NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images: Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Day and Night Raindrop Removal for Dual-Focused Images. This challenge received a wide range of impressive solutions, which are developed and evaluated using our collected real-world Raindrop Clarity dataset. Unlike existing deraining datasets, our Raindrop Clarity dataset is more diverse and challenging in degradation types and contents, which includes day raindrop-focused, day background-focused, night raindrop-focused, and night background-focused degradations. This dataset is divided into three subsets for competition: 14,139 images for training, 240 images for validation, and 731 images for testing. The primary objective of this challenge is to establish a new and powerful benchmark for the task of removing raindrops under varying lighting and focus conditions. There are a total of 361 participants in the competition, and 32 teams submitting valid solutions and fact sheets for the final testing phase. These submissions achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the Raindrop Clarity dataset. The project can be found at https://lixinustc.github.io/CVPR-NTIRE2025-RainDrop-Competition.github.io/.

An Empirical Study of GPT-4o Image Generation Capabilities

The landscape of image generation has rapidly evolved, from early GAN-based approaches to diffusion models and, most recently, to unified generative architectures that seek to bridge understanding and generation tasks. Recent advances, especially the GPT-4o, have demonstrated the feasibility of high-fidelity multimodal generation, their architectural design remains mysterious and unpublished. This prompts the question of whether image and text generation have already been successfully integrated into a unified framework for those methods. In this work, we conduct an empirical study of GPT-4o's image generation capabilities, benchmarking it against leading open-source and commercial models. Our evaluation covers four main categories, including text-to-image, image-to-image, image-to-3D, and image-to-X generation, with more than 20 tasks. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of GPT-4o under various settings, and situates it within the broader evolution of generative modeling. Through this investigation, we identify promising directions for future unified generative models, emphasizing the role of architectural design and data scaling.

JarvisIR: Elevating Autonomous Driving Perception with Intelligent Image Restoration

Vision-centric perception systems struggle with unpredictable and coupled weather degradations in the wild. Current solutions are often limited, as they either depend on specific degradation priors or suffer from significant domain gaps. To enable robust and autonomous operation in real-world conditions, we propose JarvisIR, a VLM-powered agent that leverages the VLM as a controller to manage multiple expert restoration models. To further enhance system robustness, reduce hallucinations, and improve generalizability in real-world adverse weather, JarvisIR employs a novel two-stage framework consisting of supervised fine-tuning and human feedback alignment. Specifically, to address the lack of paired data in real-world scenarios, the human feedback alignment enables the VLM to be fine-tuned effectively on large-scale real-world data in an unsupervised manner. To support the training and evaluation of JarvisIR, we introduce CleanBench, a comprehensive dataset consisting of high-quality and large-scale instruction-responses pairs, including 150K synthetic entries and 80K real entries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JarvisIR exhibits superior decision-making and restoration capabilities. Compared with existing methods, it achieves a 50% improvement in the average of all perception metrics on CleanBench-Real. Project page: https://cvpr2025-jarvisir.github.io/.

HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model

Recent advancements in vision-language models (VLMs) for common-sense reasoning have led to the development of vision-language-action (VLA) models, enabling robots to perform generalized manipulation. Although existing autoregressive VLA methods leverage large-scale pretrained knowledge, they disrupt the continuity of actions. Meanwhile, some VLA methods incorporate an additional diffusion head to predict continuous actions, relying solely on VLM-extracted features, which limits their reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce HybridVLA, a unified framework that seamlessly integrates the strengths of both autoregressive and diffusion policies within a single large language model, rather than simply connecting them. To bridge the generation gap, a collaborative training recipe is proposed that injects the diffusion modeling directly into the next-token prediction. With this recipe, we find that these two forms of action prediction not only reinforce each other but also exhibit varying performance across different tasks. Therefore, we design a collaborative action ensemble mechanism that adaptively fuses these two predictions, leading to more robust control. In experiments, HybridVLA outperforms previous state-of-the-art VLA methods across various simulation and real-world tasks, including both single-arm and dual-arm robots, while demonstrating stable manipulation in previously unseen configurations.

RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation

Developing robust and general-purpose robotic manipulation policies is a key goal in the field of robotics. To achieve effective generalization, it is essential to construct comprehensive datasets that encompass a large number of demonstration trajectories and diverse tasks. Unlike vision or language data that can be collected from the Internet, robotic datasets require detailed observations and manipulation actions, necessitating significant investment in hardware-software infrastructure and human labor. While existing works have focused on assembling various individual robot datasets, there remains a lack of a unified data collection standard and insufficient diversity in tasks, scenarios, and robot types. In this paper, we introduce RoboMIND (Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot manipulation), featuring 55k real-world demonstration trajectories across 279 diverse tasks involving 61 different object classes. RoboMIND is collected through human teleoperation and encompasses comprehensive robotic-related information, including multi-view RGB-D images, proprioceptive robot state information, end effector details, and linguistic task descriptions. To ensure dataset consistency and reliability during policy learning, RoboMIND is built on a unified data collection platform and standardized protocol, covering four distinct robotic embodiments. We provide a thorough quantitative and qualitative analysis of RoboMIND across multiple dimensions, offering detailed insights into the diversity of our datasets. In our experiments, we conduct extensive real-world testing with four state-of-the-art imitation learning methods, demonstrating that training with RoboMIND data results in a high manipulation success rate and strong generalization. Our project is at https://x-humanoid-robomind.github.io/.

