pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multi-Stage Vision Token Dropping: Towards Efficient Multimodal Large Language Model
Authors: Ting Liu, Liangtao Shi, Richang Hong, Yue Hu, Quanjun Yin, Linfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model

The vision tokens in multimodal large language models usually exhibit significant spatial and temporal redundancy and take up most of the input tokens, which harms their inference efficiency. To solve this problem, some recent works were introduced to drop the unimportant tokens during inference where the importance of each token is decided only by the information in either the vision encoding stage or the prefilling stage. In this paper, we propose Multi-stage Token Dropping (MustDrop) to measure the importance of each token from the whole lifecycle, including the vision encoding stage, prefilling stage, and decoding stage. Concretely, in the visual encoding stage, MustDrop merges spatially adjacent tokens with high similarity, and establishes a key token set to retain the most vision-critical tokens, preventing them from being discarded in later stages. In the prefilling stage, MustDrop further compresses vision tokens by the guidance of text semantics, with a dual-attention filtering strategy. In the decoding stage, an output-aware cache policy is proposed to further reduce the size of the KV cache. By leveraging tailored strategies in the multi-stage process, MustDrop can more precisely recognize the important and redundant tokens, thus achieving an optimal balance between performance and efficiency. For instance, MustDrop reduces about 88.5\% FLOPs on LLaVA with a compression ratio of 92.2\% while maintaining comparable accuracy. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/liuting20/MustDrop}.
Test-time Conditional Text-to-Image Synthesis Using Diffusion Models
Authors: Tripti Shukla, Srikrishna Karanam, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Text-to-Image Synthesis, Denoising, Image Generation

We consider the problem of conditional text-to-image synthesis with diffusion models. Most recent works need to either finetune specific parts of the base diffusion model or introduce new trainable parameters, leading to deployment inflexibility due to the need for training. To address this gap in the current literature, we propose our method called TINTIN: Test-time Conditional Text-to-Image Synthesis using Diffusion Models which is a new training-free test-time only algorithm to condition text-to-image diffusion model outputs on conditioning factors such as color palettes and edge maps. In particular, we propose to interpret noise predictions during denoising as gradients of an energy-based model, leading to a flexible approach to manipulate the noise by matching predictions inferred from them to the ground truth conditioning input. This results in, to the best of our knowledge, the first approach to control model outputs with input color palettes, which we realize using a novel color distribution matching loss. We also show this test-time noise manipulation can be easily extensible to other types of conditioning, e.g., edge maps. We conduct extensive experiments using a variety of text prompts, color palettes, and edge maps and demonstrate significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Unveiling Hidden Details: A RAW Data-Enhanced Paradigm for Real-World Super-Resolution
Authors: Long Peng, Wenbo Li, Jiaming Guo, Xin Di, Haoze Sun, Yong Li, Renjing Pei, Yang Wang, Yang Cao, Zheng-Jun Zha
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Denoising, Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution (Real SR) aims to generate high-fidelity, detail-rich high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts. Existing Real SR methods primarily focus on generating details from the LR RGB domain, often leading to a lack of richness or fidelity in fine details. In this paper, we pioneer the use of details hidden in RAW data to complement existing RGB-only methods, yielding superior outputs. We argue that key image processing steps in Image Signal Processing, such as denoising and demosaicing, inherently result in the loss of fine details in LR images, making LR RAW a valuable information source. To validate this, we present RealSR-RAW, a comprehensive dataset comprising over 10,000 pairs with LR and HR RGB images, along with corresponding LR RAW, captured across multiple smartphones under varying focal lengths and diverse scenes. Additionally, we propose a novel, general RAW adapter to efficiently integrate LR RAW data into existing CNNs, Transformers, and Diffusion-based Real SR models by suppressing the noise contained in LR RAW and aligning its distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate that incorporating RAW data significantly enhances detail recovery and improves Real SR performance across ten evaluation metrics, including both fidelity and perception-oriented metrics. Our findings open a new direction for the Real SR task, with the dataset and code will be made available to support future research.
Going Beyond Conventional OOD Detection
Authors: Sudarshan Regmi
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is critical to ensure the safe deployment of deep learning models in critical applications. Deep learning models can often misidentify OOD samples as in-distribution (ID) samples. This vulnerability worsens in the presence of spurious correlation in the training set. Likewise, in fine-grained classification settings, detection of fine-grained OOD samples becomes inherently challenging due to their high similarity to ID samples. However, current research on OOD detection has largely ignored these challenging scenarios, focusing instead on relatively easier (conventional) cases. In this work, we present a unified Approach to Spurious, fine-grained, and Conventional OOD Detection (ASCOOD). First, we propose synthesizing virtual outliers from ID data by approximating the destruction of invariant features. We identify invariant features with the pixel attribution method using the model being learned. This approach eliminates the burden of curating external OOD datasets. Then, we simultaneously incentivize ID classification and predictive uncertainty towards the virtual outliers leveraging standardized feature representation. Our approach effectively mitigates the impact of spurious correlations and encourages capturing fine-grained attributes. Extensive experiments across six datasets demonstrate the merit of ASCOOD in spurious, fine-grained, and conventional settings. The code is available at: https://github.com/sudarshanregmi/ASCOOD/
Anatomy-Guided Radiology Report Generation with Pathology-Aware Regional Prompts
Authors: Yijian Gao, Dominic Marshall, Xiaodan Xing, Junzhi Ning, Giorgos Papanastasiou, Guang Yang, Matthieu Komorowski
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Diagnostic, Text Generation

