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Seiichi Uchida

Publications and source records attributed to Seiichi Uchida.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Handwriting Trajectory Recovery with Diffusion Models

Recovering online pen trajectories from offline handwriting images, often referred to as handwriting trajectory recovery (stroke recovery), is an offline-to-online conversion task with applications in stroke-level editing and forensic analysis. We propose, to the best of our knowledge, the first diffusion-model-based framework for this task. Our method formulates trajectory recovery as image-conditioned generation and uses a denoising diffusion model to sample pen trajectories consistent with the observed ink trace. Through extensive quantitative evaluations on CASIA-OLHWDB (1.0-1.1), we verify that the proposed approach enables accurate recovery even for complex multi-stroke characters, substantially improving both temporal similarity (DTW/LDTW) and shape fidelity (AIoU) over representative prior methods such as PEN-Net and Cross-VAE. We further show that the model captures general stroke-order tendencies and generalizes to classes unseen during training, exemplified by cross-script transfer: a model trained on Chinese characters can recover reasonable stroke orders for Latin letters to some extent.

cs.CV

Leveraging Vision-Language Models as Weak Annotators in Active Learning

Active learning aims to reduce annotation cost by selectively querying informative samples for supervision under a limited labeling budget. In this work, we investigate how vision-language models (VLMs) can be leveraged to further reduce the reliance on costly human annotation within the active learning paradigm. To this end, we find that the reliability of VLMs varies significantly with label granularity in fine-grained recognition tasks: they perform poorly on fine-grained labels but can provide accurate coarse-grained labels. Leveraging this property, we propose an active learning framework that combines fine-grained human annotations with coarse-grained VLM-generated weak labels through instance-wise label assignment. We further model the systematic noise in VLM-generated labels using a small set of trusted full labels. Experiments on CUB200 and FGVC-Aircraft show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms existing active learning methods under the same annotation budget.

cs.CV

SCoRe: Clean Image Generation from Diffusion Models Trained on Noisy Images

Diffusion models trained on noisy datasets often reproduce high-frequency training artifacts, significantly degrading generation quality. To address this, we propose SCoRe (Spectral Cutoff Regeneration), a training-free, generation-time spectral regeneration method for clean image generation from diffusion models trained on noisy images. Leveraging the spectral bias of diffusion models, which infer high-frequency details from low-frequency cues, SCoRe suppresses corrupted high-frequency components of a generated image via a frequency cutoff and regenerates them via SDEdit. Crucially, we derive a theoretical mapping between the cutoff frequency and the SDEdit initialization timestep based on Radially Averaged Power Spectral Density (RAPSD), which prevents excessive noise injection during regeneration. Experiments on synthetic (CIFAR-10) and real-world (SIDD) noisy datasets demonstrate that SCoRe substantially outperforms post-processing and noise-robust baselines, restoring samples closer to clean image distributions without any retraining or fine-tuning.

cs.CV

Hierarchical Co-Embedding of Font Shapes and Impression Tags

Font shapes can evoke a wide range of impressions, but the correspondence between fonts and impression descriptions is not one-to-one: some impressions are broadly compatible with diverse styles, whereas others strongly constrain the set of plausible fonts. We refer to this graded constraint strength as style specificity. In this paper, we propose a hyperbolic co-embedding framework that models font--impression correspondence through entailment rather than simple paired alignment. Font images and impression descriptions, represented as single tags or tag sets, are embedded in a shared hyperbolic space with two complementary entailment constraints: impression-to-font entailment and low-to-high style-specificity entailment among impressions. This formulation induces a radial structure in which low style-specificity impressions lie near the origin and high style-specificity impressions lie farther away, yielding an interpretable geometric measure of how strongly an impression constrains font style. Experiments on the MyFonts dataset demonstrate improved bidirectional retrieval over strong one-to-one baselines. In addition, traversal and tag-level analyses show that the learned space captures a coherent progression from ambiguous to more style-specific impressions and provides a meaningful, data-driven quantification of style specificity.

cs.CV

Ranking-Guided Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation for Severity Classification

Semi-supervised domain adaptation leverages a few labeled and many unlabeled target samples, making it promising for addressing domain shifts in medical image analysis. However, existing methods struggle with severity classification due to unclear class boundaries. Severity classification involves naturally ordered class labels, complicating adaptation. We propose a novel method that aligns source and target domains using rank scores learned via ranking with class order. Specifically, Cross-Domain Ranking ranks sample pairs across domains, while Continuous Distribution Alignment aligns rank score distributions. Experiments on ulcerative colitis and diabetic retinopathy classification validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating successful alignment of class-specific rank score distributions.

