pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Abnormality-Driven Representation Learning for Radiology Imaging
Authors: Marta Ligero, Tim Lenz, Georg Wölflein, Omar S. M. El Nahhas, Daniel Truhn, Jakob Nikolas Kather
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, State Space Models

To date, the most common approach for radiology deep learning pipelines is the use of end-to-end 3D networks based on models pre-trained on other tasks, followed by fine-tuning on the task at hand. In contrast, adjacent medical fields such as pathology, which focus on 2D images, have effectively adopted task-agnostic foundational models based on self-supervised learning (SSL), combined with weakly-supervised deep learning (DL). However, the field of radiology still lacks task-agnostic representation models due to the computational and data demands of 3D imaging and the anatomical complexity inherent to radiology scans. To address this gap, we propose CLEAR, a framework for radiology images that uses extracted embeddings from 2D slices along with attention-based aggregation for efficiently predicting clinical endpoints. As part of this framework, we introduce lesion-enhanced contrastive learning (LeCL), a novel approach to obtain visual representations driven by abnormalities in 2D axial slices across different locations of the CT scans. Specifically, we trained single-domain contrastive learning approaches using three different architectures: Vision Transformers, Vision State Space Models and Gated Convolutional Neural Networks. We evaluate our approach across three clinical tasks: tumor lesion location, lung disease detection, and patient staging, benchmarking against four state-of-the-art foundation models, including BiomedCLIP. Our findings demonstrate that CLEAR using representations learned through LeCL, outperforms existing foundation models, while being substantially more compute- and data-efficient.
Controllable Human Image Generation with Personalized Multi-Garments
Authors: Yisol Choi, Sangkyung Kwak, Sihyun Yu, Hyungwon Choi, Jinwoo Shin
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Virtual Try-on

We present BootComp, a novel framework based on text-to-image diffusion models for controllable human image generation with multiple reference garments. Here, the main bottleneck is data acquisition for training: collecting a large-scale dataset of high-quality reference garment images per human subject is quite challenging, i.e., ideally, one needs to manually gather every single garment photograph worn by each human. To address this, we propose a data generation pipeline to construct a large synthetic dataset, consisting of human and multiple-garment pairs, by introducing a model to extract any reference garment images from each human image. To ensure data quality, we also propose a filtering strategy to remove undesirable generated data based on measuring perceptual similarities between the garment presented in human image and extracted garment. Finally, by utilizing the constructed synthetic dataset, we train a diffusion model having two parallel denoising paths that use multiple garment images as conditions to generate human images while preserving their fine-grained details. We further show the wide-applicability of our framework by adapting it to different types of reference-based generation in the fashion domain, including virtual try-on, and controllable human image generation with other conditions, e.g., pose, face, etc.
Phys4DGen: A Physics-Driven Framework for Controllable and Efficient 4D Content Generation from a Single Image
Authors: Jiajing Lin, Zhenzhong Wang, Shu Jiang, Yongjie Hou, Min Jiang
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Physical Simulations

