pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Common Feature Mining for Efficient Video Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Yaoyan Zheng, Hongyu Yang, Di Huang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Video Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in video semantic segmentation have made substantial progress by exploiting temporal correlations. Nevertheless, persistent challenges, including redundant computation and the reliability of the feature propagation process, underscore the need for further innovation. In response, we present Deep Common Feature Mining (DCFM), a novel approach strategically designed to address these challenges by leveraging the concept of feature sharing. DCFM explicitly decomposes features into two complementary components. The common representation extracted from a key-frame furnishes essential high-level information to neighboring non-key frames, allowing for direct re-utilization without feature propagation. Simultaneously, the independent feature, derived from each video frame, captures rapidly changing information, providing frame-specific clues crucial for segmentation. To achieve such decomposition, we employ a symmetric training strategy tailored for sparsely annotated data, empowering the backbone to learn a robust high-level representation enriched with common information. Additionally, we incorporate a self-supervised loss function to reinforce intra-class feature similarity and enhance temporal consistency. Experimental evaluations on the VSPW and Cityscapes datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing a superior balance between accuracy and efficiency. The implementation is available at https://github.com/BUAAHugeGun/DCFM.
Finetuned Multimodal Language Models Are High-Quality Image-Text Data Filters
Authors: Weizhi Wang, Khalil Mrini, Linjie Yang, Sateesh Kumar, Yu Tian, Xifeng Yan, Heng Wang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

We propose a novel framework for filtering image-text data by leveraging fine-tuned Multimodal Language Models (MLMs). Our approach outperforms predominant filtering methods (e.g., CLIPScore) via integrating the recent advances in MLMs. We design four distinct yet complementary metrics to holistically measure the quality of image-text data. A new pipeline is established to construct high-quality instruction data for fine-tuning MLMs as data filters. Comparing with CLIPScore, our MLM filters produce more precise and comprehensive scores that directly improve the quality of filtered data and boost the performance of pre-trained models. We achieve significant improvements over CLIPScore on popular foundation models (i.e., CLIP and BLIP2) and various downstream tasks. Our MLM filter can generalize to different models and tasks, and be used as a drop-in replacement for CLIPScore. An additional ablation study is provided to verify our design choices for the MLM filter.
Few-shot Learner Parameterization by Diffusion Time-steps
Authors: Zhongqi Yue, Pan Zhou, Richang Hong, Hanwang Zhang, Qianru Sun
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Inductive Bias

Even when using large multi-modal foundation models, few-shot learning is still challenging -- if there is no proper inductive bias, it is nearly impossible to keep the nuanced class attributes while removing the visually prominent attributes that spuriously correlate with class labels. To this end, we find an inductive bias that the time-steps of a Diffusion Model (DM) can isolate the nuanced class attributes, i.e., as the forward diffusion adds noise to an image at each time-step, nuanced attributes are usually lost at an earlier time-step than the spurious attributes that are visually prominent. Building on this, we propose Time-step Few-shot (TiF) learner. We train class-specific low-rank adapters for a text-conditioned DM to make up for the lost attributes, such that images can be accurately reconstructed from their noisy ones given a prompt. Hence, at a small time-step, the adapter and prompt are essentially a parameterization of only the nuanced class attributes. For a test image, we can use the parameterization to only extract the nuanced class attributes for classification. TiF learner significantly outperforms OpenCLIP and its adapters on a variety of fine-grained and customized few-shot learning tasks. Codes are in https://github.com/yue-zhongqi/tif.
UFO: Uncertainty-aware LiDAR-image Fusion for Off-road Semantic Terrain Map Estimation
Authors: Ohn Kim, Junwon Seo, Seongyong Ahn, Chong Hui Kim
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

