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Shijun Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Shijun Liang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

DynamicRad: Content-Adaptive Sparse Attention for Long Video Diffusion

Leveraging the natural spatiotemporal energy decay in video diffusion offers a path to efficiency, yet relying solely on rigid static masks risks losing critical long-range information in complex dynamics. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{DynamicRad}, a unified sparse-attention paradigm that grounds adaptive selection within a radial locality prior. DynamicRad introduces a \textbf{dual-mode} strategy: \textit{static-ratio} for speed-optimized execution and \textit{dynamic-threshold} for quality-first filtering. To ensure robustness without online search overhead, we integrate an offline Bayesian Optimization (BO) pipeline coupled with a \textbf{semantic motion router}. This lightweight projection module maps prompt embeddings to optimal sparsity regimes with \textbf{minimal runtime overhead}. Unlike online profiling methods, our offline BO optimizes attention reconstruction error (MSE) on a physics-based proxy task, ensuring rapid convergence. Experiments on HunyuanVideo and Wan2.1-14B demonstrate that DynamicRad pushes the efficiency--quality Pareto frontier, achieving \textbf{1.7$\times$--2.5$\times$ inference speedups} with \textbf{over 80\% effective sparsity}. In some long-sequence settings, the dynamic mode even matches or exceeds the dense baseline, while mask-aware LoRA further improves long-horizon coherence. Code is available at https://github.com/Adamlong3/DynamicRad.

cs.CV

Tada-DIP: Input-adaptive Deep Image Prior for One-shot 3D Image Reconstruction

Deep Image Prior (DIP) has recently emerged as a promising one-shot neural-network based image reconstruction method. However, DIP has seen limited application to 3D image reconstruction problems. In this work, we introduce Tada-DIP, a highly effective and fully 3D DIP method for solving 3D inverse problems. By combining input-adaptation and denoising regularization, Tada-DIP produces high-quality 3D reconstructions while avoiding the overfitting phenomenon that is common in DIP. Experiments on sparse-view X-ray computed tomography reconstruction validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, demonstrating that Tada-DIP produces much better reconstructions than training-data-free baselines and achieves reconstruction performance on par with a supervised network trained using a large dataset with fully-sampled volumes.

eess.IV

NERD: Network-Regularized Diffusion Sampling For 3D Computed Tomography

Numerous diffusion model (DM)-based methods have been proposed for solving inverse imaging problems. Among these, a recent line of work has demonstrated strong performance by formulating sampling as an optimization procedure that enforces measurement consistency, forward diffusion consistency, and both step-wise and backward diffusion consistency. However, these methods have only considered 2D reconstruction tasks and do not directly extend to 3D image reconstruction problems, such as in Computed Tomography (CT). To bridge this gap, we propose NEtwork-Regularized diffusion sampling for 3D CT (NERD) by incorporating an L1 regularization into the optimization objective. This regularizer encourages spatial continuity across adjacent slices, reducing inter-slice artifacts and promoting coherent volumetric reconstructions. Additionally, we introduce two efficient optimization strategies to solve the resulting objective: one based on the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) and another based on the Primal-Dual Hybrid Gradient (PDHG) method. Experiments on medical 3D CT data demonstrate that our approach achieves either state-of-the-art or highly competitive results.

eess.IV

LongCat-Video Technical Report

Video generation is a critical pathway toward world models, with efficient long video inference as a key capability. Toward this end, we introduce LongCat-Video, a foundational video generation model with 13.6B parameters, delivering strong performance across multiple video generation tasks. It particularly excels in efficient and high-quality long video generation, representing our first step toward world models. Key features include: Unified architecture for multiple tasks: Built on the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) framework, LongCat-Video supports Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, and Video-Continuation tasks with a single model; Long video generation: Pretraining on Video-Continuation tasks enables LongCat-Video to maintain high quality and temporal coherence in the generation of minutes-long videos; Efficient inference: LongCat-Video generates 720p, 30fps videos within minutes by employing a coarse-to-fine generation strategy along both the temporal and spatial axes. Block Sparse Attention further enhances efficiency, particularly at high resolutions; Strong performance with multi-reward RLHF: Multi-reward RLHF training enables LongCat-Video to achieve performance on par with the latest closed-source and leading open-source models. Code and model weights are publicly available to accelerate progress in the field.

