Nam Ling

Lebin Zhou, Kun Han, Nam Ling et al.

Image restoration methods like super-resolution and image synthesis have been successfully used in commercial cloud gaming products like NVIDIA's DLSS. However, restoration over gaming content is not well studied by the general public. The discrepancy is mainly caused by the lack of ground-truth gaming training data that match the test cases. Due to the unique characteristics of gaming content, the common approach of generating pseudo training data by degrading the original HR images results in inferior restoration performance. In this work, we develop GameIR, a large-scale high-quality computer-synthesized ground-truth dataset to fill in the blanks, targeting at two different applications. The first is super-resolution with deferred rendering, to support the gaming solution of rendering and transferring LR images only and restoring HR images on the client side. We provide 19200 LR-HR paired ground-truth frames coming from 640 videos rendered at 720p and 1440p for this task. The second is novel view synthesis (NVS), to support the multiview gaming solution of rendering and transferring part of the multiview frames and generating the remaining frames on the client side. This task has 57,600 HR frames from 960 videos of 160 scenes with 6 camera views. In addition to the RGB frames, the GBuffers during the deferred rendering stage are also provided, which can be used to help restoration. Furthermore, we evaluate several SOTA super-resolution algorithms and NeRF-based NVS algorithms over our dataset, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our ground-truth GameIR data in improving restoration performance for gaming content. Also, we test the method of incorporating the GBuffers as additional input information for helping super-resolution and NVS. We release our dataset and models to the general public to facilitate research on restoration methods over gaming content.

Zhendong Wang, Cihan Ruan, Jingchuan Xiao et al.

We investigate what structure emerges in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) solutions from standard multi-view optimization. We term these Rendering-Optimal References (RORs) and analyze their statistical properties, revealing stable patterns: mixture-structured scales and bimodal radiance across diverse scenes. To understand what determines these parameters, we apply learnability probes by training predictors to reconstruct RORs from point clouds without rendering supervision. Our analysis uncovers fundamental density-stratification. Dense regions exhibit geometry-correlated parameters amenable to render-free prediction, while sparse regions show systematic failure across architectures. We formalize this through variance decomposition, demonstrating that visibility heterogeneity creates covariance-dominated coupling between geometric and appearance parameters in sparse regions. This reveals the dual character of RORs: geometric primitives where point clouds suffice, and view synthesis primitives where multi-view constraints are essential. We provide density-aware strategies that improve training robustness and discuss architectural implications for systems that adaptively balance feed-forward prediction and rendering-based refinement.

Cihan Ruan, Lebin Zhou, Rongduo Han et al.

DNA storage has matured from concept to practical stage, yet its integration with neural compression pipelines remains inefficient. Early DNA encoders applied redundancy-heavy constraint layers atop raw binary data - workable but primitive. Recent neural codecs compress data into learned latent representations with rich statistical structure, yet still convert these latents to DNA via naive binary-to-quaternary transcoding, discarding the entropy model's optimization. This mismatch undermines compression efficiency and complicates the encoding stack. A plug-in module that collapses latent compression and DNA encoding into a single step. SCONE performs quaternary arithmetic coding directly on the latent space in DNA bases. Its Constraint-Aware Adaptive Coding module dynamically steers the entropy encoder's learned probability distribution to enforce biochemical constraints - Guanine-Cytosine (GC) balance and homopolymer suppression - deterministically during encoding, eliminating post-hoc correction. The design preserves full reversibility and exploits the hyperprior model's learned priors without modification. Experiments show SCONE achieves near-perfect constraint satisfaction with negligible computational overhead (<2% latency), establishing a latent-agnostic interface for end-to-end DNA-compatible learned codecs.

Cihan Ruan, Lebin Zhou, Bingqing Zhao et al.

