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Yu-Chih Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Yu-Chih Chen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

AstraMoE-SR: Trajectory-Guided Diffusion for Blind Satellite Jitter Deblurring and Super-Resolution

Pushbroom satellite imaging couples limited spatial resolution with platform attitude instability. Platform jitter produces spatially varying motion blur because each scan line is acquired under a different instantaneous attitude, while perspective geometry causes the same perturbation to induce different pixel displacements across the field of view. Existing blind restoration methods that assume a spatially invariant kernel and satellite jitter correction methods that rely on auxiliary observations are therefore not directly applicable. We present AstraMoE-SR, a single-image framework that jointly restores motion blur and spatial resolution without auxiliary measurements. Rather than estimating a blur kernel, we infer how the camera moved by reparameterizing degradation as a local exposure trajectory under pushbroom geometry. A conditional diffusion model estimates the trajectory distribution, mitigating the over-smoothing of high-frequency jitter by deterministic point estimation. The predicted trajectory conditions a pretrained latent diffusion backbone through trajectory-guided geometric alignment and spatially adaptive reconstruction. We further show that the remaining point-wise trajectory error is consistent with intrinsic jitter-phase ambiguity that is not resolved by increasing estimator capacity. On all 1,411 DOTA-v1.0 images degraded using our physically motivated forward model, AstraMoE-SR is the only evaluated method to outperform the no-restoration baseline across every fidelity metric, improving on StableSR by 0.64 dB PSNR, 15.2% LPIPS, and 0.091 DINO feature similarity. Reconstructions conditioned on predicted trajectories differ negligibly from those using ground-truth trajectories, indicating that the estimates retain the degradation information required for effective restoration.

eess.IV

Debiasing Text-to-Image Evaluation via Implicit Cultural Alignment Reward Modeling

As Text-to-Image (T2I) systems rapidly advance, evaluating the cultural authenticity of synthesized content has become increasingly important for fair and trustworthy generative AI. Existing T2I evaluation metrics and multimodal judges often rely on visual-semantic representations that underrepresent implicit cultural norms, leading to biased preference judgments and the omission of fine-grained cultural cues. In addition, visual question answering (VQA)-based evaluators typically depend on autoregressive text generation, which limits their scalability for real-time reward modeling. To address these limitations, we introduce an Implicit Cultural Alignment Reward Model built upon a lightweight 4.2-billion-parameter Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM). Our framework integrates an Implicit Cultural Probe with a Skip-connection Cross-Attention (SkipCA) mechanism, enabling late-stage semantic features to directly attend to early-stage visual representations and better preserve culturally salient details. Evaluations on 3,323 challenging and carefully curated image pairs from the CulturalFrames benchmark show that our approach achieves 82.12% pairwise accuracy, with Pearson and Kendall correlation coefficients of 0.585 and 0.412, respectively, outperforming representative vision-language metrics and MLLM-based evaluators. Moreover, by bypassing autoregressive text generation, our model processes each evaluation in 0.21 seconds under our local inference setup, achieving a $10\times$ speedup over standard VQA-based evaluators. These results suggest that the proposed reward model can provide an efficient and culturally aware scalar signal for preference optimization pipelines such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and Direct Preference Optimization. Additional resources are available on our project page at https://bensonch1214.github.io/Implicit_Cultural_Alignment/.

cs.CV

Bring Music The Horizon: Music-Driven 360$^\circ$ Video Generation

Music visualization offers a powerful way to enhance listeners' understanding and experience of music by translating auditory signals into visual forms. However, most existing approaches either rely heavily on lyrics or generate flat, non-immersive videos similar to conventional music videos, which limits their ability to convey the emotional dynamics of music and provide an immersive listening experience. We propose Bring Music The Horizon, an emotion-aware pipeline for music-driven 360$^\circ$ video generation. Given an input song, our work first estimates its emotional trajectory by predicting valence-arousal values at the level of every four bars. These values are then converted into emotion-aware visual guidance using EmotiCrafter, and these guidance vectors can be manipulated by the SEGA framework, which provides fine-grained semantic control for keyframe generation. Finally, image-to-video models are applied to the generated keyframes to synthesize temporally continuous 360$^\circ$ videos for immersive music visualization. Our pipeline generates 360$^\circ$ music visualization videos that reflect the emotional progression and temporal structure of the input song. We demonstrate its capability using songs from different genres and provide qualitative comparisons with From-Sound-To-Sight, a representative audio-to-visual generation baseline, on our project page at https://etoile-et-toi-mp3.github.io/BMTH_Project_Page/.

