pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GaussianBlock: Building Part-Aware Compositional and Editable 3D Scene by Primitives and Gaussians
Authors: Shuyi Jiang, QiHao Zhao, Hossein Rahmani, De Wen Soh, Jun Liu, Na Zhao
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction

Recently, with the development of Neural Radiance Fields and Gaussian Splatting, 3D reconstruction techniques have achieved remarkably high fidelity. However, the latent representations learnt by these methods are highly entangled and lack interpretability. In this paper, we propose a novel part-aware compositional reconstruction method, called GaussianBlock, that enables semantically coherent and disentangled representations, allowing for precise and physical editing akin to building blocks, while simultaneously maintaining high fidelity. Our GaussianBlock introduces a hybrid representation that leverages the advantages of both primitives, known for their flexible actionability and editability, and 3D Gaussians, which excel in reconstruction quality. Specifically, we achieve semantically coherent primitives through a novel attention-guided centering loss derived from 2D semantic priors, complemented by a dynamic splitting and fusion strategy. Furthermore, we utilize 3D Gaussians that hybridize with primitives to refine structural details and enhance fidelity. Additionally, a binding inheritance strategy is employed to strengthen and maintain the connection between the two. Our reconstructed scenes are evidenced to be disentangled, compositional, and compact across diverse benchmarks, enabling seamless, direct and precise editing while maintaining high quality.
Toward a Holistic Evaluation of Robustness in CLIP Models
Authors: Weijie Tu, Weijian Deng, Tom Gedeon
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Out-of-Distribution Detection, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models have shown significant potential, particularly in zero-shot classification across diverse distribution shifts. Building on existing evaluations of overall classification robustness, this work aims to provide a more comprehensive assessment of CLIP by introducing several new perspectives. First, we investigate their robustness to variations in specific visual factors. Second, we assess two critical safety objectives--confidence uncertainty and out-of-distribution detection--beyond mere classification accuracy. Third, we evaluate the finesse with which CLIP models bridge the image and text modalities. Fourth, we extend our examination to 3D awareness in CLIP models, moving beyond traditional 2D image understanding. Finally, we explore the interaction between vision and language encoders within modern large multimodal models (LMMs) that utilize CLIP as the visual backbone, focusing on how this interaction impacts classification robustness. In each aspect, we consider the impact of six factors on CLIP models: model architecture, training distribution, training set size, fine-tuning, contrastive loss, and test-time prompts. Our study uncovers several previously unknown insights into CLIP. For instance, the architecture of the visual encoder in CLIP plays a significant role in their robustness against 3D corruption. CLIP models tend to exhibit a bias towards shape when making predictions. Moreover, this bias tends to diminish after fine-tuning on ImageNet. Vision-language models like LLaVA, leveraging the CLIP vision encoder, could exhibit benefits in classification performance for challenging categories over CLIP alone. Our findings are poised to offer valuable guidance for enhancing the robustness and reliability of CLIP models.
Robo-MUTUAL: Robotic Multimodal Task Specification via Unimodal Learning
Authors: Jianxiong Li, Zhihao Wang, Jinliang Zheng, Xiaoai Zhou, Guanming Wang, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, Junzhi Yu, Xianyuan Zhan
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Multimodal task specification is essential for enhanced robotic performance, where \textit{Cross-modality Alignment} enables the robot to holistically understand complex task instructions. Directly annotating multimodal instructions for model training proves impractical, due to the sparsity of paired multimodal data. In this study, we demonstrate that by leveraging unimodal instructions abundant in real data, we can effectively teach robots to learn multimodal task specifications. First, we endow the robot with strong \textit{Cross-modality Alignment} capabilities, by pretraining a robotic multimodal encoder using extensive out-of-domain data. Then, we employ two Collapse and Corrupt operations to further bridge the remaining modality gap in the learned multimodal representation. This approach projects different modalities of identical task goal as interchangeable representations, thus enabling accurate robotic operations within a well-aligned multimodal latent space. Evaluation across more than 130 tasks and 4000 evaluations on both simulated LIBERO benchmark and real robot platforms showcases the superior capabilities of our proposed framework, demonstrating significant advantage in overcoming data constraints in robotic learning. Website: zh1hao.wang/Robo_MUTUAL
MiraGe: Editable 2D Images using Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Joanna Waczyńska, Tomasz Szczepanik, Piotr Borycki, Sławomir Tadeja, Thomas Bohné, Przemysław Spurek
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) approximate discrete data through continuous functions and are commonly used for encoding 2D images. Traditional image-based INRs employ neural networks to map pixel coordinates to RGB values, capturing shapes, colors, and textures within the network's weights. Recently, GaussianImage has been proposed as an alternative, using Gaussian functions instead of neural networks to achieve comparable quality and compression. Such a solution obtains a quality and compression ratio similar to classical INR models but does not allow image modification. In contrast, our work introduces a novel method, MiraGe, which uses mirror reflections to perceive 2D images in 3D space and employs flat-controlled Gaussians for precise 2D image editing. Our approach improves the rendering quality and allows realistic image modifications, including human-inspired perception of photos in the 3D world. Thanks to modeling images in 3D space, we obtain the illusion of 3D-based modification in 2D images. We also show that our Gaussian representation can be easily combined with a physics engine to produce physics-based modification of 2D images. Consequently, MiraGe allows for better quality than the standard approach and natural modification of 2D images.
UW-GS: Distractor-Aware 3D Gaussian Splatting for Enhanced Underwater Scene Reconstruction
Authors: Haoran Wang, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, Fan Zhang, David Bull
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) offers the capability to achieve real-time high quality 3D scene rendering. However, 3DGS assumes that the scene is in a clear medium environment and struggles to generate satisfactory representations in underwater scenes, where light absorption and scattering are prevalent and moving objects are involved. To overcome these, we introduce a novel Gaussian Splatting-based method, UW-GS, designed specifically for underwater applications. It introduces a color appearance that models distance-dependent color variation, employs a new physics-based density control strategy to enhance clarity for distant objects, and uses a binary motion mask to handle dynamic content. Optimized with a well-designed loss function supporting for scattering media and strengthened by pseudo-depth maps, UW-GS outperforms existing methods with PSNR gains up to 1.26dB. To fully verify the effectiveness of the model, we also developed a new underwater dataset, S-UW, with dynamic object masks.
DiffSSD: A Diffusion-Based Dataset For Speech Forensics
Authors: Kratika Bhagtani, Amit Kumar Singh Yadav, Paolo Bestagini, Edward J. Delp
Date: 2024-09-19 00:00:00

Diffusion-based speech generators are ubiquitous. These methods can generate very high quality synthetic speech and several recent incidents report their malicious use. To counter such misuse, synthetic speech detectors have been developed. Many of these detectors are trained on datasets which do not include diffusion-based synthesizers. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing detectors trained on one such dataset, ASVspoof2019, do not perform well in detecting synthetic speech from recent diffusion-based synthesizers. We propose the Diffusion-Based Synthetic Speech Dataset (DiffSSD), a dataset consisting of about 200 hours of labeled speech, including synthetic speech generated by 8 diffusion-based open-source and 2 commercial generators. We also examine the performance of existing synthetic speech detectors on DiffSSD in both closed-set and open-set scenarios. The results highlight the importance of this dataset in detecting synthetic speech generated from recent open-source and commercial speech generators.
Quo Vadis RankList-based System in Face Recognition?
Authors: Xinyi Zhang, Manuel Günther
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

Face recognition in the wild has gained a lot of focus in the last few years, and many face recognition models are designed to verify faces in medium-quality images. Especially due to the availability of large training datasets with similar conditions, deep face recognition models perform exceptionally well in such tasks. However, in other tasks where substantially less training data is available, such methods struggle, especially when required to compare high-quality enrollment images with low-quality probes. On the other hand, traditional RankList-based methods have been developed that compare faces indirectly by comparing to cohort faces with similar conditions. In this paper, we revisit these RankList methods and extend them to use the logits of the state-of-the-art DaliFace network, instead of an external cohort. We show that through a reasonable Logit-Cohort Selection (LoCoS) the performance of RankList-based functions can be improved drastically. Experiments on two challenging face recognition datasets not only demonstrate the enhanced performance of our proposed method but also set the stage for future advancements in handling diverse image qualities.
SinkSAM: A Monocular Depth-Guided SAM Framework for Automatic Sinkhole Segmentation
Authors: Osher Rafaeli, Tal Svoray, Ariel Nahlieli
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Soil sinkholes significantly influence soil degradation, but their irregular shapes, along with interference from shadow and vegetation, make it challenging to accurately quantify their properties using remotely sensed data. We present a novel framework for sinkhole segmentation that combines traditional topographic computations of closed depressions with the newly developed prompt-based Segment Anything Model (SAM). Within this framework, termed SinkSAM, we highlight four key improvements: (1) The integration of topographic computations with SAM enables pixel-level refinement of sinkhole boundaries segmentation; (2) A coherent mathematical prompting strategy, based on closed depressions, addresses the limitations of purely learning-based models (CNNs) in detecting and segmenting undefined sinkhole features, while improving generalization to new, unseen regions; (3) Using Depth Anything V2 monocular depth for automatic prompts eliminates photogrammetric biases, enabling sinkhole mapping without the dependence on LiDAR data; and (4) An established sinkhole database facilitates fine-tuning of SAM, improving its zero-shot performance in sinkhole segmentation. These advancements allow the deployment of SinkSAM, in an unseen test area, in the highly variable semiarid region, achieving an intersection-over-union (IoU) of 40.27\% and surpassing previous results. This paper also presents the first SAM implementation for sinkhole segmentation and demonstrates the robustness of SinkSAM in extracting sinkhole maps using a single RGB image.
SurgPointTransformer: Vertebrae Shape Completion with RGB-D Data
Authors: Aidana Massalimova, Florentin Liebmann, Sascha Jecklin, Fabio Carrillo, Farshad Mazda, Philipp Fürnstahl
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Anatomy, Segmentation

State-of-the-art computer- and robot-assisted surgery systems heavily depend on intraoperative imaging technologies such as CT and fluoroscopy to generate detailed 3D visualization of the patient's anatomy. While imaging techniques are highly accurate, they are based on ionizing radiation and expose patients and clinicians. This study introduces an alternative, radiation-free approach for reconstructing the 3D spine anatomy using RGB-D data. Drawing inspiration from the 3D "mental map" that surgeons form during surgeries, we introduce SurgPointTransformer, a shape completion approach for surgical applications that can accurately reconstruct the unexposed spine regions from sparse observations of the exposed surface. Our method involves two main steps: segmentation and shape completion. The segmentation step includes spinal column localization and segmentation, followed by vertebra-wise segmentation. The segmented vertebra point clouds are then subjected to SurgPointTransformer, which leverages an attention mechanism to learn patterns between visible surface features and the underlying anatomy. For evaluation, we utilize an ex-vivo dataset of nine specimens. Their CT data is used to establish ground truth data that were used to compare to the outputs of our methods. Our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average Chamfer Distance of 5.39, an F-Score of 0.85, an Earth Mover's Distance of 0.011, and a Signal-to-Noise Ratio of 22.90 dB. This study demonstrates the potential of our reconstruction method for 3D vertebral shape completion. It enables 3D reconstruction of the entire lumbar spine and surgical guidance without ionizing radiation or invasive imaging. Our work contributes to computer-aided and robot-assisted surgery, advancing the perception and intelligence of these systems.
