pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gazing Into Missteps: Leveraging Eye-Gaze for Unsupervised Mistake Detection in Egocentric Videos of Skilled Human Activities
Authors: Michele Mazzamuto, Antonino Furnari, Yoichi Sato, Giovanni Maria Farinella
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Gaze Prediction, Mistake Detection

We address the challenge of unsupervised mistake detection in egocentric video of skilled human activities through the analysis of gaze signals. While traditional methods rely on manually labeled mistakes, our approach does not require mistake annotations, hence overcoming the need of domain-specific labeled data. Based on the observation that eye movements closely follow object manipulation activities, we assess to what extent eye-gaze signals can support mistake detection, proposing to identify deviations in attention patterns measured through a gaze tracker with respect to those estimated by a gaze prediction model. Since predicting gaze in video is characterized by high uncertainty, we propose a novel gaze completion task, where eye fixations are predicted from visual observations and partial gaze trajectories, and contribute a novel gaze completion approach which explicitly models correlations between gaze information and local visual tokens. Inconsistencies between predicted and observed gaze trajectories act as an indicator to identify mistakes. Experiments highlight the effectiveness of the proposed approach in different settings, with relative gains up to +14%, +11%, and +5% in EPIC-Tent, HoloAssist and IndustReal respectively, remarkably matching results of supervised approaches without seeing any labels. We further show that gaze-based analysis is particularly useful in the presence of skilled actions, low action execution confidence, and actions requiring hand-eye coordination and object manipulation skills. Our method is ranked first on the HoloAssist Mistake Detection challenge.
DDR: Exploiting Deep Degradation Response as Flexible Image Descriptor
Authors: Juncheng Wu, Zhangkai Ni, Hanli Wang, Wenhan Yang, Yuyin Zhou, Shiqi Wang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Quality Assessment, Deblurring, Image Deblurring, Image Quality Assessment, Image Restoration, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Image deep features extracted by pre-trained networks are known to contain rich and informative representations. In this paper, we present Deep Degradation Response (DDR), a method to quantify changes in image deep features under varying degradation conditions. Specifically, our approach facilitates flexible and adaptive degradation, enabling the controlled synthesis of image degradation through text-driven prompts. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the versatility of DDR as an image descriptor, with strong correlations observed with key image attributes such as complexity, colorfulness, sharpness, and overall quality. Moreover, we demonstrate the efficacy of DDR across a spectrum of applications. It excels as a blind image quality assessment metric, outperforming existing methodologies across multiple datasets. Additionally, DDR serves as an effective unsupervised learning objective in image restoration tasks, yielding notable advancements in image deblurring and single-image super-resolution. Our code is available at: https://github.com/eezkni/DDR
APSeg: Auto-Prompt Network for Cross-Domain Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Weizhao He, Yang Zhang, Wei Zhuo, Linlin Shen, Jiaqi Yang, Songhe Deng, Liang Sun
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot, Few-Shot Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Few-shot semantic segmentation (FSS) endeavors to segment unseen classes with only a few labeled samples. Current FSS methods are commonly built on the assumption that their training and application scenarios share similar domains, and their performances degrade significantly while applied to a distinct domain. To this end, we propose to leverage the cutting-edge foundation model, the Segment Anything Model (SAM), for generalization enhancement. The SAM however performs unsatisfactorily on domains that are distinct from its training data, which primarily comprise natural scene images, and it does not support automatic segmentation of specific semantics due to its interactive prompting mechanism. In our work, we introduce APSeg, a novel auto-prompt network for cross-domain few-shot semantic segmentation (CD-FSS), which is designed to be auto-prompted for guiding cross-domain segmentation. Specifically, we propose a Dual Prototype Anchor Transformation (DPAT) module that fuses pseudo query prototypes extracted based on cycle-consistency with support prototypes, allowing features to be transformed into a more stable domain-agnostic space. Additionally, a Meta Prompt Generator (MPG) module is introduced to automatically generate prompt embeddings, eliminating the need for manual visual prompts. We build an efficient model which can be applied directly to target domains without fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on four cross-domain datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art CD-FSS method by 5.24% and 3.10% in average accuracy on 1-shot and 5-shot settings, respectively.
Blind Image Deblurring with FFT-ReLU Sparsity Prior
Authors: Abdul Mohaimen Al Radi, Prothito Shovon Majumder, Md. Mosaddek Khan
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Deblurring, Deblurring, Image Deblurring, SSIM

