pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HyperSeg: Towards Universal Visual Segmentation with Large Language Model
Authors: Cong Wei, Yujie Zhong, Haoxian Tan, Yong liu, Zheng Zhao, Jie Hu, Yujiu Yang
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Large Language Model, Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Reasoning Segmentation, Reasoning Video Object Segmentation, Referring Expression Segmentation, Referring Video Object Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Universal Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, World Knowledge

This paper aims to address universal segmentation for image and video perception with the strong reasoning ability empowered by Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs). Despite significant progress in current unified segmentation methods, limitations in adaptation to both image and video scenarios, as well as the complex reasoning segmentation, make it difficult for them to handle various challenging instructions and achieve an accurate understanding of fine-grained vision-language correlations. We propose HyperSeg, the first VLLM-based universal segmentation model for pixel-level image and video perception, encompassing generic segmentation tasks and more complex reasoning perception tasks requiring powerful reasoning abilities and world knowledge. Besides, to fully leverage the recognition capabilities of VLLMs and the fine-grained visual information, HyperSeg incorporates hybrid entity recognition and fine-grained visual perceiver modules for various segmentation tasks. Combined with the temporal adapter, HyperSeg achieves a comprehensive understanding of temporal information. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of our insights in resolving universal image and video segmentation tasks, including the more complex reasoning perception tasks. Our code is available.
Distractor-free Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Yanqi Bao, Jing Liao, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

We present DGGS, a novel framework addressing the previously unexplored challenge of Distractor-free Generalizable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). It accomplishes two key objectives: fortifying generalizable 3DGS against distractor-laden data during both training and inference phases, while successfully extending cross-scene adaptation capabilities to conventional distractor-free approaches. To achieve these objectives, DGGS introduces a scene-agnostic reference-based mask prediction and refinement methodology during training phase, coupled with a training view selection strategy, effectively improving distractor prediction accuracy and training stability. Moreover, to address distractor-induced voids and artifacts during inference stage, we propose a two-stage inference framework for better reference selection based on the predicted distractor masks, complemented by a distractor pruning module to eliminate residual distractor effects. Extensive generalization experiments demonstrate DGGS's advantages under distractor-laden conditions. Additionally, experimental results show that our scene-agnostic mask inference achieves accuracy comparable to scene-specific trained methods. Homepage is \url{https://github.com/bbbbby-99/DGGS}.
VideoDirector: Precise Video Editing via Text-to-Video Models
Authors: Yukun Wang, Longguang Wang, Zhiyuan Ma, Qibin Hu, Kai Xu, Yulan Guo
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Attribute, Video Editing

Despite the typical inversion-then-editing paradigm using text-to-image (T2I) models has demonstrated promising results, directly extending it to text-to-video (T2V) models still suffers severe artifacts such as color flickering and content distortion. Consequently, current video editing methods primarily rely on T2I models, which inherently lack temporal-coherence generative ability, often resulting in inferior editing results. In this paper, we attribute the failure of the typical editing paradigm to: 1) Tightly Spatial-temporal Coupling. The vanilla pivotal-based inversion strategy struggles to disentangle spatial-temporal information in the video diffusion model; 2) Complicated Spatial-temporal Layout. The vanilla cross-attention control is deficient in preserving the unedited content. To address these limitations, we propose a spatial-temporal decoupled guidance (STDG) and multi-frame null-text optimization strategy to provide pivotal temporal cues for more precise pivotal inversion. Furthermore, we introduce a self-attention control strategy to maintain higher fidelity for precise partial content editing. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (termed VideoDirector) effectively harnesses the powerful temporal generation capabilities of T2V models, producing edited videos with state-of-the-art performance in accuracy, motion smoothness, realism, and fidelity to unedited content.
Pre-training for Action Recognition with Automatically Generated Fractal Datasets
Authors: Davyd Svyezhentsev, George Retsinas, Petros Maragos
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Fine-grained Action Recognition

