# RestoreFormer++: Towards Real-World Blind Face Restoration from Undegraded Key-Value Pairs

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07228/

## Key facts

- Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 68 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [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)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Taming Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09841/) (2020)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [Deformable Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06211/) (2017)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Recovering Realistic Texture in Image Super-resolution by Deep Spatial Feature Transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02815/) (2018)
- [PULSE: Self-Supervised Photo Upsampling via Latent Space Exploration of Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.03808/) (2020)
- [MaX-DeepLab: End-to-End Panoptic Segmentation with Mask Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00759/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Towards Robust Blind Face Restoration with Codebook Lookup Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11253/) (2022)
- [GAN Prior Embedded Network for Blind Face Restoration in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06070/) (2021)
- [Image Processing Using Multi-Code GAN Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07116/) (2019)
- [FSRNet: End-to-End Learning Face Super-Resolution with Facial Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10703/) (2017)
- [The 2018 PIRM Challenge on Perceptual Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.07517/) (2018)
- [VQFR: Blind Face Restoration with Vector-Quantized Dictionary and Parallel Decoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06803/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [Posterior-Mean Rectified Flow: Towards Minimum MSE Photo-Realistic Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00418/) (2024)
- [OSDFace: One-Step Diffusion Model for Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17163/) (2024)
- [Compressed Image Generation with Denoising Diffusion Codebook Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01189/) (2025)
- [Survey on Deep Face Restoration: From Non-blind to Blind and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15490/) (2023)
- [The Second Challenge on Real-World Face Restoration at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10532/) (2026)
- [Spatial-Temporal Knowledge-Embedded Transformer for Video Scene Graph Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13237/) (2023)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Real-World Face Restoration: Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14600/) (2025)
- [Visual Style Prompt Learning Using Diffusion Models for Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.21042/) (2024)
- [The DeepSpeak Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.05366/) (2024)
- [FLAIR: A Conditional Diffusion Framework with Applications to Face Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15445/) (2023)
- [Adaptive Global-Local Representation Learning and Selection for Cross-Domain Facial Expression Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11085/) (2024)
- [TD-BFR: Truncated Diffusion Model for Efficient Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20537/) (2025)
- [MoFRR: Mixture of Diffusion Models for Face Retouching Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19770/) (2025)
- [Bridging Information Asymmetry: A Hierarchical Framework for Deterministic Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.19506/) (2026)
- [VIGIL: Part-Grounded Structured Reasoning for Generalizable Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21526/) (2026)
- [Perceptual Fairness in Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13805/) (2024)
- [Analysis and Benchmarking of Extending Blind Face Image Restoration to Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11828/) (2024)
- [Restoring Gaussian Blurred Face Images for Deanonymization Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12344/) (2025)
- [Unlocking the Potential of Diffusion Priors in Blind Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08556/) (2025)
- [HonestFace: Towards Honest Face Restoration with One-Step Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18469/) (2025)
- [Performance Decay in Deepfake Detection: The Limitations of Training on Outdated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07009/) (2025)
- [BeautyGRPO: Aesthetic Alignment for Face Retouching via Dynamic Path Guidance and Fine-Grained Preference Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01163/) (2026)
- [LAFR: Efficient Diffusion-based Blind Face Restoration via Latent Codebook Alignment Adapter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23462/) (2025)
- [QuantFace: Efficient Quantization for Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00820/) (2025)
- [CodeFormer++: Blind Face Restoration Using Deformable Registration and Deep Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04410/) (2025)
- [AI killed the video star. Audio-driven diffusion model for expressive talking head generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22488/) (2025)
- [Arc2Morph: Identity-Preserving Facial Morphing with Arc2Face](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16569/) (2026)
- [Face2Scene: Using Facial Degradation as an Oracle for Diffusion-Based Scene Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16570/) (2026)
- [IConFace: Fine-Grained Identity Conditioning for Reference-Aware Face Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02814/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Blind face restoration aims at recovering high-quality face images from those with unknown degradations. Current algorithms mainly introduce priors to complement high-quality details and achieve impressive progress. However, most of these algorithms ignore abundant contextual information in the face and its interplay with the priors, leading to sub-optimal performance. Moreover, they pay less attention to the gap between the synthetic and real-world scenarios, limiting the robustness and generalization to real-world applications. In this work, we propose RestoreFormer++, which on the one hand introduces fully-spatial attention mechanisms to model the contextual information and the interplay with the priors, and on the other hand, explores an extending degrading model to help generate more realistic degraded face images to alleviate the synthetic-to-real-world gap. Compared with current algorithms, RestoreFormer++ has several crucial benefits. First, instead of using a multi-head self-attention mechanism like the traditional visual transformer, we introduce multi-head cross-attention over multi-scale features to fully explore spatial interactions between corrupted information and high-quality priors. In this way, it can facilitate RestoreFormer++ to restore face images with higher realness and fidelity. Second, in contrast to the recognition-oriented dictionary, we learn a reconstruction-oriented dictionary as priors, which contains more diverse high-quality facial details and better accords with the restoration target. Third, we introduce an extending degrading model that contains more realistic degraded scenarios for training data synthesizing, and thus helps to enhance the robustness and generalization of our RestoreFormer++ model. Extensive experiments show that RestoreFormer++ outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms on both synthetic and real-world datasets.