pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Solving Motion Planning Tasks with a Scalable Generative Model
Authors: Yihan Hu, Siqi Chai, Zhening Yang, Jingyu Qian, Kun Li, Wenxin Shao, Haichao Zhang, Wei Xu, Qiang Liu
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Motion Planning, Scene Generation

As autonomous driving systems being deployed to millions of vehicles, there is a pressing need of improving the system's scalability, safety and reducing the engineering cost. A realistic, scalable, and practical simulator of the driving world is highly desired. In this paper, we present an efficient solution based on generative models which learns the dynamics of the driving scenes. With this model, we can not only simulate the diverse futures of a given driving scenario but also generate a variety of driving scenarios conditioned on various prompts. Our innovative design allows the model to operate in both full-Autoregressive and partial-Autoregressive modes, significantly improving inference and training speed without sacrificing generative capability. This efficiency makes it ideal for being used as an online reactive environment for reinforcement learning, an evaluator for planning policies, and a high-fidelity simulator for testing. We evaluated our model against two real-world datasets: the Waymo motion dataset and the nuPlan dataset. On the simulation realism and scene generation benchmark, our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance. And in the planning benchmarks, our planner outperforms the prior arts. We conclude that the proposed generative model may serve as a foundation for a variety of motion planning tasks, including data generation, simulation, planning, and online training. Source code is public at https://github.com/HorizonRobotics/GUMP/
Euler's Elastica Based Cartoon-Smooth-Texture Image Decomposition
Authors: Roy Y. He, Hao liu
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00

We propose a novel model for decomposing grayscale images into three distinct components: the structural part, representing sharp boundaries and regions with strong light-to-dark transitions; the smooth part, capturing soft shadows and shades; and the oscillatory part, characterizing textures and noise. To capture the homogeneous structures, we introduce a combination of $L^0$-gradient and curvature regularization on level lines. This new regularization term enforces strong sparsity on the image gradient while reducing the undesirable staircase effects as well as preserving the geometry of contours. For the smoothly varying component, we utilize the $L^2$-norm of the Laplacian that favors isotropic smoothness. To capture the oscillation, we use the inverse Sobolev seminorm. To solve the associated minimization problem, we design an efficient operator-splitting algorithm. Our algorithm effectively addresses the challenging non-convex non-smooth problem by separating it into sub-problems. Each sub-problem can be solved either directly using closed-form solutions or efficiently using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). We provide systematic experiments, including ablation and comparison studies, to analyze our model's behaviors and demonstrate its effectiveness as well as efficiency.
Learning Positional Attention for Sequential Recommendation
Authors: Fan Luo, Haibo He, Juan Zhang, Shenghui Xu
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Self-attention-based networks have achieved remarkable performance in sequential recommendation tasks. A crucial component of these models is positional encoding. In this study, we delve into the learned positional embedding, demonstrating that it often captures the distance between tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce novel attention models that directly learn positional relations. Extensive experiments reveal that our proposed models, \textbf{PARec} and \textbf{FPARec} outperform previous self-attention-based approaches. The code can be found here: https://github.com/NetEase-Media/FPARec.
Foster Adaptivity and Balance in Learning with Noisy Labels
Authors: Mengmeng Sheng, Zeren Sun, Tao Chen, Shuchao Pang, Yucheng Wang, Yazhou Yao
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning with noisy labels

Label noise is ubiquitous in real-world scenarios, posing a practical challenge to supervised models due to its effect in hurting the generalization performance of deep neural networks. Existing methods primarily employ the sample selection paradigm and usually rely on dataset-dependent prior knowledge (\eg, a pre-defined threshold) to cope with label noise, inevitably degrading the adaptivity. Moreover, existing methods tend to neglect the class balance in selecting samples, leading to biased model performance. To this end, we propose a simple yet effective approach named \textbf{SED} to deal with label noise in a \textbf{S}elf-adaptiv\textbf{E} and class-balance\textbf{D} manner. Specifically, we first design a novel sample selection strategy to empower self-adaptivity and class balance when identifying clean and noisy data. A mean-teacher model is then employed to correct labels of noisy samples. Subsequently, we propose a self-adaptive and class-balanced sample re-weighting mechanism to assign different weights to detected noisy samples. Finally, we additionally employ consistency regularization on selected clean samples to improve model generalization performance. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method. The source code has been made available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/SED.
Gradient descent with generalized Newton's method
Authors: Zhiqi Bu, Shiyun Xu
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00

