Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
12-2026
Abstract
We propose AdaDS, an Adaptive Diffusion Sampling framework for prompted metric depth estimation, which estimates high-resolution metric depth from an image and an arbitrarily degraded low-resolution depth prompt. This setting is commonly studied as depth super-resolution, where existing methods typically regress depth directly without an explicit prior over high-quality depth, and thus often produce artifacts under severe or unseen degradations. In contrast, AdaDS exploits the contraction property of Gaussian smoothing: as noise accumulates in the forward diffusion process, the noisy distributions of degraded prompts and their high-quality counterparts converge toward an isotropic Gaussian prior, while the prompt content is gradually erased. Accordingly, AdaDS refines the prompt and estimates its uncertainty to adaptively select a starting timestep, and injects learned noise to place the intermediate sample in a high-density region of the depth distribution learned by a pre-trained diffusion model. Denoising from this sample yields high-quality depth with fine-grained details and corrects residual errors, even under imperfect prompt refinement. Experiments on real-world and synthetic benchmarks demonstrate its superior zero-shot generalization and robustness to diverse degradations. Code is available at https://github.com/w2kun/AdaDS.
Discipline
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics | Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces
Publication
Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), Sydney, Australia, December 6-12
First Page
1
Last Page
20
City or Country
Sydney,Australia
Citation
WANG, Kun; ZHU, Yun; ZHOU, Pan; and ZHAO, Na.
Metric depth estimation from arbitrarily degraded low-resolution depth prompts. (2026). Proceedings of the Fortieth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), Sydney, Australia, December 6-12. 1-20.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/11374
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://neurips.cc/virtual/2026/poster/153483
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons