CIMGEN: Controlled Image Manipulation by Finetuning Pretrained Generative Models on Limited Data

Content creation and image editing can benefit from flexible user controls. A common intermediate representation for conditional image generation is a semantic map, that has information of objects present in the image. When compared to raw RGB pixels, the modification of semantic map is much easier. One can take a semantic map and easily modify the map to selectively insert, remove, or replace objects in the map. The method proposed in this paper takes in the modified semantic map and alter the original image in accordance to the modified map. The method leverages traditional pre-trained image-to-image translation GANs, such as CycleGAN or Pix2Pix GAN, that are fine-tuned on a limited dataset of reference images associated with the semantic maps. We discuss the qualitative and quantitative performance of our technique to illustrate its capacity and possible applications in the fields of image forgery and image editing. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed image forgery technique in thwarting the numerous deep learning-based image forensic techniques, highlighting the urgent need to develop robust and generalizable image forensic tools in the fight against the spread of fake media.

BLoad: Enhancing Neural Network Training with Efficient Sequential Data Handling

The increasing complexity of modern deep neural network models and the expanding sizes of datasets necessitate the development of optimized and scalable training methods. In this white paper, we addressed the challenge of efficiently training neural network models using sequences of varying sizes. To address this challenge, we propose a novel training scheme that enables efficient distributed data-parallel training on sequences of different sizes with minimal overhead. By using this scheme we were able to reduce the padding amount by more than 100$x$ while not deleting a single frame, resulting in an overall increased performance on both training time and Recall in our experiments.

Q-RBSA: High-Resolution 3D EBSD Map Generation Using An Efficient Quaternion Transformer Network

Gathering 3D material microstructural information is time-consuming, expensive, and energy-intensive. Acquisition of 3D data has been accelerated by developments in serial sectioning instrument capabilities; however, for crystallographic information, the electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) imaging modality remains rate limiting. We propose a physics-based efficient deep learning framework to reduce the time and cost of collecting 3D EBSD maps. Our framework uses a quaternion residual block self-attention network (QRBSA) to generate high-resolution 3D EBSD maps from sparsely sectioned EBSD maps. In QRBSA, quaternion-valued convolution effectively learns local relations in orientation space, while self-attention in the quaternion domain captures long-range correlations. We apply our framework to 3D data collected from commercially relevant titanium alloys, showing both qualitatively and quantitatively that our method can predict missing samples (EBSD information between sparsely sectioned mapping points) as compared to high-resolution ground truth 3D EBSD maps.

DDS: Decoupled Dynamic Scene-Graph Generation Network

Scene-graph generation involves creating a structural representation of the relationships between objects in a scene by predicting subject-object-relation triplets from input data. However, existing methods show poor performance in detecting triplets outside of a predefined set, primarily due to their reliance on dependent feature learning. To address this issue we propose DDS -- a decoupled dynamic scene-graph generation network -- that consists of two independent branches that can disentangle extracted features. The key innovation of the current paper is the decoupling of the features representing the relationships from those of the objects, which enables the detection of novel object-relationship combinations. The DDS model is evaluated on three datasets and outperforms previous methods by a significant margin, especially in detecting previously unseen triplets.

3D Neuron Morphology Analysis

We consider the problem of finding an accurate representation of neuron shapes, extracting sub-cellular features, and classifying neurons based on neuron shapes. In neuroscience research, the skeleton representation is often used as a compact and abstract representation of neuron shapes. However, existing methods are limited to getting and analyzing "curve" skeletons which can only be applied for tubular shapes. This paper presents a 3D neuron morphology analysis method for more general and complex neuron shapes. First, we introduce the concept of skeleton mesh to represent general neuron shapes and propose a novel method for computing mesh representations from 3D surface point clouds. A skeleton graph is then obtained from skeleton mesh and is used to extract sub-cellular features. Finally, an unsupervised learning method is used to embed the skeleton graph for neuron classification. Extensive experiment results are provided and demonstrate the robustness of our method to analyze neuron morphology.

