Bingchen Li

CV
h-index98
22papers
401citations
Novelty45%
AI Score57

22 Papers

IVAug 23, 2022Code
AIM 2022 Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video: Dataset, Methods and Results

Ren Yang, Radu Timofte, Xin Li et al.

This paper reviews the Challenge on Super-Resolution of Compressed Image and Video at AIM 2022. This challenge includes two tracks. Track 1 aims at the super-resolution of compressed image, and Track~2 targets the super-resolution of compressed video. In Track 1, we use the popular dataset DIV2K as the training, validation and test sets. In Track 2, we propose the LDV 3.0 dataset, which contains 365 videos, including the LDV 2.0 dataset (335 videos) and 30 additional videos. In this challenge, there are 12 teams and 2 teams that submitted the final results to Track 1 and Track 2, respectively. The proposed methods and solutions gauge the state-of-the-art of super-resolution on compressed image and video. The proposed LDV 3.0 dataset is available at https://github.com/RenYang-home/LDV_dataset. The homepage of this challenge is at https://github.com/RenYang-home/AIM22_CompressSR.

CVAug 21, 2022Code
HST: Hierarchical Swin Transformer for Compressed Image Super-resolution

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

Compressed Image Super-resolution has achieved great attention in recent years, where images are degraded with compression artifacts and low-resolution artifacts. Since the complex hybrid distortions, it is hard to restore the distorted image with the simple cooperation of super-resolution and compression artifacts removing. In this paper, we take a step forward to propose the Hierarchical Swin Transformer (HST) network to restore the low-resolution compressed image, which jointly captures the hierarchical feature representations and enhances each-scale representation with Swin transformer, respectively. Moreover, we find that the pretraining with Super-resolution (SR) task is vital in compressed image super-resolution. To explore the effects of different SR pretraining, we take the commonly-used SR tasks (e.g., bicubic and different real super-resolution simulations) as our pretraining tasks, and reveal that SR plays an irreplaceable role in the compressed image super-resolution. With the cooperation of HST and pre-training, our HST achieves the fifth place in AIM 2022 challenge on the low-quality compressed image super-resolution track, with the PSNR of 23.51dB. Extensive experiments and ablation studies have validated the effectiveness of our proposed methods. The code and models are available at https://github.com/USTC-IMCL/HST-for-Compressed-Image-SR.

CVMar 13, 2023Code
Learning Distortion Invariant Representation for Image Restoration from A Causality Perspective

Xin Li, Bingchen Li, Xin Jin et al.

In recent years, we have witnessed the great advancement of Deep neural networks (DNNs) in image restoration. However, a critical limitation is that they cannot generalize well to real-world degradations with different degrees or types. In this paper, we are the first to propose a novel training strategy for image restoration from the causality perspective, to improve the generalization ability of DNNs for unknown degradations. Our method, termed Distortion Invariant representation Learning (DIL), treats each distortion type and degree as one specific confounder, and learns the distortion-invariant representation by eliminating the harmful confounding effect of each degradation. We derive our DIL with the back-door criterion in causality by modeling the interventions of different distortions from the optimization perspective. Particularly, we introduce counterfactual distortion augmentation to simulate the virtual distortion types and degrees as the confounders. Then, we instantiate the intervention of each distortion with a virtual model updating based on corresponding distorted images, and eliminate them from the meta-learning perspective. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our DIL on the generalization capability for unseen distortion types and degrees. Our code will be available at https://github.com/lixinustc/Causal-IR-DIL.

CVApr 12
NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

Xin Li, Yeying Jin, Suhang Yao et al.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. Building upon the success of the first edition, this challenge attracted a wide range of impressive solutions, all developed and evaluated on our real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset~\cite{jin2024raindrop}. For this edition, we adjust the dataset with 14,139 images for training, 407 images for validation, and 593 images for testing. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for the removal of raindrops under various illumination and focus conditions. In total, 168 teams have registered for the competition, and 17 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset, demonstrating the growing progress in this challenging task.

