# PG-ControlNet: A Physics-Guided ControlNet for Generative Spatially Varying Image Deblurring

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21043/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [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)
- [RePaint: Inpainting using Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.09865/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Posterior Sampling for General Noisy Inverse Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14687/) (2022)
- [Palette: Image-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.05826/) (2021)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [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)
- [ConvNeXt V2: Co-designing and Scaling ConvNets with Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00808/) (2023)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [HINet: Half Instance Normalization Network for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06086/) (2021)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Rethinking Diffusion Posterior Sampling: From Conditional Score Estimator to Maximizing a Posterior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18913/) (2025)
- [SAM-Deblur: Let Segment Anything Boost Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02270/) (2023)
- [IRBridge: Solving Image Restoration Bridge with Pre-trained Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24406/) (2025)
- [Deep Model-Based Super-Resolution with Non-uniform Blur](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.10109/) (2022)
- [DeblurDiff: Real-World Image Deblurring with Generative Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03810/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [OmniRSI: Taming Latent Diffusion for Unified Multimodal Remote Sensing Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.15414/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatially varying image deblurring remains a fundamentally ill-posed problem, especially when degradations arise from complex mixtures of motion and other forms of blur under significant noise. State-of-the-art learning-based approaches generally fall into two paradigms: model-based deep unrolling methods that enforce physical constraints by modeling the degradations, but often produce over-smoothed, artifact-laden textures, and generative models that achieve superior perceptual quality yet hallucinate details due to weak physical constraints. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uniquely reconciles these paradigms by taming a powerful generative prior with explicit, dense physical constraints. Rather than oversimplifying the degradation field, we model it as a dense continuum of high-dimensional compressed kernels, ensuring that minute variations in motion and other degradation patterns are captured. We leverage this rich descriptor field to condition a ControlNet architecture, strongly guiding the diffusion sampling process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method effectively bridges the gap between physical accuracy and perceptual realism, outperforming state-of-the-art model-based methods as well as generative baselines in challenging, severely blurred scenarios.