Xiaoning Liu

Xiaoning Liu

As an ever-increasing demand for high dynamic range (HDR) scene shooting, multi-exposure image fusion (MEF) technology has abounded. In recent years, multi-scale exposure fusion approaches based on detail-enhancement have led the way for improvement in highlight and shadow details. Most of such methods, however, are too computationally expensive to be deployed on mobile devices. This paper presents a perceptual multi-exposure fusion method that not just ensures fine shadow/highlight details but with lower complexity than detailenhanced methods. We analyze the potential defects of three classical exposure measures in lieu of using detail-enhancement component and improve two of them, namely adaptive Wellexposedness (AWE) and the gradient of color images (3-D gradient). AWE designed in YCbCr color space considers the difference between varying exposure images. 3-D gradient is employed to extract fine details. We build a large-scale multiexposure benchmark dataset suitable for static scenes, which contains 167 image sequences all told. Experiments on the constructed dataset demonstrate that the proposed method exceeds existing eight state-of-the-art approaches in terms of visually and MEF-SSIM value. Moreover, our approach can achieve a better improvement for current image enhancement techniques, ensuring fine detail in bright light.

Ao Li, Xiaoning Liu, Sheng Li et al.

All-in-one image restoration aims to handle diverse degradations within a single model. However, existing methods often suffer from three key limitations: 1) per-input computational overhead from dynamic degradation estimation; 2) optimization challenges due to task heterogeneity; and 3) inefficient, frequency-agnostic encoder designs. To overcome these, we introduce the Dynamic Reparameterization Network (DRNet), a novel framework operating on an initialization-stage reconfiguration paradigm that fundamentally eliminates per-input overhead. At its core, a Dynamic Reparameterization MLP (DRMLP) guided by a Task-Specific Modulator (TSM), which effectively mitigates task heterogeneity by orchestrating both specific restoration goals and a versatile general-purpose mode within a unified architecture. Furthermore, we incorporate a Continuous Wavelet Transform Encoder (CWTE) that explicitly leverages frequency characteristics via wavelet decomposition for a lightweight yet powerful design. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DRNet achieves state-of-the-art performance across five restoration tasks with superior parameter efficiency. Crucially, it showcases unique flexibility, excelling as both a highly competitive foundation model for blind restoration and a top-performing user-guided specialist.

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.

Jiebin Yan, Chenyu Tu, Weixia Zhang et al.

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NITRE 2026 Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement (E-LLIE) Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final outcomes. This challenge focuses on mobile image enhancement under low-light conditions, aiming to design lightweight networks that improve enhancement quality while ensuring practical deployability under limited computational resources. A total of 207 participants registered, 27 teams submitted valid entries, and 17 teams ultimately provided valid factsheet. Based on these submissions, this paper provides a systematic evaluation of recent methods for E-LLIE, offering a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art progress and demonstrating significant improvements in both performance and efficiency.

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.

He Zhang, Bang Wu, Xiangwen Yang et al.

Dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have emerged and been widely deployed in various web applications (e.g., Reddit) to serve users (e.g., personalized content delivery) due to their remarkable ability to learn from complex and dynamic user interaction data. Despite benefiting from high-quality services, users have raised privacy concerns, such as misuse of personal data (e.g., dynamic user-user/item interaction) for model training, requiring DGNNs to ``forget'' their data to meet AI governance laws (e.g., the ``right to be forgotten'' in GDPR). However, current static graph unlearning studies cannot \textit{unlearn dynamic graph elements} and exhibit limitations such as the model-specific design or reliance on pre-processing, which disenable their practicability in dynamic graph unlearning. To this end, we study the dynamic graph unlearning for the first time and propose an effective, efficient, general, and post-processing method to implement DGNN unlearning. Specifically, we first formulate dynamic graph unlearning in the context of continuous-time dynamic graphs, and then propose a method called Gradient Transformation that directly maps the unlearning request to the desired parameter update. Comprehensive evaluations on six real-world datasets and state-of-the-art DGNN backbones demonstrate its effectiveness (e.g., limited drop or obvious improvement in utility) and efficiency (e.g., 7.23$\times$ speed-up) advantages. Additionally, our method has the potential to handle future unlearning requests with significant performance gains (e.g., 32.59$\times$ speed-up).

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.

Jiachen Li, Bang Wu, Xiaoyu Xia et al.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained increasing attention for their superior energy efficiency compared to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). However, their security aspects, particularly under backdoor attacks, have received limited attention. Existing defense methods developed for ANNs perform poorly or can be easily bypassed in SNNs due to their event-driven and temporal dependencies. This paper identifies the key blockers that hinder traditional backdoor defenses in SNNs and proposes an unsupervised post-training detection framework, Temporal Membrane Potential Backdoor Detection (TMPBD), to overcome these challenges. TMPBD leverages the maximum margin statistics of temporal membrane potential (TMP) in the final spiking layer to detect target labels without any attack knowledge or data access. We further introduce a robust mitigation mechanism, Neural Dendrites Suppression Backdoor Mitigation (NDSBM), which clamps dendritic connections between early convolutional layers to suppress malicious neurons while preserving benign behaviors, guided by TMP extracted from a small, clean, unlabeled dataset. Extensive experiments on multiple neuromorphic benchmarks and state-of-the-art input-aware dynamic trigger attacks demonstrate that TMPBD achieves 100% detection accuracy, while NDSBM reduces the attack success rate from 100% to 8.44%, and to 2.81% when combined with detection, without degrading clean accuracy.