Li Cao

Yangzhen Wu, Aaron J. Li, Wenjie Ma et al.

The rapid progress of frontier large language models has led to widespread benchmark saturation, limiting the ability of existing datasets to differentiate model capabilities or provide useful training signal. For instance, on LiveCodeBench, frontier models achieve over 99% Pass@1 on easy splits and exceed 90% Pass@1 on average across difficulty levels. Constructing new, challenging datasets typically requires substantial human effort, creating a bottleneck for progress. We introduce BenchEvolver, a solution-centric evolutionary framework that automatically transforms existing coding problems into harder variants. Rather than generating problems from scratch, BenchEvolver evolves reference solutions through structured transformations and derives corresponding statements and tests from the evolved solutions. This design grounds generation in executable semantics, enabling scalable construction of high-quality, diverse, and difficult tasks with verifiable correctness. Applying BenchEvolver to LiveCodeBench and SciCode, we obtain evolved tasks that are substantially harder while maintaining validity, reference correctness, and diversity. We further curate LiveCodeBench-Plus, a 91-problem benchmark combining evolved and difficult original LCB-v6 tasks, where frontier-model Pass@1 ranges from 27.5% to 62.6%, restoring clear discrimination among strong coding models. Importantly, evolved tasks remain challenging even for the model that generates them, enabling self-improvement. We further show that RL on evolved LCB tasks improves held-out coding performance: for gpt-oss-20b, seed+evolved training achieves +8.7 and +8.3 Pass@1 gains on LCB v6 Hard and LCB-Pro Easy, exceeding seed-only gains by 70.7% and 34.8%, respectively. Our results show that BenchEvolver can convert saturated benchmarks into frontier-level evaluation suites and reusable training signal.

Xiao Wang, Qingyi Si, Jianlong Wu et al.

Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) have made significant strides in video understanding but struggle with long videos due to the limitations of their backbone LLMs. Existing solutions rely on length extrapolation, which is memory-constrained, or visual token compression, which primarily leverages low-level temporal redundancy while overlooking the more effective high-level knowledge redundancy. To address this, we propose $\textbf{ReTaKe}$, a training-free method with two novel modules DPSelect and PivotKV, to jointly reduce both temporal visual redundancy and knowledge redundancy for video compression. To align with the way of human temporal perception, DPSelect identifies keyframes based on inter-frame distance peaks. To leverage LLMs' learned prior knowledge, PivotKV marks the keyframes as pivots and compress non-pivot frames by pruning low-attention tokens in their KV cache. ReTaKe enables VideoLLMs to process 8 times longer frames (up to 2048), outperforming similar-sized models by 3-5% and even rivaling much larger ones on VideoMME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and LVBench. Moreover, by overlapping compression operations with prefilling, ReTaKe introduces only ~10% prefilling latency overhead while reducing decoding latency by ~20%. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCZwangxiao/video-ReTaKe.

Xiao Wang, Qingyi Si, Jianlong Wu et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have revolutionized video understanding, yet are still limited by context length when processing long videos. Recent methods compress videos by leveraging visual redundancy uniformly, yielding promising results. Nevertheless, our quantitative analysis shows that redundancy varies significantly across time and model layers, necessitating a more flexible compression strategy. We propose AdaReTaKe, a training-free method that flexibly reduces visual redundancy by allocating compression ratios among time and layers with theoretical guarantees. Integrated into state-of-the-art MLLMs, AdaReTaKe improves processing capacity from 256 to 2048 frames while preserving critical information. Experiments on VideoMME, MLVU, LongVideoBench, and LVBench datasets demonstrate that AdaReTaKe outperforms existing methods by 2.3% and 2.8% for 7B and 72B models, respectively, with even greater improvements of 5.9% and 6.0% on the longest LVBench. Our code is available at https://github.com/SCZwangxiao/video-FlexReduc.git.

Weidong Yan, Pei Yan, Li Cao

With the rapid development of deep learning, a variety of change detection methods based on deep learning have emerged in recent years. However, these methods usually require a large number of training samples to train the network model, so it is very expensive. In this paper, we introduce a completely unsupervised shallow convolutional neural network (USCNN) fusion approach for change detection. Firstly, the bi-temporal images are transformed into different feature spaces by using convolution kernels of different sizes to extract multi-scale information of the images. Secondly, the output features of bi-temporal images at the same convolution kernels are subtracted to obtain the corresponding difference images, and the difference feature images at the same scale are fused into one feature image by using 1 * 1 convolution layer. Finally, the output features of different scales are concatenated and a 1 * 1 convolution layer is used to fuse the multi-scale information of the image. The model parameters are obtained by a redesigned sparse function. Our model has three features: the entire training process is conducted in an unsupervised manner, the network architecture is shallow, and the objective function is sparse. Thus, it can be seen as a kind of lightweight network model. Experimental results on four real remote sensing datasets indicate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Xinjie Li, Yang Zhao, Dong Wang et al.

