Liyue Shen

Rui Yan, Liangqiong Qu, Qingyue Wei et al.

The collection and curation of large-scale medical datasets from multiple institutions is essential for training accurate deep learning models, but privacy concerns often hinder data sharing. Federated learning (FL) is a promising solution that enables privacy-preserving collaborative learning among different institutions, but it generally suffers from performance deterioration due to heterogeneous data distributions and a lack of quality labeled data. In this paper, we present a robust and label-efficient self-supervised FL framework for medical image analysis. Our method introduces a novel Transformer-based self-supervised pre-training paradigm that pre-trains models directly on decentralized target task datasets using masked image modeling, to facilitate more robust representation learning on heterogeneous data and effective knowledge transfer to downstream models. Extensive empirical results on simulated and real-world medical imaging non-IID federated datasets show that masked image modeling with Transformers significantly improves the robustness of models against various degrees of data heterogeneity. Notably, under severe data heterogeneity, our method, without relying on any additional pre-training data, achieves an improvement of 5.06%, 1.53% and 4.58% in test accuracy on retinal, dermatology and chest X-ray classification compared to the supervised baseline with ImageNet pre-training. In addition, we show that our federated self-supervised pre-training methods yield models that generalize better to out-of-distribution data and perform more effectively when fine-tuning with limited labeled data, compared to existing FL algorithms. The code is available at https://github.com/rui-yan/SSL-FL.

Lixuan Chen, Zhongnan Liu, Jesse Hamilton et al.

Prospective reconstruction is crucial in many clinical applications such as MRI-guided radiotherapy, which demands accurate image reconstruction and fast motion estimation from currently acquired measurements. However, prospective reconstruction remains challenging due to ultra-sparse sampling and stringent latency requirements. In this work, we propose PDMR, a Prospective Dynamic 3D MRI Reconstruction framework with latent-space motion tracking. Our core idea is to learn an efficient and generalizable latent manifold of motion fields offline, enabling rapid online adaptation for prospective reconstruction. Specifically, we parameterize the deformation vector fields (DVFs) on a low-dimensional manifold, effectively reducing the search space for fast online adaptation, and employ a tri-plane representation to achieve geometry-aware and memory-efficient encoding of 3D motion. Experiments on both XCAT digital phantoms and in-house abdominal MRI datasets demonstrate that PDMR achieves high-fidelity and temporally consistent reconstruction across multiple prospective scenarios (Immediate and After-2min), outperforming state-of-the-art retrospective and online methods. Our results suggest a promising pathway toward ultra-fast, motion-aware prospective MRI reconstruction in clinical practice.

Bowen Song, Soo Min Kwon, Zecheng Zhang et al.

Diffusion models have recently emerged as powerful generative priors for solving inverse problems. However, training diffusion models in the pixel space are both data-intensive and computationally demanding, which restricts their applicability as priors for high-dimensional real-world data such as medical images. Latent diffusion models, which operate in a much lower-dimensional space, offer a solution to these challenges. However, incorporating latent diffusion models to solve inverse problems remains a challenging problem due to the nonlinearity of the encoder and decoder. To address these issues, we propose \textit{ReSample}, an algorithm that can solve general inverse problems with pre-trained latent diffusion models. Our algorithm incorporates data consistency by solving an optimization problem during the reverse sampling process, a concept that we term as hard data consistency. Upon solving this optimization problem, we propose a novel resampling scheme to map the measurement-consistent sample back onto the noisy data manifold and theoretically demonstrate its benefits. Lastly, we apply our algorithm to solve a wide range of linear and nonlinear inverse problems in both natural and medical images, demonstrating that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, including those based on pixel-space diffusion models.

Jiankun Zhao, Bowen Song, Liyue Shen

Diffusion models have been demonstrated as strong priors for solving general inverse problems. Most existing Diffusion model-based Inverse Problem Solvers (DIS) employ a plug-and-play approach to guide the sampling trajectory with either projections or gradients. Though effective, these methods generally necessitate hundreds of sampling steps, posing a dilemma between inference time and reconstruction quality. In this work, we try to push the boundary of inference steps to 1-2 NFEs while still maintaining high reconstruction quality. To achieve this, we propose to leverage a pretrained distillation of diffusion model, namely consistency model, as the data prior. The key to achieving few-step guidance is to enforce two types of constraints during the sampling process of the consistency model: soft measurement constraint with ControlNet and hard measurement constraint via optimization. Supporting both single-step reconstruction and multistep refinement, the proposed framework further provides a way to trade image quality with additional computational cost. Within comparable NFEs, our method achieves new state-of-the-art in diffusion-based inverse problem solving, showcasing the significant potential of employing prior-based inverse problem solvers for real-world applications. Code is available at: https://github.com/BioMed-AI-Lab-U-Michgan/cosign.

