pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EALD-MLLM: Emotion Analysis in Long-sequential and De-identity videos with Multi-modal Large Language Model
Authors: Deng Li, Xin Liu, Bohao Xing, Baiqiang Xia, Yuan Zong, Bihan Wen, Heikki Kälviäinen
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: De-identification, Emotion Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Emotion AI is the ability of computers to understand human emotional states. Existing works have achieved promising progress, but two limitations remain to be solved: 1) Previous studies have been more focused on short sequential video emotion analysis while overlooking long sequential video. However, the emotions in short sequential videos only reflect instantaneous emotions, which may be deliberately guided or hidden. In contrast, long sequential videos can reveal authentic emotions; 2) Previous studies commonly utilize various signals such as facial, speech, and even sensitive biological signals (e.g., electrocardiogram). However, due to the increasing demand for privacy, developing Emotion AI without relying on sensitive signals is becoming important. To address the aforementioned limitations, in this paper, we construct a dataset for Emotion Analysis in Long-sequential and De-identity videos called EALD by collecting and processing the sequences of athletes' post-match interviews. In addition to providing annotations of the overall emotional state of each video, we also provide the Non-Facial Body Language (NFBL) annotations for each player. NFBL is an inner-driven emotional expression and can serve as an identity-free clue to understanding the emotional state. Moreover, we provide a simple but effective baseline for further research. More precisely, we evaluate the Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with de-identification signals (e.g., visual, speech, and NFBLs) to perform emotion analysis. Our experimental results demonstrate that: 1) MLLMs can achieve comparable, even better performance than the supervised single-modal models, even in a zero-shot scenario; 2) NFBL is an important cue in long sequential emotion analysis. EALD will be available on the open-source platform.
UWAFA-GAN: Ultra-Wide-Angle Fluorescein Angiography Transformation via Multi-scale Generation and Registration Enhancement
Authors: Ruiquan Ge, Zhaojie Fang, Pengxue Wei, Zhanghao Chen, Hongyang Jiang, Ahmed Elazab, Wangting Li, Xiang Wan, Shaochong Zhang, Changmiao Wang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation, Medical Image Generation

Fundus photography, in combination with the ultra-wide-angle fundus (UWF) techniques, becomes an indispensable diagnostic tool in clinical settings by offering a more comprehensive view of the retina. Nonetheless, UWF fluorescein angiography (UWF-FA) necessitates the administration of a fluorescent dye via injection into the patient's hand or elbow unlike UWF scanning laser ophthalmoscopy (UWF-SLO). To mitigate potential adverse effects associated with injections, researchers have proposed the development of cross-modality medical image generation algorithms capable of converting UWF-SLO images into their UWF-FA counterparts. Current image generation techniques applied to fundus photography encounter difficulties in producing high-resolution retinal images, particularly in capturing minute vascular lesions. To address these issues, we introduce a novel conditional generative adversarial network (UWAFA-GAN) to synthesize UWF-FA from UWF-SLO. This approach employs multi-scale generators and an attention transmit module to efficiently extract both global structures and local lesions. Additionally, to counteract the image blurriness issue that arises from training with misaligned data, a registration module is integrated within this framework. Our method performs non-trivially on inception scores and details generation. Clinical user studies further indicate that the UWF-FA images generated by UWAFA-GAN are clinically comparable to authentic images in terms of diagnostic reliability. Empirical evaluations on our proprietary UWF image datasets elucidate that UWAFA-GAN outperforms extant methodologies. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Tinysqua/UWAFA-GAN.
