# NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement: Methods and Results

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.02212 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02212/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [SuperPoint: Self-Supervised Interest Point Detection and Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07629/) (2017)
- [Least Squares Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04076/) (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)
- [LightGlue: Local Feature Matching at Light Speed](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13643/) (2023)
- [RepVGG: Making VGG-style ConvNets Great Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03697/) (2021)
- [Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07723/) (2018)
- [Q-Align: Teaching LMMs for Visual Scoring via Discrete Text-Defined Levels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.17090/) (2023)
- [GCNet: Non-local Networks Meet Squeeze-Excitation Networks and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11492/) (2019)
- [Blind Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Correspondence: A Multitask Learning Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.14968/) (2023)
- [Retinexformer: One-stage Retinex-based Transformer for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06705/) (2023)
- [R2RNet: Low-light Image Enhancement via Real-low to Real-normal Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14501/) (2021)
- [Restoring Images in Adverse Weather Conditions via Histogram Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10172/) (2024)
- [HVI: A New Color Space for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20272/) (2025)
- [The Eleventh NTIRE 2026 Efficient Super-Resolution Challenge Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.03198/) (2026)
- [You Only Need One Color Space: An Efficient Network for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05809/) (2024)
- [LYT-NET: Lightweight YUV Transformer-based Network for Low-light Image Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15204/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a comprehensive review of the NITRE 2026 Efficient Low Light Image Enhancement (E-LLIE) Challenge, highlighting the proposed solutions and final outcomes. This challenge focuses on mobile image enhancement under low-light conditions, aiming to design lightweight networks that improve enhancement quality while ensuring practical deployability under limited computational resources. A total of 207 participants registered, 27 teams submitted valid entries, and 17 teams ultimately provided valid factsheet. Based on these submissions, this paper provides a systematic evaluation of recent methods for E-LLIE, offering a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art progress and demonstrating significant improvements in both performance and efficiency.