pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Instruct-IPT: All-in-One Image Processing Transformer via Weight Modulation
Authors: Yuchuan Tian, Jianhong Han, Hanting Chen, Yuanyuan Xi, Ning Ding, Jie Hu, Chao Xu, Yunhe Wang
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Deblurring, Denoising, Image Restoration, Rain Removal

Due to the unaffordable size and intensive computation costs of low-level vision models, All-in-One models that are designed to address a handful of low-level vision tasks simultaneously have been popular. However, existing All-in-One models are limited in terms of the range of tasks and performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Instruct-IPT -- an All-in-One Image Processing Transformer (IPT) that could effectively address manifold image restoration tasks with large inter-task gaps, such as denoising, deblurring, deraining, dehazing, and desnowing. While most research propose feature adaptation methods, we reveal their failure in addressing highly distinct tasks, and suggest weight modulation that adapts weights to specific tasks. Firstly, we search for task-sensitive weights and introduce task-specific biases on top of them. Secondly, we conduct rank analysis for a good compression strategy and perform low-rank decomposition on the biases. Thirdly, we propose synchronous training that updates the task-general backbone model and the task-specific biases simultaneously. In this way, the model is instructed to learn both general and task-specific knowledge. Via our simple yet effective method that instructs the IPT to be task experts, Instruct-IPT could better cooperate between tasks with distinct characteristics at humble costs. As an additional feature, we enable Instruct-IPT to receive human prompts. We have conducted experiments on Instruct-IPT to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on manifold tasks, and we have effectively extended our method to diffusion denoisers as well. The code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-IPT.
Resolving Variable Respiratory Motion From Unsorted 4D Computed Tomography
Authors: Yuliang Huang, Bjoern Eiben, Kris Thielemans, Jamie R. McClelland
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00

4D Computed Tomography (4DCT) is widely used for many clinical applications such as radiotherapy treatment planning, PET and ventilation imaging. However, common 4DCT methods reconstruct multiple breath cycles into a single, arbitrary breath cycle which can lead to various artefacts, impacting the downstream clinical applications. Surrogate driven motion models can estimate continuous variable motion across multiple cycles based on CT segments `unsorted' from 4DCT, but it requires respiration surrogate signals with strong correlation to the internal motion, which are not always available. The method proposed in this study eliminates such dependency by adapting the hyper-gradient method to the optimization of surrogate signals as hyper-parameters, while achieving better or comparable performance, as demonstrated on digital phantom simulations and real patient data. Our method produces a high-quality motion-compensated image together with estimates of the motion, including breath-to-breath variability, throughout the image acquisition. Our method has the potential to improve downstream clinical applications, and also enables retrospective analysis of open access 4DCT dataset where no respiration signals are stored. Code is avaibale at https://github.com/Yuliang-Huang/4DCT-irregular-motion.
DEAR: Disentangled Environment and Agent Representations for Reinforcement Learning without Reconstruction
Authors: Ameya Pore, Riccardo Muradore, Diego Dall'Alba
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms can learn robotic control tasks from visual observations, but they often require a large amount of data, especially when the visual scene is complex and unstructured. In this paper, we explore how the agent's knowledge of its shape can improve the sample efficiency of visual RL methods. We propose a novel method, Disentangled Environment and Agent Representations (DEAR), that uses the segmentation mask of the agent as supervision to learn disentangled representations of the environment and the agent through feature separation constraints. Unlike previous approaches, DEAR does not require reconstruction of visual observations. These representations are then used as an auxiliary loss to the RL objective, encouraging the agent to focus on the relevant features of the environment. We evaluate DEAR on two challenging benchmarks: Distracting DeepMind control suite and Franka Kitchen manipulation tasks. Our findings demonstrate that DEAR surpasses state-of-the-art methods in sample efficiency, achieving comparable or superior performance with reduced parameters. Our results indicate that integrating agent knowledge into visual RL methods has the potential to enhance their learning efficiency and robustness.
Consistency Purification: Effective and Efficient Diffusion Purification towards Certified Robustness
Authors: Yiquan Li, Zhongzhu Chen, Kun Jin, Jiongxiao Wang, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Diffusion Purification, purifying noised images with diffusion models, has been widely used for enhancing certified robustness via randomized smoothing. However, existing frameworks often grapple with the balance between efficiency and effectiveness. While the Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model (DDPM) offers an efficient single-step purification, it falls short in ensuring purified images reside on the data manifold. Conversely, the Stochastic Diffusion Model effectively places purified images on the data manifold but demands solving cumbersome stochastic differential equations, while its derivative, the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE), though solving simpler ordinary differential equations, still requires multiple computational steps. In this work, we demonstrated that an ideal purification pipeline should generate the purified images on the data manifold that are as much semantically aligned to the original images for effectiveness in one step for efficiency. Therefore, we introduced Consistency Purification, an efficiency-effectiveness Pareto superior purifier compared to the previous work. Consistency Purification employs the consistency model, a one-step generative model distilled from PF-ODE, thus can generate on-manifold purified images with a single network evaluation. However, the consistency model is designed not for purification thus it does not inherently ensure semantic alignment between purified and original images. To resolve this issue, we further refine it through Consistency Fine-tuning with LPIPS loss, which enables more aligned semantic meaning while keeping the purified images on data manifold. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our Consistency Purification framework achieves state-of the-art certified robustness and efficiency compared to baseline methods.
Learning Granularity-Aware Affordances from Human-Object Interaction for Tool-Based Functional Grasping in Dexterous Robotics
Authors: Fan Yang, Wenrui Chen, Kailun Yang, Haoran Lin, Dongsheng Luo, Conghui Tang, Zhiyong Li, Yaonan Wang
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Human-Object Interaction Detection, Object

