pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Zero-Shot Pediatric Tuberculosis Detection in Chest X-Rays using Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Daniel Capellán-Martín, Abhijeet Parida, Juan J. Gómez-Valverde, Ramon Sanchez-Jacob, Pooneh Roshanitabrizi, Marius G. Linguraru, María J. Ledesma-Carbayo, Syed M. Anwar
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a significant global health challenge, with pediatric cases posing a major concern. The World Health Organization (WHO) advocates for chest X-rays (CXRs) for TB screening. However, visual interpretation by radiologists can be subjective, time-consuming and prone to error, especially in pediatric TB. Artificial intelligence (AI)-driven computer-aided detection (CAD) tools, especially those utilizing deep learning, show promise in enhancing lung disease detection. However, challenges include data scarcity and lack of generalizability. In this context, we propose a novel self-supervised paradigm leveraging Vision Transformers (ViT) for improved TB detection in CXR, enabling zero-shot pediatric TB detection. We demonstrate improvements in TB detection performance ($\sim$12.7% and $\sim$13.4% top AUC/AUPR gains in adults and children, respectively) when conducting self-supervised pre-training when compared to fully-supervised (i.e., non pre-trained) ViT models, achieving top performances of 0.959 AUC and 0.962 AUPR in adult TB detection, and 0.697 AUC and 0.607 AUPR in zero-shot pediatric TB detection. As a result, this work demonstrates that self-supervised learning on adult CXRs effectively extends to challenging downstream tasks such as pediatric TB detection, where data are scarce.
A Transformer Model for Boundary Detection in Continuous Sign Language
Authors: Razieh Rastgoo, Kourosh Kiani, Sergio Escalera
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Sign Language Recognition

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) has garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years, particularly the intricate domain of Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR), which presents heightened complexity compared to Isolated Sign Language Recognition (ISLR). One of the prominent challenges in CSLR pertains to accurately detecting the boundaries of isolated signs within a continuous video stream. Additionally, the reliance on handcrafted features in existing models poses a challenge to achieving optimal accuracy. To surmount these challenges, we propose a novel approach utilizing a Transformer-based model. Unlike traditional models, our approach focuses on enhancing accuracy while eliminating the need for handcrafted features. The Transformer model is employed for both ISLR and CSLR. The training process involves using isolated sign videos, where hand keypoint features extracted from the input video are enriched using the Transformer model. Subsequently, these enriched features are forwarded to the final classification layer. The trained model, coupled with a post-processing method, is then applied to detect isolated sign boundaries within continuous sign videos. The evaluation of our model is conducted on two distinct datasets, including both continuous signs and their corresponding isolated signs, demonstrates promising results.
Two-stage Cytopathological Image Synthesis for Augmenting Cervical Abnormality Screening
Authors: Zhenrong Shen, Manman Fei, Xin Wang, Jiangdong Cai, Sheng Wang, Lichi Zhang, Qian Wang
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Detection, Data Augmentation, Image Generation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Automatic thin-prep cytologic test (TCT) screening can assist pathologists in finding cervical abnormality towards accurate and efficient cervical cancer diagnosis. Current automatic TCT screening systems mostly involve abnormal cervical cell detection, which generally requires large-scale and diverse training data with high-quality annotations to achieve promising performance. Pathological image synthesis is naturally raised to minimize the efforts in data collection and annotation. However, it is challenging to generate realistic large-size cytopathological images while simultaneously synthesizing visually plausible appearances for small-size abnormal cervical cells. In this paper, we propose a two-stage image synthesis framework to create synthetic data for augmenting cervical abnormality screening. In the first Global Image Generation stage, a Normal Image Generator is designed to generate cytopathological images full of normal cervical cells. In the second Local Cell Editing stage, normal cells are randomly selected from the generated images and then are converted to different types of abnormal cells using the proposed Abnormal Cell Synthesizer. Both Normal Image Generator and Abnormal Cell Synthesizer are built upon Stable Diffusion, a pre-trained foundation model for image synthesis, via parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods for customizing cytopathological image contents and extending spatial layout controllability, respectively. Our experiments demonstrate the synthetic image quality, diversity, and controllability of the proposed synthesis framework, and validate its data augmentation effectiveness in enhancing the performance of abnormal cervical cell detection.
QIS : Interactive Segmentation via Quasi-Conformal Mappings
Authors: Han Zhang, Daoping Zhang, Lok Ming Lui
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation plays a crucial role in extracting important objects of interest from images, enabling various applications. While existing methods have shown success in segmenting clean images, they often struggle to produce accurate segmentation results when dealing with degraded images, such as those containing noise or occlusions. To address this challenge, interactive segmentation has emerged as a promising approach, allowing users to provide meaningful input to guide the segmentation process. However, an important problem in interactive segmentation lies in determining how to incorporate minimal yet meaningful user guidance into the segmentation model. In this paper, we propose the quasi-conformal interactive segmentation (QIS) model, which incorporates user input in the form of positive and negative clicks. Users mark a few pixels belonging to the object region as positive clicks, indicating that the segmentation model should include a region around these clicks. Conversely, negative clicks are provided on pixels belonging to the background, instructing the model to exclude the region near these clicks from the segmentation mask. Additionally, the segmentation mask is obtained by deforming a template mask with the same topology as the object of interest using an orientation-preserving quasiconformal mapping. This approach helps to avoid topological errors in the segmentation results. We provide a thorough analysis of the proposed model, including theoretical support for the ability of QIS to include or exclude regions of interest or disinterest based on the user's indication. To evaluate the performance of QIS, we conduct experiments on synthesized images, medical images, natural images and noisy natural images. The results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method.
Quadruplet Loss For Improving the Robustness to Face Morphing Attacks
Authors: Iurii Medvedev, Nuno Gonçalves
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Recent advancements in deep learning have revolutionized technology and security measures, necessitating robust identification methods. Biometric approaches, leveraging personalized characteristics, offer a promising solution. However, Face Recognition Systems are vulnerable to sophisticated attacks, notably face morphing techniques, enabling the creation of fraudulent documents. In this study, we introduce a novel quadruplet loss function for increasing the robustness of face recognition systems against morphing attacks. Our approach involves specific sampling of face image quadruplets, combined with face morphs, for network training. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of our strategy in improving the robustness of face recognition networks against morphing attacks.
Multi-HMR: Multi-Person Whole-Body Human Mesh Recovery in a Single Shot
Authors: Fabien Baradel, Matthieu Armando, Salma Galaaoui, Romain Brégier, Philippe Weinzaepfel, Grégory Rogez, Thomas Lucas
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Human Reconstruction, 3D Multi-Person Mesh Recovery, 3D Multi-Person Pose Estimation, Human Mesh Recovery