Blind image deblurring is the process of recovering a sharp image from a blurred one without prior knowledge about the blur kernel. It is a small data problem, since the key challenge lies in estimating the unknown degrees of blur from a single image or limited data, instead of learning from large datasets. The solution depends heavily on developing algorithms that effectively model the image degradation process. We introduce a method that leverages a prior which targets the blur kernel to achieve effective deblurring across a wide range of image types. In our extensive empirical analysis, our algorithm achieves results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art blind image deblurring algorithms, and it offers up to two times faster inference, making it a highly efficient solution.
WMAdapter: Adding WaterMark Control to Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Hai Ci, Yiren Song, Pei Yang, Jinheng Xie, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Transfer Learning

Watermarking is crucial for protecting the copyright of AI-generated images. We propose WMAdapter, a diffusion model watermark plugin that takes user-specified watermark information and allows for seamless watermark imprinting during the diffusion generation process. WMAdapter is efficient and robust, with a strong emphasis on high generation quality. To achieve this, we make two key designs: (1) We develop a contextual adapter structure that is lightweight and enables effective knowledge transfer from heavily pretrained post-hoc watermarking models. (2) We introduce an extra finetuning step and design a hybrid finetuning strategy to further improve image quality and eliminate tiny artifacts. Empirical results demonstrate that WMAdapter offers strong flexibility, exceptional image generation quality and competitive watermark robustness.
CoLM-DSR: Leveraging Neural Codec Language Modeling for Multi-Modal Dysarthric Speech Reconstruction
Authors: Xueyuan Chen, Dongchao Yang, Dingdong Wang, Xixin Wu, Zhiyong Wu, Helen Meng
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Dysarthric speech reconstruction (DSR) aims to transform dysarthric speech into normal speech. It still suffers from low speaker similarity and poor prosody naturalness. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal DSR model by leveraging neural codec language modeling to improve the reconstruction results, especially for the speaker similarity and prosody naturalness. Our proposed model consists of: (i) a multi-modal content encoder to extract robust phoneme embeddings from dysarthric speech with auxiliary visual inputs; (ii) a speaker codec encoder to extract and normalize the speaker-aware codecs from the dysarthric speech, in order to provide original timbre and normal prosody; (iii) a codec language model based speech decoder to reconstruct the speech based on the extracted phoneme embeddings and normalized codecs. Evaluations on the commonly used UASpeech corpus show that our proposed model can achieve significant improvements in terms of speaker similarity and prosody naturalness.
UDON: Universal Dynamic Online distillatioN for generic image representations
Authors: Nikolaos-Antonios Ypsilantis, KaiFeng Chen, André Araujo, Ondřej Chum
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

Universal image representations are critical in enabling real-world fine-grained and instance-level recognition applications, where objects and entities from any domain must be identified at large scale. Despite recent advances, existing methods fail to capture important domain-specific knowledge, while also ignoring differences in data distribution across different domains. This leads to a large performance gap between efficient universal solutions and expensive approaches utilising a collection of specialist models, one for each domain. In this work, we make significant strides towards closing this gap, by introducing a new learning technique, dubbed UDON (Universal Dynamic Online DistillatioN). UDON employs multi-teacher distillation, where each teacher is specialized in one domain, to transfer detailed domain-specific knowledge into the student universal embedding. UDON's distillation approach is not only effective, but also very efficient, by sharing most model parameters between the student and all teachers, where all models are jointly trained in an online manner. UDON also comprises a sampling technique which adapts the training process to dynamically allocate batches to domains which are learned slower and require more frequent processing. This boosts significantly the learning of complex domains which are characterised by a large number of classes and long-tail distributions. With comprehensive experiments, we validate each component of UDON, and showcase significant improvements over the state of the art in the recent UnED benchmark. Code: https://github.com/nikosips/UDON .
LaMOT: Language-Guided Multi-Object Tracking
Authors: Yunhao Li, Xiaoqiong Liu, Luke Liu, Heng Fan, Libo Zhang
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking

Vision-Language MOT is a crucial tracking problem and has drawn increasing attention recently. It aims to track objects based on human language commands, replacing the traditional use of templates or pre-set information from training sets in conventional tracking tasks. Despite various efforts, a key challenge lies in the lack of a clear understanding of why language is used for tracking, which hinders further development in this field. In this paper, we address this challenge by introducing Language-Guided MOT, a unified task framework, along with a corresponding large-scale benchmark, termed LaMOT, which encompasses diverse scenarios and language descriptions. Specially, LaMOT comprises 1,660 sequences from 4 different datasets and aims to unify various Vision-Language MOT tasks while providing a standardized evaluation platform. To ensure high-quality annotations, we manually assign appropriate descriptive texts to each target in every video and conduct careful inspection and correction. To the best of our knowledge, LaMOT is the first benchmark dedicated to Language-Guided MOT. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective tracker, termed LaMOTer. By establishing a unified task framework, providing challenging benchmarks, and offering insights for future algorithm design and evaluation, we expect to contribute to the advancement of research in Vision-Language MOT. We will release the data at https://github.com/Nathan-Li123/LaMOT.
From Chaos to Clarity: 3DGS in the Dark
Authors: Zhihao LI, YuFei Wang, Alex Kot, Bihan Wen
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Novel View Synthesis, Self-Supervised Learning

