# Restore, Assess, Repeat: A Unified Framework for Iterative Image Restoration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.26385 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.26385/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 41 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 41)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02921/) (2017)
- [Real-ESRGAN: Training Real-World Blind Super-Resolution with Pure Synthetic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10833/) (2021)
- [Multi-Stage Progressive Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02808/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Benchmarking Single Image Dehazing and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.04143/) (2017)
- [Deep Joint Rain Detection and Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07769/) (2016)
- [Denoising Diffusion Models for Plug-and-Play Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08995/) (2023)
- [DiffBIR: Towards Blind Image Restoration with Generative Diffusion Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15070/) (2023)
- [DiffIR: Efficient Diffusion Model for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09472/) (2023)
- [TransWeather: Transformer-based Restoration of Images Degraded by Adverse Weather Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14813/) (2021)
- [Restoring Vision in Adverse Weather Conditions with Patch-Based Denoising Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14626/) (2022)
- [Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Raindrop Removal from a Single Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10098/) (2017)
- [Fast Underwater Image Enhancement for Improved Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09766/) (2019)
- [InstructIR: High-Quality Image Restoration Following Human Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16468/) (2024)
- [A Model-driven Deep Neural Network for Single Image Rain Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01333/) (2020)
- [Diff-Retinex: Rethinking Low-light Image Enhancement with A Generative Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13164/) (2023)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [AdaIR: Adaptive All-in-One Image Restoration via Frequency Mining and Modulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14614/) (2024)
- [Controlling Vision-Language Models for Multi-Task Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01018/) (2023)
- [Depicting Beyond Scores: Advancing Image Quality Assessment through Multi-modal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08962/) (2023)
- [AutoDIR: Automatic All-in-One Image Restoration with Latent Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10123/) (2023)
- [Multiscale Structure Guided Diffusion for Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.01789/) (2022)

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

- [DiTTo: Scalable Order-aware All-in-One Image Restoration Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30915/) (2026)
- [Loop-Mamba: A Loop Mamba with Degradation-Aware and Shared Memory for Old Photo Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.02346/) (2026)
- [EORestore-Agent: Fidelity-Guided Agentic Restoration of Remote Sensing Images with Composite Degradations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.06196/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Image restoration aims to recover high quality images from inputs degraded by various factors, such as adverse weather, blur, or low light. While recent studies have shown remarkable progress across individual or unified restoration tasks, they still suffer from limited generalization and inefficiency when handling unknown or composite degradations. To address these limitations, we propose RAR, a Restore, Assess and Repeat process, that integrates Image Quality Assessment (IQA) and Image Restoration (IR) into a unified framework to iteratively and efficiently achieve high quality image restoration. Specifically, we introduce a restoration process that operates entirely in the latent domain to jointly perform degradation identification, image restoration, and quality verification. The resulting model is fully trainable end to end and allows for an all-in-one assess and restore approach that dynamically adapts the restoration process. Also, the tight integration of IQA and IR into a unified model minimizes the latency and information loss that typically arises from keeping the two modules disjoint, (e.g. during image and/or text decoding). Extensive experiments show that our approach consistent improvements under single, unknown and composite degradations, thereby establishing a new state-of-the-art.