pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Diffusion as Sound Propagation: Physics-inspired Model for Ultrasound Image Generation
Authors: Marina Domínguez, Yordanka Velikova, Nassir Navab, Mohammad Farid Azampour
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Generation

Deep learning (DL) methods typically require large datasets to effectively learn data distributions. However, in the medical field, data is often limited in quantity, and acquiring labeled data can be costly. To mitigate this data scarcity, data augmentation techniques are commonly employed. Among these techniques, generative models play a pivotal role in expanding datasets. However, when it comes to ultrasound (US) imaging, the authenticity of generated data often diminishes due to the oversight of ultrasound physics. We propose a novel approach to improve the quality of generated US images by introducing a physics-based diffusion model that is specifically designed for this image modality. The proposed model incorporates an US-specific scheduler scheme that mimics the natural behavior of sound wave propagation in ultrasound imaging. Our analysis demonstrates how the proposed method aids in modeling the attenuation dynamics in US imaging. We present both qualitative and quantitative results based on standard generative model metrics, showing that our proposed method results in overall more plausible images. Our code is available at https://github.com/marinadominguez/diffusion-for-us-images
Multimodal Language Models for Domain-Specific Procedural Video Summarization
Authors: Nafisa Hussain
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Summarization

Videos serve as a powerful medium to convey ideas, tell stories, and provide detailed instructions, especially through long-format tutorials. Such tutorials are valuable for learning new skills at one's own pace, yet they can be overwhelming due to their length and dense content. Viewers often seek specific information, like precise measurements or step-by-step execution details, making it essential to extract and summarize key segments efficiently. An intelligent, time-sensitive video assistant capable of summarizing and detecting highlights in long videos is highly sought after. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models offer promising solutions to develop such an assistant. Our research explores the use of multimodal models to enhance video summarization and step-by-step instruction generation within specific domains. These models need to understand temporal events and relationships among actions across video frames. Our approach focuses on fine-tuning TimeChat to improve its performance in specific domains: cooking and medical procedures. By training the model on domain-specific datasets like Tasty for cooking and MedVidQA for medical procedures, we aim to enhance its ability to generate concise, accurate summaries of instructional videos. We curate and restructure these datasets to create high-quality video-centric instruction data. Our findings indicate that when finetuned on domain-specific procedural data, TimeChat can significantly improve the extraction and summarization of key instructional steps in long-format videos. This research demonstrates the potential of specialized multimodal models to assist with practical tasks by providing personalized, step-by-step guidance tailored to the unique aspects of each domain.
Cross Prompting Consistency with Segment Anything Model for Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Juzheng Miao, Cheng Chen, Keli Zhang, Jie Chuai, Quanzheng Li, Pheng-Ann Heng
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Semi-supervised Medical Image Segmentation

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved notable progress in medical image segmentation. To achieve effective SSL, a model needs to be able to efficiently learn from limited labeled data and effectively exploiting knowledge from abundant unlabeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved sample efficiency. To harness the power of foundation models for application in SSL, we propose a cross prompting consistency method with segment anything model (CPC-SAM) for semi-supervised medical image segmentation. Our method employs SAM's unique prompt design and innovates a cross-prompting strategy within a dual-branch framework to automatically generate prompts and supervisions across two decoder branches, enabling effectively learning from both scarce labeled and valuable unlabeled data. We further design a novel prompt consistency regularization, to reduce the prompt position sensitivity and to enhance the output invariance under different prompts. We validate our method on two medical image segmentation tasks. The extensive experiments with different labeled-data ratios and modalities demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over the state-of-the-art SSL methods, with more than 9% Dice improvement on the breast cancer segmentation task.
DIVESPOT: Depth Integrated Volume Estimation of Pile of Things Based on Point Cloud
Authors: Yiran Ling, Rongqiang Zhao, Yixuan Shen, Dongbo Li, Jing Jin, Jie Liu
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00

Non-contact volume estimation of pile-type objects has considerable potential in industrial scenarios, including grain, coal, mining, and stone materials. However, using existing method for these scenarios is challenged by unstable measurement poses, significant light interference, the difficulty of training data collection, and the computational burden brought by large piles. To address the above issues, we propose the Depth Integrated Volume EStimation of Pile Of Things (DIVESPOT) based on point cloud technology in this study. For the challenges of unstable measurement poses, the point cloud pose correction and filtering algorithm is designed based on the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) and the Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN). To cope with light interference and to avoid the relying on training data, the height-distribution-based ground feature extraction algorithm is proposed to achieve RGB-independent. To reduce the computational burden, the storage space optimizing strategy is developed, such that accurate estimation can be acquired by using compressed voxels. Experimental results demonstrate that the DIVESPOT method enables non-data-driven, RGB-independent segmentation of pile point clouds, maintaining a volume calculation relative error within 2%. Even with 90% compression of the voxel mesh, the average error of the results can be under 3%.
Forest2Seq: Revitalizing Order Prior for Sequential Indoor Scene Synthesis
Authors: Qi Sun, Hang Zhou, Wengang Zhou, Li Li, Houqiang Li
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Indoor Scene Synthesis, Scene Generation

