pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Learning-Based Point Cloud Registration: A Comprehensive Survey and Taxonomy
Authors: Yu-Xin Zhang, Jie Gui, Baosheng Yu, Xiaofeng Cong, Xin Gong, Wenbing Tao, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Deep Learning, Point Cloud Registration

Point cloud registration involves determining a rigid transformation to align a source point cloud with a target point cloud. This alignment is fundamental in applications such as autonomous driving, robotics, and medical imaging, where precise spatial correspondence is essential. Deep learning has greatly advanced point cloud registration by providing robust and efficient methods that address the limitations of traditional approaches, including sensitivity to noise, outliers, and initialization. However, a well-constructed taxonomy for these methods is still lacking, making it difficult to systematically classify and compare the various approaches. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey and taxonomy on deep learning-based point cloud registration (DL-PCR). We begin with a formal description of the point cloud registration problem, followed by an overview of the datasets, evaluation metrics, and loss functions commonly used in DL-PCR. Next, we categorize existing DL-PCR methods into supervised and unsupervised approaches, as they focus on significantly different key aspects. For supervised DL-PCR methods, we organize the discussion based on key aspects, including the registration procedure, optimization strategy, learning paradigm, network enhancement, and integration with traditional methods; For unsupervised DL-PCR methods, we classify them into correspondence-based and correspondence-free approaches, depending on whether they require explicit identification of point-to-point correspondences. To facilitate a more comprehensive and fair comparison, we conduct quantitative evaluations of all recent state-of-the-art approaches, using a unified training setting and consistent data partitioning strategy. Lastly, we highlight the open challenges and discuss potential directions for future study. A comprehensive collection is available at https://github.com/yxzhang15/PCR.
Swap It Like Its Hot: Segmentation-based spoof attacks on eye-tracking images
Authors: Anish S. Narkar, Brendan David-John
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00

Video-based eye trackers capture the iris biometric and enable authentication to secure user identity. However, biometric authentication is susceptible to spoofing another user's identity through physical or digital manipulation. The current standard to identify physical spoofing attacks on eye-tracking sensors uses liveness detection. Liveness detection classifies gaze data as real or fake, which is sufficient to detect physical presentation attacks. However, such defenses cannot detect a spoofing attack when real eye image inputs are digitally manipulated to swap the iris pattern of another person. We propose IrisSwap as a novel attack on gaze-based liveness detection. IrisSwap allows attackers to segment and digitally swap in a victim's iris pattern to fool iris authentication. Both offline and online attacks produce gaze data that deceives the current state-of-the-art defense models at rates up to 58% and motivates the need to develop more advanced authentication methods for eye trackers.
HOIST-Former: Hand-held Objects Identification, Segmentation, and Tracking in the Wild
Authors: Supreeth Narasimhaswamy, Huy Anh Nguyen, Lihan Huang, Minh Hoai
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Segmentation, Segmentation

We address the challenging task of identifying, segmenting, and tracking hand-held objects, which is crucial for applications such as human action segmentation and performance evaluation. This task is particularly challenging due to heavy occlusion, rapid motion, and the transitory nature of objects being hand-held, where an object may be held, released, and subsequently picked up again. To tackle these challenges, we have developed a novel transformer-based architecture called HOIST-Former. HOIST-Former is adept at spatially and temporally segmenting hands and objects by iteratively pooling features from each other, ensuring that the processes of identification, segmentation, and tracking of hand-held objects depend on the hands' positions and their contextual appearance. We further refine HOIST-Former with a contact loss that focuses on areas where hands are in contact with objects. Moreover, we also contribute an in-the-wild video dataset called HOIST, which comprises 4,125 videos complete with bounding boxes, segmentation masks, and tracking IDs for hand-held objects. Through experiments on the HOIST dataset and two additional public datasets, we demonstrate the efficacy of HOIST-Former in segmenting and tracking hand-held objects.
Neural Radiance Field in Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Authors: Lei He, Leheng Li, Wenchao Sun, Zeyu Han, Yichen Liu, Sifa Zheng, Jianqiang Wang, Keqiang Li
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Autonomous Driving, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, Survey