Zirui Gong, Liyue Shen, Yanjun Zhang et al.

The collaborative nature of federated learning (FL) poses a major threat in the form of manipulation of local training data and local updates, known as the Byzantine poisoning attack. To address this issue, many Byzantine-robust aggregation rules (AGRs) have been proposed to filter out or moderate suspicious local updates uploaded by Byzantine participants. This paper introduces a novel approach called AGRAMPLIFIER, aiming to simultaneously improve the robustness, fidelity, and efficiency of the existing AGRs. The core idea of AGRAMPLIFIER is to amplify the "morality" of local updates by identifying the most repressive features of each gradient update, which provides a clearer distinction between malicious and benign updates, consequently improving the detection effect. To achieve this objective, two approaches, namely AGRMP and AGRXAI, are proposed. AGRMP organizes local updates into patches and extracts the largest value from each patch, while AGRXAI leverages explainable AI methods to extract the gradient of the most activated features. By equipping AGRAMPLIFIER with the existing Byzantine-robust mechanisms, we successfully enhance the model's robustness, maintaining its fidelity and improving overall efficiency. AGRAMPLIFIER is universally compatible with the existing Byzantine-robust mechanisms. The paper demonstrates its effectiveness by integrating it with all mainstream AGR mechanisms. Extensive evaluations conducted on seven datasets from diverse domains against seven representative poisoning attacks consistently show enhancements in robustness, fidelity, and efficiency, with average gains of 40.08%, 39.18%, and 10.68%, respectively.

Hsin-Ling Hsu, Zizheng Wang, Donghua Zhang et al.

Most existing LLM diagnoses are evaluated on static, single-turn settings where complete patient information is provided upfront, an oversimplification of real clinical practice. We study active diagnosis: the real-life clinical process of starting from initial observation, ordering tests, interpreting results, and updating a differential diagnosis across multiple turns. Through systematic analysis, we identify three recurring failure modes in current LLMs: ungrounded test ordering, unreliable diagnostic update, and degraded multi-turn coherence. Together, these failures reveal a core deficit: existing medical training data teaches models to reason from complete information but not to act under evolving, partial evidence. To address this gap, we introduce MedAction, a tree-structured distillation pipeline that synthesizes diverse and high-quality multi-turn diagnostic trajectories via LLM-environment interaction. We propose two knowledge-graph-grounded metrics to filter trajectory quality: Disease Trajectory Consistency (DTC), which tracks whether the model's hypothesis converges toward the correct diagnosis, and Reasoning-Action Consistency (RAC), which verifies that belief updates are driven by gathered evidence. Using this pipeline, we construct MedAction-32K, a dataset of 32,681 trajectories from 2,896 PMC cases. Fine-tuning an 8B model on MedAction-32K achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on both MedR-Bench and our curated MedAction-300-Hard benchmark, pushing the edge for open-source medical LLMs.

Haijie Yuan, Chaoyan Huang, Srijita Bandopadhyay et al.

3D volumetric reconstruction from incomplete or noisy measurements is a fundamental problem in medical imaging and computational tomography. Deep image prior (DIP)-based methods have recently shown strong capability for solving inverse problems without requiring large training datasets. However, directly extending DIP to 3D reconstruction by fully 3D networks can incur high computational cost, while slice-by-slice 2D DIP approaches may lead to inter-slice inconsistencies due to the lack of explicit regularization along the third direction. In this paper, we propose a novel volumetric reconstruction framework, Fractional-gradient Autoencoding Sequential Tomography DIP (FAST-DIP), which integrates input-adaptive sequential deep image prior modeling of slices with fractional sparsity regularization to capture inter-slice dependencies. Specifically, we introduce a fractionall1/l2-based sparsity prior on the gradients along the slice (z) direction to explicitly enforce inter-slice structural consistency. We further provide theoretical analysis of the proposed alternating minimization algorithm under the majorization-minimization (MM) framework, establishing monotonic descent of the objective function and convergence to a critical point under the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property. Experimental results for 3D X-ray computed tomography (CT) reconstruction demonstrate that the proposed method improved reconstruction quality and structural consistency compared with existing DIP-based approaches.

