pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Separate and Conquer: Decoupling Co-occurrence via Decomposition and Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Zhiwei Yang, Kexue Fu, Minghong Duan, Linhao Qu, Shuo Wang, Zhijian Song
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, TAG, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with image-level labels aims to achieve segmentation tasks without dense annotations. However, attributed to the frequent coupling of co-occurring objects and the limited supervision from image-level labels, the challenging co-occurrence problem is widely present and leads to false activation of objects in WSSS. In this work, we devise a 'Separate and Conquer' scheme SeCo to tackle this issue from dimensions of image space and feature space. In the image space, we propose to 'separate' the co-occurring objects with image decomposition by subdividing images into patches. Importantly, we assign each patch a category tag from Class Activation Maps (CAMs), which spatially helps remove the co-context bias and guide the subsequent representation. In the feature space, we propose to 'conquer' the false activation by enhancing semantic representation with multi-granularity knowledge contrast. To this end, a dual-teacher-single-student architecture is designed and tag-guided contrast is conducted, which guarantee the correctness of knowledge and further facilitate the discrepancy among co-contexts. We streamline the multi-staged WSSS pipeline end-to-end and tackle this issue without external supervision. Extensive experiments are conducted, validating the efficiency of our method and the superiority over previous single-staged and even multi-staged competitors on PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. Code is available at https://github.com/zwyang6/SeCo.git.
MambaMIR: An Arbitrary-Masked Mamba for Joint Medical Image Reconstruction and Uncertainty Estimation
Authors: Jiahao Huang, Liutao Yang, Fanwen Wang, Yang Nan, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Daoqiang Zhang, Guang Yang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Reconstruction, Mamba, Representation Learning

The recent Mamba model has shown remarkable adaptability for visual representation learning, including in medical imaging tasks. This study introduces MambaMIR, a Mamba-based model for medical image reconstruction, as well as its Generative Adversarial Network-based variant, MambaMIR-GAN. Our proposed MambaMIR inherits several advantages, such as linear complexity, global receptive fields, and dynamic weights, from the original Mamba model. The innovated arbitrary-mask mechanism effectively adapt Mamba to our image reconstruction task, providing randomness for subsequent Monte Carlo-based uncertainty estimation. Experiments conducted on various medical image reconstruction tasks, including fast MRI and SVCT, which cover anatomical regions such as the knee, chest, and abdomen, have demonstrated that MambaMIR and MambaMIR-GAN achieve comparable or superior reconstruction results relative to state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, the estimated uncertainty maps offer further insights into the reliability of the reconstruction quality. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/ayanglab/MambaMIR.
Prompt-Driven Dynamic Object-Centric Learning for Single Domain Generalization
Authors: Deng Li, Aming Wu, YaoWei Wang, Yahong Han
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Domain Generalization, image-classification, Image Classification, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Prompt Learning

Single-domain generalization aims to learn a model from single source domain data to achieve generalized performance on other unseen target domains. Existing works primarily focus on improving the generalization ability of static networks. However, static networks are unable to dynamically adapt to the diverse variations in different image scenes, leading to limited generalization capability. Different scenes exhibit varying levels of complexity, and the complexity of images further varies significantly in cross-domain scenarios. In this paper, we propose a dynamic object-centric perception network based on prompt learning, aiming to adapt to the variations in image complexity. Specifically, we propose an object-centric gating module based on prompt learning to focus attention on the object-centric features guided by the various scene prompts. Then, with the object-centric gating masks, the dynamic selective module dynamically selects highly correlated feature regions in both spatial and channel dimensions enabling the model to adaptively perceive object-centric relevant features, thereby enhancing the generalization capability. Extensive experiments were conducted on single-domain generalization tasks in image classification and object detection. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods, which validates the effectiveness and generally of our proposed method.
Prediction of recurrence free survival of head and neck cancer using PET/CT radiomics and clinical information
Authors: Mona Furukawa, Daniel R. McGowan, Bartłomiej W. Papież
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation

The 5-year survival rate of Head and Neck Cancer (HNC) has not improved over the past decade and one common cause of treatment failure is recurrence. In this paper, we built Cox proportional hazard (CoxPH) models that predict the recurrence free survival (RFS) of oropharyngeal HNC patients. Our models utilise both clinical information and multimodal radiomics features extracted from tumour regions in Computed Tomography (CT) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Furthermore, we were one of the first studies to explore the impact of segmentation accuracy on the predictive power of the extracted radiomics features, through under- and over-segmentation study. Our models were trained using the HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) challenge data, and the best performing model achieved a concordance index (C-index) of 0.74 for the model utilising clinical information and multimodal CT and PET radiomics features, which compares favourably with the model that only used clinical information (C-index of 0.67). Our under- and over-segmentation study confirms that segmentation accuracy affects radiomics extraction, however, it affects PET and CT differently.
Unsupervised Cross-Domain Image Retrieval via Prototypical Optimal Transport
Authors: Bin Li, Ye Shi, Qian Yu, Jingya Wang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Retrieval, Representation Learning, Retrieval

