pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MaterialPicker: Multi-Modal Material Generation with Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Xiaohe Ma, Valentin Deschaintre, Miloš Hašan, Fujun Luan, Kun Zhou, Hongzhi Wu, Yiwei Hu
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: distortion correction, Inverse Rendering

High-quality material generation is key for virtual environment authoring and inverse rendering. We propose MaterialPicker, a multi-modal material generator leveraging a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, improving and simplifying the creation of high-quality materials from text prompts and/or photographs. Our method can generate a material based on an image crop of a material sample, even if the captured surface is distorted, viewed at an angle or partially occluded, as is often the case in photographs of natural scenes. We further allow the user to specify a text prompt to provide additional guidance for the generation. We finetune a pre-trained DiT-based video generator into a material generator, where each material map is treated as a frame in a video sequence. We evaluate our approach both quantitatively and qualitatively and show that it enables more diverse material generation and better distortion correction than previous work.
Beyond [cls]: Exploring the true potential of Masked Image Modeling representations
Authors: Marcin Przewięźlikowski, Randall Balestriero, Wojciech Jasiński, Marek Śmieja, Bartosz Zieliński
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Self-Supervised Learning

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) has emerged as a promising approach for Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) of visual representations. However, the out-of-the-box performance of MIMs is typically inferior to competing approaches. Most users cannot afford fine-tuning due to the need for large amounts of data, high GPU consumption, and specialized user knowledge. Therefore, the practical use of MIM representations is limited. In this paper we ask what is the reason for the poor out-of-the-box performance of MIMs. Is it due to weaker features produced by MIM models, or is it due to suboptimal usage? Through detailed analysis, we show that attention in MIMs is spread almost uniformly over many patches, leading to ineffective aggregation by the [cls] token. Based on this insight, we propose Selective Aggregation to better capture the rich semantic information retained in patch tokens, which significantly improves the out-of-the-box performance of MIM.
Continual Low-Rank Scaled Dot-product Attention
Authors: Ginés Carreto Picón, Illia Oleksiienko, Lukas Hedegaard, Arian Bakhtiarnia, Alexandros Iosifidis
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Audio Classification, Online Action Detection

Transformers are widely used for their ability to capture data relations in sequence processing, with great success for a wide range of static tasks. However, the computational and memory footprint of their main component, i.e., the Scaled Dot-product Attention, is commonly overlooked. This makes their adoption in applications involving stream data processing with constraints in response latency, computational and memory resources infeasible. Some works have proposed methods to lower the computational cost of transformers, i.e. low-rank approximations, sparsity in attention, and efficient formulations for Continual Inference. In this paper, we introduce a new formulation of the Scaled Dot-product Attention based on the Nystr\"om approximation that is suitable for Continual Inference. In experiments on Online Audio Classification and Online Action Detection tasks, the proposed Continual Scaled Dot-product Attention can lower the number of operations by up to three orders of magnitude compared to the original Transformers while retaining the predictive performance of competing models.
Semi-Supervised Transfer Boosting (SS-TrBoosting)
Authors: Lingfei Deng, Changming Zhao, Zhenbang Du, Kun Xia, Dongrui Wu
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Semi-supervised domain adaptation (SSDA) aims at training a high-performance model for a target domain using few labeled target data, many unlabeled target data, and plenty of auxiliary data from a source domain. Previous works in SSDA mainly focused on learning transferable representations across domains. However, it is difficult to find a feature space where the source and target domains share the same conditional probability distribution. Additionally, there is no flexible and effective strategy extending existing unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches to SSDA settings. In order to solve the above two challenges, we propose a novel fine-tuning framework, semi-supervised transfer boosting (SS-TrBoosting). Given a well-trained deep learning-based UDA or SSDA model, we use it as the initial model, generate additional base learners by boosting, and then use all of them as an ensemble. More specifically, half of the base learners are generated by supervised domain adaptation, and half by semi-supervised learning. Furthermore, for more efficient data transmission and better data privacy protection, we propose a source data generation approach to extend SS-TrBoosting to semi-supervised source-free domain adaptation (SS-SFDA). Extensive experiments showed that SS-TrBoosting can be applied to a variety of existing UDA, SSDA and SFDA approaches to further improve their performance.
Parametric PerceptNet: A bio-inspired deep-net trained for Image Quality Assessment
Authors: Jorge Vila-Tomás, Pablo Hernández-Cámara, Valero Laparra, Jesús Malo
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, regression

