pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with LLMs
Authors: Ruotong Liao, Max Erler, Huiyu Wang, Guangyao Zhai, Gengyuan Zhang, Yunpu Ma, Volker Tresp
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: EgoSchema, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Spatial Reasoning, Video Question Answering, Video Understanding

In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA, i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding. VideoINSTA contributes (1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; (2) an event-based temporal reasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; (3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme balancing temporal factors based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence. Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. The code is released here: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.
CableInspect-AD: An Expert-Annotated Anomaly Detection Dataset
Authors: Akshatha Arodi, Margaux Luck, Jean-Luc Bedwani, Aldo Zaimi, Ge Li, Nicolas Pouliot, Julien Beaudry, Gaétan Marceau Caron
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Machine learning models are increasingly being deployed in real-world contexts. However, systematic studies on their transferability to specific and critical applications are underrepresented in the research literature. An important example is visual anomaly detection (VAD) for robotic power line inspection. While existing VAD methods perform well in controlled environments, real-world scenarios present diverse and unexpected anomalies that current datasets fail to capture. To address this gap, we introduce $\textit{CableInspect-AD}$, a high-quality, publicly available dataset created and annotated by domain experts from Hydro-Qu\'ebec, a Canadian public utility. This dataset includes high-resolution images with challenging real-world anomalies, covering defects with varying severity levels. To address the challenges of collecting diverse anomalous and nominal examples for setting a detection threshold, we propose an enhancement to the celebrated PatchCore algorithm. This enhancement enables its use in scenarios with limited labeled data. We also present a comprehensive evaluation protocol based on cross-validation to assess models' performances. We evaluate our $\textit{Enhanced-PatchCore}$ for few-shot and many-shot detection, and Vision-Language Models for zero-shot detection. While promising, these models struggle to detect all anomalies, highlighting the dataset's value as a challenging benchmark for the broader research community. Project page: https://mila-iqia.github.io/cableinspect-ad/.
AI generated annotations for Breast, Brain, Liver, Lungs and Prostate cancer collections in National Cancer Institute Imaging Data Commons
Authors: Gowtham Krishnan Murugesan, Diana McCrumb, Rahul Soni, Jithendra Kumar, Leonard Nuernberg, Linmin Pei, Ulrike Wagner, Sutton Granger, Andrey Y. Fedorov, Stephen Moore, Jeff Van Oss
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT)

AI in Medical Imaging project aims to enhance the National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Image Data Commons (IDC) by developing nnU-Net models and providing AI-assisted segmentations for cancer radiology images. We created high-quality, AI-annotated imaging datasets for 11 IDC collections. These datasets include images from various modalities, such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), covering the lungs, breast, brain, kidneys, prostate, and liver. The nnU-Net models were trained using open-source datasets. A portion of the AI-generated annotations was reviewed and corrected by radiologists. Both the AI and radiologist annotations were encoded in compliance with the the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard, ensuring seamless integration into the IDC collections. All models, images, and annotations are publicly accessible, facilitating further research and development in cancer imaging. This work supports the advancement of imaging tools and algorithms by providing comprehensive and accurate annotated datasets.
Devil is in Details: Locality-Aware 3D Abdominal CT Volume Generation for Self-Supervised Organ Segmentation
Authors: Yuran Wang, Zhijing Wan, Yansheng Qiu, Zheng Wang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Generation

In the realm of medical image analysis, self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques have emerged to alleviate labeling demands, while still facing the challenge of training data scarcity owing to escalating resource requirements and privacy constraints. Numerous efforts employ generative models to generate high-fidelity, unlabeled 3D volumes across diverse modalities and anatomical regions. However, the intricate and indistinguishable anatomical structures within the abdomen pose a unique challenge to abdominal CT volume generation compared to other anatomical regions. To address the overlooked challenge, we introduce the Locality-Aware Diffusion (Lad), a novel method tailored for exquisite 3D abdominal CT volume generation. We design a locality loss to refine crucial anatomical regions and devise a condition extractor to integrate abdominal priori into generation, thereby enabling the generation of large quantities of high-quality abdominal CT volumes essential for SSL tasks without the need for additional data such as labels or radiology reports. Volumes generated through our method demonstrate remarkable fidelity in reproducing abdominal structures, achieving a decrease in FID score from 0.0034 to 0.0002 on AbdomenCT-1K dataset, closely mirroring authentic data and surpassing current methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in self-supervised organ segmentation tasks, resulting in an improvement in mean Dice scores on two abdominal datasets effectively. These results underscore the potential of synthetic data to advance self-supervised learning in medical image analysis.
HEADS-UP: Head-Mounted Egocentric Dataset for Trajectory Prediction in Blind Assistance Systems
Authors: Yasaman Haghighi, Celine Demonsant, Panagiotis Chalimourdas, Maryam Tavasoli Naeini, Jhon Kevin Munoz, Bladimir Bacca, Silvan Suter, Matthieu Gani, Alexandre Alahi
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

