Ming Sun

Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Wei Sun et al. · eth-zurich

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2023 Quality Assessment of Video Enhancement Challenge, which will be held in conjunction with the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement Workshop (NTIRE) at CVPR 2023. This challenge is to address a major challenge in the field of video processing, namely, video quality assessment (VQA) for enhanced videos. The challenge uses the VQA Dataset for Perceptual Video Enhancement (VDPVE), which has a total of 1211 enhanced videos, including 600 videos with color, brightness, and contrast enhancements, 310 videos with deblurring, and 301 deshaked videos. The challenge has a total of 167 registered participants. 61 participating teams submitted their prediction results during the development phase, with a total of 3168 submissions. A total of 176 submissions were submitted by 37 participating teams during the final testing phase. Finally, 19 participating teams submitted their models and fact sheets, and detailed the methods they used. Some methods have achieved better results than baseline methods, and the winning methods have demonstrated superior prediction performance.

Guandu Liu, Yukang Ding, Mading Li et al.

Look-up table(LUT)-based methods have shown the great efficacy in single image super-resolution (SR) task. However, previous methods ignore the essential reason of restricted receptive field (RF) size in LUT, which is caused by the interaction of space and channel features in vanilla convolution. They can only increase the RF at the cost of linearly increasing LUT size. To enlarge RF with contained LUT sizes, we propose a novel Reconstructed Convolution(RC) module, which decouples channel-wise and spatial calculation. It can be formulated as $n^2$ 1D LUTs to maintain $n\times n$ receptive field, which is obviously smaller than $n\times n$D LUT formulated before. The LUT generated by our RC module reaches less than 1/10000 storage compared with SR-LUT baseline. The proposed Reconstructed Convolution module based LUT method, termed as RCLUT, can enlarge the RF size by 9 times than the state-of-the-art LUT-based SR method and achieve superior performance on five popular benchmark dataset. Moreover, the efficient and robust RC module can be used as a plugin to improve other LUT-based SR methods. The code is available at https://github.com/liuguandu/RC-LUT.

Eduardo Pérez-Pellitero, Sibi Catley-Chandar, Richard Shaw et al.

This paper reviews the challenge on constrained high dynamic range (HDR) imaging that was part of the New Trends in Image Restoration and Enhancement (NTIRE) workshop, held in conjunction with CVPR 2022. This manuscript focuses on the competition set-up, datasets, the proposed methods and their results. The challenge aims at estimating an HDR image from multiple respective low dynamic range (LDR) observations, which might suffer from under- or over-exposed regions and different sources of noise. The challenge is composed of two tracks with an emphasis on fidelity and complexity constraints: In Track 1, participants are asked to optimize objective fidelity scores while imposing a low-complexity constraint (i.e. solutions can not exceed a given number of operations). In Track 2, participants are asked to minimize the complexity of their solutions while imposing a constraint on fidelity scores (i.e. solutions are required to obtain a higher fidelity score than the prescribed baseline). Both tracks use the same data and metrics: Fidelity is measured by means of PSNR with respect to a ground-truth HDR image (computed both directly and with a canonical tonemapping operation), while complexity metrics include the number of Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operations and runtime (in seconds).

Kai Zhao, Kun Yuan, Ming Sun et al.

Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to simulate the human perception of video quality, which is influenced by factors ranging from low-level color and texture details to high-level semantic content. To effectively model these complicated quality-related factors, in this paper, we decompose video into three levels (\ie, patch level, frame level, and clip level), and propose a novel Zoom-VQA architecture to perceive spatio-temporal features at different levels. It integrates three components: patch attention module, frame pyramid alignment, and clip ensemble strategy, respectively for capturing region-of-interest in the spatial dimension, multi-level information at different feature levels, and distortions distributed over the temporal dimension. Owing to the comprehensive design, Zoom-VQA obtains state-of-the-art results on four VQA benchmarks and achieves 2nd place in the NTIRE 2023 VQA challenge. Notably, Zoom-VQA has outperformed the previous best results on two subsets of LSVQ, achieving 0.8860 (+1.0%) and 0.7985 (+1.9%) of SRCC on the respective subsets. Adequate ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of each component. Codes and models are released in https://github.com/k-zha14/Zoom-VQA.

Zhenyu Wang, Li Wan, Biqiao Zhang et al. · amazon-science, meta-ai

A keyword spotting (KWS) engine that is continuously running on device is exposed to various speech signals that are usually unseen before. It is a challenging problem to build a small-footprint and high-performing KWS model with robustness under different acoustic environments. In this paper, we explore how to effectively apply adversarial examples to improve KWS robustness. We propose datasource-aware disentangled learning with adversarial examples to reduce the mismatch between the original and adversarial data as well as the mismatch across original training datasources. The KWS model architecture is based on depth-wise separable convolution and a simple attention module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed learning strategy improves false reject rate by $40.31%$ at $1%$ false accept rate on the internal dataset, compared to the strongest baseline without using adversarial examples. Our best-performing system achieves $98.06%$ accuracy on the Google Speech Commands V1 dataset.

Haichuan Yang, Zhaojun Yang, Li Wan et al. · amazon-science

This paper proposes a hardware-efficient architecture, Linearized Convolution Network (LiCo-Net) for keyword spotting. It is optimized specifically for low-power processor units like microcontrollers. ML operators exhibit heterogeneous efficiency profiles on power-efficient hardware. Given the exact theoretical computation cost, int8 operators are more computation-effective than float operators, and linear layers are often more efficient than other layers. The proposed LiCo-Net is a dual-phase system that uses the efficient int8 linear operators at the inference phase and applies streaming convolutions at the training phase to maintain a high model capacity. The experimental results show that LiCo-Net outperforms single-value decomposition filter (SVDF) on hardware efficiency with on-par detection performance. Compared to SVDF, LiCo-Net reduces cycles by 40% on HiFi4 DSP.

Xinyu Che, Junqi Xiong, Yunfei Ge et al.

