arXiv subjects

Xin Deng

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Deng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

R2S-EGO: Dual-Proxy Refinement for Sparse-Capture Real-to-Sim

Real-to-sim (R2S) depends on scene representations that render observations along robot ego trajectories, yet dense multi-view capture limits per-environment real-image capture-count efficiency, and sparse human capture can leave behavior-scoped robot views under-supported. Camera-controlled synthesis can fill missing views, but its use in R2S requires behavior-admissible queries and capture-anchored structural conditioning. We present R2S-EGO, which couples a simulator-derived robot proxy that represents the behavior-scoped executable query domain with a capture-anchored geometry proxy that supplies scene-specific structural conditions. Within this domain, fixed- budget selection targets current support deficits for which geometry support is available. The generated observations are assimilated as pseudo-observations to refine the visual asset, while real captures remain anchors. The fused geometry proxy also supplies the scene collision surface, which is refreshed between rounds. Together, these updates refine the existing simulation scene while its robot dynamics and control stack stay fixed. Across 48 frozen Unitree G1 ego views in three Replica scenes, six-view R2S-EGO reaches 19.062 dB PSNR, compared with 14.226 dB for the strongest reported R2S baseline. Across five paired policy-training seeds, R2S-EGO achieves 82.5% +/- 6.8% real-G1 sitting success, compared with 10.0% +/- 10.5% for GaussGym.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Degradation Frequency Curve: An Explicit Frequency-Quantified Representation for All-in-One Image Restoration

A fundamental difficulty in all-in-one blind image restoration is that degradation is usually treated as an implicit factor hidden in degraded-to-clean mapping, rather than as an explicit object that can be measured and manipulated. This limitation becomes more pronounced under mixed, compound, or unseen degradation conditions, where degradation effects are hard to assign to predefined labels or task-specific parameters. We propose the Degradation Frequency Curve (DFC), a structured spectral representation that quantifies degradation responses by measuring band-wise residual-to-degraded energy ratios in the frequency domain. DFC converts visually entangled and hard-to-describe degradation effects into a measurable degradation coordinate space. Moreover, DFC can be adaptively decomposed into band-wise spectral tokens, allowing local degradation responses to be represented as reusable restoration priors. Based on this representation, we develop the DFC-guided Image Restorer (DFC-IR), a token-conditioned multi-scale framework that progressively estimates DFCs from intermediate restorations and uses the resulting spectral tokens to guide degradation-aware restoration in a coarse-to-fine manner. Extensive experiments on standard, composite, unseen, and real-world degradation benchmarks show that DFC provides an effective representation basis for all-in-one restoration, leading to state-of-the-art performance and improved generalization under complex degradation profiles.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge at NTIRE 2026

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final results. The objective of this challenge is to identify effective networks capable of producing clearer and visually compelling images in diverse and challenging conditions by learning representative visual cues with the purpose of restoring information loss due to low-contrast and noisy images. A total of 195 participants registered for the first track and 153 for the second track of the competition, and 22 teams ultimately submitted valid entries. This paper thoroughly evaluates the state-of-the-art advances in (joint denoising and) low-light image enhancement, showcasing the significant progress in the field, while leveraging samples of our novel dataset.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

REMAC: Reference-Based Martian Asymmetrical Image Compression

To expedite space exploration on Mars, it is indispensable to develop an efficient Martian image compression method for transmitting images through the constrained Mars-to-Earth communication channel. Although the existing learned compression methods have achieved promising results for natural images from earth, there remain two critical issues that hinder their effectiveness for Martian image compression: 1) They overlook the highly-limited computational resources on Mars; 2) They do not utilize the strong \textit{inter-image} similarities across Martian images to advance image compression performance. Motivated by our empirical analysis of the strong \textit{intra-} and \textit{inter-image} similarities from the perspective of texture, color, and semantics, we propose a reference-based Martian asymmetrical image compression (REMAC) approach, which shifts computational complexity from the encoder to the resource-rich decoder and simultaneously improves compression performance. To leverage \textit{inter-image} similarities, we propose a reference-guided entropy module and a ref-decoder that utilize useful information from reference images, reducing redundant operations at the encoder and achieving superior compression performance. To exploit \textit{intra-image} similarities, the ref-decoder adopts a deep, multi-scale architecture with enlarged receptive field size to model long-range spatial dependencies. Additionally, we develop a latent feature recycling mechanism to further alleviate the extreme computational constraints on Mars. Experimental results show that REMAC reduces encoder complexity by 43.51\% compared to the state-of-the-art method, while achieving a BD-PSNR gain of 0.2664 dB.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Order-Disorder in Fe-Si Alloys: Implications for Seismic Anisotropy and Thermal Evolution of Earth's Inner Core

