Yuyang Hu

Chicago Y. Park, Weijie Gan, Zihao Zou et al.

Model-based deep learning (MBDL) is a powerful methodology for designing deep models to solve imaging inverse problems. MBDL networks can be seen as iterative algorithms that estimate the desired image using a physical measurement model and a learned image prior specified using a convolutional neural net (CNNs). The iterative nature of MBDL networks increases the test-time computational complexity, which limits their applicability in certain large-scale applications. Here we make two contributions to address this issue: First, we show how structured pruning can be adopted to reduce the number of parameters in MBDL networks. Second, we present three methods to fine-tune the pruned MBDL networks to mitigate potential performance loss. Each fine-tuning strategy has a unique benefit that depends on the presence of a pre-trained model and a high-quality ground truth. We show that our pruning and fine-tuning approach can accelerate image reconstruction using popular deep equilibrium learning (DEQ) and deep unfolding (DU) methods by 50% and 32%, respectively, with nearly no performance loss. This work thus offers a step forward for solving inverse problems by showing the potential of pruning to improve the scalability of MBDL. Code is available at https://github.com/wustl-cig/MBDL_Pruning .

Shirin Shoushtari, Jiaming Liu, Yuyang Hu et al.

There is a growing interest in deep model-based architectures (DMBAs) for solving imaging inverse problems by combining physical measurement models and learned image priors specified using convolutional neural nets (CNNs). For example, well-known frameworks for systematically designing DMBAs include plug-and-play priors (PnP), deep unfolding (DU), and deep equilibrium models (DEQ). While the empirical performance and theoretical properties of DMBAs have been widely investigated, the existing work in the area has primarily focused on their performance when the desired image prior is known exactly. This work addresses the gap in the prior work by providing new theoretical and numerical insights into DMBAs under mismatched CNN priors. Mismatched priors arise naturally when there is a distribution shift between training and testing data, for example, due to test images being from a different distribution than images used for training the CNN prior. They also arise when the CNN prior used for inference is an approximation of some desired statistical estimator (MAP or MMSE). Our theoretical analysis provides explicit error bounds on the solution due to the mismatched CNN priors under a set of clearly specified assumptions. Our numerical results compare the empirical performance of DMBAs under realistic distribution shifts and approximate statistical estimators.

Weijie Gan, Chunwei Ying, Parna Eshraghi et al.

Deep equilibrium models (DEQ) have emerged as a powerful alternative to deep unfolding (DU) for image reconstruction. DEQ models-implicit neural networks with effectively infinite number of layers-were shown to achieve state-of-the-art image reconstruction without the memory complexity associated with DU. While the performance of DEQ has been widely investigated, the existing work has primarily focused on the settings where groundtruth data is available for training. We present self-supervised deep equilibrium model (SelfDEQ) as the first self-supervised reconstruction framework for training model-based implicit networks from undersampled and noisy MRI measurements. Our theoretical results show that SelfDEQ can compensate for unbalanced sampling across multiple acquisitions and match the performance of fully supervised DEQ. Our numerical results on in-vivo MRI data show that SelfDEQ leads to state-of-the-art performance using only undersampled and noisy training data.

Yuyang Hu, Shichun Liu, Yanwei Yue et al.

Memory has emerged, and will continue to remain, a core capability of foundation model-based agents. As research on agent memory rapidly expands and attracts unprecedented attention, the field has also become increasingly fragmented. Existing works that fall under the umbrella of agent memory often differ substantially in their motivations, implementations, and evaluation protocols, while the proliferation of loosely defined memory terminologies has further obscured conceptual clarity. Traditional taxonomies such as long/short-term memory have proven insufficient to capture the diversity of contemporary agent memory systems. This work aims to provide an up-to-date landscape of current agent memory research. We begin by clearly delineating the scope of agent memory and distinguishing it from related concepts such as LLM memory, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and context engineering. We then examine agent memory through the unified lenses of forms, functions, and dynamics. From the perspective of forms, we identify three dominant realizations of agent memory, namely token-level, parametric, and latent memory. From the perspective of functions, we propose a finer-grained taxonomy that distinguishes factual, experiential, and working memory. From the perspective of dynamics, we analyze how memory is formed, evolved, and retrieved over time. To support practical development, we compile a comprehensive summary of memory benchmarks and open-source frameworks. Beyond consolidation, we articulate a forward-looking perspective on emerging research frontiers, including memory automation, reinforcement learning integration, multimodal memory, multi-agent memory, and trustworthiness issues. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a conceptual foundation for rethinking memory as a first-class primitive in the design of future agentic intelligence.

Harry Gao, Weijie Gan, Yuyang Hu et al.

