DifIISR: A Diffusion Model with Gradient Guidance for Infrared Image Super-Resolution

Infrared imaging is essential for autonomous driving and robotic operations as a supportive modality due to its reliable performance in challenging environments. Despite its popularity, the limitations of infrared cameras, such as low spatial resolution and complex degradations, consistently challenge imaging quality and subsequent visual tasks. Hence, infrared image super-resolution (IISR) has been developed to address this challenge. While recent developments in diffusion models have greatly advanced this field, current methods to solve it either ignore the unique modal characteristics of infrared imaging or overlook the machine perception requirements. To bridge these gaps, we propose DifIISR, an infrared image super-resolution diffusion model optimized for visual quality and perceptual performance. Our approach achieves task-based guidance for diffusion by injecting gradients derived from visual and perceptual priors into the noise during the reverse process. Specifically, we introduce an infrared thermal spectrum distribution regulation to preserve visual fidelity, ensuring that the reconstructed infrared images closely align with high-resolution images by matching their frequency components. Subsequently, we incorporate various visual foundational models as the perceptual guidance for downstream visual tasks, infusing generalizable perceptual features beneficial for detection and segmentation. As a result, our approach gains superior visual results while attaining State-Of-The-Art downstream task performance. Code is available at https://github.com/zirui0625/DifIISR

DEAL: Data-Efficient Adversarial Learning for High-Quality Infrared Imaging

Thermal imaging is often compromised by dynamic, complex degradations caused by hardware limitations and unpredictable environmental factors. The scarcity of high-quality infrared data, coupled with the challenges of dynamic, intricate degradations, makes it difficult to recover details using existing methods. In this paper, we introduce thermal degradation simulation integrated into the training process via a mini-max optimization, by modeling these degraded factors as adversarial attacks on thermal images. The simulation is dynamic to maximize objective functions, thus capturing a broad spectrum of degraded data distributions. This approach enables training with limited data, thereby improving model performance.Additionally, we introduce a dual-interaction network that combines the benefits of spiking neural networks with scale transformation to capture degraded features with sharp spike signal intensities. This architecture ensures compact model parameters while preserving efficient feature representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only achieves superior visual quality under diverse single and composited degradation, but also delivers a significant reduction in processing when trained on only fifty clear images, outperforming existing techniques in efficiency and accuracy. The source code will be available at https://github.com/LiuZhu-CV/DEAL.

DiffCSS: Diverse and Expressive Conversational Speech Synthesis with Diffusion Models

Conversational speech synthesis (CSS) aims to synthesize both contextually appropriate and expressive speech, and considerable efforts have been made to enhance the understanding of conversational context. However, existing CSS systems are limited to deterministic prediction, overlooking the diversity of potential responses. Moreover, they rarely employ language model (LM)-based TTS backbones, limiting the naturalness and quality of synthesized speech. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose DiffCSS, an innovative CSS framework that leverages diffusion models and an LM-based TTS backbone to generate diverse, expressive, and contextually coherent speech. A diffusion-based context-aware prosody predictor is proposed to sample diverse prosody embeddings conditioned on multimodal conversational context. Then a prosody-controllable LM-based TTS backbone is developed to synthesize high-quality speech with sampled prosody embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that the synthesized speech from DiffCSS is more diverse, contextually coherent, and expressive than existing CSS systems

Striving for Faster and Better: A One-Layer Architecture with Auto Re-parameterization for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Deep learning-based low-light image enhancers have made significant progress in recent years, with a trend towards achieving satisfactory visual quality while gradually reducing the number of parameters and improving computational efficiency. In this work, we aim to delving into the limits of image enhancers both from visual quality and computational efficiency, while striving for both better performance and faster processing. To be concrete, by rethinking the task demands, we build an explicit connection, i.e., visual quality and computational efficiency are corresponding to model learning and structure design, respectively. Around this connection, we enlarge parameter space by introducing the re-parameterization for ample model learning of a pre-defined minimalist network (e.g., just one layer), to avoid falling into a local solution. To strengthen the structural representation, we define a hierarchical search scheme for discovering a task-oriented re-parameterized structure, which also provides powerful support for efficiency. Ultimately, this achieves efficient low-light image enhancement using only a single convolutional layer, while maintaining excellent visual quality. Experimental results show our sensible superiority both in quality and efficiency against recently-proposed methods. Especially, our running time on various platforms (e.g., CPU, GPU, NPU, DSP) consistently moves beyond the existing fastest scheme. The source code will be released at https://github.com/vis-opt-group/AR-LLIE.

LUCY: Linguistic Understanding and Control Yielding Early Stage of Her

The film Her features Samantha, a sophisticated AI audio agent who is capable of understanding both linguistic and paralinguistic information in human speech and delivering real-time responses that are natural, informative and sensitive to emotional subtleties. Moving one step toward more sophisticated audio agent from recent advancement in end-to-end (E2E) speech systems, we propose LUCY, a E2E speech model that (1) senses and responds to user's emotion, (2) deliver responses in a succinct and natural style, and (3) use external tool to answer real-time inquiries. Experiment results show that LUCY is better at emotion control than peer models, generating emotional responses based on linguistic emotional instructions and responding to paralinguistic emotional cues. Lucy is also able to generate responses in a more natural style, as judged by external language models, without sacrificing much performance on general question answering. Finally, LUCY can leverage function calls to answer questions that are out of its knowledge scope.

