# Edit2Restore:Few-Shot Image Restoration via Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Editing Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.03391 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03391/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.03003/) (2022)
- [InstructPix2Pix: Learning to Follow Image Editing Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09800/) (2022)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (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)
- [Beyond a Gaussian Denoiser: Residual Learning of Deep CNN for Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03981/) (2016)
- [Qwen-Image Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02324/) (2025)
- [FLUX.1 Kontext: Flow Matching for In-Context Image Generation and Editing in Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15742/) (2025)
- [Exploring CLIP for Assessing the Look and Feel of Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12396/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Janus-Pro: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Data and Model Scaling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17811/) (2025)
- [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)
- [Exploiting Diffusion Prior for Real-World Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07015/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Step1X-Edit: A Practical Framework for General Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17761/) (2025)
- [OmniGen: Unified Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11340/) (2024)
- [DeblurGAN: Blind Motion Deblurring Using Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07064/) (2017)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Rethinking FID: Towards a Better Evaluation Metric for Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09603/) (2023)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Progressive Fusion Network for Single Image Deraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10985/) (2020)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Edit2Interp: Adapting Image Foundation Models from Spatial Editing to Video Frame Interpolation with Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15003/) (2026)
- [Leveraging Image Editing Foundation Models for Data-Efficient CT Metal Artifact Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05934/) (2026)
- [MDTD-ArtIR: Benchmarking Image Editing and Restoration Models for Art Image Restoration under Texture-Overlay Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00736/) (2026)
- [ImIR: Image-Instruction Tuning for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.25267/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image restoration has traditionally required training specialized models on thousands of paired examples per degradation type. Large pre-trained text-conditioned image editing models encode rich priors about image structure, quality, and degradation, yet we find that this knowledge does not, on its own, make them restorers: state-of-the-art editing models largely fail at restoration in the zero-shot regime. We show that what these priors lack is not capability but direction, and that a small amount of parameter-efficient adaptation supplies it. Fine-tuning LoRA adapters on FLUX.1 Kontext, a 12B-parameter flow matching model for image-to-image translation, with only 32--128 paired images per task and guided by simple text prompts, we turn a mediocre zero-shot editor into a competitive restorer. A single unified adapter, conditioned on task-specific prompts, handles five diverse degradations. Despite using three to four orders of magnitude less data, our few-shot model surpasses a recent restoration baseline trained on over a million curated pairs on the majority of perceptual and distribution-level metrics, on which we evaluate in keeping with our focus on perceptual rather than pixel-fidelity quality. Through comprehensive studies, we analyze the impact of training-set size, the trade-off between task-specific and unified multi-task adapters, the effect of text encoder adaptation, and zero-shot baseline performance, establishing pre-trained editing models as a compelling, data-efficient foundation for few-shot, prompt-guided image restoration.