pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
UniCal: Unified Neural Sensor Calibration
Authors: Ze Yang, George Chen, Haowei Zhang, Kevin Ta, Ioan Andrei Bârsan, Daniel Murphy, Sivabalan Manivasagam, Raquel Urtasun
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

Self-driving vehicles (SDVs) require accurate calibration of LiDARs and cameras to fuse sensor data accurately for autonomy. Traditional calibration methods typically leverage fiducials captured in a controlled and structured scene and compute correspondences to optimize over. These approaches are costly and require substantial infrastructure and operations, making it challenging to scale for vehicle fleets. In this work, we propose UniCal, a unified framework for effortlessly calibrating SDVs equipped with multiple LiDARs and cameras. Our approach is built upon a differentiable scene representation capable of rendering multi-view geometrically and photometrically consistent sensor observations. We jointly learn the sensor calibration and the underlying scene representation through differentiable volume rendering, utilizing outdoor sensor data without the need for specific calibration fiducials. This "drive-and-calibrate" approach significantly reduces costs and operational overhead compared to existing calibration systems, enabling efficient calibration for large SDV fleets at scale. To ensure geometric consistency across observations from different sensors, we introduce a novel surface alignment loss that combines feature-based registration with neural rendering. Comprehensive evaluations on multiple datasets demonstrate that UniCal outperforms or matches the accuracy of existing calibration approaches while being more efficient, demonstrating the value of UniCal for scalable calibration.
Spectral Wavelet Dropout: Regularization in the Wavelet Domain
Authors: Rinor Cakaj, Jens Mehnert, Bin Yang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Regularization techniques help prevent overfitting and therefore improve the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to generalize. One reason for overfitting is the complex co-adaptations among different parts of the network, which make the CNN dependent on their joint response rather than encouraging each part to learn a useful feature representation independently. Frequency domain manipulation is a powerful strategy for modifying data that has temporal and spatial coherence by utilizing frequency decomposition. This work introduces Spectral Wavelet Dropout (SWD), a novel regularization method that includes two variants: 1D-SWD and 2D-SWD. These variants improve CNN generalization by randomly dropping detailed frequency bands in the discrete wavelet decomposition of feature maps. Our approach distinguishes itself from the pre-existing Spectral "Fourier" Dropout (2D-SFD), which eliminates coefficients in the Fourier domain. Notably, SWD requires only a single hyperparameter, unlike the two required by SFD. We also extend the literature by implementing a one-dimensional version of Spectral "Fourier" Dropout (1D-SFD), setting the stage for a comprehensive comparison. Our evaluation shows that both 1D and 2D SWD variants have competitive performance on CIFAR-10/100 benchmarks relative to both 1D-SFD and 2D-SFD. Specifically, 1D-SWD has a significantly lower computational complexity compared to 1D/2D-SFD. In the Pascal VOC Object Detection benchmark, SWD variants surpass 1D-SFD and 2D-SFD in performance and demonstrate lower computational complexity during training.
ReviveDiff: A Universal Diffusion Model for Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions
Authors: Wenfeng Huang, Guoan Xu, Wenjing Jia, Stuart Perry, Guangwei Gao
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

Images captured in challenging environments--such as nighttime, foggy, rainy weather, and underwater--often suffer from significant degradation, resulting in a substantial loss of visual quality. Effective restoration of these degraded images is critical for the subsequent vision tasks. While many existing approaches have successfully incorporated specific priors for individual tasks, these tailored solutions limit their applicability to other degradations. In this work, we propose a universal network architecture, dubbed "ReviveDiff", which can address a wide range of degradations and bring images back to life by enhancing and restoring their quality. Our approach is inspired by the observation that, unlike degradation caused by movement or electronic issues, quality degradation under adverse conditions primarily stems from natural media (such as fog, water, and low luminance), which generally preserves the original structures of objects. To restore the quality of such images, we leveraged the latest advancements in diffusion models and developed ReviveDiff to restore image quality from both macro and micro levels across some key factors determining image quality, such as sharpness, distortion, noise level, dynamic range, and color accuracy. We rigorously evaluated ReviveDiff on seven benchmark datasets covering five types of degrading conditions: Rainy, Underwater, Low-light, Smoke, and Nighttime Hazy. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReviveDiff outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both quantitatively and visually.
SurfaceAI: Automated creation of cohesive road surface quality datasets based on open street-level imagery
Authors: Alexandra Kapp, Edith Hoffmann, Esther Weigmann, Helena Mihaljević
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