Abundant procedural knowledge on the Web holds great potential for helping agents solve long-horizon tasks. However, such knowledge is often multimodal, heterogeneous, noisy, and implicitly assumes human executors, making it difficult to use directly as the skills required by agents. To bridge the gap between human-oriented guides and agent-executable skills, we formalize this problem as guide-to-skill learning: converting in-the-wild guides into executable skills and continuously improving them from trajectories observable to the agent. To evaluate the capability of existing agents on this task, we introduce MMG2Skill-Bench, the first benchmark designed for this problem. We further propose MMG2Skill, a closed-loop framework that compiles guides into editable skills, conditions a fixed vision-language model (VLM) agent on these skills during execution, and revises the skills from trajectory-level root-cause feedback without using benchmark scores. Across GUI control, open-ended gameplay, and strategic card play with six VLM backbones, MMG2Skill consistently outperforms vanilla baseline agents in every model-domain setting, achieving macro-average gains of +12.8 to +25.3 percentage points across backbones. Ablation studies show that directly prompting agents with raw guides can degrade performance, while both structured skill construction and trajectory-driven revision are necessary for the observed improvements. On success-inferable tasks, analyzer-based early stopping further prevents late-stage performance regressions and saves 25%-53% of attempts when the success signal is properly calibrated.

Xinping Lei, Xinyu Che, Junqi Xiong et al.

Large language models are rapidly evolving into interactive coding agents capable of end-to-end web coding, yet existing benchmarks evaluate only narrow slices of this capability, typically text-conditioned generation with static-correctness metrics, leaving visual fidelity, interaction quality, and codebase-level reasoning largely unmeasured. We introduce WebCompass, a multimodal benchmark that provides unified lifecycle evaluation of web engineering capability. Recognizing that real-world web coding is an iterative cycle of generation, editing, and repair, WebCompass spans three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair), yielding seven task categories that mirror professional workflows. Through a multi-stage, human-in-the-loop pipeline, we curate instances covering 15 generation domains, 16 editing operation types, and 11 repair defect types, each annotated at Easy/Medium/Hard levels. For evaluation, we adopt a checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge protocol for editing and repair, and propose a novel Agent-as-a-Judge paradigm for generation that autonomously executes generated websites in a real browser, explores interactive behaviors via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and iteratively synthesizes targeted test cases, closely approximating human acceptance testing. We evaluate representative closed-source and open-source models and observe that: (1) closed-source models remain substantially stronger and more balanced; (2) editing and repair exhibit distinct difficulty profiles, with repair preserving interactivity better but remaining execution-challenging; (3) aesthetics is the most persistent bottleneck, especially for open-source models; and (4) framework choice materially affects outcomes, with Vue consistently challenging while React and Vanilla/HTML perform more strongly depending on task type.

Qizhi Xie, Kun Yuan, Yunpeng Qu et al.

Quality assessment and aesthetics assessment aim to evaluate the perceived quality and aesthetics of visual content. Current learning-based methods suffer greatly from the scarcity of labeled data and usually perform sub-optimally in terms of generalization. Although masked image modeling (MIM) has achieved noteworthy advancements across various high-level tasks (e.g., classification, detection etc.). In this work, we take on a novel perspective to investigate its capabilities in terms of quality- and aesthetics-awareness. To this end, we propose Quality- and aesthetics-aware pretraining (QPT V2), the first pretraining framework based on MIM that offers a unified solution to quality and aesthetics assessment. To perceive the high-level semantics and fine-grained details, pretraining data is curated. To comprehensively encompass quality- and aesthetics-related factors, degradation is introduced. To capture multi-scale quality and aesthetic information, model structure is modified. Extensive experimental results on 11 downstream benchmarks clearly show the superior performance of QPT V2 in comparison with current state-of-the-art approaches and other pretraining paradigms. Code and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/KeiChiTse/QPT-V2}.

Qiao Mo, Yukang Ding, Jinhua Hao et al.

Deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable performance in single JPEG artifacts removal task. However, existing methods tend to degrade on double JPEG images, which are prevalent in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Offset-Aware Partition Transformer for double JPEG artifacts removal, termed as OAPT. We conduct an analysis of double JPEG compression that results in up to four patterns within each 8x8 block and design our model to cluster the similar patterns to remedy the difficulty of restoration. Our OAPT consists of two components: compression offset predictor and image reconstructor. Specifically, the predictor estimates pixel offsets between the first and second compression, which are then utilized to divide different patterns. The reconstructor is mainly based on several Hybrid Partition Attention Blocks (HPAB), combining vanilla window-based self-attention and sparse attention for clustered pattern features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OAPT outperforms the state-of-the-art method by more than 0.16dB in double JPEG image restoration task. Moreover, without increasing any computation cost, the pattern clustering module in HPAB can serve as a plugin to enhance other transformer-based image restoration methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/QMoQ/OAPT.git .

Rui Qin, Ming Sun, Chao Zhou et al.

Recent Blind Image Super-Resolution (BSR) methods have shown proficiency in general images. However, we find that the efficacy of recent methods obviously diminishes when employed on image data with blur, while image data with intentional blur constitute a substantial proportion of general data. To further investigate and address this issue, we developed a new super-resolution dataset specifically tailored for blur images, named the Real-world Blur-kept Super-Resolution (ReBlurSR) dataset, which consists of nearly 3000 defocus and motion blur image samples with diverse blur sizes and varying blur intensities. Furthermore, we propose a new BSR framework for blur images called Perceptual-Blur-adaptive Super-Resolution (PBaSR), which comprises two main modules: the Cross Disentanglement Module (CDM) and the Cross Fusion Module (CFM). The CDM utilizes a dual-branch parallelism to isolate conflicting blur and general data during optimization. The CFM fuses the well-optimized prior from these distinct domains cost-effectively and efficiently based on model interpolation. By integrating these two modules, PBaSR achieves commendable performance on both general and blur data without any additional inference and deployment cost and is generalizable across multiple model architectures. Rich experiments show that PBaSR achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics without incurring extra inference costs. Within the widely adopted LPIPS metrics, PBaSR achieves an improvement range of approximately 0.02-0.10 with diverse anchor methods and blur types, across both the ReBlurSR and multiple common general BSR benchmarks. Code here: https://github.com/Imalne/PBaSR.

Hongbo Liu, Mingda Wu, Kun Yuan et al.

Video quality assessment (VQA) has attracted growing attention in recent years. While the great expense of annotating large-scale VQA datasets has become the main obstacle for current deep-learning methods. To surmount the constraint of insufficient training data, in this paper, we first consider the complete range of video distribution diversity (\ie content, distortion, motion) and employ diverse pretrained models (\eg architecture, pretext task, pre-training dataset) to benefit quality representation. An Adaptive Diverse Quality-aware feature Acquisition (Ada-DQA) framework is proposed to capture desired quality-related features generated by these frozen pretrained models. By leveraging the Quality-aware Acquisition Module (QAM), the framework is able to extract more essential and relevant features to represent quality. Finally, the learned quality representation is utilized as supplementary supervisory information, along with the supervision of the labeled quality score, to guide the training of a relatively lightweight VQA model in a knowledge distillation manner, which largely reduces the computational cost during inference. Experimental results on three mainstream no-reference VQA benchmarks clearly show the superior performance of Ada-DQA in comparison with current state-of-the-art approaches without using extra training data of VQA.

