pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HcNet: Image Modeling with Heat Conduction Equation
Authors: Zhemin Zhang, Xun Gong
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00

Foundation models, such as CNNs and ViTs, have powered the development of image modeling. However, general guidance to model architecture design is still missing. The design of many modern model architectures, such as residual structures, multiplicative gating signal, and feed-forward networks, can be interpreted in terms of the heat conduction equation. This finding inspired us to model images by the heat conduction equation, where the essential idea is to conceptualize image features as temperatures and model their information interaction as the diffusion of thermal energy. We can take advantage of the rich knowledge in the heat conduction equation to guide us in designing new and more interpretable models. As an example, we propose Heat Conduction Layer and Refine Approximation Layer inspired by solving the heat conduction equation using Finite Difference Method and Fourier series, respectively. This paper does not aim to present a state-of-the-art model; instead, it seeks to integrate the overall architectural design of the model into the heat conduction theory framework. Nevertheless, our Heat Conduction Network (HcNet) still shows competitive performance. Code available at \url{https://github.com/ZheminZhang1/HcNet}.
GlyphPattern: An Abstract Pattern Recognition for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Zixuan Wu, Yoolim Kim, Carolyn Jane Anderson
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) building upon the foundation of powerful large language models have made rapid progress in reasoning across visual and textual data. While VLMs perform well on vision tasks that they are trained on, our results highlight key challenges in abstract pattern recognition. We present GlyphPattern, a 954 item dataset that pairs 318 human-written descriptions of visual patterns from 40 writing systems with three visual presentation styles. GlyphPattern evaluates abstract pattern recognition in VLMs, requiring models to understand and judge natural language descriptions of visual patterns. GlyphPattern patterns are drawn from a large-scale cognitive science investigation of human writing systems; as a result, they are rich in spatial reference and compositionality. Our experiments show that GlyphPattern is challenging for state-of-the-art VLMs (GPT-4o achieves only 55% accuracy), with marginal gains from few-shot prompting. Our detailed error analysis reveals challenges at multiple levels, including visual processing, natural language understanding, and pattern generalization.
CMAB: A First National-Scale Multi-Attribute Building Dataset in China Derived from Open Source Data and GeoAI
Authors: Yecheng Zhang, Huimin Zhao, Ying Long
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Rapidly acquiring three-dimensional (3D) building data, including geometric attributes like rooftop, height and orientations, as well as indicative attributes like function, quality, and age, is essential for accurate urban analysis, simulations, and policy updates. Current building datasets suffer from incomplete coverage of building multi-attributes. This paper introduces a geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) framework for large-scale building modeling, presenting the first national-scale Multi-Attribute Building dataset (CMAB), covering 3,667 spatial cities, 29 million buildings, and 21.3 billion square meters of rooftops with an F1-Score of 89.93% in OCRNet-based extraction, totaling 337.7 billion cubic meters of building stock. We trained bootstrap aggregated XGBoost models with city administrative classifications, incorporating features such as morphology, location, and function. Using multi-source data, including billions of high-resolution Google Earth images and 60 million street view images (SVIs), we generated rooftop, height, function, age, and quality attributes for each building. Accuracy was validated through model benchmarks, existing similar products, and manual SVI validation, mostly above 80%. Our dataset and results are crucial for global SDGs and urban planning.
Enhancing 3D Transformer Segmentation Model for Medical Image with Token-level Representation Learning
Authors: Xinrong Hu, Dewen Zeng, Yawen Wu, Xueyang Li, Yiyu Shi
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In the field of medical images, although various works find Swin Transformer has promising effectiveness on pixelwise dense prediction, whether pre-training these models without using extra dataset can further boost the performance for the downstream semantic segmentation remains unexplored.Applications of previous representation learning methods are hindered by the limited number of 3D volumes and high computational cost. In addition, most of pretext tasks designed specifically for Transformer are not applicable to hierarchical structure of Swin Transformer. Thus, this work proposes a token-level representation learning loss that maximizes agreement between token embeddings from different augmented views individually instead of volume-level global features. Moreover, we identify a potential representation collapse exclusively caused by this new loss. To prevent collapse, we invent a simple "rotate-and-restore" mechanism, which rotates and flips one augmented view of input volume, and later restores the order of tokens in the feature maps. We also modify the contrastive loss to address the discrimination between tokens at the same position but from different volumes. We test our pre-training scheme on two public medical segmentation datasets, and the results on the downstream segmentation task show more improvement of our methods than other state-of-the-art pre-trainig methods.
