pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automating Deformable Gasket Assembly
Authors: Simeon Adebola, Tara Sadjadpour, Karim El-Refai, Will Panitch, Zehan Ma, Roy Lin, Tianshuang Qiu, Shreya Ganti, Charlotte Le, Jaimyn Drake, Ken Goldberg
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

In Gasket Assembly, a deformable gasket must be aligned and pressed into a narrow channel. This task is common for sealing surfaces in the manufacturing of automobiles, appliances, electronics, and other products. Gasket Assembly is a long-horizon, high-precision task and the gasket must align with the channel and be fully pressed in to achieve a secure fit. To compare approaches, we present 4 methods for Gasket Assembly: one policy from deep imitation learning and three procedural algorithms. We evaluate these methods with 100 physical trials. Results suggest that the Binary+ algorithm succeeds in 10/10 on the straight channel whereas the learned policy based on 250 human teleoperated demonstrations succeeds in 8/10 trials and is significantly slower. Code, CAD models, videos, and data can be found at https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/robot-gasket/
Real-Time Video Generation with Pyramid Attention Broadcast
Authors: Xuanlei Zhao, Xiaolong Jin, Kai Wang, Yang You
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

We present Pyramid Attention Broadcast (PAB), a real-time, high quality and training-free approach for DiT-based video generation. Our method is founded on the observation that attention difference in the diffusion process exhibits a U-shaped pattern, indicating significant redundancy. We mitigate this by broadcasting attention outputs to subsequent steps in a pyramid style. It applies different broadcast strategies to each attention based on their variance for best efficiency. We further introduce broadcast sequence parallel for more efficient distributed inference. PAB demonstrates up to 10.5x speedup across three models compared to baselines, achieving real-time generation for up to 720p videos. We anticipate that our simple yet effective method will serve as a robust baseline and facilitate future research and application for video generation.
Sapiens: Foundation for Human Vision Models
Authors: Rawal Khirodkar, Timur Bagautdinov, Julieta Martinez, Su Zhaoen, Austin James, Peter Selednik, Stuart Anderson, Shunsuke Saito
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Human Pose Estimation, 2D Pose Estimation, Depth Estimation, Human Part Segmentation, Keypoint Detection, Pose Estimation, Surface Normal Estimation

We present Sapiens, a family of models for four fundamental human-centric vision tasks -- 2D pose estimation, body-part segmentation, depth estimation, and surface normal prediction. Our models natively support 1K high-resolution inference and are extremely easy to adapt for individual tasks by simply fine-tuning models pretrained on over 300 million in-the-wild human images. We observe that, given the same computational budget, self-supervised pretraining on a curated dataset of human images significantly boosts the performance for a diverse set of human-centric tasks. The resulting models exhibit remarkable generalization to in-the-wild data, even when labeled data is scarce or entirely synthetic. Our simple model design also brings scalability -- model performance across tasks improves as we scale the number of parameters from 0.3 to 2 billion. Sapiens consistently surpasses existing baselines across various human-centric benchmarks. We achieve significant improvements over the prior state-of-the-art on Humans-5K (pose) by 7.6 mAP, Humans-2K (part-seg) by 17.1 mIoU, Hi4D (depth) by 22.4% relative RMSE, and THuman2 (normal) by 53.5% relative angular error. Project page: https://about.meta.com/realitylabs/codecavatars/sapiens.
Comparing YOLOv5 Variants for Vehicle Detection: A Performance Analysis
Authors: Athulya Sundaresan Geetha
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, vehicle detection

Vehicle detection is an important task in the management of traffic and automatic vehicles. This study provides a comparative analysis of five YOLOv5 variants, YOLOv5n6s, YOLOv5s6s, YOLOv5m6s, YOLOv5l6s, and YOLOv5x6s, for vehicle detection in various environments. The research focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of these models in detecting different types of vehicles, such as Car, Bus, Truck, Bicycle, and Motorcycle, under varying conditions including lighting, occlusion, and weather. Performance metrics such as precision, recall, F1-score, and mean Average Precision are utilized to assess the accuracy and reliability of each model. YOLOv5n6s demonstrated a strong balance between precision and recall, particularly in detecting Cars. YOLOv5s6s and YOLOv5m6s showed improvements in recall, enhancing their ability to detect all relevant objects. YOLOv5l6s, with its larger capacity, provided robust performance, especially in detecting Cars, but not good with identifying Motorcycles and Bicycles. YOLOv5x6s was effective in recognizing Buses and Cars but faced challenges with Motorcycle class.
Deep Learning Improvements for Sparse Spatial Field Reconstruction
Authors: Robert Sunderhaft, Logan Frank, Jim Davis
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Deep Learning