Vinicius Ribeiro, Yiteng Huang, Yuan Shangguan et al. · amazon-science

Wake word detection exists in most intelligent homes and portable devices. It offers these devices the ability to "wake up" when summoned at a low cost of power and computing. This paper focuses on understanding alignment's role in developing a wake-word system that answers a generic phrase. We discuss three approaches. The first is alignment-based, where the model is trained with frame-wise cross-entropy. The second is alignment-free, where the model is trained with CTC. The third, proposed by us, is a hybrid solution in which the model is trained with a small set of aligned data and then tuned with a sizeable unaligned dataset. We compare the three approaches and evaluate the impact of the different aligned-to-unaligned ratios for hybrid training. Our results show that the alignment-free system performs better than the alignment-based for the target operating point, and with a small fraction of the data (20%), we can train a model that complies with our initial constraints.

Rahil Parikh, Harshavardhan Sundar, Ming Sun et al. · amazon-science

Acoustic events are sounds with well-defined spectro-temporal characteristics which can be associated with the physical objects generating them. Acoustic scenes are collections of such acoustic events in no specific temporal order. Given this natural linkage between events and scenes, a common belief is that the ability to classify events must help in the classification of scenes. This has led to several efforts attempting to do well on Acoustic Event Tagging (AET) and Acoustic Scene Classification (ASC) using a multi-task network. However, in these efforts, improvement in one task does not guarantee an improvement in the other, suggesting a tension between ASC and AET. It is unclear if improvements in AET translates to improvements in ASC. We explore this conundrum through an extensive empirical study and show that under certain conditions, using AET as an auxiliary task in the multi-task network consistently improves ASC performance. Additionally, ASC performance further improves with the AET data-set size and is not sensitive to the choice of events or the number of events in the AET data-set. We conclude that this improvement in ASC performance comes from the regularization effect of using AET and not from the network's improved ability to discern between acoustic events.

Kai Zhao, Kun Yuan, Ming Sun et al.

Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) aims to automatically evaluate the perceived quality of a single image, whose performance has been improved by deep learning-based methods in recent years. However, the paucity of labeled data somewhat restrains deep learning-based BIQA methods from unleashing their full potential. In this paper, we propose to solve the problem by a pretext task customized for BIQA in a self-supervised learning manner, which enables learning representations from orders of magnitude more data. To constrain the learning process, we propose a quality-aware contrastive loss based on a simple assumption: the quality of patches from a distorted image should be similar, but vary from patches from the same image with different degradations and patches from different images. Further, we improve the existing degradation process and form a degradation space with the size of roughly $2\times10^7$. After pre-trained on ImageNet using our method, models are more sensitive to image quality and perform significantly better on downstream BIQA tasks. Experimental results show that our method obtains remarkable improvements on popular BIQA datasets.

Xiaolong Zeng, Yitong Yu, Shiyao Xiong et al.

Look-Up Table based methods have emerged as a promising direction for efficient image restoration tasks. Recent LUT-based methods focus on improving their performance by expanding the receptive field. However, they inevitably introduce extra computational and storage overhead, which hinders their deployment in edge devices. To address this issue, we propose ShiftLUT, a novel framework that attains the largest receptive field among all LUT-based methods while maintaining high efficiency. Our key insight lies in three complementary components. First, Learnable Spatial Shift module (LSS) is introduced to expand the receptive field by applying learnable, channel-wise spatial offsets on feature maps. Second, we propose an asymmetric dual-branch architecture that allocates more computation to the information-dense branch, substantially reducing inference latency without compromising restoration quality. Finally, we incorporate a feature-level LUT compression strategy called Error-bounded Adaptive Sampling (EAS) to minimize the storage overhead. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art method TinyLUT, ShiftLUT achieves a 3.8$\times$ larger receptive field and improves an average PSNR by over 0.21 dB across multiple standard benchmarks, while maintaining a small storage size and inference time. The code is available at: https://github.com/Sailor-t/ShiftLUT .

Meng Feng, Chieh-Chi Kao, Qingming Tang et al.

Standard acoustic event classification (AEC) solutions require large-scale collection of data from client devices for model optimization. Federated learning (FL) is a compelling framework that decouples data collection and model training to enhance customer privacy. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of applying FL to improve AEC performance while no customer data can be directly uploaded to the server. We assume no pseudo labels can be inferred from on-device user inputs, aligning with the typical use cases of AEC. We adapt self-supervised learning to the FL framework for on-device continual learning of representations, and it results in improved performance of the downstream AEC classifiers without labeled/pseudo-labeled data available. Compared to the baseline w/o FL, the proposed method improves precision up to 20.3\% relatively while maintaining the recall. Our work differs from prior work in FL in that our approach does not require user-generated learning targets, and the data we use is collected from our Beta program and is de-identified, to maximally simulate the production settings.

Kun Yuan, Zishang Kong, Chuanchuan Zheng et al.

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which aims to predict the perceptual quality of a video, has attracted raising attention with the rapid development of streaming media technology, such as Facebook, TikTok, Kwai, and so on. Compared with other sequence-based visual tasks (\textit{e.g.,} action recognition), VQA faces two under-estimated challenges unresolved in User Generated Content (UGC) videos. \textit{First}, it is not rare that several frames containing serious distortions (\textit{e.g.,}blocking, blurriness), can determine the perceptual quality of the whole video, while other sequence-based tasks require more frames of equal importance for representations. \textit{Second}, the perceptual quality of a video exhibits a multi-distortion distribution, due to the differences in the duration and probability of occurrence for various distortions. In order to solve the above challenges, we propose \textit{Visual Quality Transformer (VQT)} to extract quality-related sparse features more efficiently. Methodologically, a Sparse Temporal Attention (STA) is proposed to sample keyframes by analyzing the temporal correlation between frames, which reduces the computational complexity from $O(T^2)$ to $O(T \log T)$. Structurally, a Multi-Pathway Temporal Network (MPTN) utilizes multiple STA modules with different degrees of sparsity in parallel, capturing co-existing distortions in a video. Experimentally, VQT demonstrates superior performance than many \textit{state-of-the-art} methods in three public no-reference VQA datasets. Furthermore, VQT shows better performance in four full-reference VQA datasets against widely-adopted industrial algorithms (\textit{i.e.,} VMAF and AVQT).

