Progressive Retinal Image Registration via Global and Local Deformable Transformations

Retinal image registration plays an important role in the ophthalmological diagnosis process. Since there exist variances in viewing angles and anatomical structures across different retinal images, keypoint-based approaches become the mainstream methods for retinal image registration thanks to their robustness and low latency. These methods typically assume the retinal surfaces are planar, and adopt feature matching to obtain the homography matrix that represents the global transformation between images. Yet, such a planar hypothesis inevitably introduces registration errors since retinal surface is approximately curved. This limitation is more prominent when registering image pairs with significant differences in viewing angles. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid registration framework called HybridRetina, which progressively registers retinal images with global and local deformable transformations. For that, we use a keypoint detector and a deformation network called GAMorph to estimate the global transformation and local deformable transformation, respectively. Specifically, we integrate multi-level pixel relation knowledge to guide the training of GAMorph. Additionally, we utilize an edge attention module that includes the geometric priors of the images, ensuring the deformation field focuses more on the vascular regions of clinical interest. Experiments on two widely-used datasets, FIRE and FLoRI21, show that our proposed HybridRetina significantly outperforms some state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/lyp-deeplearning/awesome-retinal-registration.

Semantics-Oriented Multitask Learning for DeepFake Detection: A Joint Embedding Approach

In recent years, the multimedia forensics and security community has seen remarkable progress in multitask learning for DeepFake (i.e., face forgery) detection. The prevailing strategy has been to frame DeepFake detection as a binary classification problem augmented by manipulation-oriented auxiliary tasks. This strategy focuses on learning features specific to face manipulations, which exhibit limited generalizability. In this paper, we delve deeper into semantics-oriented multitask learning for DeepFake detection, leveraging the relationships among face semantics via joint embedding. We first propose an automatic dataset expansion technique that broadens current face forgery datasets to support semantics-oriented DeepFake detection tasks at both the global face attribute and local face region levels. Furthermore, we resort to joint embedding of face images and their corresponding labels (depicted by textual descriptions) for prediction. This approach eliminates the need for manually setting task-agnostic and task-specific parameters typically required when predicting labels directly from images. In addition, we employ a bi-level optimization strategy to dynamically balance the fidelity loss weightings of various tasks, making the training process fully automated. Extensive experiments on six DeepFake datasets show that our method improves the generalizability of DeepFake detection and, meanwhile, renders some degree of model interpretation by providing human-understandable explanations.

Semantic Contextualization of Face Forgery: A New Definition, Dataset, and Detection Method

In recent years, deep learning has greatly streamlined the process of generating realistic fake face images. Aware of the dangers, researchers have developed various tools to spot these counterfeits. Yet none asked the fundamental question: What digital manipulations make a real photographic face image fake, while others do not? In this paper, we put face forgery in a semantic context and define that computational methods that alter semantic face attributes to exceed human discrimination thresholds are sources of face forgery. Guided by our new definition, we construct a large face forgery image dataset, where each image is associated with a set of labels organized in a hierarchical graph. Our dataset enables two new testing protocols to probe the generalization of face forgery detectors. Moreover, we propose a semantics-oriented face forgery detection method that captures label relations and prioritizes the primary task (\ie, real or fake face detection). We show that the proposed dataset successfully exposes the weaknesses of current detectors as the test set and consistently improves their generalizability as the training set. Additionally, we demonstrate the superiority of our semantics-oriented method over traditional binary and multi-class classification-based detectors.

Federated Distillation: A Survey

Federated Learning (FL) seeks to train a model collaboratively without sharing private training data from individual clients. Despite its promise, FL encounters challenges such as high communication costs for large-scale models and the necessity for uniform model architectures across all clients and the server. These challenges severely restrict the practical applications of FL. To address these limitations, the integration of knowledge distillation (KD) into FL has been proposed, forming what is known as Federated Distillation (FD). FD enables more flexible knowledge transfer between clients and the server, surpassing the mere sharing of model parameters. By eliminating the need for identical model architectures across clients and the server, FD mitigates the communication costs associated with training large-scale models. This paper aims to offer a comprehensive overview of FD, highlighting its latest advancements. It delves into the fundamental principles underlying the design of FD frameworks, delineates FD approaches for tackling various challenges, and provides insights into the diverse applications of FD across different scenarios.

Healthcare Copilot: Eliciting the Power of General LLMs for Medical Consultation

The copilot framework, which aims to enhance and tailor large language models (LLMs) for specific complex tasks without requiring fine-tuning, is gaining increasing attention from the community. In this paper, we introduce the construction of a Healthcare Copilot designed for medical consultation. The proposed Healthcare Copilot comprises three main components: 1) the Dialogue component, responsible for effective and safe patient interactions; 2) the Memory component, storing both current conversation data and historical patient information; and 3) the Processing component, summarizing the entire dialogue and generating reports. To evaluate the proposed Healthcare Copilot, we implement an auto-evaluation scheme using ChatGPT for two roles: as a virtual patient engaging in dialogue with the copilot, and as an evaluator to assess the quality of the dialogue. Extensive results demonstrate that the proposed Healthcare Copilot significantly enhances the capabilities of general LLMs for medical consultations in terms of inquiry capability, conversational fluency, response accuracy, and safety. Furthermore, we conduct ablation studies to highlight the contribution of each individual module in the Healthcare Copilot. Code will be made publicly available on GitHub.

