pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GAUDA: Generative Adaptive Uncertainty-guided Diffusion-based Augmentation for Surgical Segmentation
Authors: Yannik Frisch, Christina Bornberg, Moritz Fuchs, Anirban Mukhopadhyay
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Augmentation by generative modelling yields a promising alternative to the accumulation of surgical data, where ethical, organisational and regulatory aspects must be considered. Yet, the joint synthesis of (image, mask) pairs for segmentation, a major application in surgery, is rather unexplored. We propose to learn semantically comprehensive yet compact latent representations of the (image, mask) space, which we jointly model with a Latent Diffusion Model. We show that our approach can effectively synthesise unseen high-quality paired segmentation data of remarkable semantic coherence. Generative augmentation is typically applied pre-training by synthesising a fixed number of additional training samples to improve downstream task models. To enhance this approach, we further propose Generative Adaptive Uncertainty-guided Diffusion-based Augmentation (GAUDA), leveraging the epistemic uncertainty of a Bayesian downstream model for targeted online synthesis. We condition the generative model on classes with high estimated uncertainty during training to produce additional unseen samples for these classes. By adaptively utilising the generative model online, we can minimise the number of additional training samples and centre them around the currently most uncertain parts of the data distribution. GAUDA effectively improves downstream segmentation results over comparable methods by an average absolute IoU of 1.6% on CaDISv2 and 1.5% on CholecSeg8k, two prominent surgical datasets for semantic segmentation.
CS-Net:Contribution-based Sampling Network for Point Cloud Simplification
Authors: Tian Guo, Chen Chen, Hui Yuan, Xiaolong Mao, Raouf Hamzaoui, Junhui Hou
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Surface Reconstruction

Point cloud sampling plays a crucial role in reducing computation costs and storage requirements for various vision tasks. Traditional sampling methods, such as farthest point sampling, lack task-specific information and, as a result, cannot guarantee optimal performance in specific applications. Learning-based methods train a network to sample the point cloud for the targeted downstream task. However, they do not guarantee that the sampled points are the most relevant ones. Moreover, they may result in duplicate sampled points, which requires completion of the sampled point cloud through post-processing techniques. To address these limitations, we propose a contribution-based sampling network (CS-Net), where the sampling operation is formulated as a Top-k operation. To ensure that the network can be trained in an end-to-end way using gradient descent algorithms, we use a differentiable approximation to the Top-k operation via entropy regularization of an optimal transport problem. Our network consists of a feature embedding module, a cascade attention module, and a contribution scoring module. The feature embedding module includes a specifically designed spatial pooling layer to reduce parameters while preserving important features. The cascade attention module combines the outputs of three skip connected offset attention layers to emphasize the attractive features and suppress less important ones. The contribution scoring module generates a contribution score for each point and guides the sampling process to prioritize the most important ones. Experiments on the ModelNet40 and PU147 showed that CS-Net achieved state-of-the-art performance in two semantic-based downstream tasks (classification and registration) and two reconstruction-based tasks (compression and surface reconstruction).
Decoupling Appearance Variations with 3D Consistent Features in Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Jiaqi Lin, Zhihao LI, Binxiao Huang, Xiao Tang, Jianzhuang Liu, Shiyong Liu, Xiaofei Wu, Fenglong Song, Wenming Yang
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

Gaussian Splatting has emerged as a prominent 3D representation in novel view synthesis, but it still suffers from appearance variations, which are caused by various factors, such as modern camera ISPs, different time of day, weather conditions, and local light changes. These variations can lead to floaters and color distortions in the rendered images/videos. Recent appearance modeling approaches in Gaussian Splatting are either tightly coupled with the rendering process, hindering real-time rendering, or they only account for mild global variations, performing poorly in scenes with local light changes. In this paper, we propose DAVIGS, a method that decouples appearance variations in a plug-and-play and efficient manner. By transforming the rendering results at the image level instead of the Gaussian level, our approach can model appearance variations with minimal optimization time and memory overhead. Furthermore, our method gathers appearance-related information in 3D space to transform the rendered images, thus building 3D consistency across views implicitly. We validate our method on several appearance-variant scenes, and demonstrate that it achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality with minimal training time and memory usage, without compromising rendering speeds. Additionally, it provides performance improvements for different Gaussian Splatting baselines in a plug-and-play manner.
LD-DETR: Loop Decoder DEtection TRansformer for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection
Authors: Pengcheng Zhao, Zhixian He, Fuwei Zhang, Shujin Lin, Fan Zhou
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Highlight Detection, Moment Retrieval, Natural Language Moment Retrieval, Retrieval

Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection aim to find corresponding content in the video based on a text query. Existing models usually first use contrastive learning methods to align video and text features, then fuse and extract multimodal information, and finally use a Transformer Decoder to decode multimodal information. However, existing methods face several issues: (1) Overlapping semantic information between different samples in the dataset hinders the model's multimodal aligning performance; (2) Existing models are not able to efficiently extract local features of the video; (3) The Transformer Decoder used by the existing model cannot adequately decode multimodal features. To address the above issues, we proposed the LD-DETR model for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection tasks. Specifically, we first distilled the similarity matrix into the identity matrix to mitigate the impact of overlapping semantic information. Then, we designed a method that enables convolutional layers to extract multimodal local features more efficiently. Finally, we fed the output of the Transformer Decoder back into itself to adequately decode multimodal information. We evaluated LD-DETR on four public benchmarks and conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. Our model outperforms the State-Of-The-Art models on QVHighlight, Charades-STA and TACoS datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/qingchen239/ld-detr.
Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaption
Authors: JinYuan Liu, Guanyao Wu, Zhu Liu, Di Wang, Zhiying Jiang, Long Ma, Wei Zhong, Xin Fan, Risheng Liu
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Infrared And Visible Image Fusion

Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) is a critical task in computer vision, aimed at integrating the unique features of both infrared and visible spectra into a unified representation. Since 2018, the field has entered the deep learning era, with an increasing variety of approaches introducing a range of networks and loss functions to enhance visual performance. However, challenges such as data compatibility, perception accuracy, and efficiency remain. Unfortunately, there is a lack of recent comprehensive surveys that address this rapidly expanding domain. This paper fills that gap by providing a thorough survey covering a broad range of topics. We introduce a multi-dimensional framework to elucidate common learning-based IVIF methods, from visual enhancement strategies to data compatibility and task adaptability. We also present a detailed analysis of these approaches, accompanied by a lookup table clarifying their core ideas. Furthermore, we summarize performance comparisons, both quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on registration, fusion, and subsequent high-level tasks. Beyond technical analysis, we discuss potential future directions and open issues in this area. For further details, visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/RollingPlain/IVIF_ZOO.
Deformable Image Registration of Dark-Field Chest Radiographs for Local Lung Signal Change Assessment
Authors: Fabian Drexel, Vasiliki Sideri-Lampretsa, Henriette Bast, Alexander W. Marka, Thomas Koehler, Florian T. Gassert, Daniela Pfeiffer, Daniel Rueckert, Franz Pfeiffer
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration

Dark-field radiography of the human chest has been demonstrated to have promising potential for the analysis of the lung microstructure and the diagnosis of respiratory diseases. However, previous studies of dark-field chest radiographs evaluated the lung signal only in the inspiratory breathing state. Our work aims to add a new perspective to these previous assessments by locally comparing dark-field lung information between different respiratory states. To this end, we discuss suitable image registration methods for dark-field chest radiographs to enable consistent spatial alignment of the lung in distinct breathing states. Utilizing full inspiration and expiration scans from a clinical chronic obstructive pulmonary disease study, we assess the performance of the proposed registration framework and outline applicable evaluation approaches. Our regional characterization of lung dark-field signal changes between the breathing states provides a proof-of-principle that dynamic radiography-based lung function assessment approaches may benefit from considering registered dark-field images in addition to standard plain chest radiographs.
Quadcopter Position Hold Function using Optical Flow in a Smartphone-based Flight Computer
Authors: Noel P. Caliston, Chris Jordan G. Aliac, James Arnold E. Nogra
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Position, Sensor Fusion

Purpose. This paper explores the capability of smartphones as computing devices for a quadcopter, specifically in terms of the ability of drones to maintain a position known as the position hold function. Image processing can be performed with the phone's sensors and powerful built-in camera. Method. Using Shi-Tomasi corner detection and the Lucas-Kanade sparse optical flow algorithms, ground features are recognized and tracked using the downward-facing camera. The position is maintained by computing quadcopter displacement from the center of the image using Euclidian distance, and the corresponding pitch and roll estimate is calculated using the PID controller. Results. Actual flights show a double standard deviation of 18.66 cm from the center for outdoor tests. With a quadcopter size of 58cm x 58cm used, it implies that 95% of the time, the quadcopter is within a diameter of 96 cm. For indoor tests, a double standard deviation of 10.55 cm means that 95% of the time, the quadcopter is within a diameter of 79 cm. Conclusion. Smartphone sensors and cameras can be used to perform optical flow position hold functions, proving their potential as computing devices for drones. Recommendations. To further improve the positioning system of the phone-based quadcopter system, it is suggested that potential sensor fusion be explored with the phone's GNSS sensor, which gives absolute positioning information for outdoor applications. Research Implications. As different devices and gadgets are integrated into the smartphone, this paper presents an opportunity for phone manufacturers and researchers to explore the potential of smartphones for a drone use-case.
A CNN-Transformer for Classification of Longitudinal 3D MRI Images -- A Case Study on Hepatocellular Carcinoma Prediction
Authors: Jakob Nolte, Maureen M. J. Guichelaar, Donald E. Bouman, Stephanie M. van den Berg, Maryam Amir Haeri
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Self-Supervised Learning

