pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LangOcc: Self-Supervised Open Vocabulary Occupancy Estimation via Volume Rendering
Authors: Simon Boeder, Fabian Gigengack, Benjamin Risse
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

The 3D occupancy estimation task has become an important challenge in the area of vision-based autonomous driving recently. However, most existing camera-based methods rely on costly 3D voxel labels or LiDAR scans for training, limiting their practicality and scalability. Moreover, most methods are tied to a predefined set of classes which they can detect. In this work we present a novel approach for open vocabulary occupancy estimation called LangOcc, that is trained only via camera images, and can detect arbitrary semantics via vision-language alignment. In particular, we distill the knowledge of the strong vision-language aligned encoder CLIP into a 3D occupancy model via differentiable volume rendering. Our model estimates vision-language aligned features in a 3D voxel grid using only images. It is trained in a self-supervised manner by rendering our estimations back to 2D space, where ground-truth features can be computed. This training mechanism automatically supervises the scene geometry, allowing for a straight-forward and powerful training method without any explicit geometry supervision. LangOcc outperforms LiDAR-supervised competitors in open vocabulary occupancy by a large margin, solely relying on vision-based training. We also achieve state-of-the-art results in self-supervised semantic occupancy estimation on the Occ3D-nuScenes dataset, despite not being limited to a specific set of categories, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed vision-language training.
DenseTrack: Drone-based Crowd Tracking via Density-aware Motion-appearance Synergy
Authors: Yi Lei, Huilin Zhu, Jingling Yuan, Guangli Xiang, Xian Zhong, Shengfeng He
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Object Localization

Drone-based crowd tracking faces difficulties in accurately identifying and monitoring objects from an aerial perspective, largely due to their small size and close proximity to each other, which complicates both localization and tracking. To address these challenges, we present the Density-aware Tracking (DenseTrack) framework. DenseTrack capitalizes on crowd counting to precisely determine object locations, blending visual and motion cues to improve the tracking of small-scale objects. It specifically addresses the problem of cross-frame motion to enhance tracking accuracy and dependability. DenseTrack employs crowd density estimates as anchors for exact object localization within video frames. These estimates are merged with motion and position information from the tracking network, with motion offsets serving as key tracking cues. Moreover, DenseTrack enhances the ability to distinguish small-scale objects using insights from the visual-language model, integrating appearance with motion cues. The framework utilizes the Hungarian algorithm to ensure the accurate matching of individuals across frames. Demonstrated on DroneCrowd dataset, our approach exhibits superior performance, confirming its effectiveness in scenarios captured by drones.
M4: Multi-Proxy Multi-Gate Mixture of Experts Network for Multiple Instance Learning in Histopathology Image Analysis
Authors: Junyu Li, Ye Zhang, Wen Shu, Xiaobing Feng, Yingchun Wang, Pengju Yan, Xiaolin Li, Chulin Sha, Min He
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Multiple Instance Learning, Prediction, whole slide images

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has been successfully applied for whole slide images (WSIs) analysis in computational pathology, enabling a wide range of prediction tasks from tumor subtyping to inferring genetic mutations and multi-omics biomarkers. However, existing MIL methods predominantly focus on single-task learning, resulting in not only overall low efficiency but also the overlook of inter-task relatedness. To address these issues, we proposed an adapted architecture of Multi-gate Mixture-of-experts with Multi-proxy for Multiple instance learning (M4), and applied this framework for simultaneous prediction of multiple genetic mutations from WSIs. The proposed M4 model has two main innovations: (1) utilizing a mixture of experts with multiple gating strategies for multi-genetic mutation prediction on a single pathological slide; (2) constructing multi-proxy expert network and gate network for comprehensive and effective modeling of pathological image information. Our model achieved significant improvements across five tested TCGA datasets in comparison to current state-of-the-art single-task methods. The code is available at:https://github.com/Bigyehahaha/M4.
Embedding-Free Transformer with Inference Spatial Reduction for Efficient Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Hyunwoo Yu, Yubin Cho, Beoungwoo Kang, Seunghun Moon, Kyeongbo Kong, Suk-Ju Kang
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We present an Encoder-Decoder Attention Transformer, EDAFormer, which consists of the Embedding-Free Transformer (EFT) encoder and the all-attention decoder leveraging our Embedding-Free Attention (EFA) structure. The proposed EFA is a novel global context modeling mechanism that focuses on functioning the global non-linearity, not the specific roles of the query, key and value. For the decoder, we explore the optimized structure for considering the globality, which can improve the semantic segmentation performance. In addition, we propose a novel Inference Spatial Reduction (ISR) method for the computational efficiency. Different from the previous spatial reduction attention methods, our ISR method further reduces the key-value resolution at the inference phase, which can mitigate the computation-performance trade-off gap for the efficient semantic segmentation. Our EDAFormer shows the state-of-the-art performance with the efficient computation compared to the existing transformer-based semantic segmentation models in three public benchmarks, including ADE20K, Cityscapes and COCO-Stuff. Furthermore, our ISR method reduces the computational cost by up to 61% with minimal mIoU performance degradation on Cityscapes dataset. The code is available at https://github.com/hyunwoo137/EDAFormer.
Artistic Intelligence: A Diffusion-Based Framework for High-Fidelity Landscape Painting Synthesis
Authors: Wanggong Yang, Yifei Zhao
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation

Generating high-fidelity landscape paintings remains a challenging task that requires precise control over both structure and style. In this paper, we present LPGen, a novel diffusion-based model specifically designed for landscape painting generation. LPGen introduces a decoupled cross-attention mechanism that independently processes structural and stylistic features, effectively mimicking the layered approach of traditional painting techniques. Additionally, LPGen proposes a structural controller, a multi-scale encoder designed to control the layout of landscape paintings, striking a balance between aesthetics and composition. Besides, the model is pre-trained on a curated dataset of high-resolution landscape images, categorized by distinct artistic styles, and then fine-tuned to ensure detailed and consistent output. Through extensive evaluations, LPGen demonstrates superior performance in producing paintings that are not only structurally accurate but also stylistically coherent, surpassing current state-of-the-art models. This work advances AI-generated art and offers new avenues for exploring the intersection of technology and traditional artistic practices. Our code, dataset, and model weights will be publicly available.
Graph Neural Networks: A suitable Alternative to MLPs in Latent 3D Medical Image Classification?
Authors: Johannes Kiechle, Daniel M. Lang, Stefan M. Fischer, Lina Felsner, Jan C. Peeken, Julia A. Schnabel
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, graph construction, image-classification, Image Classification, Medical Image Classification

Recent studies have underscored the capabilities of natural imaging foundation models to serve as powerful feature extractors, even in a zero-shot setting for medical imaging data. Most commonly, a shallow multi-layer perceptron (MLP) is appended to the feature extractor to facilitate end-to-end learning and downstream prediction tasks such as classification, thus representing the de facto standard. However, as graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a practicable choice for various tasks in medical research in the recent past, we direct attention to the question of how effective GNNs are compared to MLP prediction heads for the task of 3D medical image classification, proposing them as a potential alternative. In our experiments, we devise a subject-level graph for each volumetric dataset instance. Therein latent representations of all slices in the volume, encoded through a DINOv2 pretrained vision transformer (ViT), constitute the nodes and their respective node features. We use public datasets to compare the classification heads numerically and evaluate various graph construction and graph convolution methods in our experiments. Our findings show enhancements of the GNN in classification performance and substantial improvements in runtime compared to an MLP prediction head. Additional robustness evaluations further validate the promising performance of the GNN, promoting them as a suitable alternative to traditional MLP classification heads. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/compai-lab/2024-miccai-grail-kiechle
Unpaired Photo-realistic Image Deraining with Energy-informed Diffusion Model
Authors: Yuanbo Wen, Tao Gao, Ting Chen
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Rain Removal

Existing unpaired image deraining approaches face challenges in accurately capture the distinguishing characteristics between the rainy and clean domains, resulting in residual degradation and color distortion within the reconstructed images. To this end, we propose an energy-informed diffusion model for unpaired photo-realistic image deraining (UPID-EDM). Initially, we delve into the intricate visual-language priors embedded within the contrastive language-image pre-training model (CLIP), and demonstrate that the CLIP priors aid in the discrimination of rainy and clean images. Furthermore, we introduce a dual-consistent energy function (DEF) that retains the rain-irrelevant characteristics while eliminating the rain-relevant features. This energy function is trained by the non-corresponding rainy and clean images. In addition, we employ the rain-relevance discarding energy function (RDEF) and the rain-irrelevance preserving energy function (RPEF) to direct the reverse sampling procedure of a pre-trained diffusion model, effectively removing the rain streaks while preserving the image contents. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our energy-informed model surpasses the existing unpaired learning approaches in terms of both supervised and no-reference metrics.
Trans2Unet: Neural fusion for Nuclei Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Dinh-Phu Tran, Quoc-Anh Nguyen, Van-Truong Pham, Thi-Thao Tran
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Nuclei segmentation, despite its fundamental role in histopathological image analysis, is still a challenge work. The main challenge of this task is the existence of overlapping areas, which makes separating independent nuclei more complicated. In this paper, we propose a new two-branch architecture by combining the Unet and TransUnet networks for nuclei segmentation task. In the proposed architecture, namely Trans2Unet, the input image is first sent into the Unet branch whose the last convolution layer is removed. This branch makes the network combine features from different spatial regions of the input image and localizes more precisely the regions of interest. The input image is also fed into the second branch. In the second branch, which is called TransUnet branch, the input image will be divided into patches of images. With Vision transformer (ViT) in architecture, TransUnet can serve as a powerful encoder for medical image segmentation tasks and enhance image details by recovering localized spatial information. To boost up Trans2Unet efficiency and performance, we proposed to infuse TransUnet with a computational-efficient variation called "Waterfall" Atrous Spatial Pooling with Skip Connection (WASP-KC) module, which is inspired by the "Waterfall" Atrous Spatial Pooling (WASP) module. Experiment results on the 2018 Data Science Bowl benchmark show the effectiveness and performance of the proposed architecture while compared with previous segmentation models.
Domain Generalized Recaptured Screen Image Identification Using SWIN Transformer
Authors: Preeti Mehta, Aman Sagar, Suchi Kumari
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization

An increasing number of classification approaches have been developed to address the issue of image rebroadcast and recapturing, a standard attack strategy in insurance frauds, face spoofing, and video piracy. However, most of them neglected scale variations and domain generalization scenarios, performing poorly in instances involving domain shifts, typically made worse by inter-domain and cross-domain scale variances. To overcome these issues, we propose a cascaded data augmentation and SWIN transformer domain generalization framework (DAST-DG) in the current research work Initially, we examine the disparity in dataset representation. A feature generator is trained to make authentic images from various domains indistinguishable. This process is then applied to recaptured images, creating a dual adversarial learning setup. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach is practical and surpasses state-of-the-art methods across different databases. Our model achieves an accuracy of approximately 82\% with a precision of 95\% on high-variance datasets.
Context-aware Multi-task Learning for Pedestrian Intent and Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Farzeen Munir, Tomasz Piotr Kucner
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Multi-Task Learning, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

The advancement of socially-aware autonomous vehicles hinges on precise modeling of human behavior. Within this broad paradigm, the specific challenge lies in accurately predicting pedestrian's trajectory and intention. Traditional methodologies have leaned heavily on historical trajectory data, frequently overlooking vital contextual cues such as pedestrian-specific traits and environmental factors. Furthermore, there's a notable knowledge gap as trajectory and intention prediction have largely been approached as separate problems, despite their mutual dependence. To bridge this gap, we introduce PTINet (Pedestrian Trajectory and Intention Prediction Network), which jointly learns the trajectory and intention prediction by combining past trajectory observations, local contextual features (individual pedestrian behaviors), and global features (signs, markings etc.). The efficacy of our approach is evaluated on widely used public datasets: JAAD and PIE, where it has demonstrated superior performance over existing state-of-the-art models in trajectory and intention prediction. The results from our experiments and ablation studies robustly validate PTINet's effectiveness in jointly exploring intention and trajectory prediction for pedestrian behaviour modelling. The experimental evaluation indicates the advantage of using global and local contextual features for pedestrian trajectory and intention prediction. The effectiveness of PTINet in predicting pedestrian behavior paves the way for the development of automated systems capable of seamlessly interacting with pedestrians in urban settings.
FIIH: Fully Invertible Image Hiding for Secure and Robust
Authors: Lang Huang, Lin Huo, Zheng Gan, Xinrong He
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Steganalysis

Image hiding is the study of techniques for covert storage and transmission, which embeds a secret image into a container image and generates stego image to make it similar in appearance to a normal image. However, existing image hiding methods have a serious problem that the hiding and revealing process cannot be fully invertible, which results in the revealing network not being able to recover the secret image losslessly, which makes it impossible to simultaneously achieve high fidelity and secure transmission of the secret image in an insecure network environment. To solve this problem,this paper proposes a fully invertible image hiding architecture based on invertible neural network,aiming to realize invertible hiding of secret images,which is invertible on both data and network. Based on this ingenious architecture, the method can withstand deep learning based image steganalysis. In addition, we propose a new method for enhancing the robustness of stego images after interference during transmission. Experiments demonstrate that the FIIH proposed in this paper significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art image hiding methods in hiding a single image, and also significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in robustness and security.
RT-DETRv2: Improved Baseline with Bag-of-Freebies for Real-Time Detection Transformer
Authors: Wenyu Lv, Yian Zhao, Qinyao Chang, Kui Huang, Guanzhong Wang, Yi Liu
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder

In this report, we present RT-DETRv2, an improved Real-Time DEtection TRansformer (RT-DETR). RT-DETRv2 builds upon the previous state-of-the-art real-time detector, RT-DETR, and opens up a set of bag-of-freebies for flexibility and practicality, as well as optimizing the training strategy to achieve enhanced performance. To improve the flexibility, we suggest setting a distinct number of sampling points for features at different scales in the deformable attention to achieve selective multi-scale feature extraction by the decoder. To enhance practicality, we propose an optional discrete sampling operator to replace the grid_sample operator that is specific to RT-DETR compared to YOLOs. This removes the deployment constraints typically associated with DETRs. For the training strategy, we propose dynamic data augmentation and scale-adaptive hyperparameters customization to improve performance without loss of speed. Source code and pre-trained models will be available at https://github.com/lyuwenyu/RT-DETR.
A Self-Supervised Image Registration Approach for Measuring Local Response Patterns in Metastatic Ovarian Cancer
Authors: Inês P. Machado, Anna Reithmeir, Fryderyk Kogl, Leonardo Rundo, Gabriel Funingana, Marika Reinius, Gift Mungmeeprued, Zeyu Gao, Cathal McCague, Eric Kerfoot, Ramona Woitek, Evis Sala, Yangming Ou, James Brenton, Julia Schnabel, Mireia Crispin
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

High-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC) is characterised by significant spatial and temporal heterogeneity, typically manifesting at an advanced metastatic stage. A major challenge in treating advanced HGSOC is effectively monitoring localised change in tumour burden across multiple sites during neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) and predicting long-term pathological response and overall patient survival. In this work, we propose a self-supervised deformable image registration algorithm that utilises a general-purpose image encoder for image feature extraction to co-register contrast-enhanced computerised tomography scan images acquired before and after neoadjuvant chemotherapy. This approach addresses challenges posed by highly complex tumour deformations and longitudinal lesion matching during treatment. Localised tumour changes are calculated using the Jacobian determinant maps of the registration deformation at multiple disease sites and their macroscopic areas, including hypo-dense (i.e., cystic/necrotic), hyper-dense (i.e., calcified), and intermediate density (i.e., soft tissue) portions. A series of experiments is conducted to understand the role of a general-purpose image encoder and its application in quantifying change in tumour burden during neoadjuvant chemotherapy in HGSOC. This work is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of a self-supervised image registration approach in quantifying NACT-induced localised tumour changes across the whole disease burden of patients with complex multi-site HGSOC, which could be used as a potential marker for ovarian cancer patient's long-term pathological response and survival.
MemBench: Memorized Image Trigger Prompt Dataset for Diffusion Models
Authors: Chunsan Hong, Tae-Hyun Oh, Minhyuk Sung
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Memorization, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in Text-to-Image generation tasks, leading to the development of many commercial models. However, recent studies have reported that diffusion models often generate replicated images in train data when triggered by specific prompts, potentially raising social issues ranging from copyright to privacy concerns. To sidestep the memorization, there have been recent studies for developing memorization mitigation methods for diffusion models. Nevertheless, the lack of benchmarks impedes the assessment of the true effectiveness of these methods. In this work, we present MemBench, the first benchmark for evaluating image memorization mitigation methods. Our benchmark includes a large number of memorized image trigger prompts in various Text-to-Image diffusion models. Furthermore, in contrast to the prior work evaluating mitigation performance only on trigger prompts, we present metrics evaluating on both trigger prompts and general prompts, so that we can see whether mitigation methods address the memorization issue while maintaining performance for general prompts. This is an important development considering the practical applications which previous works have overlooked. Through evaluation on MemBench, we verify that the performance of existing image memorization mitigation methods is still insufficient for application to diffusion models. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/chunsanHong/MemBench\_code.
AI-based Density Recognition
Authors: Simone Müller, Daniel Kolb, Matthias Müller, Dieter Kranzlmüller
Date: 2024-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Recognition

Learning-based analysis of images is commonly used in the fields of mobility and robotics for safe environmental motion and interaction. This requires not only object recognition but also the assignment of certain properties to them. With the help of this information, causally related actions can be adapted to different circumstances. Such logical interactions can be optimized by recognizing object-assigned properties. Density as a physical property offers the possibility to recognize how heavy an object is, which material it is made of, which forces are at work, and consequently which influence it has on its environment. Our approach introduces an AI-based concept for assigning physical properties to objects through the use of associated images. Based on synthesized data, we derive specific patterns from 2D images using a neural network to extract further information such as volume, material, or density. Accordingly, we discuss the possibilities of property-based feature extraction to improve causally related logics.