Sum Rate Maximization for Pinching Antennas Assisted RSMA System With Multiple Waveguides

In this letter, a pinching antennas (PAs) assisted rate splitting multiple access (RSMA) system with multiple waveguides is investigated to maximize sum rate. A two-step algorithm is proposed to determine PA activation scheme and optimize the waveguide beamforming. Specifically, a low complexity spatial correlation and distance based method is proposed for PA activation selection. After determining the PA activation status, a semi-definite programming (SDP) based successive convex approximation (SCA) is leveraged to obtain the optimal waveguide beamforming. Simulation results show that the proposed multiple waveguides based PAs assisted RSMA method achieves better performance than various benchmarking schemes.

DriveSOTIF: Advancing Perception SOTIF Through Multimodal Large Language Models

Human drivers naturally possess the ability to perceive driving scenarios, predict potential hazards, and react instinctively due to their spatial and causal intelligence, which allows them to perceive, understand, predict, and interact with the 3D world both spatially and temporally. Autonomous vehicles, however, lack these capabilities, leading to challenges in effectively managing perception-related Safety of the Intended Functionality (SOTIF) risks, particularly in complex and unpredictable driving conditions. To address this gap, we propose an approach that fine-tunes multimodal language models (MLLMs) on a customized dataset specifically designed to capture perception-related SOTIF scenarios. Model benchmarking demonstrates that this tailored dataset enables the models to better understand and respond to these complex driving situations. Additionally, in real-world case studies, the proposed method correctly handles challenging scenarios that even human drivers may find difficult. Real-time performance tests further indicate the potential for the models to operate efficiently in live driving environments. This approach, along with the dataset generation pipeline, shows significant promise for improving the identification, cognition, prediction, and reaction to SOTIF-related risks in autonomous driving systems. The dataset and information are available: https://github.com/s95huang/DriveSOTIF.git

Progressive Language-guided Visual Learning for Multi-Task Visual Grounding

Multi-task visual grounding (MTVG) includes two sub-tasks, i.e., Referring Expression Comprehension (REC) and Referring Expression Segmentation (RES). The existing representative approaches generally follow the research pipeline which mainly consists of three core procedures, including independent feature extraction for visual and linguistic modalities, respectively, cross-modal interaction module, and independent prediction heads for different sub-tasks. Albeit achieving remarkable performance, this research line has two limitations: 1) The linguistic content has not been fully injected into the entire visual backbone for boosting more effective visual feature extraction and it needs an extra cross-modal interaction module; 2) The relationship between REC and RES tasks is not effectively exploited to help the collaborative prediction for more accurate output. To deal with these problems, in this paper, we propose a Progressive Language-guided Visual Learning framework for multi-task visual grounding, called PLVL, which not only finely mine the inherent feature expression of the visual modality itself but also progressively inject the language information to help learn linguistic-related visual features. In this manner, our PLVL does not need additional cross-modal fusion module while fully introducing the language guidance. Furthermore, we analyze that the localization center for REC would help identify the to-be-segmented object region for RES to some extent. Inspired by this investigation, we design a multi-task head to accomplish collaborative predictions for these two sub-tasks. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets comprehensively substantiate that our PLVL obviously outperforms the representative methods in both REC and RES tasks. https://github.com/jcwang0602/PLVL

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

Privacy-Aware Joint DNN Model Deployment and Partition Optimization for Delay-Efficient Collaborative Edge Inference

Edge inference (EI) is a key solution to address the growing challenges of delayed response times, limited scalability, and privacy concerns in cloud-based Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference. However, deploying DNN models on resource-constrained edge devices faces more severe challenges, such as model storage limitations, dynamic service requests, and privacy risks. This paper proposes a novel framework for privacy-aware joint DNN model deployment and partition optimization to minimize long-term average inference delay under resource and privacy constraints. Specifically, the problem is formulated as a complex optimization problem considering model deployment, user-server association, and model partition strategies. To handle the NP-hardness and future uncertainties, a Lyapunov-based approach is introduced to transform the long-term optimization into a single-time-slot problem, ensuring system performance. Additionally, a coalition formation game model is proposed for edge server association, and a greedy-based algorithm is developed for model deployment within each coalition to efficiently solve the problem. Extensive simulations show that the proposed algorithms effectively reduce inference delay while satisfying privacy constraints, outperforming baseline approaches in various scenarios.

DenseGNN: universal and scalable deeper graph neural networks for high-performance property prediction in crystals and molecules

Generative models generate vast numbers of hypothetical materials, necessitating fast, accurate models for property prediction. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in this domain but face challenges like high training costs, domain adaptation issues, and over-smoothing. We introduce DenseGNN, which employs Dense Connectivity Network (DCN), Hierarchical Node-Edge-Graph Residual Networks (HRN), and Local Structure Order Parameters Embedding (LOPE) to address these challenges. DenseGNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on datasets such as JARVIS-DFT, Materials Project, and QM9, improving the performance of models like GIN, Schnet, and Hamnet on materials datasets. By optimizing atomic embeddings and reducing computational costs, DenseGNN enables deeper architectures and surpasses other GNNs in crystal structure distinction, approaching X-ray diffraction method accuracy. This advances materials discovery and design.

