pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Conversational Gold: Evaluating Personalized Conversational Search System using Gold Nuggets
Authors: Zahra Abbasiantaeb, Simon Lupart, Leif Azzopardi, Jeffery Dalton, Mohammad Aliannejadi
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Conversational Search, Hallucination, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The rise of personalized conversational search systems has been driven by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), enabling these systems to retrieve and generate answers for complex information needs. However, the automatic evaluation of responses generated by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems remains an understudied challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new resource for assessing the retrieval effectiveness and relevance of response generated by RAG systems, using a nugget-based evaluation framework. Built upon the foundation of TREC iKAT 2023, our dataset extends to the TREC iKAT 2024 collection, which includes 17 conversations and 20,575 relevance passage assessments, together with 2,279 extracted gold nuggets, and 62 manually written gold answers from NIST assessors. While maintaining the core structure of its predecessor, this new collection enables a deeper exploration of generation tasks in conversational settings. Key improvements in iKAT 2024 include: (1) ``gold nuggets'' -- concise, essential pieces of information extracted from relevant passages of the collection -- which serve as a foundation for automatic response evaluation; (2) manually written answers to provide a gold standard for response evaluation; (3) unanswerable questions to evaluate model hallucination; (4) expanded user personas, providing richer contextual grounding; and (5) a transition from Personal Text Knowledge Base (PTKB) ranking to PTKB classification and selection. Built on this resource, we provide a framework for long-form answer generation evaluation, involving nuggets extraction and nuggets matching, linked to retrieval. This establishes a solid resource for advancing research in personalized conversational search and long-form answer generation. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/irlabamsterdam/CONE-RAG.
CoRe^2: Collect, Reflect and Refine to Generate Better and Faster
Authors: Shitong Shao, Zikai Zhou, Dian Xie, Yuetong Fang, Tian Ye, Lichen Bai, Zeke Xie
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00

Making text-to-image (T2I) generative model sample both fast and well represents a promising research direction. Previous studies have typically focused on either enhancing the visual quality of synthesized images at the expense of sampling efficiency or dramatically accelerating sampling without improving the base model's generative capacity. Moreover, nearly all inference methods have not been able to ensure stable performance simultaneously on both diffusion models (DMs) and visual autoregressive models (ARMs). In this paper, we introduce a novel plug-and-play inference paradigm, CoRe^2, which comprises three subprocesses: Collect, Reflect, and Refine. CoRe^2 first collects classifier-free guidance (CFG) trajectories, and then use collected data to train a weak model that reflects the easy-to-learn contents while reducing number of function evaluations during inference by half. Subsequently, CoRe^2 employs weak-to-strong guidance to refine the conditional output, thereby improving the model's capacity to generate high-frequency and realistic content, which is difficult for the base model to capture. To the best of our knowledge, CoRe^2 is the first to demonstrate both efficiency and effectiveness across a wide range of DMs, including SDXL, SD3.5, and FLUX, as well as ARMs like LlamaGen. It has exhibited significant performance improvements on HPD v2, Pick-of-Pic, Drawbench, GenEval, and T2I-Compbench. Furthermore, CoRe^2 can be seamlessly integrated with the state-of-the-art Z-Sampling, outperforming it by 0.3 and 0.16 on PickScore and AES, while achieving 5.64s time saving using SD3.5.Code is released at https://github.com/xie-lab-ml/CoRe/tree/main.
Accelerating Diffusion Sampling via Exploiting Local Transition Coherence
Authors: Shangwen Zhu, Han Zhang, Zhantao Yang, Qianyu Peng, Zhao Pu, Huangji Wang, Fan Cheng
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Generation

Text-based diffusion models have made significant breakthroughs in generating high-quality images and videos from textual descriptions. However, the lengthy sampling time of the denoising process remains a significant bottleneck in practical applications. Previous methods either ignore the statistical relationships between adjacent steps or rely on attention or feature similarity between them, which often only works with specific network structures. To address this issue, we discover a new statistical relationship in the transition operator between adjacent steps, focusing on the relationship of the outputs from the network. This relationship does not impose any requirements on the network structure. Based on this observation, we propose a novel training-free acceleration method called LTC-Accel, which uses the identified relationship to estimate the current transition operator based on adjacent steps. Due to no specific assumptions regarding the network structure, LTC-Accel is applicable to almost all diffusion-based methods and orthogonal to almost all existing acceleration techniques, making it easy to combine with them. Experimental results demonstrate that LTC-Accel significantly speeds up sampling in text-to-image and text-to-video synthesis while maintaining competitive sample quality. Specifically, LTC-Accel achieves a speedup of 1.67-fold in Stable Diffusion v2 and a speedup of 1.55-fold in video generation models. When combined with distillation models, LTC-Accel achieves a remarkable 10-fold speedup in video generation, allowing real-time generation of more than 16FPS.
I2V3D: Controllable image-to-video generation with 3D guidance
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhang, Dongdong Chen, Jing Liao
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D geometry, Image to Video Generation, Video Generation

