Zhaowei Qu

Novel view synthesis and 3D reconstruction have been extensively studied. Three-dimensional Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has gained popularity due to its rapid training and real-time rendering capabilities. However, RGB imaging is highly dependent on ideal illumination conditions. In low-light situations such as at night or in the presence of occlusions, RGB images often suffer from blurred contours or even complete failure in imaging, which severely restricts the application of 3DGS in such scenarios. Thermal imaging technology, on the other hand, serves as an effective complement. Thermal images are solely influenced by heat sources and are immune to illumination conditions. This unique property enables them to clearly identify the contour information of objects in low-light environments. Nevertheless, thermal images exhibit significant limitations in presenting texture details due to their sensitivity to temperature variations rather than surface texture features. To capitalize on the strengths of both, we propose thermal geometrically accurate Gaussian Splatting (TGA-GS), a novel Gaussian Splatting model. TGA-GS is designed to leverage RGB and thermal information to generate high-quality meshes in low-light conditions. Meanwhile, given low-resolution thermal images and low-light RGB images as inputs, our method can generate high-resolution thermal and RGB images from novel viewpoints. Moreover, we also provide a real thermal imaging dataset captured with a handheld thermal infrared camera. This not only enriches the information content of the images but also provides a more reliable data basis for subsequent computer vision tasks in low-light scenarios.

Gaussian Splatting (GS) methods, including 3DGS and 2DGS, have demonstrated significant effectiveness in real-time novel view synthesis (NVS), establishing themselves as a key technology in the field of computer graphics. However, GS-based methods still face challenges in rendering high-quality image details. Even when utilizing advanced frameworks, their outputs may display significant rendering artifacts when relying solely on a few input views, such as noise and blurriness. A reasonable approach is to conduct post-processing in order to restore clear details. Therefore, we propose GaussianEnhancer, a general GS-agnostic post-processor that employs a degradation-driven view blending method to improve the rendering quality of GS models. Specifically, we design a degradation modeling method tailored to the GS style and construct a large-scale training dataset to effectively simulate the native rendering artifacts of GS, enabling efficient training. In addition, we present a spatial information fusion framework that includes view fusion and depth modulation modules. This framework successfully integrates related images and leverages depth information from the target image to enhance rendering details. Through our GaussianEnhancer, we effectively eliminate the rendering artifacts of GS models and generate highly realistic image details. Based on GaussianEnhancer, we introduce GaussianEnhancer++, which features an enhanced GS-style degradation simulator, leading to improved enhancement quality. Furthermore, GaussianEnhancer++ can generate ultra-high-resolution outputs from noisy low resolution GS rendered images by leveraging the symmetry between high-resolution and low resolution images. Extensive experiments demonstrate the excellent restoration ability of GaussianEnhancer++ on various novel view synthesis benchmarks.

Self-play methods have achieved remarkable success in two-player zero-sum games, attaining superhuman performance in many complex game domains. Parallelizing learners is a feasible approach to handle complex games. However, parallelizing learners often leads to the suboptimal exploitation of computational resources, resulting in inefficiencies. This paper introduces the Mixed Hierarchical Oracle (MHO), which is designed to enhance training efficiency and performance in complex two-player zero-sum games. MHO efficiently leverages interaction data among parallelized solvers during the Parallelized Oracle (PO) process, while employing Model Soups (MS) to consolidate fragmented computational resources and Hierarchical Exploration (HE) to balance exploration and exploitation. These carefully designed enhancements for parallelized systems significantly improve the training performance of self-play. Additionally, MiniStar is introduced as an open source environment focused on small-scale combat scenarios, developed to facilitate research in self-play algorithms. The MHO is evaluated on both the AlphaStar888 matrix game and MiniStar environment, and ablation studies further demonstrates its effectiveness in improving the agent’s decision-making capabilities. This work highlight the potential of the MHO to optimize compute resource utilization and improve performance in self-play methods.