NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

OVERLORD: Ultimate Scaling of DataLoader for Multi-Source Large Foundation Model Training

Modern frameworks for training large foundation models (LFMs) employ data loaders in a data parallel paradigm. While this design offers implementation simplicity, it introduces two fundamental challenges. First, due to the quadratic computational complexity of the attention operator, the non-uniform sample distribution over data-parallel ranks leads to a significant workload imbalance among loaders, which degrades the training efficiency. This paradigm also impedes the implementation of data mixing algorithms (e.g., curriculum learning) over different datasets. Second, to acquire a broad range of capability, LFMs training ingests data from diverse sources, each with distinct file access states. Colocating massive datasets within loader instances can easily exceed local pod memory capacity. Additionally, heavy sources with higher transformation latency require larger worker pools, further exacerbating memory consumption. We present OVERLORD, an industrial-grade distributed data loading architecture with three innovations: (1) A centralized and declarative data plane, which facilitates elastic data orchestration strategy, such as long-short context, multimodal, and curriculum learning; (2) Disaggregated multisource preprocessing through role-specific actors, i.e., Source Loaders and Data Constructors, leveraging autoscaling for Source Loaders towards heterogeneous and evolving source preprocessing cost; (3) Shadow Loaders with differential checkpointing for uninterrupted fault recovery. Deployed on production clusters scaling to multi-thousand GPU, OVERLORD achieves: (1) 4.5x end-to-end training throughput improvement, (2) a minimum 3.6x reduction in CPU memory usage, with further improvements to be added in later experiments.

KeepKV: Eliminating Output Perturbation in KV Cache Compression for Efficient LLMs Inference

Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an ever-growing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries based on attention scores or position heuristics, which leads to information loss and hallucinations. Recently, merging-based strategies have been explored to retain more information by merging KV pairs that would be discarded; however, these existing approaches inevitably introduce inconsistencies in attention distributions before and after merging, causing output perturbation and degraded generation quality. To overcome this challenge, we propose KeepKV, a novel adaptive KV cache merging method designed to eliminate output perturbation while preserving performance under strict memory constraints. KeepKV introduces the Electoral Votes mechanism that records merging history and adaptively adjusts attention scores. Moreover, it further leverages a novel Zero Inference-Perturbation Merging methods, keeping attention consistency and compensating for attention loss resulting from cache merging. KeepKV successfully retains essential context information within a significantly compressed cache. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and LLM architectures demonstrate that KeepKV substantially reduces memory usage, enhances inference throughput by more than 2x and keeps superior generation quality even with 10% KV cache budgets.

Multi-Modal Hypergraph Enhanced LLM Learning for Recommendation

The burgeoning presence of Large Language Models (LLM) is propelling the development of personalized recommender systems. Most existing LLM-based methods fail to sufficiently explore the multi-view graph structure correlations inherent in recommendation scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Hypergraph Enhanced LLM Learning for multimodal Recommendation (HeLLM), designed to equip LLMs with the capability to capture intricate higher-order semantic correlations by fusing graph-level contextual signals with sequence-level behavioral patterns. In the recommender pre-training phase, we design a user hypergraph to uncover shared interest preferences among users and an item hypergraph to capture correlations within multimodal similarities among items. The hypergraph convolution and synergistic contrastive learning mechanism are introduced to enhance the distinguishability of learned representations. In the LLM fine-tuning phase, we inject the learned graph-structured embeddings directly into the LLM's architecture and integrate sequential features capturing each user's chronological behavior. This process enables hypergraphs to leverage graph-structured information as global context, enhancing the LLM's ability to perceive complex relational patterns and integrate multimodal information, while also modeling local temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines, confirming the advantages of fusing hypergraph-based context with sequential user behavior in LLMs for recommendation.

HM-RAG: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge, conventional single-agent RAG remains fundamentally limited in resolving complex queries demanding coordinated reasoning across heterogeneous data ecosystems. We present HM-RAG, a novel Hierarchical Multi-agent Multimodal RAG framework that pioneers collaborative intelligence for dynamic knowledge synthesis across structured, unstructured, and graph-based data. The framework is composed of three-tiered architecture with specialized agents: a Decomposition Agent that dissects complex queries into contextually coherent sub-tasks via semantic-aware query rewriting and schema-guided context augmentation; Multi-source Retrieval Agents that carry out parallel, modality-specific retrieval using plug-and-play modules designed for vector, graph, and web-based databases; and a Decision Agent that uses consistency voting to integrate multi-source answers and resolve discrepancies in retrieval results through Expert Model Refinement. This architecture attains comprehensive query understanding by combining textual, graph-relational, and web-derived evidence, resulting in a remarkable 12.95% improvement in answer accuracy and a 3.56% boost in question classification accuracy over baseline RAG systems on the ScienceQA and CrisisMMD benchmarks. Notably, HM-RAG establishes state-of-the-art results in zero-shot settings on both datasets. Its modular architecture ensures seamless integration of new data modalities while maintaining strict data governance, marking a significant advancement in addressing the critical challenges of multimodal reasoning and knowledge synthesis in RAG systems. Code is available at https://github.com/ocean-luna/HMRAG.

