pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ChatGPT Meets Iris Biometrics
Authors: Parisa Farmanifard, Arun Ross
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition, Iris Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Zero-Shot Learning

This study utilizes the advanced capabilities of the GPT-4 multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) to explore its potential in iris recognition - a field less common and more specialized than face recognition. By focusing on this niche yet crucial area, we investigate how well AI tools like ChatGPT can understand and analyze iris images. Through a series of meticulously designed experiments employing a zero-shot learning approach, the capabilities of ChatGPT-4 was assessed across various challenging conditions including diverse datasets, presentation attacks, occlusions such as glasses, and other real-world variations. The findings convey ChatGPT-4's remarkable adaptability and precision, revealing its proficiency in identifying distinctive iris features, while also detecting subtle effects like makeup on iris recognition. A comparative analysis with Gemini Advanced - Google's AI model - highlighted ChatGPT-4's better performance and user experience in complex iris analysis tasks. This research not only validates the use of LLMs for specialized biometric applications but also emphasizes the importance of nuanced query framing and interaction design in extracting significant insights from biometric data. Our findings suggest a promising path for future research and the development of more adaptable, efficient, robust and interactive biometric security solutions.
MSG-Chart: Multimodal Scene Graph for ChartQA
Authors: Yue Dai, Soyeon Caren Han, Wei Liu
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Chart Question Answering, Inductive Bias, Question Answering

Automatic Chart Question Answering (ChartQA) is challenging due to the complex distribution of chart elements with patterns of the underlying data not explicitly displayed in charts. To address this challenge, we design a joint multimodal scene graph for charts to explicitly represent the relationships between chart elements and their patterns. Our proposed multimodal scene graph includes a visual graph and a textual graph to jointly capture the structural and semantical knowledge from the chart. This graph module can be easily integrated with different vision transformers as inductive bias. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating the proposed graph module enhances the understanding of charts' elements' structure and semantics, thereby improving performance on publicly available benchmarks, ChartQA and OpenCQA.
Adversarially Robust Industrial Anomaly Detection Through Diffusion Model
Authors: Yuanpu Cao, Lu Lin, Jinghui Chen
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Purification, Adversarial Robustness, Anomaly Detection, model

Deep learning-based industrial anomaly detection models have achieved remarkably high accuracy on commonly used benchmark datasets. However, the robustness of those models may not be satisfactory due to the existence of adversarial examples, which pose significant threats to the practical deployment of deep anomaly detectors. Recently, it has been shown that diffusion models can be used to purify the adversarial noises and thus build a robust classifier against adversarial attacks. Unfortunately, we found that naively applying this strategy in anomaly detection (i.e., placing a purifier before an anomaly detector) will suffer from a high anomaly miss rate since the purifying process can easily remove both the anomaly signal and the adversarial perturbations, causing the later anomaly detector failed to detect anomalies. To tackle this issue, we explore the possibility of performing anomaly detection and adversarial purification simultaneously. We propose a simple yet effective adversarially robust anomaly detection method, \textit{AdvRAD}, that allows the diffusion model to act both as an anomaly detector and adversarial purifier. We also extend our proposed method for certified robustness to $l_2$ norm bounded perturbations. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed method exhibits outstanding (certified) adversarial robustness while also maintaining equally strong anomaly detection performance on par with the state-of-the-art methods on industrial anomaly detection benchmark datasets.
Geo-UNet: A Geometrically Constrained Neural Framework for Clinical-Grade Lumen Segmentation in Intravascular Ultrasound
Authors: Yiming Chen, Niharika S. D'Souza, Akshith Mandepally, Patrick Henninger, Satyananda Kashyap, Neerav Karani, Neel Dey, Marcos Zachary, Raed Rizq, Paul Chouinard, Polina Golland, Tanveer F. Syeda-Mahmood
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Precisely estimating lumen boundaries in intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is needed for sizing interventional stents to treat deep vein thrombosis (DVT). Unfortunately, current segmentation networks like the UNet lack the precision needed for clinical adoption in IVUS workflows. This arises due to the difficulty of automatically learning accurate lumen contour from limited training data while accounting for the radial geometry of IVUS imaging. We propose the Geo-UNet framework to address these issues via a design informed by the geometry of the lumen contour segmentation task. We first convert the input data and segmentation targets from Cartesian to polar coordinates. Starting from a convUNet feature extractor, we propose a two-task setup, one for conventional pixel-wise labeling and the other for single boundary lumen-contour localization. We directly combine the two predictions by passing the predicted lumen contour through a new activation (named CDFeLU) to filter out spurious pixel-wise predictions. Our unified loss function carefully balances area-based, distance-based, and contour-based penalties to provide near clinical-grade generalization in unseen patient data. We also introduce a lightweight, inference-time technique to enhance segmentation smoothness. The efficacy of our framework on a venous IVUS dataset is shown against state-of-the-art models.
One Shot is Enough for Sequential Infrared Small Target Segmentation
Authors: Bingbing Dan, Meihui Li, Tao Tang, Jing Zhang
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: One-Shot Segmentation, Segmentation, Zero-shot Generalization

