NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring: Methods and Results

This paper presents an overview of NTIRE 2025 the First Challenge on Event-Based Image Deblurring, detailing the proposed methodologies and corresponding results. The primary goal of the challenge is to design an event-based method that achieves high-quality image deblurring, with performance quantitatively assessed using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR). Notably, there are no restrictions on computational complexity or model size. The task focuses on leveraging both events and images as inputs for single-image deblurring. A total of 199 participants registered, among whom 15 teams successfully submitted valid results, offering valuable insights into the current state of event-based image deblurring. We anticipate that this challenge will drive further advancements in event-based vision research.

AudioCIL: A Python Toolbox for Audio Class-Incremental Learning with Multiple Scenes

Deep learning, with its robust aotomatic feature extraction capabilities, has demonstrated significant success in audio signal processing. Typically, these methods rely on static, pre-collected large-scale datasets for training, performing well on a fixed number of classes. However, the real world is characterized by constant change, with new audio classes emerging from streaming or temporary availability due to privacy. This dynamic nature of audio environments necessitates models that can incrementally learn new knowledge for new classes without discarding existing information. Introducing incremental learning to the field of audio signal processing, i.e., Audio Class-Incremental Learning (AuCIL), is a meaningful endeavor. We propose such a toolbox named AudioCIL to align audio signal processing algorithms with real-world scenarios and strengthen research in audio class-incremental learning.

Exploring structure diversity in atomic resolution microscopy with graph neural networks

The emergence of deep learning (DL) has provided great opportunities for the high-throughput analysis of atomic-resolution micrographs. However, the DL models trained by image patches in fixed size generally lack efficiency and flexibility when processing micrographs containing diversified atomic configurations. Herein, inspired by the similarity between the atomic structures and graphs, we describe a few-shot learning framework based on an equivariant graph neural network (EGNN) to analyze a library of atomic structures (e.g., vacancies, phases, grain boundaries, doping, etc.), showing significantly promoted robustness and three orders of magnitude reduced computing parameters compared to the image-driven DL models, which is especially evident for those aggregated vacancy lines with flexible lattice distortion. Besides, the intuitiveness of graphs enables quantitative and straightforward extraction of the atomic-scale structural features in batches, thus statistically unveiling the self-assembly dynamics of vacancy lines under electron beam irradiation. A versatile model toolkit is established by integrating EGNN sub-models for single structure recognition to process images involving varied configurations in the form of a task chain, leading to the discovery of novel doping configurations with superior electrocatalytic properties for hydrogen evolution reactions. This work provides a powerful tool to explore structure diversity in a fast, accurate, and intelligent manner.

Hardware Architecture Design of Model-Based Image Reconstruction Towards Palm-size Photoacoustic Tomography

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging technology combines the advantages of optical imaging and ultrasound imaging, showing great potential in biomedical applications. Many preclinical studies and clinical applications urgently require fast, high-quality, low-cost and portable imaging system. Translating advanced image reconstruction algorithms into hardware implementations is highly desired. However, existing iterative PA image reconstructions, although exhibit higher accuracy than delay-and-sum algorithm, suffer from high computational cost. In this paper, we introduce a model-based hardware acceleration architecture based on superposed Wave (s-Wave) for palm-size PA tomography (palm-PAT), aiming at enhancing both the speed and performance of image reconstruction at a much lower system cost. To achieve this, we propose an innovative data reuse method that significantly reduces hardware storage resource consumption. We conducted experiments by FPGA implementation of the algorithm, using both phantoms and in vivo human finger data to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The results demonstrate that our proposed architecture can substantially reduce system cost while maintaining high imaging performance. The hardware-accelerated implementation of the model-based algorithm achieves a speedup of up to approximately 270 times compared to the CPU, while the corresponding energy efficiency ratio is improved by more than 2700 times.

Chemical Shift Encoding based Double Bonds Quantification in Triglycerides using Deep Image Prior

This study evaluated a deep learning-based method using Deep Image Prior (DIP) to quantify triglyceride double bonds from chemical-shift encoded multi-echo gradient echo images without network training. We employed a cost function based on signal constraints to iteratively update the neural network on a single dataset. The method was validated using phantom experiments and in vivo scans. Results showed close alignment between measured and reference double bond values, with phantom experiments yielding a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.96 (p = .0005). In vivo results demonstrated good agreement in subcutaneous fat. We conclude that Deep Image Prior shows feasibility for quantifying double bonds and fatty acid content from chemical-shift encoded multi-echo MRI.

