We present NIER, a video conferencing system that can adaptively maintain a low bitrate (e.g., 10–100 Kbps) with reasonable visual quality while being robust to packet losses. We use key-point-based deep image animation (DIA) as a key building block and address a series of networking and system challenges to make NIER practical. Our evaluations show that NIER significantly outperforms the baseline solutions.

Transformer-based methods have demonstrated strong potential in hyperspectral pansharpening by modeling long-range dependencies. However, their effectiveness is often limited by redundant token representations and a lack of multi-scale feature modeling. Hyperspectral images exhibit intrinsic spectral priors (e.g., abundance sparsity) and spatial priors (e.g., non-local similarity), which are critical for accurate reconstruction. From a spectral–spatial perspective, Vision Transformers (ViTs) face two major limitations: they struggle to preserve high-frequency components—such as material edges and texture transitions—and suffer from attention dispersion across redundant tokens. These issues stem from the global self-attention mechanism, which tends to dilute high-frequency signals and overlook localized details. To address these challenges, we propose the Token-wise High-frequency Augmentation Transformer (THAT), a novel framework designed to enhance hyperspectral pansharpening through improved high-frequency feature representation and token selection. Specifically, THAT introduces: (1) Pivotal Token Selective Attention (PTSA) to prioritize informative tokens and suppress redundancy; (2) a Multi-level Variance-aware Feed-forward Network (MVFN) to enhance high-frequency detail learning. Experiments on standard benchmarks show that THAT achieves state-of-the-art performance with improved reconstruction quality and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/kailuo93/THAT.

Video Conferencing Applications (VCAs) are indispensable for real-time communication in remote work and education by enabling simultaneous transmission of audio, video, and screen-sharing content. Despite their ubiquity, research on how these platforms allocate network bandwidth, especially under constrained conditions, and how these resource allocation strategies affect the users' Quality of Experience (QoE) is lacking. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing bandwidth allocation strategies in Zoom, Webex, and Google Meet, with a focus on QoE implications. To assess QoE, we propose a general QoE prediction model based on data collected from a study involving 800 participants. This study is a pioneering effort in evaluating multimedia transmissions across diverse scenarios and network conditions, advancing beyond prior research focused on single media types. The results demonstrate the model's effectiveness and generality in predicting QoE across various VCA scenarios.

Volumetric videos offer a unique interactive experience and have the potential to enhance social virtual reality and telepresence. Streaming volumetric videos to multiple users remains a challenge due to its tremendous requirements of network and computation resources. In this paper, we develop MuV2, an edge-assisted multi-user mobile volumetric video streaming system to support important use cases such as tens of students simultaneously consuming volumetric content in a classroom. MuV2 achieves high scalability and good streaming quality through three orthogonal designs: hybridizing direct streaming of 3D volumetric content with remote rendering, dynamically sharing edge-transcoded views across users, and multiplexing encoding tasks of multiple transcoding sessions into a limited number of hardware encoders on the edge. MuV2 then integrates the three designs into a holistic optimization framework. We fully implement MuV2 and experimentally demonstrate that MuV2 can deliver high-quality volumetric videos to over 30 concurrent untethered mobile devices with a single WiFi access point and a commodity edge server.