pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
3DGS-LM: Faster Gaussian-Splatting Optimization with Levenberg-Marquardt
Authors: Lukas Höllein, Aljaž Božič, Michael Zollhöfer, Matthias Nießner
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, GPU

We present 3DGS-LM, a new method that accelerates the reconstruction of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) by replacing its ADAM optimizer with a tailored Levenberg-Marquardt (LM). Existing methods reduce the optimization time by decreasing the number of Gaussians or by improving the implementation of the differentiable rasterizer. However, they still rely on the ADAM optimizer to fit Gaussian parameters of a scene in thousands of iterations, which can take up to an hour. To this end, we change the optimizer to LM that runs in conjunction with the 3DGS differentiable rasterizer. For efficient GPU parallization, we propose a caching data structure for intermediate gradients that allows us to efficiently calculate Jacobian-vector products in custom CUDA kernels. In every LM iteration, we calculate update directions from multiple image subsets using these kernels and combine them in a weighted mean. Overall, our method is 30% faster than the original 3DGS while obtaining the same reconstruction quality. Our optimization is also agnostic to other methods that acclerate 3DGS, thus enabling even faster speedups compared to vanilla 3DGS.
GStex: Per-Primitive Texturing of 2D Gaussian Splatting for Decoupled Appearance and Geometry Modeling
Authors: Victor Rong, Jingxiang Chen, Sherwin Bahmani, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, David B. Lindell
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

Gaussian splatting has demonstrated excellent performance for view synthesis and scene reconstruction. The representation achieves photorealistic quality by optimizing the position, scale, color, and opacity of thousands to millions of 2D or 3D Gaussian primitives within a scene. However, since each Gaussian primitive encodes both appearance and geometry, these attributes are strongly coupled--thus, high-fidelity appearance modeling requires a large number of Gaussian primitives, even when the scene geometry is simple (e.g., for a textured planar surface). We propose to texture each 2D Gaussian primitive so that even a single Gaussian can be used to capture appearance details. By employing per-primitive texturing, our appearance representation is agnostic to the topology and complexity of the scene's geometry. We show that our approach, GStex, yields improved visual quality over prior work in texturing Gaussian splats. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our decoupling enables improved novel view synthesis performance compared to 2D Gaussian splatting when reducing the number of Gaussian primitives, and that GStex can be used for scene appearance editing and re-texturing.
3DTopia-XL: Scaling High-quality 3D Asset Generation via Primitive Diffusion
Authors: Zhaoxi Chen, Jiaxiang Tang, Yuhao Dong, Ziang Cao, Fangzhou Hong, Yushi Lan, Tengfei Wang, Haozhe Xie, Tong Wu, Shunsuke Saito, Liang Pan, Dahua Lin, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

The increasing demand for high-quality 3D assets across various industries necessitates efficient and automated 3D content creation. Despite recent advancements in 3D generative models, existing methods still face challenges with optimization speed, geometric fidelity, and the lack of assets for physically based rendering (PBR). In this paper, we introduce 3DTopia-XL, a scalable native 3D generative model designed to overcome these limitations. 3DTopia-XL leverages a novel primitive-based 3D representation, PrimX, which encodes detailed shape, albedo, and material field into a compact tensorial format, facilitating the modeling of high-resolution geometry with PBR assets. On top of the novel representation, we propose a generative framework based on Diffusion Transformer (DiT), which comprises 1) Primitive Patch Compression, 2) and Latent Primitive Diffusion. 3DTopia-XL learns to generate high-quality 3D assets from textual or visual inputs. We conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments to demonstrate that 3DTopia-XL significantly outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality 3D assets with fine-grained textures and materials, efficiently bridging the quality gap between generative models and real-world applications.
LVCD: Reference-based Lineart Video Colorization with Diffusion Models
Authors: Zhitong Huang, Mohan Zhang, Jing Liao
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Colorization

We propose the first video diffusion framework for reference-based lineart video colorization. Unlike previous works that rely solely on image generative models to colorize lineart frame by frame, our approach leverages a large-scale pretrained video diffusion model to generate colorized animation videos. This approach leads to more temporally consistent results and is better equipped to handle large motions. Firstly, we introduce Sketch-guided ControlNet which provides additional control to finetune an image-to-video diffusion model for controllable video synthesis, enabling the generation of animation videos conditioned on lineart. We then propose Reference Attention to facilitate the transfer of colors from the reference frame to other frames containing fast and expansive motions. Finally, we present a novel scheme for sequential sampling, incorporating the Overlapped Blending Module and Prev-Reference Attention, to extend the video diffusion model beyond its original fixed-length limitation for long video colorization. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of frame and video quality, as well as temporal consistency. Moreover, our method is capable of generating high-quality, long temporal-consistent animation videos with large motions, which is not achievable in previous works. Our code and model are available at https://luckyhzt.github.io/lvcd.
Oryx MLLM: On-Demand Spatial-Temporal Understanding at Arbitrary Resolution
Authors: Zuyan Liu, Yuhao Dong, Ziwei Liu, Winston Hu, Jiwen Lu, Yongming Rao
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Video Question Answering

