Zero-Shot Text-to-Parameter Translation for Game Character Auto-Creation

Recent popular Role-Playing Games (RPGs) saw the great success of character auto-creation systems. The bone-driven face model controlled by continuous parameters (like the position of bones) and discrete parameters (like the hairstyles) makes it possible for users to personalize and customize in-game characters. Previous in-game character auto-creation systems are mostly image-driven, where facial parameters are optimized so that the rendered character looks similar to the reference face photo. This paper proposes a novel text-to-parameter translation method (T2P) to achieve zero-shot text-driven game character auto-creation. With our method, users can create a vivid in-game character with arbitrary text description without using any reference photo or editing hundreds of parameters manually. In our method, taking the power of large-scale pre-trained multi-modal CLIP and neural rendering, T2P searches both continuous facial parameters and discrete facial parameters in a unified framework. Due to the discontinuous parameter representation, previous methods have difficulty in effectively learning discrete facial parameters. T2P, to our best knowledge, is the first method that can handle the optimization of both discrete and continuous parameters. Experimental results show that T2P can generate high-quality and vivid game characters with given text prompts. T2P outperforms other SOTA text-to-3D generation methods on both objective evaluations and subjective evaluations.

Progressive Scale-aware Network for Remote sensing Image Change Captioning

Remote sensing (RS) images contain numerous objects of different scales, which poses significant challenges for the RS image change captioning (RSICC) task to identify visual changes of interest in complex scenes and describe them via language. However, current methods still have some weaknesses in sufficiently extracting and utilizing multi-scale information. In this paper, we propose a progressive scale-aware network (PSNet) to address the problem. PSNet is a pure Transformer-based model. To sufficiently extract multi-scale visual features, multiple progressive difference perception (PDP) layers are stacked to progressively exploit the differencing features of bitemporal features. To sufficiently utilize the extracted multi-scale features for captioning, we propose a scale-aware reinforcement (SR) module and combine it with the Transformer decoding layer to progressively utilize the features from different PDP layers. Experiments show that the PDP layer and SR module are effective and our PSNet outperforms previous methods.

FedDBL: Communication and Data Efficient Federated Deep-Broad Learning for Histopathological Tissue Classification

Histopathological tissue classification is a fundamental task in computational pathology. Deep learning-based models have achieved superior performance but centralized training with data centralization suffers from the privacy leakage problem. Federated learning (FL) can safeguard privacy by keeping training samples locally, but existing FL-based frameworks require a large number of well-annotated training samples and numerous rounds of communication which hinder their practicability in the real-world clinical scenario. In this paper, we propose a universal and lightweight federated learning framework, named Federated Deep-Broad Learning (FedDBL), to achieve superior classification performance with limited training samples and only one-round communication. By simply associating a pre-trained deep learning feature extractor, a fast and lightweight broad learning inference system and a classical federated aggregation approach, FedDBL can dramatically reduce data dependency and improve communication efficiency. Five-fold cross-validation demonstrates that FedDBL greatly outperforms the competitors with only one-round communication and limited training samples, while it even achieves comparable performance with the ones under multiple-round communications. Furthermore, due to the lightweight design and one-round communication, FedDBL reduces the communication burden from 4.6GB to only 276.5KB per client using the ResNet-50 backbone at 50-round training. Since no data or deep model sharing across different clients, the privacy issue is well-solved and the model security is guaranteed with no model inversion attack risk. Code is available at https://github.com/tianpeng-deng/FedDBL.

Continuous Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution based on Context Interaction in Implicit Function Space

Despite its fruitful applications in remote sensing, image super-resolution is troublesome to train and deploy as it handles different resolution magnifications with separate models. Accordingly, we propose a highly-applicable super-resolution framework called FunSR, which settles different magnifications with a unified model by exploiting context interaction within implicit function space. FunSR composes a functional representor, a functional interactor, and a functional parser. Specifically, the representor transforms the low-resolution image from Euclidean space to multi-scale pixel-wise function maps; the interactor enables pixel-wise function expression with global dependencies; and the parser, which is parameterized by the interactor's output, converts the discrete coordinates with additional attributes to RGB values. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FunSR reports state-of-the-art performance on both fixed-magnification and continuous-magnification settings, meanwhile, it provides many friendly applications thanks to its unified nature.

