SURE Guided Posterior Sampling: Trajectory Correction for Diffusion-Based Inverse Problems

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful learned priors for solving inverse problems. However, current iterative solving approaches which alternate between diffusion sampling and data consistency steps typically require hundreds or thousands of steps to achieve high quality reconstruction due to accumulated errors. We address this challenge with SURE Guided Posterior Sampling (SGPS), a method that corrects sampling trajectory deviations using Stein's Unbiased Risk Estimate (SURE) gradient updates and PCA based noise estimation. By mitigating noise induced errors during the critical early and middle sampling stages, SGPS enables more accurate posterior sampling and reduces error accumulation. This allows our method to maintain high reconstruction quality with fewer than 100 Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs). Our extensive evaluation across diverse inverse problems demonstrates that SGPS consistently outperforms existing methods at low NFE counts.

Adaptive 3D Reconstruction via Diffusion Priors and Forward Curvature-Matching Likelihood Updates

Reconstructing high-quality point clouds from images remains challenging in computer vision. Existing generative-model-based approaches, particularly diffusion-model approaches that directly learn the posterior, may suffer from inflexibility -- they require conditioning signals during training, support only a fixed number of input views, and need complete retraining for different measurements. Recent diffusion-based methods have attempted to address this by combining prior models with likelihood updates, but they rely on heuristic fixed step sizes for the likelihood update that lead to slow convergence and suboptimal reconstruction quality. We advance this line of approach by integrating our novel Forward Curvature-Matching (FCM) update method with diffusion sampling. Our method dynamically determines optimal step sizes using only forward automatic differentiation and finite-difference curvature estimates, enabling precise optimization of the likelihood update. This formulation enables high-fidelity reconstruction from both single-view and multi-view inputs, and supports various input modalities through simple operator substitution -- all without retraining. Experiments on ShapeNet and CO3D datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior reconstruction quality at matched or lower NFEs, yielding higher F-score and lower CD and EMD, validating its efficiency and adaptability for practical applications. Code is available at https://github.com/Seunghyeok0715/FCM

CLARIFID: Improving Radiology Report Generation by Reinforcing Clinically Accurate Impressions and Enforcing Detailed Findings

Automatic generation of radiology reports has the potential to alleviate radiologists' significant workload, yet current methods struggle to deliver clinically reliable conclusions. In particular, most prior approaches focus on producing fluent text without effectively ensuring the factual correctness of the reports and often rely on single-view images, limiting diagnostic comprehensiveness. We propose CLARIFID, a novel framework that directly optimizes diagnostic correctness by mirroring the two-step workflow of experts. Specifically, CLARIFID (1) learns the logical flow from Findings to Impression through section-aware pretraining, (2) is fine-tuned with Proximal Policy Optimization in which the CheXbert F1 score of the Impression section serves as the reward, (3) enforces reasoning-aware decoding that completes "Findings" before synthesizing the "Impression", and (4) fuses multiple chest X-ray views via a vision-transformer-based multi-view encoder. During inference, we apply a reasoning-aware next-token forcing strategy followed by report-level re-ranking, ensuring that the model first produces a comprehensive Findings section before synthesizing the Impression and thereby preserving coherent clinical reasoning. Experimental results on the MIMIC-CXR dataset demonstrate that our method achieves superior clinical efficacy and outperforms existing baselines on both standard NLG metrics and clinically aware scores.

Momentum-Net: Fast and convergent iterative neural network for inverse problems

Iterative neural networks (INN) are rapidly gaining attention for solving inverse problems in imaging, image processing, and computer vision. INNs combine regression NNs and an iterative model-based image reconstruction (MBIR) algorithm, leading to both good generalization capability and outperforming reconstruction quality over existing MBIR optimization models. This paper proposes the first fast and convergent INN architecture, Momentum-Net, by generalizing a block-wise MBIR algorithm that uses momentums and majorizers with regression NNs. For fast MBIR, Momentum-Net uses momentum terms in extrapolation modules, and noniterative MBIR modules at each layer by using majorizers, where each layer of Momentum-Net consists of three core modules: image refining, extrapolation, and MBIR. Momentum-Net guarantees convergence to a fixed-point for general differentiable (non)convex MBIR functions (or data-fit terms) and convex feasible sets, under two asymptomatic conditions. To consider data-fit variations across training and testing samples, we also propose a regularization parameter selection scheme based on the spectral radius of majorization matrices. Numerical experiments for light-field photography using a focal stack and sparse-view computational tomography demonstrate that given identical regression NN architectures, Momentum-Net significantly improves MBIR speed and accuracy over several existing INNs; it significantly improves reconstruction quality compared to a state-of-the-art MBIR method in each application.

Improved low-count quantitative PET reconstruction with a variational neural network

Image reconstruction in low-count PET is particularly challenging because gammas from natural radioactivity in Lu-based crystals cause high random fractions that lower the measurement signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). In model-based image reconstruction (MBIR), using more iterations of an unregularized method may increase the noise, so incorporating regularization into the image reconstruction is desirable to control the noise. New regularization methods based on learned convolutional operators are emerging in MBIR. We modify the architecture of a variational neural network, BCD-Net, for PET MBIR, and demonstrate the efficacy of the trained BCD-Net using XCAT phantom data that simulates the low true coincidence count-rates with high random fractions typical for Y-90 PET patient imaging after Y-90 microsphere radioembolization. Numerical results show that the proposed BCD-Net significantly improves PET reconstruction performance compared to MBIR methods using non-trained regularizers, total variation (TV) and non-local means (NLM), and a non-MBIR method using a single forward pass deep neural network, U-Net. BCD-Net improved activity recovery for a hot sphere significantly and reduced noise, whereas non-trained regularizers had a trade-off between noise and quantification. BCD-Net improved CNR and RMSE by 43.4% (85.7%) and 12.9% (29.1%) compared to TV (NLM) regularized MBIR. Moreover, whereas the image reconstruction results show that the non-MBIR U-Net over-fits the training data, BCD-Net successfully generalizes to data that differs from training data. Improvements were also demonstrated for the clinically relevant phantom measurement data where we used training and testing datasets having very different activity distribution and count-level.