pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Visible-Thermal Tiny Object Detection: A Benchmark Dataset and Baselines
Authors: Xinyi Ying, Chao Xiao, Ruojing Li, Xu He, Boyang Li, Zhaoxu Li, Yingqian Wang, Mingyuan Hu, Qingyu Xu, Zaiping Lin, Miao Li, Shilin Zhou, Wei An, Weidong Sheng, Li Liu
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

Small object detection (SOD) has been a longstanding yet challenging task for decades, with numerous datasets and algorithms being developed. However, they mainly focus on either visible or thermal modality, while visible-thermal (RGBT) bimodality is rarely explored. Although some RGBT datasets have been developed recently, the insufficient quantity, limited category, misaligned images and large target size cannot provide an impartial benchmark to evaluate multi-category visible-thermal small object detection (RGBT SOD) algorithms. In this paper, we build the first large-scale benchmark with high diversity for RGBT SOD (namely RGBT-Tiny), including 115 paired sequences, 93K frames and 1.2M manual annotations. RGBT-Tiny contains abundant targets (7 categories) and high-diversity scenes (8 types that cover different illumination and density variations). Note that, over 81% of targets are smaller than 16x16, and we provide paired bounding box annotations with tracking ID to offer an extremely challenging benchmark with wide-range applications, such as RGBT fusion, detection and tracking. In addition, we propose a scale adaptive fitness (SAFit) measure that exhibits high robustness on both small and large targets. The proposed SAFit can provide reasonable performance evaluation and promote detection performance. Based on the proposed RGBT-Tiny dataset and SAFit measure, extensive evaluations have been conducted, including 23 recent state-of-the-art algorithms that cover four different types (i.e., visible generic detection, visible SOD, thermal SOD and RGBT object detection). Project is available at https://github.com/XinyiYing24/RGBT-Tiny.
Self-supervised Multi-actor Social Activity Understanding in Streaming Videos
Authors: Shubham Trehan, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Activity Recognition, Group Activity Recognition, Relational Reasoning

This work addresses the problem of Social Activity Recognition (SAR), a critical component in real-world tasks like surveillance and assistive robotics. Unlike traditional event understanding approaches, SAR necessitates modeling individual actors' appearance and motions and contextualizing them within their social interactions. Traditional action localization methods fall short due to their single-actor, single-action assumption. Previous SAR research has relied heavily on densely annotated data, but privacy concerns limit their applicability in real-world settings. In this work, we propose a self-supervised approach based on multi-actor predictive learning for SAR in streaming videos. Using a visual-semantic graph structure, we model social interactions, enabling relational reasoning for robust performance with minimal labeled data. The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on standard group activity recognition benchmarks. Evaluation on three publicly available action localization benchmarks demonstrates its generalizability to arbitrary action localization.
Capturing Temporal Components for Time Series Classification
Authors: Venkata Ragavendra Vavilthota, Ranjith Ramanathan, Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Representation Learning, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Analyzing sequential data is crucial in many domains, particularly due to the abundance of data collected from the Internet of Things paradigm. Time series classification, the task of categorizing sequential data, has gained prominence, with machine learning approaches demonstrating remarkable performance on public benchmark datasets. However, progress has primarily been in designing architectures for learning representations from raw data at fixed (or ideal) time scales, which can fail to generalize to longer sequences. This work introduces a \textit{compositional representation learning} approach trained on statistically coherent components extracted from sequential data. Based on a multi-scale change space, an unsupervised approach is proposed to segment the sequential data into chunks with similar statistical properties. A sequence-based encoder model is trained in a multi-task setting to learn compositional representations from these temporal components for time series classification. We demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments on publicly available time series classification benchmarks. Evaluating the coherence of segmented components shows its competitive performance on the unsupervised segmentation task.
MM-GTUNets: Unified Multi-Modal Graph Deep Learning for Brain Disorders Prediction
Authors: Luhui Cai, Weiming Zeng, Hongyu Chen, Hua Zhang, Yueyang Li, Yu Feng, Hongjie Yan, Lingbin Bian, Wai Ting Siok, Nizhuan Wang
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Representation Learning