Accurately reconstructing a global spatial field from sparse data has been a longstanding problem in several domains, such as Earth Sciences and Fluid Dynamics. Historically, scientists have approached this problem by employing complex physics models to reconstruct the spatial fields. However, these methods are often computationally intensive. With the increase in popularity of machine learning (ML), several researchers have applied ML to the spatial field reconstruction task and observed improvements in computational efficiency. One such method in arXiv:2101.00554 utilizes a sparse mask of sensor locations and a Voronoi tessellation with sensor measurements as inputs to a convolutional neural network for reconstructing the global spatial field. In this work, we propose multiple adjustments to the aforementioned approach and show improvements on geoscience and fluid dynamics simulation datasets. We identify and discuss scenarios that benefit the most using the proposed ML-based spatial field reconstruction approach.
Show-o: One Single Transformer to Unify Multimodal Understanding and Generation
Authors: Jinheng Xie, Weijia Mao, Zechen Bai, David Junhao Zhang, WeiHao Wang, Kevin Qinghong Lin, YuChao Gu, Zhijie Chen, Zhenheng Yang, Mike Zheng Shou
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 10-shot image generation, Image Generation, Question Answering, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation, Visual Question Answering

We present a unified transformer, i.e., Show-o, that unifies multimodal understanding and generation. Unlike fully autoregressive models, Show-o unifies autoregressive and (discrete) diffusion modeling to adaptively handle inputs and outputs of various and mixed modalities. The unified model flexibly supports a wide range of vision-language tasks including visual question-answering, text-to-image generation, text-guided inpainting/extrapolation, and mixed-modality generation. Across various benchmarks, it demonstrates comparable or superior performance to existing individual models with an equivalent or larger number of parameters tailored for understanding or generation. This significantly highlights its potential as a next-generation foundation model. Code and models are released at https://github.com/showlab/Show-o.
UMAD: University of Macau Anomaly Detection Benchmark Dataset
Authors: Dong Li, Lineng Chen, Cheng-Zhong Xu, Hui Kong
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Change Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Anomaly detection is critical in surveillance systems and patrol robots by identifying anomalous regions in images for early warning. Depending on whether reference data are utilized, anomaly detection can be categorized into anomaly detection with reference and anomaly detection without reference. Currently, anomaly detection without reference, which is closely related to out-of-distribution (OoD) object detection, struggles with learning anomalous patterns due to the difficulty of collecting sufficiently large and diverse anomaly datasets with the inherent rarity and novelty of anomalies. Alternatively, anomaly detection with reference employs the scheme of change detection to identify anomalies by comparing semantic changes between a reference image and a query one. However, there are very few ADr works due to the scarcity of public datasets in this domain. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by introducing the UMAD Benchmark Dataset. To our best knowledge, this is the first benchmark dataset designed specifically for anomaly detection with reference in robotic patrolling scenarios, e.g., where an autonomous robot is employed to detect anomalous objects by comparing a reference and a query video sequences. The reference sequences can be taken by the robot along a specified route when there are no anomalous objects in the scene. The query sequences are captured online by the robot when it is patrolling in the same scene following the same route. Our benchmark dataset is elaborated such that each query image can find a corresponding reference based on accurate robot localization along the same route in the prebuilt 3D map, with which the reference and query images can be geometrically aligned using adaptive warping. Besides the proposed benchmark dataset, we evaluate the baseline models of ADr on this dataset.
Scribbles for All: Benchmarking Scribble Supervised Segmentation Across Datasets
Authors: Wolfgang Boettcher, Lukas Hoyer, Ozan Unal, Jan Eric Lenssen, Bernt Schiele
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Benchmarking, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised segmentation

In this work, we introduce Scribbles for All, a label and training data generation algorithm for semantic segmentation trained on scribble labels. Training or fine-tuning semantic segmentation models with weak supervision has become an important topic recently and was subject to significant advances in model quality. In this setting, scribbles are a promising label type to achieve high quality segmentation results while requiring a much lower annotation effort than usual pixel-wise dense semantic segmentation annotations. The main limitation of scribbles as source for weak supervision is the lack of challenging datasets for scribble segmentation, which hinders the development of novel methods and conclusive evaluations. To overcome this limitation, Scribbles for All provides scribble labels for several popular segmentation datasets and provides an algorithm to automatically generate scribble labels for any dataset with dense annotations, paving the way for new insights and model advancements in the field of weakly supervised segmentation. In addition to providing datasets and algorithm, we evaluate state-of-the-art segmentation models on our datasets and show that models trained with our synthetic labels perform competitively with respect to models trained on manual labels. Thus, our datasets enable state-of-the-art research into methods for scribble-labeled semantic segmentation. The datasets, scribble generation algorithm, and baselines are publicly available at https://github.com/wbkit/Scribbles4All
Frame Order Matters: A Temporal Sequence-Aware Model for Few-Shot Action Recognition
Authors: Bozheng Li, Mushui Liu, Gaoang Wang, Yunlong Yu
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Decision Making, Few-Shot action recognition, Few Shot Action Recognition

