NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction in Real-world Adverse Conditions: RealX3D Challenge Results

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2026 3D Restoration and Reconstruction (3DRR) Challenge, detailing the proposed methods and results. The challenge seeks to identify robust reconstruction pipelines that are robust under real-world adverse conditions, specifically extreme low-light and smoke-degraded environments, as captured by our RealX3D benchmark. A total of 279 participants registered for the competition, of whom 33 teams submitted valid results. We thoroughly evaluate the submitted approaches against state-of-the-art baselines, revealing significant progress in 3D reconstruction under adverse conditions. Our analysis highlights shared design principles among top-performing methods and provides insights into effective strategies for handling 3D scene degradation.

Mapper-GIN: Lightweight Structural Graph Abstraction for Corrupted 3D Point Cloud Classification

Robust 3D point cloud classification is often pursued by scaling up backbones or relying on specialized data augmentation. We instead ask whether structural abstraction alone can improve robustness, and study a simple topology-inspired decomposition based on the Mapper algorithm. We propose Mapper-GIN, a lightweight pipeline that partitions a point cloud into overlapping regions using Mapper (PCA lens, cubical cover, and followed by density-based clustering), constructs a region graph from their overlaps, and performs graph classification with a Graph Isomorphism Network. On the corruption benchmark ModelNet40-C, Mapper-GIN achieves competitive and stable accuracy under Noise and Transformation corruptions with only 0.5M parameters. In contrast to prior approaches that require heavier architectures or additional mechanisms to gain robustness, Mapper-GIN attains strong corruption robustness through simple region-level graph abstraction and GIN message passing. Overall, our results suggest that region-graph structure offers an efficient and interpretable source of robustness for 3D visual recognition.

BEAT2AASIST model with layer fusion for ESDD 2026 Challenge

Recent advances in audio generation have increased the risk of realistic environmental sound manipulation, motivating the ESDD 2026 Challenge as the first large-scale benchmark for Environmental Sound Deepfake Detection (ESDD). We propose BEAT2AASIST which extends BEATs-AASIST by splitting BEATs-derived representations along frequency or channel dimension and processing them with dual AASIST branches. To enrich feature representations, we incorporate top-k transformer layer fusion using concatenation, CNN-gated, and SE-gated strategies. In addition, vocoder-based data augmentation is applied to improve robustness against unseen spoofing methods. Experimental results on the official test sets demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves competitive performance across the challenge tracks.