DRScaffold: Boosting Dense-Scene Reasoning in Lightweight Vision Language Models

Lightweight vision-language models perform competitively on standard benchmarks yet fail systematically in dense-scene reasoning, where multiple objects, attributes, and relations must be jointly grounded and resolved through multi-step inference. Such capability is critical for real-world applications where models must reliably interpret cluttered environments. Yet existing training signals provide no explicit grounding between reasoning steps and the underlying visual entities and relations, leaving lightweight models free to generate fluent but visually unanchored reasoning chains. To address this gap, we first introduce DRBench, a benchmark of 14,573 questions across 2,943 images, organized into five task categories spanning three progressive reasoning layers. Building on DRBench, we propose DRScaffold, a supervised fine-tuning framework that decomposes the supervision target into four causally ordered stages, enforcing grounded reasoning without architectural modification. Experiments on three lightweight VLMs demonstrate substantial gains on DRBench while preserving or improving performance on general-purpose benchmarks. Notably, Qwen2.5-VL-3B trained with DRScaffold surpasses the frozen Qwen2.5-VL-32B on DRBench, demonstrating that structured supervision can substitute for a significant portion of model scale in dense-scene reasoning. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/irene-shi/DRScaffold .

QuantSR+: Pushing the Limit of Quantized Image Super-Resolution Networks

Low-bit quantization is widely used to compress super-resolution (SR) models and reduce storage and computation costs for deployment on resource-limited devices. However, when SR models are pushed to ultra-low precision (2-4 bits), performance can drop sharply due to diminished representational capacity and the detail-sensitive nature of SR. To address these issues, we propose QuantSR+, a unified framework that improves quantization operators, network design, and training optimization, achieving better trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency than prior low-bit SR methods. QuantSR+ mainly relies on three technical contributions: (1) Redistribution-driven Bit Determination (RBD), which reshapes quantization distributions in both forward and backward passes to preserve representation fidelity; (2) Quantized Slimmable Architecture (QSA), which begins with an over-parameterized model and progressively prunes less critical blocks to meet efficiency budgets while pushing the accuracy performance; and (3) Slimming-guided Function-localized Distillation (SFD), which enforces block-aware feature alignment via a direct loss and a progressive, function-local training schedule to capture quantization effects better and speed up convergence. Extensive experiments show that QuantSR+ achieves state-of-the-art performance against both specialized quantized SR methods and generic quantization approaches. For SwinIR-S on Urban100 (x4), it improves PSNR by 0.29 dB over the 2-bit SOTA baseline. Meanwhile, it delivers strong efficiency gains at 2-bit, reducing operations by up to 87.9% and storage by 89.4%. QuantSR+ is effective for both convolutional and transformer-based SR models, indicating broad applicability.

VDFP: Video Deflickering with Flicker-banding Priors

Capturing digital screens with smartphones frequently induces severe banding due to hardware synchronization mismatches. Existing video restoration methods struggle with these structured, periodic luminance fluctuations, often resulting in residual artifacts or over-smoothed textures. We firstly construct DeViD, a real-world dataset in various scenes to deal with the lack of available datasets. Then we propose VDFP (Video Deflickering with Flicker-banding Priors), a novel perception-guided generation framework. First, we introduce a Degradation Field Modeling Based on Rolling Shutter Mechanism (DFM) capable of synthesizing complex multi-banding scenarios. Second, we present a spatial-temporal continuous prior perception (CPP). Unlike traditional binary segmentation, this module is optimized via a Flicker-Aware Mean Squared Error (FA-MSE) to capture the luminance transitions. By zero-initializing an augmented input layer, our model preserves pre-trained generative priors as well as spatial-temporal prior perception. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VDFP significantly outperforms other methods, eliminating complex banding with high-fidelity spatial details and temporal consistency. Our dataset and code will be released at https://github.com/ZhiyiZZhou/VDFP.

