pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Are We on the Right Way for Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models?
Authors: Lin Chen, Jinsong Li, Xiaoyi Dong, Pan Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Zehui Chen, Haodong Duan, Jiaqi Wang, Yu Qiao, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: World Knowledge

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently achieved rapid progress, sparking numerous studies to evaluate their multi-modal capabilities. However, we dig into current evaluation works and identify two primary issues: 1) Visual content is unnecessary for many samples. The answers can be directly inferred from the questions and options, or the world knowledge embedded in LLMs. This phenomenon is prevalent across current benchmarks. For instance, GeminiPro achieves 42.9% on the MMMU benchmark without any visual input, and outperforms the random choice baseline across six benchmarks over 24% on average. 2) Unintentional data leakage exists in LLM and LVLM training. LLM and LVLM could still answer some visual-necessary questions without visual content, indicating the memorizing of these samples within large-scale training data. For example, Sphinx-X-MoE gets 43.6% on MMMU without accessing images, surpassing its LLM backbone with 17.9%. Both problems lead to misjudgments of actual multi-modal gains and potentially misguide the study of LVLM. To this end, we present MMStar, an elite vision-indispensable multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,500 samples meticulously selected by humans. MMStar benchmarks 6 core capabilities and 18 detailed axes, aiming to evaluate LVLMs' multi-modal capacities with carefully balanced and purified samples. These samples are first roughly selected from current benchmarks with an automated pipeline, human review is then involved to ensure each curated sample exhibits visual dependency, minimal data leakage, and requires advanced multi-modal capabilities. Moreover, two metrics are developed to measure data leakage and actual performance gain in multi-modal training. We evaluate 16 leading LVLMs on MMStar to assess their multi-modal capabilities, and on 7 benchmarks with the proposed metrics to investigate their data leakage and actual multi-modal gain.
Convolutional Prompting meets Language Models for Continual Learning
Authors: Anurag Roy, Riddhiman Moulick, Vinay K. Verma, Saptarshi Ghosh, Abir Das
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Continual Learning

Continual Learning (CL) enables machine learning models to learn from continuously shifting new training data in absence of data from old tasks. Recently, pretrained vision transformers combined with prompt tuning have shown promise for overcoming catastrophic forgetting in CL. These approaches rely on a pool of learnable prompts which can be inefficient in sharing knowledge across tasks leading to inferior performance. In addition, the lack of fine-grained layer specific prompts does not allow these to fully express the strength of the prompts for CL. We address these limitations by proposing ConvPrompt, a novel convolutional prompt creation mechanism that maintains layer-wise shared embeddings, enabling both layer-specific learning and better concept transfer across tasks. The intelligent use of convolution enables us to maintain a low parameter overhead without compromising performance. We further leverage Large Language Models to generate fine-grained text descriptions of each category which are used to get task similarity and dynamically decide the number of prompts to be learned. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of ConvPrompt and improves SOTA by ~3% with significantly less parameter overhead. We also perform strong ablation over various modules to disentangle the importance of different components.
Learn "No" to Say "Yes" Better: Improving Vision-Language Models via Negations
Authors: Jaisidh Singh, Ishaan Shrivastava, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Aparna Bharati
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Zero-Shot Image Classification

Existing vision-language models (VLMs) treat text descriptions as a unit, confusing individual concepts in a prompt and impairing visual semantic matching and reasoning. An important aspect of reasoning in logic and language is negations. This paper highlights the limitations of popular VLMs such as CLIP, at understanding the implications of negations, i.e., the effect of the word "not" in a given prompt. To enable evaluation of VLMs on fluent prompts with negations, we present CC-Neg, a dataset containing 228,246 images, true captions and their corresponding negated captions. Using CC-Neg along with modifications to the contrastive loss of CLIP, our proposed CoN-CLIP framework, has an improved understanding of negations. This training paradigm improves CoN-CLIP's ability to encode semantics reliably, resulting in 3.85% average gain in top-1 accuracy for zero-shot image classification across 8 datasets. Further, CoN-CLIP outperforms CLIP on challenging compositionality benchmarks such as SugarCREPE by 4.4%, showcasing emergent compositional understanding of objects, relations, and attributes in text. Overall, our work addresses a crucial limitation of VLMs by introducing a dataset and framework that strengthens semantic associations between images and text, demonstrating improved large-scale foundation models with significantly reduced computational cost, promoting efficiency and accessibility.
InstantSplat: Sparse-view SfM-free Gaussian Splatting in Seconds
Authors: Zhiwen Fan, Kairun Wen, Wenyan Cong, Kevin Wang, Jian Zhang, Xinghao Ding, Danfei Xu, Boris Ivanovic, Marco Pavone, Georgios Pavlakos, Zhangyang Wang, Yue Wang
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Novel View Synthesis, SSIM

