pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FakeFormer: Efficient Vulnerability-Driven Transformers for Generalisable Deepfake Detection
Authors: Dat Nguyen, Marcella Astrid, Enjie Ghorbel, Djamila Aouada
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, image-classification, Image Classification

Recently, Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved unprecedented effectiveness in the general domain of image classification. Nonetheless, these models remain underexplored in the field of deepfake detection, given their lower performance as compared to Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) in that specific context. In this paper, we start by investigating why plain ViT architectures exhibit a suboptimal performance when dealing with the detection of facial forgeries. Our analysis reveals that, as compared to CNNs, ViT struggles to model localized forgery artifacts that typically characterize deepfakes. Based on this observation, we propose a deepfake detection framework called FakeFormer, which extends ViTs to enforce the extraction of subtle inconsistency-prone information. For that purpose, an explicit attention learning guided by artifact-vulnerable patches and tailored to ViTs is introduced. Extensive experiments are conducted on diverse well-known datasets, including FF++, Celeb-DF, WildDeepfake, DFD, DFDCP, and DFDC. The results show that FakeFormer outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of generalization and computational cost, without the need for large-scale training datasets. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/10Ring/FakeFormer}.
Spatio-temporal Transformers for Action Unit Classification with Event Cameras
Authors: Luca Cultrera, Federico Becattini, Lorenzo Berlincioni, Claudio Ferrari, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Lip Reading

Face analysis has been studied from different angles to infer emotion, poses, shapes, and landmarks. Traditionally RGB cameras are used, yet for fine-grained tasks standard sensors might not be up to the task due to their latency, making it impossible to record and detect micro-movements that carry a highly informative signal, which is necessary for inferring the true emotions of a subject. Event cameras have been increasingly gaining interest as a possible solution to this and similar high-frame rate tasks. We propose a novel spatiotemporal Vision Transformer model that uses Shifted Patch Tokenization (SPT) and Locality Self-Attention (LSA) to enhance the accuracy of Action Unit classification from event streams. We also address the lack of labeled event data in the literature, which can be considered one of the main causes of an existing gap between the maturity of RGB and neuromorphic vision models. Gathering data is harder in the event domain since it cannot be crawled from the web and labeling frames should take into account event aggregation rates and the fact that static parts might not be visible in certain frames. To this end, we present FACEMORPHIC, a temporally synchronized multimodal face dataset composed of RGB videos and event streams. The dataset is annotated at a video level with facial Action Units and contains streams collected with various possible applications, ranging from 3D shape estimation to lip-reading. We then show how temporal synchronization can allow effective neuromorphic face analysis without the need to manually annotate videos: we instead leverage cross-modal supervision bridging the domain gap by representing face shapes in a 3D space. Our proposed model outperforms baseline methods by effectively capturing spatial and temporal information, crucial for recognizing subtle facial micro-expressions.
ActiveSplat: High-Fidelity Scene Reconstruction through Active Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Yuetao Li, Zijia Kuang, Ting Li, Qun Hao, Zike Yan, Guyue Zhou, Shaohui Zhang
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Active 3D Reconstruction, Decision Making

We propose ActiveSplat, an autonomous high-fidelity reconstruction system leveraging Gaussian splatting. Taking advantage of efficient and realistic rendering, the system establishes a unified framework for online mapping, viewpoint selection, and path planning. The key to ActiveSplat is a hybrid map representation that integrates both dense information about the environment and a sparse abstraction of the workspace. Therefore, the system leverages sparse topology for efficient viewpoint sampling and path planning, while exploiting view-dependent dense prediction for viewpoint selection, facilitating efficient decision-making with promising accuracy and completeness. A hierarchical planning strategy based on the topological map is adopted to mitigate repetitive trajectories and improve local granularity given limited time budgets, ensuring high-fidelity reconstruction with photorealistic view synthesis. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the efficacy of the proposed method in terms of reconstruction accuracy, data coverage, and exploration efficiency. The released code will be available on our project page: https://li-yuetao.github.io/ActiveSplat/.
Analyzing Noise Models and Advanced Filtering Algorithms for Image Enhancement
Authors: Sahil Ali Akbar, Ananya Verma
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement

