arXiv subjects

Chao Dong

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Dong.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Evaluation of Visual Processing Should Be Human-Centered, Not Metric-Centered

This position paper argues that the evaluation of modern visual processing systems should no longer be driven primarily by single-metric image quality assessment benchmarks, particularly in the era of generative and perception-oriented methods. Image restoration exemplifies this divergence: while objective IQA metrics enable reproducible, scalable evaluation, they have increasingly drifted apart from human perception and user preferences. We contend that this mismatch risks constraining innovation and misguiding research progress across visual processing tasks. Rather than rejecting metrics altogether, this paper calls for a rebalancing of evaluation paradigms, advocating a more human-centered, context-aware, and fine-grained approach to assessing the visual models' outcomes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Phase-aware video generation for physics-grounded dynamics and interactions

Generating physically plausible videos for solid-gas dynamics is challenging as different phases exhibit distinct dynamics yet remain coupled through physical interactions. We present PAVG, a Phase-Aware Video Generator for solid-gas dynamics and interactions. It employs a dual-branch architecture to explicitly model the distinct dynamics of solids and gases, while spatiotemporal cross-attention captures their physical interactions. This design enables PAVG to preserve phasespecific motion characteristics while producing physically consistent responses across phases. To facilitate this task, we further construct a simulation corpus comprising over 700K physical trajectories across diverse solid, gas, and solid-gas interaction scenarios. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our PAVG produces videos with improved motion adherence, physical plausibility, and visual quality compared with existing approaches.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Mission Efficiency Optimization in Low-Altitude Economy: Adaptive Power Allocation for Coordinating Heterogeneous Aircraft Swarms

With the rapid development of the low-altitude economy, low-altitude operations are booming, where complex missions require collaborative efforts among multiple heterogeneous low-altitude aircrafts (LAAs). Specifically, different LAAs assume distinct roles: some for sensing, some for communication, some for computing, and others for mission execution, together forming a sensing-communication-computing-control (SC3) closed loop, akin to a reflex arc. To enable efficient coordination in such multi-LAA swarms, we introduce the concept of operational-capability entropy (OCE) to quantify the effective work capability of operational LAAs. Accordingly, by jointly considering heterogeneous OCE and channel conditions among LAAs, we formulate the power allocation problem with the goal of minimizing the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) cost, which serves as a metric for mission efficiency. The resulting complex optimization problem is decomposed into two convex subproblems that are solved iteratively, with closed-form solutions derived for each. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mission-oriented adaptive power allocation scheme significantly outperforms traditional ones.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

Lumina-OmniLV: A Unified Multimodal Framework for General Low-Level Vision

We present Lunima-OmniLV (abbreviated as OmniLV), a universal multimodal multi-task framework for low-level vision that addresses over 100 sub-tasks across four major categories: image restoration, image enhancement, weak-semantic dense prediction, and stylization. OmniLV leverages both textual and visual prompts to offer flexible and user-friendly interactions. Built on Diffusion Transformer (DiT)-based generative priors, our framework supports arbitrary resolutions -- achieving optimal performance at 1K resolution -- while preserving fine-grained details and high fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that separately encoding text and visual instructions, combined with co-training using shallow feature control, is essential to mitigate task ambiguity and enhance multi-task generalization. Our findings also reveal that integrating high-level generative tasks into low-level vision models can compromise detail-sensitive restoration. These insights pave the way for more robust and generalizable low-level vision systems.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Anomalous magnetocaloric effects in the quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnet BaCo$_2$V$_2$O$_8$

We investigate the transverse-field thermodynamics of the quasi-one-dimensional Ising-like antiferromagnet BaCo$_2$V$_2$O$_8$, whose tilted screw-chain geometry and anisotropic Landé $g$ tensor generate spatially modulated Zeeman couplings. Angle-resolved magnetocaloric-effect (MCE) measurements reveal a high-field temperature minimum near the transverse-field Ising critical field for $H\parallel[110]$ that persists and shifts only weakly upon field rotation. Tensor-network calculations show that the rotation-induced staggered transverse field rapidly lowers the Ising critical field and that the magnetic Grüneisen ratio changes sign near the high-field temperature minimum, consistent with experiment. Our results establish that a dominant MCE response can persist away from the Ising critical region, suggesting a route to magnetic cooling by tailoring anisotropic Zeeman-coupling configurations in quantum magnets.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Tilted $p$-wave magnet candidate CeNiAsO

