pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Large-scale Evaluation of Pretraining Paradigms for the Detection of Defects in Electroluminescence Solar Cell Images
Authors: David Torpey, Lawrence Pratt, Richard Klein
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Defect Detection, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Pretraining has been shown to improve performance in many domains, including semantic segmentation, especially in domains with limited labelled data. In this work, we perform a large-scale evaluation and benchmarking of various pretraining methods for Solar Cell Defect Detection (SCDD) in electroluminescence images, a field with limited labelled datasets. We cover supervised training with semantic segmentation, semi-supervised learning, and two self-supervised techniques. We also experiment with both in-distribution and out-of-distribution (OOD) pretraining and observe how this affects downstream performance. The results suggest that supervised training on a large OOD dataset (COCO), self-supervised pretraining on a large OOD dataset (ImageNet), and semi-supervised pretraining (CCT) all yield statistically equivalent performance for mean Intersection over Union (mIoU). We achieve a new state-of-the-art for SCDD and demonstrate that certain pretraining schemes result in superior performance on underrepresented classes. Additionally, we provide a large-scale unlabelled EL image dataset of $22000$ images, and a $642$-image labelled semantic segmentation EL dataset, for further research in developing self- and semi-supervised training techniques in this domain.
PLReMix: Combating Noisy Labels with Pseudo-Label Relaxed Contrastive Representation Learning
Authors: Xiaoyu Liu, Beitong Zhou, Zuogong Yue, Cheng Cheng
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Learning with noisy labels, Pseudo Label, Representation Learning

Recently, the usage of Contrastive Representation Learning (CRL) as a pre-training technique improves the performance of learning with noisy labels (LNL) methods. However, instead of pre-training, when trivially combining CRL loss with LNL methods as an end-to-end framework, the empirical experiments show severe degeneration of the performance. We verify through experiments that this issue is caused by optimization conflicts of losses and propose an end-to-end \textbf{PLReMix} framework by introducing a Pseudo-Label Relaxed (PLR) contrastive loss. This PLR loss constructs a reliable negative set of each sample by filtering out its inappropriate negative pairs, alleviating the loss conflicts by trivially combining these losses. The proposed PLR loss is pluggable and we have integrated it into other LNL methods, observing their improved performance. Furthermore, a two-dimensional Gaussian Mixture Model is adopted to distinguish clean and noisy samples by leveraging semantic information and model outputs simultaneously. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/lxysl/PLReMix}.
Structure-Guided Adversarial Training of Diffusion Models
Authors: Ling Yang, Haotian Qian, Zhilong Zhang, Jingwei Liu, Bin Cui
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Denoising, Image Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated exceptional efficacy in various generative applications. While existing models focus on minimizing a weighted sum of denoising score matching losses for data distribution modeling, their training primarily emphasizes instance-level optimization, overlooking valuable structural information within each mini-batch, indicative of pair-wise relationships among samples. To address this limitation, we introduce Structure-guided Adversarial training of Diffusion Models (SADM). In this pioneering approach, we compel the model to learn manifold structures between samples in each training batch. To ensure the model captures authentic manifold structures in the data distribution, we advocate adversarial training of the diffusion generator against a novel structure discriminator in a minimax game, distinguishing real manifold structures from the generated ones. SADM substantially improves existing diffusion transformers (DiT) and outperforms existing methods in image generation and cross-domain fine-tuning tasks across 12 datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art FID of 1.58 and 2.11 on ImageNet for class-conditional image generation at resolutions of 256x256 and 512x512, respectively.
An Empirical Study of the Generalization Ability of Lidar 3D Object Detectors to Unseen Domains
Authors: George Eskandar, Chongzhe Zhang, Abhishek Kaushik, Karim Guirguis, Mohamed Sayed, Bin Yang
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Domain Adaptation

3D Object Detectors (3D-OD) are crucial for understanding the environment in many robotic tasks, especially autonomous driving. Including 3D information via Lidar sensors improves accuracy greatly. However, such detectors perform poorly on domains they were not trained on, i.e. different locations, sensors, weather, etc., limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications. There exist methods to adapt 3D-ODs to these domains; however, these methods treat 3D-ODs as a black box, neglecting underlying architectural decisions and source-domain training strategies. Instead, we dive deep into the details of 3D-ODs, focusing our efforts on fundamental factors that influence robustness prior to domain adaptation. We systematically investigate four design choices (and the interplay between them) often overlooked in 3D-OD robustness and domain adaptation: architecture, voxel encoding, data augmentations, and anchor strategies. We assess their impact on the robustness of nine state-of-the-art 3D-ODs across six benchmarks encompassing three types of domain gaps - sensor type, weather, and location. Our main findings are: (1) transformer backbones with local point features are more robust than 3D CNNs, (2) test-time anchor size adjustment is crucial for adaptation across geographical locations, significantly boosting scores without retraining, (3) source-domain augmentations allow the model to generalize to low-resolution sensors, and (4) surprisingly, robustness to bad weather is improved when training directly on more clean weather data than on training with bad weather data. We outline our main conclusions and findings to provide practical guidance on developing more robust 3D-ODs.
PHNet: Patch-based Normalization for Portrait Harmonization
Authors: Karen Efremyan, Elizaveta Petrova, Evgeny Kaskov, Alexander Kapitanov
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Harmonization

