pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Extending Video Masked Autoencoders to 128 frames
Authors: Nitesh Bharadwaj Gundavarapu, Luke Friedman, Raghav Goyal, Chaitra Hegde, Eirikur Agustsson, Sagar M. Waghmare, Mikhail Sirotenko, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Tobias Weyand, Boqing Gong, Leonid Sigal
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Neural Information Processing Systems 2024 9
Tasks: Decoder, Video Understanding

Video understanding has witnessed significant progress with recent video foundation models demonstrating strong performance owing to self-supervised pre-training objectives; Masked Autoencoders (MAE) being the design of choice. Nevertheless, the majority of prior works that leverage MAE pre-training have focused on relatively short video representations (16 / 32 frames in length) largely due to hardware memory and compute limitations that scale poorly with video length due to the dense memory-intensive self-attention decoding. One natural strategy to address these challenges is to subsample tokens to reconstruct during decoding (or decoder masking). In this work, we propose an effective strategy for prioritizing tokens which allows training on longer video sequences (128 frames) and gets better performance than, more typical, random and uniform masking strategies. The core of our approach is an adaptive decoder masking strategy that prioritizes the most important tokens and uses quantized tokens as reconstruction objectives. Our adaptive strategy leverages a powerful MAGVIT-based tokenizer that jointly learns the tokens and their priority. We validate our design choices through exhaustive ablations and observe improved performance of the resulting long-video (128 frames) encoders over short-video (32 frames) counterparts. With our long-video masked autoencoder (LVMAE) strategy, we surpass state-of-the-art on Diving48 by 3.9 points and EPIC-Kitchens-100 verb classification by 2.5 points while relying on a simple core architecture and video-only pre-training (unlike some of the prior works that require millions of labeled video-text pairs or specialized encoders).
ID-Patch: Robust ID Association for Group Photo Personalization
Authors: Yimeng Zhang, Tiancheng Zhi, Jing Liu, Shen Sang, Liming Jiang, Qing Yan, Sijia Liu, Linjie Luo
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

The ability to synthesize personalized group photos and specify the positions of each identity offers immense creative potential. While such imagery can be visually appealing, it presents significant challenges for existing technologies. A persistent issue is identity (ID) leakage, where injected facial features interfere with one another, resulting in low face resemblance, incorrect positioning, and visual artifacts. Existing methods suffer from limitations such as the reliance on segmentation models, increased runtime, or a high probability of ID leakage. To address these challenges, we propose ID-Patch, a novel method that provides robust association between identities and 2D positions. Our approach generates an ID patch and ID embeddings from the same facial features: the ID patch is positioned on the conditional image for precise spatial control, while the ID embeddings integrate with text embeddings to ensure high resemblance. Experimental results demonstrate that ID-Patch surpasses baseline methods across metrics, such as face ID resemblance, ID-position association accuracy, and generation efficiency. Project Page is: https://byteaigc.github.io/ID-Patch/
Sparse Input View Synthesis: 3D Representations and Reliable Priors
Authors: Nagabhushan Somraj
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis, Video Compression, Video Stabilization

Novel view synthesis refers to the problem of synthesizing novel viewpoints of a scene given the images from a few viewpoints. This is a fundamental problem in computer vision and graphics, and enables a vast variety of applications such as meta-verse, free-view watching of events, video gaming, video stabilization and video compression. Recent 3D representations such as radiance fields and multi-plane images significantly improve the quality of images rendered from novel viewpoints. However, these models require a dense sampling of input views for high quality renders. Their performance goes down significantly when only a few input views are available. In this thesis, we focus on the sparse input novel view synthesis problem for both static and dynamic scenes.
MambaDETR: Query-based Temporal Modeling using State Space Model for Multi-View 3D Object Detection
Authors: Tong Ning, Ke Lu, Xirui Jiang, Jian Xue
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection

Utilizing temporal information to improve the performance of 3D detection has made great progress recently in the field of autonomous driving. Traditional transformer-based temporal fusion methods suffer from quadratic computational cost and information decay as the length of the frame sequence increases. In this paper, we propose a novel method called MambaDETR, whose main idea is to implement temporal fusion in the efficient state space. Moreover, we design a Motion Elimination module to remove the relatively static objects for temporal fusion. On the standard nuScenes benchmark, our proposed MambaDETR achieves remarkable result in the 3D object detection task, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance among existing temporal fusion methods.
Principles of Visual Tokens for Efficient Video Understanding
Authors: Xinyue Hao, Gen Li, Shreyank N Gowda, Robert B Fisher, Jonathan Huang, Anurag Arnab, Laura Sevilla-Lara
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Understanding

