pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DiffusionPen: Towards Controlling the Style of Handwritten Text Generation
Authors: Konstantina Nikolaidou, George Retsinas, Giorgos Sfikas, Marcus Liwicki
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, HTR, Metric Learning, Text Generation

Handwritten Text Generation (HTG) conditioned on text and style is a challenging task due to the variability of inter-user characteristics and the unlimited combinations of characters that form new words unseen during training. Diffusion Models have recently shown promising results in HTG but still remain under-explored. We present DiffusionPen (DiffPen), a 5-shot style handwritten text generation approach based on Latent Diffusion Models. By utilizing a hybrid style extractor that combines metric learning and classification, our approach manages to capture both textual and stylistic characteristics of seen and unseen words and styles, generating realistic handwritten samples. Moreover, we explore several variation strategies of the data with multi-style mixtures and noisy embeddings, enhancing the robustness and diversity of the generated data. Extensive experiments using IAM offline handwriting database show that our method outperforms existing methods qualitatively and quantitatively, and its additional generated data can improve the performance of Handwriting Text Recognition (HTR) systems. The code is available at: https://github.com/koninik/DiffusionPen.
Online 3D reconstruction and dense tracking in endoscopic videos
Authors: Michel Hayoz, Christopher Hahne, Thomas Kurmann, Max Allan, Guido Beldi, Daniel Candinas, ablo Márquez-Neila, Raphael Sznitman
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, 3D Scene Reconstruction, Scene Understanding

3D scene reconstruction from stereo endoscopic video data is crucial for advancing surgical interventions. In this work, we present an online framework for online, dense 3D scene reconstruction and tracking, aimed at enhancing surgical scene understanding and assisting interventions. Our method dynamically extends a canonical scene representation using Gaussian splatting, while modeling tissue deformations through a sparse set of control points. We introduce an efficient online fitting algorithm that optimizes the scene parameters, enabling consistent tracking and accurate reconstruction. Through experiments on the StereoMIS dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming state-of-the-art tracking methods and achieving comparable performance to offline reconstruction techniques. Our work enables various downstream applications thus contributing to advancing the capabilities of surgical assistance systems.
Analyzing Tumors by Synthesis
Authors: Qi Chen, Yuxiang Lai, Xiaoxi Chen, Qixin Hu, Alan Yuille, Zongwei Zhou
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00

Computer-aided tumor detection has shown great potential in enhancing the interpretation of over 80 million CT scans performed annually in the United States. However, challenges arise due to the rarity of CT scans with tumors, especially early-stage tumors. Developing AI with real tumor data faces issues of scarcity, annotation difficulty, and low prevalence. Tumor synthesis addresses these challenges by generating numerous tumor examples in medical images, aiding AI training for tumor detection and segmentation. Successful synthesis requires realistic and generalizable synthetic tumors across various organs. This chapter reviews AI development on real and synthetic data and summarizes two key trends in synthetic data for cancer imaging research: modeling-based and learning-based approaches. Modeling-based methods, like Pixel2Cancer, simulate tumor development over time using generic rules, while learning-based methods, like DiffTumor, learn from a few annotated examples in one organ to generate synthetic tumors in others. Reader studies with expert radiologists show that synthetic tumors can be convincingly realistic. We also present case studies in the liver, pancreas, and kidneys reveal that AI trained on synthetic tumors can achieve performance comparable to, or better than, AI only trained on real data. Tumor synthesis holds significant promise for expanding datasets, enhancing AI reliability, improving tumor detection performance, and preserving patient privacy.
NESI: Shape Representation via Neural Explicit Surface Intersection
Authors: Congyi Zhang, Jinfan Yang, Eric Hedlin, Suzuran Takikawa, Nicholas Vining, Kwang Moo Yi, Wenping Wang, Alla Sheffer
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00

Compressed representations of 3D shapes that are compact, accurate, and can be processed efficiently directly in compressed form, are extremely useful for digital media applications. Recent approaches in this space focus on learned implicit or parametric representations. While implicits are well suited for tasks such as in-out queries, they lack natural 2D parameterization, complicating tasks such as texture or normal mapping. Conversely, parametric representations support the latter tasks but are ill-suited for occupancy queries. We propose a novel learned alternative to these approaches, based on intersections of localized explicit, or height-field, surfaces. Since explicits can be trivially expressed both implicitly and parametrically, NESI directly supports a wider range of processing operations than implicit alternatives, including occupancy queries and parametric access. We represent input shapes using a collection of differently oriented height-field bounded half-spaces combined using volumetric Boolean intersections. We first tightly bound each input using a pair of oppositely oriented height-fields, forming a Double Height-Field (DHF) Hull. We refine this hull by intersecting it with additional localized height-fields (HFs) that capture surface regions in its interior. We minimize the number of HFs necessary to accurately capture each input and compactly encode both the DHF hull and the local HFs as neural functions defined over subdomains of R^2. This reduced dimensionality encoding delivers high-quality compact approximations. Given similar parameter count, or storage capacity, NESI significantly reduces approximation error compared to the state of the art, especially at lower parameter counts.
Pioneering Precision in Lumbar Spine MRI Segmentation with Advanced Deep Learning and Data Enhancement
Authors: Istiak Ahmed, Md. Tanzim Hossain, Md. Zahirul Islam Nahid, Kazi Shahriar Sanjid, Md. Shakib Shahariar Junayed, M. Monir Uddin, Mohammad Monirujjaman Khan
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, MRI segmentation, Segmentation

This study presents an advanced approach to lumbar spine segmentation using deep learning techniques, focusing on addressing key challenges such as class imbalance and data preprocessing. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of patients with low back pain are meticulously preprocessed to accurately represent three critical classes: vertebrae, spinal canal, and intervertebral discs (IVDs). By rectifying class inconsistencies in the data preprocessing stage, the fidelity of the training data is ensured. The modified U-Net model incorporates innovative architectural enhancements, including an upsample block with leaky Rectified Linear Units (ReLU) and Glorot uniform initializer, to mitigate common issues such as the dying ReLU problem and improve stability during training. Introducing a custom combined loss function effectively tackles class imbalance, significantly improving segmentation accuracy. Evaluation using a comprehensive suite of metrics showcases the superior performance of this approach, outperforming existing methods and advancing the current techniques in lumbar spine segmentation. These findings hold significant advancements for enhanced lumbar spine MRI and segmentation diagnostic accuracy.
Improved Visually Prompted Keyword Localisation in Real Low-Resource Settings
Authors: Leanne Nortje, Dan Oneata, Herman Kamper
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Given an image query, visually prompted keyword localisation (VPKL) aims to find occurrences of the depicted word in a speech collection. This can be useful when transcriptions are not available for a low-resource language (e.g. if it is unwritten). Previous work showed that VPKL can be performed with a visually grounded speech model trained on paired images and unlabelled speech. But all experiments were done on English. Moreover, transcriptions were used to get positive and negative pairs for the contrastive loss. This paper introduces a few-shot learning scheme to mine pairs automatically without transcriptions. On English, this results in only a small drop in performance. We also - for the first time - consider VPKL on a real low-resource language, Yoruba. While scores are reasonable, here we see a bigger drop in performance compared to using ground truth pairs because the mining is less accurate in Yoruba.
Enhanced Generative Data Augmentation for Semantic Segmentation via Stronger Guidance
Authors: Quang-Huy Che, Duc-Tri Le, Bich-Nga Pham, Duc-Khai Lam, Vinh-Tiep Nguyen
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Data augmentation is crucial for pixel-wise annotation tasks like semantic segmentation, where labeling requires significant effort and intensive labor. Traditional methods, involving simple transformations such as rotations and flips, create new images but often lack diversity along key semantic dimensions and fail to alter high-level semantic properties. To address this issue, generative models have emerged as an effective solution for augmenting data by generating synthetic images. Controllable Generative models offer data augmentation methods for semantic segmentation tasks by using prompts and visual references from the original image. However, these models face challenges in generating synthetic images that accurately reflect the content and structure of the original image due to difficulties in creating effective prompts and visual references. In this work, we introduce an effective data augmentation pipeline for semantic segmentation using Controllable Diffusion model. Our proposed method includes efficient prompt generation using \textit{Class-Prompt Appending} and \textit{Visual Prior Blending} to enhance attention to labeled classes in real images, allowing the pipeline to generate a precise number of augmented images while preserving the structure of segmentation-labeled classes. In addition, we implement a \textit{class balancing algorithm} to ensure a balanced training dataset when merging the synthetic and original images. Evaluation on PASCAL VOC datasets, our pipeline demonstrates its effectiveness in generating high-quality synthetic images for semantic segmentation. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/chequanghuy/Enhanced-Generative-Data-Augmentation-for-Semantic-Segmentation-via-Stronger-Guidance}{this https URL}.
Advance and Refinement: The Evolution of UAV Detection and Classification Technologies
Authors: Vladislav Semenyuk, Ildar Kurmashev, Alberto Lupidi, Dmitriy Alyoshin, Liliya Kurmasheva, Alessandro Cantelli-Forti
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensor Fusion

This review provides a detailed analysis of the advancements in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) detection and classification systems from 2020 to today. It covers various detection methodologies such as radar, radio frequency, optical, and acoustic sensors, and emphasizes their integration via sophisticated sensor fusion techniques. The fundamental technologies driving UAV detection and classification are thoroughly examined, with a focus on their accuracy and range. Additionally, the paper discusses the latest innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning, illustrating their impact on improving the accuracy and efficiency of these systems. The review concludes by predicting further technological developments in UAV detection, which are expected to enhance both performance and reliability.
Enhancing Cross-Modality Synthesis: Subvolume Merging for MRI-to-CT Conversion
Authors: Fuxin Fan, Jingna Qiu, Yixing Huang, Andreas Maier
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Providing more precise tissue attenuation information, synthetic computed tomography (sCT) generated from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contributes to improved radiation therapy treatment planning. In our study, we employ the advanced SwinUNETR framework for synthesizing CT from MRI images. Additionally, we introduce a three-dimensional subvolume merging technique in the prediction process. By selecting an optimal overlap percentage for adjacent subvolumes, stitching artifacts are effectively mitigated, leading to a decrease in the mean absolute error (MAE) between sCT and the labels from 52.65 HU to 47.75 HU. Furthermore, implementing a weight function with a gamma value of 0.9 results in the lowest MAE within the same overlap area. By setting the overlap percentage between 50% and 70%, we achieve a balance between image quality and computational efficiency.
UAVDB: Trajectory-Guided Adaptable Bounding Boxes for UAV Detection
Authors: Yu-Hsi Chen
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, Diversity, Management

The widespread deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in surveillance, security, and airspace management has created an urgent demand for precise, scalable, and efficient UAV detection. However, existing datasets often suffer from limited scale diversity and inaccurate annotations, hindering robust model development. This paper introduces UAVDB, a high-resolution UAV detection dataset constructed using Patch Intensity Convergence (PIC). This novel technique automatically generates high-fidelity bounding box annotations from UAV trajectory data~\cite{li2020reconstruction}, eliminating the need for manual labeling. UAVDB features single-class annotations with a fixed-camera setup and consists of RGB frames capturing UAVs across various scales, from large-scale UAVs to near-single-pixel representations, along with challenging backgrounds that pose difficulties for modern detectors. We first validate the accuracy and efficiency of PIC-generated bounding boxes by comparing Intersection over Union (IoU) performance and runtime against alternative annotation methods, demonstrating that PIC achieves higher annotation accuracy while being more efficient. Subsequently, we benchmark UAVDB using state-of-the-art (SOTA) YOLO-series detectors, establishing UAVDB as a valuable resource for advancing long-range and high-resolution UAV detection.
NeIn: Telling What You Don't Want
Authors: Nhat-Tan Bui, Dinh-Hieu Hoang, Quoc-Huy Trinh, Minh-Triet Tran, Truong Nguyen, Susan Gauch
Date: 2024-09-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Negation

Negation is a fundamental linguistic concept used by humans to convey information that they do not desire. Despite this, there has been minimal research specifically focused on negation within vision-language tasks. This lack of research means that vision-language models (VLMs) may struggle to understand negation, implying that they struggle to provide accurate results. One barrier to achieving human-level intelligence is the lack of a standard collection by which research into negation can be evaluated. This paper presents the first large-scale dataset, Negative Instruction (NeIn), for studying negation within the vision-language domain. Our dataset comprises 530,694 quadruples, i.e., source image, original caption, negative sentence, and target image in total, including 495,694 queries for training and 35,000 queries for benchmarking across multiple vision-language tasks. Specifically, we automatically generate NeIn based on a large, existing vision-language dataset, MS-COCO, via two steps: generation and filtering. During the generation phase, we leverage two VLMs, BLIP and MagicBrush, to generate the target image and a negative clause that expresses the content of the source image. In the subsequent filtering phase, we apply BLIP to remove erroneous samples. Additionally, we introduce an evaluation protocol for negation understanding of image editing models. Extensive experiments using our dataset across multiple VLMs for instruction-based image editing tasks demonstrate that even recent state-of-the-art VLMs struggle to understand negative queries. The project page is: https://tanbuinhat.github.io/NeIn/
Towards Narrowing the Generalization Gap in Deep Boolean Networks
Authors: Youngsung Kim
Date: 2024-09-06 00:00:00

