pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CylinderTag: An Accurate and Flexible Marker for Cylinder-Shape Objects Pose Estimation Based on Projective Invariants
Authors: Shaoan Wang, Mingzhu Zhu, Yaoqing Hu, Dongyue Li, Fusong Yuan, Junzhi Yu
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Heuristic Search, Pose Estimation, Visual Localization

High-precision pose estimation based on visual markers has been a thriving research topic in the field of computer vision. However, the suitability of traditional flat markers on curved objects is limited due to the diverse shapes of curved surfaces, which hinders the development of high-precision pose estimation for curved objects. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel visual marker called CylinderTag, which is designed for developable curved surfaces such as cylindrical surfaces. CylinderTag is a cyclic marker that can be firmly attached to objects with a cylindrical shape. Leveraging the manifold assumption, the cross-ratio in projective invariance is utilized for encoding in the direction of zero curvature on the surface. Additionally, to facilitate the usage of CylinderTag, we propose a heuristic search-based marker generator and a high-performance recognizer as well. Moreover, an all-encompassing evaluation of CylinderTag properties is conducted by means of extensive experimentation, covering detection rate, detection speed, dictionary size, localization jitter, and pose estimation accuracy. CylinderTag showcases superior detection performance from varying view angles in comparison to traditional visual markers, accompanied by higher localization accuracy. Furthermore, CylinderTag boasts real-time detection capability and an extensive marker dictionary, offering enhanced versatility and practicality in a wide range of applications. Experimental results demonstrate that the CylinderTag is a highly promising visual marker for use on cylindrical-like surfaces, thus offering important guidance for future research on high-precision visual localization of cylinder-shaped objects. The code is available at: https://github.com/wsakobe/CylinderTag.
Non-Negative Spherical Relaxations for Universe-Free Multi-Matching and Clustering
Authors: Johan Thunberg, Florian Bernard
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

We propose a novel non-negative spherical relaxation for optimization problems over binary matrices with injectivity constraints, which in particular has applications in multi-matching and clustering. We relax respective binary matrix constraints to the (high-dimensional) non-negative sphere. To optimize our relaxed problem, we use a conditional power iteration method to iteratively improve the objective function, while at same time sweeping over a continuous scalar parameter that is (indirectly) related to the universe size (or number of clusters). Opposed to existing procedures that require to fix the integer universe size before optimization, our method automatically adjusts the analogous continuous parameter. Furthermore, while our approach shares similarities with spectral multi-matching and spectral clustering, our formulation has the strong advantage that we do not rely on additional post-processing procedures to obtain binary results. Our method shows compelling results in various multi-matching and clustering settings, even when compared to methods that use the ground truth universe size (or number of clusters).
CXR-CLIP: Toward Large Scale Chest X-ray Language-Image Pre-training
Authors: Kihyun You, Jawook Gu, Jiyeon Ham, Beomhee Park, Jiho Kim, Eun Kyoung Hong, Woonhyunk Baek, Byungseok Roh
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

A large-scale image-text pair dataset has greatly contributed to the development of vision-language pre-training (VLP) models, which enable zero-shot or few-shot classification without costly annotation. However, in the medical domain, the scarcity of data remains a significant challenge for developing a powerful VLP model. In this paper, we tackle the lack of image-text data in chest X-ray by expanding image-label pair as image-text pair via general prompt and utilizing multiple images and multiple sections in a radiologic report. We also design two contrastive losses, named ICL and TCL, for learning study-level characteristics of medical images and reports, respectively. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art models trained under the same conditions. Also, enlarged dataset improve the discriminative power of our pre-trained model for classification, while sacrificing marginal retrieval performance. Code is available at https://github.com/kakaobrain/cxr-clip.
Pathologist-Like Explanations Unveiled: an Explainable Deep Learning System for White Blood Cell Classification
Authors: Aditya Shankar Pal, Debojyoti Biswas, Joy Mahapatra, Debasis Banerjee, Prantar Chakrabarti, Utpal Garain
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

