Yi Yu

Yufei Wang, Yi Yu, Wenhan Yang et al.

Previous raw image-based low-light image enhancement methods predominantly relied on feed-forward neural networks to learn deterministic mappings from low-light to normally-exposed images. However, they failed to capture critical distribution information, leading to visually undesirable results. This work addresses the issue by seamlessly integrating a diffusion model with a physics-based exposure model. Different from a vanilla diffusion model that has to perform Gaussian denoising, with the injected physics-based exposure model, our restoration process can directly start from a noisy image instead of pure noise. As such, our method obtains significantly improved performance and reduced inference time compared with vanilla diffusion models. To make full use of the advantages of different intermediate steps, we further propose an adaptive residual layer that effectively screens out the side-effect in the iterative refinement when the intermediate results have been already well-exposed. The proposed framework can work with both real-paired datasets, SOTA noise models, and different backbone networks. Note that, the proposed framework is compatible with real-paired datasets, real/synthetic noise models, and different backbone networks. We evaluate the proposed method on various public benchmarks, achieving promising results with consistent improvements using different exposure models and backbones. Besides, the proposed method achieves better generalization capacity for unseen amplifying ratios and better performance than a larger feedforward neural model when few parameters are adopted.

Shengyue Yao, Jingru Yu, Yi Yu et al.

With a growing complexity of the intelligent traffic system (ITS), an integrated control of ITS that is capable of considering plentiful heterogeneous intelligent agents is desired. However, existing control methods based on the centralized or the decentralized scheme have not presented their competencies in considering the optimality and the scalability simultaneously. To address this issue, we propose an integrated control method based on the framework of Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The proposed method achieves a global consensus on energy consumption efficiency (ECE), meanwhile to optimize the local objectives of all involved intelligent agents, through a consensus and incentive mechanism. Furthermore, an operation algorithm is proposed regarding the issue of structural rigidity in DAO. Specifically, the proposed operation approach identifies critical agents to execute the smart contract in DAO, which ultimately extends the capability of DAO-based control. In addition, a numerical experiment is designed to examine the performance of the proposed method. The experiment results indicate that the controlled agents can achieve a consensus faster on the global objective with improved local objectives by the proposed method, compare to existing decentralized control methods. In general, the proposed method shows a great potential in developing an integrated control system in the ITS

Yuqi Xie, Shuhan Ye, Yi Yu et al.

The integration of event cameras and spiking neural networks (SNNs) promises energy-efficient visual intelligence, yet scarce event data and the sparsity of DVS outputs hinder effective training. Prior knowledge transfers from RGB to DVS often underperform because the distribution gap between modalities is substantial. In this work, we present Time-step Mixup Knowledge Transfer (TMKT), a cross-modal training framework with a probabilistic Time-step Mixup (TSM) strategy. TSM exploits the asynchronous nature of SNNs by interpolating RGB and DVS inputs at various time steps to produce a smooth curriculum within each sequence, which reduces gradient variance and stabilizes optimization with theoretical analysis. To employ auxiliary supervision from TSM, TMKT introduces two lightweight modality-aware objectives, Modality Aware Guidance (MAG) for per-frame source supervision and Mixup Ratio Perception (MRP) for sequence-level mix ratio estimation, which explicitly align temporal features with the mixing schedule. TMKT enables smoother knowledge transfer, helps mitigate modality mismatch during training, and achieves superior performance in spiking image classification tasks. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and multiple SNN backbones, together with ablations, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Shuhan Ye, Yi Yu, Qixin Zhang et al.