cs.CV

Learning Perceptual Representations for Gaming NR-VQA with Multi-Task FR Signals

No-reference video quality assessment (NR-VQA) for gaming videos is challenging due to limited human-rated datasets and unique content characteristics including fast motion, stylized graphics, and compression artifacts. We present MTL-VQA, a multi-task learning framework that uses full-reference (FR) quality metrics as supervisory signals to learn perceptually meaningful features without human labels during pretraining. By jointly optimizing multiple complementary proxy FR objectives with adaptive task weighting, our approach learns shared representations that transfer effectively to downstream NR-VQA. Experiments on gaming video datasets show that MTL-VQA achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods in both mean opinion score-supervised and label-efficient or self-supervised settings.

eess.IV

Stream-DiffVSR: Low-Latency Streamable Video Super-Resolution via Auto-Regressive Diffusion

Diffusion-based video super-resolution (VSR) methods deliver strong perceptual quality but are often unsuitable for latency-sensitive scenarios due to reliance on future frames and expensive multi-step denoising. We propose Stream-DiffVSR, a causally conditioned diffusion framework for efficient online VSR. Operating strictly on past frames, Stream-DiffVSR integrates a four-step distilled denoiser for fast inference, an Auto-regressive Temporal Guidance (ARTG) module that injects motion-aligned cues during latent denoising, and a lightweight temporal-aware decoder with a Temporal Processor Module (TPM) to enhance detail and temporal coherence. Unlike chunk-wise streaming inference, our strictly frame-by-frame causal design avoids sequence-level waiting, substantially reducing time-to-first-frame and end-to-end latency. Stream-DiffVSR processes 720p frames in 0.328 seconds on an RTX 4090 and consistently outperforms prior diffusion-based baselines. Compared with the online state-of-the-art TMP, it improves perceptual quality (LPIPS +0.095). Compared with prior diffusion-based VSR methods such as MGLD-VSR, it reduces per-frame runtime by over 130x. Moreover, Stream-DiffVSR substantially lowers time-to-first-frame for diffusion-based VSR, reducing initial delay from over 4600 seconds to 0.328 seconds, making diffusion-based VSR markedly more practical for low-latency online and streaming deployment. Project page: https://jamichss.github.io/stream-diffvsr-project-page/

cs.CV

Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Rendered Human Avatar Videos in Virtual Reality

We study the visual quality judgments of human subjects on digital human avatars (sometimes referred to as "holograms" in the parlance of virtual reality [VR] and augmented reality [AR] systems) that have been subjected to distortions. We also study the ability of video quality models to predict human judgments. As streaming human avatar videos in VR or AR become increasingly common, the need for more advanced human avatar video compression protocols will be required to address the tradeoffs between faithfully transmitting high-quality visual representations while adjusting to changeable bandwidth scenarios. During transmission over the internet, the perceived quality of compressed human avatar videos can be severely impaired by visual artifacts. To optimize trade-offs between perceptual quality and data volume in practical workflows, video quality assessment (VQA) models are essential tools. However, there are very few VQA algorithms developed specifically to analyze human body avatar videos, due, at least in part, to the dearth of appropriate and comprehensive datasets of adequate size. Towards filling this gap, we introduce the LIVE-Meta Rendered Human Avatar VQA Database, which contains 720 human avatar videos processed using 20 different combinations of encoding parameters, labeled by corresponding human perceptual quality judgments that were collected in six degrees of freedom VR headsets. To demonstrate the usefulness of this new and unique video resource, we use it to study and compare the performances of a variety of state-of-the-art Full Reference and No Reference video quality prediction models, including a new model called HoloQA. As a service to the research community, we publicly releases the metadata of the new database at https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-Meta-rendered-human-avatar/index.html.