Human vision models are at the core of image processing. For instance, classical approaches to the problem of image quality are based on models that include knowledge about human vision. However, nowadays, deep learning approaches have obtained competitive results by simply approaching this problem as regression of human decisions, and training an standard network on human-rated datasets. These approaches have the advantages of being easily adaptable to a particular problem and they fit very efficiently when data is available. However, mainly due to the excess of parameters, they have the problems of lack of interpretability, and over-fitting. Here we propose a vision model that combines the best of both worlds by using a parametric neural network architecture. We parameterize the layers to have bioplausible functionality, and provide a set of bioplausible parameters. We analyzed different versions of the model and compared it with the non-parametric version. The parametric models achieve a three orders of magnitude reduction in the number of parameters without suffering in regression performance. Furthermore, we show that the parametric models behave better during training and are easier to interpret as vision models. Interestingly, we find that, even initialized with bioplausible trained for regression using human rated datasets, which we call the feature-spreading problem. This suggests that the deep learning approach is inherently flawed, and emphasizes the need to evaluate and train models beyond regression.
Fab-ME: A Vision State-Space and Attention-Enhanced Framework for Fabric Defect Detection
Authors: Shuai Wang, Huiyan Kong, Baotian Li, Fa Zheng
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection

Effective defect detection is critical for ensuring the quality, functionality, and economic value of textile products. However, existing methods face challenges in achieving high accuracy, real-time performance, and efficient global information extraction. To address these issues, we propose Fab-ME, an advanced framework based on YOLOv8s, specifically designed for the accurate detection of 20 fabric defect types. Our contributions include the introduction of the cross-stage partial bottleneck with two convolutions (C2F) vision state-space (C2F-VMamba) module, which integrates visual state-space (VSS) blocks into the YOLOv8s feature fusion network neck, enhancing the capture of intricate details and global context while maintaining high processing speeds. Additionally, we incorporate an enhanced multi-scale channel attention (EMCA) module into the final layer of the feature extraction network, significantly improving sensitivity to small targets. Experimental results on the Tianchi fabric defect detection dataset demonstrate that Fab-ME achieves a 3.5% improvement in mAP@0.5 compared to the original YOLOv8s, validating its effectiveness for precise and efficient fabric defect detection.
Biologically-inspired Semi-supervised Semantic Segmentation for Biomedical Imaging
Authors: Luca Ciampi, Gabriele Lagani, Giuseppe Amato, Fabrizio Falchi
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

We propose a novel two-stage semi-supervised learning approach for training downsampling-upsampling semantic segmentation architectures. The first stage does not use backpropagation. Rather, it exploits the bio-inspired Hebbian principle "fire together, wire together" as a local learning rule for updating the weights of both convolutional and transpose-convolutional layers, allowing unsupervised discovery of data features. In the second stage, the model is fine-tuned with standard backpropagation on a small subset of labeled data. We evaluate our methodology through experiments conducted on several widely used biomedical datasets, deeming that this domain is paramount in computer vision and is notably impacted by data scarcity. Results show that our proposed method outperforms SOTA approaches across different levels of label availability. Furthermore, we show that using our unsupervised stage to initialize the SOTA approaches leads to performance improvements. The code to replicate our experiments can be found at: https://github.com/ciampluca/hebbian-medical-image-segmentation
PatchDPO: Patch-level DPO for Finetuning-free Personalized Image Generation
Authors: Qihan Huang, Long Chan, Jinlong Liu, Wanggui He, Hao Jiang, Mingli Song, Jie Song
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Reconstruction, Personalized Image Generation

Finetuning-free personalized image generation can synthesize customized images without test-time finetuning, attracting wide research interest owing to its high efficiency. Current finetuning-free methods simply adopt a single training stage with a simple image reconstruction task, and they typically generate low-quality images inconsistent with the reference images during test-time. To mitigate this problem, inspired by the recent DPO (i.e., direct preference optimization) technique, this work proposes an additional training stage to improve the pre-trained personalized generation models. However, traditional DPO only determines the overall superiority or inferiority of two samples, which is not suitable for personalized image generation because the generated images are commonly inconsistent with the reference images only in some local image patches. To tackle this problem, this work proposes PatchDPO that estimates the quality of image patches within each generated image and accordingly trains the model. To this end, PatchDPO first leverages the pre-trained vision model with a proposed self-supervised training method to estimate the patch quality. Next, PatchDPO adopts a weighted training approach to train the model with the estimated patch quality, which rewards the image patches with high quality while penalizing the image patches with low quality. Experiment results demonstrate that PatchDPO significantly improves the performance of multiple pre-trained personalized generation models, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-object and multi-object personalized image generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/hqhQAQ/PatchDPO.
IRisPath: Enhancing Costmap for Off-Road Navigation with Robust IR-RGB Fusion for Improved Day and Night Traversability
Authors: Saksham Sharma, Akshit Raizada, Suresh Sundaram
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00

