pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SCoralDet: Efficient real-time underwater soft coral detection with YOLO
Authors: Zhaoxuan Lu, Lyuchao Liao, Xingang Xie, Hui Yuan
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Proceeding: journal 2024 12
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

In recent years, climate change and marine pollution have significantly degraded coral reefs, highlighting the urgent need for automated coral detection to monitor marine ecosystems. However, underwater coral detection presents unique challenges, including low image contrast, complex coral structures, and dense coral growth, which limit the effectiveness of general object detection algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose SCoralDet, a soft coral detection model based on the YOLO architecture. First, we introduce a Multi-Path Fusion Block (MPFB) to capture coral features across multiple scales, enhancing the model’s robustness to uneven lighting and image blurring. We further improve inference efficiency by applying reparameterization. Second, we integrate lightweight components such as GSConv and VoV-GSCSP to reduce computational overhead without sacrificing performance. Additionally, we develop an Adaptive Power Transformation label assignment strategy, which dynamically adjusts anchor alignment metrics. By incorporating soft labels and soft central region loss, our model is guided to prioritize high-quality, well-aligned predictions. We evaluate SCoralDet on the Soft-Coral dataset, achieving an inference latency of 9.52 ms and an mAP50 of 81.9. This surpasses the performance of YOLOv5 (79.9), YOLOv6 (79.4), YOLOv8 (79.5), YOLOv9 (78.3), and YOLOv10 (79.5). These results demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of SCoralDet in underwater coral detection tasks.
Underwater Soft Coral Detection: SCoralNet for Accurate and Efficient Annotation.
Authors: Zhaoxuan Lu; Xingang Xie; Xiaolong Zhu
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: IAENG 2024 8
Tasks: 2D Object Detection

SCoralNet (based on Faster R-CNN) is a new underwater coral detection framework that has been proposed to automatically localize and identify distinct coral species in images, allowing for fast and detailed annotation. Monitoring the coverage and abundance of underwater corals typically involves the annotation and processing of large amounts of underwater coral images. However, manually annotating a large number of images is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and CNN classifiers only provide simple classification annotations without capturing the images' finer details. SCoralNet's detection performance is improved by incorporating dilated convolutions into the backbone network. To successfully capture multi-scale and multi-level information from coral targets, a neck network called NASFPN is placed between the backbone and the detecting head. Seesaw Loss is used to reduce the impact of the dataset's long-tailed distribution on SCoralNet's classifier accuracy. CIoU loss is used to optimize the bounding box regression method. During inference, Soft-NMS is applied to suppress redundant coral detection boxes. To assess SCoralNet's effectiveness, a dataset called Coral-soft was developed using real-world photos of common soft coral species from the Sanya region of China. SCoralNet outperformed the original Faster R-CNN model on the Coral-soft dataset, with a 45.68% gain in mean average precision (mAP) and a 59.2% increase in mAP75. Furthermore, SCoralNet outperformed some advanced models in terms of overall performance.
Automatic Nostalgia Detection from Bengali Text
Authors: Ameya Debnath, Bipul Karmokar  and Mohammad Shahidur Rahman
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICCIT 2024 2
Tasks: Articles, Sentiment Analysis

The rise of user-generated content on digital plat
forms has led to various types of communication, including
 comments on social media, articles, and videos. In this context,
 detecting nostalgic feelings in Bengali comments is a unique
 challenge. This study focuses on creating a dataset on ”Nostalgic
 Bengali comments” and will check which methods perform better
 to automatically spot nostalgic Bengali comments. We will use
 techniques from natural language processing, sentiment analysis,
 and machine learning to differentiate between comments that
 contain nostalgia and those that don’t. Our dataset includes
 diverse Bengali comments collected from YouTube. Detecting nos
talgic Bengali comments could help us understand user feelings,
 cultural discussions, and how people engage with content. This
 research contributes to the field of sentiment analysis by specif
ically addressing nostalgia in the Bengali language, enhancing
 our understanding of emotions in digital communication.
Combining Priors with Experience: Confidence Calibration Based on Binomial Process Modeling
Authors: Jinzong Dong, Zhaohui Jiang, Dong Pan, Haoyang Yu
Date: 2024-12-14 00:00:00