While neural 3D reconstruction has advanced substantially, it typically requires densely captured multi-view data with carefully initialized poses (e.g., using COLMAP). However, this requirement limits its broader applicability, as Structure-from-Motion (SfM) is often unreliable in sparse-view scenarios where feature matches are limited, resulting in cumulative errors. In this paper, we introduce InstantSplat, a novel and lightning-fast neural reconstruction system that builds accurate 3D representations from as few as 2-3 images. InstantSplat adopts a self-supervised framework that bridges the gap between 2D images and 3D representations using Gaussian Bundle Adjustment (GauBA) and can be optimized in an end-to-end manner. InstantSplat integrates dense stereo priors and co-visibility relationships between frames to initialize pixel-aligned geometry by progressively expanding the scene avoiding redundancy. Gaussian Bundle Adjustment is used to adapt both the scene representation and camera parameters quickly by minimizing gradient-based photometric error. Overall, InstantSplat achieves large-scale 3D reconstruction in mere seconds by reducing the required number of input views. It achieves an acceleration of over 20 times in reconstruction, improves visual quality (SSIM) from 0.3755 to 0.7624 than COLMAP with 3D-GS, and is compatible with multiple 3D representations (3D-GS, 2D-GS, and Mip-Splatting).
Benchmarking Counterfactual Image Generation
Authors: Thomas Melistas, Nikos Spyrou, Nefeli Gkouti, Pedro Sanchez, Athanasios Vlontzos, Yannis Panagakis, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Conditional Image Generation, counterfactual, Image Generation

Generative AI has revolutionised visual content editing, empowering users to effortlessly modify images and videos. However, not all edits are equal. To perform realistic edits in domains such as natural image or medical imaging, modifications must respect causal relationships inherent to the data generation process. Such image editing falls into the counterfactual image generation regime. Evaluating counterfactual image generation is substantially complex: not only it lacks observable ground truths, but also requires adherence to causal constraints. Although several counterfactual image generation methods and evaluation metrics exist, a comprehensive comparison within a unified setting is lacking. We present a comparison framework to thoroughly benchmark counterfactual image generation methods. We integrate all models that have been used for the task at hand and expand them to novel datasets and causal graphs, demonstrating the superiority of Hierarchical VAEs across most datasets and metrics. Our framework is implemented in a user-friendly Python package that can be extended to incorporate additional SCMs, causal methods, generative models, and datasets for the community to build on. Code: https://github.com/gulnazaki/counterfactual-benchmark.
Snap-it, Tap-it, Splat-it: Tactile-Informed 3D Gaussian Splatting for Reconstructing Challenging Surfaces
Authors: Mauro Comi, Alessio Tonioni, Max Yang, Jonathan Tremblay, Valts Blukis, Yijiong Lin, Nathan F. Lepora, Laurence Aitchison
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Novel View Synthesis, Surface Reconstruction

Touch and vision go hand in hand, mutually enhancing our ability to understand the world. From a research perspective, the problem of mixing touch and vision is underexplored and presents interesting challenges. To this end, we propose Tactile-Informed 3DGS, a novel approach that incorporates touch data (local depth maps) with multi-view vision data to achieve surface reconstruction and novel view synthesis. Our method optimises 3D Gaussian primitives to accurately model the object's geometry at points of contact. By creating a framework that decreases the transmittance at touch locations, we achieve a refined surface reconstruction, ensuring a uniformly smooth depth map. Touch is particularly useful when considering non-Lambertian objects (e.g. shiny or reflective surfaces) since contemporary methods tend to fail to reconstruct with fidelity specular highlights. By combining vision and tactile sensing, we achieve more accurate geometry reconstructions with fewer images than prior methods. We conduct evaluation on objects with glossy and reflective surfaces and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, offering significant improvements in reconstruction quality.
CATSNet: a context-aware network for Height Estimation in a Forested Area based on Pol-TomoSAR data
Authors: Wenyu Yang, Sergio Vitale, Hossein Aghababaei, Giampaolo Ferraioli, Vito Pascazio, Gilda Schirinzi
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00

