pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Application of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) for Synthetic Training Data Creation to improve performance of ANN Classifier for extracting Built-Up pixels from Landsat Satellite Imagery
Authors: Amritendu Mukherjee, Dipanwita Sinha Mukherjee, Parthasarathy Ramachandran
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network

Training a neural network for pixel based classification task using low resolution Landsat images is difficult as the size of the training data is usually small due to less number of available pixels that represent a single class without any mixing with other classes. Due to this scarcity of training data, neural network may not be able to attain expected level of accuracy. This limitation could be overcome using a generative network that aims to generate synthetic data having the same distribution as the sample data with which it is trained. In this work, we have proposed a methodology for improving the performance of ANN classifier to identify built-up pixels in the Landsat$7$ image with the help of developing a simple GAN architecture that could generate synthetic training pixels when trained using original set of sample built-up pixels. To ensure that the marginal and joint distributions of all the bands corresponding to the generated and original set of pixels are indistinguishable, non-parametric Kolmogorov Smirnov Test and Ball Divergence based Equality of Distributions Test have been performed respectively. It has been observed that the overall accuracy and kappa coefficient of the ANN model for built-up classification have continuously improved from $0.9331$ to $0.9983$ and $0.8277$ to $0.9958$ respectively, with the inclusion of generated sets of built-up pixels to the original one.
Imagine with the Teacher: Complete Shape in a Multi-View Distillation Way
Authors: Zhanpeng Luo, Linna Wang, Guangwu Qian, Li Lu
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Completion, Transfer Learning

Point cloud completion aims to recover the completed 3D shape of an object from its partial observation caused by occlusion, sensor's limitation, noise, etc. When some key semantic information is lost in the incomplete point cloud, the neural network needs to infer the missing part based on the input information. Intuitively we would apply an autoencoder architecture to solve this kind of problem, which take the incomplete point cloud as input and is supervised by the ground truth. This process that develops model's imagination from incomplete shape to complete shape is done automatically in the latent space. But the knowledge for mapping from incomplete to complete still remains dark and could be further explored. Motivated by the knowledge distillation's teacher-student learning strategy, we design a knowledge transfer way for completing 3d shape. In this work, we propose a novel View Distillation Point Completion Network (VD-PCN), which solve the completion problem by a multi-view distillation way. The design methodology fully leverages the orderliness of 2d pixels, flexibleness of 2d processing and powerfulness of 2d network. Extensive evaluations on PCN, ShapeNet55/34, and MVP datasets confirm the effectiveness of our design and knowledge transfer strategy, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Committed to facilitate ongoing research, we will make our code publicly available.
Medical Semantic Segmentation with Diffusion Pretrain
Authors: David Li, Anvar Kurmukov, Mikhail Goncharov, Roman Sokolov, Mikhail Belyaev
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Linear evaluation, Medical Image Segmentation, Organ Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in deep learning have shown that learning robust feature representations is critical for the success of many computer vision tasks, including medical image segmentation. In particular, both transformer and convolutional-based architectures have benefit from leveraging pretext tasks for pretraining. However, the adoption of pretext tasks in 3D medical imaging has been less explored and remains a challenge, especially in the context of learning generalizable feature representations. We propose a novel pretraining strategy using diffusion models with anatomical guidance, tailored to the intricacies of 3D medical image data. We introduce an auxiliary diffusion process to pretrain a model that produce generalizable feature representations, useful for a variety of downstream segmentation tasks. We employ an additional model that predicts 3D universal body-part coordinates, providing guidance during the diffusion process and improving spatial awareness in generated representations. This approach not only aids in resolving localization inaccuracies but also enriches the model's ability to understand complex anatomical structures. Empirical validation on a 13-class organ segmentation task demonstrate the effectiveness of our pretraining technique. It surpasses existing restorative pretraining methods in 3D medical image segmentation by $7.5\%$, and is competitive with the state-of-the-art contrastive pretraining approach, achieving an average Dice coefficient of 67.8 in a non-linear evaluation scenario.
Neuro-LIFT: A Neuromorphic, LLM-based Interactive Framework for Autonomous Drone FlighT at the Edge
Authors: Amogh Joshi, Sourav Sanyal, Kaushik Roy
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation, Decision Making

