Unfair Alignment: Examining Safety Alignment Across Vision Encoder Layers in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have improved significantly in multi-modal tasks, but their more complex architecture makes their safety alignment more challenging than the alignment of large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we reveal an unfair distribution of safety across the layers of VLM's vision encoder, with earlier and middle layers being disproportionately vulnerable to malicious inputs compared to the more robust final layers. This 'cross-layer' vulnerability stems from the model's inability to generalize its safety training from the default architectural settings used during training to unseen or out-of-distribution scenarios, leaving certain layers exposed. We conduct a comprehensive analysis by projecting activations from various intermediate layers and demonstrate that these layers are more likely to generate harmful outputs when exposed to malicious inputs. Our experiments with LLaVA-1.5 and Llama 3.2 show discrepancies in attack success rates and toxicity scores across layers, indicating that current safety alignment strategies focused on a single default layer are insufficient.

Multi-modal Pose Diffuser: A Multimodal Generative Conditional Pose Prior

The Skinned Multi-Person Linear (SMPL) model plays a crucial role in 3D human pose estimation, providing a streamlined yet effective representation of the human body. However, ensuring the validity of SMPL configurations during tasks such as human mesh regression remains a significant challenge , highlighting the necessity for a robust human pose prior capable of discerning realistic human poses. To address this, we introduce MOPED: \underline{M}ulti-m\underline{O}dal \underline{P}os\underline{E} \underline{D}iffuser. MOPED is the first method to leverage a novel multi-modal conditional diffusion model as a prior for SMPL pose parameters. Our method offers powerful unconditional pose generation with the ability to condition on multi-modal inputs such as images and text. This capability enhances the applicability of our approach by incorporating additional context often overlooked in traditional pose priors. Extensive experiments across three distinct tasks-pose estimation, pose denoising, and pose completion-demonstrate that our multi-modal diffusion model-based prior significantly outperforms existing methods. These results indicate that our model captures a broader spectrum of plausible human poses.

POSTURE: Pose Guided Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Human Body Part Segmentation

Existing algorithms for human body part segmentation have shown promising results on challenging datasets, primarily relying on end-to-end supervision. However, these algorithms exhibit severe performance drops in the face of domain shifts, leading to inaccurate segmentation masks. To tackle this issue, we introduce POSTURE: \underline{Po}se Guided Un\underline{s}upervised Domain Adap\underline{t}ation for H\underline{u}man Body Pa\underline{r}t S\underline{e}gmentation - an innovative pseudo-labelling approach designed to improve segmentation performance on the unlabeled target data. Distinct from conventional domain adaptive methods for general semantic segmentation, POSTURE stands out by considering the underlying structure of the human body and uses anatomical guidance from pose keypoints to drive the adaptation process. This strong inductive prior translates to impressive performance improvements, averaging 8\% over existing state-of-the-art domain adaptive semantic segmentation methods across three benchmark datasets. Furthermore, the inherent flexibility of our proposed approach facilitates seamless extension to source-free settings (SF-POSTURE), effectively mitigating potential privacy and computational concerns, with negligible drop in performance.

TEMP3D: Temporally Continuous 3D Human Pose Estimation Under Occlusions

Existing 3D human pose estimation methods perform remarkably well in both monocular and multi-view settings. However, their efficacy diminishes significantly in the presence of heavy occlusions, which limits their practical utility. For video sequences, temporal continuity can help infer accurate poses, especially in heavily occluded frames. In this paper, we aim to leverage this potential of temporal continuity through human motion priors, coupled with large-scale pre-training on 3D poses and self-supervised learning, to enhance 3D pose estimation in a given video sequence. This leads to a temporally continuous 3D pose estimate on unlabelled in-the-wild videos, which may contain occlusions, while exclusively relying on pre-trained 3D pose models. We propose an unsupervised method named TEMP3D that aligns a motion prior model on a given in-the-wild video using existing SOTA single image-based 3D pose estimation methods to give temporally continuous output under occlusions. To evaluate our method, we test it on the Occluded Human3.6M dataset, our custom-built dataset which contains significantly large (up to 100%) human body occlusions incorporated into the Human3.6M dataset. We achieve SOTA results on Occluded Human3.6M and the OcMotion dataset while maintaining competitive performance on non-occluded data. URL: https://sites.google.com/ucr.edu/temp3d

Active Learning Guided Federated Online Adaptation: Applications in Medical Image Segmentation

