pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Visually Guided Generative Text-Layout Pre-training for Document Intelligence
Authors: Zhiming Mao, Haoli Bai, Lu Hou, Jiansheng Wei, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Classification, document understanding, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question Answering

Prior study shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU), which typically requires models to gain abilities to perceive and reason both document texts and layouts (e.g., locations of texts and table-cells). To this end, we propose visually guided generative text-layout pre-training, named ViTLP. Given a document image, the model optimizes hierarchical language and layout modeling objectives to generate the interleaved text and layout sequence. In addition, to address the limitation of processing long documents by Transformers, we introduce a straightforward yet effective multi-segment generative pre-training scheme, facilitating ViTLP to process word-intensive documents of any length. ViTLP can function as a native OCR model to localize and recognize texts of document images. Besides, ViTLP can be effectively applied to various downstream VDU tasks. Extensive experiments show that ViTLP achieves competitive performance over existing baselines on benchmark VDU tasks, including information extraction, document classification, and document question answering.
Transfer Learning of Real Image Features with Soft Contrastive Loss for Fake Image Detection
Authors: Ziyou Liang, Weifeng Liu, Run Wang, Mengjie Wu, Boheng Li, Yuyang Zhang, Lina Wang, Xinyi Yang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Fake Image Detection, Transfer Learning

In the last few years, the artifact patterns in fake images synthesized by different generative models have been inconsistent, leading to the failure of previous research that relied on spotting subtle differences between real and fake. In our preliminary experiments, we find that the artifacts in fake images always change with the development of the generative model, while natural images exhibit stable statistical properties. In this paper, we employ natural traces shared only by real images as an additional target for a classifier. Specifically, we introduce a self-supervised feature mapping process for natural trace extraction and develop a transfer learning based on soft contrastive loss to bring them closer to real images and further away from fake ones. This motivates the detector to make decisions based on the proximity of images to the natural traces. To conduct a comprehensive experiment, we built a high-quality and diverse dataset that includes generative models comprising GANs and diffusion models, to evaluate the effectiveness in generalizing unknown forgery techniques and robustness in surviving different transformations. Experimental results show that our proposed method gives 96.2% mAP significantly outperforms the baselines. Extensive experiments conducted on popular commercial platforms reveal that our proposed method achieves an accuracy exceeding 78.4%, underscoring its practicality for real-world application deployment.
Make-Your-Anchor: A Diffusion-based 2D Avatar Generation Framework
Authors: Ziyao Huang, Fan Tang, Yong Zhang, Xiaodong Cun, Juan Cao, Jintao Li, Tong-Yee Lee
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Denoising

Despite the remarkable process of talking-head-based avatar-creating solutions, directly generating anchor-style videos with full-body motions remains challenging. In this study, we propose Make-Your-Anchor, a novel system necessitating only a one-minute video clip of an individual for training, subsequently enabling the automatic generation of anchor-style videos with precise torso and hand movements. Specifically, we finetune a proposed structure-guided diffusion model on input video to render 3D mesh conditions into human appearances. We adopt a two-stage training strategy for the diffusion model, effectively binding movements with specific appearances. To produce arbitrary long temporal video, we extend the 2D U-Net in the frame-wise diffusion model to a 3D style without additional training cost, and a simple yet effective batch-overlapped temporal denoising module is proposed to bypass the constraints on video length during inference. Finally, a novel identity-specific face enhancement module is introduced to improve the visual quality of facial regions in the output videos. Comparative experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the system in terms of visual quality, temporal coherence, and identity preservation, outperforming SOTA diffusion/non-diffusion methods. Project page: \url{https://github.com/ICTMCG/Make-Your-Anchor}.
Medical Image Registration and Its Application in Retinal Images: A Review
Authors: Qiushi Nie, Xiaoqing Zhang, Yan Hu, Mingdao Gong, Jiang Liu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Medical image registration is vital for disease diagnosis and treatment with its ability to merge diverse information of images, which may be captured under different times, angles, or modalities. Although several surveys have reviewed the development of medical image registration, these surveys have not systematically summarized methodologies of existing medical image registration methods. To this end, we provide a comprehensive review of these methods from traditional and deep learning-based directions, aiming to help audiences understand the development of medical image registration quickly. In particular, we review recent advances in retinal image registration at the end of each section, which has not attracted much attention. Additionally, we also discuss the current challenges of retinal image registration and provide insights and prospects for future research.
Self-Supervised Learning for Medical Image Data with Anatomy-Oriented Imaging Planes
Authors: Tianwei Zhang, Dong Wei, Mengmeng Zhu, Shi Gu, Yefeng Zheng
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Medical Image Analysis, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation, Transfer Learning

