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Apr 28

Efficient Continual Pre-training by Mitigating the Stability Gap

Continual pre-training has increasingly become the predominant approach for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new domains. This process involves updating the pre-trained LLM with a corpus from a new domain, resulting in a shift in the training distribution. To study the behavior of LLMs during this shift, we measured the model's performance throughout the continual pre-training process. we observed a temporary performance drop at the beginning, followed by a recovery phase, a phenomenon known as the "stability gap," previously noted in vision models classifying new classes. To address this issue and enhance LLM performance within a fixed compute budget, we propose three effective strategies: (1) Continually pre-training the LLM on a subset with a proper size for multiple epochs, resulting in faster performance recovery than pre-training the LLM on a large corpus in a single epoch; (2) Pre-training the LLM only on high-quality sub-corpus, which rapidly boosts domain performance; and (3) Using a data mixture similar to the pre-training data to reduce distribution gap. We conduct various experiments on Llama-family models to validate the effectiveness of our strategies in both medical continual pre-training and instruction tuning. For example, our strategies improve the average medical task performance of the OpenLlama-3B model from 36.2% to 40.7% with only 40% of the original training budget and enhance the average general task performance without causing forgetting. Furthermore, we apply our strategies to the Llama-3-8B model. The resulting model, Llama-3-Physician, achieves the best medical performance among current open-source models, and performs comparably to or even better than GPT-4 on several medical benchmarks. We release our models at https://huggingface.co/YiDuo1999/Llama-3-Physician-8B-Instruct.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024 1

Towards Privacy-Guaranteed Label Unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning: Few-Shot Forgetting without Disclosure

This paper addresses the critical challenge of unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL), a setting that has received far less attention than its horizontal counterpart. Specifically, we propose the first method tailored to label unlearning in VFL, where labels play a dual role as both essential inputs and sensitive information. To this end, we employ a representation-level manifold mixup mechanism to generate synthetic embeddings for both unlearned and retained samples. This is to provide richer signals for the subsequent gradient-based label forgetting and recovery steps. These augmented embeddings are then subjected to gradient-based label forgetting, effectively removing the associated label information from the model. To recover performance on the retained data, we introduce a recovery-phase optimization step that refines the remaining embeddings. This design achieves effective label unlearning while maintaining computational efficiency. We validate our method through extensive experiments on diverse datasets, including MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ModelNet, Brain Tumor MRI, COVID-19 Radiography, and Yahoo Answers demonstrate strong efficacy and scalability. Overall, this work establishes a new direction for unlearning in VFL, showing that re-imagining mixup as an efficient mechanism can unlock practical and utility-preserving unlearning. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/bryanhx/Towards-Privacy-Guaranteed-Label-Unlearning-in-Vertical-Federated-Learning

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 26

Continual evaluation for lifelong learning: Identifying the stability gap

Time-dependent data-generating distributions have proven to be difficult for gradient-based training of neural networks, as the greedy updates result in catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Despite the progress in the field of continual learning to overcome this forgetting, we show that a set of common state-of-the-art methods still suffers from substantial forgetting upon starting to learn new tasks, except that this forgetting is temporary and followed by a phase of performance recovery. We refer to this intriguing but potentially problematic phenomenon as the stability gap. The stability gap had likely remained under the radar due to standard practice in the field of evaluating continual learning models only after each task. Instead, we establish a framework for continual evaluation that uses per-iteration evaluation and we define a new set of metrics to quantify worst-case performance. Empirically we show that experience replay, constraint-based replay, knowledge-distillation, and parameter regularization methods are all prone to the stability gap; and that the stability gap can be observed in class-, task-, and domain-incremental learning benchmarks. Additionally, a controlled experiment shows that the stability gap increases when tasks are more dissimilar. Finally, by disentangling gradients into plasticity and stability components, we propose a conceptual explanation for the stability gap.

  • 3 authors
·
May 26, 2022

RaC: Robot Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks by Scaling Recovery and Correction

Modern paradigms for robot imitation train expressive policy architectures on large amounts of human demonstration data. Yet performance on contact-rich, deformable-object, and long-horizon tasks plateau far below perfect execution, even with thousands of expert demonstrations. This is due to the inefficiency of existing ``expert'' data collection procedures based on human teleoperation. To address this issue, we introduce RaC, a new phase of training on human-in-the-loop rollouts after imitation learning pre-training. In RaC, we fine-tune a robotic policy on human intervention trajectories that illustrate recovery and correction behaviors. Specifically, during a policy rollout, human operators intervene when failure appears imminent, first rewinding the robot back to a familiar, in-distribution state and then providing a corrective segment that completes the current sub-task. Training on this data composition expands the robotic skill repertoire to include retry and adaptation behaviors, which we show are crucial for boosting both efficiency and robustness on long-horizon tasks. Across three real-world bimanual control tasks: shirt hanging, airtight container lid sealing, takeout box packing, and a simulated assembly task, RaC outperforms the prior state-of-the-art using 10times less data collection time and samples. We also show that RaC enables test-time scaling: the performance of the trained RaC policy scales linearly in the number of recovery maneuvers it exhibits. Videos of the learned policy are available at https://rac-scaling-robot.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 9, 2025

iSTFTNet: Fast and Lightweight Mel-Spectrogram Vocoder Incorporating Inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform

In recent text-to-speech synthesis and voice conversion systems, a mel-spectrogram is commonly applied as an intermediate representation, and the necessity for a mel-spectrogram vocoder is increasing. A mel-spectrogram vocoder must solve three inverse problems: recovery of the original-scale magnitude spectrogram, phase reconstruction, and frequency-to-time conversion. A typical convolutional mel-spectrogram vocoder solves these problems jointly and implicitly using a convolutional neural network, including temporal upsampling layers, when directly calculating a raw waveform. Such an approach allows skipping redundant processes during waveform synthesis (e.g., the direct reconstruction of high-dimensional original-scale spectrograms). By contrast, the approach solves all problems in a black box and cannot effectively employ the time-frequency structures existing in a mel-spectrogram. We thus propose iSTFTNet, which replaces some output-side layers of the mel-spectrogram vocoder with the inverse short-time Fourier transform (iSTFT) after sufficiently reducing the frequency dimension using upsampling layers, reducing the computational cost from black-box modeling and avoiding redundant estimations of high-dimensional spectrograms. During our experiments, we applied our ideas to three HiFi-GAN variants and made the models faster and more lightweight with a reasonable speech quality. Audio samples are available at https://www.kecl.ntt.co.jp/people/kaneko.takuhiro/projects/istftnet/.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 4, 2022

ROCKET: Rapid Optimization via Calibration-guided Knapsack Enhanced Truncation for Efficient Model Compression

We present ROCKET, a training-free model compression method that achieves state-of-the-art performance in comparison with factorization, structured-sparsification and dynamic compression baselines. Operating under a global compression budget, ROCKET comprises two key innovations: First, it formulates layer-wise compression allocation as a multi-choice knapsack problem, selecting the optimal compression level for each layer to minimize total reconstruction error while adhering to a target model size. Second, it introduces a single-step sparse matrix factorization inspired by dictionary learning: using only a small calibration set, it sparsifies weight coefficients based on activation-weights sensitivity and then updates the dictionary in closed form via least squares bypassing iterative optimization, sparse coding, or backpropagation entirely. ROCKET consistently outperforms existing compression approaches across different model architectures at 20-50\% compression rates. Notably, it retains over 90\% of the original model's performance at 30\% compression without any fine-tuning. Moreover, when applying a light fine-tuning phase, recovery is substantially enhanced: for instance, compressing Qwen3-14B to an 8B-parameter model and healing it with just 30 million tokens yields performance nearly on par with the original Qwen3-8B. The code for ROCKET is at github.com/mts-ai/ROCKET/tree/main.

