Current image fusion methods struggle with real-world composite degradations and lack the flexibility to accommodate user-specific needs. To address this, we propose ControlFusion, a controllable fusion network guided by language-vision prompts that adaptively mitigates composite degradations. On the one hand, we construct a degraded imaging model based on physical mechanisms, such as the Retinex theory and atmospheric scattering principle, to simulate composite degradations and provide a data foundation for addressing realistic degradations. On the other hand, we devise a prompt-modulated restoration and fusion network that dynamically enhances features according to degradation prompts, enabling adaptability to varying degradation levels. To support user-specific preferences in visual quality, a text encoder is incorporated to embed user-defined degradation types and levels as degradation prompts. Moreover, a spatial-frequency collaborative visual adapter is designed to autonomously perceive degradations from source images, thereby reducing complete reliance on user instructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ControlFusion outperforms SOTA fusion methods in fusion quality and degradation handling, particularly under real-world and compound degradations.

Adverse weather severely impairs real-world visual perception, while existing vision models trained on synthetic data with fixed parameters struggle to generalize to complex degradations. To address this, we first construct HFLS-Weather, a physics-driven, high-fidelity dataset that simulates diverse weather phenomena, and then design a dual-level reinforcement learning framework initialized with HFLS-Weather for cold-start training. Within this framework, at the local level, weather-specific restoration models are refined through perturbation-driven image quality optimization, enabling reward-based learning without paired supervision; at the global level, a meta-controller dynamically orchestrates model selection and execution order according to scene degradation. This framework enables continuous adaptation to real-world conditions and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of adverse weather scenarios.

Image restoration aims to recover sharp, high-quality images from degraded, lowquality inputs. Existing methods have progressively advanced from task-specific designs to general architectures, all-in-one frameworks, and composite degradation handling. Despite these advances, computational efficiency remains a critical factor for practical deployment. In this work, we present BioIR, an efficient and universal image restoration framework inspired by the human visual system. Specifically, we design two bio-inspired modules, Peripheral-to-Foveal (P2F) and Foveal-to-Peripheral (F2P), to emulate the perceptual processes of human vision, with a particular focus on the functional interplay between foveal and peripheral pathways. P2F delivers large-field contextual signals to foveal regions based on pixel-to-region affinity, while F2P propagates fine-grained spatial details through a static-to-dynamic two-stage integration strategy. Leveraging the biologically motivated design, BioIR achieves state-of-the-art performance across three representative image restoration settings: single-degradation, all-in-one, and composite degradation. Moreover, BioIR maintains high computational efficiency and fast inference speed, making it highly suitable for real-world applications. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/c-yn/BioIR.

Human-centered images often suffer from severe generic degradation during transmission and are prone to human motion blur (HMB), making restoration challenging. Existing research lacks sufficient focus on these issues, as both problems often coexist in practice. To address this, we design a degradation pipeline that simulates the coexistence of HMB and generic noise, generating synthetic degraded data to train our proposed HAODiff, a human-aware one-step diffusion. Specifically, we propose a triple-branch dual-prompt guidance (DPG), which leverages high-quality images, residual noise (LQ minus HQ), and HMB segmentation masks as training targets. It produces a positive-negative prompt pair for classifier-free guidance (CFG) in a single diffusion step. The resulting adaptive dual prompts let HAODiff exploit CFG more effectively, boosting robustness against diverse degradations. For fair evaluation, we introduce MPII-Test, a benchmark rich in combined noise and HMB cases. Extensive experiments show that our HAODiff surpasses existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in terms of both quantitative metrics and visual quality on synthetic and real-world datasets, including our introduced MPII-Test. Code is available at: https://github.com/gobunu/HAODiff.

Restoring images degraded by adverse weather remains a significant challenge due to the highly non-uniform and spatially heterogeneous nature of weather-induced artifacts, e.g., fine-grained rain streaks versus widespread haze. Accurately estimating the underlying degradation can intuitively provide restoration models with more targeted and effective guidance, enabling adaptive processing strategies. To this end, we propose a Morton-Order Degradation Estimation Mechanism (MODEM) for adverse weather image restoration. Central to MODEM is the Morton-Order 2D-Selective-Scan Module (MOS2D), which integrates Morton-coded spatial ordering with selective state-space models to capture long-range dependencies while preserving local structural coherence. Complementing MOS2D, we introduce a Dual Degradation Estimation Module (DDEM) that disentangles and estimates both global and local degradation priors.