In recent years, interest in synthetic data has grown, particularly in the context of pre-training the image modality to support a range of computer vision tasks, including object classification, medical imaging etc. Previous work has demonstrated that synthetic samples, automatically produced by various generative processes, can replace real counterparts and yield strong visual representations. This approach resolves issues associated with real data such as collection and labeling costs, copyright and privacy. We extend this trend to the video domain applying it to the task of action recognition. Employing fractal geometry, we present methods to automatically produce large-scale datasets of short synthetic video clips, which can be utilized for pre-training neural models. The generated video clips are characterized by notable variety, stemmed by the innate ability of fractals to generate complex multi-scale structures. To narrow the domain gap, we further identify key properties of real videos and carefully emulate them during pre-training. Through thorough ablations, we determine the attributes that strengthen downstream results and offer general guidelines for pre-training with synthetic videos. The proposed approach is evaluated by fine-tuning pre-trained models on established action recognition datasets HMDB51 and UCF101 as well as four other video benchmarks related to group action recognition, fine-grained action recognition and dynamic scenes. Compared to standard Kinetics pre-training, our reported results come close and are even superior on a portion of downstream datasets. Code and samples of synthetic videos are available at https://github.com/davidsvy/fractal_video .
Revisiting Point Cloud Completion: Are We Ready For The Real-World?
Authors: Stuti Pathak, Prashant Kumar, Nicholus Mboga, Gunther Steenackers, Rudi Penne
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion

Point clouds acquired in constrained and challenging real-world settings are incomplete, non-uniformly sparse, or both. These obstacles present acute challenges for a vital task - point cloud completion. Using tools from Algebraic Topology and Persistent Homology ($\mathcal{PH}$), we demonstrate that current benchmark synthetic point clouds lack rich topological features that are important constituents of point clouds captured in realistic settings. To facilitate research in this direction, we contribute the first real-world industrial point cloud dataset for point cloud completion, RealPC - a diverse set of rich and varied point clouds, consisting of $\sim$ 40,000 pairs across 21 categories of industrial structures in railway establishments. Our benchmark results on several strong baselines reveal a striking observation - the existing methods are tailored for synthetic datasets and fail miserably in real-world settings. Building on our observation that RealPC consists of several 0 and 1-dimensional $\mathcal{PH}$-based topological features, we demonstrate the potential of integrating Homology-based topological priors into existing works. More specifically, we present how 0-dimensional $\mathcal{PH}$ priors, which extract the global topology of a complete shape in the form of a 3-D skeleton, can assist a model in generating topologically-consistent complete shapes.
A Distractor-Aware Memory for Visual Object Tracking with SAM2
Authors: Jovana Videnovic, Alan Lukezic, Matej Kristan
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Object Tracking, Semi-Supervised Video Object Segmentation, Visual Object Tracking, Visual Tracking

Memory-based trackers are video object segmentation methods that form the target model by concatenating recently tracked frames into a memory buffer and localize the target by attending the current image to the buffered frames. While already achieving top performance on many benchmarks, it was the recent release of SAM2 that placed memory-based trackers into focus of the visual object tracking community. Nevertheless, modern trackers still struggle in the presence of distractors. We argue that a more sophisticated memory model is required, and propose a new distractor-aware memory model for SAM2 and an introspection-based update strategy that jointly addresses the segmentation accuracy as well as tracking robustness. The resulting tracker is denoted as SAM2.1++. We also propose a new distractor-distilled DiDi dataset to study the distractor problem better. SAM2.1++ outperforms SAM2.1 and related SAM memory extensions on seven benchmarks and sets a solid new state-of-the-art on six of them.
Uncertainty quantification for White Matter Hyperintensity segmentation detects silent failures and improves automated Fazekas quantification
Authors: Ben Philps, Maria del C. Valdes Hernandez, Chen Qin, Una Clancy, Eleni Sakka, Susana Munoz Maniega, Mark E. Bastin, Angela C. C. Jochems, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Miguel O. Bernabeu, Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

White Matter Hyperintensities (WMH) are key neuroradiological markers of small vessel disease present in brain MRI. Assessment of WMH is important in research and clinics. However, WMH are challenging to segment due to their high variability in shape, location, size, poorly defined borders, and similar intensity profile to other pathologies (e.g stroke lesions) and artefacts (e.g head motion). In this work, we apply the most effective techniques for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in segmentation to the WMH segmentation task across multiple test-time data distributions. We find a combination of Stochastic Segmentation Networks with Deep Ensembles yields the highest Dice and lowest Absolute Volume Difference % (AVD) score on in-domain and out-of-distribution data. We demonstrate the downstream utility of UQ, proposing a novel method for classification of the clinical Fazekas score using spatial features extracted for WMH segmentation and UQ maps. We show that incorporating WMH uncertainty information improves Fazekas classification performance and calibration, with median class balanced accuracy for classification models with (UQ and spatial WMH features)/(spatial WMH features)/(WMH volume only) of 0.71/0.66/0.60 in the Deep WMH and 0.82/0.77/0.73 in the Periventricular WMH regions respectively. We demonstrate that stochastic UQ techniques with high sample diversity can improve the detection of poor quality segmentations. Finally, we qualitatively analyse the semantic information captured by UQ techniques and demonstrate that uncertainty can highlight areas where there is ambiguity between WMH and stroke lesions, while identifying clusters of small WMH in deep white matter unsegmented by the model.
Natural Language Understanding and Inference with MLLM in Visual Question Answering: A Survey
Authors: Jiayi Kuang, Jingyou Xie, Haohao Luo, Ronghao Li, Zhe Xu, Xianfeng Cheng, Yinghui Li, Xika Lin, Ying Shen
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Survey, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenge task that combines natural language processing and computer vision techniques and gradually becomes a benchmark test task in multimodal large language models (MLLMs). The goal of our survey is to provide an overview of the development of VQA and a detailed description of the latest models with high timeliness. This survey gives an up-to-date synthesis of natural language understanding of images and text, as well as the knowledge reasoning module based on image-question information on the core VQA tasks. In addition, we elaborate on recent advances in extracting and fusing modal information with vision-language pretraining models and multimodal large language models in VQA. We also exhaustively review the progress of knowledge reasoning in VQA by detailing the extraction of internal knowledge and the introduction of external knowledge. Finally, we present the datasets of VQA and different evaluation metrics and discuss possible directions for future work.
TAFM-Net: A Novel Approach to Skin Lesion Segmentation Using Transformer Attention and Focal Modulation
Authors: Tariq M Khan, Dawn Lin, Shahzaib Iqbal, Eirk Meijering
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Lesion Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

