Daily Papers

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) provides all-weather, high-resolution imaging capabilities, but its unique imaging mechanism often requires expert interpretation, limiting its widespread applicability. Translating SAR images into more easily recognizable optical images using diffusion models helps address this challenge. However, diffusion models suffer from high latency due to numerous iterative inferences, while Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) can achieve image translation with just a single iteration but often at the cost of image quality. To overcome these issues, we propose a new training framework for SAR-to-optical image translation that combines the strengths of both approaches. Our method employs consistency distillation to reduce iterative inference steps and integrates adversarial learning to ensure image clarity and minimize color shifts. Additionally, our approach allows for a trade-off between quality and speed, providing flexibility based on application requirements. We conducted experiments on SEN12 and GF3 datasets, performing quantitative evaluations using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Frechet Inception Distance (FID), as well as calculating the inference latency. The results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves inference speed by 131 times while maintaining the visual quality of the generated images, thus offering a robust and efficient solution for SAR-to-optical image translation.

Among the various generative adversarial network (GAN)-based image inpainting methods, a coarse-to-fine network with a contextual attention module (CAM) has shown remarkable performance. However, owing to two stacked generative networks, the coarse-to-fine network needs numerous computational resources such as convolution operations and network parameters, which result in low speed. To address this problem, we propose a novel network architecture called PEPSI: parallel extended-decoder path for semantic inpainting network, which aims at reducing the hardware costs and improving the inpainting performance. PEPSI consists of a single shared encoding network and parallel decoding networks called coarse and inpainting paths. The coarse path produces a preliminary inpainting result to train the encoding network for the prediction of features for the CAM. Simultaneously, the inpainting path generates higher inpainting quality using the refined features reconstructed via the CAM. In addition, we propose Diet-PEPSI that significantly reduces the network parameters while maintaining the performance. In Diet-PEPSI, to capture the global contextual information with low hardware costs, we propose novel rate-adaptive dilated convolutional layers, which employ the common weights but produce dynamic features depending on the given dilation rates. Extensive experiments comparing the performance with state-of-the-art image inpainting methods demonstrate that both PEPSI and Diet-PEPSI improve the qualitative scores, i.e. the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM), as well as significantly reduce hardware costs such as computational time and the number of network parameters.

Novel view synthesis from unconstrained in-the-wild image collections remains a significant yet challenging task due to photometric variations and transient occluders that complicate accurate scene reconstruction. Previous methods have approached these issues by integrating per-image appearance features embeddings in Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). Although 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) offers faster training and real-time rendering, adapting it for unconstrained image collections is non-trivial due to the substantially different architecture. In this paper, we introduce Splatfacto-W, an approach that integrates per-Gaussian neural color features and per-image appearance embeddings into the rasterization process, along with a spherical harmonics-based background model to represent varying photometric appearances and better depict backgrounds. Our key contributions include latent appearance modeling, efficient transient object handling, and precise background modeling. Splatfacto-W delivers high-quality, real-time novel view synthesis with improved scene consistency in in-the-wild scenarios. Our method improves the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) by an average of 5.3 dB compared to 3DGS, enhances training speed by 150 times compared to NeRF-based methods, and achieves a similar rendering speed to 3DGS. Additional video results and code integrated into Nerfstudio are available at https://kevinxu02.github.io/splatfactow/.

In this research, we explore different ways to improve generative adversarial networks for video super-resolution tasks from a base single image super-resolution GAN model. Our primary objective is to identify potential techniques that enhance these models and to analyze which of these techniques yield the most significant improvements. We evaluate our results using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). Our findings indicate that the most effective techniques include temporal smoothing, long short-term memory (LSTM) layers, and a temporal loss function. The integration of these methods results in an 11.97% improvement in PSNR and an 8% improvement in SSIM compared to the baseline video super-resolution generative adversarial network (GAN) model. This substantial improvement suggests potential further applications to enhance current state-of-the-art models.