DNA-based storage has emerged as a promising approach to the global data crisis, offering molecular-scale density and millennial-scale stability at low maintenance cost. Over the past decade, substantial progress has been made in storing text, images, and files in DNA -- yet video remains an open challenge. The difficulty is not merely technical: effective video DNA storage requires co-designing compression and molecular encoding from the ground up, a challenge that sits at the intersection of two fields that have largely evolved independently. In this work, we present HELIX, the first end-to-end neural network jointly optimizing video compression and DNA encoding -- prior approaches treat the two stages independently, leaving biochemical constraints and compression objectives fundamentally misaligned. Our key insight: token-based representations naturally align with DNA's quaternary alphabet -- discrete semantic units map directly to ATCG bases. We introduce TK-SCONE (Token-Kronecker Structured Constraint-Optimized Neural Encoding), which achieves 1.91 bits per nucleotide through Kronecker-structured mixing that breaks spatial correlations and FSM-based mapping that guarantees biochemical constraints. Unlike two-stage approaches, HELIX learns token distributions simultaneously optimized for visual quality, prediction under masking, and DNA synthesis efficiency. This work demonstrates for the first time that learned compression and molecular storage converge naturally at token representations -- suggesting a new paradigm where neural video codecs are designed for biological substrates from the ground up.

Yifei Pei, Ying Liu, Nam Ling

Learned image compression has achieved competitive rate-distortion performance, but very-low-bitrate reconstruction remains difficult because the transmitted representation often cannot preserve fine textures and local structures. Perceptual and generative codecs address this problem by using learned reconstruction priors, and controllable codecs allow one model to cover different bitrate and reconstruction preferences. However, controllability alone does not resolve the decoder-side reconstruction-prior problem: under severe bit constraints, the decoder must infer missing details from limited transmitted information, while existing codebook-based controllable designs generally rely on single-codebook token-based priors. This paper proposes Adaptive Fused Prior Transfer for Controllable Generative Image Compression (AFP-GIC), a controllable codec that transfers an adaptive fused prior from a frozen pretrained AdaCode model. Encoder-side fused-prior features guide latent formation, while the decoder predicts a compatible fused prior from the compressed representation and selected control variables, enabling prior-guided reconstruction without transmitting the fused prior itself. A motivating analysis relates decoder-side fused-prior alignment to a reconstruction-error upper bound and shows that the fused-prior family contains single-codebook choices as special cases. Under the unified benchmark, AFP-GIC reduces decoder latency by 18.1% and the overall parameter count by 31.10 million (20.5%) relative to DC-VIC. Experiments on Kodak, CLIC2020, and DIV2K show competitive PSNR, with the clearest perceptual gains in NIQE scores and very-low-bitrate visual comparisons.

Licheng Xiao, Hairong Wang, Nam Ling

In this paper, we build autoencoder based pipelines for extreme end-to-end image compression based on Ballé's approach, which is the state-of-the-art open source implementation in image compression using deep learning. We deepened the network by adding one more hidden layer before each strided convolutional layer with exactly the same number of down-samplings and up-samplings. Our approach outperformed Ballé's approach, and achieved around 4.0% reduction in bits per pixel (bpp), 0.03% increase in multi-scale structural similarity (MS-SSIM), and only 0.47% decrease in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), It also outperforms all traditional image compression methods including JPEG2000 and HEIC by at least 20% in terms of compression efficiency at similar reconstruction image quality. Regarding encoding and decoding time, our approach takes similar amount of time compared with traditional methods with the support of GPU, which means it's almost ready for industrial applications.

Zhendong Wang, Lebin Zhou, Jingchuan Xiao et al.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh wrote, "I am seeking exaggeration in the essential." This principle, amplifying structural form while suppressing photographic detail, lies at the core of Post-Impressionist art. However, most existing 3D style transfer methods invert this philosophy, treating geometry as a rigid substrate for surface-level texture projection. To authentically reproduce Post-Impressionist stylization, geometric abstraction must be embraced as the primary vehicle of expression. We propose a flow-guided geometric advection framework for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) that operationalizes this principle in a mesh-free setting. Our method extracts directional flow fields from 2D paintings and back-propagates them into 3D space, rectifying Gaussian primitives to form flow-aligned brushstrokes that conform to scene topology without relying on explicit mesh priors. This enables expressive structural deformation driven directly by painterly motion rather than photometric constraints. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a projection-based, mesh-free flow guidance mechanism that transfers 2D artistic motion into 3D Gaussian geometry; (2) a luminance-structure decoupling strategy that isolates geometric deformation from color optimization, mitigating artifacts during aggressive structural abstraction; and (3) a VLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework that assesses artistic authenticity through aesthetic judgment instead of conventional pixel-level metrics, explicitly addressing the subjective nature of artistic stylization.

