Recently, the mainstream practice for training low-light raw image denoising methods has shifted towards employing synthetic data. Noise modeling, which focuses on characterizing the noise distribution of real-world sensors, profoundly influences the effectiveness and practicality of synthetic data. Currently, physics-based noise modeling struggles to characterize the entire real noise distribution, while learning-based noise modeling impractically depends on paired real data. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy: learning the noise model from dark frames instead of paired real data, to break down the data dependency. Based on this strategy, we introduce an efficient physics-informed noise neural proxy (PNNP) to approximate the real-world sensor noise model. Specifically, we integrate physical priors into neural proxies and introduce three efficient techniques: physics-guided noise decoupling (PND), physics-aware proxy model (PPM), and differentiable distribution loss (DDL). PND decouples the dark frame into different components and handles different levels of noise flexibly, which reduces the complexity of noise modeling. PPM incorporates physical priors to constrain the synthetic noise, which promotes the accuracy of noise modeling. DDL provides explicit and reliable supervision for noise distribution, which promotes the precision of noise modeling. PNNP exhibits powerful potential in characterizing the real noise distribution. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate superior performance in practical low-light raw image denoising. The source code will be publicly available at the https://fenghansen.github.io/publication/PNNP.

Scaling the effective context length is essential for advancing large language models (LLMs) toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, the quadratic increase in computational complexity inherent in traditional attention mechanisms presents a prohibitive overhead. Existing approaches either impose strongly biased structures, such as sink or window attention which are task-specific, or radically modify the attention mechanism into linear approximations, whose performance in complex reasoning tasks remains inadequately explored. In this work, we propose a solution that adheres to the ``less structure'' principle, allowing the model to determine where to attend autonomously, rather than introducing predefined biases. We introduce Mixture of Block Attention (MoBA), an innovative approach that applies the principles of Mixture of Experts (MoE) to the attention mechanism. This novel architecture demonstrates superior performance on long-context tasks while offering a key advantage: the ability to seamlessly transition between full and sparse attention, enhancing efficiency without the risk of compromising performance. MoBA has already been deployed to handle actual production workloads with long-context requirements, demonstrating significant advancements in efficient attention computation for LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/MoonshotAI/MoBA.

Implicit discourse relation recognition aims to identify logical relations between two arguments without explicit connectives and is a challenging task in discourse analysis. Recent methods tend to leverage the label hierarchy to enhance discourse relation representations. However, they fail to fully utilize the connective information. Specifically, the methods overlook the guiding role of connectives in discourse relation classification by treating them as the last-level labels in the label hierarchy to leverage connective information, whereas it would be more appropriate to exploit connective information prior to relation classification. Moreover, these methods ignore the dependency degree of labels between different levels in the label hierarchy. In other words, they consider the label hierarchy as an unweighted undirected graph, and assume that the path weights between high-level labels and their corresponding low-level labels are the same, which leads to an insufficient construction of the label hierarchy. To overcome these issues, we propose a method for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) utilizing Connective Prediction and Dependency-weighted Label Hierarchy (CP-DLH). Experimental results on PDTB 2.0 dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance at all hierarchical levels.

Low-light raw image denoising is an essential task in computational photography, to which the learning-based method has become the mainstream solution. The standard paradigm of the learning-based method is to learn the mapping between the paired real data, i.e., the low-light noisy image and its clean counterpart. However, the limited data volume, complicated noise model, and underdeveloped data quality have constituted the learnability bottleneck of the data mapping between paired real data, which limits the performance of the learning-based method. To break through the bottleneck, we introduce a learnability enhancement strategy for low-light raw image denoising by reforming paired real data according to noise modeling. Our learnability enhancement strategy integrates three efficient methods: shot noise augmentation (SNA), dark shading correction (DSC) and a developed image acquisition protocol. Specifically, SNA promotes the precision of data mapping by increasing the data volume of paired real data, DSC promotes the accuracy of data mapping by reducing the noise complexity, and the developed image acquisition protocol promotes the reliability of data mapping by improving the data quality of paired real data. Meanwhile, based on the developed image acquisition protocol, we build a new dataset for low-light raw image denoising. Experiments on public datasets and our dataset demonstrate the superiority of the learnability enhancement strategy.