Video understanding has made huge strides in recent years, relying largely on the power of the transformer architecture. As this architecture is notoriously expensive and video is highly redundant, research into improving efficiency has become particularly relevant. This has led to many creative solutions, including token merging and token selection. While most methods succeed in reducing the cost of the model and maintaining accuracy, an interesting pattern arises: most methods do not outperform the random sampling baseline. In this paper we take a closer look at this phenomenon and make several observations. First, we develop an oracle for the value of tokens which exposes a clear Pareto distribution where most tokens have remarkably low value, and just a few carry most of the perceptual information. Second, we analyze why this oracle is extremely hard to learn, as it does not consistently coincide with visual cues. Third, we observe that easy videos need fewer tokens to maintain accuracy. We build on these and further insights to propose a lightweight video model we call LITE that can select a small number of tokens effectively, outperforming state-of-the-art and existing baselines across datasets (Kinetics400 and Something-Something-V2) in the challenging trade-off of computation (GFLOPs) vs accuracy.
Unsupervised Foundation Model-Agnostic Slide-Level Representation Learning
Authors: Tim Lenz, Peter Neidlinger, Marta Ligero, Georg Wölflein, Marko van Treeck, Jakob Nikolas Kather
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Mamba, model, Multiple Instance Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, whole slide images

Representation learning of pathology whole-slide images(WSIs) has primarily relied on weak supervision with Multiple Instance Learning (MIL). This approach leads to slide representations highly tailored to a specific clinical task. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been successfully applied to train histopathology foundation models (FMs) for patch embedding generation. However, generating patient or slide level embeddings remains challenging. Existing approaches for slide representation learning extend the principles of SSL from patch level learning to entire slides by aligning different augmentations of the slide or by utilizing multimodal data. By integrating tile embeddings from multiple FMs, we propose a new single modality SSL method in feature space that generates useful slide representations. Our contrastive pretraining strategy, called COBRA, employs multiple FMs and an architecture based on Mamba-2. COBRA exceeds performance of state-of-the-art slide encoders on four different public Clinical Protemic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) cohorts on average by at least +4.5% AUC, despite only being pretrained on 3048 WSIs from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Additionally, COBRA is readily compatible at inference time with previously unseen feature extractors. Code available at https://github.com/KatherLab/COBRA.
Robust SG-NeRF: Robust Scene Graph Aided Neural Surface Reconstruction
Authors: Yi Gu, Dongjun Ye, Zhaorui Wang, Jiaxu Wang, Jiahang Cao, Renjing Xu
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Surface Reconstruction

Neural surface reconstruction relies heavily on accurate camera poses as input. Despite utilizing advanced pose estimators like COLMAP or ARKit, camera poses can still be noisy. Existing pose-NeRF joint optimization methods handle poses with small noise (inliers) effectively but struggle with large noise (outliers), such as mirrored poses. In this work, we focus on mitigating the impact of outlier poses. Our method integrates an inlier-outlier confidence estimation scheme, leveraging scene graph information gathered during the data preparation phase. Unlike previous works directly using rendering metrics as the reference, we employ a detached color network that omits the viewing direction as input to minimize the impact caused by shape-radiance ambiguities. This enhanced confidence updating strategy effectively differentiates between inlier and outlier poses, allowing us to sample more rays from inlier poses to construct more reliable radiance fields. Additionally, we introduce a re-projection loss based on the current Signed Distance Function (SDF) and pose estimations, strengthening the constraints between matching image pairs. For outlier poses, we adopt a Monte Carlo re-localization method to find better solutions. We also devise a scene graph updating strategy to provide more accurate information throughout the training process. We validate our approach on the SG-NeRF and DTU datasets. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that our methods can consistently improve the reconstruction qualities and pose accuracies.
A Deep Learning Approach to Predict the Fall [of Price] of Cryptocurrency Long Before its Actual Fall
Authors: Anika Tahsin Meem
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00

In modern times, the cryptocurrency market is one of the world's most rapidly rising financial markets. The cryptocurrency market is regarded to be more volatile and illiquid than traditional markets such as equities, foreign exchange, and commodities. The risk of this market creates an uncertain condition among the investors. The purpose of this research is to predict the magnitude of the risk factor of the cryptocurrency market. Risk factor is also called volatility. Our approach will assist people who invest in the cryptocurrency market by overcoming the problems and difficulties they experience. Our approach starts with calculating the risk factor of the cryptocurrency market from the existing parameters. In twenty elements of the cryptocurrency market, the risk factor has been predicted using different machine learning algorithms such as CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM, and GRU. All of the models have been applied to the calculated risk factor parameter. A new model has been developed to predict better than the existing models. Our proposed model gives the highest RMSE value of 1.3229 and the lowest RMSE value of 0.0089. Following our model, it will be easier for investors to trade in complicated and challenging financial assets like bitcoin, Ethereum, dogecoin, etc. Where the other existing models, the highest RMSE was 14.5092, and the lower was 0.02769. So, the proposed model performs much better than models with proper generalization. Using our approach, it will be easier for investors to trade in complicated and challenging financial assets like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
Video2BEV: Transforming Drone Videos to BEVs for Video-based Geo-localization
Authors: Hao Ju, Zhedong Zheng
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: geo-localization