MTSAIR MWS AI
·
Feb 11 3

Towards Robust and Generalizable Lensless Imaging with Modular Learned Reconstruction

Lensless cameras disregard the conventional design that imaging should mimic the human eye. This is done by replacing the lens with a thin mask, and moving image formation to the digital post-processing. State-of-the-art lensless imaging techniques use learned approaches that combine physical modeling and neural networks. However, these approaches make simplifying modeling assumptions for ease of calibration and computation. Moreover, the generalizability of learned approaches to lensless measurements of new masks has not been studied. To this end, we utilize a modular learned reconstruction in which a key component is a pre-processor prior to image recovery. We theoretically demonstrate the pre-processor's necessity for standard image recovery techniques (Wiener filtering and iterative algorithms), and through extensive experiments show its effectiveness for multiple lensless imaging approaches and across datasets of different mask types (amplitude and phase). We also perform the first generalization benchmark across mask types to evaluate how well reconstructions trained with one system generalize to others. Our modular reconstruction enables us to use pre-trained components and transfer learning on new systems to cut down weeks of tedious measurements and training. As part of our work, we open-source four datasets, and software for measuring datasets and for training our modular reconstruction.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

Global Rotation Equivariant Phase Modeling for Speech Enhancement with Deep Magnitude-Phase Interaction

While deep learning has advanced speech enhancement (SE), effective phase modeling remains challenging, as conventional networks typically operate within a flat Euclidean feature space, which is not easy to model the underlying circular topology of the phase. To address this, we propose a manifold-aware magnitude-phase dual-stream framework that aligns the phase stream with its intrinsic circular geometry by enforcing Global Rotation Equivariance (GRE) characteristic. Specifically, we introduce a Magnitude-Phase Interactive Convolutional Module (MPICM) for modulus-based information exchange and a Hybrid-Attention Dual-FFN (HADF) bottleneck for unified feature fusion, both of which are designed to preserve GRE in the phase stream. Comprehensive evaluations are conducted across phase retrieval, denoising, dereverberation, and bandwidth extension tasks to validate the superiority of the proposed method over multiple advanced baselines. Notably, the proposed architecture reduces Phase Distance by over 20\% in the phase retrieval task and improves PESQ by more than 0.1 in zero-shot cross-corpus denoising evaluations. The overall superiority is also established in universal SE tasks involving mixed distortions. Qualitative analysis further reveals that the learned phase features exhibit distinct periodic patterns, which are consistent with the intrinsic circular nature of the phase. The source code is available at https://github.com/wangchengzhong/RENet.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 9

M^3-VOS: Multi-Phase, Multi-Transition, and Multi-Scenery Video Object Segmentation

Intelligent robots need to interact with diverse objects across various environments. The appearance and state of objects frequently undergo complex transformations depending on the object properties, e.g., phase transitions. However, in the vision community, segmenting dynamic objects with phase transitions is overlooked. In light of this, we introduce the concept of phase in segmentation, which categorizes real-world objects based on their visual characteristics and potential morphological and appearance changes. Then, we present a new benchmark, Multi-Phase, Multi-Transition, and Multi-Scenery Video Object Segmentation (M^3-VOS), to verify the ability of models to understand object phases, which consists of 479 high-resolution videos spanning over 10 distinct everyday scenarios. It provides dense instance mask annotations that capture both object phases and their transitions. We evaluate state-of-the-art methods on M^3-VOS, yielding several key insights. Notably, current appearance-based approaches show significant room for improvement when handling objects with phase transitions. The inherent changes in disorder suggest that the predictive performance of the forward entropy-increasing process can be improved through a reverse entropy-reducing process. These findings lead us to propose ReVOS, a new plug-andplay model that improves its performance by reversal refinement. Our data and code will be publicly available at https://zixuan-chen.github.io/M-cube-VOS.github.io/.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 18, 2024

Explicit Estimation of Magnitude and Phase Spectra in Parallel for High-Quality Speech Enhancement

Phase information has a significant impact on speech perceptual quality and intelligibility. However, existing speech enhancement methods encounter limitations in explicit phase estimation due to the non-structural nature and wrapping characteristics of the phase, leading to a bottleneck in enhanced speech quality. To overcome the above issue, in this paper, we proposed MP-SENet, a novel Speech Enhancement Network that explicitly enhances Magnitude and Phase spectra in parallel. The proposed MP-SENet comprises a Transformer-embedded encoder-decoder architecture. The encoder aims to encode the input distorted magnitude and phase spectra into time-frequency representations, which are further fed into time-frequency Transformers for alternatively capturing time and frequency dependencies. The decoder comprises a magnitude mask decoder and a phase decoder, directly enhancing magnitude and wrapped phase spectra by incorporating a magnitude masking architecture and a phase parallel estimation architecture, respectively. Multi-level loss functions explicitly defined on the magnitude spectra, wrapped phase spectra, and short-time complex spectra are adopted to jointly train the MP-SENet model. A metric discriminator is further employed to compensate for the incomplete correlation between these losses and human auditory perception. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed MP-SENet achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple speech enhancement tasks, including speech denoising, dereverberation, and bandwidth extension. Compared to existing phase-aware speech enhancement methods, it further mitigates the compensation effect between the magnitude and phase by explicit phase estimation, elevating the perceptual quality of enhanced speech.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 17, 2023

SPRMamba: Surgical Phase Recognition for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection with Mamba

Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure initially developed for early gastric cancer treatment and has expanded to address diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted surgery (CAS) systems enhance ESD precision and safety, their efficacy hinges on accurate real-time surgical phase recognition, a task complicated by ESD's inherent complexity, including heterogeneous lesion characteristics and dynamic tissue interactions. Existing video-based phase recognition algorithms, constrained by inefficient temporal context modeling, exhibit limited performance in capturing fine-grained phase transitions and long-range dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose SPRMamba, a novel framework integrating a Mamba-based architecture with a Scaled Residual TranMamba (SRTM) block to synergize long-term temporal modeling and localized detail extraction. SPRMamba further introduces the Hierarchical Sampling Strategy to optimize computational efficiency, enabling real-time processing critical for clinical deployment. Evaluated on the ESD385 dataset and the cholecystectomy benchmark Cholec80, SPRMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance (87.64% accuracy on ESD385, +1.0% over prior methods), demonstrating robust generalizability across surgical workflows. This advancement bridges the gap between computational efficiency and temporal sensitivity, offering a transformative tool for intraoperative guidance and skill assessment in ESD surgery. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Zxnyyyyy/SPRMamba.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 18, 2024

