Qiong Cao

Zheng Chen, Kai Liu, Jingkai Wang et al.

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution.

Kai Liu, Haoyang Yue, Zeli Lin et al.

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge, one of the associated challenges of NTIRE 2026. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) infrared images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a x4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective models or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art performance for infrared image SR in remote sensing scenarios. To reflect the characteristics of infrared data and practical application needs, the challenge adopts a single-track setting. A total of 115 participants registered for the competition, with 13 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, dataset, evaluation protocol, main results, and the representative methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance research in infrared image super-resolution and promote the development of effective solutions for real-world remote sensing applications.

Wentao Tan, Qiong Cao, Yibing Zhan et al.

Human preference alignment can greatly enhance Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), but collecting high-quality preference data is costly. A promising solution is the self-evolution strategy, where models are iteratively trained on data they generate. However, current techniques still rely on human- or GPT-annotated data and sometimes require additional models or ground truth answers. To address these issues, we propose a novel multimodal self-evolution framework that enables the model to autonomously generate high-quality questions and answers using only unannotated images. First, we implement an image-driven self-questioning mechanism, allowing the model to create and evaluate questions based on image content, regenerating them if they are irrelevant or unanswerable. This sets a strong foundation for answer generation. Second, we introduce an answer self-enhancement technique, starting with image captioning to improve answer quality. We also use corrupted images to generate rejected answers, forming distinct preference pairs for optimization. Finally, we incorporate an image content alignment loss function alongside Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) loss to reduce hallucinations, ensuring the model focuses on image content. Experiments show that our framework performs competitively with methods using external information, offering a more efficient and scalable approach to MLLMs.

Changcheng Xiao, Qiong Cao, Yujie Zhong et al.

Referring multi-object tracking (RMOT) is an emerging cross-modal task that aims to locate an arbitrary number of target objects and maintain their identities referred by a language expression in a video. This intricate task involves the reasoning of linguistic and visual modalities, along with the temporal association of target objects. However, the seminal work employs only loose feature fusion and overlooks the utilization of long-term information on tracked objects. In this study, we introduce a compact Transformer-based method, termed TenRMOT. We conduct feature fusion at both encoding and decoding stages to fully exploit the advantages of Transformer architecture. Specifically, we incrementally perform cross-modal fusion layer-by-layer during the encoding phase. In the decoding phase, we utilize language-guided queries to probe memory features for accurate prediction of the desired objects. Moreover, we introduce a query update module that explicitly leverages temporal prior information of the tracked objects to enhance the consistency of their trajectories. In addition, we introduce a novel task called Referring Multi-Object Tracking and Segmentation (RMOTS) and construct a new dataset named Ref-KITTI Segmentation. Our dataset consists of 18 videos with 818 expressions, and each expression averages 10.7 masks, which poses a greater challenge compared to the typical single mask in most existing referring video segmentation datasets. TenRMOT demonstrates superior performance on both the referring multi-object tracking and the segmentation tasks.

Weinong Wang, Wenjie Pei, Qiong Cao et al.

Person re-identification aims to identify whether pairs of images belong to the same person or not. This problem is challenging due to large differences in camera views, lighting and background. One of the mainstream in learning CNN features is to design loss functions which reinforce both the class separation and intra-class compactness. In this paper, we propose a novel Orthogonal Center Learning method with Subspace Masking for person re-identification. We make the following contributions: (i) we develop a center learning module to learn the class centers by simultaneously reducing the intra-class differences and inter-class correlations by orthogonalization; (ii) we introduce a subspace masking mechanism to enhance the generalization of the learned class centers; and (iii) we devise to integrate the average pooling and max pooling in a regularizing manner that fully exploits their powers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the large-scale ReID datasets including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-ReID, CUHK03 and MSMT17.

Canmiao Fu, Wenjie Pei, Qiong Cao et al.

Typical methods for supervised sequence modeling are built upon the recurrent neural networks to capture temporal dependencies. One potential limitation of these methods is that they only model explicitly information interactions between adjacent time steps in a sequence, hence the high-order interactions between nonadjacent time steps are not fully exploited. It greatly limits the capability of modeling the long-range temporal dependencies since one-order interactions cannot be maintained for a long term due to information dilution and gradient vanishing. To tackle this limitation, we propose the Non-local Recurrent Neural Memory (NRNM) for supervised sequence modeling, which performs non-local operations to learn full-order interactions within a sliding temporal block and models global interactions between blocks in a gated recurrent manner. Consequently, our model is able to capture the long-range dependencies. Besides, the latent high-level features contained in high-order interactions can be distilled by our model. We demonstrate the merits of our NRNM on two different tasks: action recognition and sentiment analysis.

Qiong Cao, Li Shen, Weidi Xie et al.

In this paper, we introduce a new large-scale face dataset named VGGFace2. The dataset contains 3.31 million images of 9131 subjects, with an average of 362.6 images for each subject. Images are downloaded from Google Image Search and have large variations in pose, age, illumination, ethnicity and profession (e.g. actors, athletes, politicians). The dataset was collected with three goals in mind: (i) to have both a large number of identities and also a large number of images for each identity; (ii) to cover a large range of pose, age and ethnicity; and (iii) to minimize the label noise. We describe how the dataset was collected, in particular the automated and manual filtering stages to ensure a high accuracy for the images of each identity. To assess face recognition performance using the new dataset, we train ResNet-50 (with and without Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks) Convolutional Neural Networks on VGGFace2, on MS- Celeb-1M, and on their union, and show that training on VGGFace2 leads to improved recognition performance over pose and age. Finally, using the models trained on these datasets, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on all the IARPA Janus face recognition benchmarks, e.g. IJB-A, IJB-B and IJB-C, exceeding the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. Datasets and models are publicly available.

Nate Crosswhite, Jeffrey Byrne, Omkar M. Parkhi et al.

Face recognition performance evaluation has traditionally focused on one-to-one verification, popularized by the Labeled Faces in the Wild dataset for imagery and the YouTubeFaces dataset for videos. In contrast, the newly released IJB-A face recognition dataset unifies evaluation of one-to-many face identification with one-to-one face verification over templates, or sets of imagery and videos for a subject. In this paper, we study the problem of template adaptation, a form of transfer learning to the set of media in a template. Extensive performance evaluations on IJB-A show a surprising result, that perhaps the simplest method of template adaptation, combining deep convolutional network features with template specific linear SVMs, outperforms the state-of-the-art by a wide margin. We study the effects of template size, negative set construction and classifier fusion on performance, then compare template adaptation to convolutional networks with metric learning, 2D and 3D alignment. Our unexpected conclusion is that these other methods, when combined with template adaptation, all achieve nearly the same top performance on IJB-A for template-based face verification and identification.

Qiong Cao, Zheng-Chu Guo, Yiming Ying

Recently, metric learning and similarity learning have attracted a large amount of interest. Many models and optimisation algorithms have been proposed. However, there is relatively little work on the generalization analysis of such methods. In this paper, we derive novel generalization bounds of metric and similarity learning. In particular, we first show that the generalization analysis reduces to the estimation of the Rademacher average over "sums-of-i.i.d." sample-blocks related to the specific matrix norm. Then, we derive generalization bounds for metric/similarity learning with different matrix-norm regularisers by estimating their specific Rademacher complexities. Our analysis indicates that sparse metric/similarity learning with $L^1$-norm regularisation could lead to significantly better bounds than those with Frobenius-norm regularisation. Our novel generalization analysis develops and refines the techniques of U-statistics and Rademacher complexity analysis.