pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding How Nonlinear Layers Create Linearly Separable Features for Low-Dimensional Data
Authors: Alec S. Xu, Can Yaras, Peng Wang, Qing Qu
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Deep neural networks have attained remarkable success across diverse classification tasks. Recent empirical studies have shown that deep networks learn features that are linearly separable across classes. However, these findings often lack rigorous justifications, even under relatively simple settings. In this work, we address this gap by examining the linear separation capabilities of shallow nonlinear networks. Specifically, inspired by the low intrinsic dimensionality of image data, we model inputs as a union of low-dimensional subspaces (UoS) and demonstrate that a single nonlinear layer can transform such data into linearly separable sets. Theoretically, we show that this transformation occurs with high probability when using random weights and quadratic activations. Notably, we prove this can be achieved when the network width scales polynomially with the intrinsic dimension of the data rather than the ambient dimension. Experimental results corroborate these theoretical findings and demonstrate that similar linear separation properties hold in practical scenarios beyond our analytical scope. This work bridges the gap between empirical observations and theoretical understanding of the separation capacity of nonlinear networks, offering deeper insights into model interpretability and generalization.
CorrFill: Enhancing Faithfulness in Reference-based Inpainting with Correspondence Guidance in Diffusion Models
Authors: Kuan-Hung Liu, Cheng-Kun Yang, Min-Hung Chen, Yu-Lun Liu, Yen-Yu Lin
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Inpainting

In the task of reference-based image inpainting, an additional reference image is provided to restore a damaged target image to its original state. The advancement of diffusion models, particularly Stable Diffusion, allows for simple formulations in this task. However, existing diffusion-based methods often lack explicit constraints on the correlation between the reference and damaged images, resulting in lower faithfulness to the reference images in the inpainting results. In this work, we propose CorrFill, a training-free module designed to enhance the awareness of geometric correlations between the reference and target images. This enhancement is achieved by guiding the inpainting process with correspondence constraints estimated during inpainting, utilizing attention masking in self-attention layers and an objective function to update the input tensor according to the constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that CorrFill significantly enhances the performance of multiple baseline diffusion-based methods, including state-of-the-art approaches, by emphasizing faithfulness to the reference images.
Revelio: A Real-World Screen-Camera Communication System with Visually Imperceptible Data Embedding
Authors: Abbaas Alif Mohamed Nishar, Shrinivas Kudekar, Bernard Kintzing, Ashwin Ashok
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

We present `Revelio', a real-world screen-camera communication system leveraging temporal flicker fusion in the OKLAB color space. Using spatially-adaptive flickering and encoding information in pixel region shapes, Revelio achieves visually imperceptible data embedding while remaining robust against noise, asynchronicity, and distortions in screen-camera channels, ensuring reliable decoding by standard smartphone cameras. The decoder, driven by a two-stage neural network, uses a weighted differential accumulator for precise frame detection and symbol recognition. Initial experiments demonstrate Revelio's effectiveness in interactive television, offering an unobtrusive method for meta-information transmission.
Accurate Crop Yield Estimation of Blueberries using Deep Learning and Smart Drones
Authors: Hieu D. Nguyen, Brandon McHenry, Thanh Nguyen, Harper Zappone, Anthony Thompson, Chau Tran, Anthony Segrest, Luke Tonon
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

We present an AI pipeline that involves using smart drones equipped with computer vision to obtain a more accurate fruit count and yield estimation of the number of blueberries in a field. The core components are two object-detection models based on the YOLO deep learning architecture: a Bush Model that is able to detect blueberry bushes from images captured at low altitudes and at different angles, and a Berry Model that can detect individual berries that are visible on a bush. Together, both models allow for more accurate crop yield estimation by allowing intelligent control of the drone's position and camera to safely capture side-view images of bushes up close. In addition to providing experimental results for our models, which show good accuracy in terms of precision and recall when captured images are cropped around the foreground center bush, we also describe how to deploy our models to map out blueberry fields using different sampling strategies, and discuss the challenges of annotating very small objects (blueberries) and difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of our models.
Revisiting Compactness for District Plans
Authors: Kristopher Tapp
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Modern sampling methods create ensembles of district maps that score well on discrete compactness scores, whereas the Polsby-Popper and other shape-based scores remain highly relevant for building fair maps and litigating unfair ones. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we introduce population-weighted versions of shape-based scores and show a precise sense in which this interpolates between shape-based and discrete scores. Second, we introduce a modification of the ReCom sampling method that produces ensembles of maps with improved shape-based compactness scores.
RadarNeXt: Real-Time and Reliable 3D Object Detector Based On 4D mmWave Imaging Radar
Authors: Liye Jia, Runwei Guan, Haocheng Zhao, Qiuchi Zhao, Ka Lok Man, Jeremy Smith, Limin Yu, Yutao Yue
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Object Detection (RoI), Autonomous Driving, GPU, object-detection, Object Detection