In this paper, we introduce HEADS-UP, the first egocentric dataset collected from head-mounted cameras, designed specifically for trajectory prediction in blind assistance systems. With the growing population of blind and visually impaired individuals, the need for intelligent assistive tools that provide real-time warnings about potential collisions with dynamic obstacles is becoming critical. These systems rely on algorithms capable of predicting the trajectories of moving objects, such as pedestrians, to issue timely hazard alerts. However, existing datasets fail to capture the necessary information from the perspective of a blind individual. To address this gap, HEADS-UP offers a novel dataset focused on trajectory prediction in this context. Leveraging this dataset, we propose a semi-local trajectory prediction approach to assess collision risks between blind individuals and pedestrians in dynamic environments. Unlike conventional methods that separately predict the trajectories of both the blind individual (ego agent) and pedestrians, our approach operates within a semi-local coordinate system, a rotated version of the camera's coordinate system, facilitating the prediction process. We validate our method on the HEADS-UP dataset and implement the proposed solution in ROS, performing real-time tests on an NVIDIA Jetson GPU through a user study. Results from both dataset evaluations and live tests demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our approach.
Automating MedSAM by Learning Prompts with Weak Few-Shot Supervision
Authors: Mélanie Gaillochet, Christian Desrosiers, Hervé Lombaert
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Foundation models such as the recently introduced Segment Anything Model (SAM) have achieved remarkable results in image segmentation tasks. However, these models typically require user interaction through handcrafted prompts such as bounding boxes, which limits their deployment to downstream tasks. Adapting these models to a specific task with fully labeled data also demands expensive prior user interaction to obtain ground-truth annotations. This work proposes to replace conditioning on input prompts with a lightweight module that directly learns a prompt embedding from the image embedding, both of which are subsequently used by the foundation model to output a segmentation mask. Our foundation models with learnable prompts can automatically segment any specific region by 1) modifying the input through a prompt embedding predicted by a simple module, and 2) using weak labels (tight bounding boxes) and few-shot supervision (10 samples). Our approach is validated on MedSAM, a version of SAM fine-tuned for medical images, with results on three medical datasets in MR and ultrasound imaging. Our code is available on https://github.com/Minimel/MedSAMWeakFewShotPromptAutomation.
Distributed NeRF Learning for Collaborative Multi-Robot Perception
Authors: Hongrui Zhao, Boris Ivanovic, Negar Mehr
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

Effective environment perception is crucial for enabling downstream robotic applications. Individual robotic agents often face occlusion and limited visibility issues, whereas multi-agent systems can offer a more comprehensive mapping of the environment, quicker coverage, and increased fault tolerance. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent perception system where agents collectively learn a neural radiance field (NeRF) from posed RGB images to represent a scene. Each agent processes its local sensory data and shares only its learned NeRF model with other agents, reducing communication overhead. Given NeRF's low memory footprint, this approach is well-suited for robotic systems with limited bandwidth, where transmitting all raw data is impractical. Our distributed learning framework ensures consistency across agents' local NeRF models, enabling convergence to a unified scene representation. We show the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments on datasets containing challenging real-world scenes, achieving performance comparable to centralized mapping of the environment where data is sent to a central server for processing. Additionally, we find that multi-agent learning provides regularization benefits, improving geometric consistency in scenarios with sparse input views. We show that in such scenarios, multi-agent mapping can even outperform centralized training.
Leveraging CAM Algorithms for Explaining Medical Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Tillmann Rheude, Andreas Wirtz, Arjan Kuijper, Stefan Wesarg
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) achieve prevailing results in segmentation tasks nowadays and represent the state-of-the-art for image-based analysis. However, the understanding of the accurate decision-making process of a CNN is rather unknown. The research area of explainable artificial intelligence (xAI) primarily revolves around understanding and interpreting this black-box behavior. One way of interpreting a CNN is the use of class activation maps (CAMs) that represent heatmaps to indicate the importance of image areas for the prediction of the CNN. For classification tasks, a variety of CAM algorithms exist. But for segmentation tasks, only one CAM algorithm for the interpretation of the output of a CNN exist. We propose a transfer between existing classification- and segmentation-based methods for more detailed, explainable, and consistent results which show salient pixels in semantic segmentation tasks. The resulting Seg-HiRes-Grad CAM is an extension of the segmentation-based Seg-Grad CAM with the transfer to the classification-based HiRes CAM. Our method improves the previously-mentioned existing segmentation-based method by adjusting it to recently published classification-based methods. Especially for medical image segmentation, this transfer solves existing explainability disadvantages.
Match Stereo Videos via Bidirectional Alignment
Authors: Junpeng Jing, Ye Mao, Anlan Qiu, Krystian Mikolajczyk
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Stereo Matching

