Yawei Li

Yawei Li, Yuchen Fan, Xiaoyu Xiang et al. · eth-zurich

The aim of this paper is to propose a mechanism to efficiently and explicitly model image hierarchies in the global, regional, and local range for image restoration. To achieve that, we start by analyzing two important properties of natural images including cross-scale similarity and anisotropic image features. Inspired by that, we propose the anchored stripe self-attention which achieves a good balance between the space and time complexity of self-attention and the modelling capacity beyond the regional range. Then we propose a new network architecture dubbed GRL to explicitly model image hierarchies in the Global, Regional, and Local range via anchored stripe self-attention, window self-attention, and channel attention enhanced convolution. Finally, the proposed network is applied to 7 image restoration types, covering both real and synthetic settings. The proposed method sets the new state-of-the-art for several of those. Code will be available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/GRL-Image-Restoration.git.

Kai Zhang, Yawei Li, Jingyun Liang et al. · eth-zurich

While recent years have witnessed a dramatic upsurge of exploiting deep neural networks toward solving image denoising, existing methods mostly rely on simple noise assumptions, such as additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), JPEG compression noise and camera sensor noise, and a general-purpose blind denoising method for real images remains unsolved. In this paper, we attempt to solve this problem from the perspective of network architecture design and training data synthesis. Specifically, for the network architecture design, we propose a swin-conv block to incorporate the local modeling ability of residual convolutional layer and non-local modeling ability of swin transformer block, and then plug it as the main building block into the widely-used image-to-image translation UNet architecture. For the training data synthesis, we design a practical noise degradation model which takes into consideration different kinds of noise (including Gaussian, Poisson, speckle, JPEG compression, and processed camera sensor noises) and resizing, and also involves a random shuffle strategy and a double degradation strategy. Extensive experiments on AGWN removal and real image denoising demonstrate that the new network architecture design achieves state-of-the-art performance and the new degradation model can help to significantly improve the practicability. We believe our work can provide useful insights into current denoising research.

Yawei Li, Kamil Adamczewski, Wen Li et al. · eth-zurich

Channel (or 3D filter) pruning serves as an effective way to accelerate the inference of neural networks. There has been a flurry of algorithms that try to solve this practical problem, each being claimed effective in some ways. Yet, a benchmark to compare those algorithms directly is lacking, mainly due to the complexity of the algorithms and some custom settings such as the particular network configuration or training procedure. A fair benchmark is important for the further development of channel pruning. Meanwhile, recent investigations reveal that the channel configurations discovered by pruning algorithms are at least as important as the pre-trained weights. This gives channel pruning a new role, namely searching the optimal channel configuration. In this paper, we try to determine the channel configuration of the pruned models by random search. The proposed approach provides a new way to compare different methods, namely how well they behave compared with random pruning. We show that this simple strategy works quite well compared with other channel pruning methods. We also show that under this setting, there are surprisingly no clear winners among different channel importance evaluation methods, which then may tilt the research efforts into advanced channel configuration searching methods.

Yawei Li, Kai Zhang, Radu Timofte et al. · eth-zurich, tencent-ai

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2022 challenge on efficient single image super-resolution with focus on the proposed solutions and results. The task of the challenge was to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of $\times$4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high resolution images. The aim was to design a network for single image super-resolution that achieved improvement of efficiency measured according to several metrics including runtime, parameters, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption while at least maintaining the PSNR of 29.00dB on DIV2K validation set. IMDN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 3 tracks including the main track (runtime), sub-track one (model complexity), and sub-track two (overall performance). In the main track, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated. The rank of the teams were determined directly by the absolute value of the average runtime on the validation set and test set. In sub-track one, the number of parameters and FLOPs were considered. And the individual rankings of the two metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking in this track. In sub-track two, all of the five metrics mentioned in the description of the challenge including runtime, parameter count, FLOPs, activations, and memory consumption were considered. Similar to sub-track one, the rankings of five metrics were summed up to determine a final ranking. The challenge had 303 registered participants, and 43 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single image super-resolution.

Jiezhang Cao, Qin Wang, Yongqin Xian et al. · eth-zurich

Learning continuous image representations is recently gaining popularity for image super-resolution (SR) because of its ability to reconstruct high-resolution images with arbitrary scales from low-resolution inputs. Existing methods mostly ensemble nearby features to predict the new pixel at any queried coordinate in the SR image. Such a local ensemble suffers from some limitations: i) it has no learnable parameters and it neglects the similarity of the visual features; ii) it has a limited receptive field and cannot ensemble relevant features in a large field which are important in an image. To address these issues, this paper proposes a continuous implicit attention-in-attention network, called CiaoSR. We explicitly design an implicit attention network to learn the ensemble weights for the nearby local features. Furthermore, we embed a scale-aware attention in this implicit attention network to exploit additional non-local information. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate CiaoSR significantly outperforms the existing single image SR methods with the same backbone. In addition, CiaoSR also achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the arbitrary-scale SR task. The effectiveness of the method is also demonstrated on the real-world SR setting. More importantly, CiaoSR can be flexibly integrated into any backbone to improve the SR performance.

Jiezhang Cao, Jingyun Liang, Kai Zhang et al. · eth-zurich

Reference-based image super-resolution (RefSR) aims to exploit auxiliary reference (Ref) images to super-resolve low-resolution (LR) images. Recently, RefSR has been attracting great attention as it provides an alternative way to surpass single image SR. However, addressing the RefSR problem has two critical challenges: (i) It is difficult to match the correspondence between LR and Ref images when they are significantly different; (ii) How to transfer the relevant texture from Ref images to compensate the details for LR images is very challenging. To address these issues of RefSR, this paper proposes a deformable attention Transformer, namely DATSR, with multiple scales, each of which consists of a texture feature encoder (TFE) module, a reference-based deformable attention (RDA) module and a residual feature aggregation (RFA) module. Specifically, TFE first extracts image transformation (e.g., brightness) insensitive features for LR and Ref images, RDA then can exploit multiple relevant textures to compensate more information for LR features, and RFA lastly aggregates LR features and relevant textures to get a more visually pleasant result. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DATSR achieves state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets quantitatively and qualitatively.

Yuli Zhou, Guolei Sun, Yawei Li et al.

