Generalizable Non-Line-of-Sight Imaging with Learnable Physical Priors

Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging, recovering the hidden volume from indirect reflections, has attracted increasing attention due to its potential applications. Despite promising results, existing NLOS reconstruction approaches are constrained by the reliance on empirical physical priors, e.g., single fixed path compensation. Moreover, these approaches still possess limited generalization ability, particularly when dealing with scenes at a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To overcome the above problems, we introduce a novel learning-based solution, comprising two key designs: Learnable Path Compensation (LPC) and Adaptive Phasor Field (APF). The LPC applies tailored path compensation coefficients to adapt to different objects in the scene, effectively reducing light wave attenuation, especially in distant regions. Meanwhile, the APF learns the precise Gaussian window of the illumination function for the phasor field, dynamically selecting the relevant spectrum band of the transient measurement. Experimental validations demonstrate that our proposed approach, only trained on synthetic data, exhibits the capability to seamlessly generalize across various real-world datasets captured by different imaging systems and characterized by low SNRs.

Accelerated Multi-Contrast MRI Reconstruction via Frequency and Spatial Mutual Learning

To accelerate Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging procedures, Multi-Contrast MR Reconstruction (MCMR) has become a prevalent trend that utilizes an easily obtainable modality as an auxiliary to support high-quality reconstruction of the target modality with under-sampled k-space measurements. The exploration of global dependency and complementary information across different modalities is essential for MCMR. However, existing methods either struggle to capture global dependency due to the limited receptive field or suffer from quadratic computational complexity. To tackle this dilemma, we propose a novel Frequency and Spatial Mutual Learning Network (FSMNet), which efficiently explores global dependencies across different modalities. Specifically, the features for each modality are extracted by the Frequency-Spatial Feature Extraction (FSFE) module, featuring a frequency branch and a spatial branch. Benefiting from the global property of the Fourier transform, the frequency branch can efficiently capture global dependency with an image-size receptive field, while the spatial branch can extract local features. To exploit complementary information from the auxiliary modality, we propose a Cross-Modal Selective fusion (CMS-fusion) module that selectively incorporate the frequency and spatial features from the auxiliary modality to enhance the corresponding branch of the target modality. To further integrate the enhanced global features from the frequency branch and the enhanced local features from the spatial branch, we develop a Frequency-Spatial fusion (FS-fusion) module, resulting in a comprehensive feature representation for the target modality. Extensive experiments on the BraTS and fastMRI datasets demonstrate that the proposed FSMNet achieves state-of-the-art performance for the MCMR task with different acceleration factors. The code is available at: https://github.com/qic999/FSMNet.

Multi-Granularity Semantic Revision for Large Language Model Distillation

Knowledge distillation plays a key role in compressing the Large Language Models (LLMs), which boosts a small-size student model under large teacher models' guidance. However, existing LLM distillation methods overly rely on student-generated outputs, which may introduce generation errors and misguide the distillation process. Moreover, the distillation loss functions introduced in previous art struggle to align the most informative part due to the complex distribution of LLMs' outputs. To address these problems, we propose a multi-granularity semantic revision method for LLM distillation. At the sequence level, we propose a sequence correction and re-generation (SCRG) strategy. SCRG first calculates the semantic cognitive difference between the teacher and student to detect the error token, then corrects it with the teacher-generated one, and re-generates the sequence to reduce generation errors and enhance generation diversity. At the token level, we design a distribution adaptive clipping Kullback-Leibler (DAC-KL) loss as the distillation objective function. DAC-KL loss exploits a learnable sub-network to adaptively extract semantically dense areas from the teacher's output, avoiding the interference of redundant information in the distillation process. Finally, at the span level, we leverage the span priors of a sequence to compute the probability correlations within spans, and constrain the teacher and student's probability correlations to be consistent, further enhancing the transfer of semantic information. Extensive experiments across different model families with parameters ranging from 0.1B to 13B demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing methods.