Synthesizing realistic 3D indoor scenes is a challenging task that traditionally relies on manual arrangement and annotation by expert designers. Recent advances in autoregressive models have automated this process, but they often lack semantic understanding of the relationships and hierarchies present in real-world scenes, yielding limited performance. In this paper, we propose Forest2Seq, a framework that formulates indoor scene synthesis as an order-aware sequential learning problem. Forest2Seq organizes the inherently unordered collection of scene objects into structured, ordered hierarchical scene trees and forests. By employing a clustering-based algorithm and a breadth-first traversal, Forest2Seq derives meaningful orderings and utilizes a transformer to generate realistic 3D scenes autoregressively. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate Forest2Seq's superiority in synthesizing more realistic scenes compared to top-performing baselines, with significant improvements in FID and KL scores. Our additional experiments for downstream tasks and ablation studies also confirm the importance of incorporating order as a prior in 3D scene generation.
Learning Motion Blur Robust Vision Transformers with Dynamic Early Exit for Real-Time UAV Tracking
Authors: You Wu, Xucheng Wang, Dan Zeng, Hengzhou Ye, Xiaolan Xie, Qijun Zhao, Shuiwang Li
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Tracking

Recently, the surge in the adoption of single-stream architectures utilizing pre-trained ViT backbones represents a promising advancement in the field of generic visual tracking. By integrating feature extraction and fusion into a cohesive framework, these architectures offer improved performance, efficiency, and robustness. However, there has been limited exploration into optimizing these frameworks for UAV tracking. In this paper, we boost the efficiency of this framework by tailoring it into an adaptive computation framework that dynamically exits Transformer blocks for real-time UAV tracking. The motivation behind this is that tracking tasks with fewer challenges can be adequately addressed using low-level feature representations. Simpler tasks can often be handled with less demanding, lower-level features. This approach allows the model use computational resources more efficiently by focusing on complex tasks and conserving resources for easier ones. Another significant enhancement introduced in this paper is the improved effectiveness of ViTs in handling motion blur, a common issue in UAV tracking caused by the fast movements of either the UAV, the tracked objects, or both. This is achieved by acquiring motion blur robust representations through enforcing invariance in the feature representation of the target with respect to simulated motion blur. The proposed approach is dubbed BDTrack. Extensive experiments conducted on five tracking benchmarks validate the effectiveness and versatility of our approach, establishing it as a cutting-edge solution in real-time UAV tracking. Code is released at: https://github.com/wuyou3474/BDTrack.
Rethinking Unsupervised Outlier Detection via Multiple Thresholding
Authors: Zhonghang Liu, Panzhong Lu, Guoyang Xie, Zhichao Lu, Wen-Yan Lin
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Outlier Detection

In the realm of unsupervised image outlier detection, assigning outlier scores holds greater significance than its subsequent task: thresholding for predicting labels. This is because determining the optimal threshold on non-separable outlier score functions is an ill-posed problem. However, the lack of predicted labels not only hiders some real applications of current outlier detectors but also causes these methods not to be enhanced by leveraging the dataset's self-supervision. To advance existing scoring methods, we propose a multiple thresholding (Multi-T) module. It generates two thresholds that isolate inliers and outliers from the unlabelled target dataset, whereas outliers are employed to obtain better feature representation while inliers provide an uncontaminated manifold. Extensive experiments verify that Multi-T can significantly improve proposed outlier scoring methods. Moreover, Multi-T contributes to a naive distance-based method being state-of-the-art.
Multimodal Prompt Learning with Missing Modalities for Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition
Authors: Zirun Guo, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Prompt Learning, Sentiment Analysis

The development of multimodal models has significantly advanced multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. However, in real-world applications, the presence of various missing modality cases often leads to a degradation in the model's performance. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal Transformer framework using prompt learning to address the issue of missing modalities. Our method introduces three types of prompts: generative prompts, missing-signal prompts, and missing-type prompts. These prompts enable the generation of missing modality features and facilitate the learning of intra- and inter-modality information. Through prompt learning, we achieve a substantial reduction in the number of trainable parameters. Our proposed method outperforms other methods significantly across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method, showcasing its ability to effectively handle missing modalities.
Multi-branch Collaborative Learning Network for 3D Visual Grounding
Authors: Zhipeng Qian, Yiwei Ma, Zhekai Lin, Jiayi Ji, Xiawu Zheng, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D visual grounding, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Comprehension, Visual Grounding