In this study, we propose an enhanced image restoration model, SUPIR, based on the integration of two low-rank adaptive (LoRA) modules with the Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) framework. Our method leverages the advantages of LoRA to fine-tune SDXL models, thereby significantly improving image restoration quality and efficiency. We collect 2600 high-quality real-world images, each with detailed descriptive text, for training the model. The proposed method is evaluated on standard benchmarks and achieves excellent performance, demonstrated by higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), lower learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS), and higher structural similarity index measurement (SSIM) scores. These results underscore the effectiveness of combining LoRA with SDXL for advanced image restoration tasks, highlighting the potential of our approach in generating high-fidelity restored images.

Recently, learning-based models have enhanced the performance of single-image super-resolution (SISR). However, applying SISR successively to each video frame leads to a lack of temporal coherency. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) outperform traditional approaches in terms of image quality metrics such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity (SSIM). However, generative adversarial networks (GANs) offer a competitive advantage by being able to mitigate the issue of a lack of finer texture details, usually seen with CNNs when super-resolving at large upscaling factors. We present iSeeBetter, a novel GAN-based spatio-temporal approach to video super-resolution (VSR) that renders temporally consistent super-resolution videos. iSeeBetter extracts spatial and temporal information from the current and neighboring frames using the concept of recurrent back-projection networks as its generator. Furthermore, to improve the "naturality" of the super-resolved image while eliminating artifacts seen with traditional algorithms, we utilize the discriminator from super-resolution generative adversarial network (SRGAN). Although mean squared error (MSE) as a primary loss-minimization objective improves PSNR/SSIM, these metrics may not capture fine details in the image resulting in misrepresentation of perceptual quality. To address this, we use a four-fold (MSE, perceptual, adversarial, and total-variation (TV)) loss function. Our results demonstrate that iSeeBetter offers superior VSR fidelity and surpasses state-of-the-art performance.

Learned Image Compression (LIC) has shown remarkable progress in recent years. Existing works commonly employ CNN-based or self-attention-based modules as transform methods for compression. However, there is no prior research on neural transform that focuses on specific regions. In response, we introduce the class-agnostic segmentation masks (i.e. semantic masks without category labels) for extracting region-adaptive contextual information. Our proposed module, Region-Adaptive Transform, applies adaptive convolutions on different regions guided by the masks. Additionally, we introduce a plug-and-play module named Scale Affine Layer to incorporate rich contexts from various regions. While there have been prior image compression efforts that involve segmentation masks as additional intermediate inputs, our approach differs significantly from them. Our advantages lie in that, to avoid extra bitrate overhead, we treat these masks as privilege information, which is accessible during the model training stage but not required during the inference phase. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to employ class-agnostic masks as privilege information and achieve superior performance in pixel-fidelity metrics, such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). The experimental results demonstrate our improvement compared to previously well-performing methods, with about 8.2% bitrate saving compared to VTM-17.0. The source code is available at https://github.com/GityuxiLiu/SegPIC-for-Image-Compression.

Implicit neural representations (INRs) use neural networks to provide continuous and resolution-independent representations of complex signals with a small number of parameters. However, existing INR models often fail to capture important frequency components specific to each task. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a Fourier Kolmogorov Arnold network (FKAN) for INRs. The proposed FKAN utilizes learnable activation functions modeled as Fourier series in the first layer to effectively control and learn the task-specific frequency components. In addition, the activation functions with learnable Fourier coefficients improve the ability of the network to capture complex patterns and details, which is beneficial for high-resolution and high-dimensional data. Experimental results show that our proposed FKAN model outperforms three state-of-the-art baseline schemes, and improves the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM) for the image representation task and intersection over union (IoU) for the 3D occupancy volume representation task, respectively.

Image research has shown substantial attention in deblurring networks in recent years. Yet, their practical usage in real-world deblurring, especially motion blur, remains limited due to the lack of pixel-aligned training triplets (background, blurred image, and blur heat map) and restricted information inherent in blurred images. This paper presents a simple yet efficient framework to synthetic and restore motion blur images using Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data. Notably, the framework includes a strategy for training triplet generation, and a Gyroscope-Aided Motion Deblurring (GAMD) network for blurred image restoration. The rationale is that through harnessing IMU data, we can determine the transformation of the camera pose during the image exposure phase, facilitating the deduction of the motion trajectory (aka. blur trajectory) for each point inside the three-dimensional space. Thus, the synthetic triplets using our strategy are inherently close to natural motion blur, strictly pixel-aligned, and mass-producible. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed framework: only two-pixel errors between our synthetic and real-world blur trajectories, a marked improvement (around 33.17%) of the state-of-the-art deblurring method MIMO on Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR).

