pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Application of deep and reinforcement learning to boundary control problems
Authors: Zenin Easa Panthakkalakath, Juraj Kardoš, Olaf Schenk
Date: 2023-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

The boundary control problem is a non-convex optimization and control problem in many scientific domains, including fluid mechanics, structural engineering, and heat transfer optimization. The aim is to find the optimal values for the domain boundaries such that the enclosed domain adhering to the governing equations attains the desired state values. Traditionally, non-linear optimization methods, such as the Interior-Point method (IPM), are used to solve such problems. This project explores the possibilities of using deep learning and reinforcement learning to solve boundary control problems. We adhere to the framework of iterative optimization strategies, employing a spatial neural network to construct well-informed initial guesses, and a spatio-temporal neural network learns the iterative optimization algorithm using policy gradients. Synthetic data, generated from the problems formulated in the literature, is used for training, testing and validation. The numerical experiments indicate that the proposed method can rival the speed and accuracy of existing solvers. In our preliminary results, the network attains costs lower than IPOPT, a state-of-the-art non-linear IPM, in 51\% cases. The overall number of floating point operations in the proposed method is similar to that of IPOPT. Additionally, the informed initial guess method and the learned momentum-like behaviour in the optimizer method are incorporated to avoid convergence to local minima.
Deep Learning Approaches for Dynamic Mechanical Analysis of Viscoelastic Fiber Composites
Authors: Victor Hoffmann, Ilias Nahmed, Parisa Rastin, Guénaël Cabanes, Julien Boisse
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00

The increased adoption of reinforced polymer (RP) composite materials, driven by eco-design standards, calls for a fine balance between lightness, stiffness, and effective vibration control. These materials are integral to enhancing comfort, safety, and energy efficiency. Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) characterizes viscoelastic behavior, yet there's a growing interest in using Machine Learning (ML) to expedite the design and understanding of microstructures. In this paper we aim to map microstructures to their mechanical properties using deep neural networks, speeding up the process and allowing for the generation of microstructures from desired properties.
From Posterior Sampling to Meaningful Diversity in Image Restoration
Authors: Noa Cohen, Hila Manor, Yuval Bahat, Tomer Michaeli
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Restoration

Image restoration problems are typically ill-posed in the sense that each degraded image can be restored in infinitely many valid ways. To accommodate this, many works generate a diverse set of outputs by attempting to randomly sample from the posterior distribution of natural images given the degraded input. Here we argue that this strategy is commonly of limited practical value because of the heavy tail of the posterior distribution. Consider for example inpainting a missing region of the sky in an image. Since there is a high probability that the missing region contains no object but clouds, any set of samples from the posterior would be entirely dominated by (practically identical) completions of sky. However, arguably, presenting users with only one clear sky completion, along with several alternative solutions such as airships, birds, and balloons, would better outline the set of possibilities. In this paper, we initiate the study of meaningfully diverse image restoration. We explore several post-processing approaches that can be combined with any diverse image restoration method to yield semantically meaningful diversity. Moreover, we propose a practical approach for allowing diffusion based image restoration methods to generate meaningfully diverse outputs, while incurring only negligent computational overhead. We conduct extensive user studies to analyze the proposed techniques, and find the strategy of reducing similarity between outputs to be significantly favorable over posterior sampling. Code and examples are available at https://noa-cohen.github.io/MeaningfulDiversityInIR.
Towards Perceiving Small Visual Details in Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Multimodal LLMs
Authors: Jiarui Zhang, Mahyar Khayatkhoei, Prateek Chhikara, Filip Ilievski
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have recently achieved promising zero-shot accuracy on visual question answering (VQA) -- a fundamental task affecting various downstream applications and domains. Given the great potential for the broad use of these models, it is important to investigate their limitations in dealing with different image and question properties. In this work, we investigate whether MLLMs can perceive small details as well as large details in images. In particular, we show that their zero-shot accuracy in answering visual questions is very sensitive to the size of the visual subject of the question, declining up to 46% with size. Furthermore, we show that this effect is causal by observing that human visual cropping can significantly mitigate their sensitivity to size. Inspired by the usefulness of human cropping, we then propose five automatic visual cropping methods -- leveraging either external localization models or the decision process of the given MLLM itself -- as inference time mechanisms to improve the zero-shot performance of MLLMs. We study their effectiveness on four popular VQA datasets, and a subset of the VQAv2 dataset tailored towards fine visual details. Our findings suggest that MLLMs should be used with caution in detail-sensitive VQA applications, and that visual cropping is a promising direction to improve their zero-shot performance. To facilitate further investigation of MLLMs' behaviors, our code and data are publicly released.
ConvBKI: Real-Time Probabilistic Semantic Mapping Network with Quantifiable Uncertainty
Authors: Joey Wilson, Yuewei Fu, Joshua Friesen, Parker Ewen, Andrew Capodieci, Paramsothy Jayakumar, Kira Barton, Maani Ghaffari
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we develop a modular neural network for real-time {\color{black}(> 10 Hz)} semantic mapping in uncertain environments, which explicitly updates per-voxel probabilistic distributions within a neural network layer. Our approach combines the reliability of classical probabilistic algorithms with the performance and efficiency of modern neural networks. Although robotic perception is often divided between modern differentiable methods and classical explicit methods, a union of both is necessary for real-time and trustworthy performance. We introduce a novel Convolutional Bayesian Kernel Inference (ConvBKI) layer which incorporates semantic segmentation predictions online into a 3D map through a depthwise convolution layer by leveraging conjugate priors. We compare ConvBKI against state-of-the-art deep learning approaches and probabilistic algorithms for mapping to evaluate reliability and performance. We also create a Robot Operating System (ROS) package of ConvBKI and test it on real-world perceptually challenging off-road driving data.
CVPR 2023 Text Guided Video Editing Competition
Authors: Jay Zhangjie Wu, Xiuyu Li, Difei Gao, Zhen Dong, Jinbin Bai, Aishani Singh, Xiaoyu Xiang, Youzeng Li, Zuwei Huang, Yuanxi Sun, Rui He, Feng Hu, Junhua Hu, Hai Huang, Hanyu Zhu, Xu Cheng, Jie Tang, Mike Zheng Shou, Kurt Keutzer, Forrest Iandola
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Editing, Video Generation

