pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revealing Model Biases: Assessing Deep Neural Networks via Recovered Sample Analysis
Authors: Mohammad Mahdi Mehmanchi, Mahbod Nouri, Mohammad Sabokrou
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00

This paper proposes a straightforward and cost-effective approach to assess whether a deep neural network (DNN) relies on the primary concepts of training samples or simply learns discriminative, yet simple and irrelevant features that can differentiate between classes. The paper highlights that DNNs, as discriminative classifiers, often find the simplest features to discriminate between classes, leading to a potential bias towards irrelevant features and sometimes missing generalization. While a generalization test is one way to evaluate a trained model's performance, it can be costly and may not cover all scenarios to ensure that the model has learned the primary concepts. Furthermore, even after conducting a generalization test, identifying bias in the model may not be possible. Here, the paper proposes a method that involves recovering samples from the parameters of the trained model and analyzing the reconstruction quality. We believe that if the model's weights are optimized to discriminate based on some features, these features will be reflected in the reconstructed samples. If the recovered samples contain the primary concepts of the training data, it can be concluded that the model has learned the essential and determining features. On the other hand, if the recovered samples contain irrelevant features, it can be concluded that the model is biased towards these features. The proposed method does not require any test or generalization samples, only the parameters of the trained model and the training data that lie on the margin. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can determine whether the model has learned the desired features of the training data. The paper highlights that our understanding of how these models work is limited, and the proposed approach addresses this issue.
OpenSR: Open-Modality Speech Recognition via Maintaining Multi-Modality Alignment
Authors: Xize Cheng, Tao Jin, Linjun Li, Wang Lin, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio-Visual Speech Recognition, Lip Reading, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Speech Recognition

Speech Recognition builds a bridge between the multimedia streaming (audio-only, visual-only or audio-visual) and the corresponding text transcription. However, when training the specific model of new domain, it often gets stuck in the lack of new-domain utterances, especially the labeled visual utterances. To break through this restriction, we attempt to achieve zero-shot modality transfer by maintaining the multi-modality alignment in phoneme space learned with unlabeled multimedia utterances in the high resource domain during the pre-training \cite{shi2022learning}, and propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition (\textbf{OpenSR}) that enables the models trained on a single modality (e.g., audio-only) applicable to more modalities (e.g., visual-only and audio-visual). Furthermore, we employ a cluster-based prompt tuning strategy to handle the domain shift for the scenarios with only common words in the new domain utterances. We demonstrate that OpenSR enables modality transfer from one to any in three different settings (zero-, few- and full-shot), and achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance compared to the existing few-shot and full-shot lip-reading methods. To the best of our knowledge, OpenSR achieves the state-of-the-art performance of word error rate in LRS2 on audio-visual speech recognition and lip-reading with 2.7\% and 25.0\%, respectively. The code and demo are available at https://github.com/Exgc/OpenSR.
Fast light-field 3D microscopy with out-of-distribution detection and adaptation through Conditional Normalizing Flows
Authors: Josué Page Vizcaíno, Panagiotis Symvoulidis, Zeguan Wang, Jonas Jelten, Paolo Favaro, Edward S. Boyden, Tobias Lasser
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection

Real-time 3D fluorescence microscopy is crucial for the spatiotemporal analysis of live organisms, such as neural activity monitoring. The eXtended field-of-view light field microscope (XLFM), also known as Fourier light field microscope, is a straightforward, single snapshot solution to achieve this. The XLFM acquires spatial-angular information in a single camera exposure. In a subsequent step, a 3D volume can be algorithmically reconstructed, making it exceptionally well-suited for real-time 3D acquisition and potential analysis. Unfortunately, traditional reconstruction methods (like deconvolution) require lengthy processing times (0.0220 Hz), hampering the speed advantages of the XLFM. Neural network architectures can overcome the speed constraints at the expense of lacking certainty metrics, which renders them untrustworthy for the biomedical realm. This work proposes a novel architecture to perform fast 3D reconstructions of live immobilized zebrafish neural activity based on a conditional normalizing flow. It reconstructs volumes at 8 Hz spanning 512x512x96 voxels, and it can be trained in under two hours due to the small dataset requirements (10 image-volume pairs). Furthermore, normalizing flows allow for exact Likelihood computation, enabling distribution monitoring, followed by out-of-distribution detection and retraining of the system when a novel sample is detected. We evaluate the proposed method on a cross-validation approach involving multiple in-distribution samples (genetically identical zebrafish) and various out-of-distribution ones.
D3L: Decomposition of 3D Rotation and Lift from 2D Joint to 3D for Human Mesh Recovery
Authors: Xiaoyang Hao, Han Li, Jun Cheng, Lei Wang
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Mesh Recovery, Pose Estimation, Position

