pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ABCDEFGH: An Adaptation-Based Convolutional Neural Network-CycleGAN Disease-Courses Evolution Framework Using Generative Models in Health Education
Authors: Ruiming Min, Minghao Liu
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

With the advancement of modern medicine and the development of technologies such as MRI, CT, and cellular analysis, it has become increasingly critical for clinicians to accurately interpret various diagnostic images. However, modern medical education often faces challenges due to limited access to high-quality teaching materials, stemming from privacy concerns and a shortage of educational resources (Balogh et al., 2015). In this context, image data generated by machine learning models, particularly generative models, presents a promising solution. These models can create diverse and comparable imaging datasets without compromising patient privacy, thereby supporting modern medical education. In this study, we explore the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and CycleGAN (Zhu et al., 2017) for generating synthetic medical images. The source code is available at https://github.com/mliuby/COMP4211-Project.
Astrophotography turbulence mitigation via generative models
Authors: Joonyeoup Kim, Yu Yuan, Xingguang Zhang, Xijun Wang, Stanley Chan
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00

Photography is the cornerstone of modern astronomical and space research. However, most astronomical images captured by ground-based telescopes suffer from atmospheric turbulence, resulting in degraded imaging quality. While multi-frame strategies like lucky imaging can mitigate some effects, they involve intensive data acquisition and complex manual processing. In this paper, we propose AstroDiff, a generative restoration method that leverages both the high-quality generative priors and restoration capabilities of diffusion models to mitigate atmospheric turbulence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AstroDiff outperforms existing state-of-the-art learning-based methods in astronomical image turbulence mitigation, providing higher perceptual quality and better structural fidelity under severe turbulence conditions. Our code and additional results are available at https://web-six-kappa-66.vercel.app/
Solving Inverse Problems with FLAIR
Authors: Julius Erbach, Dominik Narnhofer, Andreas Dombos, Bernt Schiele, Jan Eric Lenssen, Konrad Schindler
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Flow-based latent generative models such as Stable Diffusion 3 are able to generate images with remarkable quality, even enabling photorealistic text-to-image generation. Their impressive performance suggests that these models should also constitute powerful priors for inverse imaging problems, but that approach has not yet led to comparable fidelity. There are several key obstacles: (i) the encoding into a lower-dimensional latent space makes the underlying (forward) mapping non-linear; (ii) the data likelihood term is usually intractable; and (iii) learned generative models struggle to recover rare, atypical data modes during inference. We present FLAIR, a novel training free variational framework that leverages flow-based generative models as a prior for inverse problems. To that end, we introduce a variational objective for flow matching that is agnostic to the type of degradation, and combine it with deterministic trajectory adjustments to recover atypical modes. To enforce exact consistency with the observed data, we decouple the optimization of the data fidelity and regularization terms. Moreover, we introduce a time-dependent calibration scheme in which the strength of the regularization is modulated according to off-line accuracy estimates. Results on standard imaging benchmarks demonstrate that FLAIR consistently outperforms existing diffusion- and flow-based methods in terms of reconstruction quality and sample diversity.
Hyperspectral Image Generation with Unmixing Guided Diffusion Model
Authors: Shiyu Shen, Bin Pan, Ziye Zhang, Zhenwei Shi
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Unmixing, Image Generation, model, Unity