Confidence calibration of classification models is a technique to estimate the true posterior probability of the predicted class, which is critical for ensuring reliable decision-making in practical applications. Existing confidence calibration methods mostly use statistical techniques to estimate the calibration curve from data or fit a user-defined calibration function, but often overlook fully mining and utilizing the prior distribution behind the calibration curve. However, a well-informed prior distribution can provide valuable insights beyond the empirical data under the limited data or low-density regions of confidence scores. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a new method that integrates the prior distribution behind the calibration curve with empirical data to estimate a continuous calibration curve, which is realized by modeling the sampling process of calibration data as a binomial process and maximizing the likelihood function of the binomial process. We prove that the calibration curve estimating method is Lipschitz continuous with respect to data distribution and requires a sample size of $3/B$ of that required for histogram binning, where $B$ represents the number of bins. Also, a new calibration metric ($TCE_{bpm}$), which leverages the estimated calibration curve to estimate the true calibration error (TCE), is designed. $TCE_{bpm}$ is proven to be a consistent calibration measure. Furthermore, realistic calibration datasets can be generated by the binomial process modeling from a preset true calibration curve and confidence score distribution, which can serve as a benchmark to measure and compare the discrepancy between existing calibration metrics and the true calibration error. The effectiveness of our calibration method and metric are verified in real-world and simulated data.
Integrating Functionalities To A System Via Autoencoder Hippocampus Network
Authors: Siwei Luo
Date: 2024-11-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Graph Neural Network, Hippocampus, Memorization

Integrating multiple functionalities into a system poses a fascinating challenge to the field of deep learning. While the precise mechanisms by which the brain encodes and decodes information, and learns diverse skills, remain elusive, memorization undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in this process. In this article, we delve into the implementation and application of an autoencoder-inspired hippocampus network in a multi-functional system. We propose an autoencoder-based memorization method for policy function's parameters. Specifically, the encoder of the autoencoder maps policy function's parameters to a skill vector, while the decoder retrieves the parameters via this skill vector. The policy function is dynamically adjusted tailored to corresponding tasks. Henceforth, a skill vectors graph neural network is employed to represent the homeomorphic topological structure of subtasks and manage subtasks execution.
Cultural Palette: Pluralising Culture Alignment via Multi-agent Palette
Authors: Jiahao Yuan, Zixiang Di, Shangzixin Zhao, Usman Naseem
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Question Answering, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges in aligning with diverse cultural values despite their remarkable performance in generation, which stems from inherent monocultural biases and difficulties in capturing nuanced cultural semantics. Existing methods lack adaptability to unkown culture after finetuning. Inspired by cultural geography across five continents, we propose Cultural Palette, a multi-agent framework for cultural alignment. We first introduce the Pentachromatic Cultural Palette Dataset synthesized using LLMs to capture diverse cultural values from social dialogues across five continents. Building on this, Cultural Palette integrates five continent-level alignment agents with a meta-agent using our superior Cultural MoErges alignment technique by dynamically activating relevant cultural expertise based on user prompts to adapting new culture, which outperforms other joint and merging alignment strategies in overall cultural value alignment. Each continent agent generates a cultural draft, which is then refined and self-regulated by the meta-agent to produce the final culturally aligned response. Experiments across various countries demonstrate that Cultural Palette surpasses existing baselines in cultural alignment.
Pole-based Vehicle Localization with Vector Maps: A Camera-LiDAR Comparative Study
Authors: Maxime Noizet, Philippe Xu, Philippe Bonnifait
Date: 2024-12-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