Humans watch more than a billion hours of video per day. Most of this video was edited manually, which is a tedious process. However, AI-enabled video-generation and video-editing is on the rise. Building on text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion and Imagen, generative AI has improved dramatically on video tasks. But it's hard to evaluate progress in these video tasks because there is no standard benchmark. So, we propose a new dataset for text-guided video editing (TGVE), and we run a competition at CVPR to evaluate models on our TGVE dataset. In this paper we present a retrospective on the competition and describe the winning method. The competition dataset is available at https://sites.google.com/view/loveucvpr23/track4.
Integrating View Conditions for Image Synthesis
Authors: Jinbin Bai, Zhen Dong, Aosong Feng, Xiao Zhang, Tian Ye, Kaicheng Zhou
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Object

In the field of image processing, applying intricate semantic modifications within existing images remains an enduring challenge. This paper introduces a pioneering framework that integrates viewpoint information to enhance the control of image editing tasks, especially for interior design scenes. By surveying existing object editing methodologies, we distill three essential criteria -- consistency, controllability, and harmony -- that should be met for an image editing method. In contrast to previous approaches, our framework takes the lead in satisfying all three requirements for addressing the challenge of image synthesis. Through comprehensive experiments, encompassing both quantitative assessments and qualitative comparisons with contemporary state-of-the-art methods, we present compelling evidence of our framework's superior performance across multiple dimensions. This work establishes a promising avenue for advancing image synthesis techniques and empowering precise object modifications while preserving the visual coherence of the entire composition.
Vision-Language Pseudo-Labels for Single-Positive Multi-Label Learning
Authors: Xin Xing, Zhexiao Xiong, Abby Stylianou, Srikumar Sastry, Liyu Gong, Nathan Jacobs
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Label Learning

