RGB Photo Enhancement with Deep Learning on Smartphone GPUs: Mobile AI 2026 Challenge Report

Andrey Ignatov; Georgy Perevozchikov; Radu Timofte; Dong Zhang; Zhao Ran; Yang Zhang; Xiaochen Li; Shichang Ju; Yiqin Cao; Yang Lu; Nguyen Nhu Tinh Anh; To Thanh Dat; Nguyen Ngoc Ky Duyen; Nguyen Trong Nghia; Bui Minh Hieu; Qiuhai Yan; Sunzhe Yang; Kang Chen; Tingting Wang; Faming Fang; Runhua Deng; Zhifeng Wang; Long Peng; Aiwen Jiang

arXiv · 2611.05024

RGB Photo Enhancement with Deep Learning on Smartphone GPUs: Mobile AI 2026 Challenge Report

View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

On-device RGB photo enhancement is a popular task that is needed for quality improvement of photos captured with mobile devices as well as for retouching of images acquired through other sources. This creates a need for efficient deep learning models for this problem that are not only performant but can also be deployed on constrained mobile hardware. In this Mobile AI challenge, we address this problem and propose participants to design fast solutions that can perform comprehensive enhancement of RGB photos while running on popular smartphone GPUs from Qualcomm and Arm. For this, the participants were provided with a large-scale DPED dataset consisting of RGB image pairs captured with an old iPhone 3GS smartphone and a professional Canon 70D DSLR camera. The runtime of all models was evaluated on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 and Dimensity 9500 chipsets with the Adreno and Mali GPUs, respectively. Top solutions proposed in this challenge are able to enhance Full HD resolution RGB images on both platforms under 300 milliseconds. A comprehensive description of the models developed in the challenge is provided in this paper.

Explore related subjects

cs.CV cs.AI

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeX RIS

Andrey Ignatov, Georgy Perevozchikov, Radu Timofte, Dong Zhang, Zhao Ran, Yang Zhang, Xiaochen Li, Shichang Ju, Yiqin Cao, Yang Lu, Nguyen Nhu Tinh Anh, To Thanh Dat, Nguyen Ngoc Ky Duyen, Nguyen Trong Nghia, Bui Minh Hieu, Qiuhai Yan, Sunzhe Yang, Kang Chen, Tingting Wang, Faming Fang, Runhua Deng, Zhifeng Wang, Long Peng, Aiwen Jiang. 2026-11-03. RGB Photo Enhancement with Deep Learning on Smartphone GPUs: Mobile AI 2026 Challenge Report. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.05024

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Graph-Aggregated Prototype Learning for Remote Sensing Semantic Change Detection

Semantic change detection (SCD) extends the binary change detection task to provide not only the change locations but also the detailed "from-to" categories in multi-temporal remote sensing data. Such detailed semantic insights into changes offer considerable advantages for a wide array of applications. However, since SCD involves the simultaneous optimization of multiple tasks, the model is prone to negative transfer due to task-specific learning difficulties and conflicting gradient flows. To address this issue, we propose Graph-Aggregated Prototype Learning for Remote Sensing Semantic Change Detection(GAPL-SCD). In this framework, a multi-task joint optimization method is designed to optimize the primary task of semantic segmentation and change detection, along with the auxiliary task of graph aggregation prototype learning. Adaptive weight allocation and gradient rotation methods are used to alleviate the conflict between training tasks and improve multi-task learning capabilities. Specifically, the graph aggregation prototype learning module constructs an interaction graph using high-level features. Prototypes serve as class proxies, enabling category-level domain alignment across time points and reducing interference from irrelevant changes. Additionally, the proposed self-query multi-level feature interaction and bi-temporal feature fusion modules further enhance multi-scale feature representation, improving performance in complex scenes. Experimental results on the SECOND and Landsat-SCD datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, with significant improvements in accuracy and robustness for SCD task.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Compact Attention: Exploiting Structured Spatio-Temporal Sparsity for Fast Video Generation

The quadratic computational complexity of self-attention mechanisms imposes a critical constraint on transformer-based video generation, particularly for synthesizing ultra-long and high-definition sequences. While most sparse attention techniques employ fixed or heuristic patterns, they often struggle to accommodate the heterogeneous and layer-specific redundancies inherent in video diffusion transformers (VDiTs). We find that different attention heads consistently concentrate most of their attention mass in different coarse query-key regions, a behavior we call functional specialization. Although individual attention values vary with the generated content, these regions remain similar across prompts and random seeds. Leveraging these insights, we introduce Compact Attention, a hardware-aware sparse attention framework for efficient long-video synthesis. We quantify this stability and use it to construct searchable, reusable, head-specific masks. Based on the observation, we propose a deformable dual-window sparse pattern mechanism that flexibly approximates local and axial attention regions within one tile-aligned mask family. To avoid manually choosing a mask for each head, we develop a recall-driven offline auto-search algorithm that identifies high-quality sparse masks while leveraging temporal stability for mask reuse. Extensive evaluations on Wan2.1 (14B) and Hunyuan-Video demonstrate that Compact Attention achieves 2.25x/3.03x attention speedups over FlashAttention-2 and 1.20x/1.74x over FlashAttention-3, respectively, while maintaining visual quality and temporal consistency comparable to full-attention baselines. Project Page: https://yo-ava.github.io/Compact-Attention.github.io/

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Backpropagation-Free Test-Time Adaptation via Probabilistic Gaussian Alignment

Test-time adaptation (TTA) enhances the zero-shot robustness under distribution shifts by leveraging unlabeled test data during inference. Despite notable advances, several challenges still limit its broader applicability. First, most methods rely on backpropagation or iterative optimization, which limits scalability and hinders real-time deployment. Second, they lack explicit modeling of class-conditional feature distributions. This modeling is crucial for producing reliable decision boundaries and calibrated predictions, but it remains underexplored due to the lack of both source data and supervision at test time. In this paper, we propose ADAPT, an Advanced Distribution-Aware and backPropagation-free Test-time adaptation method. We reframe TTA as a Gaussian probabilistic inference task by modeling class-conditional likelihoods using gradually updated class means and a shared covariance matrix. This enables closed-form, training-free inference. To correct potential likelihood bias, we introduce lightweight regularization guided by CLIP priors and a historical knowledge bank. ADAPT requires no source data, no gradient updates, and no full access to target data, supporting both online and transductive settings. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance under a wide range of distribution shifts with superior scalability and robustness.

cs.CV↗