cs.CV

UGoDIT: Unsupervised Group Deep Image Prior Via Transferable Weights

Recent advances in data-centric deep generative models have led to significant progress in solving inverse imaging problems. However, these models (e.g., diffusion models (DMs)) typically require large amounts of fully sampled (clean) training data, which is often impractical in medical and scientific settings such as dynamic imaging. On the other hand, training-data-free approaches like the Deep Image Prior (DIP) do not require clean ground-truth images but suffer from noise overfitting and can be computationally expensive as the network parameters need to be optimized for each measurement set independently. Moreover, DIP-based methods often overlook the potential of learning a prior using a small number of sub-sampled measurements (or degraded images) available during training. In this paper, we propose UGoDIT, an Unsupervised Group DIP via Transferable weights, designed for the low-data regime where only a very small number, M, of sub-sampled measurement vectors are available during training. Our method learns a set of transferable weights by optimizing a shared encoder and M disentangled decoders. At test time, we reconstruct the unseen degraded image using a DIP network, where part of the parameters are fixed to the learned weights, while the remaining are optimized to enforce measurement consistency. We evaluate UGoDIT on both medical (multi-coil MRI) and natural (super resolution and non-linear deblurring) image recovery tasks under various settings. Compared to recent standalone DIP methods, UGoDIT provides accelerated convergence and notable improvement in reconstruction quality. Furthermore, our method achieves performance competitive with SOTA DM-based and supervised approaches, despite not requiring large amounts of clean training data.

cs.CV

Understanding Untrained Deep Models for Inverse Problems: Algorithms and Theory

In recent years, deep learning methods have been extensively developed for inverse imaging problems (IIPs), encompassing supervised, self-supervised, and generative approaches. Most of these methods require large amounts of labeled or unlabeled training data to learn effective models. However, in many practical applications, such as medical image reconstruction, extensive training datasets are often unavailable or limited. A significant milestone in addressing this challenge came in 2018 with the work of Ulyanov et al., which introduced the Deep Image Prior (DIP)--the first training-data-free neural network method for IIPs. Unlike conventional deep learning approaches, DIP requires only a convolutional neural network, the noisy measurements, and a forward operator. By leveraging the implicit regularization of deep networks initialized with random noise, DIP can learn and restore image structures without relying on external datasets. However, a well-known limitation of DIP is its susceptibility to overfitting, primarily due to the over-parameterization of the network. In this tutorial paper, we provide a comprehensive review of DIP, including a theoretical analysis of its training dynamics. We also categorize and discuss recent advancements in DIP-based methods aimed at mitigating overfitting, including techniques such as regularization, network re-parameterization, and early stopping. Furthermore, we discuss approaches that combine DIP with pre-trained neural networks, present empirical comparison results against data-centric methods, and highlight open research questions and future directions.

eess.IV

Pruning Unrolled Networks (PUN) at Initialization for MRI Reconstruction Improves Generalization

Deep learning methods are highly effective for many image reconstruction tasks. However, the performance of supervised learned models can degrade when applied to distinct experimental settings at test time or in the presence of distribution shifts. In this study, we demonstrate that pruning deep image reconstruction networks at training time can improve their robustness to distribution shifts. In particular, we consider unrolled reconstruction architectures for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging and introduce a method for pruning unrolled networks (PUN) at initialization. Our experiments demonstrate that when compared to traditional dense networks, PUN offers improved generalization across a variety of experimental settings and even slight performance gains on in-distribution data.