Radiology reporting generative AI holds significant potential to alleviate clinical workloads and streamline medical care. However, achieving high clinical accuracy is challenging, as radiological images often feature subtle lesions and intricate structures. Existing systems often fall short, largely due to their reliance on fixed size, patch-level image features and insufficient incorporation of pathological information. This can result in the neglect of such subtle patterns and inconsistent descriptions of crucial pathologies. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative approach that leverages pathology-aware regional prompts to explicitly integrate anatomical and pathological information of various scales, significantly enhancing the precision and clinical relevance of generated reports. We develop an anatomical region detector that extracts features from distinct anatomical areas, coupled with a novel multi-label lesion detector that identifies global pathologies. Our approach emulates the diagnostic process of radiologists, producing clinically accurate reports with comprehensive diagnostic capabilities. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on most natural language generation and clinical efficacy metrics, with formal expert evaluations affirming its potential to enhance radiology practice.
C-DiffSET: Leveraging Latent Diffusion for SAR-to-EO Image Translation with Confidence-Guided Reliable Object Generation
Authors: Jeonghyeok Do, Jaehyup Lee, Munchurl Kim
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-to-Image Translation, Translation

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery provides robust environmental and temporal coverage (e.g., during clouds, seasons, day-night cycles), yet its noise and unique structural patterns pose interpretation challenges, especially for non-experts. SAR-to-EO (Electro-Optical) image translation (SET) has emerged to make SAR images more perceptually interpretable. However, traditional approaches trained from scratch on limited SAR-EO datasets are prone to overfitting. To address these challenges, we introduce Confidence Diffusion for SAR-to-EO Translation, called C-DiffSET, a framework leveraging pretrained Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) extensively trained on natural images, thus enabling effective adaptation to the EO domain. Remarkably, we find that the pretrained VAE encoder aligns SAR and EO images in the same latent space, even with varying noise levels in SAR inputs. To further improve pixel-wise fidelity for SET, we propose a confidence-guided diffusion (C-Diff) loss that mitigates artifacts from temporal discrepancies, such as appearing or disappearing objects, thereby enhancing structural accuracy. C-DiffSET achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on multiple datasets, significantly outperforming the very recent image-to-image translation methods and SET methods with large margins.
Bag of Design Choices for Inference of High-Resolution Masked Generative Transformer
Authors: Shitong Shao, Zikai Zhou, Tian Ye, Lichen Bai, Zhiqiang Xu, Zeke Xie
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Text-to-image diffusion models (DMs) develop at an unprecedented pace, supported by thorough theoretical exploration and empirical analysis. Unfortunately, the discrepancy between DMs and autoregressive models (ARMs) complicates the path toward achieving the goal of unified vision and language generation. Recently, the masked generative Transformer (MGT) serves as a promising intermediary between DM and ARM by predicting randomly masked image tokens (i.e., masked image modeling), combining the efficiency of DM with the discrete token nature of ARM. However, we find that the comprehensive analyses regarding the inference for MGT are virtually non-existent, and thus we aim to present positive design choices to fill this gap. We modify and re-design a set of DM-based inference techniques for MGT and further elucidate their performance on MGT. We also discuss the approach to correcting token's distribution to enhance inference. Extensive experiments and empirical analyses lead to concrete and effective design choices, and these design choices can be merged to achieve further performance gains. For instance, in terms of enhanced inference, we achieve winning rates of approximately 70% compared to vanilla sampling on HPS v2 with the recent SOTA MGT Meissonic. Our contributions have the potential to further enhance the capabilities and future development of MGTs.
