pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Accelerating Flood Warnings by 10 Hours: The Power of River Network Topology in AI-enhanced Flood Forecasting
Authors: Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Yinqiang Zheng, Xuan Song
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloth-Changing Person Re-Identification, Density Ratio Estimation, Feature Correlation, Person Re-Identification

Climate change-driven floods demand advanced forecasting models, yet Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) underutilize river network topology due to tree-like structures causing over-squashing from high node resistance distances. This study identifies this limitation and introduces a reachability-based graph transformation to densify topological connections, reducing resistance distances. Empirical tests show transformed-GNNs outperform EA-LSTM in extreme flood prediction, achieving 24-h water level accuracy equivalent to EA-LSTM's 14-h forecasts - a 71% improvement in long-term predictive horizon. The dense graph retains flow dynamics across hierarchical river branches, enabling GNNs to capture distal node interactions critical for rare flood events. This topological innovation bridges the gap between river network structure and GNN modeling, offering a scalable framework for early warning systems.
Generative Portrait Shadow Removal
Authors: Jae Shin Yoon, Zhixin Shu, Mengwei Ren, Xuaner Zhang, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Krishna Kumar Singh, He Zhang
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Shadow Removal

We introduce a high-fidelity portrait shadow removal model that can effectively enhance the image of a portrait by predicting its appearance under disturbing shadows and highlights. Portrait shadow removal is a highly ill-posed problem where multiple plausible solutions can be found based on a single image. While existing works have solved this problem by predicting the appearance residuals that can propagate local shadow distribution, such methods are often incomplete and lead to unnatural predictions, especially for portraits with hard shadows. We overcome the limitations of existing local propagation methods by formulating the removal problem as a generation task where a diffusion model learns to globally rebuild the human appearance from scratch as a condition of an input portrait image. For robust and natural shadow removal, we propose to train the diffusion model with a compositional repurposing framework: a pre-trained text-guided image generation model is first fine-tuned to harmonize the lighting and color of the foreground with a background scene by using a background harmonization dataset; and then the model is further fine-tuned to generate a shadow-free portrait image via a shadow-paired dataset. To overcome the limitation of losing fine details in the latent diffusion model, we propose a guided-upsampling network to restore the original high-frequency details (wrinkles and dots) from the input image. To enable our compositional training framework, we construct a high-fidelity and large-scale dataset using a lightstage capturing system and synthetic graphics simulation. Our generative framework effectively removes shadows caused by both self and external occlusions while maintaining original lighting distribution and high-frequency details. Our method also demonstrates robustness to diverse subjects captured in real environments.
Toward General Object-level Mapping from Sparse Views with 3D Diffusion Priors
Authors: Ziwei Liao, Binbin Xu, Steven L. Waslander
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Object-level mapping builds a 3D map of objects in a scene with detailed shapes and poses from multi-view sensor observations. Conventional methods struggle to build complete shapes and estimate accurate poses due to partial occlusions and sensor noise. They require dense observations to cover all objects, which is challenging to achieve in robotics trajectories. Recent work introduces generative shape priors for object-level mapping from sparse views, but is limited to single-category objects. In this work, we propose a General Object-level Mapping system, GOM, which leverages a 3D diffusion model as shape prior with multi-category support and outputs Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) for both texture and geometry for all objects in a scene. GOM includes an effective formulation to guide a pre-trained diffusion model with extra nonlinear constraints from sensor measurements without finetuning. We also develop a probabilistic optimization formulation to fuse multi-view sensor observations and diffusion priors for joint 3D object pose and shape estimation. Our GOM system demonstrates superior multi-category mapping performance from sparse views, and achieves more accurate mapping results compared to state-of-the-art methods on the real-world benchmarks. We will release our code: https://github.com/TRAILab/GeneralObjectMapping.
Residual Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for Enhanced Deep Learning
Authors: Ray Congrui Yu, Sherry Wu, Jiang Gui
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Deep Learning

Despite the strong performance in many computer vision tasks, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can sometimes struggle to efficiently capture long-range, complex non-linear dependencies in deeper layers of the network. We address this limitation by introducing Residual KAN, which incorporates the Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) within the CNN framework as a residual component. Our approach uses Chebyshev polynomials as the basis for KAN convolutions that enables more expressive and adaptive feature representations while maintaining computational efficiency. The proposed RKAN blocks, when integrated into established architectures such as ResNet and DenseNet, offer consistent improvements over the baseline models on various well-known benchmarks. Our results demonstrate the potential of RKAN to enhance the capabilities of deep CNNs in visual data.
EgoQR: Efficient QR Code Reading in Egocentric Settings
Authors: Mohsen Moslehpour, Yichao Lu, Pierce Chuang, Ashish Shenoy, Debojeet Chatterjee, Abhay Harpale, Srihari Jayakumar, Vikas Bhardwaj, Seonghyeon Nam, Anuj Kumar
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Friction

