pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Real-Time Polygonal Semantic Mapping for Humanoid Robot Stair Climbing
Authors: Teng Bin, Jianming Yao, Tin Lun Lam, Tianwei Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, GPU, Management, Navigate

We present a novel algorithm for real-time planar semantic mapping tailored for humanoid robots navigating complex terrains such as staircases. Our method is adaptable to any odometry input and leverages GPU-accelerated processes for planar extraction, enabling the rapid generation of globally consistent semantic maps. We utilize an anisotropic diffusion filter on depth images to effectively minimize noise from gradient jumps while preserving essential edge details, enhancing normal vector images' accuracy and smoothness. Both the anisotropic diffusion and the RANSAC-based plane extraction processes are optimized for parallel processing on GPUs, significantly enhancing computational efficiency. Our approach achieves real-time performance, processing single frames at rates exceeding $30~Hz$, which facilitates detailed plane extraction and map management swiftly and efficiently. Extensive testing underscores the algorithm's capabilities in real-time scenarios and demonstrates its practical application in humanoid robot gait planning, significantly improving its ability to navigate dynamic environments.
Masked Autoencoders are Parameter-Efficient Federated Continual Learners
Authors: Yuchen He, Xiangfeng Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Federated Learning, Image Reconstruction

Federated learning is a specific distributed learning paradigm in which a central server aggregates updates from multiple clients' local models, thereby enabling the server to learn without requiring clients to upload their private data, maintaining data privacy. While existing federated learning methods are primarily designed for static data, real-world applications often require clients to learn new categories over time. This challenge necessitates the integration of continual learning techniques, leading to federated continual learning (FCL). To address both catastrophic forgetting and non-IID issues, we propose to use masked autoencoders (MAEs) as parameter-efficient federated continual learners, called pMAE. pMAE learns reconstructive prompt on the client side through image reconstruction using MAE. On the server side, it reconstructs the uploaded restore information to capture the data distribution across previous tasks and different clients, using these reconstructed images to fine-tune discriminative prompt and classifier parameters tailored for classification, thereby alleviating catastrophic forgetting and non-IID issues on a global scale. Experimental results demonstrate that pMAE achieves performance comparable to existing prompt-based methods and can enhance their effectiveness, particularly when using self-supervised pre-trained transformers as the backbone. Code is available at: https://github.com/ycheoo/pMAE.
FPPL: An Efficient and Non-IID Robust Federated Continual Learning Framework
Authors: Yuchen He, Chuyun Shen, Xiangfeng Wang, Bo Jin
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Contrastive Learning, Federated Learning, Prompt Learning

Federated continual learning (FCL) aims to learn from sequential data stream in the decentralized federated learning setting, while simultaneously mitigating the catastrophic forgetting issue in classical continual learning. Existing FCL methods usually employ typical rehearsal mechanisms, which could result in privacy violations or additional onerous storage and computational burdens. In this work, an efficient and non-IID robust federated continual learning framework, called Federated Prototype-Augmented Prompt Learning (FPPL), is proposed. The FPPL can collaboratively learn lightweight prompts augmented by prototypes without rehearsal. On the client side, a fusion function is employed to fully leverage the knowledge contained in task-specific prompts for alleviating catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, global prototypes aggregated from the server are used to obtain unified representation through contrastive learning, mitigating the impact of non-IID-derived data heterogeneity. On the server side, locally uploaded prototypes are utilized to perform debiasing on the classifier, further alleviating the performance degradation caused by both non-IID and catastrophic forgetting. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of FPPL, achieving notable performance with an efficient design while remaining robust to diverse non-IID degrees. Code is available at: https://github.com/ycheoo/FPPL.
A Global Depth-Range-Free Multi-View Stereo Transformer Network with Pose Embedding
Authors: Yitong Dong, Yijin Li, Zhaoyang Huang, Weikang Bian, Jingbo Liu, Hujun Bao, Zhaopeng Cui, Hongsheng Li, Guofeng Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view stereo (MVS) framework that gets rid of the depth range prior. Unlike recent prior-free MVS methods that work in a pair-wise manner, our method simultaneously considers all the source images. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-view Disparity Attention (MDA) module to aggregate long-range context information within and across multi-view images. Considering the asymmetry of the epipolar disparity flow, the key to our method lies in accurately modeling multi-view geometric constraints. We integrate pose embedding to encapsulate information such as multi-view camera poses, providing implicit geometric constraints for multi-view disparity feature fusion dominated by attention. Additionally, we construct corresponding hidden states for each source image due to significant differences in the observation quality of the same pixel in the reference frame across multiple source frames. We explicitly estimate the quality of the current pixel corresponding to sampled points on the epipolar line of the source image and dynamically update hidden states through the uncertainty estimation module. Extensive results on the DTU dataset and Tanks&Temple benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at our project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/GD-PoseMVS/.
A Novel Deep Learning Tractography Fiber Clustering Framework for Functionally Consistent White Matter Parcellation Using Multimodal Diffusion MRI and Functional MRI
Authors: Jin Wang, Bocheng Guo, Yijie Li, Junyi Wang, Yuqian Chen, Jarrett Rushmore, Nikos Makris, Yogesh Rathi, Lauren J O'Donnell, Fan Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Diffusion  MRI

