# Degradation-Aware Residual-Conditioned Optimal Transport for Unified Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.01656 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.01656/

## Key facts

- Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 52 of its 84 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 52)

- [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)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Improved Training of Wasserstein GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00028/) (2017)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [The Perception-Distortion Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.06077/) (2017)
- [FFDNet: Toward a Fast and Flexible Solution for CNN based Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04026/) (2017)
- [Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks for Fast and Accurate Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03915/) (2017)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Multi-Modal Fusion Transformer for End-to-End Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09224/) (2021)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Progressive Image Deraining Networks: A Better and Simpler Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.09221/) (2019)
- [Deep Continuous Fusion for Multi-Sensor 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10992/) (2020)
- [Vision Transformers for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03883/) (2022)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [P+: Extended Textual Conditioning in Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09522/) (2023)
- [Learning a Single Convolutional Super-Resolution Network for Multiple Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.06116/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03198/) (2026)
- [Joint Velocity-Growth Flow Matching for Single-Cell Dynamics Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13413/) (2025)
- [Learning Continuous Wasserstein Barycenter Space for Generalized All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23169/) (2026)
- [Efficient Degradation-agnostic Image Restoration via Channel-Wise Functional Decomposition and Manifold Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18679/) (2025)
- [DSwinIR: Rethinking Window-based Attention for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04869/) (2025)
- [Universal Image Restoration Pre-training via Masked Degradation Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13282/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Blind All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18412/) (2024)
- [BaryIR: Learning Multi-Source Unified Representation in Continuous Barycenter Space for Generalizable All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21637/) (2025)
- [UDPNet: Unleashing Depth-based Priors for Robust Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06909/) (2026)
- [PaAgent: Portrait-Aware Image Restoration Agent via Subjective-Objective Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17055/) (2026)
- [Restore, Assess, Repeat: A Unified Framework for Iterative Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26385/) (2026)
- [Any Image Restoration via Efficient Spatial-Frequency Degradation Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14249/) (2025)
- [Towards Prospective Medical Image Reconstruction via Knowledge-Informed Dynamic Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17644/) (2025)
- [WeatherCycle: Unpaired Multi-Weather Restoration via Color Space Decoupled Cycle Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23150/) (2025)
- [Binding Multiple Modalities via Multimodal Wasserstein Barycenter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.33800/) (2026)
- [Generative Latent Kernel Modeling for Blind Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09285/) (2025)
- [Degradation-Aware Adaptive Context Gating for Unified Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.01236/) (2026)
- [Self-supervised Dynamic Heterogeneous Degradation Modeling for Unified Zero-Shot Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24593/) (2026)
- [DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19097/) (2026)
- [MDTD-ArtIR: Benchmarking Image Editing and Restoration Models for Art Image Restoration under Texture-Overlay Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00736/) (2026)
- [Simultaneous Neural Optimal Transport](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37424/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

All-in-one image restoration has emerged as a practical and promising low-level vision task for real-world applications. In this context, the key issue lies in how to deal with different types of degraded images simultaneously. In this work, we present a Degradation-Aware Residual-Conditioned Optimal Transport (DA-RCOT) approach that models (all-in-one) image restoration as an optimal transport (OT) problem for unpaired and paired settings, introducing the transport residual as a degradation-specific cue for both the transport cost and the transport map. Specifically, we formalize image restoration with a residual-guided OT objective by exploiting the degradation-specific patterns of the Fourier residual in the transport cost. More crucially, we design the transport map for restoration as a two-pass DA-RCOT map, in which the transport residual is computed in the first pass and then encoded as multi-scale residual embeddings to condition the second-pass restoration. This conditioning process injects intrinsic degradation knowledge (e.g., degradation type and level) and structural information from the multi-scale residual embeddings into the OT map, which thereby can dynamically adjust its behaviors for all-in-one restoration. Extensive experiments across five degradations demonstrate the favorable performance of DA-RCOT as compared to state-of-the-art methods, in terms of distortion measures, perceptual quality, and image structure preservation. Notably, DA-RCOT delivers superior adaptability to real-world scenarios even with multiple degradations and shows distinctive robustness to both degradation levels and the number of degradations.