pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Revealing the Dark Secrets of Extremely Large Kernel ConvNets on Robustness
Authors: Honghao Chen, Yurong Zhang, Xiaokun Feng, Xiangxiang Chu, Kaiqi Huang
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00

Robustness is a vital aspect to consider when deploying deep learning models into the wild. Numerous studies have been dedicated to the study of the robustness of vision transformers (ViTs), which have dominated as the mainstream backbone choice for vision tasks since the dawn of 2020s. Recently, some large kernel convnets make a comeback with impressive performance and efficiency. However, it still remains unclear whether large kernel networks are robust and the attribution of their robustness. In this paper, we first conduct a comprehensive evaluation of large kernel convnets' robustness and their differences from typical small kernel counterparts and ViTs on six diverse robustness benchmark datasets. Then to analyze the underlying factors behind their strong robustness, we design experiments from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives to reveal large kernel convnets' intriguing properties that are completely different from typical convnets. Our experiments demonstrate for the first time that pure CNNs can achieve exceptional robustness comparable or even superior to that of ViTs. Our analysis on occlusion invariance, kernel attention patterns and frequency characteristics provide novel insights into the source of robustness.
Full-Stage Pseudo Label Quality Enhancement for Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Qianhan Feng, Wenshuo Li, Tong Lin, Xinghao Chen
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Contrastive Learning, Pseudo Label, Temporal Action Localization, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization (WSTAL) aims to localize actions in untrimmed videos using only video-level supervision. Latest WSTAL methods introduce pseudo label learning framework to bridge the gap between classification-based training and inferencing targets at localization, and achieve cutting-edge results. In these frameworks, a classification-based model is used to generate pseudo labels for a regression-based student model to learn from. However, the quality of pseudo labels in the framework, which is a key factor to the final result, is not carefully studied. In this paper, we propose a set of simple yet efficient pseudo label quality enhancement mechanisms to build our FuSTAL framework. FuSTAL enhances pseudo label quality at three stages: cross-video contrastive learning at proposal Generation-Stage, prior-based filtering at proposal Selection-Stage and EMA-based distillation at Training-Stage. These designs enhance pseudo label quality at different stages in the framework, and help produce more informative, less false and smoother action proposals. With the help of these comprehensive designs at all stages, FuSTAL achieves an average mAP of 50.8% on THUMOS'14, outperforming the previous best method by 1.2%, and becomes the first method to reach the milestone of 50%.
SlideGCD: Slide-based Graph Collaborative Training with Knowledge Distillation for Whole Slide Image Classification
Authors: Tong Shu, Jun Shi, Dongdong Sun, Zhiguo Jiang, Yushan Zheng
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Existing WSI analysis methods lie on the consensus that histopathological characteristics of tumors are significant guidance for cancer diagnostics. Particularly, as the evolution of cancers is a continuous process, the correlations and differences across various stages, anatomical locations and patients should be taken into account. However, recent research mainly focuses on the inner-contextual information in a single WSI, ignoring the correlations between slides. To verify whether introducing the slide inter-correlations can bring improvements to WSI representation learning, we propose a generic WSI analysis pipeline SlideGCD that considers the existing multi-instance learning (MIL) methods as the backbone and forge the WSI classification task as a node classification problem. More specifically, SlideGCD declares a node buffer that stores previous slide embeddings for subsequent extensive slide-based graph construction and conducts graph learning to explore the inter-correlations implied in the slide-based graph. Moreover, we frame the MIL classifier and graph learning into two parallel workflows and deploy the knowledge distillation to transfer the differentiable information to the graph neural network. The consistent performance boosting, brought by SlideGCD, of four previous state-of-the-art MIL methods is observed on two TCGA benchmark datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/HFUT-miaLab/SlideGCD.
Lite-SAM Is Actually What You Need for Segment Everything
Authors: Jianhai Fu, Yuanjie Yu, Ningchuan Li, Yi Zhang, Qichao Chen, Jianping Xiong, Jun Yin, Zhiyu Xiang
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

