Menglong Yang

Zixin Zhou, Tianxi Jiang, Menglong Yang et al.

Physical neural networks offer a transformative route to edge intelligence, providing superior inference speed and energy efficiency compared to conventional digital architectures. However, realizing scalable, end-to-end, fully analog recurrent neural networks for temporal information processing remains challenging due to the difficulty of faithfully mapping trained network models onto physical hardware. Here we present a fully analog resonant recurrent neural network (R$^2$NN) implemented via a metacircuit architecture composed of coupled electrical local resonators. A reformulated mechanical-electrical analogy establishes a direct mapping between the R$^2$NN model and metacircuit elements, enabling accurate physical implementation of trained neural network parameters. By integrating jointly trainable global resistive coupling and local resonances, which generate effective frequency-dependent negative resistances, the architecture shapes an impedance landscape that steers currents along frequency-selective pathways. This mechanism enables direct extraction of discriminative spectral features, facilitating real-time temporal classification of raw analog inputs while bypassing analog-to-digital conversion. We demonstrate the cross-domain versatility of this framework using integrated hardware for tactile perception, speech recognition, and condition monitoring. This work establishes a scalable, fully analog paradigm for intelligent temporal processing and paves the way for low-latency, resource-efficient physical neural hardware for edge intelligence.

Yang Ren, Hai Jiang, Menglong Yang et al.

RAW-to-sRGB mapping, or the simulation of the traditional camera image signal processor (ISP), aims to generate DSLR-quality sRGB images from raw data captured by smartphone sensors. Despite achieving comparable results to sophisticated handcrafted camera ISP solutions, existing learning-based methods still struggle with detail disparity and color distortion. In this paper, we present ISPDiffuser, a diffusion-based decoupled framework that separates the RAW-to-sRGB mapping into detail reconstruction in grayscale space and color consistency mapping from grayscale to sRGB. Specifically, we propose a texture-aware diffusion model that leverages the generative ability of diffusion models to focus on local detail recovery, in which a texture enrichment loss is further proposed to prompt the diffusion model to generate more intricate texture details. Subsequently, we introduce a histogram-guided color consistency module that utilizes color histogram as guidance to learn precise color information for grayscale to sRGB color consistency mapping, with a color consistency loss designed to constrain the learned color information. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed ISPDiffuser outperforms state-of-the-art competitors both quantitatively and visually. The code is available at https://github.com/RenYangSCU/ISPDiffuser.

Yang Ren, Hai Jiang, Wei Li et al.

Image downscaling is critical for efficient storage and transmission of high-resolution (HR) images. Existing learning-based methods focus on performing downscaling within the sRGB domain, which typically suffers from blurred details and unexpected artifacts. RAW images, with their unprocessed photonic information, offer greater flexibility but lack specialized downscaling frameworks. In this paper, we propose a wavelet-based recurrent reconstruction framework that leverages the information lossless attribute of wavelet transformation to fulfill the arbitrary-scale RAW image downscaling in a coarse-to-fine manner, in which the Low-Frequency Arbitrary-Scale Downscaling Module (LASDM) and the High-Frequency Prediction Module (HFPM) are proposed to preserve structural and textural integrity of the reconstructed low-resolution (LR) RAW images, alongside an energy-maximization loss to align high-frequency energy between HR and LR domain. Furthermore, we introduce the Realistic Non-Integer RAW Downscaling (Real-NIRD) dataset, featuring a non-integer downscaling factor of 1.3$\times$, and incorporate it with publicly available datasets with integer factors (2$\times$, 3$\times$, 4$\times$) for comprehensive benchmarking arbitrary-scale image downscaling purposes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art competitors both quantitatively and visually. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/RenYangSCU/ASRD.

Hanyong Wang, Menglong Yang

Deep reinforcement learning has been able to solve various tasks successfully, however, due to the construction of policy gradient and training dynamics, tuning deep reinforcement learning models remains challenging. As one of the most successful deep reinforcement-learning algorithm, the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm (PPO) clips the policy gradient within a conservative on-policy updates, which ensures reliable and stable policy improvement. However, this training pattern may sacrifice sample efficiency. On the other hand, off-policy methods make more adequate use of data through sample reuse, though at the cost of increased the estimation variance and bias. To leverage the advantages of both, in this paper, we propose a new PPO variant based on the stability guarantee from conservative on-policy iteration with a more efficient off-policy data utilization. Specifically, we first derive an extended off-policy improvement from an expectation form of generalized policy improvement lower bound. Then, we extend the clipping mechanism with segmented exponential functions for a suitable surrogate objective function. Third, the trajectories generated by the past $M$ policies are organized in the replay buffer for off-policy training. We refer to this method as Extended Off-policy Proximal Policy Optimization (ExO-PPO). Compared with PPO and some other state-of-the-art variants, we demonstrate an improved performance of ExO-PPO with balanced sample efficiency and stability on varied tasks in the empirical experiments.

Xiangtong Wang, Binbin Liang, Menglong Yang et al.

Current computer vision tasks based on deep learning require a huge amount of data with annotations for model training or testing, especially in some dense estimation tasks, such as optical flow segmentation and depth estimation. In practice, manual labeling for dense estimation tasks is very difficult or even impossible, and the scenes of the dataset are often restricted to a small range, which dramatically limits the development of the community. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a synthetic dataset generation method to obtain the expandable dataset without burdensome manual workforce. By this method, we construct a dataset called MineNavi containing video footages from first-perspective-view of the aircraft matched with accurate ground truth for depth estimation in aircraft navigation application. We also provide quantitative experiments to prove that pre-training via our MineNavi dataset can improve the performance of depth estimation model and speed up the convergence of the model on real scene data. Since the synthetic dataset has a similar effect to the real-world dataset in the training process of deep model, we also provide additional experiments with monocular depth estimation method to demonstrate the impact of various factors in our dataset such as lighting conditions and motion mode.