VAPO: Efficient and Reliable Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning Tasks

We present VAPO, Value-based Augmented Proximal Policy Optimization framework for reasoning models., a novel framework tailored for reasoning models within the value-based paradigm. Benchmarked the AIME 2024 dataset, VAPO, built on the Qwen 32B pre-trained model, attains a state-of-the-art score of $\mathbf{60.4}$. In direct comparison under identical experimental settings, VAPO outperforms the previously reported results of DeepSeek-R1-Zero-Qwen-32B and DAPO by more than 10 points. The training process of VAPO stands out for its stability and efficiency. It reaches state-of-the-art performance within a mere 5,000 steps. Moreover, across multiple independent runs, no training crashes occur, underscoring its reliability. This research delves into long chain-of-thought (long-CoT) reasoning using a value-based reinforcement learning framework. We pinpoint three key challenges that plague value-based methods: value model bias, the presence of heterogeneous sequence lengths, and the sparsity of reward signals. Through systematic design, VAPO offers an integrated solution that effectively alleviates these challenges, enabling enhanced performance in long-CoT reasoning tasks.

MegaScale-Infer: Serving Mixture-of-Experts at Scale with Disaggregated Expert Parallelism

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) showcases tremendous potential to scale large language models (LLMs) with enhanced performance and reduced computational complexity. However, its sparsely activated architecture shifts feed-forward networks (FFNs) from being compute-intensive to memory-intensive during inference, leading to substantially lower GPU utilization and increased operational costs. We present MegaScale-Infer, an efficient and cost-effective system for serving large-scale MoE models. MegaScale-Infer disaggregates attention and FFN modules within each model layer, enabling independent scaling, tailored parallelism strategies, and heterogeneous deployment for both modules. To fully exploit disaggregation in the presence of MoE's sparsity, MegaScale-Infer introduces ping-pong pipeline parallelism, which partitions a request batch into micro-batches and shuttles them between attention and FFNs for inference. Combined with distinct model parallelism for each module, MegaScale-Infer effectively hides communication overhead and maximizes GPU utilization. To adapt to disaggregated attention and FFN modules and minimize data transmission overhead (e.g., token dispatch), MegaScale-Infer provides a high-performance M2N communication library that eliminates unnecessary GPU-to-CPU data copies, group initialization overhead, and GPU synchronization. Experimental results indicate that MegaScale-Infer achieves up to 1.90x higher per-GPU throughput than state-of-the-art solutions.

A Scalable Framework for Evaluating Health Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for analyzing complex datasets. Recent studies demonstrate their potential to generate useful, personalized responses when provided with patient-specific health information that encompasses lifestyle, biomarkers, and context. As LLM-driven health applications are increasingly adopted, rigorous and efficient one-sided evaluation methodologies are crucial to ensure response quality across multiple dimensions, including accuracy, personalization and safety. Current evaluation practices for open-ended text responses heavily rely on human experts. This approach introduces human factors and is often cost-prohibitive, labor-intensive, and hinders scalability, especially in complex domains like healthcare where response assessment necessitates domain expertise and considers multifaceted patient data. In this work, we introduce Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics: an evaluation framework that streamlines human and automated evaluation of open-ended questions by identifying gaps in model responses using a minimal set of targeted rubrics questions. Our approach is based on recent work in more general evaluation settings that contrasts a smaller set of complex evaluation targets with a larger set of more precise, granular targets answerable with simple boolean responses. We validate this approach in metabolic health, a domain encompassing diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. Our results demonstrate that Adaptive Precise Boolean rubrics yield higher inter-rater agreement among expert and non-expert human evaluators, and in automated assessments, compared to traditional Likert scales, while requiring approximately half the evaluation time of Likert-based methods. This enhanced efficiency, particularly in automated evaluation and non-expert contributions, paves the way for more extensive and cost-effective evaluation of LLMs in health.

AU-TTT: Vision Test-Time Training model for Facial Action Unit Detection

Facial Action Units (AUs) detection is a cornerstone of objective facial expression analysis and a critical focus in affective computing. Despite its importance, AU detection faces significant challenges, such as the high cost of AU annotation and the limited availability of datasets. These constraints often lead to overfitting in existing methods, resulting in substantial performance degradation when applied across diverse datasets. Addressing these issues is essential for improving the reliability and generalizability of AU detection methods. Moreover, many current approaches leverage Transformers for their effectiveness in long-context modeling, but they are hindered by the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Recently, Test-Time Training (TTT) layers have emerged as a promising solution for long-sequence modeling. Additionally, TTT applies self-supervised learning for iterative updates during both training and inference, offering a potential pathway to mitigate the generalization challenges inherent in AU detection tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel vision backbone tailored for AU detection, incorporating bidirectional TTT blocks, named AU-TTT. Our approach introduces TTT Linear to the AU detection task and optimizes image scanning mechanisms for enhanced performance. Additionally, we design an AU-specific Region of Interest (RoI) scanning mechanism to capture fine-grained facial features critical for AU detection. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance in both within-domain and cross-domain scenarios.

Towards Fully Automated Decision-Making Systems for Greenhouse Control: Challenges and Opportunities

Machine learning has been successful in building control policies to drive a complex system to desired states in various applications (e.g. games, robotics, etc.). To be specific, a number of parameters of policy can be automatically optimized from the observations of environment to be able to generate a sequence of decisions leading to the best performance. In this survey paper, we particularly explore such policy-learning techniques for another unique, practical use-case scenario--farming, in which critical decisions (e.g., water supply, heating, etc.) must be made in a timely manner to minimize risks (e.g., damage to plants) while maximizing the revenue (e.g., healthy crops) in the end. We first provide a broad overview of latest studies on it to identify not only domain-specific challenges but opportunities with potential solutions, some of which are suggested as promising directions for future research. Also, we then introduce our successful approach to being ranked second among 46 teams at the ''3rd Autonomous Greenhouse Challenge'' to use this specific example to discuss the lessons learned about important considerations for design to create autonomous farm-management systems.