pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MapFusion: A Novel BEV Feature Fusion Network for Multi-modal Map Construction
Authors: Xiaoshuai Hao, Yunfeng Diao, Mengchuan Wei, Yifan Yang, Peng Hao, Rong Yin, HUI ZHANG, Weiming Li, Shu Zhao, Yu Liu
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Map construction task plays a vital role in providing precise and comprehensive static environmental information essential for autonomous driving systems. Primary sensors include cameras and LiDAR, with configurations varying between camera-only, LiDAR-only, or camera-LiDAR fusion, based on cost-performance considerations. While fusion-based methods typically perform best, existing approaches often neglect modality interaction and rely on simple fusion strategies, which suffer from the problems of misalignment and information loss. To address these issues, we propose MapFusion, a novel multi-modal Bird's-Eye View (BEV) feature fusion method for map construction. Specifically, to solve the semantic misalignment problem between camera and LiDAR BEV features, we introduce the Cross-modal Interaction Transform (CIT) module, enabling interaction between two BEV feature spaces and enhancing feature representation through a self-attention mechanism. Additionally, we propose an effective Dual Dynamic Fusion (DDF) module to adaptively select valuable information from different modalities, which can take full advantage of the inherent information between different modalities. Moreover, MapFusion is designed to be simple and plug-and-play, easily integrated into existing pipelines. We evaluate MapFusion on two map construction tasks, including High-definition (HD) map and BEV map segmentation, to show its versatility and effectiveness. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, MapFusion achieves 3.6% and 6.2% absolute improvements on the HD map construction and BEV map segmentation tasks on the nuScenes dataset, respectively, demonstrating the superiority of our approach.
TexLiDAR: Automated Text Understanding for Panoramic LiDAR Data
Authors: Naor Cohen, Roy Orfaig, Ben-Zion Bobrovsky
Date: 2025-02-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, object-detection, Object Detection

Efforts to connect LiDAR data with text, such as LidarCLIP, have primarily focused on embedding 3D point clouds into CLIP text-image space. However, these approaches rely on 3D point clouds, which present challenges in encoding efficiency and neural network processing. With the advent of advanced LiDAR sensors like Ouster OS1, which, in addition to 3D point clouds, produce fixed resolution depth, signal, and ambient panoramic 2D images, new opportunities emerge for LiDAR based tasks. In this work, we propose an alternative approach to connect LiDAR data with text by leveraging 2D imagery generated by the OS1 sensor instead of 3D point clouds. Using the Florence 2 large model in a zero-shot setting, we perform image captioning and object detection. Our experiments demonstrate that Florence 2 generates more informative captions and achieves superior performance in object detection tasks compared to existing methods like CLIP. By combining advanced LiDAR sensor data with a large pre-trained model, our approach provides a robust and accurate solution for challenging detection scenarios, including real-time applications requiring high accuracy and robustness.
Towards Fair and Robust Face Parsing for Generative AI: A Multi-Objective Approach
Authors: Sophia J. Abraham, Jonathan D. Hauenstein, Walter J. Scheirer
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Face Parsing, Facial Editing, Fairness, Image Generation, Segmentation

Face parsing is a fundamental task in computer vision, enabling applications such as identity verification, facial editing, and controllable image synthesis. However, existing face parsing models often lack fairness and robustness, leading to biased segmentation across demographic groups and errors under occlusions, noise, and domain shifts. These limitations affect downstream face synthesis, where segmentation biases can degrade generative model outputs. We propose a multi-objective learning framework that optimizes accuracy, fairness, and robustness in face parsing. Our approach introduces a homotopy-based loss function that dynamically adjusts the importance of these objectives during training. To evaluate its impact, we compare multi-objective and single-objective U-Net models in a GAN-based face synthesis pipeline (Pix2PixHD). Our results show that fairness-aware and robust segmentation improves photorealism and consistency in face generation. Additionally, we conduct preliminary experiments using ControlNet, a structured conditioning model for diffusion-based synthesis, to explore how segmentation quality influences guided image generation. Our findings demonstrate that multi-objective face parsing improves demographic consistency and robustness, leading to higher-quality GAN-based synthesis.
UniCP: A Unified Caching and Pruning Framework for Efficient Video Generation
Authors: Wenzhang Sun, Qirui Hou, Donglin Di, Jiahui Yang, Yongjia Ma, Jianxun Cui
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Video Generation

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) excel in video generation but encounter significant computational challenges due to the quadratic complexity of attention. Notably, attention differences between adjacent diffusion steps follow a U-shaped pattern. Current methods leverage this property by caching attention blocks, however, they still struggle with sudden error spikes and large discrepancies. To address these issues, we propose UniCP a unified caching and pruning framework for efficient video generation. UniCP optimizes both temporal and spatial dimensions through. Error Aware Dynamic Cache Window (EDCW): Dynamically adjusts cache window sizes for different blocks at various timesteps, adapting to abrupt error changes. PCA based Slicing (PCAS) and Dynamic Weight Shift (DWS): PCAS prunes redundant attention components, and DWS integrates caching and pruning by enabling dynamic switching between pruned and cached outputs. By adjusting cache windows and pruning redundant components, UniCP enhances computational efficiency and maintains video detail fidelity. Experimental results show that UniCP outperforms existing methods in both performance and efficiency.
Decoder-Only LLMs are Better Controllers for Diffusion Models
Authors: Ziyi Dong, Yao Xiao, Pengxu Wei, Liang Lin
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Groundbreaking advancements in text-to-image generation have recently been achieved with the emergence of diffusion models. These models exhibit a remarkable ability to generate highly artistic and intricately detailed images based on textual prompts. However, obtaining desired generation outcomes often necessitates repetitive trials of manipulating text prompts just like casting spells on a magic mirror, and the reason behind that is the limited capability of semantic understanding inherent in current image generation models. Specifically, existing diffusion models encode the text prompt input with a pre-trained encoder structure, which is usually trained on a limited number of image-caption pairs. The state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) based on the decoder-only structure have shown a powerful semantic understanding capability as their architectures are more suitable for training on very large-scale unlabeled data. In this work, we propose to enhance text-to-image diffusion models by borrowing the strength of semantic understanding from large language models, and devise a simple yet effective adapter to allow the diffusion models to be compatible with the decoder-only structure. Meanwhile, we also provide a supporting theoretical analysis with various architectures (e.g., encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only), and conduct extensive empirical evaluations to verify its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the enhanced models with our adapter module are superior to the stat-of-the-art models in terms of text-to-image generation quality and reliability.
TerraQ: Spatiotemporal Question-Answering on Satellite Image Archives
Authors: Sergios-Anestis Kefalidis, Konstantinos Plas, Manolis Koubarakis
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation, Question Answering

TerraQ is a spatiotemporal question-answering engine for satellite image archives. It is a natural language processing system that is built to process requests for satellite images satisfying certain criteria. The requests can refer to image metadata and entities from a specialized knowledge base (e.g., the Emilia-Romagna region). With it, users can make requests like "Give me a hundred images of rivers near ports in France, with less than 20% snow coverage and more than 10% cloud coverage", thus making Earth Observation data more easily accessible, in-line with the current landscape of digital assistants.
No Images, No Problem: Retaining Knowledge in Continual VQA with Questions-Only Memory
Authors: Imad Eddine Marouf, Enzo Tartaglione, Stephane Lathuiliere, Joost Van de Weijer
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Continual Learning in Visual Question Answering (VQACL) requires models to learn new visual-linguistic tasks (plasticity) while retaining knowledge from previous tasks (stability). The multimodal nature of VQACL presents unique challenges, requiring models to balance stability across visual and textual domains while maintaining plasticity to adapt to novel objects and reasoning tasks. Existing methods, predominantly designed for unimodal tasks, often struggle to balance these demands effectively. In this work, we introduce QUestion-only replay with Attention Distillation (QUAD), a novel approach for VQACL that leverages only past task questions for regularisation, eliminating the need to store visual data and addressing both memory and privacy concerns. QUAD achieves stability by introducing a question-only replay mechanism that selectively uses questions from previous tasks to prevent overfitting to the current task's answer space, thereby mitigating the out-of-answer-set problem. Complementing this, we propose attention consistency distillation, which uniquely enforces both intra-modal and inter-modal attention consistency across tasks, preserving essential visual-linguistic associations. Extensive experiments on VQAv2 and NExT-QA demonstrate that QUAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving robust performance in continual VQA.
Color in Visual-Language Models: CLIP deficiencies
Authors: Guillem Arias, Ramon Baldrich, Maria Vanrell
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

