# UniProcessor: A Text-induced Unified Low-level Image Processor

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.20928 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.20928/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 81 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [DreamBooth: Fine Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models for Subject-Driven Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.12242/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [Non-local Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07971/) (2017)
- [Photo-Realistic Single Image Super-Resolution Using a Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.04802/) (2016)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [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 Very Deep Residual Channel Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02758/) (2018)
- [Real-Time Single Image and Video Super-Resolution Using an Efficient Sub-Pixel Convolutional Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.05158/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Resolution-robust Large Mask Inpainting with Fourier Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07161/) (2021)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08083/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Complexity Experts are Task-Discriminative Learners for Any Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18466/) (2024)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [FineVQ: Fine-Grained User Generated Content Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19238/) (2024)
- [Hybrid Agents for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10120/) (2025)
- [MoA-VR: A Mixture-of-Agents System Towards All-in-One Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08508/) (2025)
- [Efficient Degradation-agnostic Image Restoration via Channel-Wise Functional Decomposition and Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18679/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Restoration: Multi-Task Image Restoration Models are Zero-Shot Step-by-Step Universal Image Restorers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.08688/) (2024)
- [Learning Where and What to Restore for Composite Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17915/) (2025)
- [RGC-VQA: An Exploration Database for Robotic-Generated Video Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23852/) (2025)
- [UniLDiff: Unlocking the Power of Diffusion Priors for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.23685/) (2025)
- [Adapting Large VLMs with Iterative and Manual Instructions for Generative Low-light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18064/) (2025)
- [DINOLight: Robust Ambient Light Normalization with Self-supervised Visual Prior Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12579/) (2026)
- [Any Image Restoration via Efficient Spatial-Frequency Degradation Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14249/) (2025)
- [SLER-IR: Spherical Layer-wise Expert Routing for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05940/) (2026)
- [Preference-Guided Debiasing for No-Reference Enhancement Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.20086/) (2026)
- [OmniLight: One Model to Rule All Lighting Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15170/) (2026)
- [Continuous Expert Assembly: Instance-Conditioned Low-Rank Residuals for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06127/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for All-in-One Image Restoration via a Mixture of Frequency Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11444/) (2026)
- [DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19097/) (2026)
- [Hidden-Shot: Towards One-Shot Task Generalization for Low-Level Vision Generalist Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01535/) (2026)
- [Beyond Uniform Restoration: Empowering All-in-One Restoration with Pixel-Level Multimodal Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09482/) (2026)
- [ImIR: Image-Instruction Tuning for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25267/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image processing, including image restoration, image enhancement, etc., involves generating a high-quality clean image from a degraded input. Deep learning-based methods have shown superior performance for various image processing tasks in terms of single-task conditions. However, they require to train separate models for different degradations and levels, which limits the generalization abilities of these models and restricts their applications in real-world. In this paper, we propose a text-induced unified image processor for low-level vision tasks, termed UniProcessor, which can effectively process various degradation types and levels, and support multimodal control. Specifically, our UniProcessor encodes degradation-specific information with the subject prompt and process degradations with the manipulation prompt. These context control features are injected into the UniProcessor backbone via cross-attention to control the processing procedure. For automatic subject-prompt generation, we further build a vision-language model for general-purpose low-level degradation perception via instruction tuning techniques. Our UniProcessor covers 30 degradation types, and extensive experiments demonstrate that our UniProcessor can well process these degradations without additional training or tuning and outperforms other competing methods. Moreover, with the help of degradation-aware context control, our UniProcessor first shows the ability to individually handle a single distortion in an image with multiple degradations.
