Tieyong Zeng

Guangwei Gao, Zhengxue Wang, Juncheng Li et al.

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved significant breakthroughs with the development of deep learning. However, these methods are difficult to be applied in real-world scenarios since they are inevitably accompanied by the problems of computational and memory costs caused by the complex operations. To solve this issue, we propose a Lightweight Bimodal Network (LBNet) for SISR. Specifically, an effective Symmetric CNN is designed for local feature extraction and coarse image reconstruction. Meanwhile, we propose a Recursive Transformer to fully learn the long-term dependence of images thus the global information can be fully used to further refine texture details. Studies show that the hybrid of CNN and Transformer can build a more efficient model. Extensive experiments have proved that our LBNet achieves more prominent performance than other state-of-the-art methods with a relatively low computational cost and memory consumption. The code is available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/LBNet.

Yaofang Liu, Xiaodong Cun, Xuebo Liu et al.

The vision and language generative models have been overgrown in recent years. For video generation, various open-sourced models and public-available services have been developed to generate high-quality videos. However, these methods often use a few metrics, e.g., FVD or IS, to evaluate the performance. We argue that it is hard to judge the large conditional generative models from the simple metrics since these models are often trained on very large datasets with multi-aspect abilities. Thus, we propose a novel framework and pipeline for exhaustively evaluating the performance of the generated videos. Our approach involves generating a diverse and comprehensive list of 700 prompts for text-to-video generation, which is based on an analysis of real-world user data and generated with the assistance of a large language model. Then, we evaluate the state-of-the-art video generative models on our carefully designed benchmark, in terms of visual qualities, content qualities, motion qualities, and text-video alignment with 17 well-selected objective metrics. To obtain the final leaderboard of the models, we further fit a series of coefficients to align the objective metrics to the users' opinions. Based on the proposed human alignment method, our final score shows a higher correlation than simply averaging the metrics, showing the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation method.

Guangwei Gao, Zixiang Xu, Juncheng Li et al.

Recently, deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) steered face super-resolution methods have achieved great progress in restoring degraded facial details by jointly training with facial priors. However, these methods have some obvious limitations. On the one hand, multi-task joint learning requires additional marking on the dataset, and the introduced prior network will significantly increase the computational cost of the model. On the other hand, the limited receptive field of CNN will reduce the fidelity and naturalness of the reconstructed facial images, resulting in suboptimal reconstructed images. In this work, we propose an efficient CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network (CTCNet) for face super-resolution tasks, which uses the multi-scale connected encoder-decoder architecture as the backbone. Specifically, we first devise a novel Local-Global Feature Cooperation Module (LGCM), which is composed of a Facial Structure Attention Unit (FSAU) and a Transformer block, to promote the consistency of local facial detail and global facial structure restoration simultaneously. Then, we design an efficient Feature Refinement Module (FRM) to enhance the encoded features. Finally, to further improve the restoration of fine facial details, we present a Multi-scale Feature Fusion Unit (MFFU) to adaptively fuse the features from different stages in the encoder procedure. Extensive evaluations on various datasets have assessed that the proposed CTCNet can outperform other state-of-the-art methods significantly. Source code will be available at https://github.com/IVIPLab/CTCNet.

Jing-Xiao Liao, Sheng-Lai Wei, Chen-Long Xie et al.

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in the field of bearing fault diagnosis. However, this success comes with larger models and more complex computations, which cannot be transferred into industrial fields requiring models to be of high speed, strong portability, and low power consumption. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and deployable model for bearing fault diagnosis, referred to as BearingPGA-Net, to address these challenges. Firstly, aided by a well-trained large model, we train BearingPGA-Net via decoupled knowledge distillation. Despite its small size, our model demonstrates excellent fault diagnosis performance compared to other lightweight state-of-the-art methods. Secondly, we design an FPGA acceleration scheme for BearingPGA-Net using Verilog. This scheme involves the customized quantization and designing programmable logic gates for each layer of BearingPGA-Net on the FPGA, with an emphasis on parallel computing and module reuse to enhance the computational speed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of deploying a CNN-based bearing fault diagnosis model on an FPGA. Experimental results reveal that our deployment scheme achieves over 200 times faster diagnosis speed compared to CPU, while achieving a lower-than-0.4\% performance drop in terms of F1, Recall, and Precision score on our independently-collected bearing dataset. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/asdvfghg/BearingPGA-Net}.

Hansheng Guo, Juncheng Li, Guangwei Gao et al.

Stereo image super-resolution aims to boost the performance of image super-resolution by exploiting the supplementary information provided by binocular systems. Although previous methods have achieved promising results, they did not fully utilize the information of cross-view and intra-view. To further unleash the potential of binocular images, in this letter, we propose a novel Transformerbased parallax fusion module called Parallax Fusion Transformer (PFT). PFT employs a Cross-view Fusion Transformer (CVFT) to utilize cross-view information and an Intra-view Refinement Transformer (IVRT) for intra-view feature refinement. Meanwhile, we adopted the Swin Transformer as the backbone for feature extraction and SR reconstruction to form a pure Transformer architecture called PFT-SSR. Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that PFT-SSR achieves competitive results and outperforms most SOTA methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/MIVRC/PFT-PyTorch.

Juncheng Li, Bodong Cheng, Ying Chen et al.

Transformer-based image denoising methods have achieved encouraging results in the past year. However, it must uses linear operations to model long-range dependencies, which greatly increases model inference time and consumes GPU storage space. Compared with convolutional neural network-based methods, current Transformer-based image denoising methods cannot achieve a balance between performance improvement and resource consumption. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Wavelet Transformer (EWT) for image denoising. Specifically, we use Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Inverse Wavelet Transform (IWT) for downsampling and upsampling, respectively. This method can fully preserve the image features while reducing the image resolution, thereby greatly reducing the device resource consumption of the Transformer model. Furthermore, we propose a novel Dual-stream Feature Extraction Block (DFEB) to extract image features at different levels, which can further reduce model inference time and GPU memory usage. Experiments show that our method speeds up the original Transformer by more than 80%, reduces GPU memory usage by more than 60%, and achieves excellent denoising results. All code will be public.

Yingying Fang, Shuang Wu, Sheng Zhang et al.