QR codes have become ubiquitous in daily life, enabling rapid information exchange. With the increasing adoption of smart wearable devices, there is a need for efficient, and friction-less QR code reading capabilities from Egocentric point-of-views. However, adapting existing phone-based QR code readers to egocentric images poses significant challenges. Code reading from egocentric images bring unique challenges such as wide field-of-view, code distortion and lack of visual feedback as compared to phones where users can adjust the position and framing. Furthermore, wearable devices impose constraints on resources like compute, power and memory. To address these challenges, we present EgoQR, a novel system for reading QR codes from egocentric images, and is well suited for deployment on wearable devices. Our approach consists of two primary components: detection and decoding, designed to operate on high-resolution images on the device with minimal power consumption and added latency. The detection component efficiently locates potential QR codes within the image, while our enhanced decoding component extracts and interprets the encoded information. We incorporate innovative techniques to handle the specific challenges of egocentric imagery, such as varying perspectives, wider field of view, and motion blur. We evaluate our approach on a dataset of egocentric images, demonstrating 34% improvement in reading the code compared to an existing state of the art QR code readers.
R-Bench: Are your Large Multimodal Model Robust to Real-world Corruptions?
Authors: Chunyi Li, Jianbo Zhang, ZiCheng Zhang, HaoNing Wu, Yuan Tian, Wei Sun, Guo Lu, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Weisi Lin, Guangtao Zhai
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00

The outstanding performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has made them widely applied in vision-related tasks. However, various corruptions in the real world mean that images will not be as ideal as in simulations, presenting significant challenges for the practical application of LMMs. To address this issue, we introduce R-Bench, a benchmark focused on the **Real-world Robustness of LMMs**. Specifically, we: (a) model the complete link from user capture to LMMs reception, comprising 33 corruption dimensions, including 7 steps according to the corruption sequence, and 7 groups based on low-level attributes; (b) collect reference/distorted image dataset before/after corruption, including 2,970 question-answer pairs with human labeling; (c) propose comprehensive evaluation for absolute/relative robustness and benchmark 20 mainstream LMMs. Results show that while LMMs can correctly handle the original reference images, their performance is not stable when faced with distorted images, and there is a significant gap in robustness compared to the human visual system. We hope that R-Bench will inspire improving the robustness of LMMs, **extending them from experimental simulations to the real-world application**. Check https://q-future.github.io/R-Bench for details.
Image Watermarks are Removable Using Controllable Regeneration from Clean Noise
Authors: Yepeng Liu, Yiren Song, Hai Ci, Yu Zhang, Haofan Wang, Mike Zheng Shou, Yuheng Bu
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Denoising

Image watermark techniques provide an effective way to assert ownership, deter misuse, and trace content sources, which has become increasingly essential in the era of large generative models. A critical attribute of watermark techniques is their robustness against various manipulations. In this paper, we introduce a watermark removal approach capable of effectively nullifying state-of-the-art watermarking techniques. Our primary insight involves regenerating the watermarked image starting from a clean Gaussian noise via a controllable diffusion model, utilizing the extracted semantic and spatial features from the watermarked image. The semantic control adapter and the spatial control network are specifically trained to control the denoising process towards ensuring image quality and enhancing consistency between the cleaned image and the original watermarked image. To achieve a smooth trade-off between watermark removal performance and image consistency, we further propose an adjustable and controllable regeneration scheme. This scheme adds varying numbers of noise steps to the latent representation of the watermarked image, followed by a controlled denoising process starting from this noisy latent representation. As the number of noise steps increases, the latent representation progressively approaches clean Gaussian noise, facilitating the desired trade-off. We apply our watermark removal methods across various watermarking techniques, and the results demonstrate that our methods offer superior visual consistency/quality and enhanced watermark removal performance compared to existing regeneration approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/yepengliu/CtrlRegen.
PH-Dropout: Practical Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification for View Synthesis
Authors: Chuanhao Sun, Thanos Triantafyllou, Anthos Makris, Maja Drmač, Kai Xu, Luo Mai, Mahesh K. Marina
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF, Representation Learning, Uncertainty Quantification

