pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Scale-Invariant Object Detection by Adaptive Convolution with Unified Global-Local Context
Authors: Amrita Singh, Snehasis Mukherjee
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Dense features are important for detecting minute objects in images. Unfortunately, despite the remarkable efficacy of the CNN models in multi-scale object detection, CNN models often fail to detect smaller objects in images due to the loss of dense features during the pooling process. Atrous convolution addresses this issue by applying sparse kernels. However, sparse kernels often can lose the multi-scale detection efficacy of the CNN model. In this paper, we propose an object detection model using a Switchable (adaptive) Atrous Convolutional Network (SAC-Net) based on the efficientDet model. A fixed atrous rate limits the performance of the CNN models in the convolutional layers. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a switchable mechanism that allows for dynamically adjusting the atrous rate during the forward pass. The proposed SAC-Net encapsulates the benefits of both low-level and high-level features to achieve improved performance on multi-scale object detection tasks, without losing the dense features. Further, we apply a depth-wise switchable atrous rate to the proposed network, to improve the scale-invariant features. Finally, we apply global context on the proposed model. Our extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed SAC-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art models by a significant margin in terms of accuracy.
Cross-Task Pretraining for Cross-Organ Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation
Authors: Adrian Galdran
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization

This short abstract describes a solution to the COSAS 2024 competition on Cross-Organ and Cross-Scanner Adenocarcinoma Segmentation from histopathological image patches. The main challenge in the task of segmenting this type of cancer is a noticeable domain shift encountered when changing acquisition devices (microscopes) and also when tissue comes from different organs. The two tasks proposed in COSAS were to train on a dataset of images from three different organs, and then predict segmentations on data from unseen organs (dataset T1), and to train on a dataset of images acquired on three different scanners and then segment images acquired with another unseen microscope. We attempted to bridge the domain shift gap by experimenting with three different strategies: standard training for each dataset, pretraining on dataset T1 and then fine-tuning on dataset T2 (and vice-versa, a strategy we call \textit{Cross-Task Pretraining}), and training on the combination of dataset A and B. Our experiments showed that Cross-Task Pre-training is a more promising approach to domain generalization.
ShieldDiff: Suppressing Sexual Content Generation from Diffusion Models through Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Dong Han, Salaheldin Mohamed, Yong Li
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

With the advance of generative AI, the text-to-image (T2I) model has the ability to generate various contents. However, the generated contents cannot be fully controlled. There is a potential risk that T2I model can generate unsafe images with uncomfortable contents. In our work, we focus on eliminating the NSFW (not safe for work) content generation from T2I model while maintaining the high quality of generated images by fine-tuning the pre-trained diffusion model via reinforcement learning by optimizing the well-designed content-safe reward function. The proposed method leverages a customized reward function consisting of the CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) and nudity rewards to prune the nudity contents that adhere to the pret-rained model and keep the corresponding semantic meaning on the safe side. In this way, the T2I model is robust to unsafe adversarial prompts since unsafe visual representations are mitigated from latent space. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating unsafe content generation while preserving the high-fidelity of benign images as well as images generated by unsafe prompts. We compare with five existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods and achieve competitive performance on sexual content removal and image quality retention. In terms of robustness, our method outperforms counterparts under the SOTA black-box attacking model. Furthermore, our constructed method can be a benchmark for anti-NSFW generation with semantically-relevant safe alignment.
Noise Crystallization and Liquid Noise: Zero-shot Video Generation using Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Muhammad Haaris Khan, Hadrien Reynaud, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2024-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Style Transfer, Video Generation, Video Style Transfer

Although powerful for image generation, consistent and controllable video is a longstanding problem for diffusion models. Video models require extensive training and computational resources, leading to high costs and large environmental impacts. Moreover, video models currently offer limited control of the output motion. This paper introduces a novel approach to video generation by augmenting image diffusion models to create sequential animation frames while maintaining fine detail. These techniques can be applied to existing image models without training any video parameters (zero-shot) by altering the input noise in a latent diffusion model. Two complementary methods are presented. Noise crystallization ensures consistency but is limited to large movements due to reduced latent embedding sizes. Liquid noise trades consistency for greater flexibility without resolution limitations. The core concepts also allow other applications such as relighting, seamless upscaling, and improved video style transfer. Furthermore, an exploration of the VAE embedding used for latent diffusion models is performed, resulting in interesting theoretical insights such as a method for human-interpretable latent spaces.
FaceVid-1K: A Large-Scale High-Quality Multiracial Human Face Video Dataset
Authors: Donglin Di, He Feng, Wenzhang Sun, Yongjia Ma, Hao Li, Wei Chen, Xiaofei Gou, Tonghua Su, Xun Yang
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Unconditional Video Generation, Video Generation