Effectively leveraging multimodal data such as various images, laboratory tests and clinical information is gaining traction in a variety of AI-based medical diagnosis and prognosis tasks. Most existing multi-modal techniques only focus on enhancing their performance by leveraging the differences or shared features from various modalities and fusing feature across different modalities. These approaches are generally not optimal for clinical settings, which pose the additional challenges of limited training data, as well as being rife with redundant data or noisy modality channels, leading to subpar performance. To address this gap, we study the robustness of existing methods to data redundancy and noise and propose a generalized dynamic multimodal information bottleneck framework for attaining a robust fused feature representation. Specifically, our information bottleneck module serves to filter out the task-irrelevant information and noises in the fused feature, and we further introduce a sufficiency loss to prevent dropping of task-relevant information, thus explicitly preserving the sufficiency of prediction information in the distilled feature. We validate our model on an in-house and a public COVID19 dataset for mortality prediction as well as two public biomedical datasets for diagnostic tasks. Extensive experiments show that our method surpasses the state-of-the-art and is significantly more robust, being the only method to remain performance when large-scale noisy channels exist. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ayanglab/DMIB.

Bodong Cheng, Juncheng Li, Ying Chen et al.

Image restoration under severe weather is a challenging task. Most of the past works focused on removing rain and haze phenomena in images. However, snow is also an extremely common atmospheric phenomenon that will seriously affect the performance of high-level computer vision tasks, such as object detection and semantic segmentation. Recently, some methods have been proposed for snow removing, and most methods deal with snow images directly as the optimization object. However, the distribution of snow location and shape is complex. Therefore, failure to detect snowflakes / snow streak effectively will affect snow removing and limit the model performance. To solve these issues, we propose a Snow Mask Guided Adaptive Residual Network (SMGARN). Specifically, SMGARN consists of three parts, Mask-Net, Guidance-Fusion Network (GF-Net), and Reconstruct-Net. Firstly, we build a Mask-Net with Self-pixel Attention (SA) and Cross-pixel Attention (CA) to capture the features of snowflakes and accurately localized the location of the snow, thus predicting an accurate snow mask. Secondly, the predicted snow mask is sent into the specially designed GF-Net to adaptively guide the model to remove snow. Finally, an efficient Reconstruct-Net is used to remove the veiling effect and correct the image to reconstruct the final snow-free image. Extensive experiments show that our SMGARN numerically outperforms all existing snow removal methods, and the reconstructed images are clearer in visual contrast. All codes will be available.

Zhifan Gao, Yifeng Guo, Jiajing Zhang et al.

The long acquisition time has limited the accessibility of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) because it leads to patient discomfort and motion artifacts. Although several MRI techniques have been proposed to reduce the acquisition time, compressed sensing in magnetic resonance imaging (CS-MRI) enables fast acquisition without compromising SNR and resolution. However, existing CS-MRI methods suffer from the challenge of aliasing artifacts. This challenge results in the noise-like textures and missing the fine details, thus leading to unsatisfactory reconstruction performance. To tackle this challenge, we propose a hierarchical perception adversarial learning framework (HP-ALF). HP-ALF can perceive the image information in the hierarchical mechanism: image-level perception and patch-level perception. The former can reduce the visual perception difference in the entire image, and thus achieve aliasing artifact removal. The latter can reduce this difference in the regions of the image, and thus recover fine details. Specifically, HP-ALF achieves the hierarchical mechanism by utilizing multilevel perspective discrimination. This discrimination can provide the information from two perspectives (overall and regional) for adversarial learning. It also utilizes a global and local coherent discriminator to provide structure information to the generator during training. In addition, HP-ALF contains a context-aware learning block to effectively exploit the slice information between individual images for better reconstruction performance. The experiments validated on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HP-ALF and its superiority to the comparative methods.

Xiaole Tang, Xile Zhao, Jun Liu et al.

Non-blind deblurring methods achieve decent performance under the accurate blur kernel assumption. Since the kernel uncertainty (i.e. kernel error) is inevitable in practice, semi-blind deblurring is suggested to handle it by introducing the prior of the kernel (or induced) error. However, how to design a suitable prior for the kernel (or induced) error remains challenging. Hand-crafted prior, incorporating domain knowledge, generally performs well but may lead to poor performance when kernel (or induced) error is complex. Data-driven prior, which excessively depends on the diversity and abundance of training data, is vulnerable to out-of-distribution blurs and images. To address this challenge, we suggest a dataset-free deep residual prior for the kernel induced error (termed as residual) expressed by a customized untrained deep neural network, which allows us to flexibly adapt to different blurs and images in real scenarios. By organically integrating the respective strengths of deep priors and hand-crafted priors, we propose an unsupervised semi-blind deblurring model which recovers the latent image from the blurry image and inaccurate blur kernel. To tackle the formulated model, an efficient alternating minimization algorithm is developed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the favorable performance of the proposed method as compared to data-driven and model-driven methods in terms of image quality and the robustness to the kernel error.

Yilin Lyu, Xin Liu, Mingyang Song et al.

Information Bottlenecks (IBs) learn representations that generalize to unseen data by information compression. However, existing IBs are practically unable to guarantee generalization in real-world scenarios due to the vacuous generalization bound. The recent PAC-Bayes IB uses information complexity instead of information compression to establish a connection with the mutual information generalization bound. However, it requires the computation of expensive second-order curvature, which hinders its practical application. In this paper, we establish the connection between the recognizability of representations and the recent functional conditional mutual information (f-CMI) generalization bound, which is significantly easier to estimate. On this basis we propose a Recognizable Information Bottleneck (RIB) which regularizes the recognizability of representations through a recognizability critic optimized by density ratio matching under the Bregman divergence. Extensive experiments on several commonly used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in regularizing the model and estimating the generalization gap.

Dong Li, Shuisheng Zhou, Tieyong Zeng et al.

K-Means algorithm is a popular clustering method. However, it has two limitations: 1) it gets stuck easily in spurious local minima, and 2) the number of clusters k has to be given a priori. To solve these two issues, a multi-prototypes convex merging based K-Means clustering algorithm (MCKM) is presented. First, based on the structure of the spurious local minima of the K-Means problem, a multi-prototypes sampling (MPS) is designed to select the appropriate number of multi-prototypes for data with arbitrary shapes. A theoretical proof is given to guarantee that the multi-prototypes selected by MPS can achieve a constant factor approximation to the optimal cost of the K-Means problem. Then, a merging technique, called convex merging (CM), merges the multi-prototypes to get a better local minima without k being given a priori. Specifically, CM can obtain the optimal merging and estimate the correct k. By integrating these two techniques with K-Means algorithm, the proposed MCKM is an efficient and explainable clustering algorithm for escaping the undesirable local minima of K-Means problem without given k first. Experimental results performed on synthetic and real-world data sets have verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Tingting Wu, Wenna Wu, Ying Yang et al.

