pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Dysca: A Dynamic and Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Perception Ability of LVLMs
Authors: Jie Zhang, Zhongqi Wang, Mengqi Lei, Zheng Yuan, Bei Yan, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00

Currently many benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate the perception ability of the Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). However, most benchmarks conduct questions by selecting images from existing datasets, resulting in the potential data leakage. Besides, these benchmarks merely focus on evaluating LVLMs on the realistic style images and clean scenarios, leaving the multi-stylized images and noisy scenarios unexplored. In response to these challenges, we propose a dynamic and scalable benchmark named Dysca for evaluating LVLMs by leveraging synthesis images. Specifically, we leverage Stable Diffusion and design a rule-based method to dynamically generate novel images, questions and the corresponding answers. We consider 51 kinds of image styles and evaluate the perception capability in 20 subtasks. Moreover, we conduct evaluations under 4 scenarios (i.e., Clean, Corruption, Print Attacking and Adversarial Attacking) and 3 question types (i.e., Multi-choices, True-or-false and Free-form). Thanks to the generative paradigm, Dysca serves as a scalable benchmark for easily adding new subtasks and scenarios. A total of 24 advanced open-source LVLMs and 2 close-source LVLMs are evaluated on Dysca, revealing the drawbacks of current LVLMs. The benchmark is released at \url{https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/Dysca}.
Revisiting Backdoor Attacks against Large Vision-Language Models from Domain Shift
Authors: Siyuan Liang, Jiawei Liang, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Aishan Liu, Mingli Zhu, Xiaochun Cao, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Domain Generalization

Instruction tuning enhances large vision-language models (LVLMs) but increases their vulnerability to backdoor attacks due to their open design. Unlike prior studies in static settings, this paper explores backdoor attacks in LVLM instruction tuning across mismatched training and testing domains. We introduce a new evaluation dimension, backdoor domain generalization, to assess attack robustness under visual and text domain shifts. Our findings reveal two insights: (1) backdoor generalizability improves when distinctive trigger patterns are independent of specific data domains or model architectures, and (2) the competitive interaction between trigger patterns and clean semantic regions, where guiding the model to predict triggers enhances attack generalizability. Based on these insights, we propose a multimodal attribution backdoor attack (MABA) that injects domain-agnostic triggers into critical areas using attributional interpretation. Experiments with OpenFlamingo, Blip-2, and Otter show that MABA significantly boosts the attack success rate of generalization by 36.4%, achieving a 97% success rate at a 0.2% poisoning rate. This study reveals limitations in current evaluations and highlights how enhanced backdoor generalizability poses a security threat to LVLMs, even without test data access.
Dense Monocular Motion Segmentation Using Optical Flow and Pseudo Depth Map: A Zero-Shot Approach
Authors: Yuxiang Huang, Yuhao Chen, John Zelek
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Motion Segmentation, Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation

Motion segmentation from a single moving camera presents a significant challenge in the field of computer vision. This challenge is compounded by the unknown camera movements and the lack of depth information of the scene. While deep learning has shown impressive capabilities in addressing these issues, supervised models require extensive training on massive annotated datasets, and unsupervised models also require training on large volumes of unannotated data, presenting significant barriers for both. In contrast, traditional methods based on optical flow do not require training data, however, they often fail to capture object-level information, leading to over-segmentation or under-segmentation. In addition, they also struggle in complex scenes with substantial depth variations and non-rigid motion, due to the overreliance of optical flow. To overcome these challenges, we propose an innovative hybrid approach that leverages the advantages of both deep learning methods and traditional optical flow based methods to perform dense motion segmentation without requiring any training. Our method initiates by automatically generating object proposals for each frame using foundation models. These proposals are then clustered into distinct motion groups using both optical flow and relative depth maps as motion cues. The integration of depth maps derived from state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation models significantly enhances the motion cues provided by optical flow, particularly in handling motion parallax issues. Our method is evaluated on the DAVIS-Moving and YTVOS-Moving datasets, and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms the best unsupervised method and closely matches with the state-of-theart supervised methods.
Zero-shot Composed Image Retrieval Considering Query-target Relationship Leveraging Masked Image-text Pairs
Authors: Huaying Zhang, rintaro yanagi, Ren Togo, Takahiro Ogawa, Miki Haseyama
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

This paper proposes a novel zero-shot composed image retrieval (CIR) method considering the query-target relationship by masked image-text pairs. The objective of CIR is to retrieve the target image using a query image and a query text. Existing methods use a textual inversion network to convert the query image into a pseudo word to compose the image and text and use a pre-trained visual-language model to realize the retrieval. However, they do not consider the query-target relationship to train the textual inversion network to acquire information for retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel zero-shot CIR method that is trained end-to-end using masked image-text pairs. By exploiting the abundant image-text pairs that are convenient to obtain with a masking strategy for learning the query-target relationship, it is expected that accurate zero-shot CIR using a retrieval-focused textual inversion network can be realized. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.
3D Feature Distillation with Object-Centric Priors
Authors: Georgios Tziafas, Yucheng Xu, Zhibin Li, Hamidreza Kasaei
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Object, Robotic Grasping, Robot Manipulation, Semantic Segmentation

