pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ReSyncer: Rewiring Style-based Generator for Unified Audio-Visually Synced Facial Performer
Authors: Jiazhi Guan, Zhiliang Xu, Hang Zhou, Kaisiyuan Wang, Shengyi He, Zhanwang Zhang, Borong Liang, Haocheng Feng, Errui Ding, Jingtuo Liu, Jingdong Wang, Youjian Zhao, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Swapping

Lip-syncing videos with given audio is the foundation for various applications including the creation of virtual presenters or performers. While recent studies explore high-fidelity lip-sync with different techniques, their task-orientated models either require long-term videos for clip-specific training or retain visible artifacts. In this paper, we propose a unified and effective framework ReSyncer, that synchronizes generalized audio-visual facial information. The key design is revisiting and rewiring the Style-based generator to efficiently adopt 3D facial dynamics predicted by a principled style-injected Transformer. By simply re-configuring the information insertion mechanisms within the noise and style space, our framework fuses motion and appearance with unified training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ReSyncer not only produces high-fidelity lip-synced videos according to audio, but also supports multiple appealing properties that are suitable for creating virtual presenters and performers, including fast personalized fine-tuning, video-driven lip-syncing, the transfer of speaking styles, and even face swapping. Resources can be found at https://guanjz20.github.io/projects/ReSyncer.
Biomedical SAM 2: Segment Anything in Biomedical Images and Videos
Authors: Zhiling Yan, Weixiang Sun, Rong Zhou, Zhengqing Yuan, Kai Zhang, Yiwei Li, Tianming Liu, Quanzheng Li, Xiang Li, Lifang He, Lichao Sun
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Medical image segmentation and video object segmentation are essential for diagnosing and analyzing diseases by identifying and measuring biological structures. Recent advances in natural domain have been driven by foundation models like the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM-2). To explore the performance of SAM-2 in biomedical applications, we designed three evaluation pipelines for single-frame 2D image segmentation, multi-frame 3D image segmentation and multi-frame video segmentation with varied prompt designs, revealing SAM-2's limitations in medical contexts. Consequently, we developed BioSAM-2, an enhanced foundation model optimized for biomedical data based on SAM-2. Our experiments show that BioSAM-2 not only surpasses the performance of existing state-of-the-art foundation models but also matches or even exceeds specialist models, demonstrating its efficacy and potential in the medical domain.
DopQ-ViT: Towards Distribution-Friendly and Outlier-Aware Post-Training Quantization for Vision Transformers
Authors: Lianwei Yang, Haisong Gong, Qingyi Gu
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression, Quantization

Vision transformers (ViTs) have garnered significant attention for their performance in vision tasks, but the high computational cost and significant latency issues have hindered widespread adoption. Post-training quantization (PTQ), a promising method for model compression, still faces accuracy degradation challenges with ViTs. There are two reasons for this: the existing quantization paradigm does not fit the power-law distribution of post-Softmax activations well, and accuracy inevitably decreases after reparameterizing post-LayerNorm activations. We propose a Distribution-Friendly and Outlier-Aware Post-training Quantization method for Vision Transformers, named DopQ-ViT. DopQ-ViT analyzes the inefficiencies of current quantizers and introduces a distribution-friendly Tan Quantizer called TanQ. TanQ focuses more on values near 1, more accurately preserving the power-law distribution of post-Softmax activations, and achieves favorable results. Besides, during the reparameterization of post-LayerNorm activations from channel-wise to layer-wise quantization, the accuracy degradation is mainly due to the significant impact of outliers in the scaling factors. Therefore, DopQ-ViT proposes a method to select Median as the Optimal Scaling Factor, denoted as MOSF, which compensates for the influence of outliers and preserves the performance of the quantization model. DopQ-ViT has been extensively validated and significantly improves the performance of quantization models, especially in low-bit settings.
TextIM: Part-aware Interactive Motion Synthesis from Text
Authors: Siyuan Fan, Bo Du, Xiantao Cai, Bo Peng, Longling Sun
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Synthesis

In this work, we propose TextIM, a novel framework for synthesizing TEXT-driven human Interactive Motions, with a focus on the precise alignment of part-level semantics. Existing methods often overlook the critical roles of interactive body parts and fail to adequately capture and align part-level semantics, resulting in inaccuracies and even erroneous movement outcomes. To address these issues, TextIM utilizes a decoupled conditional diffusion framework to enhance the detailed alignment between interactive movements and corresponding semantic intents from textual descriptions. Our approach leverages large language models, functioning as a human brain, to identify interacting human body parts and to comprehend interaction semantics to generate complicated and subtle interactive motion. Guided by the refined movements of the interacting parts, TextIM further extends these movements into a coherent whole-body motion. We design a spatial coherence module to complement the entire body movements while maintaining consistency and harmony across body parts using a part graph convolutional network. For training and evaluation, we carefully selected and re-labeled interactive motions from HUMANML3D to develop a specialized dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that TextIM produces semantically accurate human interactive motions, significantly enhancing the realism and applicability of synthesized interactive motions in diverse scenarios, even including interactions with deformable and dynamically changing objects.
MDT-A2G: Exploring Masked Diffusion Transformers for Co-Speech Gesture Generation
Authors: Xiaofeng Mao, Zhengkai Jiang, Qilin Wang, Chencan Fu, Jiangning Zhang, Jiafu Wu, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Wei Li, Mingmin Chi
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Gesture Generation

