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NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild
Authors:
Aleksandr Gushchin,
Khaled Abud,
Ekaterina Shumitskaya,
Artem Filippov,
Georgii Bychkov,
Sergey Lavrushkin,
Mikhail Erofeev,
Anastasia Antsiferova,
Changsheng Chen,
Shunquan Tan,
Radu Timofte,
Dmitry Vatolin,
Chuanbiao Song,
Zijian Yu,
Hao Tan,
Jun Lan,
Zhiqiang Yang,
Yongwei Tang,
Zhiqiang Wu,
Jia Wen Seow,
Hong Vin Koay,
Haodong Ren,
Feng Xu,
Shuai Chen,
Ruiyang Xia
, et al. (29 additional authors not shown)
Abstract:
This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild, held in conjunction with the NTIRE workshop at CVPR 2026. The goal of this challenge was to develop detection models capable of distinguishing real images from generated ones in realistic scenarios: the images are often transformed (cropped, resized, compressed, blurred) for practical us…
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This paper presents an overview of the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Robust AI-Generated Image Detection in the Wild, held in conjunction with the NTIRE workshop at CVPR 2026. The goal of this challenge was to develop detection models capable of distinguishing real images from generated ones in realistic scenarios: the images are often transformed (cropped, resized, compressed, blurred) for practical usage, and therefore, the detection models should be robust to such transformations. The challenge is based on a novel dataset consisting of 108,750 real and 185,750 AI-generated images from 42 generators comprising a large variety of open-source and closed-source models of various architectures, augmented with 36 image transformations. Methods were evaluated using ROC AUC on the full test set, including both transformed and untransformed images. A total of 511 participants registered, with 20 teams submitting valid final solutions. This report provides a comprehensive overview of the challenge, describes the proposed solutions, and can be used as a valuable reference for researchers and practitioners in increasing the robustness of the detection models to real-world transformations.
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Submitted 13 April, 2026;
originally announced April 2026.
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One-Step Residual Shifting Diffusion for Image Super-Resolution via Distillation
Authors:
Daniil Selikhanovych,
David Li,
Aleksei Leonov,
Nikita Gushchin,
Sergei Kushneriuk,
Alexander Filippov,
Evgeny Burnaev,
Iaroslav Koshelev,
Alexander Korotin
Abstract:
Diffusion models for super-resolution (SR) produce high-quality visual results but require expensive computational costs. Despite the development of several methods to accelerate diffusion-based SR models, some (e.g., SinSR) fail to produce realistic perceptual details, while others (e.g., OSEDiff) may hallucinate non-existent structures. To overcome these issues, we present RSD, a new distillatio…
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Diffusion models for super-resolution (SR) produce high-quality visual results but require expensive computational costs. Despite the development of several methods to accelerate diffusion-based SR models, some (e.g., SinSR) fail to produce realistic perceptual details, while others (e.g., OSEDiff) may hallucinate non-existent structures. To overcome these issues, we present RSD, a new distillation method for ResShift. Our method is based on training the student network to produce images such that a new fake ResShift model trained on them will coincide with the teacher model. RSD achieves single-step restoration and outperforms the teacher by a noticeable margin in various perceptual metrics (LPIPS, CLIPIQA, MUSIQ). We show that our distillation method can surpass SinSR, the other distillation-based method for ResShift, making it on par with state-of-the-art diffusion SR distillation methods with limited computational costs in terms of perceptual quality. Compared to SR methods based on pre-trained text-to-image models, RSD produces competitive perceptual quality and requires fewer parameters, GPU memory, and training cost. We provide experimental results on various real-world and synthetic datasets, including RealSR, RealSet65, DRealSR, ImageNet, and DIV2K.
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Submitted 3 February, 2026; v1 submitted 17 March, 2025;
originally announced March 2025.
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A3D: Does Diffusion Dream about 3D Alignment?
