pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Action Recognition Using Temporal Shift Module and Ensemble Learning
Authors: Anh-Kiet Duong, Petra Gomez-Krämer
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Computational Efficiency, Ensemble Learning, Transfer Learning

This paper presents the first-rank solution for the Multi-Modal Action Recognition Challenge, part of the Multi-Modal Visual Pattern Recognition Workshop at the \acl{ICPR} 2024. The competition aimed to recognize human actions using a diverse dataset of 20 action classes, collected from multi-modal sources. The proposed approach is built upon the \acl{TSM}, a technique aimed at efficiently capturing temporal dynamics in video data, incorporating multiple data input types. Our strategy included transfer learning to leverage pre-trained models, followed by meticulous fine-tuning on the challenge's specific dataset to optimize performance for the 20 action classes. We carefully selected a backbone network to balance computational efficiency and recognition accuracy and further refined the model using an ensemble technique that integrates outputs from different modalities. This ensemble approach proved crucial in boosting the overall performance. Our solution achieved a perfect top-1 accuracy on the test set, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in recognizing human actions across 20 classes. Our code is available online https://github.com/ffyyytt/TSM-MMVPR.
Towards Training-Free Open-World Classification with 3D Generative Models
Authors: Xinzhe Xia, Weiguang Zhao, Yuyao Yan, Guanyu Yang, Rui Zhang, Kaizhu Huang, Xi Yang
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

3D open-world classification is a challenging yet essential task in dynamic and unstructured real-world scenarios, requiring both open-category and open-pose recognition. To address these challenges, recent wisdom often takes sophisticated 2D pre-trained models to provide enriched and stable representations. However, these methods largely rely on how 3D objects can be projected into 2D space, which is unfortunately not well solved, and thus significantly limits their performance. Unlike these present efforts, in this paper we make a pioneering exploration of 3D generative models for 3D open-world classification. Drawing on abundant prior knowledge from 3D generative models, we additionally craft a rotation-invariant feature extractor. This innovative synergy endows our pipeline with the advantages of being training-free, open-category, and pose-invariant, thus well suited to 3D open-world classification. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the potential of generative models in 3D open-world classification, achieving state-of-the-art performance on ModelNet10 and McGill with 32.0% and 8.7% overall accuracy improvement, respectively.
3DSES: an indoor Lidar point cloud segmentation dataset with real and pseudo-labels from a 3D model
Authors: Maxime Mérizette, Nicolas Audebert, Pierre Kervella, Jérôme Verdun
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Point Cloud Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation of indoor point clouds has found various applications in the creation of digital twins for robotics, navigation and building information modeling (BIM). However, most existing datasets of labeled indoor point clouds have been acquired by photogrammetry. In contrast, Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) can acquire dense sub-centimeter point clouds and has become the standard for surveyors. We present 3DSES (3D Segmentation of ESGT point clouds), a new dataset of indoor dense TLS colorized point clouds covering 427 m 2 of an engineering school. 3DSES has a unique double annotation format: semantic labels annotated at the point level alongside a full 3D CAD model of the building. We introduce a model-to-cloud algorithm for automated labeling of indoor point clouds using an existing 3D CAD model. 3DSES has 3 variants of various semantic and geometrical complexities. We show that our model-to-cloud alignment can produce pseudo-labels on our point clouds with a \&gt; 95% accuracy, allowing us to train deep models with significant time savings compared to manual labeling. First baselines on 3DSES show the difficulties encountered by existing models when segmenting objects relevant to BIM, such as light and safety utilities. We show that segmentation accuracy can be improved by leveraging pseudo-labels and Lidar intensity, an information rarely considered in current datasets. Code and data will be open sourced.
Solving Inverse Problems using Diffusion with Fast Iterative Renoising
Authors: Matt C. Bendel, Saurav K. Shastri, Rizwan Ahmad, Philip Schniter
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Imaging inverse problems can be solved in an unsupervised manner using pre-trained diffusion models. In most cases, that involves approximating the gradient of the measurement-conditional score function in the reverse process. Since the approximations produced by existing methods are quite poor, especially early in the reverse process, we propose a new approach that re-estimates and renoises the image several times per diffusion step. Renoising adds carefully shaped colored noise that ensures the pre-trained diffusion model sees white-Gaussian error, in accordance with how it was trained. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our "DDfire" method at 20, 100, and 1000 neural function evaluations on linear inverse problems and phase retrieval.
SIGN: A Statistically-Informed Gaze Network for Gaze Time Prediction
Authors: Jianping Ye, Michel Wedel
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00