GAD-Generative Learning for HD Map-Free Autonomous Driving
Authors: Weijian Sun, Yanbo Jia, Qi Zeng, Zihao Liu, Jiang Liao, Yue Li, Xianfeng Li
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Model Predictive Control, Motion Planning

Deep-learning-based techniques have been widely adopted for autonomous driving software stacks for mass production in recent years, focusing primarily on perception modules, with some work extending this method to prediction modules. However, the downstream planning and control modules are still designed with hefty handcrafted rules, dominated by optimization-based methods such as quadratic programming or model predictive control. This results in a performance bottleneck for autonomous driving systems in that corner cases simply cannot be solved by enumerating hand-crafted rules. We present a deep-learning-based approach that brings prediction, decision, and planning modules together with the attempt to overcome the rule-based methods' deficiency in real-world applications of autonomous driving, especially for urban scenes. The DNN model we proposed is solely trained with 10 hours of human driver data, and it supports all mass-production ADAS features available on the market to date. This method is deployed onto a Jiyue test car with no modification to its factory-ready sensor set and compute platform. the feasibility, usability, and commercial potential are demonstrated in this article.
Get Your Embedding Space in Order: Domain-Adaptive Regression for Forest Monitoring
Authors: Sizhuo Li, Dimitri Gominski, Martin Brandt, Xiaoye Tong, Philippe Ciais
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, regression

Image-level regression is an important task in Earth observation, where visual domain and label shifts are a core challenge hampering generalization. However, cross-domain regression within remote sensing data remains understudied due to the absence of suited datasets. We introduce a new dataset with aerial and satellite imagery in five countries with three forest-related regression tasks. To match real-world applicative interests, we compare methods through a restrictive setup where no prior on the target domain is available during training, and models are adapted with limited information during testing. Building on the assumption that ordered relationships generalize better, we propose manifold diffusion for regression as a strong baseline for transduction in low-data regimes. Our comparison highlights the comparative advantages of inductive and transductive methods in cross-domain regression.
NeRF-Guided Unsupervised Learning of RGB-D Registration
Authors: Zhinan Yu, Zheng Qin, Yijie Tang, Yongjun Wang, Renjiao Yi, Chenyang Zhu, Kai Xu
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization, NeRF

This paper focuses on training a robust RGB-D registration model without ground-truth pose supervision. Existing methods usually adopt a pairwise training strategy based on differentiable rendering, which enforces the photometric and the geometric consistency between the two registered frames as supervision. However, this frame-to-frame framework suffers from poor multi-view consistency due to factors such as lighting changes, geometry occlusion and reflective materials. In this paper, we present NeRF-UR, a novel frame-to-model optimization framework for unsupervised RGB-D registration. Instead of frame-to-frame consistency, we leverage the neural radiance field (NeRF) as a global model of the scene and use the consistency between the input and the NeRF-rerendered frames for pose optimization. This design can significantly improve the robustness in scenarios with poor multi-view consistency and provides better learning signal for the registration model. Furthermore, to bootstrap the NeRF optimization, we create a synthetic dataset, Sim-RGBD, through a photo-realistic simulator to warm up the registration model. By first training the registration model on Sim-RGBD and later unsupervisedly fine-tuning on real data, our framework enables distilling the capability of feature extraction and registration from simulation to reality. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art counterparts on two popular indoor RGB-D datasets, ScanNet and 3DMatch. Code and models will be released for paper reproduction.
What Makes for Good Image Captions?
Authors: Delong Chen, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Etsuko Ishii, Ho Shu Chan, Yejin Bang, Pascale Fung
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Image Captioning, Representation Learning

This paper establishes a formal information-theoretic framework for image captioning, conceptualizing captions as compressed linguistic representations that selectively encode semantic units in images. Our framework posits that good image captions should balance three key aspects: informationally sufficient, minimally redundant, and readily comprehensible by humans. By formulating these aspects as quantitative measures with adjustable weights, our framework provides a flexible foundation for analyzing and optimizing image captioning systems across diverse task requirements. To demonstrate its applicability, we introduce the Pyramid of Captions (PoCa) method, which generates enriched captions by integrating local and global visual information. We present both theoretical proof that PoCa improves caption quality under certain assumptions, and empirical validation of its effectiveness across various image captioning models and datasets.
