pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Transforming Dutch: Debiasing Dutch Coreference Resolution Systems for Non-binary Pronouns
Authors: Goya van Boven, Yupei Du, Dong Nguyen
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, counterfactual, Data Augmentation

Gender-neutral pronouns are increasingly being introduced across Western languages. Recent evaluations have however demonstrated that English NLP systems are unable to correctly process gender-neutral pronouns, with the risk of erasing and misgendering non-binary individuals. This paper examines a Dutch coreference resolution system's performance on gender-neutral pronouns, specifically hen and die. In Dutch, these pronouns were only introduced in 2016, compared to the longstanding existence of singular they in English. We additionally compare two debiasing techniques for coreference resolution systems in non-binary contexts: Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) and delexicalisation. Moreover, because pronoun performance can be hard to interpret from a general evaluation metric like LEA, we introduce an innovative evaluation metric, the pronoun score, which directly represents the portion of correctly processed pronouns. Our results reveal diminished performance on gender-neutral pronouns compared to gendered counterparts. Nevertheless, although delexicalisation fails to yield improvements, CDA substantially reduces the performance gap between gendered and gender-neutral pronouns. We further show that CDA remains effective in low-resource settings, in which a limited set of debiasing documents is used. This efficacy extends to previously unseen neopronouns, which are currently infrequently used but may gain popularity in the future, underscoring the viability of effective debiasing with minimal resources and low computational costs.
Training a high-performance retinal foundation model with half-the-data and 400 times less compute
Authors: Justin Engelmann, Miguel O. Bernabeu
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00

Artificial Intelligence in medicine is traditionally limited by the lack of massive training datasets. Foundation models, pre-trained models that can be adapted to downstream tasks with small datasets, could alleviate this problem. Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital (MEH) proposed RETFound-MEH, a retinal foundation model trained on 900,000 images, including private hospital data. Recently, data-efficient DERETFound was proposed providing comparable performance while being trained on only 150,000 publicly available images. However, both these models required very substantial resources to train initially and are resource-intensive in downstream use. We propose a novel Token Reconstruction objective that we use to train RETFound-Green, a retinal foundation model trained using only 75,000 publicly available images and 400 times less compute. We estimate the cost of training RETFound-MEH and DERETFound at \$10,000 and \$14,000, respectively. RETFound-Green could be trained for less than \$100, with equally reduced environmental impact. RETFound-Green is also far more efficient in downstream use: it can be downloaded 14 times faster, computes vector embeddings 2.7 times faster which then require 2.6 times less storage space. Despite this, RETFound-Green does not perform systematically worse. In fact, on various task on three downstream datasets from Brazil, India and China, it performs best on 68 tasks out of 119 comparisons, versus 21 for DERETFound and 13 for RETFound-MEH. Our results suggest that RETFound-Green is a very efficient, high-performance retinal foundation model. We anticipate that our Token Reconstruction objective could be scaled up for even higher performance and be applied to other domains beyond retinal imaging.
Creative Beam Search: LLM-as-a-Judge For Improving Response Generation
Authors: Giorgio Franceschelli, Mirco Musolesi
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

Large language models are revolutionizing several areas, including artificial creativity. However, the process of generation in machines profoundly diverges from that observed in humans. In particular, machine generation is characterized by a lack of intentionality and an underlying creative process. We propose a method called Creative Beam Search that uses Diverse Beam Search and LLM-as-a-Judge to perform response generation and response validation. The results of a qualitative experiment show how our approach can provide better output than standard sampling techniques. We also show that the response validation step is a necessary complement to the response generation step.
Towards trustable SHAP scores
Authors: Olivier Letoffe, Xuanxiang Huang, Joao Marques-Silva
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

SHAP scores represent the proposed use of the well-known Shapley values in eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). Recent work has shown that the exact computation of SHAP scores can produce unsatisfactory results. Concretely, for some ML models, SHAP scores will mislead with respect to relative feature influence. To address these limitations, recently proposed alternatives exploit different axiomatic aggregations, all of which are defined in terms of abductive explanations. However, the proposed axiomatic aggregations are not Shapley values. This paper investigates how SHAP scores can be modified so as to extend axiomatic aggregations to the case of Shapley values in XAI. More importantly, the proposed new definition of SHAP scores avoids all the known cases where unsatisfactory results have been identified. The paper also characterizes the complexity of computing the novel definition of SHAP scores, highlighting families of classifiers for which computing these scores is tractable. Furthermore, the paper proposes modifications to the existing implementations of SHAP scores. These modifications eliminate some of the known limitations of SHAP scores, and have negligible impact in terms of performance.
Bayesian-Guided Generation of Synthetic Microbiomes with Minimized Pathogenicity
Authors: Nisha Pillai, Bindu Nanduri, Michael J Rothrock Jr., Zhiqian Chen, Mahalingam Ramkumar
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Thompson Sampling