Ziran Liu, Wei Wang, Jinhao Wang et al.

This paper develops the angular and static-channel component of Geometric and Spectral Alignment for residual Jacobian chains. Starting from Cartan-coordinate rigidity and fitted effective-rank windows, we study how dominant singular subspaces are transported across adjacent layers and how the resulting finite matrices can be displayed in physical channel coordinates. The main results are deterministic, margin-verified results. We bound the error between full interface transport and its dominant-window truncation, add fitted-tail errors so that empirical spectra can be certified against the Gibbs--Cartan tail model, and distinguish source-mode incidence from fully physical input-output channel incidence. Given row groups and active supports, the Physical Alignment Matrix decomposes orthogonally as core plus overlap plus noise. Active-column gaps, pairwise overlap margins, and noise bounds combine into a static certificate radius under which the full transport and the truncated transport induce the same active supports, pairwise incidence graph, SRS sets, hub columns, and core/overlap/noise masks. The finer SC/SA/ST labels of the Invariant Channel Mapping require additional row-energy and profile-correlation margins, stated as explicit perturbation tests. The empirical section reports the matrices and block-energy heatmaps that measure these certificate quantities across CNNs, language models, and vision/diffusion backbones. The figures are interpreted as finite-dimensional measurements; complete membership in the Physical GSA certificate domain requires checking the numerical margin protocol stated in Section 10.

Ziran Liu, Wei Wang, Jinhao Wang et al.

Deep residual architectures are modeled as products of near-identity Jacobians. This paper proves deterministic quotient-geometric estimates for singular spectra of Frobenius-normalized layer factors, emphasizing a normalized top-radial Cartan coordinate and fitted power-law chart. Full-rank factors are mapped from $\mathrm{GL}(d)$ to the positive cone by $A\mapsto A^\top A$, then to ordered eigenvalue data. Under Frobenius normalization, exact power-law spectra form a trace-normalized Cartan orbit. This orbit is a Gibbs family on ranks, a Fisher information line, and a Bures--Wasserstein curve with line element $d/4$ times Fisher information. The main rigidity theorem is a slack-aware margin inequality: interface radial amplitude, non-backtracking slack, and signed residual variation control displacement of the fitted Cartan coordinate. In the exact-chart zero-slack case, a depth-$L$ budget gives exponent drift of order $(\log M)/L$; generally, slack and residual increments augment the bound. We separate scalar top-radial from full-Cartan spectral control, which also needs Bures/Hellinger residual variation. We prove approximate-power-law and metric-chart versions, converse lower bounds, Fisher--KL/Bures action estimates, and near-identity expansions for normalized residual chains. Near-identity results verify transport budgets; chart quality remains measurable. Effective rank is a spectral-energy quantile, giving finite-width power-law tail bounds and robust rank-window transition estimates. Empirical static-weight exponent profiles serve as diagnostics; full verification also requires interface budgets, slacks, and residuals for the same operator chain.

Qiming Yuan, Linyi Han, Nam Ling et al.

People increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) to interpret ambiguous social situations: a delayed text reply, an unusually cold supervisor, a teacher's mixed signals, or a boundary-crossing friend. Yet in many such cases, no stable interpretation can be verified from the available evidence alone. We study how LLMs respond to these situations across four domains: early-stage romantic relationships, teacher--student dynamics, workplace hierarchies, and ambiguous friendships. Across 72 responses from GPT, Claude, and Gemini, only 9 (12.5\%) genuinely preserved uncertainty. The remaining 87.5% produced interpretive closure through recurring pathways including narrative alignment, narrative reversal, normative advice under uncertainty, and hedged language that still supported a single conclusion. We further find that narrator perspective shapes the path to closure: first-person accounts more often elicited alignment, while third-person accounts invited more detached interpretation, even when the underlying situation remained comparable. Together, these findings show that LLMs do not simply assist interpersonal sensemaking; they tend to resolve ambiguity into coherent and actionable narratives. These results suggest that the central risk is not only that LLMs may misinterpret social situations, but that they may make unresolved situations feel prematurely settled. We frame this tendency as a design challenge for uncertainty-preserving social AI.

