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A Framework for Low-Effort Training Data Generation for Urban Semantic Segmentation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Synthetic datasets are widely used for training urban scene recognition models, but even highly realistic renderings show a noticeable gap to real imagery. This gap is particularly pronounced when adapting to a specific target domain, such as Cityscapes, where differences in architecture, vegetation, object appearance, and camera characteristics limit downstream performance. Closing this gap with more detailed 3D modelling would require expensive asset and scene design, defeating the purpose of low-cost labelled data. To address this, we present a new framework that adapts an off-the-shelf diffusion model to a target domain using only imperfect pseudo-labels. Once trained, it generates high-fidelity, target-aligned images from semantic maps of any synthetic dataset, including low-effort sources created in hours rather than months. The method filters suboptimal generations, rectifies image-label misalignments, and standardises semantics across datasets, transforming weak synthetic data into competitive real-domain training sets. Experiments on five synthetic datasets and two real target datasets show segmentation gains of up to +8.0%pt. mIoU over state-of-the-art translation methods, making rapidly constructed synthetic datasets as effective as high-effort, time-intensive synthetic datasets requiring extensive manual design. This work highlights a valuable collaborative paradigm where fast semantic prototyping, combined with generative models, enables scalable, high-quality training data creation for urban scene understanding.


Non-expert to Expert Motion Translation Using Generative Adversarial Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Decreasing skilled workers is a very serious problem in the world. To deal with this problem, the skill transfer from experts to robots has been researched. These methods which teach robots by human motion are called imitation learning. Experts' skills generally appear in not only position data, but also force data. Thus, position and force data need to be saved and reproduced. To realize this, a lot of research has been conducted in the framework of a motion-copying system. Recent research uses machine learning methods to generate motion commands. However, most of them could not change tasks by following human intention. Some of them can change tasks by conditional training, but the labels are limited. Thus, we propose the flexible motion translation method by using Generative Adversarial Networks. The proposed method enables users to teach robots tasks by inputting data, and skills by a trained model. We evaluated the proposed system with a 3-DOF calligraphy robot.


Due to the time constraints of the rebuttal, we limited

Neural Information Processing Systems

We cannot thank the reviewers enough for their valuable feedback on our work. Reviewers 1 and 2: Combine guess loss with additive noise. Most recent advances in adversarial defense methods address "black-box attacks" performed by a The latter incorporates adversarial examples during training to increase the model's robustness to the attack. Therefore the reconstructed image can serve as an adversarially perturbed example of the non-adversarial input image. Reviewer 3: Novelty is not enough as most of the proposed solution or observations are already published.


ContourDiff: Unpaired Image Translation with Contour-Guided Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Accurately translating medical images across different modalities (e.g., CT to MRI) has numerous downstream clinical and machine learning applications. While several methods have been proposed to achieve this, they often prioritize perceptual quality with respect to output domain features over preserving anatomical fidelity. However, maintaining anatomy during translation is essential for many tasks, e.g., when leveraging masks from the input domain to develop a segmentation model with images translated to the output domain. To address these challenges, we propose ContourDiff, a novel framework that leverages domain-invariant anatomical contour representations of images. These representations are simple to extract from images, yet form precise spatial constraints on their anatomical content. We introduce a diffusion model that converts contour representations of images from arbitrary input domains into images in the output domain of interest. By applying the contour as a constraint at every diffusion sampling step, we ensure the preservation of anatomical content. We evaluate our method by training a segmentation model on images translated from CT to MRI with their original CT masks and testing its performance on real MRIs. Our method outperforms other unpaired image translation methods by a significant margin, furthermore without the need to access any input domain information during training.


PhenDiff: Revealing Invisible Phenotypes with Conditional Diffusion Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Over the last five years, deep generative models have gradually been adopted for various tasks in biological research. Notably, image-to-image translation methods showed to be effective in revealing subtle phenotypic cell variations otherwise invisible to the human eye. Current methods to achieve this goal mainly rely on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). However, these models are known to suffer from some shortcomings such as training instability and mode collapse. Furthermore, the lack of robustness to invert a real image into the latent of a trained GAN prevents flexible editing of real images. In this work, we propose PhenDiff, an image-to-image translation method based on conditional diffusion models to identify subtle phenotypes in microscopy images. We evaluate this approach on biological datasets against previous work such as CycleGAN. We show that PhenDiff outperforms this baseline in terms of quality and diversity of the generated images. We then apply this method to display invisible phenotypic changes triggered by a rare neurodevelopmental disorder on microscopy images of organoids. Altogether, we demonstrate that PhenDiff is able to perform high quality biological image-to-image translation allowing to spot subtle phenotype variations on a real image.


