pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Core Tokensets for Data-efficient Sequential Training of Transformers
Authors: Subarnaduti Paul, Manuel Brack, Patrick Schramowski, Kristian Kersting, Martin Mundt
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, image-classification, Image Classification, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Deep networks are frequently tuned to novel tasks and continue learning from ongoing data streams. Such sequential training requires consolidation of new and past information, a challenge predominantly addressed by retaining the most important data points - formally known as coresets. Traditionally, these coresets consist of entire samples, such as images or sentences. However, recent transformer architectures operate on tokens, leading to the famous assertion that an image is worth 16x16 words. Intuitively, not all of these tokens are equally informative or memorable. Going beyond coresets, we thus propose to construct a deeper-level data summary on the level of tokens. Our respectively named core tokensets both select the most informative data points and leverage feature attribution to store only their most relevant features. We demonstrate that core tokensets yield significant performance retention in incremental image classification, open-ended visual question answering, and continual image captioning with significantly reduced memory. In fact, we empirically find that a core tokenset of 1\% of the data performs comparably to at least a twice as large and up to 10 times larger coreset.
SeeClear: Semantic Distillation Enhances Pixel Condensation for Video Super-Resolution
Authors: Qi Tang, Yao Zhao, Meiqin Liu, Chao Yao
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution, Video Generation, Video Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) is renowned for generating perceptually realistic videos, yet it grapples with maintaining detail consistency across frames due to stochastic fluctuations. The traditional approach of pixel-level alignment is ineffective for diffusion-processed frames because of iterative disruptions. To overcome this, we introduce SeeClear--a novel VSR framework leveraging conditional video generation, orchestrated by instance-centric and channel-wise semantic controls. This framework integrates a Semantic Distiller and a Pixel Condenser, which synergize to extract and upscale semantic details from low-resolution frames. The Instance-Centric Alignment Module (InCAM) utilizes video-clip-wise tokens to dynamically relate pixels within and across frames, enhancing coherency. Additionally, the Channel-wise Texture Aggregation Memory (CaTeGory) infuses extrinsic knowledge, capitalizing on long-standing semantic textures. Our method also innovates the blurring diffusion process with the ResShift mechanism, finely balancing between sharpness and diffusion effects. Comprehensive experiments confirm our framework's advantage over state-of-the-art diffusion-based VSR techniques. The code is available: https://github.com/Tang1705/SeeClear-NeurIPS24.
ActionAtlas: A VideoQA Benchmark for Domain-specialized Action Recognition
Authors: Mohammadreza Salehi, Jae Sung Park, Tanush Yadav, Aditya Kusupati, Ranjay Krishna, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ali Farhadi
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Video Question Answering

Our world is full of varied actions and moves across specialized domains that we, as humans, strive to identify and understand. Within any single domain, actions can often appear quite similar, making it challenging for deep models to distinguish them accurately. To evaluate the effectiveness of multimodal foundation models in helping us recognize such actions, we present ActionAtlas v1.0, a multiple-choice video question answering benchmark featuring short videos across various sports. Each video in the dataset is paired with a question and four or five choices. The question pinpoints specific individuals, asking which choice "best" describes their action within a certain temporal context. Overall, the dataset includes 934 videos showcasing 580 unique actions across 56 sports, with a total of 1896 actions within choices. Unlike most existing video question answering benchmarks that only cover simplistic actions, often identifiable from a single frame, ActionAtlas focuses on intricate movements and rigorously tests the model's capability to discern subtle differences between moves that look similar within each domain. We evaluate open and proprietary foundation models on this benchmark, finding that the best model, GPT-4o, achieves a maximum accuracy of 45.52%. Meanwhile, Non-expert crowd workers, provided with action description for each choice, achieve 61.64% accuracy, where random chance is approximately 21%. Our findings with state-of-the-art models indicate that having a high frame sampling rate is important for accurately recognizing actions in ActionAtlas, a feature that some leading proprietary video models, such as Gemini, do not include in their default configuration.
Comparative Analysis of Novel View Synthesis and Photogrammetry for 3D Forest Stand Reconstruction and extraction of individual tree parameters
Authors: Guoji Tian, Chongcheng Chen, Hongyu Huang
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