The Retinex model is one of the most representative and effective methods for low-light image enhancement. However, the Retinex model does not explicitly tackle the noise problem, and shows unsatisfactory enhancing results. In recent years, due to the excellent performance, deep learning models have been widely used in low-light image enhancement. However, these methods have two limitations: i) The desirable performance can only be achieved by deep learning when a large number of labeled data are available. However, it is not easy to curate massive low/normal-light paired data; ii) Deep learning is notoriously a black-box model [1]. It is difficult to explain their inner-working mechanism and understand their behaviors. In this paper, using a sequential Retinex decomposition strategy, we design a plug-and-play framework based on the Retinex theory for simultaneously image enhancement and noise removal. Meanwhile, we develop a convolutional neural network-based (CNN-based) denoiser into our proposed plug-and-play framework to generate a reflectance component. The final enhanced image is produced by integrating the illumination and reflectance with gamma correction. The proposed plug-and-play framework can facilitate both post hoc and ad hoc interpretability. Extensive experiments on different datasets demonstrate that our framework outcompetes the state-of-the-art methods in both image enhancement and denoising.

Feng-Lei Fan, Yingxin Li, Hanchuan Peng et al.

Throughout history, the development of artificial intelligence, particularly artificial neural networks, has been open to and constantly inspired by the increasingly deepened understanding of the brain, such as the inspiration of neocognitron, which is the pioneering work of convolutional neural networks. Per the motives of the emerging field: NeuroAI, a great amount of neuroscience knowledge can help catalyze the next generation of AI by endowing a network with more powerful capabilities. As we know, the human brain has numerous morphologically and functionally different neurons, while artificial neural networks are almost exclusively built on a single neuron type. In the human brain, neuronal diversity is an enabling factor for all kinds of biological intelligent behaviors. Since an artificial network is a miniature of the human brain, introducing neuronal diversity should be valuable in terms of addressing those essential problems of artificial networks such as efficiency, interpretability, and memory. In this Primer, we first discuss the preliminaries of biological neuronal diversity and the characteristics of information transmission and processing in a biological neuron. Then, we review studies of designing new neurons for artificial networks. Next, we discuss what gains can neuronal diversity bring into artificial networks and exemplary applications in several important fields. Lastly, we discuss the challenges and future directions of neuronal diversity to explore the potential of NeuroAI.

Cheng Chang, Tieyong Zeng

Gaussian process regression (GPR) has been a well-known machine learning method for various applications such as uncertainty quantifications (UQ). However, GPR is inherently a data-driven method, which requires sufficiently large dataset. If appropriate physics constraints (e.g. expressed in partial differential equations) can be incorporated, the amount of data can be greatly reduced and the accuracy further improved. In this work, we propose a hybrid data driven-physics constrained Gaussian process regression framework. We encode the physics knowledge with Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution and derive our model through maximum likelihood (ML) approach. We apply deep kernel learning method. The proposed model learns from both data and physics constraints through the training of a deep neural network, which serves as part of the covariance function in GPR. The proposed model achieves good results in high-dimensional problem, and correctly propagate the uncertainty, with very limited labelled data provided.

Feng-Lei Fan, Hang-Cheng Dong, Zhongming Wu et al.

Inspired by neuronal diversity in the biological neural system, a plethora of studies proposed to design novel types of artificial neurons and introduce neuronal diversity into artificial neural networks. Recently proposed quadratic neuron, which replaces the inner-product operation in conventional neurons with a quadratic one, have achieved great success in many essential tasks. Despite the promising results of quadratic neurons, there is still an unresolved issue: \textit{Is the superior performance of quadratic networks simply due to the increased parameters or due to the intrinsic expressive capability?} Without clarifying this issue, the performance of quadratic networks is always suspicious. Additionally, resolving this issue is reduced to finding killer applications of quadratic networks. In this paper, with theoretical and empirical studies, we show that quadratic networks enjoy parametric efficiency, thereby confirming that the superior performance of quadratic networks is due to the intrinsic expressive capability. This intrinsic expressive ability comes from that quadratic neurons can easily represent nonlinear interaction, while it is hard for conventional neurons. Theoretically, we derive the approximation efficiency of the quadratic network over conventional ones in terms of real space and manifolds. Moreover, from the perspective of the Barron space, we demonstrate that there exists a functional space whose functions can be approximated by quadratic networks in a dimension-free error, but the approximation error of conventional networks is dependent on dimensions. Empirically, experimental results on synthetic data, classic benchmarks, and real-world applications show that quadratic models broadly enjoy parametric efficiency, and the gain of efficiency depends on the task.

Juncheng Li, Hanhui Yang, Qiaosi Yi et al.

Single image denoising (SID) has achieved significant breakthroughs with the development of deep learning. However, the proposed methods are often accompanied by plenty of parameters, which greatly limits their application scenarios. Different from previous works that blindly increase the depth of the network, we explore the degradation mechanism of the noisy image and propose a lightweight Multiple Degradation and Reconstruction Network (MDRN) to progressively remove noise. Meanwhile, we propose two novel Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation Strategies (HMDS) to enable MDRN to learn richer and more accurate features from heterogeneous models, which make it possible to reconstruct higher-quality denoised images under extreme conditions. Extensive experiments show that our MDRN achieves favorable performance against other SID models with fewer parameters. Meanwhile, plenty of ablation studies demonstrate that the introduced HMDS can improve the performance of tiny models or the model under high noise levels, which is extremely useful for related applications.

Hanhui Yang, Juncheng Li, Lok Ming Lui et al.

Fast and accurate MRI reconstruction is a key concern in modern clinical practice. Recently, numerous Deep-Learning methods have been proposed for MRI reconstruction, however, they usually fail to reconstruct sharp details from the subsampled k-space data. To solve this problem, we propose a lightweight and accurate Edge Attention MRI Reconstruction Network (EAMRI) to reconstruct images with edge guidance. Specifically, we design an efficient Edge Prediction Network to directly predict accurate edges from the blurred image. Meanwhile, we propose a novel Edge Attention Module (EAM) to guide the image reconstruction utilizing the extracted edge priors, as inspired by the popular self-attention mechanism. EAM first projects the input image and edges into Q_image, K_edge, and V_image, respectively. Then EAM pairs the Q_image with K_edge along the channel dimension, such that 1) it can search globally for the high-frequency image features that are activated by the edge priors; 2) the overall computation burdens are largely reduced compared with the traditional spatial-wise attention. With the help of EAM, the predicted edge priors can effectively guide the model to reconstruct high-quality MR images with accurate edges. Extensive experiments show that our proposed EAMRI outperforms other methods with fewer parameters and can recover more accurate edges.