Generating talking face videos from various conditions has recently become a highly popular research area within generative tasks. However, building a high-quality face video generation model requires a well-performing pre-trained backbone, a key obstacle that universal models fail to adequately address. Most existing works rely on universal video or image generation models and optimize control mechanisms, but they neglect the evident upper bound in video quality due to the limited capabilities of the backbones, which is a result of the lack of high-quality human face video datasets. In this work, we investigate the unsatisfactory results from related studies, gather and trim existing public talking face video datasets, and additionally collect and annotate a large-scale dataset, resulting in a comprehensive, high-quality multiracial face collection named \textbf{FaceVid-1K}. Using this dataset, we craft several effective pre-trained backbone models for face video generation. Specifically, we conduct experiments with several well-established video generation models, including text-to-video, image-to-video, and unconditional video generation, under various settings. We obtain the corresponding performance benchmarks and compared them with those trained on public datasets to demonstrate the superiority of our dataset. These experiments also allow us to investigate empirical strategies for crafting domain-specific video generation tasks with cost-effective settings. We will make our curated dataset, along with the pre-trained talking face video generation models, publicly available as a resource contribution to hopefully advance the research field.
DVS: Blood cancer detection using novel CNN-based ensemble approach
Authors: Md Taimur Ahad, Israt Jahan Payel, Bo Song, Yan Li
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Transfer Learning

Blood cancer can only be diagnosed properly if it is detected early. Each year, more than 1.24 million new cases of blood cancer are reported worldwide. There are about 6,000 cancers worldwide due to this disease. The importance of cancer detection and classification has prompted researchers to evaluate Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for the purpose of classifying blood cancers. The objective of this research is to conduct an in-depth investigation of the efficacy and suitability of modern Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures for the detection and classification of blood malignancies. The study focuses on investigating the potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (D-CNNs), comprising not only the foundational CNN models but also those improved through transfer learning methods and incorporated into ensemble strategies, to detect diverse forms of blood cancer with a high degree of accuracy. This paper provides a comprehensive investigation into five deep learning architectures derived from CNNs. These models, namely VGG19, ResNet152v2, SEresNet152, ResNet101, and DenseNet201, integrate ensemble learning techniques with transfer learning strategies. A comparison of DenseNet201 (98.08%), VGG19 (96.94%), and SEresNet152 (90.93%) shows that DVS outperforms CNN. With transfer learning, DenseNet201 had 95.00% accuracy, VGG19 had 72.29%, and SEresNet152 had 94.16%. In the study, the ensemble DVS model achieved 98.76% accuracy. Based on our study, the ensemble DVS model is the best for detecting and classifying blood cancers.
Learning Low-Level Causal Relations using a Simulated Robotic Arm
Authors: Miroslav Cibula, Matthias Kerzel, Igor Farkaš
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Dimensionality Reduction

Causal learning allows humans to predict the effect of their actions on the known environment and use this knowledge to plan the execution of more complex actions. Such knowledge also captures the behaviour of the environment and can be used for its analysis and the reasoning behind the behaviour. This type of knowledge is also crucial in the design of intelligent robotic systems with common sense. In this paper, we study causal relations by learning the forward and inverse models based on data generated by a simulated robotic arm involved in two sensorimotor tasks. As a next step, we investigate feature attribution methods for the analysis of the forward model, which reveals the low-level causal effects corresponding to individual features of the state vector related to both the arm joints and the environment features. This type of analysis provides solid ground for dimensionality reduction of the state representations, as well as for the aggregation of knowledge towards the explainability of causal effects at higher levels.
Enhancing Soccer Camera Calibration Through Keypoint Exploitation
Authors: Nikolay S. Falaleev, Ruilong Chen
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Camera Calibration, Camera Pose Estimation, Line Detection, Sports Analytics

