Jingdong Zhang

Jingdong Zhang, Jiayuan Fan, Peng Ye et al.

Multi-task dense prediction aims at handling multiple pixel-wise prediction tasks within a unified network simultaneously for visual scene understanding. However, cross-task feature interactions of current methods are still suffering from incomplete levels of representations, less discriminative semantics in feature participants, and inefficient pair-wise task interaction processes. To tackle these under-explored issues, we propose a novel BridgeNet framework, which extracts comprehensive and discriminative intermediate Bridge Features, and conducts interactions based on them. Specifically, a Task Pattern Propagation (TPP) module is firstly applied to ensure highly semantic task-specific feature participants are prepared for subsequent interactions, and a Bridge Feature Extractor (BFE) is specially designed to selectively integrate both high-level and low-level representations to generate the comprehensive bridge features. Then, instead of conducting heavy pair-wise cross-task interactions, a Task-Feature Refiner (TFR) is developed to efficiently take guidance from bridge features and form final task predictions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work considering the completeness and quality of feature participants in cross-task interactions. Extensive experiments are conducted on NYUD-v2, Cityscapes and PASCAL Context benchmarks, and the superior performance shows the proposed architecture is effective and powerful in promoting different dense prediction tasks simultaneously.

Jingdong Zhang, Lingzhi Zhang, Qing Liu et al.

Digital images are often degraded by soft effects such as lens flare, haze, shadows, and reflections, which reduce aesthetics even though the underlying pixels remain partially visible. The prevailing works address these degradations in isolation, developing highly specialized, specialist models that lack scalability and fail to exploit the shared underlying essences of these restoration problems. While specialist models are limited, recent large-scale pretrained generalist models offer powerful, text-driven image editing capabilities. while recent general-purpose systems (e.g., GPT-4o, Flux Kontext, Nano Banana) require detailed prompts and often fail to achieve robust removal on these fine-grained tasks or preserve identity of the scene. Leveraging the common essence of soft effects, i.e., semi-transparent occlusions, we introduce a foundational versatile model UniSER, capable of addressing diverse degradations caused by soft effects within a single framework. Our methodology centers on curating a massive 3.8M-pair dataset to ensure robustness and generalization, which includes novel, physically-plausible data to fill critical gaps in public benchmarks, and a tailored training pipeline that fine-tunes a Diffusion Transformer to learn robust restoration priors from this diverse data, integrating fine-grained mask and strength controls. This synergistic approach allows UniSER to significantly outperform both specialist and generalist models, achieving robust, high-fidelity restoration in the wild.