This paper introduces SurfaceAI, a pipeline designed to generate comprehensive georeferenced datasets on road surface type and quality from openly available street-level imagery. The motivation stems from the significant impact of road unevenness on the safety and comfort of traffic participants, especially vulnerable road users, emphasizing the need for detailed road surface data in infrastructure modeling and analysis. SurfaceAI addresses this gap by leveraging crowdsourced Mapillary data to train models that predict the type and quality of road surfaces visible in street-level images, which are then aggregated to provide cohesive information on entire road segment conditions.
Unsupervised Low-light Image Enhancement with Lookup Tables and Diffusion Priors
Authors: Yunlong Lin, Zhenqi Fu, Kairun Wen, Tian Ye, Sixiang Chen, Ge Meng, Yingying Wang, Yue Huang, Xiaotong Tu, Xinghao Ding
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement (LIE) aims at precisely and efficiently recovering an image degraded in poor illumination environments. Recent advanced LIE techniques are using deep neural networks, which require lots of low-normal light image pairs, network parameters, and computational resources. As a result, their practicality is limited. In this work, we devise a novel unsupervised LIE framework based on diffusion priors and lookup tables (DPLUT) to achieve efficient low-light image recovery. The proposed approach comprises two critical components: a light adjustment lookup table (LLUT) and a noise suppression lookup table (NLUT). LLUT is optimized with a set of unsupervised losses. It aims at predicting pixel-wise curve parameters for the dynamic range adjustment of a specific image. NLUT is designed to remove the amplified noise after the light brightens. As diffusion models are sensitive to noise, diffusion priors are introduced to achieve high-performance noise suppression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and efficiency.
Detecting Dataset Abuse in Fine-Tuning Stable Diffusion Models for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Authors: Songrui Wang, Yubo Zhu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Text-to-image synthesis has become highly popular for generating realistic and stylized images, often requiring fine-tuning generative models with domain-specific datasets for specialized tasks. However, these valuable datasets face risks of unauthorized usage and unapproved sharing, compromising the rights of the owners. In this paper, we address the issue of dataset abuse during the fine-tuning of Stable Diffusion models for text-to-image synthesis. We present a dataset watermarking framework designed to detect unauthorized usage and trace data leaks. The framework employs two key strategies across multiple watermarking schemes and is effective for large-scale dataset authorization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, minimal impact on the dataset (only 2% of the data required to be modified for high detection accuracy), and ability to trace data leaks. Our results also highlight the robustness and transferability of the framework, proving its practical applicability in detecting dataset abuse.
S2O: Static to Openable Enhancement for Articulated 3D Objects
Authors: Denys Iliash, Hanxiao Jiang, Yiming Zhang, Manolis Savva, Angel X. Chang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: motion prediction

Despite much progress in large 3D datasets there are currently few interactive 3D object datasets, and their scale is limited due to the manual effort required in their construction. We introduce the static to openable (S2O) task which creates interactive articulated 3D objects from static counterparts through openable part detection, motion prediction, and interior geometry completion. We formulate a unified framework to tackle this task, and curate a challenging dataset of openable 3D objects that serves as a test bed for systematic evaluation. Our experiments benchmark methods from prior work and simple yet effective heuristics for the S2O task. We find that turning static 3D objects into interactively openable counterparts is possible but that all methods struggle to generalize to realistic settings of the task, and we highlight promising future work directions.
Explainable Artifacts for Synthetic Western Blot Source Attribution
Authors: João Phillipe Cardenuto, Sara Mandelli, Daniel Moreira, Paolo Bestagini, Edward Delp, Anderson Rocha
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Misinformation

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have enabled generative models to produce synthetic scientific images that are indistinguishable from pristine ones, posing a challenge even for expert scientists habituated to working with such content. When exploited by organizations known as paper mills, which systematically generate fraudulent articles, these technologies can significantly contribute to the spread of misinformation about ungrounded science, potentially undermining trust in scientific research. While previous studies have explored black-box solutions, such as Convolutional Neural Networks, for identifying synthetic content, only some have addressed the challenge of generalizing across different models and providing insight into the artifacts in synthetic images that inform the detection process. This study aims to identify explainable artifacts generated by state-of-the-art generative models (e.g., Generative Adversarial Networks and Diffusion Models) and leverage them for open-set identification and source attribution (i.e., pointing to the model that created the image).
CemiFace: Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic Face Generation for Face Recognition
Authors: Zhonglin Sun, Siyang Song, Ioannis Patras, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Face Recognition

