Junjun Jiang

Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Xianming Liu et al.

This paper aims to address the problem of supervised monocular depth estimation. We start with a meticulous pilot study to demonstrate that the long-range correlation is essential for accurate depth estimation. Therefore, we propose to leverage the Transformer to model this global context with an effective attention mechanism. We also adopt an additional convolution branch to preserve the local information as the Transformer lacks the spatial inductive bias in modeling such contents. However, independent branches lead to a shortage of connections between features. To bridge this gap, we design a hierarchical aggregation and heterogeneous interaction module to enhance the Transformer features via element-wise interaction and model the affinity between the Transformer and the CNN features in a set-to-set translation manner. Due to the unbearable memory cost caused by global attention on high-resolution feature maps, we introduce the deformable scheme to reduce the complexity. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NYU, and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that our proposed model, termed DepthFormer, surpasses state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods with prominent margins. Notably, it achieves the most competitive result on the highly competitive KITTI depth estimation benchmark. Our codes and models are available at https://github.com/zhyever/Monocular-Depth-Estimation-Toolbox.

Zhiwei Zhong, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang et al.

Guided depth map super-resolution (GDSR), which aims to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) depth map from a low-resolution (LR) observation with the help of a paired HR color image, is a longstanding and fundamental problem, it has attracted considerable attention from computer vision and image processing communities. A myriad of novel and effective approaches have been proposed recently, especially with powerful deep learning techniques. This survey is an effort to present a comprehensive survey of recent progress in GDSR. We start by summarizing the problem of GDSR and explaining why it is challenging. Next, we introduce some commonly used datasets and image quality assessment methods. In addition, we roughly classify existing GDSR methods into three categories, i.e., filtering-based methods, prior-based methods, and learning-based methods. In each category, we introduce the general description of the published algorithms and design principles, summarize the representative methods, and discuss their highlights and limitations. Moreover, the depth related applications are introduced. Furthermore, we conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of some representative methods based on unified experimental configurations, so as to offer a systematic and fair performance evaluation to readers. Finally, we conclude this survey with possible directions and open problems for further research. All the related materials can be found at \url{https://github.com/zhwzhong/Guided-Depth-Map-Super-resolution-A-Survey}.

Zhenyu Li, Xuyang Wang, Xianming Liu et al.

Monocular depth estimation is a fundamental task in computer vision and has drawn increasing attention. Recently, some methods reformulate it as a classification-regression task to boost the model performance, where continuous depth is estimated via a linear combination of predicted probability distributions and discrete bins. In this paper, we present a novel framework called BinsFormer, tailored for the classification-regression-based depth estimation. It mainly focuses on two crucial components in the specific task: 1) proper generation of adaptive bins and 2) sufficient interaction between probability distribution and bins predictions. To specify, we employ the Transformer decoder to generate bins, novelly viewing it as a direct set-to-set prediction problem. We further integrate a multi-scale decoder structure to achieve a comprehensive understanding of spatial geometry information and estimate depth maps in a coarse-to-fine manner. Moreover, an extra scene understanding query is proposed to improve the estimation accuracy, which turns out that models can implicitly learn useful information from an auxiliary environment classification task. Extensive experiments on the KITTI, NYU, and SUN RGB-D datasets demonstrate that BinsFormer surpasses state-of-the-art monocular depth estimation methods with prominent margins. Code and pretrained models will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/zhyever/Monocular-Depth-Estimation-Toolbox}.

Wenbo Zhao, Xianming Liu, Zhiwei Zhong et al.

Point clouds upsampling is a challenging issue to generate dense and uniform point clouds from the given sparse input. Most existing methods either take the end-to-end supervised learning based manner, where large amounts of pairs of sparse input and dense ground-truth are exploited as supervision information; or treat up-scaling of different scale factors as independent tasks, and have to build multiple networks to handle upsampling with varying factors. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that achieves self-supervised and magnification-flexible point clouds upsampling simultaneously. We formulate point clouds upsampling as the task of seeking nearest projection points on the implicit surface for seed points. To this end, we define two implicit neural functions to estimate projection direction and distance respectively, which can be trained by two pretext learning tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our self-supervised learning based scheme achieves competitive or even better performance than supervised learning based state-of-the-art methods. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/xnowbzhao/sapcu.

Andrey Ignatov, Grigory Malivenko, Radu Timofte et al. · tencent-ai

Various depth estimation models are now widely used on many mobile and IoT devices for image segmentation, bokeh effect rendering, object tracking and many other mobile tasks. Thus, it is very crucial to have efficient and accurate depth estimation models that can run fast on low-power mobile chipsets. In this Mobile AI challenge, the target was to develop deep learning-based single image depth estimation solutions that can show a real-time performance on IoT platforms and smartphones. For this, the participants used a large-scale RGB-to-depth dataset that was collected with the ZED stereo camera capable to generated depth maps for objects located at up to 50 meters. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Raspberry Pi 4 platform, where the developed solutions were able to generate VGA resolution depth maps at up to 27 FPS while achieving high fidelity results. All models developed in the challenge are also compatible with any Android or Linux-based mobile devices, their detailed description is provided in this paper.

Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Ang Li et al. · deepmind

Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) has achieved unprecedented success with the advent of deep learning techniques and emerging large-scale autonomous driving datasets. However, drastic performance degradation remains an unwell-studied challenge for practical cross-domain deployment as the lack of labels on the target domain. In this paper, we first comprehensively investigate the significant underlying factor of the domain gap in Mono3D, where the critical observation is a depth-shift issue caused by the geometric misalignment of domains. Then, we propose STMono3D, a new self-teaching framework for unsupervised domain adaptation on Mono3D. To mitigate the depth-shift, we introduce the geometry-aligned multi-scale training strategy to disentangle the camera parameters and guarantee the geometry consistency of domains. Based on this, we develop a teacher-student paradigm to generate adaptive pseudo labels on the target domain. Benefiting from the end-to-end framework that provides richer information of the pseudo labels, we propose the quality-aware supervision strategy to take instance-level pseudo confidences into account and improve the effectiveness of the target-domain training process. Moreover, the positive focusing training strategy and dynamic threshold are proposed to handle tremendous FN and FP pseudo samples. STMono3D achieves remarkable performance on all evaluated datasets and even surpasses fully supervised results on the KITTI 3D object detection dataset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore effective UDA methods for Mono3D.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Kui Jiang et al.