This study investigates the application and performance of the Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2) in the challenging task of video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS). VCOS involves detecting objects that blend seamlessly in the surroundings for videos, due to similar colors and textures, poor light conditions, etc. Compared to the objects in normal scenes, camouflaged objects are much more difficult to detect. SAM2, a video foundation model, has shown potential in various tasks. But its effectiveness in dynamic camouflaged scenarios remains under-explored. This study presents a comprehensive study on SAM2's ability in VCOS. First, we assess SAM2's performance on camouflaged video datasets using different models and prompts (click, box, and mask). Second, we explore the integration of SAM2 with existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and VCOS methods. Third, we specifically adapt SAM2 by fine-tuning it on the video camouflaged dataset. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SAM2 has excellent zero-shot ability of detecting camouflaged objects in videos. We also show that this ability could be further improved by specifically adjusting SAM2's parameters for VCOS. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoustan/SAM2-VCOS

Julian Moosmann, Pietro Bonazzi, Yawei Li et al.

Smart glasses are rapidly gaining advanced functions thanks to cutting-edge computing technologies, especially accelerated hardware architectures, and tiny Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms. However, integrating AI into smart glasses featuring a small form factor and limited battery capacity remains challenging for a satisfactory user experience. To this end, this paper proposes the design of a smart glasses platform for always-on on-device object detection with an all-day battery lifetime. The proposed platform is based on GAP9, a novel multi-core RISC-V processor from Greenwaves Technologies. Additionally, a family of sub-million parameter TinyissimoYOLO networks are proposed. They are benchmarked on established datasets, capable of differentiating up to 80 classes on MS-COCO. Evaluations on the smart glasses prototype demonstrate TinyissimoYOLO's inference latency of only 17ms and consuming 1.59mJ energy per inference. An end-to-end latency of 56ms is achieved which is equivalent to 18 frames per seconds (FPS) with a total power consumption of 62.9mW. This ensures continuous system runtime of up to 9.3 hours on a 154mAh battery. These results outperform MCUNet (TinyNAS+TinyEngine), which runs a simpler task (image classification) at just 7.3 FPS, while the 18 FPS achieved in this paper even include image-capturing, network inference, and detection post-processing. The algorithm's code is released open with this paper and can be found here: https://github.com/ETH-PBL/TinyissimoYOLO

Bin Ren, Guofeng Mei, Danda Pani Paudel et al.

Contrastive learning (CL) for Vision Transformers (ViTs) in image domains has achieved performance comparable to CL for traditional convolutional backbones. However, in 3D point cloud pretraining with ViTs, masked autoencoder (MAE) modeling remains dominant. This raises the question: Can we take the best of both worlds? To answer this question, we first empirically validate that integrating MAE-based point cloud pre-training with the standard contrastive learning paradigm, even with meticulous design, can lead to a decrease in performance. To address this limitation, we reintroduce CL into the MAE-based point cloud pre-training paradigm by leveraging the inherent contrastive properties of MAE. Specifically, rather than relying on extensive data augmentation as commonly used in the image domain, we randomly mask the input tokens twice to generate contrastive input pairs. Subsequently, a weight-sharing encoder and two identically structured decoders are utilized to perform masked token reconstruction. Additionally, we propose that for an input token masked by both masks simultaneously, the reconstructed features should be as similar as possible. This naturally establishes an explicit contrastive constraint within the generative MAE-based pre-training paradigm, resulting in our proposed method, Point-CMAE. Consequently, Point-CMAE effectively enhances the representation quality and transfer performance compared to its MAE counterpart. Experimental evaluations across various downstream applications, including classification, part segmentation, and few-shot learning, demonstrate the efficacy of our framework in surpassing state-of-the-art techniques under standard ViTs and single-modal settings. The source code and trained models are available at: https://github.com/Amazingren/Point-CMAE.

Hao Fang, Peng Wu, Yawei Li et al.

Open-Vocabulary Video Instance Segmentation (VIS) is attracting increasing attention due to its ability to segment and track arbitrary objects. However, the recent Open-Vocabulary VIS attempts obtained unsatisfactory results, especially in terms of generalization ability of novel categories. We discover that the domain gap between the VLM features (e.g., CLIP) and the instance queries and the underutilization of temporal consistency are two central causes. To mitigate these issues, we design and train a novel Open-Vocabulary VIS baseline called OVFormer. OVFormer utilizes a lightweight module for unified embedding alignment between query embeddings and CLIP image embeddings to remedy the domain gap. Unlike previous image-based training methods, we conduct video-based model training and deploy a semi-online inference scheme to fully mine the temporal consistency in the video. Without bells and whistles, OVFormer achieves 21.9 mAP with a ResNet-50 backbone on LV-VIS, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art performance by 7.7. Extensive experiments on some Close-Vocabulary VIS datasets also demonstrate the strong zero-shot generalization ability of OVFormer (+ 7.6 mAP on YouTube-VIS 2019, + 3.9 mAP on OVIS). Code is available at https://github.com/fanghaook/OVFormer.

Bin Ren, Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu et al.

With the proliferation of mobile devices, the need for an efficient model to restore any degraded image has become increasingly significant and impactful. Traditional approaches typically involve training dedicated models for each specific degradation, resulting in inefficiency and redundancy. More recent solutions either introduce additional modules to learn visual prompts significantly increasing model size or incorporate cross-modal transfer from large language models trained on vast datasets, adding complexity to the system architecture. In contrast, our approach, termed RAM, takes a unified path that leverages inherent similarities across various degradations to enable both efficient and comprehensive restoration through a joint embedding mechanism without scaling up the model or relying on large multimodal models. Specifically, we examine the sub-latent space of each input, identifying key components and reweighting them in a gated manner. This intrinsic degradation awareness is further combined with contextualized attention in an X-shaped framework, enhancing local-global interactions. Extensive benchmarking in an all-in-one restoration setting confirms RAM's SOTA performance, reducing model complexity by approximately 82% in trainable parameters and 85% in FLOPs. Our code and models will be publicly available.