3D object detection is crucial for Autonomous Driving (AD) and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, most 3D detectors prioritize detection accuracy, often overlooking network inference speed in practical applications. In this paper, we propose RadarNeXt, a real-time and reliable 3D object detector based on the 4D mmWave radar point clouds. It leverages the re-parameterizable neural networks to catch multi-scale features, reduce memory cost and accelerate the inference. Moreover, to highlight the irregular foreground features of radar point clouds and suppress background clutter, we propose a Multi-path Deformable Foreground Enhancement Network (MDFEN), ensuring detection accuracy while minimizing the sacrifice of speed and excessive number of parameters. Experimental results on View-of-Delft and TJ4DRadSet datasets validate the exceptional performance and efficiency of RadarNeXt, achieving 50.48 and 32.30 mAPs with the variant using our proposed MDFEN. Notably, our RadarNeXt variants achieve inference speeds of over 67.10 FPS on the RTX A4000 GPU and 28.40 FPS on the Jetson AGX Orin. This research demonstrates that RadarNeXt brings a novel and effective paradigm for 3D perception based on 4D mmWave radar.
Diabetic Retinopathy Detection Using CNN with Residual Block with DCGAN
Authors: Debjany Ghosh Aronno, Sumaiya Saeha
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diabetic Retinopathy Detection, Generative Adversarial Network

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness worldwide, caused by damage to the blood vessels in the retina due to diabetes. Early detection and classification of DR are crucial for timely intervention and preventing vision loss. This work proposes an automated system for DR detection using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with a residual block architecture, which enhances feature extraction and model performance. To further improve the model's robustness, we incorporate advanced data augmentation techniques, specifically leveraging a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) for generating diverse retinal images. This approach increases the variability of training data, making the model more generalizable and capable of handling real-world variations in retinal images. The system is designed to classify retinal images into five distinct categories, from No DR to Proliferative DR, providing an efficient and scalable solution for early diagnosis and monitoring of DR progression. The proposed model aims to support healthcare professionals in large-scale DR screening, especially in resource-constrained settings.
Efficient Video-Based ALPR System Using YOLO and Visual Rhythm
Authors: Victor Nascimento Ribeiro, Nina S. T. Hirata
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: License Plate Recognition, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Rhythm

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) involves extracting vehicle license plate information from image or a video capture. These systems have gained popularity due to the wide availability of low-cost surveillance cameras and advances in Deep Learning. Typically, video-based ALPR systems rely on multiple frames to detect the vehicle and recognize the license plates. Therefore, we propose a system capable of extracting exactly one frame per vehicle and recognizing its license plate characters from this singular image using an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) model. Early experiments show that this methodology is viable.
TDM: Temporally-Consistent Diffusion Model for All-in-One Real-World Video Restoration
Authors: Yizhou Li, Zihua Liu, Yusuke Monno, Masatoshi Okutomi
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Denoising, Video Restoration

In this paper, we propose the first diffusion-based all-in-one video restoration method that utilizes the power of a pre-trained Stable Diffusion and a fine-tuned ControlNet. Our method can restore various types of video degradation with a single unified model, overcoming the limitation of standard methods that require specific models for each restoration task. Our contributions include an efficient training strategy with Task Prompt Guidance (TPG) for diverse restoration tasks, an inference strategy that combines Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models~(DDIM) inversion with a novel Sliding Window Cross-Frame Attention (SW-CFA) mechanism for enhanced content preservation and temporal consistency, and a scalable pipeline that makes our method all-in-one to adapt to different video restoration tasks. Through extensive experiments on five video restoration tasks, we demonstrate the superiority of our method in generalization capability to real-world videos and temporal consistency preservation over existing state-of-the-art methods. Our method advances the video restoration task by providing a unified solution that enhances video quality across multiple applications.
Unsupervised Class Generation to Expand Semantic Segmentation Datasets
Authors: Javier Montalvo, Álvaro García-Martín, Pablo Carballeira, Juan C. SanMiguel
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task where classification is performed at a pixel level. Due to this, the process of labeling images for semantic segmentation is time-consuming and expensive. To mitigate this cost there has been a surge in the use of synthetically generated data -- usually created using simulators or videogames -- which, in combination with domain adaptation methods, can effectively learn how to segment real data. Still, these datasets have a particular limitation: due to their closed-set nature, it is not possible to include novel classes without modifying the tool used to generate them, which is often not public. Concurrently, generative models have made remarkable progress, particularly with the introduction of diffusion models, enabling the creation of high-quality images from text prompts without additional supervision. In this work, we propose an unsupervised pipeline that leverages Stable Diffusion and Segment Anything Module to generate class examples with an associated segmentation mask, and a method to integrate generated cutouts for novel classes in semantic segmentation datasets, all with minimal user input. Our approach aims to improve the performance of unsupervised domain adaptation methods by introducing novel samples into the training data without modifications to the underlying algorithms. With our methods, we show how models can not only effectively learn how to segment novel classes, with an average performance of 51% IoU, but also reduce errors for other, already existing classes, reaching a higher performance level overall.
MagicFace: High-Fidelity Facial Expression Editing with Action-Unit Control
Authors: Mengting Wei, Tuomas Varanka, Xingxun Jiang, Huai-Qian Khor, Guoying Zhao
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising

We address the problem of facial expression editing by controling the relative variation of facial action-unit (AU) from the same person. This enables us to edit this specific person's expression in a fine-grained, continuous and interpretable manner, while preserving their identity, pose, background and detailed facial attributes. Key to our model, which we dub MagicFace, is a diffusion model conditioned on AU variations and an ID encoder to preserve facial details of high consistency. Specifically, to preserve the facial details with the input identity, we leverage the power of pretrained Stable-Diffusion models and design an ID encoder to merge appearance features through self-attention. To keep background and pose consistency, we introduce an efficient Attribute Controller by explicitly informing the model of current background and pose of the target. By injecting AU variations into a denoising UNet, our model can animate arbitrary identities with various AU combinations, yielding superior results in high-fidelity expression editing compared to other facial expression editing works. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/weimengting/MagicFace.
Distillation-Enhanced Physical Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Wei Liu, Yonglin Wu, CHAOQUN LI, Zhuodong Liu, Huanqian Yan
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Knowledge Distillation

The study of physical adversarial patches is crucial for identifying vulnerabilities in AI-based recognition systems and developing more robust deep learning models. While recent research has focused on improving patch stealthiness for greater practical applicability, achieving an effective balance between stealth and attack performance remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, we propose a novel physical adversarial attack method that leverages knowledge distillation. Specifically, we first define a stealthy color space tailored to the target environment to ensure smooth blending. Then, we optimize an adversarial patch in an unconstrained color space, which serves as the 'teacher' patch. Finally, we use an adversarial knowledge distillation module to transfer the teacher patch's knowledge to the 'student' patch, guiding the optimization of the stealthy patch. Experimental results show that our approach improves attack performance by 20%, while maintaining stealth, highlighting its practical value.
tCURLoRA: Tensor CUR Decomposition Based Low-Rank Parameter Adaptation and Its Application in Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Guanghua He, Wangang Cheng, Hancan Zhu, Xiaohao Cai, Gaohang Yu
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Transfer learning, by leveraging knowledge from pre-trained models, has significantly enhanced the performance of target tasks. However, as deep neural networks scale up, full fine-tuning introduces substantial computational and storage challenges in resource-constrained environments, limiting its widespread adoption. To address this, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have been developed to reduce computational complexity and storage requirements by minimizing the number of updated parameters. While matrix decomposition-based PEFT methods, such as LoRA, show promise, they struggle to fully capture the high-dimensional structural characteristics of model weights. In contrast, high-dimensional tensors offer a more natural representation of neural network weights, allowing for a more comprehensive capture of higher-order features and multi-dimensional interactions. In this paper, we propose tCURLoRA, a novel fine-tuning method based on tensor CUR decomposition. By concatenating pre-trained weight matrices into a three-dimensional tensor and applying tensor CUR decomposition, we update only the lower-order tensor components during fine-tuning, effectively reducing computational and storage overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that tCURLoRA outperforms existing PEFT methods in medical image segmentation tasks.
Examining the Robustness of Homogeneity Bias to Hyperparameter Adjustments in GPT-4
Authors: Messi H. J. Lee
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00