Radio-frequency coverage maps (RF maps) are extensively utilized in wireless networks for capacity planning, placement of access points and base stations, localization, and coverage estimation. Conducting site surveys to obtain RF maps is labor-intensive and sometimes not feasible. In this paper, we propose radio-frequency adversarial deep-learning inference for automated network coverage estimation (RADIANCE), a generative adversarial network (GAN) based approach for synthesizing RF maps in indoor scenarios. RADIANCE utilizes a semantic map, a high-level representation of the indoor environment to encode spatial relationships and attributes of objects within the environment and guide the RF map generation process. We introduce a new gradient-based loss function that computes the magnitude and direction of change in received signal strength (RSS) values from a point within the environment. RADIANCE incorporates this loss function along with the antenna pattern to capture signal propagation within a given indoor configuration and generate new patterns under new configuration, antenna (beam) pattern, and center frequency. Extensive simulations are conducted to compare RADIANCE with ray-tracing simulations of RF maps. Our results show that RADIANCE achieves a mean average error (MAE) of 0.09, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.29, peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 10.78, and multi-scale structural similarity index (MS-SSIM) of 0.80.

Novel view synthesis (NVS) enables to generate new images of a scene or convert a set of 2D images into a comprehensive 3D model. In the context of Space Domain Awareness, since space is becoming increasingly congested, NVS can accurately map space objects and debris, improving the safety and efficiency of space operations. Similarly, in Rendezvous and Proximity Operations missions, 3D models can provide details about a target object's shape, size, and orientation, allowing for better planning and prediction of the target's behavior. In this work, we explore the generalization abilities of these reconstruction techniques, aiming to avoid the necessity of retraining for each new scene, by presenting a novel approach to 3D spacecraft reconstruction from single-view images, DreamSat, by fine-tuning the Zero123 XL, a state-of-the-art single-view reconstruction model, on a high-quality dataset of 190 high-quality spacecraft models and integrating it into the DreamGaussian framework. We demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction quality across multiple metrics, including Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) score (+0.33%), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) (+2.53%), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) (+2.38%), and Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) (+0.16%) on a test set of 30 previously unseen spacecraft images. Our method addresses the lack of domain-specific 3D reconstruction tools in the space industry by leveraging state-of-the-art diffusion models and 3D Gaussian splatting techniques. This approach maintains the efficiency of the DreamGaussian framework while enhancing the accuracy and detail of spacecraft reconstructions. The code for this work can be accessed on GitHub (https://github.com/ARCLab-MIT/space-nvs).

In recent years, deep generative models, such as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), has grabbed significant attention in the field of computer vision. This project focuses on the application of GAN in image deblurring with the aim of generating clearer images from blurry inputs caused by factors such as motion blur. However, traditional image restoration techniques have limitations in handling complex blurring patterns. Hence, a GAN-based framework is proposed as a solution to generate high-quality deblurred images. The project defines a GAN model in Tensorflow and trains it with GoPRO dataset. The Generator will intake blur images directly to create fake images to convince the Discriminator which will receive clear images at the same time and distinguish between the real image and the fake image. After obtaining the trained parameters, the model was used to deblur motion-blur images taken in daily life as well as testing set for validation. The result shows that the pretrained network of GAN can obtain sharper pixels in image, achieving an average of 29.3 Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and 0.72 Structural Similarity Assessment (SSIM). This help to effectively address the challenges posed by image blurring, leading to the generation of visually pleasing and sharp images. By exploiting the adversarial learning framework, the proposed approach enhances the potential for real-world applications in image restoration.

Unsupervised denoising is a crucial challenge in real-world imaging applications. Unsupervised deep-learning methods have demonstrated impressive performance on benchmarks based on synthetic noise. However, no metrics are available to evaluate these methods in an unsupervised fashion. This is highly problematic for the many practical applications where ground-truth clean images are not available. In this work, we propose two novel metrics: the unsupervised mean squared error (MSE) and the unsupervised peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), which are computed using only noisy data. We provide a theoretical analysis of these metrics, showing that they are asymptotically consistent estimators of the supervised MSE and PSNR. Controlled numerical experiments with synthetic noise confirm that they provide accurate approximations in practice. We validate our approach on real-world data from two imaging modalities: videos in raw format and transmission electron microscopy. Our results demonstrate that the proposed metrics enable unsupervised evaluation of denoising methods based exclusively on noisy data.

