pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Beyond 1D: Vision Transformers and Multichannel Signal Images for PPG-to-ECG Reconstruction
Authors: Xiaoyan Li, Shixin Xu, Faisal Habib, Arvind Gupta, Huaxiong Huang
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00

Reconstructing ECG from PPG is a promising yet challenging task. While recent advancements in generative models have significantly improved ECG reconstruction, accurately capturing fine-grained waveform features remains a key challenge. To address this, we propose a novel PPG-to-ECG reconstruction method that leverages a Vision Transformer (ViT) as the core network. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on single-channel PPG, our method employs a four-channel signal image representation, incorporating the original PPG, its first-order difference, second-order difference, and area under the curve. This multi-channel design enriches feature extraction by preserving both temporal and physiological variations within the PPG. By leveraging the self-attention mechanism in ViT, our approach effectively captures both inter-beat and intra-beat dependencies, leading to more robust and accurate ECG reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing 1D convolution-based approaches, achieving up to 29% reduction in PRD and 15% reduction in RMSE. The proposed approach also produces improvements in other evaluation metrics, highlighting its robustness and effectiveness in reconstructing ECG signals. Furthermore, to ensure a clinically relevant evaluation, we introduce new performance metrics, including QRS area error, PR interval error, RT interval error, and RT amplitude difference error. Our findings suggest that integrating a four-channel signal image representation with the self-attention mechanism of ViT enables more effective extraction of informative PPG features and improved modeling of beat-to-beat variations for PPG-to-ECG mapping. Beyond demonstrating the potential of PPG as a viable alternative for heart activity monitoring, our approach opens new avenues for cyclic signal analysis and prediction.
Highly Efficient Non-Separable Transforms for Next Generation Video Coding
Authors: Amir Said, Xin Zhao, Marta Karczewicz, Hilmi E. Egilmez, Vadim Seregin, Jianle Chen
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Compression

For the last few decades, the application of signal-adaptive transform coding to video compression has been stymied by the large computational complexity of matrix-based solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel parametric approach to greatly reduce the complexity without degrading the compression performance. In our approach, instead of following the conventional technique of identifying full transform matrices that yield best compression efficiency, we look for the best transform parameters defining a new class of transforms, called HyGTs, which have low complexity implementations that are easy to parallelize. The proposed HyGTs are implemented as an extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), and our comprehensive experimental results demonstrate that proposed HyGTs improve average coding gain by 6% bit rate reduction, while using 6.8 times less memory than KLT matrices.
Privacy-Preserving Chest X-ray Report Generation via Multimodal Federated Learning with ViT and GPT-2
Authors: Md. Zahid Hossain, Mustofa Ahmed, Most. Sharmin Sultana Samu, Md. Rakibul Islam
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

The automated generation of radiology reports from chest X-ray images holds significant promise in enhancing diagnostic workflows while preserving patient privacy. Traditional centralized approaches often require sensitive data transfer, posing privacy concerns. To address this, the study proposes a Multimodal Federated Learning framework for chest X-ray report generation using the IU-Xray dataset. The system utilizes a Vision Transformer (ViT) as the encoder and GPT-2 as the report generator, enabling decentralized training without sharing raw data. Three Federated Learning (FL) aggregation strategies: FedAvg, Krum Aggregation and a novel Loss-aware Federated Averaging (L-FedAvg) were evaluated. Among these, Krum Aggregation demonstrated superior performance across lexical and semantic evaluation metrics such as ROUGE, BLEU, BERTScore and RaTEScore. The results show that FL can match or surpass centralized models in generating clinically relevant and semantically rich radiology reports. This lightweight and privacy-preserving framework paves the way for collaborative medical AI development without compromising data confidentiality.
STA-Risk: A Deep Dive of Spatio-Temporal Asymmetries for Breast Cancer Risk Prediction
Authors: Zhengbo Zhou, Dooman Arefan, Margarita Zuley, Jules Sumkin, Shandong Wu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Predicting the risk of developing breast cancer is an important clinical tool to guide early intervention and tailoring personalized screening strategies. Early risk models have limited performance and recently machine learning-based analysis of mammogram images showed encouraging risk prediction effects. These models however are limited to the use of a single exam or tend to overlook nuanced breast tissue evolvement in spatial and temporal details of longitudinal imaging exams that are indicative of breast cancer risk. In this paper, we propose STA-Risk (Spatial and Temporal Asymmetry-based Risk Prediction), a novel Transformer-based model that captures fine-grained mammographic imaging evolution simultaneously from bilateral and longitudinal asymmetries for breast cancer risk prediction. STA-Risk is innovative by the side encoding and temporal encoding to learn spatial-temporal asymmetries, regulated by a customized asymmetry loss. We performed extensive experiments with two independent mammogram datasets and achieved superior performance than four representative SOTA models for 1- to 5-year future risk prediction. Source codes will be released upon publishing of the paper.
Laparoscopic Image Desmoking Using the U-Net with New Loss Function and Integrated Differentiable Wiener Filter
Authors: Chengyu Yang, Chengjun Liu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Laparoscopic surgeries often suffer from reduced visual clarity due to the presence of surgical smoke originated by surgical instruments, which poses significant challenges for both surgeons and vision based computer-assisted technologies. In order to remove the surgical smoke, a novel U-Net deep learning with new loss function and integrated differentiable Wiener filter (ULW) method is presented. Specifically, the new loss function integrates the pixel, structural, and perceptual properties. Thus, the new loss function, which combines the structural similarity index measure loss, the perceptual loss, as well as the mean squared error loss, is able to enhance the quality and realism of the reconstructed images. Furthermore, the learnable Wiener filter is capable of effectively modelling the degradation process caused by the surgical smoke. The effectiveness of the proposed ULW method is evaluated using the publicly available paired laparoscopic smoke and smoke-free image dataset, which provides reliable benchmarking and quantitative comparisons. Experimental results show that the proposed ULW method excels in both visual clarity and metric-based evaluation. As a result, the proposed ULW method offers a promising solution for real-time enhancement of laparoscopic imagery. The code is available at https://github.com/chengyuyang-njit/ImageDesmoke.
Optimizing Deep Learning for Skin Cancer Classification: A Computationally Efficient CNN with Minimal Accuracy Trade-Off
Authors: Abdullah Al Mamun, Pollob Chandra Ray, Md Rahat Ul Nasib, Akash Das, Jia Uddin, Md Nurul Absur
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Cancer Classification, Medical Image Analysis, Skin Cancer Classification, Transfer Learning