Optimistic Model Rollouts for Pessimistic Offline Policy Optimization

Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) has made remarkable progress, offering a promising avenue for improving generalization with synthetic model rollouts. Existing works primarily focus on incorporating pessimism for policy optimization, usually via constructing a Pessimistic Markov Decision Process (P-MDP). However, the P-MDP discourages the policies from learning in out-of-distribution (OOD) regions beyond the support of offline datasets, which can under-utilize the generalization ability of dynamics models. In contrast, we propose constructing an Optimistic MDP (O-MDP). We initially observed the potential benefits of optimism brought by encouraging more OOD rollouts. Motivated by this observation, we present ORPO, a simple yet effective model-based offline RL framework. ORPO generates Optimistic model Rollouts for Pessimistic offline policy Optimization. Specifically, we train an optimistic rollout policy in the O-MDP to sample more OOD model rollouts. Then we relabel the sampled state-action pairs with penalized rewards and optimize the output policy in the P-MDP. Theoretically, we demonstrate that the performance of policies trained with ORPO can be lower-bounded in linear MDPs. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms P-MDP baselines by a margin of 30%, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the widely-used benchmark. Moreover, ORPO exhibits notable advantages in problems that require generalization.

Self-Supervised Exploration via Temporal Inconsistency in Reinforcement Learning

In real-world scenarios, reinforcement learning under sparse-reward synergistic settings has remained challenging, despite surging interests in this field. Previous attempts suggest that intrinsic reward can alleviate the issue caused by sparsity. In this paper, we present a novel intrinsic reward that is inspired by human learning, as humans evaluate curiosity by comparing current observations with historical knowledge. Specifically, we train a self-supervised prediction model and save a set of snapshots of the model parameters, without incurring addition training cost. Then we employ nuclear norm to evaluate the temporal inconsistency between the predictions of different snapshots, which can be further deployed as the intrinsic reward. Moreover, a variational weighting mechanism is proposed to assign weight to different snapshots in an adaptive manner. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in various benchmark environments. The results suggest that our method can provide overwhelming state-of-the-art performance compared with other intrinsic reward-based methods, without incurring additional training costs and maintaining higher noise tolerance. Our code will be released publicly to enhance reproducibility.

Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity: A Bootstrap Approach for Exploration

The sparsity of extrinsic rewards poses a serious challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Currently, many efforts have been made on curiosity which can provide a representative intrinsic reward for effective exploration. However, the challenge is still far from being solved. In this paper, we present a novel curiosity for RL, named DyMeCu, which stands for Dynamic Memory-based Curiosity. Inspired by human curiosity and information theory, DyMeCu consists of a dynamic memory and dual online learners. The curiosity arouses if memorized information can not deal with the current state, and the information gap between dual learners can be formulated as the intrinsic reward for agents, and then such state information can be consolidated into the dynamic memory. Compared with previous curiosity methods, DyMeCu can better mimic human curiosity with dynamic memory, and the memory module can be dynamically grown based on a bootstrap paradigm with dual learners. On multiple benchmarks including DeepMind Control Suite and Atari Suite, large-scale empirical experiments are conducted and the results demonstrate that DyMeCu outperforms competitive curiosity-based methods with or without extrinsic rewards. We will release the code to enhance reproducibility.

Nuclear Norm Maximization Based Curiosity-Driven Learning

To handle the sparsity of the extrinsic rewards in reinforcement learning, researchers have proposed intrinsic reward which enables the agent to learn the skills that might come in handy for pursuing the rewards in the future, such as encouraging the agent to visit novel states. However, the intrinsic reward can be noisy due to the undesirable environment's stochasticity and directly applying the noisy value predictions to supervise the policy is detrimental to improve the learning performance and efficiency. Moreover, many previous studies employ $\ell^2$ norm or variance to measure the exploration novelty, which will amplify the noise due to the square operation. In this paper, we address aforementioned challenges by proposing a novel curiosity leveraging the nuclear norm maximization (NNM), which can quantify the novelty of exploring the environment more accurately while providing high-tolerance to the noise and outliers. We conduct extensive experiments across a variety of benchmark environments and the results suggest that NNM can provide state-of-the-art performance compared with previous curiosity methods. On 26 Atari games subset, when trained with only intrinsic reward, NNM achieves a human-normalized score of 1.09, which doubles that of competitive intrinsic rewards-based approaches. Our code will be released publicly to enhance the reproducibility.

CLIP2TV: An Empirical Study on Transformer-based Methods for Video-Text Retrieval

Modern video-text retrieval frameworks basically consist of three parts: video encoder, text encoder and the similarity head. With the success on both visual and textual representation learning, transformer based encoders and fusion methods have also been adopted in the field of video-text retrieval. In this report, we present CLIP2TV, aiming at exploring where the critical elements lie in transformer based methods. To achieve this, We first revisit some recent works on multi-modal learning, then introduce some techniques into video-text retrieval, finally evaluate them through extensive experiments in different configurations. Notably, CLIP2TV achieves 52.9@R1 on MSR-VTT dataset, outperforming the previous SOTA result by 4.1%.