Hongyuan Wang

Jie Qin, Shuaihang Yuan, Jiaxin Chen et al.

Sketch-based 3D shape retrieval (SBSR) is an important yet challenging task, which has drawn more and more attention in recent years. Existing approaches address the problem in a restricted setting, without appropriately simulating real application scenarios. To mimic the realistic setting, in this track, we adopt large-scale sketches drawn by amateurs of different levels of drawing skills, as well as a variety of 3D shapes including not only CAD models but also models scanned from real objects. We define two SBSR tasks and construct two benchmarks consisting of more than 46,000 CAD models, 1,700 realistic models, and 145,000 sketches in total. Four teams participated in this track and submitted 15 runs for the two tasks, evaluated by 7 commonly-adopted metrics. We hope that, the benchmarks, the comparative results, and the open-sourced evaluation code will foster future research in this direction among the 3D object retrieval community.

Xiang Liu, Hongyuan Wang, Zhiqiang Yan et al.

Perceiving the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the spacecraft is a prerequisite for successfully executing many on-orbit space missions, and it can provide critical input for many downstream vision algorithms. In this paper, we propose to sense the 3D structure of spacecraft using light detection and ranging sensor (LIDAR) and a monocular camera. To this end, Spacecraft Depth Completion Network (SDCNet) is proposed to recover the dense depth map based on gray image and sparse depth map. Specifically, SDCNet decomposes the object-level spacecraft depth completion task into foreground segmentation subtask and foreground depth completion subtask, which segments the spacecraft region first and then performs depth completion on the segmented foreground area. In this way, the background interference to foreground spacecraft depth completion is effectively avoided. Moreover, an attention-based feature fusion module is also proposed to aggregate the complementary information between different inputs, which deduces the correlation between different features along the channel and the spatial dimension sequentially. Besides, four metrics are also proposed to evaluate object-level depth completion performance, which can more intuitively reflect the quality of spacecraft depth completion results. Finally, a large-scale satellite depth completion dataset is constructed for training and testing spacecraft depth completion algorithms. Empirical experiments on the dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SDCNet, which achieves 0.25m mean absolute error of interest and 0.759m mean absolute truncation error, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. The spacecraft pose estimation experiment is also conducted based on the depth completion results, and the experimental results indicate that the predicted dense depth map could meet the needs of downstream vision tasks.

Ailin Huang, Ang Li, Aobo Kong et al.

We introduce Step 3.5 Flash, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model that bridges frontier-level agentic intelligence and computational efficiency. We focus on what matters most when building agents: sharp reasoning and fast, reliable execution. Step 3.5 Flash pairs a 196B-parameter foundation with 11B active parameters for efficient inference. It is optimized with interleaved 3:1 sliding-window/full attention and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP-3) to reduce the latency and cost of multi-round agentic interactions. To reach frontier-level intelligence, we design a scalable reinforcement learning framework that combines verifiable signals with preference feedback, while remaining stable under large-scale off-policy training, enabling consistent self-improvement across mathematics, code, and tool use. Step 3.5 Flash demonstrates strong performance across agent, coding, and math tasks, achieving 85.4% on IMO-AnswerBench, 86.4% on LiveCodeBench-v6 (2024.08-2025.05), 88.2% on tau2-Bench, 69.0% on BrowseComp (with context management), and 51.0% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparable to frontier models such as GPT-5.2 xHigh and Gemini 3.0 Pro. By redefining the efficiency frontier, Step 3.5 Flash provides a high-density foundation for deploying sophisticated agents in real-world industrial environments.

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Nancy Mehta et al.

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Ailin Huang, Boyong Wu, Bruce Wang et al.