Autonomous off-road navigation requires an accurate semantic understanding of the environment, often converted into a bird's-eye view (BEV) representation for various downstream tasks. While learning-based methods have shown success in generating local semantic terrain maps directly from sensor data, their efficacy in off-road environments is hindered by challenges in accurately representing uncertain terrain features. This paper presents a learning-based fusion method for generating dense terrain classification maps in BEV. By performing LiDAR-image fusion at multiple scales, our approach enhances the accuracy of semantic maps generated from an RGB image and a single-sweep LiDAR scan. Utilizing uncertainty-aware pseudo-labels further enhances the network's ability to learn reliably in off-road environments without requiring precise 3D annotations. By conducting thorough experiments using off-road driving datasets, we demonstrate that our method can improve accuracy in off-road terrains, validating its efficacy in facilitating reliable and safe autonomous navigation in challenging off-road settings.
HoloVIC: Large-scale Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Sensor Holographic Intersection and Vehicle-Infrastructure Cooperative
Authors: Cong Ma, Lei Qiao, Chengkai Zhu, Kai Liu, Zelong Kong, Qing Li, Xueqi Zhou, Yuheng Kan, Wei Wu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) is a popular topic in the field of Autonomous Driving in recent years. Vehicle-infrastructure cooperation (VIC) becomes one of the important research area. Due to the complexity of traffic conditions such as blind spots and occlusion, it greatly limits the perception capabilities of single-view roadside sensing systems. To further enhance the accuracy of roadside perception and provide better information to the vehicle side, in this paper, we constructed holographic intersections with various layouts to build a large-scale multi-sensor holographic vehicle-infrastructure cooperation dataset, called HoloVIC. Our dataset includes 3 different types of sensors (Camera, Lidar, Fisheye) and employs 4 sensor-layouts based on the different intersections. Each intersection is equipped with 6-18 sensors to capture synchronous data. While autonomous vehicles pass through these intersections for collecting VIC data. HoloVIC contains in total on 100k+ synchronous frames from different sensors. Additionally, we annotated 3D bounding boxes based on Camera, Fisheye, and Lidar. We also associate the IDs of the same objects across different devices and consecutive frames in sequence. Based on HoloVIC, we formulated four tasks to facilitate the development of related research. We also provide benchmarks for these tasks.
False Positive Sampling-based Data Augmentation for Enhanced 3D Object Detection Accuracy
Authors: Jiyong Oh, Junhaeng Lee, Woongchan Byun, Minsang Kong, Sang Hun Lee
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Data Augmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Recent studies have focused on enhancing the performance of 3D object detection models. Among various approaches, ground-truth sampling has been proposed as an augmentation technique to address the challenges posed by limited ground-truth data. However, an inherent issue with ground-truth sampling is its tendency to increase false positives. Therefore, this study aims to overcome the limitations of ground-truth sampling and improve the performance of 3D object detection models by developing a new augmentation technique called false-positive sampling. False-positive sampling involves retraining the model using point clouds that are identified as false positives in the model's predictions. We propose an algorithm that utilizes both ground-truth and false-positive sampling and an algorithm for building the false-positive sample database. Additionally, we analyze the principles behind the performance enhancement due to false-positive sampling. Our experiments demonstrate that models utilizing false-positive sampling show a reduction in false positives and exhibit improved object detection performance. On the KITTI and Waymo Open datasets, models with false-positive sampling surpass the baseline models by a large margin.
BSDP: Brain-inspired Streaming Dual-level Perturbations for Online Open World Object Detection
Authors: Yu Chen, Liyan Ma, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Open World Object Detection

Humans can easily distinguish the known and unknown categories and can recognize the unknown object by learning it once instead of repeating it many times without forgetting the learned object. Hence, we aim to make deep learning models simulate the way people learn. We refer to such a learning manner as OnLine Open World Object Detection(OLOWOD). Existing OWOD approaches pay more attention to the identification of unknown categories, while the incremental learning part is also very important. Besides, some neuroscience research shows that specific noises allow the brain to form new connections and neural pathways which may improve learning speed and efficiency. In this paper, we take the dual-level information of old samples as perturbations on new samples to make the model good at learning new knowledge without forgetting the old knowledge. Therefore, we propose a simple plug-and-play method, called Brain-inspired Streaming Dual-level Perturbations(BSDP), to solve the OLOWOD problem. Specifically, (1) we first calculate the prototypes of previous categories and use the distance between samples and the prototypes as the sample selecting strategy to choose old samples for replay; (2) then take the prototypes as the streaming feature-level perturbations of new samples, so as to improve the plasticity of the model through revisiting the old knowledge; (3) and also use the distribution of the features of the old category samples to generate adversarial data in the form of streams as the data-level perturbations to enhance the robustness of the model to new categories. We empirically evaluate BSDP on PASCAL VOC and MS-COCO, and the excellent results demonstrate the promising performance of our proposed method and learning manner.
Towards Geometric-Photometric Joint Alignment for Facial Mesh Registration
Authors: Xizhi Wang, Yaxiong Wang, Mengjian Li
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