Data privacy, storage, and distribution shifts are major bottlenecks in medical image analysis. Data cannot be shared across patients, physicians, and facilities due to privacy concerns, usually requiring each patient's data to be analyzed in a discreet setting at a near real-time pace. However, one would like to take advantage of the accumulated knowledge across healthcare facilities as the computational systems analyze data of more and more patients while incorporating feedback provided by physicians to improve accuracy. Motivated by these, we propose a method for medical image segmentation that adapts to each incoming data batch (online adaptation), incorporates physician feedback through active learning, and assimilates knowledge across facilities in a federated setup. Combining an online adaptation scheme at test time with an efficient sampling strategy with budgeted annotation helps bridge the gap between the source and the incoming stream of target domain data. A federated setup allows collaborative aggregation of knowledge across distinct distributed models without needing to share the data across different models. This facilitates the improvement of performance over time by accumulating knowledge across users. Towards achieving these goals, we propose a computationally amicable, privacy-preserving image segmentation technique \textbf{DrFRODA} that uses federated learning to adapt the model in an online manner with feedback from doctors in the loop. Our experiments on publicly available datasets show that the proposed distributed active learning-based online adaptation method outperforms unsupervised online adaptation methods and shows competitive results with offline active learning-based adaptation methods.

POISE: Pose Guided Human Silhouette Extraction under Occlusions

Human silhouette extraction is a fundamental task in computer vision with applications in various downstream tasks. However, occlusions pose a significant challenge, leading to incomplete and distorted silhouettes. To address this challenge, we introduce POISE: Pose Guided Human Silhouette Extraction under Occlusions, a novel self-supervised fusion framework that enhances accuracy and robustness in human silhouette prediction. By combining initial silhouette estimates from a segmentation model with human joint predictions from a 2D pose estimation model, POISE leverages the complementary strengths of both approaches, effectively integrating precise body shape information and spatial information to tackle occlusions. Furthermore, the self-supervised nature of \POISE eliminates the need for costly annotations, making it scalable and practical. Extensive experimental results demonstrate its superiority in improving silhouette extraction under occlusions, with promising results in downstream tasks such as gait recognition. The code for our method is available https://github.com/take2rohit/poise.

Learning Deformable 3D Graph Similarity to Track Plant Cells in Unregistered Time Lapse Images

Tracking of plant cells in images obtained by microscope is a challenging problem due to biological phenomena such as large number of cells, non-uniform growth of different layers of the tightly packed plant cells and cell division. Moreover, images in deeper layers of the tissue being noisy and unavoidable systemic errors inherent in the imaging process further complicates the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based method that exploits the tightly packed three-dimensional cell structure of plant cells to create a three-dimensional graph in order to perform accurate cell tracking. We further propose novel algorithms for cell division detection and effective three-dimensional registration, which improve upon the state-of-the-art algorithms. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithm in terms of tracking accuracy and inference-time on a benchmark dataset.

Prior-guided Source-free Domain Adaptation for Human Pose Estimation

Domain adaptation methods for 2D human pose estimation typically require continuous access to the source data during adaptation, which can be challenging due to privacy, memory, or computational constraints. To address this limitation, we focus on the task of source-free domain adaptation for pose estimation, where a source model must adapt to a new target domain using only unlabeled target data. Although recent advances have introduced source-free methods for classification tasks, extending them to the regression task of pose estimation is non-trivial. In this paper, we present Prior-guided Self-training (POST), a pseudo-labeling approach that builds on the popular Mean Teacher framework to compensate for the distribution shift. POST leverages prediction-level and feature-level consistency between a student and teacher model against certain image transformations. In the absence of source data, POST utilizes a human pose prior that regularizes the adaptation process by directing the model to generate more accurate and anatomically plausible pose pseudo-labels. Despite being simple and intuitive, our framework can deliver significant performance gains compared to applying the source model directly to the target data, as demonstrated in our extensive experiments and ablation studies. In fact, our approach achieves comparable performance to recent state-of-the-art methods that use source data for adaptation.

Deep Single Shot Musical Instrument Identification using Scalograms

Musical Instrument Identification has for long had a reputation of being one of the most ill-posed problems in the field of Musical Information Retrieval(MIR). Despite several robust attempts to solve the problem, a timeline spanning over the last five odd decades, the problem remains an open conundrum. In this work, the authors take on a further complex version of the traditional problem statement. They attempt to solve the problem with minimal data available - one audio excerpt per class. We propose to use a convolutional Siamese network and a residual variant of the same to identify musical instruments based on the corresponding scalograms of their audio excerpts. Our experiments and corresponding results obtained on two publicly available datasets validate the superiority of our algorithm by $\approx$ 3\% over the existing synonymous algorithms in present-day literature.