High-Frequency Prior-Driven Adaptive Masking for Accelerating Image Super-Resolution

The primary challenge in accelerating image super-resolution lies in reducing computation while maintaining performance and adaptability. Motivated by the observation that high-frequency regions (e.g., edges and textures) are most critical for reconstruction, we propose a training-free adaptive masking module for acceleration that dynamically focuses computation on these challenging areas. Specifically, our method first extracts high-frequency components via Gaussian blur subtraction and adaptively generates binary masks using K-means clustering to identify regions requiring intensive processing. Our method can be easily integrated with both CNNs and Transformers. For CNN-based architectures, we replace standard $3 \times 3$ convolutions with an unfold operation followed by $1 \times 1$ convolutions, enabling pixel-wise sparse computation guided by the mask. For Transformer-based models, we partition the mask into non-overlapping windows and selectively process tokens based on their average values. During inference, unnecessary pixels or windows are pruned, significantly reducing computation. Moreover, our method supports dilation-based mask adjustment to control the processing scope without retraining, and is robust to unseen degradations (e.g., noise, compression). Extensive experiments on benchmarks demonstrate that our method reduces FLOPs by 24--43% for state-of-the-art models (e.g., CARN, SwinIR) while achieving comparable or better quantitative metrics. The source code is available at https://github.com/shangwei5/AMSR

Bi-directional Self-Registration for Misaligned Infrared-Visible Image Fusion

Acquiring accurately aligned multi-modal image pairs is fundamental for achieving high-quality multi-modal image fusion. To address the lack of ground truth in current multi-modal image registration and fusion methods, we propose a novel self-supervised \textbf{B}i-directional \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{R}egistration framework (\textbf{B-SR}). Specifically, B-SR utilizes a proxy data generator (PDG) and an inverse proxy data generator (IPDG) to achieve self-supervised global-local registration. Visible-infrared image pairs with spatially misaligned differences are aligned to obtain global differences through the registration module. The same image pairs are processed by PDG, such as cropping, flipping, stitching, etc., and then aligned to obtain local differences. IPDG converts the obtained local differences into pseudo-global differences, which are used to perform global-local difference consistency with the global differences. Furthermore, aiming at eliminating the effect of modal gaps on the registration module, we design a neighborhood dynamic alignment loss to achieve cross-modal image edge alignment. Extensive experiments on misaligned multi-modal images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in multi-modal image alignment and fusion against the competing methods. Our code will be publicly available.

DALIP: Distribution Alignment-based Language-Image Pre-Training for Domain-Specific Data

Recently, Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has shown promising performance in domain-specific data (e.g., biology), and has attracted increasing research attention. Existing works generally focus on collecting extensive domain-specific data and directly tuning the original CLIP models. Intuitively, such a paradigm takes no full consideration of the characteristics lying in domain-specific data (e.g., fine-grained nature of biological data) and so limits model capability, while mostly losing the original ability of CLIP in the general domain. In this paper, we propose a Distribution Alignment-based Language-Image Pre-Training (DALIP) method for biological data. Specifically, DALIP optimizes CLIP models by matching the similarity between feature distribution of image-text pairs instead of the original [cls] token, which can capture rich yet effective information inherent in image-text pairs as powerful representations, and so better cope with fine-grained nature of biological data. Particularly, our DALIP efficiently approximates feature distribution via its first- and second-order statistics, while presenting a Multi-head Brownian Distance Covariance (MBDC) module to acquire second-order statistics of token features efficiently. Furthermore, we collect a new dataset for plant domain (e.g., specific data in biological domain) comprising 10M plant data with 3M general-domain data (namely PlantMix-13M) according to data mixing laws. Extensive experiments show that DALIP clearly outperforms existing CLIP counterparts in biological domain, while well generalizing to remote sensing and medical imaging domains. Besides, our PlantMix-13M dataset further boosts performance of DALIP in plant domain, while preserving model ability in general domain.