This paper presents a Geometric-Photometric Joint Alignment~(GPJA) method, which aligns discrete human expressions at pixel-level accuracy by combining geometric and photometric information. Common practices for registering human heads typically involve aligning landmarks with facial template meshes using geometry processing approaches, but often overlook dense pixel-level photometric consistency. This oversight leads to inconsistent texture parametrization across different expressions, hindering the creation of topologically consistent head meshes widely used in movies and games. GPJA overcomes this limitation by leveraging differentiable rendering to align vertices with target expressions, achieving joint alignment in both geometry and photometric appearances automatically, without requiring semantic annotation or pre-aligned meshes for training. It features a holistic rendering alignment mechanism and a multiscale regularized optimization for robust convergence on large deformation. The method utilizes derivatives at vertex positions for supervision and employs a gradient-based algorithm which guarantees smoothness and avoids topological artifacts during the geometry evolution. Experimental results demonstrate faithful alignment under various expressions, surpassing the conventional non-rigid ICP-based methods and the state-of-the-art deep learning based method. In practical, our method generates meshes of the same subject across diverse expressions, all with the same texture parametrization. This consistency benefits face animation, re-parametrization, and other batch operations for face modeling and applications with enhanced efficiency.
Modeling Collaborator: Enabling Subjective Vision Classification With Minimal Human Effort via LLM Tool-Use
Authors: Imad Eddine Toubal, Aditya Avinash, Neil Gordon Alldrin, Jan Dlabal, Wenlei Zhou, Enming Luo, Otilia Stretcu, Hao Xiong, Chun-Ta Lu, Howard Zhou, Ranjay Krishna, Ariel Fuxman, Tom Duerig
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

From content moderation to wildlife conservation, the number of applications that require models to recognize nuanced or subjective visual concepts is growing. Traditionally, developing classifiers for such concepts requires substantial manual effort measured in hours, days, or even months to identify and annotate data needed for training. Even with recently proposed Agile Modeling techniques, which enable rapid bootstrapping of image classifiers, users are still required to spend 30 minutes or more of monotonous, repetitive data labeling just to train a single classifier. Drawing on Fiske's Cognitive Miser theory, we propose a new framework that alleviates manual effort by replacing human labeling with natural language interactions, reducing the total effort required to define a concept by an order of magnitude: from labeling 2,000 images to only 100 plus some natural language interactions. Our framework leverages recent advances in foundation models, both large language models and vision-language models, to carve out the concept space through conversation and by automatically labeling training data points. Most importantly, our framework eliminates the need for crowd-sourced annotations. Moreover, our framework ultimately produces lightweight classification models that are deployable in cost-sensitive scenarios. Across 15 subjective concepts and across 2 public image classification datasets, our trained models outperform traditional Agile Modeling as well as state-of-the-art zero-shot classification models like ALIGN, CLIP, CuPL, and large visual question-answering models like PaLI-X.
Low-Res Leads the Way: Improving Generalization for Super-Resolution by Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Haoyu Chen, Wenbo Li, Jinjin Gu, Jingjing Ren, Haoze Sun, Xueyi Zou, Zhensong Zhang, Youliang Yan, Lei Zhu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Self-Supervised Learning, Super-Resolution

For image super-resolution (SR), bridging the gap between the performance on synthetic datasets and real-world degradation scenarios remains a challenge. This work introduces a novel "Low-Res Leads the Way" (LWay) training framework, merging Supervised Pre-training with Self-supervised Learning to enhance the adaptability of SR models to real-world images. Our approach utilizes a low-resolution (LR) reconstruction network to extract degradation embeddings from LR images, merging them with super-resolved outputs for LR reconstruction. Leveraging unseen LR images for self-supervised learning guides the model to adapt its modeling space to the target domain, facilitating fine-tuning of SR models without requiring paired high-resolution (HR) images. The integration of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) further refines the focus on high-frequency details. Extensive evaluations show that our method significantly improves the generalization and detail restoration capabilities of SR models on unseen real-world datasets, outperforming existing methods. Our training regime is universally compatible, requiring no network architecture modifications, making it a practical solution for real-world SR applications.
Pooling Image Datasets With Multiple Covariate Shift and Imbalance
Authors: Sotirios Panagiotis Chytas, Vishnu Suresh Lokhande, Peiran Li, Vikas Singh
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Small sample sizes are common in many disciplines, which necessitates pooling roughly similar datasets across multiple institutions to study weak but relevant associations between images and disease outcomes. Such data often manifest shift/imbalance in covariates (i.e., secondary non-imaging data). Controlling for such nuisance variables is common within standard statistical analysis, but the ideas do not directly apply to overparameterized models. Consequently, recent work has shown how strategies from invariant representation learning provides a meaningful starting point, but the current repertoire of methods is limited to accounting for shifts/imbalances in just a couple of covariates at a time. In this paper, we show how viewing this problem from the perspective of Category theory provides a simple and effective solution that completely avoids elaborate multi-stage training pipelines that would otherwise be needed. We show the effectiveness of this approach via extensive experiments on real datasets. Further, we discuss how this style of formulation offers a unified perspective on at least 5+ distinct problem settings, from self-supervised learning to matching problems in 3D reconstruction.
VEglue: Testing Visual Entailment Systems via Object-Aligned Joint Erasing
Authors: Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Junjie Wang, Cheng Li, Qing Wang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Reasoning, Sentence, Visual Entailment