Understanding the structure and dynamics of Earth's inner core is essential for constraining its composition, thermal evolution, and seismic properties. Silicon is a probable major component of Earth's core. Using first-principles molecular dynamics and thermodynamic modeling, we investigate the structural, elastic, and transport properties of Fe-Si alloys at high pressures and temperatures. By computing the Gibbs free energies of B2, hcp, fcc, and bcc solid solutions, we construct the Fe-Si phase diagram applicable to the Earth's inner core. Our results reveal a pronounced miscibility gap between hcp and B2 Fe-Si, with the two phases coexisting over the compositional range of 6-11 wt% Si at 6000 K. The B2 Fe-Si alloy exhibits strong single-crystal shear anisotropy (22.9% at 6000 K) compared to the nearly isotropic hcp phase (0.6%), and yields a shear wave velocity (3.73 km/s) and Poisson's ratio consistent with seismological observations. Moreover, the computed transport properties reveal substantially lower thermal conductivity of B2 Fe-Si relative to pure iron or hcp Fe-Si under inner-core conditions. These results imply that Earth's inner core likely comprises multiple phases, whose distribution and crystallographic texture critically influence its seismic and thermal properties.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Rethinking Diffusion Model-Based Video Super-Resolution: Leveraging Dense Guidance from Aligned Features

Diffusion model (DM) based Video Super-Resolution (VSR) approaches achieve impressive perceptual quality. However, they suffer from error accumulation, spatial artifacts, and a trade-off between perceptual quality and fidelity, primarily caused by inaccurate alignment and insufficient compensation between video frames. In this paper, within the DM-based VSR pipeline, we revisit the role of alignment and compensation between adjacent video frames and reveal two crucial observations: (a) the feature domain is better suited than the pixel domain for information compensation due to its stronger spatial and temporal correlations, and (b) warping at an upscaled resolution better preserves high-frequency information, but this benefit is not necessarily monotonic. Therefore, we propose a novel Densely Guided diffusion model with Aligned Features for Video Super-Resolution (DGAF-VSR), with an Optical Guided Warping Module (OGWM) to maintain high-frequency details in the aligned features and a Feature-wise Temporal Condition Module (FTCM) to deliver dense guidance in the feature domain. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that DGAF-VSR surpasses state-of-the-art methods in key aspects of VSR, including perceptual quality (35.82\% DISTS reduction), fidelity (0.20 dB PSNR gain), and temporal consistency (30.37\% tLPIPS reduction).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Burst Image Quality Assessment: A New Benchmark and Unified Framework for Multiple Downstream Tasks

In recent years, the development of burst imaging technology has improved the capture and processing capabilities of visual data, enabling a wide range of applications. However, the redundancy in burst images leads to the increased storage and transmission demands, as well as reduced efficiency of downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a new task of Burst Image Quality Assessment (BuIQA), to evaluate the task-driven quality of each frame within a burst sequence, providing reasonable cues for burst image selection. Specifically, we establish the first benchmark dataset for BuIQA, consisting of $7,346$ burst sequences with $45,827$ images and $191,572$ annotated quality scores for multiple downstream scenarios. Inspired by the data analysis, a unified BuIQA framework is proposed to achieve an efficient adaption for BuIQA under diverse downstream scenarios. Specifically, a task-driven prompt generation network is developed with heterogeneous knowledge distillation, to learn the priors of the downstream task. Then, the task-aware quality assessment network is introduced to assess the burst image quality based on the task prompt. Extensive experiments across 10 downstream scenarios demonstrate the impressive BuIQA performance of the proposed approach, outperforming the state-of-the-art. Furthermore, it can achieve $0.33$ dB PSNR improvement in the downstream tasks of denoising and super-resolution, by applying our approach to select the high-quality burst frames.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Melting phase relation of seifertite and pyrite-type SiO2 determined by machine learning potentials