The unexpectedly small ordered moments of CeNiAsO, a candidate for correlated $p$-wave magnet, have posed a serious challenge to the precise determination of its magnetic structure, hindering the understanding of its fundamental properties. By leveraging the high sensitivity to local internal fields, our $^{75}$As nuclear quadrupole / magnetic resonance experiments reveal a commensurate antiferromagnetic order with a small out-of-plane moment $m_z\approx0.05$ $μ_{\mathrm{B}}$. This tilted magnetic configuration not only rotates the spin polarization axis away from the crystallographic $\mathbf{c}$-axis, but also enhances the non-relativistic spin splitting. We refer to this rare paradigm as a \textit{tilted $p$-wave magnet}.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

How far have we gone in Generative Image Restoration? A study on its capability, limitations and evaluation practices

Generative Image Restoration (GIR) has achieved impressive perceptual realism, but how far have its practical capabilities truly advanced compared with previous methods? To answer this, we present a large-scale study grounded in a new multi-dimensional evaluation pipeline that assesses models on detail, sharpness, semantic correctness, and overall quality. Our analysis covers diverse architectures, including diffusion-based, GAN-based, PSNR-oriented, and general-purpose generation models, revealing critical performance disparities. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers a key evolution in failure modes that signifies a paradigm shift for the perception-oriented low-level vision field. The central challenge is evolving from the previous problem of detail scarcity (under-generation) to the new frontier of detail quality and semantic control (preventing over-generation). We also leverage our benchmark to train a new IQA model that better aligns with human perceptual judgments. Ultimately, this work provides a systematic study of modern generative image restoration models, offering crucial insights that redefine our understanding of their true state and chart a course for future development.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Pinching Antenna Systems (PASS) for Cell-Free Communications

A pinching antenna system (PASS) assisted cell-free communication system is proposed. A sum rate maximization problem under the BS power budget constraint and PA deployment constraint is formulated. To tackle the proposed non-convex optimization problem, an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is developed. In particular, the digital beamforming sub-problem is solved using the weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) method, whereas the pinching beamforming sub-problem is handled via a penalty based approach combined with element-wise optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that: 1) the PASS assisted cell-free systems achieve superior performance over benchmark schemes; 2) increasing the number of PAs per waveguides can improve the advantage of PASS assisted cell-free systems; and 3) the cell-free architecture mitigates the average user rate degradation as the number of users increases.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

Can Nano Banana 2 Replace Traditional Image Restoration Models? An Evaluation of Its Performance on Image Restoration Tasks

Recent advances in generative AI raise the question of whether general-purpose image editing models can serve as unified solutions for image restoration. We conduct a systematic evaluation of Nano Banana 2 across diverse scenes and degradations. Our results show that prompt design is critical, with concise prompts and explicit fidelity constraints achieving a better balance between reconstruction and perceptual quality. Nano Banana 2 achieves competitive full-reference performance and is consistently preferred in user studies, while showing strong generalization in challenging scenarios. However, we observe a gap between perceptual quality and restoration fidelity, as the model tends to produce visually rich results with over-enhanced details and inconsistencies. This issue is not well captured by existing IQA metrics or user studies. Overall, general-purpose models show promise as unified IR solvers from a perceptual perspective, but require improved controllability and fidelity-aware evaluation. Further comparisons and detailed analyses are available in our project repository: https://github.com/yxyuanxiao/NanoBanana2TestOnIR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Beamforming Design for Pinching Antenna Systems Enabled Cognitive Radio Systems