Beyond Feature Mapping GAP: Integrating Real HDRTV Priors for Superior SDRTV-to-HDRTV Conversion
Authors: Kepeng Xu, Li Xu, Gang He, Zhiqiang Zhang, Wenxin Yu, Shihao Wang, Dajiang Zhou, Yunsong Li
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

The rise of HDR-WCG display devices has highlighted the need to convert SDRTV to HDRTV, as most video sources are still in SDR. Existing methods primarily focus on designing neural networks to learn a single-style mapping from SDRTV to HDRTV. However, the limited information in SDRTV and the diversity of styles in real-world conversions render this process an ill-posed problem, thereby constraining the performance and generalization of these methods. Inspired by generative approaches, we propose a novel method for SDRTV to HDRTV conversion guided by real HDRTV priors. Despite the limited information in SDRTV, introducing real HDRTV as reference priors significantly constrains the solution space of the originally high-dimensional ill-posed problem. This shift transforms the task from solving an unreferenced prediction problem to making a referenced selection, thereby markedly enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the conversion process. Specifically, our approach comprises two stages: the first stage employs a Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network to capture HDRTV priors, while the second stage matches these priors to the input SDRTV content to recover realistic HDRTV outputs. We evaluate our method on public datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness with significant improvements in both objective and subjective metrics across real and synthetic datasets.
An End-to-End Real-World Camera Imaging Pipeline
Authors: Kepeng Xu, Zijia Ma, Li Xu, Gang He, Yunsong Li, Wenxin Yu, Taichu Han, Cheng Yang
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Tone Mapping

Recent advances in neural camera imaging pipelines have demonstrated notable progress. Nevertheless, the real-world imaging pipeline still faces challenges including the lack of joint optimization in system components, computational redundancies, and optical distortions such as lens shading.In light of this, we propose an end-to-end camera imaging pipeline (RealCamNet) to enhance real-world camera imaging performance. Our methodology diverges from conventional, fragmented multi-stage image signal processing towards end-to-end architecture. This architecture facilitates joint optimization across the full pipeline and the restoration of coordinate-biased distortions. RealCamNet is designed for high-quality conversion from RAW to RGB and compact image compression. Specifically, we deeply analyze coordinate-dependent optical distortions, e.g., vignetting and dark shading, and design a novel Coordinate-Aware Distortion Restoration (CADR) module to restore coordinate-biased distortions. Furthermore, we propose a Coordinate-Independent Mapping Compression (CIMC) module to implement tone mapping and redundant information compression. Existing datasets suffer from misalignment and overly idealized conditions, making them inadequate for training real-world imaging pipelines. Therefore, we collected a real-world imaging dataset. Experiment results show that RealCamNet achieves the best rate-distortion performance with lower inference latency.
MRI Parameter Mapping via Gaussian Mixture VAE: Breaking the Assumption of Independent Pixels
Authors: MouCheng Xu, Yukun Zhou, Tobias Goodwin-Allcock, Kimia Firoozabadi, Joseph Jacob, Daniel C. Alexander, Paddy J. Slator
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diffusion  MRI, Quantitative MRI

