# Enhanced Control for Diffusion Bridge in Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16303 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16303/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Improving Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems using Manifold Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00941/) (2022)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.07680/) (2022)
- [I2SB: Image-to-Image Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05872/) (2023)
- [Generative Diffusion Prior for Unified Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01247/) (2023)
- [SNIPS: Solving Noisy Inverse Problems Stochastically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14951/) (2021)
- [Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11699/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16948/) (2023)
- [Dual Aggregation Transformer for Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03364/) (2023)
- [Refusion: Enabling Large-Size Realistic Image Restoration with Latent-Space Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08291/) (2023)
- [Image Restoration Through Generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10299/) (2023)
- [Multi-stage image denoising with the wavelet transform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12394/) (2022)
- [Deep Optimal Transport: A Practical Algorithm for Photo-realistic Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02342/) (2023)
- [Mixed Hierarchy Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09554/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10041/) (2025)
- [OFTSR: One-Step Flow for Image Super-Resolution with Tunable Fidelity-Realism Trade-offs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09465/) (2024)
- [Exploring Diffusion with Test-Time Training on Efficient Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14541/) (2025)
- [GeoFlow: Efficient Driving Video Generation via Geometry-Aligned Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12203/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image restoration refers to the process of restoring a damaged low-quality image back to its corresponding high-quality image. Typically, we use convolutional neural networks to directly learn the mapping from low-quality images to high-quality images achieving image restoration. Recently, a special type of diffusion bridge model has achieved more advanced results in image restoration. It can transform the direct mapping from low-quality to high-quality images into a diffusion process, restoring low-quality images through a reverse process. However, the current diffusion bridge restoration models do not emphasize the idea of conditional control, which may affect performance. This paper introduces the ECDB model enhancing the control of the diffusion bridge with low-quality images as conditions. Moreover, in response to the characteristic of diffusion models having low denoising level at larger values of (bm t ), we also propose a Conditional Fusion Schedule, which more effectively handles the conditional feature information of various modules. Experimental results prove that the ECDB model has achieved state-of-the-art results in many image restoration tasks, including deraining, inpainting and super-resolution. Code is avaliable at https://github.com/Hammour-steak/ECDB.