Learning Unified Reference Representation for Unsupervised Multi-class Anomaly Detection

In the field of multi-class anomaly detection, reconstruction-based methods derived from single-class anomaly detection face the well-known challenge of ``learning shortcuts'', wherein the model fails to learn the patterns of normal samples as it should, opting instead for shortcuts such as identity mapping or artificial noise elimination. Consequently, the model becomes unable to reconstruct genuine anomalies as normal instances, resulting in a failure of anomaly detection. To counter this issue, we present a novel unified feature reconstruction-based anomaly detection framework termed RLR (Reconstruct features from a Learnable Reference representation). Unlike previous methods, RLR utilizes learnable reference representations to compel the model to learn normal feature patterns explicitly, thereby prevents the model from succumbing to the ``learning shortcuts'' issue. Additionally, RLR incorporates locality constraints into the learnable reference to facilitate more effective normal pattern capture and utilizes a masked learnable key attention mechanism to enhance robustness. Evaluation of RLR on the 15-category MVTec-AD dataset and the 12-category VisA dataset shows superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods under the unified setting. The code of RLR will be publicly available.

ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Models

The integration of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with robotic systems has significantly enhanced the ability of robots to interpret and act upon natural language instructions. Despite these advancements, conventional MLLMs are typically trained on generic image-text pairs, lacking essential robotics knowledge such as affordances and physical knowledge, which hampers their efficacy in manipulation tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce ManipVQA, a novel framework designed to endow MLLMs with Manipulation-centric knowledge through a Visual Question-Answering format. This approach not only encompasses tool detection and affordance recognition but also extends to a comprehensive understanding of physical concepts. Our approach starts with collecting a varied set of images displaying interactive objects, which presents a broad range of challenges in tool object detection, affordance, and physical concept predictions. To seamlessly integrate this robotic-specific knowledge with the inherent vision-reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, we adopt a unified VQA format and devise a fine-tuning strategy that preserves the original vision-reasoning abilities while incorporating the new robotic insights. Empirical evaluations conducted in robotic simulators and across various vision task benchmarks demonstrate the robust performance of ManipVQA. Code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/SiyuanHuang95/ManipVQA.

PointSeg: A Training-Free Paradigm for 3D Scene Segmentation via Foundation Models

Recent success of vision foundation models have shown promising performance for the 2D perception tasks. However, it is difficult to train a 3D foundation network directly due to the limited dataset and it remains under explored whether existing foundation models can be lifted to 3D space seamlessly. In this paper, we present PointSeg, a novel training-free paradigm that leverages off-the-shelf vision foundation models to address 3D scene perception tasks. PointSeg can segment anything in 3D scene by acquiring accurate 3D prompts to align their corresponding pixels across frames. Concretely, we design a two-branch prompts learning structure to construct the 3D point-box prompts pairs, combining with the bidirectional matching strategy for accurate point and proposal prompts generation. Then, we perform the iterative post-refinement adaptively when cooperated with different vision foundation models. Moreover, we design a affinity-aware merging algorithm to improve the final ensemble masks. PointSeg demonstrates impressive segmentation performance across various datasets, all without training. Specifically, our approach significantly surpasses the state-of-the-art specialist model by 13.4$\%$, 11.3$\%$, and 12$\%$ mAP on ScanNet, ScanNet++, and KITTI-360 datasets, respectively. On top of that, PointSeg can incorporate with various segmentation models and even surpasses the supervised methods.

DiffuMatting: Synthesizing Arbitrary Objects with Matting-level Annotation

Due to the difficulty and labor-consuming nature of getting highly accurate or matting annotations, there only exists a limited amount of highly accurate labels available to the public. To tackle this challenge, we propose a DiffuMatting which inherits the strong Everything generation ability of diffusion and endows the power of "matting anything". Our DiffuMatting can 1). act as an anything matting factory with high accurate annotations 2). be well-compatible with community LoRAs or various conditional control approaches to achieve the community-friendly art design and controllable generation. Specifically, inspired by green-screen-matting, we aim to teach the diffusion model to paint on a fixed green screen canvas. To this end, a large-scale greenscreen dataset (Green100K) is collected as a training dataset for DiffuMatting. Secondly, a green background control loss is proposed to keep the drawing board as a pure green color to distinguish the foreground and background. To ensure the synthesized object has more edge details, a detailed-enhancement of transition boundary loss is proposed as a guideline to generate objects with more complicated edge structures. Aiming to simultaneously generate the object and its matting annotation, we build a matting head to make a green color removal in the latent space of the VAE decoder. Our DiffuMatting shows several potential applications (e.g., matting-data generator, community-friendly art design and controllable generation). As a matting-data generator, DiffuMatting synthesizes general object and portrait matting sets, effectively reducing the relative MSE error by 15.4% in General Object Matting and 11.4% in Portrait Matting tasks.

