pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
TextDestroyer: A Training- and Annotation-Free Diffusion Method for Destroying Anomal Text from Images
Authors: Mengcheng Li, Mingbao Lin, Fei Chao, Chia-Wen Lin, Rongrong Ji
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

In this paper, we propose TextDestroyer, the first training- and annotation-free method for scene text destruction using a pre-trained diffusion model. Existing scene text removal models require complex annotation and retraining, and may leave faint yet recognizable text information, compromising privacy protection and content concealment. TextDestroyer addresses these issues by employing a three-stage hierarchical process to obtain accurate text masks. Our method scrambles text areas in the latent start code using a Gaussian distribution before reconstruction. During the diffusion denoising process, self-attention key and value are referenced from the original latent to restore the compromised background. Latent codes saved at each inversion step are used for replacement during reconstruction, ensuring perfect background restoration. The advantages of TextDestroyer include: (1) it eliminates labor-intensive data annotation and resource-intensive training; (2) it achieves more thorough text destruction, preventing recognizable traces; and (3) it demonstrates better generalization capabilities, performing well on both real-world scenes and generated images.
Enhancing the Traditional Chinese Medicine Capabilities of Large Language Model through Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback
Authors: Song Yu, Xiaofei Xu, Fangfei Xu, Li Li
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Although large language models perform well in understanding and responding to user intent, their performance in specialized domains such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) remains limited due to lack of expertise. In addition, high-quality data related to TCM is scarce and difficult to obtain, making large language models ineffective in handling TCM tasks. In this work, we propose a framework to improve the performance of large language models for TCM tasks using only a small amount of data. First, we use medical case data for supervised fine-tuning of the large model, making it initially capable of performing TCM tasks. Subsequently, we further optimize the model's performance using reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) to align it with the preference data. The ablation study also demonstrated the performance gain is attributed to both supervised fine-tuning and the direct policy optimization. The experimental results show that the model trained with a small amount of data achieves a significant performance improvement on a representative TCM task.
Examining Attacks on Consensus and Incentive Systems in Proof-of-Work Blockchains: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Dinitha Wijewardhana, Sugandima Vidanagamachchi, Nalin Arachchilage
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain technology - a decentralized ledger consisting of a consensus and an incentive mechanism. The consensus mechanism, Proof of Work (PoW), requires miners to solve difficult cryptographic puzzles to add new blocks, while the incentive mechanism rewards them with newly minted bitcoins. However, as Bitcoin's acceptance grows, it faces increasing threats from attacks targeting these mechanisms, such as selfish mining, double-spending, and block withholding. These attacks compromise security, efficiency, and reward distribution. Recent research shows that these attacks can be combined with each other or with either malicious strategies, such as network-layer attacks, or non-malicious strategies, like honest mining. These combinations lead to more sophisticated attacks, increasing the attacker's success rates and profitability. Therefore, understanding and evaluating these attacks is essential for developing effective countermeasures and ensuring long-term security. This paper begins by examining individual attacks executed in isolation and their profitability. It then explores how combining these attacks with each other or with other malicious and non-malicious strategies can enhance their overall effectiveness and profitability. The analysis further explores how the deployment of attacks such as selfish mining and block withholding by multiple competing mining pools against each other impacts their economic returns. Lastly, a set of design guidelines is provided, outlining areas future work should focus on to prevent or mitigate the identified threats.
Attention Tracker: Detecting Prompt Injection Attacks in LLMs
Authors: Kuo-Han Hung, Ching-Yun Ko, Ambrish Rawat, I-Hsin Chung, Winston H. Hsu, Pin-Yu Chen
Date: 2024-11-01 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains but remain vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious inputs manipulate the model into ignoring original instructions and executing designated action. In this paper, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of these attacks by analyzing the attention patterns within LLMs. We introduce the concept of the distraction effect, where specific attention heads, termed important heads, shift focus from the original instruction to the injected instruction. Building on this discovery, we propose Attention Tracker, a training-free detection method that tracks attention patterns on instruction to detect prompt injection attacks without the need for additional LLM inference. Our method generalizes effectively across diverse models, datasets, and attack types, showing an AUROC improvement of up to 10.0% over existing methods, and performs well even on small LLMs. We demonstrate the robustness of our approach through extensive evaluations and provide insights into safeguarding LLM-integrated systems from prompt injection vulnerabilities.
Adaptive Caching for Faster Video Generation with Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Kumara Kahatapitiya, Haozhe Liu, Sen He, Ding Liu, Menglin Jia, Chenyang Zhang, Michael S. Ryoo, Tian Xie
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Video Generation