Self-supervised learning has emerged as a powerful tool for pretraining deep networks on unlabeled data, prior to transfer learning of target tasks with limited annotation. The relevance between the pretraining pretext and target tasks is crucial to the success of transfer learning. Various pretext tasks have been proposed to utilize properties of medical image data (e.g., three dimensionality), which are more relevant to medical image analysis than generic ones for natural images. However, previous work rarely paid attention to data with anatomy-oriented imaging planes, e.g., standard cardiac magnetic resonance imaging views. As these imaging planes are defined according to the anatomy of the imaged organ, pretext tasks effectively exploiting this information can pretrain the networks to gain knowledge on the organ of interest. In this work, we propose two complementary pretext tasks for this group of medical image data based on the spatial relationship of the imaging planes. The first is to learn the relative orientation between the imaging planes and implemented as regressing their intersecting lines. The second exploits parallel imaging planes to regress their relative slice locations within a stack. Both pretext tasks are conceptually straightforward and easy to implement, and can be combined in multitask learning for better representation learning. Thorough experiments on two anatomical structures (heart and knee) and representative target tasks (semantic segmentation and classification) demonstrate that the proposed pretext tasks are effective in pretraining deep networks for remarkably boosted performance on the target tasks, and superior to other recent approaches.
PathoTune: Adapting Visual Foundation Model to Pathological Specialists
Authors: Jiaxuan Lu, Fang Yan, Xiaofan Zhang, Yue Gao, Shaoting Zhang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: model

As natural image understanding moves towards the pretrain-finetune era, research in pathology imaging is concurrently evolving. Despite the predominant focus on pretraining pathological foundation models, how to adapt foundation models to downstream tasks is little explored. For downstream adaptation, we propose the existence of two domain gaps, i.e., the Foundation-Task Gap and the Task-Instance Gap. To mitigate these gaps, we introduce PathoTune, a framework designed to efficiently adapt pathological or even visual foundation models to pathology-specific tasks via multi-modal prompt tuning. The proposed framework leverages Task-specific Visual Prompts and Task-specific Textual Prompts to identify task-relevant features, along with Instance-specific Visual Prompts for encoding single pathological image features. Results across multiple datasets at both patch-level and WSI-level demonstrate its superior performance over single-modality prompt tuning approaches. Significantly, PathoTune facilitates the direct adaptation of natural visual foundation models to pathological tasks, drastically outperforming pathological foundation models with simple linear probing. The code is available at https://github.com/openmedlab/PathoDuet.
CT-Bound: Robust Boundary Detection From Noisy Images Via Hybrid Convolution and Transformer Neural Networks
Authors: Wei Xu, Junjie Luo, Qi Guo
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Boundary Detection, Edge Detection

We present CT-Bound, a robust and fast boundary detection method for very noisy images using a hybrid Convolution and Transformer neural network. The proposed architecture decomposes boundary estimation into two tasks: local detection and global regularization. During the local detection, the model uses a convolutional architecture to predict the boundary structure of each image patch in the form of a pre-defined local boundary representation, the field-of-junctions (FoJ). Then, it uses a feed-forward transformer architecture to globally refine the boundary structures of each patch to generate an edge map and a smoothed color map simultaneously. Our quantitative analysis shows that CT-Bound outperforms the previous best algorithms in edge detection on very noisy images. It also increases the edge detection accuracy of FoJ-based methods while having a 3-time speed improvement. Finally, we demonstrate that CT-Bound can produce boundary and color maps on real captured images without extra fine-tuning and real-time boundary map and color map videos at ten frames per second.
REFRAME: Reflective Surface Real-Time Rendering for Mobile Devices
Authors: Chaojie Ji, Yufeng Li, Yiyi Liao
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis

This work tackles the challenging task of achieving real-time novel view synthesis for reflective surfaces across various scenes. Existing real-time rendering methods, especially those based on meshes, often have subpar performance in modeling surfaces with rich view-dependent appearances. Our key idea lies in leveraging meshes for rendering acceleration while incorporating a novel approach to parameterize view-dependent information. We decompose the color into diffuse and specular, and model the specular color in the reflected direction based on a neural environment map. Our experiments demonstrate that our method achieves comparable reconstruction quality for highly reflective surfaces compared to state-of-the-art offline methods, while also efficiently enabling real-time rendering on edge devices such as smartphones.
Camera-aware Label Refinement for Unsupervised Person Re-identification
Authors: Pengna Li, Kangyi Wu, Wenli Huang, Sanping Zhou, Jinjun Wang
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Person Re-Identification, Unsupervised Person Re-Identification