White blood cells (WBCs) play a crucial role in safeguarding the human body against pathogens and foreign substances. Leveraging the abundance of WBC imaging data and the power of deep learning algorithms, automated WBC analysis has the potential for remarkable accuracy. However, the capability of deep learning models to explain their WBC classification remains largely unexplored. In this study, we introduce HemaX, an explainable deep neural network-based model that produces pathologist-like explanations using five attributes: granularity, cytoplasm color, nucleus shape, size relative to red blood cells, and nucleus to cytoplasm ratio (N:C), along with cell classification, localization, and segmentation. HemaX is trained and evaluated on a novel dataset, LeukoX, comprising 467 blood smear images encompassing ten (10) WBC types. The proposed model achieves impressive results, with an average classification accuracy of 81.08% and a Jaccard index of 89.16% for cell localization. Additionally, HemaX performs well in generating the five explanations with a normalized mean square error of 0.0317 for N:C ratio and over 80% accuracy for the other four attributes. Comprehensive experiments comparing against multiple state-of-the-art models demonstrate that HemaX's classification accuracy remains unaffected by its ability to provide explanations. Moreover, empirical analyses and validation by expert hematologists confirm the faithfulness of explanations predicted by our proposed model.
On the Language Encoder of Contrastive Cross-modal Models
Authors: Mengjie Zhao, Junya Ono, Zhi Zhong, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Yuhta Takida, Naoki Murata, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Takashi Shibuya, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: cross-modal alignment, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

Contrastive cross-modal models such as CLIP and CLAP aid various vision-language (VL) and audio-language (AL) tasks. However, there has been limited investigation of and improvement in their language encoder, which is the central component of encoding natural language descriptions of image/audio into vector representations. We extensively evaluate how unsupervised and supervised sentence embedding training affect language encoder quality and cross-modal task performance. In VL pretraining, we found that sentence embedding training language encoder quality and aids in cross-modal tasks, improving contrastive VL models such as CyCLIP. In contrast, AL pretraining benefits less from sentence embedding training, which may result from the limited amount of pretraining data. We analyze the representation spaces to understand the strengths of sentence embedding training, and find that it improves text-space uniformity, at the cost of decreased cross-modal alignment.
UE4-NeRF:Neural Radiance Field for Real-Time Rendering of Large-Scale Scene
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 4k, NeRF, Neural Rendering

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) is a novel implicit 3D reconstruction method that shows immense potential and has been gaining increasing attention. It enables the reconstruction of 3D scenes solely from a set of photographs. However, its real-time rendering capability, especially for interactive real-time rendering of large-scale scenes, still has significant limitations. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel neural rendering system called UE4-NeRF, specifically designed for real-time rendering of large-scale scenes. We partitioned each large scene into different sub-NeRFs. In order to represent the partitioned independent scene, we initialize polygonal meshes by constructing multiple regular octahedra within the scene and the vertices of the polygonal faces are continuously optimized during the training process. Drawing inspiration from Level of Detail (LOD) techniques, we trained meshes of varying levels of detail for different observation levels. Our approach combines with the rasterization pipeline in Unreal Engine 4 (UE4), achieving real-time rendering of large-scale scenes at 4K resolution with a frame rate of up to 43 FPS. Rendering within UE4 also facilitates scene editing in subsequent stages. Furthermore, through experiments, we have demonstrated that our method achieves rendering quality comparable to state-of-the-art approaches. Project page: https://jamchaos.github.io/UE4-NeRF/.
Domain-specific optimization and diverse evaluation of self-supervised models for histopathology
Authors: Jeremy Lai, Faruk Ahmed, Supriya Vijay, Tiam Jaroensri, Jessica Loo, Saurabh Vyawahare, Saloni Agarwal, Fayaz Jamil, Yossi Matias, Greg S. Corrado, Dale R. Webster, Jonathan Krause, Yun Liu, Po-Hsuan Cameron Chen, Ellery Wulczyn, David F. Steiner
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Task-specific deep learning models in histopathology offer promising opportunities for improving diagnosis, clinical research, and precision medicine. However, development of such models is often limited by availability of high-quality data. Foundation models in histopathology that learn general representations across a wide range of tissue types, diagnoses, and magnifications offer the potential to reduce the data, compute, and technical expertise necessary to develop task-specific deep learning models with the required level of model performance. In this work, we describe the development and evaluation of foundation models for histopathology via self-supervised learning (SSL). We first establish a diverse set of benchmark tasks involving 17 unique tissue types and 12 unique cancer types and spanning different optimal magnifications and task types. Next, we use this benchmark to explore and evaluate histopathology-specific SSL methods followed by further evaluation on held out patch-level and weakly supervised tasks. We found that standard SSL methods thoughtfully applied to histopathology images are performant across our benchmark tasks and that domain-specific methodological improvements can further increase performance. Our findings reinforce the value of using domain-specific SSL methods in pathology, and establish a set of high quality foundation models to enable further research across diverse applications.
Steve-Eye: Equipping LLM-based Embodied Agents with Visual Perception in Open Worlds
Authors: Sipeng Zheng, Jiazheng Liu, Yicheng Feng, Zongqing Lu
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00