In speech enhancement and source separation, signal-to-noise ratio is a ubiquitous objective measure of denoising/separation quality. A decade ago, the BSS_eval toolkit was developed to give researchers worldwide a way to evaluate the quality of their algorithms in a simple, fair, and hopefully insightful way: it attempted to account for channel variations, and to not only evaluate the total distortion in the estimated signal but also split it in terms of various factors such as remaining interference, newly added artifacts, and channel errors. In recent years, hundreds of papers have been relying on this toolkit to evaluate their proposed methods and compare them to previous works, often arguing that differences on the order of 0.1 dB proved the effectiveness of a method over others. We argue here that the signal-to-distortion ratio (SDR) implemented in the BSS_eval toolkit has generally been improperly used and abused, especially in the case of single-channel separation, resulting in misleading results. We propose to use a slightly modified definition, resulting in a simpler, more robust measure, called scale-invariant SDR (SI-SDR). We present various examples of critical failure of the original SDR that SI-SDR overcomes.

In recent times, the need for effective super-resolution (SR) techniques has surged, especially for large-scale images ranging 2K to 8K resolutions. For DNN-based SISR, decomposing images into overlapping patches is typically necessary due to computational constraints. In such patch-decomposing scheme, one can allocate computational resources differently based on each patch's difficulty to further improve efficiency while maintaining SR performance. However, this approach has a limitation: computational resources is uniformly allocated within a patch, leading to lower efficiency when the patch contain pixels with varying levels of restoration difficulty. To address the issue, we propose the Pixel-level Classifier for Single Image Super-Resolution (PCSR), a novel method designed to distribute computational resources adaptively at the pixel level. A PCSR model comprises a backbone, a pixel-level classifier, and a set of pixel-level upsamplers with varying capacities. The pixel-level classifier assigns each pixel to an appropriate upsampler based on its restoration difficulty, thereby optimizing computational resource usage. Our method allows for performance and computational cost balance during inference without re-training. Our experiments demonstrate PCSR's advantage over existing patch-distributing methods in PSNR-FLOP trade-offs across different backbone models and benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/3587jjh/PCSR.

Although there have been significant advances in the field of image restoration recently, the system complexity of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods is increasing as well, which may hinder the convenient analysis and comparison of methods. In this paper, we propose a simple baseline that exceeds the SOTA methods and is computationally efficient. To further simplify the baseline, we reveal that the nonlinear activation functions, e.g. Sigmoid, ReLU, GELU, Softmax, etc. are not necessary: they could be replaced by multiplication or removed. Thus, we derive a Nonlinear Activation Free Network, namely NAFNet, from the baseline. SOTA results are achieved on various challenging benchmarks, e.g. 33.69 dB PSNR on GoPro (for image deblurring), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.38 dB with only 8.4% of its computational costs; 40.30 dB PSNR on SIDD (for image denoising), exceeding the previous SOTA 0.28 dB with less than half of its computational costs. The code and the pre-trained models are released at https://github.com/megvii-research/NAFNet.