Huijie Zhang, Jinfan Zhou, Yifu Lu et al.

In this work, we investigate an intriguing and prevalent phenomenon of diffusion models which we term as "consistent model reproducibility": given the same starting noise input and a deterministic sampler, different diffusion models often yield remarkably similar outputs. We confirm this phenomenon through comprehensive experiments, implying that different diffusion models consistently reach the same data distribution and scoring function regardless of diffusion model frameworks, model architectures, or training procedures. More strikingly, our further investigation implies that diffusion models are learning distinct distributions affected by the training data size. This is supported by the fact that the model reproducibility manifests in two distinct training regimes: (i) "memorization regime", where the diffusion model overfits to the training data distribution, and (ii) "generalization regime", where the model learns the underlying data distribution. Our study also finds that this valuable property generalizes to many variants of diffusion models, including those for conditional use, solving inverse problems, and model fine-tuning. Finally, our work raises numerous intriguing theoretical questions for future investigation and highlights practical implications regarding training efficiency, model privacy, and the controlled generation of diffusion models.

Chenwei Wu, David Restrepo, Zitao Shuai et al.

In-context learning (ICL) with Large Vision Models (LVMs) presents a promising avenue in medical image segmentation by reducing the reliance on extensive labeling. However, the ICL performance of LVMs highly depends on the choices of visual prompts and suffers from domain shifts. While existing works leveraging LVMs for medical tasks have focused mainly on model-centric approaches like fine-tuning, we study an orthogonal data-centric perspective on how to select good visual prompts to facilitate generalization to medical domain. In this work, we propose a label-efficient in-context medical segmentation method by introducing a novel Meta-driven Visual Prompt Selection mechanism (MVPS), where a prompt retriever obtained from a meta-learning framework actively selects the optimal images as prompts to promote model performance and generalizability. Evaluated on 8 datasets and 4 tasks across 3 medical imaging modalities, our proposed approach demonstrates consistent gains over existing methods under different scenarios, improving both computational and label efficiency. Finally, we show that MVPS is a flexible, finetuning-free module that could be easily plugged into different backbones and combined with other model-centric approaches.

Chenhui Zhao, Liyue Shen

Precision medicine, such as patient-adaptive treatments assisted by medical image analysis, poses new challenges for segmentation algorithms in adapting to new patients, due to the large variability across different patients and the limited availability of annotated data for each patient. In this work, we propose a data-efficient segmentation algorithm, namely Part-aware Prompted Segment Anything Model ($P^2SAM$). Without any model fine-tuning, $P^2SAM$ enables seamless adaptation to any new patients relying only on one-shot patient-specific data. We introduce a novel part-aware prompt mechanism to select multiple-point prompts based on the part-level features of the one-shot data, which can be extensively integrated into different promptable segmentation models, such as SAM and SAM 2. Moreover, to determine the optimal number of parts for each specific case, we propose a distribution-guided retrieval approach that further enhances the robustness of the part-aware prompt mechanism. $P^2SAM$ improves the performance by +8.0% and +2.0% mean Dice score for two different patient-adaptive segmentation applications, respectively. In addition, $P^2SAM$ also exhibits impressive generalizability in other adaptive segmentation tasks in the natural image domain, e.g., +6.4% mIoU within personalized object segmentation task. The code is available at: https://github.com/Zch0414/p2sam

Zitao Shuai, Chenwei Wu, Zhengxu Tang et al.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have achieved remarkable success in diverse and high-quality text-to-image(T2I) generation. However, how text and image latents individually and jointly contribute to the semantics of generated images, remain largely unexplored. Through our investigation of DiT's latent space, we have uncovered key findings that unlock the potential for zero-shot fine-grained semantic editing: (1) Both the text and image spaces in DiTs are inherently decomposable. (2) These spaces collectively form a disentangled semantic representation space, enabling precise and fine-grained semantic control. (3) Effective image editing requires the combined use of both text and image latent spaces. Leveraging these insights, we propose a simple and effective Extract-Manipulate-Sample (EMS) framework for zero-shot fine-grained image editing. Our approach first utilizes a multi-modal Large Language Model to convert input images and editing targets into text descriptions. We then linearly manipulate text embeddings based on the desired editing degree and employ constrained score distillation sampling to manipulate image embeddings. We quantify the disentanglement degree of the latent space of diffusion models by proposing a new metric. To evaluate fine-grained editing performance, we introduce a comprehensive benchmark incorporating both human annotations, manual evaluation, and automatic metrics. We have conducted extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis to thoroughly uncover the semantic disentanglement properties of the diffusion transformer, as well as the effectiveness of our proposed method. Our annotated benchmark dataset is publicly available at https://anonymous.com/anonymous/EMS-Benchmark, facilitating reproducible research in this domain.