Autonomous off-road navigation is required for applications in agriculture, construction, search and rescue and defence. Traditional on-road autonomous methods struggle with dynamic terrains, leading to poor vehicle control in off-road conditions. Recent deep-learning models have used perception sensors along with kinesthetic feedback for navigation on such terrains. However, this approach has out-of-domain uncertainty. Factors like change in time of day and weather impacts the performance of the model. We propose a multi modal fusion network "IRisPath" capable of using Thermal and RGB images to provide robustness against dynamic weather and light conditions. To aid further works in this domain, we also open-source a day-night dataset with Thermal and RGB images along with pseudo-labels for traversability. In order to co-register for fusion model we also develop a novel method for targetless extrinsic calibration of Thermal, LiDAR and RGB cameras with translation accuracy of +/-1.7cm and rotation accuracy of +/-0.827degrees.
Are Explanations Helpful? A Comparative Analysis of Explainability Methods in Skin Lesion Classifiers
Authors: Rosa Y. G. Paccotacya-Yanque, Alceu Bissoto, Sandra Avila
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Deep Learning has shown outstanding results in computer vision tasks; healthcare is no exception. However, there is no straightforward way to expose the decision-making process of DL models. Good accuracy is not enough for skin cancer predictions. Understanding the model's behavior is crucial for clinical application and reliable outcomes. In this work, we identify desiderata for explanations in skin-lesion models. We analyzed seven methods, four based on pixel-attribution (Grad-CAM, Score-CAM, LIME, SHAP) and three on high-level concepts (ACE, ICE, CME), for a deep neural network trained on the International Skin Imaging Collaboration Archive. Our findings indicate that while these techniques reveal biases, there is room for improving the comprehensiveness of explanations to achieve transparency in skin-lesion models.
Multi-Level Correlation Network For Few-Shot Image Classification
Authors: Yunkai Dang, Min Zhang, Zhengyu Chen, Xinliang Zhang, Zheng Wang, Meijun Sun, Donglin Wang
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Metric Learning, Semantic correspondence

Few-shot image classification(FSIC) aims to recognize novel classes given few labeled images from base classes. Recent works have achieved promising classification performance, especially for metric-learning methods, where a measure at only image feature level is usually used. In this paper, we argue that measure at such a level may not be effective enough to generalize from base to novel classes when using only a few images. Instead, a multi-level descriptor of an image is taken for consideration in this paper. We propose a multi-level correlation network (MLCN) for FSIC to tackle this problem by effectively capturing local information. Concretely, we present the self-correlation module and cross-correlation module to learn the semantic correspondence relation of local information based on learned representations. Moreover, we propose a pattern-correlation module to capture the pattern of fine-grained images and find relevant structural patterns between base classes and novel classes. Extensive experiments and analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed method on four widely-used FSIC benchmarks. The code for our approach is available at: https://github.com/Yunkai696/MLCN.
Appearance Matching Adapter for Exemplar-based Semantic Image Synthesis
Authors: Siyoon Jin, Jisu Nam, Jiyoung Kim, Dahyun Chung, Yeong-Seok Kim, Joonhyung Park, Heonjeong Chu, Seungryong Kim
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Exemplar-based semantic image synthesis aims to generate images aligned with given semantic content while preserving the appearance of an exemplar image. Conventional structure-guidance models, such as ControlNet, are limited in that they cannot directly utilize exemplar images as input, relying instead solely on text prompts to control appearance. Recent tuning-free approaches address this limitation by transferring local appearance from the exemplar image to the synthesized image through implicit cross-image matching in the augmented self-attention mechanism of pre-trained diffusion models. However, these methods face challenges when applied to content-rich scenes with significant geometric deformations, such as driving scenes. In this paper, we propose the Appearance Matching Adapter (AM-Adapter), a learnable framework that enhances cross-image matching within augmented self-attention by incorporating semantic information from segmentation maps. To effectively disentangle generation and matching processes, we adopt a stage-wise training approach. Initially, we train the structure-guidance and generation networks, followed by training the AM-Adapter while keeping the other networks frozen. During inference, we introduce an automated exemplar retrieval method to efficiently select exemplar image-segmentation pairs. Despite utilizing a limited number of learnable parameters, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, excelling in both semantic alignment preservation and local appearance fidelity. Extensive ablation studies further validate our design choices. Code and pre-trained weights will be publicly available.: https://cvlab-kaist.github.io/AM-Adapter/
Splats in Splats: Embedding Invisible 3D Watermark within Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Yijia Guo, Wenkai Huang, Yang Li, Gaolei Li, Hang Zhang, Liwen Hu, Jianhua Li, Tiejun Huang, Lei Ma
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) has demonstrated impressive 3D reconstruction performance with explicit scene representations. Given the widespread application of 3DGS in 3D reconstruction and generation tasks, there is an urgent need to protect the copyright of 3DGS assets. However, existing copyright protection techniques for 3DGS overlook the usability of 3D assets, posing challenges for practical deployment. Here we describe WaterGS, the first 3DGS watermarking framework that embeds 3D content in 3DGS itself without modifying any attributes of the vanilla 3DGS. To achieve this, we take a deep insight into spherical harmonics (SH) and devise an importance-graded SH coefficient encryption strategy to embed the hidden SH coefficients. Furthermore, we employ a convolutional autoencoder to establish a mapping between the original Gaussian primitives' opacity and the hidden Gaussian primitives' opacity. Extensive experiments indicate that WaterGS significantly outperforms existing 3D steganography techniques, with 5.31% higher scene fidelity and 3X faster rendering speed, while ensuring security, robustness, and user experience. Codes and data will be released at https://water-gs.github.io.
ObjectFinder: An Open-Vocabulary Assistive System for Interactive Object Search by Blind People
Authors: Ruiping Liu, Jiaming Zhang, Angela Schön, Karin Müller, Junwei Zheng, Kailun Yang, Anhong Guo, Kathrin Gerling, Rainer Stiefelhagen
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Navigate, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Searching for objects in unfamiliar scenarios is a challenging task for blind people. It involves specifying the target object, detecting it, and then gathering detailed information according to the user's intent. However, existing description- and detection-based assistive technologies do not sufficiently support the multifaceted nature of interactive object search tasks. We present ObjectFinder, an open-vocabulary wearable assistive system for interactive object search by blind people. ObjectFinder allows users to query target objects using flexible wording. Once the target object is detected, it provides egocentric localization information in real-time, including distance and direction. Users can then initiate different branches to gather detailed information based on their intent towards the target object, such as navigating to it or perceiving its surroundings. ObjectFinder is powered by a seamless combination of open-vocabulary models, namely an open-vocabulary object detector and a multimodal large language model. The ObjectFinder design concept and its development were carried out in collaboration with a blind co-designer. To evaluate ObjectFinder, we conducted an exploratory user study with eight blind participants. We compared ObjectFinder to BeMyAI and Google Lookout, popular description- and detection-based assistive applications. Our findings indicate that most participants felt more independent with ObjectFinder and preferred it for object search, as it enhanced scene context gathering and navigation, and allowed for active target identification. Finally, we discuss the implications for future assistive systems to support interactive object search.
Few-Shot Learning with Adaptive Weight Masking in Conditional GANs
Authors: Jiacheng Hu, Zhen Qi, Jianjun Wei, Jiajing Chen, Runyuan Bao, Xinyu Qiu
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Few-Shot Learning, Generative Adversarial Network

