pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GhostNetV3: Exploring the Training Strategies for Compact Models
Authors: Zhenhua Liu, Zhiwei Hao, Kai Han, Yehui Tang, Yunhe Wang
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Compact neural networks are specially designed for applications on edge devices with faster inference speed yet modest performance. However, training strategies of compact models are borrowed from that of conventional models at present, which ignores their difference in model capacity and thus may impede the performance of compact models. In this paper, by systematically investigating the impact of different training ingredients, we introduce a strong training strategy for compact models. We find that the appropriate designs of re-parameterization and knowledge distillation are crucial for training high-performance compact models, while some commonly used data augmentations for training conventional models, such as Mixup and CutMix, lead to worse performance. Our experiments on ImageNet-1K dataset demonstrate that our specialized training strategy for compact models is applicable to various architectures, including GhostNetV2, MobileNetV2 and ShuffleNetV2. Specifically, equipped with our strategy, GhostNetV3 1.3$\times$ achieves a top-1 accuracy of 79.1% with only 269M FLOPs and a latency of 14.46ms on mobile devices, surpassing its ordinarily trained counterpart by a large margin. Moreover, our observation can also be extended to object detection scenarios. PyTorch code and checkpoints can be found at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones/tree/master/ghostnetv3_pytorch.
BAHOP: Similarity-based Basin Hopping for A fast hyper-parameter search in WSI classification
Authors: Jun Wang, Yu Mao, Yufei Cui, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, whole slide images

Pre-processing whole slide images (WSIs) can impact classification performance. Our study shows that using fixed hyper-parameters for pre-processing out-of-domain WSIs can significantly degrade performance. Therefore, it is critical to search domain-specific hyper-parameters during inference. However, searching for an optimal parameter set is time-consuming. To overcome this, we propose BAHOP, a novel Similarity-based Basin Hopping optimization for fast parameter tuning to enhance inference performance on out-of-domain data. The proposed BAHOP achieves 5\% to 30\% improvement in accuracy with $\times5$ times faster on average.
Deep Portrait Quality Assessment. A NTIRE 2024 Challenge Survey
Authors: Nicolas Chahine, Marcos V. Conde, Daniela Carfora, Gabriel Pacianotto, Benoit Pochon, Sira Ferradans, Radu Timofte
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Portrait Quality Assessment Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. This challenge aims to obtain an efficient deep neural network capable of estimating the perceptual quality of real portrait photos. The methods must generalize to diverse scenes and diverse lighting conditions (indoor, outdoor, low-light), movement, blur, and other challenging conditions. In the challenge, 140 participants registered, and 35 submitted results during the challenge period. The performance of the top 5 submissions is reviewed and provided here as a gauge for the current state-of-the-art in Portrait Quality Assessment.
Learning SO(3)-Invariant Semantic Correspondence via Local Shape Transform
Authors: Chunghyun Park, SeungWook Kim, Jaesik Park, Minsu Cho
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Decoder, Semantic correspondence

Establishing accurate 3D correspondences between shapes stands as a pivotal challenge with profound implications for computer vision and robotics. However, existing self-supervised methods for this problem assume perfect input shape alignment, restricting their real-world applicability. In this work, we introduce a novel self-supervised Rotation-Invariant 3D correspondence learner with Local Shape Transform, dubbed RIST, that learns to establish dense correspondences between shapes even under challenging intra-class variations and arbitrary orientations. Specifically, RIST learns to dynamically formulate an SO(3)-invariant local shape transform for each point, which maps the SO(3)-equivariant global shape descriptor of the input shape to a local shape descriptor. These local shape descriptors are provided as inputs to our decoder to facilitate point cloud self- and cross-reconstruction. Our proposed self-supervised training pipeline encourages semantically corresponding points from different shapes to be mapped to similar local shape descriptors, enabling RIST to establish dense point-wise correspondences. RIST demonstrates state-of-the-art performances on 3D part label transfer and semantic keypoint transfer given arbitrarily rotated point cloud pairs, outperforming existing methods by significant margins.
HybriMap: Hybrid Clues Utilization for Effective Vectorized HD Map Construction
Authors: Chi Zhang, Qi Song, Feifei Li, Yongquan Chen, Rui Huang
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00