Deep models have achieved significant process on single image super-resolution (SISR) tasks, in particular large models with large kernel ($3\times3$ or more). However, the heavy computational footprint of such models prevents their deployment in real-time, resource-constrained environments. Conversely, $1\times1$ convolutions bring substantial computational efficiency, but struggle with aggregating local spatial representations, an essential capability to SISR models. In response to this dichotomy, we propose to harmonize the merits of both $3\times3$ and $1\times1$ kernels, and exploit a great potential for lightweight SISR tasks. Specifically, we propose a simple yet effective fully $1\times1$ convolutional network, named Shift-Conv-based Network (SCNet). By incorporating a parameter-free spatial-shift operation, it equips the fully $1\times1$ convolutional network with powerful representation capability while impressive computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCNets, despite its fully $1\times1$ convolutional structure, consistently matches or even surpasses the performance of existing lightweight SR models that employ regular convolutions. The code and pre-trained models can be found at https://github.com/Aitical/SCNet.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Kui Jiang et al.

Contrastive learning has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for high-level vision tasks, which, by introducing properly negative samples, has also been exploited for low-level vision tasks to achieve a compact optimization space to account for their ill-posed nature. However, existing methods rely on manually predefined and task-oriented negatives, which often exhibit pronounced task-specific biases. To address this challenge, our paper introduces an innovative method termed 'learning from history', which dynamically generates negative samples from the target model itself. Our approach, named Model Contrastive Learning for Image Restoration (MCLIR), rejuvenates latency models as negative models, making it compatible with diverse image restoration tasks. We propose the Self-Prior guided Negative loss (SPN) to enable it. This approach significantly enhances existing models when retrained with the proposed model contrastive paradigm. The results show significant improvements in image restoration across various tasks and architectures. For example, models retrained with SPN outperform the original FFANet and DehazeFormer by 3.41 dB and 0.57 dB on the RESIDE indoor dataset for image dehazing. Similarly, they achieve notable improvements of 0.47 dB on SPA-Data over IDT for image deraining and 0.12 dB on Manga109 for a 4x scale super-resolution over lightweight SwinIR, respectively. Code and retrained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/MCLIR.

Chenyang Wang, Junjun Jiang, Zhiwei Zhong et al.

Face super-resolution is a technology that transforms a low-resolution face image into the corresponding high-resolution one. In this paper, we build a novel parsing map guided face super-resolution network which extracts the face prior (i.e., parsing map) directly from low-resolution face image for the following utilization. To exploit the extracted prior fully, a parsing map attention fusion block is carefully designed, which can not only effectively explore the information of parsing map, but also combines powerful attention mechanism. Moreover, in light of that high-resolution features contain more precise spatial information while low-resolution features provide strong contextual information, we hope to maintain and utilize these complementary information. To achieve this goal, we develop a multi-scale refine block to maintain spatial and contextual information and take advantage of multi-scale features to refine the feature representations. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-arts in terms of quantitative metrics and visual quality. The source codes will be available at https://github.com/wcy-cs/FishFSRNet.

Xin Li, Yeying Jin, Suhang Yao et al.

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. Building upon the success of the first edition, this challenge attracted a wide range of impressive solutions, all developed and evaluated on our real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset~\cite{jin2024raindrop}. For this edition, we adjust the dataset with 14,139 images for training, 407 images for validation, and 593 images for testing. The primary goal of this challenge is to establish a strong and practical benchmark for the removal of raindrops under various illumination and focus conditions. In total, 168 teams have registered for the competition, and 17 teams submitted valid final solutions and fact sheets for the testing phase. The submitted methods achieved strong performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset, demonstrating the growing progress in this challenging task.

Yiqi Zhong, Lei Wu, Xianming Liu et al.

Robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) to malicious perturbations is a hot topic in trustworthy AI. Existing techniques obtain robust models given fixed datasets, either by modifying model structures, or by optimizing the process of inference or training. While significant improvements have been made, the possibility of constructing a high-quality dataset for model robustness remain unexplored. Follow the campaign of data-centric AI launched by Andrew Ng, we propose a novel algorithm for dataset enhancement that works well for many existing DNN models to improve robustness. Transferable adversarial examples and 14 kinds of common corruptions are included in our optimized dataset. In the data-centric robust learning competition hosted by Alibaba Group and Tsinghua University, our algorithm came third out of more than 3000 competitors in the first stage while we ranked fourth in the second stage. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/hncszyq/tianchi_challenge}.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Yuanchao Bai et al.

In recent years, the use of large convolutional kernels has become popular in designing convolutional neural networks due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and provide large receptive fields. However, the increase in kernel size also leads to a quadratic growth in the number of parameters, resulting in heavy computation and memory requirements. To address this challenge, we propose a neighborhood attention (NA) module that upgrades the standard convolution with a self-attention mechanism. The NA module efficiently extracts long-range dependencies in a sliding window pattern, thereby achieving similar performance to large convolutional kernels but with fewer parameters. Building upon the NA module, we propose a lightweight single image super-resolution (SISR) network named TCSR. Additionally, we introduce an enhanced feed-forward network (EFFN) in TCSR to improve the SISR performance. EFFN employs a parameter-free spatial-shift operation for efficient feature aggregation. Our extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that TCSR outperforms existing lightweight SISR methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/Aitical/TCSR}.

Chenyang Wang, Junjun Jiang, Xiong Zhou et al.

Data augmentation (DA) is a widely used technique for enhancing the training of deep neural networks. Recent DA techniques which achieve state-of-the-art performance always meet the need for diversity in augmented training samples. However, an augmentation strategy that has a high diversity usually introduces out-of-distribution (OOD) augmented samples and these samples consequently impair the performance. To alleviate this issue, we propose ReSmooth, a framework that firstly detects OOD samples in augmented samples and then leverages them. To be specific, we first use a Gaussian mixture model to fit the loss distribution of both the original and augmented samples and accordingly split these samples into in-distribution (ID) samples and OOD samples. Then we start a new training where ID and OOD samples are incorporated with different smooth labels. By treating ID samples and OOD samples unequally, we can make better use of the diverse augmented data. Further, we incorporate our ReSmooth framework with negative data augmentation strategies. By properly handling their intentionally created OOD samples, the classification performance of negative data augmentations is largely ameliorated. Experiments on several classification benchmarks show that ReSmooth can be easily extended to existing augmentation strategies (such as RandAugment, rotate, and jigsaw) and improve on them. Our code is available at https://github.com/Chenyang4/ReSmooth.

Yiqi Zhong, Xianming Liu, Deming Zhai et al.

Estimating the risk level of adversarial examples is essential for safely deploying machine learning models in the real world. One popular approach for physical-world attacks is to adopt the "sticker-pasting" strategy, which however suffers from some limitations, including difficulties in access to the target or printing by valid colors. A new type of non-invasive attacks emerged recently, which attempt to cast perturbation onto the target by optics based tools, such as laser beam and projector. However, the added optical patterns are artificial but not natural. Thus, they are still conspicuous and attention-grabbed, and can be easily noticed by humans. In this paper, we study a new type of optical adversarial examples, in which the perturbations are generated by a very common natural phenomenon, shadow, to achieve naturalistic and stealthy physical-world adversarial attack under the black-box setting. We extensively evaluate the effectiveness of this new attack on both simulated and real-world environments. Experimental results on traffic sign recognition demonstrate that our algorithm can generate adversarial examples effectively, reaching 98.23% and 90.47% success rates on LISA and GTSRB test sets respectively, while continuously misleading a moving camera over 95% of the time in real-world scenarios. We also offer discussions about the limitations and the defense mechanism of this attack.