Recent studies have presented compelling evidence that large language models (LLMs) can equip embodied agents with the self-driven capability to interact with the world, which marks an initial step toward versatile robotics. However, these efforts tend to overlook the visual richness of open worlds, rendering the entire interactive process akin to "a blindfolded text-based game." Consequently, LLM-based agents frequently encounter challenges in intuitively comprehending their surroundings and producing responses that are easy to understand. In this paper, we propose Steve-Eye, an end-to-end trained large multimodal model designed to address this limitation. Steve-Eye integrates the LLM with a visual encoder which enables it to process visual-text inputs and generate multimodal feedback. In addition, we use a semi-automatic strategy to collect an extensive dataset comprising 850K open-world instruction pairs, empowering our model to encompass three essential functions for an agent: multimodal perception, foundational knowledge base, and skill prediction and planning. Lastly, we develop three open-world evaluation benchmarks, then carry out extensive experiments from a wide range of perspectives to validate our model's capability to strategically act and plan. Codes and datasets will be released.
Diagnosis-oriented Medical Image Compression with Efficient Transfer Learning
Authors: Guangqi Xie, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan, Zhibo Chen
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Coronary Artery Segmentation, Image Compression, Medical Diagnosis, Semantic Compression, Transfer Learning

Remote medical diagnosis has emerged as a critical and indispensable technique in practical medical systems, where medical data are required to be efficiently compressed and transmitted for diagnosis by either professional doctors or intelligent diagnosis devices. In this process, a large amount of redundant content irrelevant to the diagnosis is subjected to high-fidelity coding, leading to unnecessary transmission costs. To mitigate this, we propose diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, a special semantic compression task designed for medical scenarios, targeting to reduce the compression cost without compromising the diagnosis accuracy. However, collecting sufficient medical data to optimize such a compression system is significantly expensive and challenging due to privacy issues and the lack of professional annotation. In this study, we propose DMIC, the first efficient transfer learning-based codec, for diagnosis-oriented medical image compression, which can be effectively optimized with only few-shot annotated medical examples, by reusing the knowledge in the existing reinforcement learning-based task-driven semantic coding framework, i.e., HRLVSC [1]. Concretely, we focus on tuning only the partial parameters of the policy network for bit allocation within HRLVSC, which enables it to adapt to the medical images. In this work, we validate our DMIC with the typical medical task, Coronary Artery Segmentation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our DMIC can achieve 47.594%BD-Rate savings compared to the HEVC anchor, by tuning only the A2C module (2.7% parameters) of the policy network with only 1 medical sample.
Auxiliary Features-Guided Super Resolution for Monte Carlo Rendering
Authors: Qiqi Hou, Feng Liu
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Super-Resolution

This paper investigates super resolution to reduce the number of pixels to render and thus speed up Monte Carlo rendering algorithms. While great progress has been made to super resolution technologies, it is essentially an ill-posed problem and cannot recover high-frequency details in renderings. To address this problem, we exploit high-resolution auxiliary features to guide super resolution of low-resolution renderings. These high-resolution auxiliary features can be quickly rendered by a rendering engine and at the same time provide valuable high-frequency details to assist super resolution. To this end, we develop a cross-modality Transformer network that consists of an auxiliary feature branch and a low-resolution rendering branch. These two branches are designed to fuse high-resolution auxiliary features with the corresponding low-resolution rendering. Furthermore, we design residual densely-connected Swin Transformer groups to learn to extract representative features to enable high-quality super-resolution. Our experiments show that our auxiliary features-guided super-resolution method outperforms both super-resolution methods and Monte Carlo denoising methods in producing high-quality renderings.
PTSR: Patch Translator for Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Neeraj Baghel, Shiv Ram Dubey, Satish Kumar Singh
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, SSIM, Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution generation aims to generate a high-resolution image from its low-resolution image. However, more complex neural networks bring high computational costs and memory storage. It is still an active area for offering the promise of overcoming resolution limitations in many applications. In recent years, transformers have made significant progress in computer vision tasks as their robust self-attention mechanism. However, recent works on the transformer for image super-resolution also contain convolution operations. We propose a patch translator for image super-resolution (PTSR) to address this problem. The proposed PTSR is a transformer-based GAN network with no convolution operation. We introduce a novel patch translator module for regenerating the improved patches utilising multi-head attention, which is further utilised by the generator to generate the 2x and 4x super-resolution images. The experiments are performed using benchmark datasets, including DIV2K, Set5, Set14, and BSD100. The results of the proposed model is improved on an average for $4\times$ super-resolution by 21.66% in PNSR score and 11.59% in SSIM score, as compared to the best competitive models. We also analyse the proposed loss and saliency map to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Zone Evaluation: Revealing Spatial Bias in Object Detection
Authors: Zhaohui Zheng, Yuming Chen, Qibin Hou, Xiang Li, Ping Wang, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