We present Multi-HMR, a strong sigle-shot model for multi-person 3D human mesh recovery from a single RGB image. Predictions encompass the whole body, i.e., including hands and facial expressions, using the SMPL-X parametric model and 3D location in the camera coordinate system. Our model detects people by predicting coarse 2D heatmaps of person locations, using features produced by a standard Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone. It then predicts their whole-body pose, shape and 3D location using a new cross-attention module called the Human Prediction Head (HPH), with one query attending to the entire set of features for each detected person. As direct prediction of fine-grained hands and facial poses in a single shot, i.e., without relying on explicit crops around body parts, is hard to learn from existing data, we introduce CUFFS, the Close-Up Frames of Full-Body Subjects dataset, containing humans close to the camera with diverse hand poses. We show that incorporating it into the training data further enhances predictions, particularly for hands. Multi-HMR also optionally accounts for camera intrinsics, if available, by encoding camera ray directions for each image token. This simple design achieves strong performance on whole-body and body-only benchmarks simultaneously: a ViT-S backbone on $448{\times}448$ images already yields a fast and competitive model, while larger models and higher resolutions obtain state-of-the-art results.
GaussianPro: 3D Gaussian Splatting with Progressive Propagation
Authors: Kai Cheng, Xiaoxiao Long, Kaizhi Yang, Yao Yao, Wei Yin, Yuexin Ma, Wenping Wang, Xuejin Chen
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Neural Rendering, Patch Matching

The advent of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently brought about a revolution in the field of neural rendering, facilitating high-quality renderings at real-time speed. However, 3DGS heavily depends on the initialized point cloud produced by Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques. When tackling with large-scale scenes that unavoidably contain texture-less surfaces, the SfM techniques always fail to produce enough points in these surfaces and cannot provide good initialization for 3DGS. As a result, 3DGS suffers from difficult optimization and low-quality renderings. In this paper, inspired by classical multi-view stereo (MVS) techniques, we propose GaussianPro, a novel method that applies a progressive propagation strategy to guide the densification of the 3D Gaussians. Compared to the simple split and clone strategies used in 3DGS, our method leverages the priors of the existing reconstructed geometries of the scene and patch matching techniques to produce new Gaussians with accurate positions and orientations. Experiments on both large-scale and small-scale scenes validate the effectiveness of our method, where our method significantly surpasses 3DGS on the Waymo dataset, exhibiting an improvement of 1.15dB in terms of PSNR.
Distributed Radiance Fields for Edge Video Compression and Metaverse Integration in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Eugen Šlapak, Matúš Dopiriak, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque, Juraj Gazda, Marco Levorato
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Scene Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decoder, Edge-computing, SSIM, Video Compression

