pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AI-driven Automation of End-to-end Assessment of Suturing Expertise
Authors: Atharva Deo, Nicholas Matsumoto, Sun Kim, Peter Wager, Randy G. Tsai, Aaron Denmark, Cherine Yang, Xi Li, Jay Moran, Miguel Hernandez, Andrew J. Hung
Date: 2025-03-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Skills Assessment

We present an AI based approach to automate the End-to-end Assessment of Suturing Expertise (EASE), a suturing skills assessment tool that comprehensively defines criteria around relevant sub-skills.1 While EASE provides granular skills assessment related to suturing to provide trainees with an objective evaluation of their aptitude along with actionable insights, the scoring process is currently performed by human evaluators, which is time and resource consuming. The AI based approach solves this by enabling real-time score prediction with minimal resources during model inference. This enables the possibility of real-time feedback to the surgeons/trainees, potentially accelerating the learning process for the suturing task and mitigating critical errors during the surgery, improving patient outcomes. In this study, we focus on the following 7 EASE domains that come under 3 suturing phases: 1) Needle Handling: Number of Repositions, Needle Hold Depth, Needle Hold Ratio, and Needle Hold Angle; 2) Needle Driving: Driving Smoothness, and Wrist Rotation; 3) Needle Withdrawal: Wrist Rotation.
Feature-Based Dual Visual Feature Extraction Model for Compound Multimodal Emotion Recognition
Authors: Ran Liu, Fengyu Zhang, Cong Yu, Longjiang Yang, Zhuofan Wen, Siyuan Zhang, Hailiang Yao, Shun Chen, Zheng Lian, Bin Liu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

This article presents our results for the eighth Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW) competition.Multimodal emotion recognition (ER) has important applications in affective computing and human-computer interaction. However, in the real world, compound emotion recognition faces greater issues of uncertainty and modal conflicts. For the Compound Expression (CE) Recognition Challenge,this paper proposes a multimodal emotion recognition method that fuses the features of Vision Transformer (ViT) and Residual Network (ResNet). We conducted experiments on the C-EXPR-DB and MELD datasets. The results show that in scenarios with complex visual and audio cues (such as C-EXPR-DB), the model that fuses the features of ViT and ResNet exhibits superior performance.Our code are avalible on https://github.com/MyGitHub-ax/8th_ABAW
Spatiotemporal Learning with Context-aware Video Tubelets for Ultrasound Video Analysis
Authors: Gary Y. Li, Li Chen, Bryson Hicks, Nikolai Schnittke, David O. Kessler, Jeffrey Shupp, Maria Parker, Cristiana Baloescu, Christopher Moore, Cynthia Gregory, Kenton Gregory, Balasundar Raju, Jochen Kruecker, Alvin Chen
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Video Classification

Computer-aided pathology detection algorithms for video-based imaging modalities must accurately interpret complex spatiotemporal information by integrating findings across multiple frames. Current state-of-the-art methods operate by classifying on video sub-volumes (tubelets), but they often lose global spatial context by focusing only on local regions within detection ROIs. Here we propose a lightweight framework for tubelet-based object detection and video classification that preserves both global spatial context and fine spatiotemporal features. To address the loss of global context, we embed tubelet location, size, and confidence as inputs to the classifier. Additionally, we use ROI-aligned feature maps from a pre-trained detection model, leveraging learned feature representations to increase the receptive field and reduce computational complexity. Our method is efficient, with the spatiotemporal tubelet classifier comprising only 0.4M parameters. We apply our approach to detect and classify lung consolidation and pleural effusion in ultrasound videos. Five-fold cross-validation on 14,804 videos from 828 patients shows our method outperforms previous tubelet-based approaches and is suited for real-time workflows.
ProDehaze: Prompting Diffusion Models Toward Faithful Image Dehazing
Authors: Tianwen Zhou, Jing Wang, Songtao Wu, Kuanhong Xu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Image Dehazing

Recent approaches using large-scale pretrained diffusion models for image dehazing improve perceptual quality but often suffer from hallucination issues, producing unfaithful dehazed image to the original one. To mitigate this, we propose ProDehaze, a framework that employs internal image priors to direct external priors encoded in pretrained models. We introduce two types of \textit{selective} internal priors that prompt the model to concentrate on critical image areas: a Structure-Prompted Restorer in the latent space that emphasizes structure-rich regions, and a Haze-Aware Self-Correcting Refiner in the decoding process to align distributions between clearer input regions and the output. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that ProDehaze achieves high-fidelity results in image dehazing, particularly in reducing color shifts. Our code is at https://github.com/TianwenZhou/ProDehaze.
Meme Similarity and Emotion Detection using Multimodal Analysis
Authors: Aidos Konyspay, Pakizar Shamoi, Malika Ziyada, Zhusup Smambayev
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00

Internet memes are a central element of online culture, blending images and text. While substantial research has focused on either the visual or textual components of memes, little attention has been given to their interplay. This gap raises a key question: What methodology can effectively compare memes and the emotions they elicit? Our study employs a multimodal methodological approach, analyzing both the visual and textual elements of memes. Specifically, we perform a multimodal CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) model for grouping similar memes based on text and visual content embeddings, enabling robust similarity assessments across modalities. Using the Reddit Meme Dataset and Memotion Dataset, we extract low-level visual features and high-level semantic features to identify similar meme pairs. To validate these automated similarity assessments, we conducted a user study with 50 participants, asking them to provide yes/no responses regarding meme similarity and their emotional reactions. The comparison of experimental results with human judgments showed a 67.23\% agreement, suggesting that the computational approach aligns well with human perception. Additionally, we implemented a text-based classifier using the DistilBERT model to categorize memes into one of six basic emotions. The results indicate that anger and joy are the dominant emotions in memes, with motivational memes eliciting stronger emotional responses. This research contributes to the study of multimodal memes, enhancing both language-based and visual approaches to analyzing and improving online visual communication and user experiences. Furthermore, it provides insights for better content moderation strategies in online platforms.
You Only Look Once at Anytime (AnytimeYOLO): Analysis and Optimization of Early-Exits for Object-Detection
Authors: Daniel Kuhse, Harun Teper, Sebastian Buschjäger, Chien-Yao Wang, Jian-Jia Chen
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

We introduce AnytimeYOLO, a family of variants of the YOLO architecture that enables anytime object detection. Our AnytimeYOLO networks allow for interruptible inference, i.e., they provide a prediction at any point in time, a property desirable for safety-critical real-time applications. We present structured explorations to modify the YOLO architecture, enabling early termination to obtain intermediate results. We focus on providing fine-grained control through high granularity of available termination points. First, we formalize Anytime Models as a special class of prediction models that offer anytime predictions. Then, we discuss a novel transposed variant of the YOLO architecture, that changes the architecture to enable better early predictions and greater freedom for the order of processing stages. Finally, we propose two optimization algorithms that, given an anytime model, can be used to determine the optimal exit execution order and the optimal subset of early-exits to select for deployment in low-resource environments. We evaluate the anytime performance and trade-offs of design choices, proposing a new anytime quality metric for this purpose. In particular, we also discuss key challenges for anytime inference that currently make its deployment costly.
Event-Based Crossing Dataset (EBCD)
Authors: Joey Mulé, Dhandeep Challagundla, Rachit Saini, Riadul Islam
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-based vision, object-detection, Object Detection, vehicle detection