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has garnered significant attention from both academia and industry due to its intrinsic advantages, particularly its implicit representation and novel view synthesis capabilities. With the rapid advancements in deep learning, a multitude of methods have emerged to explore the potential applications of NeRF in the domain of Autonomous Driving (AD). However, a conspicuous void is apparent within the current literature. To bridge this gap, this paper conducts a comprehensive survey of NeRF's applications in the context of AD. Our survey is structured to categorize NeRF's applications in Autonomous Driving (AD), specifically encompassing perception, 3D reconstruction, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), and simulation. We delve into in-depth analysis and summarize the findings for each application category, and conclude by providing insights and discussions on future directions in this field. We hope this paper serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers in this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey specifically focused on the applications of NeRF in the Autonomous Driving domain.
FaceFolds: Meshed Radiance Manifolds for Efficient Volumetric Rendering of Dynamic Faces
Authors: Safa C. Medin, Gengyan Li, Ruofei Du, Stephan Garbin, Philip Davidson, Gregory W. Wornell, Thabo Beeler, Abhimitra Meka
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

3D rendering of dynamic face captures is a challenging problem, and it demands improvements on several fronts$\unicode{x2014}$photorealism, efficiency, compatibility, and configurability. We present a novel representation that enables high-quality volumetric rendering of an actor's dynamic facial performances with minimal compute and memory footprint. It runs natively on commodity graphics soft- and hardware, and allows for a graceful trade-off between quality and efficiency. Our method utilizes recent advances in neural rendering, particularly learning discrete radiance manifolds to sparsely sample the scene to model volumetric effects. We achieve efficient modeling by learning a single set of manifolds for the entire dynamic sequence, while implicitly modeling appearance changes as temporal canonical texture. We export a single layered mesh and view-independent RGBA texture video that is compatible with legacy graphics renderers without additional ML integration. We demonstrate our method by rendering dynamic face captures of real actors in a game engine, at comparable photorealism to state-of-the-art neural rendering techniques at previously unseen frame rates.
Enforcing Conditional Independence for Fair Representation Learning and Causal Image Generation
Authors: Jensen Hwa, Qingyu Zhao, Aditya Lahiri, Adnan Masood, Babak Salimi, Ehsan Adeli
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Image Generation, Representation Learning

Conditional independence (CI) constraints are critical for defining and evaluating fairness in machine learning, as well as for learning unconfounded or causal representations. Traditional methods for ensuring fairness either blindly learn invariant features with respect to a protected variable (e.g., race when classifying sex from face images) or enforce CI relative to the protected attribute only on the model output (e.g., the sex label). Neither of these methods are effective in enforcing CI in high-dimensional feature spaces. In this paper, we focus on a nascent approach characterizing the CI constraint in terms of two Jensen-Shannon divergence terms, and we extend it to high-dimensional feature spaces using a novel dynamic sampling strategy. In doing so, we introduce a new training paradigm that can be applied to any encoder architecture. We are able to enforce conditional independence of the diffusion autoencoder latent representation with respect to any protected attribute under the equalized odds constraint and show that this approach enables causal image generation with controllable latent spaces. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach can achieve high accuracy on downstream tasks while upholding equality of odds.
Iteratively Prompting Multimodal LLMs to Reproduce Natural and AI-Generated Images
Authors: Ali Naseh, Katherine Thai, Mohit Iyyer, Amir Houmansadr
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