This paper presents a novel approach to Single-Positive Multi-label Learning. In general multi-label learning, a model learns to predict multiple labels or categories for a single input image. This is in contrast with standard multi-class image classification, where the task is predicting a single label from many possible labels for an image. Single-Positive Multi-label Learning (SPML) specifically considers learning to predict multiple labels when there is only a single annotation per image in the training data. Multi-label learning is in many ways a more realistic task than single-label learning as real-world data often involves instances belonging to multiple categories simultaneously; however, most common computer vision datasets predominantly contain single labels due to the inherent complexity and cost of collecting multiple high quality annotations for each instance. We propose a novel approach called Vision-Language Pseudo-Labeling (VLPL), which uses a vision-language model to suggest strong positive and negative pseudo-labels, and outperforms the current SOTA methods by 5.5% on Pascal VOC, 18.4% on MS-COCO, 15.2% on NUS-WIDE, and 8.4% on CUB-Birds. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/mvrl/VLPL.
Geometry-Aware Video Quality Assessment for Dynamic Digital Human
Authors: ZiCheng Zhang, Yingjie Zhou, Wei Sun, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Dynamic Digital Humans (DDHs) are 3D digital models that are animated using predefined motions and are inevitably bothered by noise/shift during the generation process and compression distortion during the transmission process, which needs to be perceptually evaluated. Usually, DDHs are displayed as 2D rendered animation videos and it is natural to adapt video quality assessment (VQA) methods to DDH quality assessment (DDH-QA) tasks. However, the VQA methods are highly dependent on viewpoints and less sensitive to geometry-based distortions. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel no-reference (NR) geometry-aware video quality assessment method for DDH-QA challenge. Geometry characteristics are described by the statistical parameters estimated from the DDHs' geometry attribute distributions. Spatial and temporal features are acquired from the rendered videos. Finally, all kinds of features are integrated and regressed into quality values. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the DDH-QA database.
Decoupled DETR: Spatially Disentangling Localization and Classification for Improved End-to-End Object Detection
Authors: Manyuan Zhang, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCV 2023 1
Tasks: Classification, Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection

The introduction of DETR represents a new paradigm for object detection. However, its decoder conducts classification and box localization using shared queries and cross-attention layers, leading to suboptimal results. We observe that different regions of interest in the visual feature map are suitable for performing query classification and box localization tasks, even for the same object. Salient regions provide vital information for classification, while the boundaries around them are more favorable for box regression. Unfortunately, such spatial misalignment between these two tasks greatly hinders DETR's training. Therefore, in this work, we focus on decoupling localization and classification tasks in DETR. To achieve this, we introduce a new design scheme called spatially decoupled DETR (SD-DETR), which includes a task-aware query generation module and a disentangled feature learning process. We elaborately design the task-aware query initialization process and divide the cross-attention block in the decoder to allow the task-aware queries to match different visual regions. Meanwhile, we also observe that the prediction misalignment problem for high classification confidence and precise localization exists, so we propose an alignment loss to further guide the spatially decoupled DETR training. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant improvement in MSCOCO datasets compared to previous work. For instance, we improve the performance of Conditional DETR by 4.5 AP. By spatially disentangling the two tasks, our method overcomes the misalignment problem and greatly improves the performance of DETR for object detection.
Improving Robustness and Reliability in Medical Image Classification with Latent-Guided Diffusion and Nested-Ensembles
Authors: Xing Shen, Hengguan Huang, Brennan Nichyporuk, Tal Arbel
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification

Ensemble deep learning has been shown to achieve high predictive accuracy and uncertainty estimation in a wide variety of medical imaging contexts. However, perturbations in the input images at test time (e.g. noise, domain shifts) can still lead to significant performance degradation, posing challenges for trustworthy clinical deployment. In order to address this, we propose LaDiNE, a novel and robust probabilistic method that is capable of inferring informative and invariant latent variables from the input images. These latent variables are then used to recover the robust predictive distribution without relying on a predefined functional-form. This results in improved (i) generalization capabilities and (ii) calibration of prediction confidence. Extensive experiments were performed on the task of disease classification based on the Tuberculosis chest X-ray and the ISIC Melanoma skin cancer datasets. Here the performance of LaDiNE was analysed under a range of challenging covariate shift conditions, where training was based on "clean" images, and unseen noisy inputs and adversarial perturbations were presented at test time. Results show that LaDiNE outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of accuracy and confidence calibration. This increases the feasibility of deploying reliable medical machine learning models in real clinical settings, where accurate and trustworthy predictions are crucial for patient care and clinical decision support.
ShARc: Shape and Appearance Recognition for Person Identification In-the-wild
Authors: Haidong Zhu, Wanrong Zheng, Zhaoheng Zheng, Ram Nevatia
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Identification

