Ce Zhu

Jiani Liu, Qinghua Tao, Ce Zhu et al.

Multitask learning (MTL) leverages task-relatedness to enhance performance. With the emergence of multimodal data, tasks can now be referenced by multiple indices. In this paper, we employ high-order tensors, with each mode corresponding to a task index, to naturally represent tasks referenced by multiple indices and preserve their structural relations. Based on this representation, we propose a general framework of low-rank MTL methods with tensorized support vector machines (SVMs) and least square support vector machines (LSSVMs), where the CP factorization is deployed over the coefficient tensor. Our approach allows to model the task relation through a linear combination of shared factors weighted by task-specific factors and is generalized to both classification and regression problems. Through the alternating optimization scheme and the Lagrangian function, each subproblem is transformed into a convex problem, formulated as a quadratic programming or linear system in the dual form. In contrast to previous MTL frameworks, our decision function in the dual induces a weighted kernel function with a task-coupling term characterized by the similarities of the task-specific factors, better revealing the explicit relations across tasks in MTL. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed methods compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches in MTL. The code of implementation will be available at https://github.com/liujiani0216/TSVM-MTL.

Hailong Yan, Ao Li, Xiangtao Zhang et al.

Recent advancements in deep neural networks have driven significant progress in image enhancement (IE). However, deploying deep learning models on resource-constrained platforms, such as mobile devices, remains challenging due to high computation and memory demands. To address these challenges and facilitate real-time IE on mobile, we introduce an extremely lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) framework with around 4K parameters. Our approach integrates reparameterization with an Incremental Weight Optimization strategy to ensure efficiency. Additionally, we enhance performance with a Feature Self-Transform module and a Hierarchical Dual-Path Attention mechanism, optimized with a Local Variance-Weighted loss. With this efficient framework, we are the first to achieve real-time IE inference at up to 1,100 frames per second (FPS) while delivering competitive image quality, achieving the best trade-off between speed and performance across multiple IE tasks. The code will be available at https://github.com/AVC2-UESTC/MobileIE.git.

Cheng Lei, Jie Fan, Xinran Li et al.

Camouflaged Object Segmentation (COS) faces significant challenges due to the scarcity of annotated data, where meticulous pixel-level annotation is both labor-intensive and costly, primarily due to the intricate object-background boundaries. Addressing the core question, "Can COS be effectively achieved in a zero-shot manner without manual annotations for any camouflaged object?" we affirmatively respond and introduce a robust zero-shot COS framework. This framework leverages the inherent local pattern bias of COS and employs a broad semantic feature space derived from salient object segmentation (SOS) for efficient zero-shot transfer. We incorporate an Masked Image Modeling (MIM) based image encoder optimized for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), a Multimodal Large Language Model (M-LLM), and a Multi-scale Fine-grained Alignment (MFA) mechanism. The MIM pre-trained image encoder focuses on capturing essential low-level features, while the M-LLM generates caption embeddings processed alongside these visual cues. These embeddings are precisely aligned using MFA, enabling our framework to accurately interpret and navigate complex semantic contexts. To optimize operational efficiency, we introduce a learnable codebook that represents the M-LLM during inference, significantly reducing computational overhead. Our framework demonstrates its versatility and efficacy through rigorous experimentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot COS with $F_β^w$ scores of 72.9\% on CAMO and 71.7\% on COD10K. By removing the M-LLM during inference, we achieve an inference speed comparable to that of traditional end-to-end models, reaching 18.1 FPS. Code: https://github.com/R-LEI360725/ZSCOS-CaMF

Xiaoning Liu, Zongwei Wu, Ao Li et al.

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 low light image enhancement challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to discover an effective network design or solution capable of generating brighter, clearer, and visually appealing results when dealing with a variety of conditions, including ultra-high resolution (4K and beyond), non-uniform illumination, backlighting, extreme darkness, and night scenes. A notable total of 428 participants registered for the challenge, with 22 teams ultimately making valid submissions. This paper meticulously evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in enhancing low-light images, reflecting the significant progress and creativity in this field.

Xiaoning Liu, Zongwei Wu, Florin-Alexandru Vasluianu et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final outcomes. The objective of the challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing brighter, clearer, and visually compelling images under diverse and challenging conditions. A remarkable total of 762 participants registered for the competition, with 28 teams ultimately submitting valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advancements in LLIE, showcasing the significant progress.

Xiaoning Liu, Ao Li, Zongwei Wu et al.

