Cascaded Multi-Scale Attention for Enhanced Multi-Scale Feature Extraction and Interaction with Low-Resolution Images

Low-resolution face recognition (LR-FR) remains a challenging task due to poor feature extraction and aggregation, as probe images often contain limited identity information resulting from extreme degradations such as blur, occlusion, and low contrast. Additionally, the domain gap between high-resolution (HR) gallery images and low-resolution (LR) probe images poses a significant challenge. A single feature encoder struggles to generalize effectively across both domains when fine-tuned on an LR dataset, and this issue is further magnified by catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose FaceMoE, an effective adaptation of Mixture of Experts (MoE) transfomer architecture for low-resolution face-recognition . Specifically, we introduce multiple specialized feed-forward network (FFN) experts and incorporate a top-k router, which dynamically assigns tokens to appropriate experts. This design emergently promotes specialization across experts for different semantic regions of the face, which enables FaceMoE to perform resolution-aware feature extraction. Moreover, the top-k router facilitates sparse expert activation, enabling the model to preserve pretrained knowledge when finetuned on a LR dataset, while increasing model capacity without proportional computational overhead. FaceMoE is trained with a combined face recognition loss, router z-loss, and load balancing loss to ensure expert specialization and stable training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work leveraging MoE for LR-FR. Extensive experiments across eleven datasets, spanning HR, mixed-quality, and LR benchmarks, demonstrate that FaceMoE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code: https://github.com/Kartik-3004/FaceMoE

The rapid advances in deep learning have significantly enhanced the accuracy of multimodal 3D human pose estimation (HPE). However, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) HPE pipelines still rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity makes real-time processing for long sequences impractical. Mamba addresses this issue through selective state-space modeling, enabling efficient sequence processing without sacrificing representational power. Nevertheless, it struggles to capture complex spatial dependencies in multimodal settings. To bridge this gap, we propose VIMCAN, a hybrid architecture that combines the efficient sequence modeling of Mamba with the spatial reasoning of Cross-Attention, and performs robust visual-inertial fusion and human pose estimation between RGB keypoints and wearable IMU data. By leveraging Mamba's dynamic parameterization for temporal modeling and Attention for spatial dependency extraction, VIMCAN achieves superior accuracy, with mean per-joint position errors (MPJPE) of 17.2 mm on TotalCapture and 45.3 mm on 3DPW. VIMCAN outperforms prior Transformer-based and other SOTA approaches while supporting real-time inference at over 60 frames per second on consumer-grade hardware. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/Eddieyzp/VIMCAN}{this GitHub repository}.

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT)-based models have exhibited remarkable performance in image super-resolution. However, the quadratic computational complexity of ViTs with respect to spatial resolution severely constrains their efficiency, leading to high latency and massive memory consumption. To alleviate this, various window-based attention mechanisms have been proposed; yet, they inherently compromise the long-range dependency modeling that is the primary advantage of ViTs. To overcome these limitations, we propose the Clustered Unit-level Similarity Transformer (CUST), a novel architecture that efficiently integrates global and local information. Specifically, CUST enables each patch to aggregate and attend to similar patches within a broadened regional scope outside its local window, thereby capturing extensive contextual understanding. Furthermore, it employs overlapping attention windows to capture local dependencies, while explicitly extracting high-frequency details by computing the residual difference between the original features and their downsampled-upsampled counterparts. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model achieves a practical balance between computational efficiency and restoration performance. It achieves a lower memory footprint and faster inference speed compared to recent global context or lightweight models under realistic constraints. Code is available at [https://github.com/jwgdmkj/CUST].