Diffusion bridges (DBs) are a class of diffusion models that enable faster sampling by interpolating between two paired image distributions. Training traditional DBs for image reconstruction requires high-quality reference images, which limits their applicability to settings where such references are unavailable. We propose SelfDB as a novel self-supervised method for training DBs directly on available noisy measurements without any high-quality reference images. SelfDB formulates the diffusion process by further sub-sampling the available measurements two additional times and training a neural network to reverse the corresponding degradation process by using the available measurements as the training targets. We validate SelfDB on compressed sensing MRI, showing its superior performance compared to the denoising diffusion models.

Tingjun Liu, Chicago Y. Park, Yuyang Hu et al.

Diffusion-based inverse problem solvers (DIS) have recently shown outstanding performance in compressed-sensing parallel MRI reconstruction by combining diffusion priors with physical measurement models. However, they typically rely on pre-calibrated coil sensitivity maps (CSMs) and ground truth images, making them often impractical: CSMs are difficult to estimate accurately under heavy undersampling and ground-truth images are often unavailable. We propose Calibration-free Measurement Score-based diffusion Model (C-MSM), a new method that eliminates these dependencies by jointly performing automatic CSM estimation and self-supervised learning of measurement scores directly from k-space data. C-MSM reconstructs images by approximating the full posterior distribution through stochastic sampling over partial measurement posterior scores, while simultaneously estimating CSMs. Experiments on the multi-coil brain fastMRI dataset show that C-MSM achieves reconstruction performance close to DIS with clean diffusion priors -- even without access to clean training data and pre-calibrated CSMs.

Weijie Gan, Shirin Shoushtari, Yuyang Hu et al.

Plug-and-play (PnP) prior is a well-known class of methods for solving imaging inverse problems by computing fixed-points of operators combining physical measurement models and learned image denoisers. While PnP methods have been extensively used for image recovery with known measurement operators, there is little work on PnP for solving blind inverse problems. We address this gap by presenting a new block-coordinate PnP (BC-PnP) method that efficiently solves this joint estimation problem by introducing learned denoisers as priors on both the unknown image and the unknown measurement operator. We present a new convergence theory for BC-PnP compatible with blind inverse problems by considering nonconvex data-fidelity terms and expansive denoisers. Our theory analyzes the convergence of BC-PnP to a stationary point of an implicit function associated with an approximate minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) denoiser. We numerically validate our method on two blind inverse problems: automatic coil sensitivity estimation in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and blind image deblurring. Our results show that BC-PnP provides an efficient and principled framework for using denoisers as PnP priors for jointly estimating measurement operators and images.

Yuyang Hu, Jiaming Liu, Xiaojian Xu et al.

Regularization by denoising (RED) is a widely-used framework for solving inverse problems by leveraging image denoisers as image priors. Recent work has reported the state-of-the-art performance of RED in a number of imaging applications using pre-trained deep neural nets as denoisers. Despite the recent progress, the stable convergence of RED algorithms remains an open problem. The existing RED theory only guarantees stability for convex data-fidelity terms and nonexpansive denoisers. This work addresses this issue by developing a new monotone RED (MRED) algorithm, whose convergence does not require nonexpansiveness of the deep denoising prior. Simulations on image deblurring and compressive sensing recovery from random matrices show the stability of MRED even when the traditional RED algorithm diverges.

Haoming Lin, Yuyang Hu, Siping Chen et al.

Fine-grained classification of cervical cells into different abnormality levels is of great clinical importance but remains very challenging. Contrary to traditional classification methods that rely on hand-crafted or engineered features, convolution neural network (CNN) can classify cervical cells based on automatically learned deep features. However, CNN in previous studies do not involve cell morphological information, and it is unknown whether morphological features can be directly modeled by CNN to classify cervical cells. This paper presents a CNN-based method that combines cell image appearance with cell morphology for classification of cervical cells in Pap smear. The training cervical cell dataset consists of adaptively re-sampled image patches coarsely centered on the nuclei. Several CNN models (AlexNet, GoogleNet, ResNet and DenseNet) pre-trained on ImageNet dataset were fine-tuned on the cervical dataset for comparison. The proposed method is evaluated on the Herlev cervical dataset by five-fold cross-validation at patient level splitting. Results show that by adding cytoplasm and nucleus masks as raw morphological information into appearance-based CNN learning, higher classification accuracies can be achieved in general. Among the four CNN models, GoogleNet fed with both morphological and appearance information obtains the highest classification accuracies of 94.5% for 2-class classification task and 64.5% for 7-class classification task. Our method demonstrates that combining cervical cell morphology with appearance information can provide improved classification performance, which is clinically important for early diagnosis of cervical dysplastic changes.