pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AD-Lite Net: A Lightweight and Concatenated CNN Model for Alzheimer's Detection from MRI Images
Authors: Santanu Roy, Archit Gupta, Shubhi Tiwari, Palak Sahu
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Alzheimer's Detection

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a non-curable progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects the human brain, leading to a decline in memory, cognitive abilities, and eventually, the ability to carry out daily tasks. Manual diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease from MRI images is fraught with less sensitivity and it is a very tedious process for neurologists. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD) system, which can detect AD at early stages with higher accuracy. In this research, we have proposed a novel AD-Lite Net model (trained from scratch), that could alleviate the aforementioned problem. The novelties we bring here in this research are, (I) We have proposed a very lightweight CNN model by incorporating Depth Wise Separable Convolutional (DWSC) layers and Global Average Pooling (GAP) layers. (II) We have leveraged a ``parallel concatenation block'' (pcb), in the proposed AD-Lite Net model. This pcb consists of a Transformation layer (Tx-layer), followed by two convolutional layers, which are thereby concatenated with the original base model. This Tx-layer converts the features into very distinct kind of features, which are imperative for the Alzheimer's disease. As a consequence, the proposed AD-Lite Net model with ``parallel concatenation'' converges faster and automatically mitigates the class imbalance problem from the MRI datasets in a very generalized way. For the validity of our proposed model, we have implemented it on three different MRI datasets. Furthermore, we have combined the ADNI and AD datasets and subsequently performed a 10-fold cross-validation experiment to verify the model's generalization ability. Extensive experimental results showed that our proposed model has outperformed all the existing CNN models, and one recent trend Vision Transformer (ViT) model by a significant margin.
Learning to Match 2D Keypoints Across Preoperative MR and Intraoperative Ultrasound
Authors: Hassan Rasheed, Reuben Dorent, Maximilian Fehrentz, Tina Kapur, William M. Wells III, Alexandra Golby, Sarah Frisken, Julia A. Schnabel, Nazim Haouchine
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00

We propose in this paper a texture-invariant 2D keypoints descriptor specifically designed for matching preoperative Magnetic Resonance (MR) images with intraoperative Ultrasound (US) images. We introduce a matching-by-synthesis strategy, where intraoperative US images are synthesized from MR images accounting for multiple MR modalities and intraoperative US variability. We build our training set by enforcing keypoints localization over all images then train a patient-specific descriptor network that learns texture-invariant discriminant features in a supervised contrastive manner, leading to robust keypoints descriptors. Our experiments on real cases with ground truth show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods and achieving 80.35% matching precision on average.
High-Frequency Anti-DreamBooth: Robust Defense against Personalized Image Synthesis
Authors: Takuto Onikubo, Yusuke Matsui
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Purification, Image Generation

Recently, text-to-image generative models have been misused to create unauthorized malicious images of individuals, posing a growing social problem. Previous solutions, such as Anti-DreamBooth, add adversarial noise to images to protect them from being used as training data for malicious generation. However, we found that the adversarial noise can be removed by adversarial purification methods such as DiffPure. Therefore, we propose a new adversarial attack method that adds strong perturbation on the high-frequency areas of images to make it more robust to adversarial purification. Our experiment showed that the adversarial images retained noise even after adversarial purification, hindering malicious image generation.
Open Source Infrastructure for Automatic Cell Segmentation
Authors: Aaron Rock Menezes, Bharath Ramsundar
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Drug Discovery, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Automated cell segmentation is crucial for various biological and medical applications, facilitating tasks like cell counting, morphology analysis, and drug discovery. However, manual segmentation is time-consuming and prone to subjectivity, necessitating robust automated methods. This paper presents open-source infrastructure, utilizing the UNet model, a deep-learning architecture noted for its effectiveness in image segmentation tasks. This implementation is integrated into the open-source DeepChem package, enhancing accessibility and usability for researchers and practitioners. The resulting tool offers a convenient and user-friendly interface, reducing the barrier to entry for cell segmentation while maintaining high accuracy. Additionally, we benchmark this model against various datasets, demonstrating its robustness and versatility across different imaging conditions and cell types.
Cross-Attention Based Influence Model for Manual and Nonmanual Sign Language Analysis
Authors: Lipisha Chaudhary, Fei Xu, Ifeoma Nwogu
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Sign Language Translation, Translation

