The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Image Denoising Challenge Report

This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2025 Image Denoising Challenge ({\sigma} = 50), highlighting the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary objective is to develop a network architecture capable of achieving high-quality denoising performance, quantitatively evaluated using PSNR, without constraints on computational complexity or model size. The task assumes independent additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) with a fixed noise level of 50. A total of 290 participants registered for the challenge, with 20 teams successfully submitting valid results, providing insights into the current state-of-the-art in image denoising.

The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.

Seaweed-7B: Cost-Effective Training of Video Generation Foundation Model

This technical report presents a cost-efficient strategy for training a video generation foundation model. We present a mid-sized research model with approximately 7 billion parameters (7B) called Seaweed-7B trained from scratch using 665,000 H100 GPU hours. Despite being trained with moderate computational resources, Seaweed-7B demonstrates highly competitive performance compared to contemporary video generation models of much larger size. Design choices are especially crucial in a resource-constrained setting. This technical report highlights the key design decisions that enhance the performance of the medium-sized diffusion model. Empirically, we make two observations: (1) Seaweed-7B achieves performance comparable to, or even surpasses, larger models trained on substantially greater GPU resources, and (2) our model, which exhibits strong generalization ability, can be effectively adapted across a wide range of downstream applications either by lightweight fine-tuning or continue training. See the project page at https://seaweed.video/

Scaling Laws of Scientific Discovery with AI and Robot Scientists

The rapid evolution of scientific inquiry highlights an urgent need for groundbreaking methodologies that transcend the limitations of traditional research. Conventional approaches, bogged down by manual processes and siloed expertise, struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern discovery. We envision an autonomous generalist scientist (AGS) system-a fusion of agentic AI and embodied robotics-that redefines the research lifecycle. This system promises to autonomously navigate physical and digital realms, weaving together insights from disparate disciplines with unprecedented efficiency. By embedding advanced AI and robot technologies into every phase-from hypothesis formulation to peer-ready manuscripts-AGS could slash the time and resources needed for scientific research in diverse field. We foresee a future where scientific discovery follows new scaling laws, driven by the proliferation and sophistication of such systems. As these autonomous agents and robots adapt to extreme environments and leverage a growing reservoir of knowledge, they could spark a paradigm shift, pushing the boundaries of what's possible and ushering in an era of relentless innovation.

Bresa: Bio-inspired Reflexive Safe Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Robotic Tasks

Ensuring safety in reinforcement learning (RL)-based robotic systems is a critical challenge, especially in contact-rich tasks within unstructured environments. While the state-of-the-art safe RL approaches mitigate risks through safe exploration or high-level recovery mechanisms, they often overlook low-level execution safety, where reflexive responses to potential hazards are crucial. Similarly, variable impedance control (VIC) enhances safety by adjusting the robot's mechanical response, yet lacks a systematic way to adapt parameters, such as stiffness and damping throughout the task. In this paper, we propose Bresa, a Bio-inspired Reflexive Hierarchical Safe RL method inspired by biological reflexes. Our method decouples task learning from safety learning, incorporating a safety critic network that evaluates action risks and operates at a higher frequency than the task solver. Unlike existing recovery-based methods, our safety critic functions at a low-level control layer, allowing real-time intervention when unsafe conditions arise. The task-solving RL policy, running at a lower frequency, focuses on high-level planning (decision-making), while the safety critic ensures instantaneous safety corrections. We validate Bresa on multiple tasks including a contact-rich robotic task, demonstrating its reflexive ability to enhance safety, and adaptability in unforeseen dynamic environments. Our results show that Bresa outperforms the baseline, providing a robust and reflexive safety mechanism that bridges the gap between high-level planning and low-level execution. Real-world experiments and supplementary material are available at project website https://jack-sherman01.github.io/Bresa.

TERL: Large-Scale Multi-Target Encirclement Using Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning

Pursuit-evasion (PE) problem is a critical challenge in multi-robot systems (MRS). While reinforcement learning (RL) has shown its promise in addressing PE tasks, research has primarily focused on single-target pursuit, with limited exploration of multi-target encirclement, particularly in large-scale settings. This paper proposes a Transformer-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning (TERL) framework for large-scale multi-target encirclement. By integrating a transformer-based policy network with target selection, TERL enables robots to adaptively prioritize targets and safely coordinate robots. Results show that TERL outperforms existing RL-based methods in terms of encirclement success rate and task completion time, while maintaining good performance in large-scale scenarios. Notably, TERL, trained on small-scale scenarios (15 pursuers, 4 targets), generalizes effectively to large-scale settings (80 pursuers, 20 targets) without retraining, achieving a 100% success rate.

