pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Convolution goes higher-order: a biologically inspired mechanism empowers image classification
Authors: Simone Azeglio, Olivier Marre, Peter Neri, Ulisse Ferrari
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

We propose a novel approach to image classification inspired by complex nonlinear biological visual processing, whereby classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are equipped with learnable higher-order convolutions. Our model incorporates a Volterra-like expansion of the convolution operator, capturing multiplicative interactions akin to those observed in early and advanced stages of biological visual processing. We evaluated this approach on synthetic datasets by measuring sensitivity to testing higher-order correlations and performance in standard benchmarks (MNIST, FashionMNIST, CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and Imagenette). Our architecture outperforms traditional CNN baselines, and achieves optimal performance with expansions up to 3rd/4th order, aligning remarkably well with the distribution of pixel intensities in natural images. Through systematic perturbation analysis, we validate this alignment by isolating the contributions of specific image statistics to model performance, demonstrating how different orders of convolution process distinct aspects of visual information. Furthermore, Representational Similarity Analysis reveals distinct geometries across network layers, indicating qualitatively different modes of visual information processing. Our work bridges neuroscience and deep learning, offering a path towards more effective, biologically inspired computer vision models. It provides insights into visual information processing and lays the groundwork for neural networks that better capture complex visual patterns, particularly in resource-constrained scenarios.
Take Fake as Real: Realistic-like Robust Black-box Adversarial Attack to Evade AIGC Detection
Authors: Caiyun Xie, Dengpan Ye, Yunming Zhang, Long Tang, Yunna Lv, Jiacheng Deng, Jiawei Song
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