This work explores how color is encoded in CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) which is currently the most influential VML (Visual Language model) in Artificial Intelligence. After performing different experiments on synthetic datasets created for this task, we conclude that CLIP is able to attribute correct color labels to colored visual stimulus, but, we come across two main deficiencies: (a) a clear bias on achromatic stimuli that are poorly related to the color concept, thus white, gray and black are rarely assigned as color labels; and (b) the tendency to prioritize text over other visual information. Here we prove it is highly significant in color labelling through an exhaustive Stroop-effect test. With the aim to find the causes of these color deficiencies, we analyse the internal representation at the neuron level. We conclude that CLIP presents an important amount of neurons selective to text, specially in deepest layers of the network, and a smaller amount of multi-modal color neurons which could be the key of understanding the concept of color properly. Our investigation underscores the necessity of refining color representation mechanisms in neural networks to foster a more comprehensive comprehension of colors as humans understand them, thereby advancing the efficacy and versatility of multimodal models like CLIP in real-world scenarios.
Measuring Physical Plausibility of 3D Human Poses Using Physics Simulation
Authors: Nathan Louis, Mahzad Khoshlessan, Jason J. Corso
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Modeling humans in physical scenes is vital for understanding human-environment interactions for applications involving augmented reality or assessment of human actions from video (e.g. sports or physical rehabilitation). State-of-the-art literature begins with a 3D human pose, from monocular or multiple views, and uses this representation to ground the person within a 3D world space. While standard metrics for accuracy capture joint position errors, they do not consider physical plausibility of the 3D pose. This limitation has motivated researchers to propose other metrics evaluating jitter, floor penetration, and unbalanced postures. Yet, these approaches measure independent instances of errors and are not representative of balance or stability during motion. In this work, we propose measuring physical plausibility from within physics simulation. We introduce two metrics to capture the physical plausibility and stability of predicted 3D poses from any 3D Human Pose Estimation model. Using physics simulation, we discover correlations with existing plausibility metrics and measuring stability during motion. We evaluate and compare the performances of two state-of-the-art methods, a multi-view triangulated baseline, and ground truth 3D markers from the Human3.6m dataset.
Fast Video Generation with Sliding Tile Attention
Authors: Peiyuan Zhang, Yongqi Chen, Runlong Su, Hangliang Ding, Ion Stoica, Zhenghong Liu, Hao Zhang
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) with 3D full attention power state-of-the-art video generation, but suffer from prohibitive compute cost -- when generating just a 5-second 720P video, attention alone takes 800 out of 945 seconds of total inference time. This paper introduces sliding tile attention (STA) to address this challenge. STA leverages the observation that attention scores in pretrained video diffusion models predominantly concentrate within localized 3D windows. By sliding and attending over the local spatial-temporal region, STA eliminates redundancy from full attention. Unlike traditional token-wise sliding window attention (SWA), STA operates tile-by-tile with a novel hardware-aware sliding window design, preserving expressiveness while being hardware-efficient. With careful kernel-level optimizations, STA offers the first efficient 2D/3D sliding-window-like attention implementation, achieving 58.79% MFU. Precisely, STA accelerates attention by 2.8-17x over FlashAttention-2 (FA2) and 1.6-10x over FlashAttention-3 (FA3). On the leading video DiT, HunyuanVideo, STA reduces end-to-end latency from 945s (FA3) to 685s without quality degradation, requiring no training. Enabling finetuning further lowers latency to 268s with only a 0.09% drop on VBench.
The Phantom of the Elytra -- Phylogenetic Trait Extraction from Images of Rove Beetles Using Deep Learning -- Is the Mask Enough?
Authors: Roberta Hunt, Kim Steenstrup Pedersen
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00

Phylogenetic analysis traditionally relies on labor-intensive manual extraction of morphological traits, limiting its scalability for large datasets. Recent advances in deep learning offer the potential to automate this process, but the effectiveness of different morphological representations for phylogenetic trait extraction remains poorly understood. In this study, we compare the performance of deep learning models using three distinct morphological representations - full segmentations, binary masks, and Fourier descriptors of beetle outlines. We test this on the Rove-Tree-11 dataset, a curated collection of images from 215 rove beetle species. Our results demonstrate that the mask-based model outperformed the others, achieving a normalized Align Score of 0.33 plus/minus 0.02 on the test set, compared to 0.45 plus/minus 0.01 for the Fourier-based model and 0.39 plus/minus 0.07 for the segmentation-based model. The performance of the mask-based model likely reflects its ability to capture shape features while taking advantage of the depth and capacity of the ResNet50 architecture. These results also indicate that dorsal textural features, at least in this group of beetles, may be of lowered phylogenetic relevance, though further investigation is necessary to confirm this. In contrast, the Fourier-based model suffered from reduced capacity and occasional inaccuracies in outline approximations, particularly in fine structures like legs. These findings highlight the importance of selecting appropriate morphological representations for automated phylogenetic studies and the need for further research into explainability in automatic morphological trait extraction.
An Optimized YOLOv5 Based Approach For Real-time Vehicle Detection At Road Intersections Using Fisheye Cameras
Authors: Md. Jahin Alam, Muhammad Zubair Hasan, Md Maisoon Rahman, Md Awsafur Rahman, Najibul Haque Sarker, Shariar Azad, Tasnim Nishat Islam, Bishmoy Paul, Tanvir Anjum, Barproda Halder, Shaikh Anowarul Fattah
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, vehicle detection