We introduce and demonstrate a new paradigm for quantitative parameter mapping in MRI. Parameter mapping techniques, such as diffusion MRI and quantitative MRI, have the potential to robustly and repeatably measure biologically-relevant tissue maps that strongly relate to underlying microstructure. Quantitative maps are calculated by fitting a model to multiple images, e.g. with least-squares or machine learning. However, the overwhelming majority of model fitting techniques assume that each voxel is independent, ignoring any co-dependencies in the data. This makes model fitting sensitive to voxelwise measurement noise, hampering reliability and repeatability. We propose a self-supervised deep variational approach that breaks the assumption of independent pixels, leveraging redundancies in the data to effectively perform data-driven regularisation of quantitative maps. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms current model fitting techniques in dMRI simulations and real data. Especially with a Gaussian mixture prior, our model enables sharper quantitative maps, revealing finer anatomical details that are not presented in the baselines. Our approach can hence support the clinical adoption of parameter mapping methods such as dMRI and qMRI.
Diffusion-Based Semantic Segmentation of Lumbar Spine MRI Scans of Lower Back Pain Patients
Authors: Maria Monzon, Thomas Iff, Ender Konukoglu, Catherine R. Jutzeler
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Semantic Segmentation

This study introduces a diffusion-based framework for robust and accurate segmenton of vertebrae, intervertebral discs (IVDs), and spinal canal from Magnetic Resonance Imaging~(MRI) scans of patients with low back pain (LBP), regardless of whether the scans are T1w or T2-weighted. The results showed that SpineSegDiff achieved comparable outperformed non-diffusion state-of-the-art models in the identification of degenerated IVDs. Our findings highlight the potential of diffusion models to improve LBP diagnosis and management through precise spine MRI analysis.
Towards a Comprehensive Benchmark for Pathological Lymph Node Metastasis in Breast Cancer Sections
Authors: Xitong Ling, Yuanyuan Lei, Jiawen Li, Junru Cheng, Wenting Huang, Tian Guan, Jian Guan, Yonghong He
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diagnostic, Multiple Instance Learning, whole slide images

Advances in optical microscopy scanning have significantly contributed to computational pathology (CPath) by converting traditional histopathological slides into whole slide images (WSIs). This development enables comprehensive digital reviews by pathologists and accelerates AI-driven diagnostic support for WSI analysis. Recent advances in foundational pathology models have increased the need for benchmarking tasks. The Camelyon series is one of the most widely used open-source datasets in computational pathology. However, the quality, accessibility, and clinical relevance of the labels have not been comprehensively evaluated. In this study, we reprocessed 1,399 WSIs and labels from the Camelyon-16 and Camelyon-17 datasets, removing low-quality slides, correcting erroneous labels, and providing expert pixel annotations for tumor regions in the previously unreleased test set. Based on the sizes of re-annotated tumor regions, we upgraded the binary cancer screening task to a four-class task: negative, micro-metastasis, macro-metastasis, and Isolated Tumor Cells (ITC). We reevaluated pre-trained pathology feature extractors and multiple instance learning (MIL) methods using the cleaned dataset, providing a benchmark that advances AI development in histopathology.
LTCXNet: Advancing Chest X-Ray Analysis with Solutions for Long-Tailed Multi-Label Classification and Fairness Challenges
Authors: Chin-wei Huang, Mu-Yi Shen, Kuan-Chang Shih, Shih-Chih Lin, Chi-Yu Chen, Po-Chih Kuo
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decoder, Diagnostic, Fairness, Management, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Chest X-rays (CXRs) often display various diseases with disparate class frequencies, leading to a long-tailed, multi-label data distribution. In response to this challenge, we explore the Pruned MIMIC-CXR-LT dataset, a curated collection derived from the MIMIC-CXR dataset, specifically designed to represent a long-tailed and multi-label data scenario. We introduce LTCXNet, a novel framework that integrates the ConvNeXt model, ML-Decoder, and strategic data augmentation, further enhanced by an ensemble approach. We demonstrate that LTCXNet improves the performance of CXR interpretation across all classes, especially enhancing detection in rarer classes like `Pneumoperitoneum' and `Pneumomediastinum' by 79\% and 48\%, respectively. Beyond performance metrics, our research extends into evaluating fairness, highlighting that some methods, while improving model accuracy, could inadvertently affect fairness across different demographic groups negatively. This work contributes to advancing the understanding and management of long-tailed, multi-label data distributions in medical imaging, paving the way for more equitable and effective diagnostic tools.
TDSM: Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching in Zero-Shot Action Recognition
Authors: Jeonghyeok Do, Munchurl Kim
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition, Text Matching, Triplet, Zero-Shot Action Recognition, Zero-Shot Learning, Zero Shot Skeletal Action Recognition