Accurate and efficient 3D reconstruction of trees is crucial for forest resource assessments and management. Close-Range Photogrammetry (CRP) is commonly used for reconstructing forest scenes but faces challenges like low efficiency and poor quality. Recently, Novel View Synthesis (NVS) technologies, including Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have shown promise for 3D plant reconstruction with limited images. However, existing research mainly focuses on small plants in orchards or individual trees, leaving uncertainty regarding their application in larger, complex forest stands. In this study, we collected sequential images of forest plots with varying complexity and performed dense reconstruction using NeRF and 3DGS. The resulting point clouds were compared with those from photogrammetry and laser scanning. Results indicate that NVS methods significantly enhance reconstruction efficiency. Photogrammetry struggles with complex stands, leading to point clouds with excessive canopy noise and incorrectly reconstructed trees, such as duplicated trunks. NeRF, while better for canopy regions, may produce errors in ground areas with limited views. The 3DGS method generates sparser point clouds, particularly in trunk areas, affecting diameter at breast height (DBH) accuracy. All three methods can extract tree height information, with NeRF yielding the highest accuracy; however, photogrammetry remains superior for DBH accuracy. These findings suggest that NVS methods have significant potential for 3D reconstruction of forest stands, offering valuable support for complex forest resource inventory and visualization tasks.
Cefdet: Cognitive Effectiveness Network Based on Fuzzy Inference for Action Detection
Authors: Zhe Luo, Weina Fu, Shuai Liu, Saeed Anwar, Muhammad Saqib, Sambit Bakshi, Khan Muhammad
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection

Action detection and understanding provide the foundation for the generation and interaction of multimedia content. However, existing methods mainly focus on constructing complex relational inference networks, overlooking the judgment of detection effectiveness. Moreover, these methods frequently generate detection results with cognitive abnormalities. To solve the above problems, this study proposes a cognitive effectiveness network based on fuzzy inference (Cefdet), which introduces the concept of "cognition-based detection" to simulate human cognition. First, a fuzzy-driven cognitive effectiveness evaluation module (FCM) is established to introduce fuzzy inference into action detection. FCM is combined with human action features to simulate the cognition-based detection process, which clearly locates the position of frames with cognitive abnormalities. Then, a fuzzy cognitive update strategy (FCS) is proposed based on the FCM, which utilizes fuzzy logic to re-detect the cognition-based detection results and effectively update the results with cognitive abnormalities. Experimental results demonstrate that Cefdet exhibits superior performance against several mainstream algorithms on the public datasets, validating its effectiveness and superiority. Code is available at https://github.com/12sakura/Cefdet.
Grounding is All You Need? Dual Temporal Grounding for Video Dialog
Authors: You Qin, Wei Ji, Xinze Lan, Hao Fei, Xun Yang, Dan Guo, Roger Zimmermann, Lizi Liao
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Contrastive Learning, Response Generation

In the realm of video dialog response generation, the understanding of video content and the temporal nuances of conversation history are paramount. While a segment of current research leans heavily on large-scale pretrained visual-language models and often overlooks temporal dynamics, another delves deep into spatial-temporal relationships within videos but demands intricate object trajectory pre-extractions and sidelines dialog temporal dynamics. This paper introduces the Dual Temporal Grounding-enhanced Video Dialog model (DTGVD), strategically designed to merge the strengths of both dominant approaches. It emphasizes dual temporal relationships by predicting dialog turn-specific temporal regions, filtering video content accordingly, and grounding responses in both video and dialog contexts. One standout feature of DTGVD is its heightened attention to chronological interplay. By recognizing and acting upon the dependencies between different dialog turns, it captures more nuanced conversational dynamics. To further bolster the alignment between video and dialog temporal dynamics, we've implemented a list-wise contrastive learning strategy. Within this framework, accurately grounded turn-clip pairings are designated as positive samples, while less precise pairings are categorized as negative. This refined classification is then funneled into our holistic end-to-end response generation mechanism. Evaluations using AVSD@DSTC-7 and AVSD@DSTC-8 datasets underscore the superiority of our methodology.
Guided Self-attention: Find the Generalized Necessarily Distinct Vectors for Grain Size Grading
Authors: Fang Gao, Xuetao Li, Jiabao Wang, Shengheng Ma, Jun Yu
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