For autonomous navigation, accurate localization with respect to a map is needed. In urban environments, infrastructure such as buildings or bridges cause major difficulties to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and, despite advances in inertial navigation, it is necessary to support them with other sources of exteroceptive information. In road environments, many common furniture such as traffic signs, traffic lights and street lights take the form of poles. By georeferencing these features in vector maps, they can be used within a localization filter that includes a detection pipeline and a data association method. Poles, having discriminative vertical structures, can be extracted from 3D geometric information using LiDAR sensors. Alternatively, deep neural networks can be employed to detect them from monocular cameras. The lack of depth information induces challenges in associating camera detections with map features. Yet, multi-camera integration provides a cost-efficient solution. This paper quantitatively evaluates the efficacy of these approaches in terms of localization. It introduces a real-time method for camera-based pole detection using a lightweight neural network trained on automatically annotated images. The proposed methods' efficiency is assessed on a challenging sequence with a vector map. The results highlight the high accuracy of the vision-based approach in open road conditions.
Classification Drives Geographic Bias in Street Scene Segmentation
Authors: Rahul Nair, Gabriel Tseng, Esther Rolf, Bhanu Tokas, Hannah Kerner
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Diversity, Instance Segmentation, Scene Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Previous studies showed that image datasets lacking geographic diversity can lead to biased performance in models trained on them. While earlier work studied general-purpose image datasets (e.g., ImageNet) and simple tasks like image recognition, we investigated geo-biases in real-world driving datasets on a more complex task: instance segmentation. We examined if instance segmentation models trained on European driving scenes (Eurocentric models) are geo-biased. Consistent with previous work, we found that Eurocentric models were geo-biased. Interestingly, we found that geo-biases came from classification errors rather than localization errors, with classification errors alone contributing 10-90% of the geo-biases in segmentation and 19-88% of the geo-biases in detection. This showed that while classification is geo-biased, localization (including detection and segmentation) is geographically robust. Our findings show that in region-specific models (e.g., Eurocentric models), geo-biases from classification errors can be significantly mitigated by using coarser classes (e.g., grouping car, bus, and truck as 4-wheeler).
Making Bias Amplification in Balanced Datasets Directional and Interpretable
Authors: Bhanu Tokas, Rahul Nair, Hannah Kerner
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Most of the ML datasets we use today are biased. When we train models on these biased datasets, they often not only learn dataset biases but can also amplify them -- a phenomenon known as bias amplification. Several co-occurrence-based metrics have been proposed to measure bias amplification between a protected attribute A (e.g., gender) and a task T (e.g., cooking). However, these metrics fail to measure biases when A is balanced with T. To measure bias amplification in balanced datasets, recent work proposed a predictability-based metric called leakage amplification. However, leakage amplification cannot identify the direction in which biases are amplified. In this work, we propose a new predictability-based metric called directional predictability amplification (DPA). DPA measures directional bias amplification, even for balanced datasets. Unlike leakage amplification, DPA is easier to interpret and less sensitive to attacker models (a hyperparameter in predictability-based metrics). Our experiments on tabular and image datasets show that DPA is an effective metric for measuring directional bias amplification. The code will be available soon.
LLM-RG4: Flexible and Factual Radiology Report Generation across Diverse Input Contexts
Authors: Zhuhao Wang, Yihua Sun, Zihan Li, Xuan Yang, Fang Chen, Hongen Liao
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Instruction Following, Large Language Model, Text Generation

