CTSR: Controllable Fidelity-Realness Trade-off Distillation for Real-World Image Super Resolution

Real-world image super-resolution is a critical image processing task, where two key evaluation criteria are the fidelity to the original image and the visual realness of the generated results. Although existing methods based on diffusion models excel in visual realness by leveraging strong priors, they often struggle to achieve an effective balance between fidelity and realness. In our preliminary experiments, we observe that a linear combination of multiple models outperforms individual models, motivating us to harness the strengths of different models for a more effective trade-off. Based on this insight, we propose a distillation-based approach that leverages the geometric decomposition of both fidelity and realness, alongside the performance advantages of multiple teacher models, to strike a more balanced trade-off. Furthermore, we explore the controllability of this trade-off, enabling a flexible and adjustable super-resolution process, which we call CTSR (Controllable Trade-off Super-Resolution). Experiments conducted on several real-world image super-resolution benchmarks demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art approaches, achieving superior performance across both fidelity and realness metrics.

GeoRSMLLM: A Multimodal Large Language Model for Vision-Language Tasks in Geoscience and Remote Sensing

The application of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in remote sensing (RS) has demonstrated significant potential in traditional tasks such as scene classification, object detection, and image captioning. However, current models, which excel in Referring Expression Comprehension (REC), struggle with tasks involving complex instructions (e.g., exists multiple conditions) or pixel-level operations like segmentation and change detection. In this white paper, we provide a comprehensive hierarchical summary of vision-language tasks in RS, categorized by the varying levels of cognitive capability required. We introduce the Remote Sensing Vision-Language Task Set (RSVLTS), which includes Open-Vocabulary Tasks (OVT), Referring Expression Tasks (RET), and Described Object Tasks (DOT) with increased difficulty, and Visual Question Answering (VQA) aloneside. Moreover, we propose a novel unified data representation using a set-of-points approach for RSVLTS, along with a condition parser and a self-augmentation strategy based on cyclic referring. These features are integrated into the GeoRSMLLM model, and this enhanced model is designed to handle a broad range of tasks of RSVLTS, paving the way for a more generalized solution for vision-language tasks in geoscience and remote sensing.

Multi-Agent Image Restoration

Image restoration (IR) is challenging due to the complexity of real-world degradations. While many specialized and all-in-one IR models have been developed, they fail to effectively handle complex, mixed degradations. Recent agentic methods RestoreAgent and AgenticIR leverage intelligent, autonomous workflows to alleviate this issue, yet they suffer from suboptimal results and inefficiency due to their resource-intensive finetunings, and ineffective searches and tool execution trials for satisfactory outputs. In this paper, we propose MAIR, a novel Multi-Agent approach for complex IR problems. We introduce a real-world degradation prior, categorizing degradations into three types: (1) scene, (2) imaging, and (3) compression, which are observed to occur sequentially in real world, and reverse them in the opposite order. Built upon this three-stage restoration framework, MAIR emulates a team of collaborative human specialists, including a "scheduler" for overall planning and multiple "experts" dedicated to specific degradations. This design minimizes search space and trial efforts, improving image quality while reducing inference costs. In addition, a registry mechanism is introduced to enable easy integration of new tools. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that proposed MAIR achieves competitive performance and improved efficiency over the previous agentic IR system. Code and models will be made available.

Grammar-Based Code Representation: Is It a Worthy Pursuit for LLMs?

Grammar serves as a cornerstone in programming languages and software engineering, providing frameworks to define the syntactic space and program structure. Existing research demonstrates the effectiveness of grammar-based code representations in small-scale models, showing their ability to reduce syntax errors and enhance performance. However, as language models scale to the billion level or beyond, syntax-level errors become rare, making it unclear whether grammar information still provides performance benefits. To explore this, we develop a series of billion-scale GrammarCoder models, incorporating grammar rules in the code generation process. Experiments on HumanEval (+) and MBPP (+) demonstrate a notable improvement in code generation accuracy. Further analysis shows that grammar-based representations enhance LLMs' ability to discern subtle code differences, reducing semantic errors caused by minor variations. These findings suggest that grammar-based code representations remain valuable even in billion-scale models, not only by maintaining syntax correctness but also by improving semantic differentiation.

Knowledge-Decoupled Synergetic Learning: An MLLM based Collaborative Approach to Few-shot Multimodal Dialogue Intention Recognition

Few-shot multimodal dialogue intention recognition is a critical challenge in the e-commerce domainn. Previous methods have primarily enhanced model classification capabilities through post-training techniques. However, our analysis reveals that training for few-shot multimodal dialogue intention recognition involves two interconnected tasks, leading to a seesaw effect in multi-task learning. This phenomenon is attributed to knowledge interference stemming from the superposition of weight matrix updates during the training process. To address these challenges, we propose Knowledge-Decoupled Synergetic Learning (KDSL), which mitigates these issues by utilizing smaller models to transform knowledge into interpretable rules, while applying the post-training of larger models. By facilitating collaboration between the large and small multimodal large language models for prediction, our approach demonstrates significant improvements. Notably, we achieve outstanding results on two real Taobao datasets, with enhancements of 6.37\% and 6.28\% in online weighted F1 scores compared to the state-of-the-art method, thereby validating the efficacy of our framework.