Synthetic microbiomes offer new possibilities for modulating microbiota, to address the barriers in multidtug resistance (MDR) research. We present a Bayesian optimization approach to enable efficient searching over the space of synthetic microbiome variants to identify candidates predictive of reduced MDR. Microbiome datasets were encoded into a low-dimensional latent space using autoencoders. Sampling from this space allowed generation of synthetic microbiome signatures. Bayesian optimization was then implemented to select variants for biological screening to maximize identification of designs with restricted MDR pathogens based on minimal samples. Four acquisition functions were evaluated: expected improvement, upper confidence bound, Thompson sampling, and probability of improvement. Based on each strategy, synthetic samples were prioritized according to their MDR detection. Expected improvement, upper confidence bound, and probability of improvement consistently produced synthetic microbiome candidates with significantly fewer searches than Thompson sampling. By combining deep latent space mapping and Bayesian learning for efficient guided screening, this study demonstrated the feasibility of creating bespoke synthetic microbiomes with customized MDR profiles.
Spectrally Pruned Gaussian Fields with Neural Compensation
Authors: Runyi Yang, Zhenxin Zhu, Zhou Jiang, Baijun Ye, Xiaoxue Chen, Yifei Zhang, Yuantao Chen, Jian Zhao, Hao Zhao
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Recently, 3D Gaussian Splatting, as a novel 3D representation, has garnered attention for its fast rendering speed and high rendering quality. However, this comes with high memory consumption, e.g., a well-trained Gaussian field may utilize three million Gaussian primitives and over 700 MB of memory. We credit this high memory footprint to the lack of consideration for the relationship between primitives. In this paper, we propose a memory-efficient Gaussian field named SUNDAE with spectral pruning and neural compensation. On one hand, we construct a graph on the set of Gaussian primitives to model their relationship and design a spectral down-sampling module to prune out primitives while preserving desired signals. On the other hand, to compensate for the quality loss of pruning Gaussians, we exploit a lightweight neural network head to mix splatted features, which effectively compensates for quality losses while capturing the relationship between primitives in its weights. We demonstrate the performance of SUNDAE with extensive results. For example, SUNDAE can achieve 26.80 PSNR at 145 FPS using 104 MB memory while the vanilla Gaussian splatting algorithm achieves 25.60 PSNR at 160 FPS using 523 MB memory, on the Mip-NeRF360 dataset. Codes are publicly available at https://runyiyang.github.io/projects/SUNDAE/.
TexSliders: Diffusion-Based Texture Editing in CLIP Space
Authors: Julia Guerrero-Viu, Milos Hasan, Arthur Roullier, Midhun Harikumar, Yiwei Hu, Paul Guerrero, Diego Gutierrez, Belen Masia, Valentin Deschaintre
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Generative models have enabled intuitive image creation and manipulation using natural language. In particular, diffusion models have recently shown remarkable results for natural image editing. In this work, we propose to apply diffusion techniques to edit textures, a specific class of images that are an essential part of 3D content creation pipelines. We analyze existing editing methods and show that they are not directly applicable to textures, since their common underlying approach, manipulating attention maps, is unsuitable for the texture domain. To address this, we propose a novel approach that instead manipulates CLIP image embeddings to condition the diffusion generation. We define editing directions using simple text prompts (e.g., "aged wood" to "new wood") and map these to CLIP image embedding space using a texture prior, with a sampling-based approach that gives us identity-preserving directions in CLIP space. To further improve identity preservation, we project these directions to a CLIP subspace that minimizes identity variations resulting from entangled texture attributes. Our editing pipeline facilitates the creation of arbitrary sliders using natural language prompts only, with no ground-truth annotated data necessary.
Adapting Pretrained Networks for Image Quality Assessment on High Dynamic Range Displays
Authors: Andrei Chubarau, Hyunjin Yoo, Tara Akhavan, James Clark
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Image Quality Assessment, SSIM

Conventional image quality metrics (IQMs), such as PSNR and SSIM, are designed for perceptually uniform gamma-encoded pixel values and cannot be directly applied to perceptually non-uniform linear high-dynamic-range (HDR) colors. Similarly, most of the available datasets consist of standard-dynamic-range (SDR) images collected in standard and possibly uncontrolled viewing conditions. Popular pre-trained neural networks are likewise intended for SDR inputs, restricting their direct application to HDR content. On the other hand, training HDR models from scratch is challenging due to limited available HDR data. In this work, we explore more effective approaches for training deep learning-based models for image quality assessment (IQA) on HDR data. We leverage networks pre-trained on SDR data (source domain) and re-target these models to HDR (target domain) with additional fine-tuning and domain adaptation. We validate our methods on the available HDR IQA datasets, demonstrating that models trained with our combined recipe outperform previous baselines, converge much quicker, and reliably generalize to HDR inputs.
RGB$\leftrightarrow$X: Image decomposition and synthesis using material- and lighting-aware diffusion models
Authors: Zheng Zeng, Valentin Deschaintre, Iliyan Georgiev, Yannick Hold-Geoffroy, Yiwei Hu, Fujun Luan, Ling-Qi Yan, Miloš Hašan
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Inverse Rendering

