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.

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. In this work, we conduct a systematic evaluation of Nano Banana 2 for image restoration across diverse scenes and degradation types. Our results show that prompt design plays a critical role, where concise prompts with explicit fidelity constraints achieve the best trade-off between reconstruction accuracy and perceptual quality. Compared with state-of-the-art restoration models, Nano Banana 2 achieves superior performance in full-reference metrics while remaining competitive in perceptual quality, which is further supported by user studies. We also observe strong generalization in challenging scenarios, such as small faces, dense crowds, and severe degradations. However, the model remains sensitive to prompt formulation and may require iterative refinement for optimal results. Overall, our findings suggest that general-purpose generative models hold strong potential as unified image restoration solvers, while highlighting the importance of controllability and robustness. All test results are available on https://github.com/yxyuanxiao/NanoBanana2TestOnIR.

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.

Position: 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.

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.

Harnessing Diffusion-Yielded Score Priors for Image Restoration

Deep image restoration models aim to learn a mapping from degraded image space to natural image space. However, they face several critical challenges: removing degradation, generating realistic details, and ensuring pixel-level consistency. Over time, three major classes of methods have emerged, including MSE-based, GAN-based, and diffusion-based methods. However, they fail to achieve a good balance between restoration quality, fidelity, and speed. We propose a novel method, HYPIR, to address these challenges. Our solution pipeline is straightforward: it involves initializing the image restoration model with a pre-trained diffusion model and then fine-tuning it with adversarial training. This approach does not rely on diffusion loss, iterative sampling, or additional adapters. We theoretically demonstrate that initializing adversarial training from a pre-trained diffusion model positions the initial restoration model very close to the natural image distribution. Consequently, this initialization improves numerical stability, avoids mode collapse, and substantially accelerates the convergence of adversarial training. Moreover, HYPIR inherits the capabilities of diffusion models with rich user control, enabling text-guided restoration and adjustable texture richness. Requiring only a single forward pass, it achieves faster convergence and inference speed than diffusion-based methods. Extensive experiments show that HYPIR outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving efficient and high-quality image restoration.

SimpleGVR: A Simple Baseline for Latent-Cascaded Video Super-Resolution

Latent diffusion models have emerged as a leading paradigm for efficient video generation. However, as user expectations shift toward higher-resolution outputs, relying solely on latent computation becomes inadequate. A promising approach involves decoupling the process into two stages: semantic content generation and detail synthesis. The former employs a computationally intensive base model at lower resolutions, while the latter leverages a lightweight cascaded video super-resolution (VSR) model to achieve high-resolution output. In this work, we focus on studying key design principles for latter cascaded VSR models, which are underexplored currently. First, we propose two degradation strategies to generate training pairs that better mimic the output characteristics of the base model, ensuring alignment between the VSR model and its upstream generator. Second, we provide critical insights into VSR model behavior through systematic analysis of (1) timestep sampling strategies, (2) noise augmentation effects on low-resolution (LR) inputs. These findings directly inform our architectural and training innovations. Finally, we introduce interleaving temporal unit and sparse local attention to achieve efficient training and inference, drastically reducing computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework over existing methods, with ablation studies confirming the efficacy of each design choice. Our work establishes a simple yet effective baseline for cascaded video super-resolution generation, offering practical insights to guide future advancements in efficient cascaded synthesis systems.

Joint Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation for Uncertain Maritime MEC via Cooperation of UAVs and Vessels

The computation demands from the maritime Internet of Things (MIoT) increase rapidly in recent years, and the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and vessels based multi-access edge computing (MEC) can fulfill these MIoT requirements. However, the uncertain maritime tasks present significant challenges of inefficient computation offloading and resource allocation. In this paper, we focus on the maritime computation offloading and resource allocation through the cooperation of UAVs and vessels, with consideration of uncertain tasks. Specifically, we propose a cooperative MEC framework for computation offloading and resource allocation, including MIoT devices, UAVs and vessels. Then, we formulate the optimization problem to minimize the total execution time. As for the uncertain MIoT tasks, we leverage Lyapunov optimization to tackle the unpredictable task arrivals and varying computational resource availability. By converting the long-term constraints into short-term constraints, we obtain a set of small-scale optimization problems. Further, considering the heterogeneity of actions and resources of UAVs and vessels, we reformulate the small-scale optimization problem into a Markov game (MG). Moreover, a heterogeneous-agent soft actor-critic is proposed to sequentially update various neural networks and effectively solve the MG problem. Finally, simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness in addressing computational offloading and resource allocation.

DualX-VSR: Dual Axial Spatial$\times$Temporal Transformer for Real-World Video Super-Resolution without Motion Compensation

Transformer-based models like ViViT and TimeSformer have advanced video understanding by effectively modeling spatiotemporal dependencies. Recent video generation models, such as Sora and Vidu, further highlight the power of transformers in long-range feature extraction and holistic spatiotemporal modeling. However, directly applying these models to real-world video super-resolution (VSR) is challenging, as VSR demands pixel-level precision, which can be compromised by tokenization and sequential attention mechanisms. While recent transformer-based VSR models attempt to address these issues using smaller patches and local attention, they still face limitations such as restricted receptive fields and dependence on optical flow-based alignment, which can introduce inaccuracies in real-world settings. To overcome these issues, we propose Dual Axial Spatial$\times$Temporal Transformer for Real-World Video Super-Resolution (DualX-VSR), which introduces a novel dual axial spatial$\times$temporal attention mechanism that integrates spatial and temporal information along orthogonal directions. DualX-VSR eliminates the need for motion compensation, offering a simplified structure that provides a cohesive representation of spatiotemporal information. As a result, DualX-VSR achieves high fidelity and superior performance in real-world VSR task.

Semantics-Aware Human Motion Generation from Audio Instructions

Recent advances in interactive technologies have highlighted the prominence of audio signals for semantic encoding. This paper explores a new task, where audio signals are used as conditioning inputs to generate motions that align with the semantics of the audio. Unlike text-based interactions, audio provides a more natural and intuitive communication method. However, existing methods typically focus on matching motions with music or speech rhythms, which often results in a weak connection between the semantics of the audio and generated motions. We propose an end-to-end framework using a masked generative transformer, enhanced by a memory-retrieval attention module to handle sparse and lengthy audio inputs. Additionally, we enrich existing datasets by converting descriptions into conversational style and generating corresponding audio with varied speaker identities. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed framework, demonstrating that audio instructions can convey semantics similar to text while providing more practical and user-friendly interactions.