pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Spiking Transformer with Spatial-Temporal Attention
Authors: DongHyun Lee, Yuhang Li, Youngeun Kim, Shiting Xiao, Priyadarshini Panda
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1

Spike-based Transformer presents a compelling and energy-efficient alternative to traditional Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-based Transformers, achieving impressive results through sparse binary computations. However, existing spike-based transformers predominantly focus on spatial attention while neglecting crucial temporal dependencies inherent in spike-based processing, leading to suboptimal feature representation and limited performance. To address this limitation, we propose Spiking Transformer with Spatial-Temporal Attention (STAtten), a simple and straightforward architecture that efficiently integrates both spatial and temporal information in the self-attention mechanism. STAtten introduces a block-wise computation strategy that processes information in spatial-temporal chunks, enabling comprehensive feature capture while maintaining the same computational complexity as previous spatial-only approaches. Our method can be seamlessly integrated into existing spike-based transformers without architectural overhaul. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STAtten significantly improves the performance of existing spike-based transformers across both static and neuromorphic datasets, including CIFAR10/100, ImageNet, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-Caltech101. The code is available at https://github.com/Intelligent-Computing-Lab-Yale/STAtten
PPLNs: Parametric Piecewise Linear Networks for Event-Based Temporal Modeling and Beyond
Authors: Chen Song, Zhenxiao Liang, Bo Sun, QiXing Huang
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deblurring, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Pose Estimation

We present Parametric Piecewise Linear Networks (PPLNs) for temporal vision inference. Motivated by the neuromorphic principles that regulate biological neural behaviors, PPLNs are ideal for processing data captured by event cameras, which are built to simulate neural activities in the human retina. We discuss how to represent the membrane potential of an artificial neuron by a parametric piecewise linear function with learnable coefficients. This design echoes the idea of building deep models from learnable parametric functions recently popularized by Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). Experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of PPLNs in event-based and image-based vision applications, including steering prediction, human pose estimation, and motion deblurring. The source code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/chensong1995/PPLN.
See Detail Say Clear: Towards Brain CT Report Generation via Pathological Clue-driven Representation Learning
Authors: Chengxin Zheng, Junzhong Ji, Yanzhao Shi, Xiaodan Zhang, Liangqiong Qu
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Representation Learning, Text Generation

Brain CT report generation is significant to aid physicians in diagnosing cranial diseases. Recent studies concentrate on handling the consistency between visual and textual pathological features to improve the coherence of report. However, there exist some challenges: 1) Redundant visual representing: Massive irrelevant areas in 3D scans distract models from representing salient visual contexts. 2) Shifted semantic representing: Limited medical corpus causes difficulties for models to transfer the learned textual representations to generative layers. This study introduces a Pathological Clue-driven Representation Learning (PCRL) model to build cross-modal representations based on pathological clues and naturally adapt them for accurate report generation. Specifically, we construct pathological clues from perspectives of segmented regions, pathological entities, and report themes, to fully grasp visual pathological patterns and learn cross-modal feature representations. To adapt the representations for the text generation task, we bridge the gap between representation learning and report generation by using a unified large language model (LLM) with task-tailored instructions. These crafted instructions enable the LLM to be flexibly fine-tuned across tasks and smoothly transfer the semantic representation for report generation. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms previous methods and achieves SoTA performance. Our code is available at "https://github.com/Chauncey-Jheng/PCRL-MRG".
Magnet: We Never Know How Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Work, Until We Learn How Vision-Language Models Function
Authors: Chenyi Zhuang, Ying Hu, Pan Gao
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Disentanglement

