arXiv subjects

Hongxia Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Hongxia Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Diffusion-Guided Adversarial Perturbation Injection for Generalizable Defense Against Facial Manipulations

Recent advances in GAN and diffusion models have significantly improved the realism and controllability of facial deepfake manipulation, raising serious concerns regarding privacy, security, and identity misuse. Proactive defenses attempt to counter this threat by injecting adversarial perturbations into images before manipulation takes place. However, existing approaches remain limited in effectiveness due to suboptimal perturbation injection strategies and are typically designed under white-box assumptions, targeting only simple GAN-based attribute editing. These constraints hinder their applicability in practical real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose AEGIS, the first diffusion-guided paradigm in which the AdvErsarial facial images are Generated for Identity Shielding. We observe that the limited defense capability of existing approaches stems from the peak-clipping constraint, where perturbations are forcibly truncated due to a fixed $L_\infty$-bounded. To overcome this limitation, instead of directly modifying pixels, AEGIS injects adversarial perturbations into the latent space along the DDIM denoising trajectory, thereby decoupling the perturbation magnitude from pixel-level constraints and allowing perturbations to adaptively amplify where most effective. The extensible design of AEGIS allows the defense to be expanded from purely white-box use to also support black-box scenarios through a gradient-estimation strategy. Extensive experiments across GAN and diffusion-based deepfake generators show that AEGIS consistently delivers strong defense effectiveness while maintaining high perceptual quality. In white-box settings, it achieves robust manipulation disruption, whereas in black-box settings, it demonstrates strong cross-model transferability.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2026

Adaptive Momentum via Minimal Dual Function for Accelerating Randomized Sparse Kaczmarz

Recently, the randomized sparse Kaczmarz method has been accelerated by designing heavy ball momentum adaptively via a minimal-error principle. In this paper, we develop a new adaptive momentum method based on the minimal dual function principle to go beyond the exact measurement restriction of the minimal-error principle. Moreover, by integrating the new adaptive momentum method with the quantile-based sampling, we introduce a general algorithmic framework, called quantile-based randomized sparse Kaczmarz with minimal dual function momentum, which provides a unified approach to exact, noisy, or corrupted linear systems. In addition, we utilize the discrepancy principle and monotone error as stopping rules for the proposed algorithm. Theoretically, we establish linear convergence in expectation of Bregman distance up to a finite horizon related to the contaminated level. At last, we provide numerical illustrations on simulated and real-world data to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Stochastic Block Bregman Projection with Polyak-like Stepsize for Possibly Inconsistent Convex Feasibility Problems

Stochastic projection algorithms for solving convex feasibility problems (CFPs) have attracted considerable attention due to their broad applicability. In this paper, we propose a unified stochastic bilevel reformulation for possibly inconsistent CFPs that combines proximity function minimization and structural regularization, leading to a feasible bilevel model with a unique and stable regularized solution. From the algorithmic perspective, we develop the stochastic block Bregman projection method with Polyak-like and projective stepsizes, which not only subsumes several recent stochastic projection algorithms but also induces new schemes tailored to specific problems. Moreover, we establish ergodic sublinear convergence rates for the expected inner function, as well as linear convergence in expectation to the inner minimizer set under a Bregman distance growth condition. In particular, the proposed Polyak-like stepsize ensures exact convergence in expectation for possibly inconsistent CFPs. Finally, numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and its robustness to noise.

math.OC↗

arXiv2026

Guiding Diffusion Models with Semantically Degraded Conditions

Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) is a cornerstone of modern text-to-image models, yet its reliance on a semantically vacuous null prompt ($\varnothing$) generates a guidance signal prone to geometric entanglement. This is a key factor limiting its precision, leading to well-documented failures in complex compositional tasks. We propose Condition-Degradation Guidance (CDG), a novel paradigm that replaces the null prompt with a strategically degraded condition, $\boldsymbol{c}_{\text{deg}}$. This reframes guidance from a coarse "good vs. null" contrast to a more refined "good vs. almost good" discrimination, thereby compelling the model to capture fine-grained semantic distinctions. We find that tokens in transformer text encoders split into two functional roles: content tokens encoding object semantics, and context-aggregating tokens capturing global context. By selectively degrading only the former, CDG constructs $\boldsymbol{c}_{\text{deg}}$ without external models or training. Validated across diverse architectures including Stable Diffusion 3, FLUX, and Qwen-Image, CDG markedly improves compositional accuracy and text-image alignment. As a lightweight, plug-and-play module, it achieves this with negligible computational overhead. Our work challenges the reliance on static, information-sparse negative samples and establishes a new principle for diffusion guidance: the construction of adaptive, semantically-aware negative samples is critical to achieving precise semantic control. Code is available at https://github.com/Ming-321/Classifier-Degradation-Guidance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