CPKD: Clinical Prior Knowledge-Constrained Diffusion Models for Surgical Phase Recognition in Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Gastrointestinal malignancies constitute a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, with advanced-stage prognosis remaining particularly dismal. Originating as a groundbreaking technique for early gastric cancer treatment, Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection has evolved into a versatile intervention for diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted systems significantly enhance procedural precision and safety in ESD, their clinical adoption faces a critical bottleneck: reliable surgical phase recognition within complex endoscopic workflows. Current state-of-the-art approaches predominantly rely on multi-stage refinement architectures that iteratively optimize temporal predictions. In this paper, we present Clinical Prior Knowledge-Constrained Diffusion (CPKD), a novel generative framework that reimagines phase recognition through denoising diffusion principles while preserving the core iterative refinement philosophy. This architecture progressively reconstructs phase sequences starting from random noise and conditioned on visual-temporal features. To better capture three domain-specific characteristics, including positional priors, boundary ambiguity, and relation dependency, we design a conditional masking strategy. Furthermore, we incorporate clinical prior knowledge into the model training to improve its ability to correct phase logical errors. Comprehensive evaluations on ESD820, Cholec80, and external multi-center demonstrate that our proposed CPKD achieves superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art approaches, validating the effectiveness of diffusion-based generative paradigms for surgical phase recognition.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 4, 2025

PhaseNet: A Deep-Neural-Network-Based Seismic Arrival Time Picking Method

As the number of seismic sensors grows, it is becoming increasingly difficult for analysts to pick seismic phases manually and comprehensively, yet such efforts are fundamental to earthquake monitoring. Despite years of improvements in automatic phase picking, it is difficult to match the performance of experienced analysts. A more subtle issue is that different seismic analysts may pick phases differently, which can introduce bias into earthquake locations. We present a deep-neural-network-based arrival-time picking method called "PhaseNet" that picks the arrival times of both P and S waves. Deep neural networks have recently made rapid progress in feature learning, and with sufficient training, have achieved super-human performance in many applications. PhaseNet uses three-component seismic waveforms as input and generates probability distributions of P arrivals, S arrivals, and noise as output. We engineer PhaseNet such that peaks in probability provide accurate arrival times for both P and S waves, and have the potential to increase the number of S-wave observations dramatically over what is currently available. This will enable both improved locations and improved shear wave velocity models. PhaseNet is trained on the prodigious available data set provided by analyst-labeled P and S arrival times from the Northern California Earthquake Data Center. The dataset we use contains more than seven million waveform samples extracted from over thirty years of earthquake recordings. We demonstrate that PhaseNet achieves much higher picking accuracy and recall rate than existing methods.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 8, 2018

Dynamical phase diagram of synchronization in one dimension: universal behavior from Edwards-Wilkinson to random deposition through Kardar-Parisi-Zhang

Synchronization in one dimension displays generic scale invariance with universal properties previously observed in surface kinetic roughening and the wider context of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. This has been established for phase oscillators and also for some limit-cycle oscillators, both in the presence of columnar (quenched) disorder and of time-dependent noise, by extensive numerical simulations, and has been analytically motivated by continuum approximations in the strong oscillator coupling limit. The robustness and the precise boundaries in parameter space for such critical behavior remain unclear, however, which may preclude further developments, including the extension of these results to higher dimensions and the experimental observation of nonequilibrium criticality in synchronizing (e.g.~electronic or chemical) oscillators. We here present complete numerical phase diagrams of one-dimensional synchronization, including saturation times and values, but, most importantly, also dynamical features giving insight into the gradual emergence of synchronous dynamics, based on systems of phase oscillators with either type of randomness. In the absence of synchronization, the dynamics evolves as expected for random deposition (for time-dependent noise) or linear growth (for columnar disorder), while a crossover from Edwards-Wilkinson to Kardar-Parisi-Zhang behavior (with the corresponding type of randomness) is observed as the randomness strength, or the nonoddity of the coupling among oscillators, is increased in the synchronous region -- their combined effect being partially captured by the so-called KPZ coupling. The distortion of scaling due to phase slips near the desynchronization boundary, a feature that is likely to play a role in experimental contexts, is also discussed.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 6

All is Not Lost: LLM Recovery without Checkpoints

Training LLMs on decentralized and wimpy computation nodes, e.g., multiple on-spot instances, lowers the training cost and enables model democratization. The inevitable challenge here is the churn of nodes due to failures and the operator's scheduling policies, leading to losing a stage - a part of the model. The conventional approaches to recover from failures are to either use checkpointing, where periodically a copy of the entire model is sent to an additional storage, or redundant computation. These approaches yield significant communication and/or computation overhead even in non-failure cases and scale poorly in settings with large models. In this paper, we propose, CheckFree, an efficient recovery method where a failing stage is substituted by a weighted average of the closest neighboring stages. In contrast to the state of the art, CheckFree requires no additional computation or storage. However, because of the nature of averaging neighbouring stages, it can only recover failures of intermediate stages. We further extend our method to CheckFree+ with out-of-order pipeline execution to tolerate crashes of the first and last stages. Thanks to out-of-order pipelining, behaviour of those stages is mimicked by their neighboring ones, which allows CheckFree+ to recover them by simply copying the weights from the immediate neighbour. To be able to recover the (de)embedding layers, CheckFree+ copies those layers to the neighboring stages, which requires relatively small storage overhead. We extensively evaluate our method on LLaMa models of model sizes from 124M to 1.5B with varying failure frequencies. In the case of low and medium failure rates (5-10%), CheckFree and CheckFree+ outperform both checkpointing and redundant computation in terms of convergence in wall-clock time by over 12%. Both of our proposals can be run via our code available at: https://github.com/gensyn-ai/CheckFree.

Gensyn Gensyn
·
Jun 18, 2025 3

Rotary Positional Embeddings as Phase Modulation: Theoretical Bounds on the RoPE Base for Long-Context Transformers

Rotary positional embeddings (RoPE) are widely used in large language models to encode token positions through multiplicative rotations, yet their behavior at long context lengths remains poorly characterized. In this work, we reinterpret RoPE as phase modulation applied to a bank of complex oscillators, enabling analysis through classical signal processing theory. Under this formulation, we derive principled lower bounds on the RoPE base parameter that are necessary to preserve positional coherence over a target context length. These include a fundamental aliasing bound, analogous to a Nyquist limit, and a DC-component stability bound that constrains phase drift in low-frequency positional modes. We further extend this analysis to deep transformers, showing that repeated rotary modulation across layers compounds angular misalignment, tightening the base requirement as depth increases. Complementing these results, we derive a precision-dependent upper bound on the RoPE base arising from finite floating-point resolution. Beyond this limit, incremental phase updates become numerically indistinguishable, leading to positional erasure even in the absence of aliasing. Together, the lower and upper bounds define a precision- and depth-dependent feasibility region a Goldilocks zone for long-context transformers. We validate the framework through a comprehensive case study of state-of-the-art models, including LLaMA, Mistral, and DeepSeek variants, showing that observed successes, failures, and community retrofits align closely with the predicted bounds. Notably, models that violate the stability bound exhibit attention collapse and long-range degradation, while attempts to scale beyond one million tokens encounter a hard precision wall independent of architecture or training.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 11

