FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restoration

Face video restoration (FVR) is a challenging but important problem where one seeks to recover a perceptually realistic face videos from a low-quality input. While diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) have been shown to achieve remarkable performance for face image restoration, they often fail to preserve temporally coherent, high-quality videos, compromising the fidelity of reconstructed faces. We present a new conditional diffusion framework called FLAIR for FVR. FLAIR ensures temporal consistency across frames in a computationally efficient fashion by converting a traditional image DPM into a video DPM. The proposed conversion uses a recurrent video refinement layer and a temporal self-attention at different scales. FLAIR also uses a conditional iterative refinement process to balance the perceptual and distortion quality during inference. This process consists of two key components: a data-consistency module that analytically ensures that the generated video precisely matches its degraded observation and a coarse-to-fine image enhancement module specifically for facial regions. Our extensive experiments show superiority of FLAIR over the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) for video super-resolution, deblurring, JPEG restoration, and space-time frame interpolation on two high-quality face video datasets.

A Structured Pruning Algorithm for Model-based Deep Learning

There is a growing interest in model-based deep learning (MBDL) for solving imaging inverse problems. MBDL networks can be seen as iterative algorithms that estimate the desired image using a physical measurement model and a learned image prior specified using a convolutional neural net (CNNs). The iterative nature of MBDL networks increases the test-time computational complexity, which limits their applicability in certain large-scale applications. We address this issue by presenting structured pruning algorithm for model-based deep learning (SPADE) as the first structured pruning algorithm for MBDL networks. SPADE reduces the computational complexity of CNNs used within MBDL networks by pruning its non-essential weights. We propose three distinct strategies to fine-tune the pruned MBDL networks to minimize the performance loss. Each fine-tuning strategy has a unique benefit that depends on the presence of a pre-trained model and a high-quality ground truth. We validate SPADE on two distinct inverse problems, namely compressed sensing MRI and image super-resolution. Our results highlight that MBDL models pruned by SPADE can achieve substantial speed up in testing time while maintaining competitive performance.

Deep Equilibrium Learning of Explicit Regularizers for Imaging Inverse Problems

There has been significant recent interest in the use of deep learning for regularizing imaging inverse problems. Most work in the area has focused on regularization imposed implicitly by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) pre-trained for image reconstruction. In this work, we follow an alternative line of work based on learning explicit regularization functionals that promote preferred solutions. We develop the Explicit Learned Deep Equilibrium Regularizer (ELDER) method for learning explicit regularizers that minimize a mean-squared error (MSE) metric. ELDER is based on a regularization functional parameterized by a CNN and a deep equilibrium learning (DEQ) method for training the functional to be MSE-optimal at the fixed points of the reconstruction algorithm. The explicit regularizer enables ELDER to directly inherit fundamental convergence results from optimization theory. On the other hand, DEQ training enables ELDER to improve over existing explicit regularizers without prohibitive memory complexity during training. We use ELDER to train several approaches to parameterizing explicit regularizers and test their performance on three distinct imaging inverse problems. Our results show that ELDER can greatly improve the quality of explicit regularizers compared to existing methods, and show that learning explicit regularizers does not compromise performance relative to methods based on implicit regularization.

Robustness of Deep Equilibrium Architectures to Changes in the Measurement Model

Deep model-based architectures (DMBAs) are widely used in imaging inverse problems to integrate physical measurement models and learned image priors. Plug-and-play priors (PnP) and deep equilibrium models (DEQ) are two DMBA frameworks that have received significant attention. The key difference between the two is that the image prior in DEQ is trained by using a specific measurement model, while that in PnP is trained as a general image denoiser. This difference is behind a common assumption that PnP is more robust to changes in the measurement models compared to DEQ. This paper investigates the robustness of DEQ priors to changes in the measurement models. Our results on two imaging inverse problems suggest that DEQ priors trained under mismatched measurement models outperform image denoisers.