Text-to-image diffusion models particularly Stable Diffusion, have revolutionized the field of computer vision. However, the synthesis quality often deteriorates when asked to generate images that faithfully represent complex prompts involving multiple attributes and objects. While previous studies suggest that blended text embeddings lead to improper attribute binding, few have explored this in depth. In this work, we critically examine the limitations of the CLIP text encoder in understanding attributes and investigate how this affects diffusion models. We discern a phenomenon of attribute bias in the text space and highlight a contextual issue in padding embeddings that entangle different concepts. We propose \textbf{Magnet}, a novel training-free approach to tackle the attribute binding problem. We introduce positive and negative binding vectors to enhance disentanglement, further with a neighbor strategy to increase accuracy. Extensive experiments show that Magnet significantly improves synthesis quality and binding accuracy with negligible computational cost, enabling the generation of unconventional and unnatural concepts.
Accelerating Non-Maximum Suppression: A Graph Theory Perspective
Authors: King-Siong Si, Lu Sun, Weizhan Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Jiahao Wang, Jiang Liu, Hao Sun
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Non-maximum suppression (NMS) is an indispensable post-processing step in object detection. With the continuous optimization of network models, NMS has become the ``last mile'' to enhance the efficiency of object detection. This paper systematically analyzes NMS from a graph theory perspective for the first time, revealing its intrinsic structure. Consequently, we propose two optimization methods, namely QSI-NMS and BOE-NMS. The former is a fast recursive divide-and-conquer algorithm with negligible mAP loss, and its extended version (eQSI-NMS) achieves optimal complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$. The latter, concentrating on the locality of NMS, achieves an optimization at a constant level without an mAP loss penalty. Moreover, to facilitate rapid evaluation of NMS methods for researchers, we introduce NMS-Bench, the first benchmark designed to comprehensively assess various NMS methods. Taking the YOLOv8-N model on MS COCO 2017 as the benchmark setup, our method QSI-NMS provides $6.2\times$ speed of original NMS on the benchmark, with a $0.1\%$ decrease in mAP. The optimal eQSI-NMS, with only a $0.3\%$ mAP decrease, achieves $10.7\times$ speed. Meanwhile, BOE-NMS exhibits $5.1\times$ speed with no compromise in mAP.
Towards Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Incomplete Data
Authors: Haoyu Zhang, Wenbin Wang, Tianshu Yu
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

The field of Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) has recently witnessed an emerging direction seeking to tackle the issue of data incompleteness. Recognizing that the language modality typically contains dense sentiment information, we consider it as the dominant modality and present an innovative Language-dominated Noise-resistant Learning Network (LNLN) to achieve robust MSA. The proposed LNLN features a dominant modality correction (DMC) module and dominant modality based multimodal learning (DMML) module, which enhances the model's robustness across various noise scenarios by ensuring the quality of dominant modality representations. Aside from the methodical design, we perform comprehensive experiments under random data missing scenarios, utilizing diverse and meaningful settings on several popular datasets (\textit{e.g.,} MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS), providing additional uniformity, transparency, and fairness compared to existing evaluations in the literature. Empirically, LNLN consistently outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating superior performance across these challenging and extensive evaluation metrics.
A Unified Framework to Classify Business Activities into International Standard Industrial Classification through Large Language Models for Circular Economy
Authors: Xiang Li, Lan Zhao, Junhao Ren, Yajuan Sun, Chuan Fu Tan, Zhiquan Yeo, Gaoxi Xiao
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Effective information gathering and knowledge codification are pivotal for developing recommendation systems that promote circular economy practices. One promising approach involves the creation of a centralized knowledge repository cataloguing historical waste-to-resource transactions, which subsequently enables the generation of recommendations based on past successes. However, a significant barrier to constructing such a knowledge repository lies in the absence of a universally standardized framework for representing business activities across disparate geographical regions. To address this challenge, this paper leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to classify textual data describing economic activities into the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), a globally recognized economic activity classification framework. This approach enables any economic activity descriptions provided by businesses worldwide to be categorized into the unified ISIC standard, facilitating the creation of a centralized knowledge repository. Our approach achieves a 95% accuracy rate on a 182-label test dataset with fine-tuned GPT-2 model. This research contributes to the global endeavour of fostering sustainable circular economy practices by providing a standardized foundation for knowledge codification and recommendation systems deployable across regions.
AUCSeg: AUC-oriented Pixel-level Long-tail Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Boyu Han, Qianqian Xu, Zhiyong Yang, Shilong Bao, Peisong Wen, Yangbangyan Jiang, Qingming Huang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-tail Learning, Semantic Segmentation

The Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) is a well-known metric for evaluating instance-level long-tail learning problems. In the past two decades, many AUC optimization methods have been proposed to improve model performance under long-tail distributions. In this paper, we explore AUC optimization methods in the context of pixel-level long-tail semantic segmentation, a much more complicated scenario. This task introduces two major challenges for AUC optimization techniques. On one hand, AUC optimization in a pixel-level task involves complex coupling across loss terms, with structured inner-image and pairwise inter-image dependencies, complicating theoretical analysis. On the other hand, we find that mini-batch estimation of AUC loss in this case requires a larger batch size, resulting in an unaffordable space complexity. To address these issues, we develop a pixel-level AUC loss function and conduct a dependency-graph-based theoretical analysis of the algorithm's generalization ability. Additionally, we design a Tail-Classes Memory Bank (T-Memory Bank) to manage the significant memory demand. Finally, comprehensive experiments across various benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our proposed AUCSeg method. The code is available at https://github.com/boyuh/AUCSeg.
Enabling Multi-Robot Collaboration from Single-Human Guidance
Authors: Zhengran Ji, Lingyu Zhang, Paul Sajda, Boyuan Chen
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