NeuralRemaster: Phase-Preserving Diffusion for Structure-Aligned Generation

Standard diffusion corrupts data using Gaussian noise whose Fourier coefficients have random magnitudes and random phases. While effective for unconditional or text-to-image generation, corrupting phase components destroys spatial structure, making it ill-suited for tasks requiring geometric consistency, such as re-rendering, simulation enhancement, and image-to-image translation. We introduce Phase-Preserving Diffusion φ-PD, a model-agnostic reformulation of the diffusion process that preserves input phase while randomizing magnitude, enabling structure-aligned generation without architectural changes or additional parameters. We further propose Frequency-Selective Structured (FSS) noise, which provides continuous control over structural rigidity via a single frequency-cutoff parameter. φ-PD adds no inference-time cost and is compatible with any diffusion model for images or videos. Across photorealistic and stylized re-rendering, as well as sim-to-real enhancement for driving planners, φ-PD produces controllable, spatially aligned results. When applied to the CARLA simulator, φ-PD improves CARLA-to-Waymo planner performance by 50\%. The method is complementary to existing conditioning approaches and broadly applicable to image-to-image and video-to-video generation. Videos, additional examples, and code are available on our https://yuzeng-at-tri.github.io/ppd-page/{project page}.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025 2

Deep priors for satellite image restoration with accurate uncertainties

Satellite optical images, upon their on-ground receipt, offer a distorted view of the observed scene. Their restoration, including denoising, deblurring, and sometimes super-resolution, is required before their exploitation. Moreover, quantifying the uncertainties related to this restoration helps to reduce the risks of misinterpreting the image content. Deep learning methods are now state-of-the-art for satellite image restoration. Among them, direct inversion methods train a specific network for each sensor, and generally provide a point estimation of the restored image without the associated uncertainties. Alternatively, deep regularization (DR) methods learn a deep prior on target images before plugging it, as the regularization term, into a model-based optimization scheme. This allows for restoring images from several sensors with a single network and possibly for estimating associated uncertainties. In this paper, we introduce VBLE-xz, a DR method that solves the inverse problem in the latent space of a variational compressive autoencoder (CAE). We adapt the regularization strength by modulating the bitrate of the trained CAE with a training-free approach. Then, VBLE-xz estimates relevant uncertainties jointly in the latent and in the image spaces by sampling an explicit posterior estimated within variational inference. This enables fast posterior sampling, unlike state-of-the-art DR methods that use Markov chains or diffusion-based approaches. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on very high-resolution simulated and real Pléiades images, asserting the performance, robustness and scalability of the proposed method. They demonstrate that VBLE-xz represents a compelling alternative to direct inversion methods when uncertainty quantification is required. The code associated to this paper is available in https://github.com/MaudBqrd/VBLExz.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 5, 2024

HoloBeam: Learning Optimal Beamforming in Far-Field Holographic Metasurface Transceivers

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

How Transformers Reject Wrong Answers: Rotational Dynamics of Factual Constraint Processing

When a language model is fed a wrong answer, what happens inside the network? Current understanding treats truthfulness as a static property of individual-layer representations-a direction to be probed, a feature to be extracted. Less is known about the dynamics: how internal representations diverge across the full depth of the network when the model processes correct versus incorrect continuations. We introduce forced-completion probing, a method that presents identical queries with known correct and incorrect single-token continuations and tracks five geometric measurements across every layer of four decoder-only models(1.5B-13B parameters). We report three findings. First, correct and incorrect paths diverge through rotation, not rescaling: displacement vectors maintain near-identical magnitudes while their angular separation increases, meaning factual selection is encoded in direction on an approximate hypersphere. Second, the model does not passively fail on incorrect input-it actively suppresses the correct answer, driving internal probability away from the right token. Third, both phenomena are entirely absent below a parameter threshold and emerge at 1.6B, suggesting a phase transition in factual processing capability. These results show that factual constraint processing has a specific geometric character-rotational, not scalar; active, not passive-that is invisible to methods based on single-layer probes or magnitude comparisons.

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 24

On the Mechanism and Dynamics of Modular Addition: Fourier Features, Lottery Ticket, and Grokking

We present a comprehensive analysis of how two-layer neural networks learn features to solve the modular addition task. Our work provides a full mechanistic interpretation of the learned model and a theoretical explanation of its training dynamics. While prior work has identified that individual neurons learn single-frequency Fourier features and phase alignment, it does not fully explain how these features combine into a global solution. We bridge this gap by formalizing a diversification condition that emerges during training when overparametrized, consisting of two parts: phase symmetry and frequency diversification. We prove that these properties allow the network to collectively approximate a flawed indicator function on the correct logic for the modular addition task. While individual neurons produce noisy signals, the phase symmetry enables a majority-voting scheme that cancels out noise, allowing the network to robustly identify the correct sum. Furthermore, we explain the emergence of these features under random initialization via a lottery ticket mechanism. Our gradient flow analysis proves that frequencies compete within each neuron, with the "winner" determined by its initial spectral magnitude and phase alignment. From a technical standpoint, we provide a rigorous characterization of the layer-wise phase coupling dynamics and formalize the competitive landscape using the ODE comparison lemma. Finally, we use these insights to demystify grokking, characterizing it as a three-stage process involving memorization followed by two generalization phases, driven by the competition between loss minimization and weight decay.

Model-agnostic search for the quasinormal modes of gravitational wave echoes

Post-merger gravitational wave echoes provide a unique opportunity to probe the near-horizon structure of astrophysical black holes, that may be modified due to non-perturbative quantum gravity phenomena. However, since the waveform is subject to large theoretical uncertainties, it is necessary to develop model-agnostic search methods for detecting echoes from observational data. A promising strategy is to identify the characteristic quasinormal modes (QNMs) associated with echoes, {\it in frequency space}, which complements existing searches of quasiperiodic pulses in time. In this study, we build upon our previous work targeting these modes by incorporating relative phase information to optimize the Bayesian search algorithm. Using a new phase-marginalized likelihood, the performance can be significantly improved for well-resolved QNMs. This enables an efficient model-agnostic search for QNMs of different shapes by using a simple search template. To demonstrate the robustness of the search algorithm, we construct four complementary benchmarks for the echo waveform that span a diverse range of different theoretical possibilities for the near-horizon structure. We then validate our Bayesian search algorithms by injecting the benchmark models into different realizations of Gaussian noise. Using two types of phase-marginalized likelihoods, we find that the search algorithm can efficiently detect the corresponding QNMs. Therefore, our search strategy provides a concrete Bayesian and model-agnostic approach to "quantum black hole seismology".