We present I2V3D, a novel framework for animating static images into dynamic videos with precise 3D control, leveraging the strengths of both 3D geometry guidance and advanced generative models. Our approach combines the precision of a computer graphics pipeline, enabling accurate control over elements such as camera movement, object rotation, and character animation, with the visual fidelity of generative AI to produce high-quality videos from coarsely rendered inputs. To support animations with any initial start point and extended sequences, we adopt a two-stage generation process guided by 3D geometry: 1) 3D-Guided Keyframe Generation, where a customized image diffusion model refines rendered keyframes to ensure consistency and quality, and 2) 3D-Guided Video Interpolation, a training-free approach that generates smooth, high-quality video frames between keyframes using bidirectional guidance. Experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our framework in producing controllable, high-quality animations from single input images by harmonizing 3D geometry with generative models. The code for our framework will be publicly released.
A Siamese Network to Detect If Two Iris Images Are Monozygotic
Authors: Yongle Yuan, Kevin W. Bowyer
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Iris Recognition

In Daugman-style iris recognition, the textures of the left and right irises of the same person are traditionally considered as being as different as the irises of two unrelated persons. However, previous research indicates that humans can detect that two iris images are from different eyes of the same person, or eyes of monozygotic twins, with an accuracy of about 80%. In this work, we employ a Siamese network architecture and contrastive learning to categorize a pair of iris images as coming from monozygotic or non-monozygotic irises. This could potentially be applied, for example, as a fast, noninvasive test to determine if twins are monozygotic or non-monozygotic. We construct a dataset comprising both synthetic monozygotic pairs (images of different irises of the same individual) and natural monozygotic pairs (images of different images from persons who are identical twins), in addition to non-monozygotic pairs from unrelated individuals, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of the model's capabilities. To gain deeper insights into the learned representations, we train and analyze three variants of the model using (1) the original input images, (2) iris-only images, and (3) non-iris-only images. This comparison reveals the critical importance of iris-specific textural details and contextual ocular cues in identifying monozygotic iris patterns. The results demonstrate that models leveraging full eye-region information outperform those trained solely on iris-only data, emphasizing the nuanced interplay between iris and ocular characteristics. Our approach achieves accuracy levels using the full iris image that exceed those previously reported for human classification of monozygotic iris pairs. This study presents the first classifier designed to determine whether a pair of iris images originates from monozygotic individuals.
SASNet: Spatially-Adaptive Sinusoidal Neural Networks
Authors: Haoan Feng, Diana Aldana, Tiago Novello, Leila De Floriani
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Super-Resolution

Sinusoidal neural networks (SNNs) have emerged as powerful implicit neural representations (INRs) for low-dimensional signals in computer vision and graphics. They enable high-frequency signal reconstruction and smooth manifold modeling; however, they often suffer from spectral bias, training instability, and overfitting. To address these challenges, we propose SASNet, Spatially-Adaptive SNNs that robustly enhance the capacity of compact INRs to fit detailed signals. SASNet integrates a frequency embedding layer to control frequency components and mitigate spectral bias, along with jointly optimized, spatially-adaptive masks that localize neuron influence, reducing network redundancy and improving convergence stability. Robust to hyperparameter selection, SASNet faithfully reconstructs high-frequency signals without overfitting low-frequency regions. Our experiments show that SASNet outperforms state-of-the-art INRs, achieving strong fitting accuracy, super-resolution capability, and noise suppression, without sacrificing model compactness.
BiasConnect: Investigating Bias Interactions in Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Pushkar Shukla, Aditya Chinchure, Emily Diana, Alexander Tolbert, Kartik Hosanagar, Vineeth N. Balasubramanian, Leonid Sigal, Matthew A. Turk
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual

The biases exhibited by Text-to-Image (TTI) models are often treated as if they are independent, but in reality, they may be deeply interrelated. Addressing bias along one dimension, such as ethnicity or age, can inadvertently influence another dimension, like gender, either mitigating or exacerbating existing disparities. Understanding these interdependencies is crucial for designing fairer generative models, yet measuring such effects quantitatively remains a challenge. In this paper, we aim to address these questions by introducing BiasConnect, a novel tool designed to analyze and quantify bias interactions in TTI models. Our approach leverages a counterfactual-based framework to generate pairwise causal graphs that reveals the underlying structure of bias interactions for the given text prompt. Additionally, our method provides empirical estimates that indicate how other bias dimensions shift toward or away from an ideal distribution when a given bias is modified. Our estimates have a strong correlation (+0.69) with the interdependency observations post bias mitigation. We demonstrate the utility of BiasConnect for selecting optimal bias mitigation axes, comparing different TTI models on the dependencies they learn, and understanding the amplification of intersectional societal biases in TTI models.
Evaluating the Impact of Synthetic Data on Object Detection Tasks in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Enes Özeren, Arka Bhowmick
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection

The increasing applications of autonomous driving systems necessitates large-scale, high-quality datasets to ensure robust performance across diverse scenarios. Synthetic data has emerged as a viable solution to augment real-world datasets due to its cost-effectiveness, availability of precise ground-truth labels, and the ability to model specific edge cases. However, synthetic data may introduce distributional differences and biases that could impact model performance in real-world settings. To evaluate the utility and limitations of synthetic data, we conducted controlled experiments using multiple real-world datasets and a synthetic dataset generated by BIT Technology Solutions GmbH. Our study spans two sensor modalities, camera and LiDAR, and investigates both 2D and 3D object detection tasks. We compare models trained on real, synthetic, and mixed datasets, analyzing their robustness and generalization capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that the use of a combination of real and synthetic data improves the robustness and generalization of object detection models, underscoring the potential of synthetic data in advancing autonomous driving technologies.
How good are deep learning methods for automated road safety analysis using video data? An experimental study
Authors: Qingwu Liu, Nicolas Saunier, Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Object Tracking, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Tracking

Image-based multi-object detection (MOD) and multi-object tracking (MOT) are advancing at a fast pace. A variety of 2D and 3D MOD and MOT methods have been developed for monocular and stereo cameras. Road safety analysis can benefit from those advancements. As crashes are rare events, surrogate measures of safety (SMoS) have been developed for safety analyses. (Semi-)Automated safety analysis methods extract road user trajectories to compute safety indicators, for example, Time-to-Collision (TTC) and Post-encroachment Time (PET). Inspired by the success of deep learning in MOD and MOT, we investigate three MOT methods, including one based on a stereo-camera, using the annotated KITTI traffic video dataset. Two post-processing steps, IDsplit and SS, are developed to improve the tracking results and investigate the factors influencing the TTC. The experimental results show that, despite some advantages in terms of the numbers of interactions or similarity to the TTC distributions, all the tested methods systematically over-estimate the number of interactions and under-estimate the TTC: they report more interactions and more severe interactions, making the road user interactions appear less safe than they are. Further efforts will be directed towards testing more methods and more data, in particular from roadside sensors, to verify the results and improve the performance.
Exploring Position Encoding in Diffusion U-Net for Training-free High-resolution Image Generation
Authors: Feng Zhou, Pu Cao, Yiyang Ma, Lu Yang, Jianqin Yin
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising, Image Generation, Position

Denoising higher-resolution latents via a pre-trained U-Net leads to repetitive and disordered image patterns. Although recent studies make efforts to improve generative quality by aligning denoising process across original and higher resolutions, the root cause of suboptimal generation is still lacking exploration. Through comprehensive analysis of position encoding in U-Net, we attribute it to inconsistent position encoding, sourced by the inadequate propagation of position information from zero-padding to latent features in convolution layers as resolution increases. To address this issue, we propose a novel training-free approach, introducing a Progressive Boundary Complement (PBC) method. This method creates dynamic virtual image boundaries inside the feature map to enhance position information propagation, enabling high-quality and rich-content high-resolution image synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Foundation X: Integrating Classification, Localization, and Segmentation through Lock-Release Pretraining Strategy for Chest X-ray Analysis
Authors: Nahid Ul Islam, Dongao Ma, Jiaxuan Pang, Shivasakthi Senthil Velan, Michael Gotway, Jianming Liang
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, General Knowledge, Segmentation