Ming Sun, Rui Wang, Xingrui Yu et al.

Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) support generalist robotic control by enabling end-to-end decision policies directly from multi-modal inputs. As trained VLAs are increasingly shared and adapted, protecting model ownership becomes essential for secure deployment and responsible open-source usage. In this paper, we present GuardVLA, the first backdoor-based ownership verification framework specifically designed for VLAs. GuardVLA embeds a stealthy and harmless backdoor watermark into the protected model during training by injecting secret messages into embodied visual data. For post-release verification, we propose a swap-and-detect mechanism, in which the trigger projector and an external classifier head are used to activate and detect the embedded backdoor based on prediction probabilities. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets, model architectures, and adaptation settings demonstrate that GuardVLA enables reliable ownership verification while preserving benign task performance. Further results show that the embedded watermark remains detectable under post-release model adaptation.

Han Li, Yifan Yao, Letian Zhu et al.

Code agents are advancing rapidly, but debugging them is becoming increasingly difficult. As frameworks orchestrate parallel tool calls and multi-stage workflows over complex tasks, making the agent's state transitions and error propagation hard to observe. In these runs, an early misstep can trap the agent in unproductive loops or even cascade into fundamental errors, forming hidden error chains that make it hard to tell when the agent goes off track and why. Existing agent tracing analyses either focus on simple interaction or rely on small-scale manual inspection, which limits their scalability and usefulness for real coding workflows. We present CodeTracer, a tracing architecture that parses heterogeneous run artifacts through evolving extractors, reconstructs the full state transition history as a hierarchical trace tree with persistent memory, and performs failure onset localization to pinpoint the failure origin and its downstream chain. To enable systematic evaluation, we construct CodeTraceBench from a large collection of executed trajectories generated by four widely used code agent frameworks on diverse code tasks (e.g., bug fixing, refactoring, and terminal interaction), with supervision at both the stage and step levels for failure localization. Experiments show that CodeTracer substantially outperforms direct prompting and lightweight baselines, and that replaying its diagnostic signals consistently recovers originally failed runs under matched budgets. Our code and data are publicly available.

Gang He, Shaoyi Long, Li Xu et al.

Joint super-resolution and inverse tone-mapping (SR-ITM) aims to enhance the visual quality of videos that have quality deficiencies in resolution and dynamic range. This problem arises when using 4K high dynamic range (HDR) TVs to watch a low-resolution standard dynamic range (LR SDR) video. Previous methods that rely on learning local information typically cannot do well in preserving color conformity and long-range structural similarity, resulting in unnatural color transition and texture artifacts. In order to tackle these challenges, we propose a global priors guided modulation network (GPGMNet) for joint SR-ITM. In particular, we design a global priors extraction module (GPEM) to extract color conformity prior and structural similarity prior that are beneficial for ITM and SR tasks, respectively. To further exploit the global priors and preserve spatial information, we devise multiple global priors guided spatial-wise modulation blocks (GSMBs) with a few parameters for intermediate feature modulation, in which the modulation parameters are generated by the shared global priors and the spatial features map from the spatial pyramid convolution block (SPCB). With these elaborate designs, the GPGMNet can achieve higher visual quality with lower computational complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed GPGMNet is superior to the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, our proposed model exceeds the state-of-the-art by 0.64 dB in PSNR, with 69$\%$ fewer parameters and 3.1$\times$ speedup. The code will be released soon.

Xin Li, Kun Yuan, Yajing Pei et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Shortform UGC Video Quality Assessment (S-UGC VQA), where various excellent solutions are submitted and evaluated on the collected dataset KVQ from popular short-form video platform, i.e., Kuaishou/Kwai Platform. The KVQ database is divided into three parts, including 2926 videos for training, 420 videos for validation, and 854 videos for testing. The purpose is to build new benchmarks and advance the development of S-UGC VQA. The competition had 200 participants and 13 teams submitted valid solutions for the final testing phase. The proposed solutions achieved state-of-the-art performances for S-UGC VQA. The project can be found at https://github.com/lixinustc/KVQChallenge-CVPR-NTIRE2024.

Ju Lin, Jing Pan, Ruizhi Li et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that prompting large language models (LLM) with audio encodings enables effective speech understanding capabilities. However, most speech LLMs are trained on single-channel, single-talker data, which makes it challenging to directly apply them to multi-talker and multi-channel speech understanding task. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation on how to enable directional multi-talker speech understanding capabilities for LLMs, specifically in smart glasses usecase. We propose two novel approaches to integrate directivity into LLMs: (1) a cascaded system that leverages a source separation front-end module, and (2) an end-to-end system that utilizes serialized output training. All of the approaches utilize a multi-microphone array embedded in smart glasses to optimize directivity interpretation and processing in a streaming manner. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods in endowing LLMs with directional speech understanding capabilities, achieving strong performance in both speech recognition and speech translation tasks.

Yunpeng Qu, Kun Yuan, Kai Zhao et al.

Diffusion-based methods, endowed with a formidable generative prior, have received increasing attention in Image Super-Resolution (ISR) recently. However, as low-resolution (LR) images often undergo severe degradation, it is challenging for ISR models to perceive the semantic and degradation information, resulting in restoration images with incorrect content or unrealistic artifacts. To address these issues, we propose a \textit{Cross-modal Priors for Super-Resolution (XPSR)} framework. Within XPSR, to acquire precise and comprehensive semantic conditions for the diffusion model, cutting-edge Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are utilized. To facilitate better fusion of cross-modal priors, a \textit{Semantic-Fusion Attention} is raised. To distill semantic-preserved information instead of undesired degradations, a \textit{Degradation-Free Constraint} is attached between LR and its high-resolution (HR) counterpart. Quantitative and qualitative results show that XPSR is capable of generating high-fidelity and high-realism images across synthetic and real-world datasets. Codes are released at \url{https://github.com/qyp2000/XPSR}.

Xin Li, Kun Yuan, Bingchen Li et al.

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

Rui Qin, Ming Sun, Fangyuan Zhang et al.