The metaverse is a virtual space that combines physical and digital elements, creating immersive and connected digital worlds. For autonomous mobility, it enables new possibilities with edge computing and digital twins (DTs) that offer virtual prototyping, prediction, and more. DTs can be created with 3D scene reconstruction methods that capture the real world's geometry, appearance, and dynamics. However, sending data for real-time DT updates in the metaverse, such as camera images and videos from connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to edge servers, can increase network congestion, costs, and latency, affecting metaverse services. Herein, a new method is proposed based on distributed radiance fields (RFs), multi-access edge computing (MEC) network for video compression and metaverse DT updates. RF-based encoder and decoder are used to create and restore representations of camera images. The method is evaluated on a dataset of camera images from the CARLA simulator. Data savings of up to 80% were achieved for H.264 I-frame - P-frame pairs by using RFs instead of I-frames, while maintaining high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) qualitative metrics for the reconstructed images. Possible uses and challenges for the metaverse and autonomous mobility are also discussed.
Overcoming Dimensional Collapse in Self-supervised Contrastive Learning for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Jamshid Hassanpour, Vinkle Srivastav, Didier Mutter, Nicolas Padoy
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Segmentation, Linear evaluation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Self-supervised learning (SSL) approaches have achieved great success when the amount of labeled data is limited. Within SSL, models learn robust feature representations by solving pretext tasks. One such pretext task is contrastive learning, which involves forming pairs of similar and dissimilar input samples, guiding the model to distinguish between them. In this work, we investigate the application of contrastive learning to the domain of medical image analysis. Our findings reveal that MoCo v2, a state-of-the-art contrastive learning method, encounters dimensional collapse when applied to medical images. This is attributed to the high degree of inter-image similarity shared between the medical images. To address this, we propose two key contributions: local feature learning and feature decorrelation. Local feature learning improves the ability of the model to focus on the local regions of the image, while feature decorrelation removes the linear dependence among the features. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our contributions significantly enhance the model's performance in the downstream task of medical segmentation, both in the linear evaluation and full fine-tuning settings. This work illustrates the importance of effectively adapting SSL techniques to the characteristics of medical imaging tasks. The source code will be made publicly available at: https://github.com/CAMMA-public/med-moco
High-Speed Detector For Low-Powered Devices In Aerial Grasping
Authors: Ashish Kumar, Laxmidhar Behera
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Autonomous aerial harvesting is a highly complex problem because it requires numerous interdisciplinary algorithms to be executed on mini low-powered computing devices. Object detection is one such algorithm that is compute-hungry. In this context, we make the following contributions: (i) Fast Fruit Detector (FFD), a resource-efficient, single-stage, and postprocessing-free object detector based on our novel latent object representation (LOR) module, query assignment, and prediction strategy. FFD achieves 100FPS@FP32 precision on the latest 10W NVIDIA Jetson-NX embedded device while co-existing with other time-critical sub-systems such as control, grasping, SLAM, a major achievement of this work. (ii) a method to generate vast amounts of training data without exhaustive manual labelling of fruit images since they consist of a large number of instances, which increases the labelling cost and time. (iii) an open-source fruit detection dataset having plenty of very small-sized instances that are difficult to detect. Our exhaustive evaluations on our and MinneApple dataset show that FFD, being only a single-scale detector, is more accurate than many representative detectors, e.g. FFD is better than single-scale Faster-RCNN by 10.7AP, multi-scale Faster-RCNN by 2.3AP, and better than latest single-scale YOLO-v8 by 8AP and multi-scale YOLO-v8 by 0.3 while being considerably faster.
FrameNeRF: A Simple and Efficient Framework for Few-shot Novel View Synthesis
Authors: Yan Xing, Pan Wang, Ligang Liu, Daolun Li, Li Zhang
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

We present a novel framework, called FrameNeRF, designed to apply off-the-shelf fast high-fidelity NeRF models with fast training speed and high rendering quality for few-shot novel view synthesis tasks. The training stability of fast high-fidelity models is typically constrained to dense views, making them unsuitable for few-shot novel view synthesis tasks. To address this limitation, we utilize a regularization model as a data generator to produce dense views from sparse inputs, facilitating subsequent training of fast high-fidelity models. Since these dense views are pseudo ground truth generated by the regularization model, original sparse images are then used to fine-tune the fast high-fidelity model. This process helps the model learn realistic details and correct artifacts introduced in earlier stages. By leveraging an off-the-shelf regularization model and a fast high-fidelity model, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various benchmark datasets.
Debiasing Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Ruifei He, Chuhui Xue, Haoru Tan, Wenqing Zhang, Yingchen Yu, Song Bai, Xiaojuan Qi
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00