We propose the generalized Newton's method (GeN) -- a Hessian-informed approach that applies to any optimizer such as SGD and Adam, and covers the Newton-Raphson method as a sub-case. Our method automatically and dynamically selects the learning rate that accelerates the convergence, without the intensive tuning of the learning rate scheduler. In practice, our method is easily implementable, since it only requires additional forward passes with almost zero computational overhead (in terms of training time and memory cost), if the overhead is amortized over many iterations. We present extensive experiments on language and vision tasks (e.g. GPT and ResNet) to showcase that GeN optimizers match the state-of-the-art performance, which was achieved with carefully tuned learning rate schedulers.
Fine-Grained Scene Image Classification with Modality-Agnostic Adapter
Authors: Yiqun Wang, Zhao Zhou, Xiangcheng Du, Xingjiao Wu, Yingbin Zheng, Cheng Jin
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

When dealing with the task of fine-grained scene image classification, most previous works lay much emphasis on global visual features when doing multi-modal feature fusion. In other words, models are deliberately designed based on prior intuitions about the importance of different modalities. In this paper, we present a new multi-modal feature fusion approach named MAA (Modality-Agnostic Adapter), trying to make the model learn the importance of different modalities in different cases adaptively, without giving a prior setting in the model architecture. More specifically, we eliminate the modal differences in distribution and then use a modality-agnostic Transformer encoder for a semantic-level feature fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that MAA achieves state-of-the-art results on benchmarks by applying the same modalities with previous methods. Besides, it is worth mentioning that new modalities can be easily added when using MAA and further boost the performance. Code is available at https://github.com/quniLcs/MAA.
Knowledge Transfer with Simulated Inter-Image Erasing for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Tao Chen, Xiruo Jiang, Gensheng Pei, Zeren Sun, Yucheng Wang, Yazhou Yao
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Though adversarial erasing has prevailed in weakly supervised semantic segmentation to help activate integral object regions, existing approaches still suffer from the dilemma of under-activation and over-expansion due to the difficulty in determining when to stop erasing. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{T}ransfer with \textbf{S}imulated Inter-Image \textbf{E}rasing (KTSE) approach for weakly supervised semantic segmentation to alleviate the above problem. In contrast to existing erasing-based methods that remove the discriminative part for more object discovery, we propose a simulated inter-image erasing scenario to weaken the original activation by introducing extra object information. Then, object knowledge is transferred from the anchor image to the consequent less activated localization map to strengthen network localization ability. Considering the adopted bidirectional alignment will also weaken the anchor image activation if appropriate constraints are missing, we propose a self-supervised regularization module to maintain the reliable activation in discriminative regions and improve the inter-class object boundary recognition for complex images with multiple categories of objects. In addition, we resort to intra-image erasing and propose a multi-granularity alignment module to gently enlarge the object activation to boost the object knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on PASCAL VOC 2012 and COCO datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach. Source codes and models are available at https://github.com/NUST-Machine-Intelligence-Laboratory/KTSE.
ADFQ-ViT: Activation-Distribution-Friendly Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers
Authors: Yanfeng Jiang, Ning Sun, Xueshuo Xie, Fei Yang, Tao Li
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization, Semantic Segmentation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have exhibited exceptional performance across diverse computer vision tasks, while their substantial parameter size incurs significantly increased memory and computational demands, impeding effective inference on resource-constrained devices. Quantization has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate these challenges, yet existing methods still suffer from significant accuracy loss at low-bit. We attribute this issue to the distinctive distributions of post-LayerNorm and post-GELU activations within ViTs, rendering conventional hardware-friendly quantizers ineffective, particularly in low-bit scenarios. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework called Activation-Distribution-Friendly post-training Quantization for Vision Transformers, ADFQ-ViT. Concretely, we introduce the Per-Patch Outlier-aware Quantizer to tackle irregular outliers in post-LayerNorm activations. This quantizer refines the granularity of the uniform quantizer to a per-patch level while retaining a minimal subset of values exceeding a threshold at full-precision. To handle the non-uniform distributions of post-GELU activations between positive and negative regions, we design the Shift-Log2 Quantizer, which shifts all elements to the positive region and then applies log2 quantization. Moreover, we present the Attention-score enhanced Module-wise Optimization which adjusts the parameters of each quantizer by reconstructing errors to further mitigate quantization error. Extensive experiments demonstrate ADFQ-ViT provides significant improvements over various baselines in image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks at 4-bit. Specifically, when quantizing the ViT-B model to 4-bit, we achieve a 10.23% improvement in Top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet dataset.
Differential Encoding for Improved Representation Learning over Graphs
Authors: Haimin Zhang, Jiahao Xia, Min Xu
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Combining the message-passing paradigm with the global attention mechanism has emerged as an effective framework for learning over graphs. The message-passing paradigm and the global attention mechanism fundamentally generate node embeddings based on information aggregated from a node's local neighborhood or from the whole graph. The most basic and commonly used aggregation approach is to take the sum of information from a node's local neighbourhood or from the whole graph. However, it is unknown if the dominant information is from a node itself or from the node's neighbours (or the rest of the graph nodes). Therefore, there exists information lost at each layer of embedding generation, and this information lost could be accumulated and become more serious when more layers are used in the model. In this paper, we present a differential encoding method to address the issue of information lost. The idea of our method is to encode the differential representation between the information from a node's neighbours (or the rest of the graph nodes) and that from the node itself. The obtained differential encoding is then combined with the original aggregated local or global representation to generate the updated node embedding. By integrating differential encodings, the representational ability of generated node embeddings is improved. The differential encoding method is empirically evaluated on different graph tasks on seven benchmark datasets. The results show that it is a general method that improves the message-passing update and the global attention update, advancing the state-of-the-art performance for graph representation learning on these datasets.
Highly Accelerated MRI via Implicit Neural Representation Guided Posterior Sampling of Diffusion Models
Authors: Jiayue Chu, Chenhe Du, Xiyue Lin, Yuyao Zhang, Hongjiang Wei
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00

