pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SparX: A Sparse Cross-Layer Connection Mechanism for Hierarchical Vision Mamba and Transformer Networks
Authors: Meng Lou, Yunxiang Fu, Yizhou Yu
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Classification, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation

Due to the capability of dynamic state space models (SSMs) in capturing long-range dependencies with linear-time computational complexity, Mamba has shown notable performance in NLP tasks. This has inspired the rapid development of Mamba-based vision models, resulting in promising results in visual recognition tasks. However, such models are not capable of distilling features across layers through feature aggregation, interaction, and selection. Moreover, existing cross-layer feature aggregation methods designed for CNNs or ViTs are not practical in Mamba-based models due to high computational costs. Therefore, this paper aims to introduce an efficient cross-layer feature aggregation mechanism for vision backbone networks. Inspired by the Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGCs) in the human visual system, we propose a new sparse cross-layer connection mechanism termed SparX to effectively improve cross-layer feature interaction and reuse. Specifically, we build two different types of network layers: ganglion layers and normal layers. The former has higher connectivity and complexity, enabling multi-layer feature aggregation and interaction in an input-dependent manner. In contrast, the latter has lower connectivity and complexity. By interleaving these two types of layers, we design a new family of vision backbone networks with sparsely cross-connected layers, achieving an excellent trade-off among model size, computational cost, memory cost, and accuracy in comparison to its counterparts. For instance, with fewer parameters, SparX-Mamba-T improves the top-1 accuracy of VMamba-T from 82.5\% to 83.5\%, while SparX-Swin-T achieves a 1.3\% increase in top-1 accuracy compared to Swin-T. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our new connection mechanism possesses both superior performance and generalization capabilities on various vision tasks.
Enhancing Weakly-Supervised Object Detection on Static Images through (Hallucinated) Motion
Authors: Cagri Gungor, Adriana Kovashka
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Weakly Supervised Object Detection

While motion has garnered attention in various tasks, its potential as a modality for weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD) in static images remains unexplored. Our study introduces an approach to enhance WSOD methods by integrating motion information. This method involves leveraging hallucinated motion from static images to improve WSOD on image datasets, utilizing a Siamese network for enhanced representation learning with motion, addressing camera motion through motion normalization, and selectively training images based on object motion. Experimental validation on the COCO and YouTube-BB datasets demonstrates improvements over a state-of-the-art method.
TextureDiffusion: Target Prompt Disentangled Editing for Various Texture Transfer
Authors: Zihan Su, Junhao Zhuang, Chun Yuan
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: text-guided-image-editing

Recently, text-guided image editing has achieved significant success. However, existing methods can only apply simple textures like wood or gold when changing the texture of an object. Complex textures such as cloud or fire pose a challenge. This limitation stems from that the target prompt needs to contain both the input image content and <texture>, restricting the texture representation. In this paper, we propose TextureDiffusion, a tuning-free image editing method applied to various texture transfer. Initially, the target prompt is directly set to "<texture>", making the texture disentangled from the input image content to enhance texture representation. Subsequently, query features in self-attention and features in residual blocks are utilized to preserve the structure of the input image. Finally, to maintain the background, we introduce an edit localization technique which blends the self-attention results and the intermediate latents. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that TextureDiffusion can harmoniously transfer various textures with excellent structure and background preservation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/THU-CVML/TextureDiffusion
DreamMover: Leveraging the Prior of Diffusion Models for Image Interpolation with Large Motion
Authors: Liao Shen, Tianqi Liu, Huiqiang Sun, Xinyi Ye, Baopu Li, Jianming Zhang, Zhiguo Cao
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic correspondence

We study the problem of generating intermediate images from image pairs with large motion while maintaining semantic consistency. Due to the large motion, the intermediate semantic information may be absent in input images. Existing methods either limit to small motion or focus on topologically similar objects, leading to artifacts and inconsistency in the interpolation results. To overcome this challenge, we delve into pre-trained image diffusion models for their capabilities in semantic cognition and representations, ensuring consistent expression of the absent intermediate semantic representations with the input. To this end, we propose DreamMover, a novel image interpolation framework with three main components: 1) A natural flow estimator based on the diffusion model that can implicitly reason about the semantic correspondence between two images. 2) To avoid the loss of detailed information during fusion, our key insight is to fuse information in two parts, high-level space and low-level space. 3) To enhance the consistency between the generated images and input, we propose the self-attention concatenation and replacement approach. Lastly, we present a challenging benchmark dataset InterpBench to evaluate the semantic consistency of generated results. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project is available at https://dreamm0ver.github.io .
One-Shot Learning for Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis in the Wild
Authors: Dongqi Fan, Tao Chen, Mingjie Wang, Rui Ma, Qiang Tang, Zili Yi, Qian Wang, Liang Chang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Image Generation, One-Shot Learning, Pose Transfer, Triplet

