# Restore-RWKV: Efficient and Effective Medical Image Restoration with RWKV

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.11087 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11087/

## Key facts

- Cited by 36 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.00092/) (2014)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [Vision Mamba: Efficient Visual Representation Learning with Bidirectional State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09417/) (2024)
- [VMamba: Visual State Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10166/) (2024)
- [Accurate Image Super-Resolution Using Very Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.04587/) (2015)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [Understanding the Effective Receptive Field in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.04128/) (2017)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [MaxViT: Multi-Axis Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01697/) (2022)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [Low-Dose CT with a Residual Encoder-Decoder Convolutional Neural Network (RED-CNN)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00288/) (2017)
- [Eagle and Finch: RWKV with Matrix-Valued States and Dynamic Recurrence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05892/) (2024)
- [Burst Denoising with Kernel Prediction Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02327/) (2017)
- [Vision-RWKV: Efficient and Scalable Visual Perception with RWKV-Like Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02308/) (2024)
- [Efficient and Accurate MRI Super-Resolution using a Generative Adversarial Network and 3D Multi-Level Densely Connected Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01417/) (2018)
- [SparseViT: Revisiting Activation Sparsity for Efficient High-Resolution Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17605/) (2023)
- [Swin Transformer for Fast MRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03230/) (2022)
- [Towards Effective Multiple-in-One Image Restoration: A Sequential and Prompt Learning Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03379/) (2024)
- [CTformer: Convolution-free Token2Token Dilated Vision Transformer for Low-dose CT Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.13517/) (2022)
- [Diffusion-RWKV: Scaling RWKV-Like Architectures for Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04478/) (2024)
- [Visual Mamba: A Survey and New Outlooks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18861/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [Linear Attention Modeling for Learned Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05741/) (2025)
- [NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14582/) (2025)
- [RWKV-UNet: Improving UNet with Long-Range Cooperation for Effective Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08458/) (2025)
- [MRI Super-Resolution with Deep Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.16854/) (2025)
- [Learning Domain-Aware Task Prompt Representations for Multi-Domain All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01725/) (2026)
- [A Survey of RWKV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14847/) (2024)
- [C3-OWD: A Curriculum Cross-modal Contrastive Learning Framework for Open-World Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23316/) (2025)
- [FEAT: Full-Dimensional Efficient Attention Transformer for Medical Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04956/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Blind All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18412/) (2024)
- [TAT: Task-Adaptive Transformer for All-in-One Medical Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14550/) (2025)
- [StyleRWKV: High-Quality and High-Efficiency Style Transfer with RWKV-like Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19535/) (2024)
- [Multi-View Learning with Context-Guided Receptance for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02705/) (2025)
- [EvRWKV: A Continuous Interactive RWKV Framework for Effective Event-Guided Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.03184/) (2025)
- [EndoIR: Degradation-Agnostic All-in-One Endoscopic Image Restoration via Noise-Aware Routing Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05873/) (2025)
- [Fourier-RWKV: A Multi-State Perception Network for Efficient Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08161/) (2025)
- [The Evolution of RWKV: Advancements in Efficient Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02795/) (2024)
- [DREMnet: An Interpretable Denoising Framework for Semi-Airborne Transient Electromagnetic Signal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22223/) (2025)
- [UniFuse: A Unified All-in-One Framework for Multi-Modal Medical Image Fusion Under Diverse Degradations and Misalignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.22736/) (2025)
- [FS-RWKV: Leveraging Frequency Spatial-Aware RWKV for 3T-to-7T MRI Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08951/) (2025)
- [MRT: Learning Compact Representations with Mixed RWKV-Transformer for Extreme Image Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06717/) (2025)
- [Towards Controllable Low-Light Image Enhancement: A Continuous Multi-illumination Dataset and Efficient State Space Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.25296/) (2026)
- [GDSR: Global-Detail Integration through Dual-Branch Network with Wavelet Losses for Remote Sensing Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01460/) (2024)
- [Exploring Linear Attention Alternative for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.00404/) (2025)
- [RSRWKV: A Linear-Complexity 2D Attention Mechanism for Efficient Remote Sensing Vision Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20382/) (2025)
- [Exploring Diffusion with Test-Time Training on Efficient Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14541/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Global Token Mixing in Task-Dependent MRI Restoration: Insights from Minimal Gated CNN Baselines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01449/) (2026)
- [MedQ-UNI: Toward Unified Medical Image Quality Assessment and Restoration via Vision-Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.18465/) (2026)
- [EventFace: Event-Based Face Recognition via Structure-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.06782/) (2026)
- [PestVL-Net: Enabling Multimodal Pest Learning via Fine-grained Vision-Language Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17278/) (2026)
- [SCRWKV: Ultra-Compact Structure-Calibrated Vision-RWKV for Topological Crack Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.14926/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformers have revolutionized medical image restoration, but the quadratic complexity still poses limitations for their application to high-resolution medical images. The recent advent of the Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV) model in the natural language processing field has attracted much attention due to its ability to process long sequences efficiently. To leverage its advanced design, we propose Restore-RWKV, the first RWKV-based model for medical image restoration. Since the original RWKV model is designed for 1D sequences, we make two necessary modifications for modeling spatial relations in 2D medical images. First, we present a recurrent WKV (Re-WKV) attention mechanism that captures global dependencies with linear computational complexity. Re-WKV incorporates bidirectional attention as basic for a global receptive field and recurrent attention to effectively model 2D dependencies from various scan directions. Second, we develop an omnidirectional token shift (Omni-Shift) layer that enhances local dependencies by shifting tokens from all directions and across a wide context range. These adaptations make the proposed Restore-RWKV an efficient and effective model for medical image restoration. Even a lightweight variant of Restore-RWKV, with only 1.16 million parameters, achieves comparable or even superior results compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the resulting Restore-RWKV achieves SOTA performance across a range of medical image restoration tasks, including PET image synthesis, CT image denoising, MRI image super-resolution, and all-in-one medical image restoration. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yaziwel/Restore-RWKV.