Finding Local Diffusion Schrödinger Bridge using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network

In image generation, Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB)-based methods theoretically enhance the efficiency and quality compared to the diffusion models by finding the least costly path between two distributions. However, they are computationally expensive and time-consuming when applied to complex image data. The reason is that they focus on fitting globally optimal paths in high-dimensional spaces, directly generating images as next step on the path using complex networks through self-supervised training, which typically results in a gap with the global optimum. Meanwhile, most diffusion models are in the same path subspace generated by weights $f_A(t)$ and $f_B(t)$, as they follow the paradigm ($x_t = f_A(t)x_{Img} + f_B(t)\epsilon$). To address the limitations of SB-based methods, this paper proposes for the first time to find local Diffusion Schr\"odinger Bridges (LDSB) in the diffusion path subspace, which strengthens the connection between the SB problem and diffusion models. Specifically, our method optimizes the diffusion paths using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN), which has the advantage of resistance to forgetting and continuous output. The experiment shows that our LDSB significantly improves the quality and efficiency of image generation using the same pre-trained denoising network and the KAN for optimising is only less than 0.1MB. The FID metric is reduced by \textbf{more than 15\%}, especially with a reduction of 48.50\% when NFE of DDIM is $5$ for the CelebA dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/Qiu-XY/LDSB.

Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection via Enhanced Open-Set Object Detector

This paper addresses the challenge of cross-domain few-shot object detection (CD-FSOD), aiming to develop an accurate object detector for novel domains with minimal labeled examples. While transformer-based open-set detectors e.g., DE-ViT~\cite{zhang2023detect} have excelled in both open-vocabulary object detection and traditional few-shot object detection, detecting categories beyond those seen during training, we thus naturally raise two key questions: 1) can such open-set detection methods easily generalize to CD-FSOD? 2) If no, how to enhance the results of open-set methods when faced with significant domain gaps? To address the first question, we introduce several metrics to quantify domain variances and establish a new CD-FSOD benchmark with diverse domain metric values. Some State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) open-set object detection methods are evaluated on this benchmark, with evident performance degradation observed across out-of-domain datasets. This indicates the failure of adopting open-set detectors directly for CD-FSOD. Sequentially, to overcome the performance degradation issue and also to answer the second proposed question, we endeavor to enhance the vanilla DE-ViT. With several novel components including finetuning, a learnable prototype module, and a lightweight attention module, we present an improved Cross-Domain Vision Transformer for CD-FSOD (CD-ViTO). Experiments show that our CD-ViTO achieves impressive results on both out-of-domain and in-domain target datasets, establishing new SOTAs for both CD-FSOD and FSOD. All the datasets, codes, and models will be released to the community.

Unsupervised Decomposition Networks for Bias Field Correction in MR Image

Bias field, which is caused by imperfect MR devices or imaged objects, introduces intensity inhomogeneity into MR images and degrades the performance of MR image analysis methods. Many retrospective algorithms were developed to facilitate the bias correction, to which the deep learning-based methods outperformed. However, in the training phase, the supervised deep learning-based methods heavily rely on the synthesized bias field. As the formation of the bias field is extremely complex, it is difficult to mimic the true physical property of MR images by synthesized data. While bias field correction and image segmentation are strongly related, the segmentation map is precisely obtained by decoupling the bias field from the original MR image, and the bias value is indicated by the segmentation map in reverse. Thus, we proposed novel unsupervised decomposition networks that are trained only with biased data to obtain the bias-free MR images. Networks are made up of: a segmentation part to predict the probability of every pixel belonging to each class, and an estimation part to calculate the bias field, which are optimized alternately. Furthermore, loss functions based on the combination of fuzzy clustering and the multiplicative bias field are also devised. The proposed loss functions introduce the smoothness of bias field and construct the soft relationships among different classes under intra-consistency constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can accurately estimate bias fields and produce better bias correction results. The code is available on the link: https://github.com/LeongDong/Bias-Decomposition-Networks.