cs.CV

Self-Organizing Score-based Data Assimilation

A state-space model is a statistical framework for inferring latent states from observed time-series data. However, inference with nonlinear and high-dimensional state-space models remains challenging. To this end, an approach based on diffusion models-a powerful class of deep generative models-has been developed, known as Score-based Data Assimilation (SDA). However, SDA cannot be directly applied when the latent-state transition depends on unknown parameters that must be inferred jointly with the latent states. To overcome this limitation, we propose a framework that enables SDA to handle latent states with unknown parameters. A key feature of the proposed method is the incorporation of the self-organization technique, which has been used in classical state-space modeling for the joint estimation of latent states and parameters. By integrating this classical technique into modern SDA, our method enables joint inference of latent states and unknown parameters while maintaining the high training efficiency of SDA. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through numerical experiments on dynamical systems arising in neuroscience and atmospheric science. In addition, its scalability is demonstrated using a high-dimensional Kolmogorov flow, with the data dimension on the order of several hundred thousand.

cs.CE

Automatic Text Box Placement for Supporting Typographic Design

In layout design for advertisements and web pages, balancing visual appeal and communication efficiency is crucial. This study examines automated text box placement in incomplete layouts, comparing a standard Transformer-based method, a small Vision and Language Model (Phi3.5-vision), a large pretrained VLM (Gemini), and an extended Transformer that processes multiple images. Evaluations on the Crello dataset show the standard Transformer-based models generally outperform VLM-based approaches, particularly when incorporating richer appearance information. However, all methods face challenges with very small text or densely populated layouts. These findings highlight the benefits of task-specific architectures and suggest avenues for further improvement in automated layout design.

cs.CV

Few-Part-Shot Font Generation

This paper proposes a novel model of few-part-shot font generation, which designs an entire font based on a set of partial design elements, i.e., partial shapes. Unlike conventional few-shot font generation, which requires entire character shapes for a couple of character classes, our approach only needs partial shapes as input. The proposed model not only improves the efficiency of font creation but also provides insights into how partial design details influence the entire structure of the individual characters.

cs.CV

Embedding Font Impression Word Tags Based on Co-occurrence

Different font styles (i.e., font shapes) convey distinct impressions, indicating a close relationship between font shapes and word tags describing those impressions. This paper proposes a novel embedding method for impression tags that leverages these shape-impression relationships. For instance, our method assigns similar vectors to impression tags that frequently co-occur in order to represent impressions of fonts, whereas standard word embedding methods (e.g., BERT and CLIP) yield very different vectors. This property is particularly useful for impression-based font generation and font retrieval. Technically, we construct a graph whose nodes represent impression tags and whose edges encode co-occurrence relationships. Then, we apply spectral embedding to obtain the impression vectors for each tag. We compare our method with BERT and CLIP in qualitative and quantitative evaluations, demonstrating that our approach performs better in impression-guided font generation.

cs.CV

Enhancing Reliability of Medical Image Diagnosis through Top-rank Learning with Rejection Module

In medical image processing, accurate diagnosis is of paramount importance. Leveraging machine learning techniques, particularly top-rank learning, shows significant promise by focusing on the most crucial instances. However, challenges arise from noisy labels and class-ambiguous instances, which can severely hinder the top-rank objective, as they may be erroneously placed among the top-ranked instances. To address these, we propose a novel approach that enhances toprank learning by integrating a rejection module. Cooptimized with the top-rank loss, this module identifies and mitigates the impact of outliers that hinder training effectiveness. The rejection module functions as an additional branch, assessing instances based on a rejection function that measures their deviation from the norm. Through experimental validation on a medical dataset, our methodology demonstrates its efficacy in detecting and mitigating outliers, improving the reliability and accuracy of medical image diagnoses.

cs.CV

Computer-Aided Multi-Stroke Character Simplification by Stroke Removal

Multi-stroke characters in scripts such as Chinese and Japanese can be highly complex, posing significant challenges for both native speakers and, especially, non-native learners. If these characters can be simplified without degrading their legibility, it could reduce learning barriers for non-native speakers, facilitate simpler and legible font designs, and contribute to efficient character-based communication systems. In this paper, we propose a framework to systematically simplify multi-stroke characters by selectively removing strokes while preserving their overall legibility. More specifically, we use a highly accurate character recognition model to assess legibility and remove those strokes that minimally impact it. Experimental results on 1,256 character classes with 5, 10, 15, and 20 strokes reveal several key findings, including the observation that even after removing multiple strokes, many characters remain distinguishable. These findings suggest the potential for more formalized simplification strategies.

cs.CV

Inverse Scene Text Removal

Scene text removal (STR) aims to erase textual elements from images. It was originally intended for removing privacy-sensitiveor undesired texts from natural scene images, but is now also appliedto typographic images. STR typically detects text regions and theninpaints them. Although STR has advanced through neural networksand synthetic data, misuse risks have increased. This paper investi-gates Inverse STR (ISTR), which analyzes STR-processed images andfocuses on binary classification (detecting whether an image has un-dergone STR) and localizing removed text regions. We demonstrate inexperiments that these tasks are achievable with high accuracies, en-abling detection of potential misuse and improving STR. We also at-tempt to recover the removed text content by training a text recognizerto understand its difficulty.