Jing Jia, Liyue Shen, Guanyang Wang

Diffusion models typically generate image batches from independent Gaussian initial noises. We argue that this independence assumption is only one choice within a broader class of valid joint noise designs. Instead, one can specify a coupling of the initial noises: each noise remains marginally standard Gaussian, so the pretrained diffusion model receives the same single-sample input distribution, while the dependence across samples is chosen by design. This reframes initial-noise control from selecting or optimizing individual seeds to designing the dependence structure of a multi-sample gallery. This view gives a general framework for initial-noise design, covering several existing methods as special cases and leading naturally to new coupled-noise constructions. Coupled noise can improve generation on its own without adding sampling cost, and it is flexible enough to serve as a structured initialization for optimization-based pipelines when additional computation is available. Empirically, repulsive Gaussian coupling improves gallery diversity on SD1.5, SDXL, and SD3 while largely preserving prompt alignment and image quality. It matches or outperforms recent test-time noise-optimization baselines on several diversity metrics at the same sampling cost as independent generation. Subspace couplings also support fixed-object background generation, producing diverse, natural backgrounds compared with specialized inpainting baselines, with a tunable trade-off in foreground fidelity.

James Song, Yifan Wang, Chuan Zhou et al.

Early diagnosis of lung cancer is challenging due to biological uncertainty and the limited understanding of the biological mechanisms driving nodule progression. To address this, we propose Nodule-Aligned Multimodal (Latent) Diffusion (NAMD), a novel framework that predicts lung nodule progression by generating 1-year follow-up nodule computed tomography images with baseline scans and the patient's and nodule's Electronic Health Record (EHR). NAMD introduces a nodule-aligned latent space, where distances between latents directly correspond to changes in nodule attributes, and utilizes an LLM-driven control mechanism to condition the diffusion backbone on patient data. On the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) dataset, our method synthesizes follow-up nodule images that achieve an AUROC of 0.805 and an AUPRC of 0.346 for lung nodule malignancy prediction, significantly outperforming both baseline scans and state-of-the-art synthesis methods, while closely approaching the performance of real follow-up scans (AUROC: 0.819, AUPRC: 0.393). These results demonstrate that NAMD captures clinically relevant features of lung nodule progression, facilitating earlier and more accurate diagnosis.

Jason Hu, Bowen Song, Jeffrey A. Fessler et al.

Diffusion models have achieved excellent success in solving inverse problems due to their ability to learn strong image priors, but existing approaches require a large training dataset of images that should come from the same distribution as the test dataset. When the training and test distributions are mismatched, artifacts and hallucinations can occur in reconstructed images due to the incorrect priors. In this work, we systematically study out of distribution (OOD) problems where a known training distribution is first provided. We first study the setting where only a single measurement obtained from the unknown test distribution is available. Next we study the setting where a very small sample of data belonging to the test distribution is available, and our goal is still to reconstruct an image from a measurement that came from the test distribution. In both settings, we use a patch-based diffusion prior that learns the image distribution solely from patches. Furthermore, in the first setting, we include a self-supervised loss that helps the network output maintain consistency with the measurement. Extensive experiments show that in both settings, the patch-based method can obtain high quality image reconstructions that can outperform whole-image models and can compete with methods that have access to large in-distribution training datasets. Furthermore, we show how whole-image models are prone to memorization and overfitting, leading to artifacts in the reconstructions, while a patch-based model can resolve these issues.

Xiaoyu Qiu, Taewon Yang, Zhanhao Liu et al.

Plug-and-play diffusion priors (PnPDP) have become a powerful paradigm for solving inverse problems in scientific and engineering domains. Yet, current evaluations of reconstruction quality emphasize point-estimate accuracy metrics on a single sample, which do not reflect the stochastic nature of PnPDP solvers and the intrinsic uncertainty of inverse problems, critical for scientific tasks. This creates a fundamental mismatch: in inverse problems, the desired output is typically a posterior distribution and most PnPDP solvers induce a distribution over reconstructions, but existing benchmarks only evaluate a single reconstruction, ignoring distributional characterization such as uncertainty. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic study to benchmark the uncertainty quantification (UQ) of existing diffusion inverse solvers. Specifically, we design a rigorous toy model simulation to evaluate the uncertainty behavior of various PnPDP solvers, and propose a UQ-driven categorization. Through extensive experiments on toy simulations and diverse real-world scientific inverse problems, we observe uncertainty behaviors consistent with our taxonomy and theoretical justification, providing new insights for evaluating and understanding the uncertainty for PnPDPs.