Decorrelation-based Self-Supervised Visual Representation Learning for Writer Identification
Authors: Arkadip Maitra, Shree Mitra, Siladittya Manna, Saumik Bhattacharya, Umapada Pal
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning has developed rapidly over the last decade and has been applied in many areas of computer vision. Decorrelation-based self-supervised pretraining has shown great promise among non-contrastive algorithms, yielding performance at par with supervised and contrastive self-supervised baselines. In this work, we explore the decorrelation-based paradigm of self-supervised learning and apply the same to learning disentangled stroke features for writer identification. Here we propose a modified formulation of the decorrelation-based framework named SWIS which was proposed for signature verification by standardizing the features along each dimension on top of the existing framework. We show that the proposed framework outperforms the contemporary self-supervised learning framework on the writer identification benchmark and also outperforms several supervised methods as well. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first of its kind to apply self-supervised learning for learning representations for writer verification tasks.
EVA-Gaussian: 3D Gaussian-based Real-time Human Novel View Synthesis under Diverse Camera Settings
Authors: Yingdong Hu, Zhening Liu, Jiawei Shao, Zehong Lin, Jun Zhang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis, Position

The feed-forward based 3D Gaussian Splatting method has demonstrated exceptional capability in real-time human novel view synthesis. However, existing approaches are restricted to dense viewpoint settings, which limits their flexibility in free-viewpoint rendering across a wide range of camera view angle discrepancies. To address this limitation, we propose a real-time pipeline named EVA-Gaussian for 3D human novel view synthesis across diverse camera settings. Specifically, we first introduce an Efficient cross-View Attention (EVA) module to accurately estimate the position of each 3D Gaussian from the source images. Then, we integrate the source images with the estimated Gaussian position map to predict the attributes and feature embeddings of the 3D Gaussians. Moreover, we employ a recurrent feature refiner to correct artifacts caused by geometric errors in position estimation and enhance visual fidelity.To further improve synthesis quality, we incorporate a powerful anchor loss function for both 3D Gaussian attributes and human face landmarks. Experimental results on the THuman2.0 and THumansit datasets showcase the superiority of our EVA-Gaussian approach in rendering quality across diverse camera settings. Project page: https://zhenliuzju.github.io/huyingdong/EVA-Gaussian.
CSIM: A Copula-based similarity index sensitive to local changes for Image quality assessment
Authors: Safouane El Ghazouali, Umberto Michelucci, Yassin El Hillali, Hichem Nouira
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, Image Quality Assessment, Image Retrieval, Object Recognition, SSIM

Image similarity metrics play an important role in computer vision applications, as they are used in image processing, computer vision and machine learning. Furthermore, those metrics enable tasks such as image retrieval, object recognition and quality assessment, essential in fields like healthcare, astronomy and surveillance. Existing metrics, such as PSNR, MSE, SSIM, ISSM and FSIM, often face limitations in terms of either speed, complexity or sensitivity to small changes in images. To address these challenges, a novel image similarity metric, namely CSIM, that combines real-time while being sensitive to subtle image variations is investigated in this paper. The novel metric uses Gaussian Copula from probability theory to transform an image into vectors of pixel distribution associated to local image patches. These vectors contain, in addition to intensities and pixel positions, information on the dependencies between pixel values, capturing the structural relationships within the image. By leveraging the properties of Copulas, CSIM effectively models the joint distribution of pixel intensities, enabling a more nuanced comparison of image patches making it more sensitive to local changes compared to other metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that CSIM outperforms existing similarity metrics in various image distortion scenarios, including noise, compression artifacts and blur. The metric's ability to detect subtle differences makes it suitable for applications requiring high precision, such as medical imaging, where the detection of minor anomalies can be of a high importance. The results obtained in this work can be reproduced from this Github repository: https://github.com/safouaneelg/copulasimilarity.