Grounding natural language to the physical world is a ubiquitous topic with a wide range of applications in computer vision and robotics. Recently, 2D vision-language models such as CLIP have been widely popularized, due to their impressive capabilities for open-vocabulary grounding in 2D images. Recent works aim to elevate 2D CLIP features to 3D via feature distillation, but either learn neural fields that are scene-specific and hence lack generalization, or focus on indoor room scan data that require access to multiple camera views, which is not practical in robot manipulation scenarios. Additionally, related methods typically fuse features at pixel-level and assume that all camera views are equally informative. In this work, we show that this approach leads to sub-optimal 3D features, both in terms of grounding accuracy, as well as segmentation crispness. To alleviate this, we propose a multi-view feature fusion strategy that employs object-centric priors to eliminate uninformative views based on semantic information, and fuse features at object-level via instance segmentation masks. To distill our object-centric 3D features, we generate a large-scale synthetic multi-view dataset of cluttered tabletop scenes, spawning 15k scenes from over 3300 unique object instances, which we make publicly available. We show that our method reconstructs 3D CLIP features with improved grounding capacity and spatial consistency, while doing so from single-view RGB-D, thus departing from the assumption of multiple camera views at test time. Finally, we show that our approach can generalize to novel tabletop domains and be re-purposed for 3D instance segmentation without fine-tuning, and demonstrate its utility for language-guided robotic grasping in clutter.
Towards Open-World Grasping with Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Georgios Tziafas, Hamidreza Kasaei
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Robotic Grasping, Visual Grounding, Visual Prompting

The ability to grasp objects in-the-wild from open-ended language instructions constitutes a fundamental challenge in robotics. An open-world grasping system should be able to combine high-level contextual with low-level physical-geometric reasoning in order to be applicable in arbitrary scenarios. Recent works exploit the web-scale knowledge inherent in large language models (LLMs) to plan and reason in robotic context, but rely on external vision and action models to ground such knowledge into the environment and parameterize actuation. This setup suffers from two major bottlenecks: a) the LLM's reasoning capacity is constrained by the quality of visual grounding, and b) LLMs do not contain low-level spatial understanding of the world, which is essential for grasping in contact-rich scenarios. In this work we demonstrate that modern vision-language models (VLMs) are capable of tackling such limitations, as they are implicitly grounded and can jointly reason about semantics and geometry. We propose OWG, an open-world grasping pipeline that combines VLMs with segmentation and grasp synthesis models to unlock grounded world understanding in three stages: open-ended referring segmentation, grounded grasp planning and grasp ranking via contact reasoning, all of which can be applied zero-shot via suitable visual prompting mechanisms. We conduct extensive evaluation in cluttered indoor scene datasets to showcase OWG's robustness in grounding from open-ended language, as well as open-world robotic grasping experiments in both simulation and hardware that demonstrate superior performance compared to previous supervised and zero-shot LLM-based methods. Project material is available at https://gtziafas.github.io/OWG_project/ .
Dynamic Gaussian Marbles for Novel View Synthesis of Casual Monocular Videos
Authors: Colton Stearns, Adam Harley, Mikaela Uy, Florian Dubost, Federico Tombari, Gordon Wetzstein, Leonidas Guibas
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis, Point Tracking

Gaussian splatting has become a popular representation for novel-view synthesis, exhibiting clear strengths in efficiency, photometric quality, and compositional edibility. Following its success, many works have extended Gaussians to 4D, showing that dynamic Gaussians maintain these benefits while also tracking scene geometry far better than alternative representations. Yet, these methods assume dense multi-view videos as supervision. In this work, we are interested in extending the capability of Gaussian scene representations to casually captured monocular videos. We show that existing 4D Gaussian methods dramatically fail in this setup because the monocular setting is underconstrained. Building off this finding, we propose a method we call Dynamic Gaussian Marbles, which consist of three core modifications that target the difficulties of the monocular setting. First, we use isotropic Gaussian "marbles'', reducing the degrees of freedom of each Gaussian. Second, we employ a hierarchical divide and-conquer learning strategy to efficiently guide the optimization towards solutions with globally coherent motion. Finally, we add image-level and geometry-level priors into the optimization, including a tracking loss that takes advantage of recent progress in point tracking. By constraining the optimization, Dynamic Gaussian Marbles learns Gaussian trajectories that enable novel-view rendering and accurately capture the 3D motion of the scene elements. We evaluate on the Nvidia Dynamic Scenes dataset and the DyCheck iPhone dataset, and show that Gaussian Marbles significantly outperforms other Gaussian baselines in quality, and is on-par with non-Gaussian representations, all while maintaining the efficiency, compositionality, editability, and tracking benefits of Gaussians. Our project page can be found here https://geometry.stanford.edu/projects/dynamic-gaussian-marbles.github.io/.
SpY: A Context-Based Approach to Spacecraft Component Detection
Authors: Trupti Mahendrakar, Ryan T. White, Madhur Tiwari
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

