pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Event-Aided Time-to-Collision Estimation for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jinghang Li, Bangyan Liao, Xiuyuan Lu, Peidong Liu, Shaojie Shen, Yi Zhou
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Predicting a potential collision with leading vehicles is an essential functionality of any autonomous/assisted driving system. One bottleneck of existing vision-based solutions is that their updating rate is limited to the frame rate of standard cameras used. In this paper, we present a novel method that estimates the time to collision using a neuromorphic event-based camera, a biologically inspired visual sensor that can sense at exactly the same rate as scene dynamics. The core of the proposed algorithm consists of a two-step approach for efficient and accurate geometric model fitting on event data in a coarse-to-fine manner. The first step is a robust linear solver based on a novel geometric measurement that overcomes the partial observability of event-based normal flow. The second step further refines the resulting model via a spatio-temporal registration process formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. Experiments on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, outperforming other alternative methods in terms of efficiency and accuracy.
CosmoCLIP: Generalizing Large Vision-Language Models for Astronomical Imaging
Authors: Raza Imam, Mohammed Talha Alam, Umaima Rahman, Mohsen Guizani, Fakhri Karray
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image-text Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Existing vision-text contrastive learning models enhance representation transferability and support zero-shot prediction by matching paired image and caption embeddings while pushing unrelated pairs apart. However, astronomical image-label datasets are significantly smaller compared to general image and label datasets available from the internet. We introduce CosmoCLIP, an astronomical image-text contrastive learning framework precisely fine-tuned on the pre-trained CLIP model using SpaceNet and BLIP-based captions. SpaceNet, attained via FLARE, constitutes ~13k optimally distributed images, while BLIP acts as a rich knowledge extractor. The rich semantics derived from this SpaceNet and BLIP descriptions, when learned contrastively, enable CosmoCLIP to achieve superior generalization across various in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Our results demonstrate that CosmoCLIP is a straightforward yet powerful framework, significantly outperforming CLIP in zero-shot classification and image-text retrieval tasks.
Dual-stage Hyperspectral Image Classification Model with Spectral Supertoken
Authors: Peifu Liu, Tingfa Xu, Jie Wang, Huan Chen, Huiyan Bai, Jianan Li
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Classification Consistency, Diversity, Hyperspectral Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Robust classification

Hyperspectral image classification, a task that assigns pre-defined classes to each pixel in a hyperspectral image of remote sensing scenes, often faces challenges due to the neglect of correlations between spectrally similar pixels. This oversight can lead to inaccurate edge definitions and difficulties in managing minor spectral variations in contiguous areas. To address these issues, we introduce the novel Dual-stage Spectral Supertoken Classifier (DSTC), inspired by superpixel concepts. DSTC employs spectrum-derivative-based pixel clustering to group pixels with similar spectral characteristics into spectral supertokens. By projecting the classification of these tokens onto the image space, we achieve pixel-level results that maintain regional classification consistency and precise boundary. Moreover, recognizing the diversity within tokens, we propose a class-proportion-based soft label. This label adaptively assigns weights to different categories based on their prevalence, effectively managing data distribution imbalances and enhancing classification performance. Comprehensive experiments on WHU-OHS, IP, KSC, and UP datasets corroborate the robust classification capabilities of DSTC and the effectiveness of its individual components. Code will be publicly available at https://github.com/laprf/DSTC.
Pairwise Distance Distillation for Unsupervised Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Yuehan Zhang, Seungjun Lee, Angela Yao
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Standard single-image super-resolution creates paired training data from high-resolution images through fixed downsampling kernels. However, real-world super-resolution (RWSR) faces unknown degradations in the low-resolution inputs, all the while lacking paired training data. Existing methods approach this problem by learning blind general models through complex synthetic augmentations on training inputs; they sacrifice the performance on specific degradation for broader generalization to many possible ones. We address the unsupervised RWSR for a targeted real-world degradation. We study from a distillation perspective and introduce a novel pairwise distance distillation framework. Through our framework, a model specialized in synthetic degradation adapts to target real-world degradations by distilling intra- and inter-model distances across the specialized model and an auxiliary generalized model. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances fidelity and perceptual quality, surpassing state-of-the-art approaches in RWSR. The source code is available at https://github.com/Yuehan717/PDD.
Deformable Feature Alignment and Refinement for Moving Infrared Dim-small Target Detection
Authors: Dengyan Luo, Yanping Xiang, Hu Wang, Luping Ji, Shuai Li, Mao Ye
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Compensation