CVApr 12
NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models: Datasets, Methods and Results

Xin Li, Jiachao Gong, Xijun Wang et al.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Restoration in the Wild with Generative Models. This challenge utilizes a new short-form UGC (S-UGC) video restoration benchmark, termed KwaiVIR, which is contributed by USTC and Kuaishou Technology. It contains both synthetically distorted videos and real-world short-form UGC videos in the wild. For this edition, the released data include 200 synthetic training videos, 48 wild training videos, 11 validation videos, and 20 testing videos. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for restoring short-form UGC videos under complex real-world degradations, especially in the emerging paradigm of generative-model-based S-UGC video restoration. This challenge has two tracks: (i) the primary track is a subjective track, where the evaluation is based on a user study; (ii) the second track is an objective track. These two tracks enable a comprehensive assessment of restoration quality. In total, 95 teams have registered for this competition. And 12 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the KwaiVIR benchmark, demonstrating encouraging progress in short-form UGC video restoration in the wild.

CVAug 21, 2024Code
MambaCSR: Dual-Interleaved Scanning for Compressed Image Super-Resolution With SSMs

Yulin Ren, Xin Li, Mengxi Guo et al.

We present MambaCSR, a simple but effective framework based on Mamba for the challenging compressed image super-resolution (CSR) task. Particularly, the scanning strategies of Mamba are crucial for effective contextual knowledge modeling in the restoration process despite it relying on selective state space modeling for all tokens. In this work, we propose an efficient dual-interleaved scanning paradigm (DIS) for CSR, which is composed of two scanning strategies: (i) hierarchical interleaved scanning is designed to comprehensively capture and utilize the most potential contextual information within an image by simultaneously taking advantage of the local window-based and sequential scanning methods; (ii) horizontal-to-vertical interleaved scanning is proposed to reduce the computational cost by leaving the redundancy between the scanning of different directions. To overcome the non-uniform compression artifacts, we also propose position-aligned cross-scale scanning to model multi-scale contextual information. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks have shown the great performance of our MambaCSR in the compressed image super-resolution task. The code will be soon available in~\textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/renyulin-f/MambaCSR}}.

CVJul 18, 2024
UCIP: A Universal Framework for Compressed Image Super-Resolution using Dynamic Prompt

Xin Li, Bingchen Li, Yeying Jin et al.

Compressed Image Super-resolution (CSR) aims to simultaneously super-resolve the compressed images and tackle the challenging hybrid distortions caused by compression. However, existing works on CSR usually focuses on a single compression codec, i.e., JPEG, ignoring the diverse traditional or learning-based codecs in the practical application, e.g., HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc. In this work, we propose the first universal CSR framework, dubbed UCIP, with dynamic prompt learning, intending to jointly support the CSR distortions of any compression codecs/modes. Particularly, an efficient dynamic prompt strategy is proposed to mine the content/spatial-aware task-adaptive contextual information for the universal CSR task, using only a small amount of prompts with spatial size 1x1. To simplify contextual information mining, we introduce the novel MLP-like framework backbone for our UCIP by adapting the Active Token Mixer (ATM) to CSR tasks for the first time, where the global information modeling is only taken in horizontal and vertical directions with offset prediction. We also build an all-in-one benchmark dataset for the CSR task by collecting the datasets with the popular 6 diverse traditional and learning-based codecs, including JPEG, HEVC, VVC, HIFIC, etc., resulting in 23 common degradations. Extensive experiments have shown the consistent and excellent performance of our UCIP on universal CSR tasks. The project can be found in https://lixinustc.github.io/UCIP.github.io

IVJul 15, 2024
MoE-DiffIR: Task-customized Diffusion Priors for Universal Compressed Image Restoration

Yulin Ren, Xin Li, Bingchen Li et al.

We present MoE-DiffIR, an innovative universal compressed image restoration (CIR) method with task-customized diffusion priors. This intends to handle two pivotal challenges in the existing CIR methods: (i) lacking adaptability and universality for different image codecs, e.g., JPEG and WebP; (ii) poor texture generation capability, particularly at low bitrates. Specifically, our MoE-DiffIR develops the powerful mixture-of-experts (MoE) prompt module, where some basic prompts cooperate to excavate the task-customized diffusion priors from Stable Diffusion (SD) for each compression task. Moreover, the degradation-aware routing mechanism is proposed to enable the flexible assignment of basic prompts. To activate and reuse the cross-modality generation prior of SD, we design the visual-to-text adapter for MoE-DiffIR, which aims to adapt the embedding of low-quality images from the visual domain to the textual domain as the textual guidance for SD, enabling more consistent and reasonable texture generation. We also construct one comprehensive benchmark dataset for universal CIR, covering 21 types of degradations from 7 popular traditional and learned codecs. Extensive experiments on universal CIR have demonstrated the excellent robustness and texture restoration capability of our proposed MoE-DiffIR. The project can be found at https://renyulin-f.github.io/MoE-DiffIR.github.io/.