Amirhossein Vahidi, Simon Schoßer, Lisa Wimmer et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic self-supervised learning via Scoring Rule Minimization (ProSMIN), which leverages the power of probabilistic models to enhance representation quality and mitigate collapsing representations. Our proposed approach involves two neural networks; the online network and the target network, which collaborate and learn the diverse distribution of representations from each other through knowledge distillation. By presenting the input samples in two augmented formats, the online network is trained to predict the target network representation of the same sample under a different augmented view. The two networks are trained via our new loss function based on proper scoring rules. We provide a theoretical justification for ProSMIN's convergence, demonstrating the strict propriety of its modified scoring rule. This insight validates the method's optimization process and contributes to its robustness and effectiveness in improving representation quality. We evaluate our probabilistic model on various downstream tasks, such as in-distribution generalization, out-of-distribution detection, dataset corruption, low-shot learning, and transfer learning. Our method achieves superior accuracy and calibration, surpassing the self-supervised baseline in a wide range of experiments on large-scale datasets like ImageNet-O and ImageNet-C, ProSMIN demonstrates its scalability and real-world applicability.

Danaé Broustail, Anna Tegon, Thorir Mar Ingolfsson et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) enables non-invasive monitoring of brain activity across clinical and neurotechnology applications, yet building foundation models for EEG remains challenging due to \emph{differing electrode topologies} and \emph{computational scalability}, as Transformer architectures incur quadratic sequence complexity. As a joint solution, we propose \textbf{LuMamba} (\textbf{L}atent \textbf{U}nified \textbf{Mamba}), a self-supervised framework combining topology-invariant encodings with linear-complexity state-space modeling, using LUNA's learned-query cross-attention mechanism for channel unification~\cite{luna}, and FEMBA's bidirectional Mamba blocks for efficient temporal modeling~\cite{femba}. Within this architecture, we provide the first systematic investigation of the Latent-Euclidean Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (LeJEPA) for biosignal learning. Pre-trained on over 21,000 hours of unlabeled EEG from the TUEG corpus, LuMamba is evaluated on five downstream tasks spanning abnormality detection, artifact recognition, and mental condition classification across electrode configurations ranging from 16 to 26 channels. In the pre-training objective, masked reconstruction alone yields structured but less generalizable representations, while LeJEPA alone produces diffuse embeddings; combining both objectives achieves the most robust performance. With only 4.6M parameters, LuMamba attains 80.99\% balanced accuracy on TUAB and achieves state-of-art performance on Alzheimer's detection (0.97 AUPR), while requiring \textbf{377$\times$ fewer FLOPS} than state-of-art models at equivalent sequence lengths and scaling to \textbf{12$\times$ longer sequences} before reaching typical GPU memory limits. Code is available at https://github.com/pulp-bio/biofoundation

Pietro Bonazzi, Thomas Ruegg, Sizhen Bian et al.

Intelligent edge vision tasks encounter the critical challenge of ensuring power and latency efficiency due to the typically heavy computational load they impose on edge platforms.This work leverages one of the first "AI in sensor" vision platforms, IMX500 by Sony, to achieve ultra-fast and ultra-low-power end-to-end edge vision applications. We evaluate the IMX500 and compare it to other edge platforms, such as the Google Coral Dev Micro and Sony Spresense, by exploring gaze estimation as a case study. We propose TinyTracker, a highly efficient, fully quantized model for 2D gaze estimation designed to maximize the performance of the edge vision systems considered in this study. TinyTracker achieves a 41x size reduction (600Kb) compared to iTracker [1] without significant loss in gaze estimation accuracy (maximum of 0.16 cm when fully quantized). TinyTracker's deployment on the Sony IMX500 vision sensor results in end-to-end latency of around 19ms. The camera takes around 17.9ms to read, process and transmit the pixels to the accelerator. The inference time of the network is 0.86ms with an additional 0.24 ms for retrieving the results from the sensor. The overall energy consumption of the end-to-end system is 4.9 mJ, including 0.06 mJ for inference. The end-to-end study shows that IMX500 is 1.7x faster than CoralMicro (19ms vs 34.4ms) and 7x more power efficient (4.9mJ VS 34.2mJ)

Ashkan Khakzar, Yawei Li, Yang Zhang et al.

One challenging property lurking in medical datasets is the imbalanced data distribution, where the frequency of the samples between the different classes is not balanced. Training a model on an imbalanced dataset can introduce unique challenges to the learning problem where a model is biased towards the highly frequent class. Many methods are proposed to tackle the distributional differences and the imbalanced problem. However, the impact of these approaches on the learned features is not well studied. In this paper, we look deeper into the internal units of neural networks to observe how handling data imbalance affects the learned features. We study several popular cost-sensitive approaches for handling data imbalance and analyze the feature maps of the convolutional neural networks from multiple perspectives: analyzing the alignment of salient features with pathologies and analyzing the pathology-related concepts encoded by the networks. Our study reveals differences and insights regarding the trained models that are not reflected by quantitative metrics such as AUROC and AP and show up only by looking at the models through a lens.

Kamil Adamczewski, Yawei Li, Luc van Gool

Neural network pruning is a rich field with a variety of approaches. In this work, we propose to connect the existing pruning concepts such as leave-one-out pruning and oracle pruning and develop them into a more general Shapley value-based framework that targets the compression of convolutional neural networks. To allow for practical applications in utilizing the Shapley value, this work presents the Shapley value approximations, and performs the comparative analysis in terms of cost-benefit utility for the neural network compression. The proposed ranks are evaluated against a new benchmark, Oracle rank, constructed based on oracle sets. The broad experiments show that the proposed normative ranking and its approximations show practical results, obtaining state-of-the-art network compression.

Yawei Li, Xin Wu, Ping Yang et al.

The recent development of imaging and sequencing technologies enables systematic advances in the clinical study of lung cancer. Meanwhile, the human mind is limited in effectively handling and fully utilizing the accumulation of such enormous amounts of data. Machine learning-based approaches play a critical role in integrating and analyzing these large and complex datasets, which have extensively characterized lung cancer through the use of different perspectives from these accrued data. In this article, we provide an overview of machine learning-based approaches that strengthen the varying aspects of lung cancer diagnosis and therapy, including early detection, auxiliary diagnosis, prognosis prediction and immunotherapy practice. Moreover, we highlight the challenges and opportunities for future applications of machine learning in lung cancer.

Yuli Zhou, Qingxuan Chen, Luca Benini et al.