Tropical forests are a key component of the global carbon cycle. With plans for upcoming space-borne missions like BIOMASS to monitor forestry, several airborne missions, including TropiSAR and AfriSAR campaigns, have been successfully launched and experimented. Typical Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (TomoSAR) methods involve complex models with low accuracy and high computation costs. In recent years, deep learning methods have also gained attention in the TomoSAR framework, showing interesting performance. Recently, a solution based on a fully connected Tomographic Neural Network (TSNN) has demonstrated its effectiveness in accurately estimating forest and ground heights by exploiting the pixel-wise elements of the covariance matrix derived from TomoSAR data. This work instead goes beyond the pixel-wise approach to define a context-aware deep learning-based solution named CATSNet. A convolutional neural network is considered to leverage patch-based information and extract features from a neighborhood rather than focus on a single pixel. The training is conducted by considering TomoSAR data as the input and Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) values as the ground truth. The experimental results show striking advantages in both performance and generalization ability by leveraging context information within Multiple Baselines (MB) TomoSAR data across different polarimetric modalities, surpassing existing techniques.
Draw-and-Understand: Leveraging Visual Prompts to Enable MLLMs to Comprehend What You Want
Authors: Weifeng Lin, Xinyu Wei, Ruichuan An, Peng Gao, Bocheng Zou, Yulin Luo, Siyuan Huang, Shanghang Zhang, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, multimodal interaction, Multimodal Large Language Model, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question Answering, Visual Prompting

The interaction between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) is a crucial factor that reflects the effectiveness of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, current MLLMs primarily focus on image-level comprehension and limit interaction to textual instructions, thereby constraining their flexibility in usage and depth of response. In this paper, we introduce the Draw-and-Understand project: a new model, a multi-domain dataset, and a challenging benchmark for visual prompting. Specifically, we propose SPHINX-V, a new end-to-end trained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that connects a vision encoder, a visual prompt encoder and an LLM for various visual prompts (points, bounding boxes, and free-form shape) and language understanding. To advance visual prompting research for MLLMs, we introduce MDVP-Data and MDVP-Bench. MDVP-Data features a multi-domain dataset containing 1.6M unique image-visual prompt-text instruction-following samples, including natural images, document images, OCR images, mobile screenshots, web screenshots, and multi-panel images. Furthermore, we present MDVP-Bench, a comprehensive and challenging benchmark to assess a model's capability in understanding visual prompting instructions. Our experiments demonstrate SPHINX-V's impressive multimodal interaction capabilities through visual prompting, revealing significant improvements in detailed pixel-level description and question-answering abilities.
Prototype-based Interpretable Breast Cancer Prediction Models: Analysis and Challenges
Authors: Shreyasi Pathak, Jörg Schlötterer, Jeroen Veltman, Jeroen Geerdink, Maurice van Keulen, Christin Seifert
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable Models

Deep learning models have achieved high performance in medical applications, however, their adoption in clinical practice is hindered due to their black-box nature. Self-explainable models, like prototype-based models, can be especially beneficial as they are interpretable by design. However, if the learnt prototypes are of low quality then the prototype-based models are as good as black-box. Having high quality prototypes is a pre-requisite for a truly interpretable model. In this work, we propose a prototype evaluation framework for coherence (PEF-C) for quantitatively evaluating the quality of the prototypes based on domain knowledge. We show the use of PEF-C in the context of breast cancer prediction using mammography. Existing works on prototype-based models on breast cancer prediction using mammography have focused on improving the classification performance of prototype-based models compared to black-box models and have evaluated prototype quality through anecdotal evidence. We are the first to go beyond anecdotal evidence and evaluate the quality of the mammography prototypes systematically using our PEF-C. Specifically, we apply three state-of-the-art prototype-based models, ProtoPNet, BRAIxProtoPNet++ and PIP-Net on mammography images for breast cancer prediction and evaluate these models w.r.t. i) classification performance, and ii) quality of the prototypes, on three public datasets. Our results show that prototype-based models are competitive with black-box models in terms of classification performance, and achieve a higher score in detecting ROIs. However, the quality of the prototypes are not yet sufficient and can be improved in aspects of relevance, purity and learning a variety of prototypes. We call the XAI community to systematically evaluate the quality of the prototypes to check their true usability in high stake decisions and improve such models further.
Benchmarking the Robustness of Temporal Action Detection Models Against Temporal Corruptions
Authors: Runhao Zeng, Xiaoyong Chen, Jiaming Liang, Huisi Wu, Guangzhong Cao, Yong Guo
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Action Detection, Benchmarking

