# Unified Diffusion Transformer for High-fidelity Text-Aware Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.08922 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08922/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Inverse problems and image restoration, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 62 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Inverse problems and image restoration](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/inverse-problems-and-image-restoration/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 62)

- [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)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [InternVL: Scaling up Vision Foundation Models and Aligning for Generic Visual-Linguistic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14238/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Image Super-Resolution via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07636/) (2021)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [ESRGAN: Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.00219/) (2018)
- [MUSIQ: Multi-scale Image Quality Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05997/) (2021)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [PixArt-α: Fast Training of Diffusion Transformer for Photorealistic Text-to-Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00426/) (2023)
- [Image Quality Assessment: Unifying Structure and Texture Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07728/) (2020)
- [MANIQA: Multi-dimension Attention Network for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08958/) (2022)
- [An End-to-End Trainable Neural Network for Image-based Sequence Recognition and Its Application to Scene Text Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1507.05717/) (2015)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [Toward Real-World Single Image Super-Resolution: A New Benchmark and A New Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00523/) (2019)
- [ResShift: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Super-resolution by Residual Shifting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12348/) (2023)
- [Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01770/) (2018)
- [SeeSR: Towards Semantics-Aware Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16518/) (2023)
- [DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07661/) (2016)

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

- [Geometry-Aware Representation Denoising for Robust Multi-view 3D Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.26230/) (2026)
- [Beyond Pixel Reconstruction: Retrieval-Guided Glyph-Aware Restoration for Low-Resource Manchu Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00315/) (2026)
- [TGSR: Text-Grounded Diffusion for Faithful Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.14281/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Text-Aware Image Restoration (TAIR) aims to recover high-quality images from low-quality inputs containing degraded textual content. While diffusion models provide strong generative priors for general image restoration, they often produce text hallucinations in text-centric tasks due to the absence of explicit linguistic knowledge. To address this, we propose UniT, a unified text restoration framework that integrates a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), a Vision-Language Model (VLM), and a Text Spotting Module (TSM) in an iterative fashion for high-fidelity text restoration. In UniT, the VLM extracts textual content from degraded images to provide explicit textual guidance. Simultaneously, the TSM, trained on diffusion features, generates intermediate OCR predictions at each denoising step, enabling the VLM to iteratively refine its guidance during the denoising process. Finally, the DiT backbone, leveraging its strong representational power, exploit these cues to recover fine-grained textual content while effectively suppressing text hallucinations. Experiments on the SA-Text and Real-Text benchmarks demonstrate that UniT faithfully reconstructs degraded text, substantially reduces hallucinations, and achieves state-of-the-art end-to-end F1-score performance in TAIR task.