View synthesis using Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and Gaussian Splatting (GS) has demonstrated impressive fidelity in rendering real-world scenarios. However, practical methods for accurate and efficient epistemic Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) in view synthesis are lacking. Existing approaches for NeRF either introduce significant computational overhead (e.g., ``10x increase in training time" or ``10x repeated training") or are limited to specific uncertainty conditions or models. Notably, GS models lack any systematic approach for comprehensive epistemic UQ. This capability is crucial for improving the robustness and scalability of neural view synthesis, enabling active model updates, error estimation, and scalable ensemble modeling based on uncertainty. In this paper, we revisit NeRF and GS-based methods from a function approximation perspective, identifying key differences and connections in 3D representation learning. Building on these insights, we introduce PH-Dropout (Post hoc Dropout), the first real-time and accurate method for epistemic uncertainty estimation that operates directly on pre-trained NeRF and GS models. Extensive evaluations validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of PH-Dropout.
Herd Mentality in Augmentation -- Not a Good Idea! A Robust Multi-stage Approach towards Deepfake Detection
Authors: Monu, Rohan Raju Dhanakshirur
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping

The rapid increase in deepfake technology has raised significant concerns about digital media integrity. Detecting deepfakes is crucial for safeguarding digital media. However, most standard image classifiers fail to distinguish between fake and real faces. Our analysis reveals that this failure is due to the model's inability to explicitly focus on the artefacts typically in deepfakes. We propose an enhanced architecture based on the GenConViT model, which incorporates weighted loss and update augmentation techniques and includes masked eye pretraining. This proposed model improves the F1 score by 1.71% and the accuracy by 4.34% on the Celeb-DF v2 dataset. The source code for our model is available at https://github.com/Monu-Khicher-1/multi-stage-learning
AI-Driven Early Mental Health Screening: Analyzing Selfies of Pregnant Women
Authors: Gustavo A. Basílio, Thiago B. Pereira, Alessandro L. Koerich, Hermano Tavares, Ludmila Dias, Maria das Graças da S. Teixeira, Rafael T. Sousa, Wilian H. Hisatugu, Amanda S. Mota, Anilton S. Garcia, Marco Aurélio K. Galletta, Thiago M. Paixão
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition

Major Depressive Disorder and anxiety disorders affect millions globally, contributing significantly to the burden of mental health issues. Early screening is crucial for effective intervention, as timely identification of mental health issues can significantly improve treatment outcomes. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be valuable for improving the screening of mental disorders, enabling early intervention and better treatment outcomes. AI-driven screening can leverage the analysis of multiple data sources, including facial features in digital images. However, existing methods often rely on controlled environments or specialized equipment, limiting their broad applicability. This study explores the potential of AI models for ubiquitous depression-anxiety screening given face-centric selfies. The investigation focuses on high-risk pregnant patients, a population that is particularly vulnerable to mental health issues. To cope with limited training data resulting from our clinical setup, pre-trained models were utilized in two different approaches: fine-tuning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) originally designed for facial expression recognition and employing vision-language models (VLMs) for zero-shot analysis of facial expressions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed VLM-based method significantly outperforms CNNs, achieving an accuracy of 77.6%. Although there is significant room for improvement, the results suggest that VLMs can be a promising approach for mental health screening.
A Deep Learning-Based Approach for Mangrove Monitoring
Authors: Lucas José Velôso de Souza, Ingrid Valverde Reis Zreik, Adrien Salem-Sermanet, Nacéra Seghouani, Lionel Pourchier
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Mamba

Mangroves are dynamic coastal ecosystems that are crucial to environmental health, economic stability, and climate resilience. The monitoring and preservation of mangroves are of global importance, with remote sensing technologies playing a pivotal role in these efforts. The integration of cutting-edge artificial intelligence with satellite data opens new avenues for ecological monitoring, potentially revolutionizing conservation strategies at a time when the protection of natural resources is more crucial than ever. The objective of this work is to provide a comprehensive evaluation of recent deep-learning models on the task of mangrove segmentation. We first introduce and make available a novel open-source dataset, MagSet-2, incorporating mangrove annotations from the Global Mangrove Watch and satellite images from Sentinel-2, from mangrove positions all over the world. We then benchmark three architectural groups, namely convolutional, transformer, and mamba models, using the created dataset. The experimental outcomes further validate the deep learning community's interest in the Mamba model, which surpasses other architectures in all metrics.
DAAL: Density-Aware Adaptive Line Margin Loss for Multi-Modal Deep Metric Learning
Authors: Hadush Hailu Gebrerufael, Anil Kumar Tiwari, Gaurav Neupane, Goitom Ybrah Hailu
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Verification, Metric Learning, Object Recognition, Retrieval