CKD-TransBTS: Clinical Knowledge-Driven Hybrid Transformer with Modality-Correlated Cross-Attention for Brain Tumor Segmentation

Brain tumor segmentation (BTS) in magnetic resonance image (MRI) is crucial for brain tumor diagnosis, cancer management and research purposes. With the great success of the ten-year BraTS challenges as well as the advances of CNN and Transformer algorithms, a lot of outstanding BTS models have been proposed to tackle the difficulties of BTS in different technical aspects. However, existing studies hardly consider how to fuse the multi-modality images in a reasonable manner. In this paper, we leverage the clinical knowledge of how radiologists diagnose brain tumors from multiple MRI modalities and propose a clinical knowledge-driven brain tumor segmentation model, called CKD-TransBTS. Instead of directly concatenating all the modalities, we re-organize the input modalities by separating them into two groups according to the imaging principle of MRI. A dual-branch hybrid encoder with the proposed modality-correlated cross-attention block (MCCA) is designed to extract the multi-modality image features. The proposed model inherits the strengths from both Transformer and CNN with the local feature representation ability for precise lesion boundaries and long-range feature extraction for 3D volumetric images. To bridge the gap between Transformer and CNN features, we propose a Trans&CNN Feature Calibration block (TCFC) in the decoder. We compare the proposed model with five CNN-based models and six transformer-based models on the BraTS 2021 challenge dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art brain tumor segmentation performance compared with all the competitors.

Semantic-aware Dense Representation Learning for Remote Sensing Image Change Detection

Training deep learning-based change detection (CD) model heavily depends on labeled data. Contemporary transfer learning-based methods to alleviate the CD label insufficiency mainly upon ImageNet pre-training. A recent trend is using remote sensing (RS) data to obtain in-domain representations via supervised or self-supervised learning (SSL). Here, different from traditional supervised pre-training that learns the mapping from image to label, we leverage semantic supervision in a contrastive manner. There are typically multiple objects of interest (e.g., buildings) distributed in varying locations in RS images. We propose dense semantic-aware pre-training for RS image CD via sampling multiple class-balanced points. Instead of manipulating image-level representations that lack spatial information, we constrain pixel-level cross-view consistency and cross-semantic discrimination to learn spatially-sensitive features, thus benefiting downstream dense CD. Apart from learning illumination invariant features, we fulfill consistent foreground features insensitive to irrelevant background changes via a synthetic view using background swapping. We additionally achieve discriminative representations to distinguish foreground land-covers and others. We collect large-scale image-mask pairs freely available in the RS community for pre-training. Extensive experiments on three CD datasets verify the effectiveness of our method. Ours significantly outperforms ImageNet, in-domain supervision, and several SSL methods. Empirical results indicate ours well alleviates data insufficiency in CD. Notably, we achieve competitive results using only 20% training data than baseline (random) using 100% data. Both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the generalization ability of our pre-trained model to downstream images even remaining domain gaps with the pre-training data. Our Code will make public.

