Yifan Deng

Kai Liu, Haoyang Yue, Zeli Lin et al.

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge, one of the associated challenges of NTIRE 2026. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) infrared images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a x4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective models or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art performance for infrared image SR in remote sensing scenarios. To reflect the characteristics of infrared data and practical application needs, the challenge adopts a single-track setting. A total of 115 participants registered for the competition, with 13 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, dataset, evaluation protocol, main results, and the representative methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance research in infrared image super-resolution and promote the development of effective solutions for real-world remote sensing applications.

Zaixiang Zheng, Yifan Deng, Dongyu Xue et al.

This paper demonstrates that language models are strong structure-based protein designers. We present LM-Design, a generic approach to reprogramming sequence-based protein language models (pLMs), that have learned massive sequential evolutionary knowledge from the universe of natural protein sequences, to acquire an immediate capability to design preferable protein sequences for given folds. We conduct a structural surgery on pLMs, where a lightweight structural adapter is implanted into pLMs and endows it with structural awareness. During inference, iterative refinement is performed to effectively optimize the generated protein sequences. Experiments show that LM-Design improves the state-of-the-art results by a large margin, leading to up to 4% to 12% accuracy gains in sequence recovery (e.g., 55.65%/56.63% on CATH 4.2/4.3 single-chain benchmarks, and >60% when designing protein complexes). We provide extensive and in-depth analyses, which verify that LM-Design can (1) indeed leverage both structural and sequential knowledge to accurately handle structurally non-deterministic regions, (2) benefit from scaling data and model size, and (3) generalize to other proteins (e.g., antibodies and de novo proteins)

Xining Ge, Gengjia Chang, Weijun Yuan et al.

Remote sensing infrared image super-resolution aims to recover sharper thermal observations from low-resolution inputs while preserving target contours, scene layout, and radiometric stability. Unlike visible-image super-resolution, thermal imagery is weakly textured and more sensitive to unstable local sharpening, which makes complementary local and global modeling especially important. This paper presents our solution to the NTIRE 2026 Infrared Image Super-Resolution Challenge, a dual-branch system that combines a HAT-L branch and a MambaIRv2-L branch. The inference pipeline applies test-time local conversion on HAT, eight-way self-ensemble on MambaIRv2, and fixed equal-weight image-space fusion. We report both the official challenge score and a reproducible evaluation on 12 synthetic times-four thermal samples derived from Caltech Aerial RGB-Thermal, on which the fused output outperforms either single branch in PSNR, SSIM, and the overall Score. The results suggest that infrared super-resolution benefits from explicit complementarity between locally strong transformer restoration and globally stable state-space modeling.

Jinta Weng, Yifan Deng, d Donghao Li et al.

The prompt has become an effective linguistic tool for utilizing pre-trained language models. However, in few-shot scenarios, subtle changes in the prompt design always make the result widely different, and the prompt learning methods also make it easy to overfit the limited samples. To alleviate this, we explore utilizing suitable contrastive samples and multi-degree contrastive learning methods to improve the robustness of the prompt representation. Therefore, the proposed Consprompt combined with the prompt encoding network, contrastive sampling modules, and contrastive scoring modules, is introduced to realize differential contrastive learning. Our results exhibit state-of-the-art performance in different few-shot settings, and the ablation experiments also certify the effectiveness of utilizing multi-degree contrastive learning in the prompt-based fine-tuning process.

Ruochi Zhang, Haoran Wu, Chang Liu et al.

Recent advances in protein language models have catalyzed significant progress in peptide sequence representation. Despite extensive exploration in this field, pre-trained models tailored for peptide-specific needs remain largely unaddressed due to the difficulty in capturing the complex and sometimes unstable structures of peptides. This study introduces a novel multi-view contrastive learning framework PepHarmony for the sequence-based peptide encoding task. PepHarmony innovatively combines both sequence- and structure-level information into a sequence-level encoding module through contrastive learning. We carefully select datasets from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) and AlphaFold database to encompass a broad spectrum of peptide sequences and structures. The experimental data highlights PepHarmony's exceptional capability in capturing the intricate relationship between peptide sequences and structures compared with the baseline and fine-tuned models. The robustness of our model is confirmed through extensive ablation studies, which emphasize the crucial roles of contrastive loss and strategic data sorting in enhancing predictive performance. The proposed PepHarmony framework serves as a notable contribution to peptide representations, and offers valuable insights for future applications in peptide drug discovery and peptide engineering. We have made all the source code utilized in this study publicly accessible via GitHub at https://github.com/zhangruochi/PepHarmony or http://www.healthinformaticslab.org/supp/.

Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Guangtao Zhai et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2024 Quality Assessment of AI-Generated Content Challenge, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2024. This challenge is to address a major challenge in the field of image and video processing, namely, Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Video Quality Assessment (VQA) for AI-Generated Content (AIGC). The challenge is divided into the image track and the video track. The image track uses the AIGIQA-20K, which contains 20,000 AI-Generated Images (AIGIs) generated by 15 popular generative models. The image track has a total of 318 registered participants. A total of 1,646 submissions are received in the development phase, and 221 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 16 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. The video track uses the T2VQA-DB, which contains 10,000 AI-Generated Videos (AIGVs) generated by 9 popular Text-to-Video (T2V) models. A total of 196 participants have registered in the video track. A total of 991 submissions are received in the development phase, and 185 submissions are received in the test phase. Finally, 12 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets. Some methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods in both tracks have demonstrated superior prediction performance on AIGC.

