pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Multispectral Object Detection: A Bag of Tricks and Comprehensive Benchmarks
Authors: Chen Zhou, Peng Cheng, Junfeng Fang, Yifan Zhang, Yibo Yan, Xiaojun Jia, Yanyan Xu, Kun Wang, Xiaochun Cao
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multispectral Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Multispectral object detection, utilizing RGB and TIR (thermal infrared) modalities, is widely recognized as a challenging task. It requires not only the effective extraction of features from both modalities and robust fusion strategies, but also the ability to address issues such as spectral discrepancies, spatial misalignment, and environmental dependencies between RGB and TIR images. These challenges significantly hinder the generalization of multispectral detection systems across diverse scenarios. Although numerous studies have attempted to overcome these limitations, it remains difficult to clearly distinguish the performance gains of multispectral detection systems from the impact of these "optimization techniques". Worse still, despite the rapid emergence of high-performing single-modality detection models, there is still a lack of specialized training techniques that can effectively adapt these models for multispectral detection tasks. The absence of a standardized benchmark with fair and consistent experimental setups also poses a significant barrier to evaluating the effectiveness of new approaches. To this end, we propose the first fair and reproducible benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the training "techniques", which systematically classifies existing multispectral object detection methods, investigates their sensitivity to hyper-parameters, and standardizes the core configurations. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted across multiple representative multispectral object detection datasets, utilizing various backbone networks and detection frameworks. Additionally, we introduce an efficient and easily deployable multispectral object detection framework that can seamlessly optimize high-performing single-modality models into dual-modality models, integrating our advanced training techniques.
MotionCharacter: Identity-Preserving and Motion Controllable Human Video Generation
Authors: Haopeng Fang, Di Qiu, Binjie Mao, Pengfei Yan, He Tang
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Video Generation

Recent advancements in personalized Text-to-Video (T2V) generation highlight the importance of integrating character-specific identities and actions. However, previous T2V models struggle with identity consistency and controllable motion dynamics, mainly due to limited fine-grained facial and action-based textual prompts, and datasets that overlook key human attributes and actions. To address these challenges, we propose MotionCharacter, an efficient and high-fidelity human video generation framework designed for identity preservation and fine-grained motion control. We introduce an ID-preserving module to maintain identity fidelity while allowing flexible attribute modifications, and further integrate ID-consistency and region-aware loss mechanisms, significantly enhancing identity consistency and detail fidelity. Additionally, our approach incorporates a motion control module that prioritizes action-related text while maintaining subject consistency, along with a dataset, Human-Motion, which utilizes large language models to generate detailed motion descriptions. For simplify user control during inference, we parameterize motion intensity through a single coefficient, allowing for easy adjustments. Extensive experiments highlight the effectiveness of MotionCharacter, demonstrating significant improvements in ID-preserving, high-quality video generation.
Visual Adversarial Attack on Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Tianyuan Zhang, Lu Wang, Xinwei Zhang, Yitong Zhang, Boyi Jia, Siyuan Liang, Shengshan Hu, Qiang Fu, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Autonomous Driving, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Vision-language models (VLMs) have significantly advanced autonomous driving (AD) by enhancing reasoning capabilities. However, these models remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing research has primarily focused on general VLM attacks, the development of attacks tailored to the safety-critical AD context has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we take the first step toward designing adversarial attacks specifically targeting VLMs in AD, exposing the substantial risks these attacks pose within this critical domain. We identify two unique challenges for effective adversarial attacks on AD VLMs: the variability of textual instructions and the time-series nature of visual scenarios. To this end, we propose ADvLM, the first visual adversarial attack framework specifically designed for VLMs in AD. Our framework introduces Semantic-Invariant Induction, which uses a large language model to create a diverse prompt library of textual instructions with consistent semantic content, guided by semantic entropy. Building on this, we introduce Scenario-Associated Enhancement, an approach where attention mechanisms select key frames and perspectives within driving scenarios to optimize adversarial perturbations that generalize across the entire scenario. Extensive experiments on several AD VLMs over multiple benchmarks show that ADvLM achieves state-of-the-art attack effectiveness. Moreover, real-world attack studies further validate its applicability and potential in practice.
Grid-augmented vision: A simple yet effective approach for enhanced spatial understanding in multi-modal agents
Authors: Joongwon Chae, Zhenyu Wang, Lian Zhang, Dongmei Yu, Peiwu Qin
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Object Recognition, Position, Scene Understanding, Spatial Reasoning