This paper introduces Lite-SAM, an efficient end-to-end solution for the SegEvery task designed to reduce computational costs and redundancy. Lite-SAM is composed of four main components: a streamlined CNN-Transformer hybrid encoder (LiteViT), an automated prompt proposal network (AutoPPN), a traditional prompt encoder, and a mask decoder. All these components are integrated within the SAM framework. Our LiteViT, a high-performance lightweight backbone network, has only 1.16M parameters, which is a 23% reduction compared to the lightest existing backbone network Shufflenet. We also introduce AutoPPN, an innovative end-to-end method for prompt boxes and points generation. This is an improvement over traditional grid search sampling methods, and its unique design allows for easy integration into any SAM series algorithm, extending its usability. we have thoroughly benchmarked Lite-SAM across a plethora of both public and private datasets. The evaluation encompassed a broad spectrum of universal metrics, including the number of parameters, SegEvery execution time, and accuracy. The findings reveal that Lite-SAM, operating with a lean 4.2M parameters, significantly outpaces its counterparts, demonstrating performance improvements of 43x, 31x, 20x, 21x, and 1.6x over SAM, MobileSAM, Edge-SAM, EfficientViT-SAM, and MobileSAM-v2 respectively, all the while maintaining competitive accuracy. This underscores Lite-SAM's prowess in achieving an optimal equilibrium between performance and precision, thereby setting a new state-of-the-art(SOTA) benchmark in the domain.
Tissue-Contrastive Semi-Masked Autoencoders for Segmentation Pretraining on Chest CT
Authors: Jie Zheng, Ru Wen, Haiqin Hu, Lina Wei, Kui Su, Wei Chen, Chen Liu, Jun Wang
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

Existing Masked Image Modeling (MIM) depends on a spatial patch-based masking-reconstruction strategy to perceive objects'features from unlabeled images, which may face two limitations when applied to chest CT: 1) inefficient feature learning due to complex anatomical details presented in CT images, and 2) suboptimal knowledge transfer owing to input disparity between upstream and downstream models. To address these issues, we propose a new MIM method named Tissue-Contrastive Semi-Masked Autoencoder (TCS-MAE) for modeling chest CT images. Our method has two novel designs: 1) a tissue-based masking-reconstruction strategy to capture more fine-grained anatomical features, and 2) a dual-AE architecture with contrastive learning between the masked and original image views to bridge the gap of the upstream and downstream models. To validate our method, we systematically investigate representative contrastive, generative, and hybrid self-supervised learning methods on top of tasks involving segmenting pneumonia, mediastinal tumors, and various organs. The results demonstrate that, compared to existing methods, our TCS-MAE more effectively learns tissue-aware representations, thereby significantly enhancing segmentation performance across all tasks.
Exploring Richer and More Accurate Information via Frequency Selection for Image Restoration
Authors: Hu Gao, Depeng Dang
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Image restoration aims to recover high-quality images from their corrupted counterparts. Many existing methods primarily focus on the spatial domain, neglecting the understanding of frequency variations and ignoring the impact of implicit noise in skip connections. In this paper, we introduce a multi-scale frequency selection network (MSFSNet) that seamlessly integrates spatial and frequency domain knowledge, selectively recovering richer and more accurate information. Specifically, we initially capture spatial features and input them into dynamic filter selection modules (DFS) at different scales to integrate frequency knowledge. DFS utilizes learnable filters to generate high and low-frequency information and employs a frequency cross-attention mechanism (FCAM) to determine the most information to recover. To learn a multi-scale and accurate set of hybrid features, we develop a skip feature fusion block (SFF) that leverages contextual features to discriminatively determine which information should be propagated in skip-connections. It is worth noting that our DFS and SFF are generic plug-in modules that can be directly employed in existing networks without any adjustments, leading to performance improvements. Extensive experiments across various image restoration tasks demonstrate that our MSFSNet achieves performance that is either superior or comparable to state-of-the-art algorithms.
One-Shot Pose-Driving Face Animation Platform
Authors: He Feng, Donglin Di, Yongjia Ma, Wei Chen, Tonghua Su
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00

The objective of face animation is to generate dynamic and expressive talking head videos from a single reference face, utilizing driving conditions derived from either video or audio inputs. Current approaches often require fine-tuning for specific identities and frequently fail to produce expressive videos due to the limited effectiveness of Wav2Pose modules. To facilitate the generation of one-shot and more consecutive talking head videos, we refine an existing Image2Video model by integrating a Face Locator and Motion Frame mechanism. We subsequently optimize the model using extensive human face video datasets, significantly enhancing its ability to produce high-quality and expressive talking head videos. Additionally, we develop a demo platform using the Gradio framework, which streamlines the process, enabling users to quickly create customized talking head videos.
Symmetry Awareness Encoded Deep Learning Framework for Brain Imaging Analysis
Authors: Yang Ma, Dongang Wang, Peilin Liu, Lynette Masters, Michael Barnett, Weidong Cai, Chenyu Wang
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diagnostic