Lift3D Foundation Policy: Lifting 2D Large-Scale Pretrained Models for Robust 3D Robotic Manipulation

3D geometric information is essential for manipulation tasks, as robots need to perceive the 3D environment, reason about spatial relationships, and interact with intricate spatial configurations. Recent research has increasingly focused on the explicit extraction of 3D features, while still facing challenges such as the lack of large-scale robotic 3D data and the potential loss of spatial geometry. To address these limitations, we propose the Lift3D framework, which progressively enhances 2D foundation models with implicit and explicit 3D robotic representations to construct a robust 3D manipulation policy. Specifically, we first design a task-aware masked autoencoder that masks task-relevant affordance patches and reconstructs depth information, enhancing the 2D foundation model's implicit 3D robotic representation. After self-supervised fine-tuning, we introduce a 2D model-lifting strategy that establishes a positional mapping between the input 3D points and the positional embeddings of the 2D model. Based on the mapping, Lift3D utilizes the 2D foundation model to directly encode point cloud data, leveraging large-scale pretrained knowledge to construct explicit 3D robotic representations while minimizing spatial information loss. In experiments, Lift3D consistently outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods across several simulation benchmarks and real-world scenarios.

Semi-Supervised Video Desnowing Network via Temporal Decoupling Experts and Distribution-Driven Contrastive Regularization

Snow degradations present formidable challenges to the advancement of computer vision tasks by the undesirable corruption in outdoor scenarios. While current deep learning-based desnowing approaches achieve success on synthetic benchmark datasets, they struggle to restore out-of-distribution real-world snowy videos due to the deficiency of paired real-world training data. To address this bottleneck, we devise a new paradigm for video desnowing in a semi-supervised spirit to involve unlabeled real data for the generalizable snow removal. Specifically, we construct a real-world dataset with 85 snowy videos, and then present a Semi-supervised Video Desnowing Network (SemiVDN) equipped by a novel Distribution-driven Contrastive Regularization. The elaborated contrastive regularization mitigates the distribution gap between the synthetic and real data, and consequently maintains the desired snow-invariant background details. Furthermore, based on the atmospheric scattering model, we introduce a Prior-guided Temporal Decoupling Experts module to decompose the physical components that make up a snowy video in a frame-correlated manner. We evaluate our SemiVDN on benchmark datasets and the collected real snowy data. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach against state-of-the-art image- and video-level desnowing methods.

Unsupervised Low-light Image Enhancement with Lookup Tables and Diffusion Priors

Low-light image enhancement (LIE) aims at precisely and efficiently recovering an image degraded in poor illumination environments. Recent advanced LIE techniques are using deep neural networks, which require lots of low-normal light image pairs, network parameters, and computational resources. As a result, their practicality is limited. In this work, we devise a novel unsupervised LIE framework based on diffusion priors and lookup tables (DPLUT) to achieve efficient low-light image recovery. The proposed approach comprises two critical components: a light adjustment lookup table (LLUT) and a noise suppression lookup table (NLUT). LLUT is optimized with a set of unsupervised losses. It aims at predicting pixel-wise curve parameters for the dynamic range adjustment of a specific image. NLUT is designed to remove the amplified noise after the light brightens. As diffusion models are sensitive to noise, diffusion priors are introduced to achieve high-performance noise suppression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and efficiency.

Cross-conditioned Diffusion Model for Medical Image to Image Translation

Multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides rich, complementary information for analyzing diseases. However, the practical challenges of acquiring multiple MRI modalities, such as cost, scan time, and safety considerations, often result in incomplete datasets. This affects both the quality of diagnosis and the performance of deep learning models trained on such data. Recent advancements in generative adversarial networks (GANs) and denoising diffusion models have shown promise in natural and medical image-to-image translation tasks. However, the complexity of training GANs and the computational expense associated with diffusion models hinder their development and application in this task. To address these issues, we introduce a Cross-conditioned Diffusion Model (CDM) for medical image-to-image translation. The core idea of CDM is to use the distribution of target modalities as guidance to improve synthesis quality while achieving higher generation efficiency compared to conventional diffusion models. First, we propose a Modality-specific Representation Model (MRM) to model the distribution of target modalities. Then, we design a Modality-decoupled Diffusion Network (MDN) to efficiently and effectively learn the distribution from MRM. Finally, a Cross-conditioned UNet (C-UNet) with a Condition Embedding module is designed to synthesize the target modalities with the source modalities as input and the target distribution for guidance. Extensive experiments conducted on the BraTS2023 and UPenn-GBM benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

RestoreAgent: Autonomous Image Restoration Agent via Multimodal Large Language Models

Natural images captured by mobile devices often suffer from multiple types of degradation, such as noise, blur, and low light. Traditional image restoration methods require manual selection of specific tasks, algorithms, and execution sequences, which is time-consuming and may yield suboptimal results. All-in-one models, though capable of handling multiple tasks, typically support only a limited range and often produce overly smooth, low-fidelity outcomes due to their broad data distribution fitting. To address these challenges, we first define a new pipeline for restoring images with multiple degradations, and then introduce RestoreAgent, an intelligent image restoration system leveraging multimodal large language models. RestoreAgent autonomously assesses the type and extent of degradation in input images and performs restoration through (1) determining the appropriate restoration tasks, (2) optimizing the task sequence, (3) selecting the most suitable models, and (4) executing the restoration. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of RestoreAgent in handling complex degradation, surpassing human experts. Furthermore, the system modular design facilitates the fast integration of new tasks and models, enhancing its flexibility and scalability for various applications.