pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LLARVA: Vision-Action Instruction Tuning Enhances Robot Learning
Authors: Dantong Niu, Yuvan Sharma, Giscard Biamby, Jerome Quenum, Yutong Bai, Baifeng Shi, Trevor Darrell, Roei Herzig
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

In recent years, instruction-tuned Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have been successful at several tasks, including image captioning and visual question answering; yet leveraging these models remains an open question for robotics. Prior LMMs for robotics applications have been extensively trained on language and action data, but their ability to generalize in different settings has often been less than desired. To address this, we introduce LLARVA, a model trained with a novel instruction tuning method that leverages structured prompts to unify a range of robotic learning tasks, scenarios, and environments. Additionally, we show that predicting intermediate 2-D representations, which we refer to as "visual traces", can help further align vision and action spaces for robot learning. We generate 8.5M image-visual trace pairs from the Open X-Embodiment dataset in order to pre-train our model, and we evaluate on 12 different tasks in the RLBench simulator as well as a physical Franka Emika Panda 7-DoF robot. Our experiments yield strong performance, demonstrating that LLARVA - using 2-D and language representations - performs well compared to several contemporary baselines, and can generalize across various robot environments and configurations.
Faces of Experimental Pain: Transferability of Deep Learned Heat Pain Features to Electrical Pain
Authors: Pooja Prajod, Dominik Schiller, Daksitha Withanage Don, Elisabeth André
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The limited size of pain datasets are a challenge in developing robust deep learning models for pain recognition. Transfer learning approaches are often employed in these scenarios. In this study, we investigate whether deep learned feature representation for one type of experimentally induced pain can be transferred to another. Participating in the AI4Pain challenge, our goal is to classify three levels of pain (No-Pain, Low-Pain, High-Pain). The challenge dataset contains data collected from 65 participants undergoing varying intensities of electrical pain. We utilize the video recording from the dataset to investigate the transferability of deep learned heat pain model to electrical pain. In our proposed approach, we leverage an existing heat pain convolutional neural network (CNN) - trained on BioVid dataset - as a feature extractor. The images from the challenge dataset are inputted to the pre-trained heat pain CNN to obtain feature vectors. These feature vectors are used to train two machine learning models: a simple feed-forward neural network and a long short-term memory (LSTM) network. Our approach was tested using the dataset's predefined training, validation, and testing splits. Our models outperformed the baseline of the challenge on both the validation and tests sets, highlighting the potential of models trained on other pain datasets for reliable feature extraction.
PhyBench: A Physical Commonsense Benchmark for Evaluating Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Fanqing Meng, Wenqi Shao, Lixin Luo, Yahong Wang, Yiran Chen, Quanfeng Lu, Yue Yang, Tianshuo Yang, Kaipeng Zhang, Yu Qiao, Ping Luo
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Text-to-image (T2I) models have made substantial progress in generating images from textual prompts. However, they frequently fail to produce images consistent with physical commonsense, a vital capability for applications in world simulation and everyday tasks. Current T2I evaluation benchmarks focus on metrics such as accuracy, bias, and safety, neglecting the evaluation of models' internal knowledge, particularly physical commonsense. To address this issue, we introduce PhyBench, a comprehensive T2I evaluation dataset comprising 700 prompts across 4 primary categories: mechanics, optics, thermodynamics, and material properties, encompassing 31 distinct physical scenarios. We assess 6 prominent T2I models, including proprietary models DALLE3 and Gemini, and demonstrate that incorporating physical principles into prompts enhances the models' ability to generate physically accurate images. Our findings reveal that: (1) even advanced models frequently err in various physical scenarios, except for optics; (2) GPT-4o, with item-specific scoring instructions, effectively evaluates the models' understanding of physical commonsense, closely aligning with human assessments; and (3) current T2I models are primarily focused on text-to-image translation, lacking profound reasoning regarding physical commonsense. We advocate for increased attention to the inherent knowledge within T2I models, beyond their utility as mere image generation tools. The data will be available soon.
Mix-Domain Contrastive Learning for Unpaired H&E-to-IHC Stain Translation
Authors: Song Wang, Zhong Zhang, Huan Yan, Ming Xu, Guanghui Wang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Translation