Temporal action detection (TAD) aims to locate action positions and recognize action categories in long-term untrimmed videos. Although many methods have achieved promising results, their robustness has not been thoroughly studied. In practice, we observe that temporal information in videos can be occasionally corrupted, such as missing or blurred frames. Interestingly, existing methods often incur a significant performance drop even if only one frame is affected. To formally evaluate the robustness, we establish two temporal corruption robustness benchmarks, namely THUMOS14-C and ActivityNet-v1.3-C. In this paper, we extensively analyze the robustness of seven leading TAD methods and obtain some interesting findings: 1) Existing methods are particularly vulnerable to temporal corruptions, and end-to-end methods are often more susceptible than those with a pre-trained feature extractor; 2) Vulnerability mainly comes from localization error rather than classification error; 3) When corruptions occur in the middle of an action instance, TAD models tend to yield the largest performance drop. Besides building a benchmark, we further develop a simple but effective robust training method to defend against temporal corruptions, through the FrameDrop augmentation and Temporal-Robust Consistency loss. Remarkably, our approach not only improves robustness but also yields promising improvements on clean data. We believe that this study will serve as a benchmark for future research in robust video analysis. Source code and models are available at https://github.com/Alvin-Zeng/temporal-robustness-benchmark.
MedCLIP-SAM: Bridging Text and Image Towards Universal Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Taha Koleilat, Hojat Asgariandehkordi, Hassan Rivaz, Yiming Xiao
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero Shot Segmentation

Medical image segmentation of anatomical structures and pathology is crucial in modern clinical diagnosis, disease study, and treatment planning. To date, great progress has been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, but most methods still lack data efficiency, generalizability, and interactability. Consequently, the development of new, precise segmentation methods that demand fewer labeled datasets is of utmost importance in medical image analysis. Recently, the emergence of foundation models, such as CLIP and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), with comprehensive cross-domain representation opened the door for interactive and universal image segmentation. However, exploration of these models for data-efficient medical image segmentation is still limited, but is highly necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, called MedCLIP-SAM that combines CLIP and SAM models to generate segmentation of clinical scans using text prompts in both zero-shot and weakly supervised settings. To achieve this, we employed a new Decoupled Hard Negative Noise Contrastive Estimation (DHN-NCE) loss to fine-tune the BiomedCLIP model and the recent gScoreCAM to generate prompts to obtain segmentation masks from SAM in a zero-shot setting. Additionally, we explored the use of zero-shot segmentation labels in a weakly supervised paradigm to improve the segmentation quality further. By extensively testing three diverse segmentation tasks and medical image modalities (breast tumor ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, and lung X-ray), our proposed framework has demonstrated excellent accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/MedCLIP-SAM.
Latent Embedding Clustering for Occlusion Robust Head Pose Estimation
Authors: José Celestino, Manuel Marques, Jacinto C. Nascimento
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Driver Attention Monitoring, Head Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Head pose estimation has become a crucial area of research in computer vision given its usefulness in a wide range of applications, including robotics, surveillance, or driver attention monitoring. One of the most difficult challenges in this field is managing head occlusions that frequently take place in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel and efficient framework that is robust in real world head occlusion scenarios. In particular, we propose an unsupervised latent embedding clustering with regression and classification components for each pose angle. The model optimizes latent feature representations for occluded and non-occluded images through a clustering term while improving fine-grained angle predictions. Experimental evaluation on in-the-wild head pose benchmark datasets reveal competitive performance in comparison to state-of-the-art methodologies with the advantage of having a significant data reduction. We observe a substantial improvement in occluded head pose estimation. Also, an ablation study is conducted to ascertain the impact of the clustering term within our proposed framework.
Relation Rectification in Diffusion Model
Authors: Yinwei Wu, Xingyi Yang, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2024-03-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: model, Relation

Despite their exceptional generative abilities, large text-to-image diffusion models, much like skilled but careless artists, often struggle with accurately depicting visual relationships between objects. This issue, as we uncover through careful analysis, arises from a misaligned text encoder that struggles to interpret specific relationships and differentiate the logical order of associated objects. To resolve this, we introduce a novel task termed Relation Rectification, aiming to refine the model to accurately represent a given relationship it initially fails to generate. To address this, we propose an innovative solution utilizing a Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Network (HGCN). It models the directional relationships between relation terms and corresponding objects within the input prompts. Specifically, we optimize the HGCN on a pair of prompts with identical relational words but reversed object orders, supplemented by a few reference images. The lightweight HGCN adjusts the text embeddings generated by the text encoder, ensuring the accurate reflection of the textual relation in the embedding space. Crucially, our method retains the parameters of the text encoder and diffusion model, preserving the model's robust performance on unrelated descriptions. We validated our approach on a newly curated dataset of diverse relational data, demonstrating both quantitative and qualitative enhancements in generating images with precise visual relations. Project page: https://wuyinwei-hah.github.io/rrnet.github.io/.