A Single-loop Stochastic Riemannian ADMM for Nonsmooth Optimization

We study a class of nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems on Riemannian manifolds. In this work, we propose MARS-ADMM, the first stochastic Riemannian alternating direction method of multipliers with provable near-optimal complexity guarantees. Our algorithm incorporates a momentum-based variance-reduced gradient estimator applied exclusively to the smooth component of the objective, together with carefully designed penalty parameter and dual stepsize updates. Unlike existing approaches that rely on computationally expensive double-loop frameworks, MARS-ADMM operates in a single-loop fashion and requires only a constant number of stochastic gradient evaluations per iteration. Under mild assumptions, we establish that MARS-ADMM achieves an iteration complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-3})$, which improves upon the previously best-known bound of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3.5})$ for stochastic Riemannian operator-splitting methods. As a result, our analysis closes the theoretical complexity gap between stochastic Riemannian operator-splitting algorithms and stochastic methods for nonsmooth optimization with nonlinear constraints. Notably, the obtained complexity also matches the best-known bounds in deterministic nonsmooth Riemannian optimization, demonstrating that deterministic-level accuracy can be achieved using only constant-size stochastic samples.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

DEAL-300K: Diffusion-based Editing Area Localization with a 300K-Scale Dataset and Frequency-Prompted Baseline

Diffusion-based image editing has made semantic level image manipulation easy for general users, but it also enables realistic local forgeries that are hard to localize. Existing benchmarks mainly focus on the binary detection of generated images or the localization of manually edited regions and do not reflect the properties of diffusion-based edits, which often blend smoothly into the original content. We present Diffusion-Based Image Editing Area Localization Dataset (DEAL-300K), a large scale dataset for diffusion-based image manipulation localization (DIML) with more than 300,000 annotated images. We build DEAL-300K by using a multi-modal large language model to generate editing instructions, a mask-free diffusion editor to produce manipulated images, and an active-learning change detection pipeline to obtain pixel-level annotations. On top of this dataset, we propose a localization framework that uses a frozen Visual Foundation Model (VFM) together with Multi Frequency Prompt Tuning (MFPT) to capture both semantic and frequency-domain cues of edited regions. Trained on DEAL-300K, our method reaches a pixel-level F1 score of 82.56% on our test split and 80.97% on the external CoCoGlide benchmark, providing strong baselines and a practical foundation for future DIML research.The dataset can be accessed via https://github.com/ymhzyj/DEAL-300K.

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arXiv2025

Nuclear Ptychoscopy: A Ptychographic Framework for Nuclear Spectroscopy

Accessing both amplitude and phase of nuclear response functions is central to fully characterizing light-matter interactions in the X-ray-nuclear regime. Recent work has demonstrated phase retrieval in two-dimensional time- and energy-resolved spectra, establishing the feasibility of phase-sensitive nuclear spectroscopy. Here, we introduce Nuclear Ptychoscopy, a ptychographic framework that adapts algorithms from coherent diffractive imaging to nuclear spectroscopy, enabling reconstruction of the complex response function by exploiting redundancy in two-dimensional spectra. We develop three complementary reconstruction schemes tailored to distinct experimental scenarios: reconstruction with a known analyzer response, blind reconstruction, and reconstruction incorporating partial prior information. In parallel, we develop geometric analysis techniques that elucidate algorithmic behavior and contribute new tools to ptychography. The framework is validated through experimental data and simulations, demonstrating its versatility across diverse nuclear spectroscopy scenarios and bridging nuclear spectroscopy with ptychography. Beyond advancing quantitative nuclear spectroscopy, our framework opens new opportunities for metrology, coherent control, and quantum applications in the X-ray-nuclear regime.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

An Efficient Algorithm for Learning-Based Visual Localization

This paper addresses the visual localization problem in Global Positioning System (GPS)-denied environments, where computational resources are often limited. To achieve efficient and robust performance under these constraints, we propose a novel algorithm. The algorithm stems from the optimal control principle (OCP). It incorporates diagonal information estimation of the Hessian matrix, which results in training a higher-performance deep neural network and accelerates optimization convergence. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that the final model achieves competitive localization accuracy and exhibits remarkable generalization capability. This study provides new insights for developing high-performance offline positioning systems.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Adaptive Riemannian ADMM for Nonsmooth Optimization: Optimal Complexity without Smoothing