Ziwen Wang, Yancheng Yuan, Jiaming Ma et al.

In this paper, we propose a randomly projected convex clustering model for clustering a collection of $n$ high dimensional data points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with $K$ hidden clusters. Compared to the convex clustering model for clustering original data with dimension $d$, we prove that, under some mild conditions, the perfect recovery of the cluster membership assignments of the convex clustering model, if exists, can be preserved by the randomly projected convex clustering model with embedding dimension $m = O(ε^{-2}\log(n))$, where $0 < ε< 1$ is some given parameter. We further prove that the embedding dimension can be improved to be $O(ε^{-2}\log(K))$, which is independent of the number of data points. Extensive numerical experiment results will be presented in this paper to demonstrate the robustness and superior performance of the randomly projected convex clustering model. The numerical results presented in this paper also demonstrate that the randomly projected convex clustering model can outperform the randomly projected K-means model in practice.

Jianfei Li, Chaoyan Huang, Raymond Chan et al.

Spherical image processing has been widely applied in many important fields, such as omnidirectional vision for autonomous cars, global climate modelling, and medical imaging. It is non-trivial to extend an algorithm developed for flat images to the spherical ones. In this work, we focus on the challenging task of spherical image inpainting with deep learning-based regularizer. Instead of a naive application of existing models for planar images, we employ a fast directional spherical Haar framelet transform and develop a novel optimization framework based on a sparsity assumption of the framelet transform. Furthermore, by employing progressive encoder-decoder architecture, a new and better-performed deep CNN denoiser is carefully designed and works as an implicit regularizer. Finally, we use a plug-and-play method to handle the proposed optimization model, which can be implemented efficiently by training the CNN denoiser prior. Numerical experiments are conducted and show that the proposed algorithms can greatly recover damaged spherical images and achieve the best performance over purely using deep learning denoiser and plug-and-play model.

Ao Chen, Jinghua Zhang, Md Mamunur Rahaman et al.

The accurate detection of sperms and impurities is a very challenging task, facing problems such as the small size of targets, indefinite target morphologies, low contrast and resolution of the video, and similarity of sperms and impurities. So far, the detection of sperms and impurities still largely relies on the traditional image processing and detection techniques which only yield limited performance and often require manual intervention in the detection process, therefore unfavorably escalating the time cost and injecting the subjective bias into the analysis. Encouraged by the successes of deep learning methods in numerous object detection tasks, here we report a deep learning model based on Double Branch Feature Extraction Network (DBFEN) and Cross-conjugate Feature Pyramid Networks (CCFPN).DBFEN is designed to extract visual features from tiny objects with a double branch structure, and CCFPN is further introduced to fuse the features extracted by DBFEN to enhance the description of position and high-level semantic information. Our work is the pioneer of introducing deep learning approaches to the detection of sperms and impurities. Experiments show that the highest AP50 of the sperm and impurity detection is 91.13% and 59.64%, which lead its competitors by a substantial margin and establish new state-of-the-art results in this problem.

Jianwei Niu, Hok Shing Wong, Tieyong Zeng

Phase retrieval is an important problem with significant physical and industrial applications. In this paper, we consider the case where the magnitude of the measurement of an underlying signal is corrupted by Gaussian noise. We introduce a convex augmentation approach for phase retrieval based on total variation regularization. In contrast to popular convex relaxation models like PhaseLift, our model can be efficiently solved by a modified semi-proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (sPADMM). The modified sPADMM is more general and flexible than the standard one, and its convergence is also established in this paper. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Fenglei Fan, Juntong Fan, Dayang Wang et al.

The rapid growth of large models' size has far outpaced that of computing resources. To bridge this gap, encouraged by the parsimonious relationship between genotype and phenotype in the brain's growth and development, we propose the so-called Hyper-Compression that turns the model compression into the issue of parameter representation via a hyperfunction. Specifically, it is known that the trajectory of some low-dimensional dynamic systems can fill the high-dimensional space eventually. Thus, Hyper-Compression, using these dynamic systems as the hyperfunctions, represents the parameters of the target network by their corresponding composition number or trajectory length. This suggests a novel mechanism for model compression, substantially different from the existing pruning, quantization, distillation, and decomposition. Along this direction, we methodologically identify a suitable dynamic system with the irrational winding as the hyperfunction and theoretically derive its associated error bound. Next, guided by our theoretical insights, we propose several engineering twists to make the Hyper-Compression pragmatic and effective. Lastly, systematic and comprehensive experiments on \textcolor{black}{NLP models such as LLaMA and Qwen series and vision models} confirm that Hyper-Compression enjoys the following \textbf{PNAS} merits: 1) \textbf{P}referable compression ratio; 2) \textbf{N}o post-hoc retraining; 3) \textbf{A}ffordable inference time; and 4) \textbf{S}hort compression time. It compresses LLaMA2-7B in an hour and achieves close-to-int4-quantization performance, without retraining and with a performance drop of less than 1\%. We have open-sourced our code in https://github.com/Juntongkuki/Hyper-Compression.git for free download and evaluation.

Yu Guo, Guoqing Chen, Tieyong Zeng et al.

Color image restoration methods typically represent images as vectors in Euclidean space or combinations of three monochrome channels. However, they often overlook the correlation between these channels, leading to color distortion and artifacts in the reconstructed image. To address this, we present Quaternion Nuclear Norm Minus Frobenius Norm Minimization (QNMF), a novel approach for color image reconstruction. QNMF utilizes quaternion algebra to capture the relationships among RGB channels comprehensively. By employing a regularization technique that involves nuclear norm minus Frobenius norm, QNMF approximates the underlying low-rank structure of quaternion-encoded color images. Theoretical proofs are provided to ensure the method's mathematical integrity. Demonstrating versatility and efficacy, the QNMF regularizer excels in various color low-level vision tasks, including denoising, deblurring, inpainting, and random impulse noise removal, achieving state-of-the-art results.

Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi et al.