Developing robust and versatile deep-learning models is essential for enhancing diagnostic accuracy and guiding clinical interventions in medical imaging, but it requires a large amount of annotated data. The advancement of deep learning has facilitated the creation of numerous medical datasets with diverse expert-level annotations. Aggregating these datasets can maximize data utilization and address the inadequacy of labeled data. However, the heterogeneity of expert-level annotations across tasks such as classification, localization, and segmentation presents a significant challenge for learning from these datasets. To this end, we introduce nFoundation X, an end-to-end framework that utilizes diverse expert-level annotations from numerous public datasets to train a foundation model capable of multiple tasks including classification, localization, and segmentation. To address the challenges of annotation and task heterogeneity, we propose a Lock-Release pretraining strategy to enhance the cyclic learning from multiple datasets, combined with the student-teacher learning paradigm, ensuring the model retains general knowledge for all tasks while preventing overfitting to any single task. To demonstrate the effectiveness of Foundation X, we trained a model using 11 chest X-ray datasets, covering annotations for classification, localization, and segmentation tasks. Our experimental results show that Foundation X achieves notable performance gains through extensive annotation utilization, excels in cross-dataset and cross-task learning, and further enhances performance in organ localization and segmentation tasks. All code and pretrained models are publicly accessible at https://github.com/jlianglab/Foundation_X.
Object-Aware DINO (Oh-A-Dino): Enhancing Self-Supervised Representations for Multi-Object Instance Retrieval
Authors: Stefan Sylvius Wagner, Stefan Harmeling
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Retrieval, Scene Understanding

Object-centric learning is fundamental to human vision and crucial for models requiring complex reasoning. Traditional approaches rely on slot-based bottlenecks to learn object properties explicitly, while recent self-supervised vision models like DINO have shown emergent object understanding. However, DINO representations primarily capture global scene features, often confounding individual object attributes. We investigate the effectiveness of DINO representations and slot-based methods for multi-object instance retrieval. Our findings reveal that DINO representations excel at capturing global object attributes such as object shape and size, but struggle with object-level details like colour, whereas slot-based representations struggle at both global and object-level understanding. To address this, we propose a method that combines global and local features by augmenting DINO representations with object-centric latent vectors from a Variational Autoencoder trained on segmented image patches that are extracted from the DINO features. This approach improves multi-object instance retrieval performance, bridging the gap between global scene understanding and fine-grained object representation without requiring full model retraining.
LuciBot: Automated Robot Policy Learning from Generated Videos
Authors: Xiaowen Qiu, Yian Wang, Jiting Cai, Zhehuan Chen, Chunru Lin, Tsun-Hsuan Wang, Chuang Gan
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

Automatically generating training supervision for embodied tasks is crucial, as manual designing is tedious and not scalable. While prior works use large language models (LLMs) or vision-language models (VLMs) to generate rewards, these approaches are largely limited to simple tasks with well-defined rewards, such as pick-and-place. This limitation arises because LLMs struggle to interpret complex scenes compressed into text or code due to their restricted input modality, while VLM-based rewards, though better at visual perception, remain limited by their less expressive output modality. To address these challenges, we leverage the imagination capability of general-purpose video generation models. Given an initial simulation frame and a textual task description, the video generation model produces a video demonstrating task completion with correct semantics. We then extract rich supervisory signals from the generated video, including 6D object pose sequences, 2D segmentations, and estimated depth, to facilitate task learning in simulation. Our approach significantly improves supervision quality for complex embodied tasks, enabling large-scale training in simulators.
FDCT: Frequency-Aware Decomposition and Cross-Modal Token-Alignment for Multi-Sensor Target Classification
Authors: Shoaib Meraj Sami, Md Mahedi Hasan, Nasser M. Nasrabadi, Raghuveer Rao
Date: 2025-03-12 00:00:00

In automatic target recognition (ATR) systems, sensors may fail to capture discriminative, fine-grained detail features due to environmental conditions, noise created by CMOS chips, occlusion, parallaxes, and sensor misalignment. Therefore, multi-sensor image fusion is an effective choice to overcome these constraints. However, multi-modal image sensors are heterogeneous and have domain and granularity gaps. In addition, the multi-sensor images can be misaligned due to intricate background clutters, fluctuating illumination conditions, and uncontrolled sensor settings. In this paper, to overcome these issues, we decompose, align, and fuse multiple image sensor data for target classification. We extract the domain-specific and domain-invariant features from each sensor data. We propose to develop a shared unified discrete token (UDT) space between sensors to reduce the domain and granularity gaps. Additionally, we develop an alignment module to overcome the misalignment between multi-sensors and emphasize the discriminative representation of the UDT space. In the alignment module, we introduce sparsity constraints to provide a better cross-modal representation of the UDT space and robustness against various sensor settings. We achieve superior classification performance compared to single-modality classifiers and several state-of-the-art multi-modal fusion algorithms on four multi-sensor ATR datasets.