We study the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth convex regularizer over a compact Riemannian submanifold embedded in Euclidean space. By introducing an auxiliary splitting variable, we propose an adaptive Riemannian alternating direction method of multipliers (ARADMM), which, for the first time, achieves convergence without requiring smoothing of the nonsmooth term. Our approach involves only one Riemannian gradient evaluation and one proximal update per iteration. Through careful and adaptive coordination of the stepsizes and penalty parameters, we establish an optimal iteration complexity of order $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3})$ for finding an $\epsilon$-approximate KKT point, matching the complexity of existing smoothing technique-based Riemannian ADMM methods. Extensive numerical experiments on sparse PCA and robust subspace recovery demonstrate that our ARADMM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art Riemannian ADMM variants in convergence speed and solution quality.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Towards Imperceptible Adversarial Defense: A Gradient-Driven Shield against Facial Manipulations

With the flourishing prosperity of generative models, manipulated facial images have become increasingly accessible, raising concerns regarding privacy infringement and societal trust. In response, proactive defense strategies embed adversarial perturbations into facial images to counter deepfake manipulation. However, existing methods often face a tradeoff between imperceptibility and defense effectiveness-strong perturbations may disrupt forgeries but degrade visual fidelity. Recent studies have attempted to address this issue by introducing additional visual loss constraints, yet often overlook the underlying gradient conflicts among losses, ultimately weakening defense performance. To bridge the gap, we propose a gradient-projection-based adversarial proactive defense (GRASP) method that effectively counters facial deepfakes while minimizing perceptual degradation. GRASP is the first approach to successfully integrate both structural similarity loss and low-frequency loss to enhance perturbation imperceptibility. By analyzing gradient conflicts between defense effectiveness loss and visual quality losses, GRASP pioneers the design of the gradient-projection mechanism to mitigate these conflicts, enabling balanced optimization that preserves image fidelity without sacrificing defensive performance. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of GRASP, achieving a PSNR exceeding 40 dB, SSIM of 0.99, and a 100% defense success rate against facial attribute manipulations, significantly outperforming existing approaches in visual quality.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Stochastic ADMM with batch size adaptation for nonconvex nonsmooth optimization

Stochastic alternating direction method of multipliers (SADMM) is a popular method for solving nonconvex nonsmooth optimization in various applications. However, it typically requires an empirical selection of the static batch size for gradient estimation, resulting in a challenging trade-off between variance reduction and computational cost. This paper proposes adaptive batch size SADMM, a practical method that dynamically adjusts the batch size based on accumulated differences along the optimization path. We develop a simple convergence analysis to handle the dependence of batch size adaptation that matches the best-known complexity with flexible parameter choices. We further extend this adaptive scheme to reduce the overall complexity of the popular variance-reduced methods, SVRG-ADMM and SPIDER-ADMM. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

math.OC↗

arXiv2025

Protecting Your Voice: Temporal-aware Robust Watermarking

The rapid advancement of generative models has led to the synthesis of real-fake ambiguous voices. To erase the ambiguity, embedding watermarks into the frequency-domain features of synthesized voices has become a common routine. However, the robustness achieved by choosing the frequency domain often comes at the expense of fine-grained voice features, leading to a loss of fidelity. Maximizing the comprehensive learning of time-domain features to enhance fidelity while maintaining robustness, we pioneer a \textbf{\underline{t}}emporal-aware \textbf{\underline{r}}ob\textbf{\underline{u}}st wat\textbf{\underline{e}}rmarking (\emph{True}) method for protecting the speech and singing voice. For this purpose, the integrated content-driven encoder is designed for watermarked waveform reconstruction, which is structurally lightweight. Additionally, the temporal-aware gated convolutional network is meticulously designed to bit-wise recover the watermark. Comprehensive experiments and comparisons with existing state-of-the-art methods have demonstrated the superior fidelity and vigorous robustness of the proposed \textit{True} achieving an average PESQ score of 4.63.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

Stochastic momentum ADMM for nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization with application to PnP algorithm

This paper proposes SMADMM, a single-loop Stochastic Momentum Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for solving a class of nonconvex and nonsmooth composite optimization problems. SMADMM achieves the optimal oracle complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-3/2})$ in the online setting. Unlike previous stochastic ADMM algorithms that require large mini-batches or a double-loop structure, SMADMM uses only $\mathcal{O}(1)$ stochastic gradient evaluations per iteration and avoids costly restarts. To further improve practicality, we incorporate dynamic step sizes and penalty parameters, proving that SMADMM maintains its optimal complexity without the need for large initial batches. We also develop PnP-SMADMM by integrating plug-and-play priors, and establish its theoretical convergence under mild assumptions. Extensive experiments on classification, CT image reconstruction, and phase retrieval tasks demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing stochastic ADMM methods both in accuracy and efficiency, validating our theoretical results.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