Constructing vectorized high-definition maps from surround-view cameras has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the commonly employed multi-stage sequential workflow in prevailing approaches often leads to the loss of early-stage information, particularly in perspective-view features. Usually, such loss is observed as an instance missing or shape mismatching in the final birds-eye-view predictions. To address this concern, we propose a novel approach, namely \textbf{HybriMap}, which effectively exploits clues from hybrid features to ensure the delivery of valuable information. Specifically, we design the Dual Enhancement Module, to enable both explicit integration and implicit modification under the guidance of hybrid features. Additionally, the perspective keypoints are utilized as supervision, further directing the feature enhancement process. Extensive experiments conducted on existing benchmarks have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed approach.
Multi-target and multi-stage liver lesion segmentation and detection in multi-phase computed tomography scans
Authors: Abdullah F. Al-Battal, Soan T. M. Duong, Van Ha Tang, Quang Duc Tran, Steven Q. H. Truong, Chien Phan, Truong Q. Nguyen, Cheolhong An
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation

Multi-phase computed tomography (CT) scans use contrast agents to highlight different anatomical structures within the body to improve the probability of identifying and detecting anatomical structures of interest and abnormalities such as liver lesions. Yet, detecting these lesions remains a challenging task as these lesions vary significantly in their size, shape, texture, and contrast with respect to surrounding tissue. Therefore, radiologists need to have an extensive experience to be able to identify and detect these lesions. Segmentation-based neural networks can assist radiologists with this task. Current state-of-the-art lesion segmentation networks use the encoder-decoder design paradigm based on the UNet architecture where the multi-phase CT scan volume is fed to the network as a multi-channel input. Although this approach utilizes information from all the phases and outperform single-phase segmentation networks, we demonstrate that their performance is not optimal and can be further improved by incorporating the learning from models trained on each single-phase individually. Our approach comprises three stages. The first stage identifies the regions within the liver where there might be lesions at three different scales (4, 8, and 16 mm). The second stage includes the main segmentation model trained using all the phases as well as a segmentation model trained on each of the phases individually. The third stage uses the multi-phase CT volumes together with the predictions from each of the segmentation models to generate the final segmentation map. Overall, our approach improves relative liver lesion segmentation performance by 1.6% while reducing performance variability across subjects by 8% when compared to the current state-of-the-art models.
REACTO: Reconstructing Articulated Objects from a Single Video
Authors: Chaoyue Song, Jiacheng Wei, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Guosheng Lin, Fayao Liu
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

In this paper, we address the challenge of reconstructing general articulated 3D objects from a single video. Existing works employing dynamic neural radiance fields have advanced the modeling of articulated objects like humans and animals from videos, but face challenges with piece-wise rigid general articulated objects due to limitations in their deformation models. To tackle this, we propose Quasi-Rigid Blend Skinning, a novel deformation model that enhances the rigidity of each part while maintaining flexible deformation of the joints. Our primary insight combines three distinct approaches: 1) an enhanced bone rigging system for improved component modeling, 2) the use of quasi-sparse skinning weights to boost part rigidity and reconstruction fidelity, and 3) the application of geodesic point assignment for precise motion and seamless deformation. Our method outperforms previous works in producing higher-fidelity 3D reconstructions of general articulated objects, as demonstrated on both real and synthetic datasets. Project page: https://chaoyuesong.github.io/REACTO.
GeoReF: Geometric Alignment Across Shape Variation for Category-level Object Pose Refinement
Authors: Linfang Zheng, Tze Ho Elden Tse, Chen Wang, Yinghan Sun, Hua Chen, Ales Leonardis, Wei zhang
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object, Pose Estimation

Object pose refinement is essential for robust object pose estimation. Previous work has made significant progress towards instance-level object pose refinement. Yet, category-level pose refinement is a more challenging problem due to large shape variations within a category and the discrepancies between the target object and the shape prior. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel architecture for category-level object pose refinement. Our approach integrates an HS-layer and learnable affine transformations, which aims to enhance the extraction and alignment of geometric information. Additionally, we introduce a cross-cloud transformation mechanism that efficiently merges diverse data sources. Finally, we push the limits of our model by incorporating the shape prior information for translation and size error prediction. We conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Through extensive quantitative experiments, we demonstrate significant improvement over the baseline method by a large margin across all metrics.
Fact :Teaching MLLMs with Faithful, Concise and Transferable Rationales
Authors: Minghe Gao, Shuang Chen, Liang Pang, Yuan YAO, Jisheng Dang, Wenqiao Zhang, Juncheng Li, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

The remarkable performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has unequivocally demonstrated their proficient understanding capabilities in handling a wide array of visual tasks. Nevertheless, the opaque nature of their black-box reasoning processes persists as an enigma, rendering them uninterpretable and struggling with hallucination. Their ability to execute intricate compositional reasoning tasks is also constrained, culminating in a stagnation of learning progression for these models. In this work, we introduce Fact, a novel paradigm designed to generate multimodal rationales that are faithful, concise, and transferable for teaching MLLMs. This paradigm utilizes verifiable visual programming to generate executable code guaranteeing faithfulness and precision. Subsequently, through a series of operations including pruning, merging, and bridging, the rationale enhances its conciseness. Furthermore, we filter rationales that can be transferred to end-to-end paradigms from programming paradigms to guarantee transferability. Empirical evidence from experiments demonstrates the superiority of our method across models of varying parameter sizes, significantly enhancing their compositional reasoning and generalization ability. Our approach also reduces hallucinations owing to its high correlation between images and text.
D-Aug: Enhancing Data Augmentation for Dynamic LiDAR Scenes
Authors: Jiaxing Zhao, Peng Zheng, Rui Ma
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Data Augmentation

