# Backbone-Agnostic Stochastic Perturbation Learning for End-to-End Real-World Image Dehazing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11623 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11623/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Restormer: Efficient Transformer for High-Resolution Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09881/) (2021)
- [Rethinking Coarse-to-Fine Approach in Single Image Deblurring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05054/) (2021)
- [DehazeNet: An End-to-End System for Single Image Haze Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1601.07661/) (2016)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [Multi-Scale Boosted Dehazing Network with Dense Feature Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13388/) (2020)
- [GridDehazeNet: Attention-Based Multi-Scale Network for Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03245/) (2019)
- [Contrastive Learning for Compact Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09367/) (2021)
- [PromptIR: Prompting for All-in-One Blind Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13090/) (2023)
- [NH-HAZE: An Image Dehazing Benchmark with Non-Homogeneous Hazy and Haze-Free Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03560/) (2020)
- [O-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free outdoor images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05101/) (2018)
- [RIDCP: Revitalizing Real Image Dehazing via High-Quality Codebook Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03994/) (2023)
- [I-HAZE: a dehazing benchmark with real hazy and haze-free indoor images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05091/) (2018)
- [MaIR: A Locality- and Continuity-Preserving Mamba for Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20066/) (2024)
- [Guided Real Image Dehazing using YCbCr Color Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17496/) (2024)
- [Gradient as Conditions: Rethinking HOG for All-in-one Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09377/) (2025)
- [Scan Clusters, Not Pixels: A Cluster-Centric Paradigm for Efficient Ultra-high-definition Image Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.21917/) (2026)
- [Neural Discrimination-Prompted Transformers for Efficient UHD Image Restoration and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00853/) (2026)
- [LMHaze: Intensity-aware Image Dehazing with a Large-scale Multi-intensity Real Haze Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16095/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Real-world paired image dehazing remains challenging because haze degradation is spatially non-uniform, illumination-dependent, and physically ambiguous even when haze-free references are available. Existing end-to-end restoration networks usually learn a deterministic mapping from a hazy observation to a clean target, while degradation-sensitive feature responses, reverse haze-formation consistency, and cross-domain negative structure remain insufficiently exploited. In this paper, we propose Backbone-Agnostic Stochastic Perturbation Learning (BSPL), a plug-and-play framework for end-to-end real-world image dehazing. BSPL first introduces a Learnable Stochastic Perturbation Modulator (LSPM), which learns input-conditioned channel-wise and spatial-wise perturbation distributions and converts the resulting feature-response discrepancies into adaptive modulation weights. It then develops a Prior-informed Perturbation-guided Reconstruction Module (PPRM), which reuses the learned bottleneck perturbations together with transmission and atmospheric-light priors to reconstruct the hazy observation from the restored result and enforce degradation consistency. Furthermore, we propose a Dual-space Domain-diversified Distribution-aware Contrastive Loss (D3CL) to regularize both clean restoration and hazy reconstruction spaces with real-world and synthetic negatives. Experiments on five real-world paired benchmarks show that BSPL consistently improves multiple representative backbones with only marginal additional inference overhead.