pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
USP-Gaussian: Unifying Spike-based Image Reconstruction, Pose Correction and Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Kang Chen, Jiyuan Zhang, Zecheng Hao, Yajing Zheng, Tiejun Huang, Zhaofei Yu
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction, Camera Pose Estimation, Image Reconstruction, NeRF, Pose Estimation

Spike cameras, as an innovative neuromorphic camera that captures scenes with the 0-1 bit stream at 40 kHz, are increasingly employed for the 3D reconstruction task via Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) or 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Previous spike-based 3D reconstruction approaches often employ a casecased pipeline: starting with high-quality image reconstruction from spike streams based on established spike-to-image reconstruction algorithms, then progressing to camera pose estimation and 3D reconstruction. However, this cascaded approach suffers from substantial cumulative errors, where quality limitations of initial image reconstructions negatively impact pose estimation, ultimately degrading the fidelity of the 3D reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose a synergistic optimization framework, \textbf{USP-Gaussian}, that unifies spike-based image reconstruction, pose correction, and Gaussian splatting into an end-to-end framework. Leveraging the multi-view consistency afforded by 3DGS and the motion capture capability of the spike camera, our framework enables a joint iterative optimization that seamlessly integrates information between the spike-to-image network and 3DGS. Experiments on synthetic datasets with accurate poses demonstrate that our method surpasses previous approaches by effectively eliminating cascading errors. Moreover, we integrate pose optimization to achieve robust 3D reconstruction in real-world scenarios with inaccurate initial poses, outperforming alternative methods by effectively reducing noise and preserving fine texture details. Our code, data and trained models will be available at \url{https://github.com/chenkang455/USP-Gaussian}.
Edge-Only Universal Adversarial Attacks in Distributed Learning
Authors: Giulio Rossolini, Tommaso Baldi, Alessandro Biondi, Giorgio Buttazzo
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Distributed learning frameworks, which partition neural network models across multiple computing nodes, enhance efficiency in collaborative edge-cloud systems but may also introduce new vulnerabilities. In this work, we explore the feasibility of generating universal adversarial attacks when an attacker has access to the edge part of the model only, which consists in the first network layers. Unlike traditional universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs) that require full model knowledge, our approach shows that adversaries can induce effective mispredictions in the unknown cloud part by leveraging key features on the edge side. Specifically, we train lightweight classifiers from intermediate features available at the edge, i.e., before the split point, and use them in a novel targeted optimization to craft effective UAPs. Our results on ImageNet demonstrate strong attack transferability to the unknown cloud part. Additionally, we analyze the capability of an attacker to achieve targeted adversarial effect with edge-only knowledge, revealing intriguing behaviors. By introducing the first adversarial attacks with edge-only knowledge in split inference, this work underscores the importance of addressing partial model access in adversarial robustness, encouraging further research in this area.
Guided Learning: Lubricating End-to-End Modeling for Multi-stage Decision-making
Authors: Jian Guo, Saizhuo Wang, Yiyan Qi
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Portfolio Optimization, Recommendation Systems

Multi-stage decision-making is crucial in various real-world artificial intelligence applications, including recommendation systems, autonomous driving, and quantitative investment systems. In quantitative investment, for example, the process typically involves several sequential stages such as factor mining, alpha prediction, portfolio optimization, and sometimes order execution. While state-of-the-art end-to-end modeling aims to unify these stages into a single global framework, it faces significant challenges: (1) training such a unified neural network consisting of multiple stages between initial inputs and final outputs often leads to suboptimal solutions, or even collapse, and (2) many decision-making scenarios are not easily reducible to standard prediction problems. To overcome these challenges, we propose Guided Learning, a novel methodological framework designed to enhance end-to-end learning in multi-stage decision-making. We introduce the concept of a ``guide'', a function that induces the training of intermediate neural network layers towards some phased goals, directing gradients away from suboptimal collapse. For decision scenarios lacking explicit supervisory labels, we incorporate a utility function that quantifies the ``reward'' of the throughout decision. Additionally, we explore the connections between Guided Learning and classic machine learning paradigms such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, multi-task, and reinforcement learning. Experiments on quantitative investment strategy building demonstrate that guided learning significantly outperforms both traditional stage-wise approaches and existing end-to-end methods.
IDEATOR: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models Using Themselves
Authors: Ruofan Wang, Bo wang, Xiaosen Wang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00