LeRF: Learning Resampling Function for Adaptive and Efficient Image Interpolation

Image resampling is a basic technique that is widely employed in daily applications, such as camera photo editing. Recent deep neural networks (DNNs) have made impressive progress in performance by introducing learned data priors. Still, these methods are not the perfect substitute for interpolation, due to the drawbacks in efficiency and versatility. In this work, we propose a novel method of Learning Resampling Function (termed LeRF), which takes advantage of both the structural priors learned by DNNs and the locally continuous assumption of interpolation. Specifically, LeRF assigns spatially varying resampling functions to input image pixels and learns to predict the hyper-parameters that determine the shapes of these resampling functions with a neural network. Based on the formulation of LeRF, we develop a family of models, including both efficiency-orientated and performance-orientated ones. To achieve interpolation-level efficiency, we adopt look-up tables (LUTs) to accelerate the inference of the learned neural network. Furthermore, we design a directional ensemble strategy and edge-sensitive indexing patterns to better capture local structures. On the other hand, to obtain DNN-level performance, we propose an extension of LeRF to enable it in cooperation with pre-trained upsampling models for cascaded resampling. Extensive experiments show that the efficiency-orientated version of LeRF runs as fast as interpolation, generalizes well to arbitrary transformations, and outperforms interpolation significantly, e.g., up to 3dB PSNR gain over Bicubic for x2 upsampling on Manga109. Besides, the performance-orientated version of LeRF reaches comparable performance with existing DNNs at much higher efficiency, e.g., less than 25% running time on a desktop GPU.

CEIA: CLIP-Based Event-Image Alignment for Open-World Event-Based Understanding

We present CEIA, an effective framework for open-world event-based understanding. Currently training a large event-text model still poses a huge challenge due to the shortage of paired event-text data. In response to this challenge, CEIA learns to align event and image data as an alternative instead of directly aligning event and text data. Specifically, we leverage the rich event-image datasets to learn an event embedding space aligned with the image space of CLIP through contrastive learning. In this way, event and text data are naturally aligned via using image data as a bridge. Particularly, CEIA offers two distinct advantages. First, it allows us to take full advantage of the existing event-image datasets to make up the shortage of large-scale event-text datasets. Second, leveraging more training data, it also exhibits the flexibility to boost performance, ensuring scalable capability. In highlighting the versatility of our framework, we make extensive evaluations through a diverse range of event-based multi-modal applications, such as object recognition, event-image retrieval, event-text retrieval, and domain adaptation. The outcomes demonstrate CEIA's distinct zero-shot superiority over existing methods on these applications.

Mamba-based Light Field Super-Resolution with Efficient Subspace Scanning

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated impressive performance in 4D light field (LF) super-resolution by effectively modeling long-range spatial-angular correlations, but their quadratic complexity hinders the efficient processing of high resolution 4D inputs, resulting in slow inference speed and high memory cost. As a compromise, most prior work adopts a patch-based strategy, which fails to leverage the full information from the entire input LFs. The recently proposed selective state-space model, Mamba, has gained popularity for its efficient long-range sequence modeling. In this paper, we propose a Mamba-based Light Field Super-Resolution method, named MLFSR, by designing an efficient subspace scanning strategy. Specifically, we tokenize 4D LFs into subspace sequences and conduct bi-directional scanning on each subspace. Based on our scanning strategy, we then design the Mamba-based Global Interaction (MGI) module to capture global information and the local Spatial- Angular Modulator (SAM) to complement local details. Additionally, we introduce a Transformer-to-Mamba (T2M) loss to further enhance overall performance. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that MLFSR surpasses CNN-based models and rivals Transformer-based methods in performance while maintaining higher efficiency. With quicker inference speed and reduced memory demand, MLFSR facilitates full-image processing of high-resolution 4D LFs with enhanced performance.