Recent advancements in the field of Diffusion Transformers have substantially improved the generation of high-quality 2D images, 3D videos, and 3D shapes. However, the effectiveness of the Transformer architecture in the domain of co-speech gesture generation remains relatively unexplored, as prior methodologies have predominantly employed the Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) or simple a few transformer layers. In an attempt to bridge this research gap, we introduce a novel Masked Diffusion Transformer for co-speech gesture generation, referred to as MDT-A2G, which directly implements the denoising process on gesture sequences. To enhance the contextual reasoning capability of temporally aligned speech-driven gestures, we incorporate a novel Masked Diffusion Transformer. This model employs a mask modeling scheme specifically designed to strengthen temporal relation learning among sequence gestures, thereby expediting the learning process and leading to coherent and realistic motions. Apart from audio, Our MDT-A2G model also integrates multi-modal information, encompassing text, emotion, and identity. Furthermore, we propose an efficient inference strategy that diminishes the denoising computation by leveraging previously calculated results, thereby achieving a speedup with negligible performance degradation. Experimental results demonstrate that MDT-A2G excels in gesture generation, boasting a learning speed that is over 6$\times$ faster than traditional diffusion transformers and an inference speed that is 5.7$\times$ than the standard diffusion model.
On Feasibility of Intent Obfuscating Attacks
Authors: ZhaoBin Li, Patrick Shafto
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Intent obfuscation is a common tactic in adversarial situations, enabling the attacker to both manipulate the target system and avoid culpability. Surprisingly, it has rarely been implemented in adversarial attacks on machine learning systems. We are the first to propose using intent obfuscation to generate adversarial examples for object detectors: by perturbing another non-overlapping object to disrupt the target object, the attacker hides their intended target. We conduct a randomized experiment on 5 prominent detectors -- YOLOv3, SSD, RetinaNet, Faster R-CNN, and Cascade R-CNN -- using both targeted and untargeted attacks and achieve success on all models and attacks. We analyze the success factors characterizing intent obfuscating attacks, including target object confidence and perturb object sizes. We then demonstrate that the attacker can exploit these success factors to increase success rates for all models and attacks. Finally, we discuss main takeaways and legal repercussions.
Scribble-Based Interactive Segmentation of Medical Hyperspectral Images
Authors: Zhonghao Wang, Junwen Wang, Charlie Budd, Oscar MacCormac, Jonathan Shapey, Tom Vercauteren
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is an advanced medical imaging modality that captures optical data across a broad spectral range, providing novel insights into the biochemical composition of tissues. HSI may enable precise differentiation between various tissue types and pathologies, making it particularly valuable for tumour detection, tissue classification, and disease diagnosis. Deep learning-based segmentation methods have shown considerable advancements, offering automated and accurate results. However, these methods face challenges with HSI datasets due to limited annotated data and discrepancies from hardware and acquisition techniques~\cite{clancy2020surgical,studier2023heiporspectral}. Variability in clinical protocols also leads to different definitions of structure boundaries. Interactive segmentation methods, utilizing user knowledge and clinical insights, can overcome these issues and achieve precise segmentation results \cite{zhao2013overview}. This work introduces a scribble-based interactive segmentation framework for medical hyperspectral images. The proposed method utilizes deep learning for feature extraction and a geodesic distance map generated from user-provided scribbles to obtain the segmentation results. The experiment results show that utilising the geodesic distance maps based on deep learning-extracted features achieved better segmentation results than geodesic distance maps directly generated from hyperspectral images, reconstructed RGB images, or Euclidean distance maps.
SiCo: An Interactive Size-Controllable Virtual Try-On Approach for Informed Decision-Making
Authors: Sherry X. Chen, Alex Christopher Lim, Yimeng Liu, Pradeep Sen, Misha Sra
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Virtual Try-on

