Protein Graph Neural Networks for Heterogeneous Cryo-EM Reconstruction

We present a geometry-aware method for heterogeneous single-particle cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstruction that predicts atomic backbone conformations. To incorporate protein-structure priors, we represent the backbone as a graph and use a graph neural network (GNN) autodecoder that maps per-image latent variables to 3D displacements of a template conformation. The objective combines a data-discrepancy term based on a differentiable cryo-EM forward model with geometric regularization, and it supports unknown orientations via ellipsoidal support lifting (ESL) pose estimation. On synthetic datasets derived from molecular dynamics trajectories, the proposed GNN achieves higher accuracy compared to a multilayer perceptron (MLP) of comparable size, highlighting the benefits of a geometry-informed inductive bias.

Sparse wavefield reconstruction and denoising with boostlets

Boostlets are spatiotemporal functions that decompose nondispersive wavefields into a collection of localized waveforms parametrized by dilations, hyperbolic rotations, and translations. We study the sparsity properties of boostlets and find that the resulting decompositions are significantly sparser than those of other state-of-the-art representation systems, such as wavelets and shearlets. This translates into improved denoising performance when hard-thresholding the boostlet coefficients. The results suggest that boostlets offer a natural framework for sparsely decomposing wavefields in unified space-time.