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 2, 2023

APNet: An All-Frame-Level Neural Vocoder Incorporating Direct Prediction of Amplitude and Phase Spectra

This paper presents a novel neural vocoder named APNet which reconstructs speech waveforms from acoustic features by predicting amplitude and phase spectra directly. The APNet vocoder is composed of an amplitude spectrum predictor (ASP) and a phase spectrum predictor (PSP). The ASP is a residual convolution network which predicts frame-level log amplitude spectra from acoustic features. The PSP also adopts a residual convolution network using acoustic features as input, then passes the output of this network through two parallel linear convolution layers respectively, and finally integrates into a phase calculation formula to estimate frame-level phase spectra. Finally, the outputs of ASP and PSP are combined to reconstruct speech waveforms by inverse short-time Fourier transform (ISTFT). All operations of the ASP and PSP are performed at the frame level. We train the ASP and PSP jointly and define multilevel loss functions based on amplitude mean square error, phase anti-wrapping error, short-time spectral inconsistency error and time domain reconstruction error. Experimental results show that our proposed APNet vocoder achieves an approximately 8x faster inference speed than HiFi-GAN v1 on a CPU due to the all-frame-level operations, while its synthesized speech quality is comparable to HiFi-GAN v1. The synthesized speech quality of the APNet vocoder is also better than that of several equally efficient models. Ablation experiments also confirm that the proposed parallel phase estimation architecture is essential to phase modeling and the proposed loss functions are helpful for improving the synthesized speech quality.

  • 2 authors
·
May 13, 2023

Preliminary sonification of ENSO using traditional Javanese gamelan scales

Sonification -- the mapping of data to non-speech audio -- offers an underexplored channel for representing complex dynamical systems. We treat El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a canonical example of low-dimensional climate chaos, as a test case for culturally-situated sonification evaluated through complex systems diagnostics. Using parameter-mapping sonification of the Niño 3.4 sea surface temperature anomaly index (1870--2024), we encode ENSO variability into two traditional Javanese gamelan pentatonic systems (pelog and slendro) across four composition strategies, then analyze the resulting audio as trajectories in a two-dimensional acoustic phase space. Recurrence-based diagnostics, convex hull geometry, and coupling analysis reveal that the sonification pipeline preserves key dynamical signatures: alternating modes produce the highest trajectory recurrence rates, echoing ENSO's quasi-periodicity; layered polyphonic modes explore the broadest phase space regions; and the two scale families induce qualitatively distinct coupling regimes between spectral brightness and energy -- predominantly anti-phase in pelog but near-independent in slendro. Phase space trajectory analysis provides a rigorous geometric framework for comparing sonification designs within a complex systems context. Perceptual validation remains necessary; we contribute the dynamical systems methodology for evaluating such mappings.

Block-Recurrent Dynamics in Vision Transformers

As Vision Transformers (ViTs) become standard vision backbones, a mechanistic account of their computational phenomenology is essential. Despite architectural cues that hint at dynamical structure, there is no settled framework that interprets Transformer depth as a well-characterized flow. In this work, we introduce the Block-Recurrent Hypothesis (BRH), arguing that trained ViTs admit a block-recurrent depth structure such that the computation of the original L blocks can be accurately rewritten using only k ll L distinct blocks applied recurrently. Across diverse ViTs, between-layer representational similarity matrices suggest few contiguous phases. To determine whether these phases reflect genuinely reusable computation, we train block-recurrent surrogates of pretrained ViTs: Recurrent Approximations to Phase-structured TransfORmers (Raptor). In small-scale, we demonstrate that stochastic depth and training promote recurrent structure and subsequently correlate with our ability to accurately fit Raptor. We then provide an empirical existence proof for BRH by training a Raptor model to recover 96% of DINOv2 ImageNet-1k linear probe accuracy in only 2 blocks at equivalent computational cost. Finally, we leverage our hypothesis to develop a program of Dynamical Interpretability. We find i) directional convergence into class-dependent angular basins with self-correcting trajectories under small perturbations, ii) token-specific dynamics, where cls executes sharp late reorientations while patch tokens exhibit strong late-stage coherence toward their mean direction, and iii) a collapse to low rank updates in late depth, consistent with convergence to low-dimensional attractors. Altogether, we find a compact recurrent program emerges along ViT depth, pointing to a low-complexity normative solution that enables these models to be studied through principled dynamical systems analysis.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 22, 2025

gQIR: Generative Quanta Image Reconstruction

Capturing high-quality images from only a few detected photons is a fundamental challenge in computational imaging. Single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) sensors promise high-quality imaging in regimes where conventional cameras fail, but raw quanta frames contain only sparse, noisy, binary photon detections. Recovering a coherent image from a burst of such frames requires handling alignment, denoising, and demosaicing (for color) under noise statistics far outside those assumed by standard restoration pipelines or modern generative models. We present an approach that adapts large text-to-image latent diffusion models to the photon-limited domain of quanta burst imaging. Our method leverages the structural and semantic priors of internet-scale diffusion models while introducing mechanisms to handle Bernoulli photon statistics. By integrating latent-space restoration with burst-level spatio-temporal reasoning, our approach produces reconstructions that are both photometrically faithful and perceptually pleasing, even under high-speed motion. We evaluate the method on synthetic benchmarks and new real-world datasets, including the first color SPAD burst dataset and a challenging Deforming (XD) video benchmark. Across all settings, the approach substantially improves perceptual quality over classical and modern learning-based baselines, demonstrating the promise of adapting large generative priors to extreme photon-limited sensing. Code at https://github.com/Aryan-Garg/gQIR{https://github.com/Aryan-Garg/gQIR}.

  • 3 authors
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Feb 23

Three-Phase Transformer

We present Three-Phase Transformer (3PT), a residual-stream structural prior for decoder-only Transformers on a standard SwiGLU + RMSNorm + RoPE + GQA backbone. The hidden vector is partitioned into N equally-sized cyclic channels, each maintained by phase-respecting ops: a per-channel RMSNorm, a 2D Givens rotation between attention and FFN that rotates each channel by theta + i*(2*pi/N), and a head-count constraint aligning GQA heads with the partition. The architecture is a self-stabilizing equilibrium between scrambling and re-imposition, not a bolted-on module. The partition carves out a one-dimensional DC subspace orthogonal to the channels, into which we inject a fixed Gabriel's horn profile r(p) = 1/(p+1) as an absolute-position side-channel composing orthogonally with RoPE's relative-position rotation. The canonical N=3 borrows its metaphor from balanced three-phase AC, where three sinusoids 120 degrees apart sum to zero with no anti-correlated pair. At 123M parameters on WikiText-103, 3PT achieves -7.20% perplexity (-2.62% bits-per-byte) over a matched RoPE-Only baseline at +1,536 parameters (0.00124% of total), with 1.93x step-count convergence speedup (1.64x wall-clock). N behaves as a parameter-sharing knob rather than a unique optimum: at 5.5M an N-sweep over {1,2,3,4,6,8,12} is near-monotone with N=1 winning; at 123M a three-seed sweep finds N=3 and N=1 statistically indistinguishable. The load-bearing mechanism is the channel-partitioned residual stream, per-block rotation, per-phase normalization, and horn DC injection. We characterize (a) self-stabilization of the geometry without explicit enforcement, a novel instance of the conservation-law framework for neural networks; (b) a U-shaped depth profile of rotation-angle drift at 12 layers; (c) orthogonal composition with RoPE, attention, and FFN.