This paper focuses on autonomously characterizing components such as solar panels, body panels, antennas, and thrusters of an unknown resident space object (RSO) using camera feed to aid autonomous on-orbit servicing (OOS) and active debris removal. Significant research has been conducted in this area using convolutional neural networks (CNNs). While CNNs are powerful at learning patterns and performing object detection, they struggle with missed detections and misclassifications in environments different from the training data, making them unreliable for safety in high-stakes missions like OOS. Additionally, failures exhibited by CNNs are often easily rectifiable by humans using commonsense reasoning and contextual knowledge. Embedding such reasoning in an object detector could improve detection accuracy. To validate this hypothesis, this paper presents an end-to-end object detector called SpaceYOLOv2 (SpY), which leverages the generalizability of CNNs while incorporating contextual knowledge using traditional computer vision techniques. SpY consists of two main components: a shape detector and the SpaceYOLO classifier (SYC). The shape detector uses CNNs to detect primitive shapes of RSOs and SYC associates these shapes with contextual knowledge, such as color and texture, to classify them as spacecraft components or "unknown" if the detected shape is uncertain. SpY's modular architecture allows customizable usage of contextual knowledge to improve detection performance, or SYC as a secondary fail-safe classifier with an existing spacecraft component detector. Performance evaluations on hardware-in-the-loop images of a mock-up spacecraft demonstrate that SpY is accurate and an ensemble of SpY with YOLOv5 trained for satellite component detection improved the performance by 23.4% in recall, demonstrating enhanced safety for vision-based navigation tasks.
Geometric Features Enhanced Human-Object Interaction Detection
Authors: Manli Zhu, Edmond S. L. Ho, Shuang Chen, Longzhi Yang, Hubert P. H. Shum
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object

Cameras are essential vision instruments to capture images for pattern detection and measurement. Human-object interaction (HOI) detection is one of the most popular pattern detection approaches for captured human-centric visual scenes. Recently, Transformer-based models have become the dominant approach for HOI detection due to their advanced network architectures and thus promising results. However, most of them follow the one-stage design of vanilla Transformer, leaving rich geometric priors under-exploited and leading to compromised performance especially when occlusion occurs. Given that geometric features tend to outperform visual ones in occluded scenarios and offer information that complements visual cues, we propose a novel end-to-end Transformer-style HOI detection model, i.e., geometric features enhanced HOI detector (GeoHOI). One key part of the model is a new unified self-supervised keypoint learning method named UniPointNet that bridges the gap of consistent keypoint representation across diverse object categories, including humans. GeoHOI effectively upgrades a Transformer-based HOI detector benefiting from the keypoints similarities measuring the likelihood of human-object interactions as well as local keypoint patches to enhance interaction query representation, so as to boost HOI predictions. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on V-COCO and achieves competitive performance on HICO-DET. Case study results on the post-disaster rescue with vision-based instruments showcase the applicability of the proposed GeoHOI in real-world applications.
CSI4Free: GAN-Augmented mmWave CSI for Improved Pose Classification
Authors: Nabeel Nisar Bhat, Rafael Berkvens, Jeroen Famaey
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Gesture Recognition

In recent years, Joint Communication and Sensing (JC&S), has demonstrated significant success, particularly in utilizing sub-6 GHz frequencies with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices for applications such as localization, gesture recognition, and pose classification. Deep learning and the existence of large public datasets has been pivotal in achieving such results. However, at mmWave frequencies (30-300 GHz), which has shown potential for more accurate sensing performance, there is a noticeable lack of research in the domain of COTS Wi-Fi sensing. Challenges such as limited research hardware, the absence of large datasets, limited functionality in COTS hardware, and the complexities of data collection present obstacles to a comprehensive exploration of this field. In this work, we aim to address these challenges by developing a method that can generate synthetic mmWave channel state information (CSI) samples. In particular, we use a generative adversarial network (GAN) on an existing dataset, to generate 30,000 additional CSI samples. The augmented samples exhibit a remarkable degree of consistency with the original data, as indicated by the notably high GAN-train and GAN-test scores. Furthermore, we integrate the augmented samples in training a pose classification model. We observe that the augmented samples complement the real data and improve the generalization of the classification model.
IDA-UIE: An Iterative Framework for Deep Network-based Degradation Aware Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Pranjali Singh, Prithwijit Guha
Date: 2024-06-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, UIE