The security of AI-generated content (AIGC) detection is crucial for ensuring multimedia content credibility. To enhance detector security, research on adversarial attacks has become essential. However, most existing adversarial attacks focus only on GAN-generated facial images detection, struggle to be effective on multi-class natural images and diffusion-based detectors, and exhibit poor invisibility. To fill this gap, we first conduct an in-depth analysis of the vulnerability of AIGC detectors and discover the feature that detectors vary in vulnerability to different post-processing. Then, considering that the detector is agnostic in real-world scenarios and given this discovery, we propose a Realistic-like Robust Black-box Adversarial attack (R$^2$BA) with post-processing fusion optimization. Unlike typical perturbations, R$^2$BA uses real-world post-processing, i.e., Gaussian blur, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise and light spot to generate adversarial examples. Specifically, we use a stochastic particle swarm algorithm with inertia decay to optimize post-processing fusion intensity and explore the detector's decision boundary. Guided by the detector's fake probability, R$^2$BA enhances/weakens the detector-vulnerable/detector-robust post-processing intensity to strike a balance between adversariality and invisibility. Extensive experiments on popular/commercial AIGC detectors and datasets demonstrate that R$^2$BA exhibits impressive anti-detection performance, excellent invisibility, and strong robustness in GAN-based and diffusion-based cases. Compared to state-of-the-art white-box and black-box attacks, R$^2$BA shows significant improvements of 15\%--72\% and 21\%--47\% in anti-detection performance under the original and robust scenario respectively, offering valuable insights for the security of AIGC detection in real-world applications.
VP-MEL: Visual Prompts Guided Multimodal Entity Linking
Authors: Hongze Mi, Jinyuan Li, Xuying Zhang, Haoran Cheng, Jiahao Wang, Di Sun, Gang Pan
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Multimodal entity linking (MEL), a task aimed at linking mentions within multimodal contexts to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base (KB), has attracted much attention due to its wide applications in recent years. However, existing MEL methods often rely heavily on mention words as retrieval cues, which limits their ability to effectively utilize information from both images and text. This reliance poses significant challenges in scenarios where mention words are absent, as current MEL approaches struggle to leverage image-text pairs for accurate entity linking. To solve these issues, we introduce a Visual Prompts guided Multimodal Entity Linking (VP-MEL) task. Given a text-image pair, VP-MEL aims to link a marked region (i.e., visual prompt) in an image to its corresponding entities in the knowledge base. To facilitate this task, we present a new dataset, VPWiki, specifically designed for VP-MEL. Furthermore, we propose a framework named FBMEL, which enhances visual feature extraction using visual prompts and leverages the pretrained Detective-VLM model to capture latent information. Experimental results on the VPWiki dataset demonstrate that FBMEL outperforms baseline methods across multiple benchmarks for the VP-MEL task.
How to Merge Your Multimodal Models Over Time?
Authors: Sebastian Dziadzio, Vishaal Udandarao, Karsten Roth, Ameya Prabhu, Zeynep Akata, Samuel Albanie, Matthias Bethge
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Model merging combines multiple expert models - finetuned from a base foundation model on diverse tasks and domains - into a single, more capable model. However, most existing model merging approaches assume that all experts are available simultaneously. In reality, new tasks and domains emerge progressively over time, requiring strategies to integrate the knowledge of expert models as they become available: a process we call temporal model merging. The temporal dimension introduces unique challenges not addressed in prior work, raising new questions such as: when training for a new task, should the expert model start from the merged past experts or from the original base model? Should we merge all models at each time step? Which merging techniques are best suited for temporal merging? Should different strategies be used to initialize the training and deploy the model? To answer these questions, we propose a unified framework called TIME - Temporal Integration of Model Expertise - which defines temporal model merging across three axes: (1) Initialization Phase, (2) Deployment Phase, and (3) Merging Technique. Using TIME, we study temporal model merging across model sizes, compute budgets, and learning horizons on the FoMo-in-Flux benchmark. Our comprehensive suite of experiments across TIME allows us to uncover key insights for temporal model merging, offering a better understanding of current challenges and best practices for effective temporal model merging.
FlexEvent: Towards Flexible Event-Frame Object Detection at Varying Operational Frequencies
Authors: Dongyue Lu, Lingdong Kong, Gim Hee Lee, Camille Simon Chane, Wei Tsang Ooi
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Event cameras offer unparalleled advantages for real-time perception in dynamic environments, thanks to the microsecond-level temporal resolution and asynchronous operation. Existing event detectors, however, are limited by fixed-frequency paradigms and fail to fully exploit the high-temporal resolution and adaptability of event data. To address these limitations, we propose FlexEvent, a novel framework that enables detection at varying frequencies. Our approach consists of two key components: FlexFuse, an adaptive event-frame fusion module that integrates high-frequency event data with rich semantic information from RGB frames, and FlexTune, a frequency-adaptive fine-tuning mechanism that generates frequency-adjusted labels to enhance model generalization across varying operational frequencies. This combination allows our method to detect objects with high accuracy in both fast-moving and static scenarios, while adapting to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on large-scale event camera datasets demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art methods, achieving significant improvements in both standard and high-frequency settings. Notably, our method maintains robust performance when scaling from 20 Hz to 90 Hz and delivers accurate detection up to 180 Hz, proving its effectiveness in extreme conditions. Our framework sets a new benchmark for event-based object detection and paves the way for more adaptable, real-time vision systems. Code is publicly available.
You See it, You Got it: Learning 3D Creation on Pose-Free Videos at Scale
Authors: Baorui Ma, Huachen Gao, Haoge Deng, Zhengxiong Luo, Tiejun Huang, Lulu Tang, Xinlong Wang
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: 3D Generation, 3D geometry