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.

Pengwei Liang, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu et al.

Image deblurring continues to achieve impressive performance with the development of generative models. Nonetheless, there still remains a displeasing problem if one wants to improve perceptual quality and quantitative scores of recovered image at the same time. In this study, drawing inspiration from the research of transformer properties, we introduce the pretrained transformers to address this problem. In particular, we leverage deep features extracted from a pretrained vision transformer (ViT) to encourage recovered images to be sharp without sacrificing the performance measured by the quantitative metrics. The pretrained transformer can capture the global topological relations (i.e., self-similarity) of image, and we observe that the captured topological relations about the sharp image will change when blur occurs. By comparing the transformer features between recovered image and target one, the pretrained transformer provides high-resolution blur-sensitive semantic information, which is critical in measuring the sharpness of the deblurred image. On the basis of the advantages, we present two types of novel perceptual losses to guide image deblurring. One regards the features as vectors and computes the discrepancy between representations extracted from recovered image and target one in Euclidean space. The other type considers the features extracted from an image as a distribution and compares the distribution discrepancy between recovered image and target one. We demonstrate the effectiveness of transformer properties in improving the perceptual quality while not sacrificing the quantitative scores (PSNR) over the most competitive models, such as Uformer, Restormer, and NAFNet, on defocus deblurring and motion deblurring tasks.

Mengshun Hu, Kui Jiang, Liang Liao et al.

Spatial-Temporal Video Super-Resolution (ST-VSR) aims to generate super-resolved videos with higher resolution(HR) and higher frame rate (HFR). Quite intuitively, pioneering two-stage based methods complete ST-VSR by directly combining two sub-tasks: Spatial Video Super-Resolution (S-VSR) and Temporal Video Super-Resolution(T-VSR) but ignore the reciprocal relations among them. Specifically, 1) T-VSR to S-VSR: temporal correlations help accurate spatial detail representation with more clues; 2) S-VSR to T-VSR: abundant spatial information contributes to the refinement of temporal prediction. To this end, we propose a one-stage based Cycle-projected Mutual learning network (CycMu-Net) for ST-VSR, which makes full use of spatial-temporal correlations via the mutual learning between S-VSR and T-VSR. Specifically, we propose to exploit the mutual information among them via iterative up-and-down projections, where the spatial and temporal features are fully fused and distilled, helping the high-quality video reconstruction. Besides extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, we also compare our proposed CycMu-Net with S-VSR and T-VSR tasks, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Jialei Xu et al.

Monocular depth estimation is an essential task in the computer vision community. While tremendous successful methods have obtained excellent results, most of them are computationally expensive and not applicable for real-time on-device inference. In this paper, we aim to address more practical applications of monocular depth estimation, where the solution should consider not only the precision but also the inference time on mobile devices. To this end, we first develop an end-to-end learning-based model with a tiny weight size (1.4MB) and a short inference time (27FPS on Raspberry Pi 4). Then, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy, called R2 crop, to boost the model performance. Moreover, we observe that the simple lightweight model trained with only one single loss term will suffer from performance bottleneck. To alleviate this issue, we adopt multiple loss terms to provide sufficient constraints during the training stage. Furthermore, with a simple dynamic re-weight strategy, we can avoid the time-consuming hyper-parameter choice of loss terms. Finally, we adopt the structure-aware distillation to further improve the model performance. Notably, our solution named LiteDepth ranks 2nd in the MAI&AIM2022 Monocular Depth Estimation Challenge}, with a si-RMSE of 0.311, an RMSE of 3.79, and the inference time is 37$ms$ tested on the Raspberry Pi 4. Notably, we provide the fastest solution to the challenge. Codes and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/zhyever/LiteDepth}.

Lingdong Kong, Yaru Niu, Shaoyuan Xie et al.

Accurate depth estimation under out-of-distribution (OoD) scenarios, such as adverse weather conditions, sensor failure, and noise contamination, is desirable for safety-critical applications. Existing depth estimation systems, however, suffer inevitably from real-world corruptions and perturbations and are struggled to provide reliable depth predictions under such cases. In this paper, we summarize the winning solutions from the RoboDepth Challenge -- an academic competition designed to facilitate and advance robust OoD depth estimation. This challenge was developed based on the newly established KITTI-C and NYUDepth2-C benchmarks. We hosted two stand-alone tracks, with an emphasis on robust self-supervised and robust fully-supervised depth estimation, respectively. Out of more than two hundred participants, nine unique and top-performing solutions have appeared, with novel designs ranging from the following aspects: spatial- and frequency-domain augmentations, masked image modeling, image restoration and super-resolution, adversarial training, diffusion-based noise suppression, vision-language pre-training, learned model ensembling, and hierarchical feature enhancement. Extensive experimental analyses along with insightful observations are drawn to better understand the rationale behind each design. We hope this challenge could lay a solid foundation for future research on robust and reliable depth estimation and beyond. The datasets, competition toolkit, workshop recordings, and source code from the winning teams are publicly available on the challenge website.

Jialei Xu, Xianming Liu, Yuanchao Bai et al.

Depth map estimation from images is an important task in robotic systems. Existing methods can be categorized into two groups including multi-view stereo and monocular depth estimation. The former requires cameras to have large overlapping areas and sufficient baseline between cameras, while the latter that processes each image independently can hardly guarantee the structure consistency between cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-camera collaborative depth prediction method that does not require large overlapping areas while maintaining structure consistency between cameras. Specifically, we formulate the depth estimation as a weighted combination of depth basis, in which the weights are updated iteratively by a refinement network driven by the proposed consistency loss. During the iterative update, the results of depth estimation are compared across cameras and the information of overlapping areas is propagated to the whole depth maps with the help of basis formulation. Experimental results on DDAD and NuScenes datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Zeyu Lu, Junjun Jiang, Junqin Huang et al.

