NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution ($\times$4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

The Tenth NTIRE 2025 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Single-Image Efficient Super-Resolution (ESR). The challenge aimed to advance the development of deep models that optimize key computational metrics, i.e., runtime, parameters, and FLOPs, while achieving a PSNR of at least 26.90 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_valid}$ dataset and 26.99 dB on the $\operatorname{DIV2K\_LSDIR\_test}$ dataset. A robust participation saw \textbf{244} registered entrants, with \textbf{43} teams submitting valid entries. This report meticulously analyzes these methods and results, emphasizing groundbreaking advancements in state-of-the-art single-image ESR techniques. The analysis highlights innovative approaches and establishes benchmarks for future research in the field.

Distilling Multi-view Diffusion Models into 3D Generators

We introduce DD3G, a formulation that Distills a multi-view Diffusion model (MV-DM) into a 3D Generator using gaussian splatting. DD3G compresses and integrates extensive visual and spatial geometric knowledge from the MV-DM by simulating its ordinary differential equation (ODE) trajectory, ensuring the distilled generator generalizes better than those trained solely on 3D data. Unlike previous amortized optimization approaches, we align the MV-DM and 3D generator representation spaces to transfer the teacher's probabilistic flow to the student, thus avoiding inconsistencies in optimization objectives caused by probabilistic sampling. The introduction of probabilistic flow and the coupling of various attributes in 3D Gaussians introduce challenges in the generation process. To tackle this, we propose PEPD, a generator consisting of Pattern Extraction and Progressive Decoding phases, which enables efficient fusion of probabilistic flow and converts a single image into 3D Gaussians within 0.06 seconds. Furthermore, to reduce knowledge loss and overcome sparse-view supervision, we design a joint optimization objective that ensures the quality of generated samples through explicit supervision and implicit verification. Leveraging existing 2D generation models, we compile 120k high-quality RGBA images for distillation. Experiments on synthetic and public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our project is available at: https://qinbaigao.github.io/DD3G_project/

Enhancing Customer Contact Efficiency with Graph Neural Networks in Credit Card Fraud Detection Workflow

Credit card fraud has been a persistent issue since the last century, causing significant financial losses to the industry. The most effective way to prevent fraud is by contacting customers to verify suspicious transactions. However, while these systems are designed to detect fraudulent activity, they often mistakenly flag legitimate transactions, leading to unnecessary declines that disrupt the user experience and erode customer trust. Frequent false positives can frustrate customers, resulting in dissatisfaction, increased complaints, and a diminished sense of security. To address these limitations, we propose a fraud detection framework incorporating Relational Graph Convolutional Networks (RGCN) to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of identifying fraudulent transactions. By leveraging the relational structure of transaction data, our model reduces the need for direct customer confirmation while maintaining high detection performance. Our experiments are conducted using the IBM credit card transaction dataset to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach.

Blind Video Super-Resolution based on Implicit Kernels

Blind video super-resolution (BVSR) is a low-level vision task which aims to generate high-resolution videos from low-resolution counterparts in unknown degradation scenarios. Existing approaches typically predict blur kernels that are spatially invariant in each video frame or even the entire video. These methods do not consider potential spatio-temporal varying degradations in videos, resulting in suboptimal BVSR performance. In this context, we propose a novel BVSR model based on Implicit Kernels, BVSR-IK, which constructs a multi-scale kernel dictionary parameterized by implicit neural representations. It also employs a newly designed recurrent Transformer to predict the coefficient weights for accurate filtering in both frame correction and feature alignment. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed BVSR-IK, when compared with four state-of-the-art BVSR models on three commonly used datasets, with BVSR-IK outperforming the second best approach, FMA-Net, by up to 0.59 dB in PSNR. Source code will be available at https://github.com.

FCVSR: A Frequency-aware Method for Compressed Video Super-Resolution

Compressed video super-resolution (SR) aims to generate high-resolution (HR) videos from the corresponding low-resolution (LR) compressed videos. Recently, some compressed video SR methods attempt to exploit the spatio-temporal information in the frequency domain, showing great promise in super-resolution performance. However, these methods do not differentiate various frequency subbands spatially or capture the temporal frequency dynamics, potentially leading to suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a deep frequency-based compressed video SR model (FCVSR) consisting of a motion-guided adaptive alignment (MGAA) network and a multi-frequency feature refinement (MFFR) module. Additionally, a frequency-aware contrastive loss is proposed for training FCVSR, in order to reconstruct finer spatial details. The proposed model has been evaluated on three public compressed video super-resolution datasets, with results demonstrating its effectiveness when compared to existing works in terms of super-resolution performance (up to a 0.14dB gain in PSNR over the second-best model) and complexity.