The dream to create AI assistants as capable and versatile as the fictional J.A.R.V.I.S from Iron Man has long captivated imaginations. With the evolution of (multi-modal) large language models ((M)LLMs), this dream is closer to reality, as (M)LLM-based Agents using computing devices (e.g., computers and mobile phones) by operating within the environments and interfaces (e.g., Graphical User Interface (GUI)) provided by operating systems (OS) to automate tasks have significantly advanced. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of these advanced agents, designated as OS Agents. We begin by elucidating the fundamentals of OS Agents, exploring their key components including the environment, observation space, and action space, and outlining essential capabilities such as understanding, planning, and grounding. We then examine methodologies for constructing OS Agents, focusing on domain-specific foundation models and agent frameworks. A detailed review of evaluation protocols and benchmarks highlights how OS Agents are assessed across diverse tasks. Finally, we discuss current challenges and identify promising directions for future research, including safety and privacy, personalization and self-evolution. This survey aims to consolidate the state of OS Agents research, providing insights to guide both academic inquiry and industrial development. An open-source GitHub repository is maintained as a dynamic resource to foster further innovation in this field. We present a 9-page version of our work, accepted by ACL 2025, to provide a concise overview to the domain.

Chenhan Jin, Kaiwen Zhou, Bo Han et al.

We consider stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data with the guarantee of being differentially private (DP). Most prior works on differentially private stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data are either restricted to gradient descent (GD) or performed multi-times clipping on stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which is inefficient for large-scale problems. In this paper, we consider a one-time clipping strategy and provide principled analyses of its bias and private mean estimation. We establish new convergence results and improved complexity bounds for the proposed algorithm called AClipped-dpSGD for constrained and unconstrained convex problems. We also extend our convergent analysis to the strongly convex case and non-smooth case (which works for generalized smooth objectives with H$\ddot{\text{o}}$lder-continuous gradients). All the above results are guaranteed with a high probability for heavy-tailed data. Numerical experiments are conducted to justify the theoretical improvement.

Xavier Hu, Jinxiang Xia, Shengze Xu et al.

Long-horizon planning is widely recognized as a core capability of autonomous LLM-based agents; however, current evaluation frameworks suffer from being largely episodic, domain-specific, or insufficiently grounded in persistent economic dynamics. We introduce EcoGym, a generalizable benchmark for continuous plan-and-execute decision making in interactive economies. EcoGym comprises three diverse environments: Vending, Freelance, and Operation, implemented in a unified decision-making process with standardized interfaces, and budgeted actions over an effectively unbounded horizon (1000+ steps if 365 day-loops for evaluation). The evaluation of EcoGym is based on business-relevant outcomes (e.g., net worth, income, and DAU), targeting long-term strategic coherence and robustness under partial observability and stochasticity. Experiments across eleven leading LLMs expose a systematic tension: no single model dominates across all three scenarios. Critically, we find that models exhibit significant suboptimality in either high-level strategies or efficient actions executions. EcoGym is released as an open, extensible testbed for transparent long-horizon agent evaluation and for studying controllability-utility trade-offs in realistic economic settings.

Qianchao Wang, Shijun Zhang, Dong Zeng et al.

In this paper, we propose a new super-expressive activation function called the Parametric Elementary Universal Activation Function (PEUAF). We demonstrate the effectiveness of PEUAF through systematic and comprehensive experiments on various industrial and image datasets, including CIFAR10, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet. Moreover, we significantly generalize the family of super-expressive activation functions, whose existence has been demonstrated in several recent works by showing that any continuous function can be approximated to any desired accuracy by a fixed-size network with a specific super-expressive activation function. Specifically, our work addresses two major bottlenecks in impeding the development of super-expressive activation functions: the limited identification of super-expressive functions, which raises doubts about their broad applicability, and their often peculiar forms, which lead to skepticism regarding their scalability and practicality in real-world applications.

Tingting Wu, Zhiyan Du, Zhi Li et al.

Recovering clear images from blurry ones with an unknown blur kernel is a challenging problem. Deep image prior (DIP) proposes to use the deep network as a regularizer for a single image rather than as a supervised model, which achieves encouraging results in the nonblind deblurring problem. However, since the relationship between images and the network architectures is unclear, it is hard to find a suitable architecture to provide sufficient constraints on the estimated blur kernels and clean images. Also, DIP uses the sparse maximum a posteriori (MAP), which is insufficient to enforce the selection of the recovery image. Recently, variational deep image prior (VDIP) was proposed to impose constraints on both blur kernels and recovery images and take the standard deviation of the image into account during the optimization process by the variational principle. However, we empirically find that VDIP struggles with processing image details and tends to generate suboptimal results when the blur kernel is large. Therefore, we combine total generalized variational (TGV) regularization with VDIP in this paper to overcome these shortcomings of VDIP. TGV is a flexible regularization that utilizes the characteristics of partial derivatives of varying orders to regularize images at different scales, reducing oil painting artifacts while maintaining sharp edges. The proposed VDIP-TGV effectively recovers image edges and details by supplementing extra gradient information through TGV. Additionally, this model is solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), which effectively combines traditional algorithms and deep learning methods. Experiments show that our proposed VDIP-TGV surpasses various state-of-the-art models quantitatively and qualitatively.

Yang Liu, Yaofang Liu, Jinshan Pan et al.

Most existing super-resolution methods and datasets have been developed to improve the image quality in well-lighted conditions. However, these methods do not work well in real-world low-light conditions as the images captured in such conditions lose most important information and contain significant unknown noises. To solve this problem, we propose a SRRIIE dataset with an efficient conditional diffusion probabilistic models-based method. The proposed dataset contains 4800 paired low-high quality images. To ensure that the dataset are able to model the real-world image degradation in low-illumination environments, we capture images using an ILDC camera and an optical zoom lens with exposure levels ranging from -6 EV to 0 EV and ISO levels ranging from 50 to 12800. We comprehensively evaluate with various reconstruction and perceptual metrics and demonstrate the practicabilities of the SRRIIE dataset for deep learning-based methods. We show that most existing methods are less effective in preserving the structures and sharpness of restored images from complicated noises. To overcome this problem, we revise the condition for Raw sensor data and propose a novel time-melding condition for diffusion probabilistic model. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative experimental results on the real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the feasibility and effectivenesses of the proposed conditional diffusion probabilistic model on Raw sensor data. Code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/Yaofang-Liu/Super-Resolving

Yu Guo, Caiying Wu, Yaxin Li et al.

Sparse view computed tomography (CT) reconstruction poses a challenging ill-posed inverse problem, necessitating effective regularization techniques. In this letter, we employ $L_p$-norm ($0<p<1$) regularization to induce sparsity and introduce inertial steps, leading to the development of the inertial $L_p$-norm half-quadratic splitting algorithm. We rigorously prove the convergence of this algorithm. Furthermore, we leverage deep learning to initialize the conjugate gradient method, resulting in a deep unrolling network with theoretical guarantees. Our extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm surpasses existing methods, particularly excelling in fewer scanned views and complex noise conditions.