Silica (SiO2) is fundamental to both industrial technology and planetary science, yet the phase relations of its high-pressure polymorphs remain poorly constrained. Here, we develop two machine learning potentials (MLPs) for SiO2 that faithfully represent the SCAN and PBEsol exchange-correlation functionals over a wide temperature (1000-10000 K) and pressure (100-400 GPa) range using deep neural networks. With large-scale two-phase simulations powered by these potentials, we determine the melting curves of seifertite and pyrite-type SiO2 and infer the solid-solid phase boundary between these two phases. The SCAN functional, which captures intermediate-range van der Waals interactions, reproduces structural and thermodynamic properties with high fidelity, predicting melting temperatures 6-10 % higher and a seifertite to pyrite-type transition pressure 22 % higher than the PBEsol. The strongly negative Clapeyron slope (-6.1 MPa/K) of this transition suggests that mantle convection could be highly layered in super-Earth exoplanets, potentially affecting their long-term thermal evolution and habitability.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Multi-Plasticity Synergy with Adaptive Mechanism Assignment for Training Spiking Neural Networks

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are promising brain-inspired models known for low power consumption and superior potential for temporal processing, but identifying suitable learning mechanisms remains a challenge. Despite the presence of multiple coexisting learning strategies in the brain, current SNN training methods typically rely on a single form of synaptic plasticity, which limits their adaptability and representational capability. In this paper, we propose a biologically inspired training framework that incorporates multiple synergistic plasticity mechanisms for more effective SNN training. Our method enables diverse learning algorithms to cooperatively modulate the accumulation of information, while allowing each mechanism to preserve its own relatively independent update dynamics. We evaluated our approach on both static image and dynamic neuromorphic datasets to demonstrate that our framework significantly improves performance and robustness compared to conventional learning mechanism models. This work provides a general and extensible foundation for developing more powerful SNNs guided by multi-strategy brain-inspired learning.

cs.NE↗

arXiv2025

Training-Free ANN-to-SNN Conversion for High-Performance Spiking Transformer

Leveraging the event-driven paradigm, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising approach for energy-efficient Transformer architectures.While ANN-to-SNN conversion avoids the high training cost of directly trained Spiking Transformers, existing approaches still struggle to handle the nonlinear operations within Transformer blocks, and often require additional fine-tuning of pretrained ANNs.To address these limitations, we propose a training-free and high-performance ANN-to-SNN conversion framework tailored for Transformer architectures. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-basis Exponential Decay (MBE) neuron that combines exponential decay with a multi-basis encoding strategy to effectively approximate nonlinear operations, eliminating the need for weight modifications in pretrained ANNs.Extensive experiments across diverse tasks (CV, NLU, NLG) and mainstream Transformer architectures (ViT, RoBERTa, GPT-2) demonstrate that our method achieves near-lossless conversion accuracy with significantly lower latency. This provides a promising pathway for the efficient and scalable deployment of Spiking Transformers in real-world applications.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Scene-Adaptive Motion Planning with Explicit Mixture of Experts and Interaction-Oriented Optimization

Despite over a decade of development, autonomous driving trajectory planning in complex urban environments continues to encounter significant challenges. These challenges include the difficulty in accommodating the multi-modal nature of trajectories, the limitations of single expert model in managing diverse scenarios, and insufficient consideration of environmental interactions. To address these issues, this paper introduces the EMoE-Planner, which incorporates three innovative approaches. Firstly, the Explicit MoE (Mixture of Experts) dynamically selects specialized experts based on scenario-specific information through a shared scene router. Secondly, the planner utilizes scene-specific queries to provide multi-modal priors, directing the model's focus towards relevant target areas. Lastly, it enhances the prediction model and loss calculation by considering the interactions between the ego vehicle and other agents, thereby significantly boosting planning performance. Comparative experiments were conducted on the Nuplan dataset against the state-of-the-art methods. The simulation results demonstrate that our model consistently outperforms SOTA models across nearly all test scenarios. Our model is the first pure learning model to achieve performance surpassing rule-based algorithms in almost all Nuplan closed-loop simulations.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2025

