pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AWRaCLe: All-Weather Image Restoration using Visual In-Context Learning
Authors: Sudarshan Rajagopalan, Vishal M. Patel
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Restoration, In-Context Learning

All-Weather Image Restoration (AWIR) under adverse weather conditions is a challenging task due to the presence of different types of degradations. Prior research in this domain relies on extensive training data but lacks the utilization of additional contextual information for restoration guidance. Consequently, the performance of existing methods is limited by the degradation cues that are learnt from individual training samples. Recent advancements in visual in-context learning have introduced generalist models that are capable of addressing multiple computer vision tasks simultaneously by using the information present in the provided context as a prior. In this paper, we propose All-Weather Image Restoration using Visual In-Context Learning (AWRaCLe), a novel approach for AWIR that innovatively utilizes degradation-specific visual context information to steer the image restoration process. To achieve this, AWRaCLe incorporates Degradation Context Extraction (DCE) and Context Fusion (CF) to seamlessly integrate degradation-specific features from the context into an image restoration network. The proposed DCE and CF blocks leverage CLIP features and incorporate attention mechanisms to adeptly learn and fuse contextual information. These blocks are specifically designed for visual in-context learning under all-weather conditions and are crucial for effective context utilization. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AWRaCLe for all-weather restoration and show that our method advances the state-of-the-art in AWIR.
Adaptive Dataset Quantization
Authors: Muquan Li, Dongyang Zhang, Qiang Dong, Xiurui Xie, Ke Qin
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Dataset Distillation, Quantization

Contemporary deep learning, characterized by the training of cumbersome neural networks on massive datasets, confronts substantial computational hurdles. To alleviate heavy data storage burdens on limited hardware resources, numerous dataset compression methods such as dataset distillation (DD) and coreset selection have emerged to obtain a compact but informative dataset through synthesis or selection for efficient training. However, DD involves an expensive optimization procedure and exhibits limited generalization across unseen architectures, while coreset selection is limited by its low data keep ratio and reliance on heuristics, hindering its practicality and feasibility. To address these limitations, we introduce a newly versatile framework for dataset compression, namely Adaptive Dataset Quantization (ADQ). Specifically, we first identify the sub-optimal performance of naive Dataset Quantization (DQ), which relies on uniform sampling and overlooks the varying importance of each generated bin. Subsequently, we propose a novel adaptive sampling strategy through the evaluation of generated bins' representativeness score, diversity score and importance score, where the former two scores are quantified by the texture level and contrastive learning-based techniques, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only exhibits superior generalization capability across different architectures, but also attains state-of-the-art results, surpassing DQ by average 3\% on various datasets.
Anchor3DLane++: 3D Lane Detection via Sample-Adaptive Sparse 3D Anchor Regression
Authors: Shaofei Huang, Zhenwei Shen, Zehao Huang, Yue Liao, Jizhong Han, Naiyan Wang, Si Liu
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Lane Detection, Lane Detection, regression

In this paper, we focus on the challenging task of monocular 3D lane detection. Previous methods typically adopt inverse perspective mapping (IPM) to transform the Front-Viewed (FV) images or features into the Bird-Eye-Viewed (BEV) space for lane detection. However, IPM's dependence on flat ground assumption and context information loss in BEV representations lead to inaccurate 3D information estimation. Though efforts have been made to bypass BEV and directly predict 3D lanes from FV representations, their performances still fall behind BEV-based methods due to a lack of structured modeling of 3D lanes. In this paper, we propose a novel BEV-free method named Anchor3DLane++ which defines 3D lane anchors as structural representations and makes predictions directly from FV features. We also design a Prototype-based Adaptive Anchor Generation (PAAG) module to generate sample-adaptive sparse 3D anchors dynamically. In addition, an Equal-Width (EW) loss is developed to leverage the parallel property of lanes for regularization. Furthermore, camera-LiDAR fusion is also explored based on Anchor3DLane++ to leverage complementary information. Extensive experiments on three popular 3D lane detection benchmarks show that our Anchor3DLane++ outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/tusen-ai/Anchor3DLane.
Lightweight Design and Optimization methods for DCNNs: Progress and Futures
Authors: Hanhua Long, Wenbin Bi, Jian Sun
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning, Model Compression, Philosophy