Video stereo matching is the task of estimating consistent disparity maps from rectified stereo videos. There is considerable scope for improvement in both datasets and methods within this area. Recent learning-based methods often focus on optimizing performance for independent stereo pairs, leading to temporal inconsistencies in videos. Existing video methods typically employ sliding window operation over time dimension, which can result in low-frequency oscillations corresponding to the window size. To address these challenges, we propose a bidirectional alignment mechanism for adjacent frames as a fundamental operation. Building on this, we introduce a novel video processing framework, BiDAStereo, and a plugin stabilizer network, BiDAStabilizer, compatible with general image-based methods. Regarding datasets, current synthetic object-based and indoor datasets are commonly used for training and benchmarking, with a lack of outdoor nature scenarios. To bridge this gap, we present a realistic synthetic dataset and benchmark focused on natural scenes, along with a real-world dataset captured by a stereo camera in diverse urban scenes for qualitative evaluation. Extensive experiments on in-domain, out-of-domain, and robustness evaluation demonstrate the contribution of our methods and datasets, showcasing improvements in prediction quality and achieving state-of-the-art results on various commonly used benchmarks. The project page, demos, code, and datasets are available at: \url{https://tomtomtommi.github.io/BiDAVideo/}.
Solution for OOD-CV Workshop SSB Challenge 2024 (Open-Set Recognition Track)
Authors: Mingxu Feng, Dian Chao, Peng Zheng, Yang Yang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Open Set Learning

This report provides a detailed description of the method we explored and proposed in the OSR Challenge at the OOD-CV Workshop during ECCV 2024. The challenge required identifying whether a test sample belonged to the semantic classes of a classifier's training set, a task known as open-set recognition (OSR). Using the Semantic Shift Benchmark (SSB) for evaluation, we focused on ImageNet1k as the in-distribution (ID) dataset and a subset of ImageNet21k as the out-of-distribution (OOD) dataset.To address this, we proposed a hybrid approach, experimenting with the fusion of various post-hoc OOD detection techniques and different Test-Time Augmentation (TTA) strategies. Additionally, we evaluated the impact of several base models on the final performance. Our best-performing method combined Test-Time Augmentation with the post-hoc OOD techniques, achieving a strong balance between AUROC and FPR95 scores. Our approach resulted in AUROC: 79.77 (ranked 5th) and FPR95: 61.44 (ranked 2nd), securing second place in the overall competition.
Active Neural Mapping at Scale
Authors: Zijia Kuang, Zike Yan, Hao Zhao, Guyue Zhou, Hongbin Zha
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

We introduce a NeRF-based active mapping system that enables efficient and robust exploration of large-scale indoor environments. The key to our approach is the extraction of a generalized Voronoi graph (GVG) from the continually updated neural map, leading to the synergistic integration of scene geometry, appearance, topology, and uncertainty. Anchoring uncertain areas induced by the neural map to the vertices of GVG allows the exploration to undergo adaptive granularity along a safe path that traverses unknown areas efficiently. Harnessing a modern hybrid NeRF representation, the proposed system achieves competitive results in terms of reconstruction accuracy, coverage completeness, and exploration efficiency even when scaling up to large indoor environments. Extensive results at different scales validate the efficacy of the proposed system.
Loose Social-Interaction Recognition in Real-world Therapy Scenarios
Authors: Abid Ali, Rui Dai, Ashish Marisetty, Guillaume Astruc, Monique Thonnat, Jean-Marc Odobez, Susanne Thümmler, Francois Bremond
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00