Adaptive Rounding has emerged as an alternative to round-to-nearest (RTN) for post-training quantization by enabling cross-element error cancellation. Yet, dense and element-wise rounding matrices are prohibitively expensive for billion-parameter large language models (LLMs). We revisit adaptive rounding from an efficiency perspective and propose VQRound, a parameter-efficient optimization framework that reparameterizes the rounding matrix into a compact codebook. Unlike low-rank alternatives, VQRound minimizes the element-wise worst-case error under $L_\infty$ norm, which is critical for handling heavy-tailed weight distributions in LLMs. Beyond reparameterization, we identify rounding initialization as a decisive factor and develop a lightweight end-to-end finetuning pipeline that optimizes codebooks across all layers using only 128 samples. Extensive experiments on OPT, LLaMA, LLaMA2, and Qwen3 models demonstrate that VQRound achieves better convergence than traditional adaptive rounding at the same number of steps while using as little as 0.2% of the trainable parameters. Our results show that adaptive rounding can be made both scalable and fast-fitting. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoustan/VQRound.

Yichang Liu, Tianyu Wang, Ziyi Ye et al.

We present a framework that integrates EEG-based visual and motor imagery (VI/MI) with robotic control to enable real-time, intention-driven grasping and placement. Motivated by the promise of BCI-driven robotics to enhance human-robot interaction, this system bridges neural signals with physical control by deploying offline-pretrained decoders in a zero-shot manner within an online streaming pipeline. This establishes a dual-channel intent interface that translates visual intent into robotic actions, with VI identifying objects for grasping and MI determining placement poses, enabling intuitive control over both what to grasp and where to place. The system operates solely on EEG via a cue-free imagery protocol, achieving integration and online validation. Implemented on a Base robotic platform and evaluated across diverse scenarios, including occluded targets or varying participant postures, the system achieves online decoding accuracies of 40.23% (VI) and 62.59% (MI), with an end-to-end task success rate of 20.88%. These results demonstrate that high-level visual cognition can be decoded in real time and translated into executable robot commands, bridging the gap between neural signals and physical interaction, and validating the flexibility of a purely imagery-based BCI paradigm for practical human-robot collaboration.

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/.

Yang Zhang, Yawei Li, Hannah Brown et al.

Feature attribution explains neural network outputs by identifying relevant input features. The attribution has to be faithful, meaning that the attributed features must mirror the input features that influence the output. One recent trend to test faithfulness is to fit a model on designed data with known relevant features and then compare attributions with ground truth input features.This idea assumes that the model learns to use all and only these designed features, for which there is no guarantee. In this paper, we solve this issue by designing the network and manually setting its weights, along with designing data. The setup, AttributionLab, serves as a sanity check for faithfulness: If an attribution method is not faithful in a controlled environment, it can be unreliable in the wild. The environment is also a laboratory for controlled experiments by which we can analyze attribution methods and suggest improvements.

Hang Guo, Yong Guo, Yaohua Zha et al.

The Mamba-based image restoration backbones have recently demonstrated significant potential in balancing global reception and computational efficiency. However, the inherent causal modeling limitation of Mamba, where each token depends solely on its predecessors in the scanned sequence, restricts the full utilization of pixels across the image and thus presents new challenges in image restoration. In this work, we propose MambaIRv2, which equips Mamba with the non-causal modeling ability similar to ViTs to reach the attentive state space restoration model. Specifically, the proposed attentive state-space equation allows to attend beyond the scanned sequence and facilitate image unfolding with just one single scan. Moreover, we further introduce a semantic-guided neighboring mechanism to encourage interaction between distant but similar pixels. Extensive experiments show our MambaIRv2 outperforms SRFormer by even 0.35dB PSNR for lightweight SR even with 9.3\% less parameters and suppresses HAT on classic SR by up to 0.29dB. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/MambaIR.

Yawei Li, Yang Zhang, Kenji Kawaguchi et al.

Feature attribution methods attempt to explain neural network predictions by identifying relevant features. However, establishing a cohesive framework for assessing feature attribution remains a challenge. There are several views through which we can evaluate attributions. One principal lens is to observe the effect of perturbing attributed features on the model's behavior (i.e., faithfulness). While providing useful insights, existing faithfulness evaluations suffer from shortcomings that we reveal in this paper. In this work, we propose two new perspectives within the faithfulness paradigm that reveal intuitive properties: soundness and completeness. Soundness assesses the degree to which attributed features are truly predictive features, while completeness examines how well the resulting attribution reveals all the predictive features. The two perspectives are based on a firm mathematical foundation and provide quantitative metrics that are computable through efficient algorithms. We apply these metrics to mainstream attribution methods, offering a novel lens through which to analyze and compare feature attribution methods.

Hang Guo, Zhaoyang Jia, Jiahao Li et al.

The autoregressive video diffusion model has recently gained considerable research interest due to its causal modeling and iterative denoising. In this work, we identify that the multi-head self-attention in these models under-utilizes historical frames: approximately 25% heads attend almost exclusively to the current frame, and discarding their KV caches incurs only minor performance degradation. Building upon this, we propose Dummy Forcing, a simple yet effective method to control context accessibility across different heads. Specifically, the proposed heterogeneous memory allocation reduces head-wise context redundancy, accompanied by dynamic head programming to adaptively classify head types. Moreover, we develop a context packing technique to achieve more aggressive cache compression. Without additional training, our Dummy Forcing delivers up to 2.0x speedup over the baseline, supporting video generation at 24.3 FPS with less than 0.5% quality drop. Project page is available at https://csguoh.github.io/project/DummyForcing/.

Wei Huang, Haotong Qin, Yangdong Liu et al.

Post-training quantization (PTQ) is an effective technique for compressing large language models (LLMs). However, while uniform-precision quantization is computationally efficient, it often compromises model performance. To address this, we propose SliM-LLM, a salience-driven mixed-precision quantization framework that allocates bit-widths at the group-wise. Our approach leverages the observation that important weights follow a structured distribution and introduces two key components: \textbf{1)} \textit{Salience-Determined Bit Allocation} adaptively assigns bit-widths to groups within each layer based on their salience; and \textbf{2)} \textit{Salience-Weighted Quantizer Calibration} optimizes quantizer parameters by incorporating element-level salience. With its structured partitioning, SliM-LLM provides a hardware-friendly solution that matches the efficiency of uniform quantization methods while improving accuracy. Experiments show that SliM-LLM achieves superior performance across various LLMs at low bit-widths. For example, a 2-bit quantized LLaMA-7B model reduces memory usage by nearly 6x compared to the floating-point baseline, decreases perplexity by 48\% compared to state-of-the-art gradient-free PTQ methods, and maintains GPU inference speed. Additionally, the extended version, SliM-LLM$^+$, which incorporates gradient-based quantization, further reduces perplexity by 35.1\%. Our code is available at https://github.com/Aaronhuang-778/SliM-LLM