Authors:
Savva Ignatyev,
Nina Konovalova,
Daniil Selikhanovych,
Oleg Voynov,
Nikolay Patakin,
Ilya Olkov,
Dmitry Senushkin,
Alexey Artemov,
Anton Konushin,
Alexander Filippov,
Peter Wonka,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
We tackle the problem of text-driven 3D generation from a geometry alignment perspective. Given a set of text prompts, we aim to generate a collection of objects with semantically corresponding parts aligned across them. Recent methods based on Score Distillation have succeeded in distilling the knowledge from 2D diffusion models to high-quality representations of the 3D objects. These methods han…
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We tackle the problem of text-driven 3D generation from a geometry alignment perspective. Given a set of text prompts, we aim to generate a collection of objects with semantically corresponding parts aligned across them. Recent methods based on Score Distillation have succeeded in distilling the knowledge from 2D diffusion models to high-quality representations of the 3D objects. These methods handle multiple text queries separately, and therefore the resulting objects have a high variability in object pose and structure. However, in some applications, such as 3D asset design, it may be desirable to obtain a set of objects aligned with each other. In order to achieve the alignment of the corresponding parts of the generated objects, we propose to embed these objects into a common latent space and optimize the continuous transitions between these objects. We enforce two kinds of properties of these transitions: smoothness of the transition and plausibility of the intermediate objects along the transition. We demonstrate that both of these properties are essential for good alignment. We provide several practical scenarios that benefit from alignment between the objects, including 3D editing and object hybridization, and experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. https://voyleg.github.io/a3d/
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Submitted 16 March, 2025; v1 submitted 21 June, 2024;
originally announced June 2024.
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An Optimal Transport Perspective on Unpaired Image Super-Resolution
Authors:
Milena Gazdieva,
Petr Mokrov,
Litu Rout,
Alexander Korotin,
Andrey Kravchenko,
Alexander Filippov,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
Real-world image super-resolution (SR) tasks often do not have paired datasets, which limits the application of supervised techniques. As a result, the tasks are usually approached by unpaired techniques based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which yield complex training losses with several regularization terms, e.g., content or identity losses. While GANs usually provide good practical…
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Real-world image super-resolution (SR) tasks often do not have paired datasets, which limits the application of supervised techniques. As a result, the tasks are usually approached by unpaired techniques based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which yield complex training losses with several regularization terms, e.g., content or identity losses. While GANs usually provide good practical performance, they are used heuristically, i.e., theoretical understanding of their behaviour is yet rather limited. We theoretically investigate optimization problems which arise in such models and find two surprising observations. First, the learned SR map is always an optimal transport (OT) map. Second, we theoretically prove and empirically show that the learned map is biased, i.e., it does not actually transform the distribution of low-resolution images to high-resolution ones. Inspired by these findings, we investigate recent advances in neural OT field to resolve the bias issue. We establish an intriguing connection between regularized GANs and neural OT approaches. We show that unlike the existing GAN-based alternatives, these algorithms aim to learn an unbiased OT map. We empirically demonstrate our findings via a series of synthetic and real-world unpaired SR experiments. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/milenagazdieva/OT-Super-Resolution.
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Submitted 8 July, 2025; v1 submitted 2 February, 2022;
originally announced February 2022.
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Long-Range Thermal 3D Perception in Low Contrast Environments
Authors:
Andrey Filippov,
Olga Filippova
Abstract:
This report discusses the results of SBIR Phase I effort to prove the feasibility of dramatic improvement of the microbolometer-based Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) detectors sensitivity, especially for the 3D measurements. The resulting low SWaP-C thermal depth-sensing system will enable the situational awareness of Autonomous Air Vehicles for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). It will provide robust 3D inf…
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This report discusses the results of SBIR Phase I effort to prove the feasibility of dramatic improvement of the microbolometer-based Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) detectors sensitivity, especially for the 3D measurements. The resulting low SWaP-C thermal depth-sensing system will enable the situational awareness of Autonomous Air Vehicles for Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). It will provide robust 3D information of the surrounding environment, including low-contrast static and moving objects, at far distances in degraded visual conditions and GPS-denied areas. Our multi-sensor 3D perception enabled by COTS uncooled thermal sensors mitigates major weakness of LWIR sensors - low contrast by increasing the system sensitivity over an order of magnitude.