Longitudinal MRI analysis is crucial for predicting disease outcomes, particularly in chronic conditions like hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), where early detection can significantly influence treatment strategies and patient prognosis. Yet, due to challenges like limited data availability, subtle parenchymal changes, and the irregular timing of medical screenings, current approaches have so far focused on cross-sectional imaging data. To address this, we propose HCCNet, a novel model architecture that integrates a 3D adaptation of the ConvNeXt CNN architecture with a Transformer encoder, capturing both the intricate spatial features of 3D MRIs and the complex temporal dependencies across different time points. HCCNet utilizes a two-stage pre-training process tailored for longitudinal MRI data. The CNN backbone is pre-trained using a self-supervised learning framework adapted for 3D MRIs, while the Transformer encoder is pre-trained with a sequence-order-prediction task to enhance its understanding of disease progression over time. We demonstrate the effectiveness of HCCNet by applying it to a cohort of liver cirrhosis patients undergoing regular MRI screenings for HCC surveillance. Our results show that HCCNet significantly improves predictive accuracy and reliability over baseline models, providing a robust tool for personalized HCC surveillance. The methodological approach presented in this paper is versatile and can be adapted to various longitudinal MRI screening applications. Its ability to handle varying patient record lengths and irregular screening intervals establishes it as an invaluable framework for monitoring chronic diseases, where timely and accurate disease prognosis is critical for effective treatment planning.
Exploring Transferable Homogeneous Groups for Compositional Zero-Shot Learning
Authors: Zhijie Rao, Jingcai Guo, Miaoge Li, Yang Chen
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, Representation Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Conditional dependency present one of the trickiest problems in Compositional Zero-Shot Learning, leading to significant property variations of the same state (object) across different objects (states). To address this problem, existing approaches often adopt either all-to-one or one-to-one representation paradigms. However, these extremes create an imbalance in the seesaw between transferability and discriminability, favoring one at the expense of the other. Comparatively, humans are adept at analogizing and reasoning in a hierarchical clustering manner, intuitively grouping categories with similar properties to form cohesive concepts. Motivated by this, we propose Homogeneous Group Representation Learning (HGRL), a new perspective formulates state (object) representation learning as multiple homogeneous sub-group representation learning. HGRL seeks to achieve a balance between semantic transferability and discriminability by adaptively discovering and aggregating categories with shared properties, learning distributed group centers that retain group-specific discriminative features. Our method integrates three core components designed to simultaneously enhance both the visual and prompt representation capabilities of the model. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.
Multi-modal Fusion and Query Refinement Network for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection
Authors: Yifang Xu, Yunzhuo Sun, Benxiang Zhai, Zien Xie, Youyao Jia, Sidan Du
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, Highlight Detection, Moment Retrieval, Optical Flow Estimation, Retrieval, Sentence

Given a video and a linguistic query, video moment retrieval and highlight detection (MR&HD) aim to locate all the relevant spans while simultaneously predicting saliency scores. Most existing methods utilize RGB images as input, overlooking the inherent multi-modal visual signals like optical flow and depth. In this paper, we propose a Multi-modal Fusion and Query Refinement Network (MRNet) to learn complementary information from multi-modal cues. Specifically, we design a multi-modal fusion module to dynamically combine RGB, optical flow, and depth map. Furthermore, to simulate human understanding of sentences, we introduce a query refinement module that merges text at different granularities, containing word-, phrase-, and sentence-wise levels. Comprehensive experiments on QVHighlights and Charades datasets indicate that MRNet outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, achieving notable improvements in MR-mAP@Avg (+3.41) and HD-HIT@1 (+3.46) on QVHighlights.
EMO2: End-Effector Guided Audio-Driven Avatar Video Generation
Authors: Linrui Tian, Siqi Hu, Qi Wang, Bang Zhang, Liefeng Bo
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Generation, Video Generation