Privacy issue is a main concern in developing face recognition techniques. Although synthetic face images can partially mitigate potential legal risks while maintaining effective face recognition (FR) performance, FR models trained by face images synthesized by existing generative approaches frequently suffer from performance degradation problems due to the insufficient discriminative quality of these synthesized samples. In this paper, we systematically investigate what contributes to solid face recognition model training, and reveal that face images with certain degree of similarities to their identity centers show great effectiveness in the performance of trained FR models. Inspired by this, we propose a novel diffusion-based approach (namely Center-based Semi-hard Synthetic Face Generation (CemiFace)) which produces facial samples with various levels of similarity to the subject center, thus allowing to generate face datasets containing effective discriminative samples for training face recognition. Experimental results show that with a modest degree of similarity, training on the generated dataset can produce competitive performance compared to previous generation methods.
Simulating Dynamic Tumor Contrast Enhancement in Breast MRI using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Richard Osuala, Smriti Joshi, Apostolia Tsirikoglou, Lidia Garrucho, Walter H. L. Pinaya, Daniel M. Lang, Julia A. Schnabel, Oliver Diaz, Karim Lekadir
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Tumor Segmentation

This paper presents a method for virtual contrast enhancement in breast MRI, offering a promising non-invasive alternative to traditional contrast agent-based DCE-MRI acquisition. Using a conditional generative adversarial network, we predict DCE-MRI images, including jointly-generated sequences of multiple corresponding DCE-MRI timepoints, from non-contrast-enhanced MRIs, enabling tumor localization and characterization without the associated health risks. Furthermore, we qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate the synthetic DCE-MRI images, proposing a multi-metric Scaled Aggregate Measure (SAMe), assessing their utility in a tumor segmentation downstream task, and conclude with an analysis of the temporal patterns in multi-sequence DCE-MRI generation. Our approach demonstrates promising results in generating realistic and useful DCE-MRI sequences, highlighting the potential of virtual contrast enhancement for improving breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, particularly for patients where contrast agent administration is contraindicated.
Emu3: Next-Token Prediction is All You Need
Authors: Xinlong Wang, Xiaosong Zhang, Zhengxiong Luo, Quan Sun, Yufeng Cui, Jinsheng Wang, Fan Zhang, Yueze Wang, Zhen Li, Qiying Yu, Yingli Zhao, Yulong Ao, Xuebin Min, Tao Li, Boya Wu, Bo Zhao, BoWen Zhang, Liangdong Wang, Guang Liu, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, Jingjing Liu, Yonghua Lin, Tiejun Huang, Zhongyuan Wang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Image Generation, Prediction, Text-to-Image Generation, Visual Question Answering

While next-token prediction is considered a promising path towards artificial general intelligence, it has struggled to excel in multimodal tasks, which are still dominated by diffusion models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and compositional approaches (e.g., CLIP combined with LLMs). In this paper, we introduce Emu3, a new suite of state-of-the-art multimodal models trained solely with next-token prediction. By tokenizing images, text, and videos into a discrete space, we train a single transformer from scratch on a mixture of multimodal sequences. Emu3 outperforms several well-established task-specific models in both generation and perception tasks, surpassing flagship models such as SDXL and LLaVA-1.6, while eliminating the need for diffusion or compositional architectures. Emu3 is also capable of generating high-fidelity video via predicting the next token in a video sequence. We simplify complex multimodal model designs by converging on a singular focus: tokens, unlocking great potential for scaling both during training and inference. Our results demonstrate that next-token prediction is a promising path towards building general multimodal intelligence beyond language. We open-source key techniques and models to support further research in this direction.
MCUBench: A Benchmark of Tiny Object Detectors on MCUs
Authors: Sudhakar Sah, Darshan C. Ganji, Matteo Grimaldi, Ravish Kumar, Alexander Hoffman, Honnesh Rohmetra, Ehsan Saboori
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Model Selection, object-detection, Object Detection

We introduce MCUBench, a benchmark featuring over 100 YOLO-based object detection models evaluated on the VOC dataset across seven different MCUs. This benchmark provides detailed data on average precision, latency, RAM, and Flash usage for various input resolutions and YOLO-based one-stage detectors. By conducting a controlled comparison with a fixed training pipeline, we collect comprehensive performance metrics. Our Pareto-optimal analysis shows that integrating modern detection heads and training techniques allows various YOLO architectures, including legacy models like YOLOv3, to achieve a highly efficient tradeoff between mean Average Precision (mAP) and latency. MCUBench serves as a valuable tool for benchmarking the MCU performance of contemporary object detectors and aids in model selection based on specific constraints.
LW2G: Learning Whether to Grow for Prompt-based Continual Learning
Authors: Qian Feng, Dawei Zhou, Hanbin Zhao, Chao Zhang, Hui Qian
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Prompt Learning, Retrieval

