pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Tri-Cam: Practical Eye Gaze Tracking via Camera Network
Authors: Sikai Yang, Wan Du
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00

As human eyes serve as conduits of rich information, unveiling emotions, intentions, and even aspects of an individual's health and overall well-being, gaze tracking also enables various human-computer interaction applications, as well as insights in psychological and medical research. However, existing gaze tracking solutions fall short at handling free user movement, and also require laborious user effort in system calibration. We introduce Tri-Cam, a practical deep learning-based gaze tracking system using three affordable RGB webcams. It features a split network structure for efficient training, as well as designated network designs to handle the separated gaze tracking tasks. Tri-Cam is also equipped with an implicit calibration module, which makes use of mouse click opportunities to reduce calibration overhead on the user's end. We evaluate Tri-Cam against Tobii, the state-of-the-art commercial eye tracker, achieving comparable accuracy, while supporting a wider free movement area. In conclusion, Tri-Cam provides a user-friendly, affordable, and robust gaze tracking solution that could practically enable various applications.
BiPC: Bidirectional Probability Calibration for Unsupervised Domain Adaption
Authors: Wenlve Zhou, Zhiheng Zhou, Junyuan Shang, Chang Niu, Mingyue Zhang, Xiyuan Tao, Tianlei Wang
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) leverages a labeled source domain to solve tasks in an unlabeled target domain. While Transformer-based methods have shown promise in UDA, their application is limited to plain Transformers, excluding Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and hierarchical Transformers. To address this issues, we propose Bidirectional Probability Calibration (BiPC) from a probability space perspective. We demonstrate that the probability outputs from a pre-trained head, after extensive pre-training, are robust against domain gaps and can adjust the probability distribution of the task head. Moreover, the task head can enhance the pre-trained head during adaptation training, improving model performance through bidirectional complementation. Technically, we introduce Calibrated Probability Alignment (CPA) to adjust the pre-trained head's probabilities, such as those from an ImageNet-1k pre-trained classifier. Additionally, we design a Calibrated Gini Impurity (CGI) loss to refine the task head, with calibrated coefficients learned from the pre-trained classifier. BiPC is a simple yet effective method applicable to various networks, including CNNs and Transformers. Experimental results demonstrate its remarkable performance across multiple UDA tasks. Our code will be available at: https://github.com/Wenlve-Zhou/BiPC.
LoRKD: Low-Rank Knowledge Decomposition for Medical Foundation Models
Authors: Haolin Li, YuHang Zhou, Ziheng Zhao, Siyuan Du, Jiangchao Yao, Weidi Xie, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Medical Imaging Segmentation, Medical Image Classification

The widespread adoption of large-scale pre-training techniques has significantly advanced the development of medical foundation models, enabling them to serve as versatile tools across a broad range of medical tasks. However, despite their strong generalization capabilities, medical foundation models pre-trained on large-scale datasets tend to suffer from domain gaps between heterogeneous data, leading to suboptimal performance on specific tasks compared to specialist models, as evidenced by previous studies. In this paper, we explore a new perspective called "Knowledge Decomposition" to improve the performance on specific medical tasks, which deconstructs the foundation model into multiple lightweight expert models, each dedicated to a particular anatomical region, with the aim of enhancing specialization and simultaneously reducing resource consumption. To accomplish the above objective, we propose a novel framework named Low-Rank Knowledge Decomposition (LoRKD), which explicitly separates gradients from different tasks by incorporating low-rank expert modules and efficient knowledge separation convolution. The low-rank expert modules resolve gradient conflicts between heterogeneous data from different anatomical regions, providing strong specialization at lower costs. The efficient knowledge separation convolution significantly improves algorithm efficiency by achieving knowledge separation within a single forward propagation. Extensive experimental results on segmentation and classification tasks demonstrate that our decomposed models not only achieve state-of-the-art performance but also exhibit superior transferability on downstream tasks, even surpassing the original foundation models in task-specific evaluations. The code is available at here.
Video DataFlywheel: Resolving the Impossible Data Trinity in Video-Language Understanding
Authors: Xiao Wang, Jianlong Wu, Zijia Lin, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Liqiang Nie
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Question Answering, Video Question Answering, Video Retrieval

