pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-supervised 3D Patient Modeling with Multi-modal Attentive Fusion
Authors: Meng Zheng, Benjamin Planche, Xuan Gong, Fan Yang, Terrence Chen, Ziyan Wu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection

3D patient body modeling is critical to the success of automated patient positioning for smart medical scanning and operating rooms. Existing CNN-based end-to-end patient modeling solutions typically require a) customized network designs demanding large amount of relevant training data, covering extensive realistic clinical scenarios (e.g., patient covered by sheets), which leads to suboptimal generalizability in practical deployment, b) expensive 3D human model annotations, i.e., requiring huge amount of manual effort, resulting in systems that scale poorly. To address these issues, we propose a generic modularized 3D patient modeling method consists of (a) a multi-modal keypoint detection module with attentive fusion for 2D patient joint localization, to learn complementary cross-modality patient body information, leading to improved keypoint localization robustness and generalizability in a wide variety of imaging (e.g., CT, MRI etc.) and clinical scenarios (e.g., heavy occlusions); and (b) a self-supervised 3D mesh regression module which does not require expensive 3D mesh parameter annotations to train, bringing immediate cost benefits for clinical deployment. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by extensive patient positioning experiments on both public and clinical data. Our evaluation results achieve superior patient positioning performance across various imaging modalities in real clinical scenarios.
Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis
Authors: Patrick Esser, Sumith Kulal, Andreas Blattmann, Rahim Entezari, Jonas Müller, Harry Saini, Yam Levi, Dominik Lorenz, Axel Sauer, Frederic Boesel, Dustin Podell, Tim Dockhorn, Zion English, Kyle Lacey, Alex Goodwin, Yannik Marek, Robin Rombach
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Reading Comprehension, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models create data from noise by inverting the forward paths of data towards noise and have emerged as a powerful generative modeling technique for high-dimensional, perceptual data such as images and videos. Rectified flow is a recent generative model formulation that connects data and noise in a straight line. Despite its better theoretical properties and conceptual simplicity, it is not yet decisively established as standard practice. In this work, we improve existing noise sampling techniques for training rectified flow models by biasing them towards perceptually relevant scales. Through a large-scale study, we demonstrate the superior performance of this approach compared to established diffusion formulations for high-resolution text-to-image synthesis. Additionally, we present a novel transformer-based architecture for text-to-image generation that uses separate weights for the two modalities and enables a bidirectional flow of information between image and text tokens, improving text comprehension, typography, and human preference ratings. We demonstrate that this architecture follows predictable scaling trends and correlates lower validation loss to improved text-to-image synthesis as measured by various metrics and human evaluations. Our largest models outperform state-of-the-art models, and we will make our experimental data, code, and model weights publicly available.
Triple-CFN: Restructuring Concept Spaces for Enhancing Abstract Reasoning Process
Authors: Ruizhuo Song, Beiming Yuan
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Abstract reasoning poses significant challenges to artificial intelligence algorithms, demanding a cognitive ability beyond that required for perceptual tasks. In this study, we introduce the Cross-Feature Network (CFN), a novel framework designed to separately extract concepts and features from images. This framework utilizes the responses of features to concepts as representations for reasoning, particularly in addressing the Bongard-Logo problem. By integrating an Expectation-Maximization process between the extracted concepts and features within the CFN, we have achieved notable results, albeit with certain limitations. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Triple-CFN, an efficient model that maximizes feature extraction from images and demonstrates effectiveness in both the Bongard-Logo and Raven's Progressive Matrices (RPM) problems. Furthermore, we introduce Meta Triple-CFN, an advanced version of Triple-CFN, which explicitly constructs a concept space tailored for RPM problems. This ensures high accuracy of reasoning and interpretability of the concepts involved. Overall, this work explores innovative network designs for abstract reasoning, thereby advancing the frontiers of machine intelligence.
NPHardEval4V: A Dynamic Reasoning Benchmark of Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Lizhou Fan, Wenyue Hua, Xiang Li, Kaijie Zhu, Mingyu Jin, Lingyao Li, Haoyang Ling, Jinkui Chi, Jindong Wang, Xin Ma, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Understanding the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is an important area of research. In this study, we introduce a dynamic benchmark, NPHardEval4V, aimed at addressing the existing gaps in evaluating the pure reasoning abilities of MLLMs. Our benchmark aims to provide a venue to disentangle the effect of various factors such as image recognition and instruction following, from the overall performance of the models, allowing us to focus solely on evaluating their reasoning abilities. It is built by converting textual description of questions from NPHardEval to image representations. Our findings reveal significant discrepancies in reasoning abilities across different models and highlight the relatively weak performance of MLLMs compared to LLMs in terms of reasoning. We also investigate the impact of different prompting styles, including visual, text, and combined visual and text prompts, on the reasoning abilities of MLLMs, demonstrating the different impacts of multimodal inputs in model performance. Unlike traditional benchmarks, which focus primarily on static evaluations, our benchmark will be updated monthly to prevent overfitting and ensure a more authentic and fine-grained evaluation of the models. We believe that this benchmark can aid in understanding and guide the further development of reasoning abilities in MLLMs. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/lizhouf/NPHardEval4V
Solving the Clustering Reasoning Problems by Modeling a Deep-Learning-Based Probabilistic Model
Authors: Ruizhuo Song, Beiming Yuan
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Visual abstract reasoning problems pose significant challenges to the perception and cognition abilities of artificial intelligence algorithms, demanding deeper pattern recognition and inductive reasoning beyond mere identification of explicit image features. Research advancements in this field often provide insights and technical support for other similar domains. In this study, we introduce PMoC, a deep-learning-based probabilistic model, achieving high reasoning accuracy in the Bongard-Logo, which stands as one of the most challenging clustering reasoning tasks. PMoC is a novel approach for constructing probabilistic models based on deep learning, which is distinctly different from previous techniques. PMoC revitalizes the probabilistic approach, which has been relatively weak in visual abstract reasoning. As a bonus, we also designed Pose-Transformer for complex visual abstract reasoning tasks. Inspired by capsule networks, it focuses on positional relationships in image data, boosting accuracy when combined with PMoC. Our Pose-Transformer effectively addresses reasoning difficulties associated with changes in the position of entities, outperforming previous models on RAVEN dataset, and the PGM dataset. RAVEN and PGM represent two significant progressive pattern reasoning problems. Finally, considering the deployment difficulties of Pose-Transformer, we introduced Straw-Pose-Transformer, a lightweight version. This study contributes to enhancing the capabilities of artificial intelligence in abstract reasoning, cognitive pattern, and probabilistic modeling of complex systems.
3DGStream: On-the-Fly Training of 3D Gaussians for Efficient Streaming of Photo-Realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos
Authors: Jiakai Sun, Han Jiao, Guangyuan Li, Zhanjie Zhang, Lei Zhao, Wei Xing
Date: 2024-03-03 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3DGS, Neural Rendering