H&E-to-IHC stain translation techniques offer a promising solution for precise cancer diagnosis, especially in low-resource regions where there is a shortage of health professionals and limited access to expensive equipment. Considering the pixel-level misalignment of H&E-IHC image pairs, current research explores the pathological consistency between patches from the same positions of the image pair. However, most of them overemphasize the correspondence between domains or patches, overlooking the side information provided by the non-corresponding objects. In this paper, we propose a Mix-Domain Contrastive Learning (MDCL) method to leverage the supervision information in unpaired H&E-to-IHC stain translation. Specifically, the proposed MDCL method aggregates the inter-domain and intra-domain pathology information by estimating the correlation between the anchor patch and all the patches from the matching images, encouraging the network to learn additional contrastive knowledge from mixed domains. With the mix-domain pathology information aggregation, MDCL enhances the pathological consistency between the corresponding patches and the component discrepancy of the patches from the different positions of the generated IHC image. Extensive experiments on two H&E-to-IHC stain translation datasets, namely MIST and BCI, demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple metrics.
Solving Vision Tasks with Simple Photoreceptors Instead of Cameras
Authors: Andrei Atanov, Jiawei Fu, Rishubh Singh, Isabella Yu, Andrew Spielberg, Amir Zamir
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Visual Navigation

A de facto standard in solving computer vision problems is to use a common high-resolution camera and choose its placement on an agent (i.e., position and orientation) based on human intuition. On the other hand, extremely simple and well-designed visual sensors found throughout nature allow many organisms to perform diverse, complex behaviors. In this work, motivated by these examples, we raise the following questions: 1. How effective simple visual sensors are in solving vision tasks? 2. What role does their design play in their effectiveness? We explore simple sensors with resolutions as low as one-by-one pixel, representing a single photoreceptor First, we demonstrate that just a few photoreceptors can be enough to solve many tasks, such as visual navigation and continuous control, reasonably well, with performance comparable to that of a high-resolution camera. Second, we show that the design of these simple visual sensors plays a crucial role in their ability to provide useful information and successfully solve these tasks. To find a well-performing design, we present a computational design optimization algorithm and evaluate its effectiveness across different tasks and domains, showing promising results. Finally, we perform a human survey to evaluate the effectiveness of intuitive designs devised manually by humans, showing that the computationally found design is among the best designs in most cases.
Matching Query Image Against Selected NeRF Feature for Efficient and Scalable Localization
Authors: Huaiji Zhou, Bing Wang, Changhao Chen
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, NeRF, Pose Estimation, Scene Segmentation, Visual Localization

Neural implicit representations such as NeRF have revolutionized 3D scene representation with photo-realistic quality. However, existing methods for visual localization within NeRF representations suffer from inefficiency and scalability issues, particularly in large-scale environments. This work proposes MatLoc-NeRF, a novel matching-based localization framework using selected NeRF features. It addresses efficiency by employing a learnable feature selection mechanism that identifies informative NeRF features for matching with query images. This eliminates the need for all NeRF features or additional descriptors, leading to faster and more accurate pose estimation. To tackle large-scale scenes, MatLoc-NeRF utilizes a pose-aware scene partitioning strategy. It ensures that only the most relevant NeRF sub-block generates key features for a specific pose. Additionally, scene segmentation and a place predictor provide fast coarse initial pose estimation. Evaluations on public large-scale datasets demonstrate that MatLoc-NeRF achieves superior efficiency and accuracy compared to existing NeRF-based localization methods.
Domain Generalization for In-Orbit 6D Pose Estimation
Authors: Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, Christophe De Vleeschouwer
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 6D Pose Estimation, Data Augmentation, Domain Generalization, Multi-Task Learning, Pose Estimation, Spacecraft Pose Estimation