PointHR: Exploring High-Resolution Architectures for 3D Point Cloud Segmentation

Significant progress has been made recently in point cloud segmentation utilizing an encoder-decoder framework, which initially encodes point clouds into low-resolution representations and subsequently decodes high-resolution predictions. Inspired by the success of high-resolution architectures in image dense prediction, which always maintains a high-resolution representation throughout the entire learning process, we consider it also highly important for 3D dense point cloud analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we explore high-resolution architectures for 3D point cloud segmentation. Specifically, we generalize high-resolution architectures using a unified pipeline named PointHR, which includes a knn-based sequence operator for feature extraction and a differential resampling operator to efficiently communicate different resolutions. Additionally, we propose to avoid numerous on-the-fly computations of high-resolution architectures by pre-computing the indices for both sequence and resampling operators. By doing so, we deliver highly competitive high-resolution architectures while capitalizing on the benefits of well-designed point cloud blocks without additional effort. To evaluate these architectures for dense point cloud analysis, we conduct thorough experiments using S3DIS and ScanNetV2 datasets, where the proposed PointHR outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods without any bells and whistles. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/haibo-qiu/PointHR}.

ChartDETR: A Multi-shape Detection Network for Visual Chart Recognition

Visual chart recognition systems are gaining increasing attention due to the growing demand for automatically identifying table headers and values from chart images. Current methods rely on keypoint detection to estimate data element shapes in charts but suffer from grouping errors in post-processing. To address this issue, we propose ChartDETR, a transformer-based multi-shape detector that localizes keypoints at the corners of regular shapes to reconstruct multiple data elements in a single chart image. Our method predicts all data element shapes at once by introducing query groups in set prediction, eliminating the need for further postprocessing. This property allows ChartDETR to serve as a unified framework capable of representing various chart types without altering the network architecture, effectively detecting data elements of diverse shapes. We evaluated ChartDETR on three datasets, achieving competitive results across all chart types without any additional enhancements. For example, ChartDETR achieved an F1 score of 0.98 on Adobe Synthetic, significantly outperforming the previous best model with a 0.71 F1 score. Additionally, we obtained a new state-of-the-art result of 0.97 on ExcelChart400k. The code will be made publicly available.

Patch-Wise Point Cloud Generation: A Divide-and-Conquer Approach

A generative model for high-fidelity point clouds is of great importance in synthesizing 3d environments for applications such as autonomous driving and robotics. Despite the recent success of deep generative models for 2d images, it is non-trivial to generate 3d point clouds without a comprehensive understanding of both local and global geometric structures. In this paper, we devise a new 3d point cloud generation framework using a divide-and-conquer approach, where the whole generation process can be divided into a set of patch-wise generation tasks. Specifically, all patch generators are based on learnable priors, which aim to capture the information of geometry primitives. We introduce point- and patch-wise transformers to enable the interactions between points and patches. Therefore, the proposed divide-and-conquer approach contributes to a new understanding of point cloud generation from the geometry constitution of 3d shapes. Experimental results on a variety of object categories from the most popular point cloud dataset, ShapeNet, show the effectiveness of the proposed patch-wise point cloud generation, where it clearly outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods for high-fidelity point cloud generation.

Free-Form Composition Networks for Egocentric Action Recognition

Egocentric action recognition is gaining significant attention in the field of human action recognition. In this paper, we address data scarcity issue in egocentric action recognition from a compositional generalization perspective. To tackle this problem, we propose a free-form composition network (FFCN) that can simultaneously learn disentangled verb, preposition, and noun representations, and then use them to compose new samples in the feature space for rare classes of action videos. First, we use a graph to capture the spatial-temporal relations among different hand/object instances in each action video. We thus decompose each action into a set of verb and preposition spatial-temporal representations using the edge features in the graph. The temporal decomposition extracts verb and preposition representations from different video frames, while the spatial decomposition adaptively learns verb and preposition representations from action-related instances in each frame. With these spatial-temporal representations of verbs and prepositions, we can compose new samples for those rare classes in a free-form manner, which is not restricted to a rigid form of a verb and a noun. The proposed FFCN can directly generate new training data samples for rare classes, hence significantly improve action recognition performance. We evaluated our method on three popular egocentric action recognition datasets, Something-Something V2, H2O, and EPIC-KITCHENS-100, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for handling data scarcity problems, including long-tailed and few-shot egocentric action recognition.

On Exploring Node-feature and Graph-structure Diversities for Node Drop Graph Pooling

A pooling operation is essential for effective graph-level representation learning, where the node drop pooling has become one mainstream graph pooling technology. However, current node drop pooling methods usually keep the top-k nodes according to their significance scores, which ignore the graph diversity in terms of the node features and the graph structures, thus resulting in suboptimal graph-level representations. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel plug-and-play score scheme and refer to it as MID, which consists of a \textbf{M}ultidimensional score space with two operations, \textit{i.e.}, fl\textbf{I}pscore and \textbf{D}ropscore. Specifically, the multidimensional score space depicts the significance of nodes through multiple criteria; the flipscore encourages the maintenance of dissimilar node features; and the dropscore forces the model to notice diverse graph structures instead of being stuck in significant local structures. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed MID, we perform extensive experiments by applying it to a wide variety of recent node drop pooling methods, including TopKPool, SAGPool, GSAPool, and ASAP. Specifically, the proposed MID can efficiently and consistently achieve about 2.8\% average improvements over the above four methods on seventeen real-world graph classification datasets, including four social datasets (IMDB-BINARY, IMDB-MULTI, REDDIT-BINARY, and COLLAB), and thirteen biochemical datasets (D\&D, PROTEINS, NCI1, MUTAG, PTC-MR, NCI109, ENZYMES, MUTAGENICITY, FRANKENSTEIN, HIV, BBBP, TOXCAST, and TOX21). Code is available at~\url{https://github.com/whuchuang/mid}.