HyperKAN: Hypergraph Representation Learning with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Hypergraph representation learning has garnered increasing attention across various domains due to its capability to model high-order relationships. Traditional methods often rely on hypergraph neural networks (HNNs) employing message passing mechanisms to aggregate vertex and hyperedge features. However, these methods are constrained by their dependence on hypergraph topology, leading to the challenge of imbalanced information aggregation, where high-degree vertices tend to aggregate redundant features, while low-degree vertices often struggle to capture sufficient structural features. To overcome the above challenges, we introduce HyperKAN, a novel framework for hypergraph representation learning that transcends the limitations of message-passing techniques. HyperKAN begins by encoding features for each vertex and then leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) to capture complex nonlinear relationships. By adjusting structural features based on similarity, our approach generates refined vertex representations that effectively addresses the challenge of imbalanced information aggregation. Experiments conducted on the real-world datasets demonstrate that HyperKAN significantly outperforms state of-the-art HNN methods, achieving nearly a 9% performance improvement on the Senate dataset.

Citation Recommendation based on Argumentative Zoning of User Queries

Citation recommendation aims to locate the important papers for scholars to cite. When writing the citing sentences, the authors usually hold different citing intents, which are referred to citation function in citation analysis. Since argumentative zoning is to identify the argumentative and rhetorical structure in scientific literature, we want to use this information to improve the citation recommendation task. In this paper, a multi-task learning model is built for citation recommendation and argumentative zoning classification. We also generated an annotated corpus of the data from PubMed Central based on a new argumentative zoning schema. The experimental results show that, by considering the argumentative information in the citing sentence, citation recommendation model will get better performance.

Large Language Models for Market Research: A Data-augmentation Approach

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by excelling in complex natural language processing tasks. Their ability to generate human-like text has opened new possibilities for market research, particularly in conjoint analysis, where understanding consumer preferences is essential but often resource-intensive. Traditional survey-based methods face limitations in scalability and cost, making LLM-generated data a promising alternative. However, while LLMs have the potential to simulate real consumer behavior, recent studies highlight a significant gap between LLM-generated and human data, with biases introduced when substituting between the two. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a novel statistical data augmentation approach that efficiently integrates LLM-generated data with real data in conjoint analysis. Our method leverages transfer learning principles to debias the LLM-generated data using a small amount of human data. This results in statistically robust estimators with consistent and asymptotically normal properties, in contrast to naive approaches that simply substitute human data with LLM-generated data, which can exacerbate bias. We validate our framework through an empirical study on COVID-19 vaccine preferences, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce estimation error and save data and costs by 24.9\% to 79.8\%. In contrast, naive approaches fail to save data due to the inherent biases in LLM-generated data compared to human data. Another empirical study on sports car choices validates the robustness of our results. Our findings suggest that while LLM-generated data is not a direct substitute for human responses, it can serve as a valuable complement when used within a robust statistical framework.

A Theory of Formalisms for Representing Knowledge

There has been a longstanding dispute over which formalism is the best for representing knowledge in AI. The well-known "declarative vs. procedural controversy" is concerned with the choice of utilizing declarations or procedures as the primary mode of knowledge representation. The ongoing debate between symbolic AI and connectionist AI also revolves around the question of whether knowledge should be represented implicitly (e.g., as parametric knowledge in deep learning and large language models) or explicitly (e.g., as logical theories in traditional knowledge representation and reasoning). To address these issues, we propose a general framework to capture various knowledge representation formalisms in which we are interested. Within the framework, we find a family of universal knowledge representation formalisms, and prove that all universal formalisms are recursively isomorphic. Moreover, we show that all pairwise intertranslatable formalisms that admit the padding property are also recursively isomorphic. These imply that, up to an offline compilation, all universal (or natural and equally expressive) representation formalisms are in fact the same, which thus provides a partial answer to the aforementioned dispute.