Tractography fiber clustering using diffusion MRI (dMRI) is a crucial strategy for white matter (WM) parcellation. Current methods primarily use the geometric information of fibers (i.e., the spatial trajectories) to group similar fibers into clusters, overlooking the important functional signals present along the fiber tracts. There is increasing evidence that neural activity in the WM can be measured using functional MRI (fMRI), offering potentially valuable multimodal information for fiber clustering. In this paper, we develop a novel deep learning fiber clustering framework, namely Deep Multi-view Fiber Clustering (DMVFC), that uses joint dMRI and fMRI data to enable functionally consistent WM parcellation. DMVFC can effectively integrate the geometric characteristics of the WM fibers with the fMRI BOLD signals along the fiber tracts. It includes two major components: 1) a multi-view pretraining module to compute embedding features from fiber geometric information and functional signals separately, and 2) a collaborative fine-tuning module to simultaneously refine the two kinds of embeddings. In the experiments, we compare DMVFC with two state-of-the-art fiber clustering methods and demonstrate superior performance in achieving functionally meaningful and consistent WM parcellation results.
GVKF: Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions for Highly Efficient Surface Reconstruction in Open Scenes
Authors: Gaochao Song, Chong Cheng, Hao Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, NeRF, Surface Reconstruction

In this paper we present a novel method for efficient and effective 3D surface reconstruction in open scenes. Existing Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) based works typically require extensive training and rendering time due to the adopted implicit representations. In contrast, 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS) uses an explicit and discrete representation, hence the reconstructed surface is built by the huge number of Gaussian primitives, which leads to excessive memory consumption and rough surface details in sparse Gaussian areas. To address these issues, we propose Gaussian Voxel Kernel Functions (GVKF), which establish a continuous scene representation based on discrete 3DGS through kernel regression. The GVKF integrates fast 3DGS rasterization and highly effective scene implicit representations, achieving high-fidelity open scene surface reconstruction. Experiments on challenging scene datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GVKF, featuring with high reconstruction quality, real-time rendering speed, significant savings in storage and training memory consumption.
KptLLM: Unveiling the Power of Large Language Model for Keypoint Comprehension
Authors: Jie Yang, Wang Zeng, Sheng Jin, Lumin Xu, Wentao Liu, Chen Qian, Ruimao Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have greatly improved their abilities in image understanding. However, these models often struggle with grasping pixel-level semantic details, e.g., the keypoints of an object. To bridge this gap, we introduce the novel challenge of Semantic Keypoint Comprehension, which aims to comprehend keypoints across different task scenarios, including keypoint semantic understanding, visual prompt-based keypoint detection, and textual prompt-based keypoint detection. Moreover, we introduce KptLLM, a unified multimodal model that utilizes an identify-then-detect strategy to effectively address these challenges. KptLLM underscores the initial discernment of semantics in keypoints, followed by the precise determination of their positions through a chain-of-thought process. With several carefully designed modules, KptLLM adeptly handles various modality inputs, facilitating the interpretation of both semantic contents and keypoint locations. Our extensive experiments demonstrate KptLLM's superiority in various keypoint detection benchmarks and its unique semantic capabilities in interpreting keypoints.
OwMatch: Conditional Self-Labeling with Consistency for Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning
Authors: Shengjie Niu, Lifan Lin, Jian Huang, Chao Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) offers a robust framework for harnessing the potential of unannotated data. Traditionally, SSL mandates that all classes possess labeled instances. However, the emergence of open-world SSL (OwSSL) introduces a more practical challenge, wherein unlabeled data may encompass samples from unseen classes. This scenario leads to misclassification of unseen classes as known ones, consequently undermining classification accuracy. To overcome this challenge, this study revisits two methodologies from self-supervised and semi-supervised learning, self-labeling and consistency, tailoring them to address the OwSSL problem. Specifically, we propose an effective framework called OwMatch, combining conditional self-labeling and open-world hierarchical thresholding. Theoretically, we analyze the estimation of class distribution on unlabeled data through rigorous statistical analysis, thus demonstrating that OwMatch can ensure the unbiasedness of the self-label assignment estimator with reliability. Comprehensive empirical analyses demonstrate that our method yields substantial performance enhancements across both known and unknown classes in comparison to previous studies. Code is available at https://github.com/niusj03/OwMatch.
Distribution alignment based transfer fusion frameworks on quantum devices for seeking quantum advantages
Authors: Xi He, Feiyu Du, Xiaohan Yu, Yang Zhao, Tao Lei
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