Existing methods for 3D human mesh recovery always directly estimate SMPL parameters, which involve both joint rotations and shape parameters. However, these methods present rotation semantic ambiguity, rotation error accumulation, and shape estimation overfitting, which also leads to errors in the estimated pose. Additionally, these methods have not efficiently leveraged the advancements in another hot topic, human pose estimation. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Decomposition of 3D Rotation and Lift from 2D Joint to 3D mesh (D3L). We disentangle 3D joint rotation into bone direction and bone twist direction so that the human mesh recovery task is broken down into estimation of pose, twist, and shape, which can be handled independently. Then we design a 2D-to-3D lifting network for estimating twist direction and 3D joint position from 2D joint position sequences and introduce a nonlinear optimization method for fitting shape parameters and bone directions. Our approach can leverage human pose estimation methods, and avoid pose errors introduced by shape estimation overfitting. We conduct experiments on the Human3.6M dataset and demonstrate improved performance compared to existing methods by a large margin.
From NeRFLiX to NeRFLiX++: A General NeRF-Agnostic Restorer Paradigm
Authors: Kun Zhou, Wenbo Li, Nianjuan Jiang, Xiaoguang Han, Jiangbo Lu
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Neural radiance fields (NeRF) have shown great success in novel view synthesis. However, recovering high-quality details from real-world scenes is still challenging for the existing NeRF-based approaches, due to the potential imperfect calibration information and scene representation inaccuracy. Even with high-quality training frames, the synthetic novel views produced by NeRF models still suffer from notable rendering artifacts, such as noise and blur. To address this, we propose NeRFLiX, a general NeRF-agnostic restorer paradigm that learns a degradation-driven inter-viewpoint mixer. Specially, we design a NeRF-style degradation modeling approach and construct large-scale training data, enabling the possibility of effectively removing NeRF-native rendering artifacts for deep neural networks. Moreover, beyond the degradation removal, we propose an inter-viewpoint aggregation framework that fuses highly related high-quality training images, pushing the performance of cutting-edge NeRF models to entirely new levels and producing highly photo-realistic synthetic views. Based on this paradigm, we further present NeRFLiX++ with a stronger two-stage NeRF degradation simulator and a faster inter-viewpoint mixer, achieving superior performance with significantly improved computational efficiency. Notably, NeRFLiX++ is capable of restoring photo-realistic ultra-high-resolution outputs from noisy low-resolution NeRF-rendered views. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent restoration ability of NeRFLiX++ on various novel view synthesis benchmarks.
A Deep Unrolling Model with Hybrid Optimization Structure for Hyperspectral Image Deconvolution
Authors: Alexandros Gkillas, Dimitris Ampeliotis, Kostas Berberidis
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Denoising, Image Deconvolution

In recent literature there are plenty of works that combine handcrafted and learnable regularizers to solve inverse imaging problems. While this hybrid approach has demonstrated promising results, the motivation for combining handcrafted and learnable regularizers remains largely underexplored. This work aims to justify this combination, by demonstrating that the incorporation of proper handcrafted regularizers alongside learnable regularizers not only reduces the complexity of the learnable prior, but also the performance is notably enhanced. To analyze the impact of this synergy, we introduce the notion of residual structure, to refer to the structure of the solution that cannot be modeled by the handcrafted regularizers per se. Motivated by these, we propose a novel optimization framework for the hyperspectral deconvolution problem, called DeepMix. Based on the proposed optimization framework, an interpretable model is developed using the deep unrolling strategy, which consists of three distinct modules, namely, a data consistency module, a module that enforces the effect of the handcrafted regularizers, and a denoising module. Recognizing the collaborative nature of these modules, this work proposes a context aware denoising module designed to sustain the advancements achieved by the cooperative efforts of the other modules. This is facilitated through the incorporation of a proper skip connection, ensuring that essential details and structures identified by other modules are effectively retained and not lost during denoising. Extensive experimental results across simulated and real-world datasets demonstrate that DeepMix is notable for surpassing existing methodologies, offering marked improvements in both image quality and computational efficiency.
AutoSAM: Adapting SAM to Medical Images by Overloading the Prompt Encoder
Authors: Tal Shaharabany, Aviad Dahan, Raja Giryes, Lior Wolf
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Polyp Segmentation

The recently introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) combines a clever architecture and large quantities of training data to obtain remarkable image segmentation capabilities. However, it fails to reproduce such results for Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) domains such as medical images. Moreover, while SAM is conditioned on either a mask or a set of points, it may be desirable to have a fully automatic solution. In this work, we replace SAM's conditioning with an encoder that operates on the same input image. By adding this encoder and without further fine-tuning SAM, we obtain state-of-the-art results on multiple medical images and video benchmarks. This new encoder is trained via gradients provided by a frozen SAM. For inspecting the knowledge within it, and providing a lightweight segmentation solution, we also learn to decode it into a mask by a shallow deconvolution network.
FalconNet: Factorization for the Light-weight ConvNets
Authors: Zhicheng Cai, Qiu Shen
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00