Predicting Nonlinear Interference for Short-Blocklength 4D Probabilistic Shaping

We derive a heuristic nonlinear interference model for 4D probabilistic shaping considering the polarization and time correlation of the 4D symbols. We demonstrate an average SNR prediction gap from split-step Fourier simulations of 0.15~dB.

Neural Antidote: Class-Wise Prompt Tuning for Purifying Backdoors in Pre-trained Vision-Language Models

While pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP exhibit excellent representational capabilities for multimodal data, recent studies have shown that they are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. To alleviate the threat, existing defense strategies primarily focus on fine-tuning the entire suspicious model, yet offer only marginal resistance to state-of-the-art attacks and often result in a decrease in clean accuracy, particularly in data-limited scenarios. Their failure may be attributed to the mismatch between insufficient fine-tuning data and massive parameters in VLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Class-wise Backdoor Prompt Tuning (CBPT) defense, an efficient and effective method that operates on the text prompts to indirectly purify the poisoned VLMs. Specifically, we first employ the advanced contrastive learning via our carefully crafted positive and negative samples, to effectively invert the backdoor triggers that are potentially adopted by the attacker. Once the dummy trigger is established, we utilize the efficient prompt tuning technique to optimize these class-wise text prompts for modifying the model's decision boundary to further reclassify the feature regions of backdoor triggers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CBPT significantly mitigates backdoor threats while preserving model utility, e.g. an average Clean Accuracy (CA) of 58.86\% and an Attack Success Rate (ASR) of 0.39\% across seven mainstream backdoor attacks. These results underscore the superiority of our prompt purifying design to strengthen model robustness against backdoor attacks.

AI Models Still Lag Behind Traditional Numerical Models in Predicting Sudden-Turning Typhoons

Given the interpretability, accuracy, and stability of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, current operational weather forecasting relies heavily on the NWP approach. In the past two years, the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has provided an alternative solution for medium-range (1-10 days) weather forecasting. Bi et al. (2023) (hereafter Bi23) introduced the first AI-based weather prediction (AIWP) model in China, named Pangu-Weather, which offers fast prediction without compromising accuracy. In their work, Bi23 made notable claims regarding its effectiveness in extreme weather predictions. However, this claim lacks persuasiveness because the extreme nature of the two tropical cyclones (TCs) examples presented in Bi23, namely Typhoon Kong-rey and Typhoon Yutu, stems primarily from their intensities rather than their moving paths. Their claim may mislead into another meaning which is that Pangu-Weather works well in predicting unusual typhoon paths, which was not explicitly analyzed. Here, we reassess Pangu-Weather's ability to predict extreme TC trajectories from 2020-2024. Results reveal that while Pangu-Weather overall outperforms NWP models in predicting tropical cyclone (TC) tracks, it falls short in accurately predicting the rarely observed sudden-turning tracks, such as Typhoon Khanun in 2023. We argue that current AIWP models still lag behind traditional NWP models in predicting such rare extreme events in medium-range forecasts.

On Shaping Gain of Multidimensional Constellation in Linear and Nonlinear Optical Fiber Channel

Utilizing the multi-dimensional (MD) space for constellation shaping has been proven to be an effective approach for achieving shaping gains. Despite there exists a variety of MD modulation formats tailored for specific optical transmission scenarios, there remains a notable absence of a dependable comparison method for efficiently and promptly re-evaluating their performance in arbitrary transmission systems. In this paper, we introduce an analytical nonlinear interference (NLI) power model-based shaping gain estimation method to enable a fast performance evaluation of various MD modulation formats in coherent dual-polarization (DP) optical transmission system. In order to extend the applicability of this method to a broader set of modulation formats, we extend the established NLI model to take the 4D joint distribution into account and thus able to analyze the complex interactions of non-iid signaling in DP systems. With the help of the NLI model, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of the state-of-the-art modulation formats and investigate their actual shaping gains in two types of optical fiber communication scenarios (multi-span and single-span). The numerical simulation shows that for arbitrary modulation formats, the NLI power and relative shaping gains in terms of signal-to-noise ratio can be more accurately estimated by capturing the statistics of MD symbols. Furthermore, the proposed method further validates the effectiveness of the reported NLI-tolerant modulation format in the literature, which reveals that the linear shaping gains and modulation-dependent NLI should be jointly considered for nonlinearity mitigation.

Efficient Self-Supervised Video Hashing with Selective State Spaces

Self-supervised video hashing (SSVH) is a practical task in video indexing and retrieval. Although Transformers are predominant in SSVH for their impressive temporal modeling capabilities, they often suffer from computational and memory inefficiencies. Drawing inspiration from Mamba, an advanced state-space model, we explore its potential in SSVH to achieve a better balance between efficacy and efficiency. We introduce S5VH, a Mamba-based video hashing model with an improved self-supervised learning paradigm. Specifically, we design bidirectional Mamba layers for both the encoder and decoder, which are effective and efficient in capturing temporal relationships thanks to the data-dependent selective scanning mechanism with linear complexity. In our learning strategy, we transform global semantics in the feature space into semantically consistent and discriminative hash centers, followed by a center alignment loss as a global learning signal. Our self-local-global (SLG) paradigm significantly improves learning efficiency, leading to faster and better convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate S5VH's improvements over state-of-the-art methods, superior transferability, and scalable advantages in inference efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/gimpong/AAAI25-S5VH.