Annotation-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation for Remote-Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation of remote sensing (RS) images is pivotal for comprehensive Earth observation, but the demand for interpreting new object categories, coupled with the high expense of manual annotation, poses significant challenges. Although open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) offers a promising solution, existing frameworks designed for natural images are insufficient for the unique complexities of RS data. They struggle with vast scale variations and fine-grained details, and their adaptation often relies on extensive, costly annotations. To address this critical gap, this paper introduces SegEarth-OV, the first framework for annotation-free open-vocabulary segmentation of RS images. Specifically, we propose SimFeatUp, a universal upsampler that robustly restores high-resolution spatial details from coarse features, correcting distorted target shapes without any task-specific post-training. We also present a simple yet effective Global Bias Alleviation operation to subtract the inherent global context from patch features, significantly enhancing local semantic fidelity. These components empower SegEarth-OV to effectively harness the rich semantics of pre-trained VLMs, making OVSS possible in optical RS contexts. Furthermore, to extend the framework's universality to other challenging RS modalities like SAR images, where large-scale VLMs are unavailable and expensive to create, we introduce AlignEarth, which is a distillation-based strategy and can efficiently transfer semantic knowledge from an optical VLM encoder to an SAR encoder, bypassing the need to build SAR foundation models from scratch and enabling universal OVSS across diverse sensor types. Extensive experiments on both optical and SAR datasets validate that SegEarth-OV can achieve dramatic improvements over the SOTA methods, establishing a robust foundation for annotation-free and open-world Earth observation.

Rotation Equivariant Arbitrary-scale Image Super-Resolution

The arbitrary-scale image super-resolution (ASISR), a recent popular topic in computer vision, aims to achieve arbitrary-scale high-resolution recoveries from a low-resolution input image. This task is realized by representing the image as a continuous implicit function through two fundamental modules, a deep-network-based encoder and an implicit neural representation (INR) module. Despite achieving notable progress, a crucial challenge of such a highly ill-posed setting is that many common geometric patterns, such as repetitive textures, edges, or shapes, are seriously warped and deformed in the low-resolution images, naturally leading to unexpected artifacts appearing in their high-resolution recoveries. Embedding rotation equivariance into the ASISR network is thus necessary, as it has been widely demonstrated that this enhancement enables the recovery to faithfully maintain the original orientations and structural integrity of geometric patterns underlying the input image. Motivated by this, we make efforts to construct a rotation equivariant ASISR method in this study. Specifically, we elaborately redesign the basic architectures of INR and encoder modules, incorporating intrinsic rotation equivariance capabilities beyond those of conventional ASISR networks. Through such amelioration, the ASISR network can, for the first time, be implemented with end-to-end rotational equivariance maintained from input to output. We also provide a solid theoretical analysis to evaluate its intrinsic equivariance error, demonstrating its inherent nature of embedding such an equivariance structure. The superiority of the proposed method is substantiated by experiments conducted on both simulated and real datasets. We also validate that the proposed framework can be readily integrated into current ASISR methods in a plug \& play manner to further enhance their performance.

Compressive Imaging Reconstruction via Tensor Decomposed Multi-Resolution Grid Encoding

Compressive imaging (CI) reconstruction, such as snapshot compressive imaging (SCI) and compressive sensing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), aims to recover high-dimensional images from low-dimensional compressed measurements. This process critically relies on learning an accurate representation of the underlying high-dimensional image. However, existing unsupervised representations may struggle to achieve a desired balance between representation ability and efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tensor Decomposed multi-resolution Grid encoding (GridTD), an unsupervised continuous representation framework for CI reconstruction. GridTD optimizes a lightweight neural network and the input tensor decomposition model whose parameters are learned via multi-resolution hash grid encoding. It inherently enjoys the hierarchical modeling ability of multi-resolution grid encoding and the compactness of tensor decomposition, enabling effective and efficient reconstruction of high-dimensional images. Theoretical analyses for the algorithm's Lipschitz property, generalization error bound, and fixed-point convergence reveal the intrinsic superiority of GridTD as compared with existing continuous representation models. Extensive experiments across diverse CI tasks, including video SCI, spectral SCI, and compressive dynamic MRI reconstruction, consistently demonstrate the superiority of GridTD over existing methods, positioning GridTD as a versatile and state-of-the-art CI reconstruction method.

