pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dispel Darkness for Better Fusion: A Controllable Visual Enhancer based on Cross-modal Conditional Adversarial Learning
Authors: Hao Zhang, Linfeng Tang, Xinyu Xiang, Xuhui Zuo, Jiayi Ma
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

    We propose a controllable visual enhancer named DDBF which is based on cross-modal conditional adversarial learning and aims to dispel darkness and achieve better visible and infrared modalities fusion. Specifically a guided restoration module (GRM) is firstly designed to enhance weakened information in the low-light visible modality. The GRM utilizes the light-invariant high-contrast characteristics of the infrared modality as the central target distribution and constructs a multi-level conditional adversarial sample set to enable continuous controlled brightness enhancement of visible images. Then we develop an information fusion module (IFM) to integrate the advantageous features of the enhanced visible image and the infrared image. Thanks to customized explicit information preservation and hue fidelity constraints the IFM produces visually pleasing results with rich textures significant contrast and vivid colors. The brightened visible image and the final fused image compose the dual output of our DDBF to meet the diverse visual preferences of users. We evaluate DDBF on the public datasets achieving state-of-the-art performances of low-light enhancement and information integration that is available for both day and night scenarios. The experiments also demonstrate that our DDBF is effective in improving decision accuracy for object detection and semantic segmentation. Moreover we offer a user-friendly interface for the convenient application of our model. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/HaoZhang1018/DDBF.
Improving Unsupervised Hierarchical Representation with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ruyi An, Yewen Li, Xu He, Pengjie Gu, Mengchen Zhao, Dong Li, Jianye Hao, Chaojie Wang, Bo An, Mingyuan Zhou
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

    Learning representations to capture the very fundamental understanding of the world is a key challenge in machine learning. The hierarchical structure of explanatory factors hidden in data is such a general representation and could be potentially achieved with a hierarchical VAE. However training a hierarchical VAE always suffers from the "posterior collapse" where the data information is hard to propagate to the higher-level latent variables hence resulting in a bad hierarchical representation. To address this issue we first analyze the shortcomings of existing methods for mitigating the "posterior collapse" from an information theory perspective then highlight the necessity of regularization for explicitly propagating data information to higher-level latent variables while maintaining the dependency between different levels. This naturally leads to formulating the inference of the hierarchical latent representation as a sequential decision process which could benefit from applying reinforcement learning (RL). Aligning RL's objective with the regularization we first introduce a "skip-generative path" to acquire a reward for evaluating the information content of an inferred latent representation and then the developed Q-value function based on it could have a consistent optimization direction of the regularization. Finally policy gradient one of the typical RL methods is employed to train a hierarchical VAE without introducing a gradient estimator. Experimental results firmly support our analysis and demonstrate that our proposed method effectively mitigates the "posterior collapse" issue learns an informative hierarchy acquires explainable latent representations and significantly outperforms other hierarchical VAE-based methods in downstream tasks.
Affine Equivariant Networks Based on Differential Invariants
Authors: Yikang Li, Yeqing Qiu, Yuxuan Chen, Lingshen He, Zhouchen Lin
Date: 2024-01-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

    Convolutional neural networks benefit from translation equivariance achieving tremendous success. Equivariant networks further extend this property to other transformation groups. However most existing methods require discretization or sampling of groups leading to increased model sizes for larger groups such as the affine group. In this paper we build affine equivariant networks based on differential invariants from the viewpoint of symmetric PDEs without discretizing or sampling the group. To address the division-by-zero issue arising from fractional differential invariants of the affine group we construct a new kind of affine invariants by normalizing polynomial relative differential invariants to replace classical differential invariants. For further flexibility we design an equivariant layer which can be directly integrated into convolutional networks of various architectures. Moreover our framework for the affine group is also applicable to its continuous subgroups. We implement equivariant networks for the scale group the rotation-scale group and the affine group. Numerical experiments demonstrate the outstanding performance of our framework across classification tasks involving transformations of these groups. Remarkably under the out-of-distribution setting our model achieves a 3.37% improvement in accuracy over the main counterpart affConv on the affNIST dataset.
EMERGE: Integrating RAG for Improved Multimodal EHR Predictive Modeling
Authors: Yinghao Zhu, Changyu Ren, Zixiang Wang, Xiaochen Zheng, Shiyun Xie, Junlan Feng, Xi Zhu, Zhoujun Li, Liantao Ma, Chengwei Pan
Date: 2024-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Time Series, Triplet