The scarcity of labelled data is specifically an urgent challenge in the field of quantum machine learning (QML). Two transfer fusion frameworks are proposed in this paper to predict the labels of a target domain data by aligning its distribution to a different but related labelled source domain on quantum devices. The frameworks fuses the quantum data from two different, but related domains through a quantum information infusion channel. The predicting tasks in the target domain can be achieved with quantum advantages by post-processing quantum measurement results. One framework, the quantum basic linear algebra subroutines (QBLAS) based implementation, can theoretically achieve the procedure of transfer fusion with quadratic speedup on a universal quantum computer. In addition, the other framework, a hardware-scalable architecture, is implemented on the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices through a variational hybrid quantum-classical procedure. Numerical experiments on the synthetic and handwritten digits datasets demonstrate that the variatioinal transfer fusion (TF) framework can reach state-of-the-art (SOTA) quantum DA method performance.
Bootstrapping Top-down Information for Self-modulating Slot Attention
Authors: Dongwon Kim, Seoyeon Kim, Suha Kwak
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Object Discovery, Visual Reasoning

Object-centric learning (OCL) aims to learn representations of individual objects within visual scenes without manual supervision, facilitating efficient and effective visual reasoning. Traditional OCL methods primarily employ bottom-up approaches that aggregate homogeneous visual features to represent objects. However, in complex visual environments, these methods often fall short due to the heterogeneous nature of visual features within an object. To address this, we propose a novel OCL framework incorporating a top-down pathway. This pathway first bootstraps the semantics of individual objects and then modulates the model to prioritize features relevant to these semantics. By dynamically modulating the model based on its own output, our top-down pathway enhances the representational quality of objects. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple synthetic and real-world object-discovery benchmarks.
Expanding Sparse Tuning for Low Memory Usage
Authors: Shufan Shen, Junshu Sun, Xiangyang Ji, Qingming Huang, Shuhui Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) is an effective method for adapting pre-trained vision models to downstream tasks by tuning a small subset of parameters. Among PEFT methods, sparse tuning achieves superior performance by only adjusting the weights most relevant to downstream tasks, rather than densely tuning the whole weight matrix. However, this performance improvement has been accompanied by increases in memory usage, which stems from two factors, i.e., the storage of the whole weight matrix as learnable parameters in the optimizer and the additional storage of tunable weight indexes. In this paper, we propose a method named SNELL (Sparse tuning with kerNELized LoRA) for sparse tuning with low memory usage. To achieve low memory usage, SNELL decomposes the tunable matrix for sparsification into two learnable low-rank matrices, saving from the costly storage of the whole original matrix. A competition-based sparsification mechanism is further proposed to avoid the storage of tunable weight indexes. To maintain the effectiveness of sparse tuning with low-rank matrices, we extend the low-rank decomposition by applying nonlinear kernel functions to the whole-matrix merging. Consequently, we gain an increase in the rank of the merged matrix, enhancing the ability of SNELL in adapting the pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple downstream tasks show that SNELL achieves state-of-the-art performance with low memory usage, endowing PEFT with sparse tuning to large-scale models. Codes are available at https://github.com/ssfgunner/SNELL.
AIWR: Aerial Image Water Resource Dataset for Segmentation Analysis
Authors: Sangdaow Noppitak, Emmanuel Okafor, Olarik Surinta
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Effective water resource management is crucial in agricultural regions like northeastern Thailand, where limited water retention in sandy soils poses significant challenges. In response to this issue, the Aerial Image Water Resource (AIWR) dataset was developed, comprising 800 aerial images focused on natural and artificial water bodies in this region. The dataset was created using Bing Maps and follows the standards of the Fundamental Geographic Data Set (FGDS). It includes ground truth annotations validated by experts in remote sensing, making it an invaluable resource for researchers in geoinformatics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. The AIWR dataset presents considerable challenges, such as segmentation due to variations in the size, color, shape, and similarity of water bodies, which often resemble other land use categories. The objective of the proposed dataset is to explore advanced AI-driven methods for water body segmentation, addressing the unique challenges posed by the dataset complexity and limited size. This dataset and related research contribute to the development of novel algorithms for water management, supporting sustainable agricultural practices in regions facing similar challenges.
Non rigid geometric distortions correction -- Application to atmospheric turbulence stabilization
Authors: Yu Mao, Jerome Gilles
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

