QPT V2: Masked Image Modeling Advances Visual Scoring

Quality assessment and aesthetics assessment aim to evaluate the perceived quality and aesthetics of visual content. Current learning-based methods suffer greatly from the scarcity of labeled data and usually perform sub-optimally in terms of generalization. Although masked image modeling (MIM) has achieved noteworthy advancements across various high-level tasks (e.g., classification, detection etc.). In this work, we take on a novel perspective to investigate its capabilities in terms of quality- and aesthetics-awareness. To this end, we propose Quality- and aesthetics-aware pretraining (QPT V2), the first pretraining framework based on MIM that offers a unified solution to quality and aesthetics assessment. To perceive the high-level semantics and fine-grained details, pretraining data is curated. To comprehensively encompass quality- and aesthetics-related factors, degradation is introduced. To capture multi-scale quality and aesthetic information, model structure is modified. Extensive experimental results on 11 downstream benchmarks clearly show the superior performance of QPT V2 in comparison with current state-of-the-art approaches and other pretraining paradigms. Code and models will be released at \url{https://github.com/KeiChiTse/QPT-V2}.

XPSR: Cross-modal Priors for Diffusion-based Image Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based methods, endowed with a formidable generative prior, have received increasing attention in Image Super-Resolution (ISR) recently. However, as low-resolution (LR) images often undergo severe degradation, it is challenging for ISR models to perceive the semantic and degradation information, resulting in restoration images with incorrect content or unrealistic artifacts. To address these issues, we propose a \textit{Cross-modal Priors for Super-Resolution (XPSR)} framework. Within XPSR, to acquire precise and comprehensive semantic conditions for the diffusion model, cutting-edge Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are utilized. To facilitate better fusion of cross-modal priors, a \textit{Semantic-Fusion Attention} is raised. To distill semantic-preserved information instead of undesired degradations, a \textit{Degradation-Free Constraint} is attached between LR and its high-resolution (HR) counterpart. Quantitative and qualitative results show that XPSR is capable of generating high-fidelity and high-realism images across synthetic and real-world datasets. Codes will be released at \url{https://github.com/qyp2000/XPSR}.

KVQ: Kwai Video Quality Assessment for Short-form Videos

Short-form UGC video platforms, like Kwai and TikTok, have been an emerging and irreplaceable mainstream media form, thriving on user-friendly engagement, and kaleidoscope creation, etc. However, the advancing content-generation modes, e.g., special effects, and sophisticated processing workflows, e.g., de-artifacts, have introduced significant challenges to recent UGC video quality assessment: (i) the ambiguous contents hinder the identification of quality-determined regions. (ii) the diverse and complicated hybrid distortions are hard to distinguish. To tackle the above challenges and assist in the development of short-form videos, we establish the first large-scale Kaleidoscope short Video database for Quality assessment, termed KVQ, which comprises 600 user-uploaded short videos and 3600 processed videos through the diverse practical processing workflows, including pre-processing, transcoding, and enhancement. Among them, the absolute quality score of each video and partial ranking score among indistinguishable samples are provided by a team of professional researchers specializing in image processing. Based on this database, we propose the first short-form video quality evaluator, i.e., KSVQE, which enables the quality evaluator to identify the quality-determined semantics with the content understanding of large vision language models (i.e., CLIP) and distinguish the distortions with the distortion understanding module. Experimental results have shown the effectiveness of KSVQE on our KVQ database and popular VQA databases.

Enhancing Automatic Modulation Recognition through Robust Global Feature Extraction

Automatic Modulation Recognition (AMR) plays a crucial role in wireless communication systems. Deep learning AMR strategies have achieved tremendous success in recent years. Modulated signals exhibit long temporal dependencies, and extracting global features is crucial in identifying modulation schemes. Traditionally, human experts analyze patterns in constellation diagrams to classify modulation schemes. Classical convolutional-based networks, due to their limited receptive fields, excel at extracting local features but struggle to capture global relationships. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel hybrid deep framework named TLDNN, which incorporates the architectures of the transformer and long short-term memory (LSTM). We utilize the self-attention mechanism of the transformer to model the global correlations in signal sequences while employing LSTM to enhance the capture of temporal dependencies. To mitigate the impact like RF fingerprint features and channel characteristics on model generalization, we propose data augmentation strategies known as segment substitution (SS) to enhance the model's robustness to modulation-related features. Experimental results on widely-used datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and exhibits significant advantages in terms of complexity. Our proposed framework serves as a foundational backbone that can be extended to different datasets. We have verified the effectiveness of our augmentation approach in enhancing the generalization of the models, particularly in few-shot scenarios. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/AMR-Master/TLDNN}.