pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cherry Yield Forecast: Harvest Prediction for Individual Sweet Cherry Trees
Authors: Andreas Gilson, Peter Pietrzyk, Chiara Paglia, Annika Killer, Fabian Keil, Lukas Meyer, Dominikus Kittemann, Patrick Noack, Oliver Scholz
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00

This paper is part of a publication series from the For5G project that has the goal of creating digital twins of sweet cherry trees. At the beginning a brief overview of the revious work in this project is provided. Afterwards the focus shifts to a crucial problem in the fruit farming domain: the difficulty of making reliable yield predictions early in the season. Following three Satin sweet cherry trees along the year 2023 enabled the collection of accurate ground truth data about the development of cherries from dormancy until harvest. The methodology used to collect this data is presented, along with its valuation and visualization. The predictive power of counting objects at all relevant vegetative stages of the fruit development cycle in cherry trees with regards to yield predictions is investigated. It is found that all investigated fruit states are suitable for yield predictions based on linear regression. Conceptionally, there is a trade-off between earliness and external events with the potential to invalidate the prediction. Considering this, two optimal timepoints are suggested that are opening cluster stage before the start of the flowering and the early fruit stage right after the second fruit drop. However, both timepoints are challenging to solve with automated procedures based on image data. Counting developing cherries based on images is exceptionally difficult due to the small fruit size and their tendency to be occluded by leaves. It was not possible to obtain satisfying results relying on a state-of-the-art fruit-counting method. Counting the elements within a bursting bud is also challenging, even when using high resolution cameras. It is concluded that accurate yield prediction for sweet cherry trees is possible when objects are manually counted and that automated features extraction with similar accuracy remains an open problem yet to be solved.
Evaluating Facial Expression Recognition Datasets for Deep Learning: A Benchmark Study with Novel Similarity Metrics
Authors: F. Xavier Gaya-Morey, Cristina Manresa-Yee, Célia Martinie, Jose M. Buades-Rubio
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

This study investigates the key characteristics and suitability of widely used Facial Expression Recognition (FER) datasets for training deep learning models. In the field of affective computing, FER is essential for interpreting human emotions, yet the performance of FER systems is highly contingent on the quality and diversity of the underlying datasets. To address this issue, we compiled and analyzed 24 FER datasets, including those targeting specific age groups such as children, adults, and the elderly, and processed them through a comprehensive normalization pipeline. In addition, we enriched the datasets with automatic annotations for age and gender, enabling a more nuanced evaluation of their demographic properties. To further assess dataset efficacy, we introduce three novel metricsLocal, Global, and Paired Similarity, which quantitatively measure dataset difficulty, generalization capability, and cross-dataset transferability. Benchmark experiments using state-of-the-art neural networks reveal that large-scale, automatically collected datasets (e.g., AffectNet, FER2013) tend to generalize better, despite issues with labeling noise and demographic biases, whereas controlled datasets offer higher annotation quality but limited variability. Our findings provide actionable recommendations for dataset selection and design, advancing the development of more robust, fair, and effective FER systems.
Latent Beam Diffusion Models for Decoding Image Sequences
Authors: Guilherme Fernandes, Vasco Ramos, Regev Cohen, Idan Szpektor, João Magalhães
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00

While diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images from text prompts, they struggle with visual consistency in image sequences. Existing methods generate each image independently, leading to disjointed narratives - a challenge further exacerbated in non-linear storytelling, where scenes must connect beyond adjacent frames. We introduce a novel beam search strategy for latent space exploration, enabling conditional generation of full image sequences with beam search decoding. Unlike prior approaches that use fixed latent priors, our method dynamically searches for an optimal sequence of latent representations, ensuring coherent visual transitions. To address beam search's quadratic complexity, we integrate a cross-attention mechanism that efficiently scores search paths and enables pruning, prioritizing alignment with both textual prompts and visual context. Human evaluations confirm that our approach outperforms baseline methods, producing full sequences with superior coherence, visual continuity, and textual alignment. By bridging advances in search optimization and latent space refinement, this work sets a new standard for structured image sequence generation.
Siformer: Feature-isolated Transformer for Efficient Skeleton-based Sign Language Recognition
Authors: Muxin Pu, Mei Kuan Lim, Chun Yong Chong
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACM Multimedia 2024 10
Tasks: Action Recognition, Computational Efficiency, Sign Language Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Sign language recognition (SLR) refers to interpreting sign language glosses from given videos automatically. This research area presents a complex challenge in computer vision because of the rapid and intricate movements inherent in sign languages, which encompass hand gestures, body postures, and even facial expressions. Recently, skeleton-based action recognition has attracted increasing attention due to its ability to handle variations in subjects and backgrounds independently. However, current skeleton-based SLR methods exhibit three limitations: 1) they often neglect the importance of realistic hand poses, where most studies train SLR models on non-realistic skeletal representations; 2) they tend to assume complete data availability in both training or inference phases, and capture intricate relationships among different body parts collectively; 3) these methods treat all sign glosses uniformly, failing to account for differences in complexity levels regarding skeletal representations. To enhance the realism of hand skeletal representations, we present a kinematic hand pose rectification method for enforcing constraints. Mitigating the impact of missing data, we propose a feature-isolated mechanism to focus on capturing local spatial-temporal context. This method captures the context concurrently and independently from individual features, thus enhancing the robustness of the SLR model. Additionally, to adapt to varying complexity levels of sign glosses, we develop an input-adaptive inference approach to optimise computational efficiency and accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as evidenced by achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on WLASL100 and LSA64. For WLASL100, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 86.50\%, marking a relative improvement of 2.39% over the previous SOTA. For LSA64, we achieve a top-1 accuracy of 99.84%.
From Trial to Triumph: Advancing Long Video Understanding via Visual Context Sample Scaling and Self-reward Alignment
Authors: Yucheng Suo, Fan Ma, Linchao Zhu, Tianyi Wang, Fengyun Rao, Yi Yang
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Understanding

Multi-modal Large language models (MLLMs) show remarkable ability in video understanding. Nevertheless, understanding long videos remains challenging as the models can only process a finite number of frames in a single inference, potentially omitting crucial visual information. To address the challenge, we propose generating multiple predictions through visual context sampling, followed by a scoring mechanism to select the final prediction. Specifically, we devise a bin-wise sampling strategy that enables MLLMs to generate diverse answers based on various combinations of keyframes, thereby enriching the visual context. To determine the final prediction from the sampled answers, we employ a self-reward by linearly combining three scores: (1) a frequency score indicating the prevalence of each option, (2) a marginal confidence score reflecting the inter-intra sample certainty of MLLM predictions, and (3) a reasoning score for different question types, including clue-guided answering for global questions and temporal self-refocusing for local questions. The frequency score ensures robustness through majority correctness, the confidence-aligned score reflects prediction certainty, and the typed-reasoning score addresses cases with sparse key visual information using tailored strategies. Experiments show that this approach covers the correct answer for a high percentage of long video questions, on seven datasets show that our method improves the performance of three MLLMs.
Contrastive Learning Guided Latent Diffusion Model for Image-to-Image Translation
Authors: Qi Si, Bo wang, Zhao Zhang
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