Visual data comes in various forms, ranging from small icons of just a few pixels to long videos spanning hours. Existing multi-modal LLMs usually standardize these diverse visual inputs to a fixed resolution for visual encoders and yield similar numbers of tokens for LLMs. This approach is non-optimal for multimodal understanding and inefficient for processing inputs with long and short visual contents. To solve the problem, we propose Oryx, a unified multimodal architecture for the spatial-temporal understanding of images, videos, and multi-view 3D scenes. Oryx offers an on-demand solution to seamlessly and efficiently process visual inputs with arbitrary spatial sizes and temporal lengths through two core innovations: 1) a pre-trained OryxViT model that can encode images at any resolution into LLM-friendly visual representations; 2) a dynamic compressor module that supports 1x to 16x compression on visual tokens by request. These design features enable Oryx to accommodate extremely long visual contexts, such as videos, with lower resolution and high compression while maintaining high recognition precision for tasks like document understanding with native resolution and no compression. Beyond the architectural improvements, enhanced data curation and specialized training on long-context retrieval and spatial-aware data help Oryx achieve strong capabilities in image, video, and 3D multimodal understanding simultaneously. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/Oryx-mllm/Oryx.
Unsupervised Feature Orthogonalization for Learning Distortion-Invariant Representations
Authors: Sebastian Doerrich, Francesco Di Salvo, Christian Ledig
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis

This study introduces unORANIC+, a novel method that integrates unsupervised feature orthogonalization with the ability of a Vision Transformer to capture both local and global relationships for improved robustness and generalizability. The streamlined architecture of unORANIC+ effectively separates anatomical and image-specific attributes, resulting in robust and unbiased latent representations that allow the model to demonstrate excellent performance across various medical image analysis tasks and diverse datasets. Extensive experimentation demonstrates unORANIC+'s reconstruction proficiency, corruption resilience, as well as capability to revise existing image distortions. Additionally, the model exhibits notable aptitude in downstream tasks such as disease classification and corruption detection. We confirm its adaptability to diverse datasets of varying image sources and sample sizes which positions the method as a promising algorithm for advanced medical image analysis, particularly in resource-constrained environments lacking large, tailored datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/sdoerrich97/unoranic-plus .
Fundus image enhancement through direct diffusion bridges
Authors: Sehui Kim, Hyungjin Chung, Se Hie Park, Eui-Sang Chung, Kayoung Yi, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement

We propose FD3, a fundus image enhancement method based on direct diffusion bridges, which can cope with a wide range of complex degradations, including haze, blur, noise, and shadow. We first propose a synthetic forward model through a human feedback loop with board-certified ophthalmologists for maximal quality improvement of low-quality in-vivo images. Using the proposed forward model, we train a robust and flexible diffusion-based image enhancement network that is highly effective as a stand-alone method, unlike previous diffusion model-based approaches which act only as a refiner on top of pre-trained models. Through extensive experiments, we show that FD3 establishes \add{superior quality} not only on synthetic degradations but also on in vivo studies with low-quality fundus photos taken from patients with cataracts or small pupils. To promote further research in this area, we open-source all our code and data used for this research at https://github.com/heeheee888/FD3
I2I-Galip: Unsupervised Medical Image Translation Using Generative Adversarial CLIP
Authors: Yilmaz Korkmaz, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Unpaired image-to-image translation is a challenging task due to the absence of paired examples, which complicates learning the complex mappings between the distinct distributions of the source and target domains. One of the most commonly used approach for this task is CycleGAN which requires the training of a new pair of generator-discriminator networks for each domain pair. In this paper, we propose a new image-to-image translation framework named Image-to-Image-Generative-Adversarial-CLIP (I2I-Galip) where we utilize a pre-trained multi-model foundation model (i.e., CLIP) to mitigate the need of separate generator-discriminator pairs for each source-target mapping while achieving better and more efficient multi-domain translation. By utilizing the massive knowledge gathered during pre-training a foundation model, our approach makes use of a single lightweight generator network with ~13M parameters for the multi-domain image translation task. Comprehensive experiments on translation performance in public MRI and CT datasets show the superior performance of the proposed framework over the existing approaches. Code will be available (https://github.com/yilmazkorkmaz1/I2I-Galip).
MambaRecon: MRI Reconstruction with Structured State Space Models
Authors: Yilmaz Korkmaz, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, MRI Reconstruction, State Space Models