Current Pose-Guided Person Image Synthesis (PGPIS) methods depend heavily on large amounts of labeled triplet data to train the generator in a supervised manner. However, they often falter when applied to in-the-wild samples, primarily due to the distribution gap between the training datasets and real-world test samples. While some researchers aim to enhance model generalizability through sophisticated training procedures, advanced architectures, or by creating more diverse datasets, we adopt the test-time fine-tuning paradigm to customize a pre-trained Text2Image (T2I) model. However, naively applying test-time tuning results in inconsistencies in facial identities and appearance attributes. To address this, we introduce a Visual Consistency Module (VCM), which enhances appearance consistency by combining the face, text, and image embedding. Our approach, named OnePoseTrans, requires only a single source image to generate high-quality pose transfer results, offering greater stability than state-of-the-art data-driven methods. For each test case, OnePoseTrans customizes a model in around 48 seconds with an NVIDIA V100 GPU.
GLCONet: Learning Multi-source Perception Representation for Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Yanguang Sun, Hanyu Xuan, Jian Yang, Lei Luo
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, object-detection, Object Detection

Recently, biological perception has been a powerful tool for handling the camouflaged object detection (COD) task. However, most existing methods are heavily dependent on the local spatial information of diverse scales from convolutional operations to optimize initial features. A commonly neglected point in these methods is the long-range dependencies between feature pixels from different scale spaces that can help the model build a global structure of the object, inducing a more precise image representation. In this paper, we propose a novel Global-Local Collaborative Optimization Network, called GLCONet. Technically, we first design a collaborative optimization strategy from the perspective of multi-source perception to simultaneously model the local details and global long-range relationships, which can provide features with abundant discriminative information to boost the accuracy in detecting camouflaged objects. Furthermore, we introduce an adjacent reverse decoder that contains cross-layer aggregation and reverse optimization to integrate complementary information from different levels for generating high-quality representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GLCONet method with different backbones can effectively activate potentially significant pixels in an image, outperforming twenty state-of-the-art methods on three public COD datasets. The source code is available at: \https://github.com/CSYSI/GLCONet.
NEVLP: Noise-Robust Framework for Efficient Vision-Language Pre-training
Authors: Yiyi Tao, Zhuoyue Wang, Hang Zhang, Lun Wang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, cross-modal alignment, Image Captioning, Image-text matching, Image-text Retrieval, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Memorization, Question Answering, Text Generation, Text Matching, Text Retrieval, Visual Question Answering

The success of Vision Language Models (VLMs) on various vision-language tasks heavily relies on pre-training with large scale web-crawled datasets. However, the noisy and incomplete nature of web data makes dataset scale crucial for performance, rendering end-to-end training increasingly prohibitive. In this paper, we propose NEVLP, a noise-robust framework for efficient vision-language pre-training that requires less pre-training data. Specifically, we bridge the modality gap between a frozen image encoder and a large language model with a transformer and introduce two innovative learning strategies: noise-adaptive learning and concept-enhanced learning to mitigate the impact of noise. In noise-adaptive learning, we estimate the noise probability of each image-text pair based on the transformer's memorization effect and employ noise-adaptive regularization on image-text contrastive learning to condition cross-modal alignment. In concept-enhanced learning, we enrich incomplete text by incorporating visual concepts (objects in the image) to provide prior information about existing objects for image-text matching and image-grounded text generation, thereby mitigating text incompletion. Our framework effectively utilizes noisy web data and achieves state-of-the-art performance with less pre-training data across a wide range of vision-language tasks, including image-text retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering.
Bias Begets Bias: The Impact of Biased Embeddings on Diffusion Models
Authors: Sahil Kuchlous, Marvin Li, Jeffrey G. Wang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Fairness

With the growing adoption of Text-to-Image (TTI) systems, the social biases of these models have come under increased scrutiny. Herein we conduct a systematic investigation of one such source of bias for diffusion models: embedding spaces. First, because traditional classifier-based fairness definitions require true labels not present in generative modeling, we propose statistical group fairness criteria based on a model's internal representation of the world. Using these definitions, we demonstrate theoretically and empirically that an unbiased text embedding space for input prompts is a necessary condition for representationally balanced diffusion models, meaning the distribution of generated images satisfy diversity requirements with respect to protected attributes. Next, we investigate the impact of biased embeddings on evaluating the alignment between generated images and prompts, a process which is commonly used to assess diffusion models. We find that biased multimodal embeddings like CLIP can result in lower alignment scores for representationally balanced TTI models, thus rewarding unfair behavior. Finally, we develop a theoretical framework through which biases in alignment evaluation can be studied and propose bias mitigation methods. By specifically adapting the perspective of embedding spaces, we establish new fairness conditions for diffusion model development and evaluation.
Learning Transferable Features for Implicit Neural Representations
Authors: Kushal Vyas, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Aniket Dashpute, Richard G. Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Guha Balakrishnan
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Rendering