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on UGC Video Enhancement: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on UGC Video Enhancement. The challenge constructed a set of 150 user-generated content videos without reference ground truth, which suffer from real-world degradations such as noise, blur, faded colors, compression artifacts, etc. The goal of the participants was to develop an algorithm capable of improving the visual quality of such videos. Given the widespread use of UGC on short-form video platforms, this task holds substantial practical importance. The evaluation was based on subjective quality assessment in crowdsourcing, obtaining votes from over 8000 assessors. The challenge attracted more than 25 teams submitting solutions, 7 of which passed the final phase with source code verification. The outcomes may provide insights into the state-of-the-art in UGC video enhancement and highlight emerging trends and effective strategies in this evolving research area. All data, including the processed videos and subjective comparison votes and scores, is made publicly available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/NTIRE25_UGC_Video_Enhancement.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

CODA: Repurposing Continuous VAEs for Discrete Tokenization

Discrete visual tokenizers transform images into a sequence of tokens, enabling token-based visual generation akin to language models. However, this process is inherently challenging, as it requires both compressing visual signals into a compact representation and discretizing them into a fixed set of codes. Traditional discrete tokenizers typically learn the two tasks jointly, often leading to unstable training, low codebook utilization, and limited reconstruction quality. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{CODA}(\textbf{CO}ntinuous-to-\textbf{D}iscrete \textbf{A}daptation), a framework that decouples compression and discretization. Instead of training discrete tokenizers from scratch, CODA adapts off-the-shelf continuous VAEs -- already optimized for perceptual compression -- into discrete tokenizers via a carefully designed discretization process. By primarily focusing on discretization, CODA ensures stable and efficient training while retaining the strong visual fidelity of continuous VAEs. Empirically, with $\mathbf{6 \times}$ less training budget than standard VQGAN, our approach achieves a remarkable codebook utilization of 100% and notable reconstruction FID (rFID) of $\mathbf{0.43}$ and $\mathbf{1.34}$ for $8 \times$ and $16 \times$ compression on ImageNet 256$\times$ 256 benchmark.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SMILENet: Unleashing Extra-Large Capacity Image Steganography via a Synergistic Mosaic InvertibLE Hiding Network

Existing image steganography methods face fundamental limitations in hiding capacity (typically $1\sim7$ images) due to severe information interference and uncoordinated capacity-distortion trade-off. We propose SMILENet, a novel synergistic framework that achieves 25 image hiding through three key innovations: (i) A synergistic network architecture coordinates reversible and non-reversible operations to efficiently exploit information redundancy in both secret and cover images. The reversible Invertible Cover-Driven Mosaic (ICDM) module and Invertible Mosaic Secret Embedding (IMSE) module establish cover-guided mosaic transformations and representation embedding with mathematically guaranteed invertibility for distortion-free embedding. The non-reversible Secret Information Selection (SIS) module and Secret Detail Enhancement (SDE) module implement learnable feature modulation for critical information selection and enhancement. (ii) A unified training strategy that coordinates complementary modules to achieve 3.0x higher capacity than existing methods with superior visual quality. (iii) Last but not least, we introduce a new metric to model Capacity-Distortion Trade-off for evaluating the image steganography algorithms that jointly considers hiding capacity and distortion, and provides a unified evaluation approach for accessing results with different number of secret image. Extensive experiments on DIV2K, Paris StreetView and ImageNet1K show that SMILENet outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of hiding capacity, recovery quality as well as security against steganalysis methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