With the digital imagery landscape rapidly evolving, image stocks and AI-generated image marketplaces have become central to visual media. Traditional stock images now exist alongside innovative platforms that trade in prompts for AI-generated visuals, driven by sophisticated APIs like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney. This paper studies the possibility of employing multi-modal models with enhanced visual understanding to mimic the outputs of these platforms, introducing an original attack strategy. Our method leverages fine-tuned CLIP models, a multi-label classifier, and the descriptive capabilities of GPT-4V to create prompts that generate images similar to those available in marketplaces and from premium stock image providers, yet at a markedly lower expense. In presenting this strategy, we aim to spotlight a new class of economic and security considerations within the realm of digital imagery. Our findings, supported by both automated metrics and human assessment, reveal that comparable visual content can be produced for a fraction of the prevailing market prices ($0.23 - $0.27 per image), emphasizing the need for awareness and strategic discussions about the integrity of digital media in an increasingly AI-integrated landscape. Our work also contributes to the field by assembling a dataset consisting of approximately 19 million prompt-image pairs generated by the popular Midjourney platform, which we plan to release publicly.
Object-Attribute Binding in Text-to-Image Generation: Evaluation and Control
Authors: Maria Mihaela Trusca, Wolf Nuyts, Jonathan Thomm, Robert Honig, Thomas Hofmann, Tinne Tuytelaars, Marie-Francine Moens
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Image Generation, Sentence, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Current diffusion models create photorealistic images given a text prompt as input but struggle to correctly bind attributes mentioned in the text to the right objects in the image. This is evidenced by our novel image-graph alignment model called EPViT (Edge Prediction Vision Transformer) for the evaluation of image-text alignment. To alleviate the above problem, we propose focused cross-attention (FCA) that controls the visual attention maps by syntactic constraints found in the input sentence. Additionally, the syntax structure of the prompt helps to disentangle the multimodal CLIP embeddings that are commonly used in T2I generation. The resulting DisCLIP embeddings and FCA are easily integrated in state-of-the-art diffusion models without additional training of these models. We show substantial improvements in T2I generation and especially its attribute-object binding on several datasets.\footnote{Code and data will be made available upon acceptance.
BC-MRI-SEG: A Breast Cancer MRI Tumor Segmentation Benchmark
Authors: Anthony Bilic, Chen Chen
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Binary breast cancer tumor segmentation with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) data is typically trained and evaluated on private medical data, which makes comparing deep learning approaches difficult. We propose a benchmark (BC-MRI-SEG) for binary breast cancer tumor segmentation based on publicly available MRI datasets. The benchmark consists of four datasets in total, where two datasets are used for supervised training and evaluation, and two are used for zero-shot evaluation. Additionally we compare state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on our benchmark and provide an exhaustive list of available public breast cancer MRI datasets. The source code has been made available at https://irulenot.github.io/BC_MRI_SEG_Benchmark.
ArtNeRF: A Stylized Neural Field for 3D-Aware Cartoonized Face Synthesis
Authors: Zichen Tang, Hongyu Yang
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D-Aware Image Synthesis, Contrastive Learning, Face Generation, Image Generation, NeRF, Neural Rendering, Transfer Learning

Recent advances in generative visual models and neural radiance fields have greatly boosted 3D-aware image synthesis and stylization tasks. However, previous NeRF-based work is limited to single scene stylization, training a model to generate 3D-aware cartoon faces with arbitrary styles remains unsolved. We propose ArtNeRF, a novel face stylization framework derived from 3D-aware GAN to tackle this problem. In this framework, we utilize an expressive generator to synthesize stylized faces and a triple-branch discriminator module to improve the visual quality and style consistency of the generated faces. Specifically, a style encoder based on contrastive learning is leveraged to extract robust low-dimensional embeddings of style images, empowering the generator with the knowledge of various styles. To smooth the training process of cross-domain transfer learning, we propose an adaptive style blending module which helps inject style information and allows users to freely tune the level of stylization. We further introduce a neural rendering module to achieve efficient real-time rendering of images with higher resolutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ArtNeRF is versatile in generating high-quality 3D-aware cartoon faces with arbitrary styles.
SVGEditBench: A Benchmark Dataset for Quantitative Assessment of LLM's SVG Editing Capabilities
Authors: Kunato Nishina, Yusuke Matsui
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Vector Graphics