Noise, an unwanted component in an image, can be the reason for the degradation of Image at the time of transmission or capturing. Noise reduction from images is still a challenging task. Digital Image Processing is a component of Digital signal processing. A wide variety of algorithms can be used in image processing to apply to an image or an input dataset and obtain important outcomes. In image processing research, removing noise from images before further analysis is essential. Post-noise removal of images improves clarity, enabling better interpretation and analysis across medical imaging, satellite imagery, and radar applications. While numerous algorithms exist, each comes with its own assumptions, strengths, and limitations. The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of different filtering techniques on images with eight types of noise. It evaluates methodologies like Wiener, Median, Gaussian, Mean, Low pass, High pass, Laplacian and bilateral filtering, using the performance metric Peak signal to noise ratio. It shows us the impact of different filters on noise models by applying a variety of filters to various kinds of noise. Additionally, it also assists us in determining which filtering strategy is most appropriate for a certain noise model based on the circumstances.
Structured Analysis and Comparison of Alphabets in Historical Handwritten Ciphers
Authors: Martín Méndez, Pau Torras, Adrià Molina, Jialuo Chen, Oriol Ramos-Terrades, Alicia Fornés
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Cryptanalysis, Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Historical ciphered manuscripts are documents that were typically used in sensitive communications within military and diplomatic contexts or among members of secret societies. These secret messages were concealed by inventing a method of writing employing symbols from diverse sources such as digits, alchemy signs and Latin or Greek characters. When studying a new, unseen cipher, the automatic search and grouping of ciphers with a similar alphabet can aid the scholar in its transcription and cryptanalysis because it indicates a probability that the underlying cipher is similar. In this study, we address this need by proposing the CSI metric, a novel way of comparing pairs of ciphered documents. We assess their effectiveness in an unsupervised clustering scenario utilising visual features, including SIFT, pre-trained learnt embeddings, and OCR descriptors.
Multi-step feature fusion for natural disaster damage assessment on satellite images
Authors: Mateusz Żarski, Jarosław Adam Miszczak
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00

Quick and accurate assessment of the damage state of buildings after natural disasters is crucial for undertaking properly targeted rescue and subsequent recovery operations, which can have a major impact on the safety of victims and the cost of disaster recovery. The quality of such a process can be significantly improved by harnessing the potential of machine learning methods in computer vision. This paper presents a novel damage assessment method using an original multi-step feature fusion network for the classification of the damage state of buildings based on pre- and post-disaster large-scale satellite images. We introduce a novel convolutional neural network (CNN) module that performs feature fusion at multiple network levels between pre- and post-disaster images in the horizontal and vertical directions of CNN network. An additional network element - Fuse Module - was proposed to adapt any CNN model to analyze image pairs in the issue of pair classification. We use, open, large-scale datasets (IDA-BD and xView2) to verify, that the proposed method is suitable to improve on existing state-of-the-art architectures. We report over a 3 percentage point increase in the accuracy of the Vision Transformer model.
A Longitudinal Analysis of Racial and Gender Bias in New York Times and Fox News Images and Articles
Authors: Hazem Ibrahim, Nouar AlDahoul, Syed Mustafa Ali Abbasi, Fareed Zaffar, Talal Rahwan, Yasir Zaki
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

