pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SOS: Segment Object System for Open-World Instance Segmentation With Object Priors
Authors: Christian Wilms, Tim Rolff, Maris Hillemann, Robert Johanson, Simone Frintrop
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Object, Open-World Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose an approach for Open-World Instance Segmentation (OWIS), a task that aims to segment arbitrary unknown objects in images by generalizing from a limited set of annotated object classes during training. Our Segment Object System (SOS) explicitly addresses the generalization ability and the low precision of state-of-the-art systems, which often generate background detections. To this end, we generate high-quality pseudo annotations based on the foundation model SAM. We thoroughly study various object priors to generate prompts for SAM, explicitly focusing the foundation model on objects. The strongest object priors were obtained by self-attention maps from self-supervised Vision Transformers, which we utilize for prompting SAM. Finally, the post-processed segments from SAM are used as pseudo annotations to train a standard instance segmentation system. Our approach shows strong generalization capabilities on COCO, LVIS, and ADE20k datasets and improves on the precision by up to 81.6% compared to the state-of-the-art. Source code is available at: https://github.com/chwilms/SOS
AEANet: Affinity Enhanced Attentional Networks for Arbitrary Style Transfer
Authors: Gen Li, Xianqiu Zheng, Yujian Li
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Style Transfer

Arbitrary artistic style transfer is a research area that combines rational academic study with emotive artistic creation. It aims to create a new image from a content image according to a target artistic style, maintaining the content's textural structural information while incorporating the artistic characteristics of the style image. However, existing style transfer methods often significantly damage the texture lines of the content image during the style transformation. To address these issues, we propose affinity-enhanced attentional network, which include the content affinity-enhanced attention (CAEA) module, the style affinity-enhanced attention (SAEA) module, and the hybrid attention (HA) module. The CAEA and SAEA modules first use attention to enhance content and style representations, followed by a detail enhanced (DE) module to reinforce detail features. The hybrid attention module adjusts the style feature distribution based on the content feature distribution. We also introduce the local dissimilarity loss based on affinity attention, which better preserves the affinity with content and style images. Experiments demonstrate that our work achieves better results in arbitrary style transfer than other state-of-the-art methods.
Reflecting Reality: Enabling Diffusion Models to Produce Faithful Mirror Reflections
Authors: Ankit Dhiman, Manan Shah, Rishubh Parihar, Yash Bhalgat, Lokesh R Boregowda, R Venkatesh Babu
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

We tackle the problem of generating highly realistic and plausible mirror reflections using diffusion-based generative models. We formulate this problem as an image inpainting task, allowing for more user control over the placement of mirrors during the generation process. To enable this, we create SynMirror, a large-scale dataset of diverse synthetic scenes with objects placed in front of mirrors. SynMirror contains around 198k samples rendered from 66k unique 3D objects, along with their associated depth maps, normal maps and instance-wise segmentation masks, to capture relevant geometric properties of the scene. Using this dataset, we propose a novel depth-conditioned inpainting method called MirrorFusion, which generates high-quality, realistic, shape and appearance-aware reflections of real-world objects. MirrorFusion outperforms state-of-the-art methods on SynMirror, as demonstrated by extensive quantitative and qualitative analysis. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to successfully tackle the challenging problem of generating controlled and faithful mirror reflections of an object in a scene using diffusion-based models. SynMirror and MirrorFusion open up new avenues for image editing and augmented reality applications for practitioners and researchers alike. The project page is available at: https://val.cds.iisc.ac.in/reflecting-reality.github.io/.
Dynamic Realms: 4D Content Analysis, Recovery and Generation with Geometric, Topological and Physical Priors
Authors: Zhiyang Dou
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

My research focuses on the analysis, recovery, and generation of 4D content, where 4D includes three spatial dimensions (x, y, z) and a temporal dimension t, such as shape and motion. This focus goes beyond static objects to include dynamic changes over time, providing a comprehensive understanding of both spatial and temporal variations. These techniques are critical in applications like AR/VR, embodied AI, and robotics. My research aims to make 4D content generation more efficient, accessible, and higher in quality by incorporating geometric, topological, and physical priors. I also aim to develop effective methods for 4D content recovery and analysis using these priors.
Phantom of Latent for Large Language and Vision Models
Authors: Byung-Kwan Lee, Sangyun Chung, Chae Won Kim, Beomchan Park, Yong Man Ro
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Question Answering