eess.IV

Study of Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Mobile Cloud Gaming Videos

We present the outcomes of a recent large-scale subjective study of Mobile Cloud Gaming Video Quality Assessment (MCG-VQA) on a diverse set of gaming videos. Rapid advancements in cloud services, faster video encoding technologies, and increased access to high-speed, low-latency wireless internet have all contributed to the exponential growth of the Mobile Cloud Gaming industry. Consequently, the development of methods to assess the quality of real-time video feeds to end-users of cloud gaming platforms has become increasingly important. However, due to the lack of a large-scale public Mobile Cloud Gaming Video dataset containing a diverse set of distorted videos with corresponding subjective scores, there has been limited work on the development of MCG-VQA models. Towards accelerating progress towards these goals, we created a new dataset, named the LIVE-Meta Mobile Cloud Gaming (LIVE-Meta-MCG) video quality database, composed of 600 landscape and portrait gaming videos, on which we collected 14,400 subjective quality ratings from an in-lab subjective study. Additionally, to demonstrate the usefulness of the new resource, we benchmarked multiple state-of-the-art VQA algorithms on the database. The new database will be made publicly available on our website: \url{https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-Meta-Mobile-Cloud-Gaming/index.html}

cs.CV

GAMIVAL: Video Quality Prediction on Mobile Cloud Gaming Content

The mobile cloud gaming industry has been rapidly growing over the last decade. When streaming gaming videos are transmitted to customers' client devices from cloud servers, algorithms that can monitor distorted video quality without having any reference video available are desirable tools. However, creating No-Reference Video Quality Assessment (NR VQA) models that can accurately predict the quality of streaming gaming videos rendered by computer graphics engines is a challenging problem, since gaming content generally differs statistically from naturalistic videos, often lacks detail, and contains many smooth regions. Until recently, the problem has been further complicated by the lack of adequate subjective quality databases of mobile gaming content. We have created a new gaming-specific NR VQA model called the Gaming Video Quality Evaluator (GAMIVAL), which combines and leverages the advantages of spatial and temporal gaming distorted scene statistics models, a neural noise model, and deep semantic features. Using a support vector regression (SVR) as a regressor, GAMIVAL achieves superior performance on the new LIVE-Meta Mobile Cloud Gaming (LIVE-Meta MCG) video quality database.

eess.IV

Topological susceptibility in finite temperature QCD with physical $(u/d, s, c)$ domain-wall quarks

We perform hybrid Monte-Carlo (HMC) simulation of lattice QCD with $N_f=2+1+1$ domain-wall quarks at the physical point, on the $64^3 \times (64,20,16,12,10,8,6)$ lattices, each with three lattice spacings. The lattice spacings and the bare quark masses are determined on the $64^4$ lattices. The resulting gauge ensembles provide a basis for studying finite temperature QCD with $N_f=2+1+1 $ domain-wall quarks at the physical point. In this paper, we determine the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum for $T > T_c \sim 150 $ MeV. The topological charge of each gauge configuration is measured by the clover charge in the Wilson flow at the same flow time in physical units, and the topological susceptibility $ χ_t(a,T) $ is determined for each ensemble with lattice spacing $a$ and temperature $T$. Using the topological susceptibility $χ_t(a,T) $ of 15 gauge ensembles with three lattice spacings and different temperatures in the range $T \sim 155-516 $ MeV, we extract the topological susceptibility $χ_t(T)$ in the continuum limit. To compare our results with others, we survey the continuum extrapolated $χ_t(T)$ in lattice QCD with $N_f=2+1(+1)$ dynamical quarks at/near the physical point, and discuss their discrepancies. Moreover, a detailed discussion on the reweighting method for domain-wall fermion is presented.