Event-based vision revolutionizes traditional image sensing by capturing asynchronous intensity variations rather than static frames, enabling ultrafast temporal resolution, sparse data encoding, and enhanced motion perception. While this paradigm offers significant advantages, conventional event-based datasets impose a fixed thresholding constraint to determine pixel activations, severely limiting adaptability to real-world environmental fluctuations. Lower thresholds retain finer details but introduce pervasive noise, whereas higher thresholds suppress extraneous activations at the expense of crucial object information. To mitigate these constraints, we introduce the Event-Based Crossing Dataset (EBCD), a comprehensive dataset tailored for pedestrian and vehicle detection in dynamic outdoor environments, incorporating a multi-thresholding framework to refine event representations. By capturing event-based images at ten distinct threshold levels (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 75), this dataset facilitates an extensive assessment of object detection performance under varying conditions of sparsity and noise suppression. We benchmark state-of-the-art detection architectures-including YOLOv4, YOLOv7, EfficientDet-b0, MobileNet-v1, and Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG)-to experiment upon the nuanced impact of threshold selection on detection performance. By offering a systematic approach to threshold variation, we foresee that EBCD fosters a more adaptive evaluation of event-based object detection, aligning diverse neuromorphic vision with real-world scene dynamics. We present the dataset as publicly available to propel further advancements in low-latency, high-fidelity neuromorphic imaging: https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/event-based-crossing-dataset-ebcd
Should we pre-train a decoder in contrastive learning for dense prediction tasks?
Authors: Sébastien Quetin, Tapotosh Ghosh, Farhad Maleki
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Contrastive learning in self-supervised settings primarily focuses on pre-training encoders, while decoders are typically introduced and trained separately for downstream dense prediction tasks. This conventional approach, however, overlooks the potential benefits of jointly pre-training both the encoder and decoder. In this paper, we propose DeCon: a framework-agnostic adaptation to convert an encoder-only self-supervised learning (SSL) contrastive approach to an efficient encoder-decoder framework that can be pre-trained in a contrastive manner. We first update the existing architecture to accommodate a decoder and its respective contrastive loss. We then introduce a weighted encoder-decoder contrastive loss with non-competing objectives that facilitates the joint encoder-decoder architecture pre-training. We adapt two established contrastive SSL frameworks tailored for dense prediction tasks, achieve new state-of-the-art results in COCO object detection and instance segmentation, and match state-of-the-art performance on Pascal VOC semantic segmentation. We show that our approach allows for pre-training a decoder and enhances the representation power of the encoder and its performance in dense prediction tasks. This benefit holds across heterogeneous decoder architectures between pre-training and fine-tuning and persists in out-of-domain, limited-data scenarios.
FMDConv: Fast Multi-Attention Dynamic Convolution via Speed-Accuracy Trade-off
Authors: Tianyu Zhang, Fan Wan, Haoran Duan, Kevin W. Tong, Jingjing Deng, Yang Long
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Edge-computing

Spatial convolution is fundamental in constructing deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for visual recognition. While dynamic convolution enhances model accuracy by adaptively combining static kernels, it incurs significant computational overhead, limiting its deployment in resource-constrained environments such as federated edge computing. To address this, we propose Fast Multi-Attention Dynamic Convolution (FMDConv), which integrates input attention, temperature-degraded kernel attention, and output attention to optimize the speed-accuracy trade-off. FMDConv achieves a better balance between accuracy and efficiency by selectively enhancing feature extraction with lower complexity. Furthermore, we introduce two novel quantitative metrics, the Inverse Efficiency Score and Rate-Correct Score, to systematically evaluate this trade-off. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet demonstrate that FMDConv reduces the computational cost by up to 49.8\% on ResNet-18 and 42.2\% on ResNet-50 compared to prior multi-attention dynamic convolution methods while maintaining competitive accuracy. These advantages make FMDConv highly suitable for real-world, resource-constrained applications.
DermDiff: Generative Diffusion Model for Mitigating Racial Biases in Dermatology Diagnosis
Authors: Nusrat Munia, Abdullah-Al-Zubaer Imran
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Diversity