Recently, hyperspectral image generation has received increasing attention, but existing generative models rely on conditional generation schemes, which limits the diversity of generated images. Diffusion models are popular for their ability to generate high-quality samples, but adapting these models from RGB to hyperspectral data presents the challenge of high dimensionality and physical constraints. To address these challenges, we propose a novel diffusion model guided by hyperspectral unmixing. Our model comprises two key modules: an unmixing autoencoder module and an abundance diffusion module. The unmixing autoencoder module leverages unmixing guidance to shift the generative task from the image space to the low-dimensional abundance space, significantly reducing computational complexity while preserving high fidelity. The abundance diffusion module generates samples that satisfy the constraints of non-negativity and unity, ensuring the physical consistency of the reconstructed HSIs. Additionally, we introduce two evaluation metrics tailored to hyperspectral data. Empirical results, evaluated using both traditional metrics and our proposed metrics, indicate that our model is capable of generating high-quality and diverse hyperspectral images, offering an advancement in hyperspectral data generation.
A Tree-guided CNN for image super-resolution
Authors: Chunwei Tian, Mingjian Song, Xiaopeng Fan, Xiangtao Zheng, Bob Zhang, David Zhang
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Deep convolutional neural networks can extract more accurate structural information via deep architectures to obtain good performance in image super-resolution. However, it is not easy to find effect of important layers in a single network architecture to decrease performance of super-resolution. In this paper, we design a tree-guided CNN for image super-resolution (TSRNet). It uses a tree architecture to guide a deep network to enhance effect of key nodes to amplify the relation of hierarchical information for improving the ability of recovering images. To prevent insufficiency of the obtained structural information, cosine transform techniques in the TSRNet are used to extract cross-domain information to improve the performance of image super-resolution. Adaptive Nesterov momentum optimizer (Adan) is applied to optimize parameters to boost effectiveness of training a super-resolution model. Extended experiments can verify superiority of the proposed TSRNet for restoring high-quality images. Its code can be obtained at https://github.com/hellloxiaotian/TSRNet.
petBrain: A New Pipeline for Amyloid, Tau Tangles and Neurodegeneration Quantification Using PET and MRI
Authors: Pierrick Coupé, Boris Mansencal, Floréal Morandat, Sergio Morell-Ortega, Nicolas Villain, Jose V. Manjón, Vincent Planche
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

INTRODUCTION: Quantification of amyloid plaques (A), neurofibrillary tangles (T2), and neurodegeneration (N) using PET and MRI is critical for Alzheimer's disease (AD) diagnosis and prognosis. Existing pipelines face limitations regarding processing time, variability in tracer types, and challenges in multimodal integration. METHODS: We developed petBrain, a novel end-to-end processing pipeline for amyloid-PET, tau-PET, and structural MRI. It leverages deep learning-based segmentation, standardized biomarker quantification (Centiloid, CenTauR, HAVAs), and simultaneous estimation of A, T2, and N biomarkers. The pipeline is implemented as a web-based platform, requiring no local computational infrastructure or specialized software knowledge. RESULTS: petBrain provides reliable and rapid biomarker quantification, with results comparable to existing pipelines for A and T2. It shows strong concordance with data processed in ADNI databases. The staging and quantification of A/T2/N by petBrain demonstrated good agreement with CSF/plasma biomarkers, clinical status, and cognitive performance. DISCUSSION: petBrain represents a powerful and openly accessible platform for standardized AD biomarker analysis, facilitating applications in clinical research.
Multi-modal brain MRI synthesis based on SwinUNETR
Authors: Haowen Pang, Weiyan Guo, Chuyang Ye
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Medical Image Analysis

Multi-modal brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a crucial role in clinical diagnostics by providing complementary information across different imaging modalities. However, a common challenge in clinical practice is missing MRI modalities. In this paper, we apply SwinUNETR to the synthesize of missing modalities in brain MRI. SwinUNETR is a novel neural network architecture designed for medical image analysis, integrating the strengths of Swin Transformer and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The Swin Transformer, a variant of the Vision Transformer (ViT), incorporates hierarchical feature extraction and window-based self-attention mechanisms, enabling it to capture both local and global contextual information effectively. By combining the Swin Transformer with CNNs, SwinUNETR merges global context awareness with detailed spatial resolution. This hybrid approach addresses the challenges posed by the varying modality characteristics and complex brain structures, facilitating the generation of accurate and realistic synthetic images. We evaluate the performance of SwinUNETR on brain MRI datasets and demonstrate its superior capability in generating clinically valuable images. Our results show significant improvements in image quality, anatomical consistency, and diagnostic value.
Latent Wavelet Diffusion: Enabling 4K Image Synthesis for Free
Authors: Luigi Sigillo, Shengfeng He, Danilo Comminiello
Date: 2025-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: 2k, 4k, Computational Efficiency, Denoising, Image Generation

