pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TALE: Training-free Cross-domain Image Composition via Adaptive Latent Manipulation and Energy-guided Optimization
Authors: Kien T. Pham, Jingye Chen, Qifeng Chen
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image-Guided Composition

We present TALE, a novel training-free framework harnessing the generative capabilities of text-to-image diffusion models to address the cross-domain image composition task that focuses on flawlessly incorporating user-specified objects into a designated visual contexts regardless of domain disparity. Previous methods often involve either training auxiliary networks or finetuning diffusion models on customized datasets, which are expensive and may undermine the robust textual and visual priors of pre-trained diffusion models. Some recent works attempt to break the barrier by proposing training-free workarounds that rely on manipulating attention maps to tame the denoising process implicitly. However, composing via attention maps does not necessarily yield desired compositional outcomes. These approaches could only retain some semantic information and usually fall short in preserving identity characteristics of input objects or exhibit limited background-object style adaptation in generated images. In contrast, TALE is a novel method that operates directly on latent space to provide explicit and effective guidance for the composition process to resolve these problems. Specifically, we equip TALE with two mechanisms dubbed Adaptive Latent Manipulation and Energy-guided Latent Optimization. The former formulates noisy latents conducive to initiating and steering the composition process by directly leveraging background and foreground latents at corresponding timesteps, and the latter exploits designated energy functions to further optimize intermediate latents conforming to specific conditions that complement the former to generate desired final results. Our experiments demonstrate that TALE surpasses prior baselines and attains state-of-the-art performance in image-guided composition across various photorealistic and artistic domains.
Weakly Contrastive Learning via Batch Instance Discrimination and Feature Clustering for Small Sample SAR ATR
Authors: Yikui Zhai, Wenlve Zhou, Bing Sun, Jingwen Li, Qirui Ke, Zilu Ying, Junying Gan, Chaoyun Mai, Ruggero Donida Labati, Vincenzo Piuri, Fabio Scotti
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Linear evaluation

In recent years, impressive performance of deep learning technology has been recognized in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Automatic Target Recognition (ATR). Since a large amount of annotated data is required in this technique, it poses a trenchant challenge to the issue of obtaining a high recognition rate through less labeled data. To overcome this problem, inspired by the contrastive learning, we proposed a novel framework named Batch Instance Discrimination and Feature Clustering (BIDFC). In this framework, different from that of the objective of general contrastive learning methods, embedding distance between samples should be moderate because of the high similarity between samples in the SAR images. Consequently, our flexible framework is equipped with adjustable distance between embedding, which we term as weakly contrastive learning. Technically, instance labels are assigned to the unlabeled data in per batch and random augmentation and training are performed few times on these augmented data. Meanwhile, a novel Dynamic-Weighted Variance loss (DWV loss) function is also posed to cluster the embedding of enhanced versions for each sample. Experimental results on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition (MSTAR) database indicate a 91.25% classification accuracy of our method fine-tuned on only 3.13% training data. Even though a linear evaluation is performed on the same training data, the accuracy can still reach 90.13%. We also verified the effectiveness of BIDFC in OpenSarShip database, indicating that our method can be generalized to other datasets. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/Wenlve-Zhou/BIDFC-master.
AgentsCoMerge: Large Language Model Empowered Collaborative Decision Making for Ramp Merging
Authors: Senkang Hu, Zhengru Fang, Zihan Fang, Yiqin Deng, Xianhao Chen, Yuguang Fang, Sam Kwong
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Ramp merging is one of the bottlenecks in traffic systems, which commonly cause traffic congestion, accidents, and severe carbon emissions. In order to address this essential issue and enhance the safety and efficiency of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) at multi-lane merging zones, we propose a novel collaborative decision-making framework, named AgentsCoMerge, to leverage large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we first design a scene observation and understanding module to allow an agent to capture the traffic environment. Then we propose a hierarchical planning module to enable the agent to make decisions and plan trajectories based on the observation and the agent's own state. In addition, in order to facilitate collaboration among multiple agents, we introduce a communication module to enable the surrounding agents to exchange necessary information and coordinate their actions. Finally, we develop a reinforcement reflection guided training paradigm to further enhance the decision-making capability of the framework. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, demonstrating its superior efficiency and effectiveness for multi-agent collaborative decision-making under various ramp merging scenarios.
Distillation Learning Guided by Image Reconstruction for One-Shot Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Feng Zhou, YanJie Zhou, Longjie Wang, Yun Peng, David E. Carlson, Liyun Tu
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Reconstruction, Image Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Traditional one-shot medical image segmentation (MIS) methods use registration networks to propagate labels from a reference atlas or rely on comprehensive sampling strategies to generate synthetic labeled data for training. However, these methods often struggle with registration errors and low-quality synthetic images, leading to poor performance and generalization. To overcome this, we introduce a novel one-shot MIS framework based on knowledge distillation, which allows the network to directly 'see' real images through a distillation process guided by image reconstruction. It focuses on anatomical structures in a single labeled image and a few unlabeled ones. A registration-based data augmentation network creates realistic, labeled samples, while a feature distillation module helps the student network learn segmentation from these samples, guided by the teacher network. During inference, the streamlined student network accurately segments new images. Evaluations on three public datasets (OASIS for T1 brain MRI, BCV for abdomen CT, and VerSe for vertebrae CT) show superior segmentation performance and generalization across different medical image datasets and modalities compared to leading methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/NoviceFodder/OS-MedSeg.
JARViS: Detecting Actions in Video Using Unified Actor-Scene Context Relation Modeling
Authors: Seok Hwan Lee, Taein Son, Soo Won Seo, Jisong Kim, Jun Won Choi
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Relation, Video Action Detection