Real-time speech interaction, serving as a fundamental interface for human-machine collaboration, holds immense potential. However, current open-source models face limitations such as high costs in voice data collection, weakness in dynamic control, and limited intelligence. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Step-Audio, the first production-ready open-source solution. Key contributions include: 1) a 130B-parameter unified speech-text multi-modal model that achieves unified understanding and generation, with the Step-Audio-Chat version open-sourced; 2) a generative speech data engine that establishes an affordable voice cloning framework and produces the open-sourced lightweight Step-Audio-TTS-3B model through distillation; 3) an instruction-driven fine control system enabling dynamic adjustments across dialects, emotions, singing, and RAP; 4) an enhanced cognitive architecture augmented with tool calling and role-playing abilities to manage complex tasks effectively. Based on our new StepEval-Audio-360 evaluation benchmark, Step-Audio achieves state-of-the-art performance in human evaluations, especially in terms of instruction following. On open-source benchmarks like LLaMA Question, shows 9.3% average performance improvement, demonstrating our commitment to advancing the development of open-source multi-modal language technologies. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/stepfun-ai/Step-Audio.

Chen Hu, Haikuo Du, Heng Wang et al.

As LLMs shift toward autonomous agents, Deep Research has emerged as a pivotal metric. However, existing academic benchmarks like BrowseComp often fail to meet real-world demands for open-ended research, which requires robust skills in intent recognition, long-horizon decision-making, and cross-source verification. To address this, we introduce Step-DeepResearch, a cost-effective, end-to-end agent. We propose a Data Synthesis Strategy Based on Atomic Capabilities to reinforce planning and report writing, combined with a progressive training path from agentic mid-training to SFT and RL. Enhanced by a Checklist-style Judger, this approach significantly improves robustness. Furthermore, to bridge the evaluation gap in the Chinese domain, we establish ADR-Bench for realistic deep research scenarios. Experimental results show that Step-DeepResearch (32B) scores 61.4% on Scale AI Research Rubrics. On ADR-Bench, it significantly outperforms comparable models and rivals SOTA closed-source models like OpenAI and Gemini DeepResearch. These findings prove that refined training enables medium-sized models to achieve expert-level capabilities at industry-leading cost-efficiency.

Ziyang Liu, Hongyuan Wang, Zijian Wang et al.

Physical adversarial attacks often overfit single surrogate models and optimization objectives. While ensemble attacks can mitigate this, existing methods struggle with severe gradient conflicts within restricted physical texture spaces, significantly degrading cross-model transferability. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a Joint Multi-Objective and Multi-Model Optimization Framework (JMOF) that leverages quantitative similarity analysis to select the optimal surrogate model ensemble. Within JMOF, a dual-level mechanism jointly suppresses prediction outputs and flattens intermediate feature distributions, balancing attack efficiency with deep generalization. Additionally, an Orthogonal Gradient Alignment (OGA) strategy resolves cross-model gradient conflicts, transforming mutually repulsive gradients into synergistic optimization directions. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that JMOF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines against diverse black-box detectors. Crucially, JMOF exhibits substantial cross-vision-task generalization, generating attacks capable of simultaneously deceiving object detection and semantic segmentation or monocular depth estimation models. This research advances the generalization limits of physical adversarial attacks, providing a robust framework for evaluating visual AI vulnerabilities in real-world deployments.

Cailin Zhuang, Ailin Huang, Wei Cheng et al.

Story visualization aims to generate coherent image sequences that faithfully depict a narrative and align with character references. Despite progress in generative models, existing benchmarks are narrow in scope, often limited to short prompts, no character reference, or single-image cases, and fall short of real-world storytelling complexity. This hinders a nuanced understanding of model capabilities and limitations. We present ViStoryBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate story visualization models across diverse narrative structures, visual styles, and character settings. The benchmark features richly annotated multi-shot scripts derived from curated stories spanning literature, film, and folklore. Large language models assist in story summarization and script generation, with all outputs verified by humans to ensure coherence and fidelity. Character references are carefully curated to maintain intra-story consistency across varying artistic styles. To enable thorough evaluation, ViStoryBench introduces a set of automated metrics that assess character consistency, style similarity, prompt adherence, aesthetic quality, and generation artifacts such as copy-paste behavior. These metrics are validated through human studies, and used to benchmark a broad range of open-source and commercial models. ViStoryBench offers a high-fidelity, multi-dimensional evaluation suite that facilitates systematic analysis and fosters future progress in visual storytelling.

Yuchen Wang, Hongyuan Wang, Lizhi Wang et al.