We address the problem of estimating the relative 6D pose, i.e., position and orientation, of a target spacecraft, from a monocular image, a key capability for future autonomous Rendezvous and Proximity Operations. Due to the difficulty of acquiring large sets of real images, spacecraft pose estimation networks are exclusively trained on synthetic ones. However, because those images do not capture the illumination conditions encountered in orbit, pose estimation networks face a domain gap problem, i.e., they do not generalize to real images. Our work introduces a method that bridges this domain gap. It relies on a novel, end-to-end, neural-based architecture as well as a novel learning strategy. This strategy improves the domain generalization abilities of the network through multi-task learning and aggressive data augmentation policies, thereby enforcing the network to learn domain-invariant features. We demonstrate that our method effectively closes the domain gap, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on the widespread SPEED+ dataset. Finally, ablation studies assess the impact of key components of our method on its generalization abilities.
V3Det Challenge 2024 on Vast Vocabulary and Open Vocabulary Object Detection: Methods and Results
Authors: Jiaqi Wang, Yuhang Zang, Pan Zhang, Tao Chu, Yuhang Cao, Zeyi Sun, Ziyu Liu, Xiaoyi Dong, Tong Wu, Dahua Lin, Zeming Chen, Zhi Wang, Lingchen Meng, Wenhao Yao, Jianwei Yang, Sihong Wu, Zhineng Chen, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang, Peixi Wu, Bosong Chai, Xuan Nie, Longquan Yan, Zeyu Wang, Qifan Zhou, Boning Wang, Jiaqi Huang, Zunnan Xu, Xiu Li, Kehong Yuan, Yanyan Zu, Jiayao Ha, Qiong Gao, Licheng Jiao
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Open-vocabulary object detection, Open Vocabulary Object Detection

Detecting objects in real-world scenes is a complex task due to various challenges, including the vast range of object categories, and potential encounters with previously unknown or unseen objects. The challenges necessitate the development of public benchmarks and challenges to advance the field of object detection. Inspired by the success of previous COCO and LVIS Challenges, we organize the V3Det Challenge 2024 in conjunction with the 4th Open World Vision Workshop: Visual Perception via Learning in an Open World (VPLOW) at CVPR 2024, Seattle, US. This challenge aims to push the boundaries of object detection research and encourage innovation in this field. The V3Det Challenge 2024 consists of two tracks: 1) Vast Vocabulary Object Detection: This track focuses on detecting objects from a large set of 13204 categories, testing the detection algorithm's ability to recognize and locate diverse objects. 2) Open Vocabulary Object Detection: This track goes a step further, requiring algorithms to detect objects from an open set of categories, including unknown objects. In the following sections, we will provide a comprehensive summary and analysis of the solutions submitted by participants. By analyzing the methods and solutions presented, we aim to inspire future research directions in vast vocabulary and open-vocabulary object detection, driving progress in this field. Challenge homepage: https://v3det.openxlab.org.cn/challenge
InterNeRF: Scaling Radiance Fields via Parameter Interpolation
Authors: Clinton Wang, Peter Hedman, Polina Golland, Jonathan T. Barron, Daniel Duckworth
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have unmatched fidelity on large, real-world scenes. A common approach for scaling NeRFs is to partition the scene into regions, each of which is assigned its own parameters. When implemented naively, such an approach is limited by poor test-time scaling and inconsistent appearance and geometry. We instead propose InterNeRF, a novel architecture for rendering a target view using a subset of the model's parameters. Our approach enables out-of-core training and rendering, increasing total model capacity with only a modest increase to training time. We demonstrate significant improvements in multi-room scenes while remaining competitive on standard benchmarks.
Correspondence Free Multivector Cloud Registration using Conformal Geometric Algebra
Authors: Francisco Xavier Vasconcelos, Jacinto C. Nascimento
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Registration, Translation