To enable robots to use tools, the initial step is teaching robots to employ dexterous gestures for touching specific areas precisely where tasks are performed. Affordance features of objects serve as a bridge in the functional interaction between agents and objects. However, leveraging these affordance cues to help robots achieve functional tool grasping remains unresolved. To address this, we propose a granularity-aware affordance feature extraction method for locating functional affordance areas and predicting dexterous coarse gestures. We study the intrinsic mechanisms of human tool use. On one hand, we use fine-grained affordance features of object-functional finger contact areas to locate functional affordance regions. On the other hand, we use highly activated coarse-grained affordance features in hand-object interaction regions to predict grasp gestures. Additionally, we introduce a model-based post-processing module that includes functional finger coordinate localization, finger-to-end coordinate transformation, and force feedback-based coarse-to-fine grasping. This forms a complete dexterous robotic functional grasping framework GAAF-Dex, which learns Granularity-Aware Affordances from human-object interaction for tool-based Functional grasping in Dexterous Robotics. Unlike fully-supervised methods that require extensive data annotation, we employ a weakly supervised approach to extract relevant cues from exocentric (Exo) images of hand-object interactions to supervise feature extraction in egocentric (Ego) images. We have constructed a small-scale dataset, FAH, which includes near 6K images of functional hand-object interaction Exo- and Ego images of 18 commonly used tools performing 6 tasks. Extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yangfan293/GAAF-DEX.
Hierarchical Memory for Long Video QA
Authors: Yiqin Wang, Haoji Zhang, Yansong Tang, Yong liu, Jiashi Feng, Jifeng Dai, Xiaojie Jin
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

This paper describes our champion solution to the LOVEU Challenge @ CVPR'24, Track 1 (Long Video VQA). Processing long sequences of visual tokens is computationally expensive and memory-intensive, making long video question-answering a challenging task. The key is to compress visual tokens effectively, reducing memory footprint and decoding latency, while preserving the essential information for accurate question-answering. We adopt a hierarchical memory mechanism named STAR Memory, proposed in Flash-VStream, that is capable of processing long videos with limited GPU memory (VRAM). We further utilize the video and audio data of MovieChat-1K training set to fine-tune the pretrained weight released by Flash-VStream, achieving 1st place in the challenge. Code is available at project homepage https://invinciblewyq.github.io/vstream-page .
HATs: Hierarchical Adaptive Taxonomy Segmentation for Panoramic Pathology Image Analysis
Authors: Ruining Deng, Quan Liu, Can Cui, Tianyuan Yao, Juming Xiong, Shunxing Bao, Hao Li, Mengmeng Yin, Yu Wang, Shilin Zhao, Yucheng Tang, Haichun Yang, Yuankai Huo
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Panoramic image segmentation in computational pathology presents a remarkable challenge due to the morphologically complex and variably scaled anatomy. For instance, the intricate organization in kidney pathology spans multiple layers, from regions like the cortex and medulla to functional units such as glomeruli, tubules, and vessels, down to various cell types. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Adaptive Taxonomy Segmentation (HATs) method, which is designed to thoroughly segment panoramic views of kidney structures by leveraging detailed anatomical insights. Our approach entails (1) the innovative HATs technique which translates spatial relationships among 15 distinct object classes into a versatile "plug-and-play" loss function that spans across regions, functional units, and cells, (2) the incorporation of anatomical hierarchies and scale considerations into a unified simple matrix representation for all panoramic entities, (3) the adoption of the latest AI foundation model (EfficientSAM) as a feature extraction tool to boost the model's adaptability, yet eliminating the need for manual prompt generation in conventional segment anything model (SAM). Experimental findings demonstrate that the HATs method offers an efficient and effective strategy for integrating clinical insights and imaging precedents into a unified segmentation model across more than 15 categories. The official implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hrlblab/HATs.
Fully invertible hyperbolic neural networks for segmenting large-scale surface and sub-surface data
Authors: Bas Peters, Eldad Haber, Keegan Lensink
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Seismic Imaging