Causal Context Adjustment Loss for Learned Image Compression

In recent years, learned image compression (LIC) technologies have surpassed conventional methods notably in terms of rate-distortion (RD) performance. Most present learned techniques are VAE-based with an autoregressive entropy model, which obviously promotes the RD performance by utilizing the decoded causal context. However, extant methods are highly dependent on the fixed hand-crafted causal context. The question of how to guide the auto-encoder to generate a more effective causal context benefit for the autoregressive entropy models is worth exploring. In this paper, we make the first attempt in investigating the way to explicitly adjust the causal context with our proposed Causal Context Adjustment loss (CCA-loss). By imposing the CCA-loss, we enable the neural network to spontaneously adjust important information into the early stage of the autoregressive entropy model. Furthermore, as transformer technology develops remarkably, variants of which have been adopted by many state-of-the-art (SOTA) LIC techniques. The existing computing devices have not adapted the calculation of the attention mechanism well, which leads to a burden on computation quantity and inference latency. To overcome it, we establish a convolutional neural network (CNN) image compression model and adopt the unevenly channel-wise grouped strategy for high efficiency. Ultimately, the proposed CNN-based LIC network trained with our Causal Context Adjustment loss attains a great trade-off between inference latency and rate-distortion performance.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2024

HiGraphDTI: Hierarchical Graph Representation Learning for Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

The discovery of drug-target interactions (DTIs) plays a crucial role in pharmaceutical development. The deep learning model achieves more accurate results in DTI prediction due to its ability to extract robust and expressive features from drug and target chemical structures. However, existing deep learning methods typically generate drug features via aggregating molecular atom representations, ignoring the chemical properties carried by motifs, i.e., substructures of the molecular graph. The atom-drug double-level molecular representation learning can not fully exploit structure information and fails to interpret the DTI mechanism from the motif perspective. In addition, sequential model-based target feature extraction either fuses limited contextual information or requires expensive computational resources. To tackle the above issues, we propose a hierarchical graph representation learning-based DTI prediction method (HiGraphDTI). Specifically, HiGraphDTI learns hierarchical drug representations from triple-level molecular graphs to thoroughly exploit chemical information embedded in atoms, motifs, and molecules. Then, an attentional feature fusion module incorporates information from different receptive fields to extract expressive target features.Last, the hierarchical attention mechanism identifies crucial molecular segments, which offers complementary views for interpreting interaction mechanisms. The experiment results not only demonstrate the superiority of HiGraphDTI to the state-of-the-art methods, but also confirm the practical ability of our model in interaction interpretation and new DTI discovery.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Quality of Compressed Images by Mitigating Enhancement Bias Towards Compression Domain

Existing quality enhancement methods for compressed images focus on aligning the enhancement domain with the raw domain to yield realistic images. However, these methods exhibit a pervasive enhancement bias towards the compression domain, inadvertently regarding it as more realistic than the raw domain. This bias makes enhanced images closely resemble their compressed counterparts, thus degrading their perceptual quality. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective method to mitigate this bias and enhance the quality of compressed images. Our method employs a conditional discriminator with the compressed image as a key condition, and then incorporates a domain-divergence regularization to actively distance the enhancement domain from the compression domain. Through this dual strategy, our method enables the discrimination against the compression domain, and brings the enhancement domain closer to the raw domain. Comprehensive quality evaluations confirm the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art methods without incurring inference overheads.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Making Large Language Models Interactive: A Pioneer Study on Supporting Complex Information-Seeking Tasks with Implicit Constraints

Current interactive systems with natural language interfaces lack the ability to understand a complex information-seeking request which expresses several implicit constraints at once, and there is no prior information about user preferences e.g.,"find hiking trails around San Francisco which are accessible with toddlers and have beautiful scenery in summer", where output is a list of possible suggestions for users to start their exploration. In such scenarios, user requests can be issued in one shot in the form of a complex and long query, unlike conversational and exploratory search models, where require short utterances or queries are often presented to the system step by step. We have designed and deployed a platform to collect the data from approaching such complex interactive systems. Moreover, despite with the current advancement of generative language models these models suffer from hallucination in providing accurate factual knowledge. All language models are mostly trained in large part on web-scraped data from the past, which usually is not useful for immediate users' needs. In this article, we propose an IA that leverages Large Language Models (LLM) for complex request understanding and makes it interactive using Reinforcement learning that allows intricately refine user requests by making them complete, leading to better retrieval and reduce LLMs hallucination problems for current user needs. To demonstrate the performance of the proposed modeling paradigm, we have adopted various pre-retrieval metrics that capture the extent to which guided interactions with our system yield better retrieval results. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrated that our method significantly outperforms several robust baselines.

cs.IR↗