We present, for the first time, a novel theoretical approach to address the problem of correspondence free multivector cloud registration in conformal geometric algebra. Such formalism achieves several favorable properties. Primarily, it forms an orthogonal automorphism that extends beyond the typical vector space to the entire conformal geometric algebra while respecting the multivector grading. Concretely, the registration can be viewed as an orthogonal transformation (\it i.e., scale, translation, rotation) belonging to $SO(4,1)$ - group of special orthogonal transformations in conformal geometric algebra. We will show that such formalism is able to: $(i)$ perform the registration without directly accessing the input multivectors. Instead, we use primitives or geometric objects provided by the conformal model - the multivectors, $(ii)$ the geometric objects are obtained by solving a multilinear eigenvalue problem to find sets of eigenmultivectors. In this way, we can explicitly avoid solving the correspondences in the registration process. Most importantly, this offers rotation and translation equivariant properties between the input multivectors and the eigenmultivectors. Experimental evaluation is conducted in datasets commonly used in point cloud registration, to testify the usefulness of the approach with emphasis to ambiguities arising from high levels of noise. The code is available at https://github.com/Numerical-Geometric-Algebra/RegistrationGA . This work was submitted to the International Journal of Computer Vision and is currently under review.
Latent Denoising Diffusion GAN: Faster sampling, Higher image quality
Authors: Luan Thanh Trinh, Tomoki Hamagami
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diversity, Image Generation

Diffusion models are emerging as powerful solutions for generating high-fidelity and diverse images, often surpassing GANs under many circumstances. However, their slow inference speed hinders their potential for real-time applications. To address this, DiffusionGAN leveraged a conditional GAN to drastically reduce the denoising steps and speed up inference. Its advancement, Wavelet Diffusion, further accelerated the process by converting data into wavelet space, thus enhancing efficiency. Nonetheless, these models still fall short of GANs in terms of speed and image quality. To bridge these gaps, this paper introduces the Latent Denoising Diffusion GAN, which employs pre-trained autoencoders to compress images into a compact latent space, significantly improving inference speed and image quality. Furthermore, we propose a Weighted Learning strategy to enhance diversity and image quality. Experimental results on the CIFAR-10, CelebA-HQ, and LSUN-Church datasets prove that our model achieves state-of-the-art running speed among diffusion models. Compared to its predecessors, DiffusionGAN and Wavelet Diffusion, our model shows remarkable improvements in all evaluation metrics. Code and pre-trained checkpoints: \url{https://github.com/thanhluantrinh/LDDGAN.git}
OGNI-DC: Robust Depth Completion with Optimization-Guided Neural Iterations
Authors: Yiming Zuo, Jia Deng
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion

Depth completion is the task of generating a dense depth map given an image and a sparse depth map as inputs. It has important applications in various downstream tasks. In this paper, we present OGNI-DC, a novel framework for depth completion. The key to our method is "Optimization-Guided Neural Iterations" (OGNI). It consists of a recurrent unit that refines a depth gradient field and a differentiable depth integrator that integrates the depth gradients into a depth map. OGNI-DC exhibits strong generalization, outperforming baselines by a large margin on unseen datasets and across various sparsity levels. Moreover, OGNI-DC has high accuracy, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the NYUv2 and the KITTI benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/princeton-vl/OGNI-DC.
A First Physical-World Trajectory Prediction Attack via LiDAR-induced Deceptions in Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yang Lou, Yi Zhu, Qun Song, Rui Tan, Chunming Qiao, Wei-Bin Lee, JianPing Wang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Prediction, Trajectory Prediction