We propose a first version of SIGN, a Statistically-Informed Gaze Network, to predict aggregate gaze times on images. We develop a foundational statistical model for which we derive a deep learning implementation involving CNNs and Visual Transformers, which enables the prediction of overall gaze times. The model enables us to derive from the aggregate gaze times the underlying gaze pattern as a probability map over all regions in the image, where each region's probability represents the likelihood of being gazed at across all possible scan-paths. We test SIGN's performance on AdGaze3500, a dataset of images of ads with aggregate gaze times, and on COCO-Search18, a dataset with individual-level fixation patterns collected during search. We demonstrate that SIGN (1) improves gaze duration prediction significantly over state-of-the-art deep learning benchmarks on both datasets, and (2) can deliver plausible gaze patterns that correspond to empirical fixation patterns in COCO-Search18. These results suggest that the first version of SIGN holds promise for gaze-time predictions and deserves further development.
Assessing the Capability of YOLO- and Transformer-based Object Detectors for Real-time Weed Detection
Authors: Alicia Allmendinger, Ahmet Oğuz Saltık, Gerassimos G. Peteinatos, Anthony Stein, Roland Gerhards
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Spot spraying represents an efficient and sustainable method for reducing the amount of pesticides, particularly herbicides, used in agricultural fields. To achieve this, it is of utmost importance to reliably differentiate between crops and weeds, and even between individual weed species in situ and under real-time conditions. To assess suitability for real-time application, different object detection models that are currently state-of-the-art are compared. All available models of YOLOv8, YOLOv9, YOLOv10, and RT-DETR are trained and evaluated with images from a real field situation. The images are separated into two distinct datasets: In the initial data set, each species of plants is trained individually; in the subsequent dataset, a distinction is made between monocotyledonous weeds, dicotyledonous weeds, and three chosen crops. The results demonstrate that while all models perform equally well in the metrics evaluated, the YOLOv9 models, particularly the YOLOv9s and YOLOv9e, stand out in terms of their strong recall scores (66.58 % and 72.36 %), as well as mAP50 (73.52 % and 79.86 %), and mAP50-95 (43.82 % and 47.00 %) in dataset 2. However, the RT-DETR models, especially RT-DETR-l, excel in precision with reaching 82.44 \% on dataset 1 and 81.46 % in dataset 2, making them particularly suitable for scenarios where minimizing false positives is critical. In particular, the smallest variants of the YOLO models (YOLOv8n, YOLOv9t, and YOLOv10n) achieve substantially faster inference times down to 7.58 ms for dataset 2 on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU for analyzing one frame, while maintaining competitive accuracy, highlighting their potential for deployment in resource-constrained embedded computing devices as typically used in productive setups.
WASUP: Interpretable Classification with Weight-Input Alignment and Class-Discriminative SUPports Vectors
Authors: Tom Nuno Wolf, Christian Wachinger
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