LaWa: Using Latent Space for In-Generation Image Watermarking
Authors: Ahmad Rezaei, Mohammad Akbari, Saeed Ranjbar Alvar, Arezou Fatemi, Yong Zhang
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

With generative models producing high quality images that are indistinguishable from real ones, there is growing concern regarding the malicious usage of AI-generated images. Imperceptible image watermarking is one viable solution towards such concerns. Prior watermarking methods map the image to a latent space for adding the watermark. Moreover, Latent Diffusion Models (LDM) generate the image in the latent space of a pre-trained autoencoder. We argue that this latent space can be used to integrate watermarking into the generation process. To this end, we present LaWa, an in-generation image watermarking method designed for LDMs. By using coarse-to-fine watermark embedding modules, LaWa modifies the latent space of pre-trained autoencoders and achieves high robustness against a wide range of image transformations while preserving perceptual quality of the image. We show that LaWa can also be used as a general image watermarking method. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that LaWa outperforms previous works in perceptual quality, robustness against attacks, and computational complexity, while having very low false positive rate. Code is available here.
SABER-6D: Shape Representation Based Implicit Object Pose Estimation
Authors: Shishir Reddy Vutukur, Mengkejiergeli Ba, Benjamin Busam, Matthias Kayser, Gurprit Singh
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, Pose Estimation

In this paper, we propose a novel encoder-decoder architecture, named SABER, to learn the 6D pose of the object in the embedding space by learning shape representation at a given pose. This model enables us to learn pose by performing shape representation at a target pose from RGB image input. We perform shape representation as an auxiliary task which helps us in learning rotations space for an object based on 2D images. An image encoder predicts the rotation in the embedding space and the DeepSDF based decoder learns to represent the object's shape at the given pose. As our approach is shape based, the pipeline is suitable for any type of object irrespective of the symmetry. Moreover, we need only a CAD model of the objects to train SABER. Our pipeline is synthetic data based and can also handle symmetric objects without symmetry labels and, thus, no additional labeled training data is needed. The experimental evaluation shows that our method achieves close to benchmark results for both symmetric objects and asymmetric objects on Occlusion-LineMOD, and T-LESS datasets.
Deep Learning in Medical Image Registration: Magic or Mirage?
Authors: Rohit Jena, Deeksha Sethi, Pratik Chaudhari, James C. Gee
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Classical optimization and learning-based methods are the two reigning paradigms in deformable image registration. While optimization-based methods boast generalizability across modalities and robust performance, learning-based methods promise peak performance, incorporating weak supervision and amortized optimization. However, the exact conditions for either paradigm to perform well over the other are shrouded and not explicitly outlined in the existing literature. In this paper, we make an explicit correspondence between the mutual information of the distribution of per-pixel intensity and labels, and the performance of classical registration methods. This strong correlation hints to the fact that architectural designs in learning-based methods is unlikely to affect this correlation, and therefore, the performance of learning-based methods. This hypothesis is thoroughly validated with state-of-the-art classical and learning-based methods. However, learning-based methods with weak supervision can perform high-fidelity intensity and label registration, which is not possible with classical methods. Next, we show that this high-fidelity feature learning does not translate to invariance to domain shift, and learning-based methods are sensitive to such changes in the data distribution. Finally, we propose a general recipe to choose the best paradigm for a given registration problem, based on these observations.
Sampling Foundational Transformer: A Theoretical Perspective
Authors: Viet Anh Nguyen, Minh Lenhat, Khoa Nguyen, Duong Duc Hieu, Dao Huu Hung, Truong Son Hy
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. To apply transformers across different data modalities, practitioners have to make specific clever data-modality-dependent constructions. In this paper, we propose Sampling Foundational Transformer (SFT) that can work on multiple data modalities (e.g., point cloud, graph, and sequence) and constraints (e.g., rotational-invariant). The existence of such model is important as contemporary foundational modeling requires operability on multiple data sources. For efficiency on large number of tokens, our model relies on our context aware sampling-without-replacement mechanism for both linear asymptotic computational complexity and real inference time gain. For efficiency, we rely on our newly discovered pseudoconvex formulation of transformer layer to increase model's convergence rate. As a model working on multiple data modalities, SFT has achieved competitive results on many benchmarks, while being faster in inference, compared to other very specialized models.