RS-MTDF: Multi-Teacher Distillation and Fusion for Remote Sensing Semi-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation in remote sensing images is crucial for various applications, yet its performance is heavily reliant on large-scale, high-quality pixel-wise annotations, which are notoriously expensive and time-consuming to acquire. Semi-supervised semantic segmentation (SSS) offers a promising alternative to mitigate this data dependency. However, existing SSS methods often struggle with the inherent distribution mismatch between limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data, leading to suboptimal generalization. To alleviate this issue, we attempt to introduce the Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) pre-trained on vast and diverse datasets into the SSS task since VFMs possess robust generalization capabilities that can effectively bridge this distribution gap and provide strong semantic priors for SSS. Inspired by this, we introduce RS-MTDF (Multi-Teacher Distillation and Fusion), a novel framework that leverages the powerful semantic knowledge embedded in VFMs to guide semi-supervised learning in remote sensing. Specifically, RS-MTDF employs multiple frozen VFMs (e.g., DINOv2 and CLIP) as expert teachers, utilizing feature-level distillation to align student features with their robust representations. To further enhance discriminative power, the distilled knowledge is seamlessly fused into the student decoder. Extensive experiments on three challenging remote sensing datasets demonstrate that RS-MTDF consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, our method outperforms existing approaches across various label ratios on LoveDA and secures the highest IoU in the majority of semantic categories. These results underscore the efficacy of multi-teacher VFM guidance in significantly enhancing both generalization and semantic understanding for remote sensing segmentation. Ablation studies further validate the contribution of each proposed module.

Improving Memory Efficiency for Training KANs via Meta Learning

Inspired by the Kolmogorov-Arnold representation theorem, KANs offer a novel framework for function approximation by replacing traditional neural network weights with learnable univariate functions. This design demonstrates significant potential as an efficient and interpretable alternative to traditional MLPs. However, KANs are characterized by a substantially larger number of trainable parameters, leading to challenges in memory efficiency and higher training costs compared to MLPs. To address this limitation, we propose to generate weights for KANs via a smaller meta-learner, called MetaKANs. By training KANs and MetaKANs in an end-to-end differentiable manner, MetaKANs achieve comparable or even superior performance while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters and maintaining promising interpretability. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark tasks, including symbolic regression, partial differential equation solving, and image classification, demonstrate the effectiveness of MetaKANs in improving parameter efficiency and memory usage. The proposed method provides an alternative technique for training KANs, that allows for greater scalability and extensibility, and narrows the training cost gap with MLPs stated in the original paper of KANs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Murphyzc/MetaKAN.

Data-Distill-Net: A Data Distillation Approach Tailored for Reply-based Continual Learning

Replay-based continual learning (CL) methods assume that models trained on a small subset can also effectively minimize the empirical risk of the complete dataset. These methods maintain a memory buffer that stores a sampled subset of data from previous tasks to consolidate past knowledge. However, this assumption is not guaranteed in practice due to the limited capacity of the memory buffer and the heuristic criteria used for buffer data selection. To address this issue, we propose a new dataset distillation framework tailored for CL, which maintains a learnable memory buffer to distill the global information from the current task data and accumulated knowledge preserved in the previous memory buffer. Moreover, to avoid the computational overhead and overfitting risks associated with parameterizing the entire buffer during distillation, we introduce a lightweight distillation module that can achieve global information distillation solely by generating learnable soft labels for the memory buffer data. Extensive experiments show that, our method can achieve competitive results and effectively mitigates forgetting across various datasets. The source code will be publicly available.