The deployment of deep learning models in critical domains necessitates a balance between high accuracy and interpretability. We introduce WASUP, an inherently interpretable neural network that provides local and global explanations of its decision-making process. We prove that these explanations are faithful by fulfilling established axioms for explanations. Leveraging the concept of case-based reasoning, WASUP extracts class-representative support vectors from training images, ensuring they capture relevant features while suppressing irrelevant ones. Classification decisions are made by calculating and aggregating similarity scores between these support vectors and the input's latent feature vector. We employ B-Cos transformations, which align model weights with inputs to enable faithful mappings of latent features back to the input space, facilitating local explanations in addition to global explanations of case-based reasoning. We evaluate WASUP on three tasks: fine-grained classification on Stanford Dogs, multi-label classification on Pascal VOC, and pathology detection on the RSNA dataset. Results indicate that WASUP not only achieves competitive accuracy compared to state-of-the-art black-box models but also offers insightful explanations verified through theoretical analysis. Our findings underscore WASUP's potential for applications where understanding model decisions is as critical as the decisions themselves.
Influence of field of view in visual prostheses design: Analysis with a VR system
Authors: Melani Sanchez-Garcia, Ruben Martinez-Cantin, Jesus Bermudez-Cameo, Jose J. Guerrero
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00

Visual prostheses are designed to restore partial functional vision in patients with total vision loss. Retinal visual prostheses provide limited capabilities as a result of low resolution, limited field of view and poor dynamic range. Understanding the influence of these parameters in the perception results can guide prostheses research and design. In this work, we evaluate the influence of field of view with respect to spatial resolution in visual prostheses, measuring the accuracy and response time in a search and recognition task. Twenty-four normally sighted participants were asked to find and recognize usual objects, such as furniture and home appliance in indoor room scenes. For the experiment, we use a new simulated prosthetic vision system that allows simple and effective experimentation. Our system uses a virtual-reality environment based on panoramic scenes. The simulator employs a head-mounted display which allows users to feel immersed in the scene by perceiving the entire scene all around. Our experiments use public image datasets and a commercial head-mounted display. We have also released the virtual-reality software for replicating and extending the experimentation. Results show that the accuracy and response time decrease when the field of view is increased. Furthermore, performance appears to be correlated with the angular resolution, but showing a diminishing return even with a resolution of less than 2.3 phosphenes per degree. Our results seem to indicate that, for the design of retinal prostheses, it is better to concentrate the phosphenes in a small area, to maximize the angular resolution, even if that implies sacrificing field of view.
A Contrastive Teacher-Student Framework for Novelty Detection under Style Shifts
Authors: Hossein Mirzaei, Mojtaba Nafez, Moein Madadi, Arad Maleki, Mahdi Hajialilue, Zeinab Sadat Taghavi, Sepehr Rezaee, Ali Ansari, Bahar Dibaei Nia, Kian Shamsaie, Mohammadreza Salehi, Mackenzie W. Mathis, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah, Mohammad Sabokrou, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Date: 2025-01-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Knowledge Distillation, Novelty Detection

There have been several efforts to improve Novelty Detection (ND) performance. However, ND methods often suffer significant performance drops under minor distribution shifts caused by changes in the environment, known as style shifts. This challenge arises from the ND setup, where the absence of out-of-distribution (OOD) samples during training causes the detector to be biased toward the dominant style features in the in-distribution (ID) data. As a result, the model mistakenly learns to correlate style with core features, using this shortcut for detection. Robust ND is crucial for real-world applications like autonomous driving and medical imaging, where test samples may have different styles than the training data. Motivated by this, we propose a robust ND method that crafts an auxiliary OOD set with style features similar to the ID set but with different core features. Then, a task-based knowledge distillation strategy is utilized to distinguish core features from style features and help our model rely on core features for discriminating crafted OOD and ID sets. We verified the effectiveness of our method through extensive experimental evaluations on several datasets, including synthetic and real-world benchmarks, against nine different ND methods.
rEGGression: an Interactive and Agnostic Tool for the Exploration of Symbolic Regression Models
Authors: Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Gabriel Kronberger
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: regression, Symbolic Regression