Jing Jia, Wei Yuan, Sifan Liu et al.

Can a diffusion model trained on bedrooms recover human faces? Diffusion models are widely used as priors for inverse problems, but standard approaches usually assume a high-fidelity model trained on data that closely match the unknown signal. In practice, one often must use a mismatched or low-fidelity diffusion prior. Surprisingly, these weak priors often perform nearly as well as full-strength, in-domain baselines. We study when and why inverse solvers are robust to weak diffusion priors. Through extensive experiments, we find that weak priors succeed when measurements are highly informative (e.g., many observed pixels), and we identify regimes where they fail. Our theory, based on Bayesian consistency, gives conditions under which high-dimensional measurements make the posterior concentrate near the true signal. These results provide a principled justification on when weak diffusion priors can be used reliably.

Liang Qiu, Liyue Shen, Lianli Liu et al.

During and after a course of therapy, imaging is routinely used to monitor the disease progression and assess the treatment responses. Despite of its significance, reliably capturing and predicting the spatial-temporal anatomic changes from a sequence of patient-specific image series presents a considerable challenge. Thus, the development of a computational framework becomes highly desirable for a multitude of practical applications. In this context, we propose a strategy of Spatial-Temporal Neural Representation learning with Prior embedding (ST-NeRP) for patient-specific imaging study. Our strategy involves leveraging an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to encode the image at the reference time point into a prior embedding. Subsequently, a spatial-temporally continuous deformation function is learned through another INR network. This network is trained using the whole patient-specific image sequence, enabling the prediction of deformation fields at various target time points. The efficacy of the ST-NeRP model is demonstrated through its application to diverse sequential image series, including 4D CT and longitudinal CT datasets within thoracic and abdominal imaging. The proposed ST-NeRP model exhibits substantial potential in enabling the monitoring of anatomical changes within a patient throughout the therapeutic journey.

Bowen Song, Zecheng Zhang, Zhaoxu Luo et al.

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks, producing high-quality outputs across diverse domains. However, how the generated data responds to the initial noise perturbation in diffusion models remains under-explored, which hinders understanding the controllability of the sampling process. In this work, we first observe an interesting phenomenon: the relationship between the change of generation outputs and the scale of initial noise perturbation is highly linear through the diffusion ODE sampling. Then we provide both theoretical and empirical study to justify this linearity property of this input-output (noise-generation data) relationship. Inspired by these new insights, we propose a novel Controllable and Constrained Sampling method (CCS) together with a new controller algorithm for diffusion models to sample with desired statistical properties while preserving good sample quality. We perform extensive experiments to compare our proposed sampling approach with other methods on both sampling controllability and sampled data quality. Results show that our CCS method achieves more precisely controlled sampling while maintaining superior sample quality and diversity.

Zitao Shuai, Chenwei Wu, Zhengxu Tang et al.

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have recently achieved remarkable success in text-guided image generation. In image editing, DiTs project text and image inputs to a joint latent space, from which they decode and synthesize new images. However, it remains largely unexplored how multimodal information collectively forms this joint space and how they guide the semantics of the synthesized images. In this paper, we investigate the latent space of DiT models and uncover two key properties: First, DiT's latent space is inherently semantically disentangled, where different semantic attributes can be controlled by specific editing directions. Second, consistent semantic editing requires utilizing the entire joint latent space, as neither encoded image nor text alone contains enough semantic information. We show that these editing directions can be obtained directly from text prompts, enabling precise semantic control without additional training or mask annotations. Based on these insights, we propose a simple yet effective Encode-Identify-Manipulate (EIM) framework for zero-shot fine-grained image editing. Specifically, we first encode both the given source image and the text prompt that describes the image, to obtain the joint latent embedding. Then, using our proposed Hessian Score Distillation Sampling (HSDS) method, we identify editing directions that control specific target attributes while preserving other image features. These directions are guided by text prompts and used to manipulate the latent embeddings. Moreover, we propose a new metric to quantify the disentanglement degree of the latent space of diffusion models. Extensive experiment results on our new curated benchmark dataset and analysis demonstrate DiT's disentanglement properties and effectiveness of the EIM framework.