Constructing photo-realistic Free-Viewpoint Videos (FVVs) of dynamic scenes from multi-view videos remains a challenging endeavor. Despite the remarkable advancements achieved by current neural rendering techniques, these methods generally require complete video sequences for offline training and are not capable of real-time rendering. To address these constraints, we introduce 3DGStream, a method designed for efficient FVV streaming of real-world dynamic scenes. Our method achieves fast on-the-fly per-frame reconstruction within 12 seconds and real-time rendering at 200 FPS. Specifically, we utilize 3D Gaussians (3DGs) to represent the scene. Instead of the na\"ive approach of directly optimizing 3DGs per-frame, we employ a compact Neural Transformation Cache (NTC) to model the translations and rotations of 3DGs, markedly reducing the training time and storage required for each FVV frame. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive 3DG addition strategy to handle emerging objects in dynamic scenes. Experiments demonstrate that 3DGStream achieves competitive performance in terms of rendering speed, image quality, training time, and model storage when compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Design2Code: Benchmarking Multimodal Code Generation for Automated Front-End Engineering
Authors: Chenglei Si, Yanzhe Zhang, Ryan Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Ruibo Liu, Diyi Yang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Code Generation

Generative AI has made rapid advancements in recent years, achieving unprecedented capabilities in multimodal understanding and code generation. This can enable a new paradigm of front-end development in which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) directly convert visual designs into code implementations. In this work, we construct Design2Code - the first real-world benchmark for this task. Specifically, we manually curate 484 diverse real-world webpages as test cases and develop a set of automatic evaluation metrics to assess how well current multimodal LLMs can generate the code implementations that directly render into the given reference webpages, given the screenshots as input. We also complement automatic metrics with comprehensive human evaluations to validate the performance ranking. To rigorously benchmark MLLMs, we test various multimodal prompting methods on frontier models such as GPT-4o, GPT-4V, Gemini, and Claude. Our fine-grained break-down metrics indicate that models mostly lag in recalling visual elements from the input webpages and generating correct layout designs.
PalmProbNet: A Probabilistic Approach to Understanding Palm Distributions in Ecuadorian Tropical Forest via Transfer Learning
Authors: Kangning Cui, Zishan Shao, Gregory Larsen, Victor Pauca, Sarra Alqahtani, David Segurado, João Pinheiro, Manqi Wang, David Lutz, Robert Plemmons, Miles Silman
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Palms play an outsized role in tropical forests and are important resources for humans and wildlife. A central question in tropical ecosystems is understanding palm distribution and abundance. However, accurately identifying and localizing palms in geospatial imagery presents significant challenges due to dense vegetation, overlapping canopies, and variable lighting conditions in mixed-forest landscapes. Addressing this, we introduce PalmProbNet, a probabilistic approach utilizing transfer learning to analyze high-resolution UAV-derived orthomosaic imagery, enabling the detection of palm trees within the dense canopy of the Ecuadorian Rainforest. This approach represents a substantial advancement in automated palm detection, effectively pinpointing palm presence and locality in mixed tropical rainforests. Our process begins by generating an orthomosaic image from UAV images, from which we extract and label palm and non-palm image patches in two distinct sizes. These patches are then used to train models with an identical architecture, consisting of an unaltered pre-trained ResNet-18 and a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with specifically trained parameters. Subsequently, PalmProbNet employs a sliding window technique on the landscape orthomosaic, using both small and large window sizes to generate a probability heatmap. This heatmap effectively visualizes the distribution of palms, showcasing the scalability and adaptability of our approach in various forest densities. Despite the challenging terrain, our method demonstrated remarkable performance, achieving an accuracy of 97.32% and a Cohen's kappa of 94.59% in testing.
Dual Mean-Teacher: An Unbiased Semi-Supervised Framework for Audio-Visual Source Localization
