Linchao He

Linchao He, Hongyu Yan, Mengting Luo et al.

Diffusion models have recently been recognised as efficient inverse problem solvers due to their ability to produce high-quality reconstruction results without relying on pairwise data training. Existing diffusion-based solvers utilize Gradient Descent strategy to get a optimal sample solution. However, these solvers only calculate the current gradient and have not utilized any history information of sampling process, thus resulting in unstable optimization progresses and suboptimal solutions. To address this issue, we propose to utilize the history information of the diffusion-based inverse solvers. In this paper, we first prove that, in previous work, using the gradient descent method to optimize the data fidelity term is convergent. Building on this, we introduce the incorporation of historical gradients into this optimization process, termed History Gradient Update (HGU). We also provide theoretical evidence that HGU ensures the convergence of the entire algorithm. It's worth noting that HGU is applicable to both pixel-based and latent-based diffusion model solvers. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to previous sampling algorithms, sampling algorithms with HGU achieves state-of-the-art results in medical image reconstruction, surpassing even supervised learning methods. Additionally, it achieves competitive results on natural images.

Nan Zhou, Ke Zou, Kai Ren et al.

The Medical Segment Anything Model (MedSAM) has shown remarkable performance in medical image segmentation, drawing significant attention in the field. However, its sensitivity to varying prompt types and locations poses challenges. This paper addresses these challenges by focusing on the development of reliable prompts that enhance MedSAM's accuracy. We introduce MedSAM-U, an uncertainty-guided framework designed to automatically refine multi-prompt inputs for more reliable and precise medical image segmentation. Specifically, we first train a Multi-Prompt Adapter integrated with MedSAM, creating MPA-MedSAM, to adapt to diverse multi-prompt inputs. We then employ uncertainty-guided multi-prompt to effectively estimate the uncertainties associated with the prompts and their initial segmentation results. In particular, a novel uncertainty-guided prompts adaptation technique is then applied automatically to derive reliable prompts and their corresponding segmentation outcomes. We validate MedSAM-U using datasets from multiple modalities to train a universal image segmentation model. Compared to MedSAM, experimental results on five distinct modal datasets demonstrate that the proposed MedSAM-U achieves an average performance improvement of 1.7\% to 20.5\% across uncertainty-guided prompts.

Hongjie Wu, Mingqin Zhang, Linchao He et al.

Diffusion models have shown remarkable promise for image restoration by leveraging powerful priors. Prominent methods typically frame the restoration problem within a Bayesian inference framework, which iteratively combines a denoising step with a likelihood guidance step. However, the interactions between these two components in the generation process remain underexplored. In this paper, we analyze the underlying gradient dynamics of these components and identify significant instabilities. Specifically, we demonstrate conflicts between the prior and likelihood gradient directions, alongside temporal fluctuations in the likelihood gradient itself. We show that these instabilities disrupt the generative process and compromise restoration performance. To address these issues, we propose Stabilized Progressive Gradient Diffusion (SPGD), a novel gradient management technique. SPGD integrates two synergistic components: (1) a progressive likelihood warm-up strategy to mitigate gradient conflicts; and (2) adaptive directional momentum (ADM) smoothing to reduce fluctuations in the likelihood gradient. Extensive experiments across diverse restoration tasks demonstrate that SPGD significantly enhances generation stability, leading to state-of-the-art performance in quantitative metrics and visually superior results. Code is available at https://github.com/74587887/SPGD.

He Lyu, Huolin Zeng, Junren Wang et al.

Real-world clinical data is inherently multimodal, providing complementary evidence that mirrors the practical necessity of jointly assessing multiple related outcomes. Although multi-task learning can improve efficiency by sharing information across outcomes, existing approaches often fail to balance shared representation learning with outcome-specific modeling. Hard parameter sharing can trigger negative transfer when task gradients conflict, while flexible sharing may still entangle shared and task-specific signals. To address this, we propose a multi-task framework built on a unified Transformer for multimodal fusion, augmented with Orthogonal Task Decomposition (OrthTD) to split patient representations into shared and task-specific subspaces and impose a geometric orthogonality constraint to reduce redundancy and isolate task-specific signals. We evaluated OrthTD on a real-world cohort of 12,430 surgical patients for predicting four outcomes. OrthTD achieved average AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 87.5% and average AUPRC (area under the precision-recall curve) of 37.2%, consistently outperformed advanced tabular and multi-task methods. Notably, OrthTD achieves substantial gains in AUPRC, indicating superior performance in identifying rare events within imbalanced clinical data. These results suggest that enforcing non-redundant shared and task-specific representations can improve multi-outcome prediction from multimodal clinical data.

Hongjie Wu, Linchao He, Mingqin Zhang et al.

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in generating high-quality samples. Existing diffusion-based image restoration algorithms exploit pre-trained diffusion models to leverage data priors, yet they still preserve elements inherited from the unconditional generation paradigm. These strategies initiate the denoising process with pure white noise and incorporate random noise at each generative step, leading to over-smoothed results. In this paper, we present a refined paradigm for diffusion-based image restoration. Specifically, we opt for a sample consistent with the measurement identity at each generative step, exploiting the sampling selection as an avenue for output stability and enhancement. The number of candidate samples used for selection is adaptively determined based on the signal-to-noise ratio of the timestep. Additionally, we start the restoration process with an initialization combined with the measurement signal, providing supplementary information to better align the generative process. Extensive experimental results and analyses validate that our proposed method significantly enhances image restoration performance while consuming negligible additional computational resources.

Linchao He, Mengting Luo, Dejun Zhang et al.

Point cloud analysis is still a challenging task due to the disorder and sparsity of samplings of their geometric structures from 3D sensors. In this paper, we introduce the homotopy equivalence relation (HER) to make the neural networks learn the data distribution from a high-dimension manifold. A shuffle operation is adopted to construct HER for its randomness and zero-parameter. In addition, inspired by prior works, we propose a local mutual information regularizer (LMIR) to cut off the trivial path that leads to a classification error from HER. LMIR utilizes mutual information to measure the distance between the original feature and HER transformed feature and learns common features in a contrastive learning scheme. Thus, we combine HER and LMIR to give our model the ability to learn non-Euclidean features from a high-dimension manifold. This is named the non-Euclidean feature learner. Furthermore, we propose a new heuristics and efficiency point sampling algorithm named ClusterFPS to obtain approximate uniform sampling but at faster speed. ClusterFPS uses a cluster algorithm to divide a point cloud into several clusters and deploy the farthest point sampling algorithm on each cluster in parallel. By combining the above methods, we propose a novel point cloud analysis neural network called PointShuffleNet (PSN), which shows great promise in point cloud classification and segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our PSN achieves state-of-the-art results on ModelNet40, ShapeNet and S3DIS with high efficiency. Theoretically, we provide mathematical analysis toward understanding of what the data distribution HER has developed and why LMIR can drop the trivial path by maximizing mutual information implicitly.