Blind super-resolution (BSR) methods based on high-resolution (HR) reconstruction codebooks have achieved promising results in recent years. However, we find that a codebook based on HR reconstruction may not effectively capture the complex correlations between low-resolution (LR) and HR images. In detail, multiple HR images may produce similar LR versions due to complex blind degradations, causing the HR-dependent only codebooks having limited texture diversity when faced with confusing LR inputs. To alleviate this problem, we propose the Rich Texture-aware Codebook-based Network (RTCNet), which consists of the Degradation-robust Texture Prior Module (DTPM) and the Patch-aware Texture Prior Module (PTPM). DTPM effectively mines the cross-resolution correlation of textures between LR and HR images by exploiting the cross-resolution correspondence of textures. PTPM uses patch-wise semantic pre-training to correct the misperception of texture similarity in the high-level semantic regularization. By taking advantage of this, RTCNet effectively gets rid of the misalignment of confusing textures between HR and LR in the BSR scenarios. Experiments show that RTCNet outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks by up to 0.16 ~ 0.46dB.

Zhengang Lu, Hongsheng Qin, Jing Li et al.

Metallic mesh is a transparent electromagnetic shielding film with a fine metal line structure. However, it can develop defects that affect the optoelectronic performance whether in the production preparation or in actual use. The development of in-situ non-destructive testing (NDT) devices for metallic mesh requires long working distances, reflective optical path design, and miniaturization. To address the limitations of existing smartphone microscopes, which feature short working distances and inadequate transmission imaging for industrial in-situ inspection, we propose a novel long-working distance reflective smartphone microscopy system (LD-RSM). LD-RSM builds a 4f optical imaging system with external optical components and a smartphone, utilizing a beam splitter to achieve reflective imaging with the illumination system and imaging system on the same side of the sample. It achieves an optical resolution of 4.92$μ$m and a working distance of up to 22.23 mm. Additionally, we introduce a dual prior weighted Robust Principal Component Analysis (DW-RPCA) for defect detection. This approach leverages spectral filter fusion and Hough transform to model different defect types, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of defect identification. Coupled with an optimized threshold segmentation algorithm, DW-RPCA method achieves a pixel-level accuracy of 84.8%. Our work showcases strong potential for growth in the field of in-situ on-line inspection of industrial products.

Qiang Zhu, Jinhua Hao, Yukang Ding et al.

Recently, numerous approaches have achieved notable success in compressed video quality enhancement (VQE). However, these methods usually ignore the utilization of valuable coding priors inherently embedded in compressed videos, such as motion vectors and residual frames, which carry abundant temporal and spatial information. To remedy this problem, we propose the Coding Priors-Guided Aggregation (CPGA) network to utilize temporal and spatial information from coding priors. The CPGA mainly consists of an inter-frame temporal aggregation (ITA) module and a multi-scale non-local aggregation (MNA) module. Specifically, the ITA module aggregates temporal information from consecutive frames and coding priors, while the MNA module globally captures spatial information guided by residual frames. In addition, to facilitate research in VQE task, we newly construct the Video Coding Priors (VCP) dataset, comprising 300 videos with various coding priors extracted from corresponding bitstreams. It remedies the shortage of previous datasets on the lack of coding information. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The code and dataset will be released at https://github.com/VQE-CPGA/CPGA.git .

Yunpeng Qu, Kun Yuan, Jinhua Hao et al.

Image Super-Resolution (ISR) has seen significant progress with the introduction of remarkable generative models. However, challenges such as the trade-off issues between fidelity and realism, as well as computational complexity, have also posed limitations on their application. Building upon the tremendous success of autoregressive models in the language domain, we propose \textbf{VARSR}, a novel visual autoregressive modeling for ISR framework with the form of next-scale prediction. To effectively integrate and preserve semantic information in low-resolution images, we propose using prefix tokens to incorporate the condition. Scale-aligned Rotary Positional Encodings are introduced to capture spatial structures and the diffusion refiner is utilized for modeling quantization residual loss to achieve pixel-level fidelity. Image-based Classifier-free Guidance is proposed to guide the generation of more realistic images. Furthermore, we collect large-scale data and design a training process to obtain robust generative priors. Quantitative and qualitative results show that VARSR is capable of generating high-fidelity and high-realism images with more efficiency than diffusion-based methods. Our codes will be released at https://github.com/qyp2000/VARSR.

Tongda Xu, Xiyan Cai, Xinjie Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in diffusion models have been leveraged to address inverse problems without additional training, and Diffusion Posterior Sampling (DPS) (Chung et al., 2022a) is among the most popular approaches. Previous analyses suggest that DPS accomplishes posterior sampling by approximating the conditional score. While in this paper, we demonstrate that the conditional score approximation employed by DPS is not as effective as previously assumed, but rather aligns more closely with the principle of maximizing a posterior (MAP). This assertion is substantiated through an examination of DPS on 512x512 ImageNet images, revealing that: 1) DPS's conditional score estimation significantly diverges from the score of a well-trained conditional diffusion model and is even inferior to the unconditional score; 2) The mean of DPS's conditional score estimation deviates significantly from zero, rendering it an invalid score estimation; 3) DPS generates high-quality samples with significantly lower diversity. In light of the above findings, we posit that DPS more closely resembles MAP than a conditional score estimator, and accordingly propose the following enhancements to DPS: 1) we explicitly maximize the posterior through multi-step gradient ascent and projection; 2) we utilize a light-weighted conditional score estimator trained with only 100 images and 8 GPU hours. Extensive experimental results indicate that these proposed improvements significantly enhance DPS's performance. The source code for these improvements is provided in https://github.com/tongdaxu/Rethinking-Diffusion-Posterior-Sampling-From-Conditional-Score-Estimator-to-Maximizing-a-Posterior.

Xinyu Mao, Junsi Li, Haoji Zhang et al.

Fine-grained cross-modal alignment aims to establish precise local correspondences between vision and language, forming a cornerstone for visual question answering and related multimodal applications. Current approaches face challenges in addressing patch redundancy and ambiguity, which arise from the inherent information density disparities across modalities. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as promising solutions to bridge this gap through their robust semantic generation capabilities. However, the dense textual outputs from MLLMs may introduce conflicts with the original sparse captions. Furthermore, accurately quantifying semantic relevance between rich visual patches and concise textual descriptions remains a core challenge. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Semantic-Enhanced Patch Slimming (SEPS) framework, which systematically addresses patch redundancy and ambiguity. Our approach employs a two-stage mechanism to integrate unified semantics from both dense and sparse texts, enabling the identification of salient visual patches. Additionally, it leverages relevance-aware selection with mean value computation to highlight crucial patch-word correspondences, thereby improving cross-modal similarity assessment. Comprehensive experiments on Flickr30K and MS-COCO datasets validate that SEPS achieves superior performance, surpassing existing approaches by 23\%-86\% in rSum across diverse model architectures, with notable enhancements in text-to-image retrieval scenarios. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/Sweet4tars/seps.git.