Recent advances in multimodal models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in object recognition and scene understanding. However, these models often struggle with precise spatial localization - a critical capability for real-world applications. Inspired by how humans use grid-based references like chess boards and maps, we propose introducing explicit visual position encoding through a simple grid overlay approach. By adding a 9x9 black grid pattern onto input images, our method provides visual spatial guidance analogous to how positional encoding works in transformers, but in an explicit, visual form. Experiments on the COCO 2017 dataset demonstrate that our grid-based approach achieves significant improvements in localization accuracy, with a 107.4% increase in IoU (from 0.27 to 0.56) and a 194.4% improvement in GIoU (from 0.18 to 0.53) compared to baseline performance. Through attention visualization analysis, we show how this visual position encoding helps models better ground spatial relationships. Our method's simplicity and effectiveness make it particularly valuable for applications requiring accurate spatial reasoning, such as robotic manipulation, medical imaging, and autonomous navigation.
Incomplete Multi-view Multi-label Classification via a Dual-level Contrastive Learning Framework
Authors: Bingyan Nie, Wulin Xie, Jiang Long, Xiaohuan Lu
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Learning Theory, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Recently, multi-view and multi-label classification have become significant domains for comprehensive data analysis and exploration. However, incompleteness both in views and labels is still a real-world scenario for multi-view multi-label classification. In this paper, we seek to focus on double missing multi-view multi-label classification tasks and propose our dual-level contrastive learning framework to solve this issue. Different from the existing works, which couple consistent information and view-specific information in the same feature space, we decouple the two heterogeneous properties into different spaces and employ contrastive learning theory to fully disentangle the two properties. Specifically, our method first introduces a two-channel decoupling module that contains a shared representation and a view-proprietary representation to effectively extract consistency and complementarity information across all views. Second, to efficiently filter out high-quality consistent information from multi-view representations, two consistency objectives based on contrastive learning are conducted on the high-level features and the semantic labels, respectively. Extensive experiments on several widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method has more stable and superior classification performance.
TSD-SR: One-Step Diffusion with Target Score Distillation for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Linwei Dong, Qingnan Fan, Yihong Guo, Zhonghao Wang, Qi Zhang, Jinwei Chen, Yawei Luo, Changqing Zou
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models are increasingly applied to real-world image super-resolution (Real-ISR) task. Given the iterative refinement nature of diffusion models, most existing approaches are computationally expensive. While methods such as SinSR and OSEDiff have emerged to condense inference steps via distillation, their performance in image restoration or details recovery is not satisfied. To address this, we propose TSD-SR, a novel distillation framework specifically designed for real-world image super-resolution, aiming to construct an efficient and effective one-step model. We first introduce the Target Score Distillation, which leverages the priors of diffusion models and real image references to achieve more realistic image restoration. Secondly, we propose a Distribution-Aware Sampling Module to make detail-oriented gradients more readily accessible, addressing the challenge of recovering fine details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TSD-SR has superior restoration results (most of the metrics perform the best) and the fastest inference speed (e.g. 40 times faster than SeeSR) compared to the past Real-ISR approaches based on pre-trained diffusion priors.
Deep End-to-end Adaptive k-Space Sampling, Reconstruction, and Registration for Dynamic MRI
Authors: George Yiasemis, Jan-Jakob Sonke, Jonas Teuwen
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Estimation

Dynamic MRI enables a range of clinical applications, including cardiac function assessment, organ motion tracking, and radiotherapy guidance. However, fully sampling the dynamic k-space data is often infeasible due to time constraints and physiological motion such as respiratory and cardiac motion. This necessitates undersampling, which degrades the quality of reconstructed images. Poor image quality not only hinders visualization but also impairs the estimation of deformation fields, crucial for registering dynamic (moving) images to a static reference image. This registration enables tasks such as motion correction, treatment planning, and quantitative analysis in applications like cardiac imaging and MR-guided radiotherapy. To overcome the challenges posed by undersampling and motion, we introduce an end-to-end deep learning (DL) framework that integrates adaptive dynamic k-space sampling, reconstruction, and registration. Our approach begins with a DL-based adaptive sampling strategy, optimizing dynamic k-space acquisition to capture the most relevant data for each specific case. This is followed by a DL-based reconstruction module that produces images optimized for accurate deformation field estimation from the undersampled moving data. Finally, a registration module estimates the deformation fields aligning the reconstructed dynamic images with a static reference. The proposed framework is independent of specific reconstruction and registration modules allowing for plug-and-play integration of these components. The entire framework is jointly trained using a combination of supervised and unsupervised loss functions, enabling end-to-end optimization for improved performance across all components. Through controlled experiments and ablation studies, we validate each component, demonstrating that each choice contributes to robust motion estimation from undersampled dynamic data.
SharpDepth: Sharpening Metric Depth Predictions Using Diffusion Distillation
Authors: Duc-Hai Pham, Tung Do, Phong Nguyen, Binh-Son Hua, Khoi Nguyen, Rang Nguyen
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation

We propose SharpDepth, a novel approach to monocular metric depth estimation that combines the metric accuracy of discriminative depth estimation methods (e.g., Metric3D, UniDepth) with the fine-grained boundary sharpness typically achieved by generative methods (e.g., Marigold, Lotus). Traditional discriminative models trained on real-world data with sparse ground-truth depth can accurately predict metric depth but often produce over-smoothed or low-detail depth maps. Generative models, in contrast, are trained on synthetic data with dense ground truth, generating depth maps with sharp boundaries yet only providing relative depth with low accuracy. Our approach bridges these limitations by integrating metric accuracy with detailed boundary preservation, resulting in depth predictions that are both metrically precise and visually sharp. Our extensive zero-shot evaluations on standard depth estimation benchmarks confirm SharpDepth effectiveness, showing its ability to achieve both high depth accuracy and detailed representation, making it well-suited for applications requiring high-quality depth perception across diverse, real-world environments.
KANs for Computer Vision: An Experimental Study
Authors: Karthik Mohan, Hanxiao Wang, Xiatian Zhu
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

This paper presents an experimental study of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) applied to computer vision tasks, particularly image classification. KANs introduce learnable activation functions on edges, offering flexible non-linear transformations compared to traditional pre-fixed activation functions with specific neural work like Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). While KANs have shown promise mostly in simplified or small-scale datasets, their effectiveness for more complex real-world tasks such as computer vision tasks remains less explored. To fill this gap, this experimental study aims to provide extended observations and insights into the strengths and limitations of KANs. We reveal that although KANs can perform well in specific vision tasks, they face significant challenges, including increased hyperparameter sensitivity and higher computational costs. These limitations suggest that KANs require architectural adaptations, such as integration with other architectures, to be practical for large-scale vision problems. This study focuses on empirical findings rather than proposing new methods, aiming to inform future research on optimizing KANs, in particular computer vision applications or alike.
Make-It-Animatable: An Efficient Framework for Authoring Animation-Ready 3D Characters
Authors: Zhiyang Guo, Jinxu Xiang, Kai Ma, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li, Ran Zhang
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

3D characters are essential to modern creative industries, but making them animatable often demands extensive manual work in tasks like rigging and skinning. Existing automatic rigging tools face several limitations, including the necessity for manual annotations, rigid skeleton topologies, and limited generalization across diverse shapes and poses. An alternative approach is to generate animatable avatars pre-bound to a rigged template mesh. However, this method often lacks flexibility and is typically limited to realistic human shapes. To address these issues, we present Make-It-Animatable, a novel data-driven method to make any 3D humanoid model ready for character animation in less than one second, regardless of its shapes and poses. Our unified framework generates high-quality blend weights, bones, and pose transformations. By incorporating a particle-based shape autoencoder, our approach supports various 3D representations, including meshes and 3D Gaussian splats. Additionally, we employ a coarse-to-fine representation and a structure-aware modeling strategy to ensure both accuracy and robustness, even for characters with non-standard skeleton structures. We conducted extensive experiments to validate our framework's effectiveness. Compared to existing methods, our approach demonstrates significant improvements in both quality and speed. More demos and code are available at https://jasongzy.github.io/Make-It-Animatable/.
Towards Lensless Image Deblurring with Prior-Embedded Implicit Neural Representations in the Low-Data Regime
Authors: Abeer Banerjee, Sanjay Singh
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Image Reconstruction