A common problem for composite images is the incompatibility of their foreground and background components. Image harmonization aims to solve this problem, making the whole image look more authentic and coherent. Most existing solutions predict lookup tables (LUTs) or reconstruct images, utilizing various attributes of composite images. Recent approaches have primarily focused on employing global transformations like normalization and color curve rendering to achieve visual consistency, and they often overlook the importance of local visual coherence. We present a patch-based harmonization network consisting of novel Patch-based normalization (PN) blocks and a feature extractor based on statistical color transfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate the network's high generalization capability for different domains. Our network achieves state-of-the-art results on the iHarmony4 dataset. Also, we created a new human portrait harmonization dataset based on FFHQ and checked the proposed method to show the generalization ability by achieving the best metrics on it. The benchmark experiments confirm that the suggested patch-based normalization block and feature extractor effectively improve the network's capability to harmonize portraits. Our code and model baselines are publicly available.
Scribble Hides Class: Promoting Scribble-Based Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation with Its Class Label
Authors: Xinliang Zhang, Lei Zhu, Hangzhou He, Lujia Jin, Yanye Lu
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Scribble-based weakly-supervised semantic segmentation using sparse scribble supervision is gaining traction as it reduces annotation costs when compared to fully annotated alternatives. Existing methods primarily generate pseudo-labels by diffusing labeled pixels to unlabeled ones with local cues for supervision. However, this diffusion process fails to exploit global semantics and class-specific cues, which are important for semantic segmentation. In this study, we propose a class-driven scribble promotion network, which utilizes both scribble annotations and pseudo-labels informed by image-level classes and global semantics for supervision. Directly adopting pseudo-labels might misguide the segmentation model, thus we design a localization rectification module to correct foreground representations in the feature space. To further combine the advantages of both supervisions, we also introduce a distance entropy loss for uncertainty reduction, which adapts per-pixel confidence weights according to the reliable region determined by the scribble and pseudo-label's boundary. Experiments on the ScribbleSup dataset with different qualities of scribble annotations outperform all the previous methods, demonstrating the superiority and robustness of our method.The code is available at https://github.com/Zxl19990529/Class-driven-Scribble-Promotion-Network.
Adapting Learned Image Codecs to Screen Content via Adjustable Transformations
Authors: H. Burak Dogaroglu, A. Burakhan Koyuncu, Atanas Boev, Elena Alshina, Eckehard Steinbach
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00

As learned image codecs (LICs) become more prevalent, their low coding efficiency for out-of-distribution data becomes a bottleneck for some applications. To improve the performance of LICs for screen content (SC) images without breaking backwards compatibility, we propose to introduce parameterized and invertible linear transformations into the coding pipeline without changing the underlying baseline codec's operation flow. We design two neural networks to act as prefilters and postfilters in our setup to increase the coding efficiency and help with the recovery from coding artifacts. Our end-to-end trained solution achieves up to 10% bitrate savings on SC compression compared to the baseline LICs while introducing only 1% extra parameters.
Multimodal Learned Sparse Retrieval with Probabilistic Expansion Control
Authors: Thong Nguyen, Mariya Hendriksen, Andrew Yates, Maarten de Rijke
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Text Retrieval

Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) is a family of neural methods that encode queries and documents into sparse lexical vectors that can be indexed and retrieved efficiently with an inverted index. We explore the application of LSR to the multi-modal domain, with a focus on text-image retrieval. While LSR has seen success in text retrieval, its application in multimodal retrieval remains underexplored. Current approaches like LexLIP and STAIR require complex multi-step training on massive datasets. Our proposed approach efficiently transforms dense vectors from a frozen dense model into sparse lexical vectors. We address issues of high dimension co-activation and semantic deviation through a new training algorithm, using Bernoulli random variables to control query expansion. Experiments with two dense models (BLIP, ALBEF) and two datasets (MSCOCO, Flickr30k) show that our proposed algorithm effectively reduces co-activation and semantic deviation. Our best-performing sparsified model outperforms state-of-the-art text-image LSR models with a shorter training time and lower GPU memory requirements. Our approach offers an effective solution for training LSR retrieval models in multimodal settings. Our code and model checkpoints are available at github.com/thongnt99/lsr-multimodal
Black-box Adversarial Attacks Against Image Quality Assessment Models
Authors: Yu Ran, Ao-Xiang Zhang, Mingjie Li, Weixuan Tang, Yuan-Gen Wang
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Quality Assessment, No-Reference Image Quality Assessment, NR-IQA