Identifying individuals in unconstrained video settings is a valuable yet challenging task in biometric analysis due to variations in appearances, environments, degradations, and occlusions. In this paper, we present ShARc, a multimodal approach for video-based person identification in uncontrolled environments that emphasizes 3-D body shape, pose, and appearance. We introduce two encoders: a Pose and Shape Encoder (PSE) and an Aggregated Appearance Encoder (AAE). PSE encodes the body shape via binarized silhouettes, skeleton motions, and 3-D body shape, while AAE provides two levels of temporal appearance feature aggregation: attention-based feature aggregation and averaging aggregation. For attention-based feature aggregation, we employ spatial and temporal attention to focus on key areas for person distinction. For averaging aggregation, we introduce a novel flattening layer after averaging to extract more distinguishable information and reduce overfitting of attention. We utilize centroid feature averaging for gallery registration. We demonstrate significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on public datasets, including CCVID, MEVID, and BRIAR.
Mitigate Domain Shift by Primary-Auxiliary Objectives Association for Generalizing Person ReID
Authors: Qilei Li, Shaogang Gong
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Auxiliary Learning, Domain Generalization, Saliency Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

While deep learning has significantly improved ReID model accuracy under the independent and identical distribution (IID) assumption, it has also become clear that such models degrade notably when applied to an unseen novel domain due to unpredictable/unknown domain shift. Contemporary domain generalization (DG) ReID models struggle in learning domain-invariant representation solely through training on an instance classification objective. We consider that a deep learning model is heavily influenced and therefore biased towards domain-specific characteristics, e.g., background clutter, scale and viewpoint variations, limiting the generalizability of the learned model, and hypothesize that the pedestrians are domain invariant owning they share the same structural characteristics. To enable the ReID model to be less domain-specific from these pure pedestrians, we introduce a method that guides model learning of the primary ReID instance classification objective by a concurrent auxiliary learning objective on weakly labeled pedestrian saliency detection. To solve the problem of conflicting optimization criteria in the model parameter space between the two learning objectives, we introduce a Primary-Auxiliary Objectives Association (PAOA) mechanism to calibrate the loss gradients of the auxiliary task towards the primary learning task gradients. Benefiting from the harmonious multitask learning design, our model can be extended with the recent test-time diagram to form the PAOA+, which performs on-the-fly optimization against the auxiliary objective in order to maximize the model's generative capacity in the test target domain. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PAOA model.
YOLO-Angio: An Algorithm for Coronary Anatomy Segmentation
Authors: Tom Liu, Hui Lin, Aggelos K. Katsaggelos, Adrienne Kline
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Coronary Artery Segmentation, feature selection, Segmentation

Coronary angiography remains the gold standard for diagnosis of coronary artery disease, the most common cause of death worldwide. While this procedure is performed more than 2 million times annually, there remain few methods for fast and accurate automated measurement of disease and localization of coronary anatomy. Here, we present our solution to the Automatic Region-based Coronary Artery Disease diagnostics using X-ray angiography images (ARCADE) challenge held at MICCAI 2023. For the artery segmentation task, our three-stage approach combines preprocessing and feature selection by classical computer vision to enhance vessel contrast, followed by an ensemble model based on YOLOv8 to propose possible vessel candidates by generating a vessel map. A final segmentation is based on a logic-based approach to reconstruct the coronary tree in a graph-based sorting method. Our entry to the ARCADE challenge placed 3rd overall. Using the official metric for evaluation, we achieved an F1 score of 0.422 and 0.4289 on the validation and hold-out sets respectively.
On Responsible Machine Learning Datasets with Fairness, Privacy, and Regulatory Norms
Authors: Surbhi Mittal, Kartik Thakral, Richa Singh, Mayank Vatsa, Tamar Glaser, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Tal Hassner
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has made its way into various scientific fields, providing astonishing improvements over existing algorithms for a wide variety of tasks. In recent years, there have been severe concerns over the trustworthiness of AI technologies. The scientific community has focused on the development of trustworthy AI algorithms. However, machine and deep learning algorithms, popular in the AI community today, depend heavily on the data used during their development. These learning algorithms identify patterns in the data, learning the behavioral objective. Any flaws in the data have the potential to translate directly into algorithms. In this study, we discuss the importance of Responsible Machine Learning Datasets and propose a framework to evaluate the datasets through a responsible rubric. While existing work focuses on the post-hoc evaluation of algorithms for their trustworthiness, we provide a framework that considers the data component separately to understand its role in the algorithm. We discuss responsible datasets through the lens of fairness, privacy, and regulatory compliance and provide recommendations for constructing future datasets. After surveying over 100 datasets, we use 60 datasets for analysis and demonstrate that none of these datasets is immune to issues of fairness, privacy preservation, and regulatory compliance. We provide modifications to the ``datasheets for datasets" with important additions for improved dataset documentation. With governments around the world regularizing data protection laws, the method for the creation of datasets in the scientific community requires revision. We believe this study is timely and relevant in today's era of AI.