Generalizable Deepfake Detection with Phase-Based Motion Analysis

We propose PhaseForensics, a DeepFake (DF) video detection method that leverages a phase-based motion representation of facial temporal dynamics. Existing methods relying on temporal inconsistencies for DF detection present many advantages over the typical frame-based methods. However, they still show limited cross-dataset generalization and robustness to common distortions. These shortcomings are partially due to error-prone motion estimation and landmark tracking, or the susceptibility of the pixel intensity-based features to spatial distortions and the cross-dataset domain shifts. Our key insight to overcome these issues is to leverage the temporal phase variations in the band-pass components of the Complex Steerable Pyramid on face sub-regions. This not only enables a robust estimate of the temporal dynamics in these regions, but is also less prone to cross-dataset variations. Furthermore, the band-pass filters used to compute the local per-frame phase form an effective defense against the perturbations commonly seen in gradient-based adversarial attacks. Overall, with PhaseForensics, we show improved distortion and adversarial robustness, and state-of-the-art cross-dataset generalization, with 91.2% video-level AUC on the challenging CelebDFv2 (a recent state-of-the-art compares at 86.9%).

Context-Matched Collage Generation for Underwater Invertebrate Detection

The quality and size of training sets often limit the performance of many state of the art object detectors. However, in many scenarios, it can be difficult to collect images for training, not to mention the costs associated with collecting annotations suitable for training these object detectors. For these reasons, on challenging video datasets such as the Dataset for Underwater Substrate and Invertebrate Analysis (DUSIA), budgets may only allow for collecting and providing partial annotations. To aid in the challenges associated with training with limited and partial annotations, we introduce Context Matched Collages, which leverage explicit context labels to combine unused background examples with existing annotated data to synthesize additional training samples that ultimately improve object detection performance. By combining a set of our generated collage images with the original training set, we see improved performance using three different object detectors on DUSIA, ultimately achieving state of the art object detection performance on the dataset.

MalGrid: Visualization Of Binary Features In Large Malware Corpora

The number of malware is constantly on the rise. Though most new malware are modifications of existing ones, their sheer number is quite overwhelming. In this paper, we present a novel system to visualize and map millions of malware to points in a 2-dimensional (2D) spatial grid. This enables visualizing relationships within large malware datasets that can be used to develop triage solutions to screen different malware rapidly and provide situational awareness. Our approach links two visualizations within an interactive display. Our first view is a spatial point-based visualization of similarity among the samples based on a reduced dimensional projection of binary feature representations of malware. Our second spatial grid-based view provides a better insight into similarities and differences between selected malware samples in terms of the binary-based visual representations they share. We also provide a case study where the effect of packing on the malware data is correlated with the complexity of the packing algorithm.

LOCL: Learning Object-Attribute Composition using Localization

This paper describes LOCL (Learning Object Attribute Composition using Localization) that generalizes composition zero shot learning to objects in cluttered and more realistic settings. The problem of unseen Object Attribute (OA) associations has been well studied in the field, however, the performance of existing methods is limited in challenging scenes. In this context, our key contribution is a modular approach to localizing objects and attributes of interest in a weakly supervised context that generalizes robustly to unseen configurations. Localization coupled with a composition classifier significantly outperforms state of the art (SOTA) methods, with an improvement of about 12% on currently available challenging datasets. Further, the modularity enables the use of localized feature extractor to be used with existing OA compositional learning methods to improve their overall performance.

Deep Learning Enabled Time-Lapse 3D Cell Analysis

This paper presents a method for time-lapse 3D cell analysis. Specifically, we consider the problem of accurately localizing and quantitatively analyzing sub-cellular features, and for tracking individual cells from time-lapse 3D confocal cell image stacks. The heterogeneity of cells and the volume of multi-dimensional images presents a major challenge for fully automated analysis of morphogenesis and development of cells. This paper is motivated by the pavement cell growth process, and building a quantitative morphogenesis model. We propose a deep feature based segmentation method to accurately detect and label each cell region. An adjacency graph based method is used to extract sub-cellular features of the segmented cells. Finally, the robust graph based tracking algorithm using multiple cell features is proposed for associating cells at different time instances. Extensive experiment results are provided and demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method. The code is available on Github and the method is available as a service through the BisQue portal.