Designing light-weight CNN models with little parameters and Flops is a prominent research concern. However, three significant issues persist in the current light-weight CNNs: i) the lack of architectural consistency leads to redundancy and hindered capacity comparison, as well as the ambiguity in causation between architectural choices and performance enhancement; ii) the utilization of a single-branch depth-wise convolution compromises the model representational capacity; iii) the depth-wise convolutions account for large proportions of parameters and Flops, while lacking efficient method to make them light-weight. To address these issues, we factorize the four vital components of light-weight CNNs from coarse to fine and redesign them: i) we design a light-weight overall architecture termed LightNet, which obtains better performance by simply implementing the basic blocks of other light-weight CNNs; ii) we abstract a Meta Light Block, which consists of spatial operator and channel operator and uniformly describes current basic blocks; iii) we raise RepSO which constructs multiple spatial operator branches to enhance the representational ability; iv) we raise the concept of receptive range, guided by which we raise RefCO to sparsely factorize the channel operator. Based on above four vital components, we raise a novel light-weight CNN model termed as FalconNet. Experimental results validate that FalconNet can achieve higher accuracy with lower number of parameters and Flops compared to existing light-weight CNNs.
NeRFool: Uncovering the Vulnerability of Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields against Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Yonggan Fu, Ye Yuan, Souvik Kundu, Shang Wu, Shunyao Zhang, Yingyan Celine Lin
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Novel View Synthesis

Generalizable Neural Radiance Fields (GNeRF) are one of the most promising real-world solutions for novel view synthesis, thanks to their cross-scene generalization capability and thus the possibility of instant rendering on new scenes. While adversarial robustness is essential for real-world applications, little study has been devoted to understanding its implication on GNeRF. We hypothesize that because GNeRF is implemented by conditioning on the source views from new scenes, which are often acquired from the Internet or third-party providers, there are potential new security concerns regarding its real-world applications. Meanwhile, existing understanding and solutions for neural networks' adversarial robustness may not be applicable to GNeRF, due to its 3D nature and uniquely diverse operations. To this end, we present NeRFool, which to the best of our knowledge is the first work that sets out to understand the adversarial robustness of GNeRF. Specifically, NeRFool unveils the vulnerability patterns and important insights regarding GNeRF's adversarial robustness. Built upon the above insights gained from NeRFool, we further develop NeRFool+, which integrates two techniques capable of effectively attacking GNeRF across a wide range of target views, and provide guidelines for defending against our proposed attacks. We believe that our NeRFool/NeRFool+ lays the initial foundation for future innovations in developing robust real-world GNeRF solutions. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/NeRFool.
EventCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Event-based Object Recognition
Authors: Ziyi Wu, Xudong Liu, Igor Gilitschenski
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Object, Object Recognition, Pseudo Label, Robust classification

Recent advances in zero-shot and few-shot classification heavily rely on the success of pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) such as CLIP. Due to a shortage of large-scale datasets, training such models for event camera data remains infeasible. Thus, adapting existing VLMs across modalities to event vision is an important research challenge. In this work, we introduce EventCLIP, a novel approach that utilizes CLIP for zero-shot and few-shot event-based object recognition. We first generalize CLIP's image encoder to event data by converting raw events to 2D grid-based representations. To further enhance performance, we propose a feature adapter to aggregate temporal information over event frames and refine text embeddings to better align with the visual inputs. We evaluate EventCLIP on N-Caltech, N-Cars, and N-ImageNet datasets, achieving state-of-the-art few-shot performance. When fine-tuned on the entire dataset, our method outperforms all existing event classifiers. Moreover, we explore practical applications of EventCLIP including robust event classification and label-free event recognition, where our approach surpasses previous baselines designed specifically for these tasks.
Two-Stage Holistic and Contrastive Explanation of Image Classification
Authors: Weiyan Xie, Xiao-Hui Li, Zhi Lin, Leonard K. M. Poon, Caleb Chen Cao, Nevin L. Zhang
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

