Bowen Shao | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

NTIRE 2026 The Second Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Multiple Classical Noise Mitigation by Multiobjective Robust Quantum Optimal Control

High-quality control is a fundamental requirement for quantum computation, but practically it is often hampered by the presence of various types of noises, which can be static or time-dependent. In many realistic scenarios, multiple noise sources coexist, and their resulting noise effects need be corrected to a sufficient order, posing significant challenges for the design of effective robust control methods. Here, we explore the method of robust quantum optimal control to generally tackle the problem of resisting multiple noises from a complicated noise environment. Specifically, we confine our analysis to unitary noises that can be described by classical noise models. This method employs a gradient-based multiobjective optimization algorithm to maximize the control figure of merit, and meanwhile to minimize the perturbative effects of the noises that are allowed for. To verify its effectiveness, we apply this method to a number of examples, including roubust entangling gate in trapped ion system and robust controlled-Z gate in superconducting qubits, under commonly encountered static and time-dependent noises. Our simulation results reveal that robust optimal control can find smooth, robust pulses that can simultaneously resist several noises and thus achieve high-fidelity gates. Therefore, we expect that this method will find wide applications on current noisy quantum computing devices.

quant-ph↗