The purpose of image inpainting is to recover scratches and damaged areas using context information from remaining parts. In recent years, thanks to the resurgence of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), image inpainting task has made great breakthroughs. However, most of the work consider insufficient types of mask, and their performance will drop dramatically when encountering unseen masks. To combat these challenges, we propose a simple yet general method to solve this problem based on the LaMa image inpainting framework, dubbed GLaMa. Our proposed GLaMa can better capture different types of missing information by using more types of masks. By incorporating more degraded images in the training phase, we can expect to enhance the robustness of the model with respect to various masks. In order to yield more reasonable results, we further introduce a frequency-based loss in addition to the traditional spatial reconstruction loss and adversarial loss. In particular, we introduce an effective reconstruction loss both in the spatial and frequency domain to reduce the chessboard effect and ripples in the reconstructed image. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can boost the performance over the original LaMa method for each type of mask on FFHQ, ImageNet, Places2 and WikiArt dataset. The proposed GLaMa was ranked first in terms of PSNR, LPIPS and SSIM in the NTIRE 2022 Image Inpainting Challenge Track 1 Unsupervised.

Meiling Fang, Marco Huber, Julian Fierrez et al.

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Presentation Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SynFacePAD 2023) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition attracted a total of 8 participating teams with valid submissions from academia and industry. The competition aimed to motivate and attract solutions that target detecting face presentation attacks while considering synthetic-based training data motivated by privacy, legal and ethical concerns associated with personal data. To achieve that, the training data used by the participants was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations and novel approaches that led to outperforming the considered baseline in the investigated benchmarks.

Enwei Tong, Yuanchao Bai, Yao Zhu et al.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate massive visual tokens that greatly increase inference latency and memory footprint; while training-free token pruning offers a practical remedy, existing methods still struggle to balance local evidence and global context under aggressive compression. We propose Focus-Scan-Refine (FSR), a human-inspired, plug-and-play pruning framework that mimics how humans answer visual questions: focus on key evidence, then scan globally if needed, and refine the scanned context by aggregating relevant details. FSR first focuses on key evidence by combining visual importance with instruction relevance, avoiding the bias toward visually salient but query-irrelevant regions. It then scans for complementary context conditioned on the focused set, selecting tokens that are most different from the focused evidence. Finally, FSR refines the scanned context by aggregating nearby informative tokens into the scan anchors via similarity-based assignment and score-weighted merging, without increasing the token budget. Extensive experiments across multiple VLM backbones and vision-language benchmarks show that FSR consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over existing state-of-the-art pruning methods. The source codes can be found at https://github.com/ILOT-code/FSR.

Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Ang Li et al.

Monocular 3D object detection (Mono3D) has achieved tremendous improvements with emerging large-scale autonomous driving datasets and the rapid development of deep learning techniques. However, caused by severe domain gaps (e.g., the field of view (FOV), pixel size, and object size among datasets), Mono3D detectors have difficulty in generalization, leading to drastic performance degradation on unseen domains. To solve these issues, we combine the position-invariant transform and multi-scale training with the pixel-size depth strategy to construct an effective unified camera-generalized paradigm (CGP). It fully considers discrepancies in the FOV and pixel size of images captured by different cameras. Moreover, we further investigate the obstacle in quantitative metrics when cross-dataset inference through an exhaustive systematic study. We discern that the size bias of prediction leads to a colossal failure. Hence, we propose the 2D-3D geometry-consistent object scaling strategy (GCOS) to bridge the gap via an instance-level augment. Our method called DGMono3D achieves remarkable performance on all evaluated datasets and surpasses the SoTA unsupervised domain adaptation scheme even without utilizing data on the target domain.

Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu, Deming Zhai et al.

One of the main challenges for feature representation in deep learning-based classification is the design of appropriate loss functions that exhibit strong discriminative power. The classical softmax loss does not explicitly encourage discriminative learning of features. A popular direction of research is to incorporate margins in well-established losses in order to enforce extra intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, which, however, were developed through heuristic means, as opposed to rigorous mathematical principles. In this work, we attempt to address this limitation by formulating the principled optimization objective as learning towards the largest margins. Specifically, we firstly define the class margin as the measure of inter-class separability, and the sample margin as the measure of intra-class compactness. Accordingly, to encourage discriminative representation of features, the loss function should promote the largest possible margins for both classes and samples. Furthermore, we derive a generalized margin softmax loss to draw general conclusions for the existing margin-based losses. Not only does this principled framework offer new perspectives to understand and interpret existing margin-based losses, but it also provides new insights that can guide the design of new tools, including sample margin regularization and largest margin softmax loss for the class-balanced case, and zero-centroid regularization for the class-imbalanced case. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy on a variety of tasks, including visual classification, imbalanced classification, person re-identification, and face verification.

Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu, Deming Zhai et al.

The success of deep neural networks greatly relies on the availability of large amounts of high-quality annotated data, which however are difficult or expensive to obtain. The resulting labels may be class imbalanced, noisy or human biased. It is challenging to learn unbiased classification models from imperfectly annotated datasets, on which we usually suffer from overfitting or underfitting. In this work, we thoroughly investigate the popular softmax loss and margin-based loss, and offer a feasible approach to tighten the generalization error bound by maximizing the minimal sample margin. We further derive the optimality condition for this purpose, which indicates how the class prototypes should be anchored. Motivated by theoretical analysis, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely prototype-anchored learning (PAL), which can be easily incorporated into various learning-based classification schemes to handle imperfect annotation. We verify the effectiveness of PAL on class-imbalanced learning and noise-tolerant learning by extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets.

Zhenyu Li, Zhipeng Zhang, Heng Fan et al.

In this paper, we improve the challenging monocular 3D object detection problem with a general semi-supervised framework. Specifically, having observed that the bottleneck of this task lies in lacking reliable and informative samples to train the detector, we introduce a novel, simple, yet effective `Augment and Criticize' framework that explores abundant informative samples from unlabeled data for learning more robust detection models. In the `Augment' stage, we present the Augmentation-based Prediction aGgregation (APG), which aggregates detections from various automatically learned augmented views to improve the robustness of pseudo label generation. Since not all pseudo labels from APG are beneficially informative, the subsequent `Criticize' phase is presented. In particular, we introduce the Critical Retraining Strategy (CRS) that, unlike simply filtering pseudo labels using a fixed threshold (e.g., classification score) as in 2D semi-supervised tasks, leverages a learnable network to evaluate the contribution of unlabeled images at different training timestamps. This way, the noisy samples prohibitive to model evolution could be effectively suppressed. To validate our framework, we apply it to MonoDLE and MonoFlex. The two new detectors, dubbed 3DSeMo_DLE and 3DSeMo_FLEX, achieve state-of-the-art results with remarkable improvements for over 3.5% AP_3D/BEV (Easy) on KITTI, showing its effectiveness and generality. Code and models will be released.

Kui Jiang, Xuemei Jia, Wenxin Huang et al.