Yiming Cui, Lecheng Ruan, Hang-Cheng Dong et al.

The networks for point cloud tasks are expected to be invariant when the point clouds are affinely transformed such as rotation and reflection. So far, relative to the rotational invariance that has been attracting major research attention in the past years, the reflection invariance is little addressed. Notwithstanding, reflection symmetry can find itself in very common and important scenarios, e.g., static reflection symmetry of structured streets, dynamic reflection symmetry from bidirectional motion of moving objects (such as pedestrians), and left- and right-hand traffic practices in different countries. To the best of our knowledge, unfortunately, no reflection-invariant network has been reported in point cloud analysis till now. To fill this gap, we propose a framework by using quadratic neurons and PCA canonical representation, referred to as Cloud-RAIN, to endow point \underline{Cloud} models with \underline{R}eflection\underline{A}l \underline{IN}variance. We prove a theorem to explain why Cloud-RAIN can enjoy reflection symmetry. Furthermore, extensive experiments also corroborate the reflection property of the proposed Cloud-RAIN and show that Cloud-RAIN is superior to data augmentation. Our code is available at https://github.com/YimingCuiCuiCui/Cloud-RAIN.

Juncheng Li, Zehua Pei, Wenjie Li et al.

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) is an important task in image processing, which aims to enhance the resolution of imaging systems. Recently, SISR has made a huge leap and has achieved promising results with the help of deep learning (DL). In this survey, we give an overview of DL-based SISR methods and group them according to their design targets. Specifically, we first introduce the problem definition, research background, and the significance of SISR. Secondly, we introduce some related works, including benchmark datasets, upsampling methods, optimization objectives, and image quality assessment methods. Thirdly, we provide a detailed investigation of SISR and give some domain-specific applications of it. Fourthly, we present the reconstruction results of some classic SISR methods to intuitively know their performance. Finally, we discuss some issues that still exist in SISR and summarize some new trends and future directions. This is an exhaustive survey of SISR, which can help researchers better understand SISR and inspire more exciting research in this field. An investigation project for SISR is provided at https://github.com/CV-JunchengLi/SISR-Survey.

Zhisheng Lu, Juncheng Li, Hong Liu et al.

Single image super-resolution (SISR) has witnessed great strides with the development of deep learning. However, most existing studies focus on building more complex networks with a massive number of layers. Recently, more and more researchers start to explore the application of Transformer in computer vision tasks. However, the heavy computational cost and high GPU memory occupation of the vision Transformer cannot be ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel Efficient Super-Resolution Transformer (ESRT) for SISR. ESRT is a hybrid model, which consists of a Lightweight CNN Backbone (LCB) and a Lightweight Transformer Backbone (LTB). Among them, LCB can dynamically adjust the size of the feature map to extract deep features with a low computational cost. LTB is composed of a series of Efficient Transformers (ET), which occupies a small GPU memory occupation, thanks to the specially designed Efficient Multi-Head Attention (EMHA). Extensive experiments show that ESRT achieves competitive results with low computational costs. Compared with the original Transformer which occupies 16,057M GPU memory, ESRT only occupies 4,191M GPU memory. All codes are available at https://github.com/luissen/ESRT.

Qiaosi Yi, Juncheng Li, Qinyan Dai et al.

Single image deraining is important for many high-level computer vision tasks since the rain streaks can severely degrade the visibility of images, thereby affecting the recognition and analysis of the image. Recently, many CNN-based methods have been proposed for rain removal. Although these methods can remove part of the rain streaks, it is difficult for them to adapt to real-world scenarios and restore high-quality rain-free images with clear and accurate structures. To solve this problem, we propose a Structure-Preserving Deraining Network (SPDNet) with RCP guidance. SPDNet directly generates high-quality rain-free images with clear and accurate structures under the guidance of RCP but does not rely on any rain-generating assumptions. Specifically, we found that the RCP of images contains more accurate structural information than rainy images. Therefore, we introduced it to our deraining network to protect structure information of the rain-free image. Meanwhile, a Wavelet-based Multi-Level Module (WMLM) is proposed as the backbone for learning the background information of rainy images and an Interactive Fusion Module (IFM) is designed to make full use of RCP information. In addition, an iterative guidance strategy is proposed to gradually improve the accuracy of RCP, refining the result in a progressive path. Extensive experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results. Code: https://github.com/Joyies/SPDNet

ZeYu Li, Te Qi, TieYong Zeng

We propose a new approach to perform the boosted difference of convex functions algorithm (BDCA) on non-smooth and non-convex problems involving the difference of convex (DC) functions. The recently proposed BDCA uses an extrapolation step from the point computed by the classical DC algorithm (DCA) via a line search procedure in a descent direction to get an additional decrease of the objective function and accelerate the convergence of DCA. However, when the first function in DC decomposition is non-smooth, the direction computed by BDCA can be ascent and a monotone line search cannot be performed. In this work, we proposed a monotone improved boosted difference of convex functions algorithm (IBDCA) for certain types of non-smooth DC programs, namely those that can be formulated as the difference of a possibly non-smooth function and a smooth one. We show that any cluster point of the sequence generated by IBDCA is a critical point of the problem under consideration and that the corresponding objective value is monotonically decreasing and convergent. We also present the global convergence and the convergent rate under the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz property. The applications of IBDCA in image recovery show the effectiveness of our proposed method. The corresponding numerical experiments demonstrate that our IBDCA outperforms DCA and other state-of-the-art DC methods in both computational time and number of iterations.

ZeYu Li, FengLei Fan, TieYong Zeng

This work addresses two fundamental limitations in neural network approximation theory. We demonstrate that a three-dimensional network architecture enables a significantly more efficient representation of sawtooth functions, which serves as the cornerstone in the approximation of analytic and $L^p$ functions. First, we establish substantially improved exponential approximation rates for several important classes of analytic functions and offer a parameter-efficient network design. Second, for the first time, we derive a quantitative and non-asymptotic approximation of high orders for general $L^p$ functions. Our techniques advance the theoretical understanding of the neural network approximation in fundamental function spaces and offer a theoretically grounded pathway for designing more parameter-efficient networks.

ZeYu Li, ShiJun Zhang, TieYong Zeng et al.