IVApr 17, 2025Code
NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: Methods and Results

Xin Li, Kun Yuan, Bingchen Li et al.

This paper presents a review for the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement. The challenge comprises two tracks: (i) Efficient Video Quality Assessment (KVQ), and (ii) Diffusion-based Image Super-Resolution (KwaiSR). Track 1 aims to advance the development of lightweight and efficient video quality assessment (VQA) models, with an emphasis on eliminating reliance on model ensembles, redundant weights, and other computationally expensive components in the previous IQA/VQA competitions. Track 2 introduces a new short-form UGC dataset tailored for single image super-resolution, i.e., the KwaiSR dataset. It consists of 1,800 synthetically generated S-UGC image pairs and 1,900 real-world S-UGC images, which are split into training, validation, and test sets using a ratio of 8:1:1. The primary objective of the challenge is to drive research that benefits the user experience of short-form UGC platforms such as Kwai and TikTok. This challenge attracted 266 participants and received 18 valid final submissions with corresponding fact sheets, significantly contributing to the progress of short-form UGC VQA and image superresolution. The project is publicly available at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQE- ChallengeCVPR-NTIRE2025.

CVApr 26, 2024Code
PromptCIR: Blind Compressed Image Restoration with Prompt Learning

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

Blind Compressed Image Restoration (CIR) has garnered significant attention due to its practical applications. It aims to mitigate compression artifacts caused by unknown quality factors, particularly with JPEG codecs. Existing works on blind CIR often seek assistance from a quality factor prediction network to facilitate their network to restore compressed images. However, the predicted numerical quality factor lacks spatial information, preventing network adaptability toward image contents. Recent studies in prompt-learning-based image restoration have showcased the potential of prompts to generalize across varied degradation types and degrees. This motivated us to design a prompt-learning-based compressed image restoration network, dubbed PromptCIR, which can effectively restore images from various compress levels. Specifically, PromptCIR exploits prompts to encode compression information implicitly, where prompts directly interact with soft weights generated from image features, thus providing dynamic content-aware and distortion-aware guidance for the restoration process. The light-weight prompts enable our method to adapt to different compression levels, while introducing minimal parameter overhead. Overall, PromptCIR leverages the powerful transformer-based backbone with the dynamic prompt module to proficiently handle blind CIR tasks, winning first place in the NTIRE 2024 challenge of blind compressed image enhancement track. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our proposed PromptCIR. The code is available at https://github.com/lbc12345/PromptCIR-NTIRE24.

CVMar 30
ColorFLUX: A Structure-Color Decoupling Framework for Old Photo Colorization

Bingchen Li, Zhixin Wang, Fan Li et al.

Old photos preserve invaluable historical memories, making their restoration and colorization highly desirable. While existing restoration models can address some degradation issues like denoising and scratch removal, they often struggle with accurate colorization. This limitation arises from the unique degradation inherent in old photos, such as faded brightness and altered color hues, which are different from modern photo distributions, creating a substantial domain gap during colorization. In this paper, we propose a novel old photo colorization framework based on the generative diffusion model FLUX. Our approach introduces a structure-color decoupling strategy that separates structure preservation from color restoration, enabling accurate colorization of old photos while maintaining structural consistency. We further enhance the model with a progressive Direct Preference Optimization (Pro-DPO) strategy, which allows the model to learn subtle color preferences through coarse-to-fine transitions in color augmentation. Additionally, we address the limitations of text-based prompts by introducing visual semantic prompts, which extract fine-grained semantic information directly from old photos, helping to eliminate the color bias inherent in old photos. Experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art colorization methods, including closed-source commercial models, producing high-quality and vivid colorization.

CVApr 2, 2025Code
Q-Adapt: Adapting LMM for Visual Quality Assessment with Progressive Instruction Tuning

Yiting Lu, Xin Li, Haoning Wu et al.