The heterogeneity of neurological conditions, ranging from structural anomalies to functional impairments, presents a significant challenge in medical imaging analysis tasks. Moreover, the limited availability of well-annotated datasets constrains the development of robust analysis models. Against this backdrop, this study introduces a novel approach leveraging the inherent anatomical symmetrical features of the human brain to enhance the subsequent detection and segmentation analysis for brain diseases. A novel Symmetry-Aware Cross-Attention (SACA) module is proposed to encode symmetrical features of left and right hemispheres, and a proxy task to detect symmetrical features as the Symmetry-Aware Head (SAH) is proposed, which guides the pretraining of the whole network on a vast 3D brain imaging dataset comprising both healthy and diseased brain images across various MRI and CT. Through meticulous experimentation on downstream tasks, including both classification and segmentation for brain diseases, our model demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art methodologies, particularly highlighting the significance of symmetry-aware learning. Our findings advocate for the effectiveness of incorporating symmetry awareness into pretraining and set a new benchmark for medical imaging analysis, promising significant strides toward accurate and efficient diagnostic processes. Code is available at https://github.com/bitMyron/sa-swin.
Constructing Concept-based Models to Mitigate Spurious Correlations with Minimal Human Effort
Authors: Jeeyung Kim, Ze Wang, Qiang Qiu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00

Enhancing model interpretability can address spurious correlations by revealing how models draw their predictions. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) can provide a principled way of disclosing and guiding model behaviors through human-understandable concepts, albeit at a high cost of human efforts in data annotation. In this paper, we leverage a synergy of multiple foundation models to construct CBMs with nearly no human effort. We discover undesirable biases in CBMs built on pre-trained models and propose a novel framework designed to exploit pre-trained models while being immune to these biases, thereby reducing vulnerability to spurious correlations. Specifically, our method offers a seamless pipeline that adopts foundation models for assessing potential spurious correlations in datasets, annotating concepts for images, and refining the annotations for improved robustness. We evaluate the proposed method on multiple datasets, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing model reliance on spurious correlations while preserving its interpretability.
Bora: Biomedical Generalist Video Generation Model
Authors: Weixiang Sun, Xiaocao You, Ruizhe Zheng, Zhengqing Yuan, Xiang Li, Lifang He, Quanzheng Li, Lichao Sun
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Tracking, Data Augmentation, model, Video Generation

Generative models hold promise for revolutionizing medical education, robot-assisted surgery, and data augmentation for medical AI development. Diffusion models can now generate realistic images from text prompts, while recent advancements have demonstrated their ability to create diverse, high-quality videos. However, these models often struggle with generating accurate representations of medical procedures and detailed anatomical structures. This paper introduces Bora, the first spatio-temporal diffusion probabilistic model designed for text-guided biomedical video generation. Bora leverages Transformer architecture and is pre-trained on general-purpose video generation tasks. It is fine-tuned through model alignment and instruction tuning using a newly established medical video corpus, which includes paired text-video data from various biomedical fields. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to establish such a comprehensive annotated biomedical video dataset. Bora is capable of generating high-quality video data across four distinct biomedical domains, adhering to medical expert standards and demonstrating consistency and diversity. This generalist video generative model holds significant potential for enhancing medical consultation and decision-making, particularly in resource-limited settings. Additionally, Bora could pave the way for immersive medical training and procedure planning. Extensive experiments on distinct medical modalities such as endoscopy, ultrasound, MRI, and cell tracking validate the effectiveness of our model in understanding biomedical instructions and its superior performance across subjects compared to state-of-the-art generation models.
LightenDiffusion: Unsupervised Low-Light Image Enhancement with Latent-Retinex Diffusion Models
Authors: Hai Jiang, Ao Luo, Xiaohong Liu, Songchen Han, Shuaicheng Liu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

In this paper, we propose a diffusion-based unsupervised framework that incorporates physically explainable Retinex theory with diffusion models for low-light image enhancement, named LightenDiffusion. Specifically, we present a content-transfer decomposition network that performs Retinex decomposition within the latent space instead of image space as in previous approaches, enabling the encoded features of unpaired low-light and normal-light images to be decomposed into content-rich reflectance maps and content-free illumination maps. Subsequently, the reflectance map of the low-light image and the illumination map of the normal-light image are taken as input to the diffusion model for unsupervised restoration with the guidance of the low-light feature, where a self-constrained consistency loss is further proposed to eliminate the interference of normal-light content on the restored results to improve overall visual quality. Extensive experiments on publicly available real-world benchmarks show that the proposed LightenDiffusion outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised competitors and is comparable to supervised methods while being more generalizable to various scenes. Our code is available at https://github.com/JianghaiSCU/LightenDiffusion.
Global-Local Collaborative Inference with LLM for Lidar-Based Open-Vocabulary Detection
Authors: Xingyu Peng, Yan Bai, Chen Gao, Lirong Yang, Fei Xia, Beipeng Mu, Xiaofei Wang, Si Liu
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Inference, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Object, Object Localization