hep-lat

Finite temperature QCD with physical $(u/d, s, c)$ domain-wall quarks

In order to understand the role of QCD in the early universe, we perform hybrid Monte-Carlo simulation of lattice QCD with $N_f=2+1+1$ optimal domain-wall quarks at the physical point, on the $64^3 \times (6,8,10,12,16,20,64)$ lattices, each with three lattice spacings. The lattice spacings and the bare quark masses are determined on the $64^4$ lattices. The resulting gauge ensembles provide a basis for studying finite temperature QCD with $N_f=2+1+1 $ domain-wall quarks at the physical point. In this Proceeding, we present our first result on the topological susceptibility of the QCD vacuum. The topological charge of each gauge configuration is measured by the clover charge in the Wilson flow at the same flow time in physical units, and the topological susceptibility $ χ_t(a,T) $ is determined for each ensemble with lattice spacing $a$ and temperature $T$. Using the topological susceptibility $χ_t(a,T) $ of 15 gauge ensembles with three lattice spacings and different temperatures in the range $T \sim 155-516 $~MeV, we extract the topological susceptibility $χ_t(T)$ in the continuum limit.

hep-lat

New $N_f=2$ Pseudofermion Action for Monte-Carlo Simulation of Lattice Field Theory with Domain-Wall Fermions

We construct a novel $ N_f = 2 $ pseudofermion action for Monte-Carlo simulation of lattice gauge theory with domain-wall fermions (DWF), of which the effective four-dimensional lattice Dirac operator is equal to the overlap-Dirac operator with the argument of the sign function equal to $ H = c γ_5 D_w (1 + d D_w)^{-1} $, where $ c $ and $ d $ are parameters, and $D_w$ is the standard Wilson-Dirac operator plus a negative parameter $-m_0 \; (0 < m_0 < 2)$. This new action is particularly useful for the challenging simulations of lattice gauge theories with large $N_f = 2n $ DWF, on the large lattices, and in the strong-coupling regime.

hep-lat

Mass Preconditioning for the Exact One-Flavor Action in Lattice QCD with Domain-Wall Fermion

The mass-preconditioning (MP) technique has become a standard tool to enhance the efficiency of the hybrid Monte-Carlo simulation (HMC) of lattice QCD with dynamical quarks, for 2-flavors QCD with degenerate quark masses, as well as its extension to the case of one-flavor by taking the square-root of the fermion determinant of 2-flavors with degenerate masses. However, for lattice QCD with domain-wall fermion, the fermion determinant of any single fermion flavor can be expressed as a functional integral with an exact pseudofermion action $ ϕ^\dagger H^{-1} ϕ$, where $ H^{-1} $ is a positive-definite Hermitian operator without taking square-root, and with the chiral structure \cite{Chen:2014hyy}. Consequently, the mass-preconditioning for the exact one-flavor action (EOFA) does not necessarily follow the conventional (old) MP pattern. In this paper, we present a new mass-preconditioning for the EOFA, which is more efficient than the old MP which we have used in Refs. \cite{Chen:2014hyy,Chen:2014bbc}. We perform numerical tests in lattice QCD with $ N_f = 1 $ and $ N_f = 1+1+1+1 $ optimal domain-wall quarks, with one mass-preconditioner applied to one of the exact one-flavor actions, and we find that the efficiency of the new MP is more than 20\% higher than that of the old MP.

hep-lat

Lattice QCD with $N_f = 2+1+1 $ domain-wall quarks

We perform hybrid Monte Carlo simulation of (2+1+1)-flavors lattice QCD with the optimal domain-wall fermion (which has the effective 4D Dirac operator exactly equal to the Zolotarev optimal rational approximation of the overlap Dirac operator). The gauge ensemble is generated on the $32^3 \times 64 $ lattice with the extent $ N_s = 16 $ in the fifth dimension, and with the plaquette gauge action at $ β= 6/g^2 = 6.20 $. The lattice spacing ($ a \simeq 0.063 $ fm) is determined by the Wilson flow, using the value $ \sqrt{t_0} = 0.1416(8) $ fm obtained by the MILC Collaboration for the $(2+1+1)$-flavors QCD. The masses of $s$ and $c$ quarks are fixed by the masses of the vector mesons $ ϕ(1020) $ and $ J/ψ(3097) $ respectively; while the mass of the $u/d$ quarks is heavier than their physical values, with the unitary pion mass $ M_π\simeq 280$ MeV (and $ M_πL \simeq 3 $). We compute the point-to-point quark propagators, and measure the time-correlation functions of meson and baryon interpolators. Our results of the mass spectra of the lowest-lying hadrons containing $ s $ and $ c $ quarks are in good agreement with the high energy experimental values, together with the predictions of the charmed baryons which have not been observed in experiments.