Leveraging Transformer attention has led to great advancements in HDR deghosting. However, the intricate nature of self-attention introduces practical challenges, as existing state-of-the-art methods often demand high-end GPUs or exhibit slow inference speeds, especially for high-resolution images like 2K. Striking an optimal balance between performance and latency remains a critical concern. In response, this work presents PASTA, a novel Progressively Aggregated Spatio-Temporal Alignment framework for HDR deghosting. Our approach achieves effectiveness and efficiency by harnessing hierarchical representation during feature distanglement. Through the utilization of diverse granularities within the hierarchical structure, our method substantially boosts computational speed and optimizes the HDR imaging workflow. In addition, we explore within-scale feature modeling with local and global attention, gradually merging and refining them in a coarse-to-fine fashion. Experimental results showcase PASTA's superiority over current SOTA methods in both visual quality and performance metrics, accompanied by a substantial 3-fold (x3) increase in inference speed.

Xin Cao, Qinghua Tao, Yingjie Zhou et al.

Residential load forecasting (RLF) is crucial for resource scheduling in power systems. Most existing methods utilize all given load records (dense data) to indiscriminately extract the dependencies between historical and future time series. However, there exist important regular patterns residing in the event-related associations among different appliances (sparse knowledge), which have yet been ignored. In this paper, we propose an Event-Response Knowledge Guided approach (ERKG) for RLF by incorporating the estimation of electricity usage events for different appliances, mining event-related sparse knowledge from the load series. With ERKG, the event-response estimation enables portraying the electricity consumption behaviors of residents, revealing regular variations in appliance operational states. To be specific, ERKG consists of knowledge extraction and guidance: i) a forecasting model is designed for the electricity usage events by estimating appliance operational states, aiming to extract the event-related sparse knowledge; ii) a novel knowledge-guided mechanism is established by fusing such state estimates of the appliance events into the RLF model, which can give particular focuses on the patterns of users' electricity consumption behaviors. Notably, ERKG can flexibly serve as a plug-in module to boost the capability of existing forecasting models by leveraging event response. In numerical experiments, extensive comparisons and ablation studies have verified the effectiveness of our ERKG, e.g., over 8% MAE can be reduced on the tested state-of-the-art forecasting models.

Sirui Pan, Zhiyuan Zha, Shigang Wang et al.

Sparsity-based tensor recovery methods have shown great potential in suppressing seismic data noise. These methods exploit tensor sparsity measures capturing the low-dimensional structures inherent in seismic data tensors to remove noise by applying sparsity constraints through soft-thresholding or hard-thresholding operators. However, in these methods, considering that real seismic data are non-stationary and affected by noise, the variances of tensor coefficients are unknown and may be difficult to accurately estimate from the degraded seismic data, leading to undesirable noise suppression performance. In this paper, we propose a novel triply Laplacian scale mixture (TLSM) approach for seismic data noise suppression, which significantly improves the estimation accuracy of both the sparse tensor coefficients and hidden scalar parameters. To make the optimization problem manageable, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm is employed to solve the proposed TLSM-based seismic data noise suppression problem. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and field seismic data demonstrate that the proposed TLSM algorithm outperforms many state-of-the-art seismic data noise suppression methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations while providing exceptional computational efficiency.

Xinwei Ou, Ce Zhu, Xiaolin Huang et al.

Second-order optimization techniques have the potential to achieve faster convergence rates compared to first-order methods through the incorporation of second-order derivatives or statistics. However, their utilization in deep learning is limited due to their computational inefficiency. Various approaches have been proposed to address this issue, primarily centered on minimizing the size of the matrix to be inverted. Nevertheless, the necessity of performing the inverse operation iteratively persists. In this work, we present a fast natural gradient descent (FNGD) method that only requires inversion during the first epoch. Specifically, it is revealed that natural gradient descent (NGD) is essentially a weighted sum of per-sample gradients. Our novel approach further proposes to share these weighted coefficients across epochs without affecting empirical performance. Consequently, FNGD exhibits similarities to the average sum in first-order methods, leading to the computational complexity of FNGD being comparable to that of first-order methods. Extensive experiments on image classification and machine translation tasks demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed FNGD. For training ResNet-18 on CIFAR-100, FNGD can achieve a speedup of 2.07$\times$ compared with KFAC. For training Transformer on Multi30K, FNGD outperforms AdamW by 24 BLEU score while requiring almost the same training time.