NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration (BSCVR). The challenge aims to advance research on recovering visually coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, whose decoding often produces severe spatial-temporal artifacts and content distortion. Built upon recent progress in bitstream-corrupted video recovery, the challenge provides a common benchmark for evaluating restoration methods under realistic corruption settings. We describe the dataset, evaluation protocol, and participating methods, and summarize the final results and main technical trends. The challenge highlights the difficulty of this emerging task and provides useful insights for future research on robust video restoration under practical bitstream corruption.

Mixture-of-Modality-Experts with Holistic Token Learning for Fine-Grained Multimodal Visual Analytics in Driver Action Recognition

Robust multimodal visual analytics remains challenging when heterogeneous modalities provide complementary but input-dependent evidence for decision-making.Existing multimodal learning methods mainly rely on fixed fusion modules or predefined cross-modal interactions, which are often insufficient to adapt to changing modality reliability and to capture fine-grained action cues. To address this issue, we propose a Mixture-of-Modality-Experts (MoME) framework with a Holistic Token Learning (HTL) strategy. MoME enables adaptive collaboration among modality-specific experts, while HTL improves both intra-expert refinement and inter-expert knowledge transfer through class tokens and spatio-temporal tokens. In this way, our method forms a knowledge-centric multimodal learning framework that improves expert specialization while reducing ambiguity in multimodal fusion.We validate the proposed framework on driver action recognition as a representative multimodal understanding taskThe experimental results on the public benchmark show that the proposed MoME framework and the HTL strategy jointly outperform representative single-modal and multimodal baselines. Additional ablation, validation, and visualization results further verify that the proposed HTL strategy improves subtle multimodal understanding and offers better interpretability.

Accelerating Diffusion-based Video Editing via Heterogeneous Caching: Beyond Full Computing at Sampled Denoising Timestep

Diffusion-based video editing has emerged as an important paradigm for high-quality and flexible content generation. However, despite their generality and strong modeling capacity, Diffusion Transformers (DiT) remain computationally expensive due to the iterative denoising process, posing challenges for practical deployment. Existing video diffusion acceleration methods primarily exploit denoising timestep-level feature reuse, which mitigates the redundancy in denoising process, but overlooks the architectural redundancy within the DiT that many attention operations over spatio-temporal tokens are redundantly executed, offering little to no incremental contribution to the model output. This work introduces HetCache, a training-free diffusion acceleration framework designed to exploit the inherent heterogeneity in diffusion-based masked video-to-video (MV2V) generation and editing. Instead of uniformly reuse or randomly sampling tokens, HetCache assesses the contextual relevance and interaction strength among various types of tokens in designated computing steps. Guided by spatial priors, it divides the spatial-temporal tokens in DiT model into context and generative tokens, and selectively caches the context tokens that exhibit the strongest correlation and most representative semantics with generative ones. This strategy reduces redundant attention operations while maintaining editing consistency and fidelity. Experiments show that HetCache achieves a noticeable acceleration, including a 2.67$\times$ latency speedup and FLOPs reduction over commonly used foundation models, with negligible degradation in editing quality.

DAOS: A Multimodal In-cabin Behavior Monitoring with Driver Action-Object Synergy Dataset

In driver activity monitoring, movements are mostly limited to the upper body, which makes many actions look similar. To tell these actions apart, human often rely on the objects the driver is using, such as holding a phone compared with gripping the steering wheel. However, most existing driver-monitoring datasets lack accurate object-location annotations or do not link objects to their associated actions, leaving a critical gap for reliable action recognition. To address this, we introduce the Driver Action with Object Synergy (DAOS) dataset, comprising 9,787 video clips annotated with 36 fine-grained driver actions and 15 object classes, totaling more than 2.5 million corresponding object instances. DAOS offers multi-modal, multi-view data (RGB, IR, and depth) from front, face, left, and right perspectives. Although DAOS captures a wide range of cabin objects, only a few are directly relevant to each action for prediction, so focusing on task-specific human-object relations is essential. To tackle this challenge, we propose the Action-Object-Relation Network (AOR-Net). AOR-Net comprehends complex driver actions through multi-level reasoning and a chain-of-action prompting mechanism that models the logical relationships among actions, objects, and their relations. Additionally, the Mixture of Thoughts module is introduced to dynamically select essential knowledge at each stage, enhancing robustness in object-rich and object-scarce conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods on various datasets.

MuseAgent-1: Interactive Grounded Multimodal Understanding of Music Scores and Performance Audio

Despite recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), their ability to understand and interact with music remains limited. Music understanding requires grounded reasoning over symbolic scores and expressive performance audio, which general-purpose MLLMs often fail to handle due to insufficient perceptual grounding. We introduce MuseAgent, a music-centric multimodal agent that augments language models with structured symbolic representations derived from sheet music images and performance audio. By integrating optical music recognition and automatic music transcription modules, MuseAgent enables multi-step reasoning and interaction over fine-grained musical content. To systematically evaluate music understanding capabilities, we further propose MuseBench, a benchmark covering music theory reasoning, score interpretation, and performance-level analysis across text, image, and audio modalities. Experiments show that existing MLLMs perform poorly on these tasks, while MuseAgent achieves substantial improvements, highlighting the importance of structured multimodal grounding for interactive music understanding.

