# Beyond the Ground Truth: Enhanced Supervision for Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03932 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03932/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 49 of its 60 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Restoration Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11793/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Noise2Noise: Learning Image Restoration without Clean Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.04189/) (2018)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [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)
- [MambaIR: A Simple Baseline for Image Restoration with State-Space Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15648/) (2024)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [Learning Enriched Features for Real Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06792/) (2020)
- [Scaling Up to Excellence: Practicing Model Scaling for Photo-Realistic Image Restoration In the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.13627/) (2024)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [One-Step Effective Diffusion Network for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08177/) (2024)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [TOPIQ: A Top-down Approach from Semantics to Distortions for Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03060/) (2023)
- [Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11699/) (2023)
- [Human-Aware Motion Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.06816/) (2020)
- [Efficient Frequency Domain-based Transformers for High-Quality Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12250/) (2022)
- [Inversion by Direct Iteration: An Alternative to Denoising Diffusion for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11435/) (2023)
- [Q-Insight: Understanding Image Quality via Visual Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22679/) (2025)

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

- [Low Light Image Enhancement Challenge at NTIRE 2026](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.17669/) (2026)
- [Revisiting the Current Frame: Physical-Trace-Guided Network Output Correction for Video Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.09342/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning-based image restoration has achieved significant success. However, when addressing real-world degradations, model performance is limited by the quality of groundtruth images in datasets due to practical constraints in data acquisition. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework that enhances existing ground truth images to provide higher-quality supervision for real-world restoration. Our framework generates perceptually enhanced ground truth images using super-resolution by incorporating adaptive frequency masks, which are learned by a conditional frequency mask generator. These masks guide the optimal fusion of frequency components from the original ground truth and its super-resolved variants, yielding enhanced ground truth images. This frequency-domain mixup preserves the semantic consistency of the original content while selectively enriching perceptual details, preventing hallucinated artifacts that could compromise fidelity. The enhanced ground truth images are used to train a lightweight output refinement network that can be seamlessly integrated with existing restoration models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves the quality of restored images. We further validate the effectiveness of both supervision enhancement and output refinement through user studies.