Unsupervised cross-domain image retrieval (UCIR) aims to retrieve images sharing the same category across diverse domains without relying on labeled data. Prior approaches have typically decomposed the UCIR problem into two distinct tasks: intra-domain representation learning and cross-domain feature alignment. However, these segregated strategies overlook the potential synergies between these tasks. This paper introduces ProtoOT, a novel Optimal Transport formulation explicitly tailored for UCIR, which integrates intra-domain feature representation learning and cross-domain alignment into a unified framework. ProtoOT leverages the strengths of the K-means clustering method to effectively manage distribution imbalances inherent in UCIR. By utilizing K-means for generating initial prototypes and approximating class marginal distributions, we modify the constraints in Optimal Transport accordingly, significantly enhancing its performance in UCIR scenarios. Furthermore, we incorporate contrastive learning into the ProtoOT framework to further improve representation learning. This encourages local semantic consistency among features with similar semantics, while also explicitly enforcing separation between features and unmatched prototypes, thereby enhancing global discriminativeness. ProtoOT surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods by a notable margin across benchmark datasets. Notably, on DomainNet, ProtoOT achieves an average P@200 enhancement of 18.17%, and on Office-Home, it demonstrates a P@15 improvement of 3.83%.
A Modular System for Enhanced Robustness of Multimedia Understanding Networks via Deep Parametric Estimation
Authors: Francesco Barbato, Umberto Michieli, Mehmet Kerim Yucel, Pietro Zanuttigh, Mete Ozay
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Domain Adaptation, image-classification, Image Classification, Semantic Segmentation

In multimedia understanding tasks, corrupted samples pose a critical challenge, because when fed to machine learning models they lead to performance degradation. In the past, three groups of approaches have been proposed to handle noisy data: i) enhancer and denoiser modules to improve the quality of the noisy data, ii) data augmentation approaches, and iii) domain adaptation strategies. All the aforementioned approaches come with drawbacks that limit their applicability; the first has high computational costs and requires pairs of clean-corrupted data for training, while the others only allow deployment of the same task/network they were trained on (\ie, when upstream and downstream task/network are the same). In this paper, we propose SyMPIE to solve these shortcomings. To this end, we design a small, modular, and efficient (just 2GFLOPs to process a Full HD image) system to enhance input data for robust downstream multimedia understanding with minimal computational cost. Our SyMPIE is pre-trained on an upstream task/network that should not match the downstream ones and does not need paired clean-corrupted samples. Our key insight is that most input corruptions found in real-world tasks can be modeled through global operations on color channels of images or spatial filters with small kernels. We validate our approach on multiple datasets and tasks, such as image classification (on ImageNetC, ImageNetC-Bar, VizWiz, and a newly proposed mixed corruption benchmark named ImageNetC-mixed) and semantic segmentation (on Cityscapes, ACDC, and DarkZurich) with consistent improvements of about 5\% relative accuracy gain across the board. The code of our approach and the new ImageNetC-mixed benchmark will be made available upon publication.
Robust Quantification of Percent Emphysema on CT via Domain Attention: the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) Lung Study
Authors: Xuzhe Zhang, Elsa D. Angelini, Eric A. Hoffman, Karol E. Watson, Benjamin M. Smith, R. Graham Barr, Andrew F. Laine
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation

Robust quantification of pulmonary emphysema on computed tomography (CT) remains challenging for large-scale research studies that involve scans from different scanner types and for translation to clinical scans. Existing studies have explored several directions to tackle this challenge, including density correction, noise filtering, regression, hidden Markov measure field (HMMF) model-based segmentation, and volume-adjusted lung density. Despite some promising results, previous studies either required a tedious workflow or limited opportunities for downstream emphysema subtyping, limiting efficient adaptation on a large-scale study. To alleviate this dilemma, we developed an end-to-end deep learning framework based on an existing HMMF segmentation framework. We first demonstrate that a regular UNet cannot replicate the existing HMMF results because of the lack of scanner priors. We then design a novel domain attention block to fuse image feature with quantitative scanner priors which significantly improves the results.
LatentSwap: An Efficient Latent Code Mapping Framework for Face Swapping
Authors: Changho Choi, Minho Kim, Junhyeok Lee, Hyoung-Kyu Song, Younggeun Kim, Seungryong Kim
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Swapping

We propose LatentSwap, a simple face swapping framework generating a face swap latent code of a given generator. Utilizing randomly sampled latent codes, our framework is light and does not require datasets besides employing the pre-trained models, with the training procedure also being fast and straightforward. The loss objective consists of only three terms, and can effectively control the face swap results between source and target images. By attaching a pre-trained GAN inversion model independent to the model and using the StyleGAN2 generator, our model produces photorealistic and high-resolution images comparable to other competitive face swap models. We show that our framework is applicable to other generators such as StyleNeRF, paving a way to 3D-aware face swapping and is also compatible with other downstream StyleGAN2 generator tasks. The source code and models can be found at \url{https://github.com/usingcolor/LatentSwap}.
Probabilistic Bayesian optimal experimental design using conditional normalizing flows
Authors: Rafael Orozco, Felix J. Herrmann, Peng Chen
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design

Bayesian optimal experimental design (OED) seeks to conduct the most informative experiment under budget constraints to update the prior knowledge of a system to its posterior from the experimental data in a Bayesian framework. Such problems are computationally challenging because of (1) expensive and repeated evaluation of some optimality criterion that typically involves a double integration with respect to both the system parameters and the experimental data, (2) suffering from the curse-of-dimensionality when the system parameters and design variables are high-dimensional, (3) the optimization is combinatorial and highly non-convex if the design variables are binary, often leading to non-robust designs. To make the solution of the Bayesian OED problem efficient, scalable, and robust for practical applications, we propose a novel joint optimization approach. This approach performs simultaneous (1) training of a scalable conditional normalizing flow (CNF) to efficiently maximize the expected information gain (EIG) of a jointly learned experimental design (2) optimization of a probabilistic formulation of the binary experimental design with a Bernoulli distribution. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed method for a practical MRI data acquisition problem, one of the most challenging Bayesian OED problems that has high-dimensional (320 $\times$ 320) parameters at high image resolution, high-dimensional (640 $\times$ 386) observations, and binary mask designs to select the most informative observations.
FineDiffusion: Scaling up Diffusion Models for Fine-grained Image Generation with 10,000 Classes
Authors: Ziying Pan, Kun Wang, Gang Li, Feihong He, Yongxuan Lai
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

The class-conditional image generation based on diffusion models is renowned for generating high-quality and diverse images. However, most prior efforts focus on generating images for general categories, e.g., 1000 classes in ImageNet-1k. A more challenging task, large-scale fine-grained image generation, remains the boundary to explore. In this work, we present a parameter-efficient strategy, called FineDiffusion, to fine-tune large pre-trained diffusion models scaling to large-scale fine-grained image generation with 10,000 categories. FineDiffusion significantly accelerates training and reduces storage overhead by only fine-tuning tiered class embedder, bias terms, and normalization layers' parameters. To further improve the image generation quality of fine-grained categories, we propose a novel sampling method for fine-grained image generation, which utilizes superclass-conditioned guidance, specifically tailored for fine-grained categories, to replace the conventional classifier-free guidance sampling. Compared to full fine-tuning, FineDiffusion achieves a remarkable 1.56x training speed-up and requires storing merely 1.77% of the total model parameters, while achieving state-of-the-art FID of 9.776 on image generation of 10,000 classes. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to other parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. The code and more generated results are available at our project website: https://finediffusion.github.io/.
Attention-Propagation Network for Egocentric Heatmap to 3D Pose Lifting
Authors: Taeho Kang, Youngki Lee
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Pose Estimation, Egocentric Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation, Position

We present EgoTAP, a heatmap-to-3D pose lifting method for highly accurate stereo egocentric 3D pose estimation. Severe self-occlusion and out-of-view limbs in egocentric camera views make accurate pose estimation a challenging problem. To address the challenge, prior methods employ joint heatmaps-probabilistic 2D representations of the body pose, but heatmap-to-3D pose conversion still remains an inaccurate process. We propose a novel heatmap-to-3D lifting method composed of the Grid ViT Encoder and the Propagation Network. The Grid ViT Encoder summarizes joint heatmaps into effective feature embedding using self-attention. Then, the Propagation Network estimates the 3D pose by utilizing skeletal information to better estimate the position of obscure joints. Our method significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrated by a 23.9\% reduction of error in an MPJPE metric. Our source code is available in GitHub.
A Multimodal Handover Failure Detection Dataset and Baselines
Authors: Santosh Thoduka, Nico Hochgeschwender, Juergen Gall, Paul G. Plöger
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Segmentation, Object, Temporal Action Segmentation, Video Classification

An object handover between a robot and a human is a coordinated action which is prone to failure for reasons such as miscommunication, incorrect actions and unexpected object properties. Existing works on handover failure detection and prevention focus on preventing failures due to object slip or external disturbances. However, there is a lack of datasets and evaluation methods that consider unpreventable failures caused by the human participant. To address this deficit, we present the multimodal Handover Failure Detection dataset, which consists of failures induced by the human participant, such as ignoring the robot or not releasing the object. We also present two baseline methods for handover failure detection: (i) a video classification method using 3D CNNs and (ii) a temporal action segmentation approach which jointly classifies the human action, robot action and overall outcome of the action. The results show that video is an important modality, but using force-torque data and gripper position help improve failure detection and action segmentation accuracy.
Multi-Scale Denoising in the Feature Space for Low-Light Instance Segmentation
Authors: Joanne Lin, Nantheera Anantrasirichai, David Bull
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Instance segmentation for low-light imagery remains largely unexplored due to the challenges imposed by such conditions, for example shot noise due to low photon count, color distortions and reduced contrast. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end solution to address this challenging task. Our proposed method implements weighted non-local blocks (wNLB) in the feature extractor. This integration enables an inherent denoising process at the feature level. As a result, our method eliminates the need for aligned ground truth images during training, thus supporting training on real-world low-light datasets. We introduce additional learnable weights at each layer in order to enhance the network's adaptability to real-world noise characteristics, which affect different feature scales in different ways. Experimental results on several object detectors show that the proposed method outperforms the pretrained networks with an Average Precision (AP) improvement of at least +7.6, with the introduction of wNLB further enhancing AP by upto +1.3.
NERV++: An Enhanced Implicit Neural Video Representation
Authors: Ahmed Ghorbel, Wassim Hamidouche, Luce Morin
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Video Compression

Neural fields, also known as implicit neural representations (INRs), have shown a remarkable capability of representing, generating, and manipulating various data types, allowing for continuous data reconstruction at a low memory footprint. Though promising, INRs applied to video compression still need to improve their rate-distortion performance by a large margin, and require a huge number of parameters and long training iterations to capture high-frequency details, limiting their wider applicability. Resolving this problem remains a quite challenging task, which would make INRs more accessible in compression tasks. We take a step towards resolving these shortcomings by introducing neural representations for videos NeRV++, an enhanced implicit neural video representation, as more straightforward yet effective enhancement over the original NeRV decoder architecture, featuring separable conv2d residual blocks (SCRBs) that sandwiches the upsampling block (UB), and a bilinear interpolation skip layer for improved feature representation. NeRV++ allows videos to be directly represented as a function approximated by a neural network, and significantly enhance the representation capacity beyond current INR-based video codecs. We evaluate our method on UVG, MCL JVC, and Bunny datasets, achieving competitive results for video compression with INRs. This achievement narrows the gap to autoencoder-based video coding, marking a significant stride in INR-based video compression research.
EchoTrack: Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jiacheng Lin, Jiajun Chen, Kunyu Peng, Xuan He, Zhiyong Li, Rainer Stiefelhagen, Kailun Yang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Multi-Object Tracking, Object, Object Tracking, Referring Multi-Object Tracking

This paper introduces the task of Auditory Referring Multi-Object Tracking (AR-MOT), which dynamically tracks specific objects in a video sequence based on audio expressions and appears as a challenging problem in autonomous driving. Due to the lack of semantic modeling capacity in audio and video, existing works have mainly focused on text-based multi-object tracking, which often comes at the cost of tracking quality, interaction efficiency, and even the safety of assistance systems, limiting the application of such methods in autonomous driving. In this paper, we delve into the problem of AR-MOT from the perspective of audio-video fusion and audio-video tracking. We put forward EchoTrack, an end-to-end AR-MOT framework with dual-stream vision transformers. The dual streams are intertwined with our Bidirectional Frequency-domain Cross-attention Fusion Module (Bi-FCFM), which bidirectionally fuses audio and video features from both frequency- and spatiotemporal domains. Moreover, we propose the Audio-visual Contrastive Tracking Learning (ACTL) regime to extract homogeneous semantic features between expressions and visual objects by learning homogeneous features between different audio and video objects effectively. Aside from the architectural design, we establish the first set of large-scale AR-MOT benchmarks, including Echo-KITTI, Echo-KITTI+, and Echo-BDD. Extensive experiments on the established benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed EchoTrack and its components. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/lab206/EchoTrack.