Ming Sun, Lihua Jing, Zixuan Zhu et al.

Backdoor attacks pose a significant threat to the training process of deep neural networks (DNNs). As a widely-used DNN-based application in real-world scenarios, face recognition systems once implanted into the backdoor, may cause serious consequences. Backdoor research on face recognition is still in its early stages, and the existing backdoor triggers are relatively simple and visible. Furthermore, due to the perceptibility, diversity, and similarity of facial datasets, many state-of-the-art backdoor attacks lose effectiveness on face recognition tasks. In this work, we propose a novel feature space backdoor attack against face recognition via makeup transfer, dubbed MakeupAttack. In contrast to many feature space attacks that demand full access to target models, our method only requires model queries, adhering to black-box attack principles. In our attack, we design an iterative training paradigm to learn the subtle features of the proposed makeup-style trigger. Additionally, MakeupAttack promotes trigger diversity using the adaptive selection method, dispersing the feature distribution of malicious samples to bypass existing defense methods. Extensive experiments were conducted on two widely-used facial datasets targeting multiple models. The results demonstrate that our proposed attack method can bypass existing state-of-the-art defenses while maintaining effectiveness, robustness, naturalness, and stealthiness, without compromising model performance.

Yangqing Fu, Ming Sun, Buqing Nie et al.

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithms such as AlphaGo and MuZero have achieved superhuman performance in many challenging tasks. However, the computational complexity of MCTS-based algorithms is influenced by the size of the search space. To address this issue, we propose a novel probability tree state abstraction (PTSA) algorithm to improve the search efficiency of MCTS. A general tree state abstraction with path transitivity is defined. In addition, the probability tree state abstraction is proposed for fewer mistakes during the aggregation step. Furthermore, the theoretical guarantees of the transitivity and aggregation error bound are justified. To evaluate the effectiveness of the PTSA algorithm, we integrate it with state-of-the-art MCTS-based algorithms, such as Sampled MuZero and Gumbel MuZero. Experimental results on different tasks demonstrate that our method can accelerate the training process of state-of-the-art algorithms with 10%-45% search space reduction.

Qizhi Xie, Kun Yuan, Yunpeng Qu et al.

Accurately estimating humans' subjective feedback on video fluency, e.g., motion consistency and frame continuity, is crucial for various applications like streaming and gaming. Yet, it has long been overlooked, as prior arts have focused on solving it in the video quality assessment (VQA) task, merely as a sub-dimension of overall quality. In this work, we conduct pilot experiments and reveal that current VQA predictions largely underrepresent fluency, thereby limiting their applicability. To this end, we pioneer Video Fluency Assessment (VFA) as a standalone perceptual task focused on the temporal dimension. To advance VFA research, 1) we construct a fluency-oriented dataset, FluVid, comprising 4,606 in-the-wild videos with balanced fluency distribution, featuring the first-ever scoring criteria and human study for VFA. 2) We develop a large-scale benchmark of 23 methods, the most comprehensive one thus far on FluVid, gathering insights for VFA-tailored model designs. 3) We propose a baseline model called FluNet, which deploys temporal permuted self-attention (T-PSA) to enrich input fluency information and enhance long-range inter-frame interactions. Our work not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but, more importantly, offers the community a roadmap to explore solutions for VFA.

Fengxiang Li, Han Zhang, Haoyang Huang et al.

We present KAT-Coder-V2, an agentic coding model developed by the KwaiKAT team at Kuaishou. KAT-Coder-V2 adopts a "Specialize-then-Unify" paradigm that decomposes agentic coding into five expert domains - SWE, WebCoding, Terminal, WebSearch, and General - each undergoing independent supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, before being consolidated into a single model via on-policy distillation. We develop KwaiEnv, a modular infrastructure sustaining tens of thousands of concurrent sandbox instances, and scale RL training along task complexity, intent alignment, and scaffold generalization. We further propose MCLA for stabilizing MoE RL training and Tree Training for eliminating redundant computation over tree-structured trajectories with up to 6.2x speedup. KAT-Coder-V2 achieves 79.6% on SWE-bench Verified (vs. Claude Opus 4.6 at 80.8%), 88.7 on PinchBench (surpassing GLM-5 and MiniMax M2.7), ranks first across all three frontend aesthetics scenarios, and maintains strong generalist scores on Terminal-Bench Hard (46.8) and tau^2-Bench (93.9). Our model is publicly available at https://streamlake.com/product/kat-coder.

Yunpeng Qu, Kun Yuan, Qizhi Xie et al.

Video Quality Assessment (VQA), which intends to predict the perceptual quality of videos, has attracted increasing attention. Due to factors like motion blur or specific distortions, the quality of different regions in a video varies. Recognizing the region-wise local quality within a video is beneficial for assessing global quality and can guide us in adopting fine-grained enhancement or transcoding strategies. Due to the heavy cost of annotating region-wise quality, the lack of ground truth constraints from relevant datasets further complicates the utilization of local perception. Inspired by the Human Visual System (HVS) that links global quality to the local texture of different regions and their visual saliency, we propose a Kaleidoscope Video Quality Assessment (KVQ) framework, which aims to effectively assess both saliency and local texture, thereby facilitating the assessment of global quality. Our framework extracts visual saliency and allocates attention using Fusion-Window Attention (FWA) while incorporating a Local Perception Constraint (LPC) to mitigate the reliance of regional texture perception on neighboring areas. KVQ obtains significant improvements across multiple scenarios on five VQA benchmarks compared to SOTA methods. Furthermore, to assess local perception, we establish a new Local Perception Visual Quality (LPVQ) dataset with region-wise annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the capability of KVQ in perceiving local distortions. KVQ models and the LPVQ dataset will be available at https://github.com/qyp2000/KVQ.

Purui Bai, Junxian Duan, Pin Wang et al.