Yanlong Chen, Amirhossein Habibian, Luca Benini et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong multimodal performance but are costly to deploy, and post-training quantization often causes significant accuracy loss. Despite its potential, quantization-aware training for VLMs remains underexplored. We propose GRACE, a framework unifying knowledge distillation and QAT under the Information Bottleneck principle: quantization constrains information capacity while distillation guides what to preserve within this budget. Treating the teacher as a proxy for task-relevant information, we introduce confidence-gated decoupled distillation to filter unreliable supervision, relational centered kernel alignment to transfer visual token structures, and an adaptive controller via Lagrangian relaxation to balance fidelity against capacity constraints. Across extensive benchmarks on LLaVA and Qwen families, our INT4 models consistently outperform FP16 baselines (e.g., LLaVA-1.5-7B: 70.1 vs. 66.8 on SQA; Qwen2-VL-2B: 76.9 vs. 72.6 on MMBench), nearly matching teacher performance. Using real INT4 kernel, we achieve 3$\times$ throughput with 54% memory reduction. This principled framework significantly outperforms existing quantization methods, making GRACE a compelling solution for resource-constrained deployment.

Hang Guo, Yawei Li, Taolin Zhang et al.

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) modeling has gained popularity for its shift towards next-scale prediction. However, existing VAR paradigms process the entire token map at each scale step, leading to the complexity and runtime scaling dramatically with image resolution. To address this challenge, we propose FastVAR, a post-training acceleration method for efficient resolution scaling with VARs. Our key finding is that the majority of latency arises from the large-scale step where most tokens have already converged. Leveraging this observation, we develop the cached token pruning strategy that only forwards pivotal tokens for scale-specific modeling while using cached tokens from previous scale steps to restore the pruned slots. This significantly reduces the number of forwarded tokens and improves the efficiency at larger resolutions. Experiments show the proposed FastVAR can further speedup FlashAttention-accelerated VAR by 2.7$\times$ with negligible performance drop of <1%. We further extend FastVAR to zero-shot generation of higher resolution images. In particular, FastVAR can generate one 2K image with 15GB memory footprints in 1.5s on a single NVIDIA 3090 GPU. Code is available at https://github.com/csguoh/FastVAR.

Anna Tegon, Nicholas Lehmann, Yawei Li et al.

Objective: To enable continuous, long-term neuro-monitoring on wearable devices by overcoming the computational bottlenecks of Transformer-based Electroencephalography (EEG) foundation models and the quantization challenges inherent to State-Space Models (SSMs). Methods: We present FEMBA, a bidirectional Mamba architecture pre-trained on over 21,000 hours of EEG. We introduce a novel Physiologically-Aware pre-training objective, consisting of a reconstruction with low-pass filtering, to prioritize neural oscillations over high-frequency artifacts. To address the activation outliers common in SSMs, we employ Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) to compress the model to 2-bit weights. The framework is deployed on a parallel ultra-low-power RISC-V microcontroller (GAP9) using a custom double-buffered memory streaming scheme. Results: The proposed low-pass pre-training improves downstream AUROC on TUAB from 0.863 to 0.893 and AUPR from 0.862 to 0.898 compared to the best contrastive baseline. QAT successfully compresses weights with negligible performance loss, whereas standard post-training quantization degrades accuracy by approximately \textbf{30\%}. The embedded implementation achieves deterministic real-time inference (\textbf{1.70~s} per 5~s window) and reduces the memory footprint by \textbf{74\%} (to $\approx$2~MB), achieving competitive accuracy with up to \textbf{27$\times$} fewer FLOPs than Transformer benchmarks. Conclusion: FEMBA demonstrates that Mamba-based foundation models can be effectively quantized and deployed on extreme-edge hardware without sacrificing the representation quality required for robust clinical analysis. Significance: This work establishes the first full-stack framework for deploying large-scale EEG foundation models on ultra-low-power wearables, facilitating continuous, SSM based monitoring for epilepsy and sleep disorders.

Yuli Zhou, Yawei Li, Yuqian Fu et al.

Video camouflaged object segmentation (VCOS), aiming at segmenting camouflaged objects that seamlessly blend into their environment, is a fundamental vision task with various real-world applications. With the release of SAM2, video segmentation has witnessed significant progress. However, SAM2's capability of segmenting camouflaged videos is suboptimal, especially when given simple prompts such as point and box. To address the problem, we propose Camouflaged SAM2 (CamSAM2), which enhances SAM2's ability to handle camouflaged scenes without modifying SAM2's parameters. Specifically, we introduce a decamouflaged token to provide the flexibility of feature adjustment for VCOS. To make full use of fine-grained and high-resolution features from the current frame and previous frames, we propose implicit object-aware fusion (IOF) and explicit object-aware fusion (EOF) modules, respectively. Object prototype generation (OPG) is introduced to abstract and memorize object prototypes with informative details using high-quality features from previous frames. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our approach. While CamSAM2 only adds negligible learnable parameters to SAM2, it substantially outperforms SAM2 on three VCOS datasets, especially achieving 12.2 mDice gains with click prompt on MoCA-Mask and 19.6 mDice gains with mask prompt on SUN-SEG-Hard, with Hiera-T as the backbone. The code is available at https://github.com/zhoustan/CamSAM2.

Yawei Li, David Rügamer, Bernd Bischl et al.

Fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) often exhibit overconfidence, particularly when trained on small datasets, resulting in poor calibration and inaccurate uncertainty estimates. Evidential Deep Learning (EDL), an uncertainty-aware approach, enables uncertainty estimation in a single forward pass, making it a promising method for calibrating fine-tuned LLMs. However, despite its computational efficiency, EDL is prone to overfitting, as its training objective can result in overly concentrated probability distributions. To mitigate this, we propose regularizing EDL by incorporating an information bottleneck (IB). Our approach IB-EDL suppresses spurious information in the evidence generated by the model and encourages truly predictive information to influence both the predictions and uncertainty estimates. Extensive experiments across various fine-tuned LLMs and tasks demonstrate that IB-EDL outperforms both existing EDL and non-EDL approaches. By improving the trustworthiness of LLMs, IB-EDL facilitates their broader adoption in domains requiring high levels of confidence calibration. Code is available at https://github.com/sandylaker/ib-edl.