Neural Style Transfer and Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation to deal with the Domain Shift Problem on Spheroid Segmentation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Background and objectives. Domain shift is a generalisation problem of machine learning models that occurs when the data distribution of the training set is different to the data distribution encountered by the model when it is deployed. This is common in the context of biomedical image segmentation due to the variance of experimental conditions, equipment, and capturing settings. In this work, we address this challenge by studying both neural style transfer algorithms and unpaired image-to-image translation methods in the context of the segmentation of tumour spheroids. Methods. We have illustrated the domain shift problem in the context of spheroid segmentation with 4 deep learning segmentation models that achieved an IoU over 97% when tested with images following the training distribution, but whose performance decreased up to an 84\% when applied to images captured under different conditions. In order to deal with this problem, we have explored 3 style transfer algorithms (NST, deep image analogy, and STROTSS), and 6 unpaired image-to-image translations algorithms (CycleGAN, DualGAN, ForkGAN, GANILLA, CUT, and FastCUT). These algorithms have been integrated into a high-level API that facilitates their application to other contexts where the domain-shift problem occurs. Results. We have considerably improved the performance of the 4 segmentation models when applied to images captured under different conditions by using both style transfer and image-to-image translation algorithms. In particular, there are 2 style transfer algorithms (NST and deep image analogy) and 1 unpaired image-to-image translations algorithm (CycleGAN) that improve the IoU of the models in a range from 0.24 to 76.07. Therefore, reaching a similar performance to the one obtained with the models are applied to images following the training distribution.


Hot papers on arXiv from the past month – November 2020

AIHub

Here are the most tweeted papers that were uploaded onto arXiv during November 2020. Results are powered by Arxiv Sanity Preserver. Abstract: Efficient gradient computation of the Jacobian determinant term is a core problem of the normalizing flow framework. Thus, most proposed flow models either restrict to a function class with easy evaluation of the Jacobian determinant, or an efficient estimator thereof. However, these restrictions limit the performance of such density models, frequently requiring significant depth to reach desired performance levels.


AI Generator Learns to 'Draw' Like Cartoonist Lee Mal-Nyeon in Just 10 Hours

#artificialintelligence

A Seoul National University Master's student and developer has trained a face generating model to transfer normal face photographs into cartoon images in the distinctive style of Lee Mal-nyeon. The student (GitHub user name: bryandlee) used webcomics images by South Korean cartoonist Lee Mal-nyeon (이말년) as input data, building a dataset of malnyun cartoon faces then testing popular deep generative models on it. By combining a pretrained face generating model with special training techniques, they were able to train a generator at 256 256 resolution in just 10 hours on a single RTX 2080ti GPU, using only 500 manually annotated images. Since the cascade classifier for human faces provided in OpenCV-- a library of programming functions mainly aimed at real-time computer vision -- did not work well on the cartoon domain, the student manually annotated 500 input cartoon face images. The student incorporated FreezeD, a simple yet effective baseline for transfer learning of GANs proposed earlier this year by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) and POSTECH ( Pohang University of Science and Technology) researchers to reduce the burden of heavy data and computational resources when training GANs. The developer tested the idea of freezing the early layers of the generator in transfer learning settings on the proposed FreezeG (freezing generator) and found that "it worked pretty well."


City2City: Translating Place Representations across Cities

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large mobility datasets collected from various sources have allowed us to observe, analyze, predict and solve a wide range of important urban challenges. In particular, studies have generated place representations (or embeddings) from mobility patterns in a similar manner to word embeddings to better understand the functionality of different places within a city. However, studies have been limited to generating such representations of cities in an individual manner and has lacked an inter-city perspective, which has made it difficult to transfer the insights gained from the place representations across different cities. In this study, we attempt to bridge this research gap by treating \textit{cities} and \textit{languages} analogously. We apply methods developed for unsupervised machine language translation tasks to translate place representations across different cities. Real world mobility data collected from mobile phone users in 2 cities in Japan are used to test our place representation translation methods. Translated place representations are validated using landuse data, and results show that our methods were able to accurately translate place representations from one city to another.