In Anticipation of Perfect Deepfake: Identity-anchored Artifact-agnostic Detection under Rebalanced Deepfake Detection Protocol
Authors: Wei-Han Wang, Chin-Yuan Yeh, Hsi-Wen Chen, De-Nian Yang, Ming-Syan Chen
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

As deep generative models advance, we anticipate deepfakes achieving "perfection"-generating no discernible artifacts or noise. However, current deepfake detectors, intentionally or inadvertently, rely on such artifacts for detection, as they are exclusive to deepfakes and absent in genuine examples. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Rebalanced Deepfake Detection Protocol (RDDP) to stress-test detectors under balanced scenarios where genuine and forged examples bear similar artifacts. We offer two RDDP variants: RDDP-WHITEHAT uses white-hat deepfake algorithms to create 'self-deepfakes,' genuine portrait videos with the resemblance of the underlying identity, yet carry similar artifacts to deepfake videos; RDDP-SURROGATE employs surrogate functions (e.g., Gaussian noise) to process both genuine and forged examples, introducing equivalent noise, thereby sidestepping the need of deepfake algorithms. Towards detecting perfect deepfake videos that aligns with genuine ones, we present ID-Miner, a detector that identifies the puppeteer behind the disguise by focusing on motion over artifacts or appearances. As an identity-based detector, it authenticates videos by comparing them with reference footage. Equipped with the artifact-agnostic loss at frame-level and the identity-anchored loss at video-level, ID-Miner effectively singles out identity signals amidst distracting variations. Extensive experiments comparing ID-Miner with 12 baseline detectors under both conventional and RDDP evaluations with two deepfake datasets, along with additional qualitative studies, affirm the superiority of our method and the necessity for detectors designed to counter perfect deepfakes.
Enhanced Textual Feature Extraction for Visual Question Answering: A Simple Convolutional Approach
Authors: Zhilin Zhang, Fangyu Wu
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering (VQA) has emerged as a highly engaging field in recent years, with increasing research focused on enhancing VQA accuracy through advanced models such as Transformers. Despite this growing interest, limited work has examined the comparative effectiveness of textual encoders in VQA, particularly considering model complexity and computational efficiency. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive comparison between complex textual models that leverage long-range dependencies and simpler models focusing on local textual features within a well-established VQA framework. Our findings reveal that employing complex textual encoders is not always the optimal approach for the VQA-v2 dataset. Motivated by this insight, we propose ConvGRU, a model that incorporates convolutional layers to improve text feature representation without substantially increasing model complexity. Tested on the VQA-v2 dataset, ConvGRU demonstrates a modest yet consistent improvement over baselines for question types such as Number and Count, which highlights the potential of lightweight architectures for VQA tasks, especially when computational resources are limited.
DmADs-Net: Dense multiscale attention and depth-supervised network for medical image segmentation
Authors: Zhaojin Fu, Zheng Chen, Jinjiang Li, Lu Ren
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Deep learning has made important contributions to the development of medical image segmentation. Convolutional neural networks, as a crucial branch, have attracted strong attention from researchers. Through the tireless efforts of numerous researchers, convolutional neural networks have yielded numerous outstanding algorithms for processing medical images. The ideas and architectures of these algorithms have also provided important inspiration for the development of later technologies.Through extensive experimentation, we have found that currently mainstream deep learning algorithms are not always able to achieve ideal results when processing complex datasets and different types of datasets. These networks still have room for improvement in lesion localization and feature extraction. Therefore, we have created the Dense Multiscale Attention and Depth-Supervised Network (DmADs-Net).We use ResNet for feature extraction at different depths and create a Multi-scale Convolutional Feature Attention Block to improve the network's attention to weak feature information. The Local Feature Attention Block is created to enable enhanced local feature attention for high-level semantic information. In addition, in the feature fusion phase, a Feature Refinement and Fusion Block is created to enhance the fusion of different semantic information.We validated the performance of the network using five datasets of varying sizes and types. Results from comparative experiments show that DmADs-Net outperformed mainstream networks. Ablation experiments further demonstrated the effectiveness of the created modules and the rationality of the network architecture.