Graph deep learning (GDL) has demonstrated impressive performance in predicting population-based brain disorders (BDs) through the integration of both imaging and non-imaging data. However, the effectiveness of GDL based methods heavily depends on the quality of modeling the multi-modal population graphs and tends to degrade as the graph scale increases. Furthermore, these methods often constrain interactions between imaging and non-imaging data to node-edge interactions within the graph, overlooking complex inter-modal correlations, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To overcome these challenges, we propose MM-GTUNets, an end-to-end graph transformer based multi-modal graph deep learning (MMGDL) framework designed for brain disorders prediction at large scale. Specifically, to effectively leverage rich multi-modal information related to diseases, we introduce Modality Reward Representation Learning (MRRL) which adaptively constructs population graphs using a reward system. Additionally, we employ variational autoencoder to reconstruct latent representations of non-imaging features aligned with imaging features. Based on this, we propose Adaptive Cross-Modal Graph Learning (ACMGL), which captures critical modality-specific and modality-shared features through a unified GTUNet encoder taking advantages of Graph UNet and Graph Transformer, and feature fusion module. We validated our method on two public multi-modal datasets ABIDE and ADHD-200, demonstrating its superior performance in diagnosing BDs. Our code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/MM-GTUNets.
Video Generation with Learned Action Prior
Authors: Meenakshi Sarkar, Devansh Bhardwaj, Debasish Ghose
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Reconstruction, Variational Inference, Video Generation

Stochastic video generation is particularly challenging when the camera is mounted on a moving platform, as camera motion interacts with observed image pixels, creating complex spatio-temporal dynamics and making the problem partially observable. Existing methods typically address this by focusing on raw pixel-level image reconstruction without explicitly modelling camera motion dynamics. We propose a solution by considering camera motion or action as part of the observed image state, modelling both image and action within a multi-modal learning framework. We introduce three models: Video Generation with Learning Action Prior (VG-LeAP) treats the image-action pair as an augmented state generated from a single latent stochastic process and uses variational inference to learn the image-action latent prior; Causal-LeAP, which establishes a causal relationship between action and the observed image frame at time $t$, learning an action prior conditioned on the observed image states; and RAFI, which integrates the augmented image-action state concept into flow matching with diffusion generative processes, demonstrating that this action-conditioned image generation concept can be extended to other diffusion-based models. We emphasize the importance of multi-modal training in partially observable video generation problems through detailed empirical studies on our new video action dataset, RoAM.
Benchmarking Monocular 3D Dog Pose Estimation Using In-The-Wild Motion Capture Data
Authors: Moira Shooter, Charles Malleson, Adrian Hilton
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Animal Pose Estimation, Benchmarking, Diversity, Pose Estimation

We introduce a new benchmark analysis focusing on 3D canine pose estimation from monocular in-the-wild images. A multi-modal dataset 3DDogs-Lab was captured indoors, featuring various dog breeds trotting on a walkway. It includes data from optical marker-based mocap systems, RGBD cameras, IMUs, and a pressure mat. While providing high-quality motion data, the presence of optical markers and limited background diversity make the captured video less representative of real-world conditions. To address this, we created 3DDogs-Wild, a naturalised version of the dataset where the optical markers are in-painted and the subjects are placed in diverse environments, enhancing its utility for training RGB image-based pose detectors. We show that using the 3DDogs-Wild to train the models leads to improved performance when evaluating on in-the-wild data. Additionally, we provide a thorough analysis using various pose estimation models, revealing their respective strengths and weaknesses. We believe that our findings, coupled with the datasets provided, offer valuable insights for advancing 3D animal pose estimation.
How far are today's time-series models from real-world weather forecasting applications?
Authors: Tao Han, Song Guo, Zhenghao Chen, Wanghan Xu, Lei Bai
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting, Weather Forecasting

The development of Time-Series Forecasting (TSF) techniques is often hindered by the lack of comprehensive datasets. This is particularly problematic for time-series weather forecasting, where commonly used datasets suffer from significant limitations such as small size, limited temporal coverage, and sparse spatial distribution. These constraints severely impede the optimization and evaluation of TSF models, resulting in benchmarks that are not representative of real-world applications, such as operational weather forecasting. In this work, we introduce the WEATHER-5K dataset, a comprehensive collection of observational weather data that better reflects real-world scenarios. As a result, it enables a better training of models and a more accurate assessment of the real-world forecasting capabilities of TSF models, pushing them closer to in-situ applications. Through extensive benchmarking against operational Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, we provide researchers with a clear assessment of the gap between academic TSF models and real-world weather forecasting applications. This highlights the significant performance disparity between TSF and NWP models by analyzing performance across detailed weather variables, extreme weather event prediction, and model complexity comparison. Finally, we summarise the result into recommendations to the users and highlight potential areas required to facilitate further TSF research. The dataset and benchmark implementation are available at: https://github.com/taohan10200/WEATHER-5K.
ATAC-Net: Zoomed view works better for Anomaly Detection
Authors: Shaurya Gupta, Neil Gautam, Anurag Malyala
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

