pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
cViL: Cross-Lingual Training of Vision-Language Models using Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Kshitij Gupta, Devansh Gautam, Radhika Mamidi
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Vision-and-language tasks are gaining popularity in the research community, but the focus is still mainly on English. We propose a pipeline that utilizes English-only vision-language models to train a monolingual model for a target language. We propose to extend OSCAR+, a model which leverages object tags as anchor points for learning image-text alignments, to train on visual question answering datasets in different languages. We propose a novel approach to knowledge distillation to train the model in other languages using parallel sentences. Compared to other models that use the target language in the pretraining corpora, we can leverage an existing English model to transfer the knowledge to the target language using significantly lesser resources. We also release a large-scale visual question answering dataset in Japanese and Hindi language. Though we restrict our work to visual question answering, our model can be extended to any sequence-level classification task, and it can be extended to other languages as well. This paper focuses on two languages for the visual question answering task - Japanese and Hindi. Our pipeline outperforms the current state-of-the-art models by a relative increase of 4.4% and 13.4% respectively in accuracy.
Parotid Gland MRI Segmentation Based on Swin-Unet and Multimodal Images
Authors: Zi'an Xu, Yin Dai, Fayu Liu, Siqi Li, Sheng Liu, Lifu Shi, Jun Fu
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: MRI segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Background and objective: Parotid gland tumors account for approximately 2% to 10% of head and neck tumors. Preoperative tumor localization, differential diagnosis, and subsequent selection of appropriate treatment for parotid gland tumors are critical. However, the relative rarity of these tumors and the highly dispersed tissue types have left an unmet need for a subtle differential diagnosis of such neoplastic lesions based on preoperative radiomics. Recently, deep learning methods have developed rapidly, especially Transformer beats the traditional convolutional neural network in computer vision. Many new Transformer-based networks have been proposed for computer vision tasks. Methods: In this study, multicenter multimodal parotid gland MR images were collected. The Swin-Unet which was based on Transformer was used. MR images of short time inversion recovery, T1-weighted and T2-weighted modalities were combined into three-channel data to train the network. We achieved segmentation of the region of interest for parotid gland and tumor. Results: The Dice-Similarity Coefficient of the model on the test set was 88.63%, Mean Pixel Accuracy was 99.31%, Mean Intersection over Union was 83.99%, and Hausdorff Distance was 3.04. Then a series of comparison experiments were designed in this paper to further validate the segmentation performance of the algorithm. Conclusions: Experimental results showed that our method has good results for parotid gland and tumor segmentation. The Transformer-based network outperforms the traditional convolutional neural network in the field of medical images.
Towards better Interpretable and Generalizable AD detection using Collective Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Huy-Dung Nguyen, Michaël Clément, Boris Mansencal, Pierrick Coupé
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

Alzheimer's Disease is the most common cause of dementia. Accurate diagnosis and prognosis of this disease are essential to design an appropriate treatment plan, increasing the life expectancy of the patient. Intense research has been conducted on the use of machine learning to identify Alzheimer's Disease from neuroimaging data, such as structural magnetic resonance imaging. In recent years, advances of deep learning in computer vision suggest a new research direction for this problem. Current deep learning-based approaches in this field, however, have a number of drawbacks, including the interpretability of model decisions, a lack of generalizability information and a lower performance compared to traditional machine learning techniques. In this paper, we design a two-stage framework to overcome these limitations. In the first stage, an ensemble of 125 U-Nets is used to grade the input image, producing a 3D map that reflects the disease severity at voxel-level. This map can help to localize abnormal brain areas caused by the disease. In the second stage, we model a graph per individual using the generated grading map and other information about the subject. We propose to use a graph convolutional neural network classifier for the final classification. As a result, our framework demonstrates comparative performance to the state-of-the-art methods in different datasets for both diagnosis and prognosis. We also demonstrate that the use of a large ensemble of U-Nets offers a better generalization capacity for our framework.
Deep Neural Patchworks: Coping with Large Segmentation Tasks
Authors: Marco Reisert, Maximilian Russe, Samer Elsheikh, Elias Kellner, Henrik Skibbe
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks are the way to solve arbitrary image segmentation tasks. However, when images are large, memory demands often exceed the available resources, in particular on a common GPU. Especially in biomedical imaging, where 3D images are common, the problems are apparent. A typical approach to solve this limitation is to break the task into smaller subtasks by dividing images into smaller image patches. Another approach, if applicable, is to look at the 2D image sections separately, and to solve the problem in 2D. Often, the loss of global context makes such approaches less effective; important global information might not be present in the current image patch, or the selected 2D image section. Here, we propose Deep Neural Patchworks (DNP), a segmentation framework that is based on hierarchical and nested stacking of patch-based networks that solves the dilemma between global context and memory limitations.
Improving Image Captioning with Control Signal of Sentence Quality
Authors: Zhangzi Zhu, Hong Qu
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Sentence