Existing single-image denoising algorithms often struggle to restore details when dealing with complex noisy images. The introduction of near-infrared (NIR) images offers new possibilities for RGB image denoising. However, due to the inconsistency between NIR and RGB images, the existing works still struggle to balance the contributions of two fields in the process of image fusion. In response to this, in this paper, we develop a cross-field Frequency Correlation Exploiting Network (FCENet) for NIR-assisted image denoising. We first propose the frequency correlation prior based on an in-depth statistical frequency analysis of NIR-RGB image pairs. The prior reveals the complementary correlation of NIR and RGB images in the frequency domain. Leveraging frequency correlation prior, we then establish a frequency learning framework composed of Frequency Dynamic Selection Mechanism (FDSM) and Frequency Exhaustive Fusion Mechanism (FEFM). FDSM dynamically selects complementary information from NIR and RGB images in the frequency domain, and FEFM strengthens the control of common and differential features during the fusion process of NIR and RGB features. Extensive experiments on simulated and real data validate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/yuchenwang815/FCENet.

StepFun, Bin Wang, Bojun Wang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

Ailin Huang, Bingxin Li, Bruce Wang et al.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have significantly advanced intelligent human-computer interaction, yet their reliance on text-based outputs limits their ability to generate natural speech responses directly, hindering seamless audio interactions. To address this, we introduce Step-Audio-AQAA, a fully end-to-end LALM designed for Audio Query-Audio Answer (AQAA) tasks. The model integrates a dual-codebook audio tokenizer for linguistic and semantic feature extraction, a 130-billion-parameter backbone LLM and a neural vocoder for high-fidelity speech synthesis. Our post-training approach employs interleaved token-output of text and audio to enhance semantic coherence and combines Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) with model merge to improve performance. Evaluations on the StepEval-Audio-360 benchmark demonstrate that Step-Audio-AQAA excels especially in speech control, outperforming the state-of-art LALMs in key areas. This work contributes a promising solution for end-to-end LALMs and highlights the critical role of token-based vocoder in enhancing overall performance for AQAA tasks.

Hongyuan Wang, Lizhi Wang, Jiang Xu et al.

Spectral super-resolution that aims to recover hyperspectral image (HSI) from easily obtainable RGB image has drawn increasing interest in the field of computational photography. The crucial aspect of spectral super-resolution lies in exploiting the correlation within HSIs. However, two types of bottlenecks in existing Transformers limit performance improvement and practical applications. First, existing Transformers often separately emphasize either spatial-wise or spectral-wise correlation, disrupting the 3D features of HSI and hindering the exploitation of unified spatial-spectral correlation. Second, existing self-attention mechanism always establishes full-rank correlation matrix by learning the correlation between pairs of tokens, leading to its inability to describe linear dependence widely existing in HSI among multiple tokens. To address these issues, we propose a novel Exhaustive Correlation Transformer (ECT) for spectral super-resolution. First, we propose a Spectral-wise Discontinuous 3D (SD3D) splitting strategy, which models unified spatial-spectral correlation by integrating spatial-wise continuous splitting strategy and spectral-wise discontinuous splitting strategy. Second, we propose a Dynamic Low-Rank Mapping (DLRM) model, which captures linear dependence among multiple tokens through a dynamically calculated low-rank dependence map. By integrating unified spatial-spectral attention and linear dependence, our ECT can model exhaustive correlation within HSI. The experimental results on both simulated and real data indicate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Codes and pretrained models will be available later.

Hongyuan Wang, Xiang Liu, Wen Kang et al.

To eliminate the problems of large dimensional differences, big semantic gap, and mutual interference caused by hybrid features, in this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Features Guidance Network for partial-to-partial point cloud registration(MFG). The proposed network mainly includes four parts: keypoints' feature extraction, correspondences searching, correspondences credibility computation, and SVD, among which correspondences searching and correspondence credibility computation are the cores of the network. Unlike the previous work, we utilize the shape features and the spatial coordinates to guide correspondences search independently and fusing the matching results to obtain the final matching matrix. In the correspondences credibility computation module, based on the conflicted relationship between the features matching matrix and the coordinates matching matrix, we score the reliability for each correspondence, which can reduce the impact of mismatched or non-matched points. Experimental results show that our network outperforms the current state-of-the-art while maintaining computational efficiency.