Novel view synthesis from raw images provides superior high dynamic range (HDR) information compared to reconstructions from low dynamic range RGB images. However, the inherent noise in unprocessed raw images compromises the accuracy of 3D scene representation. Our study reveals that 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is particularly susceptible to this noise, leading to numerous elongated Gaussian shapes that overfit the noise, thereby significantly degrading reconstruction quality and reducing inference speed, especially in scenarios with limited views. To address these issues, we introduce a novel self-supervised learning framework designed to reconstruct HDR 3DGS from a limited number of noisy raw images. This framework enhances 3DGS by integrating a noise extractor and employing a noise-robust reconstruction loss that leverages a noise distribution prior. Experimental results show that our method outperforms LDR/HDR 3DGS and previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) self-supervised and supervised pre-trained models in both reconstruction quality and inference speed on the RawNeRF dataset across a broad range of training views. Code can be found in \url{https://lizhihao6.github.io/Raw3DGS}.
AdaNCA: Neural Cellular Automata As Adaptors For More Robust Vision Transformer
Authors: Yitao Xu, Tong Zhang, Sabine Süsstrunk
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Vision Transformers (ViTs) demonstrate remarkable performance in image classification through visual-token interaction learning, particularly when equipped with local information via region attention or convolutions. Although such architectures improve the feature aggregation from different granularities, they often fail to contribute to the robustness of the networks. Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) enables the modeling of global visual-token representations through local interactions, with its training strategies and architecture design conferring strong generalization ability and robustness against noisy input. In this paper, we propose Adaptor Neural Cellular Automata (AdaNCA) for Vision Transformers that uses NCA as plug-and-play adaptors between ViT layers, thus enhancing ViT's performance and robustness against adversarial samples as well as out-of-distribution inputs. To overcome the large computational overhead of standard NCAs, we propose Dynamic Interaction for more efficient interaction learning. Using our analysis of AdaNCA placement and robustness improvement, we also develop an algorithm for identifying the most effective insertion points for AdaNCA. With less than a 3% increase in parameters, AdaNCA contributes to more than 10% absolute improvement in accuracy under adversarial attacks on the ImageNet1K benchmark. Moreover, we demonstrate with extensive evaluations across eight robustness benchmarks and four ViT architectures that AdaNCA, as a plug-and-play module, consistently improves the robustness of ViTs.
Vessel Re-identification and Activity Detection in Thermal Domain for Maritime Surveillance
Authors: Yasod Ginige, Ransika Gunasekara, Darsha Hewavitharana, Manjula Ariyarathne, Ranga Rodrigo, Peshala Jayasekara
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Activity Detection, Object Tracking

Maritime surveillance is vital to mitigate illegal activities such as drug smuggling, illegal fishing, and human trafficking. Vision-based maritime surveillance is challenging mainly due to visibility issues at night, which results in failures in re-identifying vessels and detecting suspicious activities. In this paper, we introduce a thermal, vision-based approach for maritime surveillance with object tracking, vessel re-identification, and suspicious activity detection capabilities. For vessel re-identification, we propose a novel viewpoint-independent algorithm which compares features of the sides of the vessel separately (separate side-spaces) leveraging shape information in the absence of color features. We propose techniques to adapt tracking and activity detection algorithms for the thermal domain and train them using a thermal dataset we created. This dataset will be the first publicly available benchmark dataset for thermal maritime surveillance. Our system is capable of re-identifying vessels with an 81.8% Top1 score and identifying suspicious activities with a 72.4\% frame mAP score; a new benchmark for each task in the thermal domain.
Outdoor Scene Extrapolation with Hierarchical Generative Cellular Automata
Authors: Dongsu Zhang, Francis Williams, Zan Gojcic, Karsten Kreis, Sanja Fidler, Young Min Kim, Amlan Kar
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D geometry, Autonomous Vehicles