The integration of human-intuitive interactions into autonomous systems has been limited. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems struggle with context and intent understanding, severely restricting human-robot interaction. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed this dynamic, allowing for intuitive and high-level communication through speech and text, and bridging the gap between human commands and robotic actions. Additionally, autonomous navigation has emerged as a central focus in robotics research, with artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly being leveraged to enhance these systems. However, existing AI-based navigation algorithms face significant challenges in latency-critical tasks where rapid decision-making is critical. Traditional frame-based vision systems, while effective for high-level decision-making, suffer from high energy consumption and latency, limiting their applicability in real-time scenarios. Neuromorphic vision systems, combining event-based cameras and spiking neural networks (SNNs), offer a promising alternative by enabling energy-efficient, low-latency navigation. Despite their potential, real-world implementations of these systems, particularly on physical platforms such as drones, remain scarce. In this work, we present Neuro-LIFT, a real-time neuromorphic navigation framework implemented on a Parrot Bebop2 quadrotor. Leveraging an LLM for natural language processing, Neuro-LIFT translates human speech into high-level planning commands which are then autonomously executed using event-based neuromorphic vision and physics-driven planning. Our framework demonstrates its capabilities in navigating in a dynamic environment, avoiding obstacles, and adapting to human instructions in real-time.
ContextFormer: Redefining Efficiency in Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Mian Muhammad Naeem Abid, Nancy Mehta, Zongwei Wu, Fayaz Ali Dharejo, Radu Timofte
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Real-Time Semantic Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation assigns labels to pixels in images, a critical yet challenging task in computer vision. Convolutional methods, although capturing local dependencies well, struggle with long-range relationships. Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in global context capture but are hindered by high computational demands, especially for high-resolution inputs. Most research optimizes the encoder architecture, leaving the bottleneck underexplored - a key area for enhancing performance and efficiency. We propose ContextFormer, a hybrid framework leveraging the strengths of CNNs and ViTs in the bottleneck to balance efficiency, accuracy, and robustness for real-time semantic segmentation. The framework's efficiency is driven by three synergistic modules: the Token Pyramid Extraction Module (TPEM) for hierarchical multi-scale representation, the Transformer and Modulating DepthwiseConv (Trans-MDC) block for dynamic scale-aware feature modeling, and the Feature Merging Module (FMM) for robust integration with enhanced spatial and contextual consistency. Extensive experiments on ADE20K, Pascal Context, CityScapes, and COCO-Stuff datasets show ContextFormer significantly outperforms existing models, achieving state-of-the-art mIoU scores, setting a new benchmark for efficiency and performance. The codes will be made publicly available.
Inference-Time Text-to-Video Alignment with Diffusion Latent Beam Search
Authors: Yuta Oshima, Masahiro Suzuki, Yutaka Matsuo, Hiroki Furuta
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Alignment, Video Generation

The remarkable progress in text-to-video diffusion models enables photorealistic generations, although the contents of the generated video often include unnatural movement or deformation, reverse playback, and motionless scenes. Recently, an alignment problem has attracted huge attention, where we steer the output of diffusion models based on some quantity on the goodness of the content. Because there is a large room for improvement of perceptual quality along the frame direction, we should address which metrics we should optimize and how we can optimize them in the video generation. In this paper, we propose diffusion latent beam search with lookahead estimator, which can select better diffusion latent to maximize a given alignment reward, at inference time. We then point out that the improvement of perceptual video quality considering the alignment to prompts requires reward calibration by weighting existing metrics. When evaluating outputs by using vision language models as a proxy of humans, many previous metrics to quantify the naturalness of video do not always correlate with evaluation and also depend on the degree of dynamic descriptions in evaluation prompts. We demonstrate that our method improves the perceptual quality based on the calibrated reward, without model parameter update, and outputs the best generation compared to greedy search and best-of-N sampling. We provide practical guidelines on which axes, among search budget, lookahead steps for reward estimate, and denoising steps, in the reverse diffusion process, we should allocate the inference-time computation.
Accelerating Diffusion Transformer via Error-Optimized Cache
Authors: Junxiang Qiu, Shuo Wang, Jinda Lu, Lin Liu, Houcheng Jiang, Yanbin Hao
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00