Visual entailment (VE) is a multimodal reasoning task consisting of image-sentence pairs whereby a promise is defined by an image, and a hypothesis is described by a sentence. The goal is to predict whether the image semantically entails the sentence. VE systems have been widely adopted in many downstream tasks. Metamorphic testing is the commonest technique for AI algorithms, but it poses a significant challenge for VE testing. They either only consider perturbations on single modality which would result in ineffective tests due to the destruction of the relationship of image-text pair, or just conduct shallow perturbations on the inputs which can hardly detect the decision error made by VE systems. Motivated by the fact that objects in the image are the fundamental element for reasoning, we propose VEglue, an object-aligned joint erasing approach for VE systems testing. It first aligns the object regions in the premise and object descriptions in the hypothesis to identify linked and un-linked objects. Then, based on the alignment information, three Metamorphic Relations are designed to jointly erase the objects of the two modalities. We evaluate VEglue on four widely-used VE systems involving two public datasets. Results show that VEglue could detect 11,609 issues on average, which is 194%-2,846% more than the baselines. In addition, VEglue could reach 52.5% Issue Finding Rate (IFR) on average, and significantly outperform the baselines by 17.1%-38.2%. Furthermore, we leverage the tests generated by VEglue to retrain the VE systems, which largely improves model performance (50.8% increase in accuracy) on newly generated tests without sacrificing the accuracy on the original test set.
What do we learn from inverting CLIP models?
Authors: Hamid Kazemi, Atoosa Chegini, Jonas Geiping, Soheil Feizi, Tom Goldstein
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

We employ an inversion-based approach to examine CLIP models. Our examination reveals that inverting CLIP models results in the generation of images that exhibit semantic alignment with the specified target prompts. We leverage these inverted images to gain insights into various aspects of CLIP models, such as their ability to blend concepts and inclusion of gender biases. We notably observe instances of NSFW (Not Safe For Work) images during model inversion. This phenomenon occurs even for semantically innocuous prompts, like "a beautiful landscape," as well as for prompts involving the names of celebrities.
DPAdapter: Improving Differentially Private Deep Learning through Noise Tolerance Pre-training
Authors: ZiHao Wang, Rui Zhu, Dongruo Zhou, Zhikun Zhang, John Mitchell, Haixu Tang, XiaoFeng Wang
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00

Recent developments have underscored the critical role of \textit{differential privacy} (DP) in safeguarding individual data for training machine learning models. However, integrating DP oftentimes incurs significant model performance degradation due to the perturbation introduced into the training process, presenting a formidable challenge in the {differentially private machine learning} (DPML) field. To this end, several mitigative efforts have been proposed, typically revolving around formulating new DPML algorithms or relaxing DP definitions to harmonize with distinct contexts. In spite of these initiatives, the diminishment induced by DP on models, particularly large-scale models, remains substantial and thus, necessitates an innovative solution that adeptly circumnavigates the consequential impairment of model utility. In response, we introduce DPAdapter, a pioneering technique designed to amplify the model performance of DPML algorithms by enhancing parameter robustness. The fundamental intuition behind this strategy is that models with robust parameters are inherently more resistant to the noise introduced by DP, thereby retaining better performance despite the perturbations. DPAdapter modifies and enhances the sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) technique, utilizing a two-batch strategy to provide a more accurate perturbation estimate and an efficient gradient descent, thereby improving parameter robustness against noise. Notably, DPAdapter can act as a plug-and-play component and be combined with existing DPML algorithms to further improve their performance. Our experiments show that DPAdapter vastly enhances state-of-the-art DPML algorithms, increasing average accuracy from 72.92\% to 77.09\% with a privacy budget of $\epsilon=4$.
Enhancing Weakly Supervised 3D Medical Image Segmentation through Probabilistic-aware Learning
Authors: Runmin Jiang, Zhaoxin Fan, Junhao Wu, Lenghan Zhu, Xin Huang, Tianyang Wang, Heng Huang, Min Xu
Date: 2024-03-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Pseudo Label, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-supervised Learning

3D medical image segmentation is a challenging task with crucial implications for disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Recent advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced fully supervised medical image segmentation. However, this approach heavily relies on labor-intensive and time-consuming fully annotated ground-truth labels, particularly for 3D volumes. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel probabilistic-aware weakly supervised learning pipeline, specifically designed for 3D medical imaging. Our pipeline integrates three innovative components: a Probability-based Pseudo Label Generation technique for synthesizing dense segmentation masks from sparse annotations, a Probabilistic Multi-head Self-Attention network for robust feature extraction within our Probabilistic Transformer Network, and a Probability-informed Segmentation Loss Function to enhance training with annotation confidence. Demonstrating significant advances, our approach not only rivals the performance of fully supervised methods but also surpasses existing weakly supervised methods in CT and MRI datasets, achieving up to 18.1% improvement in Dice scores for certain organs. The code is available at https://github.com/runminjiang/PW4MedSeg.