The manner in which different racial and gender groups are portrayed in news coverage plays a large role in shaping public opinion. As such, understanding how such groups are portrayed in news media is of notable societal value, and has thus been a significant endeavour in both the computer and social sciences. Yet, the literature still lacks a longitudinal study examining both the frequency of appearance of different racial and gender groups in online news articles, as well as the context in which such groups are discussed. To fill this gap, we propose two machine learning classifiers to detect the race and age of a given subject. Next, we compile a dataset of 123,337 images and 441,321 online news articles from New York Times (NYT) and Fox News (Fox), and examine representation through two computational approaches. Firstly, we examine the frequency and prominence of appearance of racial and gender groups in images embedded in news articles, revealing that racial and gender minorities are largely under-represented, and when they do appear, they are featured less prominently compared to majority groups. Furthermore, we find that NYT largely features more images of racial minority groups compared to Fox. Secondly, we examine both the frequency and context with which racial minority groups are presented in article text. This reveals the narrow scope in which certain racial groups are covered and the frequency with which different groups are presented as victims and/or perpetrators in a given conflict. Taken together, our analysis contributes to the literature by providing two novel open-source classifiers to detect race and age from images, and shedding light on the racial and gender biases in news articles from venues on opposite ends of the American political spectrum.
Self-Relaxed Joint Training: Sample Selection for Severity Estimation with Ordinal Noisy Labels
Authors: Shumpei Takezaki, Kiyohito Tanaka, Seiichi Uchida
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00

Severity level estimation is a crucial task in medical image diagnosis. However, accurately assigning severity class labels to individual images is very costly and challenging. Consequently, the attached labels tend to be noisy. In this paper, we propose a new framework for training with ``ordinal'' noisy labels. Since severity levels have an ordinal relationship, we can leverage this to train a classifier while mitigating the negative effects of noisy labels. Our framework uses two techniques: clean sample selection and dual-network architecture. A technical highlight of our approach is the use of soft labels derived from noisy hard labels. By appropriately using the soft and hard labels in the two techniques, we achieve more accurate sample selection and robust network training. The proposed method outperforms various state-of-the-art methods in experiments using two endoscopic ulcerative colitis (UC) datasets and a retinal Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) dataset. Our codes are available at https://github.com/shumpei-takezaki/Self-Relaxed-Joint-Training.
HRGR: Enhancing Image Manipulation Detection via Hierarchical Region-aware Graph Reasoning
Authors: Xudong Wang, Yuezun Li, Huiyu Zhou, Jiaran Zhou, Junyu Dong
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation, Image Manipulation Detection

Image manipulation detection is to identify the authenticity of each pixel in images. One typical approach to uncover manipulation traces is to model image correlations. The previous methods commonly adopt the grids, which are fixed-size squares, as graph nodes to model correlations. However, these grids, being independent of image content, struggle to retain local content coherence, resulting in imprecise detection. To address this issue, we describe a new method named Hierarchical Region-aware Graph Reasoning (HRGR) to enhance image manipulation detection. Unlike existing grid-based methods, we model image correlations based on content-coherence feature regions with irregular shapes, generated by a novel Differentiable Feature Partition strategy. Then we construct a Hierarchical Region-aware Graph based on these regions within and across different feature layers. Subsequently, we describe a structural-agnostic graph reasoning strategy tailored for our graph to enhance the representation of nodes. Our method is fully differentiable and can seamlessly integrate into mainstream networks in an end-to-end manner, without requiring additional supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in image manipulation detection, exhibiting its great potential as a plug-and-play component for existing architectures.
Micro-Structures Graph-Based Point Cloud Registration for Balancing Efficiency and Accuracy
Authors: Rongling Zhang, Li Yan, Pengcheng Wei, Hong Xie, Pinzhuo Wang, Binbing Wang
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration

Point Cloud Registration (PCR) is a fundamental and significant issue in photogrammetry and remote sensing, aiming to seek the optimal rigid transformation between sets of points. Achieving efficient and precise PCR poses a considerable challenge. We propose a novel micro-structures graph-based global point cloud registration method. The overall method is comprised of two stages. 1) Coarse registration (CR): We develop a graph incorporating micro-structures, employing an efficient graph-based hierarchical strategy to remove outliers for obtaining the maximal consensus set. We propose a robust GNC-Welsch estimator for optimization derived from a robust estimator to the outlier process in the Lie algebra space, achieving fast and robust alignment. 2) Fine registration (FR): To refine local alignment further, we use the octree approach to adaptive search plane features in the micro-structures. By minimizing the distance from the point-to-plane, we can obtain a more precise local alignment, and the process will also be addressed effectively by being treated as a planar adjustment algorithm combined with Anderson accelerated optimization (PA-AA). After extensive experiments on real data, our proposed method performs well on the 3DMatch and ETH datasets compared to the most advanced methods, achieving higher accuracy metrics and reducing the time cost by at least one-third.
Enhanced Survival Prediction in Head and Neck Cancer Using Convolutional Block Attention and Multimodal Data Fusion
Authors: Aiman Farooq, Utkarsh Sharma, Deepak Mishra
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Prediction, Survival Prediction

Accurate survival prediction in head and neck cancer (HNC) is essential for guiding clinical decision-making and optimizing treatment strategies. Traditional models, such as Cox proportional hazards, have been widely used but are limited in their ability to handle complex multi-modal data. This paper proposes a deep learning-based approach leveraging CT and PET imaging modalities to predict survival outcomes in HNC patients. Our method integrates feature extraction with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) and a multi-modal data fusion layer that combines imaging data to generate a compact feature representation. The final prediction is achieved through a fully parametric discrete-time survival model, allowing for flexible hazard functions that overcome the limitations of traditional survival models. We evaluated our approach using the HECKTOR and HEAD-NECK-RADIOMICS- HN1 datasets, demonstrating its superior performance compared to conconventional statistical and machine learning models. The results indicate that our deep learning model significantly improves survival prediction accuracy, offering a robust tool for personalized treatment planning in HNC
PK-YOLO: Pretrained Knowledge Guided YOLO for Brain Tumor Detection in Multiplanar MRI Slices
Authors: Ming Kang, Fung Fung Ting, Raphaël C. -W. Phan, Chee-Ming Ting
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

Brain tumor detection in multiplane Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) slices is a challenging task due to the various appearances and relationships in the structure of the multiplane images. In this paper, we propose a new You Only Look Once (YOLO)-based detection model that incorporates Pretrained Knowledge (PK), called PK-YOLO, to improve the performance for brain tumor detection in multiplane MRI slices. To our best knowledge, PK-YOLO is the first pretrained knowledge guided YOLO-based object detector. The main components of the new method are a pretrained pure lightweight convolutional neural network-based backbone via sparse masked modeling, a YOLO architecture with the pretrained backbone, and a regression loss function for improving small object detection. The pretrained backbone allows for feature transferability of object queries on individual plane MRI slices into the model encoders, and the learned domain knowledge base can improve in-domain detection. The improved loss function can further boost detection performance on small-size brain tumors in multiplanar two-dimensional MRI slices. Experimental results show that the proposed PK-YOLO achieves competitive performance on the multiplanar MRI brain tumor detection datasets compared to state-of-the-art YOLO-like and DETR-like object detectors. The code is available at https://github.com/mkang315/PK-YOLO.
SAM-Swin: SAM-Driven Dual-Swin Transformers with Adaptive Lesion Enhancement for Laryngo-Pharyngeal Tumor Detection
Authors: Jia Wei, Yun Li, Xiaomao Fan, Wenjun Ma, Meiyu Qiu, Hongyu Chen, Wenbin Lei
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lesion Segmentation