Lazy Layers to Make Fine-Tuned Diffusion Models More Traceable
Authors: Haozhe Liu, Wentian Zhang, Bing Li, Bernard Ghanem, Jürgen Schmidhuber
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Foundational generative models should be traceable to protect their owners and facilitate safety regulation. To achieve this, traditional approaches embed identifiers based on supervisory trigger-response signals, which are commonly known as backdoor watermarks. They are prone to failure when the model is fine-tuned with nontrigger data. Our experiments show that this vulnerability is due to energetic changes in only a few 'busy' layers during fine-tuning. This yields a novel arbitrary-in-arbitrary-out (AIAO) strategy that makes watermarks resilient to fine-tuning-based removal. The trigger-response pairs of AIAO samples across various neural network depths can be used to construct watermarked subpaths, employing Monte Carlo sampling to achieve stable verification results. In addition, unlike the existing methods of designing a backdoor for the input/output space of diffusion models, in our method, we propose to embed the backdoor into the feature space of sampled subpaths, where a mask-controlled trigger function is proposed to preserve the generation performance and ensure the invisibility of the embedded backdoor. Our empirical studies on the MS-COCO, AFHQ, LSUN, CUB-200, and DreamBooth datasets confirm the robustness of AIAO; while the verification rates of other trigger-based methods fall from ~90% to ~70% after fine-tuning, those of our method remain consistently above 90%.
Predictive Accuracy-Based Active Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Jun Shi, Shulan Ruan, Ziqi Zhu, Minfan Zhao, Hong An, Xudong Xue, Bing Yan
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity, Image Segmentation, Informativeness, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Active learning is considered a viable solution to alleviate the contradiction between the high dependency of deep learning-based segmentation methods on annotated data and the expensive pixel-level annotation cost of medical images. However, most existing methods suffer from unreliable uncertainty assessment and the struggle to balance diversity and informativeness, leading to poor performance in segmentation tasks. In response, we propose an efficient Predictive Accuracy-based Active Learning (PAAL) method for medical image segmentation, first introducing predictive accuracy to define uncertainty. Specifically, PAAL mainly consists of an Accuracy Predictor (AP) and a Weighted Polling Strategy (WPS). The former is an attached learnable module that can accurately predict the segmentation accuracy of unlabeled samples relative to the target model with the predicted posterior probability. The latter provides an efficient hybrid querying scheme by combining predicted accuracy and feature representation, aiming to ensure the uncertainty and diversity of the acquired samples. Extensive experiment results on multiple datasets demonstrate the superiority of PAAL. PAAL achieves comparable accuracy to fully annotated data while reducing annotation costs by approximately 50% to 80%, showcasing significant potential in clinical applications. The code is available at https://github.com/shijun18/PAAL-MedSeg.
MMTryon: Multi-Modal Multi-Reference Control for High-Quality Fashion Generation
Authors: Xujie Zhang, Ente Lin, Xiu Li, Yuxuan Luo, Michael Kampffmeyer, Xin Dong, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Virtual Try-on

This paper introduces MMTryon, a multi-modal multi-reference VIrtual Try-ON (VITON) framework, which can generate high-quality compositional try-on results by taking a text instruction and multiple garment images as inputs. Our MMTryon addresses three problems overlooked in prior literature: 1) Support of multiple try-on items. Existing methods are commonly designed for single-item try-on tasks (e.g., upper/lower garments, dresses). 2)Specification of dressing style. Existing methods are unable to customize dressing styles based on instructions (e.g., zipped/unzipped, tuck-in/tuck-out, etc.) 3) Segmentation Dependency. They further heavily rely on category-specific segmentation models to identify the replacement regions, with segmentation errors directly leading to significant artifacts in the try-on results. To address the first two issues, our MMTryon introduces a novel multi-modality and multi-reference attention mechanism to combine the garment information from reference images and dressing-style information from text instructions. Besides, to remove the segmentation dependency, MMTryon uses a parsing-free garment encoder and leverages a novel scalable data generation pipeline to convert existing VITON datasets to a form that allows MMTryon to be trained without requiring any explicit segmentation. Extensive experiments on high-resolution benchmarks and in-the-wild test sets demonstrate MMTryon's superiority over existing SOTA methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. MMTryon's impressive performance on multi-item and style-controllable virtual try-on scenarios and its ability to try on any outfit in a large variety of scenarios from any source image, opens up a new avenue for future investigation in the fashion community.