Reconstructing high-fidelity magnetic resonance (MR) images from under-sampled k-space is a commonly used strategy to reduce scan time. The posterior sampling of diffusion models based on the real measurement data holds significant promise of improved reconstruction accuracy. However, traditional posterior sampling methods often lack effective data consistency guidance, leading to inaccurate and unstable reconstructions. Implicit neural representation (INR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving inverse problems by modeling a signal's attributes as a continuous function of spatial coordinates. In this study, we present a novel posterior sampler for diffusion models using INR, named DiffINR. The INR-based component incorporates both the diffusion prior distribution and the MRI physical model to ensure high data fidelity. DiffINR demonstrates superior performance on experimental datasets with remarkable accuracy, even under high acceleration factors (up to R=12 in single-channel reconstruction). Notably, our proposed framework can be a generalizable framework to solve inverse problems in other medical imaging tasks.
ZEAL: Surgical Skill Assessment with Zero-shot Tool Inference Using Unified Foundation Model
Authors: Satoshi Kondo
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Surgical skill assessment is paramount for ensuring patient safety and enhancing surgical outcomes. This study addresses the need for efficient and objective evaluation methods by introducing ZEAL (surgical skill assessment with Zero-shot surgical tool segmentation with a unifiEd foundAtion modeL). ZEAL uses segmentation masks of surgical instruments obtained through a unified foundation model for proficiency assessment. Through zero-shot inference with text prompts, ZEAL predicts segmentation masks, capturing essential features of both instruments and surroundings. Utilizing sparse convolutional neural networks and segmentation masks, ZEAL extracts feature vectors for foreground (instruments) and background. Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks encode temporal dynamics, modeling sequential data and dependencies in surgical videos. Combining LSTM-encoded vectors, ZEAL produces a surgical skill score, offering an objective measure of proficiency. Comparative analysis with conventional methods using open datasets demonstrates ZEAL's superiority, affirming its potential in advancing surgical training and evaluation. This innovative approach to surgical skill assessment addresses challenges in traditional supervised learning techniques, paving the way for enhanced surgical care quality and patient outcomes.
Model and Feature Diversity for Bayesian Neural Networks in Mutual Learning
Authors: Cuong Pham, Cuong C. Nguyen, Trung Le, Dinh Phung, Gustavo Carneiro, Thanh-Toan Do
Date: 2024-07-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Diversity, Uncertainty Quantification

Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer probability distributions for model parameters, enabling uncertainty quantification in predictions. However, they often underperform compared to deterministic neural networks. Utilizing mutual learning can effectively enhance the performance of peer BNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to improve BNNs performance through deep mutual learning. The proposed approaches aim to increase diversity in both network parameter distributions and feature distributions, promoting peer networks to acquire distinct features that capture different characteristics of the input, which enhances the effectiveness of mutual learning. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in the classification accuracy, negative log-likelihood, and expected calibration error when compared to traditional mutual learning for BNNs.
Light-weight Fine-tuning Method for Defending Adversarial Noise in Pre-trained Medical Vision-Language Models
Authors: Xu Han, Linghao Jin, Xuezhe Ma, Xiaofeng Liu
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Fine-tuning pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) has shown remarkable capabilities in medical image and textual depiction synergy. Nevertheless, many pre-training datasets are restricted by patient privacy concerns, potentially containing noise that can adversely affect downstream performance. Moreover, the growing reliance on multi-modal generation exacerbates this issue because of its susceptibility to adversarial attacks. To investigate how VLMs trained on adversarial noisy data perform on downstream medical tasks, we first craft noisy upstream datasets using multi-modal adversarial attacks. Through our comprehensive analysis, we unveil that moderate noise enhances model robustness and transferability, but increasing noise levels negatively impact downstream task performance. To mitigate this issue, we propose rectify adversarial noise (RAN) framework, a recipe designed to effectively defend adversarial attacks and rectify the influence of upstream noise during fine-tuning.
Advancing Compressed Video Action Recognition through Progressive Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Efstathia Soufleri, Deepak Ravikumar, Kaushik Roy
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Knowledge Distillation, Temporal Action Localization, Transfer Learning

