# Seeing Through the PRISM: Compound & Controllable Restoration of Scientific Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14151 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14151/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 34 of its 70 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [GPT-4o System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21276/) (2024)
- [The Cityscapes Dataset for Semantic Urban Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01685/) (2016)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Pre-Trained Image Processing Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.00364/) (2020)
- [Simple Baselines for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04676/) (2022)
- [Designing a Practical Degradation Model for Deep Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14006/) (2021)
- [RefineNet: Multi-Path Refinement Networks for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06612/) (2016)
- [Understanding disentangling in β-VAE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03599/) (2018)
- [An Underwater Image Enhancement Benchmark Dataset and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.05495/) (2019)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09766/) (2019)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [Controlling Vision-Language Models for Multi-Task Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01018/) (2023)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [SEN12MS -- A Curated Dataset of Georeferenced Multi-Spectral Sentinel-1/2 Imagery for Deep Learning and Data Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07789/) (2019)
- [On Disentangled Representations Learned From Correlated Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07886/) (2020)
- [OneRestore: A Universal Restoration Framework for Composite Degradation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04621/) (2024)
- [A Survey on All-in-One Image Restoration: Taxonomy, Evaluation and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15067/) (2024)
- [Multimodal Prompt Perceiver: Empower Adaptiveness, Generalizability and Fidelity for All-in-One Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02918/) (2023)
- [Diff-Plugin: Revitalizing Details for Diffusion-based Low-level Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00644/) (2024)
- [Image Restoration for Under-Display Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04857/) (2020)
- [Deep Constrained Least Squares for Blind Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07508/) (2022)
- [Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Cloud Removal in Global and All-Season Sentinel-2 Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.07683/) (2020)
- [Photo-Realistic Image Restoration in the Wild with Controlled Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09732/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and scaling of deep learning models for land cover image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09451/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Scientific and environmental imagery often suffer from complex mixtures of noise related to the sensor and the environment. Existing restoration methods typically remove one degradation at a time, leading to cascading artifacts, overcorrection, or loss of meaningful signal. In scientific applications, restoration must be able to simultaneously handle compound degradations while allowing experts to selectively remove subsets of distortions without erasing important features. To address these challenges, we present PRISM (Precision Restoration with Interpretable Separation of Mixtures). PRISM is a prompted conditional diffusion framework which combines compound-aware supervision over mixed degradations with a weighted contrastive disentanglement objective that aligns primitives and their mixtures in the latent space. This compositional geometry enables high-fidelity joint removal of overlapping distortions while also allowing flexible, targeted fixes through natural language prompts. Across microscopy, wildlife monitoring, remote sensing, and urban weather datasets, PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on complex compound degradations, including zero-shot mixtures not seen during training. Importantly, we show that selective restoration significantly improves downstream scientific accuracy in several domains over standard "black-box" restoration. These results establish PRISM as a generalizable and controllable framework for high-fidelity restoration in domains where scientific utility is a priority.