In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Sequence-Aware Model (TSAM) for few-shot action recognition (FSAR), which incorporates a sequential perceiver adapter into the pre-training framework, to integrate both the spatial information and the sequential temporal dynamics into the feature embeddings. Different from the existing fine-tuning approaches that capture temporal information by exploring the relationships among all the frames, our perceiver-based adapter recurrently captures the sequential dynamics alongside the timeline, which could perceive the order change. To obtain the discriminative representations for each class, we extend a textual corpus for each class derived from the large language models (LLMs) and enrich the visual prototypes by integrating the contextual semantic information. Besides, We introduce an unbalanced optimal transport strategy for feature matching that mitigates the impact of class-unrelated features, thereby facilitating more effective decision-making. Experimental results on five FSAR datasets demonstrate that our method set a new benchmark, beating the second-best competitors with large margins.
Envisioning Class Entity Reasoning by Large Language Models for Few-shot Learning
Authors: Mushui Liu, Fangtai Wu, Bozheng Li, Ziqian Lu, Yunlong Yu, Xi Li
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Few-shot learning (FSL) aims to recognize new concepts using a limited number of visual samples. Existing approaches attempt to incorporate semantic information into the limited visual data for category understanding. However, these methods often enrich class-level feature representations with abstract category names, failing to capture the nuanced features essential for effective generalization. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework for FSL, which incorporates both the abstract class semantics and the concrete class entities extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs), to enhance the representation of the class prototypes. Specifically, our framework composes a Semantic-guided Visual Pattern Extraction (SVPE) module and a Prototype-Calibration (PC) module, where the SVPE meticulously extracts semantic-aware visual patterns across diverse scales, while the PC module seamlessly integrates these patterns to refine the visual prototype, enhancing its representativeness. Extensive experiments on four few-shot classification benchmarks and the BSCD-FSL cross-domain benchmarks showcase remarkable advancements over the current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, for the challenging one-shot setting, our approach, utilizing the ResNet-12 backbone, achieves an impressive average improvement of 1.95% over the second-best competitor.
Smartphone-based Eye Tracking System using Edge Intelligence and Model Optimisation
Authors: Nishan Gunawardena, Gough Yumu Lui, Jeewani Anupama Ginige, Bahman Javadi
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU

A significant limitation of current smartphone-based eye-tracking algorithms is their low accuracy when applied to video-type visual stimuli, as they are typically trained on static images. Also, the increasing demand for real-time interactive applications like games, VR, and AR on smartphones requires overcoming the limitations posed by resource constraints such as limited computational power, battery life, and network bandwidth. Therefore, we developed two new smartphone eye-tracking techniques for video-type visuals by combining Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with two different Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), namely Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Our CNN+LSTM and CNN+GRU models achieved an average Root Mean Square Error of 0.955 cm and 1.091 cm, respectively. To address the computational constraints of smartphones, we developed an edge intelligence architecture to enhance the performance of smartphone-based eye tracking. We applied various optimisation methods like quantisation and pruning to deep learning models for better energy, CPU, and memory usage on edge devices, focusing on real-time processing. Using model quantisation, the model inference time in the CNN+LSTM and CNN+GRU models was reduced by 21.72% and 19.50%, respectively, on edge devices.
Finding Closure: A Closer Look at the Gestalt Law of Closure in Convolutional Neural Networks
Authors: Yuyan Zhang, Derya Soydaner, Lisa Koßmann, Fatemeh Behrad, Johan Wagemans
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition

The human brain has an inherent ability to fill in gaps to perceive figures as complete wholes, even when parts are missing or fragmented. This phenomenon is known as Closure in psychology, one of the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, explaining how the human brain interprets visual stimuli. Given the importance of Closure for human object recognition, we investigate whether neural networks rely on a similar mechanism. Exploring this crucial human visual skill in neural networks has the potential to highlight their comparability to humans. Recent studies have examined the Closure effect in neural networks. However, they typically focus on a limited selection of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and have not reached a consensus on their capability to perform Closure. To address these gaps, we present a systematic framework for investigating the Closure principle in neural networks. We introduce well-curated datasets designed to test for Closure effects, including both modal and amodal completion. We then conduct experiments on various CNNs employing different measurements. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that VGG16 and DenseNet-121 exhibit the Closure effect, while other CNNs show variable results. We interpret these findings by blending insights from psychology and neural network research, offering a unique perspective that enhances transparency in understanding neural networks. Our code and dataset will be made available on GitHub.
The 2nd Solution for LSVOS Challenge RVOS Track: Spatial-temporal Refinement for Consistent Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Tuyen Tran
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Referring Video Object Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) is a challenging task due to its requirement for temporal understanding. Due to the obstacle of computational complexity, many state-of-the-art models are trained on short time intervals. During testing, while these models can effectively process information over short time steps, they struggle to maintain consistent perception over prolonged time sequences, leading to inconsistencies in the resulting semantic segmentation masks. To address this challenge, we take a step further in this work by leveraging the tracking capabilities of the newly introduced Segment Anything Model version 2 (SAM-v2) to enhance the temporal consistency of the referring object segmentation model. Our method achieved a score of 60.40 \mathcal{J\text{\&}F} on the test set of the MeViS dataset, placing 2nd place in the final ranking of the RVOS Track at the ECCV 2024 LSVOS Challenge.
Adapting MIMO video restoration networks to low latency constraints
Authors: Valéry Dewil, Zhe Zheng, Arnaud Barral, Lara Raad, Nao Nicolas, Ioannis Cassagne, Jean-Michel Morel, Gabriele Facciolo, Bruno Galerne, Pablo Arias
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Denoising, Video Restoration

MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) approaches are a recent trend in neural network architectures for video restoration problems, where each network evaluation produces multiple output frames. The video is split into non-overlapping stacks of frames that are processed independently, resulting in a very appealing trade-off between output quality and computational cost. In this work we focus on the low-latency setting by limiting the number of available future frames. We find that MIMO architectures suffer from problems that have received little attention so far, namely (1) the performance drops significantly due to the reduced temporal receptive field, particularly for frames at the borders of the stack, (2) there are strong temporal discontinuities at stack transitions which induce a step-wise motion artifact. We propose two simple solutions to alleviate these problems: recurrence across MIMO stacks to boost the output quality by implicitly increasing the temporal receptive field, and overlapping of the output stacks to smooth the temporal discontinuity at stack transitions. These modifications can be applied to any MIMO architecture. We test them on three state-of-the-art video denoising networks with different computational cost. The proposed contributions result in a new state-of-the-art for low-latency networks, both in terms of reconstruction error and temporal consistency. As an additional contribution, we introduce a new benchmark consisting of drone footage that highlights temporal consistency issues that are not apparent in the standard benchmarks.
Robotic Eye-in-hand Visual Servo Axially Aligning Nasopharyngeal Swabs with the Nasal Cavity
Authors: Peter Q. Lee, John S. Zelek, Katja Mombaur
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

The nasopharyngeal (NP) swab test is a method for collecting cultures to diagnose for different types of respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19. Delegating this task to robots would be beneficial in terms of reducing infection risks and bolstering the healthcare system, but a critical component of the NP swab test is having the swab aligned properly with the nasal cavity so that it does not cause excessive discomfort or injury by traveling down the wrong passage. Existing research towards robotic NP swabbing typically assumes the patient's head is held within a fixture. This simplifies the alignment problem, but is also dissimilar to clinical scenarios where patients are typically free-standing. Consequently, our work creates a vision-guided pipeline to allow an instrumented robot arm to properly position and orient NP swabs with respect to the nostrils of free-standing patients. The first component of the pipeline is a precomputed joint lookup table to allow the arm to meet the patient's arbitrary position in the designated workspace, while avoiding joint limits. Our pipeline leverages semantic face models from computer vision to estimate the Euclidean pose of the face with respect to a monocular RGB-D camera placed on the end-effector. These estimates are passed into an unscented Kalman filter on manifolds state estimator and a pose based visual servo control loop to move the swab to the designated pose in front of the nostril. Our pipeline was validated with human trials, featuring a cohort of 25 participants. The system is effective, reaching the nostril for 84% of participants, and our statistical analysis did not find significant demographic biases within the cohort.
FlexEdit: Marrying Free-Shape Masks to VLLM for Flexible Image Editing
Authors: Jue Wang, Yuxiang Lin, Tianshuo Yuan, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Xiaolong Wang, Jiao GH, Wei Chen, Xiaojiang Peng
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00

Combining Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) with diffusion models offers a powerful method for executing image editing tasks based on human language instructions. However, language instructions alone often fall short in accurately conveying user requirements, particularly when users want to add, replace elements in specific areas of an image. Luckily, masks can effectively indicate the exact locations or elements to be edited, while they require users to precisely draw the shapes at the desired locations, which is highly user-unfriendly. To address this, we propose FlexEdit, an end-to-end image editing method that leverages both free-shape masks and language instructions for Flexible Editing. Our approach employs a VLLM in comprehending the image content, mask, and user instructions. Additionally, we introduce the Mask Enhance Adapter (MEA) that fuses the embeddings of the VLLM with the image data, ensuring a seamless integration of mask information and model output embeddings. Furthermore, we construct FSMI-Edit, a benchmark specifically tailored for free-shape mask, including 8 types of free-shape mask. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in LLM-based image editing, and our simple prompting technique stands out in its effectiveness. The code and data can be found at https://github.com/A-new-b/flex_edit.