pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Semantic Token Reweighting for Interpretable and Controllable Text Embeddings in CLIP
Authors: Eunji Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Simyung Chang, Sungroh Yoon
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentence

A text encoder within Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP plays a crucial role in translating textual input into an embedding space shared with images, thereby facilitating the interpretative analysis of vision tasks through natural language. Despite the varying significance of different textual elements within a sentence depending on the context, efforts to account for variation of importance in constructing text embeddings have been lacking. We propose a framework of Semantic Token Reweighting to build Interpretable text embeddings (SToRI), which incorporates controllability as well. SToRI refines the text encoding process in CLIP by differentially weighting semantic elements based on contextual importance, enabling finer control over emphasis responsive to data-driven insights and user preferences. The efficacy of SToRI is demonstrated through comprehensive experiments on few-shot image classification and image retrieval tailored to user preferences.
Aligned Divergent Pathways for Omni-Domain Generalized Person Re-Identification
Authors: Eugene P. W. Ang, Shan Lin, Alex C. Kot
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Person Re-Identification, Single-Source Domain Generalization

Person Re-identification (Person ReID) has advanced significantly in fully supervised and domain generalized Person R e ID. However, methods developed for one task domain transfer poorly to the other. An ideal Person ReID method should be effective regardless of the number of domains involved in training or testing. Furthermore, given training data from the target domain, it should perform at least as well as state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully supervised Person ReID methods. We call this paradigm Omni-Domain Generalization Person ReID, referred to as ODG-ReID, and propose a way to achieve this by expanding compatible backbone architectures into multiple diverse pathways. Our method, Aligned Divergent Pathways (ADP), first converts a base architecture into a multi-branch structure by copying the tail of the original backbone. We design our module Dynamic Max-Deviance Adaptive Instance Normalization (DyMAIN) that encourages learning of generalized features that are robust to omni-domain directions and apply DyMAIN to the branches of ADP. Our proposed Phased Mixture-of-Cosines (PMoC) coordinates a mix of stable and turbulent learning rate schedules among branches for further diversified learning. Finally, we realign the feature space between branches with our proposed Dimensional Consistency Metric Loss (DCML). ADP outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) results for multi-source domain generalization and supervised ReID within the same domain. Furthermore, our method demonstrates improvement on a wide range of single-source domain generalization benchmarks, achieving Omni-Domain Generalization over Person ReID tasks.
Diverse Deep Feature Ensemble Learning for Omni-Domain Generalized Person Re-identification
Authors: Eugene P. W. Ang, Shan Lin, Alex C. Kot
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Ensemble Learning, Person Re-Identification

Person Re-identification (Person ReID) has progressed to a level where single-domain supervised Person ReID performance has saturated. However, such methods experience a significant drop in performance when trained and tested across different datasets, motivating the development of domain generalization techniques. However, our research reveals that domain generalization methods significantly underperform single-domain supervised methods on single dataset benchmarks. An ideal Person ReID method should be effective regardless of the number of domains involved, and when test domain data is available for training it should perform as well as state-of-the-art (SOTA) fully supervised methods. This is a paradigm that we call Omni-Domain Generalization Person ReID (ODG-ReID). We propose a way to achieve ODG-ReID by creating deep feature diversity with self-ensembles. Our method, Diverse Deep Feature Ensemble Learning (D2FEL), deploys unique instance normalization patterns that generate multiple diverse views and recombines these views into a compact encoding. To the best of our knowledge, our work is one of few to consider omni-domain generalization in Person ReID, and we advance the study of applying feature ensembles in Person ReID. D2FEL significantly improves and matches the SOTA performance for major domain generalization and single-domain supervised benchmarks.
A Unified Deep Semantic Expansion Framework for Domain-Generalized Person Re-identification
Authors: Eugene P. W. Ang, Shan Lin, Alex C. Kot
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Retrieval, Person Re-Identification

Supervised Person Re-identification (Person ReID) methods have achieved excellent performance when training and testing within one camera network. However, they usually suffer from considerable performance degradation when applied to different camera systems. In recent years, many Domain Adaptation Person ReID methods have been proposed, achieving impressive performance without requiring labeled data from the target domain. However, these approaches still need the unlabeled data of the target domain during the training process, making them impractical in many real-world scenarios. Our work focuses on the more practical Domain Generalized Person Re-identification (DG-ReID) problem. Given one or more source domains, it aims to learn a generalized model that can be applied to unseen target domains. One promising research direction in DG-ReID is the use of implicit deep semantic feature expansion, and our previous method, Domain Embedding Expansion (DEX), is one such example that achieves powerful results in DG-ReID. However, in this work we show that DEX and other similar implicit deep semantic feature expansion methods, due to limitations in their proposed loss function, fail to reach their full potential on large evaluation benchmarks as they have a tendency to saturate too early. Leveraging on this analysis, we propose Unified Deep Semantic Expansion, our novel framework that unifies implicit and explicit semantic feature expansion techniques in a single framework to mitigate this early over-fitting and achieve a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) in all DG-ReID benchmarks. Further, we apply our method on more general image retrieval tasks, also surpassing the current SOTA in all of these benchmarks by wide margins.
HorGait: A Hybrid Model for Accurate Gait Recognition in LiDAR Point Cloud Planar Projections
Authors: Jiaxing Hao, Yanxi Wang, Zhigang Chang, Hongmin Gao, Zihao Cheng, Chen Wu, Xin Zhao, Peiye Fang, Rachmat Muwardi
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition

Gait recognition is a remote biometric technology that utilizes the dynamic characteristics of human movement to identify individuals even under various extreme lighting conditions. Due to the limitation in spatial perception capability inherent in 2D gait representations, LiDAR can directly capture 3D gait features and represent them as point clouds, reducing environmental and lighting interference in recognition while significantly advancing privacy protection. For complex 3D representations, shallow networks fail to achieve accurate recognition, making vision Transformers the foremost prevalent method. However, the prevalence of dumb patches has limited the widespread use of Transformer architecture in gait recognition. This paper proposes a method named HorGait, which utilizes a hybrid model with a Transformer architecture for gait recognition on the planar projection of 3D point clouds from LiDAR. Specifically, it employs a hybrid model structure called LHM Block to achieve input adaptation, long-range, and high-order spatial interaction of the Transformer architecture. Additionally, it uses large convolutional kernel CNNs to segment the input representation, replacing attention windows to reduce dumb patches. We conducted extensive experiments, and the results show that HorGait achieves state-of-the-art performance among Transformer architecture methods on the SUSTech1K dataset, verifying that the hybrid model can complete the full Transformer process and perform better in point cloud planar projection. The outstanding performance of HorGait offers new insights for the future application of the Transformer architecture in gait recognition.
Human Stone Toolmaking Action Grammar (HSTAG): A Challenging Benchmark for Fine-grained Motor Behavior Recognition
Authors: Cheng Liu, Xuyang Yan, Zekun Zhang, Cheng Ding, Tianhao Zhao, Shaya Jannati, Cynthia Martinez, Dietrich Stout
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Diversity

Action recognition has witnessed the development of a growing number of novel algorithms and datasets in the past decade. However, the majority of public benchmarks were constructed around activities of daily living and annotated at a rather coarse-grained level, which lacks diversity in domain-specific datasets, especially for rarely seen domains. In this paper, we introduced Human Stone Toolmaking Action Grammar (HSTAG), a meticulously annotated video dataset showcasing previously undocumented stone toolmaking behaviors, which can be used for investigating the applications of advanced artificial intelligence techniques in understanding a rapid succession of complex interactions between two hand-held objects. HSTAG consists of 18,739 video clips that record 4.5 hours of experts' activities in stone toolmaking. Its unique features include (i) brief action durations and frequent transitions, mirroring the rapid changes inherent in many motor behaviors; (ii) multiple angles of view and switches among multiple tools, increasing intra-class variability; (iii) unbalanced class distributions and high similarity among different action sequences, adding difficulty in capturing distinct patterns for each action. Several mainstream action recognition models are used to conduct experimental analysis, which showcases the challenges and uniqueness of HSTAG https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/1697.
Optimizing YOLO Architectures for Optimal Road Damage Detection and Classification: A Comparative Study from YOLOv7 to YOLOv10
Authors: Vung Pham, Lan Dong Thi Ngoc, Duy-Linh Bui
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Road Damage Detection