With the development of steel materials, metallographic analysis has become increasingly important. Unfortunately, grain size analysis is a manual process that requires experts to evaluate metallographic photographs, which is unreliable and time-consuming. To resolve this problem, we propose a novel classifi-cation method based on deep learning, namely GSNets, a family of hybrid models which can effectively introduce guided self-attention for classifying grain size. Concretely, we build our models from three insights:(1) Introducing our novel guided self-attention module can assist the model in finding the generalized necessarily distinct vectors capable of retaining intricate rela-tional connections and rich local feature information; (2) By improving the pixel-wise linear independence of the feature map, the highly condensed semantic representation will be captured by the model; (3) Our novel triple-stream merging module can significantly improve the generalization capability and efficiency of the model. Experiments show that our GSNet yields a classifi-cation accuracy of 90.1%, surpassing the state-of-the-art Swin Transformer V2 by 1.9% on the steel grain size dataset, which comprises 3,599 images with 14 grain size levels. Furthermore, we intuitively believe our approach is applicable to broader ap-plications like object detection and semantic segmentation.
Training-free Diffusion Model Alignment with Sampling Demons
Authors: Po-Hung Yeh, Kuang-Huei Lee, Jun-Cheng Chen
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Stochastic Optimization, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Aligning diffusion models with user preferences has been a key challenge. Existing methods for aligning diffusion models either require retraining or are limited to differentiable reward functions. To address these limitations, we propose a stochastic optimization approach, dubbed Demon, to guide the denoising process at inference time without backpropagation through reward functions or model retraining. Our approach works by controlling noise distribution in denoising steps to concentrate density on regions corresponding to high rewards through stochastic optimization. We provide comprehensive theoretical and empirical evidence to support and validate our approach, including experiments that use non-differentiable sources of rewards such as Visual-Language Model (VLM) APIs and human judgements. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first inference-time, backpropagation-free preference alignment method for diffusion models. Our method can be easily integrated with existing diffusion models without further training. Our experiments show that the proposed approach significantly improves the average aesthetics scores for text-to-image generation. Implementation is available at https://github.com/aiiu-lab/DemonSampling.
Wolf2Pack: The AutoFusion Framework for Dynamic Parameter Fusion
Authors: Bowen Tian, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Re-basin

In the rapidly evolving field of deep learning, specialized models have driven significant advancements in tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, this specialization leads to a fragmented ecosystem where models lack the adaptability for broader applications. To overcome this, we introduce AutoFusion, an innovative framework that fuses distinct model parameters(with the same architecture) for multi-task learning without pre-trained checkpoints. Using an unsupervised, end-to-end approach, AutoFusion dynamically permutes model parameters at each layer, optimizing the combination through a loss-minimization process that does not require labeled data. We validate AutoFusion's effectiveness through experiments on commonly used benchmark datasets, demonstrating superior performance over established methods like Weight Interpolation, Git Re-Basin, and ZipIt. Our framework offers a scalable and flexible solution for model integration, positioning it as a powerful tool for future research and practical applications.
CUBE360: Learning Cubic Field Representation for Monocular 360 Depth Estimation for Virtual Reality
Authors: Wenjie Chang, Hao Ai, Tianzhu Zhang, Lin Wang
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, ERP, Neural Rendering, Self-Supervised Learning

Panoramic images provide comprehensive scene information and are suitable for VR applications. Obtaining corresponding depth maps is essential for achieving immersive and interactive experiences. However, panoramic depth estimation presents significant challenges due to the severe distortion caused by equirectangular projection (ERP) and the limited availability of panoramic RGB-D datasets. Inspired by the recent success of neural rendering, we propose a novel method, named $\mathbf{CUBE360}$, that learns a cubic field composed of multiple MPIs from a single panoramic image for $\mathbf{continuous}$ depth estimation at any view direction. Our CUBE360 employs cubemap projection to transform an ERP image into six faces and extract the MPIs for each, thereby reducing the memory consumption required for MPI processing of high-resolution data. Additionally, this approach avoids the computational complexity of handling the uneven pixel distribution inherent to equirectangular projectio. An attention-based blending module is then employed to learn correlations among the MPIs of cubic faces, constructing a cubic field representation with color and density information at various depth levels. Furthermore, a novel sampling strategy is introduced for rendering novel views from the cubic field at both cubic and planar scales. The entire pipeline is trained using photometric loss calculated from rendered views within a self-supervised learning approach, enabling training on 360 videos without depth annotations. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of CUBE360 compared to prior SSL methods. We also highlight its effectiveness in downstream applications, such as VR roaming and visual effects, underscoring CUBE360's potential to enhance immersive experiences.
Equi-GSPR: Equivariant SE(3) Graph Network Model for Sparse Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Xueyang Kang, Zhaoliang Luan, Kourosh Khoshelham, Bing Wang
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration is a foundational task for 3D alignment and reconstruction applications. While both traditional and learning-based registration approaches have succeeded, leveraging the intrinsic symmetry of point cloud data, including rotation equivariance, has received insufficient attention. This prohibits the model from learning effectively, resulting in a requirement for more training data and increased model complexity. To address these challenges, we propose a graph neural network model embedded with a local Spherical Euclidean 3D equivariance property through SE(3) message passing based propagation. Our model is composed mainly of a descriptor module, equivariant graph layers, match similarity, and the final regression layers. Such modular design enables us to utilize sparsely sampled input points and initialize the descriptor by self-trained or pre-trained geometric feature descriptors easily. Experiments conducted on the 3DMatch and KITTI datasets exhibit the compelling and robust performance of our model compared to state-of-the-art approaches, while the model complexity remains relatively low at the same time.
Mero Nagarikta: Advanced Nepali Citizenship Data Extractor with Deep Learning-Powered Text Detection and OCR
Authors: Sisir Dhakal, Sujan Sigdel, Sandesh Prasad Paudel, Sharad Kumar Ranabhat, Nabin Lamichhane
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text Detection