Learning collaborative behaviors is essential for multi-agent systems. Traditionally, multi-agent reinforcement learning solves this implicitly through a joint reward and centralized observations, assuming collaborative behavior will emerge. Other studies propose to learn from demonstrations of a group of collaborative experts. Instead, we propose an efficient and explicit way of learning collaborative behaviors in multi-agent systems by leveraging expertise from only a single human. Our insight is that humans can naturally take on various roles in a team. We show that agents can effectively learn to collaborate by allowing a human operator to dynamically switch between controlling agents for a short period and incorporating a human-like theory-of-mind model of teammates. Our experiments showed that our method improves the success rate of a challenging collaborative hide-and-seek task by up to 58% with only 40 minutes of human guidance. We further demonstrate our findings transfer to the real world by conducting multi-robot experiments.
Self-supervised Auxiliary Learning for Texture and Model-based Hybrid Robust and Fair Featuring in Face Analysis
Authors: Shukesh Reddy, Nishit Poddar, Srijan Das, Abhijit Das
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Auxiliary Learning, DeepFake Detection, Emotion Recognition, Face Swapping, Self-Supervised Learning

In this work, we explore Self-supervised Learning (SSL) as an auxiliary task to blend the texture-based local descriptors into feature modelling for efficient face analysis. Combining a primary task and a self-supervised auxiliary task is beneficial for robust representation. Therefore, we used the SSL task of mask auto-encoder (MAE) as an auxiliary task to reconstruct texture features such as local patterns along with the primary task for robust and unbiased face analysis. We experimented with our hypothesis on three major paradigms of face analysis: face attribute and face-based emotion analysis, and deepfake detection. Our experiment results exhibit that better feature representation can be gleaned from our proposed model for fair and bias-less face analysis.
BuildingView: Constructing Urban Building Exteriors Databases with Street View Imagery and Multimodal Large Language Mode
Authors: Zongrong Li, Yunlei Su, Hongrong Wang, Wufan Zhao
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Systematic Literature Review

Urban Building Exteriors are increasingly important in urban analytics, driven by advancements in Street View Imagery and its integration with urban research. Multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) offer powerful tools for urban annotation, enabling deeper insights into urban environments. However, challenges remain in creating accurate and detailed urban building exterior databases, identifying critical indicators for energy efficiency, environmental sustainability, and human-centric design, and systematically organizing these indicators. To address these challenges, we propose BuildingView, a novel approach that integrates high-resolution visual data from Google Street View with spatial information from OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API. This research improves the accuracy of urban building exterior data, identifies key sustainability and design indicators, and develops a framework for their extraction and categorization. Our methodology includes a systematic literature review, building and Street View sampling, and annotation using the ChatGPT-4O API. The resulting database, validated with data from New York City, Amsterdam, and Singapore, provides a comprehensive tool for urban studies, supporting informed decision-making in urban planning, architectural design, and environmental policy. The code for BuildingView is available at https://github.com/Jasper0122/BuildingView.
Domain Consistency Representation Learning for Lifelong Person Re-Identification
Authors: Shiben Liu, Qiang Wang, Huijie Fan, Weihong Ren, Baojie Fan, Yandong Tang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Knowledge Distillation, Person Re-Identification, Representation Learning, Transfer Learning

Lifelong person re-identification (LReID) exhibits a contradictory relationship between intra-domain discrimination and inter-domain gaps when learning from continuous data. Intra-domain discrimination focuses on individual nuances (e.g. clothing type, accessories, etc.), while inter-domain gaps emphasize domain consistency. Achieving a trade-off between maximizing intra-domain discrimination and minimizing inter-domain gaps is a crucial challenge for improving LReID performance. Most existing methods aim to reduce inter-domain gaps through knowledge distillation to maintain domain consistency. However, they often ignore intra-domain discrimination. To address this challenge, we propose a novel domain consistency representation learning (DCR) model that explores global and attribute-wise representations as a bridge to balance intra-domain discrimination and inter-domain gaps. At the intra-domain level, we explore the complementary relationship between global and attribute-wise representations to improve discrimination among similar identities. Excessive learning intra-domain discrimination can lead to catastrophic forgetting. We further develop an attribute-oriented anti-forgetting (AF) strategy that explores attribute-wise representations to enhance inter-domain consistency, and propose a knowledge consolidation (KC) strategy to facilitate knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments show that our DCR model achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art LReID methods. Our code will be available soon.
1st Place Solution to the 8th HANDS Workshop Challenge -- ARCTIC Track: 3DGS-based Bimanual Category-agnostic Interaction Reconstruction
Authors: Jeongwan On, Kyeonghwan Gwak, Gunyoung Kang, Hyein Hwang, Soohyun Hwang, Junuk Cha, Jaewook Han, Seungryul Baek
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, Object