Incorporating modern computer vision techniques into clinical protocols shows promise in improving skin lesion segmentation. The U-Net architecture has been a key model in this area, iteratively improved to address challenges arising from the heterogeneity of dermatologic images due to varying clinical settings, lighting, patient attributes, and hair density. To further improve skin lesion segmentation, we developed TAFM-Net, an innovative model leveraging self-adaptive transformer attention (TA) coupled with focal modulation (FM). Our model integrates an EfficientNetV2B1 encoder, which employs TA to enhance spatial and channel-related saliency, while a densely connected decoder integrates FM within skip connections, enhancing feature emphasis, segmentation performance, and interpretability crucial for medical image analysis. A novel dynamic loss function amalgamates region and boundary information, guiding effective model training. Our model achieves competitive performance, with Jaccard coefficients of 93.64\%, 86.88\% and 92.88\% in the ISIC2016, ISIC2017 and ISIC2018 datasets, respectively, demonstrating its potential in real-world scenarios.
Box for Mask and Mask for Box: weak losses for multi-task partially supervised learning
Authors: Hoàng-Ân Lê, Paul Berg, Minh-Tan Pham
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Object detection and semantic segmentation are both scene understanding tasks yet they differ in data structure and information level. Object detection requires box coordinates for object instances while semantic segmentation requires pixel-wise class labels. Making use of one task's information to train the other would be beneficial for multi-task partially supervised learning where each training example is annotated only for a single task, having the potential to expand training sets with different-task datasets. This paper studies various weak losses for partially annotated data in combination with existing supervised losses. We propose Box-for-Mask and Mask-for-Box strategies, and their combination BoMBo, to distil necessary information from one task annotations to train the other. Ablation studies and experimental results on VOC and COCO datasets show favorable results for the proposed idea. Source code and data splits can be found at https://github.com/lhoangan/multas.
IMPROVE: Improving Medical Plausibility without Reliance on HumanValidation -- An Enhanced Prototype-Guided Diffusion Framework
Authors: Anurag Shandilya, Swapnil Bhat, Akshat Gautam, Subhash Yadav, Siddharth Bhatt, Deval Mehta, Kshitij Jadhav
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Medical Image Generation

Generative models have proven to be very effective in generating synthetic medical images and find applications in downstream tasks such as enhancing rare disease datasets, long-tailed dataset augmentation, and scaling machine learning algorithms. For medical applications, the synthetically generated medical images by such models are still reasonable in quality when evaluated based on traditional metrics such as FID score, precision, and recall. However, these metrics fail to capture the medical/biological plausibility of the generated images. Human expert feedback has been used to get biological plausibility which demonstrates that these generated images have very low plausibility. Recently, the research community has further integrated this human feedback through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback(RLHF), which generates more medically plausible images. However, incorporating human feedback is a costly and slow process. In this work, we propose a novel approach to improve the medical plausibility of generated images without the need for human feedback. We introduce IMPROVE:Improving Medical Plausibility without Reliance on Human Validation - An Enhanced Prototype-Guided Diffusion Framework, a prototype-guided diffusion process for medical image generation and show that it substantially enhances the biological plausibility of the generated medical images without the need for any human feedback. We perform experiments on Bone Marrow and HAM10000 datasets and show that medical accuracy can be substantially increased without human feedback.
FTMoMamba: Motion Generation with Frequency and Text State Space Models
Authors: Chengjian Li, Xiangbo Shu, Qiongjie Cui, Yazhou Yao, Jinhui Tang
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Sentence, State Space Models