SymmCD: Symmetry-Preserving Crystal Generation with Diffusion Models

Generating novel crystalline materials has potential to lead to advancements in fields such as electronics, energy storage, and catalysis. The defining characteristic of crystals is their symmetry, which plays a central role in determining their physical properties. However, existing crystal generation methods either fail to generate materials that display the symmetries of real-world crystals, or simply replicate the symmetry information from examples in a database. To address this limitation, we propose SymmCD, a novel diffusion-based generative model that explicitly incorporates crystallographic symmetry into the generative process. We decompose crystals into two components and learn their joint distribution through diffusion: 1) the asymmetric unit, the smallest subset of the crystal which can generate the whole crystal through symmetry transformations, and; 2) the symmetry transformations needed to be applied to each atom in the asymmetric unit. We also use a novel and interpretable representation for these transformations, enabling generalization across different crystallographic symmetry groups. We showcase the competitive performance of SymmCD on a subset of the Materials Project, obtaining diverse and valid crystals with realistic symmetries and predicted properties.

CT-PatchTST: Channel-Time Patch Time-Series Transformer for Long-Term Renewable Energy Forecasting

Accurately predicting renewable energy output is crucial for the efficient integration of solar and wind power into modern energy systems. This study develops and evaluates an advanced deep learning model, Channel-Time Patch Time-Series Transformer (CT-PatchTST), to forecast the power output of photovoltaic and wind energy systems using annual offshore wind power, onshore wind power, and solar power generation data from Denmark. While the original Patch Time-Series Transformer(PatchTST) model employs a channel-independent (CI) approach, it tends to overlook inter-channel relationships during training, potentially leading to a loss of critical information. To address this limitation and further leverage the benefits of increased data granularity brought by CI, we propose CT-PatchTST. This enhanced model improves the processing of inter-channel information while maintaining the advantages of the channel-independent approach. The predictive performance of CT-PatchTST is rigorously analyzed, demonstrating its ability to provide precise and reliable energy forecasts. This work contributes to improving the predictability of renewable energy systems, supporting their broader adoption and integration into energy grids.

End-to-End Reaction Field Energy Modeling via Deep Learning based Voxel-to-voxel Transform

In computational biochemistry and biophysics, understanding the role of electrostatic interactions is crucial for elucidating the structure, dynamics, and function of biomolecules. The Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) equation is a foundational tool for modeling these interactions by describing the electrostatic potential in and around charged molecules. However, solving the PB equation presents significant computational challenges due to the complexity of biomolecular surfaces and the need to account for mobile ions. While traditional numerical methods for solving the PB equation are accurate, they are computationally expensive and scale poorly with increasing system size. To address these challenges, we introduce PBNeF, a novel machine learning approach inspired by recent advancements in neural network-based partial differential equation solvers. Our method formulates the input and boundary electrostatic conditions of the PB equation into a learnable voxel representation, enabling the use of a neural field transformer to predict the PB solution and, subsequently, the reaction field potential energy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PBNeF achieves over a 100-fold speedup compared to traditional PB solvers, while maintaining accuracy comparable to the Generalized Born (GB) model.

OAPT: Offset-Aware Partition Transformer for Double JPEG Artifacts Removal

Deep learning-based methods have shown remarkable performance in single JPEG artifacts removal task. However, existing methods tend to degrade on double JPEG images, which are prevalent in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, we propose Offset-Aware Partition Transformer for double JPEG artifacts removal, termed as OAPT. We conduct an analysis of double JPEG compression that results in up to four patterns within each 8x8 block and design our model to cluster the similar patterns to remedy the difficulty of restoration. Our OAPT consists of two components: compression offset predictor and image reconstructor. Specifically, the predictor estimates pixel offsets between the first and second compression, which are then utilized to divide different patterns. The reconstructor is mainly based on several Hybrid Partition Attention Blocks (HPAB), combining vanilla window-based self-attention and sparse attention for clustered pattern features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OAPT outperforms the state-of-the-art method by more than 0.16dB in double JPEG image restoration task. Moreover, without increasing any computation cost, the pattern clustering module in HPAB can serve as a plugin to enhance other transformer-based image restoration methods. The code will be available at https://github.com/QMoQ/OAPT.git .