Zhaoxu Luo, Bowen Song, Liyue Shen

During the acquisition of satellite images, there is generally a trade-off between spatial resolution and temporal resolution (acquisition frequency) due to the onboard sensors of satellite imaging systems. High-resolution satellite images are very important for land crop monitoring, urban planning, wildfire management and a variety of applications. It is a significant yet challenging task to achieve high spatial-temporal resolution in satellite imaging. With the advent of diffusion models, we can now learn strong generative priors to generate realistic satellite images with high resolution, which can be utilized to promote the super-resolution task as well. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based fusion algorithm called \textbf{SatDiffMoE} that can take an arbitrary number of sequential low-resolution satellite images at the same location as inputs, and fuse them into one high-resolution reconstructed image with more fine details, by leveraging and fusing the complementary information from different time points. Our algorithm is highly flexible and allows training and inference on arbitrary number of low-resolution images. Experimental results show that our proposed SatDiffMoE method not only achieves superior performance for the satellite image super-resolution tasks on a variety of datasets, but also gets an improved computational efficiency with reduced model parameters, compared with previous methods.

Bowen Song, Jason Hu, Zhaoxu Luo et al.

Diffusion models face significant challenges when employed for large-scale medical image reconstruction in real practice such as 3D Computed Tomography (CT). Due to the demanding memory, time, and data requirements, it is difficult to train a diffusion model directly on the entire volume of high-dimensional data to obtain an efficient 3D diffusion prior. Existing works utilizing diffusion priors on single 2D image slice with hand-crafted cross-slice regularization would sacrifice the z-axis consistency, which results in severe artifacts along the z-axis. In this work, we propose a novel framework that enables learning the 3D image prior through position-aware 3D-patch diffusion score blending for reconstructing large-scale 3D medical images. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to utilize a 3D-patch diffusion prior for 3D medical image reconstruction. Extensive experiments on sparse view and limited angle CT reconstruction show that our DiffusionBlend method significantly outperforms previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on real-world CT reconstruction problems with high-dimensional 3D image (i.e., $256 \times 256 \times 500$). Our algorithm also comes with better or comparable computational efficiency than previous state-of-the-art methods.

Jason Hu, Bowen Song, Xiaojian Xu et al.

Diffusion models can learn strong image priors from underlying data distribution and use them to solve inverse problems, but the training process is computationally expensive and requires lots of data. Such bottlenecks prevent most existing works from being feasible for high-dimensional and high-resolution data such as 3D images. This paper proposes a method to learn an efficient data prior for the entire image by training diffusion models only on patches of images. Specifically, we propose a patch-based position-aware diffusion inverse solver, called PaDIS, where we obtain the score function of the whole image through scores of patches and their positional encoding and utilize this as the prior for solving inverse problems. First of all, we show that this diffusion model achieves an improved memory efficiency and data efficiency while still maintaining the capability to generate entire images via positional encoding. Additionally, the proposed PaDIS model is highly flexible and can be plugged in with different diffusion inverse solvers (DIS). We demonstrate that the proposed PaDIS approach enables solving various inverse problems in both natural and medical image domains, including CT reconstruction, deblurring, and superresolution, given only patch-based priors. Notably, PaDIS outperforms previous DIS methods trained on entire image priors in the case of limited training data, demonstrating the data efficiency of our proposed approach by learning patch-based prior.

Zitao Shuai, Chenwei Wu, Zhengxu Tang et al.

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) has emerged as an effective scheme for multimodal representation learning, but its reliance on large-scale multimodal data poses significant challenges for medical applications. Federated learning (FL) offers a promising solution to scale up the dataset for medical VLP while preserving data privacy. However, we observe that client data heterogeneity in real-world scenarios could cause models to learn biased cross-modal alignment during local pre-training. This would limit the transferability of the federally learned representation model on downstream tasks. To address this challenge, we propose Federated Distributionally Robust Alignment (FedDRA), a framework for federated VLP that achieves robust vision-language alignment under heterogeneous conditions. Based on client datasets, we construct a distribution family that encompasses potential test-time domains, and apply a distributionally robust framework to optimize the pre-trained model's performance across this distribution space. This approach bridges the gap between pre-training samples and downstream applications. To avoid over-fitting on client-specific information, we use anchor representation from the global model to guide the local training, and adopt a two-stage approach to first tune deeper layers before updating the entire network. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate FedDRA's effectiveness in enhancing medical federated VLP under data heterogeneity. Our method also adapts well to various medical pre-training methods.