CNNs and Self attention have achieved great success in multimedia applications for dynamic association learning of self-attention and convolution in image restoration. However, CNNs have at least two shortcomings: 1) limited receptive field; 2) static weight of sliding window at inference, unable to cope with the content diversity.In view of the advantages and disadvantages of CNNs and Self attention, this paper proposes an association learning method to utilize the advantages and suppress their shortcomings, so as to achieve high-quality and efficient inpainting. We regard rain distribution reflects the degradation location and degree, in addition to the rain distribution prediction. Thus, we propose to refine background textures with the predicted degradation prior in an association learning manner. As a result, we accomplish image deraining by associating rain streak removal and background recovery, where an image deraining network and a background recovery network are designed for two subtasks. The key part of association learning is a novel multi-input attention module. It generates the degradation prior and produces the degradation mask according to the predicted rainy distribution. Benefited from the global correlation calculation of SA, MAM can extract the informative complementary components from the rainy input with the degradation mask, and then help accurate texture restoration. Meanwhile, SA tends to aggregate feature maps with self-attention importance, but convolution diversifies them to focus on the local textures. A hybrid fusion network involves one residual Transformer branch and one encoder-decoder branch. The former takes a few learnable tokens as input and stacks multi-head attention and feed-forward networks to encode global features of the image. The latter, conversely, leverages the multi-scale encoder-decoder to represent contexture knowledge.

Jian Liu, Xiaoshui Huang, Tianyu Huang et al.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in artificial intelligence generated content(AIGC), with diverse input modalities, e.g., text, image, video, audio and 3D. The 3D is the most close visual modality to real-world 3D environment and carries enormous knowledge. The 3D content generation shows both academic and practical values while also presenting formidable technical challenges. This review aims to consolidate developments within the burgeoning domain of 3D content generation. Specifically, a new taxonomy is proposed that categorizes existing approaches into three types: 3D native generative methods, 2D prior-based 3D generative methods, and hybrid 3D generative methods. The survey covers approximately 60 papers spanning the major techniques. Besides, we discuss limitations of current 3D content generation techniques, and point out open challenges as well as promising directions for future work. Accompanied with this survey, we have established a project website where the resources on 3D content generation research are provided. The project page is available at https://github.com/hitcslj/Awesome-AIGC-3D.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Junpeng Jiang et al.

Recent progress in single-image super-resolution (SISR) has achieved remarkable performance, yet the computational costs of these methods remain a challenge for deployment on resource-constrained devices. In particular, transformer-based methods, which leverage self-attention mechanisms, have led to significant breakthroughs but also introduce substantial computational costs. To tackle this issue, we introduce the Convolutional Transformer layer (ConvFormer) and propose a ConvFormer-based Super-Resolution network (CFSR), offering an effective and efficient solution for lightweight image super-resolution. The proposed method inherits the advantages of both convolution-based and transformer-based approaches. Specifically, CFSR utilizes large kernel convolutions as a feature mixer to replace the self-attention module, efficiently modeling long-range dependencies and extensive receptive fields with minimal computational overhead. Furthermore, we propose an edge-preserving feed-forward network (EFN) designed to achieve local feature aggregation while effectively preserving high-frequency information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFSR strikes an optimal balance between computational cost and performance compared to existing lightweight SR methods. When benchmarked against state-of-the-art methods such as ShuffleMixer, the proposed CFSR achieves a gain of 0.39 dB on the Urban100 dataset for the x2 super-resolution task while requiring 26\% and 31\% fewer parameters and FLOPs, respectively. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Aitical/CFSR.

Junjun Jiang, Zengyuan Zuo, Gang Wu et al.

Image restoration (IR) seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded observations caused by a wide range of factors, including noise, blur, compression, and adverse weather. While traditional IR methods have made notable progress by targeting individual degradation types, their specialization often comes at the cost of generalization, leaving them ill-equipped to handle the multifaceted distortions encountered in real-world applications. In response to this challenge, the all-in-one image restoration (AiOIR) paradigm has recently emerged, offering a unified framework that adeptly addresses multiple degradation types. These innovative models enhance the convenience and versatility by adaptively learning degradation-specific features while simultaneously leveraging shared knowledge across diverse corruptions. In this survey, we provide the first in-depth and systematic overview of AiOIR, delivering a structured taxonomy that categorizes existing methods by architectural designs, learning paradigms, and their core innovations. We systematically categorize current approaches and assess the challenges these models encounter, outlining research directions to propel this rapidly evolving field. To facilitate the evaluation of existing methods, we also consolidate widely-used datasets, evaluation protocols, and implementation practices, and compare and summarize the most advanced open-source models. As the first comprehensive review dedicated to AiOIR, this paper aims to map the conceptual landscape, synthesize prevailing techniques, and ignite further exploration toward more intelligent, unified, and adaptable visual restoration systems. A curated code repository is available at https://github.com/Harbinzzy/All-in-One-Image-Restoration-Survey.

Jialiang Wang, Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu et al.

Mitigating the negative impact of noisy labels has been aperennial issue in supervised learning. Robust loss functions have emerged as a prevalent solution to this problem. In this work, we introduce the Variation Ratio as a novel property related to the robustness of loss functions, and propose a new family of robust loss functions, termed Variation-Bounded Loss (VBL), which is characterized by a bounded variation ratio. We provide theoretical analyses of the variation ratio, proving that a smaller variation ratio would lead to better robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that the variation ratio provides a feasible method to relax the symmetric condition and offers a more concise path to achieve the asymmetric condition. Based on the variation ratio, we reformulate several commonly used loss functions into a variation-bounded form for practical applications. Positive experiments on various datasets exhibit the effectiveness and flexibility of our approach.

Daxin Li, Yuanchao Bai, Kai Wang et al.

Autoregressive (AR) models, the theoretical performance benchmark for learned lossless image compression, are often dismissed as impractical due to prohibitive computational cost. This work re-thinks this paradigm, introducing a framework built on hierarchical parallelism and progressive adaptation that re-establishes pure autoregression as a top-performing and practical solution. Our approach is embodied in the Hierarchical Parallel Autoregressive ConvNet (HPAC), an ultra-lightweight pre-trained model using a hierarchical factorized structure and content-aware convolutional gating to efficiently capture spatial dependencies. We introduce two key optimizations for practicality: Cache-then-Select Inference (CSI), which accelerates coding by eliminating redundant computations, and Adaptive Focus Coding (AFC), which efficiently extends the framework to high bit-depth images. Building on this efficient foundation, our progressive adaptation strategy is realized by Spatially-Aware Rate-Guided Progressive Fine-tuning (SARP-FT). This instance-level strategy fine-tunes the model for each test image by optimizing low-rank adapters on progressively larger, spatially-continuous regions selected via estimated information density. Experiments on diverse datasets (natural, satellite, medical) validate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art compression. Notably, our approach sets a new benchmark in learned lossless compression, showing a carefully designed AR framework can offer significant gains over existing methods with a small parameter count and competitive coding speeds.

Youyu Chen, Junjun Jiang, Yueru Luo et al.