Recently, video-language understanding has achieved great success through large-scale pre-training. However, data scarcity remains a prevailing challenge. This study quantitatively reveals an "impossible trinity" among data quantity, diversity, and quality in pre-training datasets. Recent efforts seek to refine large-scale, diverse ASR datasets compromised by low quality through synthetic annotations. These methods successfully leverage useful information in multimodal video content (frames, tags, ASR transcripts, etc.) to refine the original annotations. Nevertheless, they struggle to mitigate noise within synthetic annotations and lack scalability as the dataset size expands. To address these issues, we introduce the Video DataFlywheel framework, which iteratively refines video annotations with improved noise control methods. For iterative refinement, we first leverage a video-language model to generate synthetic annotations, resulting in a refined dataset. Then, we pre-train on it and fine-tune on human refinement examples for a stronger model. These processes are repeated for continuous improvement. For noise control, we present AdaTaiLr, a novel noise control method that requires weaker assumptions on noise distribution, thereby proving more effective in large datasets with theoretical guarantees. The combination of iterative refinement and AdaTaiLr can achieve better scalability in video-language understanding. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms existing data refinement baselines, delivering a 3% performance boost and improving dataset quality with minimal diversity loss. Furthermore, our refined dataset facilitates significant improvements in various video-language understanding tasks, including video question answering and text-video retrieval.
IWN: Image Watermarking Based on Idempotency
Authors: Kaixin Deng
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00

In the expanding field of digital media, maintaining the strength and integrity of watermarking technology is becoming increasingly challenging. This paper, inspired by the Idempotent Generative Network (IGN), explores the prospects of introducing idempotency into image watermark processing and proposes an innovative neural network model - the Idempotent Watermarking Network (IWN). The proposed model, which focuses on enhancing the recovery quality of color image watermarks, leverages idempotency to ensure superior image reversibility. This feature ensures that, even if color image watermarks are attacked or damaged, they can be effectively projected and mapped back to their original state. Therefore, the extracted watermarks have unquestionably increased quality. The IWN model achieves a balance between embedding capacity and robustness, alleviating to some extent the inherent contradiction between these two factors in traditional watermarking techniques and steganography methods.
OptiGrasp: Optimized Grasp Pose Detection Using RGB Images for Warehouse Picking Robots
Authors: Soofiyan Atar, Yi Li, Markus Grotz, Michael Wolf, Dieter Fox, Joshua Smith
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00

In warehouse environments, robots require robust picking capabilities to manage a wide variety of objects. Effective deployment demands minimal hardware, strong generalization to new products, and resilience in diverse settings. Current methods often rely on depth sensors for structural information, which suffer from high costs, complex setups, and technical limitations. Inspired by recent advancements in computer vision, we propose an innovative approach that leverages foundation models to enhance suction grasping using only RGB images. Trained solely on a synthetic dataset, our method generalizes its grasp prediction capabilities to real-world robots and a diverse range of novel objects not included in the training set. Our network achieves an 82.3\% success rate in real-world applications. The project website with code and data will be available at http://optigrasp.github.io.
KineDepth: Utilizing Robot Kinematics for Online Metric Depth Estimation
Authors: Soofiyan Atar, Yuheng Zhi, Florian Richter, Michael Yip
Date: 2024-09-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation

Depth perception is essential for a robot's spatial and geometric understanding of its environment, with many tasks traditionally relying on hardware-based depth sensors like RGB-D or stereo cameras. However, these sensors face practical limitations, including issues with transparent and reflective objects, high costs, calibration complexity, spatial and energy constraints, and increased failure rates in compound systems. While monocular depth estimation methods offer a cost-effective and simpler alternative, their adoption in robotics is limited due to their output of relative rather than metric depth, which is crucial for robotics applications. In this paper, we propose a method that utilizes a single calibrated camera, enabling the robot to act as a ``measuring stick" to convert relative depth estimates into metric depth in real-time as tasks are performed. Our approach employs an LSTM-based metric depth regressor, trained online and refined through probabilistic filtering, to accurately restore the metric depth across the monocular depth map, particularly in areas proximal to the robot's motion. Experiments with real robots demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art monocular metric depth estimation techniques, achieving a 22.1% reduction in depth error and a 52% increase in success rate for a downstream task.
MedCLIP-SAMv2: Towards Universal Text-Driven Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Taha Koleilat, Hojat Asgariandehkordi, Hassan Rivaz, Yiming Xiao
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Zero Shot Segmentation