Zongyu Li, Jason Hu, Xiaojian Xu et al.

Phase retrieval (PR) is a crucial problem in many imaging applications. This study focuses on resolving the holographic phase retrieval problem in situations where the measurements are affected by a combination of Poisson and Gaussian noise, which commonly occurs in optical imaging systems. To address this problem, we propose a new algorithm called "AWFS" that uses the accelerated Wirtinger flow (AWF) with a score function as generative prior. Specifically, we formulate the PR problem as an optimization problem that incorporates both data fidelity and regularization terms. We calculate the gradient of the log-likelihood function for PR and determine its corresponding Lipschitz constant. Additionally, we introduce a generative prior in our regularization framework by using score matching to capture information about the gradient of image prior distributions. We provide theoretical analysis that establishes a critical-point convergence guarantee for the proposed algorithm. The results of our simulation experiments on three different datasets show the following: 1) By using the PG likelihood model, the proposed algorithm improves reconstruction compared to algorithms based solely on Gaussian or Poisson likelihood. 2) The proposed score-based image prior method, performs better than the method based on denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM), as well as plug-and-play alternating direction method of multipliers (PnP-ADMM) and regularization by denoising (RED).

Fabian Falck, Yuyin Zhou, Emma Rocheteau et al.

A collection of the accepted abstracts for the Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) symposium 2021. This index is not complete, as some accepted abstracts chose to opt-out of inclusion.

Yang Song, Liyue Shen, Lei Xing et al.

Reconstructing medical images from partial measurements is an important inverse problem in Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). Existing solutions based on machine learning typically train a model to directly map measurements to medical images, leveraging a training dataset of paired images and measurements. These measurements are typically synthesized from images using a fixed physical model of the measurement process, which hinders the generalization capability of models to unknown measurement processes. To address this issue, we propose a fully unsupervised technique for inverse problem solving, leveraging the recently introduced score-based generative models. Specifically, we first train a score-based generative model on medical images to capture their prior distribution. Given measurements and a physical model of the measurement process at test time, we introduce a sampling method to reconstruct an image consistent with both the prior and the observed measurements. Our method does not assume a fixed measurement process during training, and can thus be flexibly adapted to different measurement processes at test time. Empirically, we observe comparable or better performance to supervised learning techniques in several medical imaging tasks in CT and MRI, while demonstrating significantly better generalization to unknown measurement processes.

Liyue Shen, John Pauly, Lei Xing

Image reconstruction is an inverse problem that solves for a computational image based on sampled sensor measurement. Sparsely sampled image reconstruction poses addition challenges due to limited measurements. In this work, we propose an implicit Neural Representation learning methodology with Prior embedding (NeRP) to reconstruct a computational image from sparsely sampled measurements. The method differs fundamentally from previous deep learning-based image reconstruction approaches in that NeRP exploits the internal information in an image prior, and the physics of the sparsely sampled measurements to produce a representation of the unknown subject. No large-scale data is required to train the NeRP except for a prior image and sparsely sampled measurements. In addition, we demonstrate that NeRP is a general methodology that generalizes to different imaging modalities such as CT and MRI. We also show that NeRP can robustly capture the subtle yet significant image changes required for assessing tumor progression.

Liyue Shen, Wei Zhao, Dante Capaldi et al.

Deep learning affords enormous opportunities to augment the armamentarium of biomedical imaging, albeit its design and implementation have potential flaws. Fundamentally, most deep learning models are driven entirely by data without consideration of any prior knowledge, which dramatically increases the complexity of neural networks and limits the application scope and model generalizability. Here we establish a geometry-informed deep learning framework for ultra-sparse 3D tomographic image reconstruction. We introduce a novel mechanism for integrating geometric priors of the imaging system. We demonstrate that the seamless inclusion of known priors is essential to enhance the performance of 3D volumetric computed tomography imaging with ultra-sparse sampling. The study opens new avenues for data-driven biomedical imaging and promises to provide substantially improved imaging tools for various clinical imaging and image-guided interventions.

Liyue Shen, Wentao Zhu, Xiaosong Wang et al.

