pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
OCMG-Net: Neural Oriented Normal Refinement for Unstructured Point Clouds
Authors: Yingrui Wu, Mingyang Zhao, Weize Quan, Jian Shi, Xiaohong Jia, Dong-Ming Yan
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

We present a robust refinement method for estimating oriented normals from unstructured point clouds. In contrast to previous approaches that either suffer from high computational complexity or fail to achieve desirable accuracy, our novel framework incorporates sign orientation and data augmentation in the feature space to refine the initial oriented normals, striking a balance between efficiency and accuracy. To address the issue of noise-caused direction inconsistency existing in previous approaches, we introduce a new metric called the Chamfer Normal Distance, which faithfully minimizes the estimation error by correcting the annotated normal with the closest point found on the potentially clean point cloud. This metric not only tackles the challenge but also aids in network training and significantly enhances network robustness against noise. Moreover, we propose an innovative dual-parallel architecture that integrates Multi-scale Local Feature Aggregation and Hierarchical Geometric Information Fusion, which enables the network to capture intricate geometric details more effectively and notably reduces ambiguity in scale selection. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and versatility of our method in both unoriented and oriented normal estimation tasks across synthetic and real-world datasets among indoor and outdoor scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/YingruiWoo/OCMG-Net.git.
Evidential Transformers for Improved Image Retrieval
Authors: Danilo Dordevic, Suryansh Kumar
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Content-Based Image Retrieval, Image Retrieval, Metric Learning, Retrieval

We introduce the Evidential Transformer, an uncertainty-driven transformer model for improved and robust image retrieval. In this paper, we make several contributions to content-based image retrieval (CBIR). We incorporate probabilistic methods into image retrieval, achieving robust and reliable results, with evidential classification surpassing traditional training based on multiclass classification as a baseline for deep metric learning. Furthermore, we improve the state-of-the-art retrieval results on several datasets by leveraging the Global Context Vision Transformer (GC ViT) architecture. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate the reliability of our approach, setting a new benchmark in CBIR in all test settings on the Stanford Online Products (SOP) and CUB-200-2011 datasets.
Towards Robust Online Domain Adaptive Semantic Segmentation under Adverse Weather Conditions
Authors: Taorong Liu, Jing Xiao, Liang Liao, Chia-Wen Lin
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Online Domain Adaptation, Semantic Segmentation

Online Domain Adaptation (OnDA) is designed to handle unforeseeable domain changes at minimal cost that occur during the deployment of the model, lacking clear boundaries between the domain, such as sudden weather events. However, existing OnDA methods that rely solely on the model itself to adapt to the current domain often misidentify ambiguous classes amidst continuous domain shifts and pass on this erroneous knowledge to the next domain. To tackle this, we propose \textbf{RODASS}, a \textbf{R}obust \textbf{O}nline \textbf{D}omain \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{S}emantic \textbf{S}egmentation framework, which dynamically detects domain shifts and adjusts hyper-parameters to minimize training costs and error propagation. Specifically, we introduce the \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{A}mbiguous \textbf{P}atch \textbf{Mask} (\textbf{DAP Mask}) strategy, which dynamically selects highly disturbed regions and masks these regions, mitigating error accumulation in ambiguous classes and enhancing the model's robustness against external noise in dynamic natural environments. Additionally, we present the \textbf{D}ynamic \textbf{S}ource \textbf{C}lass \textbf{Mix} (\textbf{DSC Mix}), a domain-aware mix method that augments target domain scenes with class-level source buffers, reducing the high uncertainty and noisy labels, thereby accelerating adaptation and offering a more efficient solution for online domain adaptation. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on widely used OnDA benchmarks while maintaining approximately 40 frames per second (FPS).
VideoLLaMB: Long-context Video Understanding with Recurrent Memory Bridges
Authors: Yuxuan Wang, Cihang Xie, Yang Liu, Zilong Zheng
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, MVBench, Video Understanding