The three areas of realistic forward rendering, per-pixel inverse rendering, and generative image synthesis may seem like separate and unrelated sub-fields of graphics and vision. However, recent work has demonstrated improved estimation of per-pixel intrinsic channels (albedo, roughness, metallicity) based on a diffusion architecture; we call this the RGB$\rightarrow$X problem. We further show that the reverse problem of synthesizing realistic images given intrinsic channels, X$\rightarrow$RGB, can also be addressed in a diffusion framework. Focusing on the image domain of interior scenes, we introduce an improved diffusion model for RGB$\rightarrow$X, which also estimates lighting, as well as the first diffusion X$\rightarrow$RGB model capable of synthesizing realistic images from (full or partial) intrinsic channels. Our X$\rightarrow$RGB model explores a middle ground between traditional rendering and generative models: we can specify only certain appearance properties that should be followed, and give freedom to the model to hallucinate a plausible version of the rest. This flexibility makes it possible to use a mix of heterogeneous training datasets, which differ in the available channels. We use multiple existing datasets and extend them with our own synthetic and real data, resulting in a model capable of extracting scene properties better than previous work and of generating highly realistic images of interior scenes.
Grains of Saliency: Optimizing Saliency-based Training of Biometric Attack Detection Models
Authors: Colton R. Crum, Samuel Webster, Adam Czajka
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Detection

Incorporating human-perceptual intelligence into model training has shown to increase the generalization capability of models in several difficult biometric tasks, such as presentation attack detection (PAD) and detection of synthetic samples. After the initial collection phase, human visual saliency (e.g., eye-tracking data, or handwritten annotations) can be integrated into model training through attention mechanisms, augmented training samples, or through human perception-related components of loss functions. Despite their successes, a vital, but seemingly neglected, aspect of any saliency-based training is the level of salience granularity (e.g., bounding boxes, single saliency maps, or saliency aggregated from multiple subjects) necessary to find a balance between reaping the full benefits of human saliency and the cost of its collection. In this paper, we explore several different levels of salience granularity and demonstrate that increased generalization capabilities of PAD and synthetic face detection can be achieved by using simple yet effective saliency post-processing techniques across several different CNNs.
Learning to Compose: Improving Object Centric Learning by Injecting Compositionality
Authors: Whie Jung, Jaehoon Yoo, Sungjin Ahn, Seunghoon Hong
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Systematic Generalization, valid, Visual Reasoning

Learning compositional representation is a key aspect of object-centric learning as it enables flexible systematic generalization and supports complex visual reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches rely on auto-encoding objective, while the compositionality is implicitly imposed by the architectural or algorithmic bias in the encoder. This misalignment between auto-encoding objective and learning compositionality often results in failure of capturing meaningful object representations. In this study, we propose a novel objective that explicitly encourages compositionality of the representations. Built upon the existing object-centric learning framework (e.g., slot attention), our method incorporates additional constraints that an arbitrary mixture of object representations from two images should be valid by maximizing the likelihood of the composite data. We demonstrate that incorporating our objective to the existing framework consistently improves the objective-centric learning and enhances the robustness to the architectural choices.
Deep Metric Learning-Based Out-of-Distribution Detection with Synthetic Outlier Exposure
Authors: Assefa Seyoum Wahd
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Metric Learning, Out-of-Distribution Detection, Out of Distribution (OOD) Detection, Synthetic Data Generation

In this paper, we present a novel approach that combines deep metric learning and synthetic data generation using diffusion models for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. One popular approach for OOD detection is outlier exposure, where models are trained using a mixture of in-distribution (ID) samples and ``seen" OOD samples. For the OOD samples, the model is trained to minimize the KL divergence between the output probability and the uniform distribution while correctly classifying the in-distribution (ID) data. In this paper, we propose a label-mixup approach to generate synthetic OOD data using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). Additionally, we explore recent advancements in metric learning to train our models. In the experiments, we found that metric learning-based loss functions perform better than the softmax. Furthermore, the baseline models (including softmax, and metric learning) show a significant improvement when trained with the generated OOD data. Our approach outperforms strong baselines in conventional OOD detection metrics.
Depth Priors in Removal Neural Radiance Fields
Authors: Zhihao Guo, Peng Wang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, NeRF, Object, Scene Generation

