mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

RestoreFormer: High-Quality Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs

arXiv 2201.06374 ↗First posted 17 Jan 2022cs.CVcited by 85

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Cited by 30 in Diffusion models, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Blind face restoration is to recover a high-quality face image from unknown degradations. As face image contains abundant contextual information, we propose a method, RestoreFormer, which explores fully-spatial attentions to model contextual information and surpasses existing works that use local operators. RestoreFormer has several benefits compared to prior arts. First, unlike the conventional multi-head self-attention in previous Vision Transformers (ViTs), RestoreFormer incorporates a multi-head cross-attention layer to learn fully-spatial interactions between corrupted queries and high-quality key-value pairs. Second, the key-value pairs in ResotreFormer are sampled from a reconstruction-oriented high-quality dictionary, whose elements are rich in high-quality facial features specifically aimed for face reconstruction, leading to superior restoration results. Third, RestoreFormer outperforms advanced state-of-the-art methods on one synthetic dataset and three real-world datasets, as well as produces images with better visual quality.

Key facts. Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 36 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jan 2022.

Builds on

36 of 48 references.

References · 36

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24 more
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  15. 2020Blind Face Restoration via Deep Multi-scale Component Dictionariescited by 106
  16. 2020Progressive Semantic-Aware Style Transformation for Blind Face Restorationcited by 99
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  20. 2019Progressive Face Super-Resolution via Attention to Facial Landmarkcited by 73
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Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 9; 2023: 22; 2024: 26; 2025: 18; 2026: 10.

85 papers.

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  1. 2023DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Priorcited by 255
  2. 2022Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformercited by 230
  3. 2022VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decodercited by 116
  4. 2022DifFace: Blind Face Restoration with Diffused Error Contractioncited by 96
  5. 2023DiffusionRig: Learning Personalized Priors for Facial Appearance Editingcited by 74
  6. 2024Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Modelcited by 73
  7. 2024Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration by Residual Shiftingcited by 64
  8. 2023PGDiff: Guiding Diffusion Models for Versatile Face Restoration via Partial Guidancecited by 49
  9. 2022Learning Dual Memory Dictionaries for Blind Face Restorationcited by 40
  10. 2024FlowVQTalker: High-Quality Emotional Talking Face Generation through Normalizing Flow and Quantizationcited by 39
  11. 2023RestoreFormer++: Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairscited by 33
  12. 2024GLARE: Low Light Image Enhancement via Generative Latent Feature based Codebook Retrievalcited by 33
38 more
  1. 2024OSDFace: One-Step Diffusion Model for Face Restorationcited by 33
  2. 2024Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restorationcited by 32
  3. 2022Rethinking the Objectives of Vector-Quantized Tokenizers for Image Synthesiscited by 31
  4. 2023SelfPromer: Self-Prompt Dehazing Transformers with Depth-Consistencycited by 24
  5. 2023Learning Generative Structure Prior for Blind Text Image Super-resolutioncited by 24
  6. 2025Compressed Image Generation with Denoising Diffusion Codebook Modelscited by 24
  7. 2023Dual Associated Encoder for Face Restorationcited by 23
  8. 2023Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Diffusion Priorcited by 21
  9. 2024WaveFace: Authentic Face Restoration with Efficient Frequency Recoverycited by 20
  10. 2022CTCNet: A CNN-Transformer Cooperation Network for Face Image Super-Resolutioncited by 19
  11. 2023Towards Authentic Face Restoration with Iterative Diffusion Models and Beyondcited by 18
  12. 2023Survey on Deep Face Restoration: From Non-blind to Blind and Beyondcited by 18
  13. 2022Deep Face Restoration: A Surveycited by 17
  14. 2025FixTalk: Taming Identity Leakage for High-Quality Talking Head Generation in Extreme Casescited by 14
  15. 2023Learning Image-Adaptive Codebooks for Class-Agnostic Image Restorationcited by 13
  16. 2024Overcoming False Illusions in Real-World Face Restoration with Multi-Modal Guided Diffusion Modelcited by 12
  17. 2025Show and Polish: Reference-Guided Identity Preservation in Face Video Restorationcited by 12
  18. 2023Always Clear Days: Degradation Type and Severity Aware All-In-One Adverse Weather Removalcited by 11
  19. 2022Semi-Cycled Generative Adversarial Networks for Real-World Face Super-Resolutioncited by 9
  20. 2025InterLCM: Low-Quality Images as Intermediate States of Latent Consistency Models for Effective Blind Face Restorationcited by 9
  21. 2024Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restorationcited by 8
  22. 2025Gradient as Conditions: Rethinking HOG for All-in-one Image Restorationcited by 8
  23. 20243D Priors-Guided Diffusion for Blind Face Restorationcited by 7
  24. 2023Perceptual Quality Improvement in Videoconferencing using Keyframes-based GANcited by 6
  25. 2024DiffBody: Human Body Restoration by Imagining with Generative Diffusion Priorcited by 6
  26. 2024Towards Real-world Video Face Restoration: A New Benchmarkcited by 6
  27. 2023Blind Face Restoration for Under-Display Camera via Dictionary Guided Transformercited by 5
  28. 2023FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restorationcited by 5
  29. 2024CLR-Face: Conditional Latent Refinement for Blind Face Restoration Using Score-Based Diffusion Modelscited by 5
  30. 2024Diffusion Prior Interpolation for Flexibility Real-World Face Super-Resolutioncited by 5
  31. 2025DiffusionReward: Enhancing Blind Face Restoration through Reward Feedback Learningcited by 5
  32. 2023Neural Image Compression Using Masked Sparse Visual Representationcited by 4
  33. 2024SelfSwapper: Self-Supervised Face Swapping via Shape Agnostic Masked AutoEncodercited by 4
  34. 2024ARoFace: Alignment Robustness to Improve Low-Quality Face Recognitioncited by 4
  35. 2024AuthFace: Towards Authentic Blind Face Restoration with Face-oriented Generative Diffusion Priorcited by 4
  36. 2023Super-Resolving Face Image by Facial Parsing Informationcited by 3
  37. 2023MetaF2N: Blind Image Super-Resolution by Learning Efficient Model Adaptation from Facescited by 3
  38. 2023Personalized Restoration via Dual-Pivot Tuningcited by 3

50 most cited of 85 All 85 (JSON)