Recent advancements in large-scale video-language models have shown significant potential for real-time planning and detailed interactions. However, their high computational demands and the scarcity of annotated datasets limit their practicality for academic researchers. In this work, we introduce VideoLLaMB, a novel framework that utilizes temporal memory tokens within bridge layers to allow for the encoding of entire video sequences alongside historical visual data, effectively preserving semantic continuity and enhancing model performance across various tasks. This approach includes recurrent memory tokens and a SceneTilling algorithm, which segments videos into independent semantic units to preserve semantic integrity. Empirically, VideoLLaMB significantly outstrips existing video-language models, demonstrating a 5.5 points improvement over its competitors across three VideoQA benchmarks, and 2.06 points on egocentric planning. Comprehensive results on the MVBench show that VideoLLaMB-7B achieves markedly better results than previous 7B models of same LLM. Remarkably, it maintains robust performance as PLLaVA even as video length increases up to 8 times. Besides, the frame retrieval results on our specialized Needle in a Video Haystack (NIAVH) benchmark, further validate VideoLLaMB's prowess in accurately identifying specific frames within lengthy videos. Our SceneTilling algorithm also enables the generation of streaming video captions directly, without necessitating additional training. In terms of efficiency, VideoLLaMB, trained on 16 frames, supports up to 320 frames on a single Nvidia A100 GPU with linear GPU memory scaling, ensuring both high performance and cost-effectiveness, thereby setting a new foundation for long-form video-language models in both academic and practical applications.
Progressive Retinal Image Registration via Global and Local Deformable Transformations
Authors: Yepeng Liu, Baosheng Yu, Tian Chen, Yuliang Gu, Bo Du, Yongchao Xu, Jun Cheng
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Retinal image registration plays an important role in the ophthalmological diagnosis process. Since there exist variances in viewing angles and anatomical structures across different retinal images, keypoint-based approaches become the mainstream methods for retinal image registration thanks to their robustness and low latency. These methods typically assume the retinal surfaces are planar, and adopt feature matching to obtain the homography matrix that represents the global transformation between images. Yet, such a planar hypothesis inevitably introduces registration errors since retinal surface is approximately curved. This limitation is more prominent when registering image pairs with significant differences in viewing angles. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid registration framework called HybridRetina, which progressively registers retinal images with global and local deformable transformations. For that, we use a keypoint detector and a deformation network called GAMorph to estimate the global transformation and local deformable transformation, respectively. Specifically, we integrate multi-level pixel relation knowledge to guide the training of GAMorph. Additionally, we utilize an edge attention module that includes the geometric priors of the images, ensuring the deformation field focuses more on the vascular regions of clinical interest. Experiments on two widely-used datasets, FIRE and FLoRI21, show that our proposed HybridRetina significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/awesome-retinal-registration.
Defending against Model Inversion Attacks via Random Erasing
Authors: Viet-Hung Tran, Ngoc-Bao Nguyen, Son T. Mai, Hans Vandierendonck, Ngai-Man Cheung
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, model

Model Inversion (MI) is a type of privacy violation that focuses on reconstructing private training data through abusive exploitation of machine learning models. To defend against MI attacks, state-of-the-art (SOTA) MI defense methods rely on regularizations that conflict with the training loss, creating explicit tension between privacy protection and model utility. In this paper, we present a new method to defend against MI attacks. Our method takes a new perspective and focuses on training data. Our idea is based on a novel insight on Random Erasing (RE), which has been applied in the past as a data augmentation technique to improve the model accuracy under occlusion. In our work, we instead focus on applying RE for degrading MI attack accuracy. Our key insight is that MI attacks require significant amount of private training data information encoded inside the model in order to reconstruct high-dimensional private images. Therefore, we propose to apply RE to reduce private information presented to the model during training. We show that this can lead to substantial degradation in MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy. Meanwhile, natural accuracy of the model is only moderately affected. Our method is very simple to implement and complementary to existing defense methods. Our extensive experiments of 23 setups demonstrate that our method can achieve SOTA performance in balancing privacy and utility of the models. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our method over existing defenses across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations.
Follow-Your-Canvas: Higher-Resolution Video Outpainting with Extensive Content Generation
Authors: Qihua Chen, Yue Ma, Hongfa Wang, Junkun Yuan, Wenzhe Zhao, Qi Tian, Hongmei Wang, Shaobo Min, Qifeng Chen, Wei Liu
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

This paper explores higher-resolution video outpainting with extensive content generation. We point out common issues faced by existing methods when attempting to largely outpaint videos: the generation of low-quality content and limitations imposed by GPU memory. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based method called \textit{Follow-Your-Canvas}. It builds upon two core designs. First, instead of employing the common practice of "single-shot" outpainting, we distribute the task across spatial windows and seamlessly merge them. It allows us to outpaint videos of any size and resolution without being constrained by GPU memory. Second, the source video and its relative positional relation are injected into the generation process of each window. It makes the generated spatial layout within each window harmonize with the source video. Coupling with these two designs enables us to generate higher-resolution outpainting videos with rich content while keeping spatial and temporal consistency. Follow-Your-Canvas excels in large-scale video outpainting, e.g., from 512X512 to 1152X2048 (9X), while producing high-quality and aesthetically pleasing results. It achieves the best quantitative results across various resolution and scale setups. The code is released on https://github.com/mayuelala/FollowYourCanvas
Learning to Discover Forgery Cues for Face Forgery Detection
Authors: Jiahe Tian, Peng Chen, Cai Yu, Xiaomeng Fu, Xi Wang, Jiao Dai, Jizhong Han
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00