The task of 4D content generation involves creating dynamic 3D models that evolve over time in response to specific input conditions, such as images. Existing methods rely heavily on pre-trained video diffusion models to guide 4D content dynamics, but these approaches often fail to capture essential physical principles, as video diffusion models lack a robust understanding of real-world physics. Moreover, these models face challenges in providing fine-grained control over dynamics and exhibit high computational costs. In this work, we propose Phys4DGen, a novel, high-efficiency framework that generates physics-compliant 4D content from a single image with enhanced control capabilities. Our approach uniquely integrates physical simulations into the 4D generation pipeline, ensuring adherence to fundamental physical laws. Inspired by the human ability to infer physical properties visually, we introduce a Physical Perception Module (PPM) that discerns the material properties and structural components of the 3D object from the input image, facilitating accurate downstream simulations. Phys4DGen significantly accelerates the 4D generation process by eliminating iterative optimization steps in the dynamics modeling phase. It allows users to intuitively control the movement speed and direction of generated 4D content by adjusting external forces, achieving finely tunable, physically plausible animations. Extensive evaluations show that Phys4DGen outperforms existing methods in both inference speed and physical realism, producing high-quality, controllable 4D content. Our project page is available at the link: \url{https://jiajinglin.github.io/Phys4DGen/}.
One is Plenty: A Polymorphic Feature Interpreter for Immutable Heterogeneous Collaborative Perception
Authors: Yuchen Xia, Quan Yuan, Guiyang Luo, Xiaoyuan Fu, Yang Li, Xuanhan Zhu, Tianyou Luo, Siheng Chen, Jinglin Li
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Collaborative perception in autonomous driving significantly enhances the perception capabilities of individual agents. Immutable heterogeneity in collaborative perception, where agents have different and fixed perception networks, presents a major challenge due to the semantic gap in their exchanged intermediate features without modifying the perception networks. Most existing methods bridge the semantic gap through interpreters. However, they either require training a new interpreter for each new agent type, limiting extensibility, or rely on a two-stage interpretation via an intermediate standardized semantic space, causing cumulative semantic loss. To achieve both extensibility in immutable heterogeneous scenarios and low-loss feature interpretation, we propose PolyInter, a polymorphic feature interpreter. It contains an extension point through which emerging new agents can seamlessly integrate by overriding only their specific prompts, which are learnable parameters intended to guide the interpretation, while reusing PolyInter's remaining parameters. By leveraging polymorphism, our design ensures that a single interpreter is sufficient to accommodate diverse agents and interpret their features into the ego agent's semantic space. Experiments conducted on the OPV2V dataset demonstrate that PolyInter improves collaborative perception precision by up to 11.1% compared to SOTA interpreters, while comparable results can be achieved by training only 1.4% of PolyInter's parameters when adapting to new agents.
Unlocking the Potential of Text-to-Image Diffusion with PAC-Bayesian Theory
Authors: Eric Hanchen Jiang, Yasi Zhang, Zhi Zhang, Yixin Wan, Andrew Lizarraga, Shufan Li, Ying Nian Wu
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models have revolutionized generative modeling by producing high-fidelity, diverse, and visually realistic images from textual prompts. Despite these advances, existing models struggle with complex prompts involving multiple objects and attributes, often misaligning modifiers with their corresponding nouns or neglecting certain elements. Recent attention-based methods have improved object inclusion and linguistic binding, but still face challenges such as attribute misbinding and a lack of robust generalization guarantees. Leveraging the PAC-Bayes framework, we propose a Bayesian approach that designs custom priors over attention distributions to enforce desirable properties, including divergence between objects, alignment between modifiers and their corresponding nouns, minimal attention to irrelevant tokens, and regularization for better generalization. Our approach treats the attention mechanism as an interpretable component, enabling fine-grained control and improved attribute-object alignment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on standard benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results across multiple metrics. By integrating custom priors into the denoising process, our method enhances image quality and addresses long-standing challenges in T2I diffusion models, paving the way for more reliable and interpretable generative models.
Learning New Concepts, Remembering the Old: A Novel Continual Learning
Authors: Songning Lai, Mingqian Liao, Zhangyi Hu, Jiayu Yang, Wenshuo Chen, Yutao Yue
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Incremental Learning

Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance model interpretability by introducing human-understandable concepts within the architecture. However, existing CBMs assume static datasets, limiting their ability to adapt to real-world, continuously evolving data streams. To address this, we define a novel concept-incremental and class-incremental continual learning task for CBMs, enabling models to accumulate new concepts and classes over time while retaining previously learned knowledge. To achieve this, we propose CONceptual Continual Incremental Learning (CONCIL), a framework that prevents catastrophic forgetting by reformulating concept and decision layer updates as linear regression problems, thus eliminating the need for gradient-based updates. CONCIL requires only recursive matrix operations, making it computationally efficient and suitable for real-time and large-scale data applications. Experimental results demonstrate that CONCIL achieves "absolute knowledge memory" and outperforms traditional CBM methods in concept- and class-incremental settings, establishing a new benchmark for continual learning in CBMs.
Phase-Informed Tool Segmentation for Manual Small-Incision Cataract Surgery
Authors: Bhuvan Sachdeva, Naren Akash, Tajamul Ashraf, Simon Mueller, Thomas Schultz, Maximilian W. M. Wintergerst, Niharika Singri Prasad, Kaushik Murali, Mohit Jain
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00