Universal approximation theory offers a foundational framework to verify neural network expressiveness, enabling principled utilization in real-world applications. However, most existing theoretical constructions are established by uniformly dividing the input space into tiny hypercubes without considering the local regularity of the target function. In this work, we investigate the universal approximation capabilities of ReLU networks from a view of polytope decomposition, which offers a more realistic and task-oriented approach compared to current methods. To achieve this, we develop an explicit kernel polynomial method to derive an universal approximation of continuous functions, which is characterized not only by the refined Totik-Ditzian-type modulus of continuity, but also by polytopical domain decomposition. Then, a ReLU network is constructed to approximate the kernel polynomial in each subdomain separately. Furthermore, we find that polytope decomposition makes our approximation more efficient and flexible than existing methods in many cases, especially near singular points of the objective function. Lastly, we extend our approach to analytic functions to reach a higher approximation rate.

Xiaohao Cai, Raymond Chan, Mila Nikolova et al. · mila

In this paper, we propose a SLaT (Smoothing, Lifting and Thresholding) method with three stages for multiphase segmentation of color images corrupted by different degradations: noise, information loss, and blur. At the first stage, a convex variant of the Mumford-Shah model is applied to each channel to obtain a smooth image. We show that the model has unique solution under the different degradations. In order to properly handle the color information, the second stage is dimension lifting where we consider a new vector-valued image composed of the restored image and its transform in the secondary color space with additional information. This ensures that even if the first color space has highly correlated channels, we can still have enough information to give good segmentation results. In the last stage, we apply multichannel thresholding to the combined vector-valued image to find the segmentation. The number of phases is only required in the last stage, so users can choose or change it all without the need of solving the previous stages again. Experiments demonstrate that our SLaT method gives excellent results in terms of segmentation quality and CPU time in comparison with other state-of-the-art segmentation methods.

Hongjun Wang, Jiyuan Chen, Yinqiang Zheng et al.

Deep learning has led to a dramatic leap on Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) performances in recent years. %Despite the substantial advancement% While most existing work assumes a simple and fixed degradation model (e.g., bicubic downsampling), the research of Blind SR seeks to improve model generalization ability with unknown degradation. Recently, Kong et al pioneer the investigation of a more suitable training strategy for Blind SR using Dropout. Although such method indeed brings substantial generalization improvements via mitigating overfitting, we argue that Dropout simultaneously introduces undesirable side-effect that compromises model's capacity to faithfully reconstruct fine details. We show both the theoretical and experimental analyses in our paper, and furthermore, we present another easy yet effective training strategy that enhances the generalization ability of the model by simply modulating its first and second-order features statistics. Experimental results have shown that our method could serve as a model-agnostic regularization and outperforms Dropout on seven benchmark datasets including both synthetic and real-world scenarios.

Rina Su, Yu Guo, Caiying Wu et al.

The main objective of the Multiple Kernel k-Means (MKKM) algorithm is to extract non-linear information and achieve optimal clustering by optimizing base kernel matrices. Current methods enhance information diversity and reduce redundancy by exploiting interdependencies among multiple kernels based on correlations or dissimilarities. Nevertheless, relying solely on a single metric, such as correlation or dissimilarity, to define kernel relationships introduces bias and incomplete characterization. Consequently, this limitation hinders efficient information extraction, ultimately compromising clustering performance. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel method that systematically integrates both kernel correlation and dissimilarity. Our approach comprehensively captures kernel relationships, facilitating more efficient classification information extraction and improving clustering performance. By emphasizing the coherence between kernel correlation and dissimilarity, our method offers a more objective and transparent strategy for extracting non-linear information and significantly improving clustering precision, supported by theoretical rationale. We assess the performance of our algorithm on 13 challenging benchmark datasets, demonstrating its superiority over contemporary state-of-the-art MKKM techniques.

Feng-Lei Fan, Meng Wang, Hang-Cheng Dong et al.

Biologically, the brain does not rely on a single type of neuron that universally functions in all aspects. Instead, it acts as a sophisticated designer of task-based neurons. In this study, we address the following question: since the human brain is a task-based neuron user, can the artificial network design go from the task-based architecture design to the task-based neuron design? Since methodologically there are no one-size-fits-all neurons, given the same structure, task-based neurons can enhance the feature representation ability relative to the existing universal neurons due to the intrinsic inductive bias for the task. Specifically, we propose a two-step framework for prototyping task-based neurons. First, symbolic regression is used to identify optimal formulas that fit input data by utilizing base functions such as logarithmic, trigonometric, and exponential functions. We introduce vectorized symbolic regression that stacks all variables in a vector and regularizes each input variable to perform the same computation, which can expedite the regression speed, facilitate parallel computation, and avoid overfitting. Second, we parameterize the acquired elementary formula to make parameters learnable, which serves as the aggregation function of the neuron. The activation functions such as ReLU and the sigmoidal functions remain the same because they have proven to be good. Empirically, experimental results on synthetic data, classic benchmarks, and real-world applications show that the proposed task-based neuron design is not only feasible but also delivers competitive performance over other state-of-the-art models.

Sicheng Fan, Qingyun Shi, Shengze Xu et al.

Current paradigms for training GUI agents are fundamentally limited by a reliance on either unsafe, non-reproducible live web interactions or costly, scarce human-crafted data and environments. We argue this focus on data volume overlooks a more critical factor: the efficiency of compressing a large language model's (LLM) latent knowledge into actionable agent behavior. We introduce WebFactory, a novel, fully automated closed-loop reinforcement learning pipeline for GUI agents, systematically compressing LLM-encoded internet intelligence into efficient, grounded actions. Our pipeline features a process of scalable environment synthesis, knowledge-aware task generation, LLM-powered trajectory collection, decomposed reward RL training, and systematic agent evaluation. Remarkably, our agent demonstrates exceptional data efficiency and generalization. Trained on synthetic data from only 10 websites within WebFactory, it achieves performance comparable to GUI agents trained on the same amount of human-annotated data from a much larger set of environments. This superior performance is consistent across our internal offline and online transfer benchmarks, where our agent also significantly outperforms the base foundation model. We further provide critical insights into the "embodiment potential" of different LLM foundations, offering a new axis for model evaluation. This work presents a scalable and cost-effective paradigm for transforming passive internet knowledge into active, grounded intelligence, marking a critical step towards general-purpose interactive agents.

Chi Kit Ng, Long Bai, Guankun Wang et al.

