTA techniques at all sparsity ratios. When considering FLOPs-accuracy trade-off, some SOTA techniques outperform Global MP at lower sparsity ratios, however, Global MP starts performing well at high sparsity ratios and performs very well at extremely high sparsity ratios. Moreover, we find that a common issue that many pruning algorithms run into at high sparsity rates, namely, layer-collapse, can be easily fixed in Global MP. We explore why layer collapse occurs in networks and how it can be mitigated in Global MP by utilizing a technique called Minimum Threshold. We showcase the above findings on various models (WRN-28-8, ResNet-32, ResNet-50, MobileNet-V1 and FastGRNN) and multiple datasets (CIFAR-10, ImageNet and HAR-2). Code is available at https://github.com/manasgupta-1/GlobalMP.
Spherical Image Inpainting with Frame Transformation and Data-driven Prior Deep Networks
Authors: Jianfei Li, Chaoyan Huang, Raymond Chan, Han Feng, Micheal Ng, Tieyong Zeng
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Inpainting

Spherical image processing has been widely applied in many important fields, such as omnidirectional vision for autonomous cars, global climate modelling, and medical imaging. It is non-trivial to extend an algorithm developed for flat images to the spherical ones. In this work, we focus on the challenging task of spherical image inpainting with deep learning-based regularizer. Instead of a naive application of existing models for planar images, we employ a fast directional spherical Haar framelet transform and develop a novel optimization framework based on a sparsity assumption of the framelet transform. Furthermore, by employing progressive encoder-decoder architecture, a new and better-performed deep CNN denoiser is carefully designed and works as an implicit regularizer. Finally, we use a plug-and-play method to handle the proposed optimization model, which can be implemented efficiently by training the CNN denoiser prior. Numerical experiments are conducted and show that the proposed algorithms can greatly recover damaged spherical images and achieve the best performance over purely using deep learning denoiser and plug-and-play model.
Dataset Distillation for Medical Dataset Sharing
Authors: Guang Li, Ren Togo, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Distillation

Sharing medical datasets between hospitals is challenging because of the privacy-protection problem and the massive cost of transmitting and storing many high-resolution medical images. However, dataset distillation can synthesize a small dataset such that models trained on it achieve comparable performance with the original large dataset, which shows potential for solving the existing medical sharing problems. Hence, this paper proposes a novel dataset distillation-based method for medical dataset sharing. Experimental results on a COVID-19 chest X-ray image dataset show that our method can achieve high detection performance even using scarce anonymized chest X-ray images.
Uncertainty Estimation for 3D Dense Prediction via Cross-Point Embeddings
Authors: Kaiwen Cai, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Xiaowei Huang
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Prediction, Semantic Segmentation