The integration of multimodal Electronic Health Records (EHR) data has notably advanced clinical predictive capabilities. However, current models that utilize clinical notes and multivariate time-series EHR data often lack the necessary medical context for precise clinical tasks. Previous methods using knowledge graphs (KGs) primarily focus on structured knowledge extraction. To address this, we propose EMERGE, a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) driven framework aimed at enhancing multimodal EHR predictive modeling. Our approach extracts entities from both time-series data and clinical notes by prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) and aligns them with professional PrimeKG to ensure consistency. Beyond triplet relationships, we include entities' definitions and descriptions to provide richer semantics. The extracted knowledge is then used to generate task-relevant summaries of patients' health statuses. These summaries are fused with other modalities utilizing an adaptive multimodal fusion network with cross-attention. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets for in-hospital mortality and 30-day readmission tasks demonstrate the superior performance of the EMERGE framework compared to baseline models. Comprehensive ablation studies and analyses underscore the efficacy of each designed module and the framework's robustness to data sparsity. EMERGE significantly enhances the use of multimodal EHR data in healthcare, bridging the gap with nuanced medical contexts crucial for informed clinical predictions.
OpenDataVal: a Unified Benchmark for Data Valuation
Authors: Kevin Fu Jiang, Weixin Liang, James Zou, Yongchan Kwon
Date: 2023-06-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Benchmarking, Data Valuation

Assessing the quality and impact of individual data points is critical for improving model performance and mitigating undesirable biases within the training dataset. Several data valuation algorithms have been proposed to quantify data quality, however, there lacks a systemic and standardized benchmarking system for data valuation. In this paper, we introduce OpenDataVal, an easy-to-use and unified benchmark framework that empowers researchers and practitioners to apply and compare various data valuation algorithms. OpenDataVal provides an integrated environment that includes (i) a diverse collection of image, natural language, and tabular datasets, (ii) implementations of eleven different state-of-the-art data valuation algorithms, and (iii) a prediction model API that can import any models in scikit-learn. Furthermore, we propose four downstream machine learning tasks for evaluating the quality of data values. We perform benchmarking analysis using OpenDataVal, quantifying and comparing the efficacy of state-of-the-art data valuation approaches. We find that no single algorithm performs uniformly best across all tasks, and an appropriate algorithm should be employed for a user's downstream task. OpenDataVal is publicly available at https://opendataval.github.io with comprehensive documentation. Furthermore, we provide a leaderboard where researchers can evaluate the effectiveness of their own data valuation algorithms.
Meta-Learning Neural Procedural Biases
Authors: Christian Raymond, Qi Chen, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhan
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Meta-Learning

The goal of few-shot learning is to generalize and achieve high performance on new unseen learning tasks, where each task has only a limited number of examples available. Gradient-based meta-learning attempts to address this challenging task by learning how to learn new tasks by embedding inductive biases informed by prior learning experiences into the components of the learning algorithm. In this work, we build upon prior research and propose Neural Procedural Bias Meta-Learning (NPBML), a novel framework designed to meta-learn task-adaptive procedural biases. Our approach aims to consolidate recent advancements in meta-learned initializations, optimizers, and loss functions by learning them simultaneously and making them adapt to each individual task to maximize the strength of the learned inductive biases. This imbues each learning task with a unique set of procedural biases which is specifically designed and selected to attain strong learning performance in only a few gradient steps. The experimental results show that by meta-learning the procedural biases of a neural network, we can induce strong inductive biases towards a distribution of learning tasks, enabling robust learning performance across many well-established few-shot learning benchmarks.
PixMamba: Leveraging State Space Models in a Dual-Level Architecture for Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Wei-Tung Lin, Yong-Xiang Lin, Jyun-Wei Chen, Kai-Lung Hua
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Enhancement, Mamba, State Space Models, UIE