There were no available thermal image sets suitable for evaluating this technology, making datasets acquisition our first goal. We discuss the design and construction of the prototype system with sixteen 640pix x 512pix LWIR detectors, camera calibration to subpixel resolution, capture, and process synchronized image. The results show the 3.84x contrast increase for intrascene-only data and an additional 5.5x - with the interscene accumulation, reaching system noise-equivalent temperature difference (NETD) of 1.9 mK with the 40 mK sensors.
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Submitted 9 December, 2021;
originally announced December 2021.
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Manifold Topology Divergence: a Framework for Comparing Data Manifolds
Authors:
Serguei Barannikov,
Ilya Trofimov,
Grigorii Sotnikov,
Ekaterina Trimbach,
Alexander Korotin,
Alexander Filippov,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
We develop a framework for comparing data manifolds, aimed, in particular, towards the evaluation of deep generative models. We describe a novel tool, Cross-Barcode(P,Q), that, given a pair of distributions in a high-dimensional space, tracks multiscale topology spacial discrepancies between manifolds on which the distributions are concentrated. Based on the Cross-Barcode, we introduce the Manifol…
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We develop a framework for comparing data manifolds, aimed, in particular, towards the evaluation of deep generative models. We describe a novel tool, Cross-Barcode(P,Q), that, given a pair of distributions in a high-dimensional space, tracks multiscale topology spacial discrepancies between manifolds on which the distributions are concentrated. Based on the Cross-Barcode, we introduce the Manifold Topology Divergence score (MTop-Divergence) and apply it to assess the performance of deep generative models in various domains: images, 3D-shapes, time-series, and on different datasets: MNIST, Fashion MNIST, SVHN, CIFAR10, FFHQ, chest X-ray images, market stock data, ShapeNet. We demonstrate that the MTop-Divergence accurately detects various degrees of mode-dropping, intra-mode collapse, mode invention, and image disturbance. Our algorithm scales well (essentially linearly) with the increase of the dimension of the ambient high-dimensional space. It is one of the first TDA-based practical methodologies that can be applied universally to datasets of different sizes and dimensions, including the ones on which the most recent GANs in the visual domain are trained. The proposed method is domain agnostic and does not rely on pre-trained networks.
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Submitted 28 October, 2021; v1 submitted 7 June, 2021;
originally announced June 2021.
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Do Neural Optimal Transport Solvers Work? A Continuous Wasserstein-2 Benchmark
Authors:
Alexander Korotin,
Lingxiao Li,
Aude Genevay,
Justin Solomon,
Alexander Filippov,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
Despite the recent popularity of neural network-based solvers for optimal transport (OT), there is no standard quantitative way to evaluate their performance. In this paper, we address this issue for quadratic-cost transport -- specifically, computation of the Wasserstein-2 distance, a commonly-used formulation of optimal transport in machine learning. To overcome the challenge of computing ground…
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Despite the recent popularity of neural network-based solvers for optimal transport (OT), there is no standard quantitative way to evaluate their performance. In this paper, we address this issue for quadratic-cost transport -- specifically, computation of the Wasserstein-2 distance, a commonly-used formulation of optimal transport in machine learning. To overcome the challenge of computing ground truth transport maps between continuous measures needed to assess these solvers, we use input-convex neural networks (ICNN) to construct pairs of measures whose ground truth OT maps can be obtained analytically. This strategy yields pairs of continuous benchmark measures in high-dimensional spaces such as spaces of images. We thoroughly evaluate existing optimal transport solvers using these benchmark measures. Even though these solvers perform well in downstream tasks, many do not faithfully recover optimal transport maps. To investigate the cause of this discrepancy, we further test the solvers in a setting of image generation. Our study reveals crucial limitations of existing solvers and shows that increased OT accuracy does not necessarily correlate to better results downstream.