Binary black holes are one of the important sources for the TianQin gravitational wave project. Our research has revealed that, for TianQin, the signal-to-noise ratio of inspiral binary black holes can be computed analytically. This finding is expected to greatly simplify the estimation of detection capabilities for binary black holes. In this paper, we demonstrated the signal-to-noise ratio relationships from stellar-mass black holes to massive black holes. With the all-sky average condition, the signal-to-noise ratio for most binary black hole signals can be determined with a relative error of lesssim10%, with notable deviations only for chirp masses near 1000~M_odot. In contrast, the signal-to-noise ratio without the average includes an additional term, which we refer to as the response factor. Although this term is not easily calculated analytically, we provide a straightforward estimation method with an error margin of 1sigma within 2\%.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have shown dominant performance in the task of super-resolution (SR). However, their heavy memory cost and computation overhead significantly restrict their practical deployments on resource-limited devices, which mainly arise from the floating-point storage and operations between weights and activations. Although previous endeavors mainly resort to fixed-point operations, quantizing both weights and activations with fixed coding lengths may cause significant performance drop, especially on low bits. Specifically, most state-of-the-art SR models without batch normalization have a large dynamic quantization range, which also serves as another cause of performance drop. To address these two issues, we propose a new quantization scheme termed PArameterized Max Scale (PAMS), which applies the trainable truncated parameter to explore the upper bound of the quantization range adaptively. Finally, a structured knowledge transfer (SKT) loss is introduced to fine-tune the quantized network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PAMS scheme can well compress and accelerate the existing SR models such as EDSR and RDN. Notably, 8-bit PAMS-EDSR improves PSNR on Set5 benchmark from 32.095dB to 32.124dB with 2.42times compression ratio, which achieves a new state-of-the-art.

Lossy image compression aims to represent images in as few bits as possible while maintaining fidelity to the original. Theoretical results indicate that optimizing distortion metrics such as PSNR or MS-SSIM necessarily leads to a discrepancy in the statistics of original images from those of reconstructions, in particular at low bitrates, often manifested by the blurring of the compressed images. Previous work has leveraged adversarial discriminators to improve statistical fidelity. Yet these binary discriminators adopted from generative modeling tasks may not be ideal for image compression. In this paper, we introduce a non-binary discriminator that is conditioned on quantized local image representations obtained via VQ-VAE autoencoders. Our evaluations on the CLIC2020, DIV2K and Kodak datasets show that our discriminator is more effective for jointly optimizing distortion (e.g., PSNR) and statistical fidelity (e.g., FID) than the state-of-the-art HiFiC model. On the CLIC2020 test set, we obtain the same FID as HiFiC with 30-40% fewer bits.

Diffusion Transformers (DiT) have attracted significant attention in research. However, they suffer from a slow convergence rate. In this paper, we aim to accelerate DiT training without any architectural modification. We identify the following issues in the training process: firstly, certain training strategies do not consistently perform well across different data. Secondly, the effectiveness of supervision at specific timesteps is limited. In response, we propose the following contributions: (1) We introduce a new perspective for interpreting the failure of the strategies. Specifically, we slightly extend the definition of Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and suggest observing the Probability Density Function (PDF) of SNR to understand the essence of the data robustness of the strategy. (2) We conduct numerous experiments and report over one hundred experimental results to empirically summarize a unified accelerating strategy from the perspective of PDF. (3) We develop a new supervision method that further accelerates the training process of DiT. Based on them, we propose FasterDiT, an exceedingly simple and practicable design strategy. With few lines of code modifications, it achieves 2.30 FID on ImageNet 256 resolution at 1000k iterations, which is comparable to DiT (2.27 FID) but 7 times faster in training.

With the evolution of 5G wireless communications, the Synchronization Signal Block (SSB) plays a critical role in the synchronization of devices and accessibility of services. However, due to the predictable nature of SSB transmission, including the Primary and Secondary Synchronization Signals (PSS and SSS), jamming attacks are critical threats. By leveraging RF domain knowledge, this work presents a novel deep learning-based technique for detecting jammers in 5G networks. Unlike the existing jamming detection algorithms that mostly rely on network parameters, we introduce a double threshold deep learning jamming detector by focusing on the SSB. The detection method is focused on RF domain features and improves the robustness of the network without requiring integration with the pre-existing network infrastructure. By integrating a preprocessing block that extracts PSS correlation and energy per null resource elements (EPNRE) characteristics, our method distinguishes between normal and jammed received signals with high precision. Additionally, by incorporation of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), the efficacy of training and detection are optimized. A double threshold double Deep Neural Network (DT-DDNN) is also introduced to the architecture complemented by a deep cascade learning model to increase the sensitivity of the model to variations of signal to jamming noise ratio (SJNR). Results show that the proposed method achieves 96.4% detection rate in extra low jamming power, i.e., SJNR between 15 to 30 dB which outperforms the single threshold DNN design with 86.0% detection rate and unprocessed IQ sample DNN design with 83.2% detection rate. Ultimately, performance of DT-DDNN is validated through the analysis of real 5G signals obtained from a practical testbed, demonstrating a strong alignment with the simulation results.