Infrared small target sequences exhibit strong similarities between frames and contain rich contextual information, which motivates us to achieve sequential infrared small target segmentation (IRSTS) with minimal data. Inspired by the success of Segment Anything Model (SAM) across various downstream tasks, we propose a one-shot and training-free method that perfectly adapts SAM's zero-shot generalization capability to sequential IRSTS. Specifically, we first obtain a confidence map through local feature matching (LFM). The highest point in the confidence map is used as the prompt to replace the manual prompt. Then, to address the over-segmentation issue caused by the domain gap, we design the point prompt-centric focusing (PPCF) module. Subsequently, to prevent miss and false detections, we introduce the triple-level ensemble (TLE) module to produce the final mask. Experiments demonstrate that our method requires only one shot to achieve comparable performance to state-of-the-art IRSTS methods and significantly outperforms other one-shot segmentation methods. Moreover, ablation studies confirm the robustness of our method in the type of annotations and the selection of reference images.
Rethinking Multiple Instance Learning: Developing an Instance-Level Classifier via Weakly-Supervised Self-Training
Authors: Yingfan Ma, Xiaoyuan Luo, Mingzhi Yuan, Xinrong Chen, Manning Wang
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multiple Instance Learning

Multiple instance learning (MIL) problem is currently solved from either bag-classification or instance-classification perspective, both of which ignore important information contained in some instances and result in limited performance. For example, existing methods often face difficulty in learning hard positive instances. In this paper, we formulate MIL as a semi-supervised instance classification problem, so that all the labeled and unlabeled instances can be fully utilized to train a better classifier. The difficulty in this formulation is that all the labeled instances are negative in MIL, and traditional self-training techniques used in semi-supervised learning tend to degenerate in generating pseudo labels for the unlabeled instances in this scenario. To resolve this problem, we propose a weakly-supervised self-training method, in which we utilize the positive bag labels to construct a global constraint and a local constraint on the pseudo labels to prevent them from degenerating and force the classifier to learn hard positive instances. It is worth noting that easy positive instances are instances are far from the decision boundary in the classification process, while hard positive instances are those close to the decision boundary. Through iterative optimization, the pseudo labels can gradually approach the true labels. Extensive experiments on two MNIST synthetic datasets, five traditional MIL benchmark datasets and two histopathology whole slide image datasets show that our method achieved new SOTA performance on all of them. The code will be publicly available.
Improved Robustness for Deep Learning-based Segmentation of Multi-Center Myocardial Perfusion MRI Datasets Using Data Adaptive Uncertainty-guided Space-time Analysis
Authors: Dilek M. Yalcinkaya, Khalid Youssef, Bobak Heydari, Janet Wei, Noel Bairey Merz, Robert Judd, Rohan Dharmakumar, Orlando P. Simonetti, Jonathan W. Weinsaft, Subha V. Raman, Behzad Sharif
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

Background. Fully automatic analysis of myocardial perfusion MRI datasets enables rapid and objective reporting of stress/rest studies in patients with suspected ischemic heart disease. Developing deep learning techniques that can analyze multi-center datasets despite limited training data and variations in software and hardware is an ongoing challenge. Methods. Datasets from 3 medical centers acquired at 3T (n = 150 subjects) were included: an internal dataset (inD; n = 95) and two external datasets (exDs; n = 55) used for evaluating the robustness of the trained deep neural network (DNN) models against differences in pulse sequence (exD-1) and scanner vendor (exD-2). A subset of inD (n = 85) was used for training/validation of a pool of DNNs for segmentation, all using the same spatiotemporal U-Net architecture and hyperparameters but with different parameter initializations. We employed a space-time sliding-patch analysis approach that automatically yields a pixel-wise "uncertainty map" as a byproduct of the segmentation process. In our approach, a given test case is segmented by all members of the DNN pool and the resulting uncertainty maps are leveraged to automatically select the "best" one among the pool of solutions. Results. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach performed similarly to the established approach on the internal dataset (p = n.s.) whereas it significantly outperformed on the external datasets (p < 0.005 for exD-1 and exD-2). Moreover, the number of image series with "failed" segmentation was significantly lower for the proposed vs. the established approach (4.3% vs. 17.1%, p < 0.0005). Conclusions. The proposed DAUGS analysis approach has the potential to improve the robustness of deep learning methods for segmentation of multi-center stress perfusion datasets with variations in the choice of pulse sequence, site location or scanner vendor.
Hyper-YOLO: When Visual Object Detection Meets Hypergraph Computation
Authors: Yifan Feng, Jiangang Huang, Shaoyi Du, Shihui Ying, Jun-Hai Yong, Yipeng Li, Guiguang Ding, Rongrong Ji, Yue Gao
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

We introduce Hyper-YOLO, a new object detection method that integrates hypergraph computations to capture the complex high-order correlations among visual features. Traditional YOLO models, while powerful, have limitations in their neck designs that restrict the integration of cross-level features and the exploitation of high-order feature interrelationships. To address these challenges, we propose the Hypergraph Computation Empowered Semantic Collecting and Scattering (HGC-SCS) framework, which transposes visual feature maps into a semantic space and constructs a hypergraph for high-order message propagation. This enables the model to acquire both semantic and structural information, advancing beyond conventional feature-focused learning. Hyper-YOLO incorporates the proposed Mixed Aggregation Network (MANet) in its backbone for enhanced feature extraction and introduces the Hypergraph-Based Cross-Level and Cross-Position Representation Network (HyperC2Net) in its neck. HyperC2Net operates across five scales and breaks free from traditional grid structures, allowing for sophisticated high-order interactions across levels and positions. This synergy of components positions Hyper-YOLO as a state-of-the-art architecture in various scale models, as evidenced by its superior performance on the COCO dataset. Specifically, Hyper-YOLO-N significantly outperforms the advanced YOLOv8-N and YOLOv9-T with 12\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ and 9\% $\text{AP}^{val}$ improvements. The source codes are at ttps://github.com/iMoonLab/Hyper-YOLO.
FewShotNeRF: Meta-Learning-based Novel View Synthesis for Rapid Scene-Specific Adaptation
Authors: Piraveen Sivakumar, Paul Janson, Jathushan Rajasegaran, Thanuja Ambegoda
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Meta-Learning, NeRF, Novel View Synthesis

In this paper, we address the challenge of generating novel views of real-world objects with limited multi-view images through our proposed approach, FewShotNeRF. Our method utilizes meta-learning to acquire optimal initialization, facilitating rapid adaptation of a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) to specific scenes. The focus of our meta-learning process is on capturing shared geometry and textures within a category, embedded in the weight initialization. This approach expedites the learning process of NeRFs and leverages recent advancements in positional encodings to reduce the time required for fitting a NeRF to a scene, thereby accelerating the inner loop optimization of meta-learning. Notably, our method enables meta-learning on a large number of 3D scenes to establish a robust 3D prior for various categories. Through extensive evaluations on the Common Objects in 3D open source dataset, we empirically demonstrate the efficacy and potential of meta-learning in generating high-quality novel views of objects.
SOD-YOLOv8 -- Enhancing YOLOv8 for Small Object Detection in Traffic Scenes
Authors: Boshra Khalili, Andrew W. Smyth
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Small Object Detection

Object detection as part of computer vision can be crucial for traffic management, emergency response, autonomous vehicles, and smart cities. Despite significant advances in object detection, detecting small objects in images captured by distant cameras remains challenging due to their size, distance from the camera, varied shapes, and cluttered backgrounds. To address these challenges, we propose Small Object Detection YOLOv8 (SOD-YOLOv8), a novel model specifically designed for scenarios involving numerous small objects. Inspired by Efficient Generalized Feature Pyramid Networks (GFPN), we enhance multi-path fusion within YOLOv8 to integrate features across different levels, preserving details from shallower layers and improving small object detection accuracy. Also, A fourth detection layer is added to leverage high-resolution spatial information effectively. The Efficient Multi-Scale Attention Module (EMA) in the C2f-EMA module enhances feature extraction by redistributing weights and prioritizing relevant features. We introduce Powerful-IoU (PIoU) as a replacement for CIoU, focusing on moderate-quality anchor boxes and adding a penalty based on differences between predicted and ground truth bounding box corners. This approach simplifies calculations, speeds up convergence, and enhances detection accuracy. SOD-YOLOv8 significantly improves small object detection, surpassing widely used models in various metrics, without substantially increasing computational cost or latency compared to YOLOv8s. Specifically, it increases recall from 40.1\% to 43.9\%, precision from 51.2\% to 53.9\%, $\text{mAP}_{0.5}$ from 40.6\% to 45.1\%, and $\text{mAP}_{0.5:0.95}$ from 24\% to 26.6\%. In dynamic real-world traffic scenes, SOD-YOLOv8 demonstrated notable improvements in diverse conditions, proving its reliability and effectiveness in detecting small objects even in challenging environments.
BRAT: Bonus oRthogonAl Token for Architecture Agnostic Textual Inversion
Authors: James Baker
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00

Textual Inversion remains a popular method for personalizing diffusion models, in order to teach models new subjects and styles. We note that textual inversion has been underexplored using alternatives to the UNet, and experiment with textual inversion with a vision transformer. We also seek to optimize textual inversion using a strategy that does not require explicit use of the UNet and its idiosyncratic layers, so we add bonus tokens and enforce orthogonality. We find the use of the bonus token improves adherence to the source images and the use of the vision transformer improves adherence to the prompt. Code is available at https://github.com/jamesBaker361/tex_inv_plus.
Deep Learning-based Unsupervised Domain Adaptation via a Unified Model for Prostate Lesion Detection Using Multisite Bi-parametric MRI Datasets
Authors: Hao Li, Han Liu, Heinrich von Busch, Robert Grimm, Henkjan Huisman, Angela Tong, David Winkel, Tobias Penzkofer, Ivan Shabunin, Moon Hyung Choi, Qingsong Yang, Dieter Szolar, Steven Shea, Fergus Coakley, Mukesh Harisinghani, Ipek Oguz, Dorin Comaniciu, Ali Kamen, Bin Lou
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Lesion Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Our hypothesis is that UDA using diffusion-weighted images, generated with a unified model, offers a promising and reliable strategy for enhancing the performance of supervised learning models in multi-site prostate lesion detection, especially when various b-values are present. This retrospective study included data from 5,150 patients (14,191 samples) collected across nine different imaging centers. A novel UDA method using a unified generative model was developed for multi-site PCa detection. This method translates diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) acquisitions, including apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) and individual DW images acquired using various b-values, to align with the style of images acquired using b-values recommended by Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) guidelines. The generated ADC and DW images replace the original images for PCa detection. An independent set of 1,692 test cases (2,393 samples) was used for evaluation. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was used as the primary metric, and statistical analysis was performed via bootstrapping. For all test cases, the AUC values for baseline SL and UDA methods were 0.73 and 0.79 (p<.001), respectively, for PI-RADS>=3, and 0.77 and 0.80 (p<.001) for PI-RADS>=4 PCa lesions. In the 361 test cases under the most unfavorable image acquisition setting, the AUC values for baseline SL and UDA were 0.49 and 0.76 (p<.001) for PI-RADS>=3, and 0.50 and 0.77 (p<.001) for PI-RADS>=4 PCa lesions. The results indicate the proposed UDA with generated images improved the performance of SL methods in multi-site PCa lesion detection across datasets with various b values, especially for images acquired with significant deviations from the PI-RADS recommended DWI protocol (e.g. with an extremely high b-value).
Segmentation of Mental Foramen in Orthopantomographs: A Deep Learning Approach
Authors: Haider Raza, Mohsin Ali, Vishal Krishna Singh, Agustin Wahjuningrum, Rachel Sarig, Akhilanand Chaurasia
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Transfer Learning

Precise identification and detection of the Mental Foramen are crucial in dentistry, impacting procedures such as impacted tooth removal, cyst surgeries, and implants. Accurately identifying this anatomical feature facilitates post-surgery issues and improves patient outcomes. Moreover, this study aims to accelerate dental procedures, elevating patient care and healthcare efficiency in dentistry. This research used Deep Learning methods to accurately detect and segment the Mental Foramen from panoramic radiograph images. Two mask types, circular and square, were used during model training. Multiple segmentation models were employed to identify and segment the Mental Foramen, and their effectiveness was evaluated using diverse metrics. An in-house dataset comprising 1000 panoramic radiographs was created for this study. Our experiments demonstrated that the Classical UNet model performed exceptionally well on the test data, achieving a Dice Coefficient of 0.79 and an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.67. Moreover, ResUNet++ and UNet Attention models showed competitive performance, with Dice scores of 0.675 and 0.676, and IoU values of 0.683 and 0.671, respectively. We also investigated transfer learning models with varied backbone architectures, finding LinkNet to produce the best outcomes. In conclusion, our research highlights the efficacy of the classical Unet model in accurately identifying and outlining the Mental Foramen in panoramic radiographs. While vital, this task is comparatively simpler than segmenting complex medical datasets such as brain tumours or skin cancer, given their diverse sizes and shapes. This research also holds value in optimizing dental practice, benefiting practitioners and patients.
Novel adaptation of video segmentation to 3D MRI: efficient zero-shot knee segmentation with SAM2
Authors: Andrew Seohwan Yu, Mohsen Hariri, Xuecen Zhang, Mingrui Yang, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaojuan Li
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Intelligent medical image segmentation methods are rapidly evolving and being increasingly applied, yet they face the challenge of domain transfer, where algorithm performance degrades due to different data distributions between source and target domains. To address this, we introduce a method for zero-shot, single-prompt segmentation of 3D knee MRI by adapting Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), a general-purpose segmentation model designed to accept prompts and retain memory across frames of a video. By treating slices from 3D medical volumes as individual video frames, we leverage SAM2's advanced capabilities to generate motion- and spatially-aware predictions. We demonstrate that SAM2 can efficiently perform segmentation tasks in a zero-shot manner with no additional training or fine-tuning, accurately delineating structures in knee MRI scans using only a single prompt. Our experiments on the Osteoarthritis Initiative Zuse Institute Berlin (OAI-ZIB) dataset reveal that SAM2 achieves high accuracy on 3D knee bone segmentation, with a testing Dice similarity coefficient of 0.9643 on tibia. We also present results generated using different SAM2 model sizes, different prompt schemes, as well as comparative results from the SAM1 model deployed on the same dataset. This breakthrough has the potential to revolutionize medical image analysis by providing a scalable, cost-effective solution for automated segmentation, paving the way for broader clinical applications and streamlined workflows.