3D referring expression comprehension (3DREC) and segmentation (3DRES) have overlapping objectives, indicating their potential for collaboration. However, existing collaborative approaches predominantly depend on the results of one task to make predictions for the other, limiting effective collaboration. We argue that employing separate branches for 3DREC and 3DRES tasks enhances the model's capacity to learn specific information for each task, enabling them to acquire complementary knowledge. Thus, we propose the MCLN framework, which includes independent branches for 3DREC and 3DRES tasks. This enables dedicated exploration of each task and effective coordination between the branches. Furthermore, to facilitate mutual reinforcement between these branches, we introduce a Relative Superpoint Aggregation (RSA) module and an Adaptive Soft Alignment (ASA) module. These modules significantly contribute to the precise alignment of prediction results from the two branches, directing the module to allocate increased attention to key positions. Comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the 3DREC and 3DRES tasks, with an increase of 2.05% in Acc@0.5 for 3DREC and 3.96% in mIoU for 3DRES.
CPM: Class-conditional Prompting Machine for Audio-visual Segmentation
Authors: Yuanhong Chen, Chong Wang, Yuyuan Liu, Hu Wang, Gustavo Carneiro
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) is an emerging task that aims to accurately segment sounding objects based on audio-visual cues. The success of AVS learning systems depends on the effectiveness of cross-modal interaction. Such a requirement can be naturally fulfilled by leveraging transformer-based segmentation architecture due to its inherent ability to capture long-range dependencies and flexibility in handling different modalities. However, the inherent training issues of transformer-based methods, such as the low efficacy of cross-attention and unstable bipartite matching, can be amplified in AVS, particularly when the learned audio query does not provide a clear semantic clue. In this paper, we address these two issues with the new Class-conditional Prompting Machine (CPM). CPM improves the bipartite matching with a learning strategy combining class-agnostic queries with class-conditional queries. The efficacy of cross-modal attention is upgraded with new learning objectives for the audio, visual and joint modalities. We conduct experiments on AVS benchmarks, demonstrating that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) segmentation accuracy.
On the power of data augmentation for head pose estimation
Authors: Michael Welter
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Face Alignment, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Deep learning has been impressively successful in the last decade in predicting human head poses from monocular images. However, for in-the-wild inputs the research community relies predominantly on a single training set, 300W-LP, of semisynthetic nature without many alternatives. This paper focuses on gradual extension and improvement of the data to explore the performance achievable with augmentation and synthesis strategies further. Modeling-wise a novel multitask head/loss design which includes uncertainty estimation is proposed. Overall, the thus obtained models are small, efficient, suitable for full 6 DoF pose estimation, and exhibit very competitive accuracy.
VideoCoT: A Video Chain-of-Thought Dataset with Active Annotation Tool
Authors: Yan Wang, Yawen Zeng, Jingsheng Zheng, Xiaofen Xing, Jin Xu, Xiangmin Xu
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Hallucination, Prompt Engineering

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are flourishing, but mainly focus on images with less attention than videos, especially in sub-fields such as prompt engineering, video chain-of-thought (CoT), and instruction tuning on videos. Therefore, we try to explore the collection of CoT datasets in videos to lead to video OpenQA and improve the reasoning ability of MLLMs. Unfortunately, making such video CoT datasets is not an easy task. Given that human annotation is too cumbersome and expensive, while machine-generated is not reliable due to the hallucination issue, we develop an automatic annotation tool that combines machine and human experts, under the active learning paradigm. Active learning is an interactive strategy between the model and human experts, in this way, the workload of human labeling can be reduced and the quality of the dataset can be guaranteed. With the help of the automatic annotation tool, we strive to contribute three datasets, namely VideoCoT, TopicQA, TopicCoT. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective benchmark based on the collected datasets, which exploits CoT to maximize the complex reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness our solution.
Exploring Phrase-Level Grounding with Text-to-Image Diffusion Model
Authors: Danni Yang, Ruohan Dong, Jiayi Ji, Yiwei Ma, Haowei Wang, Xiaoshuai Sun, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Sentence, Visual Grounding