Existing approaches to drone visual geo-localization predominantly adopt the image-based setting, where a single drone-view snapshot is matched with images from other platforms. Such task formulation, however, underutilizes the inherent video output of the drone and is sensitive to occlusions and environmental constraints. To address these limitations, we formulate a new video-based drone geo-localization task and propose the Video2BEV paradigm. This paradigm transforms the video into a Bird's Eye View (BEV), simplifying the subsequent matching process. In particular, we employ Gaussian Splatting to reconstruct a 3D scene and obtain the BEV projection. Different from the existing transform methods, \eg, polar transform, our BEVs preserve more fine-grained details without significant distortion. To further improve model scalability toward diverse BEVs and satellite figures, our Video2BEV paradigm also incorporates a diffusion-based module for generating hard negative samples, which facilitates discriminative feature learning. To validate our approach, we introduce UniV, a new video-based geo-localization dataset that extends the image-based University-1652 dataset. UniV features flight paths at $30^\circ$ and $45^\circ$ elevation angles with increased frame rates of up to 10 frames per second (FPS). Extensive experiments on the UniV dataset show that our Video2BEV paradigm achieves competitive recall rates and outperforms conventional video-based methods. Compared to other methods, our proposed approach exhibits robustness at lower elevations with more occlusions.
What You See Is What Matters: A Novel Visual and Physics-Based Metric for Evaluating Video Generation Quality
Authors: Zihan Wang, Songlin Li, Lingyan Hao, Bowen Song, Xinyu Hu
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

As video generation models advance rapidly, assessing the quality of generated videos has become increasingly critical. Existing metrics, such as Fr\'echet Video Distance (FVD), Inception Score (IS), and ClipSim, measure quality primarily in latent space rather than from a human visual perspective, often overlooking key aspects like appearance and motion consistency to physical laws. In this paper, we propose a novel metric, VAMP (Visual Appearance and Motion Plausibility), that evaluates both the visual appearance and physical plausibility of generated videos. VAMP is composed of two main components: an appearance score, which assesses color, shape, and texture consistency across frames, and a motion score, which evaluates the realism of object movements. We validate VAMP through two experiments: corrupted video evaluation and generated video evaluation. In the corrupted video evaluation, we introduce various types of corruptions into real videos and measure the correlation between corruption severity and VAMP scores. In the generated video evaluation, we use state-of-the-art models to generate videos from carefully designed prompts and compare VAMP's performance to human evaluators' rankings. Our results demonstrate that VAMP effectively captures both visual fidelity and temporal consistency, offering a more comprehensive evaluation of video quality than traditional methods.
RadPhi-3: Small Language Models for Radiology
Authors: Mercy Ranjit, Shaury Srivastav, Tanuja Ganu
Date: 2024-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Small Language Model

LLM based copilot assistants are useful in everyday tasks. There is a proliferation in the exploration of AI assistant use cases to support radiology workflows in a reliable manner. In this work, we present RadPhi-3, a Small Language Model instruction tuned from Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct with 3.8B parameters to assist with various tasks in radiology workflows. While impression summary generation has been the primary task which has been explored in prior works w.r.t radiology reports of Chest X-rays, we also explore other useful tasks like change summary generation comparing the current radiology report and its prior report, section extraction from radiology reports, tagging the reports with various pathologies and tubes, lines or devices present in them etc. In-addition, instruction tuning RadPhi-3 involved learning from a credible knowledge source used by radiologists, Radiopaedia.org. RadPhi-3 can be used both to give reliable answers for radiology related queries as well as perform useful tasks related to radiology reports. RadPhi-3 achieves SOTA results on the RaLEs radiology report generation benchmark.
Learning Fair Robustness via Domain Mixup
Authors: Meiyu Zhong, Ravi Tandon
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

