A Literature Review of Literature Reviews in Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

By consolidating scattered knowledge, the literature review provides a comprehensive understanding of the investigated topic. However, excessive reviews, especially in the booming field of pattern analysis and machine intelligence (PAMI), raise concerns for both researchers and reviewers. In response to these concerns, this Analysis aims to provide a thorough review of reviews in the PAMI field from diverse perspectives. First, large language model-empowered bibliometric indicators are proposed to evaluate literature reviews automatically. To facilitate this, a meta-data database dubbed RiPAMI, and a topic dataset are constructed, which are utilized to obtain statistical characteristics of PAMI reviews. Unlike traditional bibliometric measurements, the proposed article-level indicators provide real-time and field-normalized quantified assessments of reviews without relying on user-defined keywords. Second, based on these indicators, the study presents comparative analyses of different reviews, unveiling the characteristics of publications across various fields, periods, and journals. The newly emerging AI-generated literature reviews are also appraised, and the observed differences suggest that most AI-generated reviews still lag behind human-authored reviews in several aspects. Third, we briefly provide a subjective evaluation of representative PAMI reviews and introduce a paper structure-based typology of literature reviews. This typology may improve the clarity and effectiveness for scholars in reading and writing reviews, while also serving as a guide for AI systems in generating well-organized reviews. Finally, this Analysis offers insights into the current challenges of literature reviews and envisions future directions for their development.

Is Synthetic Data From Diffusion Models Ready for Knowledge Distillation?

Diffusion models have recently achieved astonishing performance in generating high-fidelity photo-realistic images. Given their huge success, it is still unclear whether synthetic images are applicable for knowledge distillation when real images are unavailable. In this paper, we extensively study whether and how synthetic images produced from state-of-the-art diffusion models can be used for knowledge distillation without access to real images, and obtain three key conclusions: (1) synthetic data from diffusion models can easily lead to state-of-the-art performance among existing synthesis-based distillation methods, (2) low-fidelity synthetic images are better teaching materials, and (3) relatively weak classifiers are better teachers. Code is available at https://github.com/zhengli97/DM-KD.

Accurate Fine-grained Layout Analysis for the Historical Tibetan Document Based on the Instance Segmentation

Accurate layout analysis without subsequent text-line segmentation remains an ongoing challenge, especially when facing the Kangyur, a kind of historical Tibetan document featuring considerable touching components and mottled background. Aiming at identifying different regions in document images, layout analysis is indispensable for subsequent procedures such as character recognition. However, there was only a little research being carried out to perform line-level layout analysis which failed to deal with the Kangyur. To obtain the optimal results, a fine-grained sub-line level layout analysis approach is presented. Firstly, we introduced an accelerated method to build the dataset which is dynamic and reliable. Secondly, enhancement had been made to the SOLOv2 according to the characteristics of the Kangyur. Then, we fed the enhanced SOLOv2 with the prepared annotation file during the training phase. Once the network is trained, instances of the text line, sentence, and titles can be segmented and identified during the inference stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method delivers a decent 72.7% AP on our dataset. In general, this preliminary research provides insights into the fine-grained sub-line level layout analysis and testifies the SOLOv2-based approaches. We also believe that the proposed methods can be adopted on other language documents with various layouts.