Segmentation of anatomical structures and pathological regions in medical images is essential for modern clinical diagnosis, disease research, and treatment planning. While significant advancements have been made in deep learning-based segmentation techniques, many of these methods still suffer from limitations in data efficiency, generalizability, and interactivity. As a result, developing precise segmentation methods that require fewer labeled datasets remains a critical challenge in medical image analysis. Recently, the introduction of foundation models like CLIP and Segment-Anything-Model (SAM), with robust cross-domain representations, has paved the way for interactive and universal image segmentation. However, further exploration of these models for data-efficient segmentation in medical imaging is still needed and highly relevant. In this paper, we introduce MedCLIP-SAMv2, a novel framework that integrates the CLIP and SAM models to perform segmentation on clinical scans using text prompts, in both zero-shot and weakly supervised settings. Our approach includes fine-tuning the BiomedCLIP model with a new Decoupled Hard Negative Noise Contrastive Estimation (DHN-NCE) loss, and leveraging the Multi-modal Information Bottleneck (M2IB) to create visual prompts for generating segmentation masks from SAM in the zero-shot setting. We also investigate using zero-shot segmentation labels within a weakly supervised paradigm to enhance segmentation quality further. Extensive testing across four diverse segmentation tasks and medical imaging modalities (breast tumor ultrasound, brain tumor MRI, lung X-ray, and lung CT) demonstrates the high accuracy of our proposed framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/HealthX-Lab/MedCLIP-SAMv2.
Towards Croppable Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Maor Ashkenazi, Eran Treister
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have peaked interest in recent years due to their ability to encode natural signals using neural networks. While INRs allow for useful applications such as interpolating new coordinates and signal compression, their black-box nature makes it difficult to modify them post-training. In this paper we explore the idea of editable INRs, and specifically focus on the widely used cropping operation. To this end, we present Local-Global SIRENs -- a novel INR architecture that supports cropping by design. Local-Global SIRENs are based on combining local and global feature extraction for signal encoding. What makes their design unique is the ability to effortlessly remove specific portions of an encoded signal, with a proportional weight decrease. This is achieved by eliminating the corresponding weights from the network, without the need for retraining. We further show how this architecture can be used to support the straightforward extension of previously encoded signals. Beyond signal editing, we examine how the Local-Global approach can accelerate training, enhance encoding of various signals, improve downstream performance, and be applied to modern INRs such as INCODE, highlighting its potential and flexibility. Code is available at https://github.com/maorash/Local-Global-INRs.
On the universality of neural encodings in CNNs
Authors: Florentin Guth, Brice Ménard
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Transfer Learning

We explore the universality of neural encodings in convolutional neural networks trained on image classification tasks. We develop a procedure to directly compare the learned weights rather than their representations. It is based on a factorization of spatial and channel dimensions and measures the similarity of aligned weight covariances. We show that, for a range of layers of VGG-type networks, the learned eigenvectors appear to be universal across different natural image datasets. Our results suggest the existence of a universal neural encoding for natural images. They explain, at a more fundamental level, the success of transfer learning. Our work shows that, instead of aiming at maximizing the performance of neural networks, one can alternatively attempt to maximize the universality of the learned encoding, in order to build a principled foundation model.
Language-guided Robust Navigation for Mobile Robots in Dynamically-changing Environments
Authors: Cody Simons, Zhichao Liu, Brandon Marcus, Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, Konstantinos Karydis
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

In this paper, we develop an embodied AI system for human-in-the-loop navigation with a wheeled mobile robot. We propose a direct yet effective method of monitoring the robot's current plan to detect changes in the environment that impact the intended trajectory of the robot significantly and then query a human for feedback. We also develop a means to parse human feedback expressed in natural language into local navigation waypoints and integrate it into a global planning system, by leveraging a map of semantic features and an aligned obstacle map. Extensive testing in simulation and physical hardware experiments with a resource-constrained wheeled robot tasked to navigate in a real-world environment validate the efficacy and robustness of our method. This work can support applications like precision agriculture and construction, where persistent monitoring of the environment provides a human with information about the environment state.
Contrastive ground-level image and remote sensing pre-training improves representation learning for natural world imagery
Authors: Andy V. Huynh, Lauren E. Gillespie, Jael Lopez-Saucedo, Claire Tang, Rohan Sikand, Moisés Expósito-Alonso
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Representation Learning

Multimodal image-text contrastive learning has shown that joint representations can be learned across modalities. Here, we show how leveraging multiple views of image data with contrastive learning can improve downstream fine-grained classification performance for species recognition, even when one view is absent. We propose ContRastive Image-remote Sensing Pre-training (CRISP)$\unicode{x2014}$a new pre-training task for ground-level and aerial image representation learning of the natural world$\unicode{x2014}$and introduce Nature Multi-View (NMV), a dataset of natural world imagery including $>3$ million ground-level and aerial image pairs for over 6,000 plant taxa across the ecologically diverse state of California. The NMV dataset and accompanying material are available at hf.co/datasets/andyvhuynh/NatureMultiView.
Introducing SDICE: An Index for Assessing Diversity of Synthetic Medical Datasets
Authors: Mohammed Talha Alam, Raza Imam, Mohammad Areeb Qazi, Asim Ukaye, Karthik Nandakumar
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Image Generation, Medical Image Analysis, Medical Image Generation