The application of deep learning in visual anomaly detection has gained widespread popularity due to its potential use in quality control and manufacturing. Current standard methods are Unsupervised, where a clean dataset is utilised to detect deviations and flag anomalies during testing. However, incorporating a few samples when the type of anomalies is known beforehand can significantly enhance performance. Thus, we propose ATAC-Net, a framework that trains to detect anomalies from a minimal set of known prior anomalies. Furthermore, we introduce attention-guided cropping, which provides a closer view of suspect regions during the training phase. Our framework is a reliable and easy-to-understand system for detecting anomalies, and we substantiate its superiority to some of the current state-of-the-art techniques in a comparable setting.
Enhanced Bank Check Security: Introducing a Novel Dataset and Transformer-Based Approach for Detection and Verification
Authors: Muhammad Saif Ullah Khan, Tahira Shehzadi, Rabeya Noor, Didier Stricker, Muhammad Zeshan Afzal
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Automated signature verification on bank checks is critical for fraud prevention and ensuring transaction authenticity. This task is challenging due to the coexistence of signatures with other textual and graphical elements on real-world documents. Verification systems must first detect the signature and then validate its authenticity, a dual challenge often overlooked by current datasets and methodologies focusing only on verification. To address this gap, we introduce a novel dataset specifically designed for signature verification on bank checks. This dataset includes a variety of signature styles embedded within typical check elements, providing a realistic testing ground for advanced detection methods. Moreover, we propose a novel approach for writer-independent signature verification using an object detection network. Our detection-based verification method treats genuine and forged signatures as distinct classes within an object detection framework, effectively handling both detection and verification. We employ a DINO-based network augmented with a dilation module to detect and verify signatures on check images simultaneously. Our approach achieves an AP of 99.2 for genuine and 99.4 for forged signatures, a significant improvement over the DINO baseline, which scored 93.1 and 89.3 for genuine and forged signatures, respectively. This improvement highlights our dilation module's effectiveness in reducing both false positives and negatives. Our results demonstrate substantial advancements in detection-based signature verification technology, offering enhanced security and efficiency in financial document processing.
Mask the Unknown: Assessing Different Strategies to Handle Weak Annotations in the MICCAI2023 Mediastinal Lymph Node Quantification Challenge
Authors: Stefan M. Fischer, Johannes Kiechle, Daniel M. Lang, Jan C. Peeken, Julia A. Schnabel
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning

Pathological lymph node delineation is crucial in cancer diagnosis, progression assessment, and treatment planning. The MICCAI 2023 Lymph Node Quantification Challenge published the first public dataset for pathological lymph node segmentation in the mediastinum. As lymph node annotations are expensive, the challenge was formed as a weakly supervised learning task, where only a subset of all lymph nodes in the training set have been annotated. For the challenge submission, multiple methods for training on these weakly supervised data were explored, including noisy label training, loss masking of unlabeled data, and an approach that integrated the TotalSegmentator toolbox as a form of pseudo labeling in order to reduce the number of unknown voxels. Furthermore, multiple public TCIA datasets were incorporated into the training to improve the performance of the deep learning model. Our submitted model achieved a Dice score of 0.628 and an average symmetric surface distance of 5.8~mm on the challenge test set. With our submitted model, we accomplished third rank in the MICCAI2023 LNQ challenge. A finding of our analysis was that the integration of all visible, including non-pathological, lymph nodes improved the overall segmentation performance on pathological lymph nodes of the test set. Furthermore, segmentation models trained only on clinically enlarged lymph nodes, as given in the challenge scenario, could not generalize to smaller pathological lymph nodes. The code and model for the challenge submission are available at \url{https://gitlab.lrz.de/compai/MediastinalLymphNodeSegmentation}.
Deblurring Neural Radiance Fields with Event-driven Bundle Adjustment
Authors: Yunshan Qi, Lin Zhu, Yifan Zhao, Nan Bao, Jia Li
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis, Representation Learning

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) achieves impressive 3D representation learning and novel view synthesis results with high-quality multi-view images as input. However, motion blur in images often occurs in low-light and high-speed motion scenes, which significantly degrades the reconstruction quality of NeRF. Previous deblurring NeRF methods struggle to estimate pose and lighting changes during the exposure time, making them unable to accurately model the motion blur. The bio-inspired event camera measuring intensity changes with high temporal resolution makes up this information deficiency. In this paper, we propose Event-driven Bundle Adjustment for Deblurring Neural Radiance Fields (EBAD-NeRF) to jointly optimize the learnable poses and NeRF parameters by leveraging the hybrid event-RGB data. An intensity-change-metric event loss and a photo-metric blur loss are introduced to strengthen the explicit modeling of camera motion blur. Experiments on both synthetic and real-captured data demonstrate that EBAD-NeRF can obtain accurate camera trajectory during the exposure time and learn a sharper 3D representations compared to prior works.
FIESTA: Fourier-Based Semantic Augmentation with Uncertainty Guidance for Enhanced Domain Generalizability in Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Kwanseok Oh, Eunjin Jeon, Da-Woon Heo, Yooseung Shin, Heung-Il Suk
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Single-Source Domain Generalization

