# RAW-Adapter: Adapting Pre-trained Visual Model to Camera RAW Images and A Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17027 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17027/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 78 of its 123 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 78)

- [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)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Implicit Neural Representations with Periodic Activation Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09661/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [MMDetection: Open MMLab Detection Toolbox and Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07155/) (2019)
- [Depth Anything: Unleashing the Power of Large-Scale Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10891/) (2024)
- [Per-Pixel Classification is Not All You Need for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06278/) (2021)
- [Vision Transformer Adapter for Dense Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08534/) (2022)
- [Learning multiple visual domains with residual adapters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08045/) (2017)
- [Sparse R-CNN: End-to-End Object Detection with Learnable Proposals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12450/) (2020)
- [Learning to See in the Dark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01934/) (2018)
- [Segment Anything in High Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01567/) (2023)
- [Tip-Adapter: Training-free Adaption of CLIP for Few-shot Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.09519/) (2022)
- [NeRF in the Dark: High Dynamic Range View Synthesis from Noisy Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13679/) (2021)
- [VL-Adapter: Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Vision-and-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06825/) (2021)
- [Unprocessing Images for Learned Raw Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11127/) (2018)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [CycleISP: Real Image Restoration via Improved Data Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07761/) (2020)
- [Improving Out-of-Distribution Robustness via Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00299/) (2022)
- [Data Augmentation Can Improve Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05328/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [RAWild: Sensor-Agnostic RAW Object Detection via Physics-Guided Curve and Grid Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.05941/) (2026)
- [RawVLA: Embodied Neural Image Signal Processor For Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37530/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the computer vision community, the preference for pre-training visual models has largely shifted toward sRGB images due to their ease of acquisition and compact storage. However, camera RAW images preserve abundant physical details across diverse real-world scenarios. Despite this, most existing visual perception methods that utilize RAW data directly integrate image signal processing (ISP) stages with subsequent network modules, often overlooking potential synergies at the model level. Building on recent advances in adapter-based methodologies in both NLP and computer vision, we propose RAW-Adapter, a novel framework that incorporates learnable ISP modules as input-level adapters to adjust RAW inputs. At the same time, it employs model-level adapters to seamlessly bridge ISP processing with high-level downstream architectures. Moreover, RAW-Adapter serves as a general framework applicable to various computer vision frameworks. Furthermore, we introduce RAW-Bench, which incorporates 17 types of RAW-based common corruptions, including lightness degradations, weather effects, blurriness, camera imaging degradations, and variations in camera color response. Using this benchmark, we systematically compare the performance of RAW-Adapter with state-of-the-art (SOTA) ISP methods and other RAW-based high-level vision algorithms. Additionally, we propose a RAW-based data augmentation strategy to further enhance RAW-Adapter's performance and improve its out-of-domain (OOD) generalization ability. Extensive experiments substantiate the effectiveness and efficiency of RAW-Adapter, highlighting its robust performance across diverse scenarios.