With recent advances, Feed-forward Reconstruction Models (FFRMs) have demonstrated great potential in reconstruction quality and adaptiveness to multiple downstream tasks. However, the excessive reliance on multi-view geometric annotations, e.g. 3D point maps and camera poses, makes the fully-supervised training scheme of FFRMs difficult to scale up. In this paper, we propose Reliev3R, a weakly-supervised paradigm for training FFRMs from scratch without cost-prohibitive multi-view geometric annotations. Relieving the reliance on geometric sensory data and compute-exhaustive structure-from-motion preprocessing, our method draws 3D knowledge directly from monocular relative depths and image sparse correspondences given by zero-shot predictions of pretrained models. At the core of Reliev3R, we design an ambiguity-aware relative depth loss and a trigonometry-based reprojection loss to facilitate supervision for multi-view geometric consistency. Training from scratch with the less data, Reliev3R catches up with its fully-supervised sibling models, taking a step towards low-cost 3D reconstruction supervisions and scalable FFRMs.

Jiaxin Zhang, Junjun Jiang, Haijie Li et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate exceptional semantic reasoning but struggle with 3D spatial perception when restricted to pure RGB inputs. Despite leveraging implicit geometric priors from 3D reconstruction models, image-based methods still exhibit a notable performance gap compared to methods using explicit 3D data. We argue that this gap does not arise from insufficient geometric priors, but from a misalignment in the training paradigm: text-dominated fine-tuning fails to activate geometric representations within MLLMs. Existing approaches typically resort to naive feature concatenation and optimize directly for downstream tasks without geometry-specific supervision, leading to suboptimal structural utilization. To address this limitation, we propose GAP-MLLM, a Geometry-Aligned Pre-training paradigm that explicitly activates structural perception before downstream adaptation. Specifically, we introduce a visual-prompted joint task that compels the MLLMs to predict sparse pointmaps alongside semantic labels, thereby enforcing geometric awareness. Furthermore, we design a multi-level progressive fusion module with a token-level gating mechanism, enabling adaptive integration of geometric priors without suppressing semantic reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GAP-MLLM significantly enhances geometric feature fusion and consistently enhances performance across 3D visual grounding, 3D dense captioning, and 3D video object detection tasks.

Jiayang Li, Chengjie Jiang, Junjun Jiang et al.

Image fusion aims to blend complementary information from multiple sensing modalities, yet existing approaches remain limited in robustness, adaptability, and controllability. Most current fusion networks are tailored to specific tasks and lack the ability to flexibly incorporate user intent, especially in complex scenarios involving low-light degradation, color shifts, or exposure imbalance. Moreover, the absence of ground-truth fused images and the small scale of existing datasets make it difficult to train an end-to-end model that simultaneously understands high-level semantics and performs fine-grained multimodal alignment. We therefore present DiTFuse, instruction-driven Diffusion-Transformer (DiT) framework that performs end-to-end, semantics-aware fusion within a single model. By jointly encoding two images and natural-language instructions in a shared latent space, DiTFuse enables hierarchical and fine-grained control over fusion dynamics, overcoming the limitations of pre-fusion and post-fusion pipelines that struggle to inject high-level semantics. The training phase employs a multi-degradation masked-image modeling strategy, so the network jointly learns cross-modal alignment, modality-invariant restoration, and task-aware feature selection without relying on ground truth images. A curated, multi-granularity instruction dataset further equips the model with interactive fusion capabilities. DiTFuse unifies infrared-visible, multi-focus, and multi-exposure fusion-as well as text-controlled refinement and downstream tasks-within a single architecture. Experiments on public IVIF, MFF, and MEF benchmarks confirm superior quantitative and qualitative performance, sharper textures, and better semantic retention. The model also supports multi-level user control and zero-shot generalization to other multi-image fusion scenarios, including instruction-conditioned segmentation.

Guoqing Zhang, Wenbo Zhao, Jian Liu et al.

Efficient storage of large-scale point cloud data has become increasingly challenging due to advancements in scanning technology. Recent deep learning techniques have revolutionized this field; However, most existing approaches rely on single-modality contexts, such as octree nodes or voxel occupancy, limiting their ability to capture information across large regions. In this paper, we propose PVContext, a hybrid context model for effective octree-based point cloud compression. PVContext comprises two components with distinct modalities: the Voxel Context, which accurately represents local geometric information using voxels, and the Point Context, which efficiently preserves global shape information from point clouds. By integrating these two contexts, we retain detailed information across large areas while controlling the context size. The combined context is then fed into a deep entropy model to accurately predict occupancy. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared to G-PCC, our method reduces the bitrate by 37.95\% on SemanticKITTI LiDAR point clouds and by 48.98\% and 36.36\% on dense object point clouds from MPEG 8i and MVUB, respectively.

Jiaxin Zhang, Junjun Jiang, Youyu Chen et al.

Accurate object segmentation is crucial for high-quality scene understanding in the 3D vision domain. However, 3D segmentation based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) struggles with accurately delineating object boundaries, as Gaussian primitives often span across object edges due to their inherent volume and the lack of semantic guidance during training. In order to tackle these challenges, we introduce Clear Object Boundaries for 3DGS Segmentation (COB-GS), which aims to improve segmentation accuracy by clearly delineating blurry boundaries of interwoven Gaussian primitives within the scene. Unlike existing approaches that remove ambiguous Gaussians and sacrifice visual quality, COB-GS, as a 3DGS refinement method, jointly optimizes semantic and visual information, allowing the two different levels to cooperate with each other effectively. Specifically, for the semantic guidance, we introduce a boundary-adaptive Gaussian splitting technique that leverages semantic gradient statistics to identify and split ambiguous Gaussians, aligning them closely with object boundaries. For the visual optimization, we rectify the degraded suboptimal texture of the 3DGS scene, particularly along the refined boundary structures. Experimental results show that COB-GS substantially improves segmentation accuracy and robustness against inaccurate masks from pre-trained model, yielding clear boundaries while preserving high visual quality. Code is available at https://github.com/ZestfulJX/COB-GS.

Jialiang Wang, Xiong Zhou, Deming Zhai et al.

Noisy labels pose a common challenge for training accurate deep neural networks. To mitigate label noise, prior studies have proposed various robust loss functions to achieve noise tolerance in the presence of label noise, particularly symmetric losses. However, they usually suffer from the underfitting issue due to the overly strict symmetric condition. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective approach for relaxing the symmetric condition, namely $ε$-softmax, which simply modifies the outputs of the softmax layer to approximate one-hot vectors with a controllable error $ε$. Essentially, $ε$-softmax not only acts as an alternative for the softmax layer, but also implicitly plays the crucial role in modifying the loss function. We prove theoretically that $ε$-softmax can achieve noise-tolerant learning with controllable excess risk bound for almost any loss function. Recognizing that $ε$-softmax-enhanced losses may slightly reduce fitting ability on clean datasets, we further incorporate them with one symmetric loss, thereby achieving a better trade-off between robustness and effective learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in mitigating synthetic and real-world label noise. The code is available at https://github.com/cswjl/eps-softmax.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Kui Jiang et al.