We firstly present a diffusion-based action recognition with zero-shot learning for skeleton inputs. In zero-shot skeleton-based action recognition, aligning skeleton features with the text features of action labels is essential for accurately predicting unseen actions. Previous methods focus on direct alignment between skeleton and text latent spaces, but the modality gaps between these spaces hinder robust generalization learning. Motivated from the remarkable performance of text-to-image diffusion models, we leverage their alignment capabilities between different modalities mostly by focusing on the training process during reverse diffusion rather than using their generative power. Based on this, our framework is designed as a Triplet Diffusion for Skeleton-Text Matching (TDSM) method which aligns skeleton features with text prompts through reverse diffusion, embedding the prompts into the unified skeleton-text latent space to achieve robust matching. To enhance discriminative power, we introduce a novel triplet diffusion (TD) loss that encourages our TDSM to correct skeleton-text matches while pushing apart incorrect ones. Our TDSM significantly outperforms the very recent state-of-the-art methods with large margins of 2.36%-point to 13.05%-point, demonstrating superior accuracy and scalability in zero-shot settings through effective skeleton-text matching.
It Takes Two: Accurate Gait Recognition in the Wild via Cross-granularity Alignment
Authors: Jinkai Zheng, Xinchen Liu, Boyue Zhang, Chenggang Yan, Jiyong Zhang, Wu Liu, Yongdong Zhang
Date: 2024-11-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Gait Recognition, Gait Recognition in the Wild, Human Parsing

Existing studies for gait recognition primarily utilized sequences of either binary silhouette or human parsing to encode the shapes and dynamics of persons during walking. Silhouettes exhibit accurate segmentation quality and robustness to environmental variations, but their low information entropy may result in sub-optimal performance. In contrast, human parsing provides fine-grained part segmentation with higher information entropy, but the segmentation quality may deteriorate due to the complex environments. To discover the advantages of silhouette and parsing and overcome their limitations, this paper proposes a novel cross-granularity alignment gait recognition method, named XGait, to unleash the power of gait representations of different granularity. To achieve this goal, the XGait first contains two branches of backbone encoders to map the silhouette sequences and the parsing sequences into two latent spaces, respectively. Moreover, to explore the complementary knowledge across the features of two representations, we design the Global Cross-granularity Module (GCM) and the Part Cross-granularity Module (PCM) after the two encoders. In particular, the GCM aims to enhance the quality of parsing features by leveraging global features from silhouettes, while the PCM aligns the dynamics of human parts between silhouette and parsing features using the high information entropy in parsing sequences. In addition, to effectively guide the alignment of two representations with different granularity at the part level, an elaborate-designed learnable division mechanism is proposed for the parsing features. Comprehensive experiments on two large-scale gait datasets not only show the superior performance of XGait with the Rank-1 accuracy of 80.5% on Gait3D and 88.3% CCPG but also reflect the robustness of the learned features even under challenging conditions like occlusions and cloth changes.