SHAP-CAT: A interpretable multi-modal framework enhancing WSI classification via virtual staining and shapley-value-based multimodal fusion
Authors: Jun Wang, Yu Mao, Nan Guan, Chun Jason Xue
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Virtual Staining

The multimodal model has demonstrated promise in histopathology. However, most multimodal models are based on H\&E and genomics, adopting increasingly complex yet black-box designs. In our paper, we propose a novel interpretable multimodal framework named SHAP-CAT, which uses a Shapley-value-based dimension reduction technique for effective multimodal fusion. Starting with two paired modalities -- H\&E and IHC images, we employ virtual staining techniques to enhance limited input data by generating a new clinical-related modality. Lightweight bag-level representations are extracted from image modalities and a Shapley-value-based mechanism is used for dimension reduction. For each dimension of the bag-level representation, attribution values are calculated to indicate how changes in the specific dimensions of the input affect the model output. In this way, we select a few top important dimensions of bag-level representation for each image modality to late fusion. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SHAP-CAT framework incorporating synthetic modalities significantly enhances model performance, yielding a 5\% increase in accuracy for the BCI, an 8\% increase for IHC4BC-ER, and an 11\% increase for the IHC4BC-PR dataset.
AgriCLIP: Adapting CLIP for Agriculture and Livestock via Domain-Specialized Cross-Model Alignment
Authors: Umair Nawaz, Muhammad Awais, Hanan Gani, Muzammal Naseer, Fahad Khan, Salman Khan, Rao Muhammad Anwer
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Capitalizing on vast amount of image-text data, large-scale vision-language pre-training has demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities and has been utilized in several applications. However, models trained on general everyday web-crawled data often exhibit sub-optimal performance for specialized domains, likely due to domain shift. Recent works have tackled this problem for some domains (e.g., healthcare) by constructing domain-specialized image-text data. However, constructing a dedicated large-scale image-text dataset for sustainable area of agriculture and livestock is still open to research. Further, this domain desires fine-grained feature learning due to the subtle nature of the downstream tasks (e.g, nutrient deficiency detection, livestock breed classification). To address this we present AgriCLIP, a vision-language foundational model dedicated to the domain of agriculture and livestock. First, we propose a large-scale dataset, named ALive, that leverages customized prompt generation strategy to overcome the scarcity of expert annotations. Our ALive dataset covers crops, livestock, and fishery, with around 600,000 image-text pairs. Second, we propose a training pipeline that integrates both contrastive and self-supervised learning to learn both global semantic and local fine-grained domain-specialized features. Experiments on diverse set of 20 downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of AgriCLIP framework, achieving an absolute gain of 7.8\% in terms of average zero-shot classification accuracy, over the standard CLIP adaptation via domain-specialized ALive dataset. Our ALive dataset and code can be accessible at \href{https://github.com/umair1221/AgriCLIP/tree/main}{Github}.
Toward Zero-Shot Learning for Visual Dehazing of Urological Surgical Robots
Authors: Renkai Wu, Xianjin Wang, Pengchen Liang, Zhenyu Zhang, Qing Chang, Hao Tang
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-Shot Learning

Robot-assisted surgery has profoundly influenced current forms of minimally invasive surgery. However, in transurethral suburethral urological surgical robots, they need to work in a liquid environment. This causes vaporization of the liquid when shearing and heating is performed, resulting in bubble atomization that affects the visual perception of the robot. This can lead to the need for uninterrupted pauses in the surgical procedure, which makes the surgery take longer. To address the atomization characteristics of liquids under urological surgical robotic vision, we propose an unsupervised zero-shot dehaze method (RSF-Dehaze) for urological surgical robotic vision. Specifically, the proposed Region Similarity Filling Module (RSFM) of RSF-Dehaze significantly improves the recovery of blurred region tissues. In addition, we organize and propose a dehaze dataset for robotic vision in urological surgery (USRobot-Dehaze dataset). In particular, this dataset contains the three most common urological surgical robot operation scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to organize and propose a publicly available dehaze dataset for urological surgical robot vision. The proposed RSF-Dehaze proves the effectiveness of our method in three urological surgical robot operation scenarios with extensive comparative experiments with 20 most classical and advanced dehazing and image recovery algorithms. The proposed source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wurenkai/RSF-Dehaze .