Joint-Individual Fusion Structure with Fusion Attention Module for Multi-Modal Skin Cancer Classification

Most convolutional neural network (CNN) based methods for skin cancer classification obtain their results using only dermatological images. Although good classification results have been shown, more accurate results can be achieved by considering the patient's metadata, which is valuable clinical information for dermatologists. Current methods only use the simple joint fusion structure (FS) and fusion modules (FMs) for the multi-modal classification methods, there still is room to increase the accuracy by exploring more advanced FS and FM. Therefore, in this paper, we design a new fusion method that combines dermatological images (dermoscopy images or clinical images) and patient metadata for skin cancer classification from the perspectives of FS and FM. First, we propose a joint-individual fusion (JIF) structure that learns the shared features of multi-modality data and preserves specific features simultaneously. Second, we introduce a fusion attention (FA) module that enhances the most relevant image and metadata features based on both the self and mutual attention mechanism to support the decision-making pipeline. We compare the proposed JIF-MMFA method with other state-of-the-art fusion methods on three different public datasets. The results show that our JIF-MMFA method improves the classification results for all tested CNN backbones and performs better than the other fusion methods on the three public datasets, demonstrating our method's effectiveness and robustness

SR-R$^2$KAC: Improving Single Image Defocus Deblurring

We propose an efficient deep learning method for single image defocus deblurring (SIDD) by further exploring inverse kernel properties. Although the current inverse kernel method, i.e., kernel-sharing parallel atrous convolution (KPAC), can address spatially varying defocus blurs, it has difficulty in handling large blurs of this kind. To tackle this issue, we propose a Residual and Recursive Kernel-sharing Atrous Convolution (R$^2$KAC). R$^2$KAC builds on a significant observation of inverse kernels, that is, successive use of inverse-kernel-based deconvolutions with fixed size helps remove unexpected large blurs but produces ringing artifacts. Specifically, on top of kernel-sharing atrous convolutions used to simulate multi-scale inverse kernels, R$^2$KAC applies atrous convolutions recursively to simulate a large inverse kernel. Specifically, on top of kernel-sharing atrous convolutions, R$^2$KAC stacks atrous convolutions recursively to simulate a large inverse kernel. To further alleviate the contingent effect of recursive stacking, i.e., ringing artifacts, we add identity shortcuts between atrous convolutions to simulate residual deconvolutions. Lastly, a scale recurrent module is embedded in the R$^2$KAC network, leading to SR-R$^2$KAC, so that multi-scale information from coarse to fine is exploited to progressively remove the spatially varying defocus blurs. Extensive experimental results show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Application of the nnU-Net for automatic segmentation of lung lesion on CT images, and implication on radiomic models

Lesion segmentation is a crucial step of the radiomic workflow. Manual segmentation requires long execution time and is prone to variability, impairing the realisation of radiomic studies and their robustness. In this study, a deep-learning automatic segmentation method was applied on computed tomography images of non-small-cell lung cancer patients. The use of manual vs automatic segmentation in the performance of survival radiomic models was assessed, as well. METHODS A total of 899 NSCLC patients were included (2 proprietary: A and B, 1 public datasets: C). Automatic segmentation of lung lesions was performed by training a previously developed architecture, the nnU-Net, including 2D, 3D and cascade approaches. The quality of automatic segmentation was evaluated with DICE coefficient, considering manual contours as reference. The impact of automatic segmentation on the performance of a radiomic model for patient survival was explored by extracting radiomic hand-crafted and deep-learning features from manual and automatic contours of dataset A, and feeding different machine learning algorithms to classify survival above/below median. Models' accuracies were assessed and compared. RESULTS The best agreement between automatic and manual contours with DICE=0.78 +(0.12) was achieved by averaging predictions from 2D and 3D models, and applying a post-processing technique to extract the maximum connected component. No statistical differences were observed in the performances of survival models when using manual or automatic contours, hand-crafted, or deep features. The best classifier showed an accuracy between 0.65 and 0.78. CONCLUSION The promising role of nnU-Net for automatic segmentation of lung lesions was confirmed, dramatically reducing the time-consuming physicians' workload without impairing the accuracy of survival predictive models based on radiomics.