Underwater image quality is affected by fluorescence, low illumination, absorption, and scattering. Recent works in underwater image enhancement have proposed different deep network architectures to handle these problems. Most of these works have proposed a single network to handle all the challenges. We believe that deep networks trained for specific conditions deliver better performance than a single network learned from all degradation cases. Accordingly, the first contribution of this work lies in the proposal of an iterative framework where a single dominant degradation condition is identified and resolved. This proposal considers the following eight degradation conditions -- low illumination, low contrast, haziness, blurred image, presence of noise and color imbalance in three different channels. A deep network is designed to identify the dominant degradation condition. Accordingly, an appropriate deep network is selected for degradation condition-specific enhancement. The second contribution of this work is the construction of degradation condition specific datasets from good quality images of two standard datasets (UIEB and EUVP). This dataset is used to learn the condition specific enhancement networks. The proposed approach is found to outperform nine baseline methods on UIEB and EUVP datasets.
TabReD: Analyzing Pitfalls and Filling the Gaps in Tabular Deep Learning Benchmarks
Authors: Ivan Rubachev, Nikolay Kartashev, Yury Gorishniy, Artem Babenko
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Model Selection

Advances in machine learning research drive progress in real-world applications. To ensure this progress, it is important to understand the potential pitfalls on the way from a novel method's success on academic benchmarks to its practical deployment. In this work, we analyze existing tabular benchmarks and find two common characteristics of tabular data in typical industrial applications that are underrepresented in the datasets usually used for evaluation in the literature. First, in real-world deployment scenarios, distribution of data often changes over time. To account for this distribution drift, time-based train/test splits should be used in evaluation. However, popular tabular datasets often lack timestamp metadata to enable such evaluation. Second, a considerable portion of datasets in production settings stem from extensive data acquisition and feature engineering pipelines. This can have an impact on the absolute and relative number of predictive, uninformative, and correlated features compared to academic datasets. In this work, we aim to understand how recent research advances in tabular deep learning transfer to these underrepresented conditions. To this end, we introduce TabReD -- a collection of eight industry-grade tabular datasets. We reassess a large number of tabular ML models and techniques on TabReD. We demonstrate that evaluation on time-based data splits leads to different methods ranking, compared to evaluation on random splits, which are common in current benchmarks. Furthermore, simple MLP-like architectures and GBDT show the best results on the TabReD datasets, while other methods are less effective in the new setting.
DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice Questions
Authors: Nigel Fernandez, Alexander Scarlatos, Wanyong Feng, Simon Woodhead, Andrew Lan
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Distractor Generation, Math, Misconceptions, Multiple-choice

High-quality distractors are crucial to both the assessment and pedagogical value of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), where manually crafting ones that anticipate knowledge deficiencies or misconceptions among real students is difficult. Meanwhile, automated distractor generation, even with the help of large language models (LLMs), remains challenging for subjects like math. It is crucial to not only identify plausible distractors but also understand the error behind them. In this paper, we introduce DiVERT (Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text), a novel variational approach that learns an interpretable representation of errors behind distractors in math MCQs. Through experiments on a real-world math MCQ dataset with 1,434 questions used by hundreds of thousands of students, we show that DiVERT, despite using a base open-source LLM with 7B parameters, outperforms state-of-the-art approaches using GPT-4o on downstream distractor generation. We also conduct a human evaluation with math educators and find that DiVERT leads to error labels that are of comparable quality to human-authored ones.
Subtractive Training for Music Stem Insertion using Latent Diffusion Models
Authors: Ivan Villa-Renteria, Mason L. Wang, Zachary Shah, Zhe Li, Soohyun Kim, Neelesh Ramachandran, Mert Pilanci
Date: 2024-06-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Rhythm

We present Subtractive Training, a simple and novel method for synthesizing individual musical instrument stems given other instruments as context. This method pairs a dataset of complete music mixes with 1) a variant of the dataset lacking a specific stem, and 2) LLM-generated instructions describing how the missing stem should be reintroduced. We then fine-tune a pretrained text-to-audio diffusion model to generate the missing instrument stem, guided by both the existing stems and the text instruction. Our results demonstrate Subtractive Training's efficacy in creating authentic drum stems that seamlessly blend with the existing tracks. We also show that we can use the text instruction to control the generation of the inserted stem in terms of rhythm, dynamics, and genre, allowing us to modify the style of a single instrument in a full song while keeping the remaining instruments the same. Lastly, we extend this technique to MIDI formats, successfully generating compatible bass, drum, and guitar parts for incomplete arrangements.