Dense prediction tasks are common for 3D point clouds, but the uncertainties inherent in massive points and their embeddings have long been ignored. In this work, we present CUE, a novel uncertainty estimation method for dense prediction tasks in 3D point clouds. Inspired by metric learning, the key idea of CUE is to explore cross-point embeddings upon a conventional 3D dense prediction pipeline. Specifically, CUE involves building a probabilistic embedding model and then enforcing metric alignments of massive points in the embedding space. We also propose CUE+, which enhances CUE by explicitly modeling crosspoint dependencies in the covariance matrix. We demonstrate that both CUE and CUE+ are generic and effective for uncertainty estimation in 3D point clouds with two different tasks: (1) in 3D geometric feature learning we for the first time obtain wellcalibrated uncertainty, and (2) in semantic segmentation we reduce uncertainty's Expected Calibration Error of the state-of-the-arts by 16.5%. All uncertainties are estimated without compromising predictive performance.
Online pseudo labeling for polyp segmentation with momentum networks
Authors: Toan Pham Van, Linh Bao Doan, Thanh Tung Nguyen, Duc Trung Tran, Quan Van Nguyen, Dinh Viet Sang
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is an essential task in developing medical image diagnosis systems. However, building an annotated medical dataset is expensive. Thus, semi-supervised methods are significant in this circumstance. In semi-supervised learning, the quality of labels plays a crucial role in model performance. In this work, we present a new pseudo labeling strategy that enhances the quality of pseudo labels used for training student networks. We follow the multi-stage semi-supervised training approach, which trains a teacher model on a labeled dataset and then uses the trained teacher to render pseudo labels for student training. By doing so, the pseudo labels will be updated and more precise as training progress. The key difference between previous and our methods is that we update the teacher model during the student training process. So the quality of pseudo labels is improved during the student training process. We also propose a simple but effective strategy to enhance the quality of pseudo labels using a momentum model -- a slow copy version of the original model during training. By applying the momentum model combined with re-rendering pseudo labels during student training, we achieved an average of 84.1% Dice Score on five datasets (i.e., Kvarsir, CVC-ClinicDB, ETIS-LaribPolypDB, CVC-ColonDB, and CVC-300) with only 20% of the dataset used as labeled data. Our results surpass common practice by 3% and even approach fully-supervised results on some datasets. Our source code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/sun-asterisk-research/online learning ssl
Denoising MCMC for Accelerating Diffusion-Based Generative Models
Authors: Beomsu Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Diffusion models are powerful generative models that simulate the reverse of diffusion processes using score functions to synthesize data from noise. The sampling process of diffusion models can be interpreted as solving the reverse stochastic differential equation (SDE) or the ordinary differential equation (ODE) of the diffusion process, which often requires up to thousands of discretization steps to generate a single image. This has sparked a great interest in developing efficient integration techniques for reverse-S/ODEs. Here, we propose an orthogonal approach to accelerating score-based sampling: Denoising MCMC (DMCMC). DMCMC first uses MCMC to produce samples in the product space of data and variance (or diffusion time). Then, a reverse-S/ODE integrator is used to denoise the MCMC samples. Since MCMC traverses close to the data manifold, the computation cost of producing a clean sample for DMCMC is much less than that of producing a clean sample from noise. To verify the proposed concept, we show that Denoising Langevin Gibbs (DLG), an instance of DMCMC, successfully accelerates all six reverse-S/ODE integrators considered in this work on the tasks of CIFAR10 and CelebA-HQ-256 image generation. Notably, combined with integrators of Karras et al. (2022) and pre-trained score models of Song et al. (2021b), DLG achieves SOTA results. In the limited number of score function evaluation (NFE) settings on CIFAR10, we have $3.86$ FID with $\approx 10$ NFE and $2.63$ FID with $\approx 20$ NFE. On CelebA-HQ-256, we have $6.99$ FID with $\approx 160$ NFE, which beats the current best record of Kim et al. (2022) among score-based models, $7.16$ FID with $4000$ NFE. Code: https://github.com/1202kbs/DMCMC
PerSign: Personalized Bangladeshi Sign Letters Synthesis
Authors: Mohammad Imrul Jubair, Ali Ahnaf, Tashfiq Nahiyan Khan, Ullash Bhattacharjee, Tanjila Joti
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Bangladeshi Sign Language (BdSL) - like other sign languages - is tough to learn for general people, especially when it comes to expressing letters. In this poster, we propose PerSign, a system that can reproduce a person's image by introducing sign gestures in it. We make this operation personalized, which means the generated image keeps the person's initial image profile - face, skin tone, attire, background - unchanged while altering the hand, palm, and finger positions appropriately. We use an image-to-image translation technique and build a corresponding unique dataset to accomplish the task. We believe the translated image can reduce the communication gap between signers (person who uses sign language) and non-signers without having prior knowledge of BdSL.
Spatial Moment Pooling Improves Neural Image Assessment
Authors: Tongda Xu, Yifan Shao, Yan Wang, Hongwei Qin
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Quality Assessment, Image Quality Assessment

In recent years, there has been widespread attention drawn to convolutional neural network (CNN) based blind image quality assessment (IQA). A large number of works start by extracting deep features from CNN. Then, those features are processed through spatial average pooling (SAP) and fully connected layers to predict quality. Inspired by full reference IQA and texture features, in this paper, we extend SAP ($1^{st}$ moment) into spatial moment pooling (SMP) by incorporating higher order moments (such as variance, skewness). Moreover, we provide learning friendly normalization to circumvent numerical issue when computing gradients of higher moments. Experimental results suggest that simply upgrading SAP to SMP significantly enhances CNN-based blind IQA methods and achieves state of the art performance.
Correcting the Sub-optimal Bit Allocation
Authors: Tongda Xu, Han Gao, Yuanyuan Wang, Hongwei Qin, Yan Wang, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Variational Inference, Video Compression

In this paper, we investigate the problem of bit allocation in Neural Video Compression (NVC). First, we reveal that a recent bit allocation approach claimed to be optimal is, in fact, sub-optimal due to its implementation. Specifically, we find that its sub-optimality lies in the improper application of semi-amortized variational inference (SAVI) on latent with non-factorized variational posterior. Then, we show that the corrected version of SAVI on non-factorized latent requires recursively applying back-propagating through gradient ascent, based on which we derive the corrected optimal bit allocation algorithm. Due to the computational in-feasibility of the corrected bit allocation, we design an efficient approximation to make it practical. Empirical results show that our proposed correction significantly improves the incorrect bit allocation in terms of R-D performance and bitrate error, and outperforms all other bit allocation methods by a large margin. The source code is provided in the supplementary material.
Diffusion Adversarial Representation Learning for Self-supervised Vessel Segmentation
Authors: Boah Kim, Yujin Oh, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Representation Learning, Segmentation

