arXiv Machine Learning

Tracing the Oracle: Improving Diffusion Timestep Scheduling for 3D CT Reconstruction

arXiv:2606. 06236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained diffusion models demonstrate impressive potential in solving highly ill-posed 3D computed tomography (CT) inverse problems, while the inference process suffers from significant computational overhead.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Efficient Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

arXiv:2603. 00205v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative models, particularly Diffusion Models (DM), have shown strong potential for Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction serving as expressive priors for solving ill-posed inverse problems.

By Jiayang Shi, Lincen Yang, Zhong Li, Tristan van Leeuwen, Daniel M. Pelt, K. Joost Batenburg
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Physics-Guided Flow Matching for CT Image Reconstruction

The paper introduces a high‑resolution Rectified Flow Matching model trained on 256×256 chest CT images to serve as a generative prior for CT reconstruction. A two‑stage training strategy—initial strong anatomically informed augmentation followed by fine‑tuning—helps mitigate overfitting and improve structural fidelity. When evaluated on various CT inverse problems, Flow Matching‑based reconstruction methods outperform diffusion‑based algorithms in PSNR, SSIM, and perceptual quality while requiring fewer sampling steps.

By Davide Evangelista
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Conditional Diffusion Posterior Alignment for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

The paper introduces Conditional Diffusion Posterior Alignment (CDPA), a method that scales diffusion-based sparse‑view CT reconstruction to large 3D volumes by conditioning a 2D U‑Net diffusion model on an initial 3D reconstruction and enforcing data‑consistency alignment. CDPA addresses high memory demands, limited 3D training data, and slice‑wise inconsistencies, achieving state‑of‑the‑art performance on synthetic and real Cone Beam CT data. The authors also demonstrate that the same approach improves fast denoising U‑Nets, delivering near‑diffusion quality at a fraction of the computational cost.

By Luis Barba, Johannes Kirschner, Benjamin Bejar
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Dose-Aware Cold Diffusion with Physics Consistency for Generalizable Low-Dose CT Reconstruction

The paper introduces Dose-Aware Cold Diffusion (DACD), a physics-consistent framework that treats radiation dose as a continuous latent variable in a cold diffusion process for low-dose CT reconstruction. DACD combines dose-aware perception, multi-scale structural priors, and dose-calibrated step allocation to guide denoising, and adds an iterative forward-backprojection correction to enforce projection-domain consistency. Experiments on Mayo-2020, Mayo-2016, and LoDoPaB-CT show DACD outperforms existing diffusion-based and physics-guided methods, especially at ultra-low doses, and generalizes robustly across continuous, unseen dose levels.

By Md Imam Ahasan, Guangchao Yang, A F M Abdun Noor, S M Hasan Mahmud, Md Mahfuzur Rahman
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Picard Proximal Monte Carlo for Parallel Bayesian Imaging with Score-Based Generative Priors

The paper introduces PiX-MC, a time‑parallel posterior sampling framework that combines proximal Langevin dynamics with Picard iteration for Bayesian imaging inverse problems. By leveraging efficient proximal operators for many imaging likelihoods and exploiting parallelism across discretization nodes, PiX-MC supports multi‑GPU implementation and includes multi‑block and annealed variants to enhance scalability. Experiments on various imaging tasks, including a large‑scale sparse‑view CT problem, show that PiX‑MC can reduce runtime by up to 50× while maintaining reconstruction quality.

By Deliang Wei, Evan Bell, Wenhan Guo, Yifan Chen, Yu Sun
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

FlowSGS: Improving Flow Matching Priors for Inverse Imaging with Stochastic Interpolants

FlowSGS introduces a flow-based posterior sampling method that combines Split Gibbs Sampling (SGS) with Langevin dynamics for the likelihood step and Stochastic Interpolants (SI) for the prior step. By integrating a pretrained flow model into the prior step via SI's reverse-time SDE and a novel timestep correction, FlowSGS reduces the number of network evaluations compared to plug‑and‑play diffusion samplers. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on various inverse problems, including the first flow‑based solution to a nonlinear inverse problem (Fourier phase retrieval).

By Tianao Li, Xinhui Qian, Emma Alexander
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Plug-and-Play Diffusion Meets ADMM: Dual-Variable Coupling for Robust Medical Image Reconstruction

arXiv:2602. 23214v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Plug-and-Play diffusion prior (PnPDP) frameworks have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving imaging inverse problems by treating pretrained generative models as modular priors.

By Chenhe Du, Xuanyu Tian, Qing Wu, Muyu Liu, Jingyi Yu, Hongjiang Wei, Yuyao Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 4

A Posterior-Dynamics Framework for Imaging Inverse Problems with Pretrained Diffusion Priors

The paper introduces a Posterior‑Dynamics Framework that leverages pretrained diffusion models as multiscale priors for linear imaging inverse problems such as deblurring, super‑resolution, and inpainting. By constructing a surrogate likelihood centered on the clean image and incorporating diffusion uncertainty, the authors derive continuous posterior dynamics and a tunable Langevin component for adaptive exploration. They prove theoretical guarantees (endpoint consistency, finite‑horizon tracking, weak accuracy) and present the PD‑IMEX sampler, which achieves high‑quality reconstructions with only 100 score evaluations and controllable fidelity‑diversity trade‑offs.

By Zhaoqiang Liu, Tongyao Pang, Ruibing Wang, Yang Zheng