Recent 3D generation models typically rely on limited-scale 3D `gold-labels' or 2D diffusion priors for 3D content creation. However, their performance is upper-bounded by constrained 3D priors due to the lack of scalable learning paradigms. In this work, we present See3D, a visual-conditional multi-view diffusion model trained on large-scale Internet videos for open-world 3D creation. The model aims to Get 3D knowledge by solely Seeing the visual contents from the vast and rapidly growing video data -- You See it, You Got it. To achieve this, we first scale up the training data using a proposed data curation pipeline that automatically filters out multi-view inconsistencies and insufficient observations from source videos. This results in a high-quality, richly diverse, large-scale dataset of multi-view images, termed WebVi3D, containing 320M frames from 16M video clips. Nevertheless, learning generic 3D priors from videos without explicit 3D geometry or camera pose annotations is nontrivial, and annotating poses for web-scale videos is prohibitively expensive. To eliminate the need for pose conditions, we introduce an innovative visual-condition - a purely 2D-inductive visual signal generated by adding time-dependent noise to the masked video data. Finally, we introduce a novel visual-conditional 3D generation framework by integrating See3D into a warping-based pipeline for high-fidelity 3D generation. Our numerical and visual comparisons on single and sparse reconstruction benchmarks show that See3D, trained on cost-effective and scalable video data, achieves notable zero-shot and open-world generation capabilities, markedly outperforming models trained on costly and constrained 3D datasets. Please refer to our project page at: https://vision.baai.ac.cn/see3d
Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy
Authors: Yuxuan Xue, Xianghui Xie, Riccardo Marin, Gerard Pons-Moll
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Image to 3D

Creating realistic 3D objects and clothed avatars from a single RGB image is an attractive yet challenging problem. Due to its ill-posed nature, recent works leverage powerful prior from 2D diffusion models pretrained on large datasets. Although 2D diffusion models demonstrate strong generalization capability, they cannot guarantee the generated multi-view images are 3D consistent. In this paper, we propose Gen-3Diffusion: Realistic Image-to-3D Generation via 2D & 3D Diffusion Synergy. We leverage a pre-trained 2D diffusion model and a 3D diffusion model via our elegantly designed process that synchronizes two diffusion models at both training and sampling time. The synergy between the 2D and 3D diffusion models brings two major advantages: 1) 2D helps 3D in generalization: the pretrained 2D model has strong generalization ability to unseen images, providing strong shape priors for the 3D diffusion model; 2) 3D helps 2D in multi-view consistency: the 3D diffusion model enhances the 3D consistency of 2D multi-view sampling process, resulting in more accurate multi-view generation. We validate our idea through extensive experiments in image-based objects and clothed avatar generation tasks. Results show that our method generates realistic 3D objects and avatars with high-fidelity geometry and texture. Extensive ablations also validate our design choices and demonstrate the strong generalization ability to diverse clothing and compositional shapes. Our code and pretrained models will be publicly released on https://yuxuan-xue.com/gen-3diffusion.
FedSynthCT-Brain: A Federated Learning Framework for Multi-Institutional Brain MRI-to-CT Synthesis
Authors: Ciro Benito Raggio, Mathias Krohmer Zabaleta, Nils Skupien, Oliver Blanck, Francesco Cicone, Giuseppe Lucio Cascini, Paolo Zaffino, Lucia Migliorelli, Maria Francesca Spadea
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, SSIM

The generation of Synthetic Computed Tomography (sCT) images has become a pivotal methodology in modern clinical practice, particularly in the context of Radiotherapy (RT) treatment planning. The use of sCT enables the calculation of doses, pushing towards Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) guided radiotherapy treatments. Deep learning methods for MRI-to-sCT have shown promising results, but their reliance on single-centre training dataset limits generalisation capabilities to diverse clinical settings. Moreover, creating centralised multi-centre datasets may pose privacy concerns. To address the aforementioned issues, we introduced FedSynthCT-Brain, an approach based on the Federated Learning (FL) paradigm for MRI-to-sCT in brain imaging. This is among the first applications of FL for MRI-to-sCT, employing a cross-silo horizontal FL approach that allows multiple centres to collaboratively train a U-Net-based deep learning model. We validated our method using real multicentre data from four European and American centres, simulating heterogeneous scanner types and acquisition modalities, and tested its performance on an independent dataset from a centre outside the federation. In the case of the unseen centre, the federated model achieved a median Mean Absolute Error (MAE) of $102.0$ HU across 23 patients, with an interquartile range of $96.7-110.5$ HU. The median (interquartile range) for the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PNSR) were $0.89 (0.86-0.89)$ and $26.58 (25.52-27.42)$, respectively. The analysis of the results showed acceptable performances of the federated approach, thus highlighting the potential of FL to enhance MRI-to-sCT to improve generalisability and advancing safe and equitable clinical applications while fostering collaboration and preserving data privacy.
EMOv2: Pushing 5M Vision Model Frontier
Authors: Jiangning Zhang, Teng Hu, Haoyang He, Zhucun Xue, Yabiao Wang, Chengjie Wang, Yong liu, Xiangtai Li, DaCheng Tao
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, model, object-detection, Object Detection