Generating temporally-consistent high-fidelity videos can be computationally expensive, especially over longer temporal spans. More-recent Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) -- despite making significant headway in this context -- have only heightened such challenges as they rely on larger models and heavier attention mechanisms, resulting in slower inference speeds. In this paper, we introduce a training-free method to accelerate video DiTs, termed Adaptive Caching (AdaCache), which is motivated by the fact that "not all videos are created equal": meaning, some videos require fewer denoising steps to attain a reasonable quality than others. Building on this, we not only cache computations through the diffusion process, but also devise a caching schedule tailored to each video generation, maximizing the quality-latency trade-off. We further introduce a Motion Regularization (MoReg) scheme to utilize video information within AdaCache, essentially controlling the compute allocation based on motion content. Altogether, our plug-and-play contributions grant significant inference speedups (e.g. up to 4.7x on Open-Sora 720p - 2s video generation) without sacrificing the generation quality, across multiple video DiT baselines.
AutoVFX: Physically Realistic Video Editing from Natural Language Instructions
Authors: Hao-Yu Hsu, Zhi-Hao Lin, Albert Zhai, Hongchi Xia, Shenlong Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Video Editing

Modern visual effects (VFX) software has made it possible for skilled artists to create imagery of virtually anything. However, the creation process remains laborious, complex, and largely inaccessible to everyday users. In this work, we present AutoVFX, a framework that automatically creates realistic and dynamic VFX videos from a single video and natural language instructions. By carefully integrating neural scene modeling, LLM-based code generation, and physical simulation, AutoVFX is able to provide physically-grounded, photorealistic editing effects that can be controlled directly using natural language instructions. We conduct extensive experiments to validate AutoVFX's efficacy across a diverse spectrum of videos and instructions. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that AutoVFX outperforms all competing methods by a large margin in generative quality, instruction alignment, editing versatility, and physical plausibility.
Training-free Regional Prompting for Diffusion Transformers
Authors: Anthony Chen, Jianjin Xu, Wenzhao Zheng, Gaole Dai, Yida Wang, Renrui Zhang, Haofan Wang, Shanghang Zhang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Diffusion models have demonstrated excellent capabilities in text-to-image generation. Their semantic understanding (i.e., prompt following) ability has also been greatly improved with large language models (e.g., T5, Llama). However, existing models cannot perfectly handle long and complex text prompts, especially when the text prompts contain various objects with numerous attributes and interrelated spatial relationships. While many regional prompting methods have been proposed for UNet-based models (SD1.5, SDXL), but there are still no implementations based on the recent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architecture, such as SD3 and FLUX.1.In this report, we propose and implement regional prompting for FLUX.1 based on attention manipulation, which enables DiT with fined-grained compositional text-to-image generation capability in a training-free manner. Code is available at https://github.com/antonioo-c/Regional-Prompting-FLUX.
Learning General-Purpose Biomedical Volume Representations using Randomized Synthesis
Authors: Neel Dey, Benjamin Billot, Hallee E. Wong, Clinton J. Wang, Mengwei Ren, P. Ellen Grant, Adrian V. Dalca, Polina Golland
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Diversity, Inductive Bias, Representation Learning

Current volumetric biomedical foundation models struggle to generalize as public 3D datasets are small and do not cover the broad diversity of medical procedures, conditions, anatomical regions, and imaging protocols. We address this by creating a representation learning method that instead anticipates strong domain shifts at training time itself. We first propose a data engine that synthesizes highly variable training samples that enable generalization to new biomedical contexts. To then train a single 3D network for any voxel-level task, we develop a contrastive learning method that pretrains the network to be stable against nuisance imaging variation simulated by the data engine, a key inductive bias for generalization. This network's features can be used as robust representations of input images for downstream tasks and its weights provide a strong, dataset-agnostic initialization for finetuning on new datasets. As a result, we set new standards across both multimodality registration and few-shot segmentation, a first for any 3D biomedical vision model, all without (pre-)training on any existing dataset of real images.
Machine learning identification of maternal inflammatory response and histologic choroamnionitis from placental membrane whole slide images
Authors: Abhishek Sharma, Ramin Nateghi, Marina Ayad, Lee A. D. Cooper, Jeffery A. Goldstein
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple Instance Learning, whole slide images

The placenta forms a critical barrier to infection through pregnancy, labor and, delivery. Inflammatory processes in the placenta have short-term, and long-term consequences for offspring health. Digital pathology and machine learning can play an important role in understanding placental inflammation, and there have been very few investigations into methods for predicting and understanding Maternal Inflammatory Response (MIR). This work intends to investigate the potential of using machine learning to understand MIR based on whole slide images (WSI), and establish early benchmarks. To that end, we use Multiple Instance Learning framework with 3 feature extractors: ImageNet-based EfficientNet-v2s, and 2 histopathology foundation models, UNI and Phikon to investigate predictability of MIR stage from histopathology WSIs. We also interpret predictions from these models using the learned attention maps from these models. We also use the MIL framework for predicting white blood cells count (WBC) and maximum fever temperature ($T_{max}$). Attention-based MIL models are able to classify MIR with a balanced accuracy of up to 88.5% with a Cohen's Kappa ($\kappa$) of up to 0.772. Furthermore, we found that the pathology foundation models (UNI and Phikon) are both able to achieve higher performance with balanced accuracy and $\kappa$, compared to ImageNet-based feature extractor (EfficientNet-v2s). For WBC and $T_{max}$ prediction, we found mild correlation between actual values and those predicted from histopathology WSIs. We used MIL framework for predicting MIR stage from WSIs, and compared effectiveness of foundation models as feature extractors, with that of an ImageNet-based model. We further investigated model failure cases and found them to be either edge cases prone to interobserver variability, examples of pathologist's overreach, or mislabeled due to processing errors.
Physically Based Neural Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function
Authors: Chenliang Zhou, Alejandro Sztrajman, Gilles Rainer, Fangcheng Zhong, Fazilet Gokbudak, Zhilin Guo, Weihao Xia, Rafal Mantiuk, Cengiz Oztireli
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

We introduce the physically based neural bidirectional reflectance distribution function (PBNBRDF), a novel, continuous representation for material appearance based on neural fields. Our model accurately reconstructs real-world materials while uniquely enforcing physical properties for realistic BRDFs, specifically Helmholtz reciprocity via reparametrization and energy passivity via efficient analytical integration. We conduct a systematic analysis demonstrating the benefits of adhering to these physical laws on the visual quality of reconstructed materials. Additionally, we enhance the color accuracy of neural BRDFs by introducing chromaticity enforcement supervising the norms of RGB channels. Through both qualitative and quantitative experiments on multiple databases of measured real-world BRDFs, we show that adhering to these physical constraints enables neural fields to more faithfully and stably represent the original data and achieve higher rendering quality.
MVPaint: Synchronized Multi-View Diffusion for Painting Anything 3D
Authors: Wei Cheng, Juncheng Mu, Xianfang Zeng, Xin Chen, Anqi Pang, Chi Zhang, Zhibin Wang, Bin Fu, Gang Yu, Ziwei Liu, Liang Pan
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Inpainting, Super-Resolution

Texturing is a crucial step in the 3D asset production workflow, which enhances the visual appeal and diversity of 3D assets. Despite recent advancements in Text-to-Texture (T2T) generation, existing methods often yield subpar results, primarily due to local discontinuities, inconsistencies across multiple views, and their heavy dependence on UV unwrapping outcomes. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel generation-refinement 3D texturing framework called MVPaint, which can generate high-resolution, seamless textures while emphasizing multi-view consistency. MVPaint mainly consists of three key modules. 1) Synchronized Multi-view Generation (SMG). Given a 3D mesh model, MVPaint first simultaneously generates multi-view images by employing an SMG model, which leads to coarse texturing results with unpainted parts due to missing observations. 2) Spatial-aware 3D Inpainting (S3I). To ensure complete 3D texturing, we introduce the S3I method, specifically designed to effectively texture previously unobserved areas. 3) UV Refinement (UVR). Furthermore, MVPaint employs a UVR module to improve the texture quality in the UV space, which first performs a UV-space Super-Resolution, followed by a Spatial-aware Seam-Smoothing algorithm for revising spatial texturing discontinuities caused by UV unwrapping. Moreover, we establish two T2T evaluation benchmarks: the Objaverse T2T benchmark and the GSO T2T benchmark, based on selected high-quality 3D meshes from the Objaverse dataset and the entire GSO dataset, respectively. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MVPaint surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods. Notably, MVPaint could generate high-fidelity textures with minimal Janus issues and highly enhanced cross-view consistency.
Diffusion-based Generative Multicasting with Intent-aware Semantic Decomposition
Authors: Xinkai Liu, Mahdi Boloursaz Mashhadi, Li Qiao, Yi Ma, Rahim Tafazolli, Mehdi Bennis
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Generative diffusion models (GDMs) have recently shown great success in synthesizing multimedia signals with high perceptual quality enabling highly efficient semantic communications in future wireless networks. In this paper, we develop an intent-aware generative semantic multicasting framework utilizing pre-trained diffusion models. In the proposed framework, the transmitter decomposes the source signal to multiple semantic classes based on the multi-user intent, i.e. each user is assumed to be interested in details of only a subset of the semantic classes. The transmitter then sends to each user only its intended classes, and multicasts a highly compressed semantic map to all users over shared wireless resources that allows them to locally synthesize the other classes, i.e. non-intended classes, utilizing pre-trained diffusion models. The signal retrieved at each user is thereby partially reconstructed and partially synthesized utilizing the received semantic map. This improves utilization of the wireless resources, with better preserving privacy of the non-intended classes. We design a communication/computation-aware scheme for per-class adaptation of the communication parameters, such as the transmission power and compression rate to minimize the total latency of retrieving signals at multiple receivers, tailored to the prevailing channel conditions as well as the users reconstruction/synthesis distortion/perception requirements. The simulation results demonstrate significantly reduced per-user latency compared with non-generative and intent-unaware multicasting benchmarks while maintaining high perceptual quality of the signals retrieved at the users.
PPLLaVA: Varied Video Sequence Understanding With Prompt Guidance
Authors: Ruyang Liu, Haoran Tang, Haibo Liu, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan, Chen Li, Jiankun Yang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Caption Generation, Multiple-choice, Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking, Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Consistency), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Contextual Understanding), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Correctness of Information), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Detail Orientation)), Video-based Generative Performance Benchmarking (Temporal Understanding), Video Question Answering, Video Understanding, Zero-Shot Video Question Answer

The past year has witnessed the significant advancement of video-based large language models. However, the challenge of developing a unified model for both short and long video understanding remains unresolved. Most existing video LLMs cannot handle hour-long videos, while methods custom for long videos tend to be ineffective for shorter videos and images. In this paper, we identify the key issue as the redundant content in videos. To address this, we propose a novel pooling strategy that simultaneously achieves token compression and instruction-aware visual feature aggregation. Our model is termed Prompt-guided Pooling LLaVA, or PPLLaVA for short. Specifically, PPLLaVA consists of three core components: the CLIP-based visual-prompt alignment that extracts visual information relevant to the user's instructions, the prompt-guided pooling that compresses the visual sequence to arbitrary scales using convolution-style pooling, and the clip context extension designed for lengthy prompt common in visual dialogue. Moreover, our codebase also integrates the most advanced video Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and visual interleave training. Extensive experiments have validated the performance of our model. With superior throughput and only 1024 visual context, PPLLaVA achieves better results on image benchmarks as a video LLM, while achieving state-of-the-art performance across various video benchmarks, excelling in tasks ranging from caption generation to multiple-choice questions, and handling video lengths from seconds to hours. Codes have been available at https://github.com/farewellthree/PPLLaVA.
Grouped Discrete Representation for Object-Centric Learning
Authors: Rongzhen Zhao, Vivienne Wang, Juho Kannala, Joni Pajarinen
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Object, Object Discovery

Object-Centric Learning (OCL) can discover objects in images or videos by simply reconstructing the input. For better object discovery, representative OCL methods reconstruct the input as its Variational Autoencoder (VAE) intermediate representation, which suppresses pixel noises and promotes object separability by discretizing continuous super-pixels with template features. However, treating features as units overlooks their composing attributes, thus impeding model generalization; indexing features with scalar numbers loses attribute-level similarities and differences, thus hindering model convergence. We propose \textit{Grouped Discrete Representation} (GDR) for OCL. We decompose features into combinatorial attributes via organized channel grouping, and compose these attributes into discrete representation via tuple indexes. Experiments show that our GDR improves both Transformer- and Diffusion-based OCL methods consistently on various datasets. Visualizations show that our GDR captures better object separability.
Conformal-in-the-Loop for Learning with Imbalanced Noisy Data
Authors: John Brandon Graham-Knight, Jamil Fayyad, Nourhan Bayasi, Patricia Lasserre, Homayoun Najjaran
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction

Class imbalance and label noise are pervasive in large-scale datasets, yet much of machine learning research assumes well-labeled, balanced data, which rarely reflects real world conditions. Existing approaches typically address either label noise or class imbalance in isolation, leading to suboptimal results when both issues coexist. In this work, we propose Conformal-in-the-Loop (CitL), a novel training framework that addresses both challenges with a conformal prediction-based approach. CitL evaluates sample uncertainty to adjust weights and prune unreliable examples, enhancing model resilience and accuracy with minimal computational cost. Our extensive experiments include a detailed analysis showing how CitL effectively emphasizes impactful data in noisy, imbalanced datasets. Our results show that CitL consistently boosts model performance, achieving up to a 6.1% increase in classification accuracy and a 5.0 mIoU improvement in segmentation. Our code is publicly available: CitL.