Although diffusion-based real-world image restoration (Real-IR) has achieved remarkable progress, efficiently leveraging ultra-large-scale pre-trained text-to-image (T2I) models and fully exploiting their potential remain significant challenges. To address this issue, we propose ResFlow-Tuner, an image restoration framework based on the state-of-the-art flow matching model, FLUX.1-dev, which integrates unified multi-modal fusion (UMMF) with test-time scaling (TTS) to achieve unprecedented restoration performance. Our approach fully leverages the advantages of the Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformer (MM-DiT) architecture by encoding multi-modal conditions into a unified sequence that guides the synthesis of high-quality images. Furthermore, we introduce a training-free test-time scaling paradigm tailored for image restoration. During inference, this technique dynamically steers the denoising direction through feedback from a reward model (RM), thereby achieving significant performance gains with controllable computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple standard benchmarks. This work not only validates the powerful capabilities of the flow matching model in low-level vision tasks but, more importantly, proposes a novel and efficient inference-time scaling paradigm suitable for large pre-trained models.

Zhenyu Wang, Shuyu Kong, Li Wan et al.

Existing keyword spotting (KWS) systems primarily rely on predefined keyword phrases. However, the ability to recognize customized keywords is crucial for tailoring interactions with intelligent devices. In this paper, we present a novel Query-by-Example (QbyE) KWS system that employs spectral-temporal graph attentive pooling and multi-task learning. This framework aims to effectively learn speaker-invariant and linguistic-informative embeddings for QbyE KWS tasks. Within this framework, we investigate three distinct network architectures for encoder modeling: LiCoNet, Conformer and ECAPA_TDNN. The experimental results on a substantial internal dataset of $629$ speakers have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed QbyE framework in maximizing the potential of simpler models such as LiCoNet. Particularly, LiCoNet, which is 13x more efficient, achieves comparable performance to the computationally intensive Conformer model (1.98% vs. 1.63\% FRR at 0.3 FAs/Hr).

Kaiyu Yue, Ming Sun, Yuchen Yuan et al.

The non-local module is designed for capturing long-range spatio-temporal dependencies in images and videos. Although having shown excellent performance, it lacks the mechanism to model the interactions between positions across channels, which are of vital importance in recognizing fine-grained objects and actions. To address this limitation, we generalize the non-local module and take the correlations between the positions of any two channels into account. This extension utilizes the compact representation for multiple kernel functions with Taylor expansion that makes the generalized non-local module in a fast and low-complexity computation flow. Moreover, we implement our generalized non-local method within channel groups to ease the optimization. Experimental results illustrate the clear-cut improvements and practical applicability of the generalized non-local module on both fine-grained object recognition and video classification. Code is available at: https://github.com/KaiyuYue/cgnl-network.pytorch.

Xiaodong He, Haolan He, Ruiyi Fang et al.

Graph foundation models (GFMs) seek transferable representations across graph domains but are limited by structural heterogeneity and incompatible node feature spaces. We propose Structure-Centric Graph Foundation Models (SCGFM), which treat graph topology as the primary source of transferable knowledge. Modeling graphs as metric measure spaces, SCGFM introduces learnable geometric bases that define a shared structural coordinate system. Graphs are aligned to these bases via Gromov-Wasserstein distances, yielding structure-aligned latent representations that accommodate heterogeneous graph topologies. To address feature incompatibility, SCGFM employs a structure-aware feature re-encoding mechanism that unifies node representations without assuming a fixed feature dimensionality or requiring dataset-specific preprocessing. Experiments on graph- and node-level tasks demonstrate strong in-domain and cross-domain generalization, outperforming existing GFM approaches.

Zheng Chen, Zongwei Wu, Eduard Zamfir et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

Yiting Lu, Xin Li, Yajing Pei et al.

Short-form UGC video platforms, like Kwai and TikTok, have been an emerging and irreplaceable mainstream media form, thriving on user-friendly engagement, and kaleidoscope creation, etc. However, the advancing content-generation modes, e.g., special effects, and sophisticated processing workflows, e.g., de-artifacts, have introduced significant challenges to recent UGC video quality assessment: (i) the ambiguous contents hinder the identification of quality-determined regions. (ii) the diverse and complicated hybrid distortions are hard to distinguish. To tackle the above challenges and assist in the development of short-form videos, we establish the first large-scale Kaleidoscope short Video database for Quality assessment, termed KVQ, which comprises 600 user-uploaded short videos and 3600 processed videos through the diverse practical processing workflows, including pre-processing, transcoding, and enhancement. Among them, the absolute quality score of each video and partial ranking score among indistinguishable samples are provided by a team of professional researchers specializing in image processing. Based on this database, we propose the first short-form video quality evaluator, i.e., KSVQE, which enables the quality evaluator to identify the quality-determined semantics with the content understanding of large vision language models (i.e., CLIP) and distinguish the distortions with the distortion understanding module. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of KSVQE on our KVQ database and popular VQA databases.

Xin Li, Xijun Wang, Bingchen Li et al.

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

Tongda Xu, Ziran Zhu, Jian Li et al.

Diffusion Inverse Solvers (DIS) are designed to sample from the conditional distribution $p_θ(X_0|y)$, with a predefined diffusion model $p_θ(X_0)$, an operator $f(\cdot)$, and a measurement $y=f(x'_0)$ derived from an unknown image $x'_0$. Existing DIS estimate the conditional score function by evaluating $f(\cdot)$ with an approximated posterior sample drawn from $p_θ(X_0|X_t)$. However, most prior approximations rely on the posterior means, which may not lie in the support of the image distribution, thereby potentially diverge from the appearance of genuine images. Such out-of-support samples may significantly degrade the performance of the operator $f(\cdot)$, particularly when it is a neural network. In this paper, we introduces a novel approach for posterior approximation that guarantees to generate valid samples within the support of the image distribution, and also enhances the compatibility with neural network-based operators $f(\cdot)$. We first demonstrate that the solution of the Probability Flow Ordinary Differential Equation (PF-ODE) with an initial value $x_t$ yields an effective posterior sample $p_θ(X_0|X_t=x_t)$. Based on this observation, we adopt the Consistency Model (CM), which is distilled from PF-ODE, for posterior sampling. Furthermore, we design a novel family of DIS using only CM. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed method for posterior sample approximation substantially enhance the effectiveness of DIS for neural network operators $f(\cdot)$ (e.g., in semantic segmentation). Additionally, our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the new CM-based inversion techniques. The source code is provided in the supplementary material.

Haolan Chen, Jinhua Hao, Kai Zhao et al.