This report describes our 1st place solution to the 8th HANDS workshop challenge (ARCTIC track) in conjunction with ECCV 2024. In this challenge, we address the task of bimanual category-agnostic hand-object interaction reconstruction, which aims to generate 3D reconstructions of both hands and the object from a monocular video, without relying on predefined templates. This task is particularly challenging due to the significant occlusion and dynamic contact between the hands and the object during bimanual manipulation. We worked to resolve these issues by introducing a mask loss and a 3D contact loss, respectively. Moreover, we applied 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to this task. As a result, our method achieved a value of 38.69 in the main metric, CD$_h$, on the ARCTIC test set.
Overriding Safety protections of Open-source Models
Authors: Sachin Kumar
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming, Safety Alignment

LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore they do undergo safety alignment training and Red teaming for putting in safety guardrails. For using these models, usually fine-tuning is done for model alignment on the desired tasks, which can make model more aligned but also make it more susceptible to produce unsafe responses, if fine-tuned with harmful data.In this paper, we study how much of impact introduction of harmful data in fine-tuning can make, and if it can override the safety protection of those models. Conversely,it was also explored that if model is fine-tuned on safety data can make the model produce more safer responses. Further we explore if fine-tuning the model on harmful data makes it less helpful or less trustworthy because of increase in model uncertainty leading to knowledge drift. Our extensive experimental results shown that Safety protection in an open-source can be overridden, when fine-tuned with harmful data as observed by ASR increasing by 35% when compared to basemodel's ASR. Also, as observed, fine-tuning a model with harmful data made the harmful fine-tuned model highly uncertain with huge knowledge drift and less truthfulness in its responses. Furthermore, for the safe fine-tuned model, ASR decreases by 51.68% as compared to the basemodel, and Safe model also shown in minor drop in uncertainty and truthfulness as compared to basemodel. This paper's code is available at: https://github.com/techsachinkr/Overriding_Model_Safety_Protections
Balancing Cost and Effectiveness of Synthetic Data Generation Strategies for LLMs
Authors: Yung-Chieh Chan, George Pu, Apaar Shanker, Parth Suresh, Penn Jenks, John Heyer, Sam Denton
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Synthetic Data Generation

As large language models (LLMs) are applied to more use cases, creating high quality, task-specific datasets for fine-tuning becomes a bottleneck for model improvement. Using high quality human data has been the most common approach to unlock model performance, but is prohibitively expensive in many scenarios. Several alternative methods have also emerged, such as generating synthetic or hybrid data, but the effectiveness of these approaches remain unclear, especially in resource-constrained scenarios and tasks that are not easily verified. To investigate this, we group various synthetic data generation strategies into three representative categories -- Answer Augmentation, Question Rephrase and New Question -- and study the performance of student LLMs trained under various constraints, namely seed instruction set size and query budget. We demonstrate that these strategies are not equally effective across settings. Notably, the optimal data generation strategy depends strongly on the ratio between the available teacher query budget and the size of the seed instruction set. When this ratio is low, generating new answers to existing questions proves most effective, but as this ratio increases, generating new questions becomes optimal. Across all tasks, we find that choice of augmentation method and other design choices matter substantially more in low to mid data regimes than in high data regimes. We provide a practical framework for selecting the appropriate augmentation method across settings, taking into account additional factors such as the scalability of each method, the importance of verifying synthetic data, and the use of different LLMs for synthetic data generation.
World to Code: Multi-modal Data Generation via Self-Instructed Compositional Captioning and Filtering
Authors: Jiacong Wang, Bohong Wu, Haiyong Jiang, Xun Zhou, Xin Xiao, Haoyuan Guo, Jun Xiao
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question Answering, Visual Grounding, Visual Question Answering

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. The conventional norm in VLM data construction uses a mixture of specialists in caption and OCR, or stronger VLM APIs and expensive human annotation. In this paper, we present World to Code (W2C), a meticulously curated multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final generation output into a Python code format. The pipeline leverages the VLM itself to extract cross-modal information via different prompts and filter the generated outputs again via a consistency filtering strategy. Experiments have demonstrated the high quality of W2C by improving various existing visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. Further analysis also demonstrates that the new code parsing ability of VLMs presents better cross-modal equivalence than the commonly used detail caption ability. Our code is available at https://github.com/foundation-multimodal-models/World2Code.