Implicit neural representations (INRs) have demonstrated success in a variety of applications, including inverse problems and neural rendering. An INR is typically trained to capture one signal of interest, resulting in learned neural features that are highly attuned to that signal. Assumed to be less generalizable, we explore the aspect of transferability of such learned neural features for fitting similar signals. We introduce a new INR training framework, STRAINER that learns transferrable features for fitting INRs to new signals from a given distribution, faster and with better reconstruction quality. Owing to the sequential layer-wise affine operations in an INR, we propose to learn transferable representations by sharing initial encoder layers across multiple INRs with independent decoder layers. At test time, the learned encoder representations are transferred as initialization for an otherwise randomly initialized INR. We find STRAINER to yield extremely powerful initialization for fitting images from the same domain and allow for $\approx +10dB$ gain in signal quality early on compared to an untrained INR itself. STRAINER also provides a simple way to encode data-driven priors in INRs. We evaluate STRAINER on multiple in-domain and out-of-domain signal fitting tasks and inverse problems and further provide detailed analysis and discussion on the transferability of STRAINER's features. Our demo can be accessed at https://kushalvyas.github.io/strainer.html .
MANGO: Learning Disentangled Image Transformation Manifolds with Grouped Operators
Authors: Brighton Ancelin, Yenho Chen, Peimeng Guan, Chiraag Kaushik, Belen Martin-Urcelay, Alex Saad-Falcon, Nakul Singh
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

Learning semantically meaningful image transformations (i.e. rotation, thickness, blur) directly from examples can be a challenging task. Recently, the Manifold Autoencoder (MAE) proposed using a set of Lie group operators to learn image transformations directly from examples. However, this approach has limitations, as the learned operators are not guaranteed to be disentangled and the training routine is prohibitively expensive when scaling up the model. To address these limitations, we propose MANGO (transformation Manifolds with Grouped Operators) for learning disentangled operators that describe image transformations in distinct latent subspaces. Moreover, our approach allows practitioners the ability to define which transformations they aim to model, thus improving the semantic meaning of the learned operators. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that MANGO enables composition of image transformations and introduces a one-phase training routine that leads to a 100x speedup over prior works.
An Augmentation-based Model Re-adaptation Framework for Robust Image Segmentation
Authors: Zheming Zuo, Joseph Smith, Jonathan Stonehouse, Boguslaw Obara
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Image segmentation is a crucial task in computer vision, with wide-ranging applications in industry. The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has recently attracted intensive attention; however, its application in industrial inspection, particularly for segmenting commercial anti-counterfeit codes, remains challenging. Unlike open-source datasets, industrial settings often face issues such as small sample sizes and complex textures. Additionally, computational cost is a key concern due to the varying number of trainable parameters. To address these challenges, we propose an Augmentation-based Model Re-adaptation Framework (AMRF). This framework leverages data augmentation techniques during training to enhance the generalisation of segmentation models, allowing them to adapt to newly released datasets with temporal disparity. By observing segmentation masks from conventional models (FCN and U-Net) and a pre-trained SAM model, we determine a minimal augmentation set that optimally balances training efficiency and model performance. Our results demonstrate that the fine-tuned FCN surpasses its baseline by 3.29% and 3.02% in cropping accuracy, and 5.27% and 4.04% in classification accuracy on two temporally continuous datasets. Similarly, the fine-tuned U-Net improves upon its baseline by 7.34% and 4.94% in cropping, and 8.02% and 5.52% in classification. Both models outperform the top-performing SAM models (ViT-Large and ViT-Base) by an average of 11.75% and 9.01% in cropping accuracy, and 2.93% and 4.83% in classification accuracy, respectively.
One missing piece in Vision and Language: A Survey on Comics Understanding
Authors: Emanuele Vivoli, Mohamed Ali Souibgui, Andrey Barsky, Artemis Llabrés, Marco Bertini, Dimosthenis Karatzas
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, image-classification, Image Classification, Instance Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Question Answering, Semantic Segmentation, Survey, Visual Question Answering