Single-source domain generalization (SDG) in medical image segmentation (MIS) aims to generalize a model using data from only one source domain to segment data from an unseen target domain. Despite substantial advances in SDG with data augmentation, existing methods often fail to fully consider the details and uncertain areas prevalent in MIS, leading to mis-segmentation. This paper proposes a Fourier-based semantic augmentation method called FIESTA using uncertainty guidance to enhance the fundamental goals of MIS in an SDG context by manipulating the amplitude and phase components in the frequency domain. The proposed Fourier augmentative transformer addresses semantic amplitude modulation based on meaningful angular points to induce pertinent variations and harnesses the phase spectrum to ensure structural coherence. Moreover, FIESTA employs epistemic uncertainty to fine-tune the augmentation process, improving the ability of the model to adapt to diverse augmented data and concentrate on areas with higher ambiguity. Extensive experiments across three cross-domain scenarios demonstrate that FIESTA surpasses recent state-of-the-art SDG approaches in segmentation performance and significantly contributes to boosting the applicability of the model in medical imaging modalities.
QuST-LLM: Integrating Large Language Models for Comprehensive Spatial Transcriptomics Analysis
Authors: Chao Hui Huang
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00

In this paper, we introduce QuST-LLM, an innovative extension of QuPath that utilizes the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to analyze and interpret spatial transcriptomics (ST) data. In addition to simplifying the intricate and high-dimensional nature of ST data by offering a comprehensive workflow that includes data loading, region selection, gene expression analysis, and functional annotation, QuST-LLM employs LLMs to transform complex ST data into understandable and detailed biological narratives based on gene ontology annotations, thereby significantly improving the interpretability of ST data. Consequently, users can interact with their own ST data using natural language. Hence, QuST-LLM provides researchers with a potent functionality to unravel the spatial and functional complexities of tissues, fostering novel insights and advancements in biomedical research. QuST-LLM is a part of QuST project. The source code is hosted on GitHub and documentation is available at (https://github.com/huangch/qust).
Segmentation of Non-Small Cell Lung Carcinomas: Introducing DRU-Net and Multi-Lens Distortion
Authors: Soroush Oskouei, Marit Valla, André Pedersen, Erik Smistad, Vibeke Grotnes Dale, Maren Høibø, Sissel Gyrid Freim Wahl, Mats Dehli Haugum, Thomas Langø, Maria Paula Ramnefjell, Lars Andreas Akslen, Gabriel Kiss, Hanne Sorger
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00

Considering the increased workload in pathology laboratories today, automated tools such as artificial intelligence models can help pathologists with their tasks and ease the workload. In this paper, we are proposing a segmentation model (DRU-Net) that can provide a delineation of human non-small cell lung carcinomas and an augmentation method that can improve classification results. The proposed model is a fused combination of truncated pre-trained DenseNet201 and ResNet101V2 as a patch-wise classifier followed by a lightweight U-Net as a refinement model. We have used two datasets (Norwegian Lung Cancer Biobank and Haukeland University Hospital lung cancer cohort) to create our proposed model. The DRU-Net model achieves an average of 0.91 Dice similarity coefficient. The proposed spatial augmentation method (multi-lens distortion) improved the network performance by 3%. Our findings show that choosing image patches that specifically include regions of interest leads to better results for the patch-wise classifier compared to other sampling methods. The qualitative analysis showed that the DRU-Net model is generally successful in detecting the tumor. On the test set, some of the cases showed areas of false positive and false negative segmentation in the periphery, particularly in tumors with inflammatory and reactive changes.
Learning to Discover Knowledge: A Weakly-Supervised Partial Domain Adaptation Approach
Authors: Mengcheng Lan, Min Meng, Jun Yu, Jigang Wu
Date: 2024-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Partial Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation has shown appealing performance by leveraging knowledge from a source domain with rich annotations. However, for a specific target task, it is cumbersome to collect related and high-quality source domains. In real-world scenarios, large-scale datasets corrupted with noisy labels are easy to collect, stimulating a great demand for automatic recognition in a generalized setting, i.e., weakly-supervised partial domain adaptation (WS-PDA), which transfers a classifier from a large source domain with noises in labels to a small unlabeled target domain. As such, the key issues of WS-PDA are: 1) how to sufficiently discover the knowledge from the noisy labeled source domain and the unlabeled target domain, and 2) how to successfully adapt the knowledge across domains. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective domain adaptation approach, termed as self-paced transfer classifier learning (SP-TCL), to address the above issues, which could be regarded as a well-performing baseline for several generalized domain adaptation tasks. The proposed model is established upon the self-paced learning scheme, seeking a preferable classifier for the target domain. Specifically, SP-TCL learns to discover faithful knowledge via a carefully designed prudent loss function and simultaneously adapts the learned knowledge to the target domain by iteratively excluding source examples from training under the self-paced fashion. Extensive evaluations on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that SP-TCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on several generalized domain adaptation tasks.