In this paper, we propose a novel audio-driven talking head method capable of simultaneously generating highly expressive facial expressions and hand gestures. Unlike existing methods that focus on generating full-body or half-body poses, we investigate the challenges of co-speech gesture generation and identify the weak correspondence between audio features and full-body gestures as a key limitation. To address this, we redefine the task as a two-stage process. In the first stage, we generate hand poses directly from audio input, leveraging the strong correlation between audio signals and hand movements. In the second stage, we employ a diffusion model to synthesize video frames, incorporating the hand poses generated in the first stage to produce realistic facial expressions and body movements. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, such as CyberHost and Vlogger, in terms of both visual quality and synchronization accuracy. This work provides a new perspective on audio-driven gesture generation and a robust framework for creating expressive and natural talking head animations.
Can Multimodal LLMs do Visual Temporal Understanding and Reasoning? The answer is No!
Authors: Mohamed Fazli Imam, Chenyang Lyu, Alham Fikri Aji
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved significant advancements in tasks like Visual Question Answering (VQA) by leveraging foundational Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their abilities in specific areas such as temporal understanding, which is crucial for comprehending real-world dynamics, remain underexplored. To address this, we propose a challenging evaluation benchmark named TemporalVQA, consisting of two parts: (1) Temporal Order Understanding and (2) Time-lapse Estimation. The first part requires MLLMs to determine the sequence of events by analyzing temporally consecutive video frames. The second part presents image pairs with varying time differences, framed as multiple-choice questions, asking MLLMs to estimate the time-lapse between images with options ranging from seconds to years. Our evaluations of advanced MLLMs, including models like GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5-Pro, reveal significant challenges: GPT-4o achieved only 43.8% average consistent accuracy in temporal order tasks and 70% in time-lapse estimation, with open-source models performing even less effectively. These findings underscore the limitations of current MLLMs in visual temporal understanding and reasoning, highlighting the need for further improvements in their temporal capabilities. Our dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fazliimam/temporal-vqa.
ClusterViG: Efficient Globally Aware Vision GNNs via Image Partitioning
Authors: Dhruv Parikh, Jacob Fein-Ashley, Tian Ye, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Vision Transformers (ViT) have dominated the field of Computer Vision (CV). Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have performed remarkably well across diverse domains because they can represent complex relationships via unstructured graphs. However, the applicability of GNNs for visual tasks was unexplored till the introduction of Vision GNNs (ViG). Despite the success of ViGs, their performance is severely bottlenecked due to the expensive $k$-Nearest Neighbors ($k$-NN) based graph construction. Recent works addressing this bottleneck impose constraints on the flexibility of GNNs to build unstructured graphs, undermining their core advantage while introducing additional inefficiencies. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method called Dynamic Efficient Graph Convolution (DEGC) for designing efficient and globally aware ViGs. DEGC partitions the input image and constructs graphs in parallel for each partition, improving graph construction efficiency. Further, DEGC integrates local intra-graph and global inter-graph feature learning, enabling enhanced global context awareness. Using DEGC as a building block, we propose a novel CNN-GNN architecture, ClusterViG, for CV tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that ClusterViG reduces end-to-end inference latency for vision tasks by up to $5\times$ when compared against a suite of models such as ViG, ViHGNN, PVG, and GreedyViG, with a similar model parameter count. Additionally, ClusterViG reaches state-of-the-art performance on image classification, object detection, and instance segmentation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed globally aware learning strategy. Finally, input partitioning performed by DEGC enables ClusterViG to be trained efficiently on higher-resolution images, underscoring the scalability of our approach.
A Resource-Efficient Training Framework for Remote Sensing Text--Image Retrieval
Authors: Weihang Zhang, Jihao Li, Shuoke Li, Ziqing Niu, Jialiang Chen, Wenkai Zhang
Date: 2025-01-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Transfer Learning

Remote sensing text--image retrieval (RSTIR) aims to retrieve the matched remote sensing (RS) images from the database according to the descriptive text. Recently, the rapid development of large visual-language pre-training models provides new insights for RSTIR. Nevertheless, as the complexity of models grows in RSTIR, the previous studies suffer from suboptimal resource efficiency during transfer learning. To address this issue, we propose a computation and memory-efficient retrieval (CMER) framework for RSTIR. To reduce the training memory consumption, we propose the Focus-Adapter module, which adopts a side branch structure. Its focus layer suppresses the interference of background pixels for small targets. Simultaneously, to enhance data efficacy, we regard the RS scene category as the metadata and design a concise augmentation technique. The scene label augmentation leverages the prior knowledge from land cover categories and shrinks the search space. We propose the negative sample recycling strategy to make the negative sample pool decoupled from the mini-batch size. It improves the generalization performance without introducing additional encoders. We have conducted quantitative and qualitative experiments on public datasets and expanded the benchmark with some advanced approaches, which demonstrates the competitiveness of the proposed CMER. Compared with the recent advanced methods, the overall retrieval performance of CMER is 2%--5% higher on RSITMD. Moreover, our proposed method reduces memory consumption by 49% and has a 1.4x data throughput during training. The code of the CMER and the dataset will be released at https://github.com/ZhangWeihang99/CMER.