The large spatial/temporal/frequency scale of geoscience and remote-sensing datasets causes memory issues when using convolutional neural networks for (sub-) surface data segmentation. Recently developed fully reversible or fully invertible networks can mostly avoid memory limitations by recomputing the states during the backward pass through the network. This results in a low and fixed memory requirement for storing network states, as opposed to the typical linear memory growth with network depth. This work focuses on a fully invertible network based on the telegraph equation. While reversibility saves the major amount of memory used in deep networks by the data, the convolutional kernels can take up most memory if fully invertible networks contain multiple invertible pooling/coarsening layers. We address the explosion of the number of convolutional kernels by combining fully invertible networks with layers that contain the convolutional kernels in a compressed form directly. A second challenge is that invertible networks output a tensor the same size as its input. This property prevents the straightforward application of invertible networks to applications that map between different input-output dimensions, need to map to outputs with more channels than present in the input data, or desire outputs that decrease/increase the resolution compared to the input data. However, we show that by employing invertible networks in a non-standard fashion, we can still use them for these tasks. Examples in hyperspectral land-use classification, airborne geophysical surveying, and seismic imaging illustrate that we can input large data volumes in one chunk and do not need to work on small patches, use dimensionality reduction, or employ methods that classify a patch to a single central pixel.
Unveiling Glitches: A Deep Dive into Image Encoding Bugs within CLIP
Authors: Ayush Ranjan, Daniel Wen, Karthik Bhat
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Image Comprehension

Understanding the limitations and weaknesses of state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence is crucial for their improvement and responsible application. In this research, we focus on CLIP, a model renowned for its integration of vision and language processing. Our objective is to uncover recurring problems and blind spots in CLIP's image comprehension. By delving into both the commonalities and disparities between CLIP and human image understanding, we augment our comprehension of these models' capabilities. Through our analysis, we reveal significant discrepancies in CLIP's interpretation of images compared to human perception, shedding light on areas requiring improvement. Our methodologies, the Discrepancy Analysis Framework (DAF) and the Transformative Caption Analysis for CLIP (TCAC), enable a comprehensive evaluation of CLIP's performance. We identify 14 systemic faults, including Action vs. Stillness confusion, Failure to identify the direction of movement or positioning of objects in the image, Hallucination of Water-like Features, Misattribution of Geographic Context, among others. By addressing these limitations, we lay the groundwork for the development of more accurate and nuanced image embedding models, contributing to advancements in artificial intelligence.
Humans as Checkerboards: Calibrating Camera Motion Scale for World-Coordinate Human Mesh Recovery
Authors: Fengyuan Yang, Kerui Gu, Ha Linh Nguyen, Tze Ho Elden Tse, Angela Yao
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Human Mesh Recovery, Motion Estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Accurate camera motion estimation is essential for recovering global human motion in world coordinates from RGB video inputs. SLAM is widely used for estimating camera trajectory and point cloud, but monocular SLAM does so only up to an unknown scale factor. Previous works estimate the scale factor through optimization, but this is unreliable and time-consuming. This paper presents an optimization-free scale calibration framework, Human as Checkerboard (HAC). HAC innovatively leverages the human body predicted by human mesh recovery model as a calibration reference. Specifically, it uses the absolute depth of human-scene contact joints as references to calibrate the corresponding relative scene depth from SLAM. HAC benefits from geometric priors encoded in human mesh recovery models to estimate the SLAM scale and achieves precise global human motion estimation. Simple yet powerful, our method sets a new state-of-the-art performance for global human mesh estimation tasks, reducing motion errors by 50% over prior local-to-global methods while using 100$\times$ less inference time than optimization-based methods. Project page: https://martayang.github.io/HAC.
Explaining Chest X-ray Pathology Models using Textual Concepts
Authors: Vijay Sadashivaiah, Pingkun Yan, James A. Hendler
Date: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Deep learning models have revolutionized medical imaging and diagnostics, yet their opaque nature poses challenges for clinical adoption and trust. Amongst approaches to improve model interpretability, concept-based explanations aim to provide concise and human-understandable explanations of any arbitrary classifier. However, such methods usually require a large amount of manually collected data with concept annotation, which is often scarce in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose Conceptual Counterfactual Explanations for Chest X-ray (CoCoX), which leverages the joint embedding space of an existing vision-language model (VLM) to explain black-box classifier outcomes without the need for annotated datasets. Specifically, we utilize textual concepts derived from chest radiography reports and a pre-trained chest radiography-based VLM to explain three common cardiothoracic pathologies. We demonstrate that the explanations generated by our method are semantically meaningful and faithful to underlying pathologies.
AI-powered multimodal modeling of personalized hemodynamics in aortic stenosis
Authors: Caglar Ozturk, Daniel H. Pak, Luca Rosalia, Debkalpa Goswami, Mary E. Robakowski, Raymond McKay, Christopher T. Nguyen, James S. Duncan, Ellen T. Roche
Date: 2024-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Aortic stenosis (AS) is the most common valvular heart disease in developed countries. High-fidelity preclinical models can improve AS management by enabling therapeutic innovation, early diagnosis, and tailored treatment planning. However, their use is currently limited by complex workflows necessitating lengthy expert-driven manual operations. Here, we propose an AI-powered computational framework for accelerated and democratized patient-specific modeling of AS hemodynamics from computed tomography. First, we demonstrate that our automated meshing algorithms can generate task-ready geometries for both computational and benchtop simulations with higher accuracy and 100 times faster than existing approaches. Then, we show that our approach can be integrated with fluid-structure interaction and soft robotics models to accurately recapitulate a broad spectrum of clinical hemodynamic measurements of diverse AS patients. The efficiency and reliability of these algorithms make them an ideal complementary tool for personalized high-fidelity modeling of AS biomechanics, hemodynamics, and treatment planning.
Toward a Diffusion-Based Generalist for Dense Vision Tasks
Authors: Yue Fan, Yongqin Xian, Xiaohua Zhai, Alexander Kolesnikov, Muhammad Ferjad Naeem, Bernt Schiele, Federico Tombari
Date: 2024-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation, Quantization

