One of the dominant paradigms in self-supervised learning (SSL), illustrated by MoCo or DINO, aims to produce robust representations by capturing features that are insensitive to certain image transformations such as illumination, or geometric changes. This strategy is appropriate when the objective is to recognize objects independently of their appearance. However, it becomes counterproductive as soon as appearance itself constitutes the discriminative signal. In weather analysis, for example, rain streaks, snow granularity, atmospheric scattering, as well as reflections and halos, are not noise: they carry the essential information. In critical applications such as autonomous driving, ignoring these cues is risky, since grip and visibility depend directly on ground conditions and atmospheric conditions. We introduce ST-STORM, a hybrid SSL framework that treats appearance (style) as a semantic modality to be disentangled from content. Our architecture explicitly separates two latent streams, regulated by gating mechanisms. The Content branch aims at a stable semantic representation through a JEPA scheme coupled with a contrastive objective, promoting invariance to appearance variations. In parallel, the Style branch is constrained to capture appearance signatures (textures, contrasts, scattering) through feature prediction and reconstruction under an adversarial constraint. We evaluate ST-STORM on several tasks, including object classification (ImageNet-1K), fine-grained weather characterization, and melanoma detection (ISIC 2024 Challenge). The results show that the Style branch effectively isolates complex appearance phenomena (F1=97% on Multi-Weather and F1=94% on ISIC 2024 with 10% labeled data), without degrading the semantic performance (F1=80% on ImageNet-1K) of the Content branch, and improves the preservation of critical appearance

As generative models enable rapid creation of high-fidelity images, societal concerns about misinformation and authenticity have intensified. A promising remedy is multi-bit image watermarking, which embeds a multi-bit message into an image so that a verifier can later detect whether the image is generated by someone and further identify the source by decoding the embedded message. Existing approaches often fall short in capacity, resilience to common image distortions, and theoretical justification. To address these limitations, we propose ADD (Add, Dot, Decode), a multi-bit image watermarking method with two stages: learning a watermark to be linearly combined with the multi-bit message and added to the image, and decoding through inner products between the watermarked image and the learned watermark. On the standard MS-COCO benchmark, we demonstrate that for the challenging task of 48-bit watermarking, ADD achieves 100\% decoding accuracy, with performance dropping by at most 2\% under a wide range of image distortions, substantially smaller than the 14\% average drop of state-of-the-art methods. In addition, ADD achieves substantial computational gains, with 2-fold faster embedding and 7.4-fold faster decoding than the fastest existing method. We further provide a theoretical analysis explaining why the learned watermark and the corresponding decoding rule are effective.

Recent vision and multimodal foundation backbones, such as Transformer families and state-space models like Mamba, have achieved remarkable progress, enabling unified modeling across images, text, and beyond. Despite their empirical success, these architectures remain far from the computational principles of the human brain, often demanding enormous amounts of training data while offering limited interpretability. In this work, we propose the Vision Hopfield Memory Network (V-HMN), a brain-inspired foundation backbone that integrates hierarchical memory mechanisms with iterative refinement updates. Specifically, V-HMN incorporates local Hopfield modules that provide associative memory dynamics at the image patch level, global Hopfield modules that function as episodic memory for contextual modulation, and a predictive-coding-inspired refinement rule for iterative error correction. By organizing these memory-based modules hierarchically, V-HMN captures both local and global dynamics in a unified framework. Memory retrieval exposes the relationship between inputs and stored patterns, making decisions more interpretable, while the reuse of stored patterns improves data efficiency. This brain-inspired design therefore enhances interpretability and data efficiency beyond existing self-attention- or state-space-based approaches. We conducted extensive experiments on public computer vision benchmarks, and V-HMN achieved competitive results against widely adopted backbone architectures, while offering better interpretability, higher data efficiency, and stronger biological plausibility. These findings highlight the potential of V-HMN to serve as a next-generation vision foundation model, while also providing a generalizable blueprint for multimodal backbones in domains such as text and audio, thereby bridging brain-inspired computation with large-scale machine learning.

Data unfolding -- the removal of noise or artifacts from measurements -- is a fundamental task across the experimental sciences. Of particular interest in the present work are applications of data unfolding in physics, in which context the dominant approach is RichardsonLucy (RL) deconvolution. The classical RL approach aims to find denoised data that, once passed through the noise model, is as close as possible to the measured data, in terms of Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Fundamental to this approach is the hypothesis that the support of the measured data overlaps with the output of the noise model, so that the KL divergence correctly captures their similarity. In practice, this hypothesis is typically enforced by binning the measured data and noise model, introducing numerical error into the unfolding process. As a counterpoint to classical binned methods for unfolding, the present work studies an alternative formulation of the unfolding problem, using a Wasserstein loss instead of the KL divergence to quantify the similarity between the measured data and the output of the noise model. We establish sharp conditions for existence and uniqueness of optimizers; as a consequence we answer open questions of Li, et al. [23], regarding necessary conditions for existence and uniqueness in the case of transport map noise models. Following these theoretical results, we then develop a provably convergent generalized Sinkhorn algorithm to compute approximate optimizers. Our algorithm requires only empirical observations of the noise model and measured data and scales with the size of the data, rather than the ambient dimension.