Detail-Enhancing Framework for Reference-Based Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Zihan Wang, Ziliang Xiong, Hongying Tang, Xiaobing Yuan
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Reference-based Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recent years have witnessed the prosperity of reference-based image super-resolution (Ref-SR). By importing the high-resolution (HR) reference images into the single image super-resolution (SISR) approach, the ill-posed nature of this long-standing field has been alleviated with the assistance of texture transferred from reference images. Although the significant improvement in quantitative and qualitative results has verified the superiority of Ref-SR methods, the presence of misalignment before texture transfer indicates room for further performance improvement. Existing methods tend to neglect the significance of details in the context of comparison, therefore not fully leveraging the information contained within low-resolution (LR) images. In this paper, we propose a Detail-Enhancing Framework (DEF) for reference-based super-resolution, which introduces the diffusion model to generate and enhance the underlying detail in LR images. If corresponding parts are present in the reference image, our method can facilitate rigorous alignment. In cases where the reference image lacks corresponding parts, it ensures a fundamental improvement while avoiding the influence of the reference image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method achieves superior visual results while maintaining comparable numerical outcomes.
Continuous sPatial-Temporal Deformable Image Registration (CPT-DIR) for motion modelling in radiotherapy: beyond classic voxel-based methods
Authors: Xia Li, Muheng Li, Antony Lomax, Joachim Buhmann, Ye Zhang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Background and purpose: Deformable image registration (DIR) is a crucial tool in radiotherapy for extracting and modelling organ motion. However, when significant changes and sliding boundaries are present, it faces compromised accuracy and uncertainty, determining the subsequential contour propagation and dose accumulation procedures. Materials and methods: We propose an implicit neural representation (INR)-based approach modelling motion continuously in both space and time, named Continues-sPatial-Temporal DIR (CPT-DIR). This method uses a multilayer perception (MLP) network to map 3D coordinate (x,y,z) to its corresponding velocity vector (vx,vy,vz). The displacement vectors (dx,dy,dz) are then calculated by integrating velocity vectors over time. The MLP's parameters can rapidly adapt to new cases without pre-training, enhancing optimisation. The DIR's performance was tested on the DIR-Lab dataset of 10 lung 4DCT cases, using metrics of landmark accuracy (TRE), contour conformity (Dice) and image similarity (MAE). Results: The proposed CPT-DIR can reduce landmark TRE from 2.79mm to 0.99mm, outperforming B-splines' results for all cases. The MAE of the whole-body region improves from 35.46HU to 28.99HU. Furthermore, CPT-DIR surpasses B-splines for accuracy in the sliding boundary region, lowering MAE and increasing Dice coefficients for the ribcage from 65.65HU and 90.41% to 42.04HU and 90.56%, versus 75.40HU and 89.30% without registration. Meanwhile, CPT-DIR offers significant speed advantages, completing in under 15 seconds compared to a few minutes with the conventional B-splines method. Conclusion: Leveraging the continuous representations, the CPT-DIR method significantly enhances registration accuracy, automation and speed, outperforming traditional B-splines in landmark and contour precision, particularly in the challenging areas.