The detection of moving infrared dim-small targets has been a challenging and prevalent research topic. The current state-of-the-art methods are mainly based on ConvLSTM to aggregate information from adjacent frames to facilitate the detection of the current frame. However, these methods implicitly utilize motion information only in the training stage and fail to explicitly explore motion compensation, resulting in poor performance in the case of a video sequence including large motion. In this paper, we propose a Deformable Feature Alignment and Refinement (DFAR) method based on deformable convolution to explicitly use motion context in both the training and inference stages. Specifically, a Temporal Deformable Alignment (TDA) module based on the designed Dilated Convolution Attention Fusion (DCAF) block is developed to explicitly align the adjacent frames with the current frame at the feature level. Then, the feature refinement module adaptively fuses the aligned features and further aggregates useful spatio-temporal information by means of the proposed Attention-guided Deformable Fusion (AGDF) block. In addition, to improve the alignment of adjacent frames with the current frame, we extend the traditional loss function by introducing a new motion compensation loss. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed DFAR method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets including DAUB and IRDST.
MIGS: Multi-Identity Gaussian Splatting via Tensor Decomposition
Authors: Aggelina Chatziagapi, Grigorios G. Chrysos, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2024-07-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, All, Tensor Decomposition

We introduce MIGS (Multi-Identity Gaussian Splatting), a novel method that learns a single neural representation for multiple identities, using only monocular videos. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) approaches for human avatars require per-identity optimization. However, learning a multi-identity representation presents advantages in robustly animating humans under arbitrary poses. We propose to construct a high-order tensor that combines all the learnable 3DGS parameters for all the training identities. By assuming a low-rank structure and factorizing the tensor, we model the complex rigid and non-rigid deformations of multiple subjects in a unified network, significantly reducing the total number of parameters. Our proposed approach leverages information from all the training identities and enables robust animation under challenging unseen poses, outperforming existing approaches. It can also be extended to learn unseen identities.
Dataset Quantization with Active Learning based Adaptive Sampling
Authors: Zhenghao Zhao, Yuzhang Shang, Junyi Wu, Yan Yan
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Dataset Distillation, Quantization

Deep learning has made remarkable progress recently, largely due to the availability of large, well-labeled datasets. However, the training on such datasets elevates costs and computational demands. To address this, various techniques like coreset selection, dataset distillation, and dataset quantization have been explored in the literature. Unlike traditional techniques that depend on uniform sample distributions across different classes, our research demonstrates that maintaining performance is feasible even with uneven distributions. We find that for certain classes, the variation in sample quantity has a minimal impact on performance. Inspired by this observation, an intuitive idea is to reduce the number of samples for stable classes and increase the number of samples for sensitive classes to achieve a better performance with the same sampling ratio. Then the question arises: how can we adaptively select samples from a dataset to achieve optimal performance? In this paper, we propose a novel active learning based adaptive sampling strategy, Dataset Quantization with Active Learning based Adaptive Sampling (DQAS), to optimize the sample selection. In addition, we introduce a novel pipeline for dataset quantization, utilizing feature space from the final stage of dataset quantization to generate more precise dataset bins. Our comprehensive evaluations on the multiple datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art dataset compression methods.
HAMIL-QA: Hierarchical Approach to Multiple Instance Learning for Atrial LGE MRI Quality Assessment
Authors: K M Arefeen Sultan, Md Hasibul Husain Hisham, Benjamin Orkild, Alan Morris, Eugene Kholmovski, Erik Bieging, Eugene Kwan, Ravi Ranjan, Ed DiBella, Shireen Elhabian
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention - MICCAI 2024 9
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Quality Assessment, Multiple Instance Learning

The accurate evaluation of left atrial fibrosis via high-quality 3D Late Gadolinium Enhancement (LGE) MRI is crucial for atrial fibrillation management but is hindered by factors like patient movement and imaging variability. The pursuit of automated LGE MRI quality assessment is critical for enhancing diagnostic accuracy, standardizing evaluations, and improving patient outcomes. The deep learning models aimed at automating this process face significant challenges due to the scarcity of expert annotations, high computational costs, and the need to capture subtle diagnostic details in highly variable images. This study introduces HAMIL-QA, a multiple instance learning (MIL) framework, designed to overcome these obstacles. HAMIL-QA employs a hierarchical bag and sub-bag structure that allows for targeted analysis within sub-bags and aggregates insights at the volume level. This hierarchical MIL approach reduces reliance on extensive annotations, lessens computational load, and ensures clinically relevant quality predictions by focusing on diagnostically critical image features. Our experiments show that HAMIL-QA surpasses existing MIL methods and traditional supervised approaches in accuracy, AUROC, and F1-Score on an LGE MRI scan dataset, demonstrating its potential as a scalable solution for LGE MRI quality assessment automation. The code is available at: $\href{https://github.com/arf111/HAMIL-QA}{\text{this https URL}}$
Few-Shot Image Generation by Conditional Relaxing Diffusion Inversion
Authors: Yu Cao, Shaogang Gong
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation

In the field of Few-Shot Image Generation (FSIG) using Deep Generative Models (DGMs), accurately estimating the distribution of target domain with minimal samples poses a significant challenge. This requires a method that can both capture the broad diversity and the true characteristics of the target domain distribution. We present Conditional Relaxing Diffusion Inversion (CRDI), an innovative `training-free' approach designed to enhance distribution diversity in synthetic image generation. Distinct from conventional methods, CRDI does not rely on fine-tuning based on only a few samples. Instead, it focuses on reconstructing each target image instance and expanding diversity through few-shot learning. The approach initiates by identifying a Sample-wise Guidance Embedding (SGE) for the diffusion model, which serves a purpose analogous to the explicit latent codes in certain Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) models. Subsequently, the method involves a scheduler that progressively introduces perturbations to the SGE, thereby augmenting diversity. Comprehensive experiments demonstrates that our method surpasses GAN-based reconstruction techniques and equals state-of-the-art (SOTA) FSIG methods in performance. Additionally, it effectively mitigates overfitting and catastrophic forgetting, common drawbacks of fine-tuning approaches.
Tracing Back the Malicious Clients in Poisoning Attacks to Federated Learning
Authors: Yuqi Jia, Minghong Fang, Hongbin Liu, Jinghuai Zhang, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Poisoning attacks compromise the training phase of federated learning (FL) such that the learned global model misclassifies attacker-chosen inputs called target inputs. Existing defenses mainly focus on protecting the training phase of FL such that the learnt global model is poison free. However, these defenses often achieve limited effectiveness when the clients' local training data is highly non-iid or the number of malicious clients is large, as confirmed in our experiments. In this work, we propose FLForensics, the first poison-forensics method for FL. FLForensics complements existing training-phase defenses. In particular, when training-phase defenses fail and a poisoned global model is deployed, FLForensics aims to trace back the malicious clients that performed the poisoning attack after a misclassified target input is identified. We theoretically show that FLForensics can accurately distinguish between benign and malicious clients under a formal definition of poisoning attack. Moreover, we empirically show the effectiveness of FLForensics at tracing back both existing and adaptive poisoning attacks on five benchmark datasets.
Reference-based Controllable Scene Stylization with Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Yiqun Mei, Jiacong Xu, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, NeRF

Referenced-based scene stylization that edits the appearance based on a content-aligned reference image is an emerging research area. Starting with a pretrained neural radiance field (NeRF), existing methods typically learn a novel appearance that matches the given style. Despite their effectiveness, they inherently suffer from time-consuming volume rendering, and thus are impractical for many real-time applications. In this work, we propose ReGS, which adapts 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for reference-based stylization to enable real-time stylized view synthesis. Editing the appearance of a pretrained 3DGS is challenging as it uses discrete Gaussians as 3D representation, which tightly bind appearance with geometry. Simply optimizing the appearance as prior methods do is often insufficient for modeling continuous textures in the given reference image. To address this challenge, we propose a novel texture-guided control mechanism that adaptively adjusts local responsible Gaussians to a new geometric arrangement, serving for desired texture details. The proposed process is guided by texture clues for effective appearance editing, and regularized by scene depth for preserving original geometric structure. With these novel designs, we show ReGs can produce state-of-the-art stylization results that respect the reference texture while embracing real-time rendering speed for free-view navigation.
ColorPeel: Color Prompt Learning with Diffusion Models via Color and Shape Disentanglement
Authors: Muhammad Atif Butt, Kai Wang, Javier Vazquez-Corral, Joost Van de Weijer
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Disentanglement, Prompt Learning

Text-to-Image (T2I) generation has made significant advancements with the advent of diffusion models. These models exhibit remarkable abilities to produce images based on textual prompts. Current T2I models allow users to specify object colors using linguistic color names. However, these labels encompass broad color ranges, making it difficult to achieve precise color matching. To tackle this challenging task, named color prompt learning, we propose to learn specific color prompts tailored to user-selected colors. Existing T2I personalization methods tend to result in color-shape entanglement. To overcome this, we generate several basic geometric objects in the target color, allowing for color and shape disentanglement during the color prompt learning. Our method, denoted as ColorPeel, successfully assists the T2I models to peel off the novel color prompts from these colored shapes. In the experiments, we demonstrate the efficacy of ColorPeel in achieving precise color generation with T2I models. Furthermore, we generalize ColorPeel to effectively learn abstract attribute concepts, including textures, materials, etc. Our findings represent a significant step towards improving precision and versatility of T2I models, offering new opportunities for creative applications and design tasks. Our project is available at https://moatifbutt.github.io/colorpeel/.
Barely-Visible Surface Crack Detection for Wind Turbine Sustainability
Authors: Sourav Agrawal, Isaac Corley, Conor Wallace, Clovis Vaughn, Jonathan Lwowski
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00