Large-scale generative models have achieved remarkable advancements in various visual tasks, yet their application to shadow removal in images remains challenging. These models often generate diverse, realistic details without adequate focus on fidelity, failing to meet the crucial requirements of shadow removal, which necessitates precise preservation of image content. In contrast to prior approaches that aimed to regenerate shadow-free images from scratch, this paper utilizes diffusion models to generate and refine image residuals. This strategy fully uses the inherent detailed information within shadowed images, resulting in a more efficient and faithful reconstruction of shadow-free content. Additionally, to revent the accumulation of errors during the generation process, a crosstimestep self-enhancement training strategy is proposed. This strategy leverages the network itself to augment the training data, not only increasing the volume of data but also enabling the network to dynamically correct its generation trajectory, ensuring a more accurate and robust output. In addition, to address the loss of original details in the process of image encoding and decoding of large generative models, a content-preserved encoder-decoder structure is designed with a control mechanism and multi-scale skip connections to achieve high-fidelity shadow-free image reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can reproduce high-quality results based on a large latent diffusion prior and faithfully preserve the original contents in shadow regions.

Zaiyan Zhang, Jining Yan, Yuanqi Liang et al.

Remote sensing images often suffer from substantial data loss due to factors such as thick cloud cover and sensor limitations. Existing methods for imputing missing values in remote sensing images fail to fully exploit spatiotemporal auxiliary information, which restricts the accuracy of their reconstructions. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel deep learning-based approach called MS2TAN (Multi-Scale Masked Spatial-Temporal Attention Network) for reconstructing time-series remote sensing images. First, we introduce an efficient spatiotemporal feature extractor based on Masked Spatial-Temporal Attention (MSTA) to capture high-quality representations of spatiotemporal neighborhood features surrounding missing regions while significantly reducing the computational complexity of the attention mechanism. Second, a Multi-Scale Restoration Network composed of MSTA-based Feature Extractors is designed to progressively refine missing values by exploring spatiotemporal neighborhood features at different scales. Third, we propose a "Pixel-Structure-Perception" Multi-Objective Joint Optimization method to enhance the visual quality of the reconstructed results from multiple perspectives and to preserve more texture structures. Finally, quantitative experimental results under multi-temporal inputs on two public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms competitive approaches, achieving a 9.76%/9.30% reduction in Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and a 0.56 dB/0.62 dB increase in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), along with stronger texture and structural consistency. Ablation experiments further validate the contribution of the core innovations to imputation accuracy.

Zhihua Ban, Jianguo Liu, Li Cao

Superpixel segmentation algorithms are to partition an image into perceptually coherence atomic regions by assigning every pixel a superpixel label. Those algorithms have been wildly used as a preprocessing step in computer vision works, as they can enormously reduce the number of entries of subsequent algorithms. In this work, we propose an alternative superpixel segmentation method based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM) by assuming that each superpixel corresponds to a Gaussian distribution, and assuming that each pixel is generated by first randomly choosing one distribution from several Gaussian distributions which are defined to be related to that pixel, and then the pixel is drawn from the selected distribution. Based on this assumption, each pixel is supposed to be drawn from a mixture of Gaussian distributions with unknown parameters (GMM). An algorithm based on expectation-maximization method is applied to estimate the unknown parameters. Once the unknown parameters are obtained, the superpixel label of a pixel is determined by a posterior probability. The success of applying GMM to superpixel segmentation depends on the two major differences between the traditional GMM-based clustering and the proposed one: data points in our model may be non-identically distributed, and we present an approach to control the shape of the estimated Gaussian functions by adjusting their covariance matrices. Our method is of linear complexity with respect to the number of pixels. The proposed algorithm is inherently parallel and can get faster speed by adding simple OpenMP directives to our implementation. According to our experiments, our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art superpixel algorithms in accuracy and presents a competitive performance in computational efficiency.