High-resolution image synthesis remains a core challenge in generative modeling, particularly in balancing computational efficiency with the preservation of fine-grained visual detail. We present Latent Wavelet Diffusion (LWD), a lightweight framework that enables any latent diffusion model to scale to ultra-high-resolution image generation (2K to 4K) for free. LWD introduces three key components: (1) a scale-consistent variational autoencoder objective that enhances the spectral fidelity of latent representations; (2) wavelet energy maps that identify and localize detail-rich spatial regions within the latent space; and (3) a time-dependent masking strategy that focuses denoising supervision on high-frequency components during training. LWD requires no architectural modifications and incurs no additional computational overhead. Despite its simplicity, it consistently improves perceptual quality and reduces FID in ultra-high-resolution image synthesis, outperforming strong baseline models. These results highlight the effectiveness of frequency-aware, signal-driven supervision as a principled and efficient approach for high-resolution generative modeling.
Unrolling Nonconvex Graph Total Variation for Image Denoising
Authors: Songlin Wei, Gene Cheung, Fei Chen, Ivan Selesnick
Date: 2025-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Denoising

Conventional model-based image denoising optimizations employ convex regularization terms, such as total variation (TV) that convexifies the $\ell_0$-norm to promote sparse signal representation. Instead, we propose a new non-convex total variation term in a graph setting (NC-GTV), such that when combined with an $\ell_2$-norm fidelity term for denoising, leads to a convex objective with no extraneous local minima. We define NC-GTV using a new graph variant of the Huber function, interpretable as a Moreau envelope. The crux is the selection of a parameter $a$ characterizing the graph Huber function that ensures overall objective convexity; we efficiently compute $a$ via an adaptation of Gershgorin Circle Theorem (GCT). To minimize the convex objective, we design a linear-time algorithm based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and unroll it into a lightweight feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. Experiments show that our method outperforms unrolled GTV and other representative image denoising schemes, while employing far fewer network parameters.
Tomographic Foundation Model -- FORCE: Flow-Oriented Reconstruction Conditioning Engine
Authors: Wenjun Xia, Chuang Niu, Ge Wang
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Hallucination, Image Reconstruction

Computed tomography (CT) is a major medical imaging modality. Clinical CT scenarios, such as low-dose screening, sparse-view scanning, and metal implants, often lead to severe noise and artifacts in reconstructed images, requiring improved reconstruction techniques. The introduction of deep learning has significantly advanced CT image reconstruction. However, obtaining paired training data remains rather challenging due to patient motion and other constraints. Although deep learning methods can still perform well with approximately paired data, they inherently carry the risk of hallucination due to data inconsistencies and model instability. In this paper, we integrate the data fidelity with the state-of-the-art generative AI model, referred to as the Poisson flow generative model (PFGM) with a generalized version PFGM++, and propose a novel CT framework: Flow-Oriented Reconstruction Conditioning Engine (FORCE). In our experiments, the proposed method shows superior performance in various CT imaging tasks, outperforming existing unsupervised reconstruction approaches.
RAW Image Reconstruction from RGB on Smartphones. NTIRE 2025 Challenge Report
Authors: Marcos V. Conde, Radu Timofte, Radu Berdan, Beril Besbinar, Daisuke Iso, Pengzhou Ji, Xiong Dun, Zeying Fan, Chen Wu, Zhansheng Wang, PengBo Zhang, Jiazi Huang, Qinglin Liu, Wei Yu, Shengping Zhang, Xiangyang Ji, Kyungsik Kim, Minkyung Kim, Hwalmin Lee, Hekun Ma, Huan Zheng, Yanyan Wei, Zhao Zhang, Jing Fang, Meilin Gao, Xiang Yu, Shangbin Xie, Mengyuan Sun, Huanjing Yue, Jingyu Yang Huize Cheng, Shaomeng Zhang, Zhaoyang Zhang, Haoxiang Liang
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Raw reconstruction