Skin diseases, such as skin cancer, are a significant public health issue, and early diagnosis is crucial for effective treatment. Artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms have the potential to assist in triaging benign vs malignant skin lesions and improve diagnostic accuracy. However, existing AI models for skin disease diagnosis are often developed and tested on limited and biased datasets, leading to poor performance on certain skin tones. To address this problem, we propose a novel generative model, named DermDiff, that can generate diverse and representative dermoscopic image data for skin disease diagnosis. Leveraging text prompting and multimodal image-text learning, DermDiff improves the representation of underrepresented groups (patients, diseases, etc.) in highly imbalanced datasets. Our extensive experimentation showcases the effectiveness of DermDiff in terms of high fidelity and diversity. Furthermore, downstream evaluation suggests the potential of DermDiff in mitigating racial biases for dermatology diagnosis. Our code is available at https://github.com/Munia03/DermDiff
Generating, Fast and Slow: Scalable Parallel Video Generation with Video Interface Networks
Authors: Bhishma Dedhia, David Bourgin, Krishna Kumar Singh, Yuheng Li, Yan Kang, Zhan Xu, Niraj K. Jha, Yuchen Liu
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Optical Flow Estimation, Video Generation

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) can generate short photorealistic videos, yet directly training and sampling longer videos with full attention across the video remains computationally challenging. Alternative methods break long videos down into sequential generation of short video segments, requiring multiple sampling chain iterations and specialized consistency modules. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a new paradigm called Video Interface Networks (VINs), which augment DiTs with an abstraction module to enable parallel inference of video chunks. At each diffusion step, VINs encode global semantics from the noisy input of local chunks and the encoded representations, in turn, guide DiTs in denoising chunks in parallel. The coupling of VIN and DiT is learned end-to-end on the denoising objective. Further, the VIN architecture maintains fixed-size encoding tokens that encode the input via a single cross-attention step. Disentangling the encoding tokens from the input thus enables VIN to scale to long videos and learn essential semantics. Experiments on VBench demonstrate that VINs surpass existing chunk-based methods in preserving background consistency and subject coherence. We then show via an optical flow analysis that our approach attains state-of-the-art motion smoothness while using 25-40% fewer FLOPs than full generation. Finally, human raters favorably assessed the overall video quality and temporal consistency of our method in a user study.
PRIMAL: Physically Reactive and Interactive Motor Model for Avatar Learning
Authors: Yan Zhang, Yao Feng, Alpár Cseke, Nitin Saini, Nathan Bajandas, Nicolas Heron, Michael J. Black
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Motion Generation