Laryngo-pharyngeal cancer (LPC) is a highly lethal malignancy in the head and neck region. Recent advancements in tumor detection, particularly through dual-branch network architectures, have significantly improved diagnostic accuracy by integrating global and local feature extraction. However, challenges remain in accurately localizing lesions and fully capitalizing on the complementary nature of features within these branches. To address these issues, we propose SAM-Swin, an innovative SAM-driven Dual-Swin Transformer for laryngo-pharyngeal tumor detection. This model leverages the robust segmentation capabilities of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) to achieve precise lesion segmentation. Meanwhile, we present a multi-scale lesion-aware enhancement module (MS-LAEM) designed to adaptively enhance the learning of nuanced complementary features across various scales, improving the quality of feature extraction and representation. Furthermore, we implement a multi-scale class-aware guidance (CAG) loss that delivers multi-scale targeted supervision, thereby enhancing the model's capacity to extract class-specific features. To validate our approach, we compiled three LPC datasets from the First Affiliated Hospital (FAHSYSU), the Sixth Affiliated Hospital (SAHSYSU) of Sun Yat-sen University, and Nanfang Hospital of Southern Medical University (NHSMU). The FAHSYSU dataset is utilized for internal training, while the SAHSYSU and NHSMU datasets serve for external evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAM-Swin outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its potential for advancing LPC detection and improving patient outcomes. The source code of SAM-Swin is available at the URL of \href{https://github.com/VVJia/SAM-Swin}{https://github.com/VVJia/SAM-Swin}.
Efficient and Effective Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts for Multi-Task Model Merging
Authors: Li Shen, Anke Tang, Enneng Yang, Guibing Guo, Yong Luo, Lefei Zhang, Xiaochun Cao, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts, Multi-Task Learning, Task Arithmetic, Transfer Learning

Multi-task learning (MTL) leverages a shared model to accomplish multiple tasks and facilitate knowledge transfer. Recent research on task arithmetic-based MTL demonstrates that merging the parameters of independently fine-tuned models can effectively achieve MTL. However, existing merging methods primarily seek a static optimal solution within the original model parameter space, which often results in performance degradation due to the inherent diversity among tasks and potential interferences. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Weight-Ensembling Mixture of Experts (WEMoE) method for multi-task model merging. Specifically, we first identify critical (or sensitive) modules by analyzing parameter variations in core modules of Transformer-based models before and after finetuning. Then, our WEMoE statically merges non-critical modules while transforming critical modules into a mixture-of-experts (MoE) structure. During inference, expert modules in the MoE are dynamically merged based on input samples, enabling a more flexible and adaptive merging approach. Building on WEMoE, we further introduce an efficient-and-effective WEMoE (E-WEMoE) method, whose core mechanism involves eliminating non-essential elements in the critical modules of WEMoE and implementing shared routing across multiple MoE modules, thereby significantly reducing both the trainable parameters, the overall parameter count, and computational overhead of the merged model by WEMoE. Experimental results across various architectures and tasks demonstrate that both WEMoE and E-WEMoE outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) model merging methods in terms of MTL performance, generalization, and robustness.
HairDiffusion: Vivid Multi-Colored Hair Editing via Latent Diffusion
Authors: Yu Zeng, Yang Zhang, Jiachen Liu, Linlin Shen, Kaijun Deng, Weizhao He, Jinbao Wang
Date: 2024-10-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Hair editing is a critical image synthesis task that aims to edit hair color and hairstyle using text descriptions or reference images, while preserving irrelevant attributes (e.g., identity, background, cloth). Many existing methods are based on StyleGAN to address this task. However, due to the limited spatial distribution of StyleGAN, it struggles with multiple hair color editing and facial preservation. Considering the advancements in diffusion models, we utilize Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) for hairstyle editing. Our approach introduces Multi-stage Hairstyle Blend (MHB), effectively separating control of hair color and hairstyle in diffusion latent space. Additionally, we train a warping module to align the hair color with the target region. To further enhance multi-color hairstyle editing, we fine-tuned a CLIP model using a multi-color hairstyle dataset. Our method not only tackles the complexity of multi-color hairstyles but also addresses the challenge of preserving original colors during diffusion editing. Extensive experiments showcase the superiority of our method in editing multi-color hairstyles while preserving facial attributes given textual descriptions and reference images.