Despite the breakthroughs in accuracy and speed of single image super-resolution using faster and deeper convolutional neural networks, one central problem remains largely unsolved: how do we recover the finer texture details when we super-resolve at large upscaling factors? The behavior of optimization-based super-resolution methods is principally driven by the choice of the objective function. Recent work has largely focused on minimizing the mean squared reconstruction error. The resulting estimates have high peak signal-to-noise ratios, but they are often lacking high-frequency details and are perceptually unsatisfying in the sense that they fail to match the fidelity expected at the higher resolution. In this paper, we present SRGAN, a generative adversarial network (GAN) for image super-resolution (SR). To our knowledge, it is the first framework capable of inferring photo-realistic natural images for 4x upscaling factors. To achieve this, we propose a perceptual loss function which consists of an adversarial loss and a content loss. The adversarial loss pushes our solution to the natural image manifold using a discriminator network that is trained to differentiate between the super-resolved images and original photo-realistic images. In addition, we use a content loss motivated by perceptual similarity instead of similarity in pixel space. Our deep residual network is able to recover photo-realistic textures from heavily downsampled images on public benchmarks. An extensive mean-opinion-score (MOS) test shows hugely significant gains in perceptual quality using SRGAN. The MOS scores obtained with SRGAN are closer to those of the original high-resolution images than to those obtained with any state-of-the-art method.

In recent years generative adversarial networks (GANs) have been used to supplement datasets within the field of marine bioacoustics. This is driven by factors such as the cost to collect data, data sparsity and aid preprocessing. One notable challenge with marine bioacoustic data is the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) posing difficulty when applying deep learning techniques such as GANs. This work investigates the effect SNR has on the audio-based GAN performance and examines three different evaluation methodologies for GAN performance, yielding interesting results on the effects of SNR on GANs, specifically WaveGAN.

Spatial audio quality is a highly multifaceted concept, with many interactions between environmental, geometrical, anatomical, psychological, and contextual considerations. Methods for characterization or evaluation of the geometrical components of spatial audio quality, however, remain scarce, despite being perhaps the least subjective aspect of spatial audio quality to quantify. By considering interchannel time and level differences relative to a reference signal, it is possible to construct a signal model to isolate some of the spatial distortion. By using a combination of least-square optimization and heuristics, we propose a signal decomposition method to isolate the spatial error from a processed signal, in terms of interchannel gain leakages and changes in relative delays. This allows the computation of simple energy-ratio metrics, providing objective measures of spatial and non-spatial signal qualities, with minimal assumptions and no dataset dependency. Experiments demonstrate the robustness of the method against common spatial signal degradation introduced by, e.g., audio compression and music source separation. Implementation is available at https://github.com/karnwatcharasupat/spauq.

Front-end electronics equipped with high-speed digitizers are being used and proposed for future nuclear detectors. Recent literature reveals that deep learning models, especially one-dimensional convolutional neural networks, are promising when dealing with digital signals from nuclear detectors. Simulations and experiments demonstrate the satisfactory accuracy and additional benefits of neural networks in this area. However, specific hardware accelerating such models for online operations still needs to be studied. In this work, we introduce PulseDL-II, a system-on-chip (SoC) specially designed for applications of event feature (time, energy, etc.) extraction from pulses with deep learning. Based on the previous version, PulseDL-II incorporates a RISC CPU into the system structure for better functional flexibility and integrity. The neural network accelerator in the SoC adopts a three-level (arithmetic unit, processing element, neural network) hierarchical architecture and facilitates parameter optimization of the digital design. Furthermore, we devise a quantization scheme compatible with deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow) within a selected subset of layer types. We validate the correct operations of PulseDL-II on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) alone and with an experimental setup comprising a direct digital synthesis (DDS) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The proposed system achieved 60 ps time resolution and 0.40% energy resolution at signal to noise ratio (SNR) of 47.4 dB.