The diffusion model has demonstrated superior performance in synthesizing diverse and high-quality images for text-guided image translation. However, there remains room for improvement in both the formulation of text prompts and the preservation of reference image content. First, variations in target text prompts can significantly influence the quality of the generated images, and it is often challenging for users to craft an optimal prompt that fully captures the content of the input image. Second, while existing models can introduce desired modifications to specific regions of the reference image, they frequently induce unintended alterations in areas that should remain unchanged. To address these challenges, we propose pix2pix-zeroCon, a zero-shot diffusion-based method that eliminates the need for additional training by leveraging patch-wise contrastive loss. Specifically, we automatically determine the editing direction in the text embedding space based on the reference image and target prompts. Furthermore, to ensure precise content and structural preservation in the edited image, we introduce cross-attention guiding loss and patch-wise contrastive loss between the generated and original image embeddings within a pre-trained diffusion model. Notably, our approach requires no additional training and operates directly on a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method surpasses existing models in image-to-image translation, achieving enhanced fidelity and controllability.
Towards Efficient and General-Purpose Few-Shot Misclassification Detection for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Fanhu Zeng, Zhen Cheng, Fei Zhu, Xu-Yao Zhang
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Reliable prediction by classifiers is crucial for their deployment in high security and dynamically changing situations. However, modern neural networks often exhibit overconfidence for misclassified predictions, highlighting the need for confidence estimation to detect errors. Despite the achievements obtained by existing methods on small-scale datasets, they all require training from scratch and there are no efficient and effective misclassification detection (MisD) methods, hindering practical application towards large-scale and ever-changing datasets. In this paper, we pave the way to exploit vision language model (VLM) leveraging text information to establish an efficient and general-purpose misclassification detection framework. By harnessing the power of VLM, we construct FSMisD, a Few-Shot prompt learning framework for MisD to refrain from training from scratch and therefore improve tuning efficiency. To enhance misclassification detection ability, we use adaptive pseudo sample generation and a novel negative loss to mitigate the issue of overconfidence by pushing category prompts away from pseudo features. We conduct comprehensive experiments with prompt learning methods and validate the generalization ability across various datasets with domain shift. Significant and consistent improvement demonstrates the effectiveness, efficiency and generalizability of our approach.
MLLM-Selector: Necessity and Diversity-driven High-Value Data Selection for Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Yiwei Ma, Guohai Xu, Xiaoshuai Sun, Jiayi Ji, Jie Lou, Debing Zhang, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Visual instruction tuning (VIT) has emerged as a crucial technique for enabling multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to follow user instructions adeptly. Yet, a significant gap persists in understanding the attributes of high-quality instruction tuning data and frameworks for its automated selection. To address this, we introduce MLLM-Selector, an automated approach that identifies valuable data for VIT by weighing necessity and diversity. Our process starts by randomly sampling a subset from the VIT data pool to fine-tune a pretrained model, thus creating a seed model with an initial ability to follow instructions. Then, leveraging the seed model, we calculate necessity scores for each sample in the VIT data pool to identify samples pivotal for enhancing model performance. Our findings underscore the importance of mixing necessity and diversity in data choice, leading to the creation of MLLM-Selector, our methodology that fuses necessity scoring with strategic sampling for superior data refinement. Empirical results indicate that within identical experimental conditions, MLLM-Selector surpasses LLaVA-1.5 in some benchmarks with less than 1% of the data and consistently exceeds performance across all validated benchmarks when using less than 50%.
Vision-Amplified Semantic Entropy for Hallucination Detection in Medical Visual Question Answering
Authors: Zehui Liao, Shishuai Hu, Ke Zou, Huazhu Fu, Liangli Zhen, Yong Xia
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Hallucination, Medical Visual Question Answering, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Yet, they remain prone to hallucinations-incorrect responses that contradict input images, posing substantial risks in clinical decision-making. Detecting these hallucinations is essential for establishing trust in MLLMs among clinicians and patients, thereby enabling their real-world adoption. Current hallucination detection methods, especially semantic entropy (SE), have demonstrated promising hallucination detection capacity for LLMs. However, adapting SE to medical MLLMs by incorporating visual perturbations presents a dilemma. Weak perturbations preserve image content and ensure clinical validity, but may be overlooked by medical MLLMs, which tend to over rely on language priors. In contrast, strong perturbations can distort essential diagnostic features, compromising clinical interpretation. To address this issue, we propose Vision Amplified Semantic Entropy (VASE), which incorporates weak image transformations and amplifies the impact of visual input, to improve hallucination detection in medical VQA. We first estimate the semantic predictive distribution under weak visual transformations to preserve clinical validity, and then amplify visual influence by contrasting this distribution with that derived from a distorted image. The entropy of the resulting distribution is estimated as VASE. Experiments on two medical open-ended VQA datasets demonstrate that VASE consistently outperforms existing hallucination detection methods.
Small Object Detection: A Comprehensive Survey on Challenges, Techniques and Real-World Applications
Authors: Mahya Nikouei, Bita Baroutian, Shahabedin Nabavi, Fateme Taraghi, Atefe Aghaei, Ayoob Sajedi, Mohsen Ebrahimi Moghaddam
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Data Augmentation, Defect Detection, Domain Adaptation, Edge-computing, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Small Object Detection, Super-Resolution, Synthetic Data Generation, Transfer Learning