The rapid advancement of Large Multi-modal Foundation Models (LMM) has paved the way for the possible Explainable Image Quality Assessment (EIQA) with instruction tuning from two perspectives: overall quality explanation, and attribute-wise perception answering. However, existing works usually overlooked the conflicts between these two types of perception explanations during joint instruction tuning, leading to insufficient perception understanding. To mitigate this, we propose a new paradigm for perception-oriented instruction tuning, i.e., Q-Adapt, which aims to eliminate the conflicts and achieve the synergy between these two EIQA tasks when adapting LMM, resulting in enhanced multi-faceted explanations of IQA. Particularly, we propose a progressive instruction tuning strategy by dividing the adaption process of LMM for EIQA into two stages, where the first stage empowers the LMM with universal perception knowledge tailored for two tasks using an efficient transfer learning strategy, i.e., LoRA, and the second stage introduces the instruction-adaptive visual prompt tuning to dynamically adapt visual features for the different instructions from two tasks. In this way, our proposed Q-Adapt can achieve a lightweight visual quality evaluator, demonstrating comparable performance and, in some instances, superior results across perceptual-related benchmarks and commonly-used IQA databases. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/yeppp27/Q-Adapt.

IVFeb 29, 2024
SeD: Semantic-Aware Discriminator for Image Super-Resolution

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Hanxin Zhu et al.

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been widely used to recover vivid textures in image super-resolution (SR) tasks. In particular, one discriminator is utilized to enable the SR network to learn the distribution of real-world high-quality images in an adversarial training manner. However, the distribution learning is overly coarse-grained, which is susceptible to virtual textures and causes counter-intuitive generation results. To mitigate this, we propose the simple and effective Semantic-aware Discriminator (denoted as SeD), which encourages the SR network to learn the fine-grained distributions by introducing the semantics of images as a condition. Concretely, we aim to excavate the semantics of images from a well-trained semantic extractor. Under different semantics, the discriminator is able to distinguish the real-fake images individually and adaptively, which guides the SR network to learn the more fine-grained semantic-aware textures. To obtain accurate and abundant semantics, we take full advantage of recently popular pretrained vision models (PVMs) with extensive datasets, and then incorporate its semantic features into the discriminator through a well-designed spatial cross-attention module. In this way, our proposed semantic-aware discriminator empowered the SR network to produce more photo-realistic and pleasing images. Extensive experiments on two typical tasks, i.e., SR and Real SR have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

CVApr 21, 2025
NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Short-form UGC Video Quality Assessment and Enhancement: KwaiSR Dataset and Study

Xin Li, Xijun Wang, Bingchen Li et al.

In this work, we build the first benchmark dataset for short-form UGC Image Super-resolution in the wild, termed KwaiSR, intending to advance the research on developing image super-resolution algorithms for short-form UGC platforms. This dataset is collected from the Kwai Platform, which is composed of two parts, i.e., synthetic and wild parts. Among them, the synthetic dataset, including 1,900 image pairs, is produced by simulating the degradation following the distribution of real-world low-quality short-form UGC images, aiming to provide the ground truth for training and objective comparison in the validation/testing. The wild dataset contains low-quality images collected directly from the Kwai Platform, which are filtered using the quality assessment method KVQ from the Kwai Platform. As a result, the KwaiSR dataset contains 1800 synthetic image pairs and 1900 wild images, which are divided into training, validation, and testing parts with a ratio of 8:1:1. Based on the KwaiSR dataset, we organize the NTIRE 2025 challenge on a second short-form UGC Video quality assessment and enhancement, which attracts lots of researchers to develop the algorithm for it. The results of this competition have revealed that our KwaiSR dataset is pretty challenging for existing Image SR methods, which is expected to lead to a new direction in the image super-resolution field. The dataset can be found from https://lixinustc.github.io/NTIRE2025-KVQE-KwaSR-KVQ.github.io/.

CVApr 17, 2025
NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

Xin Li, Yeying Jin, Xin Jin et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

CVMar 10, 2024
Is Vanilla MLP in Neural Radiance Field Enough for Few-shot View Synthesis?