Infrared and Visible Image Fusion: From Data Compatibility to Task Adaption

Infrared-visible image fusion (IVIF) is a critical task in computer vision, aimed at integrating the unique features of both infrared and visible spectra into a unified representation. Since 2018, the field has entered the deep learning era, with an increasing variety of approaches introducing a range of networks and loss functions to enhance visual performance. However, challenges such as data compatibility, perception accuracy, and efficiency remain. Unfortunately, there is a lack of recent comprehensive surveys that address this rapidly expanding domain. This paper fills that gap by providing a thorough survey covering a broad range of topics. We introduce a multi-dimensional framework to elucidate common learning-based IVIF methods, from visual enhancement strategies to data compatibility and task adaptability. We also present a detailed analysis of these approaches, accompanied by a lookup table clarifying their core ideas. Furthermore, we summarize performance comparisons, both quantitatively and qualitatively, focusing on registration, fusion, and subsequent high-level tasks. Beyond technical analysis, we discuss potential future directions and open issues in this area. For further details, visit our GitHub repository: https://github.com/RollingPlain/IVIF_ZOO.

Neural Codec Source Tracing: Toward Comprehensive Attribution in Open-Set Condition

Current research in audio deepfake detection is gradually transitioning from binary classification to multi-class tasks, referred as audio deepfake source tracing task. However, existing studies on source tracing consider only closed-set scenarios and have not considered the challenges posed by open-set conditions. In this paper, we define the Neural Codec Source Tracing (NCST) task, which is capable of performing open-set neural codec classification and interpretable ALM detection. Specifically, we constructed the ST-Codecfake dataset for the NCST task, which includes bilingual audio samples generated by 11 state-of-the-art neural codec methods and ALM-based out-ofdistribution (OOD) test samples. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive source tracing benchmark to assess NCST models in open-set conditions. The experimental results reveal that although the NCST models perform well in in-distribution (ID) classification and OOD detection, they lack robustness in classifying unseen real audio. The ST-codecfake dataset and code are available.

Simulating Human-like Daily Activities with Desire-driven Autonomy

Existing task-oriented AI agents often depend on explicit instructions or external rewards, limiting their ability to be driven by intrinsic motivations like humans. In this paper, we present a desire-driven autonomy framework to guide a Large Language Model-based (LLM-based) agent to simulate human-like daily activities. In contrast to previous agents, our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) operates on the principle of intrinsic desire, allowing it to propose and select tasks that fulfill its motivational framework autonomously. Inspired by the Theory of Needs, the motivational framework incorporates an understanding of human-like desires, such as the need for social interaction, personal fulfillment, and self-care. Utilizing a desire-driven task generation mechanism, the agent evaluates its current state and takes a sequence of activities aligned with its intrinsic motivations. Through simulations, we demonstrate that our Desire-driven Autonomous Agent (D2A) generates coherent, contextually relevant daily activities while exhibiting variability and adaptability similar to human behavior. A comparative analysis with other LLM-based frameworks demonstrates that our approach significantly enhances the rationality of the simulated activities.

FreeCodec: A disentangled neural speech codec with fewer tokens

Neural speech codecs have gained great attention for their outstanding reconstruction with discrete token representations. It is a crucial component in generative tasks such as speech coding and large language models (LLM). However, most works based on residual vector quantization perform worse with fewer tokens due to low coding efficiency for modeling complex coupled information. In this paper, we propose a neural speech codec named FreeCodec which employs a more effective encoding framework by decomposing intrinsic properties of speech into different components: 1) a global vector is extracted as the timbre information, 2) a prosody encoder with a long stride level is used to model the prosody information, 3) the content information is from a content encoder. Using different training strategies, FreeCodec achieves state-of-the-art performance in reconstruction and disentanglement scenarios. Results from subjective and objective experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods.

HUPE: Heuristic Underwater Perceptual Enhancement with Semantic Collaborative Learning

Underwater images are often affected by light refraction and absorption, reducing visibility and interfering with subsequent applications. Existing underwater image enhancement methods primarily focus on improving visual quality while overlooking practical implications. To strike a balance between visual quality and application, we propose a heuristic invertible network for underwater perception enhancement, dubbed HUPE, which enhances visual quality and demonstrates flexibility in handling other downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduced an information-preserving reversible transformation with embedded Fourier transform to establish a bidirectional mapping between underwater images and their clear images. Additionally, a heuristic prior is incorporated into the enhancement process to better capture scene information. To further bridge the feature gap between vision-based enhancement images and application-oriented images, a semantic collaborative learning module is applied in the joint optimization process of the visual enhancement task and the downstream task, which guides the proposed enhancement model to extract more task-oriented semantic features while obtaining visually pleasing images. Extensive experiments, both quantitative and qualitative, demonstrate the superiority of our HUPE over state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZengxiZhang/HUPE.