arXiv Machine Learning

Accelerating Hierarchical Sparse Predictive Coding with Hybrid Amortized Inference

arXiv:2606. 27802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical predictive coding provides an interpretable framework for perception as error-driven inference in multi-layer generative models, while sparse coding imposes parsimonious latent representations through explicit sparsity constraints.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

Observation-Conditioned Latent Energy Priors for Sparse Implicit Neural Shape Completion

The paper introduces a lightweight, observation-conditioned latent energy prior to improve inference for frozen implicit neural representation (INR) decoders when only sparse off‑grid signed distance function (SDF) samples are available. By standardizing latent codes based on a permutation‑invariant encoding of the sparse observations and combining this energy with a validation‑selected L2 prior, the method consistently outperforms baseline L2 and a six‑component Gaussian mixture model prior on both a controlled cell‑nucleus SDF dataset and a MedShapeNet‑derived SDF completion dataset, especially in the sparsest regimes. Ablation studies confirm that the energy term’s contribution is specific to the observed context rather than generic. whyItMatters":"The approach demonstrates that pretrained INR decoders can become more observation‑aware without retraining, improving shape completion accuracy in data‑sparse scenarios."

By Paul B\"uschl, Ezequiel de la Rosa, Julia Wolleb, Julian McGinnis, C\'esar Nombela-Arrieta, Bjoern Menze
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 18

Training-Adaptive Convolutional Sparse Coding via Information Bottleneck for Robust Visual Representation

The paper introduces a training‑adaptive convolutional sparse coding (CSC) framework that learns the sparsity coefficient jointly with network parameters using an unfolded FISTA optimization. By treating the coefficient as a differentiable variable, the method balances information retention and compression through an information bottleneck perspective, promoting compact yet task‑relevant representations. A label‑free post‑training strategy further adjusts compression for corrupted inputs, yielding competitive accuracy on clean data and enhanced robustness to perturbations on CIFAR and ImageNet.

By Meng'en Qin, Yinchen Liu, Mingxuan Cui, Youlu Xing
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Tunable Latent Generative Priors for Compressed Sensing and Inverse Problems

The paper introduces tunable latent priors for diffusion models, normalizing flows, and variational autoencoders using nested dropout. These priors allow the latent dimensionality to adapt to each inverse problem, reducing reconstruction errors compared to fixed-complexity models across tasks such as compressed sensing, inpainting, denoising, and phase retrieval. In linear denoising, the authors derive the optimal latent complexity in closed form, linking it to noise level and signal spectrum.

By Sean Gunn, Jorio Cocola, Oliver De Candido, Vaggos Chatziafratis, Paul Hand