Hanxin Zhu, Tianyu He, Xin Li et al. · microsoft-research

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) has achieved superior performance for novel view synthesis by modeling the scene with a Multi-Layer Perception (MLP) and a volume rendering procedure, however, when fewer known views are given (i.e., few-shot view synthesis), the model is prone to overfit the given views. To handle this issue, previous efforts have been made towards leveraging learned priors or introducing additional regularizations. In contrast, in this paper, we for the first time provide an orthogonal method from the perspective of network structure. Given the observation that trivially reducing the number of model parameters alleviates the overfitting issue, but at the cost of missing details, we propose the multi-input MLP (mi-MLP) that incorporates the inputs (i.e., location and viewing direction) of the vanilla MLP into each layer to prevent the overfitting issue without harming detailed synthesis. To further reduce the artifacts, we propose to model colors and volume density separately and present two regularization terms. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that: 1) although the proposed mi-MLP is easy to implement, it is surprisingly effective as it boosts the PSNR of the baseline from $14.73$ to $24.23$. 2) the overall framework achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of benchmarks. We will release the code upon publication.

CVMar 13, 2025
Hybrid Agents for Image Restoration

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

Existing Image Restoration (IR) studies typically focus on task-specific or universal modes individually, relying on the mode selection of users and lacking the cooperation between multiple task-specific/universal restoration modes. This leads to insufficient interaction for unprofessional users and limits their restoration capability for complicated real-world applications. In this work, we present HybridAgent, intending to incorporate multiple restoration modes into a unified image restoration model and achieve intelligent and efficient user interaction through our proposed hybrid agents. Concretely, we propose the hybrid rule of fast, slow, and feedback restoration agents. Here, the slow restoration agent optimizes the powerful multimodal large language model (MLLM) with our proposed instruction-tuning dataset to identify degradations within images with ambiguous user prompts and invokes proper restoration tools accordingly. The fast restoration agent is designed based on a lightweight large language model (LLM) via in-context learning to understand the user prompts with simple and clear requirements, which can obviate the unnecessary time/resource costs of MLLM. Moreover, we introduce the mixed distortion removal mode for our HybridAgents, which is crucial but not concerned in previous agent-based works. It can effectively prevent the error propagation of step-by-step image restoration and largely improve the efficiency of the agent system. We validate the effectiveness of HybridAgent with both synthetic and real-world IR tasks.

CVDec 5, 2024
LossAgent: Towards Any Optimization Objectives for Image Processing with LLM Agents

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Yiting Lu et al.

We present the first loss agent, dubbed LossAgent, for low-level image processing tasks, e.g., image super-resolution and restoration, intending to achieve any customized optimization objectives of low-level image processing in different practical applications. Notably, not all optimization objectives, such as complex hand-crafted perceptual metrics, text description, and intricate human feedback, can be instantiated with existing low-level losses, e.g., MSE loss, which presents a crucial challenge in optimizing image processing networks in an end-to-end manner. To eliminate this, our LossAgent introduces the powerful large language model (LLM) as the loss agent, where the rich textual understanding of prior knowledge empowers the loss agent with the potential to understand complex optimization objectives, trajectory, and state feedback from external environments in the optimization process of the low-level image processing networks. In particular, we establish the loss repository by incorporating existing loss functions that support the end-to-end optimization for low-level image processing. Then, we design the optimization-oriented prompt engineering for the loss agent to actively and intelligently decide the compositional weights for each loss in the repository at each optimization interaction, thereby achieving the required optimization trajectory for any customized optimization objectives. Extensive experiments on three typical low-level image processing tasks and multiple optimization objectives have shown the effectiveness and applicability of our proposed LossAgent.

CVNov 24, 2025
Test-Time Preference Optimization for Image Restoration

Bingchen Li, Xin Li, Jiaqi Xu et al.

Image restoration (IR) models are typically trained to recover high-quality images using L1 or LPIPS loss. To handle diverse unknown degradations, zero-shot IR methods have also been introduced. However, existing pre-trained and zero-shot IR approaches often fail to align with human preferences, resulting in restored images that may not be favored. This highlights the critical need to enhance restoration quality and adapt flexibly to various image restoration tasks or backbones without requiring model retraining and ideally without labor-intensive preference data collection. In this paper, we propose the first Test-Time Preference Optimization (TTPO) paradigm for image restoration, which enhances perceptual quality, generates preference data on-the-fly, and is compatible with any IR model backbone. Specifically, we design a training-free, three-stage pipeline: (i) generate candidate preference images online using diffusion inversion and denoising based on the initially restored image; (ii) select preferred and dispreferred images using automated preference-aligned metrics or human feedback; and (iii) use the selected preference images as reward signals to guide the diffusion denoising process, optimizing the restored image to better align with human preferences. Extensive experiments across various image restoration tasks and models demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of the proposed pipeline.

