pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unified Speech Recognition: A Single Model for Auditory, Visual, and Audiovisual Inputs
Authors: Alexandros Haliassos, Rodrigo Mira, Honglie Chen, Zoe Landgraf, Stavros Petridis, Maja Pantic
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Lipreading, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Research in auditory, visual, and audiovisual speech recognition (ASR, VSR, and AVSR, respectively) has traditionally been conducted independently. Even recent self-supervised studies addressing two or all three tasks simultaneously tend to yield separate models, leading to disjoint inference pipelines with increased memory requirements and redundancies. This paper proposes unified training strategies for these systems. We demonstrate that training a single model for all three tasks enhances VSR and AVSR performance, overcoming typical optimisation challenges when training from scratch. Moreover, we introduce a greedy pseudo-labelling approach to more effectively leverage unlabelled samples, addressing shortcomings in related self-supervised methods. Finally, we develop a self-supervised pre-training method within our framework, proving its effectiveness alongside our semi-supervised approach. Despite using a single model for all tasks, our unified approach achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to recent methods on LRS3 and LRS2 for ASR, VSR, and AVSR, as well as on the newly released WildVSR dataset. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ahaliassos/usr.
Fashion-VDM: Video Diffusion Model for Virtual Try-On
Authors: Johanna Karras, Yingwei Li, Nan Liu, Luyang Zhu, Innfarn Yoo, Andreas Lugmayr, Chris Lee, Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation, Virtual Try-on

We present Fashion-VDM, a video diffusion model (VDM) for generating virtual try-on videos. Given an input garment image and person video, our method aims to generate a high-quality try-on video of the person wearing the given garment, while preserving the person's identity and motion. Image-based virtual try-on has shown impressive results; however, existing video virtual try-on (VVT) methods are still lacking garment details and temporal consistency. To address these issues, we propose a diffusion-based architecture for video virtual try-on, split classifier-free guidance for increased control over the conditioning inputs, and a progressive temporal training strategy for single-pass 64-frame, 512px video generation. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of joint image-video training for video try-on, especially when video data is limited. Our qualitative and quantitative experiments show that our approach sets the new state-of-the-art for video virtual try-on. For additional results, visit our project page: https://johannakarras.github.io/Fashion-VDM.
3D Audio-Visual Segmentation
Authors: Artem Sokolov, Swapnil Bhosale, Xiatian Zhu
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Recognizing the sounding objects in scenes is a longstanding objective in embodied AI, with diverse applications in robotics and AR/VR/MR. To that end, Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS), taking as condition an audio signal to identify the masks of the target sounding objects in an input image with synchronous camera and microphone sensors, has been recently advanced. However, this paradigm is still insufficient for real-world operation, as the mapping from 2D images to 3D scenes is missing. To address this fundamental limitation, we introduce a novel research problem, 3D Audio-Visual Segmentation, extending the existing AVS to the 3D output space. This problem poses more challenges due to variations in camera extrinsics, audio scattering, occlusions, and diverse acoustics across sounding object categories. To facilitate this research, we create the very first simulation based benchmark, 3DAVS-S34-O7, providing photorealistic 3D scene environments with grounded spatial audio under single-instance and multi-instance settings, across 34 scenes and 7 object categories. This is made possible by re-purposing the Habitat simulator to generate comprehensive annotations of sounding object locations and corresponding 3D masks. Subsequently, we propose a new approach, EchoSegnet, characterized by integrating the ready-to-use knowledge from pretrained 2D audio-visual foundation models synergistically with 3D visual scene representation through spatial audio-aware mask alignment and refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EchoSegnet can effectively segment sounding objects in 3D space on our new benchmark, representing a significant advancement in the field of embodied AI. Project page: https://surrey-uplab.github.io/research/3d-audio-visual-segmentation/
FewViewGS: Gaussian Splatting with Few View Matching and Multi-stage Training
Authors: Ruihong Yin, Vladimir Yugay, Yue Li, Sezer Karaoglu, Theo Gevers
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

The field of novel view synthesis from images has seen rapid advancements with the introduction of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and more recently with 3D Gaussian Splatting. Gaussian Splatting became widely adopted due to its efficiency and ability to render novel views accurately. While Gaussian Splatting performs well when a sufficient amount of training images are available, its unstructured explicit representation tends to overfit in scenarios with sparse input images, resulting in poor rendering performance. To address this, we present a 3D Gaussian-based novel view synthesis method using sparse input images that can accurately render the scene from the viewpoints not covered by the training images. We propose a multi-stage training scheme with matching-based consistency constraints imposed on the novel views without relying on pre-trained depth estimation or diffusion models. This is achieved by using the matches of the available training images to supervise the generation of the novel views sampled between the training frames with color, geometry, and semantic losses. In addition, we introduce a locality preserving regularization for 3D Gaussians which removes rendering artifacts by preserving the local color structure of the scene. Evaluation on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates competitive or superior performance of our method in few-shot novel view synthesis compared to existing state-of-the-art methods.
SIRA: Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association for Radar Perception
Authors: Ryoma Yataka, Pu Perry Wang, Petros Boufounos, Ryuhei Takahashi
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Multiple Object Tracking, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking, Oriented Object Detection, Relation, Trajectory Prediction

