The Ninth NTIRE 2024 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2024 challenge, focusing on efficient single-image super-resolution (ESR) solutions and their outcomes. The task of this challenge is to super-resolve an input image with a magnification factor of x4 based on pairs of low and corresponding high-resolution images. The primary objective is to develop networks that optimize various aspects such as runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while still maintaining a peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of approximately 26.90 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_valid dataset and 26.99 dB on the DIV2K_LSDIR_test dataset. In addition, this challenge has 4 tracks including the main track (overall performance), sub-track 1 (runtime), sub-track 2 (FLOPs), and sub-track 3 (parameters). In the main track, all three metrics (ie runtime, FLOPs, and parameter count) were considered. The ranking of the main track is calculated based on a weighted sum-up of the scores of all other sub-tracks. In sub-track 1, the practical runtime performance of the submissions was evaluated, and the corresponding score was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 2, the number of FLOPs was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding FLOPs was used to determine the ranking. In sub-track 3, the number of parameters was considered. The score calculated based on the corresponding parameters was used to determine the ranking. RLFN is set as the baseline for efficiency measurement. The challenge had 262 registered participants, and 34 teams made valid submissions. They gauge the state-of-the-art in efficient single-image super-resolution. To facilitate the reproducibility of the challenge and enable other researchers to build upon these findings, the code and the pre-trained model of validated solutions are made publicly available at https://github.com/Amazingren/NTIRE2024_ESR/.

Pay Self-Attention to Audio-Visual Navigation

Audio-visual embodied navigation, as a hot research topic, aims training a robot to reach an audio target using egocentric visual (from the sensors mounted on the robot) and audio (emitted from the target) input. The audio-visual information fusion strategy is naturally important to the navigation performance, but the state-of-the-art methods still simply concatenate the visual and audio features, potentially ignoring the direct impact of context. Moreover, the existing approaches requires either phase-wise training or additional aid (e.g. topology graph and sound semantics). Up till this date, the work that deals with the more challenging setup with moving target(s) is still rare. As a result, we propose an end-to-end framework FSAAVN (feature self-attention audio-visual navigation) to learn chasing after a moving audio target using a context-aware audio-visual fusion strategy implemented as a self-attention module. Our thorough experiments validate the superior performance (both quantitatively and qualitatively) of FSAAVN in comparison with the state-of-the-arts, and also provide unique insights about the choice of visual modalities, visual/audio encoder backbones and fusion patterns.

Revenue and Energy Efficiency-Driven Delay Constrained Computing Task Offloading and Resource Allocation in a Vehicular Edge Computing Network: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach

For in-vehicle application,task type and vehicle state information, i.e., vehicle speed, bear a significant impact on the task delay requirement. However, the joint impact of task type and vehicle speed on the task delay constraint has not been studied, and this lack of study may cause a mismatch between the requirement of the task delay and allocated computation and wireless resources. In this paper, we propose a joint task type and vehicle speed-aware task offloading and resource allocation strategy to decrease the vehicl's energy cost for executing tasks and increase the revenue of the vehicle for processing tasks within the delay constraint. First, we establish the joint task type and vehicle speed-aware delay constraint model. Then, the delay, energy cost and revenue for task execution in the vehicular edge computing (VEC) server, local terminal and terminals of other vehicles are calculated. Based on the energy cost and revenue from task execution,the utility function of the vehicle is acquired. Next, we formulate a joint optimization of task offloading and resource allocation to maximize the utility level of the vehicles subject to the constraints of task delay, computation resources and wireless resources. To obtain a near-optimal solution of the formulated problem, a joint offloading and resource allocation based on the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (JORA-MADDPG) algorithm is proposed to maximize the utility level of vehicles. Simulation results show that our algorithm can achieve superior performance in task completion delay, vehicles' energy cost and processing revenue.