A Regularization-Guided Equivariant Approach for Image Restoration

Equivariant and invariant deep learning models have been developed to exploit intrinsic symmetries in data, demonstrating significant effectiveness in certain scenarios. However, these methods often suffer from limited representation accuracy and rely on strict symmetry assumptions that may not hold in practice. These limitations pose a significant drawback for image restoration tasks, which demands high accuracy and precise symmetry representation. To address these challenges, we propose a rotation-equivariant regularization strategy that adaptively enforces the appropriate symmetry constraints on the data while preserving the network's representational accuracy. Specifically, we introduce EQ-Reg, a regularizer designed to enhance rotation equivariance, which innovatively extends the insights of data-augmentation-based and equivariant-based methodologies. This is achieved through self-supervised learning and the spatial rotation and cyclic channel shift of feature maps deduce in the equivariant framework. Our approach firstly enables a non-strictly equivariant network suitable for image restoration, providing a simple and adaptive mechanism for adjusting equivariance based on task. Extensive experiments across three low-level tasks demonstrate the superior accuracy and generalization capability of our method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches.

Rotation-Equivariant Self-Supervised Method in Image Denoising

Self-supervised image denoising methods have garnered significant research attention in recent years, for this kind of method reduces the requirement of large training datasets. Compared to supervised methods, self-supervised methods rely more on the prior embedded in deep networks themselves. As a result, most of the self-supervised methods are designed with Convolution Neural Networks (CNNs) architectures, which well capture one of the most important image prior, translation equivariant prior. Inspired by the great success achieved by the introduction of translational equivariance, in this paper, we explore the way to further incorporate another important image prior. Specifically, we first apply high-accuracy rotation equivariant convolution to self-supervised image denoising. Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we have proved that simply replacing all the convolution layers with rotation equivariant convolution layers would modify the network into its rotation equivariant version. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that rotation equivariant image prior is introduced to self-supervised image denoising at the network architecture level with a comprehensive theoretical analysis of equivariance errors, which offers a new perspective to the field of self-supervised image denoising. Moreover, to further improve the performance, we design a new mask mechanism to fusion the output of rotation equivariant network and vanilla CNN-based network, and construct an adaptive rotation equivariant framework. Through extensive experiments on three typical methods, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Continuous Representation Methods, Theories, and Applications: An Overview and Perspectives

Recently, continuous representation methods emerge as novel paradigms that characterize the intrinsic structures of real-world data through function representations that map positional coordinates to their corresponding values in the continuous space. As compared with the traditional discrete framework, the continuous framework demonstrates inherent superiority for data representation and reconstruction (e.g., image restoration, novel view synthesis, and waveform inversion) by offering inherent advantages including resolution flexibility, cross-modal adaptability, inherent smoothness, and parameter efficiency. In this review, we systematically examine recent advancements in continuous representation frameworks, focusing on three aspects: (i) Continuous representation method designs such as basis function representation, statistical modeling, tensor function decomposition, and implicit neural representation; (ii) Theoretical foundations of continuous representations such as approximation error analysis, convergence property, and implicit regularization; (iii) Real-world applications of continuous representations derived from computer vision, graphics, bioinformatics, and remote sensing. Furthermore, we outline future directions and perspectives to inspire exploration and deepen insights to facilitate continuous representation methods, theories, and applications. All referenced works are summarized in our open-source repository: https://github.com/YisiLuo/Continuous-Representation-Zoo.

Continuous Filtered Backprojection by Learnable Interpolation Network

Accurate reconstruction of computed tomography (CT) images is crucial in medical imaging field. However, there are unavoidable interpolation errors in the backprojection step of the conventional reconstruction methods, i.e., filtered-back-projection based methods, which are detrimental to the accurate reconstruction. In this study, to address this issue, we propose a novel deep learning model, named Leanable-Interpolation-based FBP or LInFBP shortly, to enhance the reconstructed CT image quality, which achieves learnable interpolation in the backprojection step of filtered backprojection (FBP) and alleviates the interpolation errors. Specifically, in the proposed LInFBP, we formulate every local piece of the latent continuous function of discrete sinogram data as a linear combination of selected basis functions, and learn this continuous function by exploiting a deep network to predict the linear combination coefficients. Then, the learned latent continuous function is exploited for interpolation in backprojection step, which first time takes the advantage of deep learning for the interpolation in FBP. Extensive experiments, which encompass diverse CT scenarios, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed LInFBP in terms of enhanced reconstructed image quality, plug-and-play ability and generalization capability.