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is one of the most important medical imaging modalities as it provides superior resolution of soft tissues, albeit with a notable limitation in scanning speed. The advent of deep learning has catalyzed the development of cutting-edge methods for the expedited reconstruction of MRI scans, utilizing convolutional neural networks and, more recently, vision transformers. Recently proposed structured state space models (e.g., Mamba) have gained some traction due to their efficiency and low computational requirements compared to transformer models. We propose an innovative MRI reconstruction framework that employs structured state space models at its core, aimed at amplifying both long-range contextual sensitivity and reconstruction efficacy. Comprehensive experiments on public brain MRI datasets show that our model sets new benchmarks beating state-of-the-art reconstruction baselines. Code will be available (https://github.com/yilmazkorkmaz1/MambaRecon).
How to predict on-road air pollution based on street view images and machine learning: a quantitative analysis of the optimal strategy
Authors: Hui Zhong, Di Chen, Pengqin Wang, Wenrui Wang, Shaojie Shen, Yonghong Liu, Meixin Zhu
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00

On-road air pollution exhibits substantial variability over short distances due to emission sources, dilution, and physicochemical processes. Integrating mobile monitoring data with street view images (SVIs) holds promise for predicting local air pollution. However, algorithms, sampling strategies, and image quality introduce extra errors due to a lack of reliable references that quantify their effects. To bridge this gap, we employed 314 taxis to monitor NO, NO2, PM2.5 and PM10 dynamically and sampled corresponding SVIs, aiming to develop a reliable strategy. We extracted SVI features from ~ 382,000 streetscape images, which were collected at various angles (0{\deg}, 90{\deg}, 180{\deg}, 270{\deg}) and ranges (buffers with radii of 100m, 200m, 300m, 400m, 500m). Also, three machine learning algorithms alongside the linear land-used regression (LUR) model were experimented with to explore the influences of different algorithms. Four typical image quality issues were identified and discussed. Generally, machine learning methods outperform linear LUR for estimating the four pollutants, with the ranking: random forest > XGBoost > neural network > LUR. Compared to single-angle sampling, the averaging strategy is an effective method to avoid bias of insufficient feature capture. Therefore, the optimal sampling strategy is to obtain SVIs at a 100m radius buffer and extract features using the averaging strategy. This approach achieved estimation results for each aggregation location with absolute errors almost less than 2.5 {\mu}g/m^2 or ppb. Overexposure, blur, and underexposure led to image misjudgments and incorrect identifications, causing an overestimation of road features and underestimation of human-activity features, contributing to inaccurate NO, NO2, PM2.5 and PM10 estimation.
TinyVLA: Towards Fast, Data-Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Junjie Wen, Yichen Zhu, Jinming Li, Minjie Zhu, Kun Wu, Zhiyuan Xu, Ning Liu, Ran Cheng, Chaomin Shen, Yaxin Peng, Feifei Feng, Jian Tang
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language-Action