Continual Learning (CL) aims to learn in non-stationary scenarios, progressively acquiring and maintaining knowledge from sequential tasks. Recent Prompt-based Continual Learning (PCL) has achieved remarkable performance with Pre-Trained Models (PTMs). These approaches grow a prompt sets pool by adding a new set of prompts when learning each new task (\emph{prompt learning}) and adopt a matching mechanism to select the correct set for each testing sample (\emph{prompt retrieval}). Previous studies focus on the latter stage by improving the matching mechanism to enhance Prompt Retrieval Accuracy (PRA). To promote cross-task knowledge facilitation and form an effective and efficient prompt sets pool, we propose a plug-in module in the former stage to \textbf{Learn Whether to Grow (LW2G)} based on the disparities between tasks. Specifically, a shared set of prompts is utilized when several tasks share certain commonalities, and a new set is added when there are significant differences between the new task and previous tasks. Inspired by Gradient Projection Continual Learning, our LW2G develops a metric called Hinder Forward Capability (HFC) to measure the hindrance imposed on learning new tasks by surgically modifying the original gradient onto the orthogonal complement of the old feature space. With HFC, an automated scheme Dynamic Growing Approach adaptively learns whether to grow with a dynamic threshold. Furthermore, we design a gradient-based constraint to ensure the consistency between the updating prompts and pre-trained knowledge, and a prompts weights reusing strategy to enhance forward transfer. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method. The source codes are available at \url{https://github.com/RAIAN08/LW2G}.
Space-time 2D Gaussian Splatting for Accurate Surface Reconstruction under Complex Dynamic Scenes
Authors: Shuo Wang, Binbin Huang, Ruoyu Wang, Shenghua Gao
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Surface Reconstruction

Previous surface reconstruction methods either suffer from low geometric accuracy or lengthy training times when dealing with real-world complex dynamic scenes involving multi-person activities, and human-object interactions. To tackle the dynamic contents and the occlusions in complex scenes, we present a space-time 2D Gaussian Splatting approach. Specifically, to improve geometric quality in dynamic scenes, we learn canonical 2D Gaussian splats and deform these 2D Gaussian splats while enforcing the disks of the Gaussian located on the surface of the objects by introducing depth and normal regularizers. Further, to tackle the occlusion issues in complex scenes, we introduce a compositional opacity deformation strategy, which further reduces the surface recovery of those occluded areas. Experiments on real-world sparse-view video datasets and monocular dynamic datasets demonstrate that our reconstructions outperform state-of-the-art methods, especially for the surface of the details. The project page and more visualizations can be found at: https://tb2-sy.github.io/st-2dgs/.
MinerU: An Open-Source Solution for Precise Document Content Extraction
Authors: Bin Wang, Chao Xu, Xiaomeng Zhao, Linke Ouyang, Fan Wu, Zhiyuan Zhao, Rui Xu, Kaiwen Liu, Yuan Qu, FuKai Shang, Bo Zhang, Liqun Wei, Zhihao Sui, Wei Li, Botian Shi, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Conghui He
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Document content analysis has been a crucial research area in computer vision. Despite significant advancements in methods such as OCR, layout detection, and formula recognition, existing open-source solutions struggle to consistently deliver high-quality content extraction due to the diversity in document types and content. To address these challenges, we present MinerU, an open-source solution for high-precision document content extraction. MinerU leverages the sophisticated PDF-Extract-Kit models to extract content from diverse documents effectively and employs finely-tuned preprocessing and postprocessing rules to ensure the accuracy of the final results. Experimental results demonstrate that MinerU consistently achieves high performance across various document types, significantly enhancing the quality and consistency of content extraction. The MinerU open-source project is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/MinerU.
Classification and regression of trajectories rendered as images via 2D Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Mariaclaudia Nicolai, Raffaella Fiamma Cabini, Diego Ulisse Pizzagalli
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: regression

Trajectories can be regarded as time-series of coordinates, typically arising from motile objects. Methods for trajectory classification are particularly important to detect different movement patterns, while methods for regression to compute motility metrics and forecasting. Recent advances in computer vision have facilitated the processing of trajectories rendered as images via artificial neural networks with 2d convolutional layers (CNNs). This approach leverages the capability of CNNs to learn spatial hierarchies of features from images, necessary to recognize complex shapes. Moreover, it overcomes the limitation of other machine learning methods that require input trajectories with a fixed number of points. However, rendering trajectories as images can introduce poorly investigated artifacts such as information loss due to the plotting of coordinates on a discrete grid, and spectral changes due to line thickness and aliasing. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of CNNs for solving classification and regression problems from synthetic trajectories that have been rendered as images using different modalities. The parameters considered in this study include line thickness, image resolution, usage of motion history (color-coding of the temporal component) and anti-aliasing. Results highlight the importance of choosing an appropriate image resolution according to model depth and motion history in applications where movement direction is critical.