HySparK: Hybrid Sparse Masking for Large Scale Medical Image Pre-Training
Authors: Fenghe Tang, Ronghao Xu, Qingsong Yao, Xueming Fu, Quan Quan, Heqin Zhu, Zaiyi Liu, S. Kevin Zhou
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Self-Supervised Learning

The generative self-supervised learning strategy exhibits remarkable learning representational capabilities. However, there is limited attention to end-to-end pre-training methods based on a hybrid architecture of CNN and Transformer, which can learn strong local and global representations simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose a generative pre-training strategy called Hybrid Sparse masKing (HySparK) based on masked image modeling and apply it to large-scale pre-training on medical images. First, we perform a bottom-up 3D hybrid masking strategy on the encoder to keep consistency masking. Then we utilize sparse convolution for the top CNNs and encode unmasked patches for the bottom vision Transformers. Second, we employ a simple hierarchical decoder with skip-connections to achieve dense multi-scale feature reconstruction. Third, we implement our pre-training method on a collection of multiple large-scale 3D medical imaging datasets. Extensive experiments indicate that our proposed pre-training strategy demonstrates robust transfer-ability in supervised downstream tasks and sheds light on HySparK's promising prospects. The code is available at https://github.com/FengheTan9/HySparK
Prototype Learning Guided Hybrid Network for Breast Tumor Segmentation in DCE-MRI
Authors: Lei Zhou, Yuzhong Zhang, Jiadong Zhang, Xuejun Qian, Chen Gong, Kun Sun, Zhongxiang Ding, Xing Wang, Zhenhui Li, Zaiyi Liu, Dinggang Shen
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Automated breast tumor segmentation on the basis of dynamic contrast-enhancement magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) has shown great promise in clinical practice, particularly for identifying the presence of breast disease. However, accurate segmentation of breast tumor is a challenging task, often necessitating the development of complex networks. To strike an optimal trade-off between computational costs and segmentation performance, we propose a hybrid network via the combination of convolution neural network (CNN) and transformer layers. Specifically, the hybrid network consists of a encoder-decoder architecture by stacking convolution and decovolution layers. Effective 3D transformer layers are then implemented after the encoder subnetworks, to capture global dependencies between the bottleneck features. To improve the efficiency of hybrid network, two parallel encoder subnetworks are designed for the decoder and the transformer layers, respectively. To further enhance the discriminative capability of hybrid network, a prototype learning guided prediction module is proposed, where the category-specified prototypical features are calculated through on-line clustering. All learned prototypical features are finally combined with the features from decoder for tumor mask prediction. The experimental results on private and public DCE-MRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed hybrid network achieves superior performance than the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, while maintaining balance between segmentation accuracy and computation cost. Moreover, we demonstrate that automatically generated tumor masks can be effectively applied to identify HER2-positive subtype from HER2-negative subtype with the similar accuracy to the analysis based on manual tumor segmentation. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZhouL-lab/PLHN.
Egocentric Vision Language Planning
Authors: Zhirui Fang, Ming Yang, Weishuai Zeng, Boyu Li, Junpeng Yue, Ziluo Ding, Xiu Li, Zongqing Lu
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Optical Flow Estimation, Style Transfer

We explore leveraging large multi-modal models (LMMs) and text2image models to build a more general embodied agent. LMMs excel in planning long-horizon tasks over symbolic abstractions but struggle with grounding in the physical world, often failing to accurately identify object positions in images. A bridge is needed to connect LMMs to the physical world. The paper proposes a novel approach, egocentric vision language planning (EgoPlan), to handle long-horizon tasks from an egocentric perspective in varying household scenarios. This model leverages a diffusion model to simulate the fundamental dynamics between states and actions, integrating techniques like style transfer and optical flow to enhance generalization across different environmental dynamics. The LMM serves as a planner, breaking down instructions into sub-goals and selecting actions based on their alignment with these sub-goals, thus enabling more generalized and effective decision-making. Experiments show that EgoPlan improves long-horizon task success rates from the egocentric view compared to baselines across household scenarios.