A pinching antenna system (PASS) assisted cognitive radio (CR) system is proposed. A secondary system sum rate maximization problem is formulated by jointly considering the base station (BS) power budget, the pinching antenna (PA) deployment constraints, and the interference tolerance requirements of primary users. To address the resulting non-convex problem, a tractable reformulation based on the weighted minimum mean-square error (WMMSE) approach is adopted, followed by the development of an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Within this framework, the auxiliary variables are updated in closed form, enabling an efficient transformation of the digital beamforming subproblem to a convex form, while the PA deployment is refined through a tailored element-wise optimization strategy. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design and show consistent performance gains compared with conventional benchmark schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2026

PhotoFramer: Multi-modal Image Composition Instruction

Composition matters during the photo-taking process, yet many casual users struggle to frame well-composed images. To provide composition guidance, we introduce PhotoFramer, a multi-modal composition instruction framework. Given a poorly composed image, PhotoFramer first describes how to improve the composition in natural language and then generates a well-composed example image. To train such a model, we curate a large-scale dataset. Inspired by how humans take photos, we organize composition guidance into a hierarchy of sub-tasks: shift, zoom-in, and view-change tasks. Shift and zoom-in data are sampled from existing cropping datasets, while view-change data are obtained via a two-stage pipeline. First, we sample pairs with varying viewpoints from multi-view datasets, and train a degradation model to transform well-composed photos into poorly composed ones. Second, we apply this degradation model to expert-taken photos to synthesize poor images to form training pairs. Using this dataset, we finetune a model that jointly processes and generates both text and images, enabling actionable textual guidance with illustrative examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate that textual instructions effectively steer image composition, and coupling them with exemplars yields consistent improvements over exemplar-only baselines. PhotoFramer offers a practical step toward composition assistants that make expert photographic priors accessible to everyday users.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

The Fourth Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4) at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

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.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Unified Description of Spin-Lattice Coupling and Thermodynamics in the Pyrochlore Heisenberg Antiferromagnet

We study an extended model to describe the spin-lattice coupling, incorporating individual vibrations of bonds and atomic sites alongside distance-dependent exchange interactions. The proposed spin Hamiltonian can be effectively considered as an interpolation between two well-established minimum models, the bond-phonon model and the site-phonon model. The extended model, which treats bond phonons and site phonons on comparable footing, well reproduces successive field-induced phase transitions as well as the thermodynamic properties of a three-up-one-down state in the pyrochlore-lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet, including negative thermal expansion, an enhanced magnetocaloric effect, and a sharp specific-heat peak. The present approach is broadly applicable to various spin models, providing a framework for identifying the primary phonon modes responsible for spin-lattice coupling and for understanding complex magnetic phase diagrams.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Revisiting the Generalization Problem of Low-level Vision Models Through the Lens of Image Deraining

Generalization to unseen degradations remains a fundamental challenge for low-level vision models. This paper aims to investigate the underlying mechanism of this failure, using image deraining as a primary case study due to its well-defined and decoupled structure. Through systematic experiments, we reveal that generalization issues are not primarily caused by limited network capacity, but rather by a ``shortcut learning'' phenomenon driven by the relative complexity between image content and degradation patterns. We find that when background content is excessively complex, networks preferentially overfit the simpler degradation characteristics to minimize training loss, thereby failing to learn the underlying image distribution. To address this, we propose two principled strategies: (1) balancing the complexity of training data (backgrounds vs. degradations) to redirect the network's focus toward content reconstruction, and (2) leveraging strong content priors from pre-trained generative models to physically constrain the network onto a high-quality image manifold. Extensive experiments on image deraining, denoising, and deblurring validate our theoretical insights. Our work provides an interpretability-driven perspective and a principled methodology for improving the robustness and generalization of low-level vision models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Prompt-Driven Low-Altitude Edge Intelligence: Modular Agents and Generative Reasoning