We aim to generate fine-grained 3D geometry from large-scale sparse LiDAR scans, abundantly captured by autonomous vehicles (AV). Contrary to prior work on AV scene completion, we aim to extrapolate fine geometry from unlabeled and beyond spatial limits of LiDAR scans, taking a step towards generating realistic, high-resolution simulation-ready 3D street environments. We propose hierarchical Generative Cellular Automata (hGCA), a spatially scalable conditional 3D generative model, which grows geometry recursively with local kernels following, in a coarse-to-fine manner, equipped with a light-weight planner to induce global consistency. Experiments on synthetic scenes show that hGCA generates plausible scene geometry with higher fidelity and completeness compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our model generalizes strongly from sim-to-real, qualitatively outperforming baselines on the Waymo-open dataset. We also show anecdotal evidence of the ability to create novel objects from real-world geometric cues even when trained on limited synthetic content. More results and details can be found on https://research.nvidia.com/labs/toronto-ai/hGCA/.
A New Class Biorthogonal Spline Wavelet for Image Edge Detection
Authors: Dujuan Zhou, Zizhao Yuan
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge Detection

Spline wavelets have shown favorable characteristics for localizing in both time and frequency. In this paper, we propose a new biorthogonal cubic special spline wavelet (BCSSW), based on the Cohen-Daubechies-Feauveau wavelet construction method and the cubic special spline algorithm. BCSSW has better properties in compact support, symmetry, and frequency domain characteristics. However, current mainstream detection operators usually ignore the uncertain representation of regional pixels and global structures. To solve these problems, we propose a structural uncertainty-aware and multi-structure operator fusion detection algorithm (EDBSW) based on a new BCSSW spline wavelet. By constructing a spline wavelet that efficiently handles edge effects, we utilize structural uncertainty-aware modulus maxima to detect highly uncertain edge samples. The proposed wavelet detection operator utilizes the multi-structure morphological operator and fusion reconstruction strategy to effectively address anti-noise processing and edge information of different frequencies. Numerous experiments have demonstrated its excellent performance in reducing noise and capturing edge structure details.
Interpretable Representation Learning of Cardiac MRI via Attribute Regularization
Authors: Maxime Di Folco, Cosmin I. Bercea, Emily Chan, Julia A. Schnabel
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Representation Learning

Interpretability is essential in medical imaging to ensure that clinicians can comprehend and trust artificial intelligence models. Several approaches have been recently considered to encode attributes in the latent space to enhance its interpretability. Notably, attribute regularization aims to encode a set of attributes along the dimensions of a latent representation. However, this approach is based on Variational AutoEncoder and suffers from blurry reconstruction. In this paper, we propose an Attributed-regularized Soft Introspective Variational Autoencoder that combines attribute regularization of the latent space within the framework of an adversarially trained variational autoencoder. We demonstrate on short-axis cardiac Magnetic Resonance images of the UK Biobank the ability of the proposed method to address blurry reconstruction issues of variational autoencoder methods while preserving the latent space interpretability.
Dataset Enhancement with Instance-Level Augmentations
Authors: Orest Kupyn, Christian Rupprecht
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Salient Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

We present a method for expanding a dataset by incorporating knowledge from the wide distribution of pre-trained latent diffusion models. Data augmentations typically incorporate inductive biases about the image formation process into the training (e.g. translation, scaling, colour changes, etc.). Here, we go beyond simple pixel transformations and introduce the concept of instance-level data augmentation by repainting parts of the image at the level of object instances. The method combines a conditional diffusion model with depth and edge maps control conditioning to seamlessly repaint individual objects inside the scene, being applicable to any segmentation or detection dataset. Used as a data augmentation method, it improves the performance and generalization of the state-of-the-art salient object detection, semantic segmentation and object detection models. By redrawing all privacy-sensitive instances (people, license plates, etc.), the method is also applicable for data anonymization. We also release fully synthetic and anonymized expansions for popular datasets: COCO, Pascal VOC and DUTS.
OpenCOLE: Towards Reproducible Automatic Graphic Design Generation
Authors: Naoto Inoue, Kento Masui, Wataru Shimoda, Kota Yamaguchi
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

Automatic generation of graphic designs has recently received considerable attention. However, the state-of-the-art approaches are complex and rely on proprietary datasets, which creates reproducibility barriers. In this paper, we propose an open framework for automatic graphic design called OpenCOLE, where we build a modified version of the pioneering COLE and train our model exclusively on publicly available datasets. Based on GPT4V evaluations, our model shows promising performance comparable to the original COLE. We release the pipeline and training results to encourage open development.
Runtime Freezing: Dynamic Class Loss for Multi-Organ 3D Segmentation
Authors: James Willoughby, Irina Voiculescu
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Segmentation has become a crucial pre-processing step to many refined downstream tasks, and particularly so in the medical domain. Even with recent improvements in segmentation models, many segmentation tasks remain difficult. When multiple organs are segmented simultaneously, difficulties are due not only to the limited availability of labelled data, but also to class imbalance. In this work we propose dynamic class-based loss strategies to mitigate the effects of highly imbalanced training data. We show how our approach improves segmentation performance on a challenging Multi-Class 3D Abdominal Organ dataset.