To build a motor system of the interactive avatar, it is essential to develop a generative motion model drives the body to move through 3D space in a perpetual, realistic, controllable, and responsive manner. Although motion generation has been extensively studied, most methods do not support ``embodied intelligence'' due to their offline setting, slow speed, limited motion lengths, or unnatural movements. To overcome these limitations, we propose PRIMAL, an autoregressive diffusion model that is learned with a two-stage paradigm, inspired by recent advances in foundation models. In the pretraining stage, the model learns motion dynamics from a large number of sub-second motion segments, providing ``motor primitives'' from which more complex motions are built. In the adaptation phase, we employ a ControlNet-like adaptor to fine-tune the motor control for semantic action generation and spatial target reaching. Experiments show that physics effects emerge from our training. Given a single-frame initial state, our model not only generates unbounded, realistic, and controllable motion, but also enables the avatar to be responsive to induced impulses in real time. In addition, we can effectively and efficiently adapt our base model to few-shot personalized actions and the task of spatial control. Evaluations show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. We leverage the model to create a real-time character animation system in Unreal Engine that is highly responsive and natural. Code, models, and more results are available at: https://yz-cnsdqz.github.io/eigenmotion/PRIMAL
Is there anything left? Measuring semantic residuals of objects removed from 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Simona Kocour, Assia Benbihi, Aikaterini Adam, Torsten Sattler
Date: 2025-03-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Searching in and editing 3D scenes has become extremely intuitive with trainable scene representations that allow linking human concepts to elements in the scene. These operations are often evaluated on the basis of how accurately the searched element is segmented or extracted from the scene. In this paper, we address the inverse problem, that is, how much of the searched element remains in the scene after it is removed. This question is particularly important in the context of privacy-preserving mapping when a user reconstructs a 3D scene and wants to remove private elements before sharing the map. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address this question. To answer this, we propose a quantitative evaluation that measures whether a removal operation leaves object residuals that can be reasoned over. The scene is not private when such residuals are present. Experiments on state-of-the-art scene representations show that the proposed metrics are meaningful and consistent with the user study that we also present. We also propose a method to refine the removal based on spatial and semantic consistency.
Guidance Free Image Editing via Explicit Conditioning
Authors: Mehdi Noroozi, Alberto Gil Ramos, Luca Morreale, Ruchika Chavhan, Malcolm Chadwick, Abhinav Mehrotra, Sourav Bhattacharya
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Current sampling mechanisms for conditional diffusion models rely mainly on Classifier Free Guidance (CFG) to generate high-quality images. However, CFG requires several denoising passes in each time step, e.g., up to three passes in image editing tasks, resulting in excessive computational costs. This paper introduces a novel conditioning technique to ease the computational burden of the well-established guidance techniques, thereby significantly improving the inference time of diffusion models. We present Explicit Conditioning (EC) of the noise distribution on the input modalities to achieve this. Intuitively, we model the noise to guide the conditional diffusion model during the diffusion process. We present evaluations on image editing tasks and demonstrate that EC outperforms CFG in generating diverse high-quality images with significantly reduced computations.
Enhancing Martian Terrain Recognition with Deep Constrained Clustering
Authors: Tejas Panambur, Mario Parente
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Constrained Clustering, Deep Clustering, Metric Learning

Martian terrain recognition is pivotal for advancing our understanding of topography, geomorphology, paleoclimate, and habitability. While deep clustering methods have shown promise in learning semantically homogeneous feature embeddings from Martian rover imagery, the natural variations in intensity, scale, and rotation pose significant challenges for accurate terrain classification. To address these limitations, we propose Deep Constrained Clustering with Metric Learning (DCCML), a novel algorithm that leverages multiple constraint types to guide the clustering process. DCCML incorporates soft must-link constraints derived from spatial and depth similarities between neighboring patches, alongside hard constraints from stereo camera pairs and temporally adjacent images. Experimental evaluation on the Curiosity rover dataset (with 150 clusters) demonstrates that DCCML increases homogeneous clusters by 16.7 percent while reducing the Davies-Bouldin Index from 3.86 to 1.82 and boosting retrieval accuracy from 86.71 percent to 89.86 percent. This improvement enables more precise classification of Martian geological features, advancing our capacity to analyze and understand the planet's landscape.
InstructVEdit: A Holistic Approach for Instructional Video Editing
Authors: Chi Zhang, Chengjian Feng, Feng Yan, Qiming Zhang, Mingjin Zhang, Yujie Zhong, Jing Zhang, Lin Ma
Date: 2025-03-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Editing

Video editing according to instructions is a highly challenging task due to the difficulty in collecting large-scale, high-quality edited video pair data. This scarcity not only limits the availability of training data but also hinders the systematic exploration of model architectures and training strategies. While prior work has improved specific aspects of video editing (e.g., synthesizing a video dataset using image editing techniques or decomposed video editing training), a holistic framework addressing the above challenges remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce InstructVEdit, a full-cycle instructional video editing approach that: (1) establishes a reliable dataset curation workflow to initialize training, (2) incorporates two model architectural improvements to enhance edit quality while preserving temporal consistency, and (3) proposes an iterative refinement strategy leveraging real-world data to enhance generalization and minimize train-test discrepancies. Extensive experiments show that InstructVEdit achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based video editing, demonstrating robust adaptability to diverse real-world scenarios. Project page: https://o937-blip.github.io/InstructVEdit.