cs.CV

Instance-wise Supervision-level Optimization in Active Learning

Active learning (AL) is a label-efficient machine learning paradigm that focuses on selectively annotating high-value instances to maximize learning efficiency. Its effectiveness can be further enhanced by incorporating weak supervision, which uses rough yet cost-effective annotations instead of exact (i.e., full) but expensive annotations. We introduce a novel AL framework, Instance-wise Supervision-Level Optimization (ISO), which not only selects the instances to annotate but also determines their optimal annotation level within a fixed annotation budget. Its optimization criterion leverages the value-to-cost ratio (VCR) of each instance while ensuring diversity among the selected instances. In classification experiments, ISO consistently outperforms traditional AL methods and surpasses a state-of-the-art AL approach that combines full and weak supervision, achieving higher accuracy at a lower overall cost. This code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ISOAL.

cs.CV

Type-R: Automatically Retouching Typos for Text-to-Image Generation

While recent text-to-image models can generate photorealistic images from text prompts that reflect detailed instructions, they still face significant challenges in accurately rendering words in the image. In this paper, we propose to retouch erroneous text renderings in the post-processing pipeline. Our approach, called Type-R, identifies typographical errors in the generated image, erases the erroneous text, regenerates text boxes for missing words, and finally corrects typos in the rendered words. Through extensive experiments, we show that Type-R, in combination with the latest text-to-image models such as Stable Diffusion or Flux, achieves the highest text rendering accuracy while maintaining image quality and also outperforms text-focused generation baselines in terms of balancing text accuracy and image quality.

cs.CV

Self-Relaxed Joint Training: Sample Selection for Severity Estimation with Ordinal Noisy Labels

Severity level estimation is a crucial task in medical image diagnosis. However, accurately assigning severity class labels to individual images is very costly and challenging. Consequently, the attached labels tend to be noisy. In this paper, we propose a new framework for training with ``ordinal'' noisy labels. Since severity levels have an ordinal relationship, we can leverage this to train a classifier while mitigating the negative effects of noisy labels. Our framework uses two techniques: clean sample selection and dual-network architecture. A technical highlight of our approach is the use of soft labels derived from noisy hard labels. By appropriately using the soft and hard labels in the two techniques, we achieve more accurate sample selection and robust network training. The proposed method outperforms various state-of-the-art methods in experiments using two endoscopic ulcerative colitis (UC) datasets and a retinal Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) dataset. Our codes are available at https://github.com/shumpei-takezaki/Self-Relaxed-Joint-Training.

cs.CV

Can GPTs Evaluate Graphic Design Based on Design Principles?

Recent advancements in foundation models show promising capability in graphic design generation. Several studies have started employing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) to evaluate graphic designs, assuming that LMMs can properly assess their quality, but it is unclear if the evaluation is reliable. One way to evaluate the quality of graphic design is to assess whether the design adheres to fundamental graphic design principles, which are the designer's common practice. In this paper, we compare the behavior of GPT-based evaluation and heuristic evaluation based on design principles using human annotations collected from 60 subjects. Our experiments reveal that, while GPTs cannot distinguish small details, they have a reasonably good correlation with human annotation and exhibit a similar tendency to heuristic metrics based on design principles, suggesting that they are indeed capable of assessing the quality of graphic design. Our dataset is available at https://cyberagentailab.github.io/Graphic-design-evaluation .

cs.CV

Singularities in bivariate normal mixtures

We investigate mappings $F = (f_1, f_2) \colon \mathbb{R}^2 \to \mathbb{R}^2 $ where $ f_1, f_2 $ are bivariate normal densities from the perspective of singularity theory of mappings, motivated by the need to understand properties of two-component bivariate normal mixtures. We show a classification of mappings $ F = (f_1, f_2) $ via $\mathcal{A}$-equivalence and characterize them using statistical notions. Our analysis reveals three distinct types, each with specific geometric properties. Furthermore, we determine the upper bounds for the number of modes in the mixture for each type.

math.ST

Deep Bayesian Active Learning-to-Rank with Relative Annotation for Estimation of Ulcerative Colitis Severity

Automatic image-based severity estimation is an important task in computer-aided diagnosis. Severity estimation by deep learning requires a large amount of training data to achieve a high performance. In general, severity estimation uses training data annotated with discrete (i.e., quantized) severity labels. Annotating discrete labels is often difficult in images with ambiguous severity, and the annotation cost is high. In contrast, relative annotation, in which the severity between a pair of images is compared, can avoid quantizing severity and thus makes it easier. We can estimate relative disease severity using a learning-to-rank framework with relative annotations, but relative annotation has the problem of the enormous number of pairs that can be annotated. Therefore, the selection of appropriate pairs is essential for relative annotation. In this paper, we propose a deep Bayesian active learning-to-rank that automatically selects appropriate pairs for relative annotation. Our method preferentially annotates unlabeled pairs with high learning efficiency from the model uncertainty of the samples. We prove the theoretical basis for adapting Bayesian neural networks to pairwise learning-to-rank and demonstrate the efficiency of our method through experiments on endoscopic images of ulcerative colitis on both private and public datasets. We also show that our method achieves a high performance under conditions of significant class imbalance because it automatically selects samples from the minority classes.

cs.CV