Ultra-High Definition (UHD) image restoration struggles to balance computational efficiency and detail retention. While Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) offer improved efficiency by operating in the latent space, with the Gaussian variational constraint, this compression preserves semantics but sacrifices critical high-frequency attributes specific to degradation and thus compromises reconstruction fidelity. Consequently, a VAE redesign is imperative to foster a robust semantic representation conducive to generalization and perceptual quality, while simultaneously enabling effective high-frequency information processing crucial for reconstruction fidelity. To address this, we propose Latent Harmony, a twostage framework that reinvigorates VAEs for UHD restoration by concurrently regularizing the latent space and enforcing high-frequency-aware reconstruction constraints. Specifically, Stage One introduces the LH-VAE, which fortifies its latent representation through visual semantic constraints and progressive degradation perturbation for enhanced semantics robustness; meanwhile, it incorporates latent equivariance to bolster its high-frequency reconstruction capabilities.

Image restoration is a fundamental task in computer vision and machine learning, which learns a mapping between the clear images and the degraded images under various conditions (e.g., blur, low-light, haze). Yet, most existing image restoration methods are highly restricted by the requirement of degraded and clear image pairs, which limits the generalization and feasibility to enormous real-world scenarios without paired images. To address this bottleneck, we propose a Degradation-aware Dynamic Schrödinger Bridge (DDSB) for unpaired image restoration. Its general idea is to learn a Schrödinger Bridge between clear and degraded image distribution, while at the same time emphasizing the physical degradation priors to reduce the accumulation of errors during the restoration process. ADegradation-aware Optimal Transport (DOT) learning scheme is accordingly devised. Training a degradation model to learn the inverse restoration process is particularly challenging, as it must be applicable across different stages of the iterative restoration process. A Dynamic Transport with Consistency (DTC) learning objective is further proposed to reduce the loss of image details in the early iterations and therefore refine the degradation model. Extensive experiments on multiple image degradation tasks show its state-of-the-art performance over the prior arts.

The plug-and-play priors (PnP) and regularization by denoising (RED) methods have become widely used for solving inverse problems by leveraging pre-trained deep denoisers as image priors. While the empirical imaging performance and the theoretical convergence properties of these algorithms have been widely investigated, their recovery properties have not previously been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by showing how to establish theoretical recovery guarantees for PnP/RED by assuming that the solution of these methods lies near the fixedpoints of a deep neural network. We also present numerical results comparing the recovery performance of PnP/RED in compressive sensing against that of recent compressive sensing algorithms based on generative models. Our numerical results suggest that PnP with a pre-trained artifact removal network provides significantly better results compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods.

Multi-scale architectures have shown effectiveness in a variety of tasks thanks to appealing cross-scale complementarity. However, existing architectures treat different scale features equally without considering the scale-specific characteristics, i.e., the within-scale characteristics are ignored in the architecture design. In this paper, we reveal this missing piece for multi-scale architecture design and accordingly propose a novel Multi-Scale Adaptive Network (MSANet) for single image denoising. Specifically, MSANet simultaneously embraces the within-scale characteristics and the cross-scale complementarity thanks to three novel neural blocks, i.e., adaptive feature block (AFeB), adaptive multi-scale block (AMB), and adaptive fusion block (AFuB). In brief, AFeB is designed to adaptively preserve image details and filter noises, which is highly expected for the features with mixed details and noises. AMB could enlarge the receptive field and aggregate the multi-scale information, which meets the need of contextually informative features. AFuB devotes to adaptively sampling and transferring the features from one scale to another scale, which fuses the multi-scale features with varying characteristics from coarse to fine. Extensive experiments on both three real and six synthetic noisy image datasets show the superiority of MSANet compared with 12 methods.