Both manual (relating to the use of hands) and non-manual markers (NMM), such as facial expressions or mouthing cues, are important for providing the complete meaning of phrases in American Sign Language (ASL). Efforts have been made in advancing sign language to spoken/written language understanding, but most of these have primarily focused on manual features only. In this work, using advanced neural machine translation methods, we examine and report on the extent to which facial expressions contribute to understanding sign language phrases. We present a sign language translation architecture consisting of two-stream encoders, with one encoder handling the face and the other handling the upper body (with hands). We propose a new parallel cross-attention decoding mechanism that is useful for quantifying the influence of each input modality on the output. The two streams from the encoder are directed simultaneously to different attention stacks in the decoder. Examining the properties of the parallel cross-attention weights allows us to analyze the importance of facial markers compared to body and hand features during a translating task.
SDformer: Efficient End-to-End Transformer for Depth Completion
Authors: Jian Qian, Miao Sun, Ashley Lee, Jie Li, Shenglong Zhuo, Patrick Yin Chiang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Depth Completion

Depth completion aims to predict dense depth maps with sparse depth measurements from a depth sensor. Currently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models are the most popular methods applied to depth completion tasks. However, despite the excellent high-end performance, they suffer from a limited representation area. To overcome the drawbacks of CNNs, a more effective and powerful method has been presented: the Transformer, which is an adaptive self-attention setting sequence-to-sequence model. While the standard Transformer quadratically increases the computational cost from the key-query dot-product of input resolution which improperly employs depth completion tasks. In this work, we propose a different window-based Transformer architecture for depth completion tasks named Sparse-to-Dense Transformer (SDformer). The network consists of an input module for the depth map and RGB image features extraction and concatenation, a U-shaped encoder-decoder Transformer for extracting deep features, and a refinement module. Specifically, we first concatenate the depth map features with the RGB image features through the input model. Then, instead of calculating self-attention with the whole feature maps, we apply different window sizes to extract the long-range depth dependencies. Finally, we refine the predicted features from the input module and the U-shaped encoder-decoder Transformer module to get the enriching depth features and employ a convolution layer to obtain the dense depth map. In practice, the SDformer obtains state-of-the-art results against the CNN-based depth completion models with lower computing loads and parameters on the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI DC datasets.
MagicStyle: Portrait Stylization Based on Reference Image
Authors: Zhaoli Deng, Kaibin Zhou, Fanyi Wang, Zhenpeng Mi
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Stylization

The development of diffusion models has significantly advanced the research on image stylization, particularly in the area of stylizing a content image based on a given style image, which has attracted many scholars. The main challenge in this reference image stylization task lies in how to maintain the details of the content image while incorporating the color and texture features of the style image. This challenge becomes even more pronounced when the content image is a portrait which has complex textural details. To address this challenge, we propose a diffusion model-based reference image stylization method specifically for portraits, called MagicStyle. MagicStyle consists of two phases: Content and Style DDIM Inversion (CSDI) and Feature Fusion Forward (FFF). The CSDI phase involves a reverse denoising process, where DDIM Inversion is performed separately on the content image and the style image, storing the self-attention query, key and value features of both images during the inversion process. The FFF phase executes forward denoising, harmoniously integrating the texture and color information from the pre-stored feature queries, keys and values into the diffusion generation process based on our Well-designed Feature Fusion Attention (FFA). We conducted comprehensive comparative and ablation experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed MagicStyle and FFA.
Effective Segmentation of Post-Treatment Gliomas Using Simple Approaches: Artificial Sequence Generation and Ensemble Models
Authors: Heejong Kim, Leo Milecki, Mina C Moghadam, Fengbei Liu, Minh Nguyen, Eric Qiu, Abhishek Thanki, Mert R Sabuncu
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segmentation is a crucial task in the medical imaging field and is often an important primary step or even a prerequisite to the analysis of medical volumes. Yet treatments such as surgery complicate the accurate delineation of regions of interest. The BraTS Post-Treatment 2024 Challenge published the first public dataset for post-surgery glioma segmentation and addresses the aforementioned issue by fostering the development of automated segmentation tools for glioma in MRI data. In this effort, we propose two straightforward approaches to enhance the segmentation performances of deep learning-based methodologies. First, we incorporate an additional input based on a simple linear combination of the available MRI sequences input, which highlights enhancing tumors. Second, we employ various ensembling methods to weigh the contribution of a battery of models. Our results demonstrate that these approaches significantly improve segmentation performance compared to baseline models, underscoring the effectiveness of these simple approaches in improving medical image segmentation tasks.
The JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud Coding Standard: Serving Man and Machine
Authors: André F. R. Guarda, Nuno M. M. Rodrigues, Fernando Pereira
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Benchmarking