A novel algorithm for optimizing bundle adjustment in image sequence alignment

The Bundle Adjustment (BA) model is commonly optimized using a nonlinear least squares method, with the Levenberg-Marquardt (L-M) algorithm being a typical choice. However, despite the L-M algorithm's effectiveness, its sensitivity to initial conditions often results in slower convergence when applied to poorly conditioned datasets, motivating the exploration of alternative optimization strategies. This paper introduces a novel algorithm for optimizing the BA model in the context of image sequence alignment for cryo-electron tomography, utilizing optimal control theory to directly optimize general nonlinear functions. The proposed Optimal Control Algorithm (OCA) exhibits superior convergence rates and effectively mitigates the oscillatory behavior frequently observed in L-M algorithm. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets were conducted to evaluate the algorithm's performance. The results demonstrate that the OCA achieves faster convergence compared to the L-M algorithm. Moreover, the incorporation of a bisection-based update procedure significantly enhances the OCA's performance, particularly in poorly initialized datasets. These findings indicate that the OCA can substantially improve the efficiency of 3D reconstructions in cryo-electron tomography.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

Inexact Riemannian Gradient Descent Method for Nonconvex Optimization

Gradient descent methods are fundamental first-order optimization algorithms in both Euclidean spaces and Riemannian manifolds. However, the exact gradient is not readily available in many scenarios. This paper proposes a novel inexact Riemannian gradient descent algorithm for nonconvex problems, accompanied by a convergence guarantee. In particular, we establish two inexact gradient conditions on Riemannian manifolds for the first time, enabling precise gradient approximations. Our method demonstrates strong convergence results for both gradient sequences and function values. The global convergence with constructive convergence rates for the sequence of iterates is ensured under the Riemannian Kurdyka-\L ojasiewicz property. Furthermore, our algorithm encompasses two specific applications: Riemannian sharpness-aware minimization and Riemannian extragradient algorithm, both of which inherit the global convergence properties of the inexact gradient methods. Numerical experiments on low-rank matrix completion and principal component analysis problems validate the efficiency and practical relevance of the proposed approaches.

math.OC↗

arXiv2024

TVG: A Training-free Transition Video Generation Method with Diffusion Models

Transition videos play a crucial role in media production, enhancing the flow and coherence of visual narratives. Traditional methods like morphing often lack artistic appeal and require specialized skills, limiting their effectiveness. Recent advances in diffusion model-based video generation offer new possibilities for creating transitions but face challenges such as poor inter-frame relationship modeling and abrupt content changes. We propose a novel training-free Transition Video Generation (TVG) approach using video-level diffusion models that addresses these limitations without additional training. Our method leverages Gaussian Process Regression ($\mathcal{GPR}$) to model latent representations, ensuring smooth and dynamic transitions between frames. Additionally, we introduce interpolation-based conditional controls and a Frequency-aware Bidirectional Fusion (FBiF) architecture to enhance temporal control and transition reliability. Evaluations of benchmark datasets and custom image pairs demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating high-quality smooth transition videos. The code are provided in https://sobeymil.github.io/tvg.com.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

A Unified Plug-and-Play Algorithm with Projected Landweber Operator for Split Convex Feasibility Problems

In recent years Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance in inverse imaging problems by replacing proximal operators with denoisers. Based on the proximal gradient method, some theoretical results of PnP have appeared, where appropriate step size is crucial for convergence analysis. However, in practical applications, applying PnP methods with theoretically guaranteed step sizes is difficult, and these algorithms are limited to Gaussian noise. In this paper,from a perspective of split convex feasibility problems (SCFP), an adaptive PnP algorithm with Projected Landweber Operator (PnP-PLO) is proposed to address these issues. Numerical experiments on image deblurring, super-resolution, and compressed sensing MRI experiments illustrate that PnP-PLO with theoretical guarantees outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as RED and RED-PRO.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

HPPP: Halpern-type Preconditioned Proximal Point Algorithms and Applications to Image Restoration

Recently, the degenerate preconditioned proximal point (PPP) method provides a unified and flexible framework for designing and analyzing operator-splitting algorithms such as Douglas-Rachford (DR). However, the degenerate PPP method exhibits weak convergence in the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and lacks accelerated variants. To address these issues, we propose a Halpern-type PPP (HPPP) algorithm, which leverages the strong convergence and acceleration properties of Halpern's iteration method. Moreover, we propose a novel algorithm for image restoration by combining HPPP with denoiser priors such as Plug-and-Play (PnP) prior, which can be viewed as an accelerated PnP method. Finally, numerical experiments including several toy examples and image restoration validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.

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