Brain-inspired Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient intelligence via event-driven, sparse computation, but deeper architectures inflate parameters and computational cost, hindering their edge deployment. Recent progress in SNN pruning helps alleviate this burden, yet existing efforts fall into only two families: \emph{unstructured} pruning, which attains high sparsity but is difficult to accelerate on general hardware, and \emph{structured} pruning, which eases deployment but lack flexibility and often degrades accuracy at matched sparsity. In this work, we introduce \textbf{SpikeNM}, the first SNN-oriented \emph{semi-structured} \(N{:}M\) pruning framework that learns sparse SNNs \emph{from scratch}, enforcing \emph{at most \(N\)} non-zeros per \(M\)-weight block. To avoid the combinatorial space complexity \(\sum_{k=1}^{N}\binom{M}{k}\) growing exponentially with \(M\), SpikeNM adopts an \(M\)-way basis-logit parameterization with a differentiable top-\(k\) sampler, \emph{linearizing} per-block complexity to \(\mathcal O(M)\) and enabling more aggressive sparsification. Further inspired by neuroscience, we propose \emph{eligibility-inspired distillation} (EID), which converts temporally accumulated credits into block-wise soft targets to align mask probabilities with spiking dynamics, reducing sampling variance and stabilizing search under high sparsity. Experiments show that at \(2{:}4\) sparsity, SpikeNM maintains and even with gains across main-stream datasets, while yielding hardware-amenable patterns that complement intrinsic spike sparsity.

Shuhan Ye, Yi Yu, Qixin Zhang et al.

Event cameras sense brightness changes and output binary asynchronous event streams, attracting increasing attention. Their bio-inspired dynamics align well with spiking neural networks (SNNs), offering a promising energy-efficient alternative to conventional vision systems. However, SNNs remain costly to train due to temporal coding, which limits their practical deployment. To alleviate the high training cost of SNNs, we introduce \textbf{PACE} (Phase-Aligned Condensation for Events), the first dataset distillation framework to SNNs and event-based vision. PACE distills a large training dataset into a compact synthetic one that enables fast SNN training, which is achieved by two core modules: \textbf{ST-DSM} and \textbf{PEQ-N}. ST-DSM uses residual membrane potentials to densify spike-based features (SDR) and to perform fine-grained spatiotemporal matching of amplitude and phase (ST-SM), while PEQ-N provides a plug-and-play straight through probabilistic integer quantizer compatible with standard event-frame pipelines. Across DVS-Gesture, CIFAR10-DVS, and N-MNIST datasets, PACE outperforms existing coreset selection and dataset distillation baselines, with particularly strong gains on dynamic event streams and at low or moderate IPC. Specifically, on N-MNIST, it achieves \(84.4\%\) accuracy, about \(85\%\) of the full training set performance, while reducing training time by more than \(50\times\) and storage cost by \(6000\times\), yielding compact surrogates that enable minute-scale SNN training and efficient edge deployment.

Song Xia, Yi Yu, Henghui Ding et al.

Precise segmentation of out-of-distribution (OoD) objects, herein referred to as anomalies, is crucial for the reliable deployment of semantic segmentation models in open-set, safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving. Current anomalous segmentation benchmarks predominantly focus on favorable weather conditions, resulting in untrustworthy evaluations that overlook the risks posed by diverse meteorological conditions in open-set environments, such as low illumination, dense fog, and heavy rain. To bridge this gap, this paper introduces the ComsAmy, a challenging benchmark specifically designed for open-set anomaly segmentation in complex scenarios. ComsAmy encompasses a wide spectrum of adverse weather conditions, dynamic driving environments, and diverse anomaly types to comprehensively evaluate the model performance in realistic open-world scenarios. Our extensive evaluation of several state-of-the-art anomalous segmentation models reveals that existing methods demonstrate significant deficiencies in such challenging scenarios, highlighting their serious safety risks for real-world deployment. To solve that, we propose a novel energy-entropy learning (EEL) strategy that integrates the complementary information from energy and entropy to bolster the robustness of anomaly segmentation under complex open-world environments. Additionally, a diffusion-based anomalous training data synthesizer is proposed to generate diverse and high-quality anomalous images to enhance the existing copy-paste training data synthesizer. Extensive experimental results on both public and ComsAmy benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed diffusion-based synthesizer with energy and entropy learning (DiffEEL) serves as an effective and generalizable plug-and-play method to enhance existing models, yielding an average improvement of around 4.96% in $\rm{AUPRC}$ and 9.87% in $\rm{FPR}_{95}$.