Authors: Yuxin Guo, Shijie Ma, Hu Su, Zhiqing Wang, Yuhao Zhao, Wei Zou, Siyang Sun, Yun Zheng
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Audio-Visual Source Localization (AVSL) aims to locate sounding objects within video frames given the paired audio clips. Existing methods predominantly rely on self-supervised contrastive learning of audio-visual correspondence. Without any bounding-box annotations, they struggle to achieve precise localization, especially for small objects, and suffer from blurry boundaries and false positives. Moreover, the naive semi-supervised method is poor in fully leveraging the information of abundant unlabeled data. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised learning framework for AVSL, namely Dual Mean-Teacher (DMT), comprising two teacher-student structures to circumvent the confirmation bias issue. Specifically, two teachers, pre-trained on limited labeled data, are employed to filter out noisy samples via the consensus between their predictions, and then generate high-quality pseudo-labels by intersecting their confidence maps. The sufficient utilization of both labeled and unlabeled data and the proposed unbiased framework enable DMT to outperform current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin, with CIoU of 90.4% and 48.8% on Flickr-SoundNet and VGG-Sound Source, obtaining 8.9%, 9.6% and 4.6%, 6.4% improvements over self- and semi-supervised methods respectively, given only 3% positional-annotations. We also extend our framework to some existing AVSL methods and consistently boost their performance.
NRDF: Neural Riemannian Distance Fields for Learning Articulated Pose Priors
Authors: Yannan He, Garvita Tiwari, Tolga Birdal, Jan Eric Lenssen, Gerard Pons-Moll
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Pose Estimation

Faithfully modeling the space of articulations is a crucial task that allows recovery and generation of realistic poses, and remains a notorious challenge. To this end, we introduce Neural Riemannian Distance Fields (NRDFs), data-driven priors modeling the space of plausible articulations, represented as the zero-level-set of a neural field in a high-dimensional product-quaternion space. To train NRDFs only on positive examples, we introduce a new sampling algorithm, ensuring that the geodesic distances follow a desired distribution, yielding a principled distance field learning paradigm. We then devise a projection algorithm to map any random pose onto the level-set by an adaptive-step Riemannian optimizer, adhering to the product manifold of joint rotations at all times. NRDFs can compute the Riemannian gradient via backpropagation and by mathematical analogy, are related to Riemannian flow matching, a recent generative model. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of NRDF against other pose priors in various downstream tasks, i.e., pose generation, image-based pose estimation, and solving inverse kinematics, highlighting NRDF's superior performance. Besides humans, NRDF's versatility extends to hand and animal poses, as it can effectively represent any articulation.
Motion-Corrected Moving Average: Including Post-Hoc Temporal Information for Improved Video Segmentation
Authors: Robert Mendel, Tobias Rueckert, Dirk Wilhelm, Daniel Rueckert, Christoph Palm
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Real-time computational speed and a high degree of precision are requirements for computer-assisted interventions. Applying a segmentation network to a medical video processing task can introduce significant inter-frame prediction noise. Existing approaches can reduce inconsistencies by including temporal information but often impose requirements on the architecture or dataset. This paper proposes a method to include temporal information in any segmentation model and, thus, a technique to improve video segmentation performance without alterations during training or additional labeling. With Motion-Corrected Moving Average, we refine the exponential moving average between the current and previous predictions. Using optical flow to estimate the movement between consecutive frames, we can shift the prior term in the moving-average calculation to align with the geometry of the current frame. The optical flow calculation does not require the output of the model and can therefore be performed in parallel, leading to no significant runtime penalty for our approach. We evaluate our approach on two publicly available segmentation datasets and two proprietary endoscopic datasets and show improvements over a baseline approach.
Cross Pseudo-Labeling for Semi-Supervised Audio-Visual Source Localization
Authors: Yuxin Guo, Shijie Ma, Yuhao Zhao, Hu Su, Wei Zou
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Pseudo Label