U-DECN: End-to-End Underwater Object Detection ConvNet with Improved DeNoising Training
Authors: Zhuoyan Liu, Bo wang, Ye Li
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Underwater object detection has higher requirements of running speed and deployment efficiency for the detector due to its specific environmental challenges. NMS of two- or one-stage object detectors and transformer architecture of query-based end-to-end object detectors are not conducive to deployment on underwater embedded devices with limited processing power. As for the detrimental effect of underwater color cast noise, recent underwater object detectors make network architecture or training complex, which also hinders their application and deployment on underwater vehicle platforms. In this paper, we propose the Underwater DECO with improved deNoising training (U-DECN), the query-based end-to-end object detector (with ConvNet encoder-decoder architecture) for underwater color cast noise that addresses the above problems. We integrate advanced technologies from DETR variants into DECO and design optimization methods specifically for the ConvNet architecture, including Separate Contrastive DeNoising Forward and Deformable Convolution in SIM. To address the underwater color cast noise issue, we propose an underwater color denoising query to improve the generalization of the model for the biased object feature information by different color cast noise. Our U-DECN, with ResNet-50 backbone, achieves 61.4 AP (50 epochs), 63.3 AP (72 epochs), 64.0 AP (100 epochs) on DUO, and 21 FPS (5 times faster than Deformable DETR and DINO 4 FPS) on NVIDIA AGX Orin by TensorRT FP16, outperforming the other state-of-the-art query-based end-to-end object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/LEFTeyex/U-DECN.
Efficient Test-Time Prompt Tuning for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yuhan Zhu, Guozhen Zhang, Chen Xu, Haocheng Shen, Xiaoxin Chen, Gangshan Wu, LiMin Wang
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Prompt Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Vision-language models have showcased impressive zero-shot classification capabilities when equipped with suitable text prompts. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of test-time prompt tuning; however, these methods typically require per-image prompt adaptation during inference, which incurs high computational budgets and limits scalability and practical deployment. To overcome this issue, we introduce Self-TPT, a novel framework leveraging Self-supervised learning for efficient Test-time Prompt Tuning. The key aspect of Self-TPT is that it turns to efficient predefined class adaptation via self-supervised learning, thus avoiding computation-heavy per-image adaptation at inference. Self-TPT begins by co-training the self-supervised and the classification task using source data, then applies the self-supervised task exclusively for test-time new class adaptation. Specifically, we propose Contrastive Prompt Learning (CPT) as the key task for self-supervision. CPT is designed to minimize the intra-class distances while enhancing inter-class distinguishability via contrastive learning. Furthermore, empirical evidence suggests that CPT could closely mimic back-propagated gradients of the classification task, offering a plausible explanation for its effectiveness. Motivated by this finding, we further introduce a gradient matching loss to explicitly enhance the gradient similarity. We evaluated Self-TPT across three challenging zero-shot benchmarks. The results consistently demonstrate that Self-TPT not only significantly reduces inference costs but also achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing the efficiency-efficacy trade-off.
PRECISe : Prototype-Reservation for Explainable Classification under Imbalanced and Scarce-Data Settings
Authors: Vaibhav Ganatra, Drishti Goel
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification

Deep learning models used for medical image classification tasks are often constrained by the limited amount of training data along with severe class imbalance. Despite these problems, models should be explainable to enable human trust in the models' decisions to ensure wider adoption in high-risk situations. In this paper, we propose PRECISe, an explainable-by-design model meticulously constructed to concurrently address all three challenges. Evaluation on 2 imbalanced medical image datasets reveals that PRECISe outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on data efficient generalization to minority classes, achieving an accuracy of ~87% in detecting pneumonia in chest x-rays upon training on <60 images only. Additionally, a case study is presented to highlight the model's ability to produce easily interpretable predictions, reinforcing its practical utility and reliability for medical imaging tasks.
RTF-Q: Efficient Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Retraining-free Quantization
Authors: Nanyang Du, Chen Tang, Yuxiao Jiang, Yuan Meng, Zhi Wang
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Quantization, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Performing unsupervised domain adaptation on resource-constrained edge devices is challenging. Existing research typically adopts architecture optimization (e.g., designing slimmable networks) but requires expensive training costs. Moreover, it does not consider the considerable precision redundancy of parameters and activations. To address these limitations, we propose efficient unsupervised domain adaptation with ReTraining-Free Quantization (RTF-Q). Our approach uses low-precision quantization architectures with varying computational costs, adapting to devices with dynamic computation budgets. We subtly configure subnet dimensions and leverage weight-sharing to optimize multiple architectures within a single set of weights, enabling the use of pre-trained models from open-source repositories. Additionally, we introduce multi-bitwidth joint training and the SandwichQ rule, both of which are effective in handling multiple quantization bit-widths across subnets. Experimental results demonstrate that our network achieves competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art methods across three benchmarks while significantly reducing memory and computational costs.