Trajectory prediction forecasts nearby agents' moves based on their historical trajectories. Accurate trajectory prediction is crucial for autonomous vehicles. Existing attacks compromise the prediction model of a victim AV by directly manipulating the historical trajectory of an attacker AV, which has limited real-world applicability. This paper, for the first time, explores an indirect attack approach that induces prediction errors via attacks against the perception module of a victim AV. Although it has been shown that physically realizable attacks against LiDAR-based perception are possible by placing a few objects at strategic locations, it is still an open challenge to find an object location from the vast search space in order to launch effective attacks against prediction under varying victim AV velocities. Through analysis, we observe that a prediction model is prone to an attack focusing on a single point in the scene. Consequently, we propose a novel two-stage attack framework to realize the single-point attack. The first stage of prediction-side attack efficiently identifies, guided by the distribution of detection results under object-based attacks against perception, the state perturbations for the prediction model that are effective and velocity-insensitive. In the second stage of location matching, we match the feasible object locations with the found state perturbations. Our evaluation using a public autonomous driving dataset shows that our attack causes a collision rate of up to 63% and various hazardous responses of the victim AV. The effectiveness of our attack is also demonstrated on a real testbed car. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first security analysis spanning from LiDAR-based perception to prediction in autonomous driving, leading to a realistic attack on prediction. To counteract the proposed attack, potential defenses are discussed.
Lightweight Model Pre-training via Language Guided Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Mingsheng Li, Lin Zhang, Mingzhen Zhu, Zilong Huang, Gang Yu, Jiayuan Fan, Tao Chen
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

This paper studies the problem of pre-training for small models, which is essential for many mobile devices. Current state-of-the-art methods on this problem transfer the representational knowledge of a large network (as a Teacher) into a smaller model (as a Student) using self-supervised distillation, improving the performance of the small model on downstream tasks. However, existing approaches are insufficient in extracting the crucial knowledge that is useful for discerning categories in downstream tasks during the distillation process. In this paper, for the first time, we introduce language guidance to the distillation process and propose a new method named Language-Guided Distillation (LGD) system, which uses category names of the target downstream task to help refine the knowledge transferred between the teacher and student. To this end, we utilize a pre-trained text encoder to extract semantic embeddings from language and construct a textual semantic space called Textual Semantics Bank (TSB). Furthermore, we design a Language-Guided Knowledge Aggregation (LGKA) module to construct the visual semantic space, also named Visual Semantics Bank (VSB). The task-related knowledge is transferred by driving a student encoder to mimic the similarity score distribution inferred by a teacher over TSB and VSB. Compared with other small models obtained by either ImageNet pre-training or self-supervised distillation, experiment results show that the distilled lightweight model using the proposed LGD method presents state-of-the-art performance and is validated on various downstream tasks, including classification, detection, and segmentation. We have made the code available at https://github.com/mZhenz/LGD.
Effective Rank Analysis and Regularization for Enhanced 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Junha Hyung, Susung Hong, Sungwon Hwang, Jaeseong Lee, Jaegul Choo, Jin-Hwa Kim
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction

3D reconstruction from multi-view images is one of the fundamental challenges in computer vision and graphics. Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a promising technique capable of real-time rendering with high-quality 3D reconstruction. This method utilizes 3D Gaussian representation and tile-based splatting techniques, bypassing the expensive neural field querying. Despite its potential, 3DGS encounters challenges such as needle-like artifacts, suboptimal geometries, and inaccurate normals caused by the Gaussians converging into anisotropic shapes with one dominant variance. We propose using the effective rank analysis to examine the shape statistics of 3D Gaussian primitives, and identify the Gaussians indeed converge into needle-like shapes with the effective rank 1. To address this, we introduce the effective rank as a regularization, which constrains the structure of the Gaussians. Our new regularization method enhances normal and geometry reconstruction while reducing needle-like artifacts. The approach can be integrated as an add-on module to other 3DGS variants, improving their quality without compromising visual fidelity. The project page is available at https://junhahyung.github.io/erankgs.github.io.