Creating large LiDAR datasets with pixel-level labeling poses significant challenges. While numerous data augmentation methods have been developed to reduce the reliance on manual labeling, these methods predominantly focus on static scenes and they overlook the importance of data augmentation for dynamic scenes, which is critical for autonomous driving. To address this issue, we propose D-Aug, a LiDAR data augmentation method tailored for augmenting dynamic scenes. D-Aug extracts objects and inserts them into dynamic scenes, considering the continuity of these objects across consecutive frames. For seamless insertion into dynamic scenes, we propose a reference-guided method that involves dynamic collision detection and rotation alignment. Additionally, we present a pixel-level road identification strategy to efficiently determine suitable insertion positions. We validated our method using the nuScenes dataset with various 3D detection and tracking methods. Comparative experiments demonstrate the superiority of D-Aug.
TiNO-Edit: Timestep and Noise Optimization for Robust Diffusion-Based Image Editing
Authors: Sherry X. Chen, Yaron Vaxman, Elad Ben Baruch, David Asulin, Aviad Moreshet, Kuo-Chin Lien, Misha Sra, Pradeep Sen
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Despite many attempts to leverage pre-trained text-to-image models (T2I) like Stable Diffusion (SD) for controllable image editing, producing good predictable results remains a challenge. Previous approaches have focused on either fine-tuning pre-trained T2I models on specific datasets to generate certain kinds of images (e.g., with a specific object or person), or on optimizing the weights, text prompts, and/or learning features for each input image in an attempt to coax the image generator to produce the desired result. However, these approaches all have shortcomings and fail to produce good results in a predictable and controllable manner. To address this problem, we present TiNO-Edit, an SD-based method that focuses on optimizing the noise patterns and diffusion timesteps during editing, something previously unexplored in the literature. With this simple change, we are able to generate results that both better align with the original images and reflect the desired result. Furthermore, we propose a set of new loss functions that operate in the latent domain of SD, greatly speeding up the optimization when compared to prior approaches, which operate in the pixel domain. Our method can be easily applied to variations of SD including Textual Inversion and DreamBooth that encode new concepts and incorporate them into the edited results. We present a host of image-editing capabilities enabled by our approach. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/SherryXTChen/TiNO-Edit.
FastFace: Fast-converging Scheduler for Large-scale Face Recognition Training with One GPU
Authors: Xueyuan Gong, Zhiquan Liu, Yain-Whar Si, Xiaochen Yuan, Ke Wang, Xiaoxiang Liu, Cong Lin, Xinyuan Zhang
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, GPU, Scheduling

Computing power has evolved into a foundational and indispensable resource in the area of deep learning, particularly in tasks such as Face Recognition (FR) model training on large-scale datasets, where multiple GPUs are often a necessity. Recognizing this challenge, some FR methods have started exploring ways to compress the fully-connected layer in FR models. Unlike other approaches, our observations reveal that without prompt scheduling of the learning rate (LR) during FR model training, the loss curve tends to exhibit numerous stationary subsequences. To address this issue, we introduce a novel LR scheduler leveraging Exponential Moving Average (EMA) and Haar Convolutional Kernel (HCK) to eliminate stationary subsequences, resulting in a significant reduction in converging time. However, the proposed scheduler incurs a considerable computational overhead due to its time complexity. To overcome this limitation, we propose FastFace, a fast-converging scheduler with negligible time complexity, i.e. O(1) per iteration, during training. In practice, FastFace is able to accelerate FR model training to a quarter of its original time without sacrificing more than 1% accuracy, making large-scale FR training feasible even with just one single GPU in terms of both time and space complexity. Extensive experiments validate the efficiency and effectiveness of FastFace. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amoonfana/FastFace
CorrNet+: Sign Language Recognition and Translation via Spatial-Temporal Correlation
Authors: Lianyu Hu, Wei Feng, Liqing Gao, Zekang Liu, Liang Wan
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation, Sign Language Recognition, Sign Language Translation, Translation