Diffusion Transformer (DiT) is a crucial method for content generation. However, it needs a lot of time to sample. Many studies have attempted to use caching to reduce the time consumption of sampling. Existing caching methods accelerate generation by reusing DiT features from the previous time step and skipping calculations in the next, but they tend to locate and cache low-error modules without focusing on reducing caching-induced errors, resulting in a sharp decline in generated content quality when increasing caching intensity. To solve this problem, we propose the Error-Optimized Cache (EOC). This method introduces three key improvements: (1) Prior knowledge extraction: Extract and process the caching differences; (2) A judgment method for cache optimization: Determine whether certain caching steps need to be optimized; (3) Cache optimization: reduce caching errors. Experiments show that this algorithm significantly reduces the error accumulation caused by caching (especially over-caching). On the ImageNet dataset, without significantly increasing the computational burden, this method improves the quality of the generated images under the over-caching, rule-based, and training-based methods. Specifically, the Fr\'echet Inception Distance (FID) values are improved as follows: from 6.857 to 5.821, from 3.870 to 3.692 and form 3.539 to 3.451 respectively.
Integrating Semi-Supervised and Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Wanli Ma, Oktay Karakus, Paul L. Rosin
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Pseudo Label, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose a novel active learning approach integrated with an improved semi-supervised learning framework to reduce the cost of manual annotation and enhance model performance. Our proposed approach effectively leverages both the labelled data selected through active learning and the unlabelled data excluded from the selection process. The proposed active learning approach pinpoints areas where the pseudo-labels are likely to be inaccurate. Then, an automatic and efficient pseudo-label auto-refinement (PLAR) module is proposed to correct pixels with potentially erroneous pseudo-labels by comparing their feature representations with those of labelled regions. This approach operates without increasing the labelling budget and is based on the cluster assumption, which states that pixels belonging to the same class should exhibit similar representations in feature space. Furthermore, manual labelling is only applied to the most difficult and uncertain areas in unlabelled data, where insufficient information prevents the PLAR module from making a decision. We evaluated the proposed hybrid semi-supervised active learning framework on two benchmark datasets, one from natural and the other from remote sensing imagery domains. In both cases, it outperformed state-of-the-art methods in the semantic segmentation task.
Single cell resolution 3D imaging and segmentation within intact live tissues
Authors: G. Paci, P. Vicente-Munuera, I. Fernandez-Mosquera, A. Miranda, K. Lau, Q. Zhang, R. Barrientos, Y. Mao
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Segmentation

Epithelial cells form diverse structures from squamous spherical organoids to densely packed pseudostratified tissues. Quantification of cellular properties in these contexts requires high-resolution deep imaging and computational techniques to achieve truthful three-dimensional (3D) structural features. Here, we describe a detailed step-by-step protocol for sample preparation, imaging and deep-learning-assisted cell segmentation to achieve accurate quantification of fluorescently labelled individual cells in 3D within live tissues. We share the lessons learned through troubleshooting 3D imaging of Drosophila wing discs, including considerations on the choice of microscopy modality and settings (objective, sample mounting) and available segmentation methods. In addition, we include a computational pipeline alongside custom code to assist replication of the protocol. While we focus on the segmentation of cell outlines from membrane labelling, this protocol applies to a wide variety of samples, and we believe it be valuable for studying other tissues that demand complex analysis in 3D.
RaySplats: Ray Tracing based Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Krzysztof Byrski, Marcin Mazur, Jacek Tabor, Tadeusz Dziarmaga, Marcin Kądziołka, Dawid Baran, Przemysław Spurek
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) is a process that enables the direct creation of 3D objects from 2D images. This representation offers numerous advantages, including rapid training and rendering. However, a significant limitation of 3DGS is the challenge of incorporating light and shadow reflections, primarily due to the utilization of rasterization rather than ray tracing for rendering. This paper introduces RaySplats, a model that employs ray-tracing based Gaussian Splatting. Rather than utilizing the projection of Gaussians, our method employs a ray-tracing mechanism, operating directly on Gaussian primitives represented by confidence ellipses with RGB colors. In practice, we compute the intersection between ellipses and rays to construct ray-tracing algorithms, facilitating the incorporation of meshes with Gaussian Splatting models and the addition of lights, shadows, and other related effects.
A Survey on Class-Agnostic Counting: Advancements from Reference-Based to Open-World Text-Guided Approaches
Authors: Luca Ciampi, Ali Azmoudeh, Elif Ecem Akbaba, Erdi Sarıtaş, Ziya Ata Yazıcı, Hazim Kemal Ekenel, Giuseppe Amato, Fabrizio Falchi
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Counting