The need to explain the output of a deep neural network classifier is now widely recognized. While previous methods typically explain a single class in the output, we advocate explaining the whole output, which is a probability distribution over multiple classes. A whole-output explanation can help a human user gain an overall understanding of model behaviour instead of only one aspect of it. It can also provide a natural framework where one can examine the evidence used to discriminate between competing classes, and thereby obtain contrastive explanations. In this paper, we propose a contrastive whole-output explanation (CWOX) method for image classification, and evaluate it using quantitative metrics and through human subject studies. The source code of CWOX is available at https://github.com/vaynexie/CWOX.
Learning Joint Latent Space EBM Prior Model for Multi-layer Generator
Authors: Jiali Cui, Ying Nian Wu, Tian Han
Date: 2023-06-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2023 1
Tasks: Image Generation, Outlier Detection

This paper studies the fundamental problem of learning multi-layer generator models. The multi-layer generator model builds multiple layers of latent variables as a prior model on top of the generator, which benefits learning complex data distribution and hierarchical representations. However, such a prior model usually focuses on modeling inter-layer relations between latent variables by assuming non-informative (conditional) Gaussian distributions, which can be limited in model expressivity. To tackle this issue and learn more expressive prior models, we propose an energy-based model (EBM) on the joint latent space over all layers of latent variables with the multi-layer generator as its backbone. Such joint latent space EBM prior model captures the intra-layer contextual relations at each layer through layer-wise energy terms, and latent variables across different layers are jointly corrected. We develop a joint training scheme via maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), which involves Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling for both prior and posterior distributions of the latent variables from different layers. To ensure efficient inference and learning, we further propose a variational training scheme where an inference model is used to amortize the costly posterior MCMC sampling. Our experiments demonstrate that the learned model can be expressive in generating high-quality images and capturing hierarchical features for better outlier detection.
SegViTv2: Exploring Efficient and Continual Semantic Segmentation with Plain Vision Transformers
Authors: BoWen Zhang, Liyang Liu, Minh Hieu Phan, Zhi Tian, Chunhua Shen, Yifan Liu
Date: 2023-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Continual Semantic Segmentation, Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

This paper investigates the capability of plain Vision Transformers (ViTs) for semantic segmentation using the encoder-decoder framework and introduces \textbf{SegViTv2}. In this study, we introduce a novel Attention-to-Mask (\atm) module to design a lightweight decoder effective for plain ViT. The proposed ATM converts the global attention map into semantic masks for high-quality segmentation results. Our decoder outperforms the popular decoder UPerNet using various ViT backbones while consuming only about $5\%$ of the computational cost. For the encoder, we address the concern of the relatively high computational cost in the ViT-based encoders and propose a \emph{Shrunk++} structure that incorporates edge-aware query-based down-sampling (EQD) and query-based upsampling (QU) modules. The Shrunk++ structure reduces the computational cost of the encoder by up to $50\%$ while maintaining competitive performance. Furthermore, we propose to adapt SegViT for continual semantic segmentation, demonstrating nearly zero forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Experiments show that our proposed SegViTv2 surpasses recent segmentation methods on three popular benchmarks including ADE20k, COCO-Stuff-10k and PASCAL-Context datasets. The code is available through the following link: \url{https://github.com/zbwxp/SegVit}.
SAGE-NDVI: A Stereotype-Breaking Evaluation Metric for Remote Sensing Image Dehazing Using Satellite-to-Ground NDVI Knowledge
Authors: Zepeng Liu, Zhicheng Yang, Mingye Zhu, Andy Wong, Yibing Wei, Mei Han, Jun Yu, Jui-Hsin Lai
Date: 2023-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Dehazing, SSIM

Image dehazing is a meaningful low-level computer vision task and can be applied to a variety of contexts. In our industrial deployment scenario based on remote sensing (RS) images, the quality of image dehazing directly affects the grade of our crop identification and growth monitoring products. However, the widely used peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index (SSIM) provide ambiguous visual interpretation. In this paper, we design a new objective metric for RS image dehazing evaluation. Our proposed metric leverages a ground-based phenology observation resource to calculate the vegetation index error between RS and ground images at a hazy date. Extensive experiments validate that our metric appropriately evaluates different dehazing models and is in line with human visual perception.
Understanding the Benefits of Image Augmentations
Authors: Matthew Iceland, Christopher Kanan
Date: 2023-06-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Image Augmentations are widely used to reduce overfitting in neural networks. However, the explainability of their benefits largely remains a mystery. We study which layers of residual neural networks (ResNets) are most affected by augmentations using Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA). We do so by analyzing models of varying widths and depths, as well as whether their weights are initialized randomly or through transfer learning. We find that the pattern of how the layers are affected depends on the model's depth, and that networks trained with augmentation that use information from two images affect the learned weights significantly more than augmentations that operate on a single image. Deeper layers of ResNets initialized with ImageNet-1K weights and fine-tuned receive more impact from the augmentations than early layers. Understanding the effects of image augmentations on CNNs will have a variety of applications, such as determining how far back one needs to fine-tune a network and which layers should be frozen when implementing layer freezing algorithms.