Numerous low-level vision tasks operate in the RAW domain due to its linear properties, bit depth, and sensor designs. Despite this, RAW image datasets are scarce and more expensive to collect than the already large and public sRGB datasets. For this reason, many approaches try to generate realistic RAW images using sensor information and sRGB images. This paper covers the second challenge on RAW Reconstruction from sRGB (Reverse ISP). We aim to recover RAW sensor images from smartphones given the corresponding sRGB images without metadata and, by doing this, ``reverse" the ISP transformation. Over 150 participants joined this NTIRE 2025 challenge and submitted efficient models. The proposed methods and benchmark establish the state-of-the-art for generating realistic RAW data.
Are Pixel-Wise Metrics Reliable for Sparse-View Computed Tomography Reconstruction?
Authors: Tianyu Lin, Xinran Li, Chuntung Zhuang, Qi Chen, Yuanhao Cai, Kai Ding, Alan L. Yuille, Zongwei Zhou
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, CT Reconstruction

Widely adopted evaluation metrics for sparse-view CT reconstruction--such as Structural Similarity Index Measure and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio--prioritize pixel-wise fidelity but often fail to capture the completeness of critical anatomical structures, particularly small or thin regions that are easily missed. To address this limitation, we propose a suite of novel anatomy-aware evaluation metrics designed to assess structural completeness across anatomical structures, including large organs, small organs, intestines, and vessels. Building on these metrics, we introduce CARE, a Completeness-Aware Reconstruction Enhancement framework that incorporates structural penalties during training to encourage anatomical preservation of significant structures. CARE is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into analytical, implicit, and generative methods. When applied to these methods, CARE substantially improves structural completeness in CT reconstructions, achieving up to +32% improvement for large organs, +22% for small organs, +40% for intestines, and +36% for vessels.
Beyond Pixel Agreement: Large Language Models as Clinical Guardrails for Reliable Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Jiaxi Sheng, Leyi Yu, Haoyue Li, Yifan Gao, Xin Gao
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Evaluating AI-generated medical image segmentations for clinical acceptability poses a significant challenge, as traditional pixelagreement metrics often fail to capture true diagnostic utility. This paper introduces Hierarchical Clinical Reasoner (HCR), a novel framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as clinical guardrails for reliable, zero-shot quality assessment. HCR employs a structured, multistage prompting strategy that guides LLMs through a detailed reasoning process, encompassing knowledge recall, visual feature analysis, anatomical inference, and clinical synthesis, to evaluate segmentations. We evaluated HCR on a diverse dataset across six medical imaging tasks. Our results show that HCR, utilizing models like Gemini 2.5 Flash, achieved a classification accuracy of 78.12%, performing comparably to, and in instances exceeding, dedicated vision models such as ResNet50 (72.92% accuracy) that were specifically trained for this task. The HCR framework not only provides accurate quality classifications but also generates interpretable, step-by-step reasoning for its assessments. This work demonstrates the potential of LLMs, when appropriately guided, to serve as sophisticated evaluators, offering a pathway towards more trustworthy and clinically-aligned quality control for AI in medical imaging.
NTIRE 2025 the 2nd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) in the Wild Challenge
Authors: Jie Liang, Radu Timofte, Qiaosi Yi, Zhengqiang Zhang, Shuaizheng Liu, Lingchen Sun, Rongyuan Wu, Xindong Zhang, Hui Zeng, Lei Zhang
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Demosaicking, Denoising, Image Restoration