BrainsBuild BrainsBuild
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Apr 14 5

EndoNet: A Deep Architecture for Recognition Tasks on Laparoscopic Videos

Surgical workflow recognition has numerous potential medical applications, such as the automatic indexing of surgical video databases and the optimization of real-time operating room scheduling, among others. As a result, phase recognition has been studied in the context of several kinds of surgeries, such as cataract, neurological, and laparoscopic surgeries. In the literature, two types of features are typically used to perform this task: visual features and tool usage signals. However, the visual features used are mostly handcrafted. Furthermore, the tool usage signals are usually collected via a manual annotation process or by using additional equipment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for phase recognition that uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to automatically learn features from cholecystectomy videos and that relies uniquely on visual information. In previous studies, it has been shown that the tool signals can provide valuable information in performing the phase recognition task. Thus, we present a novel CNN architecture, called EndoNet, that is designed to carry out the phase recognition and tool presence detection tasks in a multi-task manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work proposing to use a CNN for multiple recognition tasks on laparoscopic videos. Extensive experimental comparisons to other methods show that EndoNet yields state-of-the-art results for both tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 9, 2016

A Model Zoo on Phase Transitions in Neural Networks

Using the weights of trained Neural Network (NN) models as data modality has recently gained traction as a research field - dubbed Weight Space Learning (WSL). Multiple recent works propose WSL methods to analyze models, evaluate methods, or synthesize weights. Weight space learning methods require populations of trained models as datasets for development and evaluation. However, existing collections of models - called `model zoos' - are unstructured or follow a rudimentary definition of diversity. In parallel, work rooted in statistical physics has identified phases and phase transitions in NN models. Models are homogeneous within the same phase but qualitatively differ from one phase to another. We combine the idea of `model zoos' with phase information to create a controlled notion of diversity in populations. We introduce 12 large-scale zoos that systematically cover known phases and vary over model architecture, size, and datasets. These datasets cover different modalities, such as computer vision, natural language processing, and scientific ML. For every model, we compute loss landscape metrics and validate full coverage of the phases. With this dataset, we provide the community with a resource with a wide range of potential applications for WSL and beyond. Evidence suggests the loss landscape phase plays a role in applications such as model training, analysis, or sparsification. We demonstrate this in an exploratory study of the downstream methods like transfer learning or model weights averaging.

  • 6 authors
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Apr 25, 2025 2

A Comprehensive Perturbative Formalism for Phase Mixing in Perturbed Disks. II. Phase Spirals in an Inhomogeneous Disk Galaxy with a Non-responsive Dark Matter Halo

We develop a linear perturbative formalism to compute the response of an inhomogeneous stellar disk embedded in a non-responsive dark matter halo to perturbations like bars, spiral arms and satellite galaxy encounters. Without self-gravity to reinforce it, the response of a Fourier mode phase mixes away due to an intrinsic spread in the vertical (Omega_z), radial (Omega_r) and azimuthal (Omega_phi) frequencies, giving rise to local phase-space spirals. Collisional diffusion due to scattering of stars by structures like giant molecular clouds causes super-exponential damping of the phase-spiral amplitude. The z-v_z phase-spiral is 1-armed (2-armed) for vertically anti-symmetric (symmetric) bending (breathing) modes. Only transient perturbations with timescales (tau_{P}) comparable to the vertical oscillation period (tau_z sim 1/Omega_z) trigger z-v_z phase-spirals. Each (n,l,m) mode of the response to impulsive (tau_{P}<tau=1/(nOmega_z+lOmega_r+mOmega_phi)) perturbations is power law (sim tau_{P}/tau) suppressed, but that to adiabatic (tau_{P}>tau) perturbations is exponentially weak (sim left[-left(tau_{mathrm{P}/tauright)^alpharight]}) except resonant (tauto infty) modes. Slower (tau_{P}>tau_z) perturbations, e.g., distant encounters with satellite galaxies, induce stronger bending modes. If the Gaia phase-spiral was triggered by a satellite, Sagittarius is the leading contender as it dominates the Solar neighborhood response of the Milky Way disk to satellite encounters. However, survival against collisional damping necessitates that the impact occurred within sim 0.6-0.7 Gyr ago. We discuss how the detailed galactic potential dictates the phase-spiral shape: phase mixing occurs slower and phase-spirals are less wound in the outer disk and in presence of an ambient halo.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 28, 2023

Tracing the Representation Geometry of Language Models from Pretraining to Post-training

Standard training metrics like loss fail to explain the emergence of complex capabilities in large language models. We take a spectral approach to investigate the geometry of learned representations across pretraining and post-training, measuring effective rank (RankMe) and eigenspectrum decay (α-ReQ). With OLMo (1B-7B) and Pythia (160M-12B) models, we uncover a consistent non-monotonic sequence of three geometric phases during autoregressive pretraining. The initial "warmup" phase exhibits rapid representational collapse. This is followed by an "entropy-seeking" phase, where the manifold's dimensionality expands substantially, coinciding with peak n-gram memorization. Subsequently, a "compression-seeking" phase imposes anisotropic consolidation, selectively preserving variance along dominant eigendirections while contracting others, a transition marked with significant improvement in downstream task performance. We show these phases can emerge from a fundamental interplay of cross-entropy optimization under skewed token frequencies and representational bottlenecks (d ll |V|). Post-training further transforms geometry: SFT and DPO drive "entropy-seeking" dynamics to integrate specific instructional or preferential data, improving in-distribution performance while degrading out-of-distribution robustness. Conversely, RLVR induces "compression-seeking", enhancing reward alignment but reducing generation diversity.

  • 7 authors
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Sep 26, 2025

Learning Energy-Based Models by Cooperative Diffusion Recovery Likelihood

Training energy-based models (EBMs) on high-dimensional data can be both challenging and time-consuming, and there exists a noticeable gap in sample quality between EBMs and other generative frameworks like GANs and diffusion models. To close this gap, inspired by the recent efforts of learning EBMs by maximizing diffusion recovery likelihood (DRL), we propose cooperative diffusion recovery likelihood (CDRL), an effective approach to tractably learn and sample from a series of EBMs defined on increasingly noisy versions of a dataset, paired with an initializer model for each EBM. At each noise level, the two models are jointly estimated within a cooperative training framework: samples from the initializer serve as starting points that are refined by a few MCMC sampling steps from the EBM. The EBM is then optimized by maximizing recovery likelihood, while the initializer model is optimized by learning from the difference between the refined samples and the initial samples. In addition, we made several practical designs for EBM training to further improve the sample quality. Combining these advances, our approach significantly boost the generation performance compared to existing EBM methods on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our models for several downstream tasks, including classifier-free guided generation, compositional generation, image inpainting and out-of-distribution detection.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 10, 2023

Complex-valued neural networks to speed-up MR Thermometry during Hyperthermia using Fourier PD and PDUNet

