# UIR-LoRA: Achieving Universal Image Restoration through Multiple Low-Rank Adaptation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20197 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20197/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [SDXL: Improving Latent Diffusion Models for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.01952/) (2023)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10196/) (2017)
- [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)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [T2I-Adapter: Learning Adapters to Dig out More Controllable Ability for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.08453/) (2023)
- [Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06782/) (2020)
- [Multi-Concept Customization of Text-to-Image Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04488/) (2022)
- [Multi-Task Learning as Multi-Objective Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04650/) (2018)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [Adversarial Diffusion Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17042/) (2023)
- [Deep Multi-scale Convolutional Neural Network for Dynamic Scene Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02177/) (2016)
- [Deep Retinex Decomposition for Low-Light Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.04560/) (2018)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Zero-Reference Deep Curve Estimation for Low-Light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06826/) (2020)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [RobuMTL: Enhancing Multi-Task Learning Robustness Against Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10921/) (2026)
- [Diffusion Once and Done: Degradation-Aware LoRA for Efficient All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03373/) (2025)
- [SpiralDiff: Spiral Diffusion with LoRA for RGB-to-RAW Conversion Across Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14885/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing unified methods typically treat multi-degradation image restoration as a multi-task learning problem. Despite performing effectively compared to single degradation restoration methods, they overlook the utilization of commonalities and specificities within multi-task restoration, thereby impeding the model's performance. Inspired by the success of deep generative models and fine-tuning techniques, we proposed a universal image restoration framework based on multiple low-rank adapters (LoRA) from multi-domain transfer learning. Our framework leverages the pre-trained generative model as the shared component for multi-degradation restoration and transfers it to specific degradation image restoration tasks using low-rank adaptation. Additionally, we introduce a LoRA composing strategy based on the degradation similarity, which adaptively combines trained LoRAs and enables our model to be applicable for mixed degradation restoration. Extensive experiments on multiple and mixed degradations demonstrate that the proposed universal image restoration method not only achieves higher fidelity and perceptual image quality but also has better generalization ability than other unified image restoration models. Our code is available at https://github.com/Justones/UIR-LoRA.