Unsupervised person re-identification aims to retrieve images of a specified person without identity labels. Many recent unsupervised Re-ID approaches adopt clustering-based methods to measure cross-camera feature similarity to roughly divide images into clusters. They ignore the feature distribution discrepancy induced by camera domain gap, resulting in the unavoidable performance degradation. Camera information is usually available, and the feature distribution in the single camera usually focuses more on the appearance of the individual and has less intra-identity variance. Inspired by the observation, we introduce a \textbf{C}amera-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{L}abel \textbf{R}efinement~(CALR) framework that reduces camera discrepancy by clustering intra-camera similarity. Specifically, we employ intra-camera training to obtain reliable local pseudo labels within each camera, and then refine global labels generated by inter-camera clustering and train the discriminative model using more reliable global pseudo labels in a self-paced manner. Meanwhile, we develop a camera-alignment module to align feature distributions under different cameras, which could help deal with the camera variance further. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art approaches. The code is accessible at https://github.com/leeBooMla/CALR.
If CLIP Could Talk: Understanding Vision-Language Model Representations Through Their Preferred Concept Descriptions
Authors: Reza Esfandiarpoor, Cristina Menghini, Stephen H. Bach
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recent works often assume that Vision-Language Model (VLM) representations are based on visual attributes like shape. However, it is unclear to what extent VLMs prioritize this information to represent concepts. We propose Extract and Explore (EX2), a novel approach to characterize textual features that are important for VLMs. EX2 uses reinforcement learning to align a large language model with VLM preferences and generates descriptions that incorporate features that are important for the VLM. Then, we inspect the descriptions to identify features that contribute to VLM representations. Using EX2, we find that spurious descriptions have a major role in VLM representations despite providing no helpful information, e.g., Click to enlarge photo of CONCEPT. More importantly, among informative descriptions, VLMs rely significantly on non-visual attributes like habitat (e.g., North America) to represent visual concepts. Also, our analysis reveals that different VLMs prioritize different attributes in their representations. Overall, we show that VLMs do not simply match images to scene descriptions and that non-visual or even spurious descriptions significantly influence their representations.
RCBEVDet: Radar-camera Fusion in Bird's Eye View for 3D Object Detection
Authors: Zhiwei Lin, Zhe Liu, Zhongyu Xia, Xinhao Wang, Yongtao Wang, Shengxiang Qi, Yang Dong, Nan Dong, Le Zhang, Ce Zhu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Object Detection (RoI), Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Robust 3D Object Detection

Three-dimensional object detection is one of the key tasks in autonomous driving. To reduce costs in practice, low-cost multi-view cameras for 3D object detection are proposed to replace the expansive LiDAR sensors. However, relying solely on cameras is difficult to achieve highly accurate and robust 3D object detection. An effective solution to this issue is combining multi-view cameras with the economical millimeter-wave radar sensor to achieve more reliable multi-modal 3D object detection. In this paper, we introduce RCBEVDet, a radar-camera fusion 3D object detection method in the bird's eye view (BEV). Specifically, we first design RadarBEVNet for radar BEV feature extraction. RadarBEVNet consists of a dual-stream radar backbone and a Radar Cross-Section (RCS) aware BEV encoder. In the dual-stream radar backbone, a point-based encoder and a transformer-based encoder are proposed to extract radar features, with an injection and extraction module to facilitate communication between the two encoders. The RCS-aware BEV encoder takes RCS as the object size prior to scattering the point feature in BEV. Besides, we present the Cross-Attention Multi-layer Fusion module to automatically align the multi-modal BEV feature from radar and camera with the deformable attention mechanism, and then fuse the feature with channel and spatial fusion layers. Experimental results show that RCBEVDet achieves new state-of-the-art radar-camera fusion results on nuScenes and view-of-delft (VoD) 3D object detection benchmarks. Furthermore, RCBEVDet achieves better 3D detection results than all real-time camera-only and radar-camera 3D object detectors with a faster inference speed at 21~28 FPS. The source code will be released at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/RCBEVDet.
Producing and Leveraging Online Map Uncertainty in Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Xunjiang Gu, Guanyu Song, Igor Gilitschenski, Marco Pavone, Boris Ivanovic
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prediction, Trajectory Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction

High-definition (HD) maps have played an integral role in the development of modern autonomous vehicle (AV) stacks, albeit with high associated labeling and maintenance costs. As a result, many recent works have proposed methods for estimating HD maps online from sensor data, enabling AVs to operate outside of previously-mapped regions. However, current online map estimation approaches are developed in isolation of their downstream tasks, complicating their integration in AV stacks. In particular, they do not produce uncertainty or confidence estimates. In this work, we extend multiple state-of-the-art online map estimation methods to additionally estimate uncertainty and show how this enables more tightly integrating online mapping with trajectory forecasting. In doing so, we find that incorporating uncertainty yields up to 50% faster training convergence and up to 15% better prediction performance on the real-world nuScenes driving dataset.
Real-time Neuron Segmentation for Voltage Imaging
Authors: Yosuke Bando, Ramdas Pillai, Atsushi Kajita, Farhan Abdul Hakeem, Yves Quemener, Hua-an Tseng, Kiryl D. Piatkevich, Changyang Linghu, Xue Han, Edward S. Boyden
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