As large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) grow in prominence, ensuring their safe deployment has become critical. Recent studies have explored VLM robustness against jailbreak attacks--techniques that exploit model vulnerabilities to elicit harmful outputs. However, the limited availability of diverse multi-modal data has led current approaches to rely heavily on adversarial or manually crafted images derived from harmful text datasets, which may lack effectiveness and diversity across different contexts. In this paper, we propose a novel jailbreak method named IDEATOR, which autonomously generates malicious image-text pairs for black-box jailbreak attacks. IDEATOR is based on the insight that VLMs themselves could serve as powerful red team models for generating multimodal jailbreak prompts. Specifically, IDEATOR uses a VLM to create targeted jailbreak texts and pairs them with jailbreak images generated by a state-of-the-art diffusion model. Our extensive experiments demonstrate IDEATOR's high effectiveness and transferability. Notably, it achieves a 94% success rate in jailbreaking MiniGPT-4 with an average of only 5.34 queries, and high success rates of 82%, 88%, and 75% when transferred to LLaVA, InstructBLIP, and Meta's Chameleon, respectively. IDEATOR uncovers specific vulnerabilities in VLMs under black-box conditions, underscoring the need for improved safety mechanisms.
UniHands: Unifying Various Wild-Collected Keypoints for Personalized Hand Reconstruction
Authors: Menghe Zhang, Joonyeoup Kim, Yangwen Liang, Shuangquan Wang, Kee-Bong Song
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00

Accurate hand motion capture and standardized 3D representation are essential for various hand-related tasks. Collecting keypoints-only data, while efficient and cost-effective, results in low-fidelity representations and lacks surface information. Furthermore, data inconsistencies across sources challenge their integration and use. We present UniHands, a novel method for creating standardized yet personalized hand models from wild-collected keypoints from diverse sources. Unlike existing neural implicit representation methods, UniHands uses the widely-adopted parametric models MANO and NIMBLE, providing a more scalable and versatile solution. It also derives unified hand joints from the meshes, which facilitates seamless integration into various hand-related tasks. Experiments on the FreiHAND and InterHand2.6M datasets demonstrate its ability to precisely reconstruct hand mesh vertices and keypoints, effectively capturing high-degree articulation motions. Empirical studies involving nine participants show a clear preference for our unified joints over existing configurations for accuracy and naturalism (p-value 0.016).
RoboGSim: A Real2Sim2Real Robotic Gaussian Splatting Simulator
Authors: Xinhai Li, Jialin Li, Ziheng Zhang, Rui Zhang, Fan Jia, Tiancai Wang, Haoqiang Fan, Kuo-Kun Tseng, Ruiping Wang
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00

Efficient acquisition of real-world embodied data has been increasingly critical. However, large-scale demonstrations captured by remote operation tend to take extremely high costs and fail to scale up the data size in an efficient manner. Sampling the episodes under a simulated environment is a promising way for large-scale collection while existing simulators fail to high-fidelity modeling on texture and physics. To address these limitations, we introduce the RoboGSim, a real2sim2real robotic simulator, powered by 3D Gaussian Splatting and the physics engine. RoboGSim mainly includes four parts: Gaussian Reconstructor, Digital Twins Builder, Scene Composer, and Interactive Engine. It can synthesize the simulated data with novel views, objects, trajectories, and scenes. RoboGSim also provides an online, reproducible, and safe evaluation for different manipulation policies. The real2sim and sim2real transfer experiments show a high consistency in the texture and physics. Moreover, the effectiveness of synthetic data is validated under the real-world manipulated tasks. We hope RoboGSim serves as a closed-loop simulator for fair comparison on policy learning. More information can be found on our project page \href{https://robogsim.github.io/}{https://robogsim.github.io/}.
Equivariant spatio-hemispherical networks for diffusion MRI deconvolution
Authors: Axel Elaldi, Guido Gerig, Neel Dey
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffusion  MRI

Each voxel in a diffusion MRI (dMRI) image contains a spherical signal corresponding to the direction and strength of water diffusion in the brain. This paper advances the analysis of such spatio-spherical data by developing convolutional network layers that are equivariant to the $\mathbf{E(3) \times SO(3)}$ group and account for the physical symmetries of dMRI including rotations, translations, and reflections of space alongside voxel-wise rotations. Further, neuronal fibers are typically antipodally symmetric, a fact we leverage to construct highly efficient spatio-hemispherical graph convolutions to accelerate the analysis of high-dimensional dMRI data. In the context of sparse spherical fiber deconvolution to recover white matter microstructure, our proposed equivariant network layers yield substantial performance and efficiency gains, leading to better and more practical resolution of crossing neuronal fibers and fiber tractography. These gains are experimentally consistent across both simulation and in vivo human datasets.
Revitalizing Electoral Trust: Enhancing Transparency and Efficiency through Automated Voter Counting with Machine Learning
Authors: Mir Faris, Syeda Aynul Karim, Md. Juniadul Islam
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00

