Beyond Gaussians: Fast and High-Fidelity 3D Splatting with Linear Kernels

Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have substantially improved novel view synthesis, enabling high-quality reconstruction and real-time rendering. However, blurring artifacts, such as floating primitives and over-reconstruction, remain challenging. Current methods address these issues by refining scene structure, enhancing geometric representations, addressing blur in training images, improving rendering consistency, and optimizing density control, yet the role of kernel design remains underexplored. We identify the soft boundaries of Gaussian ellipsoids as one of the causes of these artifacts, limiting detail capture in high-frequency regions. To bridge this gap, we introduce 3D Linear Splatting (3DLS), which replaces Gaussian kernels with linear kernels to achieve sharper and more precise results, particularly in high-frequency regions. Through evaluations on three datasets, 3DLS demonstrates state-of-the-art fidelity and accuracy, along with a 30% FPS improvement over baseline 3DGS. The implementation will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Efficient Multi-disparity Transformer for Light Field Image Super-resolution

This paper presents the Multi-scale Disparity Transformer (MDT), a novel Transformer tailored for light field image super-resolution (LFSR) that addresses the issues of computational redundancy and disparity entanglement caused by the indiscriminate processing of sub-aperture images inherent in conventional methods. MDT features a multi-branch structure, with each branch utilising independent disparity self-attention (DSA) to target specific disparity ranges, effectively reducing computational complexity and disentangling disparities. Building on this architecture, we present LF-MDTNet, an efficient LFSR network. Experimental results demonstrate that LF-MDTNet outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by 0.37 dB and 0.41 dB PSNR at the 2x and 4x scales, achieving superior performance with fewer parameters and higher speed.

E2HQV: High-Quality Video Generation from Event Camera via Theory-Inspired Model-Aided Deep Learning

The bio-inspired event cameras or dynamic vision sensors are capable of asynchronously capturing per-pixel brightness changes (called event-streams) in high temporal resolution and high dynamic range. However, the non-structural spatial-temporal event-streams make it challenging for providing intuitive visualization with rich semantic information for human vision. It calls for events-to-video (E2V) solutions which take event-streams as input and generate high quality video frames for intuitive visualization. However, current solutions are predominantly data-driven without considering the prior knowledge of the underlying statistics relating event-streams and video frames. It highly relies on the non-linearity and generalization capability of the deep neural networks, thus, is struggling on reconstructing detailed textures when the scenes are complex. In this work, we propose \textbf{E2HQV}, a novel E2V paradigm designed to produce high-quality video frames from events. This approach leverages a model-aided deep learning framework, underpinned by a theory-inspired E2V model, which is meticulously derived from the fundamental imaging principles of event cameras. To deal with the issue of state-reset in the recurrent components of E2HQV, we also design a temporal shift embedding module to further improve the quality of the video frames. Comprehensive evaluations on the real world event camera datasets validate our approach, with E2HQV, notably outperforming state-of-the-art approaches, e.g., surpassing the second best by over 40\% for some evaluation metrics.

LFACon: Introducing Anglewise Attention to No-Reference Quality Assessment in Light Field Space

Light field imaging can capture both the intensity information and the direction information of light rays. It naturally enables a six-degrees-of-freedom viewing experience and deep user engagement in virtual reality. Compared to 2D image assessment, light field image quality assessment (LFIQA) needs to consider not only the image quality in the spatial domain but also the quality consistency in the angular domain. However, there is a lack of metrics to effectively reflect the angular consistency and thus the angular quality of a light field image (LFI). Furthermore, the existing LFIQA metrics suffer from high computational costs due to the excessive data volume of LFIs. In this paper, we propose a novel concept of "anglewise attention" by introducing a multihead self-attention mechanism to the angular domain of an LFI. This mechanism better reflects the LFI quality. In particular, we propose three new attention kernels, including anglewise self-attention, anglewise grid attention, and anglewise central attention. These attention kernels can realize angular self-attention, extract multiangled features globally or selectively, and reduce the computational cost of feature extraction. By effectively incorporating the proposed kernels, we further propose our light field attentional convolutional neural network (LFACon) as an LFIQA metric. Our experimental results show that the proposed LFACon metric significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art LFIQA metrics. For the majority of distortion types, LFACon attains the best performance with lower complexity and less computational time.

