# TAPE: Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding for Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.06074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 58 of its 93 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 58)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Uformer: A General U-Shaped Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03106/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Learning Deep CNN Denoiser Prior for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03264/) (2017)
- [DeblurGAN-v2: Deblurring (Orders-of-Magnitude) Faster and Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03826/) (2019)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration with Generative Facial Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.04061/) (2021)
- [Learning Texture Transformer Network for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04139/) (2020)
- [Toward Convolutional Blind Denoising of Real Photographs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04686/) (2018)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [Exploiting Deep Generative Prior for Versatile Image Restoration and Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13659/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16468/) (2024)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Complexity Experts are Task-Discriminative Learners for Any Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18466/) (2024)
- [Selective Hourglass Mapping for Universal Image Restoration Based on Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11157/) (2024)
- [HAT: Hybrid Attention Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05239/) (2023)
- [Perceive-IR: Learning to Perceive Degradation Better for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15994/) (2024)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [A Comparative Study of Image Restoration Networks for General Backbone Network Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11881/) (2023)
- [Neural Degradation Representation Learning for All-In-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12848/) (2023)
- [RestoreAgent: Autonomous Image Restoration Agent via Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18035/) (2024)
- [Degradation-Aware Feature Perturbation for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12630/) (2025)
- [Toward Real-world Single Image Deraining: A New Benchmark and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05514/) (2022)
- [FoundIR: Unleashing Million-scale Training Data to Advance Foundation Models for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01427/) (2024)
- [Low-Light Video Enhancement with Synthetic Event Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.11014/) (2022)
- [Prompt-based Ingredient-Oriented All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03063/) (2023)
- [UniProcessor: A Text-induced Unified Low-level Image Processor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20928/) (2024)
- [Restore Anything with Masks: Leveraging Mask Image Modeling for Blind All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19403/) (2024)
- [Seeing the Unseen: A Frequency Prompt Guided Transformer for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00288/) (2024)
- [Multi-Expert Adaptive Selection: Task-Balancing for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19139/) (2024)
- [LoRA-IR: Taming Low-Rank Experts for Efficient All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15385/) (2024)
- [UniRestorer: Universal Image Restoration via Adaptively Estimating Image Degradation at Proper Granularity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20157/) (2024)
- [HAIR: Hypernetworks-based All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08091/) (2024)
- [ClearAIR: A Human-Visual-Perception-Inspired All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02763/) (2026)
- [Efficient Degradation-aware Any Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15475/) (2024)
- [Efficient Degradation-agnostic Image Restoration via Channel-Wise Functional Decomposition and Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18679/) (2025)
- [DSwinIR: Rethinking Window-based Attention for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04869/) (2025)
- [EvoIR: Towards All-in-One Image Restoration via Evolutionary Frequency Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05104/) (2025)
- [Specularity Factorization for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01998/) (2024)
- [A Preliminary Exploration Towards General Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.15143/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning a generalized prior for natural image restoration is an important yet challenging task. Early methods mostly involved handcrafted priors including normalized sparsity, l_0 gradients, dark channel priors, etc. Recently, deep neural networks have been used to learn various image priors but do not guarantee to generalize. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that embeds a task-agnostic prior into a transformer. Our approach, named Task-Agnostic Prior Embedding (TAPE), consists of two stages, namely, task-agnostic pre-training and task-specific fine-tuning, where the first stage embeds prior knowledge about natural images into the transformer and the second stage extracts the knowledge to assist downstream image restoration. Experiments on various types of degradation validate the effectiveness of TAPE. The image restoration performance in terms of PSNR is improved by as much as 1.45dB and even outperforms task-specific algorithms. More importantly, TAPE shows the ability of disentangling generalized image priors from degraded images, which enjoys favorable transfer ability to unknown downstream tasks.