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Submitted 25 October, 2021; v1 submitted 3 June, 2021;
originally announced June 2021.
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Unpaired Depth Super-Resolution in the Wild
Authors:
Aleksandr Safin,
Maxim Kan,
Nikita Drobyshev,
Oleg Voynov,
Alexey Artemov,
Alexander Filippov,
Denis Zorin,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
Depth maps captured with commodity sensors are often of low quality and resolution; these maps need to be enhanced to be used in many applications. State-of-the-art data-driven methods of depth map super-resolution rely on registered pairs of low- and high-resolution depth maps of the same scenes. Acquisition of real-world paired data requires specialized setups. Another alternative, generating lo…
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Depth maps captured with commodity sensors are often of low quality and resolution; these maps need to be enhanced to be used in many applications. State-of-the-art data-driven methods of depth map super-resolution rely on registered pairs of low- and high-resolution depth maps of the same scenes. Acquisition of real-world paired data requires specialized setups. Another alternative, generating low-resolution maps from high-resolution maps by subsampling, adding noise and other artificial degradation methods, does not fully capture the characteristics of real-world low-resolution images. As a consequence, supervised learning methods trained on such artificial paired data may not perform well on real-world low-resolution inputs. We consider an approach to depth super-resolution based on learning from unpaired data. While many techniques for unpaired image-to-image translation have been proposed, most fail to deliver effective hole-filling or reconstruct accurate surfaces using depth maps. We propose an unpaired learning method for depth super-resolution, which is based on a learnable degradation model, enhancement component and surface normal estimates as features to produce more accurate depth maps. We propose a benchmark for unpaired depth SR and demonstrate that our method outperforms existing unpaired methods and performs on par with paired.
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Submitted 23 September, 2022; v1 submitted 25 May, 2021;
originally announced May 2021.
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Multi-fidelity Neural Architecture Search with Knowledge Distillation
Authors:
Ilya Trofimov,
Nikita Klyuchnikov,
Mikhail Salnikov,
Alexander Filippov,
Evgeny Burnaev
Abstract:
Neural architecture search (NAS) targets at finding the optimal architecture of a neural network for a problem or a family of problems. Evaluations of neural architectures are very time-consuming. One of the possible ways to mitigate this issue is to use low-fidelity evaluations, namely training on a part of a dataset, fewer epochs, with fewer channels, etc. In this paper, we propose a bayesian mu…
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Neural architecture search (NAS) targets at finding the optimal architecture of a neural network for a problem or a family of problems. Evaluations of neural architectures are very time-consuming. One of the possible ways to mitigate this issue is to use low-fidelity evaluations, namely training on a part of a dataset, fewer epochs, with fewer channels, etc. In this paper, we propose a bayesian multi-fidelity method for neural architecture search: MF-KD. The method relies on a new approach to low-fidelity evaluations of neural architectures by training for a few epochs using a knowledge distillation. Knowledge distillation adds to a loss function a term forcing a network to mimic some teacher network. We carry out experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-16-120. We show that training for a few epochs with such a modified loss function leads to a better selection of neural architectures than training for a few epochs with a logistic loss. The proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines.
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Submitted 19 May, 2021; v1 submitted 15 June, 2020;
originally announced June 2020.