Bin Ren, Hang Guo, Lei Sun et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.

Lei Sun, Hang Guo, Bin Ren et al.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2025 Image Denoising Challenge (σ = 50), highlighting the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary objective is to develop a network architecture capable of achieving high-quality denoising performance, quantitatively evaluated using PSNR, without constraints on computational complexity or model size. The task assumes independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with a fixed noise level of 50. A total of 290 participants registered for the challenge, with 20 teams successfully submitting valid results, providing insights into the current state-of-the-art in image denoising.

Sizhuo Ma, Wei-Ting Chen, Qiang Gao et al.

Face images play a crucial role in numerous applications; however, real-world conditions frequently introduce degradations such as noise, blur, and compression artifacts, affecting overall image quality and hindering subsequent tasks. To address this challenge, we organized the VQualA 2025 Challenge on Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) as part of the ICCV 2025 Workshops. Participants created lightweight and efficient models (limited to 0.5 GFLOPs and 5 million parameters) for the prediction of Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) on face images with arbitrary resolutions and realistic degradations. Submissions underwent comprehensive evaluations through correlation metrics on a dataset of in-the-wild face images. This challenge attracted 127 participants, with 1519 final submissions. This report summarizes the methodologies and findings for advancing the development of practical FIQA approaches.

Yifan Deng, Spencer S. Ericksen, Anthony Gitter

Scientific databases aggregate vast amounts of quantitative data alongside descriptive text. In biochemistry, molecule screening assays evaluate candidate molecules' functional responses against disease targets. Unstructured text that describes the biological mechanisms through which these targets operate, experimental screening protocols, and other attributes of assays offer rich information for drug discovery campaigns but has been untapped because of that unstructured format. We present Assay2Mol, a large language model-based workflow that can capitalize on the vast existing biochemical screening assays for early-stage drug discovery. Assay2Mol retrieves existing assay records involving targets similar to the new target and generates candidate molecules using in-context learning with the retrieved assay screening data. Assay2Mol outperforms recent machine learning approaches that generate candidate ligand molecules for target protein structures, while also promoting more synthesizable molecule generation.

Linqi Lu, Yifan Deng, Chuan Tian et al.

This study introduces Purrfessor, an innovative AI chatbot designed to provide personalized dietary guidance through interactive, multimodal engagement. Leveraging the Large Language-and-Vision Assistant (LLaVA) model fine-tuned with food and nutrition data and a human-in-the-loop approach, Purrfessor integrates visual meal analysis with contextual advice to enhance user experience and engagement. We conducted two studies to evaluate the chatbot's performance and user experience: (a) simulation assessments and human validation were conducted to examine the performance of the fine-tuned model; (b) a 2 (Profile: Bot vs. Pet) by 3 (Model: GPT-4 vs. LLaVA vs. Fine-tuned LLaVA) experiment revealed that Purrfessor significantly enhanced users' perceptions of care ($β= 1.59$, $p = 0.04$) and interest ($β= 2.26$, $p = 0.01$) compared to the GPT-4 bot. Additionally, user interviews highlighted the importance of interaction design details, emphasizing the need for responsiveness, personalization, and guidance to improve user engagement.

Yifan Deng, Spencer S. Ericksen, Anthony Gitter

The development of large language models and multi-modal models has enabled the appealing idea of generating novel molecules from text descriptions. Generative modeling would shift the paradigm from relying on large-scale chemical screening to find molecules with desired properties to directly generating those molecules. However, multi-modal models combining text and molecules are often trained from scratch, without leveraging existing high-quality pretrained models. Training from scratch consumes more computational resources and prohibits model scaling. In contrast, we propose a lightweight adapter-based strategy named Chemical Language Model Linker (ChemLML). ChemLML blends the two single domain models and obtains conditional molecular generation from text descriptions while still operating in the specialized embedding spaces of the molecular domain. ChemLML can tailor diverse pretrained text models for molecule generation by training relatively few adapter parameters. We find that the choice of molecular representation used within ChemLML, SMILES versus SELFIES, has a strong influence on conditional molecular generation performance. SMILES is often preferable despite not guaranteeing valid molecules. We raise issues in using the entire PubChem dataset of molecules and their associated descriptions for evaluating molecule generation and provide a filtered version of the dataset as a generation test set. To demonstrate how ChemLML could be used in practice, we generate candidate protein inhibitors and use docking to assess their quality and also generate candidate membrane permeable molecules.

Siyuan Liu, Yusong Wang, Tong Wang et al.

The identification of active binding drugs for target proteins (termed as drug-target interaction prediction) is the key challenge in virtual screening, which plays an essential role in drug discovery. Although recent deep learning-based approaches achieved better performance than molecular docking, existing models often neglect certain aspects of the intermolecular information, hindering the performance of prediction. We recognize this problem and propose a novel approach named Intermolecular Graph Transformer (IGT) that employs a dedicated attention mechanism to model intermolecular information with a three-way Transformer-based architecture. IGT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 9.1% and 20.5% over the second best for binding activity and binding pose prediction respectively, and shows superior generalization ability to unseen receptor proteins. Furthermore, IGT exhibits promising drug screening ability against SARS-CoV-2 by identifying 83.1% active drugs that have been validated by wet-lab experiments with near-native predicted binding poses.