Text-to-image models have shown progress in recent years. Along with this progress, generating vector graphics from text has also advanced. SVG is a popular format for vector graphics, and SVG represents a scene with XML text. Therefore, Large Language Models can directly process SVG code. Taking this into account, we focused on editing SVG with LLMs. For quantitative evaluation of LLMs' ability to edit SVG, we propose SVGEditBench. SVGEditBench is a benchmark for assessing the LLMs' ability to edit SVG code. We also show the GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 results when evaluated on the proposed benchmark. In the experiments, GPT-4 showed superior performance to GPT-3.5 both quantitatively and qualitatively. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mti-lab/SVGEditBench.
PEMMA: Parameter-Efficient Multi-Modal Adaptation for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Nada Saadi, Numan Saeed, Mohammad Yaqub, Karthik Nandakumar
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Imaging modalities such as Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET) are key in cancer detection, inspiring Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models that merge these scans for tumor segmentation. When both CT and PET scans are available, it is common to combine them as two channels of the input to the segmentation model. However, this method requires both scan types during training and inference, posing a challenge due to the limited availability of PET scans, thereby sometimes limiting the process to CT scans only. Hence, there is a need to develop a flexible DNN architecture that can be trained/updated using only CT scans but can effectively utilize PET scans when they become available. In this work, we propose a parameter-efficient multi-modal adaptation (PEMMA) framework for lightweight upgrading of a transformer-based segmentation model trained only on CT scans to also incorporate PET scans. The benefits of the proposed approach are two-fold. Firstly, we leverage the inherent modularity of the transformer architecture and perform low-rank adaptation (LoRA) of the attention weights to achieve parameter-efficient adaptation. Secondly, since the PEMMA framework attempts to minimize cross modal entanglement, it is possible to subsequently update the combined model using only one modality, without causing catastrophic forgetting of the other modality. Our proposed method achieves comparable results with the performance of early fusion techniques with just 8% of the trainable parameters, especially with a remarkable +28% improvement on the average dice score on PET scans when trained on a single modality.
Semantic-Rearrangement-Based Multi-Level Alignment for Domain Generalized Segmentation
Authors: Guanlong Jiao, Chenyangguang Zhang, Haonan Yin, Yu Mo, Biqing Huang, Hui Pan, Yi Luo, Jingxian Liu
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Semantic Segmentation

Domain generalized semantic segmentation is an essential computer vision task, for which models only leverage source data to learn the capability of generalized semantic segmentation towards the unseen target domains. Previous works typically address this challenge by global style randomization or feature regularization. In this paper, we argue that given the observation that different local semantic regions perform different visual characteristics from the source domain to the target domain, methods focusing on global operations are hard to capture such regional discrepancies, thus failing to construct domain-invariant representations with the consistency from local to global level. Therefore, we propose the Semantic-Rearrangement-based Multi-Level Alignment (SRMA) to overcome this problem. SRMA first incorporates a Semantic Rearrangement Module (SRM), which conducts semantic region randomization to enhance the diversity of the source domain sufficiently. A Multi-Level Alignment module (MLA) is subsequently proposed with the help of such diversity to establish the global-regional-local consistent domain-invariant representations. By aligning features across randomized samples with domain-neutral knowledge at multiple levels, SRMA provides a more robust way to handle the source-target domain gap. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SRMA over the current state-of-the-art works on various benchmarks.
A sustainable development perspective on urban-scale roof greening priorities and benefits
Authors: Jie Shao, Wei Yao, Lei Luo, Linzhou Zeng, Zhiyi He, Puzuo Wang, Huadong Guo
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00