Drafting radiology reports is a complex task requiring flexibility, where radiologists tail content to available information and particular clinical demands. However, most current radiology report generation (RRG) models are constrained to a fixed task paradigm, such as predicting the full ``finding'' section from a single image, inherently involving a mismatch between inputs and outputs. The trained models lack the flexibility for diverse inputs and could generate harmful, input-agnostic hallucinations. To bridge the gap between current RRG models and the clinical demands in practice, we first develop a data generation pipeline to create a new MIMIC-RG4 dataset, which considers four common radiology report drafting scenarios and has perfectly corresponded input and output. Secondly, we propose a novel large language model (LLM) based RRG framework, namely LLM-RG4, which utilizes LLM's flexible instruction-following capabilities and extensive general knowledge. We further develop an adaptive token fusion module that offers flexibility to handle diverse scenarios with different input combinations, while minimizing the additional computational burden associated with increased input volumes. Besides, we propose a token-level loss weighting strategy to direct the model's attention towards positive and uncertain descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that LLM-RG4 achieves state-of-the-art performance in both clinical efficiency and natural language generation on the MIMIC-RG4 and MIMIC-CXR datasets. We quantitatively demonstrate that our model has minimal input-agnostic hallucinations, whereas current open-source models commonly suffer from this problem.
Impact of Adversarial Attacks on Deep Learning Model Explainability
Authors: Gazi Nazia Nur, Mohammad Ahnaf Sadat
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Learning

In this paper, we investigate the impact of adversarial attacks on the explainability of deep learning models, which are commonly criticized for their black-box nature despite their capacity for autonomous feature extraction. This black-box nature can affect the perceived trustworthiness of these models. To address this, explainability techniques such as GradCAM, SmoothGrad, and LIME have been developed to clarify model decision-making processes. Our research focuses on the robustness of these explanations when models are subjected to adversarial attacks, specifically those involving subtle image perturbations that are imperceptible to humans but can significantly mislead models. For this, we utilize attack methods like the Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and the Basic Iterative Method (BIM) and observe their effects on model accuracy and explanations. The results reveal a substantial decline in model accuracy, with accuracies dropping from 89.94% to 58.73% and 45.50% under FGSM and BIM attacks, respectively. Despite these declines in accuracy, the explanation of the models measured by metrics such as Intersection over Union (IoU) and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) shows negligible changes, suggesting that these metrics may not be sensitive enough to detect the presence of adversarial perturbations.
Spatiotemporal Blind-Spot Network with Calibrated Flow Alignment for Self-Supervised Video Denoising
Authors: Zikang Chen, Tao Jiang, Xiaowan Hu, Wang Zhang, Huaqiu Li, Haoqian Wang
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Denoising

Self-supervised video denoising aims to remove noise from videos without relying on ground truth data, leveraging the video itself to recover clean frames. Existing methods often rely on simplistic feature stacking or apply optical flow without thorough analysis. This results in suboptimal utilization of both inter-frame and intra-frame information, and it also neglects the potential of optical flow alignment under self-supervised conditions, leading to biased and insufficient denoising outcomes. To this end, we first explore the practicality of optical flow in the self-supervised setting and introduce a SpatioTemporal Blind-spot Network (STBN) for global frame feature utilization. In the temporal domain, we utilize bidirectional blind-spot feature propagation through the proposed blind-spot alignment block to ensure accurate temporal alignment and effectively capture long-range dependencies. In the spatial domain, we introduce the spatial receptive field expansion module, which enhances the receptive field and improves global perception capabilities. Additionally, to reduce the sensitivity of optical flow estimation to noise, we propose an unsupervised optical flow distillation mechanism that refines fine-grained inter-frame interactions during optical flow alignment. Our method demonstrates superior performance across both synthetic and real-world video denoising datasets. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZKCCZ/STBN.
Edge Contrastive Learning: An Augmentation-Free Graph Contrastive Learning Model
Authors: YuJun Li, Hongyuan Zhang, Yuan Yuan
Date: 2024-12-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Link Prediction, Node Classification