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Long Range 3D with Quadocular Thermal (LWIR) Camera
Authors:
Andrey Filippov,
Oleg Dzhimiev
Abstract:
Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) cameras provide images regardles of the ambient illumination, they tolerate fog and are not blinded by the incoming car headlights. These features make LWIR cameras attractive for autonomous navigation, security and military applications. Thermal images can be used similarly to the visible range ones, including 3D scene reconstruction with two or more such cameras mounted…
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Long Wave Infrared (LWIR) cameras provide images regardles of the ambient illumination, they tolerate fog and are not blinded by the incoming car headlights. These features make LWIR cameras attractive for autonomous navigation, security and military applications. Thermal images can be used similarly to the visible range ones, including 3D scene reconstruction with two or more such cameras mounted on a rigid frame. There are two additional challenges for this spectral range: lower image resolution and lower contrast of the textures.
In this work, we demonstrate quadocular LWIR camera setup, calibration, image capturing and processing that result in long range 3D perception with 0.077 pix disparity error over 90% of the depth map. With low resolution (160 x 120) LWIR sensors we achieved 10% range accuracy at 28 m with 56 degrees horizontal field of view (HFoV) and 150 mm baseline. Scaled to the now-standard 640 x 512 resolution and 200 mm baseline suitable for head-mounted application the result would be 10% accuracy at 130 m.
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Submitted 19 November, 2019; v1 submitted 16 November, 2019;
originally announced November 2019.
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See far with TPNET: a Tile Processor and a CNN Symbiosis
Authors:
Andrey Filippov,
Oleg Dzhimiev
Abstract:
Throughout the evolution of the neural networks more specialized cells were added to the set of basic building blocks. These cells aim to improve training convergence, increase the overall performance, and reduce the number of required labels, all while preserving the expressive power of the universal network. Inspired by the partitioning of the human visual perception system between the eyes and…
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Throughout the evolution of the neural networks more specialized cells were added to the set of basic building blocks. These cells aim to improve training convergence, increase the overall performance, and reduce the number of required labels, all while preserving the expressive power of the universal network. Inspired by the partitioning of the human visual perception system between the eyes and the cerebral cortex, we present TPNET, which offloads universal and application-specific CNN from the bulk processing of the high resolution pixel data and performs the translation-variant image correction while delegating all non-linear decision making to the network.
In this work, we explore application of TPNET to 3D perception with a narrow-baseline (0.0001-0.0025) quad stereo camera and prove that a trained network provides a disparity prediction from the 2D phase correlation output by the Tile Processor (TP) that is twice as accurate as the prediction from a carefully hand-crafted algorithm. The TP in turn reduces the dimensions of the input features of the network and provides instrument-invariant and translation-invariant data, making real-time high resolution stereo 3D perception feasible and easing the requirement to have a complete end-to-end network.
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Submitted 19 November, 2018;
originally announced November 2018.
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Automatic Analysis, Decomposition and Parallel Optimization of Large Homogeneous Networks
Authors:
Dmitry Yu. Ignatov,
Alexander N. Filippov,
Andrey D. Ignatov,
Xuecang Zhang
Abstract:
The life of the modern world essentially depends on the work of the large artificial homogeneous networks, such as wired and wireless communication systems, networks of roads and pipelines. The support of their effective continuous functioning requires automatic screening and permanent optimization with processing of the huge amount of data by high-performance distributed systems. We propose new m…
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The life of the modern world essentially depends on the work of the large artificial homogeneous networks, such as wired and wireless communication systems, networks of roads and pipelines. The support of their effective continuous functioning requires automatic screening and permanent optimization with processing of the huge amount of data by high-performance distributed systems. We propose new meta-algorithm of large homogeneous network analysis, its decomposition into alternative sets of loosely connected subnets, and parallel optimization of the most independent elements. This algorithm is based on a network-specific correlation function, Simulated Annealing technique, and is adapted to work in the computer cluster. On the example of large wireless network, we show that proposed algorithm essentially increases speed of parallel optimization. The elaborated general approach can be used for analysis and optimization of the wide range of networks, including such specific types as artificial neural networks or organized in networks physiological systems of living organisms.
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Submitted 23 January, 2017;
originally announced January 2017.