Small object detection (SOD) is a critical yet challenging task in computer vision, with applications like spanning surveillance, autonomous systems, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Unlike larger objects, small objects contain limited spatial and contextual information, making accurate detection difficult. Challenges such as low resolution, occlusion, background interference, and class imbalance further complicate the problem. This survey provides a comprehensive review of recent advancements in SOD using deep learning, focusing on articles published in Q1 journals during 2024-2025. We analyzed challenges, state-of-the-art techniques, datasets, evaluation metrics, and real-world applications. Recent advancements in deep learning have introduced innovative solutions, including multi-scale feature extraction, Super-Resolution (SR) techniques, attention mechanisms, and transformer-based architectures. Additionally, improvements in data augmentation, synthetic data generation, and transfer learning have addressed data scarcity and domain adaptation issues. Furthermore, emerging trends such as lightweight neural networks, knowledge distillation (KD), and self-supervised learning offer promising directions for improving detection efficiency, particularly in resource-constrained environments like Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)-based surveillance and edge computing. We also review widely used datasets, along with standard evaluation metrics such as mean Average Precision (mAP) and size-specific AP scores. The survey highlights real-world applications, including traffic monitoring, maritime surveillance, industrial defect detection, and precision agriculture. Finally, we discuss open research challenges and future directions, emphasizing the need for robust domain adaptation techniques, better feature fusion strategies, and real-time performance optimization.
MAR-3D: Progressive Masked Auto-regressor for High-Resolution 3D Generation
Authors: Jinnan Chen, Lingting Zhu, Zeyu Hu, Shengju Qian, Yugang Chen, Xin Wang, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Generation, Denoising, Quantization

Recent advances in auto-regressive transformers have revolutionized generative modeling across different domains, from language processing to visual generation, demonstrating remarkable capabilities. However, applying these advances to 3D generation presents three key challenges: the unordered nature of 3D data conflicts with sequential next-token prediction paradigm, conventional vector quantization approaches incur substantial compression loss when applied to 3D meshes, and the lack of efficient scaling strategies for higher resolution latent prediction. To address these challenges, we introduce MAR-3D, which integrates a pyramid variational autoencoder with a cascaded masked auto-regressive transformer (Cascaded MAR) for progressive latent upscaling in the continuous space. Our architecture employs random masking during training and auto-regressive denoising in random order during inference, naturally accommodating the unordered property of 3D latent tokens. Additionally, we propose a cascaded training strategy with condition augmentation that enables efficiently up-scale the latent token resolution with fast convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAR-3D not only achieves superior performance and generalization capabilities compared to existing methods but also exhibits enhanced scaling capabilities compared to joint distribution modeling approaches (e.g., diffusion transformers).
TD-BFR: Truncated Diffusion Model for Efficient Blind Face Restoration
Authors: Ziying Zhang, Xiang Gao, Zhixin Wang, Qiang Hu, Xiaoyun Zhang
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Face Restoration

Diffusion-based methodologies have shown significant potential in blind face restoration (BFR), leveraging their robust generative capabilities. However, they are often criticized for two significant problems: 1) slow training and inference speed, and 2) inadequate recovery of fine-grained facial details. To address these problems, we propose a novel Truncated Diffusion model for efficient Blind Face Restoration (TD-BFR), a three-stage paradigm tailored for the progressive resolution of degraded images. Specifically, TD-BFR utilizes an innovative truncated sampling method, starting from low-quality (LQ) images at low resolution to enhance sampling speed, and then introduces an adaptive degradation removal module to handle unknown degradations and connect the generation processes across different resolutions. Additionally, we further adapt the priors of pre-trained diffusion models to recover rich facial details. Our method efficiently restores high-quality images in a coarse-to-fine manner and experimental results demonstrate that TD-BFR is, on average, \textbf{4.75$\times$} faster than current state-of-the-art diffusion-based BFR methods while maintaining competitive quality.
Beyond Intermediate States: Explaining Visual Redundancy through Language
Authors: Dingchen Yang, Bowen Cao, Anran Zhang, Weibo Gu, Winston Hu, Guang Chen
Date: 2025-03-26 00:00:00

Multi-modal Large Langue Models (MLLMs) often process thousands of visual tokens, which consume a significant portion of the context window and impose a substantial computational burden. Prior work has empirically explored visual token pruning methods based on MLLMs' intermediate states (e.g., attention scores). However, they have limitations in precisely defining visual redundancy due to their inability to capture the influence of visual tokens on MLLMs' visual understanding (i.e., the predicted probabilities for textual token candidates). To address this issue, we manipulate the visual input and investigate variations in the textual output from both token-centric and context-centric perspectives, achieving intuitive and comprehensive analysis. Experimental results reveal that visual tokens with low ViT-[cls] association and low text-to-image attention scores can contain recognizable information and significantly contribute to images' overall information. To develop a more reliable method for identifying and pruning redundant visual tokens, we integrate these two perspectives and introduce a context-independent condition to identify redundant prototypes from training images, which probes the redundancy of each visual token during inference. Extensive experiments on single-image, multi-image and video comprehension tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, notably achieving 90% to 110% of the performance while pruning 80% to 90% of visual tokens.