Deep Plug-and-Play Prior for Hyperspectral Image Restoration

Deep-learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration methods have gained great popularity for their remarkable performance but often demand expensive network retraining whenever the specifics of task changes. In this paper, we propose to restore HSIs in a unified approach with an effective plug-and-play method, which can jointly retain the flexibility of optimization-based methods and utilize the powerful representation capability of deep neural networks. Specifically, we first develop a new deep HSI denoiser leveraging gated recurrent convolution units, short- and long-term skip connections, and an augmented noise level map to better exploit the abundant spatio-spectral information within HSIs. It, therefore, leads to the state-of-the-art performance on HSI denoising under both Gaussian and complex noise settings. Then, the proposed denoiser is inserted into the plug-and-play framework as a powerful implicit HSI prior to tackle various HSI restoration tasks. Through extensive experiments on HSI super-resolution, compressed sensing, and inpainting, we demonstrate that our approach often achieves superior performance, which is competitive with or even better than the state-of-the-art on each task, via a single model without any task-specific training.Comment: code at https://github.com/Zeqiang-Lai/DPHSI

Single-shot Phase Retrieval from a Fractional Fourier Transform Perspective

The realm of classical phase retrieval concerns itself with the arduous task of recovering a signal from its Fourier magnitude measurements, which are fraught with inherent ambiguities. A single-exposure intensity measurement is commonly deemed insufficient for the reconstruction of the primal signal, given that the absent phase component is imperative for the inverse transformation. In this work, we present a novel single-shot phase retrieval paradigm from a fractional Fourier transform (FrFT) perspective, which involves integrating the FrFT-based physical measurement model within a self-supervised reconstruction scheme. Specifically, the proposed FrFT-based measurement model addresses the aliasing artifacts problem in the numerical calculation of Fresnel diffraction, featuring adaptability to both short-distance and long-distance propagation scenarios. Moreover, the intensity measurement in the FrFT domain proves highly effective in alleviating the ambiguities of phase retrieval and relaxing the previous conditions on oversampled or multiple measurements in the Fourier domain. Furthermore, the proposed self-supervised reconstruction approach harnesses the fast discrete algorithm of FrFT alongside untrained neural network priors, thereby attaining preeminent results. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that both amplitude and phase objects can be effectively retrieved from a single-shot intensity measurement using the proposed approach and provide a promising technique for support-free coherent diffraction imaging

Instance Segmentation in the Dark

Existing instance segmentation techniques are primarily tailored for high-visibility inputs, but their performance significantly deteriorates in extremely low-light environments. In this work, we take a deep look at instance segmentation in the dark and introduce several techniques that substantially boost the low-light inference accuracy. The proposed method is motivated by the observation that noise in low-light images introduces high-frequency disturbances to the feature maps of neural networks, thereby significantly degrading performance. To suppress this ``feature noise", we propose a novel learning method that relies on an adaptive weighted downsampling layer, a smooth-oriented convolutional block, and disturbance suppression learning. These components effectively reduce feature noise during downsampling and convolution operations, enabling the model to learn disturbance-invariant features. Furthermore, we discover that high-bit-depth RAW images can better preserve richer scene information in low-light conditions compared to typical camera sRGB outputs, thus supporting the use of RAW-input algorithms. Our analysis indicates that high bit-depth can be critical for low-light instance segmentation. To mitigate the scarcity of annotated RAW datasets, we leverage a low-light RAW synthetic pipeline to generate realistic low-light data. In addition, to facilitate further research in this direction, we capture a real-world low-light instance segmentation dataset comprising over two thousand paired low/normal-light images with instance-level pixel-wise annotations. Remarkably, without any image preprocessing, we achieve satisfactory performance on instance segmentation in very low light (4~\% AP higher than state-of-the-art competitors), meanwhile opening new opportunities for future research.Comment: Accepted by International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) 202

Agent-Aware Training for Agent-Agnostic Action Advising in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Action advising endeavors to leverage supplementary guidance from expert teachers to alleviate the issue of sampling inefficiency in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Previous agent-specific action advising methods are hindered by imperfections in the agent itself, while agent-agnostic approaches exhibit limited adaptability to the learning agent. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Agent-Aware trAining yet Agent-Agnostic Action Advising (A7) to strike a balance between the two. The underlying concept of A7 revolves around utilizing the similarity of state features as an indicator for soliciting advice. However, unlike prior methodologies, the measurement of state feature similarity is performed by neither the error-prone learning agent nor the agent-agnostic advisor. Instead, we employ a proxy model to extract state features that are both discriminative (adaptive to the agent) and generally applicable (robust to agent noise). Furthermore, we utilize behavior cloning to train a model for reusing advice and introduce an intrinsic reward for the advised samples to incentivize the utilization of expert guidance. Experiments are conducted on the GridWorld, LunarLander, and six prominent scenarios from Atari games. The results demonstrate that A7 significantly accelerates the learning process and surpasses existing methods (both agent-specific and agent-agnostic) by a substantial margin. Our code will be made publicly available

Spatially Varying Nanophotonic Neural Networks

The explosive growth of computation and energy cost of artificial intelligence has spurred strong interests in new computing modalities as potential alternatives to conventional electronic processors. Photonic processors that execute operations using photons instead of electrons, have promised to enable optical neural networks with ultra-low latency and power consumption. However, existing optical neural networks, limited by the underlying network designs, have achieved image recognition accuracy much lower than state-of-the-art electronic neural networks. In this work, we close this gap by introducing a large-kernel spatially-varying convolutional neural network learned via low-dimensional reparameterization techniques. We experimentally instantiate the network with a flat meta-optical system that encompasses an array of nanophotonic structures designed to induce angle-dependent responses. Combined with an extremely lightweight electronic backend with approximately 2K parameters we demonstrate a nanophotonic neural network reaches 73.80\% blind test classification accuracy on CIFAR-10 dataset, and, as such, the first time, an optical neural network outperforms the first modern digital neural network -- AlexNet (72.64\%) with 57M parameters, bringing optical neural network into modern deep learning era

Learning to Fuse Monocular and Multi-view Cues for Multi-frame Depth Estimation in Dynamic Scenes

Multi-frame depth estimation generally achieves high accuracy relying on the multi-view geometric consistency. When applied in dynamic scenes, e.g., autonomous driving, this consistency is usually violated in the dynamic areas, leading to corrupted estimations. Many multi-frame methods handle dynamic areas by identifying them with explicit masks and compensating the multi-view cues with monocular cues represented as local monocular depth or features. The improvements are limited due to the uncontrolled quality of the masks and the underutilized benefits of the fusion of the two types of cues. In this paper, we propose a novel method to learn to fuse the multi-view and monocular cues encoded as volumes without needing the heuristically crafted masks. As unveiled in our analyses, the multi-view cues capture more accurate geometric information in static areas, and the monocular cues capture more useful contexts in dynamic areas. To let the geometric perception learned from multi-view cues in static areas propagate to the monocular representation in dynamic areas and let monocular cues enhance the representation of multi-view cost volume, we propose a cross-cue fusion (CCF) module, which includes the cross-cue attention (CCA) to encode the spatially non-local relative intra-relations from each source to enhance the representation of the other. Experiments on real-world datasets prove the significant effectiveness and generalization ability of the proposed method.Comment: Accepted by CVPR 2023. Code and models are available at: https://github.com/ruili3/dynamic-multiframe-dept