Image deblurring task is an ill-posed one, where exists infinite feasible solutions for blurry image. Modern deep learning approaches usually discard the learning of blur kernels and directly employ end-to-end supervised learning. Popular deblurring datasets define the label as one of the feasible solutions. However, we argue that it's not reasonable to specify a label directly, especially when the label is sampled from a random distribution. Therefore, we propose to make the network learn the distribution of feasible solutions, and design based on this consideration a novel multi-head output architecture and corresponding loss function for distribution learning. Our approach enables the model to output multiple feasible solutions to approximate the target distribution. We further propose a novel parameter multiplexing method that reduces the number of parameters and computational effort while improving performance. We evaluated our approach on multiple image-deblur models, including the current state-of-the-art NAFNet. The improvement of best overall (pick the highest score among multiple heads for each validation image) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.11~0.18dB. The improvement of the best single head (pick the best-performed head among multiple heads on validation set) PSNR outperforms the compared baselines up to 0.04~0.08dB. The codes are available at https://github.com/Liu-SD/multi-output-deblur.

Radio frequency (RF) signal mapping, which is the process of analyzing and predicting the RF signal strength and distribution across specific areas, is crucial for cellular network planning and deployment. Traditional approaches to RF signal mapping rely on statistical models constructed based on measurement data, which offer low complexity but often lack accuracy, or ray tracing tools, which provide enhanced precision for the target area but suffer from increased computational complexity. Recently, machine learning (ML) has emerged as a data-driven method for modeling RF signal propagation, which leverages models trained on synthetic datasets to perform RF signal mapping in "unseen" areas. In this paper, we present Geo2SigMap, an ML-based framework for efficient and high-fidelity RF signal mapping using geographic databases. First, we develop an automated framework that seamlessly integrates three open-source tools: OpenStreetMap (geographic databases), Blender (computer graphics), and Sionna (ray tracing), enabling the efficient generation of large-scale 3D building maps and ray tracing models. Second, we propose a cascaded U-Net model, which is pre-trained on synthetic datasets and employed to generate detailed RF signal maps, leveraging environmental information and sparse measurement data. Finally, we evaluate the performance of Geo2SigMap via a real-world measurement campaign, where three types of user equipment (UE) collect over 45,000 data points related to cellular information from six LTE cells operating in the citizens broadband radio service (CBRS) band. Our results show that Geo2SigMap achieves an average root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 6.04 dB for predicting the reference signal received power (RSRP) at the UE, representing an average RMSE improvement of 3.59 dB compared to existing methods.

Clouds in satellite imagery pose a significant challenge for downstream applications. A major challenge in current cloud removal research is the absence of a comprehensive benchmark and a sufficiently large and diverse training dataset. To address this problem, we introduce the largest public dataset -- AllClear for cloud removal, featuring 23,742 globally distributed regions of interest (ROIs) with diverse land-use patterns, comprising 4 million images in total. Each ROI includes complete temporal captures from the year 2022, with (1) multi-spectral optical imagery from Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8/9, (2) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery from Sentinel-1, and (3) auxiliary remote sensing products such as cloud masks and land cover maps. We validate the effectiveness of our dataset by benchmarking performance, demonstrating the scaling law -- the PSNR rises from 28.47 to 33.87 with 30times more data, and conducting ablation studies on the temporal length and the importance of individual modalities. This dataset aims to provide comprehensive coverage of the Earth's surface and promote better cloud removal results.

Separating a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) from noise is a challenging statistical task. One approach to establishing a detection criterion for the SGWB is using Bayesian evidence. If the evidence ratio (Bayes factor) between models with and without the signal exceeds a certain threshold, the signal is considered detected. We present a formalism to compute the averaged Bayes factor, incorporating instrumental-noise and SGWB uncertainties. As an example, we consider the case of power-law-shaped SGWB in LISA and generate the corresponding bayesian sensitivity curve. Unlike existing methods in the literature, which typically neglect uncertainties in both the signal and noise, our approach provides a reliable and realistic alternative. This flexible framework opens avenues for more robust stochastic gravitational wave background detection across gravitational-wave experiments.