Texture-enhanced Light Field Super-resolution with Spatio-Angular Decomposition Kernels

Despite the recent progress in light field super-resolution (LFSR) achieved by convolutional neural networks, the correlation information of light field (LF) images has not been sufficiently studied and exploited due to the complexity of 4D LF data. To cope with such high-dimensional LF data, most of the existing LFSR methods resorted to decomposing it into lower dimensions and subsequently performing optimization on the decomposed sub-spaces. However, these methods are inherently limited as they neglected the characteristics of the decomposition operations and only utilized a limited set of LF sub-spaces ending up failing to comprehensively extract spatio-angular features and leading to a performance bottleneck. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we thoroughly discover the potentials of LF decomposition and propose a novel concept of decomposition kernels. In particular, we systematically unify the decomposition operations of various sub-spaces into a series of such decomposition kernels, which are incorporated into our proposed Decomposition Kernel Network (DKNet) for comprehensive spatio-angular feature extraction. The proposed DKNet is experimentally verified to achieve substantial improvements by 1.35 dB, 0.83 dB, and 1.80 dB PSNR in 2x, 3x and 4x LFSR scales, respectively, when compared with the state-of-the-art methods. To further improve DKNet in producing more visually pleasing LFSR results, based on the VGG network, we propose a LFVGG loss to guide the Texture-Enhanced DKNet (TE-DKNet) to generate rich authentic textures and enhance LF images' visual quality significantly. We also propose an indirect evaluation metric by taking advantage of LF material recognition to objectively assess the perceptual enhancement brought by the LFVGG loss.

Efficient Light Field Reconstruction via Spatio-Angular Dense Network

As an image sensing instrument, light field images can supply extra angular information compared with monocular images and have facilitated a wide range of measurement applications. Light field image capturing devices usually suffer from the inherent trade-off between the angular and spatial resolutions. To tackle this problem, several methods, such as light field reconstruction and light field super-resolution, have been proposed but leaving two problems unaddressed, namely domain asymmetry and efficient information flow. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Spatio-Angular Dense Network (SADenseNet) for light field reconstruction with two novel components, namely correlation blocks and spatio-angular dense skip connections to address them. The former performs effective modeling of the correlation information in a way that conforms with the domain asymmetry. And the latter consists of three kinds of connections enhancing the information flow within two domains. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic datasets have been conducted to demonstrate that the proposed SADenseNet's state-of-the-art performance at significantly reduced costs in memory and computation. The qualitative results show that the reconstructed light field images are sharp with correct details and can serve as pre-processing to improve the accuracy of related measurement applications.

Learning Implicit Credit Assignment for Multi-Agent Actor-Critic

We present a new policy-based multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that implicitly addresses the credit assignment problem under fully cooperative settings. Our key motivation is that credit assignment may not require an explicit formulation as long as (1) the policy gradients of a trained, centralized critic carry sufficient information for the decentralized agents to maximize the critic estimate through optimal cooperation and (2) a sustained level of agent exploration is enforced throughout training. In this work, we achieve the former by formulating the centralized critic as a hypernetwork such that the latent state representation is now fused into the policy gradients through its multiplicative association with the agent policies, and we show that this is key to learning optimal joint actions that may otherwise require explicit credit assignment. To achieve the latter, we further propose a practical technique called adaptive entropy regularization where magnitudes of the policy gradients from the entropy term are dynamically rescaled to sustain consistent levels of exploration throughout training. Our final algorithm, which we call LICA, is evaluated on several benchmarks including the multi-agent particle environments and a set of challenging StarCraft II micromanagement tasks, and we show that LICA significantly outperforms previous methods.