Adversarial training is one of the predominant techniques for training classifiers that are robust to adversarial attacks. Recent work, however has found that adversarial training, which makes the overall classifier robust, it does not necessarily provide equal amount of robustness for all classes. In this paper, we propose the use of mixup for the problem of learning fair robust classifiers, which can provide similar robustness across all classes. Specifically, the idea is to mix inputs from the same classes and perform adversarial training on mixed up inputs. We present a theoretical analysis of this idea for the case of linear classifiers and show that mixup combined with adversarial training can provably reduce the class-wise robustness disparity. This method not only contributes to reducing the disparity in class-wise adversarial risk, but also the class-wise natural risk. Complementing our theoretical analysis, we also provide experimental results on both synthetic data and the real world dataset (CIFAR-10), which shows improvement in class wise disparities for both natural and adversarial risks.
From RNNs to Foundation Models: An Empirical Study on Commercial Building Energy Consumption
Authors: Shourya Bose, Yijiang Li, Amy Van Sant, Yu Zhang, Kibaek Kim
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Accurate short-term energy consumption forecasting for commercial buildings is crucial for smart grid operations. While smart meters and deep learning models enable forecasting using past data from multiple buildings, data heterogeneity from diverse buildings can reduce model performance. The impact of increasing dataset heterogeneity in time series forecasting, while keeping size and model constant, is understudied. We tackle this issue using the ComStock dataset, which provides synthetic energy consumption data for U.S. commercial buildings. Two curated subsets, identical in size and region but differing in building type diversity, are used to assess the performance of various time series forecasting models, including fine-tuned open-source foundation models (FMs). The results show that dataset heterogeneity and model architecture have a greater impact on post-training forecasting performance than the parameter count. Moreover, despite the higher computational cost, fine-tuned FMs demonstrate competitive performance compared to base models trained from scratch.
Multi-Agent Environments for Vehicle Routing Problems
Authors: Ricardo Gama, Daniel Fuertes, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Hugo L. Fernandes
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Research on Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches for discrete optimization problems has increased considerably, extending RL to an area classically dominated by Operations Research (OR). Vehicle routing problems are a good example of discrete optimization problems with high practical relevance where RL techniques have had considerable success. Despite these advances, open-source development frameworks remain scarce, hampering both the testing of algorithms and the ability to objectively compare results. This ultimately slows down progress in the field and limits the exchange of ideas between the RL and OR communities. Here we propose a library composed of multi-agent environments that simulates classic vehicle routing problems. The library, built on PyTorch, provides a flexible modular architecture design that allows easy customization and incorporation of new routing problems. It follows the Agent Environment Cycle ("AEC") games model and has an intuitive API, enabling rapid adoption and easy integration into existing reinforcement learning frameworks. The library allows for a straightforward use of classical OR benchmark instances in order to narrow the gap between the test beds for algorithm benchmarking used by the RL and OR communities. Additionally, we provide benchmark instance sets for each environment, as well as baseline RL models and training code.
CoNFiLD-inlet: Synthetic Turbulence Inflow Using Generative Latent Diffusion Models with Neural Fields
Authors: Xin-Yang Liu, Meet Hemant Parikh, Xiantao Fan, Pan Du, Qing Wang, Yi-fan Chen, Jian-Xun Wang
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

Eddy-resolving turbulence simulations require stochastic inflow conditions that accurately replicate the complex, multi-scale structures of turbulence. Traditional recycling-based methods rely on computationally expensive precursor simulations, while existing synthetic inflow generators often fail to reproduce realistic coherent structures of turbulence. Recent advances in deep learning (DL) have opened new possibilities for inflow turbulence generation, yet many DL-based methods rely on deterministic, autoregressive frameworks prone to error accumulation, resulting in poor robustness for long-term predictions. In this work, we present CoNFiLD-inlet, a novel DL-based inflow turbulence generator that integrates diffusion models with a conditional neural field (CNF)-encoded latent space to produce realistic, stochastic inflow turbulence. By parameterizing inflow conditions using Reynolds numbers, CoNFiLD-inlet generalizes effectively across a wide range of Reynolds numbers ($Re_\tau$ between $10^3$ and $10^4$) without requiring retraining or parameter tuning. Comprehensive validation through a priori and a posteriori tests in Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Wall-Modeled Large Eddy Simulation (WMLES) demonstrates its high fidelity, robustness, and scalability, positioning it as an efficient and versatile solution for inflow turbulence synthesis.
Model Checking for Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving: One Can Do More Than You Think!
Authors: Rong Gu
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Most reinforcement learning (RL) platforms use high-level programming languages, such as OpenAI Gymnasium using Python. These frameworks provide various API and benchmarks for testing RL algorithms in different domains, such as autonomous driving (AD) and robotics. These platforms often emphasise the design of RL algorithms and the training performance but neglect the correctness of models and reward functions, which can be crucial for the successful application of RL. This paper proposes using formal methods to model AD systems and demonstrates how model checking (MC) can be used in RL for AD. Most studies combining MC and RL focus on safety, such as safety shields. However, this paper shows different facets where MC can strengthen RL. First, an MC-based model pre-analysis can reveal bugs with respect to sensor accuracy and learning step size. This step serves as a preparation of RL, which saves time if bugs exist and deepens users' understanding of the target system. Second, reward automata can benefit the design of reward functions and greatly improve learning performance especially when the learning objectives are multiple. All these findings are supported by experiments.