Boundary condition tuning is a fundamental step in patient-specific cardiovascular modeling. Despite an increase in offline training cost, recent methods in data-driven variational inference can efficiently estimate the joint posterior distribution of boundary conditions, with amortization of training efforts over clinical targets. However, even the most modern approaches fall short in two important scenarios: open-loop models with known mean flow and assumed waveform shapes, and anatomies affected by vascular lesions where segmentation influences the reachability of pressure or flow split targets. In both cases, boundary conditions cannot be tuned in isolation. We introduce a general amortized inference framework based on probabilistic flow that treats clinical targets, inflow features, and point cloud embeddings of patient-specific anatomies as either conditioning variables or quantities to be jointly estimated. We demonstrate the approach on two patient-specific models: an aorto-iliac bifurcation with varying stenosis locations and severity, and a coronary arterial tree.

In the context of lossy compression, Blau & Michaeli (2019) adopt a mathematical notion of perceptual quality and define the information rate-distortion-perception function, generalizing the classical rate-distortion tradeoff. We consider the notion of universal representations in which one may fix an encoder and vary the decoder to achieve any point within a collection of distortion and perception constraints. We prove that the corresponding information-theoretic universal rate-distortion-perception function is operationally achievable in an approximate sense. Under MSE distortion, we show that the entire distortion-perception tradeoff of a Gaussian source can be achieved by a single encoder of the same rate asymptotically. We then characterize the achievable distortion-perception region for a fixed representation in the case of arbitrary distributions, and identify conditions under which the aforementioned results continue to hold approximately. This motivates the study of practical constructions that are approximately universal across the RDP tradeoff, thereby alleviating the need to design a new encoder for each objective. We provide experimental results on MNIST and SVHN suggesting that on image compression tasks, the operational tradeoffs achieved by machine learning models with a fixed encoder suffer only a small penalty when compared to their variable encoder counterparts.

The collection and analysis of telemetry data from user's devices is routinely performed by many software companies. Telemetry collection leads to improved user experience but poses significant risks to users' privacy. Locally differentially private (LDP) algorithms have recently emerged as the main tool that allows data collectors to estimate various population statistics, while preserving privacy. The guarantees provided by such algorithms are typically very strong for a single round of telemetry collection, but degrade rapidly when telemetry is collected regularly. In particular, existing LDP algorithms are not suitable for repeated collection of counter data such as daily app usage statistics. In this paper, we develop new LDP mechanisms geared towards repeated collection of counter data, with formal privacy guarantees even after being executed for an arbitrarily long period of time. For two basic analytical tasks, mean estimation and histogram estimation, our LDP mechanisms for repeated data collection provide estimates with comparable or even the same accuracy as existing single-round LDP collection mechanisms. We conduct empirical evaluation on real-world counter datasets to verify our theoretical results. Our mechanisms have been deployed by Microsoft to collect telemetry across millions of devices.

Learning accurate prior knowledge of natural images is of great importance for single image super-resolution (SR). Existing SR methods either learn the prior from the low/high-resolution patch pairs or estimate the prior models from the input low-resolution (LR) image. Specifically, high-frequency details are learned in the former methods. Though effective, they are heuristic and have limitations in dealing with blurred LR images; while the latter suffers from the limitations of frequency aliasing. In this paper, we propose to combine those two lines of ideas for image super-resolution. More specifically, the parametric sparse prior of the desirable high-resolution (HR) image patches are learned from both the input low-resolution (LR) image and a training image dataset. With the learned sparse priors, the sparse codes and thus the HR image patches can be accurately recovered by solving a sparse coding problem. Experimental results show that the proposed SR method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of both subjective and objective image qualities.

Segmentation of 3D images is a fundamental problem in biomedical image analysis. Deep learning (DL) approaches have achieved the state-of-the-art segmentation performance. To exploit the 3D contexts using neural networks, known DL segmentation methods, including 3D convolution, 2D convolution on the planes orthogonal to 2D slices, and LSTM in multiple directions, all suffer incompatibility with the highly anisotropic dimensions in common 3D biomedical images. In this paper, we propose a new DL framework for 3D image segmentation, based on a combination of a fully convolutional network (FCN) and a recurrent neural network (RNN), which are responsible for exploiting the intra-slice and inter-slice contexts, respectively. To our best knowledge, this is the first DL framework for 3D image segmentation that explicitly leverages 3D image anisotropism. Evaluating using a dataset from the ISBI Neuronal Structure Segmentation Challenge and in-house image stacks for 3D fungus segmentation, our approach achieves promising results, comparing to the known DL-based 3D segmentation approaches.

Modern discriminative predictors have been shown to match natural intelligences in specific perceptual tasks in image classification, object and part detection, boundary extraction, etc. However, a major advantage that natural intelligences still have is that they work well for all perceptual problems together, solving them efficiently and coherently in an integrated manner. In order to capture some of these advantages in machine perception, we ask two questions: whether deep neural networks can learn universal image representations, useful not only for a single task but for all of them, and how the solutions to the different tasks can be integrated in this framework. We answer by proposing a new architecture, which we call multinet, in which not only deep image features are shared between tasks, but where tasks can interact in a recurrent manner by encoding the results of their analysis in a common shared representation of the data. In this manner, we show that the performance of individual tasks in standard benchmarks can be improved first by sharing features between them and then, more significantly, by integrating their solutions in the common representation.