Conventional radar feature extraction faces limitations due to low spatial resolution, noise, multipath reflection, the presence of ghost targets, and motion blur. Such limitations can be exacerbated by nonlinear object motion, particularly from an ego-centric viewpoint. It becomes evident that to address these challenges, the key lies in exploiting temporal feature relation over an extended horizon and enforcing spatial motion consistency for effective association. To this end, this paper proposes SIRA (Scalable Inter-frame Relation and Association) with two designs. First, inspired by Swin Transformer, we introduce extended temporal relation, generalizing the existing temporal relation layer from two consecutive frames to multiple inter-frames with temporally regrouped window attention for scalability. Second, we propose motion consistency track with the concept of a pseudo-tracklet generated from observational data for better trajectory prediction and subsequent object association. Our approach achieves 58.11 mAP@0.5 for oriented object detection and 47.79 MOTA for multiple object tracking on the Radiate dataset, surpassing previous state-of-the-art by a margin of +4.11 mAP@0.5 and +9.94 MOTA, respectively.
One VLM to Keep it Learning: Generation and Balancing for Data-free Continual Visual Question Answering
Authors: Deepayan Das, Davide Talon, Massimiliano Mancini, Yiming Wang, Elisa Ricci
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Question Answering, Text Generation, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown significant promise in Visual Question Answering (VQA) tasks by leveraging web-scale multimodal datasets. However, these models often struggle with continual learning due to catastrophic forgetting when adapting to new tasks. As an effective remedy to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, rehearsal strategy uses the data of past tasks upon learning new task. However, such strategy incurs the need of storing past data, which might not be feasible due to hardware constraints or privacy concerns. In this work, we propose the first data-free method that leverages the language generation capability of a VLM, instead of relying on external models, to produce pseudo-rehearsal data for addressing continual VQA. Our proposal, named as GaB, generates pseudo-rehearsal data by posing previous task questions on new task data. Yet, despite being effective, the distribution of generated questions skews towards the most frequently posed questions due to the limited and task-specific training data. To mitigate this issue, we introduce a pseudo-rehearsal balancing module that aligns the generated data towards the ground-truth data distribution using either the question meta-statistics or an unsupervised clustering method. We evaluate our proposed method on two recent benchmarks, \ie VQACL-VQAv2 and CLOVE-function benchmarks. GaB outperforms all the data-free baselines with substantial improvement in maintaining VQA performance across evolving tasks, while being on-par with methods with access to the past data.
Digi2Real: Bridging the Realism Gap in Synthetic Data Face Recognition via Foundation Models
Authors: Anjith George, Sebastien Marcel
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

The accuracy of face recognition systems has improved significantly in the past few years, thanks to the large amount of data collected and advancements in neural network architectures. However, these large-scale datasets are often collected without explicit consent, raising ethical and privacy concerns. To address this, there have been proposals to use synthetic datasets for training face recognition models. Yet, such models still rely on real data to train the generative models and generally exhibit inferior performance compared to those trained on real datasets. One of these datasets, DigiFace, uses a graphics pipeline to generate different identities and intra-class variations without using real data in model training. However, the performance of this approach is poor on face recognition benchmarks, possibly due to the lack of realism in the images generated by the graphics pipeline. In this work, we introduce a novel framework for realism transfer aimed at enhancing the realism of synthetically generated face images. Our method leverages the large-scale face foundation model, and we adapt the pipeline for realism enhancement. By integrating the controllable aspects of the graphics pipeline with our realism enhancement technique, we generate a large amount of realistic variations, combining the advantages of both approaches. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that models trained using our enhanced dataset significantly improve the performance of face recognition systems over the baseline. The source code and dataset will be publicly accessible at the following link: https://www.idiap.ch/paper/digi2real
CleAR: Robust Context-Guided Generative Lighting Estimation for Mobile Augmented Reality
Authors: Yiqin Zhao, Mallesham Dasari, Tian Guo
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Lighting Estimation

