pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PixFoundation: Are We Heading in the Right Direction with Pixel-level Vision Foundation Models?
Authors: Mennatullah Siam
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Referring Expression, Referring Expression Segmentation, Visual Question Answering

Multiple works have emerged to push the boundaries on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) towards pixel-level understanding. Such approaches have shown strong performance on benchmarks for referring expression segmentation and grounded conversation generation. The current trend in pixel-level MLLMs is to train with pixel-level grounding supervision on large-scale labelled data. However, we show that such MLLMs when evaluated on recent challenging vision centric benchmarks, exhibit a weak ability in visual question answering. Surprisingly, some of these methods even downgrade the grounding ability of MLLMs that were never trained with such supervision. In this work, we propose two novel challenging benchmarks and show that MLLMs without pixel-level grounding supervision can outperform the state of the art in such tasks when evaluating both the pixel-level grounding and visual question answering. We propose simple baselines to extract the grounding information that can be plugged into any MLLM, which we call as PixFoundation. More importantly, we study the research question of ``When does grounding emerge in MLLMs that are not trained with pixel-level grounding supervision?'' We show that grounding can coincide with object parts or location/appearance information. Code repository is at https://github.com/MSiam/PixFoundation/.
HD-EPIC: A Highly-Detailed Egocentric Video Dataset
Authors: Toby Perrett, Ahmad Darkhalil, Saptarshi Sinha, Omar Emara, Sam Pollard, Kranti Parida, Kaiting Liu, Prajwal Gatti, Siddhant Bansal, Kevin Flanagan, Jacob Chalk, Zhifan Zhu, Rhodri Guerrier, Fahd Abdelazim, Bin Zhu, Davide Moltisanti, Michael Wray, Hazel Doughty, Dima Damen
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Action Recognition, Nutrition, Object, Semantic Segmentation, Video Object Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

We present a validation dataset of newly-collected kitchen-based egocentric videos, manually annotated with highly detailed and interconnected ground-truth labels covering: recipe steps, fine-grained actions, ingredients with nutritional values, moving objects, and audio annotations. Importantly, all annotations are grounded in 3D through digital twinning of the scene, fixtures, object locations, and primed with gaze. Footage is collected from unscripted recordings in diverse home environments, making HDEPIC the first dataset collected in-the-wild but with detailed annotations matching those in controlled lab environments. We show the potential of our highly-detailed annotations through a challenging VQA benchmark of 26K questions assessing the capability to recognise recipes, ingredients, nutrition, fine-grained actions, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze direction. The powerful long-context Gemini Pro only achieves 38.5% on this benchmark, showcasing its difficulty and highlighting shortcomings in current VLMs. We additionally assess action recognition, sound recognition, and long-term video-object segmentation on HD-EPIC. HD-EPIC is 41 hours of video in 9 kitchens with digital twins of 413 kitchen fixtures, capturing 69 recipes, 59K fine-grained actions, 51K audio events, 20K object movements and 37K object masks lifted to 3D. On average, we have 263 annotations per minute of our unscripted videos.
Beyond the Final Layer: Hierarchical Query Fusion Transformer with Agent-Interpolation Initialization for 3D Instance Segmentation
Authors: Jiahao Lu, Jiacheng Deng, Tianzhu Zhang
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Instance Segmentation, Decoder, Instance Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

3D instance segmentation aims to predict a set of object instances in a scene and represent them as binary foreground masks with corresponding semantic labels. Currently, transformer-based methods are gaining increasing attention due to their elegant pipelines, reduced manual selection of geometric properties, and superior performance. However, transformer-based methods fail to simultaneously maintain strong position and content information during query initialization. Additionally, due to supervision at each decoder layer, there exists a phenomenon of object disappearance with the deepening of layers. To overcome these hurdles, we introduce Beyond the Final Layer: Hierarchical Query Fusion Transformer with Agent-Interpolation Initialization for 3D Instance Segmentation (BFL). Specifically, an Agent-Interpolation Initialization Module is designed to generate resilient queries capable of achieving a balance between foreground coverage and content learning. Additionally, a Hierarchical Query Fusion Decoder is designed to retain low overlap queries, mitigating the decrease in recall with the deepening of layers. Extensive experiments on ScanNetV2, ScanNet200, ScanNet++ and S3DIS datasets demonstrate the superior performance of BFL.
Adaptive Margin Contrastive Learning for Ambiguity-aware 3D Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yang Chen, Yueqi Duan, Runzhong Zhang, Yap-Peng Tan
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Semantic Segmentation, Contrastive Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In this paper, we propose an adaptive margin contrastive learning method for 3D point cloud semantic segmentation, namely AMContrast3D. Most existing methods use equally penalized objectives, which ignore per-point ambiguities and less discriminated features stemming from transition regions. However, as highly ambiguous points may be indistinguishable even for humans, their manually annotated labels are less reliable, and hard constraints over these points would lead to sub-optimal models. To address this, we design adaptive objectives for individual points based on their ambiguity levels, aiming to ensure the correctness of low-ambiguity points while allowing mistakes for high-ambiguity points. Specifically, we first estimate ambiguities based on position embeddings. Then, we develop a margin generator to shift decision boundaries for contrastive feature embeddings, so margins are narrowed due to increasing ambiguities with even negative margins for extremely high-ambiguity points. Experimental results on large-scale datasets, S3DIS and ScanNet, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Automatic quantification of breast cancer biomarkers from multiple 18F-FDG PET image segmentation
Authors: Tewele W. Tareke, Neree Payan, Alexandre Cochet, Laurent Arnould, Benoit Presles, Jean-Marc Vrigneaud, Fabrice Meriaudeau, Alain Lalande
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) has become a standard clinical practice for tumor downsizing in breast cancer with 18F-FDG Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Our work aims to leverage PET imaging for the segmentation of breast lesions. The focus is on developing an automated system that accurately segments primary tumor regions and extracts key biomarkers from these areas to provide insights into the evolution of breast cancer following the first course of NAC. 243 baseline 18F-FDG PET scans (PET_Bl) and 180 follow-up 18F-FDG PET scans (PET_Fu) were acquired before and after the first course of NAC, respectively. Firstly, a deep learning-based breast tumor segmentation method was developed. The optimal baseline model (model trained on baseline exams) was fine-tuned on 15 follow-up exams and adapted using active learning to segment tumor areas in PET_Fu. The pipeline computes biomarkers such as maximum standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) to evaluate tumor evolution between PET_Fu and PET_Bl. Quality control measures were employed to exclude aberrant outliers. The nnUNet deep learning model outperformed in tumor segmentation on PET_Bl, achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.89 and a Hausdorff distance (HD) of 3.52 mm. After fine-tuning, the model demonstrated a DSC of 0.78 and a HD of 4.95 mm on PET_Fu exams. Biomarkers analysis revealed very strong correlations whatever the biomarker between manually segmented and automatically predicted regions. The significant average decrease of SUVmax, MTV and TLG were 5.22, 11.79 cm3 and 19.23 cm3, respectively. The presented approach demonstrates an automated system for breast tumor segmentation from 18F-FDG PET. Thanks to the extracted biomarkers, our method enables the automatic assessment of cancer progression.
Content-Rich AIGC Video Quality Assessment via Intricate Text Alignment and Motion-Aware Consistency
Authors: Shangkun Sun, Xiaoyu Liang, Bowen Qu, Wei Gao
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation, Video Quality Assessment, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

The advent of next-generation video generation models like \textit{Sora} poses challenges for AI-generated content (AIGC) video quality assessment (VQA). These models substantially mitigate flickering artifacts prevalent in prior models, enable longer and complex text prompts and generate longer videos with intricate, diverse motion patterns. Conventional VQA methods designed for simple text and basic motion patterns struggle to evaluate these content-rich videos. To this end, we propose \textbf{CRAVE} (\underline{C}ontent-\underline{R}ich \underline{A}IGC \underline{V}ideo \underline{E}valuator), specifically for the evaluation of Sora-era AIGC videos. CRAVE proposes the multi-granularity text-temporal fusion that aligns long-form complex textual semantics with video dynamics. Additionally, CRAVE leverages the hybrid motion-fidelity modeling to assess temporal artifacts. Furthermore, given the straightforward prompts and content in current AIGC VQA datasets, we introduce \textbf{CRAVE-DB}, a benchmark featuring content-rich videos from next-generation models paired with elaborate prompts. Extensive experiments have shown that the proposed CRAVE achieves excellent results on multiple AIGC VQA benchmarks, demonstrating a high degree of alignment with human perception. All data and code will be publicly available at https://github.com/littlespray/CRAVE.
PartEdit: Fine-Grained Image Editing using Pre-Trained Diffusion Models
Authors: Aleksandar Cvejic, Abdelrahman Eldesokey, Peter Wonka
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Text-based Image Editing

We present the first text-based image editing approach for object parts based on pre-trained diffusion models. Diffusion-based image editing approaches capitalized on the deep understanding of diffusion models of image semantics to perform a variety of edits. However, existing diffusion models lack sufficient understanding of many object parts, hindering fine-grained edits requested by users. To address this, we propose to expand the knowledge of pre-trained diffusion models to allow them to understand various object parts, enabling them to perform fine-grained edits. We achieve this by learning special textual tokens that correspond to different object parts through an efficient token optimization process. These tokens are optimized to produce reliable localization masks at each inference step to localize the editing region. Leveraging these masks, we design feature-blending and adaptive thresholding strategies to execute the edits seamlessly. To evaluate our approach, we establish a benchmark and an evaluation protocol for part editing. Experiments show that our approach outperforms existing editing methods on all metrics and is preferred by users 77-90% of the time in conducted user studies.
Simulating the Emergence of Differential Case Marking with Communicating Neural-Network Agents
Authors: Yuchen Lian, Arianna Bisazza, Tessa Verhoef
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Differential Case Marking (DCM) refers to the phenomenon where grammatical case marking is applied selectively based on semantic, pragmatic, or other factors. The emergence of DCM has been studied in artificial language learning experiments with human participants, which were specifically aimed at disentangling the effects of learning from those of communication (Smith & Culbertson, 2020). Multi-agent reinforcement learning frameworks based on neural networks have gained significant interest to simulate the emergence of human-like linguistic phenomena. In this study, we employ such a framework in which agents first acquire an artificial language before engaging in communicative interactions, enabling direct comparisons to human result. Using a very generic communication optimization algorithm and neural-network learners that have no prior experience with language or semantic preferences, our results demonstrate that learning alone does not lead to DCM, but when agents communicate, differential use of markers arises. This supports Smith and Culbertson (2020)'s findings that highlight the critical role of communication in shaping DCM and showcases the potential of neural-agent models to complement experimental research on language evolution.
Ontology-Guided, Hybrid Prompt Learning for Generalization in Knowledge Graph Question Answering
Authors: Longquan Jiang, Junbo Huang, Cedric Möller, Ricardo Usbeck
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Question Answering, Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Model, Prompt Learning, Question Answering, Semantic Parsing

Most existing Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) approaches are designed for a specific KG, such as Wikidata, DBpedia or Freebase. Due to the heterogeneity of the underlying graph schema, topology and assertions, most KGQA systems cannot be transferred to unseen Knowledge Graphs (KGs) without resource-intensive training data. We present OntoSCPrompt, a novel Large Language Model (LLM)-based KGQA approach with a two-stage architecture that separates semantic parsing from KG-dependent interactions. OntoSCPrompt first generates a SPARQL query structure (including SPARQL keywords such as SELECT, ASK, WHERE and placeholders for missing tokens) and then fills them with KG-specific information. To enhance the understanding of the underlying KG, we present an ontology-guided, hybrid prompt learning strategy that integrates KG ontology into the learning process of hybrid prompts (e.g., discrete and continuous vectors). We also present several task-specific decoding strategies to ensure the correctness and executability of generated SPARQL queries in both stages. Experimental results demonstrate that OntoSCPrompt performs as well as SOTA approaches without retraining on a number of KGQA datasets such as CWQ, WebQSP and LC-QuAD 1.0 in a resource-efficient manner and can generalize well to unseen domain-specific KGs like DBLP-QuAD and CoyPu KG Code: \href{https://github.com/LongquanJiang/OntoSCPrompt}{https://github.com/LongquanJiang/OntoSCPrompt}
MultiFloodSynth: Multi-Annotated Flood Synthetic Dataset Generation
Authors: YoonJe Kang, Yonghoon Jung, Wonseop Shin, Bumsoo Kim, Sanghyun Seo
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Image to 3D, Synthetic Data Generation

In this paper, we present synthetic data generation framework for flood hazard detection system. For high fidelity and quality, we characterize several real-world properties into virtual world and simulate the flood situation by controlling them. For the sake of efficiency, recent generative models in image-to-3D and urban city synthesis are leveraged to easily composite flood environments so that we avoid data bias due to the hand-crafted manner. Based on our framework, we build the flood synthetic dataset with 5 levels, dubbed MultiFloodSynth which contains rich annotation types like normal map, segmentation, 3D bounding box for a variety of downstream task. In experiments, our dataset demonstrate the enhanced performance of flood hazard detection with on-par realism compared with real dataset.
Innovative Framework for Early Estimation of Mental Disorder Scores to Enable Timely Interventions
Authors: Himanshi Singh, Sadhana Tiwari, Sonali Agarwal, Ritesh Chandra, Sanjay Kumar Sonbhadra, Vrijendra Singh
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Deep Learning, Rhythm

Individual's general well-being is greatly impacted by mental health conditions including depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), underscoring the importance of early detection and precise diagnosis in order to facilitate prompt clinical intervention. An advanced multimodal deep learning system for the automated classification of PTSD and depression is presented in this paper. Utilizing textual and audio data from clinical interview datasets, the method combines features taken from both modalities by combining the architectures of LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) and BiLSTM (Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory).Although text features focus on speech's semantic and grammatical components; audio features capture vocal traits including rhythm, tone, and pitch. This combination of modalities enhances the model's capacity to identify minute patterns connected to mental health conditions. Using test datasets, the proposed method achieves classification accuracies of 92% for depression and 93% for PTSD, outperforming traditional unimodal approaches and demonstrating its accuracy and robustness.
Single-Domain Generalized Object Detection by Balancing Domain Diversity and Invariance
Authors: Zhenwei He, Hongsu Ni
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Domain Generalization, object-detection, Object Detection

Single-domain generalization for object detection (S-DGOD) aims to transfer knowledge from a single source domain to unseen target domains. In recent years, many models have focused primarily on achieving feature invariance to enhance robustness. However, due to the inherent diversity across domains, an excessive emphasis on invariance can cause the model to overlook the actual differences between images. This overemphasis may complicate the training process and lead to a loss of valuable information. To address this issue, we propose the Diversity Invariance Detection Model (DIDM), which focuses on the balance between the diversity of domain-specific and invariance cross domains. Recognizing that domain diversity introduces variations in domain-specific features, we introduce a Diversity Learning Module (DLM). The DLM is designed to preserve the diversity of domain-specific information with proposed feature diversity loss while limiting the category semantics in the features. In addition, to maintain domain invariance, we incorporate a Weighted Aligning Module (WAM), which aligns features without compromising feature diversity. We conducted our model on five distinct datasets, which have illustrated the superior performance and effectiveness of the proposed model.
Optimized Unet with Attention Mechanism for Multi-Scale Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Xuan Li, Quanchao Lu, Yankaiqi Li, Muqing Li, Yijiashun Qi
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation is one of the core tasks in the field of computer vision, and its goal is to accurately classify each pixel in an image. The traditional Unet model achieves efficient feature extraction and fusion through an encoder-decoder structure, but it still has certain limitations when dealing with complex backgrounds, long-distance dependencies, and multi-scale targets. To this end, this paper proposes an improved Unet model combined with an attention mechanism, introduces channel attention and spatial attention modules, enhances the model's ability to focus on important features, and optimizes skip connections through a multi-scale feature fusion strategy, thereby improving the combination of global semantic information and fine-grained features. The experiment is based on the Cityscapes dataset and compared with classic models such as FCN, SegNet, DeepLabv3+, and PSPNet. The improved model performs well in terms of mIoU and pixel accuracy (PA), reaching 76.5% and 95.3% respectively. The experimental results verify the superiority of this method in dealing with complex scenes and blurred target boundaries. In addition, this paper discusses the potential of the improved model in practical applications and future expansion directions, indicating that it has broad application value in fields such as autonomous driving, remote sensing image analysis, and medical image processing.
Adaptive Semantic Prompt Caching with VectorQ
Authors: Luis Gaspar Schroeder, Shu Liu, Alejandro Cuadron, Mark Zhao, Stephan Krusche, Alfons Kemper, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Semantic prompt caches reduce the latency and cost of large language model (LLM) inference by reusing cached LLM-generated responses for semantically similar prompts. Vector similarity metrics assign a numerical score to quantify the similarity between an embedded prompt and its nearest neighbor in the cache. Existing systems rely on a static threshold to classify whether the similarity score is sufficiently high to result in a cache hit. We show that this one-size-fits-all threshold is insufficient across different prompts. We propose VectorQ, a framework to learn embedding-specific threshold regions that adapt to the complexity and uncertainty of an embedding. Through evaluations on a combination of four diverse datasets, we show that VectorQ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art systems across all static thresholds, achieving up to 12x increases in cache hit rate and error rate reductions up to 92%.
Hierarchical Contextual Manifold Alignment for Structuring Latent Representations in Large Language Models
Authors: Meiquan Dong, Haoran Liu, Yan Huang, Zixuan Feng, Jianhong Tang, Ruoxi Wang
Date: 2025-02-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Computational Efficiency, Representation Learning, Text Generation

The organization of latent token representations plays a crucial role in determining the stability, generalization, and contextual consistency of language models, yet conventional approaches to embedding refinement often rely on parameter modifications that introduce additional computational overhead. A hierarchical alignment method was introduced to restructure token embeddings without altering core model weights, ensuring that representational distributions maintained coherence across different linguistic contexts. Experimental evaluations demonstrated improvements in rare token retrieval, adversarial robustness, and long-range dependency tracking, highlighting the advantages of hierarchical structuring in mitigating inconsistencies in latent space organization. The comparative analysis against conventional fine-tuning and embedding perturbation methods revealed that hierarchical restructuring maintained computational efficiency while achieving measurable gains in representation quality. Structural refinements introduced through the alignment process resulted in improved contextual stability across varied linguistic tasks, reducing inconsistencies in token proximity relationships and enhancing interpretability in language generation. A detailed computational assessment confirmed that the realignment process introduced minimal inference overhead, ensuring that representational improvements did not compromise model efficiency. The findings reinforced the broader significance of structured representation learning, illustrating that hierarchical embedding modifications could serve as an effective strategy for refining latent space distributions while preserving pre-learned semantic associations.