Greenspaces are tightly linked to human well-being. Yet, rapid urbanization has exacerbated greenspace exposure inequality and declining human life quality. Roof greening has been recognized as an effective strategy to mitigate these negative impacts. Understanding priorities and benefits is crucial to promoting green roofs. Here, using geospatial big data, we conduct an urban-scale assessment of roof greening at a single building level in Hong Kong from a sustainable development perspective. We identify that 85.3\% of buildings reveal potential and urgent demand for roof greening. We further find green roofs could increase greenspace exposure by \textasciitilde61\% and produce hundreds of millions (HK\$) in economic benefits annually but play a small role in urban heat mitigation (\textasciitilde0.15\degree{C}) and annual carbon emission offsets (\textasciitilde0.8\%). Our study offers a comprehensive assessment of roof greening, which could provide reference for sustainable development in cities worldwide, from data utilization to solutions and findings.
A Complete System for Automated 3D Semantic-Geometric Mapping of Corrosion in Industrial Environments
Authors: Rui Pimentel de Figueiredo, Stefan Nordborg Eriksen, Ignacio Rodriguez, Simon Bøgh
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Corrosion, a naturally occurring process leading to the deterioration of metallic materials, demands diligent detection for quality control and the preservation of metal-based objects, especially within industrial contexts. Traditional techniques for corrosion identification, including ultrasonic testing, radio-graphic testing, and magnetic flux leakage, necessitate the deployment of expensive and bulky equipment on-site for effective data acquisition. An unexplored alternative involves employing lightweight, conventional camera systems, and state-of-the-art computer vision methods for its identification. In this work, we propose a complete system for semi-automated corrosion identification and mapping in industrial environments. We leverage recent advances in LiDAR-based methods for localization and mapping, with vision-based semantic segmentation deep learning techniques, in order to build semantic-geometric maps of industrial environments. Unlike previous corrosion identification systems available in the literature, our designed multi-modal system is low-cost, portable, semi-autonomous and allows collecting large datasets by untrained personnel. A set of experiments in an indoor laboratory environment, demonstrate quantitatively the high accuracy of the employed LiDAR based 3D mapping and localization system, with less then $0.05m$ and 0.02m average absolute and relative pose errors. Also, our data-driven semantic segmentation model, achieves around 70\% precision when trained with our pixel-wise manually annotated dataset.
Hyper-SD: Trajectory Segmented Consistency Model for Efficient Image Synthesis
Authors: Yuxi Ren, Xin Xia, Yanzuo Lu, Jiacheng Zhang, Jie Wu, Pan Xie, Xing Wang, Xuefeng Xiao
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Recently, a series of diffusion-aware distillation algorithms have emerged to alleviate the computational overhead associated with the multi-step inference process of Diffusion Models (DMs). Current distillation techniques often dichotomize into two distinct aspects: i) ODE Trajectory Preservation; and ii) ODE Trajectory Reformulation. However, these approaches suffer from severe performance degradation or domain shifts. To address these limitations, we propose Hyper-SD, a novel framework that synergistically amalgamates the advantages of ODE Trajectory Preservation and Reformulation, while maintaining near-lossless performance during step compression. Firstly, we introduce Trajectory Segmented Consistency Distillation to progressively perform consistent distillation within pre-defined time-step segments, which facilitates the preservation of the original ODE trajectory from a higher-order perspective. Secondly, we incorporate human feedback learning to boost the performance of the model in a low-step regime and mitigate the performance loss incurred by the distillation process. Thirdly, we integrate score distillation to further improve the low-step generation capability of the model and offer the first attempt to leverage a unified LoRA to support the inference process at all steps. Extensive experiments and user studies demonstrate that Hyper-SD achieves SOTA performance from 1 to 8 inference steps for both SDXL and SD1.5. For example, Hyper-SDXL surpasses SDXL-Lightning by +0.68 in CLIP Score and +0.51 in Aes Score in the 1-step inference.