In the dataset of image captioning, each image is aligned with several descriptions. Despite the fact that the quality of these descriptions varies, existing captioning models treat them equally in the training process. In this paper, we propose a new control signal of sentence quality, which is taken as an additional input to the captioning model. By integrating the control signal information, captioning models are aware of the quality level of the target sentences and handle them differently. Moreover, we propose a novel reinforcement training method specially designed for the control signal of sentence quality: Quality-oriented Self-Annotated Training (Q-SAT). Extensive experiments on MSCOCO dataset show that without extra information from ground truth captions, models controlled by the highest quality level outperform baseline models on accuracy-based evaluation metrics, which validates the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Utility of Equivariant Message Passing in Cortical Mesh Segmentation
Authors: Dániel Unyi, Ferdinando Insalata, Petar Veličković, Bálint Gyires-Tóth
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis, Segmentation

The automated segmentation of cortical areas has been a long-standing challenge in medical image analysis. The complex geometry of the cortex is commonly represented as a polygon mesh, whose segmentation can be addressed by graph-based learning methods. When cortical meshes are misaligned across subjects, current methods produce significantly worse segmentation results, limiting their ability to handle multi-domain data. In this paper, we investigate the utility of E(n)-equivariant graph neural networks (EGNNs), comparing their performance against plain graph neural networks (GNNs). Our evaluation shows that GNNs outperform EGNNs on aligned meshes, due to their ability to leverage the presence of a global coordinate system. On misaligned meshes, the performance of plain GNNs drop considerably, while E(n)-equivariant message passing maintains the same segmentation results. The best results can also be obtained by using plain GNNs on realigned data (co-registered meshes in a global coordinate system).
Self-Training of Handwritten Word Recognition for Synthetic-to-Real Adaptation
Authors: Fabian Wolf, Gernot A. Fink
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwritten Text Recognition, HTR

Performances of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) models are largely determined by the availability of labeled and representative training samples. However, in many application scenarios labeled samples are scarce or costly to obtain. In this work, we propose a self-training approach to train a HTR model solely on synthetic samples and unlabeled data. The proposed training scheme uses an initial model trained on synthetic data to make predictions for the unlabeled target dataset. Starting from this initial model with rather poor performance, we show that a considerable adaptation is possible by training against the predicted pseudo-labels. Moreover, the investigated self-training strategy does not require any manually annotated training samples. We evaluate the proposed method on four widely used benchmark datasets and show its effectiveness on closing the gap to a model trained in a fully-supervised manner.
Wavelet Prior Attention Learning in Axial Inpainting Network
Authors: Chenjie Cao, Chengrong Wang, Yuntao Zhang, Yanwei Fu
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Inpainting, Semantic Segmentation

Image inpainting is the task of filling masked or unknown regions of an image with visually realistic contents, which has been remarkably improved by Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) recently. Essentially, as an inverse problem, the inpainting has the underlying challenges of reconstructing semantically coherent results without texture artifacts. Many previous efforts have been made via exploiting attention mechanisms and prior knowledge, such as edges and semantic segmentation. However, these works are still limited in practice by an avalanche of learnable prior parameters and prohibitive computational burden. To this end, we propose a novel model -- Wavelet prior attention learning in Axial Inpainting Network (WAIN), whose generator contains the encoder, decoder, as well as two key components of Wavelet image Prior Attention (WPA) and stacked multi-layer Axial-Transformers (ATs). Particularly, the WPA guides the high-level feature aggregation in the multi-scale frequency domain, alleviating the textual artifacts. Stacked ATs employ unmasked clues to help model reasonable features along with low-level features of horizontal and vertical axes, improving the semantic coherence. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on Celeba-HQ and Places2 datasets are conducted to validate that our WAIN can achieve state-of-the-art performance over the competitors. The codes and models will be released.
Medical Image Registration via Neural Fields
Authors: Shanlin Sun, Kun Han, Chenyu You, Hao Tang, Deying Kong, Junayed Naushad, Xiangyi Yan, Haoyu Ma, Pooya Khosravi, James S. Duncan, Xiaohui Xie
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Registration, Model Optimization