In sign language, the conveyance of human body trajectories predominantly relies upon the coordinated movements of hands and facial expressions across successive frames. Despite the recent advancements of sign language understanding methods, they often solely focus on individual frames, inevitably overlooking the inter-frame correlations that are essential for effectively modeling human body trajectories. To address this limitation, this paper introduces a spatial-temporal correlation network, denoted as CorrNet+, which explicitly identifies body trajectories across multiple frames. In specific, CorrNet+ employs a correlation module and an identification module to build human body trajectories. Afterwards, a temporal attention module is followed to adaptively evaluate the contributions of different frames. The resultant features offer a holistic perspective on human body movements, facilitating a deeper understanding of sign language. As a unified model, CorrNet+ achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two extensive sign language understanding tasks, including continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) and sign language translation (SLT). Especially, CorrNet+ surpasses previous methods equipped with resource-intensive pose-estimation networks or pre-extracted heatmaps for hand and facial feature extraction. Compared with CorrNet, CorrNet+ achieves a significant performance boost across all benchmarks while halving the computational overhead. A comprehensive comparison with previous spatial-temporal reasoning methods verifies the superiority of CorrNet+. Code is available at https://github.com/hulianyuyy/CorrNet_Plus.
LADDER: An Efficient Framework for Video Frame Interpolation
Authors: Tong Shen, Dong Li, Ziheng Gao, Lu Tian, Emad Barsoum
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Motion Generation, Video Frame Interpolation

Video Frame Interpolation (VFI) is a crucial technique in various applications such as slow-motion generation, frame rate conversion, video frame restoration etc. This paper introduces an efficient video frame interpolation framework that aims to strike a favorable balance between efficiency and quality. Our framework follows a general paradigm consisting of a flow estimator and a refinement module, while incorporating carefully designed components. First of all, we adopt depth-wise convolution with large kernels in the flow estimator that simultaneously reduces the parameters and enhances the receptive field for encoding rich context and handling complex motion. Secondly, diverging from a common design for the refinement module with a UNet-structure (encoder-decoder structure), which we find redundant, our decoder-only refinement module directly enhances the result from coarse to fine features, offering a more efficient process. In addition, to address the challenge of handling high-definition frames, we also introduce an innovative HD-aware augmentation strategy during training, leading to consistent enhancement on HD images. Extensive experiments are conducted on diverse datasets, Vimeo90K, UCF101, Xiph and SNU-FILM. The results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with clear improvement while requiring much less FLOPs and parameters, reaching to a better spot for balancing efficiency and quality.
Object Remover Performance Evaluation Methods using Class-wise Object Removal Images
Authors: Changsuk Oh, Dongseok Shim, Taekbeom Lee, H. Jin Kim
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting, Object

Object removal refers to the process of erasing designated objects from an image while preserving the overall appearance, and it is one area where image inpainting is widely used in real-world applications. The performance of an object remover is quantitatively evaluated by measuring the quality of object removal results, similar to how the performance of an image inpainter is gauged. Current works reporting quantitative performance evaluations utilize original images as references. In this letter, to validate the current evaluation methods cannot properly evaluate the performance of an object remover, we create a dataset with object removal ground truth and compare the evaluations made by the current methods using original images to those utilizing object removal ground truth images. The disparities between two evaluation sets validate that the current methods are not suitable for measuring the performance of an object remover. Additionally, we propose new evaluation methods tailored to gauge the performance of an object remover. The proposed methods evaluate the performance through class-wise object removal results and utilize images without the target class objects as a comparison set. We confirm that the proposed methods can make judgments consistent with human evaluators in the COCO dataset, and that they can produce measurements aligning with those using object removal ground truth in the self-acquired dataset.
Synthesizing Realistic Data for Table Recognition
Authors: Qiyu Hou, Jun Wang, Meixuan Qiao, Lujun Tian
Date: 2024-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Table annotation, Table Recognition

To overcome the limitations and challenges of current automatic table data annotation methods and random table data synthesis approaches, we propose a novel method for synthesizing annotation data specifically designed for table recognition. This method utilizes the structure and content of existing complex tables, facilitating the efficient creation of tables that closely replicate the authentic styles found in the target domain. By leveraging the actual structure and content of tables from Chinese financial announcements, we have developed the first extensive table annotation dataset in this domain. We used this dataset to train several recent deep learning-based end-to-end table recognition models. Additionally, we have established the inaugural benchmark for real-world complex tables in the Chinese financial announcement domain, using it to assess the performance of models trained on our synthetic data, thereby effectively validating our method's practicality and effectiveness. Furthermore, we applied our synthesis method to augment the FinTabNet dataset, extracted from English financial announcements, by increasing the proportion of tables with multiple spanning cells to introduce greater complexity. Our experiments show that models trained on this augmented dataset achieve comprehensive improvements in performance, especially in the recognition of tables with multiple spanning cells.