PRISM: Prior Rectification and Uncertainty-Aware Structure Modeling for Diffusion-Based Text Image Super-Resolution

Text image super-resolution (Text-SR) requires more than visually plausible detail synthesis: slight errors in stroke topology may alter character identity and break readability. Existing methods improve text fidelity with stronger recognition-based or generative priors, yet they still face two unresolved challenges under severe degradation: the text condition extracted from low-quality inputs can itself be unreliable, and a plausible global prior does not fully determine fine-grained stroke boundaries. We present PRISM, a single-step diffusion-based Text-SR framework that addresses these two challenges through Flow-Matching Prior Rectification (FMPR) and a Structure-guided Uncertainty-aware Residual Encoder (SURE). FMPR constructs a privileged training-time prior from paired low-quality/high-quality latents and learns a flow matching that transports degraded embeddings toward this restoration-oriented prior space, yielding more accurate and reliable global text guidance. SURE further predicts uncertainty-aware structural residuals to selectively absorb reliable local boundary evidence while suppressing ambiguous stroke cues. Together, these components enable explicit global prior rectification and local structure refinement within a single diffusion restoration pass. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that PRISM achieves state-of-the-art performance with millisecond-level inference. Our dataset and code will be available at https://github.com/faithxuz/PRISM.

PVRF: All-in-one Adverse Weather Removal via Prior-modulated and Velocity-constrained Rectified Flow

Adverse weather removal (AWR) in real-world images remains challenging due to heterogeneous and unseen degradations, while distortion-driven training often yields overly smooth results. We propose PVRF, a unified framework that integrates zero-shot soft weather perceptions with velocity-constrained rectified-flow refinement. PVRF introduces an AWR-specific question answering module (AWR-QA) that uses frozen vision--language models (VLMs) to estimate soft probabilities of weather types and low-level attribute scores. These perceptions condition restoration networks via attribute-modulated normalization (AMN) and weather-weighted adapters (WWA), producing an anchor estimate for refinement. We then learn a terminal-consistent residual rectified flow with perception-adaptive source perturbation and a terminal-consistent velocity parameterization to stabilize learning near the terminal regime. Extensive experiments show that PVRF improves both fidelity and perceptual quality over state-of-the-art baselines, with strong cross-dataset generalization on single and combined degradations. Code will be released at https://github.com/dongw22/PVRF.

DiffST: Spatiotemporal-Aware Diffusion for Real-World Space-Time Video Super-Resolution

Diffusion-based models have shown strong performance in video super-resolution (VSR) and video frame interpolation (VFI). However, their role in the coupled space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) setting remains limited. Existing diffusion-based STVSR approaches suffer from two issues: (1) low inference efficiency and (2) insufficient utilization of spatiotemporal information. These limitations impede deployment. To address these issues, we introduce DiffST, an efficient spatiotemporal-aware video diffusion framework for real-world STVSR. To improve efficiency, we adapt a pre-trained diffusion model for one-step sampling and process the entire video directly rather than operating on individual frames. Furthermore, to enhance spatiotemporal information utilization, we introduce cross-frame context aggregation (CFCA) and video representation guidance (VRG). The CFCA module aggregates information across multiple keyframes to produce intermediate frames. The VRG module extracts video-level global features to guide the diffusion process. Extensive experiments show that DiffST obtains leading results on real-world STVSR tasks. It also maintains high inference efficiency, running about 17$\times$ faster than previous diffusion-based STVSR methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/zhengchen1999/DiffST.

SOAR: Scale Optimization for Accurate Reconstruction in NVFP4 Quantization

NVFP4 has recently emerged as an efficient 4-bit microscaling format for large language models (LLMs), offering superior numerical fidelity with native hardware support. However, existing methods often yield suboptimal performance due to inflexible scale selection and the coupled treatment of quantization and dequantization scales. To address these issues, we propose Scale Optimization for Accurate Reconstruction (SOAR), a novel post-training quantization framework that improves the accuracy of NVFP4 quantization. At its core, SOAR features Closed-form Joint Scale Optimization (CJSO), which jointly optimizes global and block-wise scales via analytical solutions derived from reconstruction error minimization. Furthermore, it incorporates Decoupled Scale Search (DSS). DSS decouples the high-precision quantization scale from its constrained dequantization counterpart, and performs discrete search to mitigate precision loss from scale quantization. Extensive experiments across multiple LLMs show that our method consistently outperforms existing NVFP4 quantization baselines, achieving superior accuracy under the same memory footprint with no additional hardware overhead. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/steven-bao1/SOAR.