Open-Vocabulary Detection (OVD) is the task of detecting all interesting objects in a given scene without predefined object classes. Extensive work has been done to deal with the OVD for 2D RGB images, but the exploration of 3D OVD is still limited. Intuitively, lidar point clouds provide 3D information, both object level and scene level, to generate trustful detection results. However, previous lidar-based OVD methods only focus on the usage of object-level features, ignoring the essence of scene-level information. In this paper, we propose a Global-Local Collaborative Scheme (GLIS) for the lidar-based OVD task, which contains a local branch to generate object-level detection result and a global branch to obtain scene-level global feature. With the global-local information, a Large Language Model (LLM) is applied for chain-of-thought inference, and the detection result can be refined accordingly. We further propose Reflected Pseudo Labels Generation (RPLG) to generate high-quality pseudo labels for supervision and Background-Aware Object Localization (BAOL) to select precise object proposals. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2 and SUN RGB-D demonstrate the superiority of our methods. Code is released at https://github.com/GradiusTwinbee/GLIS.
Latent Watermark: Inject and Detect Watermarks in Latent Diffusion Space
Authors: Zheling Meng, Bo Peng, Jing Dong
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00

Watermarking is a tool for actively identifying and attributing the images generated by latent diffusion models. Existing methods face the dilemma of image quality and watermark robustness. Watermarks with superior image quality usually have inferior robustness against attacks such as blurring and JPEG compression, while watermarks with superior robustness usually significantly damage image quality. This dilemma stems from the traditional paradigm where watermarks are injected and detected in pixel space, relying on pixel perturbation for watermark detection and resilience against attacks. In this paper, we highlight that an effective solution to the problem is to both inject and detect watermarks in the latent diffusion space, and propose Latent Watermark with a progressive training strategy. It weakens the direct connection between quality and robustness and thus alleviates their contradiction. We conduct evaluations on two datasets and against 10 watermark attacks. Six metrics measure the image quality and watermark robustness. Results show that compared to the recently proposed methods such as StableSignature, StegaStamp, RoSteALS, LaWa, TreeRing, and DiffuseTrace, LW not only surpasses them in terms of robustness but also offers superior image quality. Our code will be available at https://github.com/RichardSunnyMeng/LatentWatermark.
KGpose: Keypoint-Graph Driven End-to-End Multi-Object 6D Pose Estimation via Point-Wise Pose Voting
Authors: Andrew Jeong
Date: 2024-07-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Graph Embedding, Object, Pose Estimation

This letter presents KGpose, a novel end-to-end framework for 6D pose estimation of multiple objects. Our approach combines keypoint-based method with learnable pose regression through `keypoint-graph', which is a graph representation of the keypoints. KGpose first estimates 3D keypoints for each object using an attentional multi-modal feature fusion of RGB and point cloud features. These keypoints are estimated from each point of point cloud and converted into a graph representation. The network directly regresses 6D pose parameters for each point through a sequence of keypoint-graph embedding and local graph embedding which are designed with graph convolutions, followed by rotation and translation heads. The final pose for each object is selected from the candidates of point-wise predictions. The method achieves competitive results on the benchmark dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model. KGpose enables multi-object pose estimation without requiring an extra localization step, offering a unified and efficient solution for understanding geometric contexts in complex scenes for robotic applications.
Manipulating a Tetris-Inspired 3D Video Representation
Authors: Mihir Godbole
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Video Compression, Video Synopsis

Video Synopsis is a technique that performs video compression in a way that preserves the activity in the video. This technique is particularly useful in surveillance and monitoring applications. Although it is still a nascent field of research, there have been several approaches proposed over the last two decades varying with the application, optimization type, nature of data feed, etc. The primary data required for these algorithms arises from some sort of object tracking method. In this paper, we discuss different spatio-temporal data representations suitable for different applications. We also present a formal definition for the video synopsis algorithm. We further discuss the assumptions and modifications to this definition required for a simpler version of the problem. We explore the application of a packing algorithm to solve the problem of video synopsis. Since the nature of the data is three dimensional, we consider 3D packing problems in the discussion. This paper also provides an extensive literature review of different video synopsis methods and packing problems. Lastly, we examine the different applications of this algorithm and how the different data representations discussed earlier can make the problem simpler. We also discuss the future directions of research that can be explored following this discussion.