Dig2DIG: Dig into Diffusion Information Gains for Image Fusion

Image fusion integrates complementary information from multi-source images to generate more informative results. Recently, the diffusion model, which demonstrates unprecedented generative potential, has been explored in image fusion. However, these approaches typically incorporate predefined multimodal guidance into diffusion, failing to capture the dynamically changing significance of each modality, while lacking theoretical guarantees. To address this issue, we reveal a significant spatio-temporal imbalance in image denoising; specifically, the diffusion model produces dynamic information gains in different image regions with denoising steps. Based on this observation, we Dig into the Diffusion Information Gains (Dig2DIG) and theoretically derive a diffusion-based dynamic image fusion framework that provably reduces the upper bound of the generalization error. Accordingly, we introduce diffusion information gains (DIG) to quantify the information contribution of each modality at different denoising steps, thereby providing dynamic guidance during the fusion process. Extensive experiments on multiple fusion scenarios confirm that our method outperforms existing diffusion-based approaches in terms of both fusion quality and inference efficiency.

CoE: Chain-of-Explanation via Automatic Visual Concept Circuit Description and Polysemanticity Quantification

Explainability is a critical factor influencing the wide deployment of deep vision models (DVMs). Concept-based post-hoc explanation methods can provide both global and local insights into model decisions. However, current methods in this field face challenges in that they are inflexible to automatically construct accurate and sufficient linguistic explanations for global concepts and local circuits. Particularly, the intrinsic polysemanticity in semantic Visual Concepts (VCs) impedes the interpretability of concepts and DVMs, which is underestimated severely. In this paper, we propose a Chain-of-Explanation (CoE) approach to address these issues. Specifically, CoE automates the decoding and description of VCs to construct global concept explanation datasets. Further, to alleviate the effect of polysemanticity on model explainability, we design a concept polysemanticity disentanglement and filtering mechanism to distinguish the most contextually relevant concept atoms. Besides, a Concept Polysemanticity Entropy (CPE), as a measure of model interpretability, is formulated to quantify the degree of concept uncertainty. The modeling of deterministic concepts is upgraded to uncertain concept atom distributions. Finally, CoE automatically enables linguistic local explanations of the decision-making process of DVMs by tracing the concept circuit. GPT-4o and human-based experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CPE and the superiority of CoE, achieving an average absolute improvement of 36% in terms of explainability scores.

Dream-IF: Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent for Image Fusion

Image fusion aims to integrate comprehensive information from images acquired through multiple sources. However, images captured by diverse sensors often encounter various degradations that can negatively affect fusion quality. Traditional fusion methods generally treat image enhancement and fusion as separate processes, overlooking the inherent correlation between them; notably, the dominant regions in one modality of a fused image often indicate areas where the other modality might benefit from enhancement. Inspired by this observation, we introduce the concept of dominant regions for image enhancement and present a Dynamic Relative EnhAnceMent framework for Image Fusion (Dream-IF). This framework quantifies the relative dominance of each modality across different layers and leverages this information to facilitate reciprocal cross-modal enhancement. By integrating the relative dominance derived from image fusion, our approach supports not only image restoration but also a broader range of image enhancement applications. Furthermore, we employ prompt-based encoding to capture degradation-specific details, which dynamically steer the restoration process and promote coordinated enhancement in both multi-modal image fusion and image enhancement scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Dream-IF consistently outperforms its counterparts.

Lightweight Channel-wise Dynamic Fusion Model: Non-stationary Time Series Forecasting via Entropy Analysis

Non-stationarity is an intrinsic property of real-world time series and plays a crucial role in time series forecasting. Previous studies primarily adopt instance normalization to attenuate the non-stationarity of original series for better predictability. However, instance normalization that directly removes the inherent non-stationarity can lead to three issues: (1) disrupting global temporal dependencies, (2) ignoring channel-specific differences, and (3) producing over-smoothed predictions. To address these issues, we theoretically demonstrate that variance can be a valid and interpretable proxy for quantifying non-stationarity of time series. Based on the analysis, we propose a novel lightweight \textit{C}hannel-wise \textit{D}ynamic \textit{F}usion \textit{M}odel (\textit{CDFM}), which selectively and dynamically recovers intrinsic non-stationarity of the original series, while keeping the predictability of normalized series. First, we design a Dual-Predictor Module, which involves two branches: a Time Stationary Predictor for capturing stable patterns and a Time Non-stationary Predictor for modeling global dynamics patterns. Second, we propose a Fusion Weight Learner to dynamically characterize the intrinsic non-stationary information across different samples based on variance. Finally, we introduce a Channel Selector to selectively recover non-stationary information from specific channels by evaluating their non-stationarity, similarity, and distribution consistency, enabling the model to capture relevant dynamic features and avoid overfitting. Comprehensive experiments on seven time series datasets demonstrate the superiority and generalization capabilities of CDFM.

