Labeled-Data-Free Meta-Learning: Efficient Task Generation Using Pre-trained Models and Unlabeled Data

Meta-learning without labeled data is crucial for real-world applications, where obtaining labeled datasets can be expensive or restricted due to privacy concerns. Data-Free Meta-Learning (DFML) addresses this challenge by leveraging pre-trained models without access to training data. However, existing DFML methods rely on model inversion to generate training data, a process that is generally difficult and computationally expensive due to the need to generate high-dimensional data matching the original distribution. To address this limitation, we propose a novel meta-learning setting that avoids model inversion by jointly leveraging pre-trained models and unlabeled data. Our method generates meta-training tasks by assigning soft labels from pre-trained models to unlabeled data. Since the quality of these tasks can vary, we introduce a task-weighting mechanism based on task confidence and class distribution balance to ensure effective meta-learning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach substantially reduces computational cost and improves generalization, achieving up to 104-fold speedup and 8.4 percent to 36.4 percent improvements in few-shot classification accuracy compared to state-of-the-art DFML methods.

DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model

DreamX-World 1.0 is a general-purpose interactive text/image-to-video world model for controllable long-horizon generation. It supports camera navigation, revisits to previously observed regions, and promptable events across photorealistic, game-style, and stylized domains. Our data engine combines camera-accurate Unreal Engine rendering, action-rich gameplay recordings, and real-world videos with recovered camera geometry. For camera control, we introduce E-PRoPE, a lightweight variant of projective positional encoding that retains PRoPE's projective camera geometry while applying camera-aware attention to spatially reduced tokens. We convert a bidirectional video generator into a few-step autoregressive world model using causal forcing, DMD-style distillation, and long-rollout training. Training on self-generated long-horizon contexts exposes the model to its own generated history and reduces the style and color drift that accumulates across autoregressive chunks. Memory-Conditioned Scene Persistence retrieves earlier views through camera-geometry-based retrieval, while residual recycling makes the conditioning path less sensitive to imperfect memory latents. Event Instruction Tuning adds composable event control, and reinforcement learning alignment recovers camera control and visual quality after distillation. With mixed-precision DiT execution, residual reuse, 75\%-pruned VAE decoding, and asynchronous pipeline parallelism, DreamX-World 1.0 reaches up to 16\,FPS on eight RTX\,5090 GPUs. On our 5-second basic evaluation, DreamX-World 1.0 achieves a camera-control score of 73.75 and an overall score of 84.76, outperforming HY-WorldPlay 1.5 and LingBot-World in overall score, which achieve 80.79 and 80.45, respectively.

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($σ= 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

Towards 3D-Aware Video Diffusion Models: Render-Free Human Motion Control with Mesh Tokenization

Diffusion models have shown remarkable success in video generation. However, whether such models are truly aware of the 3D structure underlying visual observations, rather than simply reproducing plausible 2D projections, remains an open question. In this work, we investigate this question through human motion control, a task that requires precise modelling of 3D human geometry, motion, camera viewpoint, and scene context. Unlike prior methods that rely on rendered 2D motion guidance videos, we propose a render-free framework that conditions video generation directly on compressed 3D human mesh tokens. This representation preserves full 3D geometric information while enabling a unified token-based generation pipeline that processes video tokens jointly with motion tokens in a DiT-based architecture. This design requires the model to reason jointly about appearance, 3D structure, and camera viewpoint during video generation. Experimental results demonstrate strong performance on human motion control benchmarks, while reducing artifacts induced by view-dependent 2D guidance and trajectory-pose mismatches during editing. These findings suggest that video diffusion models, when equipped with mesh tokenization, can better capture complex 3D human structures and their interactions with the surrounding environment.

RISE: Reliable Improvement in Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved strong multimodal reasoning capabilities, but further improving them still relies heavily on large-scale human-constructed supervision for post-training. Such supervision is costly to obtain, especially for reasoning-intensive multimodal tasks where questions, answers, and feedback signals must be carefully designed. This motivates self-evolving learning, where a model improves itself through a dual-role closed loop: a questioner autonomously poses questions and a solver learns to solve them. However, we observe that current VLM self-evolving methods still face three major challenges: coarse-grained role alternation delays the interaction between question generation and solver adaptation; generated questions can progressively degrade in quality; and question types may collapse toward a narrow distribution. These issues limit the efficiency and reliability of self-evolution. Thus, we propose \textbf{RISE}, a reliable self-evolving framework for vision-language models. RISE is built on three complementary designs: fine-grained role alternation, which shortens the feedback loop between the questioner and the solver to improve efficiency; a quality supervisor, which improves question validity and pseudo-label reliability; and skill-aware dynamic balancing, which mitigates mode collapse and maintains broad skill coverage during evolution. Together, these components enable more reliable and effective self-evolution from unlabeled images. Experiments on two VLM backbones across seven benchmarks show that RISE consistently improves the base models, yielding broad and sustained gains. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/RISE.