Yuanzhi Li, Lebin Zhou, Nam Ling et al.

The gaming and entertainment industry is rapidly evolving, driven by immersive experiences and the integration of generative AI (GAI) technologies. Training such models effectively requires large-scale datasets that capture the diversity and context of gaming environments. However, existing datasets are often limited to specific domains or rely on artificial degradations, which do not accurately capture the unique characteristics of gaming content. Moreover, benchmarks for controllable video generation remain absent. To address these limitations, we introduce $\mathtt{M^3VIR}$, a large-scale, multi-modal, multi-view dataset specifically designed to overcome the shortcomings of current resources. Unlike existing datasets, $\mathtt{M^3VIR}$ provides diverse, high-fidelity gaming content rendered with Unreal Engine 5, offering authentic ground-truth LR-HR paired and multi-view frames across 80 scenes in 8 categories. It includes $\mathtt{M^3VIR\_MR}$ for super-resolution (SR), novel view synthesis (NVS), and combined NVS+SR tasks, and $\mathtt{M^3VIR\_{MS}}$, the first multi-style, object-level ground-truth set enabling research on controlled video generation. Additionally, we benchmark several state-of-the-art SR and NVS methods to establish performance baselines. While no existing approaches directly handle controlled video generation, $\mathtt{M^3VIR}$ provides a benchmark for advancing this area. By releasing the dataset, we aim to facilitate research in AI-powered restoration, compression, and controllable content generation for next-generation cloud gaming and entertainment.

Jinhao Wang, Cihan Ruan, Nam Ling et al.

Prior studies in learned image compression (LIC) consistently show that only a small subset of latent channels is critical for reconstruction, while many others carry limited information. Exploiting this imbalance could improve both coding and computational efficiency, yet existing approaches often rely on costly, dataset-specific ablation tests and typically analyze channels in isolation, ignoring their interdependencies. We propose a generalizable, dataset-agnostic method to identify and organize important channels in pretrained VAE-based LIC models. Instead of brute-force empirical evaluations, our approach leverages intrinsic parameter statistics-weight variances, bias magnitudes, and pairwise correlations-to estimate channel importance. This analysis reveals a consistent organizational structure, termed the Invariant Salient Channel Space (ISCS), where Salient-Core channels capture dominant structures and Salient-Auxiliary channels provide complementary details. Building on ISCS, we introduce a deterministic channel ordering and grouping strategy that enables slice-parallel decoding, reduces redundancy, and improves bitrate efficiency. Experiments across multiple LIC architectures demonstrate that our method effectively reduces bitrate and computation while maintaining reconstruction quality, providing a practical and modular enhancement to existing learned compression frameworks.

Dengchao Jin, Jianjun Lei, Bo Peng et al.

2D image coding for machines (ICM) has achieved great success in coding efficiency, while less effort has been devoted to stereo image fields. To promote the efficiency of stereo image compression (SIC) and intelligent analysis, the stereo image coding for machines (SICM) is formulated and explored in this paper. More specifically, a machine vision-oriented stereo feature compression network (MVSFC-Net) is proposed for SICM, where the stereo visual features are effectively extracted, compressed, and transmitted for 3D visual task. To efficiently compress stereo visual features in MVSFC-Net, a stereo multi-scale feature compression (SMFC) module is designed to gradually transform sparse stereo multi-scale features into compact joint visual representations by removing spatial, inter-view, and cross-scale redundancies simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed MVSFC-Net obtains superior compression efficiency as well as 3D visual task performance, when compared with the existing ICM anchors recommended by MPEG and the state-of-the-art SIC method.

Kai Han, Jin Wang, Yunhui Shi et al.