G$^2$TR: Generation-Guided Visual Token Reduction for Separate-Encoder Unified Multimodal Models

The development of separate-encoder Unified multimodal models (UMMs) comes with a rapidly growing inference cost due to dense visual token processing. In this paper, we focus on understanding-side visual token reduction for improving the efficiency of separate-encoder UMMs. While this topic has been widely studied for MLLMs, existing methods typically rely on attention scores, text-image similarity and so on, implicitly assuming that the final objective is discriminative reasoning. This assumption does not hold for UMMs, where understanding-side visual tokens must also preserve the model's capabilities for editing images. We propose G$^2$TR, a generation-guided visual token reduction framework for separate-encoder UMMs. Our key insight is that the generation branch provides a task-agnostic signal for identifying understanding-side visual tokens that are not only semantically relevant but also important for latent-space image reconstruction and generation. G$^2$TR estimates token importance from consistency with VAE latent, performs balanced token selection, and merges redundant tokens into retained representatives to reduce information loss. The method is training-free, plug-and-play, and applied only after the understanding encoding stage, making it compatible with existing UMM inference pipelines. Experiments on image understanding and editing benchmarks show that G$^2$TR substantially reduces visual tokens and prefill computation by 1.94x while maintaining both reasoning accuracy and editing quality, outperforming baselines on almost all benchmarks.

PermuQuant: Lowering Per-Group Quantization Error by Reordering Channels for Diffusion Models

Large-scale visual generative models have achieved remarkable performance. However, their high computational and memory costs make deployment challenging in resource-constrained scenarios, such as interactive applications and personal single-GPU usage. Post-training quantization (PTQ) offers a practical solution by compressing pretrained models without expensive retraining. However, existing PTQ methods still suffer from severe quality degradation under extremely low-bit settings. In this paper, we identify channel ordering as an important but underexplored factor in per-group quantization. In this setting, each contiguous group shares one quantization scale. When channels with very different statistics are placed in the same group, the scale can be dominated by outliers and cause large quantization errors. Based on this observation, we propose PermuQuant, a simple and effective PTQ framework for low-bit diffusion models. PermuQuant sorts channels by a joint second-moment criterion before per-group quantization, placing channels with similar activation and weight statistics into the same group. It further uses a calibration-based acceptance rule to apply reordering only when the selected permutation reduces quantization error on calibration data. The selected permutations are absorbed into adjacent modules or applied to weights offline, avoiding explicit runtime permutation operations. Extensive experiments on multiple large diffusion models show that PermuQuant consistently reduces quantization error and outperforms existing PTQ baselines. On FLUX.1-dev with an RTX 5090, PermuQuant achieves up to a 1.8$\times$ single step speedup and reduces the DiT memory footprint by 3.5$\times$ under W4A4 NVFP4 quantization. Code will be available at https://github.com/yscheng04/PermuQuant.

The First Challenge on Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution at NTIRE 2026: Benchmark Results and Method Overview

This paper presents the NTIRE 2026 Remote Sensing Infrared Image Super-Resolution (x4) Challenge, one of the associated challenges of NTIRE 2026. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) infrared images from low-resolution (LR) inputs generated through bicubic downsampling with a x4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective models or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art performance for infrared image SR in remote sensing scenarios. To reflect the characteristics of infrared data and practical application needs, the challenge adopts a single-track setting. A total of 115 participants registered for the competition, with 13 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, dataset, evaluation protocol, main results, and the representative methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance research in infrared image super-resolution and promote the development of effective solutions for real-world remote sensing applications.