Reinforced Rate Control for Neural Video Compression via Inter-Frame Rate-Distortion Awareness

Neural video compression (NVC) has demonstrated superior compression efficiency, yet effective rate control remains a significant challenge due to complex temporal dependencies. Existing rate control schemes typically leverage frame content to capture distortion interactions, overlooking inter-frame rate dependencies arising from shifts in per-frame coding parameters. This often leads to suboptimal bitrate allocation and cascading parameter decisions. To address this, we propose a reinforcement-learning (RL)-based rate control framework that formulates the task as a frame-by-frame sequential decision process. At each frame, an RL agent observes a spatiotemporal state and selects coding parameters to optimize a long-term reward that reflects rate-distortion (R-D) performance and bitrate adherence. Unlike prior methods, our approach jointly determines bitrate allocation and coding parameters in a single step, independent of group of pictures (GOP) structure. Extensive experiments across diverse NVC architectures show that our method reduces the average relative bitrate error to 1.20% and achieves up to 13.45% bitrate savings at typical GOP sizes, outperforming existing approaches. In addition, our framework demonstrates improved robustness to content variation and bandwidth fluctuations with lower coding overhead, making it highly suitable for practical deployment.

ResTok: Learning Hierarchical Residuals in 1D Visual Tokenizers for Autoregressive Image Generation

Existing 1D visual tokenizers for autoregressive (AR) generation largely follow the design principles of language modeling, as they are built directly upon transformers whose priors originate in language, yielding single-hierarchy latent tokens and treating visual data as flat sequential token streams. However, this language-like formulation overlooks key properties of vision, particularly the hierarchical and residual network designs that have long been essential for convergence and efficiency in visual models. To bring "vision" back to vision, we propose the Residual Tokenizer (ResTok), a 1D visual tokenizer that builds hierarchical residuals for both image tokens and latent tokens. The hierarchical representations obtained through progressively merging enable cross-level feature fusion at each layer, substantially enhancing representational capacity. Meanwhile, the semantic residuals between hierarchies prevent information overlap, yielding more concentrated latent distributions that are easier for AR modeling. Cross-level bindings consequently emerge without any explicit constraints. To accelerate the generation process, we further introduce a hierarchical AR generator that substantially reduces sampling steps by predicting an entire level of latent tokens at once rather than generating them strictly token-by-token. Extensive experiments demonstrate that restoring hierarchical residual priors in visual tokenization significantly improves AR image generation, achieving a gFID of 2.34 on ImageNet-256 with only 9 sampling steps. Code is available at https://github.com/Kwai-Kolors/ResTok.

YODA: Yet Another One-step Diffusion-based Video Compressor

While one-step diffusion models have recently excelled in perceptual image compression, their application to video remains limited. Prior efforts typically rely on pretrained 2D autoencoders that generate per-frame latent representations independently, thereby neglecting temporal dependencies. We present YODA--Yet Another One-step Diffusion-based Video Compressor--which embeds multiscale features from temporal references for both latent generation and latent coding to better exploit spatial-temporal correlations for more compact representation, and employs a linear Diffusion Transformer (DiT) for efficient one-step denoising. YODA achieves state-of-the-art perceptual performance, consistently outperforming traditional and deep-learning baselines on LPIPS, DISTS, FID, and KID. Source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/YODA.

Neural B-frame Video Compression with Bi-directional Reference Harmonization

Neural video compression (NVC) has made significant progress in recent years, while neural B-frame video compression (NBVC) remains underexplored compared to P-frame compression. NBVC can adopt bi-directional reference frames for better compression performance. However, NBVC's hierarchical coding may complicate continuous temporal prediction, especially at some hierarchical levels with a large frame span, which could cause the contribution of the two reference frames to be unbalanced. To optimize reference information utilization, we propose a novel NBVC method, termed Bi-directional Reference Harmonization Video Compression (BRHVC), with the proposed Bi-directional Motion Converge (BMC) and Bi-directional Contextual Fusion (BCF). BMC converges multiple optical flows in motion compression, leading to more accurate motion compensation on a larger scale. Then BCF explicitly models the weights of reference contexts under the guidance of motion compensation accuracy. With more efficient motions and contexts, BRHVC can effectively harmonize bi-directional references. Experimental results indicate that our BRHVC outperforms previous state-of-the-art NVC methods, even surpassing the traditional coding, VTM-RA (under random access configuration), on the HEVC datasets. The source code is released at https://github.com/kwai/NVC.

WIPES: Wavelet-based Visual Primitives

Pursuing a continuous visual representation that offers flexible frequency modulation and fast rendering speed has recently garnered increasing attention in the fields of 3D vision and graphics. However, existing representations often rely on frequency guidance or complex neural network decoding, leading to spectrum loss or slow rendering. To address these limitations, we propose WIPES, a universal Wavelet-based vIsual PrimitivES for representing multi-dimensional visual signals. Building on the spatial-frequency localization advantages of wavelets, WIPES effectively captures both the low-frequency "forest" and the high-frequency "trees." Additionally, we develop a wavelet-based differentiable rasterizer to achieve fast visual rendering. Experimental results on various visual tasks, including 2D image representation, 5D static and 6D dynamic novel view synthesis, demonstrate that WIPES, as a visual primitive, offers higher rendering quality and faster inference than INR-based methods, and outperforms Gaussian-based representations in rendering quality.