eess.IV

SITCOM: Step-wise Triple-Consistent Diffusion Sampling for Inverse Problems

Diffusion models (DMs) are a class of generative models that allow sampling from a distribution learned over a training set. When applied to solving inverse problems, the reverse sampling steps are modified to approximately sample from a measurement-conditioned distribution. However, these modifications may be unsuitable for certain settings (e.g., presence of measurement noise) and non-linear tasks, as they often struggle to correct errors from earlier steps and generally require a large number of optimization and/or sampling steps. To address these challenges, we state three conditions for achieving measurement-consistent diffusion trajectories. Building on these conditions, we propose a new optimization-based sampling method that not only enforces standard data manifold measurement consistency and forward diffusion consistency, as seen in previous studies, but also incorporates our proposed step-wise and network-regularized backward diffusion consistency that maintains a diffusion trajectory by optimizing over the input of the pre-trained model at every sampling step. By enforcing these conditions (implicitly or explicitly), our sampler requires significantly fewer reverse steps. Therefore, we refer to our method as Step-wise Triple-Consistent Sampling (SITCOM). Compared to SOTA baselines, our experiments across several linear and non-linear tasks (with natural and medical images) demonstrate that SITCOM achieves competitive or superior results in terms of standard similarity metrics and run-time.

eess.IV

Sequential Diffusion-Guided Deep Image Prior For Medical Image Reconstruction

Deep learning (DL) methods have been extensively applied to various image recovery problems, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) reconstruction. Beyond supervised models, other approaches have been recently explored including two key recent schemes: Deep Image Prior (DIP) that is an unsupervised scan-adaptive method that leverages the network architecture as implicit regularization but can suffer from noise overfitting, and diffusion models (DMs), where the sampling procedure of a pre-trained generative model is modified to allow sampling from the measurement-conditioned distribution through approximations. In this paper, we propose combining DIP and DMs for MRI and CT reconstruction, motivated by (i) the impact of the DIP network input and (ii) the use of DMs as diffusion purifiers (DPs). Specifically, we propose a sequential procedure that iteratively optimizes the DIP network with a DM-refined adaptive input using a loss with data consistency and autoencoding terms. We term the approach Sequential Diffusion-Guided DIP (uDiG-DIP). Our experimental results demonstrate that uDiG-DIP achieves superior reconstruction results compared to leading DM-based baselines and the original DIP for MRI and CT tasks.

eess.IV

Decoupled Data Consistency with Diffusion Purification for Image Restoration

Diffusion models have recently gained traction as a powerful class of deep generative priors, excelling in a wide range of image restoration tasks due to their exceptional ability to model data distributions. To solve image restoration problems, many existing techniques achieve data consistency by incorporating additional likelihood gradient steps into the reverse sampling process of diffusion models. However, the additional gradient steps pose a challenge for real-world practical applications as they incur a large computational overhead, thereby increasing inference time. They also present additional difficulties when using accelerated diffusion model samplers, as the number of data consistency steps is limited by the number of reverse sampling steps. In this work, we propose a novel diffusion-based image restoration solver that addresses these issues by decoupling the reverse process from the data consistency steps. Our method involves alternating between a reconstruction phase to maintain data consistency and a refinement phase that enforces the prior via diffusion purification. Our approach demonstrates versatility, making it highly adaptable for efficient problem-solving in latent space. Additionally, it reduces the necessity for numerous sampling steps through the integration of consistency models. The efficacy of our approach is validated through comprehensive experiments across various image restoration tasks, including image denoising, deblurring, inpainting, and super-resolution.

eess.IV

Analysis of Deep Image Prior and Exploiting Self-Guidance for Image Reconstruction

The ability of deep image prior (DIP) to recover high-quality images from incomplete or corrupted measurements has made it popular in inverse problems in image restoration and medical imaging including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, conventional DIP suffers from severe overfitting and spectral bias effects. In this work, we first provide an analysis of how DIP recovers information from undersampled imaging measurements by analyzing the training dynamics of the underlying networks in the kernel regime for different architectures. This study sheds light on important underlying properties for DIP-based recovery. Current research suggests that incorporating a reference image as network input can enhance DIP's performance in image reconstruction compared to using random inputs. However, obtaining suitable reference images requires supervision, and raises practical difficulties. In an attempt to overcome this obstacle, we further introduce a self-driven reconstruction process that concurrently optimizes both the network weights and the input while eliminating the need for training data. Our method incorporates a novel denoiser regularization term which enables robust and stable joint estimation of both the network input and reconstructed image. We demonstrate that our self-guided method surpasses both the original DIP and modern supervised methods in terms of MR image reconstruction performance and outperforms previous DIP-based schemes for image inpainting.