Virtual try-on (VTO) applications aim to replicate the in-store shopping experience and enhance online shopping by enabling users to interact with garments. However, many existing tools adopt a one-size-fits-all approach when visualizing clothing items. This approach limits user interaction with garments, particularly regarding size and fit adjustments, and fails to provide direct insights for size recommendations. As a result, these limitations contribute to high return rates in online shopping. To address this, we introduce SiCo, a new online VTO system that allows users to upload images of themselves and interact with garments by visualizing how different sizes would fit their bodies. Our user study demonstrates that our approach significantly improves users' ability to assess how outfits will appear on their bodies and increases their confidence in selecting clothing sizes that align with their preferences. Based on our evaluation, we believe that SiCo has the potential to reduce return rates and transform the online clothing shopping experience.
Analyzing Data Efficiency and Performance of Machine Learning Algorithms for Assessing Low Back Pain Physical Rehabilitation Exercises
Authors: Aleksa Marusic, Louis Annabi, Sao Msi Nguyen, Adriana TAPUS
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Analyzing human motion is an active research area, with various applications. In this work, we focus on human motion analysis in the context of physical rehabilitation using a robot coach system. Computer-aided assessment of physical rehabilitation entails evaluation of patient performance in completing prescribed rehabilitation exercises, based on processing movement data captured with a sensory system, such as RGB and RGB-D cameras. As 2D and 3D human pose estimation from RGB images had made impressive improvements, we aim to compare the assessment of physical rehabilitation exercises using movement data obtained from both RGB-D camera (Microsoft Kinect) and estimation from RGB videos (OpenPose and BlazePose algorithms). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is employed from position (and orientation) features, with performance metrics defined based on the log-likelihood values from GMM. The evaluation is performed on a medical database of clinical patients carrying out low back-pain rehabilitation exercises, previously coached by robot Poppy.
Multistain Pretraining for Slide Representation Learning in Pathology
Authors: Guillaume Jaume, Anurag Vaidya, Andrew Zhang, Andrew H. Song, Richard J. Chen, Sharifa Sahai, Dandan Mo, Emilio Madrigal, Long Phi Le, Faisal Mahmood
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, whole slide images

Developing self-supervised learning (SSL) models that can learn universal and transferable representations of H&E gigapixel whole-slide images (WSIs) is becoming increasingly valuable in computational pathology. These models hold the potential to advance critical tasks such as few-shot classification, slide retrieval, and patient stratification. Existing approaches for slide representation learning extend the principles of SSL from small images (e.g., 224 x 224 patches) to entire slides, usually by aligning two different augmentations (or views) of the slide. Yet the resulting representation remains constrained by the limited clinical and biological diversity of the views. Instead, we postulate that slides stained with multiple markers, such as immunohistochemistry, can be used as different views to form a rich task-agnostic training signal. To this end, we introduce Madeleine, a multimodal pretraining strategy for slide representation learning. Madeleine is trained with a dual global-local cross-stain alignment objective on large cohorts of breast cancer samples (N=4,211 WSIs across five stains) and kidney transplant samples (N=12,070 WSIs across four stains). We demonstrate the quality of slide representations learned by Madeleine on various downstream evaluations, ranging from morphological and molecular classification to prognostic prediction, comprising 21 tasks using 7,299 WSIs from multiple medical centers. Code is available at https://github.com/mahmoodlab/MADELEINE.
ASR-enhanced Multimodal Representation Learning for Cross-Domain Product Retrieval
Authors: Ruixiang Zhao, Jian Jia, Yan Li, Xuehan Bai, Quan Chen, Han Li, Peng Jiang, Xirong Li
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Representation Learning, Retrieval, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

E-commerce is increasingly multimedia-enriched, with products exhibited in a broad-domain manner as images, short videos, or live stream promotions. A unified and vectorized cross-domain production representation is essential. Due to large intra-product variance and high inter-product similarity in the broad-domain scenario, a visual-only representation is inadequate. While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) text derived from the short or live-stream videos is readily accessible, how to de-noise the excessively noisy text for multimodal representation learning is mostly untouched. We propose ASR-enhanced Multimodal Product Representation Learning (AMPere). In order to extract product-specific information from the raw ASR text, AMPere uses an easy-to-implement LLM-based ASR text summarizer. The LLM-summarized text, together with visual data, is then fed into a multi-branch network to generate compact multimodal embeddings. Extensive experiments on a large-scale tri-domain dataset verify the effectiveness of AMPere in obtaining a unified multimodal product representation that clearly improves cross-domain product retrieval.
Training-Free Condition Video Diffusion Models for single frame Spatial-Semantic Echocardiogram Synthesis
Authors: Van Phi Nguyen, Tri Nhan Luong Ha, Huy Hieu Pham, Quoc Long Tran
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, Segmentation