Real time vehicle detection is a challenging task for urban traffic surveillance. Increase in urbanization leads to increase in accidents and traffic congestion in junction areas resulting in delayed travel time. In order to solve these problems, an intelligent system utilizing automatic detection and tracking system is significant. But this becomes a challenging task at road intersection areas which require a wide range of field view. For this reason, fish eye cameras are widely used in real time vehicle detection purpose to provide large area coverage and 360 degree view at junctions. However, it introduces challenges such as light glare from vehicles and street lights, shadow, non-linear distortion, scaling issues of vehicles and proper localization of small vehicles. To overcome each of these challenges, a modified YOLOv5 object detection scheme is proposed. YOLOv5 is a deep learning oriented convolutional neural network (CNN) based object detection method. The proposed scheme for detecting vehicles in fish-eye images consists of a light-weight day-night CNN classifier so that two different solutions can be implemented to address the day-night detection issues. Furthurmore, challenging instances are upsampled in the dataset for proper localization of vehicles and later on the detection model is ensembled and trained in different combination of vehicle datasets for better generalization, detection and accuracy. For testing, a real world fisheye dataset provided by the Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup organizer ISSD has been used which includes images from video clips of different fisheye cameras at junction of different cities during day and night time. Experimental results show that our proposed model has outperformed the YOLOv5 model on the dataset by 13.7% mAP @ 0.5.
Multiscale style transfer based on a Laplacian pyramid for traditional Chinese painting
Authors: Kunxiao Liu, Guowu Yuan, Hongyu Liu, Hao Wu
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Stylization, Style Transfer

Style transfer is adopted to synthesize appealing stylized images that preserve the structure of a content image but carry the pattern of a style image. Many recently proposed style transfer methods use only western oil paintings as style images to achieve image stylization. As a result, unnatural messy artistic effects are produced in stylized images when using these methods to directly transfer the patterns of traditional Chinese paintings, which are composed of plain colors and abstract objects. Moreover, most of them work only at the original image scale and thus ignore multiscale image information during training. In this paper, we present a novel effective multiscale style transfer method based on Laplacian pyramid decomposition and reconstruction, which can transfer unique patterns of Chinese paintings by learning different image features at different scales. In the first stage, the holistic patterns are transferred at low resolution by adopting a Style Transfer Base Network. Then, the details of the content and style are gradually enhanced at higher resolutions by a Detail Enhancement Network with an edge information selection (EIS) module in the second stage. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through the generation of appealing high-quality stylization results and a comparison with some state-of-the-art style transfer methods. Datasets and codes are available at https://github.com/toby-katakuri/LP_StyleTransferNet.
HetSSNet: Spatial-Spectral Heterogeneous Graph Learning Network for Panchromatic and Multispectral Images Fusion
Authors: Mengting Ma, Yizhen Jiang, Mengjiao Zhao, Jiaxin Li, Wei zhang
Date: 2025-02-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Pansharpening

Remote sensing pansharpening aims to reconstruct spatial-spectral properties during the fusion of panchromatic (PAN) images and low-resolution multi-spectral (LR-MS) images, finally generating the high-resolution multi-spectral (HR-MS) images. In the mainstream modeling strategies, i.e., CNN and Transformer, the input images are treated as the equal-sized grid of pixels in the Euclidean space. They have limitations in facing remote sensing images with irregular ground objects. Graph is the more flexible structure, however, there are two major challenges when modeling spatial-spectral properties with graph: \emph{1) constructing the customized graph structure for spatial-spectral relationship priors}; \emph{2) learning the unified spatial-spectral representation through the graph}. To address these challenges, we propose the spatial-spectral heterogeneous graph learning network, named \textbf{HetSSNet}. Specifically, HetSSNet initially constructs the heterogeneous graph structure for pansharpening, which explicitly describes pansharpening-specific relationships. Subsequently, the basic relationship pattern generation module is designed to extract the multiple relationship patterns from the heterogeneous graph. Finally, relationship pattern aggregation module is exploited to collaboratively learn unified spatial-spectral representation across different relationships among nodes with adaptive importance learning from local and global perspectives. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant superiority and generalization of HetSSNet.