The success of visual instruction tuning has accelerated the development of large language and vision models (LLVMs). Following the scaling laws of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), LLVMs either have further increased their sizes, reaching 26B, 34B, and even 80B parameters. While this increase in model size has yielded significant performance gains, it demands substantially more hardware resources for both training and inference. Consequently, there naturally exists a strong need for efficient LLVMs that achieve the performance of larger models while being smaller in size. To achieve this need, we present a new efficient LLVM family with model sizes of 0.5B, 1.8B, 3.8B, and 7B parameters, Phantom, which significantly enhances learning capabilities within limited structures. By temporarily increasing the latent hidden dimension during multi-head self-attention (MHSA), we make LLVMs prepare to look and understand much more vision-language knowledge on the latent, without substantially increasing physical model sizes. To maximize its advantage, we introduce Phantom Optimization (PO) using both autoregressive supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and direct preference optimization (DPO)-like concept, which effectively follows correct answers while eliminating incorrect and ambiguous ones. Phantom outperforms numerous larger open- and closed-source LLVMs, positioning itself as a leading solution in the landscape of efficient LLVMs.
BranchPoseNet: Characterizing tree branching with a deep learning-based pose estimation approach
Authors: Stefano Puliti, Carolin Fischer, Rasmus Astrup
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Estimation

This paper presents an automated pipeline for detecting tree whorls in proximally laser scanning data using a pose-estimation deep learning model. Accurate whorl detection provides valuable insights into tree growth patterns, wood quality, and offers potential for use as a biometric marker to track trees throughout the forestry value chain. The workflow processes point cloud data to create sectional images, which are subsequently used to identify keypoints representing tree whorls and branches along the stem. The method was tested on a dataset of destructively sampled individual trees, where the whorls were located along the stems of felled trees. The results demonstrated strong potential, with accurate identification of tree whorls and precise calculation of key structural metrics, unlocking new insights and deeper levels of information from individual tree point clouds.
Robust and Flexible Omnidirectional Depth Estimation with Multiple 360° Cameras
Authors: Ming Li, Xueqian Jin, Xuejiao Hu, Jinghao Cao, Sidan Du, Yang Li
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Stereo Matching

Omnidirectional depth estimation has received much attention from researchers in recent years. However, challenges arise due to camera soiling and variations in camera layouts, affecting the robustness and flexibility of the algorithm. In this paper, we use the geometric constraints and redundant information of multiple 360-degree cameras to achieve robust and flexible multi-view omnidirectional depth estimation. We implement two algorithms, in which the two-stage algorithm obtains initial depth maps by pairwise stereo matching of multiple cameras and fuses the multiple depth maps to achieve the final depth estimation; the one-stage algorithm adopts spherical sweeping based on hypothetical depths to construct a uniform spherical matching cost of the multi-camera images and obtain the depth. Additionally, a generalized epipolar equirectangular projection is introduced to simplify the spherical epipolar constraints. To overcome panorama distortion, a spherical feature extractor is implemented. Furthermore, a synthetic 360-degree dataset consisting of 12K road scene panoramas and 3K ground truth depth maps is presented to train and evaluate 360-degree depth estimation algorithms. Our dataset takes soiled camera lenses and glare into consideration, which is more consistent with the real-world environment. Experiments show that our two algorithms achieve state-of-the-art performance, accurately predicting depth maps even when provided with soiled panorama inputs. The flexibility of the algorithms is experimentally validated in terms of camera layouts and numbers.
CFVNet: An End-to-End Cancelable Finger Vein Network for Recognition
Authors: Yifan Wang, Jie Gui, Yuan Yan Tang, James Tin-Yau Kwok
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Finger Vein Recognition

Finger vein recognition technology has become one of the primary solutions for high-security identification systems. However, it still has information leakage problems, which seriously jeopardizes users privacy and anonymity and cause great security risks. In addition, there is no work to consider a fully integrated secure finger vein recognition system. So, different from the previous systems, we integrate preprocessing and template protection into an integrated deep learning model. We propose an end-to-end cancelable finger vein network (CFVNet), which can be used to design an secure finger vein recognition system.It includes a plug-and-play BWR-ROIAlign unit, which consists of three sub-modules: Localization, Compression and Transformation. The localization module achieves automated localization of stable and unique finger vein ROI. The compression module losslessly removes spatial and channel redundancies. The transformation module uses the proposed BWR method to introduce unlinkability, irreversibility and revocability to the system. BWR-ROIAlign can directly plug into the model to introduce the above features for DCNN-based finger vein recognition systems. We perform extensive experiments on four public datasets to study the performance and cancelable biometric attributes of the CFVNet-based recognition system. The average accuracy, EERs and Dsys on the four datasets are 99.82%, 0.01% and 0.025, respectively, and achieves competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts.
Human Hair Reconstruction with Strand-Aligned 3D Gaussians
Authors: Egor Zakharov, Vanessa Sklyarova, Michael Black, Giljoo Nam, Justus Thies, Otmar Hilliges
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