Learning-based Text-to-Image (TTI) models like Stable Diffusion have revolutionized the way visual content is generated in various domains. However, recent research has shown that nonnegligible social bias exists in current state-of-the-art TTI systems, which raises important concerns. In this work, we target resolving the social bias in TTI diffusion models. We begin by formalizing the problem setting and use the text descriptions of bias groups to establish an unsafe direction for guiding the diffusion process. Next, we simplify the problem into a weight optimization problem and attempt a Reinforcement solver, Policy Gradient, which shows sub-optimal performance with slow convergence. Further, to overcome limitations, we propose an iterative distribution alignment (IDA) method. Despite its simplicity, we show that IDA shows efficiency and fast convergence in resolving the social bias in TTI diffusion models. Our code will be released.
Self-supervised Visualisation of Medical Image Datasets
Authors: Ifeoma Veronica Nwabufo, Jan Niklas Böhm, Philipp Berens, Dmitry Kobak
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning methods based on data augmentations, such as SimCLR, BYOL, or DINO, allow obtaining semantically meaningful representations of image datasets and are widely used prior to supervised fine-tuning. A recent self-supervised learning method, $t$-SimCNE, uses contrastive learning to directly train a 2D representation suitable for visualisation. When applied to natural image datasets, $t$-SimCNE yields 2D visualisations with semantically meaningful clusters. In this work, we used $t$-SimCNE to visualise medical image datasets, including examples from dermatology, histology, and blood microscopy. We found that increasing the set of data augmentations to include arbitrary rotations improved the results in terms of class separability, compared to data augmentations used for natural images. Our 2D representations show medically relevant structures and can be used to aid data exploration and annotation, improving on common approaches for data visualisation.
Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective
Authors: Zihao Yue, Liang Zhang, Qin Jin
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Sentence

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) often suffer from multimodal hallucinations, wherein they may create content that is not present in the visual inputs. In this paper, we explore a new angle of this issue: overly detailed training data hinders the model's ability to timely terminate generation, leading to continued outputs beyond visual perception limits. By investigating how the model decides to terminate generation with EOS, the special end-of-sentence token, we find that the model assesses the completeness of the entire sequence by comparing the generated text with the image. This observation suggests that the model possesses an inherent potential of making proper EOS decisions based on its visual perception to avoid overly lengthy outputs. To take advantage of such potential, we explore two methods to mitigate multimodal hallucinations: a training objective that enables the model to reduce hallucinations by learning from regular instruction data, and a data filtering strategy to prevent harmful training data from exacerbating model hallucinations. Both methods significantly improve the hallucination performance of LMMs, without requiring any additional data or knowledge.
Deep vessel segmentation based on a new combination of vesselness filters
Authors: Guillaume Garret, Antoine Vacavant, Carole Frindel
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Vascular segmentation represents a crucial clinical task, yet its automation remains challenging. Because of the recent strides in deep learning, vesselness filters, which can significantly aid the learning process, have been overlooked. This study introduces an innovative filter fusion method crafted to amplify the effectiveness of vessel segmentation models. Our investigation seeks to establish the merits of a filter-based learning approach through a comparative analysis. Specifically, we contrast the performance of a U-Net model trained on CT images with an identical U-Net configuration trained on vesselness hyper-volumes using matching parameters. Our findings, based on two vascular datasets, highlight improved segmentations, especially for small vessels, when the model's learning is exposed to vessel-enhanced inputs.
A Class of Topological Pseudodistances for Fast Comparison of Persistence Diagrams
Authors: Rolando Kindelan Nuñez, Mircea Petrache, Mauricio Cerda, Nancy Hitschfeld
Date: 2024-02-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

Persistence diagrams (PD)s play a central role in topological data analysis, and are used in an ever increasing variety of applications. The comparison of PD data requires computing comparison metrics among large sets of PDs, with metrics which are accurate, theoretically sound, and fast to compute. Especially for denser multi-dimensional PDs, such comparison metrics are lacking. While on the one hand, Wasserstein-type distances have high accuracy and theoretical guarantees, they incur high computational cost. On the other hand, distances between vectorizations such as Persistence Statistics (PS)s have lower computational cost, but lack the accuracy guarantees and in general they are not guaranteed to distinguish PDs (i.e. the two PS vectors of different PDs may be equal). In this work we introduce a class of pseudodistances called Extended Topological Pseudodistances (ETD)s, which have tunable complexity, and can approximate Sliced and classical Wasserstein distances at the high-complexity extreme, while being computationally lighter and close to Persistence Statistics at the lower complexity extreme, and thus allow users to interpolate between the two metrics. We build theoretical comparisons to show how to fit our new distances at an intermediate level between persistence vectorizations and Wasserstein distances. We also experimentally verify that ETDs outperform PSs in terms of accuracy and outperform Wasserstein and Sliced Wasserstein distances in terms of computational complexity.