cs.CV

Robust MRI Reconstruction by Smoothed Unrolling (SMUG)

As the popularity of deep learning (DL) in the field of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) continues to rise, recent research has indicated that DL-based MRI reconstruction models might be excessively sensitive to minor input disturbances, including worst-case additive perturbations. This sensitivity often leads to unstable, aliased images. This raises the question of how to devise DL techniques for MRI reconstruction that can be robust to train-test variations. To address this problem, we propose a novel image reconstruction framework, termed Smoothed Unrolling (SMUG), which advances a deep unrolling-based MRI reconstruction model using a randomized smoothing (RS)-based robust learning approach. RS, which improves the tolerance of a model against input noises, has been widely used in the design of adversarial defense approaches for image classification tasks. Yet, we find that the conventional design that applies RS to the entire DL-based MRI model is ineffective. In this paper, we show that SMUG and its variants address the above issue by customizing the RS process based on the unrolling architecture of a DL-based MRI reconstruction model. Compared to the vanilla RS approach, we show that SMUG improves the robustness of MRI reconstruction with respect to a diverse set of instability sources, including worst-case and random noise perturbations to input measurements, varying measurement sampling rates, and different numbers of unrolling steps. Furthermore, we theoretically analyze the robustness of our method in the presence of perturbations.

eess.IV

Robust Physics-based Deep MRI Reconstruction Via Diffusion Purification

Deep learning (DL) techniques have been extensively employed in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction, delivering notable performance enhancements over traditional non-DL methods. Nonetheless, recent studies have identified vulnerabilities in these models during testing, namely, their susceptibility to (\textit{i}) worst-case measurement perturbations and to (\textit{ii}) variations in training/testing settings like acceleration factors and k-space sampling locations. This paper addresses the robustness challenges by leveraging diffusion models. In particular, we present a robustification strategy that improves the resilience of DL-based MRI reconstruction methods by utilizing pretrained diffusion models as noise purifiers. In contrast to conventional robustification methods for DL-based MRI reconstruction, such as adversarial training (AT), our proposed approach eliminates the need to tackle a minimax optimization problem. It only necessitates fine-tuning on purified examples. Our experimental results highlight the efficacy of our approach in mitigating the aforementioned instabilities when compared to leading robustification approaches for deep MRI reconstruction, including AT and randomized smoothing.

eess.IV

SMUG: Towards robust MRI reconstruction by smoothed unrolling

Although deep learning (DL) has gained much popularity for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), recent studies have shown that DL-based MRI reconstruction models could be oversensitive to tiny input perturbations (that are called 'adversarial perturbations'), which cause unstable, low-quality reconstructed images. This raises the question of how to design robust DL methods for MRI reconstruction. To address this problem, we propose a novel image reconstruction framework, termed SMOOTHED UNROLLING (SMUG), which advances a deep unrolling-based MRI reconstruction model using a randomized smoothing (RS)-based robust learning operation. RS, which improves the tolerance of a model against input noises, has been widely used in the design of adversarial defense for image classification. Yet, we find that the conventional design that applies RS to the entire DL process is ineffective for MRI reconstruction. We show that SMUG addresses the above issue by customizing the RS operation based on the unrolling architecture of the DL-based MRI reconstruction model. Compared to the vanilla RS approach and several variants of SMUG, we show that SMUG improves the robustness of MRI reconstruction with respect to a diverse set of perturbation sources, including perturbations to the input measurements, different measurement sampling rates, and different unrolling steps. Code for SMUG will be available at https://github.com/LGM70/SMUG.

