# HIR-ALIGN: Enhancing Hyperspectral Image Restoration via Diffusion-Based Data Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13581/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [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)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13456/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11487/) (2022)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05600/) (2019)
- [GLIDE: Towards Photorealistic Image Generation and Editing with Text-Guided Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10741/) (2021)
- [Billion-scale similarity search with GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08734/) (2017)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (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)
- [Deep Image Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10925/) (2017)
- [Hyperspectral Image Restoration via Total Variation Regularized Low-rank Tensor Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02477/) (2017)
- [CRS-Diff: Controllable Remote Sensing Image Generation with Diffusion Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11614/) (2024)
- [HIR-Diff: Unsupervised Hyperspectral Image Restoration Via Improved Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15865/) (2024)
- [Deep Hyperspectral Prior: Denoising, Inpainting, Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00301/) (2019)
- [Spectral Enhanced Rectangle Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00844/) (2023)
- [AeroGen: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Diffusion-Driven Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15497/) (2024)
- [A Trainable Spectral-Spatial Sparse Coding Model for Hyperspectral Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09708/) (2021)
- [HSR-Diff:Hyperspectral Image Super-Resolution via Conditional Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12085/) (2023)
- [Image Restoration for Remote Sensing: Overview and Toolbox](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00557/) (2021)
- [Denoising Hyperspectral Image with Non-i.i.d. Noise Structure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.00098/) (2017)
- [ESSAformer: Efficient Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Super-resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14010/) (2023)
- [HSIGene: A Foundation Model For Hyperspectral Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12470/) (2024)
- [SSUMamba: Spatial-Spectral Selective State Space Model for Hyperspectral Image Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01726/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Hyperspectral image (HSI) restoration is crucial for reliable analysis, as real-world HSIs suffer from noise, blur, and resolution loss. However, existing models trained on source data often fail on target domains lacking clean references, a common real-world scenario. To address this, we present HIR-ALIGN, a plug-and-play target-adaptive augmentation framework that enhances HSI restoration by augmenting limited training images with synthetic data matching the target distribution, without extra clean target-domain HSI data. It has three stages: (i) proxy generation, where off-the-shelf restoration models are applied to degraded target observations to produce semantics-preserving proxy HSIs that approximate clean target-domain images; (ii) distribution-adaptive synthesis, where a blur-robust unCLIP diffusion model generates target-aligned RGBs from proxy RGBs with prompt conditioning and embedding-space noise initialization. The warp-based spectral transfer module then synthesizes HSIs by aligning each generated RGB with its proxy RGB, estimating soft patch-wise transport weights, and applying these weights and learnable local interpolation kernels to the proxy HSI; and (iii) aligned supervised finetuning, where restoration networks pretrained on the source distribution are finetuned with proxy HSIs and synthesized target-aligned HSIs, then deployed on degraded target images. We also provide theoretical analysis showing that, under stated assumptions, the proposed augmentation-based finetuning obtains a tighter target-domain restoration-risk upper bound by jointly improving target-distribution coverage and controlling spectral bias. Experiments on simulated and real datasets across denoising, super-resolution, and other restoration tasks demonstrate that HIR-ALIGN is superior to proxy-only target-adaptation baselines and outperforms representative unsupervised methods in most cases.