Multi-modal deep metric learning is crucial for effectively capturing diverse representations in tasks such as face verification, fine-grained object recognition, and product search. Traditional approaches to metric learning, whether based on distance or margin metrics, primarily emphasize class separation, often overlooking the intra-class distribution essential for multi-modal feature learning. In this context, we propose a novel loss function called Density-Aware Adaptive Margin Loss(DAAL), which preserves the density distribution of embeddings while encouraging the formation of adaptive sub-clusters within each class. By employing an adaptive line strategy, DAAL not only enhances intra-class variance but also ensures robust inter-class separation, facilitating effective multi-modal representation. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark fine-grained datasets demonstrate the superior performance of DAAL, underscoring its potential in advancing retrieval applications and multi-modal deep metric learning.
Discovering distinctive elements of biomedical datasets for high-performance exploration
Authors: Md Tauhidul Islam, Lei Xing
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00

The human brain represents an object by small elements and distinguishes two objects based on the difference in elements. Discovering the distinctive elements of high-dimensional datasets is therefore critical in numerous perception-driven biomedical and clinical studies. However, currently there is no available method for reliable extraction of distinctive elements of high-dimensional biomedical and clinical datasets. Here we present an unsupervised deep learning technique namely distinctive element analysis (DEA), which extracts the distinctive data elements using high-dimensional correlative information of the datasets. DEA at first computes a large number of distinctive parts of the data, then filters and condenses the parts into DEA elements by employing a unique kernel-driven triple-optimization network. DEA has been found to improve the accuracy by up to 45% in comparison to the traditional techniques in applications such as disease detection from medical images, gene ranking and cell recognition from single cell RNA sequence (scRNA-seq) datasets. Moreover, DEA allows user-guided manipulation of the intermediate calculation process and thus offers intermediate results with better interpretability.
Implicitly Learned Neural Phase Functions for Basis-Free Point Spread Function Engineering
Authors: Aleksey Valouev
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00

Point spread function (PSF) engineering is vital for precisely controlling the focus of light in computational imaging, with applications in neural imaging, fluorescence microscopy, and biophotonics. The PSF is derived from the magnitude of the Fourier transform of a phase function, making the construction of the phase function given the PSF (PSF engineering) an ill-posed inverse problem. Traditional PSF engineering methods rely on physical basis functions, limiting their ability to generalize across the range of PSFs required for imaging tasks. We introduce a novel approach leveraging implicit neural representations that overcome the limitations of pixel-wise optimization methods. Our approach achieves a median MSSIM of 0.8162 and a mean MSSIM of 0.5634, compared to a median MSSIM of 0.0 and a mean MSSIM of 0.1841 with pixel-wise optimization when learning randomly generated phase functions. Our approach also achieves a median PSNR of 10.38 dB and a mean PSNR of 8.672 dB, compared to a median PSNR of 6.653 dB and a mean PSNR of 6.660 dB with pixel-wise optimization for this task.
Enhanced Super-Resolution Training via Mimicked Alignment for Real-World Scenes
Authors: Omar Elezabi, Zongwei Wu, Radu Timofte
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Image super-resolution methods have made significant strides with deep learning techniques and ample training data. However, they face challenges due to inherent misalignment between low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) pairs in real-world datasets. In this study, we propose a novel plug-and-play module designed to mitigate these misalignment issues by aligning LR inputs with HR images during training. Specifically, our approach involves mimicking a novel LR sample that aligns with HR while preserving the degradation characteristics of the original LR samples. This module seamlessly integrates with any SR model, enhancing robustness against misalignment. Importantly, it can be easily removed during inference, therefore without introducing any parameters on the conventional SR models. We comprehensively evaluate our method on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness across a spectrum of SR models, including traditional CNNs and state-of-the-art Transformers. The source codes will be publicly made available at https://github.com/omarAlezaby/Mimicked_Ali .
Deep learning-based Visual Measurement Extraction within an Adaptive Digital Twin Framework from Limited Data Using Transfer Learning
Authors: Mehrdad Shafiei Dizaji
Date: 2024-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Integration, Decision Making, Structural Health Monitoring, Transfer Learning

Digital Twins technology is revolutionizing decision-making in scientific research by integrating models and simulations with real-time data. Unlike traditional Structural Health Monitoring methods, which rely on computationally intensive Digital Image Correlation and have limitations in real-time data integration, this research proposes a novel approach using Artificial Intelligence. Specifically, Convolutional Neural Networks are employed to analyze structural behaviors in real-time by correlating Digital Image Correlation speckle pattern images with deformation fields. Initially focusing on two-dimensional speckle patterns, the research extends to three-dimensional applications using stereo-paired images for comprehensive deformation analysis. This method overcomes computational challenges by utilizing a mix of synthetically generated and authentic speckle pattern images for training the Convolutional Neural Networks. The models are designed to be robust and versatile, offering a promising alternative to traditional measurement techniques and paving the way for advanced applications in three-dimensional modeling. This advancement signifies a shift towards more efficient and dynamic structural health monitoring by leveraging the power of Artificial Intelligence for real-time simulation and analysis.