Audio-Visual Source Localization (AVSL) is the task of identifying specific sounding objects in the scene given audio cues. In our work, we focus on semi-supervised AVSL with pseudo-labeling. To address the issues with vanilla hard pseudo-labels including bias accumulation, noise sensitivity, and instability, we propose a novel method named Cross Pseudo-Labeling (XPL), wherein two models learn from each other with the cross-refine mechanism to avoid bias accumulation. We equip XPL with two effective components. Firstly, the soft pseudo-labels with sharpening and pseudo-label exponential moving average mechanisms enable models to achieve gradual self-improvement and ensure stable training. Secondly, the curriculum data selection module adaptively selects pseudo-labels with high quality during training to mitigate potential bias. Experimental results demonstrate that XPL significantly outperforms existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance while effectively mitigating confirmation bias and ensuring training stability.
MiKASA: Multi-Key-Anchor & Scene-Aware Transformer for 3D Visual Grounding
Authors: Chun-Peng Chang, Shaoxiang Wang, Alain Pagani, Didier Stricker
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D visual grounding, Decision Making, Object, Object Recognition, Visual Grounding

3D visual grounding involves matching natural language descriptions with their corresponding objects in 3D spaces. Existing methods often face challenges with accuracy in object recognition and struggle in interpreting complex linguistic queries, particularly with descriptions that involve multiple anchors or are view-dependent. In response, we present the MiKASA (Multi-Key-Anchor Scene-Aware) Transformer. Our novel end-to-end trained model integrates a self-attention-based scene-aware object encoder and an original multi-key-anchor technique, enhancing object recognition accuracy and the understanding of spatial relationships. Furthermore, MiKASA improves the explainability of decision-making, facilitating error diagnosis. Our model achieves the highest overall accuracy in the Referit3D challenge for both the Sr3D and Nr3D datasets, particularly excelling by a large margin in categories that require viewpoint-dependent descriptions.
CrackNex: a Few-shot Low-light Crack Segmentation Model Based on Retinex Theory for UAV Inspections
Authors: Zhen Yao, Jiawei Xu, Shuhang Hou, Mooi Choo Chuah
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Crack Segmentation, Segmentation

Routine visual inspections of concrete structures are imperative for upholding the safety and integrity of critical infrastructure. Such visual inspections sometimes happen under low-light conditions, e.g., checking for bridge health. Crack segmentation under such conditions is challenging due to the poor contrast between cracks and their surroundings. However, most deep learning methods are designed for well-illuminated crack images and hence their performance drops dramatically in low-light scenes. In addition, conventional approaches require many annotated low-light crack images which is time-consuming. In this paper, we address these challenges by proposing CrackNex, a framework that utilizes reflectance information based on Retinex Theory to help the model learn a unified illumination-invariant representation. Furthermore, we utilize few-shot segmentation to solve the inefficient training data problem. In CrackNex, both a support prototype and a reflectance prototype are extracted from the support set. Then, a prototype fusion module is designed to integrate the features from both prototypes. CrackNex outperforms the SOTA methods on multiple datasets. Additionally, we present the first benchmark dataset, LCSD, for low-light crack segmentation. LCSD consists of 102 well-illuminated crack images and 41 low-light crack images. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/zy1296/CrackNex.
A Backpack Full of Skills: Egocentric Video Understanding with Diverse Task Perspectives
Authors: Simone Alberto Peirone, Francesca Pistilli, Antonio Alliegro, Giuseppe Averta
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Video Understanding

Human comprehension of a video stream is naturally broad: in a few instants, we are able to understand what is happening, the relevance and relationship of objects, and forecast what will follow in the near future, everything all at once. We believe that - to effectively transfer such an holistic perception to intelligent machines - an important role is played by learning to correlate concepts and to abstract knowledge coming from different tasks, to synergistically exploit them when learning novel skills. To accomplish this, we seek for a unified approach to video understanding which combines shared temporal modelling of human actions with minimal overhead, to support multiple downstream tasks and enable cooperation when learning novel skills. We then propose EgoPack, a solution that creates a collection of task perspectives that can be carried across downstream tasks and used as a potential source of additional insights, as a backpack of skills that a robot can carry around and use when needed. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach on four Ego4D benchmarks, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods.