pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
RoadRunner M&M -- Learning Multi-range Multi-resolution Traversability Maps for Autonomous Off-road Navigation
Authors: Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Deegan Atha, Patrick Spieler, Marco Hutter, Shehryar Khattak
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Navigation

Autonomous robot navigation in off-road environments requires a comprehensive understanding of the terrain geometry and traversability. The degraded perceptual conditions and sparse geometric information at longer ranges make the problem challenging especially when driving at high speeds. Furthermore, the sensing-to-mapping latency and the look-ahead map range can limit the maximum speed of the vehicle. Building on top of the recent work RoadRunner, in this work, we address the challenge of long-range (100 m) traversability estimation. Our RoadRunner (M&M) is an end-to-end learning-based framework that directly predicts the traversability and elevation maps at multiple ranges (50 m, 100 m) and resolutions (0.2 m, 0.8 m) taking as input multiple images and a LiDAR voxel map. Our method is trained in a self-supervised manner by leveraging the dense supervision signal generated by fusing predictions from an existing traversability estimation stack (X-Racer) in hindsight and satellite Digital Elevation Maps. RoadRunner M&M achieves a significant improvement of up to 50% for elevation mapping and 30% for traversability estimation over RoadRunner, and is able to predict in 30% more regions compared to X-Racer while achieving real-time performance. Experiments on various out-of-distribution datasets also demonstrate that our data-driven approach starts to generalize to novel unstructured environments. We integrate our proposed framework in closed-loop with the path planner to demonstrate autonomous high-speed off-road robotic navigation in challenging real-world environments. Project Page: https://leggedrobotics.github.io/roadrunner_mm/
HGSLoc: 3DGS-based Heuristic Camera Pose Refinement
Authors: Zhongyan Niu, Zhen Tan, Jinpu Zhang, Xueliang Yang, Dewen Hu
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, 3D Reconstruction, NeRF, Neural Rendering, Pose Estimation, Visual Localization

Visual localization refers to the process of determining camera poses and orientation within a known scene representation. This task is often complicated by factors such as illumination changes and variations in viewing angles. In this paper, we propose HGSLoc, a novel lightweight, plug and-play pose optimization framework, which integrates 3D reconstruction with a heuristic refinement strategy to achieve higher pose estimation accuracy. Specifically, we introduce an explicit geometric map for 3D representation and high-fidelity rendering, allowing the generation of high-quality synthesized views to support accurate visual localization. Our method demonstrates a faster rendering speed and higher localization accuracy compared to NeRF-based neural rendering localization approaches. We introduce a heuristic refinement strategy, its efficient optimization capability can quickly locate the target node, while we set the step-level optimization step to enhance the pose accuracy in the scenarios with small errors. With carefully designed heuristic functions, it offers efficient optimization capabilities, enabling rapid error reduction in rough localization estimations. Our method mitigates the dependence on complex neural network models while demonstrating improved robustness against noise and higher localization accuracy in challenging environments, as compared to neural network joint optimization strategies. The optimization framework proposed in this paper introduces novel approaches to visual localization by integrating the advantages of 3D reconstruction and heuristic refinement strategy, which demonstrates strong performance across multiple benchmark datasets, including 7Scenes and DB dataset.
Anti-ESIA: Analyzing and Mitigating Impacts of Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks
Authors: Denglin Kang, Youqian Zhang, Wai Cheong Tam, Eugene Y. Fu
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Cameras are integral components of many critical intelligent systems. However, a growing threat, known as Electromagnetic Signal Injection Attacks (ESIA), poses a significant risk to these systems, where ESIA enables attackers to remotely manipulate images captured by cameras, potentially leading to malicious actions and catastrophic consequences. Despite the severity of this threat, the underlying reasons for ESIA's effectiveness remain poorly understood, and effective countermeasures are lacking. This paper aims to address these gaps by investigating ESIA from two distinct aspects: pixel loss and color strips. By analyzing these aspects separately on image classification tasks, we gain a deeper understanding of how ESIA can compromise intelligent systems. Additionally, we explore a lightweight solution to mitigate the effects of ESIA while acknowledging its limitations. Our findings provide valuable insights for future research and development in the field of camera security and intelligent systems.
TrajSSL: Trajectory-Enhanced Semi-Supervised 3D Object Detection
Authors: Philip Jacobson, Yichen Xie, Mingyu Ding, Chenfeng Xu, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Wei Zhan, Ming C. Wu
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, Motion Forecasting, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Pseudo Label

Semi-supervised 3D object detection is a common strategy employed to circumvent the challenge of manually labeling large-scale autonomous driving perception datasets. Pseudo-labeling approaches to semi-supervised learning adopt a teacher-student framework in which machine-generated pseudo-labels on a large unlabeled dataset are used in combination with a small manually-labeled dataset for training. In this work, we address the problem of improving pseudo-label quality through leveraging long-term temporal information captured in driving scenes. More specifically, we leverage pre-trained motion-forecasting models to generate object trajectories on pseudo-labeled data to further enhance the student model training. Our approach improves pseudo-label quality in two distinct manners: first, we suppress false positive pseudo-labels through establishing consistency across multiple frames of motion forecasting outputs. Second, we compensate for false negative detections by directly inserting predicted object tracks into the pseudo-labeled scene. Experiments on the nuScenes dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, improving the performance of standard semi-supervised approaches in a variety of settings.
SkinMamba: A Precision Skin Lesion Segmentation Architecture with Cross-Scale Global State Modeling and Frequency Boundary Guidance
Authors: Shun Zou, Mingya Zhang, Bingjian Fan, Zhengyi Zhou, Xiuguo Zou
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Lesion Segmentation, Mamba, Segmentation, Skin Lesion Segmentation

Skin lesion segmentation is a crucial method for identifying early skin cancer. In recent years, both convolutional neural network (CNN) and Transformer-based methods have been widely applied. Moreover, combining CNN and Transformer effectively integrates global and local relationships, but remains limited by the quadratic complexity of Transformer. To address this, we propose a hybrid architecture based on Mamba and CNN, called SkinMamba. It maintains linear complexity while offering powerful long-range dependency modeling and local feature extraction capabilities. Specifically, we introduce the Scale Residual State Space Block (SRSSB), which captures global contextual relationships and cross-scale information exchange at a macro level, enabling expert communication in a global state. This effectively addresses challenges in skin lesion segmentation related to varying lesion sizes and inconspicuous target areas. Additionally, to mitigate boundary blurring and information loss during model downsampling, we introduce the Frequency Boundary Guided Module (FBGM), providing sufficient boundary priors to guide precise boundary segmentation, while also using the retained information to assist the decoder in the decoding process. Finally, we conducted comparative and ablation experiments on two public lesion segmentation datasets (ISIC2017 and ISIC2018), and the results demonstrate the strong competitiveness of SkinMamba in skin lesion segmentation tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/zs1314/SkinMamba.
BAD: Bidirectional Auto-regressive Diffusion for Text-to-Motion Generation
Authors: S. Rohollah Hosseyni, Ali Ahmad Rahmani, S. Jamal Seyedmohammadi, Sanaz Seyedin, Arash Mohammadi
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Human motion prediction, Motion Forecasting, Motion Generation, Motion Synthesis

Autoregressive models excel in modeling sequential dependencies by enforcing causal constraints, yet they struggle to capture complex bidirectional patterns due to their unidirectional nature. In contrast, mask-based models leverage bidirectional context, enabling richer dependency modeling. However, they often assume token independence during prediction, which undermines the modeling of sequential dependencies. Additionally, the corruption of sequences through masking or absorption can introduce unnatural distortions, complicating the learning process. To address these issues, we propose Bidirectional Autoregressive Diffusion (BAD), a novel approach that unifies the strengths of autoregressive and mask-based generative models. BAD utilizes a permutation-based corruption technique that preserves the natural sequence structure while enforcing causal dependencies through randomized ordering, enabling the effective capture of both sequential and bidirectional relationships. Comprehensive experiments show that BAD outperforms autoregressive and mask-based models in text-to-motion generation, suggesting a novel pre-training strategy for sequence modeling. The codebase for BAD is available on https://github.com/RohollahHS/BAD.
Single-Layer Learnable Activation for Implicit Neural Representation (SL$^{2}$A-INR)
Authors: Moein Heidari, Reza Rezaeian, Reza Azad, Dorit Merhof, Hamid Soltanian-Zadeh, Ilker Hacihaliloglu
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: CT Reconstruction, Image Super-Resolution, Novel View Synthesis, Super-Resolution

Implicit Neural Representation (INR), leveraging a neural network to transform coordinate input into corresponding attributes, has recently driven significant advances in several vision-related domains. However, the performance of INR is heavily influenced by the choice of the nonlinear activation function used in its multilayer perceptron (MLP) architecture. Multiple nonlinearities have been investigated; yet, current INRs face limitations in capturing high-frequency components, diverse signal types, and handling inverse problems. We have identified that these problems can be greatly alleviated by introducing a paradigm shift in INRs. We find that an architecture with learnable activations in initial layers can represent fine details in the underlying signals. Specifically, we propose SL$^{2}$A-INR, a hybrid network for INR with a single-layer learnable activation function, prompting the effectiveness of traditional ReLU-based MLPs. Our method performs superior across diverse tasks, including image representation, 3D shape reconstructions, inpainting, single image super-resolution, CT reconstruction, and novel view synthesis. Through comprehensive experiments, SL$^{2}$A-INR sets new benchmarks in accuracy, quality, and convergence rates for INR.
Multi-frequency Electrical Impedance Tomography Reconstruction with Multi-Branch Attention Image Prior
Authors: Hao Fang, Zhe Liu, Yi Feng, Zhen Qiu, Pierre Bagnaninchi, Yunjie Yang
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00

Multi-frequency Electrical Impedance Tomography (mfEIT) is a promising biomedical imaging technique that estimates tissue conductivities across different frequencies. Current state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms, which rely on supervised learning and Multiple Measurement Vectors (MMV), require extensive training data, making them time-consuming, costly, and less practical for widespread applications. Moreover, the dependency on training data in supervised MMV methods can introduce erroneous conductivity contrasts across frequencies, posing significant concerns in biomedical applications. To address these challenges, we propose a novel unsupervised learning approach based on Multi-Branch Attention Image Prior (MAIP) for mfEIT reconstruction. Our method employs a carefully designed Multi-Branch Attention Network (MBA-Net) to represent multiple frequency-dependent conductivity images and simultaneously reconstructs mfEIT images by iteratively updating its parameters. By leveraging the implicit regularization capability of the MBA-Net, our algorithm can capture significant inter- and intra-frequency correlations, enabling robust mfEIT reconstruction without the need for training data. Through simulation and real-world experiments, our approach demonstrates performance comparable to, or better than, SOTA algorithms while exhibiting superior generalization capability. These results suggest that the MAIP-based method can be used to improve the reliability and applicability of mfEIT in various settings.
Depth from Coupled Optical Differentiation
Authors: Junjie Luo, Yuxuan Liu, Emma Alexander, Qi Guo
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00

We propose depth from coupled optical differentiation, a low-computation passive-lighting 3D sensing mechanism. It is based on our discovery that per-pixel object distance can be rigorously determined by a coupled pair of optical derivatives of a defocused image using a simple, closed-form relationship. Unlike previous depth-from-defocus (DfD) methods that leverage spatial derivatives of the image to estimate scene depths, the proposed mechanism's use of only optical derivatives makes it significantly more robust to noise. Furthermore, unlike many previous DfD algorithms with requirements on aperture code, this relationship is proved to be universal to a broad range of aperture codes. We build the first 3D sensor based on depth from coupled optical differentiation. Its optical assembly includes a deformable lens and a motorized iris, which enables dynamic adjustments to the optical power and aperture radius. The sensor captures two pairs of images: one pair with a differential change of optical power and the other with a differential change of aperture scale. From the four images, a depth and confidence map can be generated with only 36 floating point operations per output pixel (FLOPOP), more than ten times lower than the previous lowest passive-lighting depth sensing solution to our knowledge. Additionally, the depth map generated by the proposed sensor demonstrates more than twice the working range of previous DfD methods while using significantly lower computation.
Benchmarking VLMs' Reasoning About Persuasive Atypical Images
Authors: Sina Malakouti, Aysan Aghazadeh, Ashmit Khandelwal, Adriana Kovashka
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Object Recognition, Zero-shot Generalization

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown strong zero-shot generalization across various tasks, especially when integrated with large language models (LLMs). However, their ability to comprehend rhetorical and persuasive visual media, such as advertisements, remains understudied. Ads often employ atypical imagery, using surprising object juxtapositions to convey shared properties. For example, Fig. 1 (e) shows a beer with a feather-like texture. This requires advanced reasoning to deduce that this atypical representation signifies the beer's lightness. We introduce three novel tasks, Multi-label Atypicality Classification, Atypicality Statement Retrieval, and Aypical Object Recognition, to benchmark VLMs' understanding of atypicality in persuasive images. We evaluate how well VLMs use atypicality to infer an ad's message and test their reasoning abilities by employing semantically challenging negatives. Finally, we pioneer atypicality-aware verbalization by extracting comprehensive image descriptions sensitive to atypical elements. Our findings reveal that: (1) VLMs lack advanced reasoning capabilities compared to LLMs; (2) simple, effective strategies can extract atypicality-aware information, leading to comprehensive image verbalization; (3) atypicality aids persuasive advertisement understanding. Code and data will be made available.
Online Learning via Memory: Retrieval-Augmented Detector Adaptation
Authors: Yanan Jian, Fuxun Yu, Qi Zhang, William LeVine, Brandon Dubbs, Nikolaos Karianakis
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization, object-detection, Object Detection, Retrieval

This paper presents a novel way of online adapting any off-the-shelf object detection model to a novel domain without retraining the detector model. Inspired by how humans quickly learn knowledge of a new subject (e.g., memorization), we allow the detector to look up similar object concepts from memory during test time. This is achieved through a retrieval augmented classification (RAC) module together with a memory bank that can be flexibly updated with new domain knowledge. We experimented with various off-the-shelf open-set detector and close-set detectors. With only a tiny memory bank (e.g., 10 images per category) and being training-free, our online learning method could significantly outperform baselines in adapting a detector to novel domains.
CoMamba: Real-time Cooperative Perception Unlocked with State Space Models
Authors: Jinlong Li, Xinyu Liu, Baolu Li, Runsheng Xu, Jiachen Li, Hongkai Yu, Zhengzhong Tu
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection, State Space Models

Cooperative perception systems play a vital role in enhancing the safety and efficiency of vehicular autonomy. Although recent studies have highlighted the efficacy of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication techniques in autonomous driving, a significant challenge persists: how to efficiently integrate multiple high-bandwidth features across an expanding network of connected agents such as vehicles and infrastructure. In this paper, we introduce CoMamba, a novel cooperative 3D detection framework designed to leverage state-space models for real-time onboard vehicle perception. Compared to prior state-of-the-art transformer-based models, CoMamba enjoys being a more scalable 3D model using bidirectional state space models, bypassing the quadratic complexity pain-point of attention mechanisms. Through extensive experimentation on V2X/V2V datasets, CoMamba achieves superior performance compared to existing methods while maintaining real-time processing capabilities. The proposed framework not only enhances object detection accuracy but also significantly reduces processing time, making it a promising solution for next-generation cooperative perception systems in intelligent transportation networks.
HAVANA: Hierarchical stochastic neighbor embedding for Accelerated Video ANnotAtions
Authors: Alexandru Bobe, Jan C. van Gemert
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Video Understanding

Video annotation is a critical and time-consuming task in computer vision research and applications. This paper presents a novel annotation pipeline that uses pre-extracted features and dimensionality reduction to accelerate the temporal video annotation process. Our approach uses Hierarchical Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (HSNE) to create a multi-scale representation of video features, allowing annotators to efficiently explore and label large video datasets. We demonstrate significant improvements in annotation effort compared to traditional linear methods, achieving more than a 10x reduction in clicks required for annotating over 12 hours of video. Our experiments on multiple datasets show the effectiveness and robustness of our pipeline across various scenarios. Moreover, we investigate the optimal configuration of HSNE parameters for different datasets. Our work provides a promising direction for scaling up video annotation efforts in the era of video understanding.
Optimizing Resource Consumption in Diffusion Models through Hallucination Early Detection
Authors: Federico Betti, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Diffusion models have significantly advanced generative AI, but they encounter difficulties when generating complex combinations of multiple objects. As the final result heavily depends on the initial seed, accurately ensuring the desired output can require multiple iterations of the generation process. This repetition not only leads to a waste of time but also increases energy consumption, echoing the challenges of efficiency and accuracy in complex generative tasks. To tackle this issue, we introduce HEaD (Hallucination Early Detection), a new paradigm designed to swiftly detect incorrect generations at the beginning of the diffusion process. The HEaD pipeline combines cross-attention maps with a new indicator, the Predicted Final Image, to forecast the final outcome by leveraging the information available at early stages of the generation process. We demonstrate that using HEaD saves computational resources and accelerates the generation process to get a complete image, i.e. an image where all requested objects are accurately depicted. Our findings reveal that HEaD can save up to 12% of the generation time on a two objects scenario and underscore the importance of early detection mechanisms in generative models.
SoccerNet 2024 Challenges Results
Authors: Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers, Victor Joos, Floriane Magera, Jan Held, Seyed Abolfazl Ghasemzadeh, Xin Zhou, Karolina Seweryn, Mateusz Kowalczyk, Zuzanna Mróz, Szymon Łukasik, Michał Hałoń, Hassan Mkhallati, Adrien Deliège, Carlos Hinojosa, Karen Sanchez, Amir M. Mansourian, Pierre Miralles, Olivier Barnich, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Alexandre Alahi, Bernard Ghanem, Marc Van Droogenbroeck, Adam Gorski, Albert Clapés, Andrei Boiarov, Anton Afanasiev, Artur Xarles, Atom Scott, Byoungkwon Lim, Calvin Yeung, Cristian Gonzalez, Dominic Rüfenacht, Enzo Pacilio, Fabian Deuser, Faisal Sami Altawijri, Francisco Cachón, Hankyul Kim, Haobo Wang, Hyeonmin Choe, Hyunwoo J Kim, Il-Min Kim, Jae-Mo Kang, Jamshid Tursunboev, Jian Yang, Jihwan Hong, JiMin Lee, Jing Zhang, Junseok Lee, Kexin Zhang, Konrad Habel, Licheng Jiao, Linyi Li, Marc Gutiérrez-Pérez, Marcelo Ortega, Menglong Li, Milosz Lopatto, Nikita Kasatkin, Nikolay Nemtsev, Norbert Oswald, Oleg Udin, Pavel Kononov, Pei Geng, Saad Ghazai Alotaibi, Sehyung Kim, Sergei Ulasen, Sergio Escalera, Shanshan Zhang, Shuyuan Yang, Sunghwan Moon, Thomas B. Moeslund, Vasyl Shandyba, Vladimir Golovkin, Wei Dai, WonTaek Chung, Xinyu Liu, Yongqiang Zhu, Youngseo Kim, Yuan Li, Yuting Yang, Yuxuan Xiao, Zehua Cheng, Zhihao LI
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Spotting, Dense Video Captioning, Game State Reconstruction, Video Captioning, Video Understanding

The SoccerNet 2024 challenges represent the fourth annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. These challenges aim to advance research across multiple themes in football, including broadcast video understanding, field understanding, and player understanding. This year, the challenges encompass four vision-based tasks. (1) Ball Action Spotting, focusing on precisely localizing when and which soccer actions related to the ball occur, (2) Dense Video Captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps, (3) Multi-View Foul Recognition, a novel task focusing on analyzing multiple viewpoints of a potential foul incident to classify whether a foul occurred and assess its severity, (4) Game State Reconstruction, another novel task focusing on reconstructing the game state from broadcast videos onto a 2D top-view map of the field. Detailed information about the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards can be found at https://www.soccer-net.org, with baselines and development kits available at https://github.com/SoccerNet.