The objective of image super-resolution is to generate clean and high-resolution images from degraded versions. Recent advancements in diffusion modeling have led to the emergence of various image super-resolution techniques that leverage pretrained text-to-image (T2I) models. Nevertheless, due to the prevalent severe degradation in low-resolution images and the inherent characteristics of diffusion models, achieving high-fidelity image restoration remains challenging. Existing methods often exhibit issues including semantic loss, artifacts, and the introduction of spurious content not present in the original image. To tackle this challenge, we propose Cascaded diffusion for Super-Resolution, CasSR , a novel method designed to produce highly detailed and realistic images. In particular, we develop a cascaded controllable diffusion model that aims to optimize the extraction of information from low-resolution images. This model generates a preliminary reference image to facilitate initial information extraction and degradation mitigation. Furthermore, we propose a multi-attention mechanism to enhance the T2I model's capability in maximizing the restoration of the original image content. Through a comprehensive blend of qualitative and quantitative analyses, we substantiate the efficacy and superiority of our approach.

Jingwei Bao, Jinhua Hao, Pengcheng Xu et al.

High-resolution (HR) images are commonly downscaled to low-resolution (LR) to reduce bandwidth, followed by upscaling to restore their original details. Recent advancements in image rescaling algorithms have employed invertible neural networks (INNs) to create a unified framework for downscaling and upscaling, ensuring a one-to-one mapping between LR and HR images. Traditional methods, utilizing dual-branch based vanilla invertible blocks, process high-frequency and low-frequency information separately, often relying on specific distributions to model high-frequency components. However, processing the low-frequency component directly in the RGB domain introduces channel redundancy, limiting the efficiency of image reconstruction. To address these challenges, we propose a plug-and-play tri-branch invertible block (T-InvBlocks) that decomposes the low-frequency branch into luminance (Y) and chrominance (CbCr) components, reducing redundancy and enhancing feature processing. Additionally, we adopt an all-zero mapping strategy for high-frequency components during upscaling, focusing essential rescaling information within the LR image. Our T-InvBlocks can be seamlessly integrated into existing rescaling models, improving performance in both general rescaling tasks and scenarios involving lossy compression. Extensive experiments confirm that our method advances the state of the art in HR image reconstruction.

Jiamin Xie, Ju Lin, Yiteng Huang et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that prompting large language models (LLM) with audio encodings enables effective speech recognition capabilities. However, the ability of Speech LLMs to comprehend and process multi-channel audio with spatial cues remains a relatively uninvestigated area of research. In this work, we present directional-SpeechLlama, a novel approach that leverages the microphone array of smart glasses to achieve directional speech recognition, source localization, and bystander cross-talk suppression. To enhance the model's ability to understand directivity, we propose two key techniques: serialized directional output training (S-DOT) and contrastive direction data augmentation (CDDA). Experimental results show that our proposed directional-SpeechLlama effectively captures the relationship between textual cues and spatial audio, yielding strong performance in both speech recognition and source localization tasks.

Nitin Yadav, Changsung Kang, Hongwei Shang et al.

E-commerce search engines often rely solely on product titles as input for ranking models with latency constraints. However, this approach can result in suboptimal relevance predictions, as product titles often lack sufficient detail to capture query intent. While product descriptions provide richer information, their verbosity and length make them unsuitable for real-time ranking, particularly for computationally expensive architectures like cross-encoder ranking models. To address this challenge, we propose ReLSum, a novel reinforcement learning framework designed to generate concise, query-relevant summaries of product descriptions optimized for search relevance. ReLSum leverages relevance scores as rewards to align the objectives of summarization and ranking, effectively overcoming limitations of prior methods, such as misaligned learning targets. The framework employs a trainable large language model (LLM) to produce summaries, which are then used as input for a cross-encoder ranking model. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in offline metrics, including recall and NDCG, as well as online user engagement metrics. ReLSum provides a scalable and efficient solution for enhancing search relevance in large-scale e-commerce systems.

Jinchuan Zhang, Ming Sun, Chong Mu et al.

Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning focuses on predicting events through historical information within snapshots distributed on a timeline. Existing studies mainly concentrate on two perspectives of leveraging the history of TKGs, including capturing evolution of each recent snapshot or correlations among global historical facts. Despite the achieved significant accomplishments, these models still fall short of I) investigating the impact of multi-granular interactions across recent snapshots, and II) harnessing the expressive semantics of significant links accorded with queries throughout the entire history, particularly events exerting a profound impact on the future. These inadequacies restrict representation ability to reflect historical dependencies and future trends thoroughly. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose an innovative TKG reasoning approach towards \textbf{His}torically \textbf{R}elevant \textbf{E}vents \textbf{S}tructuring (HisRES). Concretely, HisRES comprises two distinctive modules excelling in structuring historically relevant events within TKGs, including a multi-granularity evolutionary encoder that captures structural and temporal dependencies of the most recent snapshots, and a global relevance encoder that concentrates on crucial correlations among events relevant to queries from the entire history. Furthermore, HisRES incorporates a self-gating mechanism for adaptively merging multi-granularity recent and historically relevant structuring representations. Extensive experiments on four event-based benchmarks demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of HisRES and indicate the superiority and effectiveness of structuring historical relevance for TKG reasoning.

Weimin Bai, Suzhe Xu, Yiwei Ren et al.

Video inverse problems are fundamental to streaming, telepresence, and AR/VR, where high perceptual quality must coexist with tight latency constraints. Diffusion-based priors currently deliver state-of-the-art reconstructions, but existing approaches either adapt image diffusion models with ad hoc temporal regularizers - leading to temporal artifacts - or rely on native video diffusion models whose iterative posterior sampling is far too slow for real-time use. We introduce InstantViR, an amortized inference framework for ultra-fast video reconstruction powered by a pre-trained video diffusion prior. We distill a powerful bidirectional video diffusion model (teacher) into a causal autoregressive student that maps a degraded video directly to its restored version in a single forward pass, inheriting the teacher's strong temporal modeling while completely removing iterative test-time optimization. The distillation is prior-driven: it only requires the teacher diffusion model and known degradation operators, and does not rely on externally paired clean/noisy video data. To further boost throughput, we replace the video-diffusion backbone VAE with a high-efficiency LeanVAE via an innovative teacher-space regularized distillation scheme, enabling low-latency latent-space processing. Across streaming random inpainting, Gaussian deblurring and super-resolution, InstantViR matches or surpasses the reconstruction quality of diffusion-based baselines while running at over 35 FPS on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, achieving up to 100 times speedups over iterative video diffusion solvers. These results show that diffusion-based video reconstruction is compatible with real-time, interactive, editable, streaming scenarios, turning high-quality video restoration into a practical component of modern vision systems.