Unified image restoration models for diverse and mixed degradations often suffer from unstable optimization dynamics and inter-task conflicts. This paper introduces Self-Improved Privilege Learning (SIPL), a novel paradigm that overcomes these limitations by innovatively extending the utility of privileged information (PI) beyond training into the inference stage. Unlike conventional Privilege Learning, where ground-truth-derived guidance is typically discarded after training, SIPL empowers the model to leverage its own preliminary outputs as pseudo-privileged signals for iterative self-refinement at test time. Central to SIPL is Proxy Fusion, a lightweight module incorporating a learnable Privileged Dictionary. During training, this dictionary distills essential high-frequency and structural priors from privileged feature representations. Critically, at inference, the same learned dictionary then interacts with features derived from the model's initial restoration, facilitating a self-correction loop. SIPL can be seamlessly integrated into various backbone architectures, offering substantial performance improvements with minimal computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SIPL significantly advances the state-of-the-art on diverse all-in-one image restoration benchmarks. For instance, when integrated with the PromptIR model, SIPL achieves remarkable PSNR improvements of +4.58 dB on composite degradation tasks and +1.28 dB on diverse five-task benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness and broad applicability. Codes are available at our project page https://github.com/Aitical/SIPL.

Xingyu Hu, Junjun Jiang, Chenyang Wang et al.

Unified image fusion aims to integrate complementary information from multi-source images, enhancing image quality through a unified framework applicable to diverse fusion tasks. While treating all fusion tasks as a unified problem facilitates task-invariant knowledge sharing, it often overlooks task-specific characteristics, thereby limiting the overall performance. Existing general image fusion methods incorporate explicit task identification to enable adaptation to different fusion tasks. However, this dependence during inference restricts the model's generalization to unseen fusion tasks. To address these issues, we propose a novel unified image fusion framework named "TITA", which dynamically balances both Task-invariant Interaction and Task-specific Adaptation. For task-invariant interaction, we introduce the Interaction-enhanced Pixel Attention (IPA) module to enhance pixel-wise interactions for better multi-source complementary information extraction. For task-specific adaptation, the Operation-based Adaptive Fusion (OAF) module dynamically adjusts operation weights based on task properties. Additionally, we incorporate the Fast Adaptive Multitask Optimization (FAMO) strategy to mitigate the impact of gradient conflicts across tasks during joint training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TITA not only achieves competitive performance compared to specialized methods across three image fusion scenarios but also exhibits strong generalization to unseen fusion tasks. The source codes are released at https://github.com/huxingyuabc/TITA.

Linfeng Tang, Yeda Wang, Zhanchuan Cai et al.

Current image fusion methods struggle to address the composite degradations encountered in real-world imaging scenarios and lack the flexibility to accommodate user-specific requirements. In response to these challenges, we propose a controllable image fusion framework with language-vision prompts, termed ControlFusion, which adaptively neutralizes composite degradations. On the one hand, we develop a degraded imaging model that integrates physical imaging mechanisms, including the Retinex theory and atmospheric scattering principle, to simulate composite degradations, thereby providing potential for addressing real-world complex degradations from the data level. On the other hand, we devise a prompt-modulated restoration and fusion network that dynamically enhances features with degradation prompts, enabling our method to accommodate composite degradation of varying levels. Specifically, considering individual variations in quality perception of users, we incorporate a text encoder to embed user-specified degradation types and severity levels as degradation prompts. We also design a spatial-frequency collaborative visual adapter that autonomously perceives degradations in source images, thus eliminating the complete dependence on user instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlFusion outperforms SOTA fusion methods in fusion quality and degradation handling, particularly in countering real-world and compound degradations with various levels. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Linfeng-Tang/ControlFusion.

Jiuyang Dong, Jiahan Li, Junjun Jiang et al.

Although multi-instance learning (MIL) has succeeded in pathological image classification, it faces the challenge of high inference costs due to the need to process thousands of patches from each gigapixel whole slide image (WSI). To address this, we propose AHDMIL, an Asymmetric Hierarchical Distillation Multi-Instance Learning framework that enables fast and accurate classification by eliminating irrelevant patches through a two-step training process. AHDMIL comprises two key components: the Dynamic Multi-Instance Network (DMIN), which operates on high-resolution WSIs, and the Dual-Branch Lightweight Instance Pre-screening Network (DB-LIPN), which analyzes corresponding low-resolution counterparts. In the first step, self-distillation (SD), DMIN is trained for WSI classification while generating per-instance attention scores to identify irrelevant patches. These scores guide the second step, asymmetric distillation (AD), where DB-LIPN learns to predict the relevance of each low-resolution patch. The relevant patches predicted by DB-LIPN have spatial correspondence with patches in high-resolution WSIs, which are used for fine-tuning and efficient inference of DMIN. In addition, we design the first Chebyshev-polynomial-based Kolmogorov-Arnold (CKA) classifier in computational pathology, which improves classification performance through learnable activation layers. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that AHDMIL consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in both classification performance and inference speed. For example, on the Camelyon16 dataset, it achieves a relative improvement of 5.3% in accuracy and accelerates inference by 1.2.times. Across all datasets, area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, f1 score, and brier score show consistent gains, with average inference speedups ranging from 1.2 to 2.1 times. The code is available.

Jialiang Wang, Xianming Liu, Xiong Zhou et al.

Learning with noisy labels is a crucial task for training accurate deep neural networks. To mitigate label noise, prior studies have proposed various robust loss functions, particularly symmetric losses. Nevertheless, symmetric losses usually suffer from the underfitting issue due to the overly strict constraint. To address this problem, the Active Passive Loss (APL) jointly optimizes an active and a passive loss to mutually enhance the overall fitting ability. Within APL, symmetric losses have been successfully extended, yielding advanced robust loss functions. Despite these advancements, emerging theoretical analyses indicate that asymmetric losses, a new class of robust loss functions, possess superior properties compared to symmetric losses. However, existing asymmetric losses are not compatible with advanced optimization frameworks such as APL, limiting their potential and applicability. Motivated by this theoretical gap and the prospect of asymmetric losses, we extend the asymmetric loss to the more complex passive loss scenario and propose the Asymetric Mean Square Error (AMSE), a novel asymmetric loss. We rigorously establish the necessary and sufficient condition under which AMSE satisfies the asymmetric condition. By substituting the traditional symmetric passive loss in APL with our proposed AMSE, we introduce a novel robust loss framework termed Joint Asymmetric Loss (JAL). Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in mitigating label noise. Code available at: https://github.com/cswjl/joint-asymmetric-loss

Pihai Sun, Junjun Jiang, Yuanqi Yao et al.