Perception-Oriented Latent Coding for High-Performance Compressed Domain Semantic Inference

In recent years, compressed domain semantic inference has primarily relied on learned image coding models optimized for mean squared error (MSE). However, MSE-oriented optimization tends to yield latent spaces with limited semantic richness, which hinders effective semantic inference in downstream tasks. Moreover, achieving high performance with these models often requires fine-tuning the entire vision model, which is computationally intensive, especially for large models. To address these problems, we introduce Perception-Oriented Latent Coding (POLC), an approach that enriches the semantic content of latent features for high-performance compressed domain semantic inference. With the semantically rich latent space, POLC requires only a plug-and-play adapter for fine-tuning, significantly reducing the parameter count compared to previous MSE-oriented methods. Experimental results demonstrate that POLC achieves rate-perception performance comparable to state-of-the-art generative image coding methods while markedly enhancing performance in vision tasks, with minimal fine-tuning overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/NJUVISION/POLC.

Depth-Guided Bundle Sampling for Efficient Generalizable Neural Radiance Field Reconstruction

Recent advancements in generalizable novel view synthesis have achieved impressive quality through interpolation between nearby views. However, rendering high-resolution images remains computationally intensive due to the need for dense sampling of all rays. Recognizing that natural scenes are typically piecewise smooth and sampling all rays is often redundant, we propose a novel depth-guided bundle sampling strategy to accelerate rendering. By grouping adjacent rays into a bundle and sampling them collectively, a shared representation is generated for decoding all rays within the bundle. To further optimize efficiency, our adaptive sampling strategy dynamically allocates samples based on depth confidence, concentrating more samples in complex regions while reducing them in smoother areas. When applied to ENeRF, our method achieves up to a 1.27 dB PSNR improvement and a 47% increase in FPS on the DTU dataset. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art rendering quality and up to 2x faster rendering compared to existing generalizable methods. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/GDB-NeRF.

GoLF-NRT: Integrating Global Context and Local Geometry for Few-Shot View Synthesis

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) have transformed novel view synthesis by modeling scene-specific volumetric representations directly from images. While generalizable NeRF models can generate novel views across unknown scenes by learning latent ray representations, their performance heavily depends on a large number of multi-view observations. However, with limited input views, these methods experience significant degradation in rendering quality. To address this limitation, we propose GoLF-NRT: a Global and Local feature Fusion-based Neural Rendering Transformer. GoLF-NRT enhances generalizable neural rendering from few input views by leveraging a 3D transformer with efficient sparse attention to capture global scene context. In parallel, it integrates local geometric features extracted along the epipolar line, enabling high-quality scene reconstruction from as few as 1 to 3 input views. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive sampling strategy based on attention weights and kernel regression, improving the accuracy of transformer-based neural rendering. Extensive experiments on public datasets show that GoLF-NRT achieves state-of-the-art performance across varying numbers of input views, highlighting the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/KLMAV-CUC/GoLF-NRT.

3D Gaussian Adaptive Reconstruction for Fourier Light-Field Microscopy

Compared to light-field microscopy (LFM), which enables high-speed volumetric imaging but suffers from non-uniform spatial sampling, Fourier light-field microscopy (FLFM) introduces sub-aperture division at the pupil plane, thereby ensuring spatially invariant sampling and enhancing spatial resolution. Conventional FLFM reconstruction methods, such as Richardson-Lucy (RL) deconvolution, exhibit poor axial resolution and signal degradation due to the ill-posed nature of the inverse problem. While data-driven approaches enhance spatial resolution by leveraging high-quality paired datasets or imposing structural priors, Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF)-based methods employ physics-informed self-supervised learning to overcome these limitations, yet they are hindered by substantial computational costs and memory demands. Therefore, we propose 3D Gaussian Adaptive Tomography (3DGAT) for FLFM, a 3D gaussian splatting based self-supervised learning framework that significantly improves the volumetric reconstruction quality of FLFM while maintaining computational efficiency. Experimental results indicate that our approach achieves higher resolution and improved reconstruction accuracy, highlighting its potential to advance FLFM imaging and broaden its applications in 3D optical microscopy.

Efficient LiDAR Reflectance Compression via Scanning Serialization

Reflectance attributes in LiDAR point clouds provide essential information for downstream tasks but remain underexplored in neural compression methods. To address this, we introduce SerLiC, a serialization-based neural compression framework to fully exploit the intrinsic characteristics of LiDAR reflectance. SerLiC first transforms 3D LiDAR point clouds into 1D sequences via scan-order serialization, offering a device-centric perspective for reflectance analysis. Each point is then tokenized into a contextual representation comprising its sensor scanning index, radial distance, and prior reflectance, for effective dependencies exploration. For efficient sequential modeling, Mamba is incorporated with a dual parallelization scheme, enabling simultaneous autoregressive dependency capture and fast processing. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SerLiC attains over 2x volume reduction against the original reflectance data, outperforming the state-of-the-art method by up to 22% reduction of compressed bits while using only 2% of its parameters. Moreover, a lightweight version of SerLiC achieves > 10 fps (frames per second) with just 111K parameters, which is attractive for real-world applications.