Unlocking the Potential of Weakly Labeled Data: A Co-Evolutionary Learning Framework for Abnormality Detection and Report Generation

Anatomical abnormality detection and report generation of chest X-ray (CXR) are two essential tasks in clinical practice. The former aims at localizing and characterizing cardiopulmonary radiological findings in CXRs, while the latter summarizes the findings in a detailed report for further diagnosis and treatment. Existing methods often focused on either task separately, ignoring their correlation. This work proposes a co-evolutionary abnormality detection and report generation (CoE-DG) framework. The framework utilizes both fully labeled (with bounding box annotations and clinical reports) and weakly labeled (with reports only) data to achieve mutual promotion between the abnormality detection and report generation tasks. Specifically, we introduce a bi-directional information interaction strategy with generator-guided information propagation (GIP) and detector-guided information propagation (DIP). For semi-supervised abnormality detection, GIP takes the informative feature extracted by the generator as an auxiliary input to the detector and uses the generator's prediction to refine the detector's pseudo labels. We further propose an intra-image-modal self-adaptive non-maximum suppression module (SA-NMS). This module dynamically rectifies pseudo detection labels generated by the teacher detection model with high-confidence predictions by the student.Inversely, for report generation, DIP takes the abnormalities' categories and locations predicted by the detector as input and guidance for the generator to improve the generated reports.

Continual Learning for Segment Anything Model Adaptation

Although the current different types of SAM adaptation methods have achieved promising performance for various downstream tasks, such as prompt-based ones and adapter-based ones, most of them belong to the one-step adaptation paradigm. In real-world scenarios, we are generally confronted with the dynamic scenario where the data comes in a streaming manner. Driven by the practical need, in this paper, we first propose a novel Continual SAM adaptation (CoSAM) benchmark with 8 different task domains and carefully analyze the limitations of the existing SAM one-step adaptation methods in the continual segmentation scenario. Then we propose a novel simple-yet-effective Mixture of Domain Adapters (MoDA) algorithm which utilizes the Global Feature Tokens (GFT) and Global Assistant Tokens (GAT) modules to help the SAM encoder extract well-separated features for different task domains, and then provide the accurate task-specific information for continual learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed MoDA obviously surpasses the existing classic continual learning methods, as well as prompt-based and adapter-based approaches for continual segmentation. Moreover, after sequential learning on the CoSAM benchmark with diverse data distributions, our MoDA maintains highly competitive results in the natural image domain, approaching the zero-shot performance of the original SAM, demonstrating its superior capability in knowledge preservation. Notably, the proposed MoDA can be seamlessly integrated into various one-step adaptation methods of SAM, which can consistently bring obvious performance gains. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/yangjl1215/CoSAM}

PGDiffSeg: Prior-Guided Denoising Diffusion Model with Parameter-Shared Attention for Breast Cancer Segmentation

Early detection through imaging and accurate diagnosis is crucial in mitigating the high mortality rate associated with breast cancer. However, locating tumors from low-resolution and high-noise medical images is extremely challenging. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel PGDiffSeg (Prior-Guided Diffusion Denoising Model with Parameter-Shared Attention) that applies diffusion denoising methods to breast cancer medical image segmentation, accurately recovering the affected areas from Gaussian noise. Firstly, we design a parallel pipeline for noise processing and semantic information processing and propose a parameter-shared attention module (PSA) in multi-layer that seamlessly integrates these two pipelines. This integration empowers PGDiffSeg to incorporate semantic details at multiple levels during the denoising process, producing highly accurate segmentation maps. Secondly, we introduce a guided strategy that leverages prior knowledge to simulate the decision-making process of medical professionals, thereby enhancing the model's ability to locate tumor positions precisely. Finally, we provide the first-ever discussion on the interpretability of the generative diffusion model in the context of breast cancer segmentation. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of our model over the current state-of-the-art approaches, confirming its effectiveness as a flexible diffusion denoising method suitable for medical image research. Our code will be publicly available later.

When Digital Twin Meets 6G: Concepts, Obstacles, and Research Prospects

The convergence of digital twin technology and the emerging 6G network presents both challenges and numerous research opportunities. This article explores the potential synergies between digital twin and 6G, highlighting the key challenges and proposing fundamental principles for their integration. We discuss the unique requirements and capabilities of digital twin in the context of 6G networks, such as sustainable deployment, real-time synchronization, seamless migration, predictive analytic, and closed-loop control. Furthermore, we identify research opportunities for leveraging digital twin and artificial intelligence to enhance various aspects of 6G, including network optimization, resource allocation, security, and intelligent service provisioning. This article aims to stimulate further research and innovation at the intersection of digital twin and 6G, paving the way for transformative applications and services in the future.