PPGF: Probability Pattern-Guided Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting (TSF) is an essential branch of machine learning with various applications. Most methods for TSF focus on constructing different networks to extract better information and improve performance. However, practical application data contain different internal mechanisms, resulting in a mixture of multiple patterns. That is, the model's ability to fit different patterns is different and generates different errors. In order to solve this problem, we propose an end-to-end framework, namely probability pattern-guided time series forecasting (PPGF). PPGF reformulates the TSF problem as a forecasting task guided by probabilistic pattern classification. Firstly, we propose the grouping strategy to approach forecasting problems as classification and alleviate the impact of data imbalance on classification. Secondly, we predict in the corresponding class interval to guarantee the consistency of classification and forecasting. In addition, True Class Probability (TCP) is introduced to pay more attention to the difficult samples to improve the classification accuracy. Detailedly, PPGF classifies the different patterns to determine which one the target value may belong to and estimates it accurately in the corresponding interval. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets, and PPGF achieves significant performance improvements over several baseline methods. Furthermore, the effectiveness of TCP and the necessity of consistency between classification and forecasting are proved in the experiments. All data and codes are available online: https://github.com/syrGitHub/PPGF.

Online Clustering of Dueling Bandits

The contextual multi-armed bandit (MAB) is a widely used framework for problems requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty, such as recommendation systems. In applications involving a large number of users, the performance of contextual MAB can be significantly improved by facilitating collaboration among multiple users. This has been achieved by the clustering of bandits (CB) methods, which adaptively group the users into different clusters and achieve collaboration by allowing the users in the same cluster to share data. However, classical CB algorithms typically rely on numerical reward feedback, which may not be practical in certain real-world applications. For instance, in recommendation systems, it is more realistic and reliable to solicit preference feedback between pairs of recommended items rather than absolute rewards. To address this limitation, we introduce the first "clustering of dueling bandit algorithms" to enable collaborative decision-making based on preference feedback. We propose two novel algorithms: (1) Clustering of Linear Dueling Bandits (COLDB) which models the user reward functions as linear functions of the context vectors, and (2) Clustering of Neural Dueling Bandits (CONDB) which uses a neural network to model complex, non-linear user reward functions. Both algorithms are supported by rigorous theoretical analyses, demonstrating that user collaboration leads to improved regret bounds. Extensive empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets further validate the effectiveness of our methods, establishing their potential in real-world applications involving multiple users with preference-based feedback.

Asymmetric Reinforcing against Multi-modal Representation Bias

The strength of multimodal learning lies in its ability to integrate information from various sources, providing rich and comprehensive insights. However, in real-world scenarios, multi-modal systems often face the challenge of dynamic modality contributions, the dominance of different modalities may change with the environments, leading to suboptimal performance in multimodal learning. Current methods mainly enhance weak modalities to balance multimodal representation bias, which inevitably optimizes from a partialmodality perspective, easily leading to performance descending for dominant modalities. To address this problem, we propose an Asymmetric Reinforcing method against Multimodal representation bias (ARM). Our ARM dynamically reinforces the weak modalities while maintaining the ability to represent dominant modalities through conditional mutual information. Moreover, we provide an in-depth analysis that optimizing certain modalities could cause information loss and prevent leveraging the full advantages of multimodal data. By exploring the dominance and narrowing the contribution gaps between modalities, we have significantly improved the performance of multimodal learning, making notable progress in mitigating imbalanced multimodal learning.