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have achieved impressive results in 3D reconstruction and novel view generation. A significant challenge within NeRF involves editing reconstructed 3D scenes, such as object removal, which demands consistency across multiple views and the synthesis of high-quality perspectives. Previous studies have integrated depth priors, typically sourced from LiDAR or sparse depth estimates from COLMAP, to enhance NeRF's performance in object removal. However, these methods are either expensive or time-consuming. This paper proposes a new pipeline that leverages SpinNeRF and monocular depth estimation models like ZoeDepth to enhance NeRF's performance in complex object removal with improved efficiency. A thorough evaluation of COLMAP's dense depth reconstruction on the KITTI dataset is conducted to demonstrate that COLMAP can be viewed as a cost-effective and scalable alternative for acquiring depth ground truth compared to traditional methods like LiDAR. This serves as the basis for evaluating the performance of monocular depth estimation models to determine the best one for generating depth priors for SpinNeRF. The new pipeline is tested in various scenarios involving 3D reconstruction and object removal, and the results indicate that our pipeline significantly reduces the time required for the acquisition of depth priors for object removal and enhances the fidelity of the synthesized views, suggesting substantial potential for building high-fidelity digital twin systems with increased efficiency in the future.
Lane Segmentation Refinement with Diffusion Models
Authors: Antonio Ruiz, Andrew Melnik, Dong Wang, Helge Ritter
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Segmentation

The lane graph is a key component for building high-definition (HD) maps and crucial for downstream tasks such as autonomous driving or navigation planning. Previously, He et al. (2022) explored the extraction of the lane-level graph from aerial imagery utilizing a segmentation based approach. However, segmentation networks struggle to achieve perfect segmentation masks resulting in inaccurate lane graph extraction. We explore additional enhancements to refine this segmentation-based approach and extend it with a diffusion probabilistic model (DPM) component. This combination further improves the GEO F1 and TOPO F1 scores, which are crucial indicators of the quality of a lane graph, in the undirected graph in non-intersection areas. We conduct experiments on a publicly available dataset, demonstrating that our method outperforms the previous approach, particularly in enhancing the connectivity of such a graph, as measured by the TOPO F1 score. Moreover, we perform ablation studies on the individual components of our method to understand their contribution and evaluate their effectiveness.
Toward Unified Practices in Trajectory Prediction Research on Bird's-Eye-View Datasets
Authors: Theodor Westny, Björn Olofsson, Erik Frisk
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Motion Forecasting, Trajectory Prediction

The availability of high-quality datasets is crucial for the development of behavior prediction algorithms in autonomous vehicles. This paper highlights the need to standardize the use of certain datasets for motion forecasting research to simplify comparative analysis and proposes a set of tools and practices to achieve this. Drawing on extensive experience and a comprehensive review of current literature, we summarize our proposals for preprocessing, visualization, and evaluation in the form of an open-sourced toolbox designed for researchers working on trajectory prediction problems. The clear specification of necessary preprocessing steps and evaluation metrics is intended to alleviate development efforts and facilitate the comparison of results across different studies. The toolbox is available at: https://github.com/westny/dronalize.
GraCo: Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation
Authors: Yian Zhao, Kehan Li, Zesen Cheng, Pengchong Qiao, Xiawu Zheng, Rongrong Ji, Chang Liu, Li Yuan, Jie Chen
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Interactive Segmentation, Segmentation

Interactive Segmentation (IS) segments specific objects or parts in the image according to user input. Current IS pipelines fall into two categories: single-granularity output and multi-granularity output. The latter aims to alleviate the spatial ambiguity present in the former. However, the multi-granularity output pipeline suffers from limited interaction flexibility and produces redundant results. In this work, we introduce Granularity-Controllable Interactive Segmentation (GraCo), a novel approach that allows precise control of prediction granularity by introducing additional parameters to input. This enhances the customization of the interactive system and eliminates redundancy while resolving ambiguity. Nevertheless, the exorbitant cost of annotating multi-granularity masks and the lack of available datasets with granularity annotations make it difficult for models to acquire the necessary guidance to control output granularity. To address this problem, we design an any-granularity mask generator that exploits the semantic property of the pre-trained IS model to automatically generate abundant mask-granularity pairs without requiring additional manual annotation. Based on these pairs, we propose a granularity-controllable learning strategy that efficiently imparts the granularity controllability to the IS model. Extensive experiments on intricate scenarios at object and part levels demonstrate that our GraCo has significant advantages over previous methods. This highlights the potential of GraCo to be a flexible annotation tool, capable of adapting to diverse segmentation scenarios. The project page: https://zhao-yian.github.io/GraCo.