Vision-language models have recently evolved into versatile systems capable of high performance across a range of tasks, such as document understanding, visual question answering, and grounding, often in zero-shot settings. Comics Understanding, a complex and multifaceted field, stands to greatly benefit from these advances. Comics, as a medium, combine rich visual and textual narratives, challenging AI models with tasks that span image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and deeper narrative comprehension through sequential panels. However, the unique structure of comics -- characterized by creative variations in style, reading order, and non-linear storytelling -- presents a set of challenges distinct from those in other visual-language domains. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of Comics Understanding from both dataset and task perspectives. Our contributions are fivefold: (1) We analyze the structure of the comics medium, detailing its distinctive compositional elements; (2) We survey the widely used datasets and tasks in comics research, emphasizing their role in advancing the field; (3) We introduce the Layer of Comics Understanding (LoCU) framework, a novel taxonomy that redefines vision-language tasks within comics and lays the foundation for future work; (4) We provide a detailed review and categorization of existing methods following the LoCU framework; (5) Finally, we highlight current research challenges and propose directions for future exploration, particularly in the context of vision-language models applied to comics. This survey is the first to propose a task-oriented framework for comics intelligence and aims to guide future research by addressing critical gaps in data availability and task definition. A project associated with this survey is available at https://github.com/emanuelevivoli/awesome-comics-understanding.
Self-Prompting Polyp Segmentation in Colonoscopy using Hybrid Yolo-SAM 2 Model
Authors: Mobina Mansoori, Sajjad Shahabodini, Jamshid Abouei, Konstantinos N. Plataniotis, Arash Mohammadi
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Image Segmentation, Polyp Segmentation, Segmentation, Video Polyp Segmentation, Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Early diagnosis and treatment of polyps during colonoscopy are essential for reducing the incidence and mortality of Colorectal Cancer (CRC). However, the variability in polyp characteristics and the presence of artifacts in colonoscopy images and videos pose significant challenges for accurate and efficient polyp detection and segmentation. This paper presents a novel approach to polyp segmentation by integrating the Segment Anything Model (SAM 2) with the YOLOv8 model. Our method leverages YOLOv8's bounding box predictions to autonomously generate input prompts for SAM 2, thereby reducing the need for manual annotations. We conducted exhaustive tests on five benchmark colonoscopy image datasets and two colonoscopy video datasets, demonstrating that our method exceeds state-of-the-art models in both image and video segmentation tasks. Notably, our approach achieves high segmentation accuracy using only bounding box annotations, significantly reducing annotation time and effort. This advancement holds promise for enhancing the efficiency and scalability of polyp detection in clinical settings https://github.com/sajjad-sh33/YOLO_SAM2.
MAC-VO: Metrics-aware Covariance for Learning-based Stereo Visual Odometry
Authors: Yuheng Qiu, Yutian Chen, Zihao Zhang, Wenshan Wang, Sebastian Scherer
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Pose Estimation, Visual Odometry

We propose the MAC-VO, a novel learning-based stereo VO that leverages the learned metrics-aware matching uncertainty for dual purposes: selecting keypoint and weighing the residual in pose graph optimization. Compared to traditional geometric methods prioritizing texture-affluent features like edges, our keypoint selector employs the learned uncertainty to filter out the low-quality features based on global inconsistency. In contrast to the learning-based algorithms that model the scale-agnostic diagonal weight matrix for covariance, we design a metrics-aware covariance model to capture the spatial error during keypoint registration and the correlations between different axes. Integrating this covariance model into pose graph optimization enhances the robustness and reliability of pose estimation, particularly in challenging environments with varying illumination, feature density, and motion patterns. On public benchmark datasets, MAC-VO outperforms existing VO algorithms and even some SLAM algorithms in challenging environments. The covariance map also provides valuable information about the reliability of the estimated poses, which can benefit decision-making for autonomous systems.
Learning Keypoints for Multi-Agent Behavior Analysis using Self-Supervision
Authors: Daniel Khalil, Christina Liu, Pietro Perona, Jennifer J. Sun, Markus Marks
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

The study of social interactions and collective behaviors through multi-agent video analysis is crucial in biology. While self-supervised keypoint discovery has emerged as a promising solution to reduce the need for manual keypoint annotations, existing methods often struggle with videos containing multiple interacting agents, especially those of the same species and color. To address this, we introduce B-KinD-multi, a novel approach that leverages pre-trained video segmentation models to guide keypoint discovery in multi-agent scenarios. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual annotations on new experimental settings and organisms. Extensive evaluations demonstrate improved keypoint regression and downstream behavioral classification in videos of flies, mice, and rats. Furthermore, our method generalizes well to other species, including ants, bees, and humans, highlighting its potential for broad applications in automated keypoint annotation for multi-agent behavior analysis. Code available under: https://danielpkhalil.github.io/B-KinD-Multi