Video action detection (VAD) is a formidable vision task that involves the localization and classification of actions within the spatial and temporal dimensions of a video clip. Among the myriad VAD architectures, two-stage VAD methods utilize a pre-trained person detector to extract the region of interest features, subsequently employing these features for action detection. However, the performance of two-stage VAD methods has been limited as they depend solely on localized actor features to infer action semantics. In this study, we propose a new two-stage VAD framework called Joint Actor-scene context Relation modeling based on Visual Semantics (JARViS), which effectively consolidates cross-modal action semantics distributed globally across spatial and temporal dimensions using Transformer attention. JARViS employs a person detector to produce densely sampled actor features from a keyframe. Concurrently, it uses a video backbone to create spatio-temporal scene features from a video clip. Finally, the fine-grained interactions between actors and scenes are modeled through a Unified Action-Scene Context Transformer to directly output the final set of actions in parallel. Our experimental results demonstrate that JARViS outperforms existing methods by significant margins and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three popular VAD datasets, including AVA, UCF101-24, and JHMDB51-21.
Mixstyle-Entropy: Domain Generalization with Causal Intervention and Perturbation
Authors: Luyao Tang, Yuxuan Yuan, Chaoqi Chen, Xinghao Ding, Yue Huang
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Despite the considerable advancements achieved by deep neural networks, their performance tends to degenerate when the test environment diverges from the training ones. Domain generalization (DG) solves this issue by learning representations independent of domain-related information, thus facilitating extrapolation to unseen environments. Existing approaches typically focus on formulating tailored training objectives to extract shared features from the source data. However, the disjointed training and testing procedures may compromise robustness, particularly in the face of unforeseen variations during deployment. In this paper, we propose a novel and holistic framework based on causality, named InPer, designed to enhance model generalization by incorporating causal intervention during training and causal perturbation during testing. Specifically, during the training phase, we employ entropy-based causal intervention (EnIn) to refine the selection of causal variables. To identify samples with anti-interference causal variables from the target domain, we propose a novel metric, homeostatic score, through causal perturbation (HoPer) to construct a prototype classifier in test time. Experimental results across multiple cross-domain tasks confirm the efficacy of InPer.
PRISM: PRogressive dependency maxImization for Scale-invariant image Matching
Authors: Xudong Cai, Yongcai Wang, Lun Luo, Minhang Wang, Deying Li, Jintao Xu, Weihao Gu, Rui Ai
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00

Image matching aims at identifying corresponding points between a pair of images. Currently, detector-free methods have shown impressive performance in challenging scenarios, thanks to their capability of generating dense matches and global receptive field. However, performing feature interaction and proposing matches across the entire image is unnecessary, because not all image regions contribute to the matching process. Interacting and matching in unmatchable areas can introduce errors, reducing matching accuracy and efficiency. Meanwhile, the scale discrepancy issue still troubles existing methods. To address above issues, we propose PRogressive dependency maxImization for Scale-invariant image Matching (PRISM), which jointly prunes irrelevant patch features and tackles the scale discrepancy. To do this, we firstly present a Multi-scale Pruning Module (MPM) to adaptively prune irrelevant features by maximizing the dependency between the two feature sets. Moreover, we design the Scale-Aware Dynamic Pruning Attention (SADPA) to aggregate information from different scales via a hierarchical design. Our method's superior matching performance and generalization capability are confirmed by leading accuracy across various evaluation benchmarks and downstream tasks. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Master-cai/PRISM.
Hierarchical Quantum Control Gates for Functional MRI Understanding
Authors: Xuan-Bac Nguyen, Hoang-Quan Nguyen, Hugh Churchill, Samee U. Khan, Khoa Luu
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00