An effective way to realize non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assisted grant-free transmission is to first create multiple receive signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels and then serve multiple grant-free users by employing these SNR levels as bandwidth resources. These SNR levels need to be pre-configured prior to the grant-free transmission and have great impact on the performance of grant-free networks. The aim of this letter is to illustrate different designs for configuring the SNR levels and investigate their impact on the performance of grant-free transmission, where age-of-information is used as the performance metric. The presented analytical and simulation results demonstrate the performance gain achieved by NOMA over orthogonal multiple access, and also reveal the relative merits of the considered designs for pre-configured SNR levels.

With the rapid development of AI hardware accelerators, applying deep learning-based algorithms to solve various low-level vision tasks on mobile devices has gradually become possible. However, two main problems still need to be solved: task-specific algorithms make it difficult to integrate them into a single neural network architecture, and large amounts of parameters make it difficult to achieve real-time inference. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel network, SYENet, with only ~6K parameters, to handle multiple low-level vision tasks on mobile devices in a real-time manner. The SYENet consists of two asymmetrical branches with simple building blocks. To effectively connect the results by asymmetrical branches, a Quadratic Connection Unit(QCU) is proposed. Furthermore, to improve performance, a new Outlier-Aware Loss is proposed to process the image. The proposed method proves its superior performance with the best PSNR as compared with other networks in real-time applications such as Image Signal Processing(ISP), Low-Light Enhancement(LLE), and Super-Resolution(SR) with 2K60FPS throughput on Qualcomm 8 Gen 1 mobile SoC(System-on-Chip). Particularly, for ISP task, SYENet got the highest score in MAI 2022 Learned Smartphone ISP challenge.

Source separation models either work on the spectrogram or waveform domain. In this work, we show how to perform end-to-end hybrid source separation, letting the model decide which domain is best suited for each source, and even combining both. The proposed hybrid version of the Demucs architecture won the Music Demixing Challenge 2021 organized by Sony. This architecture also comes with additional improvements, such as compressed residual branches, local attention or singular value regularization. Overall, a 1.4 dB improvement of the Signal-To-Distortion (SDR) was observed across all sources as measured on the MusDB HQ dataset, an improvement confirmed by human subjective evaluation, with an overall quality rated at 2.83 out of 5 (2.36 for the non hybrid Demucs), and absence of contamination at 3.04 (against 2.37 for the non hybrid Demucs and 2.44 for the second ranking model submitted at the competition).

Many flagship smartphone cameras now use a dedicated neural image signal processor (ISP) to render noisy raw sensor images to the final processed output. Training nightmode ISP networks relies on large-scale datasets of image pairs with: (1) a noisy raw image captured with a short exposure and a high ISO gain; and (2) a ground truth low-noise raw image captured with a long exposure and low ISO that has been rendered through the ISP. Capturing such image pairs is tedious and time-consuming, requiring careful setup to ensure alignment between the image pairs. In addition, ground truth images are often prone to motion blur due to the long exposure. To address this problem, we propose a method that synthesizes nighttime images from daytime images. Daytime images are easy to capture, exhibit low-noise (even on smartphone cameras) and rarely suffer from motion blur. We outline a processing framework to convert daytime raw images to have the appearance of realistic nighttime raw images with different levels of noise. Our procedure allows us to easily produce aligned noisy and clean nighttime image pairs. We show the effectiveness of our synthesis framework by training neural ISPs for nightmode rendering. Furthermore, we demonstrate that using our synthetic nighttime images together with small amounts of real data (e.g., 5% to 10%) yields performance almost on par with training exclusively on real nighttime images. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/day-to-night.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) will be the first space-based gravitational wave (GW) observatory. It will measure gravitational wave signals in the frequency regime from 0.1 mHz to 1 Hz. The success of these measurements will depend on the suppression of the various instrument noises. One important noise source in LISA will be tilt-to-length (TTL) coupling. Here, it is understood as the coupling of angular jitter, predominantly from the spacecraft, into the interferometric length readout. The current plan is to subtract this noise in-flight in post-processing as part of a noise minimization strategy. It is crucial to distinguish TTL coupling well from the GW signals in the same readout to ensure that the noise will be properly modeled. Furthermore, it is important that the subtraction of TTL noise will not degrade the GW signals. In the present manuscript, we show on simulated LISA data and for four different GW signal types that the GW responses have little effect on the quality of the TTL coupling fit and subtraction. Also, the GW signal characteristics were not altered by the TTL coupling subtraction.