Mozhgan Hadadi, Mehdi Saraeian, Jackson Godbersen et al.

This study introduces a robust framework for generating procedural 3D models of maize (Zea mays) plants from LiDAR point cloud data, offering a scalable alternative to traditional field-based phenotyping. Our framework leverages Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) surfaces to model the leaves of maize plants, combining Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) for an initial approximation of the surface and a differentiable programming framework for precise refinement of the surface to fit the point cloud data. In the first optimization phase, PSO generates an approximate NURBS surface by optimizing its control points, aligning the surface with the LiDAR data, and providing a reliable starting point for refinement. The second phase uses NURBS-Diff, a differentiable programming framework, to enhance the accuracy of the initial fit by refining the surface geometry and capturing intricate leaf details. Our results demonstrate that, while PSO establishes a robust initial fit, the integration of differentiable NURBS significantly improves the overall quality and fidelity of the reconstructed surface. This hierarchical optimization strategy enables accurate 3D reconstruction of maize leaves across diverse genotypes, facilitating the subsequent extraction of complex traits like phyllotaxy. We demonstrate our approach on diverse genotypes of field-grown maize plants. All our codes are open-source to democratize these phenotyping approaches.

Berkay Döner, Thorir Mar Ingolfsson, Luca Benini et al.

Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive lens into human brain activity, but building large-scale models is hampered by topological heterogeneity: each public EEG data defines its own electrode layout, limiting generalization. We introduce LUNA (Latent Unified Network Architecture), a self-supervised foundation model that reconciles disparate electrode geometries while scaling linearly -- not quadratically -- with channel count. LUNA compresses multi-channel EEG into a fixed-size, topology-agnostic latent space via learned queries and cross-attention. Downstream transformer blocks then operate exclusively on this latent representation using patch-wise temporal self-attention, decoupling computation from electrode count. Pre-trained on TUEG and Siena (over 21,000 hours of raw EEG across diverse montages) using a masked-patch reconstruction objective, LUNA transfers effectively to four downstream tasks: abnormality detection, artifact rejection, slowing classification, and emotion recognition. It demonstrates highly competitive performance across several benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on TUAR and TUSL, e.g., 0.921 AUROC on TUAR, while reducing FLOPs by 300x and trimming GPU memory use by up to 10x. Critically, these gains are consistent across all evaluated electrode configurations. Code is available at https://github.com/pulp-bio/BioFoundation

Bin Ren, Eduard Zamfir, Zongwei Wu et al.

Restoring any degraded image efficiently via just one model has become increasingly significant and impactful, especially with the proliferation of mobile devices. Traditional solutions typically involve training dedicated models per degradation, resulting in inefficiency and redundancy. More recent approaches either introduce additional modules to learn visual prompts, significantly increasing model size, or incorporate cross-modal transfer from large language models trained on vast datasets, adding complexity to the system architecture. In contrast, our approach, termed AnyIR, takes a unified path that leverages inherent similarity across various degradations to enable both efficient and comprehensive restoration through a joint embedding mechanism, without scaling up the model or relying on large language models.Specifically, we examine the sub-latent space of each input, identifying key components and reweighting them first in a gated manner. To fuse the intrinsic degradation awareness and the contextualized attention, a spatial-frequency parallel fusion strategy is proposed for enhancing spatial-aware local-global interactions and enriching the restoration details from the frequency perspective. Extensive benchmarking in the all-in-one restoration setting confirms AnyIR's SOTA performance, reducing model complexity by around 82\% in parameters and 85\% in FLOPs. Our code will be available at our Project page (https://amazingren.github.io/AnyIR/)

Leheng Zhang, Wei Long, Yawei Li et al.

Recently, Transformers have gained significant popularity in image restoration tasks such as image super-resolution and denoising, owing to their superior performance. However, balancing performance and computational burden remains a long-standing problem for transformer-based architectures. Due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention, existing methods often restrict attention to local windows, resulting in limited receptive field and suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Token Dictionary (ATD), a novel transformer-based architecture for image restoration that enables global dependency modeling with linear complexity relative to image size. The ATD model incorporates a learnable token dictionary, which summarizes external image priors (i.e., typical image structures) during the training process. To utilize this information, we introduce a token dictionary cross-attention (TDCA) mechanism that enhances the input features via interaction with the learned dictionary. Furthermore, we exploit the category information embedded in the TDCA attention maps to group input features into multiple categories, each representing a cluster of similar features across the image and serving as an attention group. We also integrate the learned category information into the feed-forward network to further improve feature fusion. ATD and its lightweight version ATD-light, achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple image super-resolution benchmarks. Moreover, we develop ATD-U, a multi-scale variant of ATD, to address other image restoration tasks, including image denoising and JPEG compression artifacts removal. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of out proposed models, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Mikołaj Janusz, Tomasz Wojnar, Yawei Li et al.

Pruning is a core technique for compressing neural networks to improve computational efficiency. This process is typically approached in two ways: one-shot pruning, which involves a single pass of training and pruning, and iterative pruning, where pruning is performed over multiple cycles for potentially finer network refinement. Although iterative pruning has historically seen broader adoption, this preference is often assumed rather than rigorously tested. Our study presents one of the first systematic and comprehensive comparisons of these methods, providing rigorous definitions, benchmarking both across structured and unstructured settings, and applying different pruning criteria and modalities. We find that each method has specific advantages: one-shot pruning proves more effective at lower pruning ratios, while iterative pruning performs better at higher ratios. Building on these findings, we advocate for patience-based pruning and introduce a hybrid approach that can outperform traditional methods in certain scenarios, providing valuable insights for practitioners selecting a pruning strategy tailored to their goals and constraints. Source code is available at https://github.com/janumiko/pruning-benchmark.

Bin Ren, Yawei Li, Xu Zheng et al.