Accurate camera calibration is essential for transforming 2D images from camera sensors into 3D world coordinates, enabling precise scene geometry interpretation and supporting sports analytics tasks such as player tracking, offside detection, and performance analysis. However, obtaining a sufficient number of high-quality point pairs remains a significant challenge for both traditional and deep learning-based calibration methods. This paper introduces a multi-stage pipeline that addresses this challenge by leveraging the structural features of the football pitch. Our approach significantly increases the number of usable points for calibration by exploiting line-line and line-conic intersections, points on the conics, and other geometric features. To mitigate the impact of imperfect annotations, we employ data fitting techniques. Our pipeline utilizes deep learning for keypoint and line detection and incorporates geometric constraints based on real-world pitch dimensions. A voter algorithm iteratively selects the most reliable keypoints, further enhancing calibration accuracy. We evaluated our approach on the largest football broadcast camera calibration dataset available, and secured the top position in the SoccerNet Camera Calibration Challenge 2023 [arXiv:2309.06006], which demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in real-world scenarios. The project code is available at https://github.com/NikolasEnt/soccernet-calibration-sportlight .
Window Function-less DFT with Reduced Noise and Latency for Real-Time Music Analysis
Authors: Cai Biesinger, Hiromitsu Awano, Masanori Hashimoto
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

Music analysis applications demand algorithms that can provide both high time and frequency resolution while minimizing noise in an already-noisy signal. Real-time analysis additionally demands low latency and low computational requirements. We propose a DFT-based algorithm that accomplishes all these requirements by extending a method that post-processes DFT output without the use of window functions. Our approach yields greatly reduced sidelobes and noise, and improves time resolution without sacrificing frequency resolution. We use exponentially spaced output bins which directly map to notes in music. The resulting improved performance, compared to existing FFT and DFT-based approaches, creates possibilities for improved real-time visualizations, and contributes to improved analysis quality in other applications such as automatic transcription.
Multimodal Perception System for Real Open Environment
Authors: Yuyang Sha
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel multimodal perception system for a real open environment. The proposed system includes an embedded computation platform, cameras, ultrasonic sensors, GPS, and IMU devices. Unlike the traditional frameworks, our system integrates multiple sensors with advanced computer vision algorithms to help users walk outside reliably. The system can efficiently complete various tasks, including navigating to specific locations, passing through obstacle regions, and crossing intersections. Specifically, we also use ultrasonic sensors and depth cameras to enhance obstacle avoidance performance. The path planning module is designed to find the locally optimal route based on various feedback and the user's current state. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, we design several experiments under different scenarios. The results show that the system can help users walk efficiently and independently in complex situations.
Deconstructing equivariant representations in molecular systems
Authors: Kin Long Kelvin Lee, Mikhail Galkin, Santiago Miret
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Property Prediction

Recent equivariant models have shown significant progress in not just chemical property prediction, but as surrogates for dynamical simulations of molecules and materials. Many of the top performing models in this category are built within the framework of tensor products, which preserves equivariance by restricting interactions and transformations to those that are allowed by symmetry selection rules. Despite being a core part of the modeling process, there has not yet been much attention into understanding what information persists in these equivariant representations, and their general behavior outside of benchmark metrics. In this work, we report on a set of experiments using a simple equivariant graph convolution model on the QM9 dataset, focusing on correlating quantitative performance with the resulting molecular graph embeddings. Our key finding is that, for a scalar prediction task, many of the irreducible representations are simply ignored during training -- specifically those pertaining to vector ($l=1$) and tensor quantities ($l=2$) -- an issue that does not necessarily make itself evident in the test metric. We empirically show that removing some unused orders of spherical harmonics improves model performance, correlating with improved latent space structure. We provide a number of recommendations for future experiments to try and improve efficiency and utilization of equivariant features based on these observations.
LatteCLIP: Unsupervised CLIP Fine-Tuning via LMM-Synthetic Texts
Authors: Anh-Quan Cao, Maximilian Jaritz, Matthieu Guillaumin, Raoul de Charette, Loris Bazzani
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Large-scale vision-language pre-trained (VLP) models (e.g., CLIP) are renowned for their versatility, as they can be applied to diverse applications in a zero-shot setup. However, when these models are used in specific domains, their performance often falls short due to domain gaps or the under-representation of these domains in the training data. While fine-tuning VLP models on custom datasets with human-annotated labels can address this issue, annotating even a small-scale dataset (e.g., 100k samples) can be an expensive endeavor, often requiring expert annotators if the task is complex. To address these challenges, we propose LatteCLIP, an unsupervised method for fine-tuning CLIP models on classification with known class names in custom domains, without relying on human annotations. Our method leverages Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to generate expressive textual descriptions for both individual images and groups of images. These provide additional contextual information to guide the fine-tuning process in the custom domains. Since LMM-generated descriptions are prone to hallucination or missing details, we introduce a novel strategy to distill only the useful information and stabilize the training. Specifically, we learn rich per-class prototype representations from noisy generated texts and dual pseudo-labels. Our experiments on 10 domain-specific datasets show that LatteCLIP outperforms pre-trained zero-shot methods by an average improvement of +4.74 points in top-1 accuracy and other state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by +3.45 points.
PointOBB-v2: Towards Simpler, Faster, and Stronger Single Point Supervised Oriented Object Detection
Authors: Botao Ren, Xue Yang, Yi Yu, Junwei Luo, Zhidong Deng
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Oriented Object Detection

