LearnIR: Learnable Posterior Sampling for Real-World Image Restoration

Yihang Bao, Zhen Huang, Shanyan Guan, Songlin Yang, Yanhao Ge, Wei Li, Bukun Huang, Zengmin Xu

Keywords: Image restoration, diffusion model, residual

Abstract: Image restoration in real-world conditions is highly challenging due to heterogeneous degradations such as haze, noise, shadows, and blur. Existing diffusion-based methods remain limited: conditional generation struggles to balance fidelity and realism, inversion-based approaches accumulate errors, and posterior sampling requires a known forward operator that is rarely available. We introduce **LearnIR**, a learnable diffusion posterior sampling framework that eliminates this dependency by training a lightweight model to directly predict gradient correction distributions, enabling *Diffusion Posterior Sampling Correction (DPSC)* that maintains consistency with the true image distribution during sampling. In addition, a *Dynamic Resolution Module (DRM)* dynamically adjusts resolution to preserve global structures in early stages and refine fine textures later, while avoiding the need for a pretrained VAE. Experiments on ISTD, O-HAZE, HazyDet, REVIDE, and our newly constructed FaceShadow dataset show that LearnIR achieves state-of-the-art performance in PSNR, SSIM, and LPIPS.

Primary Area: generative models

Submission Number: 11171