Lightweight design, as a key approach to mitigate disparity between computational requirements of deep learning models and hardware performance, plays a pivotal role in advancing application of deep learning technologies on mobile and embedded devices, alongside rapid development of smart home, telemedicine, and autonomous driving. With its outstanding feature extracting capabilities, Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) have demonstrated superior performance in computer vision tasks. However, high computational costs and large network architectures severely limit the widespread application of DCNNs on resource-constrained hardware platforms such as smartphones, robots, and IoT devices. This paper reviews lightweight design strategies for DCNNs and examines recent research progress in both lightweight architectural design and model compression. Additionally, this paper discusses current limitations in this field of research and propose prospects for future directions, aiming to provide valuable guidance and reflection for lightweight design philosophy on deep neural networks in the field of computer vision.
Out-of-Distribution Detection with Prototypical Outlier Proxy
Authors: Mingrong Gong, Chaoqi Chen, Qingqiang Sun, Yue Wang, Hui Huang
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a crucial task for deploying deep learning models in the wild. One of the major challenges is that well-trained deep models tend to perform over-confidence on unseen test data. Recent research attempts to leverage real or synthetic outliers to mitigate the issue, which may significantly increase computational costs and be biased toward specific outlier characteristics. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework, Prototypical Outlier Proxy (POP), which introduces virtual OOD prototypes to reshape the decision boundaries between ID and OOD data. Specifically, we transform the learnable classifier into a fixed one and augment it with a set of prototypical weight vectors. Then, we introduce a hierarchical similarity boundary loss to impose adaptive penalties depending on the degree of misclassification. Extensive experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of POP. Notably, POP achieves average FPR95 reductions of 7.70%, 6.30%, and 5.42% over the second-best methods on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-200, respectively. Moreover, compared to the recent method NPOS, which relies on outlier synthesis, POP trains 7.2X faster and performs inference 19.5X faster. The source code is available at: https://github.com/gmr523/pop.
Predicting the Reliability of an Image Classifier under Image Distortion
Authors: Dang Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Kien Do, Svetha Venkatesh
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

In image classification tasks, deep learning models are vulnerable to image distortions i.e. their accuracy significantly drops if the input images are distorted. An image-classifier is considered "reliable" if its accuracy on distorted images is above a user-specified threshold. For a quality control purpose, it is important to predict if the image-classifier is unreliable/reliable under a distortion level. In other words, we want to predict whether a distortion level makes the image-classifier "non-reliable" or "reliable". Our solution is to construct a training set consisting of distortion levels along with their "non-reliable" or "reliable" labels, and train a machine learning predictive model (called distortion-classifier) to classify unseen distortion levels. However, learning an effective distortion-classifier is a challenging problem as the training set is highly imbalanced. To address this problem, we propose two Gaussian process based methods to rebalance the training set. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our method significantly outperforms several baselines on six popular image datasets.
MAGIC++: Efficient and Resilient Modality-Agnostic Semantic Segmentation via Hierarchical Modality Selection
Authors: Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Jiazhou Zhou, Lin Wang, Xuming Hu
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we address the challenging modality-agnostic semantic segmentation (MaSS), aiming at centering the value of every modality at every feature granularity. Training with all available visual modalities and effectively fusing an arbitrary combination of them is essential for robust multi-modal fusion in semantic segmentation, especially in real-world scenarios, yet remains less explored to date. Existing approaches often place RGB at the center, treating other modalities as secondary, resulting in an asymmetric architecture. However, RGB alone can be limiting in scenarios like nighttime, where modalities such as event data excel. Therefore, a resilient fusion model must dynamically adapt to each modality's strengths while compensating for weaker inputs.To this end, we introduce the MAGIC++ framework, which comprises two key plug-and-play modules for effective multi-modal fusion and hierarchical modality selection that can be equipped with various backbone models. Firstly, we introduce a multi-modal interaction module to efficiently process features from the input multi-modal batches and extract complementary scene information with channel-wise and spatial-wise guidance. On top, a unified multi-scale arbitrary-modal selection module is proposed to utilize the aggregated features as the benchmark to rank the multi-modal features based on the similarity scores at hierarchical feature spaces. This way, our method can eliminate the dependence on RGB modality at every feature granularity and better overcome sensor failures and environmental noises while ensuring the segmentation performance. Under the common multi-modal setting, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both real-world and synthetic benchmarks. Moreover, our method is superior in the novel modality-agnostic setting, where it outperforms prior arts by a large margin.
CoF: Coarse to Fine-Grained Image Understanding for Multi-modal Large Language Models
Authors: Yeyuan Wang, Dehong Gao, Bin Li, Rujiao Long, Lei Yi, Xiaoyan Cai, Libin Yang, Jinxia Zhang, Shanqing Yu, Qi Xuan
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Prompt Engineering, Visual Grounding