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable potential in visuomotor control and instruction comprehension through end-to-end learning processes. However, current VLA models face significant challenges: they are slow during inference and require extensive pre-training on large amounts of robotic data, making real-world deployment difficult. In this paper, we introduce a new family of compact vision-language-action models, called TinyVLA, which offers two key advantages over existing VLA models: (1) faster inference speeds, and (2) improved data efficiency, eliminating the need for pre-training stage. Our framework incorporates two essential components to build TinyVLA: (1) initializing the policy backbone with robust, high-speed multimodal models, and (2) integrating a diffusion policy decoder during fine-tuning to enable precise robot actions. We conducted extensive evaluations of TinyVLA in both simulation and on real robots, demonstrating that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art VLA model, OpenVLA, in terms of speed and data efficiency, while delivering comparable or superior performance. Additionally, TinyVLA exhibits strong generalization capabilities across various dimensions, including language instructions, novel objects, unseen positions, changes in object appearance, background variations, and environmental shifts, often matching or exceeding the performance of OpenVLA. We believe that \methodname offers an interesting perspective on utilizing pre-trained multimodal models for policy learning. Our project is at https://tiny-vla.github.io.
MambaClinix: Hierarchical Gated Convolution and Mamba-Based U-Net for Enhanced 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Chenyuan Bian, Nan Xia, Xia Yang, Feifei Wang, Fengjiao Wang, Bin Wei, Qian Dong
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Segmentation, Mamba, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning, particularly convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformers, has significantly advanced 3D medical image segmentation. While CNNs are highly effective at capturing local features, their limited receptive fields may hinder performance in complex clinical scenarios. In contrast, Transformers excel at modeling long-range dependencies but are computationally intensive, making them expensive to train and deploy. Recently, the Mamba architecture, based on the State Space Model (SSM), has been proposed to efficiently model long-range dependencies while maintaining linear computational complexity. However, its application in medical image segmentation reveals shortcomings, particularly in capturing critical local features essential for accurate delineation of clinical regions. In this study, we propose MambaClinix, a novel U-shaped architecture for medical image segmentation that integrates a hierarchical gated convolutional network(HGCN) with Mamba in an adaptive stage-wise framework. This design significantly enhances computational efficiency and high-order spatial interactions, enabling the model to effectively capture both proximal and distal relationships in medical images. Specifically, our HGCN is designed to mimic the attention mechanism of Transformers by a purely convolutional structure, facilitating high-order spatial interactions in feature maps while avoiding the computational complexity typically associated with Transformer-based methods. Additionally, we introduce a region-specific Tversky loss, which emphasizes specific pixel regions to improve auto-segmentation performance, thereby optimizing the model's decision-making process. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed MambaClinix achieves high segmentation accuracy while maintaining low model complexity.
CF-GO-Net: A Universal Distribution Learner via Characteristic Function Networks with Graph Optimizers
Authors: Zeyang Yu, Shengxi Li, Danilo Mandic
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Generative models aim to learn the distribution of datasets, such as images, so as to be able to generate samples that statistically resemble real data. However, learning the underlying probability distribution can be very challenging and intractable. To this end, we introduce an approach which employs the characteristic function (CF), a probabilistic descriptor that directly corresponds to the distribution. However, unlike the probability density function (pdf), the characteristic function not only always exists, but also provides an additional degree of freedom, hence enhances flexibility in learning distributions. This removes the critical dependence on pdf-based assumptions, which limit the applicability of traditional methods. While several works have attempted to use CF in generative modeling, they often impose strong constraints on the training process. In contrast, our approach calculates the distance between query points in the CF domain, which is an unconstrained and well defined problem. Next, to deal with the sampling strategy, which is crucial to model performance, we propose a graph neural network (GNN)-based optimizer for the sampling process, which identifies regions where the difference between CFs is most significant. In addition, our method allows the use of a pre-trained model, such as a well-trained autoencoder, and is capable of learning directly in its feature space, without modifying its parameters. This offers a flexible and robust approach to generative modeling, not only provides broader applicability and improved performance, but also equips any latent space world with the ability to become a generative model.
METDrive: Multi-modal End-to-end Autonomous Driving with Temporal Guidance
Authors: Ziang Guo, Xinhao Lin, Zakhar Yagudin, Artem Lykov, Yong Wang, Yanqiang Li, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Time Series

Multi-modal end-to-end autonomous driving has shown promising advancements in recent work. By embedding more modalities into end-to-end networks, the system's understanding of both static and dynamic aspects of the driving environment is enhanced, thereby improving the safety of autonomous driving. In this paper, we introduce METDrive, an end-to-end system that leverages temporal guidance from the embedded time series features of ego states, including rotation angles, steering, throttle signals, and waypoint vectors. The geometric features derived from perception sensor data and the time series features of ego state data jointly guide the waypoint prediction with the proposed temporal guidance loss function. We evaluated METDrive on the CARLA leaderboard benchmarks, achieving a driving score of 70%, a route completion score of 94%, and an infraction score of 0.78.
PMR-Net: Parallel Multi-Resolution Encoder-Decoder Network Framework for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiaogang Du, Dongxin Gu, Tao Lei, Yipeng Jiao, Yibin Zou
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Object Localization, Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, encoder-decoder networks have focused on expanding receptive fields and incorporating multi-scale context to capture global features for objects of varying sizes. However, as networks deepen, they often discard fine spatial details, impairing precise object localization. Additionally, conventional decoders' use of interpolation for upsampling leads to a loss of global context, diminishing edge segmentation accuracy. To address the above problems, we propose a novel parallel multi-resolution encoder-decoder network, namely PMR-Net for short. First, we design a parallel multi-resolution encoder and a multi-resolution context encoder. The parallel multi-resolution encoder can extract and fuse multi-scale fine-grained local features in parallel for input images with different resolutions. The multi-resolution context encoder fuses the global context semantic features of different receptive fields from different encoder branches to maintain effectively the integrity of global information. Secondly, we design a parallel multi-resolution decoder symmetrical to the structure of parallel multi-resolution encoder. The decoder can continuously supplement the global context features of low-resolution branches to the feature maps of high-resolution branches, and effectively solve the problem of global context feature loss caused by upsampling operation in the decoding process. Extensive experiment results demonstrate that our proposed PMR-Net can achieve more accurate segmentation results than state-of-the-art methods on five public available datasets. Moreover, PMR-Net is also a flexible network framework, which can meet the requirements of different scenarios by adjusting the number of network layers and the number of parallel encoder-decoder branches.