Multi-domain data are widely leveraged in vision applications taking advantage of complementary information from different modalities, e.g., brain tumor segmentation from multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, due to possible data corruption and different imaging protocols, the availability of images for each domain could vary amongst multiple data sources in practice, which makes it challenging to build a universal model with a varied set of input data. To tackle this problem, we propose a general approach to complete the random missing domain(s) data in real applications. Specifically, we develop a novel multi-domain image completion method that utilizes a generative adversarial network (GAN) with a representational disentanglement scheme to extract shared skeleton encoding and separate flesh encoding across multiple domains. We further illustrate that the learned representation in multi-domain image completion could be leveraged for high-level tasks, e.g., segmentation, by introducing a unified framework consisting of image completion and segmentation with a shared content encoder. The experiments demonstrate consistent performance improvement on three datasets for brain tumor segmentation, prostate segmentation, and facial expression image completion respectively.

Masoud Badiei Khuzani, Liyue Shen, Shahin Shahrampour et al.

We propose a novel supervised learning method to optimize the kernel in the maximum mean discrepancy generative adversarial networks (MMD GANs), and the kernel support vector machines (SVMs). Specifically, we characterize a distributionally robust optimization problem to compute a good distribution for the random feature model of Rahimi and Recht. Due to the fact that the distributional optimization is infinite dimensional, we consider a Monte-Carlo sample average approximation (SAA) to obtain a more tractable finite dimensional optimization problem. We subsequently leverage a particle stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method to solve the derived finite dimensional optimization problem. Based on a mean-field analysis, we then prove that the empirical distribution of the interactive particles system at each iteration of the SGD follows the path of the gradient descent flow on the Wasserstein manifold. We also establish the non-asymptotic consistency of the finite sample estimator. We evaluate our kernel learning method for the hypothesis testing problem by evaluating the kernel MMD statistics, and show that our learning method indeed attains better power of the test for larger threshold values compared to an untrained kernel. Moreover, our empirical evaluation on benchmark data-sets shows the advantage of our kernel learning approach compared to alternative kernel learning methods.

Liyue Shen, Katie Shpanskaya, Edward Lee et al.

Fetal brain imaging is a cornerstone of prenatal screening and early diagnosis of congenital anomalies. Knowledge of fetal gestational age is the key to the accurate assessment of brain development. This study develops an attention-based deep learning model to predict gestational age of the fetal brain. The proposed model is an end-to-end framework that combines key insights from multi-view MRI including axial, coronal, and sagittal views. The model also uses age-activated weakly-supervised attention maps to enable rotation-invariant localization of the fetal brain among background noise. We evaluate our methods on the collected fetal brain MRI cohort with a large age distribution from 125 to 273 days. Our extensive experiments show age prediction performance with R2 = 0.94 using multi-view MRI and attention.

Serena Yeung, Vignesh Ramanathan, Olga Russakovsky et al.

Understanding the simultaneously very diverse and intricately fine-grained set of possible human actions is a critical open problem in computer vision. Manually labeling training videos is feasible for some action classes but doesn't scale to the full long-tailed distribution of actions. A promising way to address this is to leverage noisy data from web queries to learn new actions, using semi-supervised or "webly-supervised" approaches. However, these methods typically do not learn domain-specific knowledge, or rely on iterative hand-tuned data labeling policies. In this work, we instead propose a reinforcement learning-based formulation for selecting the right examples for training a classifier from noisy web search results. Our method uses Q-learning to learn a data labeling policy on a small labeled training dataset, and then uses this to automatically label noisy web data for new visual concepts. Experiments on the challenging Sports-1M action recognition benchmark as well as on additional fine-grained and newly emerging action classes demonstrate that our method is able to learn good labeling policies for noisy data and use this to learn accurate visual concept classifiers.

Liang Zheng, Liyue Shen, Lu Tian et al.

For long time, person re-identification and image search are two separately studied tasks. However, for person re-identification, the effectiveness of local features and the "query-search" mode make it well posed for image search techniques. In the light of recent advances in image search, this paper proposes to treat person re-identification as an image search problem. Specifically, this paper claims two major contributions. 1) By designing an unsupervised Bag-of-Words representation, we are devoted to bridging the gap between the two tasks by integrating techniques from image search in person re-identification. We show that our system sets up an effective yet efficient baseline that is amenable to further supervised/unsupervised improvements. 2) We contribute a new high quality dataset which uses DPM detector and includes a number of distractor images. Our dataset reaches closer to realistic settings, and new perspectives are provided. Compared with approaches that rely on feature-feature match, our method is faster by over two orders of magnitude. Moreover, on three datasets, we report competitive results compared with the state-of-the-art methods.