pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
DVMSR: Distillated Vision Mamba for Efficient Super-Resolution
Authors: Xiaoyan Lei, Wenlong Zhang, Weifeng Cao
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Long-range modeling, Mamba, SSIM, Super-Resolution

Efficient Image Super-Resolution (SR) aims to accelerate SR network inference by minimizing computational complexity and network parameters while preserving performance. Existing state-of-the-art Efficient Image Super-Resolution methods are based on convolutional neural networks. Few attempts have been made with Mamba to harness its long-range modeling capability and efficient computational complexity, which have shown impressive performance on high-level vision tasks. In this paper, we propose DVMSR, a novel lightweight Image SR network that incorporates Vision Mamba and a distillation strategy. The network of DVMSR consists of three modules: feature extraction convolution, multiple stacked Residual State Space Blocks (RSSBs), and a reconstruction module. Specifically, the deep feature extraction module is composed of several residual state space blocks (RSSB), each of which has several Vision Mamba Moudles(ViMM) together with a residual connection. To achieve efficiency improvement while maintaining comparable performance, we employ a distillation strategy to the vision Mamba network for superior performance. Specifically, we leverage the rich representation knowledge of teacher network as additional supervision for the output of lightweight student networks. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that our proposed DVMSR can outperform state-of-the-art efficient SR methods in terms of model parameters while maintaining the performance of both PSNR and SSIM. The source code is available at https://github.com/nathan66666/DVMSR.git
E-TSL: A Continuous Educational Turkish Sign Language Dataset with Baseline Methods
Authors: Şükrü Öztürk, Hacer Yalim Keles
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Sign Language Translation

This study introduces the continuous Educational Turkish Sign Language (E-TSL) dataset, collected from online Turkish language lessons for 5th, 6th, and 8th grades. The dataset comprises 1,410 videos totaling nearly 24 hours and includes performances from 11 signers. Turkish, an agglutinative language, poses unique challenges for sign language translation, particularly with a vocabulary where 64% are singleton words and 85% are rare words, appearing less than five times. We developed two baseline models to address these challenges: the Pose to Text Transformer (P2T-T) and the Graph Neural Network based Transformer (GNN-T) models. The GNN-T model achieved 19.13% BLEU-1 score and 3.28% BLEU-4 score, presenting a significant challenge compared to existing benchmarks. The P2T-T model, while demonstrating slightly lower performance in BLEU scores, achieved a higher ROUGE-L score of 22.09%. Additionally, we benchmarked our model using the well-known PHOENIX-Weather 2014T dataset to validate our approach.
Paintings and Drawings Aesthetics Assessment with Rich Attributes for Various Artistic Categories
Authors: Xin Jin, Qianqian Qiao, Yi Lu, Shan Gao, Heng Huang, Guangdong Li
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute

Image aesthetic evaluation is a highly prominent research domain in the field of computer vision. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of datasets and corresponding evaluation methodologies for assessing the aesthetic quality of photographic works, leading to the establishment of a relatively mature research environment. However, in contrast to the extensive research in photographic aesthetics, the field of aesthetic evaluation for paintings and Drawings has seen limited attention until the introduction of the BAID dataset in March 2023. This dataset solely comprises overall scores for high-quality artistic images. Our research marks the pioneering introduction of a multi-attribute, multi-category dataset specifically tailored to the field of painting: Aesthetics of Paintings and Drawings Dataset (APDD). The construction of APDD received active participation from 28 professional artists worldwide, along with dozens of students specializing in the field of art. This dataset encompasses 24 distinct artistic categories and 10 different aesthetic attributes. Each image in APDD has been evaluated by six professionally trained experts in the field of art, including assessments for both total aesthetic scores and aesthetic attribute scores. The final APDD dataset comprises a total of 4985 images, with an annotation count exceeding 31100 entries. Concurrently, we propose an innovative approach: Art Assessment Network for Specific Painting Styles (AANSPS), designed for the assessment of aesthetic attributes in mixed-attribute art datasets. Through this research, our goal is to catalyze advancements in the field of aesthetic evaluation for paintings and drawings, while enriching the available resources and methodologies for its further development and application.
SkelCap: Automated Generation of Descriptive Text from Skeleton Keypoint Sequences
Authors: Ali Emre Keskin, Hacer Yalim Keles
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive

Numerous sign language datasets exist, yet they typically cover only a limited selection of the thousands of signs used globally. Moreover, creating diverse sign language datasets is an expensive and challenging task due to the costs associated with gathering a varied group of signers. Motivated by these challenges, we aimed to develop a solution that addresses these limitations. In this context, we focused on textually describing body movements from skeleton keypoint sequences, leading to the creation of a new dataset. We structured this dataset around AUTSL, a comprehensive isolated Turkish sign language dataset. We also developed a baseline model, SkelCap, which can generate textual descriptions of body movements. This model processes the skeleton keypoints data as a vector, applies a fully connected layer for embedding, and utilizes a transformer neural network for sequence-to-sequence modeling. We conducted extensive evaluations of our model, including signer-agnostic and sign-agnostic assessments. The model achieved promising results, with a ROUGE-L score of 0.98 and a BLEU-4 score of 0.94 in the signer-agnostic evaluation. The dataset we have prepared, namely the AUTSL-SkelCap, will be made publicly available soon.
VectorPainter: Advanced Stylized Vector Graphics Synthesis Using Stroke-Style Priors
Authors: Juncheng Hu, XiMing Xing, Jing Zhang, Qian Yu
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Vector Graphics

We introduce VectorPainter, a novel framework designed for reference-guided text-to-vector-graphics synthesis. Based on our observation that the style of strokes can be an important aspect to distinguish different artists, our method reforms the task into synthesize a desired vector graphics by rearranging stylized strokes, which are vectorized from the reference images. Specifically, our method first converts the pixels of the reference image into a series of vector strokes, and then generates a vector graphic based on the input text description by optimizing the positions and colors of these vector strokes. To precisely capture the style of the reference image in the vectorized strokes, we propose an innovative vectorization method that employs an imitation learning strategy. To preserve the style of the strokes throughout the generation process, we introduce a style-preserving loss function. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing works in stylized vector graphics synthesis, as well as the effectiveness of the various components of our method.
JOSENet: A Joint Stream Embedding Network for Violence Detection in Surveillance Videos
Authors: Pietro Nardelli, Danilo Comminiello
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Self-Supervised Learning

The increasing proliferation of video surveillance cameras and the escalating demand for crime prevention have intensified interest in the task of violence detection within the research community. Compared to other action recognition tasks, violence detection in surveillance videos presents additional issues, such as the wide variety of real fight scenes. Unfortunately, existing datasets for violence detection are relatively small in comparison to those for other action recognition tasks. Moreover, surveillance footage often features different individuals in each video and varying backgrounds for each camera. In addition, fast detection of violent actions in real-life surveillance videos is crucial to prevent adverse outcomes, thus necessitating models that are optimized for reduced memory usage and computational costs. These challenges complicate the application of traditional action recognition methods. To tackle all these issues, we introduce JOSENet, a novel self-supervised framework that provides outstanding performance for violence detection in surveillance videos. The proposed model processes two spatiotemporal video streams, namely RGB frames and optical flows, and incorporates a new regularized self-supervised learning approach for videos. JOSENet demonstrates improved performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, while utilizing only one-fourth of the frames per video segment and operating at a reduced frame rate. The source code is available at https://github.com/ispamm/JOSENet.
Score-based Generative Priors Guided Model-driven Network for MRI Reconstruction
Authors: Xiaoyu Qiao, Weisheng Li, Bin Xiao, Yuping Huang, Lijian Yang
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Hallucination, MRI Reconstruction

Score matching with Langevin dynamics (SMLD) method has been successfully applied to accelerated MRI. However, the hyperparameters in the sampling process require subtle tuning, otherwise the results can be severely corrupted by hallucination artifacts, especially with out-of-distribution test data. To address the limitations, we proposed a novel workflow where naive SMLD samples serve as additional priors to guide model-driven network training. First, we adopted a pretrained score network to generate samples as preliminary guidance images (PGI), obviating the need for network retraining, parameter tuning and in-distribution test data. Although PGIs are corrupted by hallucination artifacts, we believe they can provide extra information through effective denoising steps to facilitate reconstruction. Therefore, we designed a denoising module (DM) in the second step to coarsely eliminate artifacts and noises from PGIs. The features are extracted from a score-based information extractor (SIE) and a cross-domain information extractor (CIE), which directly map to the noise patterns. Third, we designed a model-driven network guided by denoised PGIs (DGIs) to further recover fine details. DGIs are densely connected with intermediate reconstructions in each cascade to enrich the information and are periodically updated to provide more accurate guidance. Our experiments on different datasets reveal that despite the low average quality of PGIs, the proposed workflow can effectively extract valuable information to guide the network training, even with severely reduced training data and sampling steps. Our method outperforms other cutting-edge techniques by effectively mitigating hallucination artifacts, yielding robust and high-quality reconstruction results.
Source-Free Domain Adaptation Guided by Vision and Vision-Language Pre-Training
Authors: Wenyu Zhang, Li Shen, Chuan-Sheng Foo
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Language Modelling, Representation Learning, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to adapt a source model trained on a fully-labeled source domain to a related but unlabeled target domain. While the source model is a key avenue for acquiring target pseudolabels, the generated pseudolabels may exhibit source bias. In the conventional SFDA pipeline, a large data (e.g. ImageNet) pre-trained feature extractor is used to initialize the source model at the start of source training, and subsequently discarded. Despite having diverse features important for generalization, the pre-trained feature extractor can overfit to the source data distribution during source training and forget relevant target domain knowledge. Rather than discarding this valuable knowledge, we introduce an integrated framework to incorporate pre-trained networks into the target adaptation process. The proposed framework is flexible and allows us to plug modern pre-trained networks into the adaptation process to leverage their stronger representation learning capabilities. For adaptation, we propose the Co-learn algorithm to improve target pseudolabel quality collaboratively through the source model and a pre-trained feature extractor. Building on the recent success of the vision-language model CLIP in zero-shot image recognition, we present an extension Co-learn++ to further incorporate CLIP's zero-shot classification decisions. We evaluate on 4 benchmark datasets and include more challenging scenarios such as open-set, partial-set and open-partial SFDA. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed strategy improves adaptation performance and can be successfully integrated with existing SFDA methods. Project code is available at https://github.com/zwenyu/colearn-plus.
iSEARLE: Improving Textual Inversion for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval
Authors: Lorenzo Agnolucci, Alberto Baldrati, Marco Bertini, Alberto del Bimbo
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Composed Image Retrieval (CoIR), Image Retrieval, Retrieval, Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (ZS-CIR)