Compressed video action recognition classifies video samples by leveraging the different modalities in compressed videos, namely motion vectors, residuals, and intra-frames. For this purpose, three neural networks are deployed, each dedicated to processing one modality. Our observations indicate that the network processing intra-frames tend to converge to a flatter minimum than the network processing residuals, which in turn converges to a flatter minimum than the motion vector network. This hierarchy in convergence motivates our strategy for knowledge transfer among modalities to achieve flatter minima, which are generally associated with better generalization. With this insight, we propose Progressive Knowledge Distillation (PKD), a technique that incrementally transfers knowledge across the modalities. This method involves attaching early exits (Internal Classifiers - ICs) to the three networks. PKD distills knowledge starting from the motion vector network, followed by the residual, and finally, the intra-frame network, sequentially improving IC accuracy. Further, we propose the Weighted Inference with Scaled Ensemble (WISE), which combines outputs from the ICs using learned weights, boosting accuracy during inference. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of training the ICs with PKD compared to standard cross-entropy-based training, showing IC accuracy improvements of up to 5.87% and 11.42% on the UCF-101 and HMDB-51 datasets, respectively. Additionally, WISE improves accuracy by up to 4.28% and 9.30% on UCF-101 and HMDB-51, respectively.
Funny-Valen-Tine: Planning Solution Distribution Enhances Machine Abstract Reasoning Ability
Authors: Ruizhuo Song, Beiming Yuan
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Clustering

Visual abstract reasoning problems hold immense importance in the field of image processing. Both Bongard-Logo and Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) belong to this domain, with Bongard-Logo categorized as image clustering reasoning and RPM involving image progression pattern reasoning. This paper introduces Valen, a novel baseline model under probabilistic highlighting models. Valen exhibits remarkable performance in solving both RPM and Bongard-Logo problems, offering a versatile solution. Our investigation delves into the underlying mechanisms of probability-highlighting solvers, realizing they approximate solutions to reasoning problem instances as distributions delineated by primary and auxiliary samples. We propose that the learning objective is not the distribution of correct solutions but one defined by both primary and auxiliary samples. To bridge discrepancies, we introduced the Tine method, an adversarial learning-based approach to assist Valen in estimating a solution distribution closer to the correct one, albeit with issues like unstable training. Reflecting on Tine, we propose modeling the sample distribution of reasoning problems as a mixture of Gaussian distributions, leading to the Funny method. This effectively enables Valen to capture the true form of the correct solution distribution. Furthermore, we designed the SBR method to model the distribution of progressive patterns representation similarly. Overall, the Funny, Tine, and SBR methods significantly improve Valen's performance, providing new ideas and methods for studying visual abstract reasoning problems.
No Training, No Problem: Rethinking Classifier-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models
Authors: Seyedmorteza Sadat, Manuel Kansy, Otmar Hilliges, Romann M. Weber
Date: 2024-07-02 00:00:00

Classifier-free guidance (CFG) has become the standard method for enhancing the quality of conditional diffusion models. However, employing CFG requires either training an unconditional model alongside the main diffusion model or modifying the training procedure by periodically inserting a null condition. There is also no clear extension of CFG to unconditional models. In this paper, we revisit the core principles of CFG and introduce a new method, independent condition guidance (ICG), which provides the benefits of CFG without the need for any special training procedures. Our approach streamlines the training process of conditional diffusion models and can also be applied during inference on any pre-trained conditional model. Additionally, by leveraging the time-step information encoded in all diffusion networks, we propose an extension of CFG, called time-step guidance (TSG), which can be applied to any diffusion model, including unconditional ones. Our guidance techniques are easy to implement and have the same sampling cost as CFG. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ICG matches the performance of standard CFG across various conditional diffusion models. Moreover, we show that TSG improves generation quality in a manner similar to CFG, without relying on any conditional information.