Vision-Language Models trained on massive collections of human-generated data often reproduce and amplify societal stereotypes. One critical form of stereotyping reproduced by these models is homogeneity bias-the tendency to represent certain groups as more homogeneous than others. We investigate how this bias responds to hyperparameter adjustments in GPT-4, specifically examining sampling temperature and top p which control the randomness of model outputs. By generating stories about individuals from different racial and gender groups and comparing their similarities using vector representations, we assess both bias robustness and its relationship with hyperparameter values. We find that (1) homogeneity bias persists across most hyperparameter configurations, with Black Americans and women being represented more homogeneously than White Americans and men, (2) the relationship between hyperparameters and group representations shows unexpected non-linear patterns, particularly at extreme values, and (3) hyperparameter adjustments affect racial and gender homogeneity bias differently-while increasing temperature or decreasing top p can reduce racial homogeneity bias, these changes show different effects on gender homogeneity bias. Our findings suggest that while hyperparameter tuning may mitigate certain biases to some extent, it cannot serve as a universal solution for addressing homogeneity bias across different social group dimensions.
Self-Supervised Learning for Detecting AI-Generated Faces as Anomalies
Authors: Mian Zou, Baosheng Yu, Yibing Zhan, Kede Ma
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Binary Classification, Self-Supervised Learning

The detection of AI-generated faces is commonly approached as a binary classification task. Nevertheless, the resulting detectors frequently struggle to adapt to novel AI face generators, which evolve rapidly. In this paper, we describe an anomaly detection method for AI-generated faces by leveraging self-supervised learning of camera-intrinsic and face-specific features purely from photographic face images. The success of our method lies in designing a pretext task that trains a feature extractor to rank four ordinal exchangeable image file format (EXIF) tags and classify artificially manipulated face images. Subsequently, we model the learned feature distribution of photographic face images using a Gaussian mixture model. Faces with low likelihoods are flagged as AI-generated. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments validate the effectiveness of our method. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/MZMMSEC/AIGFD_EXIF.git}.
Accounting for Focus Ambiguity in Visual Questions
Authors: Chongyan Chen, Yu-Yun Tseng, Zhuoheng Li, Anush Venkatesh, Danna Gurari
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

No existing work on visual question answering explicitly accounts for ambiguity regarding where the content described in the question is located in the image. To fill this gap, we introduce VQ-FocusAmbiguity, the first VQA dataset that visually grounds each region described in the question that is necessary to arrive at the answer. We then provide an analysis showing how our dataset for visually grounding `questions' is distinct from visually grounding `answers', and characterize the properties of the questions and segmentations provided in our dataset. Finally, we benchmark modern models for two novel tasks: recognizing whether a visual question has focus ambiguity and localizing all plausible focus regions within the image. Results show that the dataset is challenging for modern models. To facilitate future progress on these tasks, we publicly share the dataset with an evaluation server at https://focusambiguity.github.io/.
Fresh-CL: Feature Realignment through Experts on Hypersphere in Continual Learning
Authors: Zhongyi Zhou, Yaxin Peng, Pin Yi, Minjie Zhu, Chaomin Shen
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Mixture-of-Experts

Continual Learning enables models to learn and adapt to new tasks while retaining prior knowledge. Introducing new tasks, however, can naturally lead to feature entanglement across tasks, limiting the model's capability to distinguish between new domain data. In this work, we propose a method called Feature Realignment through Experts on hyperSpHere in Continual Learning (Fresh-CL). By leveraging predefined and fixed simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) classifiers on a hypersphere, our model improves feature separation both intra and inter tasks. However, the projection to a simplex ETF shifts with new tasks, disrupting structured feature representation of previous tasks and degrading performance. Therefore, we propose a dynamic extension of ETF through mixture of experts, enabling adaptive projections onto diverse subspaces to enhance feature representation. Experiments on 11 datasets demonstrate a 2% improvement in accuracy compared to the strongest baseline, particularly in fine-grained datasets, confirming the efficacy of combining ETF and MoE to improve feature distinction in continual learning scenarios.
Quaternionic Reweighted Amplitude Flow for Phase Retrieval in Image Reconstruction
Authors: Ren Hu, Pan Lian
Date: 2025-01-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Reconstruction, Retrieval

Quaternionic signal processing provides powerful tools for efficiently managing color signals by preserving the intrinsic correlations among signal dimensions through quaternion algebra. In this paper, we address the quaternionic phase retrieval problem by systematically developing novel algorithms based on an amplitude-based model. Specifically, we propose the Quaternionic Reweighted Amplitude Flow (QRAF) algorithm, which is further enhanced by three of its variants: incremental, accelerated, and adapted QRAF algorithms. In addition, we introduce the Quaternionic Perturbed Amplitude Flow (QPAF) algorithm, which has linear convergence. Extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic data and real images, demonstrate that our proposed methods significantly improve recovery performance and computational efficiency compared to state-of-the-art approaches.