Deep learning has revolutionized various fields, yet its efficacy is hindered by overfitting and the requirement of extensive annotated data, particularly in few-shot learning scenarios where limited samples are available. This paper introduces a novel approach to few-shot learning by employing a Residual Weight Masking Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (RWM-CGAN) for data augmentation. The proposed model integrates residual units within the generator to enhance network depth and sample quality, coupled with a weight mask regularization technique in the discriminator to improve feature learning from small-sample categories. This method addresses the core issues of robustness and generalization in few-shot learning by providing a controlled and clear augmentation of the sample space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RWM-CGAN not only expands the sample space effectively but also enriches the diversity and quality of generated samples, leading to significant improvements in detection and classification accuracy on public datasets. The paper contributes to the advancement of few-shot learning by offering a practical solution to the challenges posed by data scarcity and the need for rapid generalization to new tasks or categories.
MultiGO: Towards Multi-level Geometry Learning for Monocular 3D Textured Human Reconstruction
Authors: Gangjian Zhang, Nanjie Yao, Shunsi Zhang, HanFeng Zhao, Guoliang Pang, Jian Shu, Hao Wang
Date: 2024-12-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Depth Estimation

This paper investigates the research task of reconstructing the 3D clothed human body from a monocular image. Due to the inherent ambiguity of single-view input, existing approaches leverage pre-trained SMPL(-X) estimation models or generative models to provide auxiliary information for human reconstruction. However, these methods capture only the general human body geometry and overlook specific geometric details, leading to inaccurate skeleton reconstruction, incorrect joint positions, and unclear cloth wrinkles. In response to these issues, we propose a multi-level geometry learning framework. Technically, we design three key components: skeleton-level enhancement, joint-level augmentation, and wrinkle-level refinement modules. Specifically, we effectively integrate the projected 3D Fourier features into a Gaussian reconstruction model, introduce perturbations to improve joint depth estimation during training, and refine the human coarse wrinkles by resembling the de-noising process of diffusion model. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments on two out-of-distribution test sets show the superior performance of our approach compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.