The rapid advancement of deep learning in medical image analysis has greatly enhanced the accuracy of skin cancer classification. However, current state-of-the-art models, especially those based on transfer learning like ResNet50, come with significant computational overhead, rendering them impractical for deployment in resource-constrained environments. This study proposes a custom CNN model that achieves a 96.7\% reduction in parameters (from 23.9 million in ResNet50 to 692,000) while maintaining a classification accuracy deviation of less than 0.022\%. Our empirical analysis of the HAM10000 dataset reveals that although transfer learning models provide a marginal accuracy improvement of approximately 0.022\%, they result in a staggering 13,216.76\% increase in FLOPs, considerably raising computational costs and inference latency. In contrast, our lightweight CNN architecture, which encompasses only 30.04 million FLOPs compared to ResNet50's 4.00 billion, significantly reduces energy consumption, memory footprint, and inference time. These findings underscore the trade-off between the complexity of deep models and their real-world feasibility, positioning our optimized CNN as a practical solution for mobile and edge-based skin cancer diagnostics.
Single Snapshot Distillation for Phase Coded Mask Design in Phase Retrieval
Authors: Karen Fonseca, Leon Suarez-Rodriguez, Andres Jerez, Felipe Gutierrez-Barragan, Henry Arguello
Date: 2025-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization, Knowledge Distillation, Retrieval

Phase retrieval (PR) reconstructs phase information from magnitude measurements, known as coded diffraction patterns (CDPs), whose quality depends on the number of snapshots captured using coded phase masks. High-quality phase estimation requires multiple snapshots, which is not desired for efficient PR systems. End-to-end frameworks enable joint optimization of the optical system and the recovery neural network. However, their application is constrained by physical implementation limitations. Additionally, the framework is prone to gradient vanishing issues related to its global optimization process. This paper introduces a Knowledge Distillation (KD) optimization approach to address these limitations. KD transfers knowledge from a larger, lower-constrained network (teacher) to a smaller, more efficient, and implementable network (student). In this method, the teacher, a PR system trained with multiple snapshots, distills its knowledge into a single-snapshot PR system, the student. The loss functions compare the CPMs and the feature space of the recovery network. Simulations demonstrate that this approach improves reconstruction performance compared to a PR system trained without the teacher's guidance.
Prostate Cancer Screening with Artificial Intelligence-Enhanced Micro-Ultrasound: A Comparative Study with Traditional Methods
Authors: Muhammad Imran, Wayne G. Brisbane, Li-Ming Su, Jason P. Joseph, Wei Shao
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Sensitivity, Specificity