Hyperthermia (HT) in combination with radio- and/or chemotherapy has become an accepted cancer treatment for distinct solid tumour entities. In HT, tumour tissue is exogenously heated to temperatures between 39 and 43 ^circC for 60 minutes. Temperature monitoring can be performed non-invasively using dynamic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, the slow nature of MRI leads to motion artefacts in the images due to the movements of patients during image acquisition. By discarding parts of the data, the speed of the acquisition can be increased - known as undersampling. However, due to the invalidation of the Nyquist criterion, the acquired images might be blurry and can also produce aliasing artefacts. The aim of this work was, therefore, to reconstruct highly undersampled MR thermometry acquisitions with better resolution and with fewer artefacts compared to conventional methods. The use of deep learning in the medical field has emerged in recent times, and various studies have shown that deep learning has the potential to solve inverse problems such as MR image reconstruction. However, most of the published work only focuses on the magnitude images, while the phase images are ignored, which are fundamental requirements for MR thermometry. This work, for the first time, presents deep learning-based solutions for reconstructing undersampled MR thermometry data. Two different deep learning models have been employed here, the Fourier Primal-Dual network and the Fourier Primal-Dual UNet, to reconstruct highly undersampled complex images of MR thermometry. The method reduced the temperature difference between the undersampled MRIs and the fully sampled MRIs from 1.3 ^circC to 0.6 ^circC in full volume and 0.49 ^circC to 0.06 ^circC in the tumour region for an acceleration factor of 10.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Image Restoration for Remote Sensing: Overview and Toolbox

Remote sensing provides valuable information about objects or areas from a distance in either active (e.g., RADAR and LiDAR) or passive (e.g., multispectral and hyperspectral) modes. The quality of data acquired by remotely sensed imaging sensors (both active and passive) is often degraded by a variety of noise types and artifacts. Image restoration, which is a vibrant field of research in the remote sensing community, is the task of recovering the true unknown image from the degraded observed image. Each imaging sensor induces unique noise types and artifacts into the observed image. This fact has led to the expansion of restoration techniques in different paths according to each sensor type. This review paper brings together the advances of image restoration techniques with particular focuses on synthetic aperture radar and hyperspectral images as the most active sub-fields of image restoration in the remote sensing community. We, therefore, provide a comprehensive, discipline-specific starting point for researchers at different levels (i.e., students, researchers, and senior researchers) willing to investigate the vibrant topic of data restoration by supplying sufficient detail and references. Additionally, this review paper accompanies a toolbox to provide a platform to encourage interested students and researchers in the field to further explore the restoration techniques and fast-forward the community. The toolboxes are provided in https://github.com/ImageRestorationToolbox.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 20, 2022

Seismic Arrival-time Picking on Distributed Acoustic Sensing Data using Semi-supervised Learning

Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is an emerging technology for earthquake monitoring and subsurface imaging. The recorded seismic signals by DAS have several distinct characteristics, such as unknown coupling effects, strong anthropogenic noise, and ultra-dense spatial sampling. These aspects differ from conventional seismic data recorded by seismic networks, making it challenging to utilize DAS at present for seismic monitoring. New data analysis algorithms are needed to extract useful information from DAS data. Previous studies on conventional seismic data demonstrated that deep learning models could achieve performance close to human analysts in picking seismic phases. However, phase picking on DAS data is still a difficult problem due to the lack of manual labels. Further, the differences in mathematical structure between these two data formats, i.e., ultra-dense DAS arrays and sparse seismic networks, make model fine-tuning or transfer learning difficult to implement on DAS data. In this work, we design a new approach using semi-supervised learning to solve the phase-picking task on DAS arrays. We use a pre-trained PhaseNet model as a teacher network to generate noisy labels of P and S arrivals on DAS data and apply the Gaussian mixture model phase association (GaMMA) method to refine these noisy labels to build training datasets. We develop a new deep learning model, PhaseNet-DAS, to process the 2D spatial-temporal data of DAS arrays and train the model on DAS data. The new deep learning model achieves high picking accuracy and good earthquake detection performance. We then apply the model to process continuous data and build earthquake catalogs directly from DAS recording. Our approach using semi-supervised learning provides a way to build effective deep learning models for DAS, which have the potential to improve earthquake monitoring using large-scale fiber networks.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 17, 2023

HoloPASWIN: Robust Inline Holographic Reconstruction via Physics-Aware Swin Transformers

In-line digital holography (DIH) is a widely used lensless imaging technique, valued for its simplicity and capability to image samples at high throughput. However, capturing only intensity of the interference pattern during the recording process gives rise to some unwanted terms such as cross-term and twin-image. The cross-term can be suppressed by adjusting the intensity of reference wave, but the twin-image problem remains. The twin-image is a spectral artifact that superimposes a defocused conjugate wave onto the reconstructed object, severely degrading image quality. While deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful tool for phase retrieval, traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are limited by their local receptive fields, making them less effective at capturing the global diffraction patterns inherent in holography. In this study, we introduce HoloPASWIN, a physics-aware deep learning framework based on the Swin Transformer architecture. By leveraging hierarchical shifted-window attention, our model efficiently captures both local details and long-range dependencies essential for accurate holographic reconstruction. We propose a comprehensive loss function that integrates frequency-domain constraints with physical consistency via a differentiable angular spectrum propagator, ensuring high spectral fidelity. Validated on a large-scale synthetic dataset of 25,000 samples with diverse noise configurations (speckle, shot, read, and dark noise), HoloPASWIN demonstrates effective twin-image suppression and robust reconstruction quality.

  • 2 authors
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Mar 5

Patient-Specific Autoregressive Models for Organ Motion Prediction in Radiotherapy

Radiotherapy often involves a prolonged treatment period. During this time, patients may experience organ motion due to breathing and other physiological factors. Predicting and modeling this motion before treatment is crucial for ensuring precise radiation delivery. However, existing pre-treatment organ motion prediction methods primarily rely on deformation analysis using principal component analysis (PCA), which is highly dependent on registration quality and struggles to capture periodic temporal dynamics for motion modeling.In this paper, we observe that organ motion prediction closely resembles an autoregressive process, a technique widely used in natural language processing (NLP). Autoregressive models predict the next token based on previous inputs, naturally aligning with our objective of predicting future organ motion phases. Building on this insight, we reformulate organ motion prediction as an autoregressive process to better capture patient-specific motion patterns. Specifically, we acquire 4D CT scans for each patient before treatment, with each sequence comprising multiple 3D CT phases. These phases are fed into the autoregressive model to predict future phases based on prior phase motion patterns. We evaluate our method on a real-world test set of 4D CT scans from 50 patients who underwent radiotherapy at our institution and a public dataset containing 4D CT scans from 20 patients (some with multiple scans), totaling over 1,300 3D CT phases. The performance in predicting the motion of the lung and heart surpasses existing benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing motion dynamics from CT images. These results highlight the potential of our method to improve pre-treatment planning in radiotherapy, enabling more precise and adaptive radiation delivery.