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) aims to learn representations from unlabeled graph data in a self-supervised manner and has developed rapidly in recent years. However, edgelevel contrasts are not well explored by most existing GCL methods. Most studies in GCL only regard edges as auxiliary information while updating node features. One of the primary obstacles of edge-based GCL is the heavy computation burden. To tackle this issue, we propose a model that can efficiently learn edge features for GCL, namely AugmentationFree Edge Contrastive Learning (AFECL) to achieve edgeedge contrast. AFECL depends on no augmentation consisting of two parts. Firstly, we design a novel edge feature generation method, where edge features are computed by embedding concatenation of their connected nodes. Secondly, an edge contrastive learning scheme is developed, where edges connecting the same nodes are defined as positive pairs, and other edges are defined as negative pairs. Experimental results show that compared with recent state-of-the-art GCL methods or even some supervised GNNs, AFECL achieves SOTA performance on link prediction and semi-supervised node classification of extremely scarce labels. The source code is available at https://github.com/YujunLi361/AFECL.
StrandHead: Text to Strand-Disentangled 3D Head Avatars Using Hair Geometric Priors
Authors: Xiaokun Sun, Zeyu Cai, Ying Tai, Jian Yang, Zhenyu Zhang
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Text to 3D

While haircut indicates distinct personality, existing avatar generation methods fail to model practical hair due to the general or entangled representation. We propose StrandHead, a novel text to 3D head avatar generation method capable of generating disentangled 3D hair with strand representation. Without using 3D data for supervision, we demonstrate that realistic hair strands can be generated from prompts by distilling 2D generative diffusion models. To this end, we propose a series of reliable priors on shape initialization, geometric primitives, and statistical haircut features, leading to a stable optimization and text-aligned performance. Extensive experiments show that StrandHead achieves the state-of-the-art reality and diversity of generated 3D head and hair. The generated 3D hair can also be easily implemented in the Unreal Engine for physical simulation and other applications. The code will be available at https://xiaokunsun.github.io/StrandHead.github.io.
Future Sight and Tough Fights: Revolutionizing Sequential Recommendation with FENRec
Authors: Yu-Hsuan Huang, Ling Lo, HongXia Xie, Hong-Han Shuai, Wen-Huang Cheng
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) systems predict user preferences by analyzing time-ordered interaction sequences. A common challenge for SR is data sparsity, as users typically interact with only a limited number of items. While contrastive learning has been employed in previous approaches to address the challenges, these methods often adopt binary labels, missing finer patterns and overlooking detailed information in subsequent behaviors of users. Additionally, they rely on random sampling to select negatives in contrastive learning, which may not yield sufficiently hard negatives during later training stages. In this paper, we propose Future data utilization with Enduring Negatives for contrastive learning in sequential Recommendation (FENRec). Our approach aims to leverage future data with time-dependent soft labels and generate enduring hard negatives from existing data, thereby enhancing the effectiveness in tackling data sparsity. Experiment results demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance across four benchmark datasets, with an average improvement of 6.16\% across all metrics.
Loosely Synchronized Rule-Based Planning for Multi-Agent Path Finding with Asynchronous Actions
Authors: Shuai Zhou, Shizhe Zhao, Zhongqiang Ren
Date: 2024-12-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Agent Path Finding

Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) seeks collision-free paths for multiple agents from their respective starting locations to their respective goal locations while minimizing path costs. Although many MAPF algorithms were developed and can handle up to thousands of agents, they usually rely on the assumption that each action of the agent takes a time unit, and the actions of all agents are synchronized in a sense that the actions of agents start at the same discrete time step, which may limit their use in practice. Only a few algorithms were developed to address asynchronous actions, and they all lie on one end of the spectrum, focusing on finding optimal solutions with limited scalability. This paper develops new planners that lie on the other end of the spectrum, trading off solution quality for scalability, by finding an unbounded sub-optimal solution for many agents. Our method leverages both search methods (LSS) in handling asynchronous actions and rule-based planning methods (PIBT) for MAPF. We analyze the properties of our method and test it against several baselines with up to 1000 agents in various maps. Given a runtime limit, our method can handle an order of magnitude more agents than the baselines with about 25% longer makespan.