In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the NTIRE 2025 challenge on the 2nd Restore Any Image Model (RAIM) in the Wild. This challenge established a new benchmark for real-world image restoration, featuring diverse scenarios with and without reference ground truth. Participants were tasked with restoring real-captured images suffering from complex and unknown degradations, where both perceptual quality and fidelity were critically evaluated. The challenge comprised two tracks: (1) the low-light joint denoising and demosaicing (JDD) task, and (2) the image detail enhancement/generation task. Each track included two sub-tasks. The first sub-task involved paired data with available ground truth, enabling quantitative evaluation. The second sub-task dealt with real-world yet unpaired images, emphasizing restoration efficiency and subjective quality assessed through a comprehensive user study. In total, the challenge attracted nearly 300 registrations, with 51 teams submitting more than 600 results. The top-performing methods advanced the state of the art in image restoration and received unanimous recognition from all 20+ expert judges. The datasets used in Track 1 and Track 2 are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Mgqve-yNcE26IIieI8lMIf-25VvZRs_J and https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UB7nnzLwqDZOwDmD9aT8J0KVg2ag4Qae, respectively. The official challenge pages for Track 1 and Track 2 can be found at https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/21334#learn_the_details and https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/21623#learn_the_details.
Structured Pruning and Quantization for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Md Adnan Faisal Hossain, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Image Compression, Model Compression, Neural Architecture Search, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization

The high computational costs associated with large deep learning models significantly hinder their practical deployment. Model pruning has been widely explored in deep learning literature to reduce their computational burden, but its application has been largely limited to computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. In this work, we propose a structured pruning method targeted for Learned Image Compression (LIC) models that aims to reduce the computational costs associated with image compression while maintaining the rate-distortion performance. We employ a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) method based on the rate-distortion loss for computing the pruning ratio for each layer of the network. We compare our pruned model with the uncompressed LIC Model with same network architecture and show that it can achieve model size reduction without any BD-Rate performance drop. We further show that our pruning method can be integrated with model quantization to achieve further model compression while maintaining similar BD-Rate performance. We have made the source code available at gitlab.com/viper-purdue/lic-pruning.
Flexible Mixed Precision Quantization for Learned Image Compression
Authors: Md Adnan Faisal Hossain, Zhihao Duan, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2025-06-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression, Quantization

Despite its improvements in coding performance compared to traditional codecs, Learned Image Compression (LIC) suffers from large computational costs for storage and deployment. Model quantization offers an effective solution to reduce the computational complexity of LIC models. However, most existing works perform fixed-precision quantization which suffers from sub-optimal utilization of resources due to the varying sensitivity to quantization of different layers of a neural network. In this paper, we propose a Flexible Mixed Precision Quantization (FMPQ) method that assigns different bit-widths to different layers of the quantized network using the fractional change in rate-distortion loss as the bit-assignment criterion. We also introduce an adaptive search algorithm which reduces the time-complexity of searching for the desired distribution of quantization bit-widths given a fixed model size. Evaluation of our method shows improved BD-Rate performance under similar model size constraints compared to other works on quantization of LIC models. We have made the source code available at gitlab.com/viper-purdue/fmpq.
Analysis of Local Methane Emissions Using Near-Simultaneous Multi-Satellite Observations: Insights from Landfills and Oil-Gas Facilities
Authors: Alvise Ferrari, Giovanni Laneve, Raul Alejandro Carvajal Tellez, Valerio Pampanoni, Simone Saquella, Rocchina Guarini
Date: 2025-06-01 00:00:00

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas, and its detection and quantification are crucial for mitigating the greenhouse effect. This study presents a comparative analysis of methane emissions observed using near-simultaneous observations from hyperspectral imaging spectrometers hosted aboard different satellite platforms (PRISMA, EnMAP, EMIT and GHGSat). Methane emissions from oil and gas facilities and landfills are analyzed to evaluate the consistency and precision of the sensors and temporal variability of the source. Landfills, characterized by diffuse and stable emissions, and dynamic oil and gas facilities, subject to operational variability, provide contrasting use cases for emission monitoring. Emission rates are quantified using the Integrated Mass Enhancement (IME) model and validated across satellites with overlapping acquisitions. This study highlights the advantages and limitations of each satellite system, emphasizing the critical role of multi-sensor integration in bridging temporal and spatial observation gaps. Insights derived here aim to enhance global methane monitoring frameworks and guide future satellite design for improved emission quantification.