Quantum computing has emerged as a powerful tool for solving complex problems intractable for classical computers, particularly in popular fields such as cryptography, optimization, and neurocomputing. In this paper, we present a new quantum-based approach named the Hierarchical Quantum Control Gates (HQCG) method for efficient understanding of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. This approach includes two novel modules: the Local Quantum Control Gate (LQCG) and the Global Quantum Control Gate (GQCG), which are designed to extract local and global features of fMRI signals, respectively. Our method operates end-to-end on a quantum machine, leveraging quantum mechanics to learn patterns within extremely high-dimensional fMRI signals, such as 30,000 samples which is a challenge for classical computers. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms classical methods. Additionally, we found that the proposed quantum model is more stable and less prone to overfitting than the classical methods.
HistoSPACE: Histology-Inspired Spatial Transcriptome Prediction And Characterization Engine
Authors: Shivam Kumar, Samrat Chatterjee
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Prediction

Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables the visualization of gene expression within the context of tissue morphology. This emerging discipline has the potential to serve as a foundation for developing tools to design precision medicines. However, due to the higher costs and expertise required for such experiments, its translation into a regular clinical practice might be challenging. Despite the implementation of modern deep learning to enhance information obtained from histological images using AI, efforts have been constrained by limitations in the diversity of information. In this paper, we developed a model, HistoSPACE that explore the diversity of histological images available with ST data to extract molecular insights from tissue image. Our proposed study built an image encoder derived from universal image autoencoder. This image encoder was connected to convolution blocks to built the final model. It was further fine tuned with the help of ST-Data. This model is notably lightweight in compared to traditional histological models. Our developed model demonstrates significant efficiency compared to contemporary algorithms, revealing a correlation of 0.56 in leave-one-out cross-validation. Finally, its robustness was validated through an independent dataset, showing a well matched preditction with predefined disease pathology.
Teach CLIP to Develop a Number Sense for Ordinal Regression
Authors: Yao Du, Qiang Zhai, Weihang Dai, Xiaomeng Li
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Text Matching

Ordinal regression is a fundamental problem within the field of computer vision, with customised well-trained models on specific tasks. While pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) have exhibited impressive performance on various vision tasks, their potential for ordinal regression has received less exploration. In this study, we first investigate CLIP's potential for ordinal regression, from which we expect the model could generalise to different ordinal regression tasks and scenarios. Unfortunately, vanilla CLIP fails on this task, since current VLMs have a well-documented limitation of encapsulating compositional concepts such as number sense. We propose a simple yet effective method called NumCLIP to improve the quantitative understanding of VLMs. We disassemble the exact image to number-specific text matching problem into coarse classification and fine prediction stages. We discretize and phrase each numerical bin with common language concept to better leverage the available pre-trained alignment in CLIP. To consider the inherent continuous property of ordinal regression, we propose a novel fine-grained cross-modal ranking-based regularisation loss specifically designed to keep both semantic and ordinal alignment in CLIP's feature space. Experimental results on three general ordinal regression tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of NumCLIP, with 10% and 3.83% accuracy improvement on historical image dating and image aesthetics assessment task, respectively. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/NumCLIP.
A comparative study of generative adversarial networks for image recognition algorithms based on deep learning and traditional methods
Authors: Yihao Zhong, Yijing Wei, Yingbin Liang, Xiqing Liu, Rongwei Ji, Yiru Cang
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Generation

In this paper, an image recognition algorithm based on the combination of deep learning and generative adversarial network (GAN) is studied, and compared with traditional image recognition methods. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the advantages and application prospects of deep learning technology, especially GAN, in the field of image recognition. Firstly, this paper reviews the basic principles and techniques of traditional image recognition methods, including the classical algorithms based on feature extraction such as SIFT, HOG and their combination with support vector machine (SVM), random forest, and other classifiers. Then, the working principle, network structure, and unique advantages of GAN in image generation and recognition are introduced. In order to verify the effectiveness of GAN in image recognition, a series of experiments are designed and carried out using multiple public image data sets for training and testing. The experimental results show that compared with traditional methods, GAN has excellent performance in processing complex images, recognition accuracy, and anti-noise ability. Specifically, Gans are better able to capture high-dimensional features and details of images, significantly improving recognition performance. In addition, Gans shows unique advantages in dealing with image noise, partial missing information, and generating high-quality images.
Unlocking Exocentric Video-Language Data for Egocentric Video Representation Learning
Authors: Zi-Yi Dou, Xitong Yang, Tushar Nagarajan, Huiyu Wang, Jing Huang, Nanyun Peng, Kris Kitani, Fu-Jen Chu
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Instance Retrieval, Representation Learning, Style Transfer