Advancements in generative modeling are pushing the state-of-the-art in synthetic medical image generation. These synthetic images can serve as an effective data augmentation method to aid the development of more accurate machine learning models for medical image analysis. While the fidelity of these synthetic images has progressively increased, the diversity of these images is an understudied phenomenon. In this work, we propose the SDICE index, which is based on the characterization of similarity distributions induced by a contrastive encoder. Given a synthetic dataset and a reference dataset of real images, the SDICE index measures the distance between the similarity score distributions of original and synthetic images, where the similarity scores are estimated using a pre-trained contrastive encoder. This distance is then normalized using an exponential function to provide a consistent metric that can be easily compared across domains. Experiments conducted on the MIMIC-chest X-ray and ImageNet datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SDICE index in assessing synthetic medical dataset diversity.
Fast Encoding and Decoding for Implicit Video Representation
Authors: Hao Chen, Saining Xie, Ser-Nam Lim, Abhinav Shrivastava
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Video Compression

Despite the abundant availability and content richness for video data, its high-dimensionality poses challenges for video research. Recent advancements have explored the implicit representation for videos using neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in applications such as video compression and enhancement. However, the prolonged encoding time remains a persistent challenge for video Implicit Neural Representations (INRs). In this paper, we focus on improving the speed of video encoding and decoding within implicit representations. We introduce two key components: NeRV-Enc, a transformer-based hyper-network for fast encoding; and NeRV-Dec, a parallel decoder for efficient video loading. NeRV-Enc achieves an impressive speed-up of $\mathbf{10^4\times}$ by eliminating gradient-based optimization. Meanwhile, NeRV-Dec simplifies video decoding, outperforming conventional codecs with a loading speed $\mathbf{11\times}$ faster, and surpassing RAM loading with pre-decoded videos ($\mathbf{2.5\times}$ faster while being $\mathbf{65\times}$ smaller in size).
From Unimodal to Multimodal: Scaling up Projectors to Align Modalities
Authors: Mayug Maniparambil, Raiymbek Akshulakov, Yasser Abdelaziz Dahou Djilali, Sanath Narayan, Ankit Singh, Noel E. O'Connor
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image-text Retrieval, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Retrieval, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Recent contrastive multimodal vision-language models like CLIP have demonstrated robust open-world semantic understanding, becoming the standard image backbones for vision-language applications due to their aligned latent space. However, this practice has left powerful unimodal encoders for both vision and language underutilized in multimodal applications which raises a key question: Is there a plausible way to connect unimodal backbones for zero-shot vision-language tasks? To this end, we propose a novel approach that aligns vision and language modalities using only projection layers on pretrained, frozen unimodal encoders. Our method exploits the high semantic similarity between embedding spaces of well-trained vision and language models. It involves selecting semantically similar encoders in the latent space, curating a concept-rich dataset of image-caption pairs, and training simple MLP projectors. We evaluated our approach on 12 zero-shot classification datasets and 2 image-text retrieval datasets. Our best model, utilizing DINOv2 and All-Roberta-Large text encoder, achieves 76\(\%\) accuracy on ImageNet with a 20-fold reduction in data and 65 fold reduction in compute requirements. The proposed framework enhances the accessibility of model development while enabling flexible adaptation across diverse scenarios, offering an efficient approach to building multimodal models by utilizing existing unimodal architectures. Code and datasets will be released soon.
Multi-sensor Learning Enables Information Transfer across Different Sensory Data and Augments Multi-modality Imaging
Authors: Lingting Zhu, Yizheng Chen, Lianli Liu, Lei Xing, Lequan Yu
Date: 2024-09-28 00:00:00

Multi-modality imaging is widely used in clinical practice and biomedical research to gain a comprehensive understanding of an imaging subject. Currently, multi-modality imaging is accomplished by post hoc fusion of independently reconstructed images under the guidance of mutual information or spatially registered hardware, which limits the accuracy and utility of multi-modality imaging. Here, we investigate a data-driven multi-modality imaging (DMI) strategy for synergetic imaging of CT and MRI. We reveal two distinct types of features in multi-modality imaging, namely intra- and inter-modality features, and present a multi-sensor learning (MSL) framework to utilize the crossover inter-modality features for augmented multi-modality imaging. The MSL imaging approach breaks down the boundaries of traditional imaging modalities and allows for optimal hybridization of CT and MRI, which maximizes the use of sensory data. We showcase the effectiveness of our DMI strategy through synergetic CT-MRI brain imaging. The principle of DMI is quite general and holds enormous potential for various DMI applications across disciplines.