Recently, diffusion models have increasingly demonstrated their capabilities in vision understanding. By leveraging prompt-based learning to construct sentences, these models have shown proficiency in classification and visual grounding tasks. However, existing approaches primarily showcase their ability to perform sentence-level localization, leaving the potential for leveraging contextual information for phrase-level understanding largely unexplored. In this paper, we utilize Panoptic Narrative Grounding (PNG) as a proxy task to investigate this capability further. PNG aims to segment object instances mentioned by multiple noun phrases within a given narrative text. Specifically, we introduce the DiffPNG framework, a straightforward yet effective approach that fully capitalizes on the diffusion's architecture for segmentation by decomposing the process into a sequence of localization, segmentation, and refinement steps. The framework initially identifies anchor points using cross-attention mechanisms and subsequently performs segmentation with self-attention to achieve zero-shot PNG. Moreover, we introduce a refinement module based on SAM to enhance the quality of the segmentation masks. Our extensive experiments on the PNG dataset demonstrate that DiffPNG achieves strong performance in the zero-shot PNG task setting, conclusively proving the diffusion model's capability for context-aware, phrase-level understanding. Source code is available at \url{https://github.com/nini0919/DiffPNG}.
Mind the Interference: Retaining Pre-trained Knowledge in Parameter Efficient Continual Learning of Vision-Language Models
Authors: Longxiang Tang, Zhuotao Tian, Kai Li, Chunming He, Hantao Zhou, Hengshuang Zhao, Xiu Li, Jiaya Jia
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Incremental Learning, Knowledge Distillation

This study addresses the Domain-Class Incremental Learning problem, a realistic but challenging continual learning scenario where both the domain distribution and target classes vary across tasks. To handle these diverse tasks, pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are introduced for their strong generalizability. However, this incurs a new problem: the knowledge encoded in the pre-trained VLMs may be disturbed when adapting to new tasks, compromising their inherent zero-shot ability. Existing methods tackle it by tuning VLMs with knowledge distillation on extra datasets, which demands heavy computation overhead. To address this problem efficiently, we propose the Distribution-aware Interference-free Knowledge Integration (DIKI) framework, retaining pre-trained knowledge of VLMs from a perspective of avoiding information interference. Specifically, we design a fully residual mechanism to infuse newly learned knowledge into a frozen backbone, while introducing minimal adverse impacts on pre-trained knowledge. Besides, this residual property enables our distribution-aware integration calibration scheme, explicitly controlling the information implantation process for test data from unseen distributions. Experiments demonstrate that our DIKI surpasses the current state-of-the-art approach using only 0.86% of the trained parameters and requiring substantially less training time. Code is available at: https://github.com/lloongx/DIKI .
Interpreting the Residual Stream of ResNet18
Authors: André Longon
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

A mechanistic understanding of the computations learned by deep neural networks (DNNs) is far from complete. In the domain of visual object recognition, prior research has illuminated inner workings of InceptionV1, but DNNs with different architectures have remained largely unexplored. This work investigates ResNet18 with a particular focus on its residual stream, an architectural mechanism which InceptionV1 lacks. We observe that for a given block, channel features of the stream are updated along a spectrum: either the input feature skips to the output, the block feature overwrites the output, or the output is some mixture between the input and block features. Furthermore, we show that many residual stream channels compute scale invariant representations through a mixture of the input's smaller-scale feature with the block's larger-scale feature. This not only mounts evidence for the universality of scale equivariance, but also presents how the residual stream further implements scale invariance. Collectively, our results begin an interpretation of the residual stream in visual object recognition, finding it to be a flexible feature manager and a medium to build scale invariant representations.
PICA: Physics-Integrated Clothed Avatar
Authors: Bo Peng, Yunfan Tao, Haoyu Zhan, Yudong Guo, Juyong Zhang
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Graph Neural Network, Neural Rendering

We introduce PICA, a novel representation for high-fidelity animatable clothed human avatars with physics-accurate dynamics, even for loose clothing. Previous neural rendering-based representations of animatable clothed humans typically employ a single model to represent both the clothing and the underlying body. While efficient, these approaches often fail to accurately represent complex garment dynamics, leading to incorrect deformations and noticeable rendering artifacts, especially for sliding or loose garments. Furthermore, previous works represent garment dynamics as pose-dependent deformations and facilitate novel pose animations in a data-driven manner. This often results in outcomes that do not faithfully represent the mechanics of motion and are prone to generating artifacts in out-of-distribution poses. To address these issues, we adopt two individual 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) models with different deformation characteristics, modeling the human body and clothing separately. This distinction allows for better handling of their respective motion characteristics. With this representation, we integrate a graph neural network (GNN)-based clothed body physics simulation module to ensure an accurate representation of clothing dynamics. Our method, through its carefully designed features, achieves high-fidelity rendering of clothed human bodies in complex and novel driving poses, significantly outperforming previous methods under the same settings.