Efficient point cloud coding has become increasingly critical for multiple applications such as virtual reality, autonomous driving, and digital twin systems, where rich and interactive 3D data representations may functionally make the difference. Deep learning has emerged as a powerful tool in this domain, offering advanced techniques for compressing point clouds more efficiently than conventional coding methods while also allowing effective computer vision tasks performed in the compressed domain thus, for the first time, making available a common compressed visual representation effective for both man and machine. Taking advantage of this potential, JPEG has recently finalized the JPEG Pleno Learning-based Point Cloud Coding (PCC) standard offering efficient lossy coding of static point clouds, targeting both human visualization and machine processing by leveraging deep learning models for geometry and color coding. The geometry is processed directly in its original 3D form using sparse convolutional neural networks, while the color data is projected onto 2D images and encoded using the also learning-based JPEG AI standard. The goal of this paper is to provide a complete technical description of the JPEG PCC standard, along with a thorough benchmarking of its performance against the state-of-the-art, while highlighting its main strengths and weaknesses. In terms of compression performance, JPEG PCC outperforms the conventional MPEG PCC standards, especially in geometry coding, achieving significant rate reductions. Color compression performance is less competitive but this is overcome by the power of a full learning-based coding framework for both geometry and color and the associated effective compressed domain processing.
GAZEploit: Remote Keystroke Inference Attack by Gaze Estimation from Avatar Views in VR/MR Devices
Authors: Hanqiu Wang, Zihao Zhan, Haoqi Shan, Siqi Dai, Max Panoff, Shuo Wang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Gaze Estimation, Inference Attack, Mixed Reality

The advent and growing popularity of Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) solutions have revolutionized the way we interact with digital platforms. The cutting-edge gaze-controlled typing methods, now prevalent in high-end models of these devices, e.g., Apple Vision Pro, have not only improved user experience but also mitigated traditional keystroke inference attacks that relied on hand gestures, head movements and acoustic side-channels. However, this advancement has paradoxically given birth to a new, potentially more insidious cyber threat, GAZEploit. In this paper, we unveil GAZEploit, a novel eye-tracking based attack specifically designed to exploit these eye-tracking information by leveraging the common use of virtual appearances in VR applications. This widespread usage significantly enhances the practicality and feasibility of our attack compared to existing methods. GAZEploit takes advantage of this vulnerability to remotely extract gaze estimations and steal sensitive keystroke information across various typing scenarios-including messages, passwords, URLs, emails, and passcodes. Our research, involving 30 participants, achieved over 80% accuracy in keystroke inference. Alarmingly, our study also identified over 15 top-rated apps in the Apple Store as vulnerable to the GAZEploit attack, emphasizing the urgent need for bolstered security measures for this state-of-the-art VR/MR text entry method.
Bayesian Self-Training for Semi-Supervised 3D Segmentation
Authors: Ozan Unal, Christos Sakaridis, Luc van Gool
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, 3D Semantic Segmentation, 3D visual grounding, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Visual Grounding

3D segmentation is a core problem in computer vision and, similarly to many other dense prediction tasks, it requires large amounts of annotated data for adequate training. However, densely labeling 3D point clouds to employ fully-supervised training remains too labor intensive and expensive. Semi-supervised training provides a more practical alternative, where only a small set of labeled data is given, accompanied by a larger unlabeled set. This area thus studies the effective use of unlabeled data to reduce the performance gap that arises due to the lack of annotations. In this work, inspired by Bayesian deep learning, we first propose a Bayesian self-training framework for semi-supervised 3D semantic segmentation. Employing stochastic inference, we generate an initial set of pseudo-labels and then filter these based on estimated point-wise uncertainty. By constructing a heuristic $n$-partite matching algorithm, we extend the method to semi-supervised 3D instance segmentation, and finally, with the same building blocks, to dense 3D visual grounding. We demonstrate state-of-the-art results for our semi-supervised method on SemanticKITTI and ScribbleKITTI for 3D semantic segmentation and on ScanNet and S3DIS for 3D instance segmentation. We further achieve substantial improvements in dense 3D visual grounding over supervised-only baselines on ScanRefer. Our project page is available at ouenal.github.io/bst/.
EZIGen: Enhancing zero-shot personalized image generation with precise subject encoding and decoupled guidance
Authors: Zicheng Duan, Yuxuan Ding, Chenhui Gou, Ziqin Zhou, Ethan Smith, Lingqiao Liu
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Personalized Image Generation, Subject Transfer