Vessel segmentation in medical images is one of the important tasks in the diagnosis of vascular diseases and therapy planning. Although learning-based segmentation approaches have been extensively studied, a large amount of ground-truth labels are required in supervised methods and confusing background structures make neural networks hard to segment vessels in an unsupervised manner. To address this, here we introduce a novel diffusion adversarial representation learning (DARL) model that leverages a denoising diffusion probabilistic model with adversarial learning, and apply it to vessel segmentation. In particular, for self-supervised vessel segmentation, DARL learns the background signal using a diffusion module, which lets a generation module effectively provide vessel representations. Also, by adversarial learning based on the proposed switchable spatially-adaptive denormalization, our model estimates synthetic fake vessel images as well as vessel segmentation masks, which further makes the model capture vessel-relevant semantic information. Once the proposed model is trained, the model generates segmentation masks in a single step and can be applied to general vascular structure segmentation of coronary angiography and retinal images. Experimental results on various datasets show that our method significantly outperforms existing unsupervised and self-supervised vessel segmentation methods.
NAF: Neural Attenuation Fields for Sparse-View CBCT Reconstruction
Authors: Ruyi Zha, Yanhao Zhang, Hongdong Li
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Low-Dose X-Ray Ct Reconstruction, Novel View Synthesis

This paper proposes a novel and fast self-supervised solution for sparse-view CBCT reconstruction (Cone Beam Computed Tomography) that requires no external training data. Specifically, the desired attenuation coefficients are represented as a continuous function of 3D spatial coordinates, parameterized by a fully-connected deep neural network. We synthesize projections discretely and train the network by minimizing the error between real and synthesized projections. A learning-based encoder entailing hash coding is adopted to help the network capture high-frequency details. This encoder outperforms the commonly used frequency-domain encoder in terms of having higher performance and efficiency, because it exploits the smoothness and sparsity of human organs. Experiments have been conducted on both human organ and phantom datasets. The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and spends reasonably short computation time.
Self-Configurable Stabilized Real-Time Detection Learning for Autonomous Driving Applications
Authors: Won Joon Yun, Soohyun Park, Joongheon Kim, David Mohaisen
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Flow Estimation, Real-Time Object Detection

Guaranteeing real-time and accurate object detection simultaneously is paramount in autonomous driving environments. However, the existing object detection neural network systems are characterized by a tradeoff between computation time and accuracy, making it essential to optimize such a tradeoff. Fortunately, in many autonomous driving environments, images come in a continuous form, providing an opportunity to use optical flow. In this paper, we improve the performance of an object detection neural network utilizing optical flow estimation. In addition, we propose a Lyapunov optimization framework for time-average performance maximization subject to stability. It adaptively determines whether to use optical flow to suit the dynamic vehicle environment, thereby ensuring the vehicle's queue stability and the time-average maximum performance simultaneously. To verify the key ideas, we conduct numerical experiments with various object detection neural networks and optical flow estimation networks. In addition, we demonstrate the self-configurable stabilized detection with YOLOv3-tiny and FlowNet2-S, which are the real-time object detection network and an optical flow estimation network, respectively. In the demonstration, our proposed framework improves the accuracy by 3.02%, the number of detected objects by 59.6%, and the queue stability for computing capabilities.
NVRadarNet: Real-Time Radar Obstacle and Free Space Detection for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Alexander Popov, Patrik Gebhardt, Ke Chen, Ryan Oldja, Heeseok Lee, Shane Murray, Ruchi Bhargava, Nikolai Smolyanskiy
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, GPU

Detecting obstacles is crucial for safe and efficient autonomous driving. To this end, we present NVRadarNet, a deep neural network (DNN) that detects dynamic obstacles and drivable free space using automotive RADAR sensors. The network utilizes temporally accumulated data from multiple RADAR sensors to detect dynamic obstacles and compute their orientation in a top-down bird's-eye view (BEV). The network also regresses drivable free space to detect unclassified obstacles. Our DNN is the first of its kind to utilize sparse RADAR signals in order to perform obstacle and free space detection in real time from RADAR data only. The network has been successfully used for perception on our autonomous vehicles in real self-driving scenarios. The network runs faster than real time on an embedded GPU and shows good generalization across geographic regions.
Teaching Where to Look: Attention Similarity Knowledge Distillation for Low Resolution Face Recognition
Authors: Sungho Shin, Joosoon Lee, Junseok Lee, Yeonguk Yu, Kyoobin Lee
Date: 2022-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Knowledge Distillation

Deep learning has achieved outstanding performance for face recognition benchmarks, but performance reduces significantly for low resolution (LR) images. We propose an attention similarity knowledge distillation approach, which transfers attention maps obtained from a high resolution (HR) network as a teacher into an LR network as a student to boost LR recognition performance. Inspired by humans being able to approximate an object's region from an LR image based on prior knowledge obtained from HR images, we designed the knowledge distillation loss using the cosine similarity to make the student network's attention resemble the teacher network's attention. Experiments on various LR face related benchmarks confirmed the proposed method generally improved recognition performances on LR settings, outperforming state-of-the-art results by simply transferring well-constructed attention maps. The code and pretrained models are publicly available in the https://github.com/gist-ailab/teaching-where-to-look.