The goal of No-Reference Image Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) is to predict the perceptual quality of an image in line with its subjective evaluation. To put the NR-IQA models into practice, it is essential to study their potential loopholes for model refinement. This paper makes the first attempt to explore the black-box adversarial attacks on NR-IQA models. Specifically, we first formulate the attack problem as maximizing the deviation between the estimated quality scores of original and perturbed images, while restricting the perturbed image distortions for visual quality preservation. Under such formulation, we then design a Bi-directional loss function to mislead the estimated quality scores of adversarial examples towards an opposite direction with maximum deviation. On this basis, we finally develop an efficient and effective black-box attack method against NR-IQA models. Extensive experiments reveal that all the evaluated NR-IQA models are vulnerable to the proposed attack method. And the generated perturbations are not transferable, enabling them to serve the investigation of specialities of disparate IQA models.
Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey
Authors: Yi Huang, Jiancheng Huang, Yifan Liu, Mingfu Yan, Jiaxi Lv, Jianzhuang Liu, Wei Xiong, He Zhang, Shifeng Chen, Liangliang Cao
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Image Inpainting, model, Survey, text-guided-image-editing

Denoising diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool for various image generation and editing tasks, facilitating the synthesis of visual content in an unconditional or input-conditional manner. The core idea behind them is learning to reverse the process of gradually adding noise to images, allowing them to generate high-quality samples from a complex distribution. In this survey, we provide an exhaustive overview of existing methods using diffusion models for image editing, covering both theoretical and practical aspects in the field. We delve into a thorough analysis and categorization of these works from multiple perspectives, including learning strategies, user-input conditions, and the array of specific editing tasks that can be accomplished. In addition, we pay special attention to image inpainting and outpainting, and explore both earlier traditional context-driven and current multimodal conditional methods, offering a comprehensive analysis of their methodologies. To further evaluate the performance of text-guided image editing algorithms, we propose a systematic benchmark, EditEval, featuring an innovative metric, LMM Score. Finally, we address current limitations and envision some potential directions for future research. The accompanying repository is released at https://github.com/SiatMMLab/Awesome-Diffusion-Model-Based-Image-Editing-Methods.
AVS-Net: Point Sampling with Adaptive Voxel Size for 3D Scene Understanding
Authors: Hongcheng Yang, Dingkang Liang, Dingyuan Zhang, Zhe Liu, Zhikang Zou, Xingyu Jiang, Yingying Zhu
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Part Segmentation, 3D Semantic Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

The recent advancements in point cloud learning have enabled intelligent vehicles and robots to comprehend 3D environments better. However, processing large-scale 3D scenes remains a challenging problem, such that efficient downsampling methods play a crucial role in point cloud learning. Existing downsampling methods either require a huge computational burden or sacrifice fine-grained geometric information. For such purpose, this paper presents an advanced sampler that achieves both high accuracy and efficiency. The proposed method utilizes voxel centroid sampling as a foundation but effectively addresses the challenges regarding voxel size determination and the preservation of critical geometric cues. Specifically, we propose a Voxel Adaptation Module that adaptively adjusts voxel sizes with the reference of point-based downsampling ratio. This ensures that the sampling results exhibit a favorable distribution for comprehending various 3D objects or scenes. Meanwhile, we introduce a network compatible with arbitrary voxel sizes for sampling and feature extraction while maintaining high efficiency. The proposed approach is demonstrated with 3D object detection and 3D semantic segmentation. Compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, our approach achieves better accuracy on outdoor and indoor large-scale datasets, e.g. Waymo and ScanNet, with promising efficiency.
Pretrained Visual Uncertainties
Authors: Michael Kirchhof, Mark Collier, Seong Joon Oh, Enkelejda Kasneci
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Accurate uncertainty estimation is vital to trustworthy machine learning, yet uncertainties typically have to be learned for each task anew. This work introduces the first pretrained uncertainty modules for vision models. Similar to standard pretraining this enables the zero-shot transfer of uncertainties learned on a large pretraining dataset to specialized downstream datasets. We enable our large-scale pretraining on ImageNet-21k by solving a gradient conflict in previous uncertainty modules and accelerating the training by up to 180x. We find that the pretrained uncertainties generalize to unseen datasets. In scrutinizing the learned uncertainties, we find that they capture aleatoric uncertainty, disentangled from epistemic components. We demonstrate that this enables safe retrieval and uncertainty-aware dataset visualization. To encourage applications to further problems and domains, we release all pretrained checkpoints and code under https://github.com/mkirchhof/url .
Robust Zero-Shot Crowd Counting and Localization With Adaptive Resolution SAM
Authors: Jia Wan, Qiangqiang Wu, Wei Lin, Antoni B. Chan
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting

The existing crowd counting models require extensive training data, which is time-consuming to annotate. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple yet effective crowd counting method by utilizing the Segment-Everything-Everywhere Model (SEEM), an adaptation of the Segmentation Anything Model (SAM), to generate pseudo-labels for training crowd counting models. However, our initial investigation reveals that SEEM's performance in dense crowd scenes is limited, primarily due to the omission of many persons in high-density areas. To overcome this limitation, we propose an adaptive resolution SEEM to handle the scale variations, occlusions, and overlapping of people within crowd scenes. Alongside this, we introduce a robust localization method, based on Gaussian Mixture Models, for predicting the head positions in the predicted people masks. Given the mask and point pseudo-labels, we propose a robust loss function, which is designed to exclude uncertain regions based on SEEM's predictions, thereby enhancing the training process of the counting networks. Finally, we propose an iterative method for generating pseudo-labels. This method aims at improving the quality of the segmentation masks by identifying more tiny persons in high-density regions, which are often missed in the first pseudo-labeling stage. Overall, our proposed method achieves the best unsupervised performance in crowd counting, while also being comparable results to some supervised methods. This makes it a highly effective and versatile tool for crowd counting, especially in situations where labeled data is not available.
Interactive Multi-Head Self-Attention with Linear Complexity
Authors: Hankyul Kang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jongbin Ryu
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00

We propose an efficient interactive method for multi-head self-attention via decomposition. For existing methods using multi-head self-attention, the attention operation of each head is computed independently. However, we show that the interactions between cross-heads of the attention matrix enhance the information flow of the attention operation. Considering that the attention matrix of each head can be seen as a feature of networks, it is beneficial to establish connectivity between them to capture interactions better. However, a straightforward approach to capture the interactions between the cross-heads is computationally prohibitive as the complexity grows substantially with the high dimension of an attention matrix. In this work, we propose an effective method to decompose the attention operation into query- and key-less components. This will result in a more manageable size for the attention matrix, specifically for the cross-head interactions. Expensive experimental results show that the proposed cross-head interaction approach performs favorably against existing efficient attention methods and state-of-the-art backbone models.
FedLPPA: Learning Personalized Prompt and Aggregation for Federated Weakly-supervised Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Li Lin, Yixiang Liu, Jiewei Wu, Pujin Cheng, Zhiyuan Cai, Kenneth K. Y. Wong, Xiaoying Tang
Date: 2024-02-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Federated Learning, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning

Federated learning (FL) effectively mitigates the data silo challenge brought about by policies and privacy concerns, implicitly harnessing more data for deep model training. However, traditional centralized FL models grapple with diverse multi-center data, especially in the face of significant data heterogeneity, notably in medical contexts. In the realm of medical image segmentation, the growing imperative to curtail annotation costs has amplified the importance of weakly-supervised techniques which utilize sparse annotations such as points, scribbles, etc. A pragmatic FL paradigm shall accommodate diverse annotation formats across different sites, which research topic remains under-investigated. In such context, we propose a novel personalized FL framework with learnable prompt and aggregation (FedLPPA) to uniformly leverage heterogeneous weak supervision for medical image segmentation. In FedLPPA, a learnable universal knowledge prompt is maintained, complemented by multiple learnable personalized data distribution prompts and prompts representing the supervision sparsity. Integrated with sample features through a dual-attention mechanism, those prompts empower each local task decoder to adeptly adjust to both the local distribution and the supervision form. Concurrently, a dual-decoder strategy, predicated on prompt similarity, is introduced for enhancing the generation of pseudo-labels in weakly-supervised learning, alleviating overfitting and noise accumulation inherent to local data, while an adaptable aggregation method is employed to customize the task decoder on a parameter-wise basis. Extensive experiments on four distinct medical image segmentation tasks involving different modalities underscore the superiority of FedLPPA, with its efficacy closely parallels that of fully supervised centralized training. Our code and data will be available.