Ruhan Liu

Jiatong Li, Zheng Chen, Kai Liu et al.

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2026 challenge on mobile real-world image super-resolution, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through unknown degradations with a x4 scaling factor while ensuring the models remain executable on mobile devices. The objective is to develop effective and efficient network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art real-world image super-resolution performance. The track of the challenge evaluates performance using a weighted combination of image quality assessment (IQA) score and speedup ratios. The competition attracted 108 registrants, with 16 teams achieving a valid score in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of mobile real-world image super-resolution while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

Ruhan Liu, Jiajia Li, Yang Wen et al.

Objective: COVID-19 has spread worldwide and made a huge influence across the world. Modeling the infectious spread situation of COVID-19 is essential to understand the current condition and to formulate intervention measurements. Epidemiological equations based on the SEIR model simulate disease development. The traditional parameter estimation method to solve SEIR equations could not precisely fit real-world data due to different situations, such as social distancing policies and intervention strategies. Additionally, learning-based models achieve outstanding fitting performance, but cannot visualize mechanisms. Methods: Thus, we propose a deep dynamic epidemiological (DDE) method that combines epidemiological equations and deep-learning advantages to obtain high accuracy and visualization. The DDE contains deep networks to fit the effect function to simulate the ever-changing situations based on the neural ODE method in solving variants' equations, ensuring the fitting performance of multi-level areas. Results: We introduce four SEIR variants to fit different situations in different countries and regions. We compare our DDE method with traditional parameter estimation methods (Nelder-Mead, BFGS, Powell, Truncated Newton Conjugate-Gradient, Neural ODE) in fitting the real-world data in the cases of countries (the USA, Columbia, South Africa) and regions (Wuhan in China, Piedmont in Italy). Our DDE method achieves the best Mean Square Error and Pearson coefficient in all five areas. Further, compared with the state-of-art learning-based approaches, the DDE outperforms all techniques, including LSTM, RNN, GRU, Random Forest, Extremely Random Trees, and Decision Tree. Conclusion: DDE presents outstanding predictive ability and visualized display of the changes in infection rates in different regions and countries.

Yuqi Xiong, Wuzhen Shi, Yang Wen et al.

In view of the problems that existing salient object detection (SOD) methods are prone to losing details, blurring edges, and insufficient fusion of single-modal information in complex scenes, this paper proposes a dynamic uncertainty propagation and multimodal collaborative reasoning network (DUP-MCRNet). Firstly, a dynamic uncertainty graph convolution module (DUGC) is designed to propagate uncertainty between layers through a sparse graph constructed based on spatial semantic distance, and combined with channel adaptive interaction, it effectively improves the detection accuracy of small structures and edge regions. Secondly, a multimodal collaborative fusion strategy (MCF) is proposed, which uses learnable modality gating weights to weightedly fuse the attention maps of RGB, depth, and edge features. It can dynamically adjust the importance of each modality according to different scenes, effectively suppress redundant or interfering information, and strengthen the semantic complementarity and consistency between cross-modalities, thereby improving the ability to identify salient regions under occlusion, weak texture or background interference. Finally, the detection performance at the pixel level and region level is optimized through multi-scale BCE and IoU loss, cross-scale consistency constraints, and uncertainty-guided supervision mechanisms. Extensive experiments show that DUP-MCRNet outperforms various SOD methods on most common benchmark datasets, especially in terms of edge clarity and robustness to complex backgrounds. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YukiBear426/DUP-MCRNet.