Maintaining roadway infrastructure is essential for ensuring a safe, efficient, and sustainable transportation system. However, manual data collection for detecting road damage is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and poses safety risks. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly deep learning, offer a promising solution for automating this process using road images. This paper presents a comprehensive workflow for road damage detection using deep learning models, focusing on optimizations for inference speed while preserving detection accuracy. Specifically, to accommodate hardware limitations, large images are cropped, and lightweight models are utilized. Additionally, an external pothole dataset is incorporated to enhance the detection of this underrepresented damage class. The proposed approach employs multiple model architectures, including a custom YOLOv7 model with Coordinate Attention layers and a Tiny YOLOv7 model, which are trained and combined to maximize detection performance. The models are further reparameterized to optimize inference efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble of the custom YOLOv7 model with three Coordinate Attention layers and the default Tiny YOLOv7 model achieves an F1 score of 0.7027 with an inference speed of 0.0547 seconds per image. The complete pipeline, including data preprocessing, model training, and inference scripts, is publicly available on the project's GitHub repository, enabling reproducibility and facilitating further research.
Are We Ready for Real-Time LiDAR Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving?
Authors: Samir Abou Haidar, Alexandre Chariot, Mehdi Darouich, Cyril Joly, Jean-Emmanuel Deschaud
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Autonomous Driving, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Within a perception framework for autonomous mobile and robotic systems, semantic analysis of 3D point clouds typically generated by LiDARs is key to numerous applications, such as object detection and recognition, and scene reconstruction. Scene semantic segmentation can be achieved by directly integrating 3D spatial data with specialized deep neural networks. Although this type of data provides rich geometric information regarding the surrounding environment, it also presents numerous challenges: its unstructured and sparse nature, its unpredictable size, and its demanding computational requirements. These characteristics hinder the real-time semantic analysis, particularly on resource-constrained hardware architectures that constitute the main computational components of numerous robotic applications. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate various 3D semantic segmentation methodologies and analyze their performance and capabilities for resource-constrained inference on embedded NVIDIA Jetson platforms. We evaluate them for a fair comparison through a standardized training protocol and data augmentations, providing benchmark results on the Jetson AGX Orin and AGX Xavier series for two large-scale outdoor datasets: SemanticKITTI and nuScenes.
Time Traveling to Defend Against Adversarial Example Attacks in Image Classification
Authors: Anthony Etim, Jakub Szefer
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Adversarial example attacks have emerged as a critical threat to machine learning. Adversarial attacks in image classification abuse various, minor modifications to the image that confuse the image classification neural network -- while the image still remains recognizable to humans. One important domain where the attacks have been applied is in the automotive setting with traffic sign classification. Researchers have demonstrated that adding stickers, shining light, or adding shadows are all different means to make machine learning inference algorithms mis-classify the traffic signs. This can cause potentially dangerous situations as a stop sign is recognized as a speed limit sign causing vehicles to ignore it and potentially leading to accidents. To address these attacks, this work focuses on enhancing defenses against such adversarial attacks. This work shifts the advantage to the user by introducing the idea of leveraging historical images and majority voting. While the attacker modifies a traffic sign that is currently being processed by the victim's machine learning inference, the victim can gain advantage by examining past images of the same traffic sign. This work introduces the notion of ''time traveling'' and uses historical Street View images accessible to anybody to perform inference on different, past versions of the same traffic sign. In the evaluation, the proposed defense has 100% effectiveness against latest adversarial example attack on traffic sign classification algorithm.
Neural Architecture Search of Hybrid Models for NPU-CIM Heterogeneous AR/VR Devices
Authors: Yiwei Zhao, Ziyun Li, Win-San Khwa, Xiaoyu Sun, Sai Qian Zhang, Syed Shakib Sarwar, Kleber Hugo Stangherlin, Yi-Lun Lu, Jorge Tomas Gomez, Jae-sun Seo, Phillip B. Gibbons, Barbara De Salvo, Chiao Liu
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Low-Latency and Low-Power Edge AI is essential for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications. Recent advances show that hybrid models, combining convolution layers (CNN) and transformers (ViT), often achieve superior accuracy/performance tradeoff on various computer vision and machine learning (ML) tasks. However, hybrid ML models can pose system challenges for latency and energy-efficiency due to their diverse nature in dataflow and memory access patterns. In this work, we leverage the architecture heterogeneity from Neural Processing Units (NPU) and Compute-In-Memory (CIM) and perform diverse execution schemas to efficiently execute these hybrid models. We also introduce H4H-NAS, a Neural Architecture Search framework to design efficient hybrid CNN/ViT models for heterogeneous edge systems with both NPU and CIM. Our H4H-NAS approach is powered by a performance estimator built with NPU performance results measured on real silicon, and CIM performance based on industry IPs. H4H-NAS searches hybrid CNN/ViT models with fine granularity and achieves significant (up to 1.34%) top-1 accuracy improvement on ImageNet dataset. Moreover, results from our Algo/HW co-design reveal up to 56.08% overall latency and 41.72% energy improvements by introducing such heterogeneous computing over baseline solutions. The framework guides the design of hybrid network architectures and system architectures of NPU+CIM heterogeneous systems.
Music Genre Classification using Large Language Models
Authors: Mohamed El Amine Meguenani, Alceu de Souza Britto Jr., Alessandro Lameiras Koerich
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Genre classification, Information Retrieval, Music Genre Classification, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This paper exploits the zero-shot capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) for music genre classification. The proposed approach splits audio signals into 20 ms chunks and processes them through convolutional feature encoders, a transformer encoder, and additional layers for coding audio units and generating feature vectors. The extracted feature vectors are used to train a classification head. During inference, predictions on individual chunks are aggregated for a final genre classification. We conducted a comprehensive comparison of LLMs, including WavLM, HuBERT, and wav2vec 2.0, with traditional deep learning architectures like 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and the audio spectrogram transformer (AST). Our findings demonstrate the superior performance of the AST model, achieving an overall accuracy of 85.5%, surpassing all other models evaluated. These results highlight the potential of LLMs and transformer-based architectures for advancing music information retrieval tasks, even in zero-shot scenarios.
Meissonic: Revitalizing Masked Generative Transformers for Efficient High-Resolution Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Jinbin Bai, Tian Ye, Wei Chow, Enxin Song, Qing-Guo Chen, Xiangtai Li, Zhen Dong, Lei Zhu, Shuicheng Yan
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Compression, Image Generation