Zero-shot personalized image generation models aim to produce images that align with both a given text prompt and subject image, requiring the model to effectively incorporate both sources of guidance. However, existing methods often struggle to capture fine-grained subject details and frequently prioritize one form of guidance over the other, resulting in suboptimal subject encoding and an imbalance in the generated images. In this study, we uncover key insights into achieving high-quality balances on subject identity preservation and text-following, notably that 1) the design of the subject image encoder critically influences subject identity preservation, and 2) the text and subject guidance should take effect at different denoising stages. Building on these insights, we introduce a new approach, EZIGen, that employs two main components: a carefully crafted subject image encoder based on the pre-trained UNet of the Stable Diffusion model, following a process that balances the two guidances by separating their dominance stage and revisiting certain time steps to bootstrap subject transfer quality. Through these two components, EZIGen achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple personalized generation benchmarks with a unified model and 100 times less training data. Demo Page: zichengduan.github.io/pages/EZIGen/index.html
SimMAT: Exploring Transferability from Vision Foundation Models to Any Image Modality
Authors: Chenyang Lei, Liyi Chen, Jun Cen, Xiao Chen, Zhen Lei, Felix Heide, Ziwei Liu, Qifeng Chen, Zhaoxiang Zhang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Foundation models like ChatGPT and Sora that are trained on a huge scale of data have made a revolutionary social impact. However, it is extremely challenging for sensors in many different fields to collect similar scales of natural images to train strong foundation models. To this end, this work presents a simple and effective framework SimMAT to study an open problem: the transferability from vision foundation models trained on natural RGB images to other image modalities of different physical properties (e.g., polarization). SimMAT consists of a modality-agnostic transfer layer (MAT) and a pretrained foundation model. We apply SimMAT to a representative vision foundation model Segment Anything Model (SAM) to support any evaluated new image modality. Given the absence of relevant benchmarks, we construct a new benchmark to evaluate the transfer learning performance. Our experiments confirm the intriguing potential of transferring vision foundation models in enhancing other sensors' performance. Specifically, SimMAT can improve the segmentation performance (mIoU) from 22.15% to 53.88% on average for evaluated modalities and consistently outperforms other baselines. We hope that SimMAT can raise awareness of cross-modal transfer learning and benefit various fields for better results with vision foundation models.
Diffusion-Based Image-to-Image Translation by Noise Correction via Prompt Interpolation
Authors: Junsung Lee, Minsoo Kang, Bohyung Han
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image-to-Image Translation, Prediction, Translation

We propose a simple but effective training-free approach tailored to diffusion-based image-to-image translation. Our approach revises the original noise prediction network of a pretrained diffusion model by introducing a noise correction term. We formulate the noise correction term as the difference between two noise predictions; one is computed from the denoising network with a progressive interpolation of the source and target prompt embeddings, while the other is the noise prediction with the source prompt embedding. The final noise prediction network is given by a linear combination of the standard denoising term and the noise correction term, where the former is designed to reconstruct must-be-preserved regions while the latter aims to effectively edit regions of interest relevant to the target prompt. Our approach can be easily incorporated into existing image-to-image translation methods based on diffusion models. Extensive experiments verify that the proposed technique achieves outstanding performance with low latency and consistently improves existing frameworks when combined with them.
AutoPET Challenge: Tumour Synthesis for Data Augmentation
Authors: Lap Yan Lennon Chan, Chenxin Li, Yixuan Yuan
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation

Accurate lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT scans is crucial for cancer diagnosis and treatment planning, but limited datasets often hinder the performance of automated segmentation models. In this paper, we explore the potential of leveraging the deep prior from a generative model to serve as a data augmenter for automated lesion segmentation in PET/CT scans. We adapt the DiffTumor method, originally designed for CT images, to generate synthetic PET-CT images with lesions. Our approach trains the generative model on the AutoPET dataset and uses it to expand the training data. We then compare the performance of segmentation models trained on the original and augmented datasets. Our findings show that the model trained on the augmented dataset achieves a higher Dice score, demonstrating the potential of our data augmentation approach. In a nutshell, this work presents a promising direction for improving lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT scans with limited datasets, potentially enhancing the accuracy and reliability of cancer diagnostics.
Expansive Supervision for Neural Radiance Field
Authors: Weixiang Zhang, Shuzhao Xie, Shijia Ge, Wei Yao, Chen Tang, Zhi Wang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved remarkable success in creating immersive media representations through its exceptional reconstruction capabilities. However, the computational demands of dense forward passes and volume rendering during training continue to challenge its real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce Expansive Supervision to reduce time and memory costs during NeRF training from the perspective of partial ray selection for supervision. Specifically, we observe that training errors exhibit a long-tail distribution correlated with image content. Based on this observation, our method selectively renders a small but crucial subset of pixels and expands their values to estimate errors across the entire area for each iteration. Compared to conventional supervision, our approach effectively bypasses redundant rendering processes, resulting in substantial reductions in both time and memory consumption. Experimental results demonstrate that integrating Expansive Supervision within existing state-of-the-art acceleration frameworks achieves 52% memory savings and 16% time savings while maintaining comparable visual quality.