Given a query consisting of a reference image and a relative caption, Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) aims to retrieve target images visually similar to the reference one while incorporating the changes specified in the relative caption. The reliance of supervised methods on labor-intensive manually labeled datasets hinders their broad applicability. In this work, we introduce a new task, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR), that addresses CIR without the need for a labeled training dataset. We propose an approach named iSEARLE (improved zero-Shot composEd imAge Retrieval with textuaL invErsion) that involves mapping the visual information of the reference image into a pseudo-word token in CLIP token embedding space and combining it with the relative caption. To foster research on ZS-CIR, we present an open-domain benchmarking dataset named CIRCO (Composed Image Retrieval on Common Objects in context), the first CIR dataset where each query is labeled with multiple ground truths and a semantic categorization. The experimental results illustrate that iSEARLE obtains state-of-the-art performance on three different CIR datasets -- FashionIQ, CIRR, and the proposed CIRCO -- and two additional evaluation settings, namely domain conversion and object composition. The dataset, the code, and the model are publicly available at https://github.com/miccunifi/SEARLE.
Invertible Residual Rescaling Models
Authors: Jinmin Li, Tao Dai, Yaohua Zha, Yilu Luo, Longfei Lu, Bin Chen, Zhi Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, Jingyun Zhang
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Rescaling

Invertible Rescaling Networks (IRNs) and their variants have witnessed remarkable achievements in various image processing tasks like image rescaling. However, we observe that IRNs with deeper networks are difficult to train, thus hindering the representational ability of IRNs. To address this issue, we propose Invertible Residual Rescaling Models (IRRM) for image rescaling by learning a bijection between a high-resolution image and its low-resolution counterpart with a specific distribution. Specifically, we propose IRRM to build a deep network, which contains several Residual Downscaling Modules (RDMs) with long skip connections. Each RDM consists of several Invertible Residual Blocks (IRBs) with short connections. In this way, RDM allows rich low-frequency information to be bypassed by skip connections and forces models to focus on extracting high-frequency information from the image. Extensive experiments show that our IRRM performs significantly better than other state-of-the-art methods with much fewer parameters and complexity. Particularly, our IRRM has respectively PSNR gains of at least 0.3 dB over HCFlow and IRN in the x4 rescaling while only using 60% parameters and 50% FLOPs. The code will be available at https://github.com/THU-Kingmin/IRRM.
Imaging Signal Recovery Using Neural Network Priors Under Uncertain Forward Model Parameters
Authors: Xiwen Chen, Wenhui Zhu, Peijie Qiu, Abolfazl Razi
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Compressive Sensing

Inverse imaging problems (IIPs) arise in various applications, with the main objective of reconstructing an image from its compressed measurements. This problem is often ill-posed for being under-determined with multiple interchangeably consistent solutions. The best solution inherently depends on prior knowledge or assumptions, such as the sparsity of the image. Furthermore, the reconstruction process for most IIPs relies significantly on the imaging (i.e. forward model) parameters, which might not be fully known, or the measurement device may undergo calibration drifts. These uncertainties in the forward model create substantial challenges, where inaccurate reconstructions usually happen when the postulated parameters of the forward model do not fully match the actual ones. In this work, we devoted to tackling accurate reconstruction under the context of a set of possible forward model parameters that exist. Here, we propose a novel Moment-Aggregation (MA) framework that is compatible with the popular IIP solution by using a neural network prior. Specifically, our method can reconstruct the signal by considering all candidate parameters of the forward model simultaneously during the update of the neural network. We theoretically demonstrate the convergence of the MA framework, which has a similar complexity with reconstruction under the known forward model parameters. Proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that the proposed MA achieves performance comparable to the forward model with the known precise parameter in reconstruction across both compressive sensing and phase retrieval applications, with a PSNR gap of 0.17 to 1.94 over various datasets, including MNIST, X-ray, Glas, and MoNuseg. This highlights our method's significant potential in reconstruction under an uncertain forward model.
Design, analysis, and manufacturing of a glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens
Authors: Shaohua Gao, Qi Jiang, Yiqi Liao, Yi Qiu, Wanglei Ying, Kailun Yang, Kaiwei Wang, Benhao Zhang, Jian Bai
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00