In order to address issues with manual vote counting during election procedures, this study intends to examine the viability of using advanced image processing techniques for automated voter counting. The study aims to shed light on how automated systems that utilize cutting-edge technologies like OpenCV, CVZone, and the MOG2 algorithm could greatly increase the effectiveness and openness of electoral operations. The empirical findings demonstrate how automated voter counting can enhance voting processes and rebuild public confidence in election outcomes, particularly in places where trust is low. The study also emphasizes how rigorous metrics, such as the F1 score, should be used to systematically compare the accuracy of automated systems against manual counting methods. This methodology enables a detailed comprehension of the differences in performance between automated and human counting techniques by providing a nuanced assessment. The incorporation of said measures serves to reinforce an extensive assessment structure, guaranteeing the legitimacy and dependability of automated voting systems inside the electoral sphere.
Aligning Few-Step Diffusion Models with Dense Reward Difference Learning
Authors: Ziyi Zhang, Li Shen, Sen Zhang, Deheng Ye, Yong Luo, Miaojing Shi, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Aligning diffusion models with downstream objectives is essential for their practical applications. However, standard alignment methods often struggle with step generalization when directly applied to few-step diffusion models, leading to inconsistent performance across different denoising step scenarios. To address this, we introduce Stepwise Diffusion Policy Optimization (SDPO), a novel alignment method tailored for few-step diffusion models. Unlike prior approaches that rely on a single sparse reward from only the final step of each denoising trajectory for trajectory-level optimization, SDPO incorporates dense reward feedback at every intermediate step. By learning the differences in dense rewards between paired samples, SDPO facilitates stepwise optimization of few-step diffusion models, ensuring consistent alignment across all denoising steps. To promote stable and efficient training, SDPO introduces an online reinforcement learning framework featuring several novel strategies designed to effectively exploit the stepwise granularity of dense rewards. Experimental results demonstrate that SDPO consistently outperforms prior methods in reward-based alignment across diverse step configurations, underscoring its robust step generalization capabilities. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/ZiyiZhang27/sdpo.
RAWMamba: Unified sRGB-to-RAW De-rendering With State Space Model
Authors: Hongjun Chen, Wencheng Han, Huan Zheng, Jianbing Shen
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba

Recent advancements in sRGB-to-RAW de-rendering have increasingly emphasized metadata-driven approaches to reconstruct RAW data from sRGB images, supplemented by partial RAW information. In image-based de-rendering, metadata is commonly obtained through sampling, whereas in video tasks, it is typically derived from the initial frame. The distinct metadata requirements necessitate specialized network architectures, leading to architectural incompatibilities that increase deployment complexity. In this paper, we propose RAWMamba, a Mamba-based unified framework developed for sRGB-to-RAW de-rendering across both image and video domains. The core of RAWMamba is the Unified Metadata Embedding (UME) module, which harmonizes diverse metadata types into a unified representation. In detail, a multi-perspective affinity modeling method is proposed to promote the extraction of reference information. In addition, we introduce the Local Tone-Aware Mamba (LTA-Mamba) module, which captures long-range dependencies to enable effective global propagation of metadata. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RAWMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, yielding high-quality RAW data reconstruction.
From Spectra to Geography: Intelligent Mapping of RRUFF Mineral Data
Authors: Francesco Pappone, Federico Califano, Marco Tafani
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00

Accurately determining the geographic origin of mineral samples is pivotal for applications in geology, mineralogy, and material science. Leveraging the comprehensive Raman spectral data from the RRUFF database, this study introduces a novel machine learning framework aimed at geolocating mineral specimens at the country level. We employ a one-dimensional ConvNeXt1D neural network architecture to classify mineral spectra based solely on their spectral signatures. The processed dataset comprises over 32,900 mineral samples, predominantly natural, spanning 101 countries. Through five-fold cross-validation, the ConvNeXt1D model achieved an impressive average classification accuracy of 93%, demonstrating its efficacy in capturing geospatial patterns inherent in Raman spectra.
Towards Degradation-Robust Reconstruction in Generalizable NeRF
Authors: Chan Ho Park, Ka Leong Cheng, Zhicheng Wang, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF

Generalizable Neural Radiance Field (GNeRF) across scenes has been proven to be an effective way to avoid per-scene optimization by representing a scene with deep image features of source images. However, despite its potential for real-world applications, there has been limited research on the robustness of GNeRFs to different types of degradation present in the source images. The lack of such research is primarily attributed to the absence of a large-scale dataset fit for training a degradation-robust generalizable NeRF model. To address this gap and facilitate investigations into the degradation robustness of 3D reconstruction tasks, we construct the Objaverse Blur Dataset, comprising 50,000 images from over 1000 settings featuring multiple levels of blur degradation. In addition, we design a simple and model-agnostic module for enhancing the degradation robustness of GNeRFs. Specifically, by extracting 3D-aware features through a lightweight depth estimator and denoiser, the proposed module shows improvement on different popular methods in GNeRFs in terms of both quantitative and visual quality over varying degradation types and levels. Our dataset and code will be made publicly available.
FERT: Real-Time Facial Expression Recognition with Short-Range FMCW Radar
Authors: Sabri Mustafa Kahya, Muhammet Sami Yavuz, Eckehard Steinbach
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition

This study proposes a novel approach for real-time facial expression recognition utilizing short-range Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) radar equipped with one transmit (Tx), and three receive (Rx) antennas. The system leverages four distinct modalities simultaneously: Range-Doppler images (RDIs), micro range-Doppler Images (micro-RDIs), range azimuth images (RAIs), and range elevation images (REIs). Our innovative architecture integrates feature extractor blocks, intermediate feature extractor blocks, and a ResNet block to accurately classify facial expressions into smile, anger, neutral, and no-face classes. Our model achieves an average classification accuracy of 98.91% on the dataset collected using a 60 GHz short-range FMCW radar. The proposed solution operates in real-time in a person-independent manner, which shows the potential use of low-cost FMCW radars for effective facial expression recognition in various applications.
Leveraging Computational Pathology AI for Noninvasive Optical Imaging Analysis Without Retraining
Authors: Danny Barash, Emilie Manning, Aidan Van Vleck, Omri Hirsch, Kyi Lei Aye, Jingxi Li, Philip O. Scumpia, Aydogan Ozcan, Sumaira Aasi, Kerri E. Rieger, Kavita Y. Sarin, Oren Freifeld, Yonatan Winetraub
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00

Noninvasive optical imaging modalities can probe patient's tissue in 3D and over time generate gigabytes of clinically relevant data per sample. There is a need for AI models to analyze this data and assist clinical workflow. The lack of expert labelers and the large dataset required (>100,000 images) for model training and tuning are the main hurdles in creating foundation models. In this paper we introduce FoundationShift, a method to apply any AI model from computational pathology without retraining. We show our method is more accurate than state of the art models (SAM, MedSAM, SAM-Med2D, CellProfiler, Hover-Net, PLIP, UNI and ChatGPT), with multiple imaging modalities (OCT and RCM). This is achieved without the need for model retraining or fine-tuning. Applying our method to noninvasive in vivo images could enable physicians to readily incorporate optical imaging modalities into their clinical practice, providing real time tissue analysis and improving patient care.
MSSIDD: A Benchmark for Multi-Sensor Denoising
Authors: Shibin Mei, Hang Wang, Bingbing Ni
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

The cameras equipped on mobile terminals employ different sensors in different photograph modes, and the transferability of raw domain denoising models between these sensors is significant but remains sufficient exploration. Industrial solutions either develop distinct training strategies and models for different sensors or ignore the differences between sensors and simply extend existing models to new sensors, which leads to tedious training or unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we introduce a new benchmark, the Multi-Sensor SIDD (MSSIDD) dataset, which is the first raw-domain dataset designed to evaluate the sensor transferability of denoising models. The MSSIDD dataset consists of 60,000 raw images of six distinct sensors, derived through the degeneration of sRGB images via different camera sensor parameters. Furthermore, we propose a sensor consistency training framework that enables denoising models to learn the sensor-invariant features, thereby facilitating the generalization of the consistent model to unseen sensors. We evaluate previous arts on the newly proposed MSSIDD dataset, and the experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our dataset is available at https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/sjtuwh/mssidd.
Reliable Poisoned Sample Detection against Backdoor Attacks Enhanced by Sharpness Aware Minimization
Authors: Mingda Zhang, Mingli Zhu, Zihao Zhu, Baoyuan Wu
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Data Poisoning

Backdoor attack has been considered as a serious security threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). Poisoned sample detection (PSD) that aims at filtering out poisoned samples from an untrustworthy training dataset has shown very promising performance for defending against data poisoning based backdoor attacks. However, we observe that the detection performance of many advanced methods is likely to be unstable when facing weak backdoor attacks, such as low poisoning ratio or weak trigger strength. To further verify this observation, we make a statistical investigation among various backdoor attacks and poisoned sample detections, showing a positive correlation between backdoor effect and detection performance. It inspires us to strengthen the backdoor effect to enhance detection performance. Since we cannot achieve that goal via directly manipulating poisoning ratio or trigger strength, we propose to train one model using the Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) algorithm, rather than the vanilla training algorithm. We also provide both empirical and theoretical analysis about how SAM training strengthens the backdoor effect. Then, this SAM trained model can be seamlessly integrated with any off-the-shelf PSD method that extracts discriminative features from the trained model for detection, called SAM-enhanced PSD. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets show the reliable detection performance of the proposed method against both weak and strong backdoor attacks, with significant improvements against various attacks ($+34.38\%$ TPR on average), over the conventional PSD methods (i.e., without SAM enhancement). Overall, this work provides new insights about PSD and proposes a novel approach that can complement existing detection methods, which may inspire more in-depth explorations in this field.