Transforming text-based identity documents, such as Nepali citizenship cards, into a structured digital format poses several challenges due to the distinct characteristics of the Nepali script and minor variations in print alignment and contrast across different cards. This work proposes a robust system using YOLOv8 for accurate text object detection and an OCR algorithm based on Optimized PyTesseract. The system, implemented within the context of a mobile application, allows for the automated extraction of important textual information from both the front and the back side of Nepali citizenship cards, including names, citizenship numbers, and dates of birth. The final YOLOv8 model was accurate, with a mean average precision of 99.1% for text detection on the front and 96.1% on the back. The tested PyTesseract optimized for Nepali characters outperformed the standard OCR regarding flexibility and accuracy, extracting text from images with clean and noisy backgrounds and various contrasts. Using preprocessing steps such as converting the images into grayscale, removing noise from the images, and detecting edges further improved the system's OCR accuracy, even for low-quality photos. This work expands the current body of research in multilingual OCR and document analysis, especially for low-resource languages such as Nepali. It emphasizes the effectiveness of combining the latest object detection framework with OCR models that have been fine-tuned for practical applications.
Advancements in Road Lane Mapping: Comparative Fine-Tuning Analysis of Deep Learning-based Semantic Segmentation Methods Using Aerial Imagery
Authors: Willow Liu, Shuxin Qiao, Kyle Gao, Hongjie He, Michael A. Chapman, Linlin Xu, Jonathan Li
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Earth Observation, Partially Labeled Datasets, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

This research addresses the need for high-definition (HD) maps for autonomous vehicles (AVs), focusing on road lane information derived from aerial imagery. While Earth observation data offers valuable resources for map creation, specialized models for road lane extraction are still underdeveloped in remote sensing. In this study, we perform an extensive comparison of twelve foundational deep learning-based semantic segmentation models for road lane marking extraction from high-definition remote sensing images, assessing their performance under transfer learning with partially labeled datasets. These models were fine-tuned on the partially labeled Waterloo Urban Scene dataset, and pre-trained on the SkyScapes dataset, simulating a likely scenario of real-life model deployment under partial labeling. We observed and assessed the fine-tuning performance and overall performance. Models showed significant performance improvements after fine-tuning, with mean IoU scores ranging from 33.56% to 76.11%, and recall ranging from 66.0% to 98.96%. Transformer-based models outperformed convolutional neural networks, emphasizing the importance of model pre-training and fine-tuning in enhancing HD map development for AV navigation.
Enhancing Temporal Modeling of Video LLMs via Time Gating
Authors: Zi-Yuan Hu, Yiwu Zhong, Shijia Huang, Michael R. Lyu, LiWei Wang
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: MVBench, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Video Understanding

Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on video-and-language tasks, such as video question answering. However, most existing Video LLMs neglect temporal information in video data, leading to struggles with temporal-aware video understanding. To address this gap, we propose a Time Gating Video LLM (TG-Vid) designed to enhance temporal modeling through a novel Time Gating module (TG). The TG module employs a time gating mechanism on its sub-modules, comprising gating spatial attention, gating temporal attention, and gating MLP. This architecture enables our model to achieve a robust understanding of temporal information within videos. Extensive evaluation of temporal-sensitive video benchmarks (i.e., MVBench, TempCompass, and NExT-QA) demonstrates that our TG-Vid model significantly outperforms the existing Video LLMs. Further, comprehensive ablation studies validate that the performance gains are attributed to the designs of our TG module. Our code is available at https://github.com/LaVi-Lab/TG-Vid.
PixLens: A Novel Framework for Disentangled Evaluation in Diffusion-Based Image Editing with Object Detection + SAM
Authors: Stefan Stefanache, Lluís Pastor Pérez, Julen Costa Watanabe, Ernesto Sanchez Tejedor, Thomas Hofmann, Enis Simsar
Date: 2024-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, object-detection, Object Detection

Evaluating diffusion-based image-editing models is a crucial task in the field of Generative AI. Specifically, it is imperative to assess their capacity to execute diverse editing tasks while preserving the image content and realism. While recent developments in generative models have opened up previously unheard-of possibilities for image editing, conducting a thorough evaluation of these models remains a challenging and open task. The absence of a standardized evaluation benchmark, primarily due to the inherent need for a post-edit reference image for evaluation, further complicates this issue. Currently, evaluations often rely on established models such as CLIP or require human intervention for a comprehensive understanding of the performance of these image editing models. Our benchmark, PixLens, provides a comprehensive evaluation of both edit quality and latent representation disentanglement, contributing to the advancement and refinement of existing methodologies in the field.