The field of computational imaging has witnessed a promising paradigm shift with the emergence of untrained neural networks, offering novel solutions to inverse computational imaging problems. While existing techniques have demonstrated impressive results, they often operate either in the high-data regime, leveraging Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) as image priors, or through untrained iterative reconstruction in a data-agnostic manner. This paper delves into lensless image reconstruction, a subset of computational imaging that replaces traditional lenses with computation, enabling the development of ultra-thin and lightweight imaging systems. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to leverage implicit neural representations for lensless image deblurring, achieving reconstructions without the requirement of prior training. We perform prior-embedded untrained iterative optimization to enhance reconstruction performance and speed up convergence, effectively bridging the gap between the no-data and high-data regimes. Through a thorough comparative analysis encompassing various untrained and low-shot methods, including under-parameterized non-convolutional methods and domain-restricted low-shot methods, we showcase the superior performance of our approach by a significant margin.
Enhancing Computer Vision with Knowledge: a Rummikub Case Study
Authors: Simon Vandevelde, Laurent Mertens, Sverre Lauwers, Joost Vennekens
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00

Artificial Neural Networks excel at identifying individual components in an image. However, out-of-the-box, they do not manage to correctly integrate and interpret these components as a whole. One way to alleviate this weakness is to expand the network with explicit knowledge and a separate reasoning component. In this paper, we evaluate an approach to this end, applied to the solving of the popular board game Rummikub. We demonstrate that, for this particular example, the added background knowledge is equally valuable as two-thirds of the data set, and allows to bring down the training time to half the original time.
KAN See Your Face
Authors: Dong Han, Yong Li, Joachim Denzler
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Face Reconstruction, Privacy Preserving

With the advancement of face reconstruction (FR) systems, privacy-preserving face recognition (PPFR) has gained popularity for its secure face recognition, enhanced facial privacy protection, and robustness to various attacks. Besides, specific models and algorithms are proposed for face embedding protection by mapping embeddings to a secure space. However, there is a lack of studies on investigating and evaluating the possibility of extracting face images from embeddings of those systems, especially for PPFR. In this work, we introduce the first approach to exploit Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) for conducting embedding-to-face attacks against state-of-the-art (SOTA) FR and PPFR systems. Face embedding mapping (FEM) models are proposed to learn the distribution mapping relation between the embeddings from the initial domain and target domain. In comparison with Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP), we provide two variants, FEM-KAN and FEM-MLP, for efficient non-linear embedding-to-embedding mapping in order to reconstruct realistic face images from the corresponding face embedding. To verify our methods, we conduct extensive experiments with various PPFR and FR models. We also measure reconstructed face images with different metrics to evaluate the image quality. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FEMs in accurate embedding mapping and face reconstruction.
RPEE-HEADS: A Novel Benchmark for Pedestrian Head Detection in Crowd Videos
Authors: Mohamad Abubaker, Zubayda Alsadder, Hamed Abdelhaq, Maik Boltes, Ahmed Alia
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Head Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

The automatic detection of pedestrian heads in crowded environments is essential for crowd analysis and management tasks, particularly in high-risk settings such as railway platforms and event entrances. These environments, characterized by dense crowds and dynamic movements, are underrepresented in public datasets, posing challenges for existing deep learning models. To address this gap, we introduce the Railway Platforms and Event Entrances-Heads (RPEE-Heads) dataset, a novel, diverse, high-resolution, and accurately annotated resource. It includes 109,913 annotated pedestrian heads across 1,886 images from 66 video recordings, with an average of 56.2 heads per image. Annotations include bounding boxes for visible head regions. In addition to introducing the RPEE-Heads dataset, this paper evaluates eight state-of-the-art object detection algorithms using the RPEE-Heads dataset and analyzes the impact of head size on detection accuracy. The experimental results show that You Only Look Once v9 and Real-Time Detection Transformer outperform the other algorithms, achieving mean average precisions of 90.7% and 90.8%, with inference times of 11 and 14 milliseconds, respectively. Moreover, the findings underscore the need for specialized datasets like RPEE-Heads for training and evaluating accurate models for head detection in railway platforms and event entrances. The dataset and pretrained models are available at https://doi.org/10.34735/ped.2024.2.
Type-R: Automatically Retouching Typos for Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Wataru Shimoda, Naoto Inoue, Daichi Haraguchi, Hayato Mitani, Seichi Uchida, Kota Yamaguchi
Date: 2024-11-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

While recent text-to-image models can generate photorealistic images from text prompts that reflect detailed instructions, they still face significant challenges in accurately rendering words in the image. In this paper, we propose to retouch erroneous text renderings in the post-processing pipeline. Our approach, called Type-R, identifies typographical errors in the generated image, erases the erroneous text, regenerates text boxes for missing words, and finally corrects typos in the rendered words. Through extensive experiments, we show that Type-R, in combination with the latest text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion or Flux, achieves the highest text rendering accuracy while maintaining image quality and also outperforms text-focused generation baselines in terms of balancing text accuracy and image quality.