The impressive performance of Large Language Model (LLM) has prompted researchers to develop Multi-modal LLM (MLLM), which has shown great potential for various multi-modal tasks. However, current MLLM often struggles to effectively address fine-grained multi-modal challenges. We argue that this limitation is closely linked to the models' visual grounding capabilities. The restricted spatial awareness and perceptual acuity of visual encoders frequently lead to interference from irrelevant background information in images, causing the models to overlook subtle but crucial details. As a result, achieving fine-grained regional visual comprehension becomes difficult. In this paper, we break down multi-modal understanding into two stages, from Coarse to Fine (CoF). In the first stage, we prompt the MLLM to locate the approximate area of the answer. In the second stage, we further enhance the model's focus on relevant areas within the image through visual prompt engineering, adjusting attention weights of pertinent regions. This, in turn, improves both visual grounding and overall performance in downstream tasks. Our experiments show that this approach significantly boosts the performance of baseline models, demonstrating notable generalization and effectiveness. Our CoF approach is available online at https://github.com/Gavin001201/CoF.
SoundLoc3D: Invisible 3D Sound Source Localization and Classification Using a Multimodal RGB-D Acoustic Camera
Authors: Yuhang He, Sangyun Shin, Anoop Cherian, Niki Trigoni, Andrew Markham
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sound Source Localization

Accurately localizing 3D sound sources and estimating their semantic labels -- where the sources may not be visible, but are assumed to lie on the physical surface of objects in the scene -- have many real applications, including detecting gas leak and machinery malfunction. The audio-visual weak-correlation in such setting poses new challenges in deriving innovative methods to answer if or how we can use cross-modal information to solve the task. Towards this end, we propose to use an acoustic-camera rig consisting of a pinhole RGB-D camera and a coplanar four-channel microphone array~(Mic-Array). By using this rig to record audio-visual signals from multiviews, we can use the cross-modal cues to estimate the sound sources 3D locations. Specifically, our framework SoundLoc3D treats the task as a set prediction problem, each element in the set corresponds to a potential sound source. Given the audio-visual weak-correlation, the set representation is initially learned from a single view microphone array signal, and then refined by actively incorporating physical surface cues revealed from multiview RGB-D images. We demonstrate the efficiency and superiority of SoundLoc3D on large-scale simulated dataset, and further show its robustness to RGB-D measurement inaccuracy and ambient noise interference.
Diffusion-Based Approaches in Medical Image Generation and Analysis
Authors: Abdullah al Nomaan Nafi, Md. Alamgir Hossain, Rakib Hossain Rifat, Md Mahabub Uz Zaman, Md Manjurul Ahsan, Shivakumar Raman
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Generation

Data scarcity in medical imaging poses significant challenges due to privacy concerns. Diffusion models, a recent generative modeling technique, offer a potential solution by generating synthetic and realistic data. However, questions remain about the performance of convolutional neural network (CNN) models on original and synthetic datasets. If diffusion-generated samples can help CNN models perform comparably to those trained on original datasets, reliance on patient-specific data for training CNNs might be reduced. In this study, we investigated the effectiveness of diffusion models for generating synthetic medical images to train CNNs in three domains: Brain Tumor MRI, Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL), and SARS-CoV-2 CT scans. A diffusion model was trained to generate synthetic datasets for each domain. Pre-trained CNN architectures were then trained on these synthetic datasets and evaluated on unseen real data. All three datasets achieved promising classification performance using CNNs trained on synthetic data. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) analysis revealed that the models focused on relevant image features for classification. This study demonstrates the potential of diffusion models to generate synthetic medical images for training CNNs in medical image analysis.
Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Adaptive Regularization for Training Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Jinping Zou, Xiaoge Deng, Tao Sun
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00

Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has proven highly effective in improving model generalization in machine learning tasks. However, SAM employs a fixed hyperparameter associated with the regularization to characterize the sharpness of the model. Despite its success, research on adaptive regularization methods based on SAM remains scarce. In this paper, we propose the SAM with Adaptive Regularization (SAMAR), which introduces a flexible sharpness ratio rule to update the regularization parameter dynamically. We provide theoretical proof of the convergence of SAMAR for functions satisfying the Lipschitz continuity. Additionally, experiments on image recognition tasks using CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 demonstrate that SAMAR enhances accuracy and model generalization.
Seamless Detection: Unifying Salient Object Detection and Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Yi Liu, Chengxin Li, Xiaohui Dong, Lei LI, Dingwen Zhang, Shoukun Xu, Jungong Han
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection

Achieving joint learning of Salient Object Detection (SOD) and Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) is extremely challenging due to their distinct object characteristics, i.e., saliency and camouflage. The only preliminary research treats them as two contradictory tasks, training models on large-scale labeled data alternately for each task and assessing them independently. However, such task-specific mechanisms fail to meet real-world demands for addressing unknown tasks effectively. To address this issue, in this paper, we pioneer a task-agnostic framework to unify SOD and COD. To this end, inspired by the agreeable nature of binary segmentation for SOD and COD, we propose a Contrastive Distillation Paradigm (CDP) to distil the foreground from the background, facilitating the identification of salient and camouflaged objects amidst their surroundings. To probe into the contribution of our CDP, we design a simple yet effective contextual decoder involving the interval-layer and global context, which achieves an inference speed of 67 fps. Besides the supervised setting, our CDP can be seamlessly integrated into unsupervised settings, eliminating the reliance on extensive human annotations. Experiments on public SOD and COD datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework in both supervised and unsupervised settings, compared with existing state-of-the-art approaches. Code is available on https://github.com/liuyi1989/Seamless-Detection.
RealisID: Scale-Robust and Fine-Controllable Identity Customization via Local and Global Complementation
Authors: Zhaoyang Sun, Fei Du, Weihua Chen, Fan Wang, Yaxiong Chen, Yi Rong, Shengwu Xiong
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recently, the success of text-to-image synthesis has greatly advanced the development of identity customization techniques, whose main goal is to produce realistic identity-specific photographs based on text prompts and reference face images. However, it is difficult for existing identity customization methods to simultaneously meet the various requirements of different real-world applications, including the identity fidelity of small face, the control of face location, pose and expression, as well as the customization of multiple persons. To this end, we propose a scale-robust and fine-controllable method, namely RealisID, which learns different control capabilities through the cooperation between a pair of local and global branches. Specifically, by using cropping and up-sampling operations to filter out face-irrelevant information, the local branch concentrates the fine control of facial details and the scale-robust identity fidelity within the face region. Meanwhile, the global branch manages the overall harmony of the entire image. It also controls the face location by taking the location guidance as input. As a result, RealisID can benefit from the complementarity of these two branches. Finally, by implementing our branches with two different variants of ControlNet, our method can be easily extended to handle multi-person customization, even only trained on single-person datasets. Extensive experiments and ablation studies indicate the effectiveness of RealisID and verify its ability in fulfilling all the requirements mentioned above.
Technical Report: Towards Spatial Feature Regularization in Deep-Learning-Based Array-SAR Reconstruction
Authors: Yu Ren, Xu Zhan, Yunqiao Hu, Xiangdong Ma, Liang Liu, Mou Wang, Jun Shi, Shunjun Wei, Tianjiao Zeng, Xiaoling Zhang
Date: 2024-12-22 00:00:00

Array synthetic aperture radar (Array-SAR), also known as tomographic SAR (TomoSAR), has demonstrated significant potential for high-quality 3D mapping, particularly in urban areas.While deep learning (DL) methods have recently shown strengths in reconstruction, most studies rely on pixel-by-pixel reconstruction, neglecting spatial features like building structures, leading to artifacts such as holes and fragmented edges. Spatial feature regularization, effective in traditional methods, remains underexplored in DL-based approaches. Our study integrates spatial feature regularization into DL-based Array-SAR reconstruction, addressing key questions: What spatial features are relevant in urban-area mapping? How can these features be effectively described, modeled, regularized, and incorporated into DL networks? The study comprises five phases: spatial feature description and modeling, regularization, feature-enhanced network design, evaluation, and discussions. Sharp edges and geometric shapes in urban scenes are analyzed as key features. An intra-slice and inter-slice strategy is proposed, using 2D slices as reconstruction units and fusing them into 3D scenes through parallel and serial fusion. Two computational frameworks-iterative reconstruction with enhancement and light reconstruction with enhancement-are designed, incorporating spatial feature modules into DL networks, leading to four specialized reconstruction networks. Using our urban building simulation dataset and two public datasets, six tests evaluate close-point resolution, structural integrity, and robustness in urban scenarios. Results show that spatial feature regularization significantly improves reconstruction accuracy, retrieves more complete building structures, and enhances robustness by reducing noise and outliers.