Diffusion-Promoted HDR Video Reconstruction

High dynamic range (HDR) video reconstruction aims to generate HDR videos from low dynamic range (LDR) frames captured with alternating exposures. Most existing works solely rely on the regression-based paradigm, leading to adverse effects such as ghosting artifacts and missing details in saturated regions. In this paper, we propose a diffusion-promoted method for HDR video reconstruction, termed HDR-V-Diff, which incorporates a diffusion model to capture the HDR distribution. As such, HDR-V-Diff can reconstruct HDR videos with realistic details while alleviating ghosting artifacts. However, the direct introduction of video diffusion models would impose massive computational burden. Instead, to alleviate this burden, we first propose an HDR Latent Diffusion Model (HDR-LDM) to learn the distribution prior of single HDR frames. Specifically, HDR-LDM incorporates a tonemapping strategy to compress HDR frames into the latent space and a novel exposure embedding to aggregate the exposure information into the diffusion process. We then propose a Temporal-Consistent Alignment Module (TCAM) to learn the temporal information as a complement for HDR-LDM, which conducts coarse-to-fine feature alignment at different scales among video frames. Finally, we design a Zero-Init Cross-Attention (ZiCA) mechanism to effectively integrate the learned distribution prior and temporal information for generating HDR frames. Extensive experiments validate that HDR-V-Diff achieves state-of-the-art results on several representative datasets.

UniCompress: Enhancing Multi-Data Medical Image Compression with Knowledge Distillation

In the field of medical image compression, Implicit Neural Representation (INR) networks have shown remarkable versatility due to their flexible compression ratios, yet they are constrained by a one-to-one fitting approach that results in lengthy encoding times. Our novel method, ``\textbf{UniCompress}'', innovatively extends the compression capabilities of INR by being the first to compress multiple medical data blocks using a single INR network. By employing wavelet transforms and quantization, we introduce a codebook containing frequency domain information as a prior input to the INR network. This enhances the representational power of INR and provides distinctive conditioning for different image blocks. Furthermore, our research introduces a new technique for the knowledge distillation of implicit representations, simplifying complex model knowledge into more manageable formats to improve compression ratios. Extensive testing on CT and electron microscopy (EM) datasets has demonstrated that UniCompress outperforms traditional INR methods and commercial compression solutions like HEVC, especially in complex and high compression scenarios. Notably, compared to existing INR techniques, UniCompress achieves a 4$\sim$5 times increase in compression speed, marking a significant advancement in the field of medical image compression. Codes will be publicly available.

TokenUnify: Scalable Autoregressive Visual Pre-training with Mixture Token Prediction

Autoregressive next-token prediction is a standard pretraining method for large-scale language models, but its application to vision tasks is hindered by the non-sequential nature of image data, leading to cumulative errors. Most vision models employ masked autoencoder (MAE) based pretraining, which faces scalability issues. To address these challenges, we introduce \textbf{TokenUnify}, a novel pretraining method that integrates random token prediction, next-token prediction, and next-all token prediction. We provide theoretical evidence demonstrating that TokenUnify mitigates cumulative errors in visual autoregression. Cooperated with TokenUnify, we have assembled a large-scale electron microscopy (EM) image dataset with ultra-high resolution, ideal for creating spatially correlated long sequences. This dataset includes over 120 million annotated voxels, making it the largest neuron segmentation dataset to date and providing a unified benchmark for experimental validation. Leveraging the Mamba network inherently suited for long-sequence modeling on this dataset, TokenUnify not only reduces the computational complexity but also leads to a significant 45\% improvement in segmentation performance on downstream EM neuron segmentation tasks compared to existing methods. Furthermore, TokenUnify demonstrates superior scalability over MAE and traditional autoregressive methods, effectively bridging the gap between pretraining strategies for language and vision models. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/ydchen0806/TokenUnify}.

Incorporating Degradation Estimation in Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution

Recent advancements in light field super-resolution (SR) have yielded impressive results. In practice, however, many existing methods are limited by assuming fixed degradation models, such as bicubic downsampling, which hinders their robustness in real-world scenarios with complex degradations. To address this limitation, we present LF-DEST, an effective blind Light Field SR method that incorporates explicit Degradation Estimation to handle various degradation types. LF-DEST consists of two primary components: degradation estimation and light field restoration. The former concurrently estimates blur kernels and noise maps from low-resolution degraded light fields, while the latter generates super-resolved light fields based on the estimated degradations. Notably, we introduce a modulated and selective fusion module that intelligently combines degradation representations with image information, allowing for effective handling of diverse degradation types. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, demonstrating that LF-DEST achieves superior performance across a variety of degradation scenarios in light field SR.