A fundamental limitation of object detectors is that they suffer from "spatial bias", and in particular perform less satisfactorily when detecting objects near image borders. For a long time, there has been a lack of effective ways to measure and identify spatial bias, and little is known about where it comes from and what degree it is. To this end, we present a new zone evaluation protocol, extending from the traditional evaluation to a more generalized one, which measures the detection performance over zones, yielding a series of Zone Precisions (ZPs). For the first time, we provide numerical results, showing that the object detectors perform quite unevenly across the zones. Surprisingly, the detector's performance in the 96% border zone of the image does not reach the AP value (Average Precision, commonly regarded as the average detection performance in the entire image zone). To better understand spatial bias, a series of heuristic experiments are conducted. Our investigation excludes two intuitive conjectures about spatial bias that the object scale and the absolute positions of objects barely influence the spatial bias. We find that the key lies in the human-imperceptible divergence in data patterns between objects in different zones, thus eventually forming a visible performance gap between the zones. With these findings, we finally discuss a future direction for object detection, namely, spatial disequilibrium problem, aiming at pursuing a balanced detection ability over the entire image zone. By broadly evaluating 10 popular object detectors and 5 detection datasets, we shed light on the spatial bias of object detectors. We hope this work could raise a focus on detection robustness. The source codes, evaluation protocols, and tutorials are publicly available at https://github.com/Zzh-tju/ZoneEval.
Identification of Abnormality in Maize Plants From UAV Images Using Deep Learning Approaches
Authors: Aminul Huq, Dimitris Zermas, George Bebis
Date: 2023-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Early identification of abnormalities in plants is an important task for ensuring proper growth and achieving high yields from crops. Precision agriculture can significantly benefit from modern computer vision tools to make farming strategies addressing these issues efficient and effective. As farming lands are typically quite large, farmers have to manually check vast areas to determine the status of the plants and apply proper treatments. In this work, we consider the problem of automatically identifying abnormal regions in maize plants from images captured by a UAV. Using deep learning techniques, we have developed a methodology which can detect different levels of abnormality (i.e., low, medium, high or no abnormality) in maize plants independently of their growth stage. The primary goal is to identify anomalies at the earliest possible stage in order to maximize the effectiveness of potential treatments. At the same time, the proposed system can provide valuable information to human annotators for ground truth data collection by helping them to focus their attention on a much smaller set of images only. We have experimented with two different but complimentary approaches, the first considering abnormality detection as a classification problem and the second considering it as a regression problem. Both approaches can be generalized to different types of abnormalities and do not make any assumption about the abnormality occurring at an early plant growth stage which might be easier to detect due to the plants being smaller and easier to separate. As a case study, we have considered a publicly available data set which exhibits mostly Nitrogen deficiency in maize plants of various growth stages. We are reporting promising preliminary results with an 88.89\% detection accuracy of low abnormality and 100\% detection accuracy of no abnormality.
A Car Model Identification System for Streamlining the Automobile Sales Process
Authors: Said Togru, Marco Moldovan
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

This project presents an automated solution for the efficient identification of car models and makes from images, aimed at streamlining the vehicle listing process on online car-selling platforms. Through a thorough exploration encompassing various efficient network architectures including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs), and hybrid models, we achieved a notable accuracy of 81.97% employing the EfficientNet (V2 b2) architecture. To refine performance, a combination of strategies, including data augmentation, fine-tuning pretrained models, and extensive hyperparameter tuning, were applied. The trained model offers the potential for automating information extraction, promising enhanced user experiences across car-selling websites.
Breaking through Deterministic Barriers: Randomized Pruning Mask Generation and Selection
Authors: Jianwei Li, Weizhi Gao, Qi Lei, Dongkuan Xu
Date: 2023-10-19 00:00:00

It is widely acknowledged that large and sparse models have higher accuracy than small and dense models under the same model size constraints. This motivates us to train a large model and then remove its redundant neurons or weights by pruning. Most existing works pruned the networks in a deterministic way, the performance of which solely depends on a single pruning criterion and thus lacks variety. Instead, in this paper, we propose a model pruning strategy that first generates several pruning masks in a designed random way. Subsequently, along with an effective mask-selection rule, the optimal mask is chosen from the pool of mask candidates. To further enhance efficiency, we introduce an early mask evaluation strategy, mitigating the overhead associated with training multiple masks. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across eight datasets from GLUE, particularly excelling at high levels of sparsity.