The rapid growth of the size and complexity in deep neural networks has sharply increased computational demands, challenging their efficient deployment in real-world scenarios. Boolean networks, constructed with logic gates, offer a hardware-friendly alternative that could enable more efficient implementation. However, their ability to match the performance of traditional networks has remained uncertain. This paper explores strategies to enhance deep Boolean networks with the aim of surpassing their traditional counterparts. We propose novel methods, including logical skip connections and spatiality preserving sampling, and validate them on vision tasks using widely adopted datasets, demonstrating significant improvement over existing approaches. Our analysis shows how deep Boolean networks can maintain high performance while minimizing computational costs through 1-bit logic operations. These findings suggest that Boolean networks are a promising direction for efficient, high-performance deep learning models, with significant potential for advancing hardware-accelerated AI applications.
DANCE: Deep Learning-Assisted Analysis of Protein Sequences Using Chaos Enhanced Kaleidoscopic Images
Authors: Taslim Murad, Prakash Chourasia, Sarwan Ali, Imdad Ullah Khan, Murray Patterson
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Cancer is a complex disease characterized by uncontrolled cell growth. T cell receptors (TCRs), crucial proteins in the immune system, play a key role in recognizing antigens, including those associated with cancer. Recent advancements in sequencing technologies have facilitated comprehensive profiling of TCR repertoires, uncovering TCRs with potent anti-cancer activity and enabling TCR-based immunotherapies. However, analyzing these intricate biomolecules necessitates efficient representations that capture their structural and functional information. T-cell protein sequences pose unique challenges due to their relatively smaller lengths compared to other biomolecules. An image-based representation approach becomes a preferred choice for efficient embeddings, allowing for the preservation of essential details and enabling comprehensive analysis of T-cell protein sequences. In this paper, we propose to generate images from the protein sequences using the idea of Chaos Game Representation (CGR) using the Kaleidoscopic images approach. This Deep Learning Assisted Analysis of Protein Sequences Using Chaos Enhanced Kaleidoscopic Images (called DANCE) provides a unique way to visualize protein sequences by recursively applying chaos game rules around a central seed point. we perform the classification of the T cell receptors (TCRs) protein sequences in terms of their respective target cancer cells, as TCRs are known for their immune response against cancer disease. The TCR sequences are converted into images using the DANCE method. We employ deep-learning vision models to perform the classification to obtain insights into the relationship between the visual patterns observed in the generated kaleidoscopic images and the underlying protein properties. By combining CGR-based image generation with deep learning classification, this study opens novel possibilities in the protein analysis domain.
DA-MoE: Towards Dynamic Expert Allocation for Mixture-of-Experts Models
Authors: Maryam Akhavan Aghdam, Hongpeng Jin, Yanzhao Wu
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

Transformer-based Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have been driving several recent technological advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP). These MoE models adopt a router mechanism to determine which experts to activate for routing input tokens. However, existing router mechanisms allocate a fixed number of experts to each token, which neglects the varying importance of different input tokens. In this study, we propose a novel dynamic router mechanism that Dynamically Allocates a variable number of experts for Mixture-of-Experts (DA-MoE) models based on an effective token importance measure. First, we show that the Transformer attention mechanism provides a natural and effective way of calculating token importance. Second, we propose a dynamic router mechanism that effectively decides the optimal number of experts (K) and allocates the top-K experts for each input token. Third, comprehensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DA-MoE approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art Transformer based MoE model on the popular GLUE benchmark.
Sortformer: Seamless Integration of Speaker Diarization and ASR by Bridging Timestamps and Tokens
Authors: Taejin Park, Ivan Medennikov, Kunal Dhawan, Weiqing Wang, He Huang, Nithin Rao Koluguri, Krishna C. Puvvada, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization

We propose Sortformer, a novel neural model for speaker diarization, trained with unconventional objectives compared to existing end-to-end diarization models. The permutation problem in speaker diarization has long been regarded as a critical challenge. Most prior end-to-end diarization systems employ permutation invariant loss (PIL), which optimizes for the permutation that yields the lowest error. In contrast, we introduce Sort Loss, which enables a diarization model to autonomously resolve permutation, with or without PIL. We demonstrate that combining Sort Loss and PIL achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art end-to-end diarization models trained exclusively with PIL. Crucially, we present a streamlined multispeaker ASR architecture that leverages Sortformer as a speaker supervision model, embedding speaker label estimation within the ASR encoder state using a sinusoidal kernel function. This approach resolves the speaker permutation problem through sorted objectives, effectively bridging speaker-label timestamps and speaker tokens. In our experiments, we show that the proposed multispeaker ASR architecture, enhanced with speaker supervision, improves performance via adapter techniques. Code and trained models will be made publicly available via the NVIDIA NeMo framework.
KANtrol: A Physics-Informed Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Framework for Solving Multi-Dimensional and Fractional Optimal Control Problems
Authors: Alireza Afzal Aghaei
Date: 2024-09-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

In this paper, we introduce the KANtrol framework, which utilizes Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to solve optimal control problems involving continuous time variables. We explain how Gaussian quadrature can be employed to approximate the integral parts within the problem, particularly for integro-differential state equations. We also demonstrate how automatic differentiation is utilized to compute exact derivatives for integer-order dynamics, while for fractional derivatives of non-integer order, we employ matrix-vector product discretization within the KAN framework. We tackle multi-dimensional problems, including the optimal control of a 2D heat partial differential equation. The results of our simulations, which cover both forward and parameter identification problems, show that the KANtrol framework outperforms classical MLPs in terms of accuracy and efficiency.