High-resolution Iterative Feedback Network for Camouflaged Object Detection

Spotting camouflaged objects that are visually assimilated into the background is tricky for both object detection algorithms and humans who are usually confused or cheated by the perfectly intrinsic similarities between the foreground objects and the background surroundings. To tackle this challenge, we aim to extract the high-resolution texture details to avoid the detail degradation that causes blurred vision in edges and boundaries. We introduce a novel HitNet to refine the low-resolution representations by high-resolution features in an iterative feedback manner, essentially a global loop-based connection among the multi-scale resolutions. In addition, an iterative feedback loss is proposed to impose more constraints on each feedback connection. Extensive experiments on four challenging datasets demonstrate that our \ourmodel~breaks the performance bottleneck and achieves significant improvements compared with 29 state-of-the-art methods. To address the data scarcity in camouflaged scenarios, we provide an application example by employing cross-domain learning to extract the features that can reflect the camouflaged object properties and embed the features into salient objects, thereby generating more camouflaged training samples from the diverse salient object datasets The code will be available at https://github.com/HUuxiaobin/HitNet.

Highly Accurate Dichotomous Image Segmentation

We present a systematic study on a new task called dichotomous image segmentation (DIS), which aims to segment highly accurate objects from natural images. To this end, we collected the first large-scale dataset, called DIS5K, which contains 5,470 high-resolution (e.g., 2K, 4K or larger) images covering camouflaged, salient, or meticulous objects in various backgrounds. All images are annotated with extremely fine-grained labels. In addition, we introduce a simple intermediate supervision baseline (IS-Net) using both feature-level and mask-level guidance for DIS model training. Without tricks, IS-Net outperforms various cutting-edge baselines on the proposed DIS5K, making it a general self-learned supervision network that can help facilitate future research in DIS. Further, we design a new metric called human correction efforts (HCE) which approximates the number of mouse clicking operations required to correct the false positives and false negatives. HCE is utilized to measure the gap between models and real-world applications and thus can complement existing metrics. Finally, we conduct the largest-scale benchmark, evaluating 16 representative segmentation models, providing a more insightful discussion regarding object complexities, and showing several potential applications (e.g., background removal, art design, 3D reconstruction). Hoping these efforts can open up promising directions for both academic and industries. We will release our DIS5K dataset, IS-Net baseline, HCE metric, and the complete benchmark results.

Multi-Texture GAN: Exploring the Multi-Scale Texture Translation for Brain MR Images

Inter-scanner and inter-protocol discrepancy in MRI datasets are known to lead to significant quantification variability. Hence image-to-image or scanner-to-scanner translation is a crucial frontier in the area of medical image analysis with a lot of potential applications. Nonetheless, a significant percentage of existing algorithms cannot explicitly exploit and preserve texture details from target scanners and offers individual solutions towards specialized task-specific architectures. In this paper, we design a multi-scale texture transfer to enrich the reconstruction images with more details. Specifically, after calculating textural similarity, the multi-scale texture can adaptively transfer the texture information from target images or reference images to restored images. Different from the pixel-wise matching space as done by previous algorithms, we match texture features in a multi-scale scheme implemented in the neural space. The matching mechanism can exploit multi-scale neural transfer that encourages the model to grasp more semantic-related and lesion-related priors from the target or reference images. We evaluate our multi-scale texture GAN on three different tasks without any task-specific modifications: cross-protocol super-resolution of diffusion MRI, T1-Flair, and Flair-T2 modality translation. Our multi-texture GAN rehabilitates more high-resolution structures (i.e., edges and anatomy), texture (i.e., contrast and pixel intensities), and lesion information (i.e., tumor). The extensively quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior results in inter-protocol or inter-scanner translation over state-of-the-art methods.