Background and objective: Micro-ultrasound (micro-US) is a novel imaging modality with diagnostic accuracy comparable to MRI for detecting clinically significant prostate cancer (csPCa). We investigated whether artificial intelligence (AI) interpretation of micro-US can outperform clinical screening methods using PSA and digital rectal examination (DRE). Methods: We retrospectively studied 145 men who underwent micro-US guided biopsy (79 with csPCa, 66 without). A self-supervised convolutional autoencoder was used to extract deep image features from 2D micro-US slices. Random forest classifiers were trained using five-fold cross-validation to predict csPCa at the slice level. Patients were classified as csPCa-positive if 88 or more consecutive slices were predicted positive. Model performance was compared with a classifier using PSA, DRE, prostate volume, and age. Key findings and limitations: The AI-based micro-US model and clinical screening model achieved AUROCs of 0.871 and 0.753, respectively. At a fixed threshold, the micro-US model achieved 92.5% sensitivity and 68.1% specificity, while the clinical model showed 96.2% sensitivity but only 27.3% specificity. Limitations include a retrospective single-center design and lack of external validation. Conclusions and clinical implications: AI-interpreted micro-US improves specificity while maintaining high sensitivity for csPCa detection. This method may reduce unnecessary biopsies and serve as a low-cost alternative to PSA-based screening. Patient summary: We developed an AI system to analyze prostate micro-ultrasound images. It outperformed PSA and DRE in detecting aggressive cancer and may help avoid unnecessary biopsies.
Efficient Leaf Disease Classification and Segmentation using Midpoint Normalization Technique and Attention Mechanism
Authors: Enam Ahmed Taufik, Antara Firoz Parsa, Seraj Al Mahmud Mostafa
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00

Enhancing plant disease detection from leaf imagery remains a persistent challenge due to scarce labeled data and complex contextual factors. We introduce a transformative two-stage methodology, Mid Point Normalization (MPN) for intelligent image preprocessing, coupled with sophisticated attention mechanisms that dynamically recalibrate feature representations. Our classification pipeline, merging MPN with Squeeze-and-Excitation (SE) blocks, achieves remarkable 93% accuracy while maintaining exceptional class-wise balance. The perfect F1 score attained for our target class exemplifies attention's power in adaptive feature refinement. For segmentation tasks, we seamlessly integrate identical attention blocks within U-Net architecture using MPN-enhanced inputs, delivering compelling performance gains with 72.44% Dice score and 58.54% IoU, substantially outperforming baseline implementations. Beyond superior accuracy metrics, our approach yields computationally efficient, lightweight architectures perfectly suited for real-world computer vision applications.
DiMoSR: Feature Modulation via Multi-Branch Dilated Convolutions for Efficient Image Super-Resolution
Authors: M. Akin Yilmaz, Ahmet Bilican, A. Murat Tekalp
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Image Super-Resolution, SSIM, Super-Resolution

Balancing reconstruction quality versus model efficiency remains a critical challenge in lightweight single image super-resolution (SISR). Despite the prevalence of attention mechanisms in recent state-of-the-art SISR approaches that primarily emphasize or suppress feature maps, alternative architectural paradigms warrant further exploration. This paper introduces DiMoSR (Dilated Modulation Super-Resolution), a novel architecture that enhances feature representation through modulation to complement attention in lightweight SISR networks. The proposed approach leverages multi-branch dilated convolutions to capture rich contextual information over a wider receptive field while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate that DiMoSR outperforms state-of-the-art lightweight methods across diverse benchmark datasets, achieving superior PSNR and SSIM metrics with comparable or reduced computational complexity. Through comprehensive ablation studies, this work not only validates the effectiveness of DiMoSR but also provides critical insights into the interplay between attention mechanisms and feature modulation to guide future research in efficient network design. The code and model weights to reproduce our results are available at: https://github.com/makinyilmaz/DiMoSR
Taylor expansion-based Kolmogorov-Arnold network for blind image quality assessment
Authors: Ze Chen, Shaode Yu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Blind Image Quality Assessment, Computational Efficiency, Image Quality Assessment, regression

Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) has attracted growing interest for its strong function approximation capability. In our previous work, KAN and its variants were explored in score regression for blind image quality assessment (BIQA). However, these models encounter challenges when processing high-dimensional features, leading to limited performance gains and increased computational cost. To address these issues, we propose TaylorKAN that leverages the Taylor expansions as learnable activation functions to enhance local approximation capability. To improve the computational efficiency, network depth reduction and feature dimensionality compression are integrated into the TaylorKAN-based score regression pipeline. On five databases (BID, CLIVE, KonIQ, SPAQ, and FLIVE) with authentic distortions, extensive experiments demonstrate that TaylorKAN consistently outperforms the other KAN-related models, indicating that the local approximation via Taylor expansions is more effective than global approximation using orthogonal functions. Its generalization capacity is validated through inter-database experiments. The findings highlight the potential of TaylorKAN as an efficient and robust model for high-dimensional score regression.
Boosting Adversarial Transferability via High-Frequency Augmentation and Hierarchical-Gradient Fusion
Authors: Yayin Zheng, Chen Wan, Zihong Guo, Hailing Kuang, Xiaohai Lu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack

Adversarial attacks have become a significant challenge in the security of machine learning models, particularly in the context of black-box defense strategies. Existing methods for enhancing adversarial transferability primarily focus on the spatial domain. This paper presents Frequency-Space Attack (FSA), a new adversarial attack framework that effectively integrates frequency-domain and spatial-domain transformations. FSA combines two key techniques: (1) High-Frequency Augmentation, which applies Fourier transform with frequency-selective amplification to diversify inputs and emphasize the critical role of high-frequency components in adversarial attacks, and (2) Hierarchical-Gradient Fusion, which merges multi-scale gradient decomposition and fusion to capture both global structures and fine-grained details, resulting in smoother perturbations. Our experiment demonstrates that FSA consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various black-box models. Notably, our proposed FSA achieves an average attack success rate increase of 23.6% compared with BSR (CVPR 2024) on eight black-box defense models.
Cardiac Digital Twins at Scale from MRI: Open Tools and Representative Models from ~55000 UK Biobank Participants
Authors: Devran Ugurlu, Shuang Qian, Elliot Fairweather, Charlene Mauger, Bram Ruijsink, Laura Dal Toso, Yu Deng, Marina Strocchi, Reza Razavi, Alistair Young, Pablo Lamata, Steven Niederer, Martin Bishop
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis

A cardiac digital twin is a virtual replica of a patient's heart for screening, diagnosis, prognosis, risk assessment, and treatment planning of cardiovascular diseases. This requires an anatomically accurate patient-specific 3D structural representation of the heart, suitable for electro-mechanical simulations or study of disease mechanisms. However, generation of cardiac digital twins at scale is demanding and there are no public repositories of models across demographic groups. We describe an automatic open-source pipeline for creating patient-specific left and right ventricular meshes from cardiovascular magnetic resonance images, its application to a large cohort of ~55000 participants from UK Biobank, and the construction of the most comprehensive cohort of adult heart models to date, comprising 1423 representative meshes across sex (male, female), body mass index (range: 16 - 42 kg/m$^2$) and age (range: 49 - 80 years). Our code is available at https://github.com/cdttk/biv-volumetric-meshing/tree/plos2025 , and pre-trained networks, representative volumetric meshes with fibers and UVCs will be made available soon.
Generative Image Compression by Estimating Gradients of the Rate-variable Feature Distribution
Authors: Minghao Han, Weiyi You, Jinhua Zhang, Leheng Zhang, Ce Zhu, Shuhang Gu
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Compression

While learned image compression (LIC) focuses on efficient data transmission, generative image compression (GIC) extends this framework by integrating generative modeling to produce photo-realistic reconstructed images. In this paper, we propose a novel diffusion-based generative modeling framework tailored for generative image compression. Unlike prior diffusion-based approaches that indirectly exploit diffusion modeling, we reinterpret the compression process itself as a forward diffusion path governed by stochastic differential equations (SDEs). A reverse neural network is trained to reconstruct images by reversing the compression process directly, without requiring Gaussian noise initialization. This approach achieves smooth rate adjustment and photo-realistic reconstructions with only a minimal number of sampling steps. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing generative image compression approaches across a range of metrics, including perceptual distortion, statistical fidelity, and no-reference quality assessments.
Multitemporal Latent Dynamical Framework for Hyperspectral Images Unmixing
Authors: Ruiying Li, Bin Pan, Lan Ma, Xia Xu, Zhenwei Shi
Date: 2025-05-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperspectral Unmixing

Multitemporal hyperspectral unmixing can capture dynamical evolution of materials. Despite its capability, current methods emphasize variability of endmembers while neglecting dynamics of abundances, which motivates our adoption of neural ordinary differential equations to model abundances temporally. However, this motivation is hindered by two challenges: the inherent complexity in defining, modeling and solving problem, and the absence of theoretical support. To address above challenges, in this paper, we propose a multitemporal latent dynamical (MiLD) unmixing framework by capturing dynamical evolution of materials with theoretical validation. For addressing multitemporal hyperspectral unmixing, MiLD consists of problem definition, mathematical modeling, solution algorithm and theoretical support. We formulate multitemporal unmixing problem definition by conducting ordinary differential equations and developing latent variables. We transfer multitemporal unmixing to mathematical model by dynamical discretization approaches, which describe the discreteness of observed sequence images with mathematical expansions. We propose algorithm to solve problem and capture dynamics of materials, which approximates abundance evolution by neural networks. Furthermore, we provide theoretical support by validating the crucial properties, which verifies consistency, convergence and stability theorems. The major contributions of MiLD include defining problem by ordinary differential equations, modeling problem by dynamical discretization approach, solving problem by multitemporal unmixing algorithm, and presenting theoretical support. Our experiments on both synthetic and real datasets have validated the utility of our work