A novel approach is presented to recover an image degraded by atmospheric turbulence. Given a sequence of frames affected by turbulence, we construct a variational model to characterize the static image. The optimization problem is solved by Bregman Iteration and the operator splitting method. Our algorithm is simple, efficient, and can be easily generalized for different scenarios.
MSTA3D: Multi-scale Twin-attention for 3D Instance Segmentation
Authors: Duc Dang Trung Tran, Byeongkeun Kang, Yeejin Lee
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recently, transformer-based techniques incorporating superpoints have become prevalent in 3D instance segmentation. However, they often encounter an over-segmentation problem, especially noticeable with large objects. Additionally, unreliable mask predictions stemming from superpoint mask prediction further compound this issue. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called MSTA3D. It leverages multi-scale feature representation and introduces a twin-attention mechanism to effectively capture them. Furthermore, MSTA3D integrates a box query with a box regularizer, offering a complementary spatial constraint alongside semantic queries. Experimental evaluations on ScanNetV2, ScanNet200 and S3DIS datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art 3D instance segmentation methods.
Learning predictable and robust neural representations by straightening image sequences
Authors: Xueyan Niu, Cristina Savin, Eero P. Simoncelli
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction, Self-Supervised Learning

Prediction is a fundamental capability of all living organisms, and has been proposed as an objective for learning sensory representations. Recent work demonstrates that in primate visual systems, prediction is facilitated by neural representations that follow straighter temporal trajectories than their initial photoreceptor encoding, which allows for prediction by linear extrapolation. Inspired by these experimental findings, we develop a self-supervised learning (SSL) objective that explicitly quantifies and promotes straightening. We demonstrate the power of this objective in training deep feedforward neural networks on smoothly-rendered synthetic image sequences that mimic commonly-occurring properties of natural videos. The learned model contains neural embeddings that are predictive, but also factorize the geometric, photometric, and semantic attributes of objects. The representations also prove more robust to noise and adversarial attacks compared to previous SSL methods that optimize for invariance to random augmentations. Moreover, these beneficial properties can be transferred to other training procedures by using the straightening objective as a regularizer, suggesting a broader utility for straightening as a principle for robust unsupervised learning.
ARN-LSTM: A Multi-Stream Fusion Model for Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Authors: Chuanchuan Wang, Ahmad Sufril Azlan Mohmamed, Mohd Halim Bin Mohd Noor, Xiao Yang, Feifan Yi, Xiang Li
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Activity Recognition, Group Activity Recognition, Relation Network, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

This paper presents the ARN-LSTM architecture, a novel multi-stream action recognition model designed to address the challenge of simultaneously capturing spatial motion and temporal dynamics in action sequences. Traditional methods often focus solely on spatial or temporal features, limiting their ability to comprehend complex human activities fully. Our proposed model integrates joint, motion, and temporal information through a multi-stream fusion architecture. Specifically, it comprises a jointstream for extracting skeleton features, a temporal stream for capturing dynamic temporal features, and an ARN-LSTM block that utilizes Time-Distributed Long Short-Term Memory (TD-LSTM) layers followed by an Attention Relation Network (ARN) to model temporal relations. The outputs from these streams are fused in a fully connected layer to provide the final action prediction. Evaluations on the NTU RGB+D 60 and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets outperform the superior performance of our model, particularly in group activity recognition.
Automatic Structured Pruning for Efficient Architecture in Federated Learning
Authors: Thai Vu Nguyen, Long Bao Le, Anderson Avila
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

In Federated Learning (FL), training is conducted on client devices, typically with limited computational resources and storage capacity. To address these constraints, we propose an automatic pruning scheme tailored for FL systems. Our solution improves computation efficiency on client devices, while minimizing communication costs. One of the challenges of tuning pruning hyper-parameters in FL systems is the restricted access to local data. Thus, we introduce an automatic pruning paradigm that dynamically determines pruning boundaries. Additionally, we utilized a structured pruning algorithm optimized for mobile devices that lack hardware support for sparse computations. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving accuracy comparable to existing methods. Our method notably reduces the number of parameters by 89% and FLOPS by 90%, with minimal impact on the accuracy of the FEMNIST and CelebFaces datasets. Furthermore, our pruning method decreases communication overhead by up to 5x and halves inference time when deployed on Android devices.