Remote Sensing Novel View Synthesis with Implicit Multiplane Representations

Novel view synthesis of remote sensing scenes is of great significance for scene visualization, human-computer interaction, and various downstream applications. Despite the recent advances in computer graphics and photogrammetry technology, generating novel views is still challenging particularly for remote sensing images due to its high complexity, view sparsity and limited view-perspective variations. In this paper, we propose a novel remote sensing view synthesis method by leveraging the recent advances in implicit neural representations. Considering the overhead and far depth imaging of remote sensing images, we represent the 3D space by combining implicit multiplane images (MPI) representation and deep neural networks. The 3D scene is reconstructed under a self-supervised optimization paradigm through a differentiable multiplane renderer with multi-view input constraints. Images from any novel views thus can be freely rendered on the basis of the reconstructed model. As a by-product, the depth maps corresponding to the given viewpoint can be generated along with the rendering output. We refer to our method as Implicit Multiplane Images (ImMPI). To further improve the view synthesis under sparse-view inputs, we explore the learning-based initialization of remote sensing 3D scenes and proposed a neural network based Prior extractor to accelerate the optimization process. In addition, we propose a new dataset for remote sensing novel view synthesis with multi-view real-world google earth images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the ImMPI over previous state-of-the-art methods in terms of reconstruction accuracy, visual fidelity, and time efficiency. Ablation experiments also suggest the effectiveness of our methodology design. Our dataset and code can be found at https://github.com/wyc-Chang/ImMPI

HoVer-Trans: Anatomy-aware HoVer-Transformer for ROI-free Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Ultrasound Images

Ultrasonography is an important routine examination for breast cancer diagnosis, due to its non-invasive, radiation-free and low-cost properties. However, it is still not the first-line screening test for breast cancer due to its inherent limitations. It would be a tremendous success if we can precisely diagnose breast cancer by breast ultrasound images (BUS). Many learning-based computer-aided diagnostic methods have been proposed to achieve breast cancer diagnosis/lesion classification. However, most of them require a pre-define ROI and then classify the lesion inside the ROI. Conventional classification backbones, such as VGG16 and ResNet50, can achieve promising classification results with no ROI requirement. But these models lack interpretability, thus restricting their use in clinical practice. In this study, we propose a novel ROI-free model for breast cancer diagnosis in ultrasound images with interpretable feature representations. We leverage the anatomical prior knowledge that malignant and benign tumors have different spatial relationships between different tissue layers, and propose a HoVer-Transformer to formulate this prior knowledge. The proposed HoVer-Trans block extracts the inter- and intra-layer spatial information horizontally and vertically. We conduct and release an open dataset GDPH&GYFYY for breast cancer diagnosis in BUS. The proposed model is evaluated in three datasets by comparing with four CNN-based models and two vision transformer models via a five-fold cross validation. It achieves state-of-the-art classification performance with the best model interpretability.

WSSS4LUAD: Grand Challenge on Weakly-supervised Tissue Semantic Segmentation for Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death worldwide, and adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common subtype. Exploiting the potential value of the histopathology images can promote precision medicine in oncology. Tissue segmentation is the basic upstream task of histopathology image analysis. Existing deep learning models have achieved superior segmentation performance but require sufficient pixel-level annotations, which is time-consuming and expensive. To enrich the label resources of LUAD and to alleviate the annotation efforts, we organize this challenge WSSS4LUAD to call for the outstanding weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) techniques for histopathology images of LUAD. Participants have to design the algorithm to segment tumor epithelial, tumor-associated stroma and normal tissue with only patch-level labels. This challenge includes 10,091 patch-level annotations (the training set) and over 130 million labeled pixels (the validation and test sets), from 87 WSIs (67 from GDPH, 20 from TCGA). All the labels were generated by a pathologist-in-the-loop pipeline with the help of AI models and checked by the label review board. Among 532 registrations, 28 teams submitted the results in the test phase with over 1,000 submissions. Finally, the first place team achieved mIoU of 0.8413 (tumor: 0.8389, stroma: 0.7931, normal: 0.8919). According to the technical reports of the top-tier teams, CAM is still the most popular approach in WSSS. Cutmix data augmentation has been widely adopted to generate more reliable samples. With the success of this challenge, we believe that WSSS approaches with patch-level annotations can be a complement to the traditional pixel annotations while reducing the annotation efforts. The entire dataset has been released to encourage more researches on computational pathology in LUAD and more novel WSSS techniques.