Image Restoration (IR) aims to recover high quality images from degraded inputs affected by various corruptions such as noise, blur, haze, rain, and low light conditions. Despite recent advances, most existing approaches treat IR as a direct mapping problem, relying on shared representations across degradation types without modeling their structural diversity. In this work, we present MIRAGE, a unified and lightweight framework for all in one IR that explicitly decomposes the input feature space into three semantically aligned parallel branches, each processed by a specialized module attention for global context, convolution for local textures, and MLP for channel-wise statistics. This modular decomposition significantly improves generalization and efficiency across diverse degradations. Furthermore, we introduce a cross layer contrastive learning scheme that aligns shallow and latent features to enhance the discriminability of shared representations. To better capture the underlying geometry of feature representations, we perform contrastive learning in a Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold space rather than the conventional Euclidean space. Extensive experiments show that MIRAGE not only achieves new state of the art performance across a variety of degradation types but also offers a scalable solution for challenging all-in-one IR scenarios. Our code and models will be publicly available at https://amazingren.github.io/MIRAGE/.

Ruixiang Chen, Guolei Sun, Yawei Li et al.

This paper presents enhancements to the SAM2 framework for video object tracking task, addressing challenges such as occlusions, background clutter, and target reappearance. We introduce a hierarchical motion estimation strategy, combining lightweight linear prediction with selective non-linear refinement to improve tracking accuracy without requiring additional training. In addition, we optimize the memory bank by distinguishing long-term and short-term memory frames, enabling more reliable tracking under long-term occlusions and appearance changes. Experimental results show consistent improvements across different model scales. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on LaSOT and LaSOText with the large model, achieving 9.6% and 7.2% relative improvements in AUC over the original SAM2, and demonstrates even larger relative gains on smaller models, highlighting the effectiveness of our trainless, low-overhead improvements for boosting long-term tracking performance. The code is available at https://github.com/LouisFinner/HiM2SAM.

Yanlong Chen, Mattia Orlandi, Pierangelo Maria Rapa et al.

Physiological signals are often corrupted by motion artifacts, baseline drift, and other low-SNR disturbances, which pose significant challenges for analysis. Additionally, these signals exhibit strong non-stationarity, with sharp peaks and abrupt changes that evolve continuously, making them difficult to represent using traditional time-domain or filtering methods. To address these issues, a novel wavelet-based approach for physiological signal analysis is presented, aiming to capture multi-scale time-frequency features in various physiological signals. Leveraging this technique, two large-scale pretrained models specific to EMG and ECG are introduced for the first time, achieving superior performance and setting new baselines in downstream tasks. Additionally, a unified multi-modal framework is constructed by integrating pretrained EEG model, where each modality is guided through its dedicated branch and fused via learnable weighted fusion. This design effectively addresses challenges such as low signal-to-noise ratio, high inter-subject variability, and device mismatch, outperforming existing methods on multi-modal tasks. The proposed wavelet-based architecture lays a solid foundation for analysis of diverse physiological signals, while the multi-modal design points to next-generation physiological signal processing with potential impact on wearable health monitoring, clinical diagnostics, and broader biomedical applications. Code and data are available at: github.com/ForeverBlue816/PhysioWave

Jiezhang Cao, Yawei Li, Kai Zhang et al.

Video super-resolution (VSR), with the aim to restore a high-resolution video from its corresponding low-resolution version, is a spatial-temporal sequence prediction problem. Recently, Transformer has been gaining popularity due to its parallel computing ability for sequence-to-sequence modeling. Thus, it seems to be straightforward to apply the vision Transformer to solve VSR. However, the typical block design of Transformer with a fully connected self-attention layer and a token-wise feed-forward layer does not fit well for VSR due to the following two reasons. First, the fully connected self-attention layer neglects to exploit the data locality because this layer relies on linear layers to compute attention maps. Second, the token-wise feed-forward layer lacks the feature alignment which is important for VSR since this layer independently processes each of the input token embeddings without any interaction among them. In this paper, we make the first attempt to adapt Transformer for VSR. Specifically, to tackle the first issue, we present a spatial-temporal convolutional self-attention layer with a theoretical understanding to exploit the locality information. For the second issue, we design a bidirectional optical flow-based feed-forward layer to discover the correlations across different video frames and also align features. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code will be available at https://github.com/caojiezhang/VSR-Transformer.

Yawei Li, Kai Zhang, Jiezhang Cao et al.

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of locality mechanisms in vision transformers. Transformers originated from machine translation and are particularly good at modelling long-range dependencies within a long sequence. Although the global interaction between the token embeddings could be well modelled by the self-attention mechanism of transformers, what is lacking is a locality mechanism for information exchange within a local region. In this paper, locality mechanism is systematically investigated by carefully designed controlled experiments. We add locality to vision transformers into the feed-forward network. This seemingly simple solution is inspired by the comparison between feed-forward networks and inverted residual blocks. The importance of locality mechanisms is validated in two ways: 1) A wide range of design choices (activation function, layer placement, expansion ratio) are available for incorporating locality mechanisms and proper choices can lead to a performance gain over the baseline, and 2) The same locality mechanism is successfully applied to vision transformers with different architecture designs, which shows the generalization of the locality concept. For ImageNet2012 classification, the locality-enhanced transformers outperform the baselines Swin-T, DeiT-T, and PVT-T by 1.0%, 2.6% and 3.1% with a negligible increase in the number of parameters and computational effort. Code is available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/LocalViT.

Yawei Li, He Chen, Zhaopeng Cui et al.

In this paper, we aim at improving the computational efficiency of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) for learning on point clouds. The basic graph convolution that is typically composed of a $K$-nearest neighbor (KNN) search and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) is examined. By mathematically analyzing the operations there, two findings to improve the efficiency of GCNs are obtained. (1) The local geometric structure information of 3D representations propagates smoothly across the GCN that relies on KNN search to gather neighborhood features. This motivates the simplification of multiple KNN searches in GCNs. (2) Shuffling the order of graph feature gathering and an MLP leads to equivalent or similar composite operations. Based on those findings, we optimize the computational procedure in GCNs. A series of experiments show that the optimized networks have reduced computational complexity, decreased memory consumption, and accelerated inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy for learning on point clouds. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/ofsoundof/EfficientGCN.git}.

Kai Zhang, Yawei Li, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Recent works on plug-and-play image restoration have shown that a denoiser can implicitly serve as the image prior for model-based methods to solve many inverse problems. Such a property induces considerable advantages for plug-and-play image restoration (e.g., integrating the flexibility of model-based method and effectiveness of learning-based methods) when the denoiser is discriminatively learned via deep convolutional neural network (CNN) with large modeling capacity. However, while deeper and larger CNN models are rapidly gaining popularity, existing plug-and-play image restoration hinders its performance due to the lack of suitable denoiser prior. In order to push the limits of plug-and-play image restoration, we set up a benchmark deep denoiser prior by training a highly flexible and effective CNN denoiser. We then plug the deep denoiser prior as a modular part into a half quadratic splitting based iterative algorithm to solve various image restoration problems. We, meanwhile, provide a thorough analysis of parameter setting, intermediate results and empirical convergence to better understand the working mechanism. Experimental results on three representative image restoration tasks, including deblurring, super-resolution and demosaicing, demonstrate that the proposed plug-and-play image restoration with deep denoiser prior not only significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art model-based methods but also achieves competitive or even superior performance against state-of-the-art learning-based methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/cszn/DPIR.

Yawei Li, Wen Li, Martin Danelljan et al.

In this paper, we tackle the problem of convolutional neural network design. Instead of focusing on the design of the overall architecture, we investigate a design space that is usually overlooked, i.e. adjusting the channel configurations of predefined networks. We find that this adjustment can be achieved by shrinking widened baseline networks and leads to superior performance. Based on that, we articulate the heterogeneity hypothesis: with the same training protocol, there exists a layer-wise differentiated network architecture (LW-DNA) that can outperform the original network with regular channel configurations but with a lower level of model complexity. The LW-DNA models are identified without extra computational cost or training time compared with the original network. This constraint leads to controlled experiments which direct the focus to the importance of layer-wise specific channel configurations. LW-DNA models come with advantages related to overfitting, i.e. the relative relationship between model complexity and dataset size. Experiments are conducted on various networks and datasets for image classification, visual tracking and image restoration. The resultant LW-DNA models consistently outperform the baseline models. Code is available at https://github.com/ofsoundof/Heterogeneity_Hypothesis.

Gang Chen, Yawei Li, Sargur N. Srihari

Visual restoration and recognition are traditionally addressed in pipeline fashion, i.e. denoising followed by classification. Instead, observing correlations between the two tasks, for example clearer image will lead to better categorization and vice visa, we propose a joint framework for visual restoration and recognition for handwritten images, inspired by advances in deep autoencoder and multi-modality learning. Our model is a 3-pathway deep architecture with a hidden-layer representation which is shared by multi-inputs and outputs, and each branch can be composed of a multi-layer deep model. Thus, visual restoration and classification can be unified using shared representation via non-linear mapping, and model parameters can be learnt via backpropagation. Using MNIST and USPS data corrupted with structured noise, the proposed framework performs at least 20\% better in classification than separate pipelines, as well as clearer recovered images. The noise model and the reproducible source code is available at {\url{https://github.com/ganggit/jointmodel}}.

Gang Chen, Yawei Li, Sargur N. Srihari

Recognition of handwritten words continues to be an important problem in document analysis and recognition. Existing approaches extract hand-engineered features from word images--which can perform poorly with new data sets. Recently, deep learning has attracted great attention because of the ability to learn features from raw data. Moreover they have yielded state-of-the-art results in classification tasks including character recognition and scene recognition. On the other hand, word recognition is a sequential problem where we need to model the correlation between characters. In this paper, we propose using deep Conditional Random Fields (deep CRFs) for word recognition. Basically, we combine CRFs with deep learning, in which deep features are learned and sequences are labeled in a unified framework. We pre-train the deep structure with stacked restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs) for feature learning and optimize the entire network with an online learning algorithm. The proposed model was evaluated on two datasets, and seen to perform significantly better than competitive baseline models. The source code is available at https://github.com/ganggit/deepCRFs.

Song Zhang, Yanlong Chen, Yilin Li et al.

Remote sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) face a fundamental mismatch with natural-image counterparts: the same geographic object exhibits radically different visual evidence across ground sampling distances (GSDs) spanning multiple orders of magnitude. Yet existing RS-VLMs often discard GSD or inject it as a discrete text token, forcing a single static parameter set to absorb the entire scale spectrum. We introduce ScaleEarth, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework built on Qwen3-VL that treats GSD as a continuous conditioning variable governing the model's computation path. At its core, CS-HLoRA (Continuous Scale-Conditioned Hyper-LoRA) modulates the LoRA low-rank subspace through a GSD-driven gate, enabling the model to dynamically route computation by physical scale. To remove reliance on sensor metadata at deployment, we pair CS-HLoRA with SSE-U, a lightweight heteroscedastic sub-head that predicts GSD and its uncertainty from visual features. To provide matching supervision, we construct GeoScale-VQA, a 1.5M-sample scale-layered RS-VQA corpus whose question-answer generation is conditioned on the same physical scalar that drives CS-HLoRA, forming a closed method-data loop. Trained with QLoRA on an 8B backbone, ScaleEarth achieves state-of-the-art results on remote-sensing benchmarks covering diverse Earth-system tasks, including XLRS-Bench and OmniEarth-Bench.

Junkai Zhang, Hang Guo, Luca Benini et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance across diverse tasks, but their inference with long input contexts is bottlenecked by memory size and bandwidth. The Key-Value (KV) cache size grows linearly with sequence length and needs to be re-read from off-chip high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to on-chip memory at every decoding step, resulting in memory-bound inference. Existing methods reduce the cache by either eviction or quantization, but typically treat the two in isolation. In this paper, we cast KV cache compression as a rate-distortion problem, under which eviction and quantization are two end-points of the same bit allocation scheme. This exposes the need to optimize them jointly, motivating our method, RDKV (Rate-Distortion KV cache compression). RDKV derives the weight of each token or channel from the distortion that compression induces on the attention computation. Based on these weights, it assigns each token or channel a bit-width ranging from full precision down to zero bits guided by reverse water-filling, applied once after the prefilling stage. Experiments on LongBench, RULER, and InfiniteBench show that RDKV outperforms the best evaluated baseline by 9.1% on average. On LongBench it recovers 97.81% of full-cache accuracy with only 2.48% cache retention. Compared with full-cache FlashAttention-2 decoding, it achieves 4.5x decode speedup and 1.9x peak memory reduction with 128K context length, while maintaining comparable performance.

Bin Ren, Hang Guo, Yan Shu et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2026 challenge on efficient single-image super-resolution with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects, such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while maintaining PSNR of around 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset, and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. The challenge had 95 registered participants, and 15 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art results for efficient single-image super-resolution.

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.