Single point supervised oriented object detection has gained attention and made initial progress within the community. Diverse from those approaches relying on one-shot samples or powerful pretrained models (e.g. SAM), PointOBB has shown promise due to its prior-free feature. In this paper, we propose PointOBB-v2, a simpler, faster, and stronger method to generate pseudo rotated boxes from points without relying on any other prior. Specifically, we first generate a Class Probability Map (CPM) by training the network with non-uniform positive and negative sampling. We show that the CPM is able to learn the approximate object regions and their contours. Then, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to accurately estimate the orientation and the boundary of objects. By further incorporating a separation mechanism, we resolve the confusion caused by the overlapping on the CPM, enabling its operation in high-density scenarios. Extensive comparisons demonstrate that our method achieves a training speed 15.58x faster and an accuracy improvement of 11.60%/25.15%/21.19% on the DOTA-v1.0/v1.5/v2.0 datasets compared to the previous state-of-the-art, PointOBB. This significantly advances the cutting edge of single point supervised oriented detection in the modular track.
Emerging Pixel Grounding in Large Multimodal Models Without Grounding Supervision
Authors: Shengcao Cao, Liang-Yan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Current large multimodal models (LMMs) face challenges in grounding, which requires the model to relate language components to visual entities. Contrary to the common practice that fine-tunes LMMs with additional grounding supervision, we find that the grounding ability can in fact emerge in LMMs trained without explicit grounding supervision. To reveal this emerging grounding, we introduce an "attend-and-segment" method which leverages attention maps from standard LMMs to perform pixel-level segmentation. Furthermore, to enhance the grounding ability, we propose DIFFLMM, an LMM utilizing a diffusion-based visual encoder, as opposed to the standard CLIP visual encoder, and trained with the same weak supervision. Without being constrained by the biases and limited scale of grounding-specific supervision data, our approach is more generalizable and scalable. We achieve competitive performance on both grounding-specific and general visual question answering benchmarks, compared with grounding LMMs and generalist LMMs, respectively. Notably, we achieve a 44.2 grounding mask recall on grounded conversation generation without any grounding supervision, outperforming the extensively supervised model GLaMM. Project page: https://groundLMM.github.io.
SPA: 3D Spatial-Awareness Enables Effective Embodied Representation
Authors: Haoyi Zhu, Honghui Yang, Yating Wang, Jiange Yang, LiMin Wang, Tong He
Date: 2024-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Neural Rendering, Representation Learning

In this paper, we introduce SPA, a novel representation learning framework that emphasizes the importance of 3D spatial awareness in embodied AI. Our approach leverages differentiable neural rendering on multi-view images to endow a vanilla Vision Transformer (ViT) with intrinsic spatial understanding. We present the most comprehensive evaluation of embodied representation learning to date, covering 268 tasks across 8 simulators with diverse policies in both single-task and language-conditioned multi-task scenarios. The results are compelling: SPA consistently outperforms more than 10 state-of-the-art representation methods, including those specifically designed for embodied AI, vision-centric tasks, and multi-modal applications, while using less training data. Furthermore, we conduct a series of real-world experiments to confirm its effectiveness in practical scenarios. These results highlight the critical role of 3D spatial awareness for embodied representation learning. Our strongest model takes more than 6000 GPU hours to train and we are committed to open-sourcing all code and model weights to foster future research in embodied representation learning. Project Page: https://haoyizhu.github.io/spa/.