Diffusion models achieve impressive performance in human motion generation. However, current approaches typically ignore the significance of frequency-domain information in capturing fine-grained motions within the latent space (e.g., low frequencies correlate with static poses, and high frequencies align with fine-grained motions). Additionally, there is a semantic discrepancy between text and motion, leading to inconsistency between the generated motions and the text descriptions. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based FTMoMamba framework equipped with a Frequency State Space Model (FreqSSM) and a Text State Space Model (TextSSM). Specifically, to learn fine-grained representation, FreqSSM decomposes sequences into low-frequency and high-frequency components, guiding the generation of static pose (e.g., sits, lay) and fine-grained motions (e.g., transition, stumble), respectively. To ensure the consistency between text and motion, TextSSM encodes text features at the sentence level, aligning textual semantics with sequential features. Extensive experiments show that FTMoMamba achieves superior performance on the text-to-motion generation task, especially gaining the lowest FID of 0.181 (rather lower than 0.421 of MLD) on the HumanML3D dataset.
SuperMat: Physically Consistent PBR Material Estimation at Interactive Rates
Authors: Yijia Hong, Yuan-Chen Guo, Ran Yi, Yulong Chen, Yan-Pei Cao, Lizhuang Ma
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Denoising

Decomposing physically-based materials from images into their constituent properties remains challenging, particularly when maintaining both computational efficiency and physical consistency. While recent diffusion-based approaches have shown promise, they face substantial computational overhead due to multiple denoising steps and separate models for different material properties. We present SuperMat, a single-step framework that achieves high-quality material decomposition with one-step inference. This enables end-to-end training with perceptual and re-render losses while decomposing albedo, metallic, and roughness maps at millisecond-scale speeds. We further extend our framework to 3D objects through a UV refinement network, enabling consistent material estimation across viewpoints while maintaining efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that SuperMat achieves state-of-the-art PBR material decomposition quality while reducing inference time from seconds to milliseconds per image, and completes PBR material estimation for 3D objects in approximately 3 seconds. The project page is at https://hyj542682306.github.io/SuperMat/.
Perceptually Optimized Super Resolution
Authors: Volodymyr Karpenko, Taimoor Tariq, Jorge Condor, Piotr Didyk
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Sensitivity, Super-Resolution

Modern deep-learning based super-resolution techniques process images and videos independently of the underlying content and viewing conditions. However, the sensitivity of the human visual system to image details changes depending on the underlying content characteristics, such as spatial frequency, luminance, color, contrast, or motion. This observation hints that computational resources spent on up-sampling visual content may be wasted whenever a viewer cannot resolve the results. Motivated by this observation, we propose a perceptually inspired and architecture-agnostic approach for controlling the visual quality and efficiency of super-resolution techniques. The core is a perceptual model that dynamically guides super-resolution methods according to the human's sensitivity to image details. Our technique leverages the limitations of the human visual system to improve the efficiency of super-resolution techniques by focusing computational resources on perceptually important regions; judged on the basis of factors such as adapting luminance, contrast, spatial frequency, motion, and viewing conditions. We demonstrate the application of our proposed model in combination with network branching, and network complexity reduction to improve the computational efficiency of super-resolution methods without visible quality loss. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations, including user studies, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in reducing FLOPS by factors of 2$\mathbf{x}$ and greater, without sacrificing perceived quality.
Learning Visual Hierarchies with Hyperbolic Embeddings
Authors: Ziwei Wang, Sameera Ramasinghe, Chenchen Xu, Julien Monteil, Loris Bazzani, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

Structuring latent representations in a hierarchical manner enables models to learn patterns at multiple levels of abstraction. However, most prevalent image understanding models focus on visual similarity, and learning visual hierarchies is relatively unexplored. In this work, for the first time, we introduce a learning paradigm that can encode user-defined multi-level visual hierarchies in hyperbolic space without requiring explicit hierarchical labels. As a concrete example, first, we define a part-based image hierarchy using object-level annotations within and across images. Then, we introduce an approach to enforce the hierarchy using contrastive loss with pairwise entailment metrics. Finally, we discuss new evaluation metrics to effectively measure hierarchical image retrieval. Encoding these complex relationships ensures that the learned representations capture semantic and structural information that transcends mere visual similarity. Experiments in part-based image retrieval show significant improvements in hierarchical retrieval tasks, demonstrating the capability of our model in capturing visual hierarchies.