Cataract surgery is the most common surgical procedure globally, with a disproportionately higher burden in developing countries. While automated surgical video analysis has been explored in general surgery, its application to ophthalmic procedures remains limited. Existing works primarily focus on Phaco cataract surgery, an expensive technique not accessible in regions where cataract treatment is most needed. In contrast, Manual Small-Incision Cataract Surgery (MSICS) is the preferred low-cost, faster alternative in high-volume settings and for challenging cases. However, no dataset exists for MSICS. To address this gap, we introduce Sankara-MSICS, the first comprehensive dataset containing 53 surgical videos annotated for 18 surgical phases and 3,527 frames with 13 surgical tools at the pixel level. We benchmark this dataset on state-of-the-art models and present ToolSeg, a novel framework that enhances tool segmentation by introducing a phase-conditional decoder and a simple yet effective semi-supervised setup leveraging pseudo-labels from foundation models. Our approach significantly improves segmentation performance, achieving a $23.77\%$ to $38.10\%$ increase in mean Dice scores, with a notable boost for tools that are less prevalent and small. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ToolSeg generalizes to other surgical settings, showcasing its effectiveness on the CaDIS dataset.
ST-Align: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Image-Gene Alignment in Spatial Transcriptomics
Authors: Yuxiang Lin, Ling Luo, Ying Chen, Xushi Zhang, Zihui Wang, Wenxian Yang, Mengsha Tong, Rongshan Yu
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) provides high-resolution pathological images and whole-transcriptomic expression profiles at individual spots across whole-slide scales. This setting makes it an ideal data source to develop multimodal foundation models. Although recent studies attempted to fine-tune visual encoders with trainable gene encoders based on spot-level, the absence of a wider slide perspective and spatial intrinsic relationships limits their ability to capture ST-specific insights effectively. Here, we introduce ST-Align, the first foundation model designed for ST that deeply aligns image-gene pairs by incorporating spatial context, effectively bridging pathological imaging with genomic features. We design a novel pretraining framework with a three-target alignment strategy for ST-Align, enabling (1) multi-scale alignment across image-gene pairs, capturing both spot- and niche-level contexts for a comprehensive perspective, and (2) cross-level alignment of multimodal insights, connecting localized cellular characteristics and broader tissue architecture. Additionally, ST-Align employs specialized encoders tailored to distinct ST contexts, followed by an Attention-Based Fusion Network (ABFN) for enhanced multimodal fusion, effectively merging domain-shared knowledge with ST-specific insights from both pathological and genomic data. We pre-trained ST-Align on 1.3 million spot-niche pairs and evaluated its performance through two downstream tasks across six datasets, demonstrating superior zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. ST-Align highlights the potential for reducing the cost of ST and providing valuable insights into the distinction of critical compositions within human tissue.
From Diffusion to Resolution: Leveraging 2D Diffusion Models for 3D Super-Resolution Task
Authors: BoHao Chen, Yanchao Zhang, Yanan Lv, Hua Han, Xi Chen
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Diffusion models have recently emerged as a powerful technique in image generation, especially for image super-resolution tasks. While 2D diffusion models significantly enhance the resolution of individual images, existing diffusion-based methods for 3D volume super-resolution often struggle with structure discontinuities in axial direction and high sampling costs. In this work, we present a novel approach that leverages the 2D diffusion model and lateral continuity within the volume to enhance 3D volume electron microscopy (vEM) super-resolution. We first simulate lateral degradation with slices in the XY plane and train a 2D diffusion model to learn how to restore the degraded slices. The model is then applied slice-by-slice in the lateral direction of low-resolution volume, recovering slices while preserving inherent lateral continuity. Following this, a high-frequency-aware 3D super-resolution network is trained on the recovery lateral slice sequences to learn spatial feature transformation across slices. Finally, the network is applied to infer high-resolution volumes in the axial direction, enabling 3D super-resolution. We validate our approach through comprehensive evaluations, including image similarity assessments, resolution analysis, and performance on downstream tasks. Our results on two publicly available focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) datasets demonstrate the robustness and practical applicability of our framework for 3D volume super-resolution.
Leveraging the Power of MLLMs for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation
Authors: Jungeun Kim, Hyeongwoo Jeon, Jongseong Bae, Ha Young Kim
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Gloss-free Sign Language Translation, Sentence, Sign Language Translation, Translation

Sign language translation (SLT) is a challenging task that involves translating sign language images into spoken language. For SLT models to perform this task successfully, they must bridge the modality gap and identify subtle variations in sign language components to understand their meanings accurately. To address these challenges, we propose a novel gloss-free SLT framework called Multimodal Sign Language Translation (MMSLT), which leverages the representational capabilities of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Specifically, we generate detailed textual descriptions of sign language components using MLLMs. Then, through our proposed multimodal-language pre-training module, we integrate these description features with sign video features to align them within the spoken sentence space. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily, highlighting the potential of MLLMs to be effectively utilized in SLT.
TIDE: Training Locally Interpretable Domain Generalization Models Enables Test-time Correction
Authors: Aishwarya Agarwal, Srikrishna Karanam, Vineet Gandhi
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Single-Source Domain Generalization