eess.IV

Observation of Coexisting Dirac Bands and Moiré Flat Bands in Magic-Angle Twisted Trilayer Graphene

Moiré superlattices that consist of two or more layers of two-dimensional materials stacked together with a small twist angle have emerged as a tunable platform to realize various correlated and topological phases, such as Mott insulators, unconventional uperconductivity and quantum anomalous Hall effect. Recently, the magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG) has shown both robust superconductivity similar to magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene (MATBG) and other unique properties, including the Pauli-limit violating and re-entrant superconductivity. These rich properties are deeply rooted in its electronic structure under the influence of distinct moiré potential and mirror symmetry. Here, combining nanometer-scale spatially resolved angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (nano-ARPES) and scanning tunneling microscopy/spectroscopy (STM/STS), we systematically measure the yet unexplored band structure of MATTG near charge neutrality. Our measurements reveal the coexistence of the distinct dispersive Dirac band with the emergent moiré flat band, showing nice agreement with the theoretical calculations. These results serve as a stepstone for further understanding of the unconventional superconductivity in MATTG.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Adaptive Local Neighborhood-based Neural Networks for MR Image Reconstruction from Undersampled Data

Recent medical image reconstruction techniques focus on generating high-quality medical images suitable for clinical use at the lowest possible cost and with the fewest possible adverse effects on patients. Recent works have shown significant promise for reconstructing MR images from sparsely sampled k-space data using deep learning. In this work, we propose a technique that rapidly estimates deep neural networks directly at reconstruction time by fitting them on small adaptively estimated neighborhoods of a training set. In brief, our algorithm alternates between searching for neighbors in a data set that are similar to the test reconstruction, and training a local network on these neighbors followed by updating the test reconstruction. Because our reconstruction model is learned on a dataset that is in some sense similar to the image being reconstructed rather than being fit on a large, diverse training set, it is more adaptive to new scans. It can also handle changes in training sets and flexible scan settings, while being relatively fast. Our approach, dubbed LONDN-MRI, was validated on multiple data sets using deep unrolled reconstruction networks. Reconstructions were performed at four fold and eight fold undersampling of k-space with 1D variable-density random phase-encode undersampling masks. Our results demonstrate that our proposed locally-trained method produces higher-quality reconstructions compared to models trained globally on larger datasets as well as other scan-adaptive methods.

eess.IV

Temperature-sensitive spatial distribution of defects in PdSe2 flakes

Defect engineering plays an important role in tailoring the electronic transport properties of van der Waals materials. However, it is usually achieved through tuning the type and concentration of defects, rather than dynamically reconfiguring their spatial distribution. Here, we report temperature-sensitive spatial redistribution of defects in PdSe2 thin flakes through scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). We observe that the spatial distribution of Se vacancies in PdSe2 flakes exhibits a strong anisotropic characteristic at 80 K, and that this orientation-dependent feature is weakened when temperature is raised. Moreover, we carry out transport measurements on PdSe2 thin flakes and show that the anisotropic features of carrier mobility and phase coherent length are also sensitive to temperature. Combining with theoretical analysis, we conclude that temperature-driven defect spatial redistribution could interpret the temperature-sensitive electrical transport behaviors in PdSe2 thin flakes. Our work highlights that engineering spatial distribution of defects in the van der Waals materials, which has been overlooked before, may open up a new avenue to tailor the physical properties of materials and explore new device functionalities.

cond-mat.mes-hall

Electronic controllable broadband and robust terahertz surface plasmon-polaritons switch based on hybrid ITO waveguide coupler

The surface plasmon-polaritons (SPPs) switch is the key element of the integrated devices in optical computation and terahertz (THz) communications. In this paper, we propose a novel design of THz SPPs switch based on quantum engineering. Due to the robustness of coherent quantum control technique, our switch is very robust against with perturbations of geometrical parameters and presents a good performance at on-state (and off-state) from 0.5 THz to 0.7 THz. The on-state and off-state of our device can be controlled by the external voltage. We believe this finding will be the great improvement for the integrated optical computing and THz communications.

physics.optics