Image-event joint depth estimation methods leverage complementary modalities for robust perception, yet face challenges in generalizability stemming from two factors: 1) limited annotated image-event-depth datasets causing insufficient cross-modal supervision, and 2) inherent frequency mismatches between static images and dynamic event streams with distinct spatiotemporal patterns, leading to ineffective feature fusion. To address this dual challenge, we propose Frequency-decoupled Unified Self-supervised Encoder (FUSE) with two synergistic components: The Parameter-efficient Self-supervised Transfer (PST) establishes cross-modal knowledge transfer through latent space alignment with image foundation models, effectively mitigating data scarcity by enabling joint encoding without depth ground truth. Complementing this, we propose the Frequency-Decoupled Fusion module (FreDFuse) to explicitly decouple high-frequency edge features from low-frequency structural components, resolving modality-specific frequency mismatches through physics-aware fusion. This combined approach enables FUSE to construct a universal image-event encoder that only requires lightweight decoder adaptation for target datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance with 14% and 24.9% improvements in Abs .Rel on MVSEC and DENSE datasets. The framework exhibits remarkable zero-shot adaptability to challenging scenarios including extreme lighting and motion blur, significantly advancing real-world deployment capabilities. The source code for our method is publicly available at: https://github.com/sunpihai-up/FUSE

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Kui Jiang et al.

Recent advances in self-supervised learning, predominantly studied in high-level visual tasks, have been explored in low-level image processing. This paper introduces a novel self-supervised constraint for single image super-resolution, termed SSC-SR. SSC-SR uniquely addresses the divergence in image complexity by employing a dual asymmetric paradigm and a target model updated via exponential moving average to enhance stability. The proposed SSC-SR framework works as a plug-and-play paradigm and can be easily applied to existing SR models. Empirical evaluations reveal that our SSC-SR framework delivers substantial enhancements on a variety of benchmark datasets, achieving an average increase of 0.1 dB over EDSR and 0.06 dB over SwinIR. In addition, extensive ablation studies corroborate the effectiveness of each constituent in our SSC-SR framework. Codes are available at https://github.com/Aitical/SSCSR.

Zhenyu Li, Zehui Chen, Ang Li et al.

Pre-training has become a standard paradigm in many computer vision tasks. However, most of the methods are generally designed on the RGB image domain. Due to the discrepancy between the two-dimensional image plane and the three-dimensional space, such pre-trained models fail to perceive spatial information and serve as sub-optimal solutions for 3D-related tasks. To bridge this gap, we aim to learn a spatial-aware visual representation that can describe the three-dimensional space and is more suitable and effective for these tasks. To leverage point clouds, which are much more superior in providing spatial information compared to images, we propose a simple yet effective 2D Image and 3D Point cloud Unsupervised pre-training strategy, called SimIPU. Specifically, we develop a multi-modal contrastive learning framework that consists of an intra-modal spatial perception module to learn a spatial-aware representation from point clouds and an inter-modal feature interaction module to transfer the capability of perceiving spatial information from the point cloud encoder to the image encoder, respectively. Positive pairs for contrastive losses are established by the matching algorithm and the projection matrix. The whole framework is trained in an unsupervised end-to-end fashion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore contrastive learning pre-training strategies for outdoor multi-modal datasets, containing paired camera images and LIDAR point clouds. Codes and models are available at https://github.com/zhyever/SimIPU.

Gang Wu, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu

Contrastive learning has achieved remarkable success on various high-level tasks, but there are fewer contrastive learning-based methods proposed for low-level tasks. It is challenging to adopt vanilla contrastive learning technologies proposed for high-level visual tasks to low-level image restoration problems straightly. Because the acquired high-level global visual representations are insufficient for low-level tasks requiring rich texture and context information. In this paper, we investigate the contrastive learning-based single image super-resolution from two perspectives: positive and negative sample construction and feature embedding. The existing methods take naive sample construction approaches (e.g., considering the low-quality input as a negative sample and the ground truth as a positive sample) and adopt a prior model (e.g., pre-trained VGG model) to obtain the feature embedding. To this end, we propose a practical contrastive learning framework for SISR, named PCL-SR. We involve the generation of many informative positive and hard negative samples in frequency space. Instead of utilizing an additional pre-trained network, we design a simple but effective embedding network inherited from the discriminator network which is more task-friendly. Compared with existing benchmark methods, we re-train them by our proposed PCL-SR framework and achieve superior performance. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness and technical contributions of our proposed PCL-SR thorough ablation studies. The code and pre-trained models can be found at https://github.com/Aitical/PCL-SISR.

Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu, Chenyang Wang et al.

Learning with noisy labels is an important and challenging task for training accurate deep neural networks. Some commonly-used loss functions, such as Cross Entropy (CE), suffer from severe overfitting to noisy labels. Robust loss functions that satisfy the symmetric condition were tailored to remedy this problem, which however encounter the underfitting effect. In this paper, we theoretically prove that \textbf{any loss can be made robust to noisy labels} by restricting the network output to the set of permutations over a fixed vector. When the fixed vector is one-hot, we only need to constrain the output to be one-hot, which however produces zero gradients almost everywhere and thus makes gradient-based optimization difficult. In this work, we introduce the sparse regularization strategy to approximate the one-hot constraint, which is composed of network output sharpening operation that enforces the output distribution of a network to be sharp and the $\ell_p$-norm ($p\le 1$) regularization that promotes the network output to be sparse. This simple approach guarantees the robustness of arbitrary loss functions while not hindering the fitting ability. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the performance of commonly-used loss functions in the presence of noisy labels and class imbalance, and outperform the state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/hitcszx/lnl_sr.

Xiong Zhou, Xianming Liu, Junjun Jiang et al.

Robust loss functions are essential for training deep neural networks with better generalization power in the presence of noisy labels. Symmetric loss functions are confirmed to be robust to label noise. However, the symmetric condition is overly restrictive. In this work, we propose a new class of loss functions, namely \textit{asymmetric loss functions}, which are robust to learning with noisy labels for various types of noise. We investigate general theoretical properties of asymmetric loss functions, including classification calibration, excess risk bound, and noise tolerance. Meanwhile, we introduce the asymmetry ratio to measure the asymmetry of a loss function. The empirical results show that a higher ratio would provide better noise tolerance. Moreover, we modify several commonly-used loss functions and establish the necessary and sufficient conditions for them to be asymmetric. Experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that asymmetric loss functions can outperform state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/hitcszx/ALFs}{https://github.com/hitcszx/ALFs}