Locating manipulation maps, i.e., pixel-level annotation of forgery cues, is crucial for providing interpretable detection results in face forgery detection. Related learning objects have also been widely adopted as auxiliary tasks to improve the classification performance of detectors whereas they require comparisons between paired real and forged faces to obtain manipulation maps as supervision. This requirement restricts their applicability to unpaired faces and contradicts real-world scenarios. Moreover, the used comparison methods annotate all changed pixels, including noise introduced by compression and upsampling. Using such maps as supervision hinders the learning of exploitable cues and makes models prone to overfitting. To address these issues, we introduce a weakly supervised model in this paper, named Forgery Cue Discovery (FoCus), to locate forgery cues in unpaired faces. Unlike some detectors that claim to locate forged regions in attention maps, FoCus is designed to sidestep their shortcomings of capturing partial and inaccurate forgery cues. Specifically, we propose a classification attentive regions proposal module to locate forgery cues during classification and a complementary learning module to facilitate the learning of richer cues. The produced manipulation maps can serve as better supervision to enhance face forgery detectors. Visualization of the manipulation maps of the proposed FoCus exhibits superior interpretability and robustness compared to existing methods. Experiments on five datasets and four multi-task models demonstrate the effectiveness of FoCus in both in-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations.
SINET: Sparsity-driven Interpretable Neural Network for Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Gargi Panda, Soumitra Kundu, Saumik Bhattacharya, Aurobinda Routray
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, UIE

Improving the quality of underwater images is essential for advancing marine research and technology. This work introduces a sparsity-driven interpretable neural network (SINET) for the underwater image enhancement (UIE) task. Unlike pure deep learning methods, our network architecture is based on a novel channel-specific convolutional sparse coding (CCSC) model, ensuring good interpretability of the underlying image enhancement process. The key feature of SINET is that it estimates the salient features from the three color channels using three sparse feature estimation blocks (SFEBs). The architecture of SFEB is designed by unrolling an iterative algorithm for solving the $\ell_1$ regularized convolutional sparse coding (CSC) problem. Our experiments show that SINET surpasses state-of-the-art PSNR value by $1.05$ dB with $3873$ times lower computational complexity. Code can be found at: https://github.com/gargi884/SINET-UIE/tree/main.
Fed-MUnet: Multi-modal Federated Unet for Brain Tumor Segmentation
Authors: Ruojun Zhou, Lisha Qu, Lei Zhang, Ziming Li, Hongwei Yu, Bing Luo
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Deep learning-based techniques have been widely utilized for brain tumor segmentation using both single and multi-modal Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images. Most current studies focus on centralized training due to the intrinsic challenge of data sharing across clinics. To mitigate privacy concerns, researchers have introduced Federated Learning (FL) methods to brain tumor segmentation tasks. However, currently such methods are focusing on single modal MRI, with limited study on multi-modal MRI. The challenges include complex structure, large-scale parameters, and overfitting issues of the FL based methods using multi-modal MRI. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel multi-modal FL framework for brain tumor segmentation (Fed-MUnet) that is suitable for FL training. We evaluate our approach with the BraTS2022 datasets, which are publicly available. The experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves FL nature of distributed learning and privacy preserving. For the enhancing tumor, tumor core and whole tumor, the mean of five major metrics were 87.5%, 90.6% and 92.2%, respectively, which were higher than SOTA methods while preserving privacy. In terms of parameters count, quantity of floating-point operations (FLOPs) and inference, Fed-MUnet is Pareto optimal compared with the state-of-the-art segmentation backbone while achieves higher performance and tackles privacy issue. Our codes are open-sourced at https://github.com/Arnold-Jun/Fed-MUnet.
Multi-Modal Multi-Granularity Tokenizer for Chu Bamboo Slip Scripts
Authors: Yingfa Chen, Chenlong Hu, Cong Feng, Chenyang Song, Shi Yu, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Part-Of-Speech Tagging

This study presents a multi-modal multi-granularity tokenizer specifically designed for analyzing ancient Chinese scripts, focusing on the Chu bamboo slip (CBS) script used during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period (771-256 BCE) in Ancient China. Considering the complex hierarchical structure of ancient Chinese scripts, where a single character may be a combination of multiple sub-characters, our tokenizer first adopts character detection to locate character boundaries, and then conducts character recognition at both the character and sub-character levels. Moreover, to support the academic community, we have also assembled the first large-scale dataset of CBSs with over 100K annotated character image scans. On the part-of-speech tagging task built on our dataset, using our tokenizer gives a 5.5% relative improvement in F1-score compared to mainstream sub-word tokenizers. Our work not only aids in further investigations of the specific script but also has the potential to advance research on other forms of ancient Chinese scripts.
Free-DyGS: Camera-Pose-Free Scene Reconstruction based on Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Surgical Videos
Authors: Qian Li, Shuojue Yang, Daiyun Shen, Yueming Jin
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Computational Efficiency