hep-lat

Exact Pseudofermion Action for Monte Carlo Simulation of Domain-Wall Fermion

We present an exact pseudofermion action for hybrid Monte Carlo simulation (HMC) of one-flavor domain-wall fermion (DWF), with the effective 4-dimensional Dirac operator equal to the optimal rational approximation of the overlap-Dirac operator with kernel $ H = c H_w (1 + d γ_5 H_w)^{-1} $, where $ c $ and $ d $ are constants. Using this exact pseudofermion action, we perform HMC of one-flavor QCD, and compare its characteristics with the widely used rational hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm (RHMC). Moreover, to demonstrate the practicality of the exact one-flavor algorithm (EOFA), we perform the first dynamical simulation of the (1+1)-flavors QCD with DWF.

hep-lat

Decay Constants of Pseudoscalar $D$-mesons in Lattice QCD with Domain-Wall Fermion

We present the first study of the masses and decay constants of the pseudoscalar $ D $ mesons in two flavors lattice QCD with domain-wall fermion. The gauge ensembles are generated on the $24^3 \times 48 $ lattice with the extent $ N_s = 16 $ in the fifth dimension, and the plaquette gauge action at $ β= 6.10 $, for three sea-quark masses with corresponding pion masses in the range $260-475$ MeV. We compute the point-to-point quark propagators, and measure the time-correlation functions of the pseudoscalar and vector mesons. The inverse lattice spacing is determined by the Wilson flow, while the strange and the charm quark masses by the masses of the vector mesons $ ϕ(1020) $ and $ J/ψ(3097) $ respectively. Using heavy meson chiral perturbation theory (HMChPT) to extrapolate to the physical pion mass, we obtain $ f_D = 202.3(2.2)(2.6) $ MeV and $ f_{D_s} = 258.7(1.1)(2.9) $ MeV.

hep-lat

Chiral symmetry and axial U(1) symmetry in finite temperature QCD with domain-wall fermion

We study the restoration of the spontaneously broken chiral symmetry and the anomalously broken axial U(1) symmetry in finite temperature QCD at zero chemical potential. We use 2 flavors lattice QCD with optimal domain-wall fermion on the $ 16^3 \times 6 $ lattice, with the extent $ N_s = 16 $ in the fifth dimension, in the temperature range $ T = 130-230 $ MeV. To examine the restoration of the chiral symmetry and the axial $ U(1) $ symmetry, we use diluted $ Z_2 $ noises to calculate the chiral condensate, and the chiral susceptibilities in the scalar and pseudoscalar meson channels, for flavor singlet and non-singlet respectively. From the degeneracy of the chiral susceptibilities around $ T_c $, it suggests that the axial $ U(1) $ symmetry is restored in the chirally symmetric phase. Moreover, we examine the spectral density $ ρ(λ_c) $ of the 4D effective Dirac operator with exact chiral symmetry, which is obtained by computing zero modes plus (180+180) conjugate pairs of low-lying modes for each gauge configuration. The suppression of low modes in the spectral density provides a consistency check of the restoration of axial $ U(1) $ symmetry in the chirally symmetric phase.

hep-lat

Chiral Symmetry and the Residual Mass in Lattice QCD with the Optimal Domain-Wall Fermion

We derive the axial Ward identity for lattice QCD with domain-wall fermions, and from which we obtain a formula for the residual mass (45)-(46), that can be used to measure the chiral symmetry breaking due to the finite extension Ns in the fifth dimension. Furthermore, we obtain an upper bound for the residual mass in lattice QCD with the optimal domain-wall fermion.

hep-lat