The production of wind energy is a crucial part of sustainable development and reducing the reliance on fossil fuels. Maintaining the integrity of wind turbines to produce this energy is a costly and time-consuming task requiring repeated inspection and maintenance. While autonomous drones have proven to make this process more efficient, the algorithms for detecting anomalies to prevent catastrophic damage to turbine blades have fallen behind due to some dangerous defects, such as hairline cracks, being barely-visible. Existing datasets and literature are lacking and tend towards detecting obvious and visible defects in addition to not being geographically diverse. In this paper we introduce a novel and diverse dataset of barely-visible hairline cracks collected from numerous wind turbine inspections. To prove the efficacy of our dataset, we detail our end-to-end deployed turbine crack detection pipeline from the image acquisition stage to the use of predictions in providing automated maintenance recommendations to extend the life and efficiency of wind turbines.
Scaling Up Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment via Task Vector Customization
Authors: Jooyeol Yun, Jaegul Choo
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment

The task of personalized image aesthetic assessment seeks to tailor aesthetic score prediction models to match individual preferences with just a few user-provided inputs. However, the scalability and generalization capabilities of current approaches are considerably restricted by their reliance on an expensive curated database. To overcome this long-standing scalability challenge, we present a unique approach that leverages readily available databases for general image aesthetic assessment and image quality assessment. Specifically, we view each database as a distinct image score regression task that exhibits varying degrees of personalization potential. By determining optimal combinations of task vectors, known to represent specific traits of each database, we successfully create personalized models for individuals. This approach of integrating multiple models allows us to harness a substantial amount of data. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generalizing to previously unseen domains-a challenge previous approaches have struggled to achieve-making it highly applicable to real-world scenarios. Our novel approach significantly advances the field by offering scalable solutions for personalized aesthetic assessment and establishing high standards for future research. https://yeolj00.github.io/personal-projects/personalized-aesthetics/
CamFreeDiff: Camera-free Image to Panorama Generation with Diffusion Model
Authors: Xiaoding Yuan, Shitao Tang, Kejie Li, Alan Yuille, Peng Wang
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Outpainting

This paper introduces Camera-free Diffusion (CamFreeDiff) model for 360-degree image outpainting from a single camera-free image and text description. This method distinguishes itself from existing strategies, such as MVDiffusion, by eliminating the requirement for predefined camera poses. Instead, our model incorporates a mechanism for predicting homography directly within the multi-view diffusion framework. The core of our approach is to formulate camera estimation by predicting the homography transformation from the input view to a predefined canonical view. The homography provides point-level correspondences between the input image and targeting panoramic images, allowing connections enforced by correspondence-aware attention in a fully differentiable manner. Qualitative and quantitative experimental results demonstrate our model's strong robustness and generalization ability for 360-degree image outpainting in the challenging context of camera-free inputs.
ItTakesTwo: Leveraging Peer Representations for Semi-supervised LiDAR Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yuyuan Liu, Yuanhong Chen, Hu Wang, Vasileios Belagiannis, Ian Reid, Gustavo Carneiro
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The costly and time-consuming annotation process to produce large training sets for modelling semantic LiDAR segmentation methods has motivated the development of semi-supervised learning (SSL) methods. However, such SSL approaches often concentrate on employing consistency learning only for individual LiDAR representations. This narrow focus results in limited perturbations that generally fail to enable effective consistency learning. Additionally, these SSL approaches employ contrastive learning based on the sampling from a limited set of positive and negative embedding samples. This paper introduces a novel semi-supervised LiDAR semantic segmentation framework called ItTakesTwo (IT2). IT2 is designed to ensure consistent predictions from peer LiDAR representations, thereby improving the perturbation effectiveness in consistency learning. Furthermore, our contrastive learning employs informative samples drawn from a distribution of positive and negative embeddings learned from the entire training set. Results on public benchmarks show that our approach achieves remarkable improvements over the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in the field. The code is available at: https://github.com/yyliu01/IT2.