Image registration is an essential step in many medical image analysis tasks. Traditional methods for image registration are primarily optimization-driven, finding the optimal deformations that maximize the similarity between two images. Recent learning-based methods, trained to directly predict transformations between two images, run much faster, but suffer from performance deficiencies due to model generalization and the inefficiency in handling individual image specific deformations. Here we present a new neural net based image registration framework, called NIR (Neural Image Registration), which is based on optimization but utilizes deep neural nets to model deformations between image pairs. NIR represents the transformation between two images with a continuous function implemented via neural fields, receiving a 3D coordinate as input and outputting the corresponding deformation vector. NIR provides two ways of generating deformation field: directly output a displacement vector field for general deformable registration, or output a velocity vector field and integrate the velocity field to derive the deformation field for diffeomorphic image registration. The optimal registration is discovered by updating the parameters of the neural field via stochastic gradient descent. We describe several design choices that facilitate model optimization, including coordinate encoding, sinusoidal activation, coordinate sampling, and intensity sampling. Experiments on two 3D MR brain scan datasets demonstrate that NIR yields state-of-the-art performance in terms of both registration accuracy and regularity, while running significantly faster than traditional optimization-based methods.
Dual Swin-Transformer based Mutual Interactive Network for RGB-D Salient Object Detection
Authors: Chao Zeng, Sam Kwong
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, RGB-D Salient Object Detection, Saliency Prediction, Salient Object Detection

Salient Object Detection is the task of predicting the human attended region in a given scene. Fusing depth information has been proven effective in this task. The main challenge of this problem is how to aggregate the complementary information from RGB modality and depth modality. However, conventional deep models heavily rely on CNN feature extractors, and the long-range contextual dependencies are usually ignored. In this work, we propose Dual Swin-Transformer based Mutual Interactive Network. We adopt Swin-Transformer as the feature extractor for both RGB and depth modality to model the long-range dependencies in visual inputs. Before fusing the two branches of features into one, attention-based modules are applied to enhance features from each modality. We design a self-attention-based cross-modality interaction module and a gated modality attention module to leverage the complementary information between the two modalities. For the saliency decoding, we create different stages enhanced with dense connections and keep a decoding memory while the multi-level encoding features are considered simultaneously. Considering the inaccurate depth map issue, we collect the RGB features of early stages into a skip convolution module to give more guidance from RGB modality to the final saliency prediction. In addition, we add edge supervision to regularize the feature learning process. Comprehensive experiments on five standard RGB-D SOD benchmark datasets over four evaluation metrics demonstrate the superiority of the proposed DTMINet method.
Critical Regularizations for Neural Surface Reconstruction in the Wild
Authors: Jingyang Zhang, Yao Yao, Shiwei Li, Tian Fang, David McKinnon, Yanghai Tsin, Long Quan
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2022 1
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

Neural implicit functions have recently shown promising results on surface reconstructions from multiple views. However, current methods still suffer from excessive time complexity and poor robustness when reconstructing unbounded or complex scenes. In this paper, we present RegSDF, which shows that proper point cloud supervisions and geometry regularizations are sufficient to produce high-quality and robust reconstruction results. Specifically, RegSDF takes an additional oriented point cloud as input, and optimizes a signed distance field and a surface light field within a differentiable rendering framework. We also introduce the two critical regularizations for this optimization. The first one is the Hessian regularization that smoothly diffuses the signed distance values to the entire distance field given noisy and incomplete input. And the second one is the minimal surface regularization that compactly interpolates and extrapolates the missing geometry. Extensive experiments are conducted on DTU, BlendedMVS, and Tanks and Temples datasets. Compared with recent neural surface reconstruction approaches, RegSDF is able to reconstruct surfaces with fine details even for open scenes with complex topologies and unstructured camera trajectories.
Online Deep Clustering with Video Track Consistency
Authors: Alessandra Alfani, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Seidenari, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Deep Clustering, Object

Several unsupervised and self-supervised approaches have been developed in recent years to learn visual features from large-scale unlabeled datasets. Their main drawback however is that these methods are hardly able to recognize visual features of the same object if it is simply rotated or the perspective of the camera changes. To overcome this limitation and at the same time exploit a useful source of supervision, we take into account video object tracks. Following the intuition that two patches in a track should have similar visual representations in a learned feature space, we adopt an unsupervised clustering-based approach and constrain such representations to be labeled as the same category since they likely belong to the same object or object part. Experimental results on two downstream tasks on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our Online Deep Clustering with Video Track Consistency (ODCT) approach compared to prior work, which did not leverage temporal information. In addition we show that exploiting an unsupervised class-agnostic, yet noisy, track generator yields to better accuracy compared to relying on costly and precise track annotations.
Pushing the Limits of Learning-based Traversability Analysis for Autonomous Driving on CPU
Authors: Daniel Fusaro, Emilio Olivastri, Daniele Evangelista, Marco Imperoli, Emanuele Menegatti, Alberto Pretto
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, CPU