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is critical for marine research and exploration but hindered by complex color distortions and severe blurring. Recent deep learning-based methods have achieved remarkable results, yet these methods struggle with high computational costs and insufficient global modeling, resulting in locally under- or over- adjusted regions. We present PixMamba, a novel architecture, designed to overcome these challenges by leveraging State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient global dependency modeling. Unlike convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with limited receptive fields and transformer networks with high computational costs, PixMamba efficiently captures global contextual information while maintaining computational efficiency. Our dual-level strategy features the patch-level Efficient Mamba Net (EMNet) for reconstructing enhanced image feature and the pixel-level PixMamba Net (PixNet) to ensure fine-grained feature capturing and global consistency of enhanced image that were previously difficult to obtain. PixMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance across various underwater image datasets and delivers visually superior results. Code is available at: https://github.com/weitunglin/pixmamba.
TasTe: Teaching Large Language Models to Translate through Self-Reflection
Authors: Yutong Wang, Jiali Zeng, Xuebo Liu, Fandong Meng, Jie zhou, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance in various natural language processing tasks. Techniques like instruction tuning have effectively enhanced the proficiency of LLMs in the downstream task of machine translation. However, the existing approaches fail to yield satisfactory translation outputs that match the quality of supervised neural machine translation (NMT) systems. One plausible explanation for this discrepancy is that the straightforward prompts employed in these methodologies are unable to fully exploit the acquired instruction-following capabilities. To this end, we propose the TasTe framework, which stands for translating through self-reflection. The self-reflection process includes two stages of inference. In the first stage, LLMs are instructed to generate preliminary translations and conduct self-assessments on these translations simultaneously. In the second stage, LLMs are tasked to refine these preliminary translations according to the evaluation results. The evaluation results in four language directions on the WMT22 benchmark reveal the effectiveness of our approach compared to existing methods. Our work presents a promising approach to unleash the potential of LLMs and enhance their capabilities in MT. The codes and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/YutongWang1216/ReflectionLLMMT.
Coherent Optical Modems for Full-Wavefield Lidar
Authors: Parsa Mirdehghan, Brandon Buscaino, Maxx Wu, Doug Charlton, Mohammad E. Mousa-Pasandi, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, David B. Lindell
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

The advent of the digital age has driven the development of coherent optical modems--devices that modulate the amplitude and phase of light in multiple polarization states. These modems transmit data through fiber optic cables that are thousands of kilometers in length at data rates exceeding one terabit per second. This remarkable technology is made possible through near-THz-rate programmable control and sensing of the full optical wavefield. While coherent optical modems form the backbone of telecommunications networks around the world, their extraordinary capabilities also provide unique opportunities for imaging. Here, we repurpose off-the-shelf coherent optical modems to introduce full-wavefield lidar: a type of random modulation continuous wave lidar that simultaneously measures depth, axial velocity, and polarization. We demonstrate this modality by combining a 74 GHz-bandwidth coherent optical modem with free-space coupling optics and scanning mirrors. We develop a time-resolved image formation model for this system and formulate a maximum-likelihood reconstruction algorithm to recover depth, velocity, and polarization information at each scene point from the modem's raw transmitted and received symbols. Compared to existing lidars, full-wavefield lidar promises improved mm-scale ranging accuracy from brief, microsecond exposure times, reliable velocimetry, and robustness to interference from ambient light or other lidar signals.
Spatial-Frequency Dual Progressive Attention Network For Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Zhenhuan Zhou, Along He, Yanlin Wu, Rui Yao, Xueshuo Xie, Tao Li
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

In medical images, various types of lesions often manifest significant differences in their shape and texture. Accurate medical image segmentation demands deep learning models with robust capabilities in multi-scale and boundary feature learning. However, previous networks still have limitations in addressing the above issues. Firstly, previous networks simultaneously fuse multi-level features or employ deep supervision to enhance multi-scale learning. However, this may lead to feature redundancy and excessive computational overhead, which is not conducive to network training and clinical deployment. Secondly, the majority of medical image segmentation networks exclusively learn features in the spatial domain, disregarding the abundant global information in the frequency domain. This results in a bias towards low-frequency components, neglecting crucial high-frequency information. To address these problems, we introduce SF-UNet, a spatial-frequency dual-domain attention network. It comprises two main components: the Multi-scale Progressive Channel Attention (MPCA) block, which progressively extract multi-scale features across adjacent encoder layers, and the lightweight Frequency-Spatial Attention (FSA) block, with only 0.05M parameters, enabling concurrent learning of texture and boundary features from both spatial and frequency domains. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed SF-UNet on three public datasets. Experimental results show that compared to previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) medical image segmentation networks, SF-UNet achieves the best performance, and achieves up to 9.4\% and 10.78\% improvement in DSC and IOU. Codes will be released at https://github.com/nkicsl/SF-UNet.
OpenObj: Open-Vocabulary Object-Level Neural Radiance Fields with Fine-Grained Understanding
Authors: Yinan Deng, Jiahui Wang, Jingyu Zhao, Jianyu Dou, Yi Yang, Yufeng Yue
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Scene Reconstruction, NeRF, Object, Retrieval, Semantic Segmentation, Zero-Shot Semantic Segmentation