Regression analysis is used for prediction and to understand the effect of independent variables on dependent variables. Symbolic regression (SR) automates the search for non-linear regression models, delivering a set of hypotheses that balances accuracy with the possibility to understand the phenomena. Many SR implementations return a Pareto front allowing the choice of the best trade-off. However, this hides alternatives that are close to non-domination, limiting these choices. Equality graphs (e-graphs) allow to represent large sets of expressions compactly by efficiently handling duplicated parts occurring in multiple expressions. E-graphs allow to store and query all SR solution candidates visited in one or multiple GP runs efficiently and open the possibility to analyse much larger sets of SR solution candidates. We introduce rEGGression, a tool using e-graphs to enable the exploration of a large set of symbolic expressions which provides querying, filtering, and pattern matching features creating an interactive experience to gain insights about SR models. The main highlight is its focus in the exploration of the building blocks found during the search that can help the experts to find insights about the studied phenomena.This is possible by exploiting the pattern matching capability of the e-graph data structure.
Improving Genetic Programming for Symbolic Regression with Equality Graphs
Authors: Fabricio Olivetti de Franca, Gabriel Kronberger
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Evolutionary Algorithms, regression, Symbolic Regression

The search for symbolic regression models with genetic programming (GP) has a tendency of revisiting expressions in their original or equivalent forms. Repeatedly evaluating equivalent expressions is inefficient, as it does not immediately lead to better solutions. However, evolutionary algorithms require diversity and should allow the accumulation of inactive building blocks that can play an important role at a later point. The equality graph is a data structure capable of compactly storing expressions and their equivalent forms allowing an efficient verification of whether an expression has been visited in any of their stored equivalent forms. We exploit the e-graph to adapt the subtree operators to reduce the chances of revisiting expressions. Our adaptation, called eggp, stores every visited expression in the e-graph, allowing us to filter out from the available selection of subtrees all the combinations that would create already visited expressions. Results show that, for small expressions, this approach improves the performance of a simple GP algorithm to compete with PySR and Operon without increasing computational cost. As a highlight, eggp was capable of reliably delivering short and at the same time accurate models for a selected set of benchmarks from SRBench and a set of real-world datasets.
acoupi: An Open-Source Python Framework for Deploying Bioacoustic AI Models on Edge Devices
Authors: Aude Vuilliomenet, Santiago Martínez Balvanera, Oisin Mac Aodha, Kate E. Jones, Duncan Wilson
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00

1. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an essential tool for biodiversity monitoring. Traditional PAM systems require manual data offloading and impose substantial demands on storage and computing infrastructure. The combination of on-device AI-based processing and network connectivity enables local data analysis and transmission of only relevant information, greatly reducing storage needs. However, programming these devices for robust operation is challenging, requiring expertise in embedded systems and software engineering. Despite the increase in AI-based models for bioacoustics, their full potential remains unrealized without accessible tools to deploy them on custom hardware and tailor device behaviour to specific monitoring goals. 2. To address this challenge, we develop acoupi, an open-source Python framework that simplifies the creation and deployment of smart bioacoustic devices. acoupi integrates audio recording, AI-based data processing, data management, and real-time wireless messaging into a unified and configurable framework. By modularising key elements of the bioacoustic monitoring workflow, acoupi allows users to easily customise, extend, or select specific components to fit their unique monitoring needs. 3. We demonstrate the flexibility of acoupi by integrating two bioacoustic classifiers: BirdNET, for the classification of bird species, and BatDetect2, for the classification of UK bat species. We test the reliability of acoupi over a month-long deployment of two acoupi-powered devices in a UK urban park. 4. acoupi can be deployed on low-cost hardware such as the Raspberry Pi and can be customised for various applications. acoupi standardised framework and simplified tools facilitate the adoption of AI-powered PAM systems for researchers and conservationists. acoupi is on GitHub at https://github.com/acoupi/acoupi.
Learning Beyond the Surface: How Far Can Continual Pre-Training with LoRA Enhance LLMs' Domain-Specific Insight Learning?
Authors: Pouya Pezeshkpour, Estevam Hruschka
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various tasks, yet their ability to extract and internalize deeper insights from domain-specific datasets remains underexplored. In this study, we investigate how continual pre-training can enhance LLMs' capacity for insight learning across three distinct forms: declarative, statistical, and probabilistic insights. Focusing on two critical domains: medicine and finance, we employ LoRA to train LLMs on two existing datasets. To evaluate each insight type, we create benchmarks to measure how well continual pre-training helps models go beyond surface-level knowledge. We also assess the impact of document modification on capturing insights. The results show that, while continual pre-training on original documents has a marginal effect, modifying documents to retain only essential information significantly enhances the insight-learning capabilities of LLMs.
Matrix Product Sketching via Coordinated Sampling
Authors: Majid Daliri, Juliana Freire, Danrong Li, Christopher Musco
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00