The large artificial intelligence models (LAMs) show strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and multi-modal understanding, and can enable advanced capabilities in low-altitude edge intelligence. However, the deployment of LAMs at the edge remains constrained by some fundamental limitations. First, tasks are rigidly tied to specific models, limiting the flexibility. Besides, the computational and memory demands of full-scale LAMs exceed the capacity of most edge devices. Moreover, the current inference pipelines are typically static, making it difficult to respond to real-time changes of tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a prompt-to-agent edge cognition framework (P2AECF), enabling the flexible, efficient, and adaptive edge intelligence. Specifically, P2AECF transforms high-level semantic prompts into executable reasoning workflows through three key mechanisms. First, the prompt-defined cognition parses task intent into abstract and model-agnostic representations. Second, the agent-based modular execution instantiates these tasks using lightweight and reusable cognitive agents dynamically selected based on current resource conditions. Third, the diffusion-controlled inference planning adaptively constructs and refines execution strategies by incorporating runtime feedback and system context. In addition, we illustrate the framework through a representative low-altitude intelligent network use case, showing its ability to deliver adaptive, modular, and scalable edge intelligence for real-time low-altitude aerial collaborations.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

A Disentangled Representation Learning Framework for Low-altitude Network Coverage Prediction

The expansion of the low-altitude economy has underscored the significance of Low-Altitude Network Coverage (LANC) prediction for designing aerial corridors. While accurate LANC forecasting hinges on the antenna beam patterns of Base Stations (BSs), these patterns are typically proprietary and not readily accessible. Operational parameters of BSs, which inherently contain beam information, offer an opportunity for data-driven low-altitude coverage prediction. However, collecting extensive low-altitude road test data is cost-prohibitive, often yielding only sparse samples per BS. This scarcity results in two primary challenges: imbalanced feature sampling due to limited variability in high-dimensional operational parameters against the backdrop of substantial changes in low-dimensional sampling locations, and diminished generalizability stemming from insufficient data samples. To overcome these obstacles, we introduce a dual strategy comprising expert knowledge-based feature compression and disentangled representation learning. The former reduces feature space complexity by leveraging communications expertise, while the latter enhances model generalizability through the integration of propagation models and distinct subnetworks that capture and aggregate the semantic representations of latent features. Experimental evaluation confirms the efficacy of our framework, yielding a 7% reduction in error compared to the best baseline algorithm. Real-network validations further attest to its reliability, achieving practical prediction accuracy with MAE errors at the 5dB level.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2026

Unexpected type-II multiferroic phase in GdMnO3 under high magnetic fields

Perovskite manganites with small A-site ions, as the first and canonical branch of type-II multiferroics, are ideal systems to exhibit magnetism-induced ferroelectricity. Despite their established magnetoelectric phase diagrams under low magnetic fields, here an unidentified phase with a large magnetism-induced polarization (up to 1500 μC/m2) is revealed in GdMnO3 under high magnetic fields up to 60 T. Based on multiprobe experiments, a complete phase diagram is constructed with successive polar-nonpolar-polar-nonpolar transitions. Such a nonmonotonic evolution is well mimicked by model simulation, while the spin-lattice coupling is the key ingredient for the reentrant ferroelectric phase.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Hierarchical Task Offloading and Trajectory Optimization in Low-Altitude Intelligent Networks Via Auction and Diffusion-based MARL

The low-altitude intelligent networks (LAINs) emerge as a promising architecture for delivering low-latency and energy-efficient edge intelligence in dynamic and infrastructure-limited environments. By integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aerial base stations, and terrestrial base stations, LAINs can support mission-critical applications such as disaster response, environmental monitoring, and real-time sensing. However, these systems face key challenges, including energy-constrained UAVs, stochastic task arrivals, and heterogeneous computing resources. To address these issues, we propose an integrated air-ground collaborative network and formulate a time-dependent integer nonlinear programming problem that jointly optimizes UAV trajectory planning and task offloading decisions. The problem is challenging to solve due to temporal coupling among decision variables. Therefore, we design a hierarchical learning framework with two timescales. At the large timescale, a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction mechanism enables the energy-aware and incentive-compatible trajectory assignment. At the small timescale, we propose the diffusion-heterogeneous-agent proximal policy optimization, a generative multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds latent diffusion models into actor networks. Each UAV samples actions from a Gaussian prior and refines them via observation-conditioned denoising, enhancing adaptability and policy diversity. Extensive simulations show that our framework outperforms baselines in energy efficiency, task success rate, and convergence performance.

cs.LG↗