DeformMaster: An Interactive Physics-Neural World Model for Deformable Objects from Videos

World models for deformable objects should recover not only geometry and appearance, but also underlying physical dynamics, interaction grounding, and material behavior. Learning such a model from real videos is challenging because deformable linear, planar, and volumetric objects evolve under high-dimensional deformation, noisy interactions, and complex material response. The model must therefore infer a physical state from visual observations, roll it forward under new interactions, and render the resulting dynamics with high visual fidelity. We present DeformMaster, a video-derived interactive physics--neural world model that turns real interaction videos into an online interactive model of deformable objects within a unified dynamics-and-appearance framework. DeformMaster preserves structured physical rollout while using a neural residual to compensate for unmodeled effects, grounds sparse hand motion as distributed compliant actuator for hand--continuum interaction, represents material response with spatially varying constitutive experts, and drives high-fidelity 4D appearance from the predicted physical evolution. Experiments on real-world deformable-object sequences demonstrate DeformMaster's ability to roll out future dynamics and render dynamic appearance, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while supporting novel action rollout, material-parameter variation, and dynamic novel-view synthesis.

The Fourth Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4) at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the NTIRE 2026 Workshop at CVPR 2026. The challenge aims to reconstruct high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective super-resolution solutions and analyze recent advances in the field. To reflect the evolving objectives of image super-resolution, the challenge includes two tracks: (1) a restoration track, which emphasizes pixel-wise fidelity and ranks submissions based on PSNR; and (2) a perceptual track, which focuses on visual realism and evaluates results using a perceptual score. A total of 194 participants registered for the challenge, with 31 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, main results, and methods of participating teams. The challenge provides a unified benchmark and offers insights into current progress and future directions in image super-resolution.

HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation

Humans achieve complex manipulation through coordinated whole-body control, whereas most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models treat robot body parts largely independently, making high-DoF humanoid control challenging and often unstable. We present HEX, a state-centric framework for coordinated manipulation on full-sized bipedal humanoid robots. HEX introduces a humanoid-aligned universal state representation for scalable learning across heterogeneous embodiments, and incorporates a Mixture-of-Experts Unified Proprioceptive Predictor to model whole-body coordination and temporal motion dynamics from large-scale multi-embodiment trajectory data. To efficiently capture temporal visual context, HEX uses lightweight history tokens to summarize past observations, avoiding repeated encoding of historical images during inference. It further employs a residual-gated fusion mechanism with a flow-matching action head to adaptively integrate visual-language cues with proprioceptive dynamics for action generation. Experiments on real-world humanoid manipulation tasks show that HEX achieves state-of-the-art performance in task success rate and generalization, particularly in fast-reaction and long-horizon scenarios.

The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2026 challenge on efficient single-image super-resolution with a focus on the proposed solutions and results. The aim of this challenge is to devise a network that reduces one or several aspects, such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while maintaining PSNR of around 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset, and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. The challenge had 95 registered participants, and 15 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art results for efficient single-image super-resolution.

Omni-WorldBench: Towards a Comprehensive Interaction-Centric Evaluation for World Models

Video--based world models have emerged along two dominant paradigms: video generation and 3D reconstruction. However, existing evaluation benchmarks either focus narrowly on visual fidelity and text--video alignment for generative models, or rely on static 3D reconstruction metrics that fundamentally neglect temporal dynamics. We argue that the future of world modeling lies in 4D generation, which jointly models spatial structure and temporal evolution. In this paradigm, the core capability is interactive response: the ability to faithfully reflect how interaction actions drive state transitions across space and time. Yet no existing benchmark systematically evaluates this critical dimension. To address this gap, we propose Omni--WorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the interactive response capabilities of world models in 4D settings. Omni--WorldBench comprises two key components: Omni--WorldSuite, a systematic prompt suite spanning diverse interaction levels and scene types; and Omni--Metrics, an agent-based evaluation framework that quantifies world modeling capabilities by measuring the causal impact of interaction actions on both final outcomes and intermediate state evolution trajectories. We conduct extensive evaluations of 18 representative world models across multiple paradigms. Our analysis reveals critical limitations of current world models in interactive response, providing actionable insights for future research. Omni-WorldBench will be publicly released to foster progress in interactive 4D world modeling.