CVAug 21, 2025
Comp-X: On Defining an Interactive Learned Image Compression Paradigm With Expert-driven LLM Agent

Yixin Gao, Xin Li, Xiaohan Pan et al.

We present Comp-X, the first intelligently interactive image compression paradigm empowered by the impressive reasoning capability of large language model (LLM) agent. Notably, commonly used image codecs usually suffer from limited coding modes and rely on manual mode selection by engineers, making them unfriendly for unprofessional users. To overcome this, we advance the evolution of image coding paradigm by introducing three key innovations: (i) multi-functional coding framework, which unifies different coding modes of various objective/requirements, including human-machine perception, variable coding, and spatial bit allocation, into one framework. (ii) interactive coding agent, where we propose an augmented in-context learning method with coding expert feedback to teach the LLM agent how to understand the coding request, mode selection, and the use of the coding tools. (iii) IIC-bench, the first dedicated benchmark comprising diverse user requests and the corresponding annotations from coding experts, which is systematically designed for intelligently interactive image compression evaluation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed Comp-X can understand the coding requests efficiently and achieve impressive textual interaction capability. Meanwhile, it can maintain comparable compression performance even with a single coding framework, providing a promising avenue for artificial general intelligence (AGI) in image compression.

CVJun 10, 2025
LiftVSR: Lifting Image Diffusion to Video Super-Resolution via Hybrid Temporal Modeling with Only 4$\times$RTX 4090s

Xijun Wang, Xin Li, Bingchen Li et al.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced video super-resolution (VSR) by enhancing perceptual quality, largely through elaborately designed temporal modeling to ensure inter-frame consistency. However, existing methods usually suffer from limited temporal coherence and prohibitively high computational costs (e.g., typically requiring over 8 NVIDIA A100-80G GPUs), especially for long videos. In this work, we propose LiftVSR, an efficient VSR framework that leverages and elevates the image-wise diffusion prior from PixArt-$α$, achieving state-of-the-art results using only 4$\times$RTX 4090 GPUs. To balance long-term consistency and efficiency, we introduce a hybrid temporal modeling mechanism that decomposes temporal learning into two complementary components: (i) Dynamic Temporal Attention (DTA) for fine-grained temporal modeling within short frame segment ($\textit{i.e.}$, low complexity), and (ii) Attention Memory Cache (AMC) for long-term temporal modeling across segments ($\textit{i.e.}$, consistency). Specifically, DTA identifies multiple token flows across frames within multi-head query and key tokens to warp inter-frame contexts in the value tokens. AMC adaptively aggregates historical segment information via a cache unit, ensuring long-term coherence with minimal overhead. To further stabilize the cache interaction during inference, we introduce an asymmetric sampling strategy that mitigates feature mismatches arising from different diffusion sampling steps. Extensive experiments on several typical VSR benchmarks have demonstrated that LiftVSR achieves impressive performance with significantly lower computational costs.

IVMar 19, 2024
Low-Trace Adaptation of Zero-shot Self-supervised Blind Image Denoising

Jintong Hu, Bin Xia, Bingchen Li et al.

Deep learning-based denoiser has been the focus of recent development on image denoising. In the past few years, there has been increasing interest in developing self-supervised denoising networks that only require noisy images, without the need for clean ground truth for training. However, a performance gap remains between current self-supervised methods and their supervised counterparts. Additionally, these methods commonly depend on assumptions about noise characteristics, thereby constraining their applicability in real-world scenarios. Inspired by the properties of the Frobenius norm expansion, we discover that incorporating a trace term reduces the optimization goal disparity between self-supervised and supervised methods, thereby enhancing the performance of self-supervised learning. To exploit this insight, we propose a trace-constraint loss function and design the low-trace adaptation Noise2Noise (LoTA-N2N) model that bridges the gap between self-supervised and supervised learning. Furthermore, we have discovered that several existing self-supervised denoising frameworks naturally fall within the proposed trace-constraint loss as subcases. Extensive experiments conducted on natural and confocal image datasets indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance within the realm of zero-shot self-supervised image denoising approaches, without relying on any assumptions regarding the noise.