Self-driving vehicles and autonomous ground robots require a reliable and accurate method to analyze the traversability of the surrounding environment for safe navigation. This paper proposes and evaluates a real-time machine learning-based Traversability Analysis method that combines geometric features with appearance-based features in a hybrid approach based on a SVM classifier. In particular, we show that integrating a new set of geometric and visual features and focusing on important implementation details enables a noticeable boost in performance and reliability. The proposed approach has been compared with state-of-the-art Deep Learning approaches on a public dataset of outdoor driving scenarios. It reaches an accuracy of 89.2% in scenarios of varying complexity, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness. The method runs fully on CPU and reaches comparable results with respect to the other methods, operates faster, and requires fewer hardware resources.
Recent Advances for Quantum Neural Networks in Generative Learning
Authors: Jinkai Tian, Xiaoyu Sun, Yuxuan Du, Shanshan Zhao, Qing Liu, Kaining Zhang, Wei Yi, Wanrong Huang, Chaoyue Wang, Xingyao Wu, Min-Hsiu Hsieh, Tongliang Liu, Wenjing Yang, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Quantum Machine Learning

Quantum computers are next-generation devices that hold promise to perform calculations beyond the reach of classical computers. A leading method towards achieving this goal is through quantum machine learning, especially quantum generative learning. Due to the intrinsic probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, it is reasonable to postulate that quantum generative learning models (QGLMs) may surpass their classical counterparts. As such, QGLMs are receiving growing attention from the quantum physics and computer science communities, where various QGLMs that can be efficiently implemented on near-term quantum machines with potential computational advantages are proposed. In this paper, we review the current progress of QGLMs from the perspective of machine learning. Particularly, we interpret these QGLMs, covering quantum circuit born machines, quantum generative adversarial networks, quantum Boltzmann machines, and quantum autoencoders, as the quantum extension of classical generative learning models. In this context, we explore their intrinsic relation and their fundamental differences. We further summarize the potential applications of QGLMs in both conventional machine learning tasks and quantum physics. Last, we discuss the challenges and further research directions for QGLMs.
A Simple and Efficient Pipeline to Build an End-to-End Spatial-Temporal Action Detector
Authors: Lin Sui, Chen-Lin Zhang, Lixin Gu, Feng Han
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Detection, Video Understanding

Spatial-temporal action detection is a vital part of video understanding. Current spatial-temporal action detection methods mostly use an object detector to obtain person candidates and classify these person candidates into different action categories. So-called two-stage methods are heavy and hard to apply in real-world applications. Some existing methods build one-stage pipelines, But a large performance drop exists with the vanilla one-stage pipeline and extra classification modules are needed to achieve comparable performance. In this paper, we explore a simple and effective pipeline to build a strong one-stage spatial-temporal action detector. The pipeline is composed by two parts: one is a simple end-to-end spatial-temporal action detector. The proposed end-to-end detector has minor architecture changes to current proposal-based detectors and does not add extra action classification modules. The other part is a novel labeling strategy to utilize unlabeled frames in sparse annotated data. We named our model as SE-STAD. The proposed SE-STAD achieves around 2% mAP boost and around 80% FLOPs reduction. Our code will be released at https://github.com/4paradigm-CV/SE-STAD.
Object Scan Context: Object-centric Spatial Descriptor for Place Recognition within 3D Point Cloud Map
Authors: Haodong Yuan, Yudong Zhang, Shengyin Fan, Xue Li, Jian Wang
Date: 2022-06-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

The integration of a SLAM algorithm with place recognition technology empowers it with the ability to mitigate accumulated errors and to relocalize itself. However, existing methods for point cloud-based place recognition predominantly rely on the matching of descriptors, which are mostly lidar-centric. These methods suffer from two major drawbacks: first, they cannot perform place recognition when the distance between two point clouds is significant, and second, they can only calculate the rotation angle without considering the offset in the X and Y directions. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel local descriptor that is constructed around the Main Object. By using a geometric method, we can accurately calculate the relative pose. We have provided a theoretical analysis to demonstrate that this method can overcome the aforementioned limitations. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments on KITTI Odometry and KITTI360, which indicate that our proposed method has significant advantages over state-of-the-art methods.