Reconstructing endoscopic videos is crucial for high-fidelity visualization and the efficiency of surgical operations. Despite the importance, existing 3D reconstruction methods encounter several challenges, including stringent demands for accuracy, imprecise camera positioning, intricate dynamic scenes, and the necessity for rapid reconstruction. Addressing these issues, this paper presents the first camera-pose-free scene reconstruction framework, Free-DyGS, tailored for dynamic surgical videos, leveraging 3D Gaussian splatting technology. Our approach employs a frame-by-frame reconstruction strategy and is delineated into four distinct phases: Scene Initialization, Joint Learning, Scene Expansion, and Retrospective Learning. We introduce a Generalizable Gaussians Parameterization module within the Scene Initialization and Expansion phases to proficiently generate Gaussian attributes for each pixel from the RGBD frames. The Joint Learning phase is crafted to concurrently deduce scene deformation and camera pose, facilitated by an innovative flexible deformation module. In the scene expansion stage, the Gaussian points gradually grow as the camera moves. The Retrospective Learning phase is dedicated to enhancing the precision of scene deformation through the reassessment of prior frames. The efficacy of the proposed Free-DyGS is substantiated through experiments on two datasets: the StereoMIS and Hamlyn datasets. The experimental outcomes underscore that Free-DyGS surpasses conventional baseline models in both rendering fidelity and computational efficiency.
Self-Supervised Multi-Scale Network for Blind Image Deblurring via Alternating Optimization
Authors: Lening Guo, Jing Yu, Ning Zhang, Chuangbai Xiao
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Deblurring, Deblurring, Image Deblurring

Blind image deblurring is a challenging low-level vision task that involves estimating the unblurred image when the blur kernel is unknown. In this paper, we present a self-supervised multi-scale blind image deblurring method to jointly estimate the latent image and the blur kernel via alternating optimization. In the image estimation step, we construct a multi-scale generator network with multiple inputs and multiple outputs to collaboratively estimate latent images at various scales, supervised by an image pyramid constructed from only the blurred image. This generator places architectural constraints on the network and avoids the need for mathematical expression of image priors. In the blur kernel estimation step, the blur kernel at each scale is independently estimated with a direct solution to a quadratic regularized least-squares model for its flexible adaptation to the proposed multi-scale generator for image estimation. Thanks to the collaborative estimation across multiple scales, our method avoids the computationally intensive coarse-to-fine propagation and additional image deblurring processes used in traditional mathematical optimization-based methods. Quantitative and qualitative experimental results on synthetic and realistic datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, especially for handling large and real-world blurs.
Personalized Lip Reading: Adapting to Your Unique Lip Movements with Vision and Language
Authors: Jeong Hun Yeo, Chae Won Kim, Hyunjun Kim, Hyeongseop Rha, Seunghee Han, Wen-Huang Cheng, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Lip Reading, Sentence

Lip reading aims to predict spoken language by analyzing lip movements. Despite advancements in lip reading technologies, performance degrades when models are applied to unseen speakers due to their sensitivity to variations in visual information such as lip appearances. To address this challenge, speaker adaptive lip reading technologies have advanced by focusing on effectively adapting a lip reading model to target speakers in the visual modality. However, the effectiveness of adapting language information, such as vocabulary choice, of the target speaker has not been explored in previous works. Additionally, existing datasets for speaker adaptation have limited vocabulary sizes and pose variations, which restrict the validation of previous speaker-adaptive methods in real-world scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a novel speaker-adaptive lip reading method that adapts a pre-trained model to target speakers at both vision and language levels. Specifically, we integrate prompt tuning and the LoRA approach, applying them to a pre-trained lip reading model to effectively adapt the model to target speakers. Furthermore, to validate its effectiveness in real-world scenarios, we introduce a new dataset, VoxLRS-SA, derived from VoxCeleb2 and LRS3. It contains a vocabulary of approximately 100K words, offers diverse pose variations, and enables the validation of adaptation methods in the wild, sentence-level lip reading for the first time in English. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that the existing speaker-adaptive method also improves performance in the wild at the sentence level. Moreover, we show that the proposed method achieves larger improvements compared to the previous works.