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in open-vocabulary 3D scene reconstruction facilitated by visual language models (VLMs), which showcase remarkable capabilities in open-set retrieval. However, existing methods face some limitations: they either focus on learning point-wise features, resulting in blurry semantic understanding, or solely tackle object-level reconstruction, thereby overlooking the intricate details of the object's interior. To address these challenges, we introduce OpenObj, an innovative approach to build open-vocabulary object-level Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) with fine-grained understanding. In essence, OpenObj establishes a robust framework for efficient and watertight scene modeling and comprehension at the object-level. Moreover, we incorporate part-level features into the neural fields, enabling a nuanced representation of object interiors. This approach captures object-level instances while maintaining a fine-grained understanding. The results on multiple datasets demonstrate that OpenObj achieves superior performance in zero-shot semantic segmentation and retrieval tasks. Additionally, OpenObj supports real-world robotics tasks at multiple scales, including global movement and local manipulation.
Dynamic Beam-Stabilized, Additive-Printed Flexible Antenna Arrays with On-Chip Rapid Insight Generation
Authors: Sreeni Poolakkal, Abdullah Islam, Arpit Rao, Shrestha Bansal, Ted Dabrowski, Kalsi Kwan, Zhongxuan Wang, Amit Kumar Mishra, Julio Navarro, Shenqiang Ren, John Williams, Sudip Shekhar, Subhanshu Gupta
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

Conformal phased arrays promise shape-changing properties, multiple degrees of freedom to the scan angle, and novel applications in wearables, aerospace, defense, vehicles, and ships. However, they have suffered from two critical limitations. (1) Although most applications require on-the-move communication and sensing, prior conformal arrays have suffered from dynamic deformation-induced beam pointing errors. We introduce a Dynamic Beam-Stabilized (DBS) processor capable of beam adaptation through on-chip real-time control of fundamental gain, phase, and delay for each element. (2) Prior conformal arrays have leveraged additive printing to enhance flexibility, but conventional printable inks based on silver are expensive, and those based on copper suffer from spontaneous metal oxidation that alters trace impedance and degrades beamforming performance. We instead leverage a low-cost Copper Molecular Decomposition (CuMOD) ink with < 0.1% variation per degree C with temperature and strain and correct any residual deformity in real-time using the DBS processor. Demonstrating unified material and physical deformation correction, our CMOS DBS processor is low-power, low-area, and easily scalable due to a tile architecture, thereby ideal for on-device implementations.
Judging the Judges: A Systematic Study of Position Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge
Authors: Lin Shi, Chiyu Ma, Wenhua Liang, Xingjian Diao, Weicheng Ma, Soroush Vosoughi
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Position

LLM-as-a-Judge has emerged as a promising alternative to human evaluators across various tasks, yet inherent biases - particularly position bias, the tendency to favor solutions based on their position within the prompt - compromise its reliability. This exploratory study evaluates position bias in LLM judges across pairwise and list-wise comparison settings, introducing three metrics: repetition stability, position consistency, and preference fairness. Our experiments, involving 15 LLM judges across MTBench and DevBench with 22 tasks and approximately 40 solution-generating models, result in over 150,000 evaluation instances. We identify Judge-Level, Candidate-Level, and Task-Level factors contributing to bias. The findings confirm that position bias is not due to random chance and varies significantly across judges and tasks. While position bias is weakly influenced by the length of prompt components, it is strongly affected by the quality gap between solutions. Our agreement and disagreement analysis among judges further provides insights into the distribution of judging difficulty across the dataset, and highlights the potential for dataset modifications.
ICE-G: Image Conditional Editing of 3D Gaussian Splats
Authors: Vishnu Jaganathan, Hannah Hanyun Huang, Muhammad Zubair Irshad, Varun Jampani, Amit Raj, Zsolt Kira
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Recently many techniques have emerged to create high quality 3D assets and scenes. When it comes to editing of these objects, however, existing approaches are either slow, compromise on quality, or do not provide enough customization. We introduce a novel approach to quickly edit a 3D model from a single reference view. Our technique first segments the edit image, and then matches semantically corresponding regions across chosen segmented dataset views using DINO features. A color or texture change from a particular region of the edit image can then be applied to other views automatically in a semantically sensible manner. These edited views act as an updated dataset to further train and re-style the 3D scene. The end-result is therefore an edited 3D model. Our framework enables a wide variety of editing tasks such as manual local edits, correspondence based style transfer from any example image, and a combination of different styles from multiple example images. We use Gaussian Splats as our primary 3D representation due to their speed and ease of local editing, but our technique works for other methods such as NeRFs as well. We show through multiple examples that our method produces higher quality results while offering fine-grained control of editing. Project page: ice-gaussian.github.io