We introduce a new hair modeling method that uses a dual representation of classical hair strands and 3D Gaussians to produce accurate and realistic strand-based reconstructions from multi-view data. In contrast to recent approaches that leverage unstructured Gaussians to model human avatars, our method reconstructs the hair using 3D polylines, or strands. This fundamental difference allows the use of the resulting hairstyles out-of-the-box in modern computer graphics engines for editing, rendering, and simulation. Our 3D lifting method relies on unstructured Gaussians to generate multi-view ground truth data to supervise the fitting of hair strands. The hairstyle itself is represented in the form of the so-called strand-aligned 3D Gaussians. This representation allows us to combine strand-based hair priors, which are essential for realistic modeling of the inner structure of hairstyles, with the differentiable rendering capabilities of 3D Gaussian Splatting. Our method, named Gaussian Haircut, is evaluated on synthetic and real scenes and demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in the task of strand-based hair reconstruction.
Advancing Depression Detection on Social Media Platforms Through Fine-Tuned Large Language Models
Authors: Shahid Munir Shah, Syeda Anshrah Gillani, Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig, Muhammad Aamer Saleem, Muhammad Hamzah Siddiqui
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection

This study investigates the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for improved depression detection from users social media data. Through the use of fine-tuned GPT 3.5 Turbo 1106 and LLaMA2-7B models and a sizable dataset from earlier studies, we were able to identify depressed content in social media posts with a high accuracy of nearly 96.0 percent. The comparative analysis of the obtained results with the relevant studies in the literature shows that the proposed fine-tuned LLMs achieved enhanced performance compared to existing state of the-art systems. This demonstrates the robustness of LLM-based fine-tuned systems to be used as potential depression detection systems. The study describes the approach in depth, including the parameters used and the fine-tuning procedure, and it addresses the important implications of our results for the early diagnosis of depression on several social media platforms.
Two Deep Learning Solutions for Automatic Blurring of Faces in Videos
Authors: Roman Plaud, Jose-Luis Lisani
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

The widespread use of cameras in everyday life situations generates a vast amount of data that may contain sensitive information about the people and vehicles moving in front of them (location, license plates, physical characteristics, etc). In particular, people's faces are recorded by surveillance cameras in public spaces. In order to ensure the privacy of individuals, face blurring techniques can be applied to the collected videos. In this paper we present two deep-learning based options to tackle the problem. First, a direct approach, consisting of a classical object detector (based on the YOLO architecture) trained to detect faces, which are subsequently blurred. Second, an indirect approach, in which a Unet-like segmentation network is trained to output a version of the input image in which all the faces have been blurred.
Revisiting Video Quality Assessment from the Perspective of Generalization
Authors: Xinli Yue, Jianhui Sun, Liangchao Yao, Fan Xia, Yuetang Deng, Tianyi Wang, Lei LI, Fengyun Rao, Jing Lv, Qian Wang, Lingchen Zhao
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

The increasing popularity of short video platforms such as YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Kwai has led to a surge in User-Generated Content (UGC), which presents significant challenges for the generalization performance of Video Quality Assessment (VQA) tasks. These challenges not only affect performance on test sets but also impact the ability to generalize across different datasets. While prior research has primarily focused on enhancing feature extractors, sampling methods, and network branches, it has largely overlooked the generalization capabilities of VQA tasks. In this work, we reevaluate the VQA task from a generalization standpoint. We begin by analyzing the weight loss landscape of VQA models, identifying a strong correlation between this landscape and the generalization gaps. We then investigate various techniques to regularize the weight loss landscape. Our results reveal that adversarial weight perturbations can effectively smooth this landscape, significantly improving the generalization performance, with cross-dataset generalization and fine-tuning performance enhanced by up to 1.8% and 3%, respectively. Through extensive experiments across various VQA methods and datasets, we validate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, by leveraging our insights, we achieve state-of-the-art performance in Image Quality Assessment (IQA) tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/XinliYue/VQA-Generalization.
Probabilistically Aligned View-unaligned Clustering with Adaptive Template Selection
Authors: Wenhua Dong, Xiao-Jun Wu, ZhenHua Feng, Sara Atito, Muhammad Awais, Josef Kittler
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