The computer vision community has explored dyadic interactions for atomic actions such as pushing, carrying-object, etc. However, with the advancement in deep learning models, there is a need to explore more complex dyadic situations such as loose interactions. These are interactions where two people perform certain atomic activities to complete a global action irrespective of temporal synchronisation and physical engagement, like cooking-together for example. Analysing these types of dyadic-interactions has several useful applications in the medical domain for social-skills development and mental health diagnosis. To achieve this, we propose a novel dual-path architecture to capture the loose interaction between two individuals. Our model learns global abstract features from each stream via a CNNs backbone and fuses them using a new Global-Layer-Attention module based on a cross-attention strategy. We evaluate our model on real-world autism diagnoses such as our Loose-Interaction dataset, and the publicly available Autism dataset for loose interactions. Our network achieves baseline results on the Loose-Interaction and SOTA results on the Autism datasets. Moreover, we study different social interactions by experimenting on a publicly available dataset i.e. NTU-RGB+D (interactive classes from both NTU-60 and NTU-120). We have found that different interactions require different network designs. We also compare a slightly different version of our method by incorporating time information to address tight interactions achieving SOTA results.
PerCo (SD): Open Perceptual Compression
Authors: Nikolai Körber, Eduard Kromer, Andreas Siebert, Sascha Hauke, Daniel Mueller-Gritschneder, Björn Schuller
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Compression

We introduce PerCo (SD), a perceptual image compression method based on Stable Diffusion v2.1, targeting the ultra-low bit range. PerCo (SD) serves as an open and competitive alternative to the state-of-the-art method PerCo, which relies on a proprietary variant of GLIDE and remains closed to the public. In this work, we review the theoretical foundations, discuss key engineering decisions in adapting PerCo to the Stable Diffusion ecosystem, and provide a comprehensive comparison, both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the MSCOCO-30k dataset, PerCo (SD) demonstrates improved perceptual characteristics at the cost of higher distortion. We partly attribute this gap to the different model capacities being used (866M vs. 1.4B). We hope our work contributes to a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms and paves the way for future advancements in the field. Code and trained models will be released at https://github.com/Nikolai10/PerCo.
Medical Image Segmentation with SAM-generated Annotations
Authors: Iira Häkkinen, Iaroslav Melekhov, Erik Englesson, Hossein Azizpour, Juho Kannala
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The field of medical image segmentation is hindered by the scarcity of large, publicly available annotated datasets. Not all datasets are made public for privacy reasons, and creating annotations for a large dataset is time-consuming and expensive, as it requires specialized expertise to accurately identify regions of interest (ROIs) within the images. To address these challenges, we evaluate the performance of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) as an annotation tool for medical data by using it to produce so-called "pseudo labels" on the Medical Segmentation Decathlon (MSD) computed tomography (CT) tasks. The pseudo labels are then used in place of ground truth labels to train a UNet model in a weakly-supervised manner. We experiment with different prompt types on SAM and find that the bounding box prompt is a simple yet effective method for generating pseudo labels. This method allows us to develop a weakly-supervised model that performs comparably to a fully supervised model.
Classroom-Inspired Multi-Mentor Distillation with Adaptive Learning Strategies
Authors: Shalini Sarode, Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Tahira Shehzadi, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, image-classification, Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, Pose Estimation, Transfer Learning

We propose ClassroomKD, a novel multi-mentor knowledge distillation framework inspired by classroom environments to enhance knowledge transfer between student and multiple mentors. Unlike traditional methods that rely on fixed mentor-student relationships, our framework dynamically selects and adapts the teaching strategies of diverse mentors based on their effectiveness for each data sample. ClassroomKD comprises two main modules: the Knowledge Filtering (KF) Module and the Mentoring Module. The KF Module dynamically ranks mentors based on their performance for each input, activating only high-quality mentors to minimize error accumulation and prevent information loss. The Mentoring Module adjusts the distillation strategy by tuning each mentor's influence according to the performance gap between the student and mentors, effectively modulating the learning pace. Extensive experiments on image classification (CIFAR-100 and ImageNet) and 2D human pose estimation (COCO Keypoints and MPII Human Pose) demonstrate that ClassroomKD significantly outperforms existing knowledge distillation methods. Our results highlight that a dynamic and adaptive approach to mentor selection and guidance leads to more effective knowledge transfer, paving the way for enhanced model performance through distillation.