  • 4 authors
·
May 17, 2025

3D Reconstruction of Coronary Vessel Trees from Biplanar X-Ray Images Using a Geometric Approach

X-ray angiography is widely used in cardiac interventions to visualize coronary vessels, assess integrity, detect stenoses and guide treatment. We propose a framework for reconstructing 3D vessel trees from biplanar X-ray images which are extracted from two X-ray videos captured at different C-arm angles. The proposed framework consists of three main components: image segmentation, motion phase matching, and 3D reconstruction. An automatic video segmentation method for X-ray angiography to enable semantic segmentation for image segmentation and motion phase matching. The goal of the motion phase matching is to identify a pair of X-ray images that correspond to a similar respiratory and cardiac motion phase to reduce errors in 3D reconstruction. This is achieved by tracking a stationary object such as a catheter or lead within the X-ray video. The semantic segmentation approach assigns different labels to different object classes enabling accurate differentiation between blood vessels, balloons, and catheters. Once a suitable image pair is selected, key anatomical landmarks (vessel branching points and endpoints) are matched between the two views using a heuristic method that minimizes reconstruction errors. This is followed by a novel geometric reconstruction algorithm to generate the 3D vessel tree. The algorithm computes the 3D vessel centrelines by determining the intersection of two 3D surfaces. Compared to traditional methods based on epipolar constraints, the proposed approach simplifies there construction workflow and improves overall accuracy. We trained and validated our segmentation method on 62 X-ray angiography video sequences. On the test set, our method achieved a segmentation accuracy of 0.703. The 3D reconstruction framework was validated by measuring the reconstruction error of key anatomical landmarks, achieving a reprojection errors of 0.62mm +/- 0.38mm.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 15, 2025

Generalized Teacher Forcing for Learning Chaotic Dynamics

Chaotic dynamical systems (DS) are ubiquitous in nature and society. Often we are interested in reconstructing such systems from observed time series for prediction or mechanistic insight, where by reconstruction we mean learning geometrical and invariant temporal properties of the system in question (like attractors). However, training reconstruction algorithms like recurrent neural networks (RNNs) on such systems by gradient-descent based techniques faces severe challenges. This is mainly due to exploding gradients caused by the exponential divergence of trajectories in chaotic systems. Moreover, for (scientific) interpretability we wish to have as low dimensional reconstructions as possible, preferably in a model which is mathematically tractable. Here we report that a surprisingly simple modification of teacher forcing leads to provably strictly all-time bounded gradients in training on chaotic systems, and, when paired with a simple architectural rearrangement of a tractable RNN design, piecewise-linear RNNs (PLRNNs), allows for faithful reconstruction in spaces of at most the dimensionality of the observed system. We show on several DS that with these amendments we can reconstruct DS better than current SOTA algorithms, in much lower dimensions. Performance differences were particularly compelling on real world data with which most other methods severely struggled. This work thus led to a simple yet powerful DS reconstruction algorithm which is highly interpretable at the same time.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 7, 2023

Dynamical Excitation as a probe of planetary origins

We present a set of numerical simulations of the dynamical evolution of compact planetary systems migrating in a protoplanetary disk whose inner edge is sculpted by the interaction with the stellar magnetic field, as described in Yu et al. (2023). We demonstrate that the resulting final distribution of neighbouring planet period ratios contains only a small surviving fraction of resonant systems, in accordance with observations. The resulting planetary architectures are largely in place by the end of the protoplanetary disk phase (within a few Myr), and do not require significant later dynamical evolution. The divergence of planetary pairs during gas disk dispersal also leads to the excitation of eccentricities when pairs cross mean motion resonances in a divergent fashion. The resulting distribution of remnant free eccentricities is consistent with the values inferred from the observation of transit durations and transit timing variations. We furthermore demonstrate that this conclusion is not significantly altered by tides, assuming standard values for tidal dissipation in Earth or Neptune-class planets. These results demonstrate that the observed spacing and residual dynamical excitation of compact planetary systems can be reproduced by migration through a protoplanetary disk, as long as the inner disk boundary is modelled as a gradual rollover, instead of a sharp transition. Such an effect can be achieved when the model accounts for the diffusion of the stellar magnetic field into the disk. The resulting divergence of planetary pairs during the magnetospheric rebound phase breaks the resonant chains, resulting in a better match to observations than disk models with more traditional inner boundaries.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2025

Representation learning for improved interpretability and classification accuracy of clinical factors from EEG

Despite extensive standardization, diagnostic interviews for mental health disorders encompass substantial subjective judgment. Previous studies have demonstrated that EEG-based neural measures can function as reliable objective correlates of depression, or even predictors of depression and its course. However, their clinical utility has not been fully realized because of 1) the lack of automated ways to deal with the inherent noise associated with EEG data at scale, and 2) the lack of knowledge of which aspects of the EEG signal may be markers of a clinical disorder. Here we adapt an unsupervised pipeline from the recent deep representation learning literature to address these problems by 1) learning a disentangled representation using beta-VAE to denoise the signal, and 2) extracting interpretable features associated with a sparse set of clinical labels using a Symbol-Concept Association Network (SCAN). We demonstrate that our method is able to outperform the canonical hand-engineered baseline classification method on a number of factors, including participant age and depression diagnosis. Furthermore, our method recovers a representation that can be used to automatically extract denoised Event Related Potentials (ERPs) from novel, single EEG trajectories, and supports fast supervised re-mapping to various clinical labels, allowing clinicians to re-use a single EEG representation regardless of updates to the standardized diagnostic system. Finally, single factors of the learned disentangled representations often correspond to meaningful markers of clinical factors, as automatically detected by SCAN, allowing for human interpretability and post-hoc expert analysis of the recommendations made by the model.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 28, 2020

Efficient Physics-Based Learned Reconstruction Methods for Real-Time 3D Near-Field MIMO Radar Imaging

Near-field multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar imaging systems have recently gained significant attention. In this paper, we develop novel non-iterative deep learning-based reconstruction methods for real-time near-field MIMO imaging. The goal is to achieve high image quality with low computational cost at compressive settings. The developed approaches have two stages. In the first approach, physics-based initial stage performs adjoint operation to back-project the measurements to the image-space, and deep neural network (DNN)-based second stage converts the 3D backprojected measurements to a magnitude-only reflectivity image. Since scene reflectivities often have random phase, DNN processes directly the magnitude of the adjoint result. As DNN, 3D U-Net is used to jointly exploit range and cross-range correlations. To comparatively evaluate the significance of exploiting physics in a learning-based approach, two additional approaches that replace the physics-based first stage with fully connected layers are also developed as purely learning-based methods. The performance is also analyzed by changing the DNN architecture for the second stage to include complex-valued processing (instead of magnitude-only processing), 2D convolution kernels (instead of 3D), and ResNet architecture (instead of U-Net). Moreover, we develop a synthesizer to generate large-scale dataset for training with 3D extended targets. We illustrate the performance through experimental data and extensive simulations. The results show the effectiveness of the developed physics-based learned reconstruction approach in terms of both run-time and image quality at highly compressive settings. Our source codes and dataset are made available at GitHub.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 28, 2023