Deep unfolding networks have gained increasing attention in the field of compressed sensing (CS) owing to their theoretical interpretability and superior reconstruction performance. However, most existing deep unfolding methods often face the following issues: 1) they learn directly from single-channel images, leading to a simple feature representation that does not fully capture complex features; and 2) they treat various image components uniformly, ignoring the characteristics of different components. To address these issues, we propose a novel wavelet-domain deep unfolding framework named WTDUN, which operates directly on the multi-scale wavelet subbands. Our method utilizes the intrinsic sparsity and multi-scale structure of wavelet coefficients to achieve a tree-structured sampling and reconstruction, effectively capturing and highlighting the most important features within images. Specifically, the design of tree-structured reconstruction aims to capture the inter-dependencies among the multi-scale subbands, enabling the identification of both fine and coarse features, which can lead to a marked improvement in reconstruction quality. Furthermore, a wavelet domain adaptive sampling method is proposed to greatly improve the sampling capability, which is realized by assigning measurements to each wavelet subband based on its importance. Unlike pure deep learning methods that treat all components uniformly, our method introduces a targeted focus on important subbands, considering their energy and sparsity. This targeted strategy lets us capture key information more efficiently while discarding less important information, resulting in a more effective and detailed reconstruction. Extensive experimental results on various datasets validate the superior performance of our proposed method.

Honghui Chen, Yuhang Qiu, Jiabao Wang et al.

Internal Language Model (LM)-based methods use permutation language modeling (PLM) to solve the error correction caused by conditional independence in external LM-based methods. However, random permutations of human interference cause fit oscillations in the model training, and Iterative Refinement (IR) operation to improve multimodal information decoupling also introduces additional overhead. To address these issues, this paper proposes the Hierarchical Attention autoregressive Model with Adaptive Permutation (HAAP) to enhance the location-context-image interaction capability, improving autoregressive generalization with internal LM. First, we propose Implicit Permutation Neurons (IPN) to generate adaptive attention masks to dynamically exploit token dependencies. The adaptive masks increase the diversity of training data and prevent model dependency on a specific order. It reduces the training overhead of PLM while avoiding training fit oscillations. Second, we develop Cross-modal Hierarchical Attention mechanism (CHA) to couple context and image features. This processing establishes rich positional semantic dependencies between context and image while avoiding IR. Extensive experimental results show the proposed HAAP achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in terms of accuracy, complexity, and latency on several datasets.

Bingzheng Liu, Jianjun Lei, Bo Peng et al.

View synthesis aims to generate novel views from one or more given source views. Although existing methods have achieved promising performance, they usually require paired views of different poses to learn a pixel transformation. This paper proposes an unsupervised network to learn such a pixel transformation from a single source viewpoint. In particular, the network consists of a token transformation module (TTM) that facilities the transformation of the features extracted from a source viewpoint image into an intrinsic representation with respect to a pre-defined reference pose and a view generation module (VGM) that synthesizes an arbitrary view from the representation. The learned transformation allows us to synthesize a novel view from any single source viewpoint image of unknown pose. Experiments on the widely used view synthesis datasets have demonstrated that the proposed network is able to produce comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods despite the fact that learning is unsupervised and only a single source viewpoint image is required for generating a novel view. The code will be available soon.

Runmin Cong, Jianjun Lei, Huazhu Fu et al.

Co-saliency detection aims to discover common and salient objects in an image group containing more than two relevant images. Moreover, depth information has been demonstrated to be effective for many computer vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel co-saliency detection method for RGBD images based on hierarchical sparsity reconstruction and energy function refinement. With the assistance of the intra saliency map, the inter-image correspondence is formulated as a hierarchical sparsity reconstruction framework. The global sparsity reconstruction model with a ranking scheme focuses on capturing the global characteristics among the whole image group through a common foreground dictionary. The pairwise sparsity reconstruction model aims to explore the corresponding relationship between pairwise images through a set of pairwise dictionaries. In order to improve the intra-image smoothness and inter-image consistency, an energy function refinement model is proposed, which includes the unary data term, spatial smooth term, and holistic consistency term. Experiments on two RGBD co-saliency detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms both qualitatively and quantitatively.