This work focuses on developing parameter-efficient and lightweight models for dense predictions while trading off parameters, FLOPs, and performance. Our goal is to set up the new frontier of the 5M magnitude lightweight model on various downstream tasks. Inverted Residual Block (IRB) serves as the infrastructure for lightweight CNNs, but no counterparts have been recognized by attention-based design. Our work rethinks the lightweight infrastructure of efficient IRB and practical components in Transformer from a unified perspective, extending CNN-based IRB to attention-based models and abstracting a one-residual Meta Mobile Block (MMBlock) for lightweight model design. Following neat but effective design criterion, we deduce a modern Improved Inverted Residual Mobile Block (i2RMB) and improve a hierarchical Efficient MOdel (EMOv2) with no elaborate complex structures. Considering the imperceptible latency for mobile users when downloading models under 4G/5G bandwidth and ensuring model performance, we investigate the performance upper limit of lightweight models with a magnitude of 5M. Extensive experiments on various vision recognition, dense prediction, and image generation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our EMOv2 over state-of-the-art methods, e.g., EMOv2-1M/2M/5M achieve 72.3, 75.8, and 79.4 Top-1 that surpass equal-order CNN-/Attention-based models significantly. At the same time, EMOv2-5M equipped RetinaNet achieves 41.5 mAP for object detection tasks that surpasses the previous EMO-5M by +2.6. When employing the more robust training recipe, our EMOv2-5M eventually achieves 82.9 Top-1 accuracy, which elevates the performance of 5M magnitude models to a new level. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangzjn/EMOv2.
ILLUME: Illuminating Your LLMs to See, Draw, and Self-Enhance
Authors: Chunwei Wang, Guansong Lu, Junwei Yang, Runhui Huang, Jianhua Han, Lu Hou, Wei zhang, Hang Xu
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Visual Question Answering

In this paper, we introduce ILLUME, a unified multimodal large language model (MLLM) that seamlessly integrates multimodal understanding and generation capabilities within a single large language model through a unified next-token prediction formulation. To address the large dataset size typically required for image-text alignment, we propose to enhance data efficiency through the design of a vision tokenizer that incorporates semantic information and a progressive multi-stage training procedure. This approach reduces the dataset size to just 15M for pretraining -- over four times fewer than what is typically needed -- while achieving competitive or even superior performance with existing unified MLLMs, such as Janus. Additionally, to promote synergistic enhancement between understanding and generation capabilities, which is under-explored in previous works, we introduce a novel self-enhancing multimodal alignment scheme. This scheme supervises the MLLM to self-assess the consistency between text descriptions and self-generated images, facilitating the model to interpret images more accurately and avoid unrealistic and incorrect predictions caused by misalignment in image generation. Based on extensive experiments, our proposed ILLUME stands out and competes with state-of-the-art unified MLLMs and specialized models across various benchmarks for multimodal understanding, generation, and editing.
Diff5T: Benchmarking Human Brain Diffusion MRI with an Extensive 5.0 Tesla K-Space and Spatial Dataset
Authors: Shanshan Wang, Shoujun Yu, Jian Cheng, Sen Jia, Changjun Tie, Jiayu Zhu, Haohao Peng, Yijing Dong, Jianzhong He, Fan Zhang, Yaowen Xing, Xiuqin Jia, Qi Yang, Qiyuan Tian, Hua Guo, Guobin Li, Hairong Zheng
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diffusion  MRI, Image Reconstruction

Diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) provides critical insights into the microstructural and connectional organization of the human brain. However, the availability of high-field, open-access datasets that include raw k-space data for advanced research remains limited. To address this gap, we introduce Diff5T, a first comprehensive 5.0 Tesla diffusion MRI dataset focusing on the human brain. This dataset includes raw k-space data and reconstructed diffusion images, acquired using a variety of imaging protocols. Diff5T is designed to support the development and benchmarking of innovative methods in artifact correction, image reconstruction, image preprocessing, diffusion modelling and tractography. The dataset features a wide range of diffusion parameters, including multiple b-values and gradient directions, allowing extensive research applications in studying human brain microstructure and connectivity. With its emphasis on open accessibility and detailed benchmarks, Diff5T serves as a valuable resource for advancing human brain mapping research using diffusion MRI, fostering reproducibility, and enabling collaboration across the neuroscience and medical imaging communities.
Knowledge Transfer and Domain Adaptation for Fine-Grained Remote Sensing Image Segmentation
Authors: Shun Zhang, Xuechao Zou, Kai Li, Congyan Lang, Shiying Wang, Pin Tao, Tengfei Cao
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Spatial Interpolation, Transfer Learning, Zero-shot Generalization

Fine-grained remote sensing image segmentation is essential for accurately identifying detailed objects in remote sensing images. Recently, vision transformer models (VTMs) pre-trained on large-scale datasets have demonstrated strong zero-shot generalization. However, directly applying them to specific tasks may lead to domain shift. We introduce a novel end-to-end learning paradigm combining knowledge guidance with domain refinement to enhance performance. We present two key components: the Feature Alignment Module (FAM) and the Feature Modulation Module (FMM). FAM aligns features from a CNN-based backbone with those from the pretrained VTM's encoder using channel transformation and spatial interpolation, and transfers knowledge via KL divergence and L2 normalization constraint. FMM further adapts the knowledge to the specific domain to address domain shift. We also introduce a fine-grained grass segmentation dataset and demonstrate, through experiments on two datasets, that our method achieves a significant improvement of 2.57 mIoU on the grass dataset and 3.73 mIoU on the cloud dataset. The results highlight the potential of combining knowledge transfer and domain adaptation to overcome domain-related challenges and data limitations. The project page is available at https://xavierjiezou.github.io/KTDA/.
Efficiency Meets Fidelity: A Novel Quantization Framework for Stable Diffusion
Authors: Shuaiting Li, Juncan Deng, Zeyu Wang, Kedong Xu, Rongtao Deng, Hong Gu, Haibin Shen, Kejie Huang
Date: 2024-12-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation, Quantization, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generation via Stable Diffusion models (SDM) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, their computational intensity, particularly in the iterative denoising process, hinders real-time deployment in latency-sensitive applications. While Recent studies have explored post-training quantization (PTQ) and quantization-aware training (QAT) methods to compress Diffusion models, existing methods often overlook the consistency between results generated by quantized models and those from floating-point models. This consistency is paramount for professional applications where both efficiency and output reliability are essential. To ensure that quantized SDM generates high-quality and consistent images, we propose an efficient quantization framework for SDM. Our framework introduces a Serial-to-Parallel pipeline that simultaneously maintains training-inference consistency and ensures optimization stability. Building upon this foundation, we further develop several techniques including multi-timestep activation quantization, time information precalculation, inter-layer distillation, and selective freezing, to achieve high-fidelity generation in comparison to floating-point models while maintaining quantization efficiency. Through comprehensive evaluation across multiple Stable Diffusion variants (v1-4, v2-1, XL 1.0, and v3), our method demonstrates superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches with shorter training times. Under W4A8 quantization settings, we achieve significant improvements in both distribution similarity and visual fidelity, while preserving a high image quality.