High-quality environment lighting is essential for creating immersive mobile augmented reality (AR) experiences. However, achieving visually coherent estimation for mobile AR is challenging due to several key limitations in AR device sensing capabilities, including low camera FoV and limited pixel dynamic ranges. Recent advancements in generative AI, which can generate high-quality images from different types of prompts, including texts and images, present a potential solution for high-quality lighting estimation. Still, to effectively use generative image diffusion models, we must address two key limitations of content quality and slow inference. In this work, we design and implement a generative lighting estimation system called CleAR that can produce high-quality, diverse environment maps in the format of 360{\deg} HDR images. Specifically, we design a two-step generation pipeline guided by AR environment context data to ensure the output aligns with the physical environment's visual context and color appearance. To improve the estimation robustness under different lighting conditions, we design a real-time refinement component to adjust lighting estimation results on AR devices. Through a combination of quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that CleAR outperforms state-of-the-art lighting estimation methods on both estimation accuracy, latency, and robustness, and is rated by 31 participants as producing better renderings for most virtual objects. For example, CleAR achieves 51% to 56% accuracy improvement on virtual object renderings across objects of three distinctive types of materials and reflective properties. CleAR produces lighting estimates of comparable or better quality in just 3.2 seconds -- over 110X faster than state-of-the-art methods.
SAFE: Slow and Fast Parameter-Efficient Tuning for Continual Learning with Pre-Trained Models
Authors: Linglan Zhao, Xuerui Zhang, Ke Yan, Shouhong Ding, Weiran Huang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, General Knowledge, Incremental Learning, Novel Concepts

Continual learning aims to incrementally acquire new concepts in data streams while resisting forgetting previous knowledge. With the rise of powerful pre-trained models (PTMs), there is a growing interest in training incremental learning systems using these foundation models, rather than learning from scratch. Existing works often view PTMs as a strong initial point and directly apply parameter-efficient tuning (PET) in the first session for adapting to downstream tasks. In the following sessions, most methods freeze model parameters for tackling forgetting issues. However, applying PET directly to downstream data cannot fully explore the inherent knowledge in PTMs. Additionally, freezing the parameters in incremental sessions hinders models' plasticity to novel concepts not covered in the first session. To solve the above issues, we propose a Slow And Fast parameter-Efficient tuning (SAFE) framework. In particular, to inherit general knowledge from foundation models, we include a transfer loss function by measuring the correlation between the PTM and the PET-applied model. After calibrating in the first session, the slow efficient tuning parameters can capture more informative features, improving generalization to incoming classes. Moreover, to further incorporate novel concepts, we strike a balance between stability and plasticity by fixing slow efficient tuning parameters and continuously updating the fast ones. Specifically, a cross-classification loss with feature alignment is proposed to circumvent catastrophic forgetting. During inference, we introduce an entropy-based aggregation strategy to dynamically utilize the complementarity in the slow and fast learners. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our method by significantly surpassing the state-of-the-art.
Improving Domain Generalization in Self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation via Stabilized Adversarial Training
Authors: Yuanqi Yao, Gang Wu, Kui Jiang, Siao Liu, Jian Kuai, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Depth Estimation, Domain Generalization, Monocular Depth Estimation

Learning a self-supervised Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) model with great generalization remains significantly challenging. Despite the success of adversarial augmentation in the supervised learning generalization, naively incorporating it into self-supervised MDE models potentially causes over-regularization, suffering from severe performance degradation. In this paper, we conduct qualitative analysis and illuminate the main causes: (i) inherent sensitivity in the UNet-alike depth network and (ii) dual optimization conflict caused by over-regularization. To tackle these issues, we propose a general adversarial training framework, named Stabilized Conflict-optimization Adversarial Training (SCAT), integrating adversarial data augmentation into self-supervised MDE methods to achieve a balance between stability and generalization. Specifically, we devise an effective scaling depth network that tunes the coefficients of long skip connection and effectively stabilizes the training process. Then, we propose a conflict gradient surgery strategy, which progressively integrates the adversarial gradient and optimizes the model toward a conflict-free direction. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that SCAT can achieve state-of-the-art performance and significantly improve the generalization capability of existing self-supervised MDE methods.
Advanced computer vision for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from drone imagery
Authors: Robert Fonod, Haechan Cho, Hwasoo Yeo, Nikolas Geroliminis
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, geo-localization, Image Registration, Keypoint detection and image matching, Object Detection, Object Tracking, vehicle detection, Video Stabilization