We revisit the well-studied problem of approximating a matrix product, $\mathbf{A}^T\mathbf{B}$, based on small space sketches $\mathcal{S}(\mathbf{A})$ and $\mathcal{S}(\mathbf{B})$ of $\mathbf{A} \in \R^{n \times d}$ and $\mathbf{B}\in \R^{n \times m}$. We are interested in the setting where the sketches must be computed independently of each other, except for the use of a shared random seed. We prove that, when $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ are sparse, methods based on \emph{coordinated random sampling} can outperform classical linear sketching approaches, like Johnson-Lindenstrauss Projection or CountSketch. For example, to obtain Frobenius norm error $\epsilon\|\mathbf{A}\|_F\|\mathbf{B}\|_F$, coordinated sampling requires sketches of size $O(s/\epsilon^2)$ when $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$ have at most $s \leq d,m$ non-zeros per row. In contrast, linear sketching leads to sketches of size $O(d/\epsilon^2)$ and $O(m/\epsilon^2)$ for $\mathbf{A}$ and $\mathbf{B}$. We empirically evaluate our approach on two applications: 1) distributed linear regression in databases, a problem motivated by tasks like dataset discovery and augmentation, and 2) approximating attention matrices in transformer-based language models. In both cases, our sampling algorithms yield an order of magnitude improvement over linear sketching.
Hierarchical Fallback Architecture for High Risk Online Machine Learning Inference
Authors: Gustavo Polleti, Marlesson Santana, Felipe Sassi Del Sant, Eduardo Fontes
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00

Open Banking powered machine learning applications require novel robustness approaches to deal with challenging stress and failure scenarios. In this paper we propose an hierarchical fallback architecture for improving robustness in high risk machine learning applications with a focus in the financial domain. We define generic failure scenarios often found in online inference that depend on external data providers and we describe in detail how to apply the hierarchical fallback architecture to address them. Finally, we offer a real world example of its applicability in the industry for near-real time transactional fraud risk evaluation using Open Banking data and under extreme stress scenarios.
Langevin Soft Actor-Critic: Efficient Exploration through Uncertainty-Driven Critic Learning
Authors: Haque Ishfaq, Guangyuan Wang, Sami Nur Islam, Doina Precup
Date: 2025-01-29 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Efficient Exploration, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Thompson Sampling

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of Thompson sampling for efficient exploration in RL, we propose a novel model-free RL algorithm, Langevin Soft Actor Critic (LSAC), which prioritizes enhancing critic learning through uncertainty estimation over policy optimization. LSAC employs three key innovations: approximate Thompson sampling through distributional Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) based $Q$ updates, parallel tempering for exploring multiple modes of the posterior of the $Q$ function, and diffusion synthesized state-action samples regularized with $Q$ action gradients. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that LSAC outperforms or matches the performance of mainstream model-free RL algorithms for continuous control tasks. Notably, LSAC marks the first successful application of an LMC based Thompson sampling in continuous control tasks with continuous action spaces.