Building generalized models that can solve many computer vision tasks simultaneously is an intriguing direction. Recent works have shown image itself can be used as a natural interface for general-purpose visual perception and demonstrated inspiring results. In this paper, we explore diffusion-based vision generalists, where we unify different types of dense prediction tasks as conditional image generation and re-purpose pre-trained diffusion models for it. However, directly applying off-the-shelf latent diffusion models leads to a quantization issue. Thus, we propose to perform diffusion in pixel space and provide a recipe for finetuning pre-trained text-to-image diffusion models for dense vision tasks. In experiments, we evaluate our method on four different types of tasks and show competitive performance to the other vision generalists.
Development of an interactive GUI using MATLAB for the detection of type and stage of Breast Tumor
Authors: Poulmi Banerjee, Satadal Saha
Date: 2024-06-29 00:00:00

Breast cancer is described as one of the most common types of cancer which has been diagnosed mainly in women. When compared in the ratio of male to female, it has been duly found that the prone of having breast cancer is more in females than males. Breast lumps are classified mainly into two groups namely: cancerous and non-cancerous. When we say that the lump in the breast is cancerous, it means that it can spread via lobules, ducts, areola, stroma to various organs of the body. On the other hand, non-cancerous breast lumps are less harmful but it should be monitored under proper diagnosis to avoid it being transformed to cancerous lump. To diagnose these breast lumps the method of mammogram, ultrasonic images and MRI images are undertaken. Also, for better diagnosis sometimes doctors recommend for biopsy and any unforeseen anomalies occurring there may give rise to inaccurate test report. To avoid these discrepancies, processing the mammogram images is considered to be one of the most reliable methods. In the proposed method MATLAB GUI is developed and some sample images of breast lumps are placed accordingly in the respective axes. With the help of sliders the actual breast lump image is compared with the already stored breast lump sample images and then accordingly the history of the breast lumps is generated in real time in the form of test report.
Characterizing Continual Learning Scenarios and Strategies for Audio Analysis
Authors: Ruchi Bhatt, Pratibha Kumari, Dwarikanath Mahapatra, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik, Mukesh Saini
Date: 2024-06-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Audio analysis is useful in many application scenarios. The state-of-the-art audio analysis approaches assume the data distribution at training and deployment time will be the same. However, due to various real-life challenges, the data may encounter drift in its distribution or can encounter new classes in the late future. Thus, a one-time trained model might not perform adequately. Continual learning (CL) approaches are devised to handle such changes in data distribution. There have been a few attempts to use CL approaches for audio analysis. Yet, there is a lack of a systematic evaluation framework. In this paper, we create a comprehensive CL dataset and characterize CL approaches for audio-based monitoring tasks. We have investigated the following CL and non-CL approaches: EWC, LwF, SI, GEM, A-GEM, GDumb, Replay, Naive, Cumulative, and Joint training. The study is very beneficial for researchers and practitioners working in the area of audio analysis for developing adaptive models. We observed that Replay achieved better results than other methods in the DCASE challenge data. It achieved an accuracy of 70.12% for the domain incremental scenario and an accuracy of 96.98% for the class incremental scenario.