We present Meissonic, which elevates non-autoregressive masked image modeling (MIM) text-to-image to a level comparable with state-of-the-art diffusion models like SDXL. By incorporating a comprehensive suite of architectural innovations, advanced positional encoding strategies, and optimized sampling conditions, Meissonic substantially improves MIM's performance and efficiency. Additionally, we leverage high-quality training data, integrate micro-conditions informed by human preference scores, and employ feature compression layers to further enhance image fidelity and resolution. Our model not only matches but often exceeds the performance of existing models like SDXL in generating high-quality, high-resolution images. Extensive experiments validate Meissonic's capabilities, demonstrating its potential as a new standard in text-to-image synthesis. We release a model checkpoint capable of producing $1024 \times 1024$ resolution images.
In Search of Forgotten Domain Generalization
Authors: Prasanna Mayilvahanan, Roland S. Zimmermann, Thaddäus Wiedemer, Evgenia Rusak, Attila Juhos, Matthias Bethge, Wieland Brendel
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

Out-of-Domain (OOD) generalization is the ability of a model trained on one or more domains to generalize to unseen domains. In the ImageNet era of computer vision, evaluation sets for measuring a model's OOD performance were designed to be strictly OOD with respect to style. However, the emergence of foundation models and expansive web-scale datasets has obfuscated this evaluation process, as datasets cover a broad range of domains and risk test domain contamination. In search of the forgotten domain generalization, we create large-scale datasets subsampled from LAION -- LAION-Natural and LAION-Rendition -- that are strictly OOD to corresponding ImageNet and DomainNet test sets in terms of style. Training CLIP models on these datasets reveals that a significant portion of their performance is explained by in-domain examples. This indicates that the OOD generalization challenges from the ImageNet era still prevail and that training on web-scale data merely creates the illusion of OOD generalization. Furthermore, through a systematic exploration of combining natural and rendition datasets in varying proportions, we identify optimal mixing ratios for model generalization across these domains. Our datasets and results re-enable meaningful assessment of OOD robustness at scale -- a crucial prerequisite for improving model robustness.
Neural Material Adaptor for Visual Grounding of Intrinsic Dynamics
Authors: Junyi Cao, Shanyan Guan, Yanhao Ge, Wei Li, Xiaokang Yang, Chao Ma
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Grounding

While humans effortlessly discern intrinsic dynamics and adapt to new scenarios, modern AI systems often struggle. Current methods for visual grounding of dynamics either use pure neural-network-based simulators (black box), which may violate physical laws, or traditional physical simulators (white box), which rely on expert-defined equations that may not fully capture actual dynamics. We propose the Neural Material Adaptor (NeuMA), which integrates existing physical laws with learned corrections, facilitating accurate learning of actual dynamics while maintaining the generalizability and interpretability of physical priors. Additionally, we propose Particle-GS, a particle-driven 3D Gaussian Splatting variant that bridges simulation and observed images, allowing back-propagate image gradients to optimize the simulator. Comprehensive experiments on various dynamics in terms of grounded particle accuracy, dynamic rendering quality, and generalization ability demonstrate that NeuMA can accurately capture intrinsic dynamics.
Linear Convergence of Diffusion Models Under the Manifold Hypothesis
Authors: Peter Potaptchik, Iskander Azangulov, George Deligiannidis
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Score-matching generative models have proven successful at sampling from complex high-dimensional data distributions. In many applications, this distribution is believed to concentrate on a much lower $d$-dimensional manifold embedded into $D$-dimensional space; this is known as the manifold hypothesis. The current best-known convergence guarantees are either linear in $D$ or polynomial (superlinear) in $d$. The latter exploits a novel integration scheme for the backward SDE. We take the best of both worlds and show that the number of steps diffusion models require in order to converge in Kullback-Leibler~(KL) divergence is linear (up to logarithmic terms) in the intrinsic dimension $d$. Moreover, we show that this linear dependency is sharp.