We consider the problem of single-source domain generalization. Existing methods typically rely on extensive augmentations to synthetically cover diverse domains during training. However, they struggle with semantic shifts (e.g., background and viewpoint changes), as they often learn global features instead of local concepts that tend to be domain invariant. To address this gap, we propose an approach that compels models to leverage such local concepts during prediction. Given no suitable dataset with per-class concepts and localization maps exists, we first develop a novel pipeline to generate annotations by exploiting the rich features of diffusion and large-language models. Our next innovation is TIDE, a novel training scheme with a concept saliency alignment loss that ensures model focus on the right per-concept regions and a local concept contrastive loss that promotes learning domain-invariant concept representations. This not only gives a robust model but also can be visually interpreted using the predicted concept saliency maps. Given these maps at test time, our final contribution is a new correction algorithm that uses the corresponding local concept representations to iteratively refine the prediction until it aligns with prototypical concept representations that we store at the end of model training. We evaluate our approach extensively on four standard DG benchmark datasets and substantially outperform the current state-ofthe-art (12% improvement on average) while also demonstrating that our predictions can be visually interpreted
CoCoNO: Attention Contrast-and-Complete for Initial Noise Optimization in Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Aravindan Sundaram, Ujjayan Pal, Abhimanyu Chauhan, Aishwarya Agarwal, Srikrishna Karanam
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Despite recent advancements in text-to-image models, achieving semantically accurate images in text-to-image diffusion models is a persistent challenge. While existing initial latent optimization methods have demonstrated impressive performance, we identify two key limitations: (a) attention neglect, where the synthesized image omits certain subjects from the input prompt because they do not have a designated segment in the self-attention map despite despite having a high-response cross-attention, and (b) attention interference, where the generated image has mixed-up properties of multiple subjects because of a conflicting overlap between cross- and self-attention maps of different subjects. To address these limitations, we introduce CoCoNO, a new algorithm that optimizes the initial latent by leveraging the complementary information within self-attention and cross-attention maps. Our method introduces two new loss functions: the attention contrast loss, which minimizes undesirable overlap by ensuring each self-attention segment is exclusively linked to a specific subject's cross attention map, and the attention complete loss, which maximizes the activation within these segments to guarantee that each subject is fully and distinctly represented. Our approach operates within a noise optimization framework, avoiding the need to retrain base models. Through extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that CoCoNO significantly improves text-image alignment and outperforms the current state of the art.
NovelGS: Consistent Novel-view Denoising via Large Gaussian Reconstruction Model
Authors: Jinpeng Liu, Jiale Xu, Weihao Cheng, Yiming Gao, Xintao Wang, Ying Shan, Yansong Tang
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Reconstruction, Image to 3D, Text to 3D

We introduce NovelGS, a diffusion model for Gaussian Splatting (GS) given sparse-view images. Recent works leverage feed-forward networks to generate pixel-aligned Gaussians, which could be fast rendered. Unfortunately, the method was unable to produce satisfactory results for areas not covered by the input images due to the formulation of these methods. In contrast, we leverage the novel view denoising through a transformer-based network to generate 3D Gaussians. Specifically, by incorporating both conditional views and noisy target views, the network predicts pixel-aligned Gaussians for each view. During training, the rendered target and some additional views of the Gaussians are supervised. During inference, the target views are iteratively rendered and denoised from pure noise. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in addressing the multi-view image reconstruction challenge. Due to generative modeling of unseen regions, NovelGS effectively reconstructs 3D objects with consistent and sharp textures. Experimental results on publicly available datasets indicate that NovelGS substantially surpasses existing image-to-3D frameworks, both qualitatively and quantitatively. We also demonstrate the potential of NovelGS in generative tasks, such as text-to-3D and image-to-3D, by integrating it with existing multiview diffusion models. We will make the code publicly accessible.
SynDiff-AD: Improving Semantic Segmentation and End-to-End Autonomous Driving with Synthetic Data from Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Harsh Goel, Sai Shankar Narasimhan, Oguzhan Akcin, Sandeep Chinchali
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, significant progress has been made in collecting large-scale datasets to improve segmentation and autonomous driving models. These large-scale datasets are often dominated by common environmental conditions such as "Clear and Day" weather, leading to decreased performance in under-represented conditions like "Rainy and Night". To address this issue, we introduce SynDiff-AD, a novel data augmentation pipeline that leverages diffusion models (DMs) to generate realistic images for such subgroups. SynDiff-AD uses ControlNet-a DM that guides data generation conditioned on semantic maps-along with a novel prompting scheme that generates subgroup-specific, semantically dense prompts. By augmenting datasets with SynDiff-AD, we improve the performance of segmentation models like Mask2Former and SegFormer by up to 1.2% and 2.3% on the Waymo dataset, and up to 1.4% and 0.7% on the DeepDrive dataset, respectively. Additionally, we demonstrate that our SynDiff-AD pipeline enhances the driving performance of end-to-end autonomous driving models, like AIM-2D and AIM-BEV, by up to 20% across diverse environmental conditions in the CARLA autonomous driving simulator, providing a more robust model.