We present EMBED (Egocentric Models Built with Exocentric Data), a method designed to transform exocentric video-language data for egocentric video representation learning. Large-scale exocentric data covers diverse activities with significant potential for egocentric learning, but inherent disparities between egocentric and exocentric data pose challenges in utilizing one view for the other seamlessly. Egocentric videos predominantly feature close-up hand-object interactions, whereas exocentric videos offer a broader perspective on human activities. Additionally, narratives in egocentric datasets are typically more action-centric and closely linked with the visual content, in contrast to the narrative styles found in exocentric datasets. To address these challenges, we employ a data transformation framework to adapt exocentric data for egocentric training, focusing on identifying specific video clips that emphasize hand-object interactions and transforming narration styles to align with egocentric perspectives. By applying both vision and language style transfer, our framework creates a new egocentric dataset derived from exocentric video-language data. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of EMBED, achieving state-of-the-art results across various egocentric downstream tasks, including an absolute improvement of 4.7% on the Epic-Kitchens-100 multi-instance retrieval and 6.2% on the EGTEA classification benchmarks in zero-shot settings. Furthermore, EMBED enables egocentric video-language models to perform competitively in exocentric tasks. Finally, we showcase EMBED's application across various exocentric datasets, exhibiting strong generalization capabilities when applied to different exocentric datasets.
Underwater litter monitoring using consumer-grade aerial-aquatic speedy scanner (AASS) and deep learning based super-resolution reconstruction and detection network
Authors: Fan Zhao, Yongying Liu, Jiaqi Wang, Yijia Chen, Dianhan Xi, Xinlei Shao, Shigeru Tabeta, Katsunori Mizuno
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Underwater litter is widely spread across aquatic environments such as lakes, rivers, and oceans, significantly impacting natural ecosystems. Current monitoring technologies for detecting underwater litter face limitations in survey efficiency, cost, and environmental conditions, highlighting the need for efficient, consumer-grade technologies for automatic detection. This research introduces the Aerial-Aquatic Speedy Scanner (AASS) combined with Super-Resolution Reconstruction (SRR) and an improved YOLOv8 detection network. AASS enhances data acquisition efficiency over traditional methods, capturing high-quality images that accurately identify underwater waste. SRR improves image-resolution by mitigating motion blur and insufficient resolution, thereby enhancing detection tasks. Specifically, the RCAN model achieved the highest mean average precision (mAP) of 78.6% for detection accuracy on reconstructed images among the tested SRR models. With a magnification factor of 4, the SRR test set shows an improved mAP compared to the conventional bicubic set. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in detecting underwater litter.
Monitoring of Hermit Crabs Using drone-captured imagery and Deep Learning based Super-Resolution Reconstruction and Improved YOLOv8
Authors: Fan Zhao, Yijia Chen, Dianhan Xi, Yongying Liu, Jiaqi Wang, Shigeru Tabeta, Katsunori Mizuno
Date: 2024-08-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Reconstruction, Super-Resolution

Hermit crabs play a crucial role in coastal ecosystems by dispersing seeds, cleaning up debris, and disturbing soil. They serve as vital indicators of marine environmental health, responding to climate change and pollution. Traditional survey methods, like quadrat sampling, are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and environmentally dependent. This study presents an innovative approach combining UAV-based remote sensing with Super-Resolution Reconstruction (SRR) and the CRAB-YOLO detection network, a modification of YOLOv8s, to monitor hermit crabs. SRR enhances image quality by addressing issues such as motion blur and insufficient resolution, significantly improving detection accuracy over conventional low-resolution fuzzy images. The CRAB-YOLO network integrates three improvements for detection accuracy, hermit crab characteristics, and computational efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance compared to other mainstream detection models. The RDN networks demonstrated the best image reconstruction performance, and CRAB-YOLO achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 69.5% on the SRR test set, a 40% improvement over the conventional Bicubic method with a magnification factor of 4. These results indicate that the proposed method is effective in detecting hermit crabs, offering a cost-effective and automated solution for extensive hermit crab monitoring, thereby aiding coastal benthos conservation.