Building Egocentric Procedural AI Assistant: Methods, Benchmarks, and Challenges

Driven by recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) and egocentric perception research, we introduce the concept of an egocentric procedural AI assistant (EgoProceAssist) tailored to step-by-step support daily procedural tasks in a first-person view. In this work, we start by identifying three core tasks: egocentric procedural error detection, egocentric procedural learning, and egocentric procedural question answering. These tasks define the essential functions of EgoProceAssist within a new taxonomy. Specifically, our work encompasses a comprehensive review of current techniques, relevant datasets, and evaluation metrics across these three core areas. To clarify the gap between the proposed EgoProceAssist and existing VLM-based AI assistants, we introduce novel experiments and provide a comprehensive evaluation of representative VLM-based methods. Based on these findings and our technical analysis, we discuss the challenges ahead and suggest future research directions. Furthermore, an exhaustive list of this study is publicly available in an active repository that continuously collects the latest work: https://github.com/z1oong/Building-Egocentric-Procedural-AI-Assistant

Towards Blind Bitstream-corrupted Video Recovery via a Visual Foundation Model-driven Framework

Video signals are vulnerable in multimedia communication and storage systems, as even slight bitstream-domain corruption can lead to significant pixel-domain degradation. To recover faithful spatio-temporal content from corrupted inputs, bitstream-corrupted video recovery has recently emerged as a challenging and understudied task. However, existing methods require time-consuming and labor-intensive annotation of corrupted regions for each corrupted video frame, resulting in a large workload in practice. In addition, high-quality recovery remains difficult as part of the local residual information in corrupted frames may mislead feature completion and successive content recovery. In this paper, we propose the first blind bitstream-corrupted video recovery framework that integrates visual foundation models with a recovery model, which is adapted to different types of corruption and bitstream-level prompts. Within the framework, the proposed Detect Any Corruption (DAC) model leverages the rich priors of the visual foundation model while incorporating bitstream and corruption knowledge to enhance corruption localization and blind recovery. Additionally, we introduce a novel Corruption-aware Feature Completion (CFC) module, which adaptively processes residual contributions based on high-level corruption understanding. With VFM-guided hierarchical feature augmentation and high-level coordination in a mixture-of-residual-experts (MoRE) structure, our method suppresses artifacts and enhances informative residuals. Comprehensive evaluations show that the proposed method achieves outstanding performance in bitstream-corrupted video recovery without requiring a manually labeled mask sequence. The demonstrated effectiveness will help to realize improved user experience, wider application scenarios, and more reliable multimedia communication and storage systems.

SSH-Net: A Self-Supervised and Hybrid Network for Noisy Image Watermark Removal

Visible watermark removal is challenging due to its inherent complexities and the noise carried within images. Existing methods primarily rely on supervised learning approaches that require paired datasets of watermarked and watermark-free images, which are often impractical to obtain in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose SSH-Net, a Self-Supervised and Hybrid Network specifically designed for noisy image watermark removal. SSH-Net synthesizes reference watermark-free images using the watermark distribution in a self-supervised manner and adopts a dual-network design to address the task. The upper network, focused on the simpler task of noise removal, employs a lightweight CNN-based architecture, while the lower network, designed to handle the more complex task of simultaneously removing watermarks and noise, incorporates Transformer blocks to model long-range dependencies and capture intricate image features. To enhance the model's effectiveness, a shared CNN-based feature encoder is introduced before dual networks to extract common features that both networks can leverage. Our code will be available at https://github.com/wenyang001/SSH-Net.

ByteNet: Rethinking Multimedia File Fragment Classification through Visual Perspectives

Multimedia file fragment classification (MFFC) aims to identify file fragment types, e.g., image/video, audio, and text without system metadata. It is of vital importance in multimedia storage and communication. Existing MFFC methods typically treat fragments as 1D byte sequences and emphasize the relations between separate bytes (interbytes) for classification. However, the more informative relations inside bytes (intrabytes) are overlooked and seldom investigated. By looking inside bytes, the bit-level details of file fragments can be accessed, enabling a more accurate classification. Motivated by this, we first propose Byte2Image, a novel visual representation model that incorporates previously overlooked intrabyte information into file fragments and reinterprets these fragments as 2D grayscale images. This model involves a sliding byte window to reveal the intrabyte information and a rowwise stacking of intrabyte ngrams for embedding fragments into a 2D space. Thus, complex interbyte and intrabyte correlations can be mined simultaneously using powerful vision networks. Additionally, we propose an end-to-end dual-branch network ByteNet to enhance robust correlation mining and feature representation. ByteNet makes full use of the raw 1D byte sequence and the converted 2D image through a shallow byte branch feature extraction (BBFE) and a deep image branch feature extraction (IBFE) network. In particular, the BBFE, composed of a single fully-connected layer, adaptively recognizes the co-occurrence of several some specific bytes within the raw byte sequence, while the IBFE, built on a vision Transformer, effectively mines the complex interbyte and intrabyte correlations from the converted image. Experiments on the two representative benchmarks, including 14 cases, validate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on different cases by up to 12.2%.

CL-HOI: Cross-Level Human-Object Interaction Distillation from Vision Large Language Models

Human-object interaction (HOI) detection has seen advancements with Vision Language Models (VLMs), but these methods often depend on extensive manual annotations. Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) can inherently recognize and reason about interactions at the image level but are computationally heavy and not designed for instance-level HOI detection. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Cross-Level HOI distillation (CL-HOI) framework, which distills instance-level HOIs from VLLMs image-level understanding without the need for manual annotations. Our approach involves two stages: context distillation, where a Visual Linguistic Translator (VLT) converts visual information into linguistic form, and interaction distillation, where an Interaction Cognition Network (ICN) reasons about spatial, visual, and context relations. We design contrastive distillation losses to transfer image-level context and interaction knowledge from the teacher to the student model, enabling instance-level HOI detection. Evaluations on HICO-DET and V-COCO datasets demonstrate that our CL-HOI surpasses existing weakly supervised methods and VLLM supervised methods, showing its efficacy in detecting HOIs without manual labels.