Conditional video diffusion models (CDM) have shown promising results for video synthesis, potentially enabling the generation of realistic echocardiograms to address the problem of data scarcity. However, current CDMs require a paired segmentation map and echocardiogram dataset. We present a new method called Free-Echo for generating realistic echocardiograms from a single end-diastolic segmentation map without additional training data. Our method is based on the 3D-Unet with Temporal Attention Layers model and is conditioned on the segmentation map using a training-free conditioning method based on SDEdit. We evaluate our model on two public echocardiogram datasets, CAMUS and EchoNet-Dynamic. We show that our model can generate plausible echocardiograms that are spatially aligned with the input segmentation map, achieving performance comparable to training-based CDMs. Our work opens up new possibilities for generating echocardiograms from a single segmentation map, which can be used for data augmentation, domain adaptation, and other applications in medical imaging. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/gungui98/echo-free}
SGSR: Structure-Guided Multi-Contrast MRI Super-Resolution via Spatio-Frequency Co-Query Attention
Authors: Shaoming Zheng, Yinsong Wang, Siyi Du, Chen Qin
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Super-Resolution

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a leading diagnostic modality for a wide range of exams, where multiple contrast images are often acquired for characterizing different tissues. However, acquiring high-resolution MRI typically extends scan time, which can introduce motion artifacts. Super-resolution of MRI therefore emerges as a promising approach to mitigate these challenges. Earlier studies have investigated the use of multiple contrasts for MRI super-resolution (MCSR), whereas majority of them did not fully exploit the rich contrast-invariant structural information. To fully utilize such crucial prior knowledge of multi-contrast MRI, in this work, we propose a novel structure-guided MCSR (SGSR) framework based on a new spatio-frequency co-query attention (CQA) mechanism. Specifically, CQA performs attention on features of multiple contrasts with a shared structural query, which is particularly designed to extract, fuse, and refine the common structures from different contrasts. We further propose a novel frequency-domain CQA module in addition to the spatial domain, to enable more fine-grained structural refinement. Extensive experiments on fastMRI knee data and low-field brain MRI show that SGSR outperforms state-of-the-art MCSR methods with statistical significance.
LAC-Net: Linear-Fusion Attention-Guided Convolutional Network for Accurate Robotic Grasping Under the Occlusion
Authors: Jinyu Zhang, Yongchong Gu, Jianxiong Gao, Haitao Lin, Qiang Sun, Xinwei Sun, xiangyang xue, Yanwei Fu
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Robotic Grasping, Segmentation

This paper addresses the challenge of perceiving complete object shapes through visual perception. While prior studies have demonstrated encouraging outcomes in segmenting the visible parts of objects within a scene, amodal segmentation, in particular, has the potential to allow robots to infer the occluded parts of objects. To this end, this paper introduces a new framework that explores amodal segmentation for robotic grasping in cluttered scenes, thus greatly enhancing robotic grasping abilities. Initially, we use a conventional segmentation algorithm to detect the visible segments of the target object, which provides shape priors for completing the full object mask. Particularly, to explore how to utilize semantic features from RGB images and geometric information from depth images, we propose a Linear-fusion Attention-guided Convolutional Network (LAC-Net). LAC-Net utilizes the linear-fusion strategy to effectively fuse this cross-modal data, and then uses the prior visible mask as attention map to guide the network to focus on target feature locations for further complete mask recovery. Using the amodal mask of the target object provides advantages in selecting more accurate and robust grasp points compared to relying solely on the visible segments. The results on different datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, the robot experiments validate the feasibility and robustness of this method in the real world. Our code and demonstrations are available on the project page: https://jrryzh.github.io/LAC-Net.
Segment Anything in Medical Images and Videos: Benchmark and Deployment
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Segmentation, Transfer Learning, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in segmentation foundation models have enabled accurate and efficient segmentation across a wide range of natural images and videos, but their utility to medical data remains unclear. In this work, we first present a comprehensive benchmarking of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) across 11 medical image modalities and videos and point out its strengths and weaknesses by comparing it to SAM1 and MedSAM. Then, we develop a transfer learning pipeline and demonstrate SAM2 can be quickly adapted to medical domain by fine-tuning. Furthermore, we implement SAM2 as a 3D slicer plugin and Gradio API for efficient 3D image and video segmentation. The code has been made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/bowang-lab/MedSAM}.
Development of REGAI: Rubric Enabled Generative Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Zach Johnson, Jeremy Straub
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This paper presents and evaluates a new retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and large language model (LLM)-based artificial intelligence (AI) technique: rubric enabled generative artificial intelligence (REGAI). REGAI uses rubrics, which can be created manually or automatically by the system, to enhance the performance of LLMs for evaluation purposes. REGAI improves on the performance of both classical LLMs and RAG-based LLM techniques. This paper describes REGAI, presents data regarding its performance and discusses several possible application areas for the technology.