This paper presents a framework for extracting georeferenced vehicle trajectories from high-altitude drone footage, addressing key challenges in urban traffic monitoring and limitations of traditional ground-based systems. We employ state-of-the-art computer vision and deep learning to create an end-to-end pipeline that enhances vehicle detection, tracking, and trajectory stabilization. Conducted in the Songdo International Business District, South Korea, the study used a multi-drone experiment over 20 intersections, capturing approximately 12TB of 4K video data over four days. We developed a novel track stabilization method that uses detected vehicle bounding boxes as exclusion masks during image registration, which, combined with advanced georeferencing techniques, accurately transforms vehicle coordinates into real-world geographical data. Additionally, our framework includes robust vehicle dimension estimation and detailed road segmentation for in-depth traffic analysis. The framework produced two high-quality datasets: the Songdo Traffic dataset, comprising nearly 1 million unique vehicle trajectories, and the Songdo Vision dataset, containing over 5,000 human-annotated frames with about 300,000 vehicle instances in four classes. Comparisons between drone-derived data and high-precision sensor data from an instrumented probe vehicle highlight the accuracy and consistency of our framework's extraction in dense urban settings. By publicly releasing these datasets and the pipeline source code, this work sets new benchmarks for data quality, reproducibility, and scalability in traffic research. Results demonstrate the potential of integrating drone technology with advanced computer vision for precise, cost-effective urban traffic monitoring, providing valuable resources for the research community to develop intelligent transportation systems and improve traffic management strategies.
Advancements and limitations of LLMs in replicating human color-word associations
Authors: Makoto Fukushima, Shusuke Eshita, Hiroshige Fukuhara
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm

Color-word associations play a fundamental role in human cognition and design applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have become widely available and have demonstrated intelligent behaviors in various benchmarks with natural conversation skills. However, their ability to replicate human color-word associations remains understudied. We compared multiple generations of LLMs (from GPT-3 to GPT-4o) against human color-word associations using data collected from over 10,000 Japanese participants, involving 17 colors and 80 words (10 word from eight categories) in Japanese. Our findings reveal a clear progression in LLM performance across generations, with GPT-4o achieving the highest accuracy in predicting the best voted word for each color and category. However, the highest median performance was approximately 50% even for GPT-4o with visual inputs (chance level of 10%). Moreover, we found performance variations across word categories and colors: while LLMs tended to excel in categories such as Rhythm and Landscape, they struggled with categories such as Emotions. Interestingly, color discrimination ability estimated from our color-word association data showed high correlation with human color discrimination patterns, consistent with previous studies. Thus, despite reasonable alignment in basic color discrimination, humans and LLMs still diverge systematically in the words they assign to those colors. Our study highlights both the advancements in LLM capabilities and their persistent limitations, raising the possibility of systematic differences in semantic memory structures between humans and LLMs in representing color-word associations.
Multi-modal biometric authentication: Leveraging shared layer architectures for enhanced security
Authors: Vatchala S, Yogesh C, Yeshwanth Govindarajan, Krithik Raja M, Vishal Pramav Amirtha Ganesan, Aashish Vinod A, Dharun Ramesh
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

In this study, we introduce a novel multi-modal biometric authentication system that integrates facial, vocal, and signature data to enhance security measures. Utilizing a combination of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), our model architecture uniquely incorporates dual shared layers alongside modality-specific enhancements for comprehensive feature extraction. The system undergoes rigorous training with a joint loss function, optimizing for accuracy across diverse biometric inputs. Feature-level fusion via Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and classification through Gradient Boosting Machines (GBM) further refine the authentication process. Our approach demonstrates significant improvements in authentication accuracy and robustness, paving the way for advanced secure identity verification solutions.
Deep Learning on 3D Semantic Segmentation: A Detailed Review
Authors: Thodoris Betsas, Andreas Georgopoulos, Anastasios Doulamis, Pierre Grussenmeyer
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Deep Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper an exhaustive review and comprehensive analysis of recent and former deep learning methods in 3D Semantic Segmentation (3DSS) is presented. In the related literature, the taxonomy scheme used for the classification of the 3DSS deep learning methods is ambiguous. Based on the taxonomy schemes of 9 existing review papers, a new taxonomy scheme of the 3DSS deep learning methods is proposed, aiming to standardize it and improve the comparability and clarity across related studies. Furthermore, an extensive overview of the available 3DSS indoor and outdoor datasets is provided along with their links. The core part of the review is the detailed presentation of recent and former 3DSS deep learning methods and their classification using the proposed taxonomy scheme along with their GitHub repositories. Additionally, a brief but informative analysis of the evaluation metrics and loss functions used in 3DSS is included. Finally, a fruitful discussion of the examined 3DSS methods and datasets, is presented to foster new research directions and applications in the field of 3DSS. Supplementary, to this review a GitHub repository is provided (https://github.com/thobet/Deep-Learning-on-3D-Semantic-Segmentation-a- Detailed-Review) including a quick classification of over 400 3DSS methods, using the proposed taxonomy scheme.