Object counting has recently shifted towards class-agnostic counting (CAC), which addresses the challenge of counting objects across arbitrary categories, tackling a critical need in versatile counting systems. While humans effortlessly identify and count objects from diverse categories without prior knowledge, most counting methods remain restricted to enumerating instances of known classes, requiring extensive labeled datasets for training, and struggling under open-vocabulary settings. Conversely, CAC aims to count objects belonging to classes never seen during training, typically operating in a few-shot setting. In this paper, for the first time, we review advancements in CAC methodologies, categorizing them into three paradigms based on how target object classes can be specified: reference-based, reference-less, and open-world text-guided. Reference-based approaches have set performance benchmarks using exemplar-guided mechanisms. Reference-less methods eliminate exemplar dependency by leveraging inherent image patterns. Finally, open-world text-guided methods utilize vision-language models, enabling object class descriptions through textual prompts, representing a flexible and appealing solution. We analyze state-of-the-art techniques and we report their results on existing gold standard benchmarks, comparing their performance and identifying and discussing their strengths and limitations. Persistent challenges -- such as annotation dependency, scalability, and generalization -- are discussed, alongside future directions. We believe this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers to understand the progressive developments and contributions over time and the current state-of-the-art of CAC, suggesting insights for future directions and challenges to be addressed.
Augmented Intelligence for Multimodal Virtual Biopsy in Breast Cancer Using Generative Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Aurora Rofena, Claudia Lucia Piccolo, Bruno Beomonte Zobel, Paolo Soda, Valerio Guarrasi
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Full-Field Digital Mammography (FFDM) is the primary imaging modality for routine breast cancer screening; however, its effectiveness is limited in patients with dense breast tissue or fibrocystic conditions. Contrast-Enhanced Spectral Mammography (CESM), a second-level imaging technique, offers enhanced accuracy in tumor detection. Nonetheless, its application is restricted due to higher radiation exposure, the use of contrast agents, and limited accessibility. As a result, CESM is typically reserved for select cases, leaving many patients to rely solely on FFDM despite the superior diagnostic performance of CESM. While biopsy remains the gold standard for definitive diagnosis, it is an invasive procedure that can cause discomfort for patients. We introduce a multimodal, multi-view deep learning approach for virtual biopsy, integrating FFDM and CESM modalities in craniocaudal and mediolateral oblique views to classify lesions as malignant or benign. To address the challenge of missing CESM data, we leverage generative artificial intelligence to impute CESM images from FFDM scans. Experimental results demonstrate that incorporating the CESM modality is crucial to enhance the performance of virtual biopsy. When real CESM data is missing, synthetic CESM images proved effective, outperforming the use of FFDM alone, particularly in multimodal configurations that combine FFDM and CESM modalities. The proposed approach has the potential to improve diagnostic workflows, providing clinicians with augmented intelligence tools to improve diagnostic accuracy and patient care. Additionally, as a contribution to the research community, we publicly release the dataset used in our experiments, facilitating further advancements in this field.
Poison as Cure: Visual Noise for Mitigating Object Hallucinations in LVMs
Authors: Kejia Zhang, Keda Tao, Jiasheng Tang, Huan Wang
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Object Hallucination

Large vision-language models (LVMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with visual perception capabilities, enabling them to process and interpret visual information. A major challenge compromising their reliability is object hallucination that LVMs may generate plausible but factually inaccurate information. We propose a novel visual adversarial perturbation (VAP) method to mitigate this hallucination issue. VAP alleviates LVM hallucination by applying strategically optimized visual noise without altering the base model. Our approach formulates hallucination suppression as an optimization problem, leveraging adversarial strategies to generate beneficial visual perturbations that enhance the model's factual grounding and reduce parametric knowledge bias. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently reduces object hallucinations across 8 state-of-the-art LVMs, validating its efficacy across diverse evaluations.
RMDM: Radio Map Diffusion Model with Physics Informed
Authors: Haozhe Jia, Wenshuo Chen, Zhihui Huang, Hongru Xiao, Nanqian Jia, Keming Wu, Songning Lai, Yutao Yue
Date: 2025-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Intelligent Communication, model

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, the efficient utilization of spectrum resources, optimization of communication quality, and intelligent communication have become critical. Radio map reconstruction is essential for enabling advanced applications, yet challenges such as complex signal propagation and sparse data hinder accurate reconstruction. To address these issues, we propose the **Radio Map Diffusion Model (RMDM)**, a physics-informed framework that integrates **Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs)** to incorporate constraints like the **Helmholtz equation**. RMDM employs a dual U-Net architecture: the first ensures physical consistency by minimizing PDE residuals, boundary conditions, and source constraints, while the second refines predictions via diffusion-based denoising. By leveraging physical laws, RMDM significantly enhances accuracy, robustness, and generalization. Experiments demonstrate that RMDM outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving **NMSE of 0.0031** and **RMSE of 0.0125** under the Static RM (SRM) setting, and **NMSE of 0.0047** and **RMSE of 0.0146** under the Dynamic RM (DRM) setting. These results establish a novel paradigm for integrating physics-informed and data-driven approaches in radio map reconstruction, particularly under sparse data conditions.