In endoscopic procedures, autonomous tracking of abnormal regions and following circumferential cutting markers can significantly reduce the cognitive burden on endoscopists. However, conventional model-based pipelines are fragile for each component (e.g., detection, motion planning) requires manual tuning and struggles to incorporate high-level endoscopic intent, leading to poor generalization across diverse scenes. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, which integrate visual perception, language grounding, and motion planning within an end-to-end framework, offer a promising alternative by semantically adapting to surgeon prompts without manual recalibration. Despite their potential, applying VLA models to robotic endoscopy presents unique challenges due to the complex and dynamic anatomical environments of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. To address this, we introduce EndoVLA, designed specifically for continuum robots in GI interventions. Given endoscopic images and surgeon-issued tracking prompts, EndoVLA performs three core tasks: (1) polyp tracking, (2) delineation and following of abnormal mucosal regions, and (3) adherence to circular markers during circumferential cutting. To tackle data scarcity and domain shifts, we propose a dual-phase strategy comprising supervised fine-tuning on our EndoVLA-Motion dataset and reinforcement fine-tuning with task-aware rewards. Our approach significantly improves tracking performance in endoscopy and enables zero-shot generalization in diverse scenes and complex sequential tasks.

Deliang Wei, Peng Chen, Haobo Xu et al.

Plug-and-play (PnP) methods with deep denoisers have shown impressive results in imaging problems. They typically require strong convexity or smoothness of the fidelity term and a (residual) non-expansive denoiser for convergence. These assumptions, however, are violated in Poisson inverse problems, and non-expansiveness can hinder denoising performance. To address these challenges, we propose a cocoercive conservative (CoCo) denoiser, which may be (residual) expansive, leading to improved denoising. By leveraging the generalized Helmholtz decomposition, we introduce a novel training strategy that combines Hamiltonian regularization to promote conservativeness and spectral regularization to ensure cocoerciveness. We prove that CoCo denoiser is a proximal operator of a weakly convex function, enabling a restoration model with an implicit weakly convex prior. The global convergence of PnP methods to a stationary point of this restoration model is established. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms closely related methods in both visual quality and quantitative metrics.

Guanyu Chen, Shengze Xu, Dong Ni et al.

We propose a general framework for the Discontinuous Galerkin-induced Neural Network (DGNN), inspired by the Interior Penalty Discontinuous Galerkin Method (IPDGM). In this approach, the trial space consists of piecewise neural network space defined over the computational domain, while the test function space is composed of piecewise polynomials. We demonstrate the advantages of DGNN in terms of accuracy and training efficiency across several numerical examples, including stationary and time-dependent problems. Specifically, DGNN easily handles high perturbations, discontinuous solutions, and complex geometric domains.

Chaoyan Huang, Zhongming Wu, Tieyong Zeng

Prior-based methods for low-light image enhancement often face challenges in extracting available prior information from dim images. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a simple yet effective Retinex model with the proposed edge extraction prior. More specifically, we design an edge extraction network to capture the fine edge features from the low-light image directly. Building upon the Retinex theory, we decompose the low-light image into its illumination and reflectance components and introduce an edge-guided Retinex model for enhancing low-light images. To solve the proposed model, we propose a novel inertial Bregman alternating linearized minimization algorithm. This algorithm addresses the optimization problem associated with the edge-guided Retinex model, enabling effective enhancement of low-light images. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we establish the convergence properties of the algorithm. Besides, we prove that the proposed algorithm converges to a stationary point of the problem through nonconvex optimization theory. Furthermore, extensive experiments are conducted on multiple real-world low-light image datasets to demonstrate the efficiency and superiority of the proposed scheme.

Yongshuai Liu, Lianfang Wang, Kuilin Qin et al.

Deep learning has become a pivotal technology in fields such as computer vision, scientific computing, and dynamical systems, significantly advancing these disciplines. However, neural Networks persistently face challenges related to theoretical understanding, interpretability, and generalization. To address these issues, researchers are increasingly adopting a differential equations perspective to propose a unified theoretical framework and systematic design methodologies for neural networks. In this paper, we provide an extensive review of deep neural network architectures and dynamic modeling methods inspired by differential equations. We specifically examine deep neural network models and deterministic dynamical network constructs based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs), as well as regularization techniques and stochastic dynamical network models informed by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). We present numerical comparisons of these models to illustrate their characteristics and performance. Finally, we explore promising research directions in integrating differential equations with deep learning to offer new insights for developing intelligent computational methods that boast enhanced interpretability and generalization capabilities.

Penghao Rao, Tieyong Zeng

Single-image super-resolution (SISR) remains highly ill-posed because recovering structurally faithful high-frequency content from a single low-resolution observation is ambiguous. Existing edge-aware methods often attach edge priors or attention branches onto increasingly complex backbones, yet ad hoc fusion frequently introduces redundancy, unstable optimization, or limited structural gains. We address this gap with an edge-guided attention mechanism that derives an adaptive modulation map from jointly encoded edge features and intermediate feature activations, then applies it to normalize and reweight responses, selectively amplifying structurally salient regions while suppressing spurious textures. In parallel, we integrate this mechanism into a lightweight residual design trained under a composite objective combining pixel-wise, perceptual, and adversarial terms to balance fidelity, perceptual realism, and training stability. Extensive experiments on standard SISR benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in structural sharpness and perceptual quality over SRGAN, ESRGAN, and prior edge-attention baselines at comparable model complexity. The proposed formulation provides (i) a parameter-efficient path to inject edge priors, (ii) stabilized adversarial refinement through a tailored multiterm loss, and (iii) enhanced edge fidelity without resorting to deeper or heavily overparameterized architectures. These results highlight the effectiveness of principled edge-conditioned modulation for advancing perceptual super-resolution.

Juntong Fan, Shuyi Fan, Debesh Jha et al.

Accurate endoscopic image segmentation on the polyps is critical for early colorectal cancer detection. However, this task remains challenging due to low contrast with surrounding mucosa, specular highlights, and indistinct boundaries. To address these challenges, we propose FOCUS-Med, which stands for Fusion of spatial and structural graph with attentional context-aware polyp segmentation in endoscopic medical imaging. FOCUS-Med integrates a Dual Graph Convolutional Network (Dual-GCN) module to capture contextual spatial and topological structural dependencies. This graph-based representation enables the model to better distinguish polyps from background tissues by leveraging topological cues and spatial connectivity, which are often obscured in raw image intensities. It enhances the model's ability to preserve boundaries and delineate complex shapes typical of polyps. In addition, a location-fused stand-alone self-attention is employed to strengthen global context integration. To bridge the semantic gap between encoder-decoder layers, we incorporate a trainable weighted fast normalized fusion strategy for efficient multi-scale aggregation. Notably, we are the first to introduce the use of a Large Language Model (LLM) to provide detailed qualitative evaluations of segmentation quality. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that FOCUS-Med achieves state-of-the-art performance across five key metrics, underscoring its effectiveness and clinical potential for AI-assisted colonoscopy.