In most existing multi-view modeling scenarios, cross-view correspondence (CVC) between instances of the same target from different views, like paired image-text data, is a crucial prerequisite for effortlessly deriving a consistent representation. Nevertheless, this premise is frequently compromised in certain applications, where each view is organized and transmitted independently, resulting in the view-unaligned problem (VuP). Restoring CVC of unaligned multi-view data is a challenging and highly demanding task that has received limited attention from the research community. To tackle this practical challenge, we propose to integrate the permutation derivation procedure into the bipartite graph paradigm for view-unaligned clustering, termed Probabilistically Aligned View-unaligned Clustering with Adaptive Template Selection (PAVuC-ATS). Specifically, we learn consistent anchors and view-specific graphs by the bipartite graph, and derive permutations applied to the unaligned graphs by reformulating the alignment between two latent representations as a 2-step transition of a Markov chain with adaptive template selection, thereby achieving the probabilistic alignment. The convergence of the resultant optimization problem is validated both experimentally and theoretically. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PAVuC-ATS over the baseline methods.
Advancing Video Quality Assessment for AIGC
Authors: Xinli Yue, Jianhui Sun, Han Kong, Liangchao Yao, Tianyi Wang, Lei LI, Fengyun Rao, Jing Lv, Fan Xia, Yuetang Deng, Qian Wang, Lingchen Zhao
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text Generation, Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

In recent years, AI generative models have made remarkable progress across various domains, including text generation, image generation, and video generation. However, assessing the quality of text-to-video generation is still in its infancy, and existing evaluation frameworks fall short when compared to those for natural videos. Current video quality assessment (VQA) methods primarily focus on evaluating the overall quality of natural videos and fail to adequately account for the substantial quality discrepancies between frames in generated videos. To address this issue, we propose a novel loss function that combines mean absolute error with cross-entropy loss to mitigate inter-frame quality inconsistencies. Additionally, we introduce the innovative S2CNet technique to retain critical content, while leveraging adversarial training to enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing VQA techniques on the AIGC Video dataset, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by 3.1% in terms of PLCC.
DanceCamAnimator: Keyframe-Based Controllable 3D Dance Camera Synthesis
Authors: Zixuan Wang, Jiayi Li, Xiaoyu Qin, Shikun Sun, Songtao Zhou, Jia Jia, Jiebo Luo
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Animation

Synthesizing camera movements from music and dance is highly challenging due to the contradicting requirements and complexities of dance cinematography. Unlike human movements, which are always continuous, dance camera movements involve both continuous sequences of variable lengths and sudden drastic changes to simulate the switching of multiple cameras. However, in previous works, every camera frame is equally treated and this causes jittering and unavoidable smoothing in post-processing. To solve these problems, we propose to integrate animator dance cinematography knowledge by formulating this task as a three-stage process: keyframe detection, keyframe synthesis, and tween function prediction. Following this formulation, we design a novel end-to-end dance camera synthesis framework \textbf{DanceCamAnimator}, which imitates human animation procedures and shows powerful keyframe-based controllability with variable lengths. Extensive experiments on the DCM dataset demonstrate that our method surpasses previous baselines quantitatively and qualitatively. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/Carmenw1203/DanceCamAnimator-Official}.
Deep Cost Ray Fusion for Sparse Depth Video Completion
Authors: Jungeon Kim, Soongjin Kim, Jaesik Park, Seungyong Lee
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion

In this paper, we present a learning-based framework for sparse depth video completion. Given a sparse depth map and a color image at a certain viewpoint, our approach makes a cost volume that is constructed on depth hypothesis planes. To effectively fuse sequential cost volumes of the multiple viewpoints for improved depth completion, we introduce a learning-based cost volume fusion framework, namely RayFusion, that effectively leverages the attention mechanism for each pair of overlapped rays in adjacent cost volumes. As a result of leveraging feature statistics accumulated over time, our proposed framework consistently outperforms or rivals state-of-the-art approaches on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets, including the KITTI Depth Completion benchmark, VOID Depth Completion benchmark, and ScanNetV2 dataset, using much fewer network parameters.
Improving Adversarial Robustness for 3D Point Cloud Recognition at Test-Time through Purified Self-Training
Authors: Jinpeng Lin, Xulei Yang, Tianrui Li, Xun Xu
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Purification, Adversarial Robustness

Recognizing 3D point cloud plays a pivotal role in many real-world applications. However, deploying 3D point cloud deep learning model is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Despite many efforts into developing robust model by adversarial training, they may become less effective against emerging attacks. This limitation motivates the development of adversarial purification which employs generative model to mitigate the impact of adversarial attacks. In this work, we highlight the remaining challenges from two perspectives. First, the purification based method requires retraining the classifier on purified samples which introduces additional computation overhead. Moreover, in a more realistic scenario, testing samples arrives in a streaming fashion and adversarial samples are not isolated from clean samples. These challenges motivates us to explore dynamically update model upon observing testing samples. We proposed a test-time purified self-training strategy to achieve this objective. Adaptive thresholding and feature distribution alignment are introduced to improve the robustness of self-training. Extensive results on different adversarial attacks suggest the proposed method is complementary to purification based method in handling continually changing adversarial attacks on the testing data stream.