We propose a high-performance glass-plastic hybrid minimalist aspheric panoramic annular lens (ASPAL) to solve several major limitations of the traditional panoramic annular lens (PAL), such as large size, high weight, and complex system. The field of view (FoV) of the ASPAL is 360{\deg}x(35{\deg}~110{\deg}) and the imaging quality is close to the diffraction limit. This large FoV ASPAL is composed of only 4 lenses. Moreover, we establish a physical structure model of PAL using the ray tracing method and study the influence of its physical parameters on compactness ratio. In addition, for the evaluation of local tolerances of annular surfaces, we propose a tolerance analysis method suitable for ASPAL. This analytical method can effectively analyze surface irregularities on annular surfaces and provide clear guidance on manufacturing tolerances for ASPAL. Benefiting from high-precision glass molding and injection molding aspheric lens manufacturing techniques, we finally manufactured 20 ASPALs in small batches. The weight of an ASPAL prototype is only 8.5 g. Our framework provides promising insights for the application of panoramic systems in space and weight-constrained environmental sensing scenarios such as intelligent security, micro-UAVs, and micro-robots.
Boundary-aware Decoupled Flow Networks for Realistic Extreme Rescaling
Authors: Jinmin Li, Tao Dai, Jingyun Zhang, Kang Liu, Jun Wang, Shaoming Wang, Shu-Tao Xia, rizen guo
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Rescaling, SSIM

Recently developed generative methods, including invertible rescaling network (IRN) based and generative adversarial network (GAN) based methods, have demonstrated exceptional performance in image rescaling. However, IRN-based methods tend to produce over-smoothed results, while GAN-based methods easily generate fake details, which thus hinders their real applications. To address this issue, we propose Boundary-aware Decoupled Flow Networks (BDFlow) to generate realistic and visually pleasing results. Unlike previous methods that model high-frequency information as standard Gaussian distribution directly, our BDFlow first decouples the high-frequency information into \textit{semantic high-frequency} that adheres to a Boundary distribution and \textit{non-semantic high-frequency} counterpart that adheres to a Gaussian distribution. Specifically, to capture semantic high-frequency parts accurately, we use Boundary-aware Mask (BAM) to constrain the model to produce rich textures, while non-semantic high-frequency part is randomly sampled from a Gaussian distribution.Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our BDFlow significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods while maintaining lower complexity. Notably, our BDFlow improves the PSNR by 4.4 dB and the SSIM by 0.1 on average over GRAIN, utilizing only 74% of the parameters and 20% of the computation. The code will be available at https://github.com/THU-Kingmin/BAFlow.
MERIT: Multi-view Evidential learning for Reliable and Interpretable liver fibrosis sTaging
Authors: Yuanye Liu, Zheyao Gao, Nannan Shi, Fuping Wu, Yuxin Shi, Qingchao Chen, Xiahai Zhuang
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: MULTI-VIEW LEARNING, Uncertainty Quantification

Accurate staging of liver fibrosis from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial in clinical practice. While conventional methods often focus on a specific sub-region, multi-view learning captures more information by analyzing multiple patches simultaneously. However, previous multi-view approaches could not typically calculate uncertainty by nature, and they generally integrate features from different views in a black-box fashion, hence compromising reliability as well as interpretability of the resulting models. In this work, we propose a new multi-view method based on evidential learning, referred to as MERIT, which tackles the two challenges in a unified framework. MERIT enables uncertainty quantification of the predictions to enhance reliability, and employs a logic-based combination rule to improve interpretability. Specifically, MERIT models the prediction from each sub-view as an opinion with quantified uncertainty under the guidance of the subjective logic theory. Furthermore, a distribution-aware base rate is introduced to enhance performance, particularly in scenarios involving class distribution shifts. Finally, MERIT adopts a feature-specific combination rule to explicitly fuse multi-view predictions, thereby enhancing interpretability. Results have showcased the effectiveness of the proposed MERIT, highlighting the reliability and offering both ad-hoc and post-hoc interpretability. They also illustrate that MERIT can elucidate the significance of each view in the decision-making process for liver fibrosis staging.