Under-display camera (UDC) systems remove the screen notch for bezel-free displays and provide a better interactive experience. The main challenge is that the pixel array of light-emitting diodes used for display diffracts and attenuates the incident light, leading to complex degradation. Existing models eliminate spatial diffraction by maximizing model capacity through complex design and ignore the periodic distribution of diffraction in the frequency domain, which prevents these approaches from satisfactory results. In this paper, we introduce a new perspective to handle various diffraction in UDC images by jointly exploring the feature restoration in the frequency and spatial domains, and present a Frequency and Spatial Interactive Learning Network (FSI). It consists of a series of well-designed Frequency-Spatial Joint (FSJ) modules for feature learning and a color transform module for color enhancement. In particular, in the FSJ module, a frequency learning block uses the Fourier transform to eliminate spectral bias, a spatial learning block uses a multi-distillation structure to supplement the absence of local details, and a dual transfer unit to facilitate the interactive learning between features of different domains. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FSI over state-of-the-art models, through extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations in three widely-used UDC benchmarks.

Low-light raw denoising is an important and valuable task in computational photography where learning-based methods trained with paired real data are mainstream. However, the limited data volume and complicated noise distribution have constituted a learnability bottleneck for paired real data, which limits the denoising performance of learning-based methods. To address this issue, we present a learnability enhancement strategy to reform paired real data according to noise modeling. Our strategy consists of two efficient techniques: shot noise augmentation (SNA) and dark shading correction (DSC). Through noise model decoupling, SNA improves the precision of data mapping by increasing the data volume and DSC reduces the complexity of data mapping by reducing the noise complexity. Extensive results on the public datasets and real imaging scenarios collectively demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our method.

In this paper, we introduce NBNet, a novel framework for image denoising. Unlike previous works, we propose to tackle this challenging problem from a new perspective: noise reduction by image-adaptive projection. Specifically, we propose to train a network that can separate signal and noise by learning a set of reconstruction basis in the feature space. Subsequently, image denosing can be achieved by selecting corresponding basis of the signal subspace and projecting the input into such space. Our key insight is that projection can naturally maintain the local structure of input signal, especially for areas with low light or weak textures. Towards this end, we propose SSA, a non-local attention module we design to explicitly learn the basis generation as well as subspace projection. We further incorporate SSA with NBNet, a UNet structured network designed for end-to-end image denosing based. We conduct evaluations on benchmarks, including SIDD and DND, and NBNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on PSNR and SSIM with significantly less computational cost.

Previous approaches for scene text detection have already achieved promising performances across various benchmarks. However, they usually fall short when dealing with challenging scenarios, even when equipped with deep neural network models, because the overall performance is determined by the interplay of multiple stages and components in the pipelines. In this work, we propose a simple yet powerful pipeline that yields fast and accurate text detection in natural scenes. The pipeline directly predicts words or text lines of arbitrary orientations and quadrilateral shapes in full images, eliminating unnecessary intermediate steps (e.g., candidate aggregation and word partitioning), with a single neural network. The simplicity of our pipeline allows concentrating efforts on designing loss functions and neural network architecture. Experiments on standard datasets including ICDAR 2015, COCO-Text and MSRA-TD500 demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. On the ICDAR 2015 dataset, the proposed algorithm achieves an F-score of 0.7820 at 13.2fps at 720p resolution.

With the exponential growth of data size, data storage and analysis have been exposed to more challenges due to the lack of disk capacity and the limited network bandwidth. Data compression technique provides a good solution to mitigate these effects. In this paper, we propose a self-aware data compression system on FPGA for typical data warehousing, such as Hive, with column stored data and multi-threading requirements. The hardware accelerators can change the degree and hierarchy of parallelism depending on the data to be compressed (during the runtime). We test the system performance on a Xilinx VC707 FPGA board and the experimental results show that, up to 16 3-parallelism accelerators can be implemented and the throughput could be improved up to 432 MB/s. It is 6.25X speedup compared with the software solution under the same number of threads.

The artificial neural network (ANN) is among the most widely used methods in data processing applications. The memristor-based neural network further demonstrates a power efficient hardware realization of ANN. Training phase is the critical operation of memristor-based neural network. However, the traditional training method for memristor-based neural network is time consuming and energy inefficient. Users have to first work out the parameters of memristors through digital computing systems and then tune the memristor to the corresponding state. In this work, we introduce a mixed-signal training acceleration framework, which realizes the self-training of memristor-based neural network. We first modify the original stochastic gradient descent algorithm by approximating calculations and designing an alternative computing method. We then propose a mixed-signal acceleration architecture for the modified training algorithm by equipping the original memristor-based neural network architecture with the copy crossbar technique, weight update units, sign calculation units and other assistant units. The experiment on the MNIST database demonstrates that the proposed mixed-signal acceleration is 3 orders of magnitude faster and 4 orders of magnitude more energy efficient than the CPU implementation counterpart at the cost of a slight decrease of the recognition accuracy (<; 5%).