In voltage imaging, where the membrane potentials of individual neurons are recorded at from hundreds to thousand frames per second using fluorescence microscopy, data processing presents a challenge. Even a fraction of a minute of recording with a limited image size yields gigabytes of video data consisting of tens of thousands of frames, which can be time-consuming to process. Moreover, millisecond-level short exposures lead to noisy video frames, obscuring neuron footprints especially in deep-brain samples where noisy signals are buried in background fluorescence. To address this challenge, we propose a fast neuron segmentation method able to detect multiple, potentially overlapping, spiking neurons from noisy video frames, and implement a data processing pipeline incorporating the proposed segmentation method along with GPU-accelerated motion correction. By testing on existing datasets as well as on new datasets we introduce, we show that our pipeline extracts neuron footprints that agree well with human annotation even from cluttered datasets, and demonstrate real-time processing of voltage imaging data on a single desktop computer for the first time.
Benchmarks and Challenges in Pose Estimation for Egocentric Hand Interactions with Objects
Authors: Zicong Fan, Takehiko Ohkawa, Linlin Yang, Nie Lin, Zhishan Zhou, Shihao Zhou, Jiajun Liang, Zhong Gao, Xuanyang Zhang, Xue Zhang, Fei Li, Zheng Liu, Feng Lu, Karim Abou Zeid, Bastian Leibe, Jeongwan On, Seungryul Baek, Aditya Prakash, Saurabh Gupta, Kun He, Yoichi Sato, Otmar Hilliges, Hyung Jin Chang, Angela Yao
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Motion Generation, Object, Object Reconstruction, Pose Estimation

We interact with the world with our hands and see it through our own (egocentric) perspective. A holistic 3Dunderstanding of such interactions from egocentric views is important for tasks in robotics, AR/VR, action recognition and motion generation. Accurately reconstructing such interactions in 3D is challenging due to heavy occlusion, viewpoint bias, camera distortion, and motion blur from the head movement. To this end, we designed the HANDS23 challenge based on the AssemblyHands and ARCTIC datasets with carefully designed training and testing splits. Based on the results of the top submitted methods and more recent baselines on the leaderboards, we perform a thorough analysis on 3D hand(-object) reconstruction tasks. Our analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of addressing distortion specific to egocentric cameras, adopting high-capacity transformers to learn complex hand-object interactions, and fusing predictions from different views. Our study further reveals challenging scenarios intractable with state-of-the-art methods, such as fast hand motion, object reconstruction from narrow egocentric views, and close contact between two hands and objects. Our efforts will enrich the community's knowledge foundation and facilitate future hand studies on egocentric hand-object interactions.
Enhancing Visual Place Recognition via Fast and Slow Adaptive Biasing in Event Cameras
Authors: Gokul B. Nair, Michael Milford, Tobias Fischer
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Place Recognition

Event cameras are increasingly popular in robotics due to beneficial features such as low latency, energy efficiency, and high dynamic range. Nevertheless, their downstream task performance is greatly influenced by the optimization of bias parameters. These parameters, for instance, regulate the necessary change in light intensity to trigger an event, which in turn depends on factors such as the environment lighting and camera motion. This paper introduces feedback control algorithms that automatically tune the bias parameters through two interacting methods: 1) An immediate, on-the-fly \textit{fast} adaptation of the refractory period, which sets the minimum interval between consecutive events, and 2) if the event rate exceeds the specified bounds even after changing the refractory period repeatedly, the controller adapts the pixel bandwidth and event thresholds, which stabilizes after a short period of noise events across all pixels (\textit{slow} adaptation). Our evaluation focuses on the visual place recognition task, where incoming query images are compared to a given reference database. We conducted comprehensive evaluations of our algorithms' adaptive feedback control in real-time. To do so, we collected the QCR-Fast-and-Slow dataset that contains DAVIS346 event camera streams from 366 repeated traversals of a Scout Mini robot navigating through a 100 meter long indoor lab setting (totaling over 35km distance traveled) in varying brightness conditions with ground truth location information. Our proposed feedback controllers result in superior performance when compared to the standard bias settings and prior feedback control methods. Our findings also detail the impact of bias adjustments on task performance and feature ablation studies on the fast and slow adaptation mechanisms.