Milan Kumar

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.

Milon Bhattacharya, Milan Kumar

Indias e-commerce market is projected to grow rapidly, with last-mile delivery accounting for nearly half of operational expenses. Although vehicle routing problem (VRP) based solvers are widely used for delivery planning, their effectiveness in real-world scenarios is limited due to unstructured addresses, incomplete maps, and computational constraints in distance estimation. This study proposes a framework that employs large language models (LLMs) to critique VRP-generated routes against policy-based criteria, allowing logistics operators to evaluate and prioritise more efficient delivery plans. As a illustration of our approach we generate, annotate and evaluated 400 cases using large language models. Our study found that open-source LLMs identified routing issues with 79% accuracy, while proprietary reasoning models achieved reach upto 86%. The results demonstrate that LLM-based evaluation of VRP-generated routes can be an effective and scalable layer of evaluation which goes beyond beyond conventional distance and time based metrics. This has implications for improving cost efficiency, delivery reliability, and sustainability in last-mile logistics, especially for developing countries like India.