Light field microscopy (LFM) has become an emerging tool in neuroscience for large-scale neural imaging in vivo, with XLFM (eXtended Light Field Microscopy) notable for its single-exposure volumetric imaging, broad field of view, and high temporal resolution. However, learning-based 3D reconstruction in XLFM remains underdeveloped due to two core challenges: the absence of standardized datasets and the lack of methods that can efficiently model its angular-spatial structure while remaining physically grounded. We address these challenges by introducing three key contributions. First, we construct the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, a large-scale dataset and evaluation suite for XLFM reconstruction. Second, we propose Masked View Modeling for Light Fields (MVM-LF), a self-supervised task that learns angular priors by predicting occluded views, improving data efficiency. Third, we formulate the Optical Rendering Consistency Loss (ORC Loss), a differentiable rendering constraint that enforces alignment between predicted volumes and their PSF-based forward projections. On the XLFM-Zebrafish benchmark, our method improves PSNR by 7.7% over state-of-the-art baselines.

Novel view synthesis is an important problem with many applications, including AR/VR, gaming, and robotic simulations. With the recent rapid development of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) and 3DGaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods, it is becoming difficult to keep track of the current state of the art (SoTA) due to methods using different evaluation protocols, codebases being difficult to install and use, and methods not generalizing well to novel 3D scenes. In our experiments, we show that even tiny differences in the evaluation protocols of various methods can artificially boost the performance of these methods. This raises questions about the validity of quantitative comparisons performed in the literature. To address these questions, we propose NerfBaselines, an evaluation framework which provides consistent benchmarking tools, ensures reproducibility, and simplifies the installation and use of various methods. We validate our implementation experimentally by reproducing the numbers reported in the original papers. For improved accessibility, we release a web platform that compares commonly used methods on standard benchmarks. We strongly believe NerfBaselines is a valuable contribution to the community as it ensures that quantitative results are comparable and thus truly measure progress in the field of novel view synthesis.

Watermarking, the practice of embedding imperceptible information into media such as images, videos, audio, and text, is essential for intellectual property protection, content provenance and attribution. The growing complexity of digital ecosystems necessitates watermarks for different uses to be embedded in the same media. However, to detect and decode all watermarks, they need to coexist well with one another. We perform the first study of coexistence of deep image watermarking methods and, contrary to intuition, we find that various open-source watermarks can coexist with only minor impacts on image quality and decoding robustness. The coexistence of watermarks also opens the avenue for ensembling watermarking methods. We show how ensembling can increase the overall message capacity and enable new trade-offs between capacity, accuracy, robustness and image quality, without needing to retrain the base models.

Recent advances in data-centric deep generative models have led to significant progress in solving inverse imaging problems. However, these models (e.g., diffusion models) typically require large amounts of fully sampled (clean) training data, which is often impractical in medical and scientific settings. Training-data-free approaches like Deep Image Prior (DIP) do not require clean images but suffer from noise overfitting and can be computationally expensive as the network parameters need to be optimized for each measurement vector independently. Moreover, DIPbased methods often overlook the potential of learning a prior using a small number of sub-sampled measurements (or degraded images) available during training. In this paper, we propose UGoDIT--an Unsupervised Group DIP via Transferable weights--designed for the low-data regime where only a very small number, M, of sub-sampled measurement vectors are available during training.

Training-free conditional diffusion provides a flexible alternative to task-specific conditional model training, but existing samplers often allocate computation inefficiently: independent guided trajectories can vary widely in quality, and additional function evaluations along a single trajectory may not recover from poor early decisions. We propose Tempered Guided Diffusion (TGD), an annealed sequential Monte Carlo framework for training-free conditional sampling with diffusion priors. TGD targets tempered posterior distributions over the clean signal, using noisy diffusion states only as auxiliary variables for proposing reconstructions and propagating particles. Particles are reweighted by incremental likelihood ratios, resampled, and propagated across noise levels, concentrating computation on trajectories plausible under both the prior and observation. Under idealized exact-reconstruction assumptions, full TGD yields a consistent particle approximation to the posterior as the number of particles grows. For expensive reconstruction tasks, Accelerated TGD (A-TGD) retains early particle exploration but prunes to a single high-likelihood trajectory partway through sampling. Experiments on a controlled two-dimensional inverse problem and image inverse problems show improved posterior approximation and favorable wall-clock speed-quality tradeoffs over independent multi-trajectory baselines.

In addition to our main results presented in Section 4 of the paper, we also performed various exploratory experiments to investigate further application cases of the METASIN activations. The experiments cover image classification where we show favorable results of using convolutional METASIN networks over baseline RELU networks, as well as various overfitting experiments to explore the use of METASIN activations with MLPs. In all MLP experiments, we use METASIN with K = 10 sine components, and distribute the frequencies evenly across the range [1,35]. The initialization of the remaining parameters follows the description provided in Section 3. Bicycle Figure 5